20190116 : Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions ( Jan 16, 2019 , profile.theguardian.com )
"... The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades. Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all. ..."
"... Screw the war mongers and the MIC. ..."
"... If you read the article, it's obvious that [neo]liberals/whores are the apogee of hypocrisy. ..."
"... Perpetual war is about $$$. It knows no party. Never has and never will. ..."
Feral, yes; rabid, absolutely; smart... not so much. Why is anyone surprised?
The DemoRats have never been a party dedicated
to peace; the only ones thinking that are the walking bong-holes who assuage their cognitive dissonance by telling themselves
that. Both the demorats and their willing accomplices 'across the aisle' have led us into constant war for nearly eight decades.
Lilliputian Big enders and Little enders all.
Yup. It's always about the money. As Fitts would say, that screeching you hear is the cash flow drying up for the rentiers.
The murdering of women and children be damned. Hillary's demonic cackle is but the grotesque cherry on top:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y
"... Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the US is heading in the same direction. ..."
"... In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America – the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%, if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). ..."
"... In present-day United States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business oligopolies. ..."
"... A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2). ..."
"... Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P 500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000 publicly traded corporations. (*4). ..."
A close-knit oligarchy controls all major corporations. Monopolization of ownership in US
economy fast approaching Soviet levels
Starting with Ronald Reagan's presidency, the US government willingly decided to ignore the
anti-trust laws so that corporations would have free rein to set up monopolies. With each
successive president the monopolistic concentration of business and shareholding in America has
grown precipitously eventually to reach the monstrous levels of the present day.
Today's level of monopolistic concentration is of such unprecedented levels that we may
without hesitation designate the US economy as a giant oligopoly. From economic power follows
political power, therefore the economic oligopoly translates into a political oligarchy. (It
seems, though, that the transformation has rather gone the other way around, a ferocious set of
oligarchs have consolidated their economic and political power beginning from the turn of the
twentieth century). The conclusion that
the US is an oligarchy finds support in a 2014 by a Princeton University study.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world has not seen these levels of concentration
of ownership. The Soviet Union did not die because of apparent ideological reasons but due to
economic bankruptcy caused by its uncompetitive monopolistic economy. Our verdict is that the
US is heading in the same direction.
In a later report, we will demonstrate how all sectors of the US economy have fallen prey to
monopolization and how the corporate oligopoly has been set up across the country. This post
essentially serves as an appendix to that future report by providing the shocking details of
the concentration of corporate ownership.
Apart from illustrating the monopolization at the level of shareholding of the major
investors and corporations, we will in a follow-up post take a somewhat closer look at one
particularly fatal aspect of this phenomenon, namely the
consolidation of media (posted simultaneously with the present one) in the hands of
absurdly few oligarch corporations. In there, we will discuss the monopolies of the tech giants
and their ownership concentration together with the traditional media because they rightfully
belong to the same category directly restricting speech and the distribution of opinions in
society.
In a future instalment of this report, we will show that the oligarchization of America
– the placing it under the rule of the One Percent (or perhaps more accurately the 0.1%,
if not 0.01%) - has been a deliberate ideologically driven long-term project to establish
absolute economic power over the US and its political system and further extend that to involve
an absolute global hegemony (the latter project thankfully thwarted by China and Russia). To
achieve these goals, it has been crucial for the oligarchs to control and direct the narrative
on economy and war, on all public discourse on social affairs. By seizing the media, the
oligarchs have created a monstrous propaganda machine, which controls the opinions of the
majority of the US population.
We use the words 'monopoly,' 'monopolies,' and 'monopolization' in a broad sense and subsume
under these concepts all kinds of market dominance be it by one company or two or a small
number of companies, that is, oligopolies. At the end of the analysis, it is not of great
importance how many corporations share in the market dominance, rather what counts is the death
of competition and the position enabling market abuse, either through absolute dominance,
collusion, or by a de facto extinction of normal market competition. Therefore we use the term
'monopolization' to describe the process of reaching a critical level of non-competition on a
market. Correspondingly, we may denote 'monopoly companies' two corporations of a duopoly or
several of an oligopoly.
Horizontal shareholding – the cementation of the
oligarchy
One especially perfidious aspect of this concentration of ownership is that the same few
institutional investors have acquired undisputable control of the leading corporations in
practically all the most important sectors of industry. The situation when one or several
investors own controlling or significant shares of the top corporations in a given industry
(business sector) is referred to as horizontal shareholding . (*1). In present-day United
States a few major investors – equity funds or private capital - are as a rule
cross-owned by each other, forming investor oligopolies, which in turn own the business
oligopolies.
A study has shown that among a sample of the 1,500 largest US firms (S&P 1500), the
probability of one major shareholder holding significant shares in two competing firms had
jumped to 90% in 2014, while having been just 16% in 1999. (*2).
Institutional investors like BlackRock, Vanguard, State Street, Fidelity, and JP Morgan, now
own 80% of all stock in S&P 500 listed companies. The Big Three investors - BlackRock,
Vanguard and State Street – alone constitute the largest shareholder in 88% of S&P
500 firms, which roughly correspond to America's 500 largest corporations. (*3). Both BlackRock
and Vanguard are among the top five shareholders of almost 70% of America's largest 2,000
publicly traded corporations. (*4).
Blackrock had as of 2016 $6.2 trillion worth of assets under management, Vanguard $5.1
trillion, whereas State Street has dropped to a distant third with only $1 trillion in assets.
This compares with a total market capitalization of US stocks according to Russell
3000 of $30 trillion at end of 2017 (From 2016 to 2017, the Big Three has of course also
put on assets).Blackrock and Vanguard would then alone own more than one-third of all US
publicly listed shares.
From an expanded sample that includes the 3,000 largest publicly listed corporations
(Russell 3000 index), institutions owned (2016) about
78% of the equity .
The speed of concentration the US economy in the hands of institutions has been incredible.
Still back in 1950s, their share of the equity was 10%, by 1980 it was 30% after which the
concentration has rapidly grown to the present day approximately 80%. (*5). Another study puts
the present (2016) stock market capitalization held by institutional investors at 70%. (*6).
(The slight difference can possibly be explained by variations in the samples of companies
included).
As a result of taking into account the common ownership at investor level, it emerges that
the US economy is yet much more monopolized than it was previously thought when the focus had
been on the operational business corporation alone detached from their owners. (*7).
The
Oligarch owners assert their control
Apologists for monopolies have argued that the institutional investors who manage passive
capital are passive in their own conduct as shareholders as well. (*8). Even if that would be
true it would come with vastly detrimental consequences for the economy as that would mean that
in effect there would be no shareholder control at all and the corporate executives would
manage the companies exclusively with their own short-term benefits in mind, inevitably leading
to corruption and the loss of the common benefits businesses on a normally functioning
competitive market would bring.
In fact, there seems to have been a period in the US economy – before the rapid
monopolization of the last decade -when such passive investors had relinquished control to the
executives. (*9). But with the emergence of the Big Three investors and the astonishing
concentration of ownership that does not seem to hold water any longer. (*10). In fact, there
need not be any speculation about the matter as the monopolist owners are quite candid about
their ways. For example, BlackRock's CEO Larry Fink sends out
an annual guiding letter to his subject, practically to all the largest firms of the US and
increasingly also Europe and the rest of the West. In his pastoral, the CEO shares his view of
the global conditions affecting business prospects and calls for companies to adjust their
strategies accordingly.
The investor will eventually review the management's strategic plans for compliance with the
guidelines. Effectively, the BlackRock CEO has in this way assumed the role of a giant central
planner, rather like the Gosplan, the central planning agency of the Soviet command
economy.
The 2019 letter (referenced above) contains this striking passage, which should quell all
doubts about the extent to which BlackRock exercises its powers:
"As we seek to build long-term value for our clients through engagement, our aim is not to
micromanage a company's operations. Instead, our primary focus is to ensure board
accountability for creating long-term value. However, a long-term approach should not be
confused with an infinitely patient one. When BlackRock does not see progress despite ongoing
engagement, or companies are insufficiently responsive to our efforts to protect our clients'
long-term economic interests, we do not hesitate to exercise our right to vote against
incumbent directors or misaligned executive compensation."
Considering the striking facts rendered above, we should bear in mind that the establishment
of this virtually absolute oligarch ownership over all the largest corporations of the United
States is a relatively new phenomenon. We should therefore expect that the centralized control
and centralized planning will rapidly grow in extent as the power is asserted and methods are
refined.
Most of the capital of those institutional investors consists of so-called passive capital,
that is, such cases of investments where the investor has no intention of trying to achieve any
kind of control of the companies it invests in, the only motivation being to achieve as high as
possible a yield. In the overwhelming majority of the cases the funds flow into the major
institutional investors, which invest the money at their will in any corporations. The original
investors do not retain any control of the institutional investors, and do not expect it
either. Technically the institutional investors like BlackRock and Vanguard act as fiduciary
asset managers. But here's the rub, while the people who commit their assets to the funds may
be considered as passive investors, the institutional investors who employ those funds are most
certainly not.
Cross-ownership of oligarch corporations
To make matters yet worse, it must be kept in mind that the oligopolistic investors in turn
are frequently cross-owned by each other. (*11). In fact, there is no transparent way of
discovering who in fact controls the major institutional investors.
One of the major institutional investors, Vanguard is ghost owned insofar as it does not
have any owners at all in the traditional sense of the concept. The company claims that it is
owned by the multiple funds that it has itself set up and which it manages. This is how the
company puts it on
their home page : "At Vanguard, there are no outside owners, and therefore, no conflicting
loyalties. The company is owned by its funds, which in turn are owned by their shareholders --
including you, if you're a Vanguard fund investor." At the end of the analysis, it would then
seem that Vanguard is owned by Vanguard itself, certainly nobody should swallow the charade
that those funds stuffed with passive investor money would exercise any ownership control over
the superstructure Vanguard. We therefore assume that there is some group of people (other than
the company directors) that have retained the actual control of Vanguard behind the scenes
(perhaps through one or a few of the funds). In fact, we believe that all three (BlackRock,
State Street and Vanguard) are tightly controlled by a group of US oligarchs (or more widely
transatlantic oligarchs), who prefer not to brandish their power. It is beyond the scope of
this study and our means to investigate this hypothesis, but whatever, it is bad enough that as
a proven fact these three investor corporations wield this control over most of the American
economy. We also know that the three act in concert wherever they hold shares.
(*12).
Now, let's see who are the formal owners of these institutional investors
In considering these ownership charts, please, bear in mind that we have not consistently
examined to what degree the real control of one or another company has been arranged through a
scheme of issuing different classes of shares, where a special class of shares give vastly more
voting rights than the ordinary shares. One source asserts
that 355 of the companies in the Russell index consisting of the 3000 largest corporations
employ such a dual voting-class structure, or 11.8% of all major corporations.
We have mostly relied on www.stockzoa.com for the shareholder data. However, this and
other sources tend to list only the so-called institutional investors while omitting corporate
insiders and other individuals. (We have no idea why such strange practice is employed
"... If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal fakery. What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS. ..."
But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it
certainly does not
apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the
nothingburger Russiagate.
The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the
coup.
Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be
magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.
If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal
fakery.
What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.
Europe is willing to defy the U.S. on Nordstream to the point of forcing the U.S. to openly and nakedly destroy its reputation
with European contractors and governments to stop one pipeline in a place where multiple gas pipelines will be needed for future
growth.
This is the diplomatic equivalent of the nuclear option. And the neocons in the Senate just pushed the button. Europe understands
what this is really about, the U.S. retaining its imperial position as the policy setter for all the world. If it can set energy
policy for Europe then it can set everything else.
And it's clear that the leadership in Europe is done with that status quo. The Trump administration from the beginning has used
NATO as an excuse to mask its real intentions towards Europe, which is continued domination of its policies. Trump complains that
the U.S. pays into NATO to protect Europe from Russia but then Europe buys its energy from Russia. That's unfair, Donald complains,
like a little bitch, frankly, even though he right on the surface. But if the recent NATO summit is any indication, Europe is no
longer interested in NATO performing that function. French President Emmanuel Macron wants NATO re-purposed to fight global terror,
a terrible idea. NATO should just be ended.
But you'll notice how Trump doesn't talk about that anymore. He wants more billions pumped into NATO while the U.S. still sets
its policies. This is not a boondoggle for the MIC as much as it's a Sword of Damocles to hold over Europe's head. The U.S.'s involvement
in should be ended immediately, the troops brought home and the billions of dollars spent here as opposed to occupying most of Europe
to point missiles at a Russia wholly uninterested in imperial ambitions no less harboring any of them.
And Trump also knows this but thinks stopping Nordstream 2 is the price Europe has to pay him for this privilege. It's insane.
The time has come for Europe to act independently from the U.S. As much as I despise the EU, to untangle it from the U.S. on energy
policy is the means by which for it to then deal with its problems internally. It can't do that while the U.S. is threatening it.
Circling the wagons against the immediate threat, as it were.
And that means protecting its companies and citizens from the economic depredations of power-mad neoconservatives in the U.S.
Senate like Ted Cruz and Lindsey Graham.
Allseas, the Swiss company laying the pipe for Nordstream 2,
has halted construction for now
, awaiting instructions from the U.S. Gazprom will likely step in to finish the job and Germany will green light any of the necessary
permits to get the pipeline done. Those people will be put out of work just in time for Christmas, turning thousands of people against
the U.S. Commerce drives people together, politics drives them apart.
But, at the same time, the urgency to finish Nordstream 2 on time is wholly irrelevant now because Ukraine and Russia came to
terms on a new five-year gas transit contract. This ensures Gazprom can meet its contractual deliveries to Europe that no one thought
could be done on time. But when the Nazi threat to Zelensky meeting with Merkel, Macron and Putin in Paris failed to materialize,
a gas deal was on the horizon.
And, guess what? U.S. LNG will still not have the marginal lever over Europe's energy policy because of that. Putin and Zelensky
outmaneuvered Cruz, Graham and Trump on this. Because that's what this boils down to. By keeping Russian gas out of Europe, it was
supposed to constrain not only Russia's growth but also Europe's. Because then the U.S. government can control who and how much energy
can make it into European markets at critical junctures politically.
That was the Bolton Doctrine to National Security. And that doctrine brought nothing but misery to millions.
And if you look back over the past five years of U.S./EU relations you will see this gambit clearly for what it was, a way to
continue European vassalage at the hands of the U.S. by forcing market share of U.S. providers into European markets.
Again, it gets back to Trump's ideas about Emergy Dominance
and becoming the supplier of the marginal erg of energy to important economies around the world.
The smart play for the EU now that the gas transit deal is in place is to threaten counter-sanctions against the U.S. and bar
all LNG shipments into Europe. Gas prices are at historic lows, gas supplies are overflowing thanks to fears of a deal not being
in place.
So, a three to six month embargo of U.S. LNG into Europe to bleed off excess supply while Nordstream 2 is completed would be the
right play politically.
But, in reality, they won't need to, because the U.S. won't be able to import much into Europe under current prices and market
conditions. And once Nordstream 2 is complete, LNG sales to Europe should crater.
In the end, I guess it's too bad for Ted Cruz that economics and basic human ingenuity are more powerful than legislatures. Because
Nordstream 2 will be completed. Turkstream's other trains into Europe will be built. Venezuela will continue rebuilding its energy
sector with Russian and Chinese help.
There is no place for U.S. LNG in Europe outside of the Poles literally burning money virtue signaling their Russophobia. Nordstream 2 was a response to the revolt in Ukraine, to replace any potential losses in market share to Europe. Now Russia will
have what it had before passing through Ukraine along with Nordstream 2. By 2024 there will be at least two trains from Turkstream
coming into Europe.
Iran will keep expanding exports, settling its oil and gas trade through Russian banks. And the U.S. will continue to fulminate
and make itself even more irrelevant over time. What men like Ted Cruz and Donald Trump refuse to understand is that when you go nuclear you can't ever go back. If you threaten
the nuclear option, there's no fall back position.
And when those that you threaten with annihilation survive they are made all the stronger for passing through the eye of the needle. Looking at Gazprom's balance sheet right now, that's my take.
Turkey, since 2011, has been waging a pro-Sunni proxy war in Syria, in the hope of one day
establishing in Damascus a pro-Turkey, Islamist regime. This ambition has failed, costing
President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey violent political turmoil on both sides of
Turkey's 911-km border with Syria and billions of dollars spent on more than 4 million Syrian
refugees scattered across the Turkish soil.
In Egypt, in 2011-2012, Erdoğan aggressively supported the failed Muslim Brotherhood
government and deeply antagonized the incumbent -- then-general but now president -- Abdel
Fattah al-Sisi. Since Erdoğan's efforts in Syria and Egypt failed, his Sunni Islamist
ambitions have found a new proxy-war theater: Libya.
On December 10,
Erdoğan said he could deploy troops in Libya if the UN-backed Government of National
Accord (GNA) in Tripoli (which Turkey supports) requested it. Erdoğan's talks with GNA's
head, Fayez al-Sarraj, who is fighting a war against the Libyan National Army (LNA) of General
Khalifa Haftar, produced two ostensibly strategic agreements: a memorandum of understanding on
providing the GNA with arms, military training and personnel; and a maritime agreement
delineating exclusive economic zones in the Mediterranean waters.
Greece and Egypt protested immediately while the European Council unequivocally condemned
the controversial accords. Meanwhile, the deals apparently escalated a proxy competition
between Turkey's old (Greece) and new (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) rivals.
With the al-Sarraj handshake, Erdoğan is apparently aiming to:
minimize Turkey's isolation in the Mediterranean, one which has gradually worsened since
2010, following one diplomatic crisis after another with Israel;
counter strategic cooperation between Cyprus, Greece, Egypt and Israel, including joint
diplomatic, energy and military initiatives;
cut into the emerging Cypriot-Greek-Egyptian-Israeli maritime bloc;
push back against Arab (Egyptian and UAE) pressure on al-Sarraj;
fill the European vacuum in Libya; and
emerge as a deal-breaker in the Mediterranean rather than a deal-maker.
All that ambition requires military hardware as well as diplomatic software. Since 2011, a
year after the Mavi Marmara incident ruptured relations with Israel, Turkey has been investing
billions of dollars in naval technologies, in an apparent effort to build up the hardware it
would one day require.
In the eight years since then, Turkey has built
four Ada-class corvettes; two Landing Ship Tank (LST) vessels; eight fast Landing Craft Tank
(LCT) vessels; 16 military patrol ships; two deep-sea rescue ships; one submarine rescue ship;
and four assault boats.
The jewel in the naval treasury box is a $1 billion Landing Platform Dock (LPD), now being
built under license from Spain's Navantia shipyards, to be operational in 2021. The TCG
Anadolu , Turkey's first amphibious assault ship, will carry a battalion-sized unit of
1,200 troops and personnel, eight utility helicopters and three unmanned aerial vehicles; it
also will transport 150 vehicles, including battle tanks. It also may be able to deploy short
takeoff and vertical landing STOVL F-35 fighter jets. Turkey will be the third operator in the
world of this ship type, after Spain and Australia.
Erdoğan's naval ambitions, however, are not limited just to an emerging fleet of
conventional vessels. In 2016, he said
that the LPD program would hopefully be the first step toward producing a "most elite" aircraft
carrier. He also said he "sees it as a major deficiency that we still do not have a nuclear
vessel."
On December 22, Turkey's first Type 214 class submarine, the TCG Piri Reis , hit the seas
with a ceremony attended by Erdoğan. "Today,"
he said , "we gathered here for the docking of Piri Reis . As of 2020, a submarine will go
into service each year. By 2027, all six of our submarines will be at our seas for
service."
Unsurprisingly the docking ceremony reminded Erdoğan of his Libyan gambit: "We will
evaluate every opportunity in land, sea and air. If needed, we will increase military support
in Libya."
Erdoğan seems to think that his best defense in the Mediterranean power game is an
offense. On December 15, Turkish Naval Forces
intercepted an Israeli research ship, the Bat Galim , in Cypriot waters and escorted it
away, as tension over natural resource exploration continued to rise in the region.
On December 16, Turkey dispatched a surveillance and reconnaissance drone to the
Turkish-controlled north of the divided island of Cyprus. A week before the drone deployment,
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Çavuşoğlu said that Ankara could use its
military forces to halt gas drilling in waters off Cyprus that it claims as its own.
Libya is another risky proxy war theater for Turkey. Its deals with the al-Sarraj government
over troop deployment and maritime borders will become null and void if the Libyan civil war,
begun in 2014, ends with Gen. Haftar's victory. The chief of staff of the LNA, Farag
Al-Mahdawi,
announced that his forces would sink any Turkish ship approaching the Libyan coast. "I have
an order; as soon as the Turkish research vessels arrive, I will have a solution. I will sink
them myself," Al-Mahdawi warned, noting that the order was coming from Haftar. On December 21,
Haftar's forces seized
a Grenada-flagged ship with Turkish crew aboard, on the suspicion that it was carrying arms.
The ship was later released.
The European Union is another factor why Erdoğan, once again, is probably betting on
the wrong horse. Technically speaking, Turkey is a candidate for full EU membership, but it is
an open secret that accession talks have not moved an inch during the past several years, and
with no prospects of progress in sight. Making membership prospects even gloomier, EU foreign
ministers in November
agreed on economic sanctions for Ankara for violating Cyprus' maritime economic zone by
drilling off the island.
The Mediterranean chess game leaves Turkey in alliance with the breakaway Turkish Cypriot
statelet and one of the warring factions in Libya, versus a strategic grouping of Greece,
Cyprus, Egypt (and the UAE), Israel, and the other warring Libyan group.
One emerging power in Libya, however, is not a Western state actor. After controlling Syria
in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and establishing permanent military bases inside and off
the coast of the country, Russia has the potential to step into the Libyan theater with a
bigger proxy and direct force, to establish its second permanent Mediterranean military
presence. As in Syria, where divergent interests did not stop Turkey from becoming a
remote-controlled Russian player, Moscow can once again make use of the Turkish card to
undermine Western interests in Libya.
Also as in Syria, Turkey's Islamist agenda will probably fail in Libya, but by the time
Erdoğan understands that, it might be too late to get out of Moscow's orbit.
Instead of finding the real culprits - ISIS remnants, disgruntled locals, Kurds who want
to regain control over Kirkuk - the U.S. decided that Kata'ib Hizbullah was the group guilty
of the attack....
Yesterday's attacks guarantee that all U.S. troops will have to leave Iraq and will
thereby also lose their supply lines to Syria.
One wonders if that was the real intend of those strikes.
Just like with 9/11 and Iraq where the US government immediately pushed its pre-existing
agenda, so the US doesn't care who really launches attacks on US and US-client positions in
Iraq and Syria but automatically assigns them to Hezbollah and thus to Iran, in accord with
the pre-existing neocon wet dream of provoking a full-scale war with Iran.
If that's the US intent, to escalate against Iran, and if conversely the Iraq government
is serious about kicking out the US military, we'll have the confrontation discussed in the
open thread.
As for the idea that Trump was briar-patching here, wanting a good legalistic pretext to
withdraw troops from Iraq (which would then trigger the practical supply-based pretext to
withdraw them from Syria and not "take the oil" after all), well even if he had such confused
thoughts, we've already seen how spineless he is about trying to assert his will over that of
the neocon bureaucracies, civilian and military. Do we really expect them to agree to vacate
Iraq merely because the legally constituted supposedly sovereign government told them to? It
seems more likely they'll tell the government they're not going anywhere and demand that the
government help them suppress non-governmental resistance to their ongoing presence, or else.
(I don't know if there's yet been a formal order to leave from the Iraqi government, or just
rhetoric in an attempt to save face.)
Thanks sleeply,
But underlying your comment is an assumption of *logic* in this world. If it ever existed it
certainly does not
apply any longer. Look how much mileage the MSM and the anti-Democracy Party got out of the
nothingburger Russiagate.
The MSM doesn't even need to smell real blood, they will run with anything to continue the
coup.
Anything negative that involves Edward Gallagher between now and election day could be
magnified 1 million-fold and
repeated 1000 million times by the MSM and dropped in Trump's lap.
If the CIA/MI6/FBI did attempt to create a sting it need not be as dramatic as the Skripal
fakery.
What would you dream up if you were tasked by the CIA to propose something? KISS.
Now that Trump so much complains and threats by Twitter about "civilians" in Idlib...we
remember the aerial bombing of the Iraq-Kuwzit highway by US...
This crime cannot be overstated as one of the most disgusting acts the US committed in the
region. A column of withdrawing soldiers and civilians which were even found to be in
compliance with UN resolution 660, were completely eviscerated by the US Air Force. A war
crime. https://twitter.com/mideastwitness/status/1211109428759613440
As Lozion said, USAF has attacked five positions of the PMU's (KH units), three in Irak and
two in Syria, it seems there are a scores of people have been killed and injured in those air
strikes, some of them seems to be senior commanders
"The Kyiv Court of Appeal on Dec. 28 released from custody five former police officers of
the now disbanded Berkut unit who had been charged with the alleged murder of protesters
during the 2013-2014 EuroMaidan Revolution."
"... on the eve of the court hearing Prosecutor General Ruslan Riaboshapka replaced [the
prosecutors] with new prosecutors ...]"
"The new prosecutors supported the suspects' lawyers, who claimed that there is no risk of
the suspects fleeing. Later, the new prosecutors also presented a letter from Riaboshapka
saying that the suspects should be released because they are part of the prisoner exchange
with Russia."
"Moreover, the Berkut officers are not considered prisoners of war."
"A law enforcement source who could not be named due to ongoing legal proceedings told the
Kyiv Post that the Ukrainian authorities intend to have a trial in absentia for the accused
Berkut officers if they go to Russia as part of the anticipated prisoner exchange."
A research paper by University of Ottawa academic Ivan Katchanovski on the Maiden massacre.
He seems to be having a hard time getting the results into the MSM. No shit Sherlock. Can't
have anything out there to confront the UkoNazi line of thinking. I ran across this on the
Bryan MacDonald twitter feed for those interested.
Being almost 100% sure that Israeli cornering East Mediterranean gas reserves was a done
deal
and after Cyprus gerrymandered its EEZ under UNCLOS -- and Greece signing up
as pipeline terminus in Europe -- Trump put this cart before horse -- and sanctioned
Nord Stream. Europe was to get Israeli gas. Then Turkey and Libya declared EZZ,
and pipeline cannot go!
Also. there will be other claimants to reserves -- Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Gaza.
Nice try -- but Israel will not be supplying Germany gas any time soon.
"... "Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe, including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to win." ..."
"... And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats (Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here in the United States and around the world." ..."
"... The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy." ..."
"... Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context, history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian" nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis. ..."
"... By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies allegedly don't fight wars against one another. ..."
"... George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad policy. ..."
"... Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a mistake. ..."
"... "Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now." ..."
You can hear echoes of progressive realism in the statements of leading progressive
lawmakers such as Senator Bernie Sanders and Congressman Ro Khanna. They have put ending
America's support for the Saudi war on Yemen near the top of the progressive foreign policy
agenda. On the stump, Sanders now singles out the military-industrial complex and the runaway
defense budget for criticism. He promises, among other things, that "we will not continue to
spend $700 billion a year on the military." These are welcome developments. Yet since November
of 2016, something else has emerged alongside the antiwar component of progressive foreign
policy that is not so welcome. Let's call it neoprogressive internationalism, or
neoprogressivism for short.
Trump's administration brought with it the Russia scandal. To attack the president and his
administration, critics revived Cold War attitudes. This is now part of the neoprogressive
foreign policy critique. It places an "authoritarian axis" at its center. Now countries ruled
by authoritarians, nationalists, and kleptocrats can and must be checked by an American-led
crusade to make the world safe for progressive values. The problem with this neoprogressive
narrative of a world divided between an authoritarian axis and the liberal West is what it will
lead to: ever spiraling defense budgets, more foreign adventures, more Cold Wars -- and hot
ones too.
Unfortunately, Senators Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have adopted elements of the
neoprogressive program. At a much remarked upon address at Westminster College in Fulton,
Missouri, the site of Churchill's 1946 address, Sanders put forth a vision of a Manichean
world. Instead of a world divided by the "Iron Curtain" of Soviet Communism, Sanders sees a
world divided between right-wing authoritarians and the forces of progress embodied by American
and Western European progressive values.
"Today I say to Mr. Putin: We will not allow you to undermine American democracy or
democracies around the world," Sanders said. "In fact, our goal is to not only strengthen
American democracy, but to work in solidarity with supporters of democracy around the globe,
including in Russia. In the struggle of democracy versus authoritarianism, we intend to
win."
A year later, Sanders warned that the battle between the West and an "authoritarian axis"
which is "committed to tearing down a post-Second World War global order that they see as
limiting their access to power and wealth." Sanders calls this "a global struggle of enormous
consequence. Nothing less than the future of the -- economically, socially and environmentally
-- is at stake."
Sanders's focus on this authoritarian axis is one that is shared with his intraparty rivals
at the Center for American Progress (a think-tank long funded by some of the least progressive
regimes on the planet), which he has pointedly criticized for smearing progressive Democrats
like himself. CAP issued a report last September about "the threat presented by opportunist
authoritarian regimes" which "urgently requires a rapid response."
The preoccupation with the authoritarian menace is one Sanders and CAP share with prominent
progressive activists who warn about the creeping influence of what some have cynically hyped
as an "authoritarian Internationale."
Cold War Calling
Senator Warren spelled out her foreign policy vision in a speech at American University in
November 2018. Admirably, she criticized Saudi Arabia's savage war on Yemen, the defense
industry, and neoliberal free trade agreements that have beggared the American working and
middle classes.
"Foreign policy," Warren has said, "should not be run exclusively by the Pentagon." In the
second round of the Democratic primary debates, Warren also called for a nuclear "no first use"
policy.
And yet, Warren too seems in thrall to the idea that the world order is shaping up to be
one in which the white hats (Western democracies) must face off against the black hats
(Eurasian authoritarians). Warren says that the "combination of authoritarianism and corrupt
capitalism" of Putin's Russia and Xi's China "is a fundamental threat to democracy, both here
in the United States and around the world."
Warren also sees a rising tide of corrupt authoritarians "from Hungary to Turkey, from the
Philippines to Brazil," where "wealthy elites work together to grow the state's power while the
state works to grow the wealth of those who remain loyal to the leader."
The concern with the emerging authoritarian tide has become a central concern of progressive
writers and thinkers. "Today, around the world," write progressive foreign policy activists
Kate Kinzer and Stephen Miles, "growing authoritarianism and hate are fueled by oligarchies
preying on economic, gender, and racial inequality."
Daniel Nexon, a progressive scholar of international relations, believes that "progressives
must recognize that we are in a moment of fundamental crisis, featuring coordination among
right-wing movements throughout the West and with the Russian government as a sponsor and
supporter."
Likewise, The Nation 's Jeet Heer lays the blame for the rise of global
authoritarianism at the feet of Vladimir Putin, who "seems to be pushing for an international
alt-right, an informal alliance of right-wing parties held together by a shared
xenophobia."
Blithely waving away concerns over sparking a new and more dangerous Cold War between the
world's two nuclear superpowers, Heer advises that "the dovish left shouldn't let Cold War
nightmares prevent them [from] speaking out about it." He concludes: "Leftists have to be ready
to battle [Putinism] in all its forms, at home and abroad."
The Cold War echoes here are as unmistakable as they are worrying. As Princeton and NYU
professor emeritus Stephen F. Cohen has written, during the first Cold War, a "totalitarian
school" of Soviet studies grew up around the idea "that a totalitarian 'quest for absolute
power' at home always led to the 'dynamism' in Soviet behavior abroad was a fundamental axiom
of cold-war Soviet studies and of American foreign policy."
Likewise, we are seeing the emergence of an "authoritarian school" which posits that the
internal political dynamics of regimes such as Putin's cause them, ineffably, to follow
revanchist, expansionist foreign policies.
Cold warriors in both parties frequently mistook communism as a monolithic global
movement. Neoprogressives are making this mistake today when they gloss over national context,
history, and culture in favor of an all-encompassing theory that puts the "authoritarian"
nature of the governments they are criticizing at the center of their diagnosis.
By citing the threat to Western democracies posed by a global authoritarian axis, the
neoprogressives are repeating the same mistake made by liberal interventionists and
neoconservatives. They buy into the democratic peace theory, which holds without much evidence
that a world order populated by democracies is likely to be a peaceful one because democracies
allegedly don't fight wars against one another.
Yet as Richard Sakwa, a British scholar of Russia and Eastern Europe, writes, "it is often
assumed that Russia is critical of the West because of its authoritarian character, but it
cannot be taken for granted that a change of regime would automatically make the country align
with the West."
George McGovern once observed that U.S. foreign policy "has been based on an obsession
with an international Communist conspiracy that existed more in our minds than in reality." So
too the current obsession with the global authoritarians. Communism wasn't a global monolith
and neither is this. By portraying it as such, neoprogressives are midwifing bad
policy.
True, some of the economic trends voters in Europe and South America are reacting to are
global, but a diagnosis that links together the rise of Putin and Xi, the elections of Trump in
the U.S., Bolsonaro in Brazil, Orban in Hungary, and Kaczyński in Poland with the
right-wing insurgency movements of the Le Pens in France and Farage in the UK makes little
sense.
Some of these elected figures, like Trump and Farage, are symptoms of the failure of the
neoliberal economic order. Others, like Orban and Kaczyński, are responses to
anti-European Union sentiment and the migrant crises that resulted from the Western
interventions in Libya and Syria. Many have more to do with conditions and histories specific
to their own countries. Targeting them by painting them with the same broad brush is a
mistake.
Echoes of Neoconservatism
The progressive foreign policy organization Win Without War includes among its 10 foreign
policy goals "ending economic, racial and gender inequality around the world." The U.S.,
according to WWW, "must safeguard universal human rights to dignity, equality, migration and
refuge."
Is it a noble sentiment? Sure. But it's every bit as unrealistic as the crusade envisioned
by George W. Bush in his second inaugural address, in which he declared, "The survival of
liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best
hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world."
We know full well where appeals to "universal values" have taken us in the past. Such
appeals are not reliable guides for progressives if they seek to reverse the tide of unchecked
American intervention abroad. But maybe we should consider whether it's a policy of realism and
restraint that they actually seek. Some progressive thinkers are at least honest enough
to admit as much that it is not. Nexon admits that "abandoning the infrastructure of American
international influence because of its many minuses and abuses will hamstring progressives for
decades to come." In other words, America's hegemonic ambitions aren't in and of themselves
objectionable or self-defeating, as long as we achieve our kind of hegemony. Progressive
values crusades bear more than a passing resemblance to the neoconservative crusades to remake
the world in the American self-image.
"Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these
days," writes neoconservative-turned-Hillary Clinton surrogate Robert Kagan, "the one for which
we are least prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism." Max
Boot also finds cause for concern. Boot, a modern-day reincarnation (minus the pedigree and war
record) of the hawkish Cold War-era columnist Joe Alsop, believes that "the rise of populist
authoritarianism is perhaps the greatest threat we face as a world right now."
Neoprogressivism, like neoconservatism, risks catering to the U.S. establishment's worst
impulses by playing on a belief in American exceptionalism to embark upon yet another global
crusade. This raises some questions, including whether a neoprogressive approach to the crises
in Ukraine, Syria, or Libya would be substantively different from the liberal interventionist
approach of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton. Does a neoprogressive foreign policy
organized around the concept of an "authoritarian axis" adequately address the concerns of
voters in the American heartland who disproportionately suffer from the consequences of our
wars and neoliberal economic policies? It was these voters, after all, who won the election for
Trump.
Donald Trump's failure to keep his campaign promise to bring the forever wars to a close
while fashioning a new foreign policy oriented around core U.S. national security interests
provides Democrats with an opportunity. By repeatedly intervening in Syria, keeping troops in
Afghanistan, kowtowing to the Israelis and Saudis, ratcheting up tensions with Venezuela, Iran,
Russia, and China, Trump has ceded the anti-interventionist ground he occupied when he ran for
office. He can no longer claim the mantle of restraint, a position that found support among
six-in-ten Americans in 2016.
Yet with the exception of Tulsi Gabbard, for the most part the Democratic field is offering
voters a foreign policy that amounts to "Trump minus belligerence." A truly progressive foreign
policy must put questions of war and peace front and center. Addressing America's post 9/11
failures, military overextension, grotesquely bloated defense budget, and the ingrained
militarism of our political-media establishment are the proper concerns of a progressive U.S.
foreign policy.
But it is one that would place the welfare of our own citizens above all. As such, what is
urgently required is the long-delayed realization of a peace dividend. The post-Cold War peace
dividend that was envisioned in the early 1990s never materialized. Clinton's secretary of
defense Les Aspin strangled the peace dividend in its crib by keeping the U.S. military on a
footing that would allow it to fight and win two regional wars simultaneously. Unipolar
fantasies of "full spectrum dominance" would come later in the decade.
One might have reasonably expected an effort by the Obama administration to realize a
post-bin Laden peace dividend, but the forever wars dragged on and on. In a New Yorker profile
from earlier this year, Sanders asked the right question: "Do we really need to spend more than
the next ten nations combined on the military, when our infrastructure is collapsing and kids
can't afford to go to college?"
The answer is obvious. And yet, how likely is it that progressives will be able realize
their vision of a more just, more equal American society if we have to mobilize to face a
global authoritarian axis led by Russia and China?
FDR's Good Neighbor Policy
The unipolar world of the first post-Cold War decade is well behind us now. As the world
becomes more and more multipolar, powers like China, Russia, Iran, India, and the U.S. will
find increasing occasion to clash. A peaceful multipolar world requires stability. And
stability requires balance.
In the absence of stability, none of the goods progressives see as desirable can take root.
This world order would put a premium on stability and security rather than any specific set of
values. An ethical, progressive foreign policy is one which understands that great powers have
security interests of their own. "Spheres of influence" are not 19th century anachronisms, but
essential to regional security: in Europe, the Western Hemisphere and elsewhere.
It is a policy that would reject crusades to spread American values the world over. "The
greatest thing America can do for the rest of the world," George Kennan once observed, "is to
make a success of what it is doing here on this continent and to bring itself to a point where
its own internal life is one of harmony, stability and self-assurance."
Progressive realism doesn't call for global crusades that seek to conquer the hearts and
minds of others. It is not bound up in the hoary self-mythology of American Exceptionalism. It
is boring. It puts a premium on the value of human life. It foreswears doing harm so that good
may come. It is not a clarion call in the manner of John F. Kennedy who pledged to "to pay any
price, bear any burden." It does not lend itself to the cheap moralizing of celebrity
presidential speechwriters. In ordinary language, a summation of such a policy would go
something like: "we will bear a reasonable price as long as identifiable U.S. security
interests are at stake."
A policy that seeks to wind down the global war on terror, slash the defense budget, and
shrink our global footprint won't inspire. It will, however, save lives. Such a policy has its
roots in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first inaugural address. "In the field of World policy,"
said Roosevelt, "I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor, the neighbor
who resolutely respects himself and, because he does so, respects the rights of others, the
neighbor who respects his obligations and respects the sanctity of his agreements in and with a
World of neighbors."
What came to be known as the "Good Neighbor" policy was further explicated by FDR's
Secretary of State Cordell Hull at the Montevideo Conference in 1933, when he stated that "No
country has the right to intervene in the internal or external affairs of another." Historian
David C. Hendrickson sees this as an example of FDR's principles of "liberal pluralism," which
included "respect for the integrity and importance of other states" and "non-intervention in
the domestic affairs of neighboring states."
These ought to serve as the foundations on which to build a truly progressive foreign
policy. They represent a return to the best traditions of the Democratic Party and would likely
resonate with those very same blocs of voters that made up the New Deal coalition that the
neoliberal iteration of the Democratic Party has largely shunned but will sorely need in order
to unseat Trump. And yet, proponents of a neoprogressive foreign policy seem intent on running
away from a popular policy of realism and restraint on which Trump has failed to deliver.
James W. Carden is contributing writer for foreign affairs at The Nation and a
member of the Board of the Simone Weil Center for Political Philosophy.
Lyttennburgh, I can think of a couple of reasons for Erdogan's Libyan adventure. First, he'd
rather have those battle tested jihadis in Libya than on his border or in his country.
Second, he may have his eyes on Mediterranean oil. Lastly, he may see a friendly Libyan
government as an ally or province of his Ottoman Empire dream. No matter what the reason,
he's setting himself up for another confrontation with Russia.
Combating the scourge of US-supported terrorists in Syria at the behest of its government
aside, Russia's involvement elsewhere is diplomatic, including in Libya.
Obama regime-led aggression in 2011 transformed Africa's most developed nation into a
charnel house, a dystopian failed state, endless war raging with no resolution in prospect.
Wherever wars rage, chances are US dirty hands are involved, clearly the case in multiple
countries, including Libya.
Russia is not involved in the country militarily. Claims otherwise are fabricated. Russian
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov strongly denied them, saying:
"I categorically refute speculations of this kind. We are acting in the interest of the
Libyan settlement," adding:
"We are supporting the existing effort, including through the United Nations. We maintain a
dialogue with those who somehow influence the situation."
"We do not think that there is any grounds for such statements, such fiction, but this is
not the first time that US media spread different speculations, wicked rumors, falsehoods
targeting us."
"We have already gotten used to this, and we take it in stride. However, I have to
acknowledge that recurrent hoaxes of this kind exercise a negative influence on the sentiment
of the US domestic public, and the general atmosphere in the United States."
"Unfortunately it does not promote normalization of our ties, although we strive for
it."
A November NYT propaganda piece falsely accused Russia of involvement militarily in Libya --
instead of focusing on how the Obama regime raped and destroyed the country.
Trump hardliners support warlord Khalifa Haftar, a longtime CIA asset, a former US resident,
commander of the so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) -- waging war on the UN-backed
Tripoli-based Government of National Accord (GNA).
Since US-led aggression toppled Muammar Gaddafi in October 2011 and sodomized him to death,
the US continued to wage secret drone war on the country, conducting hundreds of strikes,
continuing since Trump took office.
The Times falsely claimed "Russian mercenaries (and) snipers" are involved in Libya -- no
evidence cited proving what's not so, adding:
Hundreds of "Russian fighters (are) part of a broad campaign by the Kremlin to reassert its
influence across the Middle East and Africa (sic)."
"It has introduced advanced Sukhoi jets, coordinated missile strikes, and precision-guided
artillery, as well as the snipers -- the same playbook that made Moscow a kingmaker in the
Syrian civil war (sic)."
There's nothing remotely "civil" about US aggression in Syria. No evidence suggests Russia
is involved militarily in Libya with heavy or other weapons.
The Kremlin didn't intervene in the country on behalf of anyone. Its involvement is
diplomatic to try resolving the mess US aggression created -- what the Times and other
establishment media cheerled.
Days earlier, Russia's Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova slammed false claims
about Kremlin involvement in Libya militarily, saying:
Moscow officials maintain diplomatic contact "with all current Libyan political forces,"
adding:
Congressional hardliners drafted the so-called Libya Stabilization Act -- imposing sanctions
on Russia for its "imaginary military presence in" the country.
The measure falsely accuses Moscow of "military intervention," blaming what doesn't exist on
destabilizing the country, ignoring how US-led NATO smashed Libya, massacring countless
thousands, displacing many more, destroying their livelihoods and well-being
"I wonder how US lawmakers describe the illegal US armed forces presence in Syria or the
reckless actions of the (Obama regime) in Libya to their voters," Zakharova stressed.
The Times propaganda piece barely acknowledged Trump regime support for Haftar, mentioning
it buried well into its article, ignoring its April 2019 piece, headlined:
Like it was earlier noted, the "New Detente" isn't perfect, as seen most recently by the US'
decision to impose sanctions on
the companies involved in Nord Stream II's construction, but once again, the state of relations
in general are still comparatively better than their nadir in mid-2014 immediately after the
EuroMaidan coup and Crimea's reunification with Russia. The US is still trying to "contain"
Russia with mixed success, while Russia is undertaking its best efforts to break out of this
"containment" noose and even "flip" some of the US' traditional partners such as Turkey, so the
New
Cold War probably won't end anytime soon. Nor, for that matter, did anybody reasonably
expect that it would, but just like during the Old Cold War, there comes a time when the
involved parties believe that it's in their best interests to proverbially take a break and
enter into a period of detente. It seems as though that phase is only now just beginning but
which has finally borne some fruit after Trump promised to pursue this outcome all throughout
the 2016 campaign.
One can argue over why that hasn't already happened to the extent that he promised (or even
if he was fully sincere in the first place), but the point to focus on in the here and now is
that some tangible progress has finally been made concerning the future of Russia's
trans-Ukrainian gas supplies to the EU. From the looks of it, all the relevant players --
Russia, Ukraine, the EU, and the US -- have concrete interests in seeing that this agreement is
upheld. It's convenient for Russia to continue using existing pipelines, Ukraine wants to get
paid for its transit role, the EU desires reliable but cheap gas imports, and the US recognizes
that this outcome perpetuates the geostrategic role of its Ukrainian proxy that it could then
leverage as a "bargaining chip" for reaching a more substantive "New Detente" with Russia
sometime next year or the one afterwards. That said, while each player has their interests,
they don't exactly trust one another for different reasons, which means that the "New Detente"
might still be offset if any of them decides to play the spoiler or is undermined by their
"deep states".
So Turkey goes against Uncle Sam and Egypt. Interesting...
Notable quotes:
"... Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed . ..."
"... In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict . ..."
"... Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to topple Assad? ..."
"... The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world. More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. ..."
Bloomberg has confirmed on Friday the prior rumors that Turkey will be sending mercenaries
to Libya -- where it is propping up the UN-backed government in Tripoli (the GNA) -- are true.
"Turkey is preparing to deploy troops and naval forces to support the
internationally-recognized Libyan government, joining a planned push by Ankara-backed Syrian
rebels to defeat strongman Khalifa Haftar,"
reports Bloomberg .
Though Ankara has yet to confirm or deny the new reports, Erdogan's Turkey has for years
overseen a Libya-to-Turkey-to-Syria arms
"rat line" which saw both heavy weaponry and jihadists fighters transported for the purpose
of toppling Assad. But now with Erdogan's eyes set on defeating Benghazi-based General Khalifa
Haftar, it appears this arms and jihadist rat line has conveniently been reversed
.
This also as President Erdogan
in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as
well .
Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA),
with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace
Spring', will now be sent into Libya.
There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel'
willing to go to Libya .
TFSA source told me Turkey will be offering fighters from all TFSA factions $2,000/month
to go to Libya.
And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists
backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the
latest 'oil and gas prize' -- but with immensely more at stake. As Bloomberg notes:
In a deepening proxy war, Turkey aims to send its Navy to protect Tripoli, while its
troops train and coordinate forces of Prime Minister Fayez al-Sarraj, according to a senior
Turkish official. Turkey recently signed a critical maritime deal with oil-rich Libya that
serves energy interests of both countries and aims to salvage billions of dollars of business
contracts thrown into limbo by the conflict .
As we
predicted earlier , Libya and the southern Mediterranean is on its way to becoming the next
big Middle East conflict of 2020 , also with Egypt and even Russia warning of further
involvement to block Turkey's increasing role on the ground.
And as the mainstream media finally stops ignoring the looming catastrophe for north Africa
and the region (still in denial as to the fruits of US-NATO "liberated" Libya after Gaddafi was
overthrown and killed), it
must be remembered that in another ironic plot twist, the CIA trained the very FSA 'rebel'
fighters now on their way to Libya .
Gee who would have ever predicted? It's the foreign fighter 'rat line' in reverse.
Remember when the CIA thought it was a good idea to train and fund jihadists in Syria to
topple Assad? Via a 2015
military study :
The conflict in Syria has become a rallying point for jihadists from around the world.
More than 20,000 foreign fighters are fighting or have fought in Syria, and most are part of
jihadist groups, including Jubhat al Nusra (JAN) and Islamic State (IS). North Africa has provided a large portion of these
foreign fighters, from countries as diverse as Morocco and Libya. Who are these North African fighters, and why are they
going to Syria? What do they hope to accomplish there, and do they want to return to their home countries?
Considering the tens of thousands of foreign fighters which poured into Syria starting in
2011 and 2012 in the first place, many of them from Libya, perhaps many are now simply headed
"home" -- ready to further the proxy war chaos at Erdogan's bidding.
NATO IS NOTHING more than an extension of George Soros' arm as it is also an extension
of the Rothschild arm! Most should have gleaned this by now, particularly recognizing the
radical Wahhabism that was included in this band of merry global thugs (Saudi Arabia) to do
the bidding of the globalist satanic cabal. Kind of sad hearing this kind of neive
responses from the gallery...sorry Mr. teolawki but you missed the forest for the
trees.
What is naive is not understanding that Turkey is the current NATO nations gateway for
all manner of illicit and illegitimat activity to foment and perpetuate the forever wars in
the ME. This has been going on since well before Benghazi and has only gotten worse under
Erdogan.
If you have a way to snap your fingers and solve every problem simultaneously, then
please do so. Otherwise it must be undertaken one step at a time. Closing that Turkish
gateway permanently is an excellent start.
"... Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization " big bang ." ..."
"... The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation's Ukraine branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government into power. ..."
"... Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in the US State Department ..."
Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and
the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public
good.
The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized
American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters
allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine
regime .
They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European
Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine
assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU
taxpayers.
What the three hacked documents reveal is a degree of behind-the-scene manipulation of the
most minute details of the Kiev regime by the New York billionaire.
In the longest memo, dated March 15, 2015 and marked "Confidential" Soros outlines a
detailed map of actions for the Ukraine regime. Titled, "A short and medium term comprehensive
strategy for the new Ukraine," the memo from Soros calls for steps to "restore the fighting
capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement." To do the restoring, Soros blithely
notes that "General Wesley Clark, Polish General Skrzypczak and a few specialists under the
auspices of the Atlantic Council [emphasis added -- f.w.e.] will advise President Poroshenko
how to restore the fighting capacity of Ukraine without violating the Minsk agreement
."
Soros also calls for supplying lethal arms to Ukraine and secretly training Ukrainian army
personnel in Romania to avoid direct NATO presence in Ukraine . The
Atlantic Council is a leading Washington pro-NATO think tank .
Notably, Wesley Clark is also a business associate of Soros in BNK Petroleum which does
business in Poland.
Clark, some might recall, was the mentally-unstable NATO General in charge of the 1999
bombing of Serbia who ordered NATO soldiers to fire on Russian soldiers guarding the Pristina
International Airport. The Russians were there as a part of an agreed joint NATO–Russia
peacekeeping operation supposed to police Kosovo. The British Commander, General Mike Jackson
refused Clark, retorting, "I'm not going to start the Third World War for you ." Now Clark apparently decided to
come out of retirement for the chance to go at Russia directly.
Naked asset grab
In his March 2015 memo Soros further writes that Ukrainian President Poroshenko's "first
priority must be to regain control of financial markets," which he assures Poroshenko that
Soros would be ready to assist in: "I am ready to call Jack Lew of the US Treasury to sound him
out about the swap agreement."
He also calls on the EU to give Ukraine an annual aid sum of €11 billion via a special
EU borrowing facility. Soros proposes in effect using the EU's "AAA" top credit rating to
provide a risk insurance for investment into Ukraine.
Whose risk would the EU insure?
Soros details, "I am prepared to invest up to €1 billion in Ukrainian businesses.
This is likely to attract the interest of the investment community. As stated above, Ukraine
must become an attractive investment destination."
Not to leave any doubt, Soros continues, "The investments will be for-profit but I will
pledge to contribute the profits to my foundations. This should allay suspicions that I am
advocating policies in search of personal gain. "
For anyone familiar with the history of the Soros Open Society Foundations in Eastern Europe
and around the world since the late 1980's, will know that his supposedly philanthropic
"democracy-building" projects in Poland, Russia, or Ukraine in the 1990's allowed Soros the
businessman to literally plunder the former communist countries using Harvard University's
"shock therapy" messiah, and Soros associate, Jeffrey Sachs, to convince the post-Soviet
governments to privatize and open to a "free market" at once, rather than gradually.
The example of Soros in Liberia is instructive for understanding the seemingly seamless
interplay between Soros the shrewd businessman and Soros the philanthropist. In West Africa
George Soros backed a former Open Society employee of his, Liberian President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf, giving her international publicity and through his influence, even arranging a Nobel
Peace Prize for her in 2011, insuring her election as president. Before her presidency she had
been well-indoctrinated into the Western free market game, studying economics at Harvard and
working for the US-controlled World Bank in Washington and the Rockefeller Citibank in Nairobi.
Before becoming Liberia's President, she worked for Soros directly as chair of his Open Society
Initiative for West Africa ( OSIWA
).
Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian
gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first acts
as President was to also invite the Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia whose
purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and Rothschild
mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human rights ."
Naftogaz the target
The Soros memo makes clear he has his eyes on the Ukrainian state gas and energy monopoly,
Naftogaz. He writes, "The centerpiece of economic reforms will be the reorganization of
Naftogaz and the introduction of market pricing for all forms of energy, replacing hidden
subsidies
"
In an earlier letter Soros wrote in December 2014 to both President Poroshenko and Prime
Minister Yatsenyuk, Soros openly called for his Shock Therapy:
"I want to appeal to you to unite behind the reformers in your government and give your
wholehearted support to a radical, 'big bang' type of approach. That is to say,
administrative controls would be removed and the economy would move to market prices rapidly
rather than gradually Naftogaz needs to be reorganized with a big bang replacing the hidden
subsidies
"
Splitting Naftogaz into separate companies could allow Soros to take control of one of
the new branches and essentially privatize its profits. He already suggested that he indirectly
brought in US consulting company, McKinsey, to advise Naftogaz on the privatization "
big bang
."
The Puppet-Master?
The totality of what is revealed in the three hacked documents show that Soros is
effectively the puppet-master pulling most of the strings in Kiev. Soros Foundation's Ukraine
branch, International Renaissance Foundation (IRF) has been involved in Ukraine since 1989. His
IRF doled out more than $100 million to Ukrainian NGOs two years before the fall of the Soviet
Union, creating the preconditions for Ukraine's independence from Russia in 1991. Soros also
admitted to financing the 2013-2014 Maidan Square protests that brought the current government
into power.
Soros' foundations were also deeply involved in the 2004 Orange Revolution that brought
the corrupt but pro-NATO Viktor Yushchenko into power with his American wife who had been in
the US State Department . In 2004 just weeks after Soros' International Renaissance
Foundation had succeeded in getting Viktor Yushchenko as President of Ukraine, Michael McFaul
wrote an OpEd for the Washington Post. McFaul, a specialist in organizing color revolutions,
who later became US Ambassador to Russia, revealed:
Did Americans meddle in the internal affairs of Ukraine? Yes. The American agents of
influence would prefer different language to describe their activities -- democratic
assistance, democracy promotion, civil society support, etc. -- but their work, however
labeled, seeks to influence political change in Ukraine. The U.S. Agency for International
Development, the National Endowment for Democracy and a few other foundations sponsored certain
U.S. organizations, including Freedom House, the International Republican Institute, the
National Democratic Institute, the Solidarity Center, the Eurasia Foundation, Internews and
several others to provide small grants and technical assistance to Ukrainian civil society. The
European Union, individual European countries and the Soros-funded International Renaissance
Foundation did the same .
Soros
shapes 'New Ukraine'
Today the CyberBerkut hacked papers show that Soros' IRF money is behind creation of a
National Reform Council, a body organized by presidential decree from Poroshenko which allows
the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine's legislature. Soros writes,
"The framework for bringing the various branches of government together has also emerged.
The National Reform Council (NRC) brings together the presidential administration, the
cabinet of ministers, the Rada and its committees and civil society. The International
Renaissance Foundation which is the Ukrainian branch of the Soros Foundations was the sole
financial supporter of the NRC until now "
Soros' NRC in effect is the vehicle to allow the President to override parliamentary debate
to push through "reforms," with the declared first priority being privatization of Naftogaz and
raising gas prices drastically to Ukrainian industry and households, something the bankrupt
country can hardly afford .
In his letter to Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk, Soros hints that he played a key role in
selection of three key non-Ukrainian ministers -- Natalia Jaresko, an American ex- State
Department official as Finance Minister; Aivras Abromavicius of Lithuania as Economics
Minister, and a health minister from Georgia. Soros in his December 2014 letter, referring to
his proposal for a "big bank" privatization of Naftogaz and price rise, states,
"You are fortunate to have appointed three 'new Ukrainian' ministers and several natives
(sic) who are committed to this approach
."
Elsewhere Soros speaks about de facto creating the impression within the EU that the current
government of Yatsenyuk is finally cleaning out the notorious corruption that has dominated
every Kiev regime since 1991. Creating that temporary reform illusion, he remarks, will
convince the EU to cough up the €11 billion annual investment insurance fund. His March
2015 paper says that, "It is essential for the government to produce a visible demonstration
(sic) during the next three months in order to change the widely prevailing image of Ukraine as
an utterly corrupt country." That he states will open the EU to make the €11 billion
insurance guarantee investment fund .
While saying that it is important to show Ukraine as a country that is not corrupt, Soros
reveals he has little concern when transparency and proper procedures block his agenda. Talking
about his proposals to reform Ukraine's constitution to enable privatizations and other
Soros-friendly moves, he complains,
"The process has been slowed down by the insistence of the newly elected Rada on proper
procedures and total transparency
."
Soros suggests that he intends to create this "visible demonstration" through his
initiatives, such as using the Soros-funded National Reform Council, a body organized by
presidential decree which allows the Ukrainian president to push bills through Ukraine's
legislature.
George Soros is also using his new European Council on Foreign Relations think-tank to lobby
his Ukraine strategy, with his council members such as Alexander Graf Lambsdorff or Joschka
Fischer or Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, not to mention former ECB head, Jean-Claude Trichet no
doubt laying a subtle role.
George Soros, now 84, was born in Hungary as a Jew, George Sorosz. Soros once boasted in a
TV interview that he posed during the war as a gentile with forged papers, assisting the Horthy
government to seize property of other Hungarian Jews who were being shipped to the Nazi death
camps. Soros told the TV moderator, "There was no sense that I shouldn't be there, because that
was–well, actually, in a funny way, it's just like in markets–that if I weren't
there–of course, I wasn't doing it, but somebody else would."
This is the same morality apparently behind Soros' activities in Ukraine today. It seems
again to matter not to him that the Ukrainian government he helped bring to power in February
2014 US coup d'etat is riddled with explicit anti-semites and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis from
the Svoboda Party and Pravy Sektor. George Soros is clearly a devotee of
"public-private-partnership." Only here the public gets fleeced to enrich private investors
like Mr. Soros and friends. Cynically, Soros signs his Ukraine strategy memo, "George
Soros–A self-appointed advocate of the new Ukraine, March 12, 2015."
And now we learn that our own State Department was filling Soros coffers with our taxpayer
money to use against us and destroy our republic.
Whenever Democrats scream about cuts in foreign aid, know that they are squealing because
their "cut" of the laundered funds is in jeopardy and they have to answer to Soros for the
rest.
He's contributed a lot of money to the Dem Party to be so insulated from not only
prosecution but from criticism. If and when he gets criticized in a publication or article,
he screams "Anti-Semitism!" He's become good at making everything a win-win for himself.
Preaches socialism out of one side of his mouth to "virtue signal" to the world and then
loots the objects thereof out of the other side of his mouth for the benefit of his alleged
foundations. Why we can't prosecute him for interfering in our elections with his stolen
money is something hard to understand.
Ukraine is *** infested. I would like to know Soros ties to Igor Kolomoisky.
"Once in office, President Sirleaf opened the doors for Soros to take over major Liberian
gold and base metals assets along with his partner, Nathaniel Rothschild. One of her first
acts as President was to also invite the Pentagon's new Africa Command, AFRICOM, into Liberia
whose purpose as a Liberian investigation revealed, was to "protect George Soros and
Rothschild mining operations in West Africa rather than champion stability and human
rights ."
Wherever there are wealthy *** Zionist fascist oligarch sociopaths there is trouble...
"... Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in the US of A. ..."
https://www.dianomi.com/smartads.epl?id=4777 Washington's Unmasked Imperialism Towards
Europe And Russia by Tyler Durden Sat, 12/28/2019 - 07:00 0
SHARES
Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own politicians are.
Its passing into law – signed by President Trump this week – of sanctions to halt
the Nord Stream-2 and Turk Stream gas supply projects is a naked imperialist move to bludgeon
the European energy market for its own economic advantage.
US sanctions are planned to hit European companies involved with Russia's Gazprom in the
construction of the 1,225-kilometer pipeline under the Baltic Sea which will deliver natural
gas from Russia to Germany and elsewhere across the European Union. The €9.5 billion
($11bn) project is 80 per cent complete and is due to be finished early next year.
It is quite clear – because US politicians have openly acknowledged it – that
Washington's aim is to oust Russia as the main natural gas exporter to the giant EU market, and
to replace with more expensive American-produced gas.
What's hilarious is the way American politicians, diplomats and news media are portraying
this US assault on market principles and the sovereignty of nations as an act of chivalry.
Washington claims that the sanctions are "pro-European" because they are "saving Europe from
dependency on Russia for its energy". The American hypocrisy crescendoes with the further claim
that by stopping Russia earning lucrative export revenues, then Moscow will be constrained from
"interfering" in European nations. As if Washington's own actions are not interference on a
massive scale.
European politicians and businesses are not buying this American claptrap. The vast
overstepping by Washington into European affairs has prompted EU governments to question the
nature of the trans-Atlantic relation. About time too. Thus, Washington's hubris and bullying
are undermining its objective of dominating Europe for its own selfish interests.
Russia, Germany and others have defiantly
told Washington its weaponizing of economic sanctions will not halt the Nord Stream nor the
Turk Stream projects.
As German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas
said earlier this month, "it is unacceptable" for the US to brazenly interfere in European
and Russian energy trade. The American pretext of supposedly "protecting" the national security
of its purported European allies is frankly laughable.
The American agenda is a blatantly imperialistic reordering of the energy market to benefit
US economic interests. To pull off this audacious scam, Washington, by necessity, has to
demonize and isolate Russia, while also trampling roughshod over its European allies. Europe
has partly aided this American stitch-up of its own interests because it has foolishly indulged
in the US antagonism towards Russia with sanctions due to the Ukraine conflict, Crimea and
other anti-Russia smears.
The legislation being whistled through the American Congress by both Republicans and
Democrats (collectively dubbed the War Party) is recklessly fueling tensions between the US and
Russia. In trying to gain economic advantages over Europe's energy, Washington is wantonly
ramping up animus towards Moscow.
Apart from the sanctions against Russian and European companies partnering on Nord Stream,
the US Congress passed separate legislation which seeks to boost American oil and gas
production in the East Mediterranean.
A Radio Free Europe
report this week was headlined: 'Congress Passes More Legislation Aimed At Curbing Russia's
Energy Grip On Europe'.
The headline should more accurately have been worded: 'Congress Passes More Legislation
Aimed At Bolstering America's Energy Grip On Europe'.
The RFE report states: "The bipartisan Eastern Mediterranean Security and Energy Partnership
Act, which was approved on December 19, is the latest piece of US legislation passed this year
that aims to diversify [sic] Europe's energy sources away from Kremlin-controlled
companies."
Again, the American double-think is jaw-dropping. Such is the arrogance of a flailing,
delusional empire when it can publicly justify with a straight face an energy-market-grab with
a veneer of virtue.
US oil and gas giants are moving into the East Mediterranean. Exxon Mobil
announced the discovery of a major natural gas field off Cyprus in February this year.
American firms are also
partnering with Israeli companies to begin gas production in the Leviathan Field located
off the coast at Haifa.
There is no doubt that the US sanctions targeting Nord Stream and Turk Stream are part of a
bigger concerted pincer movement by Washington to corner the EU energy market of 500 million
consumers (more than double the US population).
Colin Cavell, a US professor of political science, commented to Strategic Culture
Foundation: "What should be hammered down in this continuing debate over which country will be
able to deliver oil and natural gas to Europe is the fact that neither the United States nor,
and especially, the Republican Party, stand for so-called free trade."
Free-trade capitalism is supposed to be an ideological pillar of the US. In this ideology,
governments should not interfere with market supply and demand. But paradoxically as far as
US-imposed sanctions on Russian-European energy companies are concerned the American Congress
is "quintessentially anti-free market", notes Cavell.
In its shameless profiteering, Washington is acting aggressively towards Russia and Europe
while flouting its own supposed economic principles and relying on brute force to win its
arguments. America's imperialist agenda towards Europe and Russia is how world wars are
instigated.
"You will buy our more expensive, less efficient, non-market solution, you will pay for it
with King Dollars, and by gawd, YOU WILL LIKE IT, now shuddup, Vassals!" -- Uncle Scam and
the Reloonicans
I live in Denmark, a country Nord Stream 2 is going through. We are (used to be?) one of
the strongest allies to the US. But recent developments have alienated a lot of danes to the
US.
First Trump publicly announced he wanted to buy the isle of Greenland from Denmark.
Greenland is the largest isle in the world and of strategic importance. But you don't just
buy a part of another country, and this offer was firmly refused. As response to the refusal
Trump cancelled a previously planned official visit to Denmark. This was seen by most danes
as an insult.
Denmark was the last country holding out on permissions needed to build Nord Stream 2, but
after this incident we allowed the project to go forward. I believe the Greenland incident
caused the change making Denmark approve Nord Stream 2.
After this we have had other incidents. One is on the Faroe Islands (a part of Denmark),
where both US and Chinese ambassadors interfered in our internal affairs trying to influence
if Huawei could be used for 5G in this self-governing part of our country. Another is a
follow-up to the Greenland incident mentioned, where the US now wants to open a diplomatic
mission on the island, probably in an attempt to influence the local government to accept
that the US buys the island.
During the last year I have seen sentiment among my fellow citizens going from "the US is
great, let us support and follow them" to "we have to be careful of these guys, they
interfere in our internal affairs and try to break up our country".
I believe the US government is underestimating how much they are alienating the Europeans
with this line of foreing policy.
Its a guess but I think there are other hidden issues here nobody wants to talk about. Of
course, Trump idea of buying the island was stupid but I believe it arouse out of
frustration. You see, US wants to build huge military base there. Danes won't permit that.
The reason US wants to do it is because sea between Iceland and England/Norway is a
chokepoint aimed against Russian subs. This is the only place where they can be reasonably
stopped. It is nothing new, the same thing happened during WWII war at so called "war of
Atlantic" where the most of the fighting happened between German U-boats and alliance
marines.
You most certainly can buy land from other countries. Thomas Jefferson purchased the
entire center of N. America from the French and for pennies. We also purchased Alaska from
the Russians for next to nothing as well. Both land masses are much larger than all of
Europe.
You guys don't need Greenland so give it to us for pennies.
Russia has the largest proven reserves of easily recoverable oil and natural gas on Earth.
The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. Economic sanctions, regime change, cyber
attacks...whatever it takes. If the US doesn't utterly break Russia soon, Russia will become
the next, (and last) empire on Earth. NeoConThink.
"The US has about a decade to choke Russia to death. "
Actually you are absolutely wrong on this. It is the other way around. Russia has to get
out of US chokefold NOW or it will likely disintegrate.
Why? In short, economy, geogaphy and even more importantly demographics.
Today there are about 110 million native Russians there. Next to them are about 40 million
muslims living there. Muslims have about twice as big reproduction rate as Russians do. It is
estimated that in 30 years if current trends stand it will be 50/50. Worse, in ten years
there will be only about 90 million Russians living there.
There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube.
Another problem is soldier materiel. It is estimated that only about 30 percent of males
between the age of 18-25 are healthy enough to join military. As of today it is barely
sufficient to fill the ranks. In 10 years Russian military will have to shrink by 20 percent.
From that perspective it is do or die for Russia right now. This is most likely the peak of
their military power, then it will slowly deteriorate. Putin knows that, hence he lashes out
at its neighbours, most notably Poland. Economy shrinks, military is on vane, hence he needs
an enemy to rally his people around. Or else!
Then there is China. Make your best bet what they will do in the far east when Russia lies
prostate.Remember, Russia took over a lot of Chinese territory in late XIX century there.
Yep, the area around Vladivostok and other nearby territories, the size close to that of
today's France..There are millions of Chinese already living there.In the Asian south Chinese already took controll of the former
Russian stans. They rule there, not Putin. You didn't know that?
"There are other issues as well. About 25 percent of Russian men die before the age of 55.
The reason? Alcoholism and drug abuse. Have you ever heard about cheap Rusian drug called
Krokodil?
It kills you slowly first then fast. Your body just ROTS AWAY and falls off. Literally!
Like you have bare bones instead of feet. No kidding. Just check on you tube."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but since the end of the Soviet System (with Western criminal
thieving BILLIONAIRES who rushed in to plunder Russia (Yeltsin Years) ---- Russians now live
longer than the degraded, and impoverished Americans with what the Junk Food Nation serves in
the US of A.
" Washington must think the rest of the world is as stupid as many of its own
politicians are"
No, washington thinks no such thing. It doesnt really understand how stupid its own
politicians are. Nor DOES IT CARE!.
Did anyone watch the impeachment proceedings? Now, THAT was stupid, stupid for the
whole world to watch. And then there is the chocoate cake diplomacy of Trump, the elegance
and sophistication of Pompeo, Bolton, and the digniity of Nikki Haley. Putting Raytheon to
run our Pentagon is a magical touch.
Comment from a friend of mine concerning the statement below. He has excellent security
credentials:
"Our President has made the world far more dangerous by withdrawing from treaties without
attempting to negotiate new ones. No country is well served by this. The situation is very
destabilizing."
The Minister of Defense of the Russian Federation Sergey Shoigu:
- I hope that a full-scale war is not a question today. And all the risks and consequences
that such a full-scale war entails are obvious to everyone.
Regarding the third world war, there are a very large number of different statements. The
most accurate and adequate of them seems to me: "I do not know exactly what the third world
war will be. But I know for sure that she will be the last. "
However, if we talk about the number of threats to our country, then they do not become
less. The United States has already withdrawn from two important nuclear arms control
treaties. So far, the START-3 treaty remains, which is also under discussion in the USA: to
renew it or not to renew it?
As a result of this approach, the world is becoming more unpredictable and less secure. At
the current level of informatization and automation, there is a high probability of errors in
the weapons control system.
That is why recently issues of ensuring information security have come to the fore. When
you are aware of your vulnerability and are interested in maintaining balance and universal
equal security, it makes you turn on your head.
And when you think how the United States continues to believe by inertia that a balance of
power has developed in your favor, a variety of ideas may come to your head, including not
the most reasonable ones. It is in this situation that I see the main threat now, and not
only for Russia, "the minister replied.
It's good cop/bad cop nonsense. Europe is occupied territory, and American huffing and
puffing at Russia is just meant to get Europe "better deals" for their projects with Russia.
The only ones who don't get it are spooks and Neo-Libs/Cons
What is not expected is rational discussion on what I have described here. But since facts
contrary to my expose here are missing I doubt it will happen.
" But remember also that todays Russia is ruled by a Tsar named Putin"
Im amazed at how long this silly meme can be maintained.
Putin is NOT and autocrat, he has to struggle with a delicate balance. between the Atlantic integrationists and Eurasiaon soveriigntists. The oligarchy installed by the US is still strong in Russian. They have not won their
soveriignty yet.
People may have read that Putin has said a few more things about the documents he reviewed
with his CIS peers; and in doing so, Putin revealed an aspect about himself few have seen
previously. Putin made his statement at the annual year-end Defense Ministry Board Meeting . IMO,
Putin has had more than enough of the extreme Russophobia now in circulation and he sees it
as being very similar to that of prior historical periods where Russia was then subjected to
attack from the West. I won't post Putin's diatribe here; you'll need to read it for
yourself--I've never seen him so angry or speak undiplomatically. What I will post is what he
said after, which IMO is even more important, although removed from the overall context:
"I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were negotiating
with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red Army
soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism. These
are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must keep
this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My
Emphasis]
"Here is what I would like to say in this regard, which I think is critically important.
Please note: neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia have ever tried to create a threat to
other countries. We were always catching up in this regard. The United States created the
atomic bomb, and the Soviet Union caught up with it. We did not have nuclear weapon
delivery vehicles or carriers. There was no such thing as strategic aviation, and the
Soviet Union was catching up in this area, as well. The first intercontinental missiles
actually were not built here, and the Soviet Union was trying to catch up.
"Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history. They try to catch up
with us."
Also note the word Putin chose to describe the Outlaw US Empire's withdraw from the INF
Treaty. Clearly, Putin desires to impress upon those charged with Russia's defense that the
times are indeed perilous, that the old lies are being spread without any resistance. As with
the other three transcripts I linked, this one also demands to be read in full and also in
close association with the other three. The Poles will scream along with their sycophants,
but Putin is correct about both the past and the present and the danger present within the
future.
I read your link; Defense Ministry Board Meeting. Thanks.
All I can say is wow! Putin, rightfully angry as hell, with what we in the west are doing to
the present and the foul corruption of history.
My greatest fear is the complacency of western citizens; both U.S. (especially) and European.
Usians are the absolute worst in their total lack of knowing and understanding
history...
The study reveals a range of impressive indicators on the development of the economy between
2000 and 2013 and the health of the Russian economy:
The share of natural resources rents in GDP (oil, gas, coal, mineral, and forest rents)
more than halved between 2000 to 2012 from 44.5% to 18.7%. The actual share of oil and gas
was 16%.
Russian industrial production has grown more than 50% while having undergone a total
modernization at the same time.
Production of food has grown by 100% in 2000 – 2013.
Production of cars has more than doubled at the same time that all the production has been
totally remodeled.
Russian exports have grown by almost 400%, outdoing all major Western countries.
Growth of exports of non-oil & gas goods has been 250%.
Russia's export growth has more than doubled compared with the competing Western
powers.
Oil & gas does not count for over 50% of state revenues as has been claimed, but only
27.4%. Top revenue source is instead payroll taxes.
Russia's total tax rate at 29.5% is among lowest of developed countries, non-oil & gas
total tax rate is half that of the Western countries.
Russia's GDP has grown more than tenfold from 1999 to 2012.
Public sector share of employment in Russia is not high in comparison with developed
economies. State officials make up 17.7% of Russia's total work force, which situates it in
the middle of the pack with global economies.
Russia's labor productivity is not 40% of the Western standards as is frequently claimed,
but rather about 80%.
What these events have in common is that they amount to an admission that the globalist
New World Order project in its present form is dead, or at least in its death throes. It has
bumped its head against an impenetrable Sino-Russian wall of resistance. The heated
totalitarian propaganda against Russia since 2001 (when the NWO realized that Putin wasn't
their man); regime change and color revolutions in neighboring countries; attempts at Maidan
style coups in Moscow; and finally the sanctions since 2014 were key to the Anglo-Zionist
empires strategy. They needed to take over either China or Russia to gain absolute world
hegemony. Taking over either one, they would have checkmated the remaining one, and after
that the entire world. They rightly deemed Russia as the weaker piece and went all out in
that direction. The NWO wanted to take advantage of Russia's weakness in form of its Western
minded comprador class and a shell-shocked liberal intelligentsia (dominating media, culture
and business, just like in Hong Kong, BTW), which is constitutional uncapable of thinking
with their own brains to liberate themselves from Soviet era stereotypes ("Soviet
Union/Russia bad, West good").
They then figured that economic and cultural sanctions (e.g. Olympic ban) coupled with
doubling down on the propaganda would break the country. Luckily, the Russian narod, the
common people saw through it all and would not play along with the enemy. At the same time,
Russia paraded its resurrected military in Crimea and Syria as well as its formidable new
hypersonic doomsday weapons. The military option to take over Russia was not in the cards any
longer.
Russian economy from strength to strength
And the Russian economy. Believing their own propaganda, they had got that totally wrong.
Endlessly repeating their own self-serving talking points they must have truly fancied that
Russia's economy amounted to nothing else than export of fossil fuels, that "Russia's economy
is the size of Holland's," that "Russia does not produce anything," and that Russia was
"nothing but a gas station with nukes" (somehow managing to ignore the significance of the
nukes part). I seriously believe, that the propaganda had become so complete that the Western
leaders and the intelligence people actually had come to adapt their own propaganda as the
truth. What is for sure, is that all Western media, including what should be the most
respected business journals and all those think tanks, had not published one honest appraisal
of the Russian economy in 15 years. Every single piece I read over the years had clearly been
written with the aim to denigrate Russia's achievements and economic development. Nowhere to
be found were reports on how Putin by 2013 had totally overhauled the economy transforming
Russia into the most self-sufficient diversified major country in the world with all the
capabilities of the foremost industrial powers. In fact, I tend to think that even the US
presidents from Bush to Obama were fed in their intelligence briefings cooked up fake reports
about the Russian economy and the whole nation. Actually, I would go one step further. I bet
that the CIA itself in the end believed the propaganda it had given birth to. (It has been
said that at some point the genuine Russia analysts had all been dismissed or demoted and
replaced with a team specializing in anti-Russian propaganda).
Posted by: pogohere | Dec 24 2019 7:54 utc |
85 Russia's Net Public Debt Falls to Zero
Despite low oil prices, Russia Inc. is accumulating money quickly again as it has become a
lot more profitable than it was in the nineties...
"... Time and time again Washington has tightened Russian sanctions in an effort to crush the Russian economy. When virtually every legal outlet had been sanctioned, Washington has turned to sanctioning third parties that cooperate with Russia. ..."
"... North American investors, led fully by Wall Street, account for over half of the foreign capital flowing into Russian stocks, according to the Moscow Exchange. By comparison, Russia's next door neighbors in Europe account for only 26%. ..."
"... Speaking on German TV, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said the sanctions were an infringement of sovereignty... The US sanctions have also angered Russia and the European Union, which says it should be able to decide its own energy policies. ..."
"... "As a matter of principle, the EU opposes the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate business," a spokesman for the trading bloc told AFP news agency on Saturday. ..."
"... According to German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, the American sanctions amount to "interference in autonomous decisions taken in Europe." ..."
"... Iran, Malaysia, Turkey and Qatar are considering trading among themselves in gold and through a barter system as a hedge against any future economic sanctions on them, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Saturday. ..."
"... They have their own undersea pipe-laying equipment and experience. These sanctions will only delay the completion date for a few more months. Russia under Putin is very patient, resolute and not prone to rash decisions. They play the long game and will win out in the end. ..."
"... The Great Gas Game: Vesti Presents a New Documentary Film About Pipelines and Power youtube.com ..."
"... Nord Stream 2 is financed by leading energy companies from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Austria, ENGIE, OMV, Shell, Uniper and Wintershall Dea. A multi-billion Euro investment in European industry and services, the project involves more than 200 companies from 17 countries worldwide. ..."
"... Well, congratulations Congress and Trump. This will drive a wedge between the US and Europe. Can you just imagine how those investing in NS2 feel about the US. The US is saying in effect - lose all of your investment because we have determined that the project is against our geopolitical/economic interests. And to make matters worse the pipeline will be completed, probably only 2 months behind schedule. So the financial backers will get hit, but will eventually see returns due to Russian efforts. Russia could have built the entire pipeline themselves, but preferred to have European partners. ..."
"... to Europe at the start of the 1980's, the US had just gone through the Oil Shock of 1978–79 . The US has not been a net exporter of oil for well over 75 years. It is only this year that this has changed through the extensive use of fracking. ..."
own goalnoun: (in soccer) a goal scored inadvertently when the ball is struck into the goal by a player on the defensive team.
Time and time again Washington has tightened Russian sanctions in an effort to crush the Russian economy. When virtually every
legal outlet had been sanctioned, Washington has turned to sanctioning third parties that cooperate with Russia.
So what is the
net effect of all of these sanctions?
The Russian stock market has reached record highs this year but still has room to climb further in coming months before paring
gains towards the end of 2020, a Reuters poll of market experts found... The rouble-based MOEX index has reached an all-time high of 3,009.1 in November, taking its year-to-date gain to over 25%, and
is seen finishing this year at 3,000.
That's not exactly what Washington had in mind.
However the real kicker is
this .
North American investors, led fully by Wall Street, account for over half of the foreign capital flowing into Russian stocks,
according to the Moscow Exchange. By comparison, Russia's next door neighbors in Europe account for only 26%.
So what is happening is that Washington is punishing Europe for cooperating with Russia, while turning a blind eye to when their
Wall Street donors cooperate with Russia.
As you may have guessed, this has created some hard feelings
.
Speaking on German TV, Finance Minister Olaf Scholz said the sanctions were an infringement of sovereignty...
The US sanctions have also angered Russia and the European Union, which says it should be able to decide its own energy policies.
"As a matter of principle, the EU opposes the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate business,"
a spokesman for the trading bloc told AFP news agency on Saturday.
Imagine that: countries making their own policy decisions that don't align with Washington's interests? What's the world coming
to?
Allseas, a Dutch-Swiss private company, is going to be significantly harmed by the newest sanctions, and it will delay the Nord
Stream 2 pipeline (but it will only delay it).
However, there is a
bright side
to all of this.
While it costs Moscow hundreds of millions in lost income and additional investments, the country is benefitting on a geostrategic
and political level.
For a mere $9.5 billion, NS2's price tag, Moscow has unintentionally managed to drive another wedge between key Western allies.
Berlin is furious about the sanctions and its already fraught relations with Washington are set to escalate even further. According
to German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, the American sanctions amount to "interference in autonomous decisions taken in Europe."
What is certain is that NS2 will be completed eventually. Most of the work on the 1,230 kilometer or 765 mile long pipeline has
already been finished. Also, the vast majority of the $9.5 billion in investments have already been spent.
Much like our GWOT, we've reached a point in sanctions where staying the course just makes things worse.
It isn't just Russia. The Muslim world is looking for an
alternative trading system to avoid sanctions that Washington hasn't even threatened yet.
Iran, Malaysia, Turkey and Qatar are considering trading among themselves in gold and through a barter system as a hedge against
any future economic sanctions on them, Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Saturday.
..."I have suggested that we re-visit the idea of trading using the gold dinar and barter trade among us," Mahathir said, referring
to the Islamic medieval gold coin.
"We are seriously looking into this and we hope that we will be able to find a mechanism to put it into effect." The leaders agreed they needed do more business among themselves and trade in each other's currencies.
You know that you are using sanctions too much when other nations expect to be sanctioned by you before you even consider doing
it. As for the gold dinar, this is what was proposed by Libya's former leader Gaddafi, and also what got him eventually
killed .
The most recent batch of Clinton emails reveals perhaps the most bizarre morsel of Blumenthal-baked intelligence to date. An April
2, 2011 memo titled "France's client/Q's gold" quotes "knowledgeable individuals" with insider information about French President
Nicolas Sarkozy's motivation for bombing Libya. The military campaign, the anonymous sources say, was designed to quash plans
by Gaddafi to use $7 billion in secret gold and silver to prop up a new African currency. The French worried the move would undercut
the currency guaranteed by the French treasury, known as CFA franc, that's widely used in West Africa and acts as a strong link
between France and many of its former African colonies. After French intelligence officials got wind of this secret plan, the
Blumenthal memo reports, Sarkozy freaked out: "This was one of the factors that influenced [his] decision to commit France to
the attack on Libya."
Kruschev Many remember the quote "We will bury you". I think he was quoting someone else. Lenin?
But they forget the second sentence. "And the capitalists will sell us the shovel."
Greed is indeed a sickness, a mental illness. Not ordinary greed, but Scrooge McDuck greed. The need to have more more more,
when it cannot possibly make any difference in your life.
Not like the guys I worked with that volunteered for every Holiday, every overtime opportunity. The money did make a difference
there, although one can question whether it is worth it. But pursuing an extra billion when you already have tens of billions?
How much is enough? How high is up.
EDIT:
I'm reminded of the old sitcom "Mama's Family". Dim bulb son, Vinton, hears of a new larger lottery jackpot and says, "Wow! Imagine
how many lottery tickets you could buy with that much money!"
EDIT2:
Like an alcoholic that just drinks more and more until he passes out.
@entrepreneur
that capitalism selects for people with this mental illness. A person with a healthy view of life will never be selected as fortune
500 CEO.
excessive are the mountains of paper they accumulate are still stimulated by acquiring more. #1
And whether it be newspapers solidly packing every room in their homes to a depth of 6 feet, leaving barely a 12" crawl space
between the top of the stacks and the ceiling, or be it a pile of money, more than they and their extended family and descendants
can spend in 100 years, it is hoarding, a mental illness.
They have their own undersea pipe-laying equipment and experience. These sanctions will only delay the completion date for
a few more months. Russia under Putin is very patient, resolute and not prone to rash decisions. They play the long game and will
win out in the end.
Nord Stream 2 is financed by leading energy companies from France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain and Austria,
ENGIE, OMV, Shell, Uniper and Wintershall Dea. A multi-billion Euro investment in European industry and services, the project
involves more than 200 companies from 17 countries worldwide.
Well, congratulations Congress and Trump. This will drive a wedge between the US and Europe. Can you just imagine how those
investing in NS2 feel about the US. The US is saying in effect - lose all of your investment because we have determined that the
project is against our geopolitical/economic interests. And to make matters worse the pipeline will be completed, probably only
2 months behind schedule. So the financial backers will get hit, but will eventually see returns due to Russian efforts. Russia
could have built the entire pipeline themselves, but preferred to have European partners.
At the end of WWII most of Europe used coal for energy. The US had a goal to convert Europe to oil, since the US was the major
world exporter of oil. One of the stated reasons was to make Europe dependent on US oil and give the US political leverage over
European countries. So this whole thing is about the US projecting their geopolitical dominance schemes to Russia. As it has turned
out, for more than 70 years Russia and previously the USSR has never done that as a policy. The reason being that once you do
that you lose trust as a trade partner. But this is even worse as the US is interfering in trading among European partners that
has nothing to do directly with the US.
to Europe at the start of the 1980's, the US had just gone through the
Oil Shock of 1978–79 . The US
has not been a net exporter of oil for well over 75 years. It is only this year that this has changed through the extensive use
of fracking.
The oil shortage of the 1970's brought about the end of power generation using oil. The US, a major exporter of coal, was pushing
the use of American coal for energy security in Europe
since WWII.
Trump Makes American Coal Great Again -- Overseas
U.S. coal exports have exploded. Can that continue?
April 4, 2018
...
The export boom is the one part of Trump's pledge to help the coal sector that is coming true.
Production ticked up a bit last year after a disastrous 2016 but is still at the lowest level since 1978. And despite plenty
of promises to bring back jobs to coal country, coal mining employment only grew by some 1,100 jobs last year; mining employment
is down about 40 percent since 2012. Meanwhile, closures of coal-fired power plants continue apace, with more than two dozen
plants shutting down early last year alone, which means less domestic demand for coal.
...
And the Trump administration's other policies don't look like they'll end up helping coal much either. The push to increase
exports of natural gas to Europe, Asia, and Latin America undermines the overseas market for U.S. coal, since both can be used
to generate electricity. And as U.S. coal is shipped abroad, its price at home tends to rise slightly -- making coal even less
attractive as a power source there.
"Unfortunately, most of the policies the Trump administration is pursuing inside and outside of energy do not help domestic
coal production," Book says.
A remarkably disingenuous article I would say. Russia sanctioned and sanctioned again with
threats of being kicked out of SWIFT and isolated in every way takes minimal precautions
against an internet collapse and is criticized. For example, DNS resolution function which I
believe resides in various western countries could be denied rendering much of the Russian
internet useless.
O nce in a blue moon an indispensable book comes out making a clear case for sanity in what
is now a post-MAD world. That's the responsibility carried by " The (Real)
Revolution in Military Affairs ," by Andrei Martyanov (Clarity Press), arguably the most
important book of 2019.
Martyanov is the total package -- and he comes with extra special attributes as a top-flight
Russian military analyst, born in Baku in those Back in the U.S.S.R. days, living and working
in the U.S., and writing and blogging in English.
Right from the start, Martyanov wastes no time destroying not only Fukuyama's and
Huntington's ravings but especially Graham Allison's childish and meaningless Thucydides Trap
argument -- as if the power equation between the U.S. and China in the 21stcentury could be
easily interpreted in parallel to Athens and Sparta slouching towards the Peloponnesian War
over 2,400 years ago. What next? Xi Jinping as the new Genghis Khan?
(By the way, the best current essay on Thucydides is in Italian, by Luciano Canfora ("
Tucidide: La Menzogna, La Colpa, L'Esilio" ). No Trap. Martyanov visibly relishes defining the
Trap as a "figment of the imagination" of people who "have a very vague understanding of real
warfare in the 21st century." No wonder Xi explicitly said the Trap does not exist.)
Martyanov had already detailed in his splendid, previous book, "Losing Military Supremacy:
The Myopia of American Strategic Planning," how "American lack of historic experience with
continental warfare" ended up "planting the seeds of the ultimate destruction of the American
military mythology of the 20thand 21stcenturies which is foundational to the American decline,
due to hubris and detachment of reality." Throughout the book, he unceasingly provides solid
evidence about the kind of lethality waiting for U.S. forces in a possible, future war against
real armies (not the Taliban or Saddam Hussein's), air forces, air defenses and naval
power.
Do the Math
One of the key takeaways is the failure of U.S. mathematical models: and readers of the book
do need to digest quite a few mathematical equations. The key point is that this failure led
the U.S. "on a continuous downward spiral of diminishing military capabilities against the
nation [Russia] she thought she defeated in the Cold War."
In the U.S., Revolution in Military
Affairs (RMA) was introduced by the late Andrew Marshall, a.k.a. Yoda, the former head of
Net Assessment at the Pentagon and the de facto inventor of the "pivot to Asia" concept. Yet
Martyanov tells us that RMA actually started as MTR (Military-Technological Revolution),
introduced by Soviet military theoreticians back in the 1970s.
One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing land-attack cruise missiles,
a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and France can do it. And there are
only two global systems providing satellite guidance to cruise missiles: the American GPS and
the Russian GLONASS. Neither China's BeiDou nor the European Galileo qualify – yet
– as global GPS systems.
Then there's Net-Centric Warfare (NCW). The term itself was coined by the late Admiral
Arthur Cebrowski in 1998 in an
article he co-wrote with John Garstka's titled, "Network-Centric Warfare – Its Origin and
Future."
Deploying his mathematical equations, Martyanov soon tells us that "the era of subsonic
anti-shipping missiles is over." NATO, that brain-dead organism (copyright Emmanuel Macron)
now has to face the supersonic Russian P-800 Onyx and the Kalibr-class M54 in a "highly hostile
Electronic Warfare environment." Every developed modern military today applies Net-Centric Warfare
(NCW), developed by the Pentagon in the 1990s.
Rendering of a future combat systems network. (soldiersmediacenter/Flickr, CC BY 2.0,
Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov
mentions in his new book something that I learned on my visit to Donbass in March 2015: how
NCW principles, "based on Russia's C4ISR capabilities made available by the Russian military to
numerically inferior armed forces of the Donbass Republics (LDNR), were used to devastating
effect both at the battles of Ilovaisk and Debaltsevo, when attacking the cumbersome Soviet-era
Ukrainian Armed Forces military."
No Escape From the Kinzhal
Martyanov provides ample information on Russia's latest missile – the hypersonic
Mach-10 aero-ballistic Kinzhal, recently tested in the Arctic.
Crucially, as he explains, "no existing anti-missile defense in the U.S. Navy is capable of
shooting [it] down even in the case of the detection of this missile." Kinzhal has a range of
2,000 km, which leaves its carriers, MiG-31K and TU-22M3M, "invulnerable to the only defense a
U.S. Carrier Battle Group, a main pillar of U.S. naval power, can mount – carrier fighter
aircraft." These fighters simply don't have the range.
The Kinzhal was one of the weapons announced by Russian President Vladimir Putin's
game-changing March
1, 2018 speech at the Federal Assembly. That's the day, Martyanov stresses, when the real
RMA arrived, and "changed completely the face of peer-peer warfare, competition and global
power balance dramatically."
Top Pentagon officials such as General
John Hyten, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs, have admitted on the record there are "no
existing countermeasures" against, for instance, the hypersonic, Mach 27 glide vehicle Avangard
(which renders anti-ballistic missile systems useless), telling the U.S. Senate Armed Services
Committee the only way out would be "a nuclear deterrent." There are also no existing
counter-measures against anti-shipping missiles such as the Zircon and Kinzhal.
Any military analyst knows very well how the Kinzhal destroyed a land target the size of a
Toyota Corolla in Syria after being launched 1,000 km away in adverse weather conditions. The
corollary is the stuff of NATO nightmares: NATO's command and control installations in Europe
are de facto indefensible.
Martyanov gets straight to the point: "The introduction of hypersonic weapons surely pours
some serious cold water on the American obsession with securing the North American continent
from retaliatory strikes."
Kh-47M2 Kinzhal; 2018 Moscow Victory Day Parade. (Kremilin via Wikimedia Commons)
Martyanov is thus unforgiving on U.S. policymakers who "lack the necessary tool-kit for
grasping the unfolding geostrategic reality in which the real revolution in military affairs
had dramatically downgraded the always inflated American military capabilities and continues to
redefine U.S. geopolitical status away from its self-declared hegemony."
And it gets worse: "Such weapons ensure a guaranteed retaliation [Martyanov's italics] on
the U.S. proper." Even the existing Russian nuclear deterrents – and to a lesser degree
Chinese, as paraded recently -- "are capable of overcoming the existing U.S. anti-ballistic
systems and destroying the United States," no matter what crude propaganda the Pentagon is
peddling.
In February 2019, Moscow announced the completion of tests of a nuclear-powered engine for
the Petrel cruise missile. This is a subsonic cruise missile with nuclear propulsion that can
remain in air for quite a long time, covering intercontinental distances, and able to attack
from the most unexpected directions. Martyanov mischievously characterizes the Petrel as "a
vengeance weapon in case some among American decision-makers who may help precipitate a new
world war might try to hide from the effects of what they have unleashed in the relative safety
of the Southern Hemisphere."
Hybrid War Gone Berserk
A section of the book expands on China's military progress, and the fruits of the
Russia-China strategic partnership, such as Beijing buying $3 billion-worth of S-400 Triumph
anti-aircraft missiles -- "ideally suited to deal with the exact type of strike assets the
United States would use in case of a conventional conflict with China."
Beijing parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the People's Republic, October 2019.
(YouTube screenshot)
Because of the timing, the analysis does not even take into consideration the arsenal
presented in early October at the Beijing parade celebrating the 70thanniversary of the
People's Republic.
That includes, among other things, the "carrier-killer" DF-21D, designed to hit warships at
sea at a range of up to 1,500 km; the intermediate range "Guam Killer" DF-26; the DF-17
hypersonic missile; and the long-range submarine-launched and ship-launched YJ-18A anti-ship
cruise missiles. Not to mention the DF-41 ICBM – the backbone of China's nuclear
deterrent, capable of reaching the U.S. mainland carrying multiple warheads.
Martyanov could not escape addressing the RAND Corporation, whose reason to exist is to
relentlessly push for more money for the Pentagon – blaming Russia for "hybrid war" (an
American invention) even as it moans about the U.S.'s incapacity of defeating Russia in each
and every war game. RAND's war games pitting the U.S. and allies against Russia and China
invariably ended in a "catastrophe" for the "finest fighting force in the world."
Martyanov also addresses the S-500s, capable of reaching AWACS planes and possibly even
capable of intercepting hypersonic non-ballistic targets. The S-500 and its latest middle-range
state of the art air-defense system S-350 Vityaz will be operational in 2020.
His key takeway: "There is no parity between Russia and the United States in such fields as
air-defense, hypersonic weapons and, in general, missile development, to name just a few fields
– the United States lags behind in these fields, not just in years but in generations
[italics mine]."
All across the Global South, scores of nations are very much aware that the U.S. economic
"order" – rather disorder – is on the brink of collapse. In contrast, a
cooperative, connected, rule-based, foreign relations between sovereign nations model is being
advanced in Eurasia – symbolized by the merging of the New Silk Roads, or Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), the Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), the NDB (the BRICS bank).
The key guarantors of the new model are Russia and China. And Beijing and Moscow harbor no
illusion whatsoever about the toxic dynamics in Washington. My recent conversations with top
analysts in Kazakhstan last month and in Moscow last week once again stressed the futility of
negotiating with people described – with overlapping shades of sarcasm – as
exceptionalist fanatics. Russia, China and many corners of Eurasia have figured out there are
no possible, meaningful deals with a nation bent on breaking every deal.
Indispensable?
No: Vulnerable
Martyanov cannot but evoke Putin's speech to the Federal Assembly in February 2019, after
the unilateral Washington abandonment of the INF treaty, clearing the way for U.S. deployment
of intermediate and close range missiles stationed in Europe and pointed at Russia:
"Russia will be forced to create and deploy those types of weapons against those regions
from where we will face a direct threat, but also against those regions hosting the centers
where decisions are taken on using those missile systems threatening us."
Translation: American Invulnerability is over – for good.
In the short term, things can always get worse. At his traditional, year-end presser in
Moscow, lasting almost four and a half hours, Putin stated that Russia is more than ready to
"simply renew the existing New START agreement", which is bound to expire in early 2021: "They
[the U.S.] can send us the agreement tomorrow, or we can sign and send it to Washington." And
yet, "so far our proposals have been left unanswered. If the New START ceases to exist, nothing
in the world will hold back an arms race. I believe this is bad."
"Bad" is quite the euphemism. Martyanov prefers to stress how "most of the American elites,
at least for now, still reside in a state of Orwellian cognitive dissonance" even as the real
RMA "blew the myth of American conventional invincibility out of the water."
Martyanov is one of the very few analysts – always from different parts of Eurasia --
who have warned about the danger of the U.S. "accidentally stumbling" into a war against
Russia, China, or both which is impossible to be won conventionally, "let alone through the
nightmare of a global nuclear catastrophe."
Is that enough to instill at least a modicum of sense into those who lord over that massive
cash cow, the industrial-military-security complex? Don't count on it.
* * *
Pepe Escobar, a veteran Brazilian journalist, is the correspondent-at-large for Hong
Kong-based Asia Times . His latest book is
"
2030 ." Follow him on Facebook .
Try this: Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia – May 15,
2017
by Thane Gustafson
A review @ Amazon:
Thane masterfully succeeded in uncovering the fundamental drivers of the Russian oil
industry and its interdependency with the political complex through a comprehensive and
convincing historical analysis, with plenty of meaningful insights and endearing anecdotes.
Rooted in Soviet legacy and having gone through the 90s bust-boom roller coaster and 2000s
state reconsolidation the industry is a unique globally isolated eco system, and, with
Russia as a whole, is at a crossroads. A must read for any decision maker in the O&G
business.
"... Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger) ..."
Overwhelming Power was the stated war goal in 1942. When that failed because of the
Soviets, the Red Victories, and the Red bomb, it become essential to create a false reality
where "Everything the American Public believes is false (Casey/Honegger)
Stimson said in '42>
"We are determined that before the sun sets on this terrible struggle our flag will be
recognized throughout the world as a symbol of freedom on the one hand and of
overwhelming power on the other." (Capra Why We Fight")
If Power is overwhelming, then Power defines freedom. Stimson's rhetoric presents a
false equality. A deception. Essentially a lie.
The "Reds" are onto this, however, see VVP's informal disquisition at
Leftist revolutionaries have long been in the habit of reworking the calendar so as it
make it easier to force the population into new habits and new ways of life better suited to
the revolutionaries themselves.
The French revolutionaries famously abolished the usual calendar, replacing it with a
ten-day week system with three weeks in each month. The months were all renamed. Christian
feast days and holidays were replaced with commemorations of plants like turnips and
cauliflower.
The Soviet communists attempted major reforms to the calendar themselves. Among these was
the abolition of the traditional week with its Sundays off and predictable seven-day
cycles.
That experiment ultimately failed, but the Soviets did succeed in eradicating many
Christian traditional holidays in a country that had been for centuries influenced by popular
adherence to the Eastern Orthodox Christian religion.
Once the communists took control of the Russian state, the usual calendar of religious
holidays was naturally abolished. Easter was outlawed, and during the years when weekends
were removed, Easter was especially difficult to celebrate, even privately.
But perhaps the most difficult religious holiday to suppress was Christmas, and much of
this is evidenced in the fact that Christmas wasn't so much abolished as replaced by a
secular version with similar rituals.
Emily Tamkin writes at Foreign Policy :
Initially, the Soviets tried to replace Christmas with a more appropriate komsomol
(youth communist league) related holiday, but, shockingly, this did not take. And by 1928
they had banned Christmas entirely, and Dec. 25 was a normal working day.
Then, in 1935, Josef Stalin decided, between the great famine and the Great Terror, to
return a celebratory tree to Soviet children. But Soviet leaders linked the tree not to
religious Christmas celebrations, but to a secular new year, which, future-oriented as it
was, matched up nicely with Soviet ideology.
Ded Moroz [a Santa Claus-like figure] was brought back. He found a snow maid from
folktales to provide his lovely assistant, Snegurochka. The blue, seven-pointed star that
sat atop the imperial trees was replaced with a red, five-pointed star, like the one on
Soviet insignia. It became a civic, celebratory holiday, one that was ritually emphasized
by the ticking of the clock, champagne, the hymn of the Soviet Union, the exchange of
gifts, and big parties.
In the context of these celebrations, the word "Christmas" was replaced by "winter."
According to
a Congressional report from 1965 ,
The fight against the Christian religion, which is regarded as a remnant of the
bourgeois past, is one of the main aspects of the struggle to mold the new "Communist man."
the Christmas Tree has been officially abolished, Father Christmas has become Father Frost,
the Christmas Tree has become the Winter Tree, the Christmas Holiday the Winter Holiday.
Civil-naming ceremonies are substituted for christening and confirmation, so far without
much success.
It is perhaps significant that Stalin found the Santa Claus aspect of Christmas worth
preserving, and Stalin apparently calculated that a father figure bearing gifts might be
useful after all.
And Christmas replaced the celebration of the winter solstice, the sun was "reborn" on
the 25th when it appeared to be heading north again from those viewing it in the northern
hemisphere, hence why so many gods were "born" on the 25th of December, and is why
Christianity was influenced by pagan traditions like the winter solstice and spring
equinox.
Exactly. The Bolsheviks were Jewish. The real Russians are Orthodox and celebrate
Christmas on the sixth, when the three wise men followed the star and found Jesus Christ.
And why should all the Christians in the world follow Western style Christmas? Christians
in the rest of the world have different cultures, they don't need the tree. However they
still use the tree, same in the Middle East!
Mother Russia is back with Christmas, the symbolic birthday of the Son of God visiting
His creation as the Son of Man, offering men eternal life, advising them to keep faith in
the Father and treat all men, the Fathers children, as brothers. He was murdered for His
troubles and that murder was interpreted to be a blood sacrifice to appease a vengeful
Father who needed appeasement for the wayward ways of His dark, primitive, confused and
often innocent children. To this day all Christian denominations adhere to this barbaric
blood sacrifice inspired interpretation carried forward from global ancient superstitions.
Much of the Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is admixed with the superstitions of
men, and mischaractetizes the nature of the Father as it was represented by the Son on
earth.
In the meantime in America the same Bolsheviks who wrecked Russia are busy trying to
remove God from the country and turn his Sons symbolic birth rememberance into "Happy
Holidays" and the Son Himself into some kind of ****** rebel human. They are after all the
antichrist, it is evident in their adoption and rekindling of the once extinct temple of
Caiaphas that murdered Christ and in the adopters present day legacy.
They will not succeed for the Truth is that we are all the children of the Father under
the management of the Son. The Father of all existence will not be challeged by mere men
some who follow the legacy of His fallen child Lucifer, that elevated angel who thought too
much of himself. Earth is a spirit rebellion sphere whose lifeforms obtain energy via
various forms of predation arising out of its primitive animal evolution. We must learn to
tame this via sentient evolution by applying our free will to this purpose. The Son is
still here to gently suggest the way without inpinging on our individual sovereign free
will. Suggesting ways to leave behind many of our natural predatory animal ways and lean
towards more spiritual methods of love, brotherhood and ever evolving win/win cooperation.
We are spirit animals who will evolve towards the spirit, it is our destiny as ordained by
the Father, and whether you know him or not you will pass towards the Father through the
guidance and watchcare of the Son, our King. This us the fundamental true Christian
message, the Fatherhood of God over ALL men and His desire that we recognize all men as the
brothers we are because all have the same Father and each is valued by the Father as if he
were the only one.
Putin whether a Christian or an atheist gets political reality and meaning of commonly
shared culture for stabilizing a nation. The same happened during Roman Empire, when
Constantine the Great converted into Christianity 313 AC and used the faith skillfully to
unite a crumbling empire. Does anybody believe he was a devoted Christian or is Putin now
one.
The U.S. as the Global Cop Gorilla calls the shots. The Gorilla would never allow a value
added technology to be utilized by its client states no matter how benign unless it itself
was selling it. E.g., the Nord Stream 2 strong arm of Germany is the Gorilla doing its Mafia
henchman schtick at its best.
A floating nuke plant is actually a very clever idea. The U.S. Navy has been powering
aircraft carriers (floating cities) for decades. I wonder why no one has thought about
developing a floating Nuke plant before.
More USAAF Eighth Air Force men were killed over Europe than the total number of USMC men
killed in the Pacific.
The footage is grim. Particularly the concluding encounter between a Bf-110 and a B-17. The
former was equipped with 20 or 30mm cannon besides machine guns. It would have been
miraculous if that B-17
somehow made it back to England
@ Posted by: Deathevokation | Dec 23 2019 19:18 utc | 40
Yeah, sorry bud, but your book is pseudo-science.
I'll repeat what I stated in my last comment: just because there are Jews in your circle,
it doesn't mean you're a zionist. Not all Jews were zionists: Zionism was an organized
movement of Jews, created at the end of the 19th Century.
Besides, if Bolshevism really is a Jewish institution, then explain to me what happened to
Trotsky? Explain to me why Stalin created a city just for the Soviet Jews in the far-east (a
move that sparked a lot of anti-semitism accusations from the West at the time).
To make things even worse for you, your book admits Lenin wasn't a Jew. It only accuses
Lenin of being part of a circle of Jewish intellectuals during his exile in Switzerland (who
published the newspaper Iskra). All the authors theory about a Jewish ethnogenesis of
Bolshevism lies on the Iskra group and, in particular, Plekhanov. The problem here is that
Plekhanov wasn't Jewish either: he just married a Jewish woman. And not only he wasn't Jewish
himself, but he wasn't even a Bolshevik: he was a social-democrat at the opposite side of
Lenin during the October Revolution.
And then there's the "Jewish vs Zionist" question. Not only Zionism wasn't equivalent to
the entire Jewish race, but it actually sided with the Nazis in the 1930s. So, the far-right
not only is wrong in mixing the two, but they are preaching for the extermination of one of
its oldest allies!
The reality is much simpler: after the institutions of the old Roman Empire evaporated in
the 4th Century, commerce in Europe almost stopped. The only commerce that continued to exist
was between mainly Jewish colonies in some Mediterranean cities (Portugal, Spain, Italy,
Egypt, Levant). This commerce kept going until the Mongols liberated the Europeans by
reconnecting the Silk Road, which inaugurated the transition to the Modern Age (Low Middle
Ages). By the time commerce reflourished in Europe, its Jewish population - most of which
were actually converted tribes to Judaism, none of them being descendents of the original
people who fled Egypt (an event that most historians accept never happened either way) - had
the know-how and the capital to flourish with it.
So, in other words: most affluent and rich people in the West are Jewish for the simple
fact they were at the right place, at the right time when Europe flourished again. There is
no great conspiracy centered in the Talmud as you claim.
The USSR was no workers' paradise. For all its formal allegiance to Marx and Engels, it was a
militantly hierarchical class society ruled by a tyrannical state. After World War Two, it
held brutal military power over Eastern Europe and East Germany. Still, Soviet-era Russia
created an urban and industrialized society with real civilizational accomplishments
(including cradle-to-grave health-care, housing, and food security and an impressive
educational system and cultural apparatus) outside capitalism. It pursued an independent path
to modernity without a capitalist class, devoid of a bourgeoisie, in the name of socialism.
It therefore posed a political and ideological challenge to U.S-led Western capitalism
– and to Washington's related plans for the Third World periphery, which was supposed
to subordinate its developmental path to the needs of the rich nations (the U.S., Western
Europe, and honorarily white Japan) of the world-capitalist core.
Honest U.S. Cold Warriors knew that it was the political threat of "communism" – its
appeal to poor nations and people (including the lower and working classes within rich/core
states) – and not any serious military danger that constituted the true "Soviet
menace." Contrary to U.S. "containment" doctrine after World War II, the ruling Soviet
bureaucracy was concerned above all with keeping an iron grip on its internal and regional
empire, not global expansion and "world revolution." It did, however "deter the worst of
Western violence" (Noam Chomsky) by providing military and other assistance to Third World
targets of U.S. and Western attack (including China, Korea, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Cuba,
Vietnam, and Laos). Along the way, it provided an example of independent development outside
and against the capitalist world system advanced by the superpower headquartered in
Washington.
To make matters worse from Washington's "Open Door" perspective, the Soviet Empire kept a
vast swath of the world's natural and human resources walled off from profitable exploitation
by global capital.
All of this was more than enough to mark the Soviet Union as global public enemy number
one for the post-WWII U.S. power elite, which had truly planet-wide imperial ambitions,
unlike Moscow.
The Soviet deterrent and alternative to U.S.-led capitalism-imperialism collapsed once and
for all in the early 1990s. Washington celebrated with unchallenged invasions of Panama and
Iraq. The blood-drenched U.S. President George H.W. Bush exulted that "what we say goes" in a
newly unipolar, post-Soviet world. Russia reverted to not-so "free market" capitalism under
U.S.-led Western financial supervision and in accord with the savage austerity and inequality
imposed by the neoliberal "Washington consensus." Chomsky got it right in 1991. "With the
collapse of Soviet tyranny," he wrote, "much of the region can be expected to return to its
traditional [subordinate] status, with the former high echelons of the bureaucracy playing
the role of the Third World elites that enrich themselves while serving the interests of
foreign investors." The consequences were disastrous for many millions of ordinary
Russians.
@Kevin #18
"Can anyone recommend a good book on the privatization of state assets of the former USSR?
Particularly one that focuses on how mid-level technocrats, often of a persecuted minority,
were able to get the capital to purchase these assets."
PUTIN from Chris
Hutchins is a good read that also describes the rise of the oligarchs and how Putin dealt
with them. Like one oligarch made a small fortune selling the first western cars in the
country and how they bought up cheap shares from the Yeltsin privatisation scheme. Privatized
companies changed ownership under threats or even at gunpoint. The oligarchs were simple
mobsters at the time. That is about what i vaguely remember reading the book a few years back
but there is a lot more detail.
TG #29
Replacement level fertility" is the total fertility rate -- the average number of children
born per woman -- at which a population exactly replaces itself from one generation to the
next, without migration. This rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman for most countries,
although it may modestly vary with mortality rates'
Russia 1.61 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Canada 1.6 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Japan 1.42 children born/woman (2018 est.)
Italy 1.45 children born/woman (2018 est.)
France 2.06 children born/woman (2018 est.)
@Kevin #18
I would suggest looking at articles in the Exile: www.exile.ru
Unfortunately, these are no longer free.
The short story: the most successful "privatizations" involved getting control of a bank,
then using the bank's deposits to buy up companies.
The most successful scheme was getting control of a bank which was partly used by the Russian
government for payments; I recall one example where one bank was used to clear funds paid for
state enterprises - so the "privatizers" were literally pushing money out for assets and
getting them back.
Further down the scale - there was all manner of chicanery including kidnapping, extortion,
murder and what not.
The problem with books published in English is that you're almost guaranteed to run into
thinly disguised agitprop ranging from the usual American and British academics taking the
national security dime, to Khodorkovsky and the other O.G. Jewish oligarchs attempting to
whitewash history: Gusinski, Berezofsky, etc.
Try this: Wheel of Fortune: The Battle for Oil and Power in Russia – May 15,
2017
by Thane Gustafson
A review @ Amazon:
Thane masterfully succeeded in uncovering the fundamental drivers of the Russian oil
industry and its interdependency with the political complex through a comprehensive and
convincing historical analysis, with plenty of meaningful insights and endearing anecdotes.
Rooted in Soviet legacy and having gone through the 90s bust-boom roller coaster and 2000s
state reconsolidation the industry is a unique globally isolated eco system, and, with
Russia as a whole, is at a crossroads. A must read for any decision maker in the O&G
business.
Just a quick take, the separation of the Russian government/ruling elites from Russian
culture suggests foreign influence as in Russia's elites looking to the West and aping
Western ideas – think of Peter the Great or Gorbachev. That was a betrayal of Russian
values and a historical mistake of immense proportions. Russia is learning to how to minimize
the core values of the West – greed, deception and narcissism.
China has done a better job than Russia in that regard but on the other hand it has a
vastly different history and enjoyed more isolation from Western meddling if not outright
invasions.
I would make a distinction here. Mastering Western technology is not necessarily the same
thing as "aping Western ideas". Also would distinguish between Peter the Great who won some
remarkable geopolitical victories for Russia (think Poltava); vs Gorbachov, who completely
betrayed Russia. To the extent he even left Russia vulnerable to American nuclear attack for
a window of 2 whole hours, or more.
As I showed in
this old post .
Gorby in phone conversation to George W. Bush Daddy:
"And now concerning Russia – this is the second most important theme of our
conversations. In front of me, on the table, lies the Decree of the President of the USSR,
concerning my resignation. I am hereby also relieving myself of the duties of the
Commander-in-Chief and handing over my responsibilities for employing nuclear weapons ,
to the President of the Russian Federation. In other words, I continue to manage these
affairs right up until the completion of the constitutional process. I can assure you, that
everything is under strict control. The moment I announce my resignation, these orders will
become effective. There will not be any kind of dispute about this. You can spend your
Christmas evening in complete peace of mind."
In other words, Gorby not only left the Soviet Union completely vulnerable to nuclear
attack for a period of 2 hours or so; but even announced that fact to their greatest enemy.
What kind of national leader does something like that? The only reason any Russians are even
around today, is because George Bush Daddy was either too kind, or too dull-witted to take
advantage of that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
"... To use Krushchev's granddaugher as a source was also a very low blow: she's herself an op-ed "journalist" coopted by the western MSM (I remember reading her pieces when she worked for the Asia Times, and she's for sure not a specialist/expert). ..."
"... It's also false when the NYT stated Russia is some kind of last refuge for oligarchs, mafiosos and terrorists in the world. No, this refuge's name is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. ..."
"... The USA is also the last refuge of Latin American dictators. More than 3,000 enemies of the State from Latin American countries live in Florida under officially recognized political asylum. Many of them are ex-generals and bankers. ..."
"... There's also a macabre message in the headline of the NYT article: that it is weird, from the American point of view, that Russia was somehow able to survive the absolute destruction that should have happened with its Shock Therapy during the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The author indeed seems genuinely puzzled as to why didn't Russia degenerate to a Third World banana republic after the capitalist charge on the newly founded nation sponsored by the USA; after all, it worked in Latin America and many other countries. I've already discussed it here many times, and I stand by my hypothesis: Russia is still able to rest on the laurels of the good ol' Soviet Union. That windfall will soon end, so Putin must think a viable succession scheme and viabilize the five-year plans. ..."
The worst thing about the NYT piece is that it is not in the "Opinion" section, but right
in the Front Page, as if it were genuine investigative journalism.
To use Krushchev's granddaugher as a source was also a very low blow: she's herself
an op-ed "journalist" coopted by the western MSM (I remember reading her pieces when she
worked for the Asia Times, and she's for sure not a specialist/expert).
I disagree with b about the "hidden economy" thing. Every capitalist country has a
hidden economy; the USA, for example, has by far the largest shadow banking system in the
world, which could easily rise its GDP by 50%. Italy recently considered including the
mafia business in the GDP calculation so they could officially get out of recession. Having
20-30% of your economy "hidden", therefore, is not an excuse for the Russian Federation for
the dire state of its own people.
The NYT is also wrong when it infers Yeltsin was "fixing" the Soviet economy by making
it take the bitter pill. The Soviet economy begun to unravel precisely because of
Gorbachev's Perestroika - which was the policy designed precisely to reform the system in
the first place. Yeltsin made things even worse - far worse than a linear extrapolation
even from the Gorbachev era. Indeed, that's why he was toppled in the first place.
It's also false when the NYT stated Russia is some kind of last refuge for
oligarchs, mafiosos and terrorists in the world. No, this refuge's name is the United
Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Thanks to its inumerous tax havens (of
which the Cayman Islands are, by far, the largest), many traffickers, terrorists and
oligarchs are able to roam freely around the world, with their money laundered. Many of
them even buy residence in London and a British Green Card, so they can also enjoy the
protections the Crown gives to its subjects. In their free time, they also buy some English
football clubs, but that's another story. Switzerland also enjoy many of the perks of being
a tax haven.
The USA is also the last refuge of Latin American dictators. More than 3,000 enemies
of the State from Latin American countries live in Florida under officially recognized
political asylum. Many of them are ex-generals and bankers.
Indeed, Russia is considered a "not free" nation precisely because this kind of
financial promiscuity doesn't exist on a systemic-cultural level. Freedom, for the
liberals, is nothing more nothing less than being able to freely purchase and use the
commodities you bought on the free market with a certain amount of money. Russia (but
mainly China) doesn't allow the western oligarchs to do that, so it is kind of a
disappointment to the "vital center".
There's also a macabre message in the headline of the NYT article: that it is weird,
from the American point of view, that Russia was somehow able to survive the absolute
destruction that should have happened with its Shock Therapy during the Yeltsin
era.
The author indeed seems genuinely puzzled as to why didn't Russia degenerate to a
Third World banana republic after the capitalist charge on the newly founded nation
sponsored by the USA; after all, it worked in Latin America and many other countries. I've
already discussed it here many times, and I stand by my hypothesis: Russia is still able to
rest on the laurels of the good ol' Soviet Union. That windfall will soon end, so Putin
must think a viable succession scheme and viabilize the five-year plans.
@FSD:
Agreed, but I think we are seeing a strange form of mass psychogenic illness in the West (
https://quillette.com/2018/11/02/trigger-warnings-and-mass-psychogenic-illness/),
and in the EU and US in particular. I strongly suspect that the farther an farther the mass
media push the willingly ignorant bulk of people out into a fictional and counterfactual
mental reservation, the more and more people crave distraction that, like a junkie's fix,
needs to always get bigger to reach the same effect. I turned on the TV the other day and
happened on a show called Masked Singer, which struck me as so insanely manic in its
subject and its presentation -- loud music, flashing lights, cartoonish hosts, junkie-like
pacing -- that I wondered that anyone can function anymore inside this pin-ball machine
world. It's like the entire West is having, especially in its so-called cultural nodes, a
collective manic episode with very real danger of self-harm.
Because Russia's population is relatively stable, every small uptick in economic growth
is pure profit. With a stable population, even 1% annual growth, compounded every year, can
result in substantial prosperity before too long.
But in the United States, with open-borders cheap-labor immigration pushing the
population ever higher, the numbers are different. When a population ir forced upwards, the
economic demands are even higher than the population growth itself. That's because you need
to not just grow the ongoing population, but provide massive investments in new
infrastructure. Russia is like a person who's paid off his mortgage, and can devote all
income to living and making progress. The United States is like a homeowner with a massive
mortgage and who also has to pay massive taxes to pay for more sewers and roads and energy
conservation etc.
So 1% annual sustained economic growth in Russia means Russia is making progress, while
even 3% annual economic growth in the United States means it is falling behind.
Don't believe me? From 1950 to the present, immigration increased California's
population from 10 million to about 40 million. On paper the economy boomed, but the
average person is much worse off, the quality of life has tanked, roads are choked, rents
are sky-high while wages are stagnant, air quality is down even with massive spending on
pollution controls, poverty is the worst in the nation, homelessness is booming, etc.
It's my guess Putin doesn't waste time reading the NYTs. Why should he, and for that
matter why should anyone? The Times and the other Oligarch rags should be ignored by all.
Break the chains. Focusing on God and family a young couple may try homesteading. Ignore
the rest.
The imperial lie machine sure is disgruntled that the 1990s attempt to economically and
biologically crush Russia once and for all was a failure and Russia has since been
reasserting itself. It wasn't "the end of history" after all.
That was the source of the underlying current of Russia Derangement among the US
elite classes (political, economic, media, academia, professional etc.), the many
provocations, and then the total meltdown beginning in late 2016.
Since it really seems to be a collective mental illness (I mean that literally)
afflicting a power group which is already psychotic and violent, and since it coincides
with the accelerating erosion of the US imperial position, it's looking more and more
likely that this must eventually lead to all-out war. I just can't imagine the US stepping
back, any more than I could imagine Hitler doing so.
America's obsessive bashing of Russia (and now China) is suggestive of a deep
psychological disorder.
Though the Americans and their allied apologists will insist that it is sincerely
motivated by a humanitarian concern for Freedom, Democracy, and Human Rights(TM), that is
quite laughable given America's concentration camps for undocumented immigrants; its
incarceration of immigrant children in cages; or the US Prison Industrial Complex in
general, which has been called America's new Jim Crow in that it imprisons millions of
African Americans and other minorities and relegates them to a new racist caste system.
No, cut through the barrage of American Moral Supremacism and other delusions, the
United States is enraged that, despite its attempt to economically rape Russia in the 1990s
through American-promoted Free Market reforms and Neoliberal "shock therapy," Russia is
still standing and indeed resurgent.
THAT is what enrages the Americans and triggers them in rug-chewing fits of frenzy.
It's official: "Freedom gas" is the Worst Phrase of the Year, according to the Plain
English Foundation. But where does the expression come from? EURACTIV did not have to look
far to get the answer
So where does the whole story come from?
On 1 May, EURACTIV's energy and climate reporter Frédéric Simon attended
a briefing with US energy secretary Rick Perry in Brussels. He recalls the events
below.
The four journalists in the room had spent about an hour asking Perry a basic question:
why would Europeans choose to pay for expensive LNG imported from the US when they have
access to cheap Russian gas?
"But my surprise soon turned to dismay when Perry suddenly took a grave face and
started talking about the Normandy landings during WWII for which commemorations were planned
days after."
Here's what Perry went on to say: Seventy-five years after liberating Europe from Nazi
Germany occupation, "the United States is again delivering a form of freedom to the European
continent," the US energy secretary told reporters that day.
"And rather than in the form of young American soldiers, it's in the form of liquefied
natural gas," he added. "So yes, I think you may be correct in your observation," he said in
reference to Fred's suggestion about 'Freedom gas' .
####
Quite instructive about the mindset (f/king nuts) they are over in the States. They really
do live in their own universe where no-one picks up their dogs' (and their own) crap. They
neither notice the smell nor link to the slipperyness underfoot to their own actions. They
don't care either.
They like to talk about the European "blood-debt" to the USA.
I don't know what they think a large number of unfortunate young men were doing on Gold,
Juno and Sword beaches in June, 1944, or indeed that there were such beaches. Even moreso,
they are apparently unaware of the over 22 million Soviet citizens who died 1941-1945 during
what is known as "The Great Patriotic War for the Fatherland, 1941-1945"..
Analysts have identified a way to increase the export of Gazprom to bypass the Ukraine The
Eugal pipeline built to deliver gas from "Nord Stream-2 " to end users, will be operating
in 2020, despite US sanctions. "Gazprom" will redirect gas to this pipeline from "Northern
stream-1", experts say
The capacity of the Eugal onshore gas pipeline, built specifically for delivering gas from
the Nord Stream-2 offshore gas pipeline to end users, may allow Gazprom to increase supplies to
Europe bypassing the Ukraine, despite the fact that the United States has imposed sanctions
against laying the Nord Stream-2 gas pipeline. , said experts interviewed by RBC.
The Gascade Gastransport operator,
controlled by Gazprom and the German Wintershall Dea , will commission the first of two Eugal
pipelines with a capacity of 30.9 billion cubic metres per year from January 1, 2020 (total
pipe capacity should be 55 billion cubic metres), which will go from German Greifswald on the
Baltic Sea to the south to the border with the Czech Republic, the Eugal press service said on
December 20. And the next day it became known that the European pipe-laying company Allseas had
suspended the construction of Nord Stream-2 (which should pump 55 billion cubic meters per
year) in the Baltic Sea.
Eugal will lay another 36 billion cubic metre capacity OPAL landline, built to pump gas from the first
Baltic gas pipeline of Gazprom and partners, Nord Stream-1, which achieved at full capacity 55
billion cubic metres per year back in October 2012. Since 2013, Gazprom could only use 50% of
OPAL capacity because of restrictions, and in 2016, the company received permission to connect
to 90% of the pipeline capacity. However, in September 2019, Gazprom was forced to reduce gas
pumping through OPAL, and then through Nord Stream-1, because of a decision of the European
Court of Justice, which, in lawsuit filed by Poland, limited supply by almost half – from
90 to 50% of capacity , or up to 18 billion cubic metres per year.
"The launch of Eugal will ensure a full load of Nord Stream-1. About 20 billion cubic
metres of gas per year can be delivered via a new land gas pipeline, which volume was lost
because of restrictions imposed as a result of Poland's victory in court", said Mikhail
Korchemkin, director of East European Gas Analysis, to RBC. The remaining 17–20 billion
cubic metre Gazprom can pump through a second branch from the offshore gas pipeline
NEL , which runs only through
Germany to the west of Greifswald, so Poland could not achieve restrictions on its
capacity.
At the peak of capacity, OPAL pumped up to 103 million cubic metres of gas per day owing to
a decision of the European Court to decrease transit to 50 million cubic metre. Last week, it
fell to 12 million cubic metres per day. This is due to an increase of 115 million cubic metres
per day in supplies to the NEL gas pipeline, as well as an increase in transit to Europe
through the territory of the Ukraine, Korchemkin points out.
"Now most of the gas from Nord Stream-1, which continues to operate at its design capacity,
is sent to the markets of northwestern Europe through NEL, that is, the limitation of the use
of OPAL by the decision of the European Court has practically had no affect on the load of Nord
Stream", added Deputy General Director of the National Energy Policy Fund, Alexey Grivach.
According to him, after the introduction of Eugal, part of the gas can go to Central Europe
through a new onshore gas pipeline, depending on the current market needs and the optimization
of Gazprom's export portfolio.
Despite the impending U.S. sanctions, the possibility of using Eugal to pump Gazprom's gas
was recognized in November by Arno Bux, chief commercial officer of gas transmission operator
Fluxys, which is a minority shareholder in Gascade. According to him, since 2020, from 80 to
90% of the Eugal capacity has already been booked for 20 years at auctions. "Since the
transportation facilities are reserved on a ship-or-pay basis (" transport or pay "), the
potential delays of the Nord Stream-2 project do not affect Eugal's revenues", he told
Interfax, noting that the flows from the gas pipeline Nord Stream 1 can be routed through
Eugal.
"We cannot predict the volumes that will be transported through Eugal, because it
depends on requests from transport customers", Gascade spokesman Georg Wustner told RBC on
December 23, declining to specify whether gas supplies from Nord Stream-1 will begin on
January 1 through a new onshore pipeline. A representative of Gazprom Export declined to
comment; the press service of Nord Stream AG (operator of the Nord Stream-1 project) did not
respond to a request from RBC.
Lavrov on the 22nd appeared on what looks to be an interesting program on Russia's Channel
One--
"The Great Game Show" with a transcript at the link. Most of the questions deal with
Lavrov's recent trip to the Outlaw US Empire and his meetings with Trump and Pompeo. I found
Lavrov's remarks about Congress most revealing as they're very similar to what he says about
the tiny Russophobic nations other NATO nations seem to feel they can't break with the
overall consensus despite its being idiotic. His response is related to the illegal sanctions
laid against the construction of Nord Stream 2:
"They are threatening it. I said it will be built, no matter what, despite all these
threats. First, I am convinced that the Europeans understand their commercial interest.
Second, this implies an interest in the context of maintaining long-term energy security.
Third, they were, of course, humiliated. The statements were, nevertheless, made, including
those from Berlin which shows that our European partners still retain a sense of dignity.
"I am confident that, just like the TurkStream project, Nord Stream 2 will be implemented,
and TurkStream will start operating some two or three weeks from now.
"US President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo want to expand trade, but
the US Congress continues to bombard our relations with sanctions. A situation that has now
shaped up in the United States shows that, in their striving to revise election results and
the will of the American people, these Congressmen are ready to do anything, including
absolutely reckless things that, I would say, are not worthy of serious politicians."
As you read the transcript, you'll realize that this is a very serious program where the
truth of the overall situation is being revealed and remarked upon in a manner that would be
unimaginable here within the Outlaw US Empire, and I presume the program is viewed by a
majority of Russians. It should certainly be read in relation to what Putin said at
his presser on
the topics covered and at the Informal CIS Summit .
Many are busy with their plans for the holidays, and the combined transcripts will take
4-6 hours to read, so perhaps bookmark them to read before New Year when more time's
available.
"... It would have been simpler and much cheaper to supply the gas through land pipelines via Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland. But the undersea pipelines had to be built because the Levantine dual nationals parachuted in by the State Department to rule over Ukraine and the Baltics on Washington's behalf have shown themselves to be totally unreliable economic partners. Ukraine refused to pay for gas that was supplied and stole gas intended for European countries. The rabid Levantines in the Baltics and Poland were equally hostile. They could have made billions in transit fees, but they always insisted on cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Bulgaria blocked South Stream on Washington's instructions and lost a reliable source of cheap gas and $400 million a year in transit fees. A lot of money and a lot of jobs for a poor country. US satellites pay a high price to kowtow to Uncle Sam. Russia developed its own port facilities in the Baltic and Riga is now a ghost town. ..."
"... Its surprising how history repeats itself. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon achieved dominance over continental Europe. Only Britain stood against him. Napoleon tried to bring Britain to heel through economic warfare, the Continental System, ordering European countries not to trade with his sole remaining enemy. His orders were ignored all the way from Spain to Russia, and this lucrative trade continued. The invasion of Russia and the debacle at Moscow were an attempt to enforce the Continental System. In a similar fashion, Washington's hubris and unbridled arrogance are now alienating even its most abject, cringing, servile satraps like Macron, Merkel, and Erdogan. With the same result. ..."
"... Uncle Sam sees Nord-2 as an energy superpower challenge to energy supremacy which equates to American supremacy & hegemonic supremacy writ large across the world. If the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation make inroads by unilaterally making massive energy deals with the entire EU we will see American interests clamoring for market inroads & market share so that the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation don't make a dime. ..."
"... Uncle Sam is in actuality a waning ex-superpower thug that is yesterday's man but can't stand being taken out of the limelight being the narcissist nation it is. ..."
"... Zackarova is bang on in that the USA is wholly incompetent to govern their own business interests let alone other sovereign interests. Nord-2 is necessary infrastructure that the USA wants to thwart for their own monetary benefit. ..."
"... Stepping aside from the geopolitics for a moment. In terms of economics the US is attempting to push Russia out of natural gas markets. ..."
"... Greenpeace is yet another "NGO" that is heavily influenced by the National Endowment for Democracy a CIA front that supports US Imperialism. ..."
"... One wonders if the invertebrates of the EU will ever tire of being bullied by the Global Bullying Thug in Chief? The clerico-fascists of priest-ridden Poland one can understand, and the phony 'greens' of Greenpeace the sell-out specialists, but the others are just like mongrel dogs-the more you kick them, the more they lick your boots. ..."
What would Dr Kampmark consider to be an ecologically cleaner alternative to Nordstream I and 2? The US proposal to supply LNG
via an endless conga line of tankers across the North Atlantic would be an ecological nightmare, to say nothing of the specialised
port facilities that need to be built to accommodate the tankers, the extra pipelines needed to pipe the gas to areas of Europe
away from the Atlantic and the potential for accidents and disasters during annual hurricane season. Europe needs the best energy
supply solution possible from a sustainability POV and other POVs and while Nordstream I and 2 may not be perfect, other solutions
are either worse, more expensive or less certain and stable in the long term.
Shale gas is also poop. Only someone totally corrupt or totally insane would buy such junk from the USA.
The collapse of an empire brings up such interesting stuff.
I am of course a Russian troll for stating the obvious, so a merry Christmas from the Kremlin.
Let nuclear bombers fly, baby. Who wants another Christmas. The majority of the present American government (including Trump) are evangelical Christians who believe in
the Rapture . You wouldn't put such people in charge of a
car park, let alone put them in charge of the biggest nuclear weapons arsenal on the planet.
I find this a bit of a strange piece, for reasons that many others have pointed out here in the comments.
With regard to the environmental angle, I should perhaps point out that by far the biggest polluter on the planet is the US
military.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
The US Military pollutes everything under the sun far past Internet & the over 900 worldwide bases it occupies. Heck, the US MIC
pollutes all sports venues with their propagandistic parades of adherence to state & flag military shows.
In the USA they make you stand in honour of the military at sports events.
I'm glad I don't go down to the USA for the USA Grand National Drag Racing events just because of the MIC pollution at events.
Their propaganda pollution is all over the Internet and that is toxic waste that we all have to sift through on our way to real
news aside from institutional American killing of the third world.
GI-Joe turned out to be anything but a good hippie in my book.
MOU
ttshasta ,
The article mentions Rex Tillerson, yet fails to mention Qatar. Exxon Mobil & Exxon Mobil Qatar, that Tillerson worked for, want
to run an LP pipeline from the Norths Pars gas field, the worlds largest, and Qatar owns 2/3 of,through Saudi Arabia, through
Jordan, Syria, through Alleppo then through Turkey on to Europe. Thus Qatar, S.A. and Turkey have sponsored the foreign invasion
of Syria that the the dolts at NPR to this day call a civil war. The US's Al Udeid air base in Qatar is the largest in the region,
Cheney has been to Qatar many times as have Barack and Michele Obama, John Ashcroft was paid $2.5 million to defend Qatar from
post 911 terrorism charges.
Does it seem the article misses the elephant in the room? US Qatari investments must profit?
Never forget the Clintons, Qatar donates to Clinton Foundation, State Dpt. sells weapons to Qatar (diverted to Syria?), candidate
Clinton to declare no fly zone over Syria as POTUS.
In 2016 Thierry Messan's Voltairenet dot org translated an article from Petra the official Jordanian press paper that S.A. financed
20% of Clinton's campaign, which is illegal under US law. Subsequently, and conveniently, Saudi Prince M.B.S. declared Petra had
been hacked and the report was false. I rely on Thierry's translations, and his voluminous site.
Excellent comment. As always, one should follow the money trail.
paul ,
I've never understood the argument that buying Russian gas is a threat to the security of European countries. Russia doesn't supply
the gas out of altruism, it does so because it wants their money. They are dependent on Russian gas. Russia is dependent on their
money. Mutual dependence, mutual gain.
During the Cold War, Russia always supplied every last gallon of oil and every cubic foot of gas that contracts obliged it
to deliver. It did so, again because it wanted their money. Simple as that.
It would have been simpler and much cheaper to supply the gas through land pipelines via Ukraine, the Baltics and Poland. But
the undersea pipelines had to be built because the Levantine dual nationals parachuted in by the State Department to rule over
Ukraine and the Baltics on Washington's behalf have shown themselves to be totally unreliable economic partners. Ukraine refused
to pay for gas that was supplied and stole gas intended for European countries. The rabid Levantines in the Baltics and Poland
were equally hostile. They could have made billions in transit fees, but they always insisted on cutting off their noses to spite
their faces. Bulgaria blocked South Stream on Washington's instructions and lost a reliable source of cheap gas and $400 million
a year in transit fees. A lot of money and a lot of jobs for a poor country. US satellites pay a high price to kowtow to Uncle
Sam. Russia developed its own port facilities in the Baltic and Riga is now a ghost town.
Uncle Sam is now waging economic warfare and imposing sanctions on its previously most loyal and obedient satellites, Canada,
Mexico, France, Germany, Japan, South Korea, Turkey.
Its surprising how history repeats itself. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Napoleon achieved dominance over
continental Europe. Only Britain stood against him. Napoleon tried to bring Britain to heel through economic warfare, the Continental
System, ordering European countries not to trade with his sole remaining enemy. His orders were ignored all the way from Spain
to Russia, and this lucrative trade continued. The invasion of Russia and the debacle at Moscow were an attempt to enforce the
Continental System. In a similar fashion, Washington's hubris and unbridled arrogance are now alienating even its most abject,
cringing, servile satraps like Macron, Merkel, and Erdogan. With the same result.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Uncle Sam sees Nord-2 as an energy superpower challenge to energy supremacy which equates to American supremacy & hegemonic supremacy
writ large across the world. If the pinko commie bastards in the Russian Federation make inroads by unilaterally making massive
energy deals with the entire EU we will see American interests clamoring for market inroads & market share so that the pinko commie
bastards in the Russian Federation don't make a dime.
Uncle Sam is in actuality a waning ex-superpower thug that is yesterday's man but can't stand being taken out of the limelight
being the narcissist nation it is.
Can you imagine being dependent on the usa for anything never mind fracked gas at twice the price.no doubt brave new worlder boris
will go for it.gb inc looks over and done with.
Guy ,
"Can you imagine being dependent on the usa for anything"
Yes I can .I live in Canada and they basically own our country, for all intent and purposes .
They did not conquer us militarily but they so corporately.
MASTER OF UNIVE ,
Zackarova is bang on in that the USA is wholly incompetent to govern their own business interests let alone other sovereign interests.
Nord-2 is necessary infrastructure that the USA wants to thwart for their own monetary benefit.
The USA is anachronism, insolvent, and lacks common sense as well as entrepreneurial spirit & business acumen.
MOU
padre ,
How very concerned about environment we are, when somebody else is "destroying" it!
paul ,
The US certainly showed how concerned it was about the environment with the North Dakota pipeline.
Francis Lee ,
Stepping aside from the geopolitics for a moment. In terms of economics the US is attempting to push Russia out of natural gas
markets. If a company did this it would be attempting to construct a monopoly and be subject to anti-competitive laws. If the
US becomes the sole supplier in Europe then it has a stranglehold, both economic and political, on Europe. That's the strategy,
and it seems blatantly obvious.
But the construction being put on this sordid little play by the Anglo-American MSM is that the
US frackers – who never make a profit – are doing Europe a really big favour by enabling them not to become dependent on Russian
gas. The Europeans should there for be grateful for US LNG since it will enable to diversify away from Russian gas.
The reality is, however, that once you become dependent on a single overseas crucial energy source you have been unceremoniously
grabbed by the short and curlies.
Antonym ,
Simply connect more European harbors to the existing gas pipeline network and choose the LNG supplier you want.
Not rocket science but Dutch PM Rutte was sold on abolishing natural gas because of CO2, while trees from North America for burning
in power plants was fine.
Neighbour PM Merkel Germany wants gas but not nuclear (a scientist!). France wants nuclear but rely on a new unproven expensive
design.
Political inmates are running the EU madhouse.
John Deehan ,
In this article, it misses the whole point of why the USA wants to impose sanctions, rather late in the day, on companies involved
in its construction. Namely, the continued attempts by it to isolate The Russian Federation and its its long term strategy of
preparations for war. Moreover, the omission of the reasons why Russia built the gas pipeline could not be more striking. The
coup in the Ukraine made the transit of Russian gas to western Europe via its territory open to pressure from the USA. Hence why
the Russians built the pipeline in the first place. It's the same reasons why the USA is attempting to prevent other Russian gas/oil
pipelines in other parts of the world.
Francis Lee ,
If anything illustrates the reality of the EU-NATO 'alliance' it is this. The US to Germany – and by extension the rest of the
EU – 'You will take expensive US LNG gas and like it' Me Tarzan you Jane. This brazen realpolitik illustrates the true nature
of the vassalised EU. And of course Poland, Romania – please station your inter-mediate range missiles here – and the Baltic uber-Petainist
elites come chiming in 'America the Beautiful.' More than anything this explodes the idea of the EU as a third geopolitical bloc.
It is an occupied region always has been and is composed of countries which can't actually defend their own interests whilst privileging
the US.
Gutless and spineless!
George Cornell ,
Indeed. And as reluctant as I am to entertain it, the Brutish ( spellcheck wants it to be British, no irony there) US is forcing
any vertebrate in the EU to crave armed forces.
Why poor EU countries buy the bollocks that is the relentless pressure or requirement from NATO to buy American and Israeli arms
is beyond me. They should be much more frightened of the Americans than the imaginary bogeymen to the East.
You mean like the Azov Battalion, Right Sector and C-14?
Those bogeymen Tim? Some of whom are now in Hong Kong helping Joseph Wong and his mates fight for 'freedom and democracy' with
some help from people in, er, Langley Virginia. Oh, and Nancy Pelosi.
Well, I support the right of all peoples to self-determination as a universal right and oppose imperialism/neo-imperialism regardless
of who does it, so your false dichotomy does not apply to me.
I thought you were referring to the neo nazi thugs in Ukraine that sprung up like weeds after rain following the overthrow of
Yanukovych by you know who. No, it wasn't Putin. And no, I'm not a fan either.
All bullshit pushed by Mr Hopey Changey that has put the world in grave peril.
In fact the changes of nuclear war are greater than any time in history.
And what happened when the Berlin Wall came down Tim?
Bush solemnly promised Gorbachev that NATO would not move one inch eastward.
And where are NATO now?
paul ,
Then no doubt you support the right of the Crimea and Donbas to self determination from the CIA installed Fascist Coup Regime.
George Cornell ,
Oh for Chrissake! And where were you about Gitmo? And Iraq, and Yemen, and Syria, and Libya? And the lithium in Afghanistan makes
it morally justified? Put the photo of Kissinger on a bearskin rug in your drawer and tell me about how the 95% of Crimeans who
wanted to be part of Russia invalidates what happened there.
Come back to me about the sandbars in the South China Sea. Now there's a place to increase your debt.!
lundiel ,
Russia isn't occupying any of Ukraine. There are Russian volunteers and Russia is giving them some weapons and no doubt finance
but the Russian army isn't at war with Ukraine.
Jay ,
If they were, the war would have been on Kiev's doorstep.
Francis Lee ,
The only people 'taking' seven percent of the Ukraine are those who already live in the Donbass and Crimea are the Russian-speaking
inhabitants who have lived there for generations and who are defending their homeland against the Ukie Army and its Waffen SS
look-alikes in the Azov Battalion and various other neo-nazi outfits like Praviy Sektor, and the Tornado Battalion and Dnipro1
and other charming little outfits such as 'Patriots of the Ukraine' – backed by right-wing fanatics in the Ukrainian Rada namely
Biletsky and Parubiy.
These people are the direct descendants of the scum of the murderous Banderist pro-Nazis who were responsible for mass extermination
of Russians, Jew, and above all, Poles in Volhynia in the far west of the Ukraine between 1943-45. The Ukrainian Insurgent army
(UPA – led by Shukeviych) was the military wing of Bandera's OUN-B (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). Unfortunately for
for Mr B, he had an unfortunate rendezvous with a KGB hit-man in Munich in 1955. RIP.
Long live the heroic resistance of the Peoples Republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Frank Speaker ,
Exactly Francis.
Some of my family were massacred by these bastard who were their neighbours: a woman cut upon at the front, a woman with a
wooden stake driven through her head, two children thrown down a well. That NATO aided and abetted these same evil scum to overthrow a democratically elected government and re-start their murderous
ways – this time around upon the ethnic Russians in the wast of the country – I cannot forgive my political leaders who have done
this.
That our MSM completely ignore this situation, I cannot forgive them, and that's why I am here.If there's a place called hell, I hope there's a special place reserved for our leaders and media owners who have done this.
eddie ,
They are occupying Jacque Schitt, but their 93rd aid convoy to the Donbas in November, consisting of 45 trucks, was not imaginary.
Greenpeace is yet another "NGO" that is heavily influenced by the National Endowment for Democracy a CIA front that supports US
Imperialism.
I'm ambivalent on the issue of pipelines ( see Keystone XL Pipeline being driven through Indian Land in total violation of
the Laramie Treaty) since they are environmentally destructive but the fact is that this is all about politics and has nothing
to do with protecting the environment.
If "Russia's" Greenpeace was so concerned about the environment they'd worry about their backyard first such as the network
of pipelines being run through Siberia.
richard le sarc ,
One wonders if the invertebrates of the EU will ever tire of being bullied by the Global Bullying Thug in Chief? The clerico-fascists
of priest-ridden Poland one can understand, and the phony 'greens' of Greenpeace the sell-out specialists, but the others are
just like mongrel dogs-the more you kick them, the more they lick your boots.
Boats of LNG floating across the Atlantic to Poland is not energy security. Whatever the politics of Nord Stream 2 we may be assured
the US has not got our back in Europe on this.
We may also be in need of energy sooner than we think, as professor Valentina Zharkova of Northumbria University suggests.
Unlike the Guardian her catastrophe theory goes in the other direction where in the next few years Earth will enter into a cooling
phase. That will set off a series of events leading to a mini ice age as happened with the Maunder Minimum of the 17th Century.
"Gazprom has purchased a pipe-laying ship which would allow the company to build undersea
pipelines despite sanctions. The new vessel may be used to build the Nord Stream-2 gas
pipeline to Europe."
Apparently the Russians think several steps ahead of the Americans.
This article has all one
needs to know about Russia/Gazprom's ability to finish the job abandoned by the Swiss
cowards, although their ships are apparently still on station. Yes, there'll be a delay, but
that won't matter much. Pissing off the Germans was the absolute wrong move!
@80 Jen It is much too late for the Danes to step in and stop Nord Stream 2.
Their permission was required because the pipe enters their economic zone, but once that
permission was given then the pipelaying started on the basis of "good faith". If the Danes
attempted to renege then I would imagine that it would be Russia and Germany who would tie up
Denmark in legal red-tape, not the other way around, and by the time this got to court the
pipeline would be completed and the gas would be flowing.
The USA's only hope now is that its sanctions scare off companies like Allseas, but that
hope relies on the western conceit that Russia is too technologically backward to be able to
take over and finish the job.
But the Russians are very capable, and extremely wily: if you look at my original post you
will see a link from 2016 where the Russians are already spelling out exactly what they
intend to do.
They acquired a suitable pipeline-laying ship at last three years. They admitted at the
time that they acquired it that it made no economic sense for them to acquire such a
ship.
Economics be damned. They bought it because they had to consider the possibility that the
USA is run by a bunch of duplicitous shits.
As I'm following the case closely, a few supplements.
The problem with the high tech Russian pipelaying vessel is that it is deployed in the Far
East and would need months to get to the scene. The Russian Fortuna lacks the technical
permission from the Danes to work in their waters, but it is suspiciously idling at the
German Coast. NorthStream 2 could ask Denmark to get a special allowance for the Fortuna to
work, and that is not so far-fetched as it seems because Denmark has a new government since
last June.
The Fortuna will at least finish the German part of the pipeline. A German court yesterday
has turned down a complaint by environmentalists who are worried about wintering birds.
The sanctions are a huge strategical blunder of the USA. Yes, the Germans are pissed off,
from the bosses of the chemical industry to the "ordinary people". You can almost hear the
tectonic subterranean crack that moves Germany away from the Anglosphere towards Russia.
In German politics, the Transatlanticians are now in the defensive. The most powerful
transatlantic institutions are IMO the various intelligence services, BND, BfV and so on.
They have certainly initiated the "scandal" about the murdered Georgian djihadist (you
remember, two Russian diplomats were expelled immediately) in order to sabotage the Normandy
talks and NordStream 2 and push Merkel to distance herself from Russia. This has failed,
obviously. Stupid white men.
An excellent show from last week. However still relevant with some reminders from the 80s
that are quintessential irony. Sanchez's journalistic delivery is impressive.
Rapoza's latest effort, for Forbes, is his review of the Russia/Ukraine gas deal that
everyone is talking about. His take, in summary, is that Russia did not really have to give
up very much, it would be to Ukraine's advantage to stop fucking around and concentrate now
on the issues, that Ukraine dropped a very large amount in claims in return for not very much
money (although he does not say how likely Ukraine would have been to win them in court, and
my personal opinion is not very), that Nord Stream II will be completed with not a
significant amount of delay, and that Russia can implement the same no-gas-through-Ukraine in
five years if it does not like the way things are going.
As usual, the range of interpretations of gas agreements is wide and full of water. Most of them have hidden recognition of
groundlessness, because even a simple reading of the document requires above average schooling.
Here is this document, where it is written in black and almost white that the parties agreed on such and such conditions:
All talk about a Ukrainian victory or a Russian victory should be left to politicians for domestic consumption, although,
to be fair, it is worth noting: Ukrainian functionaries immediately claimed it is a victory for Ukraine. This sounded against
the background of the absence of fanfare in Russia, which, in the face of the most difficult negotiations, would be extremely
inappropriate.
Why?
Because
Gazprom
is Gazprom, not Russia. Confusion in concepts is a very characteristic phenomenon for immature structures and
individuals on both sides. So talk of Russia allegedly forgiving Ukraine $3 billion in credit has nothing to do with the topic
at all. There is no word in the document about this, which is natural, because, I will repeat: Russia is not Gazprom.
However, the
Naftogaz
fanfare coming from Vitrenko's mouth is also understandable on the other hand: the board (8 people) will not have
to return millions of dollars already distributed to their pockets as part of the prize according to the results of the
Stockholm Arbitration
. Moreover, now, if Gazprom pays the claim amount, the premium will increase significantly.
As for the amount Gazprom has pledged to pay – about $3 billion – it is less than 1% of the assets of the Russian gas giant
(not to be confused with capitalisation). Few will notice this drop in the ocean. And for Naftogaz? In the absence of
up-to-date information about the assets of this structure, I believe that the figure is comparable to all assets, especially
since, according to the current reform, the Ukrainian gas transit system, the market value of which is no more than $1.5
billion (according to the Chairman of the Board
Kobolev
), leaves from under Naftogaz in general.
Conclusion: tactically Naftogaz and its board benefited from a contract with Gazprom. Strategically, as it seems, Gazprom
at least did not lose, firstly, significantly reducing the term of the contract and the volume of pumping on the gas transit
system of Ukraine, taking into account the forthcoming and inevitable implementation of "
Nord
Stream-2
" and, secondly, leaving itself the right to disagree with transit tariffs, which remain the subject of
negotiations:
Point 2.2.3 The organising company [Naftogaz] will contact LLC "Operator of gas transit system of Ukraine" for the
reservation of capacities of the gas transit system of Ukraine
Provided that at the time of reservation by NCSREPU [National Commission for State Regulation of Energy and Public
Utilities] a
competitive tariff
recognised by the Organising Company and corresponding to the level of gas
transportation tariffs applied in the countries of western and central Europe will be established.
Point 3.2 The Ukrainian side
will take all necessary measures
(create all necessary conditions) by
29.12.19:
for ensuring reliable legal protection of the interests of the client of services [Gazprom] on transit,
predictability, transparency, economic validity, and stability of tariff formation
;
What went on behind the scenes went almost unnoticed:
1. Ukraine's demand for imported gas, which is still falling due to the decline in production capacity, will be covered
from the volumes approved by the agreement (65 billion m3 in 2020 and 40 billion m3 in the following 4 years). The volume of
imports according to various estimates remains at about 20 billion m3 per year. Tariffs will not be applied on all the Russian
gas that Ukraine will consume from pumping on the gas transit system and will be implemented on the territory of Ukraine at
its own expense. The volume subject to a transit tariff will be determined by the difference between the entrance to the
Ukrainian gas transit system and the exit to Europe.
2. All preliminary talk about gas discounts for Ukraine was not included in the agreement. Thus, the price of gas remains
the subject of bargaining and is inevitably dependent on the transit tariff: the higher the price of transit – the higher the
price of gas and, accordingly, vice versa.
3. In fact, the issue of direct gas supplies to Ukraine is not worth discussing at all. I.e., in the event of a
non-agreement on the price, all gas will come to Europe, Ukraine will earn from transit, but these earnings will be offset by
the increased price of gas on the reverse. Thus, even in the event of pumping all gas to Europe, earnings from transit,
according to experts, will not even cover the cost of servicing the Ukrainian gas transit system.
Lastly, Gazprom – which is not Russia, but behind whose back Russia certainly stands, and was opposed by both Ukraine and
the European Union, represented by the European Commission, as well as the United States with its global interests – managed,
at a minimum, to minimise its tactical losses and preserve strategic Russian interests.
The gas war appears to have retreated, but the most interesting thing is yet to come.
I linked a Russian newspaper article above which analysed the deal and in which it was
pointed out that the $3 billion that Gazprom coughed up is 1% of the annual turnover of that
company. And another thing that the article pointed out was that the deal is between Gazprom
and Naftogaz notRussia and the Ukraine. In return for that $3 billion,
which will be pocketed by many Yukitard bastards, I am sure, Gazprom's never ending
altercations with the Yukie gas outfit over compensation and claims and counter-claims have
had a line drawn under them. I suppose that's really why the Porky bloc in the rada is taking
action against the deal: they fear that their nice little earner is being stifled, in that
penalties imposed by arbitration courts against Gazprom have seemingly ended.
All talk about a Ukrainian victory or a Russian victory should be left to politicians
for domestic consumption, although, to be fair, it is worth noting: Ukrainian functionaries
immediately claimed it is a victory for Ukraine. This sounded against the background of the
absence of fanfare in Russia, which, in the face of the most difficult negotiations, would be
extremely inappropriate.
Why?
Because Gazprom is Gazprom, not Russia. Confusion in concepts is a very characteristic
phenomenon for immature structures and individuals on both sides. So talk of Russia allegedly
forgiving Ukraine $3 billion in credit has nothing to do with the topic at all. There is no
word in the document about this, which is natural, because, I will repeat: Russia is not
Gazprom.
However, the Naftogaz fanfare coming from Vitrenko's mouth is also understandable on
the other hand: the [Naftogaz] board (8 people) will not have to return
millions of dollars already distributed to their pockets as part of the prize
according to the results of the Stockholm Arbitration. Moreover, now, if Gazprom pays the
claim amount, the premium will increase significantly.
As for the amount Gazprom has pledged to pay – about $3 billion – it is
less than 1% of the assets of the Russian gas giant (not to be confused with
capitalisation). Few will notice this drop in the ocean. And for Naftogaz? In the absence of
up-to-date information about the assets of this structure, I believe that the figure is
comparable to all assets, especially since, according to the current reform, the Ukrainian
gas transit system, the market value of which is no more than $1.5 billion (according to the
Chairman of the Board Kobolev), leaves from under Naftogaz in general.
Conclusion: tactically Naftogaz and its board benefited from a contract with Gazprom.
Strategically, as it seems, Gazprom at least did not lose, firstly, significantly reducing
the term of the contract and the volume of pumping on the gas transit system of Ukraine,
taking into account the forthcoming and inevitable implementation of "Nord Stream-2" and,
secondly, leaving itself the right to disagree with transit tariffs, which remain the subject
of negotiations
In other news, @RANDCorporation report
firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot
drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1
"... "I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism. These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My Emphasis] ..."
Voltairenet has a very interesting article about this subject (also discussed in the last
open thread) by prof. Michael Jabara Carley of the University of Montreal: "Justin Trudeau
Needs A History Lesson", in which he describes the unsuccessful efforts of Soviet diplomats
to create an alliance of European countries against the nazis.
People may have read that Putin has said a few more things about the documents he reviewed
with his CIS peers; and in doing so, Putin revealed an aspect about himself few have seen
previously. Putin made his statement at the annual year-end Defense Ministry Board Meeting . IMO,
Putin has had more than enough of the extreme Russophobia now in circulation and he sees it
as being very similar to that of prior historical periods where Russia was then subjected to
attack from the West. I won't post Putin's diatribe here; you'll need to read it for
yourself--I've never seen him so angry or speak undiplomatically. What I will post is what he
said after, which IMO is even more important, although removed from the overall context:
"I just want to note that this kind of people, people like the ones who were
negotiating with Hitler back then, they now deface monuments to the liberator soldiers, Red
Army soldiers who liberated the countries of Europe and the European peoples from Nazism.
These are their followers. In this sense, unfortunately, little has changed. And we must
keep this in mind, also with regard to the development of our Armed Forces . [My
Emphasis]
"Here is what I would like to say in this regard, which I think is critically important.
Please note: neither the Soviet Union, nor Russia have ever tried to create a threat to other
countries. We were always catching up in this regard. The United States created the atomic
bomb, and the Soviet Union caught up with it. We did not have nuclear weapon delivery
vehicles or carriers. There was no such thing as strategic aviation, and the Soviet Union was
catching up in this area, as well. The first intercontinental missiles actually were not
built here, and the Soviet Union was trying to catch up.
"Today, we have a unique situation in our new and recent history. They try to catch up
with us."
Also note the word Putin chose to describe the Outlaw US Empire's withdraw from the INF
Treaty. Clearly, Putin desires to impress upon those charged with Russia's defense that the
times are indeed perilous, that the old lies are being spread without any resistance. As with
the other three transcripts I linked, this one also demands to be read in full and also in
close association with the other three. The Poles will scream along with their sycophants,
but Putin is correct about both the past and the present and the danger present within the
future.
It's rare that I read something on the Washington Post that I don't find highly biased, even
repugnant. But with
their recent article on the Afghanistan Papers, they truly knocked the ball out of the
park.
The facts they shared should have every American protesting in the streets.
Trillions of dollars have been spent on a war that the Pentagon knew was unwinnable all
along. More than 2300 American soldiers died there and more than 20,000 have been injured. More
than 150,000 Afghanis were killed, many of them civilians, including women and children.
And they lied to us constantly.
Congress just proved that the truth doesn't matter, though. A mere 22 hours after the
release of this document, the new National Defense Authorization Act that breezed through the
House and Senate was signed by the President. That bill authorized
$738 billion in military spending for 2020 , actually increasing the budget by $22 billion
over previous years.
So, how is your representation in Washington, DC working out for you?
What are the
Afghanistan Papers?
The Afghanistan Papers are
a brilliant piece of investigative journalism published by the Washington Post and the
article is very much worth your time to read. I know, I know – WaPo. But believe me when
I tell you this is something all Americans need to see.
This was an article that took three years of legal battles to bring to light. WaPo acquired
the documents using the Freedom of Information Act and got more than 2000 pages of insider
interviews with "people who played a direct role in the war, from generals and diplomats to aid
workers and Afghan officials." These documents were originally part of a federal investigation
into the "root failures" of the longest conflict in US history – more than 18 years
now.
Three presidents, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, have been involved in this
ongoing war. It turns out that officials knew the entire time this war was "unwinnable" yet
they kept throwing American lives and American money at it.
Here's an excerpt from WaPo's report. Anything that is underlined is taken verbatim from the
papers themselves – you can click on them to read the documents.
In the interviews, more than 400 insiders offered unrestrained criticism of what went
wrong in Afghanistan and how the United States became mired in nearly two decades of
warfare.
With a bluntness rarely expressed in public, the interviews lay bare pent-up complaints,
frustrations and confessions, along with second-guessing and backbiting.
The important thing to note about these interviews is that the interviewees never expected
their words to become public. They weren't "blowing the whistle." They were answering questions
for a federal investigation. So they didn't hold back. These aren't "soundbites." It's what the
real witnesses are saying.
The U.S. government has not carried out a comprehensive accounting of how much it has
spent on the war in Afghanistan, but the costs are staggering.
Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International
Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion, according to an
inflation-adjusted estimate calculated by Neta Crawford, a political science professor and
co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University.
Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the
Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded
veterans.
"What did we get for this $1 trillion effort? Was it worth $1 trillion?" Jeffrey Eggers, a
retired Navy SEAL and White House staffer for Bush and Obama, told government interviewers.
He added, "After the killing of Osama bin Laden, I said that Osama was probably laughing in
his watery grave considering how much we have spent on Afghanistan." (
source )
The US government deliberately misled the American people.
What's more, if you officials, up to and including three presidents, knew they were throwing
money at something that could never be achieved. They did it anyway and they lied to our faces
about it.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents,
military commanders and diplomats who assured Americans year after year that they were making
progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S.
government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military
headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear
the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
It's been an epic 18-year-long exercise in CYA. (Cover Your A$$). I don't see how anyone
could fail to be outraged by this. And what I've cited here is just the crap icing on the
maggot cupcake. It's a festering mess and I urge you, if you really want to know the truth, to
read this article on WaPo and click on these links.
How was all this money spent?
A lot of it went to building infrastructure in Afghanistan. It was flagrantly and
frivolously used there while we live in a place where people are going bankrupt at best and
dying at worst because they
can't afford medical care and there are places in our country without clean running
water or toilets.
The defense industry certainly reaped rewards and it's highly likely a lot of people who had
the power to allow it to go on made some "wise investments" that have paid off for them. But
for the rest of us, this conflict has done nothing except ensure that our tax dollars are not
here improving our infrastructure or helping Americans lead better and more productive
lives.
Dr. Ron Paul refers to this as the crime of the century.
It is not only members of the Bush, Obama, and Trump Administrations who are guilty of
this massive fraud. Falsely selling the Afghanistan war as a great success was a bipartisan
activity on Capitol Hill. In the dozens of hearings I attended in the House International
Relations Committee, I do not recall a single "expert" witness called who told us the truth.
Instead, both Republican and Democrat-controlled Congresses called a steady stream of neocon
war cheerleaders to lie to us about how wonderfully the war was going. Victory was just
around the corner, they all promised. Just a few more massive appropriations and we'd be
celebrating the end of the war.
Congress and especially Congressional leadership of both parties are all as guilty as the
three lying Administrations. They were part of the big lie, falsely presenting to the
American people as "expert" witnesses only those bought-and-paid-for Beltway neocon think
tankers.
What is even more shocking than the release of this "smoking gun" evidence that the US
government wasted two trillion dollars and killed more than three thousand Americans and more
than 150,000 Afghans while lying through its teeth about the war is that you could hear a pin
drop in the mainstream media about it. Aside from the initial publication in the Washington
Post, which has itself been a major cheerleader for the war in Afghanistan, the mainstream
media has shown literally no interest in what should be the story of the century. (
source )
And it's most likely that nobody will ever face punishment for this deception. If this is
not the very definition of the term "war crimes" I can hardly imagine what is. Dr. Paul
continues:
We've wasted at least half a year on the Donald Trump impeachment charade – a
conviction desperately in search of a crime. Meanwhile one of the greatest crimes in US
history will go unpunished. Not one of the liars in the "Afghanistan Papers" will ever be
brought to justice for their crimes. None of the three presidents involved will be brought to
trial for these actual high crimes. Rumsfeld and Lute and the others will never have to fear
justice. Because both parties are in on it. There is no justice . (
source )
The response? Silence and a budget increase.
The people in government don't care that we know about all this. Sure, it's mildly
inconvenient but "whatever."
How do I know this?
Simple. Less than a full day after the story broke, the new NDAA ended up on President
Trump's desk and was signed, authorizing an additional 22 billion dollars for next year's
defense spending. And all anyone can talk about is, "Oooohhhh Space Force!!!"
Government: "Merry Christmas. We're going to blow through more of your tax money and you
won't get a damned thing for it."
I couldn't make this up if I tried. In a notable, must-read op-ed ,
Darius Shahtahmasebi cited some horrific incidents and concluded:
We can't let this recent publication obscure itself into nothingness. The recent reaction
from Congress is a giant middle finger designed to tell you that (a) there will never be
anything you can do about it and (b) they simply don't care how you feel. Democracy at its
finest from the world's leading propagator of democratic values. ( source )
When is enough going to be enough? Why are we not enraged en masse? Why haven't we recalled
these treasonous bastards and taken our country and our budget back?
For a country that is ready to take up arms and waste countless hours "impeaching" Trump
over something he said on a phone call, it sure says a lot about those same people ignoring 18
years of treasonous behavior by three separate administrations.
Why isn't the media raising hell over this? Why aren't these lives important? Why isn't
sending trillions of our dollars to be frittered away an outrage?
People love to say "America First" and "impeach Trump for treason" and all that jazz. They
love to call anti-war people "un-American" and recommend a quick, one-way trip to Somalia if we
don't "support our troops." However, I think is far more evidence of supporting our troops to
want out of there, not risking their lives based on a castle of lies that further enriches
powerful and wealthy people who have nothing to lose.
Most people love to be outraged about frivolous matters. But when a report like this and its
following insult are met with resounding silence, it's pretty obvious that hardly anybody is
really paying attention.
So, cut funding for prisons; cut necessary levels, to insure safety, prison guard
staffing; watch as prison violence escalates; then print a story where the Union leader,
trying to protect his remaining too small workforce from the rising violence, sounds like an
inhuman bad guy in the story. Neolibs gotta love that angle.
I'm seeing the same thing in my US state over the past several years. The politicians'
answer is not to increase staffing of unionized prison guards or spend more on safety for
state prisons, but to outsource prisoner housing to the private sector. Neolibs love that
angle.
In other news, @RANDCorporation report
firmly establishes that Van Gogh was a Russian Agent. May be, the dastardly Kremlin plot
drove him to cut his ear off?.. At any rate, NATO is now on alert. pic.twitter.com/9k9j5K9rx1
Easier to demonize Putin than to have long boring articles about how different countries
have different national interests, and how he works for Russia not us. To say nothing about
discussing who exactly is it that decides what national interests are anyway
I very much enjoy watching or reading Putin's speeches. No doubt he's lying in the same
way all politicians do. Yet, when he castigates the West he is right on target and I like him
for it.
The "Afghanistan Papers" are not the "secret history" the Post says they are. What
struck me as I read them, was how drearily familiar it all was The real problem is not that
bureaucrats and politicians lied to the public, but that the institutional incentives of our
foreign policy often encouraged them to lie to themselves.
And why would they "lie to themselves?" The article doesn't dig deep enough. Rather than
accept that the Afghanistan war was a failure, viewed from the trillion dollars plus dollars
spent over 18 years, maybe it was a resounding success. Maybe instead of the WaPo doing a
retaliatory "expose" it really is just running cognitive interference.
Yes, if it was a failure, lessons can be learned, but what if it went all according to
plan, what if there really never was a desire to stamp out the poppy trade or root out the
terrorist, what if there are more nefarious forces at work? Or, maybe I've come to a point in
when I read any MSM story my first instinct is what's their angle, where do these bread
crumbs they are dropping for me lead to, or away from?
An English fellow I knew was the master of understatement, and when he related that he
made "a small but useful profit' on something, it meant he caught a whale, but claimed it was
a minnow.
'Bread crumbs' is a nice way of describing making money on a war you really don't want to
ever see the ending of, as it's just too profitable and to quit cold turkey would doom the
bottom line.
The article is basically right. My own experience with the subject and in the country is a
lot less than that of the author, but this accords with what I saw and heard. In fact it was
worse than that, because this series of stories is confined to the US, but many other nations
were involved as well, as was a complete alphabet soup of international organizations from
the UN and the EU downwards, with almost no real coordination and often conflicts of
objectives and interests.
In spite of many attempts, there never was an agreed strategy, and
within a couple of years people who'd been involved were saying basically what these articles
are saying now.
Why? Well two reasons in my experience. First is the sunk costs problem. The longer an
operation like this goes on, the longer it will go on, because it becomes
progressively more difficult to explain why you are pulling out when all this money and all
these lives have been apparently wasted. So the temptation is to stay and just hope that next
year things will get better. There are also lots of mega-political reasons for the US not to
pull out which have nothing to do with the country itself – NATO leadership, image vs
Russia etc. etc. These things are important for some people. As a result, rather than asking
yourself what you are trying to accomplish, you wind up trying to accomplish what you think
you can do – destroying poppy, for example, was never part of the original plan, but
became so because in theory it could be measured.
In addition, the military in every society are very mission oriented, and, whilst they are in
the field, will try their best to make whatever the politicians want them to do work. It's
later that they start to have doubts. After all, nobody will follow a General who tells his
men that the whole thing is a waste of time, whatever they may privately think. This is a
well-known problem in all counter insurgency wars.
So no, it's not the Pentagon Papers 2 – all this has been known to anybody interested
for a good fifteen years, and I've heard many people, military and civilians, say these sorts
of things when they come back from the front, even if they tend to be professionally
optimistic when they are there.
Now nobody wants to be the one who "lost" Afghanistan, negotiating the terms of America's
surrender to the Taliban will have awful optics.
I like what the Chinese did with the Uighur concentration camps: they declared that all of
the Uighurs had now "graduated".
Maybe get one of the Taliban guys to lose the headcovering and robes, put him in a suit
and tie and have a "historic" signing of a "peace deal".
(They won't have footage of helicopters being pushed off the decks of aircraft carriers
but maybe they can drive multi million dollar tanks off a cliff or something)
I keep hearing John Kerry's question "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a
mistake?" on Vietnam.
Wonderful isn't? 48 years since then and 44 years since the last helicopter flew off the
embassy's rooftop in Saigon and we haven't learned anything except being better
propagandists, crooks, liars, and credulous fools.
Speaking of officers encouraging the troops, "leading," I recall a scene in one of the
several Notagainistan documentaries quite a few years ago, where a colonel in the US Marines
(going from memory, I did not bookmark the video) was heating up his troops for a New Push
into I believe Wardak Province,, or maybe Kandahar. Telling the Troops to keep in their
fighting hearts the knowledge that this was going to be the operation that broke the back of
The Enemy, that they should remember every moment of it so they could tell their
grandchildren that they were part of the great victory in this noble effort.
Quite the locker room speech, as I recall it -- late enough in "the war" that his delivery
was pretty insincere, and the growled responses from the Troops made it unclear what muddled
motivations they might have, after a couple of "deployments" getting blown up by IEDs and
"kicking in doors in Kandahar " And in the rest of the world: http://vvawai.org/archive/wot/kicking-doors.html
The documenters were good enough to point out that said colonel had helicoptered in to the
marshaling area for the Big Push, then hopped back into his nicely appointed personal
Blackhawk and flown away. Leading from the rear
"Professional optimism," indeed. All of a piece with today's discussion of CEO
compensation (aka "looting.")
Correct me if I am wrong, but prior to our invasion of Afghanistan there was no poppy
problem because the Taliban did not permit it to be grown. Poppy growing for cash crops only
began after the insurgency to pay for weapons to fight the US forces there. So that is more a
measure of blowback than an initial aim of the invasion.
Further, I distinctly remember the Taliban saying that they did not have the ability to
root out AQ themselves, and just before the invasion they actually invited GWB to send in the
troops to get them. The fact that GWB ignored this invitation in favor of an invasion makes
the entire process a measure of blowback rather than progress.
It just strikes me that this was always just an excuse to start a war that accreted yet
more excuses to stay in one.
Right up there with going without a plan. By refusing the hard choice to keep all the
competing factions out of power (Taliban, Northern Alliance, Warlords) and refusing to have
new deal/bottom up extensive reconstruction plans for rebuilding they guaranteed Afghanistan
would not recover but remained mired in conflict and corruption.
Instead they went placeholder revenge war until they could get the ill conceived invasion
they wanted.
The hubris is endless. All that was required to ensure "a good outcome" would have been to
have that plan "to keep all the competing factions out of power (?Taliban, Northern Alliance,
Warlords," and then to have a "NewDeal.bottom up rebuilding ([sic -- one can't "rebuild" what
was never built in the first place]." Just "keep them out of power." Say what?
Then, that land of "tribes with flags" would somehow "recover" (from what -- the invasion
and destruction of all that "war" stuff?) and "democratically" avoid all the conflict and
corruption that are endemic to the terrain. A War College pipe dream, as in opium pipe? That
somehow a Middle Class and Constitutional Rule of Law and Chambers of Commerce and all that
would grow out of the rocks and brambles?
Choosing to empower warring factions and rebuild the opium trade which that did wasn't
hubris? We already know that it did little or nothing for the majority of the population. If
you are going to kick out a ruling party maybe not pick the successors especially when your
choice is based on who will take bribes to traffic guns and disruption to neighboring
areas.
We have never really tried a real hearts and minds operation. Seeds, farm equipment,
tools, schools, roads, building supplies and providing the time and space to use them.
I don't think there was a chance of there being no military response. Saner and better
respected leadership might have been able to do something limited and directed, but not one
better idea between doing nothing and what we did appears to have ever been considered.
It was not long before 9/11 that Cheney and crew had the Taliban in the US and took them
around to Disneyland, I kid you not. I have no idea what they thought that would do for
religious fundamentalists.
They always had big plans for the Middle East. In lots of areas.
Never forget that Cheney had barely gotten sworn in before he was on a diplomatic junket to
The ME and Europe to try to drum up a coalition to address the problem of Iraq. Funnily
enough saner people tried to tell him the problems were Israel, Palestine and yes terrorists
fixated on those areas. That didn't stop them from having plans for an invasion of Iraq on
Rumsfeld's desk seven months later on 9/11.
Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq and Syria are exactly like South Vietnam. If American Elite and
Technocrats admitted that the US Army was middle of a Civil War, invaders, and on the side of
warlords; they'd admit that it is pointless except to profit from the death and chaos. None
of the wars are in Americans' best interests. That realization ends the money flow.
Corruption is the applicable term.
It would be like Boeing admitting it killed 346 people and will kill more unless they have
a cultural change and spend money for the right people and rebuild an organization that works
together to build and fly airliners safely.
Yeah that article was just another " but we had good intentions" riff. As you suggest, the
reason people keep " failing" in these spectacular ways is that there is a lot of money to be
made in " failure", especially when accountability amounts to people saying " but we meant
well -- we just didn't understand".
what if there really never was a desire to stamp out the poppy trade
When the US began arming the Mujahiddin back in '79, it was accepted that opium smugglers
were ideally suited to smuggling weapons into Afghanistan. And when the US invaded in 2001,
it was in support of the Northern Alliance, well known for their involvement in the opium
business.
Since then, one of the few areas of development in the country has been the refining of opium
into heroin domestically, rather than exporting it raw.
No, there never was a desire to eradicate poppy.
The whole Afghanistan campaign (after the first year which was generally successful at
achieving its limited goal) has reminded me of the Tet offensive in Vietnam where entire
divisions of North Vietnamese soldiers infiltrated areas, including major cities, and no
locals would tell anybody. If you have that little support of the local population, then
there is no way you can "win a war" without simply simply creating a police state where
everybody's every move is monitored or committing genocide and wiping everybody out.
If the US couldn't identify partners that could get the population support, then the whole
"nation-building" exercise (a tacked-on goal) was doomed to failure. If the police and
soldiers aren't willing to fight for their government, then there isn't much purpose in
creating one.
I think the biggest US foreign policy failure is generally the assumption that everybody
wants to be just like the US. The Marshall Plan and Cold War were able to create stable
democracies in Western Europe and Japan where there weren't ones before. But these are the
exceptions to the rule. Most other countries have started with or reverted to strongmen or
simply devolved into chaos.
Then there is the installing the corrupt and often very partisan leadership to run the
countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Vietnam while pushing away any honest, or at
sincerely patriotic, leadership. It seems that being good for business is more important than
being good for a country, forget about winning a war.
The Congress been on a MIC spending spree for anti ballistic missile defense since Reagan
wanted Star Wars. Today Trump wants Space Force. One and the same. Perhaps MOSGA. Make Outer
Space Great Again? So what is Russia to do? It is the oldest of military equations we have
not been using at all. That equation states that an offensive or defensive weapon system will
ultimately fail if there is a cheaper counter measure that neutralizes it. ABM technology is
hard and expensive. Making missiles faster is cheap and also effective.
But our military has never given a crap about making sense about anything it spends
trillions of dollars on. Most of these massive programs are white elephants and will never
deliver the promises they make. Especially the ABM systems. Russia could have saved the fast
missiles since our systems only are able to shoot down slow ones about 25% of the time under
tightly controlled test parameters that are designed to provide the optimal conditions that
enable a successful intercept.
I really think everyone in the military knows this is a fools errand but we just have to
keep paying it forward to future budgets with bigger allocations for nonsense.
The scariest part is our Congress and President are getting stupider by the day. They
really may actually feel they can rely on this "protection" and remain safe. If that really
takes hold then the likelihood of a first strike grows by leaps and bounds. That is why
Russia has to launch all the new scary weapons. It is because our brain dead government is
not afraid of mere ten megaton thermonuclear bombs any more.
Walter , December 22, 2019 at 19:32
The statement> "One of the staples of RMA concerns nations capable of producing
land-attack cruise missiles, a.k.a. TLAMs. As it stands, only the U.S., Russia, China and
France can do it"
May not be true. Use searchterm "the 5000 dollar cruise missile" or "New Zealand man
'building cruise missile in garage'
Withal, anybody can build a fairly good cruise missile, with a range near 500 miles. The
gizmo to make it effective is another matter. And it is a stupid thing to build. Do it and
get caught – you won't need a retirement plan. It's still easy.
Drew Hunkins , December 22, 2019 at 16:38
Martyanov's "Losing Military Supremacy" was spectacular. I have it on my bookshelf with
vast passages highlighted and underlined.
Cat , December 22, 2019 at 15:58
The world will eventually witness WW3 as Russia, China and U.S. (which is currently
working on at least six different hypersonic programs/projects) are developing hypersonic
weapons and the supremely capable USAF being already fully primed to use dial-a-yield B61
tactical nukes supposedly safe to civilians on the other two (Russia and China).
ttshasta , December 22, 2019 at 15:25
That the US outspends others does not directly connote superiority.
Was it not apx. $200M
in overcharges by Halliburton for meals not delivered and fuel overcharges in Iraq?
How many false test results and double billings are there, we may never know.
And what of the F35, it was designed by Congress to have parts sourced from 50 states
guaranteeing passage. The result; so many bells and whistles it needs constant maintanence,
and its anti radar coating may melt at top speed.
As well in hurricane Michael in Florida 22 of 55 F22s were not flown to safety in Ohio and
endured the hurricane. Apparently the F22 also spends 49% of it's time in maintenance.
Of course we. need defense, but with accountability. Look up Catherine Austin Fitts and
missing money, the Pentagon's black hole of a budget is staggering.
John Drake , December 22, 2019 at 14:21
Very interesting!!!
I look at the Pentagon budget as a warped economic stimulus plan considering how many of
their exotic weapons are lemons: the F-35, the USS Gerald Ford which six years after
launching is still not fully ready to deploy, etc. etc. This organization can't even complete
a complete audit-or is it they don't dare.
They make sure their vendors are in all 50 states so any time a congress critter votes
against a defense budget, he/she votes against jobs in that state.
jo6pac , December 22, 2019 at 11:06
Thanks PE as you are an interesting read for sure. Thanks for the link to Andrei Martyanov
site.
This is capitalism at its best. Selling the world a delusional reality. What if I told you
these weapons are already obsolete? The real issue being who has more highly advanced
technology that's being held from public knowledge and what they're going to use it
towards.
Anna , December 22, 2019 at 19:41
Genuine capitalism demands expertise, technical, scientific, et cet., as well as an
adherence to the unforgiving rules of responsibility. Instead, the US "deciders" are mired in
incompetence and sycophancy.
The stunning story of the Boeing 737 MAX plane tells it all, including the total lack of
responsibility in the highest echelons of the "deciders."
SteveK9 , December 22, 2019 at 08:25
If China and Russia want to fight the American Empire, missiles are not going to be the
way. I suppose they have to keep building up conventional forces, but the idea that there
could be a long-term conventional war between the US and either Russia or China, seems
fanciful nuclear weapons. America's main weapon now is the control of international finance
through the dollar and the use of the dollar in sanctions, arming proxies, paying fifth
columnists. Those are the avenues that Russia and China have to block, if they want to loosen
America's hold on the World. Trump is helping quite a bit.
Rob , December 23, 2019 at 11:13
Nailed it. Both Russia and China have pursued advanced weaponry as a deterrent against
U.S. aggression, not for the sake of fighting a conventional war. The message being sent to
the U.S. and its allies is that there will be a heavy price to pay both at home and abroad
for hostile military threats or actual attacks.
Skip Scott , December 22, 2019 at 08:09
For pennies on the dollar, Russia and China have military superiority over us. It is the
end of Empire, but there is no getting through to our thickheaded emperors. We have no choice
but to quit insisting on our "exceptionalism", and wage peace. All the money and manpower
wasted on our 800+ military bases and bloated weapons programs could feed the world, educate
our children, and transform our infrastructure into a new model of sustainability. Hubris and
entrenched power structures must be overcome if we are to survive as a species.
It is time for the latte sippers to wake up and insist on real change or their last view
of the world will be mushroom clouds out the window from their stools in Starbucks. Corporate
sponsored warmonger from column B will not suffice.
Walter , December 22, 2019 at 07:17
Speaking from History Walter observed that "all war originates from Domestic
interests".
Mikhail Alexandrov (expert) says> " One can break through air defenses only as a result
of a massive attack operation. This can be done by concentrating aviation into massive fire
support." (Pravda)
"As soon as we can see the concentration of American aircraft on airfields in Europe
– they cannot reach us in any other way – we will simply destroy those airfields
by launching our medium-range ballistic missiles at those targets. Afterwards, our troops
will go on offensive in the Baltic direction and take control of the entire Baltic territory
within 48 hours. NATO won't even have time to come to its senses – they will see a very
powerful military buildup on the borders with Poland. Then they will have to think whether
they should continue the war. As a result, all this will end with NATO losing the Baltic
States,"
Not exactly a watered-down view, eh? See also >" According to The National Interest, a
B-52 bomber of the US Air Force practiced an attack on the Kaliningrad region in March of
this year ."
This is an explicit statement by Russia – fire on opposing forces prior in time
– an error Stalin made was to not trust the intel. Russia, it seems, designs to avoid
that mistake the next time the nazis concentrate force.
Donald Duck , December 22, 2019 at 04:51
There was an old song British soldiers used to sing in the trenches of Flanders and France
during WW1.
It went something like this:
'Hush, here comes a whizzbang (German artillery)
Hush, here comes a whizzbang
Come on you solider boys
Get down those stairs
Into your dug out
And say your prayers
Hush here comes a whizzbang
And its headed straight for you
And you'l see all the wonders of no-man's land
When that whizzbang hits you.
Now with my amendments:
Hush here comes a Zircon
Hush here comes a Zircon
Come on you neo-cons
And get down those stairss
Into your fall-out shelters
And say your prayers
Hush here comes a Zircon
And its headed straight for you
And you'll see all the wonders
Of a post nuclear apoclypse
When the Zircon hits you.
A
curious , December 22, 2019 at 00:05
@Jeff
"The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Scheivelbusch, posits that in the future wars will be won
when the opposing entity's economy is destroyed or at least seriously damaged"
China has the capability and the will to play the long game in not capitulating to the
demands of the US. The current trade wars initiated and used by the US to threaten China's
independently minded progress is only party due to the trade deficit between the two
countries. The real reason the US is so belligerent is that China successfully developing
socialist based political system which is exposing the deep failures and lack of people
oriented capitalistic system. Once the US population wakes up the this fact it will spell
doom for those wealthy oligarchs ruling the US who want to keep their "gravy" train rolling.
They know their time is running out.
Jeff Harrison , December 22, 2019 at 21:32
Oh, I agree completely that the US is still fighting the socialism vs capitalism wars of
the early 20th century. A form of socialism is the only sensible approach. But, as Nicolas
Van Rijn (see Poul Anderson's Trader to the Stars) puts it: Oh, Governments they come and
they go but greed goes on forever. But as for your thought that everybody will rise up and
hang the oligarchs by the heels from the nearest light pole? Better hope not. We know what
that looks like. It was the great communist wave before and after WWII. The reason it was so
effective in Cuba is that Castro had all the oligarchs still in the country shot.
CitizenOne , December 21, 2019 at 23:55
Cruise missiles deployed by the US do not depend on GPS information to find their targets.
They fly by internal guidance that cannot be blocked or jammed or interfered with in any way.
There is nothing else I can say other than destroying satellites or radars or even
obliterating land targets such that they are unrecognizable will have no (zero) effect on a
US counter strike by nuclear cruise missiles that will be highly lethal to the Russians. The
triad of US defenses is based on an unstoppable and completely independent model based on
unalterable and insurmountable attack strategies. If the Russians or the Chinese try to wage
a preemptive strike they will need to defeat so many invincible technologies that the task
becomes impossible. The US is also playing catch up with intermediate range nukes which the
Russians long ago abandoned the treaty prohibiting these weapons. Intermediate Nukes pose the
greatest danger for the human race since the time from launch to impact is short. That is
what this article announces as an unstoppable threat but it it is not a post MAD World we
live in. We live in a current MAD world where Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) is still
healthy and a world where the US can still inflict extinction on any nation that chooses to
launch a preemptive nuclear strike on the US. Just because the Russians chose to abandon the
anti nuclear treaties does not mean they have an edge. The US has followed suit and has
nullified the various treaties banning intermediate nuclear armaments and has begun
testing.
There can be little doubt that the nuclear armaments of the USA arrayed across multiple
weapons platforms that use technology immune to interference by any known or unknown
technology are prepared to launch a counter strike which will effectively annihilate the
nation or nations that choose to use a first strike option no matter what the technology they
employ to use for their advantage.
Hyper sonic nuclear weapons developed by various nations may be a threat but there are
enough missiles left in place to defeat this threat. The US will also develop the same
weapons.
If North Korea were ever to launch nuclear tipped missiles it would be obliterated. If
Russia were ever to do the same it would be obliterated. If China were ever to do the same it
would be obliterated.
So what is the point of the author threatening that the US will be obliterated by new
technology when the defenses the US uses rely on old tech and unstoppable means to retaliate?
Who cares about whether we can survive a first strike?
What matters is that we can mount a credible deterrence by a counter strike that will
obliterate the enemy. That has not changed in the present power balance. The United States
maintains the ability to mount a lethal blow to any nation that tries to attack it with
nuclear weapons. Hyper sonic weapons and Russians loud announcements that they have the upper
hand just amount to nothing. The facts are that even if the US was obliterated we would still
have the means to obliterate Russia.
That will keep the balance of MAD in place and also renders the article useless and devoid
of any useful information.
Nobody wants nuclear war. But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win. That is
the proposition of the US government and it is also a vision that we Americans need to
support.
Lawrence Magnuson , December 23, 2019 at 13:16
"But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win." I thought you, elsewhere in your
panegyric, conceded Mutual Assured Destruction?
Donald Duck , December 23, 2019 at 14:01
"Nobody wants nuclear war. But if there is nuclear war then we must and will win. That is
the proposition of the US government and it is also a vision that we Americans need to
support."
"Nobody wants nuclear war."
Really, so who moved NATO right up to Russia's western frontiers and parked there military
hardware there? Who revoked the INF treaty? Who is using Ukraine and Georgia as battering
rams and forward attack bases – The same goes for Poland and Romania where the US has
stationed or is stationing Intermediate Range Missiles. How would you like the Russians doing
likewise in Mexico and Canada. This is the Cuban crisis in reverse.
Nobody wants nuclear war! You called have fooled me. Your neo-con lunatics seem to be
gagging for one. And BTW you won't win such a war, nobody will. And that my friend is the
cold logic of the age, accept for your demented neo-cons.
TimN , December 23, 2019 at 15:09
So, supporting the destruction of all life is something "we" need to support? A nuclear
war can't be won, sonny, and insisting "we" to support total destruction . There's something
wrong with you.
NoOneYouKnow , December 23, 2019 at 15:51
Sure, except Obama embarked on a $1.5 trillion plan to modernize the US's nuclear arsenal
to make it "more usable." So if anyone is looking to start a nuclear war, it's the US.
LJ , December 23, 2019 at 18:11
@ CitizenOne
It seems to me that what this essay and the Russian advertising their new technology is to
ensure that MAD is still in place, as US has been 'updating' its nuclear arms in an attempt
to promote a nuclear war that is survivable.
You make the classic US mistake of assuming that North Korea, Russia, China etc are
interested in and possibly planning nuclear pre-emptive strikes against the USA. In my
opinion, it is much more likely to be the US that initiates nuclear war, and these weapons
are developed to ensure that US policy makers realise that, as you say, "The facts are that
even if the US was obliterated we would still have the means to obliterate Russia." –
if Russia/China/etc are obliterated, they still have the means to obliterate the USA.
I hope you are right that o one wants nuclear war, because it is doubtful many of us in
any country would survive it!
Dick , December 21, 2019 at 22:39
The problem with the US is the military, Congress, and the President, perhaps even most
Americans, believe their own propaganda. Belief in one's exceptionalism leads to hubris,
which leads to arrogance leading one to overestimate their capabilities and underestimating
the capabilities of one's adversary; this is always fatal.
"The essence of immorality is the tendency to make an exception of myself" – Jane
Addams
Jeff Harrison , December 21, 2019 at 18:44
Ah, Pepe, you are always a fascinating read. The United States has been foolishly chasing
diminishing returns in military hardware that have a cost that is looking asymptotic. The
actual military hardware may well become, like the medieval castle, irrelevant. One of the
more fascinating books I've read recently, The Culture of Defeat by Wolfgang Scheivelbusch,
posits that in the future wars will be won when the opposing entity's economy is destroyed or
at least seriously damaged. The cold war ended when the old SovU had their economy collapse
when they tried to keep up with the US's profligate war spending capability. Actual defense
has, historically and traditionally, been cheaper than offense. Both Russia and China have an
advantage – they are really only interested in defense; they are no longer interested
in conquering the world, unlike the US which still seeks global hegemonic status. Indeed, a
relatively small investment by Russia and China is causing the US to spend huge sums of money
in response.
Of late the US has been using its economic power in the form of the status of our currency
and the need for countries and companies to keep assets on deposit in the US where the US can
readily steal them based on illegitimate legalities. When the petro-dollar finally dies, the
US will be substantially poorer. People have to borrow US $s to trade oil even if the buyer
is India and the seller Iran and the US makes interest on every one of those loans. And it
wasn't even our oil! I predict that this latest cold war will end when enough countries are
buying and selling oil in national currencies and not the US $, when countries start to hold
fewer and fewer US$s for national reserves, and when international businesses shun American
products for fear that they won't be able to export them. Either that or, given our existing
$23T in debt with the rest of our military spending will leave us trying to borrow more money
than the world has.
Moi , December 22, 2019 at 01:46
Conventional warfare seems to depend on which nation has the greatest industrial output.
On that premise the US has already lost to China.
Perhaps that's why the US is taking warfare to space. The new frontier is hi-tech and,
because no one else is really doing it yet, it is asymmetrical not conventional.
Anna , December 22, 2019 at 12:39
The first shoots of global spring: "Russia, China Sign Deal To Settle All Trade In
Respective Currencies And Drop Bilateral Use Of US Dollars" See:
russia-briefing.com/news/russia-china-sign-deal-settle-trade-respective-currencies-drop-bilateral-use-us-dollars.html/
John Drake , December 22, 2019 at 14:05
Good analysis, however the Soviet economy never collapsed though it was weak. Gorbachev
ended it trying to transition to a Scandinavian style socialism. Then he got ousted and
Yeltsin allowed a hundred mostly American neo-liberal economic advisers in to supervise his
selling off of state assets along with "liberalization". It was the neo-liberal reforms and
predatory raiding that wiped out the Russian economy, twice, ushering in the economic and
social malaise of the early '90's.
Who was behind that: Bill Clinton. He can take credit for not only wrecking the US economy
with his banking deregulation, but the Russian economy as well. And his wife is even
worse.
Bob Van Noy , December 23, 2019 at 10:47
(In response to John Drake) Yes, John Drake and Clinton's program is well described in F.
William Engdahl's book "Manifest Destiny".
The USA government acts as a gangster and should expect that other power will behave equally
bad toward the USA. That's a very bad, disastrous calculation, even in view of the current USA
technological superiority (which might shrink in the future)
Pride goeth before a fall. Washington is proud of itself, but a day will come when it will
count the cost, and mutter, "What the fuck was I thinking?" It was not ever going to actually
interrupt, and then seize for itself, Russia's share of the European gas market – that
was just another example of its addled belief in exceptionalism and its ability to overcome
any and all limiting factors, including distance and capacity.
What it HAS done is reveal itself as a petulant global child who will break anything that
does not please it, and therefore a dangerous and unpredictable business partner.
Thus spake the official Washington arsehole in Germany:
The American Ambassador in Berlin Richard Grenell, about whom it has already been
requested in Germany that he be recognized as persona non grata because of his
repeated attacks against the German leadership, has said that the sanctions imposed by
Washington against the pipeline "Nord Stream-2" had been introduced in the interests of the
EU and many countries of Europe are grateful for them.
"Seriously: from 15 European countries, the European Commission and the European
Parliament have all expressed their concerns about the project. We have long heard from our
European partners that the United States should support their efforts. Therefore, sanctions
represent a very Pro-European solution", said Grenell to the publication
Bild am Sonntag . [A German arsewipe publication of the first magnitude -- ME]
According to him, European diplomats have allegedly already repeatedly expressed their
gratitude for the measures taken by Washington.
Recall that the United States, which from time to time has opposed the emergence in
Europe of a strong competitor for its gas, imposed sanctions against the pipelines "Nord
Stream-2" and "Turkish Stream", requiring that the companies involved in their laying
immediately stop construction. In response, the German government has said it "rejects such
extraterritorial sanctions" directed "against German and European companies.
Just two events that occurred during Saturday night have turned into one of the main news
stories in recent months and years: Russia, the Ukraine and the European Commission signed a
trilateral agreement on the transit of gas over the coming years from Russia to the EU via
the Ukrainian GTS, and President Trump signed a law on the defence budget, in which US
parliamentarians have written separate clauses concerning sanctions against companies
involved in the construction of the pipeline "Nord stream – 2″
If anyone has forgotten, allow me to remind you that Vladimir Putin has never talked about
the categorical refusal as regards the transit to Europe via the Ukraine of Russian gas.
Always, he has only stressed that it is a question exclusively of a commercial nature,
without any political overtones, and that such transit be carried out on favourable terms.
Vice-Premier of the Russian government Dmitry Kozak has said about the new contract to be
signed before the New Year that he parties had agreed on favourable terms. In addition to
this, the Ukrainian side said that "Gazprom" had agreed to pay "Naftogaz" $3 billion,
according to the decision of the Stockholm arbitration. So, can the Ukraine celebrate a
"victory"?
So far, only Kiev has stated this figure of $3 billion. On the Russian side, there has
been no confirmation of this yet, but even if the Kiev figure is correct, I do not see much
reason to celebrate "victory", for if Russia has paid this money to the Ukraine ($2.6 billion
+ penalties), then the Ukraine is obliged to return $4.5 billion to Russia (3 billion
Eurobonds + penalties). The balance is not in favour of Kiev. In addition, the Ukraine has
pledged to stop all legal disputes on gas issues. Yes, in one case there is a dispute between
economic entities, and in a second case there is a dispute about sovereign debt. However,
since both Naftogaz and Gazprom are budget-forming state companies, to a certain extent this
difference in debt statuses is leveled.
Now on transit. There is no denying that for Russia it is not only important but necessary
to transit gas through the Ukraine at the moment, since under long-term contracts with
Europe, Gazprom is obliged to supply the volumes of gas stipulated in them, regardless of the
circumstances. Otherwise, the Russian company would have to pay heavy fines and penalties. By
concluding the contract, Gazprom has once again proved its reliability as a supplier, which,
by the way, was has already been emphasized by the European Commission following the
negotiations.
The only thing currently known about the transit contract is that it has been concluded
not for 10 years as Kiev had wanted, but for 5 years. Apparently, a longer term is not
relevant, chiefly because of complete uncertainty about the future of the Ukraine -- by the
way, in the next few days Kiev is likely to start an active struggle against the agreements
already reached, and if something threatens them at the moment, it is only Ukrainian
instability. According to data received from the Russian company, the volume of transit
through the Ukraine next year will be about 65 billion cubic metres. This is certainly a very
significant figure, but it is significantly less than the 90 billion cubic metres pumped
through the Ukrainian GTS in 2017. In 2021-2024, the annual transit volume will drop to 40
billion cubic metres. This volume allows the Ukrainian GTS to operate at a plus rather than a
minus, but Kiev will not receive any significant financial gain through it.
By the way, a certain demand for Ukrainian transit will remain after the Nord Stream-2 gas
pipeline has reached its design capacity, as European gas demand grows annually and a number
of fields operated in the EU countries are decommissioned in the coming years. As for NS-2
itself, by the time the sanctions are imposed, less than 50 kilometres will have been left on
one pipeline and about 70 kilometres on the other. Even if the Swiss company gathers up its
belongings, Russian pipe-laying ships will finish the job, and even though they lay pipes 3
times slower, they have absolute immunity from American sanctions. One of them is now located
in the area of Indonesia, and the second pipe-laying ship, "Fortuna", which, by the way, has
already participated in the implementation of "NS-2", is in a German port and is ready to
start working within a few days. [My stress! See that Finnish troll? -- ME]
So, by and large, the question is only one of time. But in any case "SP-2" will be
completed in terms of installation, testing and commissioning, and can be put into operation,
at most, at the end of the first half of 2020.
I really really doubt that the US military will attack overtly or covertly. The US already
announced that it will sanction other Russian energy projects if North Stream is placed in
operation.
I don't imagine that will be necessary. Be pretty hard to argue then that they were not
acting solely in their own interests, wouldn't it? It would make a hell of a thriller novel,
though – the pipeline is on the seabed, so any American efforts to tamper with it would
probably have to be from underwater. A submarine has no business being there, so its mission
would have to be super-secret and plausibly deniable. And in that scenario, if it simply
disappeared, the Americans would have to just proceed as if it never existed. There you go,
Karl; a great book idea, you should write it. But I want 20%; 30% if I have to proofread it
before publication to take out all the rhapsodizing about freedom and democracy, and rewrite
the ending where the Americans blow up the pipeline and miraculously escape, sailing home to
a ticker-tape parade and leaving Putin with angry tears running down his face.
Bulgaria is an instructive example here. Remember when it stopped South Stream in its
tracks, and was the hero of America and the EU? And Bulgaria strutted and swaggered, and was
pretty proud of itself while it waited for the rewards of its bravery. And then the USA built
them a Middle School or a new fence or something, I forget, and there were lots of 'well
done, old chap!' compliments, and and then that was it. Bulgaria did not become everyone's
preferred business partner and the destination of enormous foreign investment. And then,
gradually, everybody stopped talking about what a great and brave thing Bulgaria did, and it
just sort of sat there with its mouth half-open, trying to take in how skillfully it had been
creampied, and evidently all for nothing.
And eventually, Bulgaria repented, and went back to Russia and Putin, cap in hand. And
Russia received it warmly, like a brother who fell in with a bad crowd but was not really, at
heart, bad himself. It did not say that Bulgaria must prove itself by repudiating its former
friends. It seemed willing to let bygones be just that.
It is not even too much of a stretch to imagine that might one day be Ukraine as well,
although it certainly could not be under the current conditions. The nationalists would have
to be purged, hard. And there would have to be a completely new political administration. But
there's time, and lots of it. The west is not going to make a prosperous paradise of Ukraine,
it is only interested in stripping it of anything of value, and in the meantime it will go
down and down, because nobody wants to put any money into it. Except, ahem; Russia.
Party Poroshenko initiates sanctions against the supply of gas from Russia
The faction of "European solidarity" in the Ukrainian Parliament initiates sanctions
against the Russian gas supplies directly, reports RIA "Novosti".
As stated by the ex-President and leader of the faction of Petro Poroshenko, the
political force will require the convening of the national security Council on this issue,
and "implementation of sanctions" against the gas supplies from Russia
The people who elected Zelensky expected him to put Porky behind bars. But, surprise
surprise, Zel is a wimp who couldn't bring himself to buck his American overlords.
Said Overlords like Porky and want to keep him around, as the new leader of the Opps, with
hope he gets back into power some day.
Porky is the Ukrainian version of Saakashvili, there is simply no getting rid of him!
What if Germany, angered by American high-handedness, decided to move away from the US
dollar. Could that happen?
It could. Analysts caution that it would be unwise for Washington to laugh at efforts by
nations to make themselves less dependent on the dollar, because it also makes those nations
less susceptible to American sanctions. The world outside America is getting fed up with the
USA's sanctions-happy punishments, which have mushroomed from 5 targeted countries at the
start of the George W. Bush administration to 22 targeted countries at the end of 2018.
One of the ways Russia has hardened its economy against American tampering is in
increasing its use and accumulation of gold as a hedge, which is immune to 'freezing' by the
USA, so long as the gold is held in Russian vaults. That's the key, and momentum is slowly
gathering in other countries. Hungary repatriated all its gold from the Bank of England in
October of this year, and increased its holdings tenfold as well. Romania has submitted a
bill to parliament which mandates that only 5% of the country's gold can be stored abroad.
Currently about 60% of its 103 tonnes is stored at the Bank of England. In 2017 Germany
repatriated around $31 Billion worth of gold which had been stored in New York and Paris.
This week, Poland and Slovakia called for a return of their gold, which is being held by, you
guessed it, the Bank of England. The lesson of Venezuela's stolen gold was not lost on
anyone, and the less foreign gold the Bank of England has in its vaults, the less useful it
is to Washington and its 'freeze' orders.
Germany was chafing at US bullying back in 2018, and talking up policies to pull away from
the US dollar. Would this latest example of American meddling make them more, or less
inclined to pursue financial policies which did not include the United States as a partner,
do you think?
"According to S&P Global Platts Analytics, Nord Stream 2 would have to seek
alternative vessels and contractors to complete the remaining section of pipe in Danish
waters if the sanctions are enacted.
"While the most challenging parts of Nord Stream 2 have been laid in water depths of
around 200 meters, the remaining section in Danish waters at 90 meters depth remains
complicated," it said.
Russian companies operate capable offshore pipe-lay vessels, which have completed projects
in challenging Arctic conditions, including the MRTS Defender, which worked on the offshore
stretch of the Bovanenkovo-Ukhta pipeline.
Platts Analytics believes MRTS Fortuna could be used to complete Nord Stream 2, but is
capable of laying just 1 km/d.
A further obstacle, according to Platts Analytics, is that the Danish permit application
states that it is assumed that the vessels used to complete the Danish section will have
dynamic positioning capabilities (such as those of the Allseas vessels) which are not present
on MRTS Fortuna.
A Russian pipelaying vessel that already has dynamic positioning capabilities, Akademik
Cherskiy, could be used, but it would take up to two months to arrive to Danish waters as it
is currently stationed in Russia's Far East."
It is surprising that the Gazprom management didn't prepare for this situation! If this
article is correct the only Russian vessel that can be used to finish the project is
currently stationed in Vladivostok, and it will take about two months for it to arrive to
Danish waters.
The sanction threat has been looming for months, but it seems that Gazprom did not prepare
for it in any meaningful way.
I would be pleasantly surprised if this project is finished in 2020.
Karl, this is no attitude for the Christmas season – don't be so dour and pessimistic.
It takes two years to build a specialized ship, at a minimum, and that's just a regular
design like an LNG tanker – should Gazprom have built two or three, only to have the
Americans laugh and not impose sanctions? Then you would have chuckled ruefully over how
foolish Gazprom was to waste its money; there's no pleasing you. Only two days ago you were
moaning over how the entirety of the funds spent so far would be wasted; the pipeline could
not be completed, America is just too strong. You can go back and look. Now it looks as if it
can be completed, just the remainder will be done at about a third the speed it could have
been. But the money which would have gone to Allseas will be saved, and really there's no
hurry now; they have 5 years if they need it. In 2 months the worst of the winter weather
should be over, and any further slowdowns between now and completion can be blamed on the
Americans, whose fault of course it is. It would have been done now but for American pressure
on Denmark to hold out.
I wouldn't say it couldn't have turned out better, but all things considered the results
are not that bad for Russia and not very good for the USA, which has incurred a lot of
resentment and ill-will in exchange for really nothing. It is not going to stop the pipeline
from completing, but it has made a lot of enemies, and even the Poles have stopped yapping
and do not appear to be celebrating too loudly, lest they anger other Europeans.
""While the most challenging parts of Nord Stream 2 have been laid in water depths of around
200 meters, the remaining section in Danish waters at 90 meters depth remains complicated,"
it said."
Norwegian divers welded pipelines at 900 meters depth (And, yes they had some
problems).
Let me guess – the United States has threatened to confiscate the assets in the USA of
any company which sells dynamic-positioning systems to the Soviets (oops! I mean the
Russians!), and so now they will have to develop the technology themselves. Why not just
threaten to slap sanctions on anyone giving 'aid and comfort' to the Russians? I mean,
they're the enemy, right? Right?? So nobody sell them boots or warm clothes, or anything. See
how they like laying pipe in their skivvies, barefoot.
Say, I'll bet that attitude is good for market share for the remaining American businesses
still operating in Russia. And speaking of that, here's another example – gosh, there
are so many – of America's love affair with sanctions; CAATSA, the Countering America's
Adversaries Through Sanctions Act. According to an analyst at the Foreign Policy Research
Institute,
it's a failure , because it did not prevent Turkey from buying the S-400 system from
Russia when they were supposed to buy the Patriot from the USA, or
prevent Egypt from buying the Sukhoi S-35 from Russia when they were meant to buy the
F-35. Oh, but they were frustrated in that because Israel did not want them to have it.
Washington never misses an opportunity to show Israel it still loves it despite all the
actions Israel makes it take against its own best interests.
"Egypt turned to Moscow for the Su-35 aircraft after being frustrated in repeated
attempts to get a foothold in the F-35 program, a move closely watched in Israel, which
remains the only country in the region to receive the fifth-generation aircraft."
America threatened Egypt with – you guessed it – sanctions if it continued
with plans to buy Russian fighters worth $2 Billion in sales, but Egypt basically ignored
them, only not laughing because it would be impolite to laugh.
"The Egyptian leadership views the US threats as not credible, based on a long history
of Egyptian/US relations where the US has made threats and even withheld assistance, but in
the end has always capitulated," said Andrew Miller, who was director for Egypt and Israel
military issues in the Obama administration's National Security Council."
Egypt also bought the two MISTRAL class light assault carriers that Washington made France
cancel the sale of when Russia had already paid a security deposit, which had to be returned.
Egypt quickly purchased helicopters from Russia to outfit its new ships.
In fact, America seems to be losing its grip on the Middle East and Africa. And its
newly-discovered and somewhat childlike faith in sanctions as a cure-all is ruining its
traditional alliances and eroding its global reach. Much less-powerful countries now
routinely ignore its threats to impose sanctions and more sanctions. The fewer foreign
businesses interested in locating significant assets in the United States – so as to
prevent their being seized in a fit of pique – the less influence Washington can bring
to bear through sanctions. Its most loyal toady, the UK, will soon no longer be a part of the
EU, while nations jostle one another in eagerness to get their gold back from the Bank of
England where the United States cannot slap a 'hold' order on it through its devoted
proxies.
Russian dolts just don't have the technology, isn't that right ?
From the Finnish naysayer:
In retrospect the biggest mistake Russia did was to start the Nord Stream 2 project
without possessing the technology to complete the project and relying on the Western
technology. This made Nord Stream 2 and Russia vulnerable for the sanctions and this
vulnerability was exploited.
Will Russia learn and not start any major project in the future without having the
means to complete the project itself without relying on the West? I doubt it.
As mentioned earlier, commercial contracts normally include provisions for frustration
– supervening illegality can prevent performance of obligations contracted under
different circumstances and no one would expect a company to commit suicide. It's just a
business problem. But a business problem which, as Mark states, leaves the instigator –
the USA – diminished by its own actions.
Every contract has Force Majeure provisions to address factors beyond the control of the
supplier. The list includes of acts of God (weather, for example), civil unrest, labor
disputes, etc. "US sanctions" need to be added.
According to ME they were within 50 kilometers of landfall. According to Karl the replacement
vessel can lay pipe at a 1km/day rate. The resulting calculation isn't rocket science
mathematics. Ribbons will be cut and valves will be turned on in a few months to the clink of
vodka and champagne glasses.
Peskov did not say a fuckin' thing about "hope" that the pipeline will be completed. He
stated that the sanctions will NOT work to bring about substantial delay.
Two pipelines are being laid in parallel. One line , if I rightly recall, has 50 kms left to
be laid, the other 75 kms. The Russian pipelayers, again if I rightly recall, lay at one
third of the speed as did the Allseas vessel. The Russians are also aware of the
geopositioning requirement that the Danes may impose. Only one Russian pipelayer, the one at
present in the Far East, has this capability. from here
"Pioneering Spirit" and" Solitaire" crossed the border of Swedish and Danish waters on
27 and 28 November, respectively, since which time the former has covered 89 km, the latter
-- a little less than 70 km, i.e. they move at a speed of 3.5–4.5 km per day. This
means that they should be able to complete the construction within a month. But maintaining
this momentum depends on the weather conditions.
There was only 1 month's worth of laying left when Allseas fucked off.
The Russians are seemingly, from the troll's point of view, faced with such insurmountable
odds that he is coming in his pants. They'll never finish the job.
Like when they said they would never finish that bridge, across the petersburg-Simferopol
train crosses for the first time this coming Christmas Day?
From same source as above, namely Moskovskiy Komsomolets :
According to a representative of one of the contractors involved in the creation of the
offshore section of "Nord Stream – 2", Gazprom began to insure against sanctions
against companies involved in laying the pipeline in October. The Fortuna pipe-laying barge,
built in 2010 at a Russian shipyard and later upgraded at Chinese shipyards, has been used.
This vessel has been based for about two months in the German port of Mukran, where the pipes
required for the gas pipeline construction are shipped.
According to an MK interlocutor who wished to remain anonymous, despite the fact that
Fortuna is the most powerful domestic vessel in its class, it is unlikely that it can fully
replace Allseas pipelayers. "Fortuna" is able to do such works, but the speed of the project
will be slowed down. "Fortuna specializes in laying infield and linear pipelines on land,
while Gazprom charters vessels with foreign registration for offshore sections.
At the same time, Fortuna has experience working in deep water areas. As part of the
Sakhalin-3 project, the barge was deploying an underwater production facility in the
Kirinskoye field at a depth of 100 meters. The depth of the sea in the Danish section of the
NS-2, which remains to be completed by Gazprom, does not exceed this mark, while Fortuna has
a depth limit of 200 meters", explains the MK interlocutor.
Yeah, according to the Troll:
it is surprising that the Gazprom management didn't prepare for this situation! If this
article is correct the only Russian vessel that can be used to finish the project is
currently stationed in Vladivostok, and it will take about two months for it to arrive to
Danish waters.
The sanction threat has been looming for months, but it seems that Gazprom did not
prepare for it in any meaningful way.
I would be pleasantly surprised if this project is finished in 2020.
For "pleasantly surprised" above, read: "bitterly disappointed".
The United States is less concerned with matters green. Nord Stream 2 poses a security
threat.
Trump's former secretary of state, Rex Tillerson,
saw it as "undermining Europe's overall energy security and stability."
US energy secretary Rick Perry
argues that "Russian gas has strings attached." The claim is that Germany will be come too
reliant and Ukraine further weakened. Ukraine had been the premier gatekeeper for Russian gas
supply, with 40 percent of Europe's total amount transiting through Ukrainian soil. A
slump in gross domestic product occasioned by an end to transit fees is considered
imminent.
Other European states have been crankily concerned about the prospect of Gazprom's deepening
involvement in the continent's energy market. Poland's anti-monopoly body UOKiK showed a
measure of that opposition
by fining France's Engie Energy (ENGIE.PA) 40 million euros in proceedings against
Gazprom.
In February, EU ambassadors agreed that the project be subjected to greater scrutiny. A
Franco-German compromise was struck : Nord Stream 2 would be placed
"under European control".
The Trump administration's actions against Gazprom and Russia's energy influence, found in a
provision of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), can hardly be seen as noble
endeavours.
The provision threatens
sanctions and the freezing of assets against entities laying down the pipeline unless their
activities cease "immediately". The United States has its own energy interests in Europe, and
wishes to frustrate the effort. Market share is at stake.
The suspension of laying activities on the part of Allseas, a Swiss company, suggests that
Trump's announcement is already biting.
"In anticipation of the enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),"
went a
company statement , "Allseas has suspended its Nord Stream 2 pipelay activities." The
company would "proceed, consistent with the legislation's wind down provision and expect
guidance comprising the necessary regulatory, technical and environmental clarifications from
the relevant US authority."
The angle taken by the European Union, Germany and Russia can hardly surprise. Themes of
energy security are reiterated. The Nord Stream 2 consortium makes the claim that, "Completing the
project is essential for European supply security." Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova spikily condemned the
sanctions measure. "A state with a $22 trillion national debt prohibits creditworthy countries
to develop the real sector of their economies!"
For a EU spokesman, this
constituted "the imposition of sanctions against EU companies conducting legitimate
business." A German government spokesman suggested that such actions "affect German and other
European businesses, and we see the move as meddling in our internal affairs." Finance Minister
Olaf Scholz has sees
it as an infringement of sovereignty. "It is up to the companies involved in the
construction of the pipeline to take the next decisions."
Nothing is quite so simple. Gas pipeline politics has always been contentious. One state's
sovereign promise is another's weakening. Concessions made to corporate monopolies are risky,
capable of fostering insecurity as much as reassurance. Those who control the tap control a
country's future.
But the imposition of any sanctions regime signals another bout of economic violence. In
the international market, where governments operate as ready gangsters for corporate interests,
prompted by such motivations as seeking more natural resources, tools of state become
handmaidens of economic self-interest...
"... Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. ..."
"... The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case. When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion. ..."
"... But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration. ..."
"... Obama told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules, China will " ..."
"... Obama takes as a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack. ..."
Currently the United States is assisting Ukraine against Russia by providing some non-lethal military equipment as well as
limited training for Kiev's army. It has balked at getting more involved in the conflict, rightly so. With that in mind,
I had a meeting with a delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians and government officials a couple of weeks ago. I tried to explain
to them why many Americans are wary of helping them by providing lethal, potentially game changing military assistance in what Kiev
sees as a struggle to regain control of Crimea and other parts of their country from militias that are clearly linked to Moscow.
I argued that while Washington should be sympathetic to Ukraine's aspirations it has no actual horse in the race, that the imperative
for bilateral relations with Russia, which is the only nation on earth that can attack and destroy the United States, is that they
be stable and that all channels for communication remain open.
I also observed that the negative perception of Washington-driven
democracy promotion around the world has been in part shaped by the actual record on interventions since 2001, which has not been
positive. Each exercise of the military option has wound up creating new problems, like the mistaken policies in Libya, Iraq and
Syria, all of which have produced instability and a surge in terrorism. I noted that the U.S. does not need to bring about a new
Cold War by trying to impose democratic norms in Eastern Europe but should instead be doing all in its power to encourage a reasonable
rapprochement between Moscow and Kiev. Providing weapons or other military support to Ukraine would only cause the situation to escalate,
leading to a new war by proxies in Eastern Europe that could rapidly spread to other regions.
The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now. They inevitably produced
the Hitler analogy, citing the example of 1938 and Munich as well as the subsequent partition of Poland in 1939 to make their case.
When I asked what the United States would gain by intervening they responded that in return for military assistance, Washington will
have a good and democratic friend in Ukraine which will serve as a bulwark against further Russian expansion.
I explained that Russia does not have the economic or military resources to dominate Eastern Europe and its ambitions appear to
be limited to establishing a sphere of influence that includes "protection" for some adjacent areas that are traditionally Russian
and inhabited by ethnic Russians. Crimea is, unfortunately, one such region that was actually directly governed by Moscow between
1783 and 1954 and it is also militarily vitally important to Moscow as it is the home of the Black Sea Fleet. I did not point that
out to excuse Russian behavior but only to suggest that Moscow does have an argument to make, particularly as the United States has
been meddling in Eastern Europe, including Ukraine where it has "invested" $5 billion, since the Clinton Administration.
I argued that if resurgent Russian nationalism actually endangered the United States there would be a case to be made for constricting
Moscow by creating an alliance of neighbors that would be able to help contain any expansion, but even the hawks in the U.S. Congress
are neither prepared nor able to demonstrate a genuine threat. Fear of the expansionistic Soviet Union after 1945 was indeed the
original motivation for creating NATO. But the reality is that Russia is only dangerous if the U.S. succeeds in backing it into a
corner where it will begin to consider the kind of disruption that was the norm during the Cold War or even some kind of nuclear
response or demonstration. If one is focused on U.S. interests globally Russia has actually been a responsible player, helping in
the Middle East and also against international terrorism.
So there was little to agree on apart from the fact that the Ukrainians have a right to have a government they choose for themselves
and also to defend themselves. And we Americans have in the Ukrainians yet another potential client state that wants our help. In
return we would have yet another dependency whose concerns have to be regarded when formulating our foreign policy. One can sympathize
with the plight of the Ukrainians but it is not up to Washington to fix the world or to go around promoting democracy as a potential
solution to pervasive regional political instability.
Obviously a discussion based on what are essentially conflicting interests will ultimately go nowhere and so it did in this case,
but it did raise the issue of why Washington's relationship with Moscow is so troubled, particularly as it need not be so. Regarding
Ukraine and associated issues, Washington's approach has been stick-and-carrot with the emphasis on the stick through the imposition
of painful sanctions and meaningless though demeaning travel bans. I would think that reversing that formulation to emphasize rewards
would actually work better as today's Russia is actually a relatively new nation in terms of its institutions and suffers from insecurity
about its place in the world and the respect that it believes it is entitled to receive.
Russia
recently celebrated the 70 th anniversary of the end of World War Two in Europe. The celebration was boycotted by
the United States and by many Western European nations in protest over Russian interference in Ukraine. I don't know to what extent
Obama has any knowledge of recent history, but the Russians were the ones who were most instrumental in the defeat of Nazi Germany,
losing 27 million citizens in the process. It would have been respectful for President Obama or Secretary of State John Kerry to
travel to Moscow for the commemoration and it would likely have produced a positive result both for Ukraine and also to mitigate
the concern that a new Cold War might be developing. But Obama chose to stay home as punishment for Putin, which I think was
a bad choice suggesting that he is being strongly influenced by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland and the other neocons
who seem to have retained considerable power in his administration.
And I also would note a couple of other bad choices made during the past several weeks. The Trans-Pacific multilateral trade agreement
that is currently working its way through Congress and is being aggressively promoted by the White House might be great for business
though it may or may not be good for the American worker, which, based on previous agreements, is a reasonable concern. But what
really disturbs me is the Obama explanation of why the pact is important. Obama
told a crowd gathered outside the Nike footwear company in Oregon that the deal is necessary because "if we don't write the rules,
China will "
Fear of the Yellow Peril might indeed be legitimate but it would be difficult to make the case that an internally troubled China
is seeking to dominate the Pacific. If it attempts to do so, it would face strong resistance from the Japanese, Vietnamese, Filipinos
and Koreans among others. But what is bothersome to me and probably also to many in the Asian audience is that Obama takes as
a given that he will be able to "write the rules." This is American hubris writ large and I am certain that many who are thereby
designated to follow Washington's lead are as offended by it as I am. Bad move Barack.
And finally there is Iran as an alleged state sponsor of terrorism. President Obama claims that he is working hard to achieve
a peaceful settlement of the alleged threat posed by Iran's nuclear program. But if that is so why does he throw obstacles irrelevant
to an agreement out to make the Iranian government more uncomfortable and therefore unwilling or unable to compromise? In an
interview with Arabic
newspaper Asharq al-Awsat Obama called Tehran a terrorism supporter, stating that "it [Iran] props up the Assad regime in
Syria. It supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. It aids the Houthi rebels in Yemen so countries in the region
are rights to be deeply concerned " I understand that the interview was designed to reassure America's friends in the Gulf that the
United States shares their concerns and will continue to support them but the timing would appear to be particularly unfortunate.
The handling of Russia, China and Iran all exemplify the essential dysfunction in American foreign policy. The United States should
have a mutually respectful relationship with Russia, ought to accept that China is an adversary but not necessarily an enemy unless
we make it so and it should also finally realize that an agreement with Iran is within its grasp as long as Washington does not overreach.
It is not clear that any of that is well understood and one has to wonder precisely what kind of advice Obama is receiving when fails
to understand the importance of Russia, insists on "writing the rules" for Asia, and persists in throwing around the terrorist label.
If the past fifteen years have taught us anything it is that the "Washington as the international arbiter model" is not working.
Obama should wake up to that reality before Hillary Clinton or Jeb Bush arrives on the scene to make everything worse.
Tom Welsh, May 19, 2015 at 7:02 am GMT • 100 Words
All of this misses the point, IMHO. There is really no need to explain that Russia has no plans to conquer Europe, China has
no plans to take over the Pacific, etc. Anyone with a little historical knowledge and some common sense can see that plainly.
What is happening is that the USA has overweening aspirations to control (and then suck dry) the entire world – and Europe, Russia
and China are next on its hit list.
So it naturally accuses those nations of aspiring to what it plans to do. Standard operating procedure.
The Priss Factor, May 19, 2015 at 7:19 am GMT • 100 Words
"The Ukrainians were not buying any of that. Their point of view is that Russia is seeking to revive the Soviet Union and will
inevitably turn on the Baltic States and Poland, so it is necessary to stop evil dictator Vladimir Putin now."
I can understand Ukrainian animus against Russia due to history and ethnic tensions.
But that is ridiculous. They can't possibly believe it. I think they're repeating Neocon talking points to persuade American
that the fate of the world is at stake.
It's really just a local affair.
And Crimea would still belong to Ukraine if the crazies in Ukraine hadn't conspired with Neocons like Nuland to subvert and
overthrow the regime.
"... For example, sources at the Pentagon admit that despite Trump's national strategy and his pledge to terminate "endless wars" in the greater Middle East, General Mike Milley, his new chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is emphasizing Iran and Syria . Furthermore, instead of drawing down American forces in the region, the administration has sent 14,000 more troops to the Persian Gulf since May, including more than 3,000 to Saudi Arabia . In addition, President Trump has twice ordered American forces to be withdrawn from Syria, only for that order to be first ignored by the military and then largely offset by the hasty infusion of heavier forces to "guard" Syrian oil. Such backsliding in the Middle East is due to the administration's hazy strategic focus. ..."
"... In Syria, U.S. troops are ridiculously being used to guard a limited supply of Syrian oil from Russia forces and Iranian militias (not from ISIS, which would not require heavy American units). ..."
"... But the model for an American withdrawal from the region is not that of the faux pullback from Syria, which did little beyond endangering U.S. military personnel and pulling the rug out from under friends who had sacrificed greatly to help the United States battle ISIS. Friends and allies in the region must be given adequate warning of U.S. withdrawal and sold adequate weapons to defend themselves. A responsible reordering of our security priorities is desperately needed, given the huge national debt and a rising China, the latter of which may eventually pose a very real security problem. ..."
Rather than drawing down, Trump has sent some 14,000 service members overseas to a region we
can't seem to extricate from. ARABIAN GULF (Nov. 22, 2019) An F/A-18F Super Hornet attached to
the "Jolly Rogers" of Strike Fighter Squadron (VFA) 103 launches from the flight deck of the
aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN 72). (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication
Specialist 3rd Class Jeremiah Bartelt/Released)
The Trump administration's national security strategy was supposed to refocus the U.S.
military's efforts on great power threats from China and Russia. However, like the prior Obama
administration's "pivot to Asia," the Trump policy has been shipwrecked on the ever-demanding
shoals of the Middle East.
For example, sources at the Pentagon admit that despite Trump's national strategy and
his pledge to terminate "endless wars" in the greater Middle East, General Mike Milley, his new
chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
is emphasizing Iran and Syria . Furthermore, instead of drawing down American forces in the
region, the administration has sent
14,000 more troops to the Persian Gulf since May, including more than
3,000 to Saudi Arabia . In addition, President Trump has twice ordered American forces to
be withdrawn from Syria, only for that order to be first ignored by the military and then
largely offset by the hasty infusion of heavier forces to "guard" Syrian oil. Such backsliding
in the Middle East is due to the administration's hazy strategic focus.
The emphasis of Trump's national security strategy on the great powers is commendable.
However, that priority has not been implemented on the ground. With a $23 trillion national
debt, the United States can no longer afford to police the globe. It must choose to let
regional allies take up the slack in certain areas. Trump's lack of experience in foreign
policy, and the fact that our national security bureaucracies are still mired in Cold War
thinking 30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, have led to muddled implementation of the
strategy.
The president is naturally prone to wander away from his goals, with the "maximum pressure"
campaign against Iran as a prime example. It is Trump's own fault that America's footprint
hasn't yet been reduced in a region of lessening strategic importance. Iran is "acting up"
largely because the U.S. welshed on a perfectly good international agreement that limited its
ability to get a nuclear weapon. Instead of getting relief from international economic
sanctions in return for limiting its nuclear program, Iran got a Trump-coerced "maximum
pressure" campaign by international banks and businesses.
As a result, Iran has retaliated by capturing oil tankers and launching air attacks on Saudi
oil fields, which has in turn led to a U.S. infusion of more troops into the Persian Gulf
region. Domestic unrest in Iran, caused in part by increased U.S. economic pressure, may cause
the Iranians to lash out even more against American allies there. In Syria, U.S. troops are
ridiculously being used to guard a limited supply of Syrian oil from Russia forces and Iranian
militias (not from ISIS, which would not require heavy American units).
If the Persian Gulf was ever strategic for the United States (a dubious proposition), that
time has now passed. The fracking boom of hydrocarbon production in the United States has made
America once again the world's largest petroleum producer, even further lessening the Middle
East's importance. But what about the threat of terrorism -- that is, ISIS and al-Qaeda?
Islamist fundamentalism has been around for centuries, but these two groups in particular were
generated by the very American Middle Eastern interventionism that President Trump is supposed
be reducing. When the United States legitimately draws down from this theater of lessening
strategic value, those groups will be much less inclined to attack U.S. targets. However,
current American policy inertia continues to mire us in the Greater Middle East -- in
Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Somalia, Chad, and Mali -- at the same time that we're
jousting with Iran.
But the model for an American withdrawal from the region is not that of the faux pullback
from Syria, which did little beyond endangering U.S. military personnel and pulling the rug out
from under friends who had sacrificed greatly to help the United States battle ISIS. Friends
and allies in the region must be given adequate warning of U.S. withdrawal and sold adequate
weapons to defend themselves. A responsible reordering of our security priorities is
desperately needed, given the huge national debt and a rising China, the latter of which may
eventually pose a very real security problem.
Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute and director of the
Independent Institute's Center on Peace & Liberty. His new book, War and the Rogue
Presidency: Restoring the Republic After Congressional Failure, was released in May
2019.
" pulling the rug out from under friends who had sacrificed greatly to help the United
States battle ISIS."
While I greatly appreciate the sacrifices the Kurds made battling ISIS, they did not do
it to help us, but to save themselves. ISIS is only a distant threat, if at all, to the US,
but a direct threat to the Kurds. They are in their neighborhood, not ours.
The President of the USofA has no power to turn this ship around. The seat of power is no
longer residing in the hands of civilian/political actors prime ministers or presidents though
they may be.
Candidate Trump indicated very early on that he intended to withdraw from Afghanistan.
Unfortunately, he soon succumbed to his advisors and generals advice of increasing troop
strength in 2017 as part of a surge strategy. This makes him no better or worse than his two
predecessors who succumbed to the same kind of advice.
However Trump has recently restarted negotiations with the Taliban and has renewed his
pledged to remove several thousand troops. "We're going down to 8,600 [from the 12,000 and
13,000 US troops now there] and then we make a determination from there as to what happens,"
Trump told Fox last August. "We're bringing it down." Of course the drawdown will be seen by
the neocons as a unilateral concession to the Taliban. That shouldn't phase Trump. I think he
plans to reannounce this withdrawal next month. DoD officials have said that the smaller US
military presence will be largely focused on counterterrorism operations against groups like
al Qaeda and IS, and that the military's ability to train and advise local Afghan forces will
be reduced considerably. Sounds like they're still looking for a reason to stay.
Trump can break the cycle. He holds no ideological conviction for staying in Afghanistan.
If he could get over his BDS (Bezos derangement syndrome), he could seize this Washington
Post series, or at least the SIGAR lessons learned reports, and trumpet them through his
twitter feed and helicopter talks. I believe he alone can generate a public cry for getting
the hell out of Afghanistan and carry through with that action no matter how much his
generals scream about it. But without a loud public outcry, especially from his base, Trump
has no incentive to break the cycle. So all you deplorables better start hootin' and
hollerin'. Hopefully enough SJWs will join you to pump up the volume.
Excellent, right up to the last sentence. SJWs are mere tools of people like George Soros
and have zero anti-war agenda nor do they care about America's manufacturing base ect.. In
fact, many are chomping at the bit to join, what was once termed in the SST comments, the
LGBTQ-C4ISR sect. I refer you to mayor Pete's exchange with Tulsi on the matter; he even
invoked our sacred honor as a reason to stay the course in Afghanistan.
TTG,
It's a shrinking cohort. For some of these types, their TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) is
actually causing them to side with the CIA and military. Enemy of my enemy.....and since
there's no draft, they have no skin in that game.
For the past 2-3 years many generals and politicians have been using the threat of ISKP as
the new bogeyman for staying in Afghanistan. This threat is not wholly unfounded, a
disproportionately large number of US airstrikes since 2015-2016 have been against ISKP in
Nangarhar(remember the MOAB?) rather than against the Taliban. If my memory serves me
correctly ISKP was responsible for every single US casualty in 2016-2017. In the past two
months however ISKP has been collapsing in its erstwhile stronghold of Nangarhar,
surrendering to the ANA rather than fall into the hands of the Taliba,à la Jowzjan
in summer 2018. I was very surprised by the number of foreign fighters and their families
to come out of there. We have the Taliban to thank for these two collapses.
IMO American "exceptionalism" doomed our effort in Afghanistan Very few of us are set up
mentally to accept the notion that other peoples are legitimately different from us and
that they don't want to be like us and do things our way. I attribute this deformation on
our part to the puritan heritage that you much admire. In your case your recent immigrant
past seems to have immunized you from this deformation. As SF men we rightly fear and dread
the attitudes of The Big Army, but, truth be told, it is we who are the outlier freaks in
the context of American culture with its steamroller approach to just about everything.
Ah yes, all that shining city on the hill stuff biting us in the ass once again. Like the
Puritans, we seem to believe we alone are His chosen people and are utterly shocked that
all others don't see this. In truth, Jesus probably sees our self righteous selves and our
pilgrim forefathers much as he saw the Pharisees... a bunch of douche nozzles.
The USA desperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find suitable
candidate other then Russia. So MIC prostitute Madcow is just a dog of war. The USA
deperately need another resource-rich country to loot and can't find sutable candiadate othe
then Russia
There is no credible analyst not shackled to the MIC trough who ventures such
an analysis beyond of course GE's W-2 harpie, Rachel Maddow.
The Western elites have long decided. WW3 is coming. In recent years, the Russians have
repeatedly tried to get this message through the western Mediadrome, but to little
effect.
The job of the GE spokespeople (Maddow et al) is diversionary/ preparatory spadework i.e.
to drill with numbing repetition into the American consciousness who the enemy is. And you
can bet the enemy is not who signs their paychecks. Their employers though happen to be OUR
enemy.
Thus we find ourselves in the odd position of having Russia's top general attempting to
shout through the Maddow racket that our two nations are on a collision course for war.
Strange messenger. Or maybe not. They want to live too.
Russia is in demographic collapse. It lacks the human capital to exploit even its own vast
resource trove. The western banking system is over-leveraged. The imaginary numbers have
gotten too big. Its 'denominator of the real' badly needs shoring up.
Russian resource wealth, Iran's massive South Pars LNG field are viewed with watering eyes
as prolongations of the doomed Ponzi. Europe is energy-poor, geriatric and overrun with
Islamic jihadists. With all due respect, who would want it at this late stage? At best, it is
a funding source --and a battleground-- for WW3.
Meanwhile the Ponzi is ravenous and never sleeps. No growth - negative interest rates is a
bell-ringer for WW3. The alternative is deflationary collapse. Maddow's been mysteriously
cranked up again: Rushah Rushah!
So we find ourselves in another Goebellian shift: accuse the opposition of your own
ulterior motives. They have no designs on us. Our overlords have designs on them.
Americans are just the People in the middle, hostages in a sense yet seemingly feared
enough that our minds are still worth battling over. Trump's affinities are too populist.
He's a dodgy helmsman for the massive undertaking of a world war where the people are only to
be galvanized, not consulted.
Far from a duteous seat-warmer, he's a leader who squeaked through. The Oval Office is no
place for leaders. It was thought to have been neutered of all that leadership malarkey
post-JFK. Trump's not enough to hold back the MIC. No POTUS is. He either must depart the job
or be compromised into executing the plan. But he's a bad Lieutenant. They'll never be
comfortable with him.
Then some evil, diseased mind had an epiphany. Don't just Get Trump! Get a twofer! Get
Trump and Russah! Weld them together for one kill-shot. Collusion means no daylight and one
bullet. Yes, there's a genius to it, a very sick genius.
B, great article as usual but disappointed that you didn't write about the latest sanctions
on N2.
Another act of WAR by the US. These sanctions now cover the comoany, Allseas, laying the
pipeline to Germany. They ceased operations and will not complete the project and Gazprom
does not have the expertise. Would love to see your
analysis on that.
The NYT propaganda, true to form and loyal to Dem Russophobes just one more attempt to
manufacture consent
This is maddening. These crazies are looking for war on Russia. Are the American people
stupid enough to give that consent?
My NYT site has the title "Russia Is a Mess. Why Is Putin Such a Formidable Enemy?"
Some quotes:
---- 1 ----
Under Mr. Putin, Vladislav Surkov, a longtime Kremlin adviser, wrote in Nezavisimaya Gazeta,
a Moscow newspaper, earlier this year, Russia "is playing with the West's minds."
Also its own.
---- 2 ----
All the same, said Gleb Pavlovsky, a political scientist who worked for more than a decade as
a Kremlin adviser, Russia under Mr. Putin still reminds him of a sci-fi movie exoskeleton:
"Inside is sitting a small, weak and perhaps frightened person, but from the outside it looks
terrifying."
---- 3 ----
Whatever its problems, Mr. Surkov, the Kremlin adviser, said, Russia has created "the
ideology of the future" by dispensing with the "illusion of choice" offered by the West and
rooting itself in the will of a single leader capable of swiftly making the choices without
constraint.
China, too, has advocated autocracy as the way to get results fast, but even Xi Jinping,
the head of the Chinese Communist Party, can't match the lightening speed with which Mr.
Putin ordered and executed the seizure of Crimea. The decision to grab the Black Sea
peninsula from Ukraine was made at a single all-night Kremlin meeting in February 2014 and
then carried out just four days later with the dispatch of a few score Russian special forces
officers to seize a handful of government buildings in Simferopol, the Crimean capital.
==========
If true, the resources committed to "Crimea takeover" were comparable with what Israel
committed to assassinate one person, Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh, dispatching a team of 33 to Dubai in
January 2010. Wasn't the superior productivity the strength of the West?
And this is not a joke. Putin is a maniac for balanced budgets, and compared to the
expansive American style, the resources committed by Syria were minuscule. And by all
accounts, spend well.
REUTERS. Oct 2, 2015 - U.S. President Barack Obama warned Russia on Friday that its
bombing campaign against Syrian rebels will suck Moscow into a "quagmire," after a third
straight day of air raids in support of President Bashar al-Assad. <<-- Obama was well
aware that Russia committed a very small number of troops, and smallish air force that his
military expert were describing as obsolete. Russia could not be many times more effective
than USA, could it?
No sign of Obama's predicted 'quagmire' as Russia's ... https://www.washingtonpost.com
› world › 2016/09/30
Sep 30, 2016 - BEIRUT -- In the year since Russia began conducting airstrikes in support of
the Syrian government, the intervention has worked to secure two ...
That explains the next quote from today NYT
---- 4 ----
"Maybe he's holding small cards, but he seems unafraid to play them," said Michael McFaul, a
former United States ambassador to Moscow and now a scholar at Stanford. "That's what makes
Putin so scary."
=========
Seems that Establishment scours most elite universities, Harvard, Yale, Stanford , Princeton
etc. for the dumbest possible graduates. I know from private sources that not all graduates
are dumb, many are actually brilliant. Does it occur to McFaul that boldness in playing small
cards is even worse than playing large card? Russia (and Assad's partisans in Syria) had to
do something well that USA (in government supporters in Afghanistan) did not do at all or did
badly.
"... Some, such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal. ..."
When Will the Afghan War Architects Be Held Accountable?
Even after the release of the Afghanistan Papers, our elites are still determined to escape
without blame. CERNOBBIO, ITALY - SEPTEMBER 06: Chairman of the KKR Global Institute David
Howell Petraeus attends the Ambrosetti International Economic Forum 2019 "Lo scenario
dell'Economia e della Finanza" on September 6, 2019 in Cernobbio, Italy. (Photo by Pier Marco
Tacca/Getty Images)
Almost two weeks after the Washington Post 's Craig Whitlock published his six-part
series on the trials, tribulations, and blunders of Washington's 19-year-long social science
experiment in Afghanistan, those involved in the war effort are desperately pointing fingers as
to who is to blame. An alternative narrative has emerged among this crop of elite policymakers,
military officers, and advisers that while American policy in Afghanistan has been horrible,
the people responsible for it really did believe it would all work out in the end. Call it the
"we were stupid" defense.
There were no lies or myths propagated by senior U.S. officials, we are told, just honest
assessments that later proved to be wrong. Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, who
has advised U.S. commanders on Afghanistan war policy, wrote that "no, there has not been a
campaign of disinformation, intentional or subliminal." Former defense secretary Jim Mattis,
who led CENTCOM during part of the war effort, called the Post 's reporting "not really
news" and was mystified that the unpublished interviews from the U.S. special inspector general
were generating such shock. Others have faulted the Post for publishing the material to
begin with, claiming that public disclosure would scare future witnesses from cooperating and
threaten other fact-finding inquiries (the fact that the newspaper was legally permitted to
publish the transcripts after winning a court case against the government is apparently
irrelevant in the minds of those making this argument).
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
All of these claims and counter-claims should be seen for what they truly are: the flailings
of a policymaking class so arrogant and unaccountable that it can't see straight. That they're
blaming the outrage engendered by the Afghanistan Papers on anything other than themselves is
Exhibit A that our narcissistic policy elite is cocooned in their own reality.
Analysts have been pouring over the Afghanistan interview transcripts for over a week in
order to determine how the war went wrong. Some of the main lessons learned have long been
evident. The decision to impose a top-down democratic political order on a country that
operated on a system of patronage and tribal systems from the bottom-up was bound to be
problematic. Throwing tens of billions of dollars of reconstruction assistance into a nation
that had no experience managing that kind of money -- or spending it properly -- helped fuel
the very nationwide corruption Washington would come to regret. Paying off warlords to fight
the Taliban and keep order while pressuring those very same warlords into following the rules
was contradictory. The mistakes go on and on and on: as Lieutenant General Douglas Lute said,
"We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking."
One of the most salient findings about this ghastly two-decade-long misadventure surfaced
after the Afghanistan Papers were released: the commentariat will stop at nothing to absolve
themselves of the slightest responsibility for the disaster they supported. The outright
refusal of the pundit class to own up to its errors is as disturbing as it is infuriating. And
even when they do acknowledge that errors were committed, they tend to minimize their own role
in those mistakes, explaining them away as unfortunate consequences of fixed withdrawal
deadlines, inter-agency tussling, Afghanistan's poor foundational state, or the inability of
the Afghans to capitalize on the opportunities Washington provided them. Some,
such as General David Petraeus , seem to sincerely believe that the U.S. was on the right
track and could have made progress if only those pesky civilians in the Beltway hadn't pulled
the rug out from under them by announcing a premature withdrawal.
It's always somebody else's fault.
Whether out of arrogance, ego, or fear of not being taken seriously in Washington's foreign
policy discussions, the architects of the war refuse to admit even the most obvious mistakes.
Instead they duck and weave like a quarterback escaping a full-on defensive rush, attempting
yet again to fool the American public.
But the public has nothing to apologize for. It is those who are making excuses who have
exercised disastrous judgment on Afghanistan. And they owe the country an apology.
Daniel R. DePetris is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and a contributor
to The American Conservative.
отметили 41
человек голосовать
источник: cdnimg.rg.ru
Французский
международный
аналитик,
директор
Высшей школы
социальных
наук Жак Сапир:
-- Резолюция
Европарламента
о "сохранении
исторической
памяти" --
серьезнейший
просчет, более
того, грубая
ошибка, по
крайней мере, по
двум аспектам.
Во-первых, не
дело
парламентариев
выносить
суждения по
историческим
вопросам. Это
компетенция
экспертов-историков
и не терпит
политической
ангажированности,
которой
отмечен этот
документ.
Во-вторых,
составив его,
евродепутаты
расписались в
вопиющем
незнании
фактов, событий,
что
предшествовали
началу Второй
мировой войны 1
сентября 1939 года.
Решив
поставить знак
равенства
между
Советским
Союзом и
нацистской
Германией в
качестве
ответственных
за
развязывания
войны, авторы
одиозной
еврорезолюции
ссылаются на
пакт
Молотова-Риббентропа,
подписанный
накануне. И тем
самым
намеренно
искажают
причины,
которые
привели к его
заключению.
О чем речь? В
марте 1939 года,
между Францией
и Англией с
одной стороны, и
СССР с другой,
возобновились
контакты с тем,
чтобы
противостоять
угрозе,
исходящей от
третьего рейха.
Начатые годом
ранее они были
прерваны в
одностороннем
порядке
Лондоном и
Парижем,
решившими
пойти на
позорную
мюнхенскую
сделку. К чему
она привела
хорошо
известно:
Гитлер и не
собирался
выполнять
условия этого
соглашения и
растоптал
Чехословакию,
как
независимое
государство.
Кстати,
следует
отметить, что
тогда Польша
вошла в союз с
нацистской
Германией и
отторгла от
Чехословакии
часть
территории.
Правда, поляки
довольно
быстро поняли,
что они могут
стать
следующей
жертвой. Однако,
когда
Франция и
Англия в
перспективе
надвигающегося
столкновение с
Германией,
предложили
Варшаве
пропустить
через свою
территорию
войска Красной
армии, там
ответили
категорическим
отказом. Более
того, надо
отметить, что к
переговорам с
Москвой о
создании
единого
антифашистского
фронта,
отнеслись,
мягко говоря,
без должной
решимости. Не об
этом ли говорит
тот факт, что их
посланники,
прибывшие в
Москву, не имели
полномочий
подписывать
соответствующее
соглашение?
Именно в этих
условиях
советские
руководители,
когда были
исчерпаны все
прочие усилия
по
формированию
общего
механизма
безопасности,
были вынуждены
пойти на
переговоры с
Берлином с тем,
чтобы отвести
опасность,
пускай,
временно, от
своих границ и
подготовиться
к войне. А то, что
она затронет
всю Европу,
сомнений мало у
кого
оставалось. Так
что пакт
Молотова-Риббентропа,
который по
ложному
утверждению
Европарламента
якобы
спровоцировал
начало войны,
стал в
определенном
смысле
вынужденным
актом,
следствием
нежелания
французов,
англичан, я уже
не говорю о
поляках,
объединиться с
СССР и дать
отпор
агрессивным
планам
Гитлера.
Такова правда.
Она в
исторических
документах, а не
резолюции с
явным
антироссийским
подтекстом. И то,
что она
появилась в
преддверии 75-й
годовщины
победы над
фашистской
Германии, в
разгром
которой
огромный вклад
внес Советский
Союз, отнюдь не
случайность.
Источник:
https://rg.ru/2019/12/21/franc...
In Canada the cost of living outpaces wages by a considerable margin, consumer debt is the
highest in the G7, permanent homeless camps are a fixture in major cities and popping up in
smaller ones, people, including families, living in their vehicles is becoming normalized, an
ongoing opioid epidemic is still killing hundreds of people a month, etc. etc.
But the media keeps telling me unemployment is at record lows and the economy is "red hot"
and "booming" so it's all good, nothing to worry about thank God because the free and
democratic media here in the west never lies or traffics in distorted facts and
disinformation. It only prints and broadcasts The Truth and I'm really happy about that, very
relieved that everything is just fine and wonderful and all the bad things and the bad people
and the bad economies are in China, Russia and scary places like that. It's great living in a
place that's so free and awesome and knows only joy and prosperity!
If Putin was smart and freedom loving he'd get some western economic experts, from Harvard
Business School say, to help get the Russian economy booming but he's paranoid and doesn't
trust the west for some reason.
The uneasiness I feel as I stumble over the sleeping homeless people on my way to the bus
stop in the morning is irrational and foolish and was planted in my mind by Russian troll
bots on Facebook. I understand this now. Everything is wonderful here, now and always. With
Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland at the helm and a first class media dedicated to Truth
why would anyone worry or be mistrustful of our great Leaders and our Democratic
Institutions? We are the envy of the world and that makes Putin's Russia jealous and
meddlesome. I understand this now and channel all my news through an Atlantic Council Fake
News Filter plugin so all the Putinist mind warping stuff on Facebook can't affect me
anymore.
Sorry that was a long post, lol. Anyways my friend I hope you are well even though I am
sad that you still have a false paranoia about Our Western Media spreading Fake News. It's
Putin bro, not "us"! I understand this now broke lurker cover to share my insight with you so
that you too can learn to speak only Teh Truth. The Russian economy is spluttering badly and
here in Canada everything is wonderful! In Germany too! They hate our freedom and therefore
it's always bad there. The Democratic West will save the Putinist economy when Putin learns
to love and trust the West like I do (and hopefully you)! Peace out bro and much love, eh,
haha.
"... As summed up by Jodi Jacobson of Rewire.News (" Putin, Trump, and Kavanaugh: A Triad of White Supremacy and Oligarchy "): ..."
"... 'Putin is a dictator. His interests are in amassing wealth and power at any cost, both in Russia and globally. He is an ethnic nationalist , a white supremacist , and an Islamophobe . He aligns himself with radical right-wing religious and political groups to marginalize and attack the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and religious and ethnic groups outside his power base.' ..."
It is debatable how much of the US government Trump actually controls. The baseless CW
finding by the State Department (with heavy pressure from Congress) is the work of Trump's
globalist enemies in the bureaucracy and in Congress (
all of the Democrats, and almost all of the Republicans ), with the complicity of his own
appointees, to undermine his overtures to Moscow and further erode his Executive authority.
Besides blocking every possible path to détente with Russia, this is another step to
setting Trump up for removal from office.
Regarding the timing of a second set of sanctions set to kick in November, it's hard to see
how that will be avoided. Russia will not submit to inspections, which the US is arrogantly
demanding of Russia, as if she were some pipsqueak country like Libya. Given that the OPCW
certified in 2017 that the Russians had completed destruction of 100% of their CW stockpile
(cf., the US still has almost 10% of our stocks, which are not expected to be completely gone
until 2023), the demand is the equivalent of proving that you have stopped beating your wife
(to the satisfaction of someone who admittedly continues to beat his own wife).
In the absence of capitulating to the US demand, which Russia will not do, legally Trump can
waive the sanctions. But that option is no doubt part of the political trap being laid for him,
presenting him a Hobson's choice.
On the one hand, he can waive the sanctions, further hyping the charges of treason against
him (and, if the waiver is before the elections, giving the Democrats another red flag to
wave), as well as inviting new legislation passed by a margin "Putin's puppet" cannot
veto;
or he can let them go into effect.
If, as seems likely, the harsher measures are applied it is hard to overstate the danger
created. These are the kind of things that countries do just one step from totally breaking
relations in advance of war: cutting off access to American banks, barring Aeroflot from the US
(in context, the least of our concerns, though symbolic), effectively blocking all exports and
imports, and downgrading or suspending diplomatic ties. With respect to the last – a
direct assault on Trump's presidential authority to send and receive ambassadors under Article
II of the Constitution (oddly, no one in Congress seems to care that presidents routinely usurp
their authority to make war) – this likely would mean withdrawing the US ambassador from
Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador in Washington, while maintaining relations if at
all at the chargé d'affaires level.
In word, this is insanity. What's perhaps worse is that this political warfare is being
conducted with total disregard for the truth, much less an honest attempt to find it. It's
worse than a presumption of guilt; it's a positive, unambiguous verdict of culpability under
circumstances where the accusers in Washington and London (I would guess but cannot prove) know
perfectly well that the CW finger pointing is false.
But there is something else too, something that touches the emotional heart of both
Russophobia in a global context and anti-Trumpism domestically. That is the accusation of
racism .
Unsurprisingly one of the first to give voice to this concept was Hillary Clinton, who in
her August 2016 "tinfoil hat speech"
sought to portray Trump as a creature of the "Alt-Right " because, among other things, he
once complimented Infowars ' Alex Jones: "Your reputation is amazing. I will not let
you down." But in Hillary's estimation, who is "the grand godfather" of the worldwide
Alt-Right? You guessed it: "Russian President Vladimir Putin." A month later she doubled down
in her infamous " basket of
deplorables " speech, branding Trump's tens of millions of supporters "racist, sexist,
homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it." (In an evident oversight, she
omitted mention of Putin.)
Give the warmongering old girl credit for her doggedness. Hillary has stuck to this theme
even as she sinks into irrelevance (while still reportedly harboring
ambitions of a 2020 presidential run !), in June 2018 calling Putin
the leader of the worldwide "authoritarian, white-supremacist, and xenophobic movement" who is
"emboldening right-wing nationalists, separatists, racists, and even neo-Nazis."
'Putin is a dictator. His interests are in amassing wealth and power at any cost, both in
Russia and globally. He is
an ethnic nationalist , a
white supremacist , and
an Islamophobe . He aligns himself with radical right-wing religious and political groups
to marginalize and attack the rights of women, LGBTQ communities, and religious and ethnic
groups outside his power base.'
But perhaps the most revealing description comes from putative comedian Bill Maher on a
recent episode of his HBO program, explaining that "Race Explains Shift From Party Of
Reagan To Party Of Putin" and excoriating not just Putin but Russians as such for
their genetic characteristics:
Trump is expected to sign into law the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020
which mandates the imposition of sanctions on companies involved in Nord Stream II's
construction, but while this crafty move isn't expected to seriously impede the project since
it's already in its final stages, its importance derives in the fact that it signals extremely
strong support for the interests of the US-backed "Three Seas Initiative" whose Polish leader
has objected to this game-changing pipeline on geopolitical grounds.
***
The US Senate's
approval of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2020 means that Trump will likely
sign it into law very soon, which is troublesome for Trans-Atlantic relations because it
mandates among its many sometimes unrelated provisions the imposition of sanctions on companies
involved in Nord Stream II's construction. This crafty move isn't expected to seriously impede
the project since it's already in its final stages after Russia
secured Denmark's permission back in October to construct a crucial segment of this
pipeline through its maritime territory, which will facilitate the project's completion and
thus strengthen Russia's strategic partnership with EU-leader Germany. That outcome will likely
accelerate the ongoing rapprochement between Russia and the bloc's Western European members
that became obvious to all after Macron's successful visit
to Moscow in late August, but which is in turn compelling the US to double down on its
commitment to the Polish-led " Three
Seas Initiative " (TSI) that it envisages functioning as its wedge for retaining influence
in the strategic Central European space between those two.
The impending NDAA 2020-connected sanctions should therefore be seen as an extremely strong
signal of support for this trans-regional integration structure because they satisfy the
demands of its Polish leader for the US to impose costs upon Germany for its reinvigorated
strategic partnership with Russia. Barely reported on at the time, it's significant to mention
that a bipartisan
resolution was submitted to the House of Representatives at the end of October shortly
after Russia secured Denmark's support for Nord Stream II mandating that Congress prioritize
its support for the TSI in the aftermath of that development, with a specific focus on energy
and physical connectivity projects. The grand strategic goal that the US is aiming to achieve
is to create a so-called "cordon sanitaire" that would serve to divide Russia from Western
Europe by exploiting the preexisting animosity that the many states between them have towards
Moscow, and it will likely end up being one of the main drivers of American foreign policy
towards the continent for the foreseeable future.
In pursuit of that objective, the US is also making strategic outreaches to
Belarus , knowing very well that its wily leader Lukashenko is more than willing to
"balance" between the West and Russia in a risky attempt to extract more (mostly economic)
"concessions" from each of them. It goes without saying that this policy will probably ramp up
now that Nord Stream II is a fait accompli and the "cordon sanitaire" is more significant than
ever in the current context. That former Soviet Republic, however, is unlikely to engage in a
decisive "pivot" against Russia, though from a zero-sum standpoint, the gradual moves that it's
making towards the West can indeed be interpreted as being "mildly" against Russia's long-term
interests. Still, there isn't much that Russia can do since it must avoid the perception that
it's putting overwhelming pressure on Belarus or even plausibly considering doing so since that
notion would only accelerate the very same trend that Moscow wants to reverse. Minsk, it must
be said, recognizes how geostrategic its position is for both the Russian-led Eurasian Union
(EAU) and the Polish-led TSI, so it'll try to play them off against the other, all with the US'
passive support.
The US isn't the only Great Power spreading its influence through the TSI, as China is also
rapidly on the ascent there too. The Balkans are becoming more important of a destination for
Chinese foreign direct investment than ever through the Belt & Road
Initiative (BRI), most visibly manifesting itself in Beijing's plans to construct a
high-speed railway from the Hungarian capital of Budapest to the Greek port of Pireaus (the
"Balkan Silk Road"). It also holds yearly meetings with the leaders of the TSI countries and
others in this region through the 17+1
format that was recently expanded to include Greece (having been the 16+1 previously). In
addition, Belarus is a key node on the Eurasian Land Bridge, with China investing in the "
Great Stone " industrial
park that it envisages becoming a major export center along that route. None of this is to
imply whatsoever that China is "teaming up" with the US to "contain" Russia in Central &
Eastern Europe, but just to point out that China's infrastructure investments will greatly help
to connect the region along the north-south axis, after which the US will likely exploit these
apolitical and purely economic projects for its strategic ends vis-a-vis Russia.
Even so, while the TSI space is certainly geostrategic, its economic importance pales in
comparison to Western Europe's. The German economy alone is larger than all of those states'
combined, so Russia isn't exactly losing out in the economic sense as a result of the US' TSI
plans. It is, however, at risk of this "cordon sanitaire" being used as its rival's
trans-regional platform for putting military pressure upon it, which has already been happening
ever since most of its states joined NATO and then doubled down on their commitment to it after
the onset of the New
Cold War in 2014 following Crimea's reunification with Russia in response to the US-backed
coup in Ukraine. Poland and increasingly Greece
bookend this pro-American military structure, while Ukraine and possibly soon even Belarus
could ultimately become its eastern-most appendages by proxy. Russia still has instruments of
influence that it can leverage in an attempt to keep this trend under control, though it's
seemingly on the defensive in recent years and appears unable to gain any successes on this
front, instead choosing to concentrate on Western Europe through Nord Stream II and other
measures.
Looking forward, the rise of the TSI as the US' preferred continental proxy is all but
assured, though it's unclear whether or not it'll succeed with its fundamental purpose of
keeping Russia and Western Europe apart. Classical geopolitical thought suggesting that it
would doesn't take into consideration the much more complex nature of contemporary
International Relations whereby a conventional military clash between the TSI states and Russia
is unlikely for reasons of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) stemming from many of the
former's memberships in NATO, and their other memberships in the EU mean that a successful
EU-Russian detente would force them to facilitate trade between Western Europe and Russia if
even a single state vetoes the continuation of sanctions in the future. Altogether, it can
therefore be said that Russia's successful completion of Nord Stream II would flip the
strategic dynamics by once again returning Moscow to a position of strength whereas Washington
would then be the Great Power on the defensive instead. Still, the TSI's potential shouldn't be
underestimated either since it might lead to some surprises for both Western Europe and Russia
if its American patron has a few tricks up its sleeve that it's wiling to teach its regional
partners.
"... It is noteworthy that not a single House Republican dared or even cared to question Schiff's framing of the issue, which was bolstered by witnesses from the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic establishment, including Trump's appointees. ..."
"... Nor is any Republican Senator likely to point out the inconvenient truth that we have no defense treaty with Ukraine, which thus is not really our "ally." ..."
"... The sole retort from Trump's establishment defenders : He released the aid to Ukraine, including the Javelin missiles Obama denied them! He's every bit the warmonger you want him to be! So there! ..."
"... Senate Demaggotic Leader Chuck Schumer gave the game away when he demanded that the World Greatest Deliberative Body receive testimony from cashiered National Security Adviser John Bolton and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney but not from the man at the center of the whole Ukraine "drug deal" (as Bolton described it): Rudy Giuliani. ..."
For a century and a half American political life has been the exclusive preserve of the
duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, also known as
the Evil Party and the Stupid Party . (If something is both Evil and Stupid, we call that
"Bipartisan.") But the familiar Evil-Stupid dichotomy doesn't even begin to describe the
descent into national dysfunction and galloping irrationality that characterizes the Trump
impeachment hysteria.
Media chatter now centers on the nuts-and-bolts questions of "what's next?" Will House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate? (Yes. Even one of the
legal "scholars" enrolled in the impeachment lynch mob avers that
Trump isn't actually impeached until the Senate receives the articles .) Who will be the
trial managers? (Who cares.) Will there be a "real trial," with witnesses? (It hardly matters.)
Will Trump be removed? (Unlikely unless some bolt from the blue flips 20 GOP Senators.) Will
impeachment be the Democrats' albatross going into November 2020? (Most polls show independents
are turned off, but there's still almost a year to go.)
None of these questions, which are meaningful only in a mental universe of the Evils and the
Stupids shadowboxing over a partisan allocation of political spoils, touch upon the grim
– and occasionally sardonic – symptoms of America's seemingly unstoppable terminal
slide.
With Trump's impeachment it's time to say goodbye to yesteryear's Team Evil and Team Stupid.
Say hello in 2020 to Team Maggot and Team Corpse!
In short, Democrats hate Trump not so much for what he's done (which, contrary to what his
passionate supporters think based on his Tweets, isn't much) but as an expression of an
amorphous dread that by some mysterious populist alchemy he might still breathe life back into
the Corpse Party's deplorable base.
With that in mind, here are a few things to note as we cruise on into Bizarro World
:
As the impeachment spectacle unfolded in the House, one could not fail to be touched by the
hushed, heartfelt reverence with which Democrat after Democrat cited the sage words of the
Founding Fathers: Madison especially, but also Jefferson and Washington. No doubt they can
hardly wait for this spectacle to be over so they can go back to denouncing the Founders as
dead, racist, Christian, patriarchal, " Anglo
," and (presumably) heterosexual slaveholders
in wigs and knee-breeches whose memory should be expunged from the historical record . It's
instructive to glance at the members of
the House Judiciary Committee who – solemnly, reluctantly, and prayerfully, they
assure us! – voted out articles of impeachment in the name of "the American people." But
which "people" might that be? Of the 23 Democrats who voted, only four even arguably fit the
heritage American, male profile of the Founding Fathers. The " gender
balance " (as it's ungrammatically called nowadays) on the voting majority side of the
Committee is 12-11. That's not quite up to
Barack Obama's exhortation that "every nation on earth" should be "run by women ," but it's
progress in that direction! (Just imagine how much more serene the world would be if all
countries were ruled by peaceniks like Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Condi Rice, Susan
Rice, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Michèle Flournoy, Evelyn Farkas, etc., plus
a
bevy of Deep State Democrats now installed in Congress .) By contrast, the 17 Republicans
on the Committee have approximately the same demographic composition they'd have had in 1950
– and aside from the inclusion of two women, that of the First Congress seated in
1789.
In short, in the Congressional Maggot Caucus the approaching
Dictatorship of Victims defined by race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language,
religion, migratory status, etc., is already becoming a reality, and they voted to get rid of
Trump. Members of the Corpse Caucus defending him still belong demographically and morally to
the declining legacy America, though they'd never, ever admit it. Impeachment is thus more than
just the latest iteration of the years-long anti-constitutional coup to overturn a presidential
election,
though it is that too . Even more fundamentally, it's a coup against the people whose
identity, traditions, and values the Constitution was intended to ensure for themselves and
their posterity.
Foreign interference in our deMOCKracy.
Even more absurd than Democrats' presumption in lip-synching the venerable principles of an
American constitutional tradition they despise almost as much as they loathe the ethnos that
ordained and established it is their feigned horror – horror! – that Trump's phone
chat with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky realized the Founders' worst fears of foreign influence
over American domestic politics. Leaving aside the fact that Ukraine under Zelensky's
predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, did try to queer the 2016 election in favor of Hillary, and that
Hunter and Joe Biden are crooks, the Maggoteers' ability to maintain a straight face of shocked
indignation smack in the middle of a souk, a flea market, a bazaar where both domestic and
foreign interests buy, sell, and trade favors like vintage baseball cards is nothing less than
heroic.
Argentina Caucus, Armenian Issues Caucus, Azerbaijan Caucus, Bangladesh Caucus, Bosnia
Caucus, Brazil Caucus, Cambodia Caucus, Central America Caucus, Colombia Caucus,
Congressional Caucus on Bulgaria, Croatian Caucus, Czech Caucus, Ethiopian-American Caucus,
Ethnic and Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka, EU Caucus, Friends of Australia Caucus, Friends of
Denmark Caucus, Friends of Egypt Caucus, Friends of Finland Caucus, Friends of Ireland
Caucus, Friends of Liechtenstein Caucus, Friends of New Zealand Caucus, Friends of Norway
Caucus, Friends of Scotland Caucus, Friends of Spain Caucus, Friends of Sweden Caucus,
Friends of the Dominican Republic Caucus, Friends of Wales Caucus, Georgia Caucus, Hellenic
Caucus, Hellenic Israel Alliance Caucus, House Baltic Caucus, Hungarian Caucus, India and
Indian Americans Caucus, Iraq Caucus, Israel Allies Caucus, Israel Victory Caucus, Kingdom of
Netherlands Caucus, Korea Caucus, Kyrgyzstan Caucus, Macedonia and Macedonian-American
Caucus, Moldova Caucus, Mongolia Caucus, Montenegro Caucus, Morocco Caucus, Nigeria Caucus,
Pakistan Caucus, Peru Caucus, Poland Caucus, Portuguese Caucus, Qatari-American Strategic
Relationships Caucus, Republican Israel Caucus, Romania Caucus, Serbian Caucus, Slovak
Caucus, Sri Lanka Caucus, Taiwan Caucus, UK Caucus, Ukraine Caucus, U.S.-Bermuda Friendship
Caucus, U.S.-China Working Group, U.S.-Japan Caucus, U.S.-Kazakhstan Caucus, U.S.-Lebanon
Friendship Caucus, U.S.-Philippines Friendship Caucus, U.S.-Turkey Relations and Turkish
American, Uzbekistan Caucus, Venezuela Democracy Caucus
Recalling
Your Working Boy 's years at the State Department – where there still exists no
"American Interests Section" – the reader can search the above in vain for anything that
looks remotely like "Friends of the United States of America."
In fact, the Democrats' core impeachment narrative – Russia bad, Ukraine good –
is itself an example to which American policy is in the grip of foreign antipathies and
attachments against which the
Father of Our Country warned us in his 1796 farewell address :
"[N]othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against
particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in
place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which
indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it
astray from its duty and its interest."
"[W]e should care about our allies. We should care about Ukraine. We should care about a
country struggling to be free and a Democracy. We used to care about Democracy. We used to
care about our allies. We used to stand up to Putin and Russia. We used to. I know the party
of Ronald Reagan used to. 'Why should we care about Ukraine?' But of course it's about more
than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about our national security. Their fight is our fight.
Their defense is our defense. When Russia remakes the map of Europe for the first time since
World War II by dint of military force [ JGJ : Well, there was Kosovo, but never mind ] and
Ukraine fights back, it is our fight too."
Indeed, one wonders how hysterical Democrats missed accusing Trump outright of treason ,
which actually is specified as grounds for impeachment in
Article II, Section 4 . After all, as described by Schiff, didn't Trump's actions
constitute (under Article
III, Section 3 ) "adhering" to our evil enemies the Russians, and "giving them aid and
comfort"? It's an open and shut case of a capital crime – and the
House Majority Whip is ready to get the rope ! (Really, how did the Democrats miss this?
Maybe GOP stupidity has migrated to the other side of the aisle )
It is noteworthy that not a single House Republican dared or even cared to question Schiff's
framing of the issue, which was bolstered by witnesses from the permanent military,
intelligence, and diplomatic establishment, including Trump's appointees.
Nor is any Republican
Senator likely to point out the inconvenient truth that we have no defense treaty with Ukraine,
which thus is not really our "ally." Partisanship is the variable; Russophobia is the constant.
The sole retort
from Trump's establishment defenders : He released the aid to Ukraine, including the
Javelin missiles Obama denied them! He's every bit the warmonger you want him to be! So
there!
Thus, even with Trump's almost (at this point) certain survival of a Senate impeachment
trial, the relevant foreign inveterate antipathies and passionate attachments will remain
entrenched. (Not just in the case of Ukraine/Russia but with respect to the rest of the world
our habitual hatreds and fondnesses remain firmly in place and are unlikely to change for the
balance of Trump's presidency, if ever. Trump's
Korea initiative is on life support. Israel/Iran is a flashpoint that could explode at any
time : "Israel, even less than the US, cannot take casualties. A couple of bull's eyes, a
lot of Israelis go back to Brooklyn. The 82 million people in Iran have no place else to
go.")
Bellingcat's transparency model is similar to the Tor Project's. It lists a bunch of
innocuous, little-known non-profits and human rights-type organizations. To understand who
they and why they'd fund an outfit like Bellingcat takes a lot more digging.
"... Are the security forces loyal to him to the extent that he could realistically counted on them to carry out a crackdown on
the "Nazis"? ..."
"... I am sympathetic to a lot of what Putin has felt it necessary to do, but I must say, I don't buy the incessant use of the term
"Ukronazi." Sounds propagandistic. ..."
"... What about the Ukrainian people? A large majority of them voted for some sort of reconciliation with the separatists and Russia.
They did so twice: once for Zelenskii, and once again for his party. Does that count for nothing? ..."
"... I think the plan is to wait until Russia collapses from Western sanctions, and then invade Crimea and Donbass. They didn't
give up on the territory by any means, which is why I don't think that any ceasefire in Donbass will hold. It is going to remain a slow-burning
conflict, the regime will continue to complain about "Russian invasion" and international investors will continue to avoid the Ukraine.
..."
The recent Paris summit and the few days following the summit have brought a lot of clarity about the future of the Minsk Agreements.
Short version: Kiev has officially rejected them (by rejecting both the sequence of steps and several crucial steps). For those interested,
let's look a little further.
First, what just happened
First, here are the key excerpts from the Paris Conference and from statements made by "Ze" and his superior, Arsen Avakov right
after their return to Kiev:
The Minsk agreements (Minsk Protocol of 5 September 2014, Minsk Memorandum of 19 September 2014 and the Minsk Package of Measures
of 12 February 2015) continue to be the basis of the work of the Normandy format whose member states are committed to their
full implementation ( ) The sides express interest in agreeing within the Normandy format (N4) and the Trilateral Contact
Group on all the legal aspects of the Special Order of Local Self-Government – special status – of Certain Areas of the Donetsk
and Luhansk Regions – as outlined in the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements from 2015 – in order
to ensure its functioning on a permanent basis .They consider it necessary to incorporate the "Steinmeier formula" into the Ukrainian
legislation, in accordance with the version agreed upon within the N4 and the Trilateral Contact Group.
President 'Ze' statement on Ukrainian TV: (unofficial, in-house, translation) source
" The most difficult question is the question of the transfer of the border control to Ukraine. It's very funny, because
its our border and the transfer of the control to us. But, it's a weak sport, the Achilles' heel of the Minsk Agreement." "It's
what was signed by us, unfortunately. We can discuss this for a very long time. Possibly, the conditions were as such." "But we
signed that we will get the control over our border only after the elections on the temporarily occupied territories." "We dedicated
a very long time to this question, we discussed it in details, we have a very different positions with the president of
Russia ." "But this is the Minsk position, we have to understand this. I only like one thing, that we started talking about
this. We agreed that we will continue talking about this in details and with the different variations during our next meeting."
"This is also a victory, because we will have a meeting in four months."
Q. What do you think, is it possible to change the Minsk Agreement? source
" This will be very difficult to do, but we have to do it. We have to change it . First, we have to understand
that it's been over four years since the Minsk Agreement was signed. Everything changes in our life. We have to understand that
it wasn't my team that signed the Minsk Agreement, but we as a power have to fulfill the conditions that our power at the time
agreed back then. But? I am sure that some things we will be able to change. We will be changing them." "Because the transfer
of the Ukraine's border after our control only after the elections, – it's not our position. I said about this don't know how
many times, but this is the final decision ."
Arsen Avakov's statement on Ukrainian TV: (unofficial, in-house, translation):
" The philosophy of the border control the part of the border that we don't have control over is 408 kilometers. It's not that
easy to take it over, to equip it, even to get there across the enemy territories. It's a procedure. As a compromise, we offered
the following scheme: we will start taking the border under our control stating with the New Year, little by little, reducing the
length of the border that is not controlled by us, and a day before the local election we will close the border, we will close this
bottleneck. And this way will get the control over the border. Why isn't this a good compromise? Considering, that at the same time
according to the Steinmeier Formula, they have to disarm all the illegal armed formations of this pseudo-state DNR. This is how we
see the compromise."
In other words, both the official President and real President of the Ukraine agree: the Ukraine will not implement the Minsk
Agreements as written, made law by the UNSC and clarified by the so-called Steinmeier Formula.
Ukrainian propagandists on Russian TV (yes, Urkonazi and hardline nationalist propagandists do get air time on Russian TV on a
daily basis – for an explanation why, see here and here ) went into damage
control mode and explained it all away by saying " these are only words, what matters is what Zelenskii signed in Paris ".
They are wrong. First of all, statements made in their official capacity by the President or the Minister of Internal Affairs do
represent OFFICIAL policy statements. Second, this explanation completely overlooks the reason why Ze and Avakov said these things.
That reason is very simple: Ze caved in to the Urkonazis, completely. He now uses EXACTLY the same rhetoric as Poroshenko did, in
spite of the fact that the only reason he was elected is that he presented himself as the ultimate anti-Poroshenko. Now all we see
is Poroshenko 2.0.
So in the behind-the-scenes (but very real) struggle between the Zionist camp (Kolomoiskii and Zelenskii) and the Urkonazi camp
(Avakov and Poroshenko), the latter have successfully taken control of the former and now the chances for saving a unitary Ukraine
are down to, maybe not quite zero, but to something like 0.0000001% (I leave that one under the heading "never say never" and because
I have been wrong in the past).
So what happens next?
That is the interesting question. In theory, the Normandy Four will meet again in 4 months. But that assumes that some progress
was made. Well, it is possible that in a few sections of the line of contact there will be an OSCE supervised withdrawal of forces.
But, let's be honest here, the people have seen many, many such promised withdrawals, and they all turned out to be fake. Either
the Ukronazis return to the neutral zone (claiming huge victories over the (sic) "Russian armed force"), or they resume bombing civilians,
or they never even bother to change position. Any withdrawal is a good thing if it can save a single life! But no amount of withdrawals
will settle anything in this conflict.
Second, there are A LOT of Ukrainian politicians who now say that the citizens of the LDNR have to "return" to Russia if they
don't like the Urkonazi coup or its ideology. They either don't realize, or don't care, that there are very few Russian volunteers
in Novorussia and that the vast majority of the men and women who compose the LDNR forces are locals. These locals, by the way, get
the Ukie message loud and clear: you better get away while you can, because when we show up you will all be prosecuted for terrorism
and aiding terrorists, that is ALSO something the Urkonazis like to repeat day after day. By the way, while in Banderastan all Russian
TV channels are censored, and while they also try to censor the Russian language Internet, in Novorussia all the Ukrainian (and Russian)
TV stations are freely available. So as soon as some Nazi freak comes out and says something crazy like "we will create filtration
camps" (aka concentration camps) this news is instantly repeated all over Novorussia, which only strengthens the resolve of the people
of the LDNR to fight to their death rather than accept a Nazi occupation..
I said it many times, Zelenskii's ONLY chance was to crackdown on the Nazis as soon as he was elected. He either did not have
the courage to do so, or his U.S. bosses told him to leave them unmolested. Whatever the case may be, it's now over, we are back
to square one.
The most likely scenario is a "slow freezing" of the conflict meaning now that Kiev has officially and overtly rejected the Minsk
Agreements, there will be some minor, pretend-negotiations, maybe, but that fundamentally the conflict will be frozen.
That will be the last nail in the coffin of the pro-EU, pro-NATO so-called "Independent Ukraine", since the most important condition
to try to salvage the Ukrainian economy, namely peace, is now gone. Furthermore, the political climate in the Ukraine will further
deteriorate (the hated Nazi minority + an even worse economic crisis are a perfect recipe for disaster).
For the Novorussians, it's now clear: the rump-Ukraine* does not want them, nor will Kiev ever agree to the Minsk Agreement. That
means that the LDNR will separate from the rump-Ukraine and, on time, rejoin Russia. Good bye Banderites and Urkonazis!
The rump-Ukraine will eventually break-up further: Crimea truly was the "jewel of the Black Sea" and its future appears to be
extremely bright while the Donbass was the biggest source of raw materials, energy, industry, high-tech, etc. etc. etc.). What is
left of the Ukraine is either poor and under-developed (the West) or needs to reopen economic ties with Russia (the South).
Besides, Zelenskii and his party are now trying to rush a new law through the Rada which will allow the sale of Ukrainian land
to private interests (aka foreign interests + a local frontman). As a result, there is now a new "maidan" brewing, pitting Iulia
Timoshenko and other nationalist leaders against Zelenskii and his party. This could become a major crisis very fast, especially
now that is appears that Zelenskii will also renege on this promise to call for a national referendum on the issue of the sale/privatization
of land .
As for the Russians, they already realize that Ze is a joke, unsurprisingly so since he is a comic by trade, and that the Ukrainians
are "not agreement capable". They will treat him like they did Poroshenko in the last years: completely ignore him and not even take
his telephone calls. Right now, there is just a tiny bit of good will left in Moscow, but it is drying up so fast that it will soon
totally disappear. Besides, the Russians really don't care that much anymore: the sanctions turned out to be a blessing, time is
on Russia's side, the Ukronazis are destroying their own state and, finally, the important stuff for Russia is happening in Asia,
not the West.
The Europeans will take a long time to come to terms with two simple facts:
Russia was never a party to this conflict (if she had, it would have been over long ago). The Ukronazis are the ones who won't implement
the Minsk Agreements
This means that the politicians who were behind the EU's backing of the Euromaidan (Merkel) will have to go before their successors
can say that, oops, we got our colors confused, and white is actually black and black turned out to be white. That's okay, politicians
are pretty good at that. The honeymoon between Kiev and Warsaw on the one hand and Berlin on the other will soon end as bad times
are ahead.
Macron looks much better, and he will probably pursue his efforts to restore semi-normal relations with Russia, for France's sake
first, but also eventually the rest of the EU. The Poles and the Balts will accuse him of "treason" and he will just ignore them.
As for Trump, he will most likely make small steps towards Russia, but most of his energy will be directed either inwards (impeachment)
or outwards (Israel), but not towards the Ukrainian conflict. Good.
Conclusion
It's over. Crimea and the Donbass are gone forever, the first is de jure , the latter merely de facto . The rump-Ukraine
is completely unconformable (barring some kind of coup followed by a government of national unity supported Moscow – I consider this
hypothesis as highly unlikely).
If you live in the West, don't expect your national media to report on any of this. They will be the LAST ones to actually admit
it (journos have a longer shelf life than politicians, it is harder for them to make a 180).
PS: to get a feeling for the kind of silly stunts the "Ze team" is now busying itself with, just check this one: they actually
tried to falsify the Ukrainian version of the Paris Communique. For details, see Scott's report here: https://thesaker.is/kiev-attempted-to-change-the-letter-and-meaning-of-paris-summit-communique/
. If the Ukraine was a Kindergarten, then "Ze" would be a perfect classroom teacher or visiting entertainer. But for a country
fighting for its survival, such stunts are a very, very bad sign indeed!
(*rump-Ukraine: In broad terms, a "rump" state is what remains of a state when a portion is carved away. Expanding on the "butcher"
metaphor, the rump is what is left when the higher-value cuts such as rib roast and loin have been removed.)
I said it many times, Zelenskii's ONLY chance was to crackdown on the Nazis as soon as he was elected. He either did not
have the courage to do so, or his U.S. bosses told him to leave them unmolested.
Are the security forces loyal to him to the extent that he could realistically counted on them to carry out a crackdown
on the "Nazis"?
For the Novorussians, it's now clear: the rump-Ukraine* does not want them, nor will Kiev ever agree to the Minsk Agreement.
So what is the Ukrainian thinking here -- that they are better off simply cutting bait on the east and letting Russia deal
with the headache of the Donbass's antiquated infrastructure? And that a truncated Ukraine would at least be mostly free of internal
pro-Russian sentiment?
I am sympathetic to a lot of what Putin has felt it necessary to do, but I must say, I don't buy the incessant use of the
term "Ukronazi." Sounds propagandistic.
What about the Ukrainian people? A large majority of them voted for some sort of reconciliation with the separatists and Russia.
They did so twice: once for Zelenskii, and once again for his party. Does that count for nothing?
I think the plan is to wait until Russia collapses from Western sanctions, and then invade Crimea and Donbass. They didn't
give up on the territory by any means, which is why I don't think that any ceasefire in Donbass will hold. It is going to remain
a slow-burning conflict, the regime will continue to complain about "Russian invasion" and international investors will continue
to avoid the Ukraine.
"That reason is very simple: Ze caved in to the Ukronazis, completely. He now uses EXACTLY the same rhetoric as Poroshenko did,
in spite of the fact that the only reason he was elected is that he presented himself as the ultimate anti-Poroshenko. Now all
we see is Poroshenko 2.0."
This is interesting. It implies z actually meant what he said in order to gain votes to get elected. In fact, he is very similar
to trump in this respect. Lied about desiring an end to the conflict (conflicts in the case of trump), but once in office continued
the aggressive policies (and expanded them in the case of trump). Actually, if one considers poroshenko as the ukraine version
of obama/clinton and zelinsky as trump, it looks like the ukrainian regime is following in the footsteps of the american regime.
It's not just Minsk that has been abandoned by the Kiev junta. Kiev itself has been abandoned by the EU, which now looks to Nordstream-2
for its energy supplies from Russia, thus bypassing the thieves in Ukraine. Even sanctions from the Supreme Sanctioner in DC is
not going to persuade the Germans to shiver in the winter.
"... It is noteworthy that not a single House Republican dared or even cared to question Schiff's framing of the issue, which was bolstered by witnesses from the permanent military, intelligence, and diplomatic establishment, including Trump's appointees. ..."
"... Nor is any Republican Senator likely to point out the inconvenient truth that we have no defense treaty with Ukraine, which thus is not really our "ally." ..."
"... The sole retort from Trump's establishment defenders : He released the aid to Ukraine, including the Javelin missiles Obama denied them! He's every bit the warmonger you want him to be! So there! ..."
"... Senate Demaggotic Leader Chuck Schumer gave the game away when he demanded that the World Greatest Deliberative Body receive testimony from cashiered National Security Adviser John Bolton and acting White House Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney but not from the man at the center of the whole Ukraine "drug deal" (as Bolton described it): Rudy Giuliani. ..."
For a century and a half American political life has been the exclusive preserve of the
duopoly of Democrats and Republicans, also known as
the Evil Party and the Stupid Party . (If something is both Evil and Stupid, we call that
"Bipartisan.") But the familiar Evil-Stupid dichotomy doesn't even begin to describe the
descent into national dysfunction and galloping irrationality that characterizes the Trump
impeachment hysteria.
Media chatter now centers on the nuts-and-bolts questions of "what's next?" Will House
Speaker Nancy Pelosi send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate? (Yes. Even one of the
legal "scholars" enrolled in the impeachment lynch mob avers that
Trump isn't actually impeached until the Senate receives the articles .) Who will be the
trial managers? (Who cares.) Will there be a "real trial," with witnesses? (It hardly matters.)
Will Trump be removed? (Unlikely unless some bolt from the blue flips 20 GOP Senators.) Will
impeachment be the Democrats' albatross going into November 2020? (Most polls show independents
are turned off, but there's still almost a year to go.)
None of these questions, which are meaningful only in a mental universe of the Evils and the
Stupids shadowboxing over a partisan allocation of political spoils, touch upon the grim
– and occasionally sardonic – symptoms of America's seemingly unstoppable terminal
slide.
With Trump's impeachment it's time to say goodbye to yesteryear's Team Evil and Team Stupid.
Say hello in 2020 to Team Maggot and Team Corpse!
In short, Democrats hate Trump not so much for what he's done (which, contrary to what his
passionate supporters think based on his Tweets, isn't much) but as an expression of an
amorphous dread that by some mysterious populist alchemy he might still breathe life back into
the Corpse Party's deplorable base.
With that in mind, here are a few things to note as we cruise on into Bizarro World
:
As the impeachment spectacle unfolded in the House, one could not fail to be touched by the
hushed, heartfelt reverence with which Democrat after Democrat cited the sage words of the
Founding Fathers: Madison especially, but also Jefferson and Washington. No doubt they can
hardly wait for this spectacle to be over so they can go back to denouncing the Founders as
dead, racist, Christian, patriarchal, " Anglo
," and (presumably) heterosexual slaveholders
in wigs and knee-breeches whose memory should be expunged from the historical record . It's
instructive to glance at the members of
the House Judiciary Committee who – solemnly, reluctantly, and prayerfully, they
assure us! – voted out articles of impeachment in the name of "the American people." But
which "people" might that be? Of the 23 Democrats who voted, only four even arguably fit the
heritage American, male profile of the Founding Fathers. The " gender
balance " (as it's ungrammatically called nowadays) on the voting majority side of the
Committee is 12-11. That's not quite up to
Barack Obama's exhortation that "every nation on earth" should be "run by women ," but it's
progress in that direction! (Just imagine how much more serene the world would be if all
countries were ruled by peaceniks like Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Condi Rice, Susan
Rice, Samantha Power, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Michèle Flournoy, Evelyn Farkas, etc., plus
a
bevy of Deep State Democrats now installed in Congress .) By contrast, the 17 Republicans
on the Committee have approximately the same demographic composition they'd have had in 1950
– and aside from the inclusion of two women, that of the First Congress seated in
1789.
In short, in the Congressional Maggot Caucus the approaching
Dictatorship of Victims defined by race, sex, ethnicity, sexual orientation, language,
religion, migratory status, etc., is already becoming a reality, and they voted to get rid of
Trump. Members of the Corpse Caucus defending him still belong demographically and morally to
the declining legacy America, though they'd never, ever admit it. Impeachment is thus more than
just the latest iteration of the years-long anti-constitutional coup to overturn a presidential
election,
though it is that too . Even more fundamentally, it's a coup against the people whose
identity, traditions, and values the Constitution was intended to ensure for themselves and
their posterity.
Foreign interference in our deMOCKracy.
Even more absurd than Democrats' presumption in lip-synching the venerable principles of an
American constitutional tradition they despise almost as much as they loathe the ethnos that
ordained and established it is their feigned horror – horror! – that Trump's phone
chat with Ukraine's Volodymyr Zelensky realized the Founders' worst fears of foreign influence
over American domestic politics. Leaving aside the fact that Ukraine under Zelensky's
predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, did try to queer the 2016 election in favor of Hillary, and that
Hunter and Joe Biden are crooks, the Maggoteers' ability to maintain a straight face of shocked
indignation smack in the middle of a souk, a flea market, a bazaar where both domestic and
foreign interests buy, sell, and trade favors like vintage baseball cards is nothing less than
heroic.
Argentina Caucus, Armenian Issues Caucus, Azerbaijan Caucus, Bangladesh Caucus, Bosnia
Caucus, Brazil Caucus, Cambodia Caucus, Central America Caucus, Colombia Caucus,
Congressional Caucus on Bulgaria, Croatian Caucus, Czech Caucus, Ethiopian-American Caucus,
Ethnic and Religious Freedom in Sri Lanka, EU Caucus, Friends of Australia Caucus, Friends of
Denmark Caucus, Friends of Egypt Caucus, Friends of Finland Caucus, Friends of Ireland
Caucus, Friends of Liechtenstein Caucus, Friends of New Zealand Caucus, Friends of Norway
Caucus, Friends of Scotland Caucus, Friends of Spain Caucus, Friends of Sweden Caucus,
Friends of the Dominican Republic Caucus, Friends of Wales Caucus, Georgia Caucus, Hellenic
Caucus, Hellenic Israel Alliance Caucus, House Baltic Caucus, Hungarian Caucus, India and
Indian Americans Caucus, Iraq Caucus, Israel Allies Caucus, Israel Victory Caucus, Kingdom of
Netherlands Caucus, Korea Caucus, Kyrgyzstan Caucus, Macedonia and Macedonian-American
Caucus, Moldova Caucus, Mongolia Caucus, Montenegro Caucus, Morocco Caucus, Nigeria Caucus,
Pakistan Caucus, Peru Caucus, Poland Caucus, Portuguese Caucus, Qatari-American Strategic
Relationships Caucus, Republican Israel Caucus, Romania Caucus, Serbian Caucus, Slovak
Caucus, Sri Lanka Caucus, Taiwan Caucus, UK Caucus, Ukraine Caucus, U.S.-Bermuda Friendship
Caucus, U.S.-China Working Group, U.S.-Japan Caucus, U.S.-Kazakhstan Caucus, U.S.-Lebanon
Friendship Caucus, U.S.-Philippines Friendship Caucus, U.S.-Turkey Relations and Turkish
American, Uzbekistan Caucus, Venezuela Democracy Caucus
Recalling
Your Working Boy 's years at the State Department – where there still exists no
"American Interests Section" – the reader can search the above in vain for anything that
looks remotely like "Friends of the United States of America."
In fact, the Democrats' core impeachment narrative – Russia bad, Ukraine good –
is itself an example to which American policy is in the grip of foreign antipathies and
attachments against which the
Father of Our Country warned us in his 1796 farewell address :
"[N]othing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against
particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in
place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which
indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave.
It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it
astray from its duty and its interest."
"[W]e should care about our allies. We should care about Ukraine. We should care about a
country struggling to be free and a Democracy. We used to care about Democracy. We used to
care about our allies. We used to stand up to Putin and Russia. We used to. I know the party
of Ronald Reagan used to. 'Why should we care about Ukraine?' But of course it's about more
than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about our national security. Their fight is our fight.
Their defense is our defense. When Russia remakes the map of Europe for the first time since
World War II by dint of military force [ JGJ : Well, there was Kosovo, but never mind ] and
Ukraine fights back, it is our fight too."
Indeed, one wonders how hysterical Democrats missed accusing Trump outright of treason ,
which actually is specified as grounds for impeachment in
Article II, Section 4 . After all, as described by Schiff, didn't Trump's actions
constitute (under Article
III, Section 3 ) "adhering" to our evil enemies the Russians, and "giving them aid and
comfort"? It's an open and shut case of a capital crime – and the
House Majority Whip is ready to get the rope ! (Really, how did the Democrats miss this?
Maybe GOP stupidity has migrated to the other side of the aisle )
It is noteworthy that not a single House Republican dared or even cared to question Schiff's
framing of the issue, which was bolstered by witnesses from the permanent military,
intelligence, and diplomatic establishment, including Trump's appointees.
Nor is any Republican
Senator likely to point out the inconvenient truth that we have no defense treaty with Ukraine,
which thus is not really our "ally." Partisanship is the variable; Russophobia is the constant.
The sole retort
from Trump's establishment defenders : He released the aid to Ukraine, including the
Javelin missiles Obama denied them! He's every bit the warmonger you want him to be! So
there!
Thus, even with Trump's almost (at this point) certain survival of a Senate impeachment
trial, the relevant foreign inveterate antipathies and passionate attachments will remain
entrenched. (Not just in the case of Ukraine/Russia but with respect to the rest of the world
our habitual hatreds and fondnesses remain firmly in place and are unlikely to change for the
balance of Trump's presidency, if ever. Trump's
Korea initiative is on life support. Israel/Iran is a flashpoint that could explode at any
time : "Israel, even less than the US, cannot take casualties. A couple of bull's eyes, a
lot of Israelis go back to Brooklyn. The 82 million people in Iran have no place else to
go.")
Pedantic point Феликс
Эдмундович
Дзержинский
Feliks (Felix) Edmundovich (son of Edmund) Dzerzhinskiy
is the Russianised version of the Polish
Feliks Dzierżyński
And just to show how how small the world is, he was a school with Piłsudski (and
Kerenskiy's father was the teacher of the young Lenin)
(In fact the Bolshevik world seems to have been as small as the conspirators' world.
Anybody know a Russian woman we can put in the same room as Flynn so we can create the story
that Putin has set a honey trap? Yeah says Halper, there's one right here in Cambridge.
Anybody know a Russian we can put in the same room as Trump junior? Yeah says Simpson,
there's this Russian lawyer who's part of our lobbying efforts. Anybody got Putin's niece?
Yeah, says Mifsud, I've got a student who can be her.)
An interesting article 2012 in the 'Baltic Times', headlined 'Dialogues between Dzerzhinsky
and Pilsudski' reports on a play by Arvydas Juozaitis, who is apparently a 'Riga-based
Lithuanian philosopher, writer and former Lithuanian diplomat'.
In it, apparently, the pair renew what was probably an early acquaintance when they both
attended the same Russian school in Vilnius, in Purgatory, and attempt to justify the very
different courses they followed to each other.
It is interesting that Juozaitis portrays both as having started out as what one might
call 'Polonised Lithuanians.' According to the report:
'Both were born into the families of Lithuanian nobility. Both families, as is custom,
possessed picturesque coats of arms of the family. Both families were of Lithuanian origin:
Dzerzhinsky, rather historically (he was born near Minsk) due to his noble roots, while
Pilsudski could be called ethnic Lithuanian (he was born in Zalavas, not far from Vilnius),
but both of them chose to be Poles.'
Even more interesting, to my mind, is the fact that we see an – obviously
intelligent – Lithuanian nationalist suggesting that Dzerzhinsky's adoption of
Bolshevism may have been underpinned by agendas not so different from those of Pilsudski.
What appears at first sight to be a radical gulf between the two men, Juozaitis appears to
suggest, was essentially about the most promising means of implementing what might be
described as a 'Polish-Polish Lithuanian revanchist' agenda.
The 'Baltic Times' report makes crystal clear the view of the play's author that this was
a dispute over means, not ends. It also appears to suggest that ultimately both men were more
Lithuanian than either Bolshevik or Polish:
'The performance by Juozaitis presents dialogues between Dzerzhinsky and Pilsudski in
Purgatory, which was placed by Juozaitis, in the drama, under the foundation of the building
of Gate of Dawn, the Vilnius Catholic shrine with its miraculous painting of St. Mary.
'Theater actors Gediminas Storpirstis and Aleksas Kazanavicius played the roles of
Pilsudski and Dzerzhinsky, presenting some pieces of the "The Heart in Vilnius."
'"I wanted to conquer Moscow and to create Rzeczpospolita [the Polish word meaning
'republic' and referring to the historical commonwealth of Poland and Lithuania] with you,
not with Lenin and Stalin," Kazanavicius-Dzerzhinsky said, talking further about "the Vilnius
empire," and adding, "I was lonely in the sea of Slavs."
'"And Poles are not Slavs?" Storpirstis-Pilsudski asked.'
"Nord Stream 2: Trump approves sanctions on Russia gas pipeline"
The Russians will probably finish that last segment themselves but the German reaction
will be the one to watch out for – if there is one. Without Nord Stream 2, Germany will
have to accept having a smaller economy because of insufficient energy to power it which will
have knock-on effects in taxation, revenue raising & allocation, etc.
This will make them less competitive against the US and other economies and if they are
forced to buy US gas shipments, it will play hell with their budget due to the excessive
cost. Having a US Ambassador that thinks of himself as a Proconsul of Germany has not
lessened any tensions either. So we will see if there is any German reaction.
When Russia finishes the pipeline, which is not really sure since the swiss special ships
might finish in time or might be actually needed to finish the pipeline, then why would a
reaction from Germany be needed?
If/when the pipeline is done, Germany will take the gas from it for e.g. its chemical
industry. From what I understand, the US hasn't sanctioned users of russian gas in general,
"only" companies who actively build on the pipeline, like the owner of the special ships
used.
If the US however doubles down and sanctions users of russian pipeline gas, then it will
probably have a big fight on its hand. Then not only Germany is affected but almost all EU
countries, except Poland and the Baltics of course.
Frankly, I just don't get the logic behind this move by Trump. Is he saying that he thinks
that Germany is a colony of the US and that the US gets to determine where they get their
resources? That is pretty high-handed, even for the US.
I think that's exactly what these sanctions are about. "The US considers the project a
security risk to Europe" certainly sounds colonialist, and "The Trump administration fears
the pipeline will tighten Russia's grip over Europe's energy supply and reduce its own share
of the lucrative European market for American liquefied natural gas" sounds like the USA
wants to tell Europe what to buy and where.
I'm not sure about pinning it all on Trump though: " Congress voted through the
measures as part of a defence bill last week and the legislation, which described the
pipeline as a "tool of coercion", was signed off by Mr Trump on Friday."
(Quotes from the BBC article)
Why have NATO. Do you need a military against a country that you buy gas from. You give
them enormous amounts of money and they can shut the switch at any time. Maybe we should
bring Russia into NATO to defend against aliens.
Russia asked to join NATO, but were rejected. NATO needs a bogey man enemy to justify
forcing all its members to spend 2% of GDP on US military equipment. The first thing American
arms salespersons did when the Berlin Wall fell was to head to Eastern Europe to sell
arms.
It might be high-handed, but it's not new. Variations of this game have gone on since the
80s, when the first gas exports from Russia were starting. This is an upswing in aggression,
but it's mostly a continuation of standard US policy.
I am not even sure that the increased aggression comes from Trump. It's more that gas
producers in the US are now more powerful than a decade ago (and somewhat desperate due to
low gas prices in the US), so their interests add to the old-school geopolitics.
Well Germany and EU are sure behaving as if they are colonies. Zero fight for what is good
for EU. Think Russia sanctions. Hurt only EU, not US and a little bit Russia, which now have
moved to produce themselves the stuff EU was selling to Russia. EU has screwed itself on the
long-term by order from the US. US is not Europe's friend, but is making sure that it gets
weaker and cannot offer an alternative, economical, social or military.
If you want to amuse yourself you can see the ships here :
They appear to be returning to port. Were last working just to the SSE of Bornholm (the
Danish island).
Here is a gazprom map of the route as of Oct .
Most of the remaining route, the segment in German EEZ waters going in the southwest directon
from Bornholm, is shallow water.
I keep wondering when Europe will decide to throw off the shackles. A complicating factor
may be history: they'd rather an American master, mostly far away, than a German one.
Didn't we interfere with Japanese oil supplies once? For large values of happy, I can say
I'm happy with synopsizing the result of World War 2 as being about 'Who had the most oil?' I
feel like we are now vaporizing so many kinds of capital to maintain energy dominance. Can
the US please stop fighting WWII sometime before WWIII
s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in
the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the
Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already
planning to move in with them!
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
"... While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation". ..."
"... Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ? ..."
"... Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place. ..."
While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and
liberation".
I hate how America exploit the weak. president moon should offer an olive branch to fatty Kim by sending back the
thaad to America and pulling out American base and troops. he should convince fatty Kim that should he really like to proliferate
his nuclear missile development as deterrence, aim it only to America and America only. there is no need for Koreans to kill fellow
Koreans.
Very good idea, after having pushed Ukraine and Georgia to a war lost in advance, lets hope US will abandon South Korea and
Japan because they were helpless in demilitarizing one of the poorest countries in the world....
Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia?
Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life
isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say
farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining
ground btw. Ask yourself why ?
In this person's opinion, the article raises a good point with regards to US defense subsidies. However, its examples are dissimilar.
Japan spends approximately 1% of its GDP on defense; South Korea spends roughly 2.5% of its GDP defense.
In fact, it seems to this person that a better example of US Defense Welfare would be direct subsidies granted to the state
of Israel.
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are
part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from
the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but
can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and
he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and
integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy
of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor
and messianic in its language.
The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of
globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that
globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization
could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap,
may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global
depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking
the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.
The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle
yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States
and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals
cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in
North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood
of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows
all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because
global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had
no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life
are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing
globalization.
After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next
places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells
us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of
such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation
of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the
actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation
of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this
rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S.
now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end
international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle
East), but a condition (disconnectedness).
Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it
occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs.
individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states
or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with
evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many
government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."
Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything
else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not
likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea,
Syria or Iran.
Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization
as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies
and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly
discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future,
system-wide dangers to globalization.
At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore
never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited
some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by
claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard
wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem,"
yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion
that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.
Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like
links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon
its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there
is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand
strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory
is built.
What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely
as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying
that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are)
the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination
of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global
insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are,
leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance
on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.
Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in
the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian
states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."
Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies
worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world
is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics
claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should
have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes
the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put
in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen
18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael
Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting
economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction
strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security
in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims
that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?
Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?
Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned
us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too
many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid
overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the
ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history
as Barnett councils; heed it.
Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet.
Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the
U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America
needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and
leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly
debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride.
Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.
I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend
it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the
military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.
It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the
New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.
I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization,
which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely.
Neither is guaranteed.
I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well
argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire
gets its hands on.
For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama
(but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse
and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender
war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing
"The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking
and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.
"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate
name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.
Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful,
guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets
---- quite yet!
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding
wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem,
or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or ....
ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.
"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but
a Global Empire only posing as your former country."
"... Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003. ..."
"... If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents. ..."
People who seem to think that Trump's generals will somehow go along and support his original vision are sadly mistaken.
Since 2003, Israel has had an increasingly strong hand in the vetting who gets promoted to upper positions in the American
armed forces. All of the generals Trump has at his side went through a vetting procedure which definitely involved a very close
look at their opinions about Israel.
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened
in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003.
Officers who openly oppose the dictates of the Israel Lobby will see their prospects for advancement simply vanish like a whiff
of smoke.. Those who support Israel's machinations are rewarded with promotions, the more fervent the support the more rapid the
promotion especially if this knowledge is made known to their congressman or senator..
Generals who support Israel already know that this support will be heavily rewarded after their retirements by being given
lucrative six figure positions on company boards of directors or positions in equally lucrative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institution or the Hoover Institute. They will receive hefty speaking fees. as well. They learned early that their
retirements could be truly glorious if they only "went" along with The Lobby. They will be able to then live the good life in
expensive places like Washington, New York or San Francisco, often invited to glitzy parties with unlimited amount of free prawns
"the size of your hand".
On the other hand, upper officers who somehow get then get "bad" reputations for their negative views about Israel ( like Karen
U. Kwiatkowski for instance) will end up, once retired, having to depend on just their often scanty pensions This requires getting
an often demeaning second jobs to get by in some place where "their dollar goes further". No bright lights in big cities for them.
No speaking fees, no college jobs. Once their fate becomes known, their still active duty contemporaries suddenly decide to "go
along".
If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years
ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents.
Face it, we live in a country under occupation by a hostile power that we willingly pay large amounts monetary tribute to.
Our government does whatever benefits Israel regardless of how negatively this effects the USA. We are increasing troop strength
in Afghanistan because, somehow, this benefits Israel. If our presence in Afghanistan (or the Mideast in general) didn't benefit
Israel, our troops would simply not be there.
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon,Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive
was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
"... oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all. ..."
Long ago (1968) after returning from Vietnam with a bullet hole in my leg (my 90 wonder, post-ROTC officer shot me when he
panicked) I wondered off to a down-at-the-heel cow college. There I took a class and C Wright Mills 'The Power Elite' was required
reading.
I had just finished 'War is a fraud' and read an article by Paul Ehrlich an then 'The Population Bomb' shortly thereafter.
The three books created an interesting fusion in my mind:
More or less after the year 2000 the world would be plagued by resource wars;
The primary role of the military is to enforce what capitalists want; and
Behind the alleged scenes of our form of government hovered oligarchs who would demand more and more.
I recently found a paper I had written long ago. It wasn't very well written, but even then the handwriting was on the wall:
oligarchic greed; a military dedicated to protecting the wealth of oligarchs; and, wars over resources. Granted Bill Clinton
began the current charade about 'humanitarian wars' but it was Bush II and Obama who turned our focus into resource wars and the
hegemons (Malignant Overlords) who decided it was time to take it all.
I guess the point of all of this is (except for the details) Ehrlich, Mills and Butler warned us. As did Huxley and Orwell
... we were just too damned dumb (or distracted) to see it.
Maybe with the Queen of Chaos, the above will result in either annihilation or in a severe reduction in the numbers of people
... (hopefully including all of the oligarchic class) and the chance to start over?
Nah ... we'll just fuck it up again ... as a species we refuse to learn. Sigh ...
And while the *** Impeachment Coup continues and the JEWS spread misery to every corner of
the world, and Russia disconnects from the JEWS, consider this:
Once upon a time there was a country,
Where there was
NO Usury
NO Unemployment
NO Homeless
NO ***********,
NO Freemasonry,
NO Zionism,
NO Communism,
(almost) NO CRIME
Where IMPORTANT decisions were MADE BY THE PEOPLE through REFERENDUMS
Where workers were payed DECENT wages
Where people could LIVE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE
Where VACATIONS were payed by the STATE
As was HEALTHCARE INSURANCE for EVERY WORKER
As were PENSION PLANS
As were MORTGAGES (Almost everybody could afford to buy a house)
Where NO ANIMALS were tortured; It was even legislated!
Where the leader of that country had an approval rate of over 98% by the people of that
country
Where there was NO HUNGER
Where NO ONE FROZE to DEATH
Where men were MEN and women were WOMEN.
After TWELVE YEARS OF DEVASTATION that man was given a DELIBERATE RUINED and BANKRUPTED
nation, with MILLIONS of unemployed citizens. Hunger was sweeping through the nation,
thousands starved and froze to death. It had become the cesspit of a continent in complete
and utter decay.
WITHIN THREE YEARS he made all of the above possible by throwing out the vultures and
making its citizens proud again of their country and their heritage.
Unfortunately this is a very sad state we have come to. The West could have embraced
Russia and worked with them to be integrated with the West. It is a vast land of resources
including human. Instead the MIC and those above that who control government have decided
that tension and fear is the best way to serve the elite.
On ZH today was an article about clandestine agencies at work since the end of WW ll. The
purpose of those agencies to sew discord and mayhem as their tool of choice was to achieve
the desired end; profit and power. gladio-the-story-of-a-conspiracy
fact
Groups that rise enough in power to begin to challenge the rulers are co-opted and
redirected to fail.
Russia has also been kicking out US NGO's from the country too.
Putin is not doing this for control but to keep the Russian people safe should our ***
oligarchs decide to shut down global internet and to shut out foreign interference.
The new US defense bill, agreed on by both parties, includes sanctions on executives of companies involved in the completion
of Nordstream 2. This is companies involved in laying the remaining pipe, and also companies involved in the infrastructure around
the arrival point.
This could include arrest of the executives of those companies, who might travel to the United States. One of the companies
is Royal Dutch Shell, who have 80,000 employees in the United States.
Some people believe 'the market' for crude oil is a fair and effective arbiter of the industry supply and demand.
But if we step back an inch or two, we all can see it has been a severely broken mechanism during this up phase in oil.
For example, there has been long lags between market signals of shortage or surplus.
Disruptive policies and mechanisms such as tariffs, embargo's, and sanctions, trade bloc quotas, military coups and popular revolutions,
socialist agendas, industry lobbying, multinational corporate McCarthyism, and massively obese debt financing, are all examples
of forces that have trumped an efficient and transparent oil market.
And yet, the problems with the oil market during this time of upslope will look placid in retrospect, as we enter the time beyond
peak.
I see no reason why it won't turn into a mad chaotic scramble.
We had a small hint of what this can look like in the last mid-century. The USA responded to military expansionism of Japan by
enacting an oil embargo against them. The response was Pearl Harbor. This is just one example of many.
How long before Iran lashes out in response to their restricted access to the market?
People generally don't respond very calmly to involuntary restriction on food, or energy, or access to the markets for these things.
President Trump is expected to sign legislation into law
AllSeas Group SA
said it would halt operations on the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany on
expectations the U.S. Congress will pass legislation to sanction companies working on the
project, which critics say will bind Europe more tightly to Moscow.
The contractor said in a two-line statement it would suspend work "in anticipation of the
enactment of the National Defense Authorization Act."
... ... ...
Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz, the main Senate sponsor of the sanctions,
wrote a letter with Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson to AllSeas Chief Executive Officer Edward
Heerema Wednesday warning the company that it would face "crushing and potentially fatal"
sanctions if it continued work on the pipeline.
"The consequences of your company continuing to do the work -- for even a single day after
the President signs the sanctions legislation -- would expose your company to crushing and
potentially fatal legal and economic sanctions," they wrote.
"... Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false) meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress should declare war. And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941. ..."
I just read your article in TD. In my opinion you buried the reason for never ending wars.
You mention exceptionalism. I call that concept preeminence. With it is one of the few ways
we try to fill the void, or as you said in fewer words, try to give meaning to life. There
can be no doubt our lives are becoming increasingly meaningless so we double down and double
down again with what we know despite the self-destruction. https://thelastwhy.ca/poems/2015/6/25/life-a-reaction-to-the-void
Yes. "War is a force that gives us meaning," as Chris Hedges wrote. It provides (false)
meaning and purpose. It's an amazingly powerful force, which is one reason why only Congress
should declare war.
And the last time that happened in the USA was December of 1941.
Doug Barr–It appears to me you are trying to blur some lines, or perhaps you are
confused about, what one might call general human psychology and the official policies of a
specific government, that of the USA. [As a student of Anthropology, I point out that though
our primate ancestors are prone to outbursts of violence, there is no evidence that making
war, especially in the contemporary phase of human society, fulfills an innate "need."] Yes,
the US seeks to be "pre-eminent"–or to be blunter, DOMINANT–over the rest of the
globe. Where "exceptionalism"–which I have designated the American Disease–enters
the picture is the attempt to justify military aggression by suggesting (some are less subtle
and openly assert) that the US somehow has been granted a "right" to do this by "a higher
power." (Apparently God Himself revealed to George W. Bush that he was born to be "a war
president" and the genius Rick Perry asserted recently that Donald Trump was put in the
presidency by direct Divine action.) A "right" to send assassin drones anywhere, anytime, to
target anyone who's been designated a Bad Guy. This is absurd, if not insane, on the face of
it. (In olden times, Rudyard Kipling called it "the white man's burden" to bring civilization
to less "enlightened" peoples.) If there was an international court that had some teeth, the
US would be vigorously swatted down, ordered to cease and desist. But one of the greatest
tragedies of our time is that there is no power on Earth that could stand up to this Monster
(as John Kay and his band Steppenwolf rightly identified the US 50 years ago) even if it
could find the backbone to make the attempt.
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
Regarding your last sentence: this is the great truth that Washington's world hegemonists would have you forget. Taking into
account the untapped vast resources of Canada and Alaska and its expansive offshore economic zones extending deep into the Atlantic,
the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, the North American anglosphere could be entirely self-sufficient and do
quite nicely on its own for hundreds of years to come, it just wouldn't be the sole tyrannical state presumably ruling the entire
planet.
Why, it might even entertain the idea of actually cooperating with other regional powers like Russia, China, the EU, India,
Iran, Turkey, the Middle East, greater central Asia, Latin America and even Africa to everyone's benefit, rather than bullying
them all because god ordained us to be the boss of all humans.
America's major malfunction is its lack of historical roots compared to the other societies mentioned. All those places had
thousands of years to refine their sundry cultures and international relationships, certainly through trial and error and many
horrible setbacks, most notably wars, famines, pestilence, genocide and human bondage which people did not have the foresight
to nip in the bud. They learned by their mistakes and some, like the great world wars, were doozies.
The United States, and some of its closest homologues like Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina, were thrown together very
rapidly as part of developing colonial empires. It was created through the brute actions of a handful of megalomaniacal oligarchs
of their day. What worked to suppress vast tracts of aboriginal homelands, often through genocide and virtual extinction of the
native populations, was so effective that it was institutionalized in the form of slavery and reckless exploitation of the local
environment. These "great leaders," "pioneers" and "founding fathers" were not about to give up a set of principles -- no matter
how sick and immoral -- which they knew to "work" and accrued to them great power and riches. They preferred to label it "American
exceptionalism" and force it upon the whole rest of the world, including long established regional powers -- cultures going back
to antiquity -- and not just conveniently sketched "burdens of the white man."
No, ancient cultures like China, India, Persia and so forth could obviously be improved for all concerned merely by allowing
a handful of Western Europeans to own all their property and run all their affairs. That grand plan fell apart for most of the
European powers in the aftermath of World War Two, but Washington has held tough and never given up its designs of micromanaging
and exploiting the whole planet. It too is soon to learn its lesson and lose its empire. Either that or it will take the world
down in flames as it tries to cling to all that it never really owned or deserved. The most tragic (or maybe just amusing) part
is that Washington still had most of the world believing its bullshit about exceptionalism and indispensability until it decided
it had to emulate every tyrannical empire that ever collapsed before it.
Realist , April 30, 2019 at 02:08
"ex·tor·tion /ik?stôrSH(?)n/ noun The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats."
"Racketeering refers to crimes committed through extortion or coercion. A racketeer attempts to obtain money or property from
another person, usually through intimidation or force. The term is typically associated with organized crime."
I see. So, American foreign policy, as applied to both its alleged enemies and presumed allies, essentially amounts to an exercise
in organised crime. So much for due process, free trade, peaceful co-existence, magical rainbows and other such hypocritical platitudes
dispensed for domestic consumption in place of the heavy-handed threats routinely delivered to Washington's targets.
That's quite in keeping with the employment of war crimes as standard "tactics, techniques and procedures" on the battlefield
which was recently admitted to us by Senator Jim Molan on the "60 Minutes" news show facsimile and discussed in one of yesterday's
forums on this blog.
Afghanistan was promised a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs as incentive to bend to our will (and that of Unocal which,
unlike Nordstream, was a pipeline Washington wanted built). Iraq was promised and delivered "shock and awe" after a secretary
of state had declared the mass starvation of that country's children as well worth the effort. They still can't find all the pieces
left of the Libyan state. Syria was told it would be stiffed on any American contribution to its rebuilding for the effrontery
of actually beating back the American-recruited, trained and financed ISIS terrorist brigades. Now it's being deliberately starved
of both its energy and food requirements by American embargoes on its own resources! North Korea was promised utter annihilation
by Yankee nukes before Kim's summit with our great leader unless it submitted totally to his will, or more likely that of Pompous
Pompeo, the man who pulls his strings. Venezuela is treated to cyber-hacked power outages and shortages of food, medicines, its
own gold bullion, income from its own international petroleum sales and, probably because someone in Washington thinks it's funny,
even toilet paper. All they have to do to get relief is kick out the president they elected and replace him with Washington's
chosen puppet! Yep, freedom and democracy blah, blah, blah. And don't even ask what the kids in Yemen got for Christmas from Uncle
Sam this year. (He probably stole their socks.) A real American patriot will laughingly take Iran to task for ever believing in
the first place that Washington could be negotiated with in good faith. All they had to do was ask the Native Americans (or the
Russians) how the Yanks keep their word and honor their treaties. It was their own fault they were taken for suckers.
"... Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious. It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest of the wealthy. ..."
"... America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla. ..."
"... Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators; it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending your kids to die. Never. ..."
Idealistic Realist , Apr 27, 2019 1:24:45 PM |
link
Best analysis by a candidate for POTUS ever:
American foreign policy is not a failure. To comfort themselves, observers often say that our leaders -- presidents, advisors,
generals -- don't know what they're doing. They do know. Their agenda just isn't what we like to imagine it is.
To quote Michael Parenti: "US policy is not filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly
and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own all of it."
The vision of our leaders as bunglers, while more accurate than the image of them as valiant public servants, is less accurate
and more rose-tinted than the closest approximation of the truth, which is that they are servants of their class interest.
That is why we go to war.
Those who buy the elite class's foreign policy BS, about the Emmanuel Goldsteins they conjure up every three years, are
fools. Obviously Hussein and Milošević were bad; but "government bad" does not mean we must invade. Wars occur for economic,
not humanitarian, reasons.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is a kleptocrat, murderer, and alleged cannibal. This is
him and his wife with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, was said to have boiled political prisoners to death, massacred hundreds
of prisoners, and made torture an institution. This is him with John Kerry.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, has been involved in the assassination of political opponents, perpetrated obvious
election fraud, and had his term extended until 2034. This is him with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious.
It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest
of the wealthy.
America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian
reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support
Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla.
Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators;
it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending
your kids to die. Never.
"... Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal' mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore. ..."
"... Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning, the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a series of impossible demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with Qatar not long ago ..."
"... Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. ..."
"... Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia. ..."
"... Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way. ..."
"... False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army. On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media ..."
As a history student years ago I remember our teacher explaining how past events are linked to what happens in the future. He
told us human behaviour always dictates that events will repeat in a similar way as before. I remember we studied 20th century history
and discussed World War I and the links to World War II. At this time, we were in the middle of the Cold War and in unchartered waters
and I couldn't really link past events to what was likely to happen next. Back then I guess like many I considered US presidents
more as statesman. They talked tough on the Soviet Union but they talked peace too. So, the threat to humanity was very different
then to now. Dangerous but perhaps a stable kind of dangerous. After the break up of the Soviet Union we then went through a phase
of disorderly change in the world. In the early 1990s the war in the Former Yugoslavia erupted and spread from republic to republic.
Up until the mid-to-late nineties I didn't necessarily sense that NATO and the West were the new threat to humanity. While there
was a clear bias to events in Yugoslavia there was still some even-handedness or fairness. Or so I thought. This all changed in 1999
with the war in Kosovo. For the first time I witnessed shocking images of civilian targets being bombed, TV stations, trains, bridges
and so on. But my wake-up call was the daily NATO briefings on the war. The NATO spokesman boasted of hundreds of Serbian tanks being
destroyed. There was something new and disturbing about his manner, language and tone, something I'd not encountered from coverage
of previous conflicts. For the first time I found myself not believing one word of the narrative.
When the peace agreement was reached, out of 300 Serbian tanks which had entered Kosovo at the start of the conflict, over 285
were counted going back into Serbia proper which was
confirmation he had been
lying .
From this conflict onwards I started to see clear parallels with events of the past and some striking similarities with the lead
up to previous world wars. This all hit home when observing events in Syria and more recently Venezuala. But looking around seeing
people absorbed in their phones you wouldn't think the world is on the brink of war. For most of us with little time to watch world
events there are distractions which have obscured the picture historians and geopolitical experts see more clearly.
Recent and current
western leaders haven't been short people in military uniform shouting. That would be far too obvious. It's still military conflict
and mass murder but in smart suits with liberal sound-bites and high-fives. Then the uncool, uncouth conservative Trump came along
and muddied the waters.
Briefly it seemed there might be hope that these wars would stop. But there can be little doubt he's been
put under pressure to comply with the regime change culture embedded in the Deep State. Today, through their incendiary language
we see US leaders morphing into the open style dictators of the past. The only thing missing are the military uniforms and hats.
Every US military action and ultimatum to a foreign state has been aggressively pushed by the losing Democrats and particularly 'liberal'
mainstream media, any dissent met with smears, censorship or worse. I would argue that today similarities with events leading up
to previous global conflicts are too striking and numerous to ignore.
Let's look at some of these:
1) Military build up, alliances and proxy wars – for all the chaos and mass murder pursued by the Obama Administration he did
achieve limited successes in signing agreements with Iran and Cuba. But rather than reverse the endless wars as promised Trump cancels
the agreements leaving the grand sum of zilch foreign policy achievements. NATO has been around for 70 years, but in the last 20
or so has become obsessed with military build up. Nowadays it has hundreds of bases around the world but keeps destablising non-aligned
states, partly to isolate Russia and China. And Syria sums up the dangers of the regime change model used today. With over a dozen
states involved in the proxy war there is a still high risk of conflict breaking out between US and Russia. The motives for military
build up are many. First there are powerful people in the arms industry and media who benefit financially from perpetual war. The
US while powerful in military terms are a declining power which will continue, new powers emerging. The only return on their money
they can see is through military build up. Also there are many in government, intelligence services and media who can see that if
the current order continues to crumble they are likely to be prosecuted for various crimes. All this explains the threatening language
and the doubling-down on those who challenge them. In 1914, Europe had two backward thinking military alliance blocks and Sarajevo
showed how one event could trigger an unstoppable escalation dragging in many states. And empires such as Austro-Hungary were crumbling
from within as they are now. So a similar mentality prevails today where the powerful in these empires under threat favour conflict
to peace. For these individuals it's a last throw of the dice and a gamble with all our lives.
2) Israel and its US relationship – I think Syria is where global conflict is still likely to start. As Syria has been winning,
the involvement of Turkey and Saudi Arabia appears to receding. More recently Israel have taken their place and is relentless and
unyielding and has its own wider, destructive plans for the Middle East. Israeli influence in the US is now so great that the US
has more or less ceded its foreign policy in the Middle East to Israel. In 1914 Austro-Hungary pursued a
series of impossible
demands against Serbia managing to drag its close and more powerful ally Germany (led by someone equally as obstinate and militaristic
as the US leadership) into World War I. Incidentally, some readers may have noticed the similarity between the 1914 diktats and modern-day
US bullying towards Venezuala and other states – and perhaps most striking, by Saudi Arabia in its dispute with
Qatar not long ago.
3) Ideology, paranoia and unstable leaders – history tells us that ideology, paranoia and power are not a good mix and this is
in abundance in western elites and media. These establishments are rabidly hostile to Iran and Russia. In addition we face a situation
of highly unpredictable, ideological regional leaders in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Israel. Most worrying of all, the language, threats
and actions of Trump, Pompeo and Bolton suggests there are psychopathic tendencies in play. Behind this is a Deep State and Democrat
Party pushing even harder for conflict. The level of paranoia is discouraging any notion of peace. 30 years ago Russia and US would
sit down at a summit and reach a consensus. Today a US leader or diplomat seen talking to a Russian official is accused of collusion.
When there are limited channels to talk in a crisis, you know we are in trouble. In Germany in the 1930s, ideology, propaganda and
creating enemies were key in getting the population on side for war. The leaders within the Nazi clique, Hitler, Goring and Himmler
look disturbingly similar to the Trump, Pompeo, Bolton line up.
4) Media deception and propaganda – The media have been responsible for getting us to where we are today. Without them, the public
would have woken up long ago. Much of the deception has been about the presentation of the narrative and the leaders. And it's been
a campaign of distraction on our news where the daily genocide in Yemen gives way to sensationalised non-events and celebrity trivia.
The terms and words; regime change, mass murder and terrorist have all been substituted by the media with 'humanitarian intervention',
'limited airstrikes' and 'moderate rebels' to fool a distracted public that the victims of the aggression are the bad guys. Western
funded 'fact checking' sites such as Bellingcat have appeared pushing the misdirections to a surreal new level. Obama was portayed
in the media as a cool guy and a little 'soft' on foreign policy. This despite the carnage in Libya, Syria and his drones. Sentiments
of equal rights and diversity fill the home affairs sections in the liberal press, while callous indifference and ethno-centrism
towards the Middle East and Russia dominate foreign affairs pages. In the press generally, BREXIT, non-existent anti-Semitism and
nonsense about the 'ISIS bride' continues unabated. This media circus seeks to distract from important matters, using these topics
to create pointless divisions, causing hostility towards Muslims and Jews in the process. The majority of a distracted public have
still not twigged largely because the propaganda is more subtle nowadays and presented under a false humanitarian cloak. A small
but vocal group of experts and journalists challenging these narratives are regularly smeared as
Putin
or Assad "apologists" . UK journalists are regularly caught out lying and some long standing hoaxes such as Russiagate exposed.
Following this and Iraq WMDs more people are starting to see a pattern here. Yet each time the media in the belief they've bamboozled
enough move on to the next big lie. This a sign of a controlled media which has reached the point of being unaccountable and untouchable,
deeply embedded within the establishment apparatus. In the lead up to World War II the Nazis ran an effective media propaganda campaign
which indoctrinated the population. The media in Germany also reached the point their blindingly obvious lies were rarely questioned.
The classic tactic was to blame others for the problems in Germany and the world and project their crimes on to their victims. There
are some differences as things have evolved. The Nazis created the media and state apparatus to pursue war. Nowadays this is the
opposite way around. Instead the state apparatus is already in place so whoever is leader whether they describe themself as liberal
or conservative, is merely a figurehead required to continue the same pro-war policies. Put a fresh-looking president in a shiny
suit and intoduce him to the Queen and you wouldn't think he's the biggest mass murderer since Hitler. Although there are some differences
in the propaganda techniques, all the signs are that today's media are on a similar war-footing as Germany's was just prior to the
outbreak of World War II.
5) Appeasement – because of its relative weakness and not wanting a war, Russia has to some extent appeased Western and Israeli
aggression in Syria and beyond. To be fair, given the aggression it faces I don't think Russia has had much choice than playing for
time. However at some point soon, with the West pushing more and more, something will have to give. Likewise, in the 1930s a militarily
unprepared UK and France appeased Germany's expansion. The more they backed off the more Germany pushed until war was the only way.
6) False flags – for those watching events in Syria know that the majority of the 'chemical attacks' have been carried out by
Western supported opposition. The timing and nature of these suggest co-ordination at the highest levels. Intelligence Services of
the UK and other agencies are believed to co-ordinate these fabrications to provoke a western response aimed at the Syrian Army.
On more than one occasion these incidents have nearly escalated to a direct conflict with Russia showing the dangerous game being
played by those involved and those pushing the false narrative in the media. The next flashpoint in Syria is Idlib, where it's highly
likely a new chemical fabrication will be attempted this Spring. In the 1930s the Nazis were believed to use false flags with increasing
frequency to discredit and close down internal opposition. Summary – We now live in a society where exposing warmongering is a more
serious crime than committing it. Prisons hold many people who have bravely exposed war crimes – yet most criminals continue to walk
free and hold positions of power. And when the media is pushing for Julian Assange to be extradicted you know this is beyond simple
envy of a man who has almost single-handedly done the job they've collectively failed to do. They are equally complicit in warmongering
hence why they see Assange and others as a threat. For those not fooled by the smart suits, liberal platitudes and media distraction
techniques, the parallels with Germany in the 1930s in particular are now fairly obvious. The blundering military alliances of 1914
and the pure evil of 1939 – with the ignorance, indifference and narcissism described above make for a destructive mix. Unless something
changes soon our days on this planet are likely be numbered. Depressing but one encouraging thing is that the indisputable truth
is now in plain sight for anyone with internet access to see and false narratives have collapsed before. It's still conceivable that
something may create a whole chain of events which sweep these dangerous parasites from power. So anything can happen. In the meantime
we should keep positive and continue to spread the message.
Kevin Smith is a British citizen living and working in London. He researches and writes down his thoughts on the foreign wars
promoted by Western governments and media. In the highly controlled and dumbed down UK media environment, he's keen on exploring
ways of discouraging ideology and tribalism in favour of free thinking.
2- 'Israel and its US relationship'. The 'hands off' policy of the Western powers, guarantees that Syria cannot even be a trigger
to any 'global conflict', supposing that a 'global conflict' was on the cards, especially when Russia is just a crumbling shadow
of the USSR and China a giant with feet of clay, heavily dependent on Western oligarchic goodwill, to maintain its economy and
its technological progress.
In 1914, the Serbian crisis was just trigger of WWI and not a true cause. It is not even clear if it was Germany that dragged
Austria-Hungary into the war or Russia. Although there was a possibility (only a possibility), that a swift and 'illegal' attack
by Austria-Hungary (without an ultimatum), would have localised and contained the conflict.
There is no similarity whatsoever between the 1914 'diktats' and modern US policy, as the US is the sole Superpower and its
acts are not opposed by a balancing and corresponding alliance. Save in the Chinese colony of North Korea, where the US is restrained
by a tacit alliance of the North Eastern Asiatic powers: China, Russia, Japan and South Korea, that oppose any military action
and so promote and protect North Korean bullying. Qatar, on the other hand, is one of the most radical supporters of the Syrian
opposition and terrorist groups around the muslim world, even more than Saudi Arabia and there are powerful reasons for the confrontation
of the Gulf rivals.
You should go back in Time and STUDY what really happened .. that means going back to the Creation of the socalled British Empire
..the Bank of England , the British East Indian Company , the Opium Wars and the Opium Trafficing , the Boer Wars for Gold and
Diamonds , the US Civil War and its aftermath , the manipulations of Gold and Silver by socalled british Financial Interests ,
The US Spanish Wars , the Japanese Russian War , the failed Coup against Czar Russia 1905 , the Young Turk Coup against the Ottoman
Empire 1908, the Armenian Genocide , the Creation of the Federal Reserve 1913 , the Multitude of Assinations and other Terror
Attacks in the period from 1900 and upwards , WHO were the perpetraders ? , , WW 1 and its originators , the Bolshevik Coup 1917
, the Treaty of Versailles and the Actors in that Treaty ,the Plunder of Germany , the dissolution of Austria Hungary , the Bolshevik
Coup attempts all over Europe , and then the run up to WW 2 , the Actions of Poland agianst Germans and Czechs .. Hitler , Musolini
and finally WW 2 .the post war period , the Nuernberg Trials , the Holocaust Mythology , the Creation of Israel , Gladio , the
Fall of the Sovjet Empire and the Warshav Pact , the Wars in the Middle East , the endless Terror Actions , the murder of Kennedy
and a mass of False Flag Terrorist Attacks since then , the destruction of the Balkans and the Middle east THERE IS PLENTY of
EXCELLENT LITERATURE and ANALYSIS on all subjects .
It was your Obama that 'persecuted' Mr Assange !!!
Syria demonstrates that there has NOT been a Western strategy for regime change (specially after the 'defeats' in Iraq and
Afghanistan), let alone a proxy war, but, on the contrary, an effort to keep the tyranny of Assad in power, in a weaker state,
to avoid any strong, 'revolutionary' rival near Israel. Russia has been given a free hand in Syria, otherwise, if the West had
properly armed the resistance groups, it would have been a catastrophe for the Russian forces, like it was in Afghanistan during
the Soviet intervention.
Trump's policy of 'equal' (proportional) contributions for all members of NATO and other allies, gives the lie to the US military
return 'argument' and should be understood as part of his war on unfair competition by other powers.
The 'military' and diplomatic alliances of 1914 were FORWARD thinking, so much so that they 'repeated' themselves during WWII,
with slight changes. But it is very doubtful that the Empires, like the Austro-Hungarian o the Russian ones, would have 'crumbled'
without the outbreak of WWI. They were never under threat, as their military power during the war showed. Only a World War of
cataclysmic character could destroy them. A war, triggered, but not created, by the 'conflict seeking mentality' of the powerful
in the small countries of the Balkans.
Generally attributed to Senator Hiram Warren Johnson in 1918 that 'when war comes the first casualty is truth' is as much a truism
now as it was then.
I'm more inclined to support hauptmanngurski's proposition that the members of the armed forces, from both sides, who return
from conflicts with life-changing injuries or even in flag-draped caskets defended only the freedom of multinational enterprises
and conglomerates to make and continue to make vast profits for the privileged few at the population's expense.
As Kevin Smith makes abundantly clear we are all subject to the downright lies and truth-stretching from our government aided
and abetted by a compliant main stream media as exemplified in the Skripal poisoning affair, which goes far beyond the counting
of Serbian tanks supposedly destroyed during the Balkans conflict. The Skripals' are now God knows where either as willing participants
or as detainees and our government shows no signs of clarifying the matter, so who would believe what it put out anyway in view
of its track record of misinformation ? The nation doesn't know what to believe.
Sadly, I believe this has always been the way of things and I cannot even speculate on how long it will be before this nation
will realise it is being deliberately mis-led.
New book by David NorthA Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016
Notable quotes:
"... "Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly." ..."
"... Typical American philosophy... "War is peace!"... ..."
We publish here the preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North.
The book will be published on August 10, and is available for preorder today at Mehring Books in both
softcover
and hardcover
.
***
"In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than
in the period of boom."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1928
"U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must
be redivided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.' The United States must 'organize' the world. History is bringing
mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1934
This volume consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response
of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 1990–91. The
analyses of events presented here, although written as they were unfolding, stand the test of time. The International Committee does
not possess a crystal ball. But its work is informed by a Marxist understanding of the contradictions of American and world imperialism.
Moreover, the Marxist method of analysis examines events not as a sequence of isolated episodes, but as moments in the unfolding
of a broader historical process. This historically oriented approach serves as a safeguard against an impressionistic response to
the latest political developments. It recognizes that the essential cause of an event is rarely apparent at the moment of
its occurrence.
Much of what passes for analysis in the bourgeois press consists of nothing more than equating an impressionistic description
of a given event with its deeper cause. This sort of political analysis legitimizes US wars as necessary responses to one or another
personification of evil, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the "warlord" Farah Aideed in Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Osama
bin Laden of Al Qaeda, the Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; and, most recently, Bashar al Assad in Syria, Kim
Jong Un in Korea, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. New names are continually added to the United States' infinitely expandable list
of monsters requiring destruction.
The material in this volume is the record of a very different and far more substantial approach to the examination of the foreign
policy of the United States.
First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in
1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the entire global nation-state system, as it
emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown of the established postwar equilibrium would
lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism. As far back as August 1990 -- twenty-six years ago -- it was able to foresee
the long-term implications of the Bush administration's war against Iraq:
It marks the beginning of a new imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means the end of the
postcolonial era. As it proclaims the "failure of socialism," the imperialist bourgeoisie, in deeds if not yet in words, proclaims
the failure of independence. The deepening crisis confronting all the major imperialist powers compels them to secure control
over strategic resources and markets. Former colonies, which had achieved a degree of political independence, must be resubjugated.
In its brutal assault against Iraq, imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of unrestrained domination
of the backward countries that existed prior to World War II. [
1 ]
This historically grounded analysis provided the essential framework for an understanding, not only of the 1990–91 Gulf War, but
also of the wars that were launched later in the decade, as well as the post-9/11 "War on Terror."
In a recently published front-page article, the New York Times called attention to a significant milestone in the presidency
of Barack Obama: "He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president." But with several months remaining
in his term in office, he is on target to set yet another record. The Times wrote:
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama's term -- a near-certainty
given the president's recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria -- he will leave
behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war. [
2 ]
On the way to setting his record, Mr. Obama has overseen lethal military actions in a total of seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The number of countries is growing, as the United States escalates its military operations
in Africa. The efforts to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency involve a buildup of US forces in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad.
Without any sense of irony, Mark Landler, author of the Times article, notes Obama's status as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
in 2009. He portrays the president as "trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate. . . ." Obama "has wrestled
with this immutable reality [of war] from his first year in the White House . . ."
Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the
order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize,
in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes
necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
During the Obama years, folly has clearly held the upper hand. But there is nothing that Landler's hero can do. Obama has found
his wars "maddeningly hard to end."
The Times ' portrayal of Obama lacks the essential element required by genuine tragedy: the identification of objective
forces, beyond his control, that frustrated and overwhelmed the lofty ideals and humanitarian aspirations of the president. If Mr.
Landler wants his readers to shed a tear for this peace-loving man who, upon becoming president, made drone killings his personal
specialty, and turned into something akin to a moral monster, the Times correspondent should have attempted to identify the
historical circumstances that determined Obama's "tragic" fate.
But this is a challenge the Times avoids. It fails to relate Obama's war-making record to the entire course of American
foreign policy over the past quarter century. Even before Obama entered office in 2009, the United States had been at war on an almost
continuous basis since the first US-Iraq War of 1990–91.
The pretext for the Gulf War was Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. But the violent US reaction to Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein's dispute with the emir of Kuwait was determined by broader global conditions and considerations. The historical context
of the US military operation was the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was finally carried out in December 1991. The
first President Bush declared the beginning of a "New World Order." [
3 ] What Bush meant by this phrase was
that the United States was now free to restructure the world in the interests of the American capitalist class, unencumbered by either
the reality of the countervailing military power of the Soviet Union or the specter of socialist revolution. The dissolution of the
USSR, hailed by Francis Fukuyama as the "End of History," signified for the strategists of American imperialism the end of military
restraint.
It is one of the great ironies of history that the definitive emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power,
amid the catastrophe of World War I, coincided with the outbreak of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which culminated in the establishment
of the first socialist workers state in history, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. On April 3, 1917, President Woodrow
Wilson delivered his war message to the US Congress and led the United States into the global imperialist conflict. Two weeks later,
V.I. Lenin returned to Russia, which was in the throes of revolution, and reoriented the Bolshevik Party toward the fight to overthrow
the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin and his principal political ally, Leon Trotsky, insisted that the struggle for socialism was indissolubly linked to the
struggle against war. As the historian R. Craig Nation has argued:
For Lenin there was no doubt that the revolution was the result of a crisis of imperialism and that the dilemmas which it posed
could only be resolved on the international level. The campaign for proletarian hegemony in Russia, the fight against the war,
and the international struggle against imperialism were now one and the same. [
4 ]
Just as the United States was striving to establish its position as the arbiter of the world's destiny, it faced a challenge,
in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, not only to the authority of American imperialism, but also to the economic, political,
and even moral legitimacy of the entire capitalist world order. "The rhetoric and actions of the Bolsheviks," historian Melvyn P.
Leffler has written, "ignited fear, revulsion and uncertainty in Washington." [
5 ]
Another perceptive historian of US foreign policy explained:
The great majority of American leaders were so deeply concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution because they were so uneasy about
what President Wilson called the "general feeling of revolt" against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of
that dissatisfaction. The Bolshevik Revolution became in their minds the symbol of all the revolutions that grew out of that discontent.
And that is perhaps the crucial insight into the tragedy of American diplomacy. [
6 ]
In a desperate effort to destroy the new revolutionary regime, Wilson sent an expeditionary force to Russia in 1918, in support
of counterrevolutionary forces in the brutal civil war. The intervention was an ignominious failure.
It was not until 1933 that the United States finally granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The diplomatic rapprochement
was facilitated in part by the fact that the Soviet regime, now under Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship, was in the process of repudiating
the revolutionary internationalism that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was abandoning the perspective of world revolution
in favor of alliances with imperialist states on the basis of "collective security." Unable to secure such an alliance with Britain
and France, Stalin signed the notorious Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, and the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941, the exigencies of the struggle against
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan required that the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forge a military alliance
with the Soviet Union. But once Germany and Japan were defeated, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly
deteriorated. The Truman administration, opposing the extension of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe, and frightened by the growth
of Communist parties in Western Europe, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 and triggered the onset of the Cold War.
The Kremlin regime pursued nationalistic policies, based on the Stalinist program of "socialism in one country," and betrayed
working class and anti-imperialist movements all over the world. But the very existence of a regime that arose out of a socialist
revolution had a politically radicalizing impact throughout the world. William Appleman Williams was certainly correct in his view
that "American leaders were for many, many years more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were
of the actual power of the Soviet Union." [
7 ]
In the decades that followed World War II, the United States was unable to ignore the existence of the Soviet Union. To the extent
that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which was established in 1949, provided limited political and material
support to anti-imperialist movements in the "Third World," they denied the US ruling class a free hand in the pursuit of its own
interests. These limitations were demonstrated -- to cite the most notable examples -- by the US defeats in Korea and Vietnam, the
compromise settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, and the acceptance of Soviet domination of the Baltic region and Eastern Europe.
The existence of the Soviet Union and an anticapitalist regime in China deprived the United States of the possibility of unrestricted
access to and exploitation of the human labor, raw materials, and potential markets of a large portion of the globe, especially the
Eurasian land mass. It compelled the United States to compromise, to a greater degree than it would have preferred, in negotiations
over economic and strategic issues with its major allies in Europe and Asia, as well as with smaller countries that exploited the
tactical opportunities provided by the US-Soviet Cold War.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, combined with the restoration of capitalism in China following the Tiananmen
Square massacre of June 1989, was seen by the American ruling class as an opportunity to repudiate the compromises of the post-World
War II era, and to carry out a restructuring of global geopolitics, with the aim of establishing the hegemony of the United States.
There was no small element of self-delusion in the grandiose American response to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The bombastic
claims that the United States had won the Cold War were based far more on myth than reality. In fact, the sudden dissolution of the
Soviet Union took the entire Washington foreign policy establishment by surprise. In February 1987, the Council on Foreign Relations
published an assessment of US-Soviet relations, authored by two of its most eminent Sovietologists, Strobe Talbott and Michael Mandelbaum.
Analyzing the discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at meetings in Geneva and Reykjavik in 1986, the two experts concluded:
No matter how Gorbachev comes to define perestroika in practice and no matter how he modifies the official definition
of security, the Soviet Union will resist pressure for change, whether it comes from without or within, from the top or the bottom.
The fundamental conditions of Soviet-American relations are therefore likely to persist. This, in turn, means that the ritual
of Soviet-American summitry is likely to have a long run. . . . [
8 ]
The "long run," Talbott and Mandelbaum predicted, would continue not only during the reign of "Gorbachev's successor," but also
his "successor's successor." No substantial changes in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were to be expected.
The two prophets from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded:
Whoever they are, and whatever changes have occurred in the meantime, the American and Soviet leaders of the next century will
be wrestling with the same great issue -- how to manage their rivalry so as to avoid nuclear catastrophe -- that has engaged the
energies, in the latter half of the 1980s, of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. [
9 ]
In contrast to the Washington experts, who foresaw nothing, the International Committee recognized that the Gorbachev regime marked
a climactic stage in the crisis of Stalinism. "The crisis of Gorbachev," it declared in a statement dated March 23, 1987, "has emerged
as every section of world Stalinism confronts economic convulsions and upheavals by the masses. In every case -- from Beijing to
Belgrade -- the response of the Stalinist bureaucrats has been to turn ever more openly toward capitalist restorationism." [
10 ]
The Cold War victory narrative encouraged, within the ruling elite, a disastrous overestimation of the power and potential of
American capitalism. The drive for hegemony assumed the ability of the US to contain the economic and political centrifugal forces
unleashed by the operation of global capitalism. Even at the height of its power, such an immense project was well beyond the capacities
of the United States. But amid the euphoria generated by the end of the Soviet Union, the ruling class chose to ignore the deep-rooted
and protracted crisis of American society. An objective observer, examining the conditions of both the United States and the Soviet
Union between 1960 and 1990, might well have wondered which regime was in greater crisis. During the three decades that preceded
the dissolution of the USSR, the United States exhibited high levels of political, social, and economic instability.
Consider the fate of the presidential administrations in power during those three decades: (1) The Kennedy administration ended
tragically in November 1963 with a political assassination, in the midst of escalating social tensions and international crises;
(2) Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was unable to seek reelection in 1968, as a result of urban riots and mass opposition
to the US invasion of Vietnam; (3) Richard Nixon was compelled to resign from office in August 1974, after the House of Representatives'
Judiciary Committee voted for his impeachment on charges related to his criminal subversion of the Constitution; (4) Gerald Ford,
who became president upon Nixon's resignation, was defeated in the November 1976 election amid popular revulsion over Nixon's crimes
and the US military debacle in Vietnam; (5) Jimmy Carter's one term in office was dominated by an inflationary crisis that sent the
federal prime interest rate to 20 percent, a bitter three month national coal miners strike, and the aftershocks generated by the
Iranian Revolution; and (6) Ronald Reagan's years in office, despite all the ballyhoo about "morning in America," were characterized
by recession, bitter social tension, and a series of foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Central America. The exposure
of an illegal scheme to finance paramilitary operations in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra crisis) brought Reagan to the very brink of
impeachment. His administration was saved by the leadership of the Democratic Party, which had no desire to remove from office a
president who was politically weakened and already exhibiting signs of dementia.
The one persistent factor that confronted all these administrations, from Kennedy to Reagan, was the erosion in the global economic
position of the United States. The unquestioned dominance of American finance and industry at the end of World War II provided the
economic underpinnings of the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility that formed the basis of global capitalist growth
and stability. By the late 1950s, the system was coming under increasing strain. It was during the Kennedy administration that unfavorable
tendencies in the US balance of trade first began to arouse significant concern. On August 15, 1971, Nixon suddenly ended the Bretton
Woods system of fixed international exchange rates, pegged to a US dollar convertible at the rate of $35 per ounce of gold. During
the 1970s and 1980s, the decline in the exchange rate of the dollar mirrored the deterioration of the American economy.
The belligerent response of the United States to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union reflected the weakness, not the strength,
of American capitalism. The overwhelming support within the ruling elite for a highly aggressive foreign policy arose from the delusion
that the United States could reverse the protracted erosion of its global economic position through the deployment of its immense
military power.
The Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by the Department of Defense in February 1992, unambiguously asserted the hegemonic ambitions
of US imperialism:
There are other potential nations or coalitions that could, in the further future, develop strategic aims and a defense posture
of region-wide or global domination. Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global
competitor. [ 11 ]
The 1990s saw a persistent use of US military power, most notably in the first Gulf War, followed by its campaign to break up
Yugoslavia. The brutal restructuring of the Balkan states, which provoked a fratricidal civil war, culminated in the US-led 1999
bombing campaign to compel Serbia to accept the secession of the province of Kosovo. Other major military operations during that
decade included the intervention in Somalia, which ended in disaster, the military occupation of Haiti, the bombing of Sudan and
Afghanistan, and repeated bombing attacks on Iraq.
The events of September 11, 2001 provided the opportunity to launch the "War on Terror," a propaganda slogan that provided an
all-purpose justification for military operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and, with increasing frequency, Africa.
They furnished the Bush administration with a pretext to institutionalize war as a legitimate and normal instrument of American foreign
policy.
The administration of the second President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. In speeches that followed
9/11, Bush used the phrase "wars of the twenty-first century." In this case, the normally inarticulate president spoke with precision.
The "War on Terror" was, from the beginning, conceived as an unending series of military operations all over the globe. One war would
necessarily lead to another. Afghanistan proved to be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Iraq.
The military strategy of the United States was revised in line with the new doctrine of "preventive warfare," adopted by the US
in 2002. This doctrine, which violated existing international law, decreed that the United States could attack any country in the
world judged to pose a potential threat -- not only of a military, but also of an economic character -- to American interests.
In a verbal sleight of hand, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive war, undertaken in
response to the imminent threat posed by the country's "weapons of mass destruction" to the national security of the United States.
Of course, the threat was as non-existent as were Saddam Hussein's WMDs. In any event, the Bush administration rendered the distinction
between preemptive and preventive war meaningless, by asserting the right of the United States to attack any country, regardless
of the existence or non-existence of an imminent threat to American national security. Whatever the terminology employed for propaganda
purposes by American presidents, the United States adheres to the illegal doctrine of preventive war.
The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation
of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext
was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the
US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are
component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.
It is through the prism of America's efforts to assert control of the strategically critical Eurasian landmass, that the essential
significance of the events of 1990–91 is being revealed. But this latest stage in the ongoing struggle for world hegemony, which
lies at the heart of the conflict with Russia and China, is bringing to the forefront latent and potentially explosive tensions between
the United States and its present-day imperialist allies, including -- to name the most significant potential adversary -- Germany.
The two world wars of the twentieth century were not the product of misunderstandings. The past is prologue. As the International
Committee foresaw in 1990–91, the American bid for global hegemony has rekindled interimperialist rivalries simmering beneath the
surface of world politics. Within Europe, dissatisfaction with the US role as the final arbiter of world affairs is being openly
voiced. In a provocative essay, published in Foreign Affairs , the journal of the authoritative US Council on Foreign Relations,
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has bluntly challenged Washington's presumption of US global dominance:
As the United States reeled from the effects of the Iraq war and the EU struggled through a series of crises, Germany held
its ground. . . .
Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership. The 2003 invasion of Iraq damaged the
United States' standing in the world. After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence ripped Iraq apart, and U.S. power
in the region began to weaken. Not only did the George W. Bush administration fail to reorder the region through force, but the
political, economic, and soft-power costs of this adventure undermined the United States' overall position. The illusion of a
unipolar world faded. [ 12 ]
In a rebuke to the United States, Steinmeier writes: "Our historical experience has destroyed any belief in national exceptionalism
-- for any nation." [ 13 ]
The journalists and academics, who work within the framework of the official narrative of the defense of human rights and the
"War on Terror," cannot explain the progression of conflicts, from the 1990–91 Gulf War, to the current expansion of NATO eight hundred
miles eastward, and the American "pivot to Asia." On a regular basis, the United States and its allies stage war games in Eastern
Europe, in close proximity to the borders of Russia, and in strategically critical waters off the coast of China. It is not difficult
to conceive of a situation in which events -- either as a result of deliberate calculation or of reckless miscalculation -- erupt
into a clash between nuclear-armed powers. In 2014, as the centenary of World War I approached, a growing number of scholarly papers
called attention to the similarities between the conditions that precipitated the disaster of August 1914 and present-day tensions.
One parallel between today and 1914 is the growing sense among political and military strategists that war between the United
States and China and/or Russia may be inevitable. As this fatalistic premise increasingly informs the judgments and actions of the
key decision makers at the highest level of the state, it becomes a dynamic factor that makes the actual outbreak of war more likely.
A specialist in international geopolitics has recently written:
Once war is assumed to be unavoidable, the calculations of leaders and militaries change. The question is no longer whether
there will or should be a war, but when the war can be fought most advantageously. Even those neither eager for nor optimistic
about war may opt to fight when operating in the framework of inevitability. [
14 ]
Not since the end of World War II has there existed so great a danger of world war. The danger is heightened by the fact that
the level of popular awareness of the threat remains very limited. What percentage of the American population, one must ask, realizes
that President Barack Obama has formally committed the United States to go to war in defense of Estonia, in the event of a conflict
between the small Baltic country and Russia? The media has politely refrained from asking the president to state how many human beings
would die in the event of a nuclear war between the United States and either Russia or China, or both at the same time.
On the eve of World War II, Leon Trotsky warned that a catastrophe threatened the entire culture of mankind. He was proven correct.
Within less than a decade, the Second World War claimed the lives of more than fifty million people. The alarm must once again be
sounded. The working class and youth within the United States and throughout the world must be told the truth.
The progressive development of a globally integrated world economy is incompatible with capitalism and the nation-state system.
If war is to be stopped and a global catastrophe averted, a new and powerful mass international movement, based on a socialist program,
and strategically guided by the principles of revolutionary class struggle, must be built. In opposition to imperialist geopolitics,
in which national states fight brutally for regional and global dominance, the International Committee counterposes the strategy
of world socialist revolution. As Trotsky advised, we "follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle. . . ." [
15 ]
In the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were mass protests against the war policies of the United States and
its allies. Millions took to the streets. But after the war began, public opposition virtually disappeared. The absence of popular
protest did not signify support for the war. Rather, it reflected the repudiation, by the old middle-class protest movement, of its
former Vietnam-era opposition to imperialism.
There are mounting signs of political radicalization among significant sections of the working class and youth. It is only a matter
of time before this radicalization gives rise to conscious opposition to war. It is the aim of this volume to impart to the new antiwar
movement a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective and program.
The quotes from Trotsky are glaring. These and others were used to argue against socialism in the post war decades, but all that
was needed was time and the working of the forces of capitalism itself. History never ended, it is right on schedule
"Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving
the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel
Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that
war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
VI lenin crushed the Krondstadt rebellion that was the true 'soviet union' model and instituted a hard right revolutionary regime
of ruthless dictatorial control from smolny, not a workers state. The US borgeouis (and french and english) intervened to keep
russia in the war and 160 german divisions from leaving the eastern front. The threat of a workers state was not the concern of
the victors. The failure of revolutionary russia to represent what this article is propping it up to be (some kind of genuine
workers state) leaves me deeply suspect about the other conclusions he's bent history to. Anyone who's read "2 years in russia"
by emma goldman, and "the victors dilemma" - john silverlight and any number of books on the russian civil war, it is clear that
the intervention was for military tactical reasons and that the nascient state was in no ways a workers state but a totalitarian
military dictatorship. Emma Goldman's disillusionment is not her falling out of love with her ideals, but her coming to terms
with the reality vs the PR of Russia. Which is why this website (Wsws) advertised a book repudiating the rejection of socialism
with the faiure of the soviet union as a false narrative a year or few ago.
The historical memoir is clear, diaries, memos, news articles, and the Western soldier revolts, time to smash the revolution.
Kronstadt was a tragedy, but the regime was under threat. history is messy.
I can imagine that
the leadership of imperialist countries was underestimating the bolsheviks in 1917, but once the Russian revolution had given
enough confidence to the German masses to make the war stop one year later, once the French black sea fleet had rebelled in 1919,
etc... they were all very conscious of the risks (potential risks, not immediate threats).
The evidence in favour of what Trotsky wrote about Kronstadt is simply overwhelming. A cmd above gave some basic evidence. Trotsky
was absolutely right and absolutely honest on what he wrote later on ("hue and cry over Kronstadt")
The working class has been the victim of betrayal after betrayal by pseudo-left forces in the 20th century, which led to two catastrophic
world wars and all the other conflicts that have created needless bloodshed around the world. The great task will be, when the
new mass working class anti-war movement arises, to give the working class the political knowledge it needs to not fall for the
traps that dissipated anti-war movements in the past. It must be made clear to the workers of the world that for us, it's do or
die time - literally, as the obscene levels of social inequality and the prospect of nuclear confrontation prove.
I understand this very well, having seen what happened to what I thought at the time was a powerful antiwar movement in the 1960s
against the war in Vietnam. I was quite politically naive at the time and became so disillusioned with politics in general and
what I then thought to be the "left" in particular, that I went off politics completely and started reading Ayn Rand.
After being turned off by Rand's misanthropy and hatred of the working class (even though I admired her atheism), I became
more or less apolitical until 1998, when I first read the World Socialist Web Site and found what I had been looking for.
for this affirming comment. Me too, having all but given up on politics and following a last ditch
search of the web I was rewarded with a political program and party that was more than compatible with my world view and personal
values. Something I had not thought possible, thank you ICFI/SEP.
There are times when even we as Marxists find ourselves scouring the past for a word that befits the character and luminosity
of a moment in human understanding. In this respect David North has given new meaning to the word 'Biblical'.
As a word, its essence is transcendent. For whoever defines an epoch in the clearest and most profoundest way as this, is elevated
to the realms of Greatness.
As the bourgeoisie now scrabbles, in fights, and drowns in the last dregs of its alchemy, a Phoenix arises out of their chaos
lest the bourgeoisie commits all to the Fires of Hell ....
Most excellent words comrade David ...a most excellent call to class struggle .
This is a remarkably panoramic account, grounded in both history and economics, of the unfolding of U.S. militarism and imperialist
warfare over the past 30 or so years. It is without peer in anything else I have seen in terms of showing that events and tendencies
- which we may have been separately aware of - were in fact part of a historical continuum growing out of economic developments
and the perceived interests of the U.S. ruling class.
Always interesting to read cmd. North. ''First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the
entire global nation-state system, as it emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown
of the established postwar equilibrium would lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism''. This is great but we also
have German militarism on the rise and we should not underestimate. The working class must be prepared for economic and even actual
wars in Europe and elsewhere. The redivision of markets and resources is evident with Germany and China on the table.
March 12, 2019 at 5:25
pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN
Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law
prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."
Hi AnonfromTN.
Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli
"dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly
given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.
They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.
What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President
t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.
Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type
of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US
military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an
Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!
Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland"
law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman
raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on
the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.
@ChuckOrloski I
can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery.
As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and
donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these
should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally,
desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and
severely punish those who expose these crimes.
I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of
any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves
are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash.
Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel
influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
The USA 'lost' in Syria, the opposing coalition incl. Iran and Russia couldn't be faced off successfully.
Destroying Afgh., Iraq, Lybia, - all 'failures' in the sense of not garnering 'advantage' for the USA as a territory, a Federated
Nation, its citizens, its trade, boosting hopeful expansion, etc. One aim rarely mentioned is keeping allies on board, e.g. Sarkozy's
France, to invade Lybia. In France many say it was Sark I who did DE-ss-troy! Lybia.
The word *failure* is based on the acceptance of a stated aim reminiscent of old-style-colonialism: grab resources, exploit
super-cheap labor, control the natives, mine, exploit, shunt the goods / profits to home base.
If the aim is to stop rivals breathing, blast them back to the Stone Age, the success is good but relative. (see Iraq.) Private
GloboCorps (e.g. Glencore.. ) are in charge behind the curtain, many Gvmts are just stooges for them in the sense of unawoved
partnerships, the one feeding into the other, in a kind of desperado death spiral.
I have always been struck by the fact that Oil Projects / Management in Iraq, even wiki gives lists that shows major movers
and profiteers are not USA oil cos. / interests, but China, Malaysia, many others.
In any case withdrawal from Syria was a surprising and bold move on the Part of the Trump. You can criticizes Trump for not doing
more but before that he bahvaves as a typical neocon, or a typical Republican presidents (which are the same things). And he started
on this path just two month after inauguration bombing Syria under false pretences. So this is something
I think the reason of change is that Trump intuitively realized the voters are abandoning him in droves and the sizable faction
of his voters who voted for him because of his promises to end foreign wars iether already defected or is ready to defect. So this is
a move designed to keep them.
Notable quotes:
"... "America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said. ..."
President Trump's big announcement to pull US troops out of Syria and Afghanistan is now emerging less as a peace move, and more
a rationalization of American military power in the Middle East. In a surprise visit to US forces in Iraq this week, Trump
said he had no intention of withdrawing the troops in that country, who have been there for nearly 15 years since GW Bush invaded
back in 2003.
Hinting at private discussions with commanders in Iraq, Trump boasted that US forces would in the future launch attacks from there
into Syria if and when needed. Presumably that rapid force deployment would apply to other countries in the region, including Afghanistan.
In other words, in typical business-style transactional thinking, Trump sees the pullout from Syria and Afghanistan as a cost-cutting
exercise for US imperialism. Regarding Syria, he has bragged about Turkey being assigned, purportedly, to "finish off" terror
groups. That's Trump subcontracting out US interests.
Critics and supporters of Trump are confounded. After his Syria and Afghanistan pullout call, domestic critics and NATO allies
have accused him of walking from the alleged "fight against terrorism" and of ceding strategic ground to US adversaries Russia
and Iran.
Meanwhile, Trump's supporters have viewed his decision in more benign light, cheering the president for "sticking it to"
the deep state and military establishment, assuming he's delivering on electoral promises to end overseas wars.
However, neither view gets what is going on. Trump is not scaling back US military power; he is rationalizing it like a cost-benefit
analysis, as perhaps only a real-estate-wheeler-dealer-turned president would appreciate. Trump is not snubbing US militarism or
NATO allies, nor is he letting loose an inner peace spirit. He is as committed to projecting American military as ruthlessly and
as recklessly as any other past occupant of the White House. The difference is Trump wants to do it on the cheap.
Here's what he said to reporters on Air Force One before touching down in Iraq:
"The United States cannot continue to be the policeman of the world. It's not fair when the burden is all on us, the United
States We are spread out all over the world. We are in countries most people haven't even heard about. Frankly, it's ridiculous."
He added: "We're no longer the suckers, folks."
Laughably, Trump's griping about US forces "spread all over the world" unwittingly demonstrates the insatiable, monstrous
nature of American militarism. But Trump paints this vice as a virtue, which, he complains, Washington gets no thanks for from the
150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in.
As US troops greeted him in Iraq, the president made explicit how the new American militarism would henceforth operate.
"America shouldn't be doing the fighting for every nation on earth, not being reimbursed in many cases at all. If they want
us to do the fighting, they also have to pay a price," Trump said.
This reiterates a big bugbear for this president in which he views US allies and client regimes as "not pulling their weight"
in terms of military deployment. Trump has been browbeating European NATO members to cough up more on military budgets, and he has
berated the Saudis
and other Gulf Arab regimes to pay more for American interventions.
Notably, however, Trump has never questioned the largesse that US taxpayers fork out every year to Israel in the form of nearly
$4 billion in military aid. To be sure, that money is not a gift because much of it goes back to the Pentagon from sales of fighter
jets and missile systems.
The long-held notion that the US has served as the "world's policeman" is, of course, a travesty.
Since WWII, all presidents and the Washington establishment have constantly harped on, with self-righteousness, about America's
mythical role as guarantor of global security.
Dozens of illegal wars on almost every continent and millions of civilian deaths attest to the real, heinous conduct of American
militarism as a weapon to secure US corporate capitalism.
But with US economic power in historic decline amid a national debt now over $22 trillion, Washington can no longer afford its
imperialist conduct in the traditional mode of direct US military invasions and occupations.
Perhaps, it takes a cost-cutting, raw-toothed capitalist like Trump to best understand the historic predicament, even if only
superficially.
This gives away the real calculation behind his troop pullout from Syria and Afghanistan. Iraq is going to serve as a new regional
hub for force projection on a demand-and-supply basis. In addition, more of the dirty work can be contracted out to Washington's
clients like Turkey, Israel and Saudi Arabia, who will be buying even more US weaponry to prop the military-industrial complex.
This would explain why Trump made his hurried, unexpected visit to Iraq this week. Significantly, he
said
: "A lot of people are going to come around to my way of thinking", regarding his decision on withdrawing forces from Syria
and Afghanistan.
Since his troop pullout plan announced on December 19, there has been serious pushback from senior Pentagon figures, hawkish Republicans
and Democrats, and the anti-Trump media. The atmosphere is almost seditious against the president. Trump flying off to Iraq on Christmas
night was
reportedly his first visit to troops in an overseas combat zone since becoming president two years ago.
What Trump seemed to be doing was reassuring the Pentagon and corporate America that he is not going all soft and dovish. Not
at all. He is letting them know that he is aiming for a leaner, meaner US military power, which can save money on the number of foreign
bases by using rapid reaction forces out of places like Iraq, as well as by subcontracting operations out to regional clients.
Thus, Trump is not coming clean out of any supposed principle when he cuts back US forces overseas. He is merely applying his
knack for screwing down costs and doing things on the cheap as a capitalist tycoon overseeing US militarism.
During past decades when American capitalism was relatively robust, US politicians and media could indulge in the fantasy of their
military forces going around the world in large-scale formations to selflessly "defend freedom and democracy."
Today, US capitalism is broke. It simply can't sustain its global military empire. Enter Donald Trump with his "business solutions."
But in doing so, this president, with his cheap utilitarianism and transactional exploitative mindset, lets the cat out of the
bag. As he says, the US cannot be the world's policeman. Countries are henceforth going to have to pay for "our protection."
Inadvertently, Trump is showing up US power for what it really is: a global thug running a protection racket.
It's always been the case. Except now it's in your face. Trump is no Smedley Butler, the former Marine general who in the 1930s
condemned US militarism as a Mafia operation. This president is stupidly revealing the racket, while still thinking it is something
virtuous.
Finian Cunningham (born 1963) has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland, he is a Master's graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor
for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. For over 20 years he worked
as an editor and writer in major news media organizations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. Now a freelance journalist
based in East Africa, his columns appear on RT, Sputnik, Strategic Culture Foundation and Press TV.
dnm1136
Once again, Cunningham has hit the nail on the head. Trump mistakenly conflates fear with respect. In reality, around the world,
the US is feared but generally not respected.
My guess is that the same was true about Trump as a businessman, i.e., he was not respected, only feared due to his willingness
to pursue his "deals" by any means that "worked" for him, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, seemingly gracious or mean-spirited.
William Smith
Complaining how the US gets no thanks for its foreign intervention. Kind of like a rapist claiming he should be thanked for
"pleasuring" his victim. Precisely the same sentiment expressed by those who believe the American Indians should thank the Whites
for "civilising" them.
Phoebe S,
"Washington gets no thanks for from the 150-plus countries around the globe that its forces are present in."
That might mean they don't want you there. Just saying.
ProRussiaPole
None of these wars are working out for the US strategically. All they do is sow chaos. They seem to not be gaining anything,
and are just preventing others from gaining anything as well.
Ernie For -> ProRussiaPole
i am a huge Putin fan, so is big Don. Please change your source of info Jerome, Trump is one man against Billions of people
and dollars in corruption. He has achieved more in the USA in 2 years than all 5 previous parasites together.
Truthbetold69
It could be a change for a better direction. Time will tell. 'If you do what you've always been doing, you'll get what you've
always been getting.'
"... The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. ..."
"... Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional "war" it's pretty cheap ..."
In truth, infinite war is a strategic abomination, an admission of professional military
bankruptcy. Erster General-Quartiermeister Ludendorff might have endorsed the term,
but Ludendorff was a military fanatic.
Check that. Infinite war is a strategic abomination except for arms merchants, so-called
defense contractors, and the " emergency
men " (and women) devoted to climbing the greasy pole of what we choose to call the
national security establishment. In other words, candor obliges us to acknowledge that, in some
quarters, infinite war is a pure positive, carrying with it a promise of yet more profits,
promotions, and opportunities to come. War keeps the gravy train rolling. And, of course,
that's part of the problem.
Who should we hold accountable for this abomination? Not the generals, in my view. If they
come across as a dutiful yet unimaginative lot, remember that a lifetime of military service
rarely nurtures imagination or creativity. And let us at least credit our generals with this:
in their efforts to liberate or democratize or pacify or dominate the Greater Middle East they
have tried every military tactic and technique imaginable. Short of nuclear annihilation,
they've played just about every card in the Pentagon's deck -- without coming up with a winning
hand. So they come and go at regular intervals, each new commander promising success and
departing after a couple years to
make way for someone else to give it a try.
... ... ...
Congressional midterm elections are just months away and another presidential election
already looms. Who will be the political leader with the courage and presence of mind to
declare: "Enough! Stop this madness!" Man or woman, straight or gay, black, brown, or white,
that person will deserve the nation's gratitude and the support of the electorate.
Until that occurs, however, the American penchant for war will stretch on toward infinity.
No doubt Saudi and Israeli leaders will cheer, Europeans who remember their Great War will
scratch their heads in wonder, and the Chinese will laugh themselves silly. Meanwhile, issues
of genuinely strategic importance -- climate change offers one obvious example -- will continue
to be treated like an afterthought. As for the gravy train, it will roll on.
1. WW1 had total casualties (civilian and military) of around 40M. WW2 had total
casualties of 60M. So yes WW2 was more deadly but "pales in comparison" is hardly justified,
especially relative to population.
2. Marshal Foch, 28 June, 1919: "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for 20
years."
WW1 inevitably led to WW2.
The only politician with a modest national stage to have said that (and meant it) in the
last 50 years was Ron Paul, who was booed and mocked as crazy. Trump made noises in that
direction, but almost as soon as the last words of his oath echoed off into the brisk January
afternoon, he seemed to change his tune. Whether he never meant it, or decided to avoid the
JFK treatment, who knows.
No, as I believe Will Rogers said, democracy is that form of government where the people
get what they want, good and hard.
I supported Ron Paul in 2012. But after his candidacy was crookedly subverted by the
Establishment (cf., Trump's) I vowed never to vote again for anyone that I believe unworthy
of the power wielded through the public office. I haven't voted since, and don't expect to
until the Empire collapses.
Kirk Douglas starred in a great film about fighting in World War I: "Paths of Glory." I
highly recommend the film for its accuracy, best described in Wiki by the reaction of
governments:
Controversy
On its release, the film's anti-military tone was subject to criticism and censorship.
In France, both active and retired personnel from the French military vehemently
criticized the film -- and its portrayal of the French Army -- after it was released in
Belgium. The French government placed enormous pressure on United Artists, (the European
distributor) to not release the film in France. The film was eventually shown in France in
1975 when social attitudes had changed.[17]
In Germany, the film was withdrawn from the Berlin Film Festival to avoid straining
relations with France;[18] it was not shown for two years until after its release.
In Spain, Spain's right-wing government of Francisco Franco objected to the film. It was
first shown in 1986, 11 years after Franco's death.
In Switzerland, the film was censored, at the request of the Swiss Army, until
1970.[18]
At American bases in Europe, the American military banned it from being shown.[18]
No, it's not the generals who have let us down, but the politicians to whom they
supposedly report and from whom they nominally take their orders.
I'd say both. The generals have greatly assisted in stringing along the trusting public,
always promising that victory is just around the corner, provided the public supports this or
that final effort. Petraeus in particular willingly played his part in misleading the public
about both Iraq and Afghanistan. His career would be a great case study for illuminating what
is wrong with the U.S. today.
As to the apparent failure of the Afghanistan war – one must be careful to separate
stated goals from real ones. What kind of "lasting success" can the U.S. possibly hope for
there? If they managed to defeat the Taliban, pacify the country, install a puppet regime to
govern it, and then leave, what would that achieve? The puppet regime would find itself
surrounded by powers antagonistic to the U.S., and the puppets would either cooperate with
them or be overthrown in no time. The U.S. are not interested in winning and leaving –
they want to continue disrupting the peaceful integration of East, West, and South Asia.
Afghanistan is ideally placed for this purpose, and so the U.S. are quite content with
dragging out that war, as a pretext for their continued presence in the region.
I would disagree on one point though: "Today, Washington need not even bother to
propagandize the public into supporting its war. By and large, members of the public are
indifferent to its very existence."
This is an error. A majority of the American public think that wasting trillions of
dollars on endless pointless foreign wars is a stupid idea, and they think that we would be
better off spending that money on ourselves. It's just that we don't live in a democracy, and
the corporate press constantly ignores the issue. But just because the press doesn't mention
something, doesn't mean that it does not exist.
So during the last presidential election Donald Trump echoed this view, why are we
throwing away all this money on stupid wars when we need that money at home? For this he was
attacked as a fascist and "literally Hitler" (really! It's jaw-dropping when you think about
it). Despite massive propaganda attacking Trump, and a personal style that could charitably
be called a jackass, Trump won the election in large part because indeed most American don't
like the status quo.
After the election, Trump started to deliver on his promises – and he was quickly
beaten down, his pragmatist nationalist advisors purged and replaced with defense-industry
chickenhawks, and now we are back to the old status quo. The public be damned.
No, the American people are not being propagandized into supporting these wars. They are
simply being ignored.
When are you going to stop insulting our intelligence with this Boy's State civics crap?
You're calling on political leaders to stop war, like they don't remember what CIA did to
JFK, RFK, Daschle, or Leahy. Or Paul Wellstone.
Your national command structure, CIA, has impunity for universal jurisdiction crime. They
can kill or torture anyone they want and get away with it. That is what put them in charge.
CIA kills anybody who gets in their way. You fail to comprehend Lenin's lesson: first destroy
the regime, then you can refrain from use of force. Until you're ready to take on CIA, your
bold phrases are silent and odorless farts of feckless self-absorption. Sack up and imprison
CIA SIS or GTFO.
Since Spain was smart enough to stay out of both World Wars (as was Switzerland, of
course), I wonder what Franco was thinking when he banned the film. Anyway, the final scene
may be the best final scene in the history of movies.
This writer, a retired military officer whose son died in service to the yankee imperium
seems to have as good a grasp as any if not a better grasp than any about the nature of the
yankee system of permanent war.
While I agree the slave-American is ignored, I think the elected, salaried members of the
elected government are also ignored.. The persons in charge are Pharaohs and massively
powerful global in scope corporations.
Abe Lincoln, McKinnley, Kennedy discovered that fact in their fate.
Organized Zionism was copted by the London bankers and their corporations 1897, since then
a string of events have emerged.. that like a Submarine, seeking a far off target, it must
divert to avoid being discovered, but soon, Red October returns to its intended path. here
the path is to take the oil from the Arabs.. and the people driving that submarine are
extremely wealthy Pharaohs and very well known major corporations.
I suggest to quit talking about the nation states and their leaders as if either could
beat their way out of a wet paper sack. instead starting talking about the corporations and
Pharaohs because they are global.
The yawning silence accompanying the centennial of the Great War is baffling to me. It was
the pivotal event of the 20th century. It was the beginning of the unmanning, the
demoralization of Western Civilization. It was the calamity that created the World we inhabit
today.
I've heard nary a peep about it in the U.S. over the last four years. It's as if it were
as remote in people's consciousness as the Punic Wars.
The World Wars (I and II) can be seen as an increasingly desperate attempt of a fading
British Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, with the material, human,
and moral cost of the wars actually accelerating the empire's demise.
Likewise, the current endless "War on Terra" can be seen as an increasingly desperate
attempt of a fading American Empire to hold on to and maintain its power and hegemony, again
with the material, human, and moral cost of this war actually accelerating its demise.
But in the meantime, in both examples, the Bankers and the MIC just keep reaping their
profits, even at the expense of the empires they purportedly support and defend.
In a traditional sense the author is right. Strategy is the attainment of political goals,
within existing constraints. (diplomatic, political, resources etc)
"Goals" traditionally means "victories". (WWI is a great example of the sometimes dubious
idea of victory)
Has the US ceased to have a strategy ? No. (Their strategy is myopic & self destructive
– ie it's not a "good" strategy)
The US strategy is based on two core principles: (1) Maintain – extend hegemony
over whole world. (Resources, military etc etc) (2) Act as Israel's Golom. Afghanistan,
at (relatively) minimal cost, US controls key land mass (& with possible future access to
fantastic resources). Threaten, mess up Russian – Chinese ambitions in this area. Iraq:
Israeli enemy, strategic location, resource extraction. Syria: Israeli enemy, strategic
location, key location for resource transfer to markets (EU esp). Deny Russia an ally. Libya:
who cares ? Gaddafi was a pain in the arse. Iran: Israeli enemy, fantastic resources, hate
them regardless.
Of course this (very abbreviated) view of US "strategy" is open to the criticisms that
it's both dumb & evil. As if US establishment cares. Compared to cost of traditional
"war" it's pretty cheap ( which is funny, because it's such a yummy gravy train for the
1% sorry, actually, forgot the FIRST core principle of US strategy: enrich all the "right"
people)
'There has never been a just [war], never an honorable one–on the part of the
instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so
many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful–as usual–will shout for
the war. The pulpit will– warily and cautiously–object–at first; the great,
big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be
a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and there is
no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side
will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing
and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently
the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity.
Before long you will see this
curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of
furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers–as
earlier– but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation–pulpit and
all– will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who
ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen
will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man
will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and
refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that
the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of
grotesque self-deception'.
- Satan, in Mark Twain's "The Mysterious Stranger" (1908)
European politicians, the war on terror, and the triumph of Bankers United: https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/12/europe-brainwashed-normalize-relations-russia/
"Europe has not had an independent existence for 75 years. European countries do not know
what it means to be a sovereign state. Without Washington European politicians feel lost, so
they are likely to stick with Washington .
Russian hopes to unite with the West in a war against terrorism overlook that terrorism is
the West's weapon for destabilizing independent countries that do not accept a unipolar
world."
The world is ripe for barter exchange. Screw the money changers.
On January 8, 2018, former government advisor Edward Luttwak wrote an opinion piece for
Foreign Policy titled "It's Time to Bomb North Korea."
Luttwak's thesis is relatively straightforward. There is a government out there that may
very soon acquire nuclear-weapons capabilities, and this country cannot be trusted to
responsibly handle such a stockpile. The responsibility to protect the world from a rogue
nation cannot be argued with, and we understandably have a duty to ensure the future of
humanity.
However, there is one rogue nation that continues to hold the world ransom with its nuclear
weapons supply. It is decimating non-compliant states left, right, and center. This country
must be stopped dead in its tracks before anyone turns to the issue of North Korea.
In August of 1945, this rogue nation dropped two atomic bombs on civilian targets, not
military targets, completely obliterating between 135,000 and
300,000 Japanese civilians in just these two acts alone. Prior to this event, this country
killed even more civilians in the infamous
firebombing of Tokyo and other areas of Japan, dropping close to 500,000 cylinders of
napalm and petroleum jelly on some of Japan's most densely populated areas.
Recently, historians have become more open to the possibility that dropping the atomic bombs
in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not actually necessary to end World War II. This has also been
confirmed by those who actually took part in it. As the Nation
explained:
Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet, stated in a public
address at the Washington Monument two months after the bombings that 'the atomic bomb played
no decisive part, from a purely military standpoint, in the defeat of Japan ' Adm. William
"Bull" Halsey Jr., Commander of the US Third Fleet, stated publicly in 1946 that 'the first
atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment . It was a mistake to ever drop it . [the
scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it
A few months' prior, this rogue country's
invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa also claimed at least one quarter of Okinawa's
population. The Okinawan people have been protesting this country's military presence ever
since. The most recent ongoing protest
has lasted well over 5,000 days in a row.
This nation's bloodlust continued well after the end of World War II. Barely half a decade
later, this country bombed North Korea into complete oblivion, destroying over 8,700 factories,
5,000 schools, 1,000 hospitals, 600,000 homes, and
eventually killing off as much as 20 percent of the country's population. As the Asia
Pacific Journal has noted, the assaulting country dropped so many bombs that they eventually
ran out of targets to hit, turning to bomb the irrigation systems, instead:
By the fall of 1952, there were no effective targets left for US planes to hit. Every
significant town, city and industrial area in North Korea had already been bombed. In the
spring of 1953, the Air Force targeted irrigation dams on the Yalu River, both to destroy the
North Korean rice crop and to pressure the Chinese, who would have to supply more food aid to
the North. Five reservoirs were hit, flooding thousands of acres of farmland, inundating
whole towns and laying waste to the essential food source for millions of North Koreans."
This was just the beginning. Having successfully destroyed the future North Korean
state, this country moved on to the rest of East Asia and Indo-China, too. As Rolling Stone's
Matt Taibbi
has explained :
We [this loose cannon of a nation] dumped 20 million gallons of toxic herbicide on Vietnam
from the air, just to make the shooting easier without all those trees, an insane plan to win
'hearts and minds' that has left about a million still disabled from defects and disease
– including about 100,000 children, even decades later, little kids with misshapen
heads, webbed hands and fused eyelids writhing on cots, our real American legacy, well out of
view, of course.
This mass murder led to the deaths of between 1.5 million and 3.8 million people,
according to the Washington Post. More bombs were dropped on Vietnam than were unleashed
during the entire
conflict in World War II . While this was going on, this same country was also
secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia, too, where there are over 80 million
unexploded bombs still killing people to this day.
This country also decided to bomb Yugoslavia ,
Panama
, and
Grenada before invading Iraq in the early 1990s. Having successfully bombed Iraqi
infrastructure, this country then punished Iraq's entire civilian population with brutal
sanctions. At the time, the U.N.
estimated that approximately 1.7 million Iraqis had died as a result, including
500,000 to 600,000 children . Some years later, a prominent medical journal attempted
to absolve the cause of this infamous history by refuting the statistics involved despite
the fact that, when interviewed during the sanctions-era, Bill Clinton's secretary of state,
Madeleine Albright, intimated that to this rogue government, the
deaths of half a million children were "worth it" as the "price" Iraq needed to pay. In other
words, whether half a million children died or not was irrelevant to this bloodthirsty nation,
which barely blinked while carrying out this murderous policy.
This almighty superpower then invaded Iraq again in 2003 and plunged the entire region
into chaos . At the end of May 2017, the Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR)
released a study
concluding that the death toll from this violent nation's 2003 invasion of Iraq had led to over
one million deaths and that at least one-third of them were caused directly by the invading
force.
Not to mention this country also invaded Afghanistan prior to the invasion of Iraq (even
though the militants plaguing Afghanistan were
originally trained and financed by this warmongering nation). It then
went on to bomb Yemen, Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and the
Philippines .
Libya famously
had one of the highest standards of living in the region. It had state-assisted healthcare,
education, transport, and affordable housing. It is now a lawless war-zone
rife with extremism where slaves are openly traded like commodities
amid the power vacuum created as a direct result of the 2011 invasion.
In 2017, the commander-in-chief of this violent nation took the monumental death and
destruction to a new a level by removing
the restrictions on delivering airstrikes, which resulted in thousands upon
thousands of civilian deaths. Before that, in the first six months of 2017, this country
dropped
over 20,650 bombs , a monumental increase from the year that preceded it.
Despite these statistics, all of the above conquests are mere child's play to this nation.
The real prize lies in some of the more defiant and more powerful states, which this country
has already unleashed a containment strategy upon. This country has deployed its own troops all
across the border
with Russia even though it promised in the early 1990s it
would do no such thing. It also has a specific policy of
containing Russia's close ally, China, all the while threatening China's borders with talks
of direct strikes on North Korea (again, remember it already did so in the 1950s).
This country also elected a president who not only believes it is okay to embrace this rampantly violent
militarism but who openly calls other
countries "shitholes" – the very same term that aptly describes the way this country
has treated the rest of the world for decades on end. This same president also reportedly once
asked three times in a meeting
, "If we have nuclear weapons, why don't we use them?" and shortly after proposed a policy to
remove the constraints protecting the world from his dangerous supply of advanced nuclear
weaponry.
If we have any empathy for humanity, it is clear that this country must be stopped. It
cannot continue to act like this to the detriment of the rest of the planet and the safety and
security of the rest of us. This country
openly talks about using its nuclear weapons, has used them before, and has continued to
use all manner of weapons unabated in the years since while threatening to expand the use of
these weapons to other countries.
Seriously, if North Korea seems like a threat, imagine how the rest of the world feels while
watching one country violently take on the rest of the planet single-handedly, leaving nothing
but destruction in its wake and promising nothing less than a nuclear holocaust in the years to
come.
There is only one country that has done and that continues to do the very things North Korea
is being accused of doing.
Take as much time as you need for that to resonate.
1 The Korean War ends (1953
2 President Kennedy invades South Vietnam (1962)
3 The US overthrows Allende in Chile (1973)
4 The West installs Iranian dictator the Shah (1953)
5 The US-led Iraq invasion (2003)
Many honorable mentions including:
– NATO bombing of Serbia
– Libya
– Afghanistan
– Syria (support of ISIS and its predecessors and spinoffs)
The US body count is simply staggering – many millions killed, millions more wounded
or poisoned (Vietnam – agent orange and other chemical agents) and tens of millions of
lives forever damaged.
USA! USA! USA! (its elites that rule us of course!)
"... In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its "exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in Vietnam. ..."
"... The cynical fabrication of "false flags" that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident" in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official documents, notably the Pentagon Papers ..."
"... Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this." ..."
"... Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record, including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941. ..."
In a society often bereft of historical memory and in thrall to the propaganda of its
"exceptionalism", Burns' "entirely new" Vietnam war is presented as "epic, historic work". Its
lavish advertising campaign promotes its biggest backer, Bank of America, which in 1971 was
burned down by students in Santa Barbara, California, as a symbol of the hated war in
Vietnam.
Burns says he is grateful to "the entire Bank of America family" which "has long supported
our country's veterans". Bank of America was a corporate prop to an invasion that killed
perhaps as many as four million Vietnamese and ravaged and poisoned a once bountiful land. More
than 58,000 American soldiers were killed, and around the same number are estimated to have
taken their own lives.
I watched the first episode in New York. It leaves you in no doubt of its intentions right
from the start. The narrator says the war "was begun in good faith by decent people out of
fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence and Cold War misunderstandings".
The dishonesty of this statement is not surprising. The cynical fabrication of "false flags"
that led to the invasion of Vietnam is a matter of record – the Gulf of Tonkin "incident"
in 1964, which Burns promotes as true, was just one. The lies litter a multitude of official
documents, notably the Pentagon Papers , which the great whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg
released in 1971.
There was no good faith. The faith was rotten and cancerous. For me – as it must be
for many Americans ! it is difficult to watch the film's jumble of "red peril" maps,
unexplained interviewees, ineptly cut archive and maudlin American battlefield sequences.
... ... ...
The sheer energy and moral persistence of these great movements largely succeeded; by 1987
Reagan had negotiated with Mikhail Gorbachev an Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF)
that effectively ended the Cold War.
Today, according to secret Nato documents obtained by the German newspaper, Suddeutsche
Zetung, this vital treaty is likely to be abandoned as "nuclear targeting planning is
increased". The German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel has warned against "repeating the worst
mistakes of the Cold War All the good treaties on disarmament and arms control from Gorbachev
and Reagan are in acute peril. Europe is threatened again with becoming a military training
ground for nuclear weapons. We must raise our voice against this."
But not in America. The thousands who turned out for Senator Bernie Sanders' "revolution" in
last year's presidential campaign are collectively mute on these dangers. That most of
America's violence across the world has been perpetrated not by Republicans, or mutants like
Trump, but by liberal Democrats, remains a taboo.
Barack Obama provided the apotheosis, with seven simultaneous wars, a presidential record,
including the destruction of Libya as a modern state. Obama's overthrow of Ukraine's elected
government has had the desired effect: the massing of American-led Nato forces on Russia's
western borderland through which the Nazis invaded in 1941.
"... While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and liberation". ..."
"... Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia? Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining ground btw. Ask yourself why ? ..."
"... Sphere of influence, the same reason why Cuba and Venezuela will pay for their insolence against the hegemon. The world is never a fair place. ..."
While I admire America's democratic society, I hate how America brought wars and chaos to the world in guise of "freedom and
liberation".
I hate how America exploit the weak. president moon should offer an olive branch to fatty Kim by sending back the
thaad to America and pulling out American base and troops. he should convince fatty Kim that should he really like to proliferate
his nuclear missile development as deterrence, aim it only to America and America only. there is no need for Koreans to kill fellow
Koreans.
Very good idea, after having pushed Ukraine and Georgia to a war lost in advance, lets hope US will abandon South Korea and
Japan because they were helpless in demilitarizing one of the poorest countries in the world....
Was it necessary to bomb civilians of Ossetia for Georgia to get rid of Russia?
Was it necessary to provoke a coup d'état against fully legitimate and democratically elected government in Ukraine? Life
isn't fair indeed : not only they will never enter in NATO (even less EU) and no one will protect them, but they can say
farewell to the land they lost. People in Georgia and Ukraine are less and less gullible and Pro Russians sentiment is gaining
ground btw. Ask yourself why ?
In this person's opinion, the article raises a good point with regards to US defense subsidies. However, its examples are dissimilar.
Japan spends approximately 1% of its GDP on defense; South Korea spends roughly 2.5% of its GDP defense.
In fact, it seems to this person that a better example of US Defense Welfare would be direct subsidies granted to the state
of Israel.
"... Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies professor from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team created an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014. ..."
"... " Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions. ..."
Tyler Durden
Aug 26, 2017 9:15 PM 0
SHARES
US has had a military presence across the world
, from almost day one of its independence.
For those who have ever wanted a clearer picture of the true reach of the United States
military - both historically and currently - but shied away due to the sheer volume of research
required to find an answer,
The Anti Media points out
that
a crew at the
Independent
just made things a whole lot simpler.
Using data compiled by a Geography and Native Studies
professor
from Evergreen State College in
Olympia, Washington, the indy100 team
created
an interactive map of U.S. military incursions outside its own borders from
Argentina in 1890 to Syria in 2014.
To avoid confusion, indy100 laid out its prerequisites for what constitutes an invasion:
" Deployment of the military to evacuate American citizens, covert military actions by US
intelligence, providing military support to an internal opposition group, providing military
support in one side of a conflict, use of the army in drug enforcement actions.
But indy100 didn't stop there.
To put all that history into context, using
data
from the Department
of Defense (DOD), the team also put together a map to display all the countries in which nearly
200,000 active members of the U.S. military are now stationed.
"... As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits? ..."
As for Washington and the proverbially bombastic, failed futurists across the Beltway, do they even know what is the
end game of "investing" in two never-ending wars with no visible benefits?
You start by assuming that the absence of war is the ultimate good, but none can say what a world without war would be like,
or how long it would last.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/wars-john-gray-conflict-peace
Has the world seen moral progress? The answer should not depend on whether one has a sunny or a morose temperament. Everyone
agrees that life is better than death, health better than sickness, prosperity better than privation, freedom better than tyranny,
peace better than war. All of these can be measured, and the results plotted over time. If they go up, that's progress.
For John Gray, this is a big problem. As a part of his campaign against reason, science and Enlightenment humanism, he insists
that the strivings of humanity over the centuries have left us no better off. This dyspepsia was hard enough to sustain when
Gray first expressed it in the teeth of obvious counterexamples such as the abolition of human sacrifice, chattel slavery and
public torture-executions. But as scholars have increasingly measured human flourishing, they have found that Gray is not just
wrong but howlingly, flat-earth, couldn't-be-more-wrong wrong. The numbers show that after millennia of near-universal poverty
and despotism, a steadily growing proportion of humankind is surviving infancy and childbirth, going to school, voting in democracies,
living free of disease, enjoying the necessities of modern life and surviving to old age.
And more people are living in peace. In the 1980s several military scholars noticed to their astonishment that the most
destructive form of armed conflict – wars among great powers and developed states – had effectively ceased to exist. At the
time this "long peace" could have been dismissed as a random lull, but it has held firm for an additional three decades.
In my opinion Gray, though wrong that violence is not decreasing, is onto something about the future being bleak because of
the rise of meliorist assumptions, because perpetual peace will be humanity's tomb.
While many suggest a danger for our world along the lines of
Brian Cox's explanation for the Fermi Paradox (ie intelligent life forms cross grainedly bring on self-annihilation through
unlimited war) I take a different view.
Given that Pinker appears substantially correct that serious war (ie wars among great powers and developed states) have effectively
ceased to exist, the trend is for peace and cooperation. Martin Nowak in his book The Supercoperators shows cooperation, not fighting,
to be the defining human trait (and indeed the most cooperative groups won their wars in history, whereby nation states
such the US are the result of not just individuals but familial tribal regional , and virtually continental groupings coming together
for mutual advantage and defence .
The future is going to be global integration pursuit of economic objectives, and I think this exponential moral progress bill
begat technological advances beyond imagining.. An escape from the war trap is almost complete and the Singularity becomes. The
most likely culprit in the paradox is a technological black hole event horizon created by unlimited peace and progress.
Cross-grained though it may be to say that the good war hallows every cause, I think it not so bad in comparison with the alternative.
"... Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor and messianic in its language. ..."
"... At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem," yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways. ..."
"... Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory is built. ..."
"... Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet. ..."
"... I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department. ..."
"... I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization, which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely. Neither is guaranteed. ..."
"... "Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened. ..."
"... Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire, ..."
"... We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem, or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or .... ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'. ..."
"... "If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but a Global Empire only posing as your former country." ..."
Barnett's main thesis in "The Pentagon's New Map" is that the world is composed of two types of states: those that are
part of an integrated and connected "Core," which embrace globalization; and states of the "Gap," which are disconnected from
the effects of globalization. Barnett proclaims that globalization will move the world into an era of peace and prosperity, but
can only do so with the help of an indispensable United States. He writes that America is the lynchpin to the entire process and
he believes that the United States should be midwife to a new world that will one day consist of peaceful democratic states and
integrated economies. Barnett is proposing no less than a new grand strategy - the historical successor to the Cold War's strategy
of containment. His approach to a future world defined by America's "exportation of security" is almost religious in its fervor
and messianic in its language.
The foundation upon which Barnett builds his binary view of the world is heavily dependant upon the continued advancement of
globalization - almost exclusively so. However, advancing globalization is not pre-ordained. Barnett himself makes the case that
globalization is a fragile undertaking similar to an interconnected chain in which any broken link destroys the whole. Globalization
could indeed be like the biblical statue whose feet are made of clay. Globalization, and therefore the integration of the Gap,
may even stop or recede - just as the globalization of the early 20th century ended abruptly with the onset of WW I and a global
depression. Moreover, Barnett's contention that the United States has an exceptional duty and moral responsibility for "remaking
the world in America's image" might be seen by many as misguided and perhaps even dangerous.
The divide between the `Functioning Core' and the `Non-Integrating Gap' differs from the gulf between rich and poor in a subtle
yet direct way. State governments make a conscious decision to become connected vs. disconnected to advancing globalization. States
and their leaders can provide the infrastructure and the opening of large global markets to their citizens in ways that individuals
cannot. An example can serve to illustrate the point: You can be rich and disconnected in Nigeria or poor and disconnected in
North Korea. In each case the country you live in has decided to be disconnected. Citizens in this case have a limited likelihood
of staying rich and unlimited prospects of staying poor. But by becoming part of the functioning Core, the enlightened state allows
all citizens a running start at becoming part of a worldwide economic system and thus provide prospects for a better future because
global jobs and markets are opened up to them. A connected economy such as India's, for example, enables citizens who once had
no prospects for a better life to find well-paying jobs, such as computer-related employment. Prospects for a better Indian life
are directly the result of the Indian government's conscious decision to become connected to the world economy, a.k.a. embracing
globalization.
After placing his theory of the Core/Gap and preemptive war strategy firmly into the church of globalization, Barnett next
places his theory squarely upon the alter of rule sets. Few would argue that the world is an anarchic place and Barnett tells
us that rule sets are needed to define `good' and `evil' behavior of actors in this chaotic international system. An example of
such a rule set is the desire of the Core to keep WMDs out of the hands of terrorist organizations. Other examples are the promulgation
of human rights and the need to stop genocide. Barnett also uses rule sets to define `system' rules that govern and shape the
actions, and even the psychology, of international actors. An example that Barnett gives of a system-wide rule set is the creation
of the `rule' defined by the United States during the Cold War called Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). Barnett claims that this
rule set effectively ended the possibility of war for all time amongst nuclear-capable great powers. Barnett states that the U.S.
now should export a brand new rule set called `preemptive war,' which aims to fight actors in the lawless Gap in order to end
international terrorism for all time. Barnett makes it clear that the Core's enemy is neither a religion (Islam) nor a place (Middle
East), but a condition (disconnectedness).
Next, Barnett points out that system-wide competition has moved into the economic arena and that military conflict, when it
occurs, has moved away from the system-wide (Cold War), to inter-state war, ending up today with primarily state conflict vs.
individuals (Core vs. bin Laden, Core vs. Kim, etc.). In other words, "we are moving progressively away from warfare against states
or even blocs of states and toward a new era of warfare against individuals." Rephrased, we've moved from confrontations with
evil empires, to evil states, to evil leaders. An example of this phenomenon is the fact that China dropped off the radar of many
government hawks after 9/11 only to be replaced by terrorist groups and other dangerous NGOs "with global reach."
Barnett also points out that the idea of `connectivity' is central to the success of globalization. Without it, everything
else fails. Connectivity is the glue that holds states together and helps prevent war between states. For example, the US is not
likely to start a war with `connected' France, but America could more likely instigate a war with `disconnected' North Korea,
Syria or Iran.
Barnett then examines the dangers associated with his definition of `disconnectedness.' He cleverly describes globalization
as a condition defined by mutually assured dependence (MAD) and advises us that `Big Men', royal families, raw materials, theocracies
and just bad luck can conspire to impede connectedness in the world. This is one of few places in his book that Barnett briefly
discusses impediments to globalization - however, this short list looks at existing roadblocks to connectedness but not to future,
system-wide dangers to globalization.
At this point in his book, Barnett also makes bold statements that America is never leaving the Gap and that we are therefore
never "bringing our boys home." He believes that there is no exiting the Gap, only shrinking it. These statements have incited
some of Barnett's critics to accuse him of fostering and advocating a state of perpetual war. Barnett rebuts these attacks by
claiming that, "America's task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization's bodyguard
wherever and whenever needed throughout the Gap." Barnett claims that the strategy of preemptive war is a "boundable problem,"
yet his earlier claim that we are never leaving the Gap and that our boys are never coming home does not square with his assertion
that there will not be perpetual war. He cannot have it both ways.
Barnett then takes us on a pilgrimage to the Ten Commandments of globalization. Tellingly, this list is set up to be more like
links in a chain than commandments. Each item in the list is connected to the next - meaning that each step is dependent upon
its predecessor. If any of the links are broken or incomplete, the whole is destroyed. For example, Barnett warns us that if there
is no security in the Gap, there can be no rules in the Gap. Barnett therefore undermines his own globalization-based grand
strategy by pointing out in detail at least ten things that can go wrong with globalization - the foundation upon which his theory
is built.
What else could kill globalization? Barnett himself tells us: "Labor, energy, money and security all need to flow as freely
as possible from those places in the world where they are plentiful to those regions where they are scarce." Here he is implying
that an interruption of any or all of these basic necessities can doom globalization. Barnett states clearly: "...(these are)
the four massive flows I believe are essential to protect if Globalization III is going to advance." Simply put, any combination
of American isolationism or closing of borders to immigration, a global energy crisis, a global financial crisis or rampant global
insecurity could adversely affect "connectedness," a.k.a. globalization. These plausible future events, unnerving as they are,
leave the inexorable advancement of globalization in doubt and we haven't yet explored other problems with Barnett's reliance
on globalization to make the world peaceful, free and safe for democracy.
Barnett goes on to tell us that Operation Iraqi Freedom was an "overt attempt to create a "System Perturbation" centered in
the Persian Gulf to trigger a Big Bang." His definition of a Big Bang in the Middle East is the democratization of the many totalitarian
states in the region. He also claims that the Big Bang has targeted Iran's "sullen majority."
Barnett claims that our problem with shrinking the Gap is not our "motive or our means, but our inability to describe the enemies
worth killing, the battles worth winning, and the future worth creating." Managing the global campaign to democratize the world
is no easy task. Barnett admits that in a worst-case scenario we may be stuck in the "mother of all intifadas" in Iraq. Critics
claim this is something that we should have planned for - that the insurgency should not have been a surprise, and that it should
have been part of the "peacemaking" planning. Barnett blithely states that things will get better "...when America internationalizes
the occupation." Barnett should not engage in wishful thinking here, as he also does when he predicted that Iraqis would be put
in charge of their own country 18 months after the fall of Baghdad. It would be more accurate if he claimed this would happen
18 months after the cessation of hostilities. Some critics claim that Iraq is an example that we are an "empire in a hurry" (Michael
Ignatieff), which then results in: 1) allocating insufficient resources to non-military aspects of the project and 2) attempting
economic and political transformation in an unrealistically short time frame.
The final basic premise of Barnett's theory of the Core and the Gap is the concept of what he calls the "global transaction
strategy." Barnett explains it best: "America's essential transaction with the outside world is one of our exporting security
in return for the world's financing a lifestyle we could far more readily afford without all that defense spending." Barnett claims
that America pays the most for global stability because we enjoy it the most. But what about the other 80 countries in the Core?
Why is America, like Atlas, bearing the weight of the world's security and stabilization on its shoulders?
Barnett claims that historical analogies are useless today and point us in the wrong direction. I disagree. James Madison cautioned
us not to go abroad to seek monsters to destroy. We can learn from his simple and profound statement that there are simply too
many state (and individual) monsters in today's world for the U.S. to destroy unilaterally or preemptively. We must also avoid
overstretching our resources and power. Thucydides reminds us that the great democracy of Athens was brought to its knees by the
ill-advised Sicilian expedition - which resulted in the destruction of everything the Athenians held dear. Do not ignore history
as Barnett councils; heed it.
Globalization is likely here to stay, though it may be slowed down or even stopped in some regions of the planet.
Therefore, America needs to stay engaged in the affairs of the world, but Barnett has not offered conclusive evidence that the
U.S. needs to become the world's single Leviathan that must extinguish all global hot wars. Barnett also has not proved that America
needs to be, as he writes, "the one willing to rush in when everyone else is running away." People like Barnett in academia and
leaders in government may proclaim and ordain the U.S. to be a global Leviathan, but it is a conscious choice that should be thoroughly
debated by the American people. After all, it is upon the backs of the American people that such a global Leviathan must ride.
Where is the debate? The American people, upon reflection, may decide upon other courses of action.
I would strongly recommend "The Pentagon's New Map" to students who are studying U.S. foreign policy. I would also recommend
it to those who are studying the Bush administration as well as the Pentagon. The ideas in the book seem to be popular with the
military and many of its ideas can be seen in the current thinking and policy of the Pentagon and State Department.
It seems to be well researched - having 35 pages of notes. Many of Barnett's citations come from the Washington Post and the
New York Times, which some may see as a liberal bias, but I see the sources as simply newspapers of record.
I would only caution the reader that Barnett's theories are heavily dependent upon the continued advancement of globalization,
which in turn is dependent upon the continued economic ability of the U.S. to sustain military operations around the world indefinitely.
Neither is guaranteed.
I don't think poorly of Thomas Barnett himself. He's very bright and, I think, good hearted, BUT his well thought-out, well
argued pride and joy (and positive intellectual pursuit) is being badly distorted ---- which happens to all 'tools' that Empire
gets its hands on.
For those who like predictions, I would predict that Barnett will wind up going through an epiphany much like Francis Fukuyama
(but a decade later) and for much the same reason, that his life's work gets misused and abused so greatly that he works to reverse
and correct its misuse. Fukuyama, also brilliant, wrote "The End of History" in 1992 (which was misused by the neocons to engender
war), and now he's working just as hard to reverse a misuse that he may feel some guilt of his work supporting, and is writing
"The Future of History" as a force for good --- and I suspect (and hope) that Barnett will, in even less time, be counter-thinking
and developing the strategy and book to reverse the misuse of his 2004 book before the Global Empire pulls down the curtain.
"Globalization" has turned out to be nothing but the polite PR term to disguise and avoid the truth of using the more accurate
name, "Global Empire" --- and there is no doubt that Barnett is more than smart enough to see that this has inexorably happened.
Best luck and love to the fast expanding 'Occupy the Empire' educational and revolutionary movement against this deceitful,
guileful, disguised EMPIRE, which can't so easily be identified as wearing Red Coats, Red Stars, nor funny looking Nazi helmets
---- quite yet!
Liberty, democracy, justice, and equality Over Violent/'Vichy' Rel 2.0 Empire,
Alan MacDonald
Sanford, Maine
We don't MERELY have; a gun/fear problem, or a 'Fiscal Cliff', 'Sequestration', and 'Debt Limit' problem, or an expanding
wars problem, or a 'drone assassinations' problem, or a vast income & wealth inequality problem, or a Wall Street 'looting' problem,
or a Global Warming and environmental death-spiral problem, or a domestic tyranny NDAA FISA spying problem, or, or, or, or ....
ad nauseam --- we have a hidden EMPIRE cancerous tumor which is the prime CAUSE of all these 'symptom problems'.
"If your country is treating you like ****, and bombing abroad, look carefully --- because it may not be your country, but
a Global Empire only posing as your former country."
"... Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003. ..."
"... If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents. ..."
People who seem to think that Trump's generals will somehow go along and support his original vision are sadly mistaken.
Since 2003, Israel has had an increasingly strong hand in the vetting who gets promoted to upper positions in the American
armed forces. All of the generals Trump has at his side went through a vetting procedure which definitely involved a very close
look at their opinions about Israel.
Lt. Col. Karen U. Kwiatkowski has written extensively about the purges of the patriots in the Defense Department that happened
in Washington during the lead up and after the commencement of the Iraq war in 2003.
Officers who openly oppose the dictates of the Israel Lobby will see their prospects for advancement simply vanish like a whiff
of smoke.. Those who support Israel's machinations are rewarded with promotions, the more fervent the support the more rapid the
promotion especially if this knowledge is made known to their congressman or senator..
Generals who support Israel already know that this support will be heavily rewarded after their retirements by being given
lucrative six figure positions on company boards of directors or positions in equally lucrative think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institution or the Hoover Institute. They will receive hefty speaking fees. as well. They learned early that their
retirements could be truly glorious if they only "went" along with The Lobby. They will be able to then live the good life in
expensive places like Washington, New York or San Francisco, often invited to glitzy parties with unlimited amount of free prawns
"the size of your hand".
On the other hand, upper officers who somehow get then get "bad" reputations for their negative views about Israel ( like Karen
U. Kwiatkowski for instance) will end up, once retired, having to depend on just their often scanty pensions This requires getting
an often demeaning second jobs to get by in some place where "their dollar goes further". No bright lights in big cities for them.
No speaking fees, no college jobs. Once their fate becomes known, their still active duty contemporaries suddenly decide to "go
along".
If anybody thinks what I have written is an exaggeration, research what the late Admiral Thomas Moorer had to say years
ago about the total infiltration of the Defense Department by Israeli agents.
Face it, we live in a country under occupation by a hostile power that we willingly pay large amounts monetary tribute to.
Our government does whatever benefits Israel regardless of how negatively this effects the USA. We are increasing troop strength
in Afghanistan because, somehow, this benefits Israel. If our presence in Afghanistan (or the Mideast in general) didn't benefit
Israel, our troops would simply not be there.
Well put. These people are like the "nobles" of medieval times. They care not a whit about the "peasants" they trample. They
are wealth bigots, compounded by some ethnic bigotry or other, in this case Jewish supremacism. America has an oligarchy problem.
At the center of that oligarchy is a Jewish mafia controlling the banks, and thereby the big corporations, and thereby the media
and the government. This oligarchy sees America as a big, dumb military machine that it can manipulate to generate war profits.
"... There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris. ..."
The Russians were there in Yugoslavia but they were not following NATO's script. There was an incident where Russian forces
took control of a key airport to the total surprise of NATO. The US overall commander ordered the UK to go in and kick the Russians
out. The UK ground commander wisely said he was not prepared to start WW III over Russian control of an airfield.
There has been a gradual decline in the rationality of UK forces thinking. They insisted on UN legal cover cover the invasion
of Iraq but were totally on board with pre-emptive action in Libya, happily training effectively ISIS forces before Gaddafi was
removed. They are now training Ukrainian Neo-Nazis and training ISIS/whatever in Syria, effectively invading the country. I guess
this may reflect the increasing direct Zionist control of Perfidious Albion with attendant levels of hubris.
According to some commenters at MoA the US neocons can be viewed as a flavor of political psychopaths: "Linear thinking is precisely
how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation.
It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking
because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates
think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone
straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced
and banished from the Washington tribe."
and " the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath
manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops
in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things
to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create
our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single
time. "
Notable quotes:
"... Provided the gross flaws of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying. ..."
"... Barack CIA 0bama. ..."
"... It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. ..."
"... Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit? ..."
"... Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives. ..."
"... you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals? ..."
"... it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion. ..."
"... the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him. ..."
"... Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP. ..."
"... There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade. ..."
"... My only gripe with his work is that he always describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc. ..."
"... Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money, guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe. ..."
"... the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told, break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed. ..."
"... Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but who cares, the cash keeps flowing. ..."
"... It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end - but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that. ..."
"... Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them! ..."
"... Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic damage. ..."
"... America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road to destruction. ..."
"... the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly, that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to disaster every single time. ..."
"... The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression. ..."
"... Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization is the embodiment of that propaganda. ..."
"... The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored. The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated. The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story. ..."
"... Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is often quite noticeable in comments at SST. ..."
"... The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality. The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane. If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it. ..."
"linear"?, I would say amateurish and often stupid! It seems that the USA cannot see far enough as it's submitted to regime changes
every 5 years and decisions are finally left to powerful lobbies that have a better continuity.
Provided the gross flaws
of the intelligence, one has to wonder about the quality of the education in politics provided by Harvard and other expensive
universities.. What they seem to learn very well there is lying.
"Linear" and all that is the mushy feel-good stuff on top of your arrogance. Kleptocracy only NOW putting down its roots? Come
on. Let's get back to the 90's where it started. Vengeance for 9/11? Cover?
It seems the, "Mission Possible" of the alphabet agencies is not intelligence, but chaos. All's well in the world with
them as long as the USSA is grinding away on some near helpless ME country. Drugs and other natural resources flow from and death
and destruction flow to the unsuspecting Muslim targets.
With America, you're our friend, (or at least we tolerate you) until you're not (or we don't), then God help you and your innocent
hoards.
The organized and well scripted chaos has been just one act in the larger play of destroying western civilization with throngs
of Muslims now flooding western Europe and to a lesser degree, USA. Of course, the Deep State had felt confident in allowing Latinos
to destroy America...Trump has put a large crimp in the pipeline--one of the reasons he is hated so badly by the destructive PTB.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
It is entirely possible that the underlying objective of, for instance, invading Iraq was to win a war and bring democracy.
Subsequent behaviour in Iraq (and Afghanistan) indicates that there might be (likely is) a hidden but central other objective.
I do not want to state that I know what that is because I am not "in the know". However, much that you attribute to failure from
linear thinking just as easily can be explained by the complexity of realizing a "hidden agenda".
Perhaps we can learn from history. Did the U.S. enter the First World War to save the world and democracy, or was it a
game of waiting until the sides were exhausted enough that victory would be a walkover, the prize a seat at the center of power
and the result that the U.S. could now take advantage of a superior position over the now exhausted former superpowers, having
sat out the worst of the fighting and sold to both sides at a healthy profit?
Invading Afghanistan and Iraq gives the U.S. a dominant role in the center of the Asian continent, the position coveted
by Britain, Russia, France and the Ottoman Empire during the Great Power rivalry leading up to the Great War. It can be seen as
partial success in a policy of encirclement of Russia and China. Redefining the Afghanistan and Iraq wars along these lines make
them look more successful, not less, however odious we may thing these objectives might be from moral and international law perspectives.
Russia learnt a huge lesson from their experience in Afghanistan. There they retreated in the face of a violent Wahabist insurgency
and paid the price. The Soviet union collapsed and became vulnerable to western free-market gangsterism as well as suffering the
blowback of terrorism in Chechnya, where they decided to play it very differently. A bit more like how Assad senior dealt with
the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980's.
Russia knew that if ISIS and friends were allowed to destroy Syria like the Mujahadeen
had done in Afghanistan, then it would only be a matter of time before blowback would come again to Russia.
Russia's involvement is entirely rational and in their national interest. It should never have come as a surprise to the US,
and the US should shake off their cold war propaganda and be grateful that people are willing to put their lives on the line to
defeat Wahabist terrorism. Russia has played a focused line with integrity. Many Syrians love them for this, and many more in
the Middle East will likewise adopt a similar line.
In other words, the linear mindset blocks out all non-conforming realities in the present and those contingent elements
which might arise in the future
you mean non-conforming realities like the rule of law, and possible future contingencies like war crimes tribunals?
i kinda skimmed this piece, but it seems to me that trying to write some kind of rational analysis of a US foreign policy
without mentioning the glaring fact that it's all absolutely illegal strikes me as an exercise in confusion.
Brenner: Washington never really had a plan in Syria.
Really? Firstly, the author's focus on successful implementation of policy is misguided. That the Iraq War was based on
a lie, the Libyan bombing Campaign was illegal, and the Syrian conflict was an illegal proxy war does not trouble him. And the
strategic reasons for US long-term occupation of Afghanistan escapes him.
Although he laments the failure to plan for contingencies, the words "accountable" and "accountability" never appear in
this essay. Nor does the word "neocon" - despite their being the malignant driving force in US FP.
The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities
has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic
to Al Qaeda.
In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in January [2007], Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said
that there is "a new strategic alignment in the Middle East," separating "reformers" and "extremists"; she pointed to the Sunni
states as centers of moderation, and said that Iran, Syria, and Hezbollah were "on the other side of that divide."
Lastly, Brenner's complaint that Obama has been "scape-goated" as having created ISIS conveniently ignores Obama's allowing ISIS
to grow by down-playing the threat that it represented. Obama's called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" and senior intelligence analysts
dutifully distorted intelligence to down-play the threat (see below). This was one of many deceptions that Obama took part in
- if not orchestrated (others: "moderate rebels", Benghazi, the "Fiscal Cliff", bank bailouts).
After months of investigation, this much is very clear: from the middle of 2014 to the middle of 2015, the United States
Central Command's most senior intelligence leaders manipulated the command's intelligence products to downplay the threat from
ISIS in Iraq" . . .
The Joint Task Force can find no justifiable reason why operational reporting was repeatedly used as a rationale to change
the analytic product, particularly when the changes only appeared to be made in a more optimistic direction . . .
There have been many lessons for the Russians since Afghanistan, two that Russia was directly involved with were the 90's
break-up of Yugoslavia in the 90's (and the diplomatic invention of R2P) and the Chechen turmoil of the last decade.
Russia has also benefited through the non-linear analysis of US diplomacy failures of the last two decades. Russia has created
a coalition backing up their military entry into the Middle East that allows achievement of tangible objectives at a sustainable
cost.
But b's article is about the US's dismal diplomacy that is exacerbating its rapid empire decline and it does very well to help
explain the rigid lack of thought that hastens the deterioration of US influence.
This article makes a lot of good points, but I didn't really grasp exactly what "linear" thinking is. OK. Venezuela very well
may be turning into a situation. What is the "linear" approach? What, instead, would be the "non-linear" approach? This article
cites many "linear" failures. It would be helpful also to learn of some non-linear successes. If not by the United States then
by somebody else.
Let me clarify my prior posting. This article seems to be asserting that the United States has attempted to pound the square peg
of its policy objectives into the round hole of the Middle East. I pretty much agree with that idea. But how is this "linear,"
as opposed to "bull-headed"? How does being "non-linear" help with the pounding? Would not adapting our policies to pound a round
peg instead be just as "linear" but more clever?
Thanks for posting these great observations by Michael Brenner, b.
The link to his bio on University of Pitsburg site is broken and the page is gone, but it still exists for now in Google's
cache from Aug. 1st
here . His bio can also be found under this ">https://www.theglobalist.com/united-states-common-man-forgotten-by-elites/">this
article from The Globalist
Everything I've read of Dr. Brenner that I've stumbled across is brilliant. My only gripe with his work is that he always
describes multiple aspects of psychopathy in his observations of U.S. foreign policy and the Washington ruling elite, but never
goes as far as to conclude the root of all our problems are psychopathic individuals and institutions, or a culture of psychopathy
infesting larger groups of the same, e.g., Washington elite, "The Borg", etc.
While he is quite accurate in describing the symptoms, one is left with the impression that they are the things to be
fixed. Linear thinking in a U.S. foreign policy of aggression? Absolutely, but it's pointless to 'fix' that without understanding
the cause.
Linear thinking is precisely how Washington psychopaths think and execute once they have identified a targeted population
for subservience and eventual exploitation. It's a laser-like focus on control using the tools psychopaths understand: money,
guns and butter. U.S. leaders use linear thinking because, as psychopaths, they do not have the ability to think otherwise. Linear
thinking give leaders control over how their subordinates think and execute. A culture of psychopathy means subordinates and supporters
will offer slavish devotion to such a linear path. Anyone straying from the path is not insightful or innovative, they are rebels
that sow confusion and weaken leaders. They must be silenced and banished from the Washington tribe.
Does anyone in Washington REALLY want to 'save' the Persians and 'rebuild' Iran as they imagine America did post WWII to German
and Japan? Or is the more overriding intent to punish and destroy a leadership that will not submit to the political and commercial
interests in the US? Of course the U.S. fails to deliver any benefits to the 'little people' after destroying their country and
government - they are incapable of understanding what the 'little people' want (same goes for domestic issues in the U.S.).
The U.S. government and leadership do not need lessons to modify their techniques or 'thinking' - they are incapable of doing
so. You can't 'talk a psychopath into having empathy' any more than you can talk them out of having smallpox. 'The law' and voting
were intentionally broken in the U.S. to make them all but useless to fix Washington, yet a zombified American public will continue
to use the religiously (or sit back and watch others use them religiously) with little result. Because we're a democracy and a
nation of laws - the government will fix anything broken with those tools.
In a certain sense, I'm glad Brennan does NOT go on about psychopathy in his articles. He would sound as tedious and nutty
as I do here and would never be allowed near Washington. I'll just be grateful for his thorough illustration of the symptoms for
now.
Your analysis of linearity is interesting. However, you make what I believe is a critical error. You assume you know the objective
and the path to follow and base your critique accordingly.
First, this is more an analysis of military failure to "do the job" that Washington "strategic thinkers" tell them to do, and
the reasons why it's such a futile game. In our system of government, the military does tactics, not strategy. And the above article,
which should be passed out to every politician in this country, isn't really about "the objective".
For example, the military was told "Go to Iraq, overthrow Saddam, everything will work out once we get our contractors
and corporations in after you." Paul Bremer's CPA and his "100 Orders" were supposed to fix everything. But the Iraqis objected
strenuously to the oil privatization selloff (and the rest of it) and the insurgency was launched. Okay, the military was told,
break the insurgency. In comes the CIA, Special Forces, mass surveillance - what comes out? Abu Ghraib torture photos. The insurgency
gets even stronger. Iran ends up winning the strategic game, hands down, and has far more influence in Iraq than it could ever
dream of during the Saddam era. The whole objective, turning Iraq into a client state of the U.S. neoliberal order, utterly failed.
Here's the point I think you're missing: the Washington strategists behind all this are batshit crazy and divorced from
reality. Their objectives have to be rewritten every few years, because they're hopeless pipe dreams. They live and work and
breathe in these Washington military-industrial think tanks, neocons and neoliberals both, that are largely financed by arms manufacturers
and associated private equity firms. As far as the defense contractors go, one war is as good as another, they can keep selling
arms to all regardless. Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria - cash cows is all they are. So, they finance the PR monkeys to
keep pushing "strategic geopolitical initiatives" that are really nonsensical and have no hope of working in the long run - but
who cares, the cash keeps flowing.
And if you want to know why the Borg State got firmly behind Hillary Clinton, it's because they could see her supporting this
agenda wholeheartedly, especially after Libya. Here's a comment she wrote to Podesta on 2014-08-19, a long 'strategy piece' ending
with this note:
Note: It is important to keep in mind that as a result of this policy there probably will be concern in the Sunni regions of
Iraq and the Central Government regarding the possible expansion of KRG controlled territory. With advisors in the Peshmerga
command we can reassure the concerned parties that, in return for increase autonomy, the KRG will not exclude the Iraqi Government
from participation in the management of the oil fields around Kirkuk, and the Mosel Dam hydroelectric facility. At the same
time we will be able to work with the Peshmerga as they pursue ISIL into disputed areas of Eastern Syria, coordinating with
FSA troops who can move against ISIL from the North. This will make certain Basher al Assad does not gain an advantage from
these operations. Finally, as it now appears the U.S. is considering a plan to offer contractors as advisors to the Iraqi Ministry
of Defense, we will be in a position to coordinate more effectively between the Peshmerga and the Iraqi Army.
It's all nonsense, there's no FSA just Al Qaeda and ISIS affiliates, plus the Kurdish proxy force is a long-term dead end
- but it keeps the war going. A more rational approach - work with Russia to defeat ISIS, don't worry about economic cooperation
between Syria and Iran, tell the Saudis and Israelis that Iran won't invade them (it won't), pull back militarily and focus instead
on domestic problems in the USA - the think tanks, defense contractors, Saudi and Israeli lobbyists, they don't like that.
Regardless, it looks like end times for the American empire, very similar to how the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1980s, and
the last days of the French and British empires in the 1950s. And good riddance, it's become a dead weight dragging down the standard
of living for most American citizens who aren't on that gravy train.
Brenner is trying to mislead us with bombastic terminology like "The Linear Mindset". The root cause of America's problems
is what Michael Scheuer calls Imperial Hubris: The idea that they are Masters of the Universe and so they have omnipotent power
to turn every country into a vassal. But when this hubris meets reality, they get confused and don't know what to do. In such
a case, they resort to three standard actions: sanctions, regime change or chaos. If these three don't work, they repeat them!
Politicians are mere puppets. Their real owners are the 1% who use the Deep State to direct policy. Among this 1% there
are zionists who have enormous influence on US Middle Eastern policy and they use the neocons as their attack dogs to direct such
policy. This hubris has caused so much pain, destruction and death all over the world and it has also caused America so much economic
damage.
America is waning as a global power but instead of self-introspection and returning to realism, they are doubling down
on neocon policy stupidity. Putin, China and Iran are trying to save them from their stupidity but they seem to be hell-bent on
committing suicide. But I hope the policy sophistication of Russia, China and Iran, as well as their military capabilities that
raise the stakes high for US military intervention will force the Masters of the Universe to see sense and reverse their road
to destruction.
There's a lot in both this piece and the comments. In a sense, I wonder if the core issue behind the Neocon/Imperial mindset isn't
a complete inability to see the other side's point of view. Psychopathy, short-termism (a common fault in businesspeople), divorce
from reality and hubris are likely a good part of it, as somebody, Paveway IV, Makutwa and nonsense factory put it, but the
Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda. Even the psychopath manages to
fake plausibility - although he has no empathy for the victim and takes a thrill out of hurting them, he can still know enough
about them to predict how they will react and to fake empathy himself. This ability seems to be missing in the folk who send the
troops in. Here there seems to be the genuine but unquestioning belief in one's own infallibility - that there is one right way
of doing things to which all others must and will yield if enough pressure is applied. The line by one of GWB's staff was, supposedly,
that "we create our own reality". It is this creation of a reality utterly divorced from the real world that seems to lead to
disaster every single time.
I would paraphrase critics of b that he (she?) has fallen into linearity trap: one point is the resources spent by USA on wars
of 21-st century (a lot), the second points are positive results (hardly any), and an intellectual charge proceeds from A to B.
However between A and B there can be diversity of problems. We can stock enough gasoline, run out of potable water. And indeed,
you can encounter pesky terrain. I recall a family vacation trip where we visited Natural Bridges National Monument and we proceeded
to Arizona on an extremely straight highway through pretty flat plateau. Then the pavement end, and the acrophobic designated
driver has to negotiate several 180* hairpins to get down on a cliff flanking Monument Valley. After second inspection, the map
had tiny letters "switchbacks" and a tiny fragment of the road not marked with the pavement. Still better than discovering "bridge
out" annotation on your map only when you gaze at the water flowing between two bridge heads. (If I recall, during late 20-th
century Balkan intervention, US military needed a lot of time to cross Danube river that unexpectedly had no functioning bridge
where they wanted to operate. Landscape changes during a war.)
That said, military usually has an appreciation for terrain. But there are also humans. On domestic side, the number of experts
on those distant societies is small, and qualified experts, minuscule. Because the qualified ones were disproportionally naysayers,
the mere whiff if expertise was treated as treason, and we had a purge of "Arabists". And it was of course worse in the lands
to charm and conquer. Effective rule requires local hands to follow our wishes, people who can be trusted. And, preferably, not
intensely hated by the locals they are supposed to administer. And like with gasoline, water, food, etc. on a vacation trip (who
forgot mosquito repellent!), the list of needed traits is surprisingly long. Like viewing collaboration with Israel supporting
infidels as a mortal sin that can be perpetrated to spare the family from starvation (you can recruit them, success!), but it
has to be atoned through backstabbing (local cadres are disappointing).
Great analysis! This is an excellent example for why I read MOA at least once a day and most of the comments! There's something
of a sad irony that Trump has made at least some kind of effort to thwart the neocons and their relentless rush toward armageddon,
seeing as how lacking in any real intellectual capcity they all seem and with Trump at the helm?
Mostly tptb, our political class, and the pundits for the masses, seem all to exhibit an astonishingly dull witted lack of
true concern or humanity for anybody anywhere, and in my years on earth so far, at least in America, they have inculcated in the
population very dubious ethical chioces, which you would think were tragic, and decisions, which you would believe were doomed,
from the wars being waged, to the lifestyles of the citizenry especially toward the top of the economic ladder, and I don't know
about others here but I for one have been confronting and dealing with these problems both in family and aquaintances for my entire
adult life! Like the battle at Kurushetra. At least they say they "have a plan," scoffingly.
Where is chipnik to weigh in on this with his poetic observations, or I think long ago it was "slthrop" who may have been bannned
for foul language as he or she raged on at the absurdities that keep heaping up exponentially? I do miss them!
Oh well, life is relatively short and we will all be gone at some point and our presense here will be one and all less than
an iota. An awareness of this one fact and its implications you would think would pierce the consciousness of every human being
well before drawing their final breath, but I guess every McCain fails to realize until too late that the jig is up?
Justin Glyn@20 "but the Neocons seem to suffer from something almost worse - a misguided belief in their own propaganda."
The propaganda part is inventing, manufacturing and embellishing some embodiment of evil that must be defeated to liberate
their victims and save humanity. That's the cover story, not the underlying purpose of U.S. aggression.
Neocons do not believe that exclusively as a goal in itself - it merely dovetails rather nicely with their ultimate obsession
with control, and it's and easy sell against any less-than-perfect targeted foreign leader or government. Irrational demonization
is the embodiment of that propaganda.
The methods of ultimately controlling the liberated people and their nation's resources are cloaked in the guise of 'bringing
Western democracy'. Methods for corrupting the resulting government and usurping their laws and voting are hidden or ignored.
The propaganda then turns to either praising the resulting utopia or identifying/creating a new evil that now must also be eliminated.
The utopia thing hasn't worked out so well in Libya, Iraq or Ukraine, so they stuck with the 'defeat evil' story.
Apart from psychopathy in US leadership, the US has no understanding, nor respect of, other cultures. This is not just in
US leadership, but in the exceptional people in general. It shows up from time to time in comments at blogs like this, and is
often quite noticeable in comments at SST.
That it why the US in its arrogance has failed in Syria, and Russia with its tiny force has been so successful.
The essence of imperial hubris is the belief that one's country is omnipotent; that the country can shape and create reality.
The country's main aspiration is to create clients, dependencies and as the Godfather Zbigniew Bzrezinski candidly put it, "vassals".Such
a mindset does not just appreciate the reality of contingency; it also does not appreciate the nature of complex systems. The
country's elites believe that both soft and hard power should be able to ensure the desired outcomes. But resistance to imperial
designs and blowback from the imperial power's activities induce cognitive dissonance. Instead of such cognitive crises leading
to a return to reality, they lead to denial amongst this elite. This elite lives in a bubble. Their discourse is intellectually
incestuous and anybody that threatens this bubble is ostracized. Limits are set to what can be debated. That is why realists like
John Mearsheimer, Steve Walt, Michael Scheuer and Stephen Cohen are ignored by this elite even though their ideas are very germane.
If other countries don't bow down to their dictates, they have only a combination of the following responses: sanctions, regime
change and chaos. The paradox is that the more they double down with their delusions the more the country's power continues to
decline. My only hope is that this doubling down will not take the world down with it.
"... A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating, if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature, is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it; of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it. ..."
"... My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us. ..."
"... Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again. ..."
Consider this article a work of speculation; a jumble of ideas thrown at a blank canvas.
A lot of art depicts war scenes, and why not? War is incredibly exciting, dynamic, destructive, and otherwise captivating,
if often in a horrific way. But I want to consider war and art in a different manner, in an impressionistic one. War, by its nature,
is often spectacle; it is also often chaotic; complex; beyond comprehension. Perhaps art theory, and art styles, have something to
teach us about war. Ways of representing it and capturing its meaning as well as its horrors. But also ways of misrepresenting it;
of fracturing its meaning. Of manipulating it.
For example, America's overseas wars today are both abstractions and distractions. They're also somewhat surreal to most Americans,
living as we do in comparative safety and material luxury (when compared to most other peoples of the world). Abstraction and surrealism:
two art styles that may say something vital about America's wars.
If some aspects of America's wars are surreal and others abstract, if reports of those wars are often impressionistic and often
blurred beyond recognition, this points to, I think, the highly stylized representations of war that are submitted for our consideration.
What we don't get very often is realism. Recall how the Bush/Cheney administration forbade photos of flag-draped coffins returning
from Iraq and Afghanistan. Think of all the war reporting you've seen on U.S. TV and Cable networks, and ask how many times you saw
severed American limbs and dead bodies on a battlefield. (On occasion, dead bodies of the enemy are shown, usually briefly and abstractly,
with no human backstory.)
Of course, there's no "real" way to showcase the brutal reality of war, short of bringing a person to the front and having them
face fire in combat -- a level of "participatory" art that sane people would likely seek to avoid. What we get, as spectators (which
is what we're told to remain in America), is an impression of combat. Here and there, a surreal report. An abstract news clip. Blown
up buildings become exercises in neo-Cubism; melted buildings and weapons become Daliesque displays. Severed limbs (of the enemy)
are exercises in the grotesque. For the vast majority of Americans, what's lacking is raw immediacy and gut-wrenching reality.
Again, we are spectators, not participants. And our responses are often as stylized and limited as the representations are. As
Rebecca Gordon put it from a different angle at
TomDispatch.com , when it comes to America's wars, are we participating in reality or merely watching reality TV? And why are
so many so prone to confuse or conflate the two?
Art, of course, isn't the only lens through which we can see and interpret America's wars. Advertising, especially hyperbole,
is also quite revealing. Thus the US military has been sold, whether by George W. Bush or Barack Obama, as "the world's finest military
in history" or WFMH, an acronym I just made up, and which should perhaps come with a copyright or trademark symbol after it. It's
classic advertising hyperbole. It's salesmanship in place of reality.
So, when other peoples beat our WFMH, we should do what Americans do best: sue them for copyright infringement. Our legions of
lawyers will most certainly beat their cadres of counsels. After all, under Bush/Cheney, our lawyers tortured logic and the law to
support torture itself. Talk about surrealism!
My point (and I think I have one) is that America's wars are in some sense elaborate productions and representations, at least
in the ways in which the government constructs and sells them to the American people. To understand these representations -- the
ways in which they are both more than real war and less than it -- art theory, as well as advertising, may have a lot to teach us.
As I said, this is me throwing ideas at the canvas of my computer screen. Do they make any sense to you? Feel free to pick up
your own brush and compose away in the comments section.
P.S. Danger, Will Robinson. I've never taken an art theory class or studied advertising closely.
William J. Astore is a retired lieutenant colonel (USAF). He taught history for fifteen years at military and civilian schools
and blogs at Bracing Views . He can be reached at
[email protected] . Reprinted from Bracing
Views with the author's permission.
Afghanistan as the unfinished masterpiece....most people forget that the government is yet to complete it except when a
Marine dies, they think about it for a day and then forget all over again.
"... It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. ..."
"JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon has two big pronouncements as the Trump administration starts reshaping
the government: "The United States of America is truly an exceptional country," and "it is clear that something is wrong."
Dimon, leader of world's most valuable bank and a counselor to the new president, used his 45-page annual letter to shareholders
on Tuesday to list ways America is stronger than ever -- before jumping into a much longer list of self-inflicted problems that
he said was "upsetting" to write.
Here's the start: Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has dumped trillions of dollars into wars, piled huge debt onto students,
forced legions of foreigners to leave after getting advanced degrees, driven millions of Americans out of the workplace with felonies
for sometimes minor offenses and hobbled the housing market with hastily crafted layers of rules.
Dimon, who sits on Donald Trump's business forum aimed at boosting job growth, is renowned for his optimism and has been voicing
support this year for parts of the president's business agenda. In February, Dimon predicted the U.S. would have a bright economic
future if the new administration carries out plans to overhaul taxes, rein in rules and boost infrastructure investment. In an
interview last month, he credited Trump with boosting consumer and business confidence in growth, and reawakening "animal spirits."
But on Tuesday, reasons for concern kept coming. Labor market participation is low, Dimon wrote. Inner-city schools are failing
poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure planning and spending
is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous it's driving capital
and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive.
" It is understandable why so many are angry at the leaders of America's institutions, including businesses, schools and
governments," Dimon, 61, summarized. "This can understandably lead to disenchantment with trade, globalization and even our free
enterprise system, which for so many people seems not to have worked. "...
"Inner-city schools are failing poor kids. High schools and vocational schools aren't providing skills to get decent jobs. Infrastructure
planning and spending is so anemic that the U.S. hasn't built a major airport in more than 20 years. Corporate taxes are so onerous
it's driving capital and brains overseas. Regulation is excessive."
Let's unpack his list. The 4th (last) sentence is his hope that his bank can back to the unregulated regime that brought us
the Great Recession. His 3rd sentence is a call for more tax cuts for the rich.
We may like his first 2 sentences here but who is going to pay for this? Not Jamie Dimon. See sentence #3.
Why would you object to government creating more demand for labor? Over time, wages will rise and higher wages will fund more
demand for labor produced goods.
"... As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror" into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice. ..."
Barack Obama won the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize -- for not being George W. Bush. This seemed unseemly at the time, but not outrageous.
Seven years later, it seems grotesque.
As the steward-in-chief of the American empire, Obama continued Bush's Afghanistan and Iraq Wars, and extended his "War on Terror"
into Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, and elsewhere in Africa and the Middle East. He also became a terrorist himself and a serial killer, weaponized drones and special ops assassins being his weapons of choice.
ANDREW LEVINE is a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, the author most recently of THE AMERICAN IDEOLOGY
(Routledge) and POLITICAL KEY WORDS
(Blackwell) as well as of many other books and articles in political philosophy. His most recent book is
In Bad Faith: What's Wrong With the
Opium of the People . He was a Professor (philosophy) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Research Professor (philosophy)
at the University of Maryland-College Park. He is a contributor to
Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics
of Illusion (AK Press).
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam, Lebanon,Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending wars are expensive
was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
Your basic question seems to be: What holds a country together? Especially, a large
country--- such as France/Germany/the UK/the USA/the USSR/China---that comprises many
disparate regions and ethnicities? What differentiates such a country from an empire?
So in the USSR seems like a case can be or is being made that the Party is what held the
union together, as an overarching organization that incorporated leaders into its structure.
Perhaps I am wrong in that inference as to what you or someone else is saying.
Seems like the queen's speech shows her effort to point out why it might be better for the
UK to stick together: ability to deliver better outcomes to all members of the
country/society.
The queen does seem to draw a certain line in her speech as to newcomers to the society
who wish to become part of it. Only those with specific skills to contribute to those already
here will be welcome. She doesn't specify that others are not welcome, but she certainly
seems to imply it. And, quite rightly, IMO.
s Putin losing his grip? Why did Russian disinformation operations fail so dramatically in
the UK election? Not only did the "rabid socialist" Corbyn fail to seize power from the
Russophobic cold-war warriors of Whitehall but Russia's man in the White House is already
planning to move in with them!
"... Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria, which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse to impose sanctions. ..."
"... Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S., which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk. ..."
"... Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been pioneering anti-sanction measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity. ..."
Washington's Proposed New Sanctions Against Turkey also Aimed Against Russia
December 18, 2019 A Opinion Leave a commentWith the world fixated on Turkish actions
against Syria, Greece and Libya at the moment, the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Senate
of the United States Congress approved a bill, "Promoting American National Security and
Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS Act," spearheaded and thoroughly promoted by staunch
anti-Syria/Venezuela/Iran/Russia Democratic Senator Robert Menendez who celebrated the bills
passing
on his Twitter . The Republican-led Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 18-4 to send
the bill for a vote in the full Senate.
The approval of the bill was widely reported in the mainstream media as an "anti-Turkey
bill." Senator Jim Risch, the panel's Republican chairman, a fellow endorser of the bill with
Menendez, said that the approval of this bill is because of the "drift by this country, Turkey,
to go in an entirely different direction than what they have in the past. They've thumbed their
nose at us, and they've thumbed their nose at their other NATO allies."
According to
the draft bill , the Turkish acquisition of the powerful S-400 missile defense system gives
grounds to impose sanctions against this country, under the Countering America's Adversaries
Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). In particular, the document restricts the sale of U.S. weapons
to Turkey and imposes sanctions on Turkish officials responsible for supplying weapons towards
their
illegal military operation in Syria.
Turkey signed in December 2017 the first contract with Russia for the purchase of the S-400
for a value of $2.5 billion, which caused tension in relations between Ankara and Washington.
The U.S. demanded that Ankara renounce that transaction and buy U.S. Patriot systems, and
threatened to delay or cancel the sale of the F-35 fighters to Turkey. Ankara refused to make
concessions and assured that its purpose of acquiring Russian systems remains firm.
What was missed, perhaps intentionally by the majority of the mainstream media is that this
bill has a heavy anti-Russian/Syrian component to it. Although not as detailed and expansive as
the Turkish section of the bill, it claims that "the Russian Federation and Iran continue to
exploit a security vacuum in Syria and continue to pose a threat to vital United States
national security interests," without explaining what these security interests are, exactly as
we have become accustomed to.
According to the bill, there will be a
"list of each Russian person that, on or after such date of enactment, knowingly exports,
transfers, or otherwise provides to Syria significant financial, material, or technological
support that contributes materially to the ability of the Government of Syria to acquire
defense articles, defense services, and related information."
Although the bill has not said which specific Russians, the nature of the bill means that
there will be inevitable sanctions against Russia as it is a top weapon exporter to Syria,
which will unlikely change despite of the new sanctions. Those in the eventual sanction list
will face an American blacklist, which means a ban on entry, freezing of assets in the United
States, a ban on doing business with this person for American citizens or companies. At the
same time, the bill allows that the US President can consider each case separately and refuse
to impose sanctions.
These proposed new sanctions that will have to pass the House of Representatives, which
passed its own anti-Turkish sanctions bill by an overwhelming 403-16 vote in October, is part
of a wider effort for the U.S. to keep pressurizing Russia's economy. On December 9, the
committees of both chambers of the U.S. Congress previously agreed on the military budget for
2020, which includes restrictions against the Nord Stream 2 and Turk Stream pipelines to bring
Russian energy to Europe, infrastructures designed to raise Europe's energy security. The U.S.
bill that provides sanctions against companies participating in the laying of the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline aims to obtain unilateral advantages in the gas area to the detriment of the
interests of the countries of Europe. This prompted the chairman of the Board of Directors of
the Russian-German Foreign Chamber of Commerce, Matthias Schepp, to explain that the new
measures against Nord Stream 2 affect not only Russia, but, above all, European companies and
Germany's energy interests.
Washington is frustrated that European energy policy is decided in Europe, not in the U.S.,
which calls into question the cooperation between the U.S. and Europe. It is a very risky
measure and Europe would need to have a blunt attitude of rejection of these measures imposed
by the U.S., because its own economy is at risk.
Effectively, the "Promoting American National Security and Preventing the Resurgence of ISIS
Act," which strangely targets Russia who had a greater role than the U.S. in defeating ISIS
terrorists, is just another way for Washington to warn other countries not to buy the S-400 or
Russian military equipment or engage in energy diplomacy with Moscow. It is unlikely that this
will deter states from conducting arms and energy deals with Russia as Moscow has been
pioneering anti-sanction
measures to protect financial transactions without punishment, and rather it demonstrates a
Washington that is becoming increasingly desperate in the Era of Multipolarity.
Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday that Moscow planned to keep gas transit
via Ukraine irrespective of a number of gas pipelines Moscow currently builds to bypass its
ex-Soviet neighbor.
...
"This is a very difficult, sensitive topic. We would like to solve this problem," Putin said
at his annual press conference in Moscow.
"We will look for a solution that is acceptable for all parties, including Ukraine. That's
despite the construction of infrastructure such as Nord Stream 1, Nord Stream 2, TurkStream.
We will preserve gas transit through Ukraine."
...
Putin said on Thursday that Russia would be ready to give Ukraine a discount of 20-25% for
gas purchases. "I am confident we will reach an agreement ... We have no desire to exacerbate
the situation ... or use this to influence the situation in Ukraine itself."
...
This gives Ukraine three options:
keep buying Russian gas from Europe
swallow their pride and buy discounted gas direct from Russia
Yes it was corrupt before the violent coup, but at least people could live nicely and be
warm during winter. People have frozen during the winters since and many of them had to go
back to work because of the damn IMF loans that hurt big time.
Congress said that they had to put sanctions on Nordstream because of Russia aggression.
One article listed all of the aggressions they have done.
Invaded Iraq.
Supported the Honduran coup.
Invaded Libya
Invaded Syria....well you get the drift. Sorta like how Iran has destabilized the Middle East
as pompous Pompeo is saying. It's the effing hypocrisy!
After more than 17 years of the United States pouring blood and treasure into the effort
to build an Afghan army and government, why is it that the Kabul government continues to lose
ground against the Taliban? Further, why were we unsuccessful creating an Iraqi army that
could stand on its own against the Islamic State?
Before that, of course, came Vietnam.
Nor was that the start of the failure of American-backed armies. I was a teenager in 1949
when Chiang Kai-shek's American-backed Nationalist army lost to the Communist forces of Mao
Zedong in China. The American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, having conducted a study on
why our side lost, declared: "The Nationalist armies did not have to be defeated; they
disintegrated. History has proved again and again that a regime without faith in itself, and
an army without morale, cannot survive the test of battle."
Forty-four years ago, the American-trained and American-supplied army of South Vietnam
simply melted away before the less-well-equipped but better-motivated army of North Vietnam.
In 1975, I watched South Vietnamese soldiers taking off their uniforms and running away in
their underwear as the North Vietnamese closed in on Saigon.
Five years ago, the world watched another American-trained and American-equipped Iraqi
army bolt and run when the better motivated Islamic State forces overran Mosul in Northern
Iraq.
Why, over and over again, does the side America has backed in these civil wars end up
defeated? Four threads connect these lost wars of the last 70 years: corruption, patriotic
nationalism, a misplaced belief in American exceptionalism, and self-deception.
I saw corruption on a grand scale in Saigon. Generals and government officials were
funneling America's tax dollars into bank accounts abroad, fielding ghost armies in which
there were fewer soldiers on the ground than on the official payrolls. In Baghdad during the
American occupation, I learned that billions of American taxpayer dollars were bleeding out
to the Persian Gulf and Jordan, causing a laundered money real estate boom in the Jordanian
capital. In Afghanistan I learned that Afghan officers and soldiers routinely robbed the
villages they were sent to protect. Corruption sapped the people's belief in their US-backed
government in all four wars. Soldiers saw no reason to die for corrupt officials.
A second thread is that our side always appeared to be fighting on the side of foreigners,
while the Communists in China and Vietnam, as well as the insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
always had a better grip on patriotic nationalism and resistance to foreigners. The
anti-colonial struggle was more important than the threat of Communism in most of the
post-World War II world, and the Islamist insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan knew how to
exploit the traditional resistance to foreign rule. The Taliban could appeal to patriotism
while trying to expel the infidel forces of the United States, just as their fathers,
grandfathers, and great grandfathers had resisted the Russians and the British before that in
the name of jihad.
A third thread is a curiously American trait of willfully ignoring other people's history
and cultures. I remember asking an American officer in Vietnam if he had read anything of the
French experience in Vietnam. His answer: "No, why should I? They lost, didn't they?" Robert
McNamara, defense secretary and an architect of our Vietnam War, said in later life that
Americans had never understood the Vietnamese. There were plenty of people who could have
helped him understand, but he wasn't interested. We were Americans -- exceptional, and
therefore not susceptible to the same forces that thwarted other efforts.
I met Americans in the Green Zone in Baghdad who knew nothing about the great schism
between Sunnis and Shia Muslims that was tearing the country apart. American-style democracy
was the answer to all ills, they felt. In Afghanistan I met Americans who thought purple ink
on the fingers of Afghans who had voted was the answer to a thousand years of tribal and
ethnic rivalries.
The fourth thread is self-deception. In Saigon, in Baghdad, and in Kabul I attended
briefings in which progress was always being made, the trend lines were always favorable, and
we were always winning wars we were actually losing. Wishful thinking is no substitute for
reality. Americans can train and assist the armies of those whom we want to support in the
civil wars of others, but we cannot supply the motivation and morale that is necessary to
survive the test of battle.
As we observe another anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attack that shattered American
life 18 years ago, its full impact is still unfolding. Those who planned it succeeded beyond
their wildest dreams. The airborne assaults that took nearly 3,000 lives on that day may now
be seen as the most diabolically successful terror attack in history. That attack not only
wreaked carnage at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a field in rural Pennsylvania.
It wound up dragging the United States into an endless state of war that has drained our
treasury, poisoned our politics, created waves of new terrorism, and made us the enemy of
millions around the world.
The apparent chief perpetrator of the 9/11 attack, Osama bin Laden, presumably cackled
with joy when he heard news of his success on that stunning day. He lived for another 10
years, long enough to cackle with even greater glee at Washington's self-defeating response
to the attack. Using the 9/11 attack as a pretext, the United States invaded Iraq in 2003.
Bin Laden died knowing that he had lured us into the greatest foreign policy disaster in
American history.
It is a truism that our lives are shaped not by what happens to us, but by how we react to
what happens to us. The same applies to nations. Devastating as the death toll was on Sept.
11, 2001, it turned out to be only a taste of what was to come. The United States has been at
war ever since. Thousands of Americans have died. So have hundreds of thousands of civilians
in the Middle East and beyond. This nearly two-decade-long spasm of attacking, bombing, and
occupying countries has decisively shaped the United States and its image in the world. Every
day that our "forever war" continues is a triumph for bin Laden. So is every wounded veteran
who returns home, every newly minted terrorist infuriated by an American attack, every
citizen of the world who recoils at what US forces are being sent to do. We did not simply
fall into bin Laden's trap, we raced in at full speed. Even now, we show little will to
extricate ourselves.
America's determination to strike back with devastating force after 9/11 was
understandable given our shared sense of ravaged innocence. We might have launched a
concentrated strike against the gang of several hundred criminals whose leaders attacked the
United States, and then come home. Instead we have used the 9/11 attack to justify wars and
military deployments around the world.
On Sept. 14, 2001, Congress passed an "authorization for the use of military force"
against the perpetrators of that week's attack and against their "associated forces." Three
presidents have used that authorization to deploy troops across the Middle East and in
countries from Kenya to Georgia to the Philippines. Every call for US withdrawal from
Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria is met by warnings that ending wars could produce "another
9/11." This has become the paralyzing mantra that prevents us from halting the hydra-headed
military campaign we have been waging for 18 years. We also use it to justify atrocities at
prisons like Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Bin Laden has succeeded even in colonizing our
minds.
Soon after passing its highly elastic authorization for military action against
"associated forces," Congress approved another, even more sweeping law: the Patriot Act. It
gave the government broad new power to monitor people and businesses, and has become a
foundation stone of our emerging "surveillance state." The 9/11 attack led us to distort not
only our approach to the world, but also the balance between freedom and security at
home.
Another pernicious aftereffect of the terror attack has been the deepening of our national
us-against-them narrative. This began with President George W. Bush's assertion that every
country in the world had to be "either with us or against us." Crusader rhetoric posits the
United States as the indispensable guardian of civilization, entitled to act as it chooses in
order to fend off a threatening tide of barbarism. Now this approach has leaked back into the
United States. Racist attacks that tear at our social fabric are the domestic reflection of
foreign policies that see the rest of the world as a hostile "other" bent on destroying our
way of life.
Last month it was announced that the five surviving alleged plotters of the 9/11 attack
will finally be brought to trial in 2021. If they are aware of what is happening in the
world, they will arrive in court with a deep sense of satisfaction. Their great triumph was
not the attack. It was the damage the United States has since inflicted upon itself.
Acheson is parroting Napoleon: "In war the moral is to the material as 3 is to 1."
He is wrong in the matter of "faith", unless the Chiang's army lost faith in Chiang's
moral poverty, what he stood for.
A better quote about Chiang losing is written by George C. Marshall, who went over and
came back sure Chiang was done for.
He said: "The US would not be dragged through the mud by those reactionaries". Meaning
Chiang was not the moral power in China.
Same for Vietnam US puppets were not and had no moral power/authority.
In Afghanistan same!
Iraq is split in moral authority, the areas populated by Shi'a are okay as long as the
central government does not pander to the Sunni 1/3 (Baathists were suppressing Shi'a).
I do not agree with quoting Acheson when there is plenty of professional soldier writings
that say it more clearly.
After Korea the professional soldiers were no longer expressive when it cme to propping
thugs, with no moral power in their own borders (granted many of the borders surround
fictional counties).
US has stood with thugs for most of its quagmire experience.......
This week US is looking for a way to start a new quagmire with Iran for royal murderers'
sharing their oil company!
Regarding your last sentence: this is the great truth that Washington's world hegemonists would have you forget. Taking into
account the untapped vast resources of Canada and Alaska and its expansive offshore economic zones extending deep into the Atlantic,
the Pacific, the Gulf of Mexico and the Arctic Ocean, the North American anglosphere could be entirely self-sufficient and do
quite nicely on its own for hundreds of years to come, it just wouldn't be the sole tyrannical state presumably ruling the entire
planet.
Why, it might even entertain the idea of actually cooperating with other regional powers like Russia, China, the EU, India,
Iran, Turkey, the Middle East, greater central Asia, Latin America and even Africa to everyone's benefit, rather than bullying
them all because god ordained us to be the boss of all humans.
America's major malfunction is its lack of historical roots compared to the other societies mentioned. All those places had
thousands of years to refine their sundry cultures and international relationships, certainly through trial and error and many
horrible setbacks, most notably wars, famines, pestilence, genocide and human bondage which people did not have the foresight
to nip in the bud. They learned by their mistakes and some, like the great world wars, were doozies.
The United States, and some of its closest homologues like Canada, Australia, Brazil and Argentina, were thrown together very
rapidly as part of developing colonial empires. It was created through the brute actions of a handful of megalomaniacal oligarchs
of their day. What worked to suppress vast tracts of aboriginal homelands, often through genocide and virtual extinction of the
native populations, was so effective that it was institutionalized in the form of slavery and reckless exploitation of the local
environment. These "great leaders," "pioneers" and "founding fathers" were not about to give up a set of principles -- no matter
how sick and immoral -- which they knew to "work" and accrued to them great power and riches. They preferred to label it "American
exceptionalism" and force it upon the whole rest of the world, including long established regional powers -- cultures going back
to antiquity -- and not just conveniently sketched "burdens of the white man."
No, ancient cultures like China, India, Persia and so forth could obviously be improved for all concerned merely by allowing
a handful of Western Europeans to own all their property and run all their affairs. That grand plan fell apart for most of the
European powers in the aftermath of World War Two, but Washington has held tough and never given up its designs of micromanaging
and exploiting the whole planet. It too is soon to learn its lesson and lose its empire. Either that or it will take the world
down in flames as it tries to cling to all that it never really owned or deserved. The most tragic (or maybe just amusing) part
is that Washington still had most of the world believing its bullshit about exceptionalism and indispensability until it decided
it had to emulate every tyrannical empire that ever collapsed before it.
Realist , April 30, 2019 at 02:08
"ex·tor·tion /ik?stôrSH(?)n/ noun The practice of obtaining something, especially money, through force or threats."
"Racketeering refers to crimes committed through extortion or coercion. A racketeer attempts to obtain money or property from
another person, usually through intimidation or force. The term is typically associated with organized crime."
I see. So, American foreign policy, as applied to both its alleged enemies and presumed allies, essentially amounts to an exercise
in organised crime. So much for due process, free trade, peaceful co-existence, magical rainbows and other such hypocritical platitudes
dispensed for domestic consumption in place of the heavy-handed threats routinely delivered to Washington's targets.
That's quite in keeping with the employment of war crimes as standard "tactics, techniques and procedures" on the battlefield
which was recently admitted to us by Senator Jim Molan on the "60 Minutes" news show facsimile and discussed in one of yesterday's
forums on this blog.
Afghanistan was promised a carpet of gold or a carpet of bombs as incentive to bend to our will (and that of Unocal which,
unlike Nordstream, was a pipeline Washington wanted built). Iraq was promised and delivered "shock and awe" after a secretary
of state had declared the mass starvation of that country's children as well worth the effort. They still can't find all the pieces
left of the Libyan state. Syria was told it would be stiffed on any American contribution to its rebuilding for the effrontery
of actually beating back the American-recruited, trained and financed ISIS terrorist brigades. Now it's being deliberately starved
of both its energy and food requirements by American embargoes on its own resources! North Korea was promised utter annihilation
by Yankee nukes before Kim's summit with our great leader unless it submitted totally to his will, or more likely that of Pompous
Pompeo, the man who pulls his strings. Venezuela is treated to cyber-hacked power outages and shortages of food, medicines, its
own gold bullion, income from its own international petroleum sales and, probably because someone in Washington thinks it's funny,
even toilet paper. All they have to do to get relief is kick out the president they elected and replace him with Washington's
chosen puppet! Yep, freedom and democracy blah, blah, blah. And don't even ask what the kids in Yemen got for Christmas from Uncle
Sam this year. (He probably stole their socks.) A real American patriot will laughingly take Iran to task for ever believing in
the first place that Washington could be negotiated with in good faith. All they had to do was ask the Native Americans (or the
Russians) how the Yanks keep their word and honor their treaties. It was their own fault they were taken for suckers.
"... Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious. It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest of the wealthy. ..."
"... America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla. ..."
"... Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators; it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending your kids to die. Never. ..."
Idealistic Realist , Apr 27, 2019 1:24:45 PM |
link
Best analysis by a candidate for POTUS ever:
American foreign policy is not a failure. To comfort themselves, observers often say that our leaders -- presidents, advisors,
generals -- don't know what they're doing. They do know. Their agenda just isn't what we like to imagine it is.
To quote Michael Parenti: "US policy is not filled with contradictions and inconsistencies. It has performed brilliantly
and steadily in the service of those who own most of the world and who want to own all of it."
The vision of our leaders as bunglers, while more accurate than the image of them as valiant public servants, is less accurate
and more rose-tinted than the closest approximation of the truth, which is that they are servants of their class interest.
That is why we go to war.
Those who buy the elite class's foreign policy BS, about the Emmanuel Goldsteins they conjure up every three years, are
fools. Obviously Hussein and Milošević were bad; but "government bad" does not mean we must invade. Wars occur for economic,
not humanitarian, reasons.
Teodoro Obiang Nguema, the president of Equatorial Guinea, is a kleptocrat, murderer, and alleged cannibal. This is
him and his wife with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Islam Karimov, the president of Uzbekistan, was said to have boiled political prisoners to death, massacred hundreds
of prisoners, and made torture an institution. This is him with John Kerry.
Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, has been involved in the assassination of political opponents, perpetrated obvious
election fraud, and had his term extended until 2034. This is him with Barack and Michelle Obama.
Why have we supported Nguema, Karimov, and Kagame but not the ones who are thorns in our sides? The reasons are obvious.
It's not the lives of their citizens - it's power for the elite class. We intervene abroad because we want to further the interest
of the wealthy.
America will always pick and choose the leaders it props up and tears down. It never was and never will be for humanitarian
reasons -- that is a clever veil. We denounce ethnic cleansing and then fund it. We call for free elections and then support
Pinochet, Stroessner, and Videla.
Opposing war is a noble and courageous act, and there will always be smears. Opposing war isn't supporting dictators;
it's opposing death and destruction in the service of the wealthy. Never believe what they tell you about why they're sending
your kids to die. Never.
New book by David NorthA Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony 1990–2016
Notable quotes:
"... "Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly." ..."
"... Typical American philosophy... "War is peace!"... ..."
We publish here the preface to A Quarter Century of War: The US Drive for Global Hegemony, 1990-2016 by David North.
The book will be published on August 10, and is available for preorder today at Mehring Books in both
softcover
and hardcover
.
***
"In the period of crisis the hegemony of the United States will operate more completely, more openly, and more ruthlessly than
in the period of boom."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1928
"U.S. capitalism is up against the same problems that pushed Germany in 1914 on the path of war. The world is divided? It must
be redivided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.' The United States must 'organize' the world. History is bringing
mankind face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
-- Leon Trotsky, 1934
This volume consists of political reports, public lectures, party statements, essays, and polemics that document the response
of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) to the quarter century of US-led wars that began in 1990–91. The
analyses of events presented here, although written as they were unfolding, stand the test of time. The International Committee does
not possess a crystal ball. But its work is informed by a Marxist understanding of the contradictions of American and world imperialism.
Moreover, the Marxist method of analysis examines events not as a sequence of isolated episodes, but as moments in the unfolding
of a broader historical process. This historically oriented approach serves as a safeguard against an impressionistic response to
the latest political developments. It recognizes that the essential cause of an event is rarely apparent at the moment of
its occurrence.
Much of what passes for analysis in the bourgeois press consists of nothing more than equating an impressionistic description
of a given event with its deeper cause. This sort of political analysis legitimizes US wars as necessary responses to one or another
personification of evil, such as Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the "warlord" Farah Aideed in Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia, Osama
bin Laden of Al Qaeda, the Mullah Omar in Afghanistan, Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; and, most recently, Bashar al Assad in Syria, Kim
Jong Un in Korea, and Vladimir Putin in Russia. New names are continually added to the United States' infinitely expandable list
of monsters requiring destruction.
The material in this volume is the record of a very different and far more substantial approach to the examination of the foreign
policy of the United States.
First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in
1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the entire global nation-state system, as it
emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown of the established postwar equilibrium would
lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism. As far back as August 1990 -- twenty-six years ago -- it was able to foresee
the long-term implications of the Bush administration's war against Iraq:
It marks the beginning of a new imperialist redivision of the world. The end of the postwar era means the end of the
postcolonial era. As it proclaims the "failure of socialism," the imperialist bourgeoisie, in deeds if not yet in words, proclaims
the failure of independence. The deepening crisis confronting all the major imperialist powers compels them to secure control
over strategic resources and markets. Former colonies, which had achieved a degree of political independence, must be resubjugated.
In its brutal assault against Iraq, imperialism is giving notice that it intends to restore the type of unrestrained domination
of the backward countries that existed prior to World War II. [
1 ]
This historically grounded analysis provided the essential framework for an understanding, not only of the 1990–91 Gulf War, but
also of the wars that were launched later in the decade, as well as the post-9/11 "War on Terror."
In a recently published front-page article, the New York Times called attention to a significant milestone in the presidency
of Barack Obama: "He has now been at war longer than Mr. Bush, or any other American president." But with several months remaining
in his term in office, he is on target to set yet another record. The Times wrote:
If the United States remains in combat in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria until the end of Mr. Obama's term -- a near-certainty
given the president's recent announcement that he will send 250 additional Special Operations forces to Syria -- he will leave
behind an improbable legacy as the only president in American history to serve two complete terms with the nation at war. [
2 ]
On the way to setting his record, Mr. Obama has overseen lethal military actions in a total of seven countries: Iraq, Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen. The number of countries is growing, as the United States escalates its military operations
in Africa. The efforts to suppress the Boko Haram insurgency involve a buildup of US forces in Nigeria, Cameroon, Niger, and Chad.
Without any sense of irony, Mark Landler, author of the Times article, notes Obama's status as a Nobel Peace Prize winner
in 2009. He portrays the president as "trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate. . . ." Obama "has wrestled
with this immutable reality [of war] from his first year in the White House . . ."
Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving the
order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel Prize,
in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that war is sometimes
necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
During the Obama years, folly has clearly held the upper hand. But there is nothing that Landler's hero can do. Obama has found
his wars "maddeningly hard to end."
The Times ' portrayal of Obama lacks the essential element required by genuine tragedy: the identification of objective
forces, beyond his control, that frustrated and overwhelmed the lofty ideals and humanitarian aspirations of the president. If Mr.
Landler wants his readers to shed a tear for this peace-loving man who, upon becoming president, made drone killings his personal
specialty, and turned into something akin to a moral monster, the Times correspondent should have attempted to identify the
historical circumstances that determined Obama's "tragic" fate.
But this is a challenge the Times avoids. It fails to relate Obama's war-making record to the entire course of American
foreign policy over the past quarter century. Even before Obama entered office in 2009, the United States had been at war on an almost
continuous basis since the first US-Iraq War of 1990–91.
The pretext for the Gulf War was Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in August 1990. But the violent US reaction to Iraqi President Saddam
Hussein's dispute with the emir of Kuwait was determined by broader global conditions and considerations. The historical context
of the US military operation was the imminent dissolution of the Soviet Union, which was finally carried out in December 1991. The
first President Bush declared the beginning of a "New World Order." [
3 ] What Bush meant by this phrase was
that the United States was now free to restructure the world in the interests of the American capitalist class, unencumbered by either
the reality of the countervailing military power of the Soviet Union or the specter of socialist revolution. The dissolution of the
USSR, hailed by Francis Fukuyama as the "End of History," signified for the strategists of American imperialism the end of military
restraint.
It is one of the great ironies of history that the definitive emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power,
amid the catastrophe of World War I, coincided with the outbreak of the 1917 Russian Revolution, which culminated in the establishment
of the first socialist workers state in history, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party. On April 3, 1917, President Woodrow
Wilson delivered his war message to the US Congress and led the United States into the global imperialist conflict. Two weeks later,
V.I. Lenin returned to Russia, which was in the throes of revolution, and reoriented the Bolshevik Party toward the fight to overthrow
the bourgeois Provisional Government.
Lenin and his principal political ally, Leon Trotsky, insisted that the struggle for socialism was indissolubly linked to the
struggle against war. As the historian R. Craig Nation has argued:
For Lenin there was no doubt that the revolution was the result of a crisis of imperialism and that the dilemmas which it posed
could only be resolved on the international level. The campaign for proletarian hegemony in Russia, the fight against the war,
and the international struggle against imperialism were now one and the same. [
4 ]
Just as the United States was striving to establish its position as the arbiter of the world's destiny, it faced a challenge,
in the form of the Bolshevik Revolution, not only to the authority of American imperialism, but also to the economic, political,
and even moral legitimacy of the entire capitalist world order. "The rhetoric and actions of the Bolsheviks," historian Melvyn P.
Leffler has written, "ignited fear, revulsion and uncertainty in Washington." [
5 ]
Another perceptive historian of US foreign policy explained:
The great majority of American leaders were so deeply concerned with the Bolshevik Revolution because they were so uneasy about
what President Wilson called the "general feeling of revolt" against the existing order, and about the increasing intensity of
that dissatisfaction. The Bolshevik Revolution became in their minds the symbol of all the revolutions that grew out of that discontent.
And that is perhaps the crucial insight into the tragedy of American diplomacy. [
6 ]
In a desperate effort to destroy the new revolutionary regime, Wilson sent an expeditionary force to Russia in 1918, in support
of counterrevolutionary forces in the brutal civil war. The intervention was an ignominious failure.
It was not until 1933 that the United States finally granted diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union. The diplomatic rapprochement
was facilitated in part by the fact that the Soviet regime, now under Stalin's bureaucratic dictatorship, was in the process of repudiating
the revolutionary internationalism that had inspired the Bolsheviks in 1917. It was abandoning the perspective of world revolution
in favor of alliances with imperialist states on the basis of "collective security." Unable to secure such an alliance with Britain
and France, Stalin signed the notorious Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler in August 1939. Following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet
Union in June 1941, and the entry of the United States into World War II in December 1941, the exigencies of the struggle against
Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan required that the administration of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt forge a military alliance
with the Soviet Union. But once Germany and Japan were defeated, relations between the United States and the Soviet Union rapidly
deteriorated. The Truman administration, opposing the extension of Soviet influence into Eastern Europe, and frightened by the growth
of Communist parties in Western Europe, launched the Marshall Plan in 1948 and triggered the onset of the Cold War.
The Kremlin regime pursued nationalistic policies, based on the Stalinist program of "socialism in one country," and betrayed
working class and anti-imperialist movements all over the world. But the very existence of a regime that arose out of a socialist
revolution had a politically radicalizing impact throughout the world. William Appleman Williams was certainly correct in his view
that "American leaders were for many, many years more afraid of the implicit and indirect challenge of the revolution than they were
of the actual power of the Soviet Union." [
7 ]
In the decades that followed World War II, the United States was unable to ignore the existence of the Soviet Union. To the extent
that the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China, which was established in 1949, provided limited political and material
support to anti-imperialist movements in the "Third World," they denied the US ruling class a free hand in the pursuit of its own
interests. These limitations were demonstrated -- to cite the most notable examples -- by the US defeats in Korea and Vietnam, the
compromise settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, and the acceptance of Soviet domination of the Baltic region and Eastern Europe.
The existence of the Soviet Union and an anticapitalist regime in China deprived the United States of the possibility of unrestricted
access to and exploitation of the human labor, raw materials, and potential markets of a large portion of the globe, especially the
Eurasian land mass. It compelled the United States to compromise, to a greater degree than it would have preferred, in negotiations
over economic and strategic issues with its major allies in Europe and Asia, as well as with smaller countries that exploited the
tactical opportunities provided by the US-Soviet Cold War.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991, combined with the restoration of capitalism in China following the Tiananmen
Square massacre of June 1989, was seen by the American ruling class as an opportunity to repudiate the compromises of the post-World
War II era, and to carry out a restructuring of global geopolitics, with the aim of establishing the hegemony of the United States.
There was no small element of self-delusion in the grandiose American response to the breakup of the Soviet Union. The bombastic
claims that the United States had won the Cold War were based far more on myth than reality. In fact, the sudden dissolution of the
Soviet Union took the entire Washington foreign policy establishment by surprise. In February 1987, the Council on Foreign Relations
published an assessment of US-Soviet relations, authored by two of its most eminent Sovietologists, Strobe Talbott and Michael Mandelbaum.
Analyzing the discussions between Reagan and Gorbachev at meetings in Geneva and Reykjavik in 1986, the two experts concluded:
No matter how Gorbachev comes to define perestroika in practice and no matter how he modifies the official definition
of security, the Soviet Union will resist pressure for change, whether it comes from without or within, from the top or the bottom.
The fundamental conditions of Soviet-American relations are therefore likely to persist. This, in turn, means that the ritual
of Soviet-American summitry is likely to have a long run. . . . [
8 ]
The "long run," Talbott and Mandelbaum predicted, would continue not only during the reign of "Gorbachev's successor," but also
his "successor's successor." No substantial changes in relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were to be expected.
The two prophets from the Council on Foreign Relations concluded:
Whoever they are, and whatever changes have occurred in the meantime, the American and Soviet leaders of the next century will
be wrestling with the same great issue -- how to manage their rivalry so as to avoid nuclear catastrophe -- that has engaged the
energies, in the latter half of the 1980s, of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. [
9 ]
In contrast to the Washington experts, who foresaw nothing, the International Committee recognized that the Gorbachev regime marked
a climactic stage in the crisis of Stalinism. "The crisis of Gorbachev," it declared in a statement dated March 23, 1987, "has emerged
as every section of world Stalinism confronts economic convulsions and upheavals by the masses. In every case -- from Beijing to
Belgrade -- the response of the Stalinist bureaucrats has been to turn ever more openly toward capitalist restorationism." [
10 ]
The Cold War victory narrative encouraged, within the ruling elite, a disastrous overestimation of the power and potential of
American capitalism. The drive for hegemony assumed the ability of the US to contain the economic and political centrifugal forces
unleashed by the operation of global capitalism. Even at the height of its power, such an immense project was well beyond the capacities
of the United States. But amid the euphoria generated by the end of the Soviet Union, the ruling class chose to ignore the deep-rooted
and protracted crisis of American society. An objective observer, examining the conditions of both the United States and the Soviet
Union between 1960 and 1990, might well have wondered which regime was in greater crisis. During the three decades that preceded
the dissolution of the USSR, the United States exhibited high levels of political, social, and economic instability.
Consider the fate of the presidential administrations in power during those three decades: (1) The Kennedy administration ended
tragically in November 1963 with a political assassination, in the midst of escalating social tensions and international crises;
(2) Lyndon B. Johnson, Kennedy's successor, was unable to seek reelection in 1968, as a result of urban riots and mass opposition
to the US invasion of Vietnam; (3) Richard Nixon was compelled to resign from office in August 1974, after the House of Representatives'
Judiciary Committee voted for his impeachment on charges related to his criminal subversion of the Constitution; (4) Gerald Ford,
who became president upon Nixon's resignation, was defeated in the November 1976 election amid popular revulsion over Nixon's crimes
and the US military debacle in Vietnam; (5) Jimmy Carter's one term in office was dominated by an inflationary crisis that sent the
federal prime interest rate to 20 percent, a bitter three month national coal miners strike, and the aftershocks generated by the
Iranian Revolution; and (6) Ronald Reagan's years in office, despite all the ballyhoo about "morning in America," were characterized
by recession, bitter social tension, and a series of foreign policy disasters in the Middle East and Central America. The exposure
of an illegal scheme to finance paramilitary operations in Nicaragua (the Iran-Contra crisis) brought Reagan to the very brink of
impeachment. His administration was saved by the leadership of the Democratic Party, which had no desire to remove from office a
president who was politically weakened and already exhibiting signs of dementia.
The one persistent factor that confronted all these administrations, from Kennedy to Reagan, was the erosion in the global economic
position of the United States. The unquestioned dominance of American finance and industry at the end of World War II provided the
economic underpinnings of the Bretton Woods system of dollar-gold convertibility that formed the basis of global capitalist growth
and stability. By the late 1950s, the system was coming under increasing strain. It was during the Kennedy administration that unfavorable
tendencies in the US balance of trade first began to arouse significant concern. On August 15, 1971, Nixon suddenly ended the Bretton
Woods system of fixed international exchange rates, pegged to a US dollar convertible at the rate of $35 per ounce of gold. During
the 1970s and 1980s, the decline in the exchange rate of the dollar mirrored the deterioration of the American economy.
The belligerent response of the United States to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union reflected the weakness, not the strength,
of American capitalism. The overwhelming support within the ruling elite for a highly aggressive foreign policy arose from the delusion
that the United States could reverse the protracted erosion of its global economic position through the deployment of its immense
military power.
The Defense Planning Guidance, drafted by the Department of Defense in February 1992, unambiguously asserted the hegemonic ambitions
of US imperialism:
There are other potential nations or coalitions that could, in the further future, develop strategic aims and a defense posture
of region-wide or global domination. Our strategy must now refocus on precluding the emergence of any potential future global
competitor. [ 11 ]
The 1990s saw a persistent use of US military power, most notably in the first Gulf War, followed by its campaign to break up
Yugoslavia. The brutal restructuring of the Balkan states, which provoked a fratricidal civil war, culminated in the US-led 1999
bombing campaign to compel Serbia to accept the secession of the province of Kosovo. Other major military operations during that
decade included the intervention in Somalia, which ended in disaster, the military occupation of Haiti, the bombing of Sudan and
Afghanistan, and repeated bombing attacks on Iraq.
The events of September 11, 2001 provided the opportunity to launch the "War on Terror," a propaganda slogan that provided an
all-purpose justification for military operations throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and, with increasing frequency, Africa.
They furnished the Bush administration with a pretext to institutionalize war as a legitimate and normal instrument of American foreign
policy.
The administration of the second President Bush ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in the autumn of 2001. In speeches that followed
9/11, Bush used the phrase "wars of the twenty-first century." In this case, the normally inarticulate president spoke with precision.
The "War on Terror" was, from the beginning, conceived as an unending series of military operations all over the globe. One war would
necessarily lead to another. Afghanistan proved to be a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Iraq.
The military strategy of the United States was revised in line with the new doctrine of "preventive warfare," adopted by the US
in 2002. This doctrine, which violated existing international law, decreed that the United States could attack any country in the
world judged to pose a potential threat -- not only of a military, but also of an economic character -- to American interests.
In a verbal sleight of hand, the Bush administration justified the invasion of Iraq as a preemptive war, undertaken in
response to the imminent threat posed by the country's "weapons of mass destruction" to the national security of the United States.
Of course, the threat was as non-existent as were Saddam Hussein's WMDs. In any event, the Bush administration rendered the distinction
between preemptive and preventive war meaningless, by asserting the right of the United States to attack any country, regardless
of the existence or non-existence of an imminent threat to American national security. Whatever the terminology employed for propaganda
purposes by American presidents, the United States adheres to the illegal doctrine of preventive war.
The scope of military operations continuously widened. New wars were started while the old ones continued. The cynical invocation
of human rights was used to wage war against Libya and overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The same hypocritical pretext
was employed to organize a proxy war in Syria. The consequences of these crimes, in terms of human lives and suffering, are incalculable.
The last quarter century of US-instigated wars must be studied as a chain of interconnected events. The strategic logic of the
US drive for global hegemony extends beyond the neocolonial operations in the Middle East and Africa. The ongoing regional wars are
component elements of the rapidly escalating confrontation of the United States with Russia and China.
It is through the prism of America's efforts to assert control of the strategically critical Eurasian landmass, that the essential
significance of the events of 1990–91 is being revealed. But this latest stage in the ongoing struggle for world hegemony, which
lies at the heart of the conflict with Russia and China, is bringing to the forefront latent and potentially explosive tensions between
the United States and its present-day imperialist allies, including -- to name the most significant potential adversary -- Germany.
The two world wars of the twentieth century were not the product of misunderstandings. The past is prologue. As the International
Committee foresaw in 1990–91, the American bid for global hegemony has rekindled interimperialist rivalries simmering beneath the
surface of world politics. Within Europe, dissatisfaction with the US role as the final arbiter of world affairs is being openly
voiced. In a provocative essay, published in Foreign Affairs , the journal of the authoritative US Council on Foreign Relations,
German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier has bluntly challenged Washington's presumption of US global dominance:
As the United States reeled from the effects of the Iraq war and the EU struggled through a series of crises, Germany held
its ground. . . .
Today both the United States and Europe are struggling to provide global leadership. The 2003 invasion of Iraq damaged the
United States' standing in the world. After the ouster of Saddam Hussein, sectarian violence ripped Iraq apart, and U.S. power
in the region began to weaken. Not only did the George W. Bush administration fail to reorder the region through force, but the
political, economic, and soft-power costs of this adventure undermined the United States' overall position. The illusion of a
unipolar world faded. [ 12 ]
In a rebuke to the United States, Steinmeier writes: "Our historical experience has destroyed any belief in national exceptionalism
-- for any nation." [ 13 ]
The journalists and academics, who work within the framework of the official narrative of the defense of human rights and the
"War on Terror," cannot explain the progression of conflicts, from the 1990–91 Gulf War, to the current expansion of NATO eight hundred
miles eastward, and the American "pivot to Asia." On a regular basis, the United States and its allies stage war games in Eastern
Europe, in close proximity to the borders of Russia, and in strategically critical waters off the coast of China. It is not difficult
to conceive of a situation in which events -- either as a result of deliberate calculation or of reckless miscalculation -- erupt
into a clash between nuclear-armed powers. In 2014, as the centenary of World War I approached, a growing number of scholarly papers
called attention to the similarities between the conditions that precipitated the disaster of August 1914 and present-day tensions.
One parallel between today and 1914 is the growing sense among political and military strategists that war between the United
States and China and/or Russia may be inevitable. As this fatalistic premise increasingly informs the judgments and actions of the
key decision makers at the highest level of the state, it becomes a dynamic factor that makes the actual outbreak of war more likely.
A specialist in international geopolitics has recently written:
Once war is assumed to be unavoidable, the calculations of leaders and militaries change. The question is no longer whether
there will or should be a war, but when the war can be fought most advantageously. Even those neither eager for nor optimistic
about war may opt to fight when operating in the framework of inevitability. [
14 ]
Not since the end of World War II has there existed so great a danger of world war. The danger is heightened by the fact that
the level of popular awareness of the threat remains very limited. What percentage of the American population, one must ask, realizes
that President Barack Obama has formally committed the United States to go to war in defense of Estonia, in the event of a conflict
between the small Baltic country and Russia? The media has politely refrained from asking the president to state how many human beings
would die in the event of a nuclear war between the United States and either Russia or China, or both at the same time.
On the eve of World War II, Leon Trotsky warned that a catastrophe threatened the entire culture of mankind. He was proven correct.
Within less than a decade, the Second World War claimed the lives of more than fifty million people. The alarm must once again be
sounded. The working class and youth within the United States and throughout the world must be told the truth.
The progressive development of a globally integrated world economy is incompatible with capitalism and the nation-state system.
If war is to be stopped and a global catastrophe averted, a new and powerful mass international movement, based on a socialist program,
and strategically guided by the principles of revolutionary class struggle, must be built. In opposition to imperialist geopolitics,
in which national states fight brutally for regional and global dominance, the International Committee counterposes the strategy
of world socialist revolution. As Trotsky advised, we "follow not the war map but the map of the class struggle. . . ." [
15 ]
In the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, there were mass protests against the war policies of the United States and
its allies. Millions took to the streets. But after the war began, public opposition virtually disappeared. The absence of popular
protest did not signify support for the war. Rather, it reflected the repudiation, by the old middle-class protest movement, of its
former Vietnam-era opposition to imperialism.
There are mounting signs of political radicalization among significant sections of the working class and youth. It is only a matter
of time before this radicalization gives rise to conscious opposition to war. It is the aim of this volume to impart to the new antiwar
movement a revolutionary socialist and internationalist perspective and program.
The quotes from Trotsky are glaring. These and others were used to argue against socialism in the post war decades, but all that
was needed was time and the working of the forces of capitalism itself. History never ended, it is right on schedule
"Landler informs his readers that Obama "went for a walk among the tombstones at Arlington National Cemetery before giving
the order to send 30,000 additional troops into Afghanistan." He recalls a passage from Obama's 2009 speech accepting the Nobel
Prize, in which the president wearily lamented that humanity needed to reconcile "two seemingly irreconcilable truths -- that
war is sometimes necessary, and war at some level is an expression of human folly."
VI lenin crushed the Krondstadt rebellion that was the true 'soviet union' model and instituted a hard right revolutionary regime
of ruthless dictatorial control from smolny, not a workers state. The US borgeouis (and french and english) intervened to keep
russia in the war and 160 german divisions from leaving the eastern front. The threat of a workers state was not the concern of
the victors. The failure of revolutionary russia to represent what this article is propping it up to be (some kind of genuine
workers state) leaves me deeply suspect about the other conclusions he's bent history to. Anyone who's read "2 years in russia"
by emma goldman, and "the victors dilemma" - john silverlight and any number of books on the russian civil war, it is clear that
the intervention was for military tactical reasons and that the nascient state was in no ways a workers state but a totalitarian
military dictatorship. Emma Goldman's disillusionment is not her falling out of love with her ideals, but her coming to terms
with the reality vs the PR of Russia. Which is why this website (Wsws) advertised a book repudiating the rejection of socialism
with the faiure of the soviet union as a false narrative a year or few ago.
The historical memoir is clear, diaries, memos, news articles, and the Western soldier revolts, time to smash the revolution.
Kronstadt was a tragedy, but the regime was under threat. history is messy.
I can imagine that
the leadership of imperialist countries was underestimating the bolsheviks in 1917, but once the Russian revolution had given
enough confidence to the German masses to make the war stop one year later, once the French black sea fleet had rebelled in 1919,
etc... they were all very conscious of the risks (potential risks, not immediate threats).
The evidence in favour of what Trotsky wrote about Kronstadt is simply overwhelming. A cmd above gave some basic evidence. Trotsky
was absolutely right and absolutely honest on what he wrote later on ("hue and cry over Kronstadt")
The working class has been the victim of betrayal after betrayal by pseudo-left forces in the 20th century, which led to two catastrophic
world wars and all the other conflicts that have created needless bloodshed around the world. The great task will be, when the
new mass working class anti-war movement arises, to give the working class the political knowledge it needs to not fall for the
traps that dissipated anti-war movements in the past. It must be made clear to the workers of the world that for us, it's do or
die time - literally, as the obscene levels of social inequality and the prospect of nuclear confrontation prove.
I understand this very well, having seen what happened to what I thought at the time was a powerful antiwar movement in the 1960s
against the war in Vietnam. I was quite politically naive at the time and became so disillusioned with politics in general and
what I then thought to be the "left" in particular, that I went off politics completely and started reading Ayn Rand.
After being turned off by Rand's misanthropy and hatred of the working class (even though I admired her atheism), I became
more or less apolitical until 1998, when I first read the World Socialist Web Site and found what I had been looking for.
for this affirming comment. Me too, having all but given up on politics and following a last ditch
search of the web I was rewarded with a political program and party that was more than compatible with my world view and personal
values. Something I had not thought possible, thank you ICFI/SEP.
There are times when even we as Marxists find ourselves scouring the past for a word that befits the character and luminosity
of a moment in human understanding. In this respect David North has given new meaning to the word 'Biblical'.
As a word, its essence is transcendent. For whoever defines an epoch in the clearest and most profoundest way as this, is elevated
to the realms of Greatness.
As the bourgeoisie now scrabbles, in fights, and drowns in the last dregs of its alchemy, a Phoenix arises out of their chaos
lest the bourgeoisie commits all to the Fires of Hell ....
Most excellent words comrade David ...a most excellent call to class struggle .
This is a remarkably panoramic account, grounded in both history and economics, of the unfolding of U.S. militarism and imperialist
warfare over the past 30 or so years. It is without peer in anything else I have seen in terms of showing that events and tendencies
- which we may have been separately aware of - were in fact part of a historical continuum growing out of economic developments
and the perceived interests of the U.S. ruling class.
Always interesting to read cmd. North. ''First, and most important, the International Committee interpreted the collapse of the
Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe in 1989–90, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, as an existential crisis of the
entire global nation-state system, as it emerged from the ashes of World War II. Second, the ICFI anticipated that the breakdown
of the established postwar equilibrium would lead rapidly to a resurgence of imperialist militarism''. This is great but we also
have German militarism on the rise and we should not underestimate. The working class must be prepared for economic and even actual
wars in Europe and elsewhere. The redivision of markets and resources is evident with Germany and China on the table.
March 12, 2019 at 5:25
pm GMT • 200 Words @AnonFromTN
Superfluously impossible, AnonfromTN said: "It is simple, really. The US needs a law
prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold public office."
Hi AnonfromTN.
Hard to comprehend how you persist to deny how the "US law" is Zionized. (Zigh) Israeli
"dual citizenship and holding "Homeland" public office is an irretractable endowment lawlessly
given to US Jews by ruling international Jewry.
They barged into our Constitution like a cancer and feast upon The Bill of Rights.
What's worse now is how livin' the "American dream" has reversed, and at present, President
t-Rump demands huge increases in war funding.
No one gets informed that future wars converge with Israel's will.
Please consider looking at the Wikileaks video linked below? It illustrates a barbaric type
of war crime-free & unaccountability to "international law," including a lawless US
military Rules of Engagement modus operandi, which governed the serial killing activity of an
Apache attack chopper crew in the Baghdad sky. Look close at the posed threat!
Tell me AnonfromTN? As you likely know, Bradley Chelsea Manning is, and under "Homeland"
law, in-the-klink for exposing the war crimes to America. Is their one (1) US Congressman
raising objection to the imprisonment? Fyi, you can look at the brave writing of Kathy Kelly on
the Manning case, and which appears at Counterpunch.org.
@ChuckOrloski I
can only agree. The patient (the US political system) is too far gone to hope for recovery.
As comment #69 rightly points out, our political system is based on bribery. Lobbyism and
donations to political campaigns and PACs are perfectly legal in the US, while all of these
should be criminal offenses punished by jail time, like in most countries. Naturally,
desperate Empires losing their dominant position resort to any war crimes imaginable, and
severely punish those who expose these crimes.
I can add only one thing: you are right that greedy Jews are evil, but greedy people of
any nationality are just as evil as greedy Jews. Not all greedy globalists and MIC thieves
are Jews, but they are all scum. I watch with dismay the US Empire heading to its crash.
Lemmings running to the cliff are about as rational as our degenerate elites. Israel
influence is toxic, but that's not the only poison the Empire will die from.
Information from local sources said that US army helicopters have already transported the gold bullions under cover of darkness
on Sunday [February 24th], before transporting them to the United States.
The sources said that tens of tons that Daesh had been keeping in their last hotbed in al-Baghouz area in Deir Ezzor countryside
have been handed to the Americans, adding up to other tons of gold that Americans have found in other hideouts for Daesh, making
the total amount of gold taken by the Americans to the US around 50 tons, leaving only scraps for the SDF [Kurdish] militias that
serve them [the US operation].
Recently, sources said that the area where Daesh leaders and members have barricaded themselves in, contains around 40 tons
of gold and tens of millions of dollars.
Allegedly, "US occupation forces in the Syrian al-Jazeera area made a deal with Daesh terrorists, by which Washington gets tens
of tons of gold that the terror organization had stolen, in exchange for providing safe passage for the terrorists and their leaders
from the areas in Deir Ezzor where they are located."
ISIS was financing its operations largely by the theft of oil from the oil wells in the Deir Ezzor area, Syria's oil-producing
region, and they transported and sold this stolen oil via their allied forces, through Turkey, which was one of those US allies trying
to overthrow Syria's secular Government
and install a Sunni fundamentalist regime that would be ruled from Riyadh (i.e., controlled by the Saud family) . This gold is
the property of the Syrian Government, which owns all that oil and the oil wells, which ISIS had captured (stolen), and then sold.
Thus, this gold is from sale of that stolen black-market oil, which was Syria's property.
The US Government evidently thinks that the public are fools, idiots. America's allies seem to be constantly amazed at how successful
that approach turns out to be.
Jihadists were recruited from throughout the world to fight against Syria's secular Government. Whereas ISIS was funded mainly
by black-market sales of oil from conquered areas, the Al-Qaeda-led groups were mainly funded by the Sauds and other Arab royal families
and their retinues, the rest of their aristocracy. On 13 December 2013, BBC headlined
"Guide to the Syrian rebels" and opened "There are
believed to be as many as 1,000 armed opposition groups in Syria, commanding an estimated 100,000 fighters." Except in the Kurdish
areas in Syria's northeast, almost all of those fighters were being led by Al Qaeda's Syrian Branch, al-Nusra. Britain's Center on
Religion & Politics headlined on 21 December 2015,
"Ideology
and Objectives of the Syrian Rebellion" and reported: "If ISIS is defeated, there are at least 65,000 fighters belonging to other
Salafi-jihadi groups ready to take its place." Almost all of those 65,000 were trained and are led by Syria's Al Qaeda (Nusra), which
was protected by
the US
In September 2016 a UK official
"FINAL REPORT OF THE TASK
FORCE ON COMBATING TERRORIST AND FOREIGN FIGHTER TRAVEL" asserted that, "Over 25,000 foreign fighters have traveled to the battlefield
to enlist with Islamist terrorist groups, including at least 4,500 Westerners. More than 250 individuals from the United States have
also joined." Even just 25,000 (that official lowest estimate) was a sizable US proxy-army of religious fanatics to overthrow Syria's
Government.
On 26 November 2015, the first of Russia's videos of Russia's bombing ISIS oil trucks headed into Turkey was bannered at a US
military website
"Russia Airstrike on ISIS Oil Tankers" , and exactly a month later, on 26 December 2015, Britain's Daily Express headlined
"WATCH: Russian fighter jets smash ISIS oil tankers after spotting 12,000 at Turkish border" . This article, reporting around
twelve thousand ISIS oil-tanker trucks heading into Turkey, opened: "The latest video, released by the Russian defence ministry,
shows the tankers bunched together as they make their way along the road. They are then blasted by the fighter jet." The US military
had nothing comparable to offer to its 'news'-media. Britain's Financial Times headlined on 14 October 2015,
"Isis Inc: how oil fuels the jihadi terrorists" . Only America's allies were
involved in this commerce with ISIS -- no nation that supported Syria's Government was participating in this black market of stolen
Syrian goods. So, it's now clear that a lot of that stolen oil was sold for gold as Syria's enemy-nations' means of buying that oil
from ISIS. They'd purchase it from ISIS, but not from Syria's Government, the actual owner.
An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit
for the terrorist organization. The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish
city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city
and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq
and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man
in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto
other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.
The US had done the same thing when it took over Ukraine by
a brutal coup in February 2014
: It grabbed the gold. Iskra News in Russian
reported, on 7 March 2014 , that "At 2 a.m. this morning ... an unmarked transport plane was on the runway at Borosipol Airport"
near Kiev in the west, and that, "According to airport staff, before the plane came to the airport, four trucks and two Volkswagen
minibuses arrived, all the truck license plates missing." This was as translated by Michel Chossudovsky at Global Research headlining
on 14 March,
"Ukraine's Gold Reserves Secretly Flown Out and Confiscated by the New York Federal Reserve?" in which he noted that, when asked,
"A spokesman for the New York Fed said simply, 'Any inquiry regarding gold accounts should be directed to the account holder.'" The
load was said to be "more than 40 heavy boxes." Chossudovsky noted that, "The National Bank of Ukraine (Central Bank) estimated Ukraine's
gold reserves in February to be worth $1.8 billion dollars." It was allegedly 36 tons. The US, according to Victoria Nuland (
Obama's detail-person
overseeing the coup ) had invested around $5 billion in the coup. Was her installed Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk
cleaning out the nation's gold reserves in order to strip the nation so that the nation's steep indebtedness for Russian gas would
never be repaid to Russia's oligarchs? Or was he doing it as a payoff for Nuland's having installed him? Or both? In any case: Russia
was being squeezed by this fascist
Ukrainian-American ploy.
The Syria operation was about oil, gold, and guns. However, most of America's support was to Al-Qaeda-led jihadists, not to ISIS-jihadists.
As the great independent investigative journalist Dilyana
Gaytandzhieva reported on 2 July 2017 :
"In December of last year while reporting on the battle of Aleppo as a correspondent for Bulgarian media I found and filmed
9 underground warehouses full of heavy weapons with Bulgaria as their country of origin. They were used by Al Nusra Front (Al
Qaeda affiliate in Syria designated as a terrorist organization by the UN)."
Furthermore, On
8 March 2013, Richard Spenser of Britain's Telegraph reported that Croatia's Jutarnji List newspaper had reported that "3,000
tons of weapons dating back to the former Yugoslavia have been sent in 75 planeloads from Zagreb airport to the rebels, largely via
Jordan since November. The airlift of dated but effective Yugoslav-made weapons meets key concerns of the West, and especially Turkey
and the United States, who want the rebels to be better armed to drive out the Assad regime."
Also, a September 2014 study by Conflict Armaments Research (CAR), titled
"Islamic State Weapons
in Iraq and Syria" , reported that not only east-European, but even US-made, weapons were being "captured from Islamic State
forces" by Kurds who were working for the Americans, and that this was very puzzling and disturbing to those Kurds, who were risking
their lives to fight against those jihadists.
In December 2017, CAR headlined
"Weapons of the Islamic State"
and reported that "this materiel was rapidly captured by IS forces, only to be deployed by the group against international coalition
forces." The assumption made there was that the transfer of weapons to ISIS was all unintentional.
That report ignored contrary evidence, which I summed up on 2 September 2017 headlining
"Russian TV
Reports US Secretly Backing ISIS in Syria" , and reporting there also from the Turkish Government an admission that the US was
working with Turkey to funnel surviving members of Iraq's ISIS into the Deir Ezzor part of Syria to help defeat Syria's Government
in that crucial oil-producing region. Moreover, at least one member of the 'rebels' that the US was training at Al Tanf on Syria's
Jordanian border had quit because his American trainers were secretly diverting some of their weapons to ISIS. Furthermore: why hadn't
the US bombed Syrian ISIS before Russia entered the Syrian war on 30 September 2015? America talked lots about its supposed effort
against ISIS, but why did US wait till 16 November 2015 before taking action,
"'Get Out Of Your Trucks And Run Away': US Gives ISIS 45 Minute Warning On Oil Tanker Strikes" ?
So, regardless of whether the US Government uses jihadists as its proxy-forces, or uses fascists as its proxy-forces, it grabs
the gold -- and grabs the oil, and takes whatever else it can.
This is today's form of imperialism.
Grab what you can, and run. And call it 'fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption'. And the
imperial regime's allies watch in amazement, as they take their respective cuts of the loot. That's the deal, and they call it 'fighting
for freedom and democracy and human rights and against corruption around the world'. That's the way it works. International gangland.
That's the reality, while most of the public think it's instead really "fighting for freedom and democracy and human rights and against
corruption around the world." For example, as
RT reported on Sunday , March 3rd,
about John Bolton's effort at regime-change in Venezuela, Bolton said: "I'd like to see as broad a coalition as we can put together
to replace Maduro, to replace the whole corrupt regime,' Bolton told CNN's Jake Tapper." Trump's regime wants to bring clean and
democratic government to the poor Venezuelans, just like Bush's did to the Iraqis, and Obama's did to the Libyans and to the Syrians
and to the Ukrainians. And Trump, who pretends to oppose Obama's regime-change policies, alternately expands them and shrinks them.
Though he's slightly different from Obama on domestic policies, he never, as the US President, condemns any of his predecessors'
many coups and invasions, all of which were disasters for everybody except America's and allies' billionaires. They're all in on
the take.
The American public were suckered into destroying Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, Syria in 2011-now, and so many other countries,
and still haven't learned anything, other than to keep trusting the allegations of this lying and psychopathically vicious and super-aggressive
Government and of its stenographic 'news'-media. When is enough finally enough ? Never? If not never, then when ? Or do most people
never learn? Or maybe they don't really care. Perhaps that's the problem.
Back on 21 December 2018, one of the US regime's top 'news'-media, the Washington Post, had headlined
"Retreating ISIS army smuggled a fortune in cash and gold out of Iraq and Syria" and reported that "the Islamic State is sitting
on a mountain of stolen cash and gold that its leaders stashed away to finance terrorist operations." So, it's not as if there hadn't
been prior reason to believe that some day some of the gold would be found after America's defeat in Syria. Maybe they just hadn't
expected this to happen quite so soon. But the regime will find ways to hoodwink its public, in the future, just as it has in the
past. Unless the public wises-up (if that's even possible).
The USA 'lost' in Syria, the opposing coalition incl. Iran and Russia couldn't be faced off successfully.
Destroying Afgh., Iraq, Lybia, - all 'failures' in the sense of not garnering 'advantage' for the USA as a territory, a Federated
Nation, its citizens, its trade, boosting hopeful expansion, etc. One aim rarely mentioned is keeping allies on board, e.g. Sarkozy's
France, to invade Lybia. In France many say it was Sark I who did DE-ss-troy! Lybia.
The word *failure* is based on the acceptance of a stated aim reminiscent of old-style-colonialism: grab resources, exploit
super-cheap labor, control the natives, mine, exploit, shunt the goods / profits to home base.
If the aim is to stop rivals breathing, blast them back to the Stone Age, the success is good but relative. (see Iraq.) Private
GloboCorps (e.g. Glencore.. ) are in charge behind the curtain, many Gvmts are just stooges for them in the sense of unawoved
partnerships, the one feeding into the other, in a kind of desperado death spiral.
I have always been struck by the fact that Oil Projects / Management in Iraq, even wiki gives lists that shows major movers
and profiteers are not USA oil cos. / interests, but China, Malaysia, many others.
"... The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya. ..."
"... Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course, his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed. ..."
"... Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. ..."
"... We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact. ..."
The start of current decade revealed the most ruthless face of a global neo-colonialism. From Syria and Libya to Europe and Latin
America, the old colonial powers of the West tried to rebound against an oncoming rival bloc led by Russia and China, which starts
to threaten their global domination.
Inside a multi-polar, complex terrain of geopolitical games, the big players start to abandon the old-fashioned, inefficient direct
wars. They use today other, various methods like
brutal proxy
wars , economic wars, financial and constitutional coups, provocative operations, 'color revolutions', etc. In this highly
complex and unstable situation, when even traditional allies turn against each other as the global balances change rapidly, the forces
unleashed are absolutely destructive. Inevitably, the results are more than evident.
Proxy Wars - Syria/Libya
After the US invasion in Iraq, the gates of hell had opened in the Middle East. Obama continued the Bush legacy of US endless
interventions, but he had to change tactics because a direct war would be inefficient, costly and extremely unpopular to the American
people and the rest of the world.
The result, however, appeared to be equally (if not more) devastating with the failed US invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US
had lost total control of the armed groups directly linked with the ISIS terrorists, failed to topple Assad, and, moreover, instead
of eliminating the Russian and Iranian influence in the region, actually managed to increase it. As a result, the US and its allies
failed to secure their geopolitical interests around the various pipeline games.
In addition, the US sees Turkey, one of its most important ally, changing direction dangerously, away from the Western bloc. Probably
the strongest indication for this, is that Turkey, Iran and Russia decided very recently to proceed in an agreement on Syria without
the presence of the US.
Yet, the list of US failures does not end here. The destruction of Syria and Libya created massive refugee flows which have
proved that the European Union was totally unprepared to deal with such a major issue. On top of that, the latest years, we have
witnessed a rapid rise of various terrorist attacks in Western soil, also as a result of the devastating wars in Syria and Libya.
Evidence from
WikiLeaks has shown that the old colonial powers have started a new round of ruthless competition on Libya's resources.
The usual story propagated by the Western media, about another tyrant who had to be removed, has now completely collapsed. They don't
care neither to topple an 'authoritarian' regime, nor to spread Democracy. All they care about is to secure each country's resources
for their big companies.
The Gaddafi case is quite interesting because it shows that
the Western
hypocrites were using him according to their interests .
Whenever they wanted to blame someone for some serious terrorist attacks, they had a scapegoat ready for them, even if they
had evidence that Libya was not behind these attacks. When Gaddafi falsely admitted that he had weapons of mass destruction in order
to gain some relief from the Western sanctions, they presented him as a responsible leader who, was ready to cooperate. Of course,
his last role was to play again the 'bad guy' who had to be removed.
Economic Wars, Financial Coups – Greece/Eurozone
It would be unthinkable for the neo-colonialists to conduct proxy wars inside European soil, especially against countries which
belong to Western institutions like NATO, EU, eurozone, etc. The wave of the US-made major economic crisis hit Greece and Europe
at the start of the decade, almost simultaneously with the eruption of the Arab Spring revolutionary wave and the subsequent disaster
in Middle East and Libya.
Greece was the easy victim for the global neoliberal dictatorship to impose catastrophic measures in favor of the plutocracy.
The Greek experiment enters its seventh year and the plan is to be used as a model for the whole eurozone. Greece has become also
the model for the looting of public property, as happened in the past with the East Germany and the
Treuhand Operation
after the fall of the Berlin Wall.
While Greece was the major victim of an economic war, Germany used its economic power and control of the European Central Bank
to impose unprecedented austerity, sado-monetarism and neoliberal destruction through silent financial coups in
Ireland ,
Italy and
Cyprus . The Greek political establishment collapsed with the rise of SYRIZA in power, and the ECB was forced to proceed
in an open financial coup against
Greece when the current PM, Alexis Tsipras, decided to conduct a referendum on the catastrophic measures imposed by the ECB, IMF
and the European Commission, through which the Greek people clearly rejected these measures, despite the propaganda of terror inside
and outside Greece. Due to the direct threat from Mario Draghi and the ECB, who actually threatened to cut liquidity sinking Greece
into a financial chaos, Tsipras finally forced to retreat, signing another catastrophic memorandum.
Through similar financial and political pressure, the Brussels bureaufascists and the German sado-monetarists along with the IMF
economic hitmen, imposed neoliberal disaster to other eurozone countries like Portugal, Spain etc. It is remarkable that even the
second eurozone economy, France,
rushed to
impose anti-labor measures midst terrorist attacks, succumbing to a - pre-designed by the elites - neo-Feudalism, under
the 'Socialist' François Hollande, despite the intense protests in many French cities.
Germany would never let the United States to lead the neo-colonization in Europe, as it tries (again) to become a major power
with its own sphere of influence, expanding throughout eurozone and beyond. As the situation in Europe becomes more and more critical
with the ongoing economic and refugee crisis and the rise of the Far-Right and the nationalists, the economic war mostly between
the US and the German big capital, creates an even more complicated situation.
The decline of the US-German relations has been exposed initially with the
NSA interceptions
scandal , yet, progressively, the big picture came on surface, revealing a
transatlantic
economic war between banking and corporate giants. In times of huge multilevel crises, the big capital always intensifies
its efforts to eliminate competitors too. As a consequence, the US has seen another key ally, Germany, trying to gain a certain degree
of independence in order to form its own agenda, separate from the US interests.
Note that, both Germany and Turkey are medium powers that, historically, always trying to expand and create their own spheres
of influence, seeking independence from the traditional big powers.
A wave of neoliberal onslaught shakes currently Latin America. While in Argentina, Mauricio Macri allegedly took the power normally,
the constitutional
coup against Dilma Rousseff in Brazil, as well as, the
usual actions
of the Right opposition in Venezuela against Nicolás Maduro with the help of the US finger, are far more obvious.
The special weight of these three countries in Latin America is extremely important for the US imperialism to regain ground in the
global geopolitical arena. Especially the last ten to fifteen years, each of them developed increasingly autonomous policies away
from the US close custody, under Leftist governments, and this was something that alarmed the US imperialism components.
Brazil appears to be the most important among the three, not only due to its size, but also as a member of the BRICS, the team
of fast growing economies who threaten the US and generally the Western global dominance. The constitutional coup against Rousseff
was rather a sloppy action and reveals the anxiety of the US establishment to regain control through puppet regimes. This is a well-known
situation from the past through which the establishment attempts to secure absolute dominance in the US backyard.
The importance of Venezuela due to its oil reserves is also significant. When Maduro tried to approach Russia in order to strengthen
the economic cooperation between the two countries, he must had set the alarm for the neocons in the US. Venezuela could find an
alternative in Russia and BRICS, in order to breathe from the multiple economic war that was set off by the US. It is characteristic
that the economic war against Russia by the US and the Saudis, by keeping the oil prices in historically low levels, had significant
impact on the Venezuelan economy too. It is also known that the US organizations are funding the opposition since Chávez era, in
order to proceed in provocative operations that could overthrow the Leftist governments.
The case of Venezuela is really interesting. The US imperialists were fiercely trying to overthrow the Leftist governments since
Chávez administration. They found now a weaker president, Nicolás Maduro - who certainly does not have the strength and personality
of Hugo Chávez - to achieve their goal.
The Western media mouthpieces are doing their job, which is propaganda as usual. The recipe is known. You present the half truth,
with a big overdose of exaggeration.
The establishment
parrots are demonizing Socialism , but they won't ever tell you about the money that the US is spending, feeding the
Right-Wing groups and opposition to proceed in provocative operations, in order to create instability. They won't tell you about
the financial war conducted through the oil prices, manipulated by the Saudis, the close US ally.
Regarding Argentina, former president, Cristina Kirchner, had also made some important moves towards the stronger cooperation
with Russia, which was something unacceptable for Washington's hawks. Not only for geopolitical reasons, but also because Argentina
could escape from the vulture funds that sucking its blood since its default. This would give the country an alternative to the neoliberal
monopoly of destruction. The US big banks and corporations would never accept such a perspective because the debt-enslaved Argentina
is a golden opportunity for a new round of huge profits. It's
happening right
now in eurozone's debt colony, Greece.
'Color Revolutions' - Ukraine
The events in Ukraine have shown that, the big capital has no hesitation to ally even with the neo-nazis, in order to impose the
new world order. This is not something new of course. The connection of Hitler with the German economic oligarchs, but also with
other major Western companies, before and during the WWII, is well known.
The most terrifying of all however, is not that the West has silenced in front of the decrees of the new Ukrainian leadership,
through which is targeting the minorities, but the fact that the West allied with the neo-nazis, while according to some information
has also funded their actions as well as other extreme nationalist groups during the riots in Kiev.
Plenty of indications show that US organizations have 'put their finger' on Ukraine. A
video , for
example, concerning the situation in Ukraine has been directed by Ben Moses (creator of the movie "Good Morning, Vietnam"), who is
connected with American government executives and organizations like National Endowment for Democracy, funded by the US Congress.
This video shows a beautiful young female Ukrainian who characterizes the government of the country as "dictatorship" and praise
some protesters with the neo-nazi symbols of the fascist Ukranian party Svoboda on them.
The same organizations are behind 'color revolutions' elsewhere, as well as, provocative operations against Leftist governments
in Venezuela and other countries.
Ukraine is the perfect place to provoke Putin and tight the noose around Russia. Of course the huge hypocrisy of the West can
also be identified in the case of Crimea. While in other cases, the Western officials were 'screaming' for the right of self-determination
(like Kosovo, for example), after they destroyed Yugoslavia in a bloodbath, they can't recognize the will of the majority of Crimeans
to join Russia.
The war will become wilder
The Western neo-colonial powers are trying to counterattack against the geopolitical upgrade of Russia and the Chinese economic
expansionism.
Despite the rise of Donald Trump in power, the neoliberal forces will push further for the expansion of the neoliberal doctrine
in the rival field of the Sino-Russian alliance. Besides, Trump has already shown his hostile feelings against China, despite
his friendly approach to Russia and Putin.
We see, however, that the Western alliances are entering a period of severe crisis. The US has failed to control the situation
in Middle East and Libya. The ruthless neo-colonialists will not hesitate to confront Russia and China directly, if they see that
they continue to lose control in the global geopolitical arena. The accumulation of military presence of NATO next to the Russian
borders, as well as, the accumulation of military presence of the US in Asia-Pacific, show that this is an undeniable fact.
"... One of the most revealing and absurd responses to rejections of forever war is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries: ..."
"... The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare. ..."
"... The routinization and normalization of endless, unauthorized war is one of the most harmful legacies of the Obama administration. ..."
"... When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something else. ..."
One of the most revealing and absurd responses to
rejections of forever war
is the ridiculous dodge that the U.S. isn't really at war when it uses force and kills people in multiple foreign countries:
Just like @POTUS , who put a limited op of NE
#Syria under heading of "endless
war," this op-ed has "drone strikes & Special Ops raids" in indictment of US-at-war. In fact, those actions are antidote to war.
Their misguided critique is insult to real war. https://t.co/DCLS9IDKSw
War has become so normalized over the last twenty years that the constant use of military force gets discounted as something other
than "real war." We have seen this war denialism on display several times in the last year. As more presidential candidates and analysts
have started rejecting endless war, the war's
defenders have often
chosen to
pretend
that the U.S. isn't at war at all. The distinction between "real war" and the constant U.S. involvement in hostilities overseas is
a phony one. The war is very real to the civilian bystanders who die in U.S. airstrikes, and it is very real to the soldiers and
Marines still getting shot at and blown up in Afghanistan. This is not an "antidote to war," but rather the routinization of warfare.
Because Obama is relatively less aggressive and reckless than his hawkish opponents (a very low bar to clear), he is frequently
given a pass on these issues, and we are treated to misleading stories about his supposed "realism" and "restraint." Insofar as
he has been a president who normalized and routinized open-ended and unnecessary foreign wars, he has shown that neither of those
terms should be used to describe his foreign policy. Even though I know all too well that the president that follows him will
be even worse, the next president will have a freer hand to conduct a more aggressive and dangerous foreign policy in part because
of illegal wars Obama has waged during his time in office.
The attempt to define war so that it never includes what the U.S. military happens to be doing when it uses force abroad has been
going on for quite a while. When the Obama administration wanted political and legal cover for the illegal Libyan war in 2011, they
came up with a preposterous claim that U.S. forces weren't engaged in hostilities because there was no real risk to them from the
Libyan government's forces. According to Harold Koh, who was the one responsible for promoting this nonsense, U.S. forces weren't
engaged in hostilities even when they were carrying out a sustained bombing campaign for months. That lie has served as a basis for
redefining what counts as involvement in hostilities so that the president and the Pentagon can pretend that the U.S. military isn't
engaged in hostilities even when it clearly is. When the only thing that
gets counted as a "real war" is a major deployment
of hundreds of thousands of troops, that allows for a lot of unaccountable warmaking that has been conveniently reinvented as something
else.
It isn't just physical war that results in active service body bags but our aggression has alreay cost lives on the home front
and there is every reason to believe it will do so again.
We were not isolationists prior to 9/11/2001, Al Qaeda had already attacked but we were distracted bombing Serbia, expanding
NATO, and trying to connect Al Qaeda attacks to Iran. We were just attacked by a Saudi officer we were training on our soil to
use the Saudis against Iran.
It remains to be seen what our economic warfare against Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Yemen, and our continued use of Afghanistan
as a bombing platform will cost us. We think we are being clever by using our Treasury Dept and low intensity warfare to minimize
direct immediate casualties but how long can that last.
This article confirms what the last Real Commander-in-Chief, General/President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about when he retired
58 years ago.
His wise Council based on his Supreme Military-Political experience has been ignored.
The MSM, Propagandists for the Military-Industrial Complex, won't remind the American People.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could,
with time and as required, make swords as well.
But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments
industry of vast proportions.
Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on
military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total
influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government.
We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the
very structure of our society.
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.
We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for
granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military
machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
The psychological contortionism required to deny that we are at war amazes me. US military forces are killing people in other
countries – but it's not war? Because we can manufacture comforting euphemisms like "police action" or "preventive action" or
"drone strike," it's not war? Because it's smaller scale than a "real" war like WWII?
Cancer is cancer. A small cancer is still a cancer. Arguing that it's not cancer because it's not metastatic stage IV is, well,
the most polite term is sophistry. More accurate terms aren't printable.
Have any of you read Bill Browder's book Red Notice?
It's a great read.
The grandson of the General Secretary of the United States Communist Party, whose great
auntie worked for the NKVD. His brother, Lev, is a great mathematician.
Browder worked with Robert Maxwell as an intern. That's the father of Ghislaine Maxwell,
Jeffrey Epstein's facilitator.
Browder went on to Salomen Brothers and ended up being one of the largest capitalists in
Eastern Europe.
For some reason the Russians believed that Browder was using front companies to aquire
stakes in Russian strategic assets, then remove billions without paying taxes, apparently
worth in excess of 4 billion. If Russian 'propaganda' is to be believed.
They must have wrong because Browder was able to achieve the Magnitsky Act in
response.
It seemed the Russians unfairly seized shares from Browder he acquired in Gazprom,
Surgutneftegaz, Unified Energy Systems, and Sidanco.
In July 2017, Browder testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee on Russia's alleged
interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
As everyone knows, this claim about Russian collusion by Trump is 100% true, and supports
the veracity of all his other claims. As the number one capitalist in Russia following the
fall of the Soviet Union.
And he was a hero too. Speaking out about how Jewish Oligarchs defenestrated Russia with
Yeltsin in the early 2000s and late 90s. He spoke out against his fellow Jews in what most
regard as conspiracy theories. Putin even praised him for assisting in liberation from the
Oligarchs.
What the Russians did was terrifying. They established a precedent where Jewish
international assets and capital could be seized for interference with affairs of state.
Of course what they apparently did was steal $230m off of Browder's fund shareholders.
Russia is of course very corrupt. And Browder's testimony against Trump for alleged Russia
collusion given what everyone knows speaks for his utmost veracity.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder. He did his best in
Poland with depressed assets, and he had a grand adventure. He's clearly amazingly good at
finance.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
Jimmy1969 says: December
19, 2019 at 2:12 pm GMT 200 Words Golden Tree Asset Management bought up Post Media in
Canada at a fire sale years ago from the bankrupt Asper family. Post Media is a conglomerate
that controls dozens and dozens of media outlets in all of Canada including 95% of all the
major Newspapers in every large city. Therefore Canadian news is de facto controlled by an
American New York Jewish hedge fund. That fact has been known for years and is joked about on
all of the bar stools in Canada where reporters hang out .but not in the Press. No one writes
about it none of the Nationalistic Professors, Journalists, Members of Parliament no one. One
fact is certain you will never ever see a single bad word in any of their papers critical of
Israel, or any actions of Israelis. Any comment critical of Israel or Zionist power, no matter
how objective or moderate is immediately deleted. And sadly this is no joke. The world should
take note of how Canada is strangled. Read More Replies: @bike-anarkist
Replies: @the
grand wazoo , @eah
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@silviosilver
Paying what you owe is perfectly fine and moral. Paying double of what you owe on account of
inflated fees and interest is blood sucking. Doing this to developing nations is downright
cruel.
Let's say Congo owes $10 billion. A finance firm buys that debt for $8 billion, collects
the full $10 billion (which already includes interest) and make a $2 billion profit. That's
not too terrible.
But to buy the debt for $8 billion and then force Congo to pay $60 billion is Jewish.
Playing the victim while accusing Congo of financial mismanagement and forcing them to close
their schools and hospitals – very Jewish. Evading the ethical implications of one's
actions and seeking cover behind legalism like a coward –> Jew level –
Godlike
Jews see themselves as the ingroup, and the "goyim" as the outgroup. Since Whites are the
"outgroup" it's not just acceptable, but praiseworthy, to exploit them. To "beat" them at
war.
The problem is that Whites wrongly do not see Jews as an outgroup – something that
Jews themselves take great pains to discourage via their various front groups like the
ADL.
There is no "technical" fix, there is no objective "system" that can change this dynamic.
There is no "level playing field."
Whites need to ostracize Jews at all levels. Boycott, Divest and Sanction – not just
their apartheid regime of Jew bigotry in Zionist-occupied Palestine, but at every level of
society, business, civil institutions, etc.
Jews are destroying the world. Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins.
Look at Europe, Africa and the Americas, Jews have left their ugly footprints. Corruption,
prostitution, drugs and human trafficking are their trade.
Reading the (obvious) Jews commenting here on their various financial swindle-systems is a
lot like reading zionists defending Israel. The basic tactics are always the same:
1.) Focus on some small aspects or most recent events and make a comparison to Gentiles or
other events with similar micro-narratives. "See? Everyone else does it! Why single out us
poor, persecuted Jews?"
2.) Use these minute distractions to drown out the overall issues, underlying concepts,
long history or guiding ideology in noise and minutiae.
3.) Never start at the beginning of the story and follow the trajectory though; always
start in the middle and focus on some trivial detail, use it to defend the (never stated)
sicko ideology that started the problem in the first place. Completely ignore any timelines
or larger perspectives.
David Icke calls it (or used to call it -- - back when his backbone was healthy) the
Reptilian Brain. The ability to manipulate trivial minutiae while never addressing underlying
concepts or timelines.
It is hard to feel sorry for WASPs, they struck a deal with the Jews centuries ago
Catholic political powers have been "striking deals with Jews" for two thousand years.
There is a synagogue in Rome right next to the Vatican which has been legally privileged
since the days of Christ. As E. Michael Jones detailed in his book, Jewish Revolutionary
Spirit , the Catholic Church itself defended Jews from the angry mobs time and time again
throughout their history, to the point bishops and priests would harbor Jews in the
cathedrals and lock the doors before the peasants could arrest them.
Indeed, the infighting among Whites promoted by the likes of Jones is yet again another
assist from Catholic powers to their partners, the Jews.
The popular "neo-reactionary/NRx" movement, started by the Ashkenazi Curtis Yarvin, is yet
another "right-wing" fad that blames Calvinists for all the problems in the world.
Jews are blameless, yet again another White ethnicity/religion is at fault.
No wonder Jews get away with what they do. Whites are too busy infighting over false
history demonizing various rival cults.
So, the "vultures" flew out to the West after devouring the Russian empire and now with the
help of the likes of the homeboy or more like a two bit whore, Ben Sasse, they've descended
on America and have started gutting it out.
Where will they fly next? White Christians don't want them and black/brown Muslims can't
stand them but perhaps China is their next destination being that they have shipped most of
the jobs out there and the whole lot of them are marrying "Chinese-American" women in droves
for good measure.
In the coming battle of the titans, the one who's name can't be pronounced, viz. Yahweh,
hopefully has better guns than Jehovah and Allah, for it sure is gonna need it when the
latter two gang up on it maybe Buddha will give it a helping hand being that they're
practically in-laws now!
My question is how do entities like Puerto Rico get so far in debt in the first
place?
For the same reason individuals get into debt, financial incompetence and sometimes a bit
of bad luck.
I've personally never understood how people can take out loans from companies like Wonga
or QuickQuid (both Jewish owned incidentally) seeing as they quite clearly advertise their
exorbitant interest rates.
Look up income by ethnic group in the UK and US, you will find that Indians and Chinese
(South Asians) are the richest in both countries (except for Jews of course).
What I have found is that these two groups come from a debt-averse culture, their kids
actually live with their parents until they have saved enough money for a house and other
such things required to start a family.
Whites meanwhile are WAY to trusting of these faceless financial institutions, they get
into debt very easily and thus become slaves, if you have kids, the first thing you should
educate them about is finance and debt, don't throw them out to the dogs either, it's tragic
to see some getting into debt and then having other problems like drugs and alcohol
addictions.
I came out of that book with the utmost admiration for Bill Browder.
You don't seem to be serious, if I understood what you want to say. Even Der Spiegel has
published a critical article in English about Browder, Browder is the one who pushed for
sanctions against Russia because of the case Magnitsky:
Questions Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story
suggest he may not have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him
to be.
@Anonymous
Sure, but you're talking utopia. The reality is that public entities issue bonds to finance
special projects or even their operations. Somebody then buys the bonds and expects to be
paid back.
@Realist
There is something especially deficient with Whites when it comes to money matter, how can
such a large number of Whites take short-term loans from companies like Wonga and QuickQuid,
when the nature of their business (usury) is very clearly advertised. I was around 10 years
old when I was astounded at the 5000% APR loans advertised on TV, and wondered if I
understood interest right.
Parents, especially White ones, really need to educate their children on personal finance
and debt, it seems a lot of Whites these days do not actually own anything and all their
flashy gadgets and whatnot are being loaned out (buying Iphone on contract for example),
these people are the hardest hit as they can't scrape together even a couple of hundred
pounds/dollars/euros when hard times come. Its farcical albeit tragic.
Wow what a confused mess. Here's a summary: Vulture capitalism is bad for no particular
reason but only an evil anti-Semite (like you) would dare criticize capitalism.
And they want the island of Puerto Rico for themselves, save a few thousand able bodies to
serve as maids and gardeners. But what about the triple-raced residents of the island itself?
Well, that's easy! Dump them in states like Florida and New York and let the suckers pay for
it. After all, it's not like they are going to vote for the other side we get to eat the cake
and keep it too!
An article that appeared in Goebbels newspaper, Der Angriff (The Attack) titled
"The Jew", a short excerpt that is relevant to your comment;
The Jew is immunized against all dangers: one may call him a scoundrel, parasite,
swindler, profiteer, it all runs off him like water off a raincoat. But call him a Jew and
you will be astonished at how he recoils, how injured he is, how he suddenly shrinks back:
"I've been found out."
I think the term "vulture capitalism" is calumnious to vultures, who, as carrion birds,
perform a useful and purifying function in nature.
The Jews as a collective, i.e., the Jews who identify as such, concur in the death
sentence of Christ handed down by their Sanhedrin and espouse the Talmudic mitzvah of killing
the best of the gentiles (which naturally implies elevating the worst of the gentiles to
power and prominence) are more to be likened to plague bearing rodents. Unlike vultures, rats
feast on corruption and putrescence, spread disease and also kill the living.
We embrace the finance capitalist worldview at our peril. In its essence, it is nothing
but the worship of money making and profiteering as the supreme aspiration of life,
irregardless of its horrible effects on our compatriots and fellow humans. In doing so, we
become Jews at heart.
There is nothing wrong with industry and the profit motive per se. Predatory finance
contributes nothing to the well being of a nation and the needs of the physical economy- it
is supremely toxic and corrosive of both. It must be expunged and its champions expropriated
and exiled. People like the odious Peter Singer have no place in a moral world; they ought to
be first expropriated, then exiled as far away from their host societies as possible.
I was personally wounded by the anti gay rhetoric peppered across this article. I can't help
making the association that Paul singer's son came out as gay and that this must be the
source of the author's animus against him and the others. Shakespeare, who was also
homosexual, described this state of mind as "a green eyed monster," i.e. jealousy. I'm
mortified that other members of the commentariat have not taken issue with this. Maybe we
would be more compassionate to the denizens of middle America if they allowed our most basic
civil rights.
@J
Adelman Oh those kind jews have always been for the working class? But there is a white
working class and jews want them extinct from the face of the earth. Read 'Abolishing
whiteness has never been more urgent.' By Mark Levine
@silviosilver
You make several good points but you don't address the issue of capitalists manipulating the
politicians with campaign contributions. If a fund gets paid off by public money due to
politicians putting the fund owners ahead of the taxpayers, that's corrupt. What happened to
the 'creative destruction' principle by which large IBs like Goldman would have been allowed
to collapse and their principals carried off in leg-irons in 2008? Oh -- they are "too big to
fail and too big to jail." So much for the free market myth.
Moreover, most Jews support endless free money for "victim groups" to be forcibly
extracted from the middle-class. Never mind if Mr. Jones has a lengthy criminal record, let's
pay for him to go to college, let's pay his rent, let's pay his medical bills, etc. Why then
take such a hard line on people who foolishly get into debt?
Moreover, the economic downturn that caused many mortgagors to default was CAUSED BY the
big Wall Street firms' irresponsible behavior.
Also, most people do tend to temper economic contracts with a degree of compassion.
Gentile capitalism does not exist in a vacuum.
I recall reading about a young female environmentalist who was refusing to leave a
venerable redwood tree that was scheduled to be cut down. The WASP businessman who owned the
tree was extremely patient with the girl, tried to win her over, threw her food and drinks,
and so on. The land with the tree was then sold to some Jewish firm. At that point the
article left off. The tree was cut down with no further negotiation.
The greatest jewish vulture fund is the zionist privately owned feral reserve aka the FED ,
is creates money out of thin air and feeds this money to the otherwise bankrupt zionist banks
and not just here in the ZUS but in Europe, and the BIS is the vulture fund of vulture funds
owned by the zionists, the biggest scam in the history of the world.
By the way, Tucker Carlson said that 911 truthers were nuts, that says it all about
him.
Mass immigration for cheap labor, the weaponization of the grievance industry against
white majority/European nations and the use for the production of anti-white race baiting
media.
Much great work!! Very impressed. Would recommend to Moses himself.
@Colin
Wright I remember seeing a clip where Jared Taylor was on some talk show. He was calmly
citing statistics on how blacks are over represented among violent criminals. A sassy black
women broken in with "Jeffrey Dahmer Ted Bundy they were all white!" Not her exact words but
something to that effect. Naxalt, in other words.
I don't think Joyce is suggesting that all unscrupulous capitalists are Jews, or vice
versa. It is true that gentiles can be scumbags (the Enron boys.)
Now most Muslims are not terrorists, and many terrorists are not Muslims.
And yet it seems like there are many people who will notice patterns among other groups,
rightfully roll their eyes when they hear PC arguments in favor of those groups, and then
pull out the naxalt and what-about-isms when you notice patterns in Jewish behavior.
@Dutch
Boy Your statement: "maximizing shareholder is the holy grail of all capitalist
enterprises" statement is spot on.
I've been saying that for decades.
Labor is never given value, but is a commodity-a "necessary evil" according to the Wall
Street types and is to be minimized and marginalized at all costs.
Adolph Hitler's Germany monetized labor and gave it value. THAT is the reason that the
jews went after Germany. Post WW1 Germany was successful in its economy due to throwing off
the shackles (and shekels) of the internationalist banksters.
Henry Ford CREATED a market which had not existed when he paid his employees $5.00 per day
when the average wage of the day was around $1.25 per day. His premise was not entirely
altruistic as assembly line work was monotonous; a way had to be found to retain employees as
well.
Of course, the wall street types and the banksters howled that Ford's wage rates would
destroy capitalism (as they knew it-those at the top reap all of the benefits while the
proles are forced to live on a bare subsistence wage, due to the machinations of those at the
top).
Guess what??
The OPPOSITE happened. Henry Ford knew one of the basic tenets of a truly free,
capitalistic society, that a well-paid work force would be able to participate and contribute
to a strong economy, unlike what is taught in business schools today-that wages must be kept
to a bare minimum and that the stockholder is king.
Our "free trade" politicians have assisted the greedy wall street types and banksters in
depressing wages on the promise of cheap foreign labor and products.
A good example of this is the negative criticism that Costco receives for paying its
employees well above market wages. These same wall street types praise Wal-Mart for paying
its employees barely subsistence wages while assisting them in filling out their public
assistance (welfare) forms.
Any sane person KNOWS that in order for capitalism to work, employees need to make an
adequate wage. Unfortunately, this premise does not exist in today's business climate.
Henry Ford openly criticized those of the "tribe" for manipulating wall street and
banksters to their own advantage, and was roundly (and unjustly) criticized for pointing out
the TRUTH.
Catholic priest, Father Coughlin did the same thing and was punished by the Catholic
church, despite his popularity and exposing the TRUTH of the American economy and the
outsider internationalists that ran it . . . and STILL run it.
Our race to the bottom will not be without consequences. A great realignment is necessary
(and is coming) . .
@lavoisier
I'm not sure I'd put Buffett in that category. For example, in one of the companies he
bought, he kept a factory with declining profits open as long as he could to avoid throwing a
large chunk of people out of work overnight. He has mostly made his money by avoiding dopey
fads and a disciplined buy-and-hold approach to stocks.
@J
Adelman' Jewish people have always stood against tyranny against the working class,
the poor and other people of color." '
Right. I'd say Jews actually collaborated extensively in the imposition of tyranny
on the working class in Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991. That'd be one counter-example.
Should we explore others? The role of Jews in the medieval slave trade? After all,
somebody had to castrate all those Christian boys who were to serve as harem
guards.
No reason to dredge up ancient history -- except here you are, making a blatantly false
claim about it. 'Always stood against ', my ass.
They are gunning for India now who do you think that brought in the Turks who ruled as the
Moguls to exploit the Hindu wealth and later on who did in the Muslims?
Disraeli and his ilk always knew that India was poor but their temples were rich with gold
and it's that they are after one can't build one's own "Third Temple" without it.
Why are the black cohens being promoted (South Brahmins the most pliable ones) at Google,
Microsoft and Pepsi etc.? Because the waterboys, and girls, will help rope in what's left of
the Indian carcass for thirty pieces of silver!
@secondElijah
You are probably the most antisemitic troll I have ever met online.
So, when did Epstein and Weinstein become the standard bearers of the Jewish community?
It is your jealousy of the Jewish people that makes you spew such vile hatred here.
Smug, obnoxious white people like you who have always considered this country their private
preserve are an endangered species. The demographic trends cannot be denied.
In less than 25 years white folks will become a minority in this country. So enjoy it while
you can, Bubba, your days of driving the bus are numbered.
You and other whites here are like the bad guys in every horror movie ever made, who gets
shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass -- even if
it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming back around,
grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that you were
finally dead this time. Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie ends. Our
ankles survive.
YOU DO NOT.
@Saguaro
The soup has boiled over, the horse has bolted and the barn has burnt down and yet you
Yankees haven't woken up.Your politicians are whores who cannot function without funding from
the jews. And Jeffery got them all for Mossad. Enjoy
@Vaterland
The "standing up for People of Color" schtick is particularly disingenous, as all the Jews
have really done isuse their disproportionate control of the media to peddle false narratives
and distort history. One good example of this is the case of then president of the Atlanda
chapter of B'nai B'rith, Leo Frank. Frank had raped and murdered 13 year-old Mary Phagan and
when he was found out, he used his connection with New York Jews to get lots of money and
hire the best defence lawyers, his lawyer then launched vicious racial attacks on a Black
semi-literate janitor who worked in the factory that Frank was in charge of (and where Phagan
worked) to try and convict him of the horrible crime.
Jews will be friends of POC when it suits them. The funny thing about the Frank case is
that the Jewish media has made it out that Frank was innocent and wrongly lynched (only after
his death sentence had been commuted by a judge who was suspected to have been bribed by
powerful New York Jews), and that the Black janitor was the guilty one. This is absurd seeing
as the racist Southern jury would never favour a "White" man over a Black man (anti-semtism
wasn't that big in the South, and especially so considering this was before the Bolsheviks
took control of Russia), and that if Frank had truly been White, this case would be a
landmark case in which the evil rich White man was tried and the Black man was given
justice.
"Gentlemen! I too have been a close observer of the doings of the Bank of the United States.
I have had men watching you for a long time, and am convinced that you have used the funds of
the bank to speculate in the breadstuffs of the country. When you won, you divided the
profits amongst you, and when you lost, you charged it to the bank. You tell me that if I
take the deposits from the bank and annul its charter I shall ruin ten thousand families.
That may be true, gentlemen, but that is your sin! Should I let you go on, you will ruin
fifty thousand families, and that would be my sin! You are a den of vipers and thieves. I
have determined to rout you out, and by the Eternal, (bringing his fist down on the table) I
will rout you out!"
Islam stands in their way of usury-ripping of mankind of their
resources and defrauding mankind via bank thefts.
Bring on the Shariah Law. I would much rather live under Shariah, God's Constitution than
under Euoropean/Western diabolic, satanic, fraudulent monies, homosexual, thievery, false
flag hoaxes, WMD's, bogus wars, Unprovoked oppression, tel-LIE-vision, Santa Claus lies,
Disney hocus pocus , hollywood, illuminati, free mason, monarchy, oligarchy, millitary
industrial complex, life time congressman/senators, upto the eye balls taxation, IRS
thievery, Fraudulent federal reserve, Rothchild/Rockerfeller/Queens and Kings city of London
satanic cabal, opec petro$$$ thievery, ISISraHELL's, al-CIA-da hoaxes, Communist, Atheist,
Idol worshippers, Fear Monger's, Drugged and Drunken's oxy crystal coccaine meth psychopath,
child pedeophilia, gambler's, Pathological and diabolical liars, Hypocrites, sodomites ..I
can't think of any right now, because my mind is exploding with rage because of these
troubling central banker's satanic hegemony!
Quran Chapter 30
39. The usury you practice, seeking thereby to multiply people's wealth, will not multiply
with God. But what you give in charity, desiring God's approval -- these are the
multipliers.
40. God is He who created you, then provides for you, then makes you die, then brings you
back to life. Can any of your idols do any of that? Glorified is He, and Exalted above what
they associate.
41. Corruption has appeared on land and sea, because of what people's hands have earned, in
order to make them taste some of what they have done, so that they might return.
@Really
No Shit Jews are doing to White countries what Whites and Jews did to India, no honour
amongst thieves, the ones with the higher verbal IQ wins.
Also it is important to note that the reason India came under the sway of Anglo-Zionist
banking cartels so easily was because how divided it was, I reckon that is why they are
promoting mass immigration. Import lots of different groups, then run lots of race-baiting
stories to distract the plebs from their financial machinations.
This is why Jews are well represented in non-antisemitic White Nationalist organisations
like Jared Taylor's AmRen, they are great at playing both sides.
And he funded the building of the Peace Palace ("Vredespaleis") in The Hague, presently
the seat of the International Court of Justice, an institution not held in high esteem in
the home country of the generous donor.
@Wally
You can act confused all you want, you know exactly what I am talking about, the fact of the
matter is Whites like you and Joyce would be laughing it up at countries/territories like
Puerto Rico, Congo, Vietnam etc etc being carved up and financially enslaved if Whites were
also allowed a piece of the pie along with Jews (as was the case in the days of the British
Empire when WASP's and Jews worked together), but now that the low-IQ countries have been
looted, the Jews have turned on the Whites and the latter are now crying that their criminal
comrades have now betrayed them.
You quite clearly have a clue, you are just terrified and trying to divert because I am
right, the Jews will do to the White nations what the White nations and Jews did to the
non-White nations. All I can say is that you WASPs should have kept to youselves like Eastern
Europeans and Eastern Asians, they didn't really engage in lofty ambitons to dominate the
world and as such are intact at the moment and seem like they will remain that way for a long
time, they are the true conservatives, WASPs have always had a Jewish streak within their
corrupt souls and are now paying the price for engaging with a criminal race.
Why do you think Epstein has all these Gentiles in his pocket? You think do-gooding
gentiles just randomly decided to get into bed with Epstein and Co.? How many East Asians and
Eastern Euros do you see terrified of being outed as paedophiles.
Don't deceive yourselves, all debts are paid in the end, especially when the creditors are
Jews.
@Adrian
They are a function of Empire in Hague, who protect empire criminals, and assume a non
existent legitimacy and jurisdiction as a private entity to take down empire opponents.
It is the very same kangaroo court as the IMT or Tokio show trials.
In the book "Heaven is for real" a 4 year old boy who supposedly is dead for a short period,
but actually visits heaven; when he returns, is asked : what is the meaning, the purpose of
life on earth?
His response is so simple, that it could only be true. And it could only come from
knowing
Don't deceive yourselves, all debts are paid in the end, especially when the creditors
are Jews.
It is a mathematical impossibility due to interest. The FED probably goes negative
interest like ECB mafia.
Chances are higher they do a reset and start anew with an electronic ponzi scheme.
No one seriously plans to pay these "debts", they can't be paid, and are actually a nothing
burger, pure fiction.
" it is truly remarkable that vulture funds like Singer's escaped major media attention prior
to this ."
Not really. The Jew's grip is starting to slip now, though. More and more people are
becoming aware that they are virulent parasites and always have been.
@Mulegino1
Real capitalism is the competition of ideas, innovation, efficient manufacturing and quality
products made and produced by honest companies. That competition can, in theory at least,
make people (and companies) "try harder". But only when a company's success is determined by
the strength of its products, not by the "deals" it cuts with Jewish financial, advertising,
"marketing" and swindling rackets, designed to line the pockets of the Jew while destroying
honest competition by Gentiles who struggle to play fair and innovate.
Jewish vulture "capitalism" contributes NOTHING of value to any company or any culture. It
never has and never will.
You and other whites here are like the bad guys in every horror movie ever made, who
gets shot five times, or stabbed ten, or blown up twice, and who will eventually pass --
even if it takes four sequels to make it happen -- but who in the meantime keeps coming
back around, grabbing at our ankles as we walk by, we having been mistakenly convinced that
you were finally dead this time. Fair enough, and have at it. But remember how this movie
ends. Our ankles survive.
YOU DO NOT.
Talk about deflection. Any nation, empire, culture or civilization wherein the Jewish
collective gains critical mass and ultimately absolute power turns into a real horror,
not a movie. The Jews may be said to be the true prototype of the "bad guys in every horror
movie", since they can only be gotten rid of by very rigorous means taken in the healthiest
and most vigorous cultures and societies. Indeed, antisemitism itself is the healthy
immunological reaction of a flourishing culture, and its lack thereof the pathology of a
moribund one.
Woke Christians of European provenance have nothing to envy the Jew (the archetypal Jew)
over. We realize that the true measure of success is not primarily monetary or the
fulfillment of cheap ambitions, but a spiritual and cultural one. On the contrary, the Jewish
hatred against Christian Europe and the civilization that it constructed is engendered out of
sheer envy and malice, because Jewry understands that is would never be capable of
constructing anything similar, and never has. In all of the arts, Jewry has produced nothing
of note.
This is not to say that individual Jews have not made contributions to the arts and sciences,
but they have done so only by participation in gentile culture, not qua Jews. Jewry only
tears down and deconstructs; it is not creative in the sense of high art, and can thrive only
in the swamp of gentile decadence and moral putrefaction. Whatever Jewry touches, it turns to
merde.
European Jewish IQ has only gone 1/2 a standard deviation above the white norm in the last
100 years. Interesting to know why, but the belief Jews have always been more intelligent is
just lack of data.
bias for co-operation
Nazis did this too – they worked reaaally well with each other. The issue was how
they thought of and treated others.
That aside, I think we daily meet plenty of individuals who'd sell their mothers, and
maybe kill lives, for pennies. They are like machines not even conscious of what they are
doing.
Your 1 data point aside, are you saying all humans act in identical ways, regardless of
how the ideologies they embrace ask them to act?
Take the ideology of Islam – it does not allow for aggressive war, surprise attacks,
the killing of women or children (unless they take up arms)..
Judaism allows for aggressive war, surprise attack, and demands the killing of all
when a state of war is declared.
Do you believe these declarations lead to identical actions by their practitioners? (in
other words – people act how they would wish to act, and don't really engage in any
belief systems beyond what pulls their own selves?)
So, it's the usual with Joyce (and not only Joyce of course). You take something that is
human, talk of Jews, point to that something in Jews, and pretend, trusting that your
readers will pretend the same, that it's a Jewish-specific something.
Yes, correct – no ideology is perfect at taming human action, and corruption is a
human action, not a Jewish action. But we could still engage in comparative ideology, and
this is what Joyce (and not only Joyce, of course) engage in.
Saying 'well, all peoples engage in force and deceit, so is there any actual difference
between them and their beliefs?' is absurdism. In such a world, I will build a nation of
priests, fashioned along the lines of the Aztek priesthood. Give me your children so I can
rip out their hearts and make it rain – after all 'we are all the same'!!
The argument is that, for the proportion of the population, the fraction of monopoly power
in Western economies that is taken up by Jewish power is much disproportional to other
nations/belief systems.
It is fair to ask whether people who engage in other belief systems have the same level of
desire for monopoly, just less skill to get it due to their belief systems.. I would say yes,
they have the same level of desire (we are all human after all (not that if you read chapter
1 of the Tanya, you will be offered that point of view)) – but that their belief
systems specifically push them away from materialism and desire for money and power, even at
the expense of others. That is the exact point of religion (self-improvement) btw, so
the next question is – is the Jewish religion effective?
At which point, the Jewish ideology becomes the wolf in the hen house – because it
fails to tame the human away from such materialistic desire (as it btw claims it does
best).
Should the hens be allowed to point out what they see as a wolf? Yes.
That the supposed wolf then obfuscates and justifies their actions by pointing to others,
mostly, betrays that it is, in fact, a wolf.
I have become totally disenchanted with the SEC. Stupid, Evil, Crazy! It would not surprise
me if they are the ones that have been terrorizing me, with stupid, evil, crazy chants
through appliances after illegallly implaced RFIDs, microchips, or sensors illegally
implanted in my ears and nose that started after my first phone was hacked in 2017! Can't
expect stupid people not to be stupid, evil people not to be evil, and crazy people not to be
crazy! They were just born that way!
@J
Adleman brookings.edu : "The US will become minority white in 2045 Census projects "
:
"During that year [2045] whites will comprise 49.7 per cent of the population in contrast to
24.6 per cent for Hispanics , 13.1 per cent for Blacks , 7.9 per cent for Asians and 3.8 per
cent for multi-racial populations " Are these projections good or bad for the "Jewish people
" ?
Nov 22, 2013 Thomas DiLorenzo – The Revolution Of 1913
From the Tom Woods show Loyola economics professor Thomas DiLorenzo discusses three events
from 1913 that greatly escalated the transmogrification of America from the founder's vision
(limited government) to its current state (unlimited government).
@silviosilver
Yes, and just because you can doesn't mean you should. And if there's a predilection among
jewish men to engage in predatory lending and collecting tactics that is disproportionate to
their of the population, there's something about their genes or their culture that shapes
them to be this way.
Also, notice how you left out the part where they jack up the interest rates and debtor's
fees to grossly inflate their income. Is there a reason to do this other than as a quick way
to make money off already impoverished people? It's kind of like opening up a rent to own
place in a low income place. The people who do that shit know exactly why they should set up
among poor people; low wealth and bad decision making abound.
And yes, it does seem to be particularly jewish given how many jews are involved in its
practice and given that it used to be frowned upon in Christian Europe. Hell, God himself (as
Jesus) went and beat the shit out of a bunch of jews for their money lending in the temple.
That's the best part of the Bible, frankly. God gets so sick of the his own chosen people
that he sends himself to chastise and whip them for their greed and hubris. No lesson was
learned.
And then they killed him. And they lost their homeland for 2000 years. And then were
kicked out of a hundred plus kingdoms, cities and countries. And then a miserable liberal
shows how vile and stupid their children are:
You know, maybe instead of making excuses, you can just acknowledge the wrongdoing and
acknowledge that some jews are particularly malicious. Cuz eventually, people are
gonna get sick of the shit jews pull and see jewish (or gentile zionist) people defending
their obvious misdeeds and get pissed at them as well. Remember, the well is open to
everyone.
Besides being retardedly wrong, the broader point is likewise retarded: when
English-speaking Jews name their businesses they shouldn't use English words. Naming a
company "Oaktree" should be limited to those of purely English blood! Jews must name their
companies "Cosmopolitan Capital" or RosenMoses Chutzpah Advisors."
Telling that you go with hyperbole here: the only two options must be Albion
Whyteman Capital or Foreskin-Chewing Pornographers Incorporated!
There are two interesting things about the onomastics of the prepuce-free business world.
One is that far fewer sons of Abraham name their businesses after themselves (I'm sure this
will insincerely be attributed to some fear of native kulaks' repressed urge-to-pogrom, even
in Finland or Japan.) The other is an observation made by an associate of a famous Austrian
landscapist: even merely remarking on their origins causes these guys mental distress.
Here in the melting pot, the difference couldn't be any starker. You can make small talk
with any flavor of goy based on it: that's a Polish name, isn't it? Yeah, how did you
know! Try this one with Levy or Nussbaum down at The Smith Group or The Jones Foundation
and watch them plotz.
Jews have always weaponized usury. Long before Christianity, Jews operated the East/West
mechanism on donkey caravan trade routes. Silver would drain from the West, and Gold would
drain from the east, while Jewish caravaneers would take usury on exchange rate differences.
This operated for thousands of years.
Haibaru donkey bones have been discovered outside of Sumer. The Aiparu/Haibaru (Hebrew)
tribes were formed as merchants operating between city states. In those days, psychopaths and
criminals would be excommunicated from civilized city states, and would take up with the
wandering merchant tribe.
Why do you think the Jew is always interested in owing the money power? Why do you think
the Jew perpetually stands outside the walls of the city state, plotting its destruction?
History tells us things, and we had better listen. That is – real history, not what
you learned in (((public skool))). There are two ways to deal with the Jew: 1) Remove him
from your country. 2) Limit him.
Limiting was done by Byzantium under Justinian. The Jew was limited FROM money
counting/banking; limited from participation in government; limited from access to pervert
young minds – especially as school teachers and professors.
It takes a King or Tsar who cares about his population, and is willing to eject or filter
out toxins from the body politic. (((Democracy))) is a failed form of government, whereby
monied Oligarchs control the polity by compromat and pulling strings.
You are not going to be able to vote your way out of the Jew problem.
@Colin
Wright Echoing words once supposedly used by Hermann Goering: whenever I here the word
'philanthropist' these days, I instinctively reach for my revolver!
Take the ideology of Islam – it does not allow for aggressive war, surprise
attacks, the killing of women or children (unless they take up arms)..
Ilya,
There is deception in Islam. Sorry. You cannot make claims about Islam not allowing for
aggressive war and surprise attacks.
These concepts even have names and doctrine that support them. Wahabbi/Salafist Islam is
exactly in alignment with Islamic teachings, especially when using abrogation techniques.
Taqiyya is lying with intent to deceive. The analog in Judaism is the Kol-Niedre, which
allows one pre-forgiveness for lying, cheating, even murder of Goyim.
Hudnas is are used to lay in wait, build up strength, to then attack the enemy.
Islam has derogatory terms to demean e.g. Kaffirs, which is similar to Goyim.
There is also deception in Christianity, but this deception is OUT OF ALIGNMENT WITH
DOCTRINE. The doctrine of super-session means the old testament is superseded, completed, a
historical record.
In Islam the doctrine of Abrogation means that the more pacific Meccan verses are
abrogated (made less relevant) that post Medina. Ergo, Wahabbi Islam and the Takfiri's are
doctrinaly correct, while Judaizer Christians (those that worship the old testament) are out
of alignment and heretics.
Judaism is actually a new religion that came into being after 73 AD, when the verbal
tradition (Caballa) became written down into Talmud.
Our Jewish friends have always been practicing usury, going back to since forever.
Our Jewish friends, I count as worse that Islamics. However two wrongs don't make a right.
Islam badly needs reform or to be expunged. Talmudic Judaism is by far the worst religion on
the planet, and its adherents must malfunction by definition.
o ..kill all the Jewish, er, "vulture capitalists" , right? Or should we go "easy" on
them all and merely ship them all off to special "re-education" camps? Or am I missing
something here ?
You are missing something because you are unwilling to adapt and learn with new
information. This makes you an ideologue.
Lolbertarianism IS A JEWISH CONSTRUCT.
There are no such things as free markets. Money's true nature is law, not gold. Money
didn't come into being with barter and other nonsense lolbertarians believe.
Most of the luminaries that came up with "libertarian" economics are Jews, and it is a
doctrine of deception. The idea is to confuse the goyim with thoughts and ideas that make
them easy pickings.
A determined in-group of predators operating in unison, will take down an "individual"
every-time.
Don't expect anything to improve with Jay Clayton as SEC Chair, and his wife and her father
Gretchen Butler Clayton who was CEO of CSC and mysterious WMB Holdings which share the same
address in addition to many Goldman Sachs divisions. Gretchen was employed by Goldman Sachs
as an attorney from 1999-2017. Many companies affiliated with the Panama Papers share the
same address as well.
Jewish people have treated me better than my own White Euro family.
Jews are tribal, gee what a surprise after 1000's of years of people trying to wipe them
out . and so their charity is within the tribe, but there is no charity within the tribe
among Whites.
Jews, along with Asians and at least some Africans, believe in not just climbing the
ladder, but in actually helping others – at least family – up it also. Whites
believe in climbing the ladder and then pulling it up after them.
I was explaining to a friend recently: My (relative) has proven that if I showed up at
their door, starving, they'd not give me a cheese sandwich, while in my experience, strangers
have been overall a fairly kind lot and a stranger, 50/50, might. Therefore, while I find the
idea of robbing or burning down the house of a stranger abhorrent, I don't mind the idea so
much when it involves a person who's proven to be cold and evil.
For more on this, see the book Angela's Ashes. The Irish family could have stayed in New
York where they were being befriended by a Jewish family. There was a ray of hope. The Irish
kids, at least, would have been fed, steered into decent schooling, etc. But foolishly they
went back to Ireland, to be treated like utter dogshit by their fellow White family and
"people".
Most of the predation going on in the US and worldwide is being done by WASPS who are
using Jews as a convenient scapegoat.
@tono
bungay Feel free to offer us some counter-examples, tono. How many such funds to you know
of that aren't disproportionately Jewish? We're all ears!
@Robjil
This is an example of what I was saying. Less Euro whites in the world is not going to be a
good world for Big Js. Non-Euros believe in freedom of speech.
Jewish Bigwigs can't get control of businesses in East Asia. They have been trying. Paul
Singer tried and failed. In Argentina he got lots of "success". Why? Lots of descendants of
Europeans there went along with "decisions" laid out by New York Jews.
Little Paulie tried to get control of Samsung. No such luck for him in Korea. In Korea
there are many family monopolies, chaebols. A Korean chaebol stopped him. Jewish Daniel Loeb
tried to get a board seat on Sony. He was rebuffed.
I was moved to reflect on the universality of this theme recently when surveying media
coverage on Korean and Argentinian responses to the activities of Paul Singer and his
co-ethnic shareholders at Elliott Associates, an arm of Singer's Elliott Management hedge
fund. The Korean story has its origins in the efforts of Samsung's holding company, Cheil
Industries, to buy Samsung C&T, the engineering and construction arm of the wider
Samsung family of businesses. The move can be seen as part of an effort to reinforce
control of the conglomerate by the founding Lee family and its heir apparent, Lee Jae-yong.
Trouble emerged when Singer's company, which holds a 7.12% stake in Samsung C&T and is
itself attempting to expand its influence and control over Far East tech companies,
objected to the move. The story is fairly typical of Jewish difficulties in penetrating
business cultures in the Far East, where impenetrable family monopolies, known in Korea as
chaebols, are common. This new story reminded me very strongly of last year's efforts by
Jewish financier Daniel Loeb to obtain a board seat at Sony. Loeb was repeatedly rebuffed
by COO Kazuo Hirai, eventually selling his stake in Sony Corp. in frustration.
Here is how the Koreans fought off Paul Singer.
The predominantly Jewish-owned and operated Elliott Associates has a wealth of
self-interest in preventing the Lee family from consolidating its control over the Samsung
conglomerate. As racial outsiders, however, Singer's firm were forced into several tactical
measures in their 52-day attempt to thwart the merger. First came lawsuits. When those
failed, Singer and his associates then postured themselves as defending Korean interests,
starting a Korean-language website and arguing that their position was really just in aid
of helping domestic Korean shareholders. This variation on the familiar theme of Jewish
crypsis was quite unsuccessful. The Lee family went on the offensive immediately and,
unlike many Westerners, were not shy in drawing attention to the Jewish nature of Singer's
interference and the sordid and intensely parasitic nature of his fund's other
ventures.
Cartoons were drawn of Singer being a vulture.
Other cartoons appearing at the same time represented Elliott, literally, as humanoid
vultures, with captions referring to the well-known history of the fund. In the above
cartoon, the vulture offers assistance to a needy and destitute figure, but conceals an axe
with which to later bludgeon the unsuspecting pauper.
ADL got all worked about this. The Koreans did not care. It is reality. Freedom of speech
works on these vultures. The west should try some real freedom of speech.
After the cartoons appeared, Singer and other influential Jews, including Abraham
Foxman, cried anti-Semitism. This was despite the fact the cartoons contain no reference
whatsoever to Judaism – unless of course one defines savage economic predation as a
Jewish trait. Samsung denied the cartoons were anti-Semitic and took them off the website,
but the uproar over the cartoons only seemed to spur on even more discussion about Jewish
influence in South Korea than was previously the case. In a piece published a fortnight
ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed "Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless
and merciless." Last week, the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco, Park Jae-seon,
expressed his concern about the influence of Jews in finance when he said, "The scary thing
about Jews is they are grabbing the currency markets and financial investment companies.
Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination." The next day, cable news channel YTN
aired similar comments by local journalist Park Seong-ho, who stated on air that "it is a
fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are born." It goes
without saying that comments like these are unambiguously similar to complaints about
Jewish economic practices in Europe over the course of centuries. The only common
denominator between the context of fourteenth-century France and the context of
twenty-first-century South Korea is, you guessed it, Jewish economic practices.
The Koreans won. Paulie lost. Good win for humanity. The Argentines were not so lucky.
They don't have freedom speech like the Koreans and East Asians have.
In the end, the Lee strategy, based on drawing attention to the alien and exploitative
nature of Elliott Associates, was overwhelmingly effective. Before a crucial shareholder
vote on the Lee's planned merger, Samsung Securities CEO Yoon Yong-am said: "We should
score a victory by a big margin in the first battle, in order to take the upper hand in a
looming war against Elliott, and keep other speculative hedge funds from taking short-term
gains in the domestic market." When the vote finally took place a few days ago, a
conclusive 69.5% of Samsung shareholders voted in favor of the Lee proposal, leaving
Elliott licking its wounds and complaining about the "patriotic marketing" of those behind
the merger.
@jack
daniels Now that I think about it, it was unfair to make an anecdotal judgment that
Jewish lenders are less forgiving. There are plenty of examples, I'm sure, of compassionate
Jews and flinty gentiles.
Finally! An intelligent criticism of Trump for a change. So tired of the brainless
Democrat/MSM impeachment circus. They make me feel like a reflexive MAGAtard just for
defending the constitution, logic, etc., from their never-ending stream of inanities.
Meanwhile, the real problem with Trump is not that he's Hitler; it's that he's not Hitler
enough!
I am also so tired of Zionist-loving cucks bleeting on about the evils of the CRA without
ever considering the role played by the (((profiteers))) who lobbied such policies into law
in the first place. Realize that what Paul Singer does for a living used to be illegal in
this country up until recently. That's right: US bankruptcy law used to forbid investors from
buying up debt second-hand at a discount and then trying to reclaim the entire face
value from the debtor. But I see all kinds of people even on this thread blaming the victim
instead -- 'Damn goyishe deadbeats!' Whatever
What Singer and the other Jewish vultures engage in is not productive, and isn't even
any recognisable form of work or business. It is greed-motivated parasitism carried out on
a perversely extravagant and highly nepotistic scale. In truth, it is Singer and his
co-ethnics who believe that money can be printed on the backs of productive workers, and
who ultimately believe they have a right to be "showered by free stuff promised by
politicians."
To what extent is Jewish success a product of Jewish intellect and industry versus being
a result of a willingness to use low, dirty, honorless and anti-social tactics which, while
maybe not in violation of the word of the law, certainly violate its spirit?
The last Gentleman on WS was not a Jew. Bring back the WASP. You can maintain your honor,
and manners and still succeed. Jews take the easy low road of deception and cheating. WASP
take the higher road of harder work and ethical business practice.
[MORE]
The courtly Mr. Jenrette, who has been dubbed "the last gentleman on Wall Street" earned this
sobriquet largely for his reputation of being particularly sensitive to the human dimension
in an industry where such matters often get sidestepped. Nonetheless, despite Mr. Jenrette's
modest demeanor, he's risen to the top in an often cutthroat business. He remained with
Donaldson Lufkin through good times and bad, guiding it after its two other founding partners
departed for other ventures and, next month, he will step down as the chairman of the
Securities Industry Association, the brokerage trade group.
"Dick has been the one who carried the firm from its original promise through to closure,"
said Samuel Hayes 3d, an investment banking professor at the Harvard Business School.
"Dick's more in tune with human values and that's not frequently found on Wall Street."
Richard Jenrette, 89, Wall Street power, Raleigh native, dies https://www.wral.com ›
richard-jenrette-89-wall-street-power-and-preserva
Apr 23, 2018 – A courtly, soft-spoken North Carolina native whom The New York Times
once called the "last gentleman on Wall Street," Jenrette (pronounced
Wall Street's 'last gentleman' left behind these 24 lessons about life and success: At the
time of his death late last month due to complications from lymphoma, these couple dozen
rules to live by were left on his desk.
Stay in the game. That's often all you need to do -- don't quit. Stick around! Don't be a
quitter!
•Don't burn bridges (behind you)
•Remember -- Life has no blessing like a good friend!
•You can't get enough of them
•Don't leave old friends behind -- you may need them
•Try to be nice and say "thank you" a lot!
•Stay informed/KEEP LEARNING!
•Study -- Stay Educated. Do Your Home Work!! Keep learning!
•Cultivate friends of all ages -- especially younger
•Run Scared -- over-prepare
•Be proud -- no Uriah Heep for you! But not conceited. Know your own worth.
•Plan ahead but be prepared to allow when opportunity presents itself.
•Turn Problems into Opportunities. Very often it can be done. Problems create
opportunities for change -- people willing to consider change when there are problems.
•Present yourself well. Clean, clean-shaven, dress "classically" to age. Beware style,
trends. Look for charm. Good grammar. Don't swear so much -- it's not cute.
•But be open to change -- don't be stuck in mud. Be willing to consider what's new but
don't blindly follow it. USE YOUR HEAD -- COMMON SENSE.
•Have some fun -- but not all the time!
•Be on the side of the Angels. Wear the White Hat.
•Have a fall-back position. Heir and the spare. Don't leave all your money in one
place.
•Learn a foreign language.
•Travel a lot -- around the world, if possible.
•Don't criticize someone in front of others.
•Don't forget to praise a job well done (but don't praise a poor job)
•I don't like to lose -- but don't be a poor loser if you do.
•It helps to have someone to love who loves you (not just sex).
•Keep your standards high in all you do.
•Look for the big picture but don't forget the small details.
"Permit me to issue and control the money of a nation and I" care not who makes its laws"
That is what Mayer Amschel Rothchild said in the 1750s. Now, is it a stretch of my
imagination to believe the Central Banks of the West, all Jewish controlled, would unfairly
favor their 'own' when issueing or disbursing the money they are permitted to create.
We are not allowed to audit the Federal Reserve, so we know not what they do with it beyond
what they tell us. In 2016 it was discovered that between the year 1999 and 2016 well over
$23 trillions had been stolen from just 2 departments of our government, the DoD and HUD.
(Someone should look at NASA). Is it possible the seed money, for not only Venture
capitalists schemes but also buying governments and law makers, has been diverted, shoveled
out of the back door of these corrupt central banks and into the hands of their fellow
jews?
Anyway, the more exposure articles like this get the closer we get to ending their reign.
As I noted in my previous examination of contemporary Jewish usury, Jews have been at
the forefront of innovation in debt for many centuries, and remain its most adroit auteurs.
Although obviously rooted in centuries of Jewish financial practice, Singer and his
co-ethnics (all four equity partners of Elliott are Jewish, and its COO is the
charmingly-named Zion Shohet) pioneered the finer points of the vulture-fund concept. The
firm was born in 1977 when Singer pooled $1.3 million from family and friends,
His firm's first big "win" was the pillage of Panama in 1995.
but it only really took off in October 1995, when Elliott Associates L.P. purchased
$28.7 million of Panamanian sovereign debt for the discounted price of $17.5 million. The
banks holding those bonds, a group that included heavy hitters like Citi and Credit Suisse,
had given up on repayment from Panama. To cut their losses, they sold their holdings to
Elliott which, like a medieval tax farmer, went in with a heavy hand. When Panama's
government asked for a restructuring of its foreign debt in 1995, the vast majority of its
bondholders agreed – apart from Elliott. In July 1996, Elliott Associates,
represented by one of the world's most high-profile securities law firms, filed a lawsuit
against Panama in a New York district court, seeking full repayment of the original $28.7
million – plus interest and fees. The case made its way from a district court in
Manhattan to the New York State Supreme Court, which sided with Elliott. In the end,
Panama's government had to pay the Jewish group over $57 million, with an additional $14
million going to other creditors. Overnight, Singer's group made $40 million, and the
people of Panama found their original sovereign debt had more than doubled.
@Mefobills
If you could point to a verse in the Quran that allows for aggressive war, it would help me
learn – when I read it I saw an explosive self defence at any infringment on the Ummah,
but not much beyond that.
Of course the origination story of the faith is one of fighting, and without any wise men
to guide the laypeople, the faith has an issue in that it is easy for people to not follow
what it teaches.
Islam has been assaulted for a millennium, and so the self defence aspect of its faith has
become more active than the rest.. it needs reform I agree (and not in the direction the
Salafists have taken it), but more so there is a need for the Ummah to have a few generations
of non-aggression from the outside world.. without it the pressure will only be towards
violence – for any nation or faith!
Judaism has monopolized for millennia though, and still acts as a victim. Different kettle
of fish.
Also, you can debate the positives and negatives of Islam with a Muslim (not as a rabid
ignoramus of course – you must be polite, and have learnt something, as well as be open
to learning more). Almost every debate with a Jew about Judaism has started with, continued
with, and ended with name calling for me however.
Judaism fails as a religion because it does not encourage the practitioner to look at
themselves when confronted with error, Islam still does imo.
Does anyone here remember how John Leibowitz aka John Stewart spent months ripping Mitt
Romney to shreds? Remember? Evil white man vulture capitalism at Bain? Remember? Romney was
Adolf Hitler, and look he put his golden retriever on the roof once?
Say. How come that Mr Leibowitz never talked about the Jews who basically destroyed yes
the entire Rust belt by acquisition and outsource?
That Mr Johnny Leibovitz sure did hate the goy a lot and all. He never talked about his
own people. What a fair fellow Mr Johnny Leibovitz was. He even changed his name. Why change
the name?
Remember. Bain Capital and that kind of merger pump and dumps is all done by Mormons
goyim.
@Colin
Wright Your statement: "Jews actually collaborated extensively in the imposition of
tyranny on the working class in Eastern Europe from 1917 to 1991" not only applies to Europe,
but the united States of America as well.
It's the JEWS it's always the JEWS
[MORE]
Our present situation and the devolving into the morass of "multiculturalism" and "diversity"
is no accident. The jewish talmud and that jewish invention-communism has "rules" for the
debasement of (white) civil society.
The following statements are a result of personal experiences–your mileage may
vary
I came of age during the first so-called "civil-rights" movement and saw for myself the
underhanded dealings, the demonization of decent, law-abiding whites, and in general, the
deterioration of civil society.
Almost all of the "civil-rights" workers and demonstration "handlers" were of one
persuasion–New York based leftist communist jews. They cared not one wit about true
"civil rights", but were there to create hate and discontent among their black charges (who
were too stupid or naive to see that they were being used to suborn and destroy legitimate
government and society–a favorite communist tactic).
These New York-based "carpetbaggers" fomented their hate and discontent, only to become
future "civil-rights" attorneys, race-hustlers, and America-hating leftist communists and the
ADL and $PLC being invented.
Those of us whites who were in the middle of this "civil-rights" revolution had a saying:
" Behind every negro, there is a jew ". No truer words were spoken.
Let's not forget their infestation of the nation's education and entertainment systems,
(which continues to the present day), in which they can spread their jewish supremacist
poison.
The so-called "non-violent civil-rights demonstrations" were anything but "non-violent".
Robberies, rapes, and other criminal acts were common, but never reported, as even the
"mainstream media" was "in on the game" and conveniently turned off their cameras during the
acts of violence. You see, even then,"creating crises" was a part of the agenda.
The "beginning of the end" of America was the use of federal troops against white
Americans, which, in itself was a violation of "posse comitatus"–the prohibition on the
use of federal troops for domestic "law enforcement" purposes. As most whites were (and still
are) law-abiding, they (we) were "steamrollered" by the use of federal troops to crush honest
dissent. We never recovered from those unconstitutional actions. It was all downhill from
there
The next step may be "civil-war" in which us whites will have to take back our birthright
by force.
"Foreign Policy described the court's decision as "a groundbreaking moment in the modern
history of finance." By taking the case to a New York district court, Elliott broke with
long-standing international law and custom, according to which sovereign governments are not
sued in regular courts meant to deal with questions internal to a nation state. Further, the
presiding judge accepted the case – another break with custom. It set the stage for two
decades of similar parasitism on struggling countries by Elliott Associates, a practice that
has reaped billions for Jewish financiers. "
A year later after the ground breaking decision. Paulie tries this scam on another nation,
Peru.
Just one year after the Panama decision, Singer spent about $11 million on
government-backed Peruvian bank debt in 1996. After Singer took Peru to court in the U.S.,
U.K., Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, and Canada, the struggling nation finally agreed in
2000 to pay him $58 million. That meant he got better than a 400 percent return.
In 2001, the victim was Argentina.
In 2001, Elliott Associates purchased an Argentinian default for $48 million; the face
value of that debt today is $630 million. The fund wants repayment for the full value of
the debt to all of Argentina's creditors, as it did in 1995 with Panama. This amounts to
$1.5 billion, which could rise to $3 billion including, again, that all-important interest
and fees.
Another victim was the Congo in 2002-03.
..specific activities of Elliott Associates in Congo, where it originally bought $32.6
million in sovereign debt incurred by that country for the knockdown price of under $20
million. In 2002 and 2003, a British court (tactically chosen) forced the Congolese
government to settle for an estimated $90 million, which included that all-important
interest and fees. Elliott Associates rapidly became known as the quintessential "vulture
fund."
1. Re Sidney, Nebraska: Maybe I'm missing something but wasn't it Cabela's owners, for
example co-founder and chairman Jim Cabela, who sold Cabela, not Elliot Management (Singer et
al)? I gather Elliot Management owned only 11% of the company. Was that enough to force them
to sell?
2. The article confuses honest straightforward loans with tax farming and government
corruption. Loans can be very useful, e.g. for a car to get to a job, or for a house so you
build up equity instead of paying rent.
@Hapalong
Cassidy Bain's not much of an exception to Joyce's pattern: although Mitt, like the other
three founders, was a goy, there were plenty of Chosen Ones associated with the company right
from the start:
In addition to the three founding partners, the early team included Fraser Bullock,
Robert F. White, Joshua Bekenstein, Adam Kirsch, and Geoffrey S. Rehnert Early investors
included Boston real estate mogul Mortimer Zuckerman and Robert Kraft, the owner of the New
England Patriots football team.
@BannedHipster
According to the Talmud, we goyim are not the descendants of Adam and Eve, like the
Jews. No, we are the bastard progeny of Adam's first wife, Lilleth, who eloped with the demon
Samael. So we goyim are really all half-demons and therefore we are an abomination in the
sight of Jew-hova, and we get what we deserve at the hands of his 'chosen people'.
improving the quality of life and access to opportunities for all Israeli citizens so that
they may benefit from the country's prosperity
Read 'all Jewish Israeli citizens'. I doubt they're going to do any life-enhancing
or make opportunities available to any of the grunting subhuman goyim .
It's important not to get carried away with this. Figures such as Andrew Carnegie, while
impeccably gentile, were hardly paragons of scrupulous ethics and disinterested virtue.
Andrew Carnegie built something that made life better for people. Making steel is a
beneficial thing.
These evil vulture Jews build nothing – they make people poorer. They suck the
wealth out of people who have little. They know 100% what they are doing.
Jesus expressed anger against the money changers on the temple steps.
It is OK for you to have natural human feelings and be angry at these Jew bastards.
@Anon
Romney is a Mormon, one of the church officials. The Mormons are closer to the Jews pattern
of worshiping money and using charity donation for business investments.
Mormons arent considered Protestants .
"Although the church has not released church-wide financial statements since 1959, in
1997, Time magazine called it one of the world's wealthiest churches per capita.[147] In a
June 2011 cover story, Newsweek stated that the LDS Church "resembles a sanctified
multinational corporation -- the General Electric of American religion, with global ambitions
and an estimated net worth of $30 billion." A whistle blower within the church reported them
to the IRS for using their status as a non taxable religious groups to invest in business
ventures instead of charities.
@anon
Maybe I can answer your question.
I studied and befriended many jews as a student (Imperial College, London etc) – none
were above average intelligent, and although they were very geeky, they only got average
grades.
When I moved to LA – most of my friends were jews and again, none were very bright
(even though a few were famous). Most of these LA jewish friends were probably psychopaths
– thinking back – very manipulative, exploitative and they lied a lot.
I think it's mostly through their cultural nepotism – they work on their own unity
(they help promote each other) while at the same time they work on destroying unity in their
host and everyone else.
Many have changed their Eastern European names.
And they go out of the way to help other jews (only) – a Serbian friend in Toronto
looks very jewish (but is not religious) told me several times here in Toronto, other Jews
(his boss etc) just offered to help him for no reason ("Is there anything I can do for you?"
etc). He did not understand why they did that – then I realized he actually looks like
a Jewish stereotype (as does his twin brother). So he thought he was helping his own
tribe.
When I went to Cuba with a Jewish 'friend' from LA – he was actively looking for
anything jewish (and nothign else – he did not want to see anything famous like a
beautiful cemetery in Havana etc) – only synagogs etc – where he gave some money
to jews he never even met. I was there with him and saw it. He was even angry if I suggested
we see something nice , historical and not-jewish. We met a NY jew there and we gave his a
ride in the car we rented – they immediately teamed up against me – for no reason
– I regretted going with him on this trip. It was an awful experience –
consistent with all the books I read on psychopaths and also that book Jewish History, Jewish
Religion, the weight of 3000 years
Another very wealthy American mother of a friend asked her South African friends (also jews)
to help her book trips in South Africa (and they of course recommended only their Jewish
friends) – it's their son who told me this.
So a lot of backstabbing, cultural nepotism and actively (but in a hidden way as most
psychopaths like to do) they do at wakening and isolating their host. That's their only
advantage – not intelligence (at least in my experience )
I recently learned that from about 1790 to 1967 the USState department refused to issue US
passports to people who held foreign passports. State also didn't hire any dual citizens for
any job from cafeteria dishwasher to ambassador.
Then in the mid sixties, an Israeli immigrant who became a US citizen applied for a US
passport. State refused to issue the US passport. So the Israeli immigrant practiced lawfare.
In 1967 the Supreme Court issued one of its usual detrimental and dangerous rulings. State
was ordered to start issuing US passports to dual citizens.
Soon there were numerous applications to State depot jobs from Israeli citizens residing
in the US. Knowing lawsuits loomed, State caved.
And that children is how and why State, commerce, DOJ CIA treasury, top security civilian
departments in the Pentagon and other federal agencies became flooded with dual American
Israeli citizens who divert money to Israel. Plus they work for Israel instead of the US.
Mysterious how the only Whites who manage to make it past affirmative action barriers are
jews.
Maybe there's a special affirmative action quota for Israelis residing in America.
@J
Adelman Adelman, be careful what you wish for, as in a debate you will be drowned.
Being labeled an ANTISEMITE is the new badge of honor and courage.
Central banks and their fiat fractional reserve banking system is slowly collapsing, as more
and more nations avoid using the BIS. Joyce's article fully explains why Russia is being
promoted as some type of arch-enemy.
@DaveE
I don't even know what capitalism means anymore. It doesn't seem like it's an actual free
market system. Seems like it is slavery for the little guy, and parasitism for the rich.
Maybe we should ditch the word capitalism for usuryism.
"'It was very gratifying to see Tucker Carlson's recent attack on the activities of Paul
Singer's vulture fund, Elliot Associates '"
I am going to avoid the Jew is bad mantra here. I read that article. But it was not an
expose' of hedgefunds, at least not at the level i was expecting. They merged two companies
and sold off or closed that which was least profitable.
In that article there was no clear discussion – about what could have prevented the
closure. So it was hard to respond positively in favor of not closing. I am advocate of
keeping work in the US, but I don't think it is unreasonable that companies be sustainable. I
would have liked that exposure, that the hedge had no intention of exploring possible profit
making alternatives.
And that is where Mr. Carlson lost me. He did not link the companies as you have. Nor
provide the examples you bring to the fore.
What distresses me about Islam is that the pacific practitioners, e.g. Suffi's, many Shias
and Sunnis are out of alignment, and hence are subject to violence from their coreligionists.
I happen to believe there are many wonderful people within the religion what I am saying is
that there is an elephant in the room, and it has a name: abrogation.
I'm going to use a smoke there is fire analogy using data.
If a religion launches repeated attacks against civilizations, then there is something
"in" the religion that is used for justification of said aggression. I'm of the opinion that
data matters, and you have to adjust your position to come into accord with real world
data.
Between 632 and 1922, Islam launched 548 offensive battles against classical
civilization
These attacks were often brutal, especially with rapes being used to "convert women"
rapidly.
In Islam (as in other religions as well) the Imam can turn knobs and get an output. This
means that abrogation is used to pick and choose verses depending on situation, to maneuver
the sheeple in the direction Imam's or political authority want them to go – including
offensive war. I used the term political authority on purpose, because Islam is more than
just a religion, it is a political-theocratic construct that is all-encompassing.
There may not be a specific verse allowing aggressive violence, but there is something
going on based on the data. (I admit to being a lay-man and not an expert on minutia of
Islam. I don't want to go there based on what I already know to be true.)
In Christianity, if there are calls for aggressive violence it is OUT OF ALIGNMENT because
of super-session. Christian adherents who do this are Judaizers, and have to use the old
testament for justification.
@Digital
Samizdat Who the heck is Lillith? Where did she come from? Adam's apple? At least Samael
is a step up from a talking snake. Talk about rewrite. Almost on par to the silly ones on the
daytime soaps. Oh wait . probably same writers.
@Rebel0007
"This won't end well."
-- They cannot help themselves. Two components make it impossible for the tribe to behave in
a preservation mode:
1. the victimhood complex, despite all the recently displayed data about Jewish murderous
ways in the host countries
2. the disproportionate number of psychopaths who are approved by tribal epos and mentality
Perhaps the only solution is to make the aggressive Jews become confined to their Jewish
country. Like an infectious disease that needs to be quarantined. Otherwise, the Jewish
psychopaths will continue leaching and destroying.
Not only the vulture bankers but a complete set of ziocons-infested stink-tanks should be
relocated (with their immediate families) to the Jewish State and prohibited from crossing
the Jewish State borders. Plus the limitations on their involvement in international commerce
and banking. Let the Jews be finally in Jerusalem today, not "next year." Let them enjoy the
company of other Jews.
Jew billionaire globalizer money-grubber Paul Singer has bought and paid for politician
puppet whore Marco Rubio.
JEWS ORGANIZED GLOBALLY(JOG) -- of which Paul Singer is a shady participant -- have plans
for after Trump and they involve the US Senators Marco Rubio and Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton
and others.
Paul Singer pushes mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration. Paul Singer wants
to continue to use mass legal immigration and mass illegal immigration as demographic weapons
to attack and destroy the historic American nation.
Paul Singer wants to continue to use the US military as muscle to fight endless wars on
behalf of Israel.
I wrote this in February of 2019:
I just got reminded that Marco Rubio won a lot of the GOP billionaire Jew donor money away
from Jebby Bush in the 2016 GOP presidential primary because the Jew billionaires -- Paul
Singer in particular -- were not too thrilled with Jebby Bush's connection to James Baker.
James Baker was a factor in the Jew billionaire decision to back Marco Rubio.
George W Bush had dragged the American Empire into a war in Iraq on behalf of Israel and
the GOP Jew billionaire donors were still not convinced of Jebby Bush's slavish devotion to
Israel.
Marco Rubio signalled his willing whoredom to the ISRAEL FIRST foreign policy of endless
war on behalf of Israel in a way that left nothing to chance for the GOP Jew billionaire
donors.
Marco Rubio is nothing more than a filthy politician whore for the GOP Jew billionaire
donors who want to continue to use the US military as muscle to fight wars on behalf of
Israel.
New York Times article:
Mr. Rubio has aggressively embraced the cause of wealthy pro-Israel donors like Mr.
[Sheldon] Adelson, whom the senator is said to call frequently, and Mr. Singer, who both
serve on the board of the Republican Jewish Coalition, an umbrella group for Republican
Jewish donors and officials. Mr. Bush has been less attentive, in the view of some of these
donors: Last spring, he refused to freeze out his longtime family friend James A. Baker
III, the former secretary of state, after Mr. Baker spoke at the conference of a liberal
Jewish group.
The lobbying of Mr. Singer intensified in recent weeks as Mr. Bush's debate stumbles and
declining poll numbers drove many donors to consider Mr. Rubio anew. Last week, Mr. Bush's
campaign manager, Danny Diaz, and senior adviser, Sally Bradshaw, flew to New York to make
personal appeals on Mr. Bush's behalf, in the hopes of heading off an endorsement of Mr.
Rubio, according to two people close to the former governor's campaign.
This is a timely article for me as I have been pondering the relationship between Jews and
neoliberalism for some time now.
At university I studied under a brilliant Neo-Marxist professor who showed me some theory
and arguments that went a long way towards explaining how to make sense of the global power
structure. (Just a quick not for those who recoil at the mere mention of Neo-Marxist: the
academics that use a marxist lens as a tool to criticize the powerful are not all the cuckold
communist SJW types – some of these individuals are extremely intelligent and they make
very powerful arguments backed by loads of data.) One of the theories I was introduced to was
the notion of the Transnational Capitalist Class in this article called Towards A Global
Ruling Class? Globalization and the Transnational Capitalist Class:
http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/reserve/respring18/Intl313_ZOnis/3_Historical_Structuralism.pdf
The authors write the following:
Sklair's work goes the furthest in conceiving of the capitalist class as no longer
tied to territoriality
Inherent in the international concept is a system of nation-states that mediates relations
between classes and groups, including the notion of national capitals and national
bourgeoisi. Transnational, by contrast, denotes economic and related social, political, and
cultural processes – including class formation that supersede nation-states
What distinguishes the TCC from national or local capitalists is that it is involved
in globalized production and manages globalized circuits of accumulation that give it an
objective class existence and identity spatially and politically in the global system above
any local territories and polities.
Since reading your (Dr Joyce) work on the JQ I began to see the connection between age old
complaints of Jews, and what Ford referred to as "The International Jew". In fact, replace
the term "transnational capitalist class" from my passages quoted above (and many others) and
what you have is perfect mirror image of the argument.
This question has come up often lately, synchronistically (or maybe not). I'm somewhat new
to the JQ, having consumed many hours of work (including much of your own) after being sent
down the rabbit hole by the ongoing Epstein case. I was pondering that perhaps, Jews take the
blame for what the predatory capitalists are doing. Not even a week later you addressed this
precise question in your piece about Slavoj Ziszek and now with "vulture capitalism" it is
coming up yet again in Carlson's segment followed by the article right here. It also came up
on the "other side" in the blog I follow of a professor of globalization in this article:
https://zeroanthropology.net/2019/11/27/global-giants-american-empire-and-transnational-capital/
The link above is a review of the book Giants: The Global Power Elite . The review
provides a summary of the book which once again could be a text about Jews if one were to
replace the term "transnational capitalist class" with "Jews". Why I mention it, though, is
the following: "Chapter 2, "The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global
Capitalism," identifies the 17 global financial giants -- money management firms that control
more than one trillion dollars in capital. As these firms invest in each other, and many
smaller firms, the interlocked capital that they manage surpasses $41 trillion (which amounts
to about 16% of the world's total wealth). The 17 global financial giants are led by 199
directors. This chapter details how these financial giants have pushed for global
privatization of virtually everything, in order to stimulate growth to absorb excess capital.
The financial giants are supported by a wide array of institutions: "governments,
intelligence services, policymakers, universities, police forces, militaries, and corporate
media all work in support of their vital interests" (p. 60).
Chapter 3, "Managers: The Global Power Elite of the Financial Giants," largely consists of
the detailed profiles of the 199 financial managers just mentioned.
This caught my eye because I immediately wondered how many of those 199 directors are
Jewish. It also pertains directly to this exact article because I am confident that the
vulture capitalists you targeted here are profiled in the book, probably with many
others.
Now, I am not in the business of writing about the JQ, so I wanted to suggest to anyone
out there that is that if they were to obtain a copy of this book and determine how many of
the 199 directors are jews. What this could accomplish is a marriage of the major two
theories of the "anti-semites" (for lack of a better word) and the "Neo-Marxists". I would
argue that perhaps both sides would learn they are coming at the same thing from two
different angles. Most would ignore it, but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much
needed electric shock if they were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms. Perhaps some
alliances could be forged across the cultural divide in this struggle. Personally I believe
that both angles are perfectly valid, and that understanding one without the other will
leaves far too much to be desired when studying the powerful.
@the
grand wazoo Reagan relaxed the laws on takeovers and as a result what Galbraith called the technostructure (modern
corporation in which the business was run by not with an eye on shareholder value but in the
interests of everyone involved) was ripped apart.
However the technostructure had come about in the 30s when the Depression led to mass lay
offs, which had began to cause social unrest. The Chinese are have already cutting a swath
through Western productive capacity, and now they are coming for the rest to the extent that
the European Union is tightening the limits of foreign direct investment and takeovers. Trump
is calling for negative interest rates, which were not adopted even during the 1930s when
one-quarter of the labor force was idle.
Prospects for severe economic pain being imposed on ordinary working people and the
consequent (eventual) establishment of a new technostructure are excellent. I hate to sound
like an accelerationist, but Jews like Singer are bringing that day closer.
@Ghali
'Everywhere they go, they leave behind nations in ruins. "
-- They always find the willing local collaborators ready to make a big profit. Who can
forget Dick Cheney, the Enemy of Humanity? The same kind of unrestricted criminality and
amorality lives on in Tony Blair the Pious. The fact that this Catholic weasel and major
criminal Tony Blair is still not excommunicated tells all we need to know about the
Vatican.
Assange is rotting in a prison, while Tony Blair and Ghislaine Maxwell are roaming free. The
Jewish connections pay off.
I know some Torah Jews who are angry that Mischlings have no right of return to Israel,
and apparently now aren't part of the ruling American Jewish nation, or American, or have
anywhere to go now. They're also angry at what they see as a repeat of the cycle of
international Jewish action and inevitable reaction they will have to bear the brunt of.
They referred me to this website: The Institute for Historical Review where they
apparently contribute.
" Although Jews make up no more than three or four percent of Russia's population, they
wield enormous economic and political power in that vast and troubled country. "At least half
of the powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish,"
the Los Angeles Times has cautiously noted. (See also: D. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New
Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27. )"
So that was the context of who owned capital in Russia, what was the effect?
" According to Harvard University scholar Graham Allison, who is also a former US
assistant Secretary of Defense, ordinary Russians have experienced, on average, a 75 percent
plunge in living standards since 1991 -- almost twice the decline in Americans' income during
the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this widespread economic misery, a
small minority has grown fabulously wealthy since the end of the Soviet era ."
But how is that possible? Swashbuckling international capitalists like Bill Browder were
bringing their Ivy League MBA's to more efficiently manage all those assets. And he said how
much he wanted to save the Polish Train-yards.
What happened? A Putin arose. He took the capital from the Jews, and the Jews were
dispatched to the United States. Putin also aligned himself with a different Jewish faction
less virulently dismissive of the needs of the people they ruled.
What do they do in the United States? Something similar as the economy careens towards
another financial crisis and living standards, mortality rates, and the middle class
plummet.
"Jewish power in Russia, Galushin continues, has resulted in millions of homeless
children, widespread tuberculosis and cholera, a shortage of medicines, cheating retirees of
their pensions, suicide in the armed forces, and the death of science. What do the Gusinskys,
the Berezovskys, the Chubais, the Nemtsovs, the Kiriyenkos, the Smolenskys, the Livshits, and
the Gaidars say about this? Millions of Russians have perished under their rule. Are the
Russian people ready to judge these scoundrels for their crimes, Galushin ask",
Robert Maxwell was a Chezch Jew – he also robbed hundreds of millions worth of
pensions. How is it possible that all these Jewish capitalists can be linked to readily to
Jeffrey Epstein?
How did Robert Maxwell get his seed money?
Here is a letter sent to Boris Berezovsky nee Abramovich.
"In sharp contrast to the intense feelings expressed by such Russian writers over the
catastrophic situation in their country today is the seeming indifference of American and
German taxpayers who have unwittingly channeled billions of dollars and marks to the
oligarchs -- who in turn have transferred this largesse to secret Swiss accounts. Who
monitors the distribution of these billions through the World Bank, the IMF, the financial
houses, and various banks? Who is responsible for this terrible injustice?"
That's really strange, because isn't that what the Russians accused Browder of doing? They
say that he channelled billions of dollars out of Russia into the United States. Then we had
the great Russian menace that is still ongoing in the media, and failing.
But Browder said that the Russian collusion story that was created by Fusion GPS, and then
the FISA court warrants issued on the basis of the fabricated Steele 'pissgate' dossier and
media stories was 100% true.
And Steele worked for the Russia desk of British Intelligence, and was being paid by the
Democrats.
Even the proto-Shabbos goys at the National Review had to distance themselves from it.
They showed that the date the FBI and Justice said it was verified it couldn't possibly have
been verified.
So why did so many Jewish capitalists like Browder support it?
And why aren't the Russians being permitted to trace Russian monies into Cyprus if Bill
Browder and now Jewish captialist ever has every done a thing that is wrong?
Because literally to the letter what is said about Donald Trump, the Democrats were
actually doing.
"" It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert
Menendez (D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to
Ukraine's prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four
investigations they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that
their support for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong
advocates for a robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators
declared, "We have supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some
in Kyiv appear to have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President
Trump," before demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation
with this important investigation ."
And yet Trump pulls the Jews ever closer. A ruling race of ubermenschen now.
'No reason'.
Can you imagine what American Blacks and savage Hispanics let alone whites are going to do
if the US economy craters like the Russian economy, and everything is transferred to the
banks?
@Old
and grumpy Yeah . fine idea. I've always maintained there are two uses of the word
"capitalism" industrial capitalism or competition of ideas vs. financial capitalism, the
Darwinian struggle for the most ruthless bankster to rig the "markets" most efficiently.
Whether we give it new terminology I don't care much . but I sure wish people would
understand the difference, one way of another !
Trump and the Republican Party puppets are nothing more than nasty politician whores for
billionaire Jews such as Seth Klarman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson and Les Wexner and
Bernie Marcus and many other money-grubber Jew donors.
The Republican Party Jew donors want to continue to flood the USA with mass legal
immigration and mass illegal immigration and the Jew donors want to continue to use the US
military as muscle to fight unnecessary wars and endless wars on behalf of Israel.
The Republican Party Jew donors also want to have all their shady money-grubber scams
protected by the Republican Party politician whores.
I wrote this in October of 2017 about Seth Klarman and Puerto Rican government debt:
Puerto Rico must be allowed to go belly up. The bond owners who own Puerto Rican debt must
go tits up. The US government must not bail out the investors who purchased Puerto Rican
government debt, or any debt whatsoever connected to Puerto Rico. Seth Klarman has been
revealed as a person who has bought Puerto Rican bonds in hopes of cashing out big.
SETH KLARMAN must be given a salt shaker to sprinkle salt on his worthless Puerto Rican
bonds before he eats them. Klarman must lose 100 cents on the dollar for his greedy purchase
of Puerto Rican debt. Klarman has loads of loot, and the Puerto Rican government debt was
purchased for one of his funds. I am sure his investors won't mind getting soaked by Seth for
a bit of money -- it is not even a whole billion dollars, only close to it.
David Dayen says:
Klarman, who has been described as the Oracle of Boston, has a history of buying
unpopular or distressed assets on the cheap in hopes of a payday. Baupost manages over $30
billion in assets. He is known as the top campaign contributor in New England and has been
a major donor in Republican politics in Massachusetts, including largely secret support for
2016's Question 2, an ultimately unsuccessful effort to lift a state cap on charter
schools. Klarman supported Hillary Clinton in 2016, calling Donald Trump "completely
unqualified for the highest office in the land."
Klarman's involvement in Puerto Rican debt will surely come as a surprise to activists
in Massachusetts and Puerto Rico, who have never mentioned him among the "vultures" who are
causing undue pain for the island's U.S. citizens.
Jewish people have treated me better than my own White Euro family.
White Euro people are/were evolved for small tribes. They were hunter gatherers, and
evolved concurrently with dogs. In my opinion the pathological altrusim of whites has to do
with the close relations to dogs, pets and later livestock. The whole "good shepherd" is more
of a Western Construct of Cro-Magnon white people, than the insular goat-herding types of the
middle east.
For example, in Scandinavia and most white countries, a 'baby sitter' can be a neighbor,
while in middle eastern cultures, a baby sitter can only be from a family member.
In other words, white people extend trust to one another, while middle-eastern ethos is
more familal then tribal. Ice age evolution, especially the fourth ice ages, selected for
pathological altruism is whites; which is why whites extend their grace to foreigners, brown
people, and are easily duped by Jews.
All you can do is try to rise above your own families failings. White people have to think
it through intellectually, as it does not come naturally.
Jews are tribal, gee what a surprise after 1000's of years of people trying to wipe them
out . and so their charity is within the tribe, but there is no charity within the tribe
among Whites.
Yes, but what is being debated here is how Jews use their ethnocentrism and in-group
methods to practice usury against out-groups. Euro-whites are a perfect host for the
parasite. The parasitical methods EVOLVED over millenia to operate the usury mechanism, to
take rents and unearned income. This is why they have been kicked out of 109 countries,
because what they do is seen as immoral and against the common good. (Euro whites eventually
smarten up and it always takes a King to eject the Jews.)
For more on this, see the book Angela's Ashes. The Irish family could have stayed in New
York where they were being befriended by a Jewish family.
Let's not get cause and effect reversed. The potato famine in Ireland was devastating
because high-value crops were being exported to England to pay for wait for it . usury on
debts the Irish owed the English. The English in turn were operating the state sponsored
usury system of the Bank of England, which came into being in 1694. The BOE in turn was
JEWISH in construct, being maneuvered into place by Sephardic Jews from Amsterdam.
The Irish, being trusting souls, fell into the usury trap and could not keep up with the
exponential debts.
A general statement: White people can build high trust civilizations that benefit all of
their people, but are easily subverted when the wrong type of predators infiltrate. If your
family was extended, and had aunts and uncles and cousins, who lived in the general area for
centuries, then there would be a network to fall back on.
See slaughter of the cities by Jones:
And yes, the FIRE sector and impetus behind the destruction of your extended family was
JEWISH. The breakdown of neighborhoods and ethnics was on purpose.
The Jew is anti-logos, and whatever he touches he destroys. (There are exceptions of
course – but these people no longer possess a negative Jewish spirit.)
Sorry your family was destroyed. When whites become un-moored they don't know how to
act.
@J
Adleman Quite bizarre post. First,he makes a half ass defense of Jew
character.(Weinstein,Epstein don't represent jews! Well,they kind of do. Any jew who is
called to accounts for his crimes automatically does not represent jews!
You are a used condom. Do you represent the jews? Id day yes.)
Your diatribe sounds like an alt righter's view of jews. Are you real?
if you think it's wrong to buy or try to collect on defaulted debt, what is the
alternative set of laws and behavior you are recommending? If debts can simply be
repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function.
Capitalism includes money. You can't separate the risks in lending from other risks. Bad
investors should be punished and good investors rewarded. Resources should be well allocated.
Otherwise it's not capitalism.
These insane Boomers seem to think that there is a Jewish coup underway to remove Trump
because of all the things that Jews are saying in Jewish publications and every single person
involved being Jewish and stuff.
@Germanicus
About the Carnegie donated "Peace Palace" in The Hague, presently the seat of the In
ternational Court of Justice:
Germanicus claims:
They are a function of Empire in Hague, who protect empire criminals, and assume a non
existent legitimacy and jurisdiction as a private entity to take down empire opponents.
Such as this ruling for instance:
Guardian 3 Oct.2018:
International court of justice orders US to lift new Iran sanctions
Mike Pompeo indicates US will ignore ruling, after judges in The Hague find unanimously in
favour of Iran
@silviosilver
"What Joyce regards as a defect of "vulture" funds, others might regard as an benefit. "
-- Of course. I hope you did not miss the fact that the Jewish vulture funds -- ruthless,
unethical, and leaching on goyim -- contribute to the Jewish Holocaust Museum.
Is not it touching that the same bloody destroyers of nations demand from the same nations a
very special reverence -- out of ethical considerations, of course -- towards the Jewish
victims of WWII? But only Jewish victims. All others were not victims but casualties. See
Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Ukraine. See the unlimited hatred of ziocons towards Russia.
@Anonymous" but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much needed electric shock if they were
to see the JQ framed in marxist terms " – I would not count on the effect of the
electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD,
GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from the very beginning and yet it left no impact
on the leftist thinkers.
"According to Harvard University scholar Graham Allison, who is also a former US
assistant Secretary of Defense, ordinary Russians have experienced, on average, a 75 percent
plunge in living standards since 1991 -- almost twice the decline in Americans' income during
the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in the midst of this widespread economic misery, a
small minority has grown fabulously wealthy since the end of the Soviet era."
"Although Jews make up no more than three or four percent of Russia's population, they
wield enormous economic and political power in that vast and troubled country. "At least half
of the powerful 'oligarchs' who control a significant percentage of the economy are Jewish,"
the Los Angeles Times has cautiously noted. (See also: D. Michaels, "Capitalism in the New
Russia," May-June 1997 Journal, pp. 21-27.)"
It's interesting how the appeal of Eduard Topol to Jews in Russia is now starting to echo
Jewish calls in the United States for Jews to stop the path they are currently on.
Here is the complete text of Topol's extraordinary "Open Letter to Berezovksy,
Gusinsky, Smolensky, Khodorkovsky and other Oligarchs," translated for the Journal by Daniel
Michaels from the text published in the respected Moscow paper Argumenty i Fakty ("Arguments
and Facts"), No. 38, September 1998:
Magnitsky and Bill Browder is also really interesting.
It turns out that a large measure of the Russiagate story arose because Russian lawyer
Natalia Veselnitskaya, who traveled to America to challenge Browder's account, arranged a
meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and other Trump campaign advisers in June 2016 to present this
other side of the story.
Then we had Democrats actually literally word for word doing what they accuse Trump of
doing in Ukraine.
"It got almost no attention, but in May [2018], CNN reported that Sens. Robert Menendez
(D-N.J.), Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) and Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) wrote a letter to Ukraine's
prosecutor general, Yuriy Lutsenko, expressing concern at the closing of four investigations
they said were critical to the Mueller probe. In the letter, they implied that their support
for U.S. assistance to Ukraine was at stake. Describing themselves as "strong advocates for a
robust and close relationship with Ukraine," the Democratic senators declared, "We have
supported [the] capacity-building process and are disappointed that some in Kyiv appear to
have cast aside these [democratic] principles to avoid the ire of President Trump," before
demanding Lutsenko "reverse course and halt any efforts to impede cooperation with this
important investigation."
What's the first rule of Communist and Satanist Saul Alinsky? Always accuse your opponents
of what you are doing.
Imagine having a Grandfather as the literal Chairman of the American Communist Party, and
all the amazing lessons you would learn about political maneuvering and ideology.
And it's amazing.
Browder's story is that Russian officials stole his companies seals and then fraudulently
formulated a tax avoidance scheme with a complete paper trail that they fabricated against
him in totem. Precisely matching the amount of money he was trying to remove from their
country, like those other Jewish Oligarchs who imposed conditions that were multiples worse
then even the American depression.
When under oath it turns out that Magnitsky wasn't even a lawyer at all, and didn't go to
law school. Why did the media owned by Mormons of course keep saying that Magnitsky was
Browder's lawyer?
Why did the Russians fraudulently fabricate a paper-trail for another Jewish Oligarch to
steal money out of Russia? Just like they colluded with Trump when a Russian lawyer sought to
explain what happened. Because that totally happened.
Maybe the problem isn't Capitalism. Maybe, when even the ur-Shabbos goys at National
Review are shaking their head and washing their hands like Pilate, maybe it's a different
problem.
Yet Trump holds these people ever close to his beating heart.
And then there are all these connections to Jeffrey Epstein that are like an explosion
linking all these people.
Poor old Russia. Even Putin isn't worse then what came before.
The link above is a review of the book Giants: The Global Power Elite. The review
provides a summary of the book which once again could be a text about Jews if one were to
replace the term "transnational capitalist class" with "Jews". Why I mention it, though, is
the following: "Chapter 2, "The Global Financial Giants: The Central Core of Global
Capitalism," identifies the 17 global financial giants -- money management firms that
control more than one trillion dollars in capital.
From the review .
"Robinson's claim that nation-states have become, "little more than population containment
zones," while "the real power lies with the decision makers who control global capital" (p.
26). Both propositions are unconvincing: first, populations are clearly not being
contained; second, if states matter so little, and the real decision-makers are global
capitalists, then why do the latter need states
That is such stupid reasoning it blows the mind. He is trying to shift the global problem
to institutions .. instead of the people who head those institutions
Institutions, agencies , financial firms, etc .are ALL run by PEOPLE .who make the
policies,laws, take the actions.
Why does the 'transnational capitalist class' need states? well duh because
people/labor/consumers are indeed "contained' in states subject to the states laws and
system. The transnational capitalist class created the institutions he speaks of 'from
within' those states thru their control of its system and their same goal partners who do the
same from within their respective states.
That the capitalist class is not tied to any territory has been observable since 1960.
I don't have time now to look up how many of 199 directors are Jews . but I know enough of
the economic history of various countries to know that Jews were the first business and
finance globe trotters,,,,.from Spain to Amsterdam, France to Africa , etc.etc. Jew were
first hired as reps and facilitators by the gentile business owners especially because of
their breather tribal contacts in many countries ..that was their stepping stone to becoming
transnational capitalist themselves.
Understanding our global capitalist ruling elite and who they are is not rocket
science
Buy your loans from another lender,
change the terms (add fees, penalties, underhanded stuff),
reposses your collatteral.
Outta be illegal.
White Gentiles, you must infiltrate and take over big business and big finance to help
protect your people from predation .and to give all peoples principled, fair financial
services. To help our society, and even others. Paul Singer doesnt seem to care about most of
his fellow men. We could do better, and help the world be a better place.
Yet more evidence is piling up that Donald J Trump is the Great Betrayer.
A man who had the biggest mandate in post war history to clean up the Swamp that is D.C.,
reform Immigration to save America and reform the economy for American workers.
He has squandered all of it while pandering to Jews.
When the Donald is revealed as the Great Betrayer where will Jews run? Yes, they have
several back up plans. Patagonia, Ukraine and Israel.
Imagine that. They have their own country and 2 back up plans. It is really tough being a
hated, oppressed minority.
@Anonymous
Thanks for your comment. You've come to the right place. Unz is an ideal hangout for
left/right fusionists who don't fit in perfectly with either side, but are interested in
hearing from both. In addition, if you're looking for other good right-wing sites that aren't
libertarian, Zionist or overly Christian, I can also heartily recommend Dr. Kevin MacDonald's
Occidental Observer ,
where Dr. Joyce himself usually posts.
What this could accomplish is a marriage of the major two theories of the "anti-semites"
(for lack of a better word) and the "Neo-Marxists". I would argue that perhaps both sides
would learn they are coming at the same thing from two different angles. Most would ignore
it, but maybe a few leftist thinkers would receive a much needed electric shock if they
were to see the JQ framed in marxist terms.
Or, more correctly, it would be a re -marriage of anti-Semitism and Marxism. If you
have a background in Marxism yourself, maybe you recall reading or hearing about Karl Marx's
pre-Kapital classic, On the Jewish Question , where he basically identifies
finance-capitalism as a Jewish phenomenon in essence and origin. Money quote
:
"Let us consider the actual, worldly Jew – not the Sabbath Jew but the everyday
Jew. Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the
secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical
need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his
worldly God? Money. Money is the jealous god of Israel, in face of which no other god may
exist. Money degrades all the gods of man – and turns them into commodities . The
bill of exchange is the real god of the Jew. His god is only an illusory bill of exchange .
The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, of the man of
money in general.[ ] The Jew has emancipated himself in a Jewish manner, not only because
he has acquired financial power, but also because, through him and also apart from him,
money has become a world power and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical
spirit of the Christian nations. The Jews have emancipated themselves insofar as the
Christians have become Jews. [ ] In the final analysis, the emancipation of the Jews is the
emancipation of mankind from Judaism."
Marx himself, of course, came from a family of rich conversos, so he knew whereof he
spoke.
Perhaps some alliances could be forged across the cultural divide in this struggle.
Personally I believe that both angles are perfectly valid, and that understanding one
without the other will leaves far too much to be desired when studying the powerful.
As a third-way national socialist, I hope so, too. Libertarianism/capitalism and mainline
socialism are dead-ends, having both been thoroughly co-opted (founded?) by the Jews. Both
fail to address the pink elephant in the corner; both put some hopelessly abstract ideology
before the welfare of my people–while benefiting another. And so, as the original NS
used to say: 'Neither godless Bolshevism nor soulless capitalism!'
Reality: Contrary to popular mythology, not all serial killers are white. Serial killers
span all racial and ethnic groups in the U.S. The racial diversity of serial killers
generally mirrors that of the overall U.S. population. There are well documented cases of
African-American, Latino and Asian-American serial killers. African-Americans comprise the
largest racial minority group among serial killers, representing approximately 20 percent of
the total. Significantly, however, only white, and normally male, serial killers such as
Ted Bundy become popular culture icons.
@Lot
Your defense of bond holders do not hold water. They agreed to take the risk at the given
price. If the debtor can't pay back, they have the eat the losses, period. Usury law needs to
be put in place to outlaw these vulture funds. Then the bond funds will adjust by demanding
better terms that truly reflects the risk from the get go, and the debtors will adjust by
being much more cautious in their borrowing since the borrowing cost is so high.
Instead, this current arrangement basically uses bond funds to put up a false front,
telling a debtor they can borrow at 2% when the real rate should be at 20% given the known
risks, then the debtor goes crazy borrowing because it's so cheap to borrow, and when they
can't pay back, the bond gets sold to the vultures who come collecting at 20% or they seize
assets. This is no different than the subprime mortgage crap, except now that is regulated so
they go after sovereign debt and corporate debt instead. These vultures need to go die
period.
Trump is now essentially funded by three Jews -- Singer, Bernard Marcus, and Sheldon
Adelson, together accounting for over $250 million in pro-Trump political money. In return,
they want war with Iran.
Hmm -- The day after Trump in inaugurated for his second term -- will Iran be in his
crosshairs?
@Jimmy1969
This is a great, concise overview of Canadian media influence by the "silent" Jewish
overlords via Golden Tree.
I tried copy/paste of your comment on CBC, but it did NOT last 2minutes before being
suspended!!
I am sorry to have used your comment without your permission, but I am going to "misspell"
some words to defeat the algorithm to get your message across.
@Lot
For points 1 and 2, I think that you would learn a lot from reading his previous article (
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2015/08/01/paul-singer-and-universality-of-anti-semitism/
) on vulture capitalism. It is not just that they are recovering assets from defaults. These
vulture groups will use the courts to increase the size of the debts and sue for extra "fees"
on top, even when all other lenders are against it. They typically manage to get US courts in
NYC to try these cases, which also is apparently abnormal (apparently it would be more normal
to use international courts). This is what Joyce refers to here:
"This type of predation is so pernicious and morally perverse that both the Belgian and UK
governments have taken steps to ban these Jewish firms from using their court systems to sue
for distressed debt owed by poor nations. "
These funds do not do something that normal investors do, especially not to the bonds of
governments of struggling third-world countries.
As for 3, you are misunderstanding. Joyce never demanded that they name their charities
anything in particular, but it is obviously the case that your typical normie thinks that
"white males," presumably golf-playing Episcopalians or something, are the ones running
finance, and these golfy-sounding names (Elliot, Monarch, GoldTree, OakTree, Canyon, Tilden
Park) fit the perception. We whites receive the society's hate for the wealth disparities
created by high finance.
4. No, it is not difficult to do finance differently. Every other investor has higher
patience for poor countries in Central America and Africa, and they all look at Elliot with
confused scorn.
And, things would probably run fine without hyper-aggressive multi-billionaires in pushing
the courts to f- over those who default on debts they owe to the maximum degree. Japan and
Norway do quite fine with businesses that are run by gentle and humble goys who feel ashamed
at the thought of getting "too rich."
@J
Adleman You will be thrown out.
You will have to choose between Israel, Ukraine and Patagonia. No one else will take you.
You have destroyed our politics, media and economy.
You are not respected.
You buy compliance with money.
You have bankrupted the U.S. dollar with debt pursuing Israel's enemies.
Do any of you goys remember when the Jewish funded Democrats through the US State
department gave Russia one third of the US strategic uranium reserve and also funnelled
military tech to Russia's Skolkovo Valley? At a time when they were working on the Hypersonic
ballistic missile engine?
It's almost like there was this plan for people to move back into Russia, just like China,
but for some reason the Russians and Chinese didn't cooperate.
Remember when David Spengler wrote about this a few years back hence?
Do you think disloyal Jews had anything to do with 18 American CIA assets getting captured
and murdered by the Chinese Intelligence services through 2010 to 2012?
Could it be that there were loyal Americans who were interfering with Chinese pay for play
with the Jewish nation in the United States? Or might have come upon it?
Imagine being an American military service member knowing that your Jewish commanders and
Jewish senior officers have got your back.
It's amazing isn't it.
Clinton was receiving tens of millions of dollars from Skolkovo Valley Syndicate owners in
Russia, and in exchange all she gave them were military secrets that may have given Russia
for example it's lead in hypersonic military technology.
And then we're told China had a duplicate version of her emails in China, in exchange for
what?
US Taxpayer money funded the Russian weapons program.
How much China tech was also funded by US taxpayers?
And then these people accused Trump of collusion with Russia, because the Russians were
telling the Trump family that the Magnitsky Act was unjust because the Russians were trying
to secure their assets against the kind of predatory practices that lowered Russian mortality
to where it's headed in the Midwest. Right now. For the same reasons.
Yeah – this trend is absolutely going to be permitted to continue.
The American nation forewarned and forearmed is simply going to allow itself to go the way
of the Russian Slav under a century of Jewish and proto-Jewish (the man who was made to call
himself Stalin) leadership.
Maybe, just maybe, an American President might consider a Magnitsky Act the subjects of
which were different. Maybe Trump is the last civic-nationalist President, maybe.
Look at how loyal the ruling nation in the United States is to their fellow Americans.
There aren't enough hours in the day to trace the labyrinthine set of Jewish betrayals and
asset transferrals – remember the Panama Papers? Remember the Samson Option?
Why won't Browder let the Russians investigate Cyprus?
Maybe good old fashioned local corruption with noblesse oblige is preferable to this
international corruption.
The Jews got out-leveraged by the Russians, and now, finally, the Empire might be able to
take back Korriban from the Jewdi.
Of course that's impossible. You have to trade one for the other. Just one set for the
other set.
If you want to find a list of these capitalists – you just look at who attends the
World Jewish Congress Galas.
" Ira Rennert (net worth $3 billion, previously, $6 billion, investor, known as a "junk
bond billionaire," found guilty of corruption in 2015, placed a mill in Baltimore's outer
harbor into bankruptcy, causing more than 2,000 workers to lose their jobs, owes Baltimore $8
million in unpaid city water bills, allegedly used money he looted from his business to build
a 29-room mansion & compound – a garage holds 100 cars)
Dick Parsons (former Time Warner CEO, CBS chair, & Citibank chair; in 2012 shareholders
filed a lawsuit against Parsons and some other executives for "stuffing their pockets while
running the bank into the ground")
Ben Ashkenazy (net worth $4 billion, Israeli American real estate tycoon, a benefactor of the
2015 AIPAC Real Estate Luncheon at New York's Grand Hyatt Hotel)
Jack Chehebar (real estate mogul, sued for alleged breach of contract, accused of beating his
son)
Ray Kelly (longest serving commissioner in the history of the New York City Police
Department, for a period was an Interpol vice president, charged by Muslim groups of
discrimination: "The commissioner oversaw a spying program that targeted Muslims based solely
on their religion, showed poor judgment by participating in a virulently anti-Islamic film,
and approved a report on terrorism that equated innocuous behavior such as quitting smoking
with signs of radicalization."
What did God say once?
In Genesis 18:32 He said he would spare Sodom and Gamorrah if Abraham could find just 10
honourable men. He couldn't find them. Only the family of Lot.
There isn't much time left. It might simply be the case that the rot goes too deep and too
dark.
Valhalla is a worthy place. I think there might be some Russians there, along with the
souls of those 18 Americans who were tortured and murdered in China for reasons unknown.
Capitalism includes money. You can't separate the risks in lending from other risks. Bad
investors should be punished and good investors rewarded. Resources should be well
allocated. Otherwise it's not capitalism.
There are different kinds of capitalism. It is part of today's hypnotism that people don't
know the different types.
For example, there is finance capitalism, industrial capitalism, and what Andrew Joyce
calls vulture capitalism.
Vulture capitalism is a subset of finance capitalism.
Industrial capitalism was invented in the American colonies, especially Massachusetts bay.
The American system of economy (industrial capitalism with mixed economy and sovereign money)
has since been lost to America, as it imported Jewish/British finance capitalism as the
operating construct after 1913.
You can separate risks in lending. That is more hypnosis that you have been imbibing on.
The entire corpus of Classical economics goes about trying to separate unearned from earned
income, how to tax properly, what is site value, and it also is able to separate risk
types.
The fact that you do not know these things is not surprising, as most of western man is
living inside of a Jewish inverted reality bubble. The agents of mammon won, and classical
economics is not even taught in university.
Homosexuality is present in our society, but doesn't register much in demographics and as
such, I am happy to call gays as homosexuals. Tackling animus towards homosexuals requires
NOT trying to enforce new nomenclature of gender etc., otherwise an unexpected nasty backlash
can occur. Within your "ingroup", you can say what you like, but do not try and force ingroup
dynamics on the majority that are not interested.
Otherwise, you are behaving by identity politics, just like the Jews force their identity
upon the majority.
@sally
" Time after time I have asked my Jewish friends are you are Zionist, and most say they do
not really know what Zionism is? "
Zionism is a name which is more well known as an identifier by the critical (among the
Goy), carrying by now negative connotations. Broadly it is not an ism which is well known to
the man in the street. It could well be that among Jews, the name Zionism is only handled by
certain groups.
The question should have been rephrased asking what position these Jewish friends take with
regard to Israel. It comes down roughly to the same thing.
To not know of Zionism might be strategically a good thing, it refers to convergent
interests, actually a power block, you don't want to throw around such things, it could make
people aware Keep it diluted, diversity, obfuscation.
Ben Franklin and the American revolution was almost put in a similar pinch by the Amsterdam
banker Jean DeNeufville. In a letter to John Adams, 14 December 1781*, Franklin explained
that DeNeufville wanted as security for a loan "all the lands, cities, territories, and
possessions of the said Thirteen States, which they may have or possess at present, and which
they may have or possess in the future, with all their income, revenue, and produce, until
the entire payment of this loan and the interests due thereon."
Franklin considered that "extravagant" but Newhouse rejoined, "this was usual in all loans
and that the money could not otherwise be obtained". Franklin retold in this lengthy letter,
"Besides this, I was led to understand that it would be very agreeable to these gentlemen if,
in acknowledgment of their zeal for our cause and great services in procuring this loan, they
would be made by some law of Congress the general consignee of America, to receive and sell
upon commission, by themselves and correspondents in the different ports and nations, all the
produce of America that should be sent by our merchants to Europe."
Talk about shooting the moon
While Wikipedia says DeNeufville was Mennonite, Franklin concluded with this colorful --
and bitter -- remark , "By this time, I fancy, your Excellency is satisfied that I was wrong
in supposing John de Neufville as much a Jew as any in Jerusalem, since Jacob was not content
with any per cents, but took the whole of his brother Esau's birthright, and his posterity
did the same by the Canaanites, and cut their throats into the bargain; which, in my
conscience, I do not think Mr. John de Neufville has the least inclination to do by us while
he can get any thing by our being alive. I am, with the greatest esteem, etc., ✪ B.
Franklin."
Perhaps it was just an expression based on an earlier stereotype?
*Bigelow, 1904. The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Vol. 9 Letters and Misc. Writings
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections, killing
dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to see with
their own eyes.
Zion had the opportunity to go to Uganda and Ugandans were willing, but NO Zion had to
have Palestine, and they got it through war, deception, and murder. It was funded by usury,
as stolen purchasing power from the Goyim.
The fake country of Israel, is not the biblical Israel, and it came into being by
maneuverings of satanic men determined to get their way no matter what, and is supported by
continuous deception. Even today's Hebrew is resurrected from a dead language, and is fake.
Many fake Jews (who have no blood lineage to Abraham), a fake country, and fake language.
These fakers, usurers, and thieves do indeed have their eyes set on Patagonia, what they call
the practical country.
Unz is an ideal hangout for left/right fusionists who don't fit in perfectly with either
side, but are interested in hearing from both
You just described me to a tee. I defy categorization, especially ideological ones
(although I half jokingly refer to myself as a free-thinkist), and I feel this makes me
weird.
I've been to TOO. However I can't bring myself to start commenting on a white nationalist
website. I will admit I am unable to articulate this discomfort presently.
As to your point about Marx – I actually forgot about his work on the JQ. The Saker,
who is a columnist on this site, referenced Marx's essay on the JQ some time ago. I must have
not read the whole thing or I'd have remembered it. I didn't know that Marxism originated
with anti-Semitism, but that is fascinating. I have encountered some Marxists in my time and
they focus exclusively (predictably) on the cis-white-male patriarchy, or whatever occupies
their brainwashed minds after an Introduction to Gender Studies class.
@Anon
"If debts can simply be repudiated at will, capitalism cannot function."
Is this children's capitalist theory class time? throwing around some simple slogans for a
susceptible congregation of future believers?
Should be quite obvious that people, groups of people, if not whole nations , can be
forced and or seduced into depths by means of certain practices. There are a thousand ways of
such trickery and thievery, these are not in the theory books though. In these books things
all match and work out wonderfully rationally
Then capitalism cannot function? Unfortunately it has become already dysfunctional, if not
a big rotten cancer.
Isaiah 1:4 4 Alas, sinful nation, A people laden with iniquity, A brood of evildoers,
Children who are corrupters! They have forsaken the LORD, They have provoked to anger The
Holy One of Israel, They have turned away backward.
Ezekiel 21:25 25 'Now to you, O profane, wicked prince of Israel, whose day has come, whose
iniquity shall end
Jeremiah 5:9 Shall I not punish them for these things?" says the LORD. "And shall I not
avenge Myself on such a nation as this?
As Jesus said which of the prophets have you not killed or persecuted? The truth hurts. As
for me I do not hate Jews ..I feel terribly sad for a people that are capable of greatness
and squandered the gifts given to them by God. Are you a holy nation? Don't make me laugh.
Repent. Your time is coming. No more running and hiding. Deception will no longer save you
only acceptance of the Messiah.
Hey! Don't mention anything a Jew ever did, especially usury, or else the entire cult will go
up in a holocaustal mushroom cloud of emo nasal whining. In Judaism you've got a fanatical
sect that systematically selects and brainwashes its members to inculcate extreme values of
two Big Five personality axes: high neuroticism and low intellect (where intellect means
open-mindedness.) Note the existential crisis triggered by a straightforward lecture from The
Society for the Study of Unbelievably Obvious Shit.
Of course Israel is holocausting the Palestinians. This is what happens when the founding
myth of a nation is, We wiped em all out and then they wiped us almost all out so now we
gotta wipe em all out etc., etc., etc.
Well, the only difference between a narcissist and a psychopath is that the former need
people to like them whereas psychopaths genuinely could not care less (although they learn
early that acting as if they do can be very helpful , as can always trying to elicit sympathy
etc).
As I noticed while reading a few books on psychopathy (I was inspired to after reading Steve
Job's biography) – their whole 'culture' is structured as a (collective )
PSYCHOPATH.
It seems that (collectively) they cannot care about others even if they wanted to. Due to
their sickness
I am not saying they are all that way – but overall their 'culture' seems to be that
way
@Digital
Samizdat Indeed I cannot agree more. I quote from a 1923 interview of Hitler:
"Why," I asked Hitler, "do you call yourself a National Socialist, since your party
programme is the very antithesis of that commonly accredited to socialism?"
"Socialism," he retorted, putting down his cup of tea, pugnaciously, "is the science of
dealing with the common weal. Communism is not Socialism. Marxism is not Socialism. The
Marxians have stolen the term and confused its meaning. I shall take Socialism away from
the Socialists.
"Socialism is an ancient Aryan, Germanic institution. Our German ancestors held certain
lands in common. They cultivated the idea of the common weal. Marxism has no right to
disguise itself as socialism. Socialism, unlike Marxism, does not repudiate private
property. Unlike Marxism, it involves no negation of personality, and unlike Marxism, it is
patriotic.
@Colin
Wright The Sacklers occupy a hoity-toity rung in the philanthropy universe, as they have
given enough $$$ to Harvard for H to paste their name on its museum housing I believe its
whole Asian art collection. Students have now protested Harvard's high-profile gift of
probity and cultural status to the Sacklers via, literally, an "Aushangerschild" on a major
university museum. Harvard protests back: Jeez, if we don't take the Sacklers' dough we might
be obliged to stop taking the dough from Exxon, etc.
@Anon
you are right about repaying the loan
but Banksters have managed over decades I think starting with Clinton to remove protection
laws (which were stating how much interest was the maximum a bankster could charge his pray
etc). They also removed the rules of how much was the maximum they could lend (according to
how much their victim makes a year etc).
So even though you are right that loans should be repaid – it is immoral to allow a
well connected mafia to change all the laws and remove protections while pushing up prices of
everything because it suits the lender (who has a licence to print).
They basically lend money that does not exist and get interest for that. So the more sheeple
are tricked into borrowing the better for them, but the worse for everyone else
They should not be allowed to bribe politicians to remove all the protection that was there
since 1920s I think.
It's a marriage from hell: easy to bribe Anglosheep meets the masters of predatory bribing
who own the printing press
That stupid cuck Trump just got impeached by the House. Thats a good lesson to everybody
how much good Jew-ass kissing does for you .you get stabbed in the back anyway lol
Couldn't have happened to a more deserving and treacherous scumbag!
But he should have been impeached for his treachery to the constitution and to the
American people for his slavish devotion to all things Jewish!
@Digital
Samizdat True, but irrelevant. The Jews that matter don't read the Talmud or believe in
"Adam and Eve."
It's 2020. The Jewish religion is "The Holocaust" and we're all "Nazis."
Frankly, it's these traditional religious notions of "anti-semitism" that get in the way
of understanding what is, at the core, an ethnic issue. It's Sheldon Adelson, the Zionist
entity in Palestine, and the ADL that are the problem, not some looney-tunes rabbi living in
Brooklyn.
The other side of the expalnation is the laking of reaction of the victim,the american
people.
The least that the people that loot the world trough and with the USA power should do, is ,at
least ,let us,the american people, a free ride.
Not illegal in the Talmud either but most certainly illegal in all of the countries that
DynCorp was caught profiting from this type of business. For some reason they never seem to
suffer for their exposure suggesting that they may be wielding the same influence that
Epstein had over our elected officials.
We dont have to get back to the Singer of this world but to our own politicians ,that allowed
them to do this to us,and to the world.In this kind of abusive realtionship the 2 sides are
to blame.
@Just
passing through "Look up income by ethnic group in the UK and US, you will find that
Indians and Chinese (South Asians) are the richest in both countries (except for Jews of
course)."
And why is that? Think about it. These are members of the Indian and Chinese elite who the
multinational corporations are doing business with.
In order to do business in China, the Chinese stipulated that the western corporations had
to give one of the members of the Chinese elite half ownership in the company. They were also
required to turn over the western technology to the China-based company. Western technology,
western money, cheap Chinese slave labor, ability to pollute to your heart's content. For
both sides, it was a win-win. The Chinese elite got filthy rich and then moved over to the
West with their newfound gains, buying up properties, forcing prices up for the natives. The
western corporations not only wanted cheap products to export back to the U.S., but they were
also developing a whole new market – Chinese consumers who would buy their products as
well. Double plus good!
And once in the West, the Chinese and the Indians stick to their groups. They hire their
own, promote their own, do business together. A lot of corruption, money laundering,
cheating, taking advantage of and bending laws. Rule of law? Code of ethics? Morals? Do unto
others? They never learned it. Opportunistic dual citizens.
I would not count on the effect of the electric shock on the leftist thinkers. The role
of Jewish Bolsheviks in the Cheka, NKVD, GULAGs, genocides by famine has been known from
the very beginning and yet it left no impact on the leftist thinkers.
It unfortunately has not had much of an effect on a lot of people in the West, who remain
ignorant or in denial of the role played by Jewish Bolsheviks in historic mass murders and
totalitarian repression.
Waiting for the Hollywood movie to tell the story.
This is an expensive, weighty, and important book, which will take some time to
digest.
Classical economists re-learn the science of money, starting with Prodhoun and even Marx
in Das Kapital volume 3. (Leftists are often correct about money, but wrong on social
issues.)
The jew Marx does do some deception in volume 3 with a sneaky equation that does not
compound interest, but otherwise he is pretty accurate. Marx was probably beholden to his
finance masters.
This is why you need to start with Zarlinga, as there is no BS to lead you astray. Hudson
tends to drill the bulls-eye too. There is so much deception in the field of money and
economy, that it is easy to get caught up in false narratives, like one-born free
libertarianism. Usury flows fund the deception, even to the point of leaving out critical
passages in translations, such as in Aristotle's works. Or, important works are bought up and
burned.
Michael Hudson is the leading economist resurrecting Classical Economics. Reading all of
Hudson and Zarlinga will take some time and effort, but it is good to take a first step.
@Anon
I respectfully disagree that "Kenya was given up [by Great Britain] before there was even an
anti-colonial movement in Kenya ."
According to Wikipedia : " The armed rebellion of the Mau Mau was the culminating response to
Colonial rule . Although there had been previous instances of violent resistance to
colonialism , the Mau Mau revolt was the most prolonged and violent anti-colonial warfare in
the British Colonial colony. From the start the land was the primary British interest in
Kenya ."
Just as the Kenyans suffered the consequences of British colonialism , the "Palestinians will
suffer
the consequences of Zionist colonialism until Israel's original sin is boldly confronted and
justly remedied " foreignpolicyjournal.com
@anon
A particular distinction of Jewish investors versus gentile investors – on average, of
course – is their use of bribery to get the force of government behind them. Rather
than taking a bet about some group being able to pay back some bonds and letting the chips
fall where they may, Jews start bribing or influencing politicians to force that group to pay
back the bonds.
Buy some bonds, charge outrageous fees, bribe officials in some form or other, get govt to
force the payment of bonds and outrageous fees. Rinse and repeat. Jews have been doing this
in some form aor another for 1500 years. It's why the peasants get a tad angry at both the
Jews and their bribed politicians/nobility.
@lavoisier
"But he should have been impeached for his treachery to the constitution and to the American
people for his slavish devotion to all things Jewish!"
A purely political impeachment, right down party lines. I hear Schiff has got his hands
full of Ukrainian-Jewish oligarchic money. Dear me, wait until that comes out.
Trump is in league with the Jews? Yeah, who isn't? Obama's lips are still sore from
kissing Jewish Wall Street bankers' asses (notice that none of them went to jail). Same with
the Clinton's.
You can get politicians to pass all sorts of laws in your favor if you've got enough dirt
on them. After all, your side owns the media, Hollywood, academia, the courts, the banks.
If dirt doesn't work, you can always threaten to impeach them in order to get what you
want.
But Trump is also revealing every last dirty one of them (accidentally or on purpose).
People see them now.
@J
Adelman J Adelman comes out swinging. He's such a tough guy. But does he make sense? Does
he care if he makes sense? The writer is talking about those Jews who are vulture
capitalists. He's not talking about every Jew. Isn't it a little odd that nearly all of these
funds are run by Jews? Can your corrupt mind accept that fact and address the question? Or
are you going to bore us with your religion and by that I mean your obsession with
anti-semitism, which is your religion.
@PCA
Stop splitting hairs. Is this the best you can do? Are you one of Lot's cronies? I don't
normally address petty matters of this kind but Joyce is describing a multitude of sins and
misconduct orchestrated by various Jewish financiers around the globe. It is not merely one
phenomenon; thus, 'phenomena' fits. Go troll someone else.
Lobelog ran some articles in Singer, Argentina, Iran Israel and the attorney from Argentina
who died mysteriously . Singer is a loan shark. Argentinian paid dearly .
Google search –
NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors – LobeLog
https://lobelog.com/tag/paul-singer/
Paul Singer NYT's Argentina Op-Ed Fails to Disclose Authors' Financial Conflict of Interest
by Eli Clifton On Tuesday, Mark Dubowitz and Toby Dershowitz, two executives at the hawkish
Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), took
The Right-Wing Americans Who Made a Doc About Argentina
https://lobelog.com/the-right-wing-americans-who-made-a-doc-about-argentina/
Oct 7, 2015 One might wonder why a movie about Argentina, in Spanish and . of Nisman's and
thought highly of the prosecutor's work, told LobeLog, FDD, for its part, has been an
outspoken critic of Kirchner but has From 2008 to 2011, Paul Singer was the group's
second-largest donor, contributing $3.6 million.
NYT Failed to Note Op-Ed Authors' Funder Has $2 Billion
@mark
green Mark green the queen of self rightousness.
There are many non jews runny vulture funds worldwide with at least 100 in china
alone.
The list joyce provided is selective and politically motivated.There are many more non
jews who are guilty of financial crimes.The jails are full of them.
The vulture funds are a product of a system that punishes failure.Do not blame the
funds,blame the system.
This story and like many that appear here is designed to pressure israel to change
politically.Israels future lies in the hands of God not some mutt with a serious case of
mutters.
@Lot
venture capital funds are only made necessary because we have a federal reserve.. which is a
private bank and private banks want to earn interest.
consider the difference between when a private lender makes loans to the USA
(treasury)
on the books of the feds is the following
due from the USA $11,000
new cash printed and given to dumb clucks at the USA $10,000
profit on the loan $ 1,000
what happened here is the fed printed $10,000 in new bills.
Assume the loan made at 10% interest and it is due in 1 year.
Ok so what is the loan on the USA books
cash $10,000
amount payable to the Federal Reserve $11,000
loss on the deal $ 1,000
this loan becomes the loan on the local bank books
the government gives the bank its loan and its obligation to repay the principal plus
interest
If there were no interest (that is the government printed its own money and made
venture loans to entrepreneurs at 0% interest the entries would look like this )
Amount due in one year from venture borrower $10,000
new cash printed and loaned to venture $10,000
so if the venture guy spent the $10,000 and then went broke the treasury would still gets
its money back in taxes from those who earned profit the money the venture paid.. no one has
to beat somebody to pay the interest (the economy does not have the extra $1000 dollars in
interest so somebody has to lose)
When interest must be paid its like musical chairs.. each time the music stops there are
not enough chairs to go around, someone is left standing ( its like that in money lending,
the debtors dance until the music stops, but because the private bank only put the principal
amount $10,000 in circulation the guy needs $11,000 to pay the loan back where does he get
the extra $1,000? <=If ten $10,000 loans are made, and 1 guy goes broke, there will be
enough cash in the system for the 9 others to pay the interest they each owe and enough for
the local private bank and lawyers to get paid for handling the bankruptcy. . <= we
started with 10 loans, one loan went broke the 9 remaining borrowers each pay $11,000 to
retire the debt , there are 9 loans "$99,000 to repay them and $1000 to pay debt service
costs and legal fees.
if there were no interest on the loans, the bankruptcy would not matter.
What makes the venture capitalist have a business at all is the Federal reserve is a
private profit making bank. Lending printed money from the Federal reserve requires interest
to be paid, and that requirement of interest makes the economy horde its capital and the
economic players playing king of the mountain to get the extra money they need to pay the
interest . ..
Zionism brought private banking to the USA and the USA wrote a tax law to collect the
money from the Americans it governs to pay the interest on the debt.
this is a really simplistic description of what is happening to our economy so don't rely
on it but instead use its simplistic idea to model the impact of having interest on the
national debt is having each year. If our government reversed what it privatized to the
Federal Reserve, we could make the economy run more or less as we please. \we could eliminate
the national debt and with it income tax es.
Typical Jew baiting article. Mitt Romney isn't a "Jew" Ashish Masih isn't. Many more examples
of gentiles taking advantage of their brothers. May as well consider the Walton family of
Wal-Mart to be vultures as well since they benefit the most from this system, they're so
called Christians, not Jews. The problem is capitalism. Author seems to suggest that a moral
economic system has been corrupted. The system was designed in an era of widespread slavery
folks. Its an immoral system that requires theft, slavery, war, immigration, all the things
you hate, to survive. The system is working exactly as it is designed to work. Exploit
workers, the environment and resources, shift all the profits from workers to the owners of
capital, period. Welcome to the late stage, it eats and destroys itself
From the days of the colonists slaughtering the Injuns and stealing their land. The days
of importing African slaves, and indentured servants. The days of child labor and factory
owners hiring Pinkertons to gun down workers who protested shitty wages and working
conditions. The good ol days of the gilded age. Now the age of offshoring to China or some
other lower wage nation. Overthrowing leaders not willing to let their resources and people
be plundered and enslaved, driving refugees to our borders fleeing violence and poverty.
Importing H1B workers to drive down wages. It was always a corrupt system of
exploitation/theft/slavery. This is nothing new and doesn't require "Jews" to be immoral.
And all these so called "Christians" like Pastor Pence approve. Usury and capitalism run
amok. I'm sure Jesus is smiling down on all these Bible toting demons who allow their fellow
man to be exploited by the parasites. Sad!
Good for Tucker. He has his moments I'd watch his show if he wasn't a partisan hack. But
that will never happen working for Fox or any other corporate media.
@Colin
Wright I doubt Trump promised to go to war with Iran before he was elected. In his
Inauguration Speech, Trump said he wanted to bring the troops home and stop the wars. He
didn't have to say these things, he had already won the election, but he said them anyway.
One of the few times the media has laid off Trump was when he sent some missiles into
Syria (after he gave them hours of warning ahead of time that the missiles were coming). If
Hillary had been elected, Syria would have been leveled by now and flying an Israeli
flag.
Obama brought us the destruction of Libya and the murder of Gaddafi, the coup in Ukraine,
and through ISIS, which the U.S. armed, trained and paid for, tried to destroy Syria.
I don't really blame Obama or Bush Jr. or Clinton. They were all puppets who did as they
were told. If they hadn't, in the words of Chuckie Schemer, there would have been "six ways
from Sunday of getting back at them".
If you don't do what they want, you're impeached, some of your dirty laundry is aired, or
they purposely crash the stock market on you. If you still don't get the message, maybe
you're just assassinated.
Trump loves his daughter and she is married to a Jew. If they're not getting their way, I
could see them telling Trump: "Sad what happened at the Pittsburgh synagogue, isn't it? Sure
hope nothing like that happens to your daughter."
I don't envy Trump. He not only is up against the Democrats, but he is also fighting the
globalist neocons in his own party. Both parties want open borders and more war, something
Trump does not believe in. As far as I can see, he's throwing them bones in order to shut
them up. If he gets elected again, which I think he will, we might see a different Trump. Who
knows.
@Jimmy1969
I think this deal has already taken place. Israel has given away to China for 99 years the
hall commercial incomming This deal has taken place 2 or 3 years ago
Don't blame it on the Talmud. These Jews act in accordance to their Torah: "If Yahweh your
God blesses you as he has promised, you will be creditors to many nations but debtors to
none; you will rule over many nations, and be ruled by none" (Deuteronomy 15:6). "feeding on
the wealth of the nations" (Isaiah 61:5) is Israel's destiny according to Yahweh.
@mcohen
I took a squint at both your own and Mark Green's comment history. Your comment history
cannot even begin to compare in value, but I should have already guessed that from the
name-calling in the first line of your comment. Just weak, extremely weak.
Rather amusing to read our resident Jewish apologists carrying on about the absolute sanctity
of the necessity of collecting debts to the functioning of the capitalistic system. These
nations and corporate entities that are now in thrall of the Wall Street Jews , were herded
into debt by that other faction of the capitalist system, the dealers in easy money.
Snookering the rubes into lifelong debt, telling them that money is on the tap, promoting
unsustainable spending habits and then let the guillotine come down, for the vultures to feed
on. They are two sides of the same coin.
Its damned funny that the rich Jews nowadays are absolutely addicted to usury, rentier
activities, and debt collection, when the Bible itself condemns such activities. But they are
our elder brothers in faith according to some.
@Colin
Wright Carnegie was a Protestant. The Protestant cancer serves it's Jewish masters. Read
'The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit' by E. Michael Jones. There is definitely a revolutionary
nature to the international Jew just as there is to their Protestant dupes. Jewish nature is
to subvert the natural order and the west was built by the guidance of LOGOS. The Catholic
Faith created by God guided the creation of the west. These Jewish exploits are a result of
the Wests rejection of its nature and its enslavement
1. rich or poor, creditor or debtor, in the final analysis, ultimately, all will become equal
in the grave. the filthy rich might decide to lay their corpses in coffins made of gold, but
it will be in vain. the sorrows and the joys of this fleeting world shall quickly pass like
the shadow.
2. talmudics feel the need to accumulate money in order to have sense of security since they
were stateless for two millennia. paradoxically, amount of wealth is indirectly proportional
to a sense of security, provoking backlash from aggrieved host people.
3. establishment of State of Israel did not reduce the need for the accumulation but has only
heightened it since now talmudics feel the need to support it so that she could maintain
military superiority over neighbouring threats.
4. as long as Palestinians are not free and Israel does not make peace, talmudics will
continue to meddle in American politics. if you don't want to save the Palestinians for the
sake of humanity and truth or justice, at least you should do it for your own sake.
5. loan sharking, vulture whatever, etc., is the ugliness of big capitalism with capital C,
what is beyond sickening is the promotion of sodomy. if one becomes poor or homeless, it's a
pity. to go against nature is an abomination.
6. by using such words as "homosexual" you have accepted the paradigm of the social engineers
and corruptors, and are therefore collaborating with them. words have consequences since that
is how we convey ideas unless you own Hollywood and can produce your own moving pictures
too.
7. talmudics is a better word than as a great American scholar says, since people who promote
sodomy are absolutely opposed to the Torah (O.T.). those who still struggle to follow it
couldn't care less what happens to benighted goyim, only becoming reinforced in pride of
their own purity as opposed to disgraced nations. thus, practically, they too are talmudics,
alien to the spirit of the ancient holy fathers and prophets of Israel. the word "Orthodox"
has been stolen and now has lost all meaning or it means the exact opposite of what it
originally meant.
8. Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth. Matthew 5:5
@Colin
Wright Well there's nothing wrong in principle about specialists in valuing distressed
debt and managing it nuying such debt and using the previously established mechanisms for
getting value out of their investment. So the problem is how they go about enforcing their
rights and the lack of regulation to mitigate hardship in hard cases.
Still it is notable that it should, overwhelmingly be a Jewish business and such a
powerful medium for enriching Jewish causes and communities at the expense of poor
Americans.
While Whites theoretically still have the numbers to affect/determine the outcome of
elections, a majority of Whites usually stay home because they are tired of the 'evil of two
lessers' choice they are offered -- even voting for Trump got them little/nothing.
@Colin
Wright George Bush needed Tony Blair's support to attack Iraq , Donald Trump now has the
support of Boris Johnson to attack Iran : "Boris Johnson refuses to rule out military
intervention on Iran ." metro.co.uk
It is said that the "deep state " removed Theresa May from office as she was "too soft" on
Iran . As you suggest the attack will not happen until Trump's second term unless, in the
meantime , there is a false flag attack like 9/11 which can be blamed on the Iranians .
East Asians have freedom of speech. That is all that is needed to end Jewish Mafia vulture
capitalism. If it was Italian Mafia vulture capitalism, the west would end it a few seconds.
When one is in a "no see, no say, no hear" tribal group one can get away with everything.
East Asians don't believe in hiding reality.
Here is more on how Samsung fought back against little Paulie.
Samsung published controversial sketches in response to row over merger
Jewish U.S. hedge fund boss Paul Singer was trying to stop a Samsung business deal
In response the firm released cartoons on its website depicting Singer as a vulture
A row has broken out in South Korea with media there describing Jews as 'ruthless' with
money
Merger between Samsung C&T and Cheil Industries was approved today
This is how Paulie's row with Samsung started.
These are the extraordinary cartoons Samsung posted on its website which reportedly
depict a Jewish hedge fund boss as a money-grabbing vulture.
The row between Samsung and one of its major shareholders, Paul Singer, has sparked an
anti-Semitism row in South Korea.
Harvard-educated Mr Singer, 70, whose hedge fund Elliott Management owns a seven per
cent stake in Samsung C&T fell out with the company after he objected to a merger
deal.
Cartoons shown what Paul's company did to the Congo, just one of many nations he
pillaged.
In response Samsung posted a number of inflammatory cartoons on its website showing Mr
Singer as a long-beaked vulture, which have since been taken down.
In one of the sketches a poor-looking man goes, cap in hand, to the vulture who has an
axe hidden behind his back.
The caption reads: 'Elliott Management's representative method of earning money is,
first of all, to buy the national debt of a struggling country cheaply, then insist on
taking control as an investor and start a legal suit'
In another people appear to be dying in the desert from dehydration. Underneath is the
caption: 'Because of it, Congo suffered even more hardship'.
This is believed to refer to Elliott Management's business dealings in the Congo.
Samsung wanted to keep their company in the Lee family. They did not want a Jewish Mafia
tribal group take over.
The bitter fall out came because Samsung Group's founding family wanted to complete a
merger with its holding company Cheil Industries and Samsung C&T to shore up its
control of the firm as its chairman, Lee Kun-hee's health is in decline.
In the End, Samsung won. Paul lost.
The Lee family, who control Samsung, owns 43 per cent of Cheil Industries. The
controversial merger was finally approved today.
South Koreans are not shy to express reality as it is. The west has to learn the value of
freedom of speech before it too late for the west.
But the row has sparked an outpouring of anti-Semitism in South Korea.
One columnist described Jewish money as 'ruthless and merciless'.
And on Tuesday the former South Korean ambassador to Morocco Park Jae-seon expressed his
concern about the influence of Jews in finance.
In an extraordianry outburst he said: 'The scary thing about Jews is they are grabbing
the currency markets and financial investment companies.
'Their network is tight-knit beyond one's imagination,' Park added.
The next day, cable news channel YTN aired similar comments by local journalist Park
Seong-ho.
'It is a fact that Jews use financial networks and have influence wherever they are
born,' he said.
Neither Park Jae-seon and Park Seong-ho were available for comment.
In a piece published a fortnight ago, Media Pen columnist Kim Ji-ho claimed 'Jewish
money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless'.
While Whites theoretically still have the numbers to affect/determine the outcome of
elections, a majority of Whites usually stay home because they are tired of the 'evil of
two lessers' choice they are offered -- even voting for Trump got them little/nothing.
I said nothing of an electoral solution to America's problems the problems will not be
solved that way.
@Art
That scary thought has crossed my mind, too, Art. I've even started wondering if this whole
impeachment circus is really part of an elaborate plot to guarantee Trump's re-election. I
mean, would Pelosi's insane actions make the slightest sense otherwise? And everyone has
noted how this is such a 'Jew coup,' haven't they? It all looks so suspicious
What our Jewish friends have done to Argentina, through maneuvering the elections,
killing dissidents, and marking territory, is a cautionary tale to anybody woke enough to
see with their own eyes.
True, but irrelevant. The Jews that matter don't read the Talmud or believe in "Adam and
Eve."
Whether they believe it or not, they act as though they do. That shows it is an ancient
and essential part of their ethnic subculture. Who knows? Maybe Kevin MacDonald is right and
it's actually genetic .
It's 2020. The Jewish religion is "The Holocaust" and we're all "Nazis."
The holo-hoax is just their modern version of 'chosenness'. Pretending to be the
biggest victims evah! is just another way of making themselves appear collectively as
morally superior to the rest of mankind–even the darkies:
But whether it's being wielded by the Zionists or the lefty Social Jewish Warriors, it's
really just a power play down deep. It's really just another way of reminding us
goyim–white and colored–that we are all just half-demons (so to speak) compared
to The Chosen.
@Wally
It is rather entertaining watching you kvetch, Jewish colonialism over WASP nations will be
glorious.
Vietnam & Congo can choose as they wish, it is they who vote for their leaders.
In fact, Congo was better off with colonialism.
America voted for Zion Don, he is now receving hundreds of millions of dollars from Jews
to do their bidding. It is hilarious that you can't see the irony of your comments.
In fact, it is even more funny what the Jews will do to WASP nations, enjoy your future of
transexualism and fast food, WASPs totally deserve everything that is coming at them.
Then you change the subject to Epstein. Pathetic.
If you had an IQ above room temperature, you would realise my segue into the Epstein
affair was a response to your question of "What deal was supposedly struck".
You killed Lumumba," she roared at the Belgian officials on the platform, before being
escorted away by the police. The music and speeches resumed.
She was right: they did. Belgium was heavily implicated in the 1961 killing of the
radical, first prime minister of an independent Congo, now the war-torn Democratic Republic
of Congo. In 1975 a US inquiry also pointed conclusively to CIA involvement in the
execution carried out by a Katangan police unit under a Belgian officer.
Paul Singer, a Jewish Mafia vulture capitalist did some "work" on the Congo too.
He also bought some of Congo's debt for $10m and sued for $127m. The Congolese
government was found to be corrupt and under US racketeering law, Singer may be able to
claim triple damages, reaping as much as $400m.
On March 9, 2016, Department of Justice (DOJ) oversight personnel learned that the FBI
had been employing outside contractors who had access to raw Section 702 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA) data, and retained that access after their work for the FBI was
completed.
This information was disclosed in a 99-page FISA court ruling on April 26, 2017, that was
declassified by Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats.
That wasn't an isolated incident and the improper access granted to outside contractors
"seems to have been the result of deliberate decisionmaking" (footnote – page 87).
The FISA court noted the "FBI's apparent disregard of minimization rules" and questioned
"whether the FBI may be engaging in similar disclosures of raw Section 702 information that
have not been reported."
"This is bigger than Watergate + 9/11 + the Bay of Pigs + almost every other conspiracy
theory you can name combined. It is also why you're seeing definite signs of panic and
desperation everywhere from the House of Representatives to the mainstream media to the
boardrooms of the Fortune 500. This reaches from the heart of the Swamp in Washington DC to
Silicon Valley and Seattle, Washington. In East Germany, it came out after the Wall fell that
one-fifth of the population was involved in the surveillance of the other four-fifths of the
population; now keep in mind that due to the mathematical reach of the FISA warrants, the 825
million surveillance orders issued actually exceeds the 320 million population of the
USA.
Now we know how and why Google and Amazon and Facebook got so big, so fast. They were the
corporate arm of the surveillance state."
You disloyal Jews used government resources and private contractors to surveil the entire
country.
I wonder what's going to happen next?
Also why haven't you responded to any of the comments about what the Jews did in
Russia?
@RealistI said nothing of an electoral solution to America's problems
And I said nothing about an "electoral solution", or any other kind of "solution", to
"America's problems" -- I said/implied that blaming Whites, or the way they vote, more or
less exclusively, as you did, for the way things are, was not exactly a genius take -- there
is literally no one for a race conscious white person, eg a WN, to vote (affirmatively)
for at the moment -- and it is hard to imagine anyone emerging in the near future.
For the record: I (also) do not think just voting, especially in the current
one two party system with the usual 'evil of two lessers' choices offered,
will do anything for Whites.
What We abrogate (of) a sign or [We] cause it to be forgotten, We bring better than it
or similar (to) it. Do not you know that Allah over every thing (is) All-Powerful?
2:106
The verses on abrogation read as to only allow Allah to abrogate, so any human action on
this is stepping over the line imo.. maybe other than when 100% of the Ummah agree on
something, I read that could remove a surah of the Quran, like a voice of God. That rhymes
nicely imo.
Of course how to judge which ruling to use? I agree, it brings in a casuistry into the
faith that generally helps to confuse.. I don't know much about it though yet.
I think Islam preaches a decent message, but the average practitioner is open to
misinterpret it quite a bit. This is a failing of the teaching.. but I think Mohammed's
message was corrupted like Christ's message pretty much straight after his death. Gospel of
Thomas and Tolstoy's rewrites all the way for something closer imo.
venture capital funds are only made necessary because we have a federal reserve.. which
is a private bank and private banks want to earn interest.
Sentiments are correct and you are hovering over the target, but some details are
needed.
The federal reserve is the tail on the dog, not the dog. The Fed was created as a part of
the corporate banking money trust. Before Fed the reserve loops of banks were not tied
together, and they had to use treasuries (T bills or Lincoln Green-backs) to balance their
ledgers.
Banksters wanted to extend their money power beyond their region. In the days before
federal reserve bank money power would fall off the further you got away from the bank. Banks
hypothecate new bank credit, and the credit has to swim home to the debt instrument. This
"swimming home" is done easily when the ledgers are all connected through reserve loops (also
called the overnight market).
After Federal Reserve (1913) and before Wright Pattman, the Federal Reserve was recycling
its profits made on public debt back to its stock owners and member banks. The member banks
especially, were guaranteed profits no matter how the economy did. After Wright Pattman (mid
60's) Fed has to rebate to treasury they couldn't face up to the allegations they were
stealing from the commons, which they were.
Today, the FED rebates interest on TBills and public debt back to Treasury. The private
banks within the system continue to hypothecate new money at interest, as that is their
business model. This business model does not include morality, nor does it work in the public
interest. It works to enrich finance at the expense of the working/laboring economy.
So, central banks are not profit centers, but instead they ensure profit lower down
– within the private banking system. Central banks are backstops to prevent instability
within the already unstable debt money system.
Recent Example: The Repo Crises, whereby FED is monetizing repurchase agreements. Non bank
actors such as hedge funds, REIT's and others have been given access to the overnight market
(where reserves are supposed to be traded). The FED now swaps new keyboard dollars for
various finance paper to keep the non bank actors in the repo market liquid.
This action is artificial and props up the finance sector at the expense of the normal
working economy, and hence it is usurious.
Usury is a word that has been normed out of our language. Why? Because our (((friends)))
are agents of mammon, and they cannot help themselves. It may be genetic.
Usury is a power relation, where you steal from others because you can. Laws are changed
to enable the thefts.
In the case of the FED it was taking 6 percent from the people on public debts. Public
debts were funded by taxpayers. This money was then funneling backwards from FED into their
crony banks and paid off sycophants.
We don't know what the FED is doing today because the bad guys won't allow an audit. The
general statement is that private corporate banking is usurious, and was born in iniquity,
and that is where your eye should gaze, not necessarily at the FED or any central bank.
The debt money system and finance capitalism is state sponsored usury, and is a Jewish
construct.
Vulture capitalism is simply vultures buying up or creating distressed assets and then
changing the law, or using force to then collect face value of the debt instrument or other
so called asset. Vultures will use hook or crook to force down what they are buying, and hook
or crook to force up what they are selling. God's special people can do this because when
they look in the mirror, they are god, and are sanctioned to do so.
Maybe the vulture should replace the bald eagle as America's favorite bird since our dear
shabbos goy President Trump and cohorts are undermining the First Amendment and trying to
make it a crime to criticize Jews and/or Israel. Oh and don't think I am promoting the other
Zionist and their shabbos goy on the demshevik side. The Jew CONTROLS both sides and "our"
two party system has become Jew vs. Jew, not republican vs. democrat. Lenin said that the
best way to control the opposition was to lead it and (((they))) are at it AGAIN.
I think Islam preaches a decent message, but the average practitioner is open to
misinterpret it quite a bit. This is a failing of the teaching.. but I think Mohammed's
message was corrupted like Christ's message pretty much straight after his death. Gospel of
Thomas and Tolstoy's rewrites all the way for something closer imo.
The line of good and evil runs down the middle of each person's heart, and they have to
decide.
My line of attack on Judaism, Islam, Christianity, or whatever, has to answer the
question: "Is it good narrative for high civilization." Does the narrative make people
malfunction?
There are branches of Islam that are good narrative – where people choose the better
side of Islam.
The point is that these good branches, say the Suffi's, have to keep the crazy aunt in the
basement.
Abrogation allows what comes later, to gain power over what comes earlier. And what comes
earlier is the best part of Islam.
Christianity has the same problem, it does not do a good job of policing its crazies, who
twist scripture. Judaism, especially Talmudic Judaism is Kabala and utterances of the sages,
and it morphs and changes over time. For example, after Sabatai Sevi, the Kol-Neidre was
weaponized, and this construct is used by today's Zionists to wreak havoc. Before Sabatai,
there was Hillel, who weaponized usury.
Yes, I agree about Christianity changing quite a bit. In the first 300 years it was much
different than today, especially after the Arien controversy was settled by Constantine's
maneuvering of Bishops at council of Nicea. For example, before; reincarnation was part of
Christian doctrine, and after; reincarnation was excluded.
Trump should be impeached and convicted. But not for the reasons in the two Articles passes
by the House.
He should be for
Violating the Symington and Glenn amended 1961 Foreign Assistance Act to ban any aid to
clandestine nuclear powers that were not NPT signatories. Trump increased aid to Israel.
Moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem in violation of numerous UN Security Council and
General Assembly resolutions.
The abuse of Office via Nepotism in having totally unqualified Jared and Ivanka Kushner
serve as US Government respresentatives.
Executive Order classifying Jews as a Nationality protected from Free Speech criticism of
them, in violation of the First Amendment.
Of course those in Congress, that facilitated and cheered on the Israeli centric Trump
acts, should all be voted out forever.
I have long maintained that libertarianism/capitalism is really like a kind of Calvinism
for atheists. Calvinists used to assume that, since whatever happened was God's will and
God's will was invariable good, then whatever happened was good. Likewise, many modern cucks
seem to have just substituted The Market for God. Morally speaking, it all lets man off the
hook for anything that results–especially when those men happen to be Jewish
financiers!
No, boys and girls, The Market is not inherently good. It requires that a moral system be
superimposed on top of it in order to make it moral.
@Anon
After reading the book of this MI6 asset (and potential killer) who tried to fleece Russia,
you probably can benefit from watching a movie by Nekrasov about him. See references in:
It looks like it was Browder who killed Magnitsky, so that he can't spill the beans. And
then in an act of ultimate chutzpah played the victim and promoted Magnitsky act.
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? Since this deceptively simple question first came into my mind, I haven't
been able to shake it. We think we understand the word, but what are we really referring to
when we talk about a system in which the people rule themselves?
The word democracy is all around us, invoked in almost every
conceivable context: government, business, technology, education, and media. At the same time,
its meaning, taken as self-evident, is rarely given much serious consideration. Though the
headlines tell us democracy is in "crisis," we don't have a clear conception of what it is that
is at risk. The significance of the democratic ideal, as well as its practical substance, is
surprisingly elusive.
For most of my life, the word democracy didn't hold much appeal. I
was of course never against democracy per se, but words such as justice
, equality , freedom , solidarity , socialism , and revolution resonated more deeply. Democracy struck me as
mealy-mouthed, even debased. That idealistic anarchists and authoritarian leaders are equally
inclined to claim "democracy" as their own only demonstrated its lack of depth. North Korea
does, after all, call itself a "Democratic People's Republic," and Iraq was invaded by the U.S.
Army in the name of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But today I no longer see the
opportunistic use of the word as a sign of the idea's vapidity. Those powers co-opt the concept
of democracy because they realize that it represents a profound threat to the established
order, a threat they desperately hope to contain.
After making a documentary film, What Is Democracy? , I now
understand the concept's disorienting vagueness and protean character as a source of strength;
I have come to accept, and even appreciate, that there is no single definition I can stand
behind that feels unconditionally conclusive. Though the practice has extensive global roots,
the word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a
seemingly simple idea: the people ( demos ) rule or hold power (
kratos ). Democracy is the promise of the people ruling, but a promise
that can never be wholly fulfilled because its implications and scope keep changing. Over
centuries our conceptions of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more
inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they
do so remain eternally up for debate. Democracy destabilizes its own legitimacy and purpose by
design, subjecting its core components to continual examination and scrutiny.
Perfect democracy, I've come to believe, may not in fact exist and never will, but that
doesn't mean we can't make progress toward it, or that what there is of it can't disappear. For
this reason, I am more convinced than ever that the questions of what democracy is -- and, more
important, what it could be -- are ones we must perpetually ask.
Right now, many who question democracy do so out of disillusionment, fear, and outrage.
Democracy may not exist, yet it still manages to disappoint. Political gridlock, corruption,
unaccountable representatives, and the lack of meaningful alternatives incense people across
the ideological spectrum; their anger simmers at dehumanizing bureaucracy, blatant hypocrisy,
and lack of voice. Leaders are not accountable and voters rightly feel their choices are
limited, all while the rich keep getting richer and regular people scramble to survive. In
advanced democracies around the world, a growing number of people aren't even bothering to vote
-- a right many people fought and died for fairly recently. Most Americans will say that they
live in a democracy, but few will say that they trust the government, while the state generally
inspires negative reactions, ranging from frustration to contempt and suspicion. The situation
calls to mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau's observation from The Social
Contract : "In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies; under a bad
government no one cares to stir a step to get to them. As soon as any man says of the State
What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost."
1
A cauldron of causes generates an atmosphere of corrosive cynicism, social fragmentation,
and unease, with blame too often directed downward at the most vulnerable populations. And it's
not just in the United States. Consider the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union,
the decision known as Brexit; the resurgence of right-wing populism across Europe; coups and
reactionary electoral victories in Brazil; and the rise of fascism in India. Plato's warning
about democracy devolving into tyranny rings chillingly prophetic. The promise of self-rule
risks becoming not a promise but a curse, a self-destructive motor pushing toward destinations
more volatile, divided, despotic, and mean.
But this book isn't about the pitfalls of popular sovereignty, though it certainly has its
perils. Nor is it about the shortcomings of current liberal democratic political systems or the
ways they have been corrupted by money and power -- though they have been. That's a story that
has been told before, and while it will be the backdrop to my inquiry it is not the focus. This
book, instead, is an invitation to think about the word democracy from
various angles, looking back through history and reflecting on the philosophy and practice of
self-rule in hopes that a more contemplative view will shed useful light on our present
predicament. My goal is not to negate the sense of alarm nor deter people from action but to
remind us that we are part of a long, complex, and still-unfolding chronicle, whatever the
day's headlines might be or whoever governs the country.
Taking a more theoretical approach to democracy's winding, thorny path and inherently
paradoxical nature can also provide solace and reassurance. Ruling ourselves has never been
straightforward and never will be. Ever vexing and unpredictable, democracy is a process that
involves endless reassessment and renewal, not an endpoint we reach before taking a rest
(leaving us with a finished system to tweak at the margins). As such, this book is my
admittedly unorthodox, idiosyncratic call to democratize society from the bottom to the top. It
is also an expression of my belief that we cannot re think democracy if
we haven't really thought about it in the first place.
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? Since this deceptively simple question first came into my mind, I haven't
been able to shake it. We think we understand the word, but what are we really referring to
when we talk about a system in which the people rule themselves?
The word democracy is all around us, invoked in almost every
conceivable context: government, business, technology, education, and media. At the same time,
its meaning, taken as self-evident, is rarely given much serious consideration. Though the
headlines tell us democracy is in "crisis," we don't have a clear conception of what it is that
is at risk. The significance of the democratic ideal, as well as its practical substance, is
surprisingly elusive.
For most of my life, the word democracy didn't hold much appeal. I
was of course never against democracy per se, but words such as justice
, equality , freedom , solidarity , socialism , and revolution resonated more deeply. Democracy struck me as
mealy-mouthed, even debased. That idealistic anarchists and authoritarian leaders are equally
inclined to claim "democracy" as their own only demonstrated its lack of depth. North Korea
does, after all, call itself a "Democratic People's Republic," and Iraq was invaded by the U.S.
Army in the name of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But today I no longer see the
opportunistic use of the word as a sign of the idea's vapidity. Those powers co-opt the concept
of democracy because they realize that it represents a profound threat to the established
order, a threat they desperately hope to contain.
After making a documentary film, What Is Democracy? , I now
understand the concept's disorienting vagueness and protean character as a source of strength;
I have come to accept, and even appreciate, that there is no single definition I can stand
behind that feels unconditionally conclusive. Though the practice has extensive global roots,
the word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a
seemingly simple idea: the people ( demos ) rule or hold power (
kratos ). Democracy is the promise of the people ruling, but a promise
that can never be wholly fulfilled because its implications and scope keep changing. Over
centuries our conceptions of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more
inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they
do so remain eternally up for debate. Democracy destabilizes its own legitimacy and purpose by
design, subjecting its core components to continual examination and scrutiny.
Perfect democracy, I've come to believe, may not in fact exist and never will, but that
doesn't mean we can't make progress toward it, or that what there is of it can't disappear. For
this reason, I am more convinced than ever that the questions of what democracy is -- and, more
important, what it could be -- are ones we must perpetually ask.
Right now, many who question democracy do so out of disillusionment, fear, and outrage.
Democracy may not exist, yet it still manages to disappoint. Political gridlock, corruption,
unaccountable representatives, and the lack of meaningful alternatives incense people across
the ideological spectrum; their anger simmers at dehumanizing bureaucracy, blatant hypocrisy,
and lack of voice. Leaders are not accountable and voters rightly feel their choices are
limited, all while the rich keep getting richer and regular people scramble to survive. In
advanced democracies around the world, a growing number of people aren't even bothering to vote
-- a right many people fought and died for fairly recently. Most Americans will say that they
live in a democracy, but few will say that they trust the government, while the state generally
inspires negative reactions, ranging from frustration to contempt and suspicion. The situation
calls to mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau's observation from The Social
Contract : "In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies; under a bad
government no one cares to stir a step to get to them. As soon as any man says of the State
What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost."
1
A cauldron of causes generates an atmosphere of corrosive cynicism, social fragmentation,
and unease, with blame too often directed downward at the most vulnerable populations. And it's
not just in the United States. Consider the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union,
the decision known as Brexit; the resurgence of right-wing populism across Europe; coups and
reactionary electoral victories in Brazil; and the rise of fascism in India. Plato's warning
about democracy devolving into tyranny rings chillingly prophetic. The promise of self-rule
risks becoming not a promise but a curse, a self-destructive motor pushing toward destinations
more volatile, divided, despotic, and mean.
But this book isn't about the pitfalls of popular sovereignty, though it certainly has its
perils. Nor is it about the shortcomings of current liberal democratic political systems or the
ways they have been corrupted by money and power -- though they have been. That's a story that
has been told before, and while it will be the backdrop to my inquiry it is not the focus. This
book, instead, is an invitation to think about the word democracy from
various angles, looking back through history and reflecting on the philosophy and practice of
self-rule in hopes that a more contemplative view will shed useful light on our present
predicament. My goal is not to negate the sense of alarm nor deter people from action but to
remind us that we are part of a long, complex, and still-unfolding chronicle, whatever the
day's headlines might be or whoever governs the country.
Taking a more theoretical approach to democracy's winding, thorny path and inherently
paradoxical nature can also provide solace and reassurance. Ruling ourselves has never been
straightforward and never will be. Ever vexing and unpredictable, democracy is a process that
involves endless reassessment and renewal, not an endpoint we reach before taking a rest
(leaving us with a finished system to tweak at the margins). As such, this book is my
admittedly unorthodox, idiosyncratic call to democratize society from the bottom to the top. It
is also an expression of my belief that we cannot re think democracy if
we haven't really thought about it in the first place.
WHAT IS DEMOCRACY? Since this deceptively simple question first came into my mind, I haven't
been able to shake it. We think we understand the word, but what are we really referring to
when we talk about a system in which the people rule themselves?
The word democracy is all around us, invoked in almost every
conceivable context: government, business, technology, education, and media. At the same time,
its meaning, taken as self-evident, is rarely given much serious consideration. Though the
headlines tell us democracy is in "crisis," we don't have a clear conception of what it is that
is at risk. The significance of the democratic ideal, as well as its practical substance, is
surprisingly elusive.
For most of my life, the word democracy didn't hold much appeal. I
was of course never against democracy per se, but words such as justice
, equality , freedom , solidarity , socialism , and revolution resonated more deeply. Democracy struck me as
mealy-mouthed, even debased. That idealistic anarchists and authoritarian leaders are equally
inclined to claim "democracy" as their own only demonstrated its lack of depth. North Korea
does, after all, call itself a "Democratic People's Republic," and Iraq was invaded by the U.S.
Army in the name of bringing democracy to the Middle East. But today I no longer see the
opportunistic use of the word as a sign of the idea's vapidity. Those powers co-opt the concept
of democracy because they realize that it represents a profound threat to the established
order, a threat they desperately hope to contain.
After making a documentary film, What Is Democracy? , I now
understand the concept's disorienting vagueness and protean character as a source of strength;
I have come to accept, and even appreciate, that there is no single definition I can stand
behind that feels unconditionally conclusive. Though the practice has extensive global roots,
the word democracy comes to us from ancient Greece, and it conveys a
seemingly simple idea: the people ( demos ) rule or hold power (
kratos ). Democracy is the promise of the people ruling, but a promise
that can never be wholly fulfilled because its implications and scope keep changing. Over
centuries our conceptions of democracy have expanded and evolved, with democracy becoming more
inclusive and robust in many ways, yet who counts as the people, how they rule, and where they
do so remain eternally up for debate. Democracy destabilizes its own legitimacy and purpose by
design, subjecting its core components to continual examination and scrutiny.
Perfect democracy, I've come to believe, may not in fact exist and never will, but that
doesn't mean we can't make progress toward it, or that what there is of it can't disappear. For
this reason, I am more convinced than ever that the questions of what democracy is -- and, more
important, what it could be -- are ones we must perpetually ask.
Right now, many who question democracy do so out of disillusionment, fear, and outrage.
Democracy may not exist, yet it still manages to disappoint. Political gridlock, corruption,
unaccountable representatives, and the lack of meaningful alternatives incense people across
the ideological spectrum; their anger simmers at dehumanizing bureaucracy, blatant hypocrisy,
and lack of voice. Leaders are not accountable and voters rightly feel their choices are
limited, all while the rich keep getting richer and regular people scramble to survive. In
advanced democracies around the world, a growing number of people aren't even bothering to vote
-- a right many people fought and died for fairly recently. Most Americans will say that they
live in a democracy, but few will say that they trust the government, while the state generally
inspires negative reactions, ranging from frustration to contempt and suspicion. The situation
calls to mind Jean-Jacques Rousseau's observation from The Social
Contract : "In a well-ordered city every man flies to the assemblies; under a bad
government no one cares to stir a step to get to them. As soon as any man says of the State
What does it matter to me? the State may be given up for lost."
1
A cauldron of causes generates an atmosphere of corrosive cynicism, social fragmentation,
and unease, with blame too often directed downward at the most vulnerable populations. And it's
not just in the United States. Consider the United Kingdom vote to leave the European Union,
the decision known as Brexit; the resurgence of right-wing populism across Europe; coups and
reactionary electoral victories in Brazil; and the rise of fascism in India. Plato's warning
about democracy devolving into tyranny rings chillingly prophetic. The promise of self-rule
risks becoming not a promise but a curse, a self-destructive motor pushing toward destinations
more volatile, divided, despotic, and mean.
But this book isn't about the pitfalls of popular sovereignty, though it certainly has its
perils. Nor is it about the shortcomings of current liberal democratic political systems or the
ways they have been corrupted by money and power -- though they have been. That's a story that
has been told before, and while it will be the backdrop to my inquiry it is not the focus. This
book, instead, is an invitation to think about the word democracy from
various angles, looking back through history and reflecting on the philosophy and practice of
self-rule in hopes that a more contemplative view will shed useful light on our present
predicament. My goal is not to negate the sense of alarm nor deter people from action but to
remind us that we are part of a long, complex, and still-unfolding chronicle, whatever the
day's headlines might be or whoever governs the country.
Taking a more theoretical approach to democracy's winding, thorny path and inherently
paradoxical nature can also provide solace and reassurance. Ruling ourselves has never been
straightforward and never will be. Ever vexing and unpredictable, democracy is a process that
involves endless reassessment and renewal, not an endpoint we reach before taking a rest
(leaving us with a finished system to tweak at the margins). As such, this book is my
admittedly unorthodox, idiosyncratic call to democratize society from the bottom to the top. It
is also an expression of my belief that we cannot re think democracy if
we haven't really thought about it in the first place.
Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone is one of those books you
might want to get in its physical form so you can shove it full of bookmarks, highlight
sentences, write notes, stick little sticky arrows to note something special, and generally
leave it in unfit condition for anyone but you, but that will be okay because you will be
going back to it again and again whenever you want to argue about something. Yes, it's that
good.
Astra Taylor does the difficult job examining democracy, something we talk about a lot
without ever completely understanding its full implications. To do this, she examines eight
tensions that pull democracies in different directions and are critical to balance or at
least understand when understanding democracy. These tensions are interrogated in separate
chapters, looking at history, research, and political experience that impinge on them. The
vast research involved in these explorations is astonishing.
In the first chapter she examines the tension between freedom and equality and notes
that once upon a time we thought they went hand in hand, but that they have become
oppositional thanks to political movements that serve the powerful who define freedom in
terms of making money and avoidance of regulation rather than freedom from want, hunger, or
fear. Equality has become, to American eyes, the enemy of freedom. The second chapter looks
at decision-making, the tension of conflict and consensus. This includes the understanding
of loyal opposition, something that seems to be lost with a president who calls his
political opponents traitors. I appreciated her taking on how consensus can become
anti-democratic and stultifying.
The third chapter looks at the tension of inclusion and exclusion, who is the demos, to
whom is the democracy accountable. In the fourth, the balance between choice and coercion
is explored. Pro-corporate theorists talk about government coercion and attacks on liberty
when they are not allowed to poison our drinking water and make government the enemy of the
people. She also explores how we seem to think freedom is the be all, end all except at
work. Chapter Five looks at spontaneity versus structure. This has an important analysis of
organizing versus activism and how the focus on youth movements has weakened social justice
movements overall as the energy dissipates after college without the labor and community
organizations to foster movement energy. Chapter Six explores the balance between mass
opinion and expertise and how meritocracy works against democracy. This chapter looks at
how education functions to keep the powerful powerful from generation to generation, "the
paradoxical, deeply contradictory role of education under capitalism , which facilitates
the ascension of some while preparing a great many more for lowly positions of
servitude."
Chapter Seven looks at the geography of democracy, not just in terms of federalism and
the federal, state, and local levels of participating in democracy but also the
supranational entities like the World Trade Organization and how they undercut democracy
and the integrity of the state. Chapter Eight considers what we inherit from the past, the
traditions and norms of democracy and what we owe the future, including our obligations to
pass on a livable planet.
Needless to say, this is all very discouraging in its totality, but the final chapter
encourages us to balance pessimism with optimism just as democracy must balance all those
other tensions.
It took me forever to read Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone.
That is because after I read a chapter I needed to think about it before I moved on to the
next. I took sixteen pages of notes while reading it. I hate taking notes, but I did not
want to lose the ideas.
This is also a book you might want to read with some other people, perhaps discussing a
chapter at a time. I do not think it is a book you can read passively, without stopping to
talk to someone, tweet, or reread. It's that good.
That does not mean I agree with every word of the book, but then the author does an
excellent job of interrogating her own ideas. She might seem to be asserting an opinion,
and then offer a counter-example because she is rigorous like that. She perhaps places too
much faith in Marxist theory from time to time, but then that may be because like
democracy, it has never really existed except in conceptual form.
Taylor does not offer a simple answer because there are no simple answers. She does not
pretend to know how to, or even if we can, fix democracy. She gives us the questions, the
problems, and some ideas, but as someone who truly believes in government by the people,
she asks us to take up the challenge.
I received an e-galley of Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone from
the publisher through NetGalley.
"The CIA was the central protagonist in Russiagate. The origins of the New Cold War are found
in Bill Clinton's first term, when administration neo-cons looted, plundered and moved NATO
against a prostrate Russia in
contradiction to explicit guarantees not to do so made by the George H.W. Bush
administration. Vladimir Putin's apparent crime was to oust the Clintonites from Russia and
restore Russian sovereignty." CounterPunch.org
"Russiagate was a declaration of war by the 'intelligence community' against a duly elected
President. As argued below, the CIA's motive is to move its own foreign policy agenda forward
without even the illusion of democratic consent." CounterPunch.org
Notable quotes:
"... Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the problem, never part of the solution. ..."
Actions in the Washington cesspool never surprise -- by members of both right wing of the US
war party. They represent the greatest threat to world peace and ordinary people everywhere at home and
abroad. Pro-war, pro-business, pro-Wall Street, anti-progressive Speaker Pelosi is part of the
problem, never part of the solution.
Her long disturbing congressional record shows she exclusively serves wealth and power
interests at the expense of the vast majority of Americans she disdains, proving it time and
again.
Her deplorable voting record speaks for itself, backing:
the 1999 Gramm-Leach-Blily Act repeal of Glass-Steagall, permitting some of the most
egregious financial abuses in the modern era;
the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), permitting endless
wars of aggression in multiple theaters, raging endlessly;
annual National Defense Authorization Acts and US wars of aggression;
Obama's neoliberal harshness, continuing under Trump, along with tax cuts for the rich,
benefitting her and her husband enormously, without admitting it;
increasingly unaffordable marketplace medicine, ripping off consumers for profit, leaving
millions uninsured, most Americans way underinsured;
the USA Patriot Act, Anti-Terrorism Act and other police state law;
the 9/11 whitewash Commission Recommendation Act;
the FISA Amendments Act -- permitting warrantless spying post-9/11, Big Brother watching
everyone;
NAFTA and other anti-consumer/corporate coup d'etat trade bills;
the repressive US gulag prison system, the world's largest by far; incarcerating
millions by federal, state, and local authorities, it includes global torture prisons;
unapologetic support for Israeli apartheid viciousness;
fierce opposition to Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, North Korea, and other
nonbelligerent sovereign states threatening no one;
the Russiagate witch hunt and Ukrainegate scams.
Calling exploitive/predatory "free market (capitalism) our greatest asset" shows her
contempt for equity and justice.
Her support for the military, industrial, security, media complex is all about backing
endless wars of aggression against invented enemies. No real ones exist.
Pelosi represents what belligerent, plutocratic, oligarchic, increasingly totalitarian rule
is all about, notably contemptuous of nations on the US target list for regime change --
Russia, China and Iran topping the list.
On Friday, she falsely accused Russia of involvement in Ukrainegate, a failed Russiagate
scam spinoff with no legitimacy, supported by undemocratic Dems and their echo-chamber
media.
Repeating the long ago debunked Russian US election meddling Big Lie that won't die, she
falsely accused Moscow of "ha(ving) a hand in this."
Referring to the Ukrainegate scam, she offered no evidence backing her accusation because
none exists.
During a Friday press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New York,
Sergey Lavrov slammed Pelosi's Big Lie, saying:
"Russia's been accused of all the deadly sins, and then some. It's paranoia, and I think
it's obvious to everyone."
It's unacceptable anti-Russia hate-mongering, what goes on endlessly, Cold War 2.0
raging.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said the following on her facebook
page:
"Speaker of the lower house of Congress Nancy Pelosi believes that Russia is involved in the
scandal over July telephone conversation between us and Ukraine Presidents Donald Trump and
Vladimir Zelensky."
"This (baseless) assumption was made on Friday Pelosi (not) explaining what it means, and
without providing evidence of her words."
"Considering that it was Nancy Pelosi who caused the 'Scandal around the telephone
conversation between the presidents of the United States and Ukraine,' then, according to the
speaker's logic, Russia attached the hand to her."
What's going on is continuation of the most shameful political chapter in US history,
ongoing since Trump took office, along with railroading Richard Nixon.
Both episodes represent McCarthyism on steroids – supported by establishment media,
furious about Trump's triumph over Hillary, targeting him largely for the wrong reasons,
ignoring plenty of right ones.
Mueller's probe ended with a whimper, not the bang Dems wanted, Ukrainegate their second
bite of the apple to try discrediting Trump for political advantage ahead of November 2020
elections.
That's what Russiagate and Ukrainegate are all about.
These actions by undemocratic Dems and their media press agents are further clear proof that
Washington's deeply corrupted political system to its rotten core is far too debauched to
fix.
"... Putin has indeed been repeatedly "rebuffed" by the West for proposing anything that makes Russia a leading equal in its sphere. This shows not limited contacts with the West, but rather ongoing and painful ones. ..."
"... In truth, Vladimir Putin is the Russian Ronald Reagan, bidding his citizens to "stand tall" against enemies from without and within working against the homeland. His stance on Ukraine, arming its "contras" in a border war against an enemy "satellite regime", may make him look the intolerant war jingo; but thus did Ronald Reagan appear outside the US. Ironically it's Reagan partisans who don't grasp the working parallels. In general, I can recommend this book as a good introduction on Vladimir Putin, but it's hardly the last word and certainly not the definitive narrative. ..."
Hill and Gaddy are pretty good scholars. They do a good job of providing a psychological
profile of Vladimir Putin and the way he operates in the Kremlin. But they have their
limitations. One of the more annoying aspects of the book is that the authors return again
and again both to Putin's graduate thesis on an American management book and his 1999
manifesto on his millenial goals for Russia. A better set of writers would have covered both
subjects in one section and then moved on. But Hill and Gaddy sprinkle references to these
documents about five times each throughout the book, which leads me to suspect that they are
padding what would otherwise be a much shorter book.
As I was reading, I felt that there was a strong bias against Putin and Russia by the
authors, but I couldn't quite pinpoint their slant until the last sentence, which is a
doozy:
"The onus will now be on the West to shore up its own home defenses, reduce the economic
and political vulnerabilities, and create its own contingency plans if it wants to counter
Vladimir Putin's new twenty-first century warfare."
For anyone who is a Russian scholar, this is proof that the authors get Russia very wrong.
They reveal themselves to be in the neocon camp of hawks who want to reactivate a new Cold
War very badly. And in their analysis, they ignore the fact that Russia as a country is in
fact deeply defensive country far more concerned with its internal boundaries and control
than some aggressive Soviet power after World War II. To be sure, Mr. Putin is no choir boy.
Interestingly enough, the authors do not fully investigate the potentially criminal behavior
that Putin performed with Russia's war on Chechnya. Hill and Gaddy could have strengthened
their case if they had included some deeper analysis of Putin's behavior on this troublesome
part of the Russian Empire. But instead they were intent on plowing their own rut, which
while somewhat interesting -- ultimately becomes a little bit too pedantic.
I am reminded of some books in the 1950s that were secretly backed by the CIA, and this
book certainly feels like it has the same flavor. Hill and Gaddy totally ignore Russian
scholars like Stephen Cohen in his analysis of the Russian situation, which is totally the
opposite of mainstream thinking unfortunately these days. But in ignoring what Cohen has to
say, the predominant attitude of the American and European foreign policy establishment is in
lock step with Hill and Gaddy, which is why the book has been so heavily publicized.
The neocon vision of what's wrong with Russia is so biased that it also ignores the
writings of such foreign policy figures as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Briezinski, former US
Secretarys of State, both of whom are much more closer in their visions of Russia to Cohen
than they are to Hill and Gaddy.
Yes, this book is all about sticking to the Rooskies, unfortunately. And the hidden
motivator are all of the defense contracts that NATO can suck up, as well as all the bankers'
books in reaming the Ukrainian economy as badly as they've reamed Greece. But the authors
never tell you that this is their motivation, until the last paragraph.
Ultimately, this is an unsatisfying work.
karenann, 2 years ago (Edited)
Kissinger has had the good sense to state that the best hope for peace in the region is to have Ukraine as a totally
neutral country, similar to Finland before the USSR collapsed. The Budapest Memorandum of NATO calls for the full military
integration of Ukraine and Georgia.
As a thought experiment, what if the Soviets undermined the provincial governments of Alberta and British Columbia, and
then wanted to include these governments in the Warsaw Pact? What do you think the reaction of the US would be?
- look at Vladimir Putin and Mr. Putin's Russia. The book is based on intensive research
and interviews with Putin, but I find it skewed by the Western biases it brings to the table.
Yet it's not a demonization, as is so much of the Western Putin literature. It gives him
credit for standing by the multi-racial and cultural realities of post-Soviet Russia.
Compared to the real hardcore nationalists, Putin in fact has come across as a domestic
liberal. The rising tide of Russian arch-nationalism, however, has taken its toll. Authors
Hill and Gaddy correctly assess Putin's playing the nationalist card as a political manouver
to keep one step ahead of his opponents - most of whom are not pro-Western liberal dissidents
by any means. Courting the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years was one such strategy.
Yet the authors see only politics in Mr. Putin's tactics, and play down the West's own
role in making him an antagonist. They take him to task for painting the Ukrainian
insurrection of 2014 as a "fascist coup," and for denouncing Ukrainian nationalist partisan
Stepan Bandera as a Nazi collaborator. Bandera and Hitler may have never met, but this was
not necessary for the arming and use of Bandera's OUN to commit atrocities and war crimes on
then-Soviet territory. Contrary to the authors' whitewash, Bandera's later persecution by
Nazis consisted of special treatment in German camps, held on ice for postwar use. Of
relevance is that the "regime change" of 2014 was largely the work of west Ukrainians - the
backbone of the OUN movement and the very folks who today make Bandera a national hero. When
he paints west Ukraine as again collaborating with Russia's enemy, Putin stands on solid
historical ground. The West continues destabilizing actions all the while it blames Putin for
the same.
The authors also lecture us on Putin's inability to grasp "Western values" as the root of
his refusal to take the West on its own terms; on "how little Putin understands about us -
our motives, our mentality, and, also, our values" (p.385) I rather think Putin grasps these
"motives, mentality, and values" very well, as they seem inseparable from European economic
hegemony and NATO expansion. His managed democracy comes off looking rather clean cut
compared to US politics following the Citizens United ruling, where American oligarch David
Koch engineered a fundamental change for the worse via the Supreme Court. In foreign policy,
Putin has indeed been repeatedly "rebuffed" by the West for proposing anything that makes
Russia a leading equal in its sphere. This shows not limited contacts with the West, but
rather ongoing and painful ones.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking but tragically familiar. It's rather the West's (and the
authors') failure to grasp regional history, and Putin's actions based on it, that fuel the
"misunderstanding." Ukraine, for instance, had strong nationalist animosity toward the
"Moskali" long before the 1930s holodomor/famine. Crimea was not transferred to Ukraine out
of any degree of recognition of said suffering, as the authors allege on p. 367; but as part
of a geo-political manouver to Russify east Ukraine with more "loyal" ethnic Russians,
exactly as in the Baltic states.
His aggressive handling of terrorists within Chechnya is "decried" by the West, the
authors note. Yet within a decade the US and its NATO partners would be pursuing an
aggressive course in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen that make Russia look the provincial
amateur. Putin in fact is *not* trying to recreate the USSR, as so often charged by Western
pundits with an axe to grind, nor even the old Russian empire. His strategic thinking is
dominated by security rationales. A wider invasive course would only threaten Russian
security. At all times he sees his actions as defensive responses. If this is self-serving,
it only puts him in good company: recall the American angst over the "dissident" Dixie
Chicks; the livid anger over Edward Snowden.
In truth, Vladimir Putin is the Russian Ronald Reagan, bidding his citizens to "stand
tall" against enemies from without and within working against the homeland. His stance on
Ukraine, arming its "contras" in a border war against an enemy "satellite regime", may make
him look the intolerant war jingo; but thus did Ronald Reagan appear outside the US.
Ironically it's Reagan partisans who don't grasp the working parallels. In general, I can
recommend this book as a good introduction on Vladimir Putin, but it's hardly the last word
and certainly not the definitive narrative.
Anon II, 4 years ago (Edited)
It is refreshing to read something on Russia written by a reviewer who knows what he is talking about. This book is full
of data, but the authors lack any intellectual basis on which to organize it. They are trying to publish a book in which
there will be reader interest, but they really have nothing to say. If you are eager to make an enemy of Russia, this book
will be useful to you. If you are simply trying to understand what is happening, it won't be.
D.B.4 years ago
Thank you for an excellent countervailing perspective!
Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't
stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation
and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the
MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.
This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors
in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party
system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.
Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much
for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying
jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out
like a garbage.
"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept.
of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered
his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded
on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship;
3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.
Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially
instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984.
Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced
by Rachel Maddow show ;-)
Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will
be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.
One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are
bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar
think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's
famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last
refuge of scoundrels."
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Forgive me for the somewhat redundant post, and again I hope this is not a waste of anyone's
time, but this is the source of the Interfax report I posted just above currently at #56. It
is relevant to the Ukrainegate impeachment fiasco.
The U.S. and lapdog EU/UK media will not touch this with a 10 foot pole.
KYIV. Dec 17 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine and the United States should investigate
the transfer of $29 million by businessman Victor Pinchuk from Ukraine to the Clinton
Foundation, Ukrainian Member of Parliament (independent) Andriy Derkach has said. According
to him, the investigation should check and establish how the Pinchuk Foundation's
activities were funded; it, among other projects, made a contribution of $29 million to the
Clinton Foundation. "Yesterday, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies registered criminal
proceeding number 12019000000001138. As part of this proceeding, I provided facts that
should be verified and established by the investigation. Establishing these facts will also
help the American side to conduct its own investigation and establish the origin of the
money received by [Hillary] Clinton," Derkach said at a press conferences at
Interfax-Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, December 17.
According to him, it was the independent French online publication Mediapart that first
drew attention to the money withdrawal scheme from Ukraine and Pinchuk's financing of the
Clinton Foundation.
"The general scheme is as follows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent money to
Ukraine in 2015. The same year, Victor Pinchuk's Credit Dnepr [Bank] received UAH 357
million in a National Bank stabilization loan from the IMF's disbursement. Delta Bank was
given a total of UAH 5.110 billion in loans. The banks siphoned the money through Austria's
Meinl Bank into offshore accounts, and further into [the accounts of] the Pinchuk
Foundation. The money siphoning scam was confirmed by a May 2016 ruling by [Kyiv's]
Pechersky court. The total damage from this scam involving other banks is estimated at $800
million. The Pinchuk Foundation transferred $29 million to the Foundation of Clinton, a
future U.S. presidential candidate from the Democratic Party," Derkach said.
Yavlisnky is a neoliberal and this can't say anything useful. His analysis by definition is
completely wrong. As for authoritarism, he lead Yabloko party for 30 years ;-)
Girsh Alexeyevich Yavlisnky is a fan of Lev Nathanovich Scharansky: Confirmed.
Mao Cheng Ji says:
December 16, 2019 at 3:50 pm "This created strong incentives for the elite to inhibit
competition which might threaten their dominance, gradually squeezing that competition
until the state became something close to totalitarian."
But this is true for every capitalist system. Amazon, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft,
Apple, ExxonMobil, a couple of financial giants. Who are they competing with?
I remember 10 years ago I realized that UBS is much richer and more powerful than the
ostensibly super-democratic state of Switzerland, where it's registered.
Russia's ungood, okay. But who is good and how, exactly?
Aule says:
December 16, 2019 at 10:03 pm > the elites have ways of ensuring that they stay in
power regardless of elections.
Isn't that a description of a "deep state"? Wouldn't USA be one of the most
authoritarian regimes by this definition? Towards which system exactly does he want Russia
to move towards?
Lyttenburgh says:
December 17, 2019 at 3:42 pm"[T]his type of capitalism relies on a narrow range of
rather unsophisticated resources and, therefore, by its very nature, does not generate
sufficient prerequisites for a full-fledged functioning of political competition."
Query (just one!). Since when did the weapon systems became "rather unsophisticated
resources" (c)?
"Consequently, says Yavlinsky, 'I agree with those who believe that this regime is
doomed.'"
Girsh Alexeyevich Yavlisnky is a fan of Lev Nathanovich Scharansky: Confirmed.
Because "you have to live not by a lie" (c). "For yours and ours freedom" (c).
ТакЪ победимЪ!
"The duty of all healthy political forces in Russia is to make an effort to develop
and put forward a realistic alternative, a truly practical plan to overcome the present
crisis."
>Written in 2015
Yabloko (and the rest of "non-systemic opposition" parties of Russia) is not among the
"healthy political forces: Confirmed.
"For a notional liberal democrat, it turns out that Grigory Yavlinsky is just a
smidgen too Bolshevik for my liking."
There is nothing "Bolshevik" in him. A lot of fascist though, ergo the liberast (liberal
+ facist) sobriquet that applies to him and other "Russian" "liberals".
Would it kill you to refrain from lazy anti-Communism, Professor? I know, you are not
getting younger with each passing year, but for THIS to be the main danger to your
health
moon says:
December 18, 2019 at 12:58 pm"For a notional liberal democrat, it turns out
that Grigory Yavlinsky is just a smidgen too Bolshevik for my liking."
Well maybe there is? Although, #metoo', just like Pavlov's dogs, may have slightly
salivated here. Considering its usage in present discourse.
PL: Meanwhile, Russia remained primarily a natural resource exporter, on the
periphery of the international system. All this reduced the opportunities for
self-enrichment, and made it easy for the elite to capture the few opportunities
which remained, turning the state into nothing more than a system for distributing
rents from the few profitable sectors of the economy into the hands of the
select.
Noticed the fine irony here? Competition? Really? That's all needed?
What I liked about Mark Smith book, which the dear Prof reviewed a while ago, was
that he callenged the idea that Russia was ever peripheral from a European perspective.
Obviously it wasn't.
I have yet to move on to Russian Conservativism. Slow reader.
*******
But if I may. I would offer Kaspersky Lap as 'competitve evidence'* beyond your
suggested military industrial complex evidence as pretty competive beyond the
exploitation of natural resources.
* Is there something like economic competitive Darwinism? And if so, how would it
work? At least one of my profs in media studies suggested something along those
lines.
moon says:
December 18, 2019 at 2:38 pm PL vs PR. PL should have been PR, obviously. Still
watching PL after all these years. Although there were at least two basic times, I
felt I should never return.
curious though. The magical force of routine? Only? Or something else? Something
beyond pure curiosity?
'Peripheral authoritarianism' would be more accurate, I suggest. As I explain in my
book, autocracy (samoderzhavie) is something different (at least in theory).
J.T. says:
December 17, 2019 at 6:47 pm I can see why a publisher or marketing team might
opt for a title change. "The Putin System: An opposing view" conveys the bare
minimum information needed to"get" what the book is about. Nevertheless, it is
generic. Yes, opposing views exist. What about 'em?
Re: translation: I see your point. Though "autocratic" and "authoritarian" are
occasionally used interchangably in political science texts.
RS. says:
December 18, 2019 at 11:27 am Which current economist, analyst or critic of the
political economy of the RF do you find as thoughtful or credible?
PaulR says:
December 18, 2019 at 12:07 pm RS,
Most of what I read is history or poli sci, rather than political economy per se.
So, if it's specifically political economy you're after, I'm not well placed to
answer. That said, one political economist studying Russia I would recommend is
Richard Connolly of Birmingham University in the UK.
Paul
"Russia is 'peripheral' because it stands outside the
'core' of global capitalism, its role being merely to be supply raw materials to the
core".
This is not only unproven but simply wrong. This thesis is based on the assumption that the
Western capitalism is the "core" and the rest is "periphery", which is clearly no longer
quite true and is going to be even less so in near future.
Beside, we can just as easily to look at the situation the other way: the role of the
"core" is merely to supply money to Russia for Russia to do its own thing. Russia is a hell
of a lot more self sufficient now than the "core". If anything is to happen to Russia, the
"core" would have its collective butt frozen in winter, and the German industry would
collapse. Russia would survive, though, for it can heat, feed and cloth itself, unlike the
"core".
"Russia is non-competitive, as the elites have ways of ensuring that they stay in power
regardless of elections".
Isn't that the case anywhere? That's why it's called "elites". It remains in power whether
the people elect a clown in a red hat or a clown in a blue hat. The US is the case in
point.
moon says:
December 18, 2019 at 1:07 pm Hmmm? OK: If anything is to happen to Russia, the "core" would have its collective butt frozen
in winter, and the German industry would collapse.
As German, should I consider this as warning. That the prototypical liberals, the
Americans, have been right all along.
"As the foremost representative of Russian liberalism , Yabloko was never very
popular, but it had enough support to get a place in the corridors of power"
"Yabloko" IS a liberal democratic party and is internationally recognized as such. You,
Professor, as person self-indentifying with being a liberal, have to respect their choice
– and EU's best and brightest' as well. Why? Because Yavlinsky's brainchild is (since
2006) a member of The
Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party (ALDE Party). It's worthy checking
out the list of luminaries belonging to that august EU-ropean grouping. Don't tell me,
Professor, that you've never before heard about, say, Mark Rutte or Andrej Babiš.
Also, please don't lower my evaluation of your knowledge, by feigning ignorance about this
two prominent members of the ALDE – Lib Dems (UK) and Fianna Fail (Republic of
Ireland).
[Also, if you scroll at the very bottom of the article, you'd find out other "prominent"
member parties – like Russian "ParNaS" (a brainchild of Mikhail "Misha 2%" Kasyanov)
and "New Kosovo Alliance" (no comments)]
I have a question to you – are these fine people also "too Bolshevik" for you?
Because when a party or a political movement takes a Devil's bargain signs
up with the ALDE fellows, it has to subject its political program to the (externally
provided) shop-list of conditions and requirements, in order to (continuously) prove their
"liberalness". Citizens liberals also like to congregate with each others in appropriate
locations and settings, thus enhancing each other's handshakability and having a jolly good
time.
ALDE is the (chief) reason, why both ParNaS and Yabloko decided not to recognize Crimea
as part of Russia plus took other questionable political decisions in liue of
"progressivism". Both ParNas and Yabloko (and, therefore, their Great Helmsmen) are not at
liberty to change their credo doctrine without approval from the
proper humans "senior European partners".
As you yourself admit, this book is rather old. Now, do you really think that the
EU-ropean areopagus disapproves of it and deems the writer to be illiberal? And if
you dare to oppose the opinion of the single most powerful block of dye-in-the-wool
liberals of Europe, what does it make you, Professor?
PaulR says:
December 18, 2019 at 1:19 pm At this point, I'd say 'define liberalism', which, as
it turns out, is even harder than defining conservatism.
A) You, Professor, self-identify as a liberal (in the number of blogposts that's
just yuuuuuuge to list here). If anything, it's YOU who should be defining the
liberal credo here.
B) ALDE Party, a card-carrying liberal "block" , is itself a part of the larger
Com literal LibIntern , whose credo
is the so-called Oxford Manifesto , still legit
after some tweaks and "improvements" over the years.
C) How does your personal liberal credo (A) relates to the officiall,
internationally recognized one (B)?
Mao Cheng Ji says:
December 18, 2019 at 5:01 pm I think conservatism is pretty much synonymous
with traditionalism, and that one is self-explanatory: preserving and maintaining
traditions.
Liberalism, on the other hand, is hard to define indeed. I suppose the original
idea was to give higher priority to the interests of individuals (as perceived by
themselves) vs. the collective interests of the tribe/society.
But as the contradictions resulting from this pursuit grow and become more
obvious, it basically devolves, I believe, into pure, idiotic sanctimony. Sort of a
cult.
melanf says:
December 18, 2019 at 4:07 pm At the same time, there is no competitive system in the
Yabloko party itself – Yavlinsky has been the irreplaceable leader of this party for
thirty years.
As I've commented here at the occasion, Putin focused on the Lenin vs Stalin debate about
what the status of the ethnicities should be in the new Union. He said Stalin was right and
Lenin was wrong, because "[Vladimir Lenin was acting] not as a state leader, but as a
revolutionary."
But Putin is factually wrong.
As I've mentioned earlier, the ethnicity problem in Russia was born with the Russian
Empire's own model of colonization -- what we call nowadays as "internal colonization", i.e.
the incorporation of the colonies directly into the territory of the metropolis. See
Mironov's article about that:
Putin should, therefore, blame the Russian Empire, and not the USSR, for its own ethnic
problems. But he won't, since he has a romanticized view of the tsars and has Peter the Great
as his personal hero.
It would be better for you to provide the words Putin spoke in answer to the question.
Here's the repartee and the question taken from the transcript linked @6:
"Andrei Kolesnikov: Good afternoon. Andrei Kolesnikov, Kommersant newspaper.
"Mr President, I have two questions on the recent meeting of the Council for Civil Society
and Human Rights. You spoke out about Vladimir Ulyanov as never before. You even brought up
his nicknames, such as 'Old Man' and 'Lenin.'
"Vladimir Putin: A pseudonym.
"Andrei Kolesnikov: You said nicknames.
"Vladimir Putin: As a matter of fact, it is all one and the same.
"Andrei Kolesnikov: Party nicknames.
"You accused him of breaking down a 1,000-year-old state. When you were saying this, you
facial expression was close to rage, it seemed to me. Will anything come out of your comment?
What would be a logical follow-up to these words? Removing Lenin's body from the Mausoleum,
at long last?"
Putin's answer:
"Regarding Lenin and his role in our history, and what I think about it, I believe that he
was a revolutionary rather than a statesman.
"When I talked about the 1,000-year history of our state, it was strictly centralised and
unitary, as we all know. But what did Vladimir Lenin propose? He went even further than a
federation and proposed a system that can be described as a confederation. It was his
decision to tie ethnic groups to specific territories, so that they obtained the right to
secede from the Soviet Union.
"What happened was that a strictly centralised state was turned into a de facto
confederation with the right of secession and with ethnic groups attached to specific
territories. But these territories were divided in such a way that they did not always
correspond and still do not correspond to where various ethnic groups traditionally lived.
This is how cracks emerged that still linger in the relations between the former Soviet
republics, and even within the Russian Federation. There are two thousand cracks of this
kind, and letting them out of sight for even a second can have grave consequences. This is
the first point I wanted to make.
"By the way, Stalin was against such organisation. He even wrote an article on autonomy,
but, eventually, adopted Lenin's formula. The upshot? Just now, our colleague from Ukraine
and I spoke about our relations. Back when the Soviet Union was created, original Russian
territories that never had anything to do with Ukraine (the entire Black Sea region and
Russia's western lands) were transferred to Ukraine under a strange pretext of "increasing
the percentage of the proletariat in Ukraine," because Ukraine was a rural territory
populated by petty-bourgeois-minded peasants, who were subjected to dispossession across the
country. This was a somewhat odd decision. Nevertheless, it took place. We are now dealing
with Vladimir Lenin's legacy of state building.
"What did they do? They tied the country's future to their own party, and this tenet went
from one Constitution to another. It was the main political force. As soon as the party
started to crumble, the country followed. That is what I meant. I stick to this point of view
to this day.
"As you are aware, I worked in intelligence for a long time. It was an integral part of a
much politicised organisation, the KGB, and I had my own ideas about our leaders and so on.
But I know better today, and I understand that there are geopolitical considerations in
addition to ideology. They were completely ignored during the creation of the Soviet Union.
All this was much politicised at the time. To reiterate, the party began to fall apart, and
that was the end of it – the country followed. This had to be prevented. This was a
mistake. An absolute, cardinal and fundamental mistake in state building.
"Now, with regard to the body. This is beside the point. I believe this subject should not
be touched at all, at least as long as there are people, lots of them, who associate their
lives and destinies, and certain achievements of the past, the Soviet years, with it. One way
or another, the Soviet Union is certainly connected with Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the
world proletariat. So, why delve deep into that? We just need to move forward and grow. That
is all."
Yes, you misrepresented what Putin answered, amongst other things. Perhaps I should add
what Putin had to say about the Kadyrovs which follows his answer about Lenin. But better
would be to include his answer to the following:
"Kira Latukhina: Kira Latukhina, Rossiyskaya Gazeta.
"I would like to return to the issue of our Victory in the Great Patriotic War. Next year
we will celebrate the anniversary – the 75th anniversary, the Year of Memory and Glory.
But at the same time, in September this year, the European Parliament adopted a resolution
stating that Nazism and fascism are equated with the Soviet regime, having timed it with the
anniversary of the outbreak of World War II. They are calling it totalitarianism and
suggesting introducing a new international holiday to celebrate the day of heroes of the
fight against totalitarianism on May 25. What do you think about it? What is your
opinion?"
Putin's answer:
"Vladimir Putin: There is nothing good about totalitarianism, it is worthy of
condemnation, without any doubt.
"I know about the European Parliament's decision. I consider it absolutely unacceptable
and wrong, because you can condemn Stalinism and totalitarianism as a whole, and in some ways
these will be well-deserved reproaches. Our people were the biggest victims of
totalitarianism. We condemned it and the personality cult and so on.
"But to equate the Soviet Union or to put the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany on one level
is incredible cynicism. This means that people do not know history; they cannot read or
write. Let them read the documents of that time, let them see how the so-called Munich
Agreement was signed in 1938, when the heads of the leading countries – France, Great
Britain – signed an agreement with Hitler on the partition of Czechoslovakia.
"How did Poland behave in this situation, which, as one diplomat wrote at the time, 'did
everything possible to participate in the partition of Czechoslovakia?' How did the Soviet
Union behave then, proposing to all participants in international life to create a united
anti-Nazi front?
"And how, by not creating it, they were really trying to push Hitler to aggression to the
East, not realising then that Nazi Germany was interested not in Polish-German relations, but
in expanding their living space to the East, that is, war against the Soviet Union.
"You see, I mean to write an article about this event. I will definitely have it published
because I asked my colleagues to select archive materials for me. When I read some of them,
everything becomes clear: everything in the process of appeasing Hitler is sorted out by
year, month, and almost by day.
"Stalin did not stain himself with direct contact with Hitler whereas the French and
British leaders met with him and signed some documents. Yes the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact
and the secret protocols to it were signed.
"Is it good or bad? I draw your attention to this – it is crucial – that the
Soviet Union was the last country in Europe to sign a non-aggression pact with Germany. All
the others had signed it earlier. And what was the Soviet Union supposed to do? Face it
alone?
"Yes, they say there were secret protocols, the division of Poland. Poland itself joined
in dividing Czechoslovakia. It entered two regions – Tesin and another one. And that's
it. Poland took them over. They in fact gave an ultimatum and set up an entire group for the
aggression. But it was not needed because Czechoslovakia surrendered under pressure and gave
those territories away. But the Poles did the same.
"By the way, yes, Soviet troops entered Poland under the protocols. I draw your attention
to the following circumstance: the troops did enter but only after the Polish government lost
control over their armed forces and over the developments in Poland while the government
itself was somewhere near the Polish-Romanian border. There was no one to talk to about it.
Do you see this?
"Moreover, we talk about the heroic defenders of the Brest Fortress. Nazi troops captured
Brest-Litovsk and then just abandoned it, and the Red Army moved in. Do you understand this
or not? This is what I want to ask all those who adopt such resolutions in the European
Parliament.
"That means the Red Army did not invade those territories in Poland. German troops entered
them and then left, and after that the Soviet troops entered. Does this mean anything? So I
will definitely let you know about that. By the way, we are holding a CIS format meeting
tomorrow, and I want to show my CIS colleagues some of our archival documents. Anyone
interested is welcome to come and listen."
Gee, I'd like to be there or at least read what gets said. I also await Putin's
essay.
Afghan war demonstrated that the USA got into the trap, the Catch 22 situation: it can't
stop following an expensive and self-destructive positive feedback loop of threat inflation
and larger and large expenditures on MIC, because there is no countervailing force for the
MIC since WWII ended. Financial oligarchy is aligned with MIC.
This is the same suicidal grip of MIC on the country that was one of the key factors
in the collapse of the USSR means that in this key area the USA does not have two party
system, It is a Uniparty: a singe War party with two superficially different factions.
Feeding and care MIC is No.1 task for both. Ordinary Americans wellbeing does matter much
for either party. New generation of Americans is punished with crushing debt and low paying
jobs. They do not care that people over 50 who lost their jobs are essentially thrown out
like a garbage.
"41 Million people in the US suffer from hunger and lack of food security"–US Dept.
of Agriculture. FDR addressed the needs of this faction of the population when he delivered
his One-Third of a Nation speech for his 2nd Inaugural. About four years later, FDR expanded
on that issue in his Four Freedoms speech: 1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship;
3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear.
Items 3 and 4 are probably unachievable under neoliberalism. And fear is artificially
instilled to unite the nation against the external scapegoat much like in Orwell 1984.
Currently this is Russia, later probably will be China. With regular minutes of hate replaced
by Rachel Maddow show ;-)
Derailing Tulsi had shown that in the USA any politician, who try to challenge MIC, will
be instantly attacked by MIC lapdogs in MSM and neutered in no time.
One interesting tidbit from Fiona Hill testimony is that neocons who dominate the USA
foreign policy establishment make their living off threat inflation. They literally are
bought by MIC, which indirectly finance Brookings institution, Atlantic Council and similar
think tanks. And this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact. Rephrasing Samuel Johnson's
famous quote, we can say, "MIC lobbyism (which often is presented as patriotism) is the last
refuge of scoundrels."
The Washington Post, through documents released through the Freedom of Information Act, has
published a long investigation into Afghanistan. Journalists have collected over 400
testimonies from American diplomats, NATO generals and other NATO personnel, that show that
reports about Afghanistan were falsified to deceive the public about the real situation on the
ground.
After the tampering with and falsification of the report of the Organization for the
Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), we are witnessing another event that will certainly
discomfit those who have hitherto relied on the official reports of the Pentagon, the US State
Department and international organizations like the OPCW for the last word.
There are very deliberate reasons for such disinformation campaigns. In the case of the
OPCW, as I wrote some time back, the aim was to paint the Syrian government as the fiend and
the al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked "moderate rebels" as the innocent souls, thereby likely
justifying a responsibility-to-protect armed intervention by the likes of the US, the UK and
France. In such circumstances, the standing and status of the reporting organization (like the
OPCW) is commandeered to validate Western propaganda that is duly disseminated through the
corporate-controlled mainstream media.
In this particular case, various Western capitals colluded with the OPCW to lay the
groundwork for the removal of Assad and his replacement with the al-Nusra Front as well as the
very same al-Qaeda- and Daesh-linked armed opposition officially responsible for the 9/11
attacks.
As if the massaging of the OPCW reports were not enough in themselves to provoke
international outrage, this dossier serves to give aid and comfort to jihadi groups supported
by the Pentagon who are known to be responsible for the worst human-rights abuses, as seen in
Syria and Iraq in the last 6 years.
False or carefully manipulated reports paint a picture vastly different from the reality on
the ground. The United States has never really declared war on Islamic terrorism, its
proclamations of a "War on Terror" notwithstanding. In reality, it has simply used this
justification to occupy or destabilize strategically important areas of the world in the
interests of maintaining US hegemony, intending in so doing to hobble the energy policies and
national security of rival countries like China, Iran and the Russian Federation.
The Post investigation lays bare how the US strategy had failed since its inception, the
data doctored to represent a reality very different from that on the ground. The inability of
the United States to clean up Afghanistan is blamed by the Post on incorrect military planning
and incorrect political choices. While this could certainly be the case, the Post's real
purpose in its investigation is to harm Trump, even as it reveals the Pentagon's efforts to
continue its regional presence for grand geopolitical goals by hiding inconvenient truths.
The real issue lies in the built-in mendacity of the bureaucratic and military apparatus of
the United States. No general has ever gone on TV to say that the US presence in Iraq is needed
to support any war against Iran; or that Afghanistan is a great point of entry for the
destabilization of Eurasia, because this very heart of the Heartland is crucial to the
Sino-Russian transcontinental integration projects like the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) and
the Belt and Road Initiative. In the same vein, the overthrow of the Syrian government would
have ensured Israel a greater capacity to expand its interests in the Middle East, as well as
to weaken Iran's main regional ally.
The Post investigation lays bare the hypocrisy of the military-industrial complex as well as
the prevailing political establishments of Europe and the United States. These parties are not
interested in human rights, the wellbeing of civilians or justice in general. Their only goal
is to try and maintain their global hegemony indefinitely by preventing any other powers from
being able to realize their potential and thereby pose a threat to Atlanticist preeminence.
The war in Iraq was launched to destabilize the Middle East, China's energy-supply basin
crucial to fueling her future growth. The war in Syria served the purpose of further
dismantling the Middle East to favor Saudi Arabia and Israel, the West's main strategic allies
in the Persian Gulf. The war in Afghanistan was to slow down the Eurasian integration of China
and Russia. And the war in Ukraine was for the purposes of generating chaos and destruction on
Russia's border, with the initial hope of wresting the very strategically area of Crimea from
Russia.
The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, and this has been on full display in
recent times. Almost all of Washington's recent strategic objectives have ended up producing
results worse than the status quo ante. In Iraq there is the type of strong cooperation between
Baghdad and Tehran reminiscent of the time prior to 1979. Through Hezbollah, Iran has
strengthened its position in Syria in defense of Damascus. Moscow has found itself playing the
role of crucial decider in the Middle East (and soon in North Africa), until only a few years
ago the sole prerogative of Washington. Turkey's problems with NATO, coupled with Tel Aviv's
open relation with Moscow are both a prime example of Washington's diminishing influence in the
region and Moscow's corresponding increase in influence.
The situation in Afghanistan is not very different, with a general recognition that peace is
the only option for the region being reflected in the talks between the Afghans, the Taliban,
the Russians, Chinese, Indians and Pakistanis. Beijing and Moscow have well known for over a
decade the real intent behind Washington's presence in the country, endeavoring to blunt its
impact.
The Post investigation only further increases the public's war weariness, the war in
Afghanistan now having lasted 18 years, the longest war in US history. Jeff Bezos, the owner of
the Post, is a bitter opponent of Trump and wants the president to come clean on the
Afghanistan debacle by admitting that the troops cannot be withdrawn. Needless to say,
admitting such would not help Trump's strategy for the 2020 election. Trump cannot afford to
humiliate the US military, given that it, along with the US dollar, is his main weapon of
"diplomacy". Were it to be revealed that some illiterate peasants holed up in caves and armed
with AK-47s some 40 years ago are responsible for successfully keeping the most powerful army
in history at bay, all of Washington's propaganda, disseminated by a compliant media, will
cease to be of any effect. Such a revelation would also humiliate military personnel, an
otherwise dependable demographic Trump cannot afford to alienate.
The Washington Post performed a service to the country by shedding light on the
disinformation used to sustain endless war. But the Post's intentions are also political,
seeking to undermine Trump's electoral chances by damaging Trump's military credentials as well
as his standing amongst military personnel. What Washington's elite and the Post do not know,
or perhaps prefer to ignore, is that such media investigations directed against political
opponents actually end up doing irreparable damage to the political and military prestige of
the United States.
In other words, when journalist do their job, the military industrial complex finds it
difficult to lie its way through wars and failures, but when a country relies on Hollywood to
sustain its make-believe world, as well as on journalists on the CIA payroll, on compliant
publishers and on censored news, then any such revelations of forbidden truths threaten to
bring the whole facade crashing down.
Philip Giraldi Ph.D., Executive Director of the
Council for the National Interest
Alan Dershowitz, the acclaimed US legal academic, is fond of noting the proverbial if the
shoe is on other foot test – to see who is and isn't sincere in their convictions. This
matter relates to the call to have Russia formally banned from the next Summer and Winter
Olympics. The same is even more applicable to those who don't favor any Russians competing
under the Olympic flag as authorized neutral athletes.
The British head of World Athletics, Sebastian Coe,
brazenly supports a ban on all Russian track and field athletes, until it can be firmly
established (in his view) that they're clean. Coe's take has been widely reported in Western
mass media, with little, if any second guessing of the hypocrisy he exhibits.
Despite
missing three consecutive drug tests , American sprinter Christian Coleman, was allowed to
compete at this past World Athletics Championships . It's quite doubtful that any Russian would
be allowed the benefit given to Coleman. As is true with a number of other sports, there're
credible reports indicating that World Athletics has an inconsistent worldwide drug testing
regimen.
A few years ago, an ESPN "Outside the Lines" segment (aired at an early Sunday morning low
ratings time slot), noted that some top Jamaican track and field athletes have regularly missed
drug tests, as a Jamaican whistleblower on this issue has been castigated in her country.
(Pardon me for not having a transcript of that show.)
Regarding non-Russian Olympians, Coleman's situation is by no means an isolated one.
The ban against Russia competing as a country at the 2018 Winter Olympics didn't see a
noticeable banning of top Russian Olympians for suspected drug use. (Under the Olympic flag and
anthem, these Russians competed as the "Olympic Athletes from Russia") Hence, that prohibition
was essentially a form of collective punishment against an entire nation and its people. At the
recommendation of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), Russia now faces a banning for the next
Summer and Winter Olympics.
On the reportedly altered Russian database of drug test results, how many other countries
have been asked to forward as complete an accounting of their respective athletes? As of now
and as reported, this particular pertaining to Russia looks shady. Verifiable specifics on the
database editing haven't been released. Regardless, when it comes to drug testing over the past
several years, Russia's top Olympic caliber athletes are probably the most carefully
scrutinized in the world. These individuals spend time outside Russia (training and/or
competing), where they can and have been suddenly tested. Unless my information is wrong (which
I doubt), they also get tested in Russia, with samples going to the WADA and/or a WADA
affiliated vender.
The
British WADA member Jonathan Taylor , said that a lengthy appeal process at the Court of
Arbitration for Sport (CAS), could allow for Russia to formally participate at the 2020 Summer
Olympics. Taylor is against this scenario – instead favoring for Russia to be excluded
from the next Summer and Winter Olympics. He emphasized that a CAS ruling against Russia after
the 2020 Summer Olympics, would result in that country getting banned from the 2024 Summer
Olympics.
I suspect that most Russians don't see Taylor as a fair reviewer, who is truly concerned
about Russia's best interests. If Russia can't achieve a relatively quick CAS appeal in its
favor, it's arguably in Russia's best interests to have a delayed decision, allowing for a
formal Russian 2020 Summer Olympics representation.
As time passes, there's a chance that a growing number will see how unfair Russia has been
treated, in conjunction with organizations like World Athletics and WADA possibly getting an
overhaul, to better prevent any unfair treatment against a given nation and its people.
The House impeachment is driven by several factors:
After Russiagate, when Trump began to investigate its fraudulent origins, the Dems feared the exposure of Obama-era
corruption if not high crimes. Hence Ukrainegate is preemptive political tactics.
The investigation into Russiagate led right to Ukraine, and thus to Biden. In the context of Sanders' campaign,
Ukrainegate became an imperative for the factions of the capitalist class that dominates the DNC. If Biden falls on Ukraine
issues, then Sanders is inevitable; an anathema to Wall Street and Big Tech DNC donors.
3. While 1 and 2 dominate DNC machinations, foreign policy is also a factor. The foreign policy establishment is absolutely
against any hesitation with respect to confronting Russia as part of a regional and global strategy for primacy. Trump's limited
prevarications on Russia might threaten the long established strategy to expand Nato to Ukraine and thereby to encircle Russia
and maintain US dominance over Europe. So, even though Trump names great power rivalry as the name of the game today, his inclination
for making nice with Putin threatens to weaken the US hold over Europe, which Trump wants to label as an economic competitor.
It is with these points that the strategic differences become apparent: Trump is raising a realist, neo-mercantalist strategy
against ALL potential competitors; the DNC and the deep state hold a strategy of liberal hegemony: globalization and US primacy
through dominating regional alliances, and impregnating US hegemony INSIDE the vassal States of the empire.
All of this, however, is bound to fail for the DNC, and down the road for Trump himself.
The contradictions of US empire and global capitalism cannot be mitigated by either more liberal strategies or realist ones.
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Forgive me for the somewhat redundant post, and again I hope this is not a waste of anyone's
time, but this is the source of the Interfax report I posted just above currently at #56. It
is relevant to the Ukrainegate impeachment fiasco.
The U.S. and lapdog EU/UK media will not touch this with a 10 foot pole.
KYIV. Dec 17 (Interfax-Ukraine) – Ukraine and the United States should investigate
the transfer of $29 million by businessman Victor Pinchuk from Ukraine to the Clinton
Foundation, Ukrainian Member of Parliament (independent) Andriy Derkach has said. According
to him, the investigation should check and establish how the Pinchuk Foundation's
activities were funded; it, among other projects, made a contribution of $29 million to the
Clinton Foundation. "Yesterday, Ukrainian law enforcement agencies registered criminal
proceeding number 12019000000001138. As part of this proceeding, I provided facts that
should be verified and established by the investigation. Establishing these facts will also
help the American side to conduct its own investigation and establish the origin of the
money received by [Hillary] Clinton," Derkach said at a press conferences at
Interfax-Ukraine in Kyiv on Tuesday, December 17.
According to him, it was the independent French online publication Mediapart that first
drew attention to the money withdrawal scheme from Ukraine and Pinchuk's financing of the
Clinton Foundation.
"The general scheme is as follows. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) lent money to
Ukraine in 2015. The same year, Victor Pinchuk's Credit Dnepr [Bank] received UAH 357
million in a National Bank stabilization loan from the IMF's disbursement. Delta Bank was
given a total of UAH 5.110 billion in loans. The banks siphoned the money through Austria's
Meinl Bank into offshore accounts, and further into [the accounts of] the Pinchuk
Foundation. The money siphoning scam was confirmed by a May 2016 ruling by [Kyiv's]
Pechersky court. The total damage from this scam involving other banks is estimated at $800
million. The Pinchuk Foundation transferred $29 million to the Foundation of Clinton, a
future U.S. presidential candidate from the Democratic Party," Derkach said.
The anti-Russian insanity that dominates the politics of America is dangerous, stupid and
detached from facts. Two news items from Wednesday (December 18th) should scare the hell out of
you.
The first concerns Russia's Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline, which is nearing completion
and will deliver gas to Europe.
According to Reuters :
The U.S. Senate on Tuesday passed legislation to slap sanctions on companies building a
massive underwater pipeline to bring Russian natural gas to Germany, but it was uncertain
whether the measures would slow completion of the project.
Senator Jim Risch, a Republican and the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
said the sanctions will prevent the project's completion and are an "important tool to counter
Russia's malign influence and to protect the integrity of Europe's energy sector."
Nord Stream 2, led by state-owned Gazprom, would allow Russia to bypass Poland and Ukraine
to deliver gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany. U.S. lawmakers say Ukraine could lose billions
of dollars in transit fees if it is built.
This is not the fault of the Democrats. This is being driven by Republicans, with Senator
Ted Cruz
leading the charge .
The Trump administration should use sanctions to halt the construction of a pipeline that
would allow Russia to transport natural gas directly to Europe, potentially generating cash to
fuel President Vladimir Putin's military aggression, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas.
The Nord Stream 2 pipeline "would make Europe even more dependent on Russian energy," Cruz
told FOX Business' Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday. "And that makes Europe susceptible to economic
blackmail, because Putin has already demonstrated he's perfectly willing to cut off the gas in
the dead of winter to try to force people to do what he wants."
Russia's "military aggression?" Did Russia invade Iraq twice in the last 29 years? Did
Russia launch a war in Libya? Did Russia arm and train insurgents in Syria? I think Ted Cruz
has not been paying attention to world events over the last thirty years. The number one
country engaged in foreign military aggression is the United States. Hands down.
Here are the actual military facts about Russia:
Russia's 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion, which is just 8% of America's total GDP of $21.5
trillion.
Russia's annual manufacturing value added is currently about $200 billion compared
to $2.2 trillion for the US economy.
Russia's working age population of about 85 million is already just a fraction of the US
working age population of 255 million.
Russia's $61 billion of military outlays in 2018 amounted to less than 32
days of Washington's current $750 billion of expenditures for defense.
During the Cold War Russia armed itself to the teeth via a forced-draft and allocated
upwards of 40% of the GDP of the Soviet empire to the military. Today the Russian defense
budget amounts to less than 4% of the country's anemic economy.
The US has eleven such carrier strike groups. Russia has zero modern
carrier strike groups and one beat-up, smoky old (diesel) aircraft carrier. A carrier based
strike group is composed of roughly 7,500 personnel, at least one cruiser, a squadron of
destroyers and/or frigates, and a carrier air wing of 65 to 70 aircraft.
The United States dwarfs Russia's ability to project force via air power-- the US has
6,100 helicopters to Russia's 1,200 and 6,000 fixed wing fighter and attack aircraft versus
Russia's 2,100. More importantly, the US has 5,700 transport and airlift aircraft compared to
just 1,100 for Russia.
The only military category where Russia enjoys a decisive edge is tanks -- 22,710 versus
8750 for the United States. This is a legacy of WW II, where Russian tanks played the
critical role in pushing the Nazis back to Germany.
As recently as 2017, the Russian fleet operated 61 submarines. "Historically the backbone
of the Russian navy, 75 percent of the 61 operational submarines are over 20 years old and
are slowly being replaced." The United States has 75 and is building two new ones each year
at a cost of $5 billion.
So why is this pipeline now a redline in the sand that Russia dare not cross? Apparently
because it will give Russia a way to make more money to finance its massive military buildup
(hopefully you understand sarcasm) and, more importantly, will cost Ukraine lost income. Can't
afford to have Ukrainian oligarchs running out of money that they are sending to Democrat and
Republican consulting firms and candidates.
While it is unlikely that the sanctions will prevent the pipeline from being completed,
largely because they come too little, too late, this is not going to
hinder efforts to punish Russia :
A new Bloomberg headline reads "U.S. Concedes Defeat on Gas Pipeline It Sees as Russian
Threat" just following new sanctions included in the House and Senate passed 2020 National
Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) this week.
But two administration officials tell Bloomberg it's too little too late, despite Trump's
heightened rhetoric of calling Germany "a captive to Russia" and charging Berlin with
essentially giving "billions" of dollars to Russia:
Senior U.S. administration officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the
administration's take on the project, said sanctions that passed Congress on Tuesday as part of
a defense bill are too late to have any effect. The U.S. instead will try to impose costs on
other Russian energy projects, one of the officials added.
Seriously, that United States has no right to threaten Russia in this way. It is reminiscent
of the sanctions that the United States imposed on Japan prior to World War II that blocked
Japan's access to critical oil and rubber supplies. That was a precipitating factor in Japan's
decision to attack us on December 7, 1941.
NATO exercises near the border with Russia reflect the alliance's preparations for a
large-scale military conflict, Russia's chief military officer said in remarks published
Wednesday.
The chief of the General Staff of the Russian armed forces, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, said at
Tuesday's meeting with foreign military attaches that NATO's activities have heightened
tensions and reduced security along the Russian border.
Asked if the Russian military sees a potential threat of war, Gerasimov said that Moscow
doesn't see "any preconditions for a large-scale war."
He added, however, that Western pressure on Russia could trigger "crisis situations" that
may spin out of control and provoke a military conflict.
The anti-Russia hysteria in the United States is tying the hands of Donald Trump to act
responsibly to protect America. If he vetoes the bill put forward by the Congress he will be
accused, as he has been for more than two years, of catering to Putin.
The fanatics and frauds waving the Russian threat ignore the fact that the United States and
Russia work closely and productively on the Space Station. Our astronauts and their cosmonauts
co-exist peacefully in space and we rely on the Russians to haul our folks to and from the
Space Station. In Syria, the Combined Air Operations Center (i.e., CAOC) communicates daily
with Russian counterparts to ensure that their respective air assets do not fire on each other
or inadvertently wander into a combat space. This has been going on for more than three
years.
Russia still has nuclear weapons. It is their ultimate deterrent against another invasion.
The memory of losing more than 12 million soldiers in World War II remains vivid and painful.
The U.S. public can barely remember that we lost less than 500,000 soldiers, marines and
sailors in World War II. Our inability to remember coupled with unjustified belligerence is
pushing us towards a war with Russia that would be beyond catastrophic.
''The Trump administration should use sanctions to halt the construction of a pipeline that
would allow Russia to transport natural gas directly to Europe, potentially generating cash
to fuel President Vladimir Putin's military aggression, says Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas''
I don't know how many times I have ..Who do these politicians think they are !!??
They were not elected to 'run the world'. WE must get rid of them.
The Col told me awhile ago that the CIA doesn't do 'accidental deaths' ....too bad.
At least, these sanctions are not only directed against Russia, but also against Western
Europe.
First,the sanctions directly affect not only Gasprom, but also Western European companies
that are involved in building the pipelines (since only a small part of the work remains to
be done, Nordstream 2 can probably be finished without some of them, but if everything
continues as before, some Western European companies involved in building the pipelines would
clearly be affected by US sanctions, among them a specialized Swiss company).
Second, the purpose of the pipelines clearly is not only to help Russia selling gas, but also
to help Germany buying Russian gas.
The sanctions are not anti-Russian sanctions, but sanctions against Europe, including Russia,
Germany, and other European countries.
Especially in Germany, there is absolutely no tolerance for such sanctions with which the US
wants to force Europeans to buy uncompetitive expensive US fracking gas. There are talks
about European countersanctions against the US. The US may hope to exploit disagreements
among EU countries. After all some EU countries like Poland are against Nordstream. But the
US should not rely on this - such blatant interference in European matters is clearly not
tolerated by the EU. An appropriate countermeasure might be punitive Tarifs on US fracking
gas exports - there is not much demand for it, anyway, but it would make sense to prevent any
significant amounts of US fracking gas from being bought in Europe as long as the US wants to
force Europeans to buy it.
In any case, these anti-European sanctions show once more that the US has become a pariah
nation that has isolated itself and has no real allies any more (except perhaps Saudi Arabia
and Israel).
I would not call these sanctions only anti-Russian sanctions. They are just as well directed
against Western Europe.
First, it is not only Gasprom which is involved in building the pipeline (although it is
the owner), but also European companies (among them a Swiss one). Since Nordstream II is
almost finished, the services of some of these companies may not be necessary any more, but
if they continued normally, also some Western European companies would be sanctioned.
Second, obviously, the purpose of the pipelines is not only to help Russia selling gas,
but also to help Germany (and other Western European countries that will receive it via
Germany) buying Russian gas.
In Germany, there is very little tolerance for such sanctions, and people talk about
counter-sanctions against the US. An appropriate measure could be punitive tariffs on US
fracking gas. There is little demand for US fracking gas in Europe, anyway, since it is more
expensive, but it may make sense to make sure than no significant amounts of US gas are sold
in Europe as long as the US wants to force Europeans to buy it.
The US may hope to exploit disagreements about Nordstream within the EU. After all, some
countries like Poland are against it. But the US should not rely on this tactic working. Such
blatant interference in European energy supplies with sanction will hardly be tolerated by
the EU.
In any case, these anti-European sanctions show one more how much the US has become a
pariah country that has isolated itself and hardly has allies any more (except perhaps Saudi
Arabia and Israel).
I agree that one of the motives for these anti-European sanctions is anti-Russian insanity
in the US. But another important motive is disrespect of the US for Western Europe, which it
seems to regard as a kind of colonies or vassal states it can tell what to do.
In Europe, there is still a certain gap - while polls show that the US is very unpopular,
among European elites, pro-US forces still have a certain influence. But probably, it won't
take very long until European countries will adapt their policies towards the US in the
direction a majority of their citizens wants. Another such example of US folly is the idea
that Germany should pay more for the presence of US troops. According to polls, about half of
the German population wanted US troops to leave, anyway, even before the question of
increased payments was raised, and if the US is serious about this demand, the consequence
that it will lose its military bases is obvious.
I credit you with possessing the good sense, seemingly rare, to not wish to enter into a
direct military conflict with Russia, particularly out of some hyper inflated sense of
threat, owing (no less) to their aggression. Kudos to you for acknowledging which country is
the number one threat of military aggression in the world.
The sarcasm of referring to a mounting Russian threat is merited insofar as their military
budget is actually falling as a proportion of output.
I would suggest, however, when assessing the strength of the enemy you rightly argue that
it is stupid to provoke, that you do not limit yourself to the prevailing think-tank
approaches to assessing that threat. It's pretty obvious to most people that comparing an
Su-35 to an F-35 in dollar terms makes the F-35 3 or 4 times the military threat of the
Sukhoi. Ditto with an Su-57 to F-22 comparison.
But it would be better to listen to actual military experts with technical training in the
STEM disciplines needed to provide the analysis. I would suggest you look at the work of A.
Martyanov's work, a retired Russian naval officer writing occasionally US Naval institute
Blog. Or visit his blog, Reminiscence of the Future, through which you could get more
background on his books, including the latest, The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs.
His concern is that (while some of us use these CIA factbook-type analysis to cool off the
hysterical claims of threat) Russia hawk politicians and think-tank military pseudo-experts
are using these to seriously downplay Russia's capacity to counter American aggression. Would
welcome your thoughts on his work.
Russia's 2018 GDP of $1.66 trillion, which is just 8% of America's total GDP of $21.5
trillion.
Larry, it is patently and, actually, grossly untrue on both counts. Nor comparison of
military budgets is legitimate tool. In fact, all this is in the foundation of the United
States failing, time after time, having a good grasp of the military balance.
Last winter LNG from the Russian Yamal gas field was delivered to the United States. Perhaps
Washington should deal with its own dependence on Russian energy before it starts pressuring
Europe.
The goal is to overturn the government of Russia, just like the goal has been to overturn the
government of Bolivia (Mission Accomplished), Venezuela, Cuba, China, Russia, North Korea,
Libya, Lebanon, Iran, Syria... This is imperialism. It's history is long and has been
successfully practiced by far by the British and Americans. And it's goal is the theft of the
resources, human and natural, of the countries targeted. It is old news. Nothing has changed
for two hundred years. My God, the original Crimean War was fought for exactly the same
reasons as the current Crimean War although the actual fighting is of a different scale and
different style. Permit me to include in the litany above Native Americans who were
slaughtered for their territory. It is astonishing that President Trump seems to be less than
enthusiastic about this program, but it certainly recommends him highly if he is. And today,
we may ask who is behind this program. It is certainly not the American people.
A new Bloomberg headline
reads "U.S. Concedes Defeat on Gas Pipeline It Sees as Russian Threat" just following new
sanctions included in the House and Senate passed 2020 National Defense Authorization Act
(NDAA) this week.
But two administration officials tell Bloomberg it's too little too late , despite Trump's
heightened rhetoric of calling Germany "a captive to Russia" and charging Berlin with
essentially giving "billions" of
dollars to Russia :
Senior U.S. administration officials, who asked not to be identified discussing the
administration's take on the project, said sanctions that passed Congress on Tuesday as part
of a defense bill are too late to have any effect . The U.S. instead will try to impose costs
on other Russian energy projects, one of the officials added.
The admission is a rare concession on what had been a top foreign-policy priority for the
Trump administration and highlights how European allies such as Germany have been impervious
to American pressure to abandon the pipeline. It also shows how the U.S. has struggled to
deter Russia from flexing its muscles on issues ranging from energy to Ukraine to election
interference.
The resolution contained in the defense spending bill, expected to be immediately signed
into law by Trump, are measures which specifically target companies assembling the pipeline --
a last ditch US effort to block the controversial 760-mile, $10.2BN project that would allow
Russia to export natural gas directly to Germany, depriving Ukraine of badly needed gas transit
fees along the current route for Russian supplies.
Washington's position has long been that it weakens European energy security, while Merkel's
Germany has rejected Trump's
"meddling" in European energy affairs, which the Europeans have lately sought to
diversify.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo during a February visit to Poland said Nord Stream 2
ultimately "funnels money to Russians in ways that undermine European national
security."
It's expected to double Russian gas shipments to the EU's biggest economy Germany, while
others fear --
including dissenters within Merkel's own ruling coalition -- it will give Moscow
significant geopolitical leverage over Europe while also punishing Ukraine.
The new US sanctions measures will target executives of companies operating vessels laying
the pipeline , and will further seek to hinder those companies' ability to operate on the
project. It's been spearheaded by Russian giant Gazprom and five European energy companies,
including French electricity and gas firm Engie SA and Royal Dutch, and the Swiss company
Allseas Group SA, among others, and is nearing completion, expected soon this coming year.
Bloomberg
reports further, "Trump has indicated that he'll sign the legislation passed Tuesday. The
penalties on companies building the project, led by Russian energy company Gazprom PJSC, would
be effective immediately, according to a Senate Republican aide."
In total, continues Bloomberg, "Some 350 companies are involved in building the undersea
link, most notably the Swiss company Allseas Group SA, whose ships are laying the last section
of pipe in Danish waters."
Regardless, Gazprom head Alexei Miller has for months said it's "past the point of no
return" and that nothing would derail it. "We are working from the idea that Nord Stream 2 will
be realized strictly in accordance with the planned timetable," he
previously told shareholders.
THE UNITED STATES CORPORATION needs to keep its nose out of European energy policy! In
fact, it needs to keep its nose out of everybody else's business.
My apologies if this has been posted before, but here is a news conference broadcast by
Interfax a few days ago detailing a joint French-Ukrainian journalistic investigation into a
huge money laundering scheme using various shadow banking organizations in Austria and
Switzerland, benefiting Clinton friendly Ukrainian oligarchs and of course the Clinton
Foundation.
The link is short enough to not require re-formatting:
Of course. I have said this repeatedly. I say this with confidence because I have read a
book that is solely about Gazprom and all aspects of gas production, distribution, payment
etc. etc. within and outside Russia. Which of course includes the major special problem of
Ukraine. You cannot understand any Ukraine politics and scams (and Uk-RF politics and
conflicts) without understanding the role of gas, and of Ukraine as a bottleneck for a LOT of
the gas flowing between Russia and the EU. The Ukrainians have always been fiddling the
Russians and their gas. And then the EU got into the picture and caused more trouble for
Russia. Anyhow, it is fitting that the scam described in the video runs on GAS.
"Trump was simply asking new Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky -- in a July phone
call -- to investigate crimes at the "highest levels" of both Kiev and Washington," Rudy
Giuliani, a personal attorney for President Trump, told Laura Ingraham on "The Ingraham
Angle."
"So, he is being impeached for doing the right thing as president of the United States,"
he said.
Giuliani told Laura Ingraham on "The Ingraham Angle" that he helped forced out Yovanovitch
because she was corrupt and obstructing the investigation into Ukraine and the Bidens.
Dem's impeachment for innocent conduct is intended to obstruct the below investigations of
Obama-era corruption:
- Billions of laundered $
- Billions, mostly US $, widely misused
- Extortion
- Bribery
- DNC collusion w/ Ukraine to destroy candidate Trump
He told Ingraham that he needed her out of the way because she was corrupt. Giuliani said he
was not the first person to go to the president with concerns about the diplomat.
In more tweets Tuesday, Giuliani elaborated:
Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to
Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine. She was
OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that's not the only thing she was doing. She at minimum enabled
Ukrainian collusion.
" Yovanovitch needed to be removed for many reasons most critical she was denying visas to
Ukrainians who wanted to come to US and explain Dem corruption in Ukraine.
She was OBSTRUCTING JUSTICE and that's not the only thing she was doing. She at
minimum enabled Ukrainian collusion."
Marie Yovanovitch was dismissed in March after Trump's allies said she was blocking the
probe of Joe Biden and bad-mouthing the Ukrainian Prosecutor General Lutsenko said that she
gave him a "do not prosecute list", that included Ukraine MPs and the exact same Sorosfunded
NGO president.
Nov 19, 2019Several sources claim former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch,
instructed Ukraine officials to keep their hands off investigating the NGO in Ukraine founded
by George Soros. Why?"
Any questions? As Putin warned the US: "ask about the 5th floor of the State Department."
(where Soros held court!). No wonder the US Commies hate Putin.
What the Shiffhead Impeachment hearings demonstrated with the appearances of Ms.
Yankonitbitch, Bowtie George, and the other "Dindunuffin/Donnonuffin Clowns" is just how much
American Taxpayers' money is being wasted employing a bunch of sanctimonious drones who do
nothing but get in the way of progress. Successful Corporations remove dead wood like that
with downsizing and shakeups. But the Federal Government seems immune to efficiency because
our elected officials NEVER DO THEIR JOBS BY USING ZERO BASE BUDGETING TO JUSTIFY EVERY
******* DOLLAR. And so, we now hear of yet another Omnibus Budget being foisted onto American
Taxpayers and more wasteful spending that never, never, never, gets reduced. We need a
Taxpayer's Revolution in this Country to stop the corrupt theft.
And one more thing: What the Ukrainian Matter reveals is how Foreign Aid is dispensed,
handed out by the foreign recipient, and the funds are laundered and kicked back to the
corrupt politicians and Deep State Operatives like the Bidens. If $400 Million in palletized
untraceable cash can be delivered via a clandestine unmarked airplane at night to Iran
supposedly for ransom as the Socialist Media Complex would have us believe in a way that is
not consistent with long practiced methods for funds transfer, can we imagine all the
billions that have quietly been stolen from us to enrich scum like Barack Obola, Quid Pro
Joe, The Clintons, and so many others? IN THE MEANTIME, PRESIDENT TRUMP CAN'T GET A DIME TO
SPEND ON BUILDING A WALL TO STOP THE ILLEGAL ALIEN COCKROACH INVASION.
Yovanovitch pulled the "poor me federal" employee act. I worked for the Feds for 31 years
most as a manger and Yovanovitch victim act is what all federal employees pull when they get
in trouble. Blah Blah my 30 years of service, my awards, my appraisals blah blah. She said
that she had no concern about Hunter Biden while being hailed as a corruption fighter. Blah
blah.
It's a crime that State Department people and ambassadors can have the same ethnic origin
as the countries they serve in. It's a recipe for personal/family agendas, corruption and not
representing the best interests of the United States. Of course if you're a DemoRat, you're
always corrupt, as they have proven it is a given.
Rudy Giuliani: Yovanovitch Was Part Of The Cover-Up, She Had To Be Ousted.
"Ousted"? I thought the penalty for high treason was hanging. What are they waiting for?
Hang the lot and in a public square near Congress so that all the traitors who reside in
Congress and the highest levels of government and banking get a sense of what awaits
them.
"At the end of the month, almost all criminals arrested for state crimes in New York,
including sex crimes , will be released without posting bail. It is a suicidal policy,
but it is nonetheless the state’s prerogative to engage in such suicide. What is
not its prerogative is the New York law that took effect this week granting
driver’s licenses to illegal aliens and blocking ICE access to criminal enforcement
information. We have a national union with a federal government controlling immigration for a
reason, and it’s time for the Trump administration to show state officials who has the
final say over this issue.
Beginning this week, the NY state government
is inviting any and all illegal aliens , with or without criminal records, to apply for
driver’s licenses. As documentation
, they can offer consular ID cards, which are fraught with fraud, expired work permits, or
foreign birth certificates. They can even offer Border Crossing Cards, which are only valid
for 72 hours and for a stay in the country near the border area! The state law further
prohibits state and county officials from disclosing any information to ICE and bars ICE and
Customs and Border Protection (CBP) from accessing N.Y. Department of Motor Vehicles (NYDMV)
records and information.
It’s truly hard to overstate the enormity of the public safety crisis this law,
dubbed “the green light law,” will spawn. There are
currently 3.3 million aliens in the ICE non-detained docket who remain at large in this
country. Just in one year, ICE put detainers on aliens criminally charged with 2,500
homicides. Given
that New York has the fourth largest illegal alien population in the country, it is
virtually certain that a large number of criminal aliens reside in the state and will now be
offered legal resident documents to shield them from removal.
Some might suggest that this is the problem of New York’s residents and that it is
their job and their responsibility alone to overturn these laws. But the difference between
this law and their general pro-criminal laws is that when it comes to immigration, they
simply lack the power to enact such a policy. Rather than the DHS and DOJ bemoaning these
laws, it’s time for the Trump administration to actually stop them in their tracks.
Otherwise the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution is nothing but ink on parchment.
A violation of federal law and the Constitution
8 U.S.C. § 1324 makes a felon of anyone who “knowing or in reckless disregard
of the fact that an alien has come to, entered, or remains in the United States in violation
of law, conceals, harbors, or shields from detection, or attempts to conceal, harbor, or
shield from detection, such alien in any place.” That statute also makes a criminal of
anyone who “encourages or induces an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United
States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such coming to, entry, or residence
is or will be in violation of law” or anyone who “engages in any conspiracy to
commit any of the preceding acts, or aids or abets the commission of any of the preceding
acts.” Some form of this law has been on the books since 1891.
NY’s new law not only harbors illegal aliens but actually calls on the DMV to notify
illegal aliens of any ICE interest in their files. There is only one purpose of this law: to
tip off criminal alien fugitives that ICE is looking for them, the most literal violation of
the law against shielding them from detection. Would we allow state officials to block
information to the FBI, ATF, or DEA?
Moreover, New York’s Green Light law violates the entire purpose of the infamous
1986 amnesty bill, the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which was “to combat
the employment of illegal aliens.” The law specifically makes it “illegal for
employers to knowingly hire, recruit, refer, or continue to employ unauthorized
workers.” Yet the rationale for the Green Light Law, according to supporters , was
“getting to work” and “ensure that our industries have the labor they need
to keep our economy moving.” That directly conflicts with federal law.
Finally, 8 U.S.C. 1373 prohibits state and local government from “in any way
restrict[ing]
, any government entity or official from sending to, or receiving from, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service information regarding the citizenship or immigration status,
lawful or unlawful, of any individual.” The entire purpose of this bill is to restrict
all New York government entities from sending information on citizenship status to ICE.
Whether one disagrees with immigration laws or not, nobody can argue that the federal
government lacks the power to enforce them. Immigration law is one of the core jobs of the
federal government. People are free to go to any state once they are in the country, which is
why the Founders transferred
immigration policy from the states under the Articles of Confederation to the federal
government under the Constitution.
This is why James Madison in Federalist #42 bemoaned that, under
the Articles of Confederation, there was a “very serious embarrassment” whereby
“an alien therefore legally incapacitated for certain rights in the [one state], may by
previous residence only in [another state], elude his incapacity; and thus the law of one
State, be preposterously rendered paramount to the law of another, within the jurisdiction of
the other.” He feared that without the Constitution’s new idea of giving the
federal Congress power “to establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization,”
“certain descriptions of aliens, who had rendered themselves obnoxious” would
choose states with weak immigration laws as entry points into the union and then move to any
other state as legal residents or citizens.
As for immigration without naturalization, because of the issue of the slave trade, the
first clause of Article I, Section 9 bars Congress from prohibiting “the Migration or
Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to
admit” until the year 1808. Well, Congress has long exercised that power to exclude
over the past 200 years. New York has lacked the ability to maintain its own separate
immigration scheme for quite some time.
When did the federal government become weak in the face of state rebellion?"
The diplomatic service made a big mistake when they abandoned the practice of preventing
people from serving in countries where they have an ethnic connection
jovanivic is part of a rabid Ukrainian diaspora, chased out of the country by the Red Army
for collaboration with the Nazis.
these people have a vicious, insatiable desire for revenge ...and the US does not need
these kind of biases mucking things up
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I
Understand
How can we explain Vladimir Putin's extraordinary levels of popularity in
Russia? Beyond accusations of poll manipulation and propaganda, Carine Clément traces the history and
characteristics of "Putinism", a system of ideas and practices feeding on patriotism and a general sense of
political apathy throughout Russia.
This essay is part of a virtual roundtable published in partnership with
Public Books
on
" Contemporary Russia "
Vladimir Putin's popularity ratings among his fellow Russians are
record-breaking, reaching 89% according to a poll conducted in June 2014 by the Levada Center. Some say
the poll was rigged and some call it manipulative propaganda, while others lament the Russian people's
incorrigible authoritarianism. Yet what if Putin quite simply enjoys the support of a large majority of
the Russian population? There are several reasons for believing this may be the case. First, there is the
revival of national pride following Russia's annexation of Crimea; the Kremlin's firm position in the
face of repeated rebukes on the part of the Western powers; the country's relative calm compared to
Ukraine's instability; and unrest in Armenia and elsewhere. Next, it is widely believed that there is no
real political alternative, an insight based on the reasoning that "Putin may not be ideal, but everyone
else is a lot worse."
These are the central components of what I call "Putinism," a political
system that is strongly centered and focused on the person of Vladimir Putin. This focus is not simply
the result of the carefully orchestrated propaganda that credits Putin with every political success,
while blaming failures on his undisciplined subordinates. It is also the consequence of
Russians' -- including the opposition's -- impression of the outsized role that Putin plays in the country's
affairs. "Putinism" refers, finally, to a system of ideas and practices associated with the current
government -- a blend of conservatism, traditionalism, patriotism, and populism.
Research that I undertook with colleagues in 2014 on the origins and
meaning of apoliticism in particular socio-professional categories
[
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sheds light on the logic of this political support, including that of the Russians who, in 2011-2012,
marched in the mass demonstrations under the slogan "for honest elections." Some of those who had
protested electoral fraud and even professed their personal "hatred" Putin declared in 2014 that they
approved his Crimean policy and recognized "the government's greater attention to the needs of ordinary
people." Other studies
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suggest that some of those who joined the protest wave of 2011-2012 are now tired and disillusioned. The
interviews abound with testimonials of the following kind: "I participated in most demonstrations, at
first, but nothing happened; there were no results"; "I'm fed up with abstract slogans, protest for
protest's sake, and wanted to do something concrete." Some of the erstwhile protestors have since come
out publicly in favor of Putin, who, they now think, "isn't so bad." An anarchist who is an experienced
and well paid programmer and system administrator -- the epitome of the anti-Putin demonstrator of
2011-2012 -- went so far as to declare in 2014: "In fact, if I were in power, if I were in Putin's shoes,
I'd do the same thing." Should we see this as a sign of resignation? Of fear?
Though repression has increased significantly, fear is rarely mentioned as
a reason for renouncing activism. Far more than political repression, the fear of jeopardizing one's job
or career is often a factor. But the crux of the problem lies in the sense of the protests' futility -- the
fact that they "accomplished nothing." Yet the so-called "Putin opposition" movement of 2011-2012 did in
fact achieve results: in particular, they led to an easing of the requirements needed to register
political parties seeking to participate in elections and a partial return to the election of regional
governors, which had been abolished in 2004. A number of local elections that were widely discussed in
the media also contributed to the impression that a liberalization of sorts was underway. This was
particularly true of the 2013 municipal elections.
At the same time, this partial liberalization was accompanied by measures
that tightened the state's grip on civil society: one law required NGOs receiving foreign funding and
engaging in "political activity" to register as "foreign agents"; another penalized "propaganda promoting
non-traditional sexual relations aimed at minors"; penal sanctions were introduced against public
activities deemed "offensive to religious sentiments"; the repression of public demonstrations increased,
legally and in practice; the definition of the crime of "state treason" was broadened; a law on
"undesirable" foreign and international NGOs was passed; and Russia retaliated against European sanctions
directed against its involvement in the eastern Ukrainian war with its own counter-sanctions. All these
measures arose from the same conservative and nationalist mindset: defending Russia's "traditional
values," thwarting the efforts of hostile foreign powers to destabilize the country, and proclaiming -- at
least at a symbolic level -- the sovereignty of the Russian state.
Vladimir Putin.
Arbitrary Repression
The Western media and international human rights organizations speak of
heightened repression in Russia. Many activists who are deemed "opponents" to Putin's regime or threats
to the "public order" have been, in practice, incarcerated. Among the most well-known scandals is the
Bolotnaya affair, named after the square in central Moscow where clashes between demonstrators and the
police occurred on May 6, 2012, following Putin's reelection to the presidency. A total of thirty people
were charged. More than a dozen remain imprisoned, including Sergei Udaltsov, the leader of the Left
Front, and Alexey Gaskarov, an anti-fascist activist who had already spent two and a half months in a
pretrial detention facility in 2010 after being arrested for his involvement in the campaign to save the
Khimki Forest (he was latter completely acquitted of those charges). Other leaders of the 2011-2012
movement who became known in the media are free but under surveillance, notably Alexey Navalny, who was
first placed under house arrest following his success in the elections for Moscow's town hall, before
receiving, in December 2014, a three and half year suspended sentence in an affair pitting him against
the French company Yves Rocher. The famous chess player Gary Kasparov and State Duma member Ilya
Ponomarev have sought refuge abroad. The fate of another renowned anti-Putin opposition figure, Boris
Nemtsov, who was assassinated near the Kremlin in February 2015, is, sadly, well known. Consequently,
there remain few media celebrities who are still active in Russia, even among those involved in public
opposition to Putin.
So does this all make the "Putin regime" a repressive system? Repression is
not occurring on a massive scale. Many independent initiatives that are critical of current authorities
still operate in broad daylight. One of the most troubling problems is that there are no clear criteria
for gauging the risks involved in opposing the regime: where does the boundary lie that must not be
crossed if one is to avoid persecution? This boundary, which, until recently, was perfectly clear to most
people, has since disappeared amidst the increasing chaos that seems to characterize the policies pursued
by Russia's political leaders.
We can distinguish between three types of repression. First is the
repression of the political opposition, which is mostly symbolic and media oriented. It is directed
against leaders and well-known establishment figures. Harsher repression, resulting in actual prison
sentences, is aimed at political newcomers. The goal, in this case, is most likely to discourage ordinary
people from getting mixed up in politics. A third form of repression targets activists for social causes
that are not directly political, but which interfere with specific financial and economic interests. The
repression targeting these organizations tries to prevent them from doing harm while denying them
publicity. This is true of the repression of labor activists and employees who are simply trying to
defend their rights. For instance, during the 2008-2009 economic crisis, potentially trouble-making union
leaders found themselves on the firing line. Thus in 2014, Leonid Tikhonov, the president of the
longshoremen's union for the Vostochny port at Nakoda (in Far Eastern Russia), was condemned to three and
a half years in prison for embezzlement, at a time when his union was involved in a serious dispute over
deteriorating labor conditions. On April 1, 2015, three leaders of the pilot's union of Aeroflot-Russian
Airlines were found guilty of mysterious illegal financial transactions and condemned to prison terms
ranging from five to six and a half years.
It is hard to measure the impact of such repression on public opinion.
Based on polls,
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repression is not something most Russians worry about (only 3% of those polled in February 2015
considered repression to be a "major threat"). Declining living standards, rising poverty, and the
economic crisis are seen as far more troubling. In a society that has abandoned the democratic illusions
and the rousing, abstract slogans about human rights that it embraced in the 1990s, these priorities are
not terribly surprising. This is particularly true given that the public is largely unaware of this
repression and that, in some instances, the latter is widely supported by public opinion, as seen with
the incarceration of the oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky (at least initially) and, to a lesser extent, the
singers of Pussy Riot, whose disrespectful behavior towards Orthodox beliefs and places of worship was
denounced by many. Finally, for many Russians, if repression means avoiding instability, civil war, and
blood baths, it can be tolerated.
The Roots of Putin's Support
The support that a majority of Russians offer Putin is primarily tied to
jittery fears of chaos and instability, which they associate with the 1990s and the rule of the first
post-Soviet president, Boris Yeltsin. Much of the population views these years as a dark period, when
they concentrated on survival as the country disintegrated, factories closed, salaries went unpaid, and
inflation was rampant. Yet it was precisely during these years that the media, politicians, and
intellectuals preached the triumph of democracy and human rights. It is hard not to conclude that this is
one of the main reasons these values have lost their legitimacy and one finds an eagerness to challenge
democracy as a system that is unjust and contemptuous of the "people."
In the 1990s, parents and grandparents skimped to feed their children, even
as, on television, they watched unscrupulous individuals make fortunes through small or big-time fraud.
And while most of the impoverished simply did their best to work and get by, they were often mocked by
the media as the "losers" of the reforms, as "maladjusted," and even as "nostalgic for bygone communism."
I personally experienced this contempt for the "masses," the "people," and the "ordinary folk" while
conducting my initial research in Russia between 1994 and 1999. The "ordinary folk" were hard-working and
conscientious, Soviet citizens who were neither over-critical nor overzealous who, in the flash of an
eye, had lost their nation, their ideological compass, and their values, income, and savings. Why
wouldn't these people identify with Putin's populist rhetoric, which recognizes their importance and
respects and acknowledges their demand for a socially progressive state, rather than scorning their
purported sense of entitlement and preference for paternalism? Why wouldn't they support patriotic
discourse that finally gives them a reason to be proud of their country, which their ancestors defended,
but which has since been allowed to decline?
Sufficient consideration is not always given to the traumatic character of
the Soviet Union's brutal dissolution, when families suddenly found themselves strewn across different
countries, despite the fact that one of the most popular themes promoted by official ideology was the
military, technological, spatial, cultural, and athletic power of the immense and imposing land of the
Soviets, which found itself humiliated by the "diktats" of international organizations and Western "aid."
Nor do we take full measure of what, for the ordinary Russian, the day-to-day experience of democracy
means when it is associated with poverty and oligarchy, or of human rights when they are paired with
unpaid salaries and pensions. And what is freedom of speech, which Russian intellectual and Western
circles see as having experienced its golden age in the 1990s, when the voices of workers and other
impoverished groups were almost never heard in public debates, other than to be belittled and scorned?
While I did not find these concerns articulated as such in my interviews
from the 2000s, they are nonetheless implicit in most of the studies of groups lying beyond the
political, economic, intellectual, and cultural elite. Consequently, mass support for Putin strikes me as
neither irrational, strange, nor symptomatic of a "Russian" affinity for authoritarianism. To the
contrary, it seems to me to result logically from the social disarray and the political ostracism that
afflicted most Russians in the 1990s. Whether or not this is tied to Putin himself seldom matters. He is
associated with a return to economic growth and paid salaries and pensions. Thanks to him, Crimea now
belongs to the Russian Federation and the wounded pride of several generations of Russians resulting from
the dissolution of the Soviet Union has been healed. Thanks to him, the "ordinary citizen" and the
"people who work" and "love Russia" (to quote Putin's speech at the rally held on February 23, 2012 at
Poklony Gory in Moscow against the "for honest elections" movement) once again have something resembling
a social and political status. Such discourse pulls the rug from under the nationalists' feet, making it
difficult for them to escalate. The left of the left (the Communist Party of the Russian Federation
having become communist in name only), which is already highly marginalized amidst the largely liberal
and anti-communist "opposition," is also challenged by the Kremlin on the terrain of egalitarian and
social values.
In these ways, Putin's popularity is rooted in the connection between
democratic disenchantment and profound social disarray. Such conditions, as Pierre Rosanvallon has
explained,
[
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give rise to a demand for populism, which is Putinism's base. Putin's populism addresses the aspirations
of the "little people" for greater recognition far more than the opposition's "anti-Putin" populism,
which celebrates the "people" for the sole purpose of uniting the masses against the enemy that is Putin.
Putin's brand of populism plays on the rejection of elites and oligarchs. It is also a form of
plebiscitary democracy, in which a people becomes "the people" through the mediation of a leader. It does
not correspond to the procedural democracy of the "for honest elections" campaign. Rather, this populism
is a response to the crisis of democracy, in which the people, in particular the "social people", have
lost their place. At the same time that it puts the people first by becoming their spokesperson, Putinism
deprives the people of their sovereignty.
Vladimir Putin.
An "Opposition" Cut Off from the People
This "opposition," whose successes and reversals of fortune are avidly
followed by experts, draws support primarily in Moscow and several other major Russian cities from the
highly educated upper middle classes, intellectuals, and independent or free-lance workers. Even if the
image of opposition leaders is partly shaped by propaganda from pro-Kremlin media outlets, they are in
fact far removed from the concerns of "hard working and patriotic common folk" whose interests the
current regime claims to defend. Generally speaking, the "opposition," which in the Western media is
described as "democratic" and "liberal," is primarily focused on Putin himself. The problems that
preoccupy most Russians, as indicated by polls, including poverty, housing, education, and health, do not
appear as priorities in the discourse of the "opposition," which focuses on laying bear the corruption,
"dishonesty," and "thievery" of the "Putin regime."
An incident recounted to me by one of my interviewees perfectly illustrates
the way in which the "opposition" is perceived. Lyudmila is a professor who participated in several
protest marches against electoral fraud in Saint-Petersburg in 2011. She spoke at length of an incident
that illustrates her relationship to politics. In 2013, she joined other residents in nearby buildings
who regularly walked their dogs in a local square to fight the "dog killers" who were poisoning the
neighborhood's pets. They formed a committee and sent a delegation to the Municipal Council, which took
several measures as a result of this meeting. But Lyudmila mostly remembers another incident. One of the
"dog walkers" was a "nice" young man who was "fascinated by politics." He advised her to go to the local
offices of Yabloko, one of the oldest democratic parties and now considered part of the "opposition." She
recalls: "I arrived at the local office. Young people, proper in every respect, were sitting around. They
asked what I wanted. I explained, but all they could say was: 'yes, of course, we see the problem. But
tell us, how are we going to fight the regime?' I exclaimed: 'What regime are we fighting? I came to talk
to you about a dog problem!' And the girl replied: 'I understand what you're saying, but it's a political
problem. It's political. We need to show the regime that people are in revolt!' But I replied: 'Miss,
thank you, but I'm not a part of your audience.' And I left. You understand. Was that about politics?
No "
This story is symptomatic of the divide between an "opposition" obsessed
with the "regime" and fighting the "regime," on the one hand, and people with everyday concerns and
personal problems, on the other. Alexei Navalny is probably an exception, as he is genuinely popular in
Moscow. Part of this is presumably explained by electoral platform, as he emphasized problems that
concern most Muscovites, notably corruption (primarily among civil servants), transportation, and
housing, as well as the large percentage of immigrants, whom Navalny, a liberal and a nationalist, wants
to regulate and control more strictly than the current regime. With the exception of Navalny and perhaps
a few other figures, the "opposition" thus reinforces as much as it counters the depoliticization of
society. Even the large marches of the "for honest elections" movement, despite the fact that they were
directed in part against the "current regime," was not really a political demonstration so much as a form
of self-representation that declared: "we're here in the street; there are lots of us; we exist." The
interviews conducted by the Laboratory of Public Sociology makes it clear how much the protestors reject
any ideological or partisan affiliation other than that of being "united against Putin." The rare
individuals who have attempted to present a political preference have used such far-fetched terms as
"national-democratic," "liberal tyranny," and "left liberal." The most recent demonstrations,
particularly the one held March 1, 2015, following the assassination of Boris Nemtsov, did not even use
real slogans. For most demonstrators, their mourning and participation were their only message.
[
5
]
A Paradoxical Apoliticism
As numerous studies have shown,
[
6
]
many of the "newly mobilized" of 2011-2012 have turned to local struggles. Their thinking is summed up by
this remark: "I'm tired of protesting just to protest. It's pointless. So I thought about something
concrete I could do, something that could yield actual results. So I told myself that I really needed to
get involved in my neighborhood, to get things moving here." Local groups were formed in the aftermath of
the "for honest elections" movement according to a logic that is the opposite of what I described in a
previous article
[
7
]
:
rather than going from something more concrete and limited to something more general, these groups
reflect a trajectory from the general to the particular.
[
8
]
There is thus another form of politicization, arising "from below" and rooted in local concerns and the
realities of daily life. In this way, people once again come to believe in collective action and
reconnect with the feeling of being able to impact their own milieu; they rediscover themselves, at least
to some degree, as the agents and subjects of their own lives.
Local mobilization, which emerged beginning in 2005 during Putin's second
term and under the impulse of liberal social reforms, continues to flourish. From the first stirrings of
the "for honest elections" movement, large local mobilization illustrated the dynamism of this kind of
activism: in Saint-Petersburg in January 2013, several demonstrations mobilized thousands of participants
against the closure of a hospital for children suffering from cancerous diseases. Battles fought in
Moscow sought primarily to defend schools that were in danger of being shut down or "fused" with others,
to guarantee access to kindergarten, and to oppose "densified" constructions (in apartment building
courtyards, sports fields, and green spaces). In the Voronezh region, the residents of threatened areas
have, since 2012, mobilized against a project to start mining the region's copper-nickel deposits. The
movement, which has been around for over three years, attracted support from across the region and
beyond, including such divergent groups as the Cossacks -- who are generally more conservative and loyal to
the existing order -- peasants, and small business owners. Another form of mobilization, the voluntary
association, has also developed in recent years to help people in dire need but also to make up for the
state's deficiencies. A particularly impressive burst of solidarity occurred during the floods that
devastated Krymsk, a city in southern Russia. Supporters and opponents of Putin participated in this new
wave of volunteering.
Also sprouting up across the country are "initiative groups," the most
popular form of autonomous organization in Russia. They are leading struggles in the realm of housing,
ecological issues, urban planning, and social and medical infrastructure. Since 2007, labor disputes are
back, despite legislative reforms from the early 2000s that make strikes almost impossible to organize
legally. The economic recession that begin in early 2015, which resulted in lower income, salary arrears,
and layoffs, led to a proliferation of conflicts, less in the form of strikes than in rallies,
demonstrations, petitions, road blockings, work slowdowns, and hunger strikes. Protest actions are
underway throughout the country, affecting every sector, including industry and transportation but also
teaching and medical employees.
Vladimir Putin.
Conclusion
"Putinism" is thus a distinct form of state populism that is a response to
the expectations of the majority of the population who self-identify as "the people" by way of its
leader. Paradoxically, it is strengthened by the political opposition, which focuses on personal attacks
against Putin while neglecting the aspirations and social demands of those who are fed up with elite
contempt. Support for "Putinism," as for the opposition, is a political posture that contradicts the
purported apoliticism of the Russian population, even if this form of politicization is paradoxical and
limited. Social mobilization "from below," even when it declares itself apolitical, are especially
political when they emphasize the demand for social justice and they acknowledge the agency of actors who
are disinclined to self-identify as such. What limits their politicization is the narrowness of a
politics that boils down to either supporting or opposing Putin, leaving little room for a political
understanding of the problems of daily life that trigger such mobilization. It seems to me, however, that
a (re)politicization -- a recovery of cognitive, emotional, and practical bearings -- has no choice but to
follow the tentative paths of mobilization "from below."
Dossier(s) :
Contemporary Russia and the
West
Carine Clément, " Putin, Patriotism and Political Apathy ",
Books
and Ideas
, 19 October 2015. ISSN : 2105-3030.
URL : http://www.booksandideas.net/Putin-Patriotism-and-Political-Apathy.html
Nota Bene:
If you want to discuss this essay further, you can send a proposal to
the editorial team (
redaction
@
laviedesidees.fr
).
We will get back to you as soon as possible.
You might also like
[
1
]
The
research project was called "The Creation of Socio-Political Attitudes in Contemporary Russia" (2014), and was
financed by the Faculty of Sciences and Liberal Arts at Saint-Petersburg State University. The cases studied
included educators, cultural professions, information technology professions, doctors, market professionals,
and teenagers.
[
2
]
Sveta
Erpyleva and Artemy Magun, eds.,
Politika apolitičnyh. Graždanskie dviženiâ v Rossii 2011-2013 godov
, M:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2014 [The Politics of the "Apolitical": Citizens Movements in Russia, 2012-2013];
A. Kal'k,
Trudovoj opyt i otnošenie k politike: slučaj rabotnikov sfery informacionnyh tehnologij
.
Saint-Petersburg European University, Master's thesis, 2015. [Work Experiences and their Relationship to
Politics: The Case of High Technology Workers].
[
6
]
Erpyleva
and Magun; Mihhail Alekseevskij and Aleksandra Arhipova, eds.,
My ne nemy: Antropologiâ protesta v Rossii
2011–2012 godov
[We are not Mute: Anthropology of the Russian Demonstrations of 2011-2012], Č
LM
,
Tartu, 2014.
This doesn't seem very complicated to me.
Turkey is emboldened by Turkstream (and by the Ukraine/Georgia stalemate) - Erdogan clearly
believes he can monopolize gas transit between Central Asia/Middle East/Eastern Mediterranean
and Europe. This would be a huge geopolitical and economic benefit for Turkey - far above and
beyond any religion based "leadership" Turkey could benefit from the Muslim world.
Russia doesn't really care as it already has a pole position regarding natural gas to Europe
- Erdogan's actions will only serve to slow down any buildout of competing supply from
Central Asia/Middle East. Erdogan is likely being financially backed by Qatar as well - they
also stand to benefit if Turkey can carve out a pipeline domination in the Eastern Med.
"Follow the money..." If I recall correctly, Haftar got a nice pile of money from Russia in
the form of Libyan banknotes that he ordered, and the status of those banknotes was unclear,
but in LNA zone they are as good as the central bank notes. Legally, payments for Libyan oil
have to go to that bank, and the operations, location and loyalty of that bank deserve an
investigative article.
Erdogan has too little money to succeed, IMHO. If he were flushed, he would place nice
weapon orders in UK, France, Germany and USA, as KSA + UAE did, and as we know from Yemen,
that secures NATO blessings, either verbal or quiet. His military is probably in a better
shape than Egyptian, if vulnerable to attacks by mysterious submarines. The coastal highway
from Egypt is surely good enough for military vehicles, but it is vulnerable to attacks from
air.
Putin's priority number 2 in the region is South Stream, so he will probably not supply
mysterious submarines, Greece could being irate over maritime claims, and Egypt would have
the most obvious motif. My conclusion is that the sultan's dog's barks a lot, and sometimes
bites, but with some caution. Libyan expedition has the smell of Sicilian Expedition, a
notable event during the Peloponessian war.
Egypt will not tolerate a Muslim Brotherhood led Libya as its neighbor. Before the Turkish
support allows the GNA government to defeat Haftar Egypt will intervene. The situation can
thereby soon develop into an intense war during which Turkish troops fight on Libyan grounds
against the Egyptian military.
<=I think if Egypt intervenes in Libya it will strengthen the brotherhood in Egypt and
Libya and may terminate brother Sisi's rule.
i agree with Psychohistorian's Mezran quote.. a Russian Turkey agreement will foreclose
USA and British access to oil from Libya, Egypt and Turkey( new OPEC will form).
Now the GNA is a UN construct so Turkey supporting it should not be a big deal politically
for the west. As for the CIA fellow, if he is working as closely as he appears to be with
Russia, I think Turkey stepping in is just as suggested:
"...from the karlof1 link:
""Mezran suggested. "If the Turks become the major supporter of the GNA, not the Europeans or
the Americans, and the Russians are the ones who are the major supporter of Haftar, then all
it would take is an agreement between Moscow and Ankara to solve the Libyan problem, causing
much damage to American and European power.""Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 17 2019 20:25
utc | 11.
I particularly like the strategy cutting out the Central Bank by the General and Russia,
looks to me like there is a master plan being rolled out and it is moving quickly. Perhaps
Peace is breaking out:)
b said; "After the NATO war destroyed Africa's richest country Libya is still split."
Another "mission accomplished" by the evil empire. They couldn't stand for any leader to
share the wealth of the nation with it's people, so a lesson was given, and is still in
effect.
@ Posted by: ben | Dec 17 2019 22:58 utc | 20 who wrote
"
b said; "After the NATO war destroyed Africa's richest country Libya is still split."
Another "mission accomplished" by the evil empire. They couldn't stand for any leader to
share the wealth of the nation with it's people, so a lesson was given, and is still in
effect.
"
Thanks for that perspective. That is THE reason that I continue to call out Hillary "We
came, we saw, he died" Clinton as the war criminal I hope she is prosecuted for in her
lifetime.
Does anyone have an idea of both the size and combat readiness of Egyptian forces?
Would Sisi be in a position to send in a force of, say, 50,000 or 100,000 troops with
armour and air cover? If so, he could end both the Muslim Brotherhood/Al-Quaeda problem in
Libya as well as nip one of Erdogan's meddlesome adventures in the bud.
I want what Libyans want, but it seems nobody can be arsed to find that out. I strongly
suspect Libyans' preference would be for neither of these two foreign funded options since
both of these grubby groups are committed to maintaining the repeal of the petroleum act
which has protected Libyans from rapacious foreign corporations and foreign-state owned
enterprises who put sweet FA into any of their hosts' economies while meddling unceasingly in
host politics to ensure everyone but them gets screwed.
IMO the amerikan interest is less about oil & other Libyan resources than ensuring
that Libya can never again support North African nations who the empire is determined to
annex and form into a vast super-national state where governments have no control, but
corporations do.
AFAIK, both cliques in Libya are proponents of Arab nationalism which intend to pretend
the black african and berber populations are all foreigners despite both groups having a
longer history of living in the region than arabs do.
Arabs entered this region, the Magreb, about 647 AD fighting to take control off the
indigenous population of the Magreb which up until then comprised myriad african ethnicities
& language groups until around 709 when Arabs united under the banner of Islam had
complete control.
There really hasn't been a demographic based census in Libya, most likely because the role
of black africans or as the imperialists like to refer to them 'sub-saharan' (which of course
implies they are outsiders) has always been contentious among some Libyans who consider
themselves to be 'Arabs' or as they like to claim, the ruling class.
Generally the bulk of lighter skinned Libyans class themselves as Berber-Arabs, while other
Libyans (eg Muamar Ghaddaffi -may he rest in peace) consider themselves to be Berber.
The iFUKUS intervention promoted a mob claiming to be solely Arab and therefore the
legitimate rulers of the nation. They also reckoned all black africans in Libya were
foreigners. A genocidal campaign of terror and good old amerikan style lynching of black
folks followed. We rightly see the sociopath in H Clinton at this time, but what about
Oblamblam, WTF was he thinking?
Eventually some bright spark saw that killing was wasteful, so those black Libyans
remaining were rounded up and sold into slavery - to 'owners' primarily in Saudi Arabia and
the UAE.
Who knows if Libya can ever find another leader as enlightened as the Colonel? All we do
know is that there is no chance of such a leader emanating from either Haftar's gang or the
'UN-recognised' gang.
Libyans don't deserve either of these agglomerations of arseholes which is why they are
copping them. A big message from the big states that any nation which indulges in such caring
and sharing of neighbours & friends as Libya did, must be severely punished so no other
decent society will dare try that on.
"<=I think if Egypt intervenes in Libya it will strengthen the brotherhood in Egypt and
Libya and may terminate brother Sisi's rule."
I think Snake is on to something here. The power balance in Egypt is fairly evenly divided
with only a slight advantage to Sisi over Muslim Brotherhood forces.
What Turkey is seeking is fair treatment and recognition of rights it feels that it has in
the Mediterranean Sea. What a group of nations (Israel, Egypt, Greece and the US –
hereafter referred to as The Group) is attempting to do is deny Turkey any rights at all.
Those that disagree with Turkish claims have the following position:
1. Greek "owned" islands, which in some cases (e.g. Kastellorizo) go really close to the
Turkish coast, exclude Turkey from any significant rights to the Mediterranean.
2. Turkey has no claim to the area around Cyprus.
3. Cyprus is partnered with Israel, Egypt, Greece and the US for energy exploration in the
Mediterranean Sea and Turkey is not included.
4. In January 2019, the Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum was convened as a means for
Cyprus, Egypt, Greece, Jordan, Israel, Italy and the Palestinian Authority to develop a
regional natural gas market. Turkey was excluded from this forum and was very upset. (A month
later ExxonMobil announced a new gas discovery in Cypriot waters.)
In other words it is a melange of denying rights, legal assertions and exclusion
tactics.
Now look at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and then tell me - Is it reasonable
that Turkey should have practically no rights at all? Any fair-minded person would recognise
that Turkey does and all reasonable people would recognise that all the countries bordering
the area of exploration have rights and should cooperate and work together and none should be
excluded. What is happening is that The Group wants it all.
It is a very big mistake to believe that Turkey is in the wrong and also that it will back
down on this.
In addition to Turkey, the countries that are excluded appear to be Syria, Lebanon, and
Libya. It is right that The Group is seeking to exclude all these other countries?
It doesn't matter whether the oil and gas are viable (it may or may not be) what is
happening is that Turkey is not being allowed any recognition and they are choosing to assert
(take) their rights (because there is no other option available to them). If Turkey did not
do so then they would lose any future rights to the Mediterranean at all.
Syrian, Lebanon and Libya are obviously too weak to assert their rights. Although the
Palestinian Authority participated in Eastern Mediterranean Gas Forum I don't really expect
Palestine to benefit much and it should be noted the Palestinian Authority is are far too
weak to do anything – I'm afraid they are just being used.
Greece and Cyprus are being used as pawns by the US (why else would US Ambassador Pyatt be
based in Greece? This kind of disruption is his speciality) and Greece is being set to
confront Turkey.
Now look at a map of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea and then tell me - Is it reasonable
that Turkey should have practically no rights at all? Any fair-minded person would recognise
that Turkey does and all reasonable people would recognise that all the countries bordering
the area of exploration have rights and should cooperate and work together and none should be
excluded. What is happening is that The Group wants it all.
The reason why Turkey does not want the Libyan GNA to fall is because they fear that
Haftar will fall into line with The Group and further strengthen Turkey's exclusion from the
Mediterranean energy exploration. So it is in Turkey's great national interest to secure
Libya as an ally. Also, the GNA are still recognised as the legitimate government of Libya by
the UN so in legal terms Turkey is not doing anything wrong in recognising and supporting the
Libyan GNA.
As regards the Turkey/Libyan Maritime Zone - What is happening is that Turkey and Libya
are showing The Group that it to can carve out areas and claim to areas of the Mediterranean
Seas just as much as they can.
It was widely believed that the 2015-17 Cyprus reunification talks where positive and the
closet ever to reaching a settlement. Who should be blamed for the collapse? Many believe
that is was the Greek Cypriot side that was a fault. The big sticking point was that the
Turkish Cypriot side wanted some 40,000 Turkish troops to remain based in the North of the
Island because of fears over security. At the time the Greek Cypriot side said it was
impossible to accept the continued presence of Turkish troops. This was a big mistake, Cyprus
would have been federally united and in 10 years time the Turkish troops could well have been
greatly reduced. When the talks collapsed the talk was of inevitable partition.
And what do we see in 2019? Anastasiades, the Greek Cypriot President, wants to reopen
talks "exactly where they left off" - A belated recognition that it was the Greek Cypriots
that threw away what would have been a fantastic settlement and a fairly blatant attempt to
peel away Turkish Cypriots from Turkey (Anastasiades call for a resumption of talks seems to
have come with some unnecessary hostile remarks directed at Turkey), and hasty desire (now
that there has been a gas discovery off the coast of Cyprus) to rescue the agreement because
The Group now they can use this agreement to further marginalise Turkey.
I like Frances's take on this...ie smells like a master plan between Russia and Turkey...
Why not...?...the Sultan and VVP deciding to carve up some territory, as in the old
colonial days...?
Russia and Turkey are getting closer all the time...Helmer's take about the 'Stavka' not
being fully on board with this notwithstanding...
The very useful clue is from that Atlantic Council article...the rule to apply here is to
just be for everything they are against...and be against whatever they are for...
In this case they are agitating for the West to step up to the plate and arm the
GNA...even a fly zone for farg's sakes...
Yeah...everything but let Turkey and Russia divide the spoils among themselves
right...?...throw a wrench into the spokes at any cost...?
But the thing is that Trump is not interested in any new wars or proxy wars...and I think
a Libya 2.0 is going to be an extremely hard sell anywhere, with the disaster of Killary's
2011 adventure still fresh in everyone's minds...
So nobody is stepping in...there is a vacuum there and I think that there may be some
grand bargain cooking behind the scenes with VVP and the Sultan...who knows how far
this thing could go...?
It's already causing HUGE headaches in Sodom on the Potomac...as is clear from the shrieks
of agony from the likes of the Atlantic Council and many others...
Turkey may not be the best militarily; they are slow and ponderous but they are strong
enough to move forward, occupy and hold space and take a significant amount of attrition
while doing so. Turkey is strong enough to be able to assert "facts on the ground" even if
they have to absorb several hard blows - they have been learning a lot from Russia on
this.
With regards to Libya, Turkey cannot be prevented from moving forward, occupying space,
supplying the Libyan GNA, providing military equipment and troops, etc. UNLESS their lines of
supply are cut and this means that The Group would have to attack first and sink a Turkish
ship.
And this would mean that Greece (the obvious party that might be set-up for this role)
would attack Turkey and sink a Turkish ship? This would be an act of war against Turkey and
Turkey would, as a result of such action, be fully (and legally) entitled to respond. So,
commonsense tells you that Greece and The Group can't really do this.
If The Group enables Haftar to sink a Turkish ship then Turkey will be able to claim an
attack against them, and retaliate and occupy Libya and expect NATO support whilst doing so.
The effect of such an act by Haftar's forces would inevitably result in victory for Erdogan
(counter-intuitive though that may seem).
While Turkey and Erdogan's association with the Muslim Brotherhood can be seen as a vector
that ensures Egypt's hostility towards Turkey's presence in Libya can this really express
itself militarily?
The Muslim Brotherhood is a strong movement in Egypt which has been around for a very long
time. Effectively this excludes Egypt from joining any direct attack on Turkey because they
will fear the unintended consequences that will arise within Egypt.
I'm afraid The Group, in seeking to exclude a major country like Turkey (with an obvious
major interest in the Mediterranean), is taking the first step towards war. Sinking a Turkish
ship would be another step towards war. Turkey will win any conflict as long as they are
prepared to accept some hard blows (and they will be). The Group will lose any conflict
because they are only able to strike small (sink a ship at most) or strike huge
(annihilation); they have no middle game – Turkey will be able to absorb small blows
and China & Russia will not allow Turkey to be destroyed.
At present, Turkey has nothing to lose (as far as the Mediterranean Sea energy exploration
goes) - it follows that in any military conflict that Turkey will gain. Military conflicts
have to be settled by negotiation - it is only a western delusion that wars are fought to
unconditional surrender or absolute destruction. It is The Group and, in particular, Greece
that will lose (Greece has a lot to lose in any conflict - no matter how well it goes for
Greece - they will have to give up something, even if they think they have won, because that
will be price of ending any conflict (because it always is unless you can annihilate your
adversary).
It is not Turkey that is over-reaching- it is The Group (Israel, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and
the US) that have overplayed their hand and have most to lose.
The only thing that makes any sense in terms of a strategic plan is that it nothing more
than machinations by the US seeking to bring chaos closer to the heart of Europe. From the
outset, The Group knew what they were doing to Turkey and they knew how Turkey would feel
about it and how Turkey was likely to react.
div> On paper, Erdogan may have easy superiority in Libya, but he may get
into troubles for two reasons:
1) Libyans, currently quite fractured, actually both major coalitions are riven by internal
lack of cohesion. To compare, Assad government had no business surviving, but the opposition
was split into moderates, i.e. small time gangsters and bandits having difficulties making
units of more than 100 people, and jihadists who had some abstruse reasons to hate each other.
And Turkey did not make such a good job in Idlib, Afrin and north Aleppo.
2) Egypt. Forget about ground troops, they would probably focus on air supremacy. This is an
Achilles heel of an expeditionary force. If they are intelligent (a risk that has to be
consider), they may hit the moment Turkey attempts to expand its foothold. Just letting it
slide would be a considerable loss of face for al-Sisi
Posted by: Piotr Berman , Dec 18 2019 2:19 utc |
36
On paper, Erdogan may have easy superiority in Libya, but he may get into troubles for two
reasons:
1) Libyans, currently quite fractured, actually both major coalitions are riven by internal
lack of cohesion. To compare, Assad government had no business surviving, but the opposition
was split into moderates, i.e. small time gangsters and bandits having difficulties making
units of more than 100 people, and jihadists who had some abstruse reasons to hate each
other. And Turkey did not make such a good job in Idlib, Afrin and north Aleppo.
2) Egypt. Forget about ground troops, they would probably focus on air supremacy. This is an
Achilles heel of an expeditionary force. If they are intelligent (a risk that has to be
consider), they may hit the moment Turkey attempts to expand its foothold. Just letting it
slide would be a considerable loss of face for al-Sisi
Posted by: Piotr Berman | Dec 18 2019 2:19 utc |
36
Kastellorizo – A Greek Island off the Turkish Coast
Greece "owns" Kastelorizo, an island which is only about 2 kilometres off the coast of
Turkey. "Ownership" of islands such as Kastellorizo is meant to "give" Greece the "right" to
exclude Turkey from the Mediterranean Sea? I'm afraid that this is an absolutist, simplistic
and unrealistic position.
The "ownership" of Kastellorizo has changed many times throughout history and has been
"owned" by Turkey (the Ottomans) on a number of occasions. If you look at the maps you can
see that Kastellorizo is part of the same geological formation as the nearby Turkish coast.
It's akin to claiming "ownership" of my doorstop and then claiming that you "own" everything
outside the walls of my house (including my garden, car, garage, dog, cat, etc. and then
telling me I can't even use my doorstep or leave my house. If you did that to me, I would
push you aside and that is what Turkey is doing to Greece.
I know that many, many Greeks fundamentally disagree but they are just being partisan,
unfair and realistic and are allowing themselves to getting carried away with hostility
towards Turkey.
Kastellorizo could have been assigned to Turkey at the end of the WWII as part of the
Paris Peace Treaties of 1947 but instead, the "ownership" of Kastellorizo was removed from
Italy and given to Greece.
In any military conflict between Turkey and Greece (like, for instance) sinking a Turkish
Ship, then islands Kastellorizo will be immediately taken into "ownership" by Turkey and it
will be a long time, if ever, that Greece can think about re-"owning" Kastellorizo.
Essentially, the issue of Kastellorizo and its "ownership" would be settled and there would
be very little Greece could do about it.
When Greece asserts is rights to the Mediterranean Sea based on "ownership" of islands
such as Kastellorizo and uses such "ownership" to deny Turkey rights to the Mediterranean Sea
it is just being provocative and unreasonable and inducing Turkey.
Turkey is wrong if it thinks something in international law allows it to annul the freedom of
the seas and block pipelines. I will repost what
I wrote on October 31:
MARITIME LAW EXPLAINED
The United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) from 1958 guarantees to all countries the right to lay
cables and pipes in international waters. This is part of the freedom of the seas. Laying
cables and pipes is not "economic" activity as defined in the 1982 treaty that gave
countries the right to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone
(EEZ).
Pipe laying is affected only by the little-known
Espoo Convention from 1991 that obliges the parties to carry out an environmental
impact assessment of certain activities at an early stage of planning. Nowhere in the
treaty does it say that it can be used to stop the freedom of navigation or other freedoms
of the seas.
Turkey does not need and doesn't intend to conquer Libya.
All Turkey has to do is maintain the Libyan GNA which is the government legally recognised
by the UN.
Only the Security Council can remove recognition of the Libyan GNA and this would be a
fairly cynical move by the West if attempted (and, I imagine, would be vetoed by more than
just Russia and China).
Military aircraft are vulnerable when ground troops have access to modern surface to air
missiles and are trained in their use. Expect Libyan GNA forces to have copious supplies of
the ground and shoulder-launched versions of these weapons. What good did aircraft do for
Saudi Arabia in Yemen? There is no winner here, only stalemate and that's more than good
enough for Turkey.
The only way to prevent Turkey from achieving its aims is to sink it's supply ships. This
would be a rash and extremely inadvisable act.
I would advise policymakers and Governments (particularly, The Group) to see where this is
all heading and not go down this path.
The coming debacle may present few heroes for our consideration. The weakest states are
probably headed for the smash-and-grab treatment at the end of the day. How is one to believe
that Erdogan gives a damn about the government in Libya?--any government? Hafter and the GNA
are both pretenders who have only marginal support in that country. These are but stick
figures in a land that's been thrown into a howling anarchy, thanks to the military operation
that Obama green-lighted. Since Erdogan is dealing with virtual nonentities, this aggression
is his aggression. And this illegal sea lane is his insult to international law and prior
agreements that recognize the rights of regional nations. It looks a lot like an act of war
or at least a pretty serious provocation.
Greece, for one, ought to be worried about this development, as some of the resources it
counts on as its territorial right is threatened here.
I don't believe that any of the Mediterranean Sea is "international waters" it's all been
carved up into Exclusive Economic Zone's (EEZ)- there's nothing left! The Group are carving
everything up for themselves and left Turkey (and a number of other countries e.g. Syria)
with very little.
Any person thinking rationally would be able to see that Turkey has been treated unfairly
and will see Turkey has been left with no effective (peaceful) way to get any redress.
All Greece and the rest of the Mediterranean nations need to do is get together, cooperate
and share.
The actions of The Group (Israel, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the US) are the ones that are
causing all the difficulties because they have tried to grab everything for themselves and
exclude everyone else.
Greece and the rest of The Group need to include Turkey, Lebanon, Libya, Syria and
Palestine (and remove the US).
When Greece asserts is rights to the Mediterranean Sea based on "ownership" of islands
such as Kastellorizo and uses such "ownership" to deny Turkey rights to the Mediterranean Sea
it is just being provocative and unreasonable and inducing Turkey to consider military
options.
Turkey controls the Dardanelles (the entrance to the Black Sea) by treaty. Turkey has been
treated as it deserves. The Aegean Sea is recognized as Greek waters; and that probably
includes the seabed beneath it. When Greece was at its most vulnerable after the recent
financial collapse, Turkish air force ramped up overflights of Greek territory, some of it
pretty aggressive, just to rub salt in the wound. It wasn't very neighborly. It looks like
Erdogan's new sea lane trespasses the Greek island of Rhodes and several others.
What Andrew Korkblko suggests is that the pipeline, that Turkey is obstructing with the
"Turkey/Libyan Maritime Zone", is not really about Cypriot gas (which b. believes will be too
small and uneconomic to justify a pipeline) but about Israeli gas which is intended to be
piped under the Mediterranean Sea into Europe as a competitor to Russian gas. Maybe the whole
thing about Cypriot gas is just a smokescreen to disguise the true origins (Israel) of the
gas.
What, I suppose, Israel is trying to achieve is to minimise the number of nations that
have a say about (and, I guess, a cut of) the pipeline. So, the attempt to cut Turkey and
other weaker countries out of share (gas transit fees) has forced Turkey to move on its
long-held grievance about being treated unfairly in the Mediterranean Sea.
Are we about to see a war in the Mediterranean between Greece and Turkey caused by US and
Israeli machinations?
I am not talking about rights that are legally justified by "ownership" - what I am saying
is that the whole of the Mediterranean Sea and its resources should be shared fairly and
reasonably by all nations of the Mediterranean.
The proposed gas pipeline is just an example where a small group of nations (Israel,
Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and the US - The Group) have got together to grab what they can for
themselves and exclude others.
Your argument is essentially we have the legal right, we are recognised under
international law, therefore we can do what we like, we can have it all, and you, who have
been excluded, you will have nothing. But, anyone can see that this is unreasonable and the
path to disaster.
But in some ways all this is now moot. The pipeline appears to be really about Israeli gas
and the lack of wisdom in trying to exclude Turkey. If The Group has any sense they will
share the booty with Turkey. If not, they will get Greece to sink a Turkish ship - the
outcome won't be good for Greece.
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
"... After a Western-backed coup overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian president in February 2014, it brought to power a government largely picked by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland. People in the Donbass region did not accept the new government and made two conditions for remaining a part of Ukraine: special autonomy status and two state languages. This is exactly what Canada provides for its large French-speaking minority. ..."
"... Those with even rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian history and its huge ethnic Russian population would agree that these demands are not unreasonable, but the post-coup government called the separatist forces terrorists, sent aviation and tanks, and started a civil war that has been raging for five years. Washington, which was in total control of the Ukrainian political class, could have resolved this crisis easily by telling the new government to accept these modest conditions. Instead, the U.S. supported Kyiv with money, weapons, military training and political support. ..."
At a time of one of the greatest political upheavals in American history that could spill
over into foreign affairs, especially U.S.-Russian relations with unpredictable and devastating
results, I thought Christmas might offer a chance for all
of us to take a pause and search for an exit from the megacrisis.
Many people believe miracles do happen at Christmastime. However, it looks like we need
President Trump , Russian President Vladimir
Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to perform
at least three of them.
Those who wonder why Mr. Zelensky is on this list
should recall that the Trump impeachment process started
because of his phone call with this guy whose country the Democrats and their pathetic
witnesses deem no less than vital to America's national security.
Let us start with Mr. Putin because someone has to take the first difficult step and he is
the only one in a clear position to do it.
Dear Mr. Putin, please make a public statement that Russia pledges not to interfere in the
next and future American elections. It would be good if the two chambers of the Russian
parliament, the Duma and Federation Council, ratify this pledge as well. Please do it
unilaterally without asking Mr. Trump and the U.S. Congress to
respond in kind.
Dear Mr. Trump , please return to your
earlier thinking about NATO as an obsolete organization that lost its purpose in 1991 after the
collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw military bloc. Since then, it has been searching
desperately for new missions and enemies to justify its existence.
Recall that NATO's continuous expansion drive is the major factor that squandered the
exceptional opportunity for U.S.-Russian rapprochement that all Russian leaders, starting with
Mikhail Gorbachev, kept proposing. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, New York Democrat, and 18
other senators voted against President Clinton's first round of NATO expansion. "We'll be back
on a hair-trigger. We're talking about nuclear war," they said.
At the same time, NATO has failed to counter international terrorism -- the real threat to
European and American security. It is NATO that boosted the jihadi peril by overthrowing
Libya's government, allowing that prosperous country to morph into a terrorist playground and
staging point for millions of unvetted migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.
Is NATO making America and our allies more secure? During the Cold War, when NATO allowed
the West to stand firm against Soviet communist designs on Europe, the answer was an easy yes,
but today, with NATO's reckless poking of the Russian bear, the answer is a resounding no.
A rebuilt NATO or a new organization, IATO -- International Anti-Terrorist Organization --
specifically targeting global jihad, would have a future with new partners including Russia,
for which terrorism represents a major security threat. Georgia and Ukraine could join IATO as
well, thus taking the first step toward reconciliation with Russia that NATO's insatiable
expansion drive helped destroy.
French President Emmanuel Macron is the first Western leader who agrees with this point of view
and is not afraid to say that "NATO's brain is dead." However, the U.S. president must take the
lead to move past legacy NATO.
Dear Mr. Zelensky , I believe that you
sincerely want to end the war in your country. It is not an easy job since you face a strong
and vocal radical nationalistic opposition with strong neo-Nazi overtones that declares that
any compromise on your side will be met with the violent resistance and another "Maidan
revolution" that may lead to your overthrow. The leader of this opposition is former President
Petro Poroshenko, whom Washington supported all these years and who was given a rare privilege
to speak at a joint session of Congress, where members greeted him with numerous standing
ovations. At the same time, Ukrainian people hated him so much that they decided to replace him
with a Jewish comic actor with no political experience.
Mr. Zelensky , I wonder if you
have read the book "Shooting Stars" by Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, which describes some
important episodes in which fate gave an individual a chance at a historical turning point.
Zweig says fate usually chooses for this purpose a strong personality, but sometimes it falls
to mediocrities who fail miserably.
You are in a position to decide which you will be, and the pass to historical Olympus is
obvious.
After a Western-backed coup overthrew the legitimate Ukrainian president in February 2014,
it brought to power a government largely picked by Assistant Secretary of State Victoria
Nuland. People in the Donbass region did not accept the new government and made two conditions
for remaining a part of Ukraine: special autonomy status and two state languages. This is
exactly what Canada provides for its large French-speaking minority.
Those with even rudimentary knowledge of Ukrainian history and its huge ethnic Russian
population would agree that these demands are not unreasonable, but the post-coup government
called the separatist forces terrorists, sent aviation and tanks, and started a civil war that
has been raging for five years.
Washington, which was in total control of the Ukrainian political class, could have resolved
this crisis easily by telling the new government to accept these modest conditions. Instead,
the U.S. supported Kyiv with money, weapons, military training and political support.
Mr. Zelensky , nowadays you and
your country are used as pawns in the attempts to impeach Mr. Trump , but your prime
responsibility is before Ukrainian people who dismissed the party of war and placed the fate of
your country and its people in your hands. They expect you to make the right decision by
choosing the road to peace.
While waiting for these miracles to materialize, I wish all a merry Christmas , happy Hanukkah and peace on
earth in 2020.
Edward Lozansky is president of American University in Moscow.
Neocons lie should properly be called "threat inflation"
The underlying critical
point-at-issue is credibility as I noted in my comment on b's 2017 article. I've since
linked to tweets and other items by that trio; the one major change seems to have been the
epiphany by them that they needed to go to where the action is and report it from there to
regain their credibility.
The fact remains that used car salespeople have a stereotypical reputation for lacking
credibility sans a confession as to why they feel the need to lie to sell cars.
Their actions belie the guilt they feel for their choices, but a confession works much
better at assuaging the soul while helping convince the audience that the change in heart's
genuine. And that's the point as b notes--genuineness, whose first predicate is
credibility.
Investor Bill Browder's allegations –Why Spiegel
is sticking to Magnitsky research
By Lucy Komisar
Dec 15, 2019
This is German news magazine Der Spiegel's response to a complaint by William Browder to its
editor
and to the
German Press Commission
about its exposé that proved he was a fraudster and his Magnitsky story a fabrication.
Key parts are marked in bold. The text and documents show the Spiegel story to be correct and Browder to be a conman.
Former major investor Bill Browder accuses SPIEGEL of misrepresenting the circumstances surrounding the
death of Russian Sergei Magnitsky. SPIEGEL rejects this – and lists the arguments and facts.
Bill Browder, founder of Hermitage Capital Management, photo Luke MacGregor / Bloomberg / Getty Images
Friday,
13.12.2019
8:21 p.m.
SPIEGEL reported on the background of the so-called Magnitsky sanctions on November 23. These punitive measures,
which were imposed on Russian officials by the United States, are mainly based on the account of the former major
investor Bill Browder and relate to the fate of his colleague Sergei Magnitsky.
Magnitsky died in a prison in Moscow in 2009 in circumstances that were not fully understood. Browder claims
Magnitsky was murdered for uncovering a tax scandal.
The SPIEGEL report describes the contradictions in
Browder's statements and states that he cannot provide sufficient evidence for his thesis.
Browder has now made a complaint against the text public, in the form of a letter to the editor-in-chief and a
complaint to the German Press Council. In his letter, he accuses SPIEGEL of distorting the facts.
We consider the complaint to be unfounded and therefore want to make it clear once again where our considerable
doubts about Brudder's story come from and why we consider it necessary to discuss it publicly. We have also made
the
text
freely available to all SPIEGEL readers (
you
can find the text here
). In this statement, we also link some of the sources to which we referred in our
research.
We have corrected an error in the English version of the SPIEGEL report. There we had the information that a rubber
truncheon was used, wrongly assigned to a report from 2009. In fact, it only appears in another report from 2011. The
German version was correct from the start.
NOTE FROM LK: That is Der Spiegel's only mistake. The claim that a rubber truncheon was used is a Browder
forgery. See this by reporter Michael Thau with whom I collaborated on exposing this very complex Browder
fakery
, which included inventing a form that doesn't exist and tracing a signature.
No doubt Magnitsky died a terrible death. As it was said in the SPIEGEL report, "horrible injustice" happened to
him. In our view, it is also appropriate to speak of a "mercilessly omitted assistance". The "use of a rubber stick"
is also
indisputable
. At no point in the SPIEGEL report is the issue of exonerating the Russian state from guilt for
Magnitsky's death. It is about showing
the inconsistencies, contradictions, and unsubstantiated claims in the
story that Browder has been coming and going to Western governments for years – and which have become the basis for
Western sanctions against Russian officials.
Browder's account of what happened to Sergei Magnitsky's death consists of several key elements:
How it all started:
According to Browder, tax inquiries were launched in Moscow in 2007, which he
described as clearly "criminal and politically motivated". The proceedings were fictitious, initiated only for the
purpose of confiscating important documents from some of his letterbox companies during a search. On June 4, 2007,
searches were conducted in Moscow. Numerous company documents were confiscated.
Magnitsky becomes a whistleblower:
Browder claims that he entrusted Magnitsky with the
investigation in 2007: three mailbox companies were hijacked after the search. According to Browder, Magnitsky
reported these events to the State Investigation Committee on June 5 and October 7, 2008, and explicitly accused two
police officers of the crime, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. According to Browder, this advertisement gives a
clear motive for the later arrest and murder of Magnitsky.
Arrest and death
: A trial against Magnitsky will open in autumn 2008. The allegation is tax
evasion. Magnitsky was arrested in November 2008. He died in Russian custody on November 16, 2009. Browder repeatedly
describes the death as a targeted murder plot.
Browder's presentation of the exact events varied
. The campaign videos that he published on
Youtube are exemplary.
Among other things, it states:
"?? After Sergei Magnitsky testified against the same criminal group for an even larger crime, the same
officers arrested, tortured and eventually killed Sergei to hide their crime."
"Instead of supporting Sergei Magnitsky and recognizing him as a hero, the government allowed interior
ministry officers, Kuznetsov, Karpov to arrest, torture and kill him."
At every stage of this presentation, numerous points do not stand up to scrutiny. A London court came to
the conclusion that Browder did not even begin to substantiate his allegations against Karpov (the
full
court order can be viewed here
)
Again and again it becomes clear that Browder's story contains errors and inconsistencies that distort the
overall picture of the events surrounding Magnitsky's death.
1. The tax investigation
The investigation started much earlier than Browder claims. While he has repeatedly stressed that he first
heard the name of the investigator Artyom Kuznetsov in 2007, the opposite is well documented. Kusnezov's name is
already on a letter from the tax investigator from June 2006, which went to Browder's companies.
That Browder's team was aware of the process also results from Magnitsky's statement of June 5, 2008.
There he describes that Kusnetzov requested company and bank documents at the end of May 2006. This mid-2006
investigation is also mentioned in complaints that Browder's people sent to the authorities in December 2007.
In addition, Magnitsky himself was questioned by the authorities in 2006 about tax inquiries.
Investigations into tax evasion by mailbox companies in the vicinity of Browder, including the company "Saturn
Investment", which Magnitsky was concerned with, also date from before 2004.
Several court rulings were brought against Browder's companies, then the proceedings were closed, but reopened in
2008.
SPIEGEL does not adopt the views of the Russian judiciary. A final clarification on whether the allegations of tax
evasion were valid would be up to an independent court, in a fair trial. It becomes clear, however, that
the
investigation did not suddenly start in 2007 as Browder claims, apparently recognizable without any basis. The
investigation has a well-documented history. The European Court of Human Rights concluded in its judgment on the case
that Magnitsky was not "arbitrarily" detained:
"
The Court observes that the inquiry into alleged tax evasion, resulting in the criminal proceedings
against Mr Magnitskyy, started in 2004, long before he complained that prosecuting officials had been involved in
fraudulent acts."
(
Find
the verdict here
)
2. Magnitsky's role as a crucial whistleblower:
In Browder's account, Magnitsky's statement to investigators is the motive for his imprisonment and later targeted
murder: a corrupt clique team silenced the man who was dangerous to it. This is the core of the story spread by
Browder.
Browder describes Magnitsky as a decisive whistleblower. But this is a retrospective construction. Several
people from Browder's team have made the same or very similar allegations against the Russian authorities, some of
them earlier than Magnitsky:
Browder's lawyer Eduard Khairetdinov in complaints to the authorities in early December 2007 (PDF on
Browders
website
)
According to Browder, Magnitsky's first statement on the matter dates back to June 5, 2008.
He speaks about the search and confiscation of documents that, in his opinion, have been carefully used to hijack
the companies. He does not speak of the great tax fraud.
Magnitsky had "not yet discovered the scam",
writes Browder on his website.
A week earlier, however, on May 28, 2008, another Browder man named Grant Felgenhauer wrote in a
letter to the anti-corruption council of the Russian president about the suspicion that the attackers' real goal
was to refund hundreds of taxes Millions of dollars
(PDF
on
Browders website
– the corresponding passage is on top three, Felgenhauer speculates over $ 300 million).
The media had already reported the events. The business service
Bloomberg
,
the "Financial Times" and the "Wall Street Journal" reported in early April 2008.
The New York Times also made public the $ 230 million fraud on July 24, 2008 (link to
article
). Magnitsky,
in turn, did not speak to the authorities until his statement on October 7, 2008.
This chronological sequence is one reason why observers have doubts as to whether Magnitsky was actually
murdered so that the charges against the police officers are no longer raised. The allegations against the Russian
police were worldwide, regardless of Magnitsky's testimony.
Human rights activist Soya Svetova, who dealt with the case from the beginning, put it this way in conversation
with SPIEGEL last summer.
SPIEGEL
:
What about the version that was specifically targeted for being killed? Is
there evidence of this?
Svetova
:
No. There is no evidence of this. What was the point of killing him? No sense.
SPIEGEL
:
Because he knew about a $ 230 million fraud.
Svetova
:
Yes, but not only did he know about this fraud, the entire management and
colleagues also knew about it. It was written about in newspapers. He didn't reveal a secret.
SPIEGEL
: But your report mentions that pressure may have been put on him while in custody.
Svetova
: When he was in custody, people wanted statements from him against Bill Browder. But he
didn't do any. And probably he would never have made such a statement. But killing him would have been completely
pointless for them.
Svetova agreed to the interview and its recording in July 2019. In previous years, she had taken the position that
there was no evidence of a targeted murder. In 2014, for example, she wrote that she could not imagine that someone
had caused Magnitsky's death in a targeted manner ("Well, after five years have passed, I think this killing was not
intentional" –
original in
Russian
).
Shortly before the publication of the SPIEGEL report in November, she said that although that was her words, she
had meanwhile changed her mind and believed that targeted murder was possible. Svetova's change of heart is
transparently documented in the SPIEGEL.
3. The motive for Magnitsky's arrest
Browder claims that Magnitsky was arrested to force him to withdraw his statements against the police. He was
therefore tortured and murdered. Magnitsky's attorney at the time presented the situation differently right from the
start.
Dmitrij Kharitonov told SPIEGEL in autumn 2009 that his client was only a hostage, and that the
authorities actually wanted to put pressure on Bill Browder
(click here for the
article
).
Kharitonov has used the phrase "hostage" more often. In an interview with the Russian edition of Forbes magazine,
he reported that Magnitsky said about himself in court: "Your honor, I was actually taken hostage. My person hardly
interests anyone, everyone is interested in the person of the Hermitage chiefs."(
Russian
text
).
Human rights activist Soya Svetova also argued in a similar fashion in an interview with SPIEGEL this summer.
Svetova
: The figure Magnitsky combines the two greatest grievances in the Russian judiciary and
the Russian investigative system. If a lawsuit is opened against a company and it is not possible to arrest its boss,
then they take his assistant or his deputy or simply a colleague hostage. We see that in many cases: It was the same
with Mikhail Khodorkovsky's group Yukos (??). First, they take hostages. Magnitsky was also a hostage. He was of no
interest to anyone, they wanted Browder.
SPIEGEL
: Although the Russian authorities had just thrown Browder out of the country.
Svetova
: You wanted Magnitsky to tell you what terrible things Browder did. They wanted him to
discredit him, that he was a fraud and tax evader. Even though they stole his companies from him.
Svetova has represented this position several times, in 2014, for example, "
Radio
Liberty
".
In the 2009 text report co-authored by Svetova, evidence is given that investigators, together with the prison
authorities, put pressure on Magnitsky. The report also contains a corresponding quote from Magnitsky. His conditions
of detention had deteriorated in coordination with the investigator of the case against him, Oleg Siltschenko.
Their
goal is "that I accept false accusations, burden myself and others". There is no mention of Browder's claim that
Magnitsky should have revoked his statements.
The Russian original of the report is available on Browder's website (
PDF
). While
the Russian text does not contain the name of the investigator Kuznetsov, the English translation also published on
Browder's website expressly refers to him
(
PDF
).
[LK: Browder posted the version with his forged paragraph at the top of page 3 to his
website
and distributed it to media, including to the
Wall Street Journal
,
which has it on its website. The
translation
filed in U.S. federal court in the Prevezon case does not have that paragraph.]
4. The alleged evidence of a targeted murder plot
As alleged evidence of his thesis of targeted murder, Browder cites photos of hematomas on the dead man's
hands. Some may have been handcuffed, others may have been from Magnitsky's desperate punches on a door. A fatal
injury cannot be seen in the pictures
.
This does not preclude Magnitsky from being killed by external violence, but
there is no evidence of a
targeted murder by beating eight prison guards over an hour and 18 minutes, as Browder has variously claimed.
The contradicting information about the cause of death of the Russian authorities is disturbing, it is not
sufficient evidence for a targeted murder. The use of a rubber stick was also mentioned in the SPIEGEL text.
[LK:
Again, that is incorrect, there is no evidence of use of a truncheon. And consider, do American police who beat up
prisoners write that in reports?]
5. Magnitsky's alleged statements against police officers Karpov and Kusnezov
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of embezzling the true content of Sergei Magnitsky's statements. That in fact, Magnitsky
clearly named police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov as guilty in the statements before his arrest.
Nowhere in the two documents does Magnitsky raise a direct personal accusation against Karpov and
Kusnezov.
6. The role of the police officer Karpov in the Magnitsky case
Browder accuses SPIEGEL of spreading Pavel Karpov's claim that it has nothing to do with Magnitsky's death and tax
fraud. However, it is part of the journalistic due diligence to give people who have been charged with serious crimes
the opportunity to comment. This also applies to Karpov.
Magnitsky's lawyer Dmitry Kharitonov has emphasized several times (for example
here
in
conversation with the Russian radio station Echo Moscow) that Pavel Karpov played no role in the prosecution of his
client.
Kharitonov repeated this statement to SPIEGEL twice. Human rights activist Soja Svetova also said in
the summer of 2019 with a view to Karpov: "But there is no evidence that Karpov put pressure on him (Magnitsky)."
In addition,
the London High Court has also
found
that
Browder's allegations against Karpov are insufficiently substantiated.
7. The question of money
The SPIEGEL report does not go any further into the course of
the $230 million fraud, of which Browder
complains.
He refers to the findings of US investigators in the New York trial (
PDF
).
LK: The Justice Department acted as Browder's proxy lawyer. Its chief investigator
admitted
under oath that he got all his information from Browder and "the internet." The complaint filed by
U.S. attorney Preet Bharara is full of fabrications and should not be believed.
However, this case is less clear than Browder claims. The responsible US investigator had to admit in a
survey that his findings are based solely on statements and documents from Browder and his team.
The process
ended with a compromise. The Russian Kazyv clan – accused by Browder of profiting from tax fraud – has enforced the
express written note that it has nothing to do with the Magnitsky case.
Browder has been interviewed in the case. Under oath, he is unable to explain how he and his people
followed the cash flows.
Video recordings of the statement have landed on Youtube, the transcript is
available on Pacer.gov, an electronic database for documents from US proceedings.
Browder was able to take a comprehensive position on SPIEGEL on all of the points covered in the report, including
two talks each lasting two hours in summer.
SPIEGEL also sent questions to Browder on November 21 that go beyond the text previously
published. Browder didn't respond.
USSR, Yugoslavia, US, EU, and the Indian Union are predicated on the ideas of the
Enlightenment Tradition. So far, USSR and FRY have disintegrated. If EU fails, could US and
EU be too far behind. In US, we have the political ascendancy of foolish Protestantism, in
India that of Hindu masses.
Can any states, predicated on secularism of the Enlightenment Tradition survive the rise
of religious politics?
"... A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become America's as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This "Israelification" of U.S. policy may prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it's not likely to be good for the United States. ..."
"... Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing what he calls his "vision of peace" in June 2009: "If we get a guarantee of demilitarization we are ready to agree to a real peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state." The inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, if armed and sufficiently angry, can certainly annoy Israel. But they cannot destroy it or do it serious harm. By any measure, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) wield vastly greater power than the Palestinians can possibly muster. Still, from Netanyahu's perspective, "real peace" becomes possible only if Palestinians guarantee that their putative state will forego even the most meager military capabilities. Your side disarms, our side stays armed to the teeth: that's Netanyahu's vision of peace in a nutshell. ..."
Peace means different things to different governments and different countries. To some it
suggests harmony based on tolerance and mutual respect. To others it serves as a euphemism for
dominance, peace defining the relationship between the strong and the supine.
In the absence of actually existing peace, a nation's reigning definition of peace
shapes its proclivity to use force. A nation committed to peace-as-harmony will tend to employ
force as a last resort. The United States once subscribed to this view. Or beyond the confines
of the Western Hemisphere, it at least pretended to do so.
A nation seeking peace-as-dominion will use force more freely. This has long been an Israeli
predilection. Since the end of the Cold War and especially since 9/11, however, it has become
America's as well. As a consequence, U.S. national-security policy increasingly conforms to
patterns of behavior pioneered by the Jewish state. This "Israelification" of U.S. policy may
prove beneficial for Israel. Based on the available evidence, it's not likely to be good for
the United States.
Here is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu describing what he calls his "vision of
peace" in June 2009: "If we get a guarantee of demilitarization we are ready to agree to a real
peace agreement, a demilitarized Palestinian state side by side with the Jewish state." The
inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank, if armed and sufficiently angry, can certainly annoy
Israel. But they cannot destroy it or do it serious harm. By any measure, the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF) wield vastly greater power than the Palestinians can possibly muster. Still, from
Netanyahu's perspective, "real peace" becomes possible only if Palestinians guarantee that
their putative state will forego even the most meager military capabilities. Your side disarms,
our side stays armed to the teeth: that's Netanyahu's vision of peace in a nutshell.
Netanyahu asks a lot of Palestinians. Yet however baldly stated, his demands reflect
longstanding Israeli thinking. For Israel, peace derives from security, which must be absolute
and assured. Security thus defined requires not simply military advantage but military
supremacy .
From Israel's perspective, threats to supremacy require anticipatory action , the
earlier the better. The IDF attack on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 provides one
especially instructive example. Israel's destruction of a suspected Syrian nuclear facility in
2007 provides a second.
Yet alongside perceived threat, perceived opportunity can provide sufficient motive for
anticipatory action. In 1956 and again in 1967, Israel attacked Egypt not because the
blustering Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser possessed the capability (even if he proclaimed the
intention) of destroying the hated Zionists, but because preventive war seemingly promised a
big Israeli pay-off. In the first instance, the Israelis came away empty-handed. In the second,
they hit the jackpot operationally, albeit with problematic strategic consequences.
For decades, Israel relied on a powerful combination of tanks and fighter-bombers as its
preferred instrument of preemption. In more recent times, however, it has deemphasized its
swift sword in favor of the shiv between the ribs. Why deploy lumbering armored columns when a
missile launched from an Apache attack helicopter or a bomb fixed to an Iranian scientist's car
can do the job more cheaply and with less risk? Thus has targeted assassination eclipsed
conventional military methods as the hallmark of the Israeli way of war.
Whether using tanks to conquer or assassins to liquidate, adherence to this
knee-to-the-groin paradigm has won Israel few friends in the region and few admirers around the
world (Americans notably excepted). The likelihood of this approach eliminating or even
diminishing Arab or Iranian hostility toward Israel appears less than promising. That said, the
approach has thus far succeeded in preserving and even expanding the Jewish state: more than 60
years after its founding, Israel persists and even prospers. By this rough but not
inconsequential measure, the Israeli security concept has succeeded. Okay, it's nasty: but so
far at least, it's worked.
What's hard to figure out is why the United States would choose to follow Israel's path. Yet
over the course of the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama quarter-century, that's precisely what we've
done. The pursuit of global military dominance, a proclivity for preemption, a growing taste
for assassination -- all justified as essential to self-defense. That pretty much describes
ourpresent-day MO.
Israel is a small country with a small population and no shortage of hostile neighbors. Ours
is a huge country with an enormous population and no enemy, unless you count the
Cuban-Venezuelan Axis of Ailing Dictators, within several thousand miles. We have choices that
Israel does not. Yet in disregarding those choices the United States has stumbled willy-nilly
into an Israeli-like condition of perpetual war, with peace increasingly tied to unrealistic
expectations of adversaries and would-be adversaries acquiescing in Washington's will.
Israelification got its kick-start with George H.W. Bush's Operation Desert Storm, a
triumphal Hundred-Hour War likened at the time to Israel's triumphal Six-Day War. Victory over
the "fourth largest army in the world" fostered illusions of the United States exercising
perpetually and on a global scale military primacy akin to what Israel has exercised
regionally. Soon thereafter, the Pentagon announced that henceforth it would settle for nothing
less than "Full Spectrum Dominance."
Bill Clinton's contribution to the process was to normalize the use of force. During the
several decades of the Cold War, the U.S. had resorted to overt armed intervention only
occasionally. Although difficult today to recall, back then whole years might pass without U.S.
troops being sent into harm's way. Over the course of Clinton's two terms in office, however,
intervention became commonplace.
The average Israeli had long since become inured to reports of IDF incursions into southern
Lebanon or Gaza. Now the average American has become accustomed to reports of U.S. troops
battling Somali warlords, supervising regime change in Haiti, or occupying the Balkans. Yet the
real signature of the Clinton years came in the form of airstrikes. Blasting targets in
Afghanistan, Bosnia, Serbia, and Sudan, but above all in Iraq, became the functional equivalent
of Israel's reliance on airpower to punish "terrorists" from standoff ranges.
In the wake of 9/11, George W. Bush, a true believer in Full Spectrum Dominance, set out to
liberate or pacify (take your pick) the Islamic world. The United States followed Israel in
assigning itself the prerogative of waging preventive war. Although it depicted Saddam Hussein
as an existential threat, the Bush administration also viewed Iraq as an opportunity: here the
United States would signal to other recalcitrants the fate awaiting them should they mess with
Uncle Sam.
More subtly, in going after Saddam, Bush was tacitly embracing a longstanding Israeli
conception of deterrence. During the Cold War, deterrence had meant conveying a credible threat
to dissuade your opponent from hostile action. Israel had never subscribed to that view.
Influencing the behavior of potential adversaries required more than signaling what Israel
might do if sufficiently aggravated; influence was exerted by punitive action, ideally
delivered on a disproportionate scale. Hit the other guy first, if possible; failing that,
whack him several times harder than he hit you: not the biblical injunction of an eye for an
eye, but both eyes, an ear, and several teeth, with a kick in the nuts thrown in for good
measure. The aim was to send a message: screw with us and this will happen to you. This is the
message Bush intended to convey when he ordered the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Unfortunately, Operation Iraqi Freedom, launched with all the confidence that had informed
Operation Peace for Galilee, Israel's equally ill-advised 1982 incursion into Lebanon, landed
the United States in an equivalent mess. Or perhaps a different comparison applies: the U.S.
occupation of Iraq triggered violent resistance akin to what the IDF faced as a consequence of
Israel occupying the West Bank. Two successive Intifadas had given the Israeli army fits. The
insurgency in Iraq (along with its Afghan sibling) gave the American army fits. Neither the
Israeli nor the American reputation for martial invincibility survived the encounter.
By the time Barack Obama succeeded Bush in 2009, most Americans -- like most Israelis -- had
lost their appetite for invading and occupying countries. Obama's response? Hew ever more
closely to the evolving Israeli way of doing things. "Obama wants to be known for winding down
long wars," writes Michael Gerson in the Washington Post. "But he has shown no hesitance
when it comes to shorter, Israel-style operations. He is a special ops hawk, a drone
militarist."
Just so: with his affinity for missile-firing drones, Obama has established targeted
assassination as the very centerpiece of U.S. national-security policy. With his affinity for
commandos, he has expanded the size and mandate of U.S. Special Operations Command, which now
maintains an active presence in more than 70 countries. In Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, and
the frontier regions of Pakistan -- and who knows how many other far-flung places -- Obama
seemingly shares Prime Minister Netanyahu's expectations: keep whacking and a positive outcome
will eventually ensue.
The government of Israel, along with ardently pro-Israel Americans like Michael Gerson, may
view the convergence of U.S. and Israeli national-security practices with some satisfaction.
The prevailing U.S. definition of self-defense -- a self-assigned mandate to target anyone
anywhere thought to endanger U.S. security -- is exceedingly elastic. As such, it provides a
certain cover for equivalent Israeli inclinations. And to the extent that our roster of enemies
overlaps with theirs -- did someone say Iran? -- military action ordered by Washington just
might shorten Jerusalem's "to do" list.
Yet where does this all lead? "We don't have enough drones," writes the columnist David
Ignatius, "to kill all the enemies we will make if we turn the world into a free-fire zone."
And if Delta Force, the Green Berets, army rangers, Navy SEALs, and the like constitute (in the
words of one SEAL) "the dark matter the force that orders the universe but can't be seen," we
probably don't have enough of them either. Unfortunately, the Obama administration seems
willing to test both propositions.
The process of aligning U.S. national-security practice with Israeli precedents is now
essentially complete. Their habits are ours. Reversing that process would require stores of
courage and imagination that may no longer exist in Washington. Given the reigning domestic
political climate, those holding or seeking positions of power find it easier -- and less risky
-- to stay the course, vainly nursing the hope that by killing enough "terrorists" peace on
terms of our choosing will result. Here too the United States has succumbed to Israeli
illusions.
Andrew J. Bacevich is a visiting professor at the University of Notre
Dame.
The infinity war We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? The infinity war We say
we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? Sam Ward (For The Washington Post) By Samuel Moyn
and Stephen Wertheim December 13, 2019
Add to list On my list
Now we know, thanks to
The
Afghanistan Papers published in The Washington Post this past week, that U.S. policymakers doubted almost from the start that
the two-decade-long Afghanistan war could ever succeed. Officials didn't know who the enemy was and had little sense of what an achievable
"victory" might look like. "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," said Douglas Lute, the Army three-star
general who oversaw the conflict from the White House during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
And yet the war ground on, as if on autopilot. Obama inherited a conflict of which Bush had grown weary, and victory drew no closer
after Obama's troop "surge" than when Bush pursued a small-footprint conflict. But while the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 during
the Vietnam War, led a generation to appreciate the perils of warmaking, a new generation may
squander this opportunity
to set things right. There is a reason the quagmire in Afghanistan, despite costing thousands of lives and
$2 trillion
, has failed to shock Americans into action: The United States for decades has made peace look unimaginable or unobtainable.
We have normalized war.
President Trump sometimes disrupts the pattern by
vowing to end America's "endless
wars." But he has
extended and escalated them at every turn, offering nakedly punitive and exploitative rationales. In September, on the cusp of
a peace deal with the Taliban, he discarded an agreement negotiated by his administration and
pummeled
Afghanistan harder than ever (now he's back to wanting to talk). In Syria, his promised military withdrawal has morphed into
a grotesque redeployment to
"secure" the country's
oil .
It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond the proclivities of the current president,
or the previous one, or the next. The United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world.
The ideal of peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of the Cold War offered
an unparalleled opportunity to advance the cause. But U.S. leaders from both parties chose another path. War -- from drone strikes
and Special Operations raids to protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in practice
and even in aspiration.
Given World War II, Korea, Vietnam and many smaller conflicts throughout the Western Hemisphere, no one has ever mistaken the
United States for Switzerland. Still, the pursuit of peace is an authentic American tradition that has shaped U.S. conduct and the
international order. At its founding, the United States resolved to steer clear of the system of war in Europe and build a "new world"
free of violent rivalry, as Alexander Hamilton put it
.
Indeed, Americans shrank from playing a fully global role until 1941 in part because they saw themselves as emissaries of peace
(even as the United States conquered Native American land, policed its hemisphere and took Pacific colonies). U.S. leaders sought
either to remake international politics along peaceful lines -- as Woodrow Wilson proposed after World War I -- or to avoid getting
entangled in the squabbles of a fallen world. And when America embraced global leadership after World War II, it felt compelled to
establish the United Nations to halt the "scourge of war," as
the U.N. Charter says right at the
start. At America's urging, the organization outlawed the use of force, except where authorized by its Security Council or used in
self-defense.
Even when the United States dishonored that ideal in the years that followed, peace remained potent as a guiding principle. Vietnam
provoked a broad-based antiwar movement. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) to tame the imperial presidency. Such opposition
to war is scarcely to be found today. (The Iraq War inspired massive protests, but they are a distant memory.) Consider that the
United States has undertaken more armed interventions since the end of the Cold War than during it. According to the Congressional
Research Service, more than 80 percent of all of the country's
adventures abroad since 1946 came after 1989. Congress, whether under Democratic or Republican control, has allowed commanders in
chief to claim the right to begin wars and continue them in perpetuity.
Legal constraints on U.S. warmaking -- including international obligations, domestic statutes and constitutional duties -- ought
to have returned to the fore after the Cold War, the rationale for America's vast mobilization in the second half of the 20th century.
Instead, they have eroded to dust. At the outset of the 1990s, as President George H.W. Bush promised a
"peace dividend" for Americans and a "peaceful international
order" for all, the United States did rely more faithfully than before on Security Council approval for military operations.
The Persian Gulf War, blessed by the United Nations to repel Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was legal under international law. But
enthralled by its exorbitant primacy in world affairs, the United States turned away from international prohibitions on war, finding
the rules too restricting.
The next two presidents, attracted to liberal internationalist and neoconservative creeds that embraced armed force, treated international
law cavalierly. Bill Clinton abused U.N. resolutions meant to control Saddam Hussein's weaponry to justify new attacks, including
the bombing of Iraq in December 1998. The next year, the U.S.-led NATO operations in Kosovo suggested that America would unleash
its military for ostensibly noble causes -- in this case to prevent heart-rending atrocity -- even without the pretense of legality.
Despite failing to obtain U.N. approval, the Clinton administration said the intervention should not be treated as a precedent (though
it became one). Others excused it as "illegal but legitimate," with self-professed moral intentions permissibly trumping law. "For
the purpose of stopping genocide," commented
the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, "the use of force is not a last resort; it is a first resort."
Once such arguments gained currency, their authors lost control of them. Conservative hawks found that a law-optional approach
suited their agenda as well, and their liberal counterparts, if they disagreed at all, did so mostly as a matter of tactics, not
principle. George W. Bush benefited from this permissive context when he launched the Iraq War, whose
illegality was
flagrant and catalytic, since it was unauthorized by the United Nations and
relied on the administration's dangerous claim that "anticipatory
self-defense" justifies invasion. The world took notice. Russia, in particular, seized on the new U.S. position as a
spectacular excuse to make incursions of its own in
Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.
Obama won election in part because he ran against the Iraq War. In office, however, he cemented more than reversed America's disregard
of international constraints on warmaking. While failing to end the war in Afghanistan, his administration
exceeded the Security Council's authorization
by working to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, converting a permission slip to avert atrocity into a blank check for regime
change. Then, to punish the Islamic State, Obama bombed Syria on a contrived
rationale
-- one that allowed attacks against nations unwilling or unable to control terrorists on their territory. When he nearly struck
again in response to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, Obama
laid the legal
foundation for Trump to strike the Syrian government, again without a U.N. sign-off. Once highly valued, then defied only with
controversy, international law now scarcely figures in U.S. decisions of war and peace.
Like international law, U.S. domestic law enshrines an expectation of peace, setting a high bar for the resort to war. If war
is to be waged, the Constitution requires Congress to declare it -- a purposeful grant of authority to the branch of government that
best reflects the diverse interests of the people and therefore should be harder to rouse to conflict than one commander in chief.
Yet the nation has drifted from that tradition, too. After defaulting on its constitutional obligation during the Cold War (partly
on the grounds that the speed of a potential nuclear strike required a president who could respond quickly), Congress declined to
reassert its authority after the Soviet threat passed.
In the 1990s, Congress might at least have kept faith with the WPR, which it passed in 1973 to rein in future presidents. The
resolution calls for Congress to authorize "hostilities" within 60 days of their start; otherwise U.S. forces must withdraw. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, members of the House of Representatives
brought presidents to
court for taking military action in violation
of the statute -- in El Salvador
, the Persian Gulf War and
Kosovo , for example. But advocates of the strategy
all but gave up, and Congress itself increasingly deferred to presidential wars in the age of terrorism. By the time Obama intervened
in Libya, the WPR lay in tatters. In a final indignity during the Libya operation, one administration lawyer
explained that "hostilities" was an "
ambiguous term of art
" that might exclude aerial bombardment, so Congress did not need to approve a war that toppled a regime.
This deference has proved costly, allowing Trump to pose as an antiwar candidate against the mainstream of two political parties,
a somnolent Congress and inactive courts. Once in power, this wildly unpredictable chief executive finally clarified the danger of
entrusting the world's mightiest military to one man's whims. Congress has begun to stir. In voting this year to end U.S. involvement
in Yemen's civil war, it invoked the WPR for the first time while forces were active in battle.
President Trump speaks to U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan last month.
though he has pledged to end America's "endless wars,"
Trump, like past presidents, has instead extended them. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Ultimately, elevating peace as a priority will require not merely changing legal norms but overturning the militarized concept
of America's world role that permeates Washington. Somehow, despite waging near-perpetual war, the leaders of the most powerful country
on Earth have convinced themselves that America is always on the brink of turning "isolationist," a peril against which
every president since Ronald
Reagan has warned as their terms wound down. Trump is likely to deviate from that rhetorical tradition, but the rest of the establishment
carries on and doubles down. Today, it is military withdrawals, not destructive deployments, that freak out pundits and spur Cabinet
members to resign, as Jim Mattis
did last year over Trump's vow to pull troops from Syria. Abandoning the Kurds there this fall was Trump's "
great betrayal ," lamented Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, who did not appear to lose sleep over our past
military incursions.
Under Trump, who applies "maximum pressure" to all foes foreign and domestic,
American militarism is more perilous than ever. It is also more undeniable. That is one reason the current moment is surprisingly
hopeful. The call to
end
"endless war" continues to rise on the flanks of both parties, even as it is flouted by leaders of each. More and more Americans
insist that, whatever interests are served by endless war, their own are not. More than
twice as many Americans prefer
to lower than raise military spending, according to a 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation survey.
Veterans support
Trump's pledge to bring Middle East wars to a close: A
majority of vets deem the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria not to have been worth fighting. The Afghanistan Papers ought to
strengthen the consensus. Americans deserve a president who will act accordingly.
The United States would find partners far and wide, in nations great and small, if it put peace first. It could make clear that
while spreading democracy or human rights remains worthwhile, values cannot come at the point of a gun or serve as a pretext for
war -- and that international peace is, in fact, a condition for human flourishing. Every time Washington searches for a monster
to destroy, it shows the world's despots how to abuse the rules and hands demagogues a phantom to inflate. The alternative is not
"isolationism" but something closer to the opposite: peaceful, lawful international cooperation against the major threats to humanity,
including climate change, pandemic disease and widespread deprivation. Those are the enemies worth fighting, and bombs and bullets
will not defeat them.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce professor of jurisprudence and professor of history at Yale University and a fellow of the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Stephen Wertheim is deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute
for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University
Follow @samuelmoyn and @stephenwertheim
(Note from the Editor – Over 20 years ago, I was working for a company while endeavoring to build a church in California [preachers
need to work many times] and in the process we worked on a transaction of enormous size – $26.5 Trillion Dollars and it was deeply
involved with the CIA and our Government. It was under code name "Project Hammer" and the actual code word for the project was "EFG
Jacobi." After the deal closed the US Government froze the money. Many people don't realize that they have two sets of books, one
for the public and one for their clandestine operations around the world. We never got paid. I met Ambassador Lee Wanta (
http://eagleonetowanta.com ) about this time and since we had similar experiences
with the Government theft of funds meant for the American People, I have stayed in touch with him for many years. This article is
from http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/sociopolitica/projecthammerreload/titlepage1.htm
written by David Guyatt who has intimate knowledge of these matters as the article will show. I kept a daily log on this for
8 years until we felt it would never pay out. Ambassador Wanta has a Court Order to release his money but powers are still refusing
to do so. We are attempting to arrange a meetingh with him and President Trump so the new Treasury Secretary can seize the funds
he has [$32.5 Trillion] which will pay off the national debt and finance the infrastructure for this country. There is a desperate
attempt in the ESTABLISHMENT, the Democrat Party, some Republicans, and the Main Streem Media to divert our attention from the true
story that you can read here and on the website of the Ambassador.)
Beginning in 1988 and lasting until approximately 1992, "
Project Hammer " was the latest
in a series of highly secretive banking practices – known as "collateral trading" programs – that are used to create, as if by magic,
huge amounts of unaccountable funds for use in specific projects.
These vast pools of unvouchered slush funds are applied to finance a wide variety of clandestine activities that include:
secret military projects
geo-political requirements
development of infrastructure projects
It is also whispered that, in the case of the Project Hammer program at least, a percentage of the proceeds generated from this
secretive activity found its way into the pockets of VIPs and well-known politicians.
Names associated with such corrupt behavior are carried on the wind; but if one listens attentively, the names
George Bush, Sr , and Jim
Baker
III are just discernible to the trained ear.
An example of the type of project on which these funds are expended is the trading programme known as "EFG Jacobi" – a predecessor
of Hammer – that I understand was used largely to finance military facilities and related operations at the
top-secret US base located at Pine Gap near
Alice Springs in central Australia.
In order to maintain the secrecy that surrounds genuine activity, these trading programmes are routinely said not to exist. Enquiries
about them are deflected and attention is instead focused on the warnings issued by government agencies about fake programmes. This,
when combined with the numerous prosecutions that occur every year over fraudulent High Yield Investment Programme transactions,
serves to create the impression that authorized programmes do not occur.
The reasons for this deflection are many, but not least is the fact that the asset bases on which these programmes usually operate
are also said not to exist – at least in the quantities that they actually do. The assets in question are large volumes of gold and
lesser amounts of platinum plundered by the Nazis and Japanese during World War II.
The fact that gold has been the one stable commodity used to back and support the issuance of currency over the decades means
that it has been subject to considerable government and central bank secrecy. It was only in 1997 that the Bank of England decided
to lift this veil of secrecy and allow the London bullion market a degree of openness. But that openness did not include coming clean
about the true amount of gold in existence, which is far larger than official figures allow.
Because of this and the extremely covert nature of related trading programmes, comprehensive details of the programmes' operations
and the financing techniques employed have remained hidden from public view. At least this was the case prior to the publication
of part one of this series,
The Project Hammer File .
1 This essay is the result
of further examination of the techniques and activity of Project Hammer, and now places additional important material into the public
domain.
Project Hammer 2
(Reloaded ) remains a high-level state secret in a number of countries including the USA. This was confirmed de facto by the
CIA in its refusal to release any relevant information following my Freedom of Information Act request in February 2001. The exemption
used by the CIA to reject my request was that relevant material is "properly classified pursuant to an Executive Order in the interest
of national defense or foreign policy".
2
Project Hammer also stands out because proceeds from the trading activity were illegally diverted by major banks. Confirmation
of this is provided by Brigadier-General
Erle Cocke in his April 2000 affidavit . In this, General Cocke was asked about the involvement of former US Treasury Secretary
Lloyd Bentsen, who was retained to investigate what had happened to (and also to recover) the missing funds.
Asked if Bentsen "had the government's interest in closing this whole problem" and if he had "ever had a discussion" with Bentsen,
Cocke replied:
Many hours just trying to find out whether any agency, any group, Federal Reserve, Treasury, CIA, FBI, security agencies, and
so forth, all of them put together, whether any of which would really like to finish. And, quite frankly, nobody stepped up to
the plate.
Cocke was then asked if "they would like to finish it", and he responded:
I think they would like to finish it, but they all back away. It is not my cup of tea, or they have spent enough time with
it and are not going to realize anything, and therefore they just quit. They don't confirm, they don't deny, they just stop.
One can conclude that the banks that diverted this money were too powerful for any agency of the US government to tackle. It also
helped that suitable and substantial "incentives" were provided to former high-level Bush (Sr) Administration figures to bring their
influence to bear quietly to ensure that action against the banks was not taken.
Although not part of the sanctioned plan for Project Hammer – which was to generate funds to pay off debts on bullion certificates
issued by certain metal trusts – the funds were siphoned off surreptitiously in order to rescue numerous major US and other banks
that by the latter half of the 1980s were tottering on the brink of bankruptcy.
3
The banks only had themselves to blame for their imminent collapse. Reckless lending to Third World nations for over a decade
or more, combined with the raw greed of senior bank executives, had caused unparalleled damage to the world's banking system. The
inability of indebted Third World nations to repay their massive debts could have been – in fact, was – foreseen, but was ignored.
The spiral of gluttony had taken prisoner the faculty of prudence and reason as bank executives, seeking their next bonus and
promotion, pleaded with sovereign nations to take loans they did not need and ultimately could not repay. Nor was it unusual for
some of the funds on loan to find their way into the private bank accounts of corrupt state officials – "diversions" that were known
about in the boardrooms of the top banks, but ignored as "business as usual".
By the end of the 1980s, big banks including Citibank, Chase Manhattan, the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC),
England's Midland Bank and many, many others were in dire straits. In all but name, they were bankrupt. The possibility of a prolonged
series of collapses of the world's top banks – a sort of "domino theory" of finance – was regarded in some quarters with palpable
fear. The entire Western banking system was rocking when it should have been rolling along nicely.
Somewhere, someone – nobody knows who (or at least no one is saying) – took the decision to bail out the banks and save the banking
system by diverting Project Hammer funds for this purpose. Those banking executives who caused the problem in the first place weren't
confronted by their mistakes or held to account by their shareholders but, instead, continued to collect their million-dollar pay
cheques, boost their bonus payments and profit shares, flick ash off their Cuban cigars, quaff bottles of expensive Cheval Blanc
and slap each other on the back in delighted relief.
One of those sighing relief was almost certainly Citibank's John Reed.
Another
one quite likely to have been cultivating a quiet exhalation was Hongkong and Shanghai Bank boss Sir William Purvis.
Meanwhile, many investors who had placed their money into Project Hammer in return for an agreed profit, as well as all those middle-men
who had worked hard for their promised commission, were relieved of their money in a twisted version of the well-known axiom, "One
man's loss is another banker's gain".
STEALING FROM THIEVES
The sanctioned purpose of Project Hammer was of a macro-economic nature, which is a nice way of saying that it was all to do with
"repatriating" the assets stolen earlier by someone else – except that when nations steal valuable assets during wartime, it's called
"plunder"; but when the victors in that war grab those same assets, they call it "recovery".
The assets in question were a vast horde of gold and lesser quantities of platinum plus not inconsiderable amounts of loose gemstones
which had been grabbed by the Nazis and the Japanese during World War II.
A large volume of this loot found its way to the Philippines where it was hidden in numerous treasure sites by the Japanese occupiers,
who planned to recover it after the war.
But it didn't quite work out the way the Japanese had planned. They lost the war, along with the Philippines – which, it seems,
they had been fairly confident of being allowed to keep in a negotiated truce with the Allies.
In their place, the OSS – the wartime forerunner of America's spy agency, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – began recovering
the bullion plundered from a dozen or so nations. This bullion formed what became known as the "Black Eagle" fund, which was part
of a secret agreement eclipsed behind the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement.
Consequently, the metal was placed under the care of OSS (and later CIA) operative Severino Garcia Santa Romana, who put it under
the control of numerous corporate entities he formed for the purpose. These entities, in turn, proceeded to establish 176 bank accounts
in 42 different countries in which to deposit these assets under private treaty agreement.
Confirmation of this came from General Cocke, after this was put to him:
"I have been advised that a chunk of the Hammer Project funds that were used to trade, to invest and reinvest, came from a
large block of assets that CIA put into the bank [Citibank]." Cocke replied: "And they pulled that several times from several
sources. Nobody is going to confirm it."
4
Santa Romana died in 1974, and following his death his former attorney and trustee was able to "acquire" considerable portions
of Santa Romana's estate by illicit means.
The lawyer was Ferdinand Marcos, who went on to become President of the Philippines and a favorite friend of the United States
until his overthrow in 1986. The acquisition of these assets helped give rise to stories of "Marcos gold" – a legend that was supplemented
by additional later recoveries of WWII gold and other loot using a Filipino Army battalion under the overall command of Marcos henchman
General Fabian Ver.
But Marcos was not the sole illegitimate beneficiary of war loot once controlled by Santa Romana.
Another was the late Baron Krupp who, I have
been told, also gained access to some of these assets. Meanwhile, it is worth mentioning that Santa Romana, prior to his death, was
apparently associated with former US President and head of the CIA,
George H. W. Bush , and "had some contact" with Jeb
Bush, the Governor of Florida.
In any event, this bullion has collectively given rise to a whole class of gold and platinum certificates issued over the decades,
mainly by top-drawer European banks.
(See the history of the Global Collateral Accounts HERE
)
The certificates bear the names of prominent, and in some cases infamous, individuals – usually heads of state – as beneficiaries.
However, these named owners were and are not the legal beneficiaries but, rather, were cat's-paws used to muddy the waters concerning
the true origin of the bullion. Nor did the banks that held the assets own them, but they could and did use them in support of their
off-balance sheet activity – to the point of irresponsibility.
It should not be forgotten that this gold and platinum hoard was stolen and that, under international law, every effort should
have been made to return it to its rightful owners – rather than secretly stash it in bank vaults for use in Cold War covert operations.
And although it can reasonably be argued that the true owners could never be traced – since the greater quantity of the bullion was
privately owned (rather than being central bank bullion) – it is clear that the ends dictated the means.
And even though numerous nations around the world were to benefit from post-war reconstruction based on the use and application
of this war booty, the price of this apparent largesse was for these nations to be moulded into Uncle Sam's image. As they say in
America's boardrooms, "There's no such thing as a free lunch".
In examining the techniques employed in setting up Project Hammer, one is struck not just by the complexity of it but also by
the way the banks and intelligence agencies involved structured things to shield themselves from responsibility (and lawsuits, no
doubt) by utilizing subterranean networks, each working at "arm's length".
Piecing these techniques and networks together has been an arduous, painstaking task, but the process has further unveiled a shadow
world of parallel finance usually only known to those initiated into it.
THE EMPIRE STATE CONNECTION
During his April 2000 deposition, just days before his death from cancer, Brigadier-General Erle Cocke, when asked about the overall
objective of Project Hammer, replied:
Well, it was mainly to bring back monies to the United States from all types of activities, both legitimately and illegitimately.
Not that they were in the smuggling business per se, but they were all in the arms business, they were all retracing dollars of
one description or another that had accumulated all through the '40s and '50s, really. And that probably is as broad a definition
as I can give you
General Cocke then added that involvement in
Project Hammer extended to:
the CIA, the FBI, the National Security Agencies of all types, Pentagon in the broad sense of it and as such, the Treasury,
Federal Reserve. Nobody got out of the act, everybody wanted to get in on the act."
5
Cocke's involvement with clandestine CIA activities dates back many years. At the very least, he is known to have been involved
with the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank. For example, US Treasury records obtained by veteran journalist and author Jonathan Kwitny show Cocke
as the registered "person in charge" of Nugan Hand's Washington office.
6
Cocke also indicated in his affidavit that he was regularly contacted by the CIA for expert assistance over the years and was
usually debriefed by them following overseas travel. Despite this, a Freedom of Information Act request to the CIA made on behalf
of this writer was dismissed with the statement that "no records responsive to your request were located" – which is not entirely
the same thing as saying that no records exist.
7
It also appears that the CIA is not the only one that cares to deny knowledge of General Cocke. Another is former Citibank CEO
and Chairman John Reed, who, in a sworn affidavit dated 5 December 2000, stated he had "no knowledge of any persons named Erle Cocke,
Jr, or Barrie D. Wamboldt". Both the CIA and Citibank's John Reed hold at least one major advantage over General Cocke: they are
alive and he is dead; and while it is true that the dead can't lie, it is also true that they can't rebut anyone's testimony–sworn
or otherwise. 8
In his deposition, Cocke states that although he had never "met" John Reed, he had attempted on numerous occasions to speak with
him, but was continually rejected:
We did our best to make the normal approaches, but I can see the President of the United States with no trouble. I cannot see
Reed. 9
The "we" Cocke was referring to, besides himself, was Paul Green, a "long-time real estate lawyer in New York" with "50 years
practice", who "had done most of his real estate dealings through Citibank".
10
Green also did some of his banking business with Citibank at its Fifth Avenue, New York, branch under account FOCUS #946 963 94.
According to Cocke, Paul Green was an outside counsel for Citibank and went back,
"30-odd years with large transactions through that bank, buying and selling big buildings. He was very much involved buying
and selling the Empire State Building one time."
11
Asked if Green was involved in the purchase and sale of collateral instruments, Cocke replied:
Probably not as an individual. But he represented the clients that certainly wanted to do the same thing.
12
News in late March 2003 revealed that the Empire State Building had just been sold by casino king Donald Trump and the heirs of
shady Japanese billionaire Hideki Yokoi for US$57.5 million.
Yokoi (who, at the time, was serving a prison sentence and had secretly negotiated the transaction through a middleman) and his
partner Trump had gained ownership of the building in 1991 for US$42 million. Little is known about Yokoi's World War II activities.
The building last changed hands four decades earlier in 1961, when it was acquired by real estate tycoon Harry Helmsley from the
Prudential Insurance Company in a sale-leaseback deal. The world-renowned skyscraper was built on land owned by the
Astor family and sold to
the DuPonts in 1929.
Construction of the Empire State Building began in 1930. John Jacob Astor was one of the first Americans to become involved in
the opium trade, from which his later fortune derived. This he invested in Manhattan real estate. The architects of the Empire State
Building were Shreve, Lamb & Harmon Associates – designers of One Bankers Trust Plaza, the HQ of Bankers Trust, together with
the Credit Lyonnais building in New York City.
It is of more than passing interest that one law firm represents many of the "actors" who appear in this story. That firm is White
& Case. Amongst numerous notable achievements listed on its website background/history is its representation of the DuPont Group
in its sale of the Empire State Building in 1954 for the princely sum of US$51.5 million.
As we noted earlier, almost 40 years later, in 1991, the building sold for the less than princely sum of US$42 million. I am not
certain how the real estate investors define investment performance over the years, but an aggregate loss of US$9.5 million over
the course of 37 years doesn't usually constitute an investment accomplishment by any standard I know.
13
Meanwhile, a brief review of White & Case's client list tell us that they also represented,
the First National Bank (the forerunner of Citibank)
Seagram Company Ltd of Canada, controlled by the Bronfman family – regarded by some as the kings of the Canadian mafia
15
But White & Case's most "enduring" client is Bankers Trust Company, a J. P. Morgan-controlled bank which the law firm was "centrally
involved" in forming back in 1903.
The ancestor of all trust companies is England's Foreign & Colonial Investment Trust, which dates back to 1868 and was conceived
by one of the foremost legal minds of the day, Lord Westbury. The current Lord Westbury, Richard Bethell, will appear later in this
story.
But first, let's step through the looking glass and examine one of the early Hammer deals, which General Cocke believed:
It was one of the very early transactions, as far as I am concerned, with Hammer. I think he [Dan Hughes] is the one who expanded
Hammer in the sense that we moved from one hundred million [dollars] to a billion-type movement, and now we are doubling, about
a trillion. He is the one who enhanced it, is the best way of saying.
THE HUGHES PORTAL
Dan Hughes , Jr , the nephew of US Representative William J. Hughes from New Jersey, made a considerable fortune in
the construction business in Florida during his early working life.
By the mid-1980s, with paper assets nearing US$100 million, he became involved in collateral trading and by late 1989 entered
the realm of Project Hammer.
During the autumn of 1989, Hughes was approached by Peter Seaman, the President and Chairman of a small investment bank called
Nantucket Holding Company. Seaman had developed an arrangement with Ecoban Limited, a small merchant bank with offices in London
and New York City that specialized in emerging market-debt and the A'forfait market.
16
Seaman, using Nantucket Holding Company , concluded an agreement by which Ecoban would purchase US$100 million worth of
documentary letters of credit issued by the head offices of Citibank NA and the Chase Manhattan Bank NA. Hughes had access to these
bank credits via a US$50 billion "commitment" extended to him by the Bankers Trust Company.
To fund the purchase, Ecoban needed the support of a bank and turned to Midland Bank Aval Limited (MidAval), the forfaiting subsidiary
of Midland Bank Group International Trade Services (MiBGITS).
MidAval, once wholly owned by Midland Bank, had, shortly before commencing with the Hammer transaction, concluded a private agreement
with Sir William Purvis, Chairman of the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation , wherein HSBC purchased a controlling
equity stake in MidAval. This meant that MidAval was 60% owned by HSBC and 40% owned by Midland Bank.
17
Accordingly, on 12 October 1989, MidAval issued a letter agreeing to purchase "$100 million with rolls until funds are exhausted
of documentary letters of credit"
18
An earlier MidAval letter (dated 25 September 1989) stated that they,
"irrevocably commit to purchase the above letters of credit and pay the amount agreed between you and Ecoban Limited ('the
purchase price') to Citibank NA, Lugano".
The reference to "Lugano" was deleted in later letters at the specific request of Nantucket's Peter Seaman, as detailed in his
11 October 1989, letter to Brian Fitzpatrick, the Managing Director of Ecoban Limited. Lugano was of some considerable importance
– as we shall see later – but not least because it was at Union Bank of Switzerland in Lugano where, according to Dan Hughes, the
actual trading of the Hammer programme took place.
Meanwhile, MidAval's letter was addressed to Jardine, Emett & Chandler, New England, Inc., in Boston, USA, which
acted as an agent for MidAval. On the strength of MidAval's signed and authorized letter, Jardine, Emett & Chandler issued its own
"Request for collateral instruments" under its letterhead. This letter, dated 12 October 1989, bore the reference "Midland Bank Aval
Limited for Ecoban Limited".
To close the circle, Dan Hughes had earlier instructed his attorney, Oswald (Ozzie) Howe, Jr, of the Miami law firm Mershon,
Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole , to cause to be issued a sight draft, dated 6 October 1989, drawn on the Southeast Bank NA,
Miami, and payable to Bankers Trust Company, for the sum of US$50,000. A further sight draft was issued in the amount of US$25,000,
at the request of Bankers Trust.
Following this sequence of events, nothing happened and no draws were made against the sight drafts issued by Southeast Bank in
favour of Bankers Trust.
But on 18 October 1989, Hughes received a time and sequence confirmation from Joan Johnson, Vice President and Operations Manager
of the Security Pacific bank in Los Angeles, which Hughes believes activated his transaction through a "back door" arrangement which
would cut him out of his commission.
19 Thereafter, Peter Seaman
point-blank and inexplicably refused to speak with Hughes again.
General Cocke was an experienced banker from a long line of bankers and was a former full-time US representative at the World
Bank.
Intimately familiar with the operational techniques of trading programmes, he was asked:
"Can you explain in a general way how it [Hammer] functioned, that it was a trade programme, for those of us that are not familiar?"
The stock way all big banks, all central banks, change within themselves and curtail their balances, build up their peaks and
then sell it.
He went on to explain that "most of it is done in a four-week program to be technically correct" and involved the trading of banking
instruments – usually known as "collateral" – that are heavily discounted and then sold off.
MAPPING THE COVERT CONNECTIONS
To appreciate the subtleties of how the diversion of this particular "portal" into Project Hammer may have occurred, it is instructive
to look at the connections and associations of the principal players.
20
Ecoban:
In addition to Ecob an Limited in London, there was the affiliated Ecoban Finance Limited that conducted business out
of an address on Third Avenue in New York City.
A one-time President and CEO of Ecoban Finance Limited in New York was Jim Demitrieus, who more recently was the President
and Chief Operating Officer of Ixnet/IPC, which was acquired by Global Crossing in June 2000.
Global Crossing was one of the US firms that recently suffered a spectacular collapse together with Worldcom, Enron and the accountancy
firm Arthur Andersen. All were subjected to a welter of media attention for what was believed to have been unparalleled insider trading
activities by senior executives.
Earlier in his career, Demitrieus,
"served as senior vice president and chief operating officer of the Commodity Division of Drexel Burnham Lambert, Inc., responsible
for the precious metals, energy products, foreign exchange trading subsidiary and institutional brokerage division".
Of interest here is the little known fact that Drexel, Burnham, Lambert, New York , was a recipient of gold bullion from
Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in January 1984.
It is not clear from Mr Demitrieus's available vitae if this was the same time period he was the Senior Vice President of Drexel's
bullion business, but I am informed this is probably the case. Before that, Demitrieus "held senior-level financial positions with
Freeport-McMoRan, ITT and Arthur Andersen".
21
Significantly, Freeport-McMoRan, back when it was Freeport Sulphur , positively heaved with CIA and elite heavy-hitters
– not to mention persistent whispers of its involvement in the recovery of plundered gold stashed in Indonesia, where Freeport had
the world's largest copper mining operation.
Over the years, the Freeport senior management has included such luminaries as Augustus "Gus" Long, Chairman of Texaco, who did
"prodigious volunteer work for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital" – which has been described as a "hotbed of CIA activity".
22
Another director was Robert Lovett, who has been described as a "Cold War architect" and was once an executive at the old Wall
Street bank of Brown Brothers Harriman. He also served as an Under Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of War and Secretary of
Defense. He was a best friend of Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman (and Warren Commission member) John J. McCloy.
The Chase Manhattan and Citibank connection to Freeport was further enhanced by the board appointment of Godfrey Rockefeller,
brother of James Stillman Rockefeller who was appointed Chairman of Citibank (then known as First National City Bank, or FNCB for
short) in 1959. (Note, too, that Chase Manhattan and Citibank are the exact same two banks that were to issue the Project Hammer
documentary letters of credit.)
Godfrey Rockefeller was a one-time trustee of the Fairfield Foundation that financed a variety of CIA "fronts". Meanwhile, Stillman's
cousin, David Rockefeller , was Chairman
of Chase Manhattan and regarded as the "goliath of American banking".
23
By a strange coincidence of fate, it was Robert Lovett and John J. McCloy who, together with Robert B. Anderson, formed Secretary
of War Henry L. Stimson's team of financial experts concerned with tracking WWII gold looted by the Axis powers.
Indeed, Lovett and McCloy were responsible for negotiating the secret agreement hidden behind the Bretton Woods Agreement
concerning the establishment of the Black Eagle trust
that was to make use of plundered WWII bullion in the postwar years.
24
Midland Bank:
When looking at MidAval's parent, Midland Bank Group International Trade Services (MiBGITS), one could do worse than read the
very informative book by former arms company chairman Gerald James, entitled In the Public Interest. James recounts numerous chilling
accounts of Her Majesty's intelligence service MI6's deep involvement with the MiBGITS special defense unit.
Included are details of Stephan Kock, who James claims to have been a former head of the Foreign Office's so-called assassination
squad, Group 13.
Another intelligence-connected individual named in James's book is Sir John Cuckney, who was a non-executive director of Midland
Bank from 1978 until 1988 and was responsible for having formed the defense unit in the first place.
Gerald James and his munitions company Astra also had dealings with, and a private account at, MidAval.
25
Kock's boss at Midland was Comte Herve de Carmoy, a Frenchman and a leading light on the
Trilateral Commission . He left Midland in
1988 to take up the position as the most senior executive of Belgium's massive transnational company, Société Générale.
portrait serre
He was replaced as head of Midland International by John Louden, a multilinguist who had an unfortunate speech impediment – leading
wags in the bank to say of him that he could stutter in seven languages. De Carmoy's departure was followed by that of both Cuckney
and Kock, after what Gerald James describes as "funny practices" relating to a loss of Ł100 million involving all three men.
26
Although a similar amount to the MidAval's Project Hammer transaction, this sum of Ł100 million cannot have been the same money
for two reasons. Firstly, the Hammer amount was in dollars and not pounds, and was discounted at approximately 4% over the prevailing
one-year interest rate (LIBOR–the London Interbank Borrowing Rate).
For US banks of the standing of Chase and Citibank, at that time a market rate of perhaps one quarter of 1% – or, at most, one
half of 1% – was applicable. Four per cent was unheard of by a very long shot indeed. Secondly, at least a year separated the two
movements of money.
Even so, there are notable connections between the MidAval CEO Ian Guild and Herve de Carmoy (who was known in the bank as "Herve
the Swerve").
Firstly, de Carmoy was Guild's overall boss.
Secondly, shortly after de Carmoy moved to Société Générale, a valued employee of MidAval (also a Frenchman, referred to
in-house by the affectionate nickname of "Froggy") left MidAval employment to take up the post of Chef du Cabinet at the specific
invitation of de Carmoy.
Thirdly, Guild and the other two senior executives, plus some other staff, left Midland in 1990 to form IndoSuez Aval Limited.
IndoSuez Bank was directly owned by Société Générale and negotiations between de Carmoy, his Chef du Cabinet – the former MidAval
employee – and the three senior MidAval executives had been ongoing for almost a year before satisfactory terms were settled.
Following the takeover of Midland Bank by HSBC, MidAval had its name changed to HSBC Forfaiting Limited. It was dissolved in February
2000. Former staff had long since scattered with the four winds. IndoSuez Aval Limited is likewise now defunct.
Note
Documents and other exhibits in support of this story are available
HERE .
2. See Project Hammer
part one, "The Project Hammer File",
HERE
3. Information about
Project Hammer has been garnered from numerous sources. Those sources that I am able to name are named in the text. The remainder
remain confidential.
4. Page 51 of General
Cocke's affidavit. One of the CIA "sources" was the slush fund controlled by Japanese Liberal Democrat Party bosses and known
as the "M-fund", after General MacArthur's economic supremo in Tokyo, General Marquat.
6. See Jonathan Kwitny's
excellent book, The Crimes of Patriots (Touchstone Books, New York, 1987), for a detailed background on the Nugan Hand Bank affair.
13. If one includes
the inflationary effect over this time period, it would reveal that the sale price is, in fact, a great deal less now than it
was almost 50 years ago, which is more than curious. Nor does the leasing agreement over this same period seem especially lucrative.
14. It is not clear
from the banking records I have viewed online, but it looks as though the Astor Trust Company was absorbed into an entity that
formed part of the Bankers Trust Company.
16. Forfaiting is
the discounting of bank-guaranteed receivables (Aval) on a non-recourse basis.
17. I use the term
"private agreement" under advice–following a recent telephone conversation with a representative of Companies House, who told
me that no change of ownership notification had been made for MidAval at that time. MidAval had first been registered as a limited
company under the shelf registration name of "Diplema Twenty Nine Limited" in June 1983. A change of name to Midland Bank Aval
Limited was formally notified to Companies House in April 1996–although the firm had been trading in the name of Midland Bank
Aval Limited from day one. Following the full buy-out of Midland Bank PLC by the HSBC Group, MidAval had its name changed to HSBC
Forfaiting Limited. The company was dissolved in February 2000.
19. Sworn and notarized
affidavit of Dan Hughes, dated December 31, 1990.
20. There are believed
to have been numerous different "portals" providing access into Project Hammer over the period of its life. The Dan Hughes transaction
was one of these–albeit a significant and "early" one, according to the testimony of General Erle Cocke.
21. Demitrieus's vitae
is drawn from that published on the Global Crossing website.
22. For details concerning
the Freeport Board of Directors, see Internet report entitled "Freeport Sulphur's Powerful Board of Directors".
23. See Phillip Zweig's
massive book, Wriston (Crown Publishers, New York, 1995) for comprehensive background on Citibank and Chase.
24. For details of
these three gentlemen's involvement in the Black Eagle Trust, see Seagrave's self-published book, Gold Warriors; details are available
on my website, under the heading of " The Seagrave Affair
"
25. I know much of
the inner workings of MidAval for the simple reason that I was the Treasurer and an Associate Director of that firm until 1991.
However, I knew nothing of the Project Hammer deal that was strictly handled by the three principal executive directors.
26. See details on
page 164 of Gerald James's book, In the Public Interest (Warner Books/Little, Brown, London, 1996).
Project Hammer Reloaded – Part 2
Part 2
MAPPING THE COVERT CONNECTIONS
Peter
Seaman:
In addition to being the President and Chairman of Nantucket Holding Company, Peter Seaman was a successful businessman
and involved in a number of other enterprises. These included an entity called Harbor Fuel Holdings Co., Inc. of Westchester
County, in which Seaman was a partner with attorney Stuart Root.
Both Root and Seaman were clients of attorney Kenneth C. Ellis. Root was a director of another firm called Bowery Advisors
Subsidiary Corporation, which was registered in Florida with a principal mailing address of Kenneth C. Ellis "care of" the
Southeast First National Bank building, located at Biscayne Boulevard, Miami. Seaman had a residence in Greenwich, Connecticut,
where, by another odd coincidence, his next-door neighbor was Citibank's John Reed.
Following his close association with Dan Hughes in setting up the MidAval Hammer deal in October 1989, Seaman thereafter
refused to speak with Hughes ever again. Whether it was guilt for diverting Hughes's commission or some other factor that caused
this extraordinary vow of silence, we shall never know. Peter Seaman died, taking all his secrets with him.
Oswald
Howe, Jr:
Dan Hughes's attorney throughout the Hammer deal and the subsequent years of investigation was Oswald (Ozzie) Howe, Jr,
of the Miami law firm of Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole, whose offices were located in the Southeast Bank
building at the Southeast Financial Center.
According to Dan Hughes, it was Howe who introduced him to Southeast Bank, and Howe did a lot of real estate work for the
bank. Hughes also feels that his ongoing law case would be a great deal more effective if several vital documents had not mysteriously
disappeared from Howe's office. In any event, Mershon, Sawyer, Johnston, Dunwoody & Cole is now defunct, and Howe practices
law and is the senior partner for Howe, Robinson & Watkins LLP in Miami.
Southeast
Bank:
Southeast Bank NA was declared insolvent on 19 September 1991; it exists no more. Over the years it could boast some famous,
if not infamous, clients – but one suspects that such boasting was the last thing the bank's board of directors had in mind.
One such account "holder" was Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos, who used his henchman and former law school classmate Roberto
Benedicto to front for him.
In addition to being appointed by Marcos as the Philippines Ambassador to Japan, Benedicto was a signatory to Marcos's Credit
Suisse accounts and was clearly content to be used by Marcos as a cat's-paw to hide his money and gold bullion.
27 Benedicto died
in May 2000, following a heart attack.
Other illustrious clients of Southeast Bank over the years have included such criminal luminaries as Licio Gelli and Michele
Sindona, named by author Luigi DiFonzo in his book,
St Peter's Banker . DiFonzo reveals that US$34 million of the "lost" money of Robert Calvi's collapsed bank, the Banco
Ambrosiano, was traced to that bank's subsidiary in Nassau, where it was withdrawn and smuggled to two Miami banks, one of
these being the Southeast First National Bank (of Miami)–where it was deposited in account number 18221465.
28
Bankers Trust:
Bankers Trust International, a subsidiary of Bankers Trust, was the other Miami bank named in St Peter's Banker as having
funds stolen from Banco Ambrosiano deposited with it. According to DiFonzo, these funds were deposited into account number
001050018, which was also controlled by Licio Gelli and Michel Sindons (i.e., Michele Sindona).
In 1982, Ferdinand Marcos arranged via his right-hand man, General Fabian Ver, to transfer 50 tonnes of gold bullion to
Switzerland via two chartered 747 aircraft. These were arranged by an individual using the name Ron Lusk, who had been retained
by Ver to deliver the gold to Bankers Trust, Zurich.
29
Bankers Trust is of considerable interest for other reasons, too. Firstly, readers will recall that Dan Hughes caused two
sight drafts to be issued in favour of Bankers Trust for the collateral commitment relative to the Chase and Citibank debenture
instruments – an activity which, as we have already seen, caused General Erle Cocke to believe kicked off the Project Hammer
programme in a big way.
Secondly, the lawyers and investigators who were building a lawsuit for Dan Hughes and other clients cheated out of their
money were quietly negotiating with the Central Intelligence Agency in an attempt to settle privately and quietly out of court.
According to Dan Hughes, these negotiations were taking place with the office of Buzzy Krongard, the then No. 3 man in the
CIA hierarchy.
By profession, Krongard is a banker and formerly was the Chairman and CEO of investment bank Alex. Brown, Inc. In September
1997, Krongard engineered the merger of Alex. Brown with Bankers Trust and became the Vice Chairman of the board of directors
of Bankers Trust. A few months later, in January 1998, he was recruited as a "counsellor" to CIA boss George Tenet. In March
2001, he was promoted to Executive Director, making him the No. 2 man of the spy agency.
But the strange coincidences don't end there. South African intelligence operatives Rolf van Rooyen and Riaan Stander,
30 who are both
deeply enmeshed in the Project Hammer (
1 and
2 ) story,
were working closely with Gregory Serras, the President/CEO of the San Diego brokerage firm, Vanguard Capital.
This involved discussions for Vanguard to act on their behalf in the private placement of Argentinian government-approved
debenture instruments that formed part of a trading programme that van Rooyen and Stander had been working on. In a signed
letter, Serras – acting on behalf of his bank, Morgan Stanley & Co. – requested confirmation that the debentures in question
were "legal securities authorized and approved by the government of Argentina"
Vanguard appears to change its banking relationships from time to time. In the period that Serras was in contact with van
Rooyen, its relationship was with Morgan Stanley & Co. Today it is with the Bank of New York, Inc. – itself no stranger to
front-page scandals, such as those involving money-laundering activities for Russian crime syndicates and political figures.
31 Of interest is
the fact that Vanguard was earlier affiliated with Buzzy Krongard's old firm, Alex. Brown, which, following the takeover of
Bankers Trust by Germany's Deutsche Bank, changed its name to Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown, Inc.
The fact is that when it comes to the fraternity of banking, one can often disregard the supposed rivalry that is said to
exist, because incestuous relationships are commonplace. In the past, at least, the big banks owned significant chunks of each
other's stock, whereas nowadays they just tend to merge. Take, for example, the Bank of America, whose second-largest stockholder
was J. P. Morgan. In third place was Citibank.
Meanwhile, Citibank's largest stockholder was J. P. Morgan, which in December 2000 merged with Chase Manhattan to form the
all-powerful J. P. Morgan Chase.
32 Bankers Trust
was a J. P. Morgan creation from day one.
White
& Case:
No doubt by sheer coincidence alone, the Marcos account held by Roberto Benedicto at Southeast Bank was a White & Case Trust
account (number 018-410191).
It may also have been mere coincidence that Peter Seaman's and Stuart Root's attorney, Kenneth C. Ellis – who was the registered
addressee at Southeast Bank building for the Bowery Advisors Subsidiary Corporation – is also listed on the
White & Case website as a partner of that firm, who specializes in
financial matters and who now works out of its Singapore office.
UBS,
Lugano:
One of the more flamboyant financiers of recent decades undoubtedly is the Italian, Florio Fiorini, the former finance director
of the Italian state-owned oil company, ENI. Fiorini is best known for his failed attempt to rescue Roberto Calvi's bankrupt
private bank, Banco Ambrosiano – an affair that also involved Mafia financier Michele Sindona and, of course, Licio Gelli,
the Grandmaster of the secret masonic lodge, P2, that was a parallel de facto government of Italy.
Unlike others, Fiorini spilled the beans, and he did so in two books that he wrote while in Champ-Dollon prison, Switzerland,
for "fraudulent bankruptcy". Of the many secrets he revealed, one of the most explosive was the now infamous conto protezione
(protection account), used to launder profits derived from myriad insider-dealing activities by some of the largest and
most prestigious banks and transnational corporations in Europe.
A significant slice of the profits was paid to what Fiorini amusingly described as "the starving of the parties". In plain
words, these allocations were kickbacks paid to the various political parties.
The administrator of the secret kickback account (number 633369) was a member of P2 and also a former Minister of Justice
of disgraced Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, who went by the name of Claudius Hammerings – and if one deletes the last four letters
of his name, coincidence throws up the word "Hammer".
33 Readers will
by now have guessed that the account was held at UBS, Lugano.
Fiorini's name also appears prominently in the story of the looting of MGM, the famous Hollywood film studio, by Italian
Mafia "thug" Giancarlo Paretti. The MGM affair was an event that almost brought France's state-owned bank, Credit Lyonnais,
crashing to its knees. Without intervention and an infusion of considerable sums of money from the French taxpayer, France's
once proud bank would have folded.
This is not the place to recount the MGM/Credit Lyonnais story, but it is of passing interest only to note that Credit Lyonnais
recruited attorney Charles Meeker to join MGM as president, to handle negotiations with Paretti. Prior to joining MGM, Meeker
was with the law firm of White & Case.
34 Following a warrant
issued by France, Paretti was eventually arrested and cuffed by US federal agents in a conference room in the downtown Los
Angeles office of White & Case.
Credit Lyonnais has also been deeply involved in Black Eagle gold transactions. In one transaction I am familiar with, a
large block of bullion was to be purchased by a representative operating on behalf of Credit Lyonnais Rouse Limited, London,
the precious metals trading arm of the bank.
35
It is also interesting to note that UBS, Lugano, was not only the bank of choice for those running the secret insider trading
protection account; it was also the bank of choice for former Philippines dictator Ferdinand Marcos. The numerous confidential
accounts he had at that bank have been dubbed the "Mother" money-laundering account for the Marcos family by Marcos gold investigator
Reiner Jacobi. 36
But the UBS connections don't end there. The Honorary Chairman of UBS (now part of the Swiss Bank Corporation Group) is
Nicholaus Senn, who was also the Chairman of the enormous transnational corporation, Compagnie Financičre Richemont AG
, until his retirement in September 2002. Senn was also the senior partner of the Swiss-based international law and consultancy
firm of Senn, Christians and Letemeyer , which, coincidentally, acted for the late Baron Arndt Krupp.
In particular, Carl Letemeyer and Nicholaus Senn worked hard on behalf of the Krupp Estate in regard to the Krupp Heritage
& World Peace Foundation (Singapore), which received a legacy of US$97 billion from
Baron Krupp . This was a cash gift. According
to documents I have in my possession, Krupp's "secret" properties and businesses did not form part of this legacy. However,
the most interesting fact is that, prior to his death, Baron Arndt Krupp controlled some of the Santa Romana "Black Eagle"
fund assets. Of the $97 billion gifted, $47 billion was on deposit in account number 4 77 22 P with the Trust Department of
the Standard & Chartered Bank, London.
Indosuez:
This is one of those banks which are barely visible but consistently circle the waters of black gold and Project Hammer
– like a prowling shark with just the tip of its dorsel fin showing. For example, in one bullion transaction being negotiated
by Dr A. Konig, the Swiss representative of Rolf van Rooyen's Eastcorp Syndicate, the nominated closing bank for the transaction
was Indosuez, Lugano – where Eastcorp Holdings maintained an account.
This is in addition to the migration of some MidAval staff to Indosuez following their involvement in the Project Hammer
trading programme, as outlined earlier. With the closure of Indosuez Aval, a rump of former MidAval employees (now unfortunately
ex-Indosuez Aval as well), including MidAval's former CEO, found a new berth for their abilities. This was at Standard & Chartered
Bank in London. Standard Bank Nominees, meanwhile, is the second largest shareholder of Oppenheimer's Anglo American, with
a stake of 11.74 per cent.
37
While knowledge of the hidden connections of the Hughes "portal" into Project Hammer is vital for an understanding of how
the world of parallel finance operates, there are still deeper "rhythms" at work. An examination of these "rhythms" leads to
the companies, people and intelligence assets that sit at the heart of the so-called Anglo-American relationship.
THE KESWICK-JARDINE CONNECTION
A few days after I published part one of Project Hammer in late October 2001, I was alerted to an anonymous posting at the
Cryptome.org website of a document produced by the South African National
Intelligence Agency in 1998.
The document describes plans, then alleged to be in preparation, for a coup to occur during the 1999 South African general election.
Whilst the coup did not happen, the document is of significance because it describes members of – and entities aligned with – the
group who wished to disrupt the ruling African National Congress (ANC) political party.
38
A large part of this document outlines the alleged involvement of Executive Outcomes (EO), the British-based private security
company that is part of the Palace Group of companies. A few days prior to this document being made available, I had published charts
showing the "network" of the Palace Group that formed the London end of the associated South African intelligence group known as
the Eastcorp Syndicate.
This group was headed by Rolf van Rooyen and Riaan Stander – both South African intelligence operatives who were deeply involved
in Project Hammer. Not only were the London and South African networks closely aligned, but in some cases they also shared the same
executives. 39
One of the entities appearing on the Cryptome.org document as a member of the London network/Palace Group is Jardine Fleming of
Hong Kong, listed under "Banking and Investments". Two lines beneath appears the name Defense Systems Ltd – a division of the arms
manufacturer, Vickers.
Jardine
Fleming is also listed in the same document as a "role player", a few lines beneath the name of Tony Buckingham – the high-profile
head of Executive Outcomes. In an accompanying financial report it is revealed that EO used account number 600774426 at Jardine Fleming
Bank Limited, located at Port Moresby, Hong Kong. The account, rendered as at 15 May 1998, held a balance of US$36 million, and included
Tony Buckingham among those authorized to sign cheques on the account.
Jardine Fleming Bank Limited was established in 1970 as a joint venture between the huge transnational company, Jardine Matheson
Limited, and British merchant bank, Robert Fleming. Jardine's 50% stake in this Hong Kong bank was exchanged in 1999 for a direct
18% stake in Robert Fleming, which in April 2000 was sold to the Chase Manhattan Corporation – the holding company of what is now
the huge US bank of J. P. Morgan Chase.
But a year later, in May 2001, the magicians' musical chairs were in use again when it was announced that Jardine Fleming Bank
was to be sold by J. P. Morgan Chase to Standard Bank. The transfer of ownership occurred on 3 July 2001, with the renaming of
Jardine Fleming Bank to Standard Bank Asia Limited, but trading was under the new name of Standard Jardine Fleming Bank Limited.
Of considerable significance is the fact that, at the time that Jardine, Emett & Chandler – the firm of Boston insurance
brokers mentioned earlier – issued its letter on behalf of MidAval, seeking collateral instruments, it was owned by Jardine Matheson
Limited. Meanwhile, Jardine Resources Limited, with an address in the Isle of Man, was a business entity used by Rolf van Rooyen
for collateral trading programme and other activities. The Isle of Man also boasted a branch of Jardine Fleming Bank Limited.
Jardine Matheson Limited, originally formed over 170 years ago, created a fortune from the China opium business. Since that time
it has diversified enormously and remains the family fiefdom of the Keswick family, descendants of the firm's co-founder, William
Jardine.
The Keswick clan, in addition to having had family members awarded the chairmanship or directorship of such notable international
companies as Hongkong & Shanghai Bank , Rio Tinto Zinc and Samuel Montagu (the London merchant bank that was
part of the Midland Bank Group, itself now owned by HSBC), is also able to boast having had family members as the head of Britain's
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) and decades-long membership of the Court of the Bank of England.
Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ) was founded in 1873 by Hugh Matheson, the co-founder of Jardine Matheson. In 1995, RTZ acquired a minority
ownership in Freeport McMoRan. Anglo American (which has long had very close ties with RTZ), together with De Beers, is the fiefdom
of the Oppenheimer family, which owns a significant piece of Lonrho. These three intertwined conglomerates dominate the precious
metals and mining world – amongst achieving other notable accomplishments. For example, the Oppenheimers' Minorco holding company
is believed to be the single largest investor in the United States.
Minorco, founded in 1981, was quick to obtain an interest in America's then biggest bank, Citibank, whose CEO, Walter Wriston,
together with Citibank's principal attorney, Robert Clare, a partner of the powerful law firm of Shearson & Sterling, both accepted
invitations to sit on the Minorco board.
40
According to the authors of the book
Dope, Inc ., the Keswick family
controls a substantial part of the world's narcotics trade and uses HSBC, the bank it is said to control, to "provide centralized
rediscounting facilities for the financing of the drugs trade".
41
How true this is remains unknown to this writer, but it is known that Li Ka-shing – the Chinese billionaire who owns a 3% stake
in Jardine Matheson Limited and has sat on the board of HSBC – has been accused of being a member of Chinese intelligence as well
as being associated with the narcotics trade.
42
Indeed, the latter allegation arose repeatedly during my investigation of Project Hammer, while the use of HSBC as an "authorized
six-point laundry" was also mentioned. Meanwhile, the description of "centralized rediscounting facilities" referenced by the authors
of Dope, Inc . is suggestive,
to this writer at least, of collateral trading techniques.
Such connections are almost endless, it seems. Take, for example, the rise to fortune of Peter Munk, Chairman of Barrick Gold
which was formed in Toronto, Canada, in 1983, with the majority stake being held by the Saudi royal family middleman and arms dealer,
Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi had long been associated with Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos and the so-called Marcos gold.
Indeed, so trusted was he that Marcos had him fronting for two "eclipsed" Marcos accounts – one in the name of Etablissement
Mabari with the private Swiss bank of Lombard Odier & Cie, and the other in the name of Etablissement Gladiator
at COGES Corraterie Gestion SA , Geneva.
Of interest, too, is the fact that Sir Henry Keswick is reported to have been responsible for "lifting" Munk to a new career,
although he also received patronage from Australia's now-deceased multi-billionaire businessman Sir Peter Abeles.
43
Sir Peter received considerable attention in Jonathan Kwitny's excellent book,
The
Crimes of Patriots , because of his alleged Mafia connections and close association with Bernie Houghton and Michael Hand in
the CIA drug smuggling laundry, the Nugan Hand Bank – which also arranged to ship gold bullion surreptitiously for Marcos.
At this point, it is worth reminding readers that Brigadier-General Erle Cocke – whom I referenced earlier concerning his affidavit
detailing his knowledge and involvement in Project Hammer – was reported by Kwitny to be a key player in the Nugan Hand Bank.
And Project Hammer is said to be a general continuation of Nugan Hand Bank activity.
MARITIME FINANCING
The ties that bind are kept hidden from public view.
Activities such as the one we have been discussing are made to operate on an "arms length" basis to confuse and also to ensure
deniability.
Following these subterranean and diverse threads can easily perplex the investigator, and patience and persistence are required
to arrive at the reality that is hidden behind all the smoke and mirrors. The story of Puffin Investments is a case in point.
During a number of extensive telephone interviews with the Canadian, Barrie Wamboldt, it was hinted that it would be worthwhile
to look into the activities of an Alan Shepherd and a firm of his called Puffin Investments. Readers will remember that Barrie Wamboldt
was involved with Project Hammer and had worked with General Cocke and Paul Green to recover Project Hammer funds.
Puffin Investment Company Limited, a Bahamas company, was owned by Old Harrovian Alan Shepherd, who had connections to the British
royal family resulting from generous donations he made to the Royal Windsor Horse Show, of which he was vice president.
In March 2001, Shepherd and Puffin Investments were involved in a High Court action initiated by the Financial Services Authority
– the government watchdog – for enticing investors to put up money for a "sham" investment trading programme. According to the
Sunday Express newspaper, reporting on the court case, up-front fees paid by investors on the promise of massive returns were
not repaid. 44
A week later, on 1 April 2001, the Sunday Express carried a further report detailing a lawsuit against Alan Shepherd, his American
wife Sherry and previous Conservative Party "grandee" Sir Edward du Cann, who was the former Chairman of City merchant bank Keyser
Ullman.
Sir Edward was earlier involved in Tradeswind, an arms trading company in which he was a director with Tiny Rowland of Lonrho
fame and the Egyptian, Ashraf Marwan – known as "Dr Death". Earlier in his career, du Cann served as Chairman of Lonrho, thus working
alongside board directors such as British MI6 luminary Nicholas Elliot.
45
Shepherd, his wife Sherry and du Cann were being sued for Ł1.25 million in a dispute involving the search for "one of the world's
most fabulous buried treasures". The treasure in question was "30 tons of gold statues, bullion, doubloons and precious stones",
stolen by Scottish pirate Captain William Thompson. The treasure was currently valued at Ł500 million.
The lawsuit was brought by Richard Bethell of the Bermuda-based Hart Group , who alleged that Shepherd and du Cann were
guilty of "misrepresentations" over an agreement for the provision of various "services" to Shepherd's planned treasure hunt.
One cannot help but be reminded of stories that have circulated in the past concerning gold plundered by the Japanese during WWII
and hidden in the Philippines – later to be recovered and "laundered" as treasure retrieved from Spanish galleons that had sunk while
traveling from Peru to Spain. A variation of this story is the recovery of lost "pirate treasure" – otherwise known as gold – on
the Cocos Islands.
Richard Bethell – elevated to Lord Westbury following the recent death of his father – is a former SAS and Scots Guards officer
and, like Alan Shepherd, an Old Harrovian. The Hart Group, of which he is the Chief Executive Officer, is one of a number of companies
that form the Global Marine Security Systems Company (GMSSCO).
A distinct cynic – as this writer has become – would easily conclude that a marked similarity in structure exists between GMSSCO
and Rolf van Rooyen's South African Eastcorp Syndicate that was closely allied with the London network of Executive Outcomes.
For example, companies belonging to the Eastcorp Syndicate also had a maritime and security theme.
APARTHEID'S
MISSING BILLIONS
But the similarity doesn't end there.
Lord Westbury is currently serving as Chief Executive Officer of Defense Systems Limited (DSL), which, as we have already seen,
is an integral member of the London network of the Palace Group (named so because of its close proximity to the royal family's official
London residence, Buckingham Palace).
46
Moreover, Executive Outcomes has been described as "the advance guard for major business interests engaged in a latter-day scramble
for the mineral wealth of Africa".
47
This is a particularly incisive description, and readers of the first part of this series will recall that one aspect of Project
Hammer apparently involved the disappearance of substantial quantities of gold reserves, as well as stocks of De Beers diamonds,
just prior to the takeover of the Republic of South Africa in 1994 by Nelson Mandela and the ANC. This theft has become known as
"apartheid's missing billions".
Defense Systems Limited has a client list that comes straight from the top drawer and includes oil and gas companies like British
Petroleum, Shell and British Gas of the UK and Amoco, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil and Texaco of the United States. Major mining and mineral
extraction companies such as Canada's Cambior and De Beers and Anglo American of South Africa also feature, as does the giant US
construction firm, Bechtel.
Another client is Canadian-based Ranger Oil, which by happy coincidence is the same name as an entity that forms part of the Palace
Group and which is run by arms trader Mick Ranger.
By miraculous good fortune, Mick Ranger was also a board member of Bridge SA – one of the entities formed and run by Rolf van
Rooyen and Riaan Stander. Meanwhile, Sandline, which many knowledgeable insiders believe is Executive Outcomes by another name, has
a client base that includes Rio Tinto Zinc.
DSL is now owned by Armor Holdings, Inc. of Jacksonville, Florida, but is still headquartered in London. This affiliation seems,
on the face of it, to be a particularly binding one, for Armor Holdings is said to have its very own US spook-type "network".
48
The senior executives of Armor Holdings are predominantly bankers of one strain or another. Take, for example, Thomas W. Strauss,
formerly a Vice Chairman of Salomon Brothers, the Wall Street investment bank that was once minority owned by the Oppenheimers' Anglo
American and De Beers strategic holding company, Minorco.
49
Until 1993, Salomons owned the controlling interest in the Bank of New York, which, as you will recall, is the current affiliated
clearing bank of Gregory Serras's Vanguard Capital. Today, Salomons is owned by Citigroup.
50
We might also mention Armor Holdings director Burtt R. Ehrlich, whose family securities firm, Ehrlich and Boger , is owned
by Cater Allen Bank of the Channel Islands, which specializes in "offshore finance"; likewise, Nicholas Sokolow, formerly
a partner in the Wall Street firm of Coudert Brothers , and Warren B. Canders, a former Senior Vice President of Orion
Bank Ltd , a merchant bank owned by the Royal Bank of Canada.
A subsidiary of Armor Holdings is the very shadowy United States Defense Systems, Inc. (USDS), which on paper is based
in Chantilly, Virginia, although its real operating headquarters are in Manassas, Virginia.
Staff recruited by USDS are usually former military types or specialists with criminal intelligence backgrounds and possessing
surveillance skills. They are usually told they will be working in support of Department of Defense programmes and will require a
DoD security clearance.
Operations in the past have included surveillance of US citizens during Fourth of July events at Capitol Mall in DC.
51
BIN LADEN AND SAUDI ARABIAN LINKS
A Google Internet search using the search term "Armor Holdings, Inc." revealed a curious message dated September 2001 from
an aggrieved investor:
"I'm horrified to find one of my investments is in a company with links to bin Laden. Apparently it is common knowledge in
London that a senior figure in Armor, Ambrose Cary, has familial ties to bin Laden and uses those in his work.
How can it be allowed that a US company providing security to US companies, embassies and airports round the world can deal
simultaneously with this type of person? Does anyone else have further information on this?"
Unsurprisingly, no answer to the question has been posted.
52
Had this been the first bin Laden connection, it is likely I would have ignored it. However, the name had already arisen during
a deposition given by Rolf van Rooyen to German police in 1995, following his detention and questioning. At that time, he admitted
to being "involved" with a Jean Ruiz, of Saudi Finance.
53
Saudi Finance (Saudifin), headquartered in Geneva, owned a controlling interest in Banque Al Saoudi via the Paris-based holding
company, Saudi Arab Finance Corporation . Banque Al Saoudi was, according to a 1999 PBS Online Frontline story, one of the
principal international financing vehicles for the bin Laden family.
Interestingly, in 1989 – in the early stages of Project Hammer's timeline – Banque Al Saoudi would have collapsed in bankruptcy
had it not been for the timely intervention of the French central bank, the Banque de France, which shored it up prior to a partial
takeover by none other than Banque Indosuez, which decided to change its name to Banque Française pour l'Orient.
A year later, the bank merged with the Mediterranée Group. Of note is the fact that a subsidiary, Saudifin SA, was active in Panama
until 1997, when it was dissolved.
54
Moreover, the Frontline story revealed that both Banque Al Saoudi and Banque Indosuez were "instrumental" in financing a portion
of Middle East weapons contracts during the 1970s and 1980s.
Meanwhile, those who are familiar with the story of black gold will recall that Dr Ole Bay was the controller on behalf of the
CIA and US Treasury in the YAB/42 bullion transaction that involved then President Marcos of the Philippines. This transaction was
structured to use cut-outs including Navegocian Global SA and DuPont , along with other CIA conduits, to make it ostensibly
a private, non-government transaction.
The transaction code YAB/42 is also instructive. Not only does "YAB" spelled backwards yield the name "BAY" but, altogether, 42
"major trusts were tapped to help fund" the deal. Coincidentally, 42 is also the number of countries in which Santa Romana gold was
deposited in the immediate post-WWII years to form the Black Eagle fund, discussed earlier.
55
One of the more salient facts about the Puffin Investments fiasco is that Alan Shepherd's American wife, Sherry, is the daughter
of Dr Ole Bay. Dr Bay is known to have been the "Master Wizard" who arranged and ran the Project Hammer trading programme.
According to one former intelligence source familiar with the inner workings of Project Hammer, Dr Bay had told him that the ultimate
responsibility for Hammer lay with the CIA and the US Treasury, and that Robert Rubin – who later became US Treasury Secretary –
acted as Dr Bay's "gofer" on the project. Robert Rubin is now a director and Chairman of the Executive Committee of Citigroup.
If one had to choose a word to describe these apparently diverse connections, that word would surely have to be "incestuous".
Currently, Li Ka-shing (whom we mentioned earlier) is bidding to purchase control of the global communication network giant, Global
Crossing (which was also mentioned earlier), via a joint venture of Ka-shing's Hutchison Whampoa and Singapore Technologies
Telemedia . Representing Ka-Shing's bid to take control of Global Crossing was the powerful neo-conservative attorney, Richard
Perle, who sought a nod of approval from the Pentagon for the deal.
Perle, who is one of the present Bush Administration "think-masters", is close to Bush Senior, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz
and to others on the Defense Policy Board , which he chaired. A recent story by legendary investigative reporter Sy Hersh
revealed that Perle had furtively met with a leading Saudi investor in Marseille, France, on 3 January 2003, in what was seen as
an attempt to gain private financial advantage from the planned war on Iraq.
A furious Perle responded to the report by calling Hersh a "terrorist". The meeting was arranged on Perle's behalf by none other
than Adnan Khashoggi (whom we mentioned earlier). Khashoggi also attended the meeting.
Khashoggi, a trusted adviser to the Saudi royal family, is one of the "high net worth individuals" whose past investments have
been handled by Mayo Shattuck, formerly head of Alex. Brown (also mentioned earlier). It is of passing interest that Saudi
Prince Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz took a 10% stake in Citigroup (also mentioned earlier) back in 1991, following a cash "infusion"
of US$400 million, which was eclipsed from view by The
Carlyle Group which acted as the
facilitator for the investment.
In 1997, Mayo Shattuck was made Trustee of the Bronfman (also mentioned earlier) family fortune. He resigned as CEO of Deutsche
Banc Alex. Brown on 12 September 2001, the day following the tragic events in New York City and Washington, DC – the day that
has come to be known as "9-11".
56
On 13 September 2001, news reports began circulating of suspicious stock market transactions that suggested prior knowledge of
the events that were to take place on 9-11 .
Short sales of airline and insurance stocks that sharply fell in price in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy were later traced back
to Alex. Brown.
Author's Note
Documents and other exhibits in support of this story are available
HERE .
Endnotes
27. See
http//www.marcosbillions.com
for some additional background on Roberto Benedicto and his willingness to front for Marcos. Additionally, I have a two-page
Marcos document listing details of the numerous bank accounts he controlled either directly or through others.
28. See Luigi DiFonzo's
St Peter's Banker (Franklin Watts, New York, 1983).
29. See William Scott
Malone's Golden Fleece (Regardies, October 1988).
30. See "
The Project Hammer File
" part one for background on van Rooyen and Stander's involvement in Project Hammer.
31. See news reports
circa 2000 of BoNY involvement in illegal money laundering activities with IMF funds on behalf of Russian criminal and political
figures.
32. See Everybody's
Business: An Almanac – The Irreverent Guide to Corporate America, edited by Milton Moskowitz, Michael Katz and Robert Levering
(Harper & Row, San Francisco, 1980).
33. Although this
may, of course, just be pure coincidence, it is worth noting.
34. For a comprehensive
account of the MGM/Credit Lyonnais affair, see David McClintick and Anne Faircloth's informative "Predator", which is freely available
on the Internet.
President Trump sometimes disrupts the pattern by vowing to end
America's "endless wars." But he has
extended and escalated them at every turn, offering nakedly punitive and exploitative
rationales. In September, on the cusp of a peace deal with the Taliban, he discarded an
agreement negotiated by his administration and
pummeled Afghanistan harder than ever (now he's back to wanting to talk). In Syria, his
promised military withdrawal has morphed into a grotesque redeployment to "secure"
the country's oil .
It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond
the proclivities of the current president, or the previous one, or the next. The United States
has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world. The ideal of
peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of
the Cold War offered an unparalleled opportunity to advance the cause. But U.S. leaders from
both parties chose another path. War -- from drone strikes and Special Operations raids to
protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in
practice and even in aspiration.
The interesting info here is that the article states Haftar's "eastern-based Libyan
National Army (LNA), backed by Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, France, Russia and
Turkey".
The NATO rift between Turkey and its other members has escalated with the Evil Outlaw US
Empire's Senate voting to recognize the Armenian Genocide and Greece to help the LNA (Bengazi
gov't) defend against Turkish shipments of militia/terrorists and weapons to the besieged GNA
in Tripoli. This
site is very helpful and up-to-date regarding what's occurring. And
this PDF Briefing Paper is very good and quite detailed.
All of the above's added to the tense situation around Cyprus, Turkey's threat to close
Incirlik, and Greek offers to house those NATO facilities. It increasingly looks like the
Turkish S-400s are aimed at Greece and NATO.
/div>
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it to
abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis, but
most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and that "If
only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with the future
deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but most of the
time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an example out of
it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have no
checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this un-democratic
way.
Viking guy at 40
"Today we are not members of the EU, but all the "regulations" are forced upon us anyway. The
EU is a non-democratic nightmare that must be demolished."
Absolutely. The EU is the 2nd biggest imperialist asshole on the block, benefitting from the
fact that 1st place is taken by the USA, which is far more blatant, in-your-face and
universally obnoxious when at it, and doing it even to the EU. The EU not being the ultimate
superpower, it can't bully the US or China and only does it when dealing with lesser powers.
That's why it's practically impossible for anyone living inside a major EU-member to actually
notice and be aware of the typical EU behaviour: to crush any lesser country and to force it
to abide by its very own rules, whether independent countries want it or not.
That the EU is that bad should have been clear and obvious to all during the Greek crisis,
but most Europhiles prefer to think this was just an accident, due to some bad apples, and
that "If only the Czar knew", this wouldn't happen. Well, UK is going to get hit badly with
the future deal, because an imperalist neo-liberal power like the EU - just like the US, but
most of the time without the military part of it - can only crush any opposition and make an
example out of it.
If the EU were a truly democratic endeavour, they would allow at least popular referendum at
EU-wide level, and possibly even initiatives, for starter. The way it works, the people have
no checks on it. Not a bit surprise though, most of its core members function this
un-democratic way.
The infinity war We say we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? The infinity war We say
we're a peaceful nation. Why do our leaders always keep us at war? Sam Ward (For The Washington Post) By Samuel Moyn
and Stephen Wertheim December 13, 2019
Add to list On my list
Now we know, thanks to
The
Afghanistan Papers published in The Washington Post this past week, that U.S. policymakers doubted almost from the start that
the two-decade-long Afghanistan war could ever succeed. Officials didn't know who the enemy was and had little sense of what an achievable
"victory" might look like. "We didn't have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking," said Douglas Lute, the Army three-star
general who oversaw the conflict from the White House during the administrations of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
And yet the war ground on, as if on autopilot. Obama inherited a conflict of which Bush had grown weary, and victory drew no closer
after Obama's troop "surge" than when Bush pursued a small-footprint conflict. But while the Pentagon Papers, published in 1971 during
the Vietnam War, led a generation to appreciate the perils of warmaking, a new generation may
squander this opportunity
to set things right. There is a reason the quagmire in Afghanistan, despite costing thousands of lives and
$2 trillion
, has failed to shock Americans into action: The United States for decades has made peace look unimaginable or unobtainable.
We have normalized war.
President Trump sometimes disrupts the pattern by
vowing to end America's "endless
wars." But he has
extended and escalated them at every turn, offering nakedly punitive and exploitative rationales. In September, on the cusp of
a peace deal with the Taliban, he discarded an agreement negotiated by his administration and
pummeled
Afghanistan harder than ever (now he's back to wanting to talk). In Syria, his promised military withdrawal has morphed into
a grotesque redeployment to
"secure" the country's
oil .
It is clearer than ever that the problem of American military intervention goes well beyond the proclivities of the current president,
or the previous one, or the next. The United States has slowly slid away from any plausible claim of standing for peace in the world.
The ideal of peace was one that America long promoted, enshrining it in law and institutions, and the end of the Cold War offered
an unparalleled opportunity to advance the cause. But U.S. leaders from both parties chose another path. War -- from drone strikes
and Special Operations raids to protracted occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan -- has come to seem inevitable and eternal, in practice
and even in aspiration.
Given World War II, Korea, Vietnam and many smaller conflicts throughout the Western Hemisphere, no one has ever mistaken the
United States for Switzerland. Still, the pursuit of peace is an authentic American tradition that has shaped U.S. conduct and the
international order. At its founding, the United States resolved to steer clear of the system of war in Europe and build a "new world"
free of violent rivalry, as Alexander Hamilton put it
.
Indeed, Americans shrank from playing a fully global role until 1941 in part because they saw themselves as emissaries of peace
(even as the United States conquered Native American land, policed its hemisphere and took Pacific colonies). U.S. leaders sought
either to remake international politics along peaceful lines -- as Woodrow Wilson proposed after World War I -- or to avoid getting
entangled in the squabbles of a fallen world. And when America embraced global leadership after World War II, it felt compelled to
establish the United Nations to halt the "scourge of war," as
the U.N. Charter says right at the
start. At America's urging, the organization outlawed the use of force, except where authorized by its Security Council or used in
self-defense.
Even when the United States dishonored that ideal in the years that followed, peace remained potent as a guiding principle. Vietnam
provoked a broad-based antiwar movement. Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) to tame the imperial presidency. Such opposition
to war is scarcely to be found today. (The Iraq War inspired massive protests, but they are a distant memory.) Consider that the
United States has undertaken more armed interventions since the end of the Cold War than during it. According to the Congressional
Research Service, more than 80 percent of all of the country's
adventures abroad since 1946 came after 1989. Congress, whether under Democratic or Republican control, has allowed commanders in
chief to claim the right to begin wars and continue them in perpetuity.
Legal constraints on U.S. warmaking -- including international obligations, domestic statutes and constitutional duties -- ought
to have returned to the fore after the Cold War, the rationale for America's vast mobilization in the second half of the 20th century.
Instead, they have eroded to dust. At the outset of the 1990s, as President George H.W. Bush promised a
"peace dividend" for Americans and a "peaceful international
order" for all, the United States did rely more faithfully than before on Security Council approval for military operations.
The Persian Gulf War, blessed by the United Nations to repel Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, was legal under international law. But
enthralled by its exorbitant primacy in world affairs, the United States turned away from international prohibitions on war, finding
the rules too restricting.
The next two presidents, attracted to liberal internationalist and neoconservative creeds that embraced armed force, treated international
law cavalierly. Bill Clinton abused U.N. resolutions meant to control Saddam Hussein's weaponry to justify new attacks, including
the bombing of Iraq in December 1998. The next year, the U.S.-led NATO operations in Kosovo suggested that America would unleash
its military for ostensibly noble causes -- in this case to prevent heart-rending atrocity -- even without the pretense of legality.
Despite failing to obtain U.N. approval, the Clinton administration said the intervention should not be treated as a precedent (though
it became one). Others excused it as "illegal but legitimate," with self-professed moral intentions permissibly trumping law. "For
the purpose of stopping genocide," commented
the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier, "the use of force is not a last resort; it is a first resort."
Once such arguments gained currency, their authors lost control of them. Conservative hawks found that a law-optional approach
suited their agenda as well, and their liberal counterparts, if they disagreed at all, did so mostly as a matter of tactics, not
principle. George W. Bush benefited from this permissive context when he launched the Iraq War, whose
illegality was
flagrant and catalytic, since it was unauthorized by the United Nations and
relied on the administration's dangerous claim that "anticipatory
self-defense" justifies invasion. The world took notice. Russia, in particular, seized on the new U.S. position as a
spectacular excuse to make incursions of its own in
Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine in 2014.
Obama won election in part because he ran against the Iraq War. In office, however, he cemented more than reversed America's disregard
of international constraints on warmaking. While failing to end the war in Afghanistan, his administration
exceeded the Security Council's authorization
by working to overthrow Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi, converting a permission slip to avert atrocity into a blank check for regime
change. Then, to punish the Islamic State, Obama bombed Syria on a contrived
rationale
-- one that allowed attacks against nations unwilling or unable to control terrorists on their territory. When he nearly struck
again in response to Bashar al-Assad's use of chemical weapons, Obama
laid the legal
foundation for Trump to strike the Syrian government, again without a U.N. sign-off. Once highly valued, then defied only with
controversy, international law now scarcely figures in U.S. decisions of war and peace.
Like international law, U.S. domestic law enshrines an expectation of peace, setting a high bar for the resort to war. If war
is to be waged, the Constitution requires Congress to declare it -- a purposeful grant of authority to the branch of government that
best reflects the diverse interests of the people and therefore should be harder to rouse to conflict than one commander in chief.
Yet the nation has drifted from that tradition, too. After defaulting on its constitutional obligation during the Cold War (partly
on the grounds that the speed of a potential nuclear strike required a president who could respond quickly), Congress declined to
reassert its authority after the Soviet threat passed.
In the 1990s, Congress might at least have kept faith with the WPR, which it passed in 1973 to rein in future presidents. The
resolution calls for Congress to authorize "hostilities" within 60 days of their start; otherwise U.S. forces must withdraw. Throughout
the 1980s and 1990s, members of the House of Representatives
brought presidents to
court for taking military action in violation
of the statute -- in El Salvador
, the Persian Gulf War and
Kosovo , for example. But advocates of the strategy
all but gave up, and Congress itself increasingly deferred to presidential wars in the age of terrorism. By the time Obama intervened
in Libya, the WPR lay in tatters. In a final indignity during the Libya operation, one administration lawyer
explained that "hostilities" was an "
ambiguous term of art
" that might exclude aerial bombardment, so Congress did not need to approve a war that toppled a regime.
This deference has proved costly, allowing Trump to pose as an antiwar candidate against the mainstream of two political parties,
a somnolent Congress and inactive courts. Once in power, this wildly unpredictable chief executive finally clarified the danger of
entrusting the world's mightiest military to one man's whims. Congress has begun to stir. In voting this year to end U.S. involvement
in Yemen's civil war, it invoked the WPR for the first time while forces were active in battle.
President Trump speaks to U.S. troops at Bagram air base in Afghanistan last month.
though he has pledged to end America's "endless wars,"
Trump, like past presidents, has instead extended them. (Tom Brenner/Reuters)
Ultimately, elevating peace as a priority will require not merely changing legal norms but overturning the militarized concept
of America's world role that permeates Washington. Somehow, despite waging near-perpetual war, the leaders of the most powerful country
on Earth have convinced themselves that America is always on the brink of turning "isolationist," a peril against which
every president since Ronald
Reagan has warned as their terms wound down. Trump is likely to deviate from that rhetorical tradition, but the rest of the establishment
carries on and doubles down. Today, it is military withdrawals, not destructive deployments, that freak out pundits and spur Cabinet
members to resign, as Jim Mattis
did last year over Trump's vow to pull troops from Syria. Abandoning the Kurds there this fall was Trump's "
great betrayal ," lamented Council on Foreign Relations President Richard Haass, who did not appear to lose sleep over our past
military incursions.
Under Trump, who applies "maximum pressure" to all foes foreign and domestic,
American militarism is more perilous than ever. It is also more undeniable. That is one reason the current moment is surprisingly
hopeful. The call to
end
"endless war" continues to rise on the flanks of both parties, even as it is flouted by leaders of each. More and more Americans
insist that, whatever interests are served by endless war, their own are not. More than
twice as many Americans prefer
to lower than raise military spending, according to a 2019 Eurasia Group Foundation survey.
Veterans support
Trump's pledge to bring Middle East wars to a close: A
majority of vets deem the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria not to have been worth fighting. The Afghanistan Papers ought to
strengthen the consensus. Americans deserve a president who will act accordingly.
The United States would find partners far and wide, in nations great and small, if it put peace first. It could make clear that
while spreading democracy or human rights remains worthwhile, values cannot come at the point of a gun or serve as a pretext for
war -- and that international peace is, in fact, a condition for human flourishing. Every time Washington searches for a monster
to destroy, it shows the world's despots how to abuse the rules and hands demagogues a phantom to inflate. The alternative is not
"isolationism" but something closer to the opposite: peaceful, lawful international cooperation against the major threats to humanity,
including climate change, pandemic disease and widespread deprivation. Those are the enemies worth fighting, and bombs and bullets
will not defeat them.
Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce professor of jurisprudence and professor of history at Yale University and a fellow of the
Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, and Stephen Wertheim is deputy director of research and policy at the Quincy Institute
for Responsible Statecraft. He is also a research scholar at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University
Follow @samuelmoyn and @stephenwertheim
It's a bit like calling 9/11 an intelligence failure. First, identify the actual measure
of success against which this outcome should really be judged...
An excerpt:
"Here's the real "secret history" of the Afganistan war: It wasn't a failure, it was a
success. In every facet, on every front, Afghanistan is exactly what America needed it to be.
They dripfeed in the blood of young Americans, they destroy 100,000s of Afghan lives, and
they reap the rewards they always intended to reap:
The permanent slow-simmer conflict gives them an excuse to keep thousands of US military
personnel in a country which borders Iran, Pakistan AND China. (Not to mention a host of
ex-Soviet states).
It keeps military expenditure nice and high, so Congressman, ex-generals and everyone else
on the boards of Boeing or Lockheed Martin get great big bonuses every year.
They have sole access to the rare-Earth elements and other vital metals in the Afghan
mountains. Lithium, most importantly of all.
They have control of the world's opium industry. A vital cog in the relations of the US
intelligence agencies, and organised crime. It's essentially reverse money-laundering –
turning tax-payer funds into dark money that can be spent hiring mercenaries, organising
assassinations, arranging coups or simply be stolen.
They have access to all the "radicalised" young men they could ever want. A little Jihadi
farm, where "terrorists" can be named, trained and sent off to fight proxy wars in Syria, or
spread fear and chaos in the West."
The USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine requires weakening and, if possible, partitioning Russia.
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin tells the audience that Skripals poisoning was a false flag operation. 7:00
He also point several weak points in Western politicians narrative about MH17
Notable quotes:
"... Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America ..."
"... Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it. ..."
"... The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans). ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause". ..."
"... Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic. ..."
"... "Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily
determined to undermine Russia.
A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign
to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff
when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation
with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating
a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy
Vogan.
Putin & the Russian citizenry play chess on this 3-dimensional world.! The Americas and their inane elites attempt checkers
on their flat Earth . Pity, some such as Noam Chomsky are admirable world citizens..! Pity again.! WE will miss men of this honest
calibre and down- to-earth intelligence. Bob Carr is of this cohort.
Eugenie Basile , December 10, 2019 at 03:36
The 'Russia did it' mantra is a gift for the powers in the Kremlin. It rallies most Russians behind their leaders because they
are proud of their country and don't accept the West's moral hypocrite grandstanding.
Just recently the WADA proclaimed sporting ban against Russia is a perfect example. It excludes all Russian athletes because
they happen to represent their country while U.S. athletes who have been caught cheating in the past are allowed to participate
.
It is very encouraging to know there are good people like Mr. Tony Kevin and Mr. Bob Carr alive and sharing their powerful
wisdom at this dangerous historical point on planet Earth. Mr. Kevin and Mr. Carr's immensely important and courageously honest
discussion should become – immediately, and for many years to come – required study in university classrooms and government halls
around this world.
Peace.
ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest
possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking
about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer
we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now
so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then,
it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of
nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.
Lois Gagnon , December 9, 2019 at 17:30
I agree. Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are
unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed
oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events
including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase
Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's
source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of
course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among
the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the
undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise
have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally
conceived and constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how
either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the
neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters
are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile
the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military,
thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic
and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world
stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world"
political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely
assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said
any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to
do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that
doesn't.
SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's
expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better
than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in
any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live
and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing
a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the
light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus.
Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more.
(The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by
killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive
campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating
the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian
citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election
interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a
very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all
of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international
conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
@ Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Dec 13 2019 7:26 utc | 34
We don't need to waste time discussing it: Putin himself publicly said (more than once)
that he also would like to have the USSR back.
His scuffle with Lenin lies in the fact of the ethnicities issue.
This debate indeed happened during the very formation of the USSR: Lenin defended each
ethnicity of the old Russian Empire should have the right to have their own republic, and,
after the fact, they should have the right to freely decide if they want to join the Union or
not (many did, others, like Poland and Finland, did not; the Baltic nations were conquered
during WWII). Stalin defended the ethnicites shouldn't have any rights to any kind of nation
(he even published a book about it).
Putin claims Lenin commited a huge mistake by giving the ethnicities their own republics.
He said it caused a lot of problems, some of them still existing today.
I don't doubt Lenin would have preferred to have one single soviet republic without any
ethnic distinctions if he could. The problem was that the situation in the Russian Empire was
unsustainable. It was a melting pot ready to explode. And he had to win the civil war before
he had to think about any political system -- the support of the ethnic minorities being of
fundamental importance.
In my opinion, Putin is anachronic by blaming Lenin for the fragmentation of the Russian
Empire. First, he has a very idyllic vision of the Empire: its capitalist reforms of the
1860s were a monumental failure, it had just came from a humiliating loss to the Japanese
(1905) and the economy had deteriorated to a point it had to constantly crush ethnic revolts
in its corners. By 1917, the Russian Empire was still considered a power -- but definitely a
second rate one, and falling (even the Japanese were considered a more important empire by
that time). The situation was so unsustainable that the Provisory Government of February
invited Nicholas II to head it as head of State -- and he refused. The tsardom had simply
given up.
Secondly, Putin may be disproportionally influenced by that French sociologist's theory
from the 1980s, which stated the USSR would fall through its ethnic divisions -- specially
the Muslim populations of its "underbelly". The USSR definitely didn't fall because of its
ethnic divisions, although it may have appeared to be the case in the Iron Curtain -- in
which Putin served as KGB.
Whatever his reasons, the fact is that the Russian Federation is an objectively worse
social experiment than the USSR. It will grow only 1.5% this year. Even Putin's boom of the
early 2000s were nothing spectacular, being worse than all the Soviet booms and comparable to
Brazil Lula's boom at exactly the same time.
Actually the IMF estimates that Russia, even under sanctions and low oil prices, will be
growing faster than the US and the EU for the next 5 years (2 % vs 1,5 %). Not to mention
that it is zero debt economy with triple surpluses - in trade, current account and federal
budget. So this is not a small achievment.
The recent shootings of three U.S. soldiers in Florida at the hands of a Saudi citizen raises a standard question in the U.S.
government's perpetual "war on terrorism": "Why do they hate us?"
Soon after the 9/11 attacks, the official mantra began being issued: The terrorists just hate us for our "freedom and values."
No other explanation for motive was to be considered. If anyone suggested an alternative motive -- such as "They are retaliating
for U.S. governmental killings over there" -- U.S. officials and interventionists would immediately go on the attack, heaping a mountain
of calumny on that person, accusing him of treason, hating America, loving the terrorists, and justifying their attacks.
It happened to me and other libertarians who dared to challenge the official motive behind the 9/11 attacks. Shortly after the
attacks, I spoke at a freedom conference in Arizona consisting of both libertarians and conservatives. When I pointed out that the
attacks were the predictable consequence of a foreign policy that kills people over there, another of the speakers was filled with
anger and rage over such an "unpatriotic" suggestion. Then, a few weeks after the 9/11 attacks, FFF published an article by me entitled,
" Is This the Wrong Time
to Question Foreign Policy? " in which I pointed out the role that U.S. interventionism had played in the attacks. FFF was hit
with the most nasty and angry attacks I have ever seen.
Eighteen years later, the evidence is virtually conclusive that the reason that the United States has been suffering a constant,
never-ending threat of terrorism is because U.S. military and CIA forces have been killing people in the Middle East and Afghanistan
since at least the end of the Cold War, and even before.
After all, if the terrorists hate us for our "freedom and values," why haven't they been attacking the Swiss? They have pretty
much the same freedom and values that Americans have. And they are much closer geographically to Middle East terrorists than the
United States is. Why haven't the terrorists been attacking them?
The answer is simple: the Swiss government, unlike the U.S. government, hasn't been killing, maiming, and injuring people and
hasn't been bombing and destroying countries in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
A long history of U.S. interventionism
U.S. interventions in the Middle East began, of course, long before the 9/11 attacks. There was the 1953 CIA coup that destroyed
Iran's experiment with democracy with a coup that replaced the democratically elected prime minister of the country with a tyrannical
pro-U.S. dictator. Not surprisingly, that produced the violent Iranian revolution almost 25 years later. The Iranian revolutionaries
didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America for the U.S. government's installation, training, and support
of the tyrannical regime against which they revolted.
In the 1980s, there was the sending of U.S. troops into Lebanon as interventionist "peacekeepers." The terrorists ended up blowing
up a Marine barracks, killing 241 U.S. soldiers. The terrorists didn't hate America for its "freedom and values." They hated America
for the federal government's interventionism into Lebanon. As soon as all U.S. troops were withdrawn from Lebanon, which was the
right thing to do, there were obviously no more deaths of U.S. soldiers in that country.
It was after the Pentagon and the CIA lost their official Cold War enemy, the Soviet Union (i.e., Russia), that they proceeded
headlong into the Middle East and began killing multitudes of people. There was the Persian Gulf War, waged without the constitutionally
required congressional declaration of war, where thousands of Iraqis were killed or injured. That was followed by a decade of brutal
sanctions against Iraq, which contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children.
Thus, when Ramzi Yousef, one of the terrorists who tried to bring down the World Trade Center with a bomb in 1993, appeared before
a federal judge for sentencing, he angrily told the judge that it was U.S. officials who were the butchers, for killing multitudes
of innocent children in Iraq.
As those Iraqi children were dying, there were retaliatory terrorist strikes on the USS Cole and the U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Once again, however, U.S. officials continued to steadfastly maintain that was all about hatred for America's "freedom and values"
and had nothing to do with the deadly and destructive U.S. interventionism in the Middle East.
Then came Osama bin Laden's declaration of war against the United States, in which he expressly cited U.S. interventionism in
the Middle East as his motivating factor. That was followed by the 9/11 attacks, along with other terrorist attacks both here and
abroad. Through it all, U.S. officials and interventionists have blindly maintained that the terrorists hate us for our "freedom
and values," not because the U.S. government kills, maims, injures, and destroys people over there.
The recent Florida killings
And now we have the latest killing spree, this one at the hands of a Saudi citizen in Florida. According to
a story in yesterday's Washington Post about the killing of three U.S. soldiers, the killer, Ahmed Mohammed al-Shamrani
was described as "strange" and "angry." "He looked like he was angry at the world," said one person who knew him. Another said that
he looked at people in an "angry, challenging" way.
The article says that "the FBI has not yet determined a motive for the mass shooting."
Well, of course it hasn't. That's undoubtedly because the FBI hasn't yet found any statements in which the killer states that
he hates America for its "freedom and values."
But the Post article does point out something quite interesting. The article states: "The gunman, who was shot dead by
a sheriff's deputy responding to the shooting, is thought to have written a 'will' that was posted to the account a few hours before
the rampage. In it, he blasts U.S. policies in Muslim countries."
Well, isn't that interesting! Unfortunately, the Post didn't provide a verbatim transcript of the killer's "will" in which
he "blasts U.S. policies in the Muslim countries." The Post does point out though that "the writer says he does not dislike
Americans per se -- 'I don't hate you because of your freedoms,' he begins -- but that he hates U.S. policies that he views as anti-Muslim
and 'evil.'"
I n an article at antiwar.com entitled, " Pensacola: Blowback Terrorism ," Scott Horton provides a verbatim transcript of the
killer's "will," in which the killer states in part:
I'm not against you for just being American, I don't hate you for your freedom, I hate you because every day you supporting,
funding, and committing crimes not only against Muslims but also humanity. I am against evil, and America as a whole has turned
into a nation of evil. What I see from America is the supporting of Israel which is invasion of Muslim countrie, I see invasion
of many countries by it's troops, I see Guantanamo Bay. I see cruise missiles, cluster bombs and UAV.
Now, if one goes back to Ramzi Yousef's sentencing hearing in 1995 -- some 24 years ago -- one will see that Yousef angrily said
much the same thing to the federal judge who was getting ready to sentence him to jail for his 1993 terrorist attack on the World
Trade Center.
Americans have a choice:
One, continue the U.S. government's decades-long killing spree in the Middle East, in which case America will continue to experience
never-ending terrorist retaliation, the perpetual "war on terrorism, and the ongoing destruction of our liberty and privacy at the
hands of our government, which is purportedly protecting us from the terrorist threats that it produces with its foreign interventionism.
Or, two, stop U.S. forces from killing any more people, bring them all home and discharge them, which would help get America back
on the right track, one toward liberty, peace, prosperity, morality, normality, and harmony with the world.
This post was written by: Jacob G. Hornberger
Jacob G. Hornberger is founder and president of The Future of Freedom Foundation. He was born and raised in Laredo, Texas, and received
his B.A. in economics from Virginia Military Institute and his law degree from the University of Texas. He was a trial attorney for
twelve years in Texas. He also was an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas, where he taught law and economics. In 1987,
Mr. Hornberger left the practice of law to become director of programs at the Foundation for Economic Education. He has advanced
freedom and free markets on talk-radio stations all across the country as well as on Fox News' Neil Cavuto and Greta van Susteren
shows and he appeared as a regular commentator on Judge Andrew Napolitano's show Freedom Watch . View these interviews at
LewRockwell.com and from
Full Context
. Send him email .
Once again,
Russia is suffering from the tainted judgment of non-transparent Western institutions, this
time from the World Anti-Doping Agency, which just banned Russia from all international
sporting events. The reason for the arbitrary judgment should surprise no one.
The globalists certainly never banked on Russia rising so fast and furious from the ruins of
the Soviet Union to the point where it is now in the position to deter Western intrigues around
the world. This was witnessed first and foremost in the miraculously recovering hot-spot of
Syria – which, unlike the tragic fate that awaited doomed countries like Ukraine, Iraq
and Libya – managed at the 11th hour to escape the jaws of NATO's regime-change
juggernaut. Syria's salvation was due overwhelmingly to Russian military and diplomatic
intervention.
Moscow's efforts, which could best be described as humanitarian in nature, did not come
without a price tag for Russia on the propaganda front. From being
wrongly accused of meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections, to being unjustly blamed by
a Dutch-led probe for the downing of Flight MH17, it is more than apparent that Russia is under
full-scale fake news attack.
This week proved no exception as the West's anti-Russia machine shifted into overdrive as
the World Anti-Doping Agency slapped Russia with a ban from all international sporting events
– including the 2020 Tokyo Games and the 2022 World Cup – for four years. The
reason is exactly the same as it was ahead of the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Games: the alleged
tampering in Moscow of athletes' laboratory drug-test results. Russia has vehemently denied
that any manipulations occurred inside of its labs, and vowed to appeal the decision.
Clearly, the motivation here is to humiliate, provoke and punish Moscow by any means
available – even on the field of dreams. Any Russian athlete who wishes to challenge the
verdict and participate in the upcoming Games will be required to "prove their innocence"
first. If they pass that stage and are allowed to compete, they will not be permitted to don
the Russian tricolors, nor will the Russian national anthem be played. Russian athletes, who
will be branded as 'Olympic Athlete from Russia,' will have to settle for pledging allegiance
to the generic Olympic flag as opposed to the Russian national flag. If ever there were a
litmus test for a One World globalist government, where athletes play for some singular
monolithic entity, this might just be it.
Euro 2020 LOC chief Alexey Sorokin tells RT 'WADA ban will not affect Russian part of Euro
2020'
Says UCL final in St. Peterbsurg unlikely to be moved
Aside from punishing Moscow for scuttling Western designs in Syria and beyond (incidentally,
news of WADA's ban came just as Vladimir Putin was sitting down in Paris for the Normandy Four
summit with Angela Merkel, Volodymyr Zelensky and Emmanuel Macron in an effort to stabilize the
situation in Eastern Ukraine, as well as relations between Moscow and Kiev), the Western
capitals have never quite recovered from Russia's flawless handling of the 2018
World Cup , hosted by 11 Russian cities and visited by an estimated 3 million fans from
around the world.
Here was a golden opportunity for Russia to prove firsthand that the Western media has been
portraying Russia in a completely misleading light for many years. And much to everyone's
apparent surprise it worked. In what amounted to a massive PR disaster for the Western world,
those millions of visitors took home with them glowingly positive reviews about Russia and the
Russian people, thereby flushing many years of Western anti-Russia propaganda down the
proverbial toilet.
According to FIFA President Gianni Infantino: "Everyone discovered a beautiful country, a
welcoming country that is keen to show the world that everything that has been said before
might not be true. A lot of preconceived ideas have been changed because people have seen the
true nature of Russia."
Infantino also went
on record as calling Russia 2018 "the best World Cup ever."
Needless to say, the Western policymakers would like nothing more than to deny Russia from
receiving any further global accolades in the future.
Danny Armstrong, a Moscow-based sports commentator for RT, described the folly of attempting
to ban Russia from Euro 2020 next year, where four games are already scheduled to be held in
St. Petersburg.
"Would fans, organizers and commentators be banned from stating they are in Russia? We're do
you draw the line?
"I think given that this level of scrutiny isn't generally applied to other nations and the
cynical calls for heightened stringency from USADA in reaction – who has had more than
its fair share of doping scandals – there's more than a whiff of motivation to
potentially eliminate a rival," Armstrong said via email.
Just had a very good meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and representatives of
Russia. Discussed many items including Trade, Iran, North Korea, INF Treaty, Nuclear Arms
Control, and Election Meddling. Look forward to continuing our dialogue in the near future!
pic.twitter.com/tHecH9a9ck
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who was meeting with Donald Trump in side of the
Oval Office when the WADA decision was made public, couldn't resist taking some cracks at
members of Congress who predictably criticized the high-ranking Russian delegation being
invited to the White House.
"If [Adam] Schiff can describe the ministerial-level contacts normal to any country and my
meeting with the president in such a way, then I believe that they will soon accuse our
diplomats, just as they have our athletes, of doping and call for criminal punishment," Lavrov
told reporters.
Although it is certainly a positive sign to see one of the highest ranking Kremlin officials
respond to these ongoing attacks against Russia in a tongue-in-cheek manner, fully aware of the
derangement syndrome that is motivating them, there can be no doubt that such actions against
Russia are being viewed in Moscow as passive forms of very real aggression that cannot go
unchallenged forever.
In other words, the world should be very wary of the other shoe dropping when that shoe
belongs to a nuclear-armed military power whose patience must be wearing very thin.
"I wish that people would realize that to interfere, in any way shape or form in wars that
occur in Islamic States is pissing into the wind.
We simply cannot and do not understand the religious/tribal and feudal component of these
societies.
It is better that we just let them go at each other. Sooner or later one despot will end
up being top dog - so be it."
Hmm. Do you know the history of colonialism in MENA? I did not think so.
My guess is that your 'knowledge' of Afghanistan and its history is based on your obvious
xenophobia aka Islamophobia and lofty Western superiority complex. Don't feel alone, that's
what folks use to make themselves feel better and able to sleep at night. Check this out:
"Despite close relations to the Axis powers, Zahir Shah refused to take sides during World
War II and Afghanistan remained one of the few countries in the world to remain neutral. In
1944 and 1945, Afghanistan experienced a series of revolts by various tribes.[13] After the
end of the Second World War, Zahir Shah recognised the need for the modernisation of
Afghanistan and recruited a number of foreign advisers to assist with the process.[14] During
this period Afghanistan's first modern university was founded.[14] During his reign a number
of potential advances and reforms were derailed as a result of factionalism and political
infighting.[15] He also requested financial aid from both the United States and the Soviet
Union, and Afghanistan was one of few countries in the world to receive aid from both the
Cold War enemies.[16] In a 1969 interview, Zahir Shah said that he is "not a capitalist. But
I also don't want socialism. I don't want socialism that would bring about the kind of
situation [that exists] in Czechoslovakia. I don't want us to become the servants of Russia
or China or the servant of any other place."[17]
Zahir Shah was able to govern on his own during 1963[9] and despite the factionalism and
political infighting a new constitution was introduced during 1964 which made Afghanistan a
modern democratic state by introducing free elections, a parliament, civil rights, women's
rights and universal suffrage.[14]"
The USA "Full Spectrum Dominance" doctrine requires weakening and, if possible, partitioning Russia.
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin tells the audience that Skripals poisoning was a false flag operation. 7:00
He also point several weak points in Western politicians narrative about MH17
Notable quotes:
"... Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America ..."
"... Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it. ..."
"... The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans). ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause". ..."
"... Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic. ..."
"... "Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily
determined to undermine Russia.
A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign
to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff
when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on Russia," Kevin says in his conversation
with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating
a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy
Vogan.
Putin & the Russian citizenry play chess on this 3-dimensional world.! The Americas and their inane elites attempt checkers
on their flat Earth . Pity, some such as Noam Chomsky are admirable world citizens..! Pity again.! WE will miss men of this honest
calibre and down- to-earth intelligence. Bob Carr is of this cohort.
Eugenie Basile , December 10, 2019 at 03:36
The 'Russia did it' mantra is a gift for the powers in the Kremlin. It rallies most Russians behind their leaders because they
are proud of their country and don't accept the West's moral hypocrite grandstanding.
Just recently the WADA proclaimed sporting ban against Russia is a perfect example. It excludes all Russian athletes because
they happen to represent their country while U.S. athletes who have been caught cheating in the past are allowed to participate
.
It is very encouraging to know there are good people like Mr. Tony Kevin and Mr. Bob Carr alive and sharing their powerful
wisdom at this dangerous historical point on planet Earth. Mr. Kevin and Mr. Carr's immensely important and courageously honest
discussion should become – immediately, and for many years to come – required study in university classrooms and government halls
around this world.
Peace.
ElderD , December 9, 2019 at 15:03
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive state of affairs deserve the widest
possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed. Cold War patterns of thinking
about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer
we come to its revival. Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now
so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then,
it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of
nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is.
Lois Gagnon , December 9, 2019 at 17:30
I agree. Putin made it clear when he said the next war would not be fought inside Russia. The troglodytes in the West are
unable to grasp not only what that means, but why he said it.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been, are via that US supported supposed
oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events
including the upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase
Russophobia) sort – about Russian hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour Party's
source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally destroy the NHS and replace it with (of
course) US "health" insurance company profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity among many Tory party supporters among
the working and lower middle classes prevented them from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the
undermining, via installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds that would otherwise
have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money – a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally
conceived and constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how
either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the
neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters
are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile
the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military,
thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what I've read the man is the most diplomatic
and intelligent politician (not just political leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world
stage. None of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries. Unlike their western "world"
political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely
assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said
any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked well. We're trying to
do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that
doesn't.
SIPIRI tags US military spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the energy department or our veteran's
expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better
than we can sustain our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there was NEVER a surrender, intended in
any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships. For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live
and work in peace. (By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear as never before, a mad man throwing
a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence universally consulted), allowing the
light in for the mass of the viewing and listening public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus.
Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more.
(The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a nation which has been started by
killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive
campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country on earth capable of obliterating
the United States. Not even China has yet reached that capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting, and worked to benefit average Russian
citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The Magnitsky Act monster, the election
interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a
very telling moment for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all
of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly. But it has regularly done the right thing in international
conflicts which the Kremlin seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
Just as was true when the Mueller investigation closed
without a single American being charged with criminally conspiring with Russia
over the 2016 election, Wednesday's issuance of the long-waited report from the
Department of Justice's Inspector General reveals that years of major claims and narratives
from the U.S. media were utter
frauds .
Before evaluating the media component of this scandal, the FBI's gross abuse of its power
– its serial deceit – is so grave and manifest that it requires little effort to
demonstrate it. In sum, the IG Report documents multiple instances in which the FBI – in
order to convince a FISA court to allow it spy on former Trump campaign operative Carter Page
during the 2016 election – manipulated documents, concealed crucial exonerating evidence,
and touted what it knew were unreliable if not outright false claims.
If you don't consider FBI lying, concealment of evidence, and manipulation of documents in
order to spy on a U.S. citizen in the middle of a presidential campaign to be a major scandal,
what is? But none of this is aberrational: the FBI still has its headquarters in a building
named after J. Edgar Hoover – who constantly blackmailed elected officials with dossiers
and tried to blackmail Martin Luther King into killing himself – because that's what
these security state agencies are. They are out-of-control, virtually unlimited police state
factions that lie, abuse their spying and law enforcement powers, and subvert democracy and
civic and political freedoms as a matter of course.
In this case, no rational person should allow standard partisan bickering to distort or hide
this severe FBI corruption. The IG Report leaves no doubt about it. It's brimming with proof of
FBI subterfuge and deceit, all in service of persuading a FISA court of something that was not
true: that U.S. citizen and former Trump campaign official Carter Page was an agent of the
Russian government and therefore needed to have his communications surveilled.
started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins
Good on him – being able to create a thing that rises to such prominence in such a
short space of time speaks volumes about this Higgins guy's entrepreneurial ability. And if
he wasn't mobbed-up to begin with, he sure as fuck is now – which is a double-
mitzvah (for him).
If he did so starting from being unemployed, then anybody who turned down a job
application from the guy must be kicking themselves. (' Unemployed ' is obviously used
pejoratively in the blockquote; 'Englishman' is purely-descriptive).
.
Also, the entire article accepts Bernays' conclusion, but disagrees as to which objectives
should be pursued.
Bernays' conclusions are hardly controversial: most people are gullible imbeciles .
It's not clear to me how much more empirical evidence we need before that becomes just a
thing that everyone with an IQ above 115 accepts.
So the question then becomes " OK, now what? ".
As usual, the right answer is " Depends " – and not just for those with
bladder control problems.
If you want to do things that are just , exploiting gullible imbeciles would appear
to violate the playing conditions. It would be hors jeu ; not done; just not
cricket .
As the Laconian famously said . " IF ."
For those for whom the 'if' condition returns 'false', it does very little to bleat about
how awful they are. You're not going to cause a little switch in their brain to flick on (or
off?), whereupon they realise the error of their ways and make a conscious decision to leave
the gullible imbeciles unexploited.
It's even unlikely to affect their victims (remember, they're imbeciles) – because
otherwise some infra-marginal imbeciles would have to process their way through quite a bit
of cognitive dissonance, and they're not wired for introspection (or processing).
So the sole real purpose (apart from κάθαρσις
catharsis ) is prophylaxis (προ +
φύλαξις – guarding ). Both good enough aims
obviously the writer is the one who gets the cathartic benefit, but who is going to be on
heightened alert as a result of this Cassandra -ish jeremiad -ing?
Non-imbeciles don't need it; imbeciles won't benefit.
Here's the thing: the gullible imbeciles are going to be exploited by
someone .
.
This is something that people of my persuasion struggle with. It boils down to the
following:
Let's assume that a reprehensible thing exists already, and is unlikely to be overthrown
by my opposition to it. Should I just participate and line my pockets?
The resources used are going to be used whether I participate or not, so it may as well
be me who gets them. After all, I will put them to moral uses – and while inside, I
can do things that are contrary to the interests of the reprehensible thing.
There is no satisfactory counter-argument to that line of reasoning, and yet I reject
it.
Then again: I was dropped on my head as an infant, so YMMV.
The US lied about the Gulf of Tonkin in order to justify attacking North Vietnam, it then
proceeded to lie about the conduct of the war and the terrible genocide it was committing. No
lesson learned because in a heartbeat the US was lying about Chile, Brazil, Argentina,
Colombia, Nicaragua and El Salvador, committing a wide range of atrocities in each.
Add Somalia, Libya, proxy wars in Angola and Yemen, efforts to destabilize Cuba, Venezuela
and Iran, illegal wars in the Lebanon and Syria, the annihilation of Afghanistan in
retaliation for what was actually a Saudi terrorist act, the destruction of modern Iraq and
her people using trumped up claims, to say nothing of Clinton's cheery disregard for the
welfare of Balkan residents when the US rained (illegal) uranium bombs down on the hapless
inhabitants.
And now the WP and Congress are worked up over spending a trillion dollars when plainly
they could care less about the Afghan casualties and American war crimes. Heck this goes back
to Theodore Roosevelt seizing Cuba claiming he was saving it from the ravages of Spain or
even further back to government backed settler land grabs "saving their white women from the
savages". Savages, indeed. Zero accountability and Britain still playing faithful lap
dog.
My take on this is that the American Department of Defense war machine remained in a state of
perpetual excitement after their successes in WW11.. almost as if they had to continuously
invent an enemy in order to maintain their war time budget.. (and therefore demonstrate their
ongoing prowess etc etc) in a cycle of wars starting with Korea and bringing us up to date
with Afghanistan.. so that's nearly 70 years worth of international hubris on display.
All on the excuse of spreading their version of democracy.. is money talks!!
In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted
influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential
for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the
weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take
nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper
meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods
and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.
That both the Afghan war and the invasion of Iraq could happen at all tells us that the UN
Security Council is not fit for purpose. These wars also told us that British pretense at
being the voice of reason or the steadying hand that prevents US foreign policy being
subsumed by the visceral and synthesised reactions of a US public is no more than empty cant.
If the US is unable to prevent foreign and defence policy being captured by money
interests and remains inclined to deliver revenge to its public on demand howsoever it might
be misdirected then the US should not be on the UN Security Council at all. They are fast
becoming the number one major rogue state. And the outlook suggests this is more likely to
get worse than improve. Whatever happens to Trump One more (and likely smarter) Trumps are
coming down the track. More Dick Cheneys too. More Bushes, more Rumsfelds, more Nixons,
Boltons, Kissingers, Johnsons and a host of others we'd all much rather were one offs. The US
is the biggest extant threat to world peace. It is too powerful and far too easily played by
warmongers and terrorists of every stripe and every persuasion. And by those seeking to
profit from war.
To call war profiteering and murder a geopolitical "mistake" is to EXCUSE criminal activity.
Anyone responding to this latest revelation of military dishonest as a "mistake" is
actually part of the crime. They are aiding the abettors. Everyone in Congress knows what
everyone in this comments section knows: our military and its global actions are, first and
foremost, a financial fraud.
But not American oil companies which were basically shut out outside of a few minor service
and procurement contracts. Looks like all the "Blood for Oil" poster were BS.
The Iraq War was only partly, however, about big profits for Anglo-American oil
conglomerates - that would be a bonus (one which in the end has failed to materialise - not
for want of trying though).
Yes, and it made no conclusion as to whether the war was legal or not.
" The inquiry did not reach a view on the legality of the war , saying this
could only be assessed by a "properly constituted and internationally recognised court", but
did make a damning assessment of how the decision was made."
Just think - the USA spends more on its military then the combined amount of the next 10
nations in the list (incl. China/Russia/India). That is a major major spend commitment. A
small percentage of that could be used for US citizens to fund their healthcare - but I
suppose they prefer to spend it to threaten and bomb other nations to their will.
Just to think - a similar report was produced post Vietnam and in the 50's even Eisenhower
was worried about the US military backed by private companies becoming a perpetual spending
machine.
But there's one big question the Post report raises but does not address: why? Why did
so many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about
how the war in Afghanistan was going?
Because "how the war is going" is not the operating question. Because it does not matter
if the war is just or unjust, whether it's winnable or not winnable, nor whether it's
supported in the "homeland" or not. No, the operating principle is that there is a war. By
its existence, the war creates funding and jobs and profits for the people that matter, the
people the author mentions, from the Security/Military complex corporations all the way to
careerists in the Pentagon and State.
So, it is NOT a waste of $1 trillion dollars ... it is just as it was supposed to be. That
is why the war president (W), the peace president (Obama), and the swamp drainer (Trump) have
all supported it. The war is doing what it's supposed to do.
In time, the US national debt will force them to rein in their military spending. By lowering
taxes while continuing to spend like drunken sailors on military adventures the national debt
is ballooning. US government debt is currently rated AA whereas Canada is AAA. US debt to GDP
is significantly higher than Canada's. (and that's just Canada vs the US). Trump is trying to
create a mafia style protection racket to force other countries to subsidize reckless US
military spending. "Pay up or who knows what might happen?" It is high time US taxpayers ask
why the US can't lower its' out of control military spending rather than pressuring others to
match their profligate ways? Some US citizens say they pay low taxes but it seems they get
nothing in return; no health care, no equal access to education, decaying public
infrastructure, etc. The rest feel overtaxed when they realize they get nothing in return but
don't question the elephant in the room. If other countries maintain responsible levels of
military spending the US will dig itself deeper into debt until the debt markets force them
to see sense.
Military spending is a fine way to transfer wealth from the general population to the rich.
War has always been a fabulous business opportunity, but what has never been so very clear is
how, even for the winning side, it represents a major defeat as wealth is transferred from
the common good into the hands of the rich.
In such matters always consider 'Who will prosper'.
Follow the money...
Considering the United States has been involved in one war or another, directly or
indirectly, for all but about 20 years of its existence, this latest revelation shouldn't
shock anyone. We're a violent country with a violent history and never more so than now, with
our built-on-conflict empire losing steam. We point fingers ("It's the Russians!" "It's the
Chinese!" It's the Iranians!") to deceive ourselves and others, but we're the real threat to
peace. Us. The United States.
Every time I see a person on the street nobly collecting 50ps or the odd fiver for a good
cause like Cancer Research or some other charity, I wonder why they have to do this when the
US has spent over a USD$1 trillion on the Afghan war and other militaries continue to soak up
massive amounts of funding. How much more could we have achieved by now for the real good of
humanity if these funds were focused on research and real human need?
Te US military has been practicing genocide around the world since WW2, millions have been
murdered and still are. But hey, they are the leaders of the free world, the corruption in
the US government, corporations, and military has no bounds. Their own poorer members of this
society are dying in their thousands for lack of medical care, innocent black people are
murdered by police, yet the greed must go on nothing else matters. The only question now
being, which country will they invade next, which government will they plot to overthrow. How
many will be murdered in the process, not that it matters, greed cannot be measured in dead
people.
World peace and the safety of the American public has never been a priority. Entirely the
opposite. Standard procedure: foment fear to wage immoral, endless, profitable war.
This isn't conjecture or "conspiracy theory"; it's as obvious as the sun rising. Anyone
casting this in any other way is either behind the curve or dangerously soft pedaling -- or
lying to stave off actual accountability.
Please stop pretending that our "leaders" are mistaken. They aren't They're doing the jobs
for which they were paid.
It's worse even than a crime... it's insanity to keep excusing a failed 18 year strategy
costing a trillion dollars, resulting in the death of more than 100,000, and the country
ending up worse than when they started. The military, politicians and the media are all to
blame. The military for being too frightened and too stupid to admit they were losing and had
no idea how to correct it.. the politicians for being too frightened to call out their
beloved but incompetent military, and for not "getting it" after more than a trillion dollars
had already been spent; the press and media for being embedded (sometimes literally) with the
military and acting as no more than unquestioning cheerleaders for a self-evidently failed
strategy. It is a terrible indictment of the US on so many levels... where were the public
anti-war protests or activists? Couldn't they see or didn't they care? Either way it's
pathetic.
Almost every year US generals stood before the media and politicians, jutting jaws and
feeble minds, to say that this year was going to be decisive against the Taliban. The fact
is, after Al Qaeda was scattered in 2001, the US picked on the Taliban pointlessly. They
stayed pretending they were engaged in countering the return of al Qaeda (that was never
going to happen) but actually made a new enemy of the Taliban by picking the wrong side in
what was a civil war. The US never understood what it was trying to do so it lied and lied
out of fear of being found out. I find it sickening that this country -the US - pretends it
is a force for good in the world when they are quite prepared to keep killing innocent people
in order to mask the generals' cowardice about facing the truth of their own
incompetence.
A terrible but interesting dichotomy. You have Governments and a broad part of the public
fiercely opposed to public spending and any kind of redistribution. It is all about the
individual.
Yet they sport and actually worship an institution where the individual counts for naught.
In the military it always is about the collective. They throw huge swaths of money to the
military. Which is the only place in the US where dreaded universal healthcare, pensions and
free education exists. Not only that, even the army shops sell goods as subsidised prices,
something unthinkable outside the barracks.
Entirely intentional according the PNAC document Rebuilding America's Defences, Orwellian for
we're going to make a lot of pointless weapons with huge mark-ups for profit by bombing the
shit out of foreigners.
I was listening to NPR about how Veterans turned against the Vietnam war. The people of south
Vietnam would collect shells and explosives that did not detonate and gave to US troops for a
small financial reward. In one such case - the shell exploded killing few kids and injuring a
girl. That girl was refused treatment from US medics because she was one of them. That
soldier involved later joined the anti war movement.
All the veterans were surprised with the image that soldiers coming back from war were spat
at and disrespected by the anti war protesters - this could not have been further from truth.
Back in Vietnam you were taught how to destroy a village, poison drinking water sources
etc. And understandably many GIs fought back.
There are similar stories out of Afghanistan - the naked prisoners with soldiers acting as
if they are engaging in a sexual act and many such shameless incidents. These soldiers were
acquitted which is another way of saying - An Afghan and his life and honor are below us. It
has de-stabilized the region for many decades.
There is a bright side to Donny and his conmen - maybe there will be less intervention and
more introspection - which can only be good for the World.
I think it should have been seen as a thirty year campaign and the same with Iraq and Libya.
The northern Ireland campaign took 30 years and many people are as bitter as they ever were
much of it secondhand from younger people who weren't even alive during the conflict. The
idea of a quick war is a very big mistake I think and flawed short-term thinking.
The West and the USA in particular have always taken the stand that their ideology is the
only right one. That they have a right to interfere in the interns, affairs of other
countries but their own internal affairs are sacrosanct.
So - USA, with UK support decided that Saddam Hussein had to be removed. They moved in to
do so - they killed Saddam but had no plan to return the country to a functioning nation.
Instead they facilitated the unleashing of internal wars and have now left the citizens of
that country in utter turmoil.
& then went and repeated the exercise n Libya.
Decades ago, Britain decided that Palestinians could be thrown out of their homes to make
way for the creation of Israel and laid the foundation for the Middle-East turmoil that has
caused untold misery and suffering. They followed that up with throwing out the Chagosians
out of their homes and making them homeless. Invited Caribbean's to the 'Mother Country' to
serve their erstwhile lords, ladies, masters and mistresses only to then drive to despair the
children and grandchildren of the invitees who had contributed to the 'Mother Country' for
decades.
We are 18 years into an illegal invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. We are the invaders,
the terrorists. The Taliban are fighting for their country, they may use brutal methods but
so did the French, Dutch, Russian freedom fighters during the Nazi invasions. America's
puppet regime in Afghanistan is reminiscent of the Quislings of WW2. And to use drones to
kill Afghans and to say it is progress that there is more transparency is the height of
hubris. All it does is show the corrosive effect of unfettered power in America and it's
military. Why do we tolerate this inhuman action on another country's society? America is by
far the greatest contributor to the rise in terrorism in the world and if not somehow stopped
the greatest threat to world peace. It keeps on invading country after country with it's MSM
propaganda machine claiming it is spreading Democracy throughout the globe. Thank you America
!
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I have just finished reading William
Shirer's
Berlin Diary
. (This may not fascinate you, but I am coming to something.) I first
encountered it in high school. It is of course Shirer's account as a correspondent in Germany of the rise of
the Nazis. Most of it is well known to the educated. The Nazis, who had control over the domestic press,
convinced the German population that the Poles were threatening Germany, as plausible as Guatemala
threatening the United States. The Poles were said to be committing atrocities against Germans.
Then the Reich, with no justification
whatever, having absolute air superiority, attacked Poland, bombing undefended cities and killing huge
numbers of people. It was a German pattern several times repeated. Many reporters told of the smell of
rotting bodies, of refugees dying of hunger and thirst. Today the Reich is endlessly remembered as a paragon
of evil. It was.
How did Nazi Germany differ from the
United States today? There is the same lying. Washington insisted that Iraq was about to get nuclear
weapons, biological agents, that it had poisonous gas. None of this was true. The government, unimpeded by
the media, persuaded over half of the American population that Iraq was responsible for Nine-Eleven. Now it
says that Iran works to get nuclear weapons, and of course that the Russians are coming. The American press,
informally but strictly controlled, carefully doesn't challenge any of this.
Having prepped the American public as the
Nazis prepped theirs, Washington unleashed a savage attack against Iraq, deliberately destroying
infrastructure, leaving the country without power or purified water. The slaughter was godawful. But, said
America, the war was to rid the Iraqi people of an evil dictator, to bring them democracy, freedom, and
human rights. (The oil was entirely incidental. The oil is always incidental.)
Fallujah, Iraq, after the American military brought it democracy, human rights, and freedom.
Guernica, after the visit of the Kondor Legion. For the historically challenged, this was the Spanish
city bombed during the Spánish Civil War by the Germans in support of the Falangists.
Washington never sleeps in its campaigns to improve the lives of people
whose most fervent wish is that America stop improving their lives. To give the Afghans democracy, human
rights, and American values, the US has for eighteen years been bombing, bombing, bombing a largely
illiterate population in a nation where America has no business. It is a coward's war with warplanes
butchering peasants who have no defenses. The pilots and drone operators who do this deserve contempt, as
does the country that sends them. How many more years? For what purpose? And how were the German Nazis
different?
The German Gestapo perpetrated sickening
torture in hidden basements. America does the same, mainltaining torture prisons around the world. In these,
men, and no doubt women, are hung by their wrists for days, naked in very cold rooms, kept awake and
periodically beaten (exactly as described by survivors of Soviet torture. Nazis, whether American, Russian,
or German, are Nazis.)
Photos of Iraqis at the American torture
operation at Abu Ghraib showed prisoners, almost naked, lying in pools of blood. Tell me, please, how this
differs from what was done by the Reich? (The bloodier photos are no longer online. Many that remain seem to
have been edited.)
Abu Ghraib.
A happy American girl soldier. Note rubber gloves. The US military used many
female soldiers for this duty. They apparently were kinky, as they seemed to get a kick out of it. A
female general ran the operation.
Gina Haspel, head of the CIA, is a sadist
who tortured Moslem prisoners, reminiscent of Ilse Koch, the notorious Nazi torturess, who also worked in
prisons. It is easy to find victims there, I suppose.
An Abu Ghraib pic apparently no longer online. I found it on an ancient memory stick. Are we having
fun yet?
President Trump has just
pardoned
several American war criminals, saying he wanted to give US soldiers the "confidence to
fight." This amounts to blanket permission to commit atrocities. A purpose of military training being to
extirpate human decency and mercifulness, the obscene barbarism is not surprising. Atrocities are what
soldiers do, and will do as long as the wars go on, being furiously denied by the government. (When I
covered Force Recon, the Marine Corps Special Forces, the motto on the wall was "Crush Their Skulls and Eat
Their Faces.")
Perhaps the best known example of
implied approval was Nixon's pardon of Lt. Calley, who ordered the murder of Vietnamese villagers, for which
he received three years of house arrest.
The Germans wanted empire,
lebensraum,
and resources, in particular oil. Americans want empire and oil, control of which allows
control of the world They go about getting them by invasion and intimidation. Thus America wants to bring
democracy and human rights to Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, and Nigeria, which have
lots
of oil, while it
has occupation troops in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Mideast. What part of Syria is Trump
occupying? Surprise, surprise! The part with the oil. Oil for the Americans, land for the Germans.
As Shirer points out, the German public
was not enthusiastic about the war, at least not through 1940, as neither is the American public today.
Neither public showed any concern about the hideousness its government inflicted around the world. What is
the difference?
The parallels with the Reich are not
complete. Washington does not essay genocide against Jews or blacks or any other internal population, being
content with killing whoever its bombs fall upon. Trump cannot reasonably be likened to Hitler. He lacks the
vision, the backbone, and apparently the viciousness. Hitler was a very smart, very evil man who knew
exactly what he was doing, at least politically. This cannot be said of Trump. However, Hitler was, and
Trump is, surrounded by freak-show curiosities of great bellicosity. Adolf had Goering, Goebbels, Himler,
Rheinhardt Heydrich, Julius Streicher, Eichman. Trump has John Bolton, as amoral and pathologically
aggressive as any in the Fuehrer's entourage, or under a log. Pompeo, a bloated toad of a man, bears an
uncanny resemblance to Goering. Both he and Pence are Christian heretics, Evangelicals, who believe they are
connected to God on broadband. O'Brien sounds like Bolton. All want war with Iran and perhaps with China and
Russia. Sieg heil, and run like hell.
My Lai, after Lt. Calley of the SS Totenkopf Div excuse me, the Americal Division, I meant to say,
brought human rights, freedom, and the American way.
Wikipedia:
"Between 347 and 504 unarmed people were killed by U.S. Army soldiers Victims
included men, women, children, and infants. Some of the women were gang-raped and their bodies mutilated as
were children as young as 12.")
For this Calley got three years house
arrest, less than the sentence for a bag of methamphetamine, until pardoned by Nixon. Many Americans said,
and many still say, that he should not have been punished at all, that we needed to take the gloves off, let
the troops fight. Again, this is what Trump said.
The German Nazis worshiped Blood and
Soil, the land of Germany and the Teutonic race, which they believed to be genetically superior to all
others. Americans can't easily worship race. Instead they think themselves Exceptional, Indispensable, a
Shining City on a Hill, the greatest civilization the world has known. Same narcissism and arrogance,
slightly different foundation.
Nazi Germany was, like Nazi America,
intensely militaristic. The US has hundreds of bases around the world (China has one overseas base, in
Djibouti), spends appallingly on the military despite the lack of a credible military enemy. It currently
buys new missile submarines (the Columbia class), aircraft carriers (the Ford class), intercontinental
nuclear bombers (the B21), and fighter planes (the F-35).
Nazi Germany attacked Poland, Norway,
Belgium, France, Russia, America, and England. America? Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, supports a
brutal proxy war against Yemen (Yemen is a grave threat to America), threatens Venezuela, China, and Iran
with attack, embargoes Cuba. These are recent. Going back a bit, we have Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam,
Yugoslavia, the intervention in Panama, on and on. Millions and millions killed.
The Third Reich was, and America is, the
chief threat to peace on the planet, a truly rogue state.
Is this something to be proud of?
Other stuff
La FIL,
Feria Internacional
de Libros
, International Book Fair, Guadalajara, an annual event. I post the photo with the joyous sense
of mischief of an eleven-year-old poking a nest of wasps. It will infuriate the Dissident Right, or Alt
Right, or Race Realists. Their leaders excepted, most of these are ill-tempered naifs who insist, and seem
to hope desperately, that Latin Americans are illiterate. I occasionally have conservative friends down and
they are astonished to find that Guadalajara, a large international city, has the sorts of bookstores had by
large international cities. Duh. (If interested,
here
are a couple of dozen.)
Another and cherished conceit of the
Dissident Right is that Latin Americans who can read must be white. Well, I guess. Why, you could easily
mistake the crowd above for Norwegians. Their ancestors probably arrived with Leif Erikson.
Merry Christmas to all! Happy "Winter
Holidays" to none.
Write Fred at
[email protected].
Put the letters "pdq" anywhere in the subject line to avoid autodeletion. All read, reply not guaranteed due
to volume.
This meritorious and beneficial column
will go into hibernation until after New Year, after which it will likely return.
It's almost a century since Smedley Butler wrote his incisive pamphlet War is a Racket.
If you've never read it, it takes about 15-20 minutes to do so. It will astound, anger and
depress you that the only thing that's changed is the number or zeroes on the eye waterering
profits. Oh, and the players. What is it exactly that makes the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
untouchable? (Answers on a postcard C/O Beelzebub.)
Smedley Butler knew of what he lectured about, being the most decorated officer in the
history of the Marine Corps.
A brief insight into this insightful all American action man man Hollywood seems to have
overlooked:
"I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this
country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks
from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time
being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In
short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.
"I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I
helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues
in.
I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street.
"The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international
banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for
American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its
way unmolested.
"During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a swell racket.
Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could
do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents."
There's been a century of endless war and profits since then with this century shaping up
nicely for the racketeers, whose finest day might well have been September 11th, 2001.
Anyway, here's a link to a pdf file of War is a Racket if you're interested.
And this is where we must listen to the wisdom of Trump..
"As of a couple of months ago, we have spent $7 trillion in the Middle East. Seven
trillion dollars. What a mistake. But it is what is," Trump said Monday at a White House
meeting on with officials and lawmakers on infrastructure. "We're trying to build roads and
bridges and fix bridges that are falling down, and we have a hard time getting the money.
It's crazy."
"Think about it: As of a couple of months ago, $7 trillion in the Middle East and the
Middle East is far worse now than it was 17 years ago when they went in and not so
intelligently, I have to say, went in. I'm being nice.'' 2/13/18 Newsweek
''..when they went in and not so intelligently, I have to say, went in. I'm being
nice...''
@Adrian About Chris Hedges' participation in presenting this award to Bellingcat "News from
Underground" came yesterday up with this:
a friend who knows the background of Chris Hedges' involvement writes that "he was duped
into presenting the Emmy to Bellingcat -- and, from what I hear, he believes it was done
intentionally to smear him."
As this friend is someone I (and many others) quite admire for his integrity and bravery,
and as it's wholly plausible that Hedges would have been set up, I am reserving judgementon
his action, and urge people on this list to do so, too.
@Adrian Hedges would have known who the nominees are just seeing Bellingcat in there and
knowing this is the Emmies well, it's hard to believe otherwise than Hedges is a clever fake as
I have long suspected
Let's recall that Hedges in his previous life was an NYT war correspondent who covered the
Bosnian conflict knowing Yugoslavia quite well from visits there in the 1980s his reports
demonizing Serbs stood out like a sore thumb
I quickly pegged him as a complete liar, like the rest of the MSM propagandists that were
repeating boilerplate canards meant to demonize the hugely successful nation of Yugoslavia
which of course they were trying to tear apart
For instance, 'the Serb-dominated Yugoslavia' was a standard sentence that appeared
literally in every single story repeated ad nauseum literallu dozens of times a day and clearly
meant to convince the reader that dismantling the progressive and ethnically harmonious nation
of Yugoslavia was somehow the right thing to do
But it was pure bullshit anyone who had ever been to Yugoslavia would instantly recognize
that as a 'WTF ?'
There is much much more in Hedges' closet
But then, miraculously, he had a 'Road to Damascus' moment a few years later [we are
supposed to believe] and somehow became a 'good guy'
Bullshit Mr. Curtin nails the sly method here exactly
[The] bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.
An excellent article
PS Counterpunch is a complete bullshit rag that has been coopted completely Plutocrat Pierre
Omidyar and his little 'Intercept' outfit is similarly continuing in the footsteps of prior
plutocrat propagandists like the Ford foundation Rockefellers and others
The ultimate goal is controlling YOU they need you to be obedient and believing and not ask
any questions
@FB Haven't looked at Bellingcat (not exactly a sophisticated operation if you ever worked
in the ad business) since MH 17 and Putin's Syria pacification, but upon reading this article
it became clear that Hedges must be either an idiot or deeply embedded.
One doesn't exclude the other, of course. The uneducated public wouldn't need to catch up on
so much information, and still get a great head start if they ever found out wtf "cui bono"
even means – but that's not gonna happen.
It's just not how the human mind works.
Any particular American war has no purpose, but the USA waging it does. The main points of
what war does:
1. Transfers wealth from social services to the military industrial complex. Americans
don't have education, infrastructure, or healthcare, but they do have a generation of
soldiers with PTSD, national debt, worldwide hatred, and an ever increasing sense of
exceptionalism.
2. Traps Americans in a cycle of fear and persecution. Americans don't need a bogeyman,
but our corporate overlords do, its how they monetize the populace. Find some disparate
population of brown people who want self autonomy, send in the CIA to fuck them up, and when
they retaliate tell Americans that people who live in a 3rd world land locked country several
thousands of miles away are a threat to their very existence and way of life because they
don't like God and Walmart.
Sadly the US uses the MIC to keep a large chunk of its population under control, as well as
providing a convenient coverup of the actual numbers of people who are unemployable or would
be unemployed if it were'nt for the taxpayer funding humungous spending in the so-called
defence sector, which needs a a constant supply of conflict to keep going. The frankly
moronic 'thank you for your service' soundbite drives me insane but it shows how much the
American public has been brainwashed.
For years my home state of Washington had a New Deal Democrat Senator named Henry Jackson,
AKA the Senator from Boeing.
He did good things for the state & was hugely popular here. One reason being that because
he brought the Federal pork back home.
IMO the things Gen. Butler wrote about in the 1920s are still the modus operandi of US
foreign policy.
If the Afghanistan war ends, the USA will go to war with someone else. You cannot spend so
much on military & not be at war. America must have an enemy. And, don’t forget,
they always have “God on our side!”
The neocons in power during 2001 were hell bent on taking out Saddam Hussein. When 9/11
happened, they were looking for avenues to blame Iraq so that they could launch the war on
that nation. Since things could not be put together, and all evidence pointed to Afghanistan,
they took a detour in their war plan with a half hearted approach.
In fact Afghanistan was never the problem - It was Pakistan that held Afghanistan on the
string and managed all terror related activities. Everything related to 9/11 and beyond
pointed directly at Pakistan. Whatever threat Bush and his cronies projected about Iraq was
true in the case of Pakistan. The war was lost when they made Pakistan an ally on the war on
terror. It is like allying with Al Capone to crack down on the mafia.
Pakistan bilked the gullible American war planners, protected its assets and deflected all
the rage on to the barren lands of Afghanistan. They hid all key Al Qaeda operatives and
handed off the ones that did not align with their strategic interests to the US, while
getting reward for it. War in Iraq happened in a hurry because the Bush family had scores to
settle in Iraq. Pressure was lifted on Afghanistan. This is when the war reached a dead
end.
The Taliban knew time was on their hands and waited it out. Obama did understand the
situation and tried to put Af-Pak together and tightened the grip on Pakistan. He got the
troops out of Iraq. Pakistan is almost bankrupt now for its deep investment on terror
infrastructure. The US has drained billions of dollars and lives in Afghanistan due to
misdirected goals. I am surprised Bush and Cheney have not been sent to jail on lies to
launch the Iraq war and botching the real war on terror.
he American people have known that the war in Afghanistan was a lost cause for quite some
time. According to the Pew Research Center, Americans' views of the war
started to go south right around the end of 2011, until eventually a majority started
seeing the writing on the wall about two years later.
That's why the Washington Post
report this week on the so-called "Afghanistan Papers", detailing how US officials
"deliberately mislead the public" on the war's progress, is almost sort of unremarkable. If the
piece took away any shred of innocence left from this ghastly enterprise, it's that perhaps
some of us thought our leaders, while failing miserably at building a nation thousands of miles
away, were at least acting in good faith.
At the same time, the Post report is rage inducing, not just because of the sheer stupidity
of American leaders continuing to fight a war they knew they could not win, but also how their
unwillingness to take responsibility for a failed policy caused so much death, destruction and
heartbreak, particularly among those American families who have admirably dedicated their lives
to serving their country, and the countless number of Afghan civilians trapped in a cycle of
endless war they have nothing to do with.
Of course, the "Afghanistan Papers" immediately recalled memories of the Pentagon variety
leaked to the New York Times nearly a half century ago because they too were government
documents outlining how numerous American administrations had lied to the public about Vietnam
– another long, costly and unnecessary war with no military solution.
But there's one major difference: the war in Afghanistan doesn't have as direct an impact on
the lives of everyday Americans as the Vietnam war did, when the military draft meant that
everyone had to deal with the cold war proxy conflict in south-east Asia
one way or another . Therefore, it's entirely possible, likely even, that this major and
important report from the Post will drift into the wilderness just like the dozens of Trump-era
stories that would have,
for example , taken down any other US president in "normal times".
But there's one big question the Post report raises but does not address: why? Why did so
many people – from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to state
department and National Security Council officials – feel the need to lie about how the
war in Afghanistan
was going?
The easy answer is that there's a long tradition in Washington, particularly among the
foreign policy establishment, that self-reflection, taking responsibility and admitting failure
is a big no-no. Heck, you can get convicted of lying to Congress about illegal arms sales, and
cover up brutal atrocities and still get a job at the
state department . Did you torture anyone? No problem .
While DC's culture of no culpability certainly plays a role in this case, the more
compelling answer lies somewhere near the fact that once the American war machine kicks into
gear, no amount of facts undermining its very existence is going to get in the way.
Indeed, the United States has so far doled out nearly one trillion dollars for the war in
Afghanistan (the true cost of the war
will be trillions more ) and everyone's on the take: from defense industry executives,
lobbyists and US political campaign coffers to Afghan government officials and poppy farmers to
anyone and anything in between.
What's more is that this
military-industrial-congressional complex is largely insulated from public accountability,
so what's the incentive to change course? The Pentagon's entire budget operates in much the
same way: unprecedented amounts in unnecessary appropriations resulting in hundreds of billions
of dollars in waste, fraud and abuse. Yet Congress continues to throw more and more money at
the defense department every year without ever requiring it to account for how it spends the
money. In fact, the war in Afghanistan is small potatoes by comparison.
The bottom line is that the Afghanistan Papers clearly show that a lot of people were
killed, injured and subject to years, if not lifetimes, of psychological trauma and financial
hardship because a bunch of men – yes, mostly men – in Washington didn't want to
admit publicly what they knew privately all along. If we don't start holding these people to
account – and it's not just about Afghanistan
– the DC foreign policy establishment will continue to act with impunity, meaning that
it's probably more likely than not that in 50 years there'll be another batch of "papers"
revealing once again that we've failed to learn obvious lessons from the past.
This war is 18 years old. It's no longer a minor in the eyes of the law. It's old enough to
think for itself, to vote, to move out of the house and get it's own place. Afghanistan will
figure it out. Once we withdraw to allow Afghanistan to return to self-governance.
Why did so many people -- from government contractors and high-ranking military officers, to
state department and National Security Council officials -- feel the need to lie about how
the war in Afghanistan was going?
This is because it's easy cash cow for the old boys club by sending working class kids
to be killed in a far off land.
The pentagon with the full cooperation of MSM will sell it as we are defending our ways of
life by fighting a country 10,000 kms away. This show the poor literacy, poor analytical
thinking of US population constantly brain washed by MSM, holy men, clergy, other neo con
organisations like National rifle club etc.
I never knew USA dropped 2.7 millions tons of bombs and now so many left unexploded and
its same in Vietnam, Cambodia as neutral,
but i met so many injured kids etc from the bombs,.
the total MADNESS OF USA IS NAZI SM AT ITS BEST,.NO SHAME OR COMPASSION FOR THE
VICTIMS.
I cannot comprehend the money it cost USA,. AN ALSO PROFITS FOR SOME,.
With the exceptions of two attacks on American soil-Pearl Harbor and 911- the American people
and for the most part their legislative representatives in Congress- will always remain
cluless what the United States Government does overseas.
This country runs on its own drum beats. The ordinary man on the street needs to take care
of his economic needs. The Big Boys always take care of themselves. That includes the
military establishment, that is always entitled to an absurd amounts of monies, fueled by an
empire building machinery, pushed by the elites that control the fate of economic might, and
political orchestra that feeds its ego and prestige.
Time and again, our American sociopaths in power have a strangle hold on us, regardless of
the destruction and animosity they heap on distant peoples and lands the world over in the
name of national security and the democratic spiel, as they like to tell us ....
Richard Nixon, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson- Vietnam and the South East Asian countries of
Laos , Cambodia, are an example .
Years later, the establishment manufactures blatant cover-ups with lies upon lies to accuse
on record, as general Powell eloquently presented at the United Nations: That Iraq has
weapons of mass destruction and needs to be held accountable.And now, this report on
Afghanistan with all this pathological violence.
Is it reasonable to conclude that our democracy and its pathological actors in government
and big business will always purchase it by demagoguery and self vested interest, because the
ordinary man whose vote should count will never have the ultimate say when it comes to war
and destruction!
Russian FM Sergey Lavrov and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo have briefed the media after
talks in Washington, DC, the first such meeting since 2017. Speaking at the press conference on
Tuesday, Pompeo said the US was seeking a "better relationship" with Russia and that the
two countries have been working on improving relations since his visit to Sochi in May. He said
lines of communication between Moscow and Washington were open and relations were candid.
Lavrov echoed that, saying the two met regularly and also spoke frequently by phone. "It
is useful to talk to each other," he said. "Always better than not talking to each
other."
In a nod to the ongoing anti-Russia hysteria in the US, Lavrov said their joint work was,
however, " hindered by the wave of suspicions that have overcome Washington." Calling
allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs "baseless," Lavrov said
Moscow had "many times" asked the Trump administration to publish all correspondence
between Trump and Putin from October 2016 and 2017, but that it had received "no
response."
Allegations of Russian interference in US internal affairs are 'baseless': 'We have not
seen any evidence, because it does not exist' – Lavrov pic.twitter.com/M1Ezgs22kd
"... The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and on everyone they communicated with. ..."
"... The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later 'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were no more than unconfirmed rumors. ..."
The FBI agents and lawyers intentionally lied to the court. Their violations were not
mistakes. All 51 of them were in favor of further spying on members of the Trump campaign and
on everyone they communicated with.
The FBI has used the Steele dossier to gain further FISA application even after it had
talked with Steele's 'primary source' (who probably was the later
'buzzed' Sergei Skripal ) and after it had learned that the allegations in the dossier were
no more than unconfirmed rumors.
By now Steele's credibility is zero. Time to revisit Steele's involvement with the debunked
"Russia bought the soccer World Champion games", the Litvinenko polonium poisening and the
Skripal novichok poisening. The timing of the Skripal matter deserves some scrutiny in
relation to Skripal possibly being Steele's source for the infamous Trump dossier. There
might be a motive hidden there.
As early as
August 2018 , there had been speculation that the Skripals were being held at USAF
Fairford airbase, based on audiovisual evidence in the background garden scene where the
interview took place. Helmer's sources (they requested anonymity) spotted a chicken coop in
the background which they say is a crow ladder trap. This is one indication that the garden
scene was located near a runway. Background noises included the roar of jet engines.
If Helmer's information is correct, then we can now understand why the British government
never gave Russian embassy staff access to the Skripals: London was in no position to do so,
the Skripals were on US territory.
One implication of this new information is that the Skripals may no longer be in Britain
and may now be living in North America somewhere with new identities. Should something happen
to them (or have happened to them already), they will not be missed by their new neighbours.
The Skripals will never be allowed to return to Russia and Sergei Skripal will never see or
be allowed to communicate with his elderly mother again.
It really does look as if Sergei Skripal may have had something to do with that Orbis
dossier after all, even if as a minor source or as a reference rather than the primary source
of disinformation about Donald Trump's past activities in Moscow. What other work has Skripal
done for his American masters?
It looks as if Sergei Skripal may not be the primary source of the disinformation in
Christopher Steele's dossier. Perhaps the person who is the primary source
is not a Russian at all.
JR | Dec 11 2019 19:41 utc | 20 brings up a revisiting of the Litvinenko polonium poisoning.
It is worth mentioning that a tiny but crucial and virtually never mentioned detail of the
official inquiry (considered the last word on the matter) is that those conducting the
official inquiry were never allowed access to the autopsy report -- which should have been
(which would have been, in any honest effort at inquiry) the bedrock starting point. The
report has right along been sequestered by Scotland Yard in the interests of... you guessed
it: national security. Go figure...
It strikes me that the best explanation of the attack on the Skripals is not that he was
responsible for the Steele Dossier in any way, but that he could easily prove that it was a
fantasy. And was planning to do so.
He knew better, though, than to say so in the UK which suggests that he was on his way
home with his daughter when MI6 caught up with him and poisoned them both.
Steele, Pablo Miller and Skripal were old partners in crime.
I'm wondering whether the mistake Sergei made was not to leave the house -- probably worth
lotsa rubles -- behind and just go. On the other hand he was almost certainly under constant
surveillance.
@50 The Official Report to which you refer was also very careful to enter extensive
caveats regarding its conclusions for which there was almost no real evidence.
It seems important to note that Mr. Lavrov refers to administrations in his
comments, not presidents per se. As there are many staff in presidential
administrations, it seems entirely possible that 1) the requests from the Russians never
reached Obama or Trump personally, and 2) either or both presidents were therefore not even
aware of the requests. In the case of Trump, that would be consistent with the fact that many
members of his administration have been revealed to have operated contrary to his wishes.
@Jen #42
The Skripals residing on US territory would definitely indicate that the US has been the
senior partner in the "Skripal operation". This seems to be part of a general pattern.
@Jackrabbit #48
For the Steele dossier to be intentional bullshit (meaning its creator(s) knew it was
false when they created it) doesn't seem all that surprising. Intelligence agencies promote
disinformation all the time. That in no way means that Trump is in on the game.
Both Putin and Lavrov have stated that they talked directly with Obama and Trump about the
issues involved with their relations, so there's no excuses or obfuscation possible is this
case.
Russia got just banned from the Olympics and the FIFA Cup.
Now, i thought that the US and the West would be imploding at any minute? That the US is
rapidly collapsing? That no one cared about what the US wants? This is what i was told by alt
media. How is this possible?
I'm tired of low quality Alt Media analysis from people who consistently underestimate
their opponents.
I'm tired of people with rose colored glasses and people with confirmation bias.
And then i'm tired of the low quality analysis about how Trump wants to break the system,
how Trump is a secret ally to Russia, how Trump wants to dismantle the US Empire, etc.
Nothing could be further from the truth. The Trump admin is far more aggressive and
imperialist than all before him in modern times. It did far more against Russia than what
Obama did. And don't tell me how he (Mister "Let's take the Syrian and Iraqi Oil and do you
know that we could nuke Afghanistan") does not want wars. He does not want big wars only
because there is no money for that. But the aggression and hatred is still there. Only the
capacity to wage military aggression has declined. But if things with the US economy were
good, you would be seeing the same wars over and over again.
The US has started (or it is starting) a full blown cold war against China and Russia. And
it intends to sabotage the global economy and globalisation in order to keep its advantage.
All will lose, but in such scenario, the US will lose less. Thus they gain in relative power.
This is what their aim is. So prepare for bad economic times ahead. The globalisation window
(1990 - 2017) is over.
I'm also tired of low quality analysis about how Europe would rebel at any moment against
the US. (Europeans instead pushed heavily in the WADA to ban Russia). These people do not
understand Europe. Europe is castrated and will go down with the US ship because their whole
psychology is based on it. On the Big Daddy US liberating them from themselves and keeping
order. They don't know any better than that or how to think, as this "could lead to another
world war". Only the US can and does. They can only be puppets to those "who know better". It
is impossible to fix it. They will go down with the US until they are destroyed.
And one day, when the population changes with non-europeans, it is then when this is going
to end. it is then when US and European imperialism will end. Because it is based on white
people. On the narcisitic poison of "knowing better", hiding today behind universalist
liberalism. See US polls about attitudes towards other countries, whites are generally more
hostile to other countries. The liberals are the same imperialists as the old school racists.
I say that as a white person. Yes, this imperialism is coming from white people, both the
liberals and the racists. Together of course with the zionists living in simbiotic
relationship with them. And when they finally get replaced by immigrant people, this mania
about ruling the world will end, and will be replaced by a real multipolar system.
A non-white USA will be less aggressive USA and a non-white Europe will be less aggressive
Europe. And both will be less pro-Israel as well. This is when this is going to end.
I think that Russia athletes being banned from Olympics is a stupid move because I think
other countries may pull out in support of this...like China and others
@ uncle tungsten about Gazprom with the question about what happens next.
I see the world in a standoff of sorts waiting to see who blinks first.....and I think it
will be empire
Read the two links below in support of my thinking that
The take away quote from the 2nd link
"
As a reminder, since the Sept 16 repo blow up, the Fed has injected $208 billion via
"temporary" rolling overnight and term repos, and $114 billion via permanent T-Bill
purchases.
"
john brewster , Dec 9 2019 17:00 utc |
105vk , Dec
9 2019 17:02 utc |
106
@ Posted by: Passer by | Dec 9 2019 16:39 utc | 102
Well, the only USA that matters to the rest of the world is the
USA-as-the-world's-sole-superpower. If that version of the USA disappears, then we would be
talking about a completely different geopolitical architecture ("multipolar").
The USA itself doesn't need to collapse or disintegrate for that to happen.
My opinion is that the USA is losing its "sole superpower" status, albeit at a very slow
pace. It couldn't be another way, since the USA is a nuclear superpower, so its competitors
must deactivate its hegemony slowly and gently.
I also believe the USA will disappear some day, but in a different way than the USSR.
Since the USA is a capitalist economy, it will desintegrate rather than collapse, and this
disintegration will happen more a la Roman Empire (Crisis of the Third Century and beyond)
rather than a la USSR. Capitalism has an anarchic way of producing and distributing its
wealth, resulting in a decentralized web of institutions. First the institutions will
decline. Second, the State will decline. Third, the economy will decline and only after this
"phase 3" that we'll be able to se the real desintegration of the USA.
I don't believe the USA will fall by conquest, mostly because it has MAD, second because
its geographic location favours a defensive war of its territory. More probable would be the
gradual secession of some States after the economy has degraded enough. I wouldn't consider
the loss of one peripheral State as the formal end of the USA, but if it goes to the stage of
it losing more or less the Southern States or the Midwest States, then I think some
historians would use these as a useful event to mark the formal end of the USA.
But before that, I belive the USA will remain a very influent regional superpower for the
forseeable future. It would have to take the entire capitalist structure to fall for the USA
to really enter its desintegration phase. I've talked with some Marxists, and the most
optimistic of them belive the USA still has some 150-200 years of tranquil existence. Of
course, we're not psychics, so they are all wild guesses.
John Brewster - 90
Did you by chance confuse Russia with Italy? Because Russia has close to 150M people, not
65M, significantly more than Germany. Granted, less than USSR back in 1939, but militarily
more powerful compared to Germany - and possibly with more exploited resources.
vk - 79
I tend to agree with the view that the key factor in USSR's demise was that it couldn't
sustain the competition with the Kapital and wasn't able to develop, "progress", "grow" at
the rate the West was showing off. US and USSR levels were far closer back in 1950 than in
1980, and the discrepancy was only growing. Reagan fanboys might argue that he sped up the
decaying process, but troubles and upheavals were going to happen, no matter what. Now, why
this rate of progress was so different is another matter, and probably the most important one
- both for 20th century history and for the fate of the West in this century.
It's also painfully obvious that the only path outside downright servitude for Europe is to
distance itself from the USA and seek if not a direct alliance at least a clear partnership
with Russia and a "detente" with clear rules on their borders and a common declaration of
neutrality over Ukraine - as in: no side will try to annex the whole country, which either
would be split up or ideally would have a heavy dose of decentralization and localism. But it
is of vital importance for the actual survival of Europe that atlanticists and Russiaphobes
be hunted down and expelled from any position of power or influence - be it from economy,
media, politics.
They poisoned with the USA with Russophobia for decades to come, and that really increases
the risk of nuclear confrontation, which would wipe out all this jerks, but also mass of innocent
people.
Notable quotes:
"... The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5. Not holding my breath I am afraid. ..."
"... Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better distractions). ..."
Sooner or later you'll have this, IMHO: Reaction time 7 minutes . You know,
decision-making time to say "launch" or not. The decision-maker in the White House, Downing
Street and Elysees Palace either a geriatric or one of this new multiracial breed. Just think
about those people
Add to that the level of overall expertise by the crews manning those systems, its
maintenance etc. Add increased automation of some parts of the launch process with
hardware/software as it's produced now (you know, quality control etc.).
It will take a miracle not to have that launch sooner or later. Not big, say .80 KT. What
happens after that is anybody's guess. Mine, taking the second point from the fourth
paragraph .a big bang.
The only way to prevent it, IMHO, is having a Western public shifting just 5 % of
their "breads and circuses" paradigm to that issue. Just 5.
Not holding my breath I am afraid.
@peterAUS The rational actor false supposition has it that the biologics can't be used
because they don't recognize friend from foe.
Rational actors? Where? Anthrax via the US mail.
One rational actor point of view is that you have to be able to respond to anything.
Anything. In a measured or escalating response. Of course biologics are being actively
pursued to the hilt. Just like you point out about Marburg.
But, the view from above is that general panic in the population cannot be allowed, and so
all biologics have to be down played. "of course we would never do anything like that, it
would be insane to endanger all of humanity". Just like nukes. So professors pontificate
misdirection, and pundits punt.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis. "We only want the fear that results
in more appropriations. Not the fear that sinks programs." Don't generate new Church
commissions. Hence the fine line. some fear yes, other fears, no.
Well Washington D.C.
Hahahahaha sorry, couldn't resist.
So don't expect real disclosure, or honest analysis.
I don't.
But I also probably forgot more about nuclear war than most of readers here will ever
know. And chemical, when you think about it; had a kit with atropine on me all the time in
all exercises. We didn't practice much that "biologics" stuff, though. We knew why, then.
Same reason for today. Call it a "stoic option" to own inevitable demise.
Now, there is a big difference between the age of those protests I mentioned and today.
The Internet. The access to information people, then, simply didn't have.
Which proves the main point of mine: access to information means shit in the real
world of power play. Sheeple didn't care then; they care even less now (better
distractions).
Well, they will care, I am sure. For about ..say in the USA ..several hours, on
average.
We here where I am typing from will care for "how to survive the aftermath" .. for two
months.Tops.
"... Lavrov told reporters Thursday: "I think that it is difficult to unbalance us and China. We are well aware of what is happening. We have an answer to all the threats that the Alliance is multiplying in this world." He also said the West is seeking to dominate the Middle East under the guise of NATO as well. ..."
"... "Naturally, we cannot but feel worried over what has been happening within NATO," Lavrov stated. "The problem is NATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only NATO is in the position to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West dislikes for some reason ." ..."
"... NATO still exists, according to Lavrov, in order to "eliminate competitors" and ensure a West-dominated global system in search of new official enemies. ..."
"... I'm wondering how many NATO states don't have US Military Bases positioned in them. It's a small distance between a forward operating base and an occupying forces. ..."
"... What NATO is doing is called racketeering. Only the problem of Europe is not Russia, but the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same Americans and NATO. ..."
"... Children sometimes need a made-up friend, and these bastards need a made-up enemy. Russia is perfect for this. ..."
"... LOL. The NATO ONLY serves US interests. It has the same function as always. Keep the US in, Russia out and Germany down. ..."
"... The collapse of the US empire has been underway for years. Nobody is excited about it because, instead of gracefully adapting to change with the dignity of a great nation, the US will continue to cling to denial, lashing out at all and sundry as reality intrudes upon the myth of American exceptionalism. ..."
"... US geopolitics has created a foe it cannot defeat without itself being destroyed. ..."
"... Technocratic sociopaths, doing a CYA for their incompetence. ..."
"... ZATO cries out in pain as it strikes you. ..."
NATO Seeking To "Dominate The World" & Eliminate Competitors: Russia's Lavrov by
Tyler Durden Mon,
12/09/2019 - 02:45 0 SHARES
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov has charged NATO with wanting to "dominate the world"
a day after 70th anniversary events of the alliance concluded in London.
"We absolutely understand that NATO wants to dominate the world and wants to eliminate any
competitors, including resorting to an information war, trying to unbalance us and China,"
Lavrov said from Bratislava,
the capital of Slovakia, while attending the 26th Ministerial Council of the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
He seized upon NATO leaders' comments this week, specifically Secretary General Jens
Stoltenberg, naming China as a new enemy alongside Russia . Stoltenberg declared
at the summit that NATO has to "tackle the issue" of China's growing
capabilities.
Lavrov told reporters Thursday: "I think that it is difficult to unbalance us and China. We
are well aware of what is happening. We have an answer to all the threats that the Alliance is
multiplying in this world." He also said the West is seeking to dominate the Middle East under
the guise of NATO as well.
The new accusation of 'world domination'
comes at a crisis moment of growing and deep divisions over the future of the Cold War era
military alliance, including back-and-forth comments on Macron's "brain death" remarks, and
looming questions over Turkey's fitness to remain in NATO, and the ongoing debate over cost
sharing burdens and the scope of the mission.
"Naturally, we cannot but feel worried over what has been happening within NATO," Lavrov
stated. "The problem is NATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to
persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only NATO is in the position
to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West dislikes for
some reason ."
A consistent theme of Lavrov's has been
to call for a "post-West world order" but that NATO has "remained a Cold War institution"
hindering balance in global relations where countries can pursue their own national
interests.
NATO still exists, according to Lavrov, in order to "eliminate competitors" and ensure a West-dominated global system in
search of new official enemies.
Remember the last Bilderberg meeting. Russia and China were not invited. The globalists
have planned this, and apparently, Russia has better intelligence to know what's going on,
and they will take the necessary precautions, along with China. Let's just hope it's not
going to lead us to WW3.
I'm wondering how many NATO states don't have US Military Bases positioned in them. It's a small distance between a forward operating base and an occupying forces.
NATO is not trying to dominate, NATO is trying to extend its profit from frightened
European donkeys who still believe that the USSR exists, and Uncle Joe sits in the Kremlin
and eats a Christian baby in garlic sauce for lunch.
What NATO is doing is called racketeering. Only the problem of Europe is not Russia, but
the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same Americans and NATO.
So there will
be a big "raspathosovka" with shooting and explosions, do not even doubt it.. Only the problem of
Europe is not Russia, but the ******* Wahhabis, who are the best friends of the same
Americans and NATO. So there will be a big **** with shooting and explosions, do not even
doubt it.
I'll just repeat the erased: NATO - lovers of freebies and they don't refuse this
freebie voluntarily. Children sometimes need a made-up friend, and these bastards need a
made-up enemy. Russia is perfect for this.
NATO is obsolete. The organization no longer serves US interests, and quite frankly,
hasn't for some time. I respectfully suggest the USA move all forces out of Germany on day 1, and station them
at Fort Trump in Poland.
Day 2, the US forms a new "mutual defense pact" with Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
(Former Eastern Bloc nations)
Russia and Germany can duke it out, just not where our guys are hanging out. Hades,
Germany and France can limp wrist at each other as they have done in the past so many
times. But insofar as US troops leaving continental Europe forever? Sorry Sergei, that ain't happening, no matter how much
propaganda you shove up western
europe's (willing) ***.
Meanwhile Vlad makes new friends around the world... Last year Putin signed accords with President Macri of Argentina which included Russia
recognizing Argentina's Falklands claim. (La Voz, 23 Jan 2018).
An Argentinian claim based upon 'usurpation' – meaningless in the 18th century and
inheritance from Spain just like Mexico inherited California and Texas.
The NATO advantage right now is of the least dirty shirt variety. As it stands, I am not
excited about the thought of the US empire collapsing. People have been predicting that for
a while and for the moment, I don't see a legit replacement stepping up to the plate. The
US is a crooked gangster, but the other countries are not exactly ready for the big
league.
The NATO advantage right now is of the least dirty shirt variety.
The NATO disadvantage right now is of the "sitting with pants full of **** and asking
others who farted" variety.
As it stands, I am not excited about the thought of the US empire collapsing.
The collapse of the US empire has been underway for years. Nobody is excited about it
because, instead of gracefully adapting to change with the dignity of a great nation, the
US will continue to cling to denial, lashing out at all and sundry as reality intrudes upon
the myth of American exceptionalism.
I don't see a legit replacement stepping up to the plate.
US imperial decline is reminiscent of Casey at the Bat.
but the other countries are not exactly ready for the big league.
Or they've decided the US game is not worth playing.
Since 2013 I have followed Russian foreign policy and actions in the middle east and
elsewhere,thanks to statesmen like Lavrov they have crossed every t and dotted every i
following international law and convention, true history will be a lot kinder to Russia than
N ot A nother T errorist O rganisation
What is happening to Europe is the same as what's happening to Russia, only Russia
didn't ask for it. Nevertheless, Azeris and Tatars are on the rise demographically, and
Russians are on the decline.
I don't think Russia ... or China for that matter ... need to worry much. The West is imploding and NATO will implode along with it. The West can't even depend on its technical superiority anymore ( see Boeing 737MAX
); it sure can't depend on (most of) its people to do any real fighting.
NATO is fading and becoming a contradictory mess. China and Russia will be the foe, with possibly India, and far more effective,
economically and militarily. Europe doesn't stand a chance against these no matter how they posture, their slope is
downward.
US geopolitics has created a foe it cannot defeat without itself being destroyed.
"The problem is ZATO positions itself as a source of legitimacy and is adamant to
persuade one and all it has no alternatives in this capacity, that only ZATO is in the
position to assign blame for everything that may be happening around us and what the West
dislikes for some reason ."
Israel Shamir quoting Prof Michael Brenner of Pittsburgh U, who has noted:
"Europe's political class is psychologically unable to break free of its
dominant/subordinate relationship with America. This pattern endures despite the presence of
a mentally impaired man in the White House. The prognosis, therefore: 'Wither thou goest, we
go!" American leaders have exploited this compulsive deference ruthlessly. It allows
Washington to ensure European fealty at virtually no cost. Moreover, they can extract
compliance across a wide array of non-security issues – commercial, financial, IT
(warring against Huawei), political, diplomatic – by drawing on the same free-floating
loyalties.
"Europe has been obedient to the siren call of Uncle Sam in following it over the cliff
time after time – in Afghanistan, in Iraq (France excepted), on Russia, on Iran (by
acquiescing in severe sanctions), on Saudi Arabia, in Yemen, in embracing Bolsonaro (invited
Keynoter at Davos), even on Venezuela and Bolivia. The ultimate test will come were
Washington to pick a fight with China that it, and the West, cannot win; will Europe then
take the final, fatal leap hand-in-hand?"
Thanks for the Gustafson reference from the Cold War era. The guy has been around awhile,
and seems to eschew blatant insults in favor of clearly constructed arguments.
I would be the first to agree that the last two decades of the USSR were a sclerotic,
declining mess. The Communist ideologues walked the system into a corrupt and ineffective
bureaucracy, with results across the board being much as Gustafson describes in your
reference.
It remains to be seen if Russia can maintain the advances that Putin's one-man show has
given them. The whole thing could collapse after he leaves the scene; although he has saved
their asses over the last two decades. Then again, it remains to be seen if the US can
survive Trump, the Deep State, the Wall St. looting, the Israeli neocons, etc.
Shoigu is 64, while Putin is 67.
This means Shoigu is a one-term successor, if we're talking age. Someone capable of long-term
work and planning after that would be a must. Medvedev is currently 54, which mean he'll be
the age Shoigu is now, if Putin stands down in say a decade.
Which means he himself–Medvedev, that is–will be good for a decade.
So that's one scenario: ten more years of less of Putin, then one mandate by Shoigu, then
another decade by Medvedev. Or fifteen years by Medvedev immediately after Putin, with Shoigu
being his cardinal
We've yet to see what happens to the reds and the browns. The leader of the
commies–Zuyganov–is 75, and the leader of the empire
revivalists–Zhirinovski–is 73. So again, at most a decade from now, the commies
and the far right will either collapse, or choose new strong leaders.
In this sense there a very serious possible reshuffle looming all across the Russian
political landscape. After all, only four parties matter: Putin's national conservatives,
Zyuganov's commies, Zhirinovski's imperialists, and Mironov's social democrats. Mironov is
66, the youngest of the batch.
Russia is still very much a "leader-based" society. Her political parties are also
"leader-based". We'll see if these parties can function beyond the lifespan of their current
leaders. If yes–then Russia has transcended the curse of the "wise emperor" formula,
where stuff only works if you've got a superhuman at the top, and the moment he's gone, shit
falls apart.
One of things which concerns me most about this site and most others inhabited by
contrarian blokes of a certain age is the way that topics discussed are most often the same
topics as those fed to the mugs via corporate media.
Sure the opinions are vastly different, but the subjects are not. So much energy and
time wasted on pointless topics like the amerikan prez when we all know that it really
doesn't matter who jags that gig nothing meaningful will alter for amerikans or the people
outside amerika oppressed by empire.
Now the prez thing is a bit of a troll since so many amerikans have been intensely
indoctrinated right through their lives to believe that all the prezdency guff is
meaningful when it so obviously isn't. That in reality the odds of any amerikan suddenly
having an epiphany about the pointlessness of DC kibuki from reading this, or something
similar written by someone else, are negligible.
So we have to accept, to a degree, that Washington Housewives and Days of Our Lives DC
will continue to feature at MoA.
But what happens when the corporate media chooses not to consider much larger, more
pernicious forms of imperialism than is currently occurring in the ME because that
imperialism is nascent, awful things are being done to humans western populations who have
not been sufficiently propagandised against, so may not greet the tales of murder and
mayhem generated by the actions of french foreign legionaires, english SAS or amerikan
special forces with sufficient approval?
Easy, we just don't talk about it except when told to or where there is no choice
because some action by the imperial thugs for hire has attracted too much attention. In
that case the barest of details make it into the news and we will be told that whoever it
was who had their families butchered belonged to an organisation which 'western
intelligence' said was 'associated with ISIS'. No specificity, not details at all apart
from the one unsubstantiated claim, which lets face it says any village of humans anywhere
that contains a single resident which western intelligence believes is somehow associated
with ISIS, is worthy of being genocided out of existence.
I reckon one of the best indicators of imperial violence is displaced persons. We saw in
the ME that various forms of ethnic cleansing were practised to persuade people to move off
their traditional lands in order to either exploit the natural resources in the area (see
Saudi Amerika driving tribes from the newly discovered hydrocarbon prospects in North
Yemen), or to create lebensraum for another group of humans currently held in favour by the
empire (see the shifting of arabs and Turkamen from North Syria to give ready made villages
to Kurds which only lasted for as long as the Kurds were needed by empire).
So many people were displaced in the ME during the first half of the teens that shock,
horror some european countries felt obliged to allow a few of those whose lives had been
destroyed into their communities.
That was then, yet we still all talk about the ME as though it is where the empire is
committing its most egregious harm, but that is no longer the case.
If you check
this Pew Center article you will see
The total number of people living in
sub-Saharan Africa who were forced to leave their homes due to conflict reached a new high
of 18.4 million in 2017, up sharply from 14.1 million in 2016 -- the largest regional
increase of forcibly displaced people in the world" .
If one checks the chart Pew has provided we can see that the numbers of decent humans in
the ME who have been displaced from their land is alleged to currently be 21.5 million
while the number of persons displaced in sub-Sahara Africa is about 3 million less at 18.4
million.
See so more action in the ME still. No, firstly the ME curve has flattened right out
over the years since 2016 meaning that new displacements are relatively low unless of
course it is your whanau that has been displaced in which case it wouldn't feel
nearly as benign. Secondly if you look at the fine-print on that chart you will see the 21.5 million line is
labelled "Middle East-North Africa".
Libya is an African state which happens to have a proportion of arabic speaking people
in its population, it also contains Berbers (e.g. Muammar Ghadaffi) and what the chart
calls "sub-Saharan Africans when they want say negro but the unfortunate connotations
associated with that term (99% the result of horrific whitefella behaviour) means that
negro is no longer a la mode in whitefella land.
Not enough to rape, steal & steal from black Africans, now we also remove the means
to identify them as a distinct group.
The Libya africa/ME issue matters a great deal because prior to the fukusi rape of
Libya, that nation acted as a bulwark for all the supra-saharan nations, some Saharan eg
Niger and that was just as likely a reason for amerika to destroy Libya setting loose the
ethno-centrists of Misratah to kill black africans, standover Berbers & Turks to ensure
that only Arab speaking semites can get control. This is the deal the empire struck. Not to
enable italy to get some of that sweet sweet crude at the sort of bargain basement prices
Italy hadn't enjoyed since Mussolini invaded Libya - that was purely a minor side benefit,
now the good colonel was no more, fukus became the only game in town. There was no longer any white knight determined to protect his/her neigbours from the
outright theft, extortion, bribery, rape & murder which are the empire's stock in
trade.
It is foolish and counterproductive to ignore the horrors that a US-led fukus mission
which runs across the entire African continent has created in the name of more billions to
the already rich. Do it if you want, but all you are really achieving is enabling the arseholes.
There is a scarcity of relevant links for the usual reasons. Not only are you more
likely to put faith in info from sources you already know & trust, getting there will
help you comprehend this crime far better than something easily digestible from a user, and
most importantly the final paras were done long after the sun rose over the yardarm
here.
@ A User 72
All very true. I would place the de jure war onslaughts within the overall context of
globalization and in particular the imperialistic assault of corporate industrial agriculture
upon Africa, the last great semi-frontier which wasn't fully assimilated by the first "Green
Revolution" onslaught. A main goal as the global empire faces decline or collapse is to seize
control of all land and drive the people OUT.
Globalization acts to destroy all local production and distribution. It destroys this
outright or seizes control of it in order to force it into the global commodity framework. It
seizes control of indigenous land and resources. It dumps subsidized Western goods. It
destroys any functional politics and democracy. It imposes the control of multinational
corporations over every part of life it can. It does this purely in the power interests of
Western elites. Any benefits it lets trickle down to locals are purely calculated payouts to
accomplices. Much of the global South has been crushed under the corporate boot this way, and
Africa has already been subject to the IMF and World Bank’s debt indenture shock
treatment (“structural adjustment”).
All this has been accompanied by the systematic ravaging of African ecosystems,
culminating in the rising climate chaos driven by the patterns of energy consumption, waste,
and ecological destruction practiced and imposed by Western industrialized productionism and
consumerism. Climate change is caused by these actions. Since corporate state elites and
their supporters have long known this and in spite of lots of lip service have refused to do
anything to avert the worst of it, it’s long been true that climate change is an
intentional campaign of aggression against the Earth and all vulnerable peoples. Thus climate
change takes its place as the most extreme and far-reaching of the corporate campaigns
designed to cause disaster, destruction, and chaos. According to this pattern of disaster
capitalism the corporations then proceed to use the crises they intentionally generate as
further opportunities for aggression and profit. All corporate sectors practice this, and
corporate agriculture is the most aggressive and destructive practitioner of all. Today
Africa is its primary new target.
Corporate control of agriculture and food has always been at the core of the globalization
onslaught. In accordance with its food weapon the US government systematically has waged
economic, political, chemical, biological (both of the former in the form of poison-based
agriculture and other pretexts for systemic and systematic environmental poisoning), and
often literal shooting warfare. Throughout this history of war and sublimated war, corporate
agriculture has been a constant weapon and battleground as well as its aggrandizement being a
constant goal.
Olympism and other major international sports events are all about profiteering,
exploiting athletes, scandalous wheeling, dealing, collusion, and bribery, marginalizing the
poor, other disenfranchised groups, and affected communities, sticking taxpayers with the bill,
and providing nothing in return but hype and the illusion of amateur athletics at their
best.
International sports competition is also highly politicized.
In December 2017, the International Olympic Committee (IOC), complicit with US hostility
toward Moscow, banned Russian athletes from participating under their nation's flag -- despite
no evidence of state-sponsored doping.
The practice occurs in amateur and professional sports, athletes on their own using
performance enhancing drugs.
Banning clean athletes from countries for actions of rules violators breaches the letter and
spirit of international sports competition.
On Monday, Tass reported the following:
"The Executive Committee of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) has approved
recommendations of the Compliance Review Committee (CRC) to strip Russia of the right to
participate in major international sports tournaments, including the Olympics and World
Championships, for the period of four years" -- citing a WADA press statement, adding:
"WADA has also banned Russian state officials, ROC and RPC officials, from attending
global sports tournaments."
They include the Olympics, Paralympics, and FIFA World Cup. RT reported that Russian
athletes not accused of doping will be allowed to compete as "neutrals."
Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) championships games scheduled for St.
Petersburg and the 2021 EUFA Champions League final in the city aren't affected by the ban.
Russia's Foreign Ministry slammed WADA for "squeez(ing) Russia out of international
sports," a politicized action.
Last month, WADA's Compliance Review Committee called for punitive actions against
Russia's Anti-Doping Agency (RUSADA), along with banning the country from hosting major
international sporting events for four years.
Individual athletes should be held accountable for their actions, along with personal
trainers or others if found to be complicit – not entire teams or nations without what's
known as evidentiary standards and burdens of proof required in credible legal
proceedings.
These standards require "clear and convincing evidence," beyond a reasonable doubt, the
highest evidentiary standard.
Arbitrarily banning Russia from participating in major international sports competition
is a politicized move, unrelated to legal standards -- part of unacceptable US-sponsored Russia
bashing.
In 2016, WADA claimed over 1,000 Russian athletes were involved in state-sponsored doping
– credible evidence proving the allegation not provided.
WADA's latest politicized action is further evidence of international sports competition's
dark side, polar opposite the spirit of amateur athletics at their best.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG) His new book as editor and
contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for Hegemony Risks WW III."
"... Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America". ..."
"... The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS ! ..."
"... Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'. ..."
"... Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what? ..."
"... Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less. ..."
"... "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018 ..."
Let's get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then
Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for
President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.
Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous
Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a
junior analyst.
At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.
Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.
Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious
position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.
Its said he was appointed purely for 'political' reasons, alleged to have been at the direct request of Bill Clinton and other
Democrats not because of a recommendation or merit from within the Agency.
Its further said that the Saudis liked Brennan because he became very quickly 'their man' so to speak. Some reports, unsubstantiated,
even allege Brennan became a Muslim while there to ingratiate himself with the Saudis.
Important to read is an NBC news article entitled 'Former Spooks Criticize CIA Director John Brennan for Spying Comments' by Ken
Dilanian dated March 2nd, 2016.
The article contains many revealing facts and evidence, while giving a flavour, of the feelings of many in the CIA who felt that
Brennan was totally unsuitable and unqualified to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A final controversy is the little known fact of Brennan's near four year departure from the CIA into the commercial world, having
been 'left out in the cold' from the CIA, from November 2005 to January 2009 when he was CEO of a private company called 'The Analysis
Corporation'.
So why was he then reinstated into the CIA, to the surprise of CIA's senior management, by newly elected President Obama, to head
the CIA? No answer is available as to why he left the CIA in 2005.
Lastly let's not forget Brennan's many failures as CIA head in recent years, one most notable is the Benghazi debacle and the
death of a US Ambassador and others there. Something else to ponder.
Back to the present an the issue of security clearances.
In early August, on the well known American TV Rachel Maddow Show, Brennan back tracked on his Trump traitor claim by saying "I
didn't mean he (Trump) committed treason. I meant what he has done is nothing short of treasonous." Rachel Maddow responded correctly
"If we diagram the sentence, 'nothing short of treason' means it's treasonous?"
A simple question follows. Since he is no longer in the CIA, why does he need a security clearance other than to commercially
exploit it?
Tucker Carlson explains succinctly here:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kzxf9TcJ_3k
Last month what can be described as 200+ 'friends of Brennan', former CIA officials of varying rank, responded against the removal
of former CIA Director Brennan's security clearances, in support of him.
These men and women too most likely will have their clearances revoked.
And why not?
Since the only purpose they retain it is to make money as civilians?
A potentially more serious issue than 'the Brennan controversies' is that the US intelligence community has around 5 million people
with security clearances as a whole includes approximately 1.4m people holding top secret clearances. It is patently a ridiculously
high number and makes a mockery of the word secret.
Former CIA veteran Sam Faddis is one of the few people brave enough and with the integrity required, that has stood up
and told some of the real truths about Brennan in an 'Open Letter', yet this letter's contents have hardly at all been reported in
the media.
Generally by nature, CIA Officers sense of service and honour to their Country, their professionalism and humility, and disdain
for publicity has dissuaded most of them to enter the current very public Brennan controversy; but for how much longer?
I implore you to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial
critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing
intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.
None of this is true.
You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad.
You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have
never heard a shot fired in anger.
You were for a short while an intelligence analyst. In that capacity, it was your job to produce finished intelligence based
on information provided to you by others. The work of intelligence analysts is important, however in truth you never truly mastered
this trade either.
In your capacity as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, while still a junior officer, you were designated to brief
the President of the United States who was at that time Bill Clinton. As the presidential briefer, it was your job to read to
the president each morning finished intelligence written by others based on intelligence collected by yet other individuals. Period.
While serving as presidential briefer you established a personal relationship with then President Bill Clinton. End of story.
Everything that has transpired in your professional career since has been based on your personal relationship with the former
president, his wife Hillary and their key associates. Your connection to President Obama was, in fact, based on you having established
yourself by the time he came to office as a reliable, highly political Democratic Party functionary.
All of your commentary in the public sphere is on behalf of your political patrons. It is no more impartial analysis then would
be the comments of a paid press spokesman or attorney. You are speaking each and every time directly on behalf of political forces
hostile to this president. You are, in fact, currently on the payroll of both NBC and MSNBC, two of the networks most vocally
opposed to President Trump and his agenda.
There is no impartiality in your comments. Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation.
They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied
yourself.
It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career
with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.
Ever since this President was elected, there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him led by you.
This has been an unprecedented; to undermine the stability of the republic and the office of the Presidency, for solely partisan
political reasons. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.
You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack. Say so.
Sam Faddis
EPILOGUE:
I decided to update this article with this epilogue that summarises events since its first publication, but by not writing more.
By simply adding links showing Brennan speaking in March just before Meuller's Report was released, and excerpts of other interviews
and commentaries.
In this way, reader's can judge for themselves Brennan's essentially undoubtable despicable character which shines through by
watching and reading the below 8 links up to 1st April 2019. There are many more, but in consideration of space, I've selected these
links.
These are not in chronological order, date/time wise.
I would add that, for his own 'survival', and that of his co-conspirators, there will, I predict, over the coming days and weeks,
be an attempt by Brennan to STILL try and fabricate 'dirt' on President Trump to justify his treacherous behaviour against importantly
more than just Trump, but 'the Office of the President', something for which, in my opinion, he and those involved should be prosecuted
for, even some jailed for.
Most particularly in addition to Brennan is clearly Obama himself, Clinton, Clapper and Comey et al.
The CIA operation in Benghazi was smuggling weapons captured from the Libyan army to Syria via Jordan and Turkey to arm the
anti Assad forces. This operation was directed by Brennan, Clinton, Obama and General Petraeus and was in total violation of national
and international law.
Ambassador Stevens was aware of this operation and allowed to die by delaying a military rescue operation, as part of a cover
up of this illegal operation. Dead men tell no tales.
Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented
in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America".
They don't like Trump because he is the first non CIA President in a long while
(George W. Bush was not CIA but under his father's influence) and not part of the secret team. Hopefully, they eventually will
be punished for their crimes. Qanon gives hope!
The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey
and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons
and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry
all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS !
Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt
with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'.
Which provided safe passage and new identities for the Nazi and Bolshevik
Elite. Funny how the stench behind the overthrow of he Russian Empire, can still be found, firmly embedded in the swamps of the
21st century.
Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union
Massacre. Coincidence or what?
Wasn't McCain's father also good friends with Allen Dulles? Wonder where Clinton fitted into the work of Dulles?
One of the more murky issues is the murder of Michael Hastings. A lot of information died with his murder but some info indicates
that he was working on a major report on Brennan. He reportedly advised his friends that the fbi was working on an investigation
on him and he was fearful for his survival
As many will recall, Hastings died in June 2013 in fiery crash of his Mercedes which
was speeding at up to 100 mph in a calif neighborhood.
Also, many will recall, the leaking of "Vault 7" by wikileaks indicated that one of the tools revealed was the ability to remotely
control a vehicle without any input from the driver, positive or negative. This ability is described in detail in the following:
How do you think the Royal Family killed princess Diana? If they can control a drone on the other side of the globe, they can
certainly control the accelerator, brakes and steering of a motor vehicle.
Only the most creepy evil people are allowed to be in our government. They have done a terrible job. Our country is like a
plane in a death spiral, and the same list of creeps keeps getting into the White House. The same people no matter who we elect.
Trump has the same people, or worse than Obama or Hillary or Bush had. It's past time to try and salvage whatever is left of this
country.
100 Stinger shoulder launch ground-to-air missiles. Stevens tried to block the shipment, the embassy was attacked by a highly
skilled, armed, assault team - the story told by "Tonto", one of the military contractors involved in the attempted rescue. All
those Americans in Benghazi were sacrificed in the same way the USS Liberty crew was sacrifice.
Greater Israel is the base of all this violence. Incidentally, "Tonto" and his mates had to commandeer a private jet, after
the fire-fight, that got them to Germany - the US/CIA/State Dept., etc. left them to their own methods and they got out, to the
consternation of the Obama/Clinton Administration.
Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets
in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile,
millions of adult Americans could care less.
Well............Those two contrasts will be intriguing to watch how the grandchildren and great-grandchilren will fare when
the US Empire becomes so degraded, that the young will have to forage on their own for housing, water, and food.
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy
America...America will triumph over you".
https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018
He has to be part of a CIA "cleansing" operation.
Better put him in jail with no rights whatsoever . Let that turd rot in some humid dungeon . That's for the rats like this one
.
The documents also contradict a long chorus of public statements from U.S. presidents, military commanders and diplomats who
assured Americans year after year that they were making progress in Afghanistan and the war was worth fighting.
Look at this:
Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public.
They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul -- and at the White House -- to distort statistics to make it appear
the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.
As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap
of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.
On that score, the presidents failed miserably. The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan
-- more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.
The Lessons Learned interviews show the grandiose nation-building project was marred from the start.
If you can get through it all, good for you. I got so mad that I had to quit reading not long after the paragraph above. We have
lost about 2,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, and sustained about 21,000 casualties of war. (Not to mention all the dead innocent Afghan
civilians, and the dead and wounded troops of our NATO allies.) We have spent altogether almost $1 trillion on that country. The
Afghan officials stole a fortune from us. We never knew what to do there. And every one of our leaders lied about it. Lied! All those
brave American soldiers, dead or maimed for life, for a war that our leaders knew that we could not win, but in defense of which
they lied.
It's the Pentagon Papers all over again. You know this, right.
Trump is negotiating now with the Taliban over the possibility of US withdrawal. The story says US officials fought the Post
in court over these documents, and have said most recently that publishing them would undermine the administration's negotiating
position. I don't care. Tell the truth, for once. Let's cut our losses and go before more Americans die in this lost cause. Poor
Afghanistan is going to fall under the tyrannical rule of the mullahs. But if, after 18 years, a trillion dollars, and all those
dead and wounded Americans, we couldn't establish a stable and decent Afghan regime, it's not going to happen.
If any of my children want to join the US military, I'm going to go to the mat to talk them out of it. I do not want them, or
anybody's sons or daughters, sent overseas to die in hopeless countries in wars that we cannot win, and shouldn't have fought, but
kept doing because of bipartisan Establishment foreign policy delusions. To be clear, we should have bombed the hell out of Afghanistan
after 9/11. The Taliban government gave shelter to Al Qaeda, and brought retribution upon itself. But the Bush Administration's nation-building
insanity was never going to work. Eight years of Obama did not fix this. Nor, so far, has three years of Trump, though maybe he will
be the one to stop the bleeding. If he does withdraw, I hope he blasts the hell out of his two predecessors and the military leadership
for what they've done here.
I've been writing lately in this space, and in the book I'm working on, about the parallels between late-imperial Russia and our
own time and place. And I've been writing about what Hannah Arendt had to say about the origins of totalitarianism. Arendt says that
one precursor of totalitarianism is a widespread loss of faith in a society's and a government's institutions.
According to a 2019 Gallup poll, the
US military is one of the few institutions that enjoys broad confidence. How can anybody possibly believe them after this? How can
we believe our Commanders-in-Chief? According to the secret documents, the men in the field have been were their commanders for a
long time that this Afghan thing was not working, and wasn't ever going to work. But they kept sending them back in.
Why? Pride? Too full of themselves to admit that it was a failure? As soldier John Kerry turned antiwar activist said back in
the 1970s, about Vietnam, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" No more American dying in and for Afghanistan.
Bring the troops home. They did not fail. Their superiors did.
How do you convince young people to join an institution whose leadership -- civilian as well as military -- is prepared to sacrifice
them for a lost cause, and then lie, and lie, and lie about it? How do you convince mothers and fathers to send their sons and daughters
with confidence to that military? How do you convince taxpayers to support throwing more money into the sh*thole that is the Pentagon's
budget?
The questions that are going to come up sooner than most of us think, and, in some version, from both the Left and the Right:
just what kind of order do we have in America anyway? Why do I owe it my loyalty? What does it mean to be a patriot when you cannot
trust the nation's leaders and institutions?
These are the kinds of questions that, depending on how they are answered, can lead to the unraveling, and even the overthrow,
of a regime. It has been said that the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan was a prime mover in the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev and the
collapse of the Soviet system. We are not the Soviet Union -- but I wouldn't be so quick to take comfort in that, if I were a political
or military leader.
We learned nothing from Vietnam, did we? Not a damn thing. It is beyond infuriating. It is beyond demoralizing. And you know,
the only thing more infuriating and more demoralizing than this will be if there are no consequences for it, or if people fall back
into partisan positions. The report makes clear that this is a disaster that was launched by a Republican administration, continued
under a Democratic administration, and has been overseen by another Republican administration.
One of the reasons Donald Trump is president today, and not some other Republican, is he was the one Republican primary candidate
who denounced the wars. If he can't get us out of Afghanistan, what good is he?
UPDATE: I was just thinking about something a military friend told me almost 15 years ago, based on his direct personal knowledge
of the situation: that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was lying to the nation about how the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were
going. And if Rumsfeld was lying, so was the administration. My friend was deeply discouraged. Rumsfeld left office in 2006 -- but
the habit remained with our leadership.
The only thing that surprised me in the WaPo article was that it was published in the CIA's house organ.
EDIT: I should have added that the squandering of blood and treasure, fighting a pointless war that benefits nobody but the
financiers, contractors, arms manufacturers and generals, all while the politicians and generals proclaim that victory is just
at hand, we can't turn back now, - all this reminds me of nothing so much as a smaller scale WWI.
Trump wants us out of Afghanistan, but Iran is a different story. He's sending more troupes to Saudi Arabia to defend the Saudi's
from Iran, how is that disentangling from the ME. I think the Saudi's Wahhabism, basically the same as ISIS practices, is the
most dangerous religion in the word today and they are busy exporting it to the rest of the world. I really think Trump is a false
prophet, a lying prophet, who serves first himself.
Didn't vote for Trump - but: He has attempted to stand up to the elite establishment intelligence-military-arms manufacturing
complex and start cutting back the forever wars. Everyone attacks him for this--establishment Republicans, Democrats, State Department,
Military, Intelligence, Media--everybody. The attacks are immediate and intense. He is almost always forced to pull back. He seems
determined to keep trying, but, as is evident, they will do anything it takes to stop him.
"A botched assassination attempt against Ukrainian politician and businessman Vyacheslav
Sobolev has resulted in the death of his three-year-old son, Alexander.
"While Sobolev and his wife were leaving his high-end restaurant "Mario" in Kiev this past
Sunday, right-wing thugs opened fire on Sobolev's Range Rover, missing him but hitting his
son who was seated in the back of the vehicle. The three-year-old died on the way to the
hospital.
"Police later apprehended two men who had fled the scene in a black Lexus sedan, Oleksiy
Semenov, 19, and Andrei Lavrega, 20. Both are veterans of the war in Donbass in eastern
Ukraine where they served as members of the fascist Right Sector's paramilitary formation
until June of this year.
"The Right Sector was instrumental in the US- and EU-backed, fascist-led coup in February
2014 that toppled the Yanukovitch government and replaced it with a pro-Western and
anti-Russian regime. Since then, the Right Sector has been among the far-right forces that
have been heavily involved in the war against Russian-backed separatists in East Ukraine.
"As is usual when members of neo-Nazi groups carry out political attacks, the Right Sector
and their former battalion commander fraudulently attempted to distance themselves from
Lavrega and Semenov, claiming they had lost contact with them since they left Ukraine's armed
forces in June. These claims are not credible.
"Lavrega, who has been identified as the principal shooter in the killing, has been a
member of the Right Sector for at least half a decade. He had participated in the Maidan
movement of 2014 as a member of the Right Sector and perfected his shooting skills as a
sniper killing separatist soldiers in eastern Ukraine. According to his Right Sector
battalion commander, Andrei Herhert, Lavrega -- also known as "Quiet" -- was "one of the best
snipers in the war" and "very ideological."
"As a thanks for his service to the right-wing Kiev government, Lavrega received a
military decoration from former President Petro Poroshenko for "courage" just last year, in
October of 2018." ..........
"Whoever is ultimately responsible for ordering this political assassination and the
murder of the three-year-old boy, it is clear that the same far-right forces that were
instrumental in the coup in February 2014 and the civil war are now being employed to carry
out political assassinations by the Ukrainian oligarchy.
"Since the 2014 coup, the number of targeted political assassinations by right-wing
neo-Nazi groups like C14 and the Right Sector has skyrocketed. At least 15 people have been
murdered in such hit jobs by the far right since 2014. Among them was the well-known
Belarusian journalist Pavel Sheremet and the politician Kateryna Handziuk, who was killed in
a horrific acid attack by right-wing thugs last year.
"In virtually all these cases, the perpetrators have been protected from serious legal
prosecution. One of the murderers of Handziuk received a barely three-year prison sentence. A
critical role in shielding the neo-Nazis is played by Ukraine's Ministry of Internal Affairs'
Arsen Avakov, who controls the country's police force and possesses well-known ties to
Ukraine's most notorious fascist militia, the Azov Battalion.
"Avakov is one of the few members of the previous Poroshenko government that have remained
in the current Cabinet of Ministers under President Volodmyr Zelensky. He was recently
praised by former US ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch while testifying before the
House of Representatives regarding the Trump impeachment investigation (see also: "The
impeachment crisis and American imperialism").
"President Zelensky, who was elected in April this year on the basis of promises that he
would bring an end to the widely despised civil war in eastern Ukraine that has claimed the
lives of over 13,000 people, has maintained a conspicuous silence on this latest political
assassination attempt by the far right. Instead, the day after the murder, he posted a
message on Facebook to honor two Ukrainian soldiers who were killed while fighting in eastern
Ukraine this past weekend."
The rest of the story can be found at the WSWS https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/12/07/ukra-d06.html
The Right Sector links with the former US Ambassador-Democratic heroine- are topical.
Thank you for that insight. I cannot see how Zelensky will manage the Nazi Ukrainians
short of a virtual civil war against one western district. The USA will foment a major
insurrection to destroy him if he does a deal with Gazprom. Your suggestion as to where those
issues are discussed would be welcome.
A User #72
Thank you and well said. The eurocentric kabuki does mesmerise the information providers.
I too seek escape from that dominance and spent a good time today researching the Power of
Siberia implications and issues of South America. The global assault on all things African is
a matter of deep despair for me and I feel totally powerless to reverse the relentless
assault on their world.
First Worlders commenting here seem to have the illusion Christianism is the good brother
of the three Abrahamic religions. Although I understand the pro-Christian bias coming from
the Europeans (since Christianism is an inextricable aspect of European identity), this
opinion is a myth: we have already tasted this in the Bolivian coup, but it's also a Latin
American phenomenon.
Christians are wolves under sheep skins.
--//--
@ Posted by: pogohere | Dec 9 2019 1:25 utc | 57
The USSR had a relatively backwards transportation system (specially railways), that still
used disproportional quantities of petroil to function, but that wasn't an existential threat
to the nation per se , it could be modernized.
Of all the theses I've read about the collapse of the USSR, the one that most convinced me
was Angelo Segrillo's "Decline of the USSR" - which I think only exists in Portuguese right
now. Segrillo covers all the arguments of the time used to explain the fall of the USSR and
refutes them all empirically before he lays out that the main cause of the fall of the USSR
was its structural inability to implement the Third Industrial Revolution ("toyotism").
When it became clear the USSR wouldn't be able to keep up technologically with the USA,
Gorbachev then decided (without knowing it) it would be preferrable for the USSR to disappear
than to continue to exist as a non-superpower.
In that sense, yes, the Soviet then relatively inneficient energy use was a symptom of the
underlying cause - but it wasn't the cause.
--//--
@ Posted by: bevin | Dec 9 2019 3:03 utc | 62
The problem with Europe is its geography: it is a tiny, depleted peninsula. In the 17th
Century, it was an advantage, since the lack of natural resources impelled it to aggressively
exploit other continents, giving birth to capitalism.
But capitalism is a global system, not a regional system. When it reached maturity, Europe
slowly, but inexorably, begun to lose its competitive advantages over purely capitalist
formations - the greatest of them all being the USA. Then what was an advantage became a
disadvantage.
This gordian knot was cut with WWI and WWII (both were only one war, in two parts) - a
last desperate attempt by British capitalism to preserve its imperialist status.
But History is unasailable: it is the saga of class struggle, of the contradictions
between the modes of production and the relations of production. The result couldn't be any
different: Western Europe was on its knees after WWII. The British Empire had just sold all
its assets to the Americans and German men were literally prostituting themselves to American
soldiers for on cigarette (and German children, for one chocolate bar). The USA was the
undisputed sovereign of the European Peninsula from 1945 on.
The last leverage the European Peninsula had, in that scenario, was the USSR itself: it
could ask the USA for good treatment and some dignity in exchange of not doing socialist
revolutions backed up by the Soviets. The result was the Marshall Plan and a permission to
revive their previous industrial parks.
That situation resulted in the rise of Atlanticism, the ideology that the USA is the
legitimate heir of Western Civilization. Andy Warhol was the successor to Michelangelo.
--//--
@ Posted by: john brewster | Dec 9 2019 4:35 utc | 65
The USSR stagnated during the period that spanned from the oil crisis of 1975 until its
fall in 1991.
But it only had a recession in two years of its history: the year after the Perestroika
and its last year of existence. Both were very mild recessions (by capitalist standards).
Even during the infamous "Brezhnev stagnation", growth was 1-3% per year - comparable to
the developed capitalist nations since the 1990s.
But the problem is that its successor states are doing objectively worse: Russia will
grown a little more than 1% this year; other ex-Soviet states are more or less in the same
situation (with Ukraine doing outright worse). The mircle promised to the Russians didn't
come: Putin's boom of the early 2000s was not comparable to the Soviet boom. Russia's status
today are completely dependent on China (which, ironically, has the Soviet system of
government) and the modernization from the old Soviet weapons and know-how it already
had.
"... The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders and Russiagate. ..."
"... Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States. It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured. ..."
"... It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first. Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation is. ..."
"... Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov (Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency). ..."
"... Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing. ..."
"... I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian citizen!) ..."
"... "From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global domination. " ..."
"... "At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause." ..."
Retired Australian diplomat Tony Kevin, in conversation with former Australian Foreign
Minister Bob Carr, says the West is unnecessarily determined to undermine Russia. A t an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause.
When Kevin said he returned to Russia after more than 40 years in 2016 he realized he "had
to take sides" in the U.S.-Russia standoff when all Nato countries boycotted the Moscow
celebrations of the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War.
"I had to take a moral position that it is not right for the West to be ganging up on
Russia," Kevin says in his conversation with the former Australian foreign minister.
The New Cold War can traced back to a broken promise made to Moscow on Nato expansion
eastward. "London and Washington are orchestrating a disinformation" campaign today against
Russia, as the New Cold War has heated up over Syria, Ukraine, NATO troops on Russia's borders
and Russiagate.
Watch the hour-long in depth discussion which was filmed and produced by Consortium
News' CN Live! Executive Producer Cathy Vogan.
Tony's (especially!) and Bob's sane and sensible view of this dangerous and destructive
state of affairs deserve the widest possible distribution and attention.
George McGlynn , December 9, 2019 at 13:27
A quarter century has passed since the fall of the Soviet Union, and little has changed.
Cold War patterns of thinking about Russia show no sign of weakening in America. The further
we distance ourselves from the end of the Cold War, the closer we come to its revival.
Hostility to Russia is the oldest continuous foreign policy tradition in the United States.
It is now so much of a part of America's identity that it is unlikely to be ever cured.
It is a dangerous miscalculation to think the "New Cold War" will end like the first.
Russia (the USSR) had a buffer zone then, it doesn't today. For Moscow the coming war (world
war) will be about survival. All that is left is the fall-back position of nuclear deterrence
doctrine – annihilation. I don't think western capitals see how perilous the situation
is.
AnneR , December 9, 2019 at 07:48
The latest efforts at attacking Russia via smear, allegation and Doublespeak have been,
are via that US supported supposed oversight committee, WADA which has done what the US-UK
wanted: banned Russia for four years from international sporting events including the
upcoming Tokyo Olympics and World Cup (Football – soccer to Americans).
Then there were allegations – of those "highly likely" (therefore one knows to be
untrue and unadulterated propaganda to increase Russophobia) sort – about Russian
hackers (always giving the impression that the "Kremlin" is behind itl) being the Labour
Party's source of the Tory party's US-UK trade deal which would/will deliberately and finally
destroy the NHS and replace it with (of course) US "health" insurance company
profiteering.
(Always the Tory intention from the NHS's initiation in May of 1948; only its popularity
among many Tory party supporters among the working and lower middle classes prevented them
from a full-frontal killing off the NHS; the Snatcher's government began the undermining, via
installing a top-heavy bureaucratization, siphoning off a sizable proportion of the funds
that would otherwise have gone to medical care, demanding that hospitals not "lose" money
– a concept completely beyond the remit of the NHS as originally conceived and
constructed and like exactions.)
Then there are snide remarks about the meeting today concerning the Ukrainian Azov
(Neo-Nazi) attacks on the Donbass (NOT how either the BBC or NPR speaks of this of course) in
France. This struggle, between the Russian-speaking Donbass peoples and the neo-Nazis of
western Ukraine, has killed many thousands of people (most likely mostly those of the
Donbass). The Donbass fighters are spoken of as "Russian-supported" in an attempt to deny
them and the reasons for their struggle *any* legitimacy (meanwhile the support for the
neo-Nazis goes unmentioned, leaving the listener with the impression that they are the
Ukrainian military, thus legitimately fighting a foreign funded and manned insurgency).
Someone even suggested that President Putin needed to be diplomatic. Really? From what
I've read the man is the most diplomatic and intelligent politician (not just political
leader) along with Xi Jinping and the Iranian government that exist on the world stage. None
of them are hubristic, solipsistic, eager beaver killers of peoples in other countries.
Unlike their western "world" political counterparts.
Jeff Harrison , December 8, 2019 at 18:30
Mad Dog Mattis spoke the truth when he said that an opponent wasn't defeated until they
agreed they were defeated. The US merely assumed that Russia agreed that they were defeated
and are doubling down when they now suddenly realize that Russia never said any such thing.
St. Ronnie's whole thing back in the 80's was to outspend Russia militarily and it worked
well. We're trying to do it again but Russia isn't playing the same game this time and now it
is the US that has a mountain of debt and Russia that doesn't. SIPIRI tags US military
spending at $650B and Russian military spending at $62B. But we know that the $650B number is
bogus because it doesn't include our in-violation-of-the-NNPT nuclear program which is in the
energy department or our veteran's expenses which are in HHS. I don't know what's missing
from Russia's $62B but I'll bet they can sustain that a whole lot better than we can sustain
our $650B and rising bill.
Antonio Costa , December 9, 2019 at 13:17
Good point regarding Russia's downsizing the Soviet Union. From Gorbachev to Putin there
was NEVER a surrender, intended in any way. The intent has been multilateral partnerships.
For Russia the US/West won nothing at all except the opportunity to live and work in peace.
(By the way this policy has a long Russian history.)
They gave up the Warsaw Pact and America with our worthless "word" expanded NATO.
The US foreign policy has lost even the semblance of sanity. Our naked aggression is clear
as never before, a mad man throwing a global fit armed with megaton nuclear projectiles on
trigger first strike alert. What could go wrong?
nondimenticare , December 8, 2019 at 15:56
If, magically, Consortium News/CN Live! were a mass-distribution network/magazine (hence
universally consulted), allowing the light in for the mass of the viewing and listening
public, it could change the world – both an exalting and despairing thought.
Lily , December 8, 2019 at 09:52
It is a great joy to listen to this conversation!
I am really sick of the smearing of Russia done by the US and UK. The Skripal as well as
the MH17 case are plain ridiculus. Anybody can see through these silly plants. US and UK
obviously don't feel obliged to respect any international rules any more. (The one person who
is suffering most at the moment from the decline in respect is Julian Assange, an Australian
citizen!)
I wish people would have the courage to break away from the group pressure originated by a
nation which has been started by killing more than 90% of the indigenous people in their
country and since then has turned the worl into a very insecure place.
Chapeau, Tony Kevin! Thanks to Bob Carr and Consortiums News.
Lily , December 9, 2019 at 01:18
It seems that some facts are beginning to be realized in the military department.
Words are catalysts of connotations and connotations are functions of
expectations/framing..
Some conflate cause with purpose thereby limiting perception of cause and purpose.
Some understand that causation is interactive and in any lateral system the genesis of
causation is difficult to determine.
Some understand that evaluation is a function of purpose and that purpose can be evaluated
through such portals into wonderlands such as "What is the "United States of America" and how
is it facilitated?"
As thumb-nailed in the comments section of the article Capitalism's suicidal trajectory
– OlyaPola
December 6, 2019 at 07:46
"From 1922 onwards the strategic purpose of the Soviet Union was to defend the Soviet
Union not global domination, whereas the purpose of the "West" has always been global
domination. "
From 1922 onwards various tactics have been attempted by the "West" to facilitate their
purpose, including attempts at "Orange revolution" in many areas which catalysed many lateral
trajectories including the process of transcendence of the "Soviet Union" by the Russian
Federation in the period from 1991 to 2005.
Consequently Mr. Suslov's observation re war of "The United States of America" can be
extended into present times and hence no "New cold war" exists.
""What is the "United States of America"
An initial step through the portal is that "The United States of America" is – a
regime of social relations to facilitate its purpose – the social relations not being
restricted to the "nation state" presently self designated "The United States of America" but
including classes in other "nation states".
Consequently alternative purposes and social relations pose an existential threat to "The
United States of America"; this being perceived of lesser significance in regard to "The
Soviet Union" and greater in regard to the Russian Federation.
"At an event last week in Sydney, Kevin and Carr discussed how the West, led by the United
States, has been on an aggressive campaign to destabilize Russia, without cause."
The American establishment's problem with Russia is simply that Russia is the only country
on earth capable of obliterating the United States. Not even China has yet reached that
capacity.
"Carthago delenda est"
Skip Scott , December 9, 2019 at 06:13
There is "cause." Russia was our latest vassal under Yeltsin. Putin stopped the looting,
and worked to benefit average Russian citizens. Just watch "The Magnitsky Act, behind the
scenes" to know the "cause".
Bruno DP , December 8, 2019 at 02:34
The West is ganging up on Russia? Replace "West" by "United States of America", and I will agree.
Much of the West (i.e. Germany) has been dragged by force into damage control mode. The
Magnitsky Act monster, the election interference hysteria, are just 2 crying examples met
with shock and disbelief across the pond. The Fiona Hill testimony was a very telling moment
for the inner workings of a self perpetuating logic.
Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin
seems to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined.
I'm German, living in the US, and I agree with your comment. I especially love the last
two sentences:
"Russia is no lightweight by any means, and not always friendly.
But it has regularly done the right thing in international conflicts which the Kremlin seems
to understand better than all of "the Western" intelligence combined."
The ban means Russia will miss next year's Olympics in Tokyo, as well as the Winter Games in
Beijing in 2022. It leaves the door open to Russian athletes determined to be free of doping to
compete under a neutral flag.
... ... ...
Not only will Russian athletes be banned from major competitions but government officials
will also be barred from attending such events. Russia will also not be eligible to host or
even bid to host major events during the same time period.
... ... ...
However, Russian athletes who can prove to WADA's satisfaction that they are
clean and were not part of what it believes was a state-sponsored system of doping will still
be allowed to compete under a neutral flag.
The Review Committee's recommendation to ban Russia was based on its finding that Moscow had
falsified doping data from the Russian Anti-Doping Agency's (RUSADA) lab, which was handed over
to WADA investigators in January. Russian Sports Minister Pavel Kolobkov has attributed the
discrepancies in the data to technical issues. Full disclosure of data from the Moscow
laboratory had been a key condition of Russia's controversial reinstatement by WADA in
September 2018.
RUSADA had been suspended for nearly three years previously over revelations of a vast
state-supported doping program contained in a
2015 WADA-commissioned report.
Russia now has 21 days to appeal the decision. If it chooses to do so, the case will be
referred to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS).
I know most people here think this is silly, but these kind of propaganda warfare are
essential for the Western elites to make the masses connect the dots and begin to hate Russia
as an entity because sports events are something they experience firsthand.
The common Westerner worker may not care if Russia nailed some Western gas exporters with
the Nordstream - but he/she will associate this with some kind of "Russian dishonesty"
because he/she also read about Russian sports banning.
The working classes won't go to war in the name of their elites against Russia because it
was banned from the Olympics - but they will do so if they perceive Russia as a direct and
imminent threat to their vision of world, to their way of life. They will fight to the death
for the interests of their elites if they perceive they are necessary to protect their
lifestyle.
That's why these propaganda warfare tactics of the likes of WADA is dangerous.
"... In regard to our suggestion, the latest move against Damascus was predominantly a UK project, a link was sent to us today to an article by Thierry Meyssan on Voltairenet that's certainly interesting. ..."
"... It's not "the US", it's an international grouping of ideologues and other cranks, focused as much, maybe even more, in the UK as in America. If Meyssan is right these people are highly placed, but operating subversively within their own governments. Of course we have always known these thing are true to some extent, but this latest event seems to be taking this subversion to a new level. ..."
"... Seventeen years ago a small group of highly placed individuals in the US government may have engineered or at very least allowed 9/11 to happen for their own geopolitical ends. We'd be naive to consider a second such event to be impossible. ..."
"... The real danger isn't that a group of ubermenschen or Bond-villains want to incinerate humanity for vague and unspecified reasons, it's that the deep heart of the Russophobic cabal is too dogma-driven and infested with idiots to understand the real world results of their plans. ..."
"... „Wasser verstärkt die oxidative und ätzende Wirkung von Chlor" (WATER exacerbates the corrosive effect of chlorine (because hydrochlorid acid is formed through the moisture) So why would medical experts then hose down these alleged „chlorine" victims? Of course they would not. So this too, seem to confirm that the whole scene was staged. ..."
"... Another article by Mr Meyssan http://www.voltairenet.org/article200375.html refers to the British regime " is elaborated by an elite gathered around the monarch, outside of any form of popular control " The idea of a deep state seems too convenient. In every sphere the regime exploits the population for it's own requirements, if indeed the regime adheres to a nationality. Cold war, hot war are regime terms, all that matters is knowing who not to trust. ..."
"... There is a very powerful deep state in the UK. I think its leadership is hidden deep in the Privy Council and enforced by MI5/MI6. It runs a hidden economy financed through crime – fraud against UK taxpayers, foreign countries etc, It controls the judiciary when need be. This speech by Gerald James although old gives some idea; ..."
"... Catte, we do know for absolute certain that WTC-7 came down by controlled demolition, not by fire – it's a matter of science – and that fact means inside job, however much it was also an outside job. It's fine to be rigorous but if the facts are staring you right in the face that's rigour enough. I simply do not understand reluctance to call things out when they're in your face. It's not as if a court hearing is necessarily going to give you a better answer, is it, but hopefully there's going to be one soon where the truth will be revealed, at least as much as necessary. ..."
"... According to the 52-page petition, which is accompanied by 57 exhibits, federal statute requires the U.S. Department of Justice to relay citizen reports of federal crimes to a special grand jury. The unprosecuted crime alleged to have taken place on 9/11 is THE BOMBING OF A PLACE OF PUBLIC USE OR A GOVERNMENT FACILITY -- as prohibited under the federal bombing statute or 18 U.S.C. § 2332f -- as well as a conspiracy to commit, or the aiding and abetting of, said offense. ..."
In regard to our suggestion, the latest move against Damascus was predominantly a UK project, a link was sent to us today to an
article by Thierry Meyssan on Voltairenet that's certainly
interesting.
Published March 20 it puts forward the idea the Skripal affair was a false flag intended to be the launch pad for a wholesale
diplomatic attack on Russia that Meyssan suggests would initiate a "new cold war."
While it's possible to question this terminology (many would suggest we already have a "new cold war" and are on the verge of
it becoming hot), his narrative offers a valid interpretation of recent events, and indeed looks more persuasive today that when
it was written.
What Meyssan suggests is as follows:
Back in March a projected coup was planned between the UK government and the neocons in Washington to create an irresistible drive
to a) launch a full blown assault on Damascus and b) get Russia removed from the UN Security Council.
The means was to be first the Skripal incident and immediately thereafter a large scale false flag chemical weapon attack on
Ghouta.
Rex Tillerson, then US Secretary of State, was involved in this plan.
However by some means (Meyssan doesn't say how) the Syrian and Russian intelligence services became aware of the plan, and
realised it was not the Pentagon behind it, but "some other agency."
The Russians immediately alerted the media to a possible false flag.
At the same time, bypassing diplomatic channels (because he was concerned to avoid others who were siding with the "plotters"),
Russian Chief of Staff, General Valeri Gerasimov contacted his American counterpart General Joseph Dunford to inform him of his fears
of a game-changing intel-sponsored event in Syria. Dunford in turn informed Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, who told Trump.
Since this apparent plot was going on without the knowledge of the White House & Pentagon, Trump then told Mike Pompeo, the
head of the CIA, to investigate.
As a result Trump became convinced Tillerson was involved and soon after, fired him.
This, in essence, is Meyssan's story. He cites no source for the claims about back-channel communications, and we can't verify
them even slightly. But we all know Russia did indeed warn of a pending false flag in Syria several times throughout March, and developments
since the time of Meyssan's writing lend credence to the broad thrust of interpretation.
The orchestrated & hysterical response of the UK state machine to the Skripal event doesn't just hint at agenda rollout, it shouts
it. The idea this was indeed the first act of a make or break plan is certainly more than believable. Indeed we all heard the suggestion
about removing Russia from the UNSC repeated in the
media at the height of the hysteria.
Whether Meyssan is right or wrong, we absolutely did just see an orchestrated, high level operation unfold, apparently
designed to discredit Russia finally and forever.
It suggests new levels of idiot-insanity going on. Not only is such a plan amateurish in conception (kicking Russia off the UNSC,
even if achievable, is not going to suddenly neutralise their political and military power), it would seem to have been doubly so
in execution.
The Skripal story is a farce. But the apparent attempts
to go forward with the "chemical attack" when all rationale for it was gone and when Douma itself was about to fall, shows stupidity
beyond comprehension. If this was the UK, as the Russians claim, rather than rescuing themselves they simply added another embarrassing
failure to the list, and dug themselves even deeper into easily-exposed crime.
The entire situation must be a warning, and not just the usual cliché about the US being a danger to world peace.
It's not "the US", it's an international grouping of ideologues and other cranks, focused as much, maybe even more, in the
UK as in America. If Meyssan is right these people are highly placed, but operating subversively within their own governments. Of
course we have always known these thing are true to some extent, but this latest event seems to be taking this subversion to a new
level.
Seventeen years ago a small group of highly placed individuals in the US government may have engineered or at very least allowed
9/11 to happen for their own geopolitical ends. We'd be naive to consider a second such event to be impossible.
It also seems clear those enacting this plan initially had little idea how dangerous it really was, and were to some extent astounded
by the Russian reaction, and the horror expressed by the more sane elements in international government. This is also significant.
It's a cliché in some alt media now to say the elites want WW3 and to talk about "population reduction" or some other meme. But,
while it's certainly true there is a strong eugenicist de-population cult in the upper echelons, it's highly improbable any of them
would choose a thermonuclear war as a viable method.
The real danger isn't that a group of ubermenschen or Bond-villains want to incinerate humanity for vague and unspecified
reasons, it's that the deep heart of the Russophobic cabal is too dogma-driven and infested with idiots to understand the real world
results of their plans.
We can be sure they won't have learned from this and won't be deterred from more of the same or worse in future. And if their
next remedial scheme doesn't get stymied by circumstance or nifty footwork, no one will be more surprised than they are when it kicks
of WW3.
But they do have some opposition within the state machine, and always have. There were people in the US and UK intelligence agencies
who didn't want to lie about WMDs, and there are people today in the UK FCO who off-record told Craig Murray about the lies being
forced on them regarding the Skripal case. These are people with enough smarts to want to avoid real confrontation with Russia, however
prepared they are to play the public word games.
I think it's important we address this more nuanced reality rather than opting for the security of familiar memes.
Pt. 2: WHY WOULD ASSAD DO IT?
The French govt also argues that the use of CW in East-Ghouta was both in a tactical and a strategical sense a (sort of) military
stroke of genius but I'll spare you the BS except for one argument:
The „strategic" aspect was that Assad wanted to punish the civilians in „rebel-held" areas and by creating „terreur et panic"
they achieved their aim of surrender.
„Because the war is not over for Assad, he wants to demonstrate thru these ruthless attacks that resistance is futile "
This is bollocks of course because the Russians and the SAA are winning and have painstakingly negotiated with the „rebels"
and arranged for them to be evacuated in buses to Idlib. (Can anyone imagine the US-military doing such a thing after 7yrs of
war?)
AND President Assad knows very well that the civilians in rebel-held areas were captives, treated like slaves, starved for
food (sold by the synthetic "rebels" at exorbitant prices) and brutally executed if they refused to live under Sharia-law or supported
Assad. So there was absolutely no need to „punish" them for anything.
Coincidentally, high-ranking former British military officers totally disagree with the French "assessment"
„Given the operational situation in Eastern-Ghouta on April 7, we estimate with high-confidence that the responsibility [for
the non-existent CW-attack] can be attributed to the Syrian Regime". (Sound familiar?)
And finally they put in this kind of „disclaimer" when they say „Les services francaises are not in the possession of any information
which would support the thesis, that these armed groups in East-Ghouta have endeavored to acquire CW for themselves or that they
were already available to them."
(Now that is a BIG Lie even the MSM has reported that the "rebels" DID use CW ( i.e. see Carla del Ponte, Seymour Hersh and
Scott Ritter on this)
„Furthermore we regard a manipulation of the released pictures as implausible, because the groups present in Ghouta had no access
to the means necessary to exercise a communication-manoeuvre of this magnitude" (!)
(this ridiculous claim does not even deserve a comment their "PR" has been highly effective since it was directed and organized
by MI6 see voltairenet for more)
The biggest lie comes at the end when they claim that Assad has not declared all his CW to the OPCW, has kept a CLANDESTINE
CW-programm all the time (since 2013), has intensified the use of CW continually and that the Russians are in on this.
And then follow the (by now familiar) highly-manipulative phrases which are supposed to be imprinted on our brains now:
"Undoubtedly a chemical attack was launched against civilians on April 7 in Douma"
"THERE IS NO OTHER PLAUSIBLE SCENARIO then the action of the SAA (CW-attack) as part of a major offensive to retake East-Ghouta"
"Russia has undeniably actively supported these operations and the clandestine policy of the SARG for the use of CW"
As Sergei Lavrov recently said to the BBC "the proof is (apparently) in the punishment" .. it is crystal clear that neither
the Briitsh nor the French gov't is interested in a thorough, forensic investigation (whether in Salisburgy or in Douma) and the
fact they have acted as prosecutor, judge, jury and executioner BEFORE any impartial investigation took place is proof enough
of their duplicity
What I find extremely puzzling is this: The Russians now say they have "irrefutable evidence" that Britain has instigated a
false flag Douma (and obviously in Salisbury as well) . SO WHY don't they show it to us???? Why not publish the findings of the
Swiss lab? Is this some weird diplomatic code of conduct they adhere to?
Cassandra ,
President MACRON recently stated that he has „proof" that CW were used in Douma and that it was the Syrian Army. Now the French
govt has released the „evaluation nationale" but it seems no-one is paying attention to it.
After reading the document carefully one can only reach one conclusion:
There is NO PROOF whatsover in this evaulation and it is obviously addressed to an audience considered to be incapable of critical
thought. The format of the document is rather revealing because it contains no offical ID from a French „service" or ministry
(just „Republique Francaise") and the authors are unknown (so no official takes personal responsibility for its content, like
the phony „assessment" on CW released by the WH in 2017)
In order to find out who committed a crime, forensic evidence is extremely important, as we all know from detective thrillers
and court-room dramas. But in this case, there is NO FORENSIC EVIDENCE (no criminal investigation by a CSI-unit). There are only
unverified pics and videos posted on YouTube by the White Helmets (WH).
It is impossible to verify WHERE these pics/vids were taken and also WHEN because the metadata have been tempered with. The
WH of course have NO CREDIBILITY whatsoever, being a cover for the massive „strategic information" (incessantly demonizing Assad)
created by MI6, who also ran the massive PR for the artificial „rebels" in Syria. (See voltairenet.org for more on this).
And yet this is the basis for the „assessment" of the French govt. They write that „French experts have analyzed the symptoms
(visible in the pics and vids) which can be described as follows (respiratory distress, asphyxiation, cyanosis, skin-burns, excessive
salivation, etc.) Taken together, these symptoms are characteristic für a CW-attack, especially for suffocating-agents. The use
of asthma-sprays supports the thesis that such agents were used."
So instead of a forensic examination and autopsy, all we get is an interpretation of symptoms to fit the frame of the Assad-gasses-his-own-people
horror-narrative. To this, they add statements from anonymous people working (in Douma) for medical NGOs like UOSSM (created in
France in 2011, PR-front group) and SAMS (US directed front group) who claim that about a hundred people „stormed" their health
facilities in Douma and at least 40 died as a result of the CW-attack.
They use medical staff of course as „CREDIBILITY-ENHANCERS" because in general people tend to trust doctors, nurses and paramedics,
hence the „White Helmets" (and the faux „nurse" telling the heart-wrenchning, invented tale of the incubator-babies in Iraq in
1990)
I asked a friend who works for one of the biggest chemical companies in Germany (BASF) about the symptoms and he said they
are consistent with a chlorine-exposure but that does NOT mean that it could ONLY have been chlorine. Very similar symptoms occur
when people have been exposed to SMOKE-INHALATION (German: Rauchgasvergiftung)
And now it gets really interesting because a video has been released by Russian and Syrian TV stations in which two medical
students who work for the emergency department of the Douma hospital, say that the people shown in the WH-video had indeed been
exposed to SMOKE-INHALATION.
A house in Douma had been hit by an airstrike which caused a fire in the lower floors and the partial collapse of the upper
floors. So these people had breathing difficulties and were taken to the emergency dept of the hospital where they were given
first aid. Suddenly some men appeared and shouted „this was a gas-attack!". They then began to douse the patients with cold water
(from a hose), which caused panic (children screamed of course). These „dramatic" scenes were filmed then the strangers disappeared
as quickly as they had arrived.
I cannot verify if these medical students told the truth, but given the political context, I have much more reason to believe
them than the White Helmets or the French DGSE.
Just one more thing, the brochure from BASF about the dangers of chlorine contains one sentence that caught my eye:
„Wasser verstärkt die oxidative und ätzende Wirkung von Chlor" (WATER exacerbates the corrosive effect of chlorine
(because hydrochlorid acid is formed through the moisture) So why would medical experts then hose down these alleged „chlorine"
victims? Of course they would not. So this too, seem to confirm that the whole scene was staged.
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
This is NOT a 'French' report. It is an Israeli Zionist pile of black propaganda, no doubt dictated by the CRIF, the de facto
government of the slave state formerly known as 'France'.
Doing a little more tunnelling into the Rabbit hole.
A Bill Clinton reference to Karl Rove led to some interesting events surrounding the recently pardoned Scooter Libby.
@KarlRove https://bit.ly/2HFtLlh opposing Military Industrial Complex isn't
equal2 Putin Apologism. War(s) Crimes of aggression started for false reasons With no proper Investigative & War reporting from
corporate media how 2 hold http://bfy.tw/AKAh #warmongerstoaccount
5:26 PM – 17 Apr 2018
The criminal group led by the red clown and the old Mare with the skewed muzzle continues the provocations. On Monday, the British
representative in the OPCW accused the Russians of non-admission of OPCW experts in Duma. At the same time, the OPCW experts while
in Damascus were expecting a solution of the Security Department of the UN, because controlled by the Britons the bandits were
instructed to fire at the place where the white helmets organized the performance with a "chemical attack". At the same time,
the United States began to yell that Russian do not allow the OPCW experts to the Duma, seeking to eliminate traces of the "chemical
attack". This gang HIGHLY LIKELY thinks we're all idiots.
The world is already clear that no poisoning of the Tablets was not, as there was no chemical attack by Assad. Clown and Mare
managed to negotiate with the Russians and they did not respond to the shelling of Syria. Seeing that the Russian did not respond,
the bandits completely insolen. And now they can arrange another chemical provocation and hit in Syria already on the Russians.
And is not the fact that the Russian will not answer. This is war. I do not want because of a bunch of idiots, teasing the Russian
bear, to a slaughter in which no one will survive.
The funniest part of Meyssan's story is that Trump asked DCI Pompeo to investigate the false flag. What a nube.
Think it through. They didn't say cabal, they said agency. DoS is not an agency, it's a department. 'Ideologues and cranks?'
'Highly placed, but operating subversively within their own governments?' You are describing CIA.
That small group of highly placed individuals who did 911? That was CIA and their moles in key departments: Brennan, Blee,
Cofer Black, Wilshire, Bikowsky, Bowman. The deep heart of the Russophobic cabal is not some secret society, it's a longstanding
CIA program. These programs look international because CIA uses eyes-only intelligence liaisons to conceal the dirty work they
delegate to other countries' agents.
The opposition within CIA is also institutionally chartered. CIA has a routine: dewy-eyed boy scout analysts secretly decry
the insanity of the operations people. Then when the shit hits the fan, CIA publishes the analysis and uses it to blame somebody
else. That's how they blamed Vietnam on the Pentagon, with their tongue-in-cheek Pentagon Papers. And that's how they blamed Tillerson
for their very own CIA plan and conspiracy for war.
milosevic,
This is a very promising thesis. I hope you can expand on it.
Another angle might be Nixon/Watergate/WaPo. Or Reagan/IranContra/North. Of course, JFK/Vietnam/Oswald goes without saying.
Here's a lecture given to FSB (KGB) students by a Russian professor. He says the world is governed by a "Conceptual Power" that
exists above elected governments and that this template has been in place since 1350 B.C.. Very interesting at the very least:
Another article by Mr Meyssan http://www.voltairenet.org/article200375.html
refers to the British regime " is elaborated by an elite gathered around the monarch, outside of any form of popular
control " The idea of a deep state seems too convenient. In every sphere the regime exploits the population for it's own requirements,
if indeed the regime adheres to a nationality. Cold war, hot war are regime terms, all that matters is knowing who not to trust.
Re BZ (British Zyklon?) the following lengthy clip from Saker's "Curious Incident" discussion reflects OffG's raison d'etre: that
Facts Really ought to be Sacred. The MSM have abandoned this principle, as have the Leaders of F, UK and US regimes among others
in the Western world. This is a huge reversal of human progress, and extremely dangerous for the world because the West now has
runaway Technology without Ethics. BTL Saker:
vot tak on April 16, 2018 · at 1:09 am UTC 14.04.2018
Embassy Press Officer comments on the findings of the Swiss experts regarding the Salisbury incident
"Q. Is there any new information regarding the findings of experts from Switzerland in connection with the Salisbury poisoning?
A. According to information from the Swiss Federal Institute for NBC-protection in Spiez, its experts received samples collected
in Salisbury by the OPCW specialists and finished testing them on 27 March.
The experts of the Institute discovered traces of toxic chemical called "BZ" and its precursors. It is a Schedule 2 substance
under the Chemical Weapons Convention.
"BZ" is a chemical agent, which is used to temporary incapacitate people. The desired psychotoxic effect is reached in 30-60
minutes after application of the agent and lasts up to four days. According to the information the Russian Federation possesses,
this agent was used in the armed forces of the USA, United Kingdom and several others NATO member states. No stocks of such substance
ever existed either in the Soviet Union or in the Russian Federation.
In addition, the Swiss specialists discovered strong concentration of traces of the nerve agent of A-234 type in its initial states
as well as its decomposition products.
In view of the experts, such concentration of the A-234 agent would result in inevitable fatal outcome of its administration.
Moreover, considering its high volatility, the detection of this substance in its initial state (pure form and high concentration)
is extremely suspicious as the samples have been taken several weeks since the poisoning.
It looks highly likely that the "BZ" nerve agent was used in Salisbury. The fact that Yulia Skripal and Detective Sergeant
Nick Bailey have already been discharged from hospital, and Sergei Skripal is on his way to recovery, only supports such conclusion.
All this information was not mentioned in the final OPCW report at all. Considering the above, we have numerous serious questions
to all interested parties, including the OPCW."
Sushi on April 16, 2018 · at 3:04 am UTC
That statement on the part of RF embassy is good to see as it confirms my own supposition as recorded in Part X.
It is always nice to go out on a limb and then discover the rest of the world supports the finding rather than sawing off the
limb 🙂
But I believe the big take-away from this event is the fact that the state is no longer held in check by the MSM. This means
that the ordinary citizen is paying for an entity which is actively acting to subvert the interests of the citizenry. This is
very dangerous.
These [truther] articles each get about 10,000 page views. This is a drop in the bucket in comparison to the total voting population
of the UK, or France, or FRG or US or CA. If you believe this information is valuable then you should share it. You do not have
to agree with all that I have written. It is quite possible I have made errors, drawn incorrect conclusions from the evidence
etc, etc.
The key issue is that the MSM is not engaged in a review of an incident which, on any degree of review fails on the merits
and is quickly exposed as false, deceptive and grounds for vilification of another state which I believe to be innocent of
the allegations made against it. If I could find evidence of RF involvement I would gladly write that. But I cannot locate
any such evidence. This event is likely to be used to further justify illegal use of force in Syria. If the public comes to
the belief that "Bad Vlad" is pulling all the strings then they will accept the march toward global war. The problem is that
the person really pulling all the strings is located at Number 10. If bad things happen they have a taxpayer financed bunker
to retreat to. The ordinary citizen is not even assured of a working NHS. _So if you find this series of value then address
it with your family and other contacts._ Cheers!
There is a very powerful deep state in the UK. I think its leadership is hidden deep in the Privy Council and enforced by MI5/MI6.
It runs a hidden economy financed through crime – fraud against UK taxpayers, foreign countries etc, It controls the judiciary
when need be. This speech by Gerald James although old gives some idea;
Excellent post Catte. Thanks. There is certainly serious dissension within the ranks of the U.S. establishment or we would not
be seeing the various fits and stops and starts that have characterized both Trump's appointments, and his subsequent removal
of various appointed advisors, as well as his erratic foreign policy actions since he entered office. Trump himself was never
"the problem" for the collective U.S. deep state, it was Trump's stated goal of "getting along with Russia" that has prompted
close to open warfare between factions of the U.S. ruling class and institutional structures. What is amazing to behold is watching
almost the entirety of the leadership of the most powerful Western nations on earth morph before our eyes into a group of slapstick
carnival clowns selling snake oil and war as if they were some sort of magic elixir sure to prolong their much cherished Western
hegemony. Recent events have pulled the mask off of the facade of "Western democracy" to reveal the grinning death mask of a dying
elite power structure, delusional, paranoid and grandiose to the bitter end.
Seventeen years ago a small group of highly placed individuals in the US government may have engineered or at very least
allowed 9/11 to happen for their own geopolitical ends
???
May have? Allowed?
How many articles has OffG published on 9/11 that show unequivocally that it was an inside job? Seventeen years later with the
vision of hindsight for those of us who did swallow the lies we can see how utterly silly we were. We can see so clearly how steel
frame skyscrapers do not collapse symmetrically due to fires, how a band of men armed with boxcutters cannot negotiate the most
restricted airspace in the world without an effective stand down – provided so very conveniently by 21 drills occurring on the
morning of 9/11, some of which exactly matched the alleged real life events.
No further investigation needs to be conducted to know that 9/11 was an inside job – only to sort out the guilty and exactly what
happened. In fact, all you need to know that 9/11 was an inside job is the undisputed 2.25 seconds of free fall acceleration in
the collapse of WTC-7. That tiny piece of information is all you need. For free fall, the 82 steel support columns must have given
way at virtually the same time and for that to have happened only controlled demolition could have been the cause and controlled
demolition can only mean inside job.
Catte,
We've successfully proved the official story is a lie, but we haven't uncovered what actually happened beyond there being foreknowledge
and pre-planning of some kind. Who did the planning, how many people knew how much how long before it happened, we do NOT know.
Do we?
Let's be as rigorous about the sceptical argument as we are about the official story.
Catte, we do know for absolute certain that WTC-7 came down by controlled demolition, not by fire – it's a matter of science –
and that fact means inside job, however much it was also an outside job. It's fine to be rigorous but if the facts are staring
you right in the face that's rigour enough. I simply do not understand reluctance to call things out when they're in your face.
It's not as if a court hearing is necessarily going to give you a better answer, is it, but hopefully there's going to be one
soon where the truth will be revealed, at least as much as necessary.
10 April – Lawyers and Victims' Families File Petition for Federal Grand Jury Investigation
According to the 52-page petition, which is accompanied by 57 exhibits, federal statute requires the U.S. Department of Justice
to relay citizen reports of federal crimes to a special grand jury. The unprosecuted crime alleged to have taken place on 9/11
is THE BOMBING OF A PLACE OF PUBLIC USE OR A GOVERNMENT FACILITY -- as prohibited under the federal bombing statute or 18 U.S.C.
§ 2332f -- as well as a conspiracy to commit, or the aiding and abetting of, said offense.
We don't know who exactly but we know for absolute certain that rogue elements within government were involved. We definitely
know it was an inside job, whatever outside involvement there was.
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
How do you explain the 'five dancing Israelis' filming the attack as it happened, from Liberty Park in New Jersey?
"Not excluding it, jut saying it's not an inevitable conclusion they were involved at all, and certainly no indication there were
at the center of anything."
No one is saying they are at the centre of anything. That they were in a position to film, were reportedly celebrating, their
story changed multiple times in interviews with law and enforcement and that they were possibly Israeli intelligence all adds
up to making it an interesting detail.
Especially when all the other evidence of 9/11 is investigated and puts the dancing Israelis in context.
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
LUDICROUS! They knew of the attack, before it happened. Others filming the atrocity were NOT wildly celebrating the deaths of
thousands. They were attempting to pose as 'Arabs' to defame them. One told one of the arresting police that 'Your enemy are the
Palestinians'. The police found traces of explosives in their van. One or more failed lie-detector tests before they were simply
released and allowed to go home to Israel, where they appeared on TV, one admitting to being MOSSAD.
Steady on. The source quoted above doesn't say anything about wild celebration, it just says the five men were looking happy and
smiling. That's a bit weird of itself but don't exaggerate it into something else. Thats just replacing memes with other memes.
Maybe they were involved, but there are many other possibilities, including them simply watching the event with no direct connection
at all.
What significance do you see in the traces of explosives? Are you suggesting these guys are the ones who wired the WTCs for demolition,
and that they had brought the RDX/thermite there in that van, which they didn't ditch but continued to drive around in?
Five guys with no known specialist knowledge, wiring three massive towers for demolition from one small van?
You don't think it was likely a bigger more professional outfit that would do that? One – say – with permits to enter and renovate
the towers/enter the lift shafts?
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
Your diversionary tactics are interesting. They were described as 'dancing, jumping and giving each other 'high-fives'. Obviously
they were overcome with grief. The presence of explosive traces plainly has nothing to do so with the controlled demolition. It
just seems odd, and suspicious. No-one at any time suggested that these five did the placing of the controlled demolition charges.
Of course it was others, probably Israeli Death Force sappers. And they were NOT 'just watching'-they were filming it, and from
the first aircraft strike. Pretty prescient of them.
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
9/11 irrefutably, I would say, was a MOSSAD operation, with US sayanim, and Sabbat Goy involvement, the US side centered on that
Zionist Israel First cabal, the 'neo-conservatives'. Christopher Bollyn does an excellent job of outlining the Zionist ' Clash
of Civilizations' and 'War on (Islam) Terror' projects, the latter, in particular, an endeavour of Netanyahu's for decades. Everything
that flowed from that event, the genocides in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the destruction inflicted on those unlucky lands,
the crucifixion of Syria, the regular, ritual, massacres in Gaza, are all creations of the Zionist elite, and follow closely the
strategy outlined in the Oded Yinon Plan of 1982, which was reiterated by Netanyahu in the 'A Clean Break' manifesto.
Zionist control easily explains May's involvement, as she is a groveling toady of the Netanyahu regime and the Holy State that
sits above mere 'International Law'. Apparently, when Netanyahu visited Putin in Sochi a year or so ago, and made certain demands
on Russia in regard to Syria, and Putin rebuffed him, so great was Netanyahu's distress at this insubordination by a mere goy
that he lost self-control and went a little hysterical. Hence the renewed determination to keep the vivisection of Syria going,
and prepare for Holy War on Lebanon and Iran. Of course Bibi's path is that of the Masada Complex, he being a wannabe zealot 'hero',
and he seems oblivious to the reality that unending Israeli aggression will only bring about Israel's destruction, in the manner
that it has inflicted ruination on its neighbours for 70 years.
bevin,
"..Let's be as rigorous about the sceptical argument as we are about the official story."
Absolutely agree.
It is quite reasonable for someone to be convinced that, to use a popular argument on this thread, Corbyn is an MI 6 agent but
if there is no evidence of this cited not only is it impossible to insist on the 'irrefutable' nature of the assertion but to
do so is to discredit oneself, the discussion in question and, fairly quickly, the blog in its entirety.
It is one of life's little ironies that off guardian, which insists that we weigh evidence rigorously where claims by the state
are concerned, is becoming something of a refuge for assertions based on evidence just as sketchy and circumstantial as those
put forward by the likes of Freedland and the BBC.
So 9/11 might have been a Mossad operation, just as Putin might have ordered the attack in Salisbury and the White helmets could
be well meaning humanitarians discovering gas attacks.
Let us see the evidence before we agree that something is irrefutable, even when it is something as clear cut as the fact that
Corbyn (already revealed to be a Czech spy, having once had tea with one) has had tea with an MI 6 agent and is therefore, connecting
the dots, completely unreliable and no more to be supported than, say, Boris Johnson. The proof being that he did not oppose,
we are told the Magnitsky Act, sponsored by his fellow agent (and PLP member) Ian Austin.
At any rate the Israeli Embassy can now call off their campaign against Corbyn who is revealed to be almost as big a friend of
Israel as Blair- who even Roman Polanski knew was a CI Agent.
It is one of life's little ironies that off guardian, which insists that we weigh evidence rigorously where claims by the
state are concerned, is becoming something of a refuge for assertions based on evidence just as sketchy and circumstantial
as those put forward by the likes of Freedland and the BBC.
Excuse me? Since when have we been guilty of that?
There is nothing elaborate whatsoever in claiming WTC-7 came down by classic, controlled demolition, aka, an implosion. It's irrelevant
how substandard its material, how much fire was in it, or how much damage it suffered. The manner of its collapse tells all. Pre-
and during- explosions, kink in middle at start, beautiful symmetry, near and partial free fall, complete dismemberment of steel
frame and molten metal are all unique characteristics of controlled demolition while there is not even a lick of flame to be seen
in videos of the collapse. WTC-7's collapse by "fire" is the greatest case of the Emperor's New Clothes the world has ever seen.
I've done an Occam's Razor exercise on the collapse of WTC-7 and offered $5,000 to those who support the official story to produce
an equivalent exercise favouring the "fire" hypothesis. No one has been able to respond. http://occamsrazorterrorevents.weebly.com/911.html
Bevin: if this comment is aimed in part at me, you are deliberately misrepresenting my assertions. No one on this thread, makes
the accusation that Jeremy is an MI6 agent except you. As you say, there is no evidence for this and personally, I do not believe
he is. What I have empirically and objectively shown (previously with links) is that he can be co-opted by the Cabinet Office
and JIC to conduit faulty intelligence fed to him. That does NOT make him part of the intelligence apparatus, only ancillary to
it. To this end, it was interesting to note his actions this weekend: commenting on Syria. For this he sought, but did not get
an intelligence briefing as a Privy Councillor. This was quite clear on the Marr show: he talked about "other parties" that may
have perpetrated the Douma provocation but he said "I don't know, I don't know" quite a few times. Corbyn "unbriefed" wants an
OPCW investigation and a UN mandate to act: which is perfectly reasonable and legal. And probably clears up any false assertion
that he is in the full-time employ of MI6?
Re: the Magnitsky ammendment. Not only did Corbyn "not oppose" this: he actively promoted it at every opportunity. As I have tried
to make clear we already have "Unexplained Wealth Orders" which are analoguous to Magnitsky sanctions. We do not need another
Magnitsky ammendment. This was the government position before 6th March. I do not claim that Jeremy is pushing this Act because
he IS an MI6 agent: but I can quite clearly show he is pushing it FOR an MI6 agent. Thank if you do not conflate and impute meaning
for me.
And no, I have not produced "evidence" that Browder is an agent for SIS: but if he is not, he might as well be? Or perhaps you
think him an innocent human rights activist as he styles himself. What is irrefutable, empirical, and objective is that this one
man is the source of much of the character assassination of Putin (from his "Enemy No1") and Jeremy is pushing his agenda. Why:
I do not know – naivety? Beyond that, I leave the speculation to you.
If Ian Austin is an agent, he would be a Mossad agent but I make no such claim.
As for the Israeli Embassy: I have covered that elsewhere in depth. No, they will not call off their campaign. Yes, they already
have a hold, and they are not far off gaining a veto control of the Labour disciplinary process: whereby anyone can be suspended
on false accusations of anti-semitism: a position Jeremy has backed himself into by his strategy of appeasement.
All in all: I would say my assertions are grounded in empiricism, and I have not claimed anything I cannot back up. So facts are
sacred: even if that means you do not like them?
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
I suggest immersing yourself in Christopher Bollyn's excellent videos regarding Israeli planning for just such an operation, to
be undertaken to provide the 'New Pearl Harbor' that the fanatic Zionist 'neo-conservatives' declared presciently would be needed
to get the USA to do Israel's dirty work in destroying the Moslem countries of the MENA. The evidence of Israeli and US sayanim
involvement is huge, most circumstantial, but other parts, like the 'five dancing Israelis' seen filming the atrocity in real
time, are rather more convincing.
I read one of Bollyn's books, can't remember the title. I take on a lot of his points: but I personally frame such events as transnational,
or better still: supra-national. To say it was this or that country alone is not how I view it: the perpetraitors were ultimately
working for a "higher cause"! Caitlin Johnstone just did a piece about this: the ultimate beneficiaries form a globalised superclass
that is totally amoral and has no allegiance to any particular cause or country. Zinoviev termed this the Westernised "supra-society".
Certainly not every individual: but at the corrupted core – all Western Intelligence agencies serve a cause that transcends the
national interest. National security is a line they feed us: the UK as a whole benefits little from our involvement in Syria,
and less still, from being embroiled in a Cold War with Russia on the grounds of national defence. It's all a con!
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
The Zionist elite support other states and their elites only in so far as they serve Israel's interests, or rather the interests
of the Israeli and Diaspora elites. These interests are not those of much of Jewry, or, of course, of any goyim but the collaborative
type like May, Micron, Cheney et al. The Zionist elite most certainly do possess global ambitions rooted in Talmudic doctrine.
Mulga Mumblebrain ,
Please don't misrepresent me. I have stated over and over again that the culprits are the Zionist elites in Israel and the Diaspora,
NOT Jews as a whole. Many Jews oppose the nefarious activities of the Zionist elites, and many others are passive, just like all
other communities. But in the matter of 9/11 proposing that the Zionists not be mentioned is quite bizarre. In my comments immediately
above (the last seven or eight) there are eight 'Zionists' and one 'Jewry' and that was in the context of asserting that not all
Jews support Zionist crimes or benefit from them.
I am sad to see you write that.
I have not seen anyone here claiming Corbyn to be an MI6 agent, and it reads as inflationary misrepresentation to say that people
have.
The Labour bureaucracy is simply overpowered/ outmaneuvered by a very well organised, well connected and well resourced psywar
operation, – one that has at least some links to Israel and zionist sympathies.
Too many on the Corbyn Left cannot engage with this for fear of being branded racist.
Do you refute the accusation of Corbyn's appeasement?
Evidence for Mossad involvement in 9/11 ?
There is a heap of evidence, arguably no conclusive evidence, but not far off:
'First, Bergen, NJ residents saw five people on a white van filming the attacks and visibly celebrating. They had set up their
cameras before the first plane hit. Police arrested them. All were Israelis (now referred to as the "dancing Israelis"). Bomb-sniffing
dogs reacted as if they had detected explosives, although officers were unable to find anything. The FBI seized the van for further
testing. All five were later released at the instigation of Israeli & American Jewish leaders, some in the US Government. Details
are still classified. This incident quickly disappeared from the mainstream media, following a brief mention in the New York Times
three days after the attacks, that was not followed up.
A second van was stopped on the approaches to the George Washington Bridge. As CBS's Dan Rather said in his live report: "Two
suspects are in FBI custody after a truckload of explosives were discovered around the George Washington Bridge. That bridge links
New York to New Jersey over the Hudson River. Whether the discovery of those explosives had anything to do with other events today
is unclear, but the FBI, has two suspects in hand, said the truckload of explosives, enough explosives were in the truck to do
great damage to the George Washington Bridge " Those suspects –also Israelis -- and the incident then seem to have disappeared
from the public record and mainstream media "examinations" <sic.> of 9/11, just like discussions of the first van, the secondary
explosions at ground level within WTC-1 and WTC-2, and the precipitous collapse into its own footprint of WTC-7.'
I think that Kevin Ryan has done some of the best work in trying to identify legitimate suspects for 9/11, and proposes a 'private
intelligence network' which spans several countries (e.g. Saudi Arabia, UAE ).
I think there is a strong case made by Sabrosky and others that 'The Big Wedding'
' wedded Neocon philosophy with 500 years of Atlanticism'.
I keep banging the drum that seeks to sound out the need for the Left to come to terms with this history. I contend that they
will not 'get anywhere' in the 21st century unless or until they do.
mog ,
@Admin
Does this network include the US/UK or any NATO countries?
Yes.
absolutely agreed. the more nuanced reality is where Karl ROVE delivered us..("We are empire now we create new realities..") which
is why the adults in Moscow have so far deflected these egregious false flags generated by the MI6 Britprop WhiteHelmets®.con
atrocity troupe.
Because they KNOW whats going on.
Thierry Meysson wrote one of the very first books on false flag 911, the event beginning WW3 (911. The big LIE) He is a voice
highly regarded. The ugly intentions of the anglozionist hegamon, loudly expressed as they slapped the Patriot Act into homeland
'Law' – to smash the middle East by all and any means (Strategy of Tension [NATO:GLADIO] YINON and 'Full Spectrum Dominance' methods/R2P,
P2OG, IIO) ushered in on the LIE of 911 casus belli; was not lost on Russian and Chinese intelligence ; nor on anyone listening.
There has been quite a lot recently in RT about the sports doping scandal and how WADA are
threatening to exclude Russia from all sorts of events. I get the impression that Russia may
be trailing its coat here, at a time when the OPCW news comes out in drips and drabs. So
maybe some bargaining is going on behind the scenes.
On quite another tack I came across this lovely conversation - translated from a
contemporary record on papyrus - between the Roman Emperor Commodus and the head of the
Alexandria Gymnasium (main school.) I think this is 2nd century AD.
Emperor: Do you know who you are talking to?
Head: Yes I know, I am speaking to a tyrant.
Emperor: No, to a monarch
Head: Do not say that. Your divine father Marcus Aurelius had the proper qualities of an
emperor. Listen! - First, he was a philosopher; second, he did not love money; third, he
loved the good. In you there are the reverse of these qualities: tyranny, hatred of the good,
common ignorance.
(He was then led off to be executed). (From City of the Sharp-Nosed Fish, by Peter
Parsons)
Makes you think about our current rulers. In the UK, Clement Attlee seems to comes closest
to the ideal.
@ Montreal | Dec 8 2019 18:32 | 17
"sports doping scandal and how WADA are threatening to exclude Russia"
There is some suggestion that the LIMS database had been hacked, with
the hacks / changes being ascribed to Russia, but in fact originating
from parties intent on discrediting Russia..
STUXNET was a sophisticated Government (Israeli / US ) effort to
attack Iran's centrifuge program. Stuxnet's design and architecture
are not domain-specific and can be adapted to other industrial targets.
Such as a LIMS system - often a unprotected visual interface to an SQL database
It is unlikely that the very capable team that gave us Stuxnet has been sitting around
bored and idle, with such a juicy target available
A British Ministry of Defence document, issued on March 12 but unnoticed since then,
reports the ministry has searched its files and records of the blood sampling and testing
for Novichok in the blood of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, but "failed to locate any
information that provides the exact time that the samples were collected."
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is the parent organization for the Defence Science and
Technology Laboratory (DSTL), the UK's chemical warfare centre at Porton Down. Porton Down,
as the laboratory is usually known, is the source of British evidence that Novichok was
detected in the bloodstreams of the two Skripals. [...]
If Gardiner's report of March 12 is true, then this is MOD's official admission there
is no chain of custody for the blood samples on which the Novichok allegation has been
based. If Gardiner is lying, then the ministry's reason is obvious: the samples which were
taken from the Skripals in Salisbury Hospital did not reveal that their blood was
contaminated by what Porton Down and Prime Minister May later claimed was Novichok.
[...]
Speaking of Shane Gustafson: this is an excellent book:
Crisis amid Plenty: The Politics of Soviet Energy under Brezhnev and Gorbachev
(Princeton Legacy Library) Paperback – February 1, 1991
Although the Soviet Union has the most abundant energy reserves of any country, energy
policy has been the single most disruptive factor in its industry since the mid-1970s. This
major case study treats the paradox of the energy crisis as an essential part of larger
economic problems of the Soviet Union and as a key issue in determining the fate of the
Gorbachev reforms.
One of the theses of the book is that the Soviet industry had a "silo" structure: the
various components (exploration, drilling, production, transport, export) didn't coordinate
with one another and depended on the glue of communist party apparatchiks to keep the system
functioning. Gorbachev is said to have eliminated that glue and chaos ensued.
Schmoe@ 36
Re: "Due to an EU ruling related to foreign-affiliated pipelines (or some variation of
that), it will likely be forced to operate at 50% of capacity."
"... The sanctions against Russia are not that broad but they have impacted Russian energy E&P efforts in difficult to reach environments. ..."
"... That is just common sense...large Euro energy companies are partners in Nordstream and have invested billions...do you think they are just going to throw up their hands and say 'Ok we give up'...? ..."
"... And supposedly the owners of those ships [there is actually only one company in the world, Swiss-based Allseas, that operates these deep sea pipe-laying ships] are going to drop Nordstream because they don't want to lose potential US business in the Gulf of Mexico... ..."
"... That is bullshit...what pipelines are being planned for the Gulf...?...Zero... ..."
We shall see how strong. I'd put money on the Germans doing business with their natural
Eastern partners. Business is business, suzerain occupation since 75 years
notwithstanding.
Actually I harbor doubts about the strength of imperial ability, as the natural reaction
every time they use dollarweapon, is the weakening of the weapon...
That Good Man V Putin, I'm sure we all recall, recently spoke to this matter...signing off
with "they (or the dollar) will collapse soon."
zerohedge > "The Dollar Enjoyed Great Trust Around The World. But For Some Reason It Is
Being Used As A Political Weapon, Imposing Restrictions. Many Countries Are Now Turning Away
From The Dollar As A Reserve Currency. US Dollar Will Collapse Soon."
We will see on Nordstream 2 sanctions' effectiveness. Generally, US sanctions, when
aggressively enforced, are extremely effective (and lethal in many cases). The sanctions
against Russia are not that broad but they have impacted Russian energy E&P efforts in
difficult to reach environments.
I would also add that:
a) LNG prices are currently at incredibly low levels and if they hold at these levels
importation of LNG could minimize Germany's hit, and Qatar last week announced it will expands
its LNG export capabilities;
b) Russia / Gazprom did not finance Nordstream 2's construction; initially I believe Gazprom
did so but a consortium of 4 Netherlands (including Royal Dutch Shell), Austrian and German
companies later assumed the financing obligation;
c) Due to an EU ruling related to foreign-affiliated pipelines (or some variation of that),
it will likely be forced to operate at 50% of capacity.
Based on a) - c) there is much less than meets to eye for Nordstream 2.
A more likely outcome than violation of US sanction IMO is an asymmetric response from
Germany; perhaps the EU aviation authorities will deny whatever Band Aid Boeing puts our for
the 737 Max's MCAS system. Or Germany approves Huawei's 5g equipment.
I'm not sure how I missed those Nov 16 posts so thanks for forwarding. This quote will be
interesting:
"With some 85% of the pipeline already laid, new congressional sanctions aimed at
companies participating in the pipeline's construction will not stop it.
Instead, they will become a new bone of contention between the United States and
Europe.
That is just common sense...large Euro energy companies are partners in Nordstream and
have invested billions...do you think they are just going to throw up their hands and say 'Ok
we give up'...?
Even a child can see this Spiegel diarrhea for what it is...
And supposedly the owners of those ships [there is actually only one company in the world,
Swiss-based Allseas, that operates these deep sea pipe-laying ships] are going to drop
Nordstream because they don't want to lose potential US business in the Gulf of Mexico...
That is bullshit...what pipelines are being planned for the Gulf...?...Zero...
Yet the Russians are the world's gas and pipeline superpower and have more pipeline
projects in the works...
As if Allseas is going to risk their biggest customer for some bullshit US
sanctions...[they are also laying the Turkstream pipeline..."
Any company whose operations are all international will unfortunately have to think long
and hard about losing accessing to dollars. Open violations of US Sanctions are still almost
unheard of - Rosneft in Venezuala, Reliance Industries might now be buying Venezuelan oil -
so I would not be pollyanish about their power. Note that European companies will not use
Instinex out of fear of losing access to dollars.
Your questions are absolutely justified. The original story was written by Georg Mascolo,
the German Dana Milbank, i.e. the chief mouth piece of the intelligence services. This is an
obvious attempt to put pressure on Merkel to hamper relations with "Evil Russia" just prior
to a possible breakthrough in the Normandy talks. The German services, especially the BND,
are the last strongholds of Transatlanticism here, and they try to brace themselves against
any rapprochment between Russia and Germany. But this will be in vain. It's simply that the
geopolitical imperative is too strong: the two countries fit together perfectly in terms of
their respective needs and abilities.
"... The way I see it now he basically had the backing of big Jewish gangstas like Adelson plus his own charisma resonated with a lot of people plus the fact that what self-respecting human on earth could vote for the she-devil Hillary ? ..."
"... I think too a lot of people were sick of Obama who was clearly one of the greatest con artists of all time President Hopium, as Mike Whitney tagged him ..."
"... So other than his rich Jewish friends The Donald really is pretty much alone except for a very lot of regular folks and I mean right across the socio-economic spectrum it's not just the blue collar folks, but a lot of people I know in my own profession [and others] ..."
"... So all things considered, I think Trump has actually made some pretty spectacular plays considering he is a one-man football team LOL ..."
"... As for Trump I think he's going to be re-elected the 'resistance' is just making themselves look incredibly bad they are getting up everyone's fucking nose and even Pelosi, as she was standing there the other day announcing the 'impeachment' darn well knew it they are toast ..."
"... I too believe he isn't dumb, but the real question is whether he's playing the fool in furtherance of a plan, or whether it's just who he is and his successes are accidental. ..."
"... The Deep State's (aka: PFPE's) ongoing behaviour indicates that Trump's using buffoonery to work a plan that's anathema to their created realities, and their increasing shrillness indicates it's working. At every turn, he's managed to make unavailable the resources their reality called for. From the M.E., to the Ukraine to N. Korea to Venezuela, things just aren't working the way they're supposed to. In fact, they're invariably working out in a way that exposes the Deep State's ineptitude and malevolence, and maximizes its embarrassment. ..."
"... Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar. ..."
"... Trump is a thief and an occupier in Syria, Afghanistan and many other countries. Only dummies think that he is a man of 'peace'. Only impostors spread lies that he wants to bring 'peace' but the 'deep state' does not allow. In fact the phony 'deep state' does not want war with Iran because knows that they will never win, only chaos. Israel wants war, and his servant Trump is pushing for one. ..."
"... I agree with you about all those examples Ukraine, Venezuela, even Iran seem to be a case of giving 'his' neocon 'team' enough rope to hang themselves while POTUS holds the hammer and ultimately gives a big NAY to going kinetic and then the whole thing crumbles into cracker crumbs ..."
"... On 1 May, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, canceling its oil concession (expired in 1993) and expropriating its assets. ..."
"... In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which was headed by his younger brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to overthrow Mossadegh. On 4 April 1953, Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used "in any way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh". Soon the CIA's Tehran station started to launch a propaganda campaign against Mossadegh. ..."
"... The zionized "progressives" have a new battle cry -- "Putin is new Hitler." Worked great for Hillary Clinton, this model of "humanitarian" interventionist. ..."
"... It does not do any good for your brains to read the Atlantic Council's idiotic propaganda. It is the same as the "Integrity Initiative" production, the dirty and poisonous brew made on orders by NATO/MIC/the Lobby. ..."
"... When Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher could get hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes against humanity, I wonder, why not the likes of Amanpour? Guess history is written by the winning side. ..."
"... Say hello to more than a century of perpetual war for profit. The Deep State, consisting of Jewish bankers and their hanger-ons, has been calling the shots since passage of the Federal Reserve Act in the closing hours of 1913, while most members of Congress were home on holiday recess. ..."
"... The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept, even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes. ..."
"... The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe anything that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty heads is but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so they'll be happy with whatever they get in Oceania. ..."
I had assumed that a real outsider couldn't have gotten to his position and that they
had a plan and would make a stand against the Empire's nomenclatura to try to turn the
ship of state to face the coming crisis head on.
Everybody has a plan until they get hit in the face.–'Iron' Mike Tyson
Yes indeed E I think PCR has commented at length about how Trump just doesn't have anyone in
his corner and yes, it is kind of surprising
Now the funny thing is that I too thought for the longest time there must be some kind of
establishment faction behind the scenes that was backing the Trump agenda of getting real and
changing course from an obvious dead end path
But I'm not so sure about that anymore Trump may indeed be the guy that 'wasn't supposed to
win' as far as all the invisible heavyweights behind the curtain are concerned
The way I see it now he basically had the backing of big Jewish gangstas like Adelson plus
his own charisma resonated with a lot of people plus the fact that what self-respecting human
on earth could vote for the she-devil Hillary ?
I think too a lot of people were sick of Obama who was clearly one of the greatest con
artists of all time President Hopium, as Mike Whitney tagged him
So other than his rich Jewish friends The Donald really is pretty much alone except for a
very lot of regular folks and I mean right across the socio-economic spectrum it's not just
the blue collar folks, but a lot of people I know in my own profession [and others]
But at this point it becomes abundantly clear that what Prof Cohen says here is what
everybody knows the ' permanent foreign policy establishment' which is quite out in the
open and neither 'deep' nor secret
For me that 'Anonymous' oped in the NYT was the milestone event that they could be that
brazen and open about basically ripping the wheel out of the president's hands I mean that's
brass they even called themselves the 'steady state' not even worried one bit about what that
says about this sham 'democracy'
It's like everyone knows right and is cool with it ?
Amazing
So all things considered, I think Trump has actually made some pretty spectacular plays
considering he is a one-man football team LOL
I point to the Syria almost-withdrawal which is in reality almost as good as a full
withdrawal since the SAA has regained almost its entire northern border and the remaining fleck
of a US footprint is a logistical and political impossibility
Let's face it for all the complainers [and yes, we've all got a lot of legit beefs] who the
fuck would have been able to do even this anyone else would have escalated a long time ago this
is the die-hard imperialist mentality of the neocons
I remember reading how some of these very people named here [including I think the harpy
Fiona Hill] were mouth-foaming freaking out at the SDF leadership and literally breaking
pencils in their face to try to stop them from accepting the lifesaver offered by the Russians
and SAA, with the Turks bearing down on them
I mean these people are just NUTS they are simply not rooted in reality at some point you
run into a brick wall going 500 miles an hour that is what awaits this crowd
As for Trump I think he's going to be re-elected the 'resistance' is just making themselves
look incredibly bad they are getting up everyone's fucking nose and even Pelosi, as she was
standing there the other day announcing the 'impeachment' darn well knew it they are toast
In the second term watch out Trump is not as dumb as they think
In the days of Kissinger, Baker, et al the Imperial Staff were well coached in the
Calculus of Power, knew the limits to Empire and thrived within them. Since the end of
history, and the apparent end of limits, policy makers had no more need of realists and their
confusing calculations and analyses.
The US had power, and no-one else had any. That's all they needed to know, and set about
creating new, wonderfully intoxicating realities. As Rove famously inverted the MO they'll
act first, creating realities and the analysis and calculation can come later. In awe of
their creations, they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington,
elsewhere it moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in
zugzwang, with no understanding how they got there. Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in
a tar pit, they've managed only to attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the
abomination.
In the second term watch out Trump is not as dumb as they think
I too believe he isn't dumb, but the real question is whether he's playing the fool in
furtherance of a plan, or whether it's just who he is and his successes are accidental.
The Deep State's (aka: PFPE's) ongoing behaviour indicates that Trump's using buffoonery
to work a plan that's anathema to their created realities, and their increasing shrillness
indicates it's working. At every turn, he's managed to make unavailable the resources their
reality called for. From the M.E., to the Ukraine to N. Korea to Venezuela, things just
aren't working the way they're supposed to. In fact, they're invariably working out in a way
that exposes the Deep State's ineptitude and malevolence, and maximizes its
embarrassment.
If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever see.
Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he promised
to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing. I guess we'll see
if he abandons buffoonery when his opponents finally sink into the tar.
The latest zionist plan designed by Donald Trump and associate to zionist stooges Pompeo and
Brian Hook, intend to expand the war against Iran, has been failed. Trump ordered fomenting
riots using the poor citizen of these countries who are under the Jewish mafia economic
sanction in Iraq, Iran and Lebanon to create choas for the expansion of Jewish mafia and
Israel in the region that he is a member of. Trump expanded the WAR against these counties,
axis of resistance, using the US treasury runs by dual citizens pro Israel, and then
supporting a US/Israel/Saudi proxies in these counties funded by the Saudi Arabia – to
kill the citizens who are fed up with economic pressure force upon them by the criminal Tribe
and its stooge Trump, and to burn buildings to create chaos so Trump can use it against Iran.
This project was funded by the MBS Saudi Arabia and UAE.
Brian Hook, a U.S. Special Representative for Iran, has done everything to satisfy his
masters, the Jewish mafia and made a big HOOK to bring down Iran, but he couldn't and now
they are trying to go after Iran with FABRICATED news, spreading lies that Iran has killed up
to 1000 people.
Trump must answer his own crimes against humanity FIRST and then shut up and focus on US
interest NOT a Israel interests, because he will be viewed as a fifth column.
Trump is a thief and an occupier in Syria, Afghanistan and many other countries. Only
dummies think that he is a man of 'peace'. Only impostors spread lies that he wants to bring
'peace' but the 'deep state' does not allow. In fact the phony 'deep state' does not want war
with Iran because knows that they will never win, only chaos. Israel wants war, and his
servant Trump is pushing for one.
they failed to notice that while history may have ended in Washington, elsewhere it
moved on to surround them with a reality where they found themselves in zugzwang ,
with no understanding how they got there.
Flailing (and wailing) like a Mastodon in a tar pit, they've managed only to
attract an unhelpful crowd of onlookers, fascinated by the abomination.
LOL that is quote-worthy E
What can I add here you've pretty much nailed 'er down to the floor
I agree with you about all those examples Ukraine, Venezuela, even Iran seem to be a case
of giving 'his' neocon 'team' enough rope to hang themselves while POTUS holds the hammer and
ultimately gives a big NAY to going kinetic and then the whole thing crumbles into cracker
crumbs
If that's so, his is the most extraordinary political performance I thought I'd ever
see. Even though I can't imagine a more effective single handed way to accomplish what he
promised to do, that he's lasted this long and has been so effective is astonishing.
Yup the one-man football team and he's actually WINNING LOL
@Priss
Factor Over the years that we've been reading Dr. Cohen who has written about Russia, the
US, etc., we've become more and more convinced that Dr. Cohen, as a Jew, refuses to come out
in bold-faced print to tell the real truths; in this case The Ukraine.
If he were to do so, his Jewish brethren, as seen in The Deep State and in Ukraine would
simply destroy this man. In effect, he's a milquetoast figure of little importance.
"Chinese will soon become a majority in swaths of Russia; why not let them vote
to secede & join the Han motherland?"
-- You think by the zionists' rules, whether the rules are applied in Palestine or
Ukraine. Just give some efforts to learning the history of Russia and the history of Ukraine.
You might also need to refresh your knowledge of the history of the Middle East, for good
measure.
@NegroPantera
Leave the ancient civilization of Persia alone. Тhe US that had been messing with
democratic development in Iran in the 1950-s. The "chosen" behave like homicidal maniacs
towards Iran and cannot wait to see Americans dying for Eretz Israel project.
On 1 May, Mosaddegh nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, canceling its oil
concession (expired in 1993) and expropriating its assets.
"Our long years of negotiations with foreign countries have yielded no results thus far.
With the oil revenues, we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease, and
backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination
of the power of the British company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue, by
means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced. Once this tutelage
has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence."
In March 1953, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles directed the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA), which was headed by his younger brother Allen Dulles, to draft plans to
overthrow Mossadegh. On 4 April 1953, Allen Dulles approved $1 million to be used "in any
way that would bring about the fall of Mosaddegh". Soon the CIA's Tehran station started to
launch a propaganda campaign against Mossadegh.
The zionized "progressives" have a new battle cry -- "Putin is new Hitler."
Worked great for Hillary Clinton, this model of "humanitarian" interventionist.
It does not do any good for your brains to read the Atlantic Council's idiotic propaganda.
It is the same as the "Integrity Initiative" production, the dirty and poisonous brew made on
orders by NATO/MIC/the Lobby.
Here are some of the Atlantic Council stars: Eliot Higgins (Bellingcat) and Anne Applebaum
("historian").
Eliot Higgins is no journalist -- his forte has been to manage sales of ladies underwear
and to produce laughable and ignorant stuff about Ukraine and Syria. He has zero (0) training
in engineering, military, sciences. He is a perfect useful idiot and successful
war-profiteer.
The exposing of the Integrity Initiative has just scratched the surface of what appears
to be a much more sophisticated, insidious, and extremely online version of Operation
Mockingbird.
Don't be so sure. Note that Trump congratulated Tulsi on Kamala's demise. If she isn't the
nominee, her mere presence in the campaign is a boon to Trump because she exposes the rot in
the DNC . and the Empire.
Dem Establishment can't control me and that scares the hell out of them
@anonymous
Because Israel is cautious not to cross a line beyond which Russia will have no choice but to
retaliate. Contrary to Americans, Russians don't have a short fuse and don't feel the need to
"pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the
world she means business". Since Russia got involved, Israel's actions have had exactly zero
effect on the course of events in Syria. Russia's goal is not to further ignite the Middle
East. Overreacting to Israel's gesticulations would be counterproductive.
Scum like Amanpour operating from within anti-imperialist countries are the reason why
those places ever needed laws curtailing the hallowed "freedom of the press." Words ARE
weapons, and the West knows this
Comments:
When Nazi propagandist Julius Streicher could get hanged at Nuremberg in 1946 for crimes
against humanity, I wonder, why not the likes of Amanpour? Guess history is written by the
winning side.
Say hello to more than a century of perpetual war for profit. The Deep State, consisting of
Jewish bankers and their hanger-ons, has been calling the shots since passage of the Federal
Reserve Act in the closing hours of 1913, while most members of Congress were home on holiday
recess.
The world is simply re-bifurcating into 2 camps. More specifically, the Anglo-World is
splitting away from whatever parts it can't bring into their sphere of dominance. They
couldn't dominate the whole playground, so they're taking their toys and carving out a corner
of it for themselves.
The current demonisation of China and Russia sets the stage for the real split that
will happen in the 2020s. Gotta get the sheeple used to the notion so that they will accept,
even demand, bringing the Bamboo Curtain down when the time comes.
What we're seeing now in Europe, the M.E., S. America etc is nothing more than the
Anglo-World's attempt to bring more along with them, and the RoW's attempts to minimize their
success.
With people like these, who needs the ptb ???
The PTB needs the people, not the other way around. People are happy to believe anything
that makes them comfortable. Instilling Sino/Russo-phobia in their otherwise empty heads is
but the prelude to splitting them off from demonic Eurasia/Eastasia, and also so they'll be
happy with whatever they get in Oceania.
They'll be living in the Free World again! Smaller this time around, but Freeeee!!!
It worked the last time. It'll work this time too. One stands in awe of how easy it
is.
@Realist
True. If he appointed all these banksters and neocons by mistake, then there should have
been a few who weren't neocons or banksters. Making a lot of mistakes could be seen as
proof of stupidity. Making nothing but mistakes has to be by design
That pos said that those who commit "hate crimes" should get the death penalty without
trail.
@anonymous
Because Israel is cautious not to cross a line beyond which Russia will have no choice but to
retaliate. Contrary to Americans, Russians don't have a short fuse and don't feel the need to
"pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world
she means business".
Since Russia got involved, Israel's actions have had exactly zero effect
on the course of events in Syria. Russia's goal is not to further ignite the Middle East.
Overreacting to Israel's gesticulations would be counterproductive.
Clamoring for retaliation. Putin only retaliated economically, although it was pretty bad for
Turkey. The Uncle showed his "gratitude" by helping the coup. Putin likely forewarned the
sultan about that coup, so it failed miserably as the result.
Now he holds sultan firmly by the
balls, economically, politically, and militarily, using Turks to push the US around in Syria
and selling them S-400, so that Uncle won't be able to "democratically" bomb Turkey.
That's the
game worthy of the Grand Master, while Trump and pathetic Europeans play checkers, at best
(their game often degenerates to the level of tick-tack-toe).
"... Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America". ..."
"... The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS ! ..."
"... Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'. ..."
"... Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union Massacre. Coincidence or what? ..."
"... Brennan may well have already been CIA when he joined the CPUSA. In any case, he's scum. ..."
"... Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile, millions of adult Americans could care less. ..."
"... "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you". https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018 ..."
Let's get something clear from the start. In 1976, in his 20s, John Brennan was a card carrying communist who supported the then
Soviet Union, at the height some might say of the Cold War, so much so he voted and assisted Gus Hall, the communist candidate for
President against a devout Christian, Jimmy Carter who ultimately won the Presidency.
Yet under four years later, just after the then Soviet Union invaded, just weeks before, Afghanistan and months after the tumultuous
Iranian revolution of 1979, which at the time many thought the Soviet Union had a hand in, Brennan was accepted into the CIA as a
junior analyst.
At that time, John Brennan should have never got into the CIA, or any Western Intelligence agency given his communist background.
Think on that carefully as you continue to read this.
Also reflect on the fact that Brennan, later in his CIA career, was surprisingly elevated from junior analyst to the prestigious
position of Station Chief in Saudi Arabia where he spent a few years.
Its said he was appointed purely for 'political' reasons, alleged to have been at the direct request of Bill Clinton and other
Democrats not because of a recommendation or merit from within the Agency.
Its further said that the Saudis liked Brennan because he became very quickly 'their man' so to speak. Some reports, unsubstantiated,
even allege Brennan became a Muslim while there to ingratiate himself with the Saudis.
Important to read is an NBC news article entitled 'Former Spooks Criticize CIA Director John Brennan for Spying Comments' by Ken
Dilanian dated March 2nd, 2016.
The article contains many revealing facts and evidence, while giving a flavour, of the feelings of many in the CIA who felt that
Brennan was totally unsuitable and unqualified to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
A final controversy is the little known fact of Brennan's near four year departure from the CIA into the commercial world, having
been 'left out in the cold' from the CIA, from November 2005 to January 2009 when he was CEO of a private company called 'The Analysis
Corporation'.
So why was he then reinstated into the CIA, to the surprise of CIA's senior management, by newly elected President Obama, to head
the CIA? No answer is available as to why he left the CIA in 2005.
Lastly let's not forget Brennan's many failures as CIA head in recent years, one most notable is the Benghazi debacle and the
death of a US Ambassador and others there. Something else to ponder.
Back to the present an the issue of security clearances.
In early August, on the well known American TV Rachel Maddow Show, Brennan back tracked on his Trump traitor claim by saying "I
didn't mean he (Trump) committed treason. I meant what he has done is nothing short of treasonous." Rachel Maddow responded correctly
"If we diagram the sentence, 'nothing short of treason' means it's treasonous?"
A simple question follows. Since he is no longer in the CIA, why does he need a security clearance other than to commercially
exploit it?
Tucker Carlson explains succinctly here:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Kzxf9TcJ_3k
Last month what can be described as 200+ 'friends of Brennan', former CIA officials of varying rank, responded against the removal
of former CIA Director Brennan's security clearances, in support of him.
These men and women too most likely will have their clearances revoked.
And why not?
Since the only purpose they retain it is to make money as civilians?
A potentially more serious issue than 'the Brennan controversies' is that the US intelligence community has around 5 million people
with security clearances as a whole includes approximately 1.4m people holding top secret clearances. It is patently a ridiculously
high number and makes a mockery of the word secret.
Former CIA veteran Sam Faddis is one of the few people brave enough and with the integrity required, that has stood up
and told some of the real truths about Brennan in an 'Open Letter', yet this letter's contents have hardly at all been reported in
the media.
Generally by nature, CIA Officers sense of service and honour to their Country, their professionalism and humility, and disdain
for publicity has dissuaded most of them to enter the current very public Brennan controversy; but for how much longer?
I implore you to cease and desist from continuing to attempt to portray yourself in the public media as some sort of impartial
critic concerned only with the fate of the republic. I beg you to stop attempting to portray yourself as some sort of wise, all-knowing
intelligence professional with deep knowledge of national security issues and no political inclinations whatsoever.
None of this is true.
You were never a spy. You were never a case officer. You never ran operations or recruited sources or worked the streets abroad.
You have no idea whatsoever of the true nature of the business of human intelligence. You have never been in harm's way. You have
never heard a shot fired in anger.
You were for a short while an intelligence analyst. In that capacity, it was your job to produce finished intelligence based
on information provided to you by others. The work of intelligence analysts is important, however in truth you never truly mastered
this trade either.
In your capacity as an analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency, while still a junior officer, you were designated to brief
the President of the United States who was at that time Bill Clinton. As the presidential briefer, it was your job to read to
the president each morning finished intelligence written by others based on intelligence collected by yet other individuals. Period.
While serving as presidential briefer you established a personal relationship with then President Bill Clinton. End of story.
Everything that has transpired in your professional career since has been based on your personal relationship with the former
president, his wife Hillary and their key associates. Your connection to President Obama was, in fact, based on you having established
yourself by the time he came to office as a reliable, highly political Democratic Party functionary.
All of your commentary in the public sphere is on behalf of your political patrons. It is no more impartial analysis then would
be the comments of a paid press spokesman or attorney. You are speaking each and every time directly on behalf of political forces
hostile to this president. You are, in fact, currently on the payroll of both NBC and MSNBC, two of the networks most vocally
opposed to President Trump and his agenda.
There is no impartiality in your comments. Your assessments are not based on some sober judgment of what is best for this nation.
They are based exclusively on what you believe to be in the best interests of the politicians with whom you long since allied
yourself.
It should be noted that not only are you most decidedly not apolitical but that you have been associated during your career
with some of the greatest foreign policy disasters in recent American history.
Ever since this President was elected, there has been a concerted effort to delegitimize him and destabilize him led by you.
This has been an unprecedented; to undermine the stability of the republic and the office of the Presidency, for solely partisan
political reasons. You and your patrons have been complicit in this effort and at its very heart.
You abandoned any hope of being a true intelligence professional decades ago and became a political hack. Say so.
Sam Faddis
EPILOGUE:
I decided to update this article with this epilogue that summarises events since its first publication, but by not writing more.
By simply adding links showing Brennan speaking in March just before Meuller's Report was released, and excerpts of other interviews
and commentaries.
In this way, reader's can judge for themselves Brennan's essentially undoubtable despicable character which shines through by
watching and reading the below 8 links up to 1st April 2019. There are many more, but in consideration of space, I've selected these
links.
These are not in chronological order, date/time wise.
I would add that, for his own 'survival', and that of his co-conspirators, there will, I predict, over the coming days and weeks,
be an attempt by Brennan to STILL try and fabricate 'dirt' on President Trump to justify his treacherous behaviour against importantly
more than just Trump, but 'the Office of the President', something for which, in my opinion, he and those involved should be prosecuted
for, even some jailed for.
Most particularly in addition to Brennan is clearly Obama himself, Clinton, Clapper and Comey et al.
The CIA operation in Benghazi was smuggling weapons captured from the Libyan army to Syria via Jordan and Turkey to arm the
anti Assad forces. This operation was directed by Brennan, Clinton, Obama and General Petraeus and was in total violation of national
and international law.
Ambassador Stevens was aware of this operation and allowed to die by delaying a military rescue operation, as part of a cover
up of this illegal operation. Dead men tell no tales.
Hillary Clinton, Her husband Bill and Barak Obama are all deep cover CIA agents in addition to their other positions, as documented
in the book "CIA: Crime Incorporated of America".
They don't like Trump because he is the first non CIA President in a long while
(George W. Bush was not CIA but under his father's influence) and not part of the secret team. Hopefully, they eventually will
be punished for their crimes. Qanon gives hope!
The arms came from more places than simply Libya, although Libya was the central shipping and gathering point to go to Turkey
and then on to Syria. Turkey was part of the Obama enablers of ISIS and ISIL big time ! Obama made sure ISIS got all the weapons
and munitions and equipment we left behind and did literally nothing to stop them at all. He, Brennan, Hillary as well as Kerry
all have massive blood on their hands via the atrocities of ISIS !
Not forgetting William Browder, part of the same gang, whose grandfather was the Leader of the US Communist Party. No doubt
with close ties to Allen Dulles and ''peration Paperclip'.
Which provided safe passage and new identities for the Nazi and Bolshevik
Elite. Funny how the stench behind the overthrow of he Russian Empire, can still be found, firmly embedded in the swamps of the
21st century.
Will never forget Brennan, going to Ukraine, with instructions, just prior to 2 May 2014 and the Odessa Trade Union
Massacre. Coincidence or what?
Wasn't McCain's father also good friends with Allen Dulles? Wonder where Clinton fitted into the work of Dulles?
One of the more murky issues is the murder of Michael Hastings. A lot of information died with his murder but some info indicates
that he was working on a major report on Brennan. He reportedly advised his friends that the fbi was working on an investigation
on him and he was fearful for his survival
As many will recall, Hastings died in June 2013 in fiery crash of his Mercedes which
was speeding at up to 100 mph in a calif neighborhood.
Also, many will recall, the leaking of "Vault 7" by wikileaks indicated that one of the tools revealed was the ability to remotely
control a vehicle without any input from the driver, positive or negative. This ability is described in detail in the following:
How do you think the Royal Family killed princess Diana? If they can control a drone on the other side of the globe, they can
certainly control the accelerator, brakes and steering of a motor vehicle.
Only the most creepy evil people are allowed to be in our government. They have done a terrible job. Our country is like a
plane in a death spiral, and the same list of creeps keeps getting into the White House. The same people no matter who we elect.
Trump has the same people, or worse than Obama or Hillary or Bush had. It's past time to try and salvage whatever is left of this
country.
100 Stinger shoulder launch ground-to-air missiles. Stevens tried to block the shipment, the embassy was attacked by a highly
skilled, armed, assault team - the story told by "Tonto", one of the military contractors involved in the attempted rescue. All
those Americans in Benghazi were sacrificed in the same way the USS Liberty crew was sacrifice.
Greater Israel is the base of all this violence. Incidentally, "Tonto" and his mates had to commandeer a private jet, after
the fire-fight, that got them to Germany - the US/CIA/State Dept., etc. left them to their own methods and they got out, to the
consternation of the Obama/Clinton Administration.
Tucker Carlson and the author of this article asks, How can someone like Brennan be provided security clearance for top secrets
in the CIA. A very easy answer: the entire American financial/judicial/military/spy organizations have become highly corrupt. Meanwhile,
millions of adult Americans could care less.
Well............Those two contrasts will be intriguing to watch how the grandchildren and great-grandchilren will fare when
the US Empire becomes so degraded, that the young will have to forage on their own for housing, water, and food.
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy
America...America will triumph over you".
https://t.co/uKppoDbduj -- John O. Brennan (@JohnBrennan) March 17, 2018
He has to be part of a CIA "cleansing" operation.
Better put him in jail with no rights whatsoever . Let that turd rot in some humid dungeon . That's for the rats like this one
.
Trump is right about the NATO members inadequate military spending; the US expects NATO
members to spend 2% of their GDP on their own defence, the US however, does not require them
to purchase American made weapons, they can produce their own weapons, like French do, or buy
from each other like Germans -- they just have to make their military up and ready in case of
emergency, that's not an unreasonable expectation.
Among the NATO members however, Canada's case is unique; due to its closeness and joint
high command (NORAD) with the US -- and direct threat from Russian claim on the Canadian
Arctic, Canada needs and must increase its military spending significantly, Canada should
purchase modern Air force fleet, Advanced Surveillance equipment, Warships and Submarines for
the defence of the Arctic; F-35, F-22, AH-64 Apache, Nuclear powered Icebreaker and
Submarines etc. because all these equipment will we be partially built in Canada which bring
many high tech jobs and economic growth to the Canadian communities.
Trump is right, NATO and Canada should spend much more on their own defence, and buying
American advanced weapons is the best strategic choice for the Canadians forces, there
shouldn't be any doubt about that.
LOL to the first comment, Russia is *zero* threat to Canada ** . Russia is zero threat to the
US or Europe either. NATO has long outlived its purpose and needs to die.
** I suppose Russia could claim the north pole, and threaten to hold Santa hostage.
@Jmaie
Russian annexation of Crimea was a blatant assault on the International Law, yet it went off
without serious consequences to Russia -- it's not a secret that Russia has claims on
Canadian Arctic seabed, Russia has already planted its flag on the Arctic seabed; here is a
Link that you should want to see: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/aug/02/russia.arctic
I'd really be interested to understand how on earth the reintegration, by overwhelming
majority in a plebiscite acknowledged by all sides as free and unconstrained, of Crimea, a
Russian province for 300+ years, and a majority-Russian area for quite a long time, is "a
blatant assault on the International Law".
The "International Law" you quote must be a newcomer.
"I'd really be interested to understand how on earth "
It is very easy to understand. As Upton Sinclair observed "It is difficult to get a man to
understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Alistair repeats typical neocon viewpoint. Nothing original here. Neocons make their
living off threat inflation and this isn't cheap cynicism. It is simply a fact.
Fiona Hill is a shining recent example here -- this intellectual prostitute of MIC is a
member of Brookings Institution, Atlantic Council and other MIC lobbing organization that
promote Cold War 2 and neoliberal globalization.
The real question is "Why we should believe any of these chickenhawks?" They has been
proven liars so many times that they deserve the rotten tomatoes to be thrown at them on any
of their public appearances or, which is sadly impossible, at their Internet posts
But again money do not smell: unless neocons start facing very real and very personal
consequences, nothing will change. And like with any sect there is small number of
intellectually deficient people who still believe them.
3. Restrainers Want Realistic Foreign Policy Goal s. Instead of engaging in
costly and futile efforts to remake the world in our image, restrainers want U.S. foreign
policy to pursue more feasible objectives. The U.S. military must be strong enough to deter
attacks on the U.S. homeland, a task that is relatively easy to accomplish. When necessary,
the United States can also help other states uphold the balance of power and deter war in a
few key strategic areas outside the Western Hemisphere. America's economic clout will also
give Washington considerable influence over the institutions that manage trade, investment
and other beneficial forms of international cooperation, and it should use that influence
to ensure these institutions are working properly. But the United States has neither the
need, the capacity, nor the wisdom to conduct massive social engineering projects
("nation-building") in deeply divided and conflict prone societies, and it should cease
trying.
4. Restrainers Want Credible Foreign Commitments . The United States keeps taking
on new security obligations in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, but it rarely
debates their wisdom or value. Americans are now formally committed to defending more
countries around the world than at any time in U.S. history, even though some of these
states are hard to defend, have little strategic importance for the United States, and
sometimes act in ways that damage U.S. interests. Washington is also engaged in less
visible military activities in dozens of other countries, some of them shrouded in secrecy.
Yet anytime U.S. leaders contemplate trimming these obligations, alarmists warn that the
slightest reduction in America's global presence will undermine U.S. credibility, embolden
rivals, and lead to catastrophe. Having allowed itself to become overextended, the United
States ends up fighting endless wars in places with no strategic value in order to convince
allies and adversaries that it will still fight in places of greater importance.
The sooner the EU & Europe generally either discard NATO or create its own defence
force in parallel with NATO, the better.
Europe MUST take control of its own destiny. It can not have an external nation, the US,
with different, if not opposing interests, dictating European policy & action.
The “Russia” situation is a perfect example of this divergence of interests.
Europe’s future clearly lies with greater Eurasian integration. Energy, primary
products, & mercantile trade all lie to the East, through Russia to China, Vietnam etc.
Notably, some countries such as Italy are already pulling away from official EU policy &
turning East.
Unfortunately, The US has bribed & threatened (many) EU leaders, leaders who
couldn’t even imagine a change to the status quo. Thankfully, though, it seems that
many average Europeans are sick to their back-teeth with the status quo & Europe’s
“evermore” subservience to US imperialism.
German tax-payers, like most other Europeans, see no need to spend billions of
hard-earned euros against a non-existent threat from the East.
They don’t even want to spend their money turning back the actual threats spilling
across their borders, but climate change is way up there on the agenda. De-industrialised
Europe chock-full of third-world denizens is going to be heaven on earth.
"... Primacists use the security threats that are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't stop, or in fact increase, the use of force. ..."
"... These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example, veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all parties involved. ..."
"... September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and denying this space wouldn't have prevented it. ..."
"... For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the Pacific." ..."
"... The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and importance. ..."
"... This article originally appeared on LobeLog.com . ..."
The unrivaled and unchallenged exertion of American military power around the world, or
what's known as "primacy," has been the basis for U.S. Grand Strategy over the past 70 years
and has faced few intellectual and political challenges. The result has been stagnant ideas,
poor logic, and an ineffective foreign policy. As global security challenges have evolved, our
foreign policy debate has remained in favor of primacy, repeatedly relying on a select few,
poorly conceived ideas and arguments. Primacy's greatest hits arguments are played on repeat
throughout the policy and journalism worlds and its latest presentation is in a recent
article in
the Wall Street Journal, written by its chief foreign policy correspondent, titled,
"America Can't Escape the Middle East." The piece provides a case study in how stagnant these
ideas have become, and how different actors throughout the system present them without serious
thought or contemplation.
Hyping the threat of withdrawal
The WSJ piece trotted out one of the most well-worn cases for unending American military
deployments in the region. "The 2003 invasion of Iraq proved to be a debacle," it rightly
notes. However, there's always a "but":[B]ut subsequent attempts to pivot away from the region
or ignore it altogether have contributed to humanitarian catastrophes, terrorist outrages and
geopolitical setbacks, further eroding America's standing in the world."
Primacists often warn of the dire security threats that will result from leaving Middle East
conflict zones. The reality is that the threats they cite are actually caused by the
unnecessary use of force by the United States in the first place. For example, the U.S. sends
military assets to deter Iran, only to have Iran increase attacks or provocations in response.
The U.S. then beefs up its military presence
to protect the forces that are already there. Primacists use the security threats that
are responding to the unnecessary use of U.S. military force to justify why the U.S. shouldn't
stop, or in fact increase, the use of force.
These stale arguments claim there will be consequences of leaving while conveniently
ignoring the consequences of staying, which of course are far from trivial. For example,
veteran suicide is an epidemics and military spending to perpetuate U.S. primacy continues at
unnecessarily high rates. The presence of U.S. soldiers in these complex conflicts can even
draw us into more unnecessary wars. The United States can engage the world in ways that don't
induce the security dilemma to undermine our own security; reduce our military presence in the
Middle East, engage Iran and other states in the region diplomatically and economically, and
don't walk away from already agreed upon diplomatic arraignments that are favorable to all
parties involved.
Terrorism safe havens
And how many times have we heard that we must defend some undefined geographical space to
prevent extremists from plotting attacks? "In the past, jihadists used havens in Afghanistan,
Yemen, Syria and Iraq to plot more ambitious and deadly attacks, including 9/11," the WSJ piece
says. "Though Islamic State's self-styled 'caliphate' has been dismantled, the extremist
movement still hasn't been eliminated -- and can bounce back."
The myth of the terrorism safe havens enabling transnational attacks on the United States
has
persisted despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary and significant scholarly research
that contradicts it. The myth persists because it provides a simple and comforting narrative
that's easy to understand. September 11th was planned in Germany and the United States, the
ability to exist in Afghanistan under the Taliban without persecution didn't enable 9/11, and
denying this space wouldn't have prevented it.
Terrorists don't need safe havens to operate, and only gain marginal increases in
capabilities by having access to them. Organizations engage in terrorism because they have such
weak capabilities in the first place. These movements are designed to operate underground with
the constant threat of arrest and execution. The Weatherman Underground in the United States
successfully carried out bombings while operating within the United States itself. The Earth
Liberation Front did the same by organizing into cells where no cell knew anything about the
other cells to prevent the identification of other members if members of one cell were
arrested. Organizations that engage in terrorism can operate with or without safe havens.
Although safe havens don't add significantly to a terrorist groups' capabilities, governing
your own territory is something completely different. ISIS is a commonly used, and misused,
example for why wars should be fought to deny safe havens. A safe haven is a country or region
in which a terrorist group is free from harassment or persecution. This is different from what
ISIS created in 2014. What ISIS had when it swept across Syria and Iraq in 2014 was a
proto-state. This gave them access to a tax base, oil revenues, and governing resources. Safe
havens don't provide any of this, at least not at substantial levels. The Islamic State's
construction of a proto-state in Syria and Iraq did give them operational capabilities they
wouldn't have had otherwise, but this isn't the same as the possible safe havens that would be
gained from a military withdrawal from Middle Eastern conflicts. The conditions of ISIS's rise
in 2014 don't exist today and the fears of an ISIS resurgence like their initial rise are
unfounded .
Credibility doesn't work how you think it works
For those arguing to maintain the ongoing forever wars, American credibility will always
be ruined in the aftermath of withdrawal. Here's the WSJ piece on that point: "When America
withdraws from the Middle East unilaterally, the Russians internalize this and move into Crimea
and Ukraine; the Chinese internalize it and move into the South China Sea and beyond in the
Pacific."
Most commentators have made this claim without recognition of their own contradictions that
abandoning the Kurds in Syria would damage American credibility. They then list all the other
times we've abandoned the Kurds. Each of these betrayals didn't stop them from working with the
United States again, and this latest iteration will be the same. People don't work with the
United States because they trust or respect us, they do it because we have a common interest
and the United States has the capability to get things done. As we were abandoning the Kurds
this time to be attacked by the Turks, Kurdish officials were continuing to
share intelligence with U.S. officials to facilitate the raid on ISIS leader Abu Bakr
al-Baghdadi because both the United States and the Kurds wanted Baghdadi eliminated and only
the United States had the capability to get it done.
Similarly, the idea that pulling out militarily in one region results in a direct chain of
events where our adversaries move into countries or areas in a completely different region is
quite a stretch of the imagination. Russia moved into Crimea because it's a strategic asset and
it was taking advantage of what it saw as an opportunity: instability and chaos in Kiev. Even
if we left troops in every conflict country we've ever been in, Russia would have correctly
assessed that Ukraine just wasn't important enough to spark a U.S. invasion. When the Soviets
withdrew from Afghanistan, did the United States invade Cuba? What alliance did the Soviets or
Chinese abandon before the United States entered the Korean War?
Assessments of credibility , especially in times of crisis (like that in Ukraine), are made
based on what leaders think the other country's interests are and the capabilities they have to
pursue those interests. There is no evidence to support -- in fact there is a lot of evidence
that contradicts -- the idea that withdrawing militarily from one region or ending an alliance
has any impact on assessments of a country's reliability or credibility.
Not all interests are created equal
Threat inflation isn't just common from those who promote a primacy-based foreign policy,
it's necessary. Indeed, as the WSJ piece claimed, "There is no avoiding the fact that the
Middle East still matters a great deal to U.S. interests."
The exorbitant costs of the U.S.'s numerous military engagements around the world need
to be justified by arguing that they secure vital U.S. interests. Without it, Primacists
couldn't justify the cost in American lives. Whether the military even has the ability to solve
all problems in international relations aside, not all interests are equal in severity and
importance. Vital interests are those that directly impact the survival of the United
States. The only thing that can threaten the survival of the United States is another powerful
state consolidating complete control of either Europe or East Asia. This would give them the
capabilities and freedom to strike directly at the territorial United States. This is why the
United States stayed in Europe after WWII, to prevent the consolidation of Europe by the
Soviets. Addressing the rise of China -- which will require some combination of cooperation and
competition -- is America's vital interest today and keeping troops in Afghanistan to prevent a
terrorism safe haven barely registers as a peripheral interest. There are U.S. interests in the
Middle East, but these interests are not important enough to sacrifice American soldiers for
and can't easily be secured through military force anyway.
Consequences
Most of these myths and arguments can be summarized by the claim that any disengagement of
any kind by the United States from the Middle East comes with consequences. This isn't entirely
wrong, but it isn't really relevant either unless compared with the consequences of continuing
engagement at current levels. We currently have 67,000 troops in the
Middle East and Afghanistan and those troops are targets of adversaries, contribute to
instability, empower hardliners in Iran, and provide continuing legitimacy to insurgent and
terrorist organizations fighting against a foreign occupation. One
article in The Atlantic argued that the problem with a progressive foreign policy
is that restraint comes with costs, almost ironically ignoring the fact that the U.S.'s current
foreign policy also comes with, arguably greater, costs. A military withdrawal, or even
drawdown, from the Middle East does come with consequences, but it's only believable that these
costs are higher than staying through the perpetuation of myths and misconceptions that inflate
such risks and costs. No wonder then that these myths have become the greatest hits of a
foreign policy that's stuck in the past.
Donald Trump is driven by desire to sweeten the balance sheet of the US as well as a deluded
belief in whatever it is that he thinks Israel stands for. Israel seeks to manipulate the
medieval barbarism of Saudi Arabia to further its fantasy of regional hegemony. They should
"wise up."
The Saudi who killed three people at Pensacola is representative of the breed.
It is time for a basic re-appraisal of our relationships in the ME. pl
It seems the Gulf Arab sheikhs and the Al Saud family have been writing big checks to all
the movers & shakers in the West, including the political and governmental elites, think
tank sinecures, and of course many media personalities.
Tony Balir became a wealthy man with the money of the sheikhs. In an earlier thread you
had posted, we read about the Lebanese man who was a conduit for Gulf arab money going to
Hillary's campaign. Then there was the post-9/11 Republican administration of George Bush who
along with the so-called liberal media and most members of Congress from both parties put a
complete kibosh on investigating any Saudi role with respect to the 11 out of 15 terrorists
of Saudi nationality.
We can see how Trump is already covering for the Saudis by saying the King was apologetic
and will compensate all those killed and injured by the Saudi airman in Pensacola.
When American and western leaders are so easily purchased by the sheikhs, how can we have
a re-appraisal of our relationships in the ME? The few who are calling for such a
re-appraisal like Tulsi Gabbard are being smeared as Russian bots.
Col Lang, you taught at West Point.
So I am wondering if you have a view of Tim Bakken's new book:
The Cost of Loyalty: Dishonesty, Hubris, and Failure in the U.S. Military
I am not trying to argue here, I have only been at West Point as an athlete competing against
it.
Bakken book reviewed here:
https://dissidentvoice.org/2019/12/west-point-professor-builds-a-case-against-the-u-s-army/
If the USA withdraws support from the Saudis then the Saudis might stop pricing their oil
only in dollars. What effect would this have on the value of the dollar? Then again how much
oil is left in Saudi Arabia? The ARAMCO shares sell off doesn't seem to be doing great
buisness, maybe the market understands the situation better.
Would you have been in a position at the time to know if there there were any Carter
Doctrine contrarians within the FP/IC/DoD establishment in the late 70's? Curious how
extensive the debate over deeper ME engagement was at the time, or if it was all just a
knee-jerk reaction to Revolutionary Iran.
Power of Siberia is here. It's finished. Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese
Premier Xi Jinping christened the pipeline to begin the month. Next month Putin will travel to
Turkey to join President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to open the first of four potential trains of the
Turkstream pipeline.
It is only Nordstream 2 that continues to lag behind because of insane levels of pressure
from the United States that is dead set against this pipeline coming online.
And the reason for that is the last of the major energy issues surrounding Gazprom needing
resolution this month, the gas transit contract between it and Ukraine's Naftogaz.
The two gas companies have been locked in legal disputes for years, some of which center on
Crimea's decision to break away from Ukraine and rejoin Russia in 2014. Most of them, however,
involve disputes over costs incurred during the previous and expiring gas transit contract.
The particulars today are ultimately irrelevant as these lawsuits have been used as nothing
more than blackmail to keep a new contract from getting signed. Ukraine has sued Gazprom in
courts, like in Sweden, that rule not by the tenets of contract law but rather through the lens
of social justice.
These have been political decisions that allowed Naftogaz to seize Gazprom's European
assets, further complicating any resolution to the conflict. These policies were pursued
aggressively by former Ukrainian President and long-time US State Department asset Petro
Poroshenko and they have done nothing to help Ukraine.
All they have done is strip-mine the country of its assets while keeping a war to prevent
the secession of the Donbass alive.
This dovetails with the external pressure applied to EU member states, like Denmark, to
delay if not outright thwart completion of Nordstream 2.
Opposition to Nordstream 2 in the US is all about leveraging influence in Ukraine and turn
it into a client state hostile to Russia sharing a border with Russia. If there's no gas
transit contract and there's no Nordstream 2 then US LNG suppliers can sell gas there and
deprive Russia of the revenues and the business.
It's truly that simple. But that strategy has morphed over the years into a convoluted chess
match of move/countermove in the vain hope of achieving something that looks like a victory.
But this isn't a game of real chess but rather a timed match.
Because the end of 2019 was always coming. And Ukraine would eventually have to decide as to
which direction it wanted to go. Moreover, that same choice was put in front of the EU who have
clearly, in the end, realized that the US under President Trump is not a long-term reliable
partner, but rather a bully which seeks its goals through threat and intimidation.
Stay with the US or green light Nordstream 2. The choice in Europe was clear. Nordstream 2
gets finished, as Denmark finally granted the final environmental permit for its construction
in October.
That delay moves the completion date out into 2020. And that now gives the US Senate one
last chance to stop the completion of the pipeline because everything else to this point has
failed, including the EU changing the rules on its gas pipeline rules to force Gazprom to
'unbundle' the pipeline from the gas flowing through it.
Germany amended that directive to allow Nordstream 2 to be regulated at the German federal
level and not at the EU level. This was as much of a win as could have been hoped for.
"The reason for the push is that this window is closing. A lot of Nord Stream is done
already. It will cost them dearly. I think if those sanctions pass [the companies] will shut
down, and I think the Russians will have to look for another way to do this if they can do
this," Risch said.
In reality the window has closed.
At the end of the day even if this legislation passes there will be no way to stop the
pipeline from being completed or the gas to flow through it. With so little of the pipeline
left to complete there is no practical way to stop it from happening. Risch and other US
senators are hoping to strand Nordstream 2 as an unfinished boondoggle but that's folly.
The German government wants this pipeline, therefore the German government will put up the
funds to ensure the contractors are paid and the pipeline completed.
There is a limit to the extent which sanctions can block commerce and once completed the US
will have no ability to sanction the gas flowing through the pipeline. It's a sad and pathetic
state of affairs that so much time, manpower and capital was wasted to stop a pipeline that is
necessary for Germany's future.
It also highlights the hypocrisy of US policy since there isn't a peep out of the US on
Turkstream, which will stitch NATO ally Turkey to Russia via 15.75 cm of natural gas every
year. Eventually it will replace the lost South Stream pipeline as the other trains are built
and contracted for.
All of the countries in eastern Europe are hungry for a piece of Turkstream's future. Serbia
Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Greece are all potential customers.
And all of these countries that currently get their gas from Ukraine are at risk if nothing
gets resolved between it and Russia. This is why the meeting between Putin and Ukrainian
President Zelensky is so important. It has the opportunity to begin reversing the damage done
to the basic fabric of Ukraine and Europe by agreeing to a path to ending the war in the
Donbass and coming to an agreement on gas transit.
There are more than $12 billion in lawsuits outstanding that Naftogaz has pending against
Gazprom. With Nordstream 2 a fait accompli that is all the leverage Zelensky has at that
meeting.
This game is a microcosm of the way the US foreign policy establishment uses Europe as the
battleground in the war against Russia. And given the way the political winds are shifting,
Europeans are getting very tired of it.
This is why gas storage facilities in Europe are full, there is real fear that Gazprom will
walk away from the talks with Ukraine and will wait out the completion of Nordstream 2. Gazprom
offered an extension of the current contract on the condition that Ukraine drop the
lawsuits.
Naftogaz said no. We'll see if Zelensky is smart enough to say yes.
Pentagon Alarmed Russia Is Gaining 'Sympathy' Among US Troops by Tyler Durden Sun, 12/08/2019 - 17:40 0
SHARES
An alarmist headline out of US state-funded media arm Voice
of America : "Pentagon Concerned Russia Cultivating Sympathy Among US Troops". The story
begins as follows:
Russian efforts to weaken the West through a relentless campaign of information warfare
may be starting to pay off, cracking a key bastion of the U.S. line of defense: the military.
While most Americans still see Moscow as a key U.S. adversary, new polling suggests that view
is changing, most notably among the households of military members .
Remember when Russia bombed Belgrade back to the middle ages, invaded and occupied Iraq,
started an eighteen-year long quagmire in Afghanistan, created anarchy in Libya, funded and
armed al-Qaeda in Syria, and expanded its bases right up to US borders? Neither do
we.
Perhaps American soldiers are simply sick and tired of the US military and intelligence
machine's legacy of ashes
across the globe and recognize the inconvenient fact that Russia most often has been on the
complete opposite side of Washington's disastrous regime change wars .
Nothing to see here...
The second annual Reagan National Defense Survey, completed in late October, found nearly
half of armed services households questioned, 46%, said they viewed Russia as ally .
Overall, the survey found 28% of Americans identified Russia as an ally, up from 19% the
previous year .
...While a majority, 71% of all Americans and 53% of military households, still views
Russia as an enemy, the spike in pro-Russian sentiment has defense officials concerned .
--
VOA
Perhaps US military households are also smart enough to know the Cold War is long over, and
only bad things can come from a direct confrontation with Russia, not to mention that
involvement in proxy war in Ukraine has nothing to do with America's national defense or to
"protect and defend the Constitution" .
To be expected, the VOA's presentation of the new poll which finds more service members are
'sympathetic' to Russia is heavy on the supposed 'Trump-Russia nexus' narrative and emphasizes
an uptick in Kremlin propaganda, while failing to acknowledge a failed legacy of 'endless wars'
and destabilizing US influence across the globe.
The poll itself claimed
the changing numbers were "predominantly driven by Republicans who have responded to positive
cues from [U.S.] President [Donald] Trump about Russia."
"There is an effort, on the part of Russia, to flood the media with disinformation to sow
doubt and confusion ," DoD spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Carla Gleason was cited in the VOA
report as saying. Ah yes, a few Kremlin-sponsored Facebook posts and Trump's expressed desire
for better relations with Putin, and suddenly the military too is 'pro-Putin'! apparently.
Perhaps the "doubt and confusion" comes via trillion dollar endless wars of regime change
and pointless occupations which cost American lives? In other words, this is not a 'Russia
problem' at all, but lies too close to home for Washington pundits and pollsters to admit.
* * *
Finally, we should ask, would US military members see in today's foreign policy adventurism
anything remotely resembling John Quincy Adams' famous 1821 admonition?
" But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the
freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will
commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her
example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even
the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication,
in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which
assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would
insensibly change from liberty to force.... She might become the dictatress of the world. She
would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit..."
From page 12 of Martyanov's RRMA, " people such as Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz, none of whom had spent a
day serving in cadre officer uniform "
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years and retired from the Navy Reserve as a full
Captain.
Rumsfeld was in fact a Naval Aviator who flew ASW aircraft for a number of years
A Tracker, in 1950s for a couple of years, while having a degree in Political Science. That sure qualifies him for making strategic
decisions, right? Especially in the 21st century. Well, we all saw results, didn't we?
@Jim Christian Jim, a lot of truth in what you say. But especially this:
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was Stars and Stripes and we served
in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Here is a quote from one of Russian undercover intelligence assets which was outed when Anna Chapman was outed. Unlike her,
however, this guy was a real deal. Here is what he had to say recently about US:
What is THEIR weakness? As enemies these guys are mediocrities, second rate. They overate. Their previous generation was
stronger. They respected us, we respected them. We don't respect these ones,they didn't deserve it. They can bully, as for
the real fight–we'll see about that They are enraged that soon they will have to live within their means.They forgot how to
do so long time ago. That is why they want to solve a problem with us now, while others are still afraid of them.
I remember 70s and 80s clearly, being myself a Cold Warrior, these were different times. many different people. Today, as you
say, I see decay everywhere in everything, the country (the US) was literally robbed, people blinded and all for a reasons of
bottom line in "business" and for Israel's, Saudi and corporate interests. The America I encountered in 1990s is gone.
but if you take away still viable American aerospace, automotive and pharmaceutical
industries among very few others, you will find a wasteland of financial speculations and
selling the snake oil
Lovely takes, Andrei. The people that need to read you see your name and immediately retort,
"Agent for Putin", Washington Post-style. Gets them off the hook from thinking because after
all, college deliberately taught them NOT to think. Most of the kids, they're hopeless. They're
hopeless idiots, they know nothing of the Constitution, they think all is normal. And they were
fleeced by the academics that dumbed them down. Meanwhile, we have in effect, been selling each
other hamburgers (services) for the past 50 years. Also, they've been selling the oil and gas
right out from under our feet overseas and putting THAT in their pockets even as we pay a world
price for gasoline and finished product. Every other country that produces crude gets a
discount. Not us. To steal a quote from a movie I watched once, they struck oil under our
garden and all we get is dead tomatoes. Our society is hollowed out, depraved, the women
becoming more and more hideous, all the institutions that held us together, deliberately
broken. decay everywhere.
As for the military? A reflection of our society. When I went into the Navy in 1975, it was
Stars and Stripes and we served in large part for Mom, Apple Pie and Chevrolet.
Today it is clear that the Stars and Stripes should be dollar signs over a defense
contractor logo. The rest? From where I sit today, for most kids, Mom is a divorced slut, Apple
Pie is a turd in a wax paper wrapper and Chevrolet is a bent shit can from China. This isn't a
society I'd defend as a nation worth defending. The feminists sit on their fat, comfortable
asses, made such on the labors of us White guys and they declare their hatred. Only a moron or
a kid that needs a shot at a job or trade or gets a kick out of airplanes or such joins. Our
women in general aren't worth defending on the streets or the world. Not in the Blue cities,
they are hideous. Take care of your own wman and kids and community and hell with the rest.
There's no draft, the society mostly hates Vets, so it isn't for country most serve. It's to
grab something, from a trade, to a pilot's license. A military based on that has no staying
power. And our corruptions and waste and outright theft in military procurement for shitty
weapons makes us ripe for the taking. And our talent is wasted building shitty weapons and the
second level builds shitty airliners. Can't fly into space? We cannot fly, literally, to
anywhere in the newest build out, the Maxx. And we're depending on the Theranos of Aerospace,
Spacex/Musk to get us to space? Right! Except for the nukes, we're ripe, man.
Andrei, speaking of Musk, how the Hell does he smoke big fat doobies and keep his security
clearance when everyone else in Washington gets fired for getting near the stuff? Queer
privilege? I'm convinced the whole thing with Musk is a shell game. You?
Thanks for your work. Very good stuff, but we can't get those who need it to even look. Our
people are incapable of marching in the streets or even seeing why they should. Kudos to those
who did it to us. They did a fine job. Read More Agree: Andrei Martyanov
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@Frederick V. Reed It has a dangerous set of nukes. The tripwires are and have always
been easy-sinkers like our surface ships. The psychos that run our policy have subs and silos
with missiles with lots of nukes.
It's a dangerous game to consider a dopey thought like that Fred. Bet your ass Russia sees
plenty of military here to defend against. Iran, Iraq, Vietnam, to them it was impossible, we
killed millions. There's enough military here that Israel wants and has harnessed it. In what
universe do you reside Fred? Ah yes, the moon name of Tequila. Fred? Go drink something.
Jesus.
This is the net result of Clinton policies and neocon dominance in the USA foreign policy.
And it is not a pretty picture. It might difficult to win Russia back as an ally after those
Russiagate nonsense. They feel really offended by it and might overreact as is evident from the
test below.
I'll just say again that imbecilization is a completely normal historical phenomenon in declining empires, Empires also tend to have a very
flexible conception of truth, that is, they believe they can
fabricate reality for the simple reason they are geopolitically dominant.
The fact that the MSM have become mouthpieces for the CIA/deep state has
played a huge role in the brainwashing of academia and the rise of neoliberalism. The false
narratives these "trusted sources" of information have been serving up create a very real
Matrix, a false reality that is ingrained into those who rely upon them for their daily
"news".
It feels like the world has gone crazy. They push someone's wallet in our pocket, and then
shout "catch the thief!". We try to debunt this false flag, show surveillance footage, which
clearly shows the setup. But the continue shout in chorus - " thief, thief, thief!".
Acquaintances turn away, hide their eyes. Those "Western partners" iare numerous and they
silence our weak attempts to protest. We were driven into a corner... They try to strangulate
us with sanctions.
Unfortunately, this is our new reality. For the next decade. The question is "Why?" Because
we are a force in international arena again. We're ruining their racketeering business. We are
a vivid example that it is possible to escape the system of the global racket of which they
feed, That there is an alternative.
So now there is a player who does not wan to pay the racketeers, And he is still alive. This
means that others may not pay either. They hate such a situation, because other players may
refuse to pay, and that also means that sooner or later they might be force to live within this
own meanss. It has been a long time since they live within their means, and they completely
lost the habit of doing so. So they want to "solve" the problem with us now ones and forever,
while others are still afraid of them.
Plus they have a new gang leader. Like all newbies, he wants to be the toughest. And raises
the stakes.
Let's face the truth. They won't let us go easily. It's pointless to explain. We will be
hunted, subjected to the array of false flags, persecuted and sanctioned to death. And if they
feel the slack – they will beta us to the death, much more thoroughly then they did in
1990th. The question of whether this can be avoided is no longer worth asking. Today we have
one question – how to survive the next two decades?
We need finally exhale and turn on the brain... The key to victory, as Sun Tzu wrote –
is in knowing the enemy and knowing yourself.
What is their strength?
First, there are many. And they have money. They can buy everything, including witnesses and
judges. We'll be blamed for for anything; they will attack and we will be framed as the
attacker.
Second, they scream loudly. In chorus. That control world mass communications. And their
propaganda works. It is useless to argue otherwise. All our arguments are useless. They will
fall of death ear and will be ignored. Nobody will question their validity -- they will be
simply swipe under the carpet. No matter how ridiculous is their "version of events" is
(Skripals, Russiagate, Ukrainegate) the label "the guilty party" is already put on us like a
yellow patch on the Jews in Nazi Germany. Before any investigation or God forbid judicial
process. And most people on the planet still take their word for it.
What is their weakness?
As opponents these guys, I mean their neoliberal elites are the second grade; they belong to
the "grey zone", the zone of mediocrity. Too greedy, too arrogant, and too lazy. Sometime
semi-senile. Their previous generation was much stronger. They respected us. And we them.
We do not respect this new neoliberal elite and they feel that. And we don't respect them
because such mediocrities do not deserve our respect, and are not trustworthily partner. They
generally can be classified as "Unable to adhere to any legal treaties" (Nedogovorosposobnie")
. And that scares us, almost to death, because you need to deal with completely unpredictable,
bizarre partner for whom treaties and agreements are not worth the paper they were printed on.
But they will avoid open fight, unless the success guaranteed. We need to ensure that such
situation never occur.
Their nervousness, their fidgeting, their second-rateness now is staring to be felt by other countries who would
prefer to hedge their bet and join only a sure winner. They see that the outcome of the USA quest for Full Spectrum Dominance is not yet
decided.
In addition, our opponents are now engaged in brutal showdown with each other. Western
Europe recovered and became competitor of the USA. They also are openly laughing over their new chief. Half of the major
Europium countries leadership probably hates him. For how long he can stay in
power is completely unclear. But this is a new and unexpected development. .
And those in the second row, the stooges, are generally ready to escape from this virtual
battlefield. It became too expensive to catch hot potatoes for Uncle Sam as the amount of loot
for partners shrunk dramatically. And problems with neoliberalism at home mounted. Neoliberal
chickens start coming to roost. They were promised money and a share of loot, not a beating in a real fight
with a strong determined opponent.
What is our strength?
First of all we no longer have any illusions about the the USA or West in general, illusions
that cost us so dearly in 1990th. They are predators who want to colonize, fleece and dismember
our nation. An having no illusions means that they can't repeat economic rape they committed in
1990th. Now we know what awaits us if we give up. They'll devour us completely. Those gangsters
will kick the lying opponent with feet until he is dead. They won't let us survive a second
time.
We also have a grenade as the last resort. They know it, and they're terrified we'll pull
the pin.
They don't understand how we can be defeated, so they try new ways to make us surrender
without a fight. Looking for a weak spot.
What is our weakness?
Our first problem is that we are alone. We are a big and clumsy country with a lot of
internal problems and convoluted history. Which refuse to became the USA vassal. We were a difficult neighbor in the past. Some
people are afraid of us because or our past.
Our second and main problem is the lack of money for economic reconstruction. We don't have enough money for the restoration of the
economy and the standard of living of our people after 1990th rape to the level we deserve as
the major European country. Say the level the Germany managed to achieve, despite being
defeated in WWII. And nobody is going to help us, at least on acceptable conditions. They will
try to slow down our economic development by all mean possible. that's why they already imposed
sanctions under bogus pretext. They will impose more to slow down the process. They will
manipulate oil prices and engage us in "gas wars." If we can solve this problem and restore the
economy and the standard of living of people after 1990 collapse other problems will be easier
to take on.
Also a nice thing about having money is that you instantly have a lot of fiends ;-) At
once.
Now some panoramic view on the situation like in oil painting.
First of all out willingness to fight back is a guarantee that they will not get into a real
fight. We need to hold out for the next ten-twenty years or so. I think this is what we can
expect for neoliberalism to last before the collapse.
But that doesn't solve all our problems. We need that they stop punching us with new
sanctions. Better forever but, at least for the next twenty years. Until their racket finally
falls apart.
So the second goal is to earn to earn money need to reconstruction of the economy and
creating first class infrastructure. Which will allow us to grow. and we need to do this while
there is time. That probably means that invest our money in growth and stop saving "for a rainy
day" in US treasures and Western banks. Otherwise, this rainy day may come in a very unexpected
fashion and way too soon: money will simply be confiscated as long as they can do it with
impunity.
Andrey Bezrukov is the associate Professor of the chair of applied analysis of
international problems, MGIMO
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
Never in the history of America, probably never in the history of any country, had there
been such open and direct control of governmental activities by the very rich. So long as a
handful of men in Wall Street control the credit and industrial processes of the country, they
will continue to control the press, the government, and, by deception, the people. They will
not only compel the public to work for them in peace, but to fight for them in war. -- John
Turner, 1922
This list tells quite a story. It deserves a name such as "US History Written in Blood," but
more ironically and yet sufficient would be "An Inconvenient List." In any case, mass murder
for fun and profit has defined war throughout the entire history of humankind. That in the
modern era of late that the US has pioneered rentier capitalism as a means of extracting
profits from the industrial war machine is a matter of the natural evolution of state
sanctioned murder, far better at returning profits to investors than the mere slaughter of
stone age natives to steal their land.
OTOH, pacifism is indeed an aberration of political thought, not necessarily an unwarranted
aberration, yet one that should be subject to close inspection for its bona fides. My
Cherokee ancestors inform me to always be suspect of the good intentions of white men
claiming that they despise war.
Pacifism for me is individual. I was a cold warrior (pacifist not!) from '72 to '85 when I
went from supporting operating weapons to the "dark side" in weapons development, which a lot
was also nuclear related.
It's pretty obvious that Team Pelosi is more concerned with the affairs of the Empire,
even though she has no constitutional responsibility. than for the welfare of the American
people. The focus of the impeachment hearing on American policy in Ukraine is further
evidence.
Meanwhile, I have gotten no answer to my basic question: what are the top 5 pieces of
progressive legislation that Pelosi has passed--legislation that representations can brag
about to their constituents when running in 2020? It's pretty obvious that their have been
almost none.
Yet, I have been assured by others here at EV that our two party representative political
system is not merely engaging in so much Kabuki theatre in order to appear relevant. Who
knew?
Outside of the fact that this fellow is a liar of monumental proportion - for instance, this
post alone contains 3 different lies - it is fundamentally untrue that BOTH parties are just
engaged in theater. One actually passes legislation to help people and to reduce the
influence of $$$. The other - as former Republican party member Norm Orenstein has pointed
out - is anti-democracy, pro-despotism and a insurgent danger with a propaganda arm.
Huh... all team Pelosi/Schumer of is rant against the US constitution, demean the congress,
disdain the office of the President and make up things about the Donald.
See the continuing resolution good through 20 Dec because Pelosi who owns the House won't
face the responsibility to try and run the US government's purse.
More selective outrage from EMichael, the partisan hack.
Sure, it's horrendous that Trump pardoned a war criminal. But let's not forget that Obama
never even prosecuted torturers ... or closed Guantanamo as promised.
As usual for EMichael and his ilk, what's a horror when their party does something, it's
perfectly acceptable when his party does it.
All these years of being a almost pacifist and now I am seeing the error in my ways.
Sometimes - hopefully increasingly less often - good people must rise up and stomp out evil.
The pardons were not just condoning war crimes - it was telling the nazi ahs in the ranks
that they can do the same domestically. The right has an army within the US. Most of the
officers are okay - but that said, they are tolerating nazis, white supremacists, oathkeepers
and dominionists in their ranks. These exceptions are to let the other nazis know they can
mass murder if the want.
"... Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians. ..."
"... Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy political opponent. ..."
Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they all
stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli
government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.
If Bernie were not Jewish, there would have been an enormous smear campaign against him
for exactly the same reasons.
Charges of anti-Semitism against Corbyn are highly suspect. From what I can see, they
all stem from Corbyn's remarks supporting Palestinian rights in the face of the Israeli
government's institutionalized racism and oppression of Palestinians.
Yes. This is clearly one of the most dirty tricks played by UK Israel lobby, if we talk
about Corbin. Baseless charge of anti-Semitism became a political smear, the way to destroy
political opponent.
Much like charge of "Putin stooge" in the USA. And Russophobia is very similar to
Anti-Semitism, if you think about it. It serves as a kind of politically correct
anti-Semitism.
"Russia is an Oligarchy. Putin is the richest man in the world."
Russia is an oligarchy. Like the USA and all Western countries. Oligarchy is the "rule of
the few", the rule of elite. We know that this is where any state (or mass party) lands due
to the "Iron law of oligarchy". So what's new ?
FYI the USA is a neoliberal plutocracy, which is pretty bad, degraded form of oligarchy.
And it is currently experiences its deep crisis as neoliberal ideology is dead, and economics
entered the phase of a secular stagnation.
This created the situation in which neoliberal elite can't rule "as usual" and
"deplorable" do not want to live "as usual".
Such a situation is called a Classic Marxism a "revolutionary situation" and there is
something in this definition. That's why we got Trump. So he is just a sign of the deep
crisis of the USA neoliberal plutocracy.
In any case this is adeep political crisis. In this sense "impeachment Kabuki theatre" is
just a tip of the iceberg and manifests the same problem
Presence on the political stage of people with noticeable senility problem like Biden and
increased age of politicians in general is yet another sign of the same (can probably be
called "Soviet Politburo syndrome").
But only completely brainwashed by neoliberal propaganda person can claim the Putin is "the
richest man in the world"
Putin is way too clever to get into such a trap, when a person became Western powers
marionette (like corrupt Yanukovich became ) because they can pull the strings and confiscate
the ill gotten wealth anytime. BTW it was Biden, who threatened Yanukovich that if he uses
force against protesters, his Western banks stored wealth is gone. We know what happened next
with the help of Victoria Nuland.
Like Kissinger aptly said, neoliberal oligarchs are always pro-Western oligarch, because
they have nowhere to go to store their wealth.
That means that Putin is "the richest man in the world" level of thinking can be viewed as
typical for a person with severe senility problem due to his/her age.
This statement actually does not even deserve a comment, because person with such level of
mental degradation can't understand argument of the other side.
"... Just war theory and military ethics crumble to dust on the battle field. We rarely fight because it is right, but rather because in some context it seemed necessary at the time. After 9/11 there was an imperative that the US military wage an extended war against any and every group of Muslims that defied US global hegemony in any way. ..."
The average demorat, aside from worshipping Ba'al and hating the constitution, is depraved,
been such since crooked Hillary forgot that the neocon, empire spreading, war mongering
liberals living on the coasts do not run the world.
"...the neocon, empire spreading, war mongering liberals living on the coasts do not run the
world."
[Who says that they do not? Certainly, it is close enough to that for government work.
Besides, in the end corporations and the interests of the donor class dictate the rules of
engagement for both illiberal and unconservative politicians. How the dogs of politics fight
over scraps thrown out for them should be of less interest to the wage class than who is
throwing out the scraps to them.]
Of course a former Air Force military hardware procurements officer likely knows no more
about present day life among the wage class than a banker. That would be like thinking that a
kid raised in poverty by the welfare state knew how to farm. Still, it is possible for either
one to be haunted by guilt late in life.
You are bound with your adversaries in ways known only to God, not a religious testimonial
but merely a proxy for the abstraction of omniscience. Some things can be seen as clear as
day and remain a complete mystery, to me at least.
At the very least Trump is guilty of being Trump. So, if you believe the charges against
Trump are Trumped up, then what else would you expect?
Just war theory and military ethics crumble to dust on the battle field. We rarely
fight because it is right, but rather because in some context it seemed necessary at the
time. After 9/11 there was an imperative that the US military wage an extended war against
any and every group of Muslims that defied US global hegemony in any way.
The US Constitution was written and then rewritten repeatedly in blood going all the way
back to Apr 19, 1775. That is what it means to be an American, son, my Cherokee ancestors
notwithstanding.
China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline in operation
HARBIN -- The China-Russia east-route natural gas pipeline was put into operation on
Monday.
At the gas-distributing and compressing station in the city of Heihe, northeast China's
Heilongjiang Province, the data screen was switched on, indicating parameter variations of
the gas passage. The station is the first stop after the Russia-supplied natural gas enters
China.
The pipeline is scheduled to provide China with 5 billion cubic meters of Russian gas in
2020 and the amount is expected to increase to 38 billion cubic meters annually from 2024,
under a 30-year contract worth 400 billion U.S. dollars signed between the China National
Petroleum Corp (CNPC) and Russian gas giant Gazprom in May 2014.
The cross-border gas pipeline has a 3,000-km section in Russia and a 5,111-km stretch in
China.
Shao Hua, general manager of Heihe City Natural Gas Development Co., Ltd. of China Gas,
said that the border city of Heihe still largely relies on coal for heat. With the
Sino-Russian natural gas pipeline's operation, the city now has access to a stable supply of
clean energy.
Heihe has registered 30,000 households for switching to natural gas for heating. It will
take one year to complete full coverage of the gas network in the city, according to the
company.
China's natural gas consumption reached 280.3 billion cubic meters in 2018. The country's
demand for natural gas will continue to soar toward 2040, outstripping domestic output by
around 43 percent, according to an International Energy Agency report.
China aims to raise the use of natural gas to 10 percent of the country's energy mix by
2020 and 15 percent by 2030, said the National Development and Reform Commission.
How Russia-China Gas Pipeline Changes Energy Calculus
By Olga Tanas, Anna Shiryaevskaya and Dan Murtaugh - Bloomberg
Russia is pivoting its energy business to the east. The world's largest exporter of
natural gas has built an enormous pipeline running from Siberia to the Chinese border to feed
China's insatiable energy appetite. The new conduit, called the Power of Siberia, is part of
a plan by Russian President Vladimir Putin to reduce his country's dependence on gas markets
in Europe and tap into the fast-growing economies of Asia. For China, whose domestic energy
production can't keep up with demand, the pipeline offers a vital new source of
supply....
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken
on Capitol Hill this week:
We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is.
And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in
power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony
about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure
that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but
it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.
This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat
called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.
Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the
often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.
And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants,
and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every
man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and
earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and
no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement
of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation
and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.
And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was
there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play
his part as a warmonger.
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq
On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S.
into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such
treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it
will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).
There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and
replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the
nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996
election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end
to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.
Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying
son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then
sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.
The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get
their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.
It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due
to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time,
but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.
Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy
with.
Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority
women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she
satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level
blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat
an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably)
going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.
An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask
because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then
I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they
overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.
I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.
...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given
the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes
hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred
if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable
cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as
legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.
You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting
millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our
election is 'personal gain'?
Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and
in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at
tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.
It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like
the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy
demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.
No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist
neoliberalism.
Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!
Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners.
Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive
your beloved democracy.
...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of
the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment
of our Ruling Class.
If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement
with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving
developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to
ensure success:
US vs Russia
US/UK vs EU
'pseudo-Christian' west vs islam
1st world vs multicutural diversity migration
Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers
looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant
class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of
the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.
Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for
any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms
in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia,
and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary
of State he trusts heavily.
... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters
is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world
on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).
What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're
guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after
this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political
mistake in the history of our Republic.
The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death
-- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.
The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in
the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on,
and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must
be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.
The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else).
To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the
East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped
at any cost.
My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir
is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union
lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your
19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely,
a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for
starters.
I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $)
for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the
coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary
President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in
2014).
NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for
no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).
I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business
in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The
Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence.
The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the
USSR.
"... A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive. ..."
"... The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain. ..."
"... Listen to the podcast here ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
"... The John Batchelor Show ..."
"... Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline! ..."
"... You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills. ..."
"... It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy. ..."
"... CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it. ..."
"... We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them. ..."
"... Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise. ..."
"... Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards. ..."
"... Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as . ..."
"... Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board. ..."
"... There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value. ..."
"... In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination ..."
"... Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The ' heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice. ..."
"... To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.) ..."
"... or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric? ..."
"... The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid. ..."
"... "TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ". Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ? ..."
"... Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad. ..."
"... Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things. ..."
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where,
he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente ("cooperation") with Moscow.
And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not
share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them
seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow's 2014
annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador
to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president's thinking
about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents
of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.
How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon
John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate
such appointees.
A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the
Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained
a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have
kept the allegations alive.
The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy
establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today,
Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views
of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave
power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even
an Obama aide termed it , will remain.
Listen to the podcast
here . Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F.
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. ANationcontributing editor, his most recent book,War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available
in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host ofThe John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth
year, are available at www.thenation.com .
because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
In an otherwise decent overview, this sticks out like a sore thumb. It would be helpful to stop using the word annexation.
While correct in a technical sense – that Crimea was added to the Russian Federation – the word comes with all kinds of connotations,
that imply illegality and or force. Given Crimea was given special status when gifted to Ukraine for administration by the USSR,
one could just as easily apply "annexation" of Crimea to Ukraine. After Ukraine voted to "leave" the USSR, Crimea voted to join
Ukraine. Obviously the "Ukrainian" vote did not include Crimea. Even after voting to join Ukraine, Crimea had special status within
Ukraine, and was semi autonomous. If you can vote to join, you can vote to leave. Either you have the right to self determination,
or you don't.
This is what is so infuriating, Stephen! These silent coups of the executive branch have been taking place for my entire life!
Both parties are guilty of refusing to appoint cabinet members that the elected presidents would have chosen for themselves, because
both parties are more interested in making the president of the opposing party look bad, make him ineffective, and incapable of
carrying out policies that he was elected to carry out. That is the very definition of treason!
Things are a disaster. The JCPOA is at the heart of the issue and Trump and his advisors stubborn refusal to capitulate on
this issue very well may cause Trump to lose the 2020 election. Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the
DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument.
The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline!
The anti-Iranian fever has created so much havoc not only with Iran, but with every country on earth other than Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE. Germany announced that it is seeking to unite with Russia, not only for Gazprom, but is now considering purchasing
defense systems from Russia, and Germany is dictating EU policy, by and large. Germany has said that Europe must be able to defend
itself independent of America and is requesting an EU military and Italy is on board with this idea, seeking to create jobs and
weapons for its economy and defense.
The EU is fed up with the economic sanctions placed on countries that the U.S. has black-listed, particularly Russia and Iran,
and China as well for Huwaei 5G.
Nobody in their right mind could ever claim this to be the free market capitalism that Larry Kudlow espouses!
You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed
novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens
that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills.
It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this
blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura
Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision.
They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy.
CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty
of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
It is a political game between to competing kleptocratic cults. The DNC and RNC are whores and will do what ever their donors
tell them to do. That is also treason. This country is just a total wasteland.
Everyone has pledged allegiance to fraud.
Too big to fail, like the Titanic and the Hindenberg.
We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or
intelligence, so we should stop paying them.
Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering
Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise.
What kind of stupid question is this? You mean you don't know or asking us for confirmation? If you really don't know then why
are you writing an article about it? If you do know then why are you asking the UNZ readers?
Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is,
as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to
the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep
"in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards.
It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
That's ok but it's a bit unfair to Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths After all most of the country is Hedonistic as hell,
it sells commercials or wtf. Satanic is philosophical and way over the heads of these clowns, though if the be a Satan, then they
are in the plan for sure, and right on the mark. As for psychopaths, those are criminals who are insane, but they can have remorse
and be their own worst enemies, often they just go off and go psycho and bad things happen, but can be unplanned off the wall
stuff, not diabolic.
Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's
are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as
kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes
likes it or not, except as .
So, once upon a time, a people got so hedonistic and they didn't watch the game and theier leaders were low quality
(especially religeous/morals ) and long story short Satan unleashed the Socio's , Things seem to be heading disastrously,
so will bit coin save the day? Green nudeal?
While massive attention is directed towards Russia and the Ukraine, the majority of the public are shown the slight of hand
and their attention is never brought near to the real perpetrators of subverting American and British foreign policy.
Doesn't matter if he's surrounded. A president CAN make foreign policy, and a president CAN fire people who disagree with his
policy. Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy
for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to
conclude that he's fully on board.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them
guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
--
first off the supreme law of the land maybe the Constitution and to oppose it may be Treason, but the Law that is supreme to the
Law of the land is Human rights law.. it is far superior to, and it is the TLD of all laws of the land of all of the Nation States
that mankind has allowed the greedy among its masses, to impose.
There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it,
not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender
of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual
promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe
propaganda value.
If you note the USA constitution has seven articles..
Article 1 is about 525 elected members of congress and their very limited powers to control
foreign activities. Each qualified to vote member of the governed (a citizen so to speak) is allowed to
vote for only 3 of the 525 persons. so basically there is no real national election anywhere .
Article II grants the electoral college the power to appoint two persons full control of the assets,
resources and manpower of America to conquer the entire world or to make peace in the entire world.
Either way: the governed are not allowed to vote for either; the EC vote determines the P or VP.
Article III allows the Article II person to appoint yes men to the judiciary
Where exist the power of the governed to deny USA governors the ability to the use the powers the constitution claims
the governors are to have, against the governed? <==No where I can find? Theoretically, the governed are protected from abuse
for as long as it takes to conduct due process?
One person, the Article II person, is basically the king when in comes to constitutional authority to establish, conduct,
prosecute or defend USA involvement in foreign affairs.
No where does the constitution of the USA deny its President the use of American resources or USA military power, to
make and use diplomat appointments, or to use the USA to use the wealth of America and the hegemonic powers of the USA to make
a private or public profit in a foreign land. <= d/n matter if the profit is personal to the President or if it assigned by appointment
(like the feudal powers granted by the feudal kings to the feudal lords) to corporate feudal lords or oligarch personal interest.
AFAICT, the president can USE the USA to conduct war, invade or otherwise infringe on, even destroy, the territory, or a
private or public interest, within a foreign sovereign more or less at will. So if the President wants to command a private
or secret Army like the CIA, he can as far as I can tell, obviously this president does, because he could with his pen alone shut
it down.
Seems to me the "NO" from Wilson's four points
no more secret diplomacy peace settlement must not lead the way to new wars
no retribution, unjust claims, and huge fines <basically indemnities paid by the losers to the winners.
no more war; includes controls on armaments and arming of nations.
no more Trade Barriers so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.
have been made the essence of nation state operations world wide.
IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.
@Curmudgeon all of that,
plus the Kosovo precedent.
In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force
self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination
Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment
there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie
enemies. It makes it ' real '. The 'heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But
the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches,
etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice.
To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens.
In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security
'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there
are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world.
(Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.)
Trump should have kept Steve Bannon as his advisor and should have fired instead his son-in-law. Perhaps "they" are blackmailing
Trump with photos like here: https://www.pinterest.com/richarddesjarla/creepy/
That would explain why Trump is so ineffective at making a reality anything he campaigned for.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.
The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself
with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
Halfway around the world from Washington's halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line.
To Ukraine's west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are
Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies. [ ] In this war on democratic movements
and democratic principles, Russia's biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however,
Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter
No mention of China, and this is the problem with the whole foreign policy establishment not just the neocons. Russia is more
of an annoyance than anything, but they are still operating assumptions on what is the
Geographical Pivot of History , so they want to talk about Russia. Like an Edwardian sea cadet we are supposed to care about
Russia getting (back) a water port in Crimea. Mahan's definition of sea power included a strong commercial fleet. After tearing
their own environment apart like a car in a wrecking yard and heating up the planet China has taken time out from deforestation
and colonising Tibet, to send huge container vessels full of cheap goods through the melting Arctic round the top of Russia all
the better to get to Europe and deindustrialise it.
Western elites have sold out to China, seen as the future, so we hear about Russia rather than the three million Uyghurs in
concentration camps complete with constantly smoking crematoria, and harvesting of organs for rich foreigners.
Who
poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
By the time the West finds itself in open conflict with Beijing, we will have lost our relative advantage. Brendan Simms and
K.C. Lin [ ] The concept of China being a threat is harder to comprehend. In what way? Yes, its hacking and intellectual property
theft is a headache. But is it worse than what Russia is up to? And don't we need Chinese investment, so does it really matter
if China builds our 5G mobile networks? In London, ministers agonise over these issues -- not knowing whether to pity China
(we still send foreign aid there), beg for its money and contracts (with prime ministerial trade trips), or treat it as a potential
antagonist.
Aid ! They sent robots to the far side of the Moon
Beijing has been the beneficiary of liberal revulsion at the Trump presidency: if the Donald is against the Chinese,
who cannot be for them? As a result, Trump's efforts to address China's unfair trade practices have so far missed the mark
with the domestic and international audience. As Trump declares war on free trade, China -- one of the most protectionist economies
in the world -- is now celebrated at Davos as the avatar of free trade. Later this month, China's Vice-President is likely
to be in attendance at Davos -- and there is even talk of him meeting with Trump. Similarly, the messiness of American politics
has made China's one-party state an apparent poster boy of political stability and governability.
"TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by
Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic
known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ".
Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ?
Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal
authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free
speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics,
and that's through America's brutal empire abroad.
The military/intelligence imperial establishment definitely see Israel as a kind of American colony in the Mideast, and they
make sure that it's well provided for. That's what the Neocon Wars have been about. Paving over large parts of Israel's noisy
neighborhood. And that includes matters like keeping Syria off-balance with occupation in its northeast. And constantly threatening
Iran.
Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference,
except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things.
By the way, the last President who tried seriously to make foreign policy as the elected head of government left half of his
head splattered on thec streets of Dallas.
@Jon Baptist We have
all been brainwashed by the propaganda screened by the massmedia ,whether it be FOX , MSNBC , CBS ,etc.. SeptemberClues.info has
a good article entitled "The central role of the news media on 9/11 " :
"The 9/11 psyop relied foremostly on that weakspot of ours .We all fell for the images we saw on TV at the time we can only
wonder why so many never questioned the absurd TV coverage proposed by all the major networks The 9/11 TV imagery of the crucial
morning events was just a computer-animated, pre-fabricated movie."
@follyofwar Pat inhabits
a strange Hollywood type world, where the US is always the good guy. He believes that, although the US may make foreign policy
mistakes, its aims and ambitions are nevertheless noble and well intentioned.
In Pat's world it's still circa 1955, but even then, his take on US foreign policy would have been hopelessly unrealistic.
"... Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online. ..."
"... And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play his part as a warmonger ..."
"... The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq ..."
"... On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S. into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point). ..."
"... Trump will never beat an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably) going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is. ..."
"... No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist neoliberalism. ..."
"... The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else). To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped at any cost. ..."
"... I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $) for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in 2014). ..."
"... NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.). ..."
"... The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the USSR. ..."
In the Year of Our Lord 2019, sixteen years after this nation launched the catastrophic Iraq War, the following words were spoken
on Capitol Hill this week:
We have become the shining city on a hill. We have become the nation that leads the world in understanding what democracy is.
And one of the things we understand most profoundly is it's not a real democracy, it's not a mature democracy, if the party in
power uses the criminal process to go after its enemies. And I think you heard testimony - the Intelligence Committee heard testimony
about how it isn't just our national interest in protecting our own elections. It's not just our national interest in making sure
that the Ukraine remains strong and on the front line so they fight the Russians there and we don't have to fight them here, but
it's also our national interest in promoting democracy worldwide.
This was not the second coming of the Wolfowitz-Cheney-Bolton brigade. This was Pamela Karlan, a Stanford law professor and Democrat
called by her party to testify in this week's House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing.
Wellsir, I'm old enough to remember 2002, when the Bush administration and its allies built a case for the Iraq War, using the
often-heard line, "We fight the terrorists over there so we don't have to fight them here." Seriously, young folks, look it up online.
And I'm old enough to remember these lines from President Bush's second inaugural address, in 2005:
There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants,
and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.
We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the
success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one. From the day of our Founding, we have proclaimed that every
man and woman on this earth has rights, and dignity, and matchless value, because they bear the image of the Maker of Heaven and
earth. Across the generations we have proclaimed the imperative of self-government, because no one is fit to be a master, and
no one deserves to be a slave. Advancing these ideals is the mission that created our Nation. It is the honorable achievement
of our fathers. Now it is the urgent requirement of our nation's security, and the calling of our time.
So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation
and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.
That didn't work out too well for us, for Iraq, or for the Middle East.
And now comes Prof. Karlan, using the same rhetoric to characterize the conflict between the US and Russia in Ukraine. She was
there to talk about the legal aspects of impeachment, but she bizarrely tipped her hand by trashing Trump because he failed to play
his part as a warmonger.
The American elites didn't learn a damn thing from Iraq
On the contrary. They learned that, via deceptive rhetoric and on false pretenses, they could easily manoeuver the U.S.
into fighting a war on behalf of another nation's interests rather than its own, and face no repercussions for committing such
treason, no matter how many lives it costs and how much it impoverishes the U.S. (to say nothing of what bloodshed and chaos it
will cause in the targeted nation -- because after all, destabilization is the point).
There are, as Victoria Nuland put it, 5 billion reasons for backing the CIA-led coup that overthrew an elected government and
replaced it with leaders that the she and the rest of the Obama/Clinton State Department chose. It was the Democrats, since the
nineties under another Clinton, that decided to move the American military right up to Russia's borders, interfere in the 1996
election to keep the puppet Yeltsin in power, and with Wall Street leaders to pillage the Russian economy with the stated end
to break up Russia into smaller satrapies with governments appointed by the IMF.
Did Joe Biden brag about a quid proof not releasing funds to the Ukraine until it ended the probe into Burisma, which was paying
son Hunter millions, and dismiss the investigators altogether? Does it turn out Ukrainian power brokers favored under Obama then
sought to influence the American elections against Trump, viewed as wanting to make peace with Russia? Yes, and yes.
The US are not a democracy, since the people do not rule. Rather, it's an oligarchy, since a few influential groups do get
their way all the time. Pamela is just shilling for one of these groups, the war party.
It does not matter who you vote for, you always get John McCain.
Agreed, I hope the Republicans agree to impeach him immediately after Election Day if he does win (which I think he will due
to the opposition candidates). I'd much prefer Mike Pence to represent us than freaking Trump. I voted third party last time,
but even as bad as Trump is, he's not nearly as bad as every democratic front runner.
Why the Democratic Party doesn't back Tulsi Gabard is insane, she's the only candidate who everyone could be somewhat happy
with.
Taking a "Unity-Party" angle this election and nominating an anti-war military Veteran who's also a super patriotic minority
women would absolutely destroy Trump. She's also a religious conservative while simultaneously being a sane social liberal, she
satisfies some of the concerns of literally every part of the electorate. A Tulsi Gabard/ Joe Manchin ticket would be an 84 level
blowout. A Joe Biden/ Kamala Harris ticket is literally the best thing that has ever happened to Trump. Trump will never beat
an actually decent candidate, he occupies the White House because Clinton was the worst candidate in American history. He's (probably)
going to win again because his opponents are even more unpopular and incompetent than he is.
An article from someone I trust on that evidence which is not hearsay would be useful, any chance you would write one? I ask
because impeachment is either political or legal. If it's political then it's just the normal noise from D.C., if it's legal then
I want legal standards of evidence. The times I've paid attention the "evidence" has been at the level of someone told me they
overhead a phone conversation or we all believed this, but Trump directly told me the opposite of what we all believed.
I'm looking for something like saying "I did not have sex with that woman" under oath as evidence of committing perjury.
...OTOH, Trump's move against Hunter Biden could possibly be a "high crime and misdemeanor" worthy of impeachment, but given
the existence of Acts of Congress against foreign corrupt practices and the New York Times investigation of Hunter Biden, it becomes
hard to untangle Trump's motives. It would seem to be difficult to prove that an impeachable "high crime and misdemeanor" occurred
if probable cause for a Hunter Biden investigation existed. If we prove (NOT assume, as the Dems currently are doing) that probable
cause did not exist then impeachment would be a slam dunk. If we don't prove that then Trump's impeachment will not be seen as
legitimate by large segments of the public. We really are teetering on the edge of something deep here.
You think that finding out what the son of a sitting vice President, a VP who was also 'point man' for Ukraine, was doing getting
millions from a corrupt Ukrainian entity is strictly 'personal gain'? You think that looking into Ukrainian influence into our
election is 'personal gain'?
Oh the spreading of democracy worldwide nonsense again! Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and
in blood! This sycophant also brought up Pres. Trumps son Baron into the proceedings for no good reason but to score points at
tea time back at Stanford. What a demagogue.
It's always such a lie too, because it's never really about spreading "democracy" -- that is, they don't at all like
the spread of true democracy when the people genuinely prefer and vote for Putin, Assad, Orban, etc., to say nothing of when democracy
demonstrates the true will of the people in cases such as Brexit.
No, they are only using the mendacious phrase "spreading democracy" as a cover for what they really want to spread: globalist
neoliberalism.
Democracies are earned not given, that lesson cost us trillions and in blood!
Yes please give us more democracy, so the uniparty can sell our jobs to global capital and our children's future to foreigners.
Nations have survived tyranny, despots, and brutal civil wars. It is not at all clear whether the nations of the West will survive
your beloved democracy.
...Of course, anyone with a brain knows it's not about Ukraine, a country having no bearing at all on the vital interests of
the United States. Rather, Ukraine is a handy pretext serving the interests of America's military-industrial complex and the enrichment
of our Ruling Class.
If Trump wanted to prove a really great president, he could forge a peace with Russia (which would entail getting a settlement
with Ukraine). It is insane, and only to the benefit of woke liberal capitalists to frame Russia as a permanent enemy. Carving
developed nations into 'us vs them', so the liberal elite can divide and rule us. They use this strategy on multiple fronts, to
ensure success:
US vs Russia
US/UK vs EU
'pseudo-Christian' west vs islam
1st world vs multicutural diversity migration
Pragmatically, we will need an alliance with Russia (and possibly with a post-communist China) to stave off the invading colonisers
looking to grift a free lunch in the 'rich' west (its only the 1% wealthy in the west who are really rich, not the >90% peasant
class), not to mention the ideologically/religiously motivated muslims planning to implement the global sharia subjugation of
the pseudo-Christian west demanded in the Koran.
Sadly, Trump does seem to be proving he lacks the organisational skills to drain the swamp - a virtually impossible task for
any one person. A 'friendship pact' with Russia (perhaps swapping trade access to US for human rights, democratic and media freedoms
in Russia) would be a big step forward to building a united free west. Perhaps bring Poland and Hungary in to to reassure Russia,
and strengthen the protections for Christians and traditional family life. But for this to happen Trump needs to have a Secretary
of State he trusts heavily.
... Signify... whatever, anything, but please not too much thinking. Same with Washington's foreign policy blob. What matters
is that the world's is forced to take America's opinions into account, no matter how bone-headed they are. If they put the world
on fire that's called collateral damage (Ledeen Doctrine).
What I find funniest about this whole "impeachment" shenanigan is how the Democrats honestly think anyone doesn't believe they're
guilty of exactly what they're accusing Trump of. All Trump has to do is reveal seven such cases to the American people after
this whole shenanigan is over and turn their own words against them and they are THROUGH! This might honestly be the biggest political
mistake in the history of our Republic.
The whole thing is nonsense. Democracy is particular to the West, and is frankly innately fragile and dying a proper death
-- slowly, mind you, but dying it is, and thankfully so.
The whole Russia situation is hilarious and a thousand percent ideological. I sat next to these same assholes in college in
the 1980s as they blithely handwaved "no true Scotsman" type arguments about the Soviet Union, and moral equivalency and so on,
and then of course without their precious hearts skipping one single beat, they switched immediately to "Russia is evil and must
be stopped at all costs" when Russia emerged with a nationalist/rightist government.
The left is shameless, duplicitous and disingenous in the extreme when it comes to Russia (and frankly anything else).
To be honest it was my collegiate experiences in the 1980s, comparing the handwaving garbage with what my own eyes saw in the
East Bloc, that made me a lifetime, permanent rightist. The left is bankrupt, full of liars and dissemblers and needs to be stopped
at any cost.
My guess is that Russia has enough nuclear weapons and the capability to launch them at every major city in the US. Vladimir
is no drunkard like Boris Yeltsin was. We should not provoke the Russian bear into lashing out at the US. The old Soviet Union
lost some 20 million of its citizens in WWII and did the heavy lifting in defeating the Nazis. Hands up if you want to send your
19 year old son to fight the Russians in Sevastopol. Does the average American even know where Sevastopol is? More than likely,
a war with Russia would result in the nuclear bombing of New York, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas and Houston for
starters.
I'd highly recommend the films "Ukraine on Fire" and "Revealing Ukraine" (available on Amazon Prime w/o extra rental $)
for a good basic primer on the Ukraine over the last 15 years, particularly of US interference and malfeasance in promoting the
coup in 2014. And if anyone "interfered" in the 2016 election it wasn't Russia, but the Ukraine, particularly its very pro-Hilary
President Poroshenko (illegitimate though he was and remains after the unconstitutional US-backed coup in against Yanukovich in
2014).
NATO should have been moth-balled c. 1992. Instead it is hell-bent on aggressive expansion and antagonizing Russia, for
no reason (other than to line the pockets of corrupt US and other officials, "business-men" i.e. oligarchs, etc.).
I'm halfway cheering for Russia in their conflict with Ukraine. That's Russia's sphere of influence, Ukraine has no business
in the EU or in NATO. Any sane American government would be courting Russia in the new Cold War that's obviously coming with The
Chinese Communist Party. Instead we pulled all of the former European countries in the USSR into our sphere of influence.
The whole conflict was completely avoidable and is 100% due to America's and Western Europe's dumb actions since the fall of the
USSR.
Exiting the news conference as she was addressed, Pelosi turned around, walked up to the
journalist -- James Rosen of Sinclair Broadcast Group -- and proceeded to wag her finger with
scorn.
"As a Catholic, I resent you using the word 'hate' in a sentence that addresses me,"
she said. "Don't mess with me when it comes to words like that."
To Republicans eager to paint Democrats as out-of-control partisans, the forceful rebuttal
was a sign of the speaker losing her grip.
"It's caused them to lose sight of why they got the majority," House Minority Whip Steve
Scalise (R-La.) said of impeachment and Pelosi's outburst. "I think things are starting to
unravel."
... ... ...
Indeed, Pelosi also has cast the constitutional clash in terms of defending
an ally against Russia, calling the concerns raised by the whistleblower complaint the "aha
moment" and repeating a phrase that she used in challenging Trump face-to-face at the White
House in October.
"All roads lead to Putin," she told reporters.
Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), a former CIA officer who was among the "national security
freshmen" who pushed Pelosi toward supporting an impeachment inquiry, praised her handling of
the process. From the beginning, she said, she asked Pelosi to ensure that the investigation
was done in a strategic, efficient and serious manner, and she said Pelosi has followed
through.
"... Karlan's emphatic doomsday warning produced stunned reaction online, with conservative journalist Jack Posobiec describing the moment as one in which the respected professor went "full neocon." ..."
"... For most level-headed experts, it would be difficult to imagine a scenario in which Americans would need to be 'fighting the Russians' on US soil, regardless of US policy in Ukraine -- but perhaps Karlan just took 'Red Dawn', a 1980s Soviet-invasion movie, a bit too seriously. ..."
"... "No wonder Russia is leary of the US -- this is what is being taught to our children," ..."
"... "Hey, the '80s called and wants its foreign policy back or something," ..."
"... the professor accused Trump of "violating his oath" to defend the Constitution and sacrificing the national interest "for his own private ends" in his communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, around which the impeachment hearings are centered. ..."
Stanford law professor Pamela Karlan raised eyebrows online for suggesting during
congressional impeachment hearings that the US must keep Ukraine strong "so they fight the
Russians there and we don't have to fight them here." Yes, you read that right. It seems in
Karlan's mind, all that's stopping "the Russians" from invading the US is the Ukrainian
army, which must be kept strong to stave off the ultimate disaster. The law professor made the
baffling comment during the House Judiciary Committee impeachment hearing on Wednesday.
Karlan's emphatic doomsday warning produced stunned reaction online, with conservative
journalist Jack Posobiec describing the moment as one in which the respected professor went "full neocon."
Professor Karlan just went full neocon and said we need to arm Ukraine to fight the
Russians there so we don't have to fight them here. Yes, really. pic.twitter.com/jeMPXgP7kf
"The students who are paying through the nose at Stanford are really not getting value
for money," added author and commentator George Szamuely, referring to Karlan's teaching
role at the prestigious university. "Anyone else would be laughed out of the pub," for making such a statement, Szamuely
continued.
The statement is so cretinous that one can safely say that only a Stanford law professor
could utter it. Anyone else would be laughed out of the pub.
For most level-headed experts, it would be difficult to imagine a scenario in which
Americans would need to be 'fighting the Russians' on US soil, regardless of US policy in
Ukraine -- but perhaps Karlan just took 'Red Dawn', a 1980s Soviet-invasion movie, a bit too
seriously.
Some on Twitter also wondered where Karlan had been when the
Obama administration was denying military aid to Ukraine -- particularly as she herself worked
at the Justice Department during his presidency.
"No wonder Russia is leary of the US -- this is what is being taught to our
children," another person said .
"Hey, the '80s called and wants its foreign policy back or something,"wrote
another.
During her testimony, the professor accused Trump of "violating his oath" to defend
the Constitution and sacrificing the national interest "for his own private ends" in his
communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, around which the impeachment
hearings are centered.
"... A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have kept the allegations alive. ..."
"... The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today, Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even an Obama aide termed it , will remain. ..."
"... Listen to the podcast here ..."
"... War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate ..."
"... The John Batchelor Show ..."
"... Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument. The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline! ..."
"... You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills. ..."
"... It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision. They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy. ..."
"... CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it. ..."
"... We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths. If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or intelligence, so we should stop paying them. ..."
"... Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise. ..."
"... Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is, as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep "in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards. ..."
"... Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes likes it or not, except as . ..."
"... Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to conclude that he's fully on board. ..."
"... There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it, not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe propaganda value. ..."
"... In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination ..."
"... Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie enemies. It makes it ' real '. The ' heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches, etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice. ..."
"... To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens. In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security 'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world. (Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.) ..."
"... or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow continue to believe his campaign rhetoric? ..."
"... The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid. ..."
"... "TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ". Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ? ..."
"... Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics, and that's through America's brutal empire abroad. ..."
"... Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference, except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things. ..."
President Trump campaigned and was elected on an anti-neocon platform: he promised to reduce direct US involvement in areas where,
he believed, America had no vital strategic interest, including in Ukraine. He also promised a new détente ("cooperation") with Moscow.
And yet, as we have learned from their recent congressional testimony, key members of his own National Security Council did not
share his views and indeed were opposed to them. Certainly, this was true of Fiona Hill and Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman. Both of them
seemed prepared for a highly risky confrontation with Russia over Ukraine, though whether retroactively because of Moscow's 2014
annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
Similarly, Trump was slow in withdrawing Marie Yovanovitch, a career foreign service officer appointed by President Obama as ambassador
to Kiev, who had made clear, despite her official position in Kiev, that she did not share the new American president's thinking
about Ukraine or Russia. In short, the president was surrounded in his own administration, even in the White House, by opponents
of his foreign policy and presumably not only in regard to Ukraine.
How did this unusual and dysfunctional situation come about? One possibility is that it was the doing and legacy of the neocon
John Bolton, briefly Trump's national security adviser. But this doesn't explain why the president would accept or long tolerate
such appointees.
A more plausible explanation is that Trump thought that by appointing such anti-Russian hard-liners he could lay to rest the
Russiagate allegations that had hung over him for three years and still did: that for some secret nefarious reason he was and remained
a "Kremlin puppet." Despite the largely exculpatory Mueller report, Trump's political enemies, mostly Democrats but not only, have
kept the allegations alive.
The larger question is who should make American foreign policy: an elected president or Washington's permanent foreign policy
establishment? (It is scarcely a "deep" or "secret" state, since its representatives appear on CNN and MSNBC almost daily.) Today,
Democrats seem to think that it should be the foreign policy establishment, not President Trump. But having heard the cold-war views
of much of that establishment, how will they feel when a Democrat occupies the White House? After all, eventually Trump will leave
power, but Washington's foreign-policy "blob," as even
an Obama aide termed it , will remain.
Listen to the podcast
here . Stephen F. Cohen Stephen F.
Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. ANationcontributing editor, his most recent book,War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate, is available
in paperback and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host ofThe John Batchelor Show, now in their sixth
year, are available at www.thenation.com .
because of Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea or for more general reasons was not entirely clear.
In an otherwise decent overview, this sticks out like a sore thumb. It would be helpful to stop using the word annexation.
While correct in a technical sense – that Crimea was added to the Russian Federation – the word comes with all kinds of connotations,
that imply illegality and or force. Given Crimea was given special status when gifted to Ukraine for administration by the USSR,
one could just as easily apply "annexation" of Crimea to Ukraine. After Ukraine voted to "leave" the USSR, Crimea voted to join
Ukraine. Obviously the "Ukrainian" vote did not include Crimea. Even after voting to join Ukraine, Crimea had special status within
Ukraine, and was semi autonomous. If you can vote to join, you can vote to leave. Either you have the right to self determination,
or you don't.
This is what is so infuriating, Stephen! These silent coups of the executive branch have been taking place for my entire life!
Both parties are guilty of refusing to appoint cabinet members that the elected presidents would have chosen for themselves, because
both parties are more interested in making the president of the opposing party look bad, make him ineffective, and incapable of
carrying out policies that he was elected to carry out. That is the very definition of treason!
Things are a disaster. The JCPOA is at the heart of the issue and Trump and his advisors stubborn refusal to capitulate on
this issue very well may cause Trump to lose the 2020 election. Trump's anti-Iranian fever is every bit as ludicrous as the
DNC's anti-Russian fever. There is absolutely nothing to support the anti-Iranian policy argument or the anti JCPOA argument.
The only thing that is missing from all of this is Iranian hookers, and that would certainly be an explosive headline!
The anti-Iranian fever has created so much havoc not only with Iran, but with every country on earth other than Israel, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE. Germany announced that it is seeking to unite with Russia, not only for Gazprom, but is now considering purchasing
defense systems from Russia, and Germany is dictating EU policy, by and large. Germany has said that Europe must be able to defend
itself independent of America and is requesting an EU military and Italy is on board with this idea, seeking to create jobs and
weapons for its economy and defense.
The EU is fed up with the economic sanctions placed on countries that the U.S. has black-listed, particularly Russia and Iran,
and China as well for Huwaei 5G.
Nobody in their right mind could ever claim this to be the free market capitalism that Larry Kudlow espouses!
You know why Rhodes called it the blob, right? Why he made it sound so formless and squishy? Ask yourself, how does a failed
novelist with zilch for foreign-affairs credentials get the big job of Obama's ventriloquist? That's a CIA billet. It so happens
that Rhodes' brother has a big job of his own with CBS News, the most servile of the Mockingbird media propaganda mills.
It's not a blob, it's a precisely-articulated hierarchy. And the top of it is CIA. So please for once somebody answer this
blindingly obvious question, Who is making US foreign policy? CIA, that's who. For the CIA show trial run by Iran/Contra nomenklatura
Bill Barr and his blackmailed flunky Durham, Trump's high crime and misdemeanor is conducting diplomacy without CIA supervision.
They come out and say so, pointing to the National Security Act's mousetrap bureaucracy.
CIA runs your country. They've got impunity, they do what they want. We've got 400,000 academics paid to overthink it.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them guilty
of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
It is a political game between to competing kleptocratic cults. The DNC and RNC are whores and will do what ever their donors
tell them to do. That is also treason. This country is just a total wasteland.
Everyone has pledged allegiance to fraud.
Too big to fail, like the Titanic and the Hindenberg.
We cannot trust that the people that destroyed the country will repair it. It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
If they were limited to just the CIA, America would be in far better shape than its in. The CIA is not capable of thinking or
intelligence, so we should stop paying them.
Drumpf has been a tool of the Wall Street/Las Vegas Zionist billionaires for many, many years. so his selection of warmongering
Zio neo-con advisors should be no surprise.
What kind of stupid question is this? You mean you don't know or asking us for confirmation? If you really don't know then why
are you writing an article about it? If you do know then why are you asking the UNZ readers?
Perhaps part of the reason that Trump often seems to be surrounded by people who don't support his policies or values is,
as Paul Craig Roberts suggested in 2016, that Trump would have real problems simply because he was an outsider. An outsider to
the Washington swamp, a swamp that Clinton had been swimming in for decades. In short he didn't know who to trust, who to keep
"in the tent" & who to shut out. Thus, we have had this huge churn in Secretaries & on so on downwards.
It is run by a Cult of Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths.
That's ok but it's a bit unfair to Hedonistic Satanic Psychopaths After all most of the country is Hedonistic as hell,
it sells commercials or wtf. Satanic is philosophical and way over the heads of these clowns, though if the be a Satan, then they
are in the plan for sure, and right on the mark. As for psychopaths, those are criminals who are insane, but they can have remorse
and be their own worst enemies, often they just go off and go psycho and bad things happen, but can be unplanned off the wall
stuff, not diabolic.
Sociopaths are the ones that do the worst because they lack any concern or "Empathy", like robots. So I read that the socio's
are some of the brightest people who often are very successful in business etc. and can hide the fact that they would soon as
kill as look at ya, but cool as ice, all they want is to get what the hell they want! They don't give a rats petoot who likes
likes it or not, except as .
So, once upon a time, a people got so hedonistic and they didn't watch the game and theier leaders were low quality
(especially religeous/morals ) and long story short Satan unleashed the Socio's , Things seem to be heading disastrously,
so will bit coin save the day? Green nudeal?
While massive attention is directed towards Russia and the Ukraine, the majority of the public are shown the slight of hand
and their attention is never brought near to the real perpetrators of subverting American and British foreign policy.
Doesn't matter if he's surrounded. A president CAN make foreign policy, and a president CAN fire people who disagree with his
policy. Trump hasn't fired any of the neocons, but he proved that he CAN fire defense executives. He fired the Sec of Navy
for disagreeing with some ridiculous personal thing that Trump wanted to do. Since Trump hasn't fired any neocons, we have to
conclude that he's fully on board.
The CIA has no authority what so ever as defined by the supreme law of the land, the constitution. That would make them
guilty of a coup which would be an act of treason, so if what you claim is true, why have they not been prosecuted.
--
first off the supreme law of the land maybe the Constitution and to oppose it may be Treason, but the Law that is supreme to the
Law of the land is Human rights law.. it is far superior to, and it is the TLD of all laws of the land of all of the Nation States
that mankind has allowed the greedy among its masses, to impose.
There are so many security holes in the constitution of the USA including that it was ratified by those who invented it,
not by a vote put to the people that would be made to suffer being governed by it. Basically the USA is useless as a defender
of human rights (one of which is the right to self determination). The so called bill of rights (1st 10 amendments) are contractual
promises, but like all clauses in contracts if there is no way to enforce them, then there is no use for the clause except maybe
propaganda value.
If you note the USA constitution has seven articles..
Article 1 is about 525 elected members of congress and their very limited powers to control
foreign activities. Each qualified to vote member of the governed (a citizen so to speak) is allowed to
vote for only 3 of the 525 persons. so basically there is no real national election anywhere .
Article II grants the electoral college the power to appoint two persons full control of the assets,
resources and manpower of America to conquer the entire world or to make peace in the entire world.
Either way: the governed are not allowed to vote for either; the EC vote determines the P or VP.
Article III allows the Article II person to appoint yes men to the judiciary
Where exist the power of the governed to deny USA governors the ability to the use the powers the constitution claims
the governors are to have, against the governed? <==No where I can find? Theoretically, the governed are protected from abuse
for as long as it takes to conduct due process?
One person, the Article II person, is basically the king when in comes to constitutional authority to establish, conduct,
prosecute or defend USA involvement in foreign affairs.
No where does the constitution of the USA deny its President the use of American resources or USA military power, to
make and use diplomat appointments, or to use the USA to use the wealth of America and the hegemonic powers of the USA to make
a private or public profit in a foreign land. <= d/n matter if the profit is personal to the President or if it assigned by appointment
(like the feudal powers granted by the feudal kings to the feudal lords) to corporate feudal lords or oligarch personal interest.
AFAICT, the president can USE the USA to conduct war, invade or otherwise infringe on, even destroy, the territory, or a
private or public interest, within a foreign sovereign more or less at will. So if the President wants to command a private
or secret Army like the CIA, he can as far as I can tell, obviously this president does, because he could with his pen alone shut
it down.
Seems to me the "NO" from Wilson's four points
no more secret diplomacy peace settlement must not lead the way to new wars
no retribution, unjust claims, and huge fines <basically indemnities paid by the losers to the winners.
no more war; includes controls on armaments and arming of nations.
no more Trade Barriers so the nations of the world would become more interdependent.
have been made the essence of nation state operations world wide.
IMO, The CIA exists at the pleasure of the President.
@Curmudgeon all of that,
plus the Kosovo precedent.
In a normally functioning world you simply can't simultaneously argue that in one case West can bomb a country to force
self-determination as in Kosovo, and also denounce exactly the same thing in Crimea. On to Catalonia and more self-determination
Trump, among his other occupations, used to engage with the professional wrestling circuit. In that well-staged entertainment
there is always a bad guy – or a ' heel ' – who is used to stir up the crowds, the Evil Sheik or Rocky's hapless movie
enemies. It makes it ' real '. The 'heel ' is sometimes allowed to win to better manage the audience. But
the narrative never changes. Our rational judgments should focus on what happens, and on outcomes – not on talk, slogans, speeches,
etc Based on that, Trump is a classical ' heel ' character. He might even be playing it consciously, or he has no choice.
To answer the question who runs ' foreign policy ', let's ignore the stadium speeches, and simply look at what happens.
In a world bereft of enough profitable consumer things to do, and enough justifiable careers for unemployable geo-political security
'experts' of all kinds, having enemies and maybe even a small war occasionally is not such an irrational thing to want. Plus there
are the deep ethnic hatreds and traumas going back generations that were naively imported into the heart of the Western world.
(Washington warned against that 200+ years ago.)
Trump should have kept Steve Bannon as his advisor and should have fired instead his son-in-law. Perhaps "they" are blackmailing
Trump with photos like here: https://www.pinterest.com/richarddesjarla/creepy/
That would explain why Trump is so ineffective at making a reality anything he campaigned for.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
An anti-neocon president appears to have been surrounded by neocons in his own administration.
The fact is Trump is not an anti-neocon (Deep State) president he only talks that way. The fact that he surrounded himself
with Deep State denizens gives lie to the thought that he is anti-Deep State no one can be that god damn stupid.
or maybe trump was a lying neocon, war-loving, immigration-loving neoliberal all along, and you and the trumptards somehow
continue to believe his campaign rhetoric?
Halfway around the world from Washington's halls of power, Ukraine sits along a civilizational and geopolitical fault line.
To Ukraine's west are the liberal democracies of Europe, governed by rule of law and democratic principles. To its east are
Russia and its client states in Eurasia, almost all of which are corrupt oligarchies. [ ] In this war on democratic movements
and democratic principles, Russia's biggest prize and chief adversary has always been the United States. Until now, however,
Russia has always had to contend with bipartisan resolve to counter
No mention of China, and this is the problem with the whole foreign policy establishment not just the neocons. Russia is more
of an annoyance than anything, but they are still operating assumptions on what is the
Geographical Pivot of History , so they want to talk about Russia. Like an Edwardian sea cadet we are supposed to care about
Russia getting (back) a water port in Crimea. Mahan's definition of sea power included a strong commercial fleet. After tearing
their own environment apart like a car in a wrecking yard and heating up the planet China has taken time out from deforestation
and colonising Tibet, to send huge container vessels full of cheap goods through the melting Arctic round the top of Russia all
the better to get to Europe and deindustrialise it.
Western elites have sold out to China, seen as the future, so we hear about Russia rather than the three million Uyghurs in
concentration camps complete with constantly smoking crematoria, and harvesting of organs for rich foreigners.
Who
poses a greater threat to the West: China or Russia?
By the time the West finds itself in open conflict with Beijing, we will have lost our relative advantage. Brendan Simms and
K.C. Lin [ ] The concept of China being a threat is harder to comprehend. In what way? Yes, its hacking and intellectual property
theft is a headache. But is it worse than what Russia is up to? And don't we need Chinese investment, so does it really matter
if China builds our 5G mobile networks? In London, ministers agonise over these issues -- not knowing whether to pity China
(we still send foreign aid there), beg for its money and contracts (with prime ministerial trade trips), or treat it as a potential
antagonist.
Aid ! They sent robots to the far side of the Moon
Beijing has been the beneficiary of liberal revulsion at the Trump presidency: if the Donald is against the Chinese,
who cannot be for them? As a result, Trump's efforts to address China's unfair trade practices have so far missed the mark
with the domestic and international audience. As Trump declares war on free trade, China -- one of the most protectionist economies
in the world -- is now celebrated at Davos as the avatar of free trade. Later this month, China's Vice-President is likely
to be in attendance at Davos -- and there is even talk of him meeting with Trump. Similarly, the messiness of American politics
has made China's one-party state an apparent poster boy of political stability and governability.
"TRUMP SUPPORTERS WERE DUPED – Trump supporters are going to find out soon enough that they were duped by
Donald Trump. Trump was given the script to run as the "Chaos Candidate" .He is just a pawn of the ruling elite .It is a tactic
known as 'CONTROLLED OPPOSITION' ".
Wasn't it FDR who said "Presidents are selected , they are not elected " ?
Trump selected the Neocons he is surrounded with. And he's given away all kinds of property that he has absolutely no legal
authority to give. He was seeking to please American Oligarchs the likes of Adelson. That's American politics. "Money is free
speech." Of course, there is another connection with foreign policy beyond the truly total corruption of American domestic politics,
and that's through America's brutal empire abroad.
The military/intelligence imperial establishment definitely see Israel as a kind of American colony in the Mideast, and they
make sure that it's well provided for. That's what the Neocon Wars have been about. Paving over large parts of Israel's noisy
neighborhood. And that includes matters like keeping Syria off-balance with occupation in its northeast. And constantly threatening
Iran.
Obama or Trump, on the main matters of importance abroad – NATO, Russia, Israel/Palestine, China – there has been no difference,
except Trump is more openly bellicose and given to saying really stupid things.
By the way, the last President who tried seriously to make foreign policy as the elected head of government left half of his
head splattered on thec streets of Dallas.
@Jon Baptist We have
all been brainwashed by the propaganda screened by the massmedia ,whether it be FOX , MSNBC , CBS ,etc.. SeptemberClues.info has
a good article entitled "The central role of the news media on 9/11 " :
"The 9/11 psyop relied foremostly on that weakspot of ours .We all fell for the images we saw on TV at the time we can only
wonder why so many never questioned the absurd TV coverage proposed by all the major networks The 9/11 TV imagery of the crucial
morning events was just a computer-animated, pre-fabricated movie."
@follyofwar Pat inhabits
a strange Hollywood type world, where the US is always the good guy. He believes that, although the US may make foreign policy
mistakes, its aims and ambitions are nevertheless noble and well intentioned.
In Pat's world it's still circa 1955, but even then, his take on US foreign policy would have been hopelessly unrealistic.
From the utopian "Yankeedom" to the conservative "Greater Appalachia" and liberal "Left Coast," looking at these
cultures sheds an interesting light on America's political and cultural divides.
"The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately including state roles and individual liberty,"
Woodard, a Maine native who won the
2012 George Polk Award
for investigative reporting, told Business Insider. "[But] in order to have any productive
conversation on these issues," he added, "you need to know where you come from."
Woodard also believes the nation is likely to become more polarized, even though America is becoming a more diverse
place every day. He says this is because people are "self-sorting."
"People choose to move to places where they identify with the values," Woodard says. "Red minorities go south and blue
minorities go north to be in the majority. This is why blue states are getting bluer and red states are getting redder and
the middle is getting smaller."
Here's how Woodard describes each nation:
Matthew Speiser contributed to a previous version of this article.
Yankeedom values education, and members are comfortable with government
regulation.
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<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/59b2be5c45e2381d008b5876?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
debra
millet/Shutterstock
>
Encompassing the entire Northeast north of New York City and spreading through Michigan, Wisconsin, and
Minnesota, Yankeedom values education, intellectual achievement, communal empowerment, and citizen
participation in government as a shield against tyranny. Yankees are comfortable with government regulation.
Woodard notes that Yankees have a "Utopian streak." The area was settled by radical Calvinists.
New Netherland in the New York area has a "materialistic" culture.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de800e9fd9db247a976a267?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Ryan
DeBerardinis/Shutterstock
>
A highly commercial culture, New Netherland is "materialistic, with a profound tolerance for ethnic and
religious diversity and an unflinching commitment to the freedom of inquiry and conscience," according to
Woodard. It is a natural ally with Yankeedom and encompasses New York City and northern New Jersey. The area
was settled by the Dutch.
The Midlands, largely located in the Midwest, opposes government regulation.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80a7ffd9db23e5a1dd0f7?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Matt Rourke / AP
>
Settled by English Quakers, The Midlands are a welcoming middle-class society that spawned the culture of
the "American Heartland." Political opinion is moderate, and government regulation is frowned upon. Woodard
calls the ethnically diverse Midlands "America's great swing region." Within the Midlands are parts of New
Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Iowa, Kansas, and Nebraska.
Tidewater started as a feudal society that embraced slavery.
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<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5d60177b00ef2b6aa56bf1e1?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Shutterstock
>
Tidewater was built by the young English gentry in the area around the Chesapeake Bay and North Carolina.
Starting as a feudal society that embraced slavery, the region places a high value on respect for authority and
tradition. Woodard notes that Tidewater is in decline, partly because "it has been eaten away by the expanding
federal halos around D.C. and Norfolk."
Greater Appalachia encompasses parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, and
Texas.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80db9fd9db252bf4b2083?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Michael Hickey/Getty
Images
>
Colonized by settlers from the war-ravaged borderlands of Northern Ireland, northern England, and the
Scottish lowlands, Greater Appalachia is stereotyped as the land of hillbillies and rednecks. Woodard says
Appalachia values personal sovereignty and individual liberty and is "intensely suspicious of lowland
aristocrats and Yankee social engineers alike." It sides with the Deep South to counter the influence of
federal government. Within Greater Appalachia are parts of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia, Arkansas,
Missouri, Oklahoma, Indiana, Illinois, and Texas.
Deep South adopts a rigid social structure and opposition to government
regulation.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80dfcfd9db2413c3a5eea?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Dave Martin/Getty
Images
>
The Deep South was established by English slave lords from Barbados and was styled as a West Indies-style
slave society, Woodard notes. It has a very rigid social structure and fights against government regulation
that threatens individual liberty. Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, Texas, Georgia, and South Carolina are all
part of the Deep South.
El Norte has a dominant Hispanic culture.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80748fd9db24dc40f4fe2?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
David McNew/Reuters
>
Composed of the borderlands of the Spanish-American empire, El Norte is "a place apart" from the rest of
America, according to Woodard. Hispanic culture dominates in the area, and the region values independence,
self-sufficiency, and hard work above all else. Parts of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California are in El
Norte.
The Left Coast, located in coastal California, is a lot like Yankeedom and
Greater Appalachia.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de8079efd9db239ec1a8f34?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
California has permanently moved up its presidential primary from June to March.
Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
>
Colonized by New Englanders and Appalachian Midwesterners, the Left Coast is a hybrid of "Yankee utopianism
and Appalachian self-expression and exploration," Woodard says, adding that it is the staunchest ally of
Yankeedom. Coastal California, Oregon, and Washington are in the Left Coast.
The Far West spans states in the central US including Montana, Wyoming, and
Utah.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de80e54fd9db2417a02be09?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Scott Olson/Getty
Images
>
The conservative west. Developed through large investment in industry, yet where inhabitants continue to
"resent" the Eastern interests that initially controlled that investment. The Far West spans several states,
including Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Nebraska, Kansas, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, North Dakota,
South Dakota, Washington, Oregon, and California.
New France inhabitants are comfortable with government involvement in the
economy.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de8086cfd9db24eb80e8128?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Max Becherer/AP
>
A pocket of liberalism nestled in the Deep South, its people are consensus driven, tolerant, and comfortable
with government involvement in the economy. Woodard says New France is among the most liberal places in North
America. New France is focused around New Orleans in Louisiana as well as the Canadian province of Quebec.
First Nation, most of whose people live in the northern part of the country, is
made up of Native Americans.
<
<img src="https://image.businessinsider.com/5de808bdfd9db23afd1df6e8?width=600&format=jpeg&auto=webp" />
Protesters demonstrate against the Energy Transfer Partners' Dakota Access oil pipeline near the Standing
Rock Sioux reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota, U.S. September 9, 2016.
REUTERS/Andrew Cullen
>
CDN/US OLYMPIAN CONSPIRACY AT GLANCE – by FancyBears
After detailed studying of the hacked WADA databases we figured out that dozens of
American athletes had tested positive. The Rio Olympic medalists regularly used illicit
strong drugs justified by certificates of approval for therapeutic use. In other words they
just got their licenses for doping. This is other evidence that WADA and IOC's Medical and
Scientific Department are corrupt and deceitful.
Level of Anti-Doping Rule Violations by American Athletes- The correspondence between Dr.
Fedoruk and Dana Leenheer, TUE&Drug Reference Specialist, reveals that USADA covers up
many athletes using prohibited substances. As evidence, see the table containing the data of
more than 200 American athletes who have USADA and other organizations' permission to take
banned drugs.
The leaked documents reveal that the U.S. and Canada have conspired against the
International Olympic Committee before Rio 2016. They tried to further their political
interests pretending to fight for clean sport.
Below is the correspondence between USADA officials discussing the ways to discredit the
IOC and to set up an agency that could have authority over the IOC . Following their
intentions, USADA and the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport launched the joint Project
Olympian .
The Fancy Bears' Hack Team obtained the International Olympic Committee officials'
correspondence . These emails and documents point to the fact that the Europeans and the
Anglo-Saxons are fighting for power and cash in the sports world. WADA headquartered in
Montreal, Canada supported by the United States Olympic Committee declared the crusade
against the IOC on the pretext of defending clean sport.
Furthermore, we encourage you to look through the correspondence between the IOC officials
and Canadian law professor Richard McLaren who initiated the Russian doping investigation.
His stance unveils his real goal to get the trump card for the Anglo-Saxons in the game vs.
IOC and not to fight against doping .
Canadian officials sound particularly cynical considering their efforts to cover up Shawn
Barber and his cocaine adventures ahead of the Olympic Games in Rio . They believe that
Canadian national interests come first and Canada must win prestigious competitions by all
means . Own the Podium was founded to reach this goal.
The project works closely with WADA and eliminates rivals when Canadian athletes can't
beat them
American Athletes Caught Doping2016-09-13
Greetings World. We are Fancy Bears' hack team.
As promised we begin our disclosures. Today we'd like to tell you about the U.S.
Olympic team and their dirty methods to win.
Just before the 2016 Summer Olympics the U.S. team was reported to be one of medal
favorites while being on top of the Rio medal forecast. Besides, the USA is commonly
known to be always ahead of the game.
As predicted, the USA dominated the 2016 Olympics medal count with 46 gold, 37 silver,
38 bronze for 121 total. The U.S. team played well but not fair.
After detailed studying of the hacked WADA databases we figured out that dozens of
American athletes had tested positive. The Rio Olympic medalists regularly used illicit
strong drugs justified by certificates of approval for therapeutic use. In other words
they just got their licenses for doping. This is other evidence that WADA and IOC's
Medical and Scientific Department are corrupt and deceitful.
Simone Biles
Artistic gymnast Simone Biles is one of those American doping athletes. She is a
four-time Olympic gold medalist and ten-time world gold medalist. In August 2016, she
tested positive after illicit methylphenidate, a psychostimulant, was detected in her
sample. Moreover, Biles had been taking amphetamine for a while, according to the leaked
data.
American basketball star Elena Delle Donne's drug test revealed that she had also used
amphetamine. In addition, since 2014 she has been taking hydrocortisone that is also
classified as doping .
Serena Williams, world's top tennis player, is taking oxycodone and hydromorphone
(opioids), prednisone, prednisolone, and methylprednisolone as well. Her sister Venus
Williams is used to take prednisone, prednisolone, triamcinolone and formoterol.
We keep on fighting for clean competition. We've got a few emails of the US sports
officials who are involved in covering up dopin g. Today we start publishing USADA
science director Dr. Matthew Fedoruk 's emails.
Level of Anti-Doping Rule Violations by American Athletes
The correspondence between Dr. Fedoruk and Dana Leenheer, TUE&Drug Reference
Specialist, reveals that USADA covers up many athletes using prohibited substances. As
evidence, see the table containing the data of more than 200 American athletes who have
USADA and other organizations' permission to take banned drugs.
According to Dr. Fedoruk's files, in 2015, five sports, i.e. cycling, track&field,
triathlon, swimming and ski/snow, were marked with the largest number of TUE certificates
issued to American athletes :
Only in 2015, 583 TUE certificates on various banned drugs were granted to them . Many
athletes are allowed to use more than one type of substances.
Will Waller , a member of the US Men's wheelchair basketball team, 2012 Paralympics
bronze medalist. He has used hydronolone and got injected with cortisone . These
substances contain glucocorticoids .
Some of Dr. Fedoruk's emails show USADA team's low level of qualification . Below is a
remark about the US anti-doping agency from the Dutch Paralympic team's chief medical
officer .
Dr. Fedoruk is aware of American and other athletes' genuine drug tests cover up as
well as of the use of banned substances under the guise of sports nutrition.
The email below reveals that American swimmer Pace Clark's sample has an elevated T/E
. But instead of disqualifying him USADA requests to review the athlete and balance out
any inconsistencies .
The next email is about some failed attempts to test Anton Kriukov, Ukrainian
weightlifter , at Rio Paralympic Games. For the record, he was not sanctioned .
U.S.
and Canada Sports Officials' Secret Plot Revealed2016-12-13
Greetings citizens of the world. We are Fancy Bears'.
We keep sharing anti-doping agencies' material with you. The leaked documents reveal
that the U.S. and Canada have conspired against the International Olympic Committee
before Rio 2016. They tried to further their political interests pretending to fight for
clean sport.
Below is the correspondence between USADA officials discussing the ways to discredit
the IOC and to set up an agency that could have authority over the IOC .
Following their intentions, USADA and the Canadian Center for Ethics in Sport launched
the joint Project Olympian . Legal assistance was provided by Davies Ward Phillips &
Vineberg LLP.
The company helped USADA and CCES to initiate a lawsuit against the IOC . USADA and
CCES addressed to Poland, Spain, South Korea, Japan, Norway, Austria and Finland seeking
for their support.
The national agencies refused, however, to be involved in political plot set up by the
U.S. and Canada . As a result, USADA and CCES had to pay all the court fees.
Project Olympian is still running despite the failure of the lawsuit against the IOC.
The United States and Canada have been frustrated by the IOC's strong and independent
stance. USADA and CCES want to play political games instead of standing for clean sport.
Their main goal is to put the IOC aside from taking decisions.
WADA
vs. IOC: Fight for Clean Sport or Fight for Power?2018-01-10
The Fancy Bears' Hack Team obtained the International Olympic Committee officials'
correspondence . These emails and documents point to the fact that the Europeans and the
Anglo-Saxons are fighting for power and cash in the sports world. WADA headquartered in
Montreal, Canada supported by the United States Olympic Committee declared the crusade
against the IOC on the pretext of defending clean sport. The national anti-doping
agencies of the USA, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and other countries
joined WADA and the USOC under the guidance of iNADO. However, the genuine intentions of
the coalition headed by the Anglo-Saxons are much less noble than a war against doping.
It is apparent that the Americans and the Canadians are eager to remove the Europeans
from the leadership in the Olympic movement and to achieve political dominance of the
English-speaking nations. Moreover, they are looking toward depriving Lausanne's old
corrupt officials of access to multimillion funds and bribes that form an integral part
of the sports world.
The USOC CEO Scott Blackmun's email sent to the IOC Director General Christophe De
Kepper proves this point. The American official on behalf of the organization calls for
WADA withdrawal from the IOC jurisdiction , so the Agency would be empowered to test and
punish guilty athletes. In other words, WADA is willing to become a super-predator in the
sports world and would have the sole authority to decide who is right or who is to blame
.
The IOC Athletes' Commission members who are also represented in the WADA Athlete
Committee stand for WADA independence from the IOC as well. Moreover, one of the IOC
signatories, Tony Estanguet, is a member of the WADA Executive Committee and WADA
Foundation Board.
Furthermore, we encourage you to look through the correspondence between the IOC
officials and Canadian law professor Richard McLaren who initiated the Russian doping
investigation. His stance unveils his real goal to get the trump card for the
Anglo-Saxons in the game vs. IOC and not to fight against doping .
At first, Professor McLaren seemed to be delighted to cooperate with the IOC
investigators, particularly with the Oswald and Schmid Commissions. Then, however,
McLaren began to avoid the collaboration since he published the second part of his report
referring to a business or urgent visit to a dentist. As a result, the IOC officials got
furious.
According to the IOC Director of Legal Affairs Howard Stupp, Richard McLaren had been
given a clear political order to expulse the Russian team from the Games and to discredit
the IOC and the whole Olympic movement letting WADA fish in troubled waters.
Special attention should be paid to the McLaren team. The member of the investigation
team, Richard Young, is a partner at the Bryan Cave company , Colorado Springs, CO. Mr.
Young is in charge of collaboration between Richard McLaren and the IOC Medical and
Scientific Director Richard Budgett.
Bryan Cave LLP is an international law firm that became famous for its close
cooperation with the FBI . In fact, one of the company's top employees Hal Goldsmith
received the FBI Director's Award.
McLaren report chief investigator Martin Dubbey is also associated with the FBI . Mr.
Dubbey serves as the Chief of intelligence for 5 Stones intelligence (5Si) in the UK and
Europe. The U.S. Department of Justice has awarded the company as a Prime Contractor for
the Asset Forfeiture Investigative Support Services Contract – a 7 year program
valued at $625 million providing Specialized Financial Investigative Services to the DEA,
FBI, OCDETF, ATF and U.S. Attorneys Offices. In addition, Martin Dubbey is a member of
the FBI-Law Enforcement Executive Development Association .
It is notable that the McLaren investigation team includes former employees of the
U.S. and British Special Forces. For example, David Tinsley , the Chief Executive Officer
for 5Si, is a retired U.S. DEA Supervisory Special Agent with a total of 32 years
combined Law Enforcement and Intelligence experience. Bryan Talay , the Chief Operating
Officer (North America) for 5Si, served as the U.S. Navy Special Operations officer. Greg
Kitsell is a British expert in Maritime/General Aviation Intelligence and Operations,
working within the Law Enforcement, Intelligence, Military and Security sectors.
The facts above expose the sport officials' tension over the fight for power and cash
. The Anglo-Saxons feel free to attract private intelligence companies and even the U.S.
special agencies . The struggle for clean sport looks like a special operation that
involves Richard McLaren as a smoke screen for special agents . This is far from the real
fair play spirit the Anglo-Saxons claim to protect.
The
FIL Files: Scandinavian Asthmatics, Missed Athletes and Berlinger Bottles2018-01-24
Fancy Bears' Hack Team has repeatedly reported anti-doping rules violations in summer
sports. Today, prior to the Olympic Games in Pyeongchang we decided to call your
attention to winter sports that have the same doping-related problems as track and field
or football. The obtained documents of the International Luge Federation (FIL) show the
violations of the principles of fair play: widespread TUE approvals, missed anti-doping
tests and the double standards approach towards guilty athletes .
The TUE granting process showed its effectiveness among the runners who eager to
obtain permission to take asthma medications prohibited in sports , in particular,
salbutamol which opens airways to and from the lungs. The same practice is widely spread
among skiers. Sometimes asthmatics represent the majority of a national team at winter
sports competitions. For example, according to the chief physician of the Norwegian ski
team Petter Olberg, 70% of the national team skiers suffer from
asthma . It raises doubts and looks like an institutional conspiracy by the Norwegian
Olympic Committee and national sports federations.
The Norwegians are using Salbutamol in large quantitie s and the scandal with the
skier Martin Johnsrud
Sundby is a perfect example . In 2016 he was penalized for taking a dose of
salbutamol close to 10 times higher than the one allowed . However, Sundby was suspended
just for two months despite such a serious anti-doping rules violation.
Sweden follows the Norwegian example . The Swedish Olympic Committee is also familiar
with the formula for successful training of future champions: ASTHMA + TUE = OLYMPIC
MEDALS. Thus, the junior athlete Rasmus Moberg, having the same "convenient" disease,
just needs to obtain a TUE and his coach has no doubts that he will get a prescription.
We will certainly see him standing at the winners' podium.
The irresponsible attitude of athletes towards anti-doping tests is another common
problem in sports. Every athlete chosen for the anti-doping test is notified beforehand
that he or she could be tested at any place, at any time. It means that these athletes
must inform the anti-doping organization about their whereabouts. It seems the Italian
athlete Ludwig Rieder didn't know these details.
An Austrian athlete Brigit Platzer didn't know the rules either. However, it seems
like an apology is enough for sports officials to end the anti-doping investigation .
Here we face the well-known double standards approach . While some athletes are being
sentenced to severe punishment, the others avoid penalty.
It's worth paying attention to repeated problems with doping sample bottles made by
the Swiss company Berlinger . Another accident occurred with Doping Control Officer from
the anti-doping laboratory based in Riga, Latvia. Media have recently reported on the
tendency of these
bottles used by WADA at the Rio 2016 Olympics to break when opened. All these facts
confirm the low quality of the bottles produced by Berlinger Special AG .
Canada
Uses Every Trick in the Book to Own the Podium2018-02-07
In February 2004, Canada's 13 winter National Sport Organizations, Canadian Olympic
Committee (COC), Canadian Paralympic Committee (CPC), Sport Canada, WinSport Canada and
VANOC started to work on a project that would become known as Own the Podium (OTP).
The decision was made amid concerns that Canada had failed to win a single gold medal
in the first two Games hosted in Canada , the 1976 Summer Olympics in Monreal and the
1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. COC pledged to make Canada the top medal winning nation
at the 2010 Games in Vancouver, and in 2005, the OTP program was launched . Now, it is a
"not-for-profit organization that prioritizes and determines investment strategies for
National Sport Organizations in an effort to deliver more Olympic and Paralympic medals
for Canada." Own the Podium's largest sponsor is the government with additional funding
provided by the Canadian Olympic Committee that in fact leads the project. Fancy Bears'
Hack Team obtained the OTP financial records. Take a look at them to see the amount of
taxpayers' money used to satisfy sports officials' ambitions.
The OTP program showed results in 2010 when Canadian athletes won 14 gold medals to
lead the medal table at the Vancouver Winter Games. But then something went wrong. Canada
failed to be in the top-three of the medal count at the Olympics in London 2012, Sochi
2014 and Rio 2016 .
Here comes a simple solution to the matter: if rivals can't be beaten they should be
eliminated . Canadians chose Russia as a target and led the fight against doping in sport
. The Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren headed an investigation commissioned by
Canada-based WADA to expose a system of doping in Russia. The real aims of the McLaren
reports have been revealed earlier . McLaren's mission was accomplished. He did an
impeccable job that resulted in a ban on Russia and the top Russian athletes competing in
Pyeongchang .
All the necessary arrangements have been put in place in order to let Canadians own
the podium at the 2018 Olympics. But COC officials believe that it's not enough. They
attempted to grab a bronze medal to get upgraded in Sochi medal table after the IOC
decision on medal reallocation. It shows the OTP project working and justifying its name
even four years after the Games .
Canadians use this scheme over and over again to push back their opponents in other
international competitions . For example, Tim Farstad, Executive Director of Luge Canada
, decided to take his part in fight against doping in Russia. He was annoyed by the fact
that members of the Russian luge team Albert Demchenko and Tatiana Ivanova had been
permitted to participate in the World Cup despite their Olympic ban . The Canadians are
so outraged that they are going to appeal to the disciplinary committee of the
International Luge Federation (FIL) seeking guidance from the Canadian Olympic
Committee.
Murray Wylie , President of Biathlon Canada, also expressed his discontent. Mr. Wylie
requested Russia to be stripped of the rights to host 2021 IBU World Championships .
Canadian officials sound particularly cynical considering their efforts to cover up
Shawn Barber and his cocaine adventures ahead of the Olympic Games in Rio . They believe
that Canadian national interests come first and Canada must win prestigious competitions
by all means . Own the Podium was founded to reach this goal. The project works closely
with WADA and eliminates rivals when Canadian athletes can't beat them.
We are Anonymous.
We are Legion.
We do not forgive.
We do not forget.
Expect us.
This has no small strategic significance: previously, for foreign sales, Russia was
dependent on customers in Europe who are all, to a greater or lesser extent, subject to
pressure from the war party.
Added to which transport was affected by Kiev's whims. Turkstream (scheduled to start next month) and
the two pipelines to Germany help with the second problem and this one with the first. Sooner
or later, Russia-China pipelines would have appeared but I think Ishchenko's
argument that the Western war on Russia speeded up the process is credible.
(Come to think of it, now that Putin's hand is imagined everywhere, maybe it's time to
consider that he's the American war party's real backer; after all, everything it's touched has
turned to dust: from the forever wars, to Iran's increased influence, to the Russia-China
alliance and now the furore in the USA over Ukraine – itself another disastrous
project.)
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and
strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question,
which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also
brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No
action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify
were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security
Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a
challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag
democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you
image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella?
Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional
Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity"
?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Gideon Rachman tries to find
similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:
Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of
Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.
The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying
continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style,
and the similarities are impressive.
There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to
another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing
that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds
with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a
"pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but
it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the
U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from
Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of
them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S.
from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most
destructive example of this continuity.
In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into
pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or
"rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's
policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead.
Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often
diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we
remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main
priorities.
The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other
issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama
negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he
wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in
2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the
benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and
undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility
to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:
The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a
diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.
Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy"
is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because
the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump
hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about
diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the
spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking
the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior,
his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats,
and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.
So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:
Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his
tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.
Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing
of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another
country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go
to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but
there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong
preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over
force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe
in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That
actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.
It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over
"withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that
they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one.
Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed
"isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been
criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies
because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to
criticize a president.
Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most
of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is
guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe,
Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think
there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world.
Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn
non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S.
involvement overseas are reducing it.
Rachman ends his column with this assertion:
In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global
commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.
The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global
commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone
could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when
Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three
years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump
was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than
there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran
policy.
We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really
have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually
been adding to them.
After presiding over a far-right coup in Bolivia, the US dubbed Nicaragua a "national
security threat" and announced new sanctions, while Trump designated drug cartels in Mexico as
"terrorists" and refused to rule out military intervention.
One successful coup against a democratically elected socialist president is not enough, it
seems.
Washington dubbed Nicaragua a threat to US national security, and announced that it will be
expanding its suffocating sanctions on the tiny Central American nation.
Trump is also turning up the heat on Mexico, baselessly linking the country to terrorism and
even hinting at potential military intervention. The moves come as the country's left-leaning
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador warns of right-wing attempts at a coup.
As Washington's rightist allies in Colombia, Brazil, Chile, and Ecuador are desperately
beating back massive grassroots uprisings against neoliberal austerity policies and yawning
inequality gaps, the United States is ramping up its aggression against the region's few
remaining progressive governments.
These moves have led left-wing forces in Latin America to warn of a 21st-century revival of
Operation Condor, the Cold War era campaign of violent subterfuge and US support for right-wing
dictatorships across the region.
Trump admin declares Nicaragua a 'national security
threat'
A day after the US-backed far-right coup in Bolivia, the White House released a statement
applauding the military putsch and making it clear that two countries were next on Washington's
target list: "These events send a strong signal to the illegitimate regimes in
Venezuela and Nicaragua ," Trump declared.
On November 25, the Trump White House then quietly issued a statement characterizing
Nicaragua as an "unusual and
extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States."
This prolonged for an additional year an executive order Trump had signed in 2018 declaring
a state of "national emergency" on the Central American country.
Trump's 2018 declaration came after a failed violent right-wing
coup attempt in Nicaragua . The US government has funded and supported many of
the opposition groups that sought to topple elected Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega, and
cheered them on as they sought to overthrow him.
The 2018 national security threat designation was quickly followed by economic warfare. In
December the US Congress approved
the NICA Act without any opposition. This legislation gave Trump the authority to impose
sanctions on Nicaragua, and prevents international financial institutions from doing business
with Managua.
Trump's new 2019 statement spewed outlandish propaganda against Nicaragua, referring to its
democratically elected government -- which for decades has been targeted for overthrow by
Washington -- as a supposedly violent and corrupt "regime."
This executive order is similar to one made by President Barack Obama in 2015, which
designated Venezuela as a threat to US national security.
Both orders were used to justify the unilateral imposition of suffocating economic
sanctions. And Trump's renewal of the order paves the way for an escalated economic attack on
Nicaragua.
The extension received negligible coverage in mainstream English-language corporate media,
but right-wing Spanish-language outlets in Latin America heavily amplified it.
And opposition activists are gleefully cheering on the intensification of Washington's
hybrid warfare against Managua.
More aggressive US sanctions against Nicaragua
Voice of America (VOA), the US government's main foreign broadcasting service, noted that
the extension of the executive order will be followed with more economic attacks.
Washington's ambassador to the Organization
of American States (OAS), Carlos Trujillo, told VOA, "The pressure against Nicaragua is
going to continue."
The OAS representative added that Trump will be announcing new sanctions against the
Nicaraguan government in the coming weeks.
VOA stated clearly that "Nicaragua, along with Cuba and Venezuela, is one of the Latin
American countries whose government Trump has made a priority to put diplomatic and economic
pressure on to bring about regime change."
This is not just rhetoric. The US Department of the Treasury updated the Nicaragua-related
sanctions section of its website as recently as November 8.
And in September, the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control announced a " more
comprehensive set of regulations ," strengthening the existing sanctions on Nicaragua.
Voice of America's report quoted several right-wing Nicaraguans who openly called for more
US pressure against their country.
Bianca Jagger, a celebrity opposition activist formerly married to Rolling Stones frontman
Mick Jagger, called on the US to impose sanctions on Nicaragua's military in particular.
"The Nicaraguan military has not been touched because they [US officials] are hoping that
the military will like act the military in Bolivia," Jagger said, referring to the military
officials who violently overthrew Bolivia's democratically elected president.
Many of these military leaders had been
trained at the US government's School of the Americas , a notorious base of subversion
dating back to Operation Condor. Latin American media has been filled in recent days with
reports that Bolivian soldiers were paid $50,000 and generals were paid up to $1 million to
carry out the putsch.
VOA added that "in the case of the Central American government [of Nicaragua], the effect
that sanctions can have can be greater because it is a more economically vulnerable
country."
VOA quoted Roberto Courtney, a prominent exiled right-wing activist and executive director
of the opposition group Ethics and Transparency, which monitors elections in Nicaragua and is
supported by the US
government's
regime-change arm , the
National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Courtney, who claims to be a human rights activist, salivated over the prospects of US
economic war on his country, telling VOA, "There is a bit of a difference [between Nicaragua
and Bolivia] the economic vulnerability makes it more likely that the sanctions will have an
effect."
Courtney, who was described by VOA as an "expert on the electoral process," added, "If there
is a stick, there must also be a carrot." He said the OAS could help apply diplomatic and
political pressure against Nicaragua's government.
These unilateral American sanctions are illegal under international law, and considered an
act of war. Iran's foreign minister,
Javad Zarif , has characterized US economic warfare "financial terrorism," explaining that
it disproportionately targets civilians in order to turn them against their government.
Top right-wing Nicaraguan opposition groups applauded Trump for extending the executive
order and for pledging new sanctions against their country.
The Nicaraguan Civic Alliance for Justice and Democracy, an opposition front group that
brings together numerous opposition groups , several of which are
also
funded by the US government's NED , welcomed the order.
Trump dubs drug cartels in
Mexico "terrorists," refuses to rule out drone strikes
While the US targeting of Nicaragua and Venezuela's governments is nothing new, Donald Trump
is setting his sights on a longtime US ally in Mexico.
In 2018, Mexican voters made history when they elected Andrés Manuel López
Obrador as president in a landslide. López Obrador, who is often referred to by his
initials AMLO, is Mexico's first left-wing president in more than five decades. He ran on a
progressive campaign pledging to boost social spending, cut poverty, combat corruption, and
even decriminalize drugs.
AMLO is wildly popular in Mexico. In February, he had a record-breaking
86 percent approval rating . And he has earned this widespread support by pledging to
combat neoliberal capitalist orthodoxy.
"The neoliberal economic model has
been a disaster, a calamity for the public life of the country," AMLO has declared. "The child
of neoliberalism is corruption."
When he unveiled his multibillion-dollar National Development Plan, López Obrador
announced the end to "the long night of neoliberalism."
AMLO's left-wing policies have caused shockwaves in Washington, which has long relied on
neoliberal Mexican leaders ensuring a steady cheap exploitable labor base and maintaining a
reliable market for US goods and open borders for US capital and corporations.
On November 27 -- a day after declaring Nicaragua a "national security threat" -- Trump
announced that the US government will be designating Mexican drug cartels as "
terrorist organizations ."
Such a designation could pave the way for direct US military intervention in Mexico.
Trump revealed this new policy in an interview with right-wing Fox News host Bill O'Reilly.
"Are you going to designate those cartels in Mexico as terror groups and start hitting them
with drones and things like that?" O'Reilly asked.
The US president refused to rule out drone strikes or other military action against drug
cartels in Mexico.
Trump's announcement seemed to surprise the Mexican government, which immediately called for
a meeting with the US State Department.
The designation was particularly ironic considering some top drug cartel leaders in Mexico
have long-standing ties to the US government. The leaders of the notoriously brutal cartel the
Zetas, for instance, were originally trained in
counter-insurgency tactics by the US military.
Throughout the Cold War, the US government armed, trained, and funded right-wing
death squads throughout Latin America, many of which were involved in drug trafficking. The
CIA also used drug money to fund far-right counter-insurgency paramilitary groups in Central
America.
These tactics were also employed in the Middle East and South Asia. The United States armed,
trained, and funded far-right Islamist
extremists in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to fight the Soviet Union. These same
US-backed Salafi-jihadists then founded al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
This strategy was later repeated in the US wars on Libya and Syria. ISIS commander
Omar al-Shishani
, to take one example, had been trained by the US military and enjoyed direct support from
Washington when he was fighting against Russia.
The Barack Obama administration also oversaw a campaign called Project Gunrunne r
and Operation Fast and Furious, in which the US government helped send thousands of guns to
cartels in Mexico.
Mexican journalist Alina Duarte explained that, with the Trump administration's designation
of cartels as terrorists, "They are creating the idea that Mexico represents a threat to their
national security ."
"Should we start talking about the possibility of a coup against Lopez Obrador in
Mexico?" Duarte asked.
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She noted that the US corporate media has embarked on an increasingly ferocious campaign to
demonize
AMLO , portraying the democratically elected president as a power-hungry aspiring dictator
who is supposedly wrecking Mexico's economy.
Duarte discussed the issue of US interference in Mexican politics in an interview with The
Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton, on their podcast Moderate
Rebels:
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7OJyCHjxCEs
Now, a whisper campaign over fears that the right-wing opposition may try to overthrow
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador is spreading across Mexico.
AMLO himself has publicly addressed the rumors, making it clear that he will not tolerate
any discussion of coups.
"How wrong the conservatives and their hawks are," López Obrador tweeted on November
2. Referencing the 1913 assassination of progressive President Francisco Madero, who had been a
leader of the Mexican Revolution, AMLO wrote, "Now is different."
"Another coup d'état will now be allowed," he declared.
In recent months, as fears of a coup intensify, López Obrador has swung even further
to the left, directly challenging the US government and asserting an independent foreign policy
that contrasts starkly to the subservience of his predecessors.
AMLO's government has rejected US efforts to delegitimize Venezuela's leftist government,
throwing a wrench in Washington's efforts to impose right-wing activist
Juan Guaidó as coup leader.
AMLO has welcomed Ecuador's ousted socialist leader Rafael Correa and hosted Argentina's
left-leaning Alberto Fernández for his first foreign trip after winning the
presidency.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/D4T0zbASfbA
In October, López Obrador even welcomed Cuban President Díaz-Canel to Mexico
for a historic visit.
Trump's Operation Condor 2.0
For Washington, an independent and left-wing Mexico is intolerable.
In a speech for right-wing, MAGA hat-wearing
Venezuelans in Miami , Florida in February, Trump ranted against socialism for nearly an
hour, threatened the remaining leftist countries in Latin America with regime change.
"The days of socialism and communism are numbered not only in Venezuela, but in Nicaragua
and in Cuba as well," he declared, adding that socialism would never be allowed to take root in
heart of capitalism in the United States.
While Trump has claimed he seeks to withdraw from wars in the Middle East (when he is not
occupying its oil fields
), he has ramped up aggressive US intervention in Latin America.
During the height of the Cold War, Operation Condor thousands of dissidents were murdered,
and hundreds of thousands more were disappeared, tortured, or imprisoned with the assistance of
the US intelligence apparatus.
Today, as Latin America is increasingly viewed through the lens of a new Cold War, Operation
Condor is being reignited with new mechanisms of sabotage and subversion in play. The mayhem
has only begun.
The poll graph without three day averaging is a great visual illustration of the margin of
error concept. It's even clear in the averaged version. I guarantee people are NOT changing
their minds that fast, and I'm sure all the issues Lambert highlighted are contributing to
the inaccuracies.
That said, a few trends are clear. Biden is trending steadily (but very slowly) downward.
Sanders and Buttigieg are trending up, Sanders slowly and Buttigieg somewhat faster, while
Warren is settling back to her long term average after a bump in October. Harris' decision to
withdraw looks like a good one. Undecided numbers are all over the place, and tend to spike
up when other lines spike down, so I'm guessing that's down to differing polling
methodologies and how hard people are pushed to make a call.
Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone? Or is the polled asked to
name a candidate? I can't get my head around how to manage a list of this many candidates by
voice without 'Name Recognition' being the first choice.
> Are these pollsters reading all twenty names over the telephone?
That's a very good question. Is the list of names so long -- I don't think we've ever had
one so long -- that it enables pollsters to game the polls in new ways? Could be such a
simple and obvious mode of rigging that we did not see it.
Morning Consult (B/C)
Nov 25 – Dec 1
Mon – Sun
15,773 Likely
National
16 candidate names, plus "Someone else" (not present in data source, derived in app)
Details here: https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/
The differences are Joe Sestak and Steve Bullock in HarrisX but not MC, going to guess
that MC decided not to list them because they dropped, and if they asked the names during the
survey their report them in the conveniently names "Someone else" category.
Regarding ChrisPacific's point about Undecideds, yes, this is affected by methodology and
whose polls came out on a particular day.
And more generally, we should expect to see noise in this data. These are minuscule
samples compared to the actual voting universe of over 65 million. The "Margin of Error" /
"Confidence Interval" claims are based on the assumption that all polls are distributed as a
uniform bell curve. Arguably useful for getting the noise out of stats for physical
observations of mechanical models, but absurd for human polling. Pollsters (who work mostly
in marketing) use MoE/CI to convince clients spend money on small polls and then spin out
reassuring MoE or CI (which scale to each other, bigger MoE = narrower CI). (Tangentially, on
political campaigns, the tactical advantages to be found in population data come from looking
into what's happening in the noise, not from smoothing it out and then assessing the
distorted surface).
And as in most viscous media, quick changes tend to snap back to origin, slow ones push
though. Consider also that a) these candidates are introducing themselves, impressions
develop over time, and engagement is still low. Also, the context of US society may be
gradually changing, but it would take a sudden shock (like 9/11 at the time) to change the
background context and be reflected in a suddenly shift in Dem Primary polls.
I participated in the last Des Moines Register/CNN Iowa poll. The pollster was required to
read all of the names, even when I could name one immediately.
The call came on my cell phone from a restricted number. I asked for what company or
candidate the poll was being conducted; the interviewer said that she was not given that
information, but at the very end I was asked whether I would be willing to talk to a reporter
from CNN or the DMR (I declined). She did tell me the research firm for which she worked,
which I later saw was the name of the firm that had conducted the poll. When I saw the
original release, I wondered whether I was correct that this was the poll, since I remembered
a question about my preference for a health care system that wasn't in the original release.
That result was released at a later date.
The M4A option for that question was simply M4A, without additional information or
qualifiers. I, as is usual for me, couldn't simply answer a multiple choice question, but
explained that I supported improved M4A, and that current Medicare is still expensive. The
interviewer told me that she herself has trouble affording Medicare, and that she
particularly has trouble paying for her medication. (We got a little chatty.)
The research firm was also contacting Republicans. She said that I had been the first
Democrat that she had reached that day, and that Republicans got different questions. She did
not know whom she was calling and, at the end, asked my first name so that her company could
verify that she had reached the right individual.
I'll check back here in case there are any other questions about the poll that I might be
able to answer. If anyone is interested in the questions themselves, those are already
available online.
Why did I agree to participate? To have my support for Bernie counted, of course!
"... A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military, flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same fantasy world as voters. ..."
"... The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them. ..."
aul MacDonald and Joseph Parent
explain in detail that Trump hasn't reduced U.S. military commitments overseas:
But after nearly three years in office, Trump's promised retrenchment has yet to
materialize. The president hasn't meaningfully altered the U.S. global military footprint he
inherited from President Barack Obama. Nor has he shifted the costly burden of defending U.S.
allies. To the contrary, he loaded even greater military responsibilities on the United
States while either ramping up or maintaining U.S. involvement in the conflicts in
Afghanistan, Syria, and elsewhere. On practically every other issue, Trump departed radically
from the path of his predecessor. But when it came to troop deployments and other overseas
defense commitments, he largely preserved the chessboard he inherited -- promises to the
contrary be damned.
MacDonald and Parent's article complements my earlier
post about U.S. "global commitments" very nicely. When we look at the specifics of Trump's
record, we see that he isn't ending U.S. military involvement anywhere. He isn't bringing
anyone home. On the contrary, he has been sending even more American troops to the Middle East
just this year alone. While he is being excoriated for withdrawals that never happen, he is
maintaining or steadily increasing the U.S. military presence in foreign countries. Many Trump
detractors and supporters are so invested in the narrative that Trump is presiding over
"withdrawal" that they are ignoring what the president has actually done. Trump's approach to
U.S. military involvement might be described as "loudly declaring withdrawal while maintaining
or increasing troop levels." Almost everyone pays attention only to his rhetoric about leaving
this or that country and treats it as if it is really happening. Meanwhile, the number of
military personnel deployed overseas never goes down.
The authors offer a possible explanation for why Trump has been able to get away with
this:
A more compelling explanation for the persistence of a large global U.S. military
footprint, and the concomitant creep of oversees commitments, is to be found in domestic
politics. Trump's rhetoric can diverge sharply from reality without consequence because few
in his party have an incentive to hold him accountable. In this hyper-polarized political
moment, most voters will stick with their party regardless of how many campaign pledges are
broken or foreign policy initiatives end in failure. With an all-volunteer military,
flattening taxes, and deficit financing, the vast majority of Americans are insulated from
the costs of American foreign policy. So long as most Americans want to look tough and
influential without paying for it, politicians won't be punished for living in the same
fantasy world as voters.
Trump is further insulated from scrutiny and criticism because he is frequently described as
presiding over a "retreat" from the world. Most news reports and commentary pieces reinforce
this false impression that Trump seeks to get the U.S. out of foreign entanglements. There are
relatively few people pointing out the truth that MacDonald and Parent spell out in their
article. The main reason why America's military commitments remain unchanged under Trump
may simply be that the president doesn't really want to reduce them.
"... That person then will land on a special list of "agents" and will be obliged to register as a company so that his or her funding is transparent to the state. A Russian journalist working for Voice of America also becomes a foreign agent under the law. ..."
"... Butina was charged under a different though similar statute , which also requires foreign agents to register with the U.S. government. Even U.S. officials sometimes confuse the regulations, and it's not easy for a layman to understand what actions make one a foreign agent under them. ..."
"... Butina, for example, was sentenced to 18 months for trying to establish contacts with Republican operatives and National Rifle Association members ..."
"... Putin was annoyed by the Butina case. "They grabbed the girl, put her behind bars, and they had nothing to show for it," he commented after her sentencing. ..."
"... Now comes the retaliation -- and as usual under Putin, mainly against Russians he sees as a Western fifth column ..."
The new law makes it possible to
apply the foreign agent label to individuals, specifically to those who spread content from
media or other organizations determined to be foreign agents and who receive any kind of
funding from a foreign or foreign-financed source...
That person then will land on a special list of "agents" and will be obliged to
register as a company so that his or her funding is transparent to the state. A Russian
journalist working for Voice of America also becomes a foreign agent under the law.
... ... ...
Failure to register, open a company or mark one's stories or posts as coming from a foreign
agent will be punishable by a yet-undetermined fine.
Andrei Klimov, one of the drafters of the law, recently told
the government-owned daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta:
Unlike our foreign counterparts, we envisage no criminal liability. We don't grab people,
we don't toss them into torture chambers, like some other countries that do it for five or
fifteen years. We are capable of getting results with administrative measures.
It's clear from his comment that the Russian law is a response to the sudden
prominence of foreign-agent registration, a previously obscure requirement best known to
professional lobbyists, in the Donald Trump-Russia investigations of special counsel Robert
Mueller. He had political operatives Paul Manafort and Rick Gates indicted for violating the
Foreign Agent Registration Act of 1938, previously a laxly enforced law.
Butina was charged under a different
though similar statute , which also requires foreign
agents to register with the U.S. government. Even U.S. officials sometimes confuse the regulations, and it's not
easy for a layman to understand what actions make one a foreign agent under them.
Butina, for example, was sentenced to 18 months for trying to establish contacts with
Republican operatives and National Rifle Association members on behalf of a Russian
Central Bank official who may have wanted to set up a back channel between the Kremlin and the
Republican elite in the U.S.
Putin was annoyed by the Butina case. "They grabbed the girl, put her behind bars, and
they had nothing to show for it," he commented after her sentencing.
Now comes the retaliation -- and as usual under Putin, mainly against Russians he sees
as a Western fifth column rather than against the U.S. as such. Also as usual under Putin,
the response is asymmetrical.
Pelosi interference in elections might cost democrats a victory. She enraged Trump base and
strengthened Trump, who before was floundering. Now election changed into "us vs them" question,
which is very unfavorable to neoliberal Dems. as neolibelism as ideology is dead. She also
brought back Trump some independents who othersie would stay home or vote for Dem candidate. No
action of House of Representatives can changes this. Bringing Vindman and Fiona Hill to testify
were huge blunders as they enhance the narrative that the Deep State, unaccountable Security
Establishment, controls the government, to which Trump represents very weak, but still a
challenge. As such they strengthened Trump
Essentially Dems had driven themselves into a trap. Moreover actions of the Senate can drag
democrats in dirt till the elections, diminishing their chances further and firther. Can you
image the effect if Schiff would be called testify under oath about his contacts with Ciaramella?
Or Biden questioning about his dirty dealing with both Yanukovich administration and Provisional
Government after the 2014 coup d'état (aka EuroMaydan, aka "the Revolution of dignity"
?
Notable quotes:
"... It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over "withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one. Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed "isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to criticize a president. ..."
"... Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe, Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world. Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S. involvement overseas are reducing it. ..."
"... We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually been adding to them. ..."
Gideon Rachman tries to find
similarities between the foreign policies of Trump and Obama:
Both men would detest the thought. But, in crucial respects, the foreign policies of
Donald Trump and Barack Obama are looking strikingly similar.
The wildly different styles of the two presidents have disguised the underlying
continuities between their approaches to the world. But look at substance, rather than style,
and the similarities are impressive.
There is usually considerable continuity in U.S. foreign policy from one president to
another, but Rachman is making a stronger and somewhat different claim than that. He is arguing
that their foreign policy agendas are very much alike in ways that put both presidents at odds
with the foreign policy establishment, and he cites "disengagement from the Middle East" and a
"pivot to Asia" as two examples of these similarities. This seems superficially plausible, but
it is misleading. Despite talking a lot about disengagement, Obama and Trump chose to keep the
U.S. involved in several conflicts, and Trump actually escalated the wars he inherited from
Obama. To the extent that there is continuity between Obama and Trump, it has been that both of
them have acceded to the conventional wisdom of "the Blob" and refused to disentangle the U.S.
from Middle Eastern conflicts. Ongoing support for the war on Yemen is the ugliest and most
destructive example of this continuity.
In reality, neither Obama nor Trump "focused" on Asia, and Trump's foray into
pseudo-engagement with North Korea has little in common with Obama's would-be "pivot" or
"rebalance." U.S. participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership was a major part of Obama's
policy in Asia. Trump pulled out of that agreement and waged destructive trade wars instead.
Once we get past generalizations and look at details, the two presidents are often
diametrically opposed to one another in practice. That is what one would expect when we
remember that Trump has made dismantling Obama's foreign policy achievements one of his main
priorities.
The significant differences between the two become much more apparent when we look at other
issues. On arms control and nonproliferation, the two could not be more different. Obama
negotiated a new arms reduction treaty with New START at the start of his presidency, and he
wrapped up a major nonproliferation agreement with Iran and the other members of the P5+1 in
2015. Trump reneged on the latter and seems determined to kill the former. Obama touted the
benefits of genuine diplomatic engagement, while Trump has made a point of reversing and
undoing most of the results of Obama's engagement with Cuba and Iran. Trump's overall hostility
to genuine diplomacy makes another one of Rachman claims quite baffling:
The result is that, after his warlike "fire and fury" phase, Mr Trump is now pursuing a
diplomacy-first strategy that is strongly reminiscent of Mr Obama.
Calling Trump's clumsy pattern of making threats and ultimatums a "diplomacy-first strategy"
is a mistake. This is akin to saying that he is adhering to foreign policy restraint because
the U.S. hasn't invaded any new countries on Trump's watch. It takes something true (Trump
hasn't started a new war yet) and misrepresents it as proof that the president is serious about
diplomacy and that he wants to reduce U.S. military engagement overseas. Trump enjoys the
spectacle of meeting with foreign leaders, but he isn't interested in doing the work or taking
the risks that successful diplomacy requires. He has shown repeatedly through his own behavior,
his policy preferences, and his proposed budgets that he has no use for diplomacy or diplomats,
and instead he expects to be able to bully or flatter adversaries into submission.
So Rachman is simply wrong he reaches this conclusion:
Mr Trump's reluctance to attack Iran was significant. It underlines the fact that his
tough-guy rhetoric disguises a strong preference for diplomacy over force.
Let's recall that the near-miss of starting a war with Iran came as a result of the downing
of an unmanned drone. The fact that the U.S. was seriously considering an attack on another
country over the loss of a drone is a worrisome sign that this administration is prepared to go
to war at the drop of a hat. Calling off such an insane attack was the right thing to do, but
there should never have been an attack to call off. That episode does not show a "strong
preference for diplomacy over force." If Trump had a strong preference for diplomacy over
force, his policy would not be one of relentless hostility towards Iran. Trump does not believe
in diplomatic compromise, but expects the other side to capitulate under pressure. That
actually makes conflict more likely and reduces the chances of meaningful negotiations.
It is true that both Obama and Trump have been falsely accused of presiding over
"withdrawal" and "retreat." In Obama's case, Republican hawks made this false claim so that
they could attack a fantasy version of Obama's record instead of arguing against the real one.
Members of the foreign policy establishment have been warning about Trump's supposed
"isolationism" for four years and it still hasn't shown up. Both presidents have been
criticized in such similar ways despite conducting significantly different foreign policies
because these are the automatic, knee-jerk criticisms that pundits and analysts use to
criticize a president.
Because there is a strong bias in favor of "action" and "leadership," the only way most
of these people know how to attack a president is to say that he is "failing" to "lead" and is
guilty of "inaction." It doesn't matter if it makes sense or matches the facts. It is the safe,
Blobby way to complain about a president's foreign policy without suggesting that you think
there is something wrong with the underlying assumptions about the U.S. role in the world.
Instead of challenging the presidents on their real records, it is easier to condemn
non-existent "isolationism" and pretend that presidents that maintain or increase U.S.
involvement overseas are reducing it.
Rachman ends his column with this assertion:
In their very different ways, both Mr Obama and Mr Trump have reduced America's global
commitments -- and adjusted the US to a more modest international role.
The problem here is that there has been no meaningful reduction in America's "global
commitments." Which commitments have been reduced or eliminated? It would be helpful if someone
could be specific about this. The U.S. has more security dependents today than it did when
Trump took office. NATO has been expanded to include two new countries in just the last three
years. U.S. troops are engaged in hostilities in just as many countries as they were when Trump
was elected. There are more troops deployed to the Middle East at the end of this year than
there were at the beginning, and that is a direct consequence of Trump's bankrupt Iran
policy.
We should debate whether U.S. commitments overseas need to be reduced, but we really
have to stop pretending that the U.S. has been reducing those commitments when it has actually
been adding to them.
...Simply put, Trump is short-term and transactional while Putin is long-term and
strategic.
The authors trace Putin's life from growing up in the deprivation of postwar Leningrad to
his rise to power in Moscow via his work as a KGB operative in East Germany. Putin comes into
his own working for Anatoly Sobchak, a reform minded mayor of now Saint Petersburg in the
early 1990s. From there he goes to Moscow where he has a ringside seat into the
disintegration of the Yeltsin government and the economic failure of post-Soviet Russia. In
succeeding Yeltsin Putin's mandate is to restore order and to restore the economy.
Putin sees himself as the CEO of Russia and as an heir to the early 20th Century Russian
reformer Prime Minister Pyotr Stolypin. What they have in common is that they both viewed
themselves as modernizers within the context of authoritarian capitalism. Although Putin may
view himself as a free marketer...
Above all else Putin is a statist. Everything has to be done in service of the state. He
is critical of the Bolsheviks in that they betrayed the Russian state by fomenting revolution
while its soldiers were dying in World War I. As an heir to the Tsars Putin sees Russia as a
bulwark against western liberalism and he has allied himself with the Russian Orthodox Church
against the perceived licentiousness of the West.
In thinking strategically Putin first had to put Russia's fiscal house in order. In doing
that he was aided by one of his Leningrad buddies, Alexie Kudrin who served as his finance
minister. Widely respected in the West, Kudrin paid off Russia's foreign debt and thereby
removed a major leverage point the West had over Russia. ...
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
Exciting new product intro from Max Blumenthal: Maddow's Tears™, a new formula that
produces soothing, cooling moisture in politically convenient circumstances.
"I am at a loss to see what motive the Kremlin might have to commit murders on foreign
soil during the buildup, let alone the enactment, of a sporting event that is of mammoth
chauvinist significance to Russia."
"The most obvious motive for these attacks would surely be from someone out to embarrass
the Russian president, Vladimir Putin – someone from his enemies, rather than from his
friends or employees. But once again we have no clue."
The blogger Eliot Higgins made waves early in the decade by covering the war in Syria from a
laptop in his apartment in Leicester, England, while caring for his infant daughter. In 2014,
he founded Bellingcat, an open-source news outlet that has grown to include roughly a dozen
staff members, with an office in The Hague. Mr. Higgins attributed his skill not to any special
knowledge of international conflicts or digital data, but to the hours he had spent playing
video games , which, he said, gave him the idea that any mystery can be cracked.
...
Bellingcat journalists have spread the word about their techniques in seminars attended by
journalists and law-enforcement officials. Along with grants from groups like the Open Society
Foundations, founded by George Soros, the seminars are a significant source of revenue for
Bellingcat, a nonprofit organization.
The Case of Sergei Magnitsky
Questions
Cloud Story Behind U.S. Sanctions
The story of Sergei Magnitsky has come to symbolize the brutal persecution of
whistleblowers in Russia. Ten years after his death, inconsistencies in Magnitsky's story suggest he may not
have been the hero many people -- and Western governments -- believed him to be.
Jahrgang 1981. Studium der Volkswirtschaftslehre in Bonn, Mannheim und St. Petersburg.
Absolvent der studienbegleitenden Journalistenausbildung des Institutes zur Förderung
publizistischen Nachwuchses (ifp). Sieben Jahre Moskau-Korrespondent von SPIEGEL ONLINE. Autor
des Buchs "Generation Putin - Das neue Russland verstehen". Seit September 2016 Mitglied der
Wirtschaftsredaktion von SPIEGEL ONLINE.
There's a tombstone in northeastern Moscow that bears the portrait of a man with a friendly yet somewhat uneasy smile. His
name is Sergei Leonidovich Magnitsky. He was born in April 1972 in Odessa, Ukraine, and died in November
2009 in Moscow. To this day, 10 years after the fact, the circumstances of his death in a Russian pretrial
detention facility remain unclear.
There are two versions of what happened to Magnitsky. The more well-known version has all the makings of
a conspiracy thriller. It's been repeated in thousands of articles, TV interviews and in parliamentary
hearings. In this version of the story, the man from the Moscow cemetery fought nobly against a corrupt
system and was murdered for it.
The other version is more complicated. In it, nobody is a hero.
The first version has had geopolitical implications. In 2012, the United States passed the Magnitsky Act,
which imposed sanctions against Russian officials who were believed to have played a role in his death. The
measure was signed into law by then-President Barack Obama after receiving a broad bipartisan majority. Back
then, if there was one thing that politicians on both sides of the aisle could agree on, it was their
opposition to a nefarious Russian state. In 2017, Congress passed the Global Magnitsky Act, which enabled
the U.S. to impose sanctions against Russia for human rights violations worldwide.
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The facilitator behind these pieces of legislation is Bill Browder, Magnitsky's former boss in Moscow.
"When he was put to the ultimate test, he became the ultimate hero," Browder says of Magnitsky. Browder was
born in the U.S.. For years, his company, Hermitage Capital Management, was one of the largest foreign
investors in Russia. At the time, Browder was an advocate for Russian President Vladimir Putin in the West.
That is, until he was prohibited from entering Russia in 2005.
Public Enemy No. 1
Today, Browder refers to himself as "Putin's No. 1 Enemy." From his office in London's Finsbury district,
Browder coordinates a campaign he calls "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky." His goal is to get other countries
to impose sanctions against Russia for what happened to his former employee. So far, four other countries
have followed the U.S.' lead. For now, Browder is concentrating on Europe. He has spoken to politicians in
Norway, Sweden and France. He came to Berlin in May and spoke with the chairman of the Committee on Foreign
Affairs in Germany's federal parliament, the Bundestag. He also had an appointment at the Chancellery.
Browder tells a gripping story of how Magnitsky, the whistleblower, is believed to have died. This
narrative is his ticket into the political sphere. It's why he's received by members of parliament,
diplomats and human rights activists alike, often with open arms. They support his push for more legislation
because they see it as setting an important precedent: Corrupt regimes all over the world that are violating
their citizens' rights must be held accountable and made to suffer consequences in the form of entry bans
and frozen accounts as laid out by the Global Magnitsky Act. The law makes it more difficult, if only
slightly, for autocrats to sneer at and ignore human rights.
But there's another version of the Magnitsky saga, one that is more contradictory than Browder's telling
and more difficult to summarize. The legal documents that underpin it fill dozens of binders, not only in
Moscow, but also in London and New York. After sifting through thousands of pages, one might begin to
wonder: Did the perfidious conspiracy to murder Magnitsky ever really take place? Or is Browder a charlatan
whose story the West was too eager to believe? The certainty surrounding the Magnitsky affair becomes
muddled in the documents, particularly the clear division between good and evil. The Russian authorities'
take is questionable, but so is everyone else's -- including Bill Browder's.
The cases raises uncomfortable questions for the West. In Europe and the U.S., critics of Russia often
argue from a position of moral superiority. But with the Magnitsky sanctions, it could be that the activist
Browder used a noble cause to manipulate Western governments.
One thing that stays the same no matter which version is told, is this: Magnitsky is dead and he was the
victim of a terrible injustice.
Magnitsky's Demise
On the evening of Nov. 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky died in a cell at Moscow's "Matrosskaya Tishina"
pretrial detention center. A prison doctor had diagnosed him with an inflammation of the pancreas four and a
half months prior, but shortly before Magnitsky was scheduled to undergo surgery, he was moved to another
prison -- one without the necessary medical equipment for such an invasive procedure. The reason given for
the move was that Magnitsky's cell needed to be renovated. Could that possibly be true? Even after the
whistleblower's death, work still hadn't commenced, according to an investigative commission. It began
looking into the case shortly after Magnitsky's death because the outrage in Moscow was so huge. The
commission counted among its members respected human rights activists and opponents of the Kremlin. They
analyzed notes and complaints filed while Magnitsky was in prison. They also interviewed the prison staffers
who, instead of helping Magnitsky, let him die.
The commission's 20-page report offered detailed insights into the sadistic, cold-hearted nature of
Russia's prison system. In the months before his death, Magnitsky was constantly moved from one cell to
another. His mother brought him medications that took 18 days to reach him. In September, he was forced to
wear his jacket at night because his cell window lacked a pane of glass. His cell toilet often backed up.
One time Magnitsky's abdominal pains became so acute that his neighbor began desperately kicking against the
door of his cell and calling for help. It took prison staff five hours to get Magnitsky to a doctor.
Mischa Japaridze/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Sergei Magnitsky's grave at a cemetery in Moscow.
Magnitsky's condition worsened on his last day. He was transferred back to the prison where he was
originally supposed to be operated on months prior. There, the dying man began to panic. He was sedated and
restrained with handcuffs. The files analyzed by the commission note the "use of a rubber baton." Magnitsky
was left alone in his cell, unobserved, without a doctor. "An ill person in severe condition was effectively
left without medical attention for 1 hour and 18 minutes to die," the commission wrote in its report, a
chronology of merciless negligence. Yet it contains no evidence of a targeted murder.
According to Browder's more dramatic telling of the story, Magnitsky's arrest and death were a targeted
act of revenge by Russian authorities against an anti-corruption activist. Browder says he tapped "my lawyer
Magnitsky," to investigate a case in 2007. Over the course of his research, Magnitsky supposedly stumbled
onto a crime of unprecedented proportions -- the biggest tax fraud in Russian history, perpetrated by a
corrupt band of police officers and government officials.
The fraud involved a sum of $230 million (208 million euros) and a complex master plan, which, according
to Browder, was run by two Moscow police officers, Artyom Kuznetsov and Pavel Karpov. The duo had initiated
a fraudulent tax investigation against Browder's Hermitage Capital Management and then seized three
letterbox firms that had originally been founded by Browder's people. With confiscated company deeds, the
firms were transferred to middlemen who fabricated massive losses and requested the reimbursement of $230
million in taxes that Browder's company had previously paid. Karpov, the policeman, denies any involvement
in the fraud or Magnitsky's death. "Browder is a liar," he says. Kuznetsov could not be reached for a
statement.
Browder's Story
According to Browder, Magnitsky was onto Kuznetsov and Karpov. He also says the same officials had
arranged for Magnitsky to be imprisoned and killed. Browder has told this version of events countless times.
He testified in front of the U.S. Congress that Magnitsky had been "murdered." Browder told Canadian
parliamentarians: "Eight riot guards with rubber batons would beat him for one hour and 18 minutes. He was
subsequently found dead on the floor of that cell."
When asked, Browder cites the investigative committee's report as evidence. He does the same on his
website, where he also says the same officials incriminated by Magnitsky "intentionally tortured and
ultimately murdered him." The report, however, makes no such assertion of an intentional killing. The names
of the two police officers, Kuznetsov and Karpov, don't even appear in the original Russian version of the
commission's report. Kuznetsov is only mentioned in an English translation on Browder's website.
By now, Browder's campaign has created its own frame of reference and its own supposed evidence. Browder
has often cited reports by the Council of Europe in recent years, though these are largely based on his own
accounts. For instance, one Council rapporteur, former German Justice Minister Sabine
Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, referred to Magnitsky as an "independent lawyer." But one look at documents
readily available online is enough to discover that Magnitsky was employed as a tax expert at an auditing
firm and had worked for Browder for years.
Browder claims to be fighting for justice. One of the reasons he's so successful may be because he's
adept at aligning his story with the devastating image that Russia has been projecting for years. And many
media outlets believe him. Browder has given countless TV interviews on the subject. In some of the shots,
viewers can see articles from prominent international media Browder has hung on his office walls -- the
Washington Post
, the
Financial Times
and Russia's
Novaya Gazeta
. The reports are all
framed and appear to lend credibility to Browder's story. DER SPIEGEL has also
written about Browder's campaign
and conducted interviews with him. The
New York Times
won the
Pulitzer Prize for its reporting on Russia's legal system, including on the Magnitsky case. There are films
and plays too.
But the question remains: Just how solid are the facts upon which politicians and the media are basing
their judgements of this case? Various inconsistencies and contradictions are apparent in some documents
that Browder's own people have published online. These include two photographs of interrogation protocols
that allegedly prove how Sergei Magnitsky courageously reported the tax fraud of $230 million after
discovering it. In his book, Browder writes, "Sergei set up an appointment at the Investigative Committee
for 5 June 2008. (...) He sat in the chair, provided the evidence and gave his witness statement, explicitly
naming Kuznetsov and Karpov."
Contradictions
The protocol itself tells a different story. Magnitsky does indeed mention the names of the two police
officers nearly 30 times and describes their role during a search. But at no point does he make a concrete
accusation against them personally. In a second protocol of a statement made on Oct. 7, Kuznetsov and Karpov
are not mentioned at all. The first document also shows that Magnitsky did not make his statements entirely
of his own free will, but as a witness in an ongoing investigation. According to other documents, the trial
had been underway since February. This was confirmed to DER SPIEGEL by Magnitsky's lawyer at the time,
Dmitry Kharitonov, who said his client had been summoned to testify.
Browder has a well-documented talent for selling a set of facts so that it supports his own version of
events. In Moscow, this was part of his business model as an investor. According to its own calculations,
Hermitage Capital Management generated a 1,500 percent return on its investments within just a few years.
According to Russian investigators, a company in Browder's fund structure had wrongly paid only 5 percent in
taxes, when in fact 15 percent should have been due. A double taxation agreement with Cyprus should not have
been applied. Browder denies this.
One way or the other, Browder's business model was lucrative. Hermitage bought cheap shares in Russian
state-owned corporations, such as Gazprom or Sberbank, from the late 1990s onward. Then he took on the
conglomerates' leadership, denounced the widespread corruption and demanded reforms. If these came to
fruition, the value of Browder's shares rose. If they didn't, at least the publicity of his fund grew.
Browder had his eye on Gazprom especially. In 1998, the company was worth $3.5 billion. Within seven
years, that number had jumped to $160 billion. Hermitage held many shares through shell companies. Several
of them perfunctorily hired mentally disabled people who they described on paper as, "analysis division
experts." In fact, the people had no knowledge of this field, as several courts would later discover.
The companies took advantage of tax breaks that were intended for firms with workplace disability rates
of at least 50 percent -- and not as a tax-saving model for Western investment funds. Over the course of
their years-long investigations into Hermitage, Russian authorities stumbled upon a man who was helping
Browder come up with his tax-saving models: Sergei Magnitsky. Browder says the practice of skirting taxes
was common at the time.
When Browder talks about his fate in front of Western audiences, he makes it sound as if the
investigations into Hermitage were completely arbitrary. In his book and during interviews, Browder claims
that Kuznetsov, the investigator, appeared out of nowhere in 2007. This is significant because it appears to
underscore that the trial was "politically motivated, fabricated" and initiated for the sole purpose of
obtaining the necessary documentation for the long-planned $230-million fraud.
'A Measure of Vindication'
But the date Browder provided is incorrect. Kuznetsov's name appeared in letters to Browder's company in
June 2006. At the time, the police had demanded the firm surrender its bank data. There is also proof that
Browder's team knew about the letters. Indeed, they were in Browder's possession.
There is another interrogation protocol that Browder did not prominently publish online like the other
two. It is from October 2006, long before Magnitsky is said to have first exposed the big tax fraud that
Browder says caused him to fall out of the authorities' good graces.
According to the protocol, Magnitsky was questioned by investigators about one of the dubious letterbox
firms that gave employment contracts to people with disabilities. He claims that Browder's people asked him
to "to 'be' CEO for a period of reorganization." Other documents show that Magnitsky was involved in the
companies as early as 2002.
Some of the people accused by Browder have begun to fight back against the allegations. The Moscow
policeman Pavel Karpov, for one, who Browder claims worked with Kuznetsov to have Magnitsky arrested and
killed in retaliation for his testimony, filed a defamation lawsuit against Browder in London in 2012.
The presiding judge, Justice Simon, ruled the British courts had no jurisdiction over the matter. But in
his written verdict, he also wrote scathingly about Browder, calling him a "story-teller" who did "not come
close to pleading facts which, if proved, would justify the sting of the libel." Simon also wrote that his
assessment was to be explicitly understood as "a measure of vindication" of Karpov.
The only problem was the judge's words hardly made it into the public discourse at the time. The
Guardian
and other British media wrote about Karpov's humiliating defeat in the courts. Some of the
language they used can be found in press releases from Browder's campaign.
A second trial in New York concerned the frozen accounts of a wealthy Russian political clan, the Katsyv
family. The U.S. government imposed the sanctions because Browder had insisted that money from the
million-dollar fraud had wound up with the Katsyvs. In response, the Russians hired star New York-based
lawyers to defend themselves against the accusations.
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of
DER SPIEGEL.
Browder, an otherwise talkative person, tried to avoid questioning. One video shows him running away when
someone tries to present him with a subpoena. In April 2015, he was required to appear in court. Under oath
and confronted with numerous documents, he answered meekly -- quite differently than during his public
appearances. Lawyer Mark Cymrot, a surly litigator with a moustache, spent six hours examining him. Cymrot
asked: Was Magnitsky a lawyer or a tax expert?
He was "acting in court representing me," Browder replied.
And he had a law degree in Russia?
"I'm not aware he did."
Did he go to law school?
"No."
How many times have you said Mr. Magnitsky is a lawyer? Fifty? A hundred? Two hundred?
"I don't know."
Have you ever told anybody that he didn't go to law school and didn't have a law degree?
"No."
DER SPIEGEL visited Browder in London and asked him to clarify some inconsistencies and contradictions in
his story. The result was a four hour-long interview and a grudging search for information, facts and
details. The meeting, which took place in a glass conference room in Browder's Finsbury office, provided
insights into his tactics: Together with his Russian partners Ivan Cherkasov and Vadim Kleiner, Browder laid
out dozens of documents that supposedly corroborated his version of events. Not all of them would stand up
to further scrutiny.
One of the documents was a previously unpublished email from Sergei Magnitsky. It supposedly confirmed
that he went to the authorities of his own volition as a whistleblower. Yet the document also makes clear
that Magnitsky was instructed to come forward by a higher-ranking lawyer working for Browder. This lawyer, a
Russian, admitted during the interview in London that Magnitsky had been sent as a stand-in for the CEO of a
letterbox company who investigators in Moscow had actually wanted to speak to.
To further back up their story, Browder and his team also presented an article by an American journalist
who had spoken to Magnitsky shortly before his arrest. The police officers Kuznetsov and Karpov had
Magnitsky arrested "immediately" after the publication of the article. But nothing in the article would
explain why Magnitsky was arrested. In it, he doesn't mention Karpov or Kuznetsov. The author of the
article, when contacted, said he couldn't imagine that it was his piece that triggered Magnitsky's
persecution.
Charles Dharapak/ AP/ Picture Alliance/ DPA
Former U.S. President Barack Obama signing the Magnitsky Act into law.
Browder's campaign has turned him into a global celebrity. His publisher advertises his book, "Red
Notice," as a
New York Times
bestseller. In interviews, he calls for Russia to be largely isolated.
He attacks politicians who disagree with him. He called John Kerry, the former U.S. secretary of state, a
"lapdog" and accused him of "appeasement." Browder has also called for Russia's banishment from the SWIFT
banking network, which would have devastating consequences for the Russian population. But is that really
necessary to ensure "Justice for Sergei Magnitsky?" Or has Browder's campaign turned into a personal
vendetta?
Too Good Not to Be True
Another strange thing about this case is that those involved sometimes change their stories completely
and begin saying the opposite of what they said before. Take Zoya Svetova, for instance: The Moscow-based
human rights activist co-wrote the investigative commission's report. She is a Kremlin opponent and writes
reports for MBKH News, the media project of the exiled Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Svetova has
been intensively involved with the Magnitsky case and published regular articles about it. She is also
planning to write a book.
In July, Svetova said in an interview with DER SPIEGEL that even 10 years after Magnitsky's death, she
didn't think much of the theory that he was the victim of a murder plot. It was more likely that Magnitsky
got into an argument with the doctors and the staff because he wasn't being medically treated. "They were
beating him to pacify him," Svetova said, adding that the beatings in and of themselves did not indicate a
targeted murder. There was no evidence of this, she said. "What sense would it make to murder him?" So that
he wouldn't talk about the $230 million fraud anymore? By that point, news of the fraud was everywhere.
"Magnitsky did not reveal any secret," Svetova said in July.
The investigative commission report she helped co-write mentions that pressure had been placed on
Magnitsky while he was in prison. "They wanted testimonies against Browder. That was the motivation. He
should have accused Browder of not paying taxes. Magnitsky was a hostage. He himself was of no interest to
them. They wanted Browder," she said.
Svetova also said that while Magnitsky's fate was dreadful, it wasn't atypical. Failure to provide
assistance as well as abuse are common in Russian prisons, she said. She wrote an article on the subject in
2010. According to information from the Council of Europe, around 4,000 prisoners died in Russia in 2014. In
Germany, 150 died. "You have to know," Svetova said, "the Russian penitentiary system is very brutal."
Shortly before this article was published, however, Svetova suddenly changed her story. Now she had the
feeling "that he was moved deliberately to the 'Matrosskaya Tishina' prison to kill him." She said that
since July, she had gone back and re-examined all the old documents and that she now had a completely
different view of things.
In August, the European Court of Human Rights announced its ruling in the Magnitsky case: Russia must pay
the deceased's relatives 34,000 euros ($37,500) because the state should have protected the prisoner's life
and health. Nowhere in its verdict was there any mention of murder. The judges did, however, take apart the
claim that the whistleblower had been imprisoned out of revenge. Magnitsky's arrest was not without cause,
they wrote, nor were the authorities' actions malicious. The investigations into Magnitsky began in 2004,
long before he first approached the authorities, it says on page 39 of the court's written verdict. But that
didn't stop Browder from describing the ruling as a "resounding victory."
His campaign has created a kind of perpetual motion. Browder was recently received by diplomats in
Finland, which currently holds the presidency of the Council of the EU. They summoned him to discuss a
European version of the U.S.' Magnitsky sanctions. "This law will become a reality in the EU," Browder
tweeted in mid-October. His chances of success aren't bad: His story is simply too good not to be true.
"... "The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq." ..."
"... " 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. 'I am sullied.' " ..."
In my opinion the most under-reported event of the Iraq war was the suicide of military Ethicist Colonel Ted Westhusing. It was
reported at the end of a Frank Rich column that appeared in the NY Times of 10-21-2007:
"The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence
was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant,
when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in
Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq."
"Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower,
according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money."
Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil,
is as much an epitaph for America's engagement in Iraq as a suicide note."
" 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating
the word mission. 'I am sullied.' "
"The tiny pink candies at the bottom of the urinals are reserved for Field Grade and Above." --sign over the urinals in the "O"
Club at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, 1965.
Now that sentiment, is Officer-on-Officer. The same dynamic tension exists throughout all Branches and ranks.
My background includes a Combat Infantry Badge and a record of having made Spec Four , two times. If you don't know what that
means, stop reading here.
I feel that no one should be promoted E-5 or O-4, if they are to command men in battle, unless they have had that life experience
themselves. It becomes virgins instructing on sexual etiquette.
Within the ranks, there exists a disdain for officers, in general. Some officers overcome this by their actions, but the vast
majority cement that assessment the same way.
What makes the thing run is the few officers who are superior human beings, and the NCOs who are of that same tribe. And there
is a love there, from top to bottom and bottom to top, a brotherhood of warriors which the civilian population will forever try
to discern, parse and examine to their lasting frustration and ignorance.
It is the spirit of this nation [Liberty, e pluribus unum and In God We Trust ] that is the binding filament of it all. The
civilians responsible for the welfare of the armed services need to be more fully aware of that spirit and they need to bring
it into the air-conditioned offices they inhabit when they make decisions about men who know sacrifice.
Looks like Brown Noser Eliot Higgins and his Bellingcrap organisation may have finally met
their match in a real investigative journalist, Dilyana Gaytandzhieva, who (some of us may
recall) has done sterling work in tracing movements of weapons from the Balkan countries to
Turkey and Azerbaijan with their ultimate destination being Syria to be used by ISIS jihadis,
and for which she was sacked by her newspaper employer in Bulgaria.
Does anyone imagine that the Brown Noser will have the courage and fortitude to respond to
legal action brought against him and Bellingcrap? Will his Atlantic Council employers support
him or has he passed his use-by date and become a liability?
"... "The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had announced the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after a similar announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield." ..."
"... Once the dust, smoke, and the fog of war had cleared, it became apparent that this, was yet again a choreographed move, same as the missiles on Shayrat airfield. ..."
"... I may well be wrong, as I do not go along with group think here, but this strike seems a preemptive move by Trump to prevent a push for for US military action in Syria that will take us to WWIII. ..."
OT but very relevant to the Skripal/Douma incidents.
The Guardian has an
article today headlined
" The taboo on chemical weapons has lasted a century – it must be preserved " which is a bare-faced lie as the Guardian
should know because the British used chemical weapons against the Russian in August, 1919, less than a century ago, and the Japanese,
among America's closest allies used them against the Chinese in World War 2.
The strongest case for Churchill as a chemical warfare enthusiast involves Russia, and was made by Giles Milton in The Guardian
on 1 September 2013, which prompted this article. Milton wrote that in 1919, scientists at the governmental laboratories at
Porton in Wiltshire developed a far more devastating weapon: the top secret "M Device," an exploding shell containing
a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine [DM].
The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised."
Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and
instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price,
was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you
would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."
A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919 .Bolshevik
soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood,
then collapsed unconscious. The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages .But the weapons proved
less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then
stopped.
"The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had announced
the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after a similar
announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield."
Watching reports coming out of Syria in real time, I thought it was a genuine strike.
Same as I thought the JK build up was the real thing and also the 59 missiles a year ago.
Once the dust, smoke, and the fog of war had cleared, it became apparent that this, was yet again a choreographed move,
same as the missiles on Shayrat airfield.
I may well be wrong, as I do not go along with group think here, but this strike seems a preemptive move by Trump to prevent
a push for for US military action in Syria that will take us to WWIII.
"... "The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant, when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq." ..."
"... " 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating the word mission. 'I am sullied.' " ..."
In my opinion the most under-reported event of the Iraq war was the suicide of military Ethicist Colonel Ted Westhusing. It was
reported at the end of a Frank Rich column that appeared in the NY Times of 10-21-2007:
"The cost cannot be measured only in lost opportunities, lives and money. There will be a long hangover of shame. Its essence
was summed up by Col. Ted Westhusing, an Army scholar of military ethics who was an innocent witness to corruption, not a participant,
when he died at age 44 of a gunshot wound to the head while working for Gen. David Petraeus training Iraqi security forces in
Baghdad in 2005. He was at the time the highest-ranking officer to die in Iraq."
"Colonel Westhusing's death was ruled a suicide, though some believe he was murdered by contractors fearing a whistle-blower,
according to T. Christian Miller, the Los Angeles Times reporter who documents the case in his book "Blood Money."
Either way, the angry four-page letter the officer left behind for General Petraeus and his other commander, Gen. Joseph Fil,
is as much an epitaph for America's engagement in Iraq as a suicide note."
" 'I cannot support a msn that leads to corruption, human rights abuse and liars,' Colonel Westhusing wrote, abbreviating
the word mission. 'I am sullied.' "
"The tiny pink candies at the bottom of the urinals are reserved for Field Grade and Above." --sign over the urinals in the "O"
Club at Tan Son Nhut Airbase, 1965.
Now that sentiment, is Officer-on-Officer. The same dynamic tension exists throughout all Branches and ranks.
My background includes a Combat Infantry Badge and a record of having made Spec Four , two times. If you don't know what that
means, stop reading here.
I feel that no one should be promoted E-5 or O-4, if they are to command men in battle, unless they have had that life experience
themselves. It becomes virgins instructing on sexual etiquette.
Within the ranks, there exists a disdain for officers, in general. Some officers overcome this by their actions, but the vast
majority cement that assessment the same way.
What makes the thing run is the few officers who are superior human beings, and the NCOs who are of that same tribe. And there
is a love there, from top to bottom and bottom to top, a brotherhood of warriors which the civilian population will forever try
to discern, parse and examine to their lasting frustration and ignorance.
It is the spirit of this nation [Liberty, e pluribus unum and In God We Trust ] that is the binding filament of it all. The
civilians responsible for the welfare of the armed services need to be more fully aware of that spirit and they need to bring
it into the air-conditioned offices they inhabit when they make decisions about men who know sacrifice.
Ukrainegate has definite signs of Soros funded operation
Notable quotes:
"... America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers. ..."
"... Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team. ..."
"... There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic, and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions. ..."
"... Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit them to infest his administration. ..."
"... PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle. ..."
"... HE PROMISED he would appoint a special prosecutor, PROMISED... ..."
"... Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through 501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil. ..."
"... Tyler, please rerun this! How George Sorros destroys countries, profits from currency trading, convinces the countries to privatize its assets, buys them and then sells them for yet another profit: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-08/how-george-soros-singlehandedly... ..."
"... We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... ..."
"... JFK was gunned down in front of the whole world. ..."
"... If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him) ..."
"... Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen. ..."
"... AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge in her own country! ..."
"... Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money ..."
Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton is not about to "go quietly into that good night". On the morning
after her surprising and unanticipated defeat at the hands of Republican Party upstart Donald Trump, Mrs. Clinton and her husband,
former President Bill Clinton, entered the ball room of the art-deco New Yorker hotel in midtown Manhattan and were both adorned
in purple attire. The press immediately noticed the color and asked what it represented. Clinton spokespeople claimed it was to represent
the coming together of Democratic "Blue America" and Republican "Red America" into a united purple blend. This statement was a complete
ruse as is known by citizens of countries targeted in the past by the vile political operations of international hedge fund tycoon
George Soros.
The Clintons, who both have received millions of dollars in campaign contributions and Clinton Foundation donations from Soros,
were, in fact, helping to launch Soros's "Purple Revolution" in America. The Purple Revolution will resist all efforts by the Trump
administration to push back against the globalist policies of the Clintons and soon-to-be ex-President Barack Obama. The Purple Revolution
will also seek to make the Trump administration a short one through Soros-style street protests and political disruption.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation of
Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when the nation
faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and Government Reform
Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on Hillary Clinton, the
Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide
Huma Abedin
. President Trump should not allow himself to be distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
America's globalists and interventionists are already pushing the meme that because so many establishment and entrenched national
security and military "experts" opposed Trump's candidacy, Trump is "required" to call on them to join his administration because
there are not enough such "experts" among Trump's inner circle of advisers.
Discredited neo-conservatives from George W. Bush's White House, such as Iraq war co-conspirator Stephen Hadley, are being
mentioned as someone Trump should have join his National Security Council and other senior positions. George H. W. Bush's Secretary
of State James Baker, a die-hard Bush loyalist, is also being proffered as a member of Trump's White House team.
There is absolutely no reason for Trump to seek the advice from old Republican fossils like Baker, Hadley, former Secretaries
of State Rice and Powell, the lunatic former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton, and others. There are plenty of Trump
supporters who have a wealth of experience in foreign and national security matters, including those of African, Haitian, Hispanic,
and Arab descent and who are not neocons, who can fill Trump's senior- and middle-level positions.
Trump must distance himself from sudden well-wishing neocons, adventurists, militarists, and interventionists and not permit
them to infest his administration. If Mrs. Clinton had won the presidency, an article on the incoming administration would have
read as follows:
"Based on the militarism and foreign adventurism of her term as Secretary of State and her husband Bill Clinton's two terms
as president, the world is in store for major American military aggression on multiple fronts around the world. President-elect
Hillary Clinton has made no secret of her desire to confront Russia militarily, diplomatically, and economically in the Middle
East, on Russia's very doorstep in eastern Europe, and even within the borders of the Russian Federation. Mrs. Clinton has dusted
off the long-discredited 'containment' policy ushered into effect by Professor George F. Kennan in the aftermath of World War.
Mrs. Clinton's administration will likely promote the most strident neo-Cold Warriors of the Barack Obama administration, including
Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs Victoria Nuland, a personal favorite of Clinton".
President-elect Trump cannot afford to permit those who are in the same web as Nuland, Hadley, Bolton, and others to join his
administration where they would metastasize like an aggressive form of cancer. These individuals would not carry out Trump's policies
but seek to continue to damage America's relations with Russia, China, Iran, Cuba, and other nations.
Not only must Trump have to deal with Republican neocons trying to worm their way into his administration, but he must deal with
the attempt by Soros to disrupt his presidency and the United States with a Purple Revolution
No sooner had Trump been declared the 45th president of the United States, Soros-funded political operations launched their activities
to disrupt Trump during Obama's lame-duck period and thereafter. The swiftness of the Purple Revolution is reminiscent of the speed
at which protesters hit the streets of Kiev, the Ukrainian capital, in two Orange Revolutions sponsored by Soros, one in 2004 and
the other, ten years later, in 2014.
As the Clintons were embracing purple in New York, street demonstrations, some violent, all coordinated by the Soros-funded Moveon.org
and "Black Lives Matter", broke out in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Oakland, Nashville, Cleveland, Washington, Austin, Seattle,
Philadelphia, Richmond, St. Paul, Kansas City, Omaha, San Francisco, and some 200 other cities across the United States.
The Soros-financed Russian singing group "Pussy Riot" released on YouTube an anti-Trump music video titled "Make America Great
Again". The video went "viral" on the Internet. The video, which is profane and filled with violent acts, portrays a dystopian Trump
presidency. Following the George Soros/Gene Sharp script to a tee, Pussy Riot member Nadya Tolokonnikova called for anti-Trump Americans
to turn their anger into art, particularly music and visual art. The use of political graffiti is a popular Sharp tactic. The street
protests and anti-Trump music and art were the first phase of Soros's Purple Revolution in America.
President-elect Trump is facing a two-pronged attack by his opponents. One, led by entrenched neo-con bureaucrats, including former
Central Intelligence Agency and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden, former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff,
and Bush family loyalists are seeking to call the shots on who Trump appoints to senior national security, intelligence, foreign
policy, and defense positions in his administration. These neo-Cold Warriors are trying to convince Trump that he must maintain the
Obama aggressiveness and militancy toward Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba, and other countries. The second front arrayed against
Trump is from Soros-funded political groups and media. This second line of attack is a propaganda war, utilizing hundreds of anti-Trump
newspapers, web sites, and broadcasters, that will seek to undermine public confidence in the Trump administration from its outset.
One of Trump's political advertisements, released just prior to Election Day, stated that George Soros, Federal Reserve chair
Janet Yellen, and Goldman Sachs chief executive officer Lloyd Blankfein, are all part of "a global power structure that is responsible
for the economic decisions that have robbed our working class, stripped our country of its wealth and put that money into the pockets
of a handful of large corporations and political entities". Soros and his minions immediately and ridiculously attacked the ad as
"anti-Semitic". President Trump should be on guard against those who his campaign called out in the ad and their colleagues. Soros's
son, Alexander Soros, called on Trump's daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, to publicly disavow Trump. Soros's tactics
not only seek to split apart nations but also families. Trump must be on guard against the current and future machinations of George
Soros, including his Purple Revolution.
"It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care."
None of those "pressing issues" involve the DOJ or the FBI.
Investigate, prosecute and jail Hillary Clinton and her crew.
Trump is going to need a hostage or two to deal with these fucks.
News for the Clintons, The R's and D's already united to vote against Hillary.
I do not understand why they think street protests will bring down a POTUS? And that would be acceptable in a major nation.
Why isn't the government cracking down the separatists in Oregon, California, and elsewhere? They are not accepting the legal
outcome of an election. They are calling for illegal secession. (Funny in 1861 this was a cause for the federal government to
attack the joint and seveal states of the union.) If a group of whites had protested Obama's election in 2008?
The people living in Kalispell are reviled and ridiculed for their separatist views. Randy Weaver and family for not accepting
politically correct views. And so on.
This is getting out of hand. There will be no walking this back.
"Yes. And who are the neocons really? Progressives. Neocon is a label successfully used by criminal progressives to shield their
brand."
Well let's go a little bit deeper in examing the 'who' thing:
"The neoconservative movement, which is generally perceived as a radical (rather than "conservative") Republican right, is, in
reality, an intellectual movement born in the late 1960s in the pages of the monthly magazine Commentary , a media arm of the American
Jewish Committee , which had replaced the Contemporary Jewish Record in 1945. The Forward , the oldest American Jewish weekly, wrote
in a January 6th, 2006 article signed Gal Beckerman: " If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can
lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.... "
The idea of arresting the Clinton Crime, Fraud and Crime Family would be welcomed. BUT, who is going to arrest them? Loretta Lynch,
James Comey, WHO? The problem here is that our so called "authorities" are all in the same bed. The tentacles of the Eastern Elite
Establishment are everywhere in high office, academia, the media, Big Business, etc. The swamp is thoroughly infested with this
elite scum of those in the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission, Bilderberg Group, Chatham House, Club of Rome,
Committee of 300, Jason Society and numerous other private clubs of the rich, powerful and influential. The Illuminati has been
exposed, however they aren't going down lightly. They still have massive amounts of money, they own the media and the banking
houses. Some have described it as MIMAC, the Military Industrial Media Academic Complex. A few months ago here at Zero Hedge,
there was an article which showed a massive flow chart of the elites and their organization
They could IF and WHEN Trump gets to Washington after 20 Jan 2017, simply implode the economy and blame t it on Trump. Sort
of what happened to Herbert Hoover in the late 1920's. Unfortunately the situation in the US will continue to deteriorate. George
Soros, a major financial backer of Hillary will see to that. Soros is a Globalist and advocate of one world government. People
comment that Soros should be arrested. I agree, BUT who is going to do that?
Agree. I think Trump will yank all the "aid" to Israel as well as "aid" to the Islamic murderers of the Palitrashian human garbage
infesting the area. This "aid" money is simply a bribe to keep both from killing each other. F**k all of them. None of our business
what they do.
We got progressives ( lots and lots of Jews in that group) who are the enemy of mankind and then we got Islam who are also
the enemy of mankind. Why help either of them? Makes no sense.
Soros is hated in Israel and has never set foot there but his foundations have done such harm that a bill was recently passed
to ban foreign funding of non profit political organizations
The fact that we all have to worry about the CIA killing a President Elect simply because the man puts America first, really says
it all.
The Agency is Cancer. Why are we even waiting for them to kill another one of our people to act? There should be no question
about the CIA's future in the US.
Dissolved & dishonored. Its members locked away or punished for Treason. Their reputation is so bad and has been for so long,
that the fact that you joined them should be enough to justify arrest and Execution for Treason, Crimes Against Humanity & Crimes
Against The American People.
There are entirely way too many Intelligence Agencies. Plus the Contractors, some of who shouldn't have high level clearance to
begin with which the US sub contracts the Intel / work out to.
For Fucks sake, Government is so incompetent it can't even handle it own Intel.
Something along the lines of Eurpoe's Five Eyes would be highly effective.
Fuck those Pure Evil Psychopaths at the CIA They're nothing more than a bunch of Scum Fuck murdering, drug running, money laundering
Global Crime Syndicate.
The FBI is still investigating the Clinton Foundation, Trump needs to encourage that through backdoor channels. Soro's needs to
be investigated, he has been tied to a conspiracy to incite violence, this needs to be documented and dealt with. Trump can not
ignore this guy. If any of these investigations come back with a recommendation to indict then that process needs to be started.
Take the fight to them, they are vulnerable!
Make a National APB Warrent for the apprehension & arrest of George Sooros for inciting violence, endsrgerimg the public & calling
for the murder of our Nations Police through funding of the BLM Group.
Have every Law Informent Agency in the Nation on alert. Also, issue a Bounty in the Sum of $5,000,000 for his immediate apprehension.
Trump needs to replace FBI chickenshits & sellouts with loyal people then get the FBI counter-terrorism to investigate and shut
down Soros & the various agencies instigating the riots. It's really simple when you quit over-thinking a problem. It's domestic
terrorism. It's the FBI's job to stop it.
I read what Paul said this morning and thought, despite Paul's hostility to Trump during the primaries most likely due to his
son, Rand's loss, that Paul gave good advice to Trump.
Let's face it Donald Trump is a STOP GAP measure. And demographic change over the next 4 years makes his re-election very, very
UNLIKELY. If he keeps his campaign promises he will be a GREAT president. However as ZH reported earlier he appears to be balking
from repealing Obamacare, I stress the word APPEARS.
Let us give him a chance. This is all speculation. His enemies are DEADLY as they were once they got total control in Russia,
they killed according to Solzhenitsyn SIXTY-SIX MILLION Russian Christians. The descendants of those Bolsheviks are VERY powerful
in the USSA. They control the Fed, Hollyweird, Wall Street, the universities...
Much of the media and advertising exist by pushing buttons that trigger appropriate financially lucrative reflexes in their
audiences, from pornography to romantic movies to team sports. Media profits are driven by competition over how best to push
those buttons. But the effort to produce politically and racially cuckolded Whites adds a layer of complexity: What buttons
do you push to make Whites complicit in their own racial and cultural demise?
Actually, there are a whole lot of them, which shouldn't be surprising. This is a very sophisticated onslaught, enabled
by control over all the moral, intellectual, and political high ground by the left. With all that high ground, there are a
lot of buttons you can push.
Our enemies see this as a pathetic last gasp of a moribund civilization and it is quite true for our civilization is dying.
Identity Christians describe this phase as Jacob's Troubles and what the secular Guillaume Faye would, I think, describe as the
catastrophe required to get people motivated. The future has yet to be written, however I cannot help but think that God's people,
the White people, are stirring from their slumber.
"PNAC: Project for New American Century. The main neocon lobby, it focused first on invading Iraq. Founded 1997, by William
Kristol & Robert Kagan. First action: open letter to Clinton advocating Iraq war. Members in the Iraq-War clique: Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Libby, Abrams, Wurmser, Perle.
JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. "explaining the link between U.S. national security and Israel's
security" Served on JINSA's Advisory Board: Cheney, Wolfowitz, Feith, BOLTON, Perle."
If Trump has probable cause on the Soros crimes, have his DoJ request a warrant for all of Soros's communications via the NSA,
empanel a grand jury, indict the bastard, and throw his raggedy ass in prison. It would be hard for him to run his retarded purple
revolution when he's getting ass-raped by his cell mate.
I agree. Thing is, I think as president he can simply order the NSA to cough up whatever they have, just like Obama could have
done at any point. The NSA is part of the Defense Department, right? What am I missing here?
But in respect to Soro's money and the Dalas shooting or other incited events, there should be a grand jury empanelled and
then charges brought against him. I think nothing short of him hiding in an embassy with all his money blocked by Swift is justice
for the violence that he funded.
It is doubtful that President Trump's aides will advise the new president to carry out a diversionary criminal investigation
of Mrs. Clinton's private email servers and other issues related to the activities of the Clinton Foundation, especially when
the nation faces so many other pressing issues, including jobs, immigration, and health care. However, House Oversight and
Government Reform Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz said he will continue hearings in the Republican-controlled Congress on
Hillary Clinton, the Clinton Foundation, and Mrs. Clinton's aide Huma Abedin. President Trump should not allow himself to be
distracted by these efforts. Chaffetz was not one of Trump's most loyal supporters.
And so it begins; I really hope that this is just some misinformation/disinformation, because HE PROMISED he would appoint
a special prosecutor, PROMISED...
The likes of Bill Kristol, Ben Shapiro and Jonah Goldberg get to catch up on their Torah for the forseeable future but the likes
of Lloyd Blankfein will probably get to entertain the court since they have probably crossed paths doing business in NYC. The
"real conservative" deeply introspective, examine-my-conscience crowd screwed themselves to the wall, god love them.
Trump should reverse the McCain Feingold bill. That would take some wind out of Soros' sails, at least temporarily because
that was Soros' bill. He wanted campaign finance reform which actually meant that he wanted to control campaign finance through
501C3 groups, or foundations such as Open Society, Moveon.org, Ella Baker society, Center for American progress, etc. He has a
massive web of these organizations and they fund smaller ones and all kinds of evil.
We know so little about Trump ... he's neoCon friendly to start with (remember he hired neoCon Grandee James Woolsey as an
advisor)... and remember too Trump is promising his own war against Iran ... (just in case you confused him with Mother Theresa)..
But then again JFK took office with a set of initiatives that were far more bellicose and provocative (like putting huge Jupiter
missile launchers on the USSR border in Turkey)... once he saw he light and fired the pro Nazi Dulles Gang , JFK was gunned
down in front of the whole world.
If Trump really is a nationalist patriot he'll need to innoculate the Population about the Deep State... they in turn will
unleash financial disintegration and chaos, a Purple Revolution and then assassinate Trump (or have his own party impeach him)
I'm guessing though that deep down Trump is quite comfortable with a neoCon cabinet... hell he already offered Jamie Diamon
the office of Treasry Secretary... no doubt a calculated gesture to signal compliance with the Deep State.
The Clintons do not do things by accident. Coordination of colors at the concession speech was meant for something. Perhaps the
purple revolution or maybe they want to be seen as royals. It doesn't really matter why they did it; the fact is they are up to
something. They will not agree to go away and even if they offered to just disappear with their wealth we know they are dishonest.
They will come back... that is what they do.
They must be stripped of power and wealth. This act must be performed publicly.
In order to succeed Mr. Trump I suggest you task a group to accomplish this result. Your efforts to make America great again
may disintegrate just like Obamacare if you allow the Clintons and Co. to languish in the background.
The protestors are groups of individuals who may seek association for any number of reasons. One major reason might be the loss
of hope for a meaningful and prosperous life. We should seek out and listen to the individuals within these groups. If they are
truly desirous of being heard they will communicate what they want without use of violence. Perhaps individuals join these protest
groups because they do not have a voice.
Organizing a means to receive the protestors' complaints may co-opt any organized effort to disrupt good political interaction
and it will also separate out the bad elements cited by Madsen.
The articles reporting that Mr. Trump has changed his response to the protestors is a good effort to discover the protestors'
complaints and channel their energy into beneficial political activity. Something must be done quickly though, before the protests
get out of hand, for if that happens the protestors will be criminals and no one will want to work with them.
In order to make America great again we need input from all of America. Mr. Trump you can harness the energy of these protestors
and let them know they are a part of your movement.
Classical economists are experts on today's capitalism, it is 18th and 19th Century capitalism, it's how it all started.
Adam Smith would think we are on the road to ruin.
"But the rate of profit does not, like rent and wages, rise with the prosperity and fall with the declension of the society.
On the contrary, it is naturally low in rich and high in poor countries, and it is always highest in the countries which are going
fastest to ruin."
Exactly the opposite of today's thinking, what does he mean?
When rates of profit are high, capitalism is cannibalizing itself by:
1) Not engaging in long term investment for the future
2) Paying insufficient wages to maintain demand for its products and services.
Got that wrong as well.
Adam Smith wouldn't like today's lobbyists.
"The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order ought always to be listened to with great
precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous,
but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men whose interest is never exactly the same with that of
the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions,
both deceived and oppressed it."
First five minutes of Alex Jones' video today is clips of people saying "Donald Trump will never be president". Full Show - Soros-Funded Goons Deployed to Overthrow America - 11/11/2016
AMERICAN SPRING: She practiced overseas in Tunisia, Algeria, Oman, Jordan, Libya, Egypt... Now it's time to apply the knowledge
in her own country!
lakecity55 -> CoCosAB •Nov 12, 2016 7:53 AM
Really good chance these subversive operations will continue. Soros has plenty of money. Trump will have to do some rough stuff,
but he needs to, it's what we hired him for.
"... "There can be no doubt in the international community's mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its agreement and its statement that it had removed them all. There is no longer any doubt ," Mattis told reporters. ..."
"... there's absolutely No Doubt that the Outlaw US Empire's mouthpieces are lying yet again. ..."
"... Perhaps the more disturbing alternative is Mattis is fully aware of everything surrounding the run up to the 2003 Iraq war and is thinking to himself: "Declaring there is no doubt worked last time..." ..."
"... The particular genius of our oppressors has been to erode the public's collective memory. With a dumbed-down educational system, a 24-hour propaganda, and an utterly vacuous popular culture, we are deprived of precisely that faculty on which following Burke's admonition depends. With our "post-literate" reliance on the Internet, it's a wonder any of us can remember what happened last week. ..."
"... If the Syrians used them, then clearly they have them. Did the Syrians use them? The US does not recognize that as a valid question. That is where Mattis goes astray. It is a valid question. We were fooled by false flag use before. There are signs it may have happened again. It is not clear enough to be sure, but it is not clear enough to be sure the other way either. ..."
"... That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. ~Aldous Huxley ..."
"There can be no doubt in the international community's mind that Syria has retained chemical weapons in violation of its
agreement and its statement that it had removed them all. There is no longer any doubt ," Mattis told reporters.
Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them
to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will
lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors ...
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
And there's absolutely No Doubt that the Outlaw US Empire's mouthpieces are lying yet again. Makes me even more curious
as to what Putin said to Tillerson, as both Putin's and Lavrov's remarks about the global situation are blunter and more accusatory
than ever before. Given the info provided by Lavrov at the press conference following the meeting of their Foreign Ministers Astana,
I must assume the SCO nations are on the same page regarding the entire International Situation. In June in Astana, the SCO Summit
will admit India and Pakistan as full members and begin the process to enroll Iran. Here, again, is the link to that press release,
http://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/-/asset_publisher/cKNonkJE02Bw/content/id/2734712
Perhaps the more disturbing alternative is Mattis is fully aware of everything surrounding the run up to the 2003 Iraq war
and is thinking to himself: "Declaring there is no doubt worked last time..."
The particular genius of our oppressors has been to erode the public's collective memory. With a dumbed-down educational system,
a 24-hour propaganda, and an utterly vacuous popular culture, we are deprived of precisely that faculty on which following Burke's
admonition depends. With our "post-literate" reliance on the Internet, it's a wonder any of us can remember what happened last
week.
If the Syrians used them, then clearly they have them. Did the Syrians use them? The US does not recognize that as a valid
question. That is where Mattis goes astray. It is a valid question. We were fooled by false flag use before. There are signs it
may have happened again. It is not clear enough to be sure, but it is not clear enough to be sure the other way either.
Therefore, Mattis is wrong to conclude anything either way. However, given the official position of the US, he can hardly
say anything different in public.
We ought to be looking at this very closely, but we vetoed such a close look by the international body that would do it. That
would put into question the missile strikes we launched based on assumptions.
Pepe Escobar evokes T.S. Eliot's Hollow Men in his latest enumeration of Russia & China's strategic relationship. Oh, and
I forgot to mention in #1 that BRICS also stands with Russia regarding all events Syria and Ukraine; and despite many efforts
to destabilize it, BRICS still stands in solidarity and continues its work to economically counter the Outlaw US Empire, which
Pepe also reminds us about,
https://sputniknews.com/columnists/201704211052866086-washington-terrified-of-russia-china/
Why would insignificant village be intentionally "gassed by Assad" while he has an absolute upper hand on the field? - is the
question nobody in the Western media asks, nor has an answer to it.
Bio-chem weapons would be last resort to use on the battlefield in a desperate situation - was an original thought of making
and having them.
Me and probably all of us here have no doubt that it is just a false flag perpetrated, oversaturated and pathetically served
to us to validate continuation to oust Assad for Saudi's concessions, oil and money. Pure con and a rather amateurish one.
As expected, no doubt. :)
Which state is Iran's greatest enemy? - Israel .. Where was the statement made? .. Who are the greatest financial political contributors
in America? Res Ipsa Loquitur.
The importance of Mattis's pronouncement, as well as some "
tilling of the soil " in the prestige press, is that another false flag attack is coming. The Hillary-McCain directive to
take out Syrian airfields is going to be implemented.
@1 karlof1
Talking Lavrov, talking history... The comprehensive history lesson Lavrov delivers to Tillerson is worth watching a number of
times. It is an absolute shut down, in Tillersons face...rolling straight off the tongue. Tillerson: 'trust us, we are sure, beyond doubt, Assad has chemical weapons' Lavrov: 'here have this 5 minute history lesson you
cabbage. '
SmoothieX12 Difference this time is Syria has Russian backing and the BRICS [almost half the population of the World].Russia knows
Syria is the key to the Middle East, if Syria fell, Hezbollah could not resist the head choppers from the North and East and attacks
from the aparthied state from the South. Iran would then be exposed and attacked financially and militarily. Of course its a huge
gamble, will those nutcases in Washington take it? These are existential stakes for many states in the region.
Assad's recent announcement about wanting to buy more Russian air defense systems comes close to addmiting that the Russians
will not be defending Syrian airspace.
To paraphrase tRump:
...the submarines, even more powerful than the carriers...
So, all the assets are in place. We're starting to see the accusation swarm against Assad occur at a rate that's too fast to
refute individual charges against the Syrian president.
Don't be surprised if the decapitation strikes against Syria and N.Korea happen simultaneously.
@18 This probably won't appear in the MSM so I'll post it here...
"Emmanuel Macron fears this as well. The 39-year-old presidential candidate – an unknown quantity here just two years ago–
is campaigning for the Jewish vote, keenly aware of the threat. But when France goes to the polls on Sunday, its Jews will face
a unique choice: To vote in the spirit of Jewish Americans, prioritizing principles of welfare and liberal democratic values,
or in the Israeli posture, with security first in mind.
Macron is betting on the former, appealing to Jewish community values shared with the French Republic of liberty, equality
and fraternity.
"He knows there is a real danger from a double extremism – from the far-Right with Marine Le Pen, and from the far-Left," said
Gilles Taieb, a prominent member of the French Jewish community who joined Macron's En Marche! campaign in August. "He understands
the specific needs of the Jewish community.""
Assad's recent announcement about wanting to buy more Russian air defense systems comes close to addmiting that the Russians
will not be defending Syrian airspace.
This is rather a confusing (in BBC's or NYT vein) statement, since Russia, through a number of her high ranking representatives
openly stated that she will upgrade Syria's AD. Syria IS NOT going to buy them, since has very little precious money, but what
Syria is doing already is letting a truck load of Russia's extracting and construction companies on her market. Google Translate
will do the job (link is in Russian)
Iran would then be exposed and attacked financially and militarily.
I have a different opinion about this dynamics and I will not be surprised if Iran "suddenly" will become a full member of
ODKB. At least for a little while.
Fog of war warning and all, but Assad definitely mentioned price as a factor in getting New AD systems in a sputniknews interview.
Of course, mechanism of what in Russian is called vzaimoraschety (mutual "payments" or "coverage") is always established. The
price of military technology may be compensated through other means, such as contractual preferences or any other privileges.
I think Russia's oil companies will be quite happy and so will be weapons' manufacturers. Come to think about it--they already
are.
The question of Russian air defence missiles to Syria should not even be asked, Israel has nuclear weapons, the US don't care,
the US supplies Israel with the latest OFFENSIVE weaponry and aircraft [f35, f16 ect]plus Iron Dome. It would be the height of
folly for Russia not to give Syria the means to defend themselves.
Just as an FYI, I'm unable to access this site when I use a VPN server based in Canada, however VPN servers located elsewhere
connect without issue. Anyone else experience this?
what's the sound of one mad dog jarhead barking? if it sounds off in the media echo-chamber, does it make a noise? it only echoes
in the tnc msm. every american knows he's howling at the moon. it may well be that there's plenty of energy among those clipping
coupons on american war bonds for more war, and no energy among those who fruitlessly opposed empire in the face of those same
coupon-clippers.
its all-war, all-the-time with tee-rump just as it was with obama, bush, and clinton before him. people who are surprised at
this are no more acute than those who might salute the flag the mad dogs have again run up the flag pole.
it would be exceptionally keen if all those cruise missiles unleashed on syria and/or north korea not only turned around, but
struck their origin. wouldn't that be the end?
The American public has to be the most ignorant and gullible group of ass-hats on the planet, if they fall for this BS being shoveled
at them again. God-almighty this crap gets old!!!
All for the sake of global hegemony, and more wealth for the Trumps of the world.
First of all, I don't know how you can tell those speeches are the same though I heard them both mention WMDs. But here's the
kicker, that's not the Canadian PM, not on that date, he was the Leader of the Opposition at that time. Harper became PM later.
Jean Chretien was the PM and he kept Canada out of Iraq. End of story.
b cites Edmund Burke "Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it."
There is also this little ditty:
"If at first you don't succeed try and try and try again. Never stop trying."
It works very well for TPTB who hold the sheeples are too dumbed down and will never recall moving lips.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
@ Perimetr 16
Israel needs to take the other side of the Golan - that's where the oil bubbles bigly. Ask Genie HQ NJ and while at it check
out their Board of Directors, Strategic Advisory Board. Hint, it's the gang and No One dares to spank
[Alert: page may load slowly but a worthy wait].
So forget about it. The op word is Strategic
Israel can strike Syria with 10 MOABs per second 24hr/7 and lips will be festiviously sealed tighter than a crabs rear-end.
A long essay by Robert Kennedy Jr Feb 2016:
"[W]e may want to look beyond the convenient explanations of religion and ideology and focus on the more complex rationales
of history and oil, which mostly point the finger of blame for terrorism back at the champions of militarism, imperialism and
petroleum here on our own shores," Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., intoned in an April editorial for
Ecowatch
thanks b... waiting for the exceptional empire to collapse.. not holding my breathe here.. the same game is being played and the
same folks are hoping for the same results.. they are already getting them when it comes to money thrown into war and prep for
war.. they are winning regardless if they can convince everyone to go deeper..
@17 wwinsti.. could be a head fake... no one knows for sure other then assad and russia.. welcome to the world of endless speculation..
@28 ia... this canuck is not having any issues accessing moa.. who nose.. maybe trudeau and freeland have set up a firewall to
protect us from a different perspective then the 'rah, rah, rah - war 24/7 we support twitter mans agenda'..
The verdict on the chemical attack was swift and certain. When it comes to the recent bus bombing, somehow it is so different:
We are investigating, but I don't have any specific ... But we think it's exaggerated . Inqury on Syria. Security Council Stakeout, 21 April, 2017
Those people have no shame. They are not going to investigate the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack. All the want is the flight
plans from the Syrian government to finish their "work".
"No doubt" is not a statement about an objective reality out there (in country x); it is a statement about the subjective reality
in the mind of the speaker (observer). A cunning ploy to speak a non-falsehood (about the mental conditioning of speaker and audience)
that is merely opinion implying it is fact about a situation lacking empirical evidence.
This hype is getting so tedious.
The WMD crap from The International (Christian Colonial) Community isn't about 'manufacturing consent'. It's about manufacturing
CONSENSUS within the Christian Colonial Community itself. The Jew-controlled MSM takes care of the brainwashing. We already know
that bribed politicians are paid to disregard the Will Of The People.
"Those people have no shame. They are not going to investigate the Khan Sheikhoun chemical attack."
They're just plugging stuff into the dossier so that historians will be able to look back and see how reasonable and restrained
the U.S. was before deciding to bomb the crap out of Assad and his country.
Here's how they can do that : They say " Look , we admit that proving guilt absolutely is next to impossible in these events
, and that we may have been a bit hasty in bombing Syria's airfield before the investigation was done. We'll even concede the
odds in Assad's favor , say 3:1 , or only a 25% chance he was guilty for any given sarin attack , even though we're pretty sure
he's been the culprit. Just know this , when we're sure - let's set a higher standard here and say 90% certainty - when we're
sure about his culpability for just one use of sarin , big or small , that's our red line, after that he gets the full Gaddafi
, no questions asked. OK ? Understand ? "
Everyone nods , probably including some here. When there's any uncertainty , which there always is , he gives Assad the benefit
of the doubt , and then requires a higher threshold to hold him accountable. You can't get more reasonable than that.
Well , maybe somewhat predictably , false-flag activity picks up - two sarin attacks per month over the following two months
, always with the typical doubts about who dunnit. The U.S. keeps their word , with no significant escalation. With the next event
, as soon as sarin is confirmed but well before we think we know who was guilty , the U.S. announces breach of the red line and
launches a full-scale attack on Assad and his partners , demanding that he step down immediately or watch as his country is turned
to rubble. Why ?
Counting the three sarin attacks to date , and the five more that follow , the probability that the rebels committed all eight
attacks is .75^8 , or 10%. That means there's a 90% chance that Assad was responsible for at least one attack - i.e. , he crossed
the red line.
That's why the false-flags will continue , and why a regime-change war with Syria is inevitable , and why the buy-in by the
public when it happens will be nearly unanimous.
That could just as easily be interpreted as Russia planning to intervene while claiming that "Syrian" air defenses have shot
down US aircraft/tomohawaks. I certainly don't know for sure that Russia has actually decided to take it to that level. Perhaps
the Russians will never do that, or perhaps they themselves have not yet decided but want to keep that option open to them if
later they do. At any rate, there is no advantage at all to reassuring the Americans that they will NOT intervene. It is best
to keep Mattis and McMaster guessing just like we are.
I do not know to what degree US planners are confident of easily overcoming serious air defenses. They probably feel that if
they defeat the S400s then US military dominance will remain unchallenged for a very long time. I'm not sure if they've gamed
the opposite outcome. If "Syria" shoots down a few F22s or 35s the US is in deep trouble and any victory (to the extent bringing
jihadists to power can be called a victory) would be a Pyrhic one.
Well, fuck! Here we go again; U.S. is blitzing the international airways with propaganda and lies.
Zieg heil, zeig heil, herr Trump...
You bloody, rotten, bastard!
Karlof1 and Harrylaw: talking about BRICS'support to Russia, never trust Brazil. After Lula and Rousseff,the right-wing president
Michel Temer has transformed the country in just another latin american lackey of Trump...
Of course, there's no way to predict the outcomes of certain actions or read minds of any of the various actors involved with
this sarin drama, but the events in Syria since Sept. 2015 or even Sept. 2001 do allow us to lean our interpretations a certain
way, don't you think?
At the end of the day, an increasingly desperate USA has available 4 Ohio class submarines that carry just short of 200 cruise
missiles each. They are, with some quibbling, decapitation weapon systems designed to overwhelm nearly any defense. I can't see
the US not making use of such a capacity if they are as hell bent on regime change as they claim.
Because the strike on Syrian territory was against International law
http://www.dw.com/en/us-missile-strike-on-syria-a-violation-of-international-law/a-38389950
Putin has to make up his mind, if the US strike Syria again or repeatedly without harming Russial personnel or assets and
without a military response, Russia should sue for peace and get the hell out of Syria, thereby acknowledging that the US are
the only Nation that can decide the fate of Nations with regard to International affairs. In other words the unanimous agreement
of the 5 veto wielding members of the UNSC will no longer be applicable and article 2 of the UN Charter is null and void.
Article 2. [3] UN Charter All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means in such a manner that international
peace and security, and justice, are not endangered.
[4] All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity
or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations.
Are you the NEW York Times commentator. I really enjoy your comments their. I hardly drop by NYT however this week you were
the only sane poster on North Korea. Your a jem keep it up. In fact I think cut and pasted you comment onto a Australian paper.
Bravo.
Yes, the US has an enormous amount of cruise missiles. But judging by the damage done by the last 60 tomohawaks, it does not
have enough to destroy Syrian air power with tomohawaks alone. In past invasions, they were used to destroy radars so that the
subsequent air campaign can be conducted without contending with air defenses. They are not an end in and of themselves. In this
case, that isn't possible unless the US plans on attacking Russian forces on both land and sea directly. The US is so far extremely
reluctant to kill any Russian personnel and that is not likely to change. And this reluctance is not because of good sportsmanship.
Add to that, the Russians have shut down the deconfliction line. It means the US can't warn the Russians to get out of the
way during the next attack. In other words, the Russians are prepared to be human shields to protect Syria. That does not scream
"we are backing down" to me. There are also indications that US and allied sortie rates over Syria have dropped in number quite
substantially since communication has been shut down.
While I agree the US is absolutely determined to destroy Syria, it is not at all clear that Russia plans to step aside while
the US does it.
OT but LA, SF, NYC all experience power outages at the same and only RT makes the connection while MSM oblivious. Meanwhile exercises
for an EMZ attack over a major US city ongoing. Strange
Peter AU @52. Sorry Peter I was being a little sarcastic. I think it has already been established that any US attack on Syria
must be countered in the first instance by Syrian forces, since Russia was invited into Syria to help put down terrorism, it might
not be in Russia's interest or anybody's [unless their forces are hit] to start WW3. Hence my point about arming Syria up the
same way the US does with Israel and Saudi Arabia.All 5 veto wielding powers are of course above International law for all time,
so that if the other members of the Security Council propose a Resolution condemning US aggression, the US simply uses its veto
and that Resolution goes down the memory hole. Here is an excellent article on the veto..
http://www.david-morrison.org.uk/iraq/ags-legal-advice.pdf
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it" does not appear in the complete 12-volume set of Works of Edmund Burke,
and Bartlett's books of quotations have never included it, but the allegation nowadays is common that Burke said this, because
many writers say things that are false. Anyone who trusts a mere allegation, like gossip, is not reliable and cannot be trusted
in what that person alleges, because falsehoods mix in with truths for any such person. The person isn't necessarily fabricating,
not necessarily intentionally falsifying; the person just doesn't care whether what he or she alleges to be true IS true. Any
such person is untrustworthy to cite on anything.
Furthermore, that alleged Burke-quotation doesn't even sound like Burke's writing-style, which was a very distinctive style.
So, anyone who has actually read Burke would suspect that this apocryphal statement from him was probably never said by him. Only
pretentious people would allege that Burke said it -- people who pretend to have read Burke.
@54 lysander, 'In other words, the Russians are prepared to be human shields to protect Syria.'
i don't think that's the message sent or that it's indicative of the action to be taken in the event of another us attack on
syria. as it stood pre-tee-rump-attack the us could call the russians and 'warn' them that the cruise missiles were theirs ...
now they can no longer do that, and the russians have made a point of stating that an attacking aircraft/missile - and the originating
vessel/station - are going to be shot down/taken down ... that the russians will not waste time in trying to figure out just whose
attacking missiles/aircraft they are destroying.
i think it will be a cold day in hell before the russians 'sacrifice' themselves to make a point.
Eric Zuesse | Apr 22, 2017 7:15:46 AM | 59
"Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it"
This from, of all places, Yahoo answers (blech); however it is referenced;
CITES: George Santayana, The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress: Reason in Common Sense 284 (2nd ed., Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York, New York 1924 (originally published 1905 Charles Scribner's Sons)(appears in chapter XII, "Flux and Constancy
in Human Nature")). George Santayana, The Life of Reason or The Phases of Human Progress 82 (one-volume edition, Charles Scribner's
Sons, New York, New York 1954)(appears in Book I, Reason in Common Sense, chapter 10, "Flux and Constancy in Human Nature").
This information was found at: http://members.aol.com/Santayana/gsguestbook.htm
``Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it,'' said Penton, echoing philosopher George Santayana's famous admonition.
All this lies, fake news, psyop by US, NATO and MSM is possibly just because they rule the world. They refuse any other views,
parties, nations questioning their wars and propaganda. Its quite scary when you think about it.
Like, is there ANYONE condemning this in the MSM nowadays? No one.
Every journalist (MSM) from Germany, to US, to Spain, to Portugal, to Columbia, to Sweden, to South Korea etc, all western MSM
peddle this same propaganda for the american empire and their endless wars.
1984?
@ 60, I don't think sacrifice is the word I would use. The US understands that killing openly Russian soldiers soldiers (vs indirectly
by arming terrorist proxies) would mean Russian retaliation. And therefore will not do it.
@ 60, I don't think sacrifice is the word I would use. The US understands that killing openly Russian soldiers soldiers (vs indirectly
by arming terrorist proxies) would mean Russian retaliation. And therefore will not do it.
well, we're real impressed that you've memorized all 12 volumes of Edmund Burke, but for those of us who haven't, Google does
credit him with this remark. a simple oversight, perhaps? so thanks for the lesson(even if you haven't cleared anything up), and
the mini diatribe, teach, even though your scholarly footnotes have fuck all to do with b's intent.
"no doubt"
Did they get this from Bush's speech to congress in March, 2003?
"Intelligence gathered by this and other governments leaves no doubt that the Iraq regime continues to possess and conceal some
of the most lethal weapons ever devised."
Real intelligence left all kinds of doubt especially from the family members of Iraqi scientists who went into Iraq to ask. They
risked their lives for this and were ignored.
"we assess" - recent prepeated mantra from USG declarations. I'm waiting for The Donald or his CIA minion to declare Syrian
WMDs to be a "slam dunk." I think Cheney used to say "we have it on good authority." The rule for most politicians and media is
if their lips move they're lying.
Perhaps after another coalition of the willing has destroyed Syria will the US president joke about searching for WMDs like Bush
did. An insult to us all.
The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Quotations has the quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" made
by George Santayana (1863 - 1952) in The Life of Reason (1905) vol. 1, ch. 12
Oxford is fairly reliable sourcing for such questions, FWIW. As far as the western world and history another quote comes to
mind from Dante Alighiere (1265-1321) that translates: Abandon all hope, you who enter! [with regard to history].
We need a Jon Stewart style montage of all these people saying "no doubt" followed by the group No Doubt saying it. (like he did
with the GOP/FNC meme of "It's A Trap")
"Counting the three sarin attacks to date , and the five more that follow , the probability that the rebels committed all eight
attacks is .75^8 , or 10%. That means there's a 90% chance that Assad was responsible for at least one attack - i.e. , he crossed
the red line."
I understand that this was presented as an incorrect reasoning, but perhaps not all readers here see the mistakes. First, probability
is used to describe random events and not historical events. The post that you see here could be written by Piotr Berman, an identifiable
individual, or by an impostor. In itself the claim that it was written by Piotr Berman is true or false, it does not have probability.
However, from the point of view of a reader, it is but one of a large number of comments posted on internet so one can apply some
guessed estimates, like "10% of comments signed with uniquely identifiable names are written by impostors". This of course begs
the question how we arrive at such estimates etc. In short, the probability assigned to a single sarin attack is an exhalation
from someones terminal end of the digestive system and quite hazardous if used.
However, even if we form an abstract model in which a chemical attack is randomly perpetrated by X with probability p and not
by X with probability 1-p, and we have 8 attacks, the probability that X perpetrated at least one attack is anywhere between 0
and 1. The formula (1-p)^8 applies only if the events are independent. For example, if X possesses the means to perpetrate an
attack with probability q, then the probability that it perpetrated any of many attacks is never larger than q.
That said, probabilities have their place in war strategy. If a false flag attack has a random effect on a key decision maker,
that repeating it many times may increase the probability that a desired decision will be made. And Trump's and Obama's behavior
has (and had) a degree of randomness.
You're correct about the technical probability considerations , of course , but I think the real-life effect of each new false-flag
may fall closer to the line drawn by the bad model than by the good. I think all parties involved know that each new false-flag
has an incremental impact driving us closer to war ,in addition to the random one you mention , at least as long as there remains
considerable doubt about the true culprit with each new event.
From Khan al-Assal to Ghouta to Khan Sheikhoun we've moved closer and closer to the real "red line". For the anti-Assad camp
, the false-flag strategy is still working and they'll keep it up , though I'm sure they're getting impatient. For the Assad side
, gaining territory has the opposite effect , moving us away from the red line. Had Assad and Putin doubled-down on battlefield
intensity after Aleppo and made further gains , rather than pausing as they did , I think they'd be in much better shape today.
The usage of "there can be no doubt" is a bit different from what we could learn in English classes. First, "doubt" is a kind
of thought-weed that is at times harmless, and at times seriously detrimental and thus subjected to eradication efforts. "There
is no doubt" declares the success of the eradication campaign while "There can be no doubt" is more like "There should not be
any doubt", i.e. an exhortation to continue and expand eradication campaign. Usually the large fields of major agribusiness companies
are well tended with copious amounts of herbicides, while on the edges, meadows, smaller organically tended fields etc. the weeds
can survive and in isolated places they can even thrive.
From that point of view excessive consumption of, say, NYT or TV news can make people positive for "symptoms of sarin or sarin-like
chemicals" like Roundup when we take swabs from their mucosal surfaces and analyze with sensitive instruments. Smaller but proudly
"mainstream" publications like New Yorker have no doubt either (in this case it is easy, because New Yorker is very compartmentalized,
few individuals are allowed to write on the topic, this way they can keep doubt from showing without mass use of chemicals). The
Nation has some articles written by doubt-free persons (like Katha Pollit) but doubt levels are significant -- kept down mostly
by small number of articles on Syria. And Counterpunch is a weed in itself.
How about this: The US is prime Nazi country/regime, and the Zionist state is modeled after the US, or the European racism.
The settler states are known for its unprecedented violence. Unfortunately, still the phenomenon of extermination is connected
with Germany and not the US.
One of many U.S. state laws that Nazis examined was this from Maryland:
"All marriages between a white person and a Negro, or between a white person and a person of Negro descent, to the third generation,
inclusive, or between a white person and a member of the Malay race or between a Negro and a member of the Malay race, or between
a person of Negro descent to the third generation, inclusive, and a member of the Malay race . . . [skipping over many variations]
. . . are forever prohibited . . . punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary for not less than eighteen months nor more
than ten years."
@78 bp. 'From that point of view excessive consumption of, say, NYT or TV news can make people positive for "symptoms of sarin
or sarin-like chemicals" like Roundup when we take swabs from their mucosal surfaces and analyze with sensitive instruments.'
very nice piotr berman. the metaphor is so well drawn, and in the following cases as well. One has a malady, here, a malady.
One feels a malady.
the dysfunctions all swell from a common source, into a slum of bloom. the wigs despoiling the Satan ear.
Yes, I was apprehensive at first, but the new regime toed BRICS's lines, participated in its functions as usual, and has tried
to use it in its national interest. Brazil's internal contradictions don't allow it to abandon its one big success story. And
as I stated, BRICS policy declarations are all in line with Russia and China's in every area.
While many of the big brains go to Wall St. to front guess Mr. Market, there are others, "no doubt", that build geopolitical
dashboards, models and simulations for the elite to monitor all the countries/governments/militaries/public.
In spite of their visibility of their universe, they are losing control and know it. The absurdity of the ongoing global debt
situation is a tell.
All countries have evolving relationships with both the US and China as well as within the various groups of nations. China
is talking growth and the US/private finance is talking austerity. It is not if but a matter of when growth wins out and global
finance is put under public control.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. ~Aldous Huxley
Afghan officials have said nearly 100 militants and no civilians were killed, but the remoteness of the area, the presence
of Islamic State fighters, and, more recently, American security forces, has left those claims unverified.
British elite is capable to commit any crimes imaginable perusing its goals.
Notable quotes:
"... "The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had announced the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after a similar announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield." ..."
OT but very relevant to the Skripal/Douma incidents.
The Guardian has an
article today headlined
" The taboo on chemical weapons has lasted a century – it must be preserved " which is a bare-faced lie as the Guardian
should know because the British used chemical weapons against the Russian in August, 1919, less than a century ago, and the Japanese,
among America's closest allies used them against the Chinese in World War 2.
The strongest case for Churchill as a chemical warfare enthusiast involves Russia, and was made by Giles Milton in The Guardian
on 1 September 2013, which prompted this article. Milton wrote that in 1919, scientists at the governmental laboratories at
Porton in Wiltshire developed a far more devastating weapon: the top secret "M Device," an exploding shell containing
a highly toxic gas called diphenylaminechloroarsine [DM].
The man in charge of developing it, Major General Charles Foulkes, called it "the most effective chemical weapon ever devised."
Trials at Porton suggested that it was indeed a terrible new weapon. Uncontrollable vomiting, coughing up blood and
instant, crippling fatigue were the most common reactions. The overall head of chemical warfare production, Sir Keith Price,
was convinced its use would lead to the rapid collapse of the Bolshevik regime. "If you got home only once with the gas you
would find no more Bolshies this side of Vologda."
A staggering 50,000 M Devices were shipped to Russia: British aerial attacks using them began on 27 August 1919 .Bolshevik
soldiers were seen fleeing in panic as the green chemical gas drifted towards them. Those caught in the cloud vomited blood,
then collapsed unconscious. The attacks continued throughout September on many Bolshevik-held villages. But the weapons proved
less effective than Churchill had hoped, partly because of the damp autumn weather. By September, the attacks were halted then
stopped.
"The 'chemical incident' has likely been faked. It suspiciously happened just a few days after U.S. President Trump had
announced the he wanted the U.S. military to leave Syria. A year earlier a similar incident was claimed to have happened after
a similar announcement by Trump. The U.S. had responded to the 2017 incident by bombing an empty Syrian airfield."
Watching reports coming out of Syria in real time, I thought it was a genuine strike. Same as I thought the JK build up was
the real thing and also the 59 missiles a year ago. Once the dust, smoke, and the fog of war had cleared, it became apparent that
this, was yet again a choreographed move, same as the missiles on Shayrat airfield.
I may well be wrong, as I do not go along with group think here, but this strike seems a preemptive move by Trump to prevent
a push for for US military action in Syria that will take us to WWIII.
"... Authored by Peter Hitchens via The Mail On Sunday blog, ..."
"... I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure. ..."
"... In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks ..."
"... But I've never seen one like this. It scared me. ..."
"... If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be started by a falsehood. ..."
I stood outside the safe house, in a road I cannot name, in a major European city I cannot
identify, not sure what I might find inside. I had no way of being sure.
I had travelled a long distance by train to an address I had been given over an encrypted email.
I was nervous that the meeting might be some sort of trap.
Leaks from inside arms
verification organisations are very sensitive matters. Powerful people mind about them.
I wasn't sure whether to be afraid of being followed, or to be worried about who might be waiting behind
the anonymous door on a dark afternoon, far from home. I took all the amateurish precautions that I could
think of.
As it happened, it was not a trap. Now, on carefully selected neutral ground, I was to meet a person
who would confirm suspicions that had been growing in my mind over several years – that there is something
rotten in the way that chemical weapons inspections are being conducted and reported. And that the world
could be hurried into war on the basis of such inspections.
Inside the safe house, I was greeted by a serious, patient expert, a non-political scientist
whose priority had until now always been to do the hard, gritty work of verification
– travelling
to the scenes of alleged horrors, sifting and searching for hard evidence of what had really happened.
But this entirely honourable occupation had slowly turned sour.
The whiff of political interference had begun as a faint unpleasant smell in the air and grown
until it was an intolerable stench.
Formerly easy-going superiors had turned into tricky bureaucrats.
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) had become so important that it could
no longer be allowed to do its job properly.
Too many of the big powers that sponsor and finance it were breathing down its neck, wanting certain
results, whether the facts justified them or not.
My source calmly showed me various pieces of evidence that they were who they said they were,
and knew what they claimed to know, making it clear that they worked for the OPCW and knew its inner workings.
They then revealed a document to me.
This was the email of protest, sent to senior OPCW officials, saying that a report on the alleged Syrian
poison gas attack in Douma, in April 2018, had been savagely censored so as to alter its meaning.
In decades of journalism I have received quite a few leaks
:
leaks
over luxurious, expensive lunches with Cabinet Ministers, anonymous leaks that just turned up in envelopes,
leaks from union officials and employers, diplomats and academics.
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But I've never seen one like this. It scared me.
If it was true, then
something hugely dishonest and dangerous was going on, in a place where absolute integrity was vital.
If bodies such as the OPCW cannot be trusted, then World War Three could one day be
started by a falsehood.
Last week I reported on the first episode in this story. Within days the OPCW had confirmed that the
email I leaked was authentic.
Nobody followed me home or threatened me. A few silly people on social media told blatant lies about
me, insinuating that I was somehow a Russian patsy or a defender of the disgusting Syrian regime that
I have been attacking in print for nearly 20 years. That was what I had expected.
But there is much more to come.
And, as it grows harder for everyone to ignore this
enormous, dangerous story,
I suspect I shall be looking over my shoulder rather more than usual.
Chile - it's not just the level of inequality and austerity in the country that triggered
the social uprising against the elite. On the OECD's 'better life' index, Chile scores very
badly even compared to other Latin American countries.
The OECD index allows you to compare well-being across countries, based on 11 topics the
OECD has identified as essential, in the areas of material living conditions and quality of
life.
The Indian economy is heading into trouble - to all intent, in recession. The
second-largest country in the world by population grew only 4.5 percent year-on-year in the
third quarter of 2019, below 5 percent in the previous period and market expectations of
4.7 percent. That's the weakest pace since the first three months of 2013, mainly due to a
fall in factory output and exports and a slowdown in investment.
Investment, sluggish for nearly a decade, grew a mere 1 per cent year-on-year, down from
4 per cent in the previous quarter. Manufacturing output contracted 1 per cent.
Infrastructure investment has collapsed.
The government has announced several measures to boost growth including a reduction in
corporate taxes, concessions on vehicle purchases, bank recapitalisation. Meanwhile, the
central bank has already cut borrowing cost 5 times this year and is seen lowering rates
again next week.
This is a very interesting example of how Western (i.e. libera, capitalist) propaganda
works, and also a very illustrative example of how capitalism declined from the point of view
of a person who benefitted the most from it when it was at its apex:
The shock in the US was that the Russians were not only competitive, but had embarrassed US
science and engineering by being first. In 1958, President Eisenhower signed into law the
National Defense Education Act, and this enabled talented students to flow into science and
engineering. The shock waves were felt throughout the entire educational system, from top
to bottom. Mathematics was more important than football.
He's right in the abovementioned paragraph. If you interviewed people who were 12-14 years
old between 1958 and 1963, and asked about what would be the future of the USA in the year
2000, most of them would have more or less the same answer: that the future of America was
scientific, bright, of high technology; a nation where scientists and engineers would be more
more venerated than tv celebrities and football/baseball players. It would be the world of
the infamous "flying cars" and space exploration and colonization.
Nobody in 1963 would imagine that the USA of the 2000s would be the USA of finance,
of Wall Street ; of football players, of the anti-vaxxers, of the flat earthers and of
the Kardashians.
But they should've. The reason this degeneration happened is the fact that the USA is a
capitalist society. In capitalism, scientific progress is accidental. What matters in the
capitalist system is the valorization process, not the process of use value creation. Like
any other societal formations, capitalism has a revolutionary period, an apex period, a
decline period and a collapse period. In my opinion, world capitalism has just exited its
apex phase and is now entering its decline phase.
Here's the propaganda part of the article:
As demonstrated by the USSR, socialism does not prohibit scientific prowess. There is a
difference, of course. Socialism's success in the USSR came at the expense of millions of
lives, the slave labor of millions more, and a lower standard of living. Nevertheless, the
fact is that Yuri Gagarin was the first person to orbit the earth. In comparison to the US
today, Soviet universities were not plagued by whining children – nor are today's
Chinese universities. The Soviets thought it wiser that their young study calculus and
physics.
This paragraph encapsulates all the elements of Cold War propaganda about the USSR. When I
read it, it felt like a blast from the past.
First, the image of the USSR as essentially a slavery society is a Western chimera. They
come from Weber -- who once theorized the USSR as a "modern Ancient Egypt" -- and the
propaganda from Solzhenitsyn, who hugely exagerated the number of prisoners in the USSR.
In fact, even at the height of the GULAG era, the USSR's jailed population never went
beyond 1.5% of its overall population (as we know now from Soviet official archives). That's
well within the world's average. If only 1.5% of the population is able to sustain the other
98.5%, then even I want to know how the Soviets operated such an economic miracle.
Besides, the USSR obviously didn't kill "millions of people" in order to send someone to
space. That's obviously absurd by any metric, logic included. First of all because this would
never gather political consensus among the population, second because it is impossible to do
rocket science with slave labor.
The quick rise of the Third Reich gave birth to the myth in the West that slave labor can
operate miracles. Nothing is further from the truth. In Ancient times, both the Greeks and
the Romans already knew slave labor was only economically viable in very basic and simple
tasks, such as agriculture, mining and other domestic services. Athens achieved naval
supremacy over Greece by using wage labor for its rowing and sailor crews, so that they could
be professionals with high morale in the battlefield. The reason for this is that maneuvering
triremes was an extremely complex art, too complex and valuable for the Athenians to trust to
slaves. They also had, by the nature and complexity of the task, a naturally high degree of
freedom from their "bosses". Either way, the task was simply too complex for a slave to
phisically learn, since a slave was kept into his/her place through physical deprivation and
domination, and a sailor had to be always fit physically and mentally to wage wars at sea.
The Spartans didn't slave their coastal colonies, giving them a much larger degree of freedom
(perioikoi), probably in exchange for a supply of sailors, ships. The Romans also did the
same: when a slave became specialized enough in the family business (such as acting as a
middle man in the paterfamilias' businesses in some coastal city), he usually "gifted" him
with his freedom.
In sum: even the ancients knew that, for more complex tasks, free people were a must.
Slavery was only economically viable for very simple and denigrating tasks (specially,
agriculture and mining).
As for the "lower quality of living", that's highly debatable. Surely, on average, the
USSR certainly didn't enjoy the same life quality than the top of the capitalist chain of the
time. But inequality was much, much lower (almost negligible) except for the rural-urban
divide, and there was no deprivation.
On average, life quality in the USSR was much better than the vast majority of the
capitalist nations with the benefit inequality was negligible (so the average approached the
median). Sure, it was no post-1980s Norway or Finland -- but those are microscopic capitalist
nations, with negligible population.
Thanks vk. The Soviet achievements in space were the achievements of a free people who had
to make superhuman sacrifices in order to preserve their freedom. Here's Boris Chertok, a
remarkable Soviet space designer whose experiences stretched from the crowds of 1917 and
Lenin's funeral to the construction of the international Space Station:
"I am part of the generation that suffered irredeemable losses, to whose lot in 20th
century fell the most arduous of tests. From childhood, a sense of duty was inculcated in
this generation - a duty to the people, to the Motherland, to our parents, to future
generations, and even to all humanity.
...
Currently ... it is ideological collapse that threatens the objective recounting of
[Soviet] science and technology ... motivated by the fact that its origins date back to the
Stalin epoch or to the period of the 'Brezhnev Stagnation'"
After six years of trials, Russia's 29B6 Konteyner over-the-horizon-radar has
finally become fully operational. According to its chief designer Mikhail Petrov, the radar
is detecting and tracking F-35 jets up to 3000 km away . The radar, located in
Mordovia (receiver) and Nizhny Novgorod Oblast (transmitter), is oriented westwards; Russia
plans to build three
more 29B6 Konteyners for the east, north-west, and south directions.
Ambassador Frank G. Wisner raised his son-in-law Nicolas Sarkozy, a teenager in New
York.
Just another ordinary coincidence. Meaningless, really./sarc
Like Jews and power (They don't have any so shut up.) ; Hillary and Benghazi
(What difference does it make? None whatsoever.) ; and Trump and Epstein (He cut
off relations! It just took him 10 years to tell us about it) .
" That anonymous author (a German intelligence analyst) documented the evilness of the overthrow of Evo Morales in Bolivia,
and the threat now clearly posed to the world by the US regime -- a spreading cancer of expansionist fascism, led from Washington.
But, even more than this, he indicated that unless the individuals who are responsible for the advancing fascism are executed,
there won't be any real hope for democracy anywhere in the world. Either this impunity will stop, or else the spread of the US
international dictatorship -- not only by CIA coups such as this, but by illegal international invasions such as of Iraq 2003,
Libya 2011, Syria 2012-, and Yemen 2015-, -- will continue and will engulf in misery ultimately the entire world . He makes
clear the complicity of US 'news'-media in the lies that 'justify' this coup (and 'justified' those invasions)." [My Emphasis]
IMO, that's a very broad interpretation of b's summation, but I cannot argue against the section I bolded--as some may have
noticed, my appellation for the USA has evolved to better reflect its nature: the Evil Outlaw US Empire. There are numerous reasons
that prompted me to do so, one I mentioned in my reply @14 to S--tact is no longer employed in diplomacy by the Evil Outlaw US
Empire, and that's a very bad sign, IMO. Zuesse continues on calling out the crimes of BigLie Media, echoing my accusation that
the writers and editors are all committing the crimes of Goebbels and ought to mimic his actions when his end was nigh.
Zueese ends his very authentic rant with the following prescription which was clearly needed prior to 911:
"Unfortunately, the only global solution would be a second American Revolution, but, this time, the news-media are far less
honest, and so almost no support exists amongst the US population for doing that. Consequently, the outlook for the future, worldwide,
is grim. If the warning (hidden by the media as it is), this time from Bolivia, is not heeded, how can this cancer ever be stopped
from engulfing the entire world?"
It's curious that an impending Civil War within the Evil Outlaw US Empire is posited but seldom a 2nd Revolution, although
the latter's been discussed at the bar by myself and others off and on over the past several years. I wrote the following in a
reply to psychohistorian on the previous open thread:
"I appears that the prerequisite to obtaining freedom and democracy is public ownership of the vast majority of financial levers.
Without public capture of that essential domain, only some form of penury is possible for the vast majority of commonfolk, leaving
only a select hierarchy free, democracy reserved only for their use. Pretty well sums up the current situation within the Evil
Outlaw US Empire I'd say."
The Civil Arm of the coup: one of the best-funded NGOs in Bolivia during 2017 and 2018 was the International Republican Institute
(IRI). http://bit.ly/37HYnit
The destabilization of Ukraine and Tunisia are the main achievements of this American organization.
US Empire's Ambassador to Germany Richard Grenell gets irked that more nations are joining the INSTEX mechanism for commerce with Iran as
shown by his Tweet:
"cc: @TreasurySpox @USTreasury sounds to me like all these people and groups should be added
to the US Sanctions list. We should ensure that they don't get to work in the US market.
Iran or the US -- they decide. But not both ." [My Emphasis]
The nations saying we're not with you are Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway,
and Sweden--what might be termed the more enlightened Europeans.
And here we have Germany's CDU acting in a manner reflecting the Bush Doctrine as it debated
Germany's 5G
rollout :
"The moderates, represented by Merkel, believe that Germany should not rule out any company
over political issues, but focus more on objective factors such as whether its technological
security and standards meet German requirements. However, some hard-liners make it an
ideological issue and believe Huawei should be excluded. The reason they provided is ' no
Chinese company is an independent company,' adding that Huawei's involvement is principally "an
imminent question of national security .
"After decades of following the US, Germany has somewhat lost the ability to independently
decide its development and destiny. But in recent years, the US has been pursuing
unilateralism. The export-oriented German economy is affected by not only China-US trade
conflicts, but also US threat of imposing tariffs on German products. Thus, it is time for
Berlin to stop its fear of threats from Washington and make choices that are in line with its
own interests." [My Emphasis]
Every Evil Outlaw US Empire chartered corporation in the tech realm is not an "independent
company" since they work hand in glove with CIA, NSA, FBI, other government organizations, and
are also funded by the government. The same is likely true of every Western tech company. A
double standard excuse in service of continuing the Bush Doctrine.
To paraphrase Grenell, Now is most certainly the time to declare your independence and
reclaim your sovereignty and cease acting in the service of another nation.
MOSCOW, November 28. /TASS/. Russian-Ukrainian gas consultations with the participation of
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak, the Minister of Energy and Environmental Protection of
Ukraine Alexey Orzhel, Gazprom CEO Alexey Miller, the heads of Naftogaz of Ukraine and LLC Gas
Transmission System of Ukraine were held in Vienna on Thursday.
This is according to statements by the Russian Energy Ministry and Gazprom. Read also
GECF believes Russia and Ukraine
will manage to agree on gas transit to EU this year "The parties discussed
Russian-Ukrainian cooperation in the gas sector -- settlement of mutual claims for the
implementation of contracts, the terms for the transit of Russian gas to Europe from 2020, the
prospects for direct purchase of Russian gas for Ukrainian consumers," the statement said.
Russia, the European Commission and Ukraine have been holding consultations on gas transit
after 2020. The dialogue is complicated by the ongoing legal disputes between Russia's Gazprom
and Naftogaz of Ukraine. Moscow offers a "package solution" that includes a settlement
agreement on legal disputes and direct gas purchases at reduced prices. As a fallback, Russia
is ready to extend the current transit agreement for the whole year of 2020.
Ukraine considers the settlement agreement on legal disputes and the signing of a
short-term contract to be unacceptable. Earlier this month, Naftogaz' executive director, Yury
Vitrenko, announced that Ukraine would pump Russian transit gas to its underground storage
facilities (UGS), if this gas entered the country without an appropriate contract starting from
January 1, 2020.
The next round of trilateral consultations on the transit of Russian gas to Europe through
Ukraine from 2020 is scheduled for the first week of December.
The existing contracts for the supply and transit of Russian gas through Ukraine expire on
December 31.
At a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on November 27, a gas price for the
population was fixed at 8 hryvnias per cubic meter. KIEV, November 30. /TASS/. The gas price
for Ukrainians may increase to 12,000 hryvnias (about $500) per 1,000 cubic meters in the event
of the termination of transit from Russia from January 1, 2020, Minister of Energy and
Environment of Ukraine Alexey Orzhel said on Friday.
"The price of 12,000 hryvnia is possible in the absence of transit," he said speaking on the
national television.
Orzhel also recalled that the government had offered Ukrainians the so-called guaranteed
price of gas in the amount of 8,000 hryvnias (about $333) per 1,000 cubic meters in case the
gas transit is halted from the new year and the cost of gas increases significantly.
At a meeting of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine on November 27, a gas price for the
population was fixed at 8 hryvnias per cubic meter.
Gazprom began construction of the offshore section of the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in May
2017. The pipeline with a length of 930 km runs along the bottom of the Black Sea to the coast
of Turkey. Further, a land section will stretch for 180 km to the border of Turkey with
neighboring countries.
Gazprom began construction of the offshore section of the Turkish Stream in May 2017,
managed by South Stream Transport B.V. (100% subsidiary of Gazprom). The offshore section of
the pipeline runs along the bottom of the Black Sea to the coast of Turkey. Its length is 930
km. The pipeline will be continues by a 180-km land transit line to the border of Turkey with
neighboring countries. The first line will be designed for the Turkish market, the second - for
gas supply to the countries of South and Southeast Europe. The capacity of each line is 15.75
billion cubic meters of gas per year. The first deliveries are scheduled for the end of 2019.
Gazprom announced the completion of deep-sea laying of the offshore section of the first
Turkish Stream in April 2018. Turkey is Gazprom's second largest export market. Currently,
Russian energy is supplied to this country through the Blue Stream pipeline and the
Trans-Balkan gas pipeline. In 2017, Gazprom exported a record volume of gas to the Turkish
market - 29 billion cubic meters, which is 17.3% more than in 2016, and 1.7 billion cubic
meters (6.2%) more than in 2014 when the previous maximum was set (27.3 billion cubic meters).
At the end of May, Gazprom and the Turkish government signed a protocol on the land section of
the Turkish Stream pipeline transit line to supply Russian gas to European consumers. Gazprom
and the Turkish company Botas concluded an agreement on the basic conditions and parameters for
the construction of the section. Joint venture TurkAkim Gaz Tasima A. S. will carry out
construction of the land section.
Earlier, Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors of Gazprom Alexander Medvedev said that
in the near future the company would finally determine the route of the second line of the
Turkish Stream for gas supply to countries in Southern and Southeast Europe. According to him,
two main options are being discussed in accordance with the procedures in the European Union
and the European Commission. Medvedev cited Greece, Italy, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary as
potential markets.
Gazprom's investments in the construction of the Turkish Stream for 2018 are planned at the
level of 182.4 bln rubles ($2.76 bln) against almost 93 bln rubles ($1.4 bln) in 2017. The
company estimates the cost of laying the pipeline at 7 bln euro.
The Ukies imagine they are so clever! They will waive a claim they have pretty much no chance
of ever being awarded, in return for a lesser amount of guaranteed cold, hard cash plus a
transit deal which will commit Russia to giving them at least another $20 Billion in transit
fees over 10 years. Russia should pretend to consider it, just to wind them up, and run out
the clock on the signing of a new contract. Then say, "I've decided not to after all, old
chap".
That would be Moscow State University, the "Harvard" of Russia.
Not in the MSM at all, but I have mu sources, and apparently sometime last week the FSB, the successor to the domestic arm of
the old KGB, raised Moscow State (whose main building is one of those "Stalin Gothic" skyscrapers) to capture a student who had been
posting leaflets on walls protesting recent government actions. He was reortedly taken into the library and severely beaten to the
point of torture.
Oh yes, VV Putin is such a lover of knowledge and science, just like his flunky, Donald J. Trump.
Happy Thanksgiving, you all.
Barkley Rosser
likbez , December 1, 2019 1:31 am
Barkley,
I think you suffer from chronic Russophobia. Or smoked something really strong. You should read Stephen Cohen more., although
I am not sure that it can help.
You just describes the set of action so stupid that they are unrealistic.
Putin after all is a lawyer and he understand how the neoliberal MSM fueled by Western money would react to such an incident.
Can you explain why this student was not taken to court and charged with vandalizing property and forces to couple of month
of community work plus to pay the cost of cleaning as is typical in such cases?
IMHO this is not how Russian authorities usually behave is such case -- they always suspect well organize western provocation
-- look at Pussies provocations and the authorities reaction.
Why FSB needs to chaise a poor student giving neoliberal MSMs another golden opportunity to smear Russia, Not like you did
-- without any evidence, but with a credible evidence? This is police work.
Stephen Cohen (one of the few pundits who actually knows something about Russia:)
"Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things
about Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the
process, we have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic
Party establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:
The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia
attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an
"attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no "attack"
in 2016, only, as I have previously explained, ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both
Russia and America have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more
phobic than the allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And
yet this myth and its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse,
campaigning, and fund-raising.
We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President
Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National
Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy
and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this operation
"Intelgate," and it has since been well documented by other writers, including Lee Smith in
his new book. Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain leading, and equally
Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed such transgressions.
This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will leave power, but
these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain.
We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be
fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media --
leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and
report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate
allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York
Times seem eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and his
appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's critics
accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or
grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and
the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert
Mueller report.
And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by Democrats about
Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations that truly
endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can elude US
missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative and
urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if he
is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did his
predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge" accusations
still being directed at him?"
The Russia thingie/falsehoods are part of corrupt demrats assault on the US constitution.
They are even now predicting their loss in 2020 due to "interference" and people wanting to
know how corrupt the DNC [front running] select has been!
Demrat allies in the shadow revolving door government of neocon humbug factories are
denouncing Trump for his ignoring their war mongering imperial objects.
[Adding assault to injury? The US Constitution was damning enough on its own. What are
they thinking inside the deep state apparatus? Don't they know that power and privilege is
reserved for holders of wealth by the US Constitution? Who do they think that they are really
working for?]
Friend ilsm may be less nuts than it appears, but friend ilsm is not less incomprehensible
than it appears. Would it be out of place to thank you for ilsm's sake?
Our two-party system was largely useless after FDR, but our two-party system has been
largely destructive since 1968. Let me know if anything really changes.
not that I would be ordinarily predisposed to defend her. The problem with delusions is that
they can easily become self-perpetuating, even easier with the right hand on the tiller.
I have just come back from the land beyond the mountain
This is not a story I was told
When all the people are made out of wood
They build their houses of bones
Sail away, Oh sail away
The edge of the world is near
Sail away, Oh sail away from here
I have just come back from the land beyond the mountain
All the cigarettes are hand rolled
Nothing is bought and nobody is sold
And everything's made of gold
I have just come back from the land beyond the mountain
There a man with wounds I did see
Said: I do not want to escape from reality
I want reality to escape from me
"... More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting at Brussels on November 19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda -- escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarization of space and countering China's rise. ..."
"... Stoltenberg said , "Space is also essential to the alliance's deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And around half of them are owned by NATO countries." ..."
"... "Is our enemy Russia or China as I sometimes hear?" he added at a press conference with Stoltenberg. "Is it the job of the Atlantic alliance to name them as enemies? I don't think so. Our common enemy, it seems, is the terrorism which is striking all our countries." ..."
"... The congruence of interests between Berlin and Washington vis-a-vis Macron manifested itself in the NATO's endorsement of the US-led escalation against Russia and China, with France rather isolated. However, this congruence will be put to test very soon at the summit meeting of the Normandy format over Ukraine, which France is hosting on December 9, following the NATO's London summit. France is helping Russia to negotiate a deal with Ukraine. ..."
"... With NATO being set up by Washington for a confrontationist posture, Russia and China won't let their guard down. Addressing a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council on November 22, Putin said , "There are many uncertainty factors competition and rivalry are growing stringer and morphing into new forms The leading countries are actively developing their offensive weapons the so-called 'nuclear club' is receiving new members, as we all know. We are also seriously concerned about the NATO infrastructure approaching our borders, as well as the attempts to militarise outer space." ..."
"... The Russian response is also visible on the ground. The share of modern weapons and equipment in the Russian Army and Navy has reached an impressive level of 70 percent. The first pilot batch of next-generation T-14 Armata tanks will arrive for the Russian troops in late 2019 – early 2020. ..."
The December 3-4 summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in London resembles
a family reunion after the acrimony over the issue of military spending by America's European
allies.
The trend is up for defence spending across European Allies and Canada. Over $100 billion is
expected to be added to the member states' defence budgets by end-2020.
More importantly, the trend at the NATO foreign ministers' meeting at Brussels on November
19-20, in the run-up to the London summit, showed that despite growing differences within the
alliance, member states closed ranks around three priority items in the US global agenda --
escalation of the aggressive policy toward Russia, militarization of space and countering
China's rise.
The NATO will follow Washington's lead to establish a space command by officially regarding
space as "a new
operational domain" .
According to NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg, this decision "can allow NATO planners
to make a request for allies to provide capabilities and services, such as satellite
communications and data imagery."
Stoltenberg said , "Space is also essential to
the alliance's deterrence and defence, including the ability to navigate, to gather
intelligence, and to detect missile launches. Around 2,000 satellites orbit the Earth. And
around half of them are owned by NATO countries."
Equally, Washington has been urging the NATO to officially identify China's rise as a
long-term challenge. According to media reports, the Brussels meeting acceded to the US demand
and decided to officially begin military surveillance of China.
The US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo hit out at
China after the Brussels meeting:
"Finally, our alliance must address the current and potential long-term threat posed by
the Chinese Communist Party. Seventy years ago, the founding nations of NATO came together
for the cause of freedom and democracy. We cannot ignore the fundamental differences and
beliefs in the – between our countries and those of the Chinese Communist Party."
So far so good.
However, it remains to be seen if Washington's grand design to draw NATO into its
"Indo-Pacific strategy" (read containment of China) will gain traction. Clearly, the US intends
to have a say in the European allies' growing business and economic relations with China to
delimit Chinese influence in Europe. The US campaign to block 5G technology from China met with
rebuff from several European countries.
On the other hand, the European project has unravelled and the Franco-German axis that was
its anchor sheet has become shaky. The rift between Paris and Berlin works to Washington's
advantage but, paradoxically, also hobbles the western alliance system.
The French President Emmanuel Macron annoyed Germany by his recent calls for better
relations with Russia "to prevent the world from going up in a conflagration"; his brutally
frank remarks about NATO being "brain dead" and the US policy on Russia being "governmental,
political and historical hysteria"; and his repeated emphasis on a European military policy
independent of the US.
"NATO is an organization of collective defense. Against what, against who is it defending
itself? Who is our common enemy? This question deserves clarification," Macron said after
talks in Paris with Jens Stoltenberg, NATO's secretary-general on Thursday, according to the
Times.
He argues that new talks with Russia are vital to European security and has pushed for
European involvement in a new deal to replace the defunct Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces
treaty between the U.S. and Russia.
"Is our enemy Russia or China as I sometimes hear?" he added at a press conference with
Stoltenberg. "Is it the job of the Atlantic alliance to name them as enemies? I don't think
so. Our common enemy, it seems, is the terrorism which is striking all our countries."
The congruence of interests between Berlin and Washington vis-a-vis Macron manifested itself
in the NATO's endorsement of the US-led escalation against Russia and China, with France rather
isolated. However, this congruence will be put to test very soon at the summit meeting of the
Normandy format over Ukraine, which France is hosting on December 9, following the NATO's
London summit. France is helping Russia to negotiate a deal with Ukraine.
The recent phone calls between
Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky underscored
the growing interest in Moscow and Kiev at the leadership level to improve relations between
the two countries.
Moscow's breakthrough Avangard missile system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will
be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force in December 2019
In the final analysis, the Franco-German relations are of pivotal importance to not only
Europe's strategic future but the western alliance system as such. If anyone was in doubt, the
French veto in October
means sudden death for the proposal on European Union accession of the Balkan state of North
Macedonia, which NATO is inducting as its newest member. Berlin and Washington are livid, but a
veto is a veto.
With NATO being set up by Washington for a confrontationist posture, Russia and China won't
let their guard down. Addressing a meeting of the Russian Federation Security Council on
November 22, Putin said , "There are many uncertainty
factors competition and rivalry are growing stringer and morphing into new forms The leading
countries are actively developing their offensive weapons the so-called 'nuclear club' is
receiving new members, as we all know. We are also seriously concerned about the NATO
infrastructure approaching our borders, as well as the attempts to militarise outer
space."
Putin stressed, "In these conditions, it is important to make adequate and accurate
forecasts, analyze the possible changes in the global situation, and to use the forecasts and
conclusions to develop our military potential."
Significantly, only four days before Putin made the above remarks, Chinese President Xi
Jinping told him at a meeting in Brasilia on the sidelines of the BRICS summit that "the
ongoing complex and profound changes in the current international situation with rising
instability and uncertainty urge China and Russia to establish closer strategic coordination to
jointly uphold the basic norms governing international relations, oppose unilateralism,
bullying and interference in other countries' affairs, safeguard the respective sovereignty and
security, and create a fair and just international environment."
Putin responded by saying that "Russia and China have important consensus and common
interests in maintaining global strategic security and stability. Under the current situation,
the two sides should continue to maintain close strategic communication and firmly support each
other in safeguarding sovereignty, security, and development rights." ( Chinese MFA )
The Russian response is also visible on the ground. The share of modern weapons and
equipment in the Russian Army and Navy has reached an impressive level of 70 percent. The first
pilot batch of next-generation T-14
Armata tanks will arrive for the Russian troops in late 2019 – early 2020.
On November 26, Russian Defence Ministry stated that Moscow's breakthrough Avangard missile
system with the hypersonic boost-glide vehicle will be deployed on combat duty with the Strategic Missile Force
in December.
For the first time, the electronic warfare systems at Russia's military base in Tajikistan will be reinforced
with the latest Pole-21 jamming station that can counter cruise missiles, drones and guided air
bombs and precision weapon guidance systems. Moscow is guarding against the US and NATO
presence in Afghanistan.
Looks like exceptions in US political jargon means "no rivals"... Trump is still dreaming about "Full Spectrum Dominance"
Otherwise he would not populate his administration with rabid neocons, leftover from Bush II administration. As well as
people who were responsible for Obama color revolutions and wars. Instead of gratitude from neocons viper nest in the State
Department he got Ukrainegate as a Thanksgiving present.
Notable quotes:
"... If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished. ..."
"... A key remark made by Kissinger was the following: "So those countries that used to be exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a rival." ..."
"... In other words, he is negating the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts that the US is somehow "exceptional", a "uni-power" and the "indispensable nation". This consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of "full-spectrum dominance". Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos. ..."
"... While sharing a public stage with Kissinger, the Chinese leader added: "The two sides should proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the people of the world, respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, pursue win-win results in cooperation, and promote bilateral ties to develop in the right direction." ..."
"... Likewise, China and Russia have continually urged for a multipolar world order for cooperation and partnership in development. But the present and recent US governments refuse to contemplate any other order other than a presumed unipolar dominance. Hence the ongoing US trade strife with China and Washington's relentless demonization of Russia. ..."
"... This "exceptional" ideological mantra of the US is leading to more tensions, and ultimately is a path to the abyss. Henry Kissinger gets it. It's a pity America's present crop of politicians and thinkers are so impoverished in their intellect. ..."
Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger made prudent
remarks recently when he said the United States is no longer a uni-power and that it must
recognize the reality of China as an equal rival. The furor over a new law passed by the US this week regarding Hong Kong and undermining
Beijing's authority underlines Kissinger's warning.
If the US cannot find some modus vivendi with China, then the outcome could be a
catastrophic conflict worst than any previous world war, he admonished.
Speaking publicly in New York on November 14, the veteran diplomat urged the US and China
to resolve their ongoing economic tensions cooperatively and mutually, adding: "It is no longer
possible to think that one side can dominate the other."
A key remark made by Kissinger was the following: "So those countries that used to be
exceptional and used to be unique, have to get used to the fact that they have a
rival."
In other words, he is negating the erroneous consensus held in Washington which asserts
that the US is somehow "exceptional", a "uni-power" and the "indispensable nation". This
consensus has grown since the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the US
viewed itself as the sole super-power. That morphed into a more virulent ideology of
"full-spectrum dominance". Thence, the past three decades of unrelenting US criminal wars and
regime-change operations across the planet, throwing the whole world into chaos.
Kissinger's frank assessment is a breath of fresh air amid the stale and impossibly arrogant
self-regard held by too many American politicians who view their nation as an unparalleled
power which brooks no other.
The seasoned statesman, who is 96-years-old and retains an admirable acumen for
international politics, ended his remarks on an optimistic note by saying: "I am confident the
leaders on both sides [US and China] will realize the future of the world depends on the two
sides working out solutions and managing the inevitable difficulties."
Aptly, Kissinger's caution about danger of conflict was reiterated separately by veteran
journalist John Pilger, who
warned in an exclusive interview for Strategic Culture Foundation this week that, presumed
"American exceptionalism is driving the world to war."
Henry Kissinger is indeed a controversial figure. Many US scholars regard him as one of the
most outstanding Secretaries of State during the post-Second World War period. He served in the
Nixon and Ford administrations during the 1970s and went on to write tomes about geopolitics
and international relations. Against that, his reputation was badly tarnished by the US war in
Vietnam and the horrendous civilian death toll from relentless aerial bombing across Indochina,
believed to have been countenanced by Kissinger.
Kissinger has also been accused of supporting the military coup in Chile in 1973 against
elected President Allende, and for backing the dirty war by Argentina's fascist generals during
the 1970s against workers and leftists.
... ... ...
At times, President Donald Trump appears to subscribe to realpolitik pragmatism. At other
times, he swings to the hyper-ideological mentality as expressed by his Vice President Mike
Pence, as well as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mike Esper. The
latter has labeled
China as the US's "greatest long-term threat".
This week President Trump signed into law "The Human Rights and Democracy Bill", which will
impose sanctions on China over alleged repression in its Hong Kong territory. Beijing has
reacted furiously to the legislation, condemning
it as a violation of its sovereignty.
This is exactly the kind of baleful move that Kissinger warned against in order to avoid a
further poisoning in bilateral relations already tense from the past 16 months of US-China
trade war.
One discerns the difference between Kissinger and more recent US politicians: the former has
copious historical knowledge and appreciation of other cultures. His shrewd, wily, maybe even
Machiavellian streak, informs Kissinger to acknowledge and respect other powers in a complex
world. That is contrasted with the puritanical banality and ignorance manifest in Trump's
administration and in the Congress.
Greeting Kissinger last Friday, November 22, during a visit to Beijing, President Xi Jinping
thanked him for his historic contribution in normalizing US-China relations during 1970s.
"At present, Sino-US relations are at a critical juncture facing some difficulties and
challenges," said
Xi, calling on the two countries to deepen communication on strategic issues. It was an echo of
the realpolitik views Kissinger had enunciated the week before.
While sharing a public stage with Kissinger, the Chinese leader added: "The two sides
should proceed from the fundamental interests of the two peoples and the people of the world,
respect each other, seek common ground while reserving differences, pursue win-win results in
cooperation, and promote bilateral ties to develop in the right direction."
Likewise, China and Russia have continually urged for a multipolar world order for
cooperation and partnership in development. But the present and recent US governments refuse to
contemplate any other order other than a presumed unipolar dominance. Hence the ongoing US
trade strife with China and Washington's relentless demonization of Russia.
This "exceptional" ideological mantra of the US is leading to more tensions, and
ultimately is a path to the abyss. Henry Kissinger gets it. It's a pity America's present crop
of politicians and thinkers are so impoverished in their intellect.
"... Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies. ..."
"... No informed American can afford to not know the names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. > ..."
"... Hersh hoped that future historians would document the fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved the takeover. ..."
"... The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket. ..."
"... In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent. ..."
"... That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book. Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters. ..."
"... Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state. However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and often place American interests second to that of the lobby. ..."
Although it is generally understood that American neoconservatives pushed hard for the war
in Iraq, this book forcefully argues that the neocons' goal was not the spread of democracy,
but the protection of Israel's interests in the Middle East. Showing that the neocon movement
has always identified closely with the interests of Israel's Likudnik right wing, the
discussion contends that neocon advice on Iraq was the exact opposite of conventional United
States foreign policy, which has always sought to maintain stability in the region to promote
the flow of oil. Various players in the rush to war are assessed according to their motives,
including President Bush, Ariel Sharon, members of the foreign-policy establishment, and the
American people, who are seen not as having been dragged into war against their will, but as
ready after 9/11 for retaliation
Every American should read this superb book about the intimate connection between the
state of Israel and the Americans who planned and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003
(and who still influence U.S. policy in the Middle East). This very well-researched and
well-argued book will enlighten Americans who want to understand how the Jewish State of
Israel powerfully shapes U.S. Middle East policy.
Stephen Sniegowski provides a detailed look at the network of die-hard pro-Israel
Neoconservatives who have worked in the U.S. government, in think tanks, and in the news
media to shape American foreign policy to serve the needs of Israel at the expense of the
U.S. From media baron Rupert Murdoch, whose 175 newspapers around the world ALL editorialized
in favor of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, to deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, to
Weekly Standard Editor William Kristol, to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, to
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and later Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton, to
Vice President Dick Cheney, to the Chairman of the Defense Policy Board Richard Perle, the
neoconservatives successfully persuaded President George W. Bush to invade Iraq to promote
Israel's foreign policy interests.
Sniegowski describes how the Neocons promoted lies about Saddam Hussein's supposed Weapons
of Mass Destruction and his supposed ties to al-Qaeda terrorists from a network of think
tanks such as the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Middle East Media Research Institute,
Hudson Institute, Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Middle East Forum, Jewish
Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), the Center for Security Policy, and the
Project for a New American Century (PNAC).
He also traces the influence of Israeli Zionist Oded Yinon on the American
Neoconservatives. Yinon wrote an article in 1982 entitled "A Strategy for Israel in the
1980s" that called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and
their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. This is basically what
is happening to Iraq and Syria today. He also called for Israelis to accelerate the
emigration of Palestinians from Israel, whose border he believed should extend to the Jordan
River and beyond it.
Yinon's article influenced a paper written for the Israeli Likud government of Benjamin
Netanyahu in 1996 by American neoconservatives Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David
Wurmser entitled "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm". This paper stated
that Netanyahu should "make a clean break" with the Oslo peace process and reassert Israel's
claim to the West Bank and Gaza. Like Yinon's article, it also called for the removal of
Saddam Hussein in Iraq and the weakening of Syria to promote Israel's interests. It was
written five years BEFORE the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center. These same three
men - Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser - who advised Netanyahu's Israeli
government on issues of national security would later advise President George W. Bush to
pursue virtually the same policies regarding the Middle East.
If you want to understand how and why powerful pro-Israel neoconservatives in the U.S.
misled Americans and convinced President George W. Bush to order the U.S. invasion of Iraq in
2003, and how they persuaded the U.S. Congress to give Bush the authority to order the
invasion, read this outstanding book.
Another episode in the sad story of recent American government. It starts with a 1996 paper
entitled "A Clean Break, A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" published by an Israeli think
tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies. The principal idea was to
foment war in the Middle East and consequently destabilize Israel's enemies.
The policy was adopted by the Israeli pro-settler right wing and Jewish activists in and
around the Clinton and Bush administrations such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David
Wurmser (who all helped produce the original document). They identified as targets Iraq,
Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia and were handed a golden opportunity after the 9/11 attack on
the World Trade Centre. Iraq was falsely presented as an Al Qaeda base and the media planted
with stories about an imminent attack on the United States using WMD. Despite the CIA knowing
all along that the WMD didn't exist, the US still invaded Iraq and the story was quietly and
unbelievably changed to "building democracy".
As Sniegoski points out, the war has exceeded the cost of Vietnam and the same activists,
now working through Hillary Clinton are looking for "incidents" in Iraq to trigger the next
phase of the plan which is a US attack on Iran.
UPDATE October 2014:
And it gets worse: The 911 story itself keeps morphing. Google "Building 7", YouTube "911
Missing Links" or check the article at http://911speakout.org/7TOCPJ.pdf. >
Important book for those trying understand the chaos that
is currently reigning in the Middle East. From the lies based NEOCON attack on Iraq trumpeted
by the mainstream USA media as a fight to save Western Civilization, to the rise of ISIL.
This books will make those connections clear. No informed American can afford to not know the
names Oded Yinon, AIPAC, The Clean Break, The NEOCONS. Knowledge is indeed power. >
On January 27, 2005, [...] posted the remarks of Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker
contributor) at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York that a neoconservative cult had
taken over the American government.
Hersh hoped that future historians would document the
fragility of American democracy by explaining how eight or nine neoconservatives were able to
overcome easily the bureaucracy, the Congress, and the press. Stephen Sniegoski, in The
Transparent Cabal, has provided a detailed history of how the neoconservative cult achieved
the takeover.
Other books have stressed how the neoconservative ideology is contrary to traditional
American values: Reclaiming the American Right (Justin Raimondo), America the Virtuous (Claes
Ryn), Where the Right Went Wrong (Patrick Buchanan).
"Memoirs of a Trotskyist" in Neo-conservatism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Irving Kristol)
provided a neoconservative account of the origins of neo-conservatism. Sniegoski noted
correctly that the term neoconservative originated with leftists critical of their former
comrades for attempting to infiltrate the Democratic and Republican parties. Thanks to
leftists who call neoconservatives the ultra-right and to conservative dupes who think that
anyone using a conservative label is a conservative, the neoconservative cancer has spread
through the fragile American political body.
The neoconservatives do not represent the only case in American history of a small group
attempting to take over America. The Plot to Seize the White House (Jules Archer) provided a
detailed account of General Smedley Butler's testimony to Congress about a secret plot to
overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. Butler, a Republican, authored War is a Racket.
Unlike earlier secret plots to take over the American government, Sniegoski explained how it
was possible for the neoconservatives to operate as a relatively transparent cabal. However,
he observed that the neoconservatives used a Trojan horse technique to take over the American
conservative movement. The goal of the neoconservatives is to promote endless wars regardless
of whether the Democrats or the Republicans are in power.
The neoconservatives do not represent a popular mass movement in America. Instead, the
neoconservatives rely upon the co-operation of other groups. Sniegoski provided extensive
documentation of which groups enabled the neoconservatives. For example, the Christian
Zionists duped their followers into sacrificing money and soldiers. Zionism originated with
the writings of Moses Hess (who helped Karl Marx write The Communist Manifesto, was nicknamed
the Communist Rabbi, and who is buried in Israel). In 1862, Moses Hess published Rome and
Jerusalem. Moses Hess: Prophet of Communism and Zionism (Shlomo Avineri) provided a detailed
explanation of the relationship between Communism and Zionism.
The reason for the fragility of American democracy is the failure of many Americans to
understand the most basic aspects of the American political system and of their
religions.
The Transparent Cabal is an important starting point for understanding how a neoconservative
cult opposed to traditional American political and religious values is able to destroy
America with endless wars.
_The Transparent Cabal: The Neoconservative Agenda, War in the Middle East, And the
National Interest of Israel_, published in 2008 by Enigma Editions of IHS Press, by scholar
Stephen J. Sniegoski is a thorough examination of the role of the neoconservatives in pushing
for war in the Middle East (beginning with the war in Iraq and pushing onwards towards Iran)
in order to protect the national interests of Israel. Sniegoski makes the claim that the
neoconservatives have been the fundamental force behind the war efforts of the United States
and have played a particularly prominent role in the Bush administration. While these claims
have now become common knowledge, Sniegoski makes an important contribution by tracing the
history of the neoconservative movement and its links to prominent pro-Jewish and pro-Israel
groups. In particular, Sniegoski claims that neoconservativism is a tool of Zionism and the
Likudniks of Israel. Sniegoski traces out how following the attacks of September 11, the
neoconservative war hawks had a profound influence on the thinking of President Bush and
offered him a ready made solution to his foreign policy agenda. In this book, Sniegoski also
considers and refutes other theories as to the root causes behind America's intervention in
Iraq (such as the role of oil and war profiteering) but explains how these theories lack the
validity of that which lays the blame on the neoconservatives and their goals for Israeli
dominance in the Middle East.
In a recently written best-seller two political scientists at
the University of Chicago and Harvard (John Meirsheimer and Stephen J. Walt _The Israeli
Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy_) broke a long-standing taboo in the United States and risked
charges of anti-Semitism by exposing the role of the powerful Israeli Lobby (AIPAC) in the
United States and its push for war against Iraq and with its future sights on Iran. This book
echoes many of the claims made by Meirsheimer and Walt and further shows the agenda of the
small circle of neoconservatives in directing American foreign policy. The author maintains
that the neoconservatives are a "transparent cabal", in that they have operated as a
tight-knit secret group but their actions remain transparent.
This book begins with a Foreword by Congressman Paul Findley (famous author of _They Dare
to Speak Out_ and longtime opponent of the Israeli Lobby) in which he explains the importance
of Sniegoski's book and deflects the spurious charge of anti-Semitism. Following this,
appears an Introduction by noted paleoconservative Paul Gottfried who explains his admiration
for Sniegoski's book, offers some comparisons between Sniegoski's claims and those of other
individuals, and contrasts the old non-interventionist limited government form of
conservativism with that of the neoconservatives.
The first chapter of Sniegoski's book is entitled "The Transparent Cabal" and notes the
disastrous consequences that have followed upon the Iraq war spurred on by the
neoconservatives. The author explains what he means in calling the neoconservatives a
"transparent cabal" and notes the importance of their Middle East, pro-Israeli agenda. The
author explains how following the events of September 11, they came to take on a prominent
role in influencing the thinking of the president (who had previously shown little interest
in the Middle East).
The second chapter is entitled "The "Neocon-Israel" Claim: Bits and
Pieces" and exposes the role of Israel's Likudnik party behind the neoconservatives. The
author deflects claims of "anti-Semitism" which are frequently hurled at those who make these
charges by showing that even many prominent Jews agree with this. Following this appears a
chapter entitled "Who are the Neocons?" which shows how the neocons emigrated from their
original home in the Democratic party of the McGovernite left into the Republican party as
the New Left began to voice criticisms of Israel. The author shows that many of the neocons
are actually socialists and Trotskyites parading under the label of "conservative". Further,
the author shows the role of various intellectuals centering around New York City in creating
the neoconservative movement.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "The Israeli Origins of the
Middle East War Agenda" which shows how the goal of Middle East war to further the interests
of Israel has been supported extensively by hawkish groups in Israel. The author explains how
these groups came to have such a prominent role in influencing the policy of the United
States and in suppressing the native population of Palestinians in Israel. Following, appears
a chapter entitled "Stability and the Gulf War of 1991: Prefigurement and Prelude to the 2003
Iraq War" in which the author explains the importance of the first Gulf War of Bush I in
prefiguring the Iraq War of Bush II. After this, appears a chapter entitled "During the
Clinton Years" in which the author shows the continuing role of the neocons during the
Clinton years.
Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Serbian Interlude and the 2000
Elections" in which the author explains how the war in Yugoslavia paved the way for the
coming Iraq War of President Bush. This also explains the split that occurred among
conservatives between those traditional conservatives who opposed the war and the neocons who
firmly supported it. Following this appears a chapter entitled "George W. Bush
Administration: The Beginning" in which the author explains the role that the neocons came to
take in the Bush administration mentioning in particular the role of such figures as
Wolfowitz and Cheney and the role of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC). Following
this appears a chapter entitled "September 11", showing how the events of Sept. 11 allowed
the neocon agenda to gain prominence in the mind of President Bush.
Next, appears a chapter
entitled "Move to War" explaining how the neocons pushed for war against Sadaam Hussein
presenting their case to the American people by claiming that Hussein was in possession of
WMDs which could be used against America. Following this appears a chapter entitled "World
War IV" explaining how the conflict in the Middle East came to be dubbed World War IV by
certain intellectuals among the neocons.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "Democracy for the
Middle East" showing the role of the neocons in foisting "democracy" onto various nations and
their goal of global democratic revolution. The author also explains the role of the thinking
of political philosopher Leo Strauss behind many of the neocons and his profoundly
anti-democratic philosophy. Following this, appears a chapter entitled "Neocons'
Post-Invasion Difficulties" showing how the invasion of Iraq turned out to be more serious
and difficult than originally anticipated by the neocons. Next, appears a chapter entitled
"Beginning of the Second Administration" showing the continuing role of the neocons under the
second Bush administration.
Then, appears a chapter entitled "Israel, Lebanon, and the 2006
Election" showing the role of Lebanon and Syria in relationship to Israel and that of the
2006 election.
Next, appears a chapter entitled "2007: On to Iran" showing how the neocons
continued to press for further wars in particular against Iran by alleging among other things
that Ahmedinejad was a mad man with possible access to nuclear weapons. Following, appears a
chapter entitled "The Supporting Cast for War" noting the role of Christian Zionists (which
includes the beliefs of President Bush, although not his father), former Cold Warriors, and
even prominent establishment liberals in supporting the Iraq war. The author notes however
that the traditional foreign policy establishment elites and many in the intelligence
agencies did not support the war, but were disregarded to further the neocon agenda. The
author also contrasts the difference between the liberal elites who frequently were pro-war
and the popular anti-war movement which had very little power.
Following this, the author
turns to a chapter entitled "Oil and Other Arguments" in which the author considers the
claims that the war was fought to obtain access to oil or for the interests of war profiteers
and shows that while both groups certainly benefited they are not the real reason for the
war. The book ends with a "Conclusion" in which the author expounds upon the continuing role
of the neocons in influencing American foreign policy and a "Postscript" in which the author
notes that no matter who wins the 2008 election that the neocon agenda will likely continue
and is not likely to go away anytime soon.
This book offers a fascinating history and account of the role of the neoconservatives in
pushing the United States into war. The author makes clear the influence of the Israeli
Likudnik party behind the neocons and their goal of strengthening the position of Israel in
the Middle East. It is important to understand the fundamental nature of the foreign policy
elites who have been pushing us into war against Iraq and now with eyes towards Iran.
That old canard "anti-semitic" is heard again in one of the reviews of this book.
Nonsense!!! If one is anti-semitic simply because he is critical of certain policies followed
by Likud, then many Jews living in Israel are also Jew haters.
Let's put aside these negative and nasty characterizations and look at the facts.
Israeli politicians are, undertandably, looking out for the intestests of their nation state.
However, many American pols are beholden to the Israeli lobby (of simply feaful of it) and
often place American interests second to that of the lobby.
To suggest that there is such a
lobby and that it is powerful is hardly anti-semitic. Nor is the author. He is simply stating
verifible facts which any student of politics is free to do. He may be mistaken in his
conclusions but that hardly makes him anti-semitic. And he may not be mistaken at all. He is
not the first to suggest that our leaders are fearful of the Israeli lobby and do its bidding
and often to the detriment of American interests .
Stephen Sniegoski, a diplomatic historian, is uniquely qualified to write about the
neoconservatives' involvement in the prolonged Iraq War originating in 2003. He accurately
predicted their activities and allegiance in this entanglement in 1998, three years before
the acts of 9-11 and two additional years before a traumatized nation yielded to a nescient,
misdirected President, his Vice President/administration, and an ostensibly compliant
bi-partisan House and Senate.
The author presents a tight outline which he cogently expands in intelligible detail,
maintaining that the origins of the American war on Iraq revolve around the adoption of a war
agenda whose basic structure was conceived in Israel to advance Israel's interests. The
pro-Israel neoconservatives and a powerful Israel lobby in the United States fervently pushed
its agenda. Ironically, he extracts his most persuasive evidence from an extensive
neoconservative paper trail that's been clearly recognized by a discreet cadre of vigilant
Americans for years. Thus the title, "The Transparent Cabal."
Dr. Sniegoski asks the appropriate question: "Who are the neoconservatives?" He provides
insightful answers on their pertinent activities since 1972, those who shaped and mentored
them, their immediate family/interconnected family networks, their prominent periodical
publications, their past and present leadership, non-Jewish minority members, their
persistent rise to positions of political influence and authority, their embrace of Christian
Zionists, and their close ties to the extremely conservative Likud Party in Israel. He
reveals their tactical affiliations with key, heavily endowed influential think tanks, and a
vast number of powerful Israel-centric lobbying organizations that reactively finance and
nurture their continued success.
Many readers will recognize his references to writers of previous books, articles and
columns -- many of Jewish heritage -- who bravely fight against well financed, mainstream
media-dominant opponents and their psychological surrogates active on the Internet. These
opponents perniciously engage in personal attacks and retribution, indiscriminately applying
irrelevant anti-semitic labels. They persist at attempting to sway public discourse by
spreading misinformation, disinformation, and mostly NO RELEVANT INFORMATION to the
public.
In various places throughout the book, the author notes curious relationships with current
and former elected and appointed officials. He writes about the ongoing 2008 presidential
campaign in a postscript, citing past and existing direct influences on specific candidates
by the neoconservatives, the Israel Lobby and its supporters.
The book concludes with a summary of the paucity of benefits compared to the predictable
losses of the American people over recent years. These are the real consequences of the
Israel-inspired plan to "drain the swamp" (a euphemism for destabilizing perceived enemies
then establishing precarious nominal democracies) that began with our misadventure in Iraq
and was to proceed with subsequent U.S. military interventions in Iran and Syria. The few
meager benefits and the enormous losses to the United States are compared to the strategic
advantages that the State of Israel derives directly from our five-year induced military
involvement in Iraq and our concomitant departure from past, longstanding policies of
diplomacy and stability in the Middle East.
Sniegoski counsels, "it is hardly controversial to propose that elites, rather than the
people as a whole, determine government policies, even in democracies."
Yet this war has a supporting cast of middle Americans. Many of them were traumatized by
the events of 9-11 and reactively saw an act of patriotism in supporting retaliation against
a falsely perceived enemy in Iraq. It's time to reconsider false arguments preceding the Iraq
War that have only been cosmetically modified until the present day. It's time to dismiss
incongruous ideas formed in the cauldron of confusion after 9-11.
Given today's realities, it DOES take patriotism and courage to insist on formally
normalizing an entangled, unreciprocated military alliance with an Israeli government that
burdens the taxpayers of the United States, promotes angst among its people, and imperils its
military forces worldwide.
Know and embrace Thomas Jefferson's ideal of 'eternal vigilance' as citizens of the United
States.
.
.
Facts in this book are reinforced in adjacent paragraphs and referenced in nearly 50 pages of
notes. Readers are encouraged to read:
World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global
Instability by Amy Chua -- "Israeli Surveillance of the Future Hijackers and FBI Suspects
in the September 11 Attacks and Their Failure to Give Us Adequate Warning: The Need for a
Public Inquiry" **a 166 PAGE LEAKED REPORT** documenting foreign espionage activities
surrounding 9-11, available on the Internet (although rarely in COMPLETE UNEDITED FORM **WITH
5 EXHIBITS AND 4 MAPS**). .
Stephen J. Sniegoski has a doctorate from the University of Maryland and studied American
diplomatic history. My review here will refer to him as "S," for short.
This book is about the American neoconservative movement. S goes from its founding through
its influential role in getting the U.S. into the Iraq War, then he discusses the War's
aftermath. S's argument is that the neoconservative agenda regarding the Middle East is
designed to serve the interests of the state of Israel, as those interests are articulated by
the right-wing Likud party there. This agenda supports weakening Arab nations surrounding
Israel so that they cannot pose a threat to her. According to S, the neoconservatives
supported such an agenda since their beginning as a movement, but 9/11 created an opportunity
for this agenda to become the foreign policy of the United States during much of the
Presidency of George W. Bush.
Here are some thoughts:
A. Looking broadly at the book itself, it is a standard narration of the events
surrounding and including the Iraq War. Like a lot of people, I lived through that, so the
sweeping narrative of the book was not particularly new to me. The story is essentially that
the U.S. went into Iraq expecting to find weapons of mass destruction after 9/11, bombed the
country and found that were no WMDs, and traveled the difficult road of trying to rebuild the
country, amidst ethnic division, turmoil, and opposition from Iraqis.
B. That said, there were some things that I learned from this book. First, while
neoconservatism is said to believe in spreading democracy in the Middle East, it is not
necessarily committed to democracy, per se. Initially, it supported a new government of Iraq
that would be led by the traditional, pre-Saddam tribal authorities, who were not democratic.
Second, S seems to imply that even the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan was
unnecessary, since the Taliban initially appeared cooperative in offering to help the U.S. to
bring al-Qaeda to justice. Third, there are neoconservatives who have supported undermining
even America's allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia. The different groups in Saudi
Arabia was also interesting, for, as S notes, Shiites hold a significant amount of control
over Saudi oil, even though the political establishment is Sunni. Fourth, S argues rigorously
against the idea that the U.S. launched the Iraq War to get more oil. Saddam was offering
U.S. oil companies opportunities to drill in Iraq, plus oil companies did not want the oil
infrastructure of the country to be disrupted or shattered by war.
C. There were also things in the book that I was interested to learn more about, even
though I had a rudimentary understanding of them before. For one, S chronicles George W.
Bush's changing views on foreign policy, as he went from rejecting nation-building, while
retaining a tough stance, to embracing nation building. In the early days of the Bush II
Administration, long before the Iraq War, Condi Rice even explained on news shows why regime
change in Iraq would be a mistake at that point. Second, S discusses the coalition that
emerged to support the war in Iraq. The neocons wanted to protect Israel, but Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld embraced the Iraq War as a way to showcase the effectiveness of a
lean military. Meanwhile, many Americans, frightened after 9/11, supported the Iraq War as a
way to keep the U.S. safe. And Christian conservatives embraced the good vs. evil, pro-Israel
stance of neoconservative policy. Third, S strategically evaluates moves that the U.S. made;
for S, for example, the surge did not actually work, but more stability emerged in Iraq as
different ethnic factions became separated from each other.
D. According to S, the Iraq War was a disaster. It stretched America's military, taking
away resources that could have been used to find Osama bin-Laden. Yet, Israel got something
that it wanted as a result: disarray among her Arab neighbors. An argument that S did not
really engage, as far as I can recall, is that the Iraq War placed Israel even more in peril,
since it increased the power of Iran by allowing Iraq to serve as a proxy for Iranian
interests.
E. For S, neoconservatism is concerned about the security of Israel. Even its staunch Cold
War policy is rooted in that concern, since the U.S.S.R. tended to support Arabs over the
Israelis. S acknowledges, though, that there is more to neoconservatism that that.
Neoconservatives supported a strong U.S. military intervention in the former Yugoslavia
during the Clinton Administration, and neoconservatism also maintains stances on domestic
issues, such as welfare.
F. S is sensitive to any charges of anti-Semitism that may be launched against his book.
He emphatically denies that he is saying there was a Jewish conspiracy to get the U.S. into
Iraq, for he observes that many Jews opposed the Iraq War. Moreover, S does not exactly
present the U.S. government as a Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG), for the neoconservatives
were long on the margins prior to the Presidency of George W. Bush. Even under Bush II, the
traditional national security and intelligence apparatus was critical of the Iraq War,
preferring more multilateralism and a focus on stability in the Middle East. The Council on
Foreign Relations (CFR), long a bogeyman of right-wing conspiracy theorists, also had
reservations about the Iraq War.
G. S largely depicts the Likud party in Israel, and neoconservatives, as supporting
Israel's security as a nation, her protection, if you will. At the same time, S argues that
Israel in 2006 was acting aggressively rather than defensively in its invasion of Lebanon,
for Lebanon had coveted water-supplies.
H. Near the end of the Iraq War, S demonstrates, neoconservatives were calling on the U.S.
to take an aggressive stance against Iran, going so far as to bomb the country. That, of
course, is an issue that remains relevant today. S probably regards such a move as a mistake.
At the same time, he can understand why Israel would be apprehensive about a nuclear-armed
Iran. He thinks that Ahmadinejad has been incorrectly understood to say that Israel should be
wiped off the map, but S still acknowledges that a powerful Iran could provide more support
to the Palestinians, which would trouble Israel. Although S understands this, he seems to
scorn the idea that Israel should get everything she wants and have hegemony.
I. S is open to the possibility that neoconservatives believe that their support for
Israel is perfectly consistent with America's well-being. As S observes, the U.S. government
since its founding has had people who believe that partisanship towards a certain nation --
-Britain or France -- -is not only good for its own sake but serves the interests of the
United States. S disputes, however, that neoconservative policy is the only way to help the
U.S. Could not one argue, after all, that the U.S. would want to be on the Arabs' good side,
with all the oil the Arabs have? This analysis may be a little dated, since the U.S. now has
some alternative sources of energy (fracking), but S makes this point in evaluating the
historical stance of neoconservatism.
I was interested to see the reviews of this book. Usually if any book suggests that Israel
is less than perfect a group of Zionist fanatics surface with several reviews telling us that
there nothing wrong Israel or American support of it.
Remarkably there is only one negative review of this book which has to be seen to be
believed. This reviewer "yoda" from Israel charges in all seriousness that Sniegoski does not
provide evidence that the neoconservatives are "predominantly Jewish " and are " strongly
aligned with Israel". Asking the author to provide evidence for such
assertions is like asking him to give evidence that the sun will
rise in the east tomorrow .
This is I believe the real reason that that there are relatively few attacks on this book.The
author does not engage in shrill denunciations of Israel or of the neoconservatives . What he
does do is quote at length what neocoservstives say and provide careful documentation for any
factual claims. For the most part the reader is allowed to
draw his own conclusions. Should the US continue to finance
Israeli repression of Palestinians and perhaps go to war against Iran or anyone else who
might object to Israeli policie?
Instead of denouncing Sniegoski "Yoda" should consider
the sane Israelis in his own country . For example former
Mossad chief Meir Dagan who said that a war with Iran was
the "stupidest idea he had ever heard of." Also moviemaker
Emmanuel Dror who interviewed virtually all the former directors of the Shin Bett ( Israel's
internal security service )
who all called for disengaging from the occupied territories .
perhaps we all would be better off listening to these Isaelis rather than follow the
neoconservatives into another disastrous war on the other side of the world.
This is going to be a very strange review coming from me. You see, I wrote a novel called
"Other Nations" and well, people that liked it a lot, liked it, but then those that really
disliked it disliked it because my "aliens among humans" were nice people, likeable people,
even charismatic people, everyday suburban types even, living that kind of life. Among us.
Next door, in the next city over. They wanted instead to see the aliens among us portrayed as
well, pick your favorite genocidal maniac or mind-controlling dictator or creature so
dementedly alien that no sense can be made of it. Well!
There are many types of true horror. The kind that passes itself off as my aliens among us
are portrayed, well, I guess some people GET IT - and they liked it.
But I'm not here to push my book. I'm here to push THIS BOOK - because my god, this is
REAL, not fantasy, it's REAL, not science fiction. And yes, they are among us with well -
BUY THIS BOOK. If you are too broke to buy it, get it from the library - and by all means
- READ IT.
Just hope to whatever god you choose that neocons are removed from governmental influence
and that their Amen corner is ignored. Hope to god, because if they suceed in doing the
INSANITY they want to do - America will be FINISHED - if it's not finished already due to
what these Fifth Columnists have done during the 8 years of Twilight Zone (GWB Rule).
And for those Jewish critics on here that might want to compare these neocon FACTS and the
other FACTS openly available to all (which is WHY the book is called the TRANSPARENT cabal) -
compare it to the Protocols - they better think twice about that. Becauase, you see, what's
in here is real, real facts, provably real facts - and if Jews themselves compare this to the
Procols? Some folks might get the idea that maybe that is real too. Perhaps George Soros (who
is Jewish) needs to speak LOUDER against the neocons. They are, indeed, crazies, as Colin
Powell called them. Crazies.
If you want to have an eye opener then read and see who were those Jewish players working
and influencing everything in the Bush Admin.promoting war with Iraq, then this is your book
of truth. The cabal of Jewish players come out of the woodwork in Stephen Sniegoski's great
work. When step by step the plan was a clear war map laid out for the U.S. in detail and
after you realize just who was working for whom in this criminal cabal of the American
government.
When you have Jewish control of the main stream media and Jewish control in Washington, D.C.,
don't wonder why the facts were omitted to make all the right connections for the public to
see in this lead up to a war from lies.
"... November in Ukraine has been marked by the adoption of the so called 'land reform', in accordance of the demands made by the IMF amongst other international financial organizations. The reform opens the way for the mass privatization of Ukraine's agricultural lands. The IMF has been making these demands for many years but assorted Ukrainian presidents have tried to postpone such an unpopular decision. Recent polls show that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of all political persuasions are opposed to land privatization, from far-right to far-left. ..."
"... After an intensive period of deindustrialization, which has taken place in recent years, agricultural land remain the only asset with any value in Ukraine but even so, it may be bought for very little. A remarkable fact is that one of the deputies from the ruling party 'Servant of the people,' Nikita Poturayev , while pressing his colleagues at the Parliament to vote for the bill on land reform, claimed [1] that this would be 'settling scores with maniac V. Lenin', i.e. the purpose of the bill was to abolish the land nationalization carried out following the October revolution. ..."
"... Ukrainian political expert Ruslan Bortnik says that the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and his team came to power under an obligation to sell out the agricultural land of Ukraine to foreign companies. Those who buy these lands, according to Bortnik, will only be thinking about making the quickest possible buck. "Foreign companies are already operating on Ukrainian soil [renting land]," said Bortnik, ..."
"... "But they are competing with large Ukrainian agricultural holdings. They do not dominate. If the adopted land market model is launched, then only large foreign companies will remain in our market Let's be honest – we are not a sovereign country. At least our government is under external control. And this is a part of the obligations of this government. This is the condition under which they came to power. They are paying the debts through privatization." [2] ..."
"... Ukrainian farmers who still are landowners, formally at least – they just can't sell it – are the same people who are unable to pay their gas and electricity bills, especially after the recent raising of energy prices – another IMF demand. ..."
"... For the most part, it was in the region of $7.4 billion of stolen Ukraine's public money, from which only a "small share" was used to bribe Western politicians, like Hunter Biden. The deputies have stressed that, according to the investigation of Ukraine's general prosecution, the withdrawn and laundered money was then invested back into Ukraine. In particular through the Franklin Templeton Investments, the money was used to buy domestic government bonds (DGB), issued by Kiev at high interest rate. ..."
"... Ukrainian prosecutor Konstantin Kulik recently stated [4] in an interview that Ukraine takes IMF loans to pay out on these debt obligations (DGB). As deputy Aleksandr Dubinsky stressed at the press conference, 40% of the current public budget goes towards the payment of the public debt of Ukraine, including the repayment of DGB at inflated interest rates. ..."
November in Ukraine has been marked by the adoption of the so called 'land reform', in accordance of the demands made by the
IMF amongst other international financial organizations. The reform opens the way for the mass privatization of Ukraine's agricultural
lands. The IMF has been making these demands for many years but assorted Ukrainian presidents have tried to postpone such an unpopular
decision. Recent polls show that the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians of all political persuasions are opposed to land privatization,
from far-right to far-left.
After an intensive period of deindustrialization, which has taken place in recent years, agricultural land remain the only
asset with any value in Ukraine but even so, it may be bought for very little. A remarkable fact is that one of the deputies from
the ruling party 'Servant of the people,' Nikita Poturayev , while pressing his colleagues at the Parliament to vote for the bill
on land reform, claimed [1] that this would be 'settling scores with maniac V. Lenin', i.e. the purpose of the bill was to abolish
the land nationalization carried out following the October revolution.
Ukraine's fertile soil up for grabs
It has long been known that Ukraine's soil is very fertile. Indeed, during WW2 the invading Nazis made a point of appropriating
quantities of it; forcing POWs to collect the top soil and load it onto trains en route to Germany. Now these same lands could fall
into the hands of international agro-holdings.
Ukrainian political expert Ruslan Bortnik says that the President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky and his team came to power
under an obligation to sell out the agricultural land of Ukraine to foreign companies. Those who buy these lands, according to Bortnik,
will only be thinking about making the quickest possible buck. "Foreign companies are already operating on Ukrainian soil [renting
land]," said Bortnik,
"But they are competing with large Ukrainian agricultural holdings. They do not dominate. If the adopted land market model
is launched, then only large foreign companies will remain in our market Let's be honest – we are not a sovereign country. At
least our government is under external control. And this is a part of the obligations of this government. This is the condition
under which they came to power. They are paying the debts through privatization." [2]
Ukrainian farmers who still are landowners, formally at least – they just can't sell it – are the same people who are unable
to pay their gas and electricity bills, especially after the recent raising of energy prices – another IMF demand. Obviously,
their financial desperation will mean that many will have to sell their land at a low price, certainly well below the market value.
Meanwhile, Ukraine remains the poorest country on the continent of Europe and Ukrainian agricultural land remains the cheapest. Moreover,
the lands may be bought up as repaying large loans collected by the Kiev government following the Euromaidan coup in 2014.
This scheme of buying up Ukraine's land is connected with the ongoing corruption scandal in the US: the one related to Joe Biden
and the gas company 'Burisma'. At the end of November, Ukrainian MPs (non-factional people's deputy Andrey Derkach; a deputy from
the Batkivshchyna Party Aleksey Kucherenko; and a deputy from the ruling Servant of the People party, Aleksandr Dubinsky) revealed
it at the press-conference [3].
The point here is that the former Minister of Ecology of Ukraine Nikolay Zlochevsky , an owner of "Burisma" gas company, in 2014
introduced a number of Western politicians to the board of directors of his company, which helped him to avoid accusations of corruption.
Hunter Biden , son of former US Vice President Joe Biden , received monthly large payments for his "consultancy services". As a result
Ukraine's General prosecutor General Viktor Shokin, who was investigating the corruption schemes of the company, was forced – under
pressure – to resign by Joe Biden, who even boasted about it in the US media.
Ukrainian MPs have now claimed at a press-conference that the money used to bribe the son of the former Vice President of the
United States was in fact stolen. "Biden received money, the source of which is not the successful activity of Burisma, brilliant
business moves, or recommendations. It is the money of the citizens of Ukraine. It was obtained by criminal means," said the MP Andrey
Derkach. The ultimate goal of all this fraud, in which the Bidens were deeply involved, will be the bankruptcy of Ukraine in 2020-2021,
through the formation of a pyramid of public debt.
Laundering scheme to withdraw money from Ukraine
According to Ukrainian deputies, this was a part of a bigger laundering scheme to withdraw money from Ukraine via Latvian banks
and the fund 'Franklin Templeton Investments,' which is close to the United States Democratic Party. The founder of the foundation,
John Templeton Jr., was one of the main sponsors of the campaign of former US President Barack Obama.
For the most part, it was in the region of $7.4 billion of stolen Ukraine's public money, from which only a "small share"
was used to bribe Western politicians, like Hunter Biden. The deputies have stressed that, according to the investigation of Ukraine's
general prosecution, the withdrawn and laundered money was then invested back into Ukraine. In particular through the Franklin Templeton
Investments, the money was used to buy domestic government bonds (DGB), issued by Kiev at high interest rate.
The principle of this scheme is that with the assistance of American funds, the laundered money was legalised and invested in
government bonds at 6-8% in dollars and 15-17% in Ukrainian currency (hryvnia). This is leading to enormous growth in the Ukrainian
public debt and eventually the bankruptcy of the country's economy.
Eventual bankruptcy of the economy
Ukrainian prosecutor Konstantin Kulik recently stated [4] in an interview that Ukraine takes IMF loans to pay out on these
debt obligations (DGB). As deputy Aleksandr Dubinsky stressed at the press conference, 40% of the current public budget goes towards
the payment of the public debt of Ukraine, including the repayment of DGB at inflated interest rates.
According to him, bankruptcy on the debts could happen by the end of 2020 or 2021.
And this scheme is connected with land privatization, as adopted by Kiev in November in accordance with the IMF demand. "DGBs
are a financial instrument by which the state owes all its property when paying off the DGB. And if the land market is opened, the
state will have no other valuable property, with the exception of land," said Dubinsky, demanding the suspension of debt payments
to international creditors.
As a result of this unpopular land reform and the widespread violations of labour rights, Ukraine's trade-unions called a general
strike [5] for November 14 and began preparations. For the first time in the history of independent Ukraine, a strike committee was
formed at the all-national level. This committee was joined by trade unions, individual entrepreneurs, small businesses, agricultural
producers and farmers.
Management fires workers, pays themselves millions in bonuses
On November 14, Ukrainian railroad workers protested [6] in front of the Presidential office in Kiev against the announced plans
to fire some 50% of railroad personnel. The workers demanded the railroad management should resign instead. The deputy head of the
railroad trade-union, Alexander Mushenok, recently said [7] that currently "only 20 workers are employed where 60 workers are needed."
At the same time the workers claim that the top-level management of the company are paying themselves millions in bonuses. One of
the IMF demands requires that the Kiev authorities privatize the railroad system as well. In practice, this means that the few profitable
routes will be privatized by western companies, while the majority of non-profitable routes – to poorly developed provinces – will
remain state-owned, making the railway transport even less profitable.
The entire course of privatization, as promoted by the IMF, can be summarized by the principle 'privatization of profits, nationalization
of losses." And the new Kiev government is far too dependent to protest against the imposition of this policy; however, this will
effectively mean that this government will lose its credibility and trustworthiness among the people.
*
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Video: How the U.S. Caused the Breakup of the Soviet UnionSean Gervasi 1992
Lecture By Sean
Gervasi and Dennis Riches Global Research,
November 30, 2019 Region: Russia and FSU , USA Theme: History
We bring to the attention of Global Research readers the text of an unpublished Lecture
delivered in 1992 by the late Sean Gervasi on the history of the collapse of the Soviet Union
and the US Strategy formulated during World War II to bring down the USSR.
The full transcript and video of Sean Gervasi's presentation is preceded by Dennis Riches
Introduction
Scroll down for the Video
Introduction
We defeated totalitarianism and won a war in the Pacific and the Atlantic simultaneously
We worked together in a completely bipartisan way to bring down communism So now we have to use
our political processes in our democracy, and then decide to act together to solve those
problems. But we have to have a different perspective on this one. It [global warming] is
different from any problem we have ever faced before [i] – Al Gore
These words above were spoken by former US vice-president Al Gore in 2007 in his film An
Inconvenient Truth . Because audiences at the time were in rapt awe of him, treating him as
a savior in the campaign to solve the global warming crisis, they never seemed to reflect on
the outrageous assumptions underlying his comments about "defeating totalitarianism" and
"bringing down communism." These are worth examining for what they say about perceptions of
world history among the American political class, and they even hint at how the errors in these
perceptions led Mr. Gore to being self-deceived about what would be necessary to solve the
problem he has devoted himself to since he has been out of power.
Although the United States played a crucial role in WWII, it was slow to get involved and it
let the Soviet Union do much of the heavy lifting and suffer the heaviest losses. The United
States had a lot of help in achieving the victory Mr. Gore claims for America, and we could
assume he knows this, so the way he chose to describe historical events is telling.
Perhaps acknowledging the reality would have detracted from his second point about "bringing
down communism." Everyone knows that what he is referring to so proudly is the destabilization
and destruction of the USSR, the Warsaw bloc nations, and Yugoslavia, not the abstract notion
of communism. He is referring to a "victory" which precipitated civil wars and a disastrous
collapse of the economy and social welfare systems in these countries, one that killed and
impoverished millions. In China, Cuba and the DPRK, contrary to what he stated, these nations'
versions of socialism haven't been brought down at all. [1992]
Explicitly describing the "bringing down of communism" as America's deliberate actions to
dismantle the USSR might run the risk of reminding the audience about the illegality of
interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign nations, and it might have reminded people of
what a betrayal this was of America's WWII ally and partner in the détente of the 1970s.
The inconvenient truth is that the USSR was the WWII ally that played a crucial role in the
victory that Mr. Gore claimed solely for America.
Nonetheless, the comment about "bringing down communism" is refreshingly, and maybe
accidentally, very honest. Most descriptions of the Soviet collapse, even those done by
historians specializing in this field, pay little attention to American efforts to undermine
the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s. The political class always denied that America had a
plan to dismantle the USSR, and denied having any significant influence on events which they
claim arose from domestic causes. If America's influence is addressed at all, it is considered
as a matter of speculation, a mystery hardly worth thinking about when one can more easily look
at the dramatic events that occurred on the surface within the Soviet Union in the last decade
of its existence. The following transcript of the lecture by Sean Gervasi, delivered in 1992,
shortly after the collapse, is unique and valuable for what it reveals about the significant,
and perhaps decisive, American role in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his conclusion, Mr. Gervasi came to this judgment:
The Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out,
extremely costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society
struggling through great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the
kind that it was. It would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think,
therefore, that Western intervention made a crucial difference in this situation."
The journey to how he came to this conclusion is well worth the reader's time.
A final comment about Mr. Gore's remarks: He is oblivious to the inconvenient solution that
has been staring him in the face all these years: that the necessary reduction of carbon
emissions will require severe constraints on capitalism, a thesis developed by Jason W. Moore
in Capitalism in the Web of Life .[ii] Mr. Gore should know that a radical solution is
needed. In his recent sequel to An Inconvenient Truth he complains about the undue
influence of "money in politics" that has gotten so much worse over the last ten years, but
that's as deep as the class analysis and ideological exploration can go in America. He evinces
no awareness of the historical figures who developed answers to the problem of unaccountable
private control of a nation's government, resources and productive capacities. Gore is still
proud of having actively worked against a revolution in human affairs that aimed to curtail the
savage capitalism that led to the present ecological catastrophe.
In spite of the flaws one might see in what the Soviet Union actually became, flaws that
arose to a great extent because it had to fight against external threats throughout its
existence, the goals of the revolution of 1917 are still relevant to the crises of the 21st
century, and this is what makes Sean Gervasi's research so valuable now, after a quarter
century in which America doubled down on its "winning ways" and worsened the crises that were
evident long ago in 1992.
About Sean Gervasi
Sean Gervasi (1933-1996) spent the latter part of his career exposing the role of the
United States and Western powers in the breakup of the USSR and Yugoslavia. He was working on a
book,Balkan Roulette, at the time of his death.
Gervasi was an economist trained at the University of Geneva, Oxford and Cornell. His
political career began when he took a post as an economic adviser in the Kennedy
administration. He resigned in protest after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.
After his resignation, Gervasi was never able to get work again in the United States as an
economist, despite his impressive academic credentials. He became a lecturer at the London
School of Economics after leaving Washington. Notwithstanding his great popularity, the school
refused to renew his contract in 1965.
During the 1970s and 1980s he was an adviser to a number of governments in Africa and the
Middle East, helping them navigate the hostile and predatory world of transnational
corporations and megabanks. He also worked for the UN Committee on Apartheid and the UN
Commission on Namibia.
In addition, Gervasi was a journalist, contributing to a wide range of publications, from
the New York Amsterdam News to Le Monde Diplomatique . He was a frequent
commentator on the listener-supported Pacifica radio station WBAI in New York. In 1976, Gervasi
broke the story of how the U.S. government was secretly arming the apartheid regime in South
Africa.
In the late 1980s, Gervasi began to focus on the Cold War and what he called the "full court
press," a basketball term for a highly aggressive "all in" strategy. In an article published in
the Covert Action Information Bulletin in early 1991[iii], when the breakup of the USSR
was imminent, Gervasi showed how the Reagan administration's strategy of economic isolation, a
gargantuan arms buildup with the threat of a nuclear attack, overt funding of internal dissent,
and CIA-directed sabotage had been decisive in bringing down the USSR. Gervasi backed up his
analysis with careful scholarship and documentation.
Gervasi was widely respected as a leading independent figure in the left, but his views were
contrary to the fashionable dogma that attributed the USSR's collapse almost exclusively to
such things as failures of leadership, centralization of the economy, the black market,
Chernobyl, or independence movements, and not to external hostility. These are the subjects
which he addressed in the following lecture given to a small audience in January 1992. The
lecture can still be found on internet video sites, but the thesis of this lecture still
remains marginal and obscure two decades later, even though it is highly pertinent to the Cold
War replay that is underway in the second decade of the 21st century -- one in which Russia
stands accused of turning the tables and doing a comparatively very tame version of the
propaganda war waged on the USSR in the 1980s.
After 1992, Gervasi focused his attention on the breakup of Yugoslavia, which he discovered
was a replay of the strategy used to break up the Soviet Union. He became active in exposing
the role of external powers, particularly the U.S. and German governments, in fomenting the
civil war in the Balkans. His view that the war in Bosnia was sparked by the aggressive
machinations these nations, and not age-old ethnic rivalries, alienated Gervasi from much of
the liberal and progressive movement. Journals to which he had once regularly contributed would
no longer print his articles. He had great difficulty finding a publisher for his book on the
Balkans, but some of his research on this topic can be found in the article "Why Is NATO In
Yugoslavia?"[iv] published by Global Research in 2001.[v]
Dennis Riches, November 2017
***
VIDEO
Scroll down for the full Transcript
https://www.youtube.com/embed/b9_aYcpxClA
Byline of the video:
Propaganda expert reveals details in 1992 of RAND Think Tank plan under Reagan to bring down
USSR, the major socialist challenge to capitalism in crisis, called Operation Full Court Press
when announced at a Reagan limited invitee press conference upon its launch. It involved
targeting mid-level Soviet bureaucrats with publications and Air America broadcasts pointing to
problems they were facing having better outcomes in the US, military provocations when they
were considering their budget in order to spend them into bankruptcy, luring them into
Afghanistan followed by arming the Mujahadeen with surface to air missiles and such; and
fanning flames of ethnic rivalries within the Soviet Union, like by sending publication
equipment to Baltic ethnic groups.
In first 20 minutes Sean prophetically lays out the impending crisis of capitalism that
drives their urgency to stamp out socialist competition. Sean died under mysterious
circumstances in Belgrad where he had set up shop pointing out a PR effort in the US Congress
by Ruder Finn hired by Croats and Kosovo Albanians to start a US war against Yugoslavia for
their secession.
Event January 26, 1992 arranged by Connie Hogarth of WESPAC, Camera: Beth
Lamont
Transcript
(edited by Dennis Riches)
Introduction
I've been speaking in the last year or so about developments in the Soviet Union from the
perspective of a person who follows the workings of the Western intelligence agencies,
something in which I was tutored while I was working at the United Nations, and was on the
receiving end of quite a lot of that activity.
That is an important theme that one needs to look at: the role of the West in developments
which have taken place in the Soviet Union, and it's one that I've been focusing on, but of
course the wider and more important issue is: how shall we understand the meaning of events in
the Soviet Union in the last five, six, ten years? That's really the critical question.
As you know, the developments, particularly the end or collapse of communist rule in the
Soviet Union, and finally the breakup of the Soviet Union itself, have been presented in our
media insistently and incessantly as evidence that socialism or social democracy, or
what-have-you, which we'll discuss, is unworkable. And this, of course, in tandem with the
theme which has been disseminated so energetically by these same people in the last decade,
that capitalism:
a) is more or less the same thing as democracy, and
b) must be seen as the core and triumphant achievement of Western civilization
Hence the thesis that this is the end of history, that we have achieved everything that
there is to achieve, that the present system of institutions in which we live in the West
represents the pinnacle of human capacities, intellectually and organizationally, and is the
best of all possible worlds.
That's the thesis, or those are the twin theses which surround us and which have been, I
think, creating an enormous amount of confusion and consternation because I think people sense
there is something wrong with this idea, and the effort to close off all discussion about
alternatives to, what I would term, our "regime" in the United States today, and possibly in
Western Europe, which is a moving backward from the more enlightened and liberal capitalism,
liberal democracy and capitalism, which evolved after the Second World War in Western Europe
and the United States.
We are today, I think, living in an irrational and savage capitalism of the 19th-century
variety, which for particular reasons, people who have power in this society either have
acceded to or have energetically worked to institute.
Part 1 The Crisis in the United States
The question is whether this great wave of propaganda makes any sense, and so I think we
should examine whether the idea that socialism and alternatives to raw capitalism are
impossible, undesirable, and unworkable. I think we have to look at that in two ways. First of
all, we have to examine our own situation in the United States, historically, and we have to
also, I think, look at what has happened in the Soviet Union because what has happened in the
Soviet Union is really very different from what we are told by the mass media. We have not
merely witnessed a collapse of communism in the Soviet Union. We have seen something really
very different, but it has been systematically misrepresented in the Western media.
There's a great deal of misunderstanding about the kind of society that American democracy
really represents, and that misunderstanding is both historical and contemporary. There is a
tremendous tension which we are all aware of in our society. It is a tension between
egalitarianism and inequality. It is a tension born of the evolution in the in the 16th, 17th
and 18th century in England, and the transfer of a particular kind of society onto American
soil through British political traditions, notwithstanding our rebellion as colonists at the
end of the 18th century. And that is the particular set of institutions known as liberal
democracy. Liberal democracy is a combination of parliamentary government and capitalism, and
liberal democracy inevitably, therefore, contains some very serious tensions because the
progressive development of parliamentary democracy has tended to give greater and greater scope
to the principle of equality in human life and politics. That's why in the course of British
19th century political development there was a progressive expansion of the franchise. And
that's why in the United States there was also an expansion of the franchise. The United States
did not have the same encumbering property qualifications in the beginning, although we did
have property qualifications in the 18th century in the United States, but eventually we had
the full franchise extended to all adults, and we've been redefining adults most recently.
We've dropped the level of political maturity or political enfranchisement to 18 years.
Capitalism, on the contrary, is a system of economic and social institutions based on the
principle of inequality, and there's a rationale for that inequality which also comes from the
18th century, but the idea, essentially, is that it makes sense from the point of view of
efficiency, and indeed equity, given all the considerations that one must take into account, to
have a society based on the unequal distribution of property organized around that institution,
to have an economy based on private property because, in the final analysis, it is most
efficient, and in the long run holds the greatest promise of continuous progress. By the way,
that's an argument that Marx made at a certain point -- that at a certain stage of history a
capitalist society is extremely progressive, that it gathers the technical capacities of
mankind, personkind, and develops them and accumulates and accumulates until it creates
something new, which we won't talk about just now.
But historically and currently in the United States we very strongly sense this tension so
that we go back and forth between periods when we have enormous pressures to give predominance
to the principle of inequality, to pay attention to the rights of property, and periods when
egalitarian tendencies have been very strong. For instance, as in the turn of the century
during the expansive phase of American populism and during the antitrust of the great popular
movements that sought -- not just popular -- but that sought to contain the power of the
cartels and the trusts in the United States. And today we sense that too. We passed the law in
1946 that's called the Employment Act. By the way, it's not called the Full Employment Act. You
have to remember that legislation. And yet we realize that our adherence to the principle of
full employment was tenuous even in the 25 years which followed the Second World War, and
completely spurious today. Why is that? It's because of this tremendous tension between the
realities of power under capitalism and the rather fragile hold which democratic principles and
institutions have on that power.
Let's go back to the Constitution and the Philadelphia Convention. I've been rereading Beard
and I'm very impressed by his grasp of who predominates really in this delicate balance in
liberal democracy between the principles of egalitarianism, the principles of parliamentary
democracy and the enormous concentration of power, which even then was inherent in the
dominance of the institutions of private property. Beard's argument essentially is that in the
final analysis a small group of men, whom he refers to as one-sixth of the adult male
population -- the only people who ratified the Constitution, the participants in the ratifying
conventions who voted positively for the Constitution -- represented one-sixth of the adult
male population. That is to say 8% of the adult population in today's terms. Against our values
that represents 8% of today's population -- the equivalent.
Now, what was obtained in that framing of the Constitution? What was obtained was a system
of political science, a system of government which was so structured as to ensure the dominance
of private property, the power of private property in any contention between the forces of
democracy and the forces of private property, and the forces of inequality, if you like, so
that the structure which constitutes, at the founding of this republic, which constitutes the
framework within which we operate today, is one which ensures that predominance.
I know that Beard has been attacked by many people, and it's perfectly understandable when
you read Beard carefully, but it seems to me that today Beard becomes more illuminating. Why? I
say I pay attention to the Constitution, to the Philadelphia Convention, to its ratification,
to the numbers who ratified it and to the purposes which they saw themselves as furthering by
their framing and ratification of this constitution because that is the framework within which
the United States experienced the most successful and untrammeled Industrial Revolution in the
history of mankind. Untrammeled. We had a straight run of industrialization which was the first
to transform the condition of man in human society, by which I mean something very, very
specific. And here I speak to things which were said by people like [ John Maynard] Keynes , by people like [
Joseph Alois] Schumpeter ,
but really ignored because they're extremely uncomfortable.
The rationalization for inequality in the institution of private property, in the thinking
of eighteenth century philosophers, was that property had to be shared unequally and income had
to be unequal because this inequality provided incentives which would constitute a constant
assurance of the drive to the expansion of production. That was the rationalization, but in the
20th century, according to the economic historians and according to people like Keynes,
countries like the United States and Great Britain began to end, began to transform the
historical situation within which these institutions were conceived. How? By developing such a
capacity to produce that gradually more and more numbers were lifted out of anything which
could be historically or comparatively called poverty so that scarcity, which dominates the
reasoning of economists, was really beginning to end in many respects. And Joseph Schumpeter
was able to say, for instance, in 1928, that if economic growth continued in the United States
for another 50 years we would see in 1978 the end of anything that could reasonably be called
poverty.
Now that didn't quite happen. That didn't quite happen because of the enormous influence of
inequality in the distribution of this productive abundance. But what it did transform was the
lives of many, many people, and it transformed everyday life and the historical condition. Look
between 1870 and 1970 at how the number of hours that the average American works falls. In the
period between 1945 and 1970, per capita production trebled, just in that period, and we
already had a huge industrial base at that time, so I would argue [agree], with Galbraith, who
-- because he was right was vilified and ignored by the economist profession and studiously
made little of by the mass media -- that indeed America began to be transformed with the
success of its enormous industrial revolution by the end of the period after 1865, when really
heavy industrialization began to take place. And indeed I would argue that the reason for the
Great Depression was that the United States had lost the ability to continue to absorb
everything that it could produce in an adequate way, given the institutions of the time.
So what happened then was that within this framework, which is the same framework conceived
by the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. To further the purposes of property and to insure
against what Madison called "the leveling attacks of democracy," we have industrialization
enhance the expansion of an enormous power, which is the power that controls the machinery and
the resources of that productive system. That is to say large corporations. The largest 500
corporations in the United States today, plus the largest 500 banks and the largest 50
financial corporations control more resources than the Soviet planners ever dreamed of
controlling. The control of those resources, which is made invisible by the clever workings of
economists, inheres in the ability to make investment decisions. Investment decisions are the
key decisions in any economic system. The power to make those decisions is the power to
continuously transform and to determine the terms of everyday life among human beings in any
society. That power is not only invisible in our system of thought, carefully hidden by the
descendants of the 18th century philosophers, but it is also totally unaccountable.
Now maybe you could say, and we did say this between 1945 and 1975:
"OK this is a contradiction of democracy. This is the inheritance from the Philadelphia
Convention, the Constitution in its ratification and the dominance of this one-sixth of the
male adult population in 1789, but this system is so productive that we can alleviate the
resulting social and political tensions by raising the standard of living of ordinary
folks."
And that was the whole philosophy of the sophisticated American leadership in the first
generation after the Second World War. That was the philosophy of the Rockefellers when they
talked about the new enlightened capitalism of 20th century. Capitalism could deliver the goods
and hence people would be content, despite the fact that the realities of power born at the end
of the 18th century, and essentially enhanced by the enormous accumulation of power represented
by industrialization and the growth of large corporations and their concentrated power in the
economy. We could live with that because the United States economy was so productive.
Now, that's our history, and the tremendous tension of our situation today as contrasted
with the post-war period because one thing is very clear today: that for 20 years in the United
States this system has not been working. There has been a systematic retreat from full
employment, high wages, advancing standards of living, security in one's job, and the advance
of the welfare state. We have systematically been retreating from those things so that we have
higher and higher official and real unemployment, which of course is about double the official
unemployment -- and the statisticians work very hard to hide the realities of
life.
Sean Gervasi
Between 1977 and 1992, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 70% of American
families have seen their after-tax income fall. 70%! In the lower ranges of the income
distribution those falls are quite sharp. Purchasing power falls by twenty 20.8% for the
poorest fifth, by something like 12% for the next fifth, by something like 11% for the third
fifth, and by smaller amounts for those in the middle of the income distribution system. So I
would say that that represents, and people are increasingly becoming aware of it, a collapse of
the American standard of living. And this collapse of the American standard of living is
related to a gradual economic decline which is causing the post-war system, as we have known it
in the United States between 1945 and 1970, to begin to disintegrate. And I think this is the
reality of what is happening so that today even according to Wall Street forecasters like the
Levies, attached to Bard
College up here in the county, we are facing what they call a contained depression, which
may be worse than the kind of depression we saw in the 1930s because the stabilizing role of
the government makes it possible not to avoid some of the awful horrors that occurred in
the depression, but to diminish them to a degree which makes them almost invisible.
So we have a very tense situation. I ask you to reflect on that when we confront the
enormous economic difficulties from which there follow all kinds of social problems in our
society today which we face. These are connected to, and, if you like, made possible by the
arrangements conceived by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton . If this crisis which we have
been living in for 20 years, and have become more acutely aware of in the last 10, is
intractable, it is, above all, intractable because of this invisible concentrated power which
exists today after industrial growth -- the rise of the large corporations in the framework
conceived by Madison, Hamilton and the other Federalists.
So if you want to argue today that we need to reconsider this framework, you run into very
fundamental problems. You run into the problem that the Constitution is treated like an icon,
that people are unaware that the preamble to the Declaration of Independence is not the law of
the United States, that people are unaware of the fact that the Bill of Rights, which is
supposed to compensate for some of the failings of our constitutional system, has been
systematically shredded by the two most recent administrations. Witness William Kunstler and
his remarkable talks on what has happened to the Bill of Rights in the last ten years.
Part 2 The Crisis in the Soviet Union
Now, let's get to the Soviet Union, keeping in mind always that it is against this
background of crisis and the intractability of crisis, and it's rooting in the historical
origins of the Constitution that we are asked, that we are invited -- without anybody saying
that that's the background -- that we are invited to ponder the proposition that there is no
alternative to the kind of capitalism that we have, and that this capitalism is the
quintessence of democracy.
Now let us look at that proposition against a second set of data, if you like, which is
supposed to prove the case that there was socialism in the Soviet Union, that the Soviet Union
then, along with its Eastern European partners, collapsed in chaos owing to the essential
unworkability of this kind of a system. Let's look at that.
When the Reagan administration came into office we all became aware rather quickly that
something new was happening. We should have known that something new was happening because, in
fact, the arrival of the Reagan administration in power had been preceded by a very careful
build-up which was, in part, visible in the American polity, and that was the emergence of the
development and the elaboration of the power of a group which we now call the new right --
people who 20 years ago, 28 years ago in 1964, after Goldwater lost the Republican National
Convention. Rockefeller took command of the party that had been relegated to what every major
political commentator at the time called the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. These were
the people who, particularly in California, were coming out of the walls in the late 1970s,
creating foundations, buying chairs of economics at universities. Look at it: the Coors ,
the
Mises , with all of their contacts. These were the people who were building a new group,
and the purpose of this group was to put a stop to the kind of systematic democratic
entrenchment which they thought had been going on in the 1960s and the 1970s.
In the 1960s and the 1970s, there were three movements: (1) the movement for workers'
rights, for unionization, the expansion of unionization, particularly among city employees and
for raising wages, and the tremendous industrial disruption that attended the 1960s and the
early 1970s in the industrial sector, (2) the civil rights movement, which preceded that,
beginning in the late 1950s, and (3) the movement against the war in Vietnam, the war in
Vietnam being one of the ways in which this society managed to utilize, in a profitable
fashion, its enormous productive capacity without giving it to ordinary folks, without giving
its fruits to ordinary folks.
The new right was determined to do something quite new. One of the new things that it did,
and Reagan really was not its spokesman because that implies a degree of activity which I think
he's incapable of. You can always program a spokesman. I don't think he had the wheels to do
that.
Reagan launched, as you know, a massive, serious, intense, ugly confrontation with the
Soviet Union, ideologically. At the same time we became aware that there was a significant
drive on to re-arm the United States, to throw enormous resources -- ultimately it was in
excess of 1.7 trillion dollars during the 1980s -- to throw enormous resources into the
military sector, to throw enormous resources into shifting the technology of the military
sector to war in space, SDI [Space Defense Initiative], etc. All of those things were on the
agenda, but many of us at the time puzzled about this. I remember asking myself, "What is it
with these folks? Do these fellows really want a world war? Can they not see that this can be
the outcome?"
And I remember those discussions, and I remember when many of you and I on June 12, 1982
were at the demonstration of 750,000 to 1 million people in the center of New York City, which
was an expression of the alarm that people felt at this enormous aggressive policy which was
coming out of the Reagan administration, which threatened to shred US-Soviet relations.
But in fact, retrospectively, we can see that there was something else behind it, that it
was not just irrational madness. There was a bit of that, but there was a rationality to what
was being done, and in fact, to understand that, it's important to see that it is connected to
every single major line of innovative policy that the Reagan administration developed. It was
extremely well thought-out, extremely shrewd. And [it involved] the military buildup and the
aggressive rhetoric towards the Soviet Union, the deliberate effort to create difficulties in
the relationships between the Soviet Union and the European powers. You remember that in 1982
the United States tried to force the European powers not to accept natural gas from the Soviet
Union, to deny shipments of technology to the Soviet Union which would make it possible for the
Soviet Union to exploit that natural gas, to earn foreign exchange, etc. It was all part of a
very complex strategy, but it was a very clear strategy.
Let me say, though, that many of us, at least I at the time, missed that. We didn't quite
comprehend what was going on, but we had in the back our mind flickers that something was
wrong. There were people who were saying or hinting clearly at what was happening, and shrewd
people, intelligent people who did begin to grasp what was happening.
Let me quote from one or two. Writing in 1982, Joe Fromm , who was then the editor of the
United States' US News and World Report , said,
"There was something behind," I'm quoting him, "the shift to a harder line in foreign
policy." The US, in fact, seemed to be "waging limited economic warfare against Russia to
force the Soviets to reform their political system." That suggests that's a nice journalist,
a reasonably liberal journalist at US News and World Report , but Joe then quoted a
State Department official saying (actually, a National Security Council official), "The
Soviet Union is in deep, deep economic and financial trouble. By squeezing wherever we can,
our purpose is to induce the Soviets to reform their system. I think we will see results over
the next several years." That's in 1982.
Robert Scheer wrote a book in 1982 called With Enough Shovels: Reagan and Bush and
Nuclear War . I think I've got the title almost right. This is a very interesting book in
which Scheer saw that there was something behind this enormously aggressive foreign policy,
foreign and military policy, that the Reagan administration was deploying. And he saw that the
United States was not simply playing nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union, as he put it, but
that it was embarked on a policy designed to create such pressure for the Soviet Union as to
force changes within the Soviet Union.
Now of course it had always been the case that the Cold War consisted of moves designed to
affect the behavior of others. The Cold War, from the point of view of the West, had always
aimed at modifying, as the State Department cookie pushers liked to put it in their delicate
prose, the behavior of our antagonist. But this, I think you will see, went beyond that
because, in fact, the Reagan administration embarked on a policy of many dimensions which
included pressure around the world on countries with close ties to the Soviet Union.
Insurgencies were initiated in Mozambique, Angola, Cambodia against Vietnam, Nicaragua, and,
quite a lot, Afghanistan.
I don't want to get into too many complicated discussions of Afghanistan, but I think
anybody who reflects upon the United States' response to the Soviet entry into Afghanistan in
1979 must realize that the United States did not want the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan,
and in fact the purpose of these insurgencies around the world, which as you know, had expended
billions of dollars, was to pin the Soviet Union down, and to inflict economic costs upon the
Soviet Union. The purpose of the remilitarization in the West was to force the Soviet Union, at
the risk of exposing itself to the pressure of escalation, to meet our resource commitments, to
defend itself, or to place itself in a position to resist our pressure.
The purpose of escalating the technology of nuclear warfare, again, was to impose costs upon
the Soviet Union. [This was ] the purpose of every principled measure, such as withholding
advanced technology from the Soviet Union, foreign assistance programs aimed not at assisting
countries on the basis of their needs, but on assisting countries on the basis of the
contribution they would make to putting pressure on the Soviet Union. All of these things were
part of a systematic strategy designed to create havoc in the Soviet Union.
Now I'll say a little bit more about what the purpose of that was, but first let me point
out that this is a systematic strategy consisting of a number of pieces, and that it did pose
enormous economic and other costs upon the Soviet Union.
But who is Gervasi [the speaker] to say that this is so, beyond quoting Joseph Fromm? Well,
let me tell you a little bit about an interesting experience I had. I had lunch one day with a
friend who was passing through the United States, who had been in jail in South Africa for
eight years, and had just got out. He had been engaged in planning one of the principal
sabotage operations against the South African nuclear installations, and he was very happy to
be out of jail. We sat at lunch and he said to me -- we talked about many things, mostly about
Africa which he and I had worked on together -- and he said to me,
"What's going on in the Soviet Union?" I said to him, "Well, you know, I really can't
figure this out. I can't figure out what's going on." He said, "It seems to me that the
Soviet Union is being destabilized." "My goodness," I say to myself quietly.
The thought had never passed my mind, but when my friend, Christie, said this I thought I
should look into this, and I did.
The first thing I found was I spent a little bit of time on a computer and some things came
up, and I said that looks very interesting. Within a very short time I had discovered reams of
material being generated at the end of the 1970s and in the early 1980s by organizations like
the RAND Corporation. You know what the RAND Corporation is. It's an Air Force/CIA contracting
agency in Southern California, very large, very powerful, very influential in the so-called
intellectual defense community, the military industrial complex, and in Washington. People go
back and forth from the CIA, from the DIA to the State Department to the RAND Corporation. And
what were the chaps at the RAND Corporation doing? Well, they were producing very interesting
studies with titles like Economic Factors Affecting Soviet Foreign and Defense Policy :
A Summary Outline , The Costs of the Soviet Empire , Sitting on Bayonets: the
Soviet Defense Burden and Moscow's Economic Dilemma: The Burden of Soviet Defense ,
Exploiting Fault Lines in the Soviet Empire: Economic Relations with the USSR .
Anyway, I started reading the stuff. First of all, I started collecting it and I started
reading this stuff, and I found out something very interesting: that these fellows at the end
of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s were clearly fashioning a plan in which we began to
see the pieces of in the emerging parts of foreign and military policy, foreign and military
and economic policy under the Reagan administration. And the basic reasoning of this plan --
I'll give it to you -- is as follows: the Soviet Union was in a dual crisis. They knew what was
going on in Soviet Union. Economic growth in the Soviet Union had begun to slow down. It had
been very rapid, by the way, in the period from 1950 to the early 1970s. Between 1960 and 1984
per capita income and per capita production in the Soviet Union trebled, so it wasn't slow.
That was a 4 or 5% rate of growth, very rapid considering that we're growing at about 1.5
which, is about, by the way, equivalent to the rate of growth on average during the decade of
the 1930s in the United States.
Now, what I found out was that they also understood there was a leadership crisis in the
Soviet Union. The old line of principal Soviet leaders born in the early stages of Soviet
redevelopment after the Revolution, formed in the Second World War -- that leadership was dying
out, as we all knew. And in fact Mikhail Gorbachev , selected by Andrei Gromyko , was the first
representative of a new generation of Soviet leaders, but in the late 70s and early 80s, people
were dying. The major figures Andropov, Chernenko and Brezhnev, were dying, and there was a
very great confusion about succession. So the country was in a kind of crisis. The CIA calls it
a dual crisis, a leadership crisis, not knowing to which new people of a new generation the
leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and the Soviet Union should pass, and at the same time
a beginning of faltering of economic growth, which was serious because since the Soviet Union
had to always, like any country, choose between investing, competing in the arms race, and
raising the standard of living of its population. The fact that economic growth fell off made
that more difficult.
Now the next step in the reasoning of the RAND Corporation, gentlemen and ladies from the
RAND Corporation, was that the United States and its allies could take various actions which
would force the Soviet Union to increase its defense spending and its military assistance to
allies and friends. They could take measures to deny the Soviet Union credits, which they did,
and to deny it technology. They could also take measures which would reduce the overall volume
of resources available to the Soviet Union and hold back the growth of productivity, which
would exacerbate the problem, or force them to shift resources from consumers to investment.
And [they knew] that all of these effects would (to quote them) "aggravate the difficulties
confronting the Soviet leadership in a stagnant economy. So, a combination of these measures to
impose costs on the Soviet Union could be expected to lead to falling investment and/or living
standards, and such measures consequently might generate pressures within the Soviet Union for
withdrawing from the world stage, and for political reform."
So the purpose of this operation, which I will try to define more clearly in a moment, was
to impose, in a variety of ways, enormous costs on the Soviet Union, or to reduce the resources
available to them in such a way as to exacerbate their economic difficulties. Let me quote from
Abraham Becker , one of the shrewder Rand analysts:
Thus the Reagan administration seized Soviet economic troubles as an opportunity to
complicate further their resource allocation difficulties dilemma, in the hope that
additional pressures would result in a reallocation of resources away from defense, or would
push the economy in the directions of economic and political reform.
The purpose of this new aggressive multi-dimensional strategy was to force reform upon the
Soviet Union. What that reform was to be is a later chapter. Now, it's one thing to say that
these plans exist, and I'll talk about other plans. For instance, I managed to pull together a
collection of documents from the National Endowment for Democracy, which as you know, is
supposed to be a quasi-government institution. It's not a quasi-government institution. It's
funded by Congress. It's a government institution funded by Congress, which sees it to be its
business to "promote democracy outside the United States" in the rest of the world, where by
"democracy" one means essentially, and when you come down to it it's clear now in the Soviet
Union, "capitalism" and "liberal democracy," if you like [the latter term].
Now, it's one thing of course to talk about all this planning, to try on your own to reason
that all of these things fit together, but in fact we began to get official indications and
documentation, as early as the spring of 1982, that the government had signed on to this
strategy, that this was not the wild thinking of a few eager folks in a few think tanks, that
it was policy and that it was policy which the American public knew very little of, did not
understand the purposes and consequences of, but would nonetheless be required to pay for to
the tune of several trillion dollars, which did indeed help to create the situation in which we
presently find ourselves at home, locked in the Philadelphia Convention.
In the spring of 1982 I had spoken to two of the participants in this little meeting. A
senior National Security Council official charged with responsibility for Soviet affairs called
a number of influential Washington correspondents and asked them to come to the National
Security Council for a briefing. Two of them told me that they left this briefing extremely
shaken. They didn't want to say too much about it, but they gave me to understand that they
thought that this was an extremely aggressive, dangerous, and highly risky strategy which the
administration was describing and stating that it was about to embark upon.
Helen Thomas of UPI was one of the people who was in that meeting, and she described the
results of the briefing -- this briefing on the Soviet Union -- in the following manner:
A senior White House official said Reagan has approved an eight-page National Security
document that undertakes a campaign aimed at internal reform in the Soviet Union and the
shrinkage of the Soviet empire. He affirmed that it could be called a full-court press
against the Soviet Union.[vi]
A little later, just a few days later, in fact, further evidence, this time quoting official
documentation, not hearsay from a briefer at the National Security Council, but quoting
official documentation: Richard Halloran, the defense correspondent of The New York
Times published an article in that paper on May the 30th of 1982, just a few days really
after Helen Thomas sent out her UPI dispatch. Halloran quoted from the fiscal years 1984-1988
Defense Guidance, of which The Times stated that it had a copy.[vii] The Secretary's
Guidance Document recommended what Halloran called "a major escalation in the nuclear arms
race." Apart from that it indicated that a number of other measures were being taken "to impose
costs on the Soviet Union." Note the language is the language of the RAND planners. Some of the
same people probably wrote the document. I quote from Halloran's direct quote from the National
Guidance document of the Secretary of Defense:
"As a peacetime complement to military strategy, the Guidance Document asserts that the
United States and its allies should, in effect, declare economic and technical war on the
Soviet Union."
This is interesting. "And so I think," it went on. They wrote,
"to put as much pressure as possible on the Soviet economy already burdened with military
expenditure, they should develop weapons that are difficult for the Soviets to counter,
impose disproportionate costs, open up new areas of major military competition, and
obsolesce," (Nice English. I've put sic in my article) "precious Soviet
investments."
So I think it's safe to say, and a number of people prove it to us a little later on, that
this policy was instituted. Let me just race ahead to one of the more recent proofs. David
Ignatius , who is a correspondent at The Washington Post, published a very remarkable
article about "spyless coups" not long ago, in October, if I'm not mistaken. Perhaps it was
September. Ignatius is a correspondent with very close ties to the intelligence community, to
be very polite about it. I quote from his article: "Preparing the ground " This is immediately
after the Yeltsin double event of August 1991 in which Mr. Gorbachev was seemingly threatened
by a coup and in which Mr. Yeltsin did not seem to take power but did. He described the event
in this way:
Preparing the ground for last month's triumph was a network of overt operatives who,
during the last ten years, have quietly been changing the rules of international politics.
They have been doing in public what the CIA used to do in private, providing money and moral
support for pro-democracy groups, training resistance fighters, working to subvert communist
rule.[viii]
Could he have written that in The Washington Post in 1982? It's difficult, I would
have thought. It might not have passed muster. Some people might have noticed, but in 1991,
evidently, it was all right to say that this is what we were doing.[ix]
If you look very carefully you can find many traces by officials stating that the United
States had embarked upon a strategy which, retrospectively, it is very clear, was nothing more
and nothing less than a strategy to destabilize the Soviet Union. Mr. Casey's magnificent and
expansive imagination had carried covert operations beyond the narrow confines of Third World
countries and aimed them at the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. If you go back and look at the
history of these events in this perspective, reading some of the documents, you'll see things
very differently
Judd Clark [name indistinct, spelling uncertain], for instance, speaking at a private
seminar at Georgetown University, again around 1982, said,
"We must force our principle adversary, the Soviet Union, to bear the brunt of its
economic shortcomings."
Well, that's slightly veiled language that means the same sort of thing that everybody else
was saying. It wasn't, though, until 1985, that the redoubtable and incomparable Jeane
Kirkpatrick appeared on the stage with the full text of the play in hand, and she gave a
speech, not surprisingly in front of the Heritage Foundation, at a conference room on Capitol
Hill in which she said, "The Reagan doctrine, as I understand it, is about our relations with
the Soviet Union," and she then described every principal element of the strategy which Helen
Thomas in 1982 called, repeating the NSC briefer's statement, "a full-court press against the
Soviet Union."
If you read her speech to the Heritage Foundation, which everybody should read because it
was 1985, she was saying that the United States is bent upon a strategy aimed at overthrowing
the Soviet Union through internal and external pressures. She principally described the
external pressure.
I want to say a little bit about the debate over the internal pressure. Again, in 1982,
there was a nasty little debate between some members of Congress and the then-Secretary of
State General Alexander Haig . Mr. Haig was very anxious that the United States should embark
upon the program which Ronald Reagan was going to describe before the British Parliament in
June 1982, at just about the time most of us were going to be in the streets of New York to
protest some of the things that he was doing. And Hague said in the debate over the creation of
the National Endowment for Democracy, which the Congress had insisted should not spill over
into efforts to meddle in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union, Mr. Haig said,
"Just as the Soviet Union gives active support to Marxist-Leninist forces in the West and
the [Global] South " [ironic commentary:] (because it owns Newsweek , for instance and
it manipulates the Columbia Broadcasting Company such enormous power the Soviet Union has in
the West) " we must give vigorous support to democratic forces wherever they are located,
including countries which are now communist. We should not hesitate to promote our own
values, knowing that the freedom and dignity of man are the ideals that motivate the quest
for social justice. A free press, free trade unions, free political parties, freedom to
travel, and freedom to create are the ingredients of the democratic revolution of the future,
not the status quo of a failed past."
The founder of the Central Intelligence Agency said that propaganda is the first arrow of
battle. A statement by Alexander Haig in 1982 to the Congress signals what the United States
would attempt to do with the National Endowment for Democracy, that it would try to create and
participate in the creation of [a false narrative of ] a failed past in the Soviet Union. And,
in fact, as you know, all that went ahead.
Now, let's look at that for a second. I know that it's very difficult to believe this. I ask
you to look at the second of the articles which I read, or to search for what I've written. You
can read it and search for some of the documentation easily available. You will find that the
mission statement of the National Endowment for Democracy, which functions as a kind of
consortium bringing many of the pressures of the US government to bear inside the Soviet
Union.
Destabilization requires external pressure and a manipulation of the internal situation to
move political developments in the direction you desire. That's what targeting a country for
destabilization involves. We deprive Cuba of sugar, of medicines etc. and that creates internal
pressure, and utilizing the internal pressure, you insert yourself, create groups, diffuse
ideas which are inconsistent with those prevailing and suitable to power, and you begin to work
on that discontent. If the discontent deepens and spreads, you get better and better odds, and
because the Soviet Union was already in a kind of crisis, which, as Abraham Becker said,
"the United States then systematically sought to intensify and exacerbate."
The National Endowment for Democracy and literally dozens and dozens of pseudo-private
foundations, which I'll talk about in a second, went into the Soviet Union under the new
umbrella of glasnost, created academic presses, created newspapers, created radio stations, and
began to mobilize and to work upon the natural dissent and discontent that existed in the
Soviet Union, not only because of the historical past but also because of the difficulties of
the present as exacerbated by the United States and its Western partners.
If you look at how much money I'll just give you an idea of some of the projects that were
involved, and this is just one agency. You have to recognize that if this was going on in the
National Endowment for Democracy that there were many, many other channels of finance and
influence into the Soviet Union that were working on this.
For instance, in 1984 the NED gave $50,000 to a book exhibit in the Soviet Union: America
through American Eyes. At the book fair in 1985 (I mean I'm just selecting [a few]):
$70,000 via the Free Trade Union Institute, which is part of the National Endowment, to
Soviet Labor Review for research in publications on Soviet trade union and worker
rights.
In 1986, $84,000 to Freedom House to expand the operations of two Russian language journals
published in the US and distributed in the higher levels of the Soviet bureaucracy and
intelligentsia, already an arresting description. Imagine the Soviet Union publishing two
English-language journals in the Soviet Union during the 1980s and having them distributed and
eagerly read in the highest levels of the United States bureaucracy and intelligentsia. I don't
think that would have stuck very well in the United States.
In 1987, Freedom House, for the Athenaeum Press, rushed $55,000 for a Russian-language
publication house in Paris to publish unofficial research conducted in the USSR by established
scholars writing under pseudonyms. Now what does that mean? If you get down to 1989, we're
talking already in the $200,000 category.
For instance, the Center for Democracy, which is related to the National Endowment for
Democracy, began to create a center for assistance to independent and nationalist groups,
including the Crimean Tatar movement for human and national rights. In other words, they began
to finance ethnic and nationalist separatism, began to finance separate trade unions, began to
finance their own academics etc., except this is open, but it's very large-scale, very
large-scale.
I've done a little calculation and I can tell you that very large amounts of money were
being spent, probably on the order of, by all the Western allies, minimum, inside the Soviet
Union in the period from the mid to the late 1980s, one hundred million dollars a year -- a
hundred million dollars a year to finance organizations which might begin like WESPAC but would
then grow, develop, have outreach, which would become extraordinary with that kind of funding,
and did finally change things.
If you look at perestroika in the Soviet Union, [we know it started when] Mr. Gorbachev
became the Soviet leader. This is the background to the two stages in which we must understand
perestroika. In the first stage it was clear that the Soviet leadership was desperate to find a
way to renew socialism, that Mr. Gorbachev was bent upon the reformation of the notion of
socialism, and that he had widespread support inside the Soviet Union.
There were genuine economic improvements which took place between 1986 and, sort of, let's
say, the end of 1988, in the Soviet Union, as a result of those efforts, but the principal
question we have to ask ourselves, since today we confront a fragmented, or, if you like,
disassembled Soviet Union, the supremacy of nationalism, ethnic conflict, and Mr. Yeltsin --
who represents an extremely right-wing constituency at the present moment -- and the supremacy
of capitalism. And a capitalist society is now being created in the Soviet Union, ending Mr.
Gorbachev's experiment the crucial question to ask ourselves is a very simple one: how is it
that between 1985 and 1990 a movement which began as an attempt to transform and renew
socialism in the Soviet Union was supplanted by a right-wing movement aiming at the creation of
a capitalist society in the Soviet Union? That is the key question. That is the key question
because that's what's happened, and it's strange.
That's why many of us were puzzled about the contradictory evidence coming out of the
Khrushchev [ sic ? Brezhnev?] era. It was very difficult to understand. At first, it
seemed very positive, and then from the end of 1988, the fall of 1988, it became increasingly
clear that things were going to pieces, that Mr. Gorbachev was either not able to control the
forces which he had unleashed or that indeed he was bent upon creating, as I heard on the
French radio in 1988 for the first time stated very clearly -- it arrested my attention: the
purpose, said Mr. [name indistinct], on the radio in his not-bad French, was to create a
regulated market economy. That was the purpose of perestroika, not when it began, but somehow
something had happened.
In fact there's a lot of very interesting information out there now on the whole process.
There was clearly a large dissatisfied set of strata in the Soviet intelligentsia. What has
happened in the Soviet Union is more complex than the collapse through its own internal
contradictions of the system of socialism in the Soviet Union. I really don't want to talk very
much about whether the Soviet Union was a socialist society. There are people who say it was
and people who say it wasn't. It's a long discussion between Trotsky and Stalin etc., but for
my part I would say this: that the Soviet Union began as a genuine attempt to establish
socialism. There were always in the Soviet Union people genuinely seeking to further socialism,
and people who didn't give a damn. On balance, the thing we have to ask ourselves is whether
the existence of the Soviet Union, as an apparently perceived socialist society, was a positive
thing in the world equation at this particular time of history. I, on balance, having spent
years in the United Nations, seeing that under the attacks of the Western countries, which in
many cases were very ugly, most of the Third World countries which emerged in the late 1950s
and 60s and early 70s were really only barely saved by the few sources of support which they
got in the socialist world. And when the Soviet Union went down, they went down too; [for
example] Angola, Mozambique, Nicaragua.
So in many respects I would have thought that the Soviet Union, for all its defects, stood
as a positive development in history, with all of the horrors that took place. The United
States has had its horrors. The question is this: did the Soviet Union collapse because
socialism is unworkable and central planning doesn't work? No, it didn't. There was a crisis in
the Soviet Union. I would argue that in the absence of the kind of pressure [that was applied],
it's very difficult to weigh the balance. How important were the internal forces? How important
were the difficulties experienced internally, and how important was the external pressure and
the externally intervening force? How important that balance was is very difficult to get. We
have to read through all a lot of intelligence to understand that, to begin to get a grasp of
things, but that's our duty as people who are living history, or who seek to understand
history. We have to try to do that, and my basic conclusion still at this moment is this: the
Soviet Union today, in the absence of this extraordinarily crafty, well-thought-out, extremely
costly strategy deployed by the Reagan administration, would be a society struggling through
great difficulties. It would still be a socialist society, at least of the kind that it was. It
would be far from perfect, but it would still be there, and I think, therefore, that Western
intervention made a crucial difference in this situation. That's a judgment.
Conclusion
All right. Now, there is a question irrespective of that: what does it mean that the Soviet
Union now has disappeared as a result of the kind of process that I'm talking about, a
combination of internal difficulties and external pressure and intervention? Does it mean that
socialism doesn't work? Does it mean that [there is no alternative to] the kind of capitalism
that we live in today, which I think increasingly of as a return to irrational and savage 19th
century capitalism? If you walk through the Bronx and Brooklyn and Harlem, how can you not
conclude that we are living in an irrational and savage capitalism in which the leveling
attacks of democracy have been dealt with, in which the possibility of remedying that situation
by the constitutional means which exist in the normal political channels of our government are
very small, that electoral changes, in other words, are not going to be very significant, until
there's a mass mobilization of American people to make something happen.
If this is so, then the fact that what has happened in the Soviet Union has happened as it
happened has no bearing whatsoever on our problems, and we should not be confused or pushed
into consternation by it. Why? Primarily, for a very simple reason: The Soviet Union was
conceived at a time when, in Marxist terms, it was not ready. The Soviet Union did not have the
material base of abundance which would make it possible to create a society at once egalitarian
and democratic because the struggle to create that base would require a degree of repression
and authoritarianism, particularly heightened by external intervention and attack, which
inevitably would distort the nature of socialism.
I sympathize with Isaac [name indistinct], but I think it's too simple when he says
socialism in a backward country is backwards socialism. But the critical fact for us is this:
the Soviet Union was a society conceived as a socialist society prior to the creation of the
economic base which would permit the creation of a socialist society with ease. We live in a
society whose capacity to produce, whose potential abundance is so great that the inability to
make use of it is literally tearing this society apart.
We live in a society which is ready, and when I say that, I want to go back to the terms of
the discussion on the constitutional conventions. Well, why can't we have economic democracy?
What does economic democracy mean? Economic democracy inevitably would mean a number of these
things: the accountability of the enormous concentrated power which exists in our society today
to public democratic institutions. The planned rational use of resources at the public level,
with democratic participation in the same manner that that planned rational use is conceived
within the framework of the corporations, where the exercise of those decisions is not
accountable. So it seems to me that in our day, when our society is riven by its
contradictions, unable to use its abundance, unable to use its productive capacity in a
rational, humane and democratic manner, that what is on the agenda today is the democratization
of economic power, the rendering accountable of the enormous economic potential and power that
exists in our society to make this a better and decent and democratic world.
Voilà.
End of lecture
Question Period
Well, dear friends, first of all, we have to have this serious debate because the real terms
of the debate are rendered invisible by the absurd rhetoric and the absurd way in which we
speak about ourselves, and by the mass media whose power and determination is to keep the real
terms of the debate invisible. The real terms of the debate are: why is this society
collapsing? Why does this economic machine not work? Who is responsible? If the people who are
responsible are not going to do something about it, let them get the hell out.
Moderator : I know there have got to be lots of questions. We'll allot a certain amount of
time. We'll try to recognize everyone.
Question : You've analyzed this quite well, but what does one do to change [the
situation]?
Well, I think part of the problem I don't mean to be repetitious but I think that people are
clearly immobilized and confused at the moment. I think one of the reasons that people are
immobilized and confused is that the proper debate is not out there. It's not possible for
people to express what they know from their experience to be true, to assert its truth. The
public debate rejects our experience and understanding because the public debate is designed to
contain us, to make us accept and even to believe in the superiority of this situation. I think
people know what needs to be done out there. In a sense the quintessential problem confronting
our country is the enormous concentrated power to shape people's lives, to define discourse, as
[name indistinct] pointed out, which is accountable to no one. The democratization of that
power means, I think, certainly radical changes in the structure of our society, but ones for
which in many respects people are ready and which indeed are supported by most of the values
that this society has lived by historically and attests to.
It seems to me it's really quite simple. We don't have democracy in the sense in which we
normally understand ourselves to have democracy in which people often speak of us as having. We
don't have that. Why do we not have it? Because of this eternal and now much more intensive,
much more intense tension that has existed from the beginning between property and democracy,
between popular majorities as the Federalists called them, disdainingly, and the rights of
property. This now has become an enormous incubus on American society. We have enormous
concentrated power for which nobody is accountable, and this is not acceptable. Roger and Me [the documentary
film] is a reflection of a sensitivity that says, "We've got to talk about this, Roger. You're
responsible for this." So I really think by not knowing these things, not changing the
discourse of our lives, and the discourse in the public arena, coming to agreements amongst one
another by hard work, by hard discussion, how can we know it's true?
And by the way, I don't think this can be done in the absence of action. That is to say, in
a haltingly naive phase of my recent existence, I tried to convince some people in the Congress
that we were headed into a really horrible situation, and they didn't want to know. They
didn't. They don't want to believe what is uncomfortable for them to believe, so my decision
was that you have to go into the trenches, that you have to work on projects that are going to
materialize these ideas, that you have to work against plant closings, that you have to work
for measures that alleviate the social burdens that exist in a city like New York, that you
have to work for things while articulating these ideas because it seems to me it's only in the
combination of action and debate of ideas that people will begin to understand the relevance
and the necessity of a new discussion. You can't have in that sense -- I cede your point -- you
can't have a drawing-room discussion which will prevail.
Certainly the people in the National Endowment for Democracy believe that. They don't just
sit back and spend millions of dollars on printing books and making radio tapes and television
shows. No. They created new political institutions. They then created new political parties,
financing people like Arkady Murashev, the Inter-Regional Group in the Soviet Parliament, until
recently. It doesn't exist anymore. The Inter-Regional Group was the group of pseudo-democrats,
pro-capitalists, speaking, in many respects for the interests represented in the agglomeration
of black market operations in the Soviet Union. Arkady Murashev was systematically cosseted,
financed and trained by an organization in Washington very closely tied to certain agencies
whose names we don't want to pronounce in the present circumstances. Murashev was a liaison man
between Washington and Yeltsin. The National Endowment for Democracy gave $40,000 just for the
faxes, and the printing machines and the telephones in the Initiatives Foundation, which was
the organization that the Inter-Regional Group used to put out its messages, get itself
organized, make contacts, etc. The United States was financing that operation. Arkady Murashev
is now the chief of police of the city of Moscow.
This is heavy stuff. I mean, really, it's incredibly dramatic, but we mustn't go on in this
vein because there are questions to be answered.
Question : Does every country have to go through this period of savage capitalism to become
socialist?
No. I don't believe that. No.
Question: Bush seemed to like Gorbachev. Was Gorbachev foolish? Was he taken for a ride?
These are the great mysteries. There are, as you know, there are a different views. There
are different theories about that. One of them is that Gorbachev was a mole, that Gorbachev was
a deep-cover or Western intelligence agent. I believe that's exaggerated. I believe that's off
the wall, but I do believe that there's an element here that's important to understand.
There was in the Soviet Union, as a result of the very success of the industrialization of
the Soviet Union, an enormous alienated set of strata amongst the educated population because
the Soviet elite absorbed people at a very small rate. It didn't reach out to large numbers of
people. They were educating enormous numbers of people, professional scientific workers,
managers, and these people were mostly urban people. They were the fruit, in many respects, of
industrialization. At the same time, being urban people, they found themselves trapped in the
most difficult conditions in the Soviet Union because in its industrialization the Soviet Union
really ignored a lot of problems. Theyfound themselves, in many respects, in a similar
situation as the United States, where the decay of urban areas, the lack of equipment, the lack
of infrastructure, the lack of adequate facilities for health or education etc. became a real
problem. They didn't have the resources to industrialize, to raise the standard of living in
the really poor republics of the Soviet Union, and to deal with the urban problem, as we call
it in the United States.
So these people were imagine all educated people earning this education and looking upon
themselves as deserving of the advantages and prerogatives of their Western counterparts,
living in the equivalent of New York City, but earning the wages of a skilled worker. They
didn't like it. They felt shut out. They were angry, and it's those people that the neoliberals
were recruiting, not just the American neoliberals but their own neoliberals. There were
neoliberals in the Soviet Union. There were reactionary people in the Soviet Union this [name
indistinct] operation out in Siberia, the so-called sociological think tank. There are people
who, I don't know why Perhaps when you become very isolated from the world and separated from
reality you conjure up the most amazing dreams in your mind. I think Marx called it idealism.
In any case, these people were very much Western idealists and they came, frankly, into Moscow
and Leningrad fervent believers in the need to embrace Western institutions because of their
frustration, because of their understanding of their own past. Whether it was distorted or not,
it's not for me to say. It's because of the way they viewed and felt about their past, because
of their own personal frustration, because of the problems which were very real that they
experienced by the Soviet leadership, by the Soviet economy and society. They were alienated,
and that's where there was recruitment. When economic growth slowed down it made it much worse,
and it spread the basis of recruitment very effectively.
There is a collection of essays which I think is quite remarkable and valuable, which gives
you some background about the incredible contradictions in the Soviet Union, and how the Soviet
Union, in fact, more than a decade and even two decades ago, was in fact being prepared for
what is happening. It was ripening for some big bull shaking the tree, which is eventually what
happened. That's the collection that The Monthly Review has published recently, After
the Fall, something like that. After the Fall of the Soviet Union is really a very
valuable collection of essays on the Soviet Union, or whatever it is after communism. Very
useful stuff.
Question : Could you talk about Third World countries?
That's a really hard question. I've worked in Third World countries which were socialist
countries and which were under attack. I worked in Mozambique in the beginning of the 1980s
when the South African-Western-CIA operations were really beginning to [take a toll], and
people were dying by the tens of thousands because the roads had been cut, and the supplies had
been cut, and the health stations blown up, and I think that it was very hard for them to
survive that. Socialism proved very frail in Mozambique, even though the leaders of the
revolution had been born in armed struggle, formed by armed struggle, were dedicated to armed
struggle, but the society just couldn't withstand that kind of pressure.
In some ways I think that's true of the Soviet Union. There was a war in the shadows waged
against the Soviet Union on a massive scale, and what these events prove is the Soviet Union
was insufficiently strong to stand up to those pressures, and I think this is all the more true
in the Third World. I don't know, but I don't want to say that I know the answer, whether they
should try to make that jump or not. I think that will depend on what happens in the Western
world. I don't see any reason why the jump couldn't be made if the West, Western Europe and the
United States, in particular North America saw [supported] significant transformation of the
present system of power. Then it's not a problem, but with this massive opposition coming from
the West, it's very difficult to survive.
Question (apparently edited from video recording): __________________
These same people today, and we're talking about within a few months, within the end of the
year there being not 50,000 but between six and eight million unemployed people in Russia, 130
million people, labor force of 65 or 70 million, and I saw this same thing happening in East
Germany.
I was very briefly in Humboldt University in 1989 or 1990, I can't remember which now. The
whole situation was in upheaval, and I saw many intellectuals genuinely enraged by the
arrogance of the Honecker regime, and at the same time, unfortunately, completely unaware of
what would happen if that regime went down, taking everything, "really existing socialism,"
with it. And my question would be, OK, it's a question. You know the old version of this
question used to be what about Stalin, but it's a little different now.
My problem is this: let's look at it in human terms, OK? Just forget ideology. What has
happened as a result of the materialization of the dreams of the so-called reformers and
democrats in the Soviet Union? What has happened is what has happened in Poland, and worse:
that the standard of living of ordinary people is going to collapse, that old people will be
destitute, that children will be without health care, that the transportation system is
collapsing, that there will be no food distribution by spring, that people will starve, that
there is continuous ethnic conflict. Now, the Soviet system of prices and of raw material
supplies were such that enormous quantities that the supply system worked in a way which led to
the waste of vast quantities of raw materials and semi-finished products. I mean vast
quantities.
So the idea was to go in to work at the enterprise level to create incentives to create
better accounting, a system of prices which would reflect the real value of these raw materials
and not the fact that they could be replaced anytime you wanted because all you have to do is
put an order in. It didn't matter what you did with them. It [the reform] was focused on the
enterprise, on profit incentives, and this loosening of the tight bonds on the enterprise,
really did lead to a recrudescence of output. For instance, between 1986 and 88 there was a 17%
increase in housing production in the Soviet Union. There was a 30% increase in overall
production. The production, the economy, accelerated in the period 1986-88. In those three
years the economy accelerated, but as I said, there were two stages of perestroika. There was a
stage of perestroika where the effects were quite beneficial, where it was clear that
perestroika and glasnost were aiming to energize and develop andfree and move forward the
Soviet Union.
As a friend of mine said, the only way to ensure the social development of the Soviet Union
is to undertake these reforms, but there was another stage, a second stage beginning in late
1988 to, obviously, the end of 1991, where the forces that were unleashed utilized the reform
program to destroy socialism, clearly to destroy socialism, and Mr. Gorbachev was either
helpless before that or a willing apprentice of that process. I could not pretend to pronounce
which of those was the case. It's very difficult to say.
On the other hand, I really don't know how anybody in his right mind could have conceived of
the notion that the way forward for the Soviet Union -- and this was the quintessential
statement of perestroika by the principle Soviet leaders in the mid-1980s -- the way for the
Soviet Union was to integrate the Soviet Union into the world economy. I mean to an economist
with any degree of sophistication and critical approach, that is sheer unadulterated madness.
It's like saying that the North American free trade agreement will lead to real economic
development in Mexico. It's absurd. I mean we know what those processes are. How can a much
weaker, less industrialized Soviet Union hope to stand up against the economic forces arrayed
against it and capable of penetrating it, once it declares its intention to integrate itself
into the world economy? When I heard that, I said, "It's all over, boys. These people don't
know that they're doing," and indeed, listening to Soviet economists as I did when I was still
teaching in Paris, and meeting with some of these people, until 1989, I got the impression of
two things: they had not the least actual understanding of what was going on in the West, and
that their theoretical conceptions were taken out of a handbook by Voltaire making fun of the
French aristocracy.
Transcript produced by Youtube "auto-caption" speech recognition software, corrected and
edited by blog author, Dennis Riches.
Notes
[i] Davis Guggenheim (Director), Al Gore (Writer), "An Inconvenient Truth," Paramount
Classics , 2006.
[ii] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life (Verso, 2015), 267-268. "What is
really needed is proper planning of available resources globally, plus a drive, through public
investment, to develop new technologies that could work and, of course, a shift out of fossil
fuels into renewables. Also, it is not just a problem of carbon and other gas emissions, but of
cleaning up the environment, which is already damaged. All these tasks require public control
and ownership of the energy and transport industries and public investment in the environment
for the public good."
The reference appears to be to this article. The dates 1984-1988 may appear to be an error
because the report referred to was written in 1982. However, the Defense Guidelines were
focused on plans for the future, fiscal years of 1984-1988.
[ix] As we know from the perspective of 2017, the normalization of such interventions
continued shamelessly, going from a bad habit to a deranged addiction. The political
establishment in America now resorts to economic warfare, violence and military intervention as
the solutions for every problem in international relations.
All images, except the featured, in this article are from the author.
"... Thank you b for this revision of the Skripal hoax. The find of pure Novichok was the fatal flaw from the very beginning. The UK is never to be trusted and inept to boot. ..."
"... "only a small amount of BZ is needed to produce complete incapacitation" ..."
"... Also holds for Novichok: Andrei Zheleznyakov, who had been exposed to a minute amount of Novichok in a lab accident five years prior wrote he was, "seared by brilliant colors and hallucinations." Many other sources mention foaming at the mouth, hallucinations and pinpoint pupils. ..."
"... And Litvinenko. The man who prepared the crucial MI6 secret presentation to the chairman of the public inquiry was a colleague of Pablo Miller, the agent runner of Skripal. His name, Christopher Steele. A man the foreign office told the FBI is not reliable!!! ..."
"... UN is owned by west will not pursue war crimes. Responsible parties should no longer lend it legitemacy. ..."
Thanks to an explosive internal memo, there is no reason to believe the claims put
forward by the Syrian opposition that President Bashar al-Assad's government used
chemical weapons against innocent civilians in Douma back in April. This is a scenario I
have questioned from the beginning. It also calls into question all the other conclusions
and reports by the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) , which
was assigned in 2014 "to establish facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic
chemicals, reportedly chlorine, for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic."
Besides its activities around dubious 'chemical' incident in Syria there is another
rather famous case in which the OPCW got involved: The alleged 'Novichok' attack on Sergei
and Julia Scripal in Salisbury, Britain.
The Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, Sergey Lavrov, threw a bombshell at
the British assertions that the collapse of the British secret agent Sergej Skripal and
his daughter Yulia on March 4 in Salisbury was caused by a 'Novichok' nerve agent 'of a
type developed by Russia'. (See our older pieces, linked below, for a detailed
documentation of the case.)
The Skripal poisoning happened on March 4.
Eye witnesses described the Skripals as disoriented and probably hallucinating. The
emergency personal suspected Fentanyl influence.
A few days later the British government claimed that the Skripals had been affected
by a chemical agent from the 'Novichok' series which they attributed to Russia. It
insinuated that the Skripals might die soon.
A doctor of the emergency center at the Salisbury District Hospital publicly
asserted that none of its patients was victim of a 'nerve agent'.
On March 14, after much pressure from Russia, Britain finally invited the
Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to analyze the blood of the
victims and to take environmental samples.
The OPCW arrived on March 19 and took specimen on the following days. It also
received a share of the samples taken earlier by the British chemical weapon laboratory
in Porton Down, which is only some 10 miles away from Salisbury.
The OPCW split the various samples it had in a certified laboratory in the
Netherlands and then distributed them to several other certified laboratories for
analysis.
One of those laboratories was the highly regarded Spiez Laboratory in Switzerland
which is part of the Swiss Federal Office for Civil Protection and fully
certified.
On April 12 the OPCW
published a public version of the result of the analyses it had received from its
laboratories.
A more extensive confidential version was given to the state members that make up
the OPCW.
During a public
speech yesterday Lavrov stated of the OPCW report:
[A] detailed and fairly substantial confidential version was distributed to the OPCW
members only. In that report, in accordance with the OPCW way of conduct, the chemical
composition of the agent presented by the British was confirmed, and the analysis of
samples, as the report states, was taken by the OPCW experts themselves. It contains no
names, Novichok or any other. The report only gives the chemical formula, which,
according to our experts, points to an agent that had been developed in many countries
and does not present any particular secret.
After receiving that report Russia was tipped off by the Spiez Laboratory or someone
else that the OPCW report did not include the full results of its analysis.
According to Lavrov this is what the Spiez Laboratory originally sent to the
OPCW:
"Following our analysis, the samples indicate traces of the toxic chemical BZ and
its precursor which are second category chemical weapons. BZ is a nerve toxic agent,
which temporarily disables a person. The psycho toxic effect is achieved within 30 to
60 minutes after its use and lasts for up to four days. This composition was in
operational service in the armies of the US, the UK and other NATO countries. The
Soviet Union and Russia neither designed nor stored such chemical agents. Also, the
samples indicate the presence of type A-234 nerve agent in its virgin state and also
products of its degradation."
The "presence of type A-234 nerve agent", an agent of the so called 'Novichok'
series, in its "virgin state", or as the OPCW stated in "high purity", points to later
addition to the sample. The 'Novichok' agents are not stable. They tend to fall rapidly
apart. Their presence in "virgin state" in a sample which was taken 15 days after the
Skripal incident happened is inexplicable. A scientist of the former Russian chemical
weapon program who worked with similar agents, Leonid Rink,
says
that if the Skripals had really been exposed to such high purity A-234 nerve agent, they
would be dead.
The whole case, the symptoms shown by the Skripals and their recuperation, makes way
more sense if they were 'buzzed', i.e. poisoned with the BZ hallucinogenic agent, than if
they were 'novi-shocked' with a highly toxic nerve agent.
The OPCW had send blood samples from the Skripals to the Spiez laboratory in
Switzerland which found BZ, a psycho agent 25 times stronger than LSD. The OPCW hid this
fact in its reports.
An attack with BZ on the Skripals would be consistent with the observed symptoms that
bystanders had described. The Skripals were indeed hallucinating and behaved very strange
with Sergei Skipal lifting his arms up to the sky while sitting on a bench. Exposure to BZ
would also explain the Skripals' survival.
The OPCW explained the BZ find by claiming that it had mixed BZ into the probe to test
the laboratory. Something which it said it regularly does. At that time I still believed in
the OPCW and
found that explanation reasonable :
The OPCW responded to Russian question about the BZ and high rate of A-234 in the Spiez
Laboratory probe and report.
OPCW said today that it was a control probe to test the laboratory. Such probes are
regularly slipped under the real probes to make sure that the laboratories the OPCW uses
are able to do their job and do not manipulate their results.
That explanation is reasonable.
I guess we can close the BZ theories and go back to food poisoning as the most likely
cause of the Skripals' illness.
In light of the OPCW management manipulation or suppression of the reports of its own
specialists for the purpose of attributing the Douma incident to the Syrian government I
have to change my opinion. I hereby retract my earlier acceptance of the OPCW's explanation
in the Skripal case.
As we now know that the OPCW management manipulates reports at will we can no longer
accept the 'control probe' excuse without further explanations or evidence.
Here is what seems to have happened.
The OPCW did not send a control sample to Spiez to test the laboratory. It sent the
original samples from the Skripals. Spiez found BZ and reported that back to the OPCW. The
OPCW suppressed the Spiez results in its own reports. Somehow Russia got wind of the Spiez
results and exposed the manipulation.
Acceptance that the Skripals had been 'buzzed', not 'novi-shocked' is central to the
Skripal case. It makes the whole Skripal case as a British operation to prevent the
repatriation of Sergei Skripal to Russia much more plausible.
Posted by b on November 30, 2019 at 19:34 UTC |
Permalink
By the writings from the Wehrmacht soldiers we have today, we can see that it was not
Nazi ideology per se which convinced them to invade the Soviet Union, but the nine
consecutive years of extremely virulent anti-Russian propaganda spread in Germany during
the 1930s (plus the myth Bolshevik conspiracy caused 1918).
The West is preparing its population psychologically to go to war against Eurasia --
Russia + China. They are appealing to irrational propaganda to achieve so: painting the
picture of "Russian deceitulness" (this plus the WADA propaganda warfare) and of "Chinese
asiatic despostism" and "Chinese exotism". They are planning for the long term -- maybe
even 20 to 30 years of consecutive brainwashing of their own population so they can
cultivate unconditional hatred for the Eurasians.
If true, then this option also indicates the Western elites are anticipating their own
decline or even a collapse. If Gramsci's theory on the rise of fascism holds true, then
expect the rise of an Anglo-Saxon version of fascism.
Thank you b for this revision of the Skripal hoax. The find of pure Novichok was the fatal
flaw from the very beginning. The UK is never to be trusted and inept to boot.
b - thanks for reconsidering this Skripal case in light of the OPSW scandal that is being
kept under wraps.. This is another phony edifice erected by the west to create what @1 vk
articulates - an anglo-saxon version of fascism towards eurasia..
the whole skripal affair is now standing on even more shaky ground..
Spiez lab and its staff might not have as much reason to frame Russia or Syria for that
kind of stuff, not being part of NATO despite being in a Western capitalist country.
It's
quite possible that the bulk of the staff has no horses in that game and wants to just do
the job - and it's very possible that one or two people there are pissed off enough to blow
the whistle on one part of the ongoing fakeries.
After all, this occurred to people whose
countries were heavily involved in such shenanigans (Scott Ritter, Craig Murray and Edward
Snowden being good examples), and most probably also happened with the Douma report.
Basically, it will be interesting to see if there's any whistleblowing about the Skripal
analyses in the near future.
@vk in 20 to 30 years the East will have risen. All this propaganda will be for nothing.
With the systems of mass communication and much greater lack of trust in authority and the
MSM, these attempts to paint Russia and China in a bad light won't be as effective as is
hoped. The western govts. and elites are hurting themselves far more than any war can hurt
the new powers arising. I read somewhere, ( I apologise that I cannot find the article ),
that the U.S. is planning a limited yield tactical nuclear weapon attack delivered by
stealth bomber on Iran. I don't know if this is in any way true. However Ultimately Chess
and the Chinese game of Go require far more sophisticated thinking than checkers or poker.
The west is very predictable in it's thinking and the East is advancing faster than the
west can sucessfully react.
@uncle tungsten. The U.K. authorities And management are incompetent and not to be
trusted. Not so the scientists, engineers and others in the employ of the civil
service.
It does makes sense that the Skripal's were buzzed as you write and that it is more
propaganda falling apart. This time it is propaganda that was focused on Russia and I am glad to read that Lavrov
is making the findings of the cover up more public. One can only hope that more threads of propaganda come unraveled and the putrid house of
cards built to cover up the global private finance controlled Western society falls apart
soon. At what point are there prosecutions for this sort of "war crimes" against
countries?
Clueless Joe @ 5 wrote: "Spiez lab and its staff might not have as much reason to frame
Russia or Syria for that kind of stuff, not being part of NATO despite being in a Western
capitalist country."
Actually, the Spiez lab is directly linked to NATO, as is Switzerland, through the smoke
screen of the "Peace Partnership" ("Partenariat pour la paix" in its official French
version).
It already go into big trouble once, quite a while ago, for being used by NATO to
whitewash United States use of uranium/depleted uranium weapons. That, apparently, went
down badly with most of the staff, so, if they are on the up-and-up, one might attribute it
to: once burned, twice shy.
Nailed in the head. All and every work from @OPCW should be deeply investigated, it has,
clearly, shown to be a corrupt organization, would like to see its leaders and key
investigators involved in those many crimes arrested and in jail.
Let us not confuse "The British" with an extreme right wing Tory faction, of which Johnson
is the public face, which, as reports coming out today remind us, has been enormously
financed by Russian kleptocrats.
It is this report chronicling the influence of these oligarchs in funding the Tory party
(hundreds of millions of dollars were raised) which was suppressed when it was due to be
released on the eve of the current general election.
The point is that it is this alliance between ultra right Tories, controlling the party
through their secret financing, and anti-Putin oligarchs of the Khodorkovsy, Browder type,
which has been behind the waves of russophobic propaganda and provocations of which Skripal
is but one, particularly flagrant instance.
This is the wing of the Tory party eighty years on, which was ready to sign a peace
agreement with Germany in May 1940. The terms of which would have preserved their power and
the empire and allied the UK with Germany in the attack on the Soviet Union.
Not to put too fine a point on it- the current leadership of the Tory party under Johnson
are crypto fascists.
@ 7 psychohistorian.. that quote from b - "During a public speech yesterday Lavrov stated
of the OPCW report" is actually from april 2018... it would be very good if lavrov actually
did an update here given the latest info we now know have on the opcw process...
As I said at the time, the OPCW has become a political weapon subject to the whims of the
UK and US's foreign policy. (thus the formation of a new attribution initiative body given
the power to blame to whoever the UK and US wants).
ANYTHING coming from the technical secretariat (in particular whilst under Robert
Fairweather) should be considered compromised.
The only thing with any remaining credibility at all are the direct field reports and
the individual lab reports, both of which are considered confidential to the
secretariat.
1. "It sent the original samples from the Skripals."
No, because that doesn't explain the A-234 found by the lab. They were then not original
following the suggested theory. We have to choose between "adding BZ as test" or "adding
A-234 to deceive".
Checking some OPCW docs like "OPCW on-site and off-site analysis of samples" mention one
authentic sample combined with one control sample containing scheduled chemicals & one
blank sample containing no scheduled chemicals. It also makes sense to have control
substances to exclude grave errors or manipulation. In other words the explanation makes
sense. If not BZ then another scheduled chemical would have been there. Not named by Lavrov
for some reason? The simplest solution here remains that Lavrov was blowing smoke or a rare
misfire.
2. From MoA's earlier article, quoting Science Direct
"only a small amount of BZ is needed to produce complete incapacitation"
This would conflict with "lifting his arms up to the sky while sitting on a bench".
That's not complete at all.
3. "consistent with the observed symptoms "
Also holds for Novichok: Andrei Zheleznyakov, who had been exposed to a minute amount of
Novichok in a lab accident five years prior wrote he was, "seared by brilliant colors and
hallucinations." Many other sources mention foaming at the mouth, hallucinations and
pinpoint pupils.
As for the timing, don't confuse "pure" drops with emulsions, the very reason Novichok
was being weaponized as it could be kept active and applied through gel and other more
static forms. Clearly exposure rate would differ based on application method and its
success. Delays could easily occur when it needs to travel eg through skin.
And Litvinenko. The man who prepared the crucial MI6 secret presentation to the chairman of
the public inquiry was a colleague of Pablo Miller, the agent runner of Skripal. His name,
Christopher Steele. A man the foreign office told the FBI is not reliable!!!
@13 James
I should have added that the oligarchs involved are the Fifth Columnist 'westernisers"
whose objection to Putin is that he is orientated towards Eurasia whereas they see their
allies as Wall St and The City, which is where their ill gotten gains are.
In other words this is not about Russophobia so much as a last ditch stand for the maritime
empire in which they are literally invested heavily. It goes without saying-or should do --
which middle eastern Apartheid state is also allied with the anti-Putin oligarchs. Which is
why Vladimir, who knows what its all about, does everything he can, verbally, to
demonstrate his solidarity with the afore unmentioned Apartheid regime.
@ james #12 with the correction to my claim about the timing of the Lavrov
statement...thanks.
@ bevin # 11 who writes that the British Tory party is a tool of Russian oligarchs...any
documentation of that?
And writing about British Tory obfuscation, I am struggling with reading Web of Debt
that keeps talking about Bank of England when I know it got nationalized in 1946 but where
is the documentation about if/how the City of London Corp still has control behind the
scenes? Or don't they? Your Tory claim seems like it should be about the City of London
Corp folks but I have no data to back it up.
Perestroika put the final nails in the USSR's economy One of the first main policies
Gorbachev adopted was Perestroika – reform of the economy. Hoarding and reciprocal
favours (blat) had been a means of survival in the Soviet Union, thieving to 'moonlight' was
also common and this cost the regime a lot. The 'command-administrative' system had become
obsolete in the Post-Industrial era and was curtailing economic development 1. To solve this,
Gorbachev wanted to give enterprise managers control over contracts and introduce aspects of
the market economy, to make it managers' responsibility to gain contracts and to make sure the
enterprise makes a profit. However, in practice the way the enterprises operated remained
unchanged except in terms – ministries rephrased their commands as contracts 2. Private
enterprise was also permitted, which seemed to contradict Gorbachev's claim to be committed to
Marxist-Leninist thought which was vehemently opposed to capitalism which Marxist's argue
exploit the proleteriat – so to actually create a class of capitalists who (according to
Marxist doctrine) would exploit the workers who were supposed to be living in socialist –
i.e. 'classless society' seemed contradictory to the very ideological concept the regime's
power was based upon. A small amount of private enterprise emerged, but the profiteering was
very much resented by the general population – goods and services were sold for four or
five times their subsidized price due to shortages. Another aspect of Perestroika was entry
into the market economy – many of the social benefits given by the enterprises had to be
done away with, as they could not make a profit and afford to maintain the benefits, resulting
in a stagnant economy occuring simultaneously with a collapsing social welfare system.
Gorbachev's reforms did not work and only succeeded in hastening the economic collapse that was
inevitable.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Glasnost facilitated Opposition to Concentrate against the Regime Allowing freedom of
thought from the 'mono-ideological controls' that existed for decades and allowing pluralist
thought and leadership meant a weakening of power for the Communist Party – it had to
convert into a proper parliamentary party to survive. Furthermore, in a regime based on
oppression and propaganda, when these are removed and freedom of speech and freedom of the
media are introduced, nasty elements about the system in the past are going to be revealed, and
when there is 70 years of repression being reported all at once, it is inevitable there will be
extreme hostility toward those responsible – the Party 1, this especially fuelled the
anger of the nationalities who had been oppressed and triggered a nationalist movement.
The population were dissatisfied with the dire state of affairs and could voice their
discontent openly with glasnost, which led to Gorbachev becoming very unpopular by 1991, in
which year the economy had contracted by 18% 2, people were also very concerned over the
incompetence of the command-administrative system and irresponsibility of the leadership with
regards to the 1986 Chernobyl power station disaster 3.
In a state committed to one ideology, the removal of mono-ideological controls, and the
ability of other ideological persuasions to come to power meant the Party had lost its RIGHT to
govern the people unless the people themselves WANTED the Party to rule. Thus, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had to win the support of the people in order to govern
effectively. However, in a society that was becoming increasingly liberal and 'bourgeois' (the
USSR was largely middle class, private property was protected and capitalism was legalised),
the people had to believe in socialist ideology – which would have been almost impossible
to achieve.
Gorbachev's reforms themselves undermined some of the principle features of socialist rule
in the USSR, e.g. atheism, mono-ideological control, one-party state, economic monopoly and the
suspendability of law. Gorbachev's ideology itself – his focus on 'all-human values'
instead of the class struggle, the rule of law, international peace and proper parliamentary
representation have more resonance with John Stuart Mill than Karl Marx 4 – Gorbachev was
subconsciously moving the USSR in this ideological direction.
With democratization and pluralist thought permitted, Gorbachev found himself operating
within an increasingly wide political spectrum – with the reformist 'democrats' on one
side and the conservative Communist Party members on the other. There was a constant power
struggle between the two and Gorbachev dealt with this by constantly playing one side against
the other and compromising. One of Gorbachev's critics at the time said this was like trying to
marry a hare to a hedgehog. The two sides were very much irreconcilable and instead of trying
to defeat one side, Gorbachev sat on the fence and as a result his policies were constantly
inconsistent – you cannot mix radical reforms with conservatism 5. The dangers of this
were apparent when Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister at the time, resigned because he warned a
dictatorship was approaching, Gorbachev ignored this threat and dismissed this claim with
overconfidence 6.
1 Kagarlitsky, B. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: neo-liberal autocracy, London: Pluto
2002
2 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
3 Haynes, M., Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000, London: Bookmarks 2002
4 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
5 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991
6 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991 No because...
Regional Nationalism and Independence Movements These original flaws in the system were
largely responsible for its own downfall – in particular the nationalities issue –
the decision to maintain the Empire without granting real power to the nationalities whilst
simultaneously repressing them left most of the nationalities feeling bitter when glasnost
revealed the truth about how they had been treated in the past and democratisation gave them
the power to chose representatives who would really represent people's interests (the
nationalist movement) whilst at the same time being given by Gorbachev an appetite for power
– a fatal combination.
The wealthier regions wanted a separation from the USSR because of the feeling they were
being milked from the centre and many other regions wanted to become independent because they
did not want to be part of an economic disaster area which became apparent when the Donbass
miners who had no commitment to nationalism thought their future would be safer if the Ukraine
wasn't part of the USSR 1.
The nationalist movement emerged when freedom of speech, media and association along with
democratisation and the loss of fear of repression allowed people to voice pride in their
nation and resentment at past repressions as well as the ongoing special treatment of Russians
in the Regions, who had access to better housing and other special privileges the locals did
not.
Certain Republics felt nationalism more strongly than others, most notably the Baltic States
who felt a strong cultural attachment to the West and felt they were being unfairly occupied.
Gorbachev's mistake here was to downplay the importance of nationalism and not treat the Baltic
States as a special case 2. After all, most of the population of the USSR wished to preserve
the Union – 76% voted to preserve the Union in March 1991 (except the Baltic States,
Moldova, Georgia and Armenia who did not conduct the referendum) 3. After the failed coup, most
states declared their independence, even if they did so with reluctance, as there was a general
feeling there was no alternative. Gorbachev tried to persuade the Republics not to become fully
independent. However, in early December, the Ukraine held a referendum where the population
voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, even after Gorbachev stated "there can be no
Union without Ukraine", on 8th December, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Bielorussian leader
and declared a formal end to the USSR and the establishment of the Confederation of Independent
States which they invited the other states to join.
There was nothing left Gorbachev could do, democratisation had brought about the means for
independence and Gorbachev didn't feel he could argue with people's wishes carried out through
democratic means and, on 25th December he resigned with regret.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996
3 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 Yeltsin Factor
Boris Yeltsin emerged as the true hero and strong leader for the fearlessness to condemn the
coup – in a press conference afterwards Yeltsin ordered Gorbachev around undermining his
position, then used his institutional powers derived from democratization to appoint Egor
Gaidar, an economist dedicated to laissez-faire economics, as his Finance Minister and
suspension of the CPSU pending an investigation into the coup. Gorbachev half heartedly argued
against this but it was no use – he was seen as a weaker leader along with discontent
over his policies, whilst Yeltsin's radicalism was keeping pace with developments and his
popularity at an all-time high, Gorbachev's position was also much less weaker without the
Communist Party. Also, the Soviet Union really could not exist without the Communist Party
arguably as they had political and economic monopoly on society and the Communist Party went
from controlling these aspects of society to ceasing to exist, the Soviet Union could not
function and the economy spiralled out of control. Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... August 1991 Coup
Counter Productive, Bringing About What It Sought To Prevent - The End of the Soviet Union
By August 1991 Gorbachev's popularity was at an all-time low both in the Party and outside it.
Despite being advised by some of his staff to sign the Treaty agreement granting the republics
real autonomy before going on holiday and some suspicious circumstances he should have been
more questioning about, he planned on signing the agreement when he returned. This was a big
mistake and allowed the conservatives to stage a coup. The Emergency Committee made no
reference whatsoever to Marxism-Leninism or the class struggle in their speech, meaning it was
a coup in the hope of returning the Soviet Union to 'normal' i.e. an Empire controlled from
Moscow and putting the final nails in the coffin of socialism in the USSR 1.
The failed coup triggered the very thing it sought to prevent – the break-up of the
Soviet Union 2.
1 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... The System Needed to
Change in Order to Survive in the Longer Term; That Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms Failed Showed
that the USSR Could Not be Saved By the Gorbachev era, all hopes of fulfilling the original
Marxist-Leninist dream were gone and most did not feel passionately about communism, even
within the Party. There was a general acknowledgement that the USSR could not continue in the
same way as before – Andropov, Gorbachev's predecessor also realised this and set about
changing society through repressive measures such as harsh labour discipline enforced by
cutting payments from workers for work deemed poor quality and restrictions on the sale of
alcohol and prohibition of alcohol on official occasions was felt overly repressive and for
many – Gorbachev was seen as a positive, energetic leader who would overcome the USSR's
problems in a less repressive manner. With economic stagnation and an economy dependent on the
exportation of natural resources to survive 1, an unsuccessful war (Afghanistan) and an ageing
Party Membership to combat, Gorbachev was the candidate for those who wanted change or at least
realised change could no longer be postponed 2.
Autocracies survive due to repressing their people to the extent that they are not given the
freedoms required to change their government, rather than because the people want them to stay
in power. Mikhail Gorbachev's conscience and sense of responsibility for his population
dictated that the system could no longer be propped up like this, and that the people needed
and deserved the freedoms and basic human rights they had been denied for decades. That the
system could not encorporate such freedoms meant that the system morally should not be allowed
to perpetuate itself, and thus the Soviet Union fell apart because it was unrepresentative and
did not support the population's human rights means the fall of the USSR should be applauded,
not mourned for its' population.
1 Volkogonov, D.A. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: political leaders from Lenin to
Gorbachev, edited and translated by M. Shukman, London: HarperCollins 1998
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... War with Afghanistan
Drained USSR of Patriotic Morale The war in Afghanistan was a key contributing factor to
the breakup of the USSR. Reuveny and Prakash argue that the Soviet-Afghan war contributed to
undermining the Soviet Union in many ways. First, it discredited the Red Army, and impacted
negatively upon the image of the Red Army as a strong, almost invincible force, which gave
nationalist movements in the Republics hope that they might succeed in attaining independence
after all. Second, it impacted upon leadership perception on the usefulness of utilising the
military to keep the union intact and as a force for foreign intervention. Third, it created
new forms of political participation, which had begun to impact upon media reporting even
before glasnost, and began the first calls for glasnost, as it created a number of war
veterans, who went on to form organisations which weakened the total authority of the CPSU
1.
1 Reuveny, Rafael, and Prakash, Aseem, 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet
Union', Review of International Studies (1999), 25:693-708 Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... It was dead from the
time Stalin took control Gorbachev finished it off, but Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev etc.
really killed it. Lenin had nothing to do with that, he was a socialist-marxist, not a
communist. You obviously don't know the difference. Learn it before you blindly yell your
opinion into the dark of the internet.
SPECIAL TO THE TIMES
MOSCOW --
Yegor K. Ligachev, once the second-most-powerful man in the Kremlin, on Wednesday called his former
boss and comrade, Mikhail S. Gorbachev, a coward and a traitor.
"I met many Communists who spent
decades in labor camps in the permafrost zone but retained their faith in the party," the erstwhile
Politburo hard-liner said. "I fail to understand its general secretary who spent three days in the
best health resort the country has by the warm sea, then called for its dissolution."
Ligachev, as straight-talking and opinionated as ever, met with journalists to present his book
"The Gorbachev Riddle," a personal chronicle of the
perestroika
years he helped to
shape before the Soviet president and party leader gave him the boot in August, 1990.
The book presentation, attended by a standing-room-only audience in the Moscow House of
Journalists, served as a forum for Ligachev, 71, to reiterate his views and credo.
Advertisement
"When life proved me wrong, I did change my perceptions," he said with quiet dignity, "but I never
changed my principles. Unlike Gorbachev, I still adhere to socialism, and I still think this is the
future for my country." The white-haired native of Siberia said his only desire is to reunite the
nation, introduce peace and stability and build a "new, refurbished Soviet Union."
A foe of both Gorbachev and Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin, Ligachev contended that his country
is in danger of becoming a "raw materials supplier and semi-colony" for the capitalist world as the
Russian leadership presses on with its economic reforms.
"The ban on the Communist Party, an organization uniting about 20 million members, cannot but
diminish the chances for a peaceful resolution of the country's current political, economic and social
crisis," Ligachev said, referring to a ban that Yeltsin ordered last Nov. 6.
Few questions during the presentation ceremony concerned Ligachev's 303-page book itself; instead,
many people sought out his view of recent political developments.
The most persistent question put to Ligachev was why none of the former leaders of the Communist Party
had volunteered to defend it at hearings on its record ordered for July by the Constitutional Court of
Russia.
Asserting that it is Gorbachev who is legally obligated to take on this task, Ligachev said
that the party "had been betrayed by its general secretary" and that it is now up to "ordinary
Communists" to defend the party's 73-year record in leading the Soviet Union.
Ligachev, who became a voting, or full, member of the ruling party Politburo in 1985, the same year
Gorbachev came to power, remains the only publicly active figure from the defunct body who voices
support for his old principles.
Others, such as former Vice President Gennady I. Yanayev, are now in prison for their roles in last
August's unsuccessful attempt at overthrowing Gorbachev when he was on vacation at a Crimean beach
resort.
Fiona Hill books does not worth even 5% of any book written by Professor Stephen Cohen. In other words they are pathetic junk.
Of the class that in UK(ream MI6) writes Luke Harding. may be they both have the same handlers. She is just a regular MIC
prostitute, like all neocons.
And Putin is a KGB thug is a terrible. simplistic argument. Pure propaganda. This isn't about either Putin (or Trump)
really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred.
Notable quotes:
"... As I was reading, I felt that there was a strong bias against Putin and Russia by the authors ..."
"... "The onus will now be on the West to shore up its own home defenses, reduce the economic and political vulnerabilities, and create its own contingency plans if it wants to counter Vladimir Putin's new twenty-first century warfare." ..."
"... For anyone who is a Russian scholar, this is proof that the authors get Russia very wrong. They reveal themselves to be in the neocon camp of hawks who want to reactivate a new Cold War very badly. ..."
"... I am reminded of some books in the 1950s that were secretly backed by the CIA, and this book certainly feels like it has the same flavor. Hill and Gaddy totally ignore Russian scholars like Stephen Cohen in his analysis of the Russian situation, which is totally the opposite of mainstream thinking unfortunately these days. ..."
"... The neocon vision of what's wrong with Russia is so biased that it also ignores the writings of such foreign policy figures as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Briezinski, former US Secretarys of State, both of whom are much more closer in their visions of Russia to Cohen than they are to Hill and Gaddy. ..."
"... Yet the authors see only politics in Mr. Putin's tactics, and play down the West's own role in making him an antagonist. They take him to task for painting the Ukrainian insurrection of 2014 as a "fascist coup," and for denouncing Ukrainian nationalist partisan Stepan Bandera as a Nazi collaborator. Bandera and Hitler may have never met, but this was not necessary for the arming and use of Bandera's OUN to commit atrocities and war crimes on then-Soviet territory. Contrary to the authors' whitewash, Bandera's later persecution by Nazis consisted of special treatment in German camps, held on ice for postwar use. Of relevance is that the "regime change" of 2014 was largely the work of west Ukrainians - the backbone of the OUN movement and the very folks who today make Bandera a national hero. When he paints west Ukraine as again collaborating with Russia's enemy, Putin stands on solid historical ground. The West continues destabilizing actions all the while it blames Putin for the same. ..."
"... I rather think Putin grasps these "motives, mentality, and values" very well, as they seem inseparable from European economic hegemony and NATO expansion. His managed democracy comes off looking rather clean cut compared to US politics following the Citizens United ruling, where American oligarch David Koch engineered a fundamental change for the worse via the Supreme Court. In foreign policy, Putin has indeed been repeatedly "rebuffed" by the West for proposing anything that makes Russia a leading equal in its sphere. This shows not limited contacts with the West, but rather ongoing and painful ones. ..."
"... A poorly written smear that would make McCarthy blush. Recycled fear for the gullible citizens so desperately uneducated and unread. The Military Industrial Corporatists will pass it around as Bible ..."
Hill and Gaddy are pretty good scholars. They do a good job of providing a psychological
profile of Vladimir Putin and the way he operates in the Kremlin. But they have their
limitations. One of the more annoying aspects of the book is that the authors return again
and again both to Putin's graduate thesis on an American management book and his 1999
manifesto on his millennial goals for Russia. A better set of writers would have covered both
subjects in one section and then moved on. But Hill and Gaddy sprinkle references to these
documents about five times each throughout the book, which leads me to suspect that they are
padding what would otherwise be a much shorter book.
As I was reading, I felt that there was a strong bias against Putin and Russia by the
authors, but I couldn't quite pinpoint their slant until the last sentence, which is a doozy:
"The onus will now be on the West to shore up its own home defenses, reduce the economic
and political vulnerabilities, and create its own contingency plans if it wants to counter
Vladimir Putin's new twenty-first century warfare."
For anyone who is a Russian scholar, this is proof that the authors get Russia very wrong.
They reveal themselves to be in the neocon camp of hawks who want to reactivate a new Cold
War very badly. And in their analysis, they ignore the fact that Russia as a country is in
fact deeply defensive country far more concerned with its internal boundaries and control
than some aggressive Soviet power after World War II.
To be sure, Mr. Putin is no choir boy.
Interestingly enough, the authors do not fully investigate the potentially criminal behavior
that Putin performed with Russia's war on Chechnya. Hill and Gaddy could have strengthened
their case if they had included some deeper analysis of Putin's behavior on this troublesome
part of the Russian Empire. But instead they were intent on plowing their own rut, which
while somewhat interesting -- ultimately becomes a little bit too pedantic.
I am reminded of some books in the 1950s that were secretly backed by the CIA, and this
book certainly feels like it has the same flavor. Hill and Gaddy totally ignore Russian
scholars like Stephen Cohen in his analysis of the Russian situation, which is totally the
opposite of mainstream thinking unfortunately these days.
But in ignoring what Cohen has to
say, the predominant attitude of the American and European foreign policy establishment is in
lock step with Hill and Gaddy, which is why the book has been so heavily publicized.
The neocon vision of what's wrong with Russia is so biased that it also ignores the
writings of such foreign policy figures as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Briezinski, former US
Secretarys of State, both of whom are much more closer in their visions of Russia to Cohen
than they are to Hill and Gaddy.
Yes, this book is all about sticking to the Rooskies, unfortunately. And the hidden
motivator are all of the defense contracts that NATO can suck up, as well as all the bankers'
books in reaming the Ukrainian economy as badly as they've reamed Greece. But the authors
never tell you that this is their motivation, until the last paragraph.
Unprofessional writing, a profound disappointment. Reads like a high school essay - one
that repeats a single thought over and over, even re-using the same phrases - than a proper
biography. The content feels like it has been skimmed only from public sources. There is no
sign of insight among the authors, nor even a curiosity as to what makes this important
figure unique. One wonders where the interests lie in those who wrote laudative reviews. I am
sad to say that this book is nothing more than a polemic, and moreover one that is repetitive
and boring.
- look at Vladimir Putin and Mr. Putin's Russia. The book is based on intensive research
and interviews with Putin, but I find it skewed by the Western biases it brings to the table.
Yet it's not a demonization, as is so much of the Western Putin literature. It gives him
credit for standing by the multi-racial and cultural realities of post-Soviet Russia.
Compared to the real hardcore nationalists, Putin in fact has come across as a domestic
liberal. The rising tide of Russian arch-nationalism, however, has taken its toll. Authors
Hill and Gaddy correctly assess Putin's playing the nationalist card as a political manouver
to keep one step ahead of his opponents - most of whom are not pro-Western liberal dissidents
by any means. Courting the Russian Orthodox Church in recent years was one such strategy.
Yet the authors see only politics in Mr. Putin's tactics, and play down the West's own
role in making him an antagonist. They take him to task for painting the Ukrainian
insurrection of 2014 as a "fascist coup," and for denouncing Ukrainian nationalist partisan
Stepan Bandera as a Nazi collaborator. Bandera and Hitler may have never met, but this was
not necessary for the arming and use of Bandera's OUN to commit atrocities and war crimes on
then-Soviet territory. Contrary to the authors' whitewash, Bandera's later persecution by
Nazis consisted of special treatment in German camps, held on ice for postwar use. Of
relevance is that the "regime change" of 2014 was largely the work of west Ukrainians - the
backbone of the OUN movement and the very folks who today make Bandera a national hero. When
he paints west Ukraine as again collaborating with Russia's enemy, Putin stands on solid
historical ground. The West continues destabilizing actions all the while it blames Putin for
the same.
The authors also lecture us on Putin's inability to grasp "Western values" as the root of
his refusal to take the West on its own terms; on "how little Putin understands about us -
our motives, our mentality, and, also, our values" (p.385) I rather think Putin grasps these
"motives, mentality, and values" very well, as they seem inseparable from European economic
hegemony and NATO expansion. His managed democracy comes off looking rather clean cut
compared to US politics following the Citizens United ruling, where American oligarch David
Koch engineered a fundamental change for the worse via the Supreme Court. In foreign policy,
Putin has indeed been repeatedly "rebuffed" by the West for proposing anything that makes
Russia a leading equal in its sphere. This shows not limited contacts with the West, but
rather ongoing and painful ones.
The hypocrisy is breathtaking but tragically familiar. It's rather the West's (and the
authors') failure to grasp regional history, and Putin's actions based on it, that fuel the
"misunderstanding." Ukraine, for instance, had strong nationalist animosity toward the
"Moskali" long before the 1930s holodomor/famine. Crimea was not transferred to Ukraine out
of any degree of recognition of said suffering, as the authors allege on p. 367; but as part
of a geo-political maneuver to Russify east Ukraine with more "loyal" ethnic Russians,
exactly as in the Baltic states.
His aggressive handling of terrorists within Chechnya is "decried" by the West, the
authors note. Yet within a decade the US and its NATO partners would be pursuing an
aggressive course in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Yemen that make Russia look the provincial
amateur. Putin in fact is *not* trying to recreate the USSR, as so often charged by Western
pundits with an axe to grind, nor even the old Russian empire. His strategic thinking is
dominated by security rationales. A wider invasive course would only threaten Russian
security. At all times he sees his actions as defensive responses. If this is self-serving,
it only puts him in good company: recall the American angst over the "dissident" Dixie
Chicks; the livid anger over Edward Snowden.
In truth, Vladimir Putin is the Russian Ronald Reagan, bidding his citizens to "stand
tall" against enemies from without and within working against the homeland. His stance on
Ukraine, arming its "contras" in a border war against an enemy "satellite regime", may make
him look the intolerant war jingo; but thus did Ronald Reagan appear outside the US.
Ironically it's Reagan partisans who don't grasp
A poorly written smear that would make McCarthy blush. Recycled fear for the gullible
citizens so desperately uneducated and unread. The Military Industrial Corporatists will pass
it around as Bible
The book gives advices what the US officials should say about Russia to advocate their
(US's) dishonest and aggressive policy. See examples of such policy in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria and Lybia.
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
"... The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August 2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate evidence to assign blame to Syria. ..."
Manufacturing a pretext for the U.S.
missile strike on Syria in April 2018 is nowhere near the biggest of OPCW's crimes. The
OPCW is an accessory , both before and after the fact to the crime of
mass murder.
It should now be clear to everyone that Syrian "rebels" gassed thousands of hostages in
cellars, most likely with chlorine gas, and then paraded the victims in White Helmets
snuff videos. OPCW conspired in this crime in both encouraging the terrorists to more murder
and by protecting them afterward by assigning blame to Assad and the Syrian government.
The worst of these massacres happened in Ghouta in August
2013 when 2000 civilian hostages (rebel claim) were gassed to death by rebels and their
pre-White Helmets "civil defence". The OPCW was there to cover up the crime and to fabricate
evidence to assign blame to Syria.
We have been documenting
these crimes and hoaxes at A Closer Look On Syria from December 2012. OPCW was used
from the beginning to manufacture consent for war. See for example:
Of course, the OPCW is already there! I highly suggest Caitlin Johnstone's article b
linked be read, which can be
found here .
We should expand on Petri's number of people involved in this crime to include all the
paid disinformation artists noted in Caitlin's essay at minimum. What becomes very clear in
all this is the total collusion with OPCW upper level management--those whom the
whistleblowers and their allies within OPCW petitioned--in these crimes as Petri contends.
Until they are visibly replaced, nothing issued by OPCW has any credence.
OPCW has shown to be a pure political entity, used at will by few regimes in the UN to
promote their agenda, b has done a tremendous job to humanity to bring the truth to the
public worldwide. Syrians have paid the price for UN leaders support to global terrorism for
too long. It must stop now.
"... In 1979 at one of my public speeches ("How to kill an elephant with a needle"), I was asked what in my opinion was the most vulnerable point in the Soviet system. I replied: the one that is considered the most reliable, namely, the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, within it - the Central Committee, and within the latter - the General Secretary. ..."
"... The reader should not think that I gave that idea to Cold War strategists. They realized that without me. One of the employees of the Intelligence Service told me that soon they (i.e. forces of the West) would put their man on "the soviet throne". ..."
"... What distinguishes this Cold War operation is that the method of "killing an elephant with a needle" was applied against a less powerful, yet mighty opponent, to obviate the possibility of a "hot war" becoming dangerous to the point where the advantages of the West could disappear, as happened in the war of Germany versus the Soviet Union in 1941-1945. ..."
"... The method in question made it possible to avoid risk and losses, save time and win by proxy. The method invented by the weak to fight stronger opponents was adopted by the most powerful forces on the planet in their war for domination over the entire human race. ..."
More than anyone else, he was responsible for handing the US and UK their greatest strategic victory ever
Alexander Zinoviev
Tue,
|
1300 words
8,718
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MORE:
History
This post first appeared on Russia Insider
RI
continues
with
a series of articles about the life and works of the brilliant postwar Russian philosopher, author, and
dissident, Alexander Zinoviev.
This time, his famous essay on how the West destroyed the USSR is introduced by his widow Olga, chairwoman
of the Zinoviev Club at Rossiya Sevodnya, a major Russian news agency.
How
different US-Russia relations were back then...
Zinoviev often said that judging from
Gorbachev's behavior, one cannot exclude the possibility that he was working for the West, but that at the end of
the day, it didn't really matter, because what he did served the West's interests exactly.
lllustrations are by Zinoviev himself, provided to
RI
by his family.
Translated from
Russian
especially
for
RI
by Sergei Malygin
Introduction
Before you, dear readers, you have one of the
seven chapters
of Zinoviev's famous essay 'How to Kill an Elephant With a Needle', written in 2005, a year
before the author's death.
The material for it derived from recollections of the numerous meetings Alexander Zinoviev had with
representatives of the West's political elite who were responsible for the formation of policy with respect to the
USSR.
1016196444.jpg
Olga Zinovieva - an active voice in
contemporary Russia
The idea underlying little episodes, including historical examples, is as elementary and limpid as spring
water: how to work out the weak spot of the enemy, adversary, scoundrel or opponent, irrespective of their
number and armaments, both literally and metaphorically.
With graphic clarity, as if it were a lesson, he provides a whole series of examples, beginning with his
own example involving a compass but then using classical examples from history, such as the episode with Francisco
Pizarro, the conquistador conqueror of Mexico, who demonstrated extraordinary quick-wittedness in his detection of
the adversary's weak spot (the Indians).
Astonished by the attack of a handful of Pizarro's warriors on their leader, whom they regarded as a god
and who in their conception was invulnerable and untouchable, the Indians capitulated without a fight. "Pizarro",
wrote Alexander Zinoviev, "had divined the enemy army's weak spot, its Achilles heel".
In this essay he writes about how the Soviet Union's weak spot turned out to be the top echelons of the
leadership.
Zinoviev was often called a dissident, but he never thought of himself as such. He was a critic of the
Soviet system, but he was not its enemy.
In his later years he often repeated that, if he had known what a dreadful fate awaited the USSR, he would
not have written a single critical book or article about it.
Olga Zinovieva
How to kill an elephant with a needle
I was exiled to the West in 1978, when the thirty-year course of the Cold War hit a radical turning point.
Cold War leaders have studied Soviet society since the beginning. The new science of Sovietology has been
developed employing thousands of experts and involving hundreds of research centers.
Within it, a separate branch of Kremlinology has appeared. It pedantically studied the structure of the
Soviet State, the party apparatus, the central party apparatus, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union, the Politburo and employees of the government apparatus individually.
But for a long time (perhaps until the end of the 1970s) the main focus was on the ideological and
psychological manipulation of the general population, the creation of pro-Western masses of Soviet citizens who
in actuality would play the role of the West's "fifth column" and (intentionally or unintentionally) working on
the ideological and moral disintegration of the Soviet population (not to mention other functions). Thus the
dissident movement was created.
In short, the main work was carried out through the destruction of Soviet society "from below". Important
achievements had been made that became factors in the future counterrevolution. But they were not significant
enough to bring the Soviet society to its collapse.
By the end of the 1970s, the Western Cold War leaders understood that. They realized that the government
system formed the basis of Soviet communism and the party apparatus was at its core. Having thoroughly studied
the party apparatus, the nature of relations between its members, their psychology and qualifications,
selection methods and its other characteristics, Cold War leaders concluded that Soviet society could be
destroyed only from the top, by destroying its system of government.
To destroy the latter it was necessary and sufficient to destroy the party apparatus, starting from its top
level - the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. So they shifted their main efforts in
that direction.
They found the most vulnerable place in the Soviet social structure. It was not difficult for me to guess
this shift, because I had an opportunity to observe and study that hidden part of the Cold War.
In 1979 at one of my public speeches ("How to kill an elephant with a needle"), I was asked what in my
opinion was the most vulnerable point in the Soviet system. I replied: the one that is considered the most
reliable, namely, the apparatus of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, within it - the Central Committee,
and within the latter - the General Secretary.
To Homeric laughter in the audience, I said that "if you put your man in that position he will ruin the
party apparatus, thus starting a chain reaction resulting in the breakdown of the entire government system and
administration. The consequence will be the breakdown of the entire society". I referred to the precedent of
Pizarro.
The reader should not think that I gave that idea to Cold War strategists. They realized that without me.
One of the employees of the Intelligence Service told me that soon they (i.e. forces of the West) would put
their man on "the soviet throne".
At that time I did not believe that was possible. I spoke hypothetically of the General Secretary as the
West's "needle". But Western strategists already considered that to be a realistic proposition. They developed
a plan for winning the war: take the supreme power in the Soviet Union under their control by promoting "their"
man to the position of the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, force him to destroy the CPSU apparatus, implement an overhaul ("perestroika") that would start a chain
reaction and consequent breakdown of the entire Soviet society.
Such a plan was realistic then because the crisis at the top level of Soviet power was already evident, due
to the senescence of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CPSU.
Soon "their" man in the role of the Western "needle" appeared (if he was not "prepared" in advance).
Admittedly, the plan worked well.
What distinguishes this Cold War operation is that the method of "killing an elephant with a needle" was
applied against a less powerful, yet mighty opponent, to obviate the possibility of a "hot war" becoming
dangerous to the point where the advantages of the West could disappear, as happened in the war of Germany
versus the Soviet Union in 1941-1945.
The method in question made it possible to avoid risk and losses, save time and win by proxy. The method
invented by the weak to fight stronger opponents was adopted by the most powerful forces on the planet in their
war for domination over the entire human race.
You put it pretty well. I also think that Gorby wasn't a conscious traitor, but he
was not capable to handle the necessary tasks for the reform of the USSR. He botched
it badly.
Yeltsin, on the other hand, was exactly that: a traitor. And he proved
it time and again.
Did not notice that about Pizarro, Kortez conquered Mexico.
Gorby was not fit and did not have what it takes to be Central Secretary and
he had no idea about how power is used. In times of restructuring and reforms
power cannot be diffused and undermined which is what he did, but must be
concentrated. Making quite a few heads roll would cause the rest to fall in
line including Yeltsin, who was a typical opportunist who smelt weakness and
rot at the top and used it.
Note that after Lenin death and until, Stalin by brutal measures concentrated
power in his hands, there was a lot of talk but little deeds. Just like in US
Congress. Same happened under Gorby, everybody started talking, then everybody
started smearing face with feces and glorifying the West until they undermined
any chance for positive change. What should have been done is to make heads
indeed roll at the top especially in Central Asia and Caucasus republics where
corruption was running amok and local intelligencia born by USSR own efforts
started thinking too much of themselves. Then when everybody would see there
is the Boss in Kremlin, things could have been started to move .
In China Deng had to deal with Hua Guo Feng and others before he started
reforms after concentrating power in own hands.
Gorby, well, was not cut for the role. Every few months new ideas, busy body
and not very straight talker. He was too soft and lacked abilities to be
leader of such a country and had none in his surrounding to shore his
deficiencies up.
He did , but me think not enough. also, it is not exactly the way
it used to be. I think Putin knew what he was doing. Unlike Gorby
who had all of the power in his hands and could do things we are
talking about, Putin had to maneuver. His position was not
unassailable when he came to power and much later. He had to be
more of a fox. He is also not a cruel man, like Stalin was.
It wouldn't be impossible, even today there are some questionable characters in very
high Kremlin positions, and if any of them manage come to power they will undermine
Russia's interests as has happened in the not so distant past.
I agree that in the
case of Gorby he was more of a fool than a Western agent. The Westerners knew how to
charm, flatter and entertain him and he was only too willing to please them and lap
up their manipulation and false promises.
It would be impossible. They do not and did not understand how things work in
Russia and they almost always are wrong. Gorby stupidity was all the required,
Yeltsin was a dark horse and Coup leaders should have studied more of Lenin
how to make coups.
With Gorby no cunning was necessary. The guy was plain sucker and not fit for
the office. Looks like he got picked for 2 qualities. Youth and good health
and having no enemies.
In those years we had new General secretary every
year.
I am so sad that the great Soviet Union for which so many many millions
of brave and honest people gave everything they had and their life in
the end got ripped apart due to this corrupted idiot. Furthermore I am
surprised beyond any belief that no one from KGB or Soviet Army arranged
for this fool to get smoked when they saw what was about to commence.
Today it is still the biggest mystery to me. I am aware that USSR had
some problems but those were truly nothing compared to what Russia and
all the other post Soviet countries faced after USSR got destroyed by
that cock sucker. 300 000 000 people more or less got their future
crippled and robbed because of 1 ( one ) western puppy. I just still
today cannot believe that happened. Looks like of course he had some KGB
staff on his payroll but in the end I just cannot believe that no one
took him to Siberia and burried him over there on time.
What is even
more sad is that today this idiot is prancing freely across Russia even
after almost everyone today sees that because of him they got Yeltsin
and his mobsters that stole their future.
I do admire Russian people and respect them for everything they wnt
through their past but some things are just not logical for a 12 year
old child and definitely not for a nation that gave the most chess
masters and champions to the world.
I would definitely like your comment on this if you are a citizen of
ex USSR.
lets look at it a different way ... Who was Gorbachev not Working FOR !
-
Gorbachev Was not Working For the USSR, Gorbachev Was not working for the People of the
USSR ...
-
now it is easier to see who Gorbachev the Traitor was Working For / and Where Gorbachev
Loyalties Were !
Mihail Sergeyevitch is a Russian
patriot, just as good as many more millions of Russians are! But Mihail Sergeyevitch
fallen for the pretence of honesty, so skilfully played by the west, as he presupposed the
existence of GENTLEMEN being in power in the west! ...and he wasn't the only one of the
Russian politicians, ...Dimitry Anatolyevitch fallen for the same, ...when the agreed for
a no-fly zone to be established over Libya!
There are NO gentlemen in western politics! ZIPPO, ZILCH, NADA! There are O N L Y
BASTARDS, one worse then the next!
i think gorbachev can in a sense be called traitorious to the RUSSIAN nation --
whether it was under the USSR or not...
but precisely because he allowed himself
to be ''open'' in ways that the west needed for the leadership to be open -- at the
exact time when russia at the core of the USSR NEEDED someone to REFUSE to be
''open'' in exactly the way the USA wanted -- in order to get rid of the
'perception' of a 'failing, geriatric ussr" - and thus , be ''welcomed" by the
''world" which to gorbachev WAS the west...
to the nearly complete ignoring of THE MAJORITY of other nations (such as we see
PUTIN achieve differently) -
he became the instrument of what was to follow -- yeltsin and the collapse of not
just the USSR -- but RUSSIA'S governance itself
which further opened russia to the pillaging through the oligarchic collaborators
with their western masters...
i think GORBACHEV LOVES RUSSIA -- i really do -- i think he is as russia in his
soul and heart as can be...
but he was simply
WRONG in his putting FAITH and confidence, just as BORIS correctly argues,
in having GENTLEMEN AS COUNTERPARTS from the west. -- reagan the ACTOR?
excuse me -- THAT IS ALL that gorbacheV should HAVE KEPT IN MIND. to know that
the USA was and IS NOT A ''partner"
as the russians, including putin -- like to say out of POLITENESS.
he should have realized that the WEST ARE NOT -- nd never have been 'THE LEAGUE
OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN"
but EXTRAORDINARILY DECEITFUL plunderers and pillagers.
AND it has been like that since the beginning of the USA - TODAY -- and WILL
continue to be so.
it is in its DNA
just as TRUE compassion -- faith, ethics, morality, a sense of TRUE justice and
brotherhood of all humanity
IS IN THE DNA Of the RUSSIAN SOUL.
in other words -- the MISTAKE of gorbachev -- and yeltsin -- who were RIVALS --
was to believe or WISH to believe THAT THE AMERICANS and west --
were and are EQUALS AS PEOPLE GUIDED BY ETHICS ABOVE politics, economics,
personal glory, even nationality --
tht the west -- reagan etc -- were actually MEN OF HONOR.
THAT WAS HIS -- and ANY russian leaderships; GREATEST mistake.
perhaps gorbachev did not HAVE to 'work for the CIA" -- AND THE author is
probably correct -- he didn'/t HAVE to - DIRECTLY \\\
it was enough that gorbachev suffered from ''infatuation" with the west....
and so -- whatever HIS intentions or beliefs were -- his ACTS -- in themselves
BECAME acts of treason to his great country and people.
for what he did was -- to try to present THEM -- IN HIS ''glasnost and perestroika"
some of the 'freedom of the west" -- that the russian people REALLY did NOT need
-- but could have a freedom of THEIR very own
INDEPENDENT of ''copying or emulating" the west...
because IN RUSSIA AND AMONG the russian people
was ALL THE STRENGTH of their own freedom and choice and prosperity they WOULD
EVER NEED!
Hearing on U.S. Security Strategy Post-9/11
Testimony before House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
November 6, 2007
(
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/...
Former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage:
Well, indeed. I think we probably didn't get off to the
right foot in the Cold War. But, you know, we did apply smart power.
And let me give you an example -- I was being facetious about the
Chou En-lai French Revolution comment. But one of the advisers to
Gorbachev was a fellow by the name of Yakovlev -- he's the fellow who
came up with the term perestroika.
He actually, back in the bad days of the Cold War, when we were
tightly constraining the number of Soviet citizens who might come here,
he actually studied at Columbia. And he studied under a professor who
taught him about pluralism.
And Yakovlev went back to the then-Soviet Union with an idea that pluralism could work.
And 20 years later, he was the adviser. So it took a while to realize that investment,
but we realized that investment.
I called this out as a real possibility 2 years ago! I actually think that Gorbachev was
just a naive fool and the real CIA agent was his top adviser, Yakovlev. Here is what I
wrote back then:
". . . after extensive research by the Prole Center research team, it
has come to light that Alexander Yakovlev, Gorbachev's chief advisor on glasnost
and perestroika, was very likely a CIA penetration agent – an agent of influence. He could
have been either a witting or unwitting asset of U.S. intelligence."
This information was included as part of a brief book review I did. Here is the link to
the full article:
I still cannot believe how many naive people live today in Russia. There are STILL plenty
of people who believe that gorbachev was just a "clumsy" person in charge of the "task too
big to handle".
I would like to remind you that even after 2 "sudden" deaths of Soviet
leaders ( Andropov and Chernenko ) before this traitor USSR was just in a period of
economic stagnation and certainly not a deep recession. Several independent prominent
western economists have also collaborated that.
What happened is just so obvious to me that it really cannot get any simpler.
Gorbachev was a very weak minded person who even wasnt a true believer in Soviet
principles and even less so even less capable manager and organizer. He was a bureaucrat
whos wife was terminally ill and who was just a simpleton who allowed himself to be
seduced by the western propaganda and few full stores even though he obviously knew
nothing of the background principles of how world economy functioned even then.
Apparently he was way out of his league when meeting with Reagan who was a smart brave
and a cunning man I do have to admit that.
Gorbachev did what he only knew he could do. He betrayed the 70 years or hard work of
Soviet people and building of different world because he thought that world will admire
this moron and traitor if he arranges the collapse of USSR and the "end of the Cold War".
Of course there is another side of this coin.
What the actually did was "below the table" arrangement with the US that he would be
able to send his wife to a treatment abroad if he made the USSR disappear and that he
would be obviously well compensated for this evil deed. Even today he is being funded by
the western government through his "charity funds" Green Cross and Gorbachev foundation.
This guy made the dissolution of USSR on purpose make no mistake about it. It was
organized to make it seem as it happened "accidentally" and as a part of "democratic
process" so less question would be asked. Apparently even that idiotic strategy worked
which seems rather incredible for a country that provided so many smart people and was a
leading chess nation for decades. Even Albania would be skeptical about it.
Of course there is a silver lining to this. He could not do this all by himself. He had
powerful friends in KGB and army who helped him in his deeds. Why? Because they were
greedy people who lost faith in CP. With the help of these people Gorbachev introduced
extremely vile version of capitalism to the 300 000 000 people while he and his "comrades"
extracted currency reserves from the sabotaged USSR and hid them in western banks and off
shore companies.
To corroborate my point I will point out few facts:
1. only when gorbachev came to power Chernobyl catastrophe happened
2. he is the person who sent top Soviet military commanders AND THEIR WHOLE FAMILIES to
move from East Germany to the PLAINS of Ukraine and live like dogs for months until their
poor quality appartements were finished while being given nothing in exchange from Helmut
Kohl but a "Danke schon". No sane 6 year old would do that and certainly not a reasonable
and intelligent but honest Soviet leader.
3. He was the person who forced the Energia rocket with Polyus payload to be rushed beyond
all reason and that is what caused its demised and failure to put first ever weapon system
into orbit.
4. He allowed for the Berlin wall to fall like a brick overnight and did nothing to stop
that
5. He DIRECTLY NEGLECTED results of referendum of Soviet people in 1991. who with 72% of
votes wanted to preserve USSR
6. He arranged for NATO not to move eastward ORALLY WITHOUT ANY KIND OF
AGREEMENT!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!??! WHO DOES THIS!?!?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?!?!?
BUAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAA
7. He himself made the USSR formally and willingly the thing of past in the end of 1991.
No one sane can believe that USSR dissolved itself in the time when there was no war
had a stable economy and strong army. This guy did it with the help of corrupt highly
positioned KGB and military personnel and of course CIA who helped them to transfer 50 000
000 000 US dollars ( 1991. value ) out of USSR for their own benefit.
To conclude: Gorbachev is a person of poor intellect, no love for Soviet or Russian
principles or state, but also a very sane traitor of USSR and Russia as well and also a
member of masonic clan who sold it for his personal interest. Just because he was playing
dumb doesnt mean he is not the biggest criminal in Soviet history. Make no mistake about
it. Even the dumbest person in Russia cannot believe that all this factors fell in place
"like chips". The probability for that is exactly 0 ( zero ).
Oh come on, this is not news. This was pretty evident. Initially he was not cooperating
with CIA. But CIA offered him something he couldn't resists. Nobel peace price, enormous
wealth, safe passage to US etc. Health care etc.
Wasn't Gorbachev from Russia's frontier lands (sometimes called Ukraine)? Not only that,
but from a place which joined the Nazis in their atrocities? I've also heard he took big
US money to step down. Bad source on that one though.
I disagree with this. Gorbachev had the right intentions. He just didn't bank on the
treachery of the wests big biz and various vested interests. Both Gorby and Reagan were
both honorable in their intentions and they did achieve much. To me it was Yeltsin who did
the utmost damage to Russia making it look like a 3rd world anarchic country as he allowed
Oligarchs to strip the countries assets.
It's difficult for me to believe that Gorbachev was simply a naive fool. Anyone
educated in Marxist theory know about the predatory nature of
capitalism/imperialism. Anyone, particularly a Soviet politician, who'd been
observing the behavior of the US after WW2 should have known that the Yanks are
masters of treachery.
This same words could be written by Gorbachov ' if he had known what a dreadful fate
awaited the USSR, he would not have written a single critical book or article about it." ,
I think Alexander Zinoviev also worked and even work for the CIA after his dead publishing
his books.
To me, Gorbachev is no traitor. He is a Russian patriot who honestly wanted to improve
Soviet Communism and adapt it to his time. Was he naďve? Yes, very much so. After all, he
started the stones rolling and should have known what could happen if other people got
their hands on them. He probably knew that if one takes one single stone from the
monolithic structure of communism the whole structure would collapse. So he just tried to
embellish some of the corner stones of communism without pulling them entirely out from
its structure, and called this 'perestroika' and 'glasnost'. Other people in his
government, oblivious of the danger of completely pulling corner stones from its
structure, didn't think embellishing stones in-situ was enough, and pulled them completely
from the structure, with the intend to put them back once the dust that had settled on
them over time had been thoroughly scratched off, with a wire brush. But by doing so the
corner stones changed their form and didn't fit anymore into the places they had been
taken from, communism. Thus, the Primal Sin was committed, and Soviet Communism collapsed.
And so did Roman Catholicism in Europe for similar reasons.
"... Ivan Nikitchuk, a Communist party deputy, said recent events and the Ukraine crisis in particular have led five MPs, including two from the ruling United Russia party, to ask the prosecutor general, Yury Chaika, to examine Gorbachev, 83. ..."
"... "The consequences of that destruction can be felt today in the conflicts that we have seen," said Nikitchuk. ..."
A group of Russian MPs have formally requested prosecutors to investigate former Soviet
leader Mikhail
Gorbachev for treason over the breakup of the Soviet Union, a lawmaker said on
Thursday.
Ivan Nikitchuk, a Communist party deputy, said recent events and the Ukraine crisis in particular have led five
MPs, including two from the ruling United Russia party, to ask the prosecutor general, Yury
Chaika, to examine Gorbachev, 83.
"We asked to prosecute him and those who helped him destroy the Soviet Union for treason of
national interests," said Nikitchuk, adding that Soviet citizens in 1991 were against the
country's breakup.
Seeking to create a more open and prosperous Soviet Union through glasnost and perestroika,
Gorbachev ended up unleashing forces that swept away the country he had sought to preserve and
himself from power.
"The consequences of that destruction can be felt today in the conflicts that we have seen,"
said Nikitchuk.
He added that this included not only Ukraine but other former Soviet countries over the past
two decades.
In February, a popular pro-Western uprising in Ukraine ousted pro-Moscow president Viktor
Yanukovych, who has since taken refuge in Russia .
The Kremlin responded by sending troops to Ukraine's Russian-speaking peninsula of Crimea
and annexing it as part of Russia last month.
"What is happening in Ukraine can happen in Russia, too," said Nikitchuk. "This pushed us to
write to the prosecutor general, so that professional lawyers rather than historians can
investigate the events of 1991."
He added that lawmakers were also concerned about internal enemies stirring unrest.
"The fifth column in our country has been formed and works in the open, funded by foreign
money," he said.
In a landmark speech marking Russia's takeover of Crimea, President Vladimir Putin called Russians
disagreeing with his policies, such as his decision to occupy Crimea, a fifth column.
There have been previous attempts by the Communist party to have Gorbachev prosecuted but
these have led nowhere.
Nikitchuk said he hoped that the current political climate makes for a more favourable
moment and that prosecutors would launch the investigation this time.
Unlike the previous cases, the current request is backed by lawmakers from the ruling party,
United Russia.
Gorbachev said the lawmakers' initiative was "poorly thought out and groundless from a
historical point of view".
"Such calls only show that some lawmakers want publicity," he told the Interfax news agency.
A spokeswoman at the prosecutor's office declined to comment.
The Soviet Union officially ceased to exist in December 1991 after Russia, Belarus and
Ukraine signed the Belavezha accords dissolving the USSR. Gorbachev resigned two weeks
later.
The Soviet Union did not disappear because of a great flood or a major earthquake. Somebody
was at the helm making decisions and setting a political course. Politicians should be
responsible for their actions. But do politicians alone bear responsibility?
In fact, Gorbachev's problem is inseparably linked with the unstated problem of the low
self-esteem and rationalization of the millions of people who lived through the drama of 1991.
Some justify Gorbachev's actions in an attempt to justify their own complicity in events. For
the same reasons, others try to shift blame from themselves by holding Gorbachev solely
responsible. "He ruined everything," they say. "We are not to blame."
Unfortunately, the Soviet people bear responsibility for what happened to their country.
That does not lift responsibility from any one individual, even if that person was part of the
leadership -- those whom we naturally call on the carpet first for anything that happens. We
the people are to blame for not mounting any resistance to that course of action, or at least
for not fighting it hard enough.
In truth, the only people with the moral right to criticize Gorbachev today are the ones who
had the courage in the 1980s and 1990s to point out how destructive his policies were, to go
against the flow, and to condemn the path followed not only by Gorbachev, but also by his main
political rival, former President Boris Yeltsin.
Gorbachev's rule contrasts favorably with the leaders who came both before and after him,
and he is not remembered for having committed any particularly egregious wrongdoings. According
to that thinking, Gorbachev did not "destroy" the Soviet Union, he "only" betrayed the country
he led.
Gorbachev took office with a pledge to serve and defend the state. He cannot be blamed for
the fact that a catastrophe that had been brewing for two decades erupted during his reign. But
as the captain, he was obligated to "go down with the ship" and share the same political fate
as the country he governed. The problem is not that Gorbachev could have prevented the collapse
and didn't -- he couldn't have under any circumstances -- but that when the troubles came, he
snuck away from the battlefield and went home to have dinner.
The people might sometimes excuse or even justify the deeds of malefactors, but it never
forgives a traitor.
Boris Kagarlitsky is the director of the Institute of Globalization
Studies.
But by his death in 1997, Deng's decision appeared vindicated, as world opinion had turned
decisively in his favor. Deng had seen enough of Russia's tumultuous politics to know where he
stood: sacrifice political liberalization for stability's sake, because the alternative was
chaos and collapse. Chinese analysts of Soviet politics continue to fault Gorbachev for
abandoning central planning too rapidly and in a disorganized fashion. Rather than liberalizing
politics, they argue, Gorbachev should have focused on the economy.
Today, top Chinese leaders cite the Soviet Union as an example of why China's Communist
Party must keep its fist clenched on power, even as it casts off the last remaining vestiges of
the Maoist economy. Jiang Zemin, who succeeded Deng as China's leader, argued in 1990 that
the Soviet Union's main problem was that Gorbachev was a traitor like Leon Trotsky, the Soviet
revolutionary who was found guilty of betraying Marxism-Leninism by then-leader Joseph
Stalin.
That was an ironic charge coming from the official who first formally welcomed China's
business classes into the supposedly communist ruling party. Yet in December 2012, Chinese
President Xi Jinping echoed this analysis. "Why did the Soviet Union disintegrate?" he
asked
a group of Communist Party members. "Their ideals and convictions wavered," he explained.
"Finally, all it took was one quiet word from Gorbachev to declare the dissolution of the
Soviet Communist Party, and a great party was gone." Yet it is Deng's logic that has come to
dominate most interpretations of the Soviet Union's collapse. "My father,"
reported Deng's youngest son, "thinks Gorbachev is an idiot."
In Russia, many agree. Russians regularly rate Gorbachev as one of their worst leaders of
the 20th century. A 2013 poll
found that only 22 percent of Russians perceive Gorbachev positively or slightly
positively, while 66 percent have a negative impression. By contrast, Leonid Brezhnev, who
presided over two decades of stagnation, is viewed positively by 56 percent of Russians. Even
Stalin, who managed a murderous reign of terror, gets positive marks from half of Russians. It
is not surprising, then, that Deng's reputation in Russia has risen. Many Russians see China as
a model of what their country should have done during the 1980s and 1990s. Liberal politics
cause chaos and economic distress, many Russians have concluded, and only a strong hand can
deliver economic growth.
... ... ...
... Deng managed to compromise with other elites, letting them retain their authority in
exchange for their support in pursuing economic reforms that allowed China to grow. But in the
Soviet Union, economic reform meant destroying the power base of the special interest groups,
leaving a potential military coup lurking in the background and hanging over Gorbachev's head.
That was a threat Deng never faced.
The reason why Gorbachev lost out is not because the Soviet economy was unreformable.
China's example proved that the transition from a centrally planned to a market economy was
possible. Rather, the Soviet Union collapsed because vast political power was entrusted to
groups that had every reason to sabotage the efforts to resolve the country's decades-long
financial dilemmas.
In the end, the political clout of these interest groups proved far greater than Gorbachev
anticipated. In his quest to reform his country and steer it away from calamity, Gorbachev
brought about the very process that would eventually lead to the Soviet Union's collapse.
Perestroika put the final nails in the USSR's economy One of the first main policies
Gorbachev adopted was Perestroika – reform of the economy. Hoarding and reciprocal
favours (blat) had been a means of survival in the Soviet Union, thieving to 'moonlight' was
also common and this cost the regime a lot. The 'command-administrative' system had become
obsolete in the Post-Industrial era and was curtailing economic development 1. To solve this,
Gorbachev wanted to give enterprise managers control over contracts and introduce aspects of
the market economy, to make it managers' responsibility to gain contracts and to make sure the
enterprise makes a profit. However, in practice the way the enterprises operated remained
unchanged except in terms – ministries rephrased their commands as contracts 2. Private
enterprise was also permitted, which seemed to contradict Gorbachev's claim to be committed to
Marxist-Leninist thought which was vehemently opposed to capitalism which Marxist's argue
exploit the proleteriat – so to actually create a class of capitalists who (according to
Marxist doctrine) would exploit the workers who were supposed to be living in socialist –
i.e. 'classless society' seemed contradictory to the very ideological concept the regime's
power was based upon. A small amount of private enterprise emerged, but the profiteering was
very much resented by the general population – goods and services were sold for four or
five times their subsidized price due to shortages. Another aspect of Perestroika was entry
into the market economy – many of the social benefits given by the enterprises had to be
done away with, as they could not make a profit and afford to maintain the benefits, resulting
in a stagnant economy occuring simultaneously with a collapsing social welfare system.
Gorbachev's reforms did not work and only succeeded in hastening the economic collapse that was
inevitable.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Glasnost facilitated Opposition to Concentrate against the Regime Allowing freedom of
thought from the 'mono-ideological controls' that existed for decades and allowing pluralist
thought and leadership meant a weakening of power for the Communist Party – it had to
convert into a proper parliamentary party to survive. Furthermore, in a regime based on
oppression and propaganda, when these are removed and freedom of speech and freedom of the
media are introduced, nasty elements about the system in the past are going to be revealed, and
when there is 70 years of repression being reported all at once, it is inevitable there will be
extreme hostility toward those responsible – the Party 1, this especially fuelled the
anger of the nationalities who had been oppressed and triggered a nationalist movement.
The population were dissatisfied with the dire state of affairs and could voice their
discontent openly with glasnost, which led to Gorbachev becoming very unpopular by 1991, in
which year the economy had contracted by 18% 2, people were also very concerned over the
incompetence of the command-administrative system and irresponsibility of the leadership with
regards to the 1986 Chernobyl power station disaster 3.
In a state committed to one ideology, the removal of mono-ideological controls, and the
ability of other ideological persuasions to come to power meant the Party had lost its RIGHT to
govern the people unless the people themselves WANTED the Party to rule. Thus, the Communist
Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) had to win the support of the people in order to govern
effectively. However, in a society that was becoming increasingly liberal and 'bourgeois' (the
USSR was largely middle class, private property was protected and capitalism was legalised),
the people had to believe in socialist ideology – which would have been almost impossible
to achieve.
Gorbachev's reforms themselves undermined some of the principle features of socialist rule
in the USSR, e.g. atheism, mono-ideological control, one-party state, economic monopoly and the
suspendability of law. Gorbachev's ideology itself – his focus on 'all-human values'
instead of the class struggle, the rule of law, international peace and proper parliamentary
representation have more resonance with John Stuart Mill than Karl Marx 4 – Gorbachev was
subconsciously moving the USSR in this ideological direction.
With democratization and pluralist thought permitted, Gorbachev found himself operating
within an increasingly wide political spectrum – with the reformist 'democrats' on one
side and the conservative Communist Party members on the other. There was a constant power
struggle between the two and Gorbachev dealt with this by constantly playing one side against
the other and compromising. One of Gorbachev's critics at the time said this was like trying to
marry a hare to a hedgehog. The two sides were very much irreconcilable and instead of trying
to defeat one side, Gorbachev sat on the fence and as a result his policies were constantly
inconsistent – you cannot mix radical reforms with conservatism 5. The dangers of this
were apparent when Shevardnadze, Foreign Minister at the time, resigned because he warned a
dictatorship was approaching, Gorbachev ignored this threat and dismissed this claim with
overconfidence 6.
1 Kagarlitsky, B. Russia under Yeltsin and Putin: neo-liberal autocracy, London: Pluto
2002
2 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
3 Haynes, M., Russia: Class and Power, 1917-2000, London: Bookmarks 2002
4 Service, R. History of Modern Russia: from Nicholas II to Putin, London: Penguin 1997
5 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991
6 Sheehy, G. The Man who changed the World, New York: HarperCollins 1991 No because...
Regional Nationalism and Independence Movements These original flaws in the system were
largely responsible for its own downfall – in particular the nationalities issue –
the decision to maintain the Empire without granting real power to the nationalities whilst
simultaneously repressing them left most of the nationalities feeling bitter when glasnost
revealed the truth about how they had been treated in the past and democratisation gave them
the power to chose representatives who would really represent people's interests (the
nationalist movement) whilst at the same time being given by Gorbachev an appetite for power
– a fatal combination.
The wealthier regions wanted a separation from the USSR because of the feeling they were
being milked from the centre and many other regions wanted to become independent because they
did not want to be part of an economic disaster area which became apparent when the Donbass
miners who had no commitment to nationalism thought their future would be safer if the Ukraine
wasn't part of the USSR 1.
The nationalist movement emerged when freedom of speech, media and association along with
democratisation and the loss of fear of repression allowed people to voice pride in their
nation and resentment at past repressions as well as the ongoing special treatment of Russians
in the Regions, who had access to better housing and other special privileges the locals did
not.
Certain Republics felt nationalism more strongly than others, most notably the Baltic States
who felt a strong cultural attachment to the West and felt they were being unfairly occupied.
Gorbachev's mistake here was to downplay the importance of nationalism and not treat the Baltic
States as a special case 2. After all, most of the population of the USSR wished to preserve
the Union – 76% voted to preserve the Union in March 1991 (except the Baltic States,
Moldova, Georgia and Armenia who did not conduct the referendum) 3. After the failed coup, most
states declared their independence, even if they did so with reluctance, as there was a general
feeling there was no alternative. Gorbachev tried to persuade the Republics not to become fully
independent. However, in early December, the Ukraine held a referendum where the population
voted overwhelmingly in favour of independence, even after Gorbachev stated "there can be no
Union without Ukraine", on 8th December, Yeltsin met with the Ukrainian and Bielorussian leader
and declared a formal end to the USSR and the establishment of the Confederation of Independent
States which they invited the other states to join.
There was nothing left Gorbachev could do, democratisation had brought about the means for
independence and Gorbachev didn't feel he could argue with people's wishes carried out through
democratic means and, on 25th December he resigned with regret.
1 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996
3 Brown, A. The Gorbachev Factor, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1996 Yeltsin Factor
Boris Yeltsin emerged as the true hero and strong leader for the fearlessness to condemn the
coup – in a press conference afterwards Yeltsin ordered Gorbachev around undermining his
position, then used his institutional powers derived from democratization to appoint Egor
Gaidar, an economist dedicated to laissez-faire economics, as his Finance Minister and
suspension of the CPSU pending an investigation into the coup. Gorbachev half heartedly argued
against this but it was no use – he was seen as a weaker leader along with discontent
over his policies, whilst Yeltsin's radicalism was keeping pace with developments and his
popularity at an all-time high, Gorbachev's position was also much less weaker without the
Communist Party. Also, the Soviet Union really could not exist without the Communist Party
arguably as they had political and economic monopoly on society and the Communist Party went
from controlling these aspects of society to ceasing to exist, the Soviet Union could not
function and the economy spiralled out of control. Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... August 1991 Coup
Counter Productive, Bringing About What It Sought To Prevent - The End of the Soviet Union
By August 1991 Gorbachev's popularity was at an all-time low both in the Party and outside it.
Despite being advised by some of his staff to sign the Treaty agreement granting the republics
real autonomy before going on holiday and some suspicious circumstances he should have been
more questioning about, he planned on signing the agreement when he returned. This was a big
mistake and allowed the conservatives to stage a coup. The Emergency Committee made no
reference whatsoever to Marxism-Leninism or the class struggle in their speech, meaning it was
a coup in the hope of returning the Soviet Union to 'normal' i.e. an Empire controlled from
Moscow and putting the final nails in the coffin of socialism in the USSR 1.
The failed coup triggered the very thing it sought to prevent – the break-up of the
Soviet Union 2.
1 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
2 Hosking, Geoffrey, History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992
Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... The System Needed to
Change in Order to Survive in the Longer Term; That Mikhail Gorbachev's Reforms Failed Showed
that the USSR Could Not be Saved By the Gorbachev era, all hopes of fulfilling the original
Marxist-Leninist dream were gone and most did not feel passionately about communism, even
within the Party. There was a general acknowledgement that the USSR could not continue in the
same way as before – Andropov, Gorbachev's predecessor also realised this and set about
changing society through repressive measures such as harsh labour discipline enforced by
cutting payments from workers for work deemed poor quality and restrictions on the sale of
alcohol and prohibition of alcohol on official occasions was felt overly repressive and for
many – Gorbachev was seen as a positive, energetic leader who would overcome the USSR's
problems in a less repressive manner. With economic stagnation and an economy dependent on the
exportation of natural resources to survive 1, an unsuccessful war (Afghanistan) and an ageing
Party Membership to combat, Gorbachev was the candidate for those who wanted change or at least
realised change could no longer be postponed 2.
Autocracies survive due to repressing their people to the extent that they are not given the
freedoms required to change their government, rather than because the people want them to stay
in power. Mikhail Gorbachev's conscience and sense of responsibility for his population
dictated that the system could no longer be propped up like this, and that the people needed
and deserved the freedoms and basic human rights they had been denied for decades. That the
system could not encorporate such freedoms meant that the system morally should not be allowed
to perpetuate itself, and thus the Soviet Union fell apart because it was unrepresentative and
did not support the population's human rights means the fall of the USSR should be applauded,
not mourned for its' population.
1 Volkogonov, D.A. The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Empire: political leaders from Lenin to
Gorbachev, edited and translated by M. Shukman, London: HarperCollins 1998
2 Hosking, G. History of the USSR, 1917-1991, London: Fontana 1992 Yes because...
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... War with Afghanistan
Drained USSR of Patriotic Morale The war in Afghanistan was a key contributing factor to
the breakup of the USSR. Reuveny and Prakash argue that the Soviet-Afghan war contributed to
undermining the Soviet Union in many ways. First, it discredited the Red Army, and impacted
negatively upon the image of the Red Army as a strong, almost invincible force, which gave
nationalist movements in the Republics hope that they might succeed in attaining independence
after all. Second, it impacted upon leadership perception on the usefulness of utilising the
military to keep the union intact and as a force for foreign intervention. Third, it created
new forms of political participation, which had begun to impact upon media reporting even
before glasnost, and began the first calls for glasnost, as it created a number of war
veterans, who went on to form organisations which weakened the total authority of the CPSU
1.
1 Reuveny, Rafael, and Prakash, Aseem, 'The Afghanistan War and the Breakdown of the Soviet
Union', Review of International Studies (1999), 25:693-708 Yes because... Report this ad
Gorbachev Was Responsible for The Collapse Of The USSR No because... It was dead from the
time Stalin took control Gorbachev finished it off, but Stalin, Khrushchev, Brezhnev etc.
really killed it. Lenin had nothing to do with that, he was a socialist-marxist, not a
communist. You obviously don't know the difference. Learn it before you blindly yell your
opinion into the dark of the internet.
Joe Venetos ,
history, European Union and politics, int'l relations
Answered Aug 22 2017 · Author has 485 answers and 325k answer views
Neither.
The USSR as it was was not sustainable, and the writing was all over the wall.
The reason it wasn't sustainable, however, is widely misunderstood.
The Soviet Union could have switched to a market or hybrid economy and still remained a
unified state. However, it was made up of 15 very different essentially nation-states from
Estonia to Uzbekistan, and separatist movements were tearing the Union apart.
Unlike other multi-national European empires that met their day earlier in the 20th century,
such as the British, French, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires, the Russian
Empi...
The USSR as it was was not sustainable, and the writing was all over the wall.
The reason it wasn't sustainable, however, is widely misunderstood.
The Soviet Union could have switched to a market or hybrid economy and still remained a
unified state. However, it was made up of 15 very different essentially nation-states from
Estonia to Uzbekistan, and separatist movements were tearing the Union apart.
Unlike other multi-national European empires that met their day earlier in the 20th century,
such as the British, French, Portuguese, Austro-Hungarian, or Ottoman Empires, the Russian
Empire never had the chance to disband; the can was simply kicked down the road by the
Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet era. Restrictions on free speech and press, followed by a
gradual economic downturn that began in the 1970s, brewed anti-Union and separatist sentiments
among sizeable sections of society. It's important to note, however, that not everyone wanted
the disband the USSR, and not everyone in the Russian republic wanted to keep it together (the
Central Asian states were the most reluctant to secede). There was, actually, a referendum on
whether or not to keep the Union together, and a slight majority voted in favor (something
Gorbachev points out to this day), but the vote was also boycotted by quite a few people,
especially in the Baltic republics. So, we know that the citizens had mixed feelings and the
reasons for the USSR's end were far more complex than just "communism failed".
By the summer of 1991, there was nothing Gorbachev could do. The hardliners saw him as
incompetent to save the Union, but too many citizens and military personnel had defected to the
politicians of the constituent republics (rather than the Union's leadership), including Russia
itself, that were increasingly pursuing their independence since the first multiparty elections
across the Union in 1989. By December 1991, Union-level political bodies agreed to
disband. So, Gorbachev had no choice but to admit that the USSR no longer existed.
Gorbachev could have ruled with an iron fist, and he could have done so from the 1985
without ever implementing glasnost and perestroika, but that could have been a disaster.
We don't really know, actually, but in my opinion, an oligarchy -which is what the USSR
was in its later years, not an authoritarian state like it was under Stalin- still needs
some level of public consent to continue governing, like China (which is also a diverse
society, but far more homogenous than the USSR was). If you have all this economic and
separatist malaise brewing, it's not going to work out.
In the long run, Russia is much better off. They now have a state where ethnic
Russians make up 80% of the population (a good balance), from what was, I think 50% in the
USSR.
While some Russians regret that the USSR ended, others don't care or were ready to call
themselves "Russian" rather than "Soviet". It's no different to French public opinion turning
against the Algerian war in the 1960s and supporting Algerian independence, or British public
opinion starting to support the independence of India yet some people from those countries, may
look back fondly. Also, Russia went through a tough economic period in the 1990s, which
strengthened Soviet nostalgia, understandably, thinking back to a time when the state
guaranteed everyone with housing and a job. While some sentiments still exist today in
the Russian Federation that may appear pro-Soviet, it's important to point out that that
doesn't necessarily mean these folks would like to recreate the Soviet Union as it
was . Many just simply miss the heaftier influence the USSR had, versus what they perceive
to be weakness or disrespect for Russia today. The communist party today gets few votes in
Russian elections; and many Russians now were not adults prior to 1991, and thus don't quite
remember the era too well; many others may be old enough to remember the economic downturn of
the 80s, and not the economic good times of the 60s.
One final point, regarding Gorbachev being a "stooge of the West": that gives far too
much credit to America under Reagan for taking down the USSR. The "West" had nothing to do with
it. In the longer run, as we may be seeing slowly unravel since the Bush Jr administration,
America pretty much screwed itself with the massive military spending that started in the 80s
and continues upward, with supporting the mujahedeen to lure the USSR into Afghanistan in 1979
(a war that lasted until 1989), with opposing any secular regime in the Middle East
friendly to Moscow in the 70s and 80s, and so on we all know how these events started playing
out for the US much later, from 9/11 to the current Trump mess.
"... A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited to phone taps and other dirty tricks. ..."
The National Lawyers Guild, born in resistance to political witch-hunts, seems to have
neutered itself in the face of the new wave of manufactured hysteria.
"The Guild has 'a sort of hip neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria
etc.'"
I recently returned from a delegation to Russia, and now smell McCarthyism more clearly.
The delegation was organized by the Center for
Citizen Initiatives , an invaluable 32-year old citizen diplomacy organization, but CCI
said it would not to print the article I wrote about the delegation because it needed to say
something critical of the Soviet period, not just praise. The article is titled Russian Pride
and US Exceptionalism. A political decision was made that, in order to have access to some
highly placed people, CCI needs to be "balanced" about the Soviet period and acknowledge the
gulags. That could be a good strategic decision, but I was surprised. [Two weeks later, after
the article was published widely with a very positive response, CCI did publish it.]
A few days after my article was printed, my nephew, who helped me edit the piece and works
for corporate America, told me he's afraid to open certain websites on his work computer -- off
the clock -- because he could be flagged as "suspicious" and questioned. McCarthy was limited
to phone taps and other dirty tricks.
Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state
has access to everything. My nephew is pragmatic, not paranoid. When I told members of the
delegation about him, several said they weren't surprised about his concern, and one called it
tragic. I told them they were all extremely cougeous to go to Russia at this frenzied point in
history. One elder, seasoned member, said McCarthyism is certainly here and she's very careful.
I am not very careful because I hold on to the belief that since I'm not doing anything
illegal, they can't get me. History proves otherwise.
"Edward Snowden is in Russia because he told us the state has access to
everything."
I have been a proud member of the National Lawyers Guild for 35 years, but since Trump's
election I have repeatedly challenged how it has become a partisan organization for the
Democrats. The Guild's Democratic Party loyalty, exposed in a Black Agenda
Report article , is reflected in its
resistance to support for Julian Assange . A recent article by Craig Murray, former British
ambassador to Uzbekistan, exposes how Assange
is being tortured before our eyes, with no pretense of the rule of law. Assange had support
when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized because he went after the
Democrats , so is apparently a Russian asset responsible for Trump, as Tulsi Gabbard and Jill
Stein are also "Russian assets." MSNBC claimed that because Gabbard didn't deny she was a
Russian asset, she clearly is. Does that sound like McCarthy?
After I publicly exposed the partisan liberalism of the Guild in the Black Agenda
Report , I was both chastised for airing dirty laundry and told I raised valid, important
concerns about the political compass of the 82-year old organization. There was talk of the
need for elders to provide political context, to help the current ahistorical political
climate, which believes it's all Trump's fault. However, a third annual convention has occurred
since Trump's election and none have addressed the new McCarthyism, or Assange, who is the
victim of one of the most egregious cases of legal abuse in history and should be of grave
concern to a legal organization such as the Guild.
"Assange had support when he went after Bush's war, but is now publicly brutalized
because he went after the Democrats."
Recently, a former Guild president posted an article to the International Committee from
Forbes with the ominous title:
Russia Attempts To Take Over Venezuelan Oil, Creating A Challenge For The U.S. I responded
to the committee and asked if I was missing something, but why can't Russia and Venezuela
trade? Within minutes, a Guild member since 1974 asked to be taken off the list because of what
he saw as "foolish ultra leftism (an infantile disorder to coin a phrase)" that was a "stupid
discussion." Another said I was "lacking in ethical grounding."
One who thought my question was valid, said "I personally support any sovereign nation's
ability to make alliances. Russia is not my enemy. Russia was invited into Venezuela just as it
was invited into Syria. When I started law school in 2002, at the ripe old age of 52, the only
thing I cared about was joining my school's Guild chapter. I have found a good deal of
disappointment in the Guild ever since." Others added that the Guild has "a sort of hip
neoliberal mindset: anti-Russia, anti-China, anti-Syria etc.," and that "If it's ultra-left to
call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a badge of honor." One member
cautioned, "as Riva said recently, being aware of source is very important." But the discussion
has been shut down, with no plans to discuss the implications of the Guild helping to fan the
flames of anti-Russia sentiment, let alone the need to quell them.
"If it's ultra-left to call out the Democrats, I wear the badge ultra-leftist as a
badge of honor."
A long-time Guild comrade who is now all about anybody but Trump, and knows my nephew, said
his story is just anecdotal. "I don't see an across-the-board 'new McCarthyism.' To rise to
that level, what I'd need to see is a major concerted effort by the government to destroy the
lives, careers and reputations of people accused of being insufficiently hostile to Russia."
Are we waiting for the first obvious suicide of this McCarthy period?
An article about the recent
conviction of seven Catholic peace activists for a Plowshares action generated this
comment: "The greatest risk of nuclear war today comes from Trump Derangement Syndrome. The
fact that the leadership of the Democratic Party would use Russia-gate, a pile of absurd lies,
for political advantage, at the risk of initiating a nuclear war with Russia is beyond
despicable."
The fear of exposing the depth of the rot is pervasive, counter-revolutionary and
jeopardizes life itself. That Trump is the only anti-endless war candidate, other than Tulsi
Gabbard, exposes the Democrats as the war party they are. Many hope that Trump is the wrecking
ball that will knock it all down. Hopefully before somebody pushes the button.
Riva Enteen edited the book Follow the Money, interviews by
Flashpoints producer Dennis J. Bernstein. She can be reached at
[email protected] .
Now after her deposition Aaron should interview Fiona Hill. I would like to see how she would lose all the feathers of her cocky
"I am Specialist in Russia" stance. She a regular MIC prostitute (intelligence agencies are a part of MIC) just like Luke Harding. And
probably both have the same handlers.
Brilliant interview !
Harding is little more than an intelligence asset himself and his idea of speaking to "Russians" is London circle of Russian emigrants
which are not objective source by any means.
He's peddling a his Russophobic line with no substantiation. In fact, the interview constitutes an overdue exposure of this pressitute.
Notable quotes:
"... He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. ..."
"... Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really, its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. ..."
"... This interview is a wonderful illustration of everything that is horribly wrong with corporate media. I hope it goes viral. ..."
"... Very well put! Everything that is labeled as "conspiracy theory" when aimed towards the West, is "respectable journalism" when aimed at Russia. ..."
"... Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman "all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil. ..."
"... Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises '' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling the postal service company for transportation costs. ..."
"... Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate to The Real News. ..."
"... GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC server was hacked. ..."
"... Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking. ..."
"... NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election. Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller? LIAR!!!! ..."
"... Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here. ..."
"... His logic seems to be: Putin does things we don't like -> Trump getting elected is something we don't like -> Putin got Trump elected. ..."
That Harding tells Mate to meet Alexi Navalny, who is a far right nationalist and most certainly a tool of US intelligence
(something like Russia's Richard Spencer) was all I needed to hear to understand where Luke is coming from.
He's little more than an intelligence asset himself if his idea of speaking to "Russians" is to go and speak to a bunch
of people who most certainly have their own ties back to the western intelligence agencies. That's not how you're going to
get the truth about Russia. He's all appeals to authority - Steele's most of all, even name dropping Kerry. To finally land on
"oh well if you would read my whole book" is just getting to the silly season.
Also "well this is the kind of person Putin is" is a terrible argument. This isn't about either Putin or Trump really,
its about the long history of US-Russia relations and all that has occurred. Also, the ubiquitous throwing around of accusations
of the murder of journalists in Russia is a straw man argument, especially when it is just thrown in as some sort of moral shielding
for a shabby argument.
Few in the US know about these cases or what occurred, or of the many forces inside of Russia that might be involved in murdering
journalists just as in Mexico or Turkey. But these cases are not explained - blame is merely assigned to Putin himself. Of course
if someone here discusses he death of Michael Hastings, they're a "conspiracy theorist", but if the crime involves a Russian were
to assign the blame to Vladimir Putin and, no further explanation is required.
That is the video about fire arm legalization "cockroaches ", even if you are not Russian speaking it's pretty graphic to understand
the idea https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ILxqIEEMg
And FYI - Central Asian workers do the low-wage jobs in Moscow, pretty like Mexicans or Puerto Ricans in US. Yet, that "future
president" is trying to gain some popularity by labeling and demonizing them. Sounds familiar a bit?
"definitelly ddissagree with that assertation about Alexei he's had nationalist views but he's definitely not far right and
calling him a tool of US intelligence is pretty bs this is the exact same assertation that the Russian state media says about
him."
I disagree that there is any evidence of Navalny being tool of US intelligence, but you are wrong for not recognizing
that Navalny is ultranationalist. His public statements are indefensible. He is a Russian ultra nationalist, far right and a racist.
Statements about cockroaches, worse than rats, bullets being too good etc - there is no way to misunderstand that.
Navalny is a corrupt ex-politician just like his mentor that was caught red-handed taking a bribe from a German businessman
"all on camera" at a restaurant. Most of corrupt politicians and businessmen that get caught by the Russian government always
cry that they are politically repressed and the government is evil.
Navalnys brother was the owner of a small transport company that Navalny helped secure contracts with government enterprises
'' anywhere in the world that would be a conflict of interest" but that's not why he is in jail! His brother is in jail for swindling
the postal service company for transportation costs.
@trdi I am a Russian. And I remember the early Navalny who made me sick to my stomach with absolutely disgusting, RACIST, anti-immigration
commentaries. The guy is basically a NEO-NAZI who has toned down his nationalist diatribes in the past 10 or so years. Has he
really reformed? I doubt it.
MrChibiluffy, Navalny became relatively popular in Russia precisely at that time, especially during the White Ribbon protests
in 2011/2012. I remember it very well myself.
I am Russian and I lived in Moscow at that time and he was the darling of the Russian opposition. He publicly defined his views
and established himself back then and hasn't altered his position to this day.
What's more important is that around 2015 or so he made an alliance with the far-right and specifically Diomushkin who is a
neo-nazi activist. I understand that people change their views, it's just that he hasn't.
Nikita Gusarov it still feels like the best chance for some form of populist opposition atm. Even though they just rejected
him he has a movement. Would you rather vote for Sobchak?
Lets not forget that one reason many voted for Trump was his rhetoric about improving the peace-threatening antagonism towards
Russia, especially in order to help resolve the situation in Syria. It's not like it was secret he was trying to hide. He only
moderated his views somewhat when the Democrat-engineered anti-Russian smear campaign took off and there was a concerted effort
to tie him to Russia.
Is it crime surround yourself with people that will help you fullfill your pledges?
Yep, when he talked about murdering journalists, I paused the video and told my girlfriend about the murder of Michael Hastings.
Oh an PS the USA puts journalists in Guantanamo. We play real baseball.
Aaron Mate is a brilliant interviewer. He keeps a calm demeanor, but does not let his guest get away with any untruths
or non sequiturs. This one of the many reasons I love The Real News. I encourage anyone who appreciates solid journalism to donate
to The Real News.
GREAT follow up questions Aaron... Harding did not expect to get a real reporter... he obfuscates and diverts to other
issues because he can not EVER provide any evidence... Going to Moscow will not tell you anything about whether or not the DNC
server was hacked.
Luke Harding is a complete and total idiot. He kept qualifying his arguments with "I've been to Moscow... I don't know
if you know this, but I've been to Moscow..." and even at one point, "Some of my friends have been murdered." LOL, sure, whatever
you say, Luke! Like you're so big time and such an all star journalist who isn't just trying to capitalize on the wild goose chase
that is psychologically trapping leftists into delusions and wishful thinking.
NSA monitors every communication over the internet. if the Russians hacked the DNC, there would be proof, and it would
not take years to uncover. Look at the numbers: Clinton spent 2 billion, Russian "agents" spent 200k to "influence" the election.
Great job Aaron for holding this opportunist's feet to the fire. Oh he's a story teller all right. You know a synonym of storyteller?
LIAR!!!!
Wow Aaron Matte NICE JOB. I'm only half through, I hope you don't make him cry. Do u make him cry? Did I hear this guy say
he's ultimately a storyteller? Lol.
It may seem like Trump has an alarming amount of associations with Russia, because he does.. that's how rich oligarchs work.
But it's all just SPECULATION still. Why publish a book on this without a smoking gun to prove anything? Collusion isn't even
a legal term, it's vague enough for people to make it mean whatever they want it to mean. People investigating and reporting on
this are operating under confirmation bias. Aaron, you're always appropriately critical and you're always asking the right questions.
You seem to be one of the few sane people left in media. Trump is a disgrace but there still is no smoking gun.
Omg a bunch of unproven conspiracy crap.. Hes making so many factual wrong statements I don't know where to start here..
How would anyone in the years before his candidacy have thought Trump would gain any political relevance. I mean even the pro
Hillary media thought until the end, their massive trump coverage would only help to get him NOT elected, but the opposite was
the case. This guy is a complete joke as are his theses. Actually reminding me of the guardian's so called report about Russian
Hacking in the Brexit referendum. Look here if you want to have a laugh
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/12/how-097-changed-the-fate-of-britain-not.html
Collusion Rejectionist! Ha Ha. Funniest interview ever. Well done Aaron. The Real News taking a stand for truth. So what's
in the book if there's no evidence? Guardian journalism? Stop questioning the official narrative, oh and have you heard of Estonia.
:)) ps that smiley face was not an admission of my working for the Kremlin.
Best interview ever. Aaron held him to his theories and asked what evidence or proof he had and he didn't come up with one
spec of evidence only hearsay and disputed theories. What a sad indictment this is on America. 1 year on a sensationalized story
and still nothing concrete. What a joke and proof of gullibility to anyone who believes this corporate media Narritive. I guess
at least they don't have to cover policies like the tax theft or net neutrality. This is why we need The Real news.
I'd rather have American business making business deals with Russia for things like hotels, rather than business deals with
the Pentagon to aim more weapons at the Russians. When haven't we been doing business with Russians? We might as well investigate
Cargill, Pepsi, McDonald's, John Deere, Ford, and most of our wheat farmers.
The U.S.' counterinsurgency war against the communist and Black self-determinationist
movements of the 20th century ensured that the period of U.S. imperial decline beginning in the
1970s would embolden the rich to eviscerate any and all gains made by workers in the decades
prior. Neoliberal austerity, privatization, and monopolization drowned the United States in a
sea of counterrevolutionary political ideology. "Call out culture" commodified movement culture
and channeled activists into profitable modes of expression that promoted individual
recognition, academic prestige, and careerism rather than the plight of the poor, especially
the Black poor.
... ... ...
"Corporate political operatives like Obama seek to 'diversify' a violent empire."
As I wrote for Black
Agenda Report in 2016, Obama's legacy is in large part shaped by a mastery of
counterinsurgency warfare. His recent slandering of millennial activists fits snugly within
this legacy. While appearing to castigate the very political environment that elevated him
beyond criticism for eight years, Obama was really taking aim at the increasingly left posture
of millennials. The "Bernie or bust" movement is worrisome to a ruling class that has utilized
the counterinsurgency skills of Barack Obama to engineer massive profits from endless war and
austerity. "Wokeness" and "purity" must be shot down by Obama because it threatens the
legitimacy of political class actors like him who expect to be praised for their intelligent
leadership over the great race to the bottom.
Barack Obama takes great pride in his impurity. Obama was elected in 2008 to bring "hope"
and "change" to the masses, only to escalate and add to every single ill of end-stage U.S.
imperialism. Under his administration, whistleblowers were prosecuted
under the Espionage Act in record numbers,
Black wealth plummeted, bankers ran away with trillions worth
in bailout rescue funds, and the military industrial complex expanded its special
operations to
engulf 70 percent of the world's nations in a regime of endless chaos. In many ways,
Obama's presidency was the biggest lie in the history of an empire built on grand lies of
democracy, liberty, and freedom. As he successfully posed as the "lesser evil," Obama was hard
at work instituting a permanent private healthcare system ( the Affordable Care Act ),
murdering thousands of people
by way of drone strike , and militarizing the African continent
through AFRICOM to ensure the instability required for Western corporations to plunder the
continent of its vast wealth.
"'Wokeness' and 'purity' must be shot down by Obama because it threatens the legitimacy
of political class actors like him."
While Obama succeeded in ramming through the ruling class' agenda, he also helped engineer
the political crisis which paved the way for the rise of Bernie Sanders. Millennials have
mobilized in the millions to elect a president that will bring them Medicare for All, a Green
New Deal, and living wages. They are no longer interested in politicians like Obama who claim
to be a "lesser evil" choice to the Republicans only to implement a more effective Wall Street
agenda that renders
ninety percent of all new jobs low-wage or temporary. The "purity" of the Sandernista's
principles is a sign to Obama and his class that Joe Biden, Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, and
Pete Buttigieg are unlikely to garner any support from Sanders' large millennial base. It
should come as no surprise, then, that Obama feels compelled to condemn the political leanings
of young people as an affront to his sordid legacy.
Obama benefitted from the proliferation of call out culture so much that he has no shame in
telling its most loyal adherents to "shut up and dribble" into the embrace of the Democratic
Party. Neither Obama nor the rest of the corporate Democratic Party has anything to offer
except the so-called civility and respectability that characterizes their approach to imperial
rule. Obama is aware of who he works for and what will keep him well-paid now that his
presidential career has ended. Like Hillary Clinton, Obama has quickly become a pundit for Wall
Street and its paid killers in the war machine. His most recent comments offer further evidence
of the desperate need for a mass exit from the Democratic Party. Of course, no mass exodus from
the Democratic Party is possible prior to a popular repudiation of Obama's legacy and all the
imperial arrogance and destruction that comes with it.
Danny Haiphong is an activist and journalist in the New York City area. He and Roberto
Sirvent are co-authors of the book entitled American Exceptionalism and American Innocence:
A People's History of Fake News--From the Revolutionary War to the War on Terror ( Skyhorse
Publishing). He can be reached at[email protected], on Twitter @spiritofho,
and on Youtube at The Left Lens with Danny Haiphong
White supremacy is an incredibly insincere distraction that tries to erase the histories of
White, Black, and Red peoples.
"Many White people seem to have forgotten what happened to them."
Some say the white supremacy ideology comes from pride. Some say it comes from a belief that
one's culture is superior. Some say it comes from hatred. I never believed these things are the
primary reason because I always sensed a deep loss in the heart of countless white people, some
deep emptiness and fear. Though, admitting to this emptiness is another matter.
James Baldwin wrote about American racism beyond the lines designed to separate us, saying
of white supremacy: "The root of the white man's hatred is terror. A bottomless and nameless
terror..."
It's said that anger is a secondary emotion. Hatred is anger. Racism is hatred. Hatred is
anger. Anger is a secondary emotion, beneath it lies something else.
After talking with many White American friends about the real origins of white supremacy, I
found there was always a certain limit beyond which they refused to go. This had nothing to do
with any hatred toward "the other" and everything to do with a chasm of pain they could not
bear to speak of -- not even for a few minutes could they speak of what has been seeping out of
the wound for so long. It is hard to speak of buried trauma. One wonders what might get stirred
up in that uncovering. Beyond wondering, there is healing, and the certainty that the truth
will set you free. We can be free in this life, you in your body, me in mine, together. To heal
the history we carry, let's allow the past and future to benefit from the courage of the
present.
There were Massacres, But No One Ever Says Their Names
The massacres in Europe lasted at least 500 years. Public tortures. Inquisitions. Generation
after generation of entire communities forced to watch their family, friends, and neighbors
terrorized and killed in front of them.
The ideology of white supremacy as we know it came at the end of this specific period of
history during which immense traumas occurred simultaneously: the mass killing and public
torture of women, the brutal assault against common people, the 'thought-police' Inquisition
committees, the terror from which one could almost not escape, and the enslavement of White
people throughout the region. This all happened in the centuries before the transatlantic slave
trade.
When you get to that part of the origin of white supremacy, and the deal that was
subsequently made with one's oppressor -- that deal being the ridiculous 'white supremacy' idea
and the target of the terror shifting to others -- the conversation often drops dead. Silence,
a few words here and there. Change the topic. Avoid that pain. This is the point beyond which
few have been willing to go.
The Details of the Time
Many have wondered how White people came up with the brutal tortures they imposed on Native
and African people in 'the Americas.' A look into history shows that many of the same tactics
were used on White people during the genocide against them.
The Inquistioners also targeted hair in Europe, especially towards women, which was used
against Native and African people in the Americas. The crimes they committed in this regard are
barely utterable.
The amount of whipping in Europe begs to be mentioned because of its relevance to American
history.
White people were intimately familiar with being enchained themselves, necks in iron,
shackled in rows together, taken on ships here and there, sold in markets -- for centuries.
They were also enslaved throughout the region during the same period as African people, likely
side by side, during the Arabic and Viking slave trades that preceded the transatlantic
one.
In Europe those days, the people who escaped slavery were certainly not free. They were
lynched, burned in public executions, tortured at length in public, and hunted down – by
the millions.
Many White people seem to have no memory of this history.
"Whites were enslaved during the Arabic and Viking slave trades that preceded the
transatlantic one."
The kind of torture documented in a book in 1860 by Pressel of a woman in Prossneck, Germany
is a small glimpse into the genocide. Anyone is advised to skip the following quoted list
describing the torture. It is reprinted simply to acknowledge what was going on and to whom, by
whom, and the lies upholding it, etc.
"Verbatim report of the first days of torture of a woman accused of witchcraft at
Prossneck, Germany, in 1629.
1. The hangman bound the hands, cut her hair, and placed her on the ladder. He threw alcohol
over her head and set fire to it so as to burn her hair to the roots.
2. He placed strips of sulphur under her arms and around her back and set fire to them.
3. He tied her hands behind her back and pulled her up to the ceiling.
4. He left her hanging there from three to four hours, while the torturer went to
breakfast.
5. On his return, he threw alcohol on her back and set fire to it.
6. He attached very heavy weights on her body and drew her up again to the ceiling. After
that he put her back on the ladder and placed a very rough plank full of sharp points against
her body.
7. Then he squeezed her thumbs and big toe in the vise, and he trussed her arms with a stick,
and in this position kept her hanging about a quarter of an hour, until she would faint away
several times.
8. Then he squeezed the calves and the legs in the vise, always alternating the torture with
questioning.
9. Then he whipped her with a rawhide whip to cause blood to flow out over her shift.
10. Once again, he placed her thumbs and big toes in the vise, and left her in this agony on
the torture stool from 10:00 a.m. till 1:00 p.m., while the hangman and the court officials
went out to get a bite to eat. In the afternoon a functionary came who disapproved this
pitiless procedure. But then they whipped her again in a frightful manner. This concluded the
first day of torture. The next day they start all over again, but without pushing things
quite as far as the day before.
-Wilhelm Pressel, Hexen and Hexenmeister (1860)"
Historian and scholar, Silvia Federici, says of the historical amnesia regarding this
period:
"That the victims, in Europe, were mostly peasant women may account for the historians'
past indifference towards this genocide, an indifference that has bordered on complicity,
since the elimination of the witches from the pages of history has contributed to
trivializing their physical elimination at the stake, suggesting that it was a phenomenon of
minor significance, if not a matter of folklore."
She also explores the emergence of Capitalism during the genocide against these women.
Supremacy Was Never The Question. It's Just a Mask
The lie that Black people are somehow inferior was a distraction that masked -- and nearly
erased -- the reality that 'white supremacy' ideology as we know it came at the end of this
brutal period in Europe. But it wasn't "about color" in Europe. There they were given a
different reason. In Europe they were killed for heresy, "any belief or theory that is strongly
at variance with established beliefs or customs." The Inquisition of that age has been
described as a court and the tormenters focused on getting 'confessions.' Their barbarity is
astounding.
The lie that Black people are somehow inferior was also another layer of the brutality that
grew as it moved on from Europe to Africa and the Americas. Psychological warfare, aimed at
distraction and destruction.
If it wasn't "about color" in Europe, then it was never about color at all. 'White
supremacy' is an incredibly insincere distraction that tries to erase the histories of White,
Black, and Red peoples. As a result, many White people seem to have forgotten what happened to
them, while many African and Native people have had to fight within their hearts regarding
their own inherent value. Who benefits from this?
Who was it that concocted this very strange 'white supremacist' idea: the White people who
had been brutalized for so long, or the powers-that-be(making the terror)? Who was it calling
People of Color savages, too natural, strangely spiritual and they should all be studying
Christianity? Who wrote that script to be repeated? It's obvious who wrote it. And it's obvious
who accepted this new ideology under duress.
Some White people tout white supremacy, and the clear truth is – they are more than
encouraged to. But to speak of these massacres and the deal one subsequently made with one's
oppressor? Well, there's a deep-seated fear there, few people will speak of it. That's not
healing. That's an imposed silence.
Who imposed that silence? When did it start?
What Kind of Deal, What Kind of Battle?
If the people living in the ghettos and reservations of America, who have been so long
mistreated, were today offered a deal that some "less than" people had just arrived and would
be put on the lowest rung, and they were offered a deal – free land and houses, a bunch
of free money, honey flattery, a much easier life, a few steps up the rung, a permanent raise,
and silence as to any mistreatment of these new "less thans" – who among the people would
take that deal? And who would not?
This, to me, is pointing to the heart of the battle. It's not skin tone, it's the battle of
the heart.
Race Conversations
James Baldwin spoke passionately about race in America, searing images unto a nation trying
to plaster itself in tv imagery that avoided the questions almost altogether. Baldwin never
tried currying favors from the class oppressing the people. He spoke searing words to the heart
of corrupted authority out of the desire for profound change.
Profound change. Not – you stay in your corner and gripe, and I'll stay in my corner
and gripe, and we'll yell at each other from our abysses when our own people ain't even doing
that well, and Those are not positive racial relations. They are not positive human
relations.
There are so many different people acting within a People. Those who hate, those who blame,
those ashamed, those who raise children to be healthy adults, those striving trying to find a
way, those who hold fast to the medicine they are here to protect. There are many people acting
within a People.
We are not really so different as we seem, our different cultures like different clothing on
the body of our lives. Do you judge me for mine? Right or wrong, good or evil, from a glance
even? We are not really so different, but America draws lines so dense between our communities
that we often conjecture about each other from afar. Why do we accept these terms of
engagement?
In many pockets of America, race conversations have moved into a state of mutual enrichment,
merging worlds even if only for a moment. The possibilities are endless for what could happen
in the healing of race in America.
No Disrespect
This is not written as any kind of acceptance of the idea of white supremacy, which is
blatantly ridiculous and untrue. It is not written as any excuse about the violence and
degradation that flows from this philosophy. It is written to look more closely at the
ideology's true origins and authors.
We now understand how trauma affects communities, and how it can manifest in future
generations if it isn't addressed. How do we work together to heal the pain we've all been
forced to endure by these powers-that-be-making(the terror)? How do we heal when some of us
turned into perpetrators in our own communities and beyond? How do we change our circumstances
when a brutal system tries to erase all our histories and replaces them with lies?
The cycles of pain unleashed on each other within our communities and between them "is
enough to make prophets and angels weep," as Baldwin said. Where does the pain end and the
beauty begin?
We can heal through changing and challenging ourselves one by one and then giving to each
other. We can heal through respect. We can heal through understanding each other's worth and
striving to lessen each other's pain. We can battle to unify beyond all arbitrary borders and
change the reality of this nation ourselves. We can heal through becoming clear about the
future we want with each other and letting nothing dissuade us from attaining it, no matter
what happens on the journey to get there.
Who will write the future story of race on this planet? Who will educate us about who we are
and our potential? The-powers-that-be(making the terror)? Or will we ourselves write a
different story?
Chelli Stanley is an independent journalist, environmentalist, Buddhist, common
person, of African, Japanese, and European descent born in Mexico. Has traveled widely, doesn't
watch tv, wants freedom. Can be contacted at [email protected]
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Looks like both Yovanovich and Hill are connected to Soros and did his bidding instead of pursuing Trump policies as for
Ukraine. Yovanovich was clearly dismiied due to her role in channeling damaging to Trump information during 2016 elections,
the fact that she denies (as she denied the exostance of "do not procecute list"). And nothing can be taken serious from a
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Notable quotes:
"... Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security Council (NSC) said other NSC staff had been "hounded out" by threats against them, including antisemitic smears linking them to the liberal financier and philanthropist, George Soros, a hate figure on the far right. ..."
"... This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories that I believe firmly to be baseless, an idea of an association between her and George Soros." ..."
"... "My entire first year of my tenure at the National Security Council was filled with hateful calls, conspiracy theories, which has started again, frankly, as it's been announced that I've been giving this deposition, accusing me of being a Soros mole in the White House, of colluding with all kinds of enemies of the president, and of various improprieties." ..."
"... "When I saw this happening to Ambassador Yovanovitch, I was furious," she said, pointing to "this whipping up of what is frankly an antisemitic conspiracy theory about George Soros to basically target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well." ..."
"... Hill dismissed the suggestion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election was a "conspiracy theory" intended to distract attention from Russia's well-documented role. ..."
Fiona Hill, who was the senior director for Europe and Russia in the National Security
Council (NSC) said other NSC staff had been "hounded out" by threats against them, including
antisemitic smears linking them to the liberal financier and philanthropist, George Soros, a
hate figure on the far right.
In her testimony to Congress, Hill described a climate of fear among administration
staff.
The UK-born academic and biographer of Vladimir Putin said that the former ambassador to
Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was the target of a hate campaign, with the aim of driving her from
her post in Kyiv, where she was seen as an obstacle to some corrupt business interests.
Yovanovitch was recalled from Ukraine in May on Trump's orders. In a 25 July conversation
with the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, Trump described Yovanovitch as "bad news"
and predicted she was "going to go through some things". The former ambassador has testified
she felt threatened by the remarks.
Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, led calls for Yovanovitch's dismissal, as did two of Giuliani
business associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman. All three are under scrutiny in hearings being
held by House committees looking at Trump's use of his office to put pressure on the Ukrainian
government to investigate his political opponents.
"There was no basis for her removal," Hill testified. "The accusations against her had no
merit whatsoever. This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories that I believe firmly to be
baseless, an idea of an association between her and George Soros."
"I had had accusations similar to this being made against me as well," Hill testified. "My
entire first year of my tenure at the National Security Council was filled with hateful calls,
conspiracy theories, which has started again, frankly, as it's been announced that I've been
giving this deposition, accusing me of being a Soros mole in the White House, of colluding with
all kinds of enemies of the president, and of various improprieties."
She added that the former national security adviser, HR McMaster "and many other members of
staff were targeted as well, and many people were hounded out of the National Security Council
because they became frightened about their own security."
"I received, I just have to tell you, death threats, calls at my home. My neighbours
reported somebody coming and hammering on my door," Hill said, adding that she had also been
targeted by obscene phone calls. "Now, I'm not easily intimidated, but that made me mad."
"When I saw this happening to Ambassador Yovanovitch, I was furious," she said, pointing to
"this whipping up of what is frankly an antisemitic conspiracy theory about George Soros to
basically target nonpartisan career officials, and also some political appointees as well."
In Yovanovitch's case, Hill said: "the most obvious explanation [for the smear campaign]
seemed to be business dealings of individuals who wanted to improve their investment positions
inside of Ukraine
itself, and also to deflect away from the findings of not just the Mueller report on Russian
interference but what's also been confirmed by your own Senate report, and what I know myself
to be true as a former intelligence analyst and somebody who has been working on Russia for
more than 30 years."
Hill dismissed the suggestion that Ukraine meddled in the 2016 election was a "conspiracy
theory" intended to distract attention from Russia's well-documented role.
That's the same bottomfeeder and tax fraud Browder, who most probably killed Magnitsky. and who abruptly changed his
citizenship from the USA to British after his adventures in Russia. What a Chutzpah on the part of a person involved in
fleecing Russia after dissolution of the USSR, the activity supported by MI6 and CIA.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
If, for example, Russia decides to cur Kiev from Southern regions and split the country into two, the USA can do nothing to
help Ukraine. If the USA are engaged in the conflict in Ukraine they will need to fight the Russian army with conventional weapons
in their own backyard and on conditions that Russian impose including the risk of escalation into a nuclear war. They are
not prepared for such a development.
Notable quotes:
"... The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies were willing to engage in. ..."
"... After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S. leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals. ..."
In the Department of Defense authored summary of the National Defense Strategy of the United
States for 2018, Secretary James Mattis quite succinctly sets out the challenges and goals of
the U.S. military in the immediate future. Importantly, he acknowledges that the U.S. had
become far too focused on counter-insurgency over the past two decades, but he seems to miss
the causation of this mission in the first place. U.S. foreign policy, and its reliance on
military intervention to solve all perceived problems, regime change and imperialist
adventurism, resulted in the need to occupy nations, or destroy them. This leads to the growth
of insurgencies, and the strengthening of long simmering religious radicalism and anti-western
sentiment in the Middle East and Central Asia. The U.S. military willfully threw itself
headlong into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The United States engaged in unnecessary wars, and when these wars were easily won on the
immediate battlefield, the unplanned for occupations lead to guerilla insurgencies that were
not so easy for a conventional military to confront. The U.S. Army was not prepared for
guerilla warfare in urban areas, nor for the brutal and immoral tactics that their new enemies
were willing to engage in.
They obviously had not reflected upon the Soviet experience in
Afghanistan, nor the nature of their new enemies. As casualties mounted due to roadside IEDs,
snipers, and suicide bombers hidden amongst civilians, the U.S. military and the defense
industry were forced to find ways to protect soldiers and make vehicle less vulnerable to these
types of attacks. This resulted in vehicles of every description being armored and new IED
resistant vehicles being designed and fielded in large numbers. This in turn, equated to a vast
amount of time, effort and money. It also focused both the U.S. military services and the
defense industry away from fighting conventional wars against peer adversaries.
After a decade of fighting an insurgency in Afghanistan and almost as long in Iraq, the U.S.
leadership decided to destroy the sovereign nation of Libya, and foment a war in Syria
immediately afterward. There is no doubt with the knowledge of historic events today, that the
CIA and State Department facilitated a foreign invasion of Syria of Islamist radicals.
They
funded and armed these groups, provided clandestine training, and facilitated the logistical
movement of fighters and weapons into a sovereign nation to cause its disintegration. In these
two examples they decided not to occupy these countries, but to destroy all semblance of
ordered society and replace it with brutally violent chaos. The U.S. political and military
leadership seems to have learned that their past adventurism resulted in costly occupations,
yet instead of refraining from using the military option as a tool to alter geopolitical
realities they did not like, they merely opted to abandon the responsibility of occupation and
reconstruction all together.
... ... ...
Atrophy and Exhaustion
The U.S. military has been engaged in counterinsurgency warfare in Afghanistan for over
seventeen years. The disastrous invasion of Iraq, the destruction of Libya, and
counterinsurgency operations in a host of nations including, but not limited to Yemen, Somalia,
Niger and Nigeria, have all taken a toll on the U.S. military. Not only has a great deal of
military hardware been destroyed, but a great deal of equipment has been worn out and
essentially must be retired from service. More importantly, the constant deployments have
undermined the personnel needs of all services, with thousands of men having been killed or
physically and psychologically maimed for life. Tens of thousands of the most skilled
commissioned and non-commissioned officers have left the services, many of them having served
multiple combat deployments.
The fact that 62% of U.S. Navy's F-18s are not mission capable is not an anomaly. In 2017,
approximately 72% of all U.S. Air Force aircraft were not flight worthy. Many of the airframes
are quite old, yet well within their engineered service life, but most are in need of
maintenance. Both the Navy and Air Force claim that there is not enough money in their
respective budgets to procure the needed spare parts to keep these aircraft flying. One would
wonder that if this is the case, why tens of billions of dollars are being poured into new
aircraft when existing fleets are being left in disrepair. The decisions being made in the
upper echelon of the DOD are quite perplexing for the thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen
struggling to keep weapons and vehicles ready for action.
The U.S. Army finds itself looking for buyers of surplus MRAPs, vehicles of little utility
in a major conventional war with a peer adversary, while at the same time lacking spare parts
and munitions for armored vehicles and artillery systems. While the Army has made some progress
in procuring the first of the 49,099 JLTVs it wants, it is far behind in all other armored
vehicle procurement and development programs. BAE has delivered the first batch of 29 AMPVs to
the U.S. Army for extensive testing before the decision can be made to start low rate initial
production (LRIP). Once the LRIP begins, it is estimated that BAE will be able to produce
approximately 262 units annually, unless the company's main manufacturing facility in
Pennsylvania is expanded. The initial contract is worth $1.6 billion USD. The Army wants at
least 3,000 AMPVs of six different main variants to replace the thousands of M113 armored
vehicles still in service. The M113 first saw service in 1962 and a replacement for the
venerable vehicle has been required for decades.
Defense Secretary James Mattis made it crystal clear in his National Defense Strategy that
the U.S. must rebuild its conventional warfare capabilities. The U.S. Army's proposed 2019
budget lays bare the new priorities of a service facing a major transition in priorities.
Procurement of tracked combat vehicles, as well as artillery rounds, rockets and missiles
account for much of this latest budget request. Procurement is up by 18.4% over the previous
year, with procurement of weapons and tracked vehicles up 84% over the previous year. Although
upgrading of the M109 Paladin self-propelled howitzer to the M109A7 level is down by 56%
compared to 2018, procurement of 155mm artillery rounds is up a whopping 800%.
The percentage of total procurement directed toward weapons and tracked combat vehicles in
the 2019 proposed budget denotes that the U.S. Army recognizes its weakness in conventional
warfighting capability.
This chart clearly shows the desire on the part of the U.S. Army to upgrade and rearm
conventional capabilities. 155mm artillery rounds and Army Tactical Missile System upgrades to
the M207 MLRS are at the top of the list, followed by MBT upgrades and acquisition of new AMPV
vehicles.
As the U.S. Army attempts to rebuild its aged and depleted armored brigade combat teams and
conventional and rocket artillery, the U.S. Navy and Air Force are facing their own challenges.
The Navy finds itself in a position that is far from enviable, but was very easy to predict.
Having dumped $38 billion USD into two failed new classes of warships and a further $13 billion
into a new aircraft carrier that will likely not become operational until 2022, the service is
currently in the process of realigning its priorities. The service is struggling to procure the
new Virginia Class SSN and Columbia Class SSBNs that are required to ensure the
viability of the nation's nuclear deterrent triad well into the foreseeable future. These
defensive weapons programs, which are integral to U.S. national security, could have benefitted
greatly from the $50 billion wasted on the LCS, DDG-1000 and Gerald R. Ford programs.
Russia and China have spent the same time wasted by the U.S. Navy on updating and modernizing
their own submarine forces, chiefly their ballistic missile submarines.
Institutional
Corruption
If one had to identify the main reason behind the utter failure of the U.S. political
establishment and military leadership, both civilian and in uniform, to identify and prioritize
weapons programs and procurement that was truly in line with the national defense needs of the
country, it would be the institutional corruption of the U.S. military industrial complex. This
is not a fault of one party, but is the inevitable outcome of a thoroughly corrupted system
that both generates and wastes great wealth at the expense of the many for the benefit of the
few.
Massive defense budgets do not lead to powerful military forces nor sound national defense
strategy. The United States is the most glaring example of how a nation's treasure can be
wasted, its citizens robbed for generations, and its political processes undermined by an
industry bent on maximizing profitability by encouraging and exacerbating conflict. At this
point it is questionable that the United States' could remain economically viable without war,
so much of its GDP is connected in some way to the pursuit of conflict.
There is no doubt that the War Department was renamed the Department of Defense in an
Orwellian sleight of hand in 1947, just a few years after end of World War II. The military
industrial complex grew into a monolith during the war, and the only way to justify the
expansion of the complex, was by finding a new enemy to justify the new reality of a massive
standing military, something that the U.S. Constitution expressly forbids. This unlawful state
of affairs has persisted and expanded into a rotten, bloated edifice of waste. Wasted effort,
wasted wealth and the wasted lives of millions of people spanning every corner of the planet.
Tens of thousands of brave men and women in uniform, and millions of civilians of so many
nations, have been tossed into the blades of this immoral meat grinder for generations.
President Donald Trump was very proud to announce the largest U.S. military budget in the
nation's history last year. The United States spent (or more accurately, borrowed from
generations yet to come) no less than $874.4 billion USD. The declared base budget for 2017 was
$523.2 billion USD, yet there are also the Overseas Contingency Operations and Support budgets
that have to be considered in determining the total cost. The total DOD annual costs have
doubled from 2003 to the present. Yet, what has the DOD really accomplished with so much money
and effort? Very little of benefit to the U.S. tax payer for sure, and paradoxically the
exorbitant waste of the past fifteen years have left every branch of the U.S. military
weaker.
The U.S. Congress has the duty and responsibility of reigning in the military adventurism of
the executive branch. They have the sole authority to declare war, but more importantly, the
sole authority to approve the budget requests of the military. It is laughable to think that
the U.S. Congress will do anything to reign in military spending. The Congress and the Senate
are as equally guilty as the Executive in promoting and benefitting from the military
industrial complex. Envisioned as a bulwark against executive power, the U.S. Congress has
become an integral component of that complex. No Senator or Representative would dare to go
against the industry that employs so many constituents within their state, or pass up on the
benefits afforded them through the legalized insider-trading exclusive to them, or the
lucrative jobs that await them in the defense industry and the many think tanks that promote
continued prosecution of war.
Possible Reforms
It would be quite simple for the U.S. Department of Defense to rectify the current endemic
problems that have rendered it weaker and less prepared for a major conventional conflict with
a peer adversary. The greater challenge is transforming the relationship between the federal
and state governments back to the constitutionally intended one, and to dissolve the powers of
the now allied executive, legislative and judicial branches of the federal government. This
would undermine the ability of the military industrial complex to coerce the nation into
working against the interests of the states and the citizenry. The military industrial complex
and the Deep State that serves it can only exist when power is greatly concentrated in a
federal system.
... ... ...
Conclusion
The United States stands at a crossroads in many respects, and the nation's military equally
so. All empires experience a period of over-expansion, military, economic and political
over-reach and imbalance. The United States has followed in the wake of the many imperialist
endeavors before it, with apparently little lessons having been learned. Imperialism is the
inevitable result of power devoid of wisdom and humility. A nation borne out of a revolution
against empire and absolutism has itself devolved into a much more dangerous and immoral avatar
of its former oppressor. This must change.
While Defense Secretary Mattis clearly acknowledged the need to transform the U.S. military
and realign it in a direction more focused on fighting and winning a conventional conflict with
the near peer adversaries he identified as Russia and China, one can only hope that he realizes
how the U.S. military that he served in for decades, got to the deplorable state that it now
finds itself in. The greatest enemy that the U.S. military has fought for the past seventy
years is undoubtedly the military industrial complex that it is an integral component of. The
Soviet Union, North Korea, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, and
Syria were never as much of a threat to the U.S. Armed Services as the corrupt military
industrial complex and the Deep State that serves as its guardian.
The United States military is in the weakest state of material strength and readiness since
the conclusion of the Cold War. The conventional ground forces of the Army have been
transformed into a force bent on occupation and counterinsurgency. Its heavy armored formations
are in a state of disrepair and material inferiority vis-a-vis its most capable theoretical
adversaries. The cornerstone of American power projection and intimidation, the aircraft
carrier strike groups, are a sad shadow of their former self. The carrier air wing, the entire
reason that an aircraft carrier exists in the first place, has devolved into a tool of
increasingly limited utility, with an ever diminishing reach.
The corrupt military industrial system that permeates every facet of American economic,
political and even cultural life has sucked the very lifeblood from the nation, eroded its
morality, bankrupt its economic future, and stolen a generation of its most patriotic and
selfless sons and daughters. While James Mattis acknowledges the challenges facing the national
security of the United States, he clearly misattributes the blame and misidentifies the very
real adversary. Russia and China are not existential threats to the continued welfare of the
American state. James Mattis need only look in the mirror to see the real threat, for he has
come to represent the cabal of special interests that enslaves the nation and constitution he
has pledged to serve, and holds the remainder of the world equally hostage.
There is very little chance that the reforms mentioned in this analysis will be adopted, or
that the United States will move in a direction that brings it back to its inception as a
constitutional republic. The interests of the military industrial complex in promoting
conflict, and maximizing financial profit will continue to steer the United States military,
and the nation as a whole, on an unsustainable and self-destructive path. There is little doubt
that if the Deep State pushes the nation to war against Russia or China, and likely an alliance
of the two, that the United States military has ever been in a weaker position. Such a conflict
would be of no benefit to any of the nations concerned, yet many potential flash points exist
that could lead to a conflict, including the South China Sea, Syria or Ukraine. As the United
States plays catch-up after decades of military adventurism, China and Russia have spent that
same time patiently and judiciously gathering their strength. The scenario of a one-sided
victory in favor of the United States is pure fantasy, existing only in the daydreams of the
emperor who wears no clothes.
Can we view MIC as analog of cancer cells what want to multiply no matter what?
Notable quotes:
"... So what exactly is the U.S. grand strategy with regard to Russia? ..."
"... Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, ..."
"... . To find out more about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com. ..."
"... Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO's quick march to Russia's ancient frontiers, is alive and well. ..."
"... "Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy?" ..."
Kiev has several patrol boats in the Sea of Azov, with a few more to be
transferred there in coming months. Russia's navy could sink those boats and wipe out that base
in minutes.
Are we going to send our Navy across the Black Sea to protect Ukraine's naval rights inside
a sea that has been as historically Russian as the Chesapeake Bay is historically American?
Poland this week invited the U.S. to establish a major base on its soil, for which the Poles
will pay $2 billion, to be called "Fort Trump."
Trump seemed to like the idea, and the name.
Yet the Bush II decision to install a missile defense system in Poland brought a Kremlin
counter-move: the installation of nuclear-capable Iskander cruise missiles in Kaliningrad, the
former German territory on Poland's northern border annexed by Stalin at the end of World War
II.
In the Balkans, over Russian protests, the U.S. is moving to bring Macedonia into NATO. But
before Macedonia can join, half of its voters have to come out on September 30 to approve a
change in the nation's name to North Macedonia. This is to mollify Greece, which claims the
birthplace of Alexander the Great as it own. Where are we going with all this?
With U.S. warships making regular visits into the Eastern Baltic and Black Sea, the
possibility of a new base in Poland, and growing lethal aid to Ukraine to fight pro-Russian
rebels in the Donbass and the Russian navy on the Sea of Azov, are we not crowding the Russians
a bit?
And are we confident the Russians will always back down?
When Georgia, believing it could kick Russian peacekeepers out and re-annex its seceded
province of South Ossetia, attacked in August 2008, the Russian army came crashing in and ran
the Georgians out in 48 hours.
George W. Bush wisely decided not to issue an ultimatum or send troops. He ignored the hawks
in his own party who had helped goad him into the great debacle of his presidency: Iraq.
So what exactly is the U.S. grand strategy with regard to Russia?
What might be called the McCain wing of the Republican Party has sought to bring Ukraine and
Georgia into NATO, which would make the containment of Russia America's policy in
perpetuity.
Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy? What are the
prospects of Russia yielding always to U.S. demands? And are we not today stretched awfully
thin?
Our share of the global economy is much shrunk from Reagan's time. Our deficit is
approaching $1 trillion. Our debt is surging toward 100 percent of GDP. Entitlements are
consuming our national wealth.
We are committed to containing the two other greatest powers, Russia and China. We are tied
down militarily in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen, with the War Party beating the drums
for another larger war with Iran. And we are sanctioning adversaries and allies for not
following our leadership of the West and the world.
In looking at America's global commitments, greatly expanded since our Cold War victory, one
word comes to mind: unsustainable.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, Nixon's White House Wars: The
Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever . To find out more
about Patrick Buchanan and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the
Creators website at www.creators.com.
Largely right. However "entitlements" are not consuming wealth. Crony capitalism and unbridled
militarism are. 800 billion per year of military spending , which is unaccountable, unaudited
and is in addition to black budgets is a major problem. In addition, it seems crimes by the
financial sector -- even when local governments are defrauded, are never punished in a way that
acts as a deters future crimes. Nobody ever goes to jail.
Tackling these internal enemies instead of trying to cook up new enemies and crises would
definitely help.
Have to remind Pat that South Ossetia was a very rebellious part of an independent Georgia only
from 1918-1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Ossetia#South_Ossetia_as_a_part_of_the_Soviet_Union
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 a CIS peacekeeping force had conrrol over South
Ossetia till August 2008.
April 2008 US promised Georgia NATO membership. Georgia was part of the willing coalition in
Iraq and US armed and trained Georgia attacked South Ossetia in August 2008 shortly after
Rice's visit in July 2008.
So the whole claim of Georgia to South Ossetia is bogus anyway.
One problem with America's fealty to Israel is that it prioritizes countering Russia over
China. Left to her own devices, America would probably try to play one country off the other to
prevent them from joining forces. However, Russia is far more active than China in the Middle
East and is therefore of much greater concern to the Israelis. Once again, the "No Daylight"
policy with Israel costs the US dearly.
Odd statement. Entitlements can't consume anything. Though they do change what is consumed.
By transferring wealth from one person to another, different choices about consumption will be
made. Like more healthcare and less video games.
Military spending on the other hand is a pure consumption of wealth. Tanks and bombs add
zero value to our wealth and put vital raw materials to use to no good effect.
"Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a policy?"
Yes. Which is why Trump was voted in as President.
Perhaps the hesitancy of Putin's response to provocations is that it is almost impossible to
gauge what a counter response might be. If Trump is in control, he is known to be
unpredictable. It seems that Trump is not, however, in control. If true, then a counter
response is even more unpredictable and it is not even clear exactly who to deal with, let
alone what their motives might be.
We won the first Cold War but failed to completely disarm Russia and turn them into West
Germany. We became infuriated that they did not become remain completely submissive to us and
started a second Cold War using the full arsenal of the first Cold War tactics. This includes
information war demonization, isolation, to be followed by an arms race. We will either succeed
this time or die trying, either figuratively or literally. God's not on our side this time.
Bolshevism may be dead, but Russian nationalism, awakened by NATO's quick march to Russia's
ancient frontiers, is alive and well.
Because the Cold War was never about "Bolshevism" in the first place, d'uh! As for the
"Russian nationalism" – what's wrong with that? Why only the US can be nationalist
("unique", "indispensible", "shining beacon of Freedom", etc.), while other countries are
shamed for that? If you don't have the nationalism, then you have it's opposite –
"internationalism". What kind of internationalism can the US offer to other countries besides
becoming American patriots within their respective countries?
"Are the American people aware of the costs and risks inherent in such a
policy?"
That presumes that the American people are in charge of anything when it comes to the
governance. Rather naive notion all things considered.
"... In contrast, the transatlantic alliance should advance American and European security. Absorbing former members of the Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union, thereby pushing the alliance up to the Russian Federation's border, proved to be a foolish move because it violated assurances made to Russian leaders. Despite being former KGB, Vladimir Putin never appeared to be ideologically antagonistic toward America. However, when he perceived Washington's behavior as threatening -- including dismembering Serbia, backing revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, and promising to include both nations in NATO -- it encouraged him to respond violently. ..."
"... Admitting new members is never costless. Aid will be necessary to improve their militaries. Moreover, newer members sometimes become the most demanding, like the Baltics and Poland, which insist that they are entitled to American bases and garrisons. ..."
"... Continuing expansion also reinforces the message that NATO is hostile toward Russia. That's the only country allies are joining to oppose, after all. Obviously, there are plenty of other reasons Moscow should distrust the United States, but reinforcing negative perceptions for no benefit at all is bad policy. ..."
America Doesn't Need Another Weakling NATO Ally Macedonia is the latest nation invited into the alliance, but how does
that enhance America's (or Europe's) security?•
July 19,
2018
Utenriksdept /
cc At last week's NATO summit, President Donald
Trump denounced the allies for taking advantage of American taxpayers. Then he approved their latest subsidies. He even agreed to
invite a military weakling, Macedonia, to join NATO, which will add yet another nation to our military dole.
When George Washington warned Americans against forming a "passionate attachment" to other countries, he might have been thinking
of the Balkans. Indeed, a couple decades later, John Quincy Adams criticized proposals to aid Greece against the Ottoman Empire,
which then ruled that region. America "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy," he intoned.
On into the 20th century, the Balkans were in turmoil. Germany's "Iron Chancellor," Otto von Bismarck, warned that "the great
European War would come out of some damned foolish thing in the Balkans." That's exactly what happened in 1914.
It took decades and two world wars for the Balkans to stabilize. But after the Cold War ended, Yugoslavia, which had emerged from
Europe's previous convulsions, broke apart. One of the smaller pieces was Macedonia.
The battles among the Serbians, Croatians, and Bosnians were bloody and brutal. In contrast, Macedonia provided comic relief.
The small, mountainous, landlocked nation of two million people won its independence without a fight in 1991, though Athens launched
a verbal and economic war against Skopje over the latter's use of the name "Macedonia."
Perhaps modern Greeks feared that a resurrected Alexander the Great would lead the newly freed Macedonian hordes south and conquer
Greece. Skopje entered the United Nations under the provisional name Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, or FYROM. In June, after
only 27 years, the two governments agreed that Macedonia/FYROM would be called the Republic of North Macedonia -- though the decision
must still be ratified by the Macedonian people in a referendum.
More serious was the insurgency launched by ethnic Albanians who made up about a quarter of the nation's population. The battle
two decades ago over Kosovo inflamed ethnic relations in Macedonia, eventually resulting in a short-lived insurgency. Although the
fighters disarmed, Skopje's politics remained nationalist and difficult. Last year, a more liberal administration took over, but
the country's democratic institutions remain fragile.
Indeed, Freedom House only rates the nation "partly free." The group cites voter intimidation, political patronage networks, violent
protests, and problems with judicial impartiality and due process. Particularly serious were the threats against press freedom, which
led to a rating of "not free" in that area. While NATO's newer members tend to score lower than "Old Europe," as Donald Rumsfeld
once referred to the original allies, Macedonia is a step further down. Only Turkey, an incipient dictatorship, is worse: it almost
certainly would not be considered for membership today.
None of this mattered last week, however. After suffering Trump's many slings and arrows, alliance members approved an invitation
for Skopje to join NATO. Macedonian lawmaker Artan Grubi called it "our dream coming true. We have been in the waiting hall for too
long."
That's because Macedonia had hoped for an invite back in 2008 at the Bucharest summit, but was blocked by Athens over the name
dispute, and has wanted to join ever since. Macedonia's Defense Minister Radmila Sekerinska said, "With NATO membership, Macedonia
becomes part of the most powerful alliance. That enhances both our security and economic prosperity." Money and status are expected
to follow.
But how would this benefit the United States and other NATO members? James Ker-Lindsay at the London School of Economics made
the astonishing claim that "opening the way for the country to join NATO would be a big win for the organization at a crucial time
when concerns over Russian influence in the Western Balkans are growing in many capitals." As Skopje goes, so goes Europe? Not likely.
If Washington and Moscow are engaged in a new "great game," it is not a battle for Macedonia.
In fact, Macedonia is a security irrelevancy, destined to require American aid to create the pretense that its military is fit
for the transatlantic alliance. Skopje spent just $112 million on its armed forces last year, ahead of only one NATO member, Montenegro.
That was barely 1 percent of its GDP, putting Macedonia near the back of the NATO pack.
With an 8,000-man military, one is tempted to ask, why bother? But then one could similarly pose that query to several other NATO
members. Skopje's military is roughly the same size as Albania's, slightly bigger than Slovenia's, and about four times the size
of Montenegro's. None will be of much use in a conflict with the only conceivable threat, Russia.
So why bring Macedonia into NATO?
Some American policymakers see alliance membership as a means to socialize nations like Macedonia, helping them move towards democracy.
However, the European Union, which sets standards governing a range of domestic policies, has always been better suited to this task,
and EU membership imposes no security obligations on Washington. With the name controversy tentatively resolved, Skopje could begin
the EU accession process -- if the Europeans are willing. That is properly their -- not Washington's -- responsibility.
In contrast, the transatlantic alliance should advance American and European security. Absorbing former members of the Warsaw
Pact and Soviet Union, thereby pushing the alliance up to the Russian Federation's border, proved to be a foolish move because it
violated assurances made to Russian leaders. Despite being former KGB, Vladimir Putin never appeared to be ideologically antagonistic
toward America. However, when he perceived Washington's behavior as threatening -- including dismembering Serbia, backing revolutions
in Georgia and Ukraine, and promising to include both nations in NATO -- it encouraged him to respond violently.
The Balkans are peripheral even to Europe and matter little to America's defense. The states and peoples there tend to be more
disruptive and less democratic than their neighbors, reflecting the region's unstable history. (North) Macedonia's 8,000 troops aren't
likely to be reborn as the Spartan 300 and hold off invading Russians. So why should America threaten war on Skopje's behalf?
Admitting new members is never costless. Aid will be necessary to improve their militaries. Moreover, newer members sometimes
become the most demanding, like the Baltics and Poland, which insist that they are entitled to American bases and garrisons.
Expansion also complicates alliance decision-making. No doubt, Washington wishes its European allies would do what they're told:
spend more, shut up, and deploy where America wants them. That doesn't work out very well in practice, alas, as Trump has discovered
in Europe (though nations with smaller militaries are more likely to acquiesce than nations with bigger ones). An organization of
30 members, which NATO will become if Macedonia is added, is a more complex and less agile creature than one of 16, the number that
existed before NATO raced east.
Continuing expansion also reinforces the message that NATO is hostile toward Russia. That's the only country allies are joining
to oppose, after all. Obviously, there are plenty of other reasons Moscow should distrust the United States, but reinforcing negative
perceptions for no benefit at all is bad policy.
Finally, expanding the alliance is nonsensical in light of the president's criticisms of the Europeans. Hiking U.S. military spending,
increasing manpower and materiel deployments in Europe, and adding new members all contradict his demand that the allies do more
and signal that the president is not serious in his demands. That leaves the Europeans with little incentive to act, especially since
most of their peoples perceive few if any security threats.
Yet again President Trump has been exposed as a thoughtless blowhard. His rabid supporters have likely enjoyed his confrontational
rhetoric, but he has done nothing to turn it into policy. The Europeans need only wait for his attacks to ebb and then they can proceed
much the same as before. The status quo will continue to reign, impervious to change.
Montenegro always resembled the Duchy of Grand Fenwick from the delightful novel The Mouse that Roared . Macedonia is
the Duchy of North Grand Fenwick, a slightly larger neighboring state with similar features but additional problems. Neither is remotely
relevant to American security. America doesn't need yet another security black hole as an alliance partner.
But, according to the CNN (the original source), Germany will still not disbuse anywhere
near the 2-3% minimum required for each member.
At this point, many people here must've been asking: why doesn't the other NATO members
rise their contributions, since, as capitalist nations, it could provide them a consumerist
black hole (infinite demand) a la Keynes? After all, what works for the USA should work for
them, right?
I hardly ever hear any discussion or outrage about nukes and nuclear war on the site/boards
that I see or visit from time to time, and yet it seems to me to be by far the most pressing
existential threat to all humankind, as well as to the planet
I went searching again for one or two of the scientific studies that I'd seen within the
past few years about global effects of a 'small' nuclear war, and came across a new study.
Surprisingly enough, there have been but a handful of studies in the past 30-40 years!! Yes,
it's true. The appetites of sharks and shark attacks on humans are more studied than nuclear
war and the Fate of the Earth.
In this recent case, a mere 100 nukes exchanged between India and Pakistan would bring
devastation
here's a few for everyone's info. And a new one which I just became aware of, from Fox of
all places:
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would place the entire planet in jeopardy by
unleashing a "climate catastrophe," according to new research published in Science Advances,
a journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science...
"A nuclear war between India and Pakistan -- which share a long history of conflicts --
would not only result in 50 to 125 million direct fatalities but could jeopardize the entire
planet, causing sharp drops in global temperatures and precipitation that could devastate the
world's food supply," writes AAAS...
..."They find that if Pakistan attacks urban targets in 2025 with 150-kiloton nuclear
weapons and if India responds with 100-kiloton nuclear weapons, smoke from burning cities
would release 16 to 36 teragrams of black carbon into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight
and cooling the global surface by 2 to 5°C (3.6 to 9°F).".....global average
precipitation would drop by 15 percent to 30 percent. Additionally, the rate at which plants
store energy as biomass would decline by 15 percent to 30 percent on land and by 5 percent to
15 percent in oceans, a scenario that would threaten mass starvation.
"Russia and the United States still possess by far the most nuclear warheads, at 6,850 and
6,550, respectively.....
If the birthrate is trending down, it is not a crisis for capitalism, but for the
economy.
Actually, Earth added 83 million people to the planet last year.
We are in massive overshoot, in a collapsing ecosystem.
Not a problem, a predicament.
some of the science about nuclear war is presented here at this link, from a 2008 study.
Computer models are much more advanced now, and it would appear that environmental
consequences of even a small nuclear war would be more severe than previously thought
Environmental consequences of nuclear war - Owen B. Toon, Alan Robock, and Richard P.
Turco
A regional war involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons would pose a worldwide threat due to
ozone destruction and climate change. A superpower confrontation with a few thousand weapons
would be catastrophic
More than 25 years ago, three independent research groups made valuable contributions to
elaborating the consequences of nuclear warfare.1 Paul Crutzen and John Birks proposed that
massive fires and smoke emissions in the lower atmosphere after a global nuclear exchange
would create severe short-term environmental aftereffects. Extending their work,two of us
(Toon and Turco) and colleagues discovered "nuclear winter," which posited that worldwide
climatic cooling from stratospheric smoke would cause agricultural collapse that threatened
the majority of the human population with starvation.
.....Neither the US Department of Homeland Security nor any other governmental agency in
the world currently has an unclassified program to evaluate the impact of nuclear
conflict.Neither the US National Academy of Sciences, nor any other scientific body in the
world, has conducted a study of the issue IN THE PART 20 YEARS (my emphasis)...
On the need to purge the "5th Column"...as the illustrative case of Bolivia so clearly
exposes....
The GDR historian Kurt Gossweiler (1917-2017) is probably the greatest Marxist-Leninist
thinker not only of the GDR but of Germany. In the IIGM he participated since 1939 as a
soldier in the Wehrmacht and in 1943 he joined the Red Army. In 1947 he joined the SED of
the GDR.
Between 1958 and 1970, Gossweiler worked at the Humboldt University of the GDR as a
research assistant, receiving in 1973 the Patriotic Order of Merit in bronze. Gossweiler
emphasized the central role of large banks in German monopolistic financial capital.
In a speech delivered at the International Seminar of communist and workers' parties in
Brussels in 1994, Gossweiler declared that "anti-Stalinism" was the "main obstacle to the
unity of all anti-imperialist forces and the communist movement."
Kurt Gossweiler, at the 1994 Brussels Seminar, defended Stalin and the "purges" carried
out in the 1930s, stating that those "purges" saved the Soviet Union from a "fifth column"
and secured the victory of the USSR in World War II.
"The Franco-German political-economic duopoly that has held Europe together during the
postwar period is fracturing, with Europe being pulled in different directions by the
gravitational forces of these two incompatible economic models that are likely incapable of
sustaining a singular economic union, let alone underwriting a geriatric military alliance
that has lost its purpose and meaning. NATO is on life-support, and Europe is being asked to
foot the bill to keep breathing life into an increasingly moribund alliance whose brain death
is readily recognized, but rarely acknowledged."
Interesting heads-up in there; NATO Exercise Defender 2020 will be the third-largest
military exercise in Europe since the Cold War; 37,000 troops from 15 nations, including
20,000 of the American troops some American politicians maintain are welcomed throughout the
world. However, the article points out the military muscle which will be on show
" pales in comparison with the scope of the U.S. commitment then when compared to now.
In 1983, more than 250,000 U.S. troops were stationed in Germany, compared to approximately
35,000 now. The 20,000 troops the U.S. is flying in next year represents the maximum number
the U.S. can deploy on short notice; the 19,000 flown in in 1983 were part of a larger force
of over 350,000 earmarked for deployment should the need have arisen."
WARNING! ABOVE-LINKED ARTICLE BY KREMLIN-CONTROLLED RT!
Having sponsored the 2011 'humanitarian' regime-change in Libya and reducing the North
African country to chaos and civil war, the US is now protesting the alleged presence of
Russian troops there as "incredibly destabilizing."
That was the claim on Tuesday by David Schenker, the assistant secretary for near
eastern affairs at the State Department. He told reporters that Russian regulars were being
sent to Libya "in significant numbers" to support the Libya National Army (LNA) and said that
"raises the specter of large-scale casualties among the civilian population."
Schenker's concern for the lives and well-being of Libyan civilians is especially
touching, given that the US was one of the driving forces behind the regime-change operation
in 2011 targeting the government of Col. Moammar Gaddafi. Few can forget then-Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton cackling ghoulishly when she was informed of Gaddafi's brutal murder at
the hands of US-backed 'moderate' rebels.
It has been estimated that some 25,000 Libyans were killed just between March and
October 2011, and who knows how many more since, as the country went from one of the most
prosperous in Africa to a chaotic wasteland dominated by warlords. Islamic State (IS,
formerly ISIS) was drawn to the chaos, and reporters even found open-air slave markets at one
point.
Even when the "humanitarian" fallout reached out to claim the lives of four Americans
at the consulate in Benghazi in 2012, Washington shrugged. Their murders were blamed on a
YouTube video and Clinton famously sneered at Congress, "what difference, at this point, does
it make?"
Now, however, as General Khalifa Haftar – who lived in the US for 20-plus years,
mind you – and his LNA seem poised to reunite the country and brush aside the US-backed
"national unity government" that clings on to the capital and not much more, Washington is
suddenly concerned for Libyan lives? Please!
"From all the SMR projects, Rosatom is arguably out in front. Unlike the other projects,
the Russian flagship RITM-200 small modular reactor design of 50 MW capacity is already tried
and tested is it is the reactor used to power Russia's Arctic icebreakers that go into
operation next year. So far six RITM-200 reactors are being installed on the icebreakers
Arktika, Sibir and Ural. Two more nuclear powered icebreakers have already been
commissioned.
The two smaller KLT-40 reactors (35 MW) also went into the Akademik Lomonosov floating
nuclear power station that was towed to its permanent Chukotka location in August to start
commercial operations next year. The logic of a floating version of an SMR is the same as the
land-based version: to serve remote locations and allow for their industrialisation. Most of
Russia's northern coast is home to a cornucopia of natural resources but are at the same time
thousands of kilometres away from any sort of infrastructure."
Russia earns more from the export of nuclear technology than from the export of arms.
Carthago delenda est The US hopes to attain this technology 2026
The Magnitsky Case
How true is the story on which US sanctions against Russia are based?
Exclusive for subscribers
Bill Browder turned the Americans against Putin with his statements about the death of a
whistleblower. However, his story is full of contradictions.
I'm almost tempted to open the month's trial Spiegel subscription on offer at the
walled-off article, but why read a "revelation" about something that all true Kremlin Stooges
the world over have known for years? -- and, I daresay, there are also more than a few who
are really in-the-know about the Magnitsky Case in the USA and in that state where
piece-of-shit Browder is now a citizen.
America eagerly embraced Browder's fabrications and rubbish because his tale fit the image
the United States is fond of cultivating of Russia, land of savagery and state repression
– but also for a more practical reason; it wanted legislation on the books which would
allow it to continue discriminating against Russia after the Jackson-Vanik Amendment was
relaxed, as it legally had to be with Russia's accession to the WTO. All members must be
granted Permanent Normal Trading Relations (PNTR) status by all other members, and America
wanted an instrument which would allow it to let Russia know things had not changed. So the
Magnitsky Act was safely in place before Jackson-Vanik restrictions were lifted.
Poking holes in Browder's story, gratifying as it is, will not make any practical
difference. As we are all aware, America will steamroller ahead as if nothing had happened,
and continue broadcasting its untruths as if it had never been contradicted, and its allies
will follow suit. The real glimmer of light is Germany's increasingly restless relationship
with the United States, and its implications for the completion of Nord Stream II. Once
that's done and dusted, either Russia or Germany can tell the USA to go fuck itself. It will
take years for the fact that Uncle Sam routinely lies in order to support manipulative
actions in its own interests to percolate through to the general public, because it mostly
listens to whoever yells the loudest. But once that pipeline is through and Russia's energy
connection to Europe exclusive of Ukraine is secure, it's just a matter of time before Uncle
Sam loses his grip on the whole region.
Browder and the Magnitsky Narrative: the end of a disinformation campaign?
24. November 2019
Der Spiegel has broken the anti-Russian story of the whistleblower's murder. The lie
construct has been known for some time: the scandal is that the media and politicians have
spread it unquestioned
Just over 10 years after the death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian prison, a large
news media organization has dared to write a critical article about this anti-Russian myth.
Browder, a shrewd businessman who made his money with tricks and tax evasion in the 1990s, is
another kind of Relotius [Claas-Hendrik Relotius: a former German journalist. He resigned
from Der Spiegel in 2018 after having admitted to numerous instances of journalistic fraud --
ME.] , who has also demonstrated his stance by moving from the USA to Britain for tax
avoidance. Persistent and eloquent, former hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who has allegedly
turned himself into a selfless human rights activist, has portrayed his employee Magnitsky as
a death-defying whistleblower and a fighter against the corrupt system of Vladimir Putin
.
The media and politicians believe in everything that fits in with their ideologies and
interests. But that's not Bidder's theme: if it were, he would have had to critically
question the role of Der Spiegel in this case as well
I any case, Bidder has not really been brave anyway. The European Court of Human Rights
(ECHR) had already made a decision about the Magnitsky Case: in September 2019, the court
granted damages to Magnitsky's family because of the conditions of his detention and his
sentencing after his death, but it did not call his death murder, nor did the court speak of
torture and it rejected key points in Browder's story .
Even then the media could have listened, but it didn't: it preferred to follow
Browder's misrepresentation, which stated, "The ECHR decision also completely destroys the
lies and propaganda about Sergei Magnitsky that the Russian government and its paid smear
campaigners in the West have been trying to spread for many years?
The article goes on to say that Bidder presents his article as a revelation of the truth,
and backs up this claim by publishing congratulatory Tweets from admiring subscribers to Der
Spiegel But the article criticising the great revelation in Der Spiegel says nothing new has
been published: what has been "revealed" by Bidder of Der Spiegel was already well known. The
article discusses Nekrasov's revelations and the blocking of the film he made exposing
Browder, stressing that Nekrasov is in no way a Putin fan.
The article critical of the Der Spiegel article says that Bidder's "revelations" also
reveal the ways of fake news story tellers, of how gullible audiences are manipulated, of how
anti-Russian prejudices are vigorously stoked by politicians, governments, Nato and NGOs. The
critical article also points out that the Council of Europe had looked at the case and
blindly accepted the Browder team interpretation of events in the Magnitsky Case, without
doing any independent research itself.
The above-linked article by Florian Rötzer ends thus:
Bill Browder, who otherwise reacts quickly, has not yet commented on the Der Spiegel
article. The strange thing is that Deutsche Welle [ German World Service -- not
Bundestag controlled, aber natürlich! ] has a report in Russian on the
Spiegel article by Bidder, but not in German or English. Bidder does not question this fact
either.
Have the German powers-that-be given the green-light, then, that Browder be exposed so as
to totally undermine the USA reason for imposing sanctions against the Evil Regime, including
its attempts to stop NS-2, whereby the Evil Orcs wish to control the EU energy market,
thereby enslaving the free and democratic satellite Western European satrap states of Uncle
Sam?
"... the United States' high-handedness is taking it dangerously close to making an enemy of Europe. ..."
"... There is nothing remotely fair about carving out markets for your product by eliminating all other choices. I realize Washington will say it is only trying to stop Nord Stream II so that Russia will be forced to transit gas across Ukraine and pay it exorbitant transit fees, and that it is doing Ukraine a favour while not restricting Europe from getting pipeline gas. ..."
"... American strategy is always all about getting everyone else by the balls so that they have no choice but to accept American control and orders. That's called American Global Leadership, which they figure is good for the world because it's certainly good for American investors. ..."
In the U.S. Senate, they have spoken about how to block "Nord stream -- 2"
06:37 24.11.2019 (updated: 06:54 24.11.2019)
MOSCOW, 24 Nov – RIA Novosti. The U.S. Congress intends to include sanctions
against the Russian gas pipeline "Nord stream -- 2" in the 2020 defence budget, says Jim
Risch, head of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, in the latest edition of "Defense
News".
Sanctions against companies involved in the construction of the pipeline have been
included in a draft law "On National Defense for 2020", said Rish. "The reason for this step
is that the window of opportunity is closings. Most of "Nord stream" has already been
constructed", said the Senator. However, he expressed the opinion that the sanctions "will
convince" the construction company to stop work on the project because the American
restrictions "will cost them dearly".
If sanctions are included in the US defence budget, companies involved in the
construction of Nord Stream 2 will close, and Russia will, supposedly, have to look for other
contractors, says Riesch.
However, he noted that the House of Representatives and the Senate have not yet reached a
final agreement on the bill as a whole.
The US Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted in late July to pass a bill on
sanctions against Nord Stream 2. It was prepared by Republican Senator Ted Cruise and
Democrat Gene Shahin, and, in particular, involves a ban on the entry into the United States
and the freezing of US assets under the jurisdiction of persons involved in the "sale, lease,
provision or assistance in providing" ships for laying at sea Russian pipelines at a depth of
30 metres.
For the bill to enter into force, it must be approved by the House of Representatives
and the US Senate, as well as US President Donald Trump.
Let the Liberty Bell ring out loud! -- albeit that it is cracked and was never rung on 4th
July, 1776, but, as usual, bullshit baffles brains!
And that'd be Jean Shaheen; the translation managed to get both her name and her gender
wrong.
As I have said before now, the United States' high-handedness is taking it dangerously
close to making an enemy of Europe. It has made it clear it is trying to restrict Europe's
energy choices to American LNG or American LNG.
There is nothing remotely fair about carving
out markets for your product by eliminating all other choices. I realize Washington will say
it is only trying to stop Nord Stream II so that Russia will be forced to transit gas across
Ukraine and pay it exorbitant transit fees, and that it is doing Ukraine a favour while not
restricting Europe from getting pipeline gas.
But Washington still aims to control Ukraine
and use it as a bastion against Russia, and if it can arrange things so that Russian gas must
pass across Ukraine under American control, why, it can conjure stoppages and interruptions
of service at its pleasure, as well as helping Ukraine to jack up transit fees so that Russia
must either raise its gas prices until American LNG is competitive, or sell at a loss.
American strategy is always all about getting everyone else by the balls so that they have no
choice but to accept American control and orders. That's called American Global Leadership,
which they figure is good for the world because it's certainly good for American
investors.
Except when he says "we all", he is talking about less than ten thousand people in a country
of 147 million. Yes, few Russians get to breathe the rarefied air of true mental clarity.
So far as I am aware, the latest offer on the table is still for a one-year extension of
the current contract, although Russia did agree to drop legal claims and counter-claims
between itself and Ukraine, in which Russia claimed Ukraine underpaid/did not pay at all for
gas it received. Ukraine has thus far not replied.
Moscow has made some concessions, but there has been no movement at all toward a long-term
contract that I have seen. I maintain that a cold winter of frozen bums in Europe would offer
a salutary effect. Russia is actually better-placed to deliver LNG by vessel than the USA, as
well, as it is much closer.
There must be a limit to European loyalty to the USA in the face of conditions so markedly
against its interests, a limit to how much shit it will smear on its own face to keep its
partner happy and amused.
Apparently U-ropean gas storage networks are full, not to mention that there has been heavy
investment in the Austrian Baumgarten storage network, Germany, France, infact just about
everywhere except the UK (coz the French will store it for them and sell the gas back at a
nice mark up)
Ukraine has already stated publicly that although its own gas storage bunkers are full, that
amount will not likely carry it through the winter if there is an interruption owing to
non-renewal of the gas contract, and if the winter is cold and harsh as usual. I imagine
Europe is the same; storage facilities are not so extensive that they could take the entire
region through a cold winter.
Not surprising that Navalny and his ilk oppose Nord Stream. They oppose anything that is good
for Russia. They don't seem to be interested in developing russia into a better place, but
tear it apart and ruin it from within. It is rather odd that Russia has these types of people
as "opposition politicians". People who hate their own country and don't even pretend to hide
their hatred.
I don't see them that dangerous though because they seem to lack wider support and Russia is
not currently facing any troubles that would turn people against the current rulers.
And I'm not saying that Russia is ruled by a very competent government currently. The economy
should be growing a lot faster than it has been growing for the past ten years. But the
current government is still 100x better than Navalny would be. He would probably bring down
Russia even worse than Yeltsin did.
"Naftogaz" has promised turn off the gas valve
03:01 28.11.2019 (updated: 10:45 28.11.2019)
KIEV, November 28 – RIA Novosti. The Ukraine does not intend to shut off the gas
valve, even if Russia fails to sign a new contract on gas transportation, Executive Director
of "Naftogaz of the Ukraine", Yuriy Vitrenko, has said in an interview with Deutsche Welle.
In his opinion, the valve will be turned off by Gazprom, not Naftogaz.
"But I remind you, that in a letter sent by Gazprom to Naftogaz, in black and white
[it states] that on January 1st at 10 am Moscow time Gazprom has no reason to keep the gas
flowing in the direction of the Ukraine", he said.
So you Russia is going to hold Europe to ransom, not the Ukraine, right?
What happened to all the leverage Ukraine gained by its blinding victory in Swiss
arbitration? They should be able to lead Moscow around by the nose now.
"... Gazprom sent about 200 BcM to Europe last year, of which 70 BcM went via Ukraine. If Ukraine is completely cut out now, Gazprom could manage about 195 BcM, with every other available pipeline to Europe straining at the rivets. But you need a 'technical reserve' capability, which would take Russia's requirement to 230 BcM. Obviously, the intent is that they should commit to sending this amount through Ukraine, forever. ..."
"... The other interesting figure is included in the claim that 'Ukraine's economy is growing nicely, but loss of transit income would shave 4% off of GDP.' When the initial threat that eventually transit would be stopped was floated, Ukraine squealed that it would bilk it of 2% of GDP. But now somehow that loss would be double but the economy is 'growing nicely'? Ummm .how do you figure? ..."
The appeal court in Sweden has refused to satisfy the appeal of "Gazprom" in a dispute
with the Ukrainian concern "Naftogaz", according to Tass. Executive Director of "Naftogaz of
Ukraine" Yuriy Vitrenko on "Facebook" called the decision a "complete victory".
"Complete victory, Ukraine wins again! We won the appeal at the first complaint of
"Gazprom" the decision of the Stockholm arbitration!" said his statement.
It is anticipated that decisions in two other cases in court between the same parties
will be taken in 2020.
The Stockholm arbitration court in December 2017 and February 2018 issued decisions on
disputes between Gazprom and Naftogaz in respect of contracts for supply and transit of gas,
obliging as a result, Russian the Ukrainian company to pay more than $ 2.5 billion. Gazprom
appealed against the decision in March 2018, and in May demanded the complete abolition of
the "transient" solution.
Ukraine allegedly offered to do a deal in which they would not drop their claim of being
owed $2.5 Billion by Gazprom, but would take it in free gas. They say they have not had a
reply yet. The same article suggests Russia would be perfectly happy to just run out the
clock. Even happier now, I would think.
A few interesting figures are included in the article. For one, the author claims that in
order to completely circumvent Ukraine for gas delivery to Europe, it would need pipeline
capacity of 230 BcM. Here's how it breaks down – Gazprom sent about 200 BcM to
Europe last year, of which 70 BcM went via Ukraine. If Ukraine is completely cut out now,
Gazprom could manage about 195 BcM, with every other available pipeline to Europe straining
at the rivets. But you need a 'technical reserve' capability, which would take Russia's
requirement to 230 BcM. Obviously, the intent is that they should commit to sending this
amount through Ukraine, forever.
The other interesting figure is included in the claim that 'Ukraine's economy is
growing nicely, but loss of transit income would shave 4% off of GDP.' When the initial
threat that eventually transit would be stopped was floated, Ukraine squealed that it would
bilk it of 2% of GDP. But now somehow that loss would be double but the economy is 'growing
nicely'? Ummm .how do you figure?
The way I see it, Russia has a couple of options; it can just let the clock run out, carry
on with Nord Stream II, and pump everything it can right to capacity, without any going
through Ukraine. That would leave it about 5 BcM short, obviously with no reserve capability.
The USA could be invited to make that shortfall up with its Molecules of Freedom. But that
relies on Merkel not suddenly deciding to slap more restrictions on Nord Stream II so that it
could not pump to its full capacity – she has apparently said all along that Nord
Stream II will not be allowed unless some gas continues to go through Ukraine – the
obvious clash of wills is that Russia is trying to ensure that amount is as small as
possible, while the west and Ukraine are trying to ensure that amount is as large as
possible.
Another option is for Russia to speed up and intensify its own LNG-export capability, and
perhaps it can make up the shortfall with its own LNG carriers. Either way, it is plain the
Ukies think they have Russia by the balls, and can dictate terms as they like – perhaps
they will even add the return of Crimea to their demands for a gas deal, they seem to feel so
confident. Let's see how it plays out; only a couple of weeks remain to get a deal done, and
it's everyone against Russia.
The look on Vitrenko's face will be priceless if the Russians just close up their
briefcases and go home. Not to mention the look on Sefcovic's face. Not to mention the jump
in gas prices in Europe.
That's the same bottomfeeder and tax fraud Browder, who most probably killed Magnitsky. and who abruptly changed his
citizenship from the USA to British after his adventures in Russia. What a Chutzpah on the part of a person involved in
fleecing Russia after dissolution of the USSR, the activity supported by MI6 and CIA.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
When did Kyiv's control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security
of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from
Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and
Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the
Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking
the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic
nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on
Germany. Would Justin Trudeau's Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin's Russia -- for
Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who
took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations
even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the
American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if
the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.
NATO was formed to protect Europe from the 'enemy' - Russia. But Russia hasn't shown or
proven its threat to Europe for decades - despite the manufactured scaremongering used to
keep the MIC funded. But now, the Chinese can (have) take(n) over that particular role so the
MIC funding is 'safe' and Russia should be taken in as a potential partner and valuable
marketplace for European countries to access.
A ground-based conflict with Russia is a ludicrous prospect - it would turn nuclear in
days - so any form of 'army' to protect those borders is nonsensical. It's not like the
sand-bandit countries where there is no real opposition (to spending) and conflicts can be
manufactured and engineered as a retail source of income.
Funny drawing, Vlad kisses Angela. In real life, Vlad is a big villain, but not a pervert.
How much schnapps needs to be drunk for Merkel to like? 1 liter or 2? This is a joke.
The USSR ceased to exist in 1991, the Russians withdrew their troops from Europe in 1995.
NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the invasion of the USSR - the invasion did not
happen, the USSR traded with Europe. Russia, this country with a normal capitalist economy
and 4 world religions on its territory that coexist peacefully. Russia trades with Europe and
does not attack. NATO is not intended to protect Europe from the Muslim tsunami, and there is
no united European army (not because Europe cannot, but because Europe does not want because
of love for the American "freebie", which is actually cheese in a mousetrap). So why do need
NATO - to suck money and resources from European countries? A good question.
Anyone with even an elementary understanding of geopolitics knows NATO is yet another arm
of US power, and a market for the US MIC.
We Europeans, with the notable exception of the always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history Poles,
do NOT want or need NATO. We are not threatened other than by the consequences of Zionist US
foreign policy.
Russia is our natural ally and reliable trading partner, as is Iran, as is China.
The list contains some (but not all) of the key participants of the 2014 coup d'état
against President Yanukovich. There are 13 names in the list: MPs Serhiy Leshchenko, Mustafa
Nayem, Svitlana Zalishchuk, Serhiy Berezenko, Serhiy Pashynsky; ex-Prime Minister Arseniy
Yatsenyuk; ex-Head of the National Bank of Ukraine Valeriya Hontareva; ex-First Deputy of the
National Security and Defense Council Oleg Hladkovsky; judge of the Constitutional Court of
Ukraine Makar Pasenyuk; candidate for presidency Anatoly Hrytsenko; singer Svyatoslav Vakarchuk;
journalist Dmytro Hordon and ex-Head of the Presidential Administration Borys Lozhkin.
Pashynsky was involved in Snipergate. Yatsenyuk was the marionette chosen by Nuland to head
the Provisional government after Yanukovich will be overthrown.
Almost all of these people from the list were involved in various sort of scandals during
the last five years. Particularly, Oleg Hladkovsky was recently dismissed from his post due to
the corruption scandal in the defense sphere. Serhiy Leshchenko became known for the purchase
of the flat for $275,253 and the number of information attacks at well-known politicians and
businessmen. Serhy Pashynsky was tied to the hostile takeover of a confectionary factory in
Zhytomyr.
In its turn, the U.S. Department of State stated that the
words of Lutsenko are not true and aims to tarnish the reputation of Ambassador
Yovanovitch. Thus, there are certain concerns that the actual list might be fake.
WASHINGTON (Sputnik) - The House is holding its second public hearing with former US envoy
to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch centring around her ouster which, according to her, is pertinent
to the impeachment probe against Trump. Former US Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch
flatly denied allegations that she circulated a list of potential corruption targets in Ukraine
that the United States did not want prosecuted, according to testimony at the opening of
hearings in the House impeachment probe of President Donald Trump on Friday.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a do not prosecute list
was a fabrication", Yovanovitch said. "Mr Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian prosecutor general
who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I did not tell Mr
Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not prosecute. Instead I
advocated the US position that rule of law should prevail."
US President Donald Trump in a series of tweets on Friday
criticised former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch's performance while she was
testifying in the impeachment hearing against him. He defended his decision to replace
Yovanovitch - appointed by his predecessor Barak Obama - as the US ambassador to Ukraine, where
she served from August 2016 until May 2019.
....They call it "serving at the pleasure of the President." The U.S. now has a very
strong and powerful foreign policy, much different than proceeding administrations. It is
called, quite simply, America First! With all of that, however, I have done FAR more for
Ukraine than O.
During Friday's Democrat-led impeachment inquiry hearing, former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine
Marie Yovanovitch testified under oath that she did not give former Ukrainian Prosecutor
General Yuriy Lutsenko a "do not prosecute list" in 2017. Yovanovitch also doubled-down on
left-wing disinformation saying that Lutsenko "acknowledged that the list never existed" in
April.
"I want to reiterate first that the allegation that I disseminated a "Do Not Prosecute" list
was a fabrication,"
Yovanovitch told the House Intelligence Committee . "Mr. Lutsenko, the former Ukrainian
prosecutor general who made that allegation, has acknowledged that the list never existed. I
did not tell Mr. Lutsenko or other Ukrainian officials who they should or should not
prosecute."
"That is such a lie," Glenn Beck said on Friday's show. "She should be held for
perjury."
During a three-part BlazeTV exposé on the Democrats' corruption in Ukraine, Glenn
debunked what he called "the most misleading fabrication I've ever seen by the mainstream
media."
Earlier this year, award-winning investigative journalist John
Solomon reported Lutsenko's claim that then-Ambassador Yovanovitch gave him a list of
"people whom we should not prosecute" during a meeting in 2016. Shortly after Solomon's article
was released, several news sources, including the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal,
reported that Lutsenko retracted his statement.
When Lutsenko said Yovanovitch "gave" him a list, he did not mean she actually handed him
anything in writing, but verbally conveyed the names of people he shouldn't prosecute.
"They never mentioned the fact that it was verbally dictated and he wrote the list down
himself -- are you kidding me?" Glenn exclaimed. "This is how the media is fact-checking and
debunking. They are playing with our republic and Ukraine's republic. They are planting
dynamite all around everything that we hold dear. How do they sleep at night? Everyone that
reads their stories actually thinks that there was a retraction of one of the most damning
parts of this entire case."
If you like what you see, use promo code GB20OFF to get $20 off a full year of BlazeTV . With a BlazeTV subscription, you're not just paying to watch
great pro-free speech, pro-America TV. Your subscription funds the intensive investigations
that let BlazeTV tell the stories
the liberal media wants to keep in the dark, giving you the unvarnished truth, showing you what
the media doesn't want you to see.
Read More
Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told Hill.TV's John Solomon in an interview that
aired Wednesday that U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch gave him a do not prosecute
list during their first meeting.
"Unfortunately, from the first meeting with the U.S. ambassador in Kiev, [Yovanovitch] gave
me a list of people whom we should not prosecute," Lutsenko, who took his post in 2016, told
Hill.TV last week.
"My response of that is it is inadmissible. Nobody in this country, neither our president
nor our parliament nor our ambassador, will stop me from prosecuting whether there is a crime,"
he continued.
The State Department called Lutsenko's claim of receiving a do not prosecute list, "an
outright fabrication."
"We have seen reports of the allegations," a department spokesperson told Hill.TV. "The
United States is not currently providing any assistance to the Prosecutor General's Office
(PGO), but did previously attempt to support fundamental justice sector reform, including in
the PGO, in the aftermath of the 2014 Revolution of Dignity. When the political will for
genuine reform by successive Prosecutors General proved lacking, we exercised our fiduciary
responsibility to the American taxpayer and redirected assistance to more productive
projects."
Hill.TV has reached out to the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine for comment.
Lutsenko also said that he has not received funds amounting to nearly $4 million that the
U.S. Embassy in Ukraine was supposed to allocate to his office, saying that "the situation was
actually rather strange" and pointing to the fact that the funds were designated, but "never
received."
"At that time we had a case for the embezzlement of the U.S. government technical assistance
worth 4 million U.S. dollars, and in that regard, we had this dialogue," he said. " At that
time, [Yovanovitch] thought that our interviews of Ukrainian citizens, of Ukrainian civil
servants, who were frequent visitors of the U.S. Embassy put a shadow on that anti-corruption
policy."
"Actually, we got the letter from the U.S. Embassy, from the ambassador, that the money that
we are speaking about [was] under full control of the U.S. Embassy, and that the U.S. Embassy
did not require our legal assessment of these facts," he said. "The situation was actually
rather strange because the funds we are talking about were designated for the prosecutor
general's office also and we told [them] we have never seen those, and the U.S. Embassy replied
there was no problem."
"The portion of the funds namely 4.4 million U.S. dollars were designated and were foreseen
for the recipient Prosecutor General's office. But we have never received it," he said.
Yovanovitch previously served as the U.S. ambassador to Armenia under former presidents
Obama and George W. Bush, as well as ambassador to Kyrgyzstan under Bush. She also served as
ambassador to Ukraine under Obama.
"... A lawyer for Andrew Favorov confirmed Tuesday that he is scheduled to meet voluntarily with the U.S. Justice Department. Favorov is the director of the integrated gas division at Naftogaz, the state-owned gas provider in Ukraine. ..."
"... Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating the business dealings of Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, including whether he failed to register as a foreign agent, according to people familiar with the probe. The people were not authorized to discuss the investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity. ..."
"... The Associated Press contributed to this report. ..."
Rudy Giuliani, the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump, eyed business deals in Ukraine as he sought
inquires into allegations of corruption against former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, according
to a report released Wednesday.
The
New York Times
said Giuliani begin negotiations with Yuri Lutsenko, Ukraine's leading prosecutor at the
time, to take him and the European country's Justice Ministry as clients earlier this year. According to the
Times
, Lutsenko was expected to compensate Giuliani and lawyers Joseph diGenova and Victoria Toensing $200,000
to "advise on Ukrainian claims for the recovery of sums of money in various financial institutions outside Ukraine."
Further, the newspaper reported that Ukraine's Justice Ministry and the Republic of Ukraine were supposed to pay
Giuliani's company $300,000. The deal was signed by the former New York City mayor, but not the Ukraine justice
minister.
In March, the Justice Ministry reportedly appeared to have negotiated an agreement to use the services of diGenova
and Toensing where the General Prosecutor's office, headed up by Lutsenko, but would pay $300,000 to Giuliani's firm.
Responding to allegations brought forth by the
Times
, Giuliani acknowledged that he weighed doing
business with Ukraine's government, but ultimately opted against the move. "I thought that would be too complicated,"
he told the
Times
, before adding: "I never received a penny." Ukraine's Justice Ministry confirmed to the
newspaper that it has never entered into any business agreements with the Trump lawyer.
The
Times'
report comes as federal prosecutors are
slated to meet with executives from Naftogaz -- the Ukraine energy giant at the center of a federal investigation
into Giuliani and two Soviet-born associates' dealings.
A lawyer for Andrew Favorov confirmed Tuesday that he is
scheduled to meet voluntarily with the U.S. Justice Department. Favorov is the director of the integrated gas
division at Naftogaz, the state-owned gas provider in Ukraine.
Federal prosecutors in New York are investigating the
business dealings of Giuliani, President Donald Trump's personal lawyer, including whether he failed to register as a
foreign agent, according to people familiar with the probe. The people were not authorized to discuss the
investigation publicly and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Giuliani's close associates, Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, were arrested last month at an airport outside
Washington while trying to board a flight to Europe with one-way tickets. They were later indicted by federal
prosecutors on charges of conspiracy, making false statements, and falsification of records.
Following an inquiry from The Associated Press, Favorov lawyer Lanny Breuer confirmed his client is set to meet
with prosecutors.
"The Department of Justice has requested an interview,"
Breuer said. "He has agreed and will voluntarily sit down with the government attorneys. At this time, it would
not be appropriate to comment further."
Breuer declined to say when or where Favorov, who has dual
U.S.-Russian citizenship and lives in Ukraine, will be meeting with prosecutors.
Jim Margolin, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney's Office in
the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.
According to a federal indictment filed last month, Parnas
and Fruman are alleged to have been key players in Giuliani's efforts earlier this year to spur the Ukrainian
government to launch an investigation of Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
So in due course the trade war was replaced by the full scale cold war.
Notable quotes:
"... Needless to say, no differences will be "settled amicably" and now China will have no choice but to retaliate, aggressively straining relations with the US, and further complicating Trump's effort to wind down his nearly two-year old trade war with Beijing. ..."
"... The legislation, S. 1838, which was passed virtually unanimously in both chambers, requires annual reviews of Hong Kong's special trade status under American law and will allow Washington to suspend said status in case the city does not retain a sufficient degree of autonomy under the "one country, two systems" framework. The bill also sanctions any officials deemed responsible for human rights abuses or undermining the city's autonomy. ..."
"... The House cleared the bill 417-1 on Nov. 20 after the Senate passed it without opposition, veto-proof majorities that left Trump with little choice but to acquiesce, or else suffer bruising fallout from his own party. the GOP. ..."
"... In accordance with the law, the Commerce Department will have 180 days to produce a report examining whether the Chinese government has tried use Hong Kong's special trading status to import advanced "dual use" technologies in violation of US export control laws. Dual use technologies are those that can have commercial and military applications. ..."
"... The new law directs the US secretary of state to "clearly inform the government of the People's Republic of China that the use of media outlets to spread disinformation or to intimidate and threaten its perceived enemies in Hong Kong or in other countries is unacceptable." ..."
"... The state department should take any such activity "into consideration when granting visas for travel and work in the United States to journalists from the People's Republic of China who are affiliated with any such media organizations", the law says. ..."
"... Yes I think getting the western financial institutions out of HK is the plan. I'm sure they appreciate the US doing this for them, but of course they could never admit that. ..."
Less than an hour after Trump once again paraded with yet another all-time high in the
S&P...
... and on day 510 of the trade war, it appears the president was confident enough that a
collapse in trade talks won't drag stocks too far lower, and moments after futures reopened at
6pm, the White House said that Trump had signed the Hong Kong bill backing pro-democracy
protesters, defying China and making sure that every trader's Thanksgiving holiday was just
ruined.
In a late Wednesday statement from the White House, Trump said that:
I signed these bills out of respect for President Xi, China, and the people of Hong Kong.
They are being enacted in the hope that Leaders and Representatives of China and Hong Kong
will be able to amicably settle their differences leading to long term peace and prosperity
for all.
Needless to say, no differences will be "settled amicably" and now China will have no
choice but to retaliate, aggressively straining relations with the US, and further complicating
Trump's effort to wind down his nearly two-year old trade war with Beijing.
Trump's signing of the bill comes during a period of unprecedented unrest in Hong Kong,
where anti-government protests sparked by a now-shelved extradition bill proposal have
ballooned into broader calls for democratic reform and police accountability.
"The Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act reaffirms and amends the United States-Hong
Kong Policy Act of 1992, specifies United States policy towards Hong Kong and directs
assessment of the political developments in Hong Kong," the White House said in a statement.
"Certain provisions of the act would interfere with the exercise of the president's
constitutional authority to state the foreign policy of the United States."
The legislation, S. 1838, which was passed virtually unanimously in both chambers,
requires annual reviews of Hong Kong's special trade status under American law and will allow
Washington to suspend said status in case the city does not retain a sufficient degree of
autonomy under the "one country, two systems" framework. The bill also sanctions any officials
deemed responsible for human rights abuses or undermining the city's autonomy.
The House cleared the bill 417-1 on Nov. 20 after the Senate passed it without
opposition, veto-proof majorities that left Trump with little choice but to acquiesce, or else
suffer bruising fallout from his own party. the GOP.
Trump also signed into law the PROTECT Hong Kong act, which will prohibit the sale of
US-made munitions such as tear gas and rubber bullets to the city's authorities.
While many members of Congress in both parties have voiced strong support for protesters
demanding more autonomy for the city, Trump had stayed largely silent, even as the
demonstrations have been met by rising police violence.
Until now.
The bill's author, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, said that with the legislation's
enactment, the US now had "new and meaningful tools to deter further influence and interference
from Beijing into Hong Kong's internal affairs."
In accordance with the law, the Commerce Department will have 180 days to produce a
report examining whether the Chinese government has tried use Hong Kong's special trading
status to import advanced "dual use" technologies in violation of US export control laws. Dual
use technologies are those that can have commercial and military applications.
One other less discussed but notable provision of the Hong Kong Human Rights Act targets
media outlets affiliated with China's government. The new law directs the US secretary of
state to "clearly inform the government of the People's Republic of China that the use of media
outlets to spread disinformation or to intimidate and threaten its perceived enemies in Hong
Kong or in other countries is unacceptable."
The state department should take any such activity "into consideration when granting
visas for travel and work in the United States to journalists from the People's Republic of
China who are affiliated with any such media organizations", the law says.
* * *
In the days leading up to Trump's signature, China's foreign ministry had urged Trump to
prevent the legislation from becoming law, warning the Americans not to underestimate China's
determination to defend its "sovereignty, security and development interests."
"If the U.S. insists on going down this wrong path, China will take strong countermeasures,
" said China's foreign ministry spokesman Geng Shuang at a briefing Thursday in Beijing. On
Monday, China's Vice Foreign Minister Zheng Zeguang summoned the U.S. ambassador, Terry
Branstad to express "strong opposition" to what the country's government considers American
interference in the protests, including the legislation, according to statement. The new U.S.
law comes just as Washington and Beijing showed signs of working toward "phase-one" of deal to
ease the trade war. Trump would like the agreement finished in order to ease economic
uncertainty for his re-election campaign in 2020, and has floated the possibility of signing
the deal in a farm state as an acknowledgment of the constituency that's borne the brunt of
retaliatory Chinese tariffs.
Last week China's Vice Premier and chief trade negotiator Liu He said before a speech at the
Bloomberg New Economy Forum in Beijing, that he was "cautiously optimistic" about reaching the
phase one accord. He will now have no choice but to amend his statement.
In anticipation of a stern Chinese rebuke, US equity futures tumbled, wiping out most of the
previous day's gains... Still, the generally modest pullback - the S&P was around 2,940
when Trump announced the Phase 1 deal on Oct 11 - suggests that despite Trump's signature,
markets expect a Chinese deal to still come through. That may be an aggressive and overly
"hopeful" assumption, especially now that China now longer has a carte blanche to do whatever
it wants in Hong Kong, especially in the aftermath of this weekend's
landslide victory for the pro-Democracy camp which won in 17 of the city's 18
districts.
"Following last weekend's historic elections in Hong Kong that included record turnout, this
new law could not be more timely in showing strong US support for Hongkongers' long-cherished
freedoms," said Rubio
This is another attempt by the US to stop BRICS. They care NOTHING about HK, only its
usefulness in the US war on Chinas growing importance in world trade.
but no no no... trading with communists brings jobs to sell cheap crap. oh what was I
thinking.... cheap crap, jobs, and the richest of the rich get richer... my bad.
it ain’t like the commies are going to use the money to build up their military..
Of course the obvious solution is to just let people choose whatever or whomever they want
to associate with and be respected and left alone for their choice.
But no. We all have to live and abide by the wishes of other people bcuz of "unity" and
****.
Eh guys, you still do not understand that all this (not only China and Hong Kong) is a
very big "elite" performance for ordinary people to keep you (the rest of the boobies) in
subjection. It's like in boxing - contractual fights. Do you think world "elites" benefit
from peace and order? You are mistaken - these guys have the world as death (the death of
their Power and their Control). An example from the history of Europe - in the 18-19 and
early 20th century, Europe only did what it fought. But the funny thing is that the monarchs
(the real owners of Europe) were relatives among themselves. The First World War was
popularly called “The War of Three Cousins” (English monarch, German Kaiser and
Russian emperor). But the Europeans paid for the dismantling of relatives. Now the "monarchs"
are bankers and your position has not changed, you changed only the owners after 1918.
Problem with Hong Kong is, it is dependent on China to survive. That is not only true for
the most basic neccessities, but also as a port for international trade. However, in the last
25 years, Shenzhen and Guangzhou have built up their own trade hubs, which has pulled trade
away from being concentrated in Hong Kong, and consequently more dependent on China. Our
ideas of Hong Kong remaining an independent island nation isn't going to work for three
reasons:
1. Without being a doorway to China, there is no other reason for its existence.
2. Hong Kong is indeed Chinese sovereign territory, that was taken away from it to be made
into a trade colony by the British in 1841, under the Treaty of Nanking. The British gave up
Hong Kong in 1997, under the 1984 signed Sino-British Joint Declaration, in which Britain
agreed to return not only the New Territories but also Kowloon and Hong Kong itself. China
promised to implement a "One Country, Two Systems" regime, under which for fifty years Hong
Kong citizens could continue to practice capitalism and political freedoms forbidden on the
mainland. So, when the year 2047 comes around, Hong Kong will be fully absorbed and
integrated in a One Country, One system Chinese regime. In otherwords, Hong Kong's fate was
already sealed in 1984, and there is nothing America can legally do about it.
3. Hong Kong still needs the basic neccessities from China to survive. Don't count on
either the British or the Americans to provide it.
Yes I think getting the western financial institutions out of HK is the plan. I'm sure
they appreciate the US doing this for them, but of course they could never admit
that.
"... Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins. ..."
"... Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics ..."
"... "The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration. It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks. ..."
"... Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe" to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy agenda on questions that would require adult supervision." ..."
"... Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the crazy banner. ..."
"... To a great degree American foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions inherited from Old Europe. ..."
Is it just me (wink, wink) but I find it completely coincidental that both Strzok (100%) and Pientka (likely) are of Polish origins.
Could it be my Russian paranoia. Nah, I am being unreasonable -- those people never had a bad feeling towards Trump's attempts to
boost Russian-American relations with Michael Flynn spearheading this effort.
Jokes aside, however, I can only imagine how SVR
and GRU are enjoying the spectacle. I can only imagine how many "free" promotions and awards can be attach to this thing as a
free ride.
Your comment brings to mind the outdated Russophobia of many in positions of influence within the American administration. I couldn't
remember who coined the term "the crazies in the basement" as applied to the more hawkish elements in US politics. I thought it
had been an American Admiral. I had no luck finding a reference so I googled it. Still no joy with the American admiral, but the
list thrown up had near the top of it this informative quote from Patrick Bahzad.
"The "crazies in the basement" is an expression that was coined originally by some unknown member of George W's administration.
It used to designate the small clique of Neo-Cons who had found their way into Bush junior's team of advisors, before they rose
to dubious fame after the 9/11 attacks.
Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, at the time Colin Powell's chief of staff, described their status enhancement from "lunatic fringe"
to top executives in the White House with his Southern sense of humor, adding that they had become almost overnight what was henceforth
called the Cheney "Gestapo". And what happened over the weekend in the Middle-East -- and in D.C. -- certainly looked like a distant
but distinct reminder of that period in the early 2000s when "crazies" coming right out of a dark basement took over the policy
agenda on questions that would require adult supervision."
Both in Canada and the States men and women of Eastern European background have risen to positions of influence in the
respective administrations. I'd argue that that has not been uniformly beneficial. Not when those men and women enlist under the
crazy banner. Or, to put it more soberly, form part of the neocon wing of those administrations. Though I, as an outside
observer, might be prejudiced here because I happen not to get on very well with Brzezinski and his copious output.
Allowing for that prejudice, which I confess runs very deep, I still think that to an extent American foreign policy has been
hijacked by Eastern European emigres who themselves retain some of the prejudices and mindset of another age and place.
Looking at it from afar, the influence of some Eastern European emigres on American foreign policy has been uniformly deleterious.
And that from a long way back and no matter whether those emigres are in Washington or Tel Aviv.
It cannot but help be distorting, that influence. It's not merely that unexamined Russophobia is embedded in the DNA of many
Eastern Europeans. There's a narrow minded focus on aggressive Machtpolitik, bred from centuries of violent territorial disputes
with neighbors.
That, transferred to the world stage as it must be when it infects the foreign policy of the United States - because that is
a country that cannot but help be at the centre of the world stage - distorts US foreign policy. To a great degree American
foreign policy no longer operates in the interests of the broad mass of the American people. It too often plays to the obsessions
inherited from Old Europe.
In the most famous of his speeches Churchill spoke of the time when, as he hoped, "the New World, with all its power and might,
steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old."
Let the historians dispute as they will, that is what happened. And continued to happen for half a century and more. But there
was a price few noticed. The New World might have stepped forward to rescue the old, but it carried back from that old world a
most destructive freight.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
I wrote what follows before reading Andrei's response to EO, but do not see much reason to change what I had written.
When in 1988 I ended up working at BBC Radio 'Analysis' programme because it was impossible to interest any of my old television
colleagues in the idea that one might go to Moscow and talk to some of the people involved in the Gorbachev 'new thinking', my
editor, Caroline Anstey, was an erstwhile aide to Jim Callaghan, the former Labour Prime Minister.
As a result of his involvement with the Trilateral Commission, she had a fascinating anecdote about what one of his fellow
members, the former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, said about another, Zbigniew Brzezinski: that he could never work out which
of his country's two traditional enemies his Polish colleague hated most.
Almost a generation after hearing her say this, in December 2013, I read an article Brzezinski published in the 'Financial
Times, headlined 'Russia, like Ukraine, will become a real democracy.'
Unfortunately, it is behind a subscription wall, but it clearly expresses its author's fundamental belief that after all those
years of giving Russia the 'spinach' treatment -- to use Victoria Nuland's term -- it would finally 'knuckle under', and become
a quiescent satellite of the West.
An ironic sidelight on this is provided in a recent article by a lady called Anna Mahjar-Barducci on the 'MEMRI' site -- which
actually has some very useful material on matters to do with Russia for those of us with no knowledge of the language -- headlined
'Contemporary Russian Thinkers Series -- Part I -- Renowned Russian Academic Sergey Karaganov On Russia And Democracy.'
Its subject, who I remember well from the days when he was very much one of the 'new thinkers', linked to it on his own website,
clearly pleased at what he saw as an accurate and informed discussion of his ideas.
There is an obvious risk of succumbing to facetiousness, but sometimes what one thinks are essential features of an argument
can be best brought out at the risk of caricaturing it.
It seems to me that some of the central themes of Karaganov's writing over the past few years -- doubly interesting, because
his attacks on conventional Western orthodoxies are very far from silly, and because he is a kind of 'panjandrum' of a significant
section of the Russian foreign policy élite -- may be illuminated in this way.
So, attempting to link his Russian concerns to British and American ones, some central contentions of his writings might be
put as follows:
'"Government of the people, by the people, for the people' looked a lovely idea, back in 1989. But if in practice "by the people"
means a choice of Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Corbyn, how can it be "for the people?"
'Moreover, it turned out that our "deplorables" were always right, against us 'intellectuals', in grasping that, with "Russophobes"
running Western policy, a "real democracy" would simply guarantee that we remained as impotent and humiliated as people like Brzezinski
clearly always wanted us to be.
'Our past, and our future, both in terms of alliances and appropriate social and political systems, are actually "Eurasian":
a 'hybrid' state, whose potential greatest advantage actually should be seen as successfully synthesising different inheritances.
'As the need for this kind of synthesis is a normal condition, with which most peoples have to reckon, this gives us a very
real potential advantage over people in the West, who, like the communists against whom I rebelled, believe that there is one
path along which all of humanity must -- and can -- go.'
At the risk of over-interpreting, I might add the following conclusion:
'Of course, precisely what this analysis does not mean is that we are anti-European -- simply that we cannot simply come to
Europe, Europe come some way to meet us.
'Given time, Helmut Schmidt's fellow countrymen, as also de Gaulle's, may very well realise that their future does not lie
in an alliance with a coalition of people like Brzezinski and traditional "Russophobes" from the "Anglosphere".
'And likewise, it does not lie with the kind of messianic universalist "liberalism" -- and, in relation to some of the SJC
and LGBT obsessions, one might say "liberalism gone bonkers" -- which Putin criticized in his interview with the "Financial Times"
back in June.
An obvious possibility implicit in the argument is that, if indeed the continental Europeans see sense, then the coalition
of traditional 'Anglophobes' and the 'insulted and injured' or the 'borderlands' may find itself marginalized, and indeed, on
the 'dustbin of history' to which Trotsky once referred.
Of course, I have no claims to be a Russianist, and my reading of Karaganov may be quite wrong.
But I do strongly believe that very superficial readings of what was happening when I was working in the 'Analysis' office,
back in 1988-9, have done an immense disservice alike to Britain and the United States.
Very well put. No better example, apart from being utter academic failure, expected from "white board" theorists with zero understanding
of power, exists of this than late Zbig. Only blind or sublime to the point of sheer idiocy could fail to see that Brzezinski's
loyalties were not with American people, but with Poland and old Polish, both legitimate and false, anti-Russian grievances. He
dedicated his life to settling whatever scores he had with historic Russia using the United States merely as a vehicle. So do
many, as you correctly stated, Eastern European immigrants to the United States. They bring with them passions, of which Founding
Fathers warned, and then infuse them into the American political discourse. It finally reached it peak of absurdity and, as I
argue constantly, utter destruction of the remnants of the Republic.
David, Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. But the events of two days ago with Putin and Lavrov being personally
present at the unveiling of the monument to Evgenii Primakov in a front of Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs speaks, in fact
screams, volumes. You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as I type this and it means that the West "lost"
(quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose) Russia and it can be "thankful" for that to a so called Russia
Studies field in the West which was primarily shaped and then turned into the wasteland, in large part thanks to influx of East
European "scholars" and some "Russian" dissidents which achieved their objectives by drawing a caricature. They succeeded and
Russia had it with the West.
DH, appreciate your comment. Haven't read the MEMRI paper yet. Scanned the first page though.
Karaganov is an opportunist, granted a smart one. ... You know of Primakov's Doctrine. It is being fully implemented as
I type this and it means that the West "lost" (quotation marks are intentional--Russia was not West's to lose)
Well, two things sticked out for me during Tumps reelection campain.
1) on the surface he stated, he wanted closer relations to Russia. Looked at more closely, as should be expected, maybe. They
were ambigous. If I may paraphrase it colloguially: I meet them and, believe me, if I don't get that beautiful deal, i'll be out
of the door the next second.
2) he promised to be enigmatic, compared to earlier American administrations. In other words, hard to read or to predict. Guess
one better is as dealmaker. But in the larger intelligence field? Enigmatic may well be a commonplace. No?
Otherwise, Andrei, I would appreciate your further elaboration on Karaganov as opportunist.
Andrei: Strzok and Pientka come from Galicia -- the westernmost portion of what is now Ukraine -- that was acquired by Empress
Maria Theresa in the mid - 18th century.
I have been curious about precisely where both Srzok and Pientka came from, but have not had time to do any serious searches.
What is the actual evidence that they have Galician origins?
And, if they do, what are these?
I would of course automatically tend to assume that Polish names mean that their origins are Polish.
But then, if this is so, why are they enthusiastically collaborating with 'Banderista' Ukrainians?
It has long been a belief of mine that one of Stalin's great mistakes was to attempt to incorporate Galicia into the empire
he was creating.
Had he returned it to Poland, the architects of the Volhynia massacres of Poles -- as also of the massacres of Jews in Lviv/Lvov/Lemberg
-- could have gone back to their old habits of assassinating Polish policemen.
I first picked up the Galician connection in an article by Scott Humor: " North America is a land run by Galician zombies "
-- published by The Saker on July 4, 2018. It seems that Galicians, especially those that arrived after WWII, migrate into security
positions such as ICE / FBI / NSA etc. It may have to do with a family history of work in the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Regrettably, I am not from Eastern Europe and cannot help you further about the Bortnicks, the Gathkes, Buchtas, and so on.
"... Chalupa, founder of the political consulting firm Chalupa & Associates, LLC, and a co-chair of the Democratic National Committee's Ethnic Council, has been at the heart of efforts by allies of President Donald Trump to draw an equivalence between Russia's large-scale hacking and propaganda operation to interfere in the 2016 election with the actions of a small cadre of Ukrainian bureaucrats who allegedly worked with Chalupa to research former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's Russia ties. ..."
"... Her LinkedIn profile includes a work history: "Online Constituency Outreach Director" for John Kerry's presidential campaign; executive director for Democrats Abroad and five years as the director of the Office of Party Leaders for the Democratic National Committee (DNC). ..."
"... A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party. ..."
"... "The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation," Politico reported and that "officials [at the embassy] became 'helpful' in Chalupa's efforts explaining that she traded information and leads with them. ..."
"... Politico also reported the Ukraine Embassy worked "directly" with reporters researching Trump's alleged Russia ties -- a claim Shulyar denied. ..."
"... "But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia," Politico reported. ..."
"... "Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa," Telizhenko said. "They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa." ..."
"... "In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort," Politico reported. ..."
"... "For the record: I have never worked for a foreign government," Chalupa tweeted during the hearings. "I have never been to Ukraine. I was not an opposition researcher. In 2008, I knew Manafort worked for Putin's interests in Ukraine. I reported my concerns about him to the NSC in 2014 & sounded the alarm bells in 2016." ..."
"... In a profile of Chalupa in October 2018 in the Kyiv Post , she said her interest in Ukraine grew after the unrest and violence on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square in November 2013. ..."
"... "I have a diverse network of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian friends on social media who were reporting real-time developments taking place in Kyiv that the western media was not covering," Chalupa said in the profile. "I wanted to do my part to be helpful to draw attention to the events on the Maidan, so I pulled together the heads of Ukrainian-American organizations and connected them with the White House." ..."
During the recent public impeachment hearings aimed at President Donald Trump, Republicans repeatedly mentioned
one woman's name: Alexandra Chalupa.
Chalupa may not be a household name, but if the impeachment effort against the president advances to the Senate
she might take center stage as an anti-Trump activist who could be credited with launching Russian collusion and
Ukraine bribery conspiracies.
If Democrats had not rejected almost all of the witnesses Republicans wanted to testify before the House Intelligence
Committee, Chalupa's role in the 2016 election may have been highlighted, including actions that led to the demise of
Paul Manafort, the man who was briefly Trump's presidential campaign manager and who is now serving a prison sentence
for financial fraud and conspiracy.
And despite the Democrats reluctance to have her at the witness table, Chalupa told
Politico
she wanted
to testify.
Eager Impeachment Witness
The
Politico
report
cited
Chalupa's willingness to be in the spotlight:
A longtime Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist says she's itching to testify in the House's
public impeachment hearings to beat back Republican assertions that Ukrainian officials used her as a conduit for
information in 2016 to damage Donald Trump.
"I'm on a mission to testify," said Alexandra Chalupa, who Republicans identified as one of nine witnesses they
would like to testify publicly when the House begins public impeachment proceedings this week.
Chalupa, founder of the political consulting firm Chalupa & Associates, LLC, and a co-chair of the Democratic
National Committee's Ethnic Council, has been at the heart of efforts by allies of President Donald Trump to draw
an equivalence between Russia's large-scale hacking and propaganda operation to interfere in the 2016 election
with the actions of a small cadre of Ukrainian bureaucrats who allegedly worked with Chalupa to research former
Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's Russia ties.
Chalupa'a Twitter account says she is a "human rights hobbyist, political strategist, connector, mom of 3 strong
girls. Lives in D.C., from California. On Putin & Trump's bad list," but her resume shows more about where her
loyalties lie.
Her LinkedIn profile
includes
a work history: "Online Constituency Outreach Director" for John Kerry's presidential campaign;
executive director for Democrats Abroad and five years as the director of the Office of Party Leaders for the
Democratic National Committee (DNC).
But it is in another
Politico
investigative piece in January 2017 that
reveals
-- despite media and Democrat denials -- Ukraine's efforts to influence the 2016 election and that Chalupa
lent them a hand.
In the report, entitled "Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire, Kiev officials are scrambling to make
amends with the president-elect after quietly working to boost Clinton" details of Chalupa's "mission" is outlined.
Longtime Activism Record
The story begins with Chalupa learning that lawyer and lobbyist Paul Manafort had been an adviser to Ukrainian
president Viktor Yanukovych before the latter fled the country under Putin's protection:
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa,
who had worked in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to
work as a staffer, then as a consultant, for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to
June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records, though she also was paid by other clients during that
time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S.
Embassy in Ukraine, Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested
in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the
pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
In an interview this month, Chalupa told
Politico
she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and
Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While
her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including
Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she
began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well.
The
Politico
report also said Chalupa shared her research with the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign,
including the narrative about Russia/Trump collusion.
"I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa said. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to
be involved in this election."
Chalupa described Manafort as "Putin's political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
She also shared her research with then-Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and his aide, Oksana
Shulyar, during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy.
Those officials said that they knew about Manafort but were not worried because they believed Trump had little
chance of being the Republican nominee let alone winning the presidency.
And then Trump hired Manafort.
"The day after Manafort's hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and
their ties to Russia, according to an operative familiar with the situation,"
Politico
reported and that
"officials [at the embassy] became 'helpful' in Chalupa's efforts explaining that she traded information and leads
with them.
Politico
also reported the Ukraine Embassy worked "directly" with reporters researching Trump's alleged
Russia ties -- a claim Shulyar denied.
"But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she
instructed him to help Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia,"
Politico
reported.
"Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people who did, then I should contact Chalupa,"
Telizhenko said. "They were coordinating an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra
Chalupa."
"Oksana was keeping it all quiet," but "the embassy worked very closely with Chalupa," Telizhenko said.
"In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with
Chalupa to provide an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort,"
Politico
reported.
Telizhenko also said in the
Politico
report: "If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or
Trump's involvement with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September."
In a tweet she posted during the hearings, Chalupa defended notifying the Obama administration about Manafort.
She also defended her work with Ukrainian officials during the 2016 campaign by claiming she never visited the
country and was not employed by its government.
"For the record: I have never worked for a foreign government," Chalupa tweeted during the hearings. "I have never
been to Ukraine. I was not an opposition researcher. In 2008, I knew Manafort worked for Putin's interests in
Ukraine. I reported my concerns about him to the NSC in 2014 & sounded the alarm bells in 2016."
2016 Election Influencer
In a Yahoo News story investigative reporter Michael Isikoff named Chalupa as one of 16 "ordinary people" who
"shaped the 2016 election."
"Chalupa this month told
Politico
that, as her research and role in the election started becoming more
public, she began receiving death threats, along with continued alerts of state-sponsored hacking. But she said,
'None of this has scared me off.'"
In a profile of Chalupa in October 2018 in the
Kyiv Post
, she
said
her interest in Ukraine grew after the unrest and violence on Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square
in November 2013.
"I have a diverse network of Ukrainian-American and Ukrainian friends on social media who were reporting real-time
developments taking place in Kyiv that the western media was not covering," Chalupa said in the profile. "I wanted to
do my part to be helpful to draw attention to the events on the Maidan, so I pulled together the heads of
Ukrainian-American organizations and connected them with the White House."
"This was the first of a handful of other meetings related to Ukraine she helped organize for Obama's National
Security Council," the
Post
reported.
The November 2019
Politico
piece explains why she is back in the spotlight:
Chalupa It's not only GOP House members who are interested in Chalupa, however. The right-wing activist group
Judicial Watch recently obtained visitor logs placing Chalupa at the White House several times in 2015, where she
attended meetings related to countering disinformation with other Ukrainian-Americans and sometimes worked with
the White House's Office of Public Liaison to organize ethnic engagement events, she said.
A photo of her at one of those meetings -- standing next to a man that conservative news outlets have identified
as the official who blew the whistle on Trump's interactions with Zelensky -- has again placed Chalupa at the center
of controversy.
She mused in an interview about how Republicans would be reacting now if she'd actually taken a job in Ukraine
that required her to shuttle back and forth from Kyiv to D.C. during the 2016 campaign. A position as an "embedded
consultant" in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was offered to her the day WikiLeaks began publishing stolen DNC
documents in July 2016, according to an email reviewed by Politico.
"I never responded to it," Chalupa said. "Felt it was a trap."
To date, it looks like Chalupa won't testify unless the impeachment effort advances to a Senate trial where
Republicans might have some tough questions for her.
Chalupa, for her part, thinks she can help the Democrats efforts to remove a duly elected president from office.
"As an expert on political hybrid warfare, including from first-hand experience being targeted by the Kremlin for
the past four years, I'm confident there's a lot I can contribute to the hearings," Chalupa said. "For now, it seems
the focus is exactly where it needs to be -- on Donald Trump and his accomplices trying to extort Ukraine, a U.S. ally
defending itself from Russia's ongoing military and hybrid warfare."
Since its creation in 1948, the modern state of Israel has steadily stolen Palestinian land
and driven Palestinians from their homes, cities and villages.
Nothing has been done to halt Israel's steady march to tighten its absolute control of the
Palestinian people with the obvious goal of ethnic cleansing, an historic fact well documented
by Israeli scholar
Ilan Pappe .
Under the protection of a security-obsessed military occupation, fully supported and
underwritten by U.S. tax payers, Israel denies it has broken any laws. Israel makes its own
self-preservation laws. It listens to no higher authority.
Israel has destroyed olive tree orchards and smothered stolen farmlands and pastures with
modern malls where U.S. firms like Ace Hardware and Burger King enrich stock holders who don't
know, or don't care, that they are taking part in the ugly crime of ethnic cleansing.
(The first time I saw an Ace Hardware store in a Ma'ale Adumim mall, I started my own
personal boycott of Ace, an action unfair to employees of my local Ace outlet, but one that has
increased the receipts of my small neighborhood hardware store.)
The narrative of Israeli governments heeding no call but their own, has been with us all
along, but U.S. media readers/viewers have avoided having to think about it, or do anything
about it.
They live comfortably within their bubble of ignorance which is created and sustained for
them by their newspapers, news magazines, television outlets, radio broadcasts, government
leaders and, alas, their religious leaders.
It does not have to be this way. During the last decade, the narrative of settlements like
Ma'ale Adumim has been available on the internet in reports like this one from Electronic Intafada , which begins
:
It is only a fifteen minute bus ride from Jerusalem to the Ma'ale Adumim settlement. After
entering through guarded gates, one's first impression is of a Miami-style suburb. The town
at noon seems almost abandoned because the major part of Ma'ale Adumim residents head off to
work in Jerusalem during the day. . . .
As soon as Barack Obama demanded from Israel the simple act of "freezing" its settlement expansion , Israel trotted out Public
Relations Plan A for distribution to the media: Have a heart, settlement residents need room
for their families to grow.
Israel operates on the logic of the man found guilty of killing his parents. The guilty man
begged for mercy on the grounds that he was now an orphan.
To tell you about the Israeli settlers' plea for mercy, the Los Angeles Times (July 6) delivered its version of the
orphan story: "Israel's settlements in West Bank present a major hurdle."
The opening paragraphs of the Times story set the tone for the plea with weasel words
(Lobby talking points) used by writer Edmund Sanders:
Reporting from Ma'ale Adumim, West Bank -- This sprawling, well-manicured Israeli
settlement -- with its rows of red-tile roofs, palm trees and air-conditioned shopping mall
-- could almost pass for Orange County. Except the guards in this gated community sometimes
pack automatic weapons.
Settlements such as the city-sized Ma'ale Adumim, about four miles east of Jerusalem in
the West Bank, are viewed by much of the world as illegal because they are built on land
seized by Israel during the 1967 Middle East War. Many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country.
Now let us review the weasel words.
The reference to the illegality of Ma'ale Adumim is softened by the qualifying rhetorical
device, "viewed by much of the world as illegal". The phase "viewed by" suggests that the issue
at hand is open to debate among reasonable people.
Reasonable, as, for example, as a story that might have appeared in a Birmingham, Alabama,
newspaper, circa 1939, reporting that "segregation is viewed by many in the South as as a way
to maintain harmony between the races and preserve our Southern Way of Life."
Should such an analysis have been open to debate? No, certainly not in the minds of a small
number of courageous Southern liberals, and an increasingly impatient black population.
It required two more decades of U.S. racial oppression for that "debate"–for and
against segregation–to reach a definitive conclusion with "all deliberate speed".
Now we have a 21st century debate. The Times' Monday story includes the phrase: "many
Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of their country." Do they, indeed? How many Israelis?
Most polls suggest that sentiment is largely confined to the pro-settler community, while
"security-minded" government leaders continue to demand the inclusion of Ma'ale Adumimin a
future Israeli state
To other more fair-minded Israelis the phrase "many Israelis see Ma'ale Adumim as part of
their country", unpleasantly evokes the case of the parent-killer who begs for mercy because he
is an orphan.
The Time s story continues:
Now the long-simmering dispute over this and other fast-growing settlements has become a
major obstacle to restarting peace talks.
Settlement building is not a long-simmering dispute. It is part of decades of immoral and
illegal actions by Israel and is much more than a "major obstacle" to peace talks. It is an
indisputable violation of international law, which, if allowed to stand, will block any
successful peace talks.
The parent-killer should mourn his Mom and Dad from his jail cell, not while sitting in the
sun in his well-watered grass covered private backyard, shaded from the hot summer sun by a
picnic umbrella purchased from a nearby Ace Hardware.
The LA Times reserves most of its early sympathy for the illegal settlers of an
illegal city with these touching "facts":
"Why is President Obama interfering with our lives, telling us how many children we can
have and whether we can get married?" asked Benny Kashriel, longtime mayor of Ma'ale Adumim.
. . .
Talk about a possible freeze has many here worried.
"You can't freeze a city," Kashriel said. "If you freeze, you go backwards. Every month we
are not building and people are not coming, it affects the economic situation of the city. .
. . It's punishing."
A freeze, officials say, would threaten the opening of four new synagogues and seven
sorely needed schools. Class sizes are already near the legal limit of 40 students per
room.
An additional 400 units of housing in various stages of construction might also be shut
down, leaving homeowners -- many of whom have already taken out mortgages up to $300,000 --
with monthly payments and no place to live.
The Times knew American readers would identify with those folks holding mortgages of
up to $300,000 with monthly payments and no place to live. And those same readers can also
identify with parents whose children are in schools "near the legal limit of 40 students per
room".
Further down in the story, the Times reports on the Arab village of Aziriyeh, (in
biblical times, the village of Bethany), where Lazarus was called from his grave by Jesus. (Or
as the Times writes, carefully avoiding any validation of a religious belief, "where the
biblical Lazarus is said to have risen from the dead").
The comparison of Aziriyeh (Bethany) with Ma'ale Adumim is fact-filled. The comparison also
strains for a "balance" that is impossible to achieve between occupiers and the occupied.
Since 1967, the story reports, the village of Aziriyeh has had three-fourths of its land
stolen to enlarge Ma'ale Adumim. Its mayor, Issam Faroun, makes a comparison between his
citizens and those of the illegal citizens of Ma'ale Adumim. The facts are presented fairly.
The comparative use of water is an example.
Mayor Faroun said:
. . . that as Ma'ale Adumim frets about the fate of its landscaped grounds or swimming
pools, Azariyah residents receive water only once a week. The town gateway has turned into a
junkyard of trash, scrap metal and old appliances. Schools have 45 students per class and
unemployment is 50%, in part because the barrier prevents workers from reaching
Jerusalem.
With no room to expand horizontally, families are adding second and third stories to their
homes as children grow up and marry. Bassem abu Roomy, 31, still lives in his parents' house,
sharing two rooms with his pregnant wife and two children. His younger brothers are not so
lucky.
"We can't add any more stories because the foundation of the house can't support it," he
said. "So they can't get married."
When did the relationship between Palestinians and Israelis in Aziriyeh (Bethany) and Ma'ale
Adumim go wrong? When that first brick was laid in Maale Adumim soon after 1967? When Ma'ale
Adumim gobbled up three fourths of Aziriyeh's farmland for its own use? Name your own moment in
recent memory.
The LA Times wants us to look back no further than two decades when the biblical
village of Lazarus and the modern Israeli city of Ma'ale Adumim had, as the Times
describes it, their harmonious relations "strained".
A decade ago, the two communities lived somewhat harmoniously. Israelis shopped in
Azariyah [Bethany] and Palestinians worked on housing projects in the settlement. But during
the last Palestinian uprising, in 2000, two settlers were shot in the village and relations
have been strained since.
The competing needs of these two communities have become part of the international
debate.
So there you have it. Everything was fine until two Israeli settlers were shot. This is a
case study on why the Israeli Lobby and the U.S. Congress are so grateful for news stories like
this one that appeared in the Los Angeles Times.
For Sanders and the Times , the Arab village of Azariyah and the modern illegal city
of Maale Adumim are merely playing a role in an "international debate".
No wonder that parent-killer failed to get any respect with his request for mercy because he
was now an orphan. He did not have the support of his own personal lobby making a case for
orphans who have killed their parents.
The picture above is of a barrier in the Arab village of Azariyah (Bethany). The break
in the barrier has been covered by barbed wire. The wire is removed and replaced on a regular
basis by Israeli authorities, who built the barrier in the first place. This photo is from
the website of the World Council of Churches' Ecumenical Accompaniment Programme in Palestine and
Israel.
When did Kyiv's control of Crimea and the Donbass become critical to the national security
of the United States, when Russia has controlled Ukraine almost without interruption from
Catherine the Great in the 18th century to Mikhail Gorbachev in the late 20th century?
Among the reasons Trump is president is that he raised provocative questions about NATO and
Russia left unaddressed for three decades, as U.S. policy has been on cruise control since the
Cold War.
And these unanswered questions are deadly serious ones.
Do we truly believe that if Russia marched into Estonia, the U.S. would start attacking
the ships, planes and troops of a nation armed with thousands of tactical and strategic
nuclear weapons?
Would NATO allies Spain, Portugal and Italy declare war on Russia?
In 1914 and 1939, in solidarity with the mother country, Britain, Canada declared war on
Germany. Would Justin Trudeau's Canada invoke NATO and declare war on Putin's Russia -- for
Estonia or Latvia?
Under NATO, we are now committed to go to war for 28 nations. And the interventionists who
took us into Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen want U.S. war guarantees extended to other nations
even closer to Russia.
One day, one of these war guarantees is going to be called upon, and we may find that the
American people were unaware of that commitment, and are unwilling to honor it, especially if
the consequence is a major war with a nuclear power.
NATO was formed to protect Europe from the 'enemy' - Russia. But Russia hasn't shown or
proven its threat to Europe for decades - despite the manufactured scaremongering used to
keep the MIC funded. But now, the Chinese can (have) take(n) over that particular role so the
MIC funding is 'safe' and Russia should be taken in as a potential partner and valuable
marketplace for European countries to access.
A ground-based conflict with Russia is a ludicrous prospect - it would turn nuclear in
days - so any form of 'army' to protect those borders is nonsensical. It's not like the
sand-bandit countries where there is no real opposition (to spending) and conflicts can be
manufactured and engineered as a retail source of income.
Funny drawing, Vlad kisses Angela. In real life, Vlad is a big villain, but not a pervert.
How much schnapps needs to be drunk for Merkel to like? 1 liter or 2? This is a joke.
The USSR ceased to exist in 1991, the Russians withdrew their troops from Europe in 1995.
NATO was supposed to protect Europe from the invasion of the USSR - the invasion did not
happen, the USSR traded with Europe. Russia, this country with a normal capitalist economy
and 4 world religions on its territory that coexist peacefully. Russia trades with Europe and
does not attack. NATO is not intended to protect Europe from the Muslim tsunami, and there is
no united European army (not because Europe cannot, but because Europe does not want because
of love for the American "freebie", which is actually cheese in a mousetrap). So why do need
NATO - to suck money and resources from European countries? A good question.
Anyone with even an elementary understanding of geopolitics knows NATO is yet another arm
of US power, and a market for the US MIC.
We Europeans, with the notable exception of the always-on-the-wrong-side-of-history Poles,
do NOT want or need NATO. We are not threatened other than by the consequences of Zionist US
foreign policy.
Russia is our natural ally and reliable trading partner, as is Iran, as is China.
Putin foe says Fusion GPS was agent for Russia while
helping Clinton in 2016 by Jerry Dunleavy | November 26,
2019 07:14 PM
Print
this article T he company that conducted anti-Trump research for Hillary Clinton's 2016
campaign also worked for the Russian government, producing material that was used by Moscow to
pressure the United States, according to a longtime foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
Businessman Bill Browder alleged Fusion GPS acted as an agent for Russian interests in 2016,
when the country was trying to combat the Magnitsky Act and its sanctions on Russian
officials.
Browder, 55, championed the
Magnitsky Act, which was named for his tax lawyer, corruption
whistleblower Sergei Magnitsky. Magnitsky died in a Russian prison in 2009 after his
investigation for Browder's business uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars of Russian tax
fraud implicating Russian officials.
Putin, who despises the law, retaliated by banning American adoptions of Russian
children.
"The work that [Fusion GPS co-founder] Glenn Simpson did involved trying to change the
narrative of how Sergei Magnitsky was killed," said Browder. "He and the Russians paying him
wanted people in Washington to believe that Sergei Magnitsky died of natural causes instead of
being killed. Glenn Simpson claimed that Sergei Magnitsky wasn't a whistleblower and that he
was criminal. He also claimed that all of my testimonies to have Magnitsky sanctions imposed
were untrue."
Browder said he believes Fusion GPS's work violated the Foreign
Agents Registration Act . He sent a
complaint to the Department of Justice in 2016, and then-Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Chuck Grassley
urged the department to look into it in 2017.
"We did receive a response from the Justice Department, essentially stating that it can
neither confirm nor deny the existence of a specific FARA investigation," Grassley's office
told the Washington Examiner .
The DOJ declined the Washington Examiner 's request for comment, and a lawyer for
Fusion GPS didn't respond, though the company has previously said
"it was not required to register under FARA and it did not spread false information about
William Browder or Sergei Magnitsky."
Browder pointed out that Fusion GPS and Simpson began working for Russian lawyer Natalia
Veselnitskaya, who would later make headlines for
her meeting with Donald Trump Jr. at Trump Tower , in 2014 and provided her with
anti-Magnitsky research for years. Veselnitskaya, a former Russian prosecutor, maintained
Russian government ties, according to special counsel Robert Mueller, including lobbying
against 2016's expanded Magnitsky Act.
The DOJ alleged that Russia-owned real estate company Prevezon Holdings laundered fraudulent
money, and the
company later settled with the DOJ for $5.9 million in what the department
called "a $230 million Russian tax refund fraud scheme involving corrupt Russian
officials."
Veselnitskaya hired law firm BakerHostetler to help Prevezon in court, and the firm hired
Fusion GPS, which Simpson
confirmed in an interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee in August 2017.
"Browder was always eager to testify before Congress or appear on TV, but he did not want to
answer questions from BakerHostetler lawyers about his role as a whistleblower in the Prevezon
case. So the lawyers asked Fusion to figure out how they could get Browder's testimony. What
ensued was a legal game of cat and mouse in which Fusion developed information that would help
BakerHostetler subpoena Browder multiple times, forcing him to testify about his business
activities in Russia and earning Fusion his everlasting enmity. The U.S. government had staked
its case against Prevezon on the credibility of Browder. Yet he was reluctant to explain under
oath where he had obtained his evidence. It was an odd position for a human rights crusader to
take," Simpson and Fusion GPS co-founder Peter Fritsch wrote in their new book, Crime in
Progress: Inside the Steele Dossier and the Fusion GPS Investigation of Donald Trump .
"I participated in two all-day depositions, but the case was settled before it went to
court," said Browder. "Otherwise, I would've been on the witness stand."
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act documents released in 2018 show the DOJ and the FBI
made extensive use of Steele's dossier in 2016. Fusion GPS was
hired by Clinton's campaign and the DNC through the Perkins Coie law firm. Fusion GPS then
hired Steele, who allegedly reached out to Russian sources to put together his dossier.
Clinton's campaign manager Robby Mook said they
received briefings from Perkins Coie about Fusion GPS's findings during the campaign.
Browder contended Fusion GPS created a dossier against him, too, by using "false
information."
"Since the Russians were working so closely with Simpson on the anti-Magnitsky, anti-Bill
Browder dossier, it would seem unlikely to me that the Russians wouldn't know that there was
another dossier being created," Browder said.
Mueller's report on Russian election
interference detailed the June 2016 meeting involving Donald Trump Jr., campaign chairman
Paul Manafort, Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, and various Russians, including Veselnitskaya.
The meeting was pitched to Trump's campaign as an opportunity to get damaging information on
Clinton, but Veselnitskaya pulled a bait-and-switch and turned it into a presentation on
Russia's desire to repeal the Magnitsky Act.
Veselnitskaya presented a
short dossier echoing nearly identical Kremlin talking points that were passed
to a Republican congressman by the Russia prosecutor general's office in April 2016,
criticizing the Magnitsky Act and criticizing Browder as a "fugitive criminal" who was engaged
in a massive fraudulent financial scheme in support of Democrats. In his Senate testimony,
Simpson admitted to researching many of the allegations that appeared in Veselnitskaya's
talking points. When Donald Trump Jr. asked Veselnitskaya for proof, she did not provide any,
according to Mueller's report. Russian American lobbyist and former Soviet military officer
Rinat Akhmetshin and the Russians then complained about U.S. sanctions and mentioned Russian
adoption, and the Trump associates considered it a waste of time.
Browder believes that presentation was from Fusion GPS research, though Simpson denies any
foreknowledge of the Trump Tower meeting despite seeing Veselnitskaya the day before, the day
of, and the day after.
Simpson "was a person who was coordinating an advocacy campaign for Natalia Veselnitskaya,
and the Trump Tower meeting seemed to be part of that advocacy campaign," said Browder. "It
seems a little odd that he would know about everything else but not that one meeting."
Veselnitskaya attended the meeting with fellow Russian anti-Magnitsky Act advocates,
including Akhmetshin. Simpson told the
Senate that BakerHostetler instructed Fusion GPS to pass anti-Browder research to
Akhmetshin, who lobbied Congress against the Magnitsky Act. Akhmetshin, who is in Browder's
FARA complaint, criticized Browder in congressional
testimony in 2017 and filed a lawsuit against him
in 2018.
In January, the DOJ unsealed an
indictment against Veselnitskaya, now out of reach in Russia, alleging she'd obstructed
justice during the Prevezon case through secret collaboration with Russia.
Fusion GPS's co-founders said in their book that Prevezon's court case was separate from its
anti-Magnitsky Act activities.
"In early 2016, Prevezon -- apart from the court case -- had launched a lobbying campaign
against the Global Magnitsky Act, working with Akhmetshin, in a backhanded effort to discredit
Browder in the halls of Congress," they wrote.
The firm never registered under FARA, they said, because it was not lobbying.
"Fusion had no say in the matter if Prevezon decided to take evidence from a court case and
repurpose it. But all this would come back to haunt Fusion," they wrote.
"The difficulty here is that Trump thinks he's defending the military, when he's not"
No, this is not about Trump defending the military. What this is about is how Trump thinks war should be fought, "tough" in
his words. What he means by this is troops should be utterly ruthless. They should murder and kill civilians, as this strikes
fear into the enemy and shows them how "tough" we are. Plus of course Trump likes vengeance. No one should be surprised by this
as Trump has voiced strong support for war crimes, he wants "strong" torture, he wants the families of terrorists, women, children,
elderly murdered to punish the terrorists. Sad thing is, I've heard lots of support for this kind of warfighting among conservatives.
Trump has the mentality of an authoritarian dictator, thankfully he's not that smart.
Army Col. Keven Benson suggests Trump may have overplayed his hand, considering all the wreckage he wrought playing to his base
at the possible cost of his legitimacy among those in uniform. Benson charges, too, that the president's decision to reverse the
directives of senior Navy officers in disciplining one of their own might lose him support not only among senior officers, but
among the rank and file -- a constituency that voted overwhelmingly to put him in the White House.
"You know, these guys, these three knuckleheads -- Lorance, Golsteyn and Gallagher -- might be welcome on Fox News," Benson
says, "but they wouldn't be welcome in my platoon."
Damn.
If it is all the same to everyone, I think we shouldn't indulge in the kind of permissiveness that makes incidents like the
My Lai Massacre or the Abu Graib prisoner abuse scandal possible.
I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 - 31 May 1968). That is to be blunt, I served as an enlisted man which
is equivalent to a working class peon in civilian life or an Indentured servant who didn't have the money to pay his passage to
the American colony but promised to serve an extended period of apprenticeship to pay it off. In American society at that time
an indentured servant was one rung above being a slave. So I am no fan of the brass. And I have never been a big fan of our Commander-in-Chief
"Bone Spurs" given what I saw during my tour of duty in Vietnam.
But on his decision to deny the brass javing their way and giving them the fickle finger of fate, i.e. the middle finger if
you don't get my drift, I support President Trump wholeheartedly. Anyone who can piss off the brass and make them whine like melting
snowflakes must be doing something right. Also does Mr. Perry remember when President Richard Nixon pardoned Lt. William Calley
after being convicted for the infamous My Lai Massacre?
The American people overwhelmingly supported Nixon's pardon.They will again support President Trump's decision. They do not
read the TAC. Nor do they read any other high-falutin' journal of political opinion. But they are still patriots in their minds.
But being populists they are not necessarily patriots when it comes to the brass who in their thinking are the equivalent of the
1% in civilian life.
It's historical class warfare that fuels populism even though these populists have probably never read Karl Marx. So the brass
can disagree vehemently with Trump, They can also resign like Richard Spencer did and join the private sector. But they may be
in for a rude awakening when they try to give an order to average civilians and are instead given fickle fingers of fate. And
besides, let's be real about this latest crisis du jour, there are plenty more brass where these whiners came from. I bet you
at the Pentagon the brass are literally bumping into each other just walking down the halls.
But they swore allegiance to our Constitution. The president gives orders to them as commander-in-chief. Not the other way
around. Mr. Perry doesn't get how our country has changed since Trump won the election. I assume reading this essay, and if I
am wrong I apologize here, he probably has never broken bread with the great unwashed given how he identifies with military authority.
Trump was elected president surfing on a wave of populism. He played his populist cards in this tempest in a teapot. He gets it.
He is playing to his base. He wants to get re-elected.
But I have one question for Mr. Perry. Why didn't the brass resign en masse against the Iraq War or all these useless Forever
Wars we have been fighting?
These same people stood by and watched our military be socially engineered and gender normed to the point of incompetence. These
are Obama sycophants pure and simple.
A "crisis" in Special Ops is good. Anything that weakens Deepstate is good. Trump didn't make his decision on this basis; he only
needed to assuage his ego; but nevertheless he accidentally did the right thing.
I don't much care about this since I consider most all US military to be war criminals. I suppose I just note the cosmic justice
which punishes many of them with PTSD, drug addiction, and suicide. Now... let's get on with privatizing the VA.
The desk jockey keyboard warrior officers in the Pentagon want to make examples even if they have to use prosecutorial misconduct
to do it and that will help morale and discipline?
Trump should get rid of all the swamp Generals and Admirals. I'm sure they
will enjoy retirement making millions at Lockheed and Raytheon. Trump supports the Troops, not the Bureaucrats.
One gets the impression that the "Rules of Engagement" seem to have been the issue in the case discussed here but they were forgotten
in the bureaucratic squabble between the military and the White House.
People like Pete Hegseth call Chief Gallagher's service exemplary and repeat that he was acquitted of 'alleged war crimes'.
He was acquitted because a medic testified that after he and Gallagher stabilized a wounded, sedated prisoner after 20 minutes,
Gallagher inexplicably stabbed him (non-fatally) below the collar bone, stormed off, and then the medic suffocated him before
Iraqi security forces could torture him. Later Gallagher posed with his corpse.
This is not the sign of a well man or one who was making a snap, life or death decision. I'm not interested in punishing Gallagher
but this hero worship of our military and failure to acknowledge that these long deployments are breaking down our military is
self-deception. But I won't be surprised if I see a trifecta of Trump, Hegseth, and Gallagher at a campaign stop.
If we are being honest, I bet the IRGC has a better reputation than us in the M.E.
Julius Caesar was able to march on Rome because the soldiers gave their fealty to him over Rome. I find Trump's pardoning of soldiers
accused of war crimes deeply disturbing.
The first and foremost principle that must be maintained is that the President has complete authority over the military. Its one
of the central constructs of our republic. The most egregious offence was for Spencer to defy Trump's order. Regardless of what
one's opinion on the state of the special forces is, we can't go down that road. To say that Trump is destroying the commanders
authorities is bass ackwards. The US military, like it or not, MUST have civilians over and above them.
Having said that, I completely agree that there is something very bad wrong with the special forces and especially the Navy
Seals. My experience with Green Berets in the Vietnam era is that they were very effective in working with indigenous populations,
to include recruiting fighters to our side, spoke their language, were highly competent, tough as nails, and very humble. Out
of uniform, one would not even know they were Green Berets. Likewise almost all Army Rangers are equally humble. Green Berets
are recruited from the Rangers.
I never had any personal experiences with Navy Seals, but over the last decade or so at least, its obvious that a large percent
of them are a bunch of braggadocios chest thumpers. There is something seriously wrong with the Navy Seal recruitment program
or training or both. They have a very bad reputation of making their missions public, making jokes out of their security clearances
and never seem to be held accountable for such violations.
The regular military has always distrusted the SOF for the very reasons cited in this article. The Pentagon forbade the beret
until JFK overruled the brass in 1963.
The Founding CO of that vaunted Tier 1 unit Seal team 6 was convicted of federal crimes and spent time in prison in the 1980s.
The Green Beret affair in 1965 resulted in the murder of a allied civilian in Vietnam. The military grew these units beyond
reasonable levels and has misused and overused them since 9/11,
One is left to wonder whether the president has really overplayed his hand or these naval officers are simply Trump-haters as
is all too often the case these days. I'd have to go with let the Navy be the Navy and handle it's own business. But one has to
question whether these officers would've objected as strongly had it been Obama giving the orders?
What a disgrace... I'm a dovish, pacifist peacenik, but even I understand maintaining organizational order, respect for authority,
chain-of-command... (and have respect for many in the military for their desire and attempts to play by international rules and
by-the-book procedures.)
Trump & Gallagher (who strikes me as a sadist) are a disgrace and Fox News is especially beyond the pale, giving Gallagher
a platform to impugn his commanding officer! in public! Where has anyone ever gotten away with that before?... unbelievable.
I guess you could hope for some silver lining that this might undermine the DoD's global empire tendencies... but I'm not sure
this is a good way to get that done (ie leaving or promoting arrogant, cruel men like Gallagher, with the stench of by-gone barbarism
clinging to him, in the services:)
If I were one of this president's advisers, I would make one thing clear.
Don't tweet instructs to any department or department member because it is neither a proper channel for official communique's
nor is it conducive to to effectively, management and more times than not creates more trouble that it solves.
After listing the reasons why "twitter" is an inappropriate forum. i would of course be fired. But I am deeply concerned that
the president is conducting official business in open forums such as twitter.
The official in question was certainly being reasonable to request the order either direct communique or in riding. Given the
nature of twitter, it was a reasonable expectation.
Laugh: I think there are plenty of issues with the military justice system. But that is another matter best left out of twitter
feeds.
Why didn't anyone mention what the effect of these democracy wars are having on our soldiers considering they aren't actually
protecting the country but helping the Muslims move over to it, not just here but to Europe as well.
Most of the terrorist fighters are coming and going from other countries and travel freely oh and besides in Syria we're really
not fighting terrorists but over-throwing a government.
To top it all off these actions are helping to bankrupt our nation. I wonder how this plays for morale of our soldiers? I'm
sure many don't care, the majority of people indluding those just coming in ro the country seem to hate the country anyway so
why would anyone want to fight for them and then maybe there is another side who sees it all and cares, cares that they are losing
their nation. What about the "fight them over there but love them and bow down to their diverstity"? What happens when you realize
that you're not the savior you thought you would be and no one is greatful to have you around, they are fighting you endlessly
and ruthlessly while you're ttying to be a gentle invader, not fighting to win but to install democracy and can't figure out why
no one wants your gift of gentrification.
I'm not so sure I could take his rank from him either, maybe just give him a break from the war on the ground and the two sides
of the war in his head.
On the other hand we increasingly see an unwillingness by the military and Deep State to be ruled over by civilian government,
and instead of a commander in chief, to make of elected Presidents mere puppets for their consensus.
I disagree with Lt.Col Milburns (Ret.) The UCMJ is military law and military law is part of federal law. The president has the
right to pardon anyone convicted under the UCMJ but his authority stops where the law is concerned. The president isn't above
the law, he can countermand the conviction but he can't force the military to withdraw the A@D given by the individual services.
That remains the prerogative of the commanders. Discipline must be maintained and the commanders are responsible and accountable
for that discipline.
CIC is a title conferred on a civilian president, he states that they are responsible for the strategic decisions used to justify
the use of our military forces, the Presidents actions with regard to anything other than the pardon does not meet the criteria
of a strategic decision.
And if water isn't involved in the mission then there really isn't need for SEALS to be there. Mission creep on the part of
the Navy to increase Spec Ops budgets.
Rank has their privilege and as far as I know, PDJT is the CiC. So either you - the un-elected bureaucrat, shut up and follow
the order or put up and resign your commission.
"... 38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another 31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night. Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to scale back U.S. involvement overall. ..."
"... The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more support for negotiations and non-intervention: ..."
"... With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons ..."
"... There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they want. It is long past time that Washington started listening. ..."
he Eurasia Group Foundation's new survey of public
opinion on U.S. foreign policy finds that support for greater restraint continues to rise:
Americans favor a less aggressive foreign policy. The findings are consistent across a
number of foreign policy issues, and across generations and party lines.
The 2019 survey results show that most Americans support a more restrained foreign policy,
and it also shows an increase in that support since last year. There is very little support for
continuing the war in Afghanistan indefinitely, there is virtually no appetite for war with
Iran, and there is a decline in support for a hawkish sort of American exceptionalism. There is
still very little support for unilateral U.S. intervention for ostensibly humanitarian reasons,
and support for non-intervention has increased slightly:
In 2018, 45 percent of Americans chose restraint as their first choice. In 2019, that has
increased to 47 percent. Only 19 percent opt for a U.S.-led military response and 34 percent
favor a multilateral, UN-led approach to stop humanitarian abuses overseas.
38% of respondents want to end the war in Afghanistan now or within one year, and another
31% support negotiations with the Taliban to bring the war to an end. A broad majority of
Americans wants to bring the war to a conclusion. I already mentioned the survey's finding that
there is majority support for reducing the U.S. military presence in East Asia last night.
Americans not only want to get out of our interminable wars overseas, but they also want to
scale back U.S. involvement overall.
The report's working definition of American exceptionalism is a useful one: "American
exceptionalism is the belief that the foreign policy of the United States should be
unconstrained by the parochial interests or international rules which govern other countries."
This is not the only definition one might use, but it gets at the heart of what a lot of hawks
really mean when they use this phrase. While most Americans still say they subscribe to
American exceptionalism either because of what the U.S. represents or what it has done, there
is less support for these views than before. Among the youngest respondents (age 18-29), there
is now a clear majority that rejects this idea.
The survey asked respondents how the U.S. should respond if "Iran gets back on track with
its nuclear weapons program." That is a loaded and potentially misleading question, since Iran
has not had anything resembling a nuclear weapons program in 16 years, so there has been
nothing to get "back on track" for a long time. Framing the question this way is likely to
elicit a more hawkish response. In spite of the questionable wording, the results from this
year show that there is less support for coercive measures against Iran than last year and more
support for negotiations and non-intervention:
A strong majority of both Republicans and Democrats continue to seek a diplomatic
resolution involving either sanctions or the resumption of nuclear negotiations. This year,
there was an increase in the number of respondents across party lines who would want
negotiations to resume even if Iran is a nuclear power in the short term, and a bipartisan
increase in those who believe outright that Iran has the right to develop nuclear weapons to
defend itself. So while Republicans might be more likely than Democrats to believe Iran
threatens peace in the Middle East, voters in neither party are eager to take a belligerent
stand against it.
With only around 10% favoring it, there is almost no support for preventive war against
Iran. Americans don't want war with Iran even if it were developing nuclear weapons, and it
isn't doing that. It may be that the failure of the "maximum pressure" campaign has also
weakened support for sanctions. Support for the sanctions option dropped by almost 10 points
overall and plunged by more than 20 points among Republicans. In 2018, respondents were evenly
split between war and sanctions on one side or negotiations and non-intervention on the other.
This year, support for diplomacy and non-intervention in response to this imaginary nuclear
weapons program has grown to make up almost 60% of the total. If most Americans favor diplomacy
and non-intervention in this improbable scenario, it is safe to assume that there is even more
support for those options with the real Iranian government that isn't pursuing nuclear
weapons.
There is substantial and growing support for bringing our current wars to an end and
avoiding unnecessary conflicts in the future. This survey shows that there is a significant
constituency in America that desires a more peaceful and restrained foreign policy, and right
now virtually no political leaders are offering them the foreign policy that they say they
want. It is long past time that Washington started listening.
"... this is why the US went into Afghanistan, to get in between China & Iran ..."
"... The implication of what you just said is that the United States will never leave Afghanistan as in ever. Even if the Taliban take the whole country leaving only Kabul and its surroundings, the US will still opt to stay to have bases to launch drones and aircraft from to dominate the region. ..."
From the moment that the U.S. re-imposed sanctions in earnest on Iran late last year,
Pakistan has been looking at ways to resuscitate a deal that had been agreed in principle
before the U.S. unilaterally withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) last
May. This deal involved moving as much gas as Pakistan needs from Iran's Asalouyeh into
Pakistan's Gwadar and then on to Nawabshah for further transit if required. At the same time,
China has been in long-running discussions with Pakistan over the specific projects that
Beijing wanted to place in Pakistan as part of its 'One Belt, One Road' (OBOR) programme. All
the while, the U.S. has been
trying to stymie any such arrangement but OilPrice.com understands that the
Iran-China-Pakistan deal is now back on, and with a vengeance.
China's covert strategic deals are virtually always buried in interminably long anodyne
statements that belie the true laser-focused intentions of Beijing and this time is no
different. Joint statements just over a week ago from both Pakistan and China sides laid out
four projects that are part of a 'broader co-operation' between China and Pakistan. They all
sound relatively run-of-the-mill affairs, although still major undertakings, and are: the
upgrading of the Pakistan Refinery Karachi, the building out of a coal to liquid engineering
plant based on Thar coal at Thar Sindh, the utilisation of Thar Block VI for coal gasification
and fertiliser projects, and the finalisation of the feasibility study on South-North Gas
Pipeline Project that traverses Pakistan.
The fact that they are much more significant to the global geopolitical balance was
evidenced by the U.S.'s furious warnings to Pakistan, based on the fact that all of these
projects are in reality a key part of Beijing's planned China-Pakistan Economic Corridor
(CPEC), which, in turn, is a cornerstone of the OBOR initiative. Even as it was, U.S. South
Asia diplomat, Alice Wells, warned that CPEC – which, vitally, includes heavy financing
from Beijing and, therefore, a massive debt obligation to China by the host country over time
– will only profit Beijing. As it stands, the cost of just the first round of CPEC
projects has risen from an initial costing of US$48 billion to at least US$62 billion right
now. "It's clear, or it needs to be clear, that CPEC is not about aid," said Wells. "[The CPEC]
corridor is going to take a growing toll on the Pakistan economy, especially when the bulk of
payments start to come due in the next four to six years," she added. "Even if loan payments
are deferred, they are going to continue to hang over Pakistan's economic development
potential, hamstringing Prime Minister [Imran] Khan's reform agenda," she underlined.
The U.S.'s fury would have been much worse if it knew that, in fact, the 'finalisation of
the feasibility study on South-North Gas Pipeline Project' whilst true, is just proverbially
the tip of the iceberg. "The actual plan is to resuscitate the Iran-Pakistan oil and gas
pipelines over time, beginning with the gas pipeline, moving unlimited amounts of Iranian gas
to Pakistan, and then into China and the rest of Asia should it be needed," a senior source who
works closely with Iran's Petroleum Ministry told OilPrice.com last week. "It is being done in
conjunction with Russia, with the twin aims of firstly ensuring that China's 'One Belt, one
Road' initiative continues to run smoothly from the East through Pakistan and then Westwards
into Iran and onwards into Europe," he said. "And, secondly, to ensure for Russia that Iran's
gas does not start flowing freely into Europe as and when the U.S. sanctions are lifted, as
this would undermine Russia's power over Europe, which is founded on supplying over a third of
Europe's gas," he added.
For China, the new pipeline – integral to its plan of making Iran and Pakistan its
client states over time – has the added benefit of putting the U.S. on the backfoot in
the ongoing trade war. For Iran, the incentives of closer ties with China and Russia are
principally financial but also relate to China being just one of five Permanent Members on the
U.N. Security Council (the others being Russia, the U.S., the U.K., and France). For Pakistan
as well there is the added incentive that it is tired of being lambasted by the U.S. for its
duplicity in dealing with international terrorism. Not that long ago, the U.S. accused Pakistan
of supporting the Taliban (correct but it was catalysed by the U.S.'s key Middle Eastern
'ally', Saudi Arabia), Al Qaeda (correct but catalysed, funded and logistically supported by
the Saudis), the Haqqani network (correct but also funded and logistically supported by the
Saudis), and Islamic State (sort of correct but that was also mainly, of course, the Saudis)
against U.S. forces, despite taking hundreds of billions of dollars in aid payments.
Islamabad has also been an outspoken critic of renewed U.S.
sanctions against Iran. Just after the first wave of the new sanctions were rolled out on 7
August last year, Pakistan's Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Faisal said that: "We are
examining the implications of the U.S.'s re-imposed sanctions on Iran, however, Pakistan, being
a sovereign state, reserves the right to pursue legitimate economic and commercial interests
while respecting the international legal regime." Later, in his inaugural speech as Pakistan's
then-new Prime Minister, Imran Khan, called for improving ties with the country's immediate
neighbours, including Iran, from whose President, Hassan Rouhani, he also accepted an
invitation for an early state visit to Tehran. Bubbling back at that time to the top of the
list of practical initiatives that could be advanced quickly was the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline
(IPP), which, according to the Iran source: "[Imran] Khan personally backs and has made a
priority project."
In practical terms, Pakistan certainly needs all the sustainable energy sources it can get.
As it stands, the country has seen domestic natural gas production stagnate at around 4 billion
cubic feet per day (Bcf/d) against demand of more than 6 Bcf/d, which has led to repeated load
shedding in many major cities of up to 15 hours a day. Moreover, the supply and demand
disparity is set to become even worse very soon, as industry estimates project that Pakistan's
domestic gas production is set to fall to nearer 2 Bcf/d by 2020, due to aging infrastructure,
whilst demand will rise to around 8 Bcf/d by the same time, driven by rising demand from the
power, industry, and domestic sectors as the economy continues to grow by around 5% per year.
According to Pakistan's Ministry of Energy (MoE), the planned 0.75 Bcf/d of gas (for five
years, in the first instance) that would flow from Iran's supergiant South Pars natural gas
field would add around 4,000 megawatts (MW) of electricity into the Pakistan grid, via a direct
Iran-Pakistan pipeline.
The original agreement for the IPP, signed between Iran and Pakistan in 1995, was predicated
on the pipeline running from Iran's supergiant South Pars non-associated natural gas field into
Karachi but the most recent iteration of the route involves the gas running from Iran's
Asalouyeh and into Pakistan's Gwadar and then on to Nawabshah. The latest projection of the
cost of the pipeline is around US$3.5 billion, according to industry sources, although US$2.5
billion of this has already been invested in the 900 kilometre stretch on Iran's side that has
already been completed. Pakistan's 780 kilometre stretch has yet to be started.
Given the geopolitical importance of both Iran and Pakistan to Russia and China, though, as
analysed in greater depth in my
new book on the global oil markets , finding the money for the remainder of the project
will not be a problem at all For China, there is a threefold motivation. First, its plans to
integrate the IPP into the CPEC project means that Gwadar is earmarked to be a key logistical
node in China's 'One Belt, One Road' initiative. Second, it wants to keep Iran as one of its
key suppliers of oil and gas in the future. And third, it regards supporting those who the U.S.
opposes as being a central plank of its foreign policy, even over and above the short-term
tactic of wrong-footing the U.S. in the ongoing trade war. "One immediate reaction [of China to
the burgeoning trade war with the US], will be to seek to expand and broaden economic links by
offering improved market access to non-U.S. companies, by strengthening supply chain links and
by replacing American commodities with imports from emerging market nations," according to
Jonathan Fenby, China research chairman at TS Lombard, in London.
"There is a tectonic shift going on that goes well beyond the tariff war, as China
seeks to assert itself regionally and tries to establish a wider global role for itself while
the U.S. moves from the 'constructive engagement' of the Clinton, Bush and Obama
administrations to regarding China as a 'strategic competitor'," he added. The U.S. clearly
sees it the same way, not just based on the latest comments by Wells but also on the fact that
as long ago as January 2010, the U.S. formally requested that Pakistan abandon the project in
return for which it would receive assistance from Washington for the construction of a
liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal and for the importing of electricity from Tajikistan
through Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor.
The implication of what you just said is that the United States will never leave
Afghanistan as in ever. Even if the Taliban take the whole country leaving only Kabul and its
surroundings, the US will still opt to stay to have bases to launch drones and aircraft from
to dominate the region.
So in twenty years time we might see a story how some young soldier has just arrived
in-country to Afghanistan who will be proud that his grandfather took part in the original
invasion and that he is now following in his grandfather's and father's footsteps.
China, the new world-engineers, has gotta be looking at Pakistan as an industrial water
source. They're probably already building several dams to catch the runoff. Perhaps mining
too – same mountains as Afghanistan, just the other side, no?
China has the money and
manpower. Iran the energy. In fact, we could be thinking the same thing.
Ambassador Wells' warning "..is going to take a growing toll on the Pakistan economy,
especially when the bulk of payments start to come due.." indicates the lack of a mirror in
the State Dept or a copy of the text of the 13th IMF 'bailout' signed last July.
In 2001 and in 2002 Congress passed authorizations for war. While not declarations of war,
these mandates, each titled an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) provided the
legal framework for attacks against al-Qaeda in 2001 and in 2002 for the Iraq War. Both AUMFs
are still in effect today. As Congress considers its annual authorization to fund the Pentagon
our current members of Congress, both in the House and the Senate, are in positions of
responsibility and ability to repeal these AUMFs.
The effect of the AUMFs :
Based on FBI and
journalist
investigations, al Qaeda had between 200-400 members worldwide in September of 2001. Al Qaeda
now has affiliates in every corner of the world, their
strength measures in the tens of thousands of members, and they control territory in Yemen,
Syria and parts of Africa. In Afghanistan, the Taliban now control as much as 60 percent of the
territory and, with regards to international terrorism, where there was one international
terror group in Afghanistan in 2001, the Pentagon now
reports twenty such groups .
ISIS was formerly al Qaeda in Iraq, an organization that came into existence solely due to
the invasion and occupation of Iraq by the United States. US military
,
intelligence agencies, journalists
and other
international organizations continually report that the reason people join such groups is
not out of ideology or religious devotion, but out of resistance to invasion and occupation,
and in response to the killing of family, friends and neighbors by foreign and government
forces. It is clear the AUMFs have worsened terrorism, not defeated it.
The cost of the AUMFs :
More
than 7,000 US service members have been killed and more than 50,000 wounded in the wars
since 9/11. Of the 2.5 million troops deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as many as 20% percent are
afflicted with PTSD, while 20 percent
more may have traumatic brain injury. The Veterans Administration reports Afghan and Iraq
veterans have rates of suicide
4-10 times higher than their civilian peers. This means almost two Afghan and Iraq veterans
are die by suicide every day. Do the math and it is clear more Afghan and Iraq veterans are
dying by suicide than by combat. The cost to the people overseas to whom we have brought these
wars is hard to grasp.
Between one and four million people have been killed, directly and indirectly, by these
wars, while tens of millions more have been wounded or psychologically traumatized, and tens of
millions more made homeless – the cause of the worst refugee crisis since WWII.
Financially, the cost of these wars is immense, at least $6 trillion. Of a vast many statistics that
compose this incomprehensible figure of $6 trillion, is that nearly $1 trillion of it is simply
just interest and debt payments. For any American, Democrat, Republican or independent, these
interest and debt payments alone should cause them to reconsider these wars.
The AUMFs have allowed for wars to be waged without end by the executive branch, wars the
American people, including veterans, say
have not been worth fighting . Congress has the ability and responsibility to help bring
about an end to these wars by ensuring the repeal of the 2001 and 2002 AUMFs. Join the debate
on Facebook More articles by: Matthew Hoh
Matthew Hoh is a member of the advisory boards of Expose Facts, Veterans For Peace and
World Beyond War. In 2009 he resigned his position with the State Department in Afghanistan in
protest of the escalation of the Afghan War by the Obama Administration. He previously had been
in Iraq with a State Department team and with the U.S. Marines. He is a Senior Fellow with the
Center for International Policy.
It's a tough road being a contrarian on Russia. This is especially true today when the
entirety of the U.S. and European political system is aligned to demonize Russia at nearly
every level.
And the main reason for this is that Russia under President Vladimir Putin refuses to do the
West's bidding both at home and abroad. The central tenet of U.S. foreign policy is that U.S.
concerns, no matter where they are, are supreme and everyone else's are subordinate.
Russia under Putin doesn't play that game. He hasn't for nearly twenty years now. This is
not to say, of course, that objectively speaking Putin is a good man or even a good leader. In
studying Putin for the past seven years I've come to one inescapable conclusion.
He was exactly the leader Russia needed to dig the country out of the abyss it found itself
in when he took over. He is exactly the kind of leader Russia needs to guide it through the
next period of history.
So much analysis of Putin and Russia is so thoroughly ideologically tainted that, on that
basis alone, it should be dismissed out of hand. And it has been successful enough that even
the best analysts who are truly skeptical of the U.S. narrative still get some of the basics
about Russia and Putin horribly wrong.
I've been recommending Russia as an investment to people since early 2015 and its
state-owned gas giant Gazprom (NYSE:OGZPY) since mid-2014. I haven't wavered in that
recommendation, despite the ups and downs.
And the reason for this is simple. While markets do not trade on fundamentals every day,
over the long run a market's or stock's fundamentals do eventually overcome sentiment and
assert themselves on the price.
So, in 2014 when oil prices collapsed so did the price of Gazprom. The ruble went through a
crisis intended to oust Putin from power in revenge for his thwarting the U.S. takeover of
Crimea.
Putin's deft handling of the ruble crisis and Russia's impeccable national balance sheet
allowed both to survive and begin digging the country out of the latest hole placed in front of
it.
Since then the U.S. has piled on obstacle after obstacle in front of Russia in the global
marketplace for capital. The Magnitsky Act has been used like a bludgeon to scare investors
away from the land of the Evil Putin.
False flags and overt provocations to war in Syria, Ukraine and the U.K. have slowed the
pace of investment in Russia's capital markets. Gazprom for years languished both because of
the political risks of U.S. pressure in Europe to stop first the South Stream and then the
Nordstream 2 pipelines.
Frivolous lawsuits from Ukraine, the EU and the Baltics have dogged the company for years.
The EU has changed its laws to retroactively try and gain a legal upper hand on Gazprom's
pricing of natural gas. But, ultimately, none of it has worked.
Slowly, but surely, Russia's fundamentals and its stable and improving political situation
are winning the hearts of investors looking for yield in a yield-free world.
"They've made themselves bulletproof," says James Barrineau, co-head of emerging-market
debt for Schroders Investment in New York.
"They can pay off all their foreign debts with their central bank reserves. Plus, they're
cutting interest rates. The currency is very stable. And they have room on the fiscal side to
spend on their economy."
The first point is something I pointed out in 2015. The numbers were this good then. And
yet, the ratings agencies, like dutiful quislings, cut Russia's ratings to junk status.
And they did this against fundamentals like having enough money to pay off the entire
country's debt load, public and private, and at the time at
13.3% debt-to-GDP ratio . Today that ratio stands, after a currency crisis, at just
11.8%.
Someone remind me what the U.S.'s is?
As always, what the world responded to was the hardship of the U.S. all but kicking Russia
out of the dollar-funding markets. The only step not taken against Russia was removing it from
the SWIFT interbank messsaging system.
That wasn't done for the same reasons that it wasn't reinstated by Trump on Iran after he
pulled out of the JCPOA. It doesn't work. All it does is hasten the rate at which the country
learns to work without U.S. dollars.
By 2019 Russia, China and Iran have alternatives to SWIFT to prosecute international trade
outside of the U.S.'s purview. Once those transactions leave SWIFT the U.S. loses a very
powerful monitoring tool.
And in surviving this full court press to destroy Russia financially and keep capital from
fleeing there the U.S. has made it a stronger destination today than it would have ever been
had it not gone this route.
Instead of isolating Russia financially and destroying the ruble, it actually made the
dollar more suspect and raised the profile of the ruble across central Asia.
President Trump has weaponized the dollar to such an extent that he's raised the costs of
using it for countries that do significant business with Russia above that of the ruble.
And it starts with the political stability created by Putin and his deft diplomatic corps,
led by Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov. Putin has made it a point of always keeping his promises
on the world stage, no matter how rocky the relationship.
Trump on the other hand has unilaterally bullied and sanctioned most of the world for not
doing what he wants. Putin keeps making this point over and over again, Trump is destroying the
long-term viability of the dollar. The key to that statement being 'long-term.'
Because a country that acts honorably on the world stage, encourages trade over blackmail,
honors its contracts even when the rules are arbitrarily changed against them and stands by its
allies will generate the kind of good will that will increase the willingness of people locally
to accept that country's currency.
Since Trump went on his sanction the world policy, the ruble has been on a tear in
international markets. While mildly strengthening versus the dollar (0.8%), the ruble has risen
11% versus the total basket of its trading partners (REER).
This is the clearest picture I can paint of the ruble decoupling from the U.S. dollar and
it's a trend worth watching into the future. Because as the dollar rises into the teeth of the
brewing financial crisis (think European banking meltdown currently underway) the ruble will
act as a port in the storm for those economies terminally short dollars.
With the Bank of Russia finally letting its boot off the neck of the Russian economy by
lowering interest rates aggressively over the past four months, the Ruble hasn't degraded one
bit.
If anything all this has done is strengthen demand for the ruble as pent-up demand in the
form of huge domestic savings now can be deployed as new business loans and corporate bond
issues at far better rates a few months ago.
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That said the Bank of Russia is still behind the curve by looking at the spread between the
Overnight lending rate (a proxy for the benchmark rate) and the yield on a 1 year government
note.
All that's happened since Elvira Nabullina began cutting rates is demand for Russian debt
has skyrocketed as investors in the West search for safe returns and across Emerging Markets
starved of dollars. And while the ruble is nowhere close to overthrowing the dollar on the
global stage and likely never will, it only takes a small shift in demand to create outsized
effects on markets as comparatively small as Russia's.
The rate of de-dollarization of the Russia economy is not as fast as the headlines would
have you believe, but it is happening. The ruble now accounts for more than 30% of Russian
exports and 20% of its overall international trade.
The world is insanely short dollars at this point and will continue to be for the next
decade. That much is certain. It will fuel a massive dollar rally ove the next few years.
But Russia isn't alone in the woods anymore on this path. India, Turkey, China, Iran and
others understand what that reliance on the dollar means during economic downturns. And they
are working with Putin to lay the groundwork to keep their economies from collapsing as the
dollars flow out.
This is why Putin and Xi have been adamant about building ways to bypass the dollar for
local trade. It will allow the dollar short positions of local companies to fade just like did
for Russian companies after the ruble crisis in 2015.
Now that we're four years beyond the worst of that and the political reality surrounding
Russia far better than it was then, its stock market is booming, demand for its debt is rising
and contrarian investors are looking for the next generational play to park their cash despite
the obstacles the U.S. places in front of them.
The key for this will be the EU, as Russia's trade with the EU in euros is nearly as big as
it is in dollars now. This is what will prompt the rescinding of sanctions against Russia this
year.
When that happens you can expect a big pop in the Moscow Exchange.
"... America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the 1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted. ..."
"... Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent, sensitive type would be concerned by it. ..."
"... America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over" as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened. ..."
"... Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington. ..."
"... Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even insist they do so. ..."
The motives for so many Western spies serving the Soviet Union – and in the 1940s and
1950s the Soviets had the best "humint" on earth – were rather idealistic. This was
largely true for the Cambridge Circle in Britain. They were concerned that America was going
to "lord it over" the Russians and everyone else.
America was feared by many intellectuals, both in the United States and Britain of the
1940s and 1950s, and their fears were not unwarranted.
Big, brawny America – its power establishment – very much was inclined
towards dominating the world after WWII. The whole tone of the American press and speeches of
major political figures in the period was actually quite frightening. Any highly intelligent,
sensitive type would be concerned by it.
You certainly did not have to be a communist to feel that way, but being one assisted with
access to important Soviet contacts. They sought you out.
America wanted a monopoly on nuclear weapons, so that it would be in an unassailable
position as it built its imperial apparatus after WWII, the time effectively it "took over"
as world imperial power with so many potential competitors flattened.
It made little secret of its desire to keep such a monopoly, so brilliant people like
Oppenheimer would be well aware of something they might well regard as ominous.
Later, the Pentagon actually planned things like an all-out first strike on the
Soviets – it did that more once as well as doing so later for China – so there
were indeed plenty of dark intentions in Washington.
A hugely important general like MacArthur was unblinkingly ready in 1950 to use atomic
weapons in the Korean War to destroy North Korea's connections with China.
I read several major biographies of Oppenheimer, and there is little to nothing concerning
Soviet intelligence work. When I came across the Sudoplatov book with its straightforward
declaration of Oppenheimer's assistance, it was difficult to know how to weigh the claim.
Spies and ex-spies often put disinformation into their books. Sometimes officials even
insist they do so.
Judging by what is suggested here, if Oppenheimer did help, it was in subtle ways like
letting Klaus Fuchs, a fellow scientist and a rather distinguished one (but a Soviet spy),
look at certain papers. But the scientific community always has some considerable tendency to
share information, a tendency having nothing to do with spying.
In general, it should be understood, that Oppenheimer, despite all his brilliance, was a
rather disturbed man all his life. Quite early on, as just one example, he attempted to
poison someone he did not like. Only pure luck prevented the man's eating a lethally-laced
apple. There were other disturbing behaviors too.
Later they believed that equality of superpower status for the Soviet Union would
contribute to world peace.
How dumb were these "scientists". Everyone knows that once Soviet Union fell, peace and
freedom and democracy are flowering all over the world and United States are not waging any
wars anymore.
Agreed. However, an addendum, you seem to have forgotten to mention Russia's aggressive
training whales to spy on Norway, crickets to drive the US embassy in Cuba nuts, weaponizing
Masha and the bear, using Pokemon to sow the seeds of discord, contemplating on freezing up a
few states, any many others the mere thought of gets one wound up.
"... "Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount of influence over both parties." ..."
"... She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so serious about what's at stake here." ..."
"... Democratic presidential primary debate, Wednesday, Nov. 20, 2019, in Atlanta, via the AP. ..."
In a rare moment with MSNBC's Chris Matthews, Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi
Gabbard explained why the leading figures in her party are war hawks. Far from days of the
Democrats feigning to have any semblance of an 'anti-war' platform (only convenient for Liberal
activism during the Bush years, but fizzling out under Obama), today's party attempts to
out-hawk Republicans at every turn.
"I'm looking at the Democratic establishment figures," Matthews introduced, "people I
normally like. John Kerry, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton. You go down the list. They all supported
the war in Iraq. Why were they hawks? " (Though we might ask, what do you mean, "
were ?"). "Why so many Democrats with a party that's not hawkish, why are so many of
their leaders hawks?" Matthews reiterated.
In the segment, Matthews heaps rare praise on Tulsi for being "out there all alone tonight
fighting against the neocons."
"Yeah," Tulsi answers. "I point to two things. One is you have the foreign policy
establishment and the military-industrial complex in Washington that carries such a huge amount
of influence over both parties."
She continues, "There are campaign contributions, the influence that these contractors
have in this pay-to-play culture , this corrupt culture in Washington, but you also just have
people who don't understand foreign policy and who lack the experience to make these critical
decisions that impact our lives and the safety and security of the American people. This is so
serious about what's at stake here."
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The interview happened immediately after this week's fifth Democratic debate Wednesday night
in Atlanta, and after pundits have continued to complain that Gabbard is a 'single issue
candidate'.
However, is there any candidate in her party or in the GOP saying these things?
We find ourselves in a rare moment of agreement with MSNBC's Matthews: she is "out there all
alone tonight fighting against the neocons." Tags Politics
From the point of view of election promise of detente with Russia, Trump clearly betrayed them. He was a neocon puppet
from the beginning to the end, His policy was not that different from hypothetical policy of Hillary administration.
Notable quotes:
"... Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump's "softness" towards Moscow. In fact, she writes, the U.S. president has actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with zero resistance from either party. ..."
"... It would be understandable if you were unaware that Trump has been escalating tensions with Moscow more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall; it's a fact that neither of America's two mainstream political factions care about, so it tends to get lost in the shuffle. Trump's opposition is interested in painting him as a sycophantic Kremlin crony, and his supporters are interested in painting him as an antiwar hero of the people, but he is neither ..."
"... Anyone who has not read Orwell's 1984 should do so sooner rather than later. The official control of narrative in the novel is what we are presently drowning in. To watch it work so spectacularly is beyond depressing. ..."
"... The complete corruption of Western MSM is the reason many of us regularly read Caitlin and Consortium, all desperately trying to get some sort of a reality-check in an otherwise "Orwellian" media environment. ..."
"... The simple truth here is that in regard to the military (read 'military complex', which includes the deep state and shadow government [intelligence agencies] every president is a puppet. ..."
"... The coup in Ukraine was a major provocation to Russia, but was also a repeat of the Americans' rape and pillaging of Russia under Yeltsin, Clinton's puppet. The per capita median income of Ukrainians has dropped in half from 2013, despite pumping $billions in from the US. ..."
"... Failing impeachment, from the attempts by the Clinton Campaign, to the Congressional sanctions on Russia, to sabotage of Syria withdrawal to the Mueller hoax, to the State Dept hawks protests on Ukraine, the effort to prevent Trump from following through on his campaign promise has been the primary goal of the intelligence community. It is instructive to note that the phone call that has led to the current impeachment inquiry was made on July 26, the day following Robert Mueller's clownish testimony before Congress, effectively ending that line of impeachment. ..."
"... Also note that although the phone call was made in July, nothing was said about it until after John Bolton was fired in September, 2 months later. ..."
Caitlin Johnstone discredits a CNN listicle on Trump's "softness" towards Moscow. In fact,
she writes, the U.S. president has actually been consistently reckless towards Moscow, with
zero resistance from either party.
CNN has published a fascinatingly manipulative and falsehood-laden article titled "
25 times Trump
was soft on Russia ," in which a lot of strained effort is poured into building the case
that the U.S. president is suspiciously loyal to the nation against which he has spent his
administration escalating dangerous new cold war aggressions.
The items within the CNN article consist mostly of times in which Trump said some words or
failed to say other words; "Trump has repeatedly praised Putin," "Trump refused to say Putin is
a killer," "Trump denied that Russia interfered in 2016," "Trump made light of Russian
hacking," etc. It also includes the
completely false but oft-repeated narrative
that "Trump's team softened the GOP platform on Ukraine", as well as the utterly ridiculous and thoroughly
invalidated claim that "Since intervening in Syria in 2015, the Russian military has
focused its airstrikes on anti-government rebels, not ISIS."
CNN's 25 items are made up almost entirely of narrative and words; Trump said a nice thing
about Putin, Trump said offending things to NATO allies, Trump thought about visiting Putin in
Russia, etc. In contrast, the 25 items which I am about to list do not consist of narrative at
all, but rather the actual movement of actual concrete objects which can easily lead to an
altercation from which there may be no re-emerging. These items show that when you ignore the
words and narrative spin and look at what this administration has actually been doing ,
it's clear to anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty that, far from being "soft" on
Russia, Trump has actually been consistently reckless in the one area where a US president must
absolutely always maintain a steady hand. And he's been doing so with zero resistance from
either party.
It would be understandable if you were unaware that Trump has been escalating tensions with
Moscow more than any other president since the fall of the Berlin Wall; it's a fact that
neither of America's two mainstream political factions care about, so it tends to get lost in
the shuffle. Trump's opposition is interested in painting him as a sycophantic Kremlin crony,
and his supporters are interested in painting him as an antiwar hero of the people, but he is
neither. Observe:
1. Implementing a Nuclear Posture Review with a more aggressive stance
toward Russia
Last year Trump's Department of Defense rolled out a Nuclear Posture Review which
CNN itself called "its toughest line yet against Russia's resurgent nuclear forces."
"In its newly released Nuclear Posture Review, the Defense Department has focused much of
its multibillion nuclear effort on an updated nuclear deterrence focused on Russia," CNN
reported last year.
This revision of nuclear policy includes the new implementation of
"low-yield" nuclear weapons , which, because they are designed to be more "usable" than
conventional nuclear ordinances,
have been called "the most dangerous weapon ever" by critics of this insane policy. These
weapons, which can remove some of the inhibitions that mutually assured destruction would
normally give military commanders, have already been rolled off the assembly line.
2.
Arming Ukraine
Lost in the gibberish about Trump temporarily withholding military aide to supposedly
pressure a Ukrainian government who was never even aware of being
pressured is the fact that arming Ukraine against Russia is an entirely new policy that was
introduced by
the Trump administration in the first place. Even the Obama administration, which was
plenty hawkish toward Russia in its own right, refused to implement this extremely provocative escalation
against Moscow. It was not until Obama was replaced with the worst Putin puppet of all time
that this policy was put in place.
3. Bombing Syria
Another escalation Trump took against Russia which Obama wasn't hawkish enough to also do
was bombing the Syrian government, a longtime ally of Moscow. These airstrikes in April 2017 and
April 2018 were perpetrated in retaliation for chemical weapons use allegations that there
is
no legitimate reason to trust at this point.
4. Staging coup attempts in
Venezuela
Venezuela, another Russian ally, has been the subject of relentless coup attempts
from the Trump administration which persist unsuccessfully to this very day .
Trump's attempts to topple the Venezuelan government have been so violent and aggressive that
the starvation sanctions which he has implemented are believed to have
killed tens of thousands of Venezuelan civilians .
"Signals coming from certain capitals indicating the possibility of external military
interference look particularly disquieting," the Russian Foreign Ministry said. "We warn
against such reckless actions, which threaten catastrophic consequences."
5. Withdrawing
from the INF treaty
For a president who's "soft" on Russia, Trump has sure been eager to keep postures between
the two nations extremely aggressive in nature. This administration has withdrawn from the 1987
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, prompting UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres to
declare that
"the world lost an invaluable brake on nuclear war." It appears entirely possible that Trump
will continue to adhere to the John Bolton school of nuclear weapons treaties until they all
lie in tatters, with the administration strongly criticizing the crucial New START
Treaty which expires in early 2021.
Some particularly demented Russiagaters try to argue that Trump withdrawing from these
treaties benefits Russia in some way. These people either (A) believe that treaties only go one
way, (B) believe that a nation with an economy the size of South
Korea can compete with the U.S. in an arms race, (C) believe that Russians are immune to
nuclear radiation, or (D) all of the above. Withdrawing from these treaties benefits no one but
the military-industrial complex.
6. Ending the Open Skies Treaty
"The Trump administration has taken steps toward leaving a nearly three-decade-old agreement
designed to reduce the risk of war between Russia and the West by allowing both sides to
conduct reconnaissance flights over one another's territories," The Wall Street Journalreported last month , adding that the
administration has alleged that "Russia has interfered with American monitoring flights while
using its missions to gather intelligence in the US."
Again, if you subscribe to the bizarre belief that withdrawing from this treaty benefits
Russia, please think harder. Or ask the Russians themselves how they feel about it:
"US plans to withdraw from the Open Skies Treaty lower the threshold for the use of nuclear
weapons and multiply the risks for the whole world, Russian Security Council Secretary Nikolai
Patrushev said," Sputnik
reports .
"All this negatively affects the predictability of the military-strategic situation and
lowers the threshold for the use of nuclear weapons, which drastically increases the risks for
the whole humanity," Patrushev said.
"In general, it is becoming apparent that Washington intends to use its technological
leadership in order to maintain strategic dominance in the information space by actually
pursuing a policy of imposing its conditions on states that are lagging behind in digital
development," he added.
7. Selling Patriot missiles to Poland
"Poland signed the largest arms procurement deal in its history on Wednesday, agreeing with
the United States to buy Raytheon Co's Patriot missile defense system for $4.75 billion in a
major step to modernize its forces against a bolder Russia," Reuters
reported last year .
8. Occupying Syrian oil fields
The Trump administration has been open about
the fact that it is not only maintaining a military presence in Syria to control the
nation's oil, but that it is doing so in order to deprive the
nation's government of that financial resource. Syria's ally Russia strongly opposes this,
accusing the Trump administration of nothing short of "international state banditry".
"In a statement, Russia's defense ministry said Washington had no mandate under
international or US law to increase its military presence in Syria and said its plan was not
motivated by genuine security concerns in the region," Reutersreported last
month.
"Therefore Washington's current actions – capturing and maintaining military control
over oil fields in eastern Syria – is, simply put, international state banditry,"
Russia's defense ministry said.
9. Killing Russians in Syria
Reports have placed Russian casualties anywhere between a handful and
hundreds , but whatever the exact number the U.S. military is known to have killed Russian
citizens as part of the Trump administration's ongoing Syria occupation in an altercation last
year.
exact number the U.S. military is known to have killed Russian citizens as part of the Trump
administration's ongoing Syria occupation in an altercation last year.
10. Tanks in
Estonia
Within weeks of taking office,
Trump was already sending Abrams battle tanks, Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and other
military hardware right up to Russia's border as part of a NATO operation.
"Atlantic Resolve is a demonstration of continued US commitment to collective security
through a series of actions designed to reassure NATO allies and partners of America's
dedication to enduring peace and stability in the region in light of the Russian intervention
in Ukraine," the Defense Department said in a statement.
11. War ships in the Black
Sea
12. Sanctions
Trump approved new sanctions against Russia on August 2017. CNN reports the following:
"US President Donald Trump approved fresh sanctions on Russia Wednesday after Congress
showed overwhelming bipartisan support for the new measures," CNN reported at
the time . "Congress passed the bill last week in response to Russia's interference in the
2016 US election, as well as its human rights violations, annexation of Crimea and military
operations in eastern Ukraine. The bill's passage drew ire from Moscow -- which responded by
stripping 755 staff members and two properties from US missions in the country -- all but
crushing any hope for the reset in US-Russian relations that Trump and Russian President
Vladimir Putin had called for."
"A full-fledged trade war has been declared on Russia," said Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev in
response.
13. More sanctions
"The United States imposed sanctions on five Russian individuals on Wednesday, including the
leader of the Republic of Chechnya, for alleged human rights abuses and involvement in criminal
conspiracies, a sign that the Trump administration is ratcheting up pressure on Russia," The
New York Timesreported in December
2017 .
14. Still more sanctions
"Trump just hit Russian oligarchs with the most aggressive sanctions yet," reads
a Vice headline from April of last year.
"The sanctions target seven oligarchs and 12 companies under their ownership or control, 17
senior Russian government officials, and a state-owned Russian weapons trading company and its
subsidiary, a Russian bank," Vice reports. "While the move is aimed, in part, at Russia's role
in the U.S. 2016 election, senior U.S. government officials also stressed that the new measures
seek to penalize Russia's recent bout of international troublemaking more broadly, including
its support for Syrian President Bashar Assad and military activity in eastern
Ukraine."
"The Trump administration on Thursday imposed new sanctions on a dozen individuals and
entities in response to Russia's annexation of Crimea," The Hill
reported in November of last year. "The group includes a company linked to Bank Rossiya and
Russian businessman Yuri Kovalchuk and others accused of operating in Crimea, which the U.S.
says Russia seized illegally in 2014."
17. Oh hey, more sanctions
"Today, the United States continues to take action in response to Russian attempts to
influence US democratic processes by imposing sanctions on four entities and seven individuals
associated with the Internet Research Agency and its financier, Yevgeniy Prigozhin. This action
increases pressure on Prigozhin by targeting his luxury assets, including three aircraft and a
vessel," reads
a statement by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from September of this year.
18.
Secondary sanctions
Secondary
sanctions are economic sanctions in which a third party is punished for breaching the
primary sanctions of the sanctioning body. The U.S. has leveled sanctions against both
China and
Turkey for
purchasing Russian S-400 air defense missiles, and it is
threatening to do so to India as well.
19. Forcing Russian media to register as
foreign agents
Both RT and
Sputnik have been forced to register as "foreign agents" by the Trump administration. This
classification forced the outlets to post a disclaimer on content, to report their activities
and funding sources to the Department of Justice twice a year, and could arguably place an unrealistic
burden on all their social media activities as it submits to DOJ micromanagement.
20.
Throwing out Russian diplomats
The Trump administration joined some 20 other nations in casting out scores of
Russian diplomats as an immediate response to the Skripal poisoning incident in the
U.K.
21. Training Polish and Latvian fighters "to resist Russian aggression"
"US Army Special Forces soldiers completed the first irregular and unconventional warfare
training iteration for members of the Polish Territorial Defense Forces and Latvian
Zemmessardze as a part of the Ridge Runner program in West Virginia, according to service
officials," Army Times
reported this past July.
"U.S. special operations forces have been training more with allies from the Baltic states
and other Eastern European nations in the wake of the annexation of Crimea by the Russian
Federation in 2014," Army Times writes. "A low-level conflict continues to simmer in
eastern Ukraine's Donbas region between Russian-backed separatists and government forces to
this day. The conflict spurred the Baltics into action, as Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia
embraced the concepts of total defense and unconventional warfare, combining active-duty,
national guard and reserve-styled forces to each take on different missions to resist Russian
aggression and even occupation."
22. Refusal to recognize Crimea as part of the Russian
Federation
Key point: Trump agreed to send more forces to Poland to defend it against Russia.
What Happened: U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to deploy approximately 1,000 additional
U.S. troops to Poland during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda on the sidelines of
the U.N. General Assembly in New York City, Reuters reported Sept. 23.
Why It Matters: The deal, which formalizes the United States' commitment to protecting
Poland from Russia, provides a diplomatic victory to Duda and his governing Law and Justice
ahead of November elections. The additional U.S. troops will likely prompt a reactive
military buildup from Moscow in places like neighboring Kaliningrad and, potentially,
Belarus.
24. Withdrawing from the Iran deal
Russia has been consistently opposed to Trump's destruction of the JCPOA. In a statement
after Trump killed the deal, the Russian Foreign Ministry said
it was "deeply disappointed by the decision of US President Donald Trump to unilaterally refuse
to carry out commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action", adding that this
administration's actions were "trampling on the norms of international law".
25.
Attacking Russian gas interests
Trump has been threatening Germany with sanctions and troop withdrawal if it continues to
support a gas pipeline from Russia called Nord Stream 2.
"Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said
he's looking at sanctions to block the project he's warned would leave Berlin 'captive' to
Moscow," Bloomberg
reports . "The US also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany."
"We're protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of
dollars in money from Germany" for its gas, Trump told the press.
I could have kept going, but that's my 25. The only reason anyone still believes Trump is
anything other than insanely hawkish toward Russia is because it doesn't benefit anyone's
partisanship or profit margins to call it like it really is. The facts are right here as plain
as can be, but there's a difference between facts and narrative. If they wanted to, the
political/media class could very easily use the facts I just laid out to weave the narrative
that this president is imperiling us all with dangerous new cold war provocations, but that's
how different narrative is from fact; there's almost no connection. Instead they use a light
sprinkling of fact to weave a narrative that has very little to do with reality. And meanwhile
the insane escalations continue.
In a cold war, it only takes one miscommunication or one defective piece of equipment to set
off a chain of events that can obliterate all life on earth. The more things escalate, the
greater the probability of that happening. We're rolling the dice on Armageddon every single
day, and with every escalation the number we need to beat gets a bit harder.
We should not be rolling the dice on this. This is very, very wrong, and the U.S. and Russia
should stop and establish detente immediately. The fact that outlets like CNN would rather
diddle made-up Russiagate narratives than point to this obvious fact with truthful reporting is
in and of itself sufficient to discredit them all forever.
Our historians here seem to be forgetting the brutal takeover of Ukraine by the USSR in
the 50's, in which millions of Ukrainians were shot, raped, beaten and starved out, while
"ethnic Russians" moved in and took over. Kruschev didn't "give" Crimea away, he simply
transferred the administration thereof to the Soviet Republic of "the" Ukraine (a term
Ukranians have always decried as a way to make it seem as if Ukraine had always been a part
of the USSR). The "ethnic Russians" wouldn't have been there at all if the Soviets hadn't put
them there. That argument is the same one Hitler used as his excuse to annex Poland, and Polk
used to annex Texas. It's true Russia's self-interest (and well-founded fears of foreign
betrayal) have been largely ignored, but it's also disingenuous to ignore their murderous
20th-century imperialism. Just because we're not the good guys doesn't mean they are
either.
anon4d2 , November 20, 2019 at 18:12
Perhaps you forgot that the USSR actions in eastern Europe after WWII were in direct
response to the murder of 20 million Russians in WWII by the Nazi forces, attacking through E
Europe just as Napoleon had done. All US casualties in all its wars are less than five
percent of that, and 95 percent of Nazi division-months were spent in the USSR. On that front
they had nearly all of the casualties and did nearly all of the fighting. No wonder they were
a bit uncomfortable afterward with leaving open the favorite attack route of the west. What
would the US have done if a hundred times its WWII casualties were caused by two invasions
through (for example) Mexico? Would we have left the door open? Such circumstances cannot be
ignored. Starting one's version of history after the world's greatest provocation cannot be
said to clarify the history.
Toby McCrossin , November 21, 2019 at 02:56
"Our historians here seem to be forgetting the brutal takeover of Ukraine by the USSR in
the 50's"
Nice alternative facts. Ukraine was one of the original constituent republics of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922!
" Kruschev didn't "give" Crimea away"
Huh? Crimea had been part of Russia since 1783. You know you can check this stuff yourself
using Google, right?
"The "ethnic Russians" wouldn't have been there at all if the Soviets hadn't put them
there."
Right, so the Soviets put the Russians in Crimea in 1783, 139 years before it was in
existence. I guess the Soviets mastered time travel.
I know reading's hard and all but you might wanna try it some time.
Jon Anderholm , November 20, 2019 at 02:22
An essential article by Caitlin .. Thanks so much .
Sam F , November 19, 2019 at 22:56
Another excellent article by Caitlin Johnstone.
Jeff G. , November 19, 2019 at 19:59
Given the laws of cause and effect, our nuclear missiles might as well be considered to be
pointed straight at ourselves. Like shooting at one's image in a mirror or joining in a
mutual suicide pact. Sheer insanity.
ranney , November 19, 2019 at 17:26
WONDERFUL article, Caitlin. You are so right! I agree with Alan Ross, you deserve an award
for this, and I hope this gets passed around for a wide readership.
Antonio Costa , November 19, 2019 at 15:14
When elected POTUS you are elected, no matter the campaign rhetoric, to take the reins of
the imperial empire.
Trump did that willingly, in fact to a fault given his "big mouth". He's no more nor less
dangerous than his predecessors. And like them, his is a mass of rhetorical contradictions.
Policy is all that should really matters. It is our only means of identifying some truth.
Trump knows what most here know regarding US invasions and assassinations. What he thinks
about any leader is anyone's guess (including his). For him it's all deal making as if it's
his private Trump Towers Enterprises. But in the end he's playing the chief gangsta role of
his like. (If you've ever listened to Sinatra at the Sands (the full concert), you'll hear
how Trump has mimicked the popular gangsta singer to the last "love ya baby ").
The media is not free. It is an arm of the national security state, with occasional
outages of truth telling, all the more to tell the big lies. It's purpose is to pacify and
repress any rebellions. Since the end of Vietnam it has succeeded. And here we are, never
knowing truth from lie. (I think of Obama as deceitful to the max, while Trump just tells
transparent lies so you don't know when he's actually telling a profound truth.)
"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to
believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people
from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally
important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the
mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the
State."
-- Joseph Goebbels (was a German Nazi politician and Reich Minister of Propaganda of Nazi
Germany from 1933 to 1945)
Mark Thomason , November 19, 2019 at 14:22
We can go one step further than to say that Trump was reckless toward Russia, "with zero
resistance from either party."
Both parties demanded it. They approved it as "Presidential" whenever he did it, and
attacked him for any effort to be less reckless. They'd done the same to Obama, but Trump
proved weaker and more malleable.
Jeff Harrison , November 19, 2019 at 14:14
Verra nice peroration. I have two objections. One, I doubt that the people of the Donbass
are Russian backed in the same sense that the "moderate" rebel scum in Syria is US backed
with weapons, intelligence, and training but the people of the Donbass are ethnic Russians.
With a steady stream of anti-Russian legislation coming out of Kiev, I imagine they're
looking for an out. Putin is trying to get it for them without starting a war with Ukraine.
The real question that Washington has yet to address is what are they going to do if the
people of Ukraine notice that since they signed on to the neo-liberal dictates of Washington
and Brussels they've become the poorest nation in Europe. I know that there are a number of
Ukrainians who think wistfully of the days when they were part of Mother Russia. But you
never know, the CIA is notorious for its subversion and the Ukrainians might prove to be
spectacularly stupid. After all, they weren't doing badly until they let the US and EU foment
a coup for them.
And, two, "We should not be rolling the dice on this. This is very, very wrong, and the
U.S. and Russia should stop and establish detente immediately." While I agree with the
sentiment, don't bring Russia into this. Everything that Russia has done has been a reaction
to what is usually an American violation of international law. Putin has been very clear that
he wants to back off this cold war but he has also been very clear that we started it and
we're going to have to be the ones to start backing off.
David Hamilton , November 20, 2019 at 02:11
I absolutely agree with your number two reaction to Caitlin's suggestion that Russia and
the U.S. should stop it and establish detente immediately. Everything Russia's leadership is
doing is a reaction to American imperial dares to defy their law violations. They exhibit
extreme and principled restraint to the Orwellian madness emanating from this place.
I think it is important that this be understood. Russians have been used and abused once
before by American largesse in the form of Clinton's puppet's assistance in the rape of the
former Soviet Union by the Harvard-sponsored project. That was the one during the nineties
that privatized national industries and created a dozen neoliberal oligarchs. The cost was a
huge increase in death rate that lowered life expectancy into the 50's from 70 years I think.
Cynical foreign policy, isn't it?
Lois Gagnon , November 19, 2019 at 13:16
Anyone who has not read Orwell's 1984 should do so sooner rather than later. The official
control of narrative in the novel is what we are presently drowning in. To watch it work so
spectacularly is beyond depressing.
Many thanks to Caitlin Johnstone, Consortium News and all the others pushing back against
this system of perception management. I keep repeating it because it rings true. It's like
waking up in the Twilight Zone.
John Neal Spangler , November 19, 2019 at 12:44
She is right. CNN. MSNBC, NYT, and Wapo totally irresponsible. Fox not much better. So
many anti-Russian bigots in US
Jimmy gates , November 19, 2019 at 12:37
Thank you Caitlin. The neoliberals and neocons both desperately want a greatly intensified
cold war with Russia, but want it started by Trump ( because he is personally an
outsider).
This gives the Democrat and Republican donors contracts for the war machine. Ever since
Clinton administration moved NATO to the Russian border, the process has worked for the
oligarchs who control all US policies, foreign and domestic.
The complete corruption of Western MSM is the reason many of us regularly read Caitlin and
Consortium, all desperately trying to get some sort of a reality-check in an otherwise
"Orwellian" media environment.
For anyone who has been waiting for the publication of reporter Udo Ulfkotte's best
selling book (in Germany), a book based on his experience as a well respected journalist
whose reporting was completely compromised by Western intelligence services and business
interests, it is finally available in an English language edition. The English language
edition has been quite obviously suppressed for the last several years and the book was
published in 9 languages BEFORE this English edition became available. It is a book that is
well worth reading to better understand why literally NOTHING written by MSM should be
believed at face value, ever:
See:
I would urge anyone interested in buying this book to get it directly from the publisher-
Progressive Press. Amazon and other mega monopolies are a big part of our problems. Take the
time to make a few extra clicks and boycott Jeff Bezos.
Noah Way , November 19, 2019 at 10:58
The simple truth here is that in regard to the military (read 'military complex', which
includes the deep state and shadow government [intelligence agencies] every president is a
puppet. Nobel Peace Prize winner oBOMBa bombed 7 countries, overthrew Ukraine's democratic
government, invaded Syria, armed terrorists as proxy armies, authorized drone assassinations,
and bombed a Nobel Peace Prize winner.
The last president to resist the military complex? JFK
Caitlin Johnstone's list points to growing tensions with Russia. Failure of the political
and media establishment to see this makes the task of avoiding world war three all the more
difficult. In the West the end of the Cold War was seen as the dawn of peace. But the Cold
War was the peace, a post-world war environment: we are now in a pre-world war
environment.
Jimmy gates , November 19, 2019 at 12:45
The Democratic Party members have not " missed" anything that Trump has done. They will
not impeach him on those grounds, because they too are guilty of complicity in those war
crimes.
As Pelosi said regarding impeaching GWB for the torture program or invasion of Iraq and
Afghanistan " it's off the table". Because she was complicit.
Lois Gagnon , November 19, 2019 at 13:23
Russia did not illegally annex Crimea. A referendum was held and 90% of the voters voted
to rejoin Russia. Most people in Crimea are ethnic Russians and speak Russian. They were
understandably scared to death of what their fate would be under the rule of the fascists the
US installed in Ukraine.
And frankly, Russia had every right to protect its only warm water port in Sevastopol that
would have been taken over by NATO if Crimea had remained part of Ukraine. Too many Americans
have been indoctrinated in the belief that Russia has no legitimate self interest to
defend.
michael , November 19, 2019 at 18:22
In addition to what Lois Gagnon points out, you have to realize that the re-patriation of
Crimea to Russia in March 2014 was the direct result of Obama, Biden, Nuland et al
overthrowing the democratically elected President of Ukraine, Yanukovych, in the Maidan coup
in February, 2014, and replacing him with a neoNAZI regime. Russian speech was outlawed,
which has been the language of the majority of Crimea since Catherine the Great.
The coup in Ukraine was a major provocation to Russia, but was also a repeat of the
Americans' rape and pillaging of Russia under Yeltsin, Clinton's puppet. The per capita
median income of Ukrainians has dropped in half from 2013, despite pumping $billions in from
the US.
Jeff G. , November 19, 2019 at 20:25
Crimeans have an absolute right of self-determination as a fundamental human right under
established international law, just as the Kosovars did when we were supporting the breakup
of Serbia when Clinton was president. Ethnic Russians voted in an overwhelming majority in a
free and fair plebiscite to rejoin Russia, which they had been part of for centuries, because
the neo-Nazi US coup government allied with Azov battalions in Kyiv terrified them and they
wanted nothing further to do with them. Crimea had every right to decide. Russia did nothing
to interfere, not a bullet was fired. Russia's troops were already stationed in Crimea by
treaty and did not invade. Russia warned NATO against the Kosovo precedent that it would come
back to bite them someday, and it was ignored. NATO is unhappy because it was denied an
illegitimate geostrategic advantage they thought they would gain. Crimea is happy, so what's
the problem?
DH Fabian , November 19, 2019 at 21:08
"We," who? Regardless, the issues you raise can't be understood outside of their
historical context, and Americans never try to understand the world within that historical
context.
anon , November 19, 2019 at 22:54
Crimea was part of Russia for roughly 200 years before the USSR premier (Kruschev?) gave
it to Ukraine, although its inhabitants were nearly all of Russian heritage and language,
like E Ukraine. So not surprising that they wanted to go back to being part of Russia.
dean 1000 , November 20, 2019 at 19:26
Couldn't agree more Lois Gagnon. Washington did an illegal coup. Russia did a legal
annexation.
btw – The Autonomous Republic of Sevastopol on SW Crimea is no longer the only
ice-free port of the Russian Navy. Kaliningrad (on the Baltic sea) has been part of Russia
since 1945. Its deep ice-free harbor is the home port of Russia's Baltic fleet according to
the 2012 world book DVD.
Good one Caitlin. Again
jdd , November 19, 2019 at 09:51
This article properly puts to rest the absurd notion that President Trump is a "tool of
Putin, " and correctly notes that it has created a potentially disastrous situation.
However,
let's put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the Anglo/American led forces arrayed
against Trump from the moment he announced his intention to run on a platform of "getting
along" with Russia and joining with Putin to defeat ISIS.
Failing impeachment, from the
attempts by the Clinton Campaign, to the Congressional sanctions on Russia, to sabotage of
Syria withdrawal to the Mueller hoax, to the State Dept hawks protests on Ukraine, the effort
to prevent Trump from following through on his campaign promise has been the primary goal of
the intelligence community. It is instructive to note that the phone call that has led to the
current impeachment inquiry was made on July 26, the day following Robert Mueller's clownish
testimony before Congress, effectively ending that line of impeachment.
Nick , November 19, 2019 at 16:50
Also note that although the phone call was made in July, nothing was said about it until
after John Bolton was fired in September, 2 months later.
Alan Ross , November 19, 2019 at 09:47
This article alone deserves an award for public service. And in a more sensibly run world
Caitlin Johnstone would have gotten at least fifty such awards for past articles.
This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a
chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department.
Interestingly she came from working class background. So much about Marx theory of class struggle. Brown, David (March 4, 2017).
"Miner's daughter
tipped as Trump adviser on Russia" . The Times.
She also illustrate level pf corruption of academic science, because she got
PhD in history from Harvard in 1998 under Richard
Pipes, Akira Iriye, and
Roman Szporluk. But at least this was history, not
languages like in case of Ciaramella.
Such appointment by Trump is difficult to describe with normal words as he understood what he is buying. So he is himself to blame for his current troubles and his inability
to behave in a diplomatic way when there was important to him question about role of CrowdStrike in 2016 election and creation of Russiagate
witch hunt.
There is something in the USA that creates conditions for producing rabid female neocons, some elevator that brings ruthless female
careerists with sharp elbows them to the establishment. She sounds like a person to the right of Madeline Albright, which is an achievement
With such books It is unclear whether she is different from Max Boot. She buys official Skripal story like hook and sinker. The
list of her book looks like produced in UK by Luke Harding
Being miner daughter raised in poverty we can also talk about betrayal of her class and upbringing.
This also rises wisdom of appointing emigrants to the Administration and the extent they pursue policies beneficial for their
native countries.
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019. [12] While being
questioned by Steve Castor , the counsel for the House Intelligence
Committee's Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon
Sondland 's involvement in the Ukraine matter: "It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's
emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right," she said.
"Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And
those two things had just diverged." [13] In response
to a question from that committee's chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff
, Hill stated: "The Russians' interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency. The goal of the Russians [in 2016]
was really to put whoever became the president -- by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale -- under a cloud."
[
This is another remnant for Bush neocon team, a protégé of Bolton. Trump probably voluntarily appointed this rabid neocon, a
chickenhawk who would shine in Hillary State Department.
Interestingly she came from working class background. So much about Marx theory of class struggle. Brown, David (March 4, 2017).
"Miner's daughter
tipped as Trump adviser on Russia" . The Times.
She also illustrate level pf corruption of academic science, because she got
PhD in history from Harvard in 1998 under Richard
Pipes, Akira Iriye, and
Roman Szporluk. But at least this was history, not
languages like in case of Ciaramella.
Such appointment by Trump is difficult to describe with normal words as he understood what he is buying. So he is himself to blame for his current troubles and his inability
to behave in a diplomatic way when there was important to him question about role of CrowdStrike in 2016 election and creation of Russiagate
witch hunt.
There is something in the USA that creates conditions for producing rabid female neocons, some elevator that brings ruthless female
careerists with sharp elbows them to the establishment. She sounds like a person to the right of Madeline Albright, which is an achievement
With such books It is unclear whether she is different from Max Boot. She buys official Skripal story like hook and sinker. The
list of her book looks like produced in UK by Luke Harding
Being miner daughter raised in poverty we can also talk about betrayal of her class and upbringing.
This also rises wisdom of appointing emigrants to the Administration and the extent they pursue policies beneficial for their
native countries.
She testified in public before the same body on November 21, 2019. [12] While being
questioned by Steve Castor , the counsel for the House Intelligence
Committee's Republican minority, Hill commented on Gordon
Sondland 's involvement in the Ukraine matter: "It struck me when (Wednesday), when you put up on the screen Ambassador Sondland's
emails, and who was on these emails, and he said these are the people who need to know, that he was absolutely right," she said.
"Because he was being involved in a domestic political errand, and we were being involved in national security foreign policy. And
those two things had just diverged." [13] In response
to a question from that committee's chairman, Rep. Adam Schiff
, Hill stated: "The Russians' interests are frankly to delegitimize our entire presidency. The goal of the Russians [in 2016]
was really to put whoever became the president -- by trying to tip their hands on one side of the scale -- under a cloud."
[
The most interesting part of testimony is that CrowdStrike machinations in case of DNC leak which was artificially turns into
Russian hack (and probably not without Crowdstyle server located in Ukraine). As this is connected to Steel which is a hot
spot for the UK government was swiped under the carpet.
She actually met with Steele. She was shown Steele dossier before it was published.
CrowdStrike was mentioned only is passing and was instantly dismissed by rabid neocon Hill.
While this was the central issue with Zelensky administration.
All questioning was about semi-senile Biden, who is probably the most favorable contender on
Democratic side for Trump.
"... Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but many of us will never know... ..."
"... They certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for "the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism. ..."
In my July 25th article " Zelenskii's dilemma " I pointed
out the fundamental asymmetry of the Ukrainian power configuration following Zelenskii's crushing victory over Poroshenko: while
a vast majority of the Ukrainian people clearly voted to stop the war and restore some kind of peace to the Ukraine, the real levers
of power in the post-Maidan Banderastan are all held by all sorts of very powerful, if also small, minority groups including:
The various "oligarchs" (Kolomoiskii, Akhmetov, etc.) and/or mobsters Arsen Avakov's internal security forces including some "legalized"
Nazi death squads The various non-official Nazi deathsquads (Parubii) The various western intelligence agencies who run various groups
inside the Ukraine The various western financial/political sponsors who run various groups inside the Ukraine The so-called "Sorosites"
(соросята) i.e. Soros and Soros-like sponsored political figures The many folks who want to milk the Ukraine down to the last drop
of Ukrainian blood and then run
These various groups all acted in unison, at least originally, during and after the Euromaidan. This has now dramatically changed
and these groups are now all fighting each other. This is what always happens when things begin to turn south and the remaining loot
shrinks with every passing day,
Whether Zelenskii ever had a chance to use the strong mandate he received from the people to take the real power back from these
groups or not is now a moot point: It did not happen and the first weeks of Zelenskii's presidency clearly showed that Zelenskii
was, indeed, in " free fall ": instead of becoming
a "Ukrainian Putin" Zelenskii became a "Ukrainian Trump" – a weak and, frankly, clueless leader, completely outside his normal element,
whose only "policy" towards all the various extremist minorities was to try to appease them, then appease them some more, and then
even more than that. As a result, a lot of Ukrainians are already speaking about "Ze" being little more than a "Poroshenko 2.0".
More importantly, pretty much everybody is frustrated and even angry at Zelenskii whose popularity is steadily declining.
... ... ...
Another major problem for Zelenskii are two competing narratives: the Ukronazi one and, shall we say, the "Russian" one. I have
outlined the Ukronazi one just above and now I will mention the competing Russian one which goes something like this:
The Euromaidan was a completely illegal violent coup against the democratically elected President of the Ukraine, whose legitimacy
nobody contested, least of all the countries which served as mediators between Poroshenko and the rioters and who betrayed their
word in less than 24 hours (a kind of a record for western politicians and promises of support!).
... ... ...
Some of the threats made by these Ukronazis are dead serious and the only person who, as of now, kinda can keep the Ukrainian
version of the Rwandan " Interahamwe " under control would probably be Arsen Avakov, but since he himself is a hardcore
Nazi nutcase, his attitude is ambiguous and unpredictable. He probably has more firepower than anybody else, but he was a pure "
Porokhobot " (Poroshenko-robot) who, in many ways, controlled Poroshenko more than Poroshenko controlled him. The best move
for Zelenskii would be to arrest the whole lot of them overnight (Poroshenko himself, but also Avakov, Parubii, Iarosh, Farion, Liashko,
Tiagnibok, etc.) and place a man he totally trusts as Minister of the Interior. Next, Zelenskii should either travel to Donetsk or,
at least, meet with the leaders of the LDNR and work with them to implement the Minsk Agreements. That would alienate the Ukronazis
for sure, but it would give Zelenskii a lot of popular support.
Needless to say, that is not going to happen. While Zelenskii's puppet master Kolomoiskii would love to stick this entire gang
in jail and replace them with his own men, it is an open secret that powerful interest groups in the US have told Zelenskii "don't
you dare touch them". Which is fine, except that this also means "don't you dare change their political course either".
...are going through the famous Kübler-Ross stages of griefs: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance: currently,
most of them are zig-zagging between bargaining and depression; acceptance is still far beyond their – very near – horizon. Except
that Zelenskii has nothing left to bargain with.
Thank you for a rational article about Ukraine. The sad thing is that it might take years to reach the "acceptance" phase.
It would take someone like Hitler to clean out the stables. Arrest is not a viable option as they will bribe their way out.
These people need to be put down like rabid dogs. That is the only way to put an end to their mischief and it would be a deterrent
to their replacements.
Personally, I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel. Another
country that is still in the "denial" phase. Its military and political leaders know full-well that their strategic aims have
all failed. The boot is now firmly on the other foot.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
To give you an idea of how ridiculous it has all become, the UK no longer accepts medical degrees awarded by universities in Crimea.
Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references? Might have been a non-biased article, but
many of us will never know...
I suspect that the Ukraine is being deliberately depopulated to make way for waves of "refugees" from Israel.
You got that right – what it's all about is building a New Khazaria. But they're neither giving up on their Greater Israel
project between the two rivers, and hence more wars, conflict and chaos to drive out the native Arabs from the Middle East.
I suspect that Crimea was their preferred destination and hence the massive non-stop propaganda against Russia on that score.
@AWMThey certainly aren't National Socialists, and arguably not nationalists. Nationalists are open to what is best for
"the nation" regardless of where it lies on the political spectrum. Since they don't consider the people in Donbas to be part
of "the nation", that means, if anything, they are useful idiots of Zionism.
@bob sykes Kolomoiskii is the real hidden owner/controller of the company that bribed the Bidens. He has a finger in lots
of pies. His pretense to leaning towards Russia is his way to try to get the Americans to stop attempts to get at the many millions
that he stole from his own Ukrainians bank – fake loans to his companies.
Of course, the Russians understand all of that. This theater is aimed at the Americans – not at the Russians.
For the Ukrainian state to break up, there need to be some forces interested in a break-up. You won't find such forces inside
the Ukraine.
What is Ukrainian South-East? In pure political terms, "South-East" is a bunch of oligarchs, who are all integrated into Ukrainian
system, and have no reason to seek independence from Kiev, especially if it means getting slapped with Western sanctions.
Even the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
It's worth pointing out that the so-called "Novorossia movement" started out as Akhmetov's project to win concessions from
new Kiev regime. It was then quickly hijacked by Strelkov, a man who actually wanted to break up the Ukraine, and it is because
of Strelkov, that Donetsk and Lugansk are now de-facto independent. Without similar figures to lead secessionist movements elsewhere
in the Ukraine, this break-up that Saker keeps talking about will never happen.
His ratings must be sky-high, because otherwise I cannot imagine why Fox would allow him to continue to use their network as
a medium to broadcast common sense.
Of course the Dems are making it so easy.
Schiff, Kent, Taylor, Yanovitch -- what a pathetic, nauseating crew.
@Alfred I had the same thoughts. Zelenskii should show a similar coffin with the text
"This one is still empty" and then start rounding up the terrorists. He finally has a good
excuse.
Thank you Saker and Unz for the very interesting article .
I wonder what has been the role of Germany in the Ukrainian disaster . ...I have the
feeling , just the suspicion , that they contributed to the ucranian disaster out of their
genetic Drang nach Osten Nordic greed , is that right ?
Anyway since the Ukrainian disaster the cohesion of the EU is going going down . Germany
which was gifted with the german reunification , is less and less trusted spetially in south
Europe , and even less in the EU far west , in England which is going out of the EU .
Most of the people in the EU would like to keep collaborating with the US , of course ,
but also with Russia and with the rest of the world . Most of the people in the UE are scared
of the dark forces operating in Ukraine trying to provoke a war with Russia .
The stupid name-calling like the term "ukronazi" makes this article look like a rant like
North Korean communiques or the ravings of some Arab despot's propagandist. It is not better
than calling "The Saker" a "Moskal", "Sovok" or "Putler's stooge" etc. He should keep this
lingo to directly "debating" "Ukronazis" on twitter or youtube commentst etc. not for an
article that is supposed to be a serious analysis.
I understand that it is hard for a Russian nationalist to accept that the majority of
Ukrainians don't want to belong to their dream Russkiy Mir, they were seduced by the West,
which is more attractive with all its failings, because mostly of simple materialistic
reasons. Ukrainians happily go to EU countries that now allow them in as guest workers. The
fact, like it or not that majority of them chose the West over Russkiy Mir despite being very
close to Russians in culture, language, history etc. He is still in the first stage of grief
it seems.
All in all, Ukrainians are probably way above average in most human characteristics. The
area of Ukraine is by planetary standards one of the best available: arable land, great
rivers, Black see, pleasant and liveable.
But it is 2019 and life in Ukraine is barely better than it was 25-50 years ago,
population has actually dropped from its peak in early 1990's. Millions of Ukrainians live
abroad (I know some of them) and have – to be polite – at best an ambivalent
attitude towards their homeland. Almost all of them prefer to be somewhere else, even to
become someone else.
Now why is that? A normal society would have enough introspection to discuss this, to look
for answers. Throwing a temper-tantrum on a big square in Kiev every few years is not looking
for a solution. That is escapism, Orange-this, Maidan-that, 'Russians bad', 'we are going
West', 'golden toilets', and always 'Stalin did it'.
I don't agree with the facile name-calling that sees Nazis everywhere and exaggerates
throw-away symbolism. But Ukraine has not been functioning and it can't go like this much
longer. Not because it will collapse, it won't, but because during an era of general
prosperity Ukraine can't be a unstable exception (oh, I get it, they are better than Moldova,
good for them.)
Rebellions against geography are doomed. Projecting one's personal frustrations on
external enemies (Kremlin!) has never worked. Ukraine needs rationality – accepting
that they will not be in EU, that attempting to join Nato would destroy Ukraine, and that
they can't beat Russia in a war. And following advise of half-mad and half-ignorant
well-wishers from Washington or Brussels is a road to ruin. Nulands, Bidens and Tusks will
never live in Ukraine, they really deeply don't care about it. They have no skin in that
game, it is just entertainment for them.
Or alternatively you can pray that Russia collapses – good luck waiting for
that.
There is not much 'drang' left in Germany, so I think this is mostly fingers on the map
post dinner empty talk.
in 1945 the jewery asked Stalin to give Crimea to the jews , Stalin refused
Crimea is a jewel, but has one big problem: not enough water. But that's also true about
Izrael, maybe there is a deep genetic memory of coming out of a desert environment.
During WWII, Germany actually established settlements in Crimea. Think about it: there is
a massive war, you have like 1-2 years, short on transport and resources, and you start
sending settlers to Crimea – that's how much drang-nach-osten types wanted it.
And the Turks, etc This must be driving them absolutely nuts.
The mexicans are able to make fun of themselves , that`s a good thing . They have a joke
which aplies also to Ukraina ( and other countries )
The mexicans say : when God created Mexico He gave Mexico everything ; land , mountains ,
plains , tropical forests , deserts , two oceans , agriculture , gold , silver , oil . then
God saw how beautiful and perfect Mexico was and He though that He should also give something
bad to the country to prevent the sin of pride , and then he populated Mexico with pure
pendejos ,( idiots ) .
@AWM "Is it not possible to have an article on Ukraine without all the N@ZI references?
If you want a decent analysis of current events in the Ukraine, which is what The Saker
provides, I guess you'll just have to put up with his terminology.
The world won't miss a thing if Curmudgeon or AWM goes off in a huff, to sit on his toilet
and read the "one joke per dump" volume lodged on the tank and stops reading The Saker's very
thorough analysis as a protest action!
@Anon My experience is that Ukrainians individually are far from being pendejos .
But they are unable to act as a group or as a nation. (Well, they 'act', but it mostly
somehow fails.)
Maybe it is the relative shallow and heterogenous history of Ukraine. Or – and this
is what I have observed – a fundamental inner disloyalty to the Ukraine as a homeland.
When one observes the assorted Porkys, Timoshenkas, Yanuks, the oligarchs, but also the
crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about to leave Ukraine or are thinking
about leaving. Societies can't be built with one foot always at the airport, or in an old car
in a 5-km column waiting on the border of Poland. Or Russia.
Another good article – thanks – Yep, the US/EU NWO is not going to let their
"West Ukraine Isis" battalions and intel gang lose their funding , arms trafficking ops, or
terrorist reputation. This is a no win situation in Ukraine and the West knows it –
Even if NovoRossiya gets some independence, the Ukraine Isis will/can reek havoc and murder
for a long time along the border. The modern Cheka { Ukraine Isis } has been modified for the
security of the new Farmland owners – Monsanto, Cargill, DuPont and the rest of the
Globalist Corporations and their ports close to Odessa.
One point of contention since it wasn't made clear in this article – Novorussia
consists of Luhansk and Donetsk, but not Kharkov. While Kharkov has more Russians than most
other provinces of Ukraine do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
All of Ukraine's doomsayers have been crying about Ukraine's demise for the lat 25
years, yet the fact is that it' s getting stronger and stronger every year,
USA diaspora keeps on delivering.
Shoutout to quarter/half Poles USA citizens LARPing as Ukrainian patriots in the
comments.
@Felix KeverichEven the Kremlin doesn't show much interest in breaking up the
Ukraine, so why the hell would it break up?
Follow the money my friend!
Some provinces send much more money to Kiev then they get back in "services". So long as
more loans from the EU, The USA and the IMF were forthcoming, that situation was not too bad.
Now, the spigot is being closed. Hence the sad face of Mr Z when he met Trump in
Washington.
This means that the provinces that are losing most from this internal transfer are going
to be strongly motivated to stop sending money to Kiev. Kiev will lose control and that will
fragment the country.
The Donbass was a big contributor to Kiev and got little in return – that was a
major reason for their dissatisfaction. Everyone there could see that Kiev sent the money
west and kept much for itself.
If the French provinces were to stop sending money to Paris, the Yellow movement would be
totally unnecessary.
@awry About 2.5 million Ukrainians have "emigrated" (you could also say "fled") to the RF
since 2014.
Per Bloomberg most of the outflow not to Russia has been to countries of Eastern Europe, esp.
Poland.
@AP "Ukraine was historically a marsh of Poland for centuries before it was a historical
marsh of Russia"
That was mostly Galicia and Volhynia. It is a tiny part of today's the Ukraine. In these
areas, the Poles were landowners, the Jews their rent/tax collectors and the peasants were
Ukrainian-speaking Slavs. Now, they are planning to sell the best farmland to "foreigners"
(i.e. Jews) and the Slavs will become serfs once again.
@Mr. Hack The problem with your argument is that the 'war' in the east was entirely
predicable. So was Crimea leaving and joining Russia. The people in charge in Kiev –
presumably with 3-digit IQ – would think about it, plan for it, etc They obviously
didn't. Instead they provided a needed catalyst to make it worse by voting in February 2014
to ban Russian language in official use, and the idiotic attacks on Russian speakers like in
Odessa, that were neither prevented nor punished. The other side – in this case Russia
and Russian speakers living in Donbas and Crimea – rationally took care of their own
interests. Post-Maidan Kiev handed them all they could on a silver platter while busying
themselves with silly slogans and videos of golden saunas.
Russia is actually one of the least susceptible countries to an economic collapse in the
world – it is largely self-sufficient, has enormous resources that others will always
buy, and has a very minimal percentage of its economy that deals with foreign trade. What
they are susceptible to is the loss of value for their currency – and that has already
largely happened since 2014. When it comes to energy, the countries that are low-cost
producers are least impacted – who you should worry about are the numerous higher-cost
producers like US shale, coal miners, or LNG gas that have huge upfront fixed costs and
built-in high transportation costs. Russia and Saudis will be fine.
Back to the drawing board, what exactly is the plan in Kiev? If they know that having a
war costs them investments, how do they end that war? It is highly unlikely that it would end
with a victorious Kiev army conquering Donetsk (or Crimea). So what's the plan?
It's amazing how spectacularly inept all these interventions over the last decades have been.
Iraq, Lybia, Syria, Yemen, the coup in Turkey but also Ukraine.
And I know that in the ME, the Isrseli policy, as iterated by Michael Orin is to let all
sides bleed each other to death, and that part has been relatively successful until
recently.
But in Ukraine, they were going to consolidate their control over the country from Kiev
and force-march the Russians out of Sevastopol. And that part didn't work at all, except as
leverage to impose sanctions on Russia; but the long term goal of using Ukraine to overthrow
Putin is now stuck in the Donbas.
My point being that it is the great fortune of the world that these criminal nitwits and
fools in the State (War) Department and their helpers in the "intelligence" community are so
arrogant and incompetent.
@Anon Merkel (who herself was studying in Donetsk for few months) definitely has a hand
in ze EuroUkrainian mess.
Afterall she met with Right Sector representatives one dayt before the final, bloody part
of the coup started. And that meeting of "reporting on delivering at our commitments and
asking Merkel about her delivery of her commitments" both with the next day start of "offence
at the government" was announced by Right Sector yet another day before, 16 February
2014.
However i have reservations about Merkel representing German peoples, especially some
alleged "genetical" trend of them to invade eastwards.
It was public, that Merkel's everything including public phone is spied upon by USA
"intelligence community", and Merkel considered it normal and proper.
So it is clearly stated what she considers her allegiance and whom she considers her
employees. Not citizens of Germany.
"Each of these countries is as inorganic and disunited as Ukraine, or worse, made up as they
are of various racial and ethnic groups who don't identify with each other."
I am dubious about this suggestion. But more importantly, Ukraine or the Ukraine has had a
violent revolution about every ten years. You simply cannot develop a stable government,
economy or safe social system if you you overturn the the government via violence every ten
tears.
That is the key differences and essential to any successful government, and more so for a
democracy that holds as innate belief, a tolerance for difference even competing ideas held
by its population. It is as if the only the only we are exporting is revolution as solution
to differences.
@Mr. Hack > Russia has never been able to lead with a carrot, but only with a stick.
Russia offered dozen billions of loans and years ahead orders for Ukrainian industries.
Those that Yatzenyuk begged to be re-started when he destroyed democratic government of
Ukraine.
EuroMaidan tried to stole the carrot from Ukraine, and while it succeeded in stealing what
Ukraine already picked, about 10%, the rest was kept safe of usurpers' reach, and so they
started looting Ukrainian economy instead. Hrivna fallen 3-fold – more than ruble.
> Positive outside influence into Ukraine's internal development in the form of
investments and economic development
EuroMaidan usurpers stopped real and ongoing investments from China and Russia by looting
what investments arrived into Ukraine already. But at least they got $5 billions of
investments from Nulland.
I like how "economic development" is listed as "outside influence". I thought that any
state or nation would claim being capable of their own economic development, but for
EuroMaidania it is quoted as some miracle that can only be given from outside.
> foreign investments being delayed until the war in the east is resolved
And that was why EuroMaidan usurpers invaded Donbass and started the war. To preclude
investments from the West after they stopped investments form China and Russia.
> create a chaotic situations
EuroMaidan proponent blaming chaotic situations. Precious. "Bees against honey"
movement.
> Since the West changed the dynamics of the energy game around the world
Did it? how exactly? By making Ukrainian pipelines liability no one wants to touch with a
pole?
> It's learned to better feed itself, and that's about it
But that is exactly what Ukraine knew how to do, and what EuroMaidania can not do.
While Russia is gaining this experience – EuroMaidania was and is destroying it, for
the sake of being "not like Russia". Way to go!
> One more jolt like in 2014
You mean the one when rouble fallen two-fold and hrivna three-fold?
Guess if the West could do it again – they would. But they can't.
> where are Russia's automobiles, televisions, medical equipment, computers,
pharmaceuticals etc; within the world markeplace?
Russia is not packaging consumer goods. Russia is sending technologies, which others pack
as consumer goods.
Ukraine could become one of those salesmen, packing Russian technologies into pretty wraps
and selling around.
EuroMaidan usurpers feared that and prevented that.
EuroMaidan even destroyed Antonov company, which was one of just 4 companies in the world
capable of building large airframes. Ensuring AirBus+Boeing+Tupolev/Ilyushin would have one
competitor less. And as Antonov was el-cheapo vendor with strategy based on dumping –
it was especially dangerous for Russian company, of the three. Thank you, guys, for removing
this riddance out of Russian pathway. You did great service!
@Hapalong Cassidy Beckow> the crowds on Maidan, I get a sense that they are all about
to leave Ukraine or are thinking about leaving.
You do not need to "have a feeling"
The promise of "visa-less living and working in EU" was exactly what EuroMaidan crowd
paraded as their aim and treasure, somehow magically warranted by the "Deep Association" that
Yatzenyuk and Poroshenko later dragged feet for months, trying to delay signing of this
economy suicide pact.
They were very public and honest about it. They claimed Yanukovich was somehow putting
ball and chain on them all by giving the second thought to orders from Brussels. Aid in
leaving Ukraine was the price they sold Ukrainian economy for. Ther were never shy in 2014 to
speak about it.
Hapalong Cassidy> While Kharkov has more Russians than most other provinces of Ukraine
do, it does not have a plurality like Donetsk and Luhansk.
There is a point. Kharkov in North-East and Odessa in South-West were trading cities,
routing the official and smuggled goods streams and hosting the largest foreign goods
markets. This clearly had impact upon mindsets of citizens and even more of cities
elites.
People in Kharkov went to the streets right after the coup commited and without support
they were at least equally numerous to all-Ukraine sponsored gathering of EuroMaidan #2.
But their leaders did not seek for independence, Kharkov city mayor Kernes openly shook hands
with Andrey "White Fuhrer" Byletsky and expressed his care about his (not Kharkov citizens)
safety in the night of Rymarskaya street murders, 2014 March 14th AFAIR.
People in Kharkov went against nazi from westernmost Ukraine regions (and even policemen)
and stormed those out of their district government building. Who else did then?
They had a huge impulse, but they also focused the most efforts from usurpers to deflect
and dissipate it. And little free resources the usurpers had back then.
Month later, in April, Kharkov was exhausted and pacified. But other regions of Ukraine were
overlooked those two months.
However, it was that first month which gave people in Donetsk and Lugansk both time and
examples to understand what is really going on (it was almost unbelievable that something
like that can actually happen in XXI century in Europe, wasn't it?) and learn their Ukrainian
elites are prostituting them, and then find some other leaders which would have enough skin
in the game to not sell them out.
You may rightly say Kharkov citizens did not resist for long. But have to admit the
resistance of Donbass and Lugansk was in significant part based upon time Kharkov bought them
in March and April 2014, and upon self-exposing that Kharkov's fleeting but furious
resistance forced EuroMaidan usurpers into.
"All, repeat, ALL the steps taken to sever crucial economic and cultural links between Russia
and the Ukraine were decided upon by Ukrainian leaders, never by Russia who only replied
symmetrically when needed.
Even with international sanctions directed at her, Russia successfully survived both the
severance of ties with the Ukraine and the AngloZionist attempts at hurting the Russian
economy. In contrast, severing economic ties with Russia was a death-sentence for the
Ukrainian economy which has now become completely deindustrialized."
No wonder saker deletes posts to his website containing info like these:
The top trade partner of *the* Ukraine is Russia. So his thesis is a little 'shoddy math'
ish. The links have not been severed as he pretends.
" the severance of ties with Russia " The Ukraine is more tied to Russia than any other
country, by recent trade volumes (as well as in traditional culture). Saker doesn't like
these facts to muddy up his thesis.
This means that the provinces that are losing most from this internal transfer are going
to be strongly motivated to stop sending money to Kiev.
You don't get it. Ukraine's South-Eastern provinces are inanimate objects . They
have no consciousness, no self-interest or free will. They don't decide anything.
Donbass never decided to break away from the Ukraine. That choice was made for it by
Strelkov, when he and his men occupied Slovyansk and began an armed confrontation.
@Anon The Ukraine used to export something like $20 billion worth of goods to Russia
annually. It's now closer to $5 billion, and Ukrainians are a lot poorer as a result.
@Felix Keverich The point is saker maintains it is completely de-industrialized. It is
'dead'. Total trade of >40 B all partners, isn't dead by a long shot. See what he says?
'Death sentence'. Far from it. A decrease isn't death. No doubt there has been a plunge. But
saker is over stating it. Russia is still a center of gravity for the Ukraine.
I am so sick and tired of hearing the term nazi this and nazi that when referring to the
situation in the Ukraine. The term nazi died in 1945 and should be left dead and buried. It
was a stupid word created by the British during the war because of their inability to
pronounce the German name for the NSDAP. The British and American media have a fetish for the
word and will call any "right-wing" movement "nazi" if given any opportunity. This shows
their total lack of creativity to come up with anything new and their deep obsession with
anything to do with Hitler which borders on religious worship. I say get rid of the usage of
the word on this site unless one is referring to the actual NSDAP party that existed until
1945.
@AWM You are an absurd cretin. Of course referring to current Ukraine as being controlled
by Nazi's is 100% accurate.
Ukronazis and Hitler Nazi's have many alignments with eachother:
1. Bizarre, fundamentally paganist usage of ahistoric/religious images from a millenia ago
as national symbols that should have had no connection to national identity of either state
in the 1930's or now ( swastika and Tryzub) even the UPA flag has more sense about it to any
"Ukrainian " state
2. Mass arrests and persecution of political opponents I'm fairly sure that Ukronazi's
have arrested ( and maybe even killed) far more people in their first 5 years, that the
Nazi's ever did in their 6 year, pre-war time in charge
3. Mass killing and torture of the people of the Donbass- now take on board this is with
Russia fighting the war of fighting the war that they are not even there and Russia/DNR/LNR
basically conducting huge talks with west/Banderastan and making huge concessions every time
they have been in a a hugely advantageous position or made a big breakthrough in the war.
Even Nazi's wouldn't have used such a lousy pretext for instigating war against the people of
Donbass – although at least the Nazi's could govern their state ukrops can't govern f
** k all without it descending into farce
4. Above average representation of freaks and/or highly camp idiots Goebbels, Goering and
Ribbentrop versus Avakov, "Yats" the yid, Poroshenko, Turchynov and many more – a
lamentable contest
5. Neither would have got off the ground without Anglo-American funding
Just because the Nazi's in the 30's and 40's were more competent does not take away the
similarities
Structural bottlenecks and slow reform progress lead to anemic growth in Ukraine
The rate of economic growth in Ukraine remains too low to reduce poverty and reach income
levels of neighboring European countries. Following the 16 percent cumulative contraction of
the economy in 2014-15, economic growth has recovered to 2.4 percent in 2016-17 and 3.3
percent in 2018. Faster economic growth for a sustained period of time is needed to reduce
poverty which remains above pre-crisis levels. More needs to be done if Ukraine's aspiration
is to become a high-income country and to close the income gap with advanced economies. Today
Ukraine is far from that goal. In terms of GDP-per-capita, Ukraine remains one of the poorest
countries in the region -- at levels of Moldova, Armenia and Georgia. Ukraine's GDP per
capita in purchasing power parity terms is about three times lower than in Poland, despite
having similar income levels in 1990.
At the growth rate of recent years, it will take Ukraine more than 50 years to reach income
levels of today's Poland. If Ukraine's productivity growth and investment rate remains at the
low levels observed in recent years, overt the medium-term the growth rate will converge to
almost zero per annum -- productivity growth is offset by declining contribution of labor as
Ukraine undergoes the demographic transition. Boosting total factor productivity growth to 3
percent per year and investment to 30 percent of GDP would result in sustained growth of
about 4 percent per year over the medium- to long-term. Given declining total population this
translates to GDP per capita growth of about 4.5 percent per year. These trends will not
improve on their own, they can happen only through the implementation of appropriate policies
that boost productivity and increase the returns on factors of production.
1. It does not split trade to industries. Hi-tech big added value and lo-tech slim added
value – falls into the same "total"
2. It only shows one snapshot, not YoY dynamics.
3. The column "Export Product" shows exactly the same value – literally, 100% –
for ALL the countries, all the rows. I wonder what we should deduce from it
2012 – $19,8B
2013 – $17,6B – the start of the coup
2014 – $15B – the coup won power but did not entrenched yet and did not had time
yet to enforce its ideals
2015 – $9.8B – the work started
2016 – $4.8B – 80% of 2012 exports are cut off, EuroMaidan means business
2017 – $3.6B – 82% of 2013 exports are cut off, coming to plateau ?
2018 – $3,9B – a slight rebound, plateau reached
@bob sykes I'd dismiss this, as Putin is apparently doing. Kolomoisky is looking who else
would provide money that he can steal. He, Porky, and others of their ilk stole Western loans
so blatantly, that even US-controlled IMF is balking at giving Ukraine more money. So,
Kolomoisky hopes that Russia will, so that he has more to steal. I hope that his hopes are in
vain.
The entire Ukraine farce can be explained as a simple project
Khazaria 2.0.
I met a Jew (American) in Ukraine over 20 years ago.
He told me the plan Jews were returning to historically Jewish cities in Ukraine by the
hundreds buying up for kopecki on the Gryvnia anything they could.
Media outlets, banks, factories, beachfront land, farmland, apartments, etc.
The idea? Make Ukraine the next EU Country, and benefit from the huge potential of
Ukraine.
I agreed with him at the time, that Ukraine had huge potential, I was there as an engineer
working for German companies but his lust for what could be 'looted' disgusted me.
This is a standard CIA scenario, used in Sarajevo and Deraa before Kiev. So, Ukrainians
bought an old stale show, swallowed it hook, line, and sinker.
But the Georgian snipers brought in 2014 to Kiev by Saakashvili started dying in
suspicious circumstances, so those who are still alive rushed to Belarus and started deposing
their testimony. They implicated a lot of Ukies, including former speaker Parubii, former MP
Pashinsky, etc. It was well known (to those who did not keep their eyes wide shut for
political reasons) that the sniper fire in 2014 on Maidan was from the building controlled by
the coup leaders, who later tried to blame Yanuk for it. That's why post-coup Ukrainian
authorities got rid of the trees on Maidan: bullet holes in those trees indicated where the
fire was coming from. But this recent testimony implicated particular people, who (surprise,
surprise!) happened to be among the coup leaders.
@Truth3 The truth is that you are absolutely right. 'Ukrainians' boasted that they are
the 'Khazars' since Mazeppa and Orlyk of the 'Constitution of Bendery' fame, while parading a
distaste for 'the adherents of deceitful Judaism' and noisy adherence to Orthodoxy.
Look at this entry of the http://www.encyclopediaofukraine.com and see if
anything changed:
"After Mazepa's death, on 16 April 1710, Orlyk was elected hetman, with the backing of
Charles XII of Sweden, in Bendery. The chief author of the Constitution of Bendery, he
pursued policies aimed at liberating Ukraine from Russian rule. He gained the support of the
Zaporozhian Host, concluded a treaty with Charles XII* in May 1710, and sought to make the
Ukrainian question a matter of international concern by continuing Mazepa's attempts at
establishing an anti-Russian coalition ** . Orlyk signed a treaty with the Crimean khan
Devlet-Girei in February 1711, negotiated with the Ottoman Porte, which formally recognized
his authority over Right-Bank Ukraine and the Zaporizhia in 1712, conducted talks with the
Don Cossack participants in Kondratii Bulavin's revolt who had fled to the Kuban, and even
contacted the Kazan Tatars and the Bashkirs. In 1711–14 he led Cossack campaigns
against the Russians in Right-Bank Ukraine. Despite initial victories they ultimately failed,
because of Turkish vacillation and because the pillaging, raping, and taking of many civilian
captives by Orlyk's Crimean Tatar allies resulted in the loss of public and military support
on the Right Bank".
Nowhere does the 'first "European" constitution' speak about 'ukrainians', but of 'Exercitu
Zaporoviensi genteque Rossiaca" (Zaporozhian Host and the Ruthenian people) living in
"Parva Rossia"/Little Russia.
* putting Ukraine under the protection of the King of Sweden.
** an plot of 'European' and Islamic powers with an intense 'Masonic-Kabbalistic' coloring
(and Jewish financial support) against Russian 'Tsardom' and 'Patriarchal' Church. 'Ukraine'
was an anti-Russian project from the get go. Brzezinski's quip: "Ukraine, a new and important
space on the Eurasian chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot because its very existence as an
independent country helps to transform Russia. Without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be a
Eurasian empire" reflects only the revival of the old plan in new circumstances.
@Seraphim " Brzezinski's quip: "Ukraine, a new and important space on the Eurasian
chessboard, is a geopolitical pivot "
Old Zbieg was as lunatic as Pole can be and as cunning as Jew can be (was he?).
The Poles were so desiring to became Slavic superpower, and on the height of their might
in 15th century – they could become. They occupied Russian lands – oh, that
mythical Kievan Rus oppressed by Moscow for centuries. And they even occupied Moscow for few
months – more than unified Europe managed to do under both Napoleon and Hitler
combined! Polska was really stronk then.
.well, they ate themselves from inside and sold their statehood to all the foreign bidders
while boasting about Polish pride. Like ukropeans do today. They lost their strength, they
lost their eastern colony, and for a while they even lost Poland itself.
They could never move over it.
Zbieg – coming from Galicia, the last shrink of Poland-occupied lands – had
this specifically Polish resentment burning in him. And he managed to make USA fight Polish
fights. Managed to use American incompetence in history and geography to sell them that idea
that the Ukraine – the borderlands between Poland and Russia have "geopolitical"
importance. For USA, no less. Wow!
Okay, USA invested at very least $5B into buying Ukrainian warchiefs, and we don't know
how much more was added by EU and Germany. They now have this "geopolitical asset" as Zbieg
urged them to do. What are they gonna do with it now? How do they gonna make Ukrainians pay
back the money they spent? Old Zbieg preached about the world "paid by Russia to fight
against Russia". This is that very "Russia, occupy the Ukraine finally, we are tired of
fruitless waiting!" whining they repeat again and again. But if this won't work, just like it
did not work yet, how do they think to make Ukrainians pay for it? Or whom else? I wonder
@Arioch "> My point is the ukraine isn't dead. It isn't dying.
In which quality? As a swath of land inhabited by few peasants here and there – it
surely will remain.
As an economically vibrant country, one of UN founders, with economy larger than German and
closing on France – what it used to be – it is dead.
As a laws-bound polity it is dead since 2014, though was dying even before.
As STEM engineering and education stronghold it was in USSR – it is dead.
As one in just four in the whole world producers of really large airplanes – it is
dead.
As one of the few ICBM producers – it is dead, know-how sold to Saudi.
As one of the few turbojet engines producers – it is dead, know-how sold to China.
As one of the reliable and well known tanks and APCs producer – it is dead, even
USA-occupied Iraq does not buy this trash.
As the country, living from the geographic rent, just providing roads and hotels for cargo
traffic, it is almost dead. Bridges are collapsing, roads – neither for cars nor
railways – are not maintained."
Bravado, anyone can see.
Dead countries don't produce electricity. Real economists look at things like this. Not
just at industrial reorganization. That is the only point you have. Industrial
reorganization. Not death of industry.
@Anon BTW, most *live* countries of the world do not produce ICBMs, nor jet engines, nor
APCs etc, nor super heavy aircraft. The military industrial complex remnants from the SU are
not industries that most of the planet's countries have. Specialties. Those can not be
measures of whether a country is living or dead. Use some real measures.
@Anon Actually a good point. Mass cargo logistics and energy generation. Indeed.
The thing here is, that as of now the Ukraine is enjoying its privileged position from
times Ukrainians ruled USSR (IOW, after Stalin died in 1953 and of few coup leaders Khruschev
became top dog in 1956). The Ukraine is reeking with then top-tech nuclear power plants, that
very few of other USSR republics had (one in Ignalina in Baltics, one in Armenia, and dozen
in Russia, that is all. Ukraine was #2 with huge gap).
There is a switch, though. What do you do with electricity you produced?
And, what kind of electricity you produce?
The second question is tangential to "green energy" fad.
The generation is split to "base" generation, which covers required minimum and should be
steadily generating around the clock, and "maneuvering" generation which can be turned on and
off in a matter of few minutes, to accommodate with daytime traits, like "people awoke in
between 7-8am, took shower, cooked breakfast and departed to school/work".
In general, base generation is predictable, thus does not need big reserves, can use economy
of scales and cut costs. Maneuvering one has to increase costs, dealing with unpredictable
mode changes and extra wearing it puts on the equipment and employees.
The first question, as you can not pour electricity into a tank and keep it for months
there, can be roughly split to
1) use at home, for things like washing, cleaning, entertaining (TV, computers), air
conditioning in summer and heating in winter.
2) use in industries, this is perhaps what "real economists" look for. Those should had less
daily spikes, they might even have near constant consumption around the clock.
3) export to the countries, who need it, but does not want to build their own power
plants
The export is significant thing. There is so called Byrshtyn Island, a constellation of
power plants in Western Ukraine, that was cut off from Ukrainian grid and plugged to Polish
grid, to act as maneuvering damper for Polish citizens' daylight cycles.
You chart shows that between 2014 and 2015 there was strong (about 2000 GWH) decrease in
production, which remained more or less stable after that. It also shows huge seasonal
variation.
It probably means Ukrainian industries and households enjoy a lot of winter-time heating, but
very little of summer-time AC. Just like it was built during USSR times.
Ukrainian electricity export seems rising. Were there new power plants put to service? I
did not heard. Then it means that domestic consumption shrunk.
There was also a streak of Nuclear Power Plants accidents in the news of 2017-2019.
This can stem from two factors:
1) increased reliance on NPP as other power plants go belly-up, especially forcing those
giant NPPs into maneuvering modes, which they were not designed for. You can find news
sources that Ukrainian NPPs were being tested to 105% of normative capacity and to
maneuvering modes, the modes that just do not make sense when together.
2) decreased maintenance
Anyway, those NPPs are of old Soviet design of 1980-s, they are closing to end of life.
We'll see if new ones will be built. Or if they will just be used regardless of aging until
some hard failure, "run to the ground". And what will come after.
Of course, as long as they operate – no mater how harmful to locals – EU will
buy cheap energy.
And since EuroMaidan government is living on debts, it will have no choice than to sell. Even
if domestic power consumption will get zero, the EU will buy the power.
But I do not think EU would invest into building new power plants there when Soviet ones
finally crack.
@Anon Indeed, only Airbus and Boeing can produce super-heavy aircrafts.
China and Russia are contenders. Ukraine used to be, but stepped out.
Does it mean, USA and France are hell-bent over their military industrial complex?
Maybe.
Does it make them run worse?
Bombardier and EmBraer factories are bought by Airbus and Boeing, not vice versa.
Avro of Canada once used to be a pillar, now is memory.
And all the other countries have to kiss up to political powers that allow them purchasing
Boeing and Airbus jets and maintenance as a privilege for their lapdogging.
Iran wanted to buy Airbus badly, how did it work out?
So, yeah, specialties. Those specialties that can not be replaced – for master
races.
And those that can easily – for lapdogs.
New Zealand can produce good beef. But so can Brazil and Argentina. And Ukraine too.
But Brazil can not produce irreplaceable large cargo aircrafts. And even mid-size they can
not produce independently.
All nations are completely artificial along with the gods, ideologies, fiat money & all
the rest if the human fictions. If humans went extinct overnight would the US, Russia et al
still exist? No, nor would their thousands of gods.
That little trick with the maps can be done with many countries. The US is a fine example.
1st map = 13 colonies – keep adding new maps for every new state they added after
France paid for & won US independence & include the theft/conquest of Mexican
territory & Hawaii.
The Ukraine is a huge basket case made much worse by the US, but your (Orlov too) Rabid
Russian nationalism blinds you. IOW, like the empires propagandists, you too are spinning a
narrative, albeit more truthful than empires, but a narrative (emotional) nonetheless.
@Dr Scanlon Maybe we just compare real Ukraine with what it was promised to become?
Michael Saakashvili, 2014-08-26, "Exactly one year from today Ukraine would send
humanitarian aid to Russia. Mark my words.". I am still trying to find that aid around me, no
luck
There also was a much more extended timetable, year by year, how Ukraine would rocket to
the future and how Russia would fall down to middle ages. Wanted to re-read it but could not
find.
@Anon Or yea, sure. Even Ukrainian statistics (which in terms of reliability might be
somewhat better than Nostradamus, at least sometimes) report 53 births for 100 deaths, with
the population shrinking due to this differential alone by more than 200,000 per year. If you
count in emigration, the picture becomes very bleak. Millions work in Russia, Poland, and
elsewhere. Mind you, temporary emigration for work easily becomes permanent. For example, I
have a cousin who used to live in Lvov. He worked in Russia for 20+ years, and since 2014
never visited Ukraine. I guess he is still counted, as he remains a Ukrainian citizen.
@Mr. Hack OK, let's go to the original of the constitution 'ratified' by "His Majesty the
King of Sweden" (cum consensu S-ae R-ae Maiestatis Sueciae, Protectoris Nostri/with the
consent of His Majesty the King of Sweden, our protector):
"It is no secret that Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky of glorious memory, with the
Zaporozhian Host, took up arms and began a just war against the Polish Commonwealth for no
other reason (apart from rights and liberties) except their Orthodox faith, which had been
forced as a result of various encumbrances placed on it by the Polish authorities into union
with the Roman church. Similarly, after the alien new Roman religion had been eradicated
from our fatherland, he with the said Zaporozhian Host and Ruthenian [Rossiaca] people,
sought and submitted himself to the protection of the Muscovite tsardom for no other
reason than "that it shared the same Orthodox religion". Therefore, if God our Lord, strong
and mighty in battle, should assist the victorious armies of His Royal Majesty the King of
Sweden to liberate our fatherland from the Muscovite yoke of slavery, the present newly
elected Hetman will be bound by duty and put under obligation to take special care that no
alien religion is introduced into our Ruthenian [Rossiacam] fatherland. Should one, however,
appear anywhere, either secretly or openly, he will be bound to extirpate it through his
authority, not allow it to be preached or disseminated, and not permit any dissenters,
MOST OF ALL THE ADHERENTS OF DECEITFUL JUDAISM, to live in Ukraine, and will be bound to make
every possible effort that only the Orthodox faith of the Eastern confession, under
obedience to the Holy Apostolic See of Constantinople, be established firmly for ever
and be allowed to expand and to flourish, like a rose among thorns, among the neighbouring
countries following alien religions, for the greater glory of God, the building of churches,
and the instruction of Ruthenian [Rossiacis] sons in the liberal arts. And for the greater
authority of the Kievan metropolitan see, which is foremost in Little Russia [Parva Rossia],
and for a more efficient administration of spiritual matters, His Grace the Hetman should,
after the liberation of our fatherland from the Muscovite yoke, obtain from the Apostolic See
of Constantinople the original power of an exarch in order thereby to renew relationship with
and filial obedience to the aforementioned Apostolic See of Constantinople, from which
it , was privileged to have been enlightened in the holy Catholic faith by the preaching of
the Gospel".
"neque ignotum est, gloriosae memoriae Ducem Theodatum Chmielniccium cum Exercitu
Zaporoviensi non ob aliam causam praeter iura libertatis commotum fuisse iustaque contra
Rempublicam Polonam arma arripuisse, solum pro Fide sua Orthodoxa, quae variorum
gravaminum compulsu a potestate Polonorum coacta fuerat ad unionem cum Ecclesia Romana;
post extirpatam quoque e patria Neoromanam exoticam Religionem, non alio motivo cum eodem
Exercitu Zaporoviensi genteque Rossiaca protectione Imperii Moscovitici dedisse et libere se
subdidisse, solum ob Religionis Orthodoxae unionem. Igitur modernus neoelectus lllustrissimus
Dux, quando Dominus Deus fortis et potens in praeliis iuvabit felicia sacrae S-ae R-ae
Maiestatis Sueciae arma ad vindicandam patriam nostram de servitutis iugo Moscovitico
tenebitur et debito iure obstringetur singularem volvere curam fortiterque obstare, ut nulla
exotica Religio in patriam nostram Rossiacam introducatur, quae si alicubi clamve , palamve
apparuerit, tune activitatem suam extirpandae ipsi debebit, praedicari ampliarique non
permittet, asseclis eiusdem, PRAESERTIM VERO PRAESTIGIOSO IUDAISMO cohabitationem in Ucraina
non concedet et omni virium conatu sollicitam impendet curam, ut sola et una Orthodoxa Fides
Orientalis Confessionis sub obedienta S-tae Apostoiicae sedis Constantinopolitanae in
perpetuum sit firmanda, atque cum amplianda gloria Divina, erigendis ecclesiis exercendisque
in artibus liberalibus filiis Rossiacis dilatetur, ac tanquam rosa inter spinas, inter vicina
exoticae Religionis Dominia virescat et florescat. Propter vero majorem authoritatem
primariae in Parva Rossia sedis Metropolitanae Kiiovensis faciliorique in Spiritualibus
regimine, impositam sibi idem Illustrissimus Dux vindicata patria nostra de iugo Moscovitico
geret provinciam circa procurandam et impertiendam a sede Apostolica Constantinopolitana
Exarchicam primitivam potestatem, ut hoc actu renovetur relatio et filialis patriae nostrae
obedientia ad praefatam Apostolicam sedem Constantinopolitanam, cuius praedicatione Evangelii
in Fide Sancta Catholica illuminari firmarique dignata est".
ТHЕ PYLYP ORLYK CONSTITUTION,
1710@http://www.lucorg.com/block.php/block_id/26
@Anon > Also, check construction spending – click on 10 year
.now how can i account there for the fact, that UAH in 2013 costed three times more than
UAH in 2015 ?
> Farming is an industry.
Grain industry – is low added value one, it is highly competitive market because
grain from any country on Earth is just grain.
USSR used to buy grain, as it sponsored bread production and peasants all around were
buying bead to feed their hens, goats, pigs, etc. Official meat production was large too.
It is definitely better to export at least something than nothing. But it also is better
to export high added value goods.
Before WW1 a minister of Russian Empire said "Let our peasants starve but we will export
all the grains we contracted" – few years later Russian Empire ceased to exist.
In 1931 and 1932 Stalin tenfold decreased then banned grains export breaking the
contracts. 15 years later USSR won WW2.
Franlky, it is just weird that Ukraine and Russia together produce most world's traded
grain, like there is no other fertile soil on Earth. Also Russia and Ukraine are both to the
north from USA, so USA should be able to produce more grains in its warmer climate. Why isn't
USA world #1 grains exporter?
and EU just whimsically bans Ukrainian meat beyond some arbitrary quota.
EU will easily find where to buy meet.
Can Ukraine reciprocate by banning Airbus or Boeing purchases? I wonder
EU can pressure Ukrainian government, and Ukraine can do little in defense.
Adding to his useful Russophrenia , Bryan
MacDonald has coined " Putophrenia ": "A condition
where the sufferer believes Vladimir Putin is a crazed Russian nationalist who wants to destroy
the West, and simultaneously, is, together with his cronies, robbing Russia blind & hiding
all the dosh in the same West." These two neatly point up the absurdities of the Western
propaganda line.
snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off
target.
The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters,
the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those
interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep
state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside
interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.
If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more
transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would
happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state
doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.
Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us
it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the
foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices,
delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding.
And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that
never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At
the turn.
And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little
granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the
room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both
directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.
And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as
'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with
us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our
family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not
collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.
The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in
their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as
rancid.
"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than
seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.
My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way
I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state
is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.
I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less
prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me
have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my
keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...
Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Semyon Vindman (né Aleksandr Semyonovich Vindman) and his
identical twin brother, Yevgeny, were born to a Jewish family in the Ukrainian Soviet
Socialist Republic, Soviet Union. After the death of their mother, the three-year-old twins
and their older brother, Leonid, were brought to New York in December 1979 by their father,
Semyon (Simon). They grew up in Brooklyn's 'Little-Odessa' neighborhood. The twins appear
briefly with their maternal grandmother in the Ken Burns documentary The Statue of Liberty.
Vindman speaks fluent Russian, Ukrainian (& probably Hebrew).
I will posit that Vindman holds citizenship in: Ukraine, USA, & Israel. Dual-Citizens
violate US Law, to wit the 1940s Nationality Act. I will NOT delve into the tangled
loyalties, ambitions and/or 'greatness' expectations of Colonel Vindman in this post.
Beginning in 2008, Vindman became a Foreign Area Officer specializing in Eurasia. In this
capacity he served in the U.S. embassies in Kiev, Ukraine, and Moscow, Russia. Returning to
Washington, D.C. he was then a politico-military affairs officer focused on Russia for the
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Vindman served on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon from
September 2015 to July 2018.
The Honorable Gordon David Sondland, United States Ambassador to the European Union, is
probably ending his stint, today.
Ambassador Sondland was born to a Jewish family in Seattle, Washington, the son of Frieda
(Piepsch) and Gunther Sondland. His mother fled Europe before the Second World War to
Uruguay, where after the war she reunited with his father, who had served in the French
Foreign Legion. In 1953, the Sondlands relocated to Seattle where they opened a dry-cleaning
business. Sondland has a sister 18 years his senior. He attended the University of Washington
but dropped out and became a commercial real estate salesman.
Does Ambassador Sondland hold dual-citizenship? Dual citizenship violates the 1940
Nationalities Act.
@Arioch Germans will likely be fleeing Germany in fairly large numbers as the Islamic /
African takeover picks up steam. Same for Swedes from Sweden (soonest), French from France,
English from England.
Ukraine is emptying out and has cheap land and space for new housing to be built, or old
houses to be replaced or thoroughly renovated. The Western Europeans need somewhere safer and
more civilized to run now that they have invited hostile invaders into their countries. It
could be a match made in heaven.
Ukraine could offer only permanent residency, not citizenship, and it could require that
white euro refugees pay in advance for a year or two years of good private medical and dental
insurance so that they don't burden the already-broke Ukrainian treasury.
Let the Germans and other euro reinvigorate the Ukrainian economy -- possibly for a steady
two decades or more -- by buying supplies and hiring workers and machinery to build or
renovate several million houses. They have savings and pensions and can afford a lot in
Ukraine. The Ukrainian treasury would take in massive receipts in VAT and other taxes paid by
the euro permanent residents and by newly employed Ukrainians working on the refugees' new
homes.
Ukrainian hospitals and dental offices could upgrade their equipment, staff, training, and
capabilities enormously with the ongoing infusion of western euro refugee funds.
The euro refugees needn't change the demographic and cultural composition of Ukraine much
longer-term, because they will, at least at first, mostly be people age 55-60 and up who can
afford to retire and give up their careers in their home countries to flee East. They'll be
beyond their childbearing/raising years. And, if the Ukrainians are wise, the western euros
will never be eligible for citizenship (I.e. they will never be able to vote the same suicide
for Ukraine as many of them allowed in their home countries).
Far, far better for Ukrainians to (1) have their own children and (2) stop antagonizing
russia and work out favorable energy and other trade deals. But since neither of those is
happening or seems likely in the near future, Ukraine should seek a steady infusion of
peaceful, reasonably intelligent, culturally compatible white Europeans to help occupy the
territory (instead of hostile aliens, the alternative) and spend billions of Euros from
Ukrainian businesses and shops.
Odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is when a country's government
misappropriates money it has borrowed from another country. A nation's debt is considered
odious debt when government leaders use borrowed funds in ways that do not benefit its
citizens, and to the contrary, often oppress them. Many believe individuals or countries
doing the lending must have known, or should have known, of the oppressive conditions upon
offering the credit.
@RadicalCenter Putin would be too old in ten years. What Russia needs is a decent
successor, as intelligent and far-sighted as Putin, who would be interested in the country
more than in his pocket, like Putin. While traitorous scum like Gorby or Yeltsin has no
chance, the greatest danger is that someone nationalistic but not particularly smart rises to
the top.
Putin understands the key thing: Russia does not need to do anything about the Empire or
its EU vassals, they are their own worst enemy. As the saying goes, when you see your enemy
committing suicide, do not interfere.
As far as Baltic vaudeville states are concerned, to the best of my knowledge (which might
be faulty: I only visited Russia three times in the last 28 years, spending less than two
months total there), most Russian residents are not interested in the Baltics.
Now that the port at Ust-Luga works at almost full capacity, Baltics aren't even useful
economically: Russian exports mostly bypass them. Besides, placing NATO troops into these
"countries" creates a significant financial and military burden on NATO, which is in the best
Russian interests.
So, from Russian perspective, the same rule applies to Baltics and Ukraine (whatever
remains of it in 5-10 years): "you broke it – you own it". So, the West would have to
do something about those territories. Considering current policies of the EU, they will be
populated by Muslims and Africans. Russian attitudes changed a lot in the last decades
regarding Baltics and in the last five years regarding Ukraine: a lot of Russians believe
that even Muslims and Africans are smarter than aborigines of those wannabe countries, so
would make more sensible neighbors.
@Malacaay "Ukrainian Republic" in 1914 ??? With presidents, parliaments, elections, sure,
sure.
And having western borders in 1914 exactly by the line draw by Georgian dictator
Jugashvili-Stalin 25 years later?
With Lwow being in 1914 city not of Poland (independent Poland in 1914 is yet another gem)
but of the said Ukrainian Republic? And Transcarpatian Ruthenia too?
Wow, so in 1939 Jugashvili-Stalin just restored well known internationally borderlines of
the glorious 1914 Ukrainian Republic, right?
@Arioch You consider Ukraine to be irrelevant, so why spend so much time on it??? Odd
isn't it. Methinks you protesteth too much. You haven't proven Ukrainians can't do science,
that they don't have a technical culture, and you haven't shown that grain production is
irrelevant. You're just insulting farmers, and basic industry. Insult your own stomach. Don't
eat bread. Food is power. All industrial economies are based on agriculture. You dismissing
it is just sour grapes.
Pretend the Ukraine is dead. That's your business. Ukraine hasn't lost the ability to do
science, engineering, etc. What do you think they do in universities there? Is there no
higher education there? I'm not going to believe that. You're just spinning. Spin away. It's
obvious you're just dismissing real activity there.
The finality with which you dismiss the logistics possibilities of the Ukraine is odd. It
is a valuable resource. The country can take up the logistics possibilities in the future.
They haven't disappeared. And that is what your argument is based on. Pretending that
something can never ever be operational again ever, for any reason, even when the
possibilities are obviously still there. Germany bounced back after the war. Russia bounced
back after the 90s. But Ukraine? According to you, Ukrainians can't ever have any future
possibilities. You dismiss the real activity that is there, and you dismiss future
possibilities. So you can read the future? Do you also pretend to have super human ability to
know the future? You don't like facts, just theatrics. Lots of arm waving and shouting and
gesticulating. No proofs. If it is dead in your books, why are you wasting so much effort to
prove it, without actually giving any proof? You really do protest too much.
@Mr. Hack Why would I be disappointed in seeing your puppet master Kolomoisky, the
'Zhidobandera', and his puppet playing the presidents, Zelenski admitting (grudgingly) that
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations"?
K: "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you [the U.S.] are
forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it."
And begging for money from Russia?
@Anon First, participation or results of International Mathematical Olympiad that both of
your links deal with do not necessarily reflect the state of science in the country. First,
math is only one of the real sciences (others include physics, chemistry, biology, etc.).
Second, the results of kids reflect the potential of young people, not the state of
scientific research in the country. Remaining scientists in Ukraine (there aren't many of
them left, unless you count bullshitters like Vyatrovich as scientists) bitterly complain
that the government does not fund science at the level that can help it survive.
BTW, many branches of Russian science (e.g., biochemistry and cell biology that I know
best) do not perform at the level that would put them on the map. There are very few
world-class biochemical or cell biological labs in Russia today, even fewer than in Soviet
times. In Ukraine today there are none, zero, zilch, nada. There used to be some decent labs
in Ukraine before 1991, but they either died out or the quality of their research went way
down. Those who awarded PhD to the girl I mentioned above are not scientists, at least not
the honest ones. They are qualified to sweep floors in college, at best.
@AnonFromTN More protesteth too much. More slurs, insults, hearsay, flailing away with no
data of any kind.
Those kids have real capabilities. Not simply 'potential of young people'. dismissing them
won't make them go away. 'Out damn'd spot'. Too bad the facts won't go away. To have kids
with strong math ability means you have to have institutions and teachers with strong
education capability. They don't learn to cut it in math by playing in the streets. Obviously
they will have no difficulty doing engineering calculations, and doing computer science and
physical sciences.
Making comparisons to the former SU is not valid for me. Comparison to other similar sized
economies makes more sense. Ukraine population is similar to Colombia, Spain, Argentina,
Uganda, Algeria, Sudan, Iraq. Looking at those countries, the capabilities of Ukraine don't
look too bad. Certainly not looking like Ukraine is dead.
Why would any one think that Ukraine must be compared to much larger economies??? The
other guy was doing that too. saker is way off to make such comparisons.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a valid
comparison. The economics are too different.
It's obvious what is going on is simply a political, prejudicial smear and dismissal of the
Ukraine and Ukrainians rather than any kind of balanced assessment of capabilities and
reality
@Anon Yes, those kids certainly had good teachers. It is quite likely that their math
teachers were educated in the Ukrainian SSR. I hear from a lot of people in Russia that the
quality of the teachers who graduated in Soviet times tends to be better than of those who
graduated later. I got my school education in Ukrainian SSR and can't complain about it.
Today Lugansk, where I went to school, is in Lugansk People's Republic, and judging by recent
polling of the population, its chances or returning to Ukraine are about as great as my
chances of living 500 years. Ukrainian bomb hit the school I went to, and Ukrainian shell hit
the library where I used to borrow books when I went to school. Luckily, a few years ago
Ukrainian troops were pushed by freedom fighters far enough from Lugansk, so they can't shell
it any more.
Comparing Ukraine to US, China, Russia, or prior SU or UkrainianSSR for me is not a
valid comparison.
Sorry, but Ukraine started by Ukrainian SSR becoming independent. It had what it had, and
lost what it lost, including a big chunk of the population and economy.
You are welcome to believe anything you want. People have a long history of believing the
most preposterous things. However, even fervent beliefs don't change the reality. That's why
all societies have lunatic asylums.
snake @95 argues "the deep state does not exist" with circular logic that is massively off
target.
The deep state is individuals INSIDE the government that do the bidding of the banksters,
the military-industrial complex, the globalists and other nefarious interests. None of those
interests have the ability to make policy and implement regime changes without the deep
state. Yes, outside interests drive the actions of the deep state, but no, those outside
interests have no ability to accomplish anything without their deep state operatives.
If the US federal government bureaucracy was a) much less powerful, b) much more
transparent, and c) more responsive to elected leaders, then none of the bad things would
happen. A pipe dream? Yes - but it is erroneous to make a simple declaration "the deep state
doesn't exist" without any rational arguments to refute my points in @72.
Thank you for your post. You say that there is a deep state, but you then go on to tell us
it is not as deep as we imagine. So, I posit we should call it "the shallow state". It is the
foam on the edge of the sea as it begins to recede from a high tide of corrupt practices,
delicate and lacy at the edges and so mesmerizing and attractive to some. But it is receding.
And out there as it departs the Deep People are waiting. They are the depths of an ocean that
never disappears. At low tide they are still there, and they will feed the incoming tide. At
the turn.
And I also say, you may not care what the future brings, but I do. I have a little
granson, born on my birthday, gazing at me with twinkling eyes from his photograph across the
room. Family is also something we can call Deep and be truthful about that. It runs in both
directions, past and future. The Deep People have Deep Families.
And yes, I know, other grandsons have met untimely deaths this century and are counted as
'collateral damage' by the shallow state. Still they are with us as the past is always with
us; they deepen our persons in unaccountable but irreversible ways. They strengthen our
family commitments. They are always here, in our memories and in our strengths. They are not
collateral; they are the fabric of our determinations, our life blood.
The Deep People do care what happens. The twinkle in their grandsons' eyes burns in
their hearts. It is a fire, a consuming force. It never dies.
"deep state", "deep people", "the swamp" .. a rose by any other name would smell just as
rancid.
"deep people" implies a small, isolated group. IMO, it's more like an iceberg than
seashore foam. 90% of it is hidden from view.
My point was that snake's blame of the oligarchs misses the target. I look at them the way
I look at any other predator - if the opportunity exists, they will take it. The deep state
is THE necessary ingredient for the evil that the US government does.
I too have grandchildren. I am convinced that their lives will be less free, less
prosperous, with less opportunity than what the seven generations of Wills family before me
have experienced in the US for the last 275 years. So what can I do about it? Typing on my
keyboard certainly won't make one whit of difference...
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
Sputnik is reporting that the US has spent $6.4 Trillion fighting wars that have killed
800,000 since Sept 11/01, that number is unbelievable, at least 1,500,000 dead in Iraq,
250,000 in Afghanistan, 750,000 in Syria.
The US military budget alone has averaged about 650 billion since then, plus the wars in
Iraq and Afghanistan were funded separately (around 200 million a year), plus CIA/ blackbook
projects - 7 or 8 trillion is a more likely number.
When things get blown up, no one really knows what was actually bought and existed and
what was just a phantom piece of equipment War has always been the ideal cover for
corruption
"... "In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to Ukraine. ..."
"... But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such? ..."
"... And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay. ..."
"... The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col. Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is the duly elected president who does that. ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn back toward Russia. ..."
"... "They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for it." ..."
"... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets. ..."
"... Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He predicted that the trauma of war will pass. ..."
"... Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received nearly 73% of all votes. ..."
"... Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They are joined in this with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup: ..."
"... Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25% of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won 5.8%. ..."
"... on Yovanovitch, She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States." ..."
"... She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. . .Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is injured in the knee ..."
NBC News
is not impressed by the first day of the Democrats' impeachment circus. But it fails to
note what the conflict is really about:
It was substantive, but it wasn't dramatic.
In the reserved manner of veteran diplomats with Harvard degrees, Bill Taylor and George
Kent opened the public phase of the House impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump on
Wednesday by bearing witness to a scheme they described as not only wildly unorthodox but
also in direct contravention of U.S. interests.
"It is clearly in our national interest to deter further Russian aggression," Taylor, the
acting U.S. ambassador to Ukraine and a decorated Vietnam War veteran, said in explaining why
Trump's decision to withhold congressionally appropriated aid to the most immediate target of
Russian expansionism didn't align with U.S. policy.
But at a time when Democrats are simultaneously eager to influence public opinion in favor
of ousting the president and quietly apprehensive that their hearings could stall or
backfire, the first round felt more like the dress rehearsal for a serious one-act play than
the opening night of a hit Broadway musical.
"In direct contravention of U.S. interests" says the NBC and quotes a member of the
permanent state who declares "it is clearly in our national interest" to give weapons to
Ukraine.
But is that really in the national U.S. interest? Who defined it as such?
President Obama was against giving weapons to Ukraine and never transferred any to Ukraine
despite pressure from certain circles. Was Obama's decision against U.S. national interest?
Where are the Democrats or deep state members accusing him of that?
Which brings us to the really critical point of the whole issue. Who defines what is in the
"national interest" with regards to foreign policy? Here is a point where for once I agree with
the right-wingers at the National Review where Andrew McCarthy writes :
[O]n the critical matter of America's interests in the Russia/Ukraine dynamic, I think the
policy community is right, and President Trump is wrong. If I were president, while I would
resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly associate myself with the delusion that
stable friendship is possible (or, frankly, desirable) with Putin's anti-American
dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia family and is acting on its revanchist
ambitions.
But you see, much like the policy community, I am not president. Donald Trump is.
And that's where the policy community and I part company. It is the president, not the
bureaucracy, who was elected by the American people. That puts him -- not the National
Security Council, the State Department, the intelligence community, the military, and their
assorted subject-matter experts -- in charge of making policy. If we're to remain a
constitutional republic, that's how it has to stay.
The U.S.
constitution "empowers the President of the United States to propose and chiefly
negotiate agreements between the United States and other countries."
The constitution does not empower the "U.S. government policy community", nor "the
administration", nor the "consensus view of the interagency" and certainly not one Lt.Col.
Vindman to define the strategic interests of the United States and its foreign policy. It is
the duly elected president who does that.
The president does not like how the 'American policy' on Russia was built. He rightly
believes that he was elected to change it. He had stated his opinion on Russia during his
campaign and won the election. It is not 'malign influence' that makes him try to have good
relations with Russia. It is his own conviction and legitimized by the voters.
...
[I]t is the president who sets the policies. The drones around him who serve "at his
pleasure" are there to implement them.
There is another point that has to be made about the NBC's assertions. It is not in
the interest of Ukraine to be a proxy for U.S. deep state antagonism towards Russia. Robber
baron Igor Kolomoisky, who after the Maidan coup
had financed the west-Ukrainian fascists who fought against east-Ukraine, says so directly in
his
recent NYT interview :
Mr. Kolomoisky, widely seen as Ukraine's most powerful figure outside government, given his
role as the patron of the recently elected President Volodymyr Zelensky, has experienced a
remarkable change of heart: It is time, he said, for Ukraine to give up on the West and turn
back toward Russia.
"They're stronger anyway. We have to improve our relations," he said, comparing Russia's
power to that of Ukraine. "People want peace, a good life, they don't want to be at war. And
you" -- America -- "are forcing us to be at war , and not even giving us the money for
it."
... Mr. Kolomoisky [..] told The Times in a profanity-laced discussion, the West has failed
Ukraine, not providing enough money or sufficiently opening its markets.
Instead, he said, the United States is simply using Ukraine to try to weaken its
geopolitical rival. "War against Russia," he said, "to the last Ukrainian." Rebuilding ties
with Russia has become necessary for Ukraine's economic survival, Mr. Kolomoisky argued. He
predicted that the trauma of war will pass.
...
Mr. Kolomoisky said he was feverishly working out how to end the war, but he refused to
divulge details because the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way."
Kolomoisky's interview is obviously a trial balloon for the policies Zelensky wants to
pursue. He has, like Trump, campaigned on working for better relations with Russia. He received
nearly 73% of all votes.
Ambassador Taylor and the other participants of yesterday's clown show would certainly "mess
it up and get in the way" if Zelensky openly pursues the policy he promised to his voters. They
are joined in this
with the west-Ukrainian fascists they have used to arrange the Maidan coup:
Zelenskiy's decision in early October to accept talks with Russia on the future of eastern
Ukraine resulted in an outcry from a relatively small but very vocal minority of Ukrainians
opposed to any deal-making with Russia. The protests were relatively short-lived, but
prospects for a negotiated end to the war in the eastern Donbas region became more remote in
light of this domestic opposition.
...
The supporters for war with Russia are ex-president Poroshenko and two parliamentary
factions, European Solidarity and Voice, whose supporters are predominantly located in
western Ukraine. Crucially, however, they can also rely on right-wing paramilitary groups
composed of veterans from the hottest phase of the war in Donbas in 2014-5.
Only some 20% of the Ukrainians are in favour of continuing the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports. During the presidential election Poroshenko received just 25%
of the votes. His party European Solidarity won 8.1% of the parliamentary election. Voice won
5.8%.
By pursuing further conflict with Russia the deep state of the United States wants to ignore
the wishes not only of the U.S. voters but also those of the Ukrainian electorate. That
undemocratic mindset is another point that unites them with the Ukrainian fascists.
Zelensky should ignore the warmongers in the U.S. embassy in Kiev and sue for immediate
peace with Russia. (He should also investigate
Biden's undue influence .) Reengaging with Russia is also the easiest and most efficient
step the Ukraine can take to lift its desolate economy.
It is in the national interest of both, the Ukraine and the United States.
Posted by b on November 14, 2019 at 18:23 UTC |
Permalink
next page " agree with mccarthy about who conducts foreign policy, disagree about who
the aggressor is; it's the USA, trying to weaken Russia, which is the aggressor.
thanks b... typo - immediate piece with Russia - 'peace' is the spelling here...
the comments from Kolomoisky in the recent nyt interview are very telling.. aside from
being a first rate kleptomaniac who will willingly play both sides if he can profit from it,
he is also speaking a moment of truth..for him Ukraine is available to the highest bidder...
he could give a rats ass about Ukraine or the people... but still, it is refreshing that the
NYT published his comments in this regard..
the quote "the Americans "will mess it up and get in the way." is very true... it was true
before kolomisky picked a side too.. this guy is very shrewd.. i wonder if his own country is
able to see thru him?
national interest.... yes, trump gets to decide and he won on the idea of having closer
relations with russia, but the cia-msm has been lambasting him and anyone else associated
with him since before the election over the clinton e mails... they have painted a scenario
that it is all russias fault and have been relentless in this portrayal... hoping trump is
going to turn this around is like hoping someone is going to turn the titanic around from
hitting a giant iceberg... the usa is too far gone and will be hitting the iceberg.. they are
in fact...
From NYT about Kolomo???? (spelling in English is highly variable)
George D. Kent, a senior State Department official, said he had told Mr. Zelensky that his
willingness to break with Mr. Kolomoisky -- "somebody who had such a bad reputation" -- would
be a litmus test for his independence. [If is good to be independent, i.e. to do what we
want.]
And William Taylor, the acting ambassador in Kiev, said he had warned Mr. Zelensky: "He,
Mr. Kolomoisky, is increasing his influence in your government, which could cause you to
fail." [La Paz is a fresh reminder for Kiev?]
Well the thing about Zelensky is he's still there, and he is making changes in Donbass.
Kolomoisky was interested in the fracked gas in Donbass, the completion of NordStream II
has made a mess of that idea. It is good that he has seen the light, as it means Zelensky
will have support in his attempts to adapt to reality. But Kolomoisky is still a crook no
doubt.
My immediate reaction was that Kolomoisky realises he has to act - the Ukrainian oligarchs
have got too close to America. I agree with James that he is a extremely clever man.
Ukraine's traditional business is playing both ends against the middle and sending the
proceeds to Switzerland (or the Caribbean in Porosyonok's case). Since 1990 a few of these
robber barons have made a very good business winding up the west against Russia, it could go
on ever - why spoil it by lifting the rock and seeing all the insects scurrying around in the
light?
Another rock that has been lifted is in Washington, where the khokhol diaspora are
desperately trying to get Uncle Sam to right the wrongs of a century ago.
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners oif the world and they run the world they
own.
... @ b -- "Only some 20% of the Ukrainians favor to continue the war against the eastern
separatists who Russia supports."
The are not 'separatists', but rather Ukrainians who want to stay in a federated Ukraine
as 'provinces' with powers to pass their regional laws, similar to those in Canada.
The segment of empire in the US that are against Russia act so because it was Russia that
stymied them in Syria and continues to be in their way of expanding the control from that
part of empire...the US segment.
I still believe that the global private finance core segment of empire is behind Trump and
throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The cult of global
private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role in the new
multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyones heads to make it ongoing.
I don't believe that strategy will work but as long as they can be fronted by a MAD player
of some sort (Occupied Palestine comes to mind) they can be bully players in international
matters.
As the world economies grind to a "halt" there will be lots of pressure everywhere and
very little clarity about the key civilization war over public/private finance, IMO
For a military dictatorship, diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means. The US has
been at war with Russia since the right-wing coup at the Democratic convention of 1944. All
presidents have been servants of the military, which includes the police/intel/security
apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead role were "dealt with."
Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state bureaucrats are shocked
and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US foreign policy for 75
years!
Wow! The depth of delusion on display is as breathtaking as its complete projection of the
intentions and actions of the Evil Outlaw US Empire! Oh so many saying I'm displaying four
fingers instead of two. Too bad there isn't a padded cell big enough to contain all the
lunatics. I recall the pre- and post-coup discussions from 2014--that Russia was going to
make NATO own Ukraine until it was forced to concede it has no business being there; that
Russia would teach the would-be leaders of Ukraine a serious lesson in where their national
interests lay. NATO is ready to cede and the lesson's been learned.
IMO, two referendums must be held. The first within Russia: Will you accept portions of
Ukraine wanting to merge with Russia: Yes/No? Second to be given within Ukraine provided Yes
wins in #1: Do you wish to join Russia or remain in Ukraine? IMO, this is a very longstanding
unresolved issue of consequence for the people involved. The political leaders of Russia and
Ukraine might both be against such a vote, but IMO that merely kicks the can further down the
road and opens the door for more mischief making by the Evil Outlaw US Empire. Assuming a Yes
from Russia and some from Ukraine, a strategic threat to Russia and Europe would be
mitigated. Additional questions about those parts of Ukraine not wanting to join Russia could
be solved via additional referenda in the Ukraine and neighboring nations that might prove
willing to absorb the remnants and their people. Such action would of course negate the Minsk
Agreements.
Given the ideological passions of those living in Western and Northern Ukraine, I don't
see any hope for the continuation of the Ukrainian state as currently arranged, thus the
proposed referenda. However, if Russia says Nyet, then Minsk must be implemented.
"Democracy" is not about letting the people as a whole have a say in how the country is
governed. That would be fascist, and racist, and populist, and LITERALLY HITLER. Letting the
people decide on things like foreign policy, is literally anti-democratic.
No, "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing responsibility. The elites get
to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take responsibility when things go wrong.
Because you see, we are a "Democracy."
Breaking off long established economic and cultural ties with a large neighbouring country,
virtually overnight, is a rash act, and certain to create dislocation and hardship. The
craziness of the idea was only achievable through the traumatizing psy-op of the sniper
event, leading directly to the coup and the state of war. The EU and the US were clearly
malevolent in orchestrating the Association agreement with its ridiculous terms and the
corresponding Maidan pressures.
The fools in Hong Kong, after protester-sponsored screenings of the World On Fire
documentary, were actually quoted as presuming the Maidan protests had "won" and expressed
their hopes that they too could "win". Good luck to them.
Kolomoisky and Zelensky know what needs to be done, but they fear the blood that will flow
with Nazi-Banderist scum! Zelinski's balls are not that big, and has no options left after
compromising his position from day one. Who will make the first move, I fear not him? Russia
has time, and patience, which is sorely lacking in the west who feel they have to push the
envelope.
The Minsk II protocol was agreed to on 12 February 2015 by the leaders of Ukraine, Russia,
France, and Germany, It included provisions for a halt in the fighting, the withdrawal of
foreign forces, new constitution to allow special status for Donbass, and election in Donbass
for local self governance. Control of the present border of Ukraine would be restored to the
Ukraine government. Donbass would continue to be in Ukraine with some autonomy here (scroll down).
There are many such autonomous zones in the world, and in Europe, seen here .
The problem in Ukraine is that the neo-Nazi factions promoted by the US don't want to see a
resolution, and will fight it with US support.
Kolomoysky is obviously a master thief and general scumbag...but he is no fool...
I think the writing on the wall became obvious with the Nordstream 2 finalization, where,
it is noted, Denmark came in just under the wire in terms of not disrupting the
timetable...
Obviously the interests of German business have prevailed...and rightly so in this
case...
And what of the famous EU line about 'protecting' Ukraine as a gas transit
corridor...?
LOLOLOL...that is in the same category of nothingburger as the EU noises about 'alternate
payment' mechanisms for trade with Iran...
As soon as the Denmark story broke, Gazprom and Russian energy analysts talked openly
about the tiny volumes that Ukraine could expect to see transiting its territory...as part of
a new agreement to replace the one that has expired...
It works out to a small fraction of the several billion dollars in transit fees the
Ukraine was getting...
Also considering that the IMF appears to be finally shutting off the tap of loans to this
failed gangster state...and that the promises from the EU in 2013 were just so much fairy
tales...hard-nosed operators like Kolomoysky are recalculating...
The chaos and national ruin has really cost these gangster capitalists nothing [in fact
they have profited wildly]...so it is easy for them to reverse course and come begging back
to Russia...
Bryan MacDonald has a good piece about this today in RT...
So, here we are, almost six years since the first "EuroMaidan" protests in Kiev, and
Ukraine's most prominent oligarch has finally voiced the unmentionable: the project has
failed.
As for Kolomoysky...like Trump, there is something to like about dirtballs who speak their
minds openly...LOL
Quite a turnaround by Kolomoisky. Wasn't he once caught on a tapped phone call admitting
while chuckling about Ukrainian complicity in shooting down MH-17? i.e. NOT Donbas rebels and
NOT Russia.
@12 karlof1... a referendum... as if the usa would agree to that, lol.... look how they
processed the one in crimea...
@18 flankerbandit... last line is true, but it pales in relation to the ugliness these 2
exhibit 99% of the time, although the 1% when they don't it's refreshing! ukraine will
continue to be used as a tool by the west..
forget about any referendum.. that makes too much sense and won't be allowed..
Nordstream 2 will come online in less than 2 months and the Ukrainian gas exports at that
time will cease (I.e. no oil for the Oligarchs to steal), no matter what the US says they
can't replace the Russian oil exports in terms of money & support to Ukraine, so the
Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in order for the Russians to keep
even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets
It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot.
But now the Ukrainian thieves are beginning to realize that the Western thieves are going
to steal the very ground from under their feet, so there will be no more Ukraine to steal
from. That's not a very good business model. Plus they're no doubt seeing how the US treats
its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere, and realize they could easily find themselves
the next meal for the US beast. Pretty easy to see why the smarter ones are getting
nervous.
they need to make peace with Russia or they will be left out in the cold, literally. They
seemed to have previously bought into some insane lie that they'd be a part of the EU and
NATO if theyd do Washington's bidding. The Deep state vastly underestimated Putin's resolve
when it became clear to the Russians that Washington may try and turn Crimea into a NATO port
one day. The game is over. Ukraine needs to find a way forward now for itself or it will be a
failed state in the near future. It's clear Merkel and Europe want no part of this headache
I don't think Russians want to 'own' any part of Ukraine...at least that is the nearly
unanimous opinion of my own contacts and colleagues in Russia...so I don't think any
referenda will be on the table...
What I do think is possible is what Yanukovich and Russia agreed to in terms of a trade
and economic deal...which was a lot more practical [not to mention generous] than the EU
'either or' nonsense...
Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they are selling vast tracts of
agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally dispossessing themselves of
their own food security...
At the time of the Soviet dissolution, Ukraine had the highest living standards and some
of the world's prime industry and technology...including for instance the Yuzhnoye design
bureau [rocket engines and spacecraft] and many more such cutting edge aerospace
concerns...
For years these crucial enterprises were able to keep going due to the Russian
market...that all ended in 2014 [and in fact was tapering off even before due to the massive
corruption]...
Now the Chinese are looking to scoop up these gems at firesale prices...
It is really quite unbelievable that the nutcases in the Ukraine would be willing to cut
off their own arm just to bleed on Russia's shirt...
Why did the Ukraine never recover from the gangster capitalism like Russia did...because
no Putin ever came along to reign in the oligarchy...[It could be argued Putin hasn't done
nearly enough in this regard].
The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the
unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal
wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on the verge of
toppling...
Kolomoisky is talking his book and helping USA to make the case that Nordstream is a NATO
security issue. To pretend that he's serious about a rapproachment with Russia just plays
into that effort.
And b ignores my comment on the prior thread that he references (about Trump being
Constitutionally charged with foreign policy). Repeating: the "Imperial Presidency" has flung
off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing the need to get Congressional
approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and
black budgets.
While for practical reasons the Executive Branch of USA government has the power to
negotiate treaties and manage foreign relations, Constitutionally he does so for the
sovereign (the American people) and his efforts are subject to review and approval of the
people's representatives via the power of the purse.
Ignoring how the "Imperial Presidency" has usurped power leads to faulty analysis that
supports that power grab.
Ukrainegate IS a farce, but for other reasons. Chief among them being the inherent fakery
of 'managed democracy' which manifests as kayfabe.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government.
There is one and only one Western Empire and its deep state spreads throughout Western
governments and society. They are the owners of the world and they run the world they
own.
Nicely put:- that is the reality. Thanks b for your intrepid reports.
Paul Craig Roberts has a deeply aggrieved rant at zero hedge if barflies want a chuckle.
What a shitshow.
Crimea?
It has been part of Russia about as long as the USA has been a country.
9 out of 10 residents are of Russian origin, and Russian is the spoken language.
I guess it could be returned to the 10%-- but out of fairness, we must turn the USA over to
its original occupants.
If you live in the USA, get your ass ready to leave.
One of the problems that the anti-nazis face in Ukraine is that there are occupying armies in
the country. Armies which cannot be trusted to obey instructions which are not agreed upon by
NATO warmongers.
One such army is Canadian, commanded I believe by a descendant of the Ukrainian SS refugees
and reporting to the Foreign Minister in Ottawa, a Russophobe with a family background of
nazi collaboration.
The actual political situation is much more delicate than media reports suggest: what are
called elections feature, in the Washington approved fashion, the banning of socialist and
communist candidates. Bans which are enforced by a combination of fascist commanded police
forces and, even less responsible, private nazi militias. Opponents of the Maidan regime are
driven into exile, jailed or murdered.
Those who wonder as Jackrabbit, in a rare essay into rationality, does above, about the
nature of the US Constitution after decades of the erosion of checks and balances thanks to
the Imperial Presidency, will recognise that a dialectic is at work here. Washington's
support for fascism abroad has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the
installation of fascist regimes abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US
intervenes it leaves a fascist regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind
it.
And what this means is that, among other things, the ability of the population to effect
political change is cancelled: there is no way that the people of Ukraine can decide what
they want because the decisions have been taken for them, in weird cult like gatherings of SS
worshiping Bandera supporters in Toronto and Chicago. It is no accident that most of the
'Ukrainians' being wheeled out by the Democrats to testify against Trump are actually greedy
expatriates who have never really lived in Ukraine.
There was a moment, not long ago, when it looked as if the Minsk accords promised a path to
peace and reconciliation. Unfortunately the plain people of Ukraine, the poorest in Europe
though living in one of the richest countries, Washington, Ottawa and NATO didn't like the
sound of Minsk. Nor did the fascists in the Baltic states and Poland, for whom, for
centuries, Ukraine has been a cow to milk, its people slaves to be exploited and its rich
resources too tempting to ignore.
As Thomas Jefferson explained the President's role in foreign affairs in 1790, and the lack
of advisors' policy making decisions: ''as the President was the only channel of
communication between the United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that
foreign nations or their agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation';
that whatever he communicated as such, they had a right and were bound to consider 'as the
expression of the nation'; and that no foreign agent could be 'allowed to question it,' or
'to interpose between him and any other branch of government, under the pretext of either's
transgressing their functions.' Mr. Jefferson therefore declined to enter into any discussion
of the question as to whether it belonged to the President under the Constitution to admit or
exclude foreign agents. 'I inform you of the fact,' he said, 'by authority from the
President.'
Might also be worth yesterdays hero's asking if dear Mr Kolomoisky, joint Uki/Israeli
national, took a part in authorising the shoot down of MH17 as a news cover for Operation
Protective Edge. Heave ho zionist USA ....et al.
1.The decisions to with hold and release aid have nothing to do with the President making
foreign policy but with his campaign. Saying it was about foreign policy is a damned lie.
2.Trump as president is supposed to lead foreign policy, which means actually setting a
policy. Military aid to Ukraine, yes, except no, except yes, personal handling without asking
anybody with experience how to achieve the national goal desired, national agenda kept secret
from the people who have to carry it out, abuse of officials, demands for dubiously legal
actions without rationale...Saying it was about the president's executive role is a damned
lie.
3.Trump has not made even a tweet that questions US support for fascists. That not even a
issue for Trump. Saying this is about support for fascism is a damned lie.
4.Kolomoyskiy is a bankroller of fascists. It is not impossible even a billionaire might get
frightened by the genie he's let out of the bottle, even if he's Jewish and rich enough to
run away. But actually undoing the fascist regime means taming the paramilitaries and this is
not even on the horizon. Given the rivalry between Poroshenko and Kolomoyskiy it's not even
certain it's a real change of heart or just soothing words for the non-fascist people. Nor is
it even clear the Zelensky will follow even the Steinmeier formula. If he does, good, but
until something actually happens? Saying it's about the antifascist turn is a damned lie.
The only thing that isn't a lie is that Trump was not committing treasons, "merely" a
campaign violation. But then, Clinton never did either. The crybabies who dished it out but
can't take it deserve zero respect, and zero time.
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region.
Wonder if he is planning to come clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17
shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his Privat Group's
subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What
does he know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17
to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew
had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
Somewhere I read it alleged that the actual owner of Burisma was or is Kolomoiski.
Anything to this?
And via John Helmer (via Checkpointasia and dances with bears) comes the perspective that
it's not so much Kolomoiski floating trial balloons (though that may also be true) but that K
is being given space in the NYT to build his credentials as the new Borg villain, thereby
making it still harder for Zelensky to reconcile with Russia.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own
future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly runs everything into the ground in order to
extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme on
the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they
could from the Ukraine (and from perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was
providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started closing the
spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they
would agree to talk mean about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the
loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord
Stream 2. That was always the plan. Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here
---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me. Although it is
a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta.
By not overreacting to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord
Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have managed to reach their goal of getting
Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with
other paramilitaries. And is the current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only
bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the
score. This guy does not know who's on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him
talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into detail with
Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may
derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum, etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only
first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and
most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an
opportunity to threaten the USA? For no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still
won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia
on a level which is easy to manipulate and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski
will get nothing.
Thank you, b, for that snippet from NY Interview with Kolomoisky . I had glanced the headline
on RT but didn't read it because of RT's usual clumsy writing.
Kolomoiski is taunting the empire: investigate my crimes and
ukraine will seek reconciliation and alliance with russia.
Russia won't fall for it. They want kolomoiski's scalp even
more than the empire. From the statements putin has made, maybe
the only concession russia would accept is the dissolution of
ukraine as a sovereign entity and reintegration with russia, minus galicia.
Putin has remarked that they are not one people but one state. Ukraine
already knows that its domestic industry is only viable in competition
with the eu industrial powerhouses if it is integrated with russia.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control
personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the
time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that
controls a very big chunk of airspace over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan
to climb from flight level 330 [33,000 ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in
eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude,
but the crew declined the clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very
likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800
ft, but flying eastward you only have odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew
figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight
plan just before it went down...ostensibly due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route
chart, which is used by pilots to plan and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway
[basically a highway in the sky] when it is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint,
which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is
visible on the previous chart and is right on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is
TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not
object...however, usually these kinds of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck
because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on course
deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will
always be chatter between the captain and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit
voice recorder, which I find very odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called
'secondary' was working which uses the transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia
traverse this territory...the plan is always to fly what's called a 'great circle route'
which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your
PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so
will not be visible to the secondary surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch
have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not
usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320
[32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could not fly under that height...but clearly they should
have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Deep State's view on the members' God given right to make foreign policy decisions (it
must be the God who has give it to them, because the people certainly have not) just reminds
the of the general attitude of the Government's bureaucracy. Give any fartbag a position in
the government and he/she becomes "a prince/princes over the people", give him or her a
monopoly over violence and you got yourself a king/queen. All these police and military kings
& queens milling around and lording over us. "Deep State" is such a totally natural
consequence of the government bureaucracy corrupted by power that it appropriated.
Pillaging taxes from the sheeple (and taking young maidens like Sheriff of
Nottingham/Epstein) could have never ever been enough. Did you seriously think that the Deep
Staters would constrain themselves to only stealing your money, taking your children for
their pleasure and to die in their wars of conquest, and putting you into a totally unsafe
airplanes to die for their profit? Constrain themselves when there is a whole globe out there
to be lorded over, like Bidens over Ukraine? It is the poor people of Ukraine who just have
too much money, thus had to give it through the gas monopoly to the Biden gang, which
selflessly brought them "democracy" at $5B in US taxpayers' expense. Therefore, it is the
Deep State which has been chosen by God, or someone just like that, to make the decisions
about the imperialist/globalist foreign policy and have billions of dollars thrown by the
grateful natives into their own pockets, as consulting fees:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/leaked-bank-records-confirm-burisma-biden-payments-morgan-stanley-account
So far the only clear-cut globalization is that one of crime, which has become
global.
What is the US National Interest b asks? Who defines it as such?
Ome magazine that might know is none other than The National Interest. Hopefully I won't
get attacked for quoting from what seems like a fairly sane article to me....
"The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to. Ukraine is a debt-ridden state
and only five years beyond an extralegal revolution. Should the government collapse again,
then American weapons could end up in the possession of any number of dubious paramilitary
groups.
It wouldn't be the first time. In the 2000s, CIA operatives were forced to repurchase
Stinger missiles that had fallen into the hands of Afghani warlords -- at a markup.
Originally offered to the Mujahideen in the 1980s, the Stingers came to threaten American
forces in the region. Similarly, many weapons provided with US authorization to Libyan rebels
in 2011 ended up in the possession of jihadists."
It's difficult to find clean information on happenings within Ukraine and those involving
Russia. The Ministry of Foreign affairs has this page
dedicated to the "Situation Around Ukraine." Of the three most recent listings,
this one --"Comment by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Maria Zakharova on the NATO
Council's visit to Ukraine"--from 1 November is quite important as it deals with the reality
on the ground versus the circus happening thousands of miles away, although it's clear the
delusions in Washington and Brussels are the same and "continue to be guided by the Cold War
logic of exaggerating the nonexistent 'threat from the East' rather than the interests of
pan-European security."
In the
second most recent listing --"Remarks by Deputy Permanent Representative of the Russian
Federation to the OSCE Vladimir Zheglov at the OSCE Permanent Council meeting on the
situation in Ukraine and the need to implement the Minsk Agreements, Vienna, October 31,
2019"--the following was noted:
"There's more to it. The odious site Myrotvorets continues to function using servers
located in the United States. The UN has repeatedly stated that this violates the presumption
of innocence and the right to privacy. Recently, Deputy Head of the UN Human Rights
Monitoring Mission in Ukraine, Benjamin Moreau, reiterated the recommendation to shut down
this website. A similar demand was made by other representatives of the international
community, including the German government. The problem was brought to the attention of the
European Court of Human Rights. The other day, the representative of Ukraine at the ECHR was
made aware of the groundlessness of the Ukrainian government's excuses saying that it
allegedly 'has no influence' on the above website.
"In closing, recent opinion polls in Ukraine indicate that its residents are expecting the
government to do more to bring peace to Donbas. The path to a settlement is well known, that
is, the full implementation of the Minsk Package of Measures of February 12, 2015, that was
approved by the UN Security Council."
Clearly, Zelensky's government is much like Poroschenko's when it comes to listening to
those who empowered it, the above citation is one of several from the overall report.
The latest report deals with an ongoing case at the International Court of Justice at The
Hague that reveals some of the anti-Russian bias there. It has no bearing on this discussion,
although it does provide evidence of the contextual background against which the entire
affair, including the circus in Washington, operates.
MoA consensus is Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords they continue to oppose
to implement despite their promise to do so. Clearly an excellent example of not being
agreement capable that hasn't changed since 2015.
If the Republicans had any brains, they'd turn the Ukrainian aspect of the hearings into
an indictment against Obama/Biden for illegally overthrowing Kiev and trying to obtain their
piece-of-the-action, but then that would be the logical thing to do and thus isn't an option.
The prospect of each day providing similar spectacle is mind numbing as it airs the sordid,
unwashed underwear if the Evil Outlaw US Empire.
I normally do not reply to trolls, but I make an exception for you. Pedo-dollar? Do you have
any more such crap to dilute the valid points discussed here?
i liked what @ 32 tod said - "he's just doing the old Jewish threatening/begging
dance!
"And you are forcing us to be at war, and not even giving us the money for it." Wink!
Wink!"
stating the obvious is one remedy for any possible confusion here..
@54 karlof1... i don't believe trump is allowed to shine any light on the usas illegal
actions as that would be sacrilege to all the americans who see their country in such a
great, exceptional-ist light... how would trumps MAGA concept swallow that? it wouldn't, so
it won't happen...
You are a bit off on that story. NS2 pipeline will increase the capacity not transitioning
via Ukraine and reduce the price banditry by the Ukrainian & US gangs, but it will not
make gas transit via Ukraine unnecessary. The planned switch off of the German nuclear and
coal power plants will gradually increase the German demand for gas, that is the Russian gas
by so much that NS1 and NS2 will not be enough. Primarily, NS2 is a signal to the Ukrainian
& US Democrat gangs that if they try excessive transit fees and stealing of gas again,
that they will be circumvented within a few years by NS 3,4,5 ...
BTW, the globalized pillaging of the population is clearly not an invention of the DNC
crime gang only. For example, the 737Max is a product of primarily Republican activity on
deregulating what should have never been deregulated and subjugation to the Wall Street (aka
financialization). The pillaging of the World is strictly bipartisan, just differently
packaged:
1) R - packaging the deregulation to steal & kill as "freedom" or
2) D - packaging the regime change as responsibility to protect R2P (such regime change and
stuffing of own pockets later).
karlof1 @54 - "Minsk backed NATO and its Ukrainian minions into a corner from which
there's only one way out, which is the implementation of the Accords"
Yes. As you well know, and as we have well discussed, Minsk was in its very essence the
surrender terms dictated to the US by NAF and Russia in return for letting the NATO
contractors go free and secretly out of the Debaltsevo cauldron. Either actually or
poetically, this was the basis. The US lost against NAF. The only way to prevent Donbass
incursion into the rest of Ukraine was to freeze the situation. The US had no choice, and
surrendered.
Out of the heat and fog of warfare came a simple document made of words which, even so,
illustrated perfectly just how elegantly the Kremlin had the entire situation both war-gamed
and peace-gamed. Minsk from that day until forever has locked the Ukraine play into a lost
war of attrition for the US sponsors, with zero gain - except for thieves.
To attempt to parse Ukraine in terms of statecraft is to miss the point that Ukraine can
only be parsed in terms of thievery. This is not cynicism, simply truth.
Now they sell their land because this is all there is left to sell. Kolomoisky proposes
selling the entire country to Russia for $100 billion but not only will Russia not bite, the
country isn't worth even a fraction of that - because of Minsk, it can cause zero harm to
Russia. But this ploy raises the perceived value (Kolomoisky hopes) in the eyes of the west,
and starts the bidding.
In Russia the people see all this very clearly, including on their TV. Yakov Kedmi in this
Vesti News clip of
Vladimir Soloviev's hugely popular talk show, discusses the situation. He baits Soloviev by
saying that the Ukrainian thieves are only doing what the Russian thieves did in the 1990's -
and one must filter through this badinage to take out the nuggets he supplies. Here are
three:
1. Zelensky has no security apparatus that follows his command, therefore how can he be
considered the leader of the country?
2. There is no power in Ukraine, only forces that contend over the scraps of plunder.
3. These forces are creating the only law there is, which is the sacred nature of private
property for the rich - the only thing the US holds sacred.
Therefore sell the very soil.
~~
The Minsk agreement is a sheer wall of ice reaching to the sky. No force imaginable can
scale it or break it. Against that ultimate, immovable wall the US pounds futilely, with
Ukraine caught in the middle, while Russia waits for Ukraine to devolve into whatever it
can.
And the Russian people and government regard the people of the Ukraine as brothers and
sisters. But until the west has worn itself down, and either gone away or changed the
equation through a weakening of its own position in some significant way, nothing can be done
by Russia except to wait.
What Tod @32 described is spot-on, "the old Jewish threatening/begging dance". It is not that
the Russians do not know this about Kolomoyskyi. They will play along not expecting anything
from the Zelo-on-a-String and his master. The Russians like to let those scumbags (Erdo comes
to mind) huff & puff and embarrass themselves by flips. They know - it could always be
worse if those did something intelligent. Kolomoyskyi is vile but he ain't no genius, not any
more than Erdo.
Sure Cheeza...everybody's a 'bit off' except you...
Gazprom is talking about 10 bcm a year through Ukraine for the new 10 year deal, as
opposed to the 60 bcm [billion cubic meters] that Ukraine is hoping for...
"Deep state" is misleading and actually a false construction.
There is an Imperial State (the ruling faction/)which consists of imperial apparatchiks
placed in every key position in government. Babyl-on @ 8
? before I begin , how do you measure the political and economic power of money
as opposed to the political and economic power of the intentions and needs of the masses.
Does $1 control a 100 people? A million dollars control 100,000,000 people? How do we measure
the comparative values between money power and people power? I think the divisions of
economics and the binaries of politics established by the nation state system means that the
measurement function (political and economic values) varies as a function of the total wealth
vs the total population in each nation state. If true, become obvious how it is that: foreign
investments displaces the existing homeostatis in any particular nation state, the smaller
the poorer the nation state, the more impact foreign wealth can have; in other words outside
wealth can completely destroy the homeostatis of an existing nation state. I think it is this
fact which makes globalization so attractive to the ruling interest (RI) and so damning to
the poorest of the poor.
Change by amendment is impossible There is one and only one Western Empire but
there is also an Eastern Empire, a southern empire, and a Northern Empire and I believe the
ruling interest (faction) manipulate all nations through these empires. In fact, they can do
this in any nation they wish. The world has been divided into containers of humans and
propaganda and culture have highly polarized the humans in one container against the humans
in other containers. <=divide, polarize, then exploit: its like pry the window, and gain
access to the residence, then exploit. It is obvious that the strength of the resistance to
ruling class exploitation is a function of common cause among the masses. But money allows to
control both the division of power and the polarization of the masses. The persons who have
the powers described in Article II of the US Constitution since Lincoln was murdered can be
controlled (Epstein, MSM directed propaganda, impeachment, assassination, to accomplish the
objects of the ruling interest (faction). Article II of the USA constitution removes foreign
activity of the USA from domestic view of the governed at home Americans. Article II makes it
possible for the POTUS to use American assets and resources to assist his/her feudal lords in
exploiting foreign nations almost at will and there is no way governed Americans can control
who the ruling interest place in the Article II position.
A little History Immigration to NYC from Eastern (the poor) and Western (the
rich) Europe transitioned NYC and other cities from Irish majority to a Jewish majority; and
the wealthy interest used the Jewish majorities in key cities to take control over both
Article I and Article II constitutional powers by electing field effect controlled
politicians (political puppets are elected that can be reprogrammed while they are in office
to suit the ruling interest. The source code is called rule of law, and money buys the
programmers who write the code. So the ruling interest can reprogram in field effect fashion,
any POTUS they wish. Out of sight use of the resources of America in foreign lands is nothing
new, it was established when the constitution was written in Philadelphia in 1787 and
ratified in 1788.
Propaganda targeted to the Jewish Immigrants allowed the wealthy interest to
control the outcome of the 1912 election. That election allowed to destroy Article I,
Section 9, paragraph 4 " No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid unless in
Proportion to the Census of enumeration herein before directed to be taken". and to enact a
law which privatized the USA monopoly on money into the hands of private bankers (the federal
reserve act of 1913)
What was the grand design Highly competitive, independent too strong economic
Germany was interfering with Western hegemony and the oil was in the lands controlled by the
Ottomans. It took two wars, but Germany was destroyed, and the Ottoman empire (basically the
entire Middle East) became the war gained property of the British (Palestine), the French
(Syria) and the USA (Israel). Since then, the ruling interest have used their (field effect
devices to align governments so the wealthy could pillage victim societies the world over.
Field effect programming allows wealth interest to use the leaders of governments to use such
governments to enable pillage in foreign places. The global rich and powerful, and their
corporations are the ruling interest.
psychohistorian says it well "..the global private finance core segment of empire is
behind Trump and throwing America(ns) under the bus as the world turns more multilateral. The
cult of global private finance intends on still having some overarching super-national role
in the new multilateral world and holding debt guns to everyone's heads to make it
ongoing..." by psychochistorian @ 10
NOBITs @ 11 says it also "All presidents have been servants of the military, which includes
the police/intel/security apparatus; the few who did not entirely accept their figurehead
role were "dealt with." Kennedy, Nixon, Carter and now Trump. The Washington permanent state
bureaucrats are shocked and understandably offended; they have after all, been running US
foreign policy for 75 years!" by: NOBTS @ 11
According to TG @ 13 "Democracy" is about privatizing power and socializing
responsibility. The elites get to set the policy, but the public at large gets to take
responsibility when things go wrong. Because you see, we are a "Democracy."by: TG @ 13 <=
absolutely not.. the constitution isolates governed Americans from the USA, because the USA
is a republic and republics are about privatizing power and socializing responsibility;
worse, there ain't nothing you can do about it.
Vonu @ 19 says "According to Kevin Shipp, the National Security Council really runs the
executive branch, not the president. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=11&v=XHbrOg092GA"
by: Vonu @ 19 <=but it is by the authority of Ariicle II that the NSC has the power to run
the executive branch?
KAdath @ 22 says "the Oligarchs are now positioning themselves to abandon the US in
order for the Russians to keep even a tiny bit of oil flowing into their pockets by: Kadath @
22" <=exactly.. but really its not abandoning the USA, its abandoning the oligarchs local
to the pillaged nation..
J Swift @ 23 says "the US treats its partners in crime in Syria and elsewhere,"
[poorly] but its not the USA per say, because only one person has the power to deal in
foreign places. Its that the POTUS, or those who control the Article II powers vested in the
POTUS, have or has been reprogrammed.. J. Switft @23>>
flankerbandit @ 25 says " Ukraine has run itself into the ground, literally...now they
are selling vast tracts of agricultural land to huge Euro agribusiness concerns...literally
dispossessing themselves of their own food security..." flankerbandit @ 25 <=Not really
the wealthy (investor interest) have pushed the pillage at will button.. since there is no
resistance remaining, the wealthy will take it all for a song..
Jackrabbit @ 26 says "Trump [is].. Constitutionally charged with foreign policy. Repeating:
the "Imperial Presidency" has flung off Constitutional checks and balances by circumventing
the need to get Congressional approval for spending. Wars (like Syria) are now be funded by
Gulf Monarchies, black ops, and black budgets.by Jackrabbit @ 26 <== Trumps orders
military to take 4 million day from Syria in oil?
your observation that the money has circumvented Article I of the COUS explains why the
democraps are so upset.. the wealthy democrap interest has been left to rot? Your comment
suggest s mafia is in charge?
Tod @ 32 says "As soon as some money goes his way, he'll discover democracy again.
Sorry to burst you bubbles." by: Tod @ 32" <==understatement of the day.. thanks.
Bevin @ 32 says "a dialectic is at work here. Washington's support for fascism abroad
has instituted fascism at home which has led in turn to the installation of fascist regimes
abroad, not just occasionally but routinely. Wherever the US intervenes it leaves a fascist
regime, in which socialists are banned and persecuted, behind it. this means.. the ability of
the population to effect political change is cancelled" by bevin @ 33 <= yes but there is
really no difference in a republic and its rule of law, and a fascist government and its
military police both rule without any influential input from the governed.
michael @ 34 reaffirms "The President was the only channel of communication between the
United States and foreign nations, it was from him alone 'that foreign nations or their
agents are to learn what is or has been the will of the nation'" michael @ 34 well known to
barflies, the design of national constitutions is at the heart of the global problem. Until
constitutional powers are placed in control of the governed there will never be a change in
how the constitutional powers ( in case of the USA Article II powers) are used and
abused.
OutofThinAir @45 says "In general, governments are the order-providing solution for
chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of those seeking power over
others.by: OutOfThinAir @ 45" <+governments are the tools of wealth interest and the
governors their hired hands.
by: War is Peace @48 " Trump is a moron, groomed by Jewish parents ( Mother was Jewish,
Father buried at biggest Jewish cementary in NYC ) to be a non-Jew worked for the mob under
Cohen ( lawyer for 1950's McCarthy ); Became the 'Goyim Fool" real estate developer as a
cover for laundering mob money. So that it didn't appear that it was Jewish Mafia Money, so
they could work with the Italian Mafia. Trump went on for his greatest role ever to be the
"fool in Chief" of the USA for AIPAC. What better way to murder people, than send out a fool,
it causes people to drop their guard. by War is Peace @48 <= yes this is my take, What
does it mean. com suggest the global wealth interest may be planning to reprogram Trump to
better protect the interest of the global wealthy.
Kiza @ 51 the reason for globalization is explained see above=> response to Babyl-on @
8
dh @ 53 says ""The US should consider whom they are giving weapons to." by dh @53 <
the USA cannot consider anything, if its foreign the POTUS (Article II) makes all decisions
because Art II gives the POTUS a monopoly on talking to, and dealing with, foreign
governments.
Deagel @ 56 says "The American people don't care, they're all drugged out, and shitting
on the side-walks all over the USA, and sleeping in their own shit. This is the best time in
USA history for the Zionists to do anything they wish." by: Deagel @ 56 <= I think you
under estimate the value Americans place on democracy and human rights, until recently
governed Americans believed the third party privately produced MSM delivered propaganda that
nearly all overseas operations by the USA were to separate the people in those places from
their despotic leaders, and to help those displaced people install Democracy.. many Americans
have come to understand such is far from the case.. the situation in the Ukraine has been an
eye opener for many Americans. thoughts are sizzling, talk is happening, and people are
trying to shut google out of their lives. that is why i think Trump is about to be
reprogrammed from elected leader to .. God in charge
I watched that Soloviev segment with Kedmi the other day...always interesting to say the
least...
Btw...I'm not really up to speed on that whole Debaltsevo cauldron thing...I've heard
snippets here and there...[there is a guy, Auslander, who comments on the Saker blog that
seems to have excellent first hand info, but I've only caught snippets here and there]...
I hadn't heard this part of the story before about Nato contractors as bargaining
chips...if you care to shed a bit more light I will be grateful...
I suggest going to The Saker Blog and
enter Debaltsevo Cauldron into the site's search box and click Submit where you'll be greeted
with numerous results.
Grieved @62--
Thanks for your reply and excellent recap. As I recall, Putin wants Donbass to remain in
Ukraine and Ukraine to remain a whole state, although I haven't read his thoughts on the
matter for quite some months as everything has revolved around implementing Minsk. The items
at the Foreign Ministry I linked to are also concerned with Minsk.
The circus act in DC is trying to avoid any mention of Minsk, the coup or anything
material to the gross imperial meddling done there to enrich the criminal elite, which
includes Biden, Clinton, other DNC members--a whole suite of actors that omits Trump in this
case, although they're trying to pin something on him. The issue being studiously ignored is
Obama/Biden needed to be busted for their actions at the time, but in time-honored fashion
weren't. And the huge rotted sewer of corruption related to that action and ALL that came
before is the real problem at issue.
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person as evidenced by The New Yorker 737Max article
in the previous thread. This good article could only be measured by how much it agrees with
your own opinion that MCAS was put in to mimic the pilots' usual fly-stick feel. If anyone
does his home work, such as the journalist of this article, then he must agree with you,
right? With experts such as you out there, why would anyone dare apply common sense and say
that it would be an unimaginably stupid idea to put in ANY AUTOMATED SYSTEM which pushes
the plane's nose down during ascent (the most risky phase of a civilian flight, when almost
desperately trying to get up and up and up) for any DUMBLY POSSIBLE REASON !? What could
ever go wrong with such an absolutely dumbly initiated system relying on one sensor? Maybe it
was a similar idea to putting a cigarette lighter right next to the car's gas tank because it
lights up cigarettes better when there are gasoline vapors around. Or maybe an idea of
testing the self-driving lithium battery (exploding & flammable) cars near kindergartens
(of some other people's children)!?
An intelligent person would have said - whatever the reason was to put in MCAS it was a
terribly dumb idea, instead of congratulating himself on understanding the "true reason".
"If I were president, while I would resist gratuitous provocations, I would not publicly
associate myself with the delusion that stable friendship is possible (or, frankly,
desirable) with Putin's anti-American dictatorship, which runs its country like a Mafia
family and is acting on its revanchist ambitions."
Really?
From what have gleaned from the alternative media available on the internet ,of which MOA is
an important part. Putin and Lavrov are the two most moral and diplomatic statesmen on the
world stage today Compared to Trump, Johnson, Macron, Merkel, Stoltenberg, Pompeo, Bolton and
whoever else blights the international scene these days these two are colossi.
To describe
them as like a Mafia family seems to me to be 180 degrees wrong. Maybe Putin overreacted, in
his early days in power, to the Chechen conflict but look at the situation today.
Look at how
Gorbachev and Yeltsin were played by the west. I appreciate you did not write the words
quoted above but you said you agree with them and I find that startling given I am usually
very admiring of your insight and knowledge of geopolitical events.
According to the Impeachniks, it is Schiff's staff who decides how Schiff votes and his
policies. It would be illegal for Schiff to make decisions. But Schiff's recommendation will
make or break the careers of his staff, so elected Schiff has some influence. That's not true
for elected Trump, because those in his service already have made careers and/or a host of
outsiders looking to place them.
Although, he didn't get impeached for it Obama did get criticized for not sending the aid to
Ukraine. He was also criticized when he did intervene, but not fast enough for the deep
state. Remember "leading from behind" in response to Libya. Obama was much more popular and
circumspect than Trump, which protected him from possible impeachment when he went off the
deep state's script.
Discussion of the USC and the responsibilities assigned therein is probably a foolish and
merely moot exercise, as law is, ultimately simply custom over time, and since '45 or so the
custom has become dissociated from the documents' provisions, particularly with regard to
war-making and the "licensed" import and sale of dangerous drugs, dope. The custom in place
is essentially ukase - rule by decree. Many decree are secret.
I do not object, simply pointing to the obvious.
This is a public secret anybody can know. Inter alia see The Politics of Heroin in
Southeast Asia (McCoy)
...........
Custom includes also permitted theft, blackmail, trafficking children and so forth.
...........
zerohedge put up some documents tying TGM Hunter B to the money from Ukraine...
................
I would not worry about the name of the person called president. The real sitrep is more
like watching rape and murder from the dirty windows of a runaway train.
Upon the dissolution of the USSR, Ukraine was left with the fifth-largest nuclear arsenal in
the world. In exchange for financial assistance in the costs of removing all the nukes, the
West guaranteed to defend Ukraine's territorial integrity.
In the meantime, Russia has annexed the Crimea and rebels have taken control of parts of
Eastern Ukraine. The West has not provided any direct military assistance to restore those
territorial infringements.
Since the West has reneged on its end of the deal, would it not only be fair to return
Ukraine's nukes so it can defend itself like the Big Boys do, namely with threat of nuclear
annihilation?
I hate this trope. The Russian Fed. is not launching offensive operations to capture
Kharkov or Kiev. Western Ukraine is shelling ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine. What would
U.S. Congressman say if these were Jews? (I would condemn that as well).
The next time someone pontificates, 'Ukrainians are dying because Trump held up aid' ask
them how many. The number is ZERO. Javelins are not being used on the front line.
Mr. Kolomoisky is spot on, i.e. when he says that the Americans will only use Ukrainians as
their little bitches to fight and die for America's gain against Russia. Just like the
Americans fucked over the Kurds in Syria, using them as proxy fighters to do USA/Israel's
dirty work. Wherever the USA shows up and starts interfering, everything turns into shit:
Iraq...Afghanistan...Venezuela...Bolivia...Ukraine...Libya...Yemen...Nicaragua...Ecuador...the
list is quite long. It remains to be seen if Mr. Kolomoisky can bring about rapprochement
with Russia. He'd better watch his back.
"Wow. My opinion of Kolomoisky has just improved ... somewhat." --Seamus Padraig @73
Yes, Kolomoisky has moved up a notch in my estimation as well; from the low of
"monstrously inhuman spawn of satan" all the way up to "rabid dog" . That's
quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
I am very glad to see you back, Grieved, and your 'wall of ice' metaphor is indeed accurate.
To me, the promising signs in Ukraine were even as here in the US when voters fought back
against what b calls Deep State, which I am sure in my heart was even more of an overwhelming
surge than registered - the best the corrupters of the system could do was make it close
enough to be a barely legitimate win for their side, and they didn't succeed. Maybe somewhere
along their line of shenanigans a small cog in the wheel got religion and didn't do their
'job'. An unsung hero who will sing when it's safe.
I hope, dearly hope, it gets safe in Ukraine very soon. They are us only further down the
line than we are, but we will get there if we can't totally remove the cancer in our midst.
That's our job; I wish Ukraine all the best in removing theirs.
Jen...I should have made clear that the two aircraft picked up by Russian PRIMARY RADAR were
unidentified...
The two commercial flights you mention were in the area and were known to both Russian and
Ukrainian controllers by means of the SECONDARY SURVEILLANCE RADAR, which picks up the
aircraft transponder signals...
However, secondary WILL NOT pick up military craft that have their transponders
off...which is normal operating procedure for military craft...
So the airspace situation was this...you can see this from one of the illustrations I
provided from the DSB prelim report...
You had MH17...you had that other flight coming from the opposite direction [flying
west]...and you had that airplane that overtook the MH17 from behind [they were in a hurry
and were going faster, so when MH17 decided to stay at FL330, they were cleared to climb to
FL350 so they could safely overtake with the necessary vertical separation...]
Those three aircraft were all picked up on the Ukrainian SECONDARY [transponder]
surveillance...as well as the Russians...on both their PRIMARY AND SECONDARY...
But what the Russians picked up were two craft ONLY ON THEIR PRIMARY...those would have
been military aircraft flying with their transponders off [they're allowed to do that and do
that most of the time in fact]...
That's why those two DIDN'T SHOW UP ON THE SECONDARY DATA HANDED OVER TO THE INVESTIGATORS
BY THE UKRAINIANS...
Only primary radar would pick those up...and, very conveniently, the Dnipro primary was
inop at the time...[so the data handed to investigators by the Ukrainians would have no trace
of any military aircraft nearby]...
But with the Russian primary radar data, there is in fact evidence that there were
military aircraft in the air at the time...just that the Dutch investigators simply decided
to exclude the very vital Russian radar data on some stupid technicality...
[Really this is a very poorly done report, both prelim and final, and I've read many over
the years...]
The other thing I should have emphasized more clearly is about that course deviation that
controllers steered MH17 to, just seconds before it was hit...
The known traffic was those three commercial aircraft, as shown on the chart...here it is
again...
Those three commercial flights are clearly labeled...and the big question is... why was
MH17 DIVERTED SOUTH...OFF ITS PLANNED ROUTE...?
We can see the deviation track by the dotted red line...
Clearly there was no 'other traffic' that required MH17 to be vectored south by the
controllers...
In fact we see that there was a FOURTH commercial flight [another B777] that was flying
south exactly to that same waypoint that MH17 was diverted to...we see this airplane is
flying west on the M70 airway and is heading to the RND waypoint...
This does not make sense...why would you divert MH17 from going to TAMAK as flight
planned...in order to go south toward RND where another airplane is heading...
If nothing else this is very bad controller practice right there...yet again, the DSB
[Dutch Safety Board] does not even raise this question...
Like I said, leaving aside any guesswork, these are the simple facts and they raise
serious questions...both about the competence of the Dutch report, and the way the
controllers handled that flight...
Ukrainian think tank Ukrainian Institute of the Future and Ukrainian media outlet Zerkalo
Nedeli (both anti-Russian, but slightly more intellectual than typical Ukrainian outlets)
have contracted a Kharkov-based pollster to conduct a poll among DNR/LNR residents from
October 7 to October 31 (method: face-to-face interviews at the homes of the respondents,
sample size: 806 respondents in DNR and 800 respondents in LNR, margin of error: 3.2%) and
published its results in an article: Тест
на сумісність
[Compatibility Test] (in Ukrainian).
It's a long and rambling article, interspersed with
Ukrainian propagandistic clichés (perhaps to placate Ukrainian nationalists), but the
numbers look solid, so I've extracted the numbers I consider important and put them in a
table format. Here they are:
GENERAL INFORMATION
Gender 46.5% male 53.5% female
Age 8.3% <25 years old 91.7% ≥25 years old
Education 31.5% no vocational training or higher education 45.2% vocational training 23.3% higher education
Religion 57% marry and baptize their children in Ukrainian Orthodox Church (Moscow Patriarchate) 31% believe in God, but do not go to any church 12% other churches, other religions, atheists
Political activity 3% are members of parties 97% are not members of parties
Language 90% speak Russian at home 10% speak other languages at home
Nationality 55.4% consider themselves Ukrainians 44.6% do not consider themselves Ukrainians
ECONOMY
Opinion about the labor market 24.3% there are almost no jobs 39.3% high unemployment, but it's possible to find a job 15.7% there are jobs, even if temporary 17.1% key enterprises are working, those who want to work can find a job 2.9% there are not enough employees
Personal financial situation 4.9% are saving on food 36.4% enough money to buy food, but have to save money to buy clothing 43.6% enough money to buy food and clothing, but have to save money to buy a suit, a mobile
phone, or a vacuum cleaner 12% enough money to buy food, clothing, and other goods, but have to save money to buy
expensive goods (e.g. consumer electronics) 2.7% enough money to buy food, clothing, and expensive goods, but have to save money to buy a
car or an apartment 0.4% enough money to buy anything
Personal financial situation compared to the previous year 28.4% worsened 57.3% stayed the same 14.2% improved
Personal financial situation expectations for the next year 21% will worsen 58.6% will stay the same 18.7% will improve
Opinion on the Ukraine's (sans DNR/LNR) economic situation compared to the previous
year 50.3% worsened 41.4% stayed the same 6.3% improved
CITIZENSHIP
Consider themselves citizens of 57.8% the Ukraine 34.8% DNR/LNR 6.8% Russia
Russian citizenship 42.9% never thought about obtaining it 15.5% don't want to obtain it 34.2% would like to obtain it 7.4% already obtained it
Considered leaving DNR/LNR for 5.2% the Ukraine 11.1% Russia 2.9% other country 80.8% never considered leaving
Visits to the Ukraine over the past year 35.1% across the DNR/LNR–Ukraine border (overwhelming majority of them -- 32.2% of all
respondents -- are pensioners who visit the Ukraine to receive their pensions) 2.6% across the Russia–Ukraine border 62.3% have not visited the Ukraine
WAR
Is the war in Donbass an internal Ukrainian conflict? 35.6% completely agree 40.5% tend to agree 14.1% tend to disagree 9.3% completely disagree
Was the war started by Moscow and pro-Russian groups? 3.1% completely agree 6.4% tend to agree 45.1% tend to disagree 44.9% completely disagree
Who must pay to rebuild DNR/LNR? (multiple answers) 63.6% the Ukraine 29.3% Ukrainian oligarchs 18.5% DNR/LNR themselves 17% the U.S. 16.5% the EU 16% Russia 13% all of the above
ZELENSKIY
Opinion about Zelenskiy 1.9% very positive 17.2% positive 49.6% negative 29.3% very negative
Has your opinion about Zelenskiy changed over the past months? 2.7% significantly improved 7.9% somewhat improved 44.8% stayed the same 22.9% somewhat worsened 20.5% significantly worsened
Will Zelenskiy be able to improve the Ukraine's economy? 1.4% highly likely 13.3% likely 55.3% unlikely 30% highly unlikely
Will Zelenskiy be able to bring peace to the region? 1.7% highly likely 12.5% likely 59% unlikely 26.5% highly unlikely
MEDIA
Where do you get your information on politics? (multiple answers) 84.3% TV 60.6% social networks 50.9% relatives, friends 45.9% websites 17.4% co-workers 10% radio 7.4% newspapers and magazines
What social networks do you use? (multiple answers) 70.7% YouTube 61% VK 52.3% Odnoklassniki 49.8% Viber 27.1% Facebook 21.4% Instagram 12.4% Twitter 11.1% Telegram
FUTURE
Desired status of DNR/LNR 5.1% part of the Ukraine 13.4% part of the Ukraine with a special status 16.2% independent state 13.4% part of Russia with a special status 50.9% part of Russia
Desired status of entire Donetsk and Lugansk oblasts 8.4% part of the Ukraine 10.8% part of the Ukraine with a special status 14.4% independent state 13.3% part of Russia with a special status 49.6% part of Russia
Just listening to a bit of the testimony of the ex-ambassador to Ukraine.
It is all BS hearsay!
Also, this lady doesn't seem to grasp that as an employee of the State Department, she
answers to Trump. Trump is her boss.
The questioning is full of leading questions that contains allegations and unproved
premises built into them. I can't imagine that such questioning would be allowed in a normal
court of justice in the USA.
Sure, Trump is a boor. But he is still the boss and he gets to pull out ambassadors if he
wants to.
This is total grandstanding.
Also, a lot of emotional stuff like "I was devastated. I was shocked. Color drained from
my face as I read the telephone transcript . . . "
This is BS!
IIRC the Russian radar showed that the two mystery planes in questions were flying in
MH17's blindspot . That's way too close to be half an hour away. Also, the fact that
the two planes were flying over a war zone with their transponders turned off (which is why
they couldn't be conclusively identified) strongly suggests that they were military.
@ Posted by: ralphieboy | Nov 15 2019 11:24 utc | 71
When the US launched a coup in Kiev, wasn't that a violation of Ukraine's sovereignty
too?
@ Posted by: Christian J Chuba | Nov 15 2019 12:36 utc | 72
You know the real reason why they have yet to deliver the javelins to Ukraine? It's
because they're afraid that they'll be sold on the black market and end up in the ME
somewhere targeting US tanks. That's why.
@ Posted by: William Gruff | Nov 15 2019 13:30 utc | 75
That's quite the dramatic improvement, I must admit.
on Yovanovitch,
She added: "If our chief representative is kneecapped, it limits our effectiveness to
safeguard the vital national security interests of the United States."
She wasn't fired, she was kneecapped, and Ukraine is a US vital national security
interest, especially after it installed a new government with neo-fascism support.. .
.Kneecapping is a form of malicious wounding, often as torture, in which the victim is
injured in the knee
Cheeza decides to launch a personal attack...also completely off topic...
Typical reaction of a zelf-zentered person [sic]...With experts such as you out there,
why would anyone dare apply common sense...an intelligent person would have said...blah
blah blah...
Look man...I'm not going to take up a lot of space on this thread because it's not about
the MAX...
BUT...I need to set the record straight because you are accusing me here of somehow
muddying the waters on the MAX issue...
That is a complete inversion of the truth...I have been very explicit in my [professional]
comments about the MAX...and it is the exact opposite of what you are trying to tar me with
here...
Yes, it is important to understand these things...which is why I have made the effort to
explain the issue more clearly for the layman audience...
Your pathetic attack here shows you have no shame, nor self-respect...
Let's rewind the tape here...I said that Gazprom is looking to cut supplies to Ukraine in
the new 10 year deal that comes up for negotiation in January...and that they are going to be
pumping much less gas through Ukraine because NS2 now allows to bypass Ukraine...
You took a run at this comment, calling it wrong, and putting up a bunch of your own
hypothesizing...
I responded by linking to the
Russian news report quoting officials saying exactly that...that gas to Ukraine will be
greatly reduced...
Instead of responding to that by admitting you were full of shit...you decide to attack me
on the MAX issue...everybody here knows my [professional] position on the MAX...and that I
have said repeatedly THAT IT CANNOT BE FIXED...[which is also why I have offered detailed
technical explanations...]
I'm not going to let you screw with my integrity here...everything you attributed to me
on the MAX is completely FALSE and in fact turning the truth on its head...
As Kiza #55 noted - Nordstream 1 and 2, combined, only equal half of Ukraine's transit
capacity.
The primary impact is that Ukraine can't hold far Western European customer gas hostage
anymore with its gas transit "negotiations" as Nordstream allows Russia to sell directly to
Germany.
There can still be Russian gas sold via Ukraine, but this will be mostly to near-Ukraine
neighbors: Romania, Slovakia, Austria, Czech as well as Ukraine itself.
Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania can transit from Turk Stream, but there are potential Turk (and
Bulgarian) issues.
Poland is already committing to LNG in order to not be dependent on Russian gas transiting
Ukraine - a double whammy.
The ultimate effect is to remove Ukraine's stranglehold position over Russian gas exports,
which in turn severely undercuts Ukraine's ability to both get really cheap Russian gas and
additional transit fees - a major blow to their economy.
Therefore, the continuation of gas transit via Ukraine in volumes greater than the 26 bcm/y
suggested above will depend on the European Commission and European gas importers, and
their insistence that gas transit via Ukraine continues.
Otherwise, gas transit via Ukraine will be reduced to delivering limited volumes for
European storage re-fills in the 'off-peak' summer months...
This prospect will undoubtedly complicate any negotiations between Gazprom and its
Ukrainian counterparty over a new contract to govern the transit of Russian gas via
Ukraine, once the existing contract expires at the end of December 2019.
...Gazprom may be willing to commit to only limited annual transit volumes...
European gas importers don't give a shit about Ukraine...and they have the final
word...they care only about getting the gas they need from Russia in a reliable way and at a
good price...
The news report I linked to makes it perfectly clear that the Europeans are demanding that
the Ukranians get their act together on the gas issue, or they will be dropped
altogether...
You know...FOOL...it really makes me wonder how fools like you decide to make statements
here with a very authoritative tone...when it is quite clear you are talking out your rear
end...
Nobody needs that kind of bullshit here...if you don't know a subject sufficiently well,
then maybe you should keep quiet...or when making a statement, phrase it as your own OPINION
and nothing more...
"... The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch have made some kind of excuse about that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not usable... ..."
Curious to know how Kolomoisky is working "feverishly" to end the war in the Donbass region. Wonder if he is planning to come
clean on what he knows of the Malaysia Airlines MH17 shootdown and crash in an area not far from Slavyansk and near where his
Privat Group's subsidiary company Burisma Holdings holds a licence to drill for oil and natural gas. What does he know about Kiev
and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000 metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000
metres above as the flight crew had requested? He had been governor of Dnepropetrovsk region at the time.
fb @ 25 said;"The Ukraine is actually a preview of what we can expect to see in our own future...as the unleashed oligarchy similarly
runs everything into the ground in order to extract maximal wealth for a parasite elite...already we are nothing but a Ponzi Scheme
on the verge of toppling..."
Yup, aided and abetted by our current regime, while pretending not to...
@23
"It's a tough balancing act, being a Ukrainian oligarch. For two decades they stole what they could from the Ukraine (and from
perverting the various sweetheart deals Russia was providing). Once the industry and energy money was stripped, and Russia started
closing the spigots, they managed to get the West to pump in ungodly amounts of cash so long as they would agree to talk mean
about Russia, and didn't mind the US machine taking its cut of the loot."
This is it in a nutshell. The Russians were fed up with Ukraine stealing gas. Hence, Nord Stream 2. That was always the plan.
Whether the Yanks truly grasped the rationale here ---Russia is cutting off gas to Ukraine, simple---has never been clear to me.
Although it is a fairly simple plot. The Russians had decades of shenanigans with the Ukes and said Basta. By not overreacting
to the Ukrainian-USA freakout and keeping their eyes on the prize (Nord Stream and disengaging, gas-wise, from Uk), they have
managed to reach their goal of getting Nord Stream 2 online.
Kolomoiski is the bankroller and commander of the Azov Battalion. Has close arrangements with other paramilitaries. And is the
current principal of Burisma. And is Privatbank, the only bank left in Ukraine. He gets a cut of all the action.
When Trump queries Zelensky, all that Zelensky is thinking is this guy does not know the score. This guy does not know who's
on first. He wants me to investigate the boss? Let him talk to the boss. And who does Z talk to in D.C.? Pointless getting into
detail with Trump.
Trump has no team. No one in D.C. is on his side. He's unable to finish anything.
1) Say the fantasy happens and the US/Russia become BFFs like US/UK...
- Say hello to the new boss, same as the old boss?
- Tough to answer, many unknowns- Russia may act different once its on top, actors may derail schemes, Deep State temper tantrum,
etc...
In general, governments are the order-providing solution for chaos and problems that only first existed inside the minds of
those seeking power over others.
Kolomoiski is a U.S. asset. His interview with the NYTimes proves it.
His threats are meant to mobilize NATO and Russia haters in general; because Trump and most of his cadre care nothing for Ukraine.
Does anyone think Russia will give Kolomoiski 100 million dollars? Why was he given an opportunity to threaten the USA? For
no reason? Something else is afoot but Russia still won't take the bait because they are winning.
Russia is quite happy with the status quo. The war in Ukraine keeps the war against Russia on a level which is easy to manipulate
and therefore geostrategically beneficial. Kolomoiski will get nothing.
What does [Kolomoysky] know about Kiev and Dnepropetrovsk air traffic control personnel's direction to MH17 to fly at 10,000
metres in the warzone and not an extra 1,000 metres above as the flight crew had requested?
Okay..so an interesting can of worms here...
First is the fact that Kolomoysky was the governor of Dnipropetrovsk Oblast at the time...
Now as to the flight and Dnipro Radar [the regional air traffic control facility that controls a very big chunk of airspace
over eastern Ukraine]...
First the issue of the airplane cruising altitude...the crew had filed their flight plan to climb from flight level 330 [33,000
ft] to FL350 after passing a certain waypoint in eastern Ukraine...
Now the controllers did instruct the crew to go ahead and climb to their planned altitude, but the crew declined the
clearance and opted to stay at FL330...this was done very likely because the atmospheric conditions at that height were better
for fuel economy...
[To be even more specific...the Boeing manual gave an optimum flight altitude of 33,800 ft, but flying eastward you only have
odd numbered flight levels to choose from, so the crew figured they would be better off staying at 33 than climbing to 35...]
BUT...there are a couple of very curious things here...
First is the fact that Dnipro controllers deviated the airplane from its flight plan just before it went down...ostensibly
due to other traffic...
We can see this in the following map, which is what's called a high altitude en route chart, which is used by pilots to plan
and execute their flight...
You will note a couple of things here...the airplane is flying on the L980 airway [basically a highway in the sky] when it
is turned south by controllers to the RND waypoint, which is in Russian territory...
This is NOT the route filed by the crew...which can be seen
here...
They were supposed to continue flying on L980 right to the TAMAK waypoint, which is visible on the previous chart and is right
on the border with Russia...
They would have continued on the A87 airway to their next waypoint in Russia which is TIKNA...
Now here is the thing...right after they were turned south, they got shot down...
According to the radio transcripts, the crew acknowledged the course change, but did not object...however, usually these kinds
of course changes aren't appreciated on the flight deck because the crew is trying to minimize wasted time and wasted fuel on
course deviations...
Most times you will just not bother to complain to controllers...but for sure there will always be chatter between the captain
and copilot about being yanked around like that...
No mention is made in the Dutch Safety Board report about such chatter from the cockpit voice recorder, which I find very
odd...
Also odd is the fact that Dnipro ATC primary radar was down, and only the so-called 'secondary' was working which uses the
transponder signals from the airplane...
This is very busy airspace because a lot of flights from western Europe to South Asia traverse this territory...the plan is
always to fly what's called a 'great circle route' which is basically a straight line, if you flattened out the globe...
Plus considering that you have a war going on underneath...it's very unusual to have your PRIMARY radar inoperable...
This is significant also because military aircraft will not be using transponders and so will not be visible to the secondary
surveillance...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch have made some kind of excuse about
that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not usable...
So we see some very suspicious anomalies here...
The Ukrainian authorities did have a NOTAM [notice to airmen] in effect up to FL320 [32,000 ft] so commercial traffic could
not fly under that height...but clearly they should have closed the airspace over the hot conflict area...
They didn't do that...and Kolomoysky was in charge...
The Russian primary radar did pick up two other aircraft very nearby MH17...but the Dutch have made some kind of excuse about
that data not being in 'raw' form and thus not usable...
One of these aircraft was possibly an Air India flight travelling from Delhi to Birmingham. The flight crew was asked by Dnipro
ATC to make radio contact with MH17 after the latter plane could not be located by Dnipro ATC personnel. The Air India pilots
did try but did not get an answer.
The other craft could have been a Singapore Airlines flight from Denmark to Singapore. Singapore Airlines ran two flights on
17 July 2014 that went within half an hour of MH17 over much the same area travelling from Europe to Singapore.
This is the full video of the July 21 Russian military presentation. It also shows positions of Ukrainian BUK system radar
coverage that operating at the time of the shootdown and also sat photos of Ukraine BUK launcher positions in the hours before
the shootdown.
I will add here also [since we are on the MH17 issue] that the Russians produced a
verified paper trail of that BUK missile serial number that the Dutch came up with...
showing that it was DELIVERED TO THE UKRANIANS back in the 1980s...
Also that the Russians haven't even used that model of missile for more than 20 years,
having replaced them with substantially different, modernized versions...
Also, the Russians performed an extremely rigorous test of a BUK explosion, using a mocked
up airplane fuselage... and found results completely inconsistent with what the Dutch have
presented...
The whole thing is a disaster for the Nato deep state...nobody is fooled by their bullshit
on MH17...
I don't have links right now to those items mentioned above, but it should not be too
difficult to find...
I did find the exact location of the launchers on google maps some time ago but would take
a few hours research to locate it again. The positions of those launchers as in the Russian
military presentation also corresponds with the general area Almaz Antey believes a buk
missile would have to be launched from to create the damage pattern.
Peter, I agree about diverting the plane to get it into range of the Ukrainian BUK...there
certainly was no possible reason because of nonexistent 'traffic'...which is the official
Dutch story here...
Thanks again for the map info...very interesting to say the least...
I have been simply here raising very obvious questions about the known facts of that
flight, as presented by the completely incompetent Dutch...I will leave it to others to
connect the dots...[as you are doing].
I also do vaguely recall something about one of the Ukranian controllers coming forward
with some info that contradicts the official story...but I could be wrong and don't have any
links or anything like that...
Re the flight controller. There appears to have been something happen there but nothing
solid on the various flight controller rumors. Ukraine security did, I think, take all
records in the hours after the shootdown.
[... Opus Dei ...] Neo-cons at it again.
Posted by: Ghost Ship | Nov 14 2019 13:24 utc | 98
Opus Dei was created in 1928 is Spain, where Catholics were opposing emerging hordes of
godless Communists, Anarchists and Socialists. Since ca. 1960 Opus Dei is active in Bolivia
where they continue Work of God, with fruits that he have just witnessed. Sadly, in Bolivia
the error of Marxism is compounded by native superstition and paganism under flags of
Pachamama. Perhaps Opus Dei is neo-Saint Inquisition, but as conservatists, they have
decently long pedigree.
Economic warfare was widely used in WWII. When one country blockaded another's supply of essential goods or
bombed the industries producing them, why did the adversary's economy fail to collapse? This column, part of
the Vox debate on the economics of WWII, reviews Mançur Olson's insights, which arose from the elementary
economic concept of substitution. He concluded that there are no essential goods; there are only essential
uses, which can generally be supplied in many ways.
Mançur Olson (1932–1998) is best known for contributions to the political economy of collective action
(Olson 1965) and of comparative economic development (Olson 1982, 2000). In earlier work, Olson also
provided novel insights into the economic adaptation of countries to international conflict.
When one country imposed trade sanctions on another, blockaded its food supply, or bombed its war
industries, why did the results so often disappoint or surprise? This question puzzled and frustrated
civilian and military leaders on both sides in two world wars. Olson proposed that the answer lay in the
elementary economic concept of substitution.
Bombing Germany
The possibility of economic warfare arose when a country's economy was fully employed in the supply of
war. The strategy of economic warfare was to weaken an adversary's fighting power by attacking it, not
directly, but through its supply chain. The tactics of economic warfare then aimed to block or destroy
supplies of the commodities thought to be essential to the enemy's war production or its war economy more
generally. It was a tactical success if ships were sunk or factories were destroyed.
But strategic success was achieved only if the enemy's fighting power was weakened as a result. Given
tactical success, would strategic success follow? Olson (1962) argued that the link from tactics to strategy
would generally be undermined by the adversary's adaptation. The key to this response, he suggested, was
substitution.
Allied economic analysis suggested that ball and roller bearings were 'essential' to the supply chain of
German munitions (Bollard 2019). From August to October 1943, the US Army Air Forces systemically attacked
and largely destroyed the small number of factories around Schweinfurt that provided around half of
Germany's ball-bearing capacity. While the cost in aircraft and crew was heavy, the observed effect on
German war production was near zero (USSBS 1946: 4-5).
Olson noted several reasons. A high proportion of Germany's existing supply of ball-bearings was used
unnecessarily, where plain bearings would also do. Plain bearings were easily substituted when the supply of
ball-bearings failed so that the much smaller range of truly essential uses could still be met. In addition,
to assure the essential uses, capital and labour were quickly diverted from other employments to rebuild the
essential capacity in dispersed, less vulnerable locations. Thus, the German economy under attack was
re-optimised for war by sliding along its production frontier, although at a cost to other less-important
objectives.
This led Olson to be critical of model-based approaches to target selection (such as Wassily Leontief's
input-output framework) that assumed fixed coefficients in production and consumption. Such models implied
that to deprive an economy of a single 'essential' commodity, whether ball-bearings, oil, or molybdenum,
would be a crippling blow. But this followed entirely from ruling out substitution, which turned out to be
crucial to the outcome.
Starving Britain
In
The Economics of the Wartime Shortage,
Olson (1963) generalised his idea. He asked how Great
Britain, of all nations most dependent on international trade, survived three major conflicts -- the Napoleonic
War and two World Wars -- without famine. Olson noted that food was widely thought of as an 'essential' good
and that, in all countries, food security loomed large in thinking about war preparations. This was the
thinking of German leaders in two world wars when they applied submarine warfare to the blockade of the
British Isles, aiming to cut the UK economy off from its main sources of food.
Olson rejected the idea that, in an integrated market economy, any one commodity, even food, was more
essential than any other. At the margin, where choices must be made, the strategic value of a dollar's worth
of food would always be about the same as a dollar's worth of anything else. In a rich society, food would
have many uses, some essential and some inessential or luxurious. "It is not the
type of good
",
Olson wrote (1963: 9), "but the
type of use
that distinguishes a necessity from a luxury" (my
emphasis).
Before WWII, Britain imported more than three-quarters of wheat and flour, oils and fats, butter, cheese,
and sugar (Hammond 1951: 394). The Battle of the Atlantic was hard fought and very costly to both sides. By
1942, as Table 1 shows, food imports were running at just half the rate of the first nine months (October
1939 to June 1940). The loss of imports was only partly mitigated by a substantial increase in home
production. Yet, after a dip at the end of 1939, British food stocks never fell below the pre-war level.
Table 1
British food supplies and consumption in WWII
Sources
: Food imports and stocks are from Hancock and Gowing (1949: 206-207, 357-358);
home production and energy consumed from Hammond (1951: 387, 393).
Notes
: The figure for food imports under 1939 covers October 1939 to June 1940, and that for 1940
covers July to December 1940. The figures for pre-war home production are averaged over 1936-1938. The
figure for pre-war food stocks is from the end of August 1939.
Most importantly, Table 1 shows the calories consumed per person remained essentially constant throughout
the war, while their distribution was probably somewhat equalised by rationing. Rationing covered 'luxury'
foods, but bread and potatoes were the most important sources of calories. These were never rationed, which
also speaks to the adequacy of the food supply (Hammond 1951: 388). As for health, in 1942, deaths among
children and adult civilians fell below the rates of 1939 and continued along the pre-war downward trend
(Titmuss 1950: 521, 524).
Thus, Britain survived blockade despite initially relying on foreign sources for nearly two-thirds of
calories for human consumption. Other countries that entered the war more nearly or entirely self-sufficient
struggled and sometimes failed to feed their populations. They failed because they were poorer and so had
fewer inessential uses of food at the outset or because their economies were insufficiently integrated so
that efficient substitutions did not take place -- or both.
Implications
The implications of Olson's thinking were at the time, and remain today, contrary to the thinking of
nearly all government leaders and advisers in every country, including Britain. For two centuries, the
threat of war has prompted calls for a larger agriculture (or manufacturing industry), more food and oil
security, and larger stocks of 'essential' goods. Any suggestion that the pursuit of self-sufficiency in
such commodities is unnecessary, or even harmful, appears to lie well beyond the bounds of 'acceptable'
discourse. Yet historical investigation shows that such efforts were often, if not always, misdirected.
It is tempting to swing the other way and conclude that economic warfare was always pointless or had no
effect on the outcome of the war. Olson (1962: 313) took pains to reject this conclusion. He emphasised that
supply-chain disruption was ineffective mainly when the economy was wealthy (so any commodity had many
inessential uses) and when the commodity concerned was only partly interrupted (so enough remained for
essential uses). He maintained that substitution had its limits.
As an example of when those limits were breached, he gave the German synthetic oil industry in 1944–45.
Germany had no natural oil reserves and the pre-war creation of a synthetic oil industry was itself a
substitute for a commodity in short supply. Access to Romania's oilfields was lost in August 1944, making
Germany entirely dependent on domestic sources. Repeated bombing of the oil plants in the summer of 1944
permanently reduced supply below consumption. By the time of the Ardennes offensive of December 1944, German
plans relied on capturing Allied fuel stocks for their success (USSBS 1946: 8-9).
Extensions
Four extensions are suggested. One is to the uses of economic assistance from one ally to another in
wartime. During the decisive years of the war, the US economy, being twice the size of the combined
economies of the UK and USSR, showered $50 billion of military-economic aid on Britain and the Soviet Union
through the Lend-Lease programme. The framing purpose of Lend-Lease was "further to promote the defense of
the US" -- and nothing else. But that is not necessarily how the aid was used.
Inter-Ally aid turned out to be the converse of economic warfare. Just as the architects of the Combined
Bomber Offensive did not predict and could not control the substitutions that the Germany economy made to
adapt to destruction from the air, so too the US Lend-Lease administration did not predict and could not
control the Soviet economy's adaptation to the inflow of Allied munitions and war goods.
These resources were provided strictly to support Soviet fighting power. Because the external resources
were at least partial substitutes for home resources; however, the Soviet authorities were able to respond
by diverting those home resources to consumption and investment (Harrison 1996: 139-146). The
re-optimisation described here was also an element in Olson's later work (Olson and Zeckhauser 1966) on the
free-riding problem in NATO.
Another extension is to the sources of national feeling in wartime. The effect of economic warfare on the
enemy's fighting power is indirect; it works via the economy. It follows that economic warfare always does
'collateral' damage to people who are civilians, whether or not they are part of the enemy's supply chain.
The result is often to stiffen the enemy's resistance. The collateral damage inflicted on British cities by
German bombers stiffened British resistance; the same done to German cities stiffened German resistance. The
collateral damage of Germany's submarine war on Atlantic shipping in WWI brought America into the war
against Germany.
More generally, war is polarising and economic warfare extends that polarisation to the civilian
population. This then facilitates what Olson saw as the enemy's adaptation to economic warfare: economic
warfare makes angry civilians more willing to tighten belts and make do with substitutes that would be
unacceptable in peacetime. This does not make economic sanctions pointless, but it is a predictable
consequence that should be reckoned with beforehand.
A third extension addresses the question: can economic sanctions be a substitute for battle?
International relations since 1945 have provided many cases of economic sanctions aimed at forcing states to
change their behaviour without bloodshed, most of them apparently unsuccessful (Jones 2015). Examples range
from the Warsaw Pact countries in the Cold War to China, Cuba, North Korea, Southern Rhodesia, South Africa,
Myanmar, Iraq, Iran, and Russia. In a few cases, sanctions or the threat of them have had completely
unexpected side-effects: in 1941, US oil sanctions precipitated Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, while the
fear of blockade was a factor in Hitler's plan to seize the farmlands and oilfields of the Soviet Union.
These examples suggest that economic sanctions may not ultimately save soldiers' lives. They may achieve
their goals only when backed up by the credible threat or use of superior fighting power.
Finally, Olson's idea may be useful in illustrating the importance of economic analysis. When you teach
the principles of consumer choice, consider whether your students may find the life-or-death consequences of
substitution in a besieged economy to be a more impressive motivation than doughnuts versus pizza.
In Germany, the ball bearings were far from the most important thing, true. But Germany was running into
way more significant problems, amongs them notably transportation. The decimation of the German (more
widely, West-European) rail network by Allied raids was massive, and Germans had rail problems already
before. The destruction (especially from 44 onwards, especially using long range fighters and
fighter-bombers that could target trains with high precision) of the German logistics was crippling. And
there was no substitute. Similarly, there was little substitute for molybdenum and wolfram, needed for
quality armour (or, for that matter, Swedish iron ore, which was way better than German one). There was no
realistic substitue for the rail tranport in Germany.
In the UK – yes, the UK could provide the food. But at the expense of lots of other things (i.e if you're
growing food, you can't do other things. Which si why the food part of L&L was so important for the USSR).
Perharps even more importantly, sinking the merchant marine was sinking the navy you'd need to trade. If
Germany was able to sink the ships faster than you replaced them. From July to October 1940, U-boats sunk
282 ships. That is more than two ships a day on average. Compare to the Liberty ships productions later on,
the average was three ships every two days. So still losing proposition to two ships a day sunk. No ships,
not trade.
Crucually, he also commits the mistake a lot of economists do with the "oh, it will be just substitution"
assumption. Any substitution takes time. In war, time matters. By the time you substituted, you might have
well lost. (this is relevant to moder economies too, as the time and effort it takes to substitute at
similar quality and quantity is often just waved away in the "assume can opener" way).
Then there is Albert Speer's claim that Germany wasn't on a war footing (fully mobilized) until 1944.
In late '44 the bombing of German railheads was found by Enigma intercepts to have brought rail
transport to a standstill. But the advocates of attacking oil supplies won the priority debate -- (based on
my recollection of a piece in the NYRB. Can anybody corroborate?)
Allied planners in WW2 thought that the Germans were so super-efficient, that their economy would be 'as
tight as a drum'. A precursor of the just-in-time economy if you will. That is why the attacks against the
ball-bearing factories. As it turned out, after those factories were hit the German planners started to work
the phones and discovered that there was so much slack in the system, that they they had over a months worth
of ball-bearings ready to go which would last them while they rebuilt the factories. Slackers!
The rail problem that vlade mentioned was made worse by the fact that the trains to the concentration camps
had priority which led to German troops spinning their wheels while waiting for train transport as
train-loads of civilians went sailing by. This was made worse by the German practice swapping units between
the eastern and western front for whatever reason.
Olson may say that products can be simply substituted but it does not mean that it was a successful
substitution. As an example, by the end of WW1 German troops were forced to use bandages based on paper that
had been substituted for cloth bandages as there was no choice. Tough luck if you were wounded and needed a
good bandage. Economic warfare is brutal and we saw this in modern times Some 500,000 children in Iraq died
due to it but 'the price was worth it'. Thousands have died recently in Venezuela too so how are you going
to substitute for these deaths?
Frankly I suspect that Olson is not getting a true reflection of the reality of the situation with
blockades. Jerome K. Jerome, who spent time in Germany before WW1, in his autobiography mentioned people
like little old ladies he had know that had starved to death in the British blockade. Would the UK print
stories of people starving due to the German blockade? You might have to read a lot of autobiographies of
people who lived through those times to get a true picture of what was going on.
In any case, I believe that somebody ran the numbers on economic blockades and found that over the past
century, that they do not work no matter how many civilians that they ended up killing. Modern day Yemen is
proof of this.
On economic sanctions see the roughly 300 case studies that form the foundation for: Hufbauer, Gary
Clyde, Jeffrey J. Schott, and Kimberly Ann Elliott. "Economic Sanctions Reconsidered 3rd edition (hardcover+
CD)." Peterson Institute Press: All Books (2008).
I have the impression that the single most devastating consequence of aerial disruption of the German
rail network was the interruption of coal deliveries to power plants. Not sure where I read that, perhaps in
Adam Tooze's "Wages of Destruction", but it may have been another author.
If that's right, there
was
one or more single-points-of-failure within the Nazi economy, but it
took most of the war to locate it.
There are a number of metrics that show that the Russian's production quality of their tanks fell off
during their crises period and improved somewhat toward the end of the war. There is also the same, but I
have not seen it in as clear cut a form, shown for the German's. Since they didn't survive their crisis,
quality dropped and never recovered.
Ball bearings would be part of the "quality" issue, but very hard to quantify. The reliability of a lot
of the German tanks was never particularly good because of rushed design. As the tanks were loaded up with
bigger guns and armor, but using the same engines, overloading issues were added to the rushed design of
their later designs. Somewhere in that mess, you are trying to get by with using less ball bearings.
If I am teaching a course and trying to find a good example of substitution that can probably be
quantified. I might look at the (coal-based) synthetic oil issue. This is a case where you can probably get
descent numbers. And you can look at the reduction of oil imports versus the added cost of the synthetic
fuel.
You could also look at what part of the rest of their economy were the Germans willing to sacrifice to
keep the program running.
If there are "no essential goods, only essential uses" we might want to insure that our uses are made
sustainable. And for basic survival because modern life is not survivable let alone modern warfare. Foot
soldiers and tanks are no longer an essential use of force. Neither are planes. Nor trains. Don't tell all
the would-be belligerents, but we've all got hypersonic nuclear missiles that can travel half way around the
world. We've got a redundancy of satellites. And modernized grids. Bio warfare. Weather manipulation. We've
got mass destruction down pat. The word "blockade" is a punchline. We've gone MAD. But one small problem,
we've got no where to run. So clinging to the patriotic hope of a long drawn out fight to be victorious is
as silly as it gets. There won't be any way for "substitution" in a time of war. It's nauseating to think
about World Wars. But it is encouraging to think we can substitute neoliberalism for an economy of
collective action going into the future. I'd say first on a national scale. Only substituting when disaster
prevents a good harvest, etc.
This analysis makes the same mistake that writers make about US war on terror claiming it is failing, not
winning, chaotic, etc.
The relatively recent goal, 20+ years or so, with sanctions as well as military exploits is demand
destruction. I read somewhere that the West has some 8000 sanctions in place around the world and the
military has bombed how many Countries "back to the stone age? How much would all these Countries be
consuming if none of this was taking place?
Substitution was only a big factor back in the good old days of plenty. Now we need to substitute less
for more.
With all due respect, humans are complex machines requiring more than just raw fuel (calories).
It's the quality of the nutrition, ie protein, vitamin complexes, that determine critical health factors.
A diet poor in those will have serious deletrious effects, including inhibiting cognitive development.
That an equal calory regimen was maintained during wartime rationing is commendable, but it says
nothing about the actual levels of penury.
At the 19th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party, President Xi (31 October 2019)
reiterated the imperative of "Upholding the centralized and unified leadership of the CPC."
Why does Xi insist on this point as #1 item on the party's agenda of items?
Let's make a comparison. In 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin as a "dictator" and of
using the party as a sort of church for the worship of his own "personality cult." This was
nonsense of course and Mao said so formally in 1963, but it was music to the ears of the
capitalist powers, in the lead the US .
Kruscev then decided to liberalize the "Stalinist party"--which was more music to the
ears of the capitalist "Free West." He said, since the class struggle in in the USSR was
over, there were no class enemies, and everyone could join the party. Opportunist did;
corrupt greedy people did, until at last in 1989 it was top heavy with members of the
shadow economy--managers of factories, mines, industries of all sorts who had over 3
decades accumulated undeclared private wealth from leeching from the the public wealth. The
party had become a club of "entrepreneurs" (thieves) whose best bet for investments of
their ill-gotten accumulation of wealth was the restoration of capitalism.
There was much more damage to the party than I can synthesize in a post, but this small
bit will do. The party was infiltrated by opportunists of the worst greed. And its
integrity, authority, ability to plan the economy according to scientific Marxist Lenininst
wisdom and principles died.
Now the US and the Cia had long ago figured that if the integrity of party could be
disintegrated the USSR would collapse. And so it did.
The CPC has no intention of China collapsing and falling once again into the avid hands
of Western imperialism, which wages capitalist.imperialist class war on China. So, China
would never dream of declaring the class struggle over for China.
Its constitution states that China will remain a class society for a long time. Not only
because it depends for the creation of wealth on a loyal national, anti-imperialist
bourgeoisie but also because China is threatened by imperialism, which is also a class war
Khrushchev ignored, calling for "peaceful coexistence" with imperialism, since both USSR
and the imperialists supposedly shared the goal of peace under the nuclear cloud.
The man was a scoundrel and destroyed the power of the Communist Party, paving the way
to the restoration of capitalism.
This is the difference between the Soviet Union post-1956 and China. Mao was not
cleansed out of the party and consigned to the lower depths of Hell like Stalin. Whatever
his mistakes, he was treated as a comrade not an enemy, his contribution acknowledged, his
deficits also--unlike Stalin. Furthermore, his revolutionary contribution to the founding
and survival of the People's Republic of China was enshrined in the party's memory. His
picture is on the currency. He is loved and respected. The party was not stressed, purged,
or divided by making Mao an issue of allegiance.
Finally, by recognizing the contribution of the loyal bourgeoisie to a self-sufficient,
independent China, the CPC acknowledges that China is still a class society. No second
economy, operating in the shadow for China. The private sector exists and is regulated (and
lately bought up gradually by the state). No chance for a clutch of opportunists to
accumulate more combined wealth than the state's and so able to take over the state and
exact regime change.
This is why Xi specifically demands and requires a strong, centralized, integral, and
uncorrupt Communist party. The party is the insurance for the persistence of the path to
socialism and eventually communism for China. No party, no sovereign, imperialism-free
China
And in this determination of making the CPC the pillar of China's social and economic
progress for all the people, Xi is acting as a Leninist. The party is for the people and
the people for the party. They are one. Without a revolutionary party and a revolutionary
theory (in China "scientific and Marxist) the revolution would die. A it did in the Soviet
Union, starting with the Kruscev gambit.
This for the West is "authoritarianism," though the West is ruled by a clutch of
authoritarian economic elites who make all the decisions in their own interests. But they
call tit "democracy." At least in China, if anything, it's an "authoritarianism" for and by
the people--a bit closer to democracy, I should argue.
The problem with import substitution is that the factories that used to make these goods were
largely moved to China. China isn't going to give them back.
So in order to attempt to substitute US made for the China imports, the factories have to
be built first.
Secondly, China heavily subsidizes the early parts of the supply chains: raw materials and
what not. This wouldn't hold true to American factories.
So while the goal and the theory are good, the problem is the execution.
Russia is doing it because they're forced to: sanctions actually accelerates the process
because Russian internal investors know there will be a reasonably long term market for
Russian goods so long as the sanctions hold true, and the sanctions also lock in Russian
capital (that which was repatriated) to some extent.
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
Often I expect these stories in the media to get important technical details wrong...but
here we see that this writer did his homework...
I have said this many times before, but the MCAS system is NOT an anti-stall system...it
is there solely for the purpose of providing the right kind of stick feel to the pilot...
"On most airplanes, as you approach stall you can feel it," a veteran pilot for a U.S.
commercial carrier told me.
Instead of the steadily increasing force on the control column that pilots were used
to feeling -- and that F.A.A. guidelines required -- the new engines caused a loosening
sensation.
This is exactly it...and this is why I have to wonder how exactly is MCAS going to be
cleared to fly again...since the original, much less authoritative version was found
inadequate in providing the stick force required...and the rejigged production version proved
to be a surefire killer if it kicked in at low altitudes such as takeoff...
We recall that Captain Sullenberger called the MAX a 'death trap'...
So clearly the system's authority has to be dialed back...in which case the airplane
handling qualities do not meet established requirements...
The story here tells of the struggle that the family of Ralph Nader's grand-niece, who
perished in the Ethiopian flight, is waging to 'axe the max'...
Hopefully they will succeed, but I doubt it..the MAX can never be a good airplane...full
stop...
Inadvertently today I found myself trapped into listening for a couple of minutes to the
nonsense that Schiff was spouting in the House of Horrors.
It is almost incredible that what he was doing, in essence, was to draw attention to the two
great facts in this case, the first being the gangster Maidan coup, which the US no longer
even pretends not to have brought about for its own purposes, and the second, the way in
which the Vice President and his family set about profiting, personally, from the looting of
every Ukrainian's fortune-every family's healthcare, pension plan, utility bill, home. In
this case by saddling the people, dependent on gas heat to see them through the winter, with
millions to be paid to Hunter Biden, friends of John Kerry and other assorted profiteers.
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can of
worms and feeding it to the world.
But then I wonder if, perhaps, these people do not know something that foreigners cannot
know, something about the societal stupidity and institutional ignorance for which the only
country ever known to have supported "No Nothing" candidates is famous.
Perhaps Schiff and Pelosi know what they are doing and what they are doing is based upon HL
Mencken's dictum:
"Nobody ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American people."
@Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
Just found your query. Quick and dead-on response is a major EMP event, but that is not
what I had in mind.
Let me see if I can work up another, but necessarily lengthier response.
As I noted on the Bolivia thread, BRICS is having its Summit today & tomorrow in
Brasilia, and will likely be the most important of its brief life. So far, just this report :
"The heads of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa will discuss issues related to
economic, financial and cultural cooperation as well as arms control and joint efforts to
counter terrorism.
"The leaders of the five member-states are to attend the BRICS Business Forum, and meet
with the BRICS Business Council and the heads of the New Development Bank.
"In addition, Vladimir Putin will hold a number of bilateral meetings with the heads of
state and government taking part in the summit."
No! But there will be a new "civil war" in the US around the mid of the next decade. Split
occuring not south to north, but west to east; chaos further increased by immigrants from the
middle & south Americas with their own agenda.
Forces (land & air), militia & DHS people of the eastern party may seek secure
backing near frontier to Canada (area of Great Lakes therefore save). Some of the 'big
capitalists' who feel more international than patriot will flee to outer South America
(Argentinia, Chile).
Eventually a dead president (for that and for the civil war please look into cycles of
US-history). Peace will come with the first female president. Keep watch on Tulsi Gabbard
(but may be also another lady - as I am in Europe I am not familiar with all probable coming
female candidates).
Why no permanent split of the States? There are internal benefits (common traffic, markets
etc.) but more it is the outside pressure: to be able to compete with China it is a necessity
for the States to remain united. Also the coming chaos in Europe and Russia demands
unification of the US.
Now a very strange remark: some elites in the US have already accepted, even promote the
tendency toward "civil war" to enable a 'reset' of the political, economical and social
structure of the country. Furthermore, a seemingly weak US with a split in the military may
lead Russia in temptation to make some mistake (towards Ukraine and Europe). And now a very,
very strange remark: while some forces in the homeland are caught in civil disorder some
other forces in the overseas may be involved in a foreign war. Extremely pointed out: the
coming civil war in a very specific manner is a fake (to deceive and trap Russia - of course
not Putin but his followers).
Today I had a look into George Friedman's book about the next hundred years. For the first
view there is a lot of nonsense (disintegration of China etc.). But I agree that the power of
the US will be restored during the century. And if not the same power as it was in the 1990s,
then in every case the internal stability of the USA is completely guaranteed.
With greetings from Germany and with thanks to Bernhard for his valuable work, Gerhard
Like 'b' I find it almost impossible to believe that the Democrats are opening this can
of worms and feeding it to the world.
Just don't claim (like I do) that Russiagate and Ukrainegate are kayfabe courtesy of Deep
State 'managed democracy' or you're a nutcase that everyone will ignore.
Nah, just sit back and enjoy while the Democratic Party cuts its own throat for over the
Ukrainegate nothingburger which will see no one held accountable for anything.
A partisan witch-hunt less than a year before the 2020 Election? Double-plus good for
Trump's re-election.
But the possibility of a set-up is INCONCEIVABLE to naval-gazing Kool-Aid
drinkers.
It's gotta be real because Bloomberg wants to join the Democratic race!
Just as he wanted to join the race in 2016? His intention to do so also underscored the
reality of THAT race. Rinse, repeat. LOL. The dumbf*cks won't notice.
@ 11 jackrabbit.. you can claim that too and i am not ignoring you! i agree with bevin and b
how this is insane what the dems are doing, but the whole usa political scenario is insane...
at the same time i get cranky with regard to everything being laid at the deep states feet
when no one can articulate just what the deep state is.. in fact, i think there are a number
of powerful players running at cross purposes to each other, so i don't think it is as easy
as you make out laying it all at the feet of this 'deep state'... sure, the political process
is mostly a charade and i doubt it matters much who wins at this point...
but, i do think the usa continues to slide into a more precarious place that coincides
with a multi polar world that the usa is also very resistant to... as for the people of the
usa - maybe many of them are easily manipulated, but not all of them.. it is the same around
the world... how does one explain how the protesters in bolivia or honk kong are so easily
duped? no.. i think generally people are easily duped, but not all people..
Karlof1 @ 9 --
"I expect the atmosphere to be tense..."
I do, as well. Though I imagine certain leaders might feel a temptation to suspend
Brazil's membership, doing so would illustrate a structural weakness to be overcome by any
legitimate multipolar body. That is, if the Empire is able to turn just one member (in this
case Brazil), it may be used to weaken the organization as a whole.
Having just a limited exposure to Putin's approach to multipolarity, my understanding is
that it is to be accepted that sovereign countries evolve along their own trajectories (as
opposed to being subjected to "universal" "liberal" principles). If Brazil or Turkey decide
that this means playing both sides off each other, it will be interesting to see whether
there are any principled (as opposed to realpolitical or pragmatic) objections that Russia
might offer.
Deep State: the unusual behavior and strange coincides driven by a small number of very
well connected people that make little sense but advance the interests of the
establishment.
Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) means controlled opposition everywhere. FSD in practice:
> Political kayfabe
Hillary makes mistakes that help elect Trump. Trump helps to get Pelosi elected as House
Speaker.
> Compromising whistle-blowers
The Intercept turns in whistle-blowers.
The reason I ask is because I have heard a load of bull about Russia's plans to Russianize
the world and that Trump is his pawn since day -167 of his inauguration. I have heard this
from coworkers, from friends, from family, seen it on Reddit, read it on neolib outlets like
slate and the like. I'm wondering if you live in Trump country and just don't hear or see the
Russophobia being played out in the beltway and on the elitest coastlines.
Trust me when I say that the dems played the right card, albeit a desperate one, when they
started with the whole Russiagate nonsense. To you and I, b and others, Russiagate is
nonsense. But tell that to the average dem or moron yuppie in their towers along our shining
seas.
Please illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA would be suddenly
discontinued...
Posted by: Chevrus | Nov 13 2019 17:33 utc | 3
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next willing to surrender?
**What are those limits?**
The Resistance, Democrats, no longer respects democratic rights -
no thought to the millions of voters that they would disenfranchise if
the nullification of Trump's election were successful via a coup (impeachment).
Five years ago would you have imagined that Democratic voters would be so cavalier
about democratic rights? So willing to accept the vacuous accusation that our
President is a Russian agent. Would resurrect the CIA - the torturing, kidnapping,
assassinating, war promoting, false flag creating, disinformation spewing CIA, - and
ravenously swallow endless streams of McCarthyist propaganda.
How fast,how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power too far down the
spiral
to imagine? Five years ago would you have imagined the current decent of Democrats we have
witnessed?
If the pretext, the myth, of the necessity of seizing power, were echoed by the mouthpiece
MSM
would Democrats go along? Americans have surrendered rights in our near lifetime.
Americans
worship militarism and their military heroes more than ever before. Americans have
swallowed
hook-line-and-sinker the new-McCathyism and "Putin is an evil man".
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham has powerful players
quaking
in their boots. To answer your question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their criminal limit or capability.
Paul Damascene @13: I generally share your view, about Putin's view, but I don't think Putin
minds Erdogan playing both sides, Bolsonaro, yeah, but not Erdogan, he can play games with us
all he wants. Keeps us distracted, and Erdogan doesn't like us "taking the oil", and we can't
get in a shooting war with him, he's NATO. He's the military counter-balance to the Pentagon
in Syria that Russia cannot be. So I think he will be thrashing around in N. Syria with
Putin's consent until we leave (as long as he doesn't pick a fight with Assad.)
Bolsonaro he may see as something to wait for the end of.
It will be interesting and possibly informative to see what comes out of this meeting.
Thanks for your reply! Note that the main event is the Business Forum, which is an arena
where genuine national interests usually reign. As you're likely aware, BRICS was formulated
as an instrument to facilitate development via commerce and mutual investment and that its
first major joint accomplishment was the formulation of the BRICS Development Bank to bypass
the IMF, World Bank and the dollar dominated international trade regime. I found it curious
that Global Times had zero articles on its main page related to the Summit, while
Xinhuanet ran this
short commentary overview which amounts to a short recap and cheerleading. We'll need to
await the presser this evening to get a better feel.
You make an interesting point librul... It reminds me of the whole continuity of government
scheme. 'In case of _____, break glass an impose martial law or whatever the manufactured
disaster calls for. The fact that the north woods 911 bit worked is a testament to just how
far the ptb are willing to go. You know, in regard to the USA perspective I can tell you from
first hand experience that a steady diet of agitation propaganda as well loads of distraction
have rendered a majority of the population easily lead no matter what stripes they might be
wearing. Selling Russia as the bad bad guy was easy. Look if a large group of people buy the
Bin Laden hit then the sky is the limit.
The 5 mile asteroid would pose a serious problem to most mammals, but given the amount of
species self loathing being pedaled about.... My point about the executive branch and the
question of 'is he the last' hinges on the fact that the president does nothing which is not
somewhat scripted. We know what happens when they go "off the Rez"...
Below is a ZH quote about the meeting with Trump and Erdogan today
"
"It's a great honor to be with President Erdogan... the ceasefire is holding very well, we've
been speaking to the Kurds and they seem to be very satisfied, as you know we pulled back our
troops quite a while ago..."
"I want to thank the President for the job they've [Turkey] done in Syria," Trump said of
Erdogan.
And on that note, he already addressed the rationale for continued US troop presence in
Syria, saying with Erdogan sitting next to him: "We are keeping the oil. We have the oil. The
oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil."
"
To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the keep the oil fits in
with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?
'Deep State' is just a convenient way of labeling something we can also call 'the
illuminati', or 'the globalists', or 'the one percent', or 'Big Brother', etc.. We know that
there are hidden powers. Some call them reptilians. Who knows? We can tell that they are
there, though we cannot say exactly who they are and how they constitute their coherence, how
they organize themselves. We can see pieces of the deeper pattern, but we cannot see the
whole thing. So we use these vague and sometimes fanciful labels.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle. Humanity is
maybe in its final throes, there and in so many other places. Or maybe its the birth pains of
who we were really meant to be. God help us.
IMO, lumping the D-Party into the same boat doesn't reflect reality. A great many D-Party
members were disenfranchised by the DNC during 2016; many know it and know why, and never
swallowed Russiagate. Many of those D-Party folk are again backing Sanders and Gabbard
because they're the genuine social-democratic faction the DNC abandoned as soon as Reagan won
in 1980 since it supposedly was the Reagan Democrats that swung the election--an assumption
never proven correct. And the DNC stated during the lawsuit over 2016 that it would repeat
its actions again in 2016, 2020, and beyond. Thus there're two main factions: DNC-Corporate
D-Party and small d social-democratic D-Party--both of which are clearly incompatible. It's
the former of those two that Gabbard wants to purge; Sanders also seems willing but hasn't
been as explicit as Gabbard. Thus we have the old House divided against itself cannot stand
situation. Either you're with Obama, Clinton, the Banksters, and the further enslavement of
citizens via debt-peonage and expansion of the Outlaw US Empire or you're with the Sanders
and Gabbard social-democrats and liberation of citizens via the nationalization of education,
health care and dignified retirement, and the neutering of the Outlaw US Empire.
Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they won't run as 3rd Party POTUS
candidates, which means the Corporate faction will get its candidate on the ballot unless
something remarkable occurs--a coup within the DNC that totally purges the
Obama/Clinton/Corporate faction.
Sorry, but that last phrase I find to be 100% fantastical--about as probable as Kentucky's
#1 ranked basketball team losing at home to Evansville at much greater odds than the 40:1
cited for Evansville. Morrison said it was 5:1 50+ years ago, but I don't think people were
as brainwashed then as now.
The 'Orwellian Globalists' may have overstepped, hubristically, when they chose an
out-and-out racist, an outspoken racist, to be their puppet to head the new government in
Bolivia. This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of
Bolivia ...
Librul@16 responds to the statement by start, Chevrus @ 3. "Please
illustrate a situation where the executive branch/office of the USA
would be suddenly discontinued..." Chevrus @ 3, end
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots.
9/11 saw Americans willingly surrendering rights;
accepting a pack of lies, a myth, to explain the event;
militarism becoming the refuge for American's safety.
What are the limits of the rights that Americans are next
willing to surrender? **What are those limits?**
How fast, how far, can we spiral downwards? Is the seizure of power
too far down the spiral to imagine? Five years ago would you have
imagined the current decent of Democrats we have witnessed?
Is media capable to determine who shall have the power? Can
media make Americans surrender their rights?
An imminent one-two punch from IG Horowitz and John Durham
has powerful players quaking in their boots. To answer your
question, I cannot imagine what players like John Brennan
are scheming. But as you know 9/11 was not beyond their
criminal limit or capability. by: librul @ 16
Snake says look at and carefully read the statements by Assad in Syria.. they
are very telling about circumstances here in the states. Assad distinguishes
top down ideology from bottom up cause a very interesting distinguishment.. ..
So to answer your question how far are Americans willing to allow the Oligarchs to
retract human rights in America: are their any limits to the willing surrender?
I think it is as Assad said in the above citation.. outside investors
instigated the unrest in Syria and used it as pretense to get their governments
to invade Syria so that the investors could privatize all of
Syria.. That is exactly what is happening in USA governed America.
karlof1 @4
Your scenario doesn't reach its logical conclusion:
1) Asteroid strike is automatically blamed on "those damn rooskies".
2) Nuclear war ensues.
3) Far West, South, TransMissisippi and New England all secede with each claiming to be the
rightful 'United State of America'.
4) Voila.
IIRC the Clintons rode into the Whitehouse on the Democratic Leadership Committee (DLC).
The DLC has quietly morphed into the DNC (or stolen their ID). Proof might be found on
identifying the faction controlling the Democratic Party's finance committee under the
assumption whoever controls the finance also controls the party. Memory is a perfidious and
ephemeral thing and goes down Alice's rabbit hole in nothing flat.
@14 jackrabbit.. i am sorry, but it is too simplistic for me... your examples are fine, but
as i see it, they random and not some orchestrated plot from up above... that is where we
differ here... in fact, your overview is much too simplistic..you can make it simple for me,
but the whole concept of deep state orchestrating everything here is much too simplistic..
@ 16 librul... good overview that is kind of how i see the democratic party here, although
@ 24 karlof1 disagrees, it looks like that to this outsider / canuck.. here is the line from
karlof1 that gives it away for me - "Unfortunately, both Gabbard and Sanders are adamant they
won't run as 3rd Party POTUS candidates" which begs the question, why? my answer - they are
useful shills for this same agenda..
I am aware not *every single* Democrat bought into Russiagate.
You seem to suggest that the corruption on full display by the DNC during 2016
inoculated
**some** Democrats to Russiagate if they were Bernie supports. Maybe. But we are faced with
the puzzling contradiction that Bernie himself did not support the lawsuit brought by the
Bernie supporters against the corrupt DNC ... AND ... AND ... Bernie has been a
foaming-at-the-mouth supporter of the Russiagate hysteria!
"How can he not talk about the reality that Russia, through cyberwarfare, interfered in
our election in 2016, is interfering in democratic elections all over the world, and
according to his own CIA director will likely interfere in the 2018 midterm elections that we
will be holding?" "How do you not talk about that unless you have a very special relationship
with Mr. Putin?"
Who said the above? Rachael Maddow? Hillary Clinton? John Brennan? Why none other than
Bernie Sanders!
And did you note that Bernie is being a megaphone for the CIA in this quote?
More and more and more Bernie Russiagate promoting quotes here (and 2018 had only
begun!):
I see a civil war in the USA as highly unlikely. The upper class has too much common
interest and purpose. The lower classes are divided and powerless and in the near future only
seem to be becoming more so. When the third-worldization reaches a critical point, a staged
and managed revolution may be in the cards. Before a real revolution has any chance, the
elites will have flooded the USA with immigrants from the south, ensuring further division of
the lower classes and postponing any real challenge.
Overall, the societal foundation of the USA looks to have been crumbling for maybe five
decades already and for the next few decades an acceleration of that process is more likely
than a reversal. Don't be on the lookout for leaders or movements to change any of that. Only
when the american people clean up their act, ie. their addiction to numbing drugs, empty
consumerism and false jingoisms, will anything there ever change for good. Until that
happens, the place will be withering more and more.
Not until the American elites start to fail to safeguard their own priviliges at the cost
of the rest of the population will change happen.
I don't see the Russian aggression that you propose to be realistic or likely to happen.
Russia does not need to reach abroad for energy, resources or food. Their main challenge is
to manage the riches of the huge country with the people they have. Already the resurgence
after the post-1990 crash (and the preceding stagnation) is an accomplishment worthy of
admiration.
The Russian interest clearly is consolidation and defence, which is exactly what their
policies have been showing on the international stage. Suggestions of aggression are pure
projection by Atlanticists theselves. Instead of Washington trying to provoke Russian
mistakes, the real game is about Moscow trying to contain NATO's erratic trashing and
carefully preventing any catastrophic escalation.
To wit, what country did recently "update" its nuclear doctrine, suggesting the
possibility of 'limited' use of nuclear weapons? Was it Russia, or ehhm... perhaps the
USA?
The only uncertain factor between Russia and the USA is Europe. I expect a lot more
American craziness towards Europe, as its effective leverage crumbles. Europe has not yet
devolved as badly as the USA and the American implosion is a major risk factor for the
Europeans.
psychohistoiran @22 asks "To those Trump supporters, I would appreciate understanding how the
keep the oil fits in with you saying Trump wants to get out of Syria?"
As someone who voted for Trump I can tell you I do not agree with this decision nor will I
defend it. I hold the same sentiment pre 2016 that I do now - bring these endless wars to an
end. Period. Am I disappointed in his walking back the decision to leave Syria entirely? You
betcha.
Weeks ago when barflies were discussing Trump's withdrawal, someone corrected my
understanding regarding the Kurds who took control of the oil fields, so to speak, and were
selling the oil to SAA. My understanding of this newest policy is the Kurds will continue to
manage and benefit from the sale of the oil. I could be wrong. Feel free to correct me if I
am. But if my understanding of the arrangement is correct, the Kurds maintaining their role,
then they are likely still selling the oil to the SAA. Then again, maybe not, but I wouldn't
be surprised if they were.
So, management or control of the oil fields has changed, but it looks like everything else
remains as it was before when the oil fields were managed/controlled by the Kurds.
What I do respect in the President's decision to leave NE Syria is removing troops from
theater. The CIA's proxy war appears to have been shutdown. This w/o question I applaud,
LOUDLY.
BTW, all this talk about asteroids and false flags makes me remind the brilliant nineties
movie "Starship Troopers", in which Paul Verhoeven not only sort of presages 911 and the
ensuing war on the bugs, but also smuggled into it the ephemeral phrase "Are you psychic?". I
sometimes wonder how many people got that...
This may be just what was needed to provoke the MAJORITY indigenous people of Bolivia ...
I doubt it, without massive quantities of weapons similar to those received by the Syrian
takfiris, the indigenous people don't stand a chance once the Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation (formerly SOA) trained Washington-supported death squads get to
work. It's going to be a massacre that'll be barely reported in MSM, because after the
"election" they'll be anti-democratic. Bolivia is not Syria.
The issue with the Americans is a hyper-partisan mindset has been instilled, akin to duelling
sports teams, so one cheers for their team facts or context be damned. This used to be a Fox
News-Republican phenomenon, but now has infected Dem supporters as well.
Break up of US would mean break up of Canada too. Look to the moves made by province of
Alberta in response to fed election - a sort of firewall is being proposed where Alberta will
take on fed gov responsibilities pension, health care, etc. Alberta is a Koch Bros oil
republic, and any N American melt-down will result in formation of private fiefdoms - i.e.
Alberta-Montana-Wyoming-South Dakota become Kochland.
Then you must be a shut-in or unemployed to not see the dual-benefit of the deep state in
that it stymies trump and resurrects Russia as a boogeyman. Nay! Thrice-benefit in that it
also allows for an excuse to be horrifically status quo and gamble on everything returning to
normal after the trump phenomenon runs its course and the duopoly reassert its grip.
I wonder how in the Earth can anyone have cultural cooperation and join efforts against
terrorism with a goon like Bolsonaro who has posted Twitters celebrating Bolivia´s coup
and is known misses Pinochet ´s "expeditive measures" against communists...How this, so
called group BRICS, can continue following its path, as if nothing had happened, especially
since the coup in Bolivia...
Just today read the statements by Kremlin spokeman, Peshkov, and what to say, seemed to me
quite soft his stance, throwing balons out...Sometimes I feel like to trust John Helmer on
his assesment on the existence of two blocks in the Russian Federation, the stavka ,
and these people of the Kremlin office...
To this you add the Russian ambassador to the US, today visiting Kissinger ( the builder
of the Condor Plan...) a man always like begging for better relations to this bully of a
country, and this is one of the times when I wonder if i would not be supporting all this
time just the people who wants to crush me...( meaning my now almost 6 years long support for
the RF and concretely this adminsitration...)
I found quite different the unambiguous and strong statements by the Russian FM and
Kremlin itself when Venezuela was about to suffer a coup, and now when the legitimate
government of Bolivia has been sent into exile and his indigenous population on the verge of
extermination by nazi thugs...
You can not be against nazis in the Ukraine and then support ( or be way too soft in your
lack of condemnation...) nazis in Brasil or Bolivia (... or the EU...) or you are for
international law and human rights, always, or not, but not only when business opportunities
are in prospect....
Yes, today is one of those days when my consideration of the RF and Putin´s
administration as a referent in keeping international order in the face of a lawless US just
wobbles...
No se puede estar en misa y repicando al mismo tiempo
Waiting for the final statement of the meeting for to possibly take a determination on
this issue...
@ 36 jayc... kenney is a divisive politician.. i always think of alberta like the 'texas
wannabe' of canada... they think highly of themselves and their oil, even when they can't get
it out to the coast due the fact the people on the coast view all this very differently.. and
now they are resorting to a type of quebec referendum option to use as leverage over the rest
of canada.. it didn't work with quebec, and it definitely won't work with alberta.. at least
quebec could legitimately claim itself a different type of culture... as for dividing up
canada and the usa - it makes more sense to go along north south lines - cascadia being a
good example of this.. koch republic would be a good name for that zone!!
You'd probably do well to study the history of China after the downfall of the Manchu Qing
dynasty up to the 1930s at least (when Japan began invading the country and bringing its own
forms of chaos, violence and enslavement) to get an idea of where the US might be heading if
and when the Federal government falls. From the 1910s onwards, China was governed by warlords
looking out for No 1, with their own armies.
Not so very different from the situation prevailing in Afghanistan and Libya. Talk about
the chickens coming home to roost.
The other alternative is if the 50 states decide to be self-governing statelets or form
their own federations among themselves or with neighbouring provinces and states in Canada
and Mexico, or even abroad. Alaska may petition Moscow to be accepted back into the Russian
Federation and Hawaii may seek another large patron to attach itself for security reasons.
Washington and Oregon
states may finally form a federation with British Columbia and call it Cascadia.
Yeah, like Formerly T-Bear intoned about memory. I concede, but still note Gabbard hasn't
faltered in her zeal. I finally finished my series of thoughts on the Bolivian thread
regarding the Big Picture. IMO, Evil's sly enough to get elected even if it campaigned
showing its attributes as in
this image . If I were 20 years younger, I'd emigrate to Russia or China, but I'm not and
doubt I've 20 years remaining on this orb. But I do think I've got the struggle properly
diagnosed, although no cure's readily available.
Right now a struggle is going on in Bolivia that is the world's struggle.
@Posted by: Paul | Nov 13 2019 20:06 utc | 23
Indeed ,the same way I see it, and it seems that, in this one, Russian will not be with
us...After all there is neither oil, nor weapons to sale in Bolivia, nor to the working poor
people.....
Just today I was hearing Trump stating that he would like very much assisting to the next
Vicotry Day parade in Moscow...Well, how to say ( wait for me while I go throwing up a
bit...) Just here again, a bit back in myself...
Thus, this thug, who just has unleashed those rabid nazi death squads over the poor
indigenous people of Bolivia is going to sit along the veterans who really fought the nazis
in WWII, the few who still are alive to remember the 25 millions of their own who died in the
battle fields, moreover taking into account that Trump´s father really was a nazi
himself and supported Nazi Germany as if there was no tomorrow...If you though that of
Netanyahu last year was way too much...to see how yo take this...
Seeing these things, no wonder that fascism advance without obstacles...Voting in the UN
or passing all day energically protestingthe demolition of monuments to Soviet heros of WWII
is not enough...It is neede to eergically protest when today´s nazis are salughterin
currently lving people...
As happened during WWII, I fear, it will be us the people who will have to organize
ourselves to fight this scourge...Putin, simply, will not be there....May be the Red Army
will...
Gerhard @10;
I agree the US will split up. As a poli sci initiate, i was forced to consider the role of
institutions acting in support of the polis. I wasn't impressed at the time. my disdain for
the rot of leadership in most if not all institutions in the west, it was mostly for the
greed....but i realize the cumulative effect is the fraying of those 'supports' of the nation
itself. Consider:
The 16 intelligence agencies each have their own agendas, the regulatory agencies are
revolving doors for industry placements, the FBI was crooked since the days of Hoover, the
governments agencies are rife with oligarchy quislings .....and in the end the greed of those
in power will be not be held back by any moral force. The police are militarized, murdering
and robbing their own citizens.
Meanwhile, the MSM are owned by the oligarch, so there is no national forum where the
corruption can be addressed on a national level. This leaves the blog sites such as MOA to
lead the fight against the PTB. The problem is in the nature of the internet, which has no
'locus' as in a national voice. The internet has no center. As example, i am not a US
citizen. When the polis finally hit the point where the Rentier economy has driven them to
extreme reaction, they will not be thinking of reclaiming the vast American experiment,
rather they will seek to at least control their little part of the world. I believe you will
see blocs of similar states rising up to control whet they think is in their own best
interests: The mid-west, the west coast and mountain states, the deep south, the eastern
states will find common issues to crytalize around.
That's my read.
As a Canadian, my thoughts are how Canada will negotiate with these remainder blocs of former
US states.
James @ 39
I general concur with your brief reading of Jayson Kenney and Alberta talk of separatism. But
on that score the comparison would not so much be to Texas as perhaps to Boris Johnson /
Nigel Farage, in their moves to break away from the EU. I don't know that either of them (or
Kenney) is all that passionate about separation itself, but the divisiveness -- and surfing
various waves of polarization -- are what this new nihilist political wave seems to be about.
I support the Cascadia concept. There's a wonderful work of speculative fiction called
Ecotopia that is set in a Cascadia - although it was written before the digital hi-tech era
and so could not predict that such an entity, short of a true revolution, would be run by
Microsoft - Google - Apple etc.
A high speed rail link from Vancouver to Portland has been proposed, which is a
forward-thinking policy initiative, but they are going to take a few years to think about it,
and then another fifteen to twenty years to build it, and that itself will only happen if the
"no new taxes" retrograde types don't stop it in its "tracks" (which they intend to do).
off topic: I've just realized how vexing the idea of a non-citizen army.
Imagine: The tax payer funds the majority of tax dollars to a bureau that funds its own
production of weapons, recruitment, training personnel, maintenance of 800 or so bases across
the world and, finally, deploying these recruits wherever it deems worthy, based on the
directions of it's head, potus. its just so sweet: hire mercenaries, and do whatever you want
across the planet....there are no draftees ....no one to criticize when the body bags return
stateside. Some otherwise brain-dead fuck in the pentagon is enjoying lieutenant generalship,
just for figuring out the army didn't need a draft...there were plenty of poor people, who
could be had with a few bucks......
I'm in Montana and working on a piece of fiction that anticipates the breakup of the
States in the not-so-distant future. I did a little research on Cascadia and found that
there's elements of white supremacism wanting to co-opt the idea of Cascadia for their own
ethno-state fever
dreams :
The far right is known to appropriate pop culture imagery, particularly for recruitment and
to mitigate their viewpoints. But Alexander Reid Ross, a professor at Portland State
University, explained that Cascadia, "a really important movement in the Pacific
Northwest," is targeted specifically for its link to bioregionalism. "It implies a
territorial imperative but doesn't necessarily involve anti-racism, according to the far
right, so fascists appropriate it," he told me of Cascadia.
The appropriation began at least as far back as 2004, when a flag suspiciously similar
to the Cascadian flag appeared on the cover of Harold Armstead Covington's book, A Distant
Thunder. In 2008, Covington founded the white nationalist group Northwest Front, which
calls for an "independent and sovereign White nation in the Pacific Northwest." The group
later penned a disturbing rhyme on its website about this flag, the Tricolor flag, using
language similar to Baretich's:
The sky is blue, and the land is green. The white is for the people, in
between.
Cascadia appropriation has snowballed since then. In 2016, a man adopting the moniker
Herrenvolk, a German word for "master race" used by the Nazis, helped form Cascadia, the
"foremost" alt-right group in the Pacific Northwest. According to its website, its mission
is to "regain our sovereignty and prevent foreign influence on our people." That goal
correlates with the narrative of Cascadia as quintessential, and it echoes the groaning
around Portland about newcomers spoiling the city.
in the narrative I'm working on, New Cascadia does become a white supremacist
stronghold.
I was somewhat puzzled by your Good and Evil post in the last thread, karlof1. Were you just
being facetious or did I misread you to say that all would depend on the outcome of the 2020
election?.
I followed you on the course of 'the rest of the world' under leadership from Russia and
China into multipolarity rather than one hegemon; I'd tend to agree with you on that concept,
though maybe we'd have disagreements on the course of history up to that point. I have a
literary turn of mind myself, and to me "good" literature (with a small g) always comes out
on top - as with goodness in most other aspects of life learning as well.
All the same, it's hard for me to think the coming US election will really decide
anything. That is, I don't see any of the candidates preparing his or herself to join 'the
rest of the world'. That would be the good outcome for me and I just can't see it
happening.
I'll be literary and say that maybe for nations 'the way up is the way down.' And while
the disparity and struggle between wealthy and not in the US is starkly apparent, we are
nowhere near bottoming out here yet. And I think we have to be; I think we will be - but
when? I'll be literary again and say that for Tigger it was when he got all his bounce taken
out of him. All of it. Not 'make America great' but rather 'help America survive
yadayadayada...'
I'm kinda doubting I'll be around to see it. It's sort of that 'not with a bang but a
wimper' sort of scenario - and we're a long way from wimpering yet.
Still, I feel very positive. I think 'the rest of the world' is going to be kinder than we
deserve when it all boils down to the dregs. What a day that will be!
Nemesiscalling 15
Right you are. The Anti-Russia hype has been going on for a while but had a bit of a hiatus
during King (W) Shrub II. Both parties worked to destroy the Russian economy during the
80s/90s with the Chicago/Harvard boys gutting it completely while enriching themselves. It
accelerated under Obama while they presented us with the "Reset" switch. Apparently the
Russians didn't play along so they became the bogeyman that gets inflated as time goes on.
Trump tried but got dragged down in the process.
As to a US split, I live in the south. So I've wondered if California (for example) tried
to leave if a US President would pull a Lincoln and destroy the state ... in order to save
it.
Nemesis@15 -"Trust me when I say" ... never trust anyone who says anything after that phrase!
How exactly did the Dems play the right card with Russiagate? Do you mean they hoodwinked
their supporters into believing Russia to be the enemy, so that is somehow 'the right card'?
I'll stop there. You've completely confused me.
Occupied Palestine continues killing people as documented in the report below from Reuters
"
GAZA (Reuters) - An Israeli missile strike in the Gaza Strip killed six members of a
Palestinian family on Thursday, all of them civilians, medical officials and residents said,
bringing the death toll in the territory from a 48-hour surge in fighting to 32.
The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the pre-dawn incident in Deir al-Balah,
which came as cross-border shelling exchanges continued despite a ceasefire offer by the
Palestinian militant group Islamic Jihad.
Israel killed an Islamic Jihad field commander on Tuesday, sparking cross-border rocket
salvoes by the militant group and further Israeli strikes. Medics said 32 Palestinians have
been killed, at least a third of them civilians.
Those killed in Thursday's attack on a home in Deir al-Balah included a woman and a child,
medical officials said. Another 12 people were wounded, they said.
"
Sad to see this continue to go on and no resolution in sight, only escalation
I mean "right" in that allowing Russiagate to seep into the waking consciousness of
America took the pressure off the dems and what was going to be their reckoning. In effect,
they have now doubled-down in the hope that the Trump phenomenon of nationalism will fade
away and their rule will be restored. Whether or not Sanders plays into this I think we are
yet to see, but, so far, Sanders has played ball with a lot of dem garbage.
Again, by the "right" play I mean as if a dark sorcerer had banked his continued favor
with the king he serves on a magic brew that would muddle the King's brain and keep him from
knowing of the Sorcerer's repulsive ambition. Such is the dems plan as well as many if not
all of the republicans who secretly detest DJT but who don't speak up because their base
believes in Trump.
TASS and Sputnik have both published short reports on events from the BRICS Summit in
Brasilia. As I noted earlier, it revolved around the Business Forum, so most everything
focused on economics, global trade, and the hindrances in the normal conduct of commerce:
"'Undoubtedly, the global economy was affected by the fact that methods of unfair
competition, unilateral sanctions - including politically motivated ones are being used on a
wider scale in the global trade, [and] protectionism is flourishing. Under those
circumstances, BRICS nations have to take serious effort to ensure the development of their
economies, to prevent the deterioration of the social situation and the fall of living
standards, of our citizens' welfare,' Putin said at the closing ceremony of the BRICS
business forum."
Hopefully, there'll be a full transcript of Putin's remarks and further reporting to
digest tomorrow.
Re: trustworthy people, I meant that my eyes have seen first hand the effects of this
whole Russiagate brainwashing. As a result, I don't talk politics with my family, and it is
tenuous with my coworkers. Can you imagine a guy working in a west-coast city and actually
has something positive to say about DJT?
I still say that DJT deserves an ENORMOURS!...ENORMOUS! amount of credit for awakening
such terminology into the public lexicon as "Globalism," "nationalism," "fake news," and the
like. How he was able to do this was very simple but absolutely revolutionary for any
bonafide presidential candidate that I can remember or know. For myself, I view the issue as
globalism as paramount and far more world-shattering than US imperialism.
Here
is an interesting Frontline interview with Ann Coulter a week or so ago. It shines a light on
how a guy like Trump was able to capture the public imagination. Hint: it wasn't because the
Deep State was grooming him.
For any of you who use protonmail. They seem to be touting their links to clearly compromised
media sources such as Bellingcat quite strongly these days, and are pushing the empire's
message on MH17, Ukraine, Scripals, Russiagate etc etc. I was an early adopter but they now
seem compromised or simply deluded. Too bad, another one bites the dust.
Got it, Nemesiscalling, sorry to be obtuse. But I'm afraid I do disagree. This whole phobia
against Russia and anti-Trump scenario turned off huge numbers of their voters - some didn't
vote but some actually held their noses and voted for Trump. To me (and I sure could be
wrong) Dems just dug themselves a deeper hole with all of this. Save some sort of coup, I
can't see them winning a year from now. If anything more US voters have wised up than were
wised up before - you don't go back once eyes are opened.
I agree with your premise about this being kayfabe. From where I sit, there is no other
explanation for any political party to make these endless attacks based on absolutely nothing
over and over again. Attacks which can only maintain the charade from 2016 of Trump the
Victim. Does anyone think that somehow the Dems suddenly stopped being to calculating
psycho/sociopaths that they and the other side of the aisle are? Why would such shrewd
players not verify what people like Vindeman had to say before putting them on the stand?
They keep undermining their own case over and over again.
I find it impossible that they would continue to stick their hands in the fire after being
burned every single time before this, and with easily verifiable information. Especially when
the attacks are ALWAYS over stupid shit and never go after anything he actually could be
attacked for doing. What I keep seeing is like watching kindergarten kids try to kill a grown
man with foam rocks.
We keep seeing this complex, convoluted, evil shit come out of DC and yet we
simultaneously think these same players are morons? No freaking way. These attacks are the
only thing that keeps Trump's base on his side as he keeps betraying them and the opposition
keeps trying to outdo its last performance of stupid. I have seen a LOT of Trump supporters
throw in the towel on him for things he has done in the last 3 years, yet they come back to
his side after the newest stupid thing the left wing of the uni-party comes up with.
Shit, it isn't like Trump is even really shaking things up to cause such a ruckus!
"... And, of course, it wouldn't be good, old-fashioned Washington gunslinging if she didn't pin the blame on somebody else. In this case, it was former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff John Kelly -- portrayed by Haley as duplicitous snakes who sought to undermine the president behind his back. ..."
Her messaging confirms what many have long suspected: Nikki Haley is a human weathervane, trying to ingratiate herself to the
boss (she knows Trump will remain a popular figure within Republican politics for years to come) while at the same time distancing
herself from his most controversial actions.
And, of course, it wouldn't be good, old-fashioned Washington gunslinging if she didn't
pin the blame on somebody else. In this case, it was former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and former White House chief of staff
John Kelly --
portrayed by Haley as duplicitous snakes who sought to undermine the president behind his back.
She is a neocon and people arent going to vote for more war. She has no real accomplishments. I think she would make an interesting
candidate. A republican woman is generally not as loopy left wing as the democratic women running just because their women. Personally
Nikki does not represent my values and I wouldnt vote for her.
Well, what does that tell ya about the continuing corruption and ruining of America's elections systems in this evolving, shallower
society and the major 'news' media being 'neo-con' run or influenced as such?
It's ridiculous and I'm being kind, that people with no qualifications are seriously being given money and given media exposure
such as- Buttgieg, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker and some others with low IQ's and only want the ego tripping and be one of the 'elites'
all their non-productive lives.
So, Nikki Haley is seriously one of those to lead America?
You now what, people who vote for these clowns, clowns that never worked in their lives, are just plain shallow too. But...the
big donors give these characters money so that they will continue the terrible neo-con foreign policy.
Now, may I ask, as a fella that was born in another nation:
how come I use my real name but Nikki Haley and others do not?
I laugh, as did others, over the years when I say-you would think, that a guy with my name, being a Palestinian/Arab/Moslem heritage,
would be the last one to do that!
Well, how 'bout that question in our great big country America? Dig?
Opportunism of this one is so sky high that it resembles a cartoonish psychopath. Even her name is not real. A pathological liar
who took up barking as a profession because that is what sells these days. Tragedy of America is that snakes move high and up.
Brilliant! Acting Ambassador Bill Taylor's testimony today was unabashed and explicit: the
real issue is how best to bring Ukraine into the Western orbit–a bipartisan 30-year
effort.
For a follow-up, dig deeper into Burisma Holdings and its strange set of directors: Hunter
Biden, Devon Archer, Cofer Black, Alan Apter, and the former president of Poland, among
others. Then Google "Burisma and LNG," as in liquified natural gas.
That will lead to the
business press: Forbes 9/30/2019, Reuters 8/30/2019, and Petroleum Economist 8/8/2017.
The
apparent plan, still in process, is to ship U.S. LNG to Ukraine via a port on the Baltic
coast of Poland, thereby weaning Ukraine away from Russian natural gas and hurting Russia's
export-dependent economy. Cold War II stuff. Check it out.
"... So the Ukrainians traded their corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with it). ..."
"... Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down (American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"). ..."
"to a one they are turf-conscious careerists who think they set U.S. foreign policy and
resent the president for intruding upon them. It is increasingly evident that Trump's true
offense is proposing to renovate a foreign policy framework that has been more or less
untouched for 75 years (and is in dire need of renovation)."
This may be even worse than Lawrence depicts. It is clear that Vindman in his opening
remarks made it clear that the consensus policy of experts (like John Bolton) had been
following an agenda from the Obama administration (or before, but implemented under Obama,
Biden and Nuland) and it is verboten to change anything, despite constitutionally these
people at best only having advisory roles to the President (and constitutionally the
President can ask for their opinions in writing; CYA even back then!) The Ukrainian Americans
involved in the coup (national security from Vindman's perspective) are deeply committed
since 2014, and they expect to reap the benefits with no interference from Trump. And the
Democrats/ Ukraine-Americans "running the show" are probably much more corrupt than
Ukrainians governing their country before 2014.
I have started Oliver Bullough's "Money Land" and was aghast at the luxury items
Yanukovich had stolen through corruption and accumulated at his many properties. Surely with
so much money going to corrupt Yanukovich and his henchmen, the coup would have been a
blessing for the Ukrainian people! Right? I was shocked to find that after the overthrow of
Yanukovich in 2014, the median per capita household income in Ukraine, which had risen
steadily from $2032 in 2010 to $2601 in 2013, had dropped over 50% to $1110 to $1135 in 2015
and 2016, and has only risen to $1694 in 2018 (ceicdata.com).
So the Ukrainians traded their
corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt
neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their
pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with
it).
Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such
bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in
loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in
skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down
(American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman").
"... So the Ukrainians traded their corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with it). ..."
"... Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down (American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman"). ..."
"to a one they are turf-conscious careerists who think they set U.S. foreign policy and
resent the president for intruding upon them. It is increasingly evident that Trump's true
offense is proposing to renovate a foreign policy framework that has been more or less
untouched for 75 years (and is in dire need of renovation)."
This may be even worse than Lawrence depicts. It is clear that Vindman in his opening
remarks made it clear that the consensus policy of experts (like John Bolton) had been
following an agenda from the Obama administration (or before, but implemented under Obama,
Biden and Nuland) and it is verboten to change anything, despite constitutionally these
people at best only having advisory roles to the President (and constitutionally the
President can ask for their opinions in writing; CYA even back then!) The Ukrainian Americans
involved in the coup (national security from Vindman's perspective) are deeply committed
since 2014, and they expect to reap the benefits with no interference from Trump. And the
Democrats/ Ukraine-Americans "running the show" are probably much more corrupt than
Ukrainians governing their country before 2014.
I have started Oliver Bullough's "Money Land" and was aghast at the luxury items
Yanukovich had stolen through corruption and accumulated at his many properties. Surely with
so much money going to corrupt Yanukovich and his henchmen, the coup would have been a
blessing for the Ukrainian people! Right? I was shocked to find that after the overthrow of
Yanukovich in 2014, the median per capita household income in Ukraine, which had risen
steadily from $2032 in 2010 to $2601 in 2013, had dropped over 50% to $1110 to $1135 in 2015
and 2016, and has only risen to $1694 in 2018 (ceicdata.com).
So the Ukrainians traded their
corrupt Ukrainian elected President, mostly accumulating stuff in Ukraine, for corrupt
neocon/ neolib Democrat bureaucrats and Ukrainian/ Americans, who now cannot be denied their
pound of flesh (which will quickly exit Ukraine, taking much of that country's value with
it).
Even the anti-corruption agencies are corrupt! So American policy now is set by such
bureaucrats, who not only play military adventurism games (to justify all that money in
loans, grants, and weapons), but even pass the corruption level of the Native Ukrainians in
skimming that incoming money and getting rich, and of course steal whatever isn't nailed down
(American policy as previewed in "Confessions of an Economic Hitman").
If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are
aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of
the world. They don't know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators
imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War,
detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton's incursion–the list
could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as
invaders. Which they would be.
The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to
ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers,
underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The
is exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful
advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed
with garden trowels couldn't possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk.
Let's think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face.
To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly
across it. You can't police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force.
A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn't.
Well, I noticed the point you raised. I was a software engineer, not a real engineer, so I
have steadfastly stayed out of arguments about 9/11 and what really happened.
I have always found the whole 9/11 thing implausible, and still do, but I've been used to
that sort of thing since the 60s. Three new impossible things every day. I considered the
uses of passenger jets as weapons on more than one occasion while riding around in one,
seeing the buildings go by as you glide to the runway, so I wasn't surprised.
And then I realized, like the next day, that our leaders, whomever they might be, intended
to make it a military affair, and since then I've been waiting for our collapse.
I don't believe I've seen any attempts to emulate 9/11 though. Certainly some other
aircraft terrorism, like in Ukraine.
It was kind of obvious that the Bushites were all ready at the gate when 9/11 happened,
Patriot Act Mighty Wurlitzer and all, so I don't doubt their complicity, but other than that
I don't want to fight.
"... this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods. ..."
"... Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth. ..."
"... To me Trump is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split when it comes to impeachment. ..."
"... Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist Web Site: The CIA Democrats . ..."
"... "The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth." ..."
"... Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all boats! ..."
"... Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a "war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all. ..."
"... To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero. ..."
"... The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee. ..."
I am amazed how the Impeachment Circus and the mainstream media continue to
ignore the facts of this story:
Joe Biden has been a favorite target for Trump-allied lawmakers. Many have adopted Trump's unsubstantiated assertion that Biden
pushed for the ouster of a Ukrainian prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, because he was investigating Burisma.
The CIA is emerging as a domestic political party.
...
Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest. "The CIA is not involved in domestic politics," he said. "Period. That's on the
record."
This he asserted confidently, at an event where he had just spoken about about influence campaigns on swing voters and implied
that Hillary Clinton might be right in calling U.S. Representative Tulsi Gabbard a Russian asset. Even seasoned analysts, it
seems, have their blind spots.
What shifted [House Speaker Nancy Pelosi] now? I'd say the answer is: this impeachment isn't directed at Trump at all, it's
about undermining the rising left-wing opposition in the Democratic party. They are plausibly on the verge of seizing the party
agenda away from the neo-liberal consensus of the Clinton-Obama decades -- with issues like universal public health-care and
equitable taxes. They've even found ways to fund campaigns without bowing to the corporate gods.
I agree with Mr. Salutin, the impeachment is not about impeachment, although if impeachment results, I'm sure they will take
it. And I agree it's about protecting the current Democratic Part "elites", both from scandal (Joe Biden, Clinton) and from the
challenge on the left. A risky and desperate move .
I tend to think it was Trump going after the Ukraine cesspit that precipitated the impeachment, but other motives seem relevant.
I have thought since Obama went all in with Russiagate that the current Dem leadership does not feel it can afford to relinquish
control.
Political parties are nothing more than gangs. To me, the Dems are like the Gambinos and the Repoops are like the Genovese. And
they hate it when someone from outside their domain comes and disrupt their racket, when things are going smooth.
To me Trump
is like the mobster Joe Gallo, killed at Umberto's clam house in NYC. Gallo was a big shot, talked loud and fast, and wanted to
start his own racket. And the other crime families would not let him do that. So they whacked him. The same thing both Dems and Repoops are trying to do with Trump. And yes Repoops don't like Trump, as in the latest from Drudge, that the Repoops are split
when it comes to impeachment.
Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)
Apropòs the articles about the 'deep state' meddling in US domestic politics, here's an oldie but a goodie from the World Socialist
Web Site: The CIA Democrats .
Craig Murray has an exclusive interview with
Randy Credico he prefaces with these remarks:
"The Mueller investigation has thus ultimately ended up prosecuting people for telling the same pack of lies that Mueller himself
was pushing. The Clinton media, including CNN, the Washington Post and New York Times, are baffled by this. They follow the Stone
trial assiduously from delight in seeing a long term Trump hanger-on brought down, and in the hope something will come out about
Wikileaks or Russia. Their reporting, as that of the BBC, has been deliberately vague on why Stone is being charged, contriving
to leave their audience with the impression that Stone's trial proves Trump connections to Wikileaks and Russia, when in fact
it proves the precise opposite. A fact you will never learn from the mainstream media. Which is why I am doing this at 2am on
a very cold Edinburgh night, for the small but vital audience which is interested in the truth."
That would include MoA barflies since we crave Truth. Murray has a bit more to say prior to the excerpt I provide, which I
suggest be read, too.
What a feast of links! I've only just started, with b's Daniel Lazare piece at Stretegic Culture.org - well done!
" ...This is what impeachment is about, not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine – plus Syria, Libya,
Yemen, and other countries that the Obama administration succeeded in destroying – and why Trump should pay the supreme penalty
for suggesting that Democrats are in any way to blame..."
Of course, it stretches back to both parties, but that's what it is about - not high crimes and misdemeanors, but who lost the Ukraine - plus S, L, Y, and above all I & A!!! Gosh, we might get the entire alphabet included; ahoy all
boats!
Impeachment is about controlling where the attention is focused. When things get to close to home Pelosi says look over here at
the orange head, look over there at the border but whatever you do, do not look over
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1KfU5ifhqE ">here.
"Biden / Ukraine: Others begin to get it: 'Further scratches become visible on the picture of the Bidens in the Ukraine affair'
(original in German: 'Am Bild der Bidens in der Ukraine-Affäre werden weitere Kratzer sichtbar' nzz 9.11.19, nzz.ch/international/ukraine-affaere-rolle-der-biden-familie-undurchsichtig-ld.1520759)"
Andrew J. Bacevich weighs in on US foreign policy:
Let me briefly sketch out an alternative narrative that more accurately captures our present predicament. Since the end of
World War II, successive administrations have sought to devise a formula for assuring American consumers access to Persian
Gulf oil while also satisfying pressing domestic political interests. Over a period of decades, that effort succeeded chiefly
in giving birth to new problems. Out of these multiplying difficulties came the 9/11 attacks and their immediate sequel, a
"war on terrorism" meant to settle matters once and for all.
To state the matter bluntly, 9/11 was an expression of chickens coming home to roost, a massive strategic failure that the
ensuing military campaigns beginning in 2001 and continuing to the present moment have affirmed. Given the dimensions of that
failure, the likelihood of resuscitating X's illusory Pax is essentially zero.
There is no going back to an imagined Golden Age of American statecraft in the Middle East. The imperative is to go forward,
which requires acknowledging how wrongheaded U.S. policy in region has been ever since FDR had his famous tete-a-tete with
King Ibn Saud and Harry Truman rushed to recognize the newborn State of Israel.t
The very fact Bloomberg had to enter the Democratic Party presidential race is the definite proof Biden's corruption and involvement
on the destruction of Ukraine is so overwhelming and difficult to hide that it will eventually be impossible to cover it with
the NYT and WaPo power alone should he be chosen as the nominee.
"... The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are 'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing along. ..."
Recent class history of US is quite simple: the elite class first tried to shift the burden
of supporting the lower classes on the middle class with taxation. But as the lower class
became demographically distinct, partially via mass immigration, the elites decided to ally
with the ' underpriviledged ' via identity posturing and squeeze no longer needed
middle class out of existence.
What's left are government employees, a few corporate sinecures, NGO parasitic sector, and
old people. The rest will be melded into a few mutually antagonistic tribal groups providing
ever cheaper service labor. With an occasional lottery winner to showcase mobility. Actually
very similar to what happened in Latin America in the past few centuries.
The truth is that for the Clintonite-Bushite elite almost all Americans are
'deplorable'. What is fun for them is to play geopolitics – the elite version of
corporate travel perks – just look at how shocked they are that Trump is not playing
along.
Unlike the USA (under Neocon stewardship) China has not squandered twenty trillion dollars
of its national solvency bombing countries which never attacked it post 9-11.
China's leaders (unlike our own) never LIED its people into launching obscenely expensive,
illegal wars of aggression across the middle east. (WMD's, Mushroom clouds, Yellow Cake,
etc.)
China has used its wealth and resources to build up its infrastructure, build out its
capital markets, and turbo charge its high tech sectors. As a consequence, it has lifted
nearly half a billion people out of poverty. There has been an explosion in the growth of the
"middle class" in China. Hundreds of millions of Chinese are now living comfortable "upwardly
mobile" lives.
The USA, on the other hand, having been defrauded by its "ruling elites" into launching
and fighting endless illegal wars, is now 23 trillion dollars in catastrophic debt.
NOT ONE PENNY of this heinous "overspending" has been dedicated to building up OUR
infrastructure, or BUILDING OUT our middle class.
It has all gone into BLOWING UP countries which never (even) attacked us on 9-11.
As a consequence , the USA is fast becoming a failed nation, a nation where all its wealth
is being siphoned into the hands of its one percent "war pilfer-teers".
It is so sad to have grown up in such an amazing country , with such immense resources and
possibilities, and having to bear witness to it going down the tubes.
To watch all our sovereign wealth being vaporized by our "lie us into endless illegal war"
ruling elites is truly heartbreaking.
The white middle class is the only group that might effectively resist Globohomo's designs on
total power.
Blacks? Too dumb. Will be disposed of once Globohomo is finished the job.
Hispanics? Used to corrupt one party systems. Give them cerveza and Netflix and they're
good.
East Asians? Perfectly fine with living like bug people.
South Asians? Cowardly; will go with the flow.
The middle class is almost completely unique to white people.
Racial aliens cannot wrap their minds around being middle class. They think I'm crazy for
appreciating my 2009 Honda Accord. They literally cannot understand why somebody would want
to live a frugal and mundane life. They are desperate to be like Drake but most end up broke.
It will be very easy for GloboHomo to control a bucket of poor brown slop.
There IS a black middle class, but a big chunk of that works for governments of all
shapes and sizes.
Strictly speaking, there is no more "middle class" in the sense of the classical
economists: a person with just enough capital to live off the income if he works the capital
himself or herself. By this definition professionals (lawyers, dentists, physicians, small
store owners, even spinsters [1] and hand loom operators in a sense) were middle class. Upper
class had enough property to turn it over to managers, lower class had little or no property
and worked for others (servants and farm workers, for example). Paupers didn't earn enough
income per year to feed themselves and didn't live all that long, usually.
What we have is "middle income" people, almost all of whom work as an employee of some
organization -- people who would be considered "lower class" by the classical economists
because they don't have freedom of action and make no independent decisions about how the
capital of their organizations is spent. Today they are considered "intelligentsia", educated
government workers, or, by analogy, educated corporate workers. IMHO, intelligentsia is a
suicide job, and is responsible for the depressed fertility rate, but that's just me.
Back in the AD 1800s and pre-AD 1930 there were many black middle class people. usually
concentrating on selling to black clientele. Now there are effectively none outside of
criminal activities, usually petty criminal. And so it goes.
Of course, back then there were many white middle class people also, usually concentrating
on selling to white clientele. Now there are effectively none, except in some rural areas.
And so it goes.
Counterinsurgency
1] Cottagers who made their living spinning wool skeins into wool threads.
@unit472 A
lot of the middle class are Democrats but not particularly liberal. Many of them vote
Democrat only when they personally benefit. For example, my parents were suburban public
school teachers. They voted for Democrats at the state level because the Democrats supported
better pay and benefits for teachers but voted for Republicans like Goldwater and Reagan at
the national level because Republicans would keep their federal taxes lower. They had no
political philosophy. It was all about what left them financially better off. My parents also
got on well with their suburban neighbors. Suburbanites generally like their local school
system and its teachers and the suburban school systems are usually careful not to engage in
teaching anything controversial. A lot of the government employed white middle class would be
like my parents. Except in situations where specific Republicans talk about major cuts to
their pay and pensions they are perfectly willing to consider voting Republican. They are
generally social moderates, like the status quo, are fairly traditionalist and don't want any
radical changes. Since the Democrats seem be trending in a radical direction, this would put
off a lot of them. Trump would be more appealing as the status quo candidate. When running
the last time, he carefully avoided talking about any major cuts in government spending and
he's governed that way too. At the same time, his talk of cutting immigration, his lack of
enthusiasm for nonwhite affirmative action, and his more traditional views on social issues
is appealing to the white middle class.
The term middle class is used in the U.S. to mean middle income. It has nothing to do with
class. Why not just say what you mean? Most of the middle class that we say is disappearing
is really that rarest of phenomenons. A prosperous working class. The prosperous American
working class is no longer prosperous due to the Neoliberal agenda. Free trade, open borders
and the financialization of everything.
Americans know nothing of class dynamics. Not even the so called socialists. They don't
even see the economy. All they see is people with infinite need and government with infinite
wealth. In their world all of Central America can come to the U.S. and the government (if it
only wants to) can give them all homes, health care and education.
Lets stop saying class when we mean income. Not using the word class would be better than
abusing it.
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists. If
the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with the
Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
Are we to the point where we've collectively resigned ourselves to the death of the
middle class?
In the neoliberal worldview, the middle class is illegitimate, existing only as a
consequence of artificial trade and immigration barriers. Anytime Americans are spied out
making a good living, there is a "shortage" that must be addressed with more visas. Or else
there is an "inefficiency" where other countries could provide said service or produce said
product for less because they have a "comparative advantage."
Anyway. Yes. Middle Class denotes white people. The coalition of the fringes is neither
working, middle nor ruling class. They are black or brown. They are perverts or feminists.
If the workers among them identified as working class they would find common ground with
the Deplorables. We can't have that now can we.
I don't know about that anymore. Increasingly, "middle class" means Asian, with Whiteness
being associated with the lower middle class (or perhaps "working class"). Sometimes the
media uses the term " noncollege Whites," which I think is actually very apt. They are the
ones who identify with Whiteness the most.
If AMLO were to invite the Americans into Mexico, he would be lynched. Few Americans are
aware of how much the United States is hated in Latin America, and for that matter in most of
the world. They don't know of the long series of military interventions, brutal dictators
imposed and supported, and economic rapine. Somoza, Pinochet, the Mexican-American War,
detachment of Panama from Colombia, bombardment of Veracruz, Patton's incursion–the list
could go on for pages. The Mexican public would look upon American troops not as saviors but as
invaders. Which they would be.
The incursion would not defeat the cartels, for several reasons that trump would do well to
ponder. To begin with, America starts its wars by overestimating its own powers,
underestimating the enemy, and misunderstanding the kind of war on which it is embarking. The
is exactly what Trump seems to be doing.
He probably thinks of Mexicans as just gardeners and rapists and we have all these beautiful
advanced weapons and beautiful drones and things with blinking lights. A pack of rapists armed
with garden trowels couldn't possibly be difficult to defeat by the US. I mean, get serious:
Dope dealers against the Marines? A cakewalk.
You know, like Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. That sort of cakewalk.
Let's think what an expedition against the narcos would entail, what it would face.
To begin with, Mexico is a huge country of 127 million souls with the narcos spread unevenly
across it. You can't police a nation that size with a small force, or even with a large force.
A (preposterous) million soldiers would be well under one percent of the population. Success
would be impossible even if that population helped you. Which it wouldn't.
Other problems exist. Many, many of them.
Let's consider terrain. Terrain is what militaries fight in. Start with the Sierra Madre,
which I suspect Trump doesn't know from Madre Teresa. This is the brutally inhospitable
mountain range in the northwest of Mexico, from which a great many of the narcos come.(Sinaloa
is next door.) Forestation is dense, slopes steep, communication only by narrow trails that the
natives know as well as you know how to find your bathroom. Nobody else knows them. American
infantry would be helpless here. The Narcos would be found only when they chose to be found,
which would not be at opportune moments.
The Sierra Madre Occidental, home of many of the drug traffickers. I have walked in these
mountains, or tried to. It is impossible for infantry, worse for armor, and airplanes can't see
through the trees.
The Tarahumara Indians live in the Sierra Madre. They frequent the trails, sometimes in
groups, and carry things not identifiable from the air. In frustration American forces would do
what they always do: start bombing, or launching Hellfires from drones, at what they think are,
or think may be, or hope might be, narcos. Frequently they would kill innocents having nothing
to do with drugs. This wouldn't bother the military, certainly not remote drone operators in
Colorado or somewhere. They get paid anyway. The Indians who just had their families turned
into science projects couldn't do anything about it.
Well, nothing but join the narcos, who might call this a "force multiplier."
Some other northern Mexican terrain. The Duarte Bridge between Sinaloa and Durango. A
company commander, looking at it, would would have PTSD in advance, just to get a start on
things.
Of the rest of Mexico, much consists of jungle, presenting the same problems as the Sierra
Madre, and of cities and villages. Here we encounter the problem that has proved disastrous for
US forces in war after war: there is no way to tell who is a narco and who isn't.
In cities and towns, narcos are indistinguishable from the general population.
How–precisely how, I want to know–would American troops, kitted out in body armor
and goggles and looking like idiots, fight the narcos in villages with which they were
unfamiliar? The narcos, well armed, would pick off GIs from windows, whereupon the Americans
would respond by firing at random, calling in air strikes, and otherwise killing locals. These
would now hate Americans. The narcos know this. They would use it.
Culiacan, Sinaloa, Chapo's home city. It has a high concentration of narcos. Suppose that
you are an infantry officer, sent to "fight the cartels." You have, say, twenty troops with
you, all with hi-tech equipment and things dangling. How do you propose to fight the cartels
here? Which of the people in the photo, if any, are narcos? You could ask them. That would
work.
Don't expect help from the locals. Most would much rather see you killed than the narcos.
And if they collaborated they and their families would be killed. This would discourage them.
Bright ideas?
Now a point that Schwarzehairdye in the White House has likely not grasped. The narcos are
Mexicans. So is the population. You know, brown, speak Spanish, that kind of thing. The
invaders would not be Mexicans. This matters. Villagers usually do not hate the narcos. These
provide jobs, buy their marijuana crops, often do Robin Hood things to help the locals. Pablo
Escobar did this, Al Capone, Chapo Guzman. There is a whole genre of popular music,
narcocorridos, celebrating the doings of the drug trade. (Corridos Prohibidos ,
by LosTigres del Norte, for example). Amazon has the CD.
Which means that they would side with the narcos instead of the already-hated soldiers,
putos gringos cabrones, que se chinguen sus putas madres.
Further, much of Mexico doesn't much like its government.
And of course the narcos will have the option of fading into the population and waiting for
the gringos to go home. This means that the invasion would become an occupation. The
invading forces would thus need bases, which would become permanent. Bases where? All over the
country, which is where the narcos are?
Getting the American military into one's country is much easier than getting it out. The
world knows this. Mexicans assuredly do. They know that America has wrecked country after
country in the Mideast, always to do something good about democracy and human rights. They know
that America is squeezing Venezuela to get control of its oil, squeezing Iran for the same
reason, attacked Iraq for the same reason, has troops in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait for the same
reason, and has just confiscated Syria's oil . Mexico has oil. So when Trump wants to send the
military to "help" fight drugs, what do you suppose the Mexicans suspect?
Another point: Roughly a million American expats live happily in Mexico. These would be
hostages, and they–we–are soft targets. The drones kill five narcos, and the narcos
kill five expats. Or ten, or fifty. What does Washington do now?
Finally, consider what happens when you bomb a country, make life dangerous, kill its
children, destroy the economy and impoverish its people? Answer: They go somewhere else. With
Mexico being made unlivable, Mexicans would have two choices of somewhere else, Guatemala and
.See whether you can fill in the blank. Maybe four or five million of them.
Nuff said. May God protect Mexico from Yanquis who would do it good, from advisers, and then
adviser creep, and then occupation, and then from badly led militaries who have no idea where
they are.
stephen t johnson #77: "Whatever military assistance Russia gives the rebels is
about making sure they don't go too the left in fighting the fascists and making sure there are
no embarrassing wave of Russian-speaking refugees from Ukrainian fascism."
Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the "embarrassment" of an
exodus into Russia? Your whole paragraph stirs propagandistic bits of excuse-mongering into an
illogical mash. Look, Ukraine is a long complicated discussion but a simple overview is that
most of the country wants to ally with the EU and the eastern portion wants to ally with
Russia. Yes, there is a lot of corruption. Yes, Euromaidan (pro-EU) was probably 1/3 far right.
Yes, there are fascist parties. But the majority of the people want democracy and not fascism.
Instead these poor people got Zelensky being extorted by yet another thug.
(Vindman is correct, this is another disaster by Trump with longterm consequences for US
foreign policy. While the US Republicans have also gone thug, saying it's no big deal.)
If the Steinmeier formula holds and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority
votes for kicking out Putin, do you think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars?
Accompanying the annexation of Crimea was Putin's long letter to the international community
justifying his action because there were "nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and
anti-Semites" who are committing "pogroms and terror". This now appears to be mostly fiction
(perhaps enhanced by Putin's agent provocateurs).
stephen
t johnson #77: "Whatever military assistance Russia gives the rebels is about making sure they
don't go too the left in fighting the fascists and making sure there are no embarrassing wave
of Russian-speaking refugees from Ukrainian fascism."
Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the "embarrassment" of an
exodus into Russia? Your whole paragraph stirs propagandistic bits of excuse-mongering into an
illogical mash. Look, Ukraine is a long complicated discussion but a simple overview is that
most of the country wants to ally with the EU and the eastern portion wants to ally with
Russia.
Yes, there is a lot of corruption. Yes, Euromaidan (pro-EU) was probably 1/3 far right.
Yes, there are fascist parties. But the majority of the people want democracy and not fascism.
Instead these poor people got Zelensky being extorted by yet another thug. (Vindman is correct,
this is another disaster by Trump with long term consequences for US foreign policy.
While the
US Republicans have also gone thug, saying it's no big deal.) If the Steinmeier formula holds
and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority votes for kicking out Putin, do you
think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars? Accompanying the annexation of Crimea
was Putin's long letter to the international community justifying his action because there were
"nationalists, neo-Nazis, Russophobes, and anti-Semites" who are committing "pogroms and
terror".
Lee Arnold@80 "Putin is really afraid of leftism among Russian Ukrainians, and the
"embarrassment" of an exodus into Russia? "
Yes, Putin does not want wholesale expropriation of oligarchs, as he does not stand for
that in Russia (selective prosecution sufficient to appear to be a defender of the people and
serve as a stick -- accompanied by carrots -- to negotiate oligarch support. Also, Putin
doesn't even want to pay pensions, he certainly doesn't want the embarrassment of refugees
neglected, or worse, costing.
This point rests on the premise Putin isn't a right-winger, which is absurd.
"If the Steinmeier formula holds and there are free elections in Donbass and the majority
votes for kicking out Putin, do you think Putin going to withdraw his Russian Army regulars?"
https://www.rferl.org/a/what-is-the-steinmeier-formula-and-did-zelenskiy-just-capitulate-to-moscow-/30195593.html
This source may not be right-wing enough for your tastes, of course. But for the rest of us,
it suggests that an if centered on the Steinmeier formula is disingenuous in itself.
It's not even clear that Zelensky hasn't rejected the Steinmeier formula! The problem with
re-unifying the country is the fascist regime is quite hostile to what it sees as unUkrainian
elements, namely Russian speakers. National purity are favorite fascist principles but none
of the rest of us are required to accept them. Your belief that an election supervised by the
fascist regime is free and fair is wrong, no matter what you imply. And frankly, the notion
the OSCE is surely neutral is dubious too.
There was never any reliable evidence of any significant numbers of regulars moving into
Donetsk and Lugansk, because no, media reports are not reliable when addressing official
enemies. It is almost certain there are advisors and mercenaries, copying the US model, but
they are not what is generally meant by an invasion. They have not stakes out a separate
territory as the US territory did in Syria. There are military reasons for setting up a
perimeter, for mission security if nothing else. In short, there is in fact quite simple
reasons for thinking, yes, Putin would stop spending money on Donetsk and Lugansk, and save
on weapons and withdraw his advisers.
Further, the casualties in the Russian Army's officer corps by the way would end up being
known to the Russian Army, and eventually everyone else concerned. But they're not. Equally,
the large numbers of regulars alleged would have been in the recent prisoner exchange, but
they weren't. Some of those as I recall had been arrested merely for subversion, not taken
prisoner of war. Casualties of course are not the only costs to Putin, there also being the
money and weapons. The thing is of course, these are all excellent reasons for Putin to
withdraw. You are tacitly presuming the conclusion, that Putin is a crazed warmonger unable
even to calculate self-interest. Substituting scorn for analysis is not becoming.
"Yes, there are fascist parties." This is entirely misleading. There are fascist armed
formations incorporated into the Ukrainian army, financed privately.
I can't actually read the article as it's paywalled but it's conservative enough to carry
weight here.
There's the bit about Haaretz, which is like the anti-socialists ginning up anti-semitism
smears against Corbyn. I say the stylized swastika on the stage with the PM of Ukraine shows
us more than an old letter. I have no idea how you can say the people murdered when a
building was set on fire and democratic mob drove people back in, don't somehow count as
"pogroms and terror."
But you missed a trick in pointing out "Jewish" opposition to "Putin." (The people in
Donestsk and Lugansk are no one? Except maybe pre-corpses?) Ihor Kolomoyskiy, the primary
funder/founder of the Azov battalion, definitely wants no part of "Putin."
Most of this discussion is rarely about the left, but here arises a major marker
distinguishing the left, which is anti-fascism. You're pro-fascist.
nastywoman@79 was so stung the comment was actually intelligible. Unfortunately, asserting
something which isn't nonsense -- unlike nastywoman's usual incoherence -- without a shred of
argument is naked hostility, not an argument. The gored ox bellows loud!
FILE PHOTO: Judges at the UN's highest court are seen during a hearing in a case launched
by Ukraine which alleges Moscow is funding pro-Russian separatist groups in Ukraine, in
The Hague, Netherlands June 3, 2019. REUTERS/Eva Plevier
Reading a summary of the ruling, Presiding Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf said conditions had been met
for the case to be heard in full, with the 16-judge panel rejecting Russian objections by a large
majority.
The International Court of Justice found that on the basis of anti-terrorism and
anti-discrimination treaties signed by both countries it has jurisdiction to hear the case over
Russia's alleged support for separatists in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.
At a hearing in June, Moscow had asked judges to dismiss the suit, saying Kiev was using it as
pretext for a ruling on the legality of Russia's 2014 annexation of Crimea.
Addressing that point, Yusuf said Ukraine had not asked the court to rule "on the status of
Crimea or on violations of the rules of international law" other than those contained in the United
Nations anti-discrimination and anti-terrorism treaties.
Kiev says Russia's support for separatist forces violated a U.N. convention banning the
funding of terrorist groups.
The EU sees US leadership failing while the Russian beast to its east are getting stronger. The lessons of Russia wielding power
over Ukraine by cutting off energy supplies have been noted: energy security is a long-term threat to the EU and Russia is on the
verge of controlling Middle Eastern supplies as well. Furthermore, the lessons of China's economic successes through non-democratic
government control will also have been noted as something for European statists to emulate.
The EU's response to the energy threat from Russia has been to adopt a radical green agenda without reservation. Despite about
98% of transport and logistics being delivered by diesel and gasoline, some member states in the EU are banning the sales of internal
combustion engines as motive power from as soon as 2030 . This accelerated path to zero emissions will require massive investment.
Clearly this is being viewed as economically stimulative at a time of declining optimism over the general economic outlook.
These views are articulated in UNCTAD's Trade and Development Report 2019, Financing a Global Green Deal [iii]. The authors argue
that internationally coordinated action between governments pursuing reflationary monetary and fiscal policies, while restricting
international capital flows, will generate the economic growth and capture the resources to finance the investment. The charts below
are indicative of their thinking, and are copied from Page 56 of the report.
Excellent laying out of the situation but little in the way of digestible solutions. Demonizing Russia as "the Beast" is both
unhelpful and shows a prejudice of the author shared by the genuinely evil powers of the world. Russia has a huge interest in
keeping Europe as an energy trading partner. The troubles with Ukraine were due to the US / Globalist efforts in that country
to destabilize a competitor (Russia) in their global hegemonic bid.
Russia is well led and debt free. The gold backed crypto is well underway in that country but was not mentioned in this otherwise
breathy article. Crypto is a bridge too far at the moment for general consumption. I am betting on a return to a fractional gold
tie down. The mis-leaders and the bankers will not enjoy having their print-fest party spoiled but it is the only practical solution
and carries the much desired mechanism of tying their dirty hands.
Debt is the noose which will hang the central banks and this hanging needs to be done in public whether 5% or 50% of the people
understand it. Some people will only understand how the system works when Starbucks declines their cattle card.
Again pathetic assholes making plans against Russia.
It is a terrible shame: only two countries at the UN opposed Russia's resolution on the fight against Nazism.
The third committee of the UN General Assembly on social and humanitarian issues by a majority vote adopted a draft Russian
resolution to combat the glorification of Nazism. Thanks to this initiative, radical groups can have big problems.
Representatives of 121 countries supported the idea of Russian diplomats. As expected, only two countries voted against -
the United States and Ukraine. Another 55 countries abstained from voting.
No wonder. Americans are behind any Nazism. Hitler's fascism in particular, they grew up in the hope of inciting Hitler to the
USSR. Well, Ukro-Nazis today are the favorite Nazi whores of Americans. Therefore, such results: the owner and his whore.
As Nikita Khrushchev said, we did not finish you off near Stalingrad, but we will finish you off!
From the Medium article "John Bolton's Old Rivals Say Trump Should Be Very, Very
Worried"
"I don't think dirt-digging would offend Bolton. What would offend Bolton is interrupting
military supplies to a country in a deadly battle with Russia. Doing something that for
whatever reason appeases Putin," Thielmann said."
The country referred to is Ukraine. I guess I've missed all the msm articles detailing all
those deadly clashes between Russian & Ukrainian military units along with casualty
figures and all that. I suppose I need to pay closer attention (or something).
UN says 12,800–13,000 killed since April 2014. So Congress bought a pile of Javelin
AT munitions, the ones with a top attack flight profile that will place a high explosive
shape-charge of molten copper through tops of young Russian tank commanders' heads, who are
sons of Putin's base, if there was a mechanized push further into Ukraine. [The political
tolerance window for which is narrowing.]
Our benevolent leader said, "Hold-on. You gotta first get your FBI to clear my campaign
and come up with some trumped-up charges against my political opponent. My FBI won't do it."
Congressional impoundment, solicitation of a bribe for personal gain, and abuse of power. In
any case, Ukraine's getting a smaller pile of missiles until next year, so, gross incompetent
moves, both domestic and abroad.
You recall that the Obama administration opposed giving Ukraine any lethal assistance?
Congress has just come up with an excellent method of giving the Russians a lot of free
Javelins if there were a serious fight. Which there continues to be no sign of.
The great bulk of (pro-government) Ukrainian casualties occurred in the course of
ill-advised and poorly conducted offensives against the breakaway republics. When it only
defends, the Ukrainian side doesn't suffer casualties. Because nobody attacks it.
Andrew Bacevich
describes how the U.S. learned all the wrong lessons from the fall of the Berlin Wall and
the end of the Cold War:
You won't hear it from any of the candidates vying to succeed Trump, but we are still
haunted by our false conception of the Cold War. On the stump, politicians get away with
reciting comforting clichés about the imperative of American global leadership. Yet
the time for believing such malarkey is long gone.
An essential first step toward recoupling national security policy and reason is to see
the Cold War for what it was: not a "long, twilight struggle" ending in victory, but a vast
and costly tragedy that inflicted needless suffering, brought humankind absurdly close to
extinction, and from which U.S. policymakers have drawn all the wrong lessons.
The anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall offers an occasion not for celebration but
for somber and long overdue reflection.
One of the wrong lessons that U.S. policymakers drew from the events of 1989-1991 was that
the U.S. was chiefly responsible for ending and "winning" the Cold War, which inevitably
overestimated our government's capabilities and effectiveness in affecting the political
fortunes of other parts of the world. The far more critical and important role of the peoples
of central and eastern Europe and the Soviet Union itself in overthrowing the system that had
oppressed them was pushed into the background as much as possible. The U.S. took credit for
their success and policymakers frequently attributed the outcome to the policies of the late
Cold War rather than to the deficiencies and failings of the other system. After waging
stalemated and failed wars in the name of anticommunism, U.S. policymakers wanted to be able to
claim that they had "won" something, and so they declared victory for something that they
hadn't caused.
The period that followed the dissolution of the USSR was one of triumphalism, expansion, and
overreach. The U.S. not only congratulated itself for achieving something that was accomplished
by others, but it also assumed that it could achieve similar results in other parts of the
world. If NATO had been a great success as a defensive alliance, the "thinking" went, why
shouldn't it continue and expand to include many more countries? If the U.S. was supposedly
able to bring down the Soviet Union, why shouldn't it do the same to authoritarian regimes
elsewhere? Absent the check on ambition and hubris that a superpower rival provided, the U.S.
was free to run amok and do whatever it liked without regard for the consequences. That
triumphalism sowed the seeds for many of the more significant post-Cold War failures that we
have witnessed since then. Even today, that same overconfidence encourages U.S. policymakers to
flirt with the idea of engaging in another Cold War-style rivalry with a more formidable state
in China.
George Kennan presciently warned
against the triumphalism that he saw around him as early as 1992. At that time, he was
responding directly to the claims from Republicans that Reagan and his policies had "won" the
Cold War:
The suggestion that any American administration had the power to influence decisively the
course of a tremendous domestic-political upheaval in another great country on another side
of the globe is intrinsically silly and childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
Kennan went on to say that the militarization of U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War was
a boon to Soviet hard-liners and in that way helped prolong it:
The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line
circles over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the
Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate
military rather than political resolution of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the
tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater the
braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold
war extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union
at the end of the 1980's.
Whenever hawks talk about "winning" the Cold War, they invariably mean that it was the
militarized policies they favored that carried the day, but Kennan reminded us that this was
not so. In fact, a militarized foreign policy perpetuated the struggle by providing Soviet
hard-liners with a plausible foreign threat that they could use to justify their own policies
and to clamp down on internal dissent. We have seen the same thing repeated several times in
the last thirty years on a smaller scale with other governments. The most aggressive and
confrontational policies unwittingly aid authoritarian regimes by giving them an external enemy
that they can use to deflect attention from their own failings and as a pretext for the
consolidation of power at home.
Kennan was already telling us shortly after the Cold War ended that no one had "won" it:
Nobody -- no country, no party, no person -- "won" the cold war. It was a long and costly
political rivalry, fueled on both sides by unreal and exaggerated estimates of the intentions
and strength of the other party [bold mine-DL]. It greatly overstrained the economic
resources of both countries, leaving both, by the end of the 1980's, confronted with heavy
financial, social and, in the case of the Russians, political problems that neither had
anticipated and for which neither was fully prepared.
We can all be grateful that the Cold War ended, but we shouldn't delude ourselves with talk
of victory. Not only is it inaccurate, but it encourages the worst kinds of overreach and
arrogance that has led to several serious foreign policy failures in the decades that have
followed. Kennan warned us almost thirty years ago not to go down this path of triumphalism,
and as so often happened Americans ignored Kennan's wisdom.
Kennan concluded with the same idea that Bacevich stated at the end of his op-ed:
That the conflict should now be formally ended is a fit occasion for satisfaction but also
for sober re-examination of the part we took in its origin and long continuation. It is not a
fit occasion for pretending that the end of it was a great triumph for anyone, and
particularly not one for which any American political party could properly claim principal
credit.
American policymakers are not known for sober re-examination and acknowledgment of error,
but these are exactly the things that are needed if we are to stop making the same blunders and
learning the wrong lessons from the past. Kennan and Bacevich's advice is just as timely and
important today as it was twenty-seven years ago. Perhaps this time we should pay attention and
listen to it.
Lavrov "I wouldn't want to drag myself into a discussion about the medical side of this
issue.. If Macron had felt that the diagnosis he made [of NATO] was so evident – he had
all the right to state it. He knows NATO better than me, since he represents a nation which
is a member of the alliance."
"... Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange. ..."
"... Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government. ..."
"... In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town. ..."
"... Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found that untrue. Robertson accused local police of a cover-up. ..."
"... Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could those lawyers be so ignorant about the facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications? ..."
"... What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future. ..."
"... because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky ..."
"... who is going to foot these barristers' bills? ..."
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder, Assange
and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense. Editor
A US government lawyer in the Assange extradition case just wrote a London Times oped
promoting the Browder Magnitsky hoax. Ben Brandon is one of five lawyers in a London network whose spokes link to convicted tax
fraudster William Browder, the U.S. government, and to both sides of the extradition case against whistleblower publisher Julian
Assange.
Here is how the British legal system works. Lawyers are either solicitors who work with clients or barristers who go to court
in cases assigned by the solicitors. To share costs, barristers operate in chambers , which provide office space, including
conference rooms and dining halls, clerks who receive and assign cases from solicitors, and other support staff. London has 210 chambers.
There are not "partners" sharing profits, but members operate fraternally with each other.
Browder is key in the U.S. demonization of Russia. Assange has exposed U.S. war crimes. For lawyers associated in the British
legal system to take both sides on that conflict would appear to be an egregious conflict of interest. But it fits with the U.S.-UK
support of the Browder-Magnitsky hoax and their cooperation in the attack on Assange.
The law firm and chambers involved in the Browder-Assange stories are Mishcon de Reya, Matrix Chambers and Doughty Street Chambers.
Ben Brandon of Mishcon de Reya and Alex
Bailin of Matrix Chambers co-authored an opinion
article
in The Times of London October 24, 2019 in which they repeated William Browder's fabrications about the death of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky.
The article aimed to promote the Magnitsky Act which builds a political wall against Russia. It is based on the fake claim that
Magnitsky, the accountant who handled Browder's tax evasion in Russia, was really a lawyer who exposed a government scam.
Except that is not true, there is no evidence for it, and the lies are documented
here . But the Act has prevented the Russians from collecting about $100 million Browder owes in back taxes and illicit stock
buys.
Brandon's and Bailin's connections are notable. Law firms, at least in the U.S., tend to stake out their commitments. Lawyers
who represent unions do not represent companies fighting unions. It appears to be different in Britain, where legal chambers have
members on either side of some cases.
Bailin is a member of Matrix Chambers, which was founded by the wife of Tony Blair, the former neocon Labor British Prime
Minister. He is solidly in the Browder camp. He represented Leonid Nevzlin, a major partner of Browder collaborator Mikhail Khodorkovsky,
who according to filings with FARA (the Foreign Agents Registration Act), paid $385,000 for Congress to adopt the Magnitsky Act which
has been used by the U.S. as a weapon against the Russian government.
Nevzlin's suit was for $50 billion against Russia for money allegedly lost by the nationalization of Yukos Oil. Yukos was obtained
by Khodorkovsky in the mid-90s in one of then Russian President Boris Yeltsin's rigged auctions. Khodorkovsky's bank Menatep ran
the auction.
He paid $309 million for a controlling 78 percent of the state company. Months later, Yukos traded on the Russian stock exchange
at a market capitalization of $6 billion. Not surprising, after Yeltsin departed, the state wanted the stolen assets back.
To add insult to injury, Khodorkovsky laundered profits from Yukos through
transfer-pricing
and other scams.
Transfer pricing is when you sell products to a shell company at a fake low price, and the shell sells them on the world market
at the real price, giving you the rake-off. It cheats tax authorities and minority shareholders.
See how
Khodorkovsky and Browder did this with Russian company Avisma, which Khodorkovsky also got through a rigged auction.
The Times oped co-author, Brandon of Mishcon de Reya, has a startling connection. The day after an extradition request
targeting Julian Assange was
signed by the UK home secretary , Brandon representing the U.S. government, formally opened the extradition case.
Now look at another Assange link. Mark Summers , who is
representing Julian Assange is, along with Bailin,
a member of Matrix Chambers.
But while he is Assange's lawyer, Summers is acting for Assange's persecutor, the U.S. government, in a major extradition
case involving executives of Credit
Suisse in 2013 making fake loans and getting kickbacks from Mozambique government officials.
Does Assange, or those who care about his interests, know he is part of chambers working for the U.S. government?
And where do you put this factoid? Alex Bailin is representing Andrew Pearse, one of the Credit Suisse bankers that the U.S. government,
represented by Summers, is seeking to extradite!
But there's chambers where two members are each supporting both Browder and Assange.
Geoffrey Robertson is founder of Doughty Street Chambers. He is also a longtime Browder / Magnitsky story promoter. He has pitched
implementation of a Magnitsky Act in Australia and has served Browder in UK court.
In 2017 British legal actions surrounding an inquest into the death of Alexander Perepilichnyy, he represented Browder, who
claimed that the Russian, who died of a heart attack, was somehow a victim of Russian President Putin. Perepilichnyy had lost money
in investments he was handling for clients and had to get out of town.
Needing support, he decamped to London and gave Browder documents relating to his client's questionable bank transfers. He
died after a jog, Browder claimed he was poisoned by a rare botanical substance, obviously ordered by Putin, but forensic tests found
that untrue. Robertson
accused local
police of a cover-up.
He is a legal advisor to Assange and is regularly
interviewed by international media about the case.
Jennifer Robinson of Doughty Street Chambers also has a Browder connection. She is acting for Paul Radu a journalist and official
of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) which is being
sued by an Azerbaijan MP. OCCRP is a Browder collaborator.
Browder admits in a deposition
that OCCRP prepared documents he would give to the U.S. Justice Department to accuse the son of a Russian railway official of
getting $1.9 million of $230 million defrauded from the Russian Treasury. The case was settled when the U.S. couldn't prove the charge,
and the target declined to spend more millions of dollars in his defense. OCCRP got the first Magnitsky Human Rights
award , set up for Browder's partners and acolytes.
Robinson is also the longest-serving member of Assange's legal team. She
acted for Assange in the Swedish extradition proceedings and in relation to Ecuador's request to the Inter-American Court of
Human Rights Advisory Opinion proceedings on the right to asylum.
Why did Assange or his advisors choose lawyers associated with the interests of the U.S. government and Browder? Or how could
those lawyers be so ignorant about the
facts of Browder's massive tax evasion and his Magnitsky story fabrications?
It raises questions about how they are handling the Assange defense.
The individuals cited were asked to respond to points made about them, but none did.
The Telegraph reports on a 2015 private dinner in the home of Doughty Street 's Geoffrey Robertson at which the
Magnitsky myth and sanctions against Russia are pitched to then-Labour-Party-leader Ed Miliband, and Doughty Street lawyer Amal
Clooney and co.:
Today we find aforementioned Browder/Magnitsky touts Alex Bailin, QC (Matrix lawyer and "legal writer for The Guardian, The
Times and The Lawyer – co-writer of the bogus FT Magnitsky column with Ben Brandon), and Geoffrey Robertson, QC (Doughty
Street's eminence grise), both on the Advisory Board of Amal Clooney's " TrialWatch " (part of the Clooney " Foundation
for Justice "): TrialWatch® Advisory Board
universal
The tentacles of the deep state (no longer secret now) are clamping on our life so tightly that one would honestly wish that one
of those extraterrestrial rocks would smash into this planet causing total annhilation –just in order to get rid of these psychopathic
mongrels ruling over us.
I am not sure, though, fantasy could solve problems!
mark
We have a corrupt and politicised "justice" system used for the purposes of intimidation and political persecution. Some people
still believe in fairy stories like the Rule of Law and an independent judiciary.
What we are seeing now is no different from the Lula case in Brazil or any one of a thousand similar cases in authoritarian
regimes. Upset the Deep State and you face selected targeted application of the law and the destruction of your life and future.
Jen
Unfortunately what we don't get in Lucy Komisar's article, perhaps because of the peculiar quirks of the legal system in Britain
that may include a great deal of secrecy about how aspects of it operate, is how Julian Assange came to have such a dubious legal
representation with its various connections to Bill Browder and Mikhail Khodorkovsky. Who recommended Mishcon de Reya and
other barristers to Assange and Wikileaks, and who is going to foot these barristers' bills? Are there no other barristers
specialising in human rights cases in Britain who can take on Assange's case or was the case awarded to certain chambers in some
kind of bidding arrangement or some other competitive arrangement?
BTW it's not unusual for law firms in Britain and Australia to have clients whose interests may be opposed, ie a law firm can
represent both a company and a trade union whose members may be employed by that company. What usually happens is that different
teams of lawyers work for the two sides and the work of one team is separated from the other team by internal firewalls. The firewalls
include physical separations: the teams may even work on different floors so as not to share copiers or other office equipment
and lawyers in opposing teams may be discouraged from socialising with each other during lunch and coffee breaks. Sounds bizarre
but this does happen.
R Heybroek
With respect, you can't judge British law by US standards. Barristers are briefed by solicitors, not individual clients, and associate
primarily in areas of competence, e.g. criminal, corporate or tax law. In their specialization, they generally follow the 'cab
rank' principle and accept briefs from prosecution or defence as they arise. It's a strength of the system, not a problem.
Whatever I may think of some of the barristers in Matrix or Doughty, it would be foolish to assume that everyone in a chambers
shares the same political views or attitudes. They do not. They argue like cats and dogs, usually with considerable professional
respect.
I see nothing dubious about the range of experience of Assange's legal team. If his solicitor thinks a barrister has a conflict
of interest, he will withdraw the brief. I'd suggest you direct your enquiries to the instructing solicitor.
Julian Assange was a dead man walking from the time he was taken (totally illegally) from the Ecuadorian embassy. Just about all
the Wikileaks team are now totally corrupted; and as this article points out, most of Assange's legal team are also corrupted.
The alleged mental deterioration of Assange, combined with harsh (and totally unnecessary) prison conditions, might account for
some of this.
An important subsidiary question becomes, why aren't any of his high profile champions asking these questions? John Pilger? Craig
Murray? They all bang on about stuff like 'torture' but never point out that his lawyers totally fail to address this pretty darn
crucial issue. Craig Murray says 'Julian has great lawyers'. Really? If we step back and think for a minute, does it honestly
look that way?
They can't even get him out of solitary or into a lower security prison. Shit, they can't even get his mail delivered adequately
or uphold his right to get regular legal visitation! And yet no one, not even his parents, are complaining about these failures!
And who is running Wikileaks these days? Do we have any way of being sure they aren't just a co-opted shell?
Betrayed planet
To be fair Pilger is one of the few real supporters of Julian along with a handful of musicians. His lone voice is not enough.
I saw a clip of Pilger crying after the recent spectacle of a so called hearing. The presiding judge, The Honorary Upyourbottom
should have been in the dock for perjury, fraud, lying before a court and crimes against humanity.
LawStudent
I'm a 2nd year law student and I can confirm that questions about the conduct of Assange's defence are legion in my school. MNynpeople
talking about the inexplicable lapses. Just s fee usdyes often discussed: Why didn't the defense take up the judge's offer of
bail application? To say 'well they would lose' is counter to the basics of jurisprudence.
Why is there no complaint being lodged about his detention in a maximum security facility when he's on remand – not serving
a sentence – pending an extradition hearing? Why don't his lawyers lodge an appeal to the ECHR based on the testimony of the UN
observers? Why are his lawyers keeping such low media profiles?
It's generally agreed something is very 'off' about this.
L Took
I think his lawyers stated that they were never offered a bail application, even though the judge claimed they had refused one.
But I'm not sure; I had heard previous to this event that the lawyers would not ask because if they lost (the appeal?) Assange
could be further punished for the loss. Is this accurate?
MaryD
It may be relevant that one of Assange's barristers also represents the corporate psyop Extinction Rebellion!
nottheonly1
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises questions. The network of lawyers in conflicting roles in Browder,
Assange and US government cases raises questions about Julian Assange's defense.
Assange lawyers' links to US govt & Bill Browder raises only one question: What the?
I know it's not comedy, because people get seriously hurt and killed as a result of the transformation of a more or less democratic
government into a well organized criminal organization. Who better to run the courts, than the mob? Mob 'Law' enforcement included.
So, organized crime owns everything. The big club. The biggest profits are made with stuff that was bought to blow up something.
Or somebody. One could ask: 'With links like these, who needs enemies?' Anybody interfering into, or compromising the Mob execution
of the owners' plan, will be taken care of. Laws are written to owners' demands and are quickly as needed in show trials.
The eloquence in describing what is happening right now – and in all other show trials – is comforting.
As it is more like 'a gang of lawyers in revolving door roles in organized crime by Browder and US regime et al versus Julian
Assange, providing Defense for Julian Assange in his case against the same people and the same regime.
I forgot where, but I have heard of such things before.
The World will have to understand that, without the immediate release of Julian Assange, no more rule of law exists on Earth.
And to whomever has not connected the Assange affair with 'pre-emptive incarceration', might for a little longer enjoy playing
outdoor chess on the deck of a sinking cruise ship.
Oh, and yes, the qualifier "six ways to/from Sunday" should also be mentioned as an exemplary business practice by the Mob
regime. Actually, the Mob merged with the regime, with the regime belonging to the owners' club.
Northern
Good to see another article on this, seen several people raising concerns about these associations in independent media over the
last few months, though it's no doubt one of those things that will never be 'officially' addressed. Many people with more knowledge
than I have questioned the wisdom of certain decisions his legal team have made (or not, as the case may be) in recent proceedings.
Craig Murray's account of Julian's recent court appearance reads like something you'd expect from a country with 'the people's
democratic republic' in the name.
On a tangentially related note, anybody reading this who has the impetus to write to Julian in support;
The 'writetoJulian' website which appears at to the top of Google's search results for those who google how to go about such
a thing, is either accidentally or deliberately (one can probably guess which) mis-advising its readers of the requirements. The
website advises several times NOT to include Julian's prisoner number on any correspondence sent to him, but I know from direct
knowledge of communicating with the incarcerated that without the prisoner number your correspondence will be destroyed and neither
you nor the receiver will be notified. I hate to think how many well meaning messages of support for Julian have been 'legally'
destroyed without him seeing them as a result of this.
Northern
Ah, in a limited sliver of good news; The aforementioned website seem to have cottoned on to their mistake after several people
bringing it to their attention. They now advise you should include his number on all correspondence.
Mr Julian Assange
Prisoner #: A9379AY
HMP Belmarsh
Western Way
London SE28 0EB
UK
Betrayed planet
I have long suspected that Julian is not getting proper legal council. That his lawyers have not yet been able to get a proper
hearing whilst he is left to rot in a maximum security prison is suspect in the extreme. The obvious Nazi style behaviour of the
unlawful and fascist U.K. government and its lick spittle judiciary are apparent to all with absolutely no fight back from the
excuse of a media nor indeed 99.9 percent of its compliant increasingly dumbed down and wilfully ignorant population.
What is obvious now to anyone with half an eye open is that the U.K. is now a rogue state where law and justice are meaningless,
where bribery and corruption are common place. That Julian Assange is slowly dying in front of the whole world, will die without
some kind of major intervention is a stain on every single aware English resident. Mind you with a population seemingly set to
vote back in the same filthy vermin that have turned the country into the complete shithole it has become, it's hardly surprising.
Does anybody know if Gareth Pierce is still involved in his case?
nottheonly1
For quite some time now, an odd possibility offers itself – theoretically. Julian Assange is not the messenger. He is the message.
As a messenger, he is somewhat ineffective. He has not been able to convince people that the need for an uprising against lawlessness
exists. That any form of government cannot work when the judiciary is corrupt and that there is no justice in a society ruled
over by a regime.
As a message however, he is in the eyes of masses of people. Probably a majority of humans on Earth know who Julian Assange
is. How many know who he is, where he came from and what it was exactly he did, before he published videos showing how well the
'Support our Troops' deserve was used up in the way it was intended, can only be a guess. Or a dedicated team of statisticians
to hold polls in every country.
So, the published material, that was also leaked by a whistle blower, was proof of how deserving those soldiers were
of our support – showing them killing innocent human beings and 'our Troops' having the greatest times of their lives doing it.
The message is simply: Look, if we can do this to Assange, what do you think we will do to you from Monday to Sunday – if you
get any ideas?
No matter where you are. No matter who you are.
The only antidote to this insanity is the Truth and it be given its day(s) in court. 'Justice Mondays'.
I wonder if Alexander Perepilichnyy's death happened any which way – if indeed he was even a real person – there's only two photos
of him as far as I can tell and the feeling of reality about his is not strong – as the Japan Times says, "What we know of Perepilichnyy
is slight." Could he have just conveniently been invented and disappeared somehow? The story of him spending his last night with
his 22 year-old mistress (the good old 22) in Paris, complaining about his dinner, vomiting and then having his wife the next
day in London prepare his favourite food, sorrel soup, for lunch then going out jogging somehow doesn't ring true and we see a
typical anomaly of faked stories, different versions:
The Guardian: "was found outside his Surrey home"
The Atlantic: "He collapsed on Granville Road, within 100 meters of the house he was renting"
Japan Times: "Then, 50 meters from his home, he staggered into the road and died."
Wikipedia: "[he] was found dead on the road by a neighbour" with a reference to a BBC story makes no mention of neighbour
BBC story: "[he] has been found dead near his home in Weybridge. had collapsed on a road early on the evening"
Collapsed on a road? Wouldn't you give the name of the road in a suburban area?
Rhys Jaggar
Same story in UK sports reporting corrupt industries raking in cash for unprincipled wordsmithery
DiggerUK
The defence team around Julian seems to be unfathomable at many levels. My main concern has been over the unproved allegations
of chemical torture made during his incarceration in Bellmarsh Prison. Why has his defence team not asked for an independent medical
assessment? Why have concerns not been raised with prison visitors who are allowed to investigate independently?
https://www.imb.org.uk/independent-monitoring-boards/
Craig Murray who saw Julian on his last court appearance wrote of his condition .
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/10/assange-in-court/
is it as a result of drugs used during interrogations, or is it down to mental trauma after what he has been through.
Either way, his defense team and close friends need to up their game.
This article is not the first time that concerns have been raised in a worrying manner about the defence team around Julian
_
Rhys Jaggar
It is a standard Uk tactic to have someone try to beat you up then publicly say what a friend of yours they are. Happened to me
four times: I called the lot of them out on it, something which gets them on their faux high horses very quickly
Harry Stotle
Amazing isn't it, the way the legal system goes into hyperdrive pursuing those who expose war crimes while nonchantly turning
a blind eye to those who commit them (no matter how high the body count). Harder to find a more glaring example of the way hypocrisy
defines the elite's relationship with things like morality, fairness or decency, not least because no western politician has ever
been held to account for the havoc they have unleashed (in any court prosecuting war crimes).
Ellen DeGeneres hi-fiving with George Bush. British MPs pretending a courageous whistle blower is not being tortured to death
just a few miles from parliament.
Needless to say the MSM has fully sided with the criminals: first denigrating Julian Assange, then mocking his plight – this
gave way to lies, and now silence.
Put simply can anyone expect justice in Britain if their actions conflict with the ethos of the gangsters who control Britain's
economic, media and military interests?
Rhys Jaggar
We are actually approaching apartheid South Africa in that regard, namely contempt for legal due process. Not quite had the Met
coppers beating Assange over the head like SA cops did to Steve Biko, but we are slowly getting there
"... The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an "attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. ..."
"... We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. ..."
"... We also learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. ..."
"... Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies, particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly, they have not been. ..."
"... However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed. It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty. ..."
Almost daily for three years, Democrats and their media have told us very bad things about
Donald Trump's life, character, and presidency. Some of them are true. But in the process, we
have also learned some lamentable, even alarming, things about the Democratic Party
establishment, including self-professed liberals. Consider the following:
The Democratic establishment is deeply and widely imbued with rancid Russophobic
attitudes. Most telling was (and remains) a core "Russiagate" allegation that "Russia
attacked American democracy during the 2016 presidential election" on Trump's behalf -- an
"attack" so nefarious it has often been equated with Pearl Harbor. But there was no
"attack" in 2016, only, as I have
previously explained , ritualistic "meddling" of the kind that both Russia and America
have undertaken in the other's elections for decades. Little can be more phobic than the
allegation or belief that one has been "attacked by a hostile" entity. And yet this myth and
its false narrative persist in the Democratic Party's discourse, campaigning, and
fund-raising. We have also learned that the heads of America's intelligence agencies
under President Obama, especially John Brennan of the CIA and James Clapper, director of
National Intelligence, felt themselves entitled to try to undermine an American presidential
candidacy and subsequent presidency, that of Donald Trump. Early on, I termed this
operation " Intelgate ," and it has
since been well documented by other writers, including
Lee Smith in his new book . Intel officials did so in tacit alliance with certain
leading, and equally Russophobic, members of the Democratic Party, which had once opposed
such transgressions. This may be the most alarming revelation of the Trump years: Trump will
leave power, but these self-aggrandizing intelligence agencies will remain. We also
learned that, contrary to Democratic dogma, the mainstream "free press" cannot be fully
trusted to readily expose such abuses of power. Indeed, what the mainstream media --
leading national newspapers and two cable news networks, in particular -- chose to cover and
report, and chose not to cover and report, made the abuses and consequences of Russiagate
allegations possible. Even now, exceedingly influential publications such as The New York
Times seem
eager to delegitimize the investigation by Attorney General William Barr and
his appointed special investigator John Durham into the origins of Russiagate. Barr's
critics accuse him of fabricating a "conspiracy theory" on behalf of Trump. But the real, or
grandest, conspiracy theory was the Russiagate allegation of "collusion" between Trump and
the Kremlin, an accusation that was -- or should have been -- discredited by the Robert
Mueller report. And we have learned, or should have learned, that for all the talk by
Democrats about Trump as a danger to US national security, it is their Russiagate allegations
that truly endanger it. Consider two examples. Russia's new "hyper-sonic" missiles, which can
elude US missile-defense systems, make new nuclear arms negotiations with Moscow imperative
and urgent. If only for the sake of his legacy, Trump is likely to want to do so. But even if
he is able to, will Trump be entrusted enough to conduct negotiations as successfully as did
his predecessors in the White House, given the "Putin puppet" and "Kremlin stooge"
accusations still being directed at him? Similarly, as I have asked repeatedly, if confronted
with a US-Russian Cuban missile–like crisis -- anywhere Washington and Moscow are
currently eyeball-to-eyeball militarily, from the Baltic region and Ukraine to Syria -- will
Trump be as free politically as was President John F. Kennedy to resolve it without war? Here
too there is an inconvenient truth: To the extent that Democrats any longer seriously discuss
national security in the context of US-Russian relations, it mostly involves vilifying both
Trump and Russian leader Vladimir Putin. (Recall also that previous presidents were free to
negotiate with Russia's Soviet communist leaders, even encouraged to do so, whereas the
demonized Putin is an anti-communist, post-Soviet leader.)
The current state of US-Russian relations is unprecedentedly dangerous, not only due to
reasons cited here -- a new Cold War fraught with the possibility of hot war. Whether President
Trump serves one or two terms, he must be fully empowered to cope with the multiple
possibilities of a US-Russian military confrontation. That requires ridding him and our nation
of Russiagate allegations -- and that in turn requires learning how such allegations
originated.
Opponents of Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate say it is impermissible
or unprecedented to "investigate the investigators." But the bipartisan Church Committee, based
in the US Senate, did so in the mid-1970s. It exposed many abuses by US intelligence agencies,
particularly by the CIA, and adopted remedies that it believed would be permanent. Clearly,
they have not been.
However well-intentioned Barr may be, he is Trump's attorney general and therefore not
fully credible. As I have also argued repeatedly, a new Church Committee is urgently needed.
It's time for honorable members of the Senate of both parties to do their duty.
"... This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia. ..."
"... Then good old Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and nail. ..."
"... Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from Kaliningrad could be accomplished. ..."
You are 100% correct that trust is the number one point in coming to any agreement and
currently there is very little trust on either side for varying reasons. One important fact
that is overlooked by most people is the leadership of President George H. W. Bush and PM
Margaret Thatcher during the transition from the Soviet Union/Warsaw pact to independent
sovereign nations. The Bush was a WW II pilot and Thatcher earned the name Iron Lady for her
decisive action in the Falklands War, both understood the world as it was in 1990. This
statement highlights the view that prevailed from Bush at the time: "Not once, but three
times, Baker tried out the "not one inch eastward" formula with Gorbachev in the February 9,
1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev's statement in response to the assurances that "NATO
expansion is unacceptable." Baker assured Gorbachev that "neither the President nor I intend
to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place," and that the
Americans understood that "not only for the Soviet Union but for other European countries as
well it is important to have guarantees that if the United States keeps its presence in
Germany within the framework of NATO, not an inch of NATO's present military jurisdiction
will spread in an eastern direction." (See Document 6)"
These were complicated issues that involved a multitude of parties being negotiated by
just a few i.e. US, UK, France and West Germany a holdover from the WW II model. The Poles,
Czechs and others were not consulted and IMHO had they been the situation would have become
untenable. It must be remembered that Poland and Czechoslovakia suffered heavily due to
"large important nations" giving them away pre and post WW II. There was no written agreement
nor official treaty between the west and the Soviet Union soon to be Russian Federation and I
believe that was intentional for the reason I give above. George H. W. Bush was not reelected
in 1992 and Bill Clinton became POTUS and he pursued a foreign policy that was entirely
different. Some of his ideas used Thatchers earlier idea of a more political NATO with less
emphasis on the original military mission which brought in the Partnerships for Peace
program. That program was IMHO quite good as it stabilized countries that were wobbly in the
1990's after the breakup occurred. The Clinton White House had Madeline Albright an immigrant
from Czechoslovakia as secretary of State and Zbigniew Brzezinski a former secretary of State
and an academic that influenced his policies which were pro eastern European anti Russian. It
was during this time that NATO expanded. The US is a country of immigrants and there is a
large Polish population as well as other eastern Europeans and political considerations are
always come into play.
This period is when Clinton IMHO sent NATO in a wrong direction from being strictly
defensive/political to getting involved in Yugoslavia which certainly irritated Russia.
G.W. Bush basically continued the trend with regard to NATO but was preoccupied with 9/11
more than anything else. Bush thought that he understood Putin and even invited him to his
ranch in Crawford, Texas which Putin accepted and they did seem to get along.
However 2008
and the Georgia War began the slide in relations between the two countries. Then good old
Obama and another Clinton deciding to overthrow Gaddafi and his whole Arab Spring foreign
policy to include getting involved in Syria. These were disastrous decisions that the current
POTUS inherited and is trying to change except the "deep state" is fighting him tooth and
nail.
Getting out of Ukraine would be a huge trust maker for Russia and it would be followed by
sanctions being lifted allowing for a level playing field to begin working on the issues that
need fixing. NATO isn't going away however the forward deployed forces in the Baltic's and
Poland could over time in an agreed to reciprocal move say removing Iskander missiles from
Kaliningrad could be accomplished.
Many have tried, usually ended up in those infamous endless Russian fields, in long boxes.
See Pushkin, for the exact quote. But historical trivialities aside, there should be a way to
satisfy Imperial hubris without 'salting the grounds'. Hannibal's elephants did not carry
nukes in their trunks. Trying for the sixth time in the last 4 centuries to get Moscow
grounds salted might end badly for the entire planet.
Trust was not breached by Russia, military buildup, hostile threatening military, NATO
expansion and refusal to negotiate on these issues did not originate from Russia. Russia has
tried to negotiate, concede and de-escalate before. The West did not respond to those moves.
Even US sanctions placed on Soviet Union were not removed from Russia, despite there being no
reason for them to remain in place. This and other recent events (libya, iran deal etc) tells
Russia and other global players that de-escalating with the West doesn't work.
Even now, West seems to be interested to trade with Russia at least in some areas. And
Europe is increasingly frustrated with the United States. There is reportedly a number of EU
initiatives aimed at gradually limiting US economic levers created during the Cold War.
Rising economies will gradually offer more opportunities outside of the Western world.
Multipolar wolrd was a slogan in the 00s, in the 2040es it might be a reality.
We know NATO will not maintain ABM and CFE, and it is apparently not interested in INF and
Open Skies, and even START is in question now. NATO will withdraw troops if only Russia does
something? Please, you don't really believe that. With INF gone, Iskander is outdated, it was
a treaty-limited weapon. Moving it a few hundred klicks will not make NATO concede anything
now.
A huge trust maker would be for all NATO members to publically admit on their web page
that pledges to Russia were broken and at least some NATO officials feel responsibility for
that. They've spent 27 years denying any verbal assurances, now that those assurances are
declassified, they build other narratives about how those pledges did not matter. For there
to be trust, there needs to be an admission that trust was there, and was broken, and not by
Russia. No troop movements necessary even.
Biden isn't going to win the next election Trump will be reelected in 2020. The current
strain in relations with Russia has been inherited by Trump and even before he was elected
the DNC and Hillary Clinton cooked up the "Russia colusion" story which after $46 million and
2 1/2 years no Russia collision. Of course now we have the Dems trying to impeach Trump which
will not go anywhere in the Senate more waste of time and money. However there is the Justice
Department I.G. report soon to be released and many of the people who brought you the Russia
colusion hoax will be named. The Justice Department has an ongoing criminal investigation
into the key players and will undoubtedly result in indictments and prosecutions.
The real reason all of this is going on is because the establishment both Dem's & Repub's
along with the deep state look at Trump as an outsider who is tipping over their apple cart
i.e. he is changing the foreign policy direction and they don't like it one bit so they
create fake issues to try and stop him.
After his reelection I predict that more normal relations with Russia will resume.
Nowadays the actual attacks are manifested as 'hybrid warfare'. Of course Russia took the
US intervention and financing of Chechen rebels as an attack back in the 2000 ties. She took
fermenting and financing of the Georgian rose revolution as a hybrid attack, same as promises
made to pres. Saakashvili to support him militarily and politically after his attack on
Tskhinvali were taken as a hybrid attack. Same goes for both of the first color revolution in
Ukraine, and then the Revolution of dignity of 2014 that pushed ultra-right government to
power in Ukraine. In fact the NATO promise to both Georgia and Ukraine to take them in as
members in 2008 right after Putin's warning in 2007 was the first move in the 'hybrid war'.
The West had been warned, yet it decided to bulldoze its way across Eurasia and triggered the
confrontation. The placings of Aegises ashore in Poland and Romania was the cherry on top.
There can be be no meaningful compromise until the West backs off on the NATO enlargement.
That 2008 conference was what had reanimated the image of the collective West as adversary
for Russia.
What both sides should strive for though is at the very least to diminish the degree of
danger to the planet. Russia would not back off because she finds it easy enough to corner
individual EU states into minimal economic cooperation - Germany is already in recession and
there is no way they are going to continue damaging their economy for the sake of US
politics. And then there is China. When the Russians cannot buy goods from Germans they go
for made in China, which in turn gets China secure oil and gas from Russia. Which make the
repeat of pre-WW II situation with blockade on Japan pretty much impossible. Get realistic,
the West is loosing this one and should count her chickens already.
Well, then the sanctions will continue, as will the policy of keeping Russian in check in
the EU gas market.
What's interesting is that NATO never attacked Russia or threatened to attack Russia. Seems
to me that Putin is simply using the expansion as a pretext for military aggression against
the neighboring states. It's what the USSR did in 1939 against Finland. According the Soviet
side, the war started after Finland attacked the Soviet Union...
Russia *needs* the sanctions for at least another 5 years. Her milk and beef production is
still lagging compared to the deceased USSR and the only way her greedy oligarchs will
heavily invest in cow herd rearing is to continue to block the Eastern European milk products
to enter Russia. Chicken, eggs, pork and veggies are already up to speed, wheat production is
exploding, the salmon breeding programme have started so the Norway is not getting her market
back, bu the cow herds take longer to rear.
The Power of Siberia pipeline is being certified and filled right now - China would receive
her first delivery of piped Russian gas in 2020, so it is good that EU is prepping or the
squeeze - they are not going to continue getting unlimited cheap Russian gas, because Power
of Siberia II is in the works.
Every individual NATO member had attacked Russia in the past 4 centuries ( including small
but meaningful US contingent in the 1918), and some non-member allies had stomped those
fields as well. So the Russians are not taking any chances with the buffer zone. All of
Russia expansions to the West have always started with West invading first - then being
rolled back league by league. But seriously - ? Russians can live with Europe staying where
she is - if in turn Europe can learn to respect her civilization borders. The move on Ukraine
and Georgia was not a wise one.
The US openly occupies parts of Syria, boasts of taking it resources and supported the
attempts of the Kurds to set up their own little state, until the Turks blew a hissy fit.
And
yet it has the gall to call out what Russia does in the Ukraine as a breach of international
law.
The Integrity Initiative, as paid for by the British Foreign Office, Ministry of
Defense, NATO and other such entities, will live on as a non-charitable entity with even less
transparency. Its website, as well as that of Institute of Statecraft, is down. That it
will now have to live in total secrecy will make it more difficult for it to recruit foreign
journalists to spread its propaganda.
On 3rd April, Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) minister Alan Duncan revealed his
department's 'Counter Disinformation and Media Development Programme' - which bankrolls the
Institute for Statecraft and its Integrity Initiative subsidiary - was funding a new
endeavour, Open Information
Partnership (OIP).
The announcement, buried in a response to a written parliamentary question, was supremely
light on detail - Duncan merely said the effort would "respond to manipulated information in
the news, social media and across the public space". Official fanfare was also unforthcoming
- there was no accompanying press release, briefing document, or even mention of the launch
by any government minister or department via social media channels.
The original proposal for
the Open Information Partnership , as
released by 'anonymous' , included the Institute of Statecraft , a Media
Diversity Institute , Bellingcat , DFR Lab (i.e. the Atlantic Council) and
some others in a so called ZINC Network . On the current OIP website the Institute of
Statecraft 'charity' is no longer named.
---
Previous Moon of Alabama reports on the issue:
At Kit Klarenberg's Twitter ,
there's a long tweet thread further detailing what b has written above. I can't help be
wonder how the Monty Python troop would have portrayed the Institute for Statecraft and its
parent the Integrity Initiative. It appears that the governments of the English speaking
nations became addicted to lying to their citizens @1900 and are unable to kick the habit and
instead have actually deepened their addiction. Elsewhere on the planet, it seems that people
are learning it's easier to talk straight and transparently with other people and to pool
resources and combine efforts to form a community of nations and humanity to better one and
all. Seems simple enough to determine which is functional and which isn't.
Bellingcat only serves one interest, a propaganda/info laundering shop for NATO, the military
industrial complex and some very rich people. The blatant lies about MH17, chemical weapons
in Syria, OPCW, Russia, the list goes on and on.
By the time the people in the Netherlands find out how they have been manipulated with the
MH17 narrative and the role of Bellingcat in this operation, hopefully they will torch the
office of Bellingcat in The Hague and club the survivors to death like the Uktainian Nazi
friends of Bellingcat did in Odessa.
The Ukrainian army shot down MH17. It was no accident. The Dutch were also involved with
the 2014 coup in the Ukraine. Putting the blame on Russia is a political decision, its not
based on facts. Dutch politicians are very dirty people. Burn in hell.
Obama Bin Biden and the crooked clan need to get back in the game somehow so they can rip
off another 3 billion in US tax payer loans. What were they up to 44 Billion in fraudulent
loans to Ukraine?
Interesting how they want to Impeach Trump over Ukraine, don't you think?
Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem
politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his
partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the
US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised
transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of
the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit
of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its
dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas,
sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low;
and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to
produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and
cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma)
had very high profits and very little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to
European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went
sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating;
and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering
prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his
projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a
partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually
its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners
into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He
had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it
didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney
General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin
immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand
dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the
Ukrainian tax code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six
hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US
taxpayers' funds won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner,
paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars,
according to different sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and
installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma,
but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep
his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself.
Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and
now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another
case, Firtash case.
"... As for the rest of Ukraine, even though they lost something, they get something valuable in return: it's called neutral status between east and west. A subdued, federalized Ukraine led by Zelensky, in many ways, makes Ukraine "Finlandized." That is good for the Ukrainian people. It means they retain their independence, but peacefully accept that Russia controls their foreign policy. That position benefited Finland between 1945 and 1991. Finland is now a peaceful and prosperous country, and it is no longer living under influence of Russia or the Soviets. If "Finlandization" led to happiness for the Finns, it can do the same for Ukraine. ..."
"... Finland did not fight against Swedish language and peacefully uses it, while it is "legacy of Swedish occupation" and less than 10% of Finnish people can speak it. Ukrainian Nazis are deprived of wisdom, they are fighting with Russian language and own people. So, if you haven't brain, nothing will help you. ..."
"... after Maidan, Nuland directly stated that the United States spent 5 billion on "building democracy in Ukraine." The United States invested 5 billion in a coup, but is Poland to blame? why? if Poland had really done that, then western Ukraine would have become part of Poland immediately after the Maidan, but this did not happen. After the Maidan, Biden was photographed in a pride chair, but not the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland;) ..."
When Russia is led by truly capable leaders, it can beat any foreign power in war or geostrategic conflict. Today Russia is
led by a great man who is starting to look more and more like another Suvorov.
And everyone knows who Suvorov was.
Just read today's headlines concerning Syria. Russia ordered Turkey to stand down its offensive. Russian troops are now functioning
as peacekeepers in-between the Turkish and Syrian armies. The Kurds have signed allied themselves with Russia and Assad.
..while Americans of all stripes scratch their heads wondering what went wrong, and then check CNN and their FB feeds in a
hopeless bid to understand what's going down. Just.... hilarious....
What disturbs me the most is that Americans are being misled into believing that they "lost" something in Syria. In reality,
America "lost" nothing in Syria. That's because the US was never established in Syria to begin with. America has long been established
in Syria's neighbors, Israel, SA, Turkey, and to a lesser degree Iraq. But not Syria.
Basically, America got involved in Syria for aggressive, illegitimate, and unnecessary reasons. We were there to further the
over-ambitious geopolitical ambitions of our ME allies. That's why America launched a minor invasion of eastern Syria, and armed
and funded rebels, jihadis to try to violently overthrow Assad. And when that didn't work, the US POTUS justifiably pulled out
US troops and stopped supporting the rebels.
So, America didn't ever have anything to gain or to lose in Syria. Nothing at all.
Meanwhile, all the hawkish American newspapers -- which includes much of MSM -- are now complaining that Trump allowed Russia
to "take" Syria, and to "humiliate" and "drive out" America from that country. What hogwash! What propaganda and lies!
Russia has been in Syria for nearly 50 years. That means Russia's the chief ally of Syria, and as such, is a guarantor peace
and stability in the country. Also, Russia definitely has something to lose in Syria if Assad gets overthrown. So, in the end,
Russia wasn't trying to "take over Syria," as lying US media suggests. Russia was just protecting itself, protecting Assad, and
trying to impose peace on the region.
Check out Newsweek's totally dishonest story on this is subject. The article was published today. It's a shame so many
naive Americans believe these lies about America's alleged "role" in Syria.
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people. If you're talking about Butinterests in
terms of money, no -- we don't have any. But in terms of principles, yes, we were justified in entering that area of the country.
And we made a difference. Or else the Russians wouldn't be rushing in to take the place we left. We were getting a lot out
of very little engagement.
Russia has never been a guarantee for peace and stability anywhere; it has always been a guarantee of more support for Russia.
Whenever necessary, instabillity was sown, and inconvenient parties, whether or not former allies, were abandoned.
Plus, there is the nagging issue of the Kurds having helped us in the fight against ISIS. Letting this out of the picture is
as dishonest as you try to make parts of the MSM be.
But hey -- have your own opinions. Write a book about them while you're at it.
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people. If you're talking about Butinterests in
terms of money, no -- we don't have any. But in terms of principles, yes, we were justified in entering that area of the country.
sorry what???
In fact, Assad is the legitimate, democratically elected president of Syria. have you decided in the USA that you have the
right to decide who is bad and who is good?
The United States has worked hard to overthrow legitimate power in Syria. for 7 years of NATO's joint operation in Syria, ISIS
captured 70% of the territory of this country. Of course, with the active support of the United States, it supplied weapons to
everyone who was ready to fight against the Syrian army. but the "evil" Russia came and ruined everything. for 5 years of military
operations in Syria, ISIS were defeated and switched to guerrilla warfare. solved the problem between the Kurds, Turks and Syrians.
US plans have completely collapsed. or not?
Congress is currently making a decision to bring tanks into Syria to protect oil fields from terrorists. Really??? it looks
like American democracy is black and actually called oil! all these hundreds of thousands of murdered women and children in Syria
just so that the United States could continue to steal oil from Syria!
"the greatest power in the world" turns out to be an ordinary thief! do not you disgust?
Sir, we got involved in Syria because of Assad, who is a monster to his own people.
Define what you mean by "monster to his own people." And explain to me why 30% of Syrians -- a huge chunk of whole -- have
always been solidly behind Assad.
If you're talking about the Assad regime's barrel bombing, yes, that's monstrous. But Assad didn't start doing that until the
civil war was fulling raging. That war, mind you, didn't broaden and deepen until America stepped in to fund and arm Assad's enemies.
Had America had stayed out of Syria and allowed Assad to stamp out the initial protests and acts of rebellion, then there would
have been no civil war. Therefore, America's involved escalated Syria's civil disorder all the way up to the level of a full fledged
war, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths.
I really don't understand how American Triumphalists and messianic spreaders of American democracy can justify what they did
in Syria. Essentially, America consciously took a chance in Syria, choosing to support the rebels on the off chance that they
might topple Assad. America knew that the price of failure in this reckless gambit would be the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of Syrians.
Why did America do this? America's action in Syria were driven by the desire to turn the country into a strategic asset. America
chose to pursue this goal on behalf of its regional allies (all Syrian enemies), Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Turkey. That's
all. Never mind "principles." We're talking geopolitical ambitions here. Blind ambitions.
It's a mysterious to me as to why you blame the war on Russia. After all, Russia's been in Syria for nearly 50 years. During
that time, Syria was stable, and experienced no civil war. But as soon as America began meddling in Syria, war broke out. Russia
worked with Assad to try to stomp out that war. America worked with the rebels to expand it.
Ukraine power captured it's country in own trap. They can't stop civil war in Donbass because then they will need to explain
somehow why they killed Donbass people (Ukraine Nazis power hate Donbassians, but at the same time pretends to call them their
own citizens) for so many years. Admit truth means acknowledge own crimes. So, the only way they have is continuing lying about
"liberation" (means genociding) of Donbass.
But rest assured: Ukraine is beaten and the Ukrainians know it. They can feel it. That's why they elected Zelensky, who
may be a sensible guy.
Implementation of the peace plan in Donbass will turn the region into a virtually independent part of Ukraine. Russia will
be able to influence Ukrainian politics through its connections in Donbass. That means Russia will have gained exactly what it
fought for: veto power over Ukraine's attempts to join the EU and NATO.
As for the rest of Ukraine, even though they lost something, they get something valuable in return: it's called neutral
status between east and west. A subdued, federalized Ukraine led by Zelensky, in many ways, makes Ukraine "Finlandized." That
is good for the Ukrainian people. It means they retain their independence, but peacefully accept that Russia controls their foreign
policy. That position benefited Finland between 1945 and 1991. Finland is now a peaceful and prosperous country, and it is no
longer living under influence of Russia or the Soviets. If "Finlandization" led to happiness for the Finns, it can do the same
for Ukraine.
Finland did not fight against Swedish language and peacefully uses it, while it is "legacy of Swedish occupation" and less
than 10% of Finnish people can speak it. Ukrainian Nazis are deprived of wisdom, they are fighting with Russian language and own
people. So, if you haven't brain, nothing will help you.
But rest assured: Ukraine is beaten and the Ukrainians know it. They can feel it. That's why they elected Zelensky, who may
be a sensible guy.
your optimism is due to ignorance of the peculiarities of Ukrainian political life;) Let's start with a short introduction
to Ukrainian political life. Who is Zelensky? this is a representative of the oligarch Kolomoisky. exactly the same oligarch as
Parashenko has ruled Ukraine for the past 5 years. For 5 years, Parashenko has robbed banks and enterprises of other oligarchs
in Ukraine, now Kolomoisky will do the same through his representative Zelensky.
Now about the peace process in the Donbas ... The armed coup in 2014 was carried out by the forces of Ukrainian Nazis and over
the past 5 years, the Ukrainian Nazis have firmly established themselves in the Verkhovna Rada and, most importantly, in the army
and law enforcement agencies. these structures are controlled by Avakov, not Zelensky. Zelensky cannot withdraw troops, and even
more so "Ukrainian volunteers" from punitive battalions Aidar, Azov, etc. Zelensky does not control these formations and has no
leverage over them. all he can do is put forward an additional requirement of 7 days without shelling. Naturally, the shelling
is not embellished and no one withdraws the troops. Even if Zelensky really wanted to end the war, there simply isn't any opportunity
for this. all that he can do is populism and tell that he will return Crimea :))))
Mr Gvosdev sounds like one of those Eastern European svidomites . They combine this unwavering faith in the power of
Washington on top of a deep, irrational hostility to Russia.
How is "collapse of Russian economy" going to happen exactly? Judging by the casual manner in which Gvosdev talks about it,
I think he imagines president Biden flipping some switch in his cabinet, and the economy of vast country shutting down in an instant.
How does a Western economic war on Russia can help its proxies seize power? It didn't work like this in Iran or Venezuela,
it's even less likely to happen in Russia. If anything the opposite is likely to happen: pro-Western 5th column in Russia will
be eradicated.
You know that the Ukraine is doomed when your "optimistic scenario" requires Russia to drop dead essentially.
Russia's economy is functioning very close to autarky. That means Russia could survive expulsion from SWIFT.
As for for your reference to China, your point is anything but clear. China is forming a strategic alliance with Russia pointed
directly at the US. If you don't realize this, you haven't been reading the news. It would behoove you to know that China and
the US have long been drifting in the direction of a conflict for supremacy in Pan-Pacific affairs. The US has lots of weapons
systems set up in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. Beijing is determined to make the US withdraw those military assets from China's
borders. China is also wary of the US's messianic impulse to spread democracy anywhere it can. China blames America for the Hong
Kong disturbances, which Beijing thinks of as America's latest attempt at a "color revolution."
Meanwhile, Russia poses no such threat to China. If anything, Russia makes an ideal junior ally for China in the latter's growing
tendency to constantly subvert the US as the world's superpower. So, I am confused as to what kind of threat you think China poses
to Russia?
Perhaps you believe that China wants to take Siberia from Russia. Do you really believe China has the ability to do so? If
that's what you're thinking, you are willfully blind to the fact that Russia remains a nuclear weapons superpower. If war broke
out between China and Russia (which is very unlikely), which country would do more damage to the other? Think about it: Russia
is a massive open land mass that is not densely populated, and it is full of nuclear missile launch sites. China is a population
dense nation consisting of far less territory than Russia. Who would suffer more in an exchange of nuclear missiles? I think the
answer is clear. For this reason, Beijing is not thinking about war with Russia, or making Russia "collapse," as you say.
Wow, I can write comments here. I am russian, so I can tell the Mordor's version. The article is generally objective, but the
author was cunning in a few points
1) The principal reason why Yanukovich refused to sign the agreement with Europe was the duty free zone with Russia. Russians
sad: ok, You will sign the agreement with Europe, but we have high customs duties with europeneans, so we will break our free
trade zone agreement. Russia was the biggest export market for Ukraine and ukranians understood that they will lose a lot of money.
But Maidan decided differently.
2) Today the Russian primary strategy for Ukraine is do nothing and wait, we have no any influence in this country. We understand
that Europe and USA will not feed this country a lot of time. Internal contradictions will ruin this country before our intervention
3) But we support new government of Zelensky because he has an opportunity to implement Minsk agreements (may be). It will
be enough to close this deal and move on
But we support new goverment of Zelensky because he has an oportunity to implement Minsk aggreements (may be). It will be enough
to close this deal and move on
I do not agree with this. how Zelensky can end the war when the security forces and the army are controlled by Avakov and the
punitive battalions do not even know who controls?
the support of any government in Ukraine is due to the fact that our countries still have a fairly large turnover. while we trade
with ukraine will cooperate ..
But now Poland and other Central European states were similarly interested in changing their position -- from being Euro-Atlantic
frontline states to shifting that line further east
I believe that this is a big reason why Maidan occured. It is also a big reason for the war in Ukraine today. The Poles have
had a hand in this issue from the very beginning. Poland is literally an aggressor state at this point, stoking trouble in Ukraine.
America's greatest sin in all of this has been to allow itself to be influenced by Poland and the Baltic states. Just like
America allowed itself to be led by the nose by its "allies" in the Syrian War. We're talking about two conflicts that have very
little to do with America's best interests, and which could result in disaster (nuclear exchange with Russia) if something goes
wrong.
It's absolutely nuts for anyone to think that nuclear equipped Russia would allow Poland and America to have their way in Ukraine,
which is virtually Russia's front porch. By supporting our Polish "ally," the US has come close to creating a Cuban Missile Crisis
in reverse. In 1963 the Russians provoked America. Since 2014, America has been provoking Russia. It could get much worse.
I believe that this is a big reason why Maidan occured. It is also a big reason for the war in Ukraine today. The Poles have
had a hand in this issue from the very beginning. Poland is literally an aggressor state at this point, stoking trouble in
Ukraine.
but after Maidan, Nuland directly stated that the United States spent 5 billion on "building democracy in Ukraine." The
United States invested 5 billion in a coup, but is Poland to blame? why? if Poland had really done that, then western Ukraine
would have become part of Poland immediately after the Maidan, but this did not happen. After the Maidan, Biden was photographed
in a pride chair, but not the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Poland;)
Okay, I can see where you're coming from. But still, the Russians were readying to station missiles in Cuba, just miles from
America's borders. That means the Russians must have known -- or should have known -- that they were risking war with the US.
That's my point.
Now America's doing the same thing as the USSR did in 1963. America is setting the stage to establish bases, radars, and missiles
in Ukraine. That's what preparing Ukraine for NATO membership is all about. Therefore, America must know -- or should know --
that it is risking war with Russia. In a major way.
Agree with the thrust of your agrument. The US knows it is stoking conflict with their actions (ie Donbass), but since they
are not directly in the firing line (barring major escalations) they simply don't care. They want to discomfort and undermine
Russia, drive a wedge between Russia and Germany/France, and force the Eurotrash into compliance with US diktat as a demonstration
of US power over its minions.
Re the Cuban Missile Crisis, on the balance it wasn't really a climb-down by the Soviets, but it is usually interpreted that
way, especially as anti-Krushchev factions in the USSR were succesful in portraying it that way as part of their palace coup.
The US remoived its misiles from Turkey, promised not to update them with new ones, and undertook not to repeat any more "Bay
of Pigs" attempts at overthrowing Castro by force of arms. All the Soviets needed to do was halt their mobilisation and similarly
agree not to base missiles. On the balance, the Soviets played brinkmanship well and won real concessions in exchange for very
little. Krushchevs problem was really that he marketted the ploy very poorly and was able to be portrayed as a loser by his political
enemies, and Westeners have happily repeated the narratives ever since.
And what? US placed their missiles in every corner of the Globe, including Soviet/Russian borders. Why USSR can't place it's
missiles in Cuba?
BTW, what Gary Powers did in his U-2 in the sky above Ekaterinburg 01.05.1960?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
My point is that each power is expected to respect the other's buffer zones. That's how the powers have gotten along historically.
If and when one side disrespects the other's buffer zone, major trouble is right around the corner.
Generally, in these confrontations between the nuclear superpowers, the side with the less to lose is the first to back down.
That side is always the one that has overreached. In 1963 it was the Soviets who overreached. It's looking increasingly clear
that since 2014, it's the US that's overreached.
The US will find a graceful way to end the Ukraine-NATO expansion issue, something amounting to a face-saving American retreat
from the region. Putin will likely make it easy for America to pull out without loss of prestige.
In general, you are right, but in 60's it was not Soviets, who overreached. It was US planes intervened in Soviet airspace,
not vice versa. It was US, who firstly placed missiles in Turkey in 1961, not USSR in Cuba in 1963.
Ukraine is not going anywhere, because of 115 Mrd. outstanding Debt. Ukraine lost 85% of their Industrial Base in the last
5 Years. Most of them working for Russian Companies. Those Companies get Advanced Payments from Russia till 2014 worth about 10
Mrd. for Material and Salaries. That Money is not coming again. Russian Companies replace 90% of all Ukraine deliveries during
the last 5 Years - more modern and especially with far better time frames. Ukraine has a minor Cash Reserve of 7 Billion USD.
Whatever happens to Ukraine we can be sure of one thing, through our contributions via the World Bank, the IMF and Obama's
loan guarantees, the one million dollars a day paid by U.S taxpayers directly into the pockets of Ukrainian Oligarchs will continue
in perpetuity.
I doubt Putin is in any hurry to relieve us of that 'honor' the man is a master of playing the U.S for a sucker.
You are correct on most counts. However, I think that Putin wants the US to scale down its Ukraine involvement ASAP. That's
because Russia's nightmare is NATO expansion into Ukraine. Therefore, the sooner the US backs away, the less likely Russia will
have to fight a future war in order to keep NATO off of its front yard. Nobody, including Putin, wants war.
Ukraine needs internal stability, this means peace treaty with rebels and some kind of minimal agreement with Russia. Country
needs to buy time, it is too much to expect to fight war, to do reforms and fight corruption and to develop all at the same time.
NATO expansion to East proved to be big destabilizing factor for Ukraine, its geopolitical situation is difficult. It will
always need to balance and make concessions between Eastern and Western interests.
New president looks very promising, hopefully he will be able to bring country back to stability and push it more toward faster
economical development and national reconciliation.
You make some good points regarding stability within the country. The amount now spent on fighting the war in Donbas will not
go down as Ukraine will need to continue to rebuild their military to include new fighters and new ships for the navy however
the killing will stop. Any agreement made with Putin should be made with eyes wide open as Russia has no honor so agreements are
worthless only a potent enough military will guarantee Ukraine's peace.
Peace at any cost is not acceptable and any plan that allows complete autonomy should be a no go, it would be better to just
build a wall along the existing line and rid the country of a fifth columnist element. If the plan allows for local elections,
local use of Russian, local police forces not military but police that is acceptable. These elections must allow for all residents
who resided in the area prior to the war to vote and for all Ukrainian political parties to participate.
Zelenskiy has made corruption a key to his election and it is imperative that he takes some bold action(s) soon to set the
tone. I am a little concerned that he has selected some less than pure individuals to be part of his presidential team, apparently
he hasn't picked up on how bad the optics are by having a lawyer that worked for Kolomosky as your chief of staff?
Cracking down on the oligarchs would allow Ukraine to have a standard of living like Poland within a very few years and many of
the Ukrainians that now work in Poland could come home an make as much money.
The presidential vote proved that at least 73% of Ukrainians agreed that a new beginning was needed hence Zelnskiy being elected.
The reason IMHO that "national reconciliation" hasn't been achieved is the continued Russian interference/influence in Ukraine.
It hasn't been long enough for Ukraine as an independent nation to come to terms with the past history. This part of the world
has seen millions killed over the past 100+ years, the country hasn't come to grips with that there is still finger pointing and
until that is dealt with the reconciliation will be difficult.
The desire to join NATO is all on Russia and it's continuous interference in Ukraine. In all reality NATO is a long way off
as Ukraine needs to do a lot to bring the country up to NATO standards including in the corruption realm.
This part of the world has seen millions killed over the past 100+ years
Ukraine has been used an invasion route by Western aggressors who want to conquer Russia. That's resulted in Russia suffering
millions killed in the 20th century, and hundreds of thousands more killed in earlier wars.
You keep failing to see matters from Russia's perspective. You only think about Ukraine's most selfish national interests.
You've got to understand that any security arrangement in that part of the world will have to be a shared security plan. It will
have to consider and respect Russia's concerns. NATO is not the answer here. Militarization of a Ukraine led by far-right wing
nationalists is not the answer either.
Ukraine's only path to peace and security is to accept the status of Finlandization.
If the plan allows for local elections, local use of Russian, local police forces not military but police that
is acceptable.
It's too late for that. Remember, the Ukrainian ATO invaded Donbass and killed many thousands of innocent local people. For
this reason, Donbass will never allow the Ukrainian military onto its soil.
Yes, I read what you said. That's why I highlighted "military" in my quote. You are saying that Donbass Russians are expected
to allow themselves to be occupied by the Ukrainian military, as if they are conquered, humiliated people. I am saying that Russia
and Donbass will never let that happen.
Let's not overlook that it appears very much like the war is ending now, with Ukraine submitting to the terms set by Donbass
and Russia. That means Zelensky will have to drink his poison soup and allow the Donbass militia to have exclusive and unrestricted
military rights within Donbass, and along the region's borders. That's unavoidable.
Even if you go by Minsk II which plainly does not allow for a Separatist Military there is zero chance that Ukraine will agree
to anything resembling a "military". This territory will be under Ukrainian sovereignty and the border will be under Ukrainian
sovereignty. The autonomy will be for language, education, elections of local councils, cultural endeavors etc...
It is the thugs in charge who are supported by the Kremlin are the ones that envision some quasi country within Ukraine. If
you were to go out into the villages the average person wants the war to end and life to go back to as close to what it was before
this all started. The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections are to
be held without Russian and mercenary gun toting thugs walking the streets. They are the ones that are worried as their world
will come to an end if real peace comes to past.
If you were to go out into the villages the average person wants the war to end and life to go back to as close to what
it was before this all started. The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections
are to be held...
You are in denial of the facts. Respected international polling agencies have taken polls inside the rebel held portion of
Donbass. The results confirm that the people there want nothing to do with the Ukrainian government, and that they identify themselves
as an extension of Russia.
The only open question among the Donbass people is whether they want to be annexed by Russia (many do), or whether they want
to remain in Ukraine as a completely autonomous region, running all of their own affairs (many like this idea too).
But under no circumstances do the Donbass people want the Ukrainian army to enter their territory, establish bases or outposts,
and then garrison the border with Russia. Why would the Donbass people have fought for five hard, victorious years only to accept
this ignominious outcome? It makes no sense. Donbass and Russia won. Ukraine lost. The winners will not let the losers take military
control of their homeland. No possible way.
From the way your posts read, it's obvious you are way, way oversold on anti-Russian propaganda.
Who says that the Ukrainian Army is going to go into this area of Donbas? Th border will be secured by Ukrainian Border personnel
as it is on every other part of the border. Ukraine is currently decentralizing services and responsibility in the rest of the
country withheld control coming from Kyiv. A modified version of that for occupied Donbas to include local elections, language,
education and local law enforcement is what they should expect. In exchange Kyiv promises to rebuild destroyed infrastructure
and provide economic assistance to the area.
If that isn't good enough then as I said build a wall and cut them lose and let Putin take on the burden which he doesn't want.
Money coming form Russia to rebuild will be a long time in coming and what they have now is pretty much what they can expect for
the future. Of course the educate and most of the young have left the area an only the poor pensioners who had no where to go
are left.
Even if you go by Minsk II which plainly does not allow for a Separatist Military there is zero chance that Ukraine will
agree to anything resembling a "military"
You're living in a dream world if you think this. The reality is that Ukraine has lost the war. Zelensky wouldn't dare to implement
Minsk II unless he were leading a defeated nation, a nation that was throwing in the towel. We're talking about a complete capitulation.
That's what Minsk II means.
I am certain that Zelensky fully expects that once Minsk II is implemented, Ukraine will be somehow be maneuvered into accepting
that the Donbass military is in charge of Donbass and the abutting section of the Russian-Ukraine frontier.
Most likely, after Donbass holds internationally ratified elections per Minsk II, the newly elected officials will claim that
they are officially part of Ukraine's government. From there, they will claim that the Donbass rebel militia, therefore, is officially
an extension of Ukraine's national army. Then, finally, the Donbass leaders and Russia will say that "returning control of the
border to Ukraine" means, in reality, putting the border under the control of the Donbass militia.
Possibly the Donbass militia will wear Ukrainian army uniforms, just for show. But believe me: there's no way the victors in
this war are going to settle for surrendering military control of their territory to a despised, alien military force (i.e., the
Ukrainian army).
There's no possible way that Putin, Russia, or the Donbass rebels would have pushed the Minsk II Accords on Ukraine unless
it one of the treaty's unstated implications is that the Ukrainian military is ejected from the region permanently. That's what
Russia and Donbass fought to achieve. It's unthinkable that they would settle for anything less.
I'm certain that Zelensky and everyone else understands this.
It will not happen Minsk II will not be implemented. Th eUkrainian foreign minister already stated what will be the approach
in the Normandy talks an edit isn't Minsk II.
"The thugs in charge know that their power and authority will go away if truly free and fair elections are to be held without
Russian and mercenary gun toting thugs walking the streets."
What nonsense. You really think that voters in Donetsk & Lugansk would to reward Kiev authorities with their support in light
of the atrocities the "volunteer" battalions have dished out to civilians over the last 5 years???
You can cry about "thugs" or "mercenaries" all you like (in a futile attempt to de-legitimise the views of the seperatists)
but your bias is clear when you whitewash the crimes of Banderites and Neo-Nazis. Or maybe you would prefer to adopt the US MSM
ploy and simply pretend that these factions don't exist, or that no warcrimes have been committed?
You really think that voters in Donetsk & Lugansk would to reward Kiev authorities...
You make a valid point. I'd add also that the rebel controlled areas are the parts of Donetsk and Lugansk where the ethnic
Russian demographic majorities are heaviest. That means there's virtually zero chance that any elections held in that zone will
favor Kiev.
...as Ukraine will need to continue to rebuild their military to include new fighters and new ships for the navy...
Impossible. That's because there aren't enough Ukrainians who feel nationalistic enough to be willing to lay down their lives
in war for Ukraine. The reason for this problem is that a huge minority of Ukrainians are ethnic Russians and pro-Russian Ukrainians
who won't fight Russia. Many other Ukrainian people are ambivalent about national identity, and will not honor their military
obligations.
In some ways, Ukraine's military problem today is akin to that suffered by the Austro-Hungarian Empire in WW1. The Austro-Hungarian
state was multi-national, and much of its population did not share the political and national values of the rulers in Vienna and
Budapest.
Multi-national countries always have trouble fielding political reliable militaries. Even the Soviet Union, a superpower, had
a bottom one-third of military recruits (most from Cental Asia) that simply weren't politically reliable.
Ukraine's military future looks very grim. Only if Kiev grants independence to the non-Ukrainian regions will the country finally
have a population of people who share the same national and political values. That will have to precede Ukraine building any kind
of competent army.
The presidential vote proved that at least 73% of Ukrainians agreed that a new beginning was needed hence Zelnskiy being
elected.
That Ukrainian majority is exhausted and demoralized by the Donbass War. They want peace at any cost, even if that means granting
virtual independence to Donbass. Even if that means allowing Russia to use Donbass as an agent through which it can influence
Ukraine's domestic political situation. That's the "new beginning" that Ukrainians have in mind.
There's no way Zelensky can be in power while simultaneously continuing the Donbass War. Ukrainians elected him to get the
country out of that agony.
My wife is Ukrainian and they will not accept Russia running things through a Fifth column in Donbas. They might as well just
wall it off and be done with it makes zero sense to allow your rendition.
"... On the other hand, as Targ explains, are the Trumpian, "America First" nationalist capitalists. This faction of the ruling class, while also supporting global dominance and a permanent war economy (military-related spending will consume 48 percent of the 2020 federal budget) favors trade restrictions, economic nationalism, building walls and anti-immigrant policies. Although Trump is inconsistent, bumbling and sometimes contradictory, he's departed from the neocon's agenda by making overtures to North Korea and Russia, voicing doubts about NATO as an expensive relic from the past that is being dangerously misused outside of Europe, not being afraid to speak bluntly to EU allies, frequently mentioning ending our "endless, ridiculous and costly wars," asserting that the U.S. is badly overextended and saying "The job of our military is not to police the world." ..."
"... This is a high stakes intra-ruling class struggle and neither side cares a fig about what's best for the American people or those beyond our borders. At this point it's impossible to know how it will play out but grasping the underlying dynamics explains much about current U.S. domestic and foreign policy. This understanding may, in turn, point toward how opponents of America's oligarchic elites can most expeditiously use their time and energy. ..."
"... Foremost is the fact that Trump's intra-elite enemies despise him not for being a neo-fascistic demagogue, a despicable human being devoid of a conscience, or for the brouhaha over Ukraine. Their animus is rooted in the conviction that Trump has been a foot dragging imperialist, an equivocal caretaker of empire, unreliable pull-the-trigger Commander-in-chief (e.g.Iran) and transparent truth-teller about the real motives behind U.S. foreign policy. These are his unforgivable sins and if he's impeached or denied the Oval Office by some other means, they will be real reasons. ..."
"... One of Trump's most traitorous acts is that he's been consistent, at least rhetorically, in being opposed to U.S. troops being killed in "endless wars." One need not agree with his reasons to find merit in this worthy objective. His motives probably include Nativism, racism, foreign investment stability, the wars causing more refugees to come here, his massive ego, appeals to his voting base, or simply because he believes both he and the "real America" would be better off. For him, the latter two are synonymous. ..."
"... For this treachery, those arrayed against Trump include at least, the Pentagon-CIA-armaments lobby, MSM editors like those at CNN, The New York Times ..."
Over the past few months President Trump has unilaterally by Tweet and telephone begun to
dismantle the U.S. military's involvement in the Middle East. The irony is amazing, because in
a general overarching narrative sense, this is what the marginalized antiwar movement has been
trying to do for decades.
1
Prof. Harry Targ, in his important piece "United States foreign policy: yesterday, today,
and tomorrow," (MR online, October 23, 2919), reminds us of the factional dispute among U.S.
foreign policy elites over how to maintain the U.S. empire. On the one hand are the neoliberal
global capitalists who favor military intervention, covert operations, regime change,
strengthening NATO, thrusting China into the enemy vacuum and re-igniting the Cold War with
Russia. All of this is concealed behind lofty rhetoric about humanitarianism, protecting human
rights, promoting democracy, fighting terrorism and American exceptionalism. Their mantra is
Madeleine Albright's description of the United States as the world's "one indispensable
nation."
On the other hand, as Targ explains, are the Trumpian, "America First" nationalist
capitalists. This faction of the ruling class, while also supporting global dominance and a
permanent war economy (military-related spending will consume 48 percent of the 2020 federal
budget) favors trade restrictions, economic nationalism, building walls and anti-immigrant
policies. Although Trump is inconsistent, bumbling and sometimes contradictory, he's departed
from the neocon's agenda by making overtures to North Korea and Russia, voicing doubts about
NATO as an expensive relic from the past that is being dangerously misused outside of Europe,
not being afraid to speak bluntly to EU allies, frequently mentioning ending our "endless,
ridiculous and costly wars," asserting that the U.S. is badly overextended and saying "The job
of our military is not to police the world."
I would add that Trump is also an "American exceptionalist" but ascribes a very different
provincial meaning to the term, something closer to a crabbed provincialism, an insular
"Shining City on a Hill," surrounded by a moat.
This is a high stakes intra-ruling class struggle and neither side cares a fig about
what's best for the American people or those beyond our borders. At this point it's impossible
to know how it will play out but grasping the underlying dynamics explains much about current
U.S. domestic and foreign policy. This understanding may, in turn, point toward how opponents
of America's oligarchic elites can most expeditiously use their time and energy.
Foremost is the fact that Trump's intra-elite enemies despise him not for being a
neo-fascistic demagogue, a despicable human being devoid of a conscience, or for the brouhaha
over Ukraine. Their animus is rooted in the conviction that Trump has been a foot dragging
imperialist, an equivocal caretaker of empire, unreliable pull-the-trigger Commander-in-chief
(e.g.Iran) and transparent truth-teller about the real motives behind U.S. foreign policy.
These are his unforgivable sins and if he's impeached or denied the Oval Office by some other
means, they will be real reasons.
One of Trump's most traitorous acts is that he's been consistent, at least rhetorically,
in being opposed to U.S. troops being killed in "endless wars." One need not agree with his
reasons to find merit in this worthy objective. His motives probably include Nativism, racism,
foreign investment stability, the wars causing more refugees to come here, his massive ego,
appeals to his voting base, or simply because he believes both he and the "real America" would
be better off. For him, the latter two are synonymous.
For this treachery, those arrayed against Trump include at least, the
Pentagon-CIA-armaments lobby, MSM editors like those at CNN, The New York Times and
The Washington Post , NSA, Zionist neocons, the DNC, establishment Democrats, some
hawkish Republican senators, many lifestyle liberals still harboring a sentimental faith in
American goodness and even EU and NATO elites who've benefited from being faithful lackeys to
Washington's global imperialism.
In a recent interview, Major Danny Sjursen, retired army officer and West Point instructor
with tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, notes that "The last bipartisan issue in American
politics today is warfare, forever warfare." In terms of the military, that means " even the
hint of getting out of the establishment interventionist status quo is terrifying to these
generals, terrifying to these former intelligence officers from the Obama administration who
seem to live on MSNBC now." Sjursen adds that many of these generals (like Mattis) have already
found lucrative work with the military industrial complex.
2
In response to Trump's announcement about removing some U.S. troops from the region, we find
an op-ed in The New York Times by Admiral William McRaven where he states that Trump
"should be out of office sooner than later. It's time for a new person in the Oval Office,
Republican, Democrat or Independent. The fate of the nation depends on it." The unmistakeable
whiff of support for a soft coup is chilling. If Trump can't be contained, he must be deposed
one way or another.
And this is all entirely consistent with the fact that the national security state was
totally caught off guard by Trump's victory in 2016. For them, Trump was a loose cannon,
erratic and ultra-confrontational, someone they couldn't control. Their favored candidate was
the ever reliable, Wall Street-friendly, war-mongering Hillary Clinton or even Jeb Bush. Today,
barring a totally chastised Trump, the favorites include a fading Biden, Pence, a reprise of
Clinton or someone in her mold but without the baggage.
For Trump's establishment enemies, another closely related failing is his habit of blurting
out inconvenient truths. I'm not the first person to say that Trump is the most honest
president in my lifetime. Yes, he lies most of the time but as left analyst Paul Street puts
it, "Trump is too clumsily and childishly brazen in laying bare the moral nothingness and
selfishness of the real material-historical bourgeois society that lives beneath the veils of
'Western civilization' and 'American democracy.'"
3
All his predecessors took pains or were coached to conceal their imperialist actions behind
declarations of humanitarian interventionism but Trump has pulled the curtains back to reveal
the ugly truths about U.S. foreign policy. As such, the carefully calibrated propaganda fed to
the public in endless reiterations over a lifetime is jeopardized whenever Trump utters a
transparent truth. This is intolerable.
Here are a few examples culled from speeches, interviews and press reports:
+ At a May 10, 2017 Oval Office meeting with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislayak, Trump said he was unconcerned about Moscow's interference
in the U.S. election because "We do the same thing in elections in other countries." [White
House officials were so alarmed they tried to limit access to the transcript].
+ When asked about whether Putin is a killer, Trump sarcastically asked whether "our
country was so innocent?" and added, "Our country does plenty of killing."
+ His reaction to Saudi Arabia's murder of Khashoggi was that "they really messed up."
[Translation: He/our government didn't care about what happened except that the Saudis
bungled the job. Uttering this inconvenient truth removed the usual fig leaf claim of moral
outrage and checked off another box on the Trump-Must-Go list maintained by the
globalists].
+ "The Kurds are no angels." [This dried up all the crocodile tears being shed by both
Dems and Republicans].
+ On Libya: Asked about a role for the U.S. in Libya, Trump responded "I do not see a
role in Libya. I think the United States has, right now, enough roles. We're in a role
everywhere." He did say "I would just go in and take the oil," and repeated this intention
regarding Syria. [Once again Trump sabotaged any pretense of righteous motives behind
Washington's foreign policy in the Middle East. To wit: It's always been about blood for
oil].
+ When firing John Bolton, his former national security advisor, Trump remarked "He made
some very big mistakes. When he talked about the Libya model for Kim Jong Un, that was not a
good statement to make. You just look at what happened with Gaddafi." [Here, Trump's truth
telling undermined the standard U.S. position by saying it makes perfect sense for other
countries to obtain nukes if they wish to avoid being destroyed by us.]
+ "We're in many, many countries. I do know the exact number of countries we have troops
in but I'm embarrassed to say it because it's so foolish. We're in countries that don't even
like us some people, whether it's – – you call it the military-industrial complex
or beyond that, they'd like me to stay the want me to fight forever That's what they want to
do, fight. A lot of companies want to to fight because they make their weapons based on
fighting, not based on peace. And they take up a lot of people. I want to bring our soldiers
back home."
+ During a private military briefing, Trump stunned officials by scowling, "Seriously,
who gives a shit about Afghanistan?" And he continued, "So far we've in for $7 trillion,
fellas. $7 trillion including Iraq. Worst decision ever "
+ On Ukraine: "The people of Crimea would rather be with Russia than where they
were."
+ On Syria, "Let someone else fight over this long blood stained sand." And more broadly,
he said "The same people that I watched and read -- give me and the United States advice --
were the people I've been watching and reading for many years. They are the ones who got us
into the Middle East mess but never have the vision or courage to get us out. They just
talk."
+ Responding to South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham's criticism: "The people of
South Carolina don't want us to get into another war with Turkey, a NATO member, or with
Syria. Let them fight their own wars."
+ On Middle East wars: "All of those lives lost, the young men and women gravely wounded
-- so many -- the Middle East is less safe, less stable, and less secure than before these
conflicts began."
As noted earlier, the endgame is not in sight. Trump seems without a clear strategy for
moving forward and from all reports he can't depend on his current coterie of White House
advisors to produce one. Further, he may lack the necessary political in-fight skills or
tenacity to see it through. When some of his Republican "allies" savaged his announcement to
withdraw troops from Syria, he backtracked and made some, at least cosmetic concessions.
However, the fact that Trump's position remains popular with his voter base and especially with
veterans of these wars will give pause to Republicans. If some finally join the Democrats in
voting for impeachment over Ukraine-gate they may minimize re-election risks by hiding their
real motives behind pious claims -- as will most Democrats -- about "protecting the
constitution and the rule of law".
Now, lest I be misunderstood, nothing I've written here should be construed as support for
Donald Trump or that I believe he's antiwar. Trump is aberration only in that his brand of
Western imperialism means that the victims remain foreigners while U.S. soldiers remain out of
harm's way. He knows that boots on the ground can quickly descend into bodies in the ground and
unlike his opponents, coffins returning to Dover Air Base are not worth risking his personal
ambitions. This is clearly something to build upon. We don't know if Trump views drones, cyber
warfare and proxies as substitutes but his intra-elite opponents remain extremely dubious. In
any event, that's another dimension to expose and challenge.
Finally, we know the ruling class in a capitalist democracy -- an oxymoron -- expends
enormous time and resources to obtain a faux "consent of the governed" through misinformation
conveyed via massive, lifelong ideological indoctrination. For them, citizen's policing
themselves is more efficient than coercion and precludes raising questions that might
delegitimize the system. Obviously force and fear are hardly unknown -- witness the mass
incarceration and police murder of black citizens -- but one only has to look around to see how
successful this method of control has been.
Nevertheless, as social historian Margaret Jacoby wisely reminds us, "No institution is safe
if people simply stop believing the assumptions that justify its existence."
4 Put another way, the system simply can't accommodate certain "dangerous ideas."
Today, we see promising political fissures developing, especially within the rising
generation, and it's our responsibility to help deepen and widen these openings through
whatever means at our disposal.
Gosh, the Taliban wiped out poppy production in 2000. The Twin Towers were destroyed in 2001.
Bush (son of CIA Bush) invaded Afghanistan to... well, to do what? To defeat the Taliban?
Why? To restore poppy production? To find bin Laden? Didn't really do that. After all he was
in Pakistan. And what has happened to poppy farming since we invaded? Booming. For 17 years.
Those farming families are doing really well under the protection of U.S. troops. Just like
the oil families in Syria that are protected by U.S. troops. Now, Trump seems to be throwing
a spanner in all this. Of course, "We came, we saw, he died [giggle, giggle]" Clinton would
have never committed Trump's crimes. Trump's just a loose cannon.
Angleton, quoting Jesus, said "In my Father's house are many mansions."
I guess we know which mansion Brennan inhabits.
May 20, 2001
The first American narcotics experts to go to Afghanistan under Taliban rule have concluded
that the movement's ban on opium-poppy cultivation appears to have wiped out the world's
largest crop in less than a year, officials said today.
The American findings confirm earlier reports from the United Nations drug control program
that Afghanistan, which supplied about three-quarters of the world's opium and most of the
heroin reaching Europe, had ended poppy planting in one season.
But the eradication of poppies has come at a terrible cost to farming families, [A
TERRIBLE COST TO FARMING FAMILIES, OH, THOSE POOR FARMING FAMILIES]and experts say it will
not be known until the fall planting season begins whether the Taliban can continue to
enforce it.
''It appears that the ban has taken effect,'' said Steven Casteel, assistant administrator
for intelligence at the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington.
The findings came in part from a Pakistan-based agent of the administration who was one of
the two Americans on the team just returned from eight days in the poppy-growing areas of
Afghanistan.
Tue 11 Sep 2001: 9/11
Tue 25 Sep 2001:
In a dramatic and little-noticed reversal of policy, the Taliban have told farmers in
Afghanistan that they are free to start planting poppy seeds again if the Americans decide to
launch a military attack.
Drug enforcement agencies last night confirmed that they expect to see a massive resumption
of opium cultivation inside Afghanistan, previously the world's biggest supplier of heroin,
in the next few weeks.
The Taliban virtually eradicated Afghanistan's opium crop last season after an edict by
Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader.
In July last year he said that growing opium was "un-Islamic" and warned that anyone
caught planting seeds would be severely punished.
Taliban soldiers enforced the ruling two summers ago and made thousands of villagers
across Afghanistan plough up their fields. Earlier this year UN observers agreed that
Afghanistan's opium crop had been completely wiped out.
"... Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus. ..."
Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern
Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria.
After the drawdown of US
troops at Erdogan's insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria,
the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and
at al-Tanf military base.
Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria,
Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which
serves as a lifeline for Damascus.
Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around
al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.
It's worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence
of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel's concerns regarding the expansion of
Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it's worth pointing out
that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war – roughly 400,000
barrels per day, which isn't much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the
Gulf states.
Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of
1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where
there was oil,
the purpose of exercising control over Syria's oil is neither to smuggle oil
out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.
There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in
Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on
the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion
of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State
strongholds in eastern Syria.
Much like the "scorched earth" battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic
State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds
in eastern Syria –
Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and
natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other
main rival in the region, Damascus.
After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need
of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington
hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over
Syria's own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.
Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria's oil wealth, it bears mentioning
that "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep
state.
President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment.
Regarding Washington's interest in propping up the Gulf's autocrats and fighting their wars in regional
conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister
threatened
that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other
assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the
United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually
passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were
Saudi nationals.
Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment
in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total
would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf's investments in North America and Western Europe.
Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf's oil in the energy-starved
industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data:
Saudi Arabia has the world's
largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million
barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million
barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3
million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788
billion barrels, more than half of world's 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military
bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of
1980, which states: "Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United
States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force."
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry's sales of arms to the Gulf Arab
States,
a report
authored
by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration
had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during
its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump's agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were:
firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to counter Iran's influence
in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package
included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.
Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind,
during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is
not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms
to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive
policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its
attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term
security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.
Similarly, when King Abdullah's successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the
dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not
only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars'
worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab
states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf's petro-sheikhs contribute substantial
investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order,
according to a January 2017
infographic
by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world,
including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.
Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops,
particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second
World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is
already shared between Washington and host countries.
Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe
whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost
for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in
South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.
Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar – pay
two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of
world's proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the
politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
I am always amazed (and amused) at
how much smarter "journalists" are
than POTUS. If ONLY Mr. Trump would
read more and listen to those who
OBVIOUSLY are sooo much smarter!!!!
Maybe then he wouldn't be cowed and
bullied by Erdogan, Xi, Jung-on,
Trudeau (OK so maybe that one was
too far fetched) to name a few.
Please note the sarcasm. Do I really
need to go in to the success after
success Mr. Trump's foreign policy
has enjoyed? Come on Man.
What a load of BOLOCKS...The ONLY, I
mean The Real and True Reason for
American Armored presence is one
thing,,,,,,,Ready for IT ? ? ? To
Steal as much OIL as Possible, AND
convert the Booty into Currency,
Diamonds or some other intrinsically
valuable commodity, Millions of
Dollars at a Time......17 Years of
Shadows and Ghost Trucks and Tankers
Loading and Off-Loading the Black
Gold...this is what its all
about......M-O-N-E-Y....... Say It
With Me.... Mon-nee, Money Money
Mo_on_ne_e_ey, ......
From the sale of US oil in Syria
receive 30 million. dollars per
month. Image losses are immeasurably
greater. The United States put the
United States as a robbery bandit.
This is American democracy. The
longer the troops are in Syria, the
more countries will switch to
settlements in national currencies.
"Our interests", "strategic
interests" is always about money,
just a euphemism so it doesn't
look as greedy as it is. Another
euphemism is "security' ,meaning
war preparations.
...The military power of the USA
put directly in the service of "the
original TM" PIRATE STATE.
U are
the man Norm! But wait... now things
get a little hazy... in the
classic... 'alt0media fake
storyline' fashion!
"President Trump is known to be a
businessman and at least ostensibly
follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the
craft of international diplomacy,
however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and
Washington's national security
establishment."
Awww! Poor "DUmb as Rocks
Donnie" done been fooled agin!
...In the USA... the military men
are stirring at last... having been
made all too aware that their
putative 'boss' has been operating
on behalf of foreign powers ever
since being [s]elected, that the
State Dept of the once Great
Republic has been in active cahoots
with the jihadis ...
and that those who were sent over
there to fight against the
headchoppers discovered that the
only straight shooters in the whole
mess turned out to be the Kurds who
AGENT FRIMpf THREW UNDER THE BUS
ON INSTRUCTIONS FROM JIHADI HQ!
"... Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other main rival in the region, Damascus. ..."
Before the evacuation of 1,000 American troops from northern
Syria to western Iraq, the Pentagon had 2,000 US forces in Syria.
After the drawdown of US
troops at Erdogan's insistence in order for Ankara to mount a ground offensive in northern Syria,
the US has still deployed 1,000 troops, mainly in oil-rich eastern Deir al-Zor province and
at al-Tanf military base.
Al-Tanf military base is strategically located in southeastern Syria on the border between Syria,
Iraq and Jordan, and it straddles on a critically important Damascus-Baghdad highway, which
serves as a lifeline for Damascus.
Washington has illegally occupied 55-kilometer area around
al-Tanf since 2016, and several hundred US Marines have trained several Syrian militant groups there.
It's worth noting that rather than fighting the Islamic State, the purpose of continued presence
of the US forces at al-Tanf military base is to address Israel's concerns regarding the expansion of
Iran's influence in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.
Regarding the oil- and natural gas-rich Deir al-Zor governorate, it's worth pointing out
that Syria used to produce modest quantities of oil for domestic needs before the war – roughly 400,000
barrels per day, which isn't much compared to tens of millions barrels daily oil production in the
Gulf states.
Although Donald Trump crowed in a characteristic blunt manner in a tweet after the withdrawal of
1,000 American troops from northern Syria that Washington had deployed forces in eastern Syria where
there was oil,
the purpose of exercising control over Syria's oil is neither to smuggle oil
out of Syria nor to deny the valuable source of revenue to the Islamic State.
There is no denying the fact that the remnants of the Islamic State militants are still found in
Syria and Iraq but its emirate has been completely dismantled in the region and its leadership is on
the run. So much so that the fugitive caliph of the terrorist organization was killed in the bastion
of a rival jihadist outfit, al-Nusra Front in Idlib, hundreds of kilometers away from the Islamic State
strongholds in eastern Syria.
Much like the "scorched earth" battle strategy of medieval warlords – as in the case of the Islamic
State which early in the year burned crops of local farmers while retreating from its former strongholds
in eastern Syria –
Washington's basic purpose in deploying the US forces in oil and
natural gas fields of Deir al-Zor governorate is to deny the valuable source of income to its other
main rival in the region, Damascus.
After the devastation caused by eight years of proxy war, the Syrian government is in dire need
of tens of billions dollars international assistance to rebuild the country. Not only is Washington
hampering efforts to provide international aid to the hapless country, it is in fact squatting over
Syria's own resources with the help of its only ally in the region, the Kurds.
Although Donald Trump claimed credit for expropriating Syria's oil wealth, it bears mentioning
that "scorched earth" policy is not a business strategy, it is the institutional logic of the deep
state.
President Trump is known to be a businessman and at least ostensibly follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the craft of international diplomacy, however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and Washington's national security establishment.
Regarding Washington's interest in propping up the Gulf's autocrats and fighting their wars in regional
conflicts, it bears mentioning that in April 2016, the Saudi foreign minister
threatened
that the Saudi kingdom would sell up to $750 billion in treasury securities and other
assets if the US Congress passed a bill that would allow Americans to sue the Saudi government in the
United States courts for its role in the September 11, 2001 terror attack – though the bill was eventually
passed, Saudi authorities have not been held accountable; even though 15 out of 19 9/11 hijackers were
Saudi nationals.
Moreover, $750 billion is only the Saudi investment in the United States, if we add its investment
in Western Europe and the investments of UAE, Kuwait and Qatar in the Western economies, the sum total
would amount to trillions of dollars of Gulf's investments in North America and Western Europe.
Furthermore, in order to bring home the significance of the Persian Gulf's oil in the energy-starved
industrialized world, here are a few stats from the OPEC data:
Saudi Arabia has the world's
largest proven crude oil reserves of 265 billion barrels and its daily oil production exceeds 10 million
barrels; Iran and Iraq, each, has 150 billion barrels reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million
barrels per day, each; while UAE and Kuwait, each, has 100 billion barrels reserves and produces 3
million barrels per day, each; thus, all the littoral states of the Persian Gulf, together, hold 788
billion barrels, more than half of world's 1477 billion barrels of proven oil reserves.
No wonder then, 36,000 United States troops have currently been deployed in their numerous military
bases and aircraft carriers in the oil-rich Persian Gulf in accordance with the Carter Doctrine of
1980, which states: "Let our position be absolutely clear: an attempt by any outside force to gain
control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United
States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military
force."
Additionally, regarding the Western defense production industry's sales of arms to the Gulf Arab
States,
a report
authored
by William Hartung of the US-based Center for International Policy found that the Obama administration
had offered Saudi Arabia more than $115 billion in weapons, military equipment and training during
its eight-year tenure.
Similarly, the top items in Trump's agenda for his maiden visit to Saudi Arabia in May 2017 were:
firstly, he threw his weight behind the idea of the Saudi-led "Arab NATO" to counter Iran's influence
in the region; and secondly, he announced an unprecedented arms package for Saudi Arabia. The package
included between $98 billion and $128 billion in arms sales.
Therefore, keeping the economic dependence of the Western countries on the Gulf Arab States in mind,
during the times of global recession when most of manufacturing has been outsourced to China, it is
not surprising that when the late King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia decided to provide training and arms
to the Islamic jihadists in the border regions of Turkey and Jordan against the government of Bashar
al-Assad in Syria, the Obama administration was left with no other choice but to toe the destructive
policy of its regional Middle Eastern allies, despite the sectarian nature of the proxy war and its
attendant consequences of breeding a new generation of Islamic jihadists who would become a long-term
security risk not only to the Middle East but to the Western countries, as well.
Similarly, when King Abdullah's successor King Salman decided, on the whim of the Crown Prince Mohammad
bin Salman, to invade Yemen in March 2015, once again the Obama administration had to yield to the
dictates of Saudi Arabia and UAE by fully coordinating the Gulf-led military campaign in Yemen not
only by providing intelligence, planning and logistical support but also by selling billions of dollars'
worth of arms and ammunition to the Gulf Arab States during the conflict.
In this reciprocal relationship, the US provides security to the ruling families of the Gulf Arab
states by providing weapons and troops; and in return, the Gulf's petro-sheikhs contribute substantial
investments to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars to the Western economies.
Regarding the Pax Americana which is the reality of the contemporary neocolonial order,
according to a January 2017
infographic
by the New York Times, 210,000 US military personnel were stationed all over the world,
including 79,000 in Europe, 45,000 in Japan, 28,500 in South Korea and 36,000 in the Middle East.
Although Donald Trump keeps complaining that NATO must share the cost of deployment of US troops,
particularly in Europe where 47,000 American troops are stationed in Germany since the end of the Second
World War, 15,000 in Italy and 8,000 in the United Kingdom, fact of the matter is that the cost is
already shared between Washington and host countries.
Roughly, European countries pay one-third of the cost for maintaining US military bases in Europe
whereas Washington chips in the remaining two-third. In the Far Eastern countries, 75% of the cost
for the deployment of American troops is shared by Japan and the remaining 25% by Washington, and in
South Korea, 40% cost is shared by the host country and the US contributes the remaining 60%.
Whereas the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Countries (GCC) – Saudi Arabia, UAE, Kuwait and Qatar – pay
two-third of the cost for maintaining 36,000 US troops in the Persian Gulf where more than half of
world's proven oil reserves are located and Washington contributes the remaining one-third.
* * *
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused on the
politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and petro-imperialism.
I am always amazed (and amused) at
how much smarter "journalists" are
than POTUS. If ONLY Mr. Trump would
read more and listen to those who
OBVIOUSLY are sooo much smarter!!!!
Maybe then he wouldn't be cowed and
bullied by Erdogan, Xi, Jung-on,
Trudeau (OK so maybe that one was
too far fetched) to name a few.
Please note the sarcasm. Do I really
need to go in to the success after
success Mr. Trump's foreign policy
has enjoyed? Come on Man.
What a load of BOLOCKS...The ONLY, I
mean The Real and True Reason for
American Armored presence is one
thing,,,,,,,Ready for IT ? ? ? To
Steal as much OIL as Possible, AND
convert the Booty into Currency,
Diamonds or some other intrinsically
valuable commodity, Millions of
Dollars at a Time......17 Years of
Shadows and Ghost Trucks and Tankers
Loading and Off-Loading the Black
Gold...this is what its all
about......M-O-N-E-Y....... Say It
With Me.... Mon-nee, Money Money
Mo_on_ne_e_ey, ......
From the sale of US oil in Syria
receive 30 million. dollars per
month. Image losses are immeasurably
greater. The United States put the
United States as a robbery bandit.
This is American democracy. The
longer the troops are in Syria, the
more countries will switch to
settlements in national currencies.
"Our interests", "strategic
interests" is always about money,
just a euphemism so it doesn't
look as greedy as it is. Another
euphemism is "security' ,meaning
war preparations.
...The military power of the USA
put directly in the service of "the
original TM" PIRATE STATE.
U are
the man Norm! But wait... now things
get a little hazy... in the
classic... 'alt0media fake
storyline' fashion!
"President Trump is known to be a
businessman and at least ostensibly
follows a non-interventionist
ideology; being a novice in the
craft of international diplomacy,
however, he has time and again been
misled by the Pentagon and
Washington's national security
establishment."
Awww! Poor "DUmb as Rocks
Donnie" done been fooled agin!
...In the USA... the military men
are stirring at last... having been
made all too aware that their
putative 'boss' has been operating
on behalf of foreign powers ever
since being [s]elected, that the
State Dept of the once Great
Republic has been in active cahoots
with the jihadis ...
and that those who were sent over
there to fight against the
headchoppers discovered that the
only straight shooters in the whole
mess turned out to be the Kurds who
AGENT FRIMpf THREW UNDER THE BUS
ON INSTRUCTIONS FROM JIHADI HQ!
http://www.unz.com/mhudson/the-saker-interviews-michael-hudson/
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Introduction: I recently spoke to a
relative of mine who, due to her constant and voluntary exposure to the legacy AngloZionist media, sincerely
believed that the three Baltic states and Poland had undergone some kind of wonderful and quasi-miraculous
economic and cultural renaissance thanks to their resolute break with the putatively horrible Soviet past
and their total submission to the Empire since. Listening to her, I figured that this kind of delusion was
probably common amongst those who still pay attention and even believe the official propaganda. So I asked
Michael Hudson, whom I consider to be the best US economists and who studied the Baltics in great detail, to
reply to a few very basic questions, which he very kindly did in spite of being very pressed on time. Once
again, I want to sincerely thank him for his kind time, support and expertise.
* * *
The Saker:
The US
propaganda often claims that the three Baltic states are a true success, just like Poland is also supposed
to be. Does this notion have a factual basis? Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing
growth, but was that not mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies? Looking specifically at the three
Baltic states, and especially Latvia, these were the "showcase" Soviet republics, with a high standard of
living (at least compared to the other Soviet republics) and a lot of high-tech industries (including
defense contracts). Could you please outline for us what truly happened to these economies following
independence? How did they "reform" their economies going from an ex-Soviet one to the modern "liberal" one?
Michael Hudson:
This is
a trick question, because it all depends on what you mean by "success."
The post-Soviet neoliberalism has been a
great success for kleptocrats at the top. They gave themselves the public domain, from key industries to
prime real estate. But the Balts largely let their Soviet industries collapse, making no effort to salvage
or reorganize them.
Much of the problem, of course, was that all the linkages to Soviet-era
industry were torn apart as the Soviet Union was disbanded. With their supplier and final markets closed
down from Russia to Central Asia, the Baltic economies had to start afresh – with a very right-wing tax
policy and no government help whatsoever, as the government itself had become privatized in the hands of
former officials and grabitizers.
Lithuania was marginally better in having some industrial policy. EU and
NATO accession in 2004, along with easy credit, kicked off property bubbles in the Baltics, largely inflated
by Swedish banks that made a bonanza off these countries that lacked their own banks or public credit
creation. The resulting 2008 crashes were the largest in the world as a percent of GDP, with Latvia
suffering the world's biggest contraction.
The neoliberal western advisors who took
control of these economies – as if this was the only alternative to Soviet bureaucracy – imposed crushing
austerity programs to restore macroeconomic "stability" meaning security of their land and infrastructure
grabs. This was applauded by Europe's bankers, who thought the Balts had discovered a workable recipe
allowing austerity governments to retain power in a seeming democracy. These policies would have collapsed
governments anywhere else, but the ability to emigrate, plus ethnic divisions against Russian speakers,
allowed these governments to survive.
It's a historically specific situation,
but Europe's bankers promote it as a generalized model. George Soros's INET and his associated front
institutions have been leaders in subsidizing this financialization-cum-grabitization. The result has been a
massive exodus of prime working age people from Lithuania and Latvia. (Estonians simply commute to Finland.)
Meanwhile, their economies are buoyed by foreign bank lending, which sends profits back to home countries
and can be reversed at any time.
Politically, the neoliberal revolution also has been a success for U.S.
Cold Warriors, who sent over native Balts from Georgetown and other universities to impose "free market"
doctrine – that is, a market "free" of domestic regulation against theft of the public domain, against
monopolies, against land taxes and other income taxes. The Baltic states, like most of the rest of the
former Soviet Union, became the Wild East.
What was left to the Baltic countries
was land and real estate. Their forests are being cut down to sell wood abroad. I describe all this in my
book
Killing the Host
.
The Saker:
After
independence, the Baltic states had tried to cut as many ties with Russia as possible. This included
building (rather silly looking) fences, to forcing the Russians to develop their ports on the Baltic, to
shutting down large (or selling to foreign interests which then shut them down) and profitable factories
(including a large nuclear plant I believe), etc. What has been the impact of this policy of "economic
de-Sovietization" on the local economies?
Michael Hudson:
Dissolution of the Soviet Union meant
that Baltic countries lost their traditional markets, and had to shift their focus to Western Europe and, to
some extent, Asia.
Latvia and Estonia had been assigned computer and information technology,
and they have found this to be much in demand. When I was in Japan, for instance, CEOs told me that they
were looking to Latvia above all to outsource computer work.
Banking also was a surviving sector.
Gregory Lautchansky, former vice-rector at the University of Riga had been a major player already in the
1980s for moving out Russian oil and KGB money. (His company, Nordex, was sold to Mark Rich.) Many banks
continued to shepherd Russian flight capital via offshore banking centers into the United States, Britain
and other countries. Cyprus of course was another big player in this.
The Saker:
Russians are still considered "non-citizens"
in the Baltic republics; what has been the economic impact of this policy, if any, of anti-Russian
discrimination in the Baltic states?
ORDER IT NOW
Michael Hudson:
Russian-speakers, who do not acquire citizenship (which requires passing local language and history tests),
are blocked from political office and administrative work. While most Russian speakers below retirement age
have now acquired that citizenship, the means by which citizenship must be acquired has caused divisions.
Early on in independence, many Russians
were blocked from government, and they went into business, which was avoided by many native Balts during the
Soviet era because it was not as remunerative as going into government and profiting from corruption. For
instance, real estate was a burden to administer. Russian-speakers, especially Jewish ones, have wisely
focused on real estate.
The largest political party is Harmony
Center, whose members and leadership are mainly Russian-speaking. But the various neoliberal and nationalist
parties have jointed to block its ability to influence law in Parliament.
Since Russian speakers are only able to
"vote with their feet," many have joined in the vast outflow of emigration, either back to Russia or to
other EU countries. Moreover, the poor quality of social benefits has led to few children being born.
The Saker:
I often hear that a huge number of locals
(including non-Russians) have emigrated from the Baltic states. What has caused this and what has been the
impact of this emigration for the Baltic states?
Michael Hudson:
The Baltic states, especially Latvia,
have lost about 30 percent of their population since the 1990s, especially those of working age. In Latvia,
about 10 percent of the loss were Russians who exited shortly after independence. The other 20 percent have
subsequently emigrated.
The European Commission forecasts that Latvia's working-age population
will decline by 1.6% annually for the next 20 years, while the birth rate remains as stagnant as it was in
the late 1980s. The retired population (over age 65) will rise to half a million people by 2030, more than a
quarter of today's population, and perhaps about a third of what remains. This is not a domestic market that
will attract foreign or local investment.
And in any case, the European Union has
viewed the post-Soviet economies simply as markets for their own industrial and agricultural exports, not as
economies to be built up by public subsidy as the European countries themselves, the U.S. and Chinee
economies have done. The European motto is, "Give a man a fish, and he will be fed all day with your surplus
fish and consumer goods – but give him a fishing rod and we will lose a customer."
Readers who are interested might want to
look at the following books and articles. I think the leading work has been done by Jeffrey Sommers and
Charles Woolfson.
The Contradictions of Austerity: The Socio-Economic Costs of the Baltic Model
(London:
Routledge Press, 2014). Editors, J. Sommers & C. Woolfson. Foreword, J. Galbraith. ISBN:
978-0-415-82003-5.
Jeffrey Sommers, "No People, Big Problem': Democracy And Its Discontents In Latvia's National
Elections,"
Social Europe,
October 17, 2018.
Jeffrey Sommers, "Decline of the Demos: Latvia, the Face of New Europe and Austerity's Return," in F.
Jaitner, T. Olteanu and T. Spöri, eds.,
Crises in the Post-Soviet Space: From the dissolution of the
Soviet Union to the conflict in Ukraine
(Routledge Press, 2018) pp. 195-209. ISBN 9780815377245.
Jeffrey Sommers,
"
Austerity as a global prescription and lessons from the neoliberal
Baltic experiment."
Economic & Labour Relations Review.
Keynote article, 25:3 (fall 2014) pp.
1-20. DOI 10.1177/1035304614544091. Co-authored with C. Woolfson and A. Juskaa.
The Saker:
Finally,
what do you believe is the most likely future for these states? Will the succeed in becoming a "tiny
anti-Russia" on Russia's doorstep? The Russians appear to have been very successful in their
import-substitution program, at least when trying to replace the Baltic states: does that mean that the
economic ties between Russia and these states is now gone forever? Is it now too late, or are there still
measures these countries could take to reverse the current trends?
Michael Hudson:
Trump's
trade sanctions against Russia hurt the Baltic countries especially. One of their strong sectors was
agriculture. Lithuania, for instance, was known for its cheese, even in Latvia. The sanctions led Russian
dairy farming to develop their own cheese-making, and agriculture has become one of Russia's strongest
performing sectors.
This is a market that looks like it will
be permanently lost to the Baltic states. In effect, Trump is helping Russia follow precisely the policy
that made American agriculture rich: agricultural isolation has forced domestic replacement for hitherto
foreign food. I expect that this will lead to consumer goods and other products as well.
I am in Tallinn, Estonia right now. Just how good an economy is performing is often hard to determine by
talking to people, because like economists, many people have different perceptions. I was just talking to a
Russian-Estonian who was telling me how much better Lithuanians and Latvians are then Estonians at doing
things and how much cheaper things are there. It is true that things are much cheaper in the other Baltic
countries because Estonia (a tiny country of just over 1 million people) has taken off. Since the 2008
econmic collapse housing prices have shot up and in Tallinn there is building going on all over the city.
But, my acquaintance is wrong about other things. Estonians do things very well and Tallinn is a very nice
city, with beautiful cafes, clean and well kept streets and crime is very low. It is a very good city,
except it is now very expensive, especially considering how much people make here. The weather is not nice,
except for in the summer and there are friendly Estonians but they don't have a reputation for being
particularly friendly, even among themselves. I have not been back to Latvia yet, but when I was in Riga
years ago, it was a gorgeous city, bigger than Tallinn too. I think they do things very well there too. The
Russians I speak to here are often friendly and based on what I have been told, relations between Russians
and Estonians are much better than when I was here in the early 2000's.
No offense is intended to
Russians, but the Baltic countries had large German populations that played a key role in the development of
the cultures and peoples of these countries. There were also many Jews here prior to WW II. By the time WW
II had begun the German populations were much smaller than they had been and at the end of the war the
Jewish populations were much smaller. Jews were targeted in Latvia and Lithuania and many Latvians,
Lithuanians and Estonians were shipped off to far off places in the USSR during the war. I believe the Jews
were largely pro communist and welcomed the Soviet takeover of these countries in 1940, while the Latvian
and Estonian peoples were pro German, thus explaining the hard feelings between Balts and Jews.. They wanted
independence and formed legions to fight alongside the German army during WW II.
These countries were very advanced before WW II, having engineering industries and the Russian Empire's
first auto company was formed in Riga before WW I. While engineering may have been restarted after WW II,
these countries populations were decimated and they never returned to their former heights. Perhaps they
still can.
I'm assuming that these 3 East European countries are being bombarded with the same propaganda as the Ukies
are, so Russian speakers and those intelligent enough to see the game being played will be belittled and
isolated. But the Russian folks living in Russia have a birds eye view of what is going on in the west and
their puppet countries. Russia TV and debate programs, just have to show the delinquencies that are daily
happenings in the States, and Europe, in order to make the Ru people say – No Thanks to that way of life. As
far as the new Russian cheeses that are now in the markets -lol – they make a lightly smoked gouda that is
really good and is about 120-140 roubles a kilo. And, they are making more cheddar that is a white medium
taste as well. No scarcity of good natural food in Russia and No POlice state. Spacibo Unz Rev.
The trade volume between Russia and the Baltic states has actually risen, despite the sanctions. The Baltics
send food products and booze to Russia (and another 150 countries, food exports to Russia actually grew in
2016-2018). As well as chemical products and pharmaceuticals. Meldonium, btw, is made in Latvia and is still
being sent to Russia (as well as 20 other countries), not for athletes, but for regular folks. Work is being
carried out on a new generation Meldonium pill (the biggest market will be Russia).
Growth in the Baltic states has been 3-4% in the last few years. GDP per capita, as well as HDI, is
higher than in Russia. Foreign investment, including from Russia, has been growing (Russia was the second
largest investor in Latvia in 2018). Savings rates are growing, too. After a relative quiet period after
2010, the number of Russian (and other tourists) has grown again.
Estonia's population stopped shrinking in 2016 and is now growing in fact. They've seen immigration from
Finland, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, as well as returning Estonians.
Emigration is a problem, of course, but this is partly because the Baltic states are the only former USSR
republics whose citizens were even given work permits in the West, imagine what would happen if these
permits were given to Russians from the regions.
Neo-liberal policies are of course bad and certain types of investment should be controlled, but to say
that there are no social services in the Baltic states is complete nonsense. Due to generous parental
payments, birthrates have risen significantly since the 1990s – in fact, birthrates in the Baltics are now
slightly higher than the EU average. Life expectancy is also growing. Latvia covers IVF treatments in full.
There are free school lunches.
Yes, it is true that some of the Soviet era factories should've been salvaged but the problem was they
were not competitive globally at that time (and there was no capital to remodel them). The Soviet market was
a closed one. However, some businesses were salvaged. There is local manufacturing (electronics,
pharmaceuticals, etc).
Not everything is ideal, but it is also not the kind of gloom and doom as you paint.
Saker says:
"Initially it did appear that these states were experiencing growth, but was that not
mostly/entirely due to EU/IMF/US subsidies?"
"Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt":
"Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption And there are few
better examples than Ukraine – just don't tell the House impeachment hearings. Counting on foreign aid to
reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure alcoholism .If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would
have become a rule of law paradise long ago . The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid."
@onebornfree
The EU gives every year about 2,500 million euros to the 3 Baltic countries ( 6 million people the three of
them ) , and 9000 million euros to Poland ( 38 million people ) , plus more billions to other eastern
members .
Older members of the EU , specially the UK which is going out , Greece witch was tortured ( again )
economically by Germany , and south Europe in general are not very happy about admitting so many ex-soviets
countries en the EU and subsidizing them .
Recovery and self-sufficiency since Yeltsin show the brilliance of the Russian people
It's not so much brilliance as sheer necessity to survive under sanctions. But some results were better
than anyone expected. Say, food before sanctions used to be so-so in the provinces and downright bad in
Moscow because of abundance of imported crap. Now the food is exclusively domestic, fresh and tasty. Russia
never had traditions of making fancy cheeses. Now, to bypass sanctions, quite a few Italian and French
cheese-makers started production in Russia, so in the last 2-3 years domestically made excellent fancy
cheeses appeared in supermarkets. Arguably, Russian agriculture benefited by sanctions more than any other
sector, but there are success stories virtually in every industry. Sanctions and Ukrainian stupidity served
as a timely wake up call for Russian elites, who earlier wanted to sell oil and natural gas and buy
everything else. Replacing imports after the sanctions were imposed had a significant cost in the short run,
but in the long run it made Russia much stronger, economically and militarily. Speak of unintended
consequences.
My mom is from Lithuania and I've been there several times. We have second cousins our age.
Her father was
a surveyor for the Republic in the 20s and 30s, charged with breaking up the manors and estates and the
state distributing the land to the peasantry. It was near-feudalism. There was very little
industrialization; that which existed were in a few urban centers. One interesting comment from her was that
the "Jews were communists". From what I've read they were the urban working class, but perhaps part of the
socialist/Jewish Bund?
There is no doubt that the Soviet period unleashed considerable industrialization and modernization.
Lithuania had some of the best infrastructure in the USSR. Its traditional culture was really celebrated.
When I first visited, not long after the fall of the USSR, there were enormous, vacant industrial plants.
The collective farms were in the process of being sold off the western European agribusiness firms. One
relative through marriage was from the Ukraine, with a PhD in Physics and had been employed in the military
industries -- she was cleaning houses thereafter.
Any usable industrial enterprises were quickly sold off. The utilities are all foreign owned. Part of EU
mandates are "open" electricity "markets", which resulting in DC interconnections costing hundreds of
millions with the west to import very high priced electricity. The EU has paid for "Via Baltica", a highway
running from Poland to Estonia; it is choked with trucks carrying imports and there are huge distribution
and fulfillment centers along the highway. Such progress, huh?
There had been good public transport in the earlier years of independence, but that has been replaced
with personal automobiles -- usually western European used cars that pollute a lot. Trakai is a commuter town
to Vilnius with a medieval castle (restored in Soviet times). First time I went it was very pleasant. Second
time in 2018 the place was choked with cars and not very nice at all.
The impact of emigration cannot be over-stated. College educated young people leave by the hundreds
of thousands. Those that remain are paid very low wages (e.g., 1000 euros for a veterinarian or dentist),
but pay west European prices for many essentials. Housing is cheaper than the west.
Last time in Kazlu Ruda there were huge NATO exercises in progress and even bigger ones planned for 2020.
German units were billeted at an airbase nearby, rumored to have been a CIA black site. How fitting, as the
Germans with the Lithuanian Riflemens Union exterminated a quarter of a million Jews in a matter of months
(see Jager Report on Wikipedia). There is a Red Army graveyard in the town that has the remains of perhaps
350 soldiers killed in the area driving out the Nazis. I was frankly surprised it was still there.
Lithuania hasn't been independent since the days of the Pagans and Vytautas. It surely isn't independent
today.
Anecdotal -- yes. But based on personal observation.
Foreign Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt
by
Tyler Durden
Sun, 11/03/2019 - 07:00
0
SHARES
Authored by James Bovard at
jimbovard.com
,
Any time a government hands out money, not just foreign aid, it breeds corruption...
And there are few better examples than Ukraine - just don't tell the House impeachment
hearings.
Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev,
Ukraine.Sasha Maksymenko / cc
Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure
alcoholism.
After closed House of Representatives impeachment hearings heard testimony on
President Trump's role in delaying U.S. aid to Ukraine, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer
declared:
"
Numbers
don't lie
. It's even more clear now that President Trump is not the anti-corruption crusader
he claims to be."
Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to
fighting corruption in Ukraine.
But that ignores foreign aid's toxic record and Ukraine's
post-Soviet history.
A
2002 American
Economic Review analysis
concluded that
"increases in [foreign] aid are associated
with contemporaneous increases in corruption,"
and that "corruption is positively
correlated with aid received from the United States."
That was the year President George W. Bush launched a new foreign aid program, the
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA).
Bush declared, "I
think
it makes no sense to give aid
, money, to countries that are corrupt." But the Bush
administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of the world's most
corrupt regimes. By 2004, the State Department had codified what amounted to backtracking: "
The
MCA is an incentive-based supplement to other U.S. aid programs."
The Bush team found excuses
to give MCA aid to some of the world's most corrupt governments as well, including Georgia.
In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that America was "
leading
a global effort to combat corruption
."
Obama's "aides said the United States in the
past has often seemed
to
just throw money at problems
," the
Los Angeles Times
reported. But the reform charade
was exposed the following year when the Obama administration fiercely resisted congressional
efforts to curb wasteful aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that restricting handouts
to nations that fail anti-corruption tests "has
the
potential to affect a staggering number
of needy aid recipients."
The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of American tax dollars into
sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was "one of
the
most
corrupt countries on earth
."
And the deluge of aid the Afghan government received only
worsened the corruption. As John Sopko, the heroic Special Inspector General for Afghan
Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, "
We
need to understand how
US policies and practices unintentionally aided and abetted corruption.
We must recognize the danger of dealing with characters or networks of unsavory repute, tolerating
contracting abuses, accepting shoddy performance and delivering unsustainable projects."
The closed House impeachment hearings last week heard from acting U.S. ambassador to the Ukraine
William B. Taylor Jr., who testified that he "
had
authority over the bulk
of the U.S. effort to support Ukraine against the Russian invasion and
to help it defeat corruption."
The
Washington Post
lauded Taylor as someone who "
spent
much of the 1990s telling
Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical to their
long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law
, in his
role as the head of U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries."
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that
corruption
surged in Ukraine during the late 1990s
and remains at obscene levels
(though recent
years have shown slight improvements). Taylor was ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, when
corruption sharply worsened despite
hundreds
of millions of dollars in U.S. aid
. Ukraine is now ranked as the
120th
least
corrupt
nation in the world
-- lower than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients. What
Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is to the NFL, Taylor appears to be to the anti-corruption
cause.
Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as
distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence.
Rather than encouraging good governance
practices, foreign aid is more likely to produce kleptocracies, or governments of thieves. As a
Brookings Institution analysis observed, "The history of
U.S.
assistance is littered
with tales of corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own
pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects."
And both American
politicians and bureaucrats are want to continue the aid gravy train, regardless of how foreign
regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.
If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would have become a rule of law paradise long ago. The
country's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, may be sincere in his efforts to root out corruption.
But it is an insult to both him and his nation to pretend that Ukraine cannot clean up its act
without help from Donald Trump.
The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end
foreign aid.
"... The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or supply documents to them. ..."
"... Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian Oceans. ..."
"... There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one of his top aides. ..."
"... General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat." ..."
"... Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on the Bidens. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in Syria. ..."
"... Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in Washington. ..."
By a near party-line vote of 232-196, the US House of Representatives voted Thursday for a
resolution laying out the procedures for the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump
that was begun September 24. The resolution sets the stage for the holding of public, televised
hearings and the likely drawing up of articles of impeachment in the course of the next
month.
Only two Democrats out of 233 in the House voted against the resolution, Jeff Van Drew of
New Jersey and Colin Peterson of Minnesota. Only one member elected as a Republican, Justin
Amash of Michigan, voted for the resolution. He left the Republican Party in July because of
his support for impeachment, and he now sits as an independent.
The sharp divisions over the resolution were reflected in the hour-long debate, in which
Republican defenders of Trump denounced the impeachment inquiry with hysterical anticommunist
rhetoric, calling it "Soviet-style" and a "show trial." Democrats wrapped themselves in the
American flag -- or displayed it on a large placard as they spoke, in the case of Speaker Nancy
Pelosi -- and denounced Trump for endangering US "national security."
The procedure laid down in the eight-page resolution, drafted Wednesday by the House Rules
Committee, gives an outsized role to the House Intelligence Committee, which is to begin public
hearings sometime in November at which many of the witnesses who have testified behind closed
doors will be asked to do so again in front of television cameras.
The Intelligence Committee, along with four other committees conducting investigations into
various aspects of President Trump's personal, business and official conduct, will report its
findings to the Judiciary Committee, which would actually draw up any articles of impeachment,
vote on them, and send them to the full House for final action.
The overall procedures, including provisions for extended questioning of witnesses by
representatives of both the majority and minority parties, conform generally to similar
measures adopted during the impeachment hearings against President Richard Nixon in 1974 and
President Bill Clinton in 1998.
The main difference is that the right of the president to have his own attorneys attend
and participate at sessions of the Judiciary Committee is conditional on Trump dropping his
order that executive branch officials refuse to testify before the various House probes or
supply documents to them.
In the event of continued presidential stonewalling of the House committees, the resolution
provides that the chair of the Judiciary Committee "shall have the discretion to impose
appropriate remedies, including by denying specific requests by the president or his counsel
under these procedures to call or question witnesses."
In other words, if Trump continues to block testimony and evidence, his attorneys will not
be allowed to cross-examine those witnesses who do appear despite the full-throated opposition
of the White House. Given that many officials and former officials of the Trump administration
have agreed to testify under subpoena, this could become a significant issue.
The special role of the House Intelligence Committee underscores the reactionary nature of
the Democrats' impeachment drive. Trump is being targeted, not for his real crimes as
president, attacking immigrants, undermining democratic rights, and asserting quasi-dictatorial
powers, but for his foreign policy actions that are opposed by a substantial section of the US
military-intelligence apparatus.
The witnesses testifying before the closed-door sessions of the Intelligence Committee are
not immigrant mothers, cruelly and in some cases permanently separated from their children, or
the victims of Trump-inspired fascist gunmen like the El Paso mass shooter. Instead, they are
an array of State Department and military officials at odds with Trump's efforts to browbeat
the government of Ukraine into supplying him with political dirt against former vice president
Joe Biden, viewed by Trump as a likely opponent in the 2020 election.
Particularly significant in that context is the announcement that the Intelligence Committee
has set a November 7 date for the testimony of John Bolton, Trump's former national security
advisor. It is not clear whether Bolton will testify, but the potential alignment of the
Democrats and one of the most notorious war criminals in the American government is a clear
demonstration of the reactionary motives of the Democrats, who are acting as front men for
rabid warmongers in the national-security state.
Already, on Thursday, the Intelligence Committee took hours of testimony from Bolton's
top deputy for Russia and Eastern Europe, Timothy Morrison. Morrison was brought on the
National Security Council by Bolton with main responsibility for White House policy on weapons
of mass destruction. He spearheaded the drive by the Trump administration to withdraw from the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty, which both he and Bolton vehemently opposed, in order
to give the US military the green light to develop nuclear missiles that could target China
from US bases like Guam, other US-controlled islands, and ships in the Pacific and Indian
Oceans.
Morrison is the highest-ranking Trump aide to provide evidence to the Intelligence
Committee, and he announced his impending departure from the White House on Wednesday night,
hours before he was sworn in as a witness. According to leaks to the press from the closed-door
hearing, Morrison largely confirmed the testimony of other witnesses, particularly Lt. Col.
Alexander Vindman, that there was a direct quid pro quo involved in US policy towards Ukraine:
Trump demanded a public investigation into the Democratic Party and the Bidens, in return for
military aid and a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to the White House.
There are other indications that Bolton is playing a key role behind the scenes in the
gathering storm over impeachment. Two Democratic senators have sent a letter to US Trade
Representative Robert Lighthizer seeking details on the Trump administration's decision not to
restore Ukrainian access to the "generalized system of preferences" (GSP), a program that
benefits developing countries. The letter follows a Washington Post report October 24 that
Bolton had warned Lighthizer not to seek restoration of benefits to Ukraine because Trump would
not approve it, as part of his effort to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate the
Bidens. Given the content of the article, the most likely source for the leak is Bolton or one
of his top aides.
There were further indications of support for the impeachment drive -- or at least for the
national-security officials who have come forward to testify against Trump -- from the top
levels of the military and diplomatic establishment. General Joseph F. Dunford, who retired
only a month ago as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, issued a statement to CNN Wednesday
defending Colonel Vindman against attacks from Fox News and other ultra-right media, calling
him "a professional, competent, patriotic, and loyal officer" who "has made an extraordinary
contribution to the security of our nation in both peacetime and combat."
And in testimony Wednesday before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which is expected
to confirm his nomination to be US Ambassador to Russia, Deputy Secretary of State John
Sullivan defended the former ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, and agreed that she was
the victim of a smear campaign by Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, who helped engineer
her recall from her post in Kiev because she was an obstacle to the effort to dig up dirt on
the Bidens.
Asked whether it was "ever appropriate for the president to use his office to solicit
investigations into his domestic political opponents," Sullivan replied, "I don't think that
would be in accord with our values." Given Trump's frequent declarations that his telephone
conversation with Zelensky, in which he made just such a request, was "perfect," Sullivan's
statement is extraordinary. It suggests an unprecedented degree of open revolt against Trump
within the national-security establishment.
The real motives of the impeachment drive were spelled out with particular frenzy in a
column by neoconservative Max Boot, who, like Bolton, has been an all-out supporter of US
military aggression in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and throughout the world. Writing in the
Washington Post , under the headline, "More Trump gifts to Russia," he declares,
"Trump is bringing the United States to its knees and making Russia great again."
Boot focuses on two decisions that have most provoked the CIA-Pentagon-State Department
axis of evil: holding up aid to Ukraine, thus undermining military operations against
pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, and Trump's partial pullout of US forces in
Syria.
He writes: "Russian soldiers are entering U.S. bases and taking up the joint patrolling
duties with the Turkish army that U.S. troops had been performing until recently. The fate of
Syria was settled not in Washington but in Sochi -- Putin's favorite Black Sea resort. Trump
has given Russia what it has sought for decades: a leading role in the Middle East. This is the
biggest geopolitical shift in the region since 1972 when Egypt's Anwar Sadat expelled Soviet
advisers and aligned with Washington."
Boot is, of course, a fervent supporter of impeachment, because he sees that as a step
towards reversing course on foreign policy and adopting a more aggressive and militaristic US
role in the Middle East. His ranting only underscores the reality of the political conflict in
Washington.
by John Quiggin on October 13, 2019 On Facebook, my frined
Timothy Scriven pointed to an opinion piece by classics professor Ian Morris headlined
In the long run, wars make us safer and richer It's pushing a book with the clickbaity
title War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to
Robots .". Timothy correctly guessed that I wouldn't like it.
Based on the headline, I was expecting a claim along the lines "wars stimulate technological
progress" which I refuted (to my own satisfaction at any rate) in Economics in Two
Lessons" . But the argument is much stranger than this. The claim is that war, despite its
brutality created big states, like the Roman empire, which then delivered peace and
prosperity.
For the classical world at 100 CE or so, the era on which Morris is an expert, that argument
seemed pretty convincing. As the famous Life of Brian sketch suggests, Roman rule delivered a
lot of benefits to its conquered provinces.
The next 1900 years or so present a bit of a problem, though. There have been countless wars
in that time, and no trend towards bigger states. On the contrary two or three dozen states
(depending on how you count them) now occupy the territory of the former Roman Empire.
You could cut the number down a bit by treating the European Union as a new empire, but then
you have an even bigger problem. The EU was not formed through war, but through a determination
to avoid it. Whatever you think about the EU in other respects, this goal has been
achieved.
Morris avoids the problem by a "no true Scotsman" argument. He admits in passing that the
1000 years of war following the high point of Rome had the effect of breaking down larger,
safer societies into smaller, more dangerous ones, but returns with relief to the era of true
wars, in which big states always win. That story works, roughly, until 1914, when the empires
he admires destroyed themselves, killing millions in the process.
After that, the argument descends into Pinker-style nonsense. While repeating the usual
stats about the decline in violent deaths, Morris mentions in passing that a nuclear war could
cause billions of deaths. He doesn't consider the obvious anthropic fallacy problem – if
such a war had happened, there would not be any op-eds in the Washington Post discussing the
implications for life expectancy.
I haven't read the book, and don't intend to. If someone can't present a 700 word summary of
their argument without looking silly, they shouldn't write opinion pieces. But, for what its
worth, FB friends who have read it agree that it's not very good.
William Meyer 10.13.19 at 12:31 pm (no link)
I have not read the book in question, so I don't know if the author made this point: "Since
violence or implicit violence is how we overcome essentially all collective action problems
as humans, war probably does belong in the human toolkit." Obviously it would be better if we
could find more and better alternatives to war, and remove the obvious glitches in the
alternatives (e.g., representative democracy, single-party states, etc.) we have tried in the
past. So I find it odd as I get old that so little energy/research/academic effort is devoted
by the human race to finding better means of collective decision making. Clearly our current
abilities in this field are completely inadequate. I ponder if this is because we are
incapable of doing better by some inherent flaw in our makeup or if it is because, as in some
many areas of life, the wicked work tirelessly to maintain the systems that enrich and
empower them. I suspect I'll never find out.
Omega Centauri 10.13.19 at 4:33 pm (no link)
There might be a case to be made for empire building conquest advancing human society. I
think it was primarily by forcing the mixing of cultures which otherwise would have been
relatively isolated from each other. Also empires tended to create safe internal trade
routes, the Silk Road was made possible by the Mongol empire.
At least the authors of books about such empires like to state that over a timespan of
centuries that empire creation was a net positive.
Orange Watch 10.13.19 at 7:07 pm (no link)
Tim Worstall and Dipper's suggestion that the EU is borne of war is mostly just a failure to
take Morris's claim on its unsophisticated face and instead assume it contains subtle
complexity that is obviously missing if you read the article itself:
This happened because about 10,000 years ago, the winners of wars began incorporating
the losers into larger societies. The victors found that the only way to make these larger
societies work was by developing stronger governments; and one of the first things these
governments had to do, if they wanted to stay in power, was suppress violence among their
subjects.
For the EU to have been a result of war in the sense that Morris means, it would have to
have been forcibly formed in 1945 by the US/UK/Russia forcibly incorporating Europe into it.
When Morris states "wars make us stronger and richer" he very simply means wars of conquest
are long-term net positives. He doesn't mean something subtle about nations banding together
to forestall further war; he bluntly means conquerors gluing together their conquests into
empires and then liberally applying boot leather to necks.
Mark Brady 10.13.19 at 7:56 pm (no link)
John Quiggin is, of course, well aware of this quotation, but some of you may not.
"Though some of them would disdain to say that there are net benefits in small acts of
destruction, they see almost endless benefits in enormous acts of destruction. They tell us
how much better off economically we all are in war than in peace. They see "miracles of
production" which it requires a war to achieve. And they see a postwar world made certainly
prosperous by an enormous "accumulated" or "backed up" demand. In Europe they joyously count
the houses, the whole cities that have been leveled to the ground and that "will have to be
replaced." In America they count the houses that could not be built during the war, the nylon
stockings that could not be supplied, the worn-out automobiles and tires, the obsolescent
radios and refrigerators. They bring together formidable totals.
"It is merely our old friend, the broken-window fallacy, in new clothing, and grown fat
beyond recognition. This time it is supported by a whole bundle of related fallacies. It
confuses need with demand."
Henry Hazlitt, Economics in One Lesson, Chapter 3, "The Blessings of Destruction."
Alex SL 10.13.19 at 8:37 pm (no link)
On one side, AFAIK the last few centuries of war in Europe have indeed seen a reduction of
the number of states. Yes, the trend was partly reversed since 1914, but never to the degree
of splintering that existed in the middle ages.
On the other side, even the widely accepted cases of supposedly 'beneficial' empires such
as the Romans bringing the Pax Romana and the Mongols allowing far-reaching trade and travel
need to be seen against the devastation they caused to make their victories possible. The
Romans, for example, committed genocide in Gaul and Carthage, and they enslaved millions.
Best case argument in my eyes is that a very successful war is beneficial because it stops
continuous smaller wars, which is still not exactly the same as a general "war is
beneficial". Why not just create institutional arrangements that avoid wars between small
nations in the first place?
fran6 10.13.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Here's another personality who's also unfazed by the evils of war (although, she does wish
more folks were "kind" to each other):
Stephen @11 Say what? Are you suggesting that the Soviet bloc was part of the EU? As both
your comment and Tim Worstall's unwittingly illustrate, the fact that the EU has been
entirely peaceful since its creation (by contrast with non-EU Europe) is not because
Europeans suddenly became pacifists.
Sorry if I have a hard time getting Morris' argument, but: towards the end, be seems to be
saying the world requires a "Globocop" like the US to ensure its prosperity. But how does
that relate to his wider point about the benefits of war? Does Morris believe the hegemon
owes it to itself, and to the rest of the world, to wage permanent war?
Morris sold out. This was evident in his book comparing the progress of China and Europe,
though that book made excellent points in between the fluff and is well worth reading. But he
is well versed enough in Chinese history to be aware of the ultimate example of armies
conquering and bringing peace to a large area, which happens repeatedly in Chinese history.
Actually, Chinese history itself shows that the opposite argument has more support, that
instead of war being valuable because one powerful country will conquer a large area and
bring peace to it, its valuable because competition between states who are worried about
other states getting a jump on them turns out to be valuable to progress. Large continental
empires, including the Roman one as well, tended to stagnate in terms of culture and
technology and become correct.
MFB 10.15.19 at 7:18 am (no link)
Well, the opinion-piece was published on Jeff Bezos' blog. Oligarchs are naturally in favour
of centralised power and therefore of empires (so long as they are at the apex thereof, which
they usually are). The best way to build an empire is through war.
Of course, the author has to say "despite Hitler, Stalin and Mao", for ideological
reasons. Actually, Hitler built his empire largely through the threat of war rather than
through war itself; once he had actually started the war, he antagonised three more powerful
empires than his own and his empire was then crushed. As for Stalin, he actually did various
double-back-somersaults to avoid getting into wars, and the "empire" which he built in
Eastern Europe as a result of winning a war he didn't want did not sustain itself. And of
course Mao didn't start any wars at all -- his name just had to be thrown in for reactionary
reasons.
It is true that the Spanish, Portuguese, French and British empires were built upon war.
But where are they now? The United States fought a lot of wars against its indigenous people,
but frankly it would still have been a global superpower if it had simply sidestepped most of
them, at least from about 1865 onward.
An interesting question: can it be that a professor of Classics doesn't actually have to
understand the concept of evidence-based argument in any case, because everything has already
been said on the subject and all you have to do is cherry-pick other people's statements?
Because that seems to be how that silly article reads.
And yes, the whole thing reeks of the better angels propaganda. Let's not forget, by the
way, that various members of the EU -- Britain, France, Italy et al -- have launched brutally
murderous wars elsewhere, and the fact that they don't fight among themselves doesn't make
them peaceful or moral entities.
@TheSophist #25: that was mentioned as a joke rather than self-publicity, but if you're
really interested: The Roman Empire: roots of imperialism (Pluto Press, 2020). Obviously
books about the Roman Empire are ten a penny; my main claim for this one, besides its being
less apologetic and/or gung-ho than most, is that I try to integrate the historical reality
with its reception, i.e. how people have subsequently deployed Rome as an example or model.
Maybe the Roman Empire delivered on peace, but prosperity is a bit more complicated. Some
years ago David Hays wrote a book on the history of technology. One of the things he did was
make a back-of-the-envelope estimate of material welfare at different levels of development.
He concluded that, while civilization has always been a good deal for the elite, it's been
rather iffy for peasants and workers. It's only during the Industrial Evolution that the
standard of living at the lower end of society rose above that of hunter-gatherers. So, the
prosperity delivered by the Roman Empire went mostly to the elite, not the peasantry.
Peter Erwin@43 wanted the Nazis to roll right up to the eastern border of Poland, etc. etc.
So did Hitler. And although I'm quite reluctant to read minds, especially dead one, I will
nevertheless guarantee the move into the Baltics was seen as a blow to his plans, even if
accepted for temporary advantage. You must always see who hates Stalin for beating Hitler,
and those rare few who object to his real crimes.
And, Erwin thinks Chinese troops being in Korea with permission is an aggression, while US
troops closing on Chinese borders is not. The US still isn't out of Korea, but China is, but
he can't figure out who the aggressor is.
Really, Peter Erwin really says it all. The maddest ant-Communist propaganda is now
official.
MFB 10.17.19 at 9:02 am (no link)
I don't want to unnecessarily dump on Peter Erwin, because I don't believe in kicking
disadvantaged children, but if he reads the original post he will notice that it was talking
about international wars, not civil wars. I'll admit the invasion of Finland (and of the
Baltic states and Poland) but those were fairly obviously ways of strengthening the USSR's
position in order to discourage a German invasion, and all took place within the boundaries
of the former Russian Empire which Stalin undoubtedly saw as the default position.
As to Mao, he didn't start the Korean war (as Erwin unwillingly admits) and all the other
wars except for the invasion of Vietnam were civil wars since they entailed moving into
Chinese-controlled territory which had broken away during the main civil war. I'll admit that
Vietnam was a problem, but then, since Mao had been dead for some time by then, it's would be
hard for Erwin to blame him except for the fact that Erwin clearly lives on Planet
Bizarro.
@John Quiggin The claim is that war, despite its brutality created big states, like the
Roman empire, which then delivered peace and prosperity
I don't think this is an intellectually generous summary of the arguments, as presented in
the article.
The author himself summarizes it as "war made states, and states made peace", and if it is
indeed true that the author often speaks of "larger, more organized societies" there is a
strong implication that for a society to be "large" in the sense discussed in the article, it
is not really necessary that it be territorially very wide (the most clear cut indication of
that is that the author refers to the European states of the 1600s as "big, settled states"
while they all were geographically tiny at the time). So the point of the author, if
interpreted with intellectual honesty, seems to me to be twofold: 1) that war has been a
crucial factor in the formation of complex, organized states and societies and 2) that these
complex, organized states and societies brought with them so many positive things that the
wars required to form them were worth it.
The second point is pure Pinker. I consider it logically meaningless, myself (it
ultimately relies on the concept that History proceeds like an individual who is choosing a
pair of shoes) and morally repugnant (it is not hard to see who will be pleased to have a
rhetorical tool that can justify any atrocity by the long term gains it will provide humanity
– indeed, it is instructive in that respect to read SS internal papers on when and why
children should be executed with their parents, and how to select people for that task:
contrary to what could be guessed, the manual recommends the soldiers who appear to have a
strong sense of empathy and morality, with the idea that they will those who will most
strongly endorse the "by doing this abominable act, we are sacrificing ourselves on behalf of
future generations" thesis).
The first point, however, appears to me to be broadly correct descriptively. Extracting an
interesting thesis out of it requires much more work than is indicated by the article,
however (I consider Ertman's Birth of the Levianthan an example of that kind of extra
work done successfully).
@John Quiggin Lots of people predicted, along the lines of your post, that with the
external threat of the USSR gone, and the US pulling back, the old warlike Europe would
reassert itself.
I think what we may call the "wide military context thesis" runs rather like this: because
of the experience of WWII and the Cold War, modern industrial states have amassed enormous
military power while at the same time knowing that they can experience total destruction if
they enter into a military conflict with a state of comparable military might. As a
consequence, peace dominates between them. So France is not at war with the United Kingdom or
Germany, certainly in part because they are all (for now) members of the EU but also in part
for the same reason Japan is not at war with South Korea and Russia not at war with
China.
Personally, I think it would be absurd to claim that the EU has played no role in the
pacification of Western Europe in the second half of the twentieth century, but I think it
would be equally absurd to deny the role of other factors that plainly play a major role in
the equally remarkable pacification of other regional areas in the absence of an economical
and political unification process (rise in prosperity, rise in education, aging populations,
increased military power ).
@7, Omega
Not really wanting to get into the "do empires benefit civilization by promoting trade"
argument, but having just read Lost Enlightenment, nothing in that lengthy tome suggests the
Silk Road city states gain any special advantage from the Mongol invasion. In fact, quite the
opposite. After the Mongols (in part for reasons preceeding the conquest), Central Asia never
regained its pre-eminence (it had actually not just been a facilitator of trade but also a
center of manufacture, culture, scientific progress). Maybe the trade routes hobbled along as
trade routes but the civilization that was both built by and facilitated trade did not
rebound. Most empires seem to get that there is wealth to be had from involvement in trade,
they don't always know how to keep the gold goose alive.
LFC 10.20.19 at 9:10 pm (no link)
"War made states and states made peace" is a riff on Charles Tilly's line "war made the state
and the state made war."
Good point about the underestimated Ukrainian death toll in the war against the DPR and
LPR. The number of photos showing Ukrainian destroyed armor suggests larger losses
Add to this was the 7k Ukr troops were surrounded and nearly wiped out near Debaltsevo
following the Illovaisk defeat and the several brigades being trapped and mostly destroyed in
the SE of the DPR and LPR along the Russian border. The MH17 shoot-down seemed timed to
allowed many of these most experienced troops to escape the cauldron.
Meanwhile, damage from Ukrainian shelling and bombing infrastructure of south-eastern
Ukrainian breakaway cities of Donetsk and Luhansk is estimated at $440 million.
Arguably some of the most significant events since the eight-year long war's start have played out in Syria with rapid pace over
just the last month alone, including Turkey's military incursion in the north, the US pullback from the border and into Syria's oil
fields, the Kurdish-led SDF&# deal making with Damascus, and the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. All of this is why a
televised interview with Presiden39;st Bashar Assad was highly anticipated at the end of this week.
Assad's commentary on the latest White House policy to "secure the oil" in Syria, for which US troops have already been redeployed
to some of the largest oil fields in the Deir Ezzor region, was the biggest pressing question. The Syrian president's response was
unexpected and is now driving headlines, given what he said directly about Trump, calling him the "best American president" ever
– because he's the "most transparent."
"When it comes to Trump you may ask me a question and I'll give you an answer which might seem strange. I tell you he's the best
American president," Assad said, according to a
translation provided by NBC.
"Why? Not because his policies are good, but because he is the most transparent president," Assad continued.
"All American presidents commit crimes and end up taking the Nobel Prize and appear as a defender of human rights and the 'unique'
and 'brilliant' American or Western principles. But all they are is a group of criminals who only represent the interests of the
American lobbies of large corporations in weapons, oil and others," he added.
"Trump speaks with the transparency to say 'We want the oil'." Assad's unique approach to an 'enemy' head of state which has just
ordered the seizure of Syrian national resources also comes after in prior years the US president called Assad "our enemy" and an
"animal."
Trump tweeted in April 2018 after
a new chemical attack allegation had surfaced: "If President Obama had crossed his stated Red Line In The Sand, the Syrian disaster
would have ended long ago! Animal Assad would have been history!"
A number of mainstream outlets commenting on Assad's interview falsely presented it as "praise" of Trump or that Assad thinks
"highly" of him; however,
it appears the Syrian leader was merely presenting Trump's policy statements from a 'realist' perspective , contrasting them from
the misleading 'humanitarian' motives typical of Washington's rhetoric about itself.
That is, Damascus sees US actions in the Middle East as motivated fundamentally by naked imperial ambition, a constant prior theme
of Assad's speeches , across administrations, whether US leadership dresses it up as 'democracy promotion' or in humanitarian terms
characteristic of liberal interventionism. As Assad described, Trump seems to skip dressing up his rhetoric in moralistic idealism
altogether, content to just unapologetically admit the ugly reality of US foreign policy.
I see Americans keep calling Assad and Putin a ''dictator'' Hey, jackasses, they were ELECTED in elections far less corrupt than what you have in the USSA
Assad is a very eloquent speaker. Witty, sharp and always calm when speaking with decadent press. Of course the MSM understood
what he DID mean, but they cannot help themselves, but parse anything to try hurting Trump.
If true. It means the Vatican (the oldest most important money there is) like Saudi Arabia and the UAE sure do seem to care
about stuff like purchasing power in their "portfolios" and a "store of value"?...
I see lots of EU participants taking their money to Moscow as well with that Arctic bonanza that says "come hither" if you
want your money to be worth something!!!
It's always been about oil. Spreading Freedumb, Dumbocracy and Western values, is PR spiel. The reality is, the West are scammers,
plunderers and outright thieves. Forget the billions Shell Oil, is holding for the Biafran people/region in Nigeria, which it
won't give to either the Bianfran states in the east, nor the Nigerian government, dating back to the secessionist state of Biafra/Nigerian civil war 1967-70. The west are nothing more than gang-bangers, but on the world stage.
Yet the department for trade and industry is scratching its head, wondering why their are so few takers for a post-Brexit trade
deal with the UK, where the honest UK courts have the final say? lol
Too bad it is political suicide for an American president to try to establish communication with Assad. He seems like a pretty
practical guy and who knows, it might be possible to work out a peaceful settlement with him.
economic warfare on the syrian civlian population through illegal confiscation of vital civilian economic assets, and as conducted
in venezeula, is called ________________
Assad is saying where before the UKK was a masked thief, with Trompas and his egotism alias exceptionalism, has not bothered
withthe mask. He is still a murderer and thief.
Now Assad has some idea why Trump is so popular with his base, they love him for not being politically correct, for "telling
it like it is". He's like the wolf looking at the sheep and telling them he's going to eat them and the sheep cheering because
he's not being a wolf in sheep's clothing.
Unfortunately in the case of Trump's sheeple, they don't even have a clue they're going to be eaten, the Trumptards all think
he's going to eat someone else like the "deep state" or the "dumbocrats". Meanwhile he's chewing away at their health care, their
export markets, piling up record deficits, handing the tax gold to the rich and corporations while they get the shaft, taking
away program after program that aided students, the poor, and the elderly, appointing lobbyists to dismantle or corrupt departments
they used to lobby against, and in general destroying the international good will that it's taken decades to build.
"... In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted. ..."
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though,
is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended
up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being
reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture.
Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years
afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development
was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and
ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region.
Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached
in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia
failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from
their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political
division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged
Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists
have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine
cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents
reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia
and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment
of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere,
including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected
Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of
Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly
wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations
into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation
with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long
as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's
pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed
by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic
brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective
of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive
determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace;
now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily
protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with
them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian
Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without
Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However,
adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes
to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in
NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow
blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for
Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S.
has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration
defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing
to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally
backed Minsk accord.
Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia.
European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy
with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned
to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author
of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate
policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what
exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment of
dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.
Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination
and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture
sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal with
the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the Donbass
and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support for the region
would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?
As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the Ukrainian
military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev and Odessa,
what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word "hegemony" to
describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men (which they are)
in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign policy establishment
in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings
in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to
escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history
of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.
And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are
conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.
How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is
false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and
jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist
monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more
adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US
was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be
kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously,
as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.
This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border.
And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.
When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate, no
international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans should
look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops wherever
it fancies.
This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats
protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy for
its own elites benefit is being denied.
This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you, or
that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives for
a while?
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed only
mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The strategy
should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening. It may be slow
to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether they are using
fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will have China as a
greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take decades of building
trust on both sides.
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then spouse,
at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that
it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria
Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.
If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were born,
near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued in 1916
in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.
When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would not
extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and the US
broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.
The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs
of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our own
central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's
list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).
Very interesting but I have a small note. Not that it matters politically how they entered
France, but World War 2 was Blitzkrieg.
"In desperation, Churchill therefore ordered a series of large-scale bombing raids against the German capital of Berlin, doing
considerable damage, and after numerous severe warnings, Hitler finally began to retaliate with similar attacks against British
cities." (RU)
This makes me wonder when this happened and how the bombing of Rotterdam (may 14 1940) by the Nazis fits into the story chronologically.
I have read most of the revisionist literature (regarding the holocaust) on your website and found most of it either beyond my
ken or else rather poorly sourced. There is something though that I know for 100% sure and it mitigates against the revisionists:
starting even before the war and then continuing the German government started to exterminate all Germans they considered not
worthy of further sustenance. That is severly physically or mentally handicapped children and the insane. At least a 100 000 children
and adults were killed. Usually by injection but some also by being gassed. Although it was a government secret as this happened
in Germany and to ethnic Germans the news inadvertedly spread and the practise was (officially but not entirely) abandoned after
the Catholic Archbishop of Münster had publicly protested against it. So if gas was used in Germany to exterminate Germans it
seems rather logical that it would be also used against Jews.
Having said that I do agree that there are things that are rather spurious regarding the Holocaust. Specifically the numbers
don´t seem to add up.
One book in your archive stood out: The Dissolution of Eastern European Jewry by
WALTER N. SANNING: a book revising downward the number of Jews killed in Poland. A meticilously researched piece of scholarship
about the demographics of Eastern European Jewry.
Everything else I find rather doubtful. I have personally talked to several people who have survived the Holocaust and there
is no doubt in my mind that to be a Jew in German dominated Europe amounted to a death sentence. That is not to say that the numbers
haven´t been exaggerated. Just as the numbers of German vistims after the war have been downplayed. Alas, that has been the way
since antiquity: the victor writes what is later regarded as "history" .
Simply magnificent. Simply infuriating.
It's bone chilling to read this. It must be an enormous burden for Mr Unz to possess this knowledge. It feels demoralising to simply be the recipient of it – knowing full well the price of telling the truth, even now, even today.
Typical Unzian goulash. It is good that he exposed Churchill's lunacy & Eisenhower's culpability (although I'm not sure for how
many victims Eisenhower is to blame).
Though, I'm not convinced at all that Japanese soldiers would have surrendered en masse from 41. to 45. The situation with
Soviets is simply not derivable from their previous behavior. As for Hitler- no, he was much more ambitious & ruthless:
Ron Unz seems to write in the following manner: Nazi empire was not 100% guilty for the outbreak of WW 2 (true)- therefore
Nazis were almost blameless (false); Churchill & his cronies have much to be blamed for (true) -therefore, they're almost completely
guilty (false); Jews have magnified numbers of their WW 2 victims & some influential American Jewish figures like Morgenthau are
repulsive & perhaps war criminals (true) – therefore, Jews suck & are to be blamed for many, if not most of Germany's miseries
during 1940s (false).
Readers & followers of this site think, I guess, that Jews are collectively guilty of __ (type in your favorite obsession).
This is the inversion of another lunatic idea: Germans are collectively guilty for WW 2 in Europe.
Of course, both claims are nonsensical. Collective guilt does not exist.
Here's the scoop on ww2. that pos, fdr (he set up Pearl Harbor attack) got us into it even though he knew the vast majority of
Americans were against going to war in Europe. We lost every encounter we had with the German infantry without our overwhelming
air and arty support (Africa, Sicily, Italy, Normandy, Holland, Bulge, Hurtgen Forest, etc. Then we did unspeakable things to
the German people and their leadership all for the jews. There you have it – simple.
WRONG, and it is an insult to the courageous and diligent efforts of people like David Irving, Ernst Zundel, A J P Taylor,
Harry Elmer Barnes, Ron Unz to keep repeating that Bernaysian drivel.
What the victors wrote re the 20th century world wars is not history, it is a continuation of propaganda.
Historian Thomas Fleming (RIP) has argued that at least 50 years must pass before cool, objective history can be written; before
that, recountings of the events are emotion-laden and agenda-driven.
It is intellectually lazy and extremely dangerous to "sum up" by miming the victor's 2 minutes of hate: you do their work for
them.
"Atrocity propaganda is how we won the war. And we're only really beginning with it now! We will continue this atrocity propaganda,
we will escalate it until nobody will accept even a good word from the Germans, until all the sympathy they may still have abroad
will have been destroyed and they themselves will be so confused that they will no longer know what they are doing. Once that
has been achieved, once they begin to run down their own country and their own people, not reluctantly but with eagerness to please
the victors, only then will our victory be complete. It will never be final. Re-education needs careful tending, like an English
lawn. Even one moment of negligence, and the weeds crop up again – those indestructible weeds of historical truth."
-- Sefton Delmer, 1904-1979, former British Chief of Black propaganda, said after the German surrender, in 1945, in a conversation
with the German professor of international law, Dr. Friedrich Grimm
@Bardon Kaldian
Yes, this reversed black-and-white thinking irks me too. I have said before that WWII was not a war of "good guys against bad
guys", even if we reverse the roles. All parties (including the Jews) were guilty in this conflict. All lied and all committed
atrocities.
As for "collective guilt", I think to a certain degree it does exist. Groups of course are led by their leaders, and "collective
crimes" are instigated by their leaders, but still it is the groups that choose or tolerate their leaders, and thus share a responsibility
in their criminal conduct.
@Antares Chronologically,
I am not sure.
Some use Rotterdam and Warsaw as examples of terror bombing being used by the Germans before the British ever but they also leave
out why those cities were bombed. Firstly they were not declared "open cities" as Paris was, secondly Dutch and Polish troops
had occupied their respective cities before any formal cease fire/peace treaty had been formalized. Also in the case of Warsaw
the mayor, or whatever the equivalent, had refused multiple German demands for surrender.
@Brabantian
Czechoslovakia was being torn apart by all its neighbors, Austria, Hungary and Poland. Not just Germany. There was also ethnic
tensions among the Czechs and Slovaks. The prime minister of Czechoslovakia met Hitler in Germany a few days before the countries
complete annexation REQUESTING Germany occupy the entire country before an ethnic civil war or perhaps the Hungarians or Poles
decided they wanted more.
For instance, most Germans did not vote for Hitler. And even if he was elected by 90% margin- what would it mean? He did many
great things to heal German post-WW 1 humiliation & succeeded in spectacular economic recovery. When Europe (and world) descended
into WW 2 – how could an average German, or any group of Germans, do anything to change the course of history?
They were indoctrinated, but even if most of them had not been – no individual nor collective can change the inertia of events.
Things just keep on happening. For instance, Waffen SS were denounced as a "criminal organization" & its members deprived of military
honors (ca. 900,000 men, 500,000 out of them Germans). I call it baloney. You don't have 900,000 "war criminals". This is simply
a nonsense.
I am not saying that collectives do not share peculiar characteristics (for instance, you can't have anything seriously done
with Gypsies), but any political-social-historical movement is too complex to be reduced to moralistic sermonizing.
@Brabantian
Yes, all wars are bankers war. That being said, once the first spark is struck, events rapidly spiral out of control. What I find
with these older and even newer versions of revisionist history is Stalin and Soviet Russia very rarely ever assigned any blame
in the starting of the whole mess which I find absurd. A great example of this is story of Rudolf Hess and how he was betrayed
by everyone.
[Hide MORE]
Was Hess aware at the time of the existence of a Secret Protocol, attached to the Hitler-Stalin "Non-Aggression" Pact of
Aug. 23, 1939 and signed by Nazi Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop and Soviet Foreign Minister Vyascheslav Molotov, which
stated "in event of any war," Russia would be assigned"spheres of influence" in eastern Poland (40% of the country); .the Baltic
states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia; a freehand in Finland; and that portion of Romania abutting Soviet territory. Soviet
actions after Hitler's invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, showed how precisely the Soviets adhered to the Protocol's terms.
On Sept. 17, Russia invaded Poland from the east; on Sept. 18 Russian and German troops shook hands in Poland. Then, Moscow
invaded Finland. Next, it took the Baltic states.
"Stalin was able, in conference with Britain and the United States (when they became his allies against Hitler), to present
these actions as "defensive" against the Nazi threat. But the
Secret Protocol would prove that, to the contrary, Russia had used the deal with Hitler to advance her ancient imperial designs
on Europe."
"Obviously, if Stalin were shown to be guilty of plotting with Hitler-to wage aggressive war, then the question arose: What
were the Soviets doing as judges with the French,
British, and Americans on the Nuremberg tribunal? The tribunal would have to be reconstituted. Would not Molotov and Stalin
have to be tried? They had stood at a map table with Ribbentrop in Moscow, while Ribbentrop consulted with Hitler on the phone
from Germany, and the four of them had redrawn the map of Eastern Europe. Stalin and Molotov could be accused of having conspired
with Hitler to wage war; shouldn't they take their
places in the Nuremberg dock?"
As for Hitler- no, he was much more ambitious & ruthless:
That video is pretty questionable imo, because as far as I know the Generalplan Ost plans of the SS don't exist anymore,
at least not in detail. What does exist, is a memorandum drawn up by Dr Wetzel from Rosenberg's Ostministerium , whose
text can be read here: https://www.ifz-muenchen.de/heftarchiv/1958_3_5_heiber.pdf
The proposals in that document are undoubtedly extremely racist and would have amounted to massive ethnic cleansing programmes,
at least against Poles and Czechs. They don't quite amount to genocide though, in fact the author explicitly states that one can't
physically exterminate Poles like Jews (whose physical destruction is quite openly affirmed in the text), because Germany would
then be generally hated by all neighbouring peoples instead Poles who can't be Germanized should emigrate to Siberia, or possibly
to Brazil. Proposal for Russia is basically to split up the country in various republics and foster regional identities, with
Siberia maybe becoming a pan-European economic zone.
Much attention is devoted to "racially valuable" Slavs who should be sent to the Reich for Germanization (Dr Wetzel is concerned
about foreign workers from Italy and the Balkans who could bring Near Eastern and negroid ancestry to Germany; he'd prefer to
replace them with "Nordic" types from Belarus). Even the view of Russians isn't entirely negative while Wetzel regards most of
them as a "dull primitive mass", he thinks there still are Nordic types in the Russian peasantry and attributes Russia's industrialization
to people of such a background (which makes Russia especially dangerous). So this isn't exactly the same view as of Jews.
Of course even the ethnic cleansing schemes proposed in that document could easily have shaded into genocide (in 1940 even top
Nazis still thought of just sending the Jews away to Madagascar, not killing them all, so there was a precedent for such radicalisation).
And presumably the plans of the SS were more extreme than what Rosenberg's Ostministerium proposed.
Still, in any case a German victory in WW2 would certainly have been pretty bad for many of the peoples of Eastern Europe. As
for revisionism of the kind demonstrated once again on Ron Unz's article, imo it's not worth bothering with, since it's so far
removed from reality.
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to
force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired
in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.
In the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which was
the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during World
War I pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side of the
war.
@Alta And what
would be excuse for bombing Frampol? Because for Wieluń Germans had at least excuse that before war there was cavalry unit stationed
nearby, though indiscriminate bombing still was bad.
Not to mention that Polish witnesses remember that all Red Cross flags soon had to be taken off the hospitals and other objects,
because they became favourite target of Luftwaffe.
@Alta Because
you said so. And, of course, Poles from Zamojszczyzna left their homes voluntarily, and thousands or testimonies about Zamojszczyzna
children being separated from families (and most of them never returned) are all propaganda, while you should believe without
question all German stories.
Japanese soldiers on the Pacific islands had habits. One of those was sometimes setting off a grenade after 'surrendering'.
This lead to a lot fewer surrenders being accepted.
American soldiers on the Pacific islands also had habits. One of those was routinely torturing and murdering Japanese servicemen
who tried to surrender, and mutilating and defiling their corpses.
This lead to a lot fewer Japanese surrendering, and to some of them setting off a grenade after "surrendering".
In case I have to point it out, I'm not saying this to be anti-American. I think that's more or less what you can expect to
happen when you send these scared young men, forcefed for years on propaganda about the Japanese being subhuman monsters, out
to fight them life or death in hellish climates thousands of miles from home. I blame the crooked politicians and the lying media
more than the soldiers. But it's astonishing how, even today, the propaganda narratives about noble Yanks and evil Japs still
persist. Even among people who ought to know better.
If anyone else feels inclined to nod and agree with knee-jerk posts like the one I'm responding to here, please make the effort
to at least read the book about the Pacific War our host Mr. Unz is recommending. (I've read it. It's good, and it's not
just mindless America-bashing like some people will no doubt want to think. Dower looks at how both the Americans and the
Japanese dehumanized the enemy.) It's one more tiny but important step along the difficult road toward the vitally necessary goal
of attaining a more balanced view of our modern history.
@German_reader
I am not saying that everything would go as if planned in some document. Those totalitarian regimes possess their own internal
dynamic which is hard to stop when they're set into motion.
For instance, all atrocities which devoured perhaps 30+ million people (including those who perished in Russian civil war)
were contained, in nuce , in Lenin's works, ideas & positions (I am not talking about good things that came to pass as
the result of his actions). Lenin did not write about extermination of whole classes, forced famine, new & more efficient Inquisition
etc. But they were somehow logical result of his (and not only his) vision of the future society.
Hitler's (mostly) intra-white racism could also have predictable results. His world-view had, basically, two pillars: eastern
expansion to somewhere along Urals- Caucasus axis & getting rid of Jews. Of course Jews get much rap because they suffered, percentage-wise,
more than others (Gypsies excluded), but the real deal would be annihilation of Balto-Slavophone central & eastern European peoples
(Czechs, Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Russians & most Baltic peoples).
He would, I guess, have chosen "racially" desirable children for assimilation & off with others. First, they would have worked
as slaves; then, they would be simultaneously killed & deported (probably similar to Stalin's deportation of Chechens & other
potentially disloyal peoples. Out of 900,000 of them, perhaps 400,000-500,000 died in the process of deportation). If one tries
to annihilate a people- and these are numerous peoples by European standards – you don't have to shoot or gas them. Just relocate
them somewhere in the east of Urals, most of them (you can't keep so many of them within your sphere of authority because they
will rebel, sooner or later). So, I guess tens of millions individuals, from Czechs to Russians, were slated to death from famine,
disease & overwork.
Generalplan Ost is more important as the document of the state of mind than as a master plan with all the details & nuances.
And that state of mind would have resulted in tens of millions of unnatural deaths & Poles, Ukrainians, .. would be now just a
footnote in history, similar to Indians in what is now Manhattan.
They say nothing about exterminating half of Russia; on the contrary, they expected the population to grow through natural
increase under the German occupation once it was no longer oppressed by Communism.
Gee whizz, Hitler had the bright future for Russians somewhere in his heart. Just..he somehow failed to communicate his hidden
sympathies to them.
@Bardon Kaldian
No. He wanted Russia to be a subordinate, essentially colonial dependency for Germany to use as a captive market for its industries,
so he would be able to compete with global American capitalism capitalism in economies of scale. He realized that you need a domestic
market of hundreds of millions of people (like US, Russia, China) to be an economic superpower.
Hitler personally used the figure of India a lot in his "Table Talk" conversations: Just like India was the market for Britain's
textile industries in the 19th century, Russia would be the market for Germany's modern industries in the 20th. (In those, if
you check them, he incidentally also used a lot of hyperbole about wanting the Russian rank and file to be illiterate, though
in the official policy documents he wanted a compulsory elementary school for them. Which, of course, makes infinitely better
economic sense.)
Hitler did want meritocracy within his empire: Russians who were of good character and "good race" were to be given German
work permits and citizenship if they applied for it, just like Dutchmen, poles and anyone else who was Aryan (that is, "White").
So kind of a H1B option, more like India is for America in the 21st century than it was for Britain in the 19th. I guess you could
say he wanted a "bright future" for them. But the big mass of Russians he wanted to stay in Russia, and to be banned from moving
to Germany (which he wanted to remain ethnically German, with only a relatively small leavening of bright foreigners).
However, in order to be good consumers of German exports, the Russians in Russia still had to have their living standards raised
over the squalor of Bolshevism. Hitler thought that was absolutely necessary. So in the end, they would benefit, even if they
remained subordinate and disprivileged compared to the Germans.
Of course, these were long-term plans, spanning over decades. Hitler and his planning staff still anticipated that many Russians
would die in the war (which of course happened in real life, even though they won it), and weren't extremely sad about that. But
it wasn't a specific aim of German policy to cause those deaths. In more modern lingo that wasn't yet used at the time, they were
collateral damage from destroying the Communist superstate and establishing a German economic and political sphere of influence.
Of course, this makes the Nazis sound well, not exactly nice, but far less evil than Stalin was comfortable with, given potential
comparisons to his own record. Which is why he had his propaganda commissars bruit the nonsense that the Nazis wanted to murder
all Russians (and/or all "Slavs" for good measure). And incidentally, such a demonic image also fit very well with how certain
other powerful vested interests, these ones operating in the "Western" world's media, academia and assorted institutions, wanted
to portray a regime they hated for their own reasons. Though Stalin is long gone, these other ones are still going strong, and
still keeping up his good work.
I again recommend that you read the Madajczyk book I referred to, if you read German. It will add considerably to your understanding
of World War II. If you don't read German, there is another good book by one Dr. Rainer Zitelmann that has been translated and
is called "Hitler: The Policies of Seduction" in English. That one is more about Hitler's general ideology and policy, but touches
on these issues also.
History isn't binary. You don't have to think Hitler and the Germans were angels from Heaven, any more than you have to buy
that they were demons from Hell. But in this day and age, with so much material available fairly easily (and often even free on
the Internet), there are few excuses left for believing the recycled Soviet propaganda your video was promoting.
Perry is another neocon in Trump administration and it looks like he pushed Trump under the train.
Notable quotes:
"... In November, Perry touted a shipment of Pennsylvania coal to Ukraine as "just one example of America's readiness and commitment to help diversify Europe's energy markets." ..."
"... Another major priority for Perry is opposing the construction of Nord Stream 2, a proposed gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany that many nations, including the United States, fear will increase the European Union's reliance on Russia for its energy needs. While in Ukraine in May, Perry promised that Trump would back a bill sanctioning companies involved in the project. ..."
Congressional Democrats want to know more about Rick Perry's travels to Ukraine and
conversations with officials there, signaling that the mild-mannered energy secretary won't
escape the intense of heat of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump.
In a memo released Wednesday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah E. Cummings (D-Md.)
said he plans to issue a subpoena for White House documents by the end of the week centered on
Trump's requests to the Ukrainian government to open an investigation into one of his chief
political rivals, former vice president Joe Biden.
Among the records his committee is seeking are any related to Perry's attendance of
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's inauguration on May 20 as well as a White House
meeting Perry attended three days later.
Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
similarly sent a letter to Perry on Tuesday asking him what instructions Trump gave him when
the Cabinet official flew to Ukraine in May, as well as who asked Perry to go there in the
first place. And three House committees on Monday issued a sweeping subpoena to Trump's
personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani, in part seeking documents related to Perry.
The multiple congressional inquiries have put a spotlight on Perry, who has distinguished
himself during his time in the job for avoiding controversy. Though the energy secretary is not
accused of wrongdoing and has not been directly subpoenaed, Perry and his Energy Department
spent Wednesday reassuring congressional Democrats they will cooperate with the impeachment
probe.
"We're going to work with Congress and answer all their questions," Perry told reporters
Wednesday at a departmental event in Chicago on artificial intelligence.
Leading a department he once called to eliminate when running for president in 2012, Perry
has kept his head down and avoided the scandals that embroiled some of Trump's original energy
and environmental policy team members, including former Environmental Protection Agency chief
Scott Pruitt and ex-Interior Department secretary Ryan Zinke, who were both ousted amid ethics
investigations. Perry's easygoing demeanor has let him develop productive relationships with
members of Congress on both sides of the aisle.
"Regardless of subject, the Department is always willing to work with Congress in response
to requests that follow proper procedures," Energy Department spokeswoman Shaylyn Hynes wrote
by email.
An explosive whistleblower complaint from an anonymous U.S. intelligence official alleged
Trump did not want to meet with Zelensky until he saw how the new Ukrainian leader "chose to
act" in office. In May, Perry led the American delegation to Zelensky's inauguration in lieu of
Vice President Pence after Pence canceled his planned trip, according to the complaint.
Two months later, on July 25, Trump repeatedly urged Zelensky in a phone call to investigate
Biden, offering to enlist Attorney General William P. Barr in that effort while dangling the
possibility of a White House meeting, according to a rough transcript of the call the White
House released.
On Wednesday, Perry declined to say to reporters whether he was on the July phone call. He
joked that he was asked to fill in for Pence in Ukraine in May because he is "just such a darn
good Cabinet member."
As energy secretary, Perry has regularly traveled to Eastern Europe to promote the sale of
U.S.-produced natural gas and coal. "I've had the opportunity to go into so many different
countries to represent the United States, our energy opportunities," Perry said Wednesday.
"Ukraine is one of those."
It is not unusual for energy secretaries to have a hand in foreign policy. Ernest Moniz, a
nuclear physicist who served as President Barack Obama's energy secretary, played a central
role in brokering the Iran nuclear deal in 2015.
Energy secretaries "do get involved from time to time on diplomatic issues," said Susan
Tierney, a former assistant secretary for policy at the Energy Department under Obama.
Curbing Eastern and Central European countries' dependence on Russia for electricity and
heating fuel was "very early on a priority" for the Trump administration, according to George
David Banks, a former Trump White House energy policy adviser. Given Perry's happy-go-lucky
charm -- and the fact that former secretary of state Rex Tillerson was recused from dealing
with several energy issues because of his previous job as ExxonMobil's chief executive -- it
made sense for Perry to work on Ukraine, Banks said.
"He's a natural-born diplomat," Banks said.
Ukraine, rich with its own natural gas reserves, does not import gas from the United States,
unlike some Eastern European nations such as Poland and Lithuania. But it does take in and burn
American coal -- about 4.8 million tons of it in 2018, according to the U.S. Energy Information
Administration. Most of that U.S.-to-Ukraine-bound coal is of a special grade often used in
manufacturing steel, a major industry in Ukraine. The United States is only one of a few
coal-exporting countries that has that type of coal.
The country has its own coal reserves, but much of them are located in contested territory
in eastern Ukraine. Facing costly imports from Russia, Ukraine has begun getting coal supplies
from the United States, Australia, Kazakhstan, and others places in recent years, according to
EIA.
In November, Perry touted a shipment of Pennsylvania coal to Ukraine as "just one example of
America's readiness and commitment to help diversify Europe's energy markets."
Another major priority for Perry is opposing the construction of Nord Stream 2, a proposed
gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany that many nations, including the
United States, fear will increase the European Union's reliance on Russia for its energy needs.
While in Ukraine in May, Perry promised that Trump would back a bill sanctioning companies
involved in the project.
O
ct.
27, 1962, is the date on which we humans were spared extinction thanks to Soviet Navy submarine Captain Vasili
Alexandrovich Arkhipov.
Arkhipov insisted on
following the book on using nuclear weapons. He overruled his colleagues on Soviet submarine B-59, who were readying
a 10-kiloton nuclear torpedo to fire at the USS Randolph task force near Cuba without the required authorization from
Moscow.
Communications links with
naval headquarters were down, and Arkhipov's colleagues were convinced WWIII had already begun. After hours of
battering by depth charges from U.S. warships, the captain of B-59, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky, screamed, "We're
going to blast them now! We will die, but we will sink them all -- we will not disgrace our Navy!" But Captain
Arkipov's permission was also required. He countermanded Savitsky and B-59 came to the surface.
Much of this account of
what happened on submarine B-59 is drawn from Daniel Ellsberg's masterful book, "The Doomsday Machine" -- one of the
most gripping and important books I have ever read. Dan explains, inter alia, on pages 216-217 the curious
circumstance whereby the approval of Arkhipov, chief of staff of the submarine brigade at the time, was also
required.
Ellsberg adds that had
Arkhipov been stationed on one of the other submarines (for example, B-4, which was never located by the Americans),
there is every reason to believe that the carrier USS Randolph and several, perhaps all, of its accompanying
destroyers would have been destroyed by a nuclear explosion.
Equally chilling, says Dan:
"The source of this
explosion would have been mysterious to other commanders in the Navy and officials on the ExComm, since no
submarines known to be in the region were believed to carry nuclear warheads. The clear implication on the cause
of the nuclear destruction of this antisubmarine hunter-killer group would have been a medium-range missile from
Cuba whose launch had not been detected. That is the event that President Kennedy had announced on October 22
would lead to a full-scale nuclear attack on the Soviet Union."
'The Most Dangerous
Moment in Human History'
Historian Arthur
Schlesinger Jr., a close adviser to President John F. Kennedy, later described Oct. 27, 1962, as Black Saturday,
calling it "the most dangerous moment in human history." On that same day, the Joint Chiefs of Staff recommended an
all-out invasion of Cuba to destroy the newly emplaced Soviet missile bases there. Kennedy, who insisted that former
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Llewelyn Thompson attend the meetings of the crisis planning group, rejected the advice of
the military and, with the help of his brother Robert, Ambassador Thompson, and other sane minds, was able to work
out a compromise with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev.
As for the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, the president had already concluded that the top military were unhinged Russophobes, and that they deserved
the kind of sobriquet used by Under Secretary of State George Ball applied to them -- a "sewer of deceit." As
Ellsberg writes (in his Prologue, p. 3): "The total death toll as calculated by the Joint Chiefs, from a U.S. first
strike aimed at the Soviet Union, its Warsaw Pact satellites, and China, would be roughly six hundred million dead. A
hundred Holocausts." And yet the fools pressed on, as in trying to cross "The Big Muddy."
Intelligence Not So
Good
The pre-Cuban-missile
crisis performance of the intelligence community, including Pentagon intelligence, turned out to hugely inept. The
U.S. military, for example, was blissfully unaware that the Soviet submarines loitering in the Caribbean were
equipped with nuclear-armed torpedoes. Nor did U.S. intelligence know that the Russians had already mounted nuclear
warheads on some of the missiles installed in Cuba and aimed at the U.S. (The U.S. assumption on Oct. 27 was that the
warheads had not been mounted.)
It was not until 40 years
later, at a Cuban crisis "anniversary" conference in Havana, that former U.S. officials like Defense Secretary Robert
McNamara and National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy learned that some of their key assumptions were dead and
dangerously wrong. (Ellsberg p. 215ff)
Today
the Establishment media has inculcated into American brains that it is a calumny to criticize the "intelligence
community." This is despite the relatively recent example of the concocting of outright fraudulent "intelligence" to
"justify" the attack on Iraq in 2003, followed even more recently, sans evidence, falsely accusing Putin himself of
ordering Russian intelligence to "hack" the computers of the Democratic National Committee. True, the U.S.
intelligence performance on Russia and Cuba in 1962 came close to getting us all killed in 1962, but back then in my
view it was more a case of ineptitude and arrogance than outright dishonesty.
As for Cuba, one of the
most consequential CIA failures was the formal Special National Intelligence Estimate (SNIE) of Sept. 19, 1962, which
advised President Kennedy that Russia would not risk trying to put nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. To a large extent
this judgment was a consequence of one of the cardinal sins of intelligence analysis -- "mirror imaging." That is, we
had warned the Russians strongly against putting missiles in Cuba; they knew the U.S., in those years would not take
that kind of risk; ergo, they would take us at our word and avoid blowing up the world over Cuba. Or so the esteemed
NIE estimators thought.
The Russians, too, were
mirror imaging. Khrushchev and his advisers regarded U.S. nuclear war planners as rational actors acutely aware of
the risks of escalation, who would shy away from ending life immediately for hundreds of millions of human beings.
Their intelligence was not very good on the degree of Russophobia infecting Air Force General Curtis LeMay and others
on the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who were prepared to countenance hundreds of millions of deaths in order "to end the
Soviet threat." (Ellsberg was there; he provides a first-hand account of the craziness in "The Doomsday Machine.")
Where Did the
Grenade Launchers Go?
I reported for active duty
at Infantry Officers School at Fort Benning, Georgia, on Nov. 3, 1962, six days after the incident. Most of us new
lieutenants had heard about a new weapon, the grenade launcher, and were eager to try it out. There were none to be
found. Lots of other weapons normally used for training were also missing.
After we made numerous
inquiries, the brass admitted that virtually all the grenade launchers and much of the other missing arms and
vehicles had been swept up and carried south by a division coming through Georgia a week or so before. All of it was
still down in the Key West area, we were told. Tangible signs as to how ready the JCS and Army brass were to attack
Cuba, were President Kennedy to have acceded to their wishes.
Had that happened, it is
likely that neither you nor I would be reading this. Yet, down at Benning, there were moans and groans complaining
that we let the Commies off too easy.
Ray McGovern works
with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was an
Army infantry/intelligence officer from 1962-64 and later served as Chief of CIA's Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and
morning briefer of the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity
(VIPS).
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"airmen were holding an Air Force nuclear missile crew at gunpoint deep in a top-secret bunker on
Okinawa.
The crew had just been ordered to launch the island's missiles at targets in the Soviet Union and
Asia, just as the Cuban Missile Crisis was reaching a harrowing climax in October 1962. But an Air
Force launch officer was opposing the order.
The officer sent "two men over there with .45's and [they were] told to shoot anybody who tried to
launch until the situation was resolved so those two men kept that whole crew at bay while we made a
decision of what to do," said John Bordne, a nuclear missile mechanic for the Okinawa-based 873rd
Tactical Missile Squadron who was on duty Oct. 28, 1962."
Coleen Rowley
,
October 30, 2019 at 21:44
Arkhipov was not the only Russian to save the world from nuclear Armageddon.
See this article:
vox.com/2018/9/26/17905796/nuclear-war-1983-stanislav-petrov-soviet-union?fbclid=IwAR3XZREPaiekG2ncpUOUGkzppOqs9102z4pityZtIjvi19tWsHD4CLf3h4s
for a few other cases of Russians who kept their cool during mistaken perceptions when the protocol
would have been to launch nuclear war.
Remembering the time and remembering it was like watching children playing chicken. Remember to0 the
country was ingrained with the belief that mankind could be destroyed. Movies like On the Beach and Dr.
Strangelove(that may not have been the title) made America conscious of the real threat of extinction out
there and equally serious that there might be a Doctor Strangelove near the trigger. So as I and others
watched and read we were torn between fear and the sense that it was unreal. The former Lieutenant Ray
McGovern reminds us it was. And yes, a Russian of all things saved our behinds. Back to game seven of the
World Series.
Lone Wolf
,
October 30, 2019 at 09:55
Mr. Ray McGovern, your article is a ray of light, no pun intended, shining brightly on the heart of
darkness we live in. A MAD rule keeps the clock ticking two minutes to midnight, and there is no hope in
sight of moving it backwards. All for what? Greed and possessiveness. What is the winner going to inherit
after a nuclear war? A nuclear winter? How can they market that? Summer in Venus? Retirement on the moon?
Tanning rooms galore? Just FYI, survivors might not have a skin to tan. The empire is reaching sunset,
and it is threatening to take humanity with it into a long nuclear night mare. We can't let them.
Lone Wolf
PS: A new abnormal: It is still two minutes to midnight – See:
thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/
A Tribute to Vasily Arkhipov (Who Saved the World in October of 1962)
(b. 30 January 1926 d. 19 August 1998)
Vice Admiral, Russian Navy
By Dave Evans
Today, as I sense the earth awakening
Under an umbrella of dueling pear trees,
I inhale the sweet esters of spring
Assuaging all my mortal fears.
So much beauty in a simple flower
Cast away those jaded eyes!
To see the art of a higher power
In the tears the racing clouds cry.
The universe has for many eons labored
To produce a blushing plum,
As the mountains were skillfully chiseled
With the rays of the rising sun.
Ours is a blue green gem hanging in the sky
Home to so many great aspirations,
Of generations gone by and by
Rising above our pitiful lamentations.
And what of our tumultuous history
Frozen in amber teardrop,
We are the offspring of a great mystery
Whose outcome we know not.
The world goes round and round
On this the eve of destruction,
As we are oblivion bound
Unknown actors in a tragic production.
Once before in history we were on the brink
Verily, verily, verily!
We have but one man to thank
Vasily, Vasily, Vasily!
Thank you for preserving Sophia's dream
Beyond the Warmongers' guile,
As the angry Generals screamed
With a blood-lust most vile.
Vasily, you have saved all mankind
We owe you a great debt of gratitude,
As we part the mists of time
And pay homage to your infinitude.
Bless the wake of your fair heart
That gave us our world back,
With the rays of a brand new start
Stopping the final attack!
I wish I could thank you to your face
Vasily my dear friend,
For saving the human race
And to our noble destiny defend!
To say the proper words to thank you
They are indeed hard to find,
As we were trapped in annihilation's queue
You saved all mankind!
elmerfudzie
,
October 29, 2019 at 22:49
Ray, thank you for rewriting the old propaganda story that claimed humanity was saved by JFK s diplomatic
negotiations and unique skills during the Cuban missile crisis. Here's a cut n paste reprint of a few
comments I made a few years ago, regarding the heroism of one, Vice Admiral Vasili Arkhipov and it is
paraphrased here. I wish to pause, take a moment to extend the warmest thanks to Soviet Naval officer,
Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov and his extended family. He, who single handed-ly prevented WW III during
the crisis by refusing to launch a nuclear tipped torpedo into one of our U.S. battle cruisers.
Vice
Admiral Arkhipov, if you can hear us from the grave, we award you the real "Nobel Peace Prize" not a
piece of paper, not a figurine, not a check for one million dollars but a peace prize from our hearts,
from those of us who truly understand, what is meant by military leadership and just how lonely,
unrewarding, that place of authority and decision was for you! The world will NEVER be so lucky again!
Coleen Rowley
,
October 30, 2019 at 21:31
A FB friend filled me in on the following "rest of the story" re Arkhipov who was also on the the
Soviet submarine K-19:
(From Wikipedia) "In July 1961, Arkhipov was appointed deputy commander and therefore executive
officer of the new Hotel-class ballistic missile submarine K-19.[3] After a few days of conducting
exercises off the south-east coast of Greenland, the submarine developed an extreme leak in its
reactor coolant system. This leak led to failure of the cooling system. Radio communications were also
affected, and the crew was unable to make contact with Moscow. With no backup systems, Commander
Zateyev ordered the seven members of the engineer crew to come up with a solution to avoid nuclear
meltdown. This required the men to work in high radiation levels for extended periods. They eventually
came up with a secondary coolant system and were able to keep the reactor from a meltdown. Although
they were able to save themselves from a nuclear meltdown, the entire crew, including Arkhipov, were
irradiated. All members of the engineer crew and their divisional officer died within a month due to
the high levels of radiation they were exposed to. Over the course of two years, fifteen more sailors
died from the after-effects."
Tony
,
October 31, 2019 at 09:44
Yes, but Kennedy was also a big factor.
He was able to resist pressure to invade Cuba and so the Luna tactical nuclear missiles in Cuba
were not used. We owe both Kennedy and Arkhipov a great deal.
now wth the dumbest is president of the usa
remember the usa is only on of 35 independent countries
i worry more than i did in from 1950 to 1963
but i realise it is hard to open any pressure cooker under full pressure
also the now totally useless un is degraded to an puppy of the usa
all the hope we had with the un is not lost i hope they wake and rise up
Stan W.
,
October 29, 2019 at 15:33
I remember those days well as I was on a temporary assignment in Washington, D.C. Nerve-wracking period
in history!
Tony
,
October 29, 2019 at 12:09
It is truly frightening to think of what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had been president at the
time.
He bombed Hanoi at around the time that Soviet premier Kosygin was there!
We need to eliminate nuclear
weapons before they eliminate us. That is the very clear message coming from Ellsberg's book.
Incidentally, the Bay of Pigs was deliberately set up by the CIA to fail. It was in order to force JFK
to invade Cuba.
John Drake
,
October 29, 2019 at 18:55
Good point, it is even more frightening to contemplate if Richard Nixon had defeated Kennedy and was
President then.
Let us not forget that Kennedy refused to follow up war in Laos and Cambodia and had ordered the
withdrawal of 1000 US troops(stymied by the Pentagon) from Vietnam; a precursor to complete
withdrawal.
LBJ immediately reversed the order after JFK's death and then sent in combat troops after an election
in which he promised "I'll not send Amurican(sic) boys to do what Asian boys ought to do for
themselves".
jerry olek
,
October 29, 2019 at 10:53
I remember working on National Estimates in the late 1970s when the Pentagon was still pushing the idea
that we could fight and win a nuclear war with the Soviets. Then CIA director, Stansfield Turner strongly
disagreed with the analysis and successfully convinced people in power not to entertain such an idea. I
believe military and civilian leaders, especially after Chernobyl, have come to realize that nuclear war
would be catastrophic for all participants. But, I am concerned that President Trump does not fully
understand the consequences of using nuclear weapons He supposedly asked in a Pentagon briefing why we
had nuclear weapons if we don't use them.
M Le Docteur Ralph
,
October 29, 2019 at 08:40
Words mean everything.
We always call it the Cuban missile crisis, not the Turkish missile crisis and that betrays our
prejudice.
Meaning that it was perfectly okay for the U.S. Air Force to handover nuclear capable Jupiter missiles
that could reach Moscow to the Italian and Turkish air force to be installed at Bari and Izmir, but when
Khrushchev reacted and installed Soviet missiles in Cuba this created the crisis.
The real origins of this crisis lie in the fact that the real enemy of the U.S. Army was never the Red
Army it was always the U.S. Navy and the US Air Force. The U.S. Army developed the Jupiter missile so
that it would possess its own nuclear deterrent but then lost control of it to the U.S. Air Force.
The U.S. Air Force and its preferred contractors were not missile friendly at the time as they wanted to
build as many bombers as possible and had invented the "bomber gap" to enable this. So given the U.S.
Army's Jupiter program was an anathema to the U.S. Air Force as they represented a potential threat to
the bomber budget, the missiles were parked on Italian and Turkish air force bases with the local air
force being responsible for the missiles (to ensure there would be problems with the Army developed
missiles) and the U.S. Air Force controlling the nuclear warheads.
A brilliant plan, sure to win victory in the war of inter-service rivalry but which failed to take into
account the fact that what the Soviet leadership saw were missiles that could reach Moscow being placed
into the hands of the Italians who had participated in Operation Barbarossa and their traditional enemies
the Turks with whom Russia had fought an endless series of wars and who had so recently facilitated the
Nazi invasion of the USSR by allowing access through the Dardanelles.
In April 1959, the Secretary of the Air Force issued instructions to deploy two Jupiter squadrons to
Italy to be operated by Italian Air Force crews with USAF personnel controlling the arming of the nuclear
warheads. In October 1959, a government-to-government agreement was signed with Turkey and resulted in a
third Jupiter squadron being deployed in and around ?zmir, Turkey. In October 1962 a first flight of
three Jupiter missiles was handed over to control of the Turkish Air Force again with USAF personnel
supposedly controlling the arming of the nuclear warheads.
How are the Soviets to know that the USAF personnel were really in control and an Italian or Turkish
equivalent of General Ripper did not have access to the keys? You cannot overfly with a U2 to find that
out.
Real equivalence in the so-called Cuban missile crisis would be if the Soviet Union had installed
medium-range missiles that could hit Los Angeles, Chicago and New York at a base in Sinaloa Mexico, then
handed over the keys to the missiles to the Mexicans while insisting that everything was hunky-dory
because a Soviet officer with known drug problems had the keys to the nuclear warhead.
Todd Pierce
,
October 29, 2019 at 08:24
Great article Ray! And absolutely necessary for the American people, meaning all of us in this
hemisphere, to know how close millions of us came to being incinerated by the criminality of the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff and their allies in government who saw the Cuban Crisis as an "opportunity" to launch our
own "preemptive" nuclear attack on the USSR, and the JCS willingness to accept a reciprocal attack in
retaliation which would predictably kill at least 20 million people in this hemisphere, as a "fair
exchange" for the hundreds of millions of human beings the US nuclear attack would incinerate in the
USSR. That's how "Mad" the US military was then, and is today, if one reads current doctrine. William R.
Polk was there in the White House as McGeorge Bundy's advisor, and has written of this and told me
details in a lengthy oral history. He tells of how angry at Kennedy the JCS were, so much that he feared
a military coup, as did Kennedy, as explained in this video:
`JFK wanted movie "Seven Days in May" made' [youtube.com/watch?v=fRiZtqVPJ9U]
But Americans have this placid confidence, similar to the "What, me worry" attitude of the Holstein
cows I once dealt with in my youth, even as we would be preparing them for a ride to the stockyards, that
the threat or possibility of nuclear war/accident is a thing of the past, even while we, the US, under
three administrations now, has been hard at work to increase the possibility of some sort of nuclear
conflagration in our lifetimes.
Noah Way
,
October 28, 2019 at 20:09
The Soviets also had atomic artillery which could have been used to repel a US invasion, which would also
have started WW3. The bullet was dodged twice – first by JFK NOT invading, then by Arkhipov by not
allowing the launch of a nuclear torpedo.
As Ray has said, now there are no adults in the room.
SteveK9
,
October 28, 2019 at 17:46
Our military is no less crazy today. Subtext of Putin's March 1, 2018 address on new strategic nuclear
weapons 'nuclear war is unthinkable, so kindly stop thinking about it'.
geeyp
,
October 28, 2019 at 16:27
Those moans and groans weren't just happening in Georgia, Ray.
robert e williamson jr
,
October 28, 2019 at 16:02
Hats off again to Mr. McGovern for calling balls and strikes with uncanny precision .
I'm sure of that moaning and groaning at Ft. Benning seeing as how those folks had no clue to what had
really happened and would have moaned and groaned even had they known. After all Ray it was OCS.
Ray I'm recommending that everyone listen to the interview of Edward Snowden by Joe Rogan. In fact get
a hold of Bill Binney, Tom Drake, J. Kurt Wiebe and Ed Loomis and let them know about it. Some
fascinating stuff for me and it could be a major eye opener for those naive individuals who believe cell
phones in their current configuration are great tools. I'm betting 90% of those who would watch this
would want that, "I own my data not ( the cell phone company name goes here), "button" Snowden talked
about.
I'm I wrong here or can everyone who agrees that the "Orange Apocalypse" could shoot someone on 5th
Avenue and be above prosecution be tried on conspiring to give the " fake potus" dictatorial powers and
removed from office?
Thanks again Ray for your great work
Tennegon
,
October 29, 2019 at 17:50
As for Mr. Snowden, I happened to watch the video, 'Citizenfour', last night on Roku. If you're not
aware of it, it's certainly worth trying to view: citizenfourfilm.com
incontinent reader
,
October 28, 2019 at 14:34
Ray- Great article. I hope those in the Administration and Congress read it- and read Ellsberg's book.
Drew Hunkins
,
October 28, 2019 at 14:05
Now the lines of communication between the Kremlin and Washington are all but severed. Any current or
future U.S. president who merely wants to sit down for two minutes and discuss Russian hockey with Lavrov
will be immediately branded a Putin puppet or Moscow stooge. If we experience a Cuban missile crisis type
scenario today we could all be pulverized into dust thanks to Maddow, Clapper, Brennan, Podesta, NPR,
Fred Hiatt and the other establishment Russophobes in our midst.
This madness must stop.
Hank
,
October 28, 2019 at 19:07
I feel that the unspoken consensus among high CIA officials and warmongering US military brass was
that the Bay of Pigs was a win-win for them, regardless of how it played out. The CIA had to know
Castro's immense popularity among the Cuban population, so long impoverished by American corporations
under Batista. To think that a man like Castro would have to face a "Cuban uprising" when a beachhead
was secured by a small contingent of about 1300 anti-Castro mercenaries(trained by the CIA) is
laughable when looking back. JFK was between a rock and a hard place and he NEVER promised any air
support should this small brigade come under attack by Castro small Cuban air force of a few planes!
He even had to deal with a lying Adlai Stevenson at the UN, who stated that the USA was NOT involved
in the Bay of Pigs attack. That ammunition ship off shore that blew up could easily have been a CIA op
expediting what it really wanted- a crushing and embarrassing defeat for the new President(who wasn't
supposed to be President in the first place- sound familiar?) JFK quickly accepted responsibility for
this defeat but was now intent on paying back those in the CIA who had set him up. Much of what we
think we know about wars is just the "smoke" that comes out of the fire, while the fire generally gets
swept under the rug of "history". Kennedy stood up to the Deep State in the early 60's much like Trump
advertised his intention to during his campaign, but it was certainly easier to convince a gullible
public that "Oswald did it" in 1963 than it would be to set someone up for Trump's assassination
nowadays! Hence, we have the CONSTANT media/Deep State CHARACTER assassination of Trump 24/7.
countykerry
,
October 28, 2019 at 19:58
I completely agree with you DH .
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"... Ciaramella was a known Susan Rice protege. He is said to have traveled to Ukraine with Vice President Joe Biden twice. ..."
"... He was a close associate of State Department anti-Trump partisan Victoria Nuland. Ciaramella was involved in the 2016 correspondence about the $1 billion dollar loan guarantee Biden held up until prosecutor Victor Shokin was fired. ..."
If Eric Ciaramella really is the whistleblower, the whole impeachment narrative is
decimated Published 1 day ago on October 30, 2019 By 1 day ago on October 30, 2019 By on
October 30, 2019 By on October 30, 2019 By October 30, 2019 By JD Rucker
The purpose of being a "whistleblower" is to expose wrongdoing perpetrated by people in
power whose actions are being concealed from the public, oversight officials, and/or law
enforcement. It is never to be used for political gain, whether personal or on behalf of
others. It is also not supposed to be used as a ploy against one's political opponents or the
political opponents of those with whom the whistleblower is attached.
In other words, blowing the whistle is not supposed to be weaponized for political purposes,
but if it turns out CIA operative Eric Ciaramella is the Ukraine whistleblower, his report can
only be viewed as an attempted political assassination.
We know this because he has been actively involved in multiple attempts to take down the
President even before he was elected. He is the "Deep State" pawn many on the right have
condemned, a pawn who has reported multiple instances of the President's "wrongdoings" which
invariably turned out to be false.
If anyone can be less credible than Adam Schiff, it's Eric Ciaramella. When other news
outlets pointed out the whistleblower was a Democrat, I shrugged. No big deal. A person's
allegiance to an opposing party does not eliminate credibility in and of itself. But when it
was revealed that he worked for former Vice President Joe Biden, his credibility started
slipping away, even in the eyes of skeptics like me. Now, we're learning he has a long history
of attempts to expose President Trump, including getting fired from the NSC for leaking
information to the press. His attachments to John Brennan, Adam Schiff, Susan Rice, and others
who have worked against the President is the cherry on top of the obliteration of his
credibility.
The more we learn about him, the easier it is to understand why Democrats have pulled back
on having him as part of the impeachment inquiry at all in spite of his whistleblower complaint
being the catalyst for the whole debacle.
The official added that it soon became clear among NSC staff that Ciaramella opposed the
new Republican president's foreign policies. "My recollection of Eric is that he was very
smart and very passionate, particularly about Ukraine and Russia. That was his thing –
Ukraine," he said. "He didn't exactly hide his passion with respect to what he thought was
the right thing to do with Ukraine and Russia, and his views were at odds with the
president's policies." "So I wouldn't be surprised if he was the whistleblower," the official
said. In May 2017, Ciaramella went "outside his chain of command," according to a former NSC
co-worker, to send an email alerting another agency that Trump happened to hold a meeting
with Russian diplomats in the Oval Office the day after firing Comey, who led the
Trump-Russia investigation. The email also noted that Russian President Vladimir Putin had
phoned the president a week earlier.
It's clear Democrats want to distance their inquiry (and themselves) from Ciaramella because
he represents and unambiguous demonstration of the political motivations behind the Obama
administration's initial investigation into Russian collusion, the Mueller investigation, and
now the impeachment inquiry. Moving forward on impeachment based on the word of Ciaramella is
like initiating a study to prove tobacco is healthy because of a report presented by Philip
Morris.
Eric Ciaramella was a CIA analyst and expert on Ukraine and Russia. He was detailed to
the Obama White House NSC as Director of Baltic and Eastern European Affairs including
Ukraine. Ciaramella was a known Susan Rice protege. He is said to have traveled to
Ukraine with Vice President Joe Biden twice.
He was a close associate of State Department anti-Trump partisan Victoria Nuland.
Ciaramella was involved in the 2016 correspondence about the $1 billion dollar loan
guarantee Biden held up until prosecutor Victor Shokin was fired.
Ciaramella was said to be traveling with Biden on that trip.
He was certainly in the loop on all things Ukraine. Including disinformation on Paul
Manafort and Trump passed to Victoria Nuland by Ukrainian sources. Clinton donor Victor
Pinchuk sent Ukrainian Member of Parliament Olga Bielkova to meet with Ciaramella. One day
before Bielkova also met with infamous John McCain aide David Kramer.
Ciaramello is not confirmed as the whistleblower, but all circumstantial evidence points
squarely at him. We may never hear the official word on it because doing so would paint the
Democrats' impeachment narrative as one built like a house of cards.
The sheer fact the alleged whistleblower, Eric Ciaramella, had attempted on multiple
occasions to frame the President is enough to destroy the entire impeachment narrative. This
is the boy who cried wolf every chance he got.
See also
Will John Bolton support impeachment to spite President Trump?
The biggest reason to reject opinions that Ukrainian aid was tied to a Biden
investigation
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"... making a donation ..."
"... to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Consider Israel's 1967 war for the Golan Heights, WWI partitions of Germany, Spanish American war, What am I missing? ..."
"... "Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations." ..."
"... Clearly, the UN is the arbiter of war crimes but they only ever find small, weak offenders guilty. ..."
"... The powerful countries like the US, Britain and Europe are not even investigated for war crimes let alone prosecuted. War crimes are only war crimes if there is someone there to police, prosecute and punish the offenders. There is no such authority, so reference to war crimes is just self gratification and meaningless. The US doesn't even pretend to adhere to international law. ..."
"... You can't be President of the US without engaging in war crimes. They all serve the military industrial complex. At least Trump does some things right instead of 100% for the elite and their NWO. ..."
"... I agree he's stupid, generally. But it seems pretty rational for any US President to expect he (or she) will never face any consequences for the horrific crimes they commit. ..."
"... The trouble is, angry spittle, that the US will get away with this pillage, as it has done in the past. The only difference between this "prez" and the ones before him is his *boasting* openly, publicly about America's war crimes. ..."
"... The issue of "securing oil" makes a lot if sense in this perspective. Syria is not as utterly miserable as planned, but quite miserable indeed, and delaying her access to her own oil will keep it that way. ..."
What the president advocated was one of the most telling statements of his presidency. It
amounted to an admission that he is perfectly willing to commit a war crime.
P resident Donald Trump on Sunday held a highly unusual press
conference to announce the successful special forces operation the night before that
resulted in the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. When Trump read his prepared
statement and did not walk away from the podium, my first thought was, "Oh, boy. How much
classified information is he going to release now?" My own informed opinion is that he released
a lot, talking about who did the raid, how they did it, where they launched from, what other
countries were involved, and the fact that special forces elements remained on-scene for two
hours to collect documentary intelligence. Often, those kinds of details leak out in the days
and weeks after a raid like this. But they never, ever come from the president himself.
Trump also gloated
inappropriately that Baghdadi "ran whimpering, crying, and screaming all the way" before
detonating a suicide vest, killing himself and three of his children. The whimpering, crying,
and screaming part probably wasn't true. After all, the raid was in the middle of the night and
Baghdadi had fled into a tunnel to try to escape the onslaught. It would have been impossible
to know if he was crying down there. Trump added about Baghdadi, "He died like a dog. He died
like a coward. The world is now a much safer place."
>>Please
Donate to Consortium News' Fall Fund Drive<<
Very few people in the Middle East keep dogs as pets. This was an insult just for the sake
of insult. Don't get me wrong -- I'm glad Baghdadi is dead. He was a coldblooded murderer,
child killer, and terrorist, and the world is a better place without him in it. But the insults
were unnecessary.
President Donald Trump announcing the U.S. killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (Twitter)
All of that is irrelevant to the story, though. The most interesting part of the president's
press conference was his segue into a non sequitur
about Iraq. Mid way through the press conference a reporter asked Trump about what "brilliant"
people helped in his decision-making process for the operation. Trump's response was one of the
most telling statements of his presidency. Indeed, it was an admission that he is perfectly
willing to commit a war crime, an impeachable offense, as part of his personal ideology. Here's
the exchange :
Reporter: "You -- you mentioned that you had met some -- gotten to know some brilliant
people along this process who -- who had helped provide information and -- and -- and advice
along the way. Is there anyone in particular or would you like to give anyone credit for
getting to this point today?"
Trump: "Well, I -- I would but if I mention one, I have to mention so many. I spoke to
Senator Richard Burr this morning and as you know, he's very involved with intelligence and
the committee. [Note: Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) is the chairman of the Senate Select
Committee on Intelligence.] And he's a great gentleman. I spoke with Lindsey Graham just a
little while -- in fact, Lindsey Graham is right over here, and he's been very much involved
in this subject and he's -- he's a very strong hawk, but I think Lindsey agrees with what
we're doing now. And again, there are plenty of other countries that can help them patrol. I
don't want to leave 1,000 or 2,000 or 3,000 soldiers on the border. But where Lindsey and I
totally agree is the oil.
"The oil is, you know, so valuable. For many reasons. It fueled ISIS, number one. Number
two, it helps the Kurds, because it's basically been taken away from the Kurds. They were
able to live with that oil. And number three, it can help us, because we should be able to
take some also. And what I intend to do, perhaps, is make a deal with an ExxonMobil or one of
our great companies to go in there and do it properly. Right now it's not big. It's big oil
underground but it's not big oil up top. Much of the machinery has been shot and dead. It's
been through wars. But -- and -- and spread out the wealth. But no, we're protecting the oil,
we're securing the oil. Now that doesn't mean we don't make a deal at some point.
"But I don't want to be -- they're -- they're fighting for 1,000 years, they're fighting
for centuries. I want to bring our soldiers back home, but I do want to secure the oil. If
you read about the history of Donald Trump, I was a civilian. I had absolutely nothing to do
with going into Iraq and I was totally against it. But I always used to say that if they're
going to go in -- nobody cared that much but it got written about -- if they're going to go
in -- I'm sure you've heard the statement because I made it more than any human being alive.
If they're going into Iraq, keep the oil. They never did. They never did. I know Lindsey
Graham had a bill where basically we would have been paid back for all of the billions of
dollars we've spent."
Pillaging
What Donald Trump is advocating here, in his very Donald Trump kind of way, is "pillaging."
He is advocating taking Iraq's oil by force, ostensibly as payment for our "liberation" of that
country. This is clearly and definitively a war
crime .
International law has long protected property against pillage during armed conflict. The
Lieber Code, a military law from the U.S. civil war, said, "All pillage or sacking, even after
taking place by force, are prohibited under penalty of death, or such other severe punishment
as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense." In The Hague Regulations of 1907, two
provisions stipulate clearly that "the pillage of a town or place, even when taken by assault,
is prohibited," and that "pillage is formally forbidden." The Geneva Conventions of 1949 and
the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court have both formally reaffirmed that
pillaging a country of its natural resources is illegal and is considered to be a war crime.
It's as simple as that.
It matters not one whit if Lindsey Graham has a bill to take Iraq's oil. It doesn't matter
if Trump thinks we should take the oil as reimbursement for U.S. aggression against that
country. What matters here is the rule of law, and the law is clear. It's bad enough that the
U.S. military is in Syria illegally. (There are only three ways to send troops to a foreign
country legally: If the troops are invited by the country; if the country attacks the United
States; or with the permission of the United Nations Security Council.) Let's not add more
international crimes to the ones we've already committed.
John Kiriakou is a former CIA counterterrorism officer and a former senior investigator with
the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. John became the sixth whistleblower indicted by the
Obama administration under the Espionage Act -- a law designed to punish spies. He served 23
months in prison as a result of his attempts to oppose the Bush administration's torture
program.
If you enjoyed this original article, please considermaking a donationto Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like
this one.
Vincent Castigliola , October 30, 2019 at 14:03
We have no right undertaking any military action in Syria or taking or deciding how
Syria's oil should be used. I also respect John K; however, I question his characterization
of taking control of Syrian territory or resources as "pillage".
I would distinguish the literal definition and also ask him to cite a single instance in
which the victor in a war didn't take property fro the loser.
Consider Israel's 1967 war for the Golan Heights, WWI partitions of Germany, Spanish American
war,
What am I missing?
You're missing that the law changed over time and that Israel's pillage of Palestine is an
ongoing legal issue.
1949 4th Geneva Convention, Article 33: "Pillage is prohibited."
Article 53:
"Any destruction by the Occupying Power of real or personal property belonging
individually or collectively to private persons, or to the State, or to other public
authorities, or to social or cooperative organizations, is prohibited, except where such
destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military operations."
GMCasey , October 31, 2019 at 11:37
Vincent, I think you missed the pillage of America when the Supreme Court ruled that
corporations are people too.
This has been a "pillage" act from day one The US Congress, never declared a war on
Syria.
GMCasey , October 31, 2019 at 11:57
Vincent, you forgot how America took down the free nation of Hawaii and its queen. Then
there's the Whiskey Rebellion when America was forming that was pretty depressing too as it
let the citizens know that freedom was missing from certain classes. The sadness of America's
continual influence in South America was begun so long ago, and remember, the land on which
Guantanamo is situated does belong to Cuba -- -and then of course, Taft and the Philippines
-- -- – actually, it seems since the beginning of America's time this nation has not
seriously committed to making ,"a more perfect union," for its citizens and the world -- --
–maybe the Climate Crisis will rein us in.
robert e williamson jr , October 30, 2019 at 13:00
RE: my earlier comment!
The US Government has been a thief ever since those who created it started stealing the
North American Continent from the indigenous people who lived here. Never mind the genocide
the white man prosecuted against those people.
We been stealing oil from the middle east ever since the 1950's. Now that the problems
created world wide by the super wealthy elitists, SWETS, greed are coming back to haunt us
has the deep state decided we need to be governed by a dictator or is the dictator the excuse
for the security state to take over the government because a dictator got elected potus?
Vera Gottlieb , October 30, 2019 at 12:56
All one needs to do is study up close a world map, locate all the countries rich in
natural resources and bingo know where the US will meddle next, bring "democracy and human
rights", instigate civil unrest and then intervene. All in a nutshell: stealing.
robert e williamson jr , October 30, 2019 at 12:43
Anyone, the only republicans talking for the last two years, who supports the proposition
that the "Orange Apocalypse " could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and get away with it needs
to be in the dock also. . The one thing the security state, deep state, intelligence
community and congress have all trumpeted, pardon the pun, is the U.S. does not support
dictators. Right.
Er, that is dictators anywhere the U.S. security state, deep state, intelligence community
and congress doesn't want them.
The CIA history does support that last statement BTW.
CIA has stellar record of interfering in elections and overthrowing legitimately elected
rulers the globe over. Successful endeavors CIA calls them I believe.
The CIA went against the conventions of democracy by supporting dictators as soon as the
agency was created. See the Dulles Bros. and the United Fruit Company saga. The U.S. foreign
policy has been schizophrenic ever since.
Rob , October 30, 2019 at 12:36
Hey, maybe the pillaging of natural resources acquired by military conquest can be added
to the list of impeachment charges against Trump. That list could stretch across an ocean, if
the Dems include all of Trump's impeachable offenses. Ukrainegate is possibly the least
serious of all.
Michael McNulty , October 30, 2019 at 11:53
If Al Capone was alive today he wouldn't go into organised crime and bribe officials, he'd
go into Wall Street and own them.
Dale , October 30, 2019 at 10:18
Excellent article, John. I will never forget the oil guys gathering in my Bahrain office
with their maps of Iraq's oil fields. I don't think they have yet made their millions, but I
have no doubt they expect they will.
"International law has long protected property against pillage during armed conflict. The
Lieber Code, a military law from the U.S. civil war, said, "All pillage or sacking, even
after taking place by force, are prohibited under penalty of death, or such other severe
punishment as may seem adequate for the gravity of the offense." "
As if that was anything new. The USA| pilfered tens of thousands of patents after WW2 fom
Germany – from private companies. The confiscation of German foreign accounts, like in
WW1 the removing of machinery and the dismantling of Factories etc. etc. The USA is no
diffrnet in this aspect than what the Nazis did in the areas they occupied. See:
spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-29194050.html
Michael McNulty , October 30, 2019 at 12:04
Regarding patent theft, I read the two places the Nazis headed for when invading a country
were the Central Bank and the Patent Office. It turns out the pulse engine they used on the
V1 Doodlebug was a design stolen from the Patent Office in Paris. The design was granted a
patent around the end of WWI but it had not been in production because nobody had a practical
use for it. Until the Germans did.
Keith , October 30, 2019 at 09:40
When it is said that "we take the oil," what is meant is that our oligarchs are taking the
oil. "We" are not taking the oil, they are. I wonder if, when the time comes that the means
of production are seized in an uprising in this country if those leading such uprising will
be considered war criminals.
Nathan Mulcahy , October 30, 2019 at 08:02
There is nothing surprising or unusual about Trump saying that he is willing to commit war
crimes. His immediate predecessors (Obama, Bush and Clinton) have all committed war crimes
and all are celebrated widely as great statesmen (one of them recently even as a "peace
expert"). It is just that, unlike his predecessors, Trump does not care about the false
facade.
What is stunning is not Trump's bluntness, but the utter disregard for (international) law
by both political "parties" (I'd rather call them two brands of the same Mafia organization),
our so called "media" (I'd rather call them propaganda arms of the said Mafia organization),
but also of the "intellectuals" of the land, and of course the vast, vast majority of its
citizens. (Of course I exclude the readers of this website, and of similar news media from my
condemnation).
john wilson , October 30, 2019 at 07:02
If plundering the oil was America's only war crime we would think that wasn't so bad. The
war crimes committed by the West are so huge that much of them are never reported. Clearly,
the UN is the arbiter of war crimes but they only ever find small, weak offenders guilty.
The
powerful countries like the US, Britain and Europe are not even investigated for war crimes
let alone prosecuted. War crimes are only war crimes if there is someone there to police,
prosecute and punish the offenders. There is no such authority, so reference to war crimes is
just self gratification and meaningless. The US doesn't even pretend to adhere to
international law.
@ "The war crimes committed by the West are so huge that much of them are never
reported."
I disagree. I think generally they are reported but are not identified as the war crimes
that they are. E.g., the wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Sudan,
etc.
Dao Gen , October 30, 2019 at 02:53
It's unlikely that Trump is sending US troops back into Syria for economic or for
long-term reasons. Oil is just a smokescreen. Probably there are several real reasons:
1. Lindsey Graham is chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, so Graham would oversee a
possible Senate trial if the foolish Dems choose to impeach. Right after Trump's recent
pullout, the neocon Graham was furious and said he would support impeachment. Trump needs to
mollify Graham and other neocon Repubs for a while for the sake of his own survival.
2. The DINO lib-neocon Dem leadership, attacked Trump ferociously from the right. And the
Repub leadership in the House all voted with the Dems to censure Trump for his very helpful
pullout. With impeachment likely, Trump can't ignore this situation.
3. The MSM are overwhelmingly neocon about foreign affairs, and they have put out many
stories romanticizing the Kurds, who have actually done a fair amount of ethnic cleansing
against Christians, Sunnis, and various tribal groups, so millions of Americans have been
brainwashed into thinking Trump actually "betrayed" the poor Kurds, whereas it was the
pro-PKK leadership of the Kurds who betrayed ordinary Kurds by not reconciling with Syria
long ago. After all, Trump announced last December that he was soon going to withdraw from
Syria. If the PKK-affiliated leaders had been realistic, there would have been no Turkish
invasion. But the MSM hide this situation, thus putting great pressure on Trump.
4. France and Israel and much of the US security state want to continue to use the Kurds as
tools to balkanize Syria, attack the Syrian government, and block Iran. They are fighting
back hard against Trump.
Ultimately Trump's reasons for staying in Syria are basically kabuki to pacify the neocons
and strengthen his domestic political position. Of course this does not justify his war
crimes. However, US forces are unlikely to stay for a long time in Syria for several reasons,
and when Trump sees a good opening, surely he will try to make another realistic withdrawal
after the impeachment farce has passed. Probably Putin will come up with some kind of
diplomatic solution that will allow the US to save face while withdrawing. The conditions
which will limit US oil banditry in Syria are:
1. After impeachment has passed and after the Syrian government liberates Idlib province, it
will send its military to eastern Syria, and the small US force will be obliged to leave.
Neither Trump nor the Syrians want a war to break out over second-rate oil fields, so
diplomacy will win out.
2. The Kurds normally look down on Arabs and discriminate against them, so there is no way
the Arab tribes now running the Deir Ezzour oil field will allow the Kurds to come in and
take it away from them. Likewise, further to the northeast the Kurds have been pushed out of
several oil fields which they grabbed after Isis forced the Syrian government to leave the
area.
3. Trump's base doesn't at all like this plan to send US troops back into Syria. If Trump
wants to be reelected, he'll be forced to withdraw by late spring of 2020. By then Trump's
base will be more important to him than the DC neocons.
This Great Oil Rustling Expedition is actually the last hurrah for the US in Syria. The US
has definitely lost in Syria, but the neocons are just too stupid, stubborn, narcissistic,
and immature to be able to come out and directly say, "We lost. Let's move on." Instead they
have to grandstand and pretend they are winning until the very last moment. How many more
people will have to die because of the vanity of the neocons and the weakness of Trump? Let
us pray there will not be many.
Dale , October 30, 2019 at 10:15
Can you supply corroboration for your allegations against the Kurds? I went looking and
found an old Telegraph article, which identified a small part of Syria where Kurdish
operations had driven Syrians toward ISIL.
But I also found this:
See: medium.com/@makreyi/have-the-syrian-kurds-committed-ethnic-cleansing-8af3c33abf6c :
"YPG has had its share of faults. Crimes have been committed in regions under their
control. Some members of Syrian Democratic Force (SDF) -- a multi-national force made up of
Kurds, Arabs, Turkmen and other minorities -- have committed violations against civilians.
And those few perpetrators were reprimanded by SDF and YPG. However, by no means have the
Kurds committed ethnic cleansing and forced displacement against any ethnic or religious
group. Despite their faults, the Kurds have considerably done a phenomenon job in protecting
the civilians of all backgrounds."
Trump's no more guilty of war crimes than every President since I've been alive, for 69
years. And even Presidents before then. You can't be President of the US without engaging in
war crimes. They all serve the military industrial complex. At least Trump does some things
right instead of 100% for the elite and their NWO.
dfnslblty , October 30, 2019 at 09:45
¿What?
potus does few things correctly, and economically those things benefit the elite.
Peter , October 29, 2019 at 21:09
Historically, who benefits by emboldening the the fly overs? In show business,
entertainers always starts out by telling their audience how great they are. Essentially,
lodging their tongues up the audience's bum. Trump's got his tongue so far up the fly over's
bums, well, it's just embarrassing really. This is the recipe for popularity. Trump tells
American's just what they want to hear. Exceptionalism on steroids.
angry spittle , October 29, 2019 at 20:46
The stupid idiot announces to the world he is about to commit a war crime. That on top of
his bone headed admissions of several other crimes. The guy is so stupid he probably thinks
Cheerios are donut seeds.
Cambo mambo , October 30, 2019 at 01:14
I agree he's stupid, generally. But it seems pretty rational for any US President to
expect he (or she) will never face any consequences for the horrific crimes they commit.
Are you actually suggesting Trump would ever face justice if he sent ExxonMobil to take
over Syria or Iraqi oil wells, by force? Bush did much, much worse. Obama committed horrible
war crimes. Why would Trump face consequence when they didn't? Believing he would is what's
"stupid", imo.
AnneR , October 30, 2019 at 08:34
The trouble is, angry spittle, that the US will get away with this pillage, as it has done
in the past. The only difference between this "prez" and the ones before him is his
*boasting* openly, publicly about America's war crimes.
Of course, the Strumpet is clueless about such things as the Geneva Convention. Mind you,
even being aware of it doesn't mean that the US president and admin and Pentagon etc will in
fact abide by any of the international laws regarding war. The past 70 years have made that
absolutely clear. And so far as I recall the US has refused to agree to any possibility of
its politicos, military, secret agency folks being tried for war crimes by any international
body. So the whole political, MIC, corporate-capitalist-imperialist set up here feels
completely free to destroy, steal, lay claim to, give away, kill, torture – as it
pleases anywhere it wants, when and how it wants.
The stupidity of Trump may be exaggerated. Keep in mind that he is a businessman who had
his key property bankrupted and survived pretty well. Superficially, bankruptcy is a symptom
of stupidity, but the trick is to make OTHER people to loose money and yet continue in spite
of common wisdom of lost trust etc.
Exhibit one is "insane" endeavor to bring Iran to its knees by unilaterally breaking a
multilateral agreement and imposing sanctions that would be utterly unenforceable because no
serious country would cooperate. Initially that was my thinking, all leaders of major allied
countries were against and promised measures to resist. And "heroically" petitioned to
Washington to be allowed to do so. Washington gave a limited time reprieve and otherwise
refused. So that make them sad, although quickly they focused on other troubles. Trump proved
that Amercan ability to get away with any s t imaginable was greatly underestimated.
Thus Trump's citizenry can rejoice that America proved better than before that it has
unique power to make selected other countries very misreable. Wimps like Obama were dabbling
in that too, but now the lives of Venezuela and Iran are worse than before. Not that allies
and lap dog countries do well, but not as miserable. And leaders from Equador to Lithuania
can be glad that following America is a wise choice, the alternative is worse, even if they
are periodically humiliated.
The issue of "securing oil" makes a lot if sense in this perspective. Syria is not as
utterly miserable as planned, but quite miserable indeed, and delaying her access to her own
oil will keep it that way.
To summarise, "admitting to crimes" is not stupid if you can get away with it. But it is
evil.
JustAMaverick , October 29, 2019 at 20:14
From here on out the rule of law will have very little meaning if any at all
internationally or otherwise. We can't vote our way out and the corporate fascists and the
military industrial machine have assumed virtually total control of everything. They will not
give that power back, nor will they give up one cent of their ill gotten gains without a
fight .a fight they have been preparing for, for almost forty years.
America is truly a Kleptocracy with all the goals and lack of ethics or morals that word
implies. We have let them sow an enormous amount of greed, hate and ignorance while they
lobotomized the citizenry with endless programming and propaganda, and that crop is soon to
be reaped. It will be bad. Really bad Worse, nobody even addresses the real issues let alone
unites to defend themselves.
To my eyes the daylight is almost gone and all I can see in the future is as Orwell put
it: "A boot kicking you in the face forever."
The problem traces back to the conquest of Iraq. The article implicitly assumes the
existence of a sovereign entity named
"Iraq." That is wrong. There is no such entity. There was one up until 2003. Then U.S. imperialism
invaded and destroyed it. Iraq's oil was taken by force right there.
What resulted is an occupation political project in place of the former Iraqi state. Then
the plan went wrong. Iran seized control of the project entity through elections. The first
and second "Iraqi prime ministers" under the conquest represented an Iranian clerical
organization called the Islamic Dawa.
Now, the occupation political entity was granted exclusive control of Iraq's oil revenues
under the terms of the conquest. The U.S. imperialists figured they would remain in control
of the entity, but Iran gained control.
Trump doesn't want to take Iraq's oil away not from Iraq. He wants to take it away from
Iran.
Jimmy Gates , October 29, 2019 at 18:58
Valid call. Include, in the prosecution, all previous executives who are\ were complicit
in these crimes. We all know the Presidents etc, but Congress members should be indicted and
IC members as well.
Nick , October 30, 2019 at 10:25
Don't forget 'journalists'! Bill Kristol and Judith Miller should be in the dock as
well!
lizzie dw , October 29, 2019 at 18:44
I agree totally with this author. Taking Syria's oil is Not A Good Thing. It is blatant
thievery to take something from a sovereign country "because you can", then try to justify it
by some lame statement. What additionally bothers me is that this attitude has been present
in the USA through many administrations. Look at the Ukraine since 2014. Many long time
politicians were involved with getting money from Ukraine – for no reason other than
they were American and in charge. Look at Afghanistan and the poppy fields our soldiers are
guarding for the CIA. Thieves, all of them. Look at Clinton and the Central American drugs
through Mina. We can look at the Turks looting areas of Syria of whole factories(!) while
they were occupying the northeast. What about WWII? Politicians took whatever was not nailed
down from Germany. Stealing the art. Look at Britain only now returning some artifacts they
took out of countries they were administrating decades ago. I am sickened by all of them and
I sure am disgusted with President Trump.
rodney lowery , October 29, 2019 at 18:39
My circle of friends thought Trump's speech and actions were refreshing and perfect to
reduce these terrorist leaders publicly to nothing. You libs just can't get it. Trump is not
going to give respect and dignity to murderers. We take their life and dress them down
publicly, and take away any prestige they may have had towards other terrorists. And since
when do democrats and libs care about war crimes? why don't you go apologize for us.
ML , October 30, 2019 at 09:01
Your lack of respect for decency, decorum, the rule of international law, statesmanship,
diplomacy, etc etc, is simply breathtaking. Many of us here were appalled by Obama's war
crimes too, rodney. And most of us here are not "libs" but free and critically thinking human
beings, well apart from your Team Red/Team Blue baloney dichotomous way of seeing the
U.S.A.'s role in the world. Now, who doesn't "get it?" Why, I'd say that would be you!
With all due respect, sir Since there are a good number of Americans who've swallowed the
obvious psychological warfare "Operation Baghdadi" operation hook, line and sinker, featuring
a President of the United States effectively sharing with the American boys and girls a scary
bedtime story, – and drenched with a very poor actor's "tells" or giveaways – the
more accurate term might be "My circle jerk of friends ". We would strongly suggest sobering
up – before Phase 2 of this extremely dangerous fairy tale commences.
Peace.
Joe , October 29, 2019 at 18:35
Lot of folks were bit premature giving Trump some credit for pulling troops out of Syria.
The MIC waved a dollar sign in front of Trump and showed his true colors once again.
Noah Way , October 29, 2019 at 18:18
Just a continuation of oBOMBa's war crimes .The deep state / shadow government is in control.
Nick , October 30, 2019 at 10:35
Which were a continuation of Bush's war crimes, which were a continuation of Clinton's
which were a continuation of Bush's which were a continuation of Reagan's which were a
continuation of Carter's
Cohen notes that the Russian press, which follows American politics closely, has resulted in
a consensus that all of this -- Russiagate, Ukrainegate -- was created to stop Trump from
having better relations with Russia. Thus, it is important that Putin had been told the reason
Trump cannot engage in détente is because of Trump being shackled.
Cohen noted that expert opinion in Russia -- which informs the Kremlin leadership, including
Putin -- has soured on the United States; the older generation of Russian America specialists
who like America, who visit regularly and appreciate American culture, have become utterly
disillusioned and cannot promote a Russian-American partnership given what has happened to
Trump.
Regarding Ukraine, Cohen notes it shares a very large border with Russia, tens of millions
of intermarriages, language, culture and history, and although the United States shares none of
this with Ukraine, the United States has declared Ukraine is a strategic ally, and this would
be equivalent to Russia stating that Mexico is its strategic ally, which is preposterous; the
term "strategic" clearly has military implications.
Your line of thinking might reflect the way some people in the US Establishment look on the
matter. However, this is militarily a non-starter. Attacking Russia with nuclear weapons
would immediately result in the disappearance of the USA.
IMHO, Ukraine and other countries has been a gift to corrupt US politicians. The money
they send to Ukraine never ends in the hands of those who are supposed to get it -- the
Ukrainian peoples (it is de facto several countries). The money is redirected into the hands
of US and Ukrainian politicians and Jewish oligarchs.
The weapons that are sent to Ukraine are largely sold off to countries in the Middle East
-- countries which in turn give them to terrorists on their payrolls. This money largely
benefits the upper echelons of the army of Ukraine.
Powerful elements amongst the US power elites and their hangers on wish to provoke a war with
Russia. The obtainment of total world power would seem to be the ultimate objective.
Z Brzizinski in his late 1990's book The Grand Chessboard specifically points out
the importance of Ukraine to US ambitions in Eurasia.
Excerpts below from an 1853 US geo-political book called The New Rome elaborate
further. I see the mid 19th century book and it's contents potentially as 'a suggestion'
being put into the US public's mind to let them know what was expected of them in the future,
and why, as most people in the US, then and now, are rather indifferent about Russia, just as
most Russians are probably indifferent about the United States.
Similarly, Russia could be being manipulated into a war with the US, a war which
potentially could largely destroy both the US and Russia, which indeed may be the idea as
part of a larger picture.
People have their refusal.
Has Mr Cohen read this generally unknown 1853 book, The New Rome ?
Some excerpts from The New Rome linked below:
US and UK are free, Russia is not.
pg 155
'Freedom is now limited to the oceanic world, to England and America; Russia, with its
continental dependencies, is despotic..'
After US and UK form a united front and conquer Germany (the center of power upon
continental Europe) and consolidate control over it, the US and Russia will then square
off.
pg 109
'Thus the lines are drawn. The choirs are marshalled on each wing of the world's stage,
Russia leading the one, the United States the other. Yet the world is too small for both, and
the contest must end in the downfall of the one and the victory of the other.'
Global projection of US air power is to be the key for final US victory over Russia.
pg.155-156
'It [air power] will give us the victory over Russian continentalism. American
air-privateers will be down upon the Russian garrisons, to use our own expressive slang,
'like a parcel of bricks'
Who transcribed the broadcast (Giraldi?). BTW, I regard the transcription as very fair and
accurate.
Listening to the very last stages of the broadcast I felt that Batchelor became somewhat
confrontational towards Cohen. As a matter of fact Cohen remarked that Batchelor will be
getting a lot of phone calls and emails over that!
Here is the obvious explanation.
Zio-Globalist led by Rothschild are dead set to destroy, or at least neutralize Russia.
Keep in mind another clear and obvious point: The Zio-Globalists now see the USA as
totally expendable. There is some sign they are throwing it to the curb right now.
To be fair, Netanyahu said as much years ago. America would be tossed when no longer
needed. Well, that day is coming close. Productive facilities leaving the nation is nearing
its half-century mark, and now even films and TV shows mostly film in Canada, the UK, etc.,
even though they are sold as US products, which they are mostly not.
Destroy and Russia and USA, part one. Get them to blame each other, part two. Three?
They'll both still have lots of bombs
@Ilyana_Rozumova
“Russia now is last resistance to Globalist control of all world.
China for Globalists is not really a problem. When Globalists will control Russia than China
will like it not, will be controlled by flow of energy.”
That is essentially the situation. If Russia is forced to be something close to a vassal
of the Anglo-Zionist Empire, then China will be faced with being forced into the same boat.
The Chinese might well prefer nuclear war, and unleashing 5 million men at arms, with another
5 million in training camps.
The leaders of the Anglo-Zionist Empire would not care a teeny tiny bit if Korea,
southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Japan were to be decimated. They would be tickled pink
to fill those lands with black Africans and Sunni Arabs, with Jews running the local
shows
@Baron
Ukraine is lebensraum . It has had little importance in geopolitical affairs until
Russia stupidly gave it its independence upon the breakup of the Soviet Union. Now it’s
a slush fund for the most prominent Democrat politicians. It’s also become another
conveniently remote shithole for justifying insane military spending.
The only mistake Merry makes is his erroneous statement that Trump held up aid to Ukraine to
pressure the Ukrainian president to investigate the Ukrainian firm that made $1,750,000
payments to the corrupt Biden and his corrupt son. The transcript of the telephone call between
Trump and the Ukrainian president shows no Quid Pro Quo, and the Ukrainian president says there
was none. The Quid Pro Quo was entirely on Biden's part when he told the president of Ukraine
to fire the prosecutor investigating the firm that was paying him and his son seven figures in
protection money or forfeit $1 billion in US aid. You can watch it here:
https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html
Moreover, even it Trump did threaten to withhold aid from a country that was covering up
corruption by a US vice president and his son, that is the US president's right. There is no
reason whatsoever that a president should permit US taxpayers' money to be given to a
government that covers up corruption by a vice president of the United States.
Biden's son has admitted that he used poor judgment taking money from a firm in order to
protect it from prosecution.
Even if Trump did what the Democrats allege, which he did not, there is nothing illegal or
unethical about it whatsoever. Compared to the tactics US prosecutors use to convict the
innocent, Trump's conversation with the president of Ukraine is far above the highest ethics
known to US prosecutors.
Why aren't the Democrats complaining about the criminally illegal treatment of Julian
Assange and Manning? The reason is that the Democrats, the most utterly corrupt political
organization on the face of the Earth, are bought and paid for by the Deep State. The Democrats
are dog excrement to the core. They are traitors to America and to our Constitutional order.
The entire party should be arrested and put on trial for sedition to overthrow the government
of the United States.
U.S. efforts to derail Nordstream 2 have failed. Hehehe. All those sanctions were bypassed;
the partnerships of Nordstream 2 - Wintershall, Austria's OMV, France's Engie, and the
Netherlands' Royal Dutch Shell - were converted to loans and Gazprom owns it all.
COPENHAGEN/BUDAPEST (Reuters) - Denmark on Wednesday gave the go-ahead to the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline, removing the last major hurdle to completion of the Russian-led project that
has divided opinion in the European Union.[.]
For the past three years the U.S. has fought the construction of the Nordstream 2
pipeline from Russia to Germany every inch of the way.
The battle came down to the last few miles, literally, as Denmark has been withholding the
final environmental permit on Nordstream 2 for months.
The U.S., especially under Trump, have committed themselves to a 'whole of government
approach' to stop the 55 bcm natural gas pipeline from making landfall in Germany.[.]
In a sense, this pipeline is Germany's declaration of independence from seventy-plus years
of U.S. policy setting. Never forget that Germany is occupied territory with more than
50,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
So it is supremely rich of President Trump call Nordstream 2 something that could make
Germany a "hostage of Russia" when it's been a hostage of the U.S. since 1945.
Then again, history isn't one of Trump's strong suits.[.]
How is that song again? do not know much about geography or geology.
@23 Thanks for the Nordstream 2 news. The Danish objections were critical to completing the
pipeline. Apparently the problem was more environmental than political as far as the Danes
were concerned.
@23 Likklemore.
Northstream II is a gift from Trump. Remember how he insulted the Danes by suggesting to buy
Greenland and then again insulted the Queen by
cancelling his trip to the country because she refused to discuss the offer? It was that
moment back in August when I thought "Thank you Trump, you just gave us Northstream II". This
is how Trump defeats the Borg so now and then.
@ Likklemore 23
There's also UNCLOS as a factor on the Denmark decision for Nordstream 2:
In the exclusive economic zone, all States, whether coastal or land-locked, enjoy, subject
to the relevant provisions of this Convention, the freedoms referred to in article 87
["freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines"] of navigation and overflight and of the
laying of submarine cables and pipelines, and other internationally lawful uses of the sea
related to these freedoms, such as those associated with the operation of ships, aircraft
and submarine cables and pipelines, and compatible with the other provisions of this
Convention. . . here
@30 The Danes had geographic and economic reasons for sure. I like joost's theory too.
Offering to buy Greenland and insulting the Queen was no way to get the Danes to block the
pipeline.....if that's what Trump really wanted. That would be sheer genius on Trump's part.
But I don't think the Danes will say that was the reason. I'm guessing they'll say they
had environmental concerns.
Nordstream II follows Nordstream I closely near Bornholm, which makes one wonder what the
environmentally based objections were to the second pipeline's route. The pipeline can be
laid down in three to four weeks so construction issues would not appear to be a major
problem.
Posted by: Breadonwater | Oct 31 2019 20:05 utc | 45
Why is Denmark's approval needed for Nordstream 2? Is it due to the Danish island of
Bornholm?
MARITIME LAW EXPLAINED
The United Nations Convention on
the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) from 1958 guarantees to all countries the right to lay
cables and pipes in international waters. This is part of the freedom of the seas. Laying
cables and pipes is not "economic" activity as defined in the 1982 treaty that gave countries
the right to a 200 nautical mile exclusive economic zone
(EEZ).
Pipe laying is affected only by the little-known
Espoo Convention from 1991 that obliges the parties to carry out an environmental impact
assessment of certain activities at an early stage of planning. Nowhere in the treaty does it
say that it can be used to stop the freedom of navigation or other freedoms of the seas.
NordStream 2 will NOT pass through Danish territorial waters, as Russian and Western media
often falsely impliy.
Denmark was instructed to delay the European/Russian Nordstream2 approval. The delay
forced the consortium to redirect the pipeline to avoid Danish waters and so now whatever
they decide is completely moot and irrelevant. They are only trying to save face because they
recently approved a pipeline to Poland for expensive US freedom gas. This is how it works,
small countries like Denmark and Poland have no say of their own when the US wants
something.
Acting U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor, who provided key testimony to the Democrats' controversial
impeachment inquiry last week, led an election observation delegation in Ukraine earlier this year for a George
Soros-funded organization that at the time boasted Hunter Biden on its small chairman's council.
Two months before he came out of retirement to serve as the highest ranking U.S. official in Ukraine, Taylor led
an election observer delegation to Ukraine's April 21, 2019 second round presidential election for the National
Democratic Institute (NDI) organization.
The delegation's mission, according to NDI
literature
, was to "accurately and impartially assess various aspects of the election process, and to offer
recommendations to support peaceful, credible elections and public confidence in the process."
Taylor led the team along with former Director of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe's Office
for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (OSCE/ODIHR) Audrey Glover and former Minister for European Union
Affairs Birgitta Ohlsson.
Hunter Biden at the time served on NDI's ten person Chairman's Council, which
describes itself
as
bringing together "leaders from corporate, philanthropic, and academia sectors to provide expertise, counsel and
resources to help the Institute meet these evolving challenges."
Biden was engaged in Ukraine in his role as a board member for Burisma, the Ukranian natural gas company at the
center of allegations regarding Joe Biden's involvement in Ukraine policy during the Obama administration while his
son was being paid by Burisma.
NDI did not immediately respond to a Breitbart News inquiry about when Hunter Biden was removed from the
organization's chairman's council. The WayBack Internet archive
shows
Biden was
listed on NDI's website in that position until at least August 2019, encompassing the period when Taylor led the
organization's delegation.
Earlier this month, an attorney for Biden
said
the former vice president's son had stepped down from the Burisma board and that he planned to step down
from the board of BHR, a Chinese company seeking to invest Chinese funds outside China.
The NDI is not Taylor's only seemingly conspicuous link. Last week, Breitbart News
reported
that Taylor has evidenced a close relationship with the Atlantic Council think tank, writing Ukraine
policy pieces with the organization's director and analysis articles published by the Council. The Atlantic
Council is
funded
by
and works in partnership with Burisma.
In addition to a direct relationship with the Atlantic Council, Taylor for the last nine years also served as a
senior adviser to the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), which has
co-hosted
events
with the Atlantic Council and has participated in events co-hosted
jointly
by
the Atlantic Council and Burisma. USUBC events have been financially sponsored by Burisma.
Another senior
adviser
to
the USUBC is David J. Kramer, a long-time adviser to late Senator John McCain. Kramer played a central role in
disseminating the anti-Trump dossier to the news media and Obama administration.
Taylor participated in events and initiatives organized by Kramer.
The links may be particularly instructive after Breitbart News
reported
that
itinerary for a trip to Ukraine in August organized by the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council for ten Congressional
aides reveals that a staffer on Rep. Adam Schiff's House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence held a meeting
during the trip with Taylor. The pre-planned trip took place after the so-called whistleblower officially filed his
August 12 complaint and
reportedly
after
a Schiff aide was contacted by the so-called whistleblower.
Common funding themes
Meanwhile, NDI, where Taylor led the election observation delegation,
lists
partners and sponsors who "provide much-needed resources," including Soros's Open Society Foundation, Google Inc.,
the National Endowment for Democracy, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the U.S.
Department of State.
Besides Burisma funding, the Atlantic Council is also financed by Soros's Open Society Foundations, Google, and
the U.S. State Department. Another Atlantic Council funder is the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Inc.,
Google, Soros's Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Fund, and an agency of the State Department each also
finance a self-described investigative journalism organization repeatedly referenced as a source of information in
the so-called whistleblower's complaint alleging Trump was "using the power of his office to solicit interference
from a foreign country" in the 2020 presidential race.
The charges in the July 22 report referenced in the so-called whistleblower's document and released by the Google
and Soros-funded organization, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), seem to be the public
precursors for a lot of the so-called whistleblower's own claims, as Breitbart News
documented
.
One key section of the so-called whistleblower's document claims that "multiple U.S. officials told me that Mr.
Giuliani had reportedly privately reached out to a variety of other Zelensky advisers, including Chief of Staff
Andriy Bohdan and Acting Chairman of the Security Service of Ukraine Ivan Bakanov."
This was allegedly to follow up on Trump's call with Zelensky in order to discuss the "cases" mentioned in that
call, according to the so-called whistleblower's narrative. The complainer was clearly referencing Trump's request
for Ukraine to investigate the Biden corruption allegations.
Even though the statement was written in first person – "multiple U.S. officials told me" – it contains a footnote
referencing a report by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP).
That footnote reads:
In a report published by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) on 22 July, two associates
of Mr. Giuliani reportedly traveled to Kyiv in May 2019 and met with Mr. Bakanov and another close Zelensky adviser,
Mr. Serhiy Shefir.
The so-called whistleblower's account goes on to rely upon that same OCCRP report on three more occasions. It does
so to:
Write that Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko "also stated that he wished to communicate directly
with Attorney General Barr on these matters."
Document that Trump adviser Rudy Giuliani "had spoken in late 2018 to former Prosecutor General Shokin, in a
Skype call arranged by two associates of Mr. Giuliani."
Bolster the charge that, "I also learned from a U.S. official that 'associates' of Mr. Giuliani were trying to
make contact with the incoming Zelenskyy team." The so-called whistleblower then relates in another footnote, "I
do not know whether these associates of Mr. Giuliani were the same individuals named in the 22 July report by
OCCRP, referenced above."
The OCCRP
report
repeatedly
referenced is actually a "joint investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and
BuzzFeed News, based on interviews and court and business records in the United States and Ukraine."
BuzzFeed infamously also first
published
the
full anti-Trump dossier alleging unsubstantiated collusion between Trump's presidential campaign and Russia. The
dossier was paid for by Hillary Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee, and was produced by the
Fusion GPS opposition dirt outfit.
The OCCRP and BuzzFeed "joint investigation" resulted in both OCCRP and BuzzFeed publishing similar lengthy pieces
on July 22 claiming that Giuliani was attempting to use connections to have Ukraine investigate Trump's political
rivals.
The so-called whistleblower's document, however, only mentions the largely unknown OCCRP and does not reference
BuzzFeed, which has faced scrutiny over its reporting on the Russia collusion claims.
Taylor, Atlantic Council, Kramer
Multiple U.S. media outlets last week
obtained
Taylor's
full opening statement to the House Intelligence, Oversight and Foreign Affairs committees.
In the leaked pre-written full opening statement, Taylor alluded to work he said he did for a "small Ukrainian
non- governmental organization" but he omitted the name of the organization.
"In the intervening 10 years, I have stayed engaged with Ukraine, visiting frequently since 2013 as a board member
of a small Ukrainian non- governmental organization supporting good governance and reform," he said.
The name of the organization is the U.S.-Ukraine Business Council (USUBC), where Taylor served for nine years as
senior advisor. The USUBC has co-hosted or participated in scores of events with the Atlantic Council. Taylor has
also authored numerous analysis pieces published by the Atlantic Council itself and has co-authored opeds written
together with the Atlantic Council's director.
Burisma is a key financial backer of the Atlantic Council. In 2017, Burisma and the Atlantic Council
signed
a
cooperative agreement to develop transatlantic programs with Burisma's financial support reportedly to focus "on
European and international energy security." Burisma specifically finances the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Besides funding the Atlantic Council, Burisma also routinely partners with the think tank. Only four months ago,
the company
co-hosted
the
Atlantic Council's second Annual Kharkiv Security Conference. Burisma
advertises
that
it committed itself to "15 key principles of rule of law and economic policy in Ukraine developed by the Atlantic
Council."
In March, three months before he became Trump's ambassador to Ukraine, the Atlantic Council
featured
an
oped co-authored by Taylor in which the diplomat argued Ukraine "has further to travel toward its self-proclaimed
European goal" of reformation.
In 2017, Taylor wrote a
piece
for
the Atlantic Council about a Ukrainian parliament vote on health care reform.
Last year, he
participated
in
an online Atlantic Council Q & A on the Crimea.
In November 2011, the Atlantic Council
hosted
Taylor
as the featured speaker at a discussion event when he was appointed that year as Special Coordinator for Middle East
Transitions at the State Department.
In March 2014, Taylor co-authored an analysis piece at Foreign Policy
magazine
written
together with John E. Herbst, a former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine who serves as director of the Eurasia Center for
the Atlantic council – the same Eurasia Center that is specifically funded by Burisma.
That same year, Taylor also co-authored a
New York Times
op-ed
with
the Atlantic Council's Herbst on Ukraine. The duo co-authored another
Times
op-ed
one
year later on the future of Ukraine. The op-ed was
reprinted
on
the USUBC's website.
The USUBC, where Taylor was a senior adviser for nine years along with Kramer, has
hosted
Herbst
for briefings and other events.
Kramer of the USUBC, infamous for his role in disseminating the anti-Trump dossier, also held a November 2011
event
at
the Atlantic Council's D.C. offices for a group that he heads called Freedom House. Taylor was one of six featured
speakers at Kramer's event.
The Atlantic Council published what it deemed a
24-point
plan
for ending the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. In conjunction with the plan, Kramer, in his role as
director of Freedom House, organized a letter by American and European experts and former officials urging Russia to
end its conflict with Ukraine. Signatories of the letter,
published
on
the Burisma-funded Atlantic Council's website, include Taylor, Kramer and the Atlantic Council's Herbst.
As late as this past March, Taylor was
listed
as
one of nine members of the Friends of Ukraine Network Economic Security Task Force. Another member is Kramer.
When he deployed to Ukraine as Trump's ambassador in June, the USUBC
authored
a
piece in the Kyiv Post welcoming him.
In the USUBC
piece
welcoming
Taylor to Ukraine, Kramer himself commented about Taylor's ambassador position. "He's a great choice for now," Kramer
gushed.
The USUBC's piece noted that the "USUBC has worked closely with Ambassador Taylor for many years," touting his
role as the business group's senior adviser.
On June 26, just nine days after arriving in Ukraine as ambassador, the USUBC already
hosted
Taylor
for a roundtable discussion about his new position.
Vadym Pozharskyi, adviser to the board of directors at Burisma Holdings, was also previously
hosted
as
a USUBC featured speaker.
Geysha Gonzalez is the sponsoring Atlantic Council officer listed on the Congressional disclosure form for the
Schiff staffer's trip to Ukraine in August. She is deputy director of the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center.
Gonzalez is also one of eleven members of the rapid response
team
for
the Ukrainian Election Task Force, which says it is working to expose "foreign interference in Ukraine's democracy."
Another
member
of
the team is Kramer.
Kramer revealed in testimony that he held a meeting about the anti-Trump dossier with a reporter from BuzzFeed
News, who he says snapped photos of the controversial document without Kramer's permission when he left the room to
go to the bathroom. That meeting was held at the McCain Institute office in Washington, Kramer stated.
BuzzFeed infamously
published
the
Christopher Steele dossier on January 10, 2017, setting off a firestorm of news media coverage about the document.
The Washington Post
reported
last
February that Kramer received the dossier directly from Fusion GPS after McCain expressed interest in it.
In a deposition taken on December 13, 2017, and
posted
online
earlier this year, Kramer revealed that he met with two Obama administration officials to inquire about
whether the anti-Trump dossier was being taken seriously.
In one case, Kramer said that he personally provided a copy of the dossier to Obama National Security Council
official Celeste Wallander.
In the deposition, Kramer said that McCain specifically asked him in early December 2016 to meet about the dossier
with Wallander and Victoria Nuland, a senior official in John Kerry's State Department.
Taylor testimony and Burisma
In his testimony to the Democrats secretive impeachment inquiry, Taylor said that he "understood" from U.S.
Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland that a White House meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky "was dependent on a public announcement of the investigations." Taylor was referring to the announcement of
an investigation that included Burisma, as well as alleged Ukrainian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
Taylor's testimony was
characterized
by
CNN as "explosive" and was similarly hyped by other news media outlets despite it not being unusual for the U.S. to
condition aspects of relations on participation in ongoing American investigations involving the foreign country in
question.
Still, Taylor conceded that there was no quid pro quo.
"Ambassador Sondland said that he had talked to President Zelensky and Mr. Yermak and told them that, although
this was not a quid pro quo, if President Zelensky did not 'clear things up' in public, we could be at a 'stalemate.'
I understood 'stalemate to mean that Ukraine would not receive the much-needed military assistance," Taylor
testified.
Aaron Klein is Breitbart's Jerusalem bureau
chief and senior investigative reporter. He is a New York Times bestselling author and hosts the popular weekend talk
radio program, "
Aaron
Klein Investigative Radio
." Follow him on
Twitter
@AaronKleinShow.
Follow him on
Facebook.
Joshua Klein contributed research to this article.
In addition to the fired Shokin's claim that President Poroshenko warned him not to
investigate Burisma because it was not in the Bidens' interest, the notes say, the prosecutor
also said he "was warned to stop" by the then-U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt .
The State Department declined to explain this assertion about Pyatt, who was ambassador to
Ukraine from 2013 to 2016 and now is Ambassador to Greece. The Biden presidential campaign did
not respond to a request for comment.
Recounting Shokin's version of events, the notes say he "was called into Mr. Poroshenko's
office and told that the investigation into Burisma and the Managing Director where Hunter
Biden is on the board, has caused Joe Biden to hold up one billion dollars in U.S. aid to
Ukraine." Poroshenko later told Shokin that "he had to be fired as the aid to the Ukraine was
being withheld by Joe Biden," the Giuliani interview notes say.
Trump has claimed that Vice
President Biden pressured the Ukrainian government to fire Shokin because he was investigating
his son's employer.
"I heard you had a prosecutor who was very good and he was shut down and that's really
unfair," the president said, referring to Shokin in his July 25 phone call with Ukraine's
president, Volodymyr Zelensky. That call triggered the current impeachment crisis after a CIA
whistleblower alleged that Trump had pressured the Ukrainian leader to investigate Biden in
return for military aid.
A Politico
investigation in 2017 found that officials in Poroshenko's government helped Hillary
Clinton allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, notably Paul Manafort,
who before joining the Trump campaign was a political consultant for ousted Ukrainian President
Viktor Yanukovych.
Poroshenko's administration insisted at the time that Ukraine stayed neutral in the
race.
Following a short artillery and air engagement with Syria over raids by exiled Palestinian
guerillas, Egypt mobilized against her nemesis in 1967. President Nasser sent six divisions to
the Sinai, removed the UN peacekeeping force, and closed the Straits of Tiran south of Israel.
Israel struck first, fearing annihilation.
As Israeli historian Martin Van Creveld states in
The Transformation of War , "for six glorious days war was Israel and Israel was war."
The result was a smashing victory for the Israelis
, who lost around 800 soldiers, as opposed to 20,000 for Egypt, Syria, and Jordan. The Sinai
peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights were added to
Israel's territory.
Compare this short war with another conflict that played out in 2006. For 34 days, Israel
battled Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in response to the Shia terrorist group's killing and
capturing of several Israeli soldiers in cross-border raids. Israel launched a massive air and
artillery campaign, followed by a ground invasion in late July. When the ceasefire was signed
on August 14, both sides claimed victory, but as John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt noted in
The Israel Lobbyand U.S. Foreign
Policy , "it was clear to most independent experts" that "Hezbollah had come out ahead
in the fight." The IDF chief of staff resigned, and an Israeli government investigation rebuked
the planning and handling of the campaign, stating that the military had "pursued goals that
were not clear and could not be achieved."
Worse still, the air, artillery, and naval campaign killed an estimated 1,183 Lebanese (a
third of them children) and devastated the country's infrastructure. These actions drew strong
condemnation from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch for causing "destruction on a
catastrophic scale." During the last three days of the war, the IDF fired over one million
cluster bombs into southern Lebanon, "saturating the area." The leader of an IDF rocket unit called these actions
"insane and monstrous."
War can still be won by being nasty and short, as shown in the first Gulf War, but time is
not on the side of the powerful. Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped
adversary almost always works to the advantage of the weaker side. Van Creveld compares this
situation to an adult who "administers a prolonged, violent beating to a child in a public
place." Observers will sympathize with the child and intervene, regardless of its prior
behavior.
With the Palestinians, the position of weakness is even more extreme. Israel dominates the
lives of 3.8 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, controlling air, land, and sea
access, in a situation that's been compared to "living in a cage" by Swedish foreign minister
Jan Eliasson. Despite numerous American attempts to secure Palestinian statehood and resolve
the conflict, the present situation seems worse than ever.
The Trump administration, on the other hand, has made it clear that Israel will be supported
through thick and thin. And the world has slowly but surely begun to take notice. The
BDS movement (Boycott, Divest, Sanction), initially confined to college campuses and
Palestine, spilled into the national news when Democratic lawmakers Ilhan Omar and Rashida
Talib spearheaded a movement opposing bills aimed at criminalizing support of BDS. Some
Republicans, namely Senator Rand Paul, have opposed those bills, too, on
free speech grounds.
Recently, after the congresswomen were denied entry to Israel because of their support of
BDS, liberal Jewish journalist Peter Beinart defended their stance. Speaking on a CNN panel , he openly
sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, claiming their treatment by Israel constitutes
an "indefensible denial of basic human rights." Fellow panelists attempted to tie support for
Palestine to terrorism, a common tactic. But terrorism in that part of the world is nothing
new. Israel's defenders tend to forget or are ignorant of the fact that beginning in 1937, the
militant Zionist group Irgun
was responsible for placing bombs in buses and large crowds. One of its leaders during Israel's
war for independence, future prime minister Menachem Begin, was referred to by Prime Minister
Levi Eshkol simply as "the terrorist."
Modern Israel is no longer a weak state in danger of annihilation. The IDF is highly
motivated, trained, and funded. Emboldened by the financial and moral backing of the United
States and powerful lobbying groups, its treatment of Palestinians and other enemies has become
steadily more severe.
With recent
elections still contested , it remains to be seen whether these policies will continue. But
militarily, Israel's position is not tenable. You can win at the tactical level and rack up a
higher body count, but still lose the war. As frequent TAC contributor and military historian
William S. Lind notes, "in the 3,000 years that the story of David and Goliath has been told,
how many listeners have identified with Goliath?"
Israel will last as long as Wash. extorts money from our wages and supports it. Without the
US taxpayer, Israel wouldn't exist, both from its beginning to right now.
I think the lack of sympathy for Israel is not that it s the "Goliath" of this story but
that it is allowing settlers to live in the Occupied Territories.
So TAC is standing with the Palestinians now I see. Will it stand with those other Davids,
the intersectional allies of the BDS crowd too? namely Black Lives Matter, illegal Latino
migrants, the LGBTQ+ community, and other assorted SJW types?
We are now in the end times; when it comes to Israel, all is in the hands of the Lord. As
the nations of the earth seek to attack and destroy Israel, they fall into ruin: look at
the entire Muslim world; look at what's happening to Europe. Most of all, look at the
astonishing rise and continued power of Donald Trump, the man who recognized Jerusalem as
the capital of Israel. Pick your side and accept your fate accordingly.
"Escalation by a powerful state against a poorly equipped adversary almost always
works to the advantage of the weaker side."
I don't always buy this. For me this only works if the powerful state is in the wrong.
And sadly, in this situation, Israel is deeply in the wrong.
But what does happen is over time, the weak becomes slowly stronger. Because they are
always studying their enemies. They are learning their tactics and how to defeat them. This
may take decades, but eventually the weak become the strong.
This is why it is always best to quickly offer a hand of friendship to a vanquished
enemy. If you don't, you'll eventually trade places.
"Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to
fighting corruption in Ukraine."
Then I must have missed most of the press coverage. First of all, most of the reporting
I've seen has been about Trump's attempts to convince Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump's
political opponents. The purpose of the aid package is a minor part of the story, but when it
has been discussed the reporting I've seen has indicated that the purpose of the aid package
that Trump held up was to help the Ukrainian military, not to fight corruption. So I can't
help wondering: where does James Bovard gets his news?
Then you've missed the point of this article. It's neither about the purpose of that aid.
It's about the aid as such leading to corruption. Do you really think Ukrainians will have
any troubles with selling those weapons out to some Middle Eastern or African caudillos? Or
maybe you think that a single penny from the sums obtained as a result of that sellout will
end up in the hands of their average citizens, and not in those of local mobsters and
oligarchs?
I believe I am reading this right: That providing foreign aid is always going to lead to
corruption. That what Trump did with Ukraine is basically drinking the same sauce others have
in the past and anyone else will do in the future. That then suggests that the solution is to
close the tap and end using foreign aid because, whatever the initial motive, it's too
corrupting an influence.
In that... honestly that's the best argument I've heard against foreign aid. Typically I
hear arguments from economic standpoints, which seemed silly when many of the targetted
examples are in the millions-pennies by US standards.
But putting it from a control standpoint: that leadership, present or future, will either
use foreign aid as a cover for corrupt means or take an active use of foreign aid as a wedge
against a foreign country.
I can hear a counterargument that "we are a superpower. We should be helping others." And
the response I hear in my head is "given our inability to truly help others without such
corruption and how we abuse the status, maybe we really do need to let that title go." It
means giving it up to Russia or China, but we aren't doing a good job holding them back, even
if we should be doing so.
Ignoring the world really isn't an option. But our priority should probably be to focus on
home as we can and better ourselves rather than ruining yourselves while ruining everyone who
brushes with us.
So yeah. I can see the idea behind pulling back from these foreign aid elements.
The "just don't tell the House impeachment hearings." did seem rather clickbaity. It
suggests this is an argument against the impeachment hearings as if their mistaken believe in
supporting foreign aid is a mark against the hearings themselves. The article itself doesn't
seem to go that route. "just don't tell congress" would've done far better. But that's a
nitpick combined with all of this impeachment discussion leaving me rather kneejerky.
Not only Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe, it's also the poorest on the
continent. It became such after all American aid and after all, much, much bigger IMF loans.
Which makes one kind of suggest that the known level of corruption there is only a tip of the
iceberg.
But, getting back home, I just love those "closed impeachment hearings". Paraphrasing the
famous quotation, why so closed? Afraid that, being it open, any half-literate first-year law
college student (not to mention Rudy and the DoJ) would tear the so-called "evidence"
asunder?
It became such after all American aid and after all, much, much bigger IMF loans
I feel like you're glossing over some other major events that have happened in the South
and East of the country which have contributed to the sluggish economic development and
hampered the corruption fight...
The open hearings will come, Alex. They're closed because those are the rules Republicans
abided by with the Benghazi hearings. However it's going to take a lot more than Rudy and the
DoJ to combat testimony from Trump-appointed ambassadors who've been plucked from retirement
to help with Ukraine and say that there was a quid pro quo.
So what's the point here, foreign aid to corrupt governments is standard American policy,
so Presidential corruption in distributing that aid is no big deal.
"The surest way to reduce foreign corruption is to end foreign aid."
This is a point that can and has been argued. I remember having just that debate in
relation to aid to Africia in the '80s.
However, the House is investigating Presidential coruption in the distribution of that aid
and that would seem to be a different matter.
If you think Trump cares about corruption in Ukraine, I have a Trump U course to sell
you.
Trump tried to extort a foreign leader to help him win an election, this is beyond dispute
to anyone who isn't ignoring the facts. He wanted the president of Ukraine to make a public
announcement that he was investigating Hunter Biden. Whether the investigation would turn up
anything was irrelevant, Trump knew an appearance of Biden corruption could work wonders for
him.
Oh yes... The purported presence of the "evidence" of the said "extortion" is precisely
why the House hearings are closed. And, of course, Trump's most vital necessity was kicking
the weakest of his opponents out of the race, so that Democrats could pick someone with
better chances, instead of the continuation of the DNC's idiotic course aimed at nominating
that one at all costs, which persists even now.
Just like the corrupt aid we have been giving to dictatorships since WW II ended. The
difference is the president in previous decades did not use the aid as a bribe to foreign
leaders to conduct nefarious investigations on US citizens. I can only imagine the columns
TAC would write if Obama called the Saudi Crown Prince in 2010 and told him that military aid
is contingent on information about their business dealings with the Bush family because Jeb
might run in 2012.
Then where's the evidence of that "bribe" having even happened? As of yet we have only a
clownery called "closed hearings" and the idea that Trump would be interested in getting rid
of the weakest of his possible opponents which defies the mere principles of logic.
Hogwash. Tell us how "Russian interference" has forced the Ukrainian junta to be as
corrupt, brutal and incompetent as it has been since it became a full-fledged US puppet?
A better use of our hard-earned tax dollars would be for the US government to put its own
house in order before addressing problems of "corruption" abroad.
Corruption is incidental to the political control that foreign aid provides to the US. In
other words, it's a feature and not a bug. The exception to this rule is Israel, where US
foreign aid is turned around to exert influence on American politicians. Again, a feature and
not a bug.
Don't hold your breath waiting for this situation to change.
Charitable (non-government) aid typically nurtures corruption, too
Arm's-length dealing is the cure and the preventive, and it's the only one.
I know - sounds cruel, doesn't it?
I usually do - just ask my children
U.S. Aid Makes Corrupt Countries More Corrupt
Our 'democracy building' assistance to certain countries--including Ukraine--has produced kleptocracies, or
worse.
By
James Bovard
•
October 30, 2019
Barricade with the protesters at Hrushevskogo street on January 26, 2014 in Kiev, Ukraine.
Sasha
Maksymenko
/
cc
Counting on foreign aid to reduce corruption is like expecting whiskey to cure
alcoholism. After closed House of Representatives impeachment hearings heard testimony on President Trump's role in
delaying U.S. aid to Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer declared: "
Numbers
don't lie
. It's even more clear now that President Trump is not the
anti-corruption crusader he claims to be."
Most of the press coverage has tacitly assumed that American assistance is vital to fighting corruption in Ukraine. But
that ignores foreign aid's toxic record and Ukraine's post-Soviet history.
A
2002 American Economic Review analysis
concluded that "increases in [foreign] aid are associated with contemporaneous increases in corruption," and that
"corruption is positively correlated with aid received from the United States."
That was the year President George W. Bush launched a new foreign aid program, the
Millennium Challenge Account (MCA). Bush declared, "I
think it makes no sense to give aid
, money, to
countries that are corrupt." But the Bush administration continued delivering billions of dollars in handouts to many of
the world's most corrupt regimes. By 2004, the State Department had codified what amounted to backtracking: "
The
MCA is an incentive-based supplement to other U.S. aid programs."
The Bush
team found excuses to give MCA aid to some of the world's most corrupt governments as well, including Georgia.
In 2010, President Barack Obama proclaimed at the United Nations that America was "
leading
a global effort to combat corruption
." Obama's "aides said the United States
in the past has often seemed
to just throw money at problems
," the
Los Angeles Times
reported. But the reform
charade was exposed the following year when the Obama administration fiercely resisted congressional efforts to curb
wasteful aid. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton warned that restricting handouts to nations that fail anti-corruption
tests "has
the potential to affect a staggering number
of
needy aid recipients."
The Obama administration continued pouring tens of billions of American tax dollars
into sinkholes such as Afghanistan, which even its president, Ashraf Ghani, admitted in 2016 was "one of the
most corrupt countries on earth
." And the
deluge of aid the Afghan government received only worsened the corruption. As John Sopko, the heroic Special Inspector
General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), observed, "
We
need to understand how
US policies and practices unintentionally aided and
abetted corruption. We must recognize the danger of dealing with characters or networks of unsavory repute, tolerating
contracting abuses, accepting shoddy performance and delivering unsustainable projects."
The closed House impeachment hearings last week heard from acting U.S. ambassador to
the Ukraine William B. Taylor Jr., who testified that he "
had
authority over the bulk
of the U.S. effort to support Ukraine against the
Russian invasion and to help it defeat corruption." The
Washington Post
lauded Taylor as someone who "
spent
much of the 1990s telling
Ukrainian politicians that nothing was more critical
to their long-term prosperity than rooting out corruption and bolstering the rule of law, in his role as the head of
U.S. development assistance for post-Soviet countries."
Transparency International, which publishes an annual Corruption Perceptions Index, shows that
corruption surged in
Ukraine during the late 1990s
and remains at obscene levels (though recent
years have shown slight improvements). Taylor was ambassador to Ukraine from 2006 to 2009, when corruption sharply
worsened despite
hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. aid
.
Ukraine is now ranked as the
120th
least
corrupt nation in the world
-- lower
than Egypt and Pakistan, two other major U.S. aid recipients. What Washington Redskins owner Dan Snyder is to the NFL,
Taylor appears to be to the anti-corruption cause.
Bribing foreign politicians to encourage honest government makes as much sense as
distributing free condoms to encourage abstinence. Rather than encouraging good governance practices, foreign aid is
more likely to produce kleptocracies, or governments of thieves. As a Brookings Institution analysis observed, "The
history of
U.S. assistance is littered
with tales of
corrupt foreign officials using aid to line their own pockets, support military buildups, and pursue vanity projects."
And both American politicians and bureaucrats are want to continue the aid gravy train, regardless of how foreign
regimes waste the money or use it to repress their own citizens.
If U.S. aid was effective, Ukraine would have become a rule of law paradise long ago. The country's new president,
Volodymyr Zelensky, may be sincere in his efforts to root out corruption. But it is an insult to both him and his nation
to pretend that Ukraine cannot clean up its act without help from Donald Trump. The surest way to reduce foreign
corruption is to end foreign aid.
"... The brother of the current Chilean president, scions of one of the richest families in Chile, became famous for introducing, as Minister of Labor and Social Security under Pinochet, a funded system of pensions where employees make compulsory contributions from their wages into one of several pension funds, and after retirement receive pensions based on investment performance of such funds. Old-age pensions thus became a part of roulette capitalism. But In the process, the pension funds, charging often exorbitant fees, and their managers became rich. ..."
"... José Piñera had tried to "sell" this model to Yeltsin's Russia and to George Bush's United States, but, despite the strong (and quite understandable) support of the financial communities in both countries, he failed. Nowadays, most Chilean pensioners receive $200-$300 per month in a country whose price level (according to International Comparison Project, a worldwide UN- and World Bank-led project to compare price levels around the world) is about 80% of that of the United States. ..."
"... the combined wealth of Chilean billionaires' (there were twelve of them) was equal to 25% of Chilean GDP. The next Latin American countries with highest wealth concentrations are Mexico and Peru where the wealth share of billionaires is about half (13 percent of GDP) of Chile's. But even better: Chile is the country where billionaires' share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world (if we exclude countries like Lebanon and Cyprus) where many foreign billionaires simply "park" their wealth for tax reasons. The wealth of Chile's billionaires, compared to their country's GDP, exceeds even that of Russians. [Graph] ..."
"... Such extraordinary inequality of wealth and income, combined with full marketization of many social services (water, electricity etc.), and pensions that depend on the vagaries of the stock market has long been "hidden" from foreign observers by Chile's success in raising its GDP per capita. ..."
"... if there Is no social justice and minimum of social cohesion, the effects of growth will dissolve in grief, demonstrations, and yes, in the shooting of people. ..."
Chile: The poster boy of neoliberalism who fell from grace
It is not common for an Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development county to
shoot and kill 16 people in two days of socially motivated riots. (Perhaps only Turkey, in
its unending wars against the Kurdish guerrilla, comes close to that level of violence.) This
is however what Chilean government, the poster child of neoliberalism and transition to
democracy, did last week in the beginning of protests that do not show the signs of subsiding
despite cosmetic reforms proposed by President Sebastian Piñera.
The fall from grace of Chile is symptomatic of worldwide trends that reveal the damages
causes by neoliberal policies over the past thirty years, from privatizations in Eastern
Europe and Russia to the global financial crisis to the Euro-related austerity. Chile was
held, not the least thanks to favorable press that it enjoyed, as a exemplar of success.
Harsh policies introduced after the overthrow of Salvador Allende in 1973, and the murderous
spree that ensued afterwards, have been softened by the transition to democracy but their
essential features were preserved. Chile indeed had a remarkably good record of growth, and
while in the 1960-70s it was in the middle of the Latin American league by GDP per capita, it
is now the richest Latin American country. It was of course helped too by high prices for its
main export commodity, copper, but the success in growth is incontestable. Chile was
"rewarded" by the membership in the OECD, a club of the rich nations, the first South
American country to accede to it.
Where the country failed is in its social policies which somewhat bizarrely were
considered by many to have been successful too. In the 1980s-90s, the World Bank hailed
Chilean "flexible" labor policies which consisted of breaking up the unions and imposing a
model of branch-level negotiations between employers and workers rather than allowing an
overall umbrella union organization to negotiate for all workers. It was even more bizarrely
used by the World Bank as a model of transparency and good governance, something that the
transition countries in Eastern Europe should have presumably copied from Chile. The
brother of the current Chilean president, scions of one of the richest families in Chile,
became famous for introducing, as Minister of Labor and Social Security under Pinochet, a
funded system of pensions where employees make compulsory contributions from their wages into
one of several pension funds, and after retirement receive pensions based on investment
performance of such funds. Old-age pensions thus became a part of roulette capitalism. But In
the process, the pension funds, charging often exorbitant fees, and their managers became
rich.
José Piñera had tried to "sell" this model to Yeltsin's Russia and to
George Bush's United States, but, despite the strong (and quite understandable) support of
the financial communities in both countries, he failed. Nowadays, most Chilean pensioners
receive $200-$300 per month in a country whose price level (according to International
Comparison Project, a worldwide UN- and World Bank-led project to compare price levels around
the world) is about 80% of that of the United States.
While Chile leads Latin America in GDP per capita, it also leads it terms of inequality.
In 2015, its level of income inequality was higher than in any other Latin American country
except for Colombia and Honduras. It exceeded even Brazil's proverbially high inequality. The
bottom 5% of the Chilean population have an income level that is about the same as that of
the bottom 5% in Mongolia. The top 2% enjoy the income level equivalent to that of the top 2%
in Germany. Dortmund and poor suburbs of Ulan Bataar were thus brought together.
Chilean income distribution is extremely unequal. But even more so is its wealth
distribution. There, Chile is an outlier even compared to the rest of Latin America.
According to the Forbes' 2014 data on world billionaires, the combined wealth of Chilean
billionaires' (there were twelve of them) was equal to 25% of Chilean GDP. The next Latin
American countries with highest wealth concentrations are Mexico and Peru where the wealth
share of billionaires is about half (13 percent of GDP) of Chile's. But even better: Chile is
the country where billionaires' share, in terms of GDP, is the highest in the world (if we
exclude countries like Lebanon and Cyprus) where many foreign billionaires simply "park"
their wealth for tax reasons. The wealth of Chile's billionaires, compared to their country's
GDP, exceeds even that of Russians.
[Graph]
Such extraordinary inequality of wealth and income, combined with full marketization of
many social services (water, electricity etc.), and pensions that depend on the vagaries of
the stock market has long been "hidden" from foreign observers by Chile's success in raising
its GDP per capita.
But the recent protests show that the latter is not enough. Growth is
indispensable for economic success and reduction in poverty. But it is not enough: if there
Is no social justice and minimum of social cohesion, the effects of growth will dissolve in
grief, demonstrations, and yes, in the shooting of people.
MOSCOW, October 26, 2019 – RIA Novosti – The Russian Ministry of Defense has
published satellite intelligence images , showing American oil smuggling from Syria.
Image 1: Situation in the Syrian Arab Republic as of October 26, 2019.
According to the ministry, the photos confirm that "Syrian oil, both before and after the
routing defeat of the Islamic State terrorists in land beyond the Euphrates river , under the
reliable protection by US military servicemen, oil was actively being extracted and then the
fuel trucks were massively being sent for processing outside of Syria."
Image 2: Daman oil gathering station, Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 42 km east of Deir
ez-Zor, August 23, 2019.
Here, in a picture of the Daman oil gathering station (42 kilometers east of the Deir-ez-Zor
province), taken on August 23, a large amount of trucks were spotted. "There were 90 automotive
vehicles, including 23 fuel trucks," the caption to the image said.
In addition, on September 5, there were 25 vehicles in the Al-Hasakah province, including 22
fuel trucks. Three days later, on September 8, in the vicinity of Der Ez-Zor, 36 more vehicles
were recorded (32 of them were fuel trucks). On the same day, 41 vehicles, including 34 fuel
trucks, were in the Mayadin onshore area.
Image 3: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Al-Hasakah province, 8 km west of Al-Shaddadi,
September 5, 2019.
As the official representative of the Defense Ministry Igor Konashenkov noted, the Americans
are extracting oil in Syria with the help of equipment, bypassing their own sanctions.
Igor Konashenkov:
"Under the protection of American military servicemen and employees of American PMCs, fuel
trucks from the oil fields of Eastern Syria are smuggling to other states. In the event of
any attack on such a caravan, special operations forces and US military aircraft are
immediately called in to protect it," he said.
According to Konashenkov, the US-controlled company Sadcab , established under the so-called
Autonomous Administration of Eastern Syria , is engaged in the export of oil, and the income of
smuggling goes to the personal accounts of US PMCs and special forces.
The Major General added that as of right now, a barrel of smuggled Syrian oil is valued at
$38, therefore the monthly revenue of US governmental agencies exceeds $30 million.
Image 4: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 10 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
"For such a continuous financial flow, free from control and taxes of the American
government, the leadership of the Pentagon and Langley will be ready to guard and defend oil
fields in Syria from the mythical 'hidden IS cells' endlessly," he said.
According to Konashenkov, Washington, by holding oil fields in eastern Syria, is engaged in
international state banditry.
Image 5: Gathering of vehicles in Syria, Deir ez-Zor province, 14 km east of Mayadin,
September 8, 2019.
The reason for this activity, he believes, "lies far from the ideals of freedom proclaimed
by Washington and their slogans on the fight against terrorism."
Igor Konashenkov:
"Neither in international law, nor in American legislation itself – there is not and
cannot be a single legal task for the American troops to protect and defend the hydrocarbon
deposits of Syria from Syria itself and its own people, " the representative of the Defense
Ministry concluded.
A day earlier, the Pentagon's head, Mark Esper declared that the United States is studying
the situation in the Deir ez-Zor region and intends to strengthen its positions there in the
near future "to ensure the safety of oil fields."
The Ruskies are mad - Trump is stopping them from taking the oil, it belongs to the Kurds
for their revenue and if US wants to help them have it so what....US is staying to secure
those oilfields against ISIS taking it again!
If everyone listened to the President when he talks there wouldn't be any spin that anyone
could get away with.
The oil is on Kurdish land. This part of Syria is just a small sector of Kurdish territory
that has been stolen from them by dividing it between four "countries", each of which has
oil. This is why the territory was stolen and why the Kurds have become the world's best
fighters.
Putin brokered a deal to stop Turkey wiping the Kurds by having their fighting force
assimilate with the Syrian military and required Russian observers access to ensure the Turks
keep their word and not invade to wipe all the Kurd civilians in order to also take their
Syrian oil.
So the corrupt US generals get caught in the act. Their senators and reps on the payroll
are going to need some more of that fairy tale PR for POTUS to read to us at bedtime.
If we are to believe that this is to protect the oil fields then the oil revenue should be
going to Syria, even though the Kurds are on the land. Follow the money to find the truth
because there is no one you can trust on this stage.
MSM are simply not covering this story. Or the other story about the supposed gas attack
at Douma where evidence was adulterated and/or ignored completely under US pressure.
Expect the same from MH17.
WTF is going on with our leaders and corporate MSM....can no one in a leadership position
distinguish between lies and the truth? Or fantasy and reality? Where are the 'journalists'
who will stand up and tell the truth in MSM? They no longer exist.
18 wheel fuel trucks around here hold 10K gal. 50 truck loads 500K of un processed oil if
it's true? I though they just got there. but no telling who might steal under those
conditions.
That was August. this is now. The Russians must have really wanted that oil to finance
their occupation. Trump is preventing ISIS from using the oil as their piggy bank.
Wasn't Erdogan doing the same not too long ago? Shortly after Erdogan became close friends
with Putin. Does this mean Trump and Putin will become close friends as well? Or is this
simply a common practice between two people who undeservingly place relatives in government
positions? First Turkey hands over Al Baghdadi (he received medical treatment in Southern
Turkey in a private clinic owned by Erdogan's daughter guarded by MIT agents) so that they
can continue to commit genocide against Kurds in Turkey and Syria... and now the US is
stealing Syrian oil like how the Turks initially were doing. What a mess and a
disappointment. Hopefully Erdogan visits DC and unleashes his security guards beating any
person freely walking the streets while Trump smiles and describes him as a great leader.
Watch in coming weeks as the tanker convoys are proven to be rogue operations from an out
of control CIA / Cabal network. Trump removed the troops, and now Russia is shining a light
on it.
No coincidence another article on ZH brung attention to the Ukrainian wareehouse arsos..12
in 2 yrs..2017-2018 where stored munition were carted away...not to fight rebels n Donbass
but sold to Islamic groups in Syria..it was one of Bidens pals..one keeps the wars going
while the others steal siphon of resources..whatever isn't nailed down..I've never seen
anything like this..Democrats are truly CRIME INC
w/o that oil..Syria can never reconstruct itself..Usually in a War or ,after that is, the
victors help rebuild..what we see is pillaging and salting the earth and walk away.. as the
Romans did to enemies like Carthage..it will resemble Libya ...a shambles
So the smuggling is protected by air cover and special forces? Light up the fields using
some scud missiles. I'm sure Iran or Iraq have a few they could lend Syria. Can't sell it if
its burning.
Brits and Americans have pillaged, as any other empire, wherever they conquered.
After WW1 the 'Allies' robbed Germany of all foreign currency and its entire gold. This
triggering hyperinflation and mega crisis.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated' across
Europe.
In more recent history, the gold of Iraq, Ukraine and Libya was flown to Fort Knox.
All well documented.
This is common practice by empires. Just please stop pretending you were the good
guys , spreading freedom and democracy, because that's really a mockery and the
disgusting part of your invasions.
During WW2 central bank gold was pillaged from countries that were 'liberated'.
Exactly, that's where the US got its 8,000 tons of gold. Before WWII, the US had 2000 tons
of gold, after WWII it had 8,000 tons. Even today the US always steals the gold of the
countries it "liberates"
Help me understand why the USA would want to smuggle oil from Syria. When the USA has more
oil than all of the middleast.
Now I can see why Russia would blame the USA if smuggling Oil from Syria. Russia needs
that oil really bad. So to get the USA away from the Syrian oil fields they would of course
create a reason for the rest of the world that the USA is Dishonerable and must not be
trusted with Syrian oil. It is just too obvious to me, what Russia is trying to
accomplish.
Huh? The US is stealing the oil to deprive the Syrian people energy they need to rebuild
the country we destroyed. This is collective punishment of Syrians because they won't
overthrow Assad.
Collective punishment is a crime against humanity according to international law. There's
your impeachable offense. But don't worry, that kind of crime is ok with Shifty Schiff and
the rest of the Israel ***-kissers in Congress.
The US is NOT stealing the oil - the American Military have become PIRATES - no different
than Somali Red Sea Pirates or looters in Newark stealing diapers and TV's
This is nothing new. We've been stealing oil from dozens of countries for the past 75
years since WWII. The only difference is that Trump is being blatant about it which in a way
is weirdly refreshing.
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the
key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon
vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
The Courage Foundation , an international
protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has
published the findings of a panel it
convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its
investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the
OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General)
report that they are "unanimous in expressing
our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus
on 7 April 2018."
I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who
aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.
In late March of last year, President Trump
publicly
stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like
independent US congressional candidate Steve
Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had
already
been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal
of standing US Syria policy, as I
noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.
"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017,"
Cox told me on Twitter earlier
today.
"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."
There was immediate skepticism, partly because
acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have
been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing
to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet
highly ineffective
weapon in a battle he'd already essentially
won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the
Al Qaeda-linked
extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady
narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand
everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government
and perhaps saving their necks.
Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed,
the US State Department declared it to have
been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that
Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.
On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France
launched an airstrike on the Syrian government
as punishment for using chemical weapons,
citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The
public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation
could take place.
The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018
published an interim
report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental
samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits
like Charles Lister who claimed that
sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW
issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly
implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter
account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted
at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed
chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."
In May of this year, a leaked
internal document from the OPCW investigation was
published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report
published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment
said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability
both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the
forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.
The OPCW
indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's
Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by
clicking here . Establishment narrative
managers
had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented
from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications
that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.
Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes
deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.
The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General
José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering
once saw the lives of his
children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks
editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of
International Law Richard Falk , former British Army
Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut
Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor
Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab
World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable
professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into
the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint
statement and analytical points are
quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:
"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma,
near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical
analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained
conclusion ."
"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts
and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of
investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani
"A critical analysis of the
final report of the Douma
investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation
(chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "
From the section on Chemical Analysis:
"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking
gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in
the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact,
acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such
chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground
would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."
"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6),
it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called
'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background
presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals
in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."
"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated
by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing
hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation.
(' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The
panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis
simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific
."
From the section on Toxicology:
"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with
toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of
what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible
to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there
were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."
"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in
June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed
in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing
chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear
and of concern. "
From the section on Ballistic Studies:
"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical
crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because
of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics
were noted in the leaked study ."
From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":
"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the
inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to,
or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational
efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma
investigation."
This implicates State Department in the attempt to run a false flag operation. If we add that the State Department is the
key organization behind for color revolution against Trump that picture becomes even more disturbing. This is really a neocon
vipers nest.
Notable quotes:
"... This was because the public had already been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal of standing US Syria policy, as I noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun. ..."
"... "I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017," Cox told me on Twitter earlier today. ..."
"... And, like clockwork, on April 7 2018 dozens of civilians in Douma were killed in an incident which was quickly reported as a Syrian government chemical attack by all the usual establishment narrative managers on Syria , with everyone from the White Helmets to Charles Lister to Eliot Higgins to Julian Röpcke loudly flagging it on social media to draw the attention of mainstream news outlets who were slower to pick up the story. ..."
"... Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed, the US State Department declared it to have been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests. ..."
"... On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France launched an airstrike on the Syrian government as punishment for using chemical weapons, citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation could take place. ..."
"... The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018 published an interim report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits like Charles Lister who claimed that sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population." ..."
"... In May of this year, a leaked internal document from the OPCW investigation was published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government. ..."
"... The OPCW indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by clicking here . Establishment narrative managers had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work. ..."
"... "Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports, we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion ." ..."
"... "The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. " ..."
"... "The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact, acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported." ..."
"... "One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics were noted in the leaked study ." ..."
"... "Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to, or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma investigation." ..."
The Courage Foundation , an international
protection and advocacy group for whistleblowers, has
published the findings of a panel it
convened last week on the extremely suspicious behavior of the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in its
investigation of an alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria last year. After hearing an extensive presentation from a member of the
OPCW's Douma investigation team, the panel's members (including a world-renowned former OPCW Director General)
report that they are "unanimous in expressing
our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus
on 7 April 2018."
I'll get to the panel and its findings in a moment, but first I should provide some historical background so that readers who
aren't intimately familiar with this ongoing scandal can fully appreciate the significance of this new development.
In late March of last year, President Trump
publicly
stated that the US military would soon be withdrawing troops from Syria, causing some with an ear to the ground like
independent US congressional candidate Steve
Cox to predict that there would shortly be a false flag chemical weapons attack in that nation. This was because the public had
already
been shown that highly suspicious chemical attacks tended to happen when the Trump administration begins pushing for a reversal
of standing US Syria policy, as I
noted in April 2017 immediately following the alleged attack in Khan Shaykhun.
"I was able to predict Douma in 2018 because it happened already almost exactly 1 year prior, at Khan Shaykhun, April 4, 2017,"
Cox told me on Twitter earlier
today.
"Khan Shaykhun also occurred within days of the Trump Admin saying we're leaving Syria."
There was immediate skepticism, partly because
acclaimed journalists like Sy Hersh have
been highlighting plot holes in the official story about chemical weapons in Syria since 2013, partly because Assad would stand nothing
to gain and everything to lose by using a banned yet
highly ineffective
weapon in a battle he'd already essentially
won in that region, and partly because the people controlling things on the ground in Douma were the
Al Qaeda-linked
extremist group Jaysh-al Islam and the incredibly shady
narrative management operation known as the White Helmets. Those groups, unlike the Assad government, most certainly would stand
everything to gain by staging a chemical attack in the desperate hope that it would draw NATO powers into attacking the Syrian government
and perhaps saving their necks.
Long before any investigation into this suspicious incident could even be begun, much less completed,
the US State Department declared it to have
been a chemical weapons attack perpetrated by the Syrian government, saying "the Assad regime must be held accountable", and that
Russia "ultimately bears responsibility" for the attack. Which was of course mighty convenient for US geostrategic interests.
On the 14th of April 2018, the US, UK and France
launched an airstrike on the Syrian government
as punishment for using chemical weapons,
citing secret "intelligence" which the US government claimed gave them "very high confidence that Syria was responsible." The
public has to this day never been permitted to see this intelligence. This all happened before any formal international investigation
could take place.
The OPCW conducted their investigation, and in July 2018
published an interim
report saying that "no organophosphorus nerve agents or their degradation products were detected, either in the environmental
samples or in plasma samples from the alleged casualties." This ruled out sarin gas, invalidating earlier reports by Syria war pundits
like Charles Lister who claimed that
sarin had been used, but it didn't rule out chlorine gas. In March of this year the OPCW
issued its final report saying forensics were consistent with chlorine gas use and advancing a ballistics report which strongly
implicated the Assad government by implying it was an aerial drop (Syrian opposition militias have no air force). The official Twitter
account for the UK Delegation to the OPCW tweeted
at the time that the report "confirms chemical weapons used, demonstrating the vital importance of OPCW's work. This confirmed
chlorine attack was only the latest example of Asad regime's CW attacks on its own population."
In May of this year, a leaked
internal document from the OPCW investigation was
published by the Working Group on Syria, Propaganda and Media which completely contradicts the findings of the official report
published in March. The leaked Engineering Assessment
said that "observations at the scene of the two locations, together with subsequent analysis, suggest there is a higher probability
both cylinders were manually placed at those two locations rather than being delivered from aircraft," which would implicate the
forces on the ground in the incident rather than the Assad government.
The OPCW
indirectly confirmed the document's authenticity by telling the press that its release had been "unauthorised". Climate Audit's
Stephen McIntyre published an excellent thread breaking down how the document invalidates the OPCW's claims which you can read by
clicking here . Establishment narrative
managers
had a very difficult time spinning the fact that the OPCW had taken it upon itself to hide findings from the public which dissented
from its official report on an incident which preceded an international act of war upon a sovereign nation, and all the implications
that necessarily has for the legitimacy of the organization's other work.
Throughout this time, critical thinkers like myself have been aggressively smeared as deranged conspiracy theorists, war crimes
deniers and genocide deniers for expressing skepticism of the establishment-authorized narrative on Douma. Which takes us to today.
The Courage Foundation panel who met with the OPCW whistleblower consists of former OPCW Director General
José Bustani (whose highly successful peacemongering
once saw the lives of his
children threatened by John Bolton during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion in an attempt to remove him from his position), WikiLeaks
editor-in-chief Kristinn Hrafnsson , Professor of
International Law Richard Falk , former British Army
Major General John Holmes , Dr Helmut
Lohrer of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, German professor
Dr Guenter Meyer of the Centre for Research on the Arab
World, and former Deputy National Intelligence Officer for the Near East Elizabeth Murray of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for
Sanity.
So these are not scrubs. These are not "conspiracy theorists" or "Russian propagandists". These are highly qualified and reputable
professionals expressing deep concerns in the opaque and manipulative way the OPCW appears to have conducted its investigation into
the Douma incident. Some highlights from their joint
statement and analytical points are
quoted below, with my own emphasis added in bold:
"Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in Douma,
near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical
analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained
conclusion ."
"The convincing evidence of irregular behaviour in the OPCW investigation of the alleged Douma chemical attack confirms doubts
and suspicions I already had. I could make no sense of what I was reading in the international press. Even official reports of
investigations seemed incoherent at best. The picture is certainly clearer now, although very disturbing. "
~ Bustani
"A critical analysis of the
final report of the Douma
investigation left the panel in little doubt that conclusions drawn from each of the key evidentiary pillars of the investigation
(chemical analysis, toxicology, ballistics and witness testimonies,) are flawed and bear little relation to the facts. "
From the section on Chemical Analysis:
"The interpretation of the environmental analysis results is equally questionable. Many, if not all, of the so-called 'smoking
gun' chlorinated organic chemicals claimed to be not naturally present in the environment' (para 2.6) are in fact ubiquitous in
the background, either naturally or anthropogenically (wood preservatives, chlorinated water supplies etc). The report, in fact,
acknowledges this in Annex 4 para 7, even stating the importance of gathering control samples to measure the background for such
chlorinated organic derivatives. Yet, no analysis results for these same control samples (Annex 5), which inspectors on the ground
would have gone to great lengths to gather, were reported."
"Although the report stresses the 'levels' of the chlorinated organic chemicals as a basis for its conclusions (para 2.6),
it never mentions what those levels were -- high, low, trace, sub-trace? Without providing data on the levels of these so-called
'smoking-gun' chemicals either for background or test samples, it is impossible to know if they were not simply due to background
presence . In this regard, the panel is disturbed to learn that quantitative results for the levels of 'smoking gun' chemicals
in specific samples were available to the investigators but this decisive information was withheld from the report ."
"The final report also acknowledges that the tell-tale chemicals supposedly indicating chlorine use, can also be generated
by contact of samples with sodium hypochlorite, the principal ingredient of household bleaching agent (para 8.15). This game-changing
hypothesis is, however, dismissed (and as it transpires, incorrectly) by stating no bleaching was observed at the site of investigation.
(' At both locations, there were no visible signs of a bleach agent or discoloration due to contact with a bleach agent' ). The
panel has been informed that no such observation was recorded during the on-site inspection and in any case dismissing the hypothesis
simply by claiming the non -observation of discoloration in an already dusty and scorched environment seems tenuous and unscientific
."
From the section on Toxicology:
"The toxicological studies also reveal inconsistencies, incoherence and possible scientific irregularities. Consultations with
toxicologists are reported to have taken place in September and October 2018 (para 8.87 and Annex 3), but no mention is made of
what those same experts opined or concluded. Whilst the final toxicological assessment of the authors states ' it is not possible
to precisely link the cause of the signs and symptoms to a specific chemical ' (para 9.6) the report nonetheless concludes there
were reasonable grounds to believe chlorine gas was the chemical (used as a weapon)."
"More worrying is the fact that the panel viewed documented evidence that showed other toxicologists had been consulted in
June 2018 prior to the release of the interim report. Expert opinions on that occasion were that the signs and symptoms observed
in videos and from witness accounts were not consistent with exposure to molecular chlorine or any reactive-chlorine-containing
chemical. Why no mention of this critical assessment, which contradicts that implied in the final report, was made is unclear
and of concern. "
From the section on Ballistic Studies:
"One alternative ascribing the origin of the crater to an explosive device was considered briefly but, despite an almost identical
crater (understood to have resulted from a mortar penetrating the roof) being observed on an adjacent rooftop, was dismissed because
of ' the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristics'. In contrast, explosive fragmentation characteristics
were noted in the leaked study ."
From the section titled "Exclusion of inspectors and attempts to obfuscate":
"Contrary to what has been publicly stated by the Director General of the OPCW it was evident to the panel that many of the
inspectors in the Douma investigation were not involved or consulted in the post-deployment phase or had any contribution to,
or knowledge of the content of the final report until it was made public . The panel is particularly troubled by organisational
efforts to obfuscate and prevent inspectors from raising legitimate concerns about possible malpractices surrounding the Douma
investigation."
Oct 26 2019 American foreign policy elites are in near-unanimous agreement that President
Trump's withdrawal of troops from northern Syria, along with the ensuing influx of Russian and
Syrian troops, is a "gift to Putin." Some variant of that phrase has over the past two weeks
appeared in headlines from the venerable New York Times, the venerable Foreign Affairs, and the
quasi-venerable CNN, among other mainstream outlets.
Russian elites have
joined their American counterparts in viewing recent developments in Syria as a zero-sum
game that Russia won and the United States lost. One Russian newspaper touted Russia's "triumph
in the Middle East," and an analyst on Russian TV said this triumph is "sad for America."
There are certainly things to be sad about. It's sad that Trump's withdrawal -- impulsively
ordered, with no diplomatic preparation -- has caused so much more havoc and suffering,
especially for the Kurds, than was necessary. And to me, at least, it's sad that Trump, in his
record-setting incompetence, is giving military withdrawals a bad name.
But I don't buy the premise of the "gift to Putin" meme -- that a decline of American influence
in Syria, and a commensurate growth in Russian influence, is inherently a sad thing for
America. This shift may well be good for Putin, but it could also be, in the long run, good for
the United States and good for the Middle East broadly.
Some people may find the previous sentence, with it's win-win overtones, deeply disorienting
if not flat-out unintelligible. The Cold War idea that the U.S. and Russia are playing a
zero-sum game has gotten a second wind in recent years, in part because of genuine contentions
between the two but also because of #Resistance psychology. Acting on the intuition that the
friend of my enemy is my enemy, lots of anti-Trumpers look at the often-cozy relationship
between Trump and Vladimir Putin (including their symbiosis during the 2016 presidential
campaign) and conclude that Russia must be thwarted at every stop.
But what most needs thwarting is this archaic way of looking at foreign policy -- as a
Manichaean struggle for influence between the United States and its allies, on the one hand,
and the forces of darkness on the other. The U.S. shares important interests with Russia --
and, for that matter, with Russian allies Syria and Iran -- and the sooner it recognizes that,
the better.
I noted one example of this in last week's newsletter: Russia and Syria and Iran are enemies of
ISIS, one of the final obstacles to firm regime control of Syria. So any reprieve to ISIS
granted by America's abrupt withdrawal may be temporary.
But a larger and more critical point is that the challenge facing Russia and its client regime
in Syria -- not just consolidating control of Syria but rebuilding a devastated country --
leaves Russia with no interest in the further destabilization of the Middle East. Which is
good, because it's hard to imagine the Middle East getting much more unstable -- especially
along the fault line between Iran and Syria on the one hand and Israel and Saudi Arabia on the
other -- without another disastrous war breaking out.
Russia has already shown signs of being able to play a constructive role here -- a fact that,
oddly, has been emphasized even by some who buy the "gift to Putin" thesis. Hal Brands of the
American Enterprise Institute -- in a Bloomberg Opinion
essay titled, "Putin Conquered the Middle East. The U.S. Can Get It Back" -- notes that
"Putin has shown diplomatic flexibility, keeping the lines open to nearly all players
throughout the region."
Brands laments "the collapse of America's position in the region and Moscow's ascendance as the
key power broker in the Syrian civil war." He goes on: "Moscow, in partnership with Iran and
its proxies, has made itself the centerpiece of the diplomacy and regional power struggles
surrounding that conflict. To what other capital would both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
of Israel and Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran's Quds Force, trek to discuss Middle
Eastern security?"
Not Washington, certainly -- and that's the point! It isn't just that Russia shares America's
interest in a stable Middle East. It's that Russia, unlike America, is in a position to do
something about it. Yet Brands is so busy recoiling at Russia's regional rise that he doesn't
welcome, or perhaps even quite recognize, its potential benefits -- even as he comes
tantalizingly close to spelling them out.
Brands's disposition is shared by many in the American foreign policy establishment. They
combine an awareness that America hasn't translated its regional power into productive
diplomacy with a deep aversion to any waning of that power. This isn't as ironic as it may
sound. Many, perhaps most, of them see America's diplomatic impotence as a product of the Trump
era. They want to preserve American influence so that, once Trump is gone, it can again be used
wisely.
Hope is a wonderful thing, but in this case you have to wonder what its historical basis is.
When exactly in recent American history could you have gotten an Iranian leader, and not
just an Israeli leader, to trek to Washington? Would that be, say, right after George W. Bush
declared Iran part of the "axis of evil"? Even Barack Obama, more intent on improving relations
with Iran than any recent president, never got all the way to rapprochement. To read the rest of this piece, go to
Politico Magazine . [ Back story: A Politico editor who read the piece in last week's NZN that noted
the shared Russian-US interest in subduing ISIS asked me if I wanted to do a piece on other
non-zero-sum aspects of Russia's growing influence in the Middle East -- in other words, a
piece that would rebut the "gift to Putin" argument more broadly. This piece, published in
Politico Magazine a few hours before this week's newsletter came out, is the result.]
"... Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon. ..."
"... Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia further into the ground. ..."
"... That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil and gas only in Euro. ..."
"... US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the fastest, real fuckups. ..."
"... I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the 2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace. ..."
"... Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the boot . ..."
"... Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup attempt? ..."
... Somebody leaked e-mails from the DNC showing that it was rigging the nomination for
Clinton and she lost a
99% certain election. Immediately, her campaign settled on blaming Russia for both.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November
2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to
engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours,
with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to
the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From
Shattered
, quoted
here .)
The bogus – bogus because most of the people on his team were part of the conspiracy
and knew there was no collusion – Mueller investigation dragged on until – despite
the endless " bombshells "
– it finally stopped. But the crazies insist not guilty but
not exonerated ! And Trumputin's
principal conspiracist rants on .
Everything I mention below comes from "trusted sources". Therefore we must assume that all
of them – Putin wants Trump to buy Greenland, Russians want to get Americans arguing
about pizza, Russians have no moral sense and all the rest – are not "conspiracy
theories" but honestly "more probable".
" A Kremlin-Linked
Firm Invested Millions in Kentucky. Were They After More Than Money? " To ask the
question is to answer it, isn't it? "[T]hey warn the deal is a stalking horse for a new kind
of Russian meddling in America, one that exploits the U.S. free-market system instead of its
elections". So not only do Putin's super powers threaten our brains but his hands are in our
pockets too.
Tulsi Gabbard questions Washington's addiction to regime-change wars and actually met
Assad. This makes her not only Assad's "
mouthpiece " but (because all enemies are connected) the "
New Darling of 'Russia's Propaganda Machine '".
And don't let the facts confuse you: what Moscow has done is no
guide to what it could do : "Russia has generally followed international law and
procedure in establishing the limits of its extended continental shelf. Russia could choose
to unilaterally establish those limits if the procedures prove unfavourable and could utilize
its military capabilities in an effort to deny access to disputed Arctic waters or
resources". USAID must counter " Malign
Kremlin Influence " (and you thought USAID was about being " the world's premier international development agency "). The
astute reader will, of course, have noticed that all this is projection
. Serious observers have long understood that when Washington and its minions accuse Moscow
of something it's an admission that they are already doing it
Russia, Russia, Russia, unchanged since whenever: "
A Post-Soviet 'War and Peace': What Tolstoy's Masterwork Explains About Putin's Foreign
Policy ". Of course that's a famously long novel, full of impenetrable Russian names and,
because Putin has probably read it, something no self-respecting American would want to read
( gotta watch these
tricky Russian novelists – propagandists every one) so here's the short version:
"In the early decades of the nineteenth century, Napoleon (like Putin after him) wanted to
construct his own international order "
Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences. We have just learned that Putin phoned
Bush a couple of days before 911 to warn him that something long-prepared and big was coming
out of Afghanistan. Other Russian warnings had been dismissed by Condoleezza Rice –
supposedly a Russia "expert" – as "Russian bitterness toward Pakistan for supporting the
Afghan mujahideen". One is reminded of Chamberlain's dismissal of Stalin's attempts to form an
anti-Hitler alliance because of his "most profound distrust of Russia" (
see Habakkuk comment ). In some alternate universe they listened to Moscow in the 1930s and
in the 2000s, but, in the one we live in, they didn't. And they don't.
Or maybe (foolish optimism!) this is starting to end: after all, it's been a complete
failure. I especially enjoyed the NYT, that bastion of the
Russian-conspiracy/Putin-superpowers/Trump-treason meme, solemnly opining :
"That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder relationship with Russia
and peel it away from China. But his approach has been ham-handed and at times even counter to
American interests and values." Ham-handed! – here's the NYT's view of the Trump-Putin "
love affair " again
if you missed it the first time. And now it's Trump's fault that relations with Russia aren't
better! French President Macron has recently said that " I believe we should rebuild and revise the
architecture oftrust between Russia and the European
Union ." And Trump rather brutally delivered the
message to Ukraine's new president that he ought to talk to Putin .
Well, we'll see. Russophobia runs deep and the Russians have probably got the message. As
long as we're stuck in a mindset of "
Nine Things Russia Must Do Before Being Allowed to Rejoin the G7 " it's not going to
change. An arrogant invitation is not an invitation.
The ossified club of the imperialist G7 has served its time and the times they are a
changin'.
Without China as the 2nd (and soon) largest economy, nothing goes in this world and ever
since 2014 Russia was forced to look to the East for not bowing down to the imperial US
and
its minions in the G7, ousted from the G8.
Thus only the broader spectrum of the G20
makes
any sense in the context of the world economy.
Paperclips carried the last message from the Wolf's lair: "The western world must unite
against the slavic hordes".
.
They are still peddling the same mantra. Kind of sad, really. The world is going through a
phase change. All the symptoms are there:
Global cooling; Failing crops; African Swine Fever; huge asymmetric response from the
world population over energy price increases... Other signs are more subtle but the dying
culture of the shopping mall must be noted; Amazon; Alexa.
The US is following the lead of the ghosts of WWII to its own detriment. Brzezinsky's
Grand Chessboard is no more, all its objectives have been defeated. The "World order"
nightmare is fading away fast.
One has to be amazed that these desperate MSM & political idiots get so much mileage
out of this dead horse. Worse yet is that anyone - catching the first whiff of a Russiadiddit
narrative - doesn't reflexively just pass on and ignore it.
Libs and neocons are too stupid to see the Russia situation with any clarity. They think
it's still 1951 and they're battling the commies hither and yon.
What those two aforementioned groups of dumb asses represent is mr global in their corner
and, in the other corner, national culture and sovereignty.
Back then, I remember you saying (I remember because I have a brain the size of a planet)
that Putin was finished and that you would be out of here. You indeed disappeared for a while
to come back some time ago. Back then, your postings were more elaborate and eloquent. Now,
not so much. Makes me wonder what happened to you in the meanwhile...
Oh, and Putin is still here. Despite the sanctions and despite the Soros funded color
revolution against him. Don't get me wrong, I don't trust him much (neither do I trust any
politician in the world) but he is the result of the US policy of the 90s to push Russia
further into the ground.
That color revolution might get stepped up a bit now since Rosneft decided to trade oil
and gas only in Euro.
According to Google and Michael R. Gordon of the NYT, there was a bombing of 116 ISIS
tanker trucks on Monday November 16, 2015, three days before the Russian attack. And then
again on Monday November 23, 2015, four days after the Russian bombing, when the US destroyed
295 ISIS tankers.
I remember nothing about "Tidal Wave II", and the US attack 3 days before the renown
Russian attack. But hey, I'm an oldtimer and my memory is dim. Do you? Or is this an example of the Pentagon's 'Memory Hole' and Winston Smith's day
job?
(1) after all Geroge Herbert Walker Bush was a corrupt crook who stole the money
from the AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a
blatant tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real
democratic political opposition.
(2) after all William Jefferson Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(3) after all George W Bush is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(4) after all **** Cheney is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN
people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will
not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political
opposition.
(5) after all Barak Hussein Obama is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(6) after all Joe Biden is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the AMERICAN
people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant tyrant, who will
not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic political
opposition.
(7) after all Hillary Clinton is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
(8) after all Victoria Nuland is a corrupt crook who stole the money from the
AMERICAN people, just to enrich his family and lackeys, and is nothing but a blatant
tyrant, who will not allow any real democratic election, nor any sort of real democratic
political opposition.
Read in their own words as the DNC went insane election night -- - Read the new book for sale on amazon the night 'Trump Derangement Syndrome' began the democrats are insane with LOSER hate
the whole russia deal was a con
their deranged hate for our President is why we must remove them all from office
I like Putin as the alien love child reincarnation of Rasputin, see, it is all in the name
;DDD.
The more US and EU media attacked Putin in that PR=B$ way, the more popular Putin
became.
Here's an attack. Putin is doing deals with Saudi Arabia, this after Saudi Arabia funded
terrorism in Chechnya killing thousands of Russians, I mean it is really bad, the optics
would be quite damaging, in fact I challenged them on it via Vesti and was immediately
censored, no bad language just pointing out reality.
The funny thing is, the US B$=PR machine can not use it because it would mean attacking
Saudi Arabia. So there they have a great opportunity to really stick it to Putin, taking
Saudi Arabia money after Saudi Arabia funded the murder of thousands of Russians, really bad
political optics (to be clear my beef is with Saudi Arabia and their murdering Australians
with the terrorist funding the House of Saud did all over the globe and not with the Russian
government, apart from them letting the House of Saud get away with it, just like the slimey
American government).
Passed it onto Voice of America, to stick it to Vesti with a damned if you do and damned
if you don't message and as you can guess, silence from the US government, bwa hah hah. Their
chance to attack and silence because they would also have to attack the House of Saud.
Now the reason Russia media was uptight and hence the government, well, after all the US
**** ups all over the place, they stand to gain diplomatic alliances with Iran, Saudi Arabia
and Venezuela and then add in Russian Oil and well, the US just clumsily and stupidly handed
over control of oil to Russia, if they can tie up the deal with Saudi Arabia and so US sent
more troops to Saudi Arabia during the negotiation process, what a pack of clowns.
Oil is yesterdays tech, nuclear energy is where the focus should be and there are much
better designs available including a low output reactor, quite a smart design, it is all
changing and the US really has to push nuclear, abandon oil and make deals with Australia and
Japan, one for uranium and the other for manufacturing including rebuilding US
manufacturing.
US diplomacy and foreign policy has become amateur hour and who can steal the most the
fastest, real fuckups.
I think the label first became widely used to slander people who questioned the details
surrounding the JFK assassination, and forty years later, there aren't too many thinking
people who still believe the Warren Commission's "lone gunman" explanation. That explanation
is doubted by everyone who has taken the time to look into the details, and believed only by
people who refuse to.
Which is "theory" and which is fact? In the absence of a full confession, this can only be
decided by a preponderance of evidence, and it would be silly to come to a conclusion on any
matter without looking at all the evidence available. This is only common sense, just as it
is safe to assume some degree of guilt or complicity on the part of anyone who lies about an
event, or tries to hide, plant, or destroy any type of evidence.
Conspiracy theories arise from evidence. After the government releases an explanation of a
particular event, a conspiracy theory is only born because evidence exists to disprove their
explanation, or at least call it into question. There's nothing insane about it, unless you
define sanity as believing whatever the government tells you. In light of the fact that our
government lies to us regularly, I would define believing everything they tell you as utter
stupidity.
The orthodox, for their part, dismiss the unorthodox as conspiracy theorists (by which
term they mean: people whose opinions are based in something other than objective reality
– if it were objectively real, the sources which provide the orthodox with their
opinions would have told them about it).
In July of 1996, flight 800 exploded over Long Island. Shortly after their terrorist
explanation failed scrutiny, our government then explained the event by claiming that a
faulty electrical system caused a spark that ignited a fuel tank, and the people who doubted
this explanation were quickly labeled "conspiracy theorists." More than a hundred witnesses
saw a missile travel from the ground up to the plane just prior to its explosion, but rather
than being treated as eyewitnesses to an event, they were labeled "conspiracy theorists,"
which label allowed all subsequent investigation to ignore the strongest evidence in the
matter.
Our "investigative" news agencies decided to accept and disseminate the official story,
and they helped us forget the U.S. naval station nearby, the fact that missiles were
regularly test fired there, and naturally, they paid no heed to more than a hundred
"conspiracy theorists" who saw the plane get blown out of the sky by a missile. I believe
that the U.S. Navy accidentally shot down flight 800, and that's my belief because it's the
most sensible explanation that can be drawn from the available evidence. I'm not theorizing
about conspiracies, but there are conflicting explanations of the event, and if the Navy did
accidentally blow a passenger plane out of the sky, who would have a motive to lie about it?
The U.S. government, or a hundred witnesses?
The one thing that always puzzled me about flight 800 was why a gas tank explosion lead to
no more waiting in your cars outside the terminals and additional gate security?
"Responding to repeated criticisms of the security at Kennedy International Airport after
the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800, Port Authority officials announced a series of
changes yesterday intended to make it more difficult for anyone to plant a bomb on a
plane."
But it was the jet fuel fumes from sitting on the hot tarmac and a frayed wire. So how in
the world did someone think about the B word?
I just watched CNN's 1-hour prime-time special on "Russian spying" on State
Department in 1999 (which was, like, 20 years ago. I guess the Russians also colluded in the
2000 presidential elections with the aim of electing George W. Bush) I kid you not. These guys are about as subtle as a gigantic iron mace.
I practically had to be hospitalized for acute lobotomy. An hour later, I still feel like
3/4s of my brain were surgically sucked out by Jeff Zucker. Will have to have me some Russian
sex soon to regain some of my missing IQ.
Within the first few years after the Kennedy Assassination, the American people were
collecting evidence and pointing fingers at the CIA, the Military Industrial Complex, the
Mossad and Israel. The late Michael Collins Piper provides all the evidence necessary in his
book FINAL JUDGEMENT to realize that Israel had Kennedy killed.
1967 is the same year Israel murdered 34 US Servicemen and injured over 200 others during
its cowardly attack on the USS Liberty.
In the mid-sixties, the world was first introduced in full baloney mode to the
Holocaust.
Intersting coincidence.
Maybe the deep state (Central Banks and Israel) desparately needed a BAIT and SWITCH to
hide their tracks.
Today, our kids must bow before the Holocaust g_d and yet few realize that JFK wanted to
eliminate Israel's nuclear weapons and was instead sacrificed for GREATER ISRAEL
For Bibi, being against him, equates to Antisemitism, for Trump being critical of him is
Anti-American, for ZH being opposed to Putin is a Anti-Russian.
Anti-Russia prejudice can have unhappy consequences.
Fortunately this is not 1938 ! Now its easy for people to look behind the curtain using the internet and see this is all
BS . It only takes one voiciferous truth teller , to get all the 'believing' sheeple to also
have a look behind the curtain . I suspect this hysteria is designed to keep Gov slaves in line : toe the line or get the
boot .
So, is the anti-Russia/anti-Putin a head fake? By looking to be oh-so over the top freaked
out about anything Russian, and taking on the mantle of looking freaked out (though in
actuality are not), Democrats are perhaps intentionally making him look less harmful and
dangerous by comparison.
After all, the Russian communist form of government, a dictatorship run by a small
percentage of elites, is exactly the road down which Democrats want to take the U.S. Similar
comparisons of this fashion can be made with the Chinese communist government, too.
The Democratic primary was obviously rigged. Democrats thought, with insider help from the
FBI, CIA, IRS and others, that the actual election was rigged, too.
Is it just coincidental, the Deep State and minion (dupe) based "Resistance" from day one
of (actually before) Trumps inauguration - which more recently looks distinctly like a coup
attempt? With, of course, the vast majority of news outlets (virtually all Left leaning) in
the US pushing and covering the obvious subversion. Hence, the astoundingly intense looks of
deep shock on TV when it was realized an "outsider," Trump, would win?
Last week, Thierry Meyssan posted an excellent paper ( https://www.voltairenet.org/article208007.html),
in which he states that the recent events in Syria, in which 'a quarter of the country was
freed in a week' is not only a victory for Assad, but the defeat of the 'military strategy to
establish the supremacy of financial capitalism'. These events mark the overturning of the
world order that has been in place since the end of WWII.
What I find remarkable is how quickly the old order has been overturned. The old order was
initially a bi-polar world, which evolved, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, into a
Uni-Polar World Order under the control of 'financial capitalism' (i.e. the 'Globalists',
also referred to as 'international financial elites', 'Anglo-Zionists', the 'Davos Crowd',
etc.). Arguably the Uni-Pole's power peaked in the early 2000s after the creation of the EU
and the eastern expansion of NATO. The first cracks in the Uni-Pole's hegemonic power
appeared in 2003 with the fiasco in Iraq, and in 2008 with the Global Financial Crisis. But
even as late as 2015, when Obama dismissed Russia's entry into Syria as nothing but Russia
stepping into a quagmire, the 'Globalists' could foresee no opposing force that would prevent
them from consolidating their Uni-Polar World Order into an enduring world-wide system of
'Global Governance' through a 'Rules-based International Order' under the 'Globalists'
control and enforced by the U.S. and NATO. But now, as Meyssan suggests, only four years
later, the Uni-Polar World Order has been toppled.
In its place a 'Multi-Polar World' order is emerging. I would like to suggest that the
outlines of this emerging order are as follows:
1. The dominant pole of this Multi-polar World is that led by the alliance of Russia and
China. Spanning Eurasia from the Pacific to the Mediterranean, this pole includes the
countries of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, and the Eurasian Economic Union, and
includes Iran, Iraq, Syria, and possibly, in the future, Turkey.
2. The second pole will be the remnants of the 'Globalist' empire, stripped, however, of
Europe (ex. U.K.) and any Asian representation, i.e. the U.S., U.K., Israel and likely
Canada.
3. A third group consists of countries that are currently either occupied militarily by
the U.S. or are part of NATO, but are either economically dependent on China or are in
economic competition with the U.S. This includes most of Europe, Japan, South Korea,
Australia, New Zealand, and the GCC countries (KSA, UAE, etc.). These countries cannot be
considered as poles by themselves, for while some of them may have the economic weight to be
considered a pole, such as Germany and Japan, they lack the geo-political weight. These
countries are likely to try to escape from their status as American ('Globalist') vassals and
become independent nations dealing equitably with all the poles of the new Multi-Polar World.
In my view, it is unlikely that the EU will survive the birth of this new-world order in its
current form. At best it is likely to revert back to a European free trade area, in which
each country will recapture its sovereignty and its own currency.
4. A fourth group consists of countries that, while not being a part of the Russia/China
pole will be under its wing, with Russia providing military, political and geo-political
support, and China providing economic support. This group includes countries which are
currently either under threat from the 'Globalists' (ie. Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia,
etc.), are in turmoil due to exploitation by the 'Globalists' (ie. Chile, Argentina, Brazil,
etc.) or are outright failed states (most of Africa). Under the protection of Russia and
China, they will once again have a chance to overcome the anarchy of the past 20 or so years
and to return to peaceful development.
5. A fifth group consists of what will likely end up as secondary poles of the Multi-Polar
World. These are countries that today are both independent and have the geo-political and
economic weight to continue to function independently. This group includes the likes of India
and the ASEAN countries.
Uncertain is the time that it will take for this emerging order to stabilize. In my view,
this depends to a great extent on whether Trump survives impeachment and wins in 2020. If he
does then the emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order could be quite quick and painless, as
it is aligned with the policies that Trump has been espousing from the beginning of his
presidential campaign in 2015. To 'Make America Great Again' requires that the U.S. recover
its sovereignty and redevelop its industrial power. After all, a countries wealth, and thus
its power, is what it produces, and a country that doesn't produce as much as it consumes
will, in the end, consume itself. To redevelop its industrial power the U.S. needs to isolate
itself, as Trump is attempting to do behind a wall of tariff barriers and a devalued
currency. The Multi-Polar World Order will allow the U.S. the opportunity it needs isolate,
and then rebuild, itself. One must remember that it was the isolation of the U.S. in the 19th
and early 20th centuries that enabled the U.S. to become so powerful in the first place.
If, on the other hand, Trump is either overthrown by the 'Globalists' or defeated in 2020
then the emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order will be fraught with conflict. The
'Globalists' will fight it every step of the way, using all tools at their disposal, and
particularly the military muscle of the U.S. and NATO. For the 'Globalists' the Multi-Polar
World Order means the dispossession of their power and wealth. However, I believe that will
simply be a case of the losers continuing to fight long after the war has been lost. It is
only a question of how much time that it will take, and death and destruction that will
occur, before the U.S. and NATO are exhausted.
The emergence of the Multi-Polar World Order, once it stabilizes, is likely to usher in a
new era of peace and human development, similar to that which the world experienced in the
decades following WWII.
I agree with dh-mtl that we are entering a multi-polar world but that is happening because of
the deep corruption and divisions within the Washington Deep State. Still, the imperial
forces are formidable and should any faction get full control of them an expansion of current
wars is very possible. Trump is trying to fashion and has been trying to fashion a coalition
but he's failed and is failing. Media narratives, in the USA, always represent the interests
of the factions in power and they are all against Trump. This election is critical to world
history. Will we get a restoration with Biden (or Buttigieg) or Pence or will we start moving
in a new direction with Warren or Sanders? If the latter then the Deep State may move in a
new direction and begin to negotiated with Russia/China. If Trump then more chaos.
Sorry John, the quote that you posted was not taken from Thierry Meyssan, but is my
original work. I only quoted from Meyssan in the first paragraph.
The decades after WW2 may have spawned the CIA and their dirty tricks, but in spite of
this, the stand off between the U.S. and Russia, the bi-polar world, ensured a level of peace
and stability that lasted until the fall of the Soviet Union. These decades were undoubtedly
on of the greatest eras of human development that mankind has experienced.
I think those 5 categories are pretty much spot on. They also appear to be in sync with
Russia's envisioned relation with the main elements of those categories, as they develop in
practice. China's positioning looks more obscure though, but that must be due to lack of
information on my part more than anything else. What Russia initiates, China consolidates in
its broad strokes, but i am missing how coherent the details where the space of action
actually overlaps between the two.
The switch between the first and second category members from the previous status quo
appears to be settled along with tolerable levels of conflict. Circe won't like to hear it,
but in my opinion, we have Trump to thank for that, not because he intended for the switch,
but because he stresses on the US economical system the main effective capitalist
contradiction: productive vs financial capital. The tumultuous social and psychological state
of the US, attest to that contradiction despite emerging as very heated but apparently
distant themes (immigration, gender issues, the personality and conduct of the president,
etc..), Circe would have us believe it is all kabuki. I believe it is real, commonly
misanalysed but very very real.
What I have yet to see though is the multi-polar trend to take root. Obvious signs would
be Germany and Europe in general of course, but at best as a block of sovereigns, and for
that, Frankfurt will have to surrender before the remaining capitals. That may actually come
about as production takes the main stage, and this could be very sudden.
This is obvious positive thinking. An anecdote:
Once I super glued the tip of my finger. I had a box cutter nearby and I just thought - I
simply must use it as a razor blade to scrap the glue out, movements perpendicular to the
blade, and I'll be fine - whatever I do just don't move along the .... zaaaat - here's the
scar. The point being: as soon as the wrong thought crossed my mind, my hand simply ignored
the "don't do" part of the thinking and obeyed the rest.
The Duran's Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the DOJ's
Russiagate probe taking it up a notch, to now be turned into criminal investigation.
Deep State officials John Brennan, James Clapper and James Comey better lawyer up.
What began as an administrative review by the Justice Department into the origins of
Russiagate has "shifted" to a criminal inquiry , according to the New
York Times , citing two people familiar with the matter.
The move will allow prosecutor John H Durham the power to subpoena documents and witnesses,
to impanel a grand jury, and to file criminal charges. Durham's progress has
been closely monitored by Attorney General William Barr, who appointed the veteran investigator
in May , tasking him with looking into FBI and CIA intelligence gathering operations
surrounding the 2016 US election.
As the Daily
Caller ' s Chuck Ross notes, Barr said on April 10 that he believed "spying" had taken
place against the Trump campaign , and that he doesn't buy former FBI officials' version of how
the collusion investigation began.
Little is known about Durham's activities so far in the investigation. The Times report
said it is unclear when the investigation took on a criminal element, or what specific crime
Durham is investigating.
Durham
accompanied Barr to Italy late in September as part of an inquiry into U.S. intelligence
agents' activities there during the 2016 campaign. They also inquired about Joseph Mifsud, a
mysterious Maltese professor who established contact with Trump aide George Papadopoulos in
2016. – Daily
Caller
Just over three weeks ago , the Times also reported that President Trump asked the
Australian Prime Minister to help Barr uncover the origins of "Russiagate," a move which
Justice Department officials said "would be neither illegal nor untoward for Trump to ask."
And according to NBC News , Durham has set his sights on former CIA Director John Brennan and former
national intelligence director James Clapper .
Durham's investigation has been running parallel to a probe by Justice Department Inspector
General (and registered Democrat) Michael Horowitz, who told Congress on Thursday that he
expects his report to be "lengthy," but able to be made mostly available to the public.
The Durham probe is similar to a Justice Department inspector general's investigation into
the FBI's surveillance of Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. Michael Horowitz, the inspector
general, told Congress on Thursday that the report of that investigation is "lengthy" and
that he anticipates most of it will be made public.
Horowitz has been investigating whether the FBI misled the foreign surveillance court in
spy applications against Page. Investigators relied heavily on the Steele dossier in the
applications, though information in that document was largely unverified. Unlike Durham,
Horowitz has not had subpoena power, and cannot use a grand jury as part of his
investigation. – Daily
Caller
And of course, with Durham's administrative review turning into a criminal probe , the
Times has already given away the predictable response from the left; Barr is
investigating the Obama intelligence community to help Trump win in 2020. Nothing to see here
folks, right?
"... The below analysis is provided by " Ehsani " -- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical analysis blog, Syria Comment . ..."
"... An M1 Abrams tank at the Udairi Range Complex in Kuwait, via Army National Guard/Military Times. ..."
Here's
Why Trump's "Secure Syria's Oil" Plan Will Prove Practically Impossible
by
Tyler Durden
Sat, 10/26/2019 - 23:30
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The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
" -- a Middle
East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst who visits the region frequently and writes
for the influential geopolitical analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.
Much has been debated since President Trump tweeted that
"The U.S has secured the oil"
in Syria. Is this feasible? Does it make any sense? The below will
explain how and why
the answer is a resounding
NO
.
Al-Omar and Conoco fields are already secured by Kurdish-led SDF and U.S forces. Some of the oil
from these fields was being sold through third parties to Syria's government by giving it in crude
form and taking back half the quantity as refined product
(the government owns the
refineries).
Syria's government now has access to oil fields inside the 32km zone
(established
by the Turkish military incursion and subsequent withdrawal of Kurdish forces). Such fields can produce
up to 100K barrels a day and will already go a long way in terms of meeting the country's immediate
demand.
So the importance of accessing oil in SDF/U.S hands is not as pressing any longer.
SDF/U.S forces can of course decide to sell the oil to Iraq's Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)
but Syria's government now has control over the border area connecting Syria to KRG territory through
both Yaaroubia and Al-Mallkiya.
The Syrian government also now has control over supply of electricity. This was made possible by
taking control of the Tishreen and Furat dams.
Operating those fields needs electric power
supply and the state is now the provider.
Securing and operating these fields also entails paying salaries to those operating the fields.
International companies would be very reluctant to get involved without legal backing to operate
the fields.
"Securing the oil" therefore
can only mean preventing the Syrian state from accessing al-Omar/Conoco
only (not oil in the north)
. It's unlikely anything can be sold or transported.
And let's not forget "securing" this oil would need
ready air cover, and all for what?
SDF composition included Arab fighters and tribes who accepted Kurds in leadership since they had
American support and key cities in north. Many of those Arabs are already switching and joining the
Syrian Army.
"Securing" oil for benefit of the Kurds is likely to antagonize the Arab fighters
and tribes in the region.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more
than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
The psychopaths destroyed the last secular country in the ME. Same
with Lybia. Now all we get are extremists on all sides. Mossad doing
what it knows best, bringing chaos for the psychopaths.
By withdrawing from Northern Kurdistan and by making an exception
for the oil fields, Genius President Trump just told the world a number
of things:
To trust the U.S.A. as an ally is sheer stupidity
The "alternative media" theory that it is all about oil (and
possible gas) has been proven true
The U.S.A. is being ruled by a hobbyist who has no strategic
plans, replacing them with a "random walk" concept
Of course, the European allies (except Turkey) are still refusing
to learn from this experience. "Duck and cover until November 2020"
is their current tactics. Not sure if this is a good idea.
Turkey has learned to go their own ways, but I don't think it is
a good idea to create ever more enemies at one's borders. Greece,
Armenia, the Kurdish regions, Syria, Cyprus, not sure how their stance
is towards Iran. Reminds me of Germany before both World Wars. Won't
end well.
"America/The US", a label, is
actually just a location on a map and is not a reference to the actual
identities of those who start wars for profit.
Also it is hilarious to use that label as if an area of the planet
is or has attacked another area. Land can not attack itself, ever,
just as guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Trump is not claiming posession of oil in syria by leaving some
troops behind. Just as he did not declare war, nor start any EVER.
Every conflct on earth has it's roots with very specific individuals,
none of whom are even related to Trump.
Syria was a conflicting mess before he took office and he is dutifully
attempting to pull US soldiers out of a powder keg of nonsense he
wants no part of. Nor does any sane American want more conflict in
battles we can't afford, in countries we'll never even visit.
Like I said before, Trump can't just abruptly yank all our troops.
It's simply not that simple. And for those pretending he is doing
syria a disservice, I dare any one of you to go there yourselves and
see if you bunch of complete dipshits can do better. Who knows, maybe
you'll find the love of your life, ******* idiots.
First, the US invades Syria in violation of the Geneva Convention
on War making it an international criminal. Then it funds and equips
the most vile terrorists on the planet which leads to the killing
of thousands of innocent Syrians. And now it has decided to stay and
steal oil from Syria. The US is now the Evil American Empire owned
and run by crooks, gangsters and mass murderers. The Republic is dead
along with morality, justice and freedom.
Let's limit the culprits to: The Obama regime... and
not all the US. This is why these devils need to be brought
to trial and their wealth clawed out of their hiding places to
pay reparations to some of the victims.
The US has been an Evil American Empire for a long time, since
at least the Wilson administration, and Republican or Democrat...it
make little difference. World wars, the Fed, IRS, New Deal,
Korea, Vietnam, War OF Terror, assassinations, coups, sanctions,
Big Pharma, Seeds of Death and Big Agri...and the list goes
on and on. Please understand that America is not great and one
day all Americans will have to account for what their country
did in their name. If you believe in the Divine, then know that
their will be a reckoning.
The Obama regime was merely a continuation of the Chimpy Bush
regime, which was merely a continuation of the Clinton regime,
which was merely a continuation of the Pappy Bush regime, which
was merely a continuation... etc.
More chinks in the petrodollar armor will be the outcome of this. The credibility of murica is withering
away as every day passes. Iraqi pressure upon foreign troops there
to leave and/or drawdown further will also make this venture even
more difficult to manage.
The Kurds
may not be the smartest with regards to picking allies, but even they
may by now have learned that sticking to murica any longer will destroy
any semblance of hope for any autonomy status whatsoever once the
occupants have left. Likewise, the Sunni tribes around this area don't
want to become another Pariah group once things revert to normal.
Assad will eventually retake all his territory and
this is speeding up the process of eventual reconciliation in Syria.
They've spent far more on these wars than they've made back by stealing
other countries' resources. Trillions wasted in exchange for mere
billions in profit, to say nothing of the massive loss of life and
destruction incurred.
'The below analysis is provided by "
Ehsani
"
-- a Middle East expert, Syrian-American banker and financial analyst
who visits the region frequently and writes for the influential geopolitical
analysis blog,
Syria Comment
.'
this quote was my first red flag.
so POTUS outsmarts Erdongan, takes out ISIS leader BAGHDADI along
with Erdongan MIT agents meeting with him. sorry, Ehsani, i think
your full of sh*t.
CIA & MOSSAD LLC
friends ISIS is just the excuse the american
an israeli terrorists used and use in order to keep trying to remove
Assad from the Government.
They just can't accept defeat and absolute failure. What's worse
than an american/israeli terrorist destroyed ego?!
All info needs verification. US sources are not trustworthy including
anyone where money originates from the usual fake info instigators/
players.
POTUS is so misled by the deep state MIC /CIA/ FBI et al and their
willing fake media cohorts that he agreed to give the White Helmets
more public money for more fake movies, as has been properly proven
and widely reported.
Either they have taken control of his mind with a chip insert or
they have got his balls to the knife.
The false flags have been discredited systematically and only a
very brainwashed or a very frightened person would believe anything
from the same source until after a thorough scourge is proven successfully
undertaken.
It is evident that even the last hope department has been got at
by the money-power.
If they can do 9/11 and get away with it, as they have, then they
will stop at nothing to remain entrenched.
90% of oil is traded in U.S. dollars if that stops living standards
will drop in the U.S.. We dropped from 97% look how bad its now
with 7% imagine going down to 50% life would be unlivable
here.
...meanwhile, both according to
russia today
as well as the
(otherwise lying rag of a newspaper)
guardian
, the russian
government seems to take a different position to the views expressed
here by "a middle east expert".
russian state media is reporting that US troops are in the process
of taking control of syrian oil fields in the deir el-zour region
and have described such actions as "banditry". the crux of the matter
is this: if the US were not actually illegally taking control of Syrian
oil, then Russia would not be reporting this. Contrary to western
mainstream media, Russian sources have repeatedly shown themselves
to be factual.
Shame the "withdrawl" from Syria is tainted with "securing the oil".
US doesnt need that oil at all. So Orwellian! Unless the Kurds somehow
get rights to it.
Preventing rise of ISIS is likely to entail securing support of the region's Arabs and tribes more than that of the Kurds. This Kurd/Arab issue is yet another reason why President Trump's idea of
"securing" the oil for the benefit of the Kurds just doesn't make sense nearly on every level
.
Trump
is
securing
the
oil
not
for
the
Kurds
or
anything
in
the
middle
east-
his
doing
it
as
a response
to
the
media
backlash
he
received
when
he
announced
he's
abandoning
the
Kurds.
this is nonsense. thinking of the kurds and their interests is the absolutely last thing on trump`s mind: what counts for trump is how he is viewed by his voter base, no more, no less.
"... This is really going to piss off the Deep State. All their plans initiated by Obama and Hillary are being destroyed by the red haired road runner known as Trump. ..."
"... If these reports are true of the oil tanker smuggling operation, then the Syrian Kurds do not have clean hands. ..."
"... Kind of sounds to me like Erdogan and Trump made a deal. ..."
"... Baghdadi wasn't the jihadis' only loss today. Abu-Hassan al-Muhajir, the likely successor to Baghdadi, was blown away near Jarabulus in a US strike. Here's a couple of tweets about these events: ..."
"... "Led by the 4th Armored Division, the Syrian Arab Army began their attack around 10 A.M. on Saturday, when their troops began to storm the Zuwayqat Mountain and its corresponding hills. Following a heavy battle that lasted for several hours, the Syrian Arab Army was able to take hold of the Zuwayqat Mountain, giving their forces fire control over the remaining hills south of Kabani. The Syrian Arab Army is now trying to push their way into Kabani; however, they are facing heavy resistance from the jihadist rebels of Hay'at Tahrir Al-Sham and the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP)." ..."
What does a radical Islamic mother say to another radical Islamic mother? Children, they blow up so fast.
What a contrast with the raid that killed Bin Laden in May 2011. The Obama Administration came out with conflicting accounts and
required the SEALS who carried out the attack to sign non-disclosure agreements. Why? Because the raid was conducted with the cooperation
and knowledge of the Pakistani government; the SEALS faced no guard force; Bin Laden was a cripple unable to get out of bed and was
shot so many times by the SEALs his body has to be dumped in the ocean.
Al Baghdadi? It is now clear he was protected by someone in Turkey. The Turks knew where he was and, until yesterday, kept him
safe. Trump's actions over the last three weeks with respect to U.S. forces in Syria set the table for this operation. A combination
of pressure and incentives confronted Turkey's President Erdogan and he rolled over.
It is telling that there was not a huge fire fight going in. Where was the Baghdadi security team? This is a further indicator
that Baghdadi was betrayed by folks he thought were protecting him. Baghdadi fled his house and jumped into a tunnel. Baghdadi is
reported to have blown himself up. Looks like the mission was carried out by Delta Force. They are accompanied by Malanois dogs (looks
a little like a German shepherd). Based on what Trump briefed today the dog followed Baghdadi down into the tunnel. The dog can run
faster than any soldier in such an environment. Once Baghdadi was trapped he detonated his suicide vest. Fortunately, the dog was
not killed (but probably suffered some frag wounds.)
(Someone needs to re-write the Peter and Gordon lyrics on "I Go to Pieces" in honor of Baghdadi's passing.)
Don't believe the media reports that the U.S. forces launched from Iraq. Just look at a map. Al Baghdadi was hiding out in Idlib
province, which is in northwest Syria. Flight time in helicopters from Iraq is three hours plus. Flight time from the U.S. Air Force
base in Incirlik, Turkey is about one hour. This came out of Turkey. That is why the U.S. coordinated/deconflicted the flight path
with Russia. Flying from Turkey into northwest Syria takes one directly over territory controlled by the Russians and Syrians.
Trump's press conference was amazing. He did not divulge key operational details and did a good job of obfuscating the intel sources
that provided the break on Al Baghdadi's location.
One thing is certain--most of the anti-Trump crowd will look for some reason to criticize Trump's victory. The anti-Trumper crowd
looks pretty stupid now. They were predicting the resurgence of ISIS. Whoops!! There goes that narrative. The new status quo in Syria
means the end of the U.S. policy of regime change and the beginning of the rehabilitation of Syria as a legitimate nation state.
This is really going to piss off the Deep State. All their plans initiated by Obama and Hillary are being destroyed by the red
haired road runner known as Trump.
But what about Trump's comments about keeping the oil, and protecting it with heavy fire power, and inviting in Exxon, etc. He
did say a deal might be possible.
Watch what he does, not what he says. He thinks while talking. This is a bad habit since he does not speak English well. I
am told that this is a characteristic of people from the Outer Boroughs of NY City.
Russia's defense ministry has no reliable
information about an operation by US forces in the Turkey-controlled part of the Idlib de-escalation zone aimed at another extermination
of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ministry's spokesman, Igor Konashenkov, said"
Artemesia
...I weep for my country that the way that its leader re-establishes his bona fides is by celebrating brutal murder, and many
Americans will celebrate that murder right along with him.
HillaryObama did the same thing; so did G H W Bush with the "precision bombing" of Iraq that became a thing of pride; the capture
of Saddam in his "spider hole;" Hillary's glee over the sodomized assassination of Qaddafi.
We have been inured to outrages to human beings, especially if they are "over there," and many who have become wealthy producers
of popular culture have played a major role in conditioning the American people to celebrate blood and gore in the name of American
Values.
Col. Lang -- Your post on Comments is at the back of my mind. I like to think I'm complying; that if I hated USA it would not
bother me that we are conditioned to celebrate killing. It does bother me. I don't think the killing of el Baghdadi is something
that enhances the moral stature of USA -- particularly when it is coupled, as it was in Trump's speech -- with the bold declaration
that US intends to steal Syria's oil.
"Real Men Go To Tehran."
Real Man James Jeffrey has been hot to bankrupt Syria for at least a year, his scheme to make reconstruction of Syria impossible
unless / until Syria ejects Iran & complies with the Borg's demands.
Erdogan's Islam views appears to be genuine. Rather than terrible Turk, Erdogan is strongly Islamic and taking Turkey from a secular
state back to and Islamic state. Turkey put off as long as possible declaring AQ a terrorist organization. AQ have no problems
having the Turk bases through Idlib.
Turkey was buying oil from ISIS earlier in the piece. There was some fighting when Erdogan
first moved his jihadis into Syria but large number of ISIS left Manbij once they had nutted out a deal.
Turk border in Idlib may well have been the safest place for Baghdadi to stay.
Baghdadi wasn't the jihadis' only loss today. Abu-Hassan al-Muhajir, the likely successor to Baghdadi, was blown away near
Jarabulus in a US strike. Here's a couple of tweets about these events:
"So SDF and Iraq shared intel with US on position of ISIS leader Baghdadi - 3.5 miles from border with Turkey. And SDF shared
intel with US on the position of ISIS spox Muhajir - just outside Turkish Euphrates Shield city of Jarablus. Doesn't look *great*
for Turkey, have to say"
We believe ISIS spox. Al-Muhajir was in Jarablus to facilitate Baghdadi's entry to Euphrates Shield area. The two US-led operations
have effectively disabled top ISIS leadership who were hiding [in] NW Syria. More still remain hiding in the same area."
The SAA did well at Kabani... if they can keep it this time. From Al Masdar:
"Led by the 4th Armored Division, the Syrian Arab Army began their attack around 10 A.M. on Saturday, when their troops
began to storm the Zuwayqat Mountain and its corresponding hills. Following a heavy battle that lasted for several hours, the
Syrian Arab Army was able to take hold of the Zuwayqat Mountain, giving their forces fire control over the remaining hills south
of Kabani. The Syrian Arab Army is now trying to push their way into Kabani; however, they are facing heavy resistance from the
jihadist rebels of Hay'at Tahrir Al-Sham and the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP)."
Maybe with Baghdadi's ass now far from his head, perhaps the HTS and TIP will loose some of their enthusiasm for defending
Kabani. They have been tenacious.
"... Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him. ..."
"... Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure. ..."
"... These [neoliberal] politicians are the absolute dregs of our society. Human cesspits. They make the pirates of old look like kindergarten. And they mass murder to get the loot. ..."
"... Author does not mention approx 40 tons of gold transferred to US at night, covered lorries, darkened airfield. Coincidentally just a few hours before MH370 went missing ..."
"... Implementation of Western values and democracy cost Libia more than 134 ton of gold. Not including shares and valuable papers..How democracy working in Libya? ..."
"... Regarding the Ukraine, about 12 oligarch holding of 60% of the wealth.Today the Ukrainian oligarch have to pay USA democrats oligarch for protection. Whatever who is Ukraine President-they must to pay to USA.Ukraine today is like banana republic :Honduras or Guatemala with 60% of population living below poverty line. Just do the homework all of you readers. ..."
"... All Democrats and RINO's who are currently participating in the impeachment hoax in order to keep themselves from being indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for their parts in this corruption are automatically guilty of obstruction of justice, because that's exactly what they're doing. ..."
"... She was never supposed to lose. ..."
"... DNC types always show up at these poor countries to plunder them. Haiti: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Biden Family foundation. ..."
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one.
During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised
transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen,
and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and
Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural
gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay
pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for
heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and
very little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president
Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and
heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko
demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be
considered a partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its founder and owner Mr Nicolai
Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's
appetites. He had brought in Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney General Shokin to investigate Burisma
trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and
150 thousand dollar per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax code; it can't
be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son.
Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner,
paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko
was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could
not keep his trap shut: by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr Shokin gave
evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers
in connection with another case, Firtash case.
... ... ...
This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is
Amos J. Hochstein, a protege of former VP Joe Biden, who has served
in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine.
Together with an American citizen Andrew Favorov, the Deputy Director
of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by
Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go
via Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while the margin is collected
by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price
will be paid by the Ukrainians, while profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.
In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party.
A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta,
producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the
Project for the New American Century (PNAC),
pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian
ore deposits.
One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with
Audrius Butkevicius, the former Minister of Defence (1996
to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now
is a member of the notorious Institute for Statecraft, a UK
deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations, subversion of the democratic process and promoting
Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war. In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed
to the Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of his troops from Lithuania.
Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In 1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000
USD from a senior executive of a troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings
concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested on receipt of the bribe, had been
sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.
In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated the feat in 2003 during the Rose
Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought
to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars' grant.
In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught fire; allegedly
thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind:
the previous one, equally huge, torched Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal
fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.
When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios
investigated the fires, he discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't destroyed
by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the
hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this
enormous operation was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the Minister of Defence
Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr Biden. (They say Mr Matios
was given $10 million for his silence).
The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably
just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians.
The Plundering Of Ukraine By Corrupt American Democrats. Whats new. The plundering of Syria - the Golan. Genie oil - Every
leading democrat name is on that Shareholder's list. Plundering of Serbia. Kosovo, its Gold mines and Minerals. Speciality per
Madeleine Albright . Wesley Clark and the Clintons. Sniff around where the Libyan gold went....not Fort Knox
These [neoliberal] politicians are the absolute dregs of our society. Human cesspits. They make the pirates of old look
like kindergarten. And they mass murder to get the loot.
Author does not mention approx 40 tons of gold transferred to US at night, covered lorries, darkened airfield. Coincidentally
just a few hours before MH370 went missing .
Implementation of Western values and democracy cost Libia more than 134 ton of gold. Not including shares and valuable
papers..How democracy working in Libya?
Fantastic article. Thanks for Israel. Thanks God, whatever you believe or not, majority of the World citizens are good and
friendly. Were did not nuke each other despite 1% of our corrupted elites. They hold about 90% of media, can give Hollywood Oscar
Price or Nobel Price to my lovely dog. If I paid them.
Regarding the Ukraine, about 12 oligarch holding of 60% of the wealth.Today
the Ukrainian oligarch have to pay USA democrats oligarch for protection. Whatever who is Ukraine President-they must to pay
to USA.Ukraine today is like banana republic :Honduras or Guatemala with 60% of population living below poverty line. Just do
the homework all of you readers.
You will NOT see once micron of this on the lame stream Media.....nor out of the mouths of Dems anywhere.....THIS info if true
should ensure the Dem corrupt Party is dissolved and a new one using pro-USA model is erected.
That we have seen little of this story in the Wall Street Journal nor Fox News shows just who controls those networks for sure.....This
story MUST become a part of the Congressional record....ASAP.....and ALL these folks no matter which Party MUST be held accountable
for lost US Funds...OUR TAX DOLLARS. Imagine what could be done with 3 BILLION for OUR Vets or the homeless......yet you see little
exposure of this corruption any where in US papers or even conservative outfits...????
All Democrats and RINO's who are currently participating in the impeachment hoax in order to keep themselves from being
indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for their parts in this corruption are automatically guilty of obstruction of justice, because
that's exactly what they're doing.
DNC types always show up at these poor countries to plunder them. Haiti: Clinton Foundation. Ukraine: Clinton Foundation.
Ukraine: Biden Family foundation.
Corrupt American Democrats AND Corrupt American Republicans . . . who gave Standing Ovations in Washington, District of Columbia,
United States Capitol for the Murders and Burning Humans Alive. United States President Trump never received 5 minute Standing
Ovations in Washington, District of Columbia, United States Capitol by the Capitalist Political Party composed of two factions:
Corrupt American Republicans AND Corrupt American Democrats.
So Shamir says that Tsarev is claiming Daniluk is the "whistleblower"? A foreigner can be a whistleblower?
And " Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was informed that there is an
order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev." ?? An order to arrest Daniluk in Washington, is that the claim? Why and who would
arrest him in Washington?
We would all be better off, including the Ukrainians, if they had stayed with Russia, where they were.
Money quote: “Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts."
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils. ..."
"... Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen. ..."
"... The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive. ..."
"... Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp. ..."
"... In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits. ..."
"... The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians. ..."
"... The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. ..."
"... If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh. ..."
A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"
Israel Shamir October
25, 2019 2,400 Words 6 Comments Reply
Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts.
The mysterious 'whistleblower' whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the
exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an
ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine's presidency, Oleg Tsarev.
Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a
leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after
President Yanukovych's flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had
to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life. During the failed attempt to secede, he was
elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in
Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters
in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.
Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem
politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his
partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US
proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer
of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine;
the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a
few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence
on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for
domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians
got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine
could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did.
Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very
little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to
European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high.
The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge
profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices,
President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said
that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its
founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the
company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in
Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney
General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin
immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar
per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax
code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours
to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds
won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for
this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different
sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed
Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also
could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut:
by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr
Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was
confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash
case.
What is Firtash Case?
The Democrats wanted to get another Ukrainian oligarch, Mr Firtash, to the US and make him
to confess that he illegally supported Trump's campaign for the sake of Russia. Firtash had
been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it
is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin's deposition to substantiate their claim. For
this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were
willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help
and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It
seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash's funds helped Trump to win elections, an
extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].
Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could
give or withhold?
It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for "support of democracy". First billion
dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for
Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the "acting President". The Ukrainian
constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, "the acting President" had no
right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed
by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, Biden countersigned the papers signed by
Turchynov and allocated money for Ukraine. And the money was stolen – by the Democrats
and their Ukrainian counterparts.
Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to
investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016;
one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the
money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment,
discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.
As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for
"Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers' money". Among the accused there are two
consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and
Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, and three US banks. The investigation caused the
USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. As Trump said, now the US does not give away
money and does not impose democracy.
The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk
assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a
substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without
documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by
the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.
Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of
Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have
many friends who are Sam's friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my
friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about
this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump
will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of
the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right
to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved.
Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once
the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent
the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally
allied with Clinton camp.
And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats' influence?
If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of
this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a
whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this
whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was
present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky's side. This man was (perhaps)
a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking
official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk . He is also the man
the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at
the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer's best
dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally,
and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all.
Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was
informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the
hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and
concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations
with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not
admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president's
administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan , who allegedly framed
Daniluk.)
This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is Amos J. Hochstein , a protege of former
VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of
State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen
Andrew Favorov
, the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into
Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine
with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via
Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while
the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from
the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while
profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.
In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the
Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of
Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian
titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq
war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits.
One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius , the former
Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet
Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for
Statecraft , a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations,
subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war.
In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed to the
Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of
his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In
1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a
troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings
concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested
on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such
qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.
In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated
the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers
killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who
called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars'
grant.
In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught
fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by
fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched
Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal
fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.
When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he
discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't
destroyed by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the
Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev
to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation
was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the
Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr
Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).
The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep
State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and
politicians.
The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're
bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured
incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal
murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein
himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's family only makes me more certain that they will get
away with this heist like they've done with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.
If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same
grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty
hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine
Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War
childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.
Who will hold then responsible? The country appears to have been entirely taken over by
crookish spooks and politicians.
The US is now confirmed as a cleptocracy.
Ukraine is corrupted by outsiders (those who are not Ukrainian/Russian). In past centuries
there was a simple but effective answer to foreigners corrupting their country. The Cossacks
would sharpen up their sabres. saddle up their horses and have a slaughter. It was effective
then and would be effective today. Get rid of those who are not Slavic.
Money quote: “Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts."
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils. ..."
"... Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016; one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment, discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen. ..."
"... The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive. ..."
"... Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally allied with Clinton camp. ..."
"... In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits. ..."
"... The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and politicians. ..."
"... The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. ..."
"... If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War childhood out of my head long enough to laugh. ..."
A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"
Israel Shamir October
25, 2019 2,400 Words 6 Comments Reply
Top Dems are involved in the plundering of the Ukraine: new names, mind-boggling accounts.
The mysterious 'whistleblower' whose report had unleashed the impeachment is named in the
exclusive interview given to the Unz Review by a prominent Ukrainian politician, an
ex-Member of Parliament of four terms, a candidate for Ukraine's presidency, Oleg Tsarev.
Mr Tsarev, a tall, agile and graceful man, a good speaker and a prolific writer, had been a
leading and popular Ukrainian politician before the 2014 putsch; he stayed in the Ukraine after
President Yanukovych's flight; ran for the Presidency against Mr Poroshenko, and eventually had
to go to exile due to multiple threats to his life. During the failed attempt to secede, he was
elected the speaker of the Parliament of Novorossia (South-Eastern Ukraine). I spoke to him in
Crimea, where he lives in the pleasant seaside town of Yalta. Tsarev still has many supporters
in the Ukraine, and is a leader of the opposition to the Kiev regime.
Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem
politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama's administration, was his
partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US
proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer
of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers' money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine;
the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a
few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence
on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for
domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians
got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine
could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did.
Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very
little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to
European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high.
The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge
profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices,
President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects. He said
that he arranged the price hike; it means he should be considered a partner.
Burisma Gas company had to pay extortion money to the president Poroshenko. Eventually its
founder and owner Mr Nicolai Zlochevsky decided to invite some important Westerners into the
company's board of directors hoping it would moderate Poroshenko's appetites. He had brought in
Biden's son Hunter, John Kerry, Polish ex-President Kwasniewski; but it didn't help him.
Poroshenko became furious that the fattened calf may escape him, and asked the Attorney
General Shokin to investigate Burisma trusting some irregularities would emerge. AG Shokin
immediately discovered that Burisma had paid these 'stars' between 50 and 150 thousand dollar
per month each just for being on the list of directors. This is illegal by the Ukrainian tax
code; it can't be recognised as legitimate expenditure.
At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours
to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers' funds
won't pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for
this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different
sources.
AG Shokin said he can't close the case within six hours; Poroshenko sacked him and installed
Mr Lutsenko in his stead. Lutsenko was willing to dismiss the case of Burisma, but he also
could not do it in a day, or even in a week. Biden, as we know, could not keep his trap shut:
by talking about the pressure he put on Poroshenko, he incriminated himself. Meanwhile Mr
Shokin gave evidence that Biden put pressure on Poroshenko to fire him, and now it was
confirmed. The evidence was given to the US lawyers in connection with another case, Firtash
case.
What is Firtash Case?
The Democrats wanted to get another Ukrainian oligarch, Mr Firtash, to the US and make him
to confess that he illegally supported Trump's campaign for the sake of Russia. Firtash had
been arrested in Vienna, Austria; there he fought extradition to the US. His lawyers claimed it
is purely political case, and they used Mr Shokin's deposition to substantiate their claim. For
this reason, the evidence supplied by Shokin is not easily reversible, even if Shokin were
willing, and he is not. He also stated under oath that the Democrats pressurised him to help
and extradite Firtash to the US, though he had no standing in this purely American issue. It
seems that Mrs Clinton believes that Firtash's funds helped Trump to win elections, an
extremely unlikely thing [says Mr Tsarev].
Talking about Burisma and Biden; what is this billion dollars of aid that Biden could
give or withhold?
It is USAID money, the main channel of the US aid for "support of democracy". First billion
dollars of USAID came to the Ukraine in 2014. This was authorised by Joe Biden, while for
Ukraine, the papers were signed by Mr Turchinov, the "acting President". The Ukrainian
constitution does not know of such a position, and Turchinov, "the acting President" had no
right to sign neither a legal nor financial document. Thus, all the documents that were signed
by him, in fact, had no legal force. However, Biden countersigned the papers signed by
Turchynov and allocated money for Ukraine. And the money was stolen – by the Democrats
and their Ukrainian counterparts.
Two years ago, (that is already under President Trump) the United States began to
investigate the allocation of 3 billion dollars; it was allocated in 2014, in 2015, in 2016;
one billion dollars per year. The investigation showed that the documents were falsified, the
money was transferred to Ukraine, and stolen. The investigators tracked each payment,
discovered where the money went, where it was spent and how it was stolen.
As a result, in October 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice opened a criminal case for
"Abuse of power and embezzlement of American taxpayers' money". Among the accused there are two
consecutive Finance Ministers of the Ukraine, Mrs Natalie Ann Jaresko who served 2014-2016 and
Mr Alexander Daniluk who served 2016-2018, and three US banks. The investigation caused the
USAID to cease issuing grants since August 2019. As Trump said, now the US does not give away
money and does not impose democracy.
The money was allocated with the flagrant violation of American law. There was no risk
assessment, no audit reports. Normally the USAID, when allocating cash, always prepares a
substantial package of documents. But the billions were given to Ukraine completely without
documents. The criminal case on the embezzlement of USAID funds had been signed personally by
the US Attorney General, so these issues are very much alive.
Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of
Giuliani, Trump's lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have
many friends who are Sam's friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my
friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about
this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump
will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of
the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right
to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved.
Poroshenko was aware of that; he gave orders to declare Sam Kislin persona non grata. Once
the old man (he is over 80) flew into Kiev airport and he was not allowed to come in; he spent
the night in detention and was flown back to the US next day. Poroshenko had been totally
allied with Clinton camp.
And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats' influence?
If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of
this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a
whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this
whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was
present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky's side. This man was (perhaps)
a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking
official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk . He is also the man
the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at
the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer's best
dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally,
and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all.
Daniluk was supposed to accompany President Zelensky on his visit to Washington; but he was
informed that there is an order for his arrest. He remained in Kiev. And soon afterwards, the
hell of the alleged leaked phone call broke out. Zelensky administration investigated and
concluded that the leak was done by Mr Alexander Daniluk, who is known for his close relations
with George Soros and with Mr Biden. Alexander Daniluk had been fired. (However, he did not
admit his guilt and said the leak was done by his sworn enemy, the head of president's
administration office, Mr Andrey Bogdan , who allegedly framed
Daniluk.)
This is not the only case of US-connected corruption in Ukraine. There is Amos J. Hochstein , a protege of former
VP Joe Biden, who has served in the Barack Obama administration as the Assistant Secretary of
State for Energy Resources. He still hangs on the Ukraine. Together with an American citizen
Andrew Favorov
, the Deputy Director of Naftogas he organised very expensive "reverse gas import" into
Ukraine. In this scheme, the Russian gas is bought by Europeans and afterwards sold to Ukraine
with a wonderful margin. In reality, gas comes from Russia directly, but payments go via
Hochstein. It is much more costly than to buy directly from Russia; Ukrainian people pay, while
the margin is collected by Hochstein and Favorov. Now they plan to import liquefied gas from
the United States, at even higher price. Again, the price will be paid by the Ukrainians, while
profits will go to Hochstein and Favorov.
In all these scams, there are people of Clinton and spooks who are fully integrated in the
Democratic Party. A former head of CIA, Robert James Woolsey, now sits on the Board of
Directors of Velta , producing Ukrainian
titanium. Woolsey is a neocon, a member of the Project for the New
American Century (PNAC), pro-Israel think-tank, and a man who relentlessly pushed for Iraq
war. A typical Democrat spook, now he gets profits from Ukrainian ore deposits.
One of the best Ukrainian corruption stories is connected with Audrius Butkevicius , the former
Minister of Defence (1996 to 2000) and a Member of the Seimas (Parliament) of post-Soviet
Lithuania. Mr AB is supposedly working for MI6, and now is a member of the notorious Institute for
Statecraft , a UK deep state propaganda outfit involved in disinformation operations,
subversion of the democratic process and promoting Russophobia and the idea of a new cold war.
In 1991 he commanded snipers that shoot Lithuanian protesters. The kills were ascribed to the
Soviet armed forces, and the last Soviet President Mr Gorbachev ordered speedy withdrawal of
his troops from Lithuania. Mr AB became the Minister of Defence of his independent nation. In
1997 the Honourable Minister of Defence "had requested 300,000 USD from a senior executive of a
troubled oil company for his assistance in obtaining the discontinuance of criminal proceedings
concerning the company's vast debts", in the language of the court judgement. He was arrested
on receipt of the bribe, had been sentenced to five years of jail, but a man with such
qualifications was not left to rot in a prison.
In 2005 he commanded the snipers who killed protesters in Kyrgyzstan, in Georgia he repeated
the feat in 2003 during the Rose Revolution. In 2014 he did it again in Kiev, where his snipers
killed around a hundred men, protesters and police. He was brought to Kiev by Mr Turchinov, who
called himself the "acting President" and who countersigned Joe Biden's billion dollars'
grant.
In October 2018 the name of Mr AB came up again. Military warehouses of Chernigov had caught
fire; allegedly thousands of shells stored for fighting the separatists had been destroyed by
fire. And it was not the first fire of this kind: the previous one, equally huge, torched
Ukrainian army warehouses in Vinnitsa in 2017. Altogether, there were 12 huge army arsenal
fires for the last few years. Just for 2018, the damage was over $2 billion.
When Chief Military Prosecutor of Ukraine Anatoly Matios investigated the fires, he
discovered that 80% of weapons and shells in the warehouses were missing. They weren't
destroyed by fire, they weren't there in the first place. Instead of being used to kill the
Russian-speaking Ukrainians of Donetsk, the hardware had been shipped from the port of Nikolaev
to Syria, to the Islamic rebels and to ISIS. And the man who organised this enormous operation
was our Mr AB, the old fighter for democracy on behalf of MI6, acting in cahoots with the
Minister of Defence Poltorak and Mr Turchinov, the friend of Mr
Biden. (They say Mr Matios was given $10 million for his silence).
The loss was of Ukrainian people, and of US taxpayers, while the beneficiaries were the Deep
State, which is probably just another name for the deadly mix of spooks, media and
politicians.
The globalist criminal elites will not be held responsible for any of these crimes. They're
bound together by ties of blackmail forged by guys like Epstein, mutually assured
incrimination in serial swindles which cross Left and Right political boundaries and literal
murder in the case of guys like Seth Rich. The cozy proximity of recently-murdered Epstein
himself to crypto-converso AG Barr's family only makes me more certain that they will get
away with this heist like they've done with dozens of other billion-dollar swindles.
If they were only stealing money it would be bad enough, but the fact that these same
grifters are our "diplomats" and warmakers is positively Orwellian. Watching these petty
hoodlums play nuclear chicken with Russia so they can squeeze more shekels from the supine
Ukraine would be laughable if I could get the first-strike nightmares of my Cold War
childhood out of my head long enough to laugh.
Who will hold then responsible? The country appears to have been entirely taken over by
crookish spooks and politicians.
The US is now confirmed as a cleptocracy.
Ukraine is corrupted by outsiders (those who are not Ukrainian/Russian). In past centuries
there was a simple but effective answer to foreigners corrupting their country. The Cossacks
would sharpen up their sabres. saddle up their horses and have a slaughter. It was effective
then and would be effective today. Get rid of those who are not Slavic.
New York - Tel
Aviv - Moscow
Triangle
This section contains the materials
that document the background of Trump - Russia. From the banking houses of
New York, to the Bolshevik Revolution. From the New School to the Neo-Cons.
From the arming of Irgun to the creation of the Zionist state of Israel.
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the mafia state that rose out of the
USSR. The development of international criminal networks, think tanks,
governments, oligarchy and multinational corporate control of our politics,
interests, technology, freedoms and even our minds.
The Life of an American Jew Living in
Racist Marxist Israel
Jack
Bernstein
The Soviets would institute a pro-Arab policy
solely as a camouflage for its true intention, which was to furnish aid
to the Arabs, but never enough to enable the Arabs to destroy Israel.
The Soviets would open the gates of Soviet
satellite countries to Jewish immigration to Israel. Should this be
insufficient, Soviet Russia then would open its own gates to
immigration.
<strong>The Soviets would absolutely guarantee the
security of Israel.
Both the Soviet Union and Israel would share
intelligence reports.
The latest scientific developments that the US
provides Israel are channeled on to the Soviet Union. The main center
through which this scientific information passes is Israel's Weizman
Institute in the town of Rehoovot about 40 kilometers south of Tel Aviv.
The Controversy Of Zion (Book)
Douglas Reed
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options in the text editing bar.
All Israeli Prime Ministers linked to
USSR/Russian Empire
Jon Swinn
This infographic details the links each Israeli Prime Minister has to
the USSR/Russian Empire.
TRUMP IS PUPPET OF KISSINGER, CFR AND
ROTHSCHILDS, THE TRUE ARCHITECTS OF RUSSIAN COLLUSION
David
Livingstone
A vital read detailing the history that has led to
the present day situation we face.
NIXON CENTER -- KREMLIN -- TRUMP
Zarina Zabrisky
The Center for the National Interest, former Nixon
Center, a hosting institution for Trump's first foreign policy speech
and the adviser who helped writing the speech have multiple long-term
ties to the Kremlin.
Red Mafiya - How the Russian Mob Has Invaded America
Robert
Friedman
New York -- Moscow -- Tel Aviv Triangle
Fitzpatrick
Israel and the Soviets are ideological allies –
both follow the ideas of Karl Marx, so both are communist/socialist.
Yet, the Soviets supplied military equipment to the Arabs -- Israel's
enemies; and at the same time, the Soviet Union's enemy, the United
States, was arming Israel.
To understand the treachery which Zionist/
Bolshevik Jews are capable and to understand the treachery which took
place before and during the 1973 War, I must explain the New York/
Moscow/Tel Aviv Triangle.
PUTIN DOSSIER
Fitzpatrick
Exposing Russian president Vladimir Putin and his
crypto-Soviet state for the Judeo-masonic, Chabad mafiya collaborators
that they are
THE AMERICAN AWAKENING - NEW YORK - TEL AVIV - MOSCOW AXIS
Michael
Herzog and Brendon O'Connell
Part 1 - 18 June 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3GpnUF_nwA
Part 2 - 22 June 2018
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kso1KWHXmNo&t=1688s
Rare Interview with Gordon Thomas author
of Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy
Gordon
Thomas
Gordon Thomas is interviewed on TruNews about his
book Robert Maxwell Israel's Superspy.
AT PUTIN'S SIDE, AN ARMY OF JEWISH
BILLIONAIRES
Gil Stern
Watching the group of mega-wealthy interact, one
cannot help but wonder how so many affluent businessmen in the former
Soviet Union are Jewish.
On Multiple Fronts, Russian Jews Reshape
Israel
Phillip
Reeves
"I was [politically] on the left, and I thought it
was possible to reach an agreement with the Arabs. But after 20 years, I
no longer think an accord is possible," he says.
Most of Israel's Russian-speaking community,
including Esterman, is on the right these days. Since they now make up
about 15 percent of Israel's 8 million people, they wield considerable
political clout and have played a significant role in the general
rightward shift of the Israeli electorate.
Russian-speaking immigrants form the base of the
influential right-wing nationalist party Yisrael Beiteinu. The party has
teamed up with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud to form a bloc
that is leading the polls ahead of this month's elections.
Galili argues that immigrants from the former
Soviet Union have made a considerable impact on the politics of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- not least because of their resistance to
the idea of giving up territory.
Russian Immigrants
in Israeli Politics:
The Past, the Recent Elections
and the Near Future
Arkadi
Mazin
Since the beginning of the large-scale immigration
to Israel from the
former
Soviet Union in the 1990s, Israel's community of Russian speakers has
played an dominant role in Israeli politics. Some maintain that it has
tipped the balance and decided the final outcome in all the elections
since then, perhaps with the exception of the most recent ones.
Nevertheless, as will be shown, the
Russian-speaking community's
vote
played a major role in these elections, too.
From this, it may be concluded that the electoral
behavior of the
Russian-speaking
community in Israel differs from that of the majority of the Israeli
population. And indeed, as has been observed in various areas of life,
such as consumer behavior, media and entertainment, as well as from the
political-electoral perspective, the Russian-speaking community in
Israel is commonly viewed as a separate sector, alongside two other
important minority sectors – the ultra-Orthodox and Arab
– and the "general Israeli population."
An Emerging Alliance: Russia and Israel
Robert Zapesochny
The core of this growing alliance is the more than
one million Israeli citizens who were born in the former Soviet Union.
Between 1970 and 1988, only 291,000 Jews, and their non-Jewish
relatives, were allowed to leave the Soviet Union (165,000 went to
Israel, and 126,000 went to the United States).
In 1989, Mikhail Gorbachev ended restrictions on
Jewish emigration, in part for better relations with the United States.
From 1989 to 2006, 1.6 million Soviet Jews, and their family members,
left the former Soviet Union (979,000 went to Israel, 325,000 to the
U.S. and 219,000 to Germany).
Earlier this year, President Putin said, "Russia
and Israel have developed a special relationship primarily because 1.5
million Israeli citizens come from the former Soviet Union, they speak
the Russian language, are the bearers of Russian culture, Russian
mentality. They maintain relations with their relatives and friends in
Russia, and this make the interstate relations very special."
Israel also needs Russia, as well. Israel's
Start-Up Nation has been fueled by one million Russian-speaking
Israelis. For this economic miracle to continue, the Israelis will need
more engineers from the former Soviet Union. The Russian-speaking
Israelis will have plenty of talent to choose from in the former Soviet
Union. According the World Economic Forum, in 2015, Russia graduated
454,000 engineers and Ukraine graduated 130,000 engineers.
THE DEBILITATING BRAIN DRAIN
Shilomo Maital
Israel has gained immensely from the brain gain of
one million immigrants from the former Soviet Union during the years
1990-1999. According to a study by Sarit Cohen of Bar-Ilan University
and Chang-Tai Hsieh from Princeton University, 60 percent of the
Russian-speaking immigrants who arrived in Israel between 1989 and 1990
were college educated, twice the proportion of college-educated
Israelis. From 1990 to 1993, their study notes, "57,000 [Russian
immigrants] had worked as engineers and 12,000 as medical doctors; in
contrast, there were only 30,000 engineers and 15,000 medical doctors in
Israel in 1989."
That brain gain was a one-time stroke of luck.
Many of the brain-gain Russian-speaking engineers and doctors are now
retiring, and many of the educated Israelis who could replace them are
going abroad.
Israel's former Soviet immigrants
transform adopted country
Harriet Sherwood
The million-plus citizens of the former Soviet
Union who migrated to Israel in the past 20 years have not only made new
lives of their own but they have transformed their adopted country. They
have influenced the culture, hi-tech industry, language, education and,
perhaps most significantly, Israeli politics.
Jews in the former Soviet Union were largely
banned from making aliya – migrating to Israel – before the collapse of
the empire. But from 1990 onwards they came in their thousands, and they
now constitute around 15% of Israel's 7.7 million population.
Strictly speaking not all of them are Jewish. In
traditional Judaism only someone whose mother is Jewish or who has
undergone a formal conversion to Judaism is a Jew. But from 1990 anyone
from the former Soviet Union who had a Jewish father or grandparent, or
who was married to someone meeting those criteria, was granted Israeli
citizenship under the country's law of return.
The Million Russians That Changed Israel
to Its Core
Masha Zur Glozman
The authors begin their story toward the end of
the 1980s, after Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir realized that Mikhail
Gorbachev was prepared to release those Jews who longed to leave the
Soviet Union, because he wished to obtain American loan guarantees for
the far-reaching reforms he had planned.
Bronfman and Galili describe the clandestine and
open channels through which the State of Israel acted to advance this
immigration, and the various interests involved, such as the desire to
bolster the "demographic data" (a euphemism for increasing Israel's
Jewish population ).
Yitzhak Shamir, the Prime Minister Who
Spied on Me
Aluf Benn
According to Meridor, Shamir's most important
contribution was convincing the U.S. administration under President
George Bush Sr. to desist from issuing refugee visas to Soviet Jews.
Up to 1989, Jews leaving the USSR could choose to
immigrate either to the United States or to Israel, with many choosing
the U.S. Shamir was opposed to this "defection," as it was termed at the
time. He believed Jews ought to settle in Israel, whether they were from
a Russian gulag or Brooklyn. He persuaded the American government and
U.S. Jewish organizations that the Soviet Jews weren't refugees, that
they had a homeland in Israel. Then the floodgates of the collapsing
Soviet Empire opened wide, and a million Jews along with their relatives
immigrated to Israel. Had Shamir not insisted, today, many of them would
have been living on the shores of the Hudson River.
Shamir Wants U.S. Pressure on Emigrants
The so-called "dropout" rate among Jews who leave
the Soviet Union has reached as high as 80% in recent years. "Dropouts"
are Jews who claim political refugee status from the United States when
they reach Vienna rather than fly to Israel.
How Russia's rich elite spend their
billions in London
Roman
Borisovich
Wealthy [Jewish] oligarchs have become a fixture
of the British landscape during the past 20 years. But what do they
offer to the country's culture?
Rich Russians: The Wealthiest Oligarchs
Who Call London Home
Alisher Usmanov and Roman Abramovich are joined in
the capital by a host of lesser-known wealthy compatriots
Vladimir Putin told me a personal story
in the Kremlin
This video includes excerpts from the speeches of
Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, Attorney Alan Dershowitz, and footage
of the legendary Chabad Lubavitch "Roll Call" at the 2006 International
Conference of Shluchim.
Putin's Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar
friend of Nathaniel Rothschild.
"My call to fame is actually being Mr.
Rothschild's friend and it is a pleasure to honour Mr. Rothschild and
David Slager for what they have done here in Oxford for the Oxford
University Chabad Society." -
Chief Rabbi Lazar
The KGB's Middle East Files: 'Illegals'
in Israel
Ronen Bergman
In
1992, Vasili Mitrokhin, a KGB archivist, defected to the West with a
trove of top secret documents from the Soviet intelligence agency, which
helped expose many Russian agents and assets in Israel and elsewhere.
This series of articles explores these documents and brings to light the
secrets they revealed.
Russian Firm to Train Israelis in Hot
Tech Fields
Ruti Levy
Fifty Israeli students – most of them computer
science graduates or veterans of army technology units – will begin a
program in October to learn the ins and outs of some of the hottest
fields in Israeli high-tech, such as data science and machine learning.
he classes will meet at Tel Aviv University, but
no Israeli academic institution is involved. The syllabus was written
and the lecturers hired and paid for by the Russian company Yandex.
The Happy-Go-Lucky Jewish Group That
Connects Trump and Putin
Ben Schreckinger
Chabad of Port Washington, a Jewish community
center on Long Island's Manhasset Bay, sits in a squat brick edifice
across from a Shell gas station and a strip mall. The center is an
unexceptional building on an unexceptional street, save for one thing:
Some of the shortest routes between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin run
straight through it.
Know Your Oligarch: A Guide to the Jewish
Billionaires in the Trump-Russia Probe
Ron Kampeas
Of 10 billionaires with Kremlin ties who funneled
political contributions to Donald Trump and a number of top Republican
leaders, at least five are Jewish
Russia's Chief Rabbi Reportedly Paid
Secret Visit to Iran on Trip Organized by Putin
Russian Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar secretly visited
Iran almost six months ago as part of a diplomatic trip organized by
Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli media reported over the
weekend.
The Islamic Republic opposed the rabbi's arrival,
but Putin himself insisted on Lazar's participation in the diplomatic
mission, the website Ynetnews reported. The trip was reportedly headed
by the chairman of Russia's State Duma and included talks in the Iranian
parliament.
Lazar, who heads the Chabad movement in Russia, is
considered close to Putin and is often accused of supporting the
president unconditionally in exchange for his regime's seal of approval
for Chabad.
Israel has argued for months that Iran needs to
withdraw its forces from the war-torn country. In recent weeks, senior
U.S. officials have stated that while both Russia and the U.S. agree
with Israel that Iran needs to exit Syria, it is currently unrealistic
for Russia to force Iran out of the country.
DONALD TRUMP, CHABAD-LUBAVITCH AND THE OLIGARCHS
Despite his alignment with the racist right, Trump
has professed ultra-right views on Israel. His connections with Israel
also extend to his broad ties with the Russian mafia, many of whom hold
dual citizenship in Israel. The Russian mafia is closely associated with
Chabad-Lubavitch, a Hasidic movement that derived originally from
Sabbateanism.
Putin: 'I support the struggle of Israel'
Chaim Lev, Ari Yashar
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday met
with a delegation of rabbis, led by Sephardic Chief Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef,
former Chief Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau, Chief Rabbi of Russia Berel Lazar,
and rabbis of the Rabbinical Center of Europe (RCE).
"I follow closely what's going on in Israel," said
Putin during the long meeting, which was held in Moscow.
"I support the struggle of Israel as it attempts
to protect its citizens. I also heard about the shocking murder of the
three youths. It is an act that cannot be allowed, and I ask you to
transmit my condolences to the families," added the Russian president,
in referring to the abduction and murder of three teens in June by Hamas
terrorists.
PUTIN AND NETANYAHU TO STRIKE DEAL ON
LEVIATHAN GAS FIELD
Erica
Mills
Israeli foreign affairs analyst, Ehud Yaari, says
Russian President Vladimir Putin & Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu want to
strike a deal on the Leviathan field
Ronald S. Lauder: Russia's fight against
anti-Semitism isn't just good for Jews – it's good for Russia as well
"At a time when global terrorism singles out Jews
around the world, at a time when we see the impact of intolerance and
hate on every continent, here in Russia, the Jewish community is
thriving. Jewish kindergartens and Jewish schools are filled to
capacity, synagogues are crowded on Shabbat. But Jews in Western Europe
are seriously thinking of leaving," Lauder said.
"President [Vladimir] Putin has made Russia a
country where Jews are welcome. And that's not just a good thing for
Jews. It is good for Russia as well," Lauder said. "It is because of
this unprecedented change that the World Jewish Congress looks to
continue to work with Russia. We want to be able to count on Russia as a
solid friend."
PUTIN TO NETANYAHU: ISRAEL, RUSSIA
'UNCONDITIONAL ALLIES' IN WAR AGAINST TERROR
Israel and Russia agreed to strengthen their regional military
cooperation, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Russian
President Vladimir Putin met face-to-face in the Kremlin on Tuesday.
The
two leaders agreed to tightened their cooperation in the fight against
terrorism and stressed the importance of ending regional violence such
as in Syria. They also reiterated the importance of Israel ending its
short-term conflict with Turkey and its long-standing one with the
Palestinians.
"We
discussed the continued coordination between our two militaries in the
region, which already works quite well," Netanyahu told reporters at a
joint press conference in the Kremlin with Putin after their meeting.
It
is their fourth meeting in the last year, and their third in Moscow.
The Countless Israeli Connections to
Mueller's Probe of Trump and Russia
Chemi Shalev
The Israeli media usually takes scant interest in
Robert Mueller's investigations. It prefers to dwell on Donald Trump's
supposedly pro-Israeli policies. Last week's report in the New York
Times about the participation of Joel Zamel, the Australian-born
"Israeli specialist in social media manipulation," in an August 3, 2016
meeting at Trump Tower in New York was an exception to the rule. The
FBI, the Times reported, had even come to Israel to search the offices
of Zamel's company. Here was a direct Israeli link to the scandal that
has bewitched much of America since Trump was first elected.
Mueller reveals ANOTHER effort to arrange
a Trump-Putin meeting – this one involving the chief Rabbi of Russia known
as 'Putin's Rabbi' who visited Trump Tower in 2016
Geoff
Earle
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report sketches
out yet another effort to arrange a meeting between Donald Trump and
Russia's Vladimir Putin – this time from a man touting a connection to
the Chief Rabbi of Russia.
The Trump-Putin meeting never occurred, but Rabbi
Berel Lazar, known as 'Putin's Rabbi,' did attend a Trump Tower meeting
in 2016 with the man who pitched it.
Here are 5 shady ways Trump, Israel and
Russia are colluding on the world stage
Tana Ganeva
In
the latest bizarre twist in the Paul Manafort saga, the Guardian reports
that Manafort may have conspired with an Israeli official to manipulate
members of the Obama administration into supporting Viktor Yanukovych
over Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, and link the latter to anti-Semitism.
Yanukovych was Russia's chosen candidate.
1.
As Bashar al-Assad moves to consolidate power in Syria, the US, Russia
and Israel seem united in their efforts to throw Hezbollah, a proxy of
Iran, out of the conflict. In mid-August, Secretary of State John Bolton
told ABC that the three countries are united in this goal.
3.
During the President's much derided one-on-one talks with Russian
President Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump assured the world that the
security of Israel is a priority for both Russia and the United States.
4.
House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the
Russian Mafia,ť the writer Craig Unger writes about how up to 59 Russian
oligarchs have been cultivating Donald Trump and his associates for
years, through such means as New York's unregulated real estate
industry.
As
the Times of Israel has pointed out, many of these wealthy Russian
business-people also have ties to Israel.
5.
So far, the President has made good on his promise to prioritize the
interests of the current Israeli government.
It's not a surprise when Trump flouts international norms. But his
decision to move the US embassy to Jerusalem sparked furor around the
world and led to deadly protests by Palestinians.
The
administration dismissed the demonstrations, in which multiple civilians
were killed, as 'unfortunate propaganda'.
Paul Manafort: Trump's ex-campaign chair
agrees to cooperate with Mueller
Jon Swaine
Manafort may have conspired with an Israeli
official to manipulate members of the Obama administration into
supporting Viktor Yanukovych over Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine, and link
the latter to anti-Semitism. Yanukovych was Russia's chosen candidate.
Manafort allegedly orchestrated a plan to smear a Yanukovych domestic
rival, Yulia Tymoshenko, by disseminating "with no fingerprints"
allegations that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian
official. "My goal is to plant some stink on Tymo," Manafort wrote in a
message.
He also allegedly schemed to have "Obama Jews" exert pressure on Barack
Obama's administration to support Yanukovych and disavow Tymoshenko, and
conspired with an Israeli government official to spread allegations
linking Tymoshenko to antisemitism. Manafort allegedly wrote in one
message to an unidentified associate: "I have someone pushing it on the
NY Post. Bada bing bada boom.
MATIMOP, Skolkovo deepen Israel-Russia
start-up cooperation
Israeli Industry Center for R&D (MATIMOP) and
Russia's Skolkovo Foundation will shortly announce a call for papers for
joint R&D project by Israeli and Russian start-ups to obtain support
from Office of the Chief Scientist in Israel and the Skolkovo
Foundation. Skolkovo Foundation VP Stanislav Naumov said, "The
difference between Russia and Israel's entrepreneurial system required
thinking together to find a formula for cooperation. The formula we
reached enables us to move forward to the stage of extensive
collaboration by ventures of the two countries. The special call for
papers that we are publishing is another important stage in developing
cooperation between Russia and Israel, which began a year ago with the
fostering of innovation and the commercialization of advanced
technologies."
Israel-Skolkovo Center co-managing director
Alexander Zinigrad said, "This is the first time that special binational
collaboration for start-ups has been declared in Israel. This is an
important measure, which gives a great boost to the cooperation that
began in the summer of 2011 between the start-up industry in Israel and
the Skolkovo Foundation. Since the establishment of the Israel-Skolkovo
Center, we have received scores of inquiries from Israeli start-up
companies every month. Within less than a year, we have assisted six
Israeli start-up companies at Skolkovo."
Putin Reveals Who Will Be the Lord of the
World
"Artificial intelligence is not only the future of
Russia, but the future of all mankind. It holds both tremendous
opportunities and is fraught with scarcely predictable dangers. Whoever
takes the lead in this sphere will become Lord of the World," President
Putin told Russian schoolchildren during an open lesson on their first
day of the new school year.
Hillary's Secret Kremlin Connection Is
Quickly Unraveling
John
Schindler
Exactly how Clinton profited off deals with
Skolkovo is something the American public has a right to know before
November 8.
Then there's the matter of what Skolkovo actually
is. In truth, it's nothing like Silicon Valley except in outward
appearance. It's a fully state-driven enterprise -- funded largely by the
Kremlin and acting on its orders. It does the bidding of the Russian
government, and President Putin has taken intense interest in his
high-tech complex, understanding its value to the country's defense and
security sector.
Yandex Partners With Tel Aviv University
to Launch AI Study Program, Scholarships
Amarella
Wenkert
The Russian technology company will launch the
Yandex Machine Learning Initiative, offering courses in artificial
intelligence and financial support to students and faculty
Modeled on Yeshiva University, first
Jewish university to open in Russia
Modeled after Yeshiva University in the United
States, The Jewish University of Moscow is a private institution with a
student body of 200 whose budget comes mostly from donors and the
Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia, dean Alexander Lebedev told
JTA earlier this week.
The university -- whose faculties include
economics, law, humanities and Jewish studies – comprises two existing
Jewish community colleges: Institute XXI century for men and Institute
Machon CHaMeSH for women. Their reconstitution as campuses of a single,
state-recognized university is a first in Russian history, according to
Lebedev.
Russian VC shows the love to Israeli
startups
Abigail Klein Leichman
Titanium Investments unveils its $50 million
venture capital fund geared mainly to Israeli companies such as
Feedvisor, Any.do and MUV Interactive.
US backs Israel's proposal for railway
link to Gulf
The US has expressed support for an
Israeli plan to revive a historic railroad network linking the Jewish
state to Gulf countries.
Jason Greenblatt, US President Donald Trump's
peace envoy, hailed the proposal on Monday as an Israeli minister visits
Oman to present the "Tracks for Regional Peace" project.
How Russia Created a Jewish Museum and
Tolerance Center Even Vladimir Putin Can Tolerate
Olga Gershenson
The museum project was initiated by the Federation
of Jewish Communities of Russia -- the umbrella organization for
Chabad-Lubavitch in Russia -- supported by the Kremlin and financed by a
handful of Russian Jewish oligarchs at a cost of $50 million. The
journey to museum from garage began in 2001, when Moscow City Hall
donated the dilapidated building to the Hasidic Jewish Community Center.
The idea was that the building would house a cultural center, including
an exhibition on Jewish culture and an art gallery. While this site is
neither central nor easily accessible to tourists, it is part of an
entire campus of Jewish religious and cultural organizations that
sprouted in the post-Soviet era in the traditionally Jewish neighborhood
(to the extent that Moscow has Jewish neighborhoods) of Maryina Roshcha.
The museum building shares its territory with a Jewish day school, a
yeshiva, a medical center and several Jewish charity organizations.
Several years of faltering attempts to renovate
the garage building ended in 2007, when Roman Abramovich, a federation
board member, restored it. In 2008 it opened its doors to the public as
the Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, managed by Dasha Zhukova,
Abramovich's girlfriend at the time.
Top Israeli officials were part of KGB
spy ring -- report
Toi Staff
KGB files reportedly revealed the existence of an
extensive Soviet spy ring in Israel, encompassing Knesset members,
senior IDF officers, engineers, members of the Israeli intelligence
community, and others who worked on classified projects.
Top-secret KGB documents reported on by the
Hebrew-language daily Yedioth Ahronoth Wednesday detailed the extent of
the network of agents run by the Soviet secret service.
The documents were copied over a period of 20
years by Vasili Mitrokhin, a senior KGB archivist who defected to the UK
in 1992. His edited notes on various KGB operations were released in
2014 and are stored in Churchill College in Cambridge; his handwritten
notes remain classified by MI5.
Soviet documents 'show Abbas was KGB
agent'; Fatah decries 'smear campaign'
Tamar
Pileggi
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was
a Soviet spy in Damascus in the 1980s, Israel's Channel 1 television
reported Wednesday, citing information it said was included in an
archive smuggled out of the USSR.
According to Channel 1's foreign news editor Oren
Nahari, the famed Mitrokhin archive, kept by KGB defector Vasily
Mitrokhin, revealed that Abbas was a Soviet mole in Damascus in 1983.
The documents -- obtained by Israeli researchers
Isabella Ginor and Gideon Remez -- purportedly show that Abbas,
code-named Krotov (mole), was involved with the Soviets while Mikhail
Bogdanov, today Vladimir Putin's envoy to the Middle East. was stationed
in Damascus.
KGB Infiltrated Highest Echelons of
Israel's Army, Business, and Political Leadership
Richard
Silverstein
The Israeli military censor compelled Bergman to
suppress the names of the most damaging of the KGB spies working in
Israel in a three-part series published in recent weeks by Ynet. In part
four of his series, Bergman secured the cooperation of an Israeli triple
agent who worked for the CIA, KGB and Shabak. The ex-spy agreed to be
interviewed and for his identity to be exposed. But the IDF censor, Col.
Ariella Ben Avraham, so eviscerated the proposed article that it could
not be published. As a result, it will be some time before we learn this
individual's identity. Given that the former spy agreed to be identified
and the incident presumably occurred decades ago, one wonders what the
censor is protecting except her own power and prerogative to render
secret what should be known in any other democratic society.
Lieberman Appointed Israeli KGB Agent to
Senior Government Role, Then He Disappeared
Richard
Silverstein
Bergman, who is compelled by the military censor
to suppress the names of almost all of the spies, tells (Nana recounts
the story at 3:05 of this news report) of a Soviet Jew born in
south-central Russia in the mid-1950s. He studied engineering and was
considered quite proficient in his field of study. The spy, whose
code-name was Bejan, was recruited to an elite Soviet espionage school,
where he was trained in the field of spycraft. He made aliyah to Israel
and was inducted into the IDF shortly thereafter. He joined the officer
training school and from there rose quickly in the ranks until he was
appointed the chief of one of the army's most critical infrastructure
ventures. He was privy to a multitude of highly secret material
including the location of bases, infrastructure facilities, data on the
order of battle, and preparations for future wars.
After retiring from the IDF, he turned to various
jobs in private industry. Later, he was appointed by Avigdor Lieberman,
who himself has often been rumored to be a Russian intelligence asset,
to a senior post. Then suddenly, Bejan disappeared in 2005. He has not
been heard from since.
He is not the first person in Lieberman's circle
to suffer a strange, mysterious fate. News1 detailed the circumstances
in which several key witnesses in the last Lieberman investigation who
either committed suicide, disappeared, or "forgot" key elements of their
previous testimony. Among them are Michael Falkov, a Lieberman
communications advisor who disappeared in 2014. Yosef Shuldiner was
found shot to death in an Israeli cemetery in 2006. Artium Borovik, a
senior Russian journalist close to the Kremlin, whom Lieberman used to
lobby on behalf of his business ventures, died in a mysterious plane
crash in 2008. Daniella Mourtzi was the corporate accountant for five
Cyprus-based Lieberman companies which were fronts. She was to testify
as part of the government investigation into Lieberman's shady business
dealings about his ownership of the companies. But before her time came
to testify, she suddenly developed amnesia and couldn't recall a thing.
Another witness in Moldova (where Lieberman was born) was interrogated
and shortly afterward had a fatal stroke.
Soviet spies infiltrate Mossad, sources
say
Richard
Sale
Soviet infiltration of Israel's spy agency,
Mossad, is the most serious blow to Israeli intelligence since the 1970s
and U.S. intelligence also was breached as a result, U.S. sources
reveal.
Mossad has been penetrated by 'highly placed'
Soviet moles and a full-scale internal counterintelligence investigation
is under way, the intelligence sources said.
A Justice Department source said U.S.
counterintelligence agents became aware of the Israeli-Soviet espionage
pipeline when data stolen by Jonathan Jay Pollard, a U.S. Navy analyst
convicted of spying for Israel, was 'traced to the Eastern bloc.'
Intelligence sources said data reaching the
Soviets via this route included sensitive U.S. weapons technology and
strategic information about the defense forces of Turkey, Pakistan and
moderate Arab countries, including Saudi Arabia.
U.S. intelligence analysts said the Pollard data
was traded to the Soviets in return for promises to increase emigration
of Soviet Jews to Israel.
One analyst said Israel's 'right-wing' Jews are
involved with spying for the Soviets and called it 'ironic,' noting that
left-wing elements were responsible for similar scandals in the past.
No Love Lost
Yossi
Melman
"There is a paradoxical situation," says the chief rabbi of Moscow. "The
Jews in Russia have power, money and influence, as never before; yet at
the same time the situation of the Jewish community is at an all-time
low." A guide to the wars of the Jewish oligarchs in Russia.
Why Data Science is Booming in Israel
Jacob Maslow
Yandex, the "Google of Russia," is going to expand
into Israel. The tech firm, the largest in Russia, will be launching a
few services in Israel. The firm will be launching Yandex Music in just
a few weeks, and then there are additional plans for Israel.
Times of Israel broke the news that Yandex is
still thinking about opening a taxi venture in Israel and also plans to
offer an eight-month course in data science. Yandex plans to introduce
their Y-Data initiative in Israel, a course that will be very similar to
what is already running in Russia.
Exploring Al Qaeda's Murky Connection To
Russian Intelligence
John
Schindler
[Note: This is an unusually controversial piece, even for my blog, for
reasons that will quickly become obvious. Linkages between Al-Qa'ida and
Russian intelligence have been discussed in hushed tones among spies in
many countries, for years, and this matter has been a "hobby file" of
mine for some time. Here is a think-piece on it, in the hope of spurring
additional discussion and research into this important yet murky matter.
This is particularly necessary given rising tensions between Moscow and
the West at present.
'The USSR Is Our Second Homeland,' Said
One Kibbutznik When Stalin Died
Tom Segev
In
fact, it is of interest to recall - incredible as it may seem - that
Stalin's Soviet Union was once at the center of Israeli identity. In the
first Knesset, the left-wing Mapam (United Workers Party ) was the
second-largest faction, with 19 seats. During the debate over the makeup
of the government that was held in the Knesset on March 10, 1949, one of
Mapam's two leaders, Ya'akov Hazan of Kibbutz Mishmar Ha'emek, said:
"For us, the Soviet Union is the fortress of world socialism, it is our
second homeland, the socialist one." That comment could go down as one
of the 10 most-quoted sentences in the history of Israeli politics.
Jabotinsky's Likud Was Anything but a
Liberal Bastion
Ofri Ilany
While Ze'ev Jabotinsky has in recent years been
lionized as the picture of a faultless liberal standout, there is no
justification for describing Likud as a movement that was once liberal
and has deteriorated into fascism.
David Ben-Gurion visited the Soviet Union in 1923,
and drew inspiration from the Leninist form of organization and use of
power. He described Lenin admiringly as "an iron-willed man who would
not spare human life or the blood of the innocent on behalf of the
revolution." In the wake of that visit, Ben-Gurion built his political
party into a power-centric revolutionary organization that was not
squeamish about using whatever means possible to realize its objectives.
RUSSIANS AND JEWS: THE ODD COUPLE
Jonathan
Adelman
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has in the last
three years gone nine times to a Russia that has promoted dozens of
Russian Jews to become oligarchs in the new Russia.
FROM RUSSIA WITH JEWS
Amiram Barkat and Yossi Melman
Zvi Magen did what few Israelis would dare to do:
He rejected a tempting, well-paying job offer from Arcadi Gaydamak, the
Israeli-Russian oligarch, whom the State Prosecutor's office is
considering putting on trial for money laundering, and who is wanted in
France on suspicion of illegal arms trading with Angola. Gaydamak wanted
Magen to head the Congress of Jewish Religious Communities and
Organizations in Russia (KEROOR). This is an off-the-shelf organization
that came to life about 18 months ago under the aegis of Gaydamak, who
contributes money to it and acts as its president.
Magen received the generous offer a few months
ago, while he was still head of Nativ, but preferred to join the
Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya as head of a new Euro-Asia institute
that will conduct "studies from the Balkans to Mongolia."
Magen, a lieutenant colonel in the Israel Defense
Forces reserves and a former ambassador to Ukraine and Russia, has
headed Nativ for almost seven years. He concluded his term of office at
the beginning of last month, but his successor has only just been named.
Last week, Naomi Ben Ami, Israel's ambassador to Ukraine, was chosen to
head Nativ. This is the first time in the history of the Israeli
intelligence community that a woman has been named to head one of its
agencies - although Nativ in fact is no longer involved in intelligence.
HOLY RUSSIA SACRED ISRAEL
Dominic
Rubin
Jewish‐Christian Encounters in Russian Religious
Thought
Russia's use of false flag terrorism
facilitating the rise of Putin
'September, 1998: Kremlin Insider Predicts
'Massive Unrest' to Journalist'
March 19, 1999: Bombing in Russian Market Near
Chechnya Kills Fifty.
June 6, 1999: Kremlin False Flag Terror Plot
Rumors Surface in Swedish Newspaper
July 22, 1999: Russian Journalist Alleges
Destabilization Plot by Kremlin Insiders
September 9, 1999: Apartment Blast in Moscow Kills
94; Chechen Rebels Blamed
September 13, 1999: Second Moscow Apartment
Bombing Kills 118; Chechen Rebels Blamed
September 22-24, 1999: FSB Agents Plant Large Bomb
in Ryazan: 'Security Exercise' or Terror Plot?
Henry Kissinger's criminal sale of
nuclear weapons technology to Soviet Russia in 1972
Antony Sutton
Kalmanowich affair shows
KGB-Israeli mafia link
Thierry Lalevee and Joseph Brewda
On Dec. 23, 1987, Israeli businessman Shabtai
Kalmanowich was arrested by Israeli authorities on charges of being "a
spy
for the Soviet Union." Since his emigration from Lithuania in 1971,
Kalmanowich had become a leading figure in the Israeli political and
business establishment, directing a far-flung diamond, gold, gambling,
prostitution, and armstrafficking empire, based in Africa, West Germany,
and New York City. When Israeli authorities announced Kalmanowich's
arrest on Jan. 10, however, they failed to mention the fact that
millionaire Kalmanowich was also an officer in the Israeli foreign
intelligence service, the Mossad. Kalmanowich was something of the late
CIA director Bill Casey's ideal intelligence officer: He made a fortune
as he carried out espionage.
Kalmanowich is certainly not the first Soviet
Jewish
emigre caught as a spy;
there have been four or five over recent years. Analyzing this
phenomenon, a former head of Israeli military intelligence reported on
Israeli television that there are two kinds of spies among the emigres:
those who are blackmailed because their families have remained behind,
and those who are ideologically committed to Soviet communism.
Kalmanowich belonged to the second category.
The Chicago School of Economics
Jon Swinn
This infographic displays the connections and
people known collectively as the 'Chicago School'. The strong links to
the elites are identified.
The neoconservative as well as Thatcherism and the
false opposition libertarian movement find their roots in the 'Chicago
School'.
This is essential background information into
understanding the next infographic 'Rise of the Neo-Cons / Wohlstetter
Network'.
The Rise of the Neo-Cons / Wohlstetter
Network
Jon Swinn
This infographic displays the links between some of the important
players behind the creation of the neoconservative movement, 9/11 and
resulting War on Terror.
[Perle, Feith, Gaffney] Suspected Soviet
Cell Wrote Reagan's Long-Term Strategy
Jeffrey
Steinberg
Jackson - Vanik amendment
Jackson organized the political movement to link
trade and emigration in America's relations with the Soviet Union in
concert with Jewish activists, but he soon took matters into his own
hands. Jackson drafted what would become the Jackson–Vanik amendment in
the summer of 1972 and introduced it to the Ninety-second Congress on
October 4, 1972. Jackson's efforts, rooted in his own domestic political
calculations and ideological distrust of and antipathy toward the Soviet
Union, complicated the Nixon White House's pursuit of Detente, which it
had worked on since 1969. However, three-quarters of the Senate
co-sponsored the amendment, neutralizing opposition from President
Nixon.
Jackson's staffer Richard Perle said in an
interview that the idea belonged to Jackson, who believed that the right
to emigrate was the most powerful among the human rights in certain
respects: "if people could vote with their feet, governments would have
to acknowledge that and governments would have to make for their
citizens a life that would keep them there." While there was some
opposition, the American Jewish establishment on the whole and Soviet
Jewry activists (particularly the Washington Committee for Soviet Jewry
and the National Conference on Soviet Jewry) supported the amendment...
Soviet Union
At first the Jackson–Vanik amendment did little to
help free Soviet Jewry. The number of exit visas declined after the
passing of the amendment. However, in the late 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev
agreed to comply with the protocols of the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe. Lazin (2005) states that scholars differ on how
effective the amendment was in helping Soviet Jews. Some argue that it
helped bring the plight of Soviet Jews to the world's attention, while
others believe it hindered emigration and decreased America's diplomatic
bargaining power.
Since 1975 more than 500,000 refugees, large
numbers of whom were Jews, evangelical Christians, and Catholics from
the former Soviet Union, have been resettled in the United States. An
estimated one million Soviet Jews have immigrated to Israel in that
time.
Jackson-Vanik also led to great changes within the
Soviet Union. Other ethnic groups subsequently demanded the right to
emigrate, and the ruling Communist Party had to face the fact that there
was widespread dissatisfaction with its governance
Russia
In 2003, Vladimir Putin pursued an economic agenda
for Russia to begin normalized trade relations with the West which
included Russia joining the European Union and the repeal of the
Jackson-Vannik amendment. Putin tried to use his relationships with both
the Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who was the head of the
European Union's Council in 2003, to gain Russia's membership in the
European Union, and also Hank Greenberg, who was the chairman and CEO of
the American International Group (AIG), to repeal the Jackson-Vannik
provisions in the United States.[20] Putin wished for Greenberg to
support through Greenberg's AIG greater development of the nascent
Russian home-mortgage market.
On November 16, 2012 the U.S. House of
Representatives passed a bill that would repeal the Jackson–Vanik
amendment for Russia and Moldova. After approval by the Senate, the law
repealing the effects of the Jackson–Vanik amendment on Russia and
Moldova was signed together with Magnitsky bill by President Barack
Obama on December 14, 2012.
Excerpt from Robert Friedman's Red Mafiya -
America's gates were opened to Jewish mobsters by
the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, which withheld most-favored-nation status
from Marxist countries that restricted Jewish emigration. According to
Mr. Friedman, the Soviets were happy to oblige during the 1970s by
"emptying their jails of thousands of hard-core criminals, dumping vast
numbers of undesirables" on an unsuspecting United States. More than
40,000 Soviet Jews settled in Brighton Beach which soon became the seat
of the "Organisatsiya," the new Jewish mob. Initially assisted by the
Genovese crime family and the politically astute and well-connected
Jewish rabbi Ronald Greenwald, the Jewish mobsters, some of whom have
Ph.D.s in mathematics, physics and engineering, as well as MBAs, quickly
expanded their operations to include bank fraud, money laundering,
Medicare and insurance fraud, counterfeiting, drug dealing, natural gas
bootlegging - scams which netted billions of dollars. The mob has even
infiltrated the National Hockey League through its intimidation of
Russian and Ukrainian players.
The Soviet mole network running U.S.
counterintelligence
At the very beginning of 1988, a purported
"official CIA
evaluation" of
the Jonathan Jay Pollard spy case surfaced among senior French
intelligence officers. The essential conclusion of the dossier,
according to French officials who directly reviewed it, was that the
Pollard case showed only that "one or two" KGB agents had infiltrated
Israeli intelligence. No higher-level problems were shown to exist
within the Mossad. The purported document went on to say, that while
senior Israeli officials, including Ariel Sharon and Rafael "Dirty Rafi"
Eytan, would be cut off from continued
collaboration with their American counterparts,
there was no
evidence
suggesting that the pair were either Soviet "moles" or involved in any
witting perfidy with Moscow.
Whether or not the document was a bona fide CIA
damage
assessment, the
evaluation, as reported, is a fraud. Not only was Jonathan Jay Pollard
merely one small fish in an extensive Soviet "false flag" espionage ring
run through the highest
levels of Israeli intelligence; the same ring,
operating principally through Israeli and social democratic channels,
has
successfully penetrated the
inner sanctums of the Reagan administration's counterintelligence
apparatus.
The "CIA document" bears mentioning, because it
perhaps provides a clue to the identities of some of the "bigger
fish"-American
and Israeli-who are still in place, attempting to "damage control" the
continuing search for "other Pollards. "
The Israeli spy network that
Jonathan Pollard left behind
Joseph Brewda
Sanhedrin Asks Putin and Trump to Build
Third Temple in Jerusalem
Adam Eliyahu Berkowitz
The Nascent Sanhedrin is calling on Russian
President Vladmir Putin and US president-elect Donald Trump to join
forces and fulfill their Biblically-mandated roles by rebuilding the
Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.
Rabbi Hillel Weiss, spokesman for the Sanhedrin,
contacted Breaking Israel News to announce that the election of Trump,
who has promised to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel,
coupled with Putin's expressed desire for the Temple to be rebuilt,
prompted the Jewish court to send a letter offering the two the
opportunity to act as modern-day Cyrus figures: non-Jewish kings who
recognize the importance of Israel and the Temple.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn: 200 years together - English audiobook
Part 1
Part 2
Grant
Stern
Grant Stern's 10 part series on the Grand Old
Putin Party.
Part 1 - Prologue
Part 2-
Putin's Propagandist Eerily Predicted Trump's Relationship With General
Flynn and Dana Rohrabacher Last Year
Part 3-
Putin's Favorite Congressman Secretly Met With Paul Manafort After The
FBI Warned Russian Agents Were Recruiting Him
Part 4-
The GOP's Favorite Russian Professor Spent Decades Building Conservative
Ties To Moscow
Part 5-
American University In Moscow: Linked To Russian State, But Fake Like
TrumpU
Part 6-
Here's Lozansky Introducing Republicans To The Father Of Russian Foreign
Intelligence -- And Putin's Mentor
Part 7-
Soviet Human Rights Activists Believed Lozansky Worked With Russian
Intelligence
Part 8-
From Orange Revolution To "Stars And Stripes Revolution"
Part 9-
Opinion: Edward Lozansky's Russia Lobby Compromised The Republican Party
Part 10-
Opinion: Without Ed Lozansky, Trump-Russia Could Not Have Happened
Communism Among Jewish Children in Russia
Nov 5, 1924
The Communist Child Movement, according to figures
published here, includes 7,000 organized Jewish children in the Ukraine
and 2,000 in White Russia. The work among the Jewish "pioneers", as they
are called, is conducted exclusively in the Yiddish language. There are
five detachments of Jewish "pioneers" in Witebsk, three in Homel, a
Jewish "pioneer" base in Minsk, and scores of detachments in Odessa and
Kiev. "Pioneer" clubs are attached to the schools, children's homes and
workshops. A proposal is now made for the publication of a special
Yiddish magazine for the Communist Child Movement.
Freiheit Calls on Jews to Desert Zionism, Back Soviets
Nov 9, 1930
Calling upon the Jewish workers to desert the
Zionist cause and to fight for Soviet Russia and Communism, an editorial
in Friday's Freiheit, New York Yiddish Communist organ, enumerates what
it alleges to be Jewish failures in Palestine with regard to land
settlement, and contrasts this with what it regards as the great success
of Jewish land settlement in Russia within recent years.
"During the past five years the Soviet Union has
settled three hundred thousand Jews on the land," says the editorial.
"During the coming five years it will build a large new settlement in
Bira-Bidjan. Wherever Jews live in compact masses the whole governmental
apparatus is conducted in Yiddish. If great Jewish masses will come to
Bira-Bidjan a Soviet Republic will be organized there.
"All this is being done by the Soviet Republic
without noise, without trumpeting; it is part of the general work of
building up the country. The Jews in the Soviet Union have equal rights
together with all citizens. Jewish books and periodicals are being
issued at the expense of the government. Anti-Semitism is being uprooted
with an iron hand.
"In Palestine it is just the opposite. There
during the past fifty years hundreds of millions of dollars have poured
in, nevertheless only about twenty thousand Jews are settled upon the
land. There everything is kept up by philanthropy, and there is no room
for a large Jewish population. There the ruler is the British
imperialistic power which has encouraged pogroms and which now declares
openly that it will give the Jews no governmental power in Palestine.
There Jews are being settled upon alien soil from which the peasants are
being driven off by force, although they have been living there scores
and hundreds of years. There a poisonous hatred on the part of the local
population towards the aliens who come with the bayonet and the dollar
exists, and the masses have already revolted against the alien
oppressors."
"Down with Zionism! Long live the Soviet Union!"
JEWS CREATED COMMUNISM
Dewey
(Buddy) Tucker
THE JEWS AND THE COMMUNIZATION OF RUSSIA
Elizabeth Dilling
Very few people are aware of the extent to which
Jews were responsible for the Communization of Russia, first through
organizing of the unsuccessful revolution of 1905, and then the later
and successful Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Both were heavily financed
by outside Jewish financial and banking houses, and ultimately resulted
in Jews assuming control of what had become the Russian Soviet
Government. Concurrently, Jewish machinations in the United States,
Germany and elsewhere helped set the stage for the take-over.
The Three Holodomor Genocides
"You must understand. The leading Bolsheviks who
took over Russia were not Russians. They hated Russians. They hated
Christians. Driven by ethnic hatred they tortured and slaughtered
millions of Russians without a shred of human remorse. The October
Revolution was not what you call in America the "Russian Revolution." It
was an invasion and conquest over the Russian people. More of my
countrymen suffered horrific crimes at their bloodstained hands than any
people or nation ever suffered in the entirety of human history. It
cannot be understated. Bolshevism was the greatest human slaughter of
all time. The fact that most of the world is ignorant of this reality is
proof that the global media itself is in the hands of the perpetrators."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008), Nobel-Prize-winning novelist,
historian and victim of Jewish Bolshevism (Marxism).
Woodrow Wilson And The Zionist Network
Infographic highlighting the Zionist influence
surrounding Woodrow Wilson, his rise to power and historical events
during his presidency and the role of the Zionist powers in the creation
of WW1, WW2, creation of the Federal Reserve system, Bolshevik
Revolution, Great Depression etc.
Geneva Versus Peace
Comte de Saint-Aulaire
Comte de Saint-Aulaire, French Ambassador to Great
Britain in the 1920s, discussed his meetings with Kuhn, Loeb, & Co.
financiers. They had discussions regarding why they [the Kuhn, Loeb, &;
Co. bankers] financed the Bolshevik Revolution. One of them said (p.
80):
"You say that Marxism is the very antithesis of
capitalism, which is equally sacred to us. It is precisely for this
reason that they are direct opposites to one another, that they put into
our hands the two poles of this planet and allow us to be its axis.
These two contraries, like Bolshevism and ourselves, find their identity
in the International. These opposites, which are at the antipodes to one
another in society and in their doctrines meet again in the identity of
their purpose and end, the remaking of the world from above by the
control of riches, and from below by revolution.
Our mission consists in promulgating the new law
and in creating a God, that is to say in purifying the idea of God and
realizing it, when the time shall come.
We shall purify the idea by identifying it with
the nation of Israel, which has become its own Messiah. The advent of it
will be facilitated by the final triumph of Israel, which has become
it's own Messiah."
This same financier also said (pp. 83-84):
"our essential dynamism makes use of the forces of
destruction and forces of creation, but uses the first to nourish the
second. Our organization for revolution is evidenced by destructive
Bolshevism and for construction by the League of Nations which is also
our work. Bolshevism is the accelerator and the League is the brake on
the mechanism of which we supply both the motive force and the guiding
power.
What is the end? It is already determined by our
mission. It is formed of elements scattered throughout the whole world,
but cast in the flame of our faith in ourselves. We are a League of
Nations which contains the elements of all others."
Israeli support for anti-Ukrainian
separatists of "Novorussia"
Sean Jobst
Eurasianists and Nazbols link Ukraine with Israel,
ignoring Putin's close alliance with Israel and the central involvement
of hardcore Zionists like Avigdor Eskin in Dugin's networks. They
rewrite this narrative to deceive Western dissidents opposed to Zionism
and Jewish power, into signing off on their own anti-Ukrainian
subversion. Their efforts to enlist support for separatists who openly
proclaim themselves a Communist "People's Republic", include bizarre
claims that have been refuted by no less a figure as Donetsk leader
Denis Pushilin, who openly touts himself as "Chairman of the Soviet"
while his fighters brandish Soviet flags and include many foreign
Communists.
Borscht Belt: Will Israel Spurn America
for Russia?
Lincoln Mitchell
FOR MOST OF LAST YEAR, THE WEST STRUGGLED TO find
an appropriate response to Russia's incursions into Crimea and eastern
and southern Ukraine. Many European and North American governments
strongly condemned Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin, but Israel
has been noticeably silent.
In the past, Israel has been similarly mum on
Russian aggression -- or worse. In 2008, when the Russia-Georgia war began,
Israel cut its previously substantial military support for Georgia and
withdrew its military advisors.
Why has Israel declined to slap Russia? Because
the Jewish state may someday need Russia as a powerful ally if relations
with the U.S. wither -- something that's not an immediate risk but not
necessarily unthinkable .
The Partition Plan, November 29, 1947:
Soviet Support for Establishing Israel in Perspective
Alex Grobman
Given the Soviet Union's avowed hostility to
Zionism, the Soviet vote "came as a great surprise, as a bombshell,"
recounted Moshe Sharett, then head of the Jewish Agency's political
department.
When May Day Was a Major Event in Israel
Armin Rosen
It wasn't just that Stalin's Red Army had
liberated Auschwitz, or that "the Soviets had shipped Czech weapons to
the IDF in 1948" and supported Jewish statehood at a crucial moment,
including in the United Nations partition vote in 1947. The ties went
deeper than any political alliance: For many, Zionism was an avowedly
secular pro-labor movement with the same utopian aims as Communism
itself. As Halevi writes, the logo of the newspaper for the Hashomer
Hatzair Marxist Zionist movement translated to "For Zionism -- For
Socialism -- For the Fraternity of Nations."
May Day was a major event for some Israeli
communities, outranking most of the Jewish holidays in importance.
Stalin's Jews
Sever Plocker
We mustn't forget that some of greatest murderers
of modern times were Jewish
Back in the USSR?
David
Horovitz
Chabad's chief rabbi
The Jewish leader closest to Putin is Chabad's
Berel Lazar, one of Russia's two chief rabbis, a Milan-born, New
York-ordained emissary, who first came here in the late 1980s on several
trips to teach Judaism to refuseniks and was then appointed by the
Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, to help revive and
strengthen the Jewish community as the Soviet Union entered its death
throes in 1990.
A father of 12 aged 49, with a graying beard and
the trademark Chabad warmth -- he immediately invites me for Shabbat
dinner when we meet -- Lazar works from a book-lined sixth-floor office
in the Moscow Jewish Community Center building that houses his
now-thriving Maryina Roshcha District synagogue.
When he arrived, Lazar recalls, there was "an
underground" of people leading a return to Judaism. By 1989 Mikhail
Gorbachev had granted "unofficial permission to open a school and a
yeshiva." And when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most everyone
whose Judaism was important to them was leaving. "The place was emptying
out. The Israeli embassy was sure there'd be no Jews left," says Lazar.
"They laughed at us as we tried to fix up synagogues. It was a conveyor
belt: come to shul, learn Hebrew, go to Israel. No one thought there'd
be a future here."
Putin Welcomes Kissinger: 'Old Friends'
to Talk Shop
Ellen
Berry
Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin will meet Friday
with former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger to discuss world
affairs, including elections in Russia and the United States, said Mr.
Putin's press secretary, Dmitri S. Peskov.
Mr. Peskov said Mr. Kissinger requested the
meeting in late November or early December. The two men are "old
friends" who have met 8 or 10 times over the years, once dining at Mr.
Kissinger's home in New York, he said. Mr. Peskov said Mr. Putin was
interested in Mr. Kissinger's counsel about domestic politics, among
other subjects.
"He values everyone's point of view, and
especially such a wise man as Henry Kissinger," Mr. Peskov said.
Alexander Dugin - The one Russian linking
Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdogan
Henry Meyer, Onur Ant
Dugin, who's been described as everything from an
occult fascist to a mystical imperialist, lost his prestigious job
running the sociology department at Moscow State University in 2014
after activists accused him of encouraging genocide. Thousands of people
signed a petition calling for his removal after a rant in support of
separatists in Ukraine in which he said, "kill, kill, kill."
What is Duginism and why it matters
Youtube video by Freedom Alternative.
Duginist publication calls Russians and
Jews "chosen peoples"
Sean Jobst
The volume was part of an effort to strengthen
ties between the Eurasianist movement and Chabad and far-right-wing
Zionist movements, approvingly quoting one of Bromberg's contemporaries
(Lev Karsavin, who greeted the Soviet regime) about the "primordial tie
between the Jewish people and Russia". Dugin has praised the predominant
Jewish role in Bolshevism as representing a continued "positive" Jewry,
that can now contribute to "the general struggle against Western
culture" and to the founding of the "Great Eurasian Empire". He extolled
"messianic national-bolshevism" as "the spiritual union of Jewish and
Russian eurasianists".
Rise of the NazBols
MAGA OPUS Bitchute video.
Holocaust Deniers in Russia Now Face Five
Years in Prison
ussian President Vladimir Putin signed a law on
Monday making the denial of Nazi crimes and distortion of the Soviet
Union's role in the World War Two a criminal offence punishable by up to
five years in jail.
The law, described by critics as an attempt to
curb freedom of expression to appease conservative Russians, the ex-KGB
spy's main support base, also criminalises the public desecration of war
memorials.
The Kremlin has used World War Two as a pillar to
unite a society that Putin has said lost its moral bearings following
the 1991 Soviet collapse.
It has become increasingly risky for Russians to
dispute an official line that glorifies the wartime achievements of the
Soviet leadership and plays down its errors.
The new law would ban "wittingly spreading false
information about the activity of the USSR during the years of World War
Two".
LIFE AFTER PUTIN: THE JARED KUSHNER OF
RUSSIA
Fiona Zublin
The putative son-in-law is the son of Nikolay
Shamalov, one of Putin's longtime friends and hockey buddies. "Putin
made Shamalov Jr. a billionaire and effected a transfer of wealth to the
next generation," Dawisha says. Nikolay is also a shareholder in Rossiya
Bank -- described by the BBC as the "personal bank" of Russian oligarchs
-- and was sanctioned by the U.S. and EU after tensions mounted over the
annexation of Crimea in 2014, along with several other Russian banks and
businessmen.
Former Israeli double agent shot dead
near Putin's office
Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Adrian Blomfield in Jerusalem
Shabtai Kalmanovich, a former Israeli double agent who penetrated Golda
Meir's government on behalf of the KGB, has been shot dead in Moscow.
Kalmanovich, who later became a prominent businessman and allegedly had
links with the Russian mafia, died after an unidentified gunman fired at
least 20 shots into his chauffeur-driven Mercedes Benz. Mr Kalmanovich's
driver was seriously wounded in the incident.
"Kalmanovich had practically no chance of surviving," a police official
was quoted as saying by Russia's Interfax news agency. "He died on the
spot from numerous gun wounds." A figure with a colourful if chequered
past, Kalmanovich and his Jewish family immigrated to Israel from
Lithuania in 1971.
After becoming an Israeli citizen, he joined the Israeli Labour Party,
was appointed to a position in the government press office and became a
mole for the KGB.
Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The
Life and Murder of a Media Mogul
Robert Younes
Was Robert Maxwell a Soviet spy? FBI
files reveal US fears the media mogul was working for Russia
Rob Cooper
Stalin & Secret Diaries: "Soviet
Involvement in the Creation of the State of Israel"
The Maisky Diaries ed by Gabriel
Gorodetsky, review: 'a spectacular find'
Nicholas Shakespeare
n February 1953, two weeks before Stalin's death,
Ivan Maisky, Soviet ambassador to London from 1932 to 1943, was arrested
and accused of being a British spy. Interrogated 36 times in his
Lubyanka cell, the stocky exdiplomat was detained for two years without
books, pen or paper.
Rehabilitated in 1960 and desperate to write his
memoirs, he was granted one year of limited access to his personal
archive, which included the 1,500-page diary Maisky had kept while in
London, when he enjoyed automatic access to the chief personalities of
the day.
Published in the Sixties and written under the
twin clouds of purges and censorship, his memoirs were apologetic,
misleading and selective - and not terribly interesting. Then, in 1993,
the historian Gabriel Gorodetsky discovered Maisky's original diary in
the Russian Foreign Ministry. "Spiced with anecdotes and gossip", this
differed radically from the official version. Its candid depictions of
the British political and social scene reminded Gorodetsky of Samuel
Pepys.
Harry Hopkins, Soviet agent
But there are still many people alive who can
remember when the chief confidant of President Franklin Roosevelt was a
man named Harry Hopkins. And they will be understandably astonished to
learn that in a message dated May 29, 1943, Iskhak Akhmerov, the chief
Soviet "illegal" agent in the United States at the time, referred to an
Agent 19 who had reported on discussions between Roosevelt and Winston
Churchill in Washington at which the agent had been present. Only Harry
Hopkins meets the requirements for this agent's identity. Small wonder
that Akhmerov, in a lecture in Moscow in the early 1960s, identified
Hopkins by name as "the most important of all Soviet wartime agents in
the United States."
It took 50 years to bludgeon Alger Hiss' defenders
into admitting that this suave bureaucrat, who rose to be chief of the
State Department's Office of Special Political Affairs, had actually
been a Soviet agent all along. And it will probably take another 50 to
force Franklin Roosevelt's admirers to concede that their hero's closest
confidant and adviser was yet another Soviet agent.
But the documents and the testimony are now on the
public record, and they make it plain that those of us who sounded the
warning about Soviet espionage and policy subversion 50 years ago didn't
know the half of it.
The Resumption Of Russian-"Israeli" Free
Trade Talks Proves Ties Are Fantastic
Andrew Korybko
No, Russian-"Israeli" ties aren't in a state of
"crisis" after the latter bombed Syria earlier this month, but are
actually enjoying an unprecedented flourishment that won't be offset by
whatever happens in the Arab Republic, and Moscow might even tie Tel
Aviv into the same multilateral free trade area that has recently
expanded to include Iran.
"Israel's" bombing of Syria earlier this month
predictably prompted many in the Alt-Media to declare that this time
Russia will surely 'teach its ally a lesson' by openly turning into the
'anti-Zionist crusader state' that their dogma has indoctrinated them
into imagining that it's been this entire time. They were, as is
becoming the norm, totally wrong, and three specific events prove that
ties between the two sides aren't in a state of "crisis" but are rather
flourishing, with the latest milestone in their relationship being the
resumption of free trade talks.
Israel and Russia are NOT on the verge of
war. They are allies!
Andrew Korybko
The alternative media community, especially its
social media iteration, is experiencing collective psychosis in
hallucinating that "Israel" and Russia are on the verge of war with one
another.
The prevailing narrative is that Israeli "Defense
Minister" Lieberman's threat to destroy Syria's air defense systems is
tantamount to a declaration of war against Russia, with the assumption
being that Moscow is on a crusade against Zionism and has thus become
Tel Aviv's worst enemy.
There's no diplomatic way to say this, but the
presumptions on which such a crazy conclusion has been reached are
absolutely and utterly wrong.
Far from being Israel's hated nemesis like many in
the alternative media community wishfully pretend that it is, Moscow is
one of Tel Aviv's closest allies, and this is entirely due to President
Putin's deliberate policies. Not only does he enjoy a very strong
personal friendship with Netanyahu, but President Putin also sees a lot
of opportunity to advance his country's interests in Israel through the
large Russian diaspora there.
Does anyone still seriously think that
Russia and Israel aren't allies
Andrew Korybko
Russian Oil Giant Rosneft Expands in
Middle East
Russia's state-owned oil company Rosneft has begun
to expand its operations in the Middle East with deals in Libya and
Iraq, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday.
Rosneft, which is run by Putin ally Igor Sechin,
struck a deal to purchase an undisclosed amount of crude oil from the
Libyan National Oil Corp on Monday. The deal will also allow the Russian
company to invest in exploration and production in the volatile North
African country.
The chairman of National Oil Corp welcomed the
deal, saying it would help to stabilize the warring country's economy.
"We need the assistance and investment of major
international oil companies to reach our production goals and stabilize
our economy," NOC Chairman Mustafa Sanalla said in a statement.
Rosneft announced on the same day it had struck a
deal with authorities of the autonomous Kurdish region in northern Iraq
to purchase oil until 2019. The deal with Kurdish authorities will also
allow the Russian company to invest in exploration and production.
REPORT: MAJORITY OF ISRAELI OIL IMPORTED
FROM KURDISTAN
Sharon
Udasin
On Sunday night, The Financial Times reported that
Israel had imported as much as 77 percent of its oil supply from
Kurdistan in recent months, bringing in some 19 million barrels between
the beginning of May and August 11. During that period, more than a
third of all northern Iraqi exports, shipped through Turkey's Ceyhan
port, went to Israel, with transactions amounting to almost $1b., the
report said, citing "shipping data, trading sources and satellite tanker
tracking."
Nonetheless, Dr. Amit Mor, CEO of the Eco Energy
Financial and Strategic Consulting firm, confirmed to The Jerusalem Post
that "for some time, Kurdish oil [has been arriving] to the Ashkelon
petroleum port." In all likelihood, he explained, the oil was being
stored at the Eilat-Ashkelon Pipeline Company facilities for commercial
reasons, by international trading firms and investors. Israel's
refineries may then be purchasing the oil from the international
companies, he added.
Importing Kurdish oil could be beneficial to
Israel from both geostrategic and economic perspectives, according to
Mor.
"Although I don't think the Kurds are having major
difficulties in exporting their oil these days, it is very sensible for
the Israeli refineries to purchase Kurdish oil via Turkey's Ceyhan
petroleum port, as it takes only one day of sailing for oil tankers to
reach the Ashkelon petroleum port. Such is also the case for
[Azerbaijani] oil," he said.
The Truth about Oil and the Iraq War, 15
Years Later
Gary Vogler
The oil agenda I discovered and experienced was to
supply Iraq oil to Israel. The players were the neoconservatives in the
Bush Administration, their favorite Iraqi – Dr Ahmed Chalabi and the
Israeli government. One of the motives was because Israel was paying a
huge premium for its oil imports and this premium had just started in
the late1990s. The agenda called for the reopening of the old Kirkuk to
Haifa pipeline and its significant expansion. When this pipeline plan
became unattainable in the 2nd half of 2003 then Chalabi took other
actions to get inexpensive Iraqi oil to Israel.
A much more credible explanation for intentionally
destroying the Syrian export pipeline than what Secretary Rumsfeld told
the NY Times was found in the British press. The Guardian, a London
newspaper, quoted a retired CIA agent just after the Syria pipeline
attack. "It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people
now driving the Bush administration and the war in Iraq to safeguard
Israel's energy supply.
Russia is suspected of deploying troops
to Libya, but what's Moscow's play in this muddy conflict?
"Vladimir Putin wants to make the war-torn North
African country 'his new Syria.'" Citing sources in British
intelligence, the tabloid claimed that Russia has already embedded
"dozens" of GRU agents and Spetsnaz troops in eastern Libya, and
established two military bases in the coastal towns of Tobruk and
Benghazi, supposedly using the Wagner private military group as "cover."
Russian Kalibr anti-ship missiles and S-300 air-defense systems are also
reportedly on the ground in Libya. The tabloid's sources claimed that
the Kremlin has sided with the warlord General Khalifa Haftar in an
effort to "seize control of the country's coastline." This would
allegedly give Russia the power to unleash a "fresh tidal wave of
migrants" across the Mediterranean "like a tap."
note -
Khalifa
Belqasim Haftar studied in Egypt and the Soviet Union, also at the M.V.
Frunze Military Academy. He is a fluent Russian speaker. In 1969, Haftar
took part in the coup that brought Muammar Gaddafi to power and
overthrew the monarchy.
9/11 inside job "impossible to conceal," says Vladimir Putin
"Claims that the terror attacks of September 11,
2001 were orchestrated by US intelligence agencies are "complete
nonsense," Prime Minister Vladimir Putin told attendees of a youth
forum"
How the War on Terrorism Did Russia a
Favor
Simon Shuster
"Putin, who had been the first to call Bush with
his sympathy after learning of the 9/11 attacks, graciously offered to
help with the invasion of Afghanistan"
Putin: Russia warned U.S. of Iraq terror
"Russian President Vladimir Putin said his country
warned the United States several times that Saddam Hussein's regime was
planning terror attacks on the United States and its overseas interests"
REPORT: IRAN ACCUSES RUSSIA OF GIVING ISRAEL CODES FOR SYRIAN AIR DEFENSES
Yasser Okbi, Maariv Hashavua
According to the source, Damascus and Tehran "were
shocked" every time the Russian-made air defense system did not work to
defend Syria's airspace, or even give notification that the air space
had been penetrated in order to evacuate outposts prior to the
airstrike. The systems are supposed to identify the takeoff of Israeli
Air Force jets from their bases because of the small distance between
the countries and is even supposed to attempt to target the planes and
any missiles that are fired from them.
According to the source, three weeks ago, during
Iranian military maneuvers, Iranian engineers hacked into the codes of
the S-300, but when the Bavar-373 was not working in conjunction with
the Russian air defense system the experiment was suspended.
The source said further that the Iranian Defense
Ministry sent several engineers to Syria to change the codes of the air
defense system that was under the control of the Syrian army, without
Moscow's knowledge. "They succeeded in changing some of the codes last
month and therefore when the Israel fighter jets took off from their
bases - the air defense system succeeded in identifying them and firing
interceptor missiles at them and at the missiles they had launched."
Russia canceled S-300 deal with Assad,
report says
Ron
Friedman
Despite official statements to the contrary,
Russia will not transfer a shipment of advanced anti-aircraft missiles
to Syria, an unnamed senior Russian official has told London's Sunday
Times.
According to Sunday's report, Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu managed to convince Russian President Vladimir Putin
of the risk such a deal posed to regional stability and Israeli
civilians, during a meeting in the Black Sea resort of Sochi earlier
this month, leading to the cancelation of the planned sale of six S-300
batteries to Bashar Assad's regime.
In their meeting, Netanyahu reportedly warned
Putin that Moscow's sale of the sophisticated missile defense system to
Assad could push the Middle East into war, and argued that the S-300 had
no relevance to Assad's civil-war battles against rebel groups.
Netanyahu visits Moscow in secret to
obstruct Iran missile sale
Rory
McCarthy
Russia and Israel were both facing domestic
embarrassment today after it emerged that the Israeli prime minister,
Binyamin Netanyahu, had taken a secret trip to Moscow to persuade the
Russians not to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Iran.
Officials in Moscow and Jerusalem were left
backtracking after they initially denied media reports that Netanyahu
flew by private jet to Russia to discourage the Kremlin from giving the
Iranians Russia's advanced S-300 system
Israel, Russia to cooperate on foreign
troop exit from Syria - Netanyahu
Putin's Double Game in Syria:
Russian-Israeli Cooperation
Sean Jobst
Assorted Assad groupies and Putin cultists use as
"evidence" of Putin's alleged chess-playing hidden "maneuvering" against
Israel, his support for the Syrian government side in Syria's war. They
simply ignore all evidence to the contrary, not least of which they're
at a complete loss to explain why the Russian air force never engages
with Israeli planes attacking their alleged "allies" in Syria, including
this very week. Why is Putin always silent even in token criticism?
Much can be said about the Kremlin's role in
setting the stage for what later became ISIS, by exporting thousands of
extremists from its occupied territories in the Caucasus in 2013 and
2014, knowing full well they'd go to Syria. The flow of Russian-speaking
fighters has continued to ISIS and other armed Wahhabist groups in
Syria, yet we're supposed to believe this large number couldn't leave
the Russian borders without complicity from the security services?
Senior Russian Rabbi Says Putin's Ouster
Would Endanger Jews
Boroda's Federation is among several Russian
Jewish organizations that credit Putin for facilitating efforts to
re-consolidate Russia's Jewish community of 350,000 after decades of
communist repression.
Under Putin, dozens of synagogues have been
renovated with government support and a massive Jewish museum was opened
in Moscow with state funding.
"In Russia, there is virtually unlimited freedom
of religion and the Jewish community must ensure this situation
continues," Boroda said. "The support for religious institutions is
wider than in the United States and defense of Jews against
manifestations of anti-Semitism is greater than in other European
countries. We do not have the privilege of losing what we have achieved
and the support of the government for the community."
Russia-Israel Relationship
Transformed by Syria Conflict
Lidia Averbukh and Margarete Klein
The American Jews Who Are Proud to Be
Pro-Putin
Lev Stesin
An alarming number of Jews who fled authoritarian
Soviet Russia for America are now admirers of Mr. Putin, a peculiar show
of intellectual sclerosis and utter ethical failure
President Donald Trump is one more factor in these
shifting attitudes. Many Russian-speaking Jews have flocked en masse to
support him. His direct tone and 'toughness' fell on fertile ground.
Many abhor the Democratic Party in general and the radical tendencies of
its extreme left wing in particular. They tend to think of liberalism as
a modern-day reincarnation of Communism, and of Islam as a modern-day
Nazism and the biggest threat facing the world. Grey is not a color they
know: you're either with or against them.
The Democratic Order's Berezovsky Trap
Phil
Butler
It was Litvinenko the UK government and the
mainstream media said was "probably" ordered killed by Vladimir Putin.
But the other side of the story tells of two who were intricately
involved in the steeping criminal activity Boris Yeltsin essentially
resigned over, and the literal theft of the heritage of the Russian
people from the instant of perestroika onward. In a poisonous bit of
irony, a slew of Russian mafia outcasts and New World Order captains
have now fallen into the same game of blackmail and murderous betrayal,
or something my Dutch colleague Holger Eekhof refers to as "The
Berezovsky Trap".
The Berezovsky Trap Revisited: The Israel
Connection
Phil
Butler
The Russian mafia we've seen on TV is also known
as the "Red Octopus", but this organization is really the Jewish mafia
in disguise. The story you are reading comes full circle when you
research how the Jewish mafia has links to Mossad, the Rothschild
family, the Federal Reserve Bank, and to powerful Jewish organizations
such as AIPAC and the ADL. Like I mentioned, the Chuck
Schumer-Komorov-Ivankov association is one clue to how deep and
intricate this organization's "screws" go into the American system.
Laura Radanko, in her book "The Superpower of Crime", gives up the goods
on Russian Jews as instruments for Israeli aims:
"During the detente days of the early 1970s, when
Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had agreed to allow the limited emigration
of Soviet Jews, thousands of hard-core criminals, many of them released
from Soviet Gulags by the KGB, took advantage of their nominal Jewish
status to swarm into the United States ."
https://journal-neo.org/2017/05/08/the-berezovsky-trap-revisited-the-israel-connection/
RUSSIAN OLIGARCH WANTED TO TURN MY JOKE
INTO REALITY
Jon
Schwartz
"Berezovsky also had another brilliant idea, which
to his regret Putin did not grasp: creating a fake two-party system,
with Putin at the head of a socialist-democrat sort of party and
Berezovsky leading a neoconservative one, or the other way around."
Here are Berezovsky's exact words, in an interview
with Gessen from 2008:
When Putin became president, I was for a long time
in a state of profound naiveté. Well, I went to him I told him:
"Listen, Volodya, what happened: we destroyed the entire political
space. Devoured, not destroyed, but devoured it. We absolutely dominated
Look, I'll suggest that we can not have effective political system, if
there's a tough competition. So I suggest we create an artificial
two-party system. So, let's say, the left and right. A Socially Oriented
party and neo-conservatives liberal party. Choose any. And I'll make
another party. At the same time, my own heart is closer to
neoconservatives, and I think so, you [Putin] are socially oriented. " I
earnestly believed then that he understood it. But I think that even
then he looked at me like I was crazy.
The Hidden Author of Putinism:
How Vladislav Surkov invented the new
Russia
Peter
Pomerantsev
There is no mention of holy wars in Surkov's
vision, none of the cabaret used to provoke and tease the West. But
there is a darkling vision of globalization, in which instead of
everyone rising together, interconnection means multiple contests
between movements and corporations and city-states -- where the old
alliances, the EUs and NATOs and "the West," have all worn out, and
where the Kremlin can play the new, fluctuating lines of loyalty and
interest, the flows of oil and money, splitting Europe from America,
pitting one Western company against another and against both their
governments so no one knows whose interests are what and where they're
headed.
Documentary - HyperNormalisation
Adam
Curtis
We live in a time of great uncertainty and
confusion. Events keep happening that seem inexplicable and out of
control. Donald Trump, Brexit, the War in Syria, the endless migrant
crisis, random bomb attacks. And those who are supposed to be in power
are paralysed - they have no idea what to do.
This film is the epic story of how we got to this
strange place. It explains not only why these chaotic events are
happening - but also why we, and our politicians, cannot understand
them.
It shows that what has happened is that all of us
in the West - not just the politicians and the journalists and the
experts, but we ourselves - have retreated into a simplified, and often
completely fake version of the world. But because it is all around us we
accept it as normal.
But there is another world outside. Forces that
politicians tried to forget and bury forty years ago - that then
festered and mutated - but which are now turning on us with a vengeful
fury. Piercing though the wall of our fake world.
Alternative links
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fh2cDKyFdyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUiqaFIONPQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thLgkQBFTPw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fny99f8amM
PUTINISM: INTRODUCTION
Zarina Zabrisky
translation of excerpts from a blog Putinism As Is
by a Radio Svoboda analyst and blogger Artem Kruglov. In the light of
Helsinki Summit 2018 and Trump/Putin relationship, it is important to
know these facts of Putin's background.
"The group around Putin today is the same as the
one that brought him to power from St. Petersburg in the 1990s," wrote
celebrated author Karen Dawisha in her book Putin's Kleptocracy. In
today's political climate it is critical for the EU and US analysts,
journalists and general audience to understand the true origin and
background of the Russian mafia state. "In the 90s, gangsters and the
KGB fused into one structure," said Olga Litvinenko... This structure is
what we now call a mafia state. "Putin was never in business and he does
not have 'business associates,'" noted Nikita Kulachenkov, a forensic
accountant and political activist fighting against corruption in the
Russian government, has also served as a principal investigator at the
Anti-Corruption Foundation, a nonprofit organization based in Moscow and
founded by Alexei Navalny. "Russian oligarchs do not own their fortunes.
They can't hide their money. They need the status quo and will fight for
it, using the mafia methods" -- even if it requires taking these mafia
methods to the West.
Read the profiles of Putin's allies. The
incomplete list of their achievements includes cocaine and heroin trade,
illegal arms trafficking, running prostitution rings, using child labor
for diamond mining, smuggling, extortion, assassinations, dismemberment,
blackmail, racketeering, theft, money-laundering and much more.
Is Israel becoming a mafia state?
Simona Weinglass
Some 25% of the revenue of Israel's lauded
high-tech sector comes from shady or fraudulent industries;
three-quarters of MKs are said to be in thrall to special interest
groups.
Israel has become one of the world's leading
exporters of investment scams, stealing an estimated $5 billion to $10
billion per year from victims worldwide.
Despite the fact that Israeli police recently
announced that these investment scams are largely run by organized
crime, which has grown to "monstrous proportions" as a consequence of
little to no law enforcement for years, the Israeli government,
parliament and authorities have to date proved unwilling or unable to
shut them down, in part because these fraudulent industries have a
powerful lobby in the Knesset.
How Russia's mafia is taking over
Israel's underworld
Billions invested in Israel
Former police chief Asaf Hefetz says Ł2.5bn ($4bn)
of organised crime money from the former Soviet Union has been invested
in Israeli real estate, businesses and banks in the past seven years.
Jewish-American organized crime
The History of the Jews and the Mob
Youtube video featuring Jewish 'tough guy' Myron
Sugerman, the "Last Jewish Gangster," running his mouth for an hour
complaining about antisemitism while bragging about their criminal
history. The deluded Sugerman spills the beans on how the Jewish mob
played in arming Jewish terrorists in the Middle-East.
Israeli Mafia
Out of prison, notorious Russian mobster
yearns to return home
Jake
Pearson
New York's most notorious living Russian (Jewish)
mobster just wants to go back to the motherland.
Once flush from heroin trafficking, tax fraud
schemes and other criminal enterprises, Boris Nayfeld is now 70, fresh
out of prison for the third time, divorced and broke. And he is left
with few job prospects in his adopted country, at least those in line
with his experiences.
"I can't do nothing," Nayfeld griped in a thick
Russian accent between shots of vodka at a restaurant a few blocks north
of Brooklyn's Brighton Beach neighborhood, which has been a haven for
immigrants from the former Soviet Union since the 1970s. "Give me a
chance to start a new life."
Human Trafficking: Russian Mafia and the
Israeli Connection
The illegal trafficking of human beings is a
growing international crime. Criminal groups have developed a brisk
trade selling tens of thousands of women into prostitution. The result
is virtual enslavement, as Attorney General John Ashcroft emphasized in
announcing new regulations for dealing with traffickers and their
victims. Russian mafia, and its connections in Israel, provide an
example of how the trade works.
The newspaper ad is hard to resist: a high paying
job as a waitress or secretary or model, and it helps to be young and
pretty.
For desperate women in the shrunken economies of
Russia, Ukraine, and other states of the former Soviet Union, the offer
from abroad is too good to be true, and of course it is not. But they do
not know that as they make their first contact with the elaborate
traffic in prostitution.
Sharp Increase in Sex Trafficking in
Years Since Israel Lifted Visa Restrictions
Or Kashti
Justice Ministry official says criminals are
bringing in women from Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, Russia and Georgia on
three-month tourist visas.
Esther
Hertzog and Erella Shadmi
Destination Israel for Sex 'Slaves'
Eric
Silver
"On the third night I was desperate," she says. "I
tried to break out. I shouted for help. But it was no use. Two men, who
spoke Russian with a Georgian accent, carted me off to a massage
parlour. When I refused to work there, they beat me up. They raped me,
punched my body, slapped my face. I agreed."
Israel becoming 'safe haven for
paedophiles' with laws that allow any Jews to legally return, activists
claim
Peter
Walker
14 Israelis suspected of running child
sex trafficking ring in Colombia
Toi Staff
Fourteen Israelis are suspected by Colombian authorities of running a
child sex trafficking ring which marketed tour packages from Israel to
the Latin American country aimed at businessmen and recently discharged
soldiers, according to reports on Monday..
Israeli who headed Colombia child
prostitution ring arrested in Portugal
An ex-Israeli soldier wanted in Colombia for
heading a child prostitution ring and sex trafficking offences has been
arrested in Portugal.
Forty-five-year-old Assi Ben-Mosh – also known as
Assi Moosh – was arrested near the Portuguese capital Lisbon on
Wednesday during an operation by Spain's Guardia Civil police force. The
Guardia Civil said in a statement that Ben-Mosh is thought to have been
hiding on the Spanish island of Ibiza, and then in Barcelona, before
eventually being arrested in Portugal this week. It added that Ben-Mosh
had been using a fake Israeli ID, the Times of Israel reported
yesterday.
Ben-Mosh is wanted by Colombian authorities for
running a child prostitution ring in the small fishing village of
Taganga, located on the South American country's Caribbean coast. He,
along with a group of ex-Israeli soldiers, reportedly turned the luxury
Benjamin Hostel into a "sex and drug den" in which more than 250
underage girls were subjected to sexual exploitation.
The shocking story of Israel's
disappeared babies
Jonathan
Cook
His biological parents - recent immigrants to
Israel from Tunisia - were told their child had died during delivery.
They were sent home without a death certificate and denied the chance to
see their baby's body or a grave.
A Field Guide to Israeli Organized Crime
Assaf Gur
Exploring an underworld of gambling, drug
trafficking, arms dealing, extortion, assassination, and corruption
'Israel's First Oligarch' Grigori Lerner
¦ How a Serial Criminal Got Help From an Israeli Government Minister
Gidi Weitz
and Maya Zinshtein
Immigrant Absorption Minister Sofa Landver pursued
business ties with serial criminal Gregory Lerner. Her former chief of
staff had links to Alexei Zakharenko, a Russian tycoon who disappeared
two years ago. New facts from police files, published here for the first
time.
He also admitted to receiving $37 million
fraudulently from Mostroy, a Russian bank, establishing a series of
straw companies that he controlled, and committing numberless forgeries.
He admitted to having defrauded Semion Mogilevich, who holds Russian and
Israeli citizenship and is high on the FBI's most-wanted list.
Reputed Israeli Ecstasy Dealer Charged in
U.S.
NEW YORK - An Israeli, once reputedly the world's
most active ecstasy dealer, was extradited from Spain and charged in a
U.S. court Wednesday with recruiting women nightclub strippers as
couriers and laundering millions of dollars in cash.
Known as "The Fat Man," Oded Tuito was designated
as a drug kingpin by the U.S. government a year ago. He pleaded not
guilty in a U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to charges of supervising
the trafficking of millions of ecstasy pills to New York from Paris,
Brussels and Frankfurt.
Prosecutors accused Tuito, a 41-year-old Israeli
citizen who lived in New York, California and France before his arrest
in May 2001 in Barcelona of operating the international trafficking
scheme since 1997.
Israeli Organ-trafficking Ring Busted
Ukrainian police have smashed an Israeli-run
organ-trafficking network illegally recruiting organ donors to send
their body parts to Israel.
Ukrainian authorities said on Friday that twelve
people, most of them Israelis, were arrested for taking part in a scheme
to recruit organ donors from Ukraine and other former Soviet countries
via internet and transplant the organs into Israelis who had ordered
them in advance.
The network, which sought mostly kidneys, offered
as much as USD 10,000 per body part and according to Ukraine's interior
ministry most of the organ donors were impoverished young women.
The head of the ministry's department on human
trafficking, Yuriy Kucher, said the transplant surgeries, which cost up
to USD 200,000 an operation, were performed in Kiev, Azerbaijan and
Ecuador.
Israeli Organ Trafficking and Theft: From
Moldova to Palestine
Alison
Weir
The fact is, however, that Israeli organ
harvesting – sometimes with Israeli governmental funding and the
participation of high Israeli officials, prominent Israeli physicians,
and Israeli ministries – has been documented for many years. Among the
victims have been Palestinians.
Nancy Scheper-Hughes is Chancellor's Professor of
Medical Anthropology at the University of California Berkeley, the
founder of Organ Watch, and the author of scholarly books and articles
on organ trafficking. She is the pundit mainstream media call upon when
they need expert commentary on the topic.5
While Scheper-Hughes emphasizes that traffickers
and procurers come from numerous nations and ethnicities, including
Americans and Arabs, she is unflinchingly honest in speaking about the
Israeli connection:
"Israel is at the top," she states. "It has
tentacles reaching out worldwide."
Organ Trafficking: Anatomy of a network.
Israeli nexus #1
Robert Maxwell
Organ Trafficking: Anatomy of a network. Israeli
nexus #1
Israeli organ trafficker walks free in
Cyprus
An
Israeli man convicted of international human organ trafficking walked
free on Tuesday, after Russian authorities failed to challenge a Larnaca
judge who dismissed an extradition request.
Gangsters of the Mediterranean
Seb
Rotella
In hundreds of telephone calls intercepted during
the year before Petrov's arrest in 2008, Spanish investigators listened
as the mob boss chatted with powerful businessmen, notorious criminals
and high-level officials in the government of Vladimir Putin. During one
trip to Russia, Petrov called his son to say he had just met with a man
who turned out to be the Russian defense minister -- and to report that
they had sorted out a land deal, the sale of some airplanes, and a
scheme to invest in Russian energy companies.
Britain's contribution to fighting Russian organised crime is 'less than
negative', says renowned prosecutor
Tom
Embury-Dennis
Britain's contribution to fighting Russian
organised crime is "less than negative", one of Europe's leading
prosecutors has said.
Jose Grinda, hailed as the man who "brought down
the Russian mafia in Spain", condemned the UK's lack of cooperation in a
fight which has gone increasingly global.
"We have a wonderful relationship with the United
States," the Spanish prosecutor told The American Interest magazine.
"However we have a very serious problem in fighting organised crime with
the UK.
The truth behind McMafia: London is 'the
jurisdiction of choice' for Russian crime gangs
Robert Verkaik
"Unfortunately, London has become the global
centre for laundering the money and reputations of Russian organised
criminals. McMafia brings that realisation into the living rooms of
people all over the country. Hopefully, this will actually lead to some
political change and tougher rules in the future."
Russians kill Dublin drugs lord in Spain
Henry
McDonald
Russian mafia hitmen shot dead Dublin gangland
member Paddy Doyle on the Costa del Sol, senior gardai claimed this
weekend
Doyle, the survivor of a vicious criminal turf war
in south Dublin which has claimed at least 10 lives, was gunned down in
Estepona last Monday. Veteran detectives with the Garda Siochana's
'Operation Anvil', the drive against Dublin's crime gangs, said the
27-year-old had beaten up a close relative of a Russian mafia leader
based on the southern Spanish coastline.
'From what our Spanish colleagues have told us,
this was a professional Russian hit. There were 13 shots and we don't
think they wasted a bullet. It has a military-trained assassin written
all over it, possibly ex-special forces,' a senior detective told The
Observer. 'The intelligence coming back from the Costa del Sol is that
Paddy Doyle crossed the Russian mafia, which is something you do there
at your peril.'
Cold blood: Shocking CCTV footage of
Kinahan enforcer's murder
Owen
Conlon and Stephen Breen
THIS is the moment the Kinahans' main enforcer met his end at the hands
of Russian gangsters -- with the blessing of his old boss Christy.
WATCH: RUSSIAN MAFIA LEADER ARRESTED ON
SPAIN'S COSTA DEL SOL WHILE 'PLOTTING GANG RIVAL'S MURDER'
Luke
Madeira
One of the leaders is said to be third-in-command
of the mafia and was arrested as the group held a meeting in which they
were said to be planning the assassination of a rival gang leader.
According to El Correo, the planned assassination
of a rival gang leader was to warn other clans of their strength in
Europe.
The suspects were also thought to have been trying
to restructure the organisation after Policia Nacional arrested 129
members of the clan in June, including seven highly ranked members.
The investigation was then reopened in July after
a former leader of a criminal gang in Lithuania was spotted in Marbella.
Roman Abramovich invests $10m in StoreDot
June 15, 2014 | According to reports by the "Wall
Street Journal" Russian billionaire and Chelsea Football Club owner
Roman Abramovich invested $10 million in StoreDot. StoreDot is an
Israeli startup producing electronics using bio-organic materials and
recently made a splash in the headlines when it revealed a method for
charging a Samsung smartphone in 30 seconds. The investment was carried
out through Abramovich's asset management company Millhouse LLC, making
this is the second investment of the firm in Israel.
Israeli crowd-funding company i-Angels
raises $2.25M from Millhouse Capital.
March 25, 2015 | Israeli crowd-funding company
iAngels has raised $2.25 million in a seed round led by investment firm
Millhouse Capital, which is owned by Russian billionaire Roman
Abramovich. iAngels enables private investments in early-stage startups.
It was founded in 2013 by Mor Assia and Shelly Hod Moyal.
Roman Abramovich invests in AltaIR
October 26, 2015 | Millhouse Capital, the
investment fund owned by Roman Abramovich is investing an undisclosed
amount in AltaIR, the venture capital firm led by Russian-Austrian
investor Igor Ryabenkiy. AltaIR has already invested in almost 80
companies from Israel, the US, Europe and Australia. Among its early
stage investments in Israel are Gbooking, Crowdx, Klear, and Correlor.
Oligarch Roman Abramovich Leads $21m
Investment in Startup AnyClip
Inbal Orpaz
Russian-British billionaire Roman Abramovich is
deepening his presence in Israeli high-tech, leading a $21 million
investment round in the start-up AnyClip Media.
Russian Internet Giant Yandex Acquiring
Israeli Geolocation Startup KitLocate
Inbal
Orpaz
Yandex, a Russian Internet company that operates
the country's most popular search engine, said on Tuesday that it was
acquiring Israel's KitLocate and plans to turn the startup into the
basis a research and development center for an undisclosed price.
Israeli social analytics startup Klear
secures $1.5 million from Altair and TMT
Israeli startup Klear, formerly known as Twtrland,
has raised $1.5 million in new funding from Altair and TMT Investments,
two international venture funds with Russian backers.
The company defines its product as "a social
intelligence platform that helps you do smarter marketing." It has
rebranded to Klear, since the platform now looks at data from Facebook
and Instagram in addition to Twitter, and plans to integrate other
social networks, including Pinterest, Google Plus, and LinkedIn,
TechCrunch notes.
BILLIONAIRE ROMAN ABRAMOVICH REVEALED AS
$30M. TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY DONOR
Greer Fay Cashman
Yandex: Tool of Russian Disinformation
and Cyber Operations in Ukraine
Sergey Sukhankin
The recent decision by Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko to ban popular Russian social networks VKontakte (VK) and
Odnoklassniki, on May 15 (see EDM, June 7), provoked serious debate both
inside Ukraine and abroad. Now that the initial anxiety over that ban
has somewhat subsided, it is worth analyzing other, less commented-on
but no less important, elements of the decree.
Aside from social networks, Poroshenko's May 15
decree bans Russian Internet search engine giant Yandex, some
information technology (IT) programs, as well as anti-virus software
(including Kaspersky and Doctor Web) that have allegedly been
undermining Ukrainian information and cyber security. According to
Colonel Oleksandr Tkachuk, from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU),
approximately 300 of the largest Ukrainian companies and corporations
use Russian IT programs "directly controlled by the Russian Federal
Security Service [FSB]" (Espreso.tv, April 27). Moreover, the Ukrainian
side has suffered huge financial losses as a direct result of using
Russian products. In his interview, the head of the information security
division of the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine,
Valentin Petrov, noted that Ukraine annually spends approximately one
billion hryvnas (roughly $39 million) on Russian IT and software
products (Ukrinform.ua, May 17).
Russia's Billionaire Usmanov Among
Investors Of Uber Taxi Service
USM Holdings owned by Russia's business magnate
Alisher Usmanov and his partners is one of investors of the popular Uber
taxi service, a source close to the company told TASS on Sunday.
The official representatives of USM and Uber in
Russia have declined to comment on the reports.
Uber is an international transportation network
company that develops mobile app for requesting trips with personal
drivers. The company provides services in 360 cities in 64 countries of
the world.
In Russia, the company began operations in 2013.
In October 2015, Uber said it planned to launch services in all Russian
million-strong cities this year. The value of the car-booking company is
estimated at $62.5 billion, CNBC reported earlier this month citing
sources.
USM Holdings Ltd. is an international company that
has assets in metals and mining industry, telecommunications, the
Internet and mass media. USM's main shareholders are Alisher Usmanov,
Vladimir Skoch and Farhad Moshiri. Usmanov has earlier invested in
Apple, Facebook, Alibaba, JD.com and other high-technology companies.
VK taken over by the Kremlin claims
founder Pavel Durov.
Durov started VKontakte, later known as VK, in
2006, which was initially influenced by Facebook.[16] During the time
when he and his brother Nikolai built upon the VKontakte website, the
company grew to a value of $3 billion.[5]
In 2011, he was involved in a standoff with police
in St. Petersburg when the government demanded the removal of opposition
politicians' pages after the 2011 election to the Duma; Durov posted a
picture of a dog with his tongue out wearing a hoodie and the police
left after an hour when he did not answer the door.[15][16]
In 2012, Durov publicly posted a picture of
himself extending his middle finger and calling it his official response
to Mail.ru's efforts to buy VK.[15] In December 2013, Durov was
pressured[vague] into selling his 12% of VK stock to Ivan Tavrin, the
owner of the major Russian internet company Mail.ru,[5] who subsequently
sold it to Mail.ru, giving it 52% majority ownership of VK. In 2014,
Mail.ru bought all remaining shares and became the sole owner of
VK.[17][18]
Durov then claimed the company had been
effectively taken over by Vladimir Putin's allies,[23][24] suggesting
his ouster was the result of both his refusal to hand over personal
details of users to federal law enforcement and his refusal to hand over
the personal details of people who were members of a VKontakte group
dedicated to the Euromaidan protest movement.[23][24] Durov then left
Russia and stated that he had "no plans to go back"[24] and that "the
country is incompatible with Internet business at the moment".[3]
Mossad Launches New Social Media Account
on VKontakte to Recruit Russians
Mossad is known for being a very secretive spy
agency responsible for intelligence collection, covert operations and
counterterrorism. Its director reports directly to the Prime Minister.
A new group called "Mossad" has appeared on
Vkontakte. According to information on the group's page anyone who wants
to "say something" should click on the link provided below.
Usmanov's Mail.ru Israeli technology connections.
Israeli mobile video platform secures $2 million from Mail.ru Group
Magisto, an Israeli cloud-based mobile video platform, announced on
Friday a $2 million investment from Mail.Ru Group, the LSE-listed
Russian Internet giant. The investment is designed to fuel further
growth and customer acquisition.
In addition, Magisto has integrated its offering into Odnoklassniki.ru,
a subsidiary of Mail.Ru Group and the second largest social network in
Russia with 33 million daily unique visitors.
Image recognition startup Cortica nabs $1.5M from Russian tech leader
Mail.Ru
Now the startup will have backing from Mail.Ru, which has a major
presence in the Russian-speaking markets. Mail.Ru Group claims that its
sites reach 86 percent of Russian-speaking Internet users every month.
It operates top Russian email service Mail.Ru, two of the largest IM
services (Mail.Ru Agent and ICQ), and two of the three largest Russian
social networking sites (My World and Odnoklassniki.ru). Additionally,
it owns a minority equity stake in top Russian social network Vkontakte.
"We are really excited to work with Mail.Ru Group," Cortica CEO and
co-founder Igal Raichelgauz said in a statement. "Mail.ru shares our
vision for leveraging Image2Text technology for visual search and
contextual advertising and taking users' web surfing experience to a
whole new level."
Cortica was founded in 2007 and has employess in New York City,
Sunnyvale, Calif. and Israel.
https://www.cortica.com/
-
The first AI capable of human-level image understanding.
ARCHIMEDICX Announces Partnership with Mail.Ru Group, Providing
Millions with Access to the Best Medical Care in the World
a big data search engine for specialized medical facilities around the
world, is announcing a partnership with Mail.Ru Group, the largest
internet company in Russia. Mail.Ru Group will integrate ARCHIMEDICX
onto its platform on Health Mail.Ru (the most popular health portal in
Russia), allowing any user who searches for medical problems to use the
ARCHIMEDICX search engine. Together, they will provide millions of users
with vast information about the top treatment facilities in the world.
Billionaire Alisher Usmanov's partnership
with Alibaba reveals his strategy for survival in the era of sanctions
Russian oligarchs are making difficult decisions
in the face of possible new sanctions. Some are trying to do everything
to distance themselves from those in the Kremlin. While others are doing
the exact opposite and getting as close to the authorities as they can.
The best example of the latter is Alisher Usmanov, who -- on his 65th
birthday no less -- announced a deal fully in line with the government's
aim to build economic ties with China. On September 11,
telecommunications giant Megafon (partially owned by Usmanov), internet
group Mail.ru Group (Usmanov owns 15% via Megafon), and the Russian
Direct Investment Fund (RDIF) announced the creation of a joint venture
with Alibaba Group.
Usmanov publicly supports the "digital
transformation" announced by Putin, a key part of the president's
election campaign. Together with state conglomerate Rostec and
Gazprombank, Usmanov in May announced the creation of a new digital
company, MF Technology. Usmanov has also talked about a joint investment
fund. All of this, of course, makes Usmanov very vulnerable to
sanctions. But the billionaire has likely earned what he was probably
fighting for in the first place: the Kremlin's loyalty. On his last
birthday, Usmanov received a personal telegram from Putin.
Kazakh Rakishev is a lead investor of Russian VC who held major stake in
Mobl
i
Rakishev is the lead investor of Fastlane
Ventures, a Russian tech development company, he held a major stake in
the Israeli visual media platform Mobli, and invested in the Russian
bank card and loyalty program company IQcard. Rakishev is Chairman of
Net Element International, a global technology group based in the US
that specializes in value-added transaction services and mobile
payments.
The whole truth about Kenes Rakishev
Rakishev and Imangal Tasmagambetov
It is believed that in part Kenes Rakishev is a
nominal figure. In reality, all the assets and billions that he
allegedly owns belong to the higher elite of Kazakhstan, which uses
Kenes as a screen. It's about the test of Rakishev Imangale
Tasmagambetov,
Timur Kulibayev (the head of Kazakhstan's
Nursultan Nazarbayev), the head of the KNB Karime Massimov. Rakishev
himself categorically denies such statements, assuring himself that he
has achieved everything himself, thanks to his talents. And here is that
he says under oath about his test Tasmagambetov. .
Moshe Hogeg, Singulariteam partners (Rakishev) sued for $50m
"Embezzlement of tens of millions of shekels"
"Forbes Magazine" named Rakishev as one of the 50
most influential people in Kazakhstan, with wealth in excess of $2
billion. According to the statement of claim, Chen, a director in IDC
Holdings, was a consultant in enterprises led by Singulariteam,
including stox.com.
The manager of Singulariteam in 2014 was Adi
Sheleg, a former shares trader who turned state's witness in the IDB
share offering case, in which Nochi Dankner was later convicted of share
manipulation. Singulariteam's chairperson in 2014 was former Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert, who was convicted of accepting a bribe in the
Hazera Genetic case in 2015. Olmert served 18 months in prison in
2016-2017 for this conviction. Singulariteam's current chairperson is
Hogeg.
Lev Leviev claims to have personally
appointed 8 of 18 members of the Knesset.
In this article we give an entertaining
conversation Berezovsky and Roman Abramovich, the current billionaire,
and then "key holder" from the Treasury of WOMEN. Abramovich says that
yesterday, when they were at Chernomyrdin, Polezhaev showed him
(Berezovsky) a letter addressed to Yeltsin. Polezhaev spoke by A.
Korabelshikov, he said that to meet the President now impossible, but
he'll talk to Livshits, who must give this letter. Abramovich asked
whether Berezovsky to deliver the letter to Livshits, he replies in the
affirmative. Abramovich reports that yesterday he met Levayev. Levayev
said that he is great friends with Netanyahu and if it is necessary that
Netanyahu spoke in support of Yeltsin, he (Levayev) can organize.
Levayev also said that of the 18 members of the Israeli government, he
personally appoints 8, including the Minister of energy. So they will
have plans there
Russia oligarch and Pres. of Israeli
Jewish Congress, Vladimir Slutsker is a serious criminal
If analysts immediately suspected in this contract
murder the political underpinnings, the investigation initially
stubbornly clung to only the version of the connection of the crime with
the commercial activities of the retired general. The son of the
murdered, Boris Trofimov, then also suggested that his father's
involvement in the conflict between the owners of the company, Vladimir
Slutsker and Ambartsum Safaryan, who at that time was very tense,
divided.
Criminal list of Mikhail Fridman (Alfa Bank, Genesis Prize, CFR)
"Mikhail Fridman - Friend of Bibi,
Putin and linked to Trump, allegedly. Dual citizen of Israel and
Russia." - Jon Swinn
Part 1 -
https://rucriminal.info/en/material/664?hl=israel
Is Jewish Oligarch the Cyber Link Between
Donald Trump and Russia?
Larry Cohler-Esses
Is a Russian Jewish oligarch with Israeli
citizenship and close ties to both Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu
running a secret cyber-communications channel between Donald Trump's
presidential campaign and Russian authorities?
That question, about billionaire Mikhail Fridman,
is at the heart of a new and detailed investigative report by Franklin
Foer, the former editor of The New Republic, published Tuesday on the
news website Slate.
According to a story published in The New York
Times just hours after Foer's report went live, FBI investigators looked
into -- and ultimately came to doubt -- evidence that a mysterious server
registered to the Trump Organization was receiving regular covert email
communiqués from two servers registered to Fridman's Alfa Bank, the
largest commercial bank in Russia.
Tea Pain - Alfa Bank server connection to Trump Tower
Trump Tower's "Stealth Russian Data Machine"
Jared Kushner is currently taking a victory lap, crowin' about his
"Stealth Data Machine" that put Donald Trump over the top in the 2016
race. Let's pry off the lid and peer into the inner-workings of this
"Data Machine."
Major Alfa Bank-Trump Tower Breakthrough!
The funny thing about mysteries is
sometime the answer is starin' you right in the face so intently you
can't see it. A year ago, Tea Pain saw a signal in the noise that got
him lookin' into the mystery of the Trump Tower/Alfa Bank server
scandal.
Trump Tower's "Stealth Russian Data
Machine"
Mikhail Fridman's bank is linked to
financing the installation of nuclear reactors in Iran.
Tara
Palmeri
Fridman's Alfa Bank provided financing
throughout the 2000s to Atomstroyexport, the state-owned Russian nuclear
vendor that installed the reactors at Bushehr, according to reports.
DIAMOND KINGS, LUXURY CONDOS, CORRUPT
COPS AND CHINESE SPIES
Zarina Zabrisky
In 2008, a self-pronounced Putin's friend,
USSR-born Israeli Lev Leviev sold $710 million in Manhattan real estate
to a subsidiary of the infamous 88 Queensway Group.
In 2011, Blackstone bought 51% of one of three
properties, the old New York Times Building. In 2015, Jared Kushner's
company bought the remaining 49%.
The Mueller Report, Alfa Bank, and the
Deep State
Peter Dale
Scott
As the Guardian reported in 2002, Alfa's 1990s
clout in Washington was demonstrated when its oil company, Tyumen,
was loaned $489m in credits by the US
Export-Import Bank after lobbying by Halliburton . The [Clinton] White
House and State Department tried to veto the Russian deal. But after
intense lobbying by Halliburton the objections were overruled on Capitol
Hill [which then was Republican controlled] . The State Department's
concerns were based on the fact that Tyumen was controlled by a holding
conglomerate, the Alfa Group, that had been investigated in Russia for
mafia connections.
Fridman is behind Alfa group
Russia-Israel investments
Netanyahu's 'list of millionaires'
List of potential donors prepared by
then-opposition leader in 2007 provides peek into his fundraising
industry in US. Officials include extreme rightists, people who got in
trouble with law.
Included in the list of prominently Jewish
millionaires and billionaires appears the name 'Donald Trump'.
Genesis Prize: Flattering Oligarchs and
Laundering Their Ill-Gotten Gains
Richard
Silerstein
Among the oligarchs are Mikhail Fridman (net
worth, $18-billion and 46th on Forbes list of the richest people in the
world and second richest Russian) and some of his cronies, Petr Aven
(chairman of Alfa Bank, Russia's largest commercial bank) and Stan
Polovets (who made his billions in Russian energy). Here's a Foreign
Policy article from way back in 2000, detailing how these crooks
stripped assets and stole billions.
" Asset-stripping has also victimized major
international oil companies. In a highly publicized case, [Mikhail]
Fridman's Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) allegedly stole Sidanko's most
valuable assets by manipulatinig the bankruptcy process. According to
defrauded Sidanko shareholders (who include BP Amoco), the theft was
carried out through the corrupt appointment of a TNK-friendly receiver,
the unlawful reduction of the claims of major creditors such as the
European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (in which the United
States holds shares), and a rigged bankruptcy "auction" in which only
TNK-affiliated companies could bid."
Psy Group sister company controlled by
Russian billionaire
Scott
Stedman
A month-long investigation into the corporate
structure of the private intelligence company that met with Donald Trump
Jr., Erik Prince, and George Nader in the middle of the 2016 election
campaign has revealed that a sister company of Psy Group is controlled
by a Russian billionaire.
Investigation links Psy Group to
Macedonian Troll Farms
Justin
Hendrix
New Knowledge also looks closely at "Kris
Crawford," another Facebook account PSY-Group used in the pitch material
obtained by the Wall Street Journal.
While he appears to be an American man, Crawford's
URL suggests his Facebook page used to belong to a "Martina Jakimovska."
"Looking through the 'Kris Crawford's' account history it's still
possible to see when Martina updated her profile photo and used Facebook
to check in at a location in Macedonia," New Knowledge notes.
The fake news machine: Inside a town
gearing up for 2020
Veles used to make porcelain for the whole of
Yugoslavia. Now it makes fake news.
This sleepy riverside town in Macedonia is home to
dozens of website operators who churn out bogus stories designed to
attract the attention of Americans. Each click adds cash to their bank
accounts.
The scale is industrial: Over 100 websites were
tracked here during the final weeks of the 2016 U.S. election campaign,
producing fake news that mostly favored Republican candidate for
President Donald Trump.
Meet the shady Putin crony funding
Russia's troll farm and mercenary army
Zack Beauchamp
Yevgeny Prigozhin, the man widely
referred to as "Putin's chef," doesn't actually prepare food. Instead,
he cooks up international plots -- like Russia's campaign to use social
media to undermine Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and promote Donald
Trump's.
Prigozhin was among the 13 Russian nationals
indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller in February and is by far the
most well-known. His ties to Putin go back to at least 2001: He's worked
on everything from election interference to setting up pro-Putin
newspapers to sending Russian mercenaries to Syria to fight on behalf of
Bashar al-Assad's regime.
A recent Washington Post report says that he
personally approved a Russian mercenary attack on US forces stationed in
eastern Syria in early February; US intelligence, per the Post,
intercepted a conversation where he promoted the idea.
"Putin's chef" would be better described as
Putin's fixer: someone who does the Russian leader's dirty work, while
giving Putin plausible deniability if things go wrong
Deeper Than Blackwater
Jon Swinn
Utkin became the CEO of Concord Management and
Consulting LLC, which belongs to the Concord company group and is
co-owned by Yevgeny Prigozhin.[8]
Prigozhin, or "Putin's chef" as he is also known,
is among the 13 Russian nationals indicted by special counsel Robert
Mueller for his connections to troll farms involved in an operation to
assist U.S. President Donald Trump win the 2016 Presidential election.
According to the indictment , Mueller accuses troll farm company
Internet Research Agency employees of "posing as U.S. persons and
creating false U.S. personas, operating social media pages and groups
designed to attract U.S. audiences."[9]
Prigozhin's Concord Management is directly
involved with the administration of troll farm Internet Research Agency,
according to documents published by hackers from Anonymous
International.[10]
Understanding Krysha
The Putin-Prigozhin relation is great example of
the "Krysha" concept. Krysha means roof and is a slang word for
protection. In exchange for contracts with the Kremlin, oligarchs such
as Prigozhin work on behalf of the Mafiya State.[11]
Internet Research Agency
Kremlin-linked Billionaire, Netanyahu
Friend Donated to Trump's Private Legal Fund
Len Blavatnik, who made his fortune in the former
Soviet Union in the oil business, appears on a legal defense fund list
uncovered by the Wall St. Journal
A Soviet-born billionaire who is considered close to Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu donated to a private legal defense fund for U.S.
President Donald Trump, the Wall Street Journal revealed.
Israel questions PM's billionaire friend
over corruption charges
Israeli police are to fly to London today to
question billionaire businessman Len Blavatnik in relation to corruption
charges facing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to
Haaretz.
The Soviet-born media investor will primarily be
questioned as to whether Netanyahu was involved in the sale of a
television channel in 2015 to Arnon Mozes, publisher of Israeli daily
Yedioth Ahronoth, as part of "Case 2000". It is alleged that Netanyahu
tried to negotiate a deal with Mozes, offering legislation that would
impede the activities of Mozes' rival paper, Israel Hayom, in return for
more favourable media coverage of the prime minister and his policies.
Blavatnik's ties to the Bronfmans.
Blavatnik's the Bronfman Buyer! Oil
Tycoon Spills $50 M.-Plus for Townhouse
Every kvetching New Yorker wants more
space. But only a Russian-born, Harvard-trained oil tycoon would want
more legroom than a 14-room Fifth Avenue co-op (bought just this year
for $27.5 million) and an East 63rd Street palace (bought two years ago
for $31.25 million).
Those properties didn't content Len
Blavatnik. According to two sources, he's the buyer for Seagram heir
Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s 31-foot-wide townhouse at 15 East 64th.
Time Inc. Shares Rise After Reported Buyout Bid from Bronfman,
Blavatnik
Edgar Bronfman Jr. and billionaire
investors reportedly offered $18 a share for Time.
Shares of Time Inc. were soaring as
much as 20 percent ahead of the closing bell on Monday after the New
York Post reported that the parent of magazines like People, Sports
Illustrated and Time had turned down an acquisition offer from Edgar
Bronfman Jr., Leonard Blavatnik and Ynon Kreiz.
Billionaire Len Blavatnik Buys Warner Music Group (From Bronfman) For
$3.3 Billion
Mikhail Fridman
The oligarchs behind Alfa-Access-Renova (AAR)
include Fridman.At 47, he has an estimated wealth of $15.1bn, making him
Russia's seventh richest man.
Fridman and Peter Aven founded the Alfa Group
Consortium – a holding company which controls Alfa Bank, Alfa Capital,
Tyumen Oil, several construction material firms and a supermarket chain.
Len Blavatnik
The multibillionaire recently agreed to pay $3.3bn
for Warner Music via his industrial holding company Access Industries.
Blavatnik is a major petrochemicals investor, but has occasionally
bought media assets. Access has a controlling stake in Top Up TV, the
pay-TV business.
Born in the Soviet Union in 1957, he emigrated
with his family to the US in 1978. He lives in New York and London,
where he has a home in Kensington Palace Gardens.
Viktor Vekselberg
Ukraine-born oil and metals baron Vekselberg is
overseeing a turnaround at aluminium giant UC Rusal, which he formed
with fellow billionaire, Oleg Deripaska. Made first million selling
scrap copper from old cables. In the 1990s together with fellow
billionaire Leonard Blavatnik bought aluminum smelters to form a company
called Sual. Consummate dealmaker also has interests in chemicals,
utilities and telecoms.
Owns Fabergé egg collection.
German Khan
A native of Kiev, graduated from the Moscow
Institute of Steel and Alloys in 1988. The next year, with former
classmate Fridman, co-founded Alfa-Eco, a commodities trader and
predecessor of Alfa Group. Heads Alfa Group's oil business as executive
director and board member of oil company TNK-BP. He enjoys hunting and
has a large collection of sporting guns and rifles.
MOSCOW'S SECRET WEAPON: THE ISRAELI
MOSSAD AND THE ZIONIST CULTS
Putin met with the Exxon Mobil CEO,
Jewish organisation leaders in Washington
Russia and Israel's Technion Agree to
Launch Satellite in Joint Venture
Russia and the Technion-Israel Institute of
Technology in Haifa have agreed to a joint venture that will launch a
satellite into space in 1995.
After a five-member delegation arrived here to
finalize details of the venture, the agreement was signed Monday between
the Technion and the Russian STC Complex. The Russian firm was
established in 1991 to convert Soviet military technology into Russian
civilian enterprises.
The Gurwinl-TechSat communications satellite was
designed and built over a period of three years at a cost of $3.5
million. The satellite is scheduled to be launched into space in March,
along with two other satellites from a site about 560 miles from Moscow.
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Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defence which reveals the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND
TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A
DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR), AND THIS
IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN
REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was
circulated widely among various government agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS,
NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the
Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the
group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified
documents from the U.S. Department of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on
ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they
should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and
some of its coalition allies had actually facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria –
as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also that ISIS
members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency
at facilities in Jordan in 2012.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters
trained in Jordan became members of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S. instructors working at a secret base in Jordan,
according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of
covert aid to the insurgents targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in
Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future campaign in
Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria
were first vetted for any links to extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a
training base for the Syrian rebels in the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern
desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in
Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it
was not clear whether the Americans worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but
the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan reportedly focused on
use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three
months amid U.S. plans to train a total of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps
in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding
Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on
the German magazine's report. The French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense
ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
The USA is a real leader in technology and arm production. This is the country that created
PC, Internet and smartphones, which changed the world. So technical supremacy paves the way to
imperial behaviour.
CIA is one of the most powerful tools of the empire, the force that is instrumental in
peeking the USA on globalist path now (looks at Russiagate) .
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with
its direct and indirect extensions and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and
political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies and plans, one
after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability
to control the progress of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader
international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps to expose the
American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism,
the characteristics of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and
international stock markets, and by the confusion and powerlessness of the American economy.
This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell
the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic
order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its
hands, this project has witnessed great development of the means of control and unprecedented
subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments in
science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an
economic political plan that views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws
of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic
of hegemony in particular, is their basic belief that they own the world, and have the right
to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western, and especially
American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has
become a strategy of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow
discord, to destroy identities, and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic,
and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase, when it was transformed
into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest
manifestation of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to
Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The
Bush administration has turned the U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all
levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would emerge as the most
hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples
politically, economically, and culturally, and to plunder their resources.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
"... It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East. ..."
"... Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ..."
"... They've re-started the Cold War. Keeps all the warmongers in business. Surely they're not stupid enough to want a hot one are they? ..."
"... It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold. ..."
"... "Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and influence it continues to bestow on them." ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
"... Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the Middle East. ..."
"... No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State – and they didn't care. ..."
"... The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest public health services. ..."
"... After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered. ..."
"... The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria. ..."
"... This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building their state on parts of Syria. ..."
"... We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements. ..."
"... Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally better than Hitlery Clinton. ..."
"... The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.). ..."
"... Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless. ..."
"... Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination, but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and later senators who become lobbyists are doing. ..."
"... Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to happen to Israel since 9/11. ..."
"... I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis. Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests ..."
There is something profoundly deceitful in the way the Democratic Party and the corporate media are framing Donald Trump's decision
to pull troops out of Syria.
One does not need to defend Trump's actions or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the departure
of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger
picture.
The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". Explaining why she and other senior Democrats stormed out, the
paper writes
that "it became clear the president had no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East".
Hang on a minute! Let's pull back a little, and not pretend – as the media and Democratic party leadership wish us to – that the
last 20 years did not actually happen. Many of us lived through those events. Our memories are not so short.
Islamic State, or Isis, didn't emerge out of nowhere. It was entirely a creation of two decades of US interference in the
Middle East. And I'm not even referring to the mountains
of evidence that US officials backed their Saudi allies in directly funding and arming Isis – just as their predecessors in Washington,
in their enthusiasm to oust the Soviets from the region, assisted the jihadists who went on to become al-Qaeda.
No, I'm talking about the fact that in destroying three key Arab states – Iraq, Libya and Syria – that refused to submit to
the joint regional hegemony of Saudi Arabia and Israel, Washington's local client states, the US created a giant void of governance
at the heart of the Middle East. They knew that that void would be filled soon enough by religious extremists like Islamic State
– and they didn't care.
Overthrow, not regime change
You don't have to be a Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi or Bashar Assad apologist to accept this point. You don't even have to
be concerned that these so-called "humanitarian" wars violated each state's integrity and sovereignty, and are therefore defined
in international law as "the supreme war crime".
The bigger picture – the one no one appears to want us thinking about – is that the US intentionally sought to destroy these states
with no obvious plan for the day after. As I explained in my book
Israel and the Clash of Civilisations
, these haven't so much been regime-change wars as nation-state dismantling operations – what I have termed overthrow wars.
The logic was a horrifying hybrid of two schools of thought that meshed neatly in the psychopathic foreign policy goals embodied
in the ideology of neoconservatism – the so-called "Washington consensus" since 9/11.
The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region.
The second was the Chicago school's Shock Doctrine, as explained in Naomi Klein's book of that name. The chaotic campaign of destruction,
the psychological trauma and the sense of dislocation created by these overthrow wars were supposed to engender a far more malleable
population that would be ripe for a US-controlled "colour revolution".
The recalcitrant states would be made an example of, broken apart, asset-stripped of their resources and eventually remade as
new dependent markets for US goods. That was what George W Bush, Dick Cheney and Halliburton really meant when they talked about
building a New Middle East and exporting democracy.
Even judged by the vile aims of its proponents, the Shock Doctrine has been a half-century story of
dismal economic failure everywhere it has been attempted
– from Pinochet's Chile to Yeltsin's Russia. But let us not credit the architects of this policy with any kind of acumen for learning
from past errors. As Bush's senior adviser Karl Rove explained to a journalist whom he rebuked for being part of the "reality-based
community": "We're an empire now and, when we act, we create our own reality."
The birth of Islamic State
The barely veiled aim of the attacks on Iraq, Libya and Syria was to destroy the institutions and structures that held these
societies together, however imperfectly. Though no one likes to mention it nowadays, these states – deeply authoritarian though they
were – were also secular, and had well-developed welfare states that ensured high rates of literacy and some of the region's finest
public health services.
Given how closed a society Syria was and is, and how difficult it therefore is to weigh the evidence in ways that are likely to
prove convincing to those not already persuaded, let us set that issue aside too. Anyway, it is irrelevant to the bigger picture
I want to address.
The indisputable fact is that Washington and its Gulf allies wished to exploit this initial unrest as an opportunity to create
a void in Syria – just as they had earlier done in Iraq, where there were no uprisings, nor even the WMDs the US promised would be
found and that served as the pretext for Bush's campaign of Shock and Awe.
The limited uprisings in Syria quickly turned into a much larger and far more vicious war because the Gulf states, with US backing,
flooded the country with proxy fighters and arms in an effort to overthrow Assad and thereby weaken Iranian and Shia influence in
the region. The events in Syria and earlier in Iraq gradually transformed the Sunni religious extremists of al-Qaeda into the even
more barbaric, more nihilistic extremists of Islamic State.
A dark US vanity project
After Rove and Cheney had had their fill playing around with reality, nature got on with honouring the maxim that it always
abhors a vacuum. Islamic State filled the vacuum Washington's policy had engineered.
The clue, after all, was in the name. With the US and Gulf states using oil money to wage a proxy war against Assad, Isis
saw its chance to establish a state inspired by a variety of Saudi Arabia's Wahhabist dogma. Isis needed territory for their planned
state, and the Saudis and US obliged by destroying Syria.
This barbarian army, one that murdered other religious groups as infidels and killed fellow Sunnis who refused to bow before
their absolute rule, became the west's chief allies in Syria. Directly and covertly, we gave them money and weapons to begin building
their state on parts of Syria.
Again, let us ignore the fact that the US, in helping to destroy a sovereign nation, committed the supreme war crime, one that
in a rightly ordered world would ensure every senior Washington official faces their own Nuremberg Trial. Let us ignore too for the
moment that the US, consciously through its actions, brought to life a monster that sowed death and destruction everywhere it went.
The fact is that at the moment Assad called in Russia to help him survive, the battle the US and the Gulf states were waging through
Islamic State and other proxies was lost. It was only a matter of time before Assad would reassert his rule.
From that point onwards, every single person who was killed and every single Syrian made homeless – and there were hundreds of
thousands of them – suffered their terrible fate for no possible gain in US policy goals. A vastly destructive overthrow war became
instead something darker still: a neoconservative vanity project that ravaged countless Syrian lives.
A giant red herring
Trump now appears to be ending part of that policy. He may be doing so for the wrong reasons. But very belatedly – and possibly
only temporarily – he is seeking to close a small chapter in a horrifying story of western-sponsored barbarism in the Middle East,
one intimately tied to Islamic State.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring they
are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like it – was
inevitably going to fill. Then, it allowed those seeds to flourish by assisting its Gulf allies in showering fighters in Syria with
money and arms that came with only one string attached – a commitment to Sunni jihadist ideology inspired by Saudi Wahhabism.
Isis was made in Washington as much as it was in Riyadh. For that reason, the only certain strategy for preventing the revival
of Islamic State is preventing the US and the Gulf states from interfering in Syria again.
With the Syrian army in charge of Syrian territory, there will be no vacuum for Isis to fill. The jihadists' state-building project
is now unrealisable, at least in Syria. Islamic State will continue to wither, as it would have done years before if the US and its
Gulf allies had not fuelled it in a proxy war they knew could not be won.
Doomed Great Game
The same lesson can be drawn by looking at the experience of the Syrian Kurds. The Rojava fiefdom they managed to carve out in
northern Syria during the war survived till now only because of continuing US military support. With a US departure, and the Kurds
too weak to maintain their improvised statelet, a vacuum was again created that this time has risked sucking in the Turkish army,
which fears a base for Kurdish nationalism on its doorstep.
The Syrian Kurds' predicament is simple: face a takeover by Turkey or seek Assad's protection to foil Turkish ambitions. The best
hope for the Kurds looks to be the Syrian army's return, filling the vacuum and regaining a chance of long-term stability.
That could have been the case for all of Syria many tens of thousands of deaths ago. Whatever the corporate media suggest, those
deaths were lost not in a failed heroic battle for freedom, which, even if it was an early aspiration for some fighters, quickly
became a goal that was impossible for them to realise. No, those deaths were entirely pointless. They were sacrificed by a western
military-industrial complex in a US-Saudi Great Game that dragged on for many years after everyone knew it was doomed.
Nancy Pelosi's purported worries about Isis reviving because of Trump's Syria withdrawal are simply crocodile fears. If she is
really so worried about Islamic State, then why did she and other senior Democrats stand silently by as the US under Barack Obama
spent years spawning, cultivating and financing Isis to destroy Syria, a state that was best placed to serve as a bulwark against
the head-chopping extremists?
Pelosi and the Democratic leadership's bad faith – and that of the corporate media – are revealed in their ongoing efforts to
silence and smear Tulsi Gabbard, the party's only candidate for the presidential nomination who has pointed out the harsh political
realities in Syria, and tried to expose their years of lies.
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power – and the personal wealth and influence it continues
to bestow on them.
Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His books include "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair"
(Zed Books). His website is www.jonathan-cook.net .
The problem largely traces back to simple mistakes by prior Saudi administrations.
The Wahhabi were a threat to the royal family. So, the royal family funded them to go elsewhere. Given the craziness of Wahhabism
that made sense at the time. Crazy usually dies out. However, in this case the Crazy came with enough money in hand to establish
credibility. The extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a direct result of these exported extremism.
ISIS is the result of a schism inside the extremist Muslim Brotherhood. A "direct action" group wanted an even more extreme
and immediate solution and broke away.
-- Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability. Violent, ultra-extreme
ISIS fanatics would not follow the commands of infidel heretics. The Saudi royal family by this point realized that the Muslim
Brotherhood was a threat to them just like the original Wahhabi, but they had no good way to undo their prior mistake.
-- Did Turkey attempt to use ISIS to weaken Syria and Iraq? This is far more probable. Turkey's AK party is also a schismatic
offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. So, there is a great deal of opportunity for the two troops to find common cause. The New
Ottoman Empire needs to absorb Syrian and Iraqi land, so undermining those governments would be step #1.
One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution. If the
problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside forces driving
the Craziness. There is no "plug to pull".
The wild savage dogs of ISIS are the Khmer Rouge of Islamic fundamentalism and their rise and violence should be attributed to
the liberal interventionism that has proven to be a disaster not only for the region but those who carried out the intervention.
"One does not need outside actors to explain how the hole was dug. Unfortunately, that means there is no good solution.
If the problem was driven by outside forces, those forces could stop it. However, the reality is that there are no outside
forces driving the Craziness. There is no 'plug to pull'".
Absolute nonsense. And what do you mean by "outside forces." The US and Israel count as outside forces but Turkey does not?
Forces outside of what?
ISIS emerged out of ISI, Zarqawi's Islamic State in Iraq, an affiliate, for a while, of AQ. The US invasion of Iraq created
the political and military space in Iraq for transnational terror groups.
Meanwhile, the US, at Israel's instigation, had been working to weaken Assad in Syria. After the rebellion against him in 2011,
the US, along with Turkey, Saudi, Qatar, Israel and others, began to support various jihadi groups inside Syria with the goal
of eliminating the Assad government, each for his own reasons. Syria began lost control of its border with Iraq and much of eastern
Syria and the Euphrates valley as well. This process allowed ISIS to emerge from an ISI under stress during the so-called "surge"
in 2007-10 and establish itself in Syria. In 2014, ISIS, now a powerful well-armed group went back into Iraq to defeat the incompetent
and unmotivated Iraq Security Forces that the US had established.
While the US moved against ISIS in Iraq after 2014, it left ISIS in Syria alone since it was depriving Assad of control over
most of Syria's oil and much of its arable land.
And yes, of course the US, instigated by Israel, didn't "deploy" ISIS in the sense of directing its operations. But they left
ISIS largely unimpeded to play a role in the overthrow of Assad which was always the primary goal. ISIS, it was thought, could
be dealt with later after Assad was gone.
That plan would probably have worked eventually, but the Russians entered the picture in the second half of 2015 and changed
the situation.
The US had been nominally supporting the usual "freedom fighters" but in effect supplying the more competent and vicious jihadis
who could take the TOW missiles and other weapons the US was providing to the approved sad-sacks and make more effective use of
them. Finally, with Russia and Iran facilitating the roll-back of all the jihadis, and the US threatened with being relegated
to the sidelines, Obama jumped on the SDF (Kurdish) bandwagon and actually started doing what the US had not done previously:
Taking serious action against ISIS so that a Russian/Iranian-backed Syrian reconquest of eastern Syria could be pre-empted.
And of course, the biggest supporter of the Kurds has consistently been Israel, who sees the possibility of creating pro-Israel
statelets or at least enclaves in the midst of a Turkish, Iranian and Arab region that detests the Judenreich.
So in order to eliminate another of Israel's enemies, reduce a unified Syrian state to a handful of even more impotent emirates
and ensure that Bibi would not be pestered with legal questions over the seizure and retention of the Golan, Syria was laid waste
under the guise of "promoting democracy" and then further devastated under the guise of combatting ISIS.
We have done more than enough damage at the behest of Israel and its fifth column in the US. ISIS might well have emerged regardless
of US actions, but it was the Jew-induced insanity of US regime-change/COIN policies that created the geographical, political
and military space in Iraq and Syria for the jihadists and the ensuing physical destruction of so much of those countries.
The best solution would be to facilitate the re-establishment of Syrian sovereignty over all of Syria. But instead of doing
that, Trump has instead facilitated the entry of Turkish forces and allied jihadis in an attempt to mend fences with a thoroughly
alienated Erdogan. We'll see if Putin can mitigate the brutal incompetence of Israel-infected US policy.
@A123 For fuck's sake. Is there any way to stop Hasbara agents from effectively using software to get consistent first posts
on this site?
Their mere presence is annoying. Whatever they have to say, on any topic and no matter what it is, no one here wants to read
it because they are not beginning with any credibility whatsoever. As they are are religiously-avowed enemies of the West (who
they hold to be the continuation of Rome) and the demonstrated fervent enemies of non-Jewish Whites.
Given the craziness of Wahhabism
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
A very real but completely unadvertised reality of these regime changes was that the publicly owned central bank of the country
– Iraq and Libya – was eliminated and changed to a private central bank. Iraq and Libya both succumbed and Ron Paul related that
the smoke had barely cleared in Libya before the private central bank charter was drafted and implemented. Syria and Iran are
the last two countries that do not have a private central banks. Hence the drive by the neo-cons to destroy those countries and
fully implement the New World (banking) Order.
Not widely discussed but (I think) vitally important to understanding foreign policy.
What of the supposed concerns of Pelosi and the Democratic Party under whose watch the barbarism in Syria took place. They should
have no credibility on the matter to begin with.
But their claims that Trump has "no plan to deal with a potential revival of Isis in the Middle East" is a giant red herring
they are viciously slapping us in the face with in the hope the spray of seawater blinds us.
I love the second para. Getting slapped with a red herring with hope that the salt water blinds us .
My only gripe with Jonathan Cook is that this and all mid-eastern conflicts are engineered by the dual citizens and Israel
isn't called out by him as the chief instigator. The saudis are slave of the west and amount to nothing.
@A123 " Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability"
Perhaps. Except that it did happen in plain daylight, before our eyes, but we should, of course, trust your "reasonability" --
instead of our own lying eyes.
@A123 US President Donald Trump said Monday that a small number of US troops remain in Syria at the request of Israel and
Jordan, with some positioned near the borders with Jordan and Israel and others deployed to secure oil fields.
"The other region where we've been asked by Israel and Jordan to leave a small number of troops is a totally different section
of Syria, near Jordan, and close to Israel," Trump said when asked whether he would leave soldiers in Syria. "So we have a small
group there, and we secured the oil. Other than that, there's no reason for it, in our opinion."
Times of Israel
and J Post 21st oct
It 's all about Israel and for its "royal patsy when not for royal patsy it's for the cannon fodder/ foot solder of Israel.
This mayhem from 2003 hasn't seen the full effects of the blow-back yet .Just starting . Tulsi Gabbard and Trump have knowingly
and sometime unknowingly have told the master that the king never had any clothes even when the king was talking about the decency
of having clothes on .
"The first was Israel's long-standing approach to the Palestinians. By constantly devastating any emerging Palestinian institution
or social structures, Israel produced a divide-and-rule model on steriods, creating a leaderless, ravaged, enfeebled society that
sucked out all the local population's energy. That strategy proved very appealing to the neoconservatives, who saw it as one they
could export to non-compliant states in the region."-
This sums up everything one want to know about certain human clones and the impact of the clones on the humanity.
Who will ever blame the victims for creating a future Hitler among them ?
We cannot, of course, forget an assistance this witch had from very GOPiish Senators such as late American hero John McCain
and his buddy Lindsey Graham. They played a key role in supporting all kinds of jihadist elements.
Let's be accurate: It was US Democrats AND REPUBLICANS who helped cultivate the barbarism of Isis. The mess was started with
Bush/Cheney/Powell. McCain was probably the biggest ISIS guy ever. Graham, Romney and friends are the same, and at best marginally
better than Hitlery Clinton.
Lock them all up, regardless of party affiliation.
Many interesting points here, and I agree with a lot of them. But:
[MORE]
"Or was it driven by something else: as a largely economic protest by an under-class suffering from food shortages as climate
change led to repeated crop failures?"
Syria did run out of water, and it's hard not to see that as a major driver of the chaos that unfolded. But Syria didn't run
out of water because of "climate change," that's false.
The explanation is that the Syrian government deliberately engineered a massive population explosion. Seriously, they made
the sale and possession of contraceptives a crime! (See "Demographic Developments and Population: Policies in Ba'thist Syria (Demographic
Developments and Socioeconomics)", by Onn Winkler).
The population of Syria increased exponentially right up through 2010, with a doubling time of about 18 years, at which
point food ran out and population started trending downwards (not so much due to outright famine, as to poverty, lack of medical
care, warfare, and people fleeing the country.).
Now as far as weather goes, there were a couple of dry years before the collapse, but weather is always like that. Last year
there were record rainfalls. If Syria's population had been stable at 5 or even 10 million, they could have coasted on water stored
in the aquifers until the rains came back. But when the population increases so much that you drain the aquifers even when there
is plenty of rain, then when a temporary drought hits you have no reserve and it all falls apart.
Check out the section in wikipedia on Syria's aquifers and groundwater – the water table had been dropping drastically
as far back as 1985. Long before the post-2010 dry spell, Syria's rapid population growth had been consuming more water than fell
as rain – EVEN DURING WET YEARS. The low rainfall post-2010 was an early trigger, but the collapse would have come regardless.
simple and straightforward journalism that cuts through the "corporate veil." Tulsi may not win the democratic nomination,
but I see her determination to educate the majority of Americans of what our government/deep state/military industrial complex/and
later senators who become lobbyists are doing.
I also feel for our veterans who are indoctrinated to protect freedom, but in the end, when they come home injured and disabled,
or even dead, it was all for naught.
I find some of the rhetoric in this piece irritating and repetitive -- but the analysis is essentially correct.
We created a power vacuum that was almost certain to give rise to something like ISIS.
Worse, I suspect that many weren't too disturbed by this prospect. After all, ISIS and its incredibly vicious terrorist
attacks in the West did a great deal to fuel Islamophobia -- and Islamophobia has its uses. ISIS was probably the best thing to
happen to Israel since 9/11.
"The problem is neatly illustrated in this line from a report by the Guardian newspaper of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's meeting
this week with Trump, who is described as having had a "meltdown". "
That's a poorly written statement. It reads as though Trump was the one having a meltdown. How about: "House Speaker Pelosi's
meltdown during a meeting with Trump." ?
@MarathonMan That is a fact that should be kept foremost in the discussions of "why regime change is necessary". It is the
most basic and obvious reason for all this war in the ME.
"First, Washington sowed the seeds of Islamic State by engineering a vacuum in Syria that Isis – or something very like
it – was inevitably going to fill."
Not quite accurate. The US Government "sowed the seeds of" ISIS by giving them material support before the vacuum was created.
IS is mainly a creature of empire, including the US and older remnants of empire in the UK and Europe which survives mainly in
the existence of (international) banks.
@Christian truth Project "Tulsi is/was a member of the CFR". Aren't all Congressmen members? Doesn't that come with signing
the AIPAC form, getting the secret decoder ring from Adam Schiff, and the free trip to Israel? (maybe Ilhan Omar and Rashida Talib
"don't measure up?")
I believe CFR was the organization Biden was regaling with his story of holding up $one billion in Ukrainian
aid unless the Ukrainians fired the investigator of his son Hunter "who did nothing wrong". Can you imagine if Biden had been
President rather than VP? This would have been a scandal!
@A123 One does not need outside actors, but then there would be a lot of 'dark matter' in the history of the ME over the last
100 years. Personally it's plain state terrorism to me, and the Brits have a good definition!
http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/part/I
Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about
Assad, or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of American power
Correction: They only care about the maintenance and expansion of Israeli power.
I think it is worse than that : ISIS was a creation by the Israel-US- Saudi Arabia-Gulf States-axis.
Significantly ISIS never attacked Israeli interests, and when it once did so by accident, it apologized to Israel. The destruction
of Syria is part of Israel's notorious Oded Yinon plan, according to which all states in Israel's neighborhood need to be fragmentized.
In Iraq and Libya that was a success, in Syria, thanks to Iran, Hizbollah and Russia, it failed. The US is simply a puppet for
Israel's foreign policy, but nobody in the US, not even Tulsi Gabbard, dares to say so.
@A123 Sorry Bibi, but your beloved Israel played a BIG part in establishing ISIS, then supporting it with shekels, medical
care for their wounded, training and weapons.
WikiLeaks: US, Israel, And Saudi Arabia Planned Overthrow Of Syrian Govt. In 2006
Cables reveal that before the beginning of the Syrian revolt and civil war, the United States hoped to overthrow Assad and
create strife between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
Let's not forget that when the term ISIS first came out, the Tel Aviv war mongers realized it stood for Israeli Secret Intelligence
Services and changed that to ISIL, which their adoring MSM gladly obliged by parroting that change.
From the Israeli masterminded 9/11 False Flag to the destruction of Syria, there's one common factor, Israel and her American
Jew sayanim who keep pushing America into forever wars so Israel can finish off the Palestinians and steal more land.
@Digital Samizdat Absolutely. Gabbard is the "Democrat" Trump. A Jew puppet presented as an outsider. They're exactly the
same. Even Obama was presented that way to an extent.
Yet the dumb goyim will fall for it for the third time in a row.
Based on the whistleblower's extensive presentation, including internal emails, text exchanges and suppressed draft reports,
we are unanimous in expressing our alarm over unacceptable practices in the investigation of the alleged chemical attack in
Douma, near the Syrian capital of Damascus on 7 April 2018. We became convinced by the testimony that key information about
chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor
a preordained conclusion.
We have learned of disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts
to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments
-- a right explicitly conferred on inspectors in the Chemical Weapons Convention, evidently with the intention of ensuring
the independence and authoritativeness of inspection reports.
Fixed "report" of OPCW was necessary to maintain anti-Assad narrative which is now unchallenged even by Gabbard (not to mention
the weak sheep-dog Sanders).
@Ilyana_Rozumova The US does not have to directly support the jihadists. It just has to manage the chaos, for whatever be
the action on the ground and whoever is killed or not killed, as long as there is chaos within their chosen sandbox, the chaos
masters in Israel wins and that is all that counts with all too many Americans. It doesn't matter how many Arabs, Turks, Etruscans
or Kurds are killed, as long as Israel's interests are taken care of, the results are "worth it". Its a very deeply cynical, and
evil policy that the US has pursued all these years in the Mid-East.
But fortunately the Russians have turned things around.
@MarathonMan Gangster business and slavery are OK so long as our central bank gets our cut. ME is also about "fragmenting"
neighboring countries so Israel can expand. Yinon Plan.
Oct 18, 2019 Tulsi Gabbard responds to Hillary Clinton: Clinton "knows she can't control me"
Hillary Clinton implied Russians are "grooming" Tulsi Gabbard to run as a third-party candidate to disrupt the election, a
charge which Gabbard denies. In a live interview with CBSN, Gabbard responds to Clinton's claims and says she will not run as
a third-party candidate.
And now, according to the latest news, Trump will send tanks into Syria to help the Kurds secure the oil for Israel. It's hard
to understand why the Elders of the Deep State want to impeach Trump. He has done everything they wanted, moved the embassy, gave
Syria's Golan Heights to Israel, never criticizes the illegal settlements in Palestine. What else do they want from him?
What do you mean Pelosi has no credibility? Have you checked her bank balance lately? Nancy, had she not waded into politics,
would have been a pole dancer she had the goods for it.
@TG Excellent post. You bring up 2 very important but rarely discussed issues.
Demographics: Population is one of the most easily predictable developments within a country, and you'd think it might be one
of the most publically-discussed, and therefore, best-managed. Au contraire. Assad wasn't the only one who stood on the tracks
watching the headlights approach:
1. The EU is having problems with an aging native population because it earlier encouraged low birth rates, and is now promoting
mass immigration of rapidly-breeding immigrants who threaten to at least overwhelm if not overrun European society. Yet, as Douglas
Murray points out in his book The Strange Death of Europe, openly talking about this problem has been, and still is, verboten.
2. China is now wondering to do with its preponderance of young men, caused very predictably by the Communist Party's one-child
policy.
Climate:
If the rains had been good every single year – which is impossible – it would only have pushed the point of collapse back
a few years, at most.
The Syrian case you cite shows how even relatively minor climate changes can carry events past a tipping point. I do agree
with you that effects of APGW on climactic conditions are greatly exaggerated, yet changes in climate, for good or ill, have often
triggered much larger historical events. The cooling that caused a famine and that preceded the Justinian Plague weakened European
and Sassanian civilizations. These misfortunes paved the way for the Islamic takeover that followed. Contrariwise, Norse exploration
and the Renaissance, to give 2 examples of increasing activity, both occurred during the Medieval Warming Period.
When it comes to senior American politihoes, no one is ever right. Pelosi may be cultivating the ISIS, but Gabbard is busy blowing
assorted dictators and more closer to the heart, the hindoo nationalist queers, as impotent (I mean that in a literal sexual context,
as their elites don't marry) as they might be.
Tulsi needs to conduct herself with gravitas, because of her age. However, she is helped by the fact that the leader of the progressive
wing is a former bartender, and the leader of the environmental resistance is a high-school sophomore.
@MarathonMan It goes without comment that the first act of the US following Nudelman's (Why do these fuckers keep changing
their names?) Ukraine coup was to steal its gold.
"Pelosi and most of the Democratic leadership don't care about Syria, or its population's welfare. They don't care about Assad,
or Isis. They care only about the maintenance and expansion of their own Democratic Party power – for the personal wealth and
influence it continues to bestow on them."
FTFY
Just as the GOP is precisely and thoroughly corrupt in exactly the same way, focused exclusively on their own craven self-interest,
the country be damned.
There is nothing in Sunni Islam that does not have its root in Judaism. To state otherwise is to be a typical Semitic liar.
Lol! Deceitful lies from some godless/pagan whitrash.
If you are referring to some self-perceived notions of barbarity/deception/etc., within Islam, then you are a deceitful !@#
who is trying to cover up the sheer savagery/psychopathy/deception/hypocrisy/etc., of the Christoo whitrash race.
Again, as far as the roots of Islam being in Judaism, that is laughable. It is Christooism which is clearly having roots in
Judaism (there have been so many here who have quoted from your pagan scriptures about the haloed position of the Jooscum)
and Hindooism .
In-his-image mangods/womangods, Trinity/Trimurthi, the human body is the temple of god the list is long where you all share
your pagan theologies.
Islam utterly rejects all such pagan abominations. The following verses of the Holy Quran amply proves the simplest and purest
form of monotheism, that is Islam;
Say, "He is Allah, [who is] One, Allah, the Eternal Refuge. He neither begets nor is born , Nor is there to Him
any equivalent ."
@A123 "Did the U.S. or Israel attempt to deploy ISIS? This is far-fetched beyond the bounds of reasonability."
Wrong.
The Oded Yinon Plan employs exactly this strategy, and along with the Neocon dominated State Dept with its Regime Change program
(Oded Yinon plan in stealth mode) is the predicate. Meanwhile, once it emerged, Obama & Kerry sought to preserve ISIS as a means
to pressure Assad. Neocon Zionist fifth column in the US, & Israel-behind-the-scenes are the dual agency-behind-the-curtain of
US regime-change wars ***EVERYWHERE*** (because they hate Russia, too.).
@DESERT FOX And rule, finally, over a smoldering wreck of a planet? They already rule most of it, they're at the Endgame of
their long match with the world. Not that they eschew violence and mass murder. Indeed, they got their start thousands years ago
by worshiping a god who told them to genocide all their neighbors and steal all their goods.
@really no shit I'm in the same age cohort as most of these shameless grifters, so I know the end of this run on earth is
drawing near. I know that no one can take whatever they accumulate in this life with them into oblivion or whatever their imagined
version of paradise might be. The loot stays here in this vale of tears.
ALL of these players busy ruining and ending lives, like Pelosi, the Clintons and the Bush family, are multi-millionaires at
the least–and all on the taxpayers' dime. Why do they desperately seek to add ever more cash to their bank accounts by bringing
yet more misery into the world? It won't be very long and either the collection of psychopaths known as the government of the
United States and its ruthless war machine will end up with the proceeds or they will pass down to further generations of these
congenital parasites and deadbeats.
Does Joe ask himself whether it was worthy to spend his wretched life accumulating ill-gotten wealth to pass on to Hunter and
his ilk? Or for Hillary to set up Chelsea and the next generation of Rodham Clinton lampreys? Jimmy Carter seems to have been
the only American president who didn't constantly grasp for money once out of office and the world never heard a peep about Amy
ever again.
[MORE]
[EDITOR'S NOTE: Since publication, this story has been corrected to clarify that the fighters trained in Jordan became members
of the ISIS after their training.]
JERUSALEM – Syrian rebels who would later join the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIS, were trained in 2012 by U.S.
instructors working at a secret base in Jordan, according to informed Jordanian officials.
The officials said dozens of future ISIS members were trained at the time as part of covert aid to the insurgents targeting
the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Syria. The officials said the training was not meant to be used for any future
campaign in Iraq.
The Jordanian officials said all ISIS members who received U.S. training to fight in Syria were first vetted for any links to
extremist groups like al-Qaida.
In February 2012, WND was first to report the U.S., Turkey and Jordan were running a training base for the Syrian rebels in
the Jordanian town of Safawi in the country's northern desert region.
That report has since been corroborated by numerous other media accounts.
Last March, the German weekly Der Spiegel reported Americans were training Syrian rebels in Jordan.
Quoting what it said were training participants and organizers, Der Spiegel reported it was not clear whether the Americans
worked for private firms or were with the U.S. Army, but the magazine said some organizers wore uniforms. The training in Jordan
reportedly focused on use of anti-tank weaponry.
The German magazine reported some 200 men received the training over the previous three months amid U.S. plans to train a total
of 1,200 members of the Free Syrian Army in two camps in the south and the east of Jordan.
Britain's Guardian newspaper also reported last March that U.S. trainers were aiding Syrian rebels in Jordan along with British
and French instructors.
Reuters reported a spokesman for the U.S. Defense Department declined immediate comment on the German magazine's report. The
French foreign ministry and Britain's foreign and defense ministries also would not comment to Reuters.
Conservative government watchdog Judicial Watch have published formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department of Defence
which reveals the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that
they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
Levantreport.com reports:
Astoundingly, the newly declassified report states that for "THE WEST, GULF COUNTRIES, AND TURKEY [WHO] SUPPORT THE [SYRIAN] OPPOSITION
THERE IS THE POSSIBILITY OF ESTABLISHING A DECLARED OR UNDECLARED SALAFIST PRINCIPALITY IN EASTERN SYRIA (HASAKA AND DER ZOR),
AND THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT THE SUPPORTING POWERS TO THE OPPOSITION WANT, IN ORDER TO ISOLATE THE SYRIAN REGIME ".
The DIA report, formerly classified "SECRET//NOFORN" and dated August 12, 2012, was circulated widely among various government
agencies, including CENTCOM, the CIA, FBI, DHS, NGA, State Dept., and many others.
The document shows that as early as 2012, U.S. intelligence predicted the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
(ISIL or ISIS), but instead of clearly delineating the group as an enemy, the report envisions the terror group as a U.S. strategic
asset.
Government watchdog Judicial Watch published more than 100 pages of formerly classified documents from the U.S. Department
of Defense and the State Department.
The documents obtained through a federal lawsuit, revealed the agencies earlier views on ISIS, namely that they were a desirable
presence in Eastern Syria in 2012 and that they should be "supported" in order to isolate the Syrian regime.
The U.S. intelligence documents not only confirms suspicions that the United States and some of its coalition allies had actually
facilitated the rise of the ISIS in Syria – as a counterweight to the Syrian government of President Bashar al-Assad- but also
that ISIS members were initially trained by members and contractors of the Central Intelligence Agency at facilities in Jordan
in 2012.
@Anonymous Jimmah was the last honest man in American politics. But since he told Americans that gas was going to cost more,
that perhaps they needed to drive a wee bit less, the Americans hated him. They didn't like the "malaise" of having to pay for
their lifestyle.
As for the Israelis, what did Jimmah not to do for them : Got Egypt out of the Arab alliance, arranged the annual tribute to
Israel, started the ball rolling on the Holocaust religion, paid off Egypt and Jordan to stay away from any alliance against the
Israelis. But what did he get in return; branded as anti-Semite merely for mentioning that the Palestinians had rights, were human
beings too. With the Zionist Jews, one is always on probation. No point playing their silly games.
The path of U.S.-Israeli arrogance and domination, with its various dimensions, and with its direct and indirect extensions
and alliances, which is witnessing military defeats and political failures, reflected successive defeats for the American strategies
and plans, one after the other. All this has led [the U.S.] to a state of indecision, retreat, and inability to control the progress
of events in our Arab and Islamic world. There is a broader international context for this – a context that, in its turn, helps
to expose the American crisis, and the decline of the [U.S.] unipolar hegemony, in the face of pluralism, the characteristics
of which are yet to be stabilized.
"The crisis of the arrogant world order is deepened by the collapse of U.S. and international stock markets, and by the confusion
and powerlessness of the American economy. This reflects the height of the structural crisis of the model of capitalist arrogance.
Therefore, it can be said that we are in the midst of historic transformations that foretell the retreat of the USA as a hegemonic
power, the disintegration of the unipolar hegemonic order, and the beginning of the accelerated historic decline of the Zionist
entity.
After World War II, the U.S. has adopted the leading, central hegemonic project. At its hands, this project has witnessed great
development of the means of control and unprecedented subjugation. It has benefited from an accumulation of multi-faceted accomplishments
in science, culture, technology, knowledge, economy, and the military, which was supported by an economic political plan that
views the world as nothing but open markets subject to the laws of [the U.S.].
"The most dangerous aspect of Western logic of hegemony in general, and the American logic of hegemony in particular, is their
basic belief that they own the world, and have the right to hegemony due to their supremacy in several fields. Thus, the Western,
and especially American, expansionist strategy, when coupled with the enterprise of capitalist economy, has become a strategy
of a global nature, whose covetous desires and appetite know no bounds.
The barbaric capitalism has turned globalism into a means to spread disintegration, to sow discord, to destroy identities,
and to impose the most dangerous form of cultural, economic, and social plunder. Globalization reached its most dangerous phase,
when it was transformed into military globalization by the owners of the Western hegemony enterprise, the greatest manifestation
of which was evident in the Middle East, from Afghanistan to Iraq, to Palestine, and to Lebanon.
There is no doubt that American terrorism is the source of all terrorism in the world. The Bush administration has turned the
U.S. into a danger threatening the whole world, on all levels. If a global opinion poll were held today, the United States would
emerge as the most hated country in the world.
The most important goal of American arrogance is to take control of the peoples politically, economically, and culturally,
and to plunder their resources.
– Hassan Nasrallah December 8, 2009
and Trump IS NOT "pulling out" Will Tulsi? One way to find out. Doesn't look good though, unless shes willing to splinter the
C.I.A. into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds, as they say..
Where's the proof that she is CFR member, I see sock puppets parrot this line all the time but offer no proof. Her serving
on the armed & financial services committees and doing a speech for them doesn't make her a member. I'd take her over Trump any
day.
Hundreds of Islamic State fighters, both Syrian and foreign, were covertly evacuated by US,
UK and Kurdish forces from the besieged city of Raqqa last month and freed to "spread out far
and wide across Syria and beyond".
Although reports on the convoy surfaced at the time, BBC journalists Quentin Sommerville
and Riam Dalati have revealed the details in their documentary Raqqa's Dirty Secret.
Their investigation describes how the convoy carrying 250 fighters, 3,500 family members,
and lorry loads of arms and possessions, was arranged for October 12th by local officials in
meetings attended by a western officer.
During a visit to Syria in mid-October, The Irish Times was told not only about the
evacuation but also that senior Islamic State commanders and their families, 45 people in
all, had been airlifted out of Raqqa by a US helicopter and flown to the Kurdish region in
northern Iraq.
Fighters escaping Raqqa were said to have been given passage across the desert to join
comrades battling the Syrian army and its allies in Deir al-Zor.
Among the people the BBC team interviewed for the exposé were drivers paid by the
Islamic State to drive the buses and trucks carrying the evacuees. According to driver Abu
Fawzi, men, women and children wore suicide vests and the trucks had been booby-trapped in
case "something went wrong".
The convoy contained 50 trucks, 13 buses, and more than 100 of the fighters' own vehicles.
Although it had been agreed they would take only personal weapons, they filled 10 trucks with
arms and ammunition.
Three-day convoy
It had also been stipulated that no foreigners would leave, but drivers told the BBC that
French, Turkish, Azerbaijani, Pakistani, Yemeni, Saudi, Chinese, Tunisian and Egyptians had
joined the exodus. The only restriction observed was a ban against flags and banners.
Whenever it passed through a village or hamlet, fighters warned frightened bystanders they
would return, a villager called Muhanad told the BBC, "running a finger across their
throats".
Two Humvees led the convoy into the desert where the going was rough. Coalition aircraft
and drones hovered above, dropping flares after dark to light the way. When the motorcade
reached Islamic State-held territory, fighters and civilians departed with their arms and
possessions and drivers returned home.
The BBC investigation compelled Col Ryan Dillon, spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve,
to admit to the deal. He told the team: "We didn't want anyone to leave. But this goes to the
heart of our strategy 'by, with and through' local leaders on the ground.
His statement on foreign fighters contradicted information given to the BBC by drivers and
people along the route as well as a statement about strategy made by US defence secretary
James Mattis in May.
On one hand, you're totally right about the necessity of reducing the number of NATO members. On the other hand, the problem is
that without Turkey NATO will militarily become only a little more than a bilateral Franco-American agreement plus those 215 British
warheads.
The problem with Trump is he has no morals, values, and/or convictions. He does what he thinks will be the most popular and what
will make him LOOK NOT weak.
Motto for the USA: Whats mine is mine and whats yours is mine
Lemme know when Syria sends troops to support some group or to fight some group in the US won't you?
Let me know when Syria or any nation in the Middle East bombs American military bases in the US because they believe that the
US government mis-treated some group or area in the US.
Then let me know who the hell the US government and military think they are...
talking about Syria and Turkey as if it's any of you alls damn business-oh yeah, you're the good guys right? You preach to other
nations and cultures?
Have you any decency left, when you demand this or that from other nations?
After it was and is proven that, since 1945, the US has murdered more civilians around the world than any other nation? That the
US and it's fine 'civilized' military and agencies like the CIA tortured people in and from Iraq and other places in the MIddle
East?
And, what business is it of yours what religion Turkey has?
Is Turkey telling America what it must do on America's borders?
You arrogant hypocrites. Was it Moslem nations that did the terror in Russia starting in 1917? World War 1 and mustard gas and
so on?
World War 11 and that suffering? How about the US bombing northern Korea and Vietnam in the 50' and 60's? Over a million humans
slaughtered there!!
How would you feel if it was a close relative of yours that got blown apart by the fine US military in Iraq and Afghanistan or
in Syria?
I'll tell you 'know it's all' something which including the above article writer:
if true justice were to happen the US and NATO nations would be brought to trial for high crimes against humanity and trillions
of dollars in reparations paid to nations the US and NATO destroyed and those leaders such as Bush, HIllary Clinton, Condi Rice,
Obama and their neo-con owners would be jailed, at the very least. So, how about throw the US and NATO out of NATO? As in, disband
that criminal enterprise. NATO: a question why do you even exist?
You know, the politicians in D.C. don't care and the American people will never get it-what I mean from my words above. Dig?
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam. ... (right click) ...
https://www.strategic-cultu... .... Trump strikes back at the CIA (deep state) and the CIA will be after his scalp till Kingdom
Come.
The real corruption in Ukraine started in February of 2014 (right click)
https://www.strategic-cultu... when Obama/Biden and ZioCON Communist Victoria Nuland "ILLEGALLY OVERTHREW" the Ukraine
Government and INSTALLED a corrupt illegal dictator handpicked by Obama and Nuland.
The real question is: Would we be here today if Obama/Biden had not taken part in an illegal overthrow of Ukraine? If you follow
actual events, the people of Crimea were so upset they voted, LAWFULLY, to return to Russia. The two Eastern regions of Ukraine
voted to join Russia too; but President Putin refused to accept them.
The vultures also descended on Ukraine to make a profit and Hunter Biden was one of them and an honest prosecutor started to
investigate, and Joe Biden blackmailed the "installed" President to fire him.
When the people of Ukraine got fed up with the "installed" President, they voted a COMEDIAN, who ran as a joke, into office.
Now the conspirators have a new ball game and, before this is over, the CORRUPTION will come out and impeachment will only speed
it up.
So, bring on the impeachment and let the truth come out as it should. Before this is over, this could be the Dimms last Rodeo
for a long, long time.
The failed coup against Erdogan marked a turn from Erdogan away from US and towards Russia. Might well be that Turkey didn't view
US a a "good ally" since that coup.
I agree. Turkey should be expelled but I think its not as easy as simple expulsion. I think its a matter of timing and justification
otherwise it will appear anti-muslim and we may need Turkey at some point in the future (and I think we are keeping that ace in
the hand just a little longer before playing it).
I suspect that it is time for the US to leave NATO.
Create a new alliance with Canada and Britain and let the continent create it's own alliance. They will be forced to use their
own money and
The devastation created in Syria by the USA and its allies who recruited and armed the ISIS fighters and "moderate islamists"
with weapons captured in Libya after fall of Libyan government and start of the civil war will be remembered for generations.
Obama and Hillary were key war criminals in this game.
But the gamble to remove Assad using Islamists as the driving force and then somehow deal with islamists failed.
Now the USA, Israel and KSA suffered a geopolitical defeat.
Notable quotes:
"... The Russia-Turkey deal establishes a safe zone along the Syrian-Turkish border – something Erdogan had been gunning for since 2014. There will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols. The Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units), part of the rebranded, US-aligned Syrian Democratic Forces, will need to retreat and even disband, especially in the stretch between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and they will have to abandon their much-cherished urban areas such as Kobane and Manbij. The Syrian Arab Army will be back in the whole northeast. And Syrian territorial integrity – a Putin imperative – will be preserved. ..."
"... This is a Syria-Russia-Turkey win-win-win – and, inevitably, the end of a separatist-controlled Syrian Kurdistan. Significantly, Erdogan's spokesman Fahrettin Altun stressed Syria's "territorial integrity" and "political unity." That kind of rhetoric from Ankara was unheard of until quite recently. ..."
Russia-Turkey deal establishes 'safe zone' along Turkish border and there will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols
The negotiations in Sochi were long – over six hours – tense and tough. Two leaders in a room with their interpreters and several
senior Turkish ministers close by if advice was needed. The stakes were immense: a road map to pacify northeast Syria, finally.
The press conference afterwards was somewhat awkward – riffing on generalities. But there's no question that in the end Russian
President Vladimir Putin and his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan managed the near impossible.
The Russia-Turkey deal establishes a safe zone along the Syrian-Turkish border – something Erdogan had been gunning for since
2014. There will be joint Russia-Turkey military patrols. The Kurdish YPG (People's Protection Units), part of the rebranded, US-aligned
Syrian Democratic Forces, will need to retreat and even disband, especially in the stretch between Tal Abyad and Ras al-Ayn, and
they will have to abandon their much-cherished urban areas such as Kobane and Manbij. The Syrian Arab Army will be back in the whole
northeast. And Syrian territorial integrity – a Putin imperative – will be preserved.
This is a Syria-Russia-Turkey win-win-win – and, inevitably, the end of a separatist-controlled Syrian Kurdistan. Significantly,
Erdogan's spokesman Fahrettin Altun stressed Syria's "territorial integrity" and "political unity." That kind of rhetoric from Ankara
was unheard of until quite recently.
Putin immediately called Syrian President Bashar al Assad to detail the key points of the memorandum of understanding. Kremlin
spokesman Dmitry Peskov once again stressed Putin's main goal – Syrian territorial integrity – and the very hard work ahead to form
a Syrian Constitutional Committee for the legal path towards a still-elusive political settlement.
Russian military police and Syrian border guards are already arriving to monitor the imperative YPG withdrawal – all the way to
a depth of 30 kilometers from the Turkish border. The joint military patrols are tentatively scheduled to start next Tuesday.
On the same day this was happening in Sochi, Assad was visiting the frontline in Idlib – a de facto war zone that the Syrian army,
allied with Russian air power, will eventually clear of jihadi militias, many supported by Turkey until literally yesterday. That
graphically illustrates how Damascus, slowly but surely, is recovering sovereign territory after eight and a half years of war.
Who gets the oil?
For all the cliffhangers in Sochi, there was not a peep about an absolutely key element: who's in control of Syria's oilfields
, especially after President Trump's now-notorious tweet stating, "the US has secured the oil." No one knows which oil. If he meant
Syrian oil, that would be against international law. Not to mention Washington has no mandate – from the UN or anyone else – to occupy
Syrian territory.
The Arab street is inundated with videos of the not exactly glorious exit by US troops, leaving Syria pelted by rocks and rotten
tomatoes all the way to Iraqi Kurdistan, where they were greeted by a stark reminder. "All US forces that withdrew from Syria received
approval to enter the Kurdistan region [only] so that they may be transported outside Iraq. There is no permission granted for these
forces to stay inside Iraq," the Iraqi military headquarters in Baghdad said.
The Pentagon said a
"residual force" may remain in the Middle Euphrates river valley, side by side with Syrian Democratic Forces militias, near a
few oilfields, to make sure the oil does not fall "into the hands of ISIS/Daesh or others." "Others" actually means the legitimate
owner, Damascus. There's no way the Syrian army will accept that, as it's now fully engaged in a national drive to recover the country's
sources of food, agriculture and energy. Syria's northern provinces have a wealth of water, hydropower dams, oil, gas and food.
As it stands, the US retreat is partial at best, also considering that a small garrison remains behind at al-Tanf, on the border
with Jordan. Strategically, that does not make sense, because the al-Qaem border between Iran and Iraq is now open and thriving.
Map: Energy Consulting Group
The map above shows the position of US bases in early October, but that's changing fast. The Syrian Army is already working to
recover oilfields around Raqqa, but the strategic US base of Ash Shaddadi still seems to be in place. Until quite recently US troops
were in control of Syria's largest oilfield, al-Omar, in the northeast.
There have been accusations by Russian sources that
mercenaries recruited by private US military companies trained jihadi militias such as the Maghawir al-Thawra ("Army of Free
Tribes") to sabotage Syrian oil and gas infrastructure and/or sell Syrian oil and gas to bribe tribal leaders and finance jihadi
operations. The Pentagon denies it.
Gas pipeline
As I have argued for years, Syria to a large extent has been a key '
Pipelineistan' war – not
only in terms of pipelines inside Syria, and the US preventing Damascus from commercializing its own natural resources, but most
of all around the fate of the Iran-Iraq-Syria gas pipeline which was agreed in a memorandum of understanding signed in 2012.
This pipeline has, over the years, always been a red line, not only for Washington but also for Doha, Riyadh and Ankara.
The situation should dramatically change when the $200 billion-worth of reconstruction in Syria finally takes off after a comprehensive
peace deal is in place. It will be fascinating to watch the European Union – after NATO plotted for an "Assad must go" regime change
operation for years – wooing Tehran, Baghdad and Damascus with financial offers for their gas.
NATO explicitly supported the Turkish offensive "Operation Peace Spring." And we haven't even seen the ultimate geoeconomic irony
yet: NATO member, Turkey, purged of its neo-Ottoman dreams, merrily embracing the Gazprom-supported Iran-Iraq-Syria 'Pipelineistan'
road map .
NATO explicitly supported the Turkish offensive "Operation Peace Spring." And we haven't even seen the ultimate geoeconomic
irony yet: NATO member, Turkey, purged of its neo-Ottoman dreams, merrily embracing the Gazprom-supported Iran-Iraq-Syria
'Pipelineistan' road map .
except, I thought the EU and the US cut Erdogan off from military supplies?
Oct 14, 2019 - European leaders warn of ISIS revival with Turkish invasion of Syria ... condemned the Turkish
incursion and agreed on an informal, E.U. -wide ban on arms sales to Ankara. ... That is a
direct security threat to the European Union." AD ... who escape from Syrian prison camps could make their
way to France.
And, six hours isn't ****. The deal was cut long before that meeting. Funny Assad wasn't there -- it's his country. Or is it?
given that he couldn't resupply his army, what choice did he have?
...oh to be rid of this vipers nest of **** bought to you by George Sr and Jnr, Obamawambachamawamba and of course Killary
and Co along with quite a few Repub. necons...
I worked in Syria before all this **** went down and I can tell you it was thriving and probably the best exemplar in the mid
east; I hope they get back to where they should never have been torn down from...
Trump is the one that deserves the credit here, no one else...
Read the entire crap all through again as well as anything that is published in the Saker blog. While they feign sympathy for
Syria (with oodles of Zionist plots to get the reader emotionally-activated), their true intent is to promote Turkey's interests.
There is hardly any mention of Turkey's role in the genocide in Syria, and the sex-slave and organ trafficking markets it had
facilitated. Turkey appears white as snow and anything bad can be blamed on an exiled Gulen.
Who is threatening to flood White Europe with millions Muslim refugees...? ...
Russia and Ukraine are topics on all Americans' minds only because the Obama Administration made the collossal mistake of trying
to turn Ukraine into a de facto American base. Under Obama, the US sponsored a coup which put Ukraine under the control of anti-Russian
nationalists. The ultimate goal for the US and the Ukrainian nationalists was to turn Ukraine into a NATO member.
Clearly, the Obama Administration attacked Russia on a geopolitical and geostrategic level. Unsurprisingly, Russia fought back
ferociously, just as the Russian have always done when their existential needs and vital national security interests are threatened.
Consequently, the Ukrainian nationalists have been defeated in war and at the polls in Ukraine. America must now make its exit
from Ukraine in as graceful and organized a way as possible. Nobody wants to see US helicopters fleeing the rooftops of Kiev.
Trump has the right idea about pulling America out of Ukraine. The US should never have been in that country in the first place.
Ukraine is part of Russia's zone of influence. Nothing will ever change that.
"when an experimental nuclear-powered cruise missile exploded during testing along the shores of the White Sea."
Except it wasn't. A damaged nuclear reactor with highly enriched uranium for fuel would still be glowing to this day. Also,
while tragic, seven people dead is less than a pipeline explosion, if that's the worst that can happen, it's pretty safe technology.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...
Russia reported radioisotopes for power source (radioisotope thermoelectric generators, or RTGs), which makes more sense. RTGs
are used for long term power needs (such as batteries on Voyager spacecraft that are still going strong). That makes them ideal
for robotic sleeper drones (Poseidon/Status 6 types) that will go undetected to the ocean floor and then get activated in the
event of nuclear war.
""The American television channel CNBC recently reported that the test of the Petrel missile near Arkhangelsk was the fifth
in a row, and all five were unsuccessful. Is this an acceptable number of failures for a new project?""
Yes. That's how you learn - by building and testing. Also, I strongly doubt Russian military invites CNBC to every classified
weapons test. Five tests may have been unsuccessful, but there could have been more tests that CNBC doesn't know about.
"but this record illustrates an "emergency situation" and indeed a "failed development process.""
It doesn't. Nuclear powered propulsion is a difficult subject and very few countries can do it successfully. Especially at
small size.
"So, "this missile is only necessary in the circumstance that we and America depart from all arms agreements and beat each
other with missiles until we are blue"
United States is indeed leaving all arms agreements and is preparing for nuclear war.
"The best explanation Gorbachevsky can find for this weapon is "domestic consumption.""
If that's the case, then Gorbachevsky is not well informed.
The reason that Russia will continue to invest in nuclear weapons and their modernization regardless of the cost is that it
is still cheaper than the alternative.
Having a western Army murder and slaughter its way to your capital as it did in 1941 is the one thing you definitely avoid
if you have a viable nuclear deterrance.
For Russia it is the ultimate insurance policy and the threat of a preemptive nuclear strike is the one effective guarantee
against any western power once again launching another invasion against Russia.And is relatively cheap at the price!
They have sufficient numbers of existing nuclear weapons to protect themselves from some imaginary western Army. Where they
need to worry is in their far east that is where the real threat will come from. Spending additional monies on nuclear weapons
is overkill and the money is better spent diversifying the economy.
You overlook that the real issue isn't war or nuclear war, but the stationing of US military assets all along Russia's borders.
If that happens, America will have established coercive influence over Russia. That's because Russia will have to spend untold
billions countering the fleets of American F-35's that are parked only minutes away from the RF's cities and defensive bastions.
That's the kind of stress that the US is trying to impose on Russia. That's why Russia wants the US and NATO out of the former
Soviet Union, and for good reason.
Your remark about Russia's far east comes across as Sinophobia, BTW.
Russian Federation: 146 million, China: 1.4 billion a 10 to 1 advantage in population in a country with little to no natural
resources and little usable open space. Lebensraum has been used many times in the past as a reason to start a war.
As I pointed in another post the irony is that NATO was pretty timid up until 2008 and Putin's first little go at a mini war in
Georgia then invade and annex Crimea followed by fostering war in Donbas. Of course NATO responded to those Russian aggressions
and low and behold we now have Putin pouting about NATO an the US surrounding Russia.
You have missiles in Kaliningrad aimed at Europe same in Sevastopol. The basic problem is that no one trusts Russia and no one
really likes Russia. Putin started this and now he will need to change his tack if he wants the "stress" to start to be relieved.
NATO is a defensive organization and they are deploying in a defensive manner in other NATO countries.
Nuclear propulsion research is by definition diversifying the economy. It is far more high tech than "like" button on Facebook
or whatever passes for "high tech" in Silicon Valley.
Considering the Soviet Union was working on this in the 1970's it really doesn't count as "diversification" in the traditional
economic sense. Why not work with the US, UK, Canada, France on nuclear fusion? That would truly take man kind a lot further than
nuclear powered cruise missiles.
NATO will have to stop expanding into the former USSR before Russia can realistically be expected to work the US, UK, Canada,
and France on nuclear fusion.
Western aggression against Russia must stop. That's step number one towards solving the West vs East problem.
Russia is a part of the ITER project, so it does work with the West in fusion research. As far as Burevestnik goes, i view
it in the same venue as NASA Kilopower type small reactors (or Soviet TOPAZ line). If it is light enough to power a cruise missile,
it is light enough to provide power to spacecraft. This will be very economically important in the near future.
Fair enough regarding the joint study on Fusion. However the nuclear powered cruise missile is for domestic consumption and
to incite the western MSM. It makes little sense to pile more nuclear weapons on top of the existing ones. As the article mentions
there are a lot nuclear reactors that need maintenance in Russia old Soviet era designs that pose a safety risk.
As long as the US is setting up bases in the Baltics and ramping up mililtary aid to Ukraine, and as long as the West is trying
to turn Ukraine into a NATO member, then Russia has no option except to fight back. That means Russia must develop new missiles
and even more destructive WMD's.
American and the Ukrainian nationalists have suffered a humiliating defeat in Donbass. It looks like peace will be made there
on Russian terms, and that the US and its allies will pull out of Ukraine. Upon completion of that retreat, the relationship between
Russia and the West can be reassessed. But not until then.
It is rather ironic that there were no NATO forces in the Baltic states until Putin invaded and annexed Crimea and tried the
same in Donbas. Naturally the countries such as the Baltic states who have experienced Russian/Soviet occupation tend too get
nervous when Putin decides to play war in the neighborhood.
As far as Ukraine the amount of military aid provided by the US, Canada, Poland is relatively small with regard to major arms
systems. The only major arms system is Javelin which is a defensive weapon.
You obviously have little or no knowledge of nuclear weapons and MAD. Russia has plenty of nuclear warheads in fact the most of
any nation on planet Earth.
There are no NATO forces anywhere near the line of contact in Donbas. Any peace accord/deal has nothing to do with the US or NATO
it is between Ukraine and Russia with the pawns being the poor saps called separatists.
The only major arms system is Javelin which is a defensive weapon.
Javelins can be used to support offensive operations. They can serve to neutralize the enemy's ability to use tanks on the
defensive, or to squelch the enemy's counteroffensive.
It's a very thin line that differentiates offense from defense.
True but all weapons have a certain amount of offensive capability. Javelin is designed for infantrymen to take out advancing
armor. Artillery and tanks are offensive.
Artillery and tanks are also used for counter-offensives, so the defender can repulse the aggressor.
There are hawks in the West who are hoping that Ukraine launches one more major military offensive against Donbass. In that
case, the Ukrainians will attack with superior numbers of tanks and troops. If the Ukrainians capture ground (which is unlikely),
they will use their Javelins to try to prevent the Russians and rebels from using tanks to recapture that ground.
That's the real significance of the Javelin missile. That's why American warmongers are sending this weapon to Kiev.
It is rather ironic that there were no NATO forces in the Baltic states until Putin invaded and annexed Crimea...
You are in denial of the facts again. The reality is that the Baltics joined NATO in 2004. That means, since that year, the
US could put any weapons systems it so desires in the Baltics, and there's nothing Russia can do about it short of war.
If that's not a threatening situation for Russia, then I don't know what is.
There was nothing in the Baltic's until after Putin's venture into Crimea and Ukraine proper. He miscalculated as to the push
back regarding both operations and now you are complaining. Those nations are tiny and have almost no defensive capability hence
the deployment of US, UK, Canadian and the NATO troops.
Well, nuclear weapons get obsolete like anything else. ICBMs travel in predictable trajectories and silos are vulnerable to
first strikes. Hence the need for technology evolution.
And sure, old Soviet reactors are getting up there in age. Rosatom is replacing them with modern VVER-1200 designs, not just
in Russia, but all over the world. Rosatom is like the largest and most productive nuclear corporation in the world. in general
though, i would argue that fears of nuclear power are vastly overblown, and it is one of the safest, most reliable forms of power
available.
I'm not anti nuclear power however like everything mechanical it has a safe life time. Weapons of course need modernizing and
that can be done without designing an entirely new weapons system.
MAD is still relevant today as it was during the Cold War. Ultimately I would like to see a reduction in the number of war heads
that the US, Russia have as China, France, UK, India, Pakistan and Israel have far fewer.
I think, US people have enough of their own internal problems. Isn't it better to concentrate on them? Slavics will deal with
their problems themselves. US already piled fantastic bunch of sh@t in Ukraine. As well as in the Middle East.
Current trends of immigration and birthrates in the west mean that by 2070 Russia will be the last homogeneous all white conservative
christian democracy left on earth.
It's possible that there are actually 11,400,000 Moslems in Russia, but nobody knows for certain. Either way, it's rubbish
to claim that there are "25 million Moslems" in the RF.
as famous Russian classics once meticulously observed - Everything was in confusion in the Oblonskys' house [Всё смешалось
в доме Облонских]
Same is this article - first they "scare" you with this "Vergeltungswaffe" of the Soviet designed ca 1970, and, consequently,
abandoned around same time for multiple reasons.
Then they praise the wisdom of not helping Ukraine with real weapons - because Russia was not able achieve much in the current
status quo, so it was wise not to arm Ukraine.
The only thing one can learn from this article (or, more accurately, despite) is that to get a degree in Slavic Studies, ability
to use colloquial phrases in Russian only will not cut it. Even superficially, one should drop Polish or Czech, or, god forbid,
Ukrainian words of wisdom - [Кохайтеся, чорнобриві,. Та не з москалями]
"... Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit. ..."
"... At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown. ..."
"... For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria. ..."
"... This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics. ..."
"... During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy. ..."
"... The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world. ..."
"... Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. ..."
"... Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc ..."
"... Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds? ..."
"... Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks. ..."
"... It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it. ..."
"... Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria. ..."
"... He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress. ..."
"... The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/ ..."
"... It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change. ..."
"... Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests. ..."
"... Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist. ..."
"... IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause ..."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
"... "This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth. ..."
"... On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/ ..."
"... TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them. ..."
"... ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously. ..."
"... That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds ..."
"... the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous. ..."
"... we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power. ..."
"... He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers. ..."
"Joltin" Jack Keane, General (ret.), Fox Business Senior Strategery Analyst, Chairman of the
Board of the Kagan run neocon "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) and Graduate
Extraordinaire of Fordham University, was on with Lou Dobbs last night. Dobbs appears to have
developed a deep suspicion of this paladin. He stood up to Keane remarkably well. This was
refreshing in light of the fawning deference paid to Keane by all the rest of the Fox crew.
In the course of this dialogue Keane let slip the slightly disguised truth that he and the
other warmongers want to keep something like 200 US soldiers and airmen in Syria east of the
Euphrates so that they can keep Iran or any other "Iranian proxy forces" from crossing the
Euphrates from SAG controlled territory to take control of Syrian sovereign territory and the
oil and gas deposits that are rightly the property of the Syrian people and their government
owned oil company. The map above shows how many of these resources are east of the Euphrates.
Pilgrims! It is not a lot of oil and gas judged by global needs and markets, but to Syria and
its prospects for reconstruction it is a hell of a lot!
Keane was clear that what he means by "Iranian proxy forces" is the Syrian Arab Army, the
national army of that country. If they dare cross the river, to rest in the shade of their own
palm trees, then in his opinion the air forces of FUKUS should attack them and any 3rd party
air forces (Russia) who support them
This morning, on said Fox Business News with Charles Payne, Keane was even clearer and
stated specifically that if "Syria" tries to cross the river they must be fought.
IMO he and Lindsey Graham are raving lunatics brainwashed for years with the Iran obsession
and they are a danger to us all. pl
If only General Keane was as willing to defend America and America's oil on the Texas-Mexico
border. Or hasn't anyone noticed that Mexico just a lost a battle with the Sinaloa drug
cartel?
I view them as selling their Soul for a dollar. Keane comes across as dense enough to believe
his bile but Graham comes across as an opportunist without any real ideology except power.
Its probably one step at a time for the Syrians, although the sudden move over the past
couple of weeks must have been a bit of a God given opportunity for them.
Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart.
After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I
can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their
exit.
As I posted in the other thread, the Syrian Government is the only real customer for their
oil and the Kurds already have a profit share agreement in place, so the US, if they allow
any oil out, will effectively be protecting the fields on behalf of Assad. Surely not what
Congress wants?
At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a
steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is
unknown.
I think this might be President Putin's next problem to solve. As far as I know, there is no
legal reason for us to be there, not humanitarian, not strategic not even tactical. We simply
are playing dog-in-the-manger.
My guess is that we will receive an offer to good to refuse from Putin.
For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny
relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the
SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore
social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to
the policy of FUKUSing Syria.
Why is the Champs Elise' Regime still committed to putting the F in UKUS?
(I can understand why UKUS would want to keep France involved. Without France, certain nasty
people might re-brand UKUS as USUK. And that would be very not nice.)
Because France wants to be on the good side of the United States, and as you indicate, the
United States is in Syria to turn that country into a failed state and for no other reason.
A good antidote for Joltin' Jack Keane's madness would be for Lou Dobbs and other mainstream
media (MSM) to have Col Pat Lang as the commentator for analysis of the Syrian situation.
Readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware that Col. Lang's knowledge of the peoples of the
region and their customs is a national treasure.
This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning
of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut
instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact --
saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane,
Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where
they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics.
In WWI millions of soldiers died fighting for imperial designs. They did not know it. They
thought they were fighting for democracy, or to stop the spread of evil, or save their
country. They were not. Secret treaties signed before the war started stated explicitly what
the war was about.
Now "representatives" of the military, up to and including the Commander in Chief say it's
about conquest, oil. The cards of the elite are on the table. How do you account for this?
During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when
asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy.
The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that
200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or
keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is
threaten to blow up the world.
Justin Trudeau was elected Monday in Canada with a minority in Parliament joining the
United Kingdom and Israel with governments without a majority's mandate. Donald Trump's
impeachment escalates. MbS is nearing a meat hook in Saudi Arabia. This is not a coincidence.
The Elites' flushing government down the drain succeeded.
Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer,
but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police
and the military to protect them. Already California electricity is being cut off for a
second time due to wildfires and PG&E's corporate looting. The Sinaloa shootout reminds
me of the firefight in the first season of "True Detectives" when the outgunned LA cops tried
to go after the Cartel. The writing is on the wall, California is next. Who will the lawmen
serve and protect? Their people or the rich? Without the law, justice and order, there is
chaos.
Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural
plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador,
Peru, etc
No doubt that Keane and his ilk want endless war and view Trump as a growing obstacle. Trump
is consistent: He wanted out of JCPOA, and after being stalled by his national security
advisors, he finally reached the boiling point and left. The advisors who counseled against
this are all gone. With Pompeo, Enders and O'Brien as the new key security advisors, I doubt
Trump got as much push back. He wanted out of Syria in December 2018 and was slow-walked.
Didn't anyone think he'd come back at some point and revive the order to pull out? The talk
with Erdogan, the continuing Trump view that Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia
should bear the burden of sorting out what is left of the Syria war, so long as ISIS does not
see a revival, all have been clear for a long time.
My concern is with Lindsey Graham, who is smarter and nastier than Jack Keane. He is also
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may hold some blackmail leverage over the
President. If the House votes up impeachment articles, Graham will be overseeing the Senate
trial. A break from Trump by Graham could lead to a GOP Senate stampede for conviction. No
one will say this openly, as I am, but it cannot be ignored as a factor for "controlling"
Trump and keeping as much of the permanent war machine running as possible.
Trump has committed the United States to a long war against the Shia Crescent. He has ceded
to Turkey on Syrian Kurds, but has continued with his operations against SAR. US needs
Turkey, Erdogan knows that. Likewise in regards to Russia, EU, and Iran. Turkey, as is said
in Persian, has grown a tail.
Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has
released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds?
Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE
pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success.
During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of
curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and
banks.
It was also reported in September that in Dubai that recent US Treasury sanctions were
beginning to have a devastating effect. Iranian businessmen were being squeezed out. Even
leaving the Emirates. Yet only a few days ago--a month later-- there are now reports that
Iranian exchange bureaus have suddenly reopened in Dubai after a long period of closure.
Also, billions of dollars in contracts were signed between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE
during Putin's recent visit to the region. It seems to me that this is real news. Something
big seems to be happening. It looks to me as if there could be a serious confrontation
between the Trump administration and MBZ in the offing.
Do you have an opinion on the Iranian situation in Dubai at the moment?
I have my doubt that Sen. Graham will lead any revolt, but if it starts to look like Trump
will lose big next year, there will be a stampede looking like the Nile getting through a
cataract.
They will not want to go down the tube with Trump. I still maintain that there is a good
reason for him to resign before he loses an election or an impeachment. It will come down to
the price.
Lose big to whom in the next election? Biden got 300 people to show up for his rally in his hometown of Scranton and he is
supposedly the front runner. Bernie got 20,000 to show up at his rally in NY when he was
endorsed by The Squad and Michael Moore. Do you think the Dem establishment will allow him to
be the nominee?
Trump in contrast routinely can fill up stadiums with 30,000 people. That was the
indicator in the last election, not the polls. Recall the NY Times forecasting Hillary with a
95% probability of winning the day before the election.
As Rep. Al Green noted , the only way the Democrats can stop him is for the Senate to
convict him in an impeachment trial. Who do you believe are the 20 Republican senators that
will vote to convict?
Trump barely won the last time and while he currently has wide support in the GOP, it is not
nearly as deep as his cultists believe. When half the country, and growing, want him removed,
there is trouble ahead. Republicans are largely herd animals and if spooked, will create a
stampede.
You can tell that there are problems when his congressional enablers are not defending him
on facts and just using gripes about processes that they themselves have used in the past. In
addition to circus acts.
I realize that many do not want to admit that they made a mistake by voting for him. I am
not so sure they want to repeat that mistake.
It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the
compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore..
representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it.
It's not a question if he barely won. The fact is he competed with many other Republican
candidates including governors and senators and even one with the name Bush. He was 1% in the
polls in the summer of 2016 and went on to win the Republican nomination despite the intense
opposition of the Republican establishment. He then goes on to win the general election
defeating a well funded Hillary with all her credentials and the full backing of the vast
majority of the media. That is an amazing achievement for someone running for public office
for the first time. Like him or hate him, you have to give credit where it's due. Winning an
election for the presidency is no small feat.
There only two ways to defeat him. First, the Senate convicts him in an impeachment trial
which will require at least 20 Republican senators. Who are they? Second, a Democrat in the
general election. Who? I can see Bernie with a possibility since he has enthusiastic
supporters. But will the Democrat establishment allow him to win the nomination?
We're no longer having to listen to Yosemite Sam Bolton. His BFF Graham is left to fight on
his own. I don't think Trump feels the need to pay that much attention to Graham. He didn't
worry about him during the primary when Graham always seemed to be on the verge of crying
when he was asked questions.
Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies
so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and
failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria.
He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he
simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress.
What the Colonel calls the Borg is akin to an aircraft carrier that has been steaming at near
flank speed for many years too long, gathering mass and momentum since the end of Cold War I.
With the exception of Gulf War I, none of our interventions have gone well, and even the
putative peace at the end of GUlf War I wasn't managed well because it eventuated in Gulf War
Ii which has been worst than a disaster because the disaster taught the Borg nothing and
became midwife to additional disasters.
It probably should come as no surprise to us that
Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many
deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive
to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a
platform of change.
Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen.
At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy--
turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the
dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard
against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual
interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying
degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests.
With that said, I doubt very much whether the Republicans in the Senate will abandon Trump in
an impeachment trial. Trump's argument that the process is a political coup is arguably
completely true, or certainly true enough that his political base in the electorate will not
tolerate his abandonment by Republican politicians inside the Beltway. I think there is even
some chance that Trump, were he to be removed from office by what could be credibly portrayed
as a political coup, would consider running in 2020 as an independent. The damage that would
cause to the Republican Party would be severe, pervasive, and possibly fatal to the Party as
such. I doubt Beltway pols would be willing to take that chance.
I don't think Keane or Trump are focused on the oil. Keane just used that as a lens to focus
Trump on Iran. That's the true sickness. Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity
towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see
beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia
Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This
administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist.
And in response, Russia killed and captured hundreds of US Special forces and PMC's alongside
SAS in East Ghouta . It is said that the abrupt russian op on East Ghouta was a response to
the Battle of Khasham.
The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media
is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the
MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them
distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of
affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking
points without understanding any of it.
While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support
America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for
eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these
wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to
it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to
contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from
under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.
No, they just have to sit there and be an excuse to fly Coalition CAPs that would effectively
prevent SAA from crossing the Euphrates in strength. Feasible until the SAA finishes with
Idlib and moves some of its new Russian anti-aircraft toys down to Deir Ezzor.
TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the
permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless
covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them.
Colonel Lang, I am well aware of the power seekers who gravitate towards Trump or whoever
holds power not out of loyalty, but because they covet access to power. The neocons and
Zionists flock to Trump because they can manipulate him to do their bidding. That fact
certainly doesn't make me feel any better about Trump as President. The man needs help.
you are an experienced clan case officer. You do not know that most people are more than a
little mad? Hillary is more than a little nuts. Obama was so desperately neurotically in need
of White approval that he let the WP COIN generals talk him into a COIN war in Afghanistan. I
was part of that discussion. All that mattered to him was their approval. FDR could not be
trusted with SIGINT product and so Marshall never gave him any, etc., George Bush 41 told me
that he deliberately mis-pronounced Saddam's name to hurt his feelings. Georgie Junior let
the lunatic neocons invade a country that had not attacked us. Trump is no worse than many of
our politicians, or politicians anywhere. Britain? The Brexit disaster speaks for itself, And
then there is the British monarchy in which a princeling devastated by the sure DNA proof
that he is illegitimate is acting like a fool. The list is endless.
CK, the people surrounding Trump are largely appointees. Keane doesn't have to be let into
the WH. His problem is that those who would appeal to his non-neocon tendencies are not
people he wants to have around him. Gabbard, for instance, would be perfect for helping Trump
get ourselves out of the ME, is a progressive. Non-interventionists are hard to come by.
Those who he does surround himself with are using him for their own ideologies, mostly neocon
and Zionist.
Bacevich interview:
> Andrew Bacevich, can you respond to President Trump pulling the U.S. troops away from
this area of northern Syria, though saying he will keep them to guard oil fields?
> ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at
any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that
you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are
going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens
back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is
a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that
seriously.
> That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again,
is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy
or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And
here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our
abandonment of the Kurds.
> Let's stipulate. U.S. abandonment of the Kurds was wrong, it was callous, it was
immoral. It was not the first betrayal by the United States in our history, but the fact that
there were others certainly doesn't excuse this one. But apart from those concerned about the
humanitarian aspect of this crisis -- and not for a second do I question the sincerity of
people who are worried about the Kurds -- it seems to me that the controversy has gotten as
big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are
concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of
U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of
bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism.
Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen
to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a
fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment
nervous.
> NERMEEN SHAIKH: As you mentioned, Professor Bacevich, Trump has come under bipartisan
criticism for this decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell was one of the many Republicans to criticize Trump for his decision. In an
opinion piece in The Washington Post McConnell writes, quote, "We saw humanitarian disaster
and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the
groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama's
retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners
and retreat from these conflicts before they are won." He also writes, quote, "As
neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more
talk of 'endless wars.' But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars
are won or lost." So Professor Bacevich, could you respond to that, and how accurate you
think an assessment of that is? Both what he says about Afghanistan and what is likely to
happen now with U.S. withdrawal.
> ANDREW BACEVICH: I think in any discussion of our wars, ongoing wars, it is important to
set them in some broader historical context than Senator McConnell will probably entertain. I
mean, to a very great extent -- not entirely, but to a very great extent -- we created the
problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power.
> People like McConnell, and I think other members of the political establishment, even
members of the mainstream media -- _The New York Times_, The Washington Post -- have yet to
reckon with the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And if
you focus your attention at that start point -- you could choose another start point, but if
you focus your attention at that start point, then it seems to me that leads you to a
different conclusion about the crisis that we are dealing with right now. That is to say,
people like McConnell want to stay the course. They want to maintain the U.S. presence in
Syria. U.S. military presence. But if we look at what the U.S. military presence in that
region, not simply Syria, has produced over the course of almost two decades, then you have
to ask yourself, how is it that we think that simply staying the course is going to produce
any more positive results?
> It is appalling what Turkey has done to Syrian Kurds and the casualties they have
inflicted and the number of people that have been displaced. But guess what? The casualties
that we inflicted and the number of people that we displaced far outnumbers what Turkey has
done over the last week or so. So I think that we need to push back against this tendency to
oversimplify the circumstance, because oversimplifying the circumstance doesn't help us fully
appreciate the causes of this mess that we're in.
In addition to oil from Iran, Assad also gets oil from the SDF and the Kurds. Supposedly a
profit sharing arrangement as commented on by JohninMK in a previous post.
This oil sharing deal was also mentioned by Global Research and Southfront back in June of
2018:
Colonel Lang, the only way to "overthrow" Trump is through impeachment in the House and
conviction in the Senate. That is a Constitutional process, not a coup. The process is
intentionally difficult. Was the impeachment of Clinton an attempted coup?
In the first place isn't the dissolution of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen
exactly what we have wished to achieve, and wouldn't an intelligent observer, such as
Vladimir Putin, want to do exactly the same thing to us, and hasn't he come very close to
witnessing the achievement of this aim whether he is personally involved or not? What goes
around comes around?
But that is relatively unimportant compared to the question whether dissolution of the
Union is a bad thing or a good thing. Preserving it cost 600,000 lives the first time. One
additional life would be one additional life too many. Ukraine is an excellent example.
Western Ukraine has a long history support for Nazi's. Eastern Ukraine is Russian. Must a war
be fought to bring them together? Or should they be permitted to go their separate ways?
As Hector said of Helen of Troy, "She is not worth what she doth cost the keeping."
After hanging up from a call to Putin, thanking him for Russia's help with the Turks, YPG
leader Mazloum Kobane returned to the Senate hearings in which he alternately reminded his
flecless American allies of their failure, not only to protect Rojava from the Turks, but
didn't even give them a heads up about what was about to happen and begged an already angry
[at Trump] Senate about their urgent need for a continued American presence in the territory.
It seems that some in the USG do not understand that all the land on the east bank of the
Euphrates is "Rojava" or somehow is the mandate of the Kurds to continue to control. For a
long time, now, the mainly Arab population of that region have been chafing under what is
actually Kurdish rule. This could be a a trigger for ISIS or some other jihadis to launch
another insurgency, or at the least, low level attacks, especially in Rojava to the
north.
To remind, the USG is not using military personnel, but also contracts, about 200 troops in
one field and 400 contractors in the other.
There is video of the SAA escorting the Americans to the Iraqi border. PM Abdel Hadi has
reiterated that the US cannot keep these troops in Iraq, as they go beyond the agreed upon
number. It is quite likely that the anti-Iranian aspect of the border region is NOT something
they wish to see.
"Iranian proxies" refers to Hezbollah, the various Shia militia groups from Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and of course, others, not the SAA.
"... Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart. After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their exit. ..."
"... At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is unknown. ..."
"... For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to the policy of FUKUSing Syria. ..."
"... This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact -- saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane, Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics. ..."
"... During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy. ..."
"... The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that 200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is threaten to blow up the world. ..."
"... Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer, but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police and the military to protect them. ..."
"... Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador, Peru, etc ..."
"... Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds? ..."
"... Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success. During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and banks. ..."
"... It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore.. representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it. ..."
"... Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria. ..."
"... He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress. ..."
"... The Great Trumpian Mystery. I don't pretend to understand but I'm intrigued by his inconsistent inconsistencies. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/03/17/trump-mysteries-inconsistent-inconsistencies/ ..."
"... It probably should come as no surprise to us that Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a platform of change. ..."
"... Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen. At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy-- turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests. ..."
"... Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist. ..."
"... IMO Trump cares about what Sheldon Adelson wants and Adelson wants to destroy Iran: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sCW4IasWXc Note the audience applause ..."
"... The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking points without understanding any of it. ..."
"... "This administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist." I think TTG speaks the truth. ..."
"... On Monday, 21 October, president Trump "authorized $4.5 million in direct support to the Syria Civil Defense (SCD)", a/k/a the White Helmets, who have been discussed here on SST before-- https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/statement-press-secretary-89/ ..."
"... TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them. ..."
"... ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that seriously. ..."
"... That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again, is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our abandonment of the Kurds ..."
"... the controversy has gotten as big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism. Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment nervous. ..."
"... we created the problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power. ..."
"... He let them roll him, just like Obama and so many others. Just a different set of rollers. ..."
"Joltin" Jack Keane, General (ret.), Fox Business Senior Strategery Analyst, Chairman of the
Board of the Kagan run neocon "Institute for the Study of War" (ISW) and Graduate
Extraordinaire of Fordham University, was on with Lou Dobbs last night. Dobbs appears to have
developed a deep suspicion of this paladin. He stood up to Keane remarkably well. This was
refreshing in light of the fawning deference paid to Keane by all the rest of the Fox crew.
In the course of this dialogue Keane let slip the slightly disguised truth that he and the
other warmongers want to keep something like 200 US soldiers and airmen in Syria east of the
Euphrates so that they can keep Iran or any other "Iranian proxy forces" from crossing the
Euphrates from SAG controlled territory to take control of Syrian sovereign territory and the
oil and gas deposits that are rightly the property of the Syrian people and their government
owned oil company. The map above shows how many of these resources are east of the Euphrates.
Pilgrims! It is not a lot of oil and gas judged by global needs and markets, but to Syria and
its prospects for reconstruction it is a hell of a lot!
Keane was clear that what he means by "Iranian proxy forces" is the Syrian Arab Army, the
national army of that country. If they dare cross the river, to rest in the shade of their own
palm trees, then in his opinion the air forces of FUKUS should attack them and any 3rd party
air forces (Russia) who support them
This morning, on said Fox Business News with Charles Payne, Keane was even clearer and
stated specifically that if "Syria" tries to cross the river they must be fought.
IMO he and Lindsey Graham are raving lunatics brainwashed for years with the Iran obsession
and they are a danger to us all. pl
If only General Keane was as willing to defend America and America's oil on the Texas-Mexico
border. Or hasn't anyone noticed that Mexico just a lost a battle with the Sinaloa drug
cartel?
I view them as selling their Soul for a dollar. Keane comes across as dense enough to believe
his bile but Graham comes across as an opportunist without any real ideology except power.
Its probably one step at a time for the Syrians, although the sudden move over the past
couple of weeks must have been a bit of a God given opportunity for them.
Whilst the are absorbing that part of their country the battle of Iblib will restart.
After that they can move their attention south and southeast, al-Tanf and the oilfields. I
can't see how the US will be able to stop them but at least they will have time to plan their
exit.
As I posted in the other thread, the Syrian Government is the only real customer for their
oil and the Kurds already have a profit share agreement in place, so the US, if they allow
any oil out, will effectively be protecting the fields on behalf of Assad. Surely not what
Congress wants?
At the moment the Syrian Government has enough oil, it is getting it from Iran via a
steady stream of SUEZMAX tankers. The cost, either in terms of money or quid pro quo, is
unknown.
I think this might be President Putin's next problem to solve. As far as I know, there is no
legal reason for us to be there, not humanitarian, not strategic not even tactical. We simply
are playing dog-in-the-manger.
My guess is that we will receive an offer to good to refuse from Putin.
For those who have wondered as to why the DC FedRegime would fight over the tiny
relative-to-FUKUS's-needs amount of oil in the Syrian oilfields. It is clearly to keep the
SAR hobbled, crippled and too impoverished to retake all its territory or even to restore
social, civic and economic functionality to the parts it retains. FUKUS is still committed to
the policy of FUKUSing Syria.
Why is the Champs Elise' Regime still committed to putting the F in UKUS?
(I can understand why UKUS would want to keep France involved. Without France, certain nasty
people might re-brand UKUS as USUK. And that would be very not nice.)
Because France wants to be on the good side of the United States, and as you indicate, the
United States is in Syria to turn that country into a failed state and for no other reason.
A good antidote for Joltin' Jack Keane's madness would be for Lou Dobbs and other mainstream
media (MSM) to have Col Pat Lang as the commentator for analysis of the Syrian situation.
Readers of this blog are undoubtedly aware that Col. Lang's knowledge of the peoples of the
region and their customs is a national treasure.
This President appears at times to recognize the reality of nation states and the meaning
of national sovereignty. He needs to understand that on principle, not merely on gut
instinct. President Trump's press conference today focused in one section on a simple fact --
saving the lives of Americans. Gen. Jack Keane,
Sen. Lindsay Graham, and other gamers who think they are running an imperial chessboard where
they can use living soldiers as American pawns, are a menace. Thanks Col. Lang for calling out these lunatics.
In WWI millions of soldiers died fighting for imperial designs. They did not know it. They
thought they were fighting for democracy, or to stop the spread of evil, or save their
country. They were not. Secret treaties signed before the war started stated explicitly what
the war was about.
Now "representatives" of the military, up to and including the Commander in Chief say it's
about conquest, oil. The cards of the elite are on the table. How do you account for this?
During the 2016 election, Jack Keane and John Bolton were the two people Trump mentioned when
asked who he listens to on foreign affairs/military policy.
The crumbling apart is apparent. I don't know in what delusional world can conceive that
200 soldiers in the middle of the desert can deny Syria possession of their oil fields or
keep the road between Bagdad and Damascus cut. All the West's Decision Makers can do is
threaten to blow up the world.
Justin Trudeau was elected Monday in Canada with a minority in Parliament joining the
United Kingdom and Israel with governments without a majority's mandate. Donald Trump's
impeachment escalates. MbS is nearing a meat hook in Saudi Arabia. This is not a coincidence.
The Elites' flushing government down the drain succeeded.
Corporate Overlords imposed austerity, outsourced industry and cut taxes to get richer,
but the one thing for certain is that they can't keep their wealth without laws, the police
and the military to protect them. Already California electricity is being cut off for a
second time due to wildfires and PG&E's corporate looting. The Sinaloa shootout reminds
me of the firefight in the first season of "True Detectives" when the outgunned LA cops tried
to go after the Cartel. The writing is on the wall, California is next. Who will the lawmen
serve and protect? Their people or the rich? Without the law, justice and order, there is
chaos.
Latin America is burning too - although the elites here have plundered and imposed structural
plunder for too long. No matter where you are it .. Chile poster of the right, or Ecuador,
Peru, etc
No doubt that Keane and his ilk want endless war and view Trump as a growing obstacle. Trump
is consistent: He wanted out of JCPOA, and after being stalled by his national security
advisors, he finally reached the boiling point and left. The advisors who counseled against
this are all gone. With Pompeo, Enders and O'Brien as the new key security advisors, I doubt
Trump got as much push back. He wanted out of Syria in December 2018 and was slow-walked.
Didn't anyone think he'd come back at some point and revive the order to pull out? The talk
with Erdogan, the continuing Trump view that Russia, Turkey, Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia
should bear the burden of sorting out what is left of the Syria war, so long as ISIS does not
see a revival, all have been clear for a long time.
My concern is with Lindsey Graham, who is smarter and nastier than Jack Keane. He is also
Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and may hold some blackmail leverage over the
President. If the House votes up impeachment articles, Graham will be overseeing the Senate
trial. A break from Trump by Graham could lead to a GOP Senate stampede for conviction. No
one will say this openly, as I am, but it cannot be ignored as a factor for "controlling"
Trump and keeping as much of the permanent war machine running as possible.
Trump has committed the United States to a long war against the Shia Crescent. He has ceded
to Turkey on Syrian Kurds, but has continued with his operations against SAR. US needs
Turkey, Erdogan knows that. Likewise in regards to Russia, EU, and Iran. Turkey, as is said
in Persian, has grown a tail.
Did you notice the Middle East Monitor article on October 21 reporting that the UAE has
released to Iran $700 million in previously frozen funds?
Yet in early September, Sigal Mandelker, a senior US Treasury official, was in the UAE
pressing CEOs there to tighten the financial screws on Iran. The visit was deemed a success.
During this visit she was quoted as saying that the Treasury has issued over 30 rounds of
curbs targeting Iran-related entities. That would include targeting shipping companies and
banks.
It was also reported in September that in Dubai that recent US Treasury sanctions were
beginning to have a devastating effect. Iranian businessmen were being squeezed out. Even
leaving the Emirates. Yet only a few days ago--a month later-- there are now reports that
Iranian exchange bureaus have suddenly reopened in Dubai after a long period of closure.
Also, billions of dollars in contracts were signed between Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE
during Putin's recent visit to the region. It seems to me that this is real news. Something
big seems to be happening. It looks to me as if there could be a serious confrontation
between the Trump administration and MBZ in the offing.
Do you have an opinion on the Iranian situation in Dubai at the moment?
I have my doubt that Sen. Graham will lead any revolt, but if it starts to look like Trump
will lose big next year, there will be a stampede looking like the Nile getting through a
cataract.
They will not want to go down the tube with Trump. I still maintain that there is a good
reason for him to resign before he loses an election or an impeachment. It will come down to
the price.
Lose big to whom in the next election? Biden got 300 people to show up for his rally in his hometown of Scranton and he is
supposedly the front runner. Bernie got 20,000 to show up at his rally in NY when he was
endorsed by The Squad and Michael Moore. Do you think the Dem establishment will allow him to
be the nominee?
Trump in contrast routinely can fill up stadiums with 30,000 people. That was the
indicator in the last election, not the polls. Recall the NY Times forecasting Hillary with a
95% probability of winning the day before the election.
As Rep. Al Green noted , the only way the Democrats can stop him is for the Senate to
convict him in an impeachment trial. Who do you believe are the 20 Republican senators that
will vote to convict?
Trump barely won the last time and while he currently has wide support in the GOP, it is not
nearly as deep as his cultists believe. When half the country, and growing, want him removed,
there is trouble ahead. Republicans are largely herd animals and if spooked, will create a
stampede.
You can tell that there are problems when his congressional enablers are not defending him
on facts and just using gripes about processes that they themselves have used in the past. In
addition to circus acts.
I realize that many do not want to admit that they made a mistake by voting for him. I am
not so sure they want to repeat that mistake.
It depends on who will be the democratic ticket .. will it mobilize the basis? I think the
compromise candidate is Warren, but she looks to me a lot like John Kerry, Al Gore..
representing the professional, college educated segment of society, and that doesn't cut it.
It's not a question if he barely won. The fact is he competed with many other Republican
candidates including governors and senators and even one with the name Bush. He was 1% in the
polls in the summer of 2016 and went on to win the Republican nomination despite the intense
opposition of the Republican establishment. He then goes on to win the general election
defeating a well funded Hillary with all her credentials and the full backing of the vast
majority of the media. That is an amazing achievement for someone running for public office
for the first time. Like him or hate him, you have to give credit where it's due. Winning an
election for the presidency is no small feat.
There only two ways to defeat him. First, the Senate convicts him in an impeachment trial
which will require at least 20 Republican senators. Who are they? Second, a Democrat in the
general election. Who? I can see Bernie with a possibility since he has enthusiastic
supporters. But will the Democrat establishment allow him to win the nomination?
We're no longer having to listen to Yosemite Sam Bolton. His BFF Graham is left to fight on
his own. I don't think Trump feels the need to pay that much attention to Graham. He didn't
worry about him during the primary when Graham always seemed to be on the verge of crying
when he was asked questions.
Trump is far from consistent. This is the man who attacked Syria twice on the basis of lies
so transparent that my youngest housecat would have seen through them, and who tried and
failed to leave Syria twice, then said he was "100%" for the continued occupation of Syria.
He could have given the order to leave Syria this month, but Trump did not. Instead, he
simply ordered withdrawal to a smaller zone of occupation, and that under duress.
What the Colonel calls the Borg is akin to an aircraft carrier that has been steaming at near
flank speed for many years too long, gathering mass and momentum since the end of Cold War I.
With the exception of Gulf War I, none of our interventions have gone well, and even the
putative peace at the end of GUlf War I wasn't managed well because it eventuated in Gulf War
Ii which has been worst than a disaster because the disaster taught the Borg nothing and
became midwife to additional disasters.
It probably should come as no surprise to us that
Trump is having small, but not no, success in getting the ship to alter course - too many
deeply entrenched interests with no incentive to recognize their failures and every incentive
to stay the course by removing, or at least handicapping the President who was elected on a
platform of change.
Whether the country elected the right man for the job remains to be seen.
At times he appears to be his own worst enemy and his appointments are frequently topsy--
turvy to the platform he ran on but he does have his moments of success. He called off the
dumb plan to go to war with Iran, albeit at 20 minutes to mid night and he is trying hard
against the full might of the Borg to withdraw from Syria in accord with our actual
interests. Trumps, alas, assumed office with no political friends, only enemies with varying
degrees of Trump hate depending on how they define their political interests.
With that said, I doubt very much whether the Republicans in the Senate will abandon Trump in
an impeachment trial. Trump's argument that the process is a political coup is arguably
completely true, or certainly true enough that his political base in the electorate will not
tolerate his abandonment by Republican politicians inside the Beltway. I think there is even
some chance that Trump, were he to be removed from office by what could be credibly portrayed
as a political coup, would consider running in 2020 as an independent. The damage that would
cause to the Republican Party would be severe, pervasive, and possibly fatal to the Party as
such. I doubt Beltway pols would be willing to take that chance.
I don't think Keane or Trump are focused on the oil. Keane just used that as a lens to focus
Trump on Iran. That's the true sickness. Keane manipulated Trump by aggravating his animosity
towards Iran, more specifically, his animosity towards Obama's JCPOA. I doubt Trump can see
beyond his personal animus towards Obama and his legacy. He doesn't care about Iran, the Shia
Crescent, the oil or even the jihadis any more than he cares about ditching the Kurds. This
administration doesn't need a national security advisor, it needs a psychiatrist.
And in response, Russia killed and captured hundreds of US Special forces and PMC's alongside
SAS in East Ghouta . It is said that the abrupt russian op on East Ghouta was a response to
the Battle of Khasham.
The difference between the reality that we perceive and the way it is portrayed in the media
is so stark that sometimes I am not sure whether it is me who is insane or the world - the
MSM and the cool-aid drinking libtards whose animosity against Trump won't let them
distinguish black from white. Not that they were ever able to understand the real state of
affairs. Discussions with them have always been about them regurgitating the MSM talking
points without understanding any of it.
While it will always be mystifying to me why so many people on the street blindly support
America fighting and dying in the middle east, the support of the MSM and the paid hacks for
eternal war is no surprise. I hope they get to send their children and grandchildren to these
wars. More than that, I hope we get out of these wars. Trump might be able to put an end to
it, and not just in Syria, if he wins a second term, which he will if he is allowed to
contest the next election. There is however a chance that the borg will pull the rug from
under him and bar him from the elections. Hope that doesn't come to pass.
No, they just have to sit there and be an excuse to fly Coalition CAPs that would effectively
prevent SAA from crossing the Euphrates in strength. Feasible until the SAA finishes with
Idlib and moves some of its new Russian anti-aircraft toys down to Deir Ezzor.
TTG IMO you and the other NEVER Trumpers are confused about the presence in both the
permanent and appointed government of people who while they are not loyal to him nevertheless
covet access to power. A lot of neocons and Zionists are among them.
Colonel Lang, I am well aware of the power seekers who gravitate towards Trump or whoever
holds power not out of loyalty, but because they covet access to power. The neocons and
Zionists flock to Trump because they can manipulate him to do their bidding. That fact
certainly doesn't make me feel any better about Trump as President. The man needs help.
you are an experienced clan case officer. You do not know that most people are more than a
little mad? Hillary is more than a little nuts. Obama was so desperately neurotically in need
of White approval that he let the WP COIN generals talk him into a COIN war in Afghanistan. I
was part of that discussion. All that mattered to him was their approval. FDR could not be
trusted with SIGINT product and so Marshall never gave him any, etc., George Bush 41 told me
that he deliberately mis-pronounced Saddam's name to hurt his feelings. Georgie Junior let
the lunatic neocons invade a country that had not attacked us. Trump is no worse than many of
our politicians, or politicians anywhere. Britain? The Brexit disaster speaks for itself, And
then there is the British monarchy in which a princeling devastated by the sure DNA proof
that he is illegitimate is acting like a fool. The list is endless.
CK, the people surrounding Trump are largely appointees. Keane doesn't have to be let into
the WH. His problem is that those who would appeal to his non-neocon tendencies are not
people he wants to have around him. Gabbard, for instance, would be perfect for helping Trump
get ourselves out of the ME, is a progressive. Non-interventionists are hard to come by.
Those who he does surround himself with are using him for their own ideologies, mostly neocon
and Zionist.
Bacevich interview:
> Andrew Bacevich, can you respond to President Trump pulling the U.S. troops away from
this area of northern Syria, though saying he will keep them to guard oil fields?
> ANDREW BACEVICH: First of all, I think we should avoid taking anything that he says at
any particular moment too seriously. Clearly, he is all over the map on almost any issue that
you can name. I found his comment about taking the oil in that part of Syria, as if we are
going to decide how to dispose of it, to be striking. And yet of course it sort of harkens
back to his campaign statement about the Iraq war, that we ought to have taken Iraq's oil is
a way of paying for that war. So I just caution against taking anything he says that
seriously.
> That said, clearly a recurring theme to which he returns over and over and over again,
is his determination to end what he calls endless wars. He clearly has no particular strategy
or plan for how to do that, but he does seem to be insistent on pursuing that objective. And
here I think we begin to get to the real significance of the controversy over Syria in our
abandonment of the Kurds.
> Let's stipulate. U.S. abandonment of the Kurds was wrong, it was callous, it was
immoral. It was not the first betrayal by the United States in our history, but the fact that
there were others certainly doesn't excuse this one. But apart from those concerned about the
humanitarian aspect of this crisis -- and not for a second do I question the sincerity of
people who are worried about the Kurds -- it seems to me that the controversy has gotten as
big as it is in part because members of the foreign policy establishment in both parties are
concerned about what an effort to end endless wars would mean for the larger architecture of
U.S. national security policy, which has been based on keeping U.S. troops in hundreds of
bases around the world, maintaining the huge military budget, a pattern of interventionism.
Trump seems to think that that has been a mistake, particularly in the Middle East. I happen
to agree with that critique. And I think that it is a fear that he could somehow engineer a
fundamental change in U.S. policy is what really has the foreign policy establishment
nervous.
> NERMEEN SHAIKH: As you mentioned, Professor Bacevich, Trump has come under bipartisan
criticism for this decision to withdraw troops from northern Syria. Senate Majority Leader
Mitch McConnell was one of the many Republicans to criticize Trump for his decision. In an
opinion piece in The Washington Post McConnell writes, quote, "We saw humanitarian disaster
and a terrorist free-for-all after we abandoned Afghanistan in the 1990s, laying the
groundwork for 9/11. We saw the Islamic State flourish in Iraq after President Barack Obama's
retreat. We will see these things anew in Syria and Afghanistan if we abandon our partners
and retreat from these conflicts before they are won." He also writes, quote, "As
neo-isolationism rears its head on both the left and the right, we can expect to hear more
talk of 'endless wars.' But rhetoric cannot change the fact that wars do not just end; wars
are won or lost." So Professor Bacevich, could you respond to that, and how accurate you
think an assessment of that is? Both what he says about Afghanistan and what is likely to
happen now with U.S. withdrawal.
> ANDREW BACEVICH: I think in any discussion of our wars, ongoing wars, it is important to
set them in some broader historical context than Senator McConnell will probably entertain. I
mean, to a very great extent -- not entirely, but to a very great extent -- we created the
problems that exist today through our reckless use of American military power.
> People like McConnell, and I think other members of the political establishment, even
members of the mainstream media -- _The New York Times_, The Washington Post -- have yet to
reckon with the catastrophic consequences of the U.S. invasion of Iraq back in 2003. And if
you focus your attention at that start point -- you could choose another start point, but if
you focus your attention at that start point, then it seems to me that leads you to a
different conclusion about the crisis that we are dealing with right now. That is to say,
people like McConnell want to stay the course. They want to maintain the U.S. presence in
Syria. U.S. military presence. But if we look at what the U.S. military presence in that
region, not simply Syria, has produced over the course of almost two decades, then you have
to ask yourself, how is it that we think that simply staying the course is going to produce
any more positive results?
> It is appalling what Turkey has done to Syrian Kurds and the casualties they have
inflicted and the number of people that have been displaced. But guess what? The casualties
that we inflicted and the number of people that we displaced far outnumbers what Turkey has
done over the last week or so. So I think that we need to push back against this tendency to
oversimplify the circumstance, because oversimplifying the circumstance doesn't help us fully
appreciate the causes of this mess that we're in.
In addition to oil from Iran, Assad also gets oil from the SDF and the Kurds. Supposedly a
profit sharing arrangement as commented on by JohninMK in a previous post.
This oil sharing deal was also mentioned by Global Research and Southfront back in June of
2018:
Colonel Lang, the only way to "overthrow" Trump is through impeachment in the House and
conviction in the Senate. That is a Constitutional process, not a coup. The process is
intentionally difficult. Was the impeachment of Clinton an attempted coup?
In the first place isn't the dissolution of Ukraine and Syria and Iraq and Libya and Yemen
exactly what we have wished to achieve, and wouldn't an intelligent observer, such as
Vladimir Putin, want to do exactly the same thing to us, and hasn't he come very close to
witnessing the achievement of this aim whether he is personally involved or not? What goes
around comes around?
But that is relatively unimportant compared to the question whether dissolution of the
Union is a bad thing or a good thing. Preserving it cost 600,000 lives the first time. One
additional life would be one additional life too many. Ukraine is an excellent example.
Western Ukraine has a long history support for Nazi's. Eastern Ukraine is Russian. Must a war
be fought to bring them together? Or should they be permitted to go their separate ways?
As Hector said of Helen of Troy, "She is not worth what she doth cost the keeping."
After hanging up from a call to Putin, thanking him for Russia's help with the Turks, YPG
leader Mazloum Kobane returned to the Senate hearings in which he alternately reminded his
flecless American allies of their failure, not only to protect Rojava from the Turks, but
didn't even give them a heads up about what was about to happen and begged an already angry
[at Trump] Senate about their urgent need for a continued American presence in the territory.
It seems that some in the USG do not understand that all the land on the east bank of the
Euphrates is "Rojava" or somehow is the mandate of the Kurds to continue to control. For a
long time, now, the mainly Arab population of that region have been chafing under what is
actually Kurdish rule. This could be a a trigger for ISIS or some other jihadis to launch
another insurgency, or at the least, low level attacks, especially in Rojava to the
north.
To remind, the USG is not using military personnel, but also contracts, about 200 troops in
one field and 400 contractors in the other.
There is video of the SAA escorting the Americans to the Iraqi border. PM Abdel Hadi has
reiterated that the US cannot keep these troops in Iraq, as they go beyond the agreed upon
number. It is quite likely that the anti-Iranian aspect of the border region is NOT something
they wish to see.
"Iranian proxies" refers to Hezbollah, the various Shia militia groups from Pakistan and
Afghanistan, and of course, others, not the SAA.
Indeed Orwell's "1984" referred to the UK as "Airstrip One" and this Brexit fiasco surely
proves that Outside Influences not only run the Judiciary when necessary, but also plant
poison on doorknobs when it suits them.
The ever servile Australian government to the empire du jour does nothing to honor their
passport pledge. We would have to assume it qualifies as Orwell's "Airstrip Two"
In contrast to Assange's predicament (and Manning I assume), the main point of this post
is to mention the recent Joe Rogan interview of Edward Snowden (touting his book) --
http://podcasts.joerogan.net/podcasts/edward-snowden
Nearly three hours of mostly Snowden rambling on. I stayed with it to the end. A few items
of interest but mostly just noise. I found him initially somewhat suspicious -- by the end I
was more neutral. However, what a display of American arrogance and ingratitude. The Russian
government has saved his bacon and has given him refuge with great freedoms he would not have
in the USA -- or Airstrip One ... or, HK, or any South American backyard colony. And yet he
makes no attempt to thank them and even virtually panders to the American anti-Russian meme.
He has even dabbled in Russian opposition politics via local newspaper comments. What an
ungrateful guest! (Or still an agent @ work?) I would entirely understand the Russians
putting him on a plane back to the USA tomorrow. Ungrateful little character, imo. And says a
lot about the way Americans treat the external world from inside their little fishbowl.
Simply a doormat for convenience.
The main take away for me came towards the end where Snowden outlines the special legal
conditions and laws that the US government enforces to control presentation of evidence in
these cases. These same 'servant' thugs who are stepping into the now 3rd-world UK court
system and pulling the strings on Australia's Assange. The same crew that Snowden worked with
and blew the whistle on (apparently).
Snowden makes great bravado about being willing to go back to the USA and face the music
-- if only he could say in court why he did it (something the legal Act prohibits
apparently). In this, and a few other matters of history, I find him less than genuine.
Is/was he a plant? .... I'm still out with the jury on that.
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism,
to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut,
The Undoing of Thought
Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities
for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison
des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway,
only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases
that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the
medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits,
moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals
,
1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics,
intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to
be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice
of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men,
Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and
formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to
the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal
of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward
in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted
men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon
is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian
hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close
altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the
lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in
the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little
more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the
greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement,
or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily
should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the
way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation
as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The
ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were
not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success."
It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas
the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek
sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates'
devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts
Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully
pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles
sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles
espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism
by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other
'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things
were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him.
To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche.
His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and
evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real
problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all
values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated
but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of
scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated
"one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality
of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral
if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence
against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul
which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is
measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human
mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.
The Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently
described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky,
erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless
in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication,
Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given
the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly
be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands
for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues
to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm
is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief
but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée
2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this
sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives
of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent
strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century
German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that
of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned
by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit."
Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he
writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists
are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions
of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction
of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the
mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular
tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s]
some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes
the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive
worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both
books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends
to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still
had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much
attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the
measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its
current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things,
this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual
divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not
fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is
"Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular
chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science":
these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism."
The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason
and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other
absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational
animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment.
Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine
-- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill
another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about
the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged
as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce,
anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and
moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to
tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which
substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality,
the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence
in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason
went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.
It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith
is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its
end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many
anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed
with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It
is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought
itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed
as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside,
by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason
of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's
scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual
in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty
the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic"
cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting
them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment
to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded
that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced?
In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points
out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular
age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond
reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection
of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological
practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been
greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in
the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences
hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality"
and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article
on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man
who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim,
in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition
that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive
forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he
explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic
matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed
that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly
think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given
culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces
from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels
(whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.
F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other
cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological
construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the
name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and
say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than
Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than
the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read
is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The
footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller,
are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.
The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high
culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone
who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum
of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed
up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition
demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its
own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which
its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity,
is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version
of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar
to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference:
Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of
the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this."
The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism
promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is
a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change
one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the
destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's
right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural
institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children
and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does
not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars
refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common
humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand
causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity"
meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but
the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier:
Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth."
Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as
their truth.
1The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928.
This translation is still in print from Norton.
2La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in
a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book
is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
Supporting neoliberalism is the key treason of contemporary intellectuals eeho were instrumental in decimating the New Deal capitalism,
to say nothing about neocon, who downgraded themselves into intellectual prostitutes of MIC mad try to destroy post WWII order.
Notable quotes:
"... More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. ..."
"... "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration. ..."
"... In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates' devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles sounds! ..."
"... In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other 'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time." ..."
"... In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him. ..."
"... His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ." ..."
"... From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm is erupting in every corner of cultural life today. ..."
"... Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned by the court of diversity." ..."
"... Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit." ..."
"... Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason ..."
"... In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity." ..."
"... The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. ..."
"... In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things, this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual divisions ..."
"... Granted, the belief that there is "Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science": these are among today's talismanic fetishes. ..."
"... Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism." The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational animus in the mid-1940s. ..."
"... Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce, anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity." ..."
"... The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. ..."
"... There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual in favor of the group ..."
"... To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection of culture to anthropology. ..."
"... In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than Shakespeare." ..."
"... The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? ..."
"... . Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference: Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value ..."
"... The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim." ..."
"... "'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children and of the detractors of the West. ..."
"... There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. ..."
"... As the impassioned proponents of "diversity" meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom. ..."
"... Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but the idea of a world common to all men." ..."
On the abandonment of Enlightenment intellectualism, and the emergence of a new form of Volksgeist.
When hatred of culture becomes itself a part of culture, the life of the mind loses all meaning. -- Alain Finkielkraut,
The Undoing of Thought
Today we are trying to spread knowledge everywhere. Who knows if in centuries to come there will not be universities
for re-establishing our former ignorance? -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799)
I n 1927, the French essayist Julien Benda published his famous attack on the intellectual corruption of the age, La Trahison
des clercs. I said "famous," but perhaps "once famous" would have been more accurate. For today, in the United States anyway,
only the title of the book, not its argument, enjoys much currency. "La trahison des clercs": it is one of those memorable phrases
that bristles with hints and associations without stating anything definite. Benda tells us that he uses the term "clerc" in "the
medieval sense," i.e., to mean "scribe," someone we would now call a member of the intelligentsia. Academics and journalists, pundits,
moralists, and pontificators of all varieties are in this sense clercs . The English translation, The Treason of the Intellectuals
,
1 sums it up neatly.
The "treason" in question was the betrayal by the "clerks" of their vocation as intellectuals. From the time of the pre-Socratics,
intellectuals, considered in their role as intellectuals, had been a breed apart. In Benda's terms, they were understood to
be "all those whose activity essentially is not the pursuit of practical aims, all those who seek their joy in the practice
of an art or a science or a metaphysical speculation, in short in the possession of non-material advantages." Thanks to such men,
Benda wrote, "humanity did evil for two thousand years, but honored good. This contradiction was an honor to the human species, and
formed the rift whereby civilization slipped into the world."
According to Benda, however, this situation was changing. More and more, intellectuals were abandoning their attachment to
the traditional panoply of philosophical and scholarly ideals. One clear sign of the change was the attack on the Enlightenment ideal
of universal humanity and the concomitant glorification of various particularisms. The attack on the universal went forward
in social and political life as well as in the refined precincts of epistemology and metaphysics: "Those who for centuries had exhorted
men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon
is given, for their 'fidelity to the French soul,' 'the immutability of their German consciousness,' for the 'fervor of their Italian
hearts.'" In short, intellectuals began to immerse themselves in the unsettlingly practical and material world of political passions:
precisely those passions, Benda observed, "owing to which men rise up against other men, the chief of which are racial passions,
class passions and national passions." The "rift" into which civilization had been wont to slip narrowed and threatened to close
altogether.
Writing at a moment when ethnic and nationalistic hatreds were beginning to tear Europe asunder, Benda's diagnosis assumed the
lineaments of a prophecy -- a prophecy that continues to have deep resonance today. "Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual
organization of political hatreds ," he wrote near the beginning of the book. "It will be one of its chief claims to notice in
the moral history of humanity." There was no need to add that its place in moral history would be as a cautionary tale. In little
more than a decade, Benda's prediction that, because of the "great betrayal" of the intellectuals, humanity was "heading for the
greatest and most perfect war ever seen in the world," would achieve a terrifying corroboration.
J ulien Benda was not so naïve as to believe that intellectuals as a class had ever entirely abstained from political involvement,
or, indeed, from involvement in the realm of practical affairs. Nor did he believe that intellectuals, as citizens, necessarily
should abstain from political commitment or practical affairs. The "treason" or betrayal he sought to publish concerned the
way that intellectuals had lately allowed political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation
as such. Increasingly, Benda claimed, politics was "mingled with their work as artists, as men of learning, as philosophers." The
ideal of disinterestedness, the universality of truth: such guiding principles were contemptuously deployed as masks when they were
not jettisoned altogether. It was in this sense that he castigated the " desire to abase the values of knowledge before the values
of action ."
In its crassest but perhaps also most powerful form, this desire led to that familiar phenomenon Benda dubbed "the cult of success."
It is summed up, he writes, in "the teaching that says that when a will is successful that fact alone gives it a moral value, whereas
the will which fails is for that reason alone deserving of contempt." In itself, this idea is hardly novel, as history from the Greek
sophists on down reminds us. In Plato's Gorgias , for instance, the sophist Callicles expresses his contempt for Socrates'
devotion to philosophy: "I feel toward philosophers very much as I do toward those who lisp and play the child." Callicles taunts
Socrates with the idea that "the more powerful, the better, and the stronger" are simply different words for the same thing. Successfully
pursued, he insists, "luxury and intemperance are virtue and happiness, and all the rest is tinsel." How contemporary Callicles
sounds!
In Benda's formula, this boils down to the conviction that "politics decides morality." To be sure, the cynicism that Callicles
espoused is perennial: like the poor, it will be always with us. What Benda found novel was the accreditation of such cynicism
by intellectuals. "It is true indeed that these new 'clerks' declare that they do not know what is meant by justice, truth, and other
'metaphysical fogs,' that for them the true is determined by the useful, the just by circumstances," he noted. "All these things
were taught by Callicles, but with this difference; he revolted all the important thinkers of his time."
In other words, the real treason of the intellectuals was not that they countenanced Callicles but that they championed him.
To appreciate the force of Benda's thesis one need only think of that most influential modern Callicles, Friedrich Nietzsche.
His doctrine of "the will to power," his contempt for the "slave morality" of Christianity, his plea for an ethic "beyond good and
evil," his infatuation with violence -- all epitomize the disastrous "pragmatism" that marks the intellectual's "treason." The real
problem was not the unattainability but the disintegration of ideals, an event that Nietzsche hailed as the "transvaluation of all
values." "Formerly," Benda observed, "leaders of States practiced realism, but did not honor it; With them morality was violated
but moral notions remained intact, and that is why, in spite of all their violence, they did not disturb civilization ."
Benda understood that the stakes were high: the treason of the intellectuals signaled not simply the corruption of a bunch of
scribblers but a fundamental betrayal of culture. By embracing the ethic of Callicles, intellectuals had, Benda reckoned, precipitated
"one of the most remarkable turning points in the moral history of the human species. It is impossible," he continued,
to exaggerate the importance of a movement whereby those who for twenty centuries taught Man that the criterion of the morality
of an act is its disinterestedness, that good is a decree of his reason insofar as it is universal, that his will is only moral
if it seeks its law outside its objects, should begin to teach him that the moral act is the act whereby he secures his existence
against an environment which disputes it, that his will is moral insofar as it is a will "to power," that the part of his soul
which determines what is good is its "will to live" wherein it is most "hostile to all reason," that the morality of an act is
measured by its adaptation to its end, and that the only morality is the morality of circumstances. The educators of the human
mind now take sides with Callicles against Socrates, a revolution which I dare to say seems to me more important than all political
upheavals.
The Treason of the Intellectuals is an energetic hodgepodge of a book. The philosopher Jean-François Revel recently
described it as "one of the fussiest pleas on behalf of the necessary independence of intellectuals." Certainly it is rich, quirky,
erudite, digressive, and polemical: more an exclamation than an analysis. Partisan in its claims for disinterestedness, it is ruthless
in its defense of intellectual high-mindedness. Yet given the horrific events that unfolded in the decades following its publication,
Benda's unremitting attack on the politicization of the intellect and ethnic separatism cannot but strike us as prescient. And given
the continuing echo in our own time of the problems he anatomized, the relevance of his observations to our situation can hardly
be doubted. From the savage flowering of ethnic hatreds in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union to the mendacious demands
for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses across America and Europe, the treason of the intellectuals continues
to play out its unedifying drama. Benda spoke of "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world." That cataclysm
is erupting in every corner of cultural life today.
In 1988, the young French philosopher and cultural critic Alain Finkielkraut took up where Benda left off, producing a brief
but searching inventory of our contemporary cataclysms. Entitled La Défaite de la pensée
2 ("The 'Defeat' or 'Undoing' of Thought"), his essay is in part an updated taxonomy of intellectual betrayals. In this
sense, the book is a trahison des clercs for the post-Communist world, a world dominated as much by the leveling imperatives
of pop culture as by resurgent nationalism and ethnic separatism. Beginning with Benda, Finkielkraut catalogues several prominent
strategies that contemporary intellectuals have employed to retreat from the universal. A frequent point of reference is the eighteenth-century
German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder. "From the beginning, or to be more precise, from the time of Plato until that
of Voltaire," he writes, "human diversity had come before the tribunal of universal values; with Herder the eternal values were condemned
by the court of diversity."
Finkielkraut focuses especially on Herder's definitively anti-Enlightenment idea of the Volksgeist or "national spirit."
Quoting the French historian Joseph Renan, he describes the idea as "the most dangerous explosive of modern times." "Nothing," he
writes, "can stop a state that has become prey to the Volksgeist ." It is one of Finkielkraut's leitmotifs that today's multiculturalists
are in many respects Herder's (generally unwitting) heirs.
True, Herder's emphasis on history and language did much to temper the tendency to abstraction that one finds in some expressions
of the Enlightenment. Ernst Cassirer even remarked that "Herder's achievement is one of the greatest intellectual triumphs of the
philosophy of the Enlightenment."
Nevertheless, the multiculturalists' obsession with "diversity" and ethnic origins is in many ways a contemporary redaction
of Herder's elevation of racial particularism over the universalizing mandate of reason. Finkielkraut opposes this just as the
mature Goethe once took issue with Herder's adoration of the Volksgeist. Finkielkraut concedes that we all "relate to a particular
tradition" and are "shaped by our national identity." But, unlike the multiculturalists, he soberly insists that "this reality merit[s]
some recognition, not idolatry."
In Goethe's words, "A generalized tolerance will be best achieved if we leave undisturbed whatever it is which constitutes
the special character of particular individuals and peoples, whilst at the same time we retain the conviction that the distinctive
worth of anything with true merit lies in its belonging to all humanity."
The Undoing of Thought resembles The Treason of the Intellectuals stylistically as well as thematically. Both
books are sometimes breathless congeries of sources and aperçus. And Finkielkraut, like Benda (and, indeed, like Montaigne), tends
to proceed more by collage than by demonstration. But he does not simply recapitulate Benda's argument.
The geography of intellectual betrayal has changed dramatically in the last sixty-odd years. In 1927, intellectuals still
had something definite to betray. In today's "postmodernist" world, the terrain is far mushier: the claims of tradition are much
attenuated and betrayal is often only a matter of acquiescence. Finkielkraut's distinctive contribution is to have taken the
measure of the cultural swamp that surrounds us, to have delineated the links joining the politicization of the intellect and its
current forms of debasement.
In the broadest terms, The Undoing of Thought is a brief for the principles of the Enlightenment. Among other things,
this means that it is a brief for the idea that mankind is united by a common humanity that transcends ethnic, racial, and sexual
divisions.
The humanizing "reason" that Enlightenment champions is a universal reason, sharable, in principle, by all. Such ideals have not
fared well in the twentieth century: Herder's progeny have labored hard to discredit them. Granted, the belief that there is
"Jewish thinking" or "Soviet science" or "Aryan art" is no longer as widespread as it once was. But the dispersal of these particular
chimeras has provided no inoculation against kindred fabrications: "African knowledge," "female language," "Eurocentric science":
these are among today's talismanic fetishes.
Then, too, one finds a stunning array of anti-Enlightenment phantasmagoria congregated under the banner of "anti-positivism."
The idea that history is a "myth," that the truths of science are merely "fictions" dressed up in forbidding clothes, that reason
and language are powerless to discover the truth -- more, that truth itself is a deceitful ideological construct: these and other
absurdities are now part of the standard intellectual diet of Western intellectuals. The Frankfurt School Marxists Max Horkheimer
and Theodor Adorno gave an exemplary but by no means uncharacteristic demonstration of one strain of this brand of anti-rational
animus in the mid-1940s.
Safely ensconced in Los Angeles, these refugees from Hitler's Reich published an influential essay on the concept of Enlightenment.
Among much else, they assured readers that "Enlightenment is totalitarian." Never mind that at that very moment the Nazi war machine
-- what one might be forgiven for calling real totalitarianism -- was busy liquidating millions of people in order to fulfill
another set of anti-Enlightenment fantasies inspired by devotion to the Volksgeist .
The diatribe that Horkheimer and Adorno mounted against the concept of Enlightenment reminds us of an important peculiarity about
the history of Enlightenment: namely, that it is a movement of thought that began as a reaction against tradition and has now emerged
as one of tradition's most important safeguards. Historically, the Enlightenment arose as a deeply anti-clerical and, perforce,
anti-traditional movement. Its goal, in Kant's famous phrase, was to release man from his "self-imposed immaturity."
The chief enemy of Enlightenment was "superstition," an omnibus term that included all manner of religious, philosophical, and
moral ideas. But as the sociologist Edward Shils has noted, although the Enlightenment was in important respects "antithetical to
tradition" in its origins, its success was due in large part "to the fact that it was promulgated and pursued in a society in which
substantive traditions were rather strong." "It was successful against its enemies," Shils notes in his book Tradition (1981),
because the enemies were strong enough to resist its complete victory over them. Living on a soil of substantive traditionality,
the ideas of the Enlightenment advanced without undoing themselves. As long as respect for authority on the one side and self-confidence
in those exercising authority on the other persisted, the Enlightenment's ideal of emancipation through the exercise of reason
went forward. It did not ravage society as it would have done had society lost all legitimacy.
It is this mature form of Enlightenment, championing reason but respectful of tradition, that Finkielkraut holds up as an ideal.
W hat Finkielkraut calls "the undoing of thought" flows from the widespread disintegration of a faith. At the center of that faith
is the assumption that the life of thought is "the higher life" and that culture -- what the Germans call Bildung -- is its
end or goal.
The process of disintegration has lately become an explicit attack on culture. This is not simply to say that there are many
anti-intellectual elements in society: that has always been the case. "Non-thought," in Finkielkraut's phrase, has always co-existed
with the life of the mind. The innovation of contemporary culture is to have obliterated the distinction between the two. "It
is," he writes, "the first time in European history that non-thought has donned the same label and enjoyed the same status as thought
itself, and the first time that those who, in the name of 'high culture,' dare to call this non-thought by its name, are dismissed
as racists and reactionaries." The attack is perpetrated not from outside, by uncomprehending barbarians, but chiefly from inside,
by a new class of barbarians, the self-made barbarians of the intelligentsia. This is the undoing of thought. This is the new "treason
of the intellectuals."
There are many sides to this phenomenon. What Finkielkraut has given us is not a systematic dissection but a kind of pathologist's
scrapbook. He reminds us, for example, that the multiculturalists' demand for "diversity" requires the eclipse of the individual
in favor of the group . "Their most extraordinary feat," he observes, "is to have put forward as the ultimate individual liberty
the unconditional primacy of the collective." Western rationalism and individualism are rejected in the name of a more "authentic"
cult.
One example: Finkielkraut quotes a champion of multiculturalism who maintains that "to help immigrants means first of all respecting
them for what they are, respecting whatever they aspire to in their national life, in their distinctive culture and in their attachment
to their spiritual and religious roots." Would this, Finkielkraut asks, include "respecting" those religious codes which demanded
that the barren woman be cast out and the adulteress be punished with death?
What about those cultures in which the testimony of one man counts for that of two women? In which female circumcision is practiced?
In which slavery flourishes? In which mixed marriages are forbidden and polygamy encouraged? Multiculturalism, as Finkielkraut points
out, requires that we respect such practices. To criticize them is to be dismissed as "racist" and "ethnocentric." In this secular
age, "cultural identity" steps in where the transcendent once was: "Fanaticism is indefensible when it appeals to heaven, but beyond
reproach when it is grounded in antiquity and cultural distinctiveness."
To a large extent, the abdication of reason demanded by multiculturalism has been the result of what we might call the subjection
of culture to anthropology. Finkielkraut speaks in this context of a "cheerful confusion which raises everyday anthropological
practices to the pinnacle of the human race's greatest achievements." This process began in the nineteenth century, but it has been
greatly accelerated in our own age. One thinks, for example, of the tireless campaigning of that great anthropological leveler, Claude
Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss is assuredly a brilliant writer, but he has also been an extraordinarily baneful influence. Already in
the early 1950s, when he was pontificating for UNESCO , he was urging all and sundry to "fight against ranking cultural differences
hierarchically." In La Pensée sauvage (1961), he warned against the "false antinomy between logical and prelogical mentality"
and was careful in his descriptions of natives to refer to "so-called primitive thought." "So-called" indeed. In a famous article
on race and history, Lévi-Strauss maintained that the barbarian was not the opposite of the civilized man but "first of all the man
who believes there is such a thing as barbarism." That of course is good to know. It helps one to appreciate Lévi-Strauss's claim,
in Tristes Tropiques (1955), that the "true purpose of civilization" is to produce "inertia." As one ruminates on the proposition
that cultures should not be ranked hierarchically, it is also well to consider what Lévi-Strauss coyly refers to as "the positive
forms of cannibalism." For Lévi-Strauss, cannibalism has been unfairly stigmatized in the "so-called" civilized West. In fact, he
explains, cannibalism was "often observed with great discretion, the vital mouthful being made up of a small quantity of organic
matter mixed, on occasion, with other forms of food." What, merely a "vital mouthful"? Not to worry! Only an ignoramus who believed
that there were important distinctions, qualitative distinctions, between the barbarian and the civilized man could possibly
think of objecting.
Of course, the attack on distinctions that Finkielkraut castigates takes place not only among cultures but also within a given
culture. Here again, the anthropological imperative has played a major role. "Under the equalizing eye of social science," he writes,
hierarchies are abolished, and all the criteria of taste are exposed as arbitrary. From now on no rigid division separates masterpieces
from run-of-the mill works. The same fundamental structure, the same general and elemental traits are common to the "great" novels
(whose excellence will henceforth be demystified by the accompanying quotation marks) and plebian types of narrative activity.
F or confirmation of this, one need only glance at the pronouncements of our critics. Whether working in the academy or other
cultural institutions, they bring us the same news: there is "no such thing" as intrinsic merit, "quality" is an only ideological
construction, aesthetic value is a distillation of social power, etc., etc.
In describing this process of leveling, Finkielkraut distinguishes between those who wish to obliterate distinctions in the
name of politics and those who do so out of a kind of narcissism. The multiculturalists wave the standard of radical politics and
say (in the words of a nineteenth-century Russian populist slogan that Finkielkraut quotes): "A pair of boots is worth more than
Shakespeare."
Those whom Finkielkraut calls "postmodernists," waving the standard of radical chic, declare that Shakespeare is no better than
the latest fashion -- no better, say, than the newest item offered by Calvin Klein. The litany that Finkielkraut recites is familiar:
A comic which combines exciting intrigue and some pretty pictures is just as good as a Nabokov novel. What little Lolitas read
is as good as Lolita . An effective publicity slogan counts for as much as a poem by Apollinaire or Francis Ponge . The
footballer and the choreographer, the painter and the couturier, the writer and the ad-man, the musician and the rock-and-roller,
are all the same: creators. We must scrap the prejudice which restricts that title to certain people and regards others as sub-cultural.
The upshot is not only that Shakespeare is downgraded, but also that the bootmaker is elevated. "It is not just that high
culture must be demystified; sport, fashion and leisure now lay claim to high cultural status." A grotesque fantasy? Anyone
who thinks so should take a moment to recall the major exhibition called "High & Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture" that the Museum
of Modern Art mounted a few years ago: it might have been called "Krazy Kat Meets Picasso." Few events can have so consummately summed
up the corrosive trivialization of culture now perpetrated by those entrusted with preserving it. Among other things, that exhibition
demonstrated the extent to which the apotheosis of popular culture undermines the very possibility of appreciating high art on its
own terms.
When the distinction between culture and entertainment is obliterated, high art is orphaned, exiled from the only context in which
its distinctive meaning can manifest itself: Picasso becomes a kind of cartoon. This, more than any elitism or obscurity,
is the real threat to culture today. As Hannah Arendt once observed, "there are many great authors of the past who have survived
centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version
of what they have to say."
And this brings us to the question of freedom. Finkielkraut notes that the rhetoric of postmodernism is in some ways similar
to the rhetoric of Enlightenment. Both look forward to releasing man from his "self-imposed immaturity." But there is this difference:
Enlightenment looks to culture as a repository of values that transcend the self, postmodernism looks to the fleeting desires of
the isolated self as the only legitimate source of value.
For the postmodernist, then, "culture is no longer seen as a means of emancipation, but as one of the élitist obstacles to this."
The products of culture are valuable only as a source of amusement or distraction. In order to realize the freedom that postmodernism
promises, culture must be transformed into a field of arbitrary "options." "The post-modern individual," Finkielkraut writes, "is
a free and easy bundle of fleeting and contingent appetites. He has forgotten that liberty involves more than the ability to change
one's chains, and that culture itself is more than a satiated whim."
What Finkielkraut has understood with admirable clarity is that modern attacks on elitism represent not the extension but the
destruction of culture. "Democracy," he writes, "once implied access to culture for everybody. From now on it is going to mean everyone's
right to the culture of his choice." This may sound marvelous -- it is after all the slogan one hears shouted in academic and cultural
institutions across the country -- but the result is precisely the opposite of what was intended.
"'All cultures are equally legitimate and everything is cultural,' is the common cry of affluent society's spoiled children
and of the detractors of the West." The irony, alas, is that by removing standards and declaring that "anything goes," one does
not get more culture, one gets more and more debased imitations of culture. This fraud is the dirty secret that our cultural commissars
refuse to acknowledge.
There is another, perhaps even darker, result of the undoing of thought. The disintegration of faith in reason and common
humanity leads not only to a destruction of standards, but also involves a crisis of courage. "A careless indifference to grand
causes," Finkielkraut warns, "has its counterpart in abdication in the face of force." As the impassioned proponents of "diversity"
meet the postmodern apostles of acquiescence, fanaticism mixes with apathy to challenge the commitment required to preserve freedom.
Communism may have been effectively discredited. But "what is dying along with it is not the totalitarian cast of mind, but
the idea of a world common to all men."
Julien Benda took his epigraph for La Trahison des clercs from the nineteenth-century French philosopher Charles Renouvier:
Le monde souffre du manque de foi en une vérité transcendante : "The world suffers from lack of faith in a transcendent truth."
Without some such faith, we are powerless against the depredations of intellectuals who have embraced the nihilism of Callicles as
their truth.
1The Treason of the Intellectuals, by Julien Benda, translated by Richard Aldington, was first published in 1928.
This translation is still in print from Norton.
2La Défaite de la pensée , by Alain Finkielkraut; Gallimard, 162 pages, 72 FF . It is available in English, in
a translation by Dennis O'Keeffe, as The Undoing of Thought (The Claridge Press [London], 133 pages, £6.95 paper).
Roger Kimball is Editor and Publisher of The New Criterion and President and Publisher of Encounter Books. His latest book
is The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia (St. Augustine's Press)
Neocons are lobbyists for MIC, the it is MIC that is the center of this this cult. People like Kriston, Kagan and Max Boot are
just well paid prostituttes on MIC, which includes intelligence agencies as a very important part -- the bridge to Wall Street so to
speak.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us. ..."
Glenn Greenwald has just published a very important
article in The Intercept that I would have everyone in America read if I could. Titled "With New D.C. Policy Group,
Dems Continue to Rehabilitate and Unify With Bush-Era Neocons", Greenwald's excellent piece details the frustratingly under-reported
way that the leaders of the neoconservative death cult have been realigning with the Democratic party.
This pivot back to the party of neoconservatism's origin is one of the most significant political events of the new millennium,
but aside from a handful of sharp political analysts like Greenwald it's been going largely undiscussed. This is weird, and we need
to start talking about it. A lot. Their willful alignment with neoconservatism should be the very first thing anyone ever talks about
when discussing the Democratic party.
When you hear someone complaining that the Democratic party has no platform besides being anti-Trump, your response should be,
"Yeah it does. Their platform is the omnicidal death cult of neoconservatism."
It's absolutely insane that neoconservatism is still a thing, let alone still a thing that mainstream America tends to regard
as a perfectly legitimate set of opinions for a human being to have. As what Dr. Paul Craig Roberts rightly
calls "the most dangerous ideology that has ever
existed," neoconservatism has used its nonpartisan bloodlust to work with the Democratic party for the purpose of escalating tensions
with Russia on multiple fronts, bringing our species to the brink of what could very well end up being a
world war with a nuclear superpower and its allies.
This is not okay. Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan
member or a child molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Check out leading neoconservative Bill Kristol's response to the aforementioned Intercept article:
... ... ...
Okay, leaving aside the fact that this bloodthirsty psychopath is saying neocons "won" a Cold War that neocons have deliberately
reignited by fanning the flames of the Russia hysteria and
pushing for more escalations , how insane is it that we live in a society where a public figure can just be like, "Yeah, I'm
a neocon, I advocate for using military aggression to maintain US hegemony and I think it's great," and have that be okay? These
people kill children. Neoconservatism means piles upon piles of child corpses. It means devoting the resources of a nation that won't
even provide its citizens with a real healthcare system to widespread warfare and all the death, destruction, chaos, terrorism, rape
and suffering that necessarily comes with war. The only way that you can possibly regard neoconservatism as just one more set of
political opinions is if you completely compartmentalize away from the reality of everything that it is.
This should not happen. The tensions with Russia that these monsters have worked so hard to escalate could blow up at any moment;
there are too many moving parts, too many things that could go wrong. The last Cold War brought our species
within a hair's
breadth of total annihilation due to our inability to foresee all possible complications which can arise from such a contest,
and these depraved death cultists are trying to drag us back into another one. Nothing is worth that. Nothing is worth risking the
life of every organism on earth, but they're risking it all for geopolitical influence.
... ... ...
I've had a very interesting last 24 hours. My
article about Senator John
McCain (which I titled "Please Just Fucking Die Already" because the title I really wanted to use seemed a bit crass) has received
an amount of attention that I'm not accustomed to, from
CNN to
USA Today to the
Washington Post . I watched Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar
talking about me on The View . They called me a "Bernie
Sanders person." It was a trip. Apparently some very low-level Republican with a few hundred Twitter followers went and retweeted
my article with an approving caption, and that sort of thing is worthy of coast-to-coast mainstream coverage in today's America.
This has of course brought in a deluge of angry comments, mostly from people whose social media pages are full of Russiagate
nonsense , showing
where McCain's current support base comes from. Some call him a war hero, some talk about him like he's a perfectly fine politician,
some defend him as just a normal person whose politics I happen to disagree with.
This is insane. This man has actively and enthusiastically pushed for every single act of military aggression that America has
engaged in, and some that
it hasn't , throughout his entire career. He makes Hillary "We came, we saw, he died" Clinton look like a dove. When you look
at John McCain, the very first thing you see should not be a former presidential candidate, a former POW or an Arizona Senator; the
first thing you see should be the piles of human corpses that he has helped to create. This is not a normal kind of person, and I
still do sincerely hope that he dies of natural causes before he can do any more harm.
Can we change this about ourselves, please? None of us should have to live in a world where pushing for more bombing campaigns
at every opportunity is an acceptable agenda for a public figure to have. Neoconservatism is a psychopathic death cult whose relentless
hyper-hawkishness is a greater threat to the survival of our species than anything else in the world right now. These people are
traitors to humanity, and their ideology needs to be purged from the face of the earth forever. I'm not advocating violence of any
kind here, but let's stop pretending that this is okay. Let's start calling these people the murderous psychopaths that they are
whenever they rear their evil heads and stop respecting and legitimizing them. There should be a massive, massive social stigma around
what these people do, so we need to create one. They should be marginalized, not leading us.
-- -- --
I'm a 100 percent reader-funded journalist so if you enjoyed this, please consider helping me out by sharing it around, liking
me on Facebook , following me on
Twitter , or throwing some money into my hat on
Patreon .
"... we are talking about a man who launched 60+ Tomahawks over chocolate cake, with no investigation on a false flag gas attack, has reopened a war on Iran and is currently sanctioning Syria, Russia, Venezuela and many more to a level never seen before, sold anti tank missiles to Ukraine and made the KSA his first official overseas visit. ..."
"... Trump set up Gen. Flynn (who would have implemented his campaign promises) and unceremoniously fired him for the crime of doing his job. Then Trump put a bunch of neocons in charge and cleansed the NSC of any staff critical of the neocon agenda. Trump has filled his administration with disgusting swamp creatures and essentially put a simpleton son-in-law in charge of middle east policy. This is a complete disaster and b is way off base. His policy on Israel has been a nightmare, as has the policy on KSA. ..."
"... I think a civilizational winter is settling in on the Global North, while a thaw is on the verge of breaking out in the Global South. ..."
... many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies.
Wait ... what?
Those 'subordinates' work for Trump. Trump could easily prevent the subverting of
his policies - if he chose to.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Wasn't it Trump that tweeted that he was "locked and loaded" for war with Iran?
Wasn't it Trump that ordered TWO missile strikes on Syria based on false pretenses?
Wasn't it Trump that fully supported the Venezuela coup? And approved of illegally seizing
Venezuelan assets?
Wasn't it Trump that violated UN Resolutions by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and
recognizing Golan Heights as Israeli territory? All while drastically curtailing aid to the
Palestinians?
Wasn't it Trump that militarized Space? (He seems rather proud of doing so.)
Furthermore, I don't hear Trump complaining about things like USA not following thru on
commitments made for peace in Korea or USA's terminating the INF Treaty.
Trump was better at governing his TV show than running his government. Certainly, his
irresponsible choices for his chief aides carry much blame, but so does his
inability/unwillingness/false promise to drain the swamp of all the saboteurs--just look at
the Justice Department for a graphic example. But Trump's mismanagement was exacerbated by
his totally different conception of the Outlaw US Empire and how it would go about its
business--views that were diametrically opposite of those indoctrinated into the career
bureaucrats that would be charged with carrying out policy--when you've been told it's fine
and dandy to ignore and break as many laws and treaties as needed to implement policy, it
becomes second nature to ignore and work against policy directives that go against your
indoctrination. One major point Trump was correct about was the a priori need to Drain the
Swamp of the creatures that brought about all the ill-fated policies he now wanted to unwind
and abandon--the most important singular point he hasn't really tried to accomplish. Instead,
one of the first places he visited after his inauguration was CIA headquarters--Downtown
Swampland HQ.
I included and linked to
this article earlier today, "Trump's Foreign Policy Strategy Is All About the 2020
Elections." Lets assume that assumption is 100% correct; what does that leave post-election
when there's no further election to attempt to win? If all troops are removed from Syria,
Iraq and Afghanistan, what else will occur? Continued withdrawal from the Persian Gulf as
Iran's HOPE project swings into action? Withdrawal from Korea? Closing Gitmo? I haven't heard
Trump say anything about potential domestic or foreign second term policy. The D-Party's
candidates have proposed lots of domestic policy changes, some greatly needed and desired by
the public; but aside from Gabbard, little's been said about foreign policy.
Let's back away from the chalk board and its maps to look at the entire globe and do a
quick review of Trump's global policy.
His Trade War multiple tariff impositions were aimed at numerous nations, not just China,
all aimed at enhancing the MAGA domestic policy. The so-called Freedom of Navigation
provocation remains in place despite the USN botching it so badly. Somewhat reinvigorated
imperialism South of the border, particularly with the targeting of Venezuela and revamping
the Cuban Embargo. Renegotiation of NAFTA and dropping of all other pending Neoliberal trade
pacts. Illegal withdrawal from JCPOA, but withdrawal of troops from Syria and perhaps beyond.
Continued support for Saudi and UAE aggression against Yemen, which Ansarallah calls US-Saudi
aggression and terrorism. Included in all the above are numerous war crimes and other crimes
against humanity either originated or exacerbated by Trump. Those saying Trump hasn't begun a
war are 100% liars. But what was perhaps the most curious was his rant at the UNGA where he
declared war against Globalists and promoted Patriots. And although the ice was broken in the
frozen relations with DPRK, nothing positive has ensued.
In some ways we see continuity with the ongoing Outlaw US Empire policy to gain Full
Spectrum Dominance, but in other ways there're distinctive breaks with that policy. It
appears Trump wants to rollback US Imperialism to the Western Hemisphere in an effort to MAGA
as the Globalist's drive is a massive drain on US wealth and prestige. Do recall his loud but
very brief threat to attack all US-based companies that didn't repatriate their overseas
factories. As Trump's continuing Imperialism South of the Border proves, he's no
isolationist; and as his requests for additional military funding show, he's no pacifist
either. And to-date, his war fighting is limited to all forms of hybrid warfare, his only
kinetic actions being war crimes against Syria.
So, where will Trump go from here? Will he make any additional foreign policy related
campaign promises; and if so, what might they be? And as we've seen, there's a big push on to
replace the Dollar as the primary commercial currency with Trump so far being silent about
that. Does Trump even care about the international status of the Dollar or its importance to
the domestic economic situation, or is he totally ignorant?
Hmmm, i am not sure what to think of this analysis. On the one hand, Trump has said many
things, so who knows what he really wants. On the other, we are talking about a man who
launched 60+ Tomahawks over chocolate cake, with no investigation on a false flag gas attack,
has reopened a war on Iran and is currently sanctioning Syria, Russia, Venezuela and many
more to a level never seen before, sold anti tank missiles to Ukraine and made the KSA his
first official overseas visit.
In other words, not much of a peace maker. So while he may talk about bringing troops
home, one wonders how much of it is really just for show. His incompetence is well
established, but as others also mentioned, if one really wanted peace, then Pompeo, Bolton
and Haley are not really the people to be surrounded with. There are plenty of Republicans
from former senior Pentagon's Col. Wilkerson to Senators like Rand Paul who would have been
both fit for the job and willing to enable such policies, so forgive my skepticism, Trump the
peacemaker he is not, as for honouring any promises, never trust a salesman especially a
proven liar like Trump.
Trump set up Gen. Flynn (who would have implemented his campaign promises) and
unceremoniously fired him for the crime of doing his job. Then Trump put a bunch of neocons
in charge and cleansed the NSC of any staff critical of the neocon agenda. Trump has filled
his administration with disgusting swamp creatures and essentially put a simpleton son-in-law
in charge of middle east policy. This is a complete disaster and b is way off base. His
policy on Israel has been a nightmare, as has the policy on KSA.
WSWS reports that "Kramp-Karrenbauer called for a massive European Union (EU) force to occupy
northern Syria, sup..." and "Imperialist circles in both America and Europe are outraged at
the military and financial advantages that could accrue to Russia, Iran and China from their
defeat in Syria."
Well, contrary to Trump, who has specialized on making money playing the boss, the
establishment have some knowledge of what Trump is talking about.
Like leaving some isolated US troops in the desert "protecting oil fields". Trump
presumably has a very hazy idea that Syria and Turkey are countries. If you cannot take the
boss seriously you look out for yourself.
US establishment is capable of withdrawing when needed, see Vietnam, and I guess the
decision was not Trump's. Nor did I notice that Trump's zionist backers mentioned anything
about it. Nor do I believe that anyone in US establishment has the slightest interest in
protecting Rojava.
juliania @89 said: "We northerners have a winter ahead of us, but way down south it is
already spring."
Am I the only one who read that thinking of the Global North/Global South metaphor?
Probably not, and I have to say it is a surprisingly concise but deep observation juliania
makes. I think a civilizational winter is settling in on the Global North, while a thaw is
on the verge of breaking out in the Global South.
Last month, on the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, the European Parliament
voted on a resolution entitled
" On the Importance of European Remembrance for the Future of Europe ." The adopted
document:
" Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe's history, was
started as an immediate result of the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty on Non-Aggression of 23
August 1939, also known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, whereby two
totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest divided Europe into two zones of
influence; Recalls that the Nazi and communist regimes carried out mass murders, genocide and
deportations and caused a loss of life and freedom in the 20th century on a scale unseen in
human history, and recalls the horrific crime of the Holocaust perpetrated by the Nazi
regime; condemns in the strongest terms the acts of aggression, crimes against humanity and
mass human rights violations perpetrated by the Nazi, communist and other totalitarian
regimes."
For 75 years, we have been told that the war started on September 1st, 1939 when Germany
invaded Poland, even though the Pacific Theater between Japan and China began two years
earlier. Now we are to understand that it actually began eight days prior when the German
foreign minister visited Moscow. Take no notice of the inherent doublespeak in the premise that
a war could be the consequence of a peace agreement, which without any evidence provided is
said to have contained "secret protocols", not provisions. You see, unlike the other pacts
signed between European countries and Nazi Germany -- such as the Munich Betrayal
of 1938 with France and Great Britain to which the Soviets were uninvited while Austria and
Czechoslovakia were gifted to Hitler for the courtesy of attacking Moscow --
Molotov-Ribbentrop was really a confidential agreement between Hitler and Stalin to
conquer Europe and divide it between them.
This is pure mythology. The fact of the matter is that neither the Soviets or even Germany
drew the dividing line in Poland in 1939, because it was a reinstatement of the border
acknowledged by the League of Nations and Poland itself as put forward by the British following
WWI. Even Winston Churchill during his first wartime radio broadcast later that year admitted :
"Russia has pursued a cold policy of self-interest. We could have wished that the Russian
Armies should be standing on their present line as the friends and allies of Poland, instead
of as invaders. But that the Russian Armies should stand on this line was clearly necessary
for the safety of Russia against the Nazi menace."
Yet according to the EU, even though Moscow was the last country to agree to a peace
deal with Hitler, it was all part of a hidden plot between them. In that case, why then did
Germany choose to invade the USSR in 1941? The EU leaves this question unanswered. Forget about
its racial policies of enslaving slavs or that Hitler openly declared in Mein Kampf that
Germany needed to conquer the East to secure the Lebensraum . Nevermind that in the
Spring of 1941, less than two months before Operation Barbarossa, Stalin gave a speech to the Kremlin
at a state banquet for recent graduates of the Frunze Military Academy to give warning of an
imminent attack:
"War with Germany is inevitable. If comrade Molotov can manage to postpone the war for two
or three months through the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, that will be our good fortune, but
you yourselves must go off and take measures to raise the combat readiness of our
forces."
The EU has redacted that the entire reason for the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact in August
1939 had been to buy time for the Red Army's attrition warfare strategy to adequately prepare
its armaments against a future invasion by the Wehrmacht. The Soviet leadership well understood
that Germany would eventually renege on the agreement, considering that in 1936 it had signed
the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan and Italy directed at the Communist International. For six
years, the USSR was thwarted in its attempts to forge an equivalent anti-fascist coalition and
to collectively defend Czechoslovakia by the British and the French, whose ruling classes were
too busy courting and doing business with Germany. It had been the Soviets alone who defended
the Spanish Republic from Franco in the final rehearsal before the worldwide conflict and only
when all other recourses had run out did they finally agree to a deal with the
Hitlerites.
Joachim von Ribbentrop signing the Anti-Comintern Pact
Just a week prior to the signing of the neutrality treaty, Stalin gave a secret
speech to the Politburo where he explained:
"The question of war or peace has entered a critical phase for us. If we conclude a mutual
assistance treaty with France and Great Britain, Germany will back off of Poland and seek a
modus vivendi with the Western Powers. War would thus be prevented but future events could
take a serious turn for the USSR. If we accept Germany's proposal to conclude with it a
non-aggression pact, Germany will then attack Poland and Europe will be thrown into serious
acts of unrest and disorder. Under these circumstances we will have many chances of remaining
out of the conflict while being able to hope for our own timely entrance into war."
This latest resolution is part of a long pattern of misrepresentation of WWII by the
Anglo-Saxon empire, but is perhaps its most egregious falsification that truly desecrates the
graves of the 27 million Soviet citizens who were 80% of the total Allied death toll. Earlier
this year, for the commemoration on the 75th anniversary of the Normandy landings, Russia and
its head of state were excluded from the events in Portsmouth, England. As if the ongoing
absence of Western European leaders from the May 9th Victory Day ceremonies held annually in
Russia weren't insulting enough, while it's true that the Eastern Front was not involved in
Operation Overlord, Russian President Vladimir Putin had previously been in attendance at the
70th anniversary D-Day events in 2014. No doubt the increase in geopolitical tensions between
the West and Moscow in the years since has given the EU license to write out Russia's role in
the Allied victory entirely with little public disapproval, though many of the families of
those who volunteered in the International Brigades were rightly insulted by this tampering of
history and voiced their objection.
The EU motion's real purpose is to fabricate the war's history by giving credit to the
United States for the liberation of Europe while absolving the Western democracies that opened
the door for the rise of fascism and tried to use Germany to annihilate the USSR. History
itself should always be open to debate and subject to study and revision, but the Atlanticists
have made this formal change without any evidence to support it and entirely for political
purposes. Like the founding of the EU project itself, the declared aim of the proposal is
supposedly to prevent future atrocities from taking place, even though the superstate was
designed by former Nazis like Walter Hallstein, the first President of the European Commission,
who was a German lawyer in several Nazi Party law organizations and fought for the Wehrmacht in
France until his capture as a POW after the invasion of Normandy.
Rather than preventing future crimes, the EU has committed one itself by deceptively
modifying the historical record of communism to be parallel with that of the Third Reich. Even
further, that they were two sides of the same coin of 'totalitarianism' and that for all the
barbarity committed during the war, the Soviets were equally culpable -- or judging by the
amount of times the text cites the USSR versus Germany, even more so. It remains unclear
whether we are now to completely disregard the previous conclusions reached by the military
tribunals held by the Allies under international law at Nuremberg of which all 12 war criminals
sentenced to death in 1946 were German, not Soviet. The document doesn't even attempt to hide
its politicized direction at the current government in Moscow, stating that:
"Russia remains the greatest victim of communist totalitarianism and that its development
into a democratic state will be impeded as long as the government, the political elite and
political propaganda continue to whitewash communist crimes and glorify the Soviet
totalitarian regime."
This accusation does not stand up to critical observation, as Russia has since erected
official memorials to those executed and politically persecuted during the so-called 'Great
Terror.' However, the stark difference between the EU resolution and the Wall of Grief in
Moscow is that the latter is based on evidence from the Soviet archives. It has become a
widespread and ridiculous belief in the West that Stalin somehow killed as much as five times
as many people as Hitler, an absurdity not reflected in the now disclosed and once highly
secretive Soviet archives, which after two decades of examination show that over a period of
three decades from the early 1920s to his death in 1953, the total recorded number of Soviet
citizens executed by the state was slightly less than 800,000. While that is certainly a horrid
number, how does it even begin to compare to an industrial scale extermination based on the
race theory?
How can anyone believe Stalin killed tens of millions of people when even the most simple
analysis of a population demographics chart shows that the Soviet population rate consistently
increased each decade with the only reduction taking place during WWII as a result of
their casualties? Socialists, who perhaps more than any other political tendency seem to suffer
from autophobia, should defend their own history from such falsification. It is only when flaws
occur under communist states that the entire political and economic system is to be denounced
outright, but never capitalism which for five centuries has colonized half the world while
enslaving and killing entire nations.
Most of the wildly exaggerated death figures stem from falsities written in The Black
Book of Communism by a group of right-wing French academics in 1997 , who did not
conceal their
apologism for the Nazi collaborationist self-proclaimed Russian Liberation Army (ROA)
commanded by Gen. Andrey Vlasov who defected to Germany during the war:
"A singular fate was reserved for the Vlasovtsy, the Soviet soldiers who had fought under
the Soviet general Andrei Vlasov. Vlasov was the commander of the Second Army who had been
taken prisoner by the Germans in July 1942. On the basis of his anti-Stalinist convictions,
General Vlasov agreed to collaborate with the Nazis to free his country from the tyranny of
the Bolsheviks."
The other highly cited work by the West for its overestimated portrayal of Soviet repression
is the equally unreliable The Gulag Archipelago volumes by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who
as historian Ludo Martens noted also attempted to provide justification for Vlasov's treason
in his best-selling 1973 work :
"And so it was that Vlasov's Second Shock Army perished, literally recapitulating the fate
of Samsonov's Russian Second Army in World War I, having been just as insanely thrown into
encirclement. Now this, of course, was treason to the Motherland! This, of course, was
vicious, self-obsessed betrayal! But it was Stalin's. Treason does not necessarily involve
selling out for money. It can include ignorance and carelessness in the preparations for war,
confusion and cowardice at its very start, the meaningless sacrifice of armies and corps
solely for the sake of saving one's own marshal's uniform. Indeed, what more bitter treason
is there on the part of a Supreme Commander in Chief?"
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
The truth is located in the Soviet archives which indicate that Stalin's successor, the
Ukrainian-born Nikita Khrushchev, was as intent on absolving the entirety of the Soviet
leadership as himself from any culpability in the purges of the 1930s so that blame for its
excesses were placed squarely on his predecessor. In succession, Western historians like the
British Foreign Office propagandist Robert Conquest followed his example and this account
quickly became official doctrine. In hindsight, Khrushchev's infamous 1956 secret speech, "
On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences ", was what planted the seeds of
self-doubt in the Soviet system that would eventually lead to its undoing decades later. To the
contrary, what the historical records
show is most of those who were purged in that period were not necessarily perceived as
political threats to Stalin himself, but were targeted because of an overall systemic paranoia
held by the entire Soviet government regarding internal sabotage and counter-revolutionary
activity by a real fifth column getting inspiration from a certain traitorous former Bolshevik
in exile and a potential invasion originating from outside the country.
Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when the
Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side of the
Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not entirely
unreasonable. Not to mention, the rapid industrialization of the entire nation in a single
decade while in preparation for the growing threat of war with Germany. When Hitler began his
Masterplan for the East, their worst fears came to fruition when tens of thousands of Banderite
turncoats enlisted in the 14th Waffen Grenadier Division of the SS (1st Galician) in Ukraine to
collaborate with the German occupiers in the slaughter of their fellow countrymen and after the
war ended, continued their treasonous struggle during the 1950s with assistance from the CIA.
So the saying goes, just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
As for the accusation of "whitewashing", it is true that recent
polls indicate that 70% of Russians today hold a favorable view of Stalin -- but just as
many are nostalgic for communism itself and regret the breakup of the USSR on the basis that
the socialist system '
took care of ordinary people .' Putin did once remark that despite Stalin's legacy of
repression, he doubted that the native Georgian statesman would have been willing to drop two
atomic bombs on Japan like the United States, an atrocity that killed 225,000 innocent
civilians (most of them instantly) which is more than a quarter of those capitally
punished during the entire Stalin era. Was he wrong to say so? A significant amount of deaths
also occurred in the Soviet-wide famines of the 1930s, but there is significantly more evidence
to suggest that the British deliberately starved 3 million Bengalis to death then there is to
support the Holodomor fraud concocted by the Ukrainian nationalist diaspora. If the West wants
to talk about deliberate starvation, it should take a look at what the U.S. did with its
economic sanctions in the 1990s killing half a million Iraqi children which former U.S.
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright famously described as "worth it."
This isn't the first time the Anglosphere has historically omitted the Soviet role in the
Allied victory or conflated the USSR with the Third Reich. On previous occasions the European
Parliament has issued resolutions declaring August 23rd " a European day of remembrance of
the victims of the Nazi-Soviet alliance ." This is all an attempt by the Atlanticists to
depict communism as somehow worse than fascism while disconnecting the Nazis from the lineage
of European settler colonialism whose racism was its source of inspiration. Why is that which
befell the Jews not considered an extension of what was already done to the Herero-Nama tribes
for which Namibia is now suing Germany a century later?
The neoliberal political establishment in Europe and its anti-EU populist opponents are fond
of appearing dead-set against one another, but it seems they share the same fairytale beliefs
about WWII that the Nazis and Soviets were equivalent evils as inscribed in this latest decree.
It has always been ironic that the liberal billionaire "philanthropist" and currency
manipulator George Soros is so derided by right-wing populists when it was his Open Society
Institute NGOs which engineered the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. Soros may be
averse to the anti-immigrant brand of right-wing nationalism currently on the rise in Western
Europe, but as a fanatical Russophobe he is willing to make strange bedfellows with
ultra-nationalists in Kiev to undermine Moscow's sphere of influence and that includes revising
WWII history to a version favored by the Banderites which took power during the pro-EU 2014
coup d'etat in Ukraine.
The Nazi junta regime in Kiev has since instituted Russophobic 'de-communization' laws
erasing the remaining traces of Ukraine's Soviet past while replacing them with memorials to
their wartime foes. A recent example was the city of
Vinnitsa renaming a street that paid tribute to the Soviet spy and war hero Richard Sorge to
that after Omelyan Hrabetsk, a commander of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army which cooperated with
Germany during the war and killed thousands of Poles and Jews. Sorge posed as a German
journalist in Tokyo and famously provided timely intelligence to Moscow that Japan did not plan
to attack the USSR, allowing Stalin to transfer essential reinforcements to the Battle of
Moscow which proved to be a major turning point in the war. He was executed by the Japanese in
1944 and posthumously awarded the Hero of the Soviet Union.
Now the EU is 'decommunizing' history in its own legislation. Meanwhile, Soros's influence
over the EU cannot be overstated as his lobbying power has enabled him to provide direct
council to its executive branch more than any official head of state in the political and
economic union. The hedge fund tycoon made a fortune as an investor during Russia's mass
privatization in the 1990s after enlisting Jeffrey Sachs and the IMF to apply 'shock therapy'
to its economy as it did in Poland and his native Hungary. Under Putin, however, Soros's NGOs
have since been barred from Russia. Perhaps the reason he can so cynically provide support to
fascist elements in Ukraine to undercut Moscow is that he did so personally in his upbringing
in Hungary.
Born Gyorgy Schwartz, during WWII he was a teenager from an affluent Jewish family which
survived the Axis occupation by using their wealth to bribe a government official from the
collaborationist Arrow Cross government who provided the Soros's forged documents identifying
them as Christians, while the adolescent by his own admission delivered deportation notices to
other Jews. A short time later, the young Soros impersonated the adopted gentile son of an
official who inventoried the stolen valuables and property from Jewish estates and even
accompanied him during his work. One would assume as a Jew he would have been haunted by these
experiences, but Soros has repeatedly stated he has no regrets and even disturbingly compared
it to his future work as an investor.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/X9tKvasRO54?feature=oembed SHOCKING: George Soros, a chief financial supporter of Antifa, was himself a Nazi
collaborator and to this day has no regrets
Like Soros, the EU has no ideology except an unquenchable thirst for greed and is fond of
Nazis when they are the kind that hate Russia. For its own political interests, it is willing
to dangerously foster a version of history invented by a rebranded far right where the
quislings who collaborated with the Axis powers elude guilt and the Soviets who courageously
defeated them are maliciously slandered. Fascism was never fully eradicated only because the
West continued to nurture it during the Cold War and even now that capitalism has been
reinstated in Eurasia, it continues to do so to undermine a resurgent Moscow on the world
stage.
As the world appears increasingly on the brink of WWIII, one is reminded of the expression
by Karl Marx who famously stated that "history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce"
in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , when comparing Napoleon Bonaparte's
seizure of power in the French Revolution with the coup by his nephew half a century later
which brought an end to the French Revolution. Equally fitting is the humorous line by the
legendary writer and noted anti-imperialist Mark Twain who reputedly said, "history doesn't
repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Both are applicable to the unquestionable tragedy of WWII
and the farcical mockery of its history by the EU whose policies continue to make another
global conflict that much more likely.
Max Parry is an independent journalist and geopolitical analyst. His work has appeared in
Counterpunch, Global Research, Dissident Voice, Greanville Post, OffGuardian, American Herald
Tribune and more. Max may be reached [email protected]
I think it is a bit backward to say that Stalins speech in Spring of 1941 of Nazi aggression
is proof of Germany's plan to invade the Soviets, but instead more likely telegraphing and
preparing his troops for the offensive that he had planned himself.
@Tusk Have you read NOTHING?? The ENTIRE basis of Hitler's foreign policy, all the way
back to "Mein Kampf", was a massive German invasion to destroy international Bolshevism and
seize Lebensraum (living space) for German colonization in Eastern Europe. The discussions
with the Russians in 1939 were temporary, tactical diplomacy intended ONLY to stabilize the
local situation during resolution of the "Polish Crisis".
Many forget that during the Russian Civil War, exactly such a scenario had occurred when
the Allies of World War I, including the United States, collectively intervened on the side
of the Whites only to be driven out by the Red Army, making such fearful instincts not
entirely unreasonable.
America reciprocated when Russia was being threatened by an Allied force in Siberia in
1919. The United States troops were there more for the purpose of watching the Japanese
than of fighting Russians. During the course of the peace conference, both Wilson and Lloyd
George went home for a short time and in their absence the conferees were whipped up to a
mood of more active intervention. Wilson heard of it in mid-ocean and, although thoroughly
disliking the Communistic philosophy, promptly dispatched a radio message to the effect
that the only course he would agree to was speedy withdrawal of all Allied troops from
Russian soil.
The British and French exerted great pressure on Mr. Wilson for Americans to join in a
general attack on Moscow. General Foch drew up plans for such an attack. Winston Churchill,
representing the British Cabinet, appeared before the Big Four on February 14, 1919, and
demanded a united invasion of Russia.
The Americans then experience a sudden change of heart. Not only that, they ponder the
large war debts owed by their allies to them. In an internal note by Tasker Bliss:
It is perfectly well known that every nation in Europe, except England, is bankrupt, and
that England would become bankrupt if she engaged on any considerable scale in such a
venture.
I.e.: "Hey, can you guys really afford that?" Hoover himself supplies additional
reasons, in a letter to Wilson (bear in mind that Hoover had considerable experience as an
engineer in Czarist Russia):
We have also to consider, what would actually happen if we undertook military
intervention. We should probably be involved in years of police duty, and our first act
would probably in the nature of things make us a party with the Allies to re-establishing
the reactionary classes. It also requires consideration as to whether or not our people at
home would stand for our providing power by which such reactionaries held their position.
Furthermore, we become a junior in this partnership of four. It is therefore inevitable
that we would find ourselves subordinated and even committed to politics against our
convictions.
Thus Wilson guaranteed the victory of the Bolsheviks. The Brits and French pulled their
support for the Whites.
@Vinnie O Hitler met with Molotov in Nov. 1940 to try to prevent war with the Soviet
Union. But Molotov pretty much spat in Hitler's eye, and that was that.
Not since his talks with the British before Munich, in ,
had Adolf Hitler heard such tough language as Molotov used on November and
.As Ribbentrop had done before him, Hitler harangued the Russian ministeras
though he were at a Party rally: if Russia wanted to share in the booty as the British
Empire fell apart, then now was the time to declare Soviet solidarity with the Tripartite
Pact powers. He sympathised, he said, with Russia's desire for an outlet to the high seas,
and suggested that she should expand southward from Batum and Baku toward the Persian Gulf
and India; Germany would expand into Africa. As for Russia's interest in the Dardanelles,
Hitler restated his willingness to call for the renegotiation of the Montreux Convention,
which governed the straits, to bring it into line with Moscow's defensive interests.
The demands which Molotov stated were shockers. Russia wanted another stab at Finland
– she intended to occupy and annex the whole country,which had, after all, been
assigned her by the pact which he had signed with Ribbentrop in Moscow. Hitler,
however, needed Finland's nickel and timber supplies. When Molotov announced Russia's
intention of inviting Bulgaria to sign a non-aggression pact which would permit the
establishment of a Soviet base near the Dardanelles, Hitler ironically inquired whether
Bulgaria had asked for such assistance; pressed later by Molotov for a reply to Soviet
terms, Hitler evasively answered that he must consult Mussolini! Each of Molotov's
conferences with Hitler was terminated by the warning of approaching British aircraft, and
his dinner at the Soviet embassy on the thirteenth ended abruptly for the same reason.
Ribbentrop invited Molotov to the concrete shelter at his home; here the Soviet foreign
minister revealed that Moscow could never entirely forgo an interest in the western
approaches to the Baltic either – the Kattegat and Skagerrak. When Ribbentrop told
his Führer of this, Hitler was stunned. 'He demanded that we give him military bases
on Danish soil on the outlets to the North Sea,' Hitler was to recall in the last week of
his life. 'He had already staked a claim to them. He demanded Constantinople, Romania,
Bulgaria, and Finland – and we were supposed to be the victors!'
While the public was deliberately fed the impression that the formal Nazi–Soviet
discussions had been harmonious and successful, within the chancellery there was no doubt
that they had reached the parting of the ways. Irrevocable and terrible in its finality,
the decision which Adolf Hitler
now took was one he never regretted, even in the abyss of ultimate defeat.
@Vinnie O Sure that's why Stalin amassed all his units on the border and was talking
about the necessity to fight Germany. You imply it was a one way street and that Hitler was
to blame, but despite the love towards the commies in this article Stalin does bear burden
for what happened too.
So in order to combat European revisionism, Parry gives us one long story about the Soviet
Union's honourable intentions towards its neighbours. One can hang any story onto the events
preceding the invasion of Poland, but the fact is as General Manstein wrote about the Polish
camapaign, the Poles were defeated before they started since they had to plan for war against
all comers due their invidious situation. Stalin stepped into Poland a mere 17 days after the
Germans. The Poles had no "hinterland" to retreat to. Under the hammer and anvil of the Nazis
and the Commies the Poles perished.
And Chamberlain like every one else in Europe understood that to effectively contain the
Germans, the Soviet Union has to be part of a united front. But like the gentleman he was, he
could not stomach the price that Uncle Joe wanted to extract, viz the extinction of the
independence of the East European nations. That Hitler wanted Bolshevism destroyed is a no
brainer, but Saint Stalin had his own plans to invade Europe picking up the pieces after the
Europeans had duked it out. In the event the German speed caught everyone by surprise,
including the bloody Stalin
But the article has value : For much of the embroidery around the death camps came from
Soviet accounts, and their later embellishments. Who knows, the same skepticism about the
Soviet Union will later filter into Holocaust worship.
The US/UK and France (Rothschild) are demonising Russia, not the EU.
The EU is probably under pressure to demonise Russia, however most EU countries are
normally doing well with Russia, they are anti-US/UK, considering all the US-UK led NATO
horrific crimes committed in the seven ME countries.
Germany in the grip of Anglo-Saxon war policies?
by Karl Müller
{Excerpts}
"The Europe of today is politically stable and well-off, it is capable of organising its
own defence. The European states have failed to do that for much too long." And: "By using
the financial means, which the USA could spare this way, they could concentrate on Asia
– a process, that was already under way during the Obama administration." And finally:
"In regard to Russia the USA need to pursue a new path of agreement, because otherwise we
will be driving the Russians even closer towards China."
"On 22 August News Agency Reuters reported: "Germany, France and Great Britain rejected US
President Donald Trump's proposal to once again admit Russia to the Circle of G7 countries.
On Wednesday evening, before meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Chancellor
Angela Merkel said that in 2014 Russia had been excluded for definite reasons, and that those
reasons were still valid [ ]. A few days before the G7 Summit in France President Emmanuel
Macron declared his rejection of Russia's re-admittance as well. "I believe that Russia's
unconditional return would be a sign of the G7's weakness and a strategic mistake. Britain's
Prime Minister Johnson concurred in this opinion. [ ]"
"Up to 2023 the USA are planning to invest another two billion dollars only in their bases
in Rheinland Pfalz. Ramstein and Landstuhl have already been rebuilt and modernized for some
billion dollars and cannot be substituted in the short and long term."
This is an interesting yet complex issue. From my blog:
May 1, 2017 – Must Ukraine Return Volhynia?
Hillary Clinton's State Department funneled $5 billion to orchestrate a "revolution" to
overthrow the elected President of Ukraine in 2014. (See my June 7, 2016 blog post for
details.) Ukraine's President was ousted because he refused to support Ukraine joining the EU
and NATO, and violence spread throughout Ukraine as CIA funded factions fought for power.
Crimea was part of Russia for over a century until it was administratively attached to
Ukraine in 1954 by a Soviet premier to promote Soviet solidarity. Russians are the majority
people in Crimea and Russian is the common language, but they were not consulted. In 2014,
after years of Ukrainian political turmoil and an American coup in Kiev, Russia accepted a
request by the people of Crimea to rejoin Russia after 94% voted in favor. (See my Aug 8,
2016 blog post for details.) Russians and Crimeans were puzzled by intense American
opposition to this reannexation, and rightly concluded the Americans really wanted "NATO"
military bases in strategic Crimea.
For those concerned about European borders and justice, they should address a truly
outrageous annexation. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and seized half of its land
while Soviet police massacred 22,000 influential Polish POWs and civilians. This area was
invaded by Germany two years later, which formed Ukrainian paramilitary units that murdered
over 100,000 Poles during the war. Entire Polish villages disappeared as Ukrainians massacred
everyone to include women and children, who were buried in mass graves. After the war, the
Polish regions of Volhynia and Eastern Galicia were formally annexed by Soviet Ukraine after
1.5 million Poles were forcibly deported. Over the next decade, another 1.5 million Poles
were deported by Ukraine to ethically cleanse these regions (noted in yellow below).
The West did nothing about this brutality because it occurred within the powerful Soviet
Union. However, that union broke up and Ukraine is weak and at odds with Russia. On July 22,
2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres of ethnic Poles
in Volhynia and Galicia as genocide. Poland is now part of NATO and American troops are based
there. Thousands of Poles are still alive who were expelled from these regions. Homes and
land were seized from millions of Poles. Ukrainian war criminals remain at large.
This raises several questions. If Poland demands a return of its territory or compensation
for Poles, will powerful NATO support its demand? Will sanctions be imposed against Ukraine
for this genocide and illegal seizure of Polish territory? Since Crimea was attached to
Ukraine without a democratic vote, and the citizens of Crimea voted to rejoin Russia, should
sanctions against Russia be removed?
Informed people know these issues will never be addressed because NATO does not exist to
protect member states, but is a proxy arm of America's neocon empire trying to conquer the
world. However, as Poland's military grows stronger and Ukraine struggles, this issue may
arise, and crafty Russia may support a return of Poland's, Slovakia's, and Romania's seized
territories!
I do not think that Ukraine demand are all that bad if other conditions such as grating the region special status and the level
of autonomy similar to Crimea in the past are fulfilled. With Russian language restored in status as a regional language. Plus total
unconditional amnesty. All three are prerequisite for successful reintegration and in those condition t make sense: (1) the
LNR/DNR dissolve themselves, (2) that they have to leave the Ruble zone and switch back to the Grivna, (3) that the local military
forces have to be disbanded and, finally, (4) that Kiev wants the total control of the LDNR/Russian border. But also should be
a strict prohibition of any member of paramilitary battalions to enter the autonomous region under the penalty to prison
sentence for several years to prevent revenge killings.
The problems with Ukrainian economy are structural and the absence of economic detente with Russia alone can be undoing of
Zelensky government. Further accumulation of IMF credits is the only way forward. Add to this almost total breakdown of economic
ties with Russia because of EuroMaydan and subsequent Western Ukraine nationalist coup d'état, and you have Catch 22 situation for
him. Add to the pressure from the USA and the impression is the there is no way of this situation . BTW Poroshenko despite all
his rhetoric somehow managed to preserve his chocolate factory in Russia ;-)
...First, Trump, Macron and Merkel apparently told Zelenskii that he had to sign the so-called Steinmeier formula, which
basically spells out the sequence of confidence-building and de-escalation measures foreseen by the Minsk Agreements.
Now, you would be excused for thinking that this is a no-brainer. After all, the Minsk Agreements were ratified by the
UNSC (which makes them mandatory, no "if" or "buts" about this!) and it was Poroshenko who agreed to the Steinmeier
formula.
Heck, in 2016 he sure did not have a problem with it, but in 2019 he now calls the self-same formula a Russian
invention and that there is no such thing as a Steinmeier formula, see for yourself (in Ukrainian only):
Zelenskii's problem can be summed up in a simple sentence: the non-existing Nazis. Well, at least in the past all the
Neo-Nazis
cum
Jew-haters were constantly trying to convince us that there are no Nazis in the Ukraine;
apparently, my use of the term Ukronazi really set them off. Then came the election in which an absolute majority of
Ukrainians rejected Poroshenko's drive for war and voted for Zelenskii. If the Ukrainian people voted en masse to elect
an anti-war/pro-peace Jew, surely the Ukronazis were just a small minority of fringe individuals, right?
Wrong! Very very wrong!
And if those who were whitewashing the Ukrainian Nazis (obviously to obfuscate their real ideology and power) had
paid closer attention they would have seen signs of real Nazi power all over this election.
First, there was the remarkable change in tone in Zelenskii's rhetoric. Just like so many politicians (including
Trump!), he radically changed his tune and clearly tried to say one thing when speaking to the general Ukrainian public
and quite another when meeting with the Nazis or nationalist exiles in the USA.
You could say that there is a "Nazi deep state" in the Ukraine which, just like the other deep states out there,
can weather any elected president and quickly reassert its control over whomever the people elected.
You don't believe me when I say that he actually hosted the Ukronazis "fringe minority"? Fine, see for yourself:
In the photo above, Zelenskii is sitting with your typical gang of Ukronazi skinheads, including members of the infamous
Azov death-squad, and he is trying really hard to charm them while they, very publicly, have threatened him with a new
Maidan.
And this is not an isolated case or a fluke.
Zelenskii's prime minister went to a concert for an openly Nazi "Scream" music group called Sekira Peruna and thanked
the crowd of veterans of the "anti terrorist operation" (i.e. thugs from the Ukronazi deathsquads) for being there and
for saving the Ukraine. I did not find any English language translation of the typical lyrics of Sekira Peruna, but I
assure you that they contain all the obligatory nonsense which the Nazi ideology is built upon (see
here
for a
very good article with more details on this event and the Nazis involved).
Check out what their concert posters look like (shown here on the right) or, even better, check out the website of
this group:
http://sokyraperuna.com/
'Nuff said, I think.
So what is going on here?
Basically, exactly what I predicted as soon as Zelenskii was elected in my article "
Zelenskii's
dilemma
" in which I wrote: (emphasis added)
The Nazi-occupied Ukraine is not a democracy, but a plutocracy combined with an ochlocracy
.
The oligarchs are still there, as are the neo-Nazis mobs and death squads. And that creates an immense problem for
Zelenskii: this new Rada might well represent the views of a majority of the Ukrainian people, but
the real
power in the country is not concentrated in the Rada at all: it is in the streets
( ) The people of the
Ukraine desperately want peace. For the time being, the Rada reflects this overwhelmingly important fact. I say "for
the time being" because what will happen next is that the various forces and individuals who currently support
Zelenskii have done so just to gain power. They do not, however, have a common ideological platform or even a common
program. As soon as things go south (which they will inevitably do) many (most?) of these folks will turn against
Zelenskii and side with whoever can muster the biggest crowds and mete out the most violence. Now that he got
elected, Zelenskii quasi-instantly switched to the exact same rhetoric as what got Poroshenko so severely defeated.
Why? Because Zelenskiii is afraid that the neo-Nazi mobs and death squads will be unleashed against him at the very
first opportunity. In fact, the neo-Nazis have already begun promising a new Maidan. The truth is that
Zelenskii has to choose between acting on the will of the people and face the wrath of the neo-Nazis or do the will
of the neo-Nazis and face the wrath of the people
: tertium non datur! So far, Zelenskii has apparently
decided that talking is all he is going to do simply because his triumphant electoral victories have landed him in
the middle of an immense minefield, and
any steps he takes from now on could cost him very dearly
.
Right now, in the short term, the neo-Nazi mobs represent a much bigger danger to Zelenskii than the (disorganized,
demoralized and generally apathetic) people. But this will inevitably change as the economic and political situation
gets worse
.
We see exactly that scenario unfolding before our eyes. Zelenskii took not one, but three very real, if small, steps.
First, he ordered a pullback of some regular Ukrainian armed forces from a few important segments of the line of
contact, then he agreed to a relatively minor prisoner exchange and, finally, he ordered the Ukrainian delegation to
sign the Steinmeier formula. The prisoner exchange went okay for both sides. The Ukronazis soon categorically rejected
any withdrawal and they publicly promised to immediately re-occupy any village vacated by the regular army and they
rejected what they call the "Russian" or "Putin" formula. So far there were a few attempts to block the thugs of the
Azov battalion, but after a few minor clashes, the Azov people passed the police line. And now, the Nazi organized mass
protests in 300 Ukrainian cities. I could post lots of videos here, but that would take a lot of space. If you want to
get a feel for what took place today, go to YouTube and copy-paste the following search query "протесты в украине" into
the search bar, and then use the filter option and chose "this week": you will easily get many hours of video and you
don't even need to understand a word of Ukrainian to immediately get it.
There is another very important factor which you will almost never see on these videos or on any public statements
and that is that there are a number of civil and even criminal cases currently being brought to trial in the Ukraine
against a host of officials of the
ancient régime
including even against Poroshenko (11-14 separate
investigations just for him already!) These men (Poroshenko, Parubii, Turchinov, etc.) now have absolutely no choice but
to try to overthrow Zelenskii.
Just like the US Dems need a coup against Trump (in the form of an impeachment or something else) because the
Clinton-Biden gang now risks real, hard, jail time, so do the former Ukronazi leaders now need a coup against Zelenskii
or they go to jail.
Initially, it appeared that Trump had given Poroshenko some personal security guarantees, but everybody knows how
much the US President's security "guarantees" are worth (just ask the Kurds!). So Poroshenko did not flee the country.
It now appears that some of the people behind Zelenskii (aka Kolomoiskii) are out to get the "Poroshenko clan &
Associates" – Poroshenko has to either topple Zelenskii or run away abroad. There are also rumors that the US "deep
state" (as opposed to the Trump Administration) is now putting pressure on Zelenskii to stop these investigations. Thus,
the current battle between Trump and the Neocons and their "deep state" has now spilled over into the Ukraine and it
appears that various US interest groups are now creating local Ukrainian surrogates whom they will use in their struggle
against each other.
Furthermore, a real possibility opened up now that all sorts of previously buried issues will be investigated by
the Ukrainian prosecutors including:
An official and true investigation to find out who opened fired on the police and demonstrators during the
Euromaidan
MH-17
Ukronazi atrocities in the Donbass
Human rights violations in the Ukraine (where over 1000 political prisoners are still being held) starting with
innumerable cases of horrible torture of detainees (in secret torture camps,
ŕ la
CIA, including an
especially infamous one in Mariupol).
Poroshenko's role in the "Crimea Bridge provocation"
All the many murders of journalists and opponents to the Nazis beginning with the murder of Oles Buzina
A quasi infinite list of war profiteering, corruption, fraud, etc. etc. etc.
Simply put: there is no way that the Ukronazis will just stand by and let those investigations proceed. And while
it is true that numerically the Ukronazis are a small minority in the Ukraine, there is plenty enough of them to terrify
Zelenskii and his handlers, especially considering that they are 1) well armed 2) many have frontline combat experience
and 3) that they are willing not only to engage in "regular" violence, but also to commit atrocities and engage in
terrorism (they did plenty of both in the Donbass).
Zelenskii does have a number of things going for him: first, the mandate of the people (though his popularity is
already down from 73% to 66% – which is still very big), his legal prerogatives as the President and Commander in Chief
and the support of Kolomoiskii's strong network of international connections, especially in Israel.
But that is all rather theoretical so far.
All Zelenskii has done, besides hosting the skinheads in his office, was to make a 14 hour long interview with a
group of reporters. Yes, fourteen hours. Alas, all he achieved was to show that he is a much better actor than
politician. In fact, most experts seem to agree that in his role as President Zelenskii is a total failure who speaks a
lot, says a lot of silly things when he does, and seems to be absolutely unable to take any real action.
At the time of writing (Wed 16th) the leader of the Ukronazis has given Zelenskii 10 days to yield to all the
demands of the opposition. If not, he has promised to trigger a new Maidan and bring millions of people to the streets.
Yup. The "tiny" "fringe" and otherwise "non-existing" Nazis have now given Zelenskii an ultimatum.
Zelenskii is in free fall: Trump, Macron and Merkel are demanding that he abide by the decisions of the UNSC, the
Minsk Agreements and the Steinmeier formula. The Russians have clearly indicated that unless tangible and real progress
is made in the implementation of this formula, there will be nothing else to discuss. The Ukraine is basically bankrupt
and desperately needs both Novorussian coal and Russian gas
. Furthermore, only a removal of the self-defeating
barriers and boycotts imposed by the former regime against any trade or even communications with Russia could begin to
kick-start the economy of what is now clearly a failed state.
Yet the Nazis will oppose any and all such measures, with violence if needed. As for Zelenskii, he appears to be in a
no win situation: no matter what he does next, things will only get worse. Thus the most likely outcome of all these
processes will be, in the short term, further futile attempts by Zelenskii to appease the Nazis (thereby alienating the
general population), in the middle term a violent confrontation, followed in the long term by (the probably inevitable)
break-up of the Ukraine into separately much more viable parts.
UPDATE
: I just heard that the Ukraine is now demanding that 1) the LNR/DNR dissolve themselves,
2) that they have to leave the Ruble zone and switch back to the Hrivna, 3) that the local military forces have to be
disbanded and, finally, 4) that Kiev wants the total control of the LDNR/Russian border.
Well, good luck with that, folks! I hope they are not holding their breath (they aren't – they are just trying to
find a pretext to renege on their legal and political obligations )
"... Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum of Russia-Turkey relationship. ..."
"... If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially catastrophic for regional stability. ..."
"... the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory. ..."
"... Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. " ..."
Now, [..] the sense of betrayal among the Kurds [..] is matched only by their outrage at who
will move in: Turkish soldiers supported by Syrian fighters the United States had long
rejected as extremists, criminals and thugs .
...
The deadly battles [..] have also given new leeway to Syrian fighters once considered too
extreme or unruly to receive American military support.
...
Grandly misnamed the Syrian National Army, this coalition of Turkish-backed militias is in
fact largely composed of the dregs of the eight-year-old conflict's failed rebel movement.
Early in the war [..] the military and the C.I.A. sought to train and equip moderate,
trustworthy rebels to fight the government and the Islamic State.
A few of those now fighting in the northeast took part in those failed programs, but most
were rejected as too extreme or too criminal . Some have expressed extremist sensibilities or
allied with jihadist groups.
The reality is the opposite of what the NYT claims. The majority of the groups now
fighting with the Turkish army had earlier received support from the U.S. Even their nominal
leader is the same one who the U.S. earlier paid, armed and promoted.
On August 31, the Syrian National Coalition came together and elected the president and the
cabinet of the Syrian Interim Government in which Abdurrahman Mustafa was elected president
and Salim Idriss was elected defense minister . With the new cabinet, the Syrian Interim
Government became more active on the ground, started visiting each faction of the National
Army, and accelerated the stalled negotiations to unite the National Army and the NLF under
one command.
Among the 41 factions that joined the merger, 15 are from the NLF and 26 from the National
Army. Thirteen of these factions were formed after the United States cut its support to the
armed Syrian opposition. Out of the 28 factions, 21 were previously supported by the United
States , three of them via the Pentagon's program to combat DAESH. Eighteen of these factions
were supplied by the CIA via the MOM Operations Room in Turkey, a joint intelligence
operation room of the 'Friends of Syria' to support the armed opposition. Fourteen factions
of the 28 were also recipients of the U.S.-supplied TOW anti-tank guided missiles.
The SETA study provides a detailed list of the groups involved in the current Turkish
invasion of Syria. Not only is their commander Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge but the
majority of these groups did receive U.S. support and weapons.
The New York Times claim that only "a few of those" who now fight the YPG Kurds
took part in the U.S. programs is a blatant lie.
The NYT piece quotes three 'experts' who testify that the 'rebels' the U.S. had
armed are really, really bad:
"These are the misfits of the conflict, the worst of the worst," said Hassan Hassan, a
Syrian-born scholar tracking the fighting. "They have been notorious for extortion, theft and
banditry, more like thugs than rebels -- essentially mercenaries."
It was Hassan Hassan who since the start of the conflict lobbied for
arming the rebels from his perch at the UAE's media flagship The National .
Another 'expert' quoted is the Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov:
"They are basically gangsters, but they are also racist toward Kurds and other minorities,"
said Elizabeth Tsurkov, a fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. "No human should
be subjected to their rule."
Tsurkov earlier
lauded the Israeli hiring and arming of the very same 'Syrian rebels'.
Another 'expert' quoted by the Times is a co-chair of the 'congressionally
sponsored bipartisan Syrian Study Group':
"We are turning areas that had been controlled by our allies over to the control of criminals
or thugs, or that in some cases groups were associated or fighting alongside Al Qaeda," said
Ms. Stroul, of the Syrian Study Group. "It is a profound and epic strategic blunder."
The 'Syrian Study Group' wants to prolong the war on Syria. Ms.
Stroul and her co-chair Michael Singh reside at the Washington
Institute which is a part of the Zionist lobby and has long
argued for 'arming the Syrian rebels'.
The Times report does not mention that the 'experts' it quotes all once lobbied for
arming the very same groups they are now lamenting about. When these groups ran rampant in the
areas they took from the Syrian government the Times and its 'experts' were lauding
them all the way. No effort to support them was big enough. All crimes they committed were
covered up or excused.
Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what
they always have been.
Posted by b on October 20, 2019 at 11:19 UTC |
Permalink
Hah! More lies from the NYT....mainstream media in the west has deteriorated into a
propaganda channel for the Military Industrial Complex and the oligarchy, pumping out a never
ending tide of lying filth aimed at more and more war (more and more weapon sales) and
promoting and preserving predatory capitalism (more money for the Billionaire class, less for
you).
In my own reading of MSM press and my own watching of the MSM Talking Heads I believe I've
indentified 8 techniques that amoral, dangerous, barely competent idiots that have the cheek
to call themselves journalists use to lie to you, the reader/viewer/listener. Here's my
list...
Okay how practical.
Now only is the NYT trying to whitewash themselves by faking, they are also kind enough to do
the same for their Jihadi lovin partners in crime.
How empathic! How sensible! Like a true moral authority.
BTW: It seems my previous claims were right. The Turks made a 180 and allied with the US
again, reviving the NATO allaince. Now that the Kurds are out of the way in Turk-US
relations, US and NATO has much more to offer than Russia, and noe Erdogan has support from
NATO and will not be deterred by Putin.
B, i respect you immensly, but your belief the Turkish invasion was Erdogan doing some secret
Putin plan was unproven at the time, and now, AT LEAST since the US-Turk deal, is
obsolte.
Read M. K. BHADRAKUMARs blog, he thought like you, but after the US-Turk deal, EVERYTHING
HAS CHANGED:
"The extraordinary US overture to Turkey regarding northern Syria resulted in a joint
statement on Thursday, whose ramifications can be rated only in the fulness of time , as
several intersecting tracks are running.
The US objectives range from Trump's compulsions in domestic politics to the future
trajectory of the US policies toward Syria and the impact of any US-Turkish rapprochement on
the geopolitics of the Syrian conflict.
Meanwhile, the US-Turkish joint statement creates new uncertainties. The two countries
have agreed on a set of principles -- Turkey's crucial status as a NATO power ; security of
Christian minorities in Syria; prevention of an ISIS surge; creation of a "safe zone" on
Turkish-Syrian border; a 120-hour ceasefire ("pause") in Turkish military operations leading
to a permanent halt, hopefully.
The devil lies in the details. Principally, there is no transparency regarding the future
US role in Syria . The Kurds and the US military will withdraw from the 30-kilometre broad
buffer zone. What thereafter? In the words of the US Vice-President Mike Pence at the press
conference in Ankara on Thursday,
"Kurdish population in Syria, with which we have a strong relationship, will continue to
endure. The United States will always be grateful for our partnership with SDF in defeating
ISIS, but we recognise the importance and the value of a safe zone to create a buffer between
Syria proper and the Kurdish population and -- and the Turkish border. And we're going to be
working very closely ."
To be sure, everything devolves upon the creation of the safe zone. Turkey envisages a
zone stretching across the entire 440 kilometre border with Syria upto Iraqi border, while
the US special envoy James Jeffrey remains non-committal, saying it is up to the "Russians
and the Syrians in other areas of the northeast and in Manbij to the west of the Euphrates"
to agree to Turkey's maximalist stance.
Herein lies the rub. Jeffrey would know Ankara will never get its way with Moscow and
Damascus. In fact, President Bashar al-Assad told in unequivocal terms to a high-level
Russian delegation visiting Damascus on Friday, "At the current phase it is necessary to
focus on putting an end to aggression and on the pullout of all Turkish, US and other forces
illegally present in Syrian territories."
Is there daylight between Moscow and Damascus on this highly sensitive issue? Turkish
President Recep Erdogan's forthcoming meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Sochi
on October 22 may provide an answer.
Clearly, the US hopes wrench Turkey from the Russian embrace. Moscow's studied
indifference toward the US-Turkish cogitations betrays its uneasiness. Conceivably, Erdogan
will expect Putin to take a holistic view, considering Russia's flourishing and high
lucrative economic and military ties with Turkey and the imperative to preserve the momentum
of Russia-Turkey relationship.
If the US policy in Syria in recent years promoted the Kurdish identity, it has now
swung to the other extreme of stoking the fires of Turkish revanchism. This is potentially
catastrophic for regional stability. The heart of the matter is that while Turkey's
concerns over terrorism and the refugee problem are legitimate, Operation Peace Spring has
deeper moorings: Turkey's ambitions as regional power and its will to correct the perceived
injustice of territorial losses incurred during the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. The
ultra-nationalistic Turkish commentator (and staunch supporter of Erdogan) wrote this week in
the pro-government daily Yeni Safak:
"Turkey once again revived the millennium-old political history on Anatolian
territory. It took action with a mission that will carry the legacy of the Seljuks, the
Ottomans, the Republic of Turkey to the next stage It is not possible to set an equation in
this region by excluding Turkey – it will not happen. A map cannot be drawn that
excludes Turkey – it will not happen. A power cannot be established without Turkey
– it will not happen. Throughout history, both the rise and fall of this country has
altered the region the mind in Turkey is now a regional mind, a regional conscience, a
regional identity. President Erdoğan is the pioneer, the bearer of that political
legacy from the Seljuks, the Ottomans, and the Turkish Republic to the future."
Trump is unlikely to pay attention to the irredentist instincts in Turkish regional
policies. Trump's immediate concerns are to please the evangelical Christian constituency in
the US and silence his critics who allege that he threw the Kurds under the bus or that a
ISIS resurgence is imminent. But there is no way the US can deliver on the tall promises made
in the joint statement. The Kurds have influential friends in the Pentagon. (See the article
by Gen. Joseph Votel, former chief of the US Central Command, titled The Danger of Abandoning
our Partners.) Nonetheless, the main outcome will be that Turkey feels it has western
support for its long-term occupation of Syrian territory.
All in all, it's a "win-win" for Erdogan insofar as he got what he wanted -- US' political
and diplomatic support for "the kind of long-term buffer zone that will ensure peace and
stability in the region", to borrow the words of Vice President Pence. A Turkish withdrawal
from Syrian territory can now be virtually ruled out. State secretary Mike Pompeo added at
the press conference in Ankara on Thursday that there is "a great deal of work to do in the
region. There's lots of challenges that remain."
Pompeo said Erdogan's "decision to work alongside President Trump will be one that I think
will benefit Turkey a great deal." Arguably, US expects Turkey's cooperation to
strengthen its strategy in Syria (and Iraq) where it seeks to contain Iran's influence. From
Ankara, Pompeo travelled to Jerusalem to brief Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu. "
Add to that, that the Turks now threaten SAA with "full out war".
John Helmers latest post sheds light on the fact, that the Russian military leadership and
the Stavka in general has warned Putin since the Idlib deal again and again to no avail that
the Turks would do this.
Which seems now to have been proven true since the US-Turk deal, which in essence changed
everything overnight.
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American
consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The
barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news
from any source. That is not the American way.
The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT.
Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem
that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is
wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those
who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable.
For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the
Times will never untie the knot.
As the extremity of propaganda in mainstream news becomes more obvious a few American
consumers of news do begin to have doubts. Most continue to be entirely uncritical. The
barflies here are in the habit of being critical, analytic, skeptical when reading any news
from any source. That is not the American way.
The cohort of educated prosperous middle class readers of the NYT has total faith in NYT.
Having the paper edition on the doorstep in the morning is a badge of membership. A totem
that gives them status. Questioning any word or phrase or clause that appears in print is
wrong. Asking questions means something is wrong with you. The Times is never wrong. Those
who doubt the Times have mental health issues. Or they are alt-right. Or they are deplorable.
For the intended audience the propaganda feed is always completely effective. Readers of the
Times will never untie the knot.
"Why" always seem like a good question, eh? The NYT lies...why?
This quote caught my attention> " The powerful and historical walls to study today are
those of the Kremlin." (Fisk, information clearing house)
As it was for Winston's "Ministry of Truth" (Orwell) the NYT article is necessary. That's
the significance - not the lies but the necessity of lies...
And under what situations are lies required? Think about that when (if) you read Fisk's
analysis. (I am not a fan of Fisk, but his views in this instance align with my own rather
well)
Fisk article title> "Trump's disgrace in the Middle East is the death of an empire.
Vladimir Putin is Caesar now"
Some may recall that the monks on Mt Athos quietly elected VVP as the Byzantine Emperor
(about 2 years ago) - the Eastern branch of Christianity continues whilst nominally
christian(western) branch is fake and perverse ritual and worse...while his Popeness in Rome
has as Luther saw... I think Luther said it was a vast brothel...
Does this need Daniel to read the writing...
which is?
mene mene tekel upharsin (well somebody said..)
By the way my vote for the clown-man was cast because I reasoned the best esthetic feature
in the freak parade at the end of empire would be a clown act. I am indebted to the late
George Carlin for the symbolism.
I am proved right? I think so. Dogs bark and caravan continue...and many expect dollars to
go weimarish. then?
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian "born-scholar"...
Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...
As for Israeli propagandist Elizabeth Tsurkov, those very same "bad extremists" she now
repudiates on Twitter she once excused for mutilating children "because they were deeply
traumatised"... A very coherent "expert"!!
From The Grayzone, Ben Norton and Aaron Maté (and Dan Cohen) about Tsurkov: Western
pundits who lobbied for Syrian rebels now admit they are jihadist extremists, Oct. 16 (about
Tsurkov, go about 1:45 and the rest): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tkg4wJFpc_E
Now Tsurkov seems rather busy rooting for some "color revolution" to take place in Lebanon.
Where is Israel?...
As for the picture of Guy Verhofstadt next to Salim Idriss, it seems very aptly to epitomize
the EU "politics" about the Syrian conflict: "How tasty those American boots are!! Wanna lick
more American boots, please!!"
Ahh.. "experts"... Hassan Hassan is not a Syrian-born scholar, but a Syrian
"born-scholar"... Nuance. Or is it "a natural-born-scholar"? ...
If he is writing nothing but lies he is not any kind of scholar at all except a
fake scholar. Nor is he a journalist. He is a propagandist, nothing else. Call a spade
a spade.
-----
Ahhh, I've just posted to the Media and Pundits thread, but it should have come here much
more sensibly. Anyway the post is top a new page over there, on Trump and Syria's oil
fields.
The new narrative seems to me to have everything to do with Turkey and nothing to do with
Russia.
A comment in the last Syria-related thread.
Then again there are so many loose ends concerning Turkey that almost anything could
happen (coup attempt and "cleansing", dead ambassadors, Cyprus, Greece, Armenia, Syria, ISIS
and others, Kurds, weapon deals, shooting down a Russian plane, annoying Europe and the EU as
well as the US and just about everybody, some only politically but many militarily as well
(at least the US, Germany, and France), the list surely goes on).
As I commented I'm not convinced Turkey will survive this, are they able to stop and
reverse if they find they've set themselves up?
Turkey might be playing a double-game, or plan to betray one side - whether it'll be US or
Russia remains to be seen. But that this is all a clever NATO plot conflicts a bit with the
fact that the US is systematically destroying its bases in NE Syria. Sure, that might be
because they don't want the SAA to use them and to plunder them for techs and scraps, but
that would also make things more complicated for a Turkish take-over - it will surely
considerably slow the process if the Turkish army and its lackeys have to do everything back
from scratches.
Besides, odds are that Putin has taken that into consideration and has some contingency
measures ready, just in case - not that they could fully stop Turkish aggression in its
tracks in a couple of hours, but still.
Meanwhile Nicholas Kristof at the NYTimes also is whitewashing Obama's Syrian policy. He
conveniently forgets Timber Sycamore (the CIA's second largest operation, over $1 billion) to
overthrow Assad - 2013-2017, that allowed ISIS to get a firm foothold.
Trump Takes Incoherence and Inhumanity and Calls It Foreign Policy
"It was just five years ago that an American president, faced with a crisis on Syria's
border, acted decisively and honorably."
"Barack Obama responded with airstrikes and a rescue operation in 2014 when the Islamic
State started a genocide against members of the Yazidi sect, slaughtering men and forcing
women and girls into sexual slavery. Obama's action, along with a heroic intervention by
Kurdish fighters, saved tens of thousands of Yazidi lives."
"Contrast Obama's move, successfully working with allies to avert a genocide, with
President Trump's betrayal this month of those same Kurdish partners in a way that handed a
victory to the Islamic State, Turkey, Syria, Iran -- and, of course, Russia, ."
@ Walter 5: "I reasoned the best esthetic feature in the freak parade at the end of empire
would be a clown act"
Just love it!!
On a side note. Last night met with a new friend couple for dinner. Both are highly
educated and work in technical professions. Accordingly they pride themselves in logical
thinking ability. I wanted to check out their political leanings and asked about Trump's
troop pullback in Syria. Not surprisingly, both were outraged. When asked about their
rationale the expected answer was Trump's betrayal of the Kurds. I politely pointed out that
our troops' presence in Syria violates both domestic and international laws. That was news to
them!!! One of them did lamely point out that Assad is a brutal dictator. Being new
"friends", we refrained from further in depth political discussions. That incidence further
convinced me of the impending total collapse of the empire.
There has been some discussion regarding Syrian oilfields, here's some more on that.
The Syrian Democratic Council is the political wing of the Syrian Democratic Forces in the
Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria, including sites of Syrian oilfields. The
SDC's stated mission is working towards the implementation of a "secular, democratic and
decentralized system for all of Syria. The Syrian Democratic Council was established on 10
December 2015 in Al-Malikiyah.
Here is a
letter dated Jan 21, 2019 from the SDC to the CEO of Global Development Corporation (GDC)
Inc. in New Jersey, "a formal acceptance of your company, GDC, to represent the Syrian
Democratic Council (SDC) in all matters related to the sale of oil owned by SDC . .the
estimate off production of crude oil to be 400,000 barrels per day. . .current daily
production is 125,000 barrels. ."
The CEO of New Jersey's GDC (no mention on the web) is Mordechai (Moti) Kahana (Hebrew:
מוטי כהנא; born February 28, 1968,
Jerusalem, Israel) is an Israeli-American businessman and philanthropist. He is most notable
for his work for the civil war refugees in Syria. . .Since 2011 he heads a group of Israeli
businessmen and American Jews who travel to the Syrian refugee camps to provide humanitarian
aid to Syrian Civil War refugees.. . He paid for Senator John McCain's trip to war-torn
Syria. . . here
.
The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275 Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.
re: Salim Idriss a former U.S. stooge
WSJ, Jun 12, 2013 Rebels Plead for Weapons in Face of Syrian Onslaught
A top Syrian rebel commander has issued a desperate plea for weapons from Western
governments to prevent the fall of his forces in Aleppo, pushing the Obama administration
to decide quickly whether to agree to arm rebels for the first time or risk the loss of
another rebel stronghold just days after the regime's biggest victory.
Gen. Salim Idris, the top Syrian rebel commander backed by the West, issued a detailed
request in recent days to the U.S., France and Britain for antitank missiles, antiaircraft
weapons and hundreds of thousands of ammunition rounds, according to U.S. and European
officials and Mr. Idris's request to the Americans, a copy of which was reviewed by The
Wall Street Journal.
Gen. Idris's call comes at a pivotal moment in Syria's war, following rapid-fire gains
by Bashar al-Assad forces, including last week's recapture of Qusayr, a strategic town near
the Lebanon border. Fighters from Hezbollah, which were crucial in helping the Assad regime
to take Qusayr, are now massing around Aleppo, say rebels and Western officials. . .
here
This was after H. Clinton (SecState) and D. Petraeus (CIA) wanted to fully arm the
US-supported rebels but President Obama declined. Clinton had resigned Feb 1, 2013.
thanks b... stellar writing and comments throughout... i especially liked your last line
:
"Now, as the very same rebels attack the Kurds, they are suddenly called out for being what
they always have been."
@13 don bacon - the address says it all.. The GDC mailing address is the Roxbury Mall, 275
Route 10 E, Succasunna, NJ.
regarding the nyt, larry johnson has a post up on sst
here.. i quote from it :
"Let us start with a reminder of how damn corrupt the NY Times and its reporters are.
Consider this paragraph penned by Adam Goldman and William Rashbaum:
Closely overseen by Mr. Barr, Mr. Durham and his investigators have sought help from
governments in countries that figure into right-wing attacks and unfounded conspiracy
theories about the Russia investigation, stirring criticism that they are trying to deliver
Mr. Trump a political victory rather than conducting an independent review.
"Unfounded conspiracy theories?" What a damn joke."
Wow! Quite a knee jerk reaction by the NY Times to Max
Blumenthal's 16 Oct article in The Grayzone , "The US has backed 21 of the 28
'crazy' militias leading Turkey's brutal invasion of northern Syria," which I linked to
Friday. It's great to see such a reaction to what for most people's an obscure online
publication.
Notice of MoA website change: I must now type in my name and email every time I want to
comment after years of never needing to do so. My issue might be related to the one ben
encountered in thinking he couldn't comment, which you can't if those two fields aren't
filled.
"Strong, credible allegations of high-level criminal activity can bring down a government.
When the government lacks an effective, fact-based defense, other techniques must be
employed. The success of these techniques depends heavily upon a cooperative, compliant press
and a mere token opposition party..."
Trump should not have sent Pence and Pompeo to Turkey. They will do everything possible to
derail the rollback of the US in Syria. They are both more subtle than Bolton, but they are
both neocons. If you want anything done, you have to do it yourself.
Michael McFaul was the key person in failed "white color revolution in Russia in 2011-2012
designed to prevent reelection of Putin. h was recalled soon after Putin elections. So his praise
instantly suggests that the other person might be a color revolution specialist as well
In this sense his participation in Ukrainegate is just a top of his long carier as colore
revolution specialist. Ukrainegate does looks like the second Maydan.
Michael
McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called Taylor, who he's
known for three decades, "just a consummate public servant."
"I do remember when he was ambassador to Ukraine he saw the bigness of the moment -- this is
well before Russia annexed Crimea and went into Donbass -- that fighting for sovereignty for
Ukraine and democracy and anti-corruption, he was very committed to that," McFaul said.
Michael McFaul was the key person in failed "white color revolution in Russia in 2011-2012
designed to prevent reelection of Putin. h was recalled soon after Putin elections. So his praise
instantly suggests that the other person might be a color revolution specialist as well
In this sense his participation in Ukrainegate is just a top of his long carier as colore
revolution specialist. Ukrainegate does looks like the second Maydan.
Michael
McFaul, who served as the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, called Taylor, who he's
known for three decades, "just a consummate public servant."
"I do remember when he was ambassador to Ukraine he saw the bigness of the moment -- this is
well before Russia annexed Crimea and went into Donbass -- that fighting for sovereignty for
Ukraine and democracy and anti-corruption, he was very committed to that," McFaul said.
"... This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected" mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. ..."
"... Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard, they aren't easing up. ..."
"... Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington ..."
"... Excuse me, the voting going on up there for sanctions on Russia for various bogus things has been pretty much unanimous and bipartisan. ..."
The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their
wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.
– Arundhati Roy
Last week, Hillary Clinton called Tulsi Gabbard (and Jill Stein) Russian agents on a podcast. More
specifically :
"I'm not making any predictions, but I think they've got their eye on someone who's currently in the Democratic primary and
are grooming her to be the third-party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians," said Clinton, apparently referring to Rep.
Gabbard, who's been accused of receiving support from Russian bots and the Russian news media. "They have a bunch of sites and
bots and other ways of supporting her so far." She added: "That's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because
she's also a Russian asset. Yeah, she's a Russian asset -- I mean, totally. They know they can't win without a third-party candidate.
So I don't know who it's going to be, but I will guarantee you they will have a vigorous third-party challenge in the key states
that they most needed."
Tulsi subsequently responded to this slanderous accusation with a series of devastating blows.
Her tweets set off a firestorm, and even if you're as disillusioned by presidential politics as myself, you couldn't help but
cheer wildly that someone with a major political platform finally stated without any hint of fear or hesitation exactly what so many
Americans across the ideological spectrum feel.
Of course, this has far wider implications than a high profile feud between these two. The "let's blame Russia for Hillary's loss"
epidemic of calculated stupidity driven by Ellen-Democrats and their mouthpieces across corporate mass media began immediately after
the election. I know about it on a personal level because this website was an early target of the neoliberal-led new McCarthyism
courtesy of a ridiculous and libelous smear in the Washington Post over Thanksgiving weekend 2016 (see:
Liberty Blitzkrieg Included on Washington Post Highlighted Hit List of "Russian Propaganda" Websites) .
This is when it became clear it wasn't just political operatives pushing fake news about Russian influence, but that "respected"
mass media would be leading the charge for them. The rest is pretty much history. MSNBC, CNN, The Washington Post, etc have been
spewing outlandish Russiagate nonsense for three years straight, and despite the complete failure of special counsel Robert Mueller
to find any evidence of Trump-Russia collusion, these agents of empire refuse to stop. The whole charade seems more akin to an intelligence
operation than journalism, which shouldn't be surprising given the proliferation of former intelligence agents throughout mass media
in the Trump era.
Former CIA Director
John Brennan
(2013-17) is the latest superspook to be reborn as a TV newsie. He just
cashed in at
NBC News as a "senior national security and intelligence analyst" and served his first expert views on last Sunday's edition of
Meet the Press .
The Brennan acquisition seeks to elevate NBC to spook parity with CNN, which employs former Director of National Intelligence
James Clapper and former CIA Director
Michael Hayden
in a similar capacity.
Other, lesser-known national security veterans thrive under TV's grow lights. Almost too numerous to list, they include
Chuck Rosenberg
, former acting DEA administrator, chief of staff for FBI Director James B. Comey, and
counselor to former FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III;
Frank Figliuzzi , former chief of FBI counterintelligence;
Juan Zarate , deputy national security adviser under Bush, at NBC; and
Fran
Townsend , homeland security adviser under Bush, at CBS News.
CNN's bulging roster also includes former FBI agent Asha Rangappa
; former FBI agent James Gagliano
; Obama's former deputy national security adviser
Tony Blinken ; former House
Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers ; senior
adviser to the National Security Council during the Obama administration
Samantha Vinograd ; retired CIA operations officer
Steven L. Hall; and
Philip Mudd , also retired from the CIA.
Americans like to sneer at more transparently unfree societies around the world, but when you think about the disturbing implications
of former spooks delivering news to the public, one can't help but conclude that mass media in 2019 looks like a gigantic propaganda
campaign targeting U.S. citizens. Moreover, as can be seen by the recent attacks by Clinton and her allies in the media on Gabbard,
they aren't easing up.
Which brings us to the crux of the issue. Why are they doing this? Why is Clinton, with zero evidence whatsoever, falsely calling
a sitting U.S. Congresswoman, a veteran with two tours in Iraq, and someone polling at only 2% in the Democratic primary a "Russian
asset." Why are they so afraid of Tulsi Gabbard?
It's partly personal. Tulsi was one of only a handful of congressional Democrats to set aside fears of the Clintons and their
mafia-like network to endorse Bernie Sanders early in 2016. In fact, she
stepped
down from her position as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee to do so. This is the sort of thing a petty narcissist
like Hillary Clinton could never forgive, but it goes further.
Tulsi's mere presence on stage during recent debates has proven devastating for the Ellen Degeneres wing of the Democratic party.
She effectively ended neoliberal darling Kamala Harris' chances by simply telling the truth about her horrible record, something
no one else in the race had the guts to do.
In other words, Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris and put an end to her primary chances by simply telling the truth about her on
national television. This is how powerful the truth can be when somebody's actually willing to stand up and say it. It's why the
agents of empire -- in charge of virtually all major institutions -- go out of their way to ensure the American public is exposed
to as little truth as possible. It's also why they lie and scream "Russia" instead of debating the actual issues.
But this goes well beyond Tulsi Gabbard. Empire requires constant meddling abroad as well as periodic regime change wars to ensure
compliant puppets are firmly in control of any country with any geopolitical significance. The 21st century has been littered with
a series of disastrous U.S. interventions abroad, while the country back home continues to descend deeper into a neo-feudal oligarchy
with a hunger games style economy. As such, an increasing number of Americans have begun to question the entire premise of imperial
foreign policy.
To the agents of empire, dominant throughout mainstream politics, mega corporations, think-tanks and of course mass media, this
sort of thought crime is entirely unacceptable. In case you haven't noticed, empire is a third-rail of U.S. politics. If you dare
touch the issue, you'll be ruthlessly smeared, without any evidence, as a Russian agent or asset. There's nothing logical about this,
but then again there typically isn't much logic when it comes to psychological operations. They depend on manipulation and triggering
specific emotional responses.
There's a reason people like Hillary Clinton and her minions just yell "Russia" whenever an individual with a platform criticizes
empire and endless war. They know they can't win an argument if they debate the actual issues, so a conscious choice was made to
simply avoid debate entirely. As such, they've decided to craft and spread a disingenuous narrative in which anyone critical of establishment
neocon/neoliberal foreign policy is a Russia asset/agent/bot. This is literally all they've got. These people are telling you 2+2=5
and if you don't accept it, you're a traitorous, Putin-loving nazi with a pee pee tape. And these same people call themselves "liberal."
Importantly, it isn't just a few trollish kooks doing this. It's being spread by some of the most powerful people and institutions
in the country, including of course mass media.
This inane verbal vomit is considered "liberal" news in modern America, a word which has now lost all meaning. Above, we witness
a collection of television mannequins questioning the loyalty of a U.S. veteran who continues to serve in both Congress and the national
guard simply because she dared call out America's perpetually failing foreign policy establishment.
To conclude, it's now clear dissent is only permitted so long as it doesn't become too popular. By polling at 2% in the primary,
it appears Gabbard became too popular, but the truth is she's just a vessel. What's really got the agents of empire concerned is
we may be on the verge of a tipping point within the broader U.S. population regarding regime change wars and empire. This is why
debate needs to be shut down and shut down now. A critical mass of citizens openly questioning establishment foreign policy cannot
be permitted. Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor. The national
security state doesn't want the public to even think about such topics, let alone debate them.
Ultimately, if you give up your capacity for reason, for free-thought and for the courage to say what you think about issues of
national significance, you've lost everything. This is what these manipulators want you to do. They want you to shut-up, to listen
to the "experts" who destroy everything they touch, and to be a compliant subject as opposed to an active, empowered citizen. The
answer to such a tactic is to be more bold, more informed and more ethical. They fear truth and empowered individuals more than anything
else. Stand up tall and speak your mind. Pandering to bullies never works.
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For those of us who grew up during the Cold War going to Russia is intense. I have never been so scared in my life as when
that plane touched down at Pulkovo 2. And I though Dulles was a shithole.
Russians love art and they have fantastic museums and fantastic architecture. Food is a bit sketchy but you can make do. No
fat women there that I saw. In fact, you will see some of the most beautiful women in the world there. Trust me on that.
Pelosi is smart enough to know that all roads lead to Putin. But is she smart enough to know that're not just American and
its 'allied' Western 'roads', but now its all the roads in the world.
Because the world finally understands that Putin is the only peacemaker on the scene. And that most of the disputes the international
community is saddled with are a direct result of American foreign policy and the excesses of its economy.
The world is tired of being dragged through Hell at the whim of a handful of American neocon devotees of Paul Wolfowitz and
the fallacious Wolfowitz Doctrine which was credited with having won the Cold War for the West and has been in effect ever since.
Except there seems to be some doubt now who actually won the Cold War with America scrambling to get out of Syria, leaving
behind a symbolic force of a couple of thousand troops.
That's the reason for everything that's going on America today. Russia, under Putin, has turned the tables on Congress, the
neocons, the warmongers, and those politicians and elite who want the Middle East and its vast reserves of oil to continue to
be destabilized by intranational, neighborly hatreds, by terrorism and by America's closest ally, Israel to continue to expand
its borders with its policy of settlements. This problematic situation is scrupulously avoided in America and the West's MSM,
and can only be seen in foreign media. Which brings us back to Putin.
Is he following the strategies of Sun Tzu, who advises you to
'appear weak when you are strong and strong when you are weak.'
'all warfare is based on deception'
'victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first then try to win.'
Hillary Clinton is obviously testing the waters for a last-minute, swoop-in candidacy. She sees Biden deflating and realizes
there's nobody to keep the Democratic nomination firmly in corporate hands. She wants them to beg her, though.
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and Greater Israhell would have been
fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
In other words, Russia bashing by Jewish-controlled politicians and in Jewish-controlled Western media
is simply PAYBACK .
I am a Russian Agent. Well, not formally but act as one. Only in elections though as Russia forbids (after losing 30 million
dead in WW2) any military or violent interference. Agent may be too strong a word as my actions reflect the beauty of Russian
literature, music and philosophy. (qv Kropotkin, Rimsky Korsakoff etc. etc.) Maybe a spokesman?
In this coming election vote for the agent of your choice. Gabbard, Trump, (Cackles, hang on and wait for this one) or Biden
( on whom we await a conversion). This agency stuff is fun. Can't wait.
The quid pro quo for many Deep State bureaucrats comes after they are no longer in office as typified by jobs as "experts"
with the corrupt news networks. Comey was a senior vice president for Lockheed Martin before returning to Washington.
Trump is outing them all and they are out to destroy him.
If the Russians are so bad, why did we give them our Uranium? Hillary and corrupt Washington Swamp dwellers in action. How
many in Congress opposed the deal? We need Trump to be reelected to Make America Great Again.
I remember in the 80's Democrats would mercilessly lampoon and make fun of Conservatives for their (at the time) hard-line
stance against the Soviet Union and how we should just get over it: peace, love and b*llsh*t. My how times have changed.
You need a scorecard to keep track these days. Barry lampooned Mitt for speaking against the Russians, like they were the 'good
guys' (ahem, 'tell Vlad' and Kills power reset button) Make up your ******* minds people.
Thank you for bringing my attention to Russia. Had it not been for your constant denunciations, I probably would never have
investigated that nation to the extent that I have, and that would have been my loss. Allow me to explain.
As a permanent student of human history and culture, I've traveled to, and studied many different nations, from Japan, China
and Thailand, to Europe, Latin America and the Middle East, but somehow I managed to completely miss Russia. Of course I was familiar
with the Western narrative concerning communism and the USSR - I grew up with that - but I never fully understood Russian culture
until, by your actions, you forced me to look into it.
I've since studied their history intently, and have studied their language to the point where I can at least make myself understood.
I've spoken to Russian expats, read numerous books, watched their TV shows, listened to their music, and have kept a close eye
on current events, including the coup in Ukraine and Russia's response to that event. At this point I feel well enough prepared
to travel to Russia and I'm looking forward to my upcoming trip with great anticipation.
I operate on the basic premise that I'm nobody special - that there are thousands of people just like me with a deep interest
in human affairs, who, like myself, have been prompted to investigate a culture that, for various reasons, has been largely overlooked
in the West. So, on my own and their behalf I thank you for providing the impetus to focus our attention in that regard. It's
probably not what you intended, but it is what it is. Thanks to you, many hundreds, if not thousands of people have now undertaken
a study of Russia and her people, and that can only be a good thing, as the more we know about each other, the less we have to
fear, and the less likely we are to come into conflict with one another.
Bravo well written and right on the mark. If Tulsi wasn't a gun grabber and openly supported the 2nd Amendment she would be
a front runner, only a few steps behind Trump. And by the way, don't trust those 2% Polls. We all know the polls are pure ********.
When one Colonel Gary Powers was shot down in his USAF U2 spy plane in 1960 and captured alive he was asked by his then KGB
interrogators what the difference was between the Republican and Democratic parties.......and he admitted to being at a loss to
explain that there was any fundamental difference at all.
Therein lies the root problem with the American political system. All through the process it arrives at the same outcomes and
it doesnt matter who you vote for.
It could be argued that it is in effect a one party system as both are indistinguishable from each other ultimately as they
push the America PLC agenda.
The entire system is held captive by secretive and "invisible" unelected groups who call the shots and if you push too hard
they have you killed one way or another.....all the esoteric secret societies of any significance are represented.
The question therefore is this; Is America any different to China other than the wallpaper coverings?
To paraphrase Mark Twain; If voting really mattered they wouldn't let you do it.
Those on the fence need to be bullied and manipulated into thinking dissent is equivalent to being a traitor
This is true with Trumptards on this comments board. They unquestionably follow lies, manipulative, and hollow Trump doctrine
without thinking.
Just yesterday there was and idiot spewing out that 'Assange was treasonous' before engaging his cerebral matter to realise
you cannot be a traitor against a country that's not yours.
Being a neoconservative should receive at least as much vitriolic societal rejection as being a Ku Klux Klan member or a child
molester, but neocon pundits are routinely invited on mainstream television outlets to share their depraved perspectives.
Notable quotes:
"... Some of the "virtual facts:" ..."
"... The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of the Russian government. ..."
"... Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." ..."
"... The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be destroyed and replaced by God knows what . ..."
"... Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. ..."
"... It is beyond scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both political parties ..."
"... I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect. ..."
"... The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are always simplified and usually grossly distorted. ..."
"... Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'. ..."
"... It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled. A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi, is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country, ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen. (Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug", just as they call Assad a "butcher".) ..."
"... Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that attacked us on 9/11. ..."
"... Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown his way by the Arab sheikhs ..."
Mika B remarked a couple of years ago on the show that she and her sex slave stage in the
early morning that the social media were out of control because it is the job of the MSM to
tell people what to think. The Hillary stated recently that life was better when there were
only three TeeVee news outlets because it was easier to keep things under control. Now? My God!
Any damned fool can propagate unauthorized "facts." What? Who?
Well, pilgrims, the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters)
are the preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base
our policy. These "facts" are "ginned up" in the well moneyed hidden staff groups of "hidden"
candidates that are devoted to the seizure of power made possible by a deluded electorate.
These "facts" are then propagated and reinforced through relentless IO campaigns run by
executive "bots" in the MSM and in such remarkable and imaginative efforts as the "White
Helmets" film company manned by jihadis and managed by clubby Brits left over from the Days of
The Raj (sob). These "facts" are now so entrenched in the general mind that they can be used to
denounce people like Rep. (major ) Gabbard as traitors because they challenge them.
Some of the "virtual facts:"
The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist and an inevitable and indeed
indispensable enemy of the US. Anyone who challenges that certitude is an obvious agent of
the Russian government.
Iran is the "greatest supporter of terrorism" in the world." Iran is so designated by the
State Department on the annual list of terrorism supporting states which asserts this to be
true on the basis of Iranian support of Lebanese Hizbullah and Palestinian Hamas, calling
them "terrorist" groups rather than anti -Israeli nationalist resistance organizations. This
Zionist inspired propaganda is spread far and wide by neocon "useful idiots" like Maria
Bartiromo and Jesse Watters.
The Syrian Arab Government is an abomination on the scale of Nazi Germany and must be
destroyed and replaced by God knows what ... "They gassed their own people!" Bullshit! There
is no objective evidence for that. There are nothing but propaganda statements by the FUKUS
governments unsupported by any real evidence. The MI-6 funded (with USAID money) Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights (located in a basement in England) as well as the White Helmets
murder/propaganda operation states that the SAG is guilty as charged but independent
investigation says that assertions of SAG guilt are untrue.
Saudi Arabia is a deeply friendly state and ally of the US. How mad an idea is this! This
theocratic, absolute monarchy is a friend of the US? How insane an idea! Trump has a balance
sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief that MBS and/or his
"country" are our friends. pl
Yes I fully concur. We have gone from fact-based news to faith-based fake news led by the
MSM. I recall at the start of the Iraq War in March 2003, the line was out that British PM
Tony Blair was George W. Bush's "poodle," forgetting entirely that it was the first of the
British "dodgy dossiers" that made the totally discredited claim that Saddam had gotten tons
of yellow cake from Niger. So the British have no military resources but they continue to
maintain the idea that they can manipulate the U.S. and make up for the demise of the old
British empire.
The Steele dossier was the second British "dodgy dossier" that got the ball rolling on
Trump the Russian mole and Putin's "poodle."
So much fraud. But now social media must be patrolled and anyone daring to challenge the
voice of the MSM must be purged by Google, Facebook, Twitter et al.
My question is: When will the machinations of the Big Lie MSM Wurlitzer cross the line and
trigger the backlash that they secretly fear so much? MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or
else his "fake news" polemic will stick... because there is no much truth to it. The
messenger may be crude, but he has the bully pulpit to have a real impact.
I await the release, as Larry Johnson pointed out, of the Horowitz IG report on the
origins of the fake Trump-Russia collusion line. Also the pending Barr-Durham larger report
which is zeroing in on John Brennan.
"MSM has to destroy Trump by 2020 or else..."
The MSM are joined by all those folks who were wined, dined, and degraded by Jeffrey Epstein
and Hollywood hero Harvey Weinstein. Nobody seems to care about who Jeffrey abused, or who
enjoyed his island paradise. Harvey, he's about to buy a free ride out of jail. Meanwhile we
jail idiots who "bribe" there kids way into that "elite" institution - UCLA.
an ideal study would no doubt want to look into the Italy-GB-US angle already concerning
the "first dossier", or whatevers. Didn*t that have mediawise an intermediate French
angle?
This is what happens when the deciders believe their own propaganda. The media now says
that a residual force of American troops and contractors will stay behind at the Deir ez-Zor
oil fields and Al-Tanf base near the Jordon border. The media moguls dare not mention that
the real intention is to prevent the Syrian Arab Army from retaking its own territory or that
Turkey is seizing thousands of square miles of Syria. Syrians with Russia, Chinese and
Iranian aid won't quit until Syria is whole again and rebuilt. This means that America
continues its uninvited unwinnable war in the middle of nowhere with no allies for no reason
at all except to do Israel's bidding and to make money for military contractors. The swamp's
regime change campaign failed. The Houthis' Aramco attack shows that the gulf oil supply is
at risk and can be shut down at will. Continuing these endless wars that are clearly against
the best interests of the American people is insane.
It strikes me, as a matter of observable fact, that the Houthi attack had almost no long run
affect on oil production. Everything was back to normal within 10 days. I think that the
attack was allowed to occur for exactly one reason and that was to start a shooting war
between the USA as KSA's great defender and Iran as the horrible nation that has a mild
dislike for Israel.
It failed. So far.
To believe that the 24/7/52 AWACS, Ground radar, Israeli radar, and the overlapping close in
radar coverage of the Saudi oil fields all failed to detect the drones and cruise missiles is
to believe in more miracles than I can handle on a good day. It also means that assets in
other parts of this world covered by these same type of radars are just as vulnerable to
local disaffected groups.
The FUKUS thinks we are all a bunch of brainless sheep to be led by a ring in our noses. The
'Muktar' is clueless regarding our Saudi brethren, he's supposed to administer how the
overlords say he's to administer, nothing more. The CIA administration still has a hard-on
because they blew it regarding Iran and they're still embarrassed about it.
In two days, counting closer to a day and a half will be the sad anniversary (October 23)
where the Israeli government willfully with forethought let our Marines and other service
personnel bunked with them at the barracks in Beirut die needlessly, because Nahum Admoni
wanted U.S. to get our noses bloodied.
Never mind that the Russians lost close to 30 million to the brotherhood of the Operation
Paper Clip, and the Bormann Group that today controls from behind the scenes most of the
World's money thanks to Martin creating over 750 corporations initially to start with, that
has expanded like a Hydra. Any time that truth (Russia is no longer Communist) rears its ugly
head, the Bormann group goes into overdrive to ensure that the big lie perpetuates.
The FUKUS think we're all a bunch of sheep to be led off a cliff, and the propaganda mills
have created the trail right up to the edge of the precipice that the sheep are trotting.
Amen. The landslide of disinformation and bullshit disseminated on a daily basis by a pliant
media is happily lapped up by ignorant, uninformed Americans. I've had quite an exchange with
a liberal friend of mine who was shrieking MSNBC talking points on Syria and the Kurds. Mind
you, this fellow never served a day in the military. Never held a clearance in his life.
Didn't know a thing about JOPES and how Special Ops forces use a series of written orders
signed off on by the CJCS. Yet, he was qualified to criticize Trump. At the same time not one
of his kids or grandkids are signed up to fight on that frontline. I told him politely to
STFU and get educated before trying to comment on something he knows nothing about.
Thanks Colonel.
I am British and did consider the military in my youth but if I were that age now I would
not. Having seen what my political master, and yours, have asked the military to do the
danger of being sent on some counter product regime change mission or to prop-up someone I
would rather fight is just too great. I would only end up refusing to follow orders which I
understand the military takes a rather dim view of.
... regime change mission or to prop-up someone I would rather fight is just too
great.
once upon a time, and strictly I had opted not to believe either side before that, but
yes, at one point I wondered fully aware they may be legitimate complaints, how would the
UCK, or the Kosovo Liberation Army become the "Western" partner in war.
In hindsight I was made aware of this one grandiose British officer ... once upon a
time.
"if I were that age now..." That is the same line used by the American left since the
'60s.
"I would only end up refusing to follow orders..."
Samantha Power at the UN and James Comey at the FBI both had a "higher loyalty" than to the
elected government or the Constitution on which it is based. That's why they are busy trying
to subvert it.
There's a lot of truth there, Colonel. Life would be better with just three TV new outlets,
huh. Which three? Can you imagine being limited to three cable new outlets? Actually most
people probably limit themselves to three news outlets or less. They find an echo chamber and
stick with it. I thank God I don't have cable or satellite TV and I have too many interests
to engage with talk radio.
I couldn't agree more with your characterization of "virtual facts" about Iran, Syria and
Saudi Arabia. I also agree that those who continue to view Russia as an implacable enemy bent
on our destruction and world domination are liars and/or fools. The Soviet Union was just a
phase, a phase now past. Russia never ended. Conversely, those who insist that Russia is a
newly minted nation of glitter farting unicorns incapable of nefarious behavior are also
fools and/or liars. Russia is a formidable competitor, fully capable and willing to take
prudent actions in pursuit of her interests. We should respect her and seek cooperation where
we can and tolerance where we must.
How the never-Trumpers treat Tulsi Gabbard is shameful. What Clinton recently said is mild
compared to what others have been saying for quite some time. Calling Tulsi a Russian asset
is foolishly wrong. That Russia may prefer Tulsi over other potential Presidential candidates
should be seen as a positive thing. A policy of mutual respect, cooperation and tolerance
between our two countries would benefit the entire world.
America needed to restore the Kuwait monarchy for freedom and democracy. Remember defense
Secretary Dick Cheney sending captured Iraq arms to the Taliban.
Same play book was used to run Libyan arms through Bengazi to Wahhabism freedom fighter
"ISIS" and the al Lindsey McCain head choppers.
The nonsense will end since not even the United States can endure these costs. Did you hear
Trump? 8 trillion yankee dollars and nothing to show for it.
What is highly alarming, almost terrifying, is that really well educated people who have
achieved great things in their careers and are pillars of society believe this crap.
I had dinner guests last week; a former Chairman of a bank and his wife who is a highly
acclaimed Professor of public Health and Epidemiology who told me how awful Trump and Putin
are neither of these friends are what you could remotely classify as Social Justice
leftists.
My problem is that I don't know where to start to try and put them right without them
thinking I'm a tinfoil hatted conspiracy nut. I wish there was a website dedicated solely to
purveying basic truthful information that is not perhaps as esoteric as SST. Should I try and
start one or are there already good examples to point to?
I'm thinking this is so far and so deep there is nothing that can or will be done. Trump's
election and presidency has lifted the curtain on the puppet show. This recent Syria troop
removal is Trump's second attempt at openly declaring troops will be pulled out of Syria only
to have the military has said, "Um, no, we will stay and simply relocate."
Trump openly
called for FISA warrants to be declassified only to have the DOJ and FBI either ignore and
defy him. Groups like Judicial Watch and others go into court to get the requested
information through FOIA and DOJ and FBI lawyers and the courts block them.
It is beyond
scary to see just how entrenched and powerful Deep State is and how it involves/controls both
political parties. Trump has faced hurricane winds of opposition from day one and has been
constantly subverted by his own party and his own people. I don't know how he can get up
every day and continue to fight the obvious and concerted Deep State coup against him. I pray
for him. I pray the rosary for him.
There are members within Trump's own party who have agreed that there should be an
investigation into the impeachment of Trump for running a yellow light (at most). Again,
members of his own party. Renowned Constitutional lawyers John Yoo and Alan Dershowitz, from
Cal-Berkeley and Harvard laws schools respectively, have said that not only has Trump done
nothing, even remotely, which could trigger an impeachment inquiry but if Congress were to do
so it would be unconstitutional and illegal. But alas, who would enforce this? Deep State
snakes like John Roberts at the Supreme Court? Robert has already signed off on the coup (
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/10/john-roberts-mitch-mcconnell-trump-impeachment-trial.amp).
The only thing that separates America from falling into the abyss is Trump, a handful of
people in Washington, a few conservative talk show hosts, and about 40% of America. Many
people have talked a good game at points but I think in the end are just double agents of the
dark side/Deep State (Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, ... IG Horowitz, etc.). And some, such
as Chris Wray, are unabashed dark side/Deep State agents in good standing.
As St. Thomas More said, "The times are never so bad that a good man cannot live in them."
I have faith in Barr. I have faith in Durham. Two men whose Catholic faith is integral to
every aspect of their lives and work. But with as pervasive, entrenched, and powerful as the
Deep State is I'm skeptical they have the power to do anything. Btw, here's U.S. Attorney
John Durham's lecture before the Thomistic Institute at Yale (hosted by the Dominican Order):
https://soundcloud.com/thomisticinstitute/perspective-of-a-catholic-prosecutor-honorable-john-durham
One thing that really amuses me is that the marionettes of Deep State in the media and
politics actually believe that once Trump is gone their puppet show theatre can resume like
nothing happened. Sorry, but there is no coming back from this. They will be lucky if the
worst thing that happens is a sizable part of of the American populace protests by throwing
sand in the gears. I'm afraid it will end much worse.
I doubt there is any magic bullet website or other source of information that would turn
people over night. A good start would be encouraging them to read transcripts of various
Putin and Lavrov speeches and pressers, also Valdai Club, economic forum ect.
Most only get to see the odd sentence or paragragh in western MSM with an entirely
fictional story built around it, so perhaps and MSM piece like that and the transcript of the
relevant presser or speech alongside it.
I suspect the fine detail in Putin and Lavrov's replies to press questions
rather than cliches would surprise many people.
Walrus--100% my experience as well. Many dinners with "liberal" even "progressive" friends,
mostly of the retired kind require great psychic energy. Their Overton Window is 1"-square,
making exchanges very difficult to squeeze even minimal bits of political reality.
My daily
blog tour, like MW's above, takes me through: Moon of Alabama, Naked Capitalism, SST, Caitlin
Johnstone, Grayzone and a few others. I'm intel gathering -- but I need to figure out how to
convey broader perspectives even to my 40-45 year-old children and their friends. Inside the
Beltway assumptions are hard to de-program.
While I agree with the essence of the post I disagree with the characterization of SOHR. It
tends to get its stuff right. I have listed several significant events where SOHR disagreed
with the official narrative: On Sources And Information - The Syrian
Observatory For Human Rights . Those are exactly the moments where SOHR is disregarded by
the pressitude.
It is the selective quoting of such sources that paint them as partisan even as they try
to stay somewhat neutral.
---
@Pat - Any comment to the Gen. McRaven op-ed in the NYT? Our Republic
Is Under Attack From the President If President Trump doesn't demonstrate the leadership that America needs, then it is time
for a new person in the Oval Office.
Isn't it a call to mutiny? It seems to me to be far beyond the allowed political comment
from a retired General.
Those that look up the pole, all they see is assholes. Those that look down all they see is
assholes, but those that look straight ahead, they see which path to take.
The colonel's complaint implicitly assumes that things were not always thus. My adult
experience since I saw a war up close has been that the "facts" of our public discourse are
always simplified and usually grossly distorted.
Is the Iranian regime terrible? Well, yes,
but it is also a regime that holds real elections and often loses them. Not in the same
league of awful with Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.
Similarly with the other examples. The
"facts" have in each case a basis in truth but do not by themselves give a true picture. Is
our discourse more unfair to Russia than it was to Nasser's Egypt? Is our promotion of Saudi
Arabia any worse than our adulation of Chiang Kai-shek?
Not only are the MSM married to a narrative but they feel compelled to attack the few who
ever challenge the orthodoxy. For example, 'Tulsi Gabbard met with the war criminal Assad'.
It would do our vaunted free press wonders if they traveled to Damascus instead of
repeating the same tired talking points about Syria. I'll never forget the look on Gabbard's
face when she talked about the Syrians came up to her and said, 'why are you attacking us,
what did we do to you'. Meeting real people can undo a lifetime of blather and must be
stopped at all cost.
b Perhaps memory fails me but I think SOHR propagated the SAG gas attacks mythology. I have
stated that McRaven should be recalled to active duty and court-martialed. I could find
several punitice articles in UCMJ under which he could be charged.
When McCain returned from the Hanoi Hilton he could have been prosecuted for treason he was
not because "peace with honour" overrode UCMJ and honour. McRaven is being offered up as a
distraction. Call him back to active duty yes, and assign him somewhere dreary, unimportant
and far from CONUS. Ignore the stuff he is blathering while he is retired, if he repeats
blather while on active duty then the navy might be able to recover some honour.
No...your memory does not fail you, Colonel, the SOHR was the main source cited at MSM level
on the alleged protests which gave place to the destruction of Syria and the legitimation and
labelling of alleged "moderate rebels" which then resulted being but terrorist jihadi groups
brought mainly from abroad under financing and mtrainning of non Syrian actors...
The source on the alleged atrocities commited by Assad was SOHR at the first years of the
war on Syria, along with Doctors Without Borders and "special envoys" by British and French
main papers reporting from the former, and first, "Baba Amr" caliphate in Homs....I am
meaning the times of Sunday Times´ Marie Colvin and the other woman from Le
Figaro , who then resulted or KIA or caught amongst the jihadists ranks along with other
foreign "special envoys" who then were released in a truce with Assad through a safe
corridor, especially made for that end, to Lebanon.
I fear SOHR was the source of the super-trolling consisting on inundating the MSM comments
sections, like that of El País , with dozens of vertical doctored photographs
every time any of us aware entered commenting to debunk their fake news.
I remember this since that was the starting point of Elora as net activist...( till then,
just a baby, peacefully growing up...unaware....but had no election, felt it was a duty,
since, as you comment here, so few people aware...Having known Syria few years before she
could not believe what they were telling about Assad, who, eventhough not being perfect, as
it has been long ago proved any other leader in the world is, had managed to show the
visitant a flourishing Syria where misery present at other ME countries was almost
absent...
It is only lately, when the Syrian war was obviously lost for the US coalition, that the
SOHR started contradicting some fake claims by the White Helmets, especially last two alleged
chemical attacks, if Elora´s not wrong.
Why this, why now, why in this form? Probably those powers behind SOHR trying to secure a
part in the cake of reconstruction and future of Syria...since, it got obvious, love for
Syria is not amongst one of their mottos...
Trump approves $4.5 million in aid for Syria's White Helmets
WASHINGTON -- US President Donald Trump has authorized $4.5 million in aid for Syria's
White Helmets group, famed for rescuing wounded civilians from the frontlines in the civil
war, the White House says today...
Thank you for this refuge from the noise. How long before the strangling of information makes
its way here, and to Craig Murray, Naked Capitalism, and others who look on with clear eyes?
Humans are copy/paste artists and generally not very good at creative thinking. When shown a
series of steps to achieve a reward people will repeat all the steps including clearly
unnecessary ones. Monkeys will drop unnecessary steps and frequently show more creativity by
using a different method to achieve the reward instead of copying.
The old story goes how a woman always cut the ends off a roast before putting it in a pan.
When her daughter asks why she doesn't know, asks her mother who doesn't know and asks the
great grandmother who laughs and says her pan was too small.
I suspect it is a functional tradeoff that lets us transfer great amounts of cultural
information and maintain a civilization of sorts. It creates a tough environment for
innovators and allows for easy manipulation of the majority.
Nature of course always has a sprinkling of minority traits in the gene pool to allow for
sudden changes in the environment. Most likely those of us that are more critical thinkers
and like in depth, multi-dimensional viewpoints and historical knowledge are always going to
be standing by watching the crowd do their copy/paste thing.
The rise of the internet giving easy access to more "sources" means more fragmentation in
worldviews than ever before depending on where people copy/paste from.
Re: only three TV channels and they all said the same thing!
Once Upon a Time, not so long ago, publishing news was hard. For one thing, you needed a
printing press, which was big, expensive and required housing and specialized technicians to
operate it. Not only that, but a printing press cost money for every sheet of paper printed,
and you had to spend more money to distribute what he printed.
They say that "freedom of the press belongs to those who own one" but there's more! Unless
you were already rich and planned to publish as an expensive and time-consuming hobby, you
needed an income stream. You would get some money from subscriptions, but subscriptions are
really a means to sell advertising. Dependence on advertising meant that there were some
people the publisher had to keep happy, and others he could not afford to annoy.
Anyone who knows anything about local news knows this. At best, it's a tightrope walk
between giving subscribers the news they want to know, and not infuriating your advertisers.
The result was a sort of natural censorship. Publishers had to think long and hard before
they published anything that would tork the bigwigs off. The fact that a publisher was tied
to a physical location and physical assets also made libel suits much easier.
The same thing applied to broadcast TV, only more so. It took orders of magnitude more
money, and you were restricted to a limited amount of bandwidth.
The internet changed all that. Now, any anonymous toolio with a laptop ($299 cheap at
WallyWorld) and WiFi (free at many businesses) can go into the news publishing business by
nightfall, and with worldwide distribution and an advertising revenue stream, to boot.
Marginal cost of readership is zero.
Needless to say, this development has The People That Matter very concerned, and they are
working hard to stuff that genie back into the bottle.
For what it's worth, I found the late Udo Ulfkotte's personal-experience book "Bought
Jounalism" to be quite interesting on this topic, as it details the kind of nuts-and-bolts of
print-media prostitution. But I would really like to see an org-chart sometime of the
overlapping, possibly competing, mission control centers (if that's the right phrase) that
control the various "Wurlitzer" messaging and who, ultimately, is on charge of these. It has
been intriguing to watch, since Kerry uttered his "the Internet makes it very hard to govern"
line years ago, the blurry outline of a vast operation to shut down any non-approved media
messages, now including all social media. To give credit where credit is due, "they" sure
have done a bang-up job in feeding bullshit across all platforms down the throats of a
Western people, like a goose being fattened up for foie gras.
"...the US government (along with our British and Israeli helpmates and masters) are the
preeminent creators and purveyors of the manufactured virtual facts on which we base our
policy."
Sir
I've been perplexed for some time what the objectives are of these virtual fact creators?
When one digs into who the movers & shakers are in the virtual fact creation apparatus
then it seems very much analogous to the Jeffrey Epstein orbit. Folks bound together through
the carrot of extraordinary personal gain and the stick of personal destruction. Your
Drinking the Koolaid, is a seminal work in exploring how these virtual facts are created and
how those who challenge the creation are marginalized and even destroyed personally.
IMO, policy making on the basis of virtual facts extends beyond foreign policy to economic
and financial policy as well as healthcare policy in the US. The symptoms are seen in growing
wealth inequality and increased market concentration globally and financial policy completely
unmoored from common sense and sophistry an important element in virtual fact creation.
We're seeing signs of the early breakdown in social cohesion with social unrest in France,
Spain, Hong Kong, Chile, Lebanon, Ecuador. Brexit and the election of Trump despite the
intensity and vitriolic nature of how the media was used against them. The impeachment of
Trump another tool in the desperate attempt to retain and consolidate power. Maybe we're in
the Fourth Turning as Howe & Strauss label it.
"The Soviet Union never ended. Russia is still communist ..."
In the interest of specificity and accountability, where/who in the MSM are asserting
that?
You (PL) are making a serious charge.
Just who is guilty of perpetrating such a blatant falsehood?
well it seems to me that the groundwork is being laid for an authoritarian state - and it
already has sophisticated tools that are unprecedented in their scope and depth and ability
to store data. And the whole enterprise is based on three rules:
1) secrecy - data is restricted to "insiders";
2) deception - the "outsiders" (you know, the citizens) are regarded as a herd of cattle to
be managed - with lies and disinformation so we don't get any ideas;
3) ruthless enforcement to dehumanize and destroy dissent. Just consider the torture and
destruction of Journalist Julian Assange: https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/
Not sure what the appropriate response is but I spend a lot of time at my camp working in
the woods. Thanks, Colonel Lang, for maintaining this site.
Keith Harbaugh
This is my opinion. I am uninterested in proving anything to you. If you listen to what is
said on the MSM (including Fox) it is evident that in the "minds" of the media squirrels
Russia is just the USSR in disguise. Try listening to what they are saying as sub-text.
The request was not just for my benefit, but with the thought that it would be useful to
document the occurrences of such clearly false statements in the media.
It is certainly true that Russia is being demonized in all the MSM I have sampled.
A frequent criticism is that Putin, like Assad, and earlier Saddam and Quadaffi,
is essentially an illegitimate ruler of his country,
ruling through brute force and without the consent of his countrymen.
(Thus the WaPo editorials routinely call Putin a "thug",
just as they call Assad a "butcher".)
I am certainly not endorsing that view, just reporting what I hear and read.
When I hear that, I harken back to my graduate school days,
when the same sort of charges were leveled against America, which was usually spelled
"Amerika", or sometimes "AmeriKKKa", and described as a racist, imperialist, fascist country
whose establishment must be "Smashed".
I believe the core group of people who so wanted a revolution in America in 1970
(which they essentially got, as we have seen over the last 50 years)
are much the same as those now demonizing Russia.
Here is some specificity on their complaints against Russia back then:
They were not opposed to the USSR, or communism.
Many of them were in effect communists.
The cry among many was : "Marx, Mao, and Marcuse" (Herbert Marcuse was a former Brandeis professor who extolled cultural Marxism).
What they did have, in spades, was a feeling that their ancestors had been victimized by the
Czarist regime in Russia,
which, among other supposed sins, had not done enough to prevent pogroms against them.
They seemed to have a deep fear of the Russian people,
based on their long experience with them.
My suspicion (actually, belief) is that the opposition to Putin is based on the fact that
he is sometimes viewed as a throwback to the the Czars,
and that is definitely not something looked upon favorably by many Jews.
"Trump has a balance sheet where a soul should be and that is the basis for the belief
that MBS and/or his "country" are our friends."
Not to defend Trump and his balance sheet mindset with respect to the Saudis, the reality
is that both parties and presidents from George H.W to Bill Clinton to W and Obama have
treated the Saudi monarchy as our "friend", even when they sponsored the terrorists that
attacked us on 9/11.
Tony Blair became a wealthy man after his prime ministership on the back of money thrown
his way by the Arab sheikhs.
It's the same rabid militarism and American exceptionalism. Preserving and expanding the US
neoliberal empire as the top priority. Subservant to Israeli interests as the driving force of
many of his moves, as he depends on Zionist donor money for re-election.
... many of his subordinates have tried to subvert his policies.
Wait ... what? Those 'subordinates' work for Trump. Trump could easily prevent the
subverting of his policies - if he chose to.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Wasn't it Trump that tweeted that he was "locked and loaded" for war with
Iran?
Wasn't it Trump that ordered TWO missile strikes on Syria based on false
pretenses?
Wasn't it Trump that fully supported the Venezuela coup? And approved of illegally
seizing Venezuelan assets?
Wasn't it Trump that violated UN Resolutions by moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem and
recognizing Golan Heights as Israeli territory? All while drastically curtailing aid to the
Palestinians?
Wasn't it Trump that militarized Space? (He seems rather proud of doing so.)
Furthermore, I don't hear Trump complaining about things like USA not following thru on
commitments made for peace in Korea or USA's terminating the INF Treaty.
Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops who had been protecting the SDF (Syrian
democratic forces) in the northeast of Syria, prompting Kurdish leadership and the Damascus
governed to strike a deal allowing Syrian Arab Army to retake control of the border with Turkey
after nearly six years.
... ... ..
Given that the deep state retains ultimate control of US foreign policy, Trump
is allowed to do and say what he wants – provided it is only within the confines of his
media playpen, safe in the knowledge that his motivations are purely electoral and not really
aimed and upending the foreign-policy consensus of the US establishment.
If we look beyond Trump's histrionics, we can see that the US deep state continues its
illegal stay in Syria, with Trump in reality having no intention of opposing the
military-industrial complex (indeed often appointing its members to serve in his
administration), with these two parties finding a common point of agreement in the alleged
threat posed by Iran.
US troops will only shift near Iraq, looking at disrupting any form of cooperation between
Baghdad, Damascus and Tehran.
Trump's Saudi and Israeli allies in the region have long been conspiring with the Pentagon
to bring down the Islamic Republic of Iran.
That said, the possibility of war with Iran does not align well with Trump's focus on
securing a second term. In any such war, Israel and Saudi Arabia would bear the brunt of
hostilities, making pointless their support for Trump. The price of oil would rise sharply,
throwing the financial markets into chaos; and all this would conspire to ensure that Trump
lost the 2020 election. Trump, therefore, has nothing to gain from war and will prefer dialogue
and negotiation with the likes of North Korea, even if it does not bear much fruit.
Trump's main problem lies in the long-term damage his actions and statements may do to the
credibility of the US empire. The photo-op with Kim was criticized by many in mainstream media
for giving credibility to a "dictator". But the anger of the military and intelligence
community really lay in leaving Washington with nowhere to go after Trump's threats of
annihilation only led to negotiations that did not go anywhere.
I have previously written about the effectiveness of Pyongyang's nuclear and conventional
deterrence, something well known to US policy makers, making them careful to avoid exposing
themselves too much such that Pyongyang calls their bluff, thereby revealing to the world that
Washington's bark is worse than its bite. To avoid such an embarrassing situation, Obama and
his predecessors were always careful to refuse to meet with the North Korean leader.
The United States bases much of its military strength on the display of power, advertising
its theoretical ability to annihilate anyone anywhere. By North Korea calling its bluff and
revealing that the most powerful country in the world cannot in actual fact attack it, the
projected image of American invincibility is thus punctured.
Similarly, when Trump announced the withdrawal of US troops from the northeast of Syria
(quickly downsized by the Pentagon), and above all gave the green light to Turkey to occupy the
area vacated, the political establishment and mainstream media swung into action to dissuade
Trump from communicating to the world that America does not stick with its allies. Even Fox
News, now siding with the Democrats, started giving wide coverage to Trump's impeachment story,
inviting in the process an angry Twitter response from Trump.
Trump is of course more than aware that a complete US withdrawal from Syria would go against
the interests of Riyadh and Tel Aviv, those who actually have an influence on him.
Turkey's aspirations to occupy the northeast Syria are part of Erdogan's strategy to improve
negotiating positions with Damascus and Moscow with regard to the jihadists in Idlib. Erdogan
hopes to be able to annex Syrian territory and fill them with the jihadists and their families
who lost the war in Syria and who otherwise pose the security risk of invading Turkey from
Idlib. Erdogan seems to have come to some kind of understanding with the US, which has hitherto
been the protector of the SDF.
Erdogan and Trump didn't seem to consider the possibility of the SDF and Damascus finding
common ground, but this is exactly what happened.
The Syrian Arab Army is now in the North East of the country, protecting its borders against
an invading army. Russia and Iran will try and convince Erdogan to downplay the operation in
exchange for some sort of arrangement regarding Idlib. The Syrian government in the near future
should be able to take back the rich oil fields, boosting its economy.
Turkey and the US have have for years armed and financed terrorism in the region, as have
Qatar and Saudi Arabia (in spite of their ideological differences). Even the Syrian Democratic
Forces (SDF) were involved in the destabilization of Syria.
All this chaos is ultimately supervised and directed by the United States, which has for
years been coordinating in the region color revolutions, the Arab Spring, and proxy wars. Any
other interpretation of events would be disingenuous and untruthful.
The withdrawal of US troops from Syria simply reinforces Damascus's position as the only
legitimate authority in Syria, undermines confidence of European allies in the US, and
emphasizes the consistency of Moscow's actions, which has always been opposed to Washington's
chaotic actions in the region.
Amidst this generalized chaos and confusion, Russia, Iran and Syria are trying to put the
house back in order again, which includes the international system where sovereign states are
respected.
The unipolarists have been suffering pronounced setbacks of late. The expensive air-defense
systems of the United States were shown by the Houthis in the last month to be rather
ineffectual; Saudi troops soon after this suffered a humiliating defeat in the south of their
own country; Washington saw its high-tech drone shot down by Iran; and numerous European and
Middle Eastern allies have lost faith in the US, as they watch factions fighting with each
other over control for US foreign policy
The US is the victim of a unipolar world order onto which it desperately hangs without any
thought of letting go, even as the rest of the world inexorably moves towards a multipolar
world order, one that becomes ever more difficult to subdue with every waking day.
So, it looks like that's it for America, folks. Putin has gone and done it again. He and his
conspiracy of Putin-Nazis have "hacked," or "influenced," or "meddled in" our democracy.
Unless Admiral Bill McRaven and his special ops cronies can ginny up
a last-minute military coup , it's four more years of the Trumpian Reich, Russian soldiers
patrolling the streets, martial law, concentration camps, gigantic banners with the faces of
Trump and Putin hanging in the football stadiums, mandatory Sieg-heiling in the public schools,
National Vodka-for-Breakfast Day, death's heads, babushkas, the whole nine yards.
"If minorities prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the
state law.
Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special
privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell
"discrimination"
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
"... How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook expansion.. NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the target area. ..."
"... Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. ..."
"... Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to mind. ..."
"... A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion? ..."
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials. Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
But its not just the US that is a war machine. Bourne's statement equally applies to _all_
states everywhere, past present and future.
If any state appears to not be making war on other countries at any particular time,
its only because it is too busy making war on its own citizens [ eg taxes, drug laws,
weapons/gun laws, religion laws, speech laws, environmental laws etc.etc. etc.], and has not
yet created enough fake money via its central bank to enable it to debt-fund consistent
overseas aggressions against others.
Wars by the US will never end because arms manufactures own Trump. Almost one half of the
US budget goes for the security of the state, domestic and abroad. New weapon development
would come to a halt if the US was not threatened. Fake news about China and Russia planning
to attack the US keeps the arms industry humming. Over a million national security workers
and their families would be devastated if Trump stopped fighting fake wars. God bless
imagined threat of wars.
This has strengthened the possibility of the revival of the Islamic State in Iraq and
the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There are around 10,000 such ISIS fighters currently lodged in
prisons run by the SDF.
And with this, "the war on terror" is guaranteed to go on, and on, and on..
Just in case you hadn't heard the good news, the last man from the president's foreign
policy "team" still standing, Trump whisperer Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left
National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust.
June 27, 2018 Harvard Research Scholar Explains How America Created Al-Qaeda & The
ISIS Terror Group
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past 5
years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
What Trump wants to do and what he can do are two very different things. The MIC/Zionist rot
in DC is way too deep and entrenched for any one man to tackle.
Trump could make all his Schiffty problems go away by bombing Iran. Overnight, the man
would be lauded as the president we need and that aging hack Pelosi would suddenly drop that
phony impeachment hearing.
Trump is finding out that when making foreign policy, the safest route to take is to first
ask, "Is this good for Israel?"
I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego. Let's
inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he hasn't
vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego will
opt for the former
@DESERT
FOX Exactly, with thousands of ISIS,ISIL(American/Israeli proxy forces)types now being
freed due to Turkey's incursions into Syria, these "rebels" will be free to re-group and
fight another day. Hence the need for American forces to STAY deployed in the Area. This is
nothing more than a distraction move by Trump, which will result in the opposite "intended"
actions of American forces being withdrawn from Syria. This will also guarantee the "need"
for a strong Soviet presence in Syria.
America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria, the only point of
contention between America/Israel and Russia was whether Assad was to be forced from power or
would be allowed to remain President as a puppet of Putin and the Russians. Syria was to
never remain a sovereign nation.
The US still hasn't acknowledged the Armenian Massacre by the Turks. Why should it care
about Kurds. US is the nation that said killing 500,000 kids in Iraq was worth it.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace.
Not really. All are still standing and not under US control. Iraq now leans even more
toward Iran and Syria toward Russia ..and that outcome in these countries has made Israel's
goal of destroying Iran much harder and less likely .
The curtailment of the Kurds, Israel's long time friends and proxy , is another blow to
Israel's plot.
It appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
@WJ
Right. But as Giraldi always points out, Trump almost attacked Venezuela. He said mean
words and rattled sabres! As opposed to Obama, who said no mean words ('cause he upheld the
"dignity of the office") but sent the fighter jets into Libya and turned that country from a
stable, secular regime into a human trafficking warzone. And also got an ambassador killed.
Here are some of Giraldi's gems from April 2011:
Libya is a humanitarian mission
it [the invasion] has no clearly stated objective except to protect Libyan
civilians
it is now clear that the rebels do not have any military organization to speak of and
Gaddafi has the whip hand
Nice analysis there, Mr. CIA lifer and Obama lickspittle. I can only assume Giraldi was
part of the crack CIA team of Sovietologists who were utterly blindsided when the Soviet
Union broke up. It's amazing how much slack he's given around here for his anti-Israel stuff.
It's like Teflon for him.
@Priss
Factor Agree, and the ZUS has killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and
Syria, for their zionist masters, the only lives the ZUS cares about is zionists.
@NoseytheDuke
The only question you failed to address is what was the true motives of Putin's intervention
into the whole mess. A few good points:
As in Ukraine, Putin will stay in Syria until it no longer suits him. He has no
long-term strategic goals beyond creating chaos and weakening the alliances of the free
world wherever possible. This allows him to play the big man on the international stage, an
essential element of his domestic appeal. 24/7 propaganda and Soviet nostalgia have turned
Putin's invasion into a domestic hit in Russia. In contrast, Russians have no interest in
Syria or Assad, but who cares what they want? Unlike the leaders of Europe, the U.S., and
other democratic countries, Putin doesn't have to worry about how popular his foreign
adventures are at home. There are no checks and balances in the Russian government, no free
media to criticize him, and no popularity polls that matter more than ranks of well-armed
riot police.
Licks for Giraldi: Giraldi has been careless but not where he lists Trumps lies about ending
'silly' wars. from what Trump has actually done compared to what he says about ending
America's wars he is a liar of clear and complete proportions
"the military the only real source of pride the only thing Americans feel they excel at"
An insightful point. Politicians support the military and its deployments for economic
reasons, but the support of the public might derive from "what else is there?" Examples of
institutional and private-sector failure abound in the news over recent years, and every day.
The Boeing Max. The hotel collapse. 250,000 deaths per year from medical negligence. Power
shutoffs. Useless college. The dive boat. A relaxed performance standard. The demise of
meritocracy and rationality. During Katrina, every agency except the Coast Guard went into
gridlock. There are remaining islands of expertise, but the unraveling is contagious.
The dirty, filthy hand of the Jew is all over America's Mideast policy. Israel backs ISIS in
Syria with weapons. The Israeli-Occupied Government in Washington D.C. has even protected
ISIS in Syria at times. The Jew-owned media gives no credit to Iran and Russia for defeating
Jew and American-supported terrorists inside Syria. Now the Jew-owned government is aching
for war with Iran, which is not a threat to Gentile America.
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime
are still there. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Replacing Assad was an Globalist goal, heavily pushed by Erdogan. We also remember the
failed presidency of Barak Hussein that never represented the citizens of the U.S. So it
would be more precise to say that:
-- George Soros, Erdogan, Obama, Wahhabism, and the Globalists are losing.
-- Putin, Trump, Assad, and Populism are winning.
The real test will be Putin getting all other foreign troops & proxies to leave. The
Globalist agenda is to keep the fight between Iran (Shia) and Turkey (Sunni) going, when they
both leave combatants in Syria. Hopefully, Putin will be able to fully rout the Globalists
and move out both Turkish and Iranian agitators.
@Johnny
Walker Read Maybe you don't know who the author of that article is .Garry Kasparov
Kasparov might be great at chess but in Russia he was big fail as a politician .couldn't
get any votes on his campaign to make Russia like America. He went into a self-imposed exile
in the West. claiming Putin ruined his political campaigning.
Now everything Putin does infuses all Kasparov's punditry
Kasparow's love for Bolton should clue you to what he is about.
Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) · Twitter
As I said about Bolton entering the Trump admin nearly 3 years ago, you may not agree with
his views as much as I generally do, but he puts US interests first, not Trump's. Can't say
same about Pompeo & the rest.
31 mins ago
The short story on Syria, Turkey, USAISRAEL, Russia –
Turkey-Syria offensive: Russia vows to prevent clashes with Assad forces
BBC
Takeaways
THEN .
"When the US decided to equip and train Syrian Kurds, as well as some Arabs, to fight IS,
they were aware of a potential problem, that their would-be Kurdish allies were regarded as
terrorists by their Nato ally, Turkey. Washington turned a blind eye to a problem that could
be kicked into the future. Now the future is here, and it has blown up."
NOW .
"On Sunday the Kurds announced a deal with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
agreeing that its troops could advance into the zone that had not been controlled by Damascus
since 2012, right up to the border with Turkey. That is a big victory for the regime. The
troops moved quickly out of bases they maintained in the north-east. Assad loyalists dug out
regime flags.
It was a disastrous day for American Middle East policy. The alliance with the Kurds, and the
security guarantee safeguarding their self-governing slice of Syria, gave the Americans a
stake in the war's endgame. It was also a way of pushing against the backers of the Assad
regime: Russia and Iran. The departure of the Americans, and the advance of the Syrian army,
are victories for them too.
European governments, rattled in the way that happens when the problems of the Middle East
come knocking at their doors, are calling on Turkey to stop the offensive. Some Nato members
can see a nightmare scenario unfolding, with Syria, backed by Russian power, potentially
facing off against Turkey, a fellow Nato member. The Russians say they are in regular contact
with Turkey. But in a fluid, violent theatre of war. the chances for misperception, mistakes
and escalation are always present.
Perhaps what has happened in the last week simplifies the endgame of the Syrian war. Two
major players, the Americans and the Kurds, look to be out of the picture. And President
Assad, along with his allies from Russia and Iran, continue to solidify their victory in
Syria's catastrophic war."
WHAT IS BEING LEFT OUT OF THE CURRENT COMBING THRU THE ASHES OF THE SYRIAN WAR IS THE FACT
SAUDI STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR.
The discussion, if one might even call it that, regarding the apparent President Donald
Trump decision to withdraw at least some American soldiers from Syria has predictably
developed along partisan, ideologically fueled lines.
Not too sure where this partisan line is, Dr. G.
It looks like they're screeching from both sides of the isle.
Both powerful Republican Liz Cheney and Hillary called the pull out "sickening".
While Republican Senator Rand Paul applauds the decision, Tulsi Gabbard condemns it.
As for 'ideological', we all know that ideologically, the vast majority of all
congress-critters (99+%) from both sides of the isle, are motivated by the ideology of
doing "what's good for the Jew$"
NATO agreement stipulates that if an alliance member is threatened, other members must
support it in its defense. Turkey has not made that claim, but it is completely
plausible that it should do so .
Are you joking, Dr. G?
Hasn't Turkey been engaged in waging an aggressive war on Syria these last few years?
Wouldn't Turkey demanding military aid from NATO, (for a "threat" from the Kurds or
Syria), amount to the US demanding NATO aid for a "threat" from Iran?
IOW, it's Turkey that has been the murderous aggressor, and the Kurds and Syrians their
victims. Not to mention that Turkey's military could make mince-meat out of the Kurdish
"threat" in a New York minute.
So it seems to me that the only thing holding Turkey back, is orders from the ZUSA and
Russia. Russia is certainly a large part of this equation, IMHO.
did not understand the Turkish mindset regarding the Kurdish threat, which they regard
as existential.
'Existential'?
Would a limited autonomy Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border, perhaps incorporating
a small swath of Turkey, be the end of Turkey's existence?
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the world demanded that Germany sacrifice some of its
territory as recompense for its aggressive military imperialism.
If I were in a position to do so, I'd hand Syria a slice of Israel's and Saudi Arabia's
and Turkey's territory – as a punishment for their depraved attacks on an innocent and
unthreatening Syria.
Definitely the Hatay province, which arguably belongs to Syria anyways.
I'm sure Turkey would call that an existential! calamity, but I'd tell them 'karma's a
bitch'.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's
actual record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more
soldiers to no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special
ops forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in
Venezuela, continues to support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors
and has exited to from treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed
conflict less likely. And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in
Iraq, a country that the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity
and which is now experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump
is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting than
all of his predecessors. These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to
end wars
I remain you most loyal fan, Dr. G. But I confess this sounds to me like you think the
situation above started on the day of Trump's inauguration.
He inherited those things by the former ZUS regimes.
He has tried over and over again to disengage, only to be dragged back by the screeching
from the members of his own party. Not to mention the ((media)).
There are a lot of reasons to condemn the actions of Trump. The Golan Heights, for
instance. But it seem glaringly obvious to me at least, that Trump is not ideologically
committed to Eternal Wars.
As you put it, he threatened regime change in Venezuela.
He wanted to have talks with the Taliban, (and the whole deepstate and their ((media))
screeched)
He "continues to support Saudi Arabia" but as Pat Buchannan points out.. "The Saudis
got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or
Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh's oil production, did
nothing.
Said Washington, this is between Saudi Arabia and Iran."
And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that
the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now
experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds
You really do make it sound like all that is his fault.
I love your work Dr. G. And consider you one of the very best, most honorable and most
courageous writers out there.
But I confess, (like so many others!), it seems like to me that you have an irrational,
personal hatred for Donald Trump that colors your perspective.
IMHO.
I didn't have time to write this response well, have to go. Hope it's not too off
base..
@animalogicMore information on Trump & drone attacks would be useful & welcome.
There is a gigantic problem in America. It makes us dysfunctional. Certain news cannot get
to the American people.
Everyone in the know gets it – do not go to the NY Times with anti-Israel news. Do
NOT buck the AIPAC agenda – period. The darkest element of the ADL will be at your door
within minutes. The US government will soon follow.
It is obvious – when it comes to Jew matters, US government employees fear for their
jobs, if not their lives. Same for the MSM.
US President Donald Trump has lambasted American broadcaster ABC News for airing a video from
Knob Creek Gun Range in the town of West Point, Kentucky, claiming that the network used
footage from the facility to depict a Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians in northern Syria.
Trump called the mistake "a big scandal" and "a real disgrace".
"A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the
Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace", the president wrote on Twitter early Tuesday
morning.
@renfro
The Crimean Peninsula was annexed by the Russian Federation in February–March 2014.
Despite all the protests about Crimea, the Donbass invasion using asymmetric tactics with
Putin out outright denying responsability, Ukraine is a vital interest for Putin, and he
would have been willing to confront America and Nato there because it is his home ground and
advantage. But Russia is powerful enough to; Putin only went into Syria after Obama decided
not to overthrow Assad. No one particularly cares about Syria and neither do they care about
the Kurds (despite them having as good a case as the Palestinians to be given a state) and
that is why jumped up Turkey can get away with invading Syria and attacking Kurds, just like
they INVADED Cyprus.
This whole thing is probably a a storm in a teacup, but if Turkey gets into trouble they
know, because they were already told very clearly over Cyprus, that if they play Lone Ranger,
Nato does not have their back. Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey
threatening to get their own nuclear weapons because Israel has them is not very good
diplomacy from Turkey's point of view. It is begining to experience delusions of its own
importance.
@renfroIt appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
Here is a very good video – Putin being interviewed. They asked him hard questions.
He came across as being very rational.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
People! The internet is there for you to verify/debunk any statement you question. Running a
website is a lot of work, why don't you guys collect the information you demand from Mr. Unz,
and share with us?
Or are you looking at others to supply you with ready-made opinions?
@onebornfree
Thanks for the link about Mr.Bourne and you correct about his statement applying to ALL
states.
They are more like progressive, merciful and humanitarian slave owners.
Be free
I wonder why the "high IQ" westerners have never deemed it fit to study their undeniable mass
psychopathy.
If they were indeed as smart as claimed, they would begin to admit it, and given the claim
to their innate highly civilised humanitarian inclinations *cough* , they would come to the
conclusion that this world needs less of their cursed kind.
Since that is not going to happen, I guess nature has its way
@Rev.
Spooner The point he makes is extremely vague. No specificity. None. Yet 10's of
thousands are dead. Ok, how about some evidence.
Why don't you go back to kindergarten, Rev?
@SafeNow
The support of the public for the military derives from constant and pervasive propaganda
particularly through movies and TV shows , David Sirota calls it the "Military
Entertainment
Complex".
Zero Hedge : " Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon , CIA
& NSA ".
@Johnny
Walker Read I was making a rhetorical point. I don't think the U.S. can decouple from the
Middle East.
I do, however, think that Trump wants value for blood and treasure.
Long-term, America simply lacks the financial strength to continue to project power. The
MIC costs the U.S. a tremendous amount of money. Budget to the MIC will continue to be
slashed over time. The Deep State in the U.S. will contract simply due to financial
realities.
Israel will be less and less of a priority.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio relative to
the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
@Whitewolf
Yes, lack of talent and totall inane radical left wing proposals whiped up by the AOC wing
and swallowed by all the candidates 'hook, line and stinker '.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
After JFK's assassination, every successive president is/was shown a film clip of JFK's head
exploding from an angle nobody's ever seen.
It doesn't matter what party they're from; they'll tow TPTB's line. All of them.
US Foreign Policy = Occupied Palestine Foreign Policy.
That's all that's wrong with US foreign policies in a nutshell.
@Bragadocious
Whether he or his father served is irrelevant. Carter was in the Naval Academy, Reagan and
Bush 43 were in the reserves. Clinton had none and neither did Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge,
Harding, or Wilson.
What is telling, is the "alleged bone spurs", and "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf".
An allegation is an unproven accusation. What Giraldi is stating, is that Trump's physician
falsified records. You think old man Trump sent Donnie for a megadollar military academy
education so he could avoid the military?
As for Drumpf, I was acquainted with a couple of Schmidts who became Smith, a Bryjolfson who
became Byron, a Pachkowski who became Berry and, no one says Roosevelt's name was changed
from Rosenfeld. The snide commentary doesn't help.
I have said all along, that there is a lot not to like about Trump, but let's keep it in the
realm of reality. Whether he wants to end the stupid wars or not, he will never be allowed
to, as long as Giraldi's old employer is in business and making up non-existent bullshit
"threats to American interests", whatever they are.
@Sean
"Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey threatening to get their own nuclear
weapons because Israel has them is not very good diplomacy from Turkey's point of view"
Israel is known to puff and bluff . It is grandiose polemic or rabid canine barking. It
was not exposed by the west . But the west now knows it ,thanks to Hizbullah
@anon
Getting women to work had nothing to do with their 'liberation.'
Even though my mom had her own [private] school, my dad's salary was enough to provide for
all 5 of us, go on annual holidays abroad and put three kids through college, loan-free.
To TPTB, it's better to tax 2 people instead of 1.
To them it's just a number game, like the 'Torches of Freedom' gambit, all spiel, smoke
and mirrors, to fool us gullible idiots into believing we do have a say
We should really start to use our guns and rifles to free the country and rid it of the
rot that's smothering it.
Oh, look, another Cartra$$hian selfie butt shot on Instagram!!!!!!
It's very old habit.Very much ingrained . It is also generational . Increasingly and suddenly
religious also as the feckless toothless Evangelicals are rooting for 1 second fame .
But here is a short chronology–
1 Plans for mayhem in Syria have been on the imperial table since the 1950s (Operation
Straggle).
2 US general Wesley Clark gave the game away years ago when he revealed US intentions in
the Middle East after 9/11: seven countries were to be invaded
3 Seymour Hersh gave the game away too in his 2007 New Yorker article: "The Redirection".
In this piece he revealed how the US were hooking up once again with the Saudi/Sunni
fundamentalists in and around Syria.
4 France's ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas also gave the game away when he revealed that the
British State (a definite CIA asset) was preparing for a war on Syria two years before the
start of the Syrian Holocaust in 2011.
"This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June,
"goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."
As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that
time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help
of "rebels"' (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)
Between 2006 to 2010, the US spent 12 million dollars in order to support and instigate
demonstrations and propaganda against the Syrian government. 6,3 million dollars was funneled
to the Movement for Justice and Development, a Syrian dissident organization based in London.
The Movement operated the Barada satellite channel
@Johnny
Walker Read Quote: "America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Reply: Kindly allow me to correct your statement.
"America/Israel have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Russia has a wet entrance into the Med via Syria.
Perhaps you've dozed off a bit over the past few years, but Russia has been destroying and
killing the FUKZUIS 'war' machine goons in Syria [aka the takfiri terrorist].
They're assisting in getting the country back [on its feet] as a whole again.
@anon
I'll keep it short. You can find the beginnings back in the 2012 coverage.
In 2012 Saudi sent Saudi Prince Bandar to Syria to be in charge of helping Syrian rebels
bring down Assad, an ally of Riyadh's biggest regional rival Iran.
They were originally created, set up and armed and financed by Saudi.
The Saudis were then joined by Israel and Qatari and finally by the US under Obama.
A new twist appeared in the Saudi rebels war with Assad when ISI appeared and joined the
fight.
This scared Saudi shitless as they thought this ISI version of ALQ might be a threat to them
and lead to an invasion of Saudi as ALQ always saw it as a' westernerized' Saudi.
Everyone doubled down on both fighting Assad and fighting ISI ..which was a FUBAR if there
ever was one.
Then enter the proxies, the Kurds, the PPK terrorist group all fighting for their own
agendas within and under cover of the original war on Assad.
What could possibility go wrong in all this? LOL
Then enter Russia. Which gave some pause to the US in how far they wanted to go to throw
Assad out for Saudi and Israel and open a gateway to get Iran.
So now we are headed to the ending of the Saud and others Syrian adventure which is probably
best expressed by the fable of the fox and his shadow.
"A fox arose in the morning and saw his large shadow cast in the morning sun and said " I
will have a camel for lunch today'. The fox hunted all day for the camel without success. As
he paused in the afternoon setting sun he saw his shadow was much smaller and said "A mouse
will do after all."
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during
the Holocaust. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
[Alexandra said:] "Anne Frank's diary was the first diary that was published. And her
voice was so powerful that it captured the voices of all the children and all the people
who had been killed. That's the way it's framed. And that by reading her diary and sort of
taking her into our hearts, we could redeem her life. . . ." [US Holocaust Memorial Museum
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/alexandra-zapruder
]
Alexandra Zapruder is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the
Zapruder Film.
Her grandfather was Abraham Zapruder, who took a twenty-six second home movie of President
John F. Kennedy's assassination[1] -- now known as the Zapruder film.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Zapruder
]
From a strategic point of view it is very noteworthy to observe that Kurdish troops are
fully positioned east of the Euphrates River. The Kurds are allies of Israel and a vital
proxy implemented to fracture Syria along the lines envisioned for Greater Israel (Oded Yinon
Plan).
It is perceived that Russia is an ally of Syria. However, Putin has not prevented Kurdish
troops from establishing themselves firmly within Syrian territory.
Israel along with their diaspora will never relent until their abomination of "Eretz
Yisrael" is achieved. It's not an accident that the ISIS flag is marked "All Jew."
@NoseytheDuke
Washingtonsblog : " Balkanizing the Middle East – The real goal of America and Israel :
shatter Iraq and Syria into many small pieces "
Thomas Harrington : " One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine
conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet "
Sanchez : " Plan B is to Balkanize Israel is endorsing its plan B for Syria just when its
enemies are making it clear that its plan A (Assad must go) is not happening anytime soon ."
Pro-Israel America launched Tuesday endorsing 27 candidates -- 14 Democrats and 13
Republicans. All have long histories of working with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee to advance the brand of pro-Israel legislation it favors. Its endorsements on its
website praise the named lawmakers for their actions favoring the legislative agenda closely
identified with the lobby: funding for Israel's defense, sanctions on Iran and its regional
proxies, and bills that seek to counter the boycott Israel movement.
They include Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Coons, D-Del.; Rep. Steny Hoyer,
D-Md., the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy,
R-Calif., the minority leader; Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, that committee's ranking Republican.
here are all of them listed .make sure you don't vote for one:
@barr
Blaming Saudi or Turkey or UAE has possibly some validity but as far as far the effect of the
independent move by any of them is concerned , it has less than zero effect on Syria on its
own.
It is like a hypothetical scenario where Florida and Alabama are independent countries .
Rest of America is splintered into 50 different states and Canada is trying to get rid of
Cuban regime for 50 years and only in last 5 years Florida and Alabama have joined the scheme
under dubious circumstances of pressure bribery and blackmail.
@NoseytheDuke
Israel was more powerful and also more favorite of the west across ideological drive until
2003
It is not a normal country . Somewhere that guilt and remorse of stealing and killing have
left a mark on its psyche . It doesn't know how to settle and be normal
It doesn't know the meaning of the power, advantage or gain . The paranoia drives to more
dangerous world of fear and insecurity . It can't rest . Even if it is left alone, he talks
to itself and bangs it head against wall . Recent election is the manifestation of more
madness . It's begging jaunt to Russia and screaming through US media show how badly weakened
the country is.
The countries that bow to Israel – UK, USA, Egypt, Saudi are finding themselves also
badly weakened ,
A seed was planted in 2006 in Lebanon . That tree is growing taller and establishing roots
, Israel will be a shrub hiding in the shadow of that tree in a few years time.
Soviet and Russia were both almost destroyed by Jews . Now they look for the Russian shadow
to hide .
@renfro
A pack of lions can bring down an adult elephant at night when they have the advantage, but
they are careful not to choose a really big strong one. Russia is fighting in the Ukraine its
traditional heartland and what H. Mackinder called the Heartland of the World Island. A
victory in Syria that only came because Obama chose to not crush Assad with a couple of days
of air raids is hardly evidence of the Empire falling.
The real meaning of Trump is the facing of the threat from China, and if the neocons want
to play games in the Middle East so what? There is a fight coming with China and it is a
match for the West led by giant Bull Elephant America, Backward ME shitholes all together
could not take down America in a thousand years.
And what were the Kurds in Iraq called?
Didn't Saddam use some type of gas on them and that's why we were siding with them? Who told
about the incubator babies, maybe some other terrorist group?
@renfro
Mmmm, okay, you must have meant something like 'organized shooting' when you said, "SAUDI
STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR." Sorry I bit on false advertising.
As you see from 'barr' at #119 above, your starting point is months, years, even decades
too late. For a fact (I've met some of the Syrians who met with Robert Ford in Damascus, now
here and still lobbying for regime-change), the US was meddling, encouraging, prompting the
anti-Assadists well before the 2011 demonstrations.
@Daniel
Rich Putin is not the nice guy we have been told he is. He is in Syria for a reason, and
that is not simply because he wants Syria returned to al-Assad. Syria is only one cog in the
wheel. World wide Communism marches on, if you hadn't noticed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=4sKxkY0Tz5s
LOL. My favourite rapid US evacuation was the CIA flying off the roof of the Saigon
Embassy while the Viet Kong were busting in through the door and running up the stairs.
who benefits from these wars – isn't it just one small but powerful segment of
America – AIPAC. Isn't it time to call these wars by the honest truthful term –
"AIPAC Wars?"
Except the main beneficiary of these wars is George Soros and his anti-Semitic Globalist
movement.
Soros intentionally orchestrated the ultra-weak, time limited JCPOA treaty to create a
nuclear arms race among Iran, SA, Turkey, and possibly other MENA nations. That way he and
his buddies with MIC investments could profit by selling weapons to all sides.
So let's put in everyone's face with a factual term
Trump confuses tweeting with taking action. How many times has he mentioned 'birthright
citizenship' and then done nothing about it?
A: Every time.
If Trump drives too hard, too early and the case arrives at the Supreme Court while it is
split 5-4 in favor of 'birthright citizenship' Is that a win? Or, a loss?
There is a huge difference between 'failed action' and 'successful action'.
Given the proven hostility of the deep state establishment, it makes a great deal of sense
to lay groundwork now (via tweets), but only launch the correct constitutional action once
the courts are prepared to support it.
With class, Philip Giraldi amused me by his article's mere title, "Trump wants to end the
"Stupid Wars?"
Oh yea! Thanks, Phil , & please continue with offering dashes of intelligent,
dissident, & unflappable humor. Haha. For example, "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs at Normandy, they were undoubtedly on
the German side."
(Zigh) The insatiable global tag team, M.I.C. and The Land of Bilk & Money , want "Big
Time" and more stupidly unnecessary & immoral wars. (Zigh) One sure path to a 2nd term
for President Bonespur is for him to get off the "low energy" Turkey/Syria skirmish, &
get on with real war against Iran , for Israel.
Thanks, Phil! Fyi, I think Senator Lindsey Graham wants to get Bolton back in The Blue
& White House, and sanction Camp Mar a Lago.
P.S.: For all commenters assembled here, linked below is Stephen Colbert's satiric
covering of President Drumpf's having followed Israel's yonder (fallen) , and establishing a
US Space Force Command! To that, Colbert quipped, "Trump can not join it because of his
galactic bonespur."
@9/11
Inside job Seven Nations to Destroy for the nine eleven false flag. Wesley Clark
mentioned the seven – Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.
Seven Nations to Destroy for Yahweh's Israel – Deut. 7:1-2 –
Tanakh/OT.
Iraq 2003 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
Libya 2011 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
How four other nations on the list that were destroyed.
Somalia –
Since 2006 it has been a mess with Israel/US Al-Qaeda running the show.
Bizarre article about US/Israel terrorists "worried" about the environment.
Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabab has reportedly announced a ban on the use of
single-use plastic bags in territories under its control.
The Al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, which has been blamed for thousands of deaths
since its inception in 2006, dubbed plastic a "serious threat to the well-being of both
humans and animals," the BBC reported, citing Al-Shabab's radio station Radio Andalus.
It even mentions that Osama Bin Laden, the puppet of Israel/US, was "worried" about the
environment too. It makes one wonder if this Climate Change thing and Imperialism terror are
connected.
Bin Laden wrote that Americans needed to save Obama from corporate and other nefarious
influences to empower him to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its
destiny."
He added that the world would be better off fighting climate change than waging what he
claimed was a war against Islam.
Sudan
Divided in two in 2011. Israel/US is pushing for more divisions.
Asked about his demand for protection during his meeting with Putin, al-Bashir said we
wanted to highlight "the big U.S. pressure and conspiracy" on Sudan in Darfur crisis and
the huge pressure exerted on his government to separate the South Sudan.
"Now we have information that the American quest is to divide the Sudan into five
countries If we do not find protection and security. America took the world leadership and
devastated the Arab world. (See) what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Iraq, what
happened in Syria, what happened in Yemen and what happened in Sudan," said al-Bashir.
Lebanon
Invaded by Israel in the summer of 2006. It made a mess out of Lebanon. Israel had a lot
of trouble fighting off Hezbollah. This is the reason that Israel fears going into Lebanon
again. After this adventure, Golems like US and its friends are the go to for Israel's war
adventures.
Initially, both Israel and Hezbollah claimed victory in the war, with Nasrallah
declaring that Hezbollah had achieved a "divine, historic and strategic victory". Some
international observers saw the fact that Hezbollah had survived the Israeli assault,
despite the asymmetrical power balance, as a PR victory for the group. According to
Reuters, the Lebanese government estimated direct war damage at $2.8 billion, and lost
output and income for 2006 at $2.2 billion. The economy also shrank five per cent, with
tourism effectively halted.
Six of the seven were messed up, destroyed. It leaves only Iran left. Iran is in the
"news" everyday for this reason.
Trump is flawed, ok then, but we had Clinton as the alternative. She would have been ten
times worse so what choice did the American people have? He's rolling up the Obama-Clinton
project in Syria which was a huge atrocity. Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have
ensued had the US backed jihadi cannon fodder actually succeeded in overthrowing Assad? It's
not a one man show and Trump has to go along with much of what has been taking place. Much of
this has been imposed upon the American people as well as on Trump.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish PKK. Why
so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have been resisting
for so long. But yet the mighty Turks are going to defeat the Kurds of Syria even as they
can't defeat the ones living in their own country? Perhaps they'll take on the inferior
Syrian army at the same time. After all, they're a big NATO ally with lots of weapons to dump
on lightly armed foes. Reality is they haven't fought anyone in a hundred years so who knows
how well they'd do.
Quit calling Afghanistan a "war". It's an occupation with anti-guerilla operations going on.
Apparently they don't like being occupied so they fight on.
Trump's name is Trump, not Drumpf. Or do we now refer to people by the family name used a
hundred years ago, or why not five hundred years ago?
Excerpt from
"Trump Mistake: Allowing Turkish Invasion of Northern Syria"
by Joel Skousen (there is no direct link to it but it is/was on his website World Affairs Brief ):
This week in a telephone conversation with Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan he [President
Trump] assented to Erdogan's demand from over a year ago to let them enter Turkey and
establish a buffer zone where Turkey can resettle the hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees that have burdened Turkey since the beginning of the US-created terror attacks on
Syria. But as part of that strategy, and without emphasizing that to Trump, Erdogan intends
to drive out or destroy the Syrian Kurds which occupy northern Syria. Erdogan calls them
terrorists because the US-backed YPG Kurds are affiliated with the homegrown Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) which represents about 20% of the Turkish population, and which has
been fighting for independence from Turkey. So while the Turkish Foreign Minister plays lip
service to Syrian sovereignty, Turkey has already begun the invasion and occupation of
northern Syria. While Trump claims he is fulfilling a campaign promise to remove troops
from Syria, this isn't really a pullout at all since only two observation posts in the path
of the Turkish invasion are pulling out. There are thousands of other US troops elsewhere
in Syria protecting US-backed terrorist rebels.
@Johnny
Walker Read H.E. Mr. Putin has clearly stated it's up to the Syrian population to choose
who leads them, not him.
Tartus has a port Russia needs and uses.
Khmeimim Air Base is also needed and used by the Russian AF.
These are military strategic assets and used to counter balance the FUKZUS 'war' machine's
bases dotted around the ME region. Of course, those you don't mention.
No president actually controls the government, least of all Trump. The Deep State controls
the government. Trump is a an interloper. Why does one have to remind the author of this
elementary fact? The threat to destroy the economy of Turkey was made by Stephen Israel
Mnuchin. Trump had to make noises as if it was his "decision" when in fact he had nothing to
do with it. What Trump wants to do, and what he can do, are entirely different things. And
anyone who has anything to do with Americans knows what happened to all the previous allies.
Mnuchin has clued in those Turks who may have had illusions.
@renfro
very bad US is indeed . It continues to sabotage ,cast evil eye,try to strangle ,and continue
to punish Cuba . That long history is really long punctuated by half hearted Obama attempt
.
Once empire decided a project,it becomes , NASA , Present Danger , PNAC or NED . The project
goes on losing the aim . The project goes on because the vested interest
,employees,pensioner,glory seeking men, arm merchant, politicians and expatriate find means
to rake up profit and launder dishonest living into honest lifestyle . Name is changed when
it suits the project . Aim is not lost. It becomes the final destination . It never stops
energegizing the dishonest, looter,profit seekers, and opportunists . Often the brains that
gather under the flag are not that intelligent or ideologically certain.
Money and corruption drive them.
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past
5 years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
Going broke happens slowly at first, then quickly. The Western cities are going broke, as
are those in the Third World. Nothing else changes peoples minds like having their basic
income reduced or eliminated.
All the promises (including self-governmement and freedom and equality) have turned out to
be lies, smoke. Computers, which were supposed to be a seamless adjunct to human existence, a
source of education and information, and a liberation from the bad parts of part of reality,
have turned into (poor but cheap) entertainment, gossip, a drug substitute, and a propaganda
source. The result is shock and horror, sometimes followed by violent psychosis [1] (e.g.
antifa).
Once again, I recommend "Marat/Sade"
(1967). It gives you a feel for what a revolution is like once the revolution gets going.
Note the movie's final scene, which almost breaks the "fourth wall" convention. It was made
during our last revolution, and the director wanted to record the spirit of what he had
seen.
@Art I
like it, very catchy, original, Art said: "AIPAC Wars."
Oh yea, Art, thanks, and a "spade is a spade" when one manages to get the hell out of the
AIPAC shade.
Unfortunately tonight, millions of process estranged Amerikan Democrat & GOP voters
are now "beamed up" to an AIPAC-approved strange & hostile telescreen's DebateLand.
(Zigh) Across aisle, including a possible Beaming Bloomberg entry, , "winnable" 2020
presidential nomination contestants shall pick & choose, finagle & sell, an either/or
USrael foreign policy posture, as regrettably follows:
1.) The Zio-Democrat War to end the deplorable Trump's stupid call to end all Amerika's
endless Wars just for the paltry good of gradually achieving Greater Israel's unending
endgame. or,
2.) The Zio-GOP's War to end all Democrat Party hopefuls' stupid call to end all US endless
wars just because a lefty AIPAC-Branch put an Israel Labor Party "bug in their ear" about
having lowly dead-ender 'Merikan workers fucking pay for it.
Thanks again, Art, and "Good night America."*
* Phil Giraldi inhabits Sinatra's City That Never Sleeps.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio
relative to the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
Agree.
And the financial debt must be augmented by degradation of physical infrastructure
(especially in cities and city support infrastructure) and the degradation of human capital
by importation of low IQ populations and effective destruction of education. And the capital
misallocation that continues today.
The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as global
trade will end with it.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish
PKK. Why so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have
been resisting for so long.
Turkish birth rate low (lower in cities than in hinterlands), Kurdish birth rate high.
Kurds replace Turks in a few decades. Kurds don't follow Turkish cultural norms, nor Turks
follow Kurdish. Kurds don't want to wait a few decades, want power _now_ (c.f. Black Power
and Whiteness in USA). Kurds use destructive commando raides ("terrorism") to get power now.
Turks don't like that, respond with same.
Long term: demography wins barring very large change.
Please correct parts of this that are wrong. I'm not following this conflict closely.
Latest TruNews godcast, E. Michael Jones: The Deception Facing the Church by Christian
Zionism
YT Description:
Today on TruNews, Dr. E. Michael Jones joins us to talk about the influence of modern
Christian Zionism upon the American Church, and how that has led to a dramatic
radicalization of US foreign policy in favor of one nation, Israel.
Prof. Jones takes the deluded xian Zionists to task, calling them "useful idiots." My
favourite passage starts @ 18:58:
.. which means you got a lot of Christians who don't understand the gospel. Because
there are plenty of Christians out there who are Christian Zionists. It's a simple fact of
life. I think it can be traced to Jewish influence in our culture Jewish influence over the
publishing industry, for example. How did the Scofield Bible end up being published by
Oxford University Press? Because it's a great scholarly work? No! Because of people like
Mr. Untermeyer pulled strings. This is the way this happened. It's the biggest issue facing
American politics, right now. The role that Zionism is playing right now, in corrupting the
government of the United States, in diverting American resources into a quagmire in the
Middle East, which doesn't serve the interests of the American people at all and is all
done in the name of Israel.
@Counterinsurgency
I'm kind of having a mental barrier with this now.
There is a guy in Vancouver who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, Jensen I believe (he
wrote to the Bank of Canada and a list of people in 2006). He argues that the fundamentals
are even worse now due to the failure to finance these foreign adventures and other factors
(expenditures on domestic expenses not matching tax income, etc.).
I haven't even taken the time to consider the knock on effects. Mentally, I've been more
focused on having to sit through the screaming match that is going to occur over who is to
blame and the lying that will go on with respect to needing to move to a sound money system
but having bankers et al try to argue for a rollover into a new currency. It is going to be
ugly, I can feel it. It will provide an opportunity for some serious structural change and
constitutional amendments. A whole host of reforms are open when you have a debt induced
currency collapse. I just know it could be really ugly and I've been dreading thinking
through how this will play out. I keep thinking that I never expected to live in a time like
this; I think back to being a teenager during the Reagan years and, despite the Cold
War-nuclear war scenario hanging over our heads, it seemed a much more optimistic time.
I am not optimistic. I'm very worried.
@Robjil
Somalia under a failing Siad Barre regime was going to the dogs with various warlords
cannibalising each other. Then the Americans were told in the flush of victory in the Gulf in
1991, that they should just kick the door in to save the dumb Muslims. It is not the fault of
the late senior Bush that Somalia is compounded of that specimen of humanity that emerges
like clockwork when African tribalism is married to Islamic fanaticism (but is there any
other kind?) . The Americans were minding their own business, but were told that it was the
humanitarian thing (and furthermore quite cheap to boot) to do at little cost to themselves
to save Muslim chillun'.
Afghanistan was no better : The idiot, the younger George Bush instead of bombing the the
hell out of Al-Queda and leaving was instead misled by mystagogues of various hues, including
his own self into sinking lives and treasure in a vain attempt to civilise the Afghans.
The truth is the further you keep away from Muslims, the better it is for your health and
sanity, notwithstanding the parallel machinations of various neocohens, for Islam is a
pernicious religion that breeds insanity, intolerance and bloodshed all by itself.
E. Michael Jones: a very wise man. He believes in free speech and is hated by Jews who, of
course, label him an 'anti-semite'. I would argue they are 'truth averse' fanatical
maniacs.
He makes a good case that 'Christian Zionism' is a heresy. I don't believe he uses that term
BUT I do.
It's just another bubbling that is bursting.
What will they do besides scream and throw tantrums? Is it time for another false flag 911
type event?
What the media never really exposed was how Syria, and every Middle East country that has
been attacked by the DeepStateZio monster, has seen the oldest Christian communities on the
planet under attack. Strange pattern. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, initiated by the
British alliance with the Wahabi's and the Saud Family and furthered by the CIA/Mossad in
Afghanistan, has corresponded with the destruction and diasporas of the world's oldest
Christian communites.
Somehow, Europe has ended up with a bunch of Muslims when these Christians would have fit
into their societies much better.
I think that none of this just 'happened'. I strongly suspect that if we were to kick over
some rocks we would find the usual suspects: the Khazar/Black Nobility Alliance.
@renfro
How?????????????????????????????????????????
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I do think it was Mc Cain.
Concerning historically lazy Saudis I am entirely confident that they were only taking care
of payroll.
( I am not entirely confident but there is a possibility that CIA did channel some profits
from Afghanistan poppy fields for this noble cause.
@Counterinsurgency
Quote: "The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as
global trade will end with it."
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road project,
[IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global trade will
not nosedive along with it.
Too much a stake for the multinationals [not necessary a good thing, but alas].
Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington
that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, which
later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which were,
at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
It's very challenging to come up with any foreign policy initiatives that do not serve
Zionist Israel's interests, first and foremost. Israeli interests have defined American
foreign policy objectives in the ME for much of the post-WWII era. Not at Israel's behest,
but on Israel's instructions and demands via pro-Zionist lobbies and the infestation of the
Administration with Israel First officials, Israeli citizens and spies. Add to that the
Israel First MSM.
@ivan
Is it methamphetamine instead of regular fentanyl ? Anyway, this logic and perverted emotion
make sense to you. Unfortunately it will reinforce your decision to switch . Business will
sure be coming back from China to rural America.
@A123 I
respectfully disagree on this particular matter. There is no US law bestowing birthright
citizenship. All that would change is recognition of what the law really says.
Trump waiting to win another 4 (still a gamble) AND for RBG's animatronics to fizzle out
AND for her replacement to not be another skunk like Roberts is foolish.
There is no underwater 38th-dimensional quantum chess being played here, and we still have
no wall.
Oops, I posted this under another writer. (Small wonder I got no answer.) Since then, someone
else remarked that at the end of WWI this land (northern Syria) was taken from Turkey. So
this is a long grievance, with deep sense of entitlement.
Rurik wrote, " .the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they
use Libya's stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring that
Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the team.
Maybe Phil can enlighten us:
We know that Robert Ford, US Embassador to Syria, was meeting privately with Syrian "civil
society" activists before the 2011 demonstrations.
-- Was Erdogan/Turkey also involved in infiltrating, inflaming those anti-Assad
elements?
-- How did Turkey involvement begin?
-- Was the CIA actively involved in Syria before the fall of Libya?
C'mon guys.
Using prior military service as some sort of litmus test to the right to critique involvement
and opinion sharing today plays to an audience mentality that encourages blind
patriotism.
There really are no necessary wars these days as they are all being fought for the banker
elite which holds no loyalty to country though it plays on ppl's ignorance to use such
loyalties for propaganda purposes.
There is no justification for US troops to be all over the world as a banker mercenary force
and this site acknowledges 911 was an Israeli- internationalist false flag which removes all
justifications for the meddling in Israeli neighbor's internal affairs.
Tolerating this to get air time with magazines that lie for power is encouraging this
negative behavior for personal advantage in a country and world striving to control the most
minute areas of our lives.
Going along to get along only brings the eternal boot down of the forehead forever@!
The fact that none of these bickering forces are targeting Israel who always was the
catalyst for the divisions there, is a huge clue that we and Israel are the problem causers
primarily. Of course we need false flags to excite the population to support the fake war on
terror within the US and Europe (as well as justify the reverse colonialism going on). Jews
for hundreds of years have counted on stupid goyim to do the fighting but now that Israel is
a supposed stand alone nation, that should be harder to accomplish but apparently total
corporate media control keeps the truth hidden from 85% of the public.
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road
project, [IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global
trade will not nosedive along with it.
I actually hadn't thought of that. Now that you point it out, of course the dollar trade
will decrease. Negative interest rates are, in a way, saying that nobody wants US Dollars
anymore, and trades that are not in US Dollars are being actively sought. The decrease will
happen a bit before the USN becomes ineffective. And that will be hard on the
multi-nationals, but I can't say I have much sympathy. They were firmly behind the move of
Western manufacturing to East Asia – what did they think would happen?
But I do disagree over the assertion that global trade will remain about as it is.
The New Silk Road. Interesting topic.
Well, first of all it's a reasonable thing for the PRC to do. Historically, the Silk
Road has paid off for China, at least in terms of precious metals, and being dependent on a
single transportation mode for one's raw materials is strategically undesirable. It's a
good move. It's also an attempt to realize McKinder's proposed making the World Island into
a unified state[1].
But a couple of points:
a) New Silk Road is much more expensive than sea transport [2]. If sea lanes are cut
off, China's raw materials costs increase by several times.
b) New Silk Road recapitulates the interaction of European empires of the 1800s through
1900s with ethnicities along the Silk Road. The Europeans were resented and eventually
ejected. The Chinese are having similar problems.
China has loaned money to various nations which have then spent that money on immediate
consumption and are attempting to repudiate the debt. The Chinese (who have no compunctions
about debt repudiation through currency devaluation) are apparently taking over completion
of the Silk Road facilities for which the natives can no longer pay (having spent the money
on other things). Local rulers are saying that this makes the Chinese foreign invaders (on
a very low level so far). Just like the Europeans.
Chinese society also does not mix well with either Islamic or African tribal society, yet
the Silk Road crosses both cultural territories.
So far as I know, the Chinese takeover of the Panama Canal since the US evacuation has gone
well. Last I heard, a few years back, Panama had started teaching Chinese in its public
schools. Chinese operations in South and Meso America are increasing, however, and I know
little about how they are going.
The nice thing about policed sea lanes is that shippers don't have to worry much about
the natives. Piracy is and has been a problem, but so far not a serious one. New Silk Road
goes overland, and that has (historically) always led to security problems with the locals,
whoever the locals may be.
So: Let's suppose that the USN were to become ineffective. Only the part of the Silk
Road guarded by the Russian Federation would remain secure. The rest would be subject to
local raids and extortion from the local government. Note that raw materials costs would
increase drastically for everybody (because of less shipping), so local governments and
bandits would have motives for confiscating goods.
This would be especially the case in Africa, which is largely dependent on food imports.
That conflict could become severe, as China is increasingly dependent on Africa for raw
materials (as is the rest of the world).
In other words, sole reliance on the New Silk Road (should that ever be necessary) would
be expensive in terms of shipping and in terms of security / warfare costs. China's
bellicose policy is, IMHO, counterproductive. China should be positioning itself to police
the sea lanes cooperatively but reluctantly with a declining USN, gradually assuming the
mantle of worldwide protection of the sea lanes that China needs so badly. Current efforts
to be able to interdict the sea lanes are not in the PRC's interest, as the PRC needs these
sea lanes open. It's sort of like developing a hyperbomb to make the Sun go nova. Under
what circumstances would you use such a device? Under what circumstances would China want
to cease shipping by sea?
So, what's likely to happen? The USN will decline because it needs recapitalization due
to age and a changing threat, and the US is instead devoting its income to debt repayment
and immediate social stability expenditures. The PRC, which has never been a naval power,
will still attempt to keep global trade alive. When that fails, the PRC will trade more
with the Russian Federation It will also take what sea and land it has, make an
expeditionary force out of it, and deploy it in some trading zones (possibly in countries
that have resources China needs) rather than see its population starve and itself
overthrown. That's the standard response from any H. Sap. political organization. Things
will get very messy.
And please remember that I'm like the weatherman: I report, I don't cause.
@Stan
Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for the
West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility. A
confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,
@Daniel
Rich What part of BOTH the US and Russia are only there to serve their own
interest don't people understand. My only point is Russia is not there out of the goodness of
their hearts. People who claim Russia is fighting the globalist juggernaut and is only in
Syria to "fight ISIS/ISL" and to make Syria "safe for Democracy" aren't seeing the big
picture. Russia is working hand in hand with China to make sure America is reduced to a
second rate global power. Assad has become nothing more than Putin's puppet on a string.
Syria will need money for re-construction, thanks to Russia destroying much of their
infrastructure, that money more than likely will come from China(China's version of "Economic
Hit Men"). All the while, lurking in the back ground, that little shit stain known as Israel.
This report will present the reality of Russia's Syrian campaign. Russia launched air
strikes on hospitals, water treatment plants, and mosques. Russia used cluster bombs.
Russia almost exclusively targeted non-ISIS targets. These are the truths that Russia will
not admit, and the truths that must be understood when negotiating with Russia as a
potential partner.
It's all about the "Belt and Road Initiative". There are no good guy's in this mess, and
the real losers in this conflict are the citizens of Syria. Russia is a main partner in
"Globalization".
One of the main problems of the People's Republic is to connect the "Belt" with the
"Road". For China it is crucial to be able to bypass the choke points represented by the
straits that separate the South China Sea from the Indian Ocean (Malacca, Sunda and Lombok)
that, being controlled by the US, prevent the Chinese maritime power to fully develop. A
first important asset in this sense is represented by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,
which connects by land Eastern China to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, in turn connected
to the String of Pearls.
Why Syria?
In this perspective, Syria becomes a crucial junction within the BRI: a possible
development of its transport and port infrastructures, properly connected with each other
and with the Belt and Road Initiative, would allow China a further maritime outlet for its
land trade and a formidable trade post in the Mediterranean. A further advantage is
represented by the increased quantity of goods that China could deliver into the
Mediterranean, overcoming the further bottleneck of the Suez Canal.
Syria also has at least two important factors that represent opportunities to be
exploited by Beijing: the country's urgent need to obtain funds to be allocated to
reconstruction and development and the simultaneous disengagement of the United States from
the Middle East, an empty space not filled by the EU. Syria is therefore an extremely
interested and receptive partner to the proposals of the Chinese government, which finds
itself at the same time freed from any diplomatic controversy that could slow down its
action.
@Counterinsurgency
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and other
third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn sour for
them eventually.
@Abdul
Alhazred Thank you for that video. I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my
life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering to people like me,
but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said.
More on Trump by Shamir's recent article:
What is much worse for Israel, is Trump's intent to leave the region. There is a good
chance you haven't seen relevant tweets of the President, for the MSM doomed to surround it
by the wall of silence. That is what the President said while ordering withdrawal:
"Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA
should never have been in Middle East. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending! The
United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have
died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers
& military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE!"
Just for this recognition "GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN
THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY" and for this promise "The stupid endless wars, for us, are
ending!" Trump deserves to be re-elected and remembered as the most courageous and
independent US President since Richard Nixon.
His efforts on withdrawing from the Middle East remind of Nixon's hard struggle to leave
Vietnam and to make peace with Russia and China. If he succeeds in this endeavour, he will
be rewarded by the American people in 2020..
If he succeeds, then he sure will have my support!
One of the main instigators of the Syrian imbroglio – Saudi Arabia – had
been beaten in Yemen and is no longer eager for battle; ditto Qatar and UAE. Europe is less
keen on removing "bloody dictators" than it was. CIA, Jewish Lobby and Clintonite Democrats
would keep Syria boiling, but mercifully they are not in full command in Washington. .
@A123
What is allegedly being built is the same worthless fence. The wall prototypes couldn't
legally be used per a clause in one of the terrible spending bills hastily signed by "Master
Negotiator" Trump.
Better than cacklin' cankles? Yes, but so is my last bowel movement.
Even if we got a real wall, Orangemeister wants legal gimmegrants in record numbers. We
just can't effing win.
Don't you think Trump was a tad premature in announcing "Only I can fix," to all these
problems?
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and
other third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn
sour for them eventually.
Every high value PRC project in Africa seems to come with as suspiciously large number of
military age, ethnic Han Chinese staff.
The PRC colonization effort is informed by the lessons of former Euro colonies. They have
built-in measures to make them very hard to displace. And, should they eventually be forced
out, the locals will get nothing but destroyed and poisoned lands.
@geokat62
Know more News with Adam News covers the Christian Zionist story. He is still on you
tube.
Jones was banned from that platform recently. He can still be heard on bitchute as well as
his own website, Culturewars.com
the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they use Libya's
stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring
that Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the
team.
I have a metric that I use.
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.
Insofar as Erdogan has been aligned with Israel and its interests and agendas (the
destruction and carving up of Syria)- is the degree to which he has been a malefactor on the
world's stage.
/
Vs. the degree to which he's opposed to Israel's nefarious agendas;
– he's demonstrated actual statesmanship.
So that's my metric. That's why generally I don't have to pour over the minutia of every
action or issue with a fine tooth comb, rather I just ask, 'is this person or action aligned
with Israel's agenda.. (genocide, theft, murder, hegemony, strife ), and the question always
seems to answer itself!
Just consider the Obama regime. When I approved of what Obama was doing- peace with Iran-
it was when he was in Israel's crosshairs.
When I disapproved of Obama's treasons, it was when his actions were perfectly aligned
with Israel – destruction of Libya, destruction of Syria and so forth.
It really is a near perfect, if not perfect metric.
When Trump is betraying America and Americans, is when he's serving Israel – open
borders, drones, sanctions on Iran and Russia and others..
When he's acting like an actual American president, in the service of this nation, is when
he's in direct opposition to Israel's agenda – ending the Eternal Wars, making videos
about dead American soldiers, firing Bolton, talking about nationalism at the UN..
I'm really sort of waiting for this test to ever fail, it's been so reliably perfect for
so long.
So if you want to know if Erdogan is acting in good faith, just check to see if what he's
doing pleases Israel, and you'll know all you need to know!
Is a Kurdish state a good thing?
Well, what does the 'metric' say?
Is Turkey's incursion into Syria a good thing?
Here, a mouthpiece of Zion posits 'no'.
The Turkish government is no longer interested in helping Syrians liberate themselves
from Assad's murderous regime.
The video is very powerful, and this video linked in this link features Trump's speaking
with attendant images of the families of the soldiers and what they have to go through
.because of the lies of the warmongers.
@Rurik
As Commander in Chief tRump wanted to kill Syria President Basher Assad for having gassed his
own people & having to be restrained by his Generals, Amerikans now see another side to
their president which Rurik observed on video & gushed: "I've never been so proud of a
U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering
to people like me, but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said Thank
God. Peace."
Am sincerely glad you're "happy," Rurik, that Trumpstein moved to shed some of his
Adelson/Netantahu skin implants. Nonetheless, & I don't want to be a GOP Likud-Party
pooper, but am sticking with Philip Giraldi's advisory to, "Let's see what he actually
does."
At any rate, linked below (& fyr in ), is Brother Nathanael's latest video. In order
to stave off our nation's descent into Greater Sodom & Gomorrah, it's understandable to
me how Bro Nat prefers "The Chosen One" to continue as ZUS president over his uber-liberal
& decadent Zio-Democrat opponents.
Thanks Rurik, and enjoy the good times of tRump's proclamation of an end to endless wars
for Greater Israel while it lasts!
"Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue
for the West . . . A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons"
Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is at the heart of US
FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's
rise.
The wonderful context is, it's not up to Trump. It's not up to the US government. The world
will squeeze the CIA regime out of Syria. Russian doctrine of coercion to peace works equally
well on degenerate great powers, with the minor filip of face-saving subterfuge for routed US
functionaries.
Lindsay Graham gets to shake his tiny fist ineffectually at a sneering NATO ally instead
of shaking his tiny fist ineffectually at a nuclear power with overwhelming hypersonic
nonballistic missile capability. Much safer.
@Wally
The only way to change this cast of filthy charACTORs we have running this country is to have
a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" box located prominently at the bottom of every ballot. One I
would take the time and effort needed to check.
@Cloak And
Dagger Trump's problem is that he has very little support for his MAGA agenda in his own
party. People like Lindsey Graham who support him here and there will not hesitate to turn on
him if he takes positions that offend Sheldon Adelson. Trump's none-too-sophisticated,
none-too-affluent base is opposed by the media, academe, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the FBI
and CIA, and the Rainbow Coalition assemblage of minority voices. Even Fox News (apart from
Tucker) opposes Trump's agenda even as it defends Trump against spurious charges of colluding
with the Russians. For example, Hannity regularly charges the Democrats with being in league
with Putin, in effect conceding that the Russians are evil enemies. Yet Trump's MAGA proposal
was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian) Russia.
At the end of the day, the 4D Chess view seems more right than wrong. While Trump's
commitment to the right is both shallow and wavery, in the present setting he cannot do more
than hold the enemy at bay and wait for reinforcements to show up. That means it's up to US,
his supporters, to find ways to weigh in on his side. As the fascists used to say, a bundle
of sticks can be strong even if the individual sticks are weak.
@Sean
My question to you is: a confrontation between who or what and China? To the extent that
America collapses into a post-Christian, post-European congeries of plutocrats and their
commercial interests, such a confrontation has no clear shape. The evolving character of
American society has been put on the table by the Trump/populist revolution, and the role of
Jews in our cultural evolution is part of that even if it is taboo to discuss it. The issue
over the Palestinians is the only way to challenge the successful assumption of moral carte
blanche by the secular Jewish community, which Jewish thought leaders have parlayed into an
effective assault on freedom of speech and assembly (particularly in Europe but also here),
and a campaign to stigmatize whiteness, Christianity, and the nuclear family.
Conclusion: The issue of Palestine is a proxy for the larger issue of whether secular
Judaism deserves its current status as moral hegemon. It is the only way to raise this issue
that is not instantly dismissed as neo-Nazism.
@SolontoCroesus
SolontoCroesus wrote: "Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is
at the heart of US FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's rise."
To All commenters,
Above, when SolontoCroesus speaks, I listen & learn.
When President Bonespur speaks, it pains to listen, & I can potentially become
deceived.
Will likely get friendly fire from Rurik, but I truly wish he reads your comment &
astutely watches the very informative linked Talpiot video. Hurts when I see good men (like
him) gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
Thanks for your patriotic servus, S2C!
P.S.: Behind D.C.'s Blue & White House curtain, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin licks his
choppers in anticipation of effectual ZUS sanctions, & the Chinese communist government's
finally granting Goldman Sachs Group permission to do "untethered" investment business" in
the mainland; the largest consumer market on the planet.
@Sean'Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for
the West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility.
A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,'
As usual you've being dishonest. You agree Israel is a 'shitty little country' -- but
manage to insinuate we should continue to support it.
After all, we don't have to spend a penny to 'play Santa' to the Palestinians (as if we
had nothing to do with their expulsion.). It's the Israelis we subsidize and protect, not the
Palestinians.
In fact, we can help the Palestinians and save money too! Yank Israel off our tit and we
get to have our cake and eat it too. The Palestinians get their home back, and we save
billions every year. All we have to do is to stop funding their tormentors,
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.'
It is always wrong to support Israel.
In 2008, I voted for McCain instead of Obama. I told myself they'd both be equally
supportive of Israel, but I knew deep down inside that was a lie.
I voted for McCain because he wasn't black. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is
that I allowed some other consideration to seduce me into supporting Israel -- however
trivially and as it turned out ineffectually.
If you establish 911 was a fraud then subsequent war on terror is a fraud. The West will
exhaust themselves waging war against Islam and the Muslims despite killing millions of
people. They will dig their own graves and cast themselves in hell fire for eternal damnation
for subscribing to Santa Claus lies and Jesus died for their evils by supporting the money
changer's ideology for greater Israel project to usher in their Anti-Christ as their Messiah.
Anti-Christ Dajjal will take them for a ride to hell. He will play them "By way of Deception"
just as they are playing the rest of the world "By way of Deception wage wars." So how many
of us are willing to sell our souls in exchange for the worldly gains and pay a penalty for
eternal damnation?
gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
"I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video.
"
Gushing?
Perhaps, I suppose, depending on your definition.
But when's the last time you heard a Z.U.S. president speak of the war dead with
compassion and pathos? Hell, when's the last time you heard them speak of these tragic
victims of American f0lly (treason and war crimes), and their families- at all?
He was saying 'enough of this madness!'
And from what I understand, American troops are indeed vacating Syrian bases.
BTW, leaving for a few days, so keep up the good fight, Brother Chuck!
@Wally
Wally likes to cheap shot P.G., haha, and once again futilely asked him: "Has Giraldi ever
stated which current candidate is his preference vs. Trump?"
Get on the ball, wailing Wall! (zzZigh) Likely, even some knowledgeable CODAH associates
will inform that YOU'LL get what Supremacist Jews give you.
Haha. The Zionized D.N.C. is presently fretting over which Jewish Lobby-approved
presidential 2020 candidate they should give to their "base" voters. Haha. Liberal tribe
chieftains are confident that even Mayor Pete Buttigieg will make incumbent, Trumpstein,
Tweet-out "endless" sweat on election night.
Nonetheless, had Amerika a real choice, , Ron Paul would be my #1 "anti-Chosen One"
alternative. Refer to his article below, wailing Wall?
Yet Trump's MAGA proposal was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian)
Russia.
That's why the NeoCohens hate Putin so much, for re-establishing Russian Christian
Orthodoxy as the 'national' religion. Trump, on the other hand, admires Putin for his
nationalism and wants white Christian Russia to be friends with nominally Christian
America. Unfortunately he must bow down to the Satanic anti Christ power brokers, the Cabal,
that keeps him in power and checks his nationalist leanings. Hopefully he will overcome this
in a second term but I've been saying that about presidents for years!
@ChuckOrloski
Thanks ChuckOrloski.
Undeserved, tho -- I was just being a shepherd guiding the flock to other people's good work,
a practice I learned from your comment style.
I don't want to be in the business of educating you on un-American actions undertaken by
"Z.U.S. presidents." You really know better, but since Jacques Sheete, peace be upon him, is
M.I.A., I will now do my best.
No doubt, Trumpstein is different. Please pause momentarily and consider how he very
recently wanted to sell/provide nuclear weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. Fyi, and lucky for
the entire Middle East's general population, Trump's lack of "compassion" was overuled by
those higher in the ZUS's Blue & White House Lowerarchy. (Note: He ain't "The Decider,"
he is the ever useful & divisive Zion Tweet-Chord)
So given the U.R. Moderator sword is not activated, linked down below, is a joint radio
show, hosted by Dr. David Duke & Ryan Dawson. Ideally, this action will take the job of
trying to educate YOU from off my shoulders, Rurik. No reading needed, & just carefully
listen!
Fyi, Dr. Duke and Mr. Dawson will provide the means by which an anti-Zionist &
patriotic American can resist the evil sway dished-out daily by our "Homeland's" Zionist
Corporate Media. These largely demonized gentlemen/scholars explain how Zionized Republicans
& Democrats are curiously "on the same page" when it comes to humanely protecting the
Kurds.
But when it comes to supporting & defending The Land of Bilk & Money, they unite.
Yippie! On other hand, and when it comes to actually helping the restless & sorry lot of
dumb goyim working Amerikans, they fight like , er, "Tom and Jerry." (Zigh) Why Trumpstein
even moved to kill the underachieving & oft unaffordable "Affordable Care Act," a.k.a.,
Obamacare.
Enjoy your time off, my Brother Rurik, and I suggest, at minimum, partial evacuation from
the dug-in Jewish Corporate Media "bases."
@Rurik'That's a very honest act of self-reflection, Colin.
I voted for Ron Paul, (If I recall, I wrote in his name).
I would have preferred the racist commie to the war mongering scumbag, but only because by
then I understood the nature of McCain all too well '
Now you're reminding me of 2012. Of course, I was going to vote for Obama over Israel's
man-in-the-White House-to-be. An unpleasant choice, but there it was
So my wife and I were down in Alameda at a winery. Somewhat incongruously, the server was
right-wing, and started praising Romney. I stayed tactful, as I didn't want to kill my buzz,
but my wife -- who is easily influenced -- came out of there going 'Romney number one.
Yeah -- I'm going to vote for him!'
In an unusual display of wisdom, I bit my tongue. We'll see how this plays out
You need to understand my wife comes from a poor background. If you want to meet 'the
working poor,' go see her relatives.
So the very next day, Romney comes out with his '49%' remark. It was classic.
@Johnny
Walker Read Right. This happens every so often. I am not recommending de Sade or any of
his works.
I'm recommending the movie:
"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ", play 1963, movie 1967 [1].
The movie has very little to do with the writings of the original Marquis de Sade [2], but it
does do a good job of showing the spirit of revolutions.
de Sade had a good reputation with the revolutionaries. He was elected a delegate to the
French National Convention, but fell during the Reign of Terror [3]. He really did direct
publicly presented plays at Charenton starting in 1803, but was eventually arrested and
denied paper and pen in 1809. Died 1815, and several large manuscripts were subsequently
burned by his son, who apparently thought that de Sade had done quite enough harm
already.
Insofar as tje video has anything to do with the real de Sade, it is that the director
(fictional de Sade) manages to stage a small revolution himself in the final scene, _after_
demonstrating that the audience is little more sane than de Sade is ("15 glorious years"
scene). As in the link given by Read [4], de Sade acts as the philosophical godfather of
revolution and revolt as an end in itself.
The really pathetic attempt by ABC to pass off Kentucky gun range footage as a Syrian
conflict zone is a good example of the consequences of Congress' horrible 2013 decision
(that you may not have heard of) to totally legalize domestic propaganda. @_whitneywebb
In the age of legal, weaponized propaganda directed against the American people, false
narratives have become so commonplace in the mainstream media that they have essentially
become normalized, leading to the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts."
The bad and ugly shepherds persistently hit vulnerable & trusting Unzers with their
"best shot." For one example, the currently M.I.A. commenter, Maven Sam Shama.
Subsequently, I see no valid reason why intelligent & good men -- like you! -- should
not give their "best shot" and attempt to support & rescue lost sheeple who regularly
appear here.*
* Some lost sheep simply like it that way, and therefore, bad shepherds, for one example,
the featherweight commenter "Sean," get lots of practice at misguiding the flock.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
Right, what to do is the question now that everybody has been taken by surprise.
I'd say that the advice "get out of debt, get out of the major cities" is fairly good, and
fairly obvious, and has been so for some time. As to income, I just don't know. You might try
linking up to some group (non-Left) that seems to be cohesive and has _some_ plan of action
that isn't too weird. Under stress, cohesive groups can survive better than individuals.
You might also remember the rule of thumb that prophets can predict either what or when,
but not both. It's obvious that the US in general and cities in particular are in severe
decline, but _when_ the current system will cast off much of the population it now supports
is simply not known. Abandon it too soon and you end up extremely poor, so a sharp break is
extremely risky. I'd say that retiring debt, hardening your house against home invasion, and
finding some group as above, would be about all that would be justified right now. If your
neighborhood is deteriorating, it might be a good idea to go to another one that isn't, since
the deterioration is unlikely to reverse itself. If you're in with an ethnic group that
doesn't like your ethnic group, it might be a good idea to displace, if only to avoid the
unpleasantness.
@jack
daniels The current US system / world order will end within the next decade no matter
what Trump does. Trump is trying to shut it down with minimal casualties and replace it with
something viable, which is a good thing to do, but if Trump were to vanish tomorrow the
current US system / world order would still end within the next decade, maybe two decades if
things went very badly wrong.
Trump has the wind at his back, he's trying to do things that would do themselves (although
not as well) and that's why the appearance of 4D Chess. But, as you point out, Trump leads a
very small force of government officials, and would lose without the strength given by his
supporters. Continued support, in word and in deed, should reduce casualties (to include
Trump and his family) during the current transition.
MEANWHILE, Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US
"According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million
Americans, including over 11 million children -- the numbers likely way understated."
"Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually."
"At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity."
"Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide
problem."
"Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate
help."
"1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from."
"22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at
school, but as many as 3 million children still aren't getting the breakfast they need."
@Rurik
I applaud the sentiment too.
I'm hearing rumours that Trump has put a thousand troops into Saudi Arabia and claimed they
are paying for it.
Is it now America's lot to be not just Israel's but SA's mercenaries?
2020 can't come fast enough. I'd love to see a Trump super majority and some serious
reform.
It's pretty clear the Evangelical Zionist's are Israelis' b@tches.
America, it seems, must not only reclaim itself but also it's religion. EV is a heresy and
the leaders are on their knees f@llating Israel. It is disgusting to watch.
Yes, I agree, having trucks and trains go overland and via various countries comes with
the risk of conflicts erupting between 2 or more states participating in Chinese projects.
China burnt itself badly in Libya, where Hillary " We Came, We Saw, He Died! Haw, haw,
haw " Rotham Clingon ran amok.
China is actively setting up routes via the attic as well, so I think China carefully
weighs all its options, but doing business comes with certain risks, those are
unavoidable.
When I was in Africa [The Gambia and there about], I noticed a lot of Chinese merchandise
being sold all over the place. I heard stories of some Chinese being attacked and/or murdered
elsewhere in Africa, but haven't dealt with any Chinese businessman myself or heard their
stories in person.
Having been on that vast continent doesn't make me an expert whatsoever, but I see Africa
become a huge anchor around the world's neck. Can't use a single brush to paint entire
nations, I know, but what I saw didn't look good.
side note : I didn't live in a hotel with armed guards, I lived in a compound with
Africans, so it's not that I have no up close experience. Furthermore, I was always treated
with kindness, respect and warmth.
"If minorities prefer Sharia Law, then we advise them to go to those places where that's the
state law.
Russia does not need minorities. Minorities need Russia, and we will not grant them special
privileges, or try to change our laws to fit their desires, no matter how loud they yell
"discrimination"
Without lifting a gun, Jacob H. Schiff crushed the Czarist army and plunged its finest
battleships down to a watery grave! Schiff, a direct descendant of the Maharam Schiff, was born
in Frankfurt in 5607/1847. Although he studied at Rav Samson Raphael Hirsch's religious school,
it can hardly be said that he kept to his alma mater's standards once he had left for the US at
the age of eighteen. Instead, he devoted his energies to high fi nance and became managing
director of Kuhn, Loeb & Co., one of the two most influential private international banking
houses of the Western Hemisphere.
At the turn of the last century, he wielded his powerful influence against Czar Nicholas II
after the eruption of the Russo-Japanese War in 5664/1904. It was largely thanks to Schiff's
efforts that the struggle ended in a crushing defeat over Russia, leading Russia's Minister of
Finance to declare in 5671/1911, "Our government will never forgive or forget what the Jew
Schiff did to us He was one of the most dangerous men we had against us abroad."
BLACKMAIL
Schiff had an iron scruple when it came to lending money. He could not tolerate Czarist
Russia's inhuman persecution of its Jewish subjects and believed that no Jew should lend the
Czar a cent. He harbored a withering contempt for the world of Jewish finance that lent Russia
money during the 5650s/1890s with no strings attached. Jewish finance should have demanded
better conditions for Russia's Jews, he criticized. "But, instead, [it] closed its eye to make
a despicable profit, and rendered service to the Russian government, selling her Jewish
subjects for a few pieces of silver."
Then came the opportunity of a lifetime. In February 5664/1904, Schiff invited a number of
Jewish communal leaders to a meeting in his home. "Within 72 hours, war will break out between
Japan and Russia," he informed the gathering. "The question has been presented to me of
undertaking a loan to Japan. I would like to get your views as to what effect my undertaking of
this would have upon the Jewish people in Russia." Whatever they told him, Schiff left the
meeting convinced that his best course was to threaten Russia with financial blackmail. He
would convince Russia that mistreating Jews came at disastrous cost. Through his widespread
influence, he made it difficult for Russia to raise loans in the US at even three to four times
the normal profit.
Desperate, Russia's anti-Semitic Minister of the Interior, Vyacheslav von Plehve, let it be
known via proxy that he was willing to confer with Schiff and formulate some kind of deal.
Schiff wrote back: "June 21, 1904 I must repeat that the unwillingness of American money
markets to take up Russian financing are due purely to the disgust that is felt here against a
system of government which permits such things as the recent Kishinev episode [a major pogrom]
and the legal discrimination which is the order of the day in Russia
"If his Excellency von Plehve really wants me to come he must not say that he is
prepared to see me; he must say that he wishes to see me – and the
invitation must be addressed to me directly. The only condition which I must lay down is this:
I cannot enter a country which admits me only by special consideration and which is closed to
all members of the Jewish faith except by special dispensation. If I am to come to Russia, the
existing restriction against the issuing of passports for foreign Jews must first be abolished
"
The meeting never took place. When Russian Jews objected to Schiff's strategy, well
cognizant of the fact that it might backfire onto their heads, Schiff brushed their objections
aside with a spurious argument: "It is simply one more case of the experience which Moses had
in Egypt when he intervened for the Children of Israel and tried to stir them up, 'but they
hearkened not unto him, for anguish of spirit and for bondage ( Shemos 6:9).'" Schiff
also helped organize the distribution of revolutionary literature to Russian POWs held in
Japan.
JAPANESE DESPERATION
Besides stymieing Russia's finances, Schiff actively supported the Japanese cause. Baron
Korekiyo Takahashi, the Japanese official in charge of selling war bonds, was desperate. New
York bankers showed no interest in investing in Japan's war and even in Britain, Japan's
official ally, the pickings were minimal.
In his diary, Takahashi complains how the fantastically wealthy Rothschild House refused to
contribute a penny:
"The House of Rothschild cannot come in openly during the war. If they did, it will be known
to St. Petersburg. They cannot do anything that might inflict oppression on the Jews by the
Russian Government."
Then Takahashi struck gold at a London dinner. Who was sitting next to him but Jacob H.
Schiff! Takahashi poured out his heart to the powerful financier, informing him that Japan
needed at least five million pounds sterling (thirty million dollars) to continue her
life-and-death struggle. And much more would be needed later on.
His appeal fell on willing ears. Only a few weeks earlier, Schiff had written to Rothschild
claiming that the only hope for Russian Jews was for Russia to suffer an upheaval resulting
from the Russo- Japanese War. Here, at last, was his golden opportunity to make this
happen.
"A system of government capable of such cruelties and outrages at home as well in foreign
relations must be overhauled from the foundations up in the interests of the oppressed race,
the Russian people, and the world at large and taught an object lesson," he told the Japanese
statesman.
Schiff agreed to set US financial machinery in motion and raise the required funds. "[It was
not] so much [because of] my father's interest in Japan," his daughter, Frieda, explained
later, "but, rather, his hatred of Imperial Russia and its anti-Semitic policies that prompted
him to take this great financial risk." He would show Russia that the dollar was mightier than
the sword.
JAPANESE WAR BONDS
As good as his word, Schiff proceeded to spur major US banks and insurance companies into
action. After subscriptions to the Japanese bonds opened at 10:00am, May 12, 5664/1904, the
bonds sold like wildfire, and even more so after Japan began overwhelming the Russian army on
land and at sea.
People were almost breaking down doors to get their hands on Japanese bonds. The New York
Times of March 1, 5665/1905, describes scenes of market madness.
"When the office force arrived for work, the lower corridor outside the doors of the banking
house was jammed with people so that it was hardly possible to reach the elevators. Outside the
portal, there was a double line of people extending across William Street and two or three
doors up Pine Street."
"An employee reported: 'They fairly tore us to pieces Until 11 or 12 o'clock, we had not
time to breath.'"
Altogether, of the total of 410 million dollars raised by Japan to win its war, 180 million
dollars was raised in the US. After Japan's victory in 5665/1905, Schiff was granted diplomatic
honors in Britain and Japan. The British king, Edward VII, invited him for a luncheon at
Buckingham Palace. Then he was invited by the Japanese emperor to personally receive one of
Japan's highest honors, the Second Order of the Sacred Treasure.
"It is the first time the Emperor has invited a foreign private citizen to have a repast at
the palace; heretofore, only foreign princes having been thus honored," he boasted.
Schiff and a large entourage of relatives, friends and servants set off in four private rail
coaches to San Francisco and sailed off to Japan by liner, pausing briefly en route to visit
Queen Liliuokalani of Honolulu. Later, during a festive lunch at the Japanese Imperial Palace,
Schiff surprised his royal hosts by lifting his glass in a toast, "To the Emperor, first in
war, first in peace, first in the hearts of his countrymen." In Japan, toasts were unknown.
He made a second mistake by casually remarking to Baron Takahashi's fifteenyear- old
daughter, Wakiko, "You must come and visit us in New York some time." The Japanese baron
understood that his daughter had been invited to stay with the Schiffs for three years!
Schiff's wife was less than delighted.
"Mother believes it somewhat of a responsibility we are undertaking in assuming charge of
the responsibility of the girl and her education," Schiff recorded at the time, "but we have
decided to assume the responsibility."
IN RETROSPECT
In retrospect, Schiff's personal duel with the Czar of Russia probably caused more harm than
good. The Jews were targeted as scapegoats for his defeat and suffered a series of violent
pogroms. In addition, Schiff's powerful influence reinforced the "Jewish International
Conspiracy" myth, portrayed in the infamous "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" that the Czar's
secret police had disseminated in 5663/1903.
Although Schiff's efforts during the Japanese war and later during World War I helped
precipitate the Russian Revolution, this only led to a repression far worse than anything the
Jews ever suffered under the Czars.
Years later, it seemed that Schiff's private war might have a positive spinoff after all.
During the 5690s/1930s, when Germany began deporting tens of thousands of Jews, the Japanese
remembered the great power the Jew Schiff had wielded during their war and considered that it
might be a good idea to have people like him living in Japan. This gave rise to the Fugu Plan
that might have saved hundreds of thousands of Jews.
The Fugu (Puffer Fish) is regarded as a rare delicacy in Japan. The only problem is that its
flesh contains deadly poison that has to be carefully prepared by an expert, leaving only
enough poison to provide a pleasant tingling sensation; inexpertly prepared Fugu fish paralyzes
and kills. In the same vein, the Japanese believed that although the Jews were a valuable
asset, like the delicious Fugu fish, they needed to be watched carefully in order to keep them
from putting their "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" plots into action. Plans were made to
create autonomous Jewish settlements in the Far East. For various reasons, the Fugu Plan
collapsed. In summation, there is little doubt that Schiff's strong-arm tactics were an
irresponsible, risky gamble in contravention to the navi's advice in times of adversary:
"Go, My nation, come into your rooms and close your doors after you. Hide for a little moment
until anger passes" ( Yeshayahu 26:20).
(Sources: 1) Best, Gary Dean. "Financing a Foreign War: Jacob H. Schiff and Japan,
1904-05." American Jewish Historical Review no. 61 1971/72; 2) Birmingham, Stephen. Our Crowd:
The Great Jewish Families of New York. New York: Harper & Row, 1967; 3) Cohen, Naomi
Wiener. Jacob H. Schiff: a Study in American Jewish Leadership. Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis
University Press, 1999; 4)
"... Just to remind you: the charge against Trump is that he tried to expose a massive rip off of the people of Ukraine, made practical thanks to the US replacing an elected President with a bunch of neo-nazis in uniforms, for political advantage. ..."
"... And that is to put aside the obvious point that nothing could be more advantageous to any Presidential candidate than to have to run against Joe Biden, supported by Hillary Clinton. ..."
"Will he be convicted in the Senate? Who cares so long as he slowly roasts in the court of
public opinion."
Do you not see how unlikely it is that a story which demonstrates the utter corruption,
personally, of Joe Biden and, institutionally, of the Obama regime will, as it unwinds, turn
the people against Trump?
Just to remind you: the charge against Trump is that he tried to expose a massive rip off
of the people of Ukraine, made practical thanks to the US replacing an elected President with
a bunch of neo-nazis in uniforms, for political advantage.
And that is to put aside the obvious point that nothing could be more advantageous to any
Presidential candidate than to have to run against Joe Biden, supported by Hillary
Clinton.
"... "Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare for All (though estimates vary)." ..."
"... cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with 900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual budget. ..."
"... "The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress. ..."
Yves here. For those of you who have friends and colleagues who would go on tilt if you tried educating them about MMT, a simpler
approach to persuade them that Medicare for All is affordable is to sell them on another worthy goal, cutting the military-surveillance
state down to size.
Even then, I still encourage you to set them up for a later conversation about MMT: "Even if you accept the idea that taxes pay
for spending, which actually isn't true for the Federal government, we can still get the money for Medicare for All by ."
Note also that the Pentagon has various black budgets, an "official" one and covert ones.
By Julia Conley, staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published at
Common Dreams
The Institute for Policy Studies on Thursday shared the results of extensive research into how the $750 billion U.S. military
budget could be significantly slashed, freeing up annual funding to cover the cost of Medicare for All -- calling into question the
notion that the program needs to create any tax burden whatsoever for working families.
Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the National Priorities Project at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), took aim in a
New York Times op-ed at a "chorus of scolds" from both sides of the aisle who say that raising middle class taxes is the
only way to pay for Medicare for All. The pervasive claim was a primary focus of Tuesday night's debate, while Medicare for All proponents
Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) attempted to focus on the dire need for a universal healthcare program.
At the Democratic presidential primary debate on CNN Tuesday night, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was
criticized
by some opponents for saying that "costs will go down for hardworking, middle-class families" under Medicare for All, without using
the word "taxes." Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), on the other hand, clearly stated that taxes may go up for some middle class families
but pointed out that the increase would be more than offset by the fact that they'll no longer have to pay monthly premiums, deductibles,
and other medical costs.
"All these ambitious policies of course will come with a hefty price tag," wrote Koshgarian. "Proposals to fund Medicare for All
have focused on raising taxes. But what if we could imagine another way entirely?"
"Over 18 years, the United States has spent $4.9 trillion on wars, with only more intractable violence in the Middle East and
beyond to show for it," she added. "That's nearly the $300 billion per year over the current system that is estimated to cover Medicare
for All (though estimates vary)."
"While we can't un-spend that $4.9 trillion," Koshgarian continued, "imagine if we could make different choices for the next 20
years."
Koshgarian outlined a multitude of areas in which the U.S. government could shift more than $300 billion per year, currently used
for military spending, to pay for a government-run healthcare program. Closing just half of U.S. military bases, for example, would
immediately free up $90 billion.
"What are we doing with that base in Aruba, anyway?" Koshgarian asked.
Other areas where IPS identified savings include:
cancellation of current plans to develop more nuclear weapons, saving $20 billion a total nuclear weapons ban, saving $43 billion
ending military partnerships with private contractors, saving $364 billion production cuts for the F-35 -- a military plane with
900 performance deficiencies, according to the Government Accountability Office -- saving $17.7 billion a shift of $33 billion
per year, currently used to provide medical care to veterans, servicemembers, and their families, to Medicare for All's annual
budget.
"This item takes us well past our goal of saving $300 billion," Koshgarian wrote of the last item.
As Koshgarian published her op-ed in the Times , progressive think tank Data for Progress released
its own report showing that a majority
of Americans support a "progressive foreign policy" far less focused on decades-long on-the-ground wars, establishing military bases
around the world, drone strikes, and arms sales.
"The public rejects the predominant, fear-based framing and policies; instead, they want to see a revamped, demilitarized American
foreign policy focused on international cooperation, human rights, and peacebuilding," wrote Data for Progress.
"Voters want to see U.S. funding go to domestic needs such as healthcare, or to other national security tools like diplomacy,
instead of to the Pentagon and more endless war," according to the report.
Polling more than 1,000 ppl with YouGov, Data for Progress found that 73 percent of Democratic primary voters ranked numerous
issues -- including economic challenges and the climate -- as more important to them than national security and military funding.
Progressive national security proposals proved popular with respondents, including closing Guantanamo Bay, ending arms sales to
Saudi Arabia, and leveraging military aid to Israel to force it to adopt better human rights policies toward Palestinians.
"There is a clear appetite for progressive reforms to U.S. foreign policy," wrote Data for Progress.
In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly "defense-based institution, rather than a war
machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes."
But, she wrote, "that's no excuse for continuing to spend hundreds of billions in ways that make our world more dangerous and
deny us the ability to seriously invest in things like jobs, healthcare, education, and all that makes our lives better."
I would love to see it, but I strongly doubt this would happen in my lifetime. The Pentagon budget seems to be one of those
political "third rail" issues like Social Security.
Many people are so paranoid that I think it constitutes a mass hysteria; others are propagandized into 24×7 jingoism. I'm not
talking concepts here, I deal with pro-military people almost daily. Its the glorifying and fetishizing of the military that bothers
me.
Most if not all pro-military types are also deeply conservative; bring up *any* social program and they will wonder how to
pay for it.
I don't know, how many "third rail" type taboos has Trump danced on and become more popular because he did? I think the average
voter would be *extremely* receptive to a well-crafted message promoting the redirection of resources away from forever foreign
wars and bases to concrete material benefits for Americans. I don't even think it'd be a hard sell, once the pearls had been gathered
up.
What's so maddening about this question is the fact that we know that the military budget is probably much more than 750 billion
per year, but we can never know how much more, because the government is expressly allowed to hide and even fake spending totals.
What matters is whether the goods and services are there for them to buy with that money, and this is where real wealth lies.
Governments can create all the money they want, but if they create too much you will get inflation, or hyper-inflation if they
type in too many zero's when creating money.
Money has no intrinsic value; its value comes from what it can buy.
Banks create money from loans and that's easy too, just type the numbers in.
They can dash wildly into the latest fad, like the dot.com boom, and finance it with money they create out of nothing.
What could possibly go wrong?
Bankers do need to ensure the vast majority of that money gets paid back, and this is where they keep falling flat on their
faces.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it.
If someone can't repay a loan, they need to repossess that asset and sell it to recoup that money. If they use bank loans to
inflate asset prices they get into a world of trouble when those asset prices collapse.
"It's nearly $14 trillion pyramid of super leveraged toxic assets was built on the back of $1.4 trillion of US sub-prime
loans, and dispersed throughout the world" All the Presidents Bankers, Nomi Prins.
When this little lot lost almost all its value overnight, the Western banking system became insolvent. Wall Street can turn
a normal asset price bubble into something that will take out the global economy using leverage.
Bankers create money out of nothing and the monetary system requires that nearly all that money they loaned out gets paid back.
Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity, and when you realise all that debt can't be paid back, a financial black hole
opens up, as it did in 2008.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation.
When banks create too much money you tend to see it in asset price inflation.
We see inflation in asset prices as good and consumer price inflation as bad.
The asset price boom will crash the economy, but no one realises while it's happening.
They believed in the markets and neoclassical economics in the 1920s and after 1929 they had to reassess everything. They had
placed their faith in the markets and this had proved to be a catastrophic mistake.
This is why they stopped using the markets to judge the performance of the economy and came up with the GDP measure instead.
In the 1930s, they pondered over where all that wealth had gone to in 1929 and realised inflating asset prices doesn't create
real wealth, they came up with the GDP measure to track real wealth creation in the economy.
The transfer of existing assets, like stocks and real estate, doesn't create real wealth and therefore does not add to GDP.
The real wealth creation in the economy is measured by GDP.
Inflated asset prices aren't real wealth, and this can disappear almost over-night, as it did in 1929 and 2008.
Real wealth creation involves real work, producing new goods and services in the economy.
Banking requires prudent lending, that is all there is to it. Sound of the Suburbs
100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors means we (the general public) wouldn't have to give a flip if banks lent
prudently or not since we would have an additional but risk-free payment system consisting of debit/checking accounts for all
who want one at the Central Bank (or Treasury) itself.
Moreover without government privileges and without captive depositors and unable to hold the economy hostage via a SINGLE payment
system that must work through them, you can rest assured that banks WOULD lend prudently or go under, like they should, if they
don't.
So what is required is 100% private banks with 100% voluntary depositors and that situation has NEVER before existed in history
so it cannot be said to have failed.
When governments create too much money you tend to see it in consumer price inflation. Sound of the Suburbs
Because the DEMAND for fiat is suppressed in that only depository institutions may use it in the private sector.
Fix that injustice and eliminate all other privileges for banks and then government should be able to create much MORE fiat
for the general welfare since banks would be much LESS able to create deposits for the private welfare of themselves and for the
so-called "worthy" of what is, currently, the public's credit but for private gain.
if they [governments] create too much you will get inflation
Is this true, or is it an economist's assumption? Here's the other thought:
Capitalism embraces borrowing for investment. Real estate development is an example. Borrowing involves an assumption of paying
back more than was borrowed, but at a future date. When that future date arrives, it is in the borrower's best interest if the
face value dollars are wroth less in spending power that the face value of the loan. You stated that, but the link to inflation
is fuzzy. Bank credit is a claim on future prosperity
Rather than the government's causality, and a nebulous prosperity, it may be the borrower's CFO who then decides to raise consumer
prices to keep up with expenses. The borrowed dollars came from a banker-created asset, but the inflation is tied to a direct
result similar to the so-called "wage-price spiral." In this case, the "interest-price spiral" that is not visibly tied to the
supply of money.
I've got a new disconnect. I understand and appreciate how MMT works. It is the only way, imo, for a sovereign country to pay
for the social costs of a good society. And, of course, the government does not charge itself interest, does not expect to be
"paid back" at all. The tradeoff for the government is the betterment of society. So if your neighbor loans you $500 and you tell
him you'll pay him back as soon as your check comes in and with some interest that seems fair bec. you're dealing with two private
budgets. But when a licensed bank loans you money for a new house under the terms that you pay it back over 30 years with interests
that amounts to triple the original cost of the house – then you are not dealing as one private person to another. You are then
dealing with usury. Made legal by the private financial industry. This private industry does not use its own money – it uses the
government's money by a computer click. And the government then lets it profiteer on this tiny transaction of apples and oranges
to the degree that over time the money "earned" by the private bank accumulates and topples the steady state of the economy. At
that point there's no place left to invest that "private" profit and the whole financial system goes haywire in a panic not to
"lose" money. Money that should never have been given to them in the first place. It's an oxymoron – demanding that money be paid
back with interest when it's not your money in the first place and you do nothing to stabilize your profligate profiteering. Nothing.
Just a thought.
Zimbabwe found it all too easy to create so much money they caused hyper-inflation.
Yes, after destroying their Ag Industry, and having no Ag products to export, because Mugabe and his party assumed all the
white farmers just sat around drinking beer while the dark farm workers did all the work.
After Mugabe took the land, there was no collateral for the farmers to get loans for the next planting season.
Who knew that managing the farm was so much work? /s
Inflation in Zimbabwe first came from shortages, especially food, as things looted rhe country of 4x and mismanaged the economy,
like farm price controls under cost of production.
Historically shortages cause high inflation.
"In her op-ed, Koshgarian acknowledged that remaking the U.S. military as a truly 'defense-based institution, rather than a
war machine and A.T.M. for private contractors, will require major changes.'"
Interesting. Beyond cost cutting, what exactly would it take to remake the military into a true defense-based institution ?
How would assets be deployed? What weapons systems would be prioritized and ultimately receive funding? What doctrines would need
to change to flip from an offensive mindset to a defensive mindset? What alliances would we maintain and what alliances would
we discard?
I see that the article offers some examples, but I think crafting a progressive foreign policy would entail answering these
kinds of more fundamental military questions. Cost cutting is a laudable goal but it strikes me that there's much more to it if
real transformation is desired.
As a civil servant working for the Department of Defense, I can tell you that this would be a difficult shift in priorities
for Congress to accept. It all comes down to the defense industry political donations they receive year after year, and the jobs
the defense industry provides their constituents (no matter how meager or sub-optimal). Since defense spending is basically this
nation's sole industrial policy, I think that finding employment for displaced workers (whether defense civil servants or contractors)
is the biggest hurdle to address; a green new deal would solve the problem. We'd also need political campaign reform to force
Congress off of the teet of defense industry political contributions.
Finding employment for displaced defense civil servants or contractors? We've done that before . . . we tell them to train
for the jobs of the future as we did for manufacturing workers and leave it at that. The same goes for the parasites working in
health insurance companies, pharmacy benefit management and healtcare administration when M4A becomes a reality.
I have no sympathy for those people nor care for their well being as they deliberately, and with malice aforethought, make
life meaner for us all.
I remember when the defense/aerospace industry collapsed in Southern California in the early 1970's as the Vietnam war was
winding down.
Tech jobs were scarce.
The political sphere is well aware of potential job loss due to defense cutbacks.
I have mentioned before, the relatively liberal CA Senator Barbara Boxer fought to preserve Mare Island Naval Shipyard, in
Vallejo, CA, when it was slated to be shut down in the 1990's.
One could suggest that Vallejo has not fully recovered.
It is a tragedy of immense proportions, as I believe a future historian will remark that the USA, a nation that in its 200
+ year history had only one large deadly war on its soil (the internal Civil War), re-titled its WWII "War Department" as "Defense
Department" and then consumed tremendous resources in its purported defense for the next 70+ years.
A recent discussion with someone, that I regard as a "Northern California Liberal", about Trump's pullout of Syria further
re-enforced that the resistance to ANY change in the MIC in the USA is formidable.
He was sure that Trump would be deservedly impeached because he was pulling out of Syria and abandoning our allies, the Kurds.
And he is old enough to remember Vietnam.
The USA news media and entertainment industries (big sports/Hollywood) are fully on board with the righteous USA "war is good"
meme.
Given how the USA economy has restructured much employment and lifelihoods in costly sectors (finance, education, medicine,
military) it is difficult for me to see how there would be political will to downsize the military to any extent as "good paying"
jobs of politically powerful people would be lost.
Many of the manufacturing jobs have been moved overseas.
There is some hope for policy redirection in the Administration's recent Turkey-Syria-Kurd action. If there really is a shift
away from foreign nation building and away from endless wars over endless enmities, then that could lead to redirection and reduction
of military budgets. Watching the defenders of those engagements fall all over themselves recently has reconfirmed my notion that
they are not acting in the best interests of their constituents. Meanwhile, the sun rose today.
The current defense spending and growth of national debt
more or less "prove" the validity of MMT. This has supported the channeling of resources and energy into military activity (and
profits for enterprizes). Something similar is happening with healthcare; maybe it's inelastic
demand. (The similar something is ever-increasing costs.)
Healthcare at the moment seems to be outside of
the scope of current uses of MMT. But there are major
cost-control issues with it nonethess.
In what direction will things head if healthcare is
swept under the government MMT umbrella in the form of medicare for all? Will the government negotiate prices
with providers (hospitals, staff, pharma)? Certainly military procurement is no leading light.
While cutting the bloated Pentagon's budget is a very good idea, why is no one talking about the fringe benefit that is employer
provided healthcare? I do believe a sizable fraction of folks on private insurance (maybe 40%?) get their health coverage through
a fringe benefit from their employer. If that coverage is no longer necessary under universal coverage, it seems contractually
that the money spent on the fringe benefit should go to the employees. That money is enough to pay for their insurance under universal
coverage, so the employer pays it to the employee, the government taxes part of that to pay for the universal healthcare and everyone
is better off. The employee, due to savings in the system, ends up with more money in pocket. The employer is out from under the
ever increasing costs of the fringe benefit (plus can now claim to be paying higher salaries), and, well, the insurance companies
are left behind to pick up "expanded coverage" for those wanting to pay for it.
This and "defense" spending cuts could pay for the whole system easily, no?
The relative value of small business based jobs would increase with a functional health care system. There would be an outflow
of employees from jobs with healthcare benefits.
With single payer, looking for a less stressful job becomes an alternative. Big employers know this.
It also means people may retire earlier if they don't need their employer-provided health insurance.
Health insurance becomes a minor consideration in selecting which employer to work for.
Companies and state/local governments that provide health care coverage in retirement should see their liabilities for that
plummet as healthcare costs drop and public insurance improves.
COULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Technically, yes.
WOULD employers give the surplus to employees?
Not in this age of activist stockholders seeking new sources of "revenue." Everywhere. Benefits are simply a "cost." Human Resources
is a "cost center." Defined benefits that averaged out the risk among many have segued to defined contribution that is no more
than a tax-abated savings account. Risk has monetary value, but risk invisibly is shifting more and more to the individual.
After the last Democratic debate, it is safe say anti-war Progressivism is dead. Everyone was frothing at the mouth to prove
how much they care for the Kurds, and our nation's honor, and that we should stay in the ME. Except Tulsi, but her response fell
flat with the audience, and judging by my Left friends/family on Facebook, fell flat with them too. Having the same position as
Trump is a death sentence. My faith in my fellow citizens is at quite a low ebb.
Cheer up. No matter what you used to think of Lindsay Graham, he is setting the pace for a representative to think for him/herself.
Commentators reported surprise that he was "formerly in Trump's corner." Think about how easily we accept that the future is secured
by a majority in either house. The outrageous president is inspiring elected Republicans to analyze issues (imagine!). Even if
it is cold and calculated to influence their own voters, let's begin to applaud and encourage those who seem to think for them/ourselves.
We don't suffer from a lack of ideas in this area; no, we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Thus, another
exercise in mental masturbation.
we lack the ability (political will) to accomplish it. Carl
A Citizen's Dividend would be the camel's nose under the tent since the less wasted by government, the more that could be distributed
to citizens to counter price deflation.
And it's only justice that all fiat creation, beyond that created for government to spend for the general welfare, be in the
form of an equal Citizen's Dividend.
Funny you should mention Europe since an equal Citizen's Dividend for all Euro zone citizens would be a way to eliminate austerity
that even Germany might not object to since Germans would receive it too.
For example, Italy gives the unemployed 500 euros per month and tries to find them any sort of job. I think you're a little
behind. But by all means, keep tilting at windmills.
i was just thinking about that this am while finishing my fence like in alaska.
i figger that after 40+ years of declining or stagnant wages, a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay.
but "dividend" works just as well.
a majority of us are owed some frelling back-pay. Amfortas the hippie
The Citizen's Dividend would vary as required to counter price deflation but during the period when the banks are progressively
de-privileged, it would have to be quite high to provide for the conversion of bank deposits to fiat deposits at the Central Bank
– with the banks, by necessity, having to borrow the needed fiat from citizens.
Its still the wrong set of arguments. The problem in the US is not that Medicare-for-All would require new taxes that need
funding. The problem is that the US spends twice per capita on healthcare what the average OECD country spends. The US spends
more public tax money on healthcare per capita than Canada does, and Canada insures the entire population.
We can pay for our entire military budget as it exists if we simply drop our per capita healthcare spending to less than what
Switzerland pays. Name one other thing that costs more in the US than in Switzerland.
Americans simply cannot comprehend how exorbitantly expensive and unequal the US healthcare system is compared to the rest
of the developed world.
While I gladly accept the results of these surveys, I question the reasons they seem to have garnered from the public. To most
citizens, lower taxes mean much more than non-aggresive foreign policy and peaceful diplomacy. If the question was phrased in
such a way that respondents were replying to the lower cost AND the concomitant peace-oriented habits that should (would?) come
from it, then it is an issue whether they agreed with both statements. Further, this reorientation of spending would have to be
bully-pulpited quite strongly to educate the US as to its long-term benefits since most of us have been prepped to be anxious
about foreign nations and the paranoia of saving us from the evil dictator "X". Oh, yes, peace should come, but compare the Syria
brou-ha-ha to what would descend upon us when peace broke out. The elites won't disappear.
Bizarre. The question is: How can we afford something that's half as expensive as what we're already paying? I wouldn't expect
that level of insanity from someone in a straitjacket yet it's a commonplace in these discussions.
Even worse: the argument that government is financially constrained. It's not "tax & spend," it can't be. Where would taxpayers
get dollars to pay those taxes if government didn't spend them first?
So it must be "spend first & then ask for some back in taxes." This is how reality works. And what do we call the dollar financial
assets left in the economy, not retrieved by taxes? a) The dollar financial assets of the citizens, i.e. their savings or (same
thing) b) National 'Debt'
National 'Debt' is completely unlike household debt. It's like bank debt. If you have a bank account, that's your asset, but
to the bank, it's a liability. It's the money they owe you. It's their debt.
Now imagine a mob of depositors marching down to the bank to demand it reduce the size of its debt (i.e. make their accounts
smaller) Crazy? Yes, but that's the austerian line of talk.
Finally, the inflationistas: "If you just print money, you'll have [gasp][hyper-]inflation!" This is the finest quality bullshit,
and people spout it practically without prompting. The truth: The Fed extended $16 – $29 trillion in credit to cure the frauds
of the financial sector in 2007-8. I defy anyone to find a measurement of inflation that says there was any then.
Was there central-bank-run-amok inflation in the classical cases (Weimar, Zimbabwe). Nope. Not even there. Yes they did print
lots of Deutchmarks and Zimbabwe currency, but only after a shortage of good occurred that actually caused the inflation.
Just printing money, especially if there's spare capacity, does not cause inflation. You need a bidding war for some commodity
that's become scarce (like oil in the '70s). So Weimar had the burden of war reparations, a balance of payments problem, and when
they delayed sending some telephone poles to France, the French military shut down the German equivalent of Ohio (the Ruhr). Shortages
led to the hyperinflation. Similarly, the Rhodesian colonists left Zimbabwe, which had previously fed itself, and food shortages
led to the hyperinflation.
The Cato study of 56 hyperinflationary episodes in human history also validates the above. In *no* case did a central bank
"run amok" and print too much to kick off the hyperinflation. Always the cost push of a shortage of goods drove it.
Gosh, it's all so simple. We just need to take on the military industrial complex, the medical industrial complex, and our
corrupt political system all at the same time.
Researchers Detail How Slashing the Social Security and Medicare Budgets Could Pay for More Pointless Wars While Creating the
Progressive Wall Street Bailouts Americans Want.
"... Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia (and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes. ..."
The transcript of President Trump's July 25 telephone conversation with Ukraine's recently
elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has ignited the usual anti-Trump bashing in American
political-media circles, even more calls for impeachment, with little, if any, regard for the
national security issues involved. Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to
make the transcript public and ask: Which, if any, foreign leaders will now feel free to
conduct personal telephone diplomacy with an American president directly or indirectly, of the
kind that helped end the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, knowing that his or her comments might
become known to domestic political opponents? Consider instead only the following undiscussed
issues:
§ Even if former vice president Joseph Biden, who figured prominently in the
Trump-Zelensky conversation, is not the Democratic nominee, Ukraine is now likely to be a
contested, and poisonous, issue in the 2020 US presidential election. How did the United States
become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt politics? The short answer is
NATO expansion, as some of us who opposed that folly back in the 1990s warned would be the
case, and not only in Ukraine. The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in
2013 -- 14 resulted in the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally
elected president Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass. All
those fateful events infused the Trump-Zelensky talk, if only between the lines.
§ Russia shares centuries of substantial civilizational values, language, culture,
geography, and intimate family relations with Ukraine. America does not. Why, then, is it
routinely asserted in the US political-media establishment that Ukraine is a "vital US national
interest" and not a vital zone of Russian national security, as by all geopolitical reckoning
it would seem to be? The standard American establishment answer is: because of "Russian
aggression against Ukraine." But the "aggression" cited is Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea
and support for anti-Kiev fighters in the Donbass civil war, both of which came after, not
before, the Maidan crisis, and indeed were a direct result of it. That is, in Moscow's eyes, it
was reacting, not unreasonably, to US-led "aggression." In any event, as opponents of eastward
expansion also warned in the 1990s, NATO has increased no one's security, only diminished
security throughout the region bordering Russia.
§ Which brings us back to the Trump-Zelensky telephone conversation. President Zelensky
ran and won overwhelmingly as a peace-with-Moscow candidate, which is why the roughly $400
million in US military aid to Ukraine, authorized by Congress, figured anomalously in the
conversation. Trump is being sharply criticized for withholding that aid or threatening to do
so, including by Obama partisans. Forgotten, it seems, is that President Obama, despite
considerable bipartisan pressure, steadfastly refused to authorize such military assistance to
Kiev, presumably because it might escalate the Russian-Ukrainian conflict (and Russia, with its
long border with Ukraine, had every escalatory advantage). Instead of baiting Trump on this
issue, we should hope he encourages the new peace talks that Zelensky has undertaken in recent
days with Moscow, which could end the killing in Donbass. (For this, Zelensky is being
threatened by well-armed extreme Ukrainian nationalists, even quasi-fascists. Strong American
support for his negotiations with Moscow may not deter them, but it might.)
§ Finally, but not surprisingly, the shadow of Russiagate is now morphing into
Ukrainegate. Trump is also being sharply criticized for asking Zelensky to cooperate with
Attorney General William Barr's investigation into the origins of Russiagate, even though
the role of
Ukrainian-Americans and Ukraine itself in Russiagate allegations against Trump on behalf of
Hillary Clinton in 2016 is now well-documented
.
We need to know fully the origins of Russiagate, arguably the worst presidential scandal in
American history, and if Ukrainian authorities can contribute to that understanding, they
should be encouraged to do so. As I've argued repeatedly, fervent anti-Trumpers must decide
whether they loathe him more than they care about American and international security. Imaging,
for example, a Cuban missile -- like crisis somewhere in the world today where Washington and
Moscow are militarily eyeball-to-eyeball, directly or through proxies, from the Baltic and the
Black Seas to Syria and Ukraine. Will Trump's presidential legitimacy be sufficient for him to
resolve such an existential crisis peacefully, as President John F. Kennedy did in 1962?
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York
University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book War
With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and
in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now in
their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com.
Trump is an agent of the Deep State, playing good cop to the bad cop Deep State. I have been
saying this since mid April 2017. His multitude of actions belie his promises. Trump is a
quisling to his supporters.
Here is an excellent article that comports with my view of Trump.
I am puzzled why Cohen is permitted to publish in the Nation. Is it due to his marriage
to its publisher or to the magazine's remnant infatuation with the Soviet state? Just
asking.
The whole situation is a rather ironic
Prof. Cohen is certainly one of America's most eminent Russia scholars, and I think that
for decades he was regarded as one of the most left-leaning ones, regularly denounced for his
leftism by all the Neocons and other rightwingers. I remember I used to see him on the PBS
Newshour, sometimes paired with a conservative critic of the Soviets. I'd guess that past
history plus being married to the publisher of The Nation is what gives him his
residual foothold there.
I'd suspect that if someone had told him a couple of decades ago that by the late 2010s
he'd be blacklisted from the MSM and denounced as a "Russian agent," he probably would have
been greatly saddened at the disheartening turn in American society, but not totally shocked.
He probably would have regarded such a scenario as having a 10% possibility.
But if someone would have told him that the people denouncing and blacklisting him would
have been the *liberal Democrats* and some of their most "excitable" elements would be
accusing him of being a "Neo-Nazi White Supremacist Russian Agent" he would have thought the
entire country had gone on LSD.
It's sad that our entire country has gone on LSD
The whole situation is actually a perfect parallel to the various past American purges
I've often covered in my articles:
Russia is the excuse for US actions in the Ukraine as it was in the ME.
What is America without a big bad boogeyman like Russia?.
Certainly not a “Superpower’ defending the world.
Without enemies like Russia we would be nothing but big rich country.
And all the Neos and Zios and politicians would have to use Viagra instead of war to squirt
out their poison.
A lot of countries like the Ukraine have gotten a lot of US taxpayer money by
‘standing up to a Russian takeover’….and are laughing all the way to
their bank.
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine’s torturous and famously
corrupt politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in
the target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs
of the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes
to mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump
said to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is
the exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption
can be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of
other plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
It is more than ironic that the Dems (and their like-minded cronies in Big Media) are up in
arms over Trump’s attempt in find ‘dirt’ about Joe Biden when the
‘dirt’ looks and smells like actual corruption. Have laws been broken? Was
Biden selling influence through his son? Stranger things have happened. At the very least,
it looks as though Joe Biden crossed an ethical line. This will likely cost him the
nomination.
Similarly, the news media should–if it was doing its job–pursue leads that
would help find the source behind the missing server and the Fake News that helped justify
the toxic and duplicitous ‘Russiagate’ investigation. But they’d rather
pursue Trump instead. I have never witnessed a more partisan and bloodthirsty Fourth
Estate.
Why is the media so utterly uninterested in finding out who/how the fake
Putin-Trump ‘conspiracy’ was cooked up in the first place? Doesn’t it
make sense the Trump would want to find out more? Justice demands it. False intelligence
can sow chaos and start wars.
Consider, for instance, the manufactured lies (Saddam’s phantom WMD, links to 911,
etc) that were used to justify Zio-America’s annihilation of Iraq. What intelligence
agency cooked up these falsehoods? Who spoon-fed these fairy tales to G.W. Bush and Colin
Powell?
Not only have these questions never been answered, they are seldom even asked! The Deep
State has gone rogue. And Big Media is covering it up.
This whole ridiculous drama may profit the Dem’s in the longer term — that is,
by removing that corrupt, dementia ridden nit-wit Biden from the presidential
competition.
As president, Biden would be a greater sock puppet than even GWB…of course,
“sock puppet” maybe just what the Dem’s want….
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with inevitable
impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
@Ron Unz Thanks to Tucker Carlson’s show, some folks on the left like Cohen, Mate
and Greenwald, are more likely to get air time on Fox News than MSNBC and CNN.
The current CIA talking point is that it is illegal for the President to seek foreign
assistance for his campaign. One might also slant it that the President of the United
States has an obligation to the people who elected him to require an allied, friendly
government to reopen the investigation of Biden because there is adequate reason to suspect
that the Democrats are running yet another corrupt criminal for President. Incidentally,
this puts Zelensky in a very awkward position, as one of the backers of his transition from
sitcom star to President of Ukraine was a principal in Burisma
It is not the threat of impeachment that will energize Trump’s base; it is the
grotesque, constant character assassination in the (largely CIA manipulated) media that
will return him to the White House. The American people have a sense of fairness. They have
always been of better character than the reprobates we are allowed to vote for. Whatever
happened to trusting the democratic process, instead of using intelligence assets to
engineer domestic regime change?
History is not made by nice guys. Trump has torn a big hole in the tissue of lies about
what this country is and what it stands for, and that is too much for those who make their
living deceiving us.
Russia hating is the lynchpin of oligarchic deepstate MIC MSM propaganda. Take that
away and the fat cats are revealed as the naked face of evil that they are. Hating Russia
(and China) supposedly justifies all their crimes.
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country’s constitutionally elected president
Viktor Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment — none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) — how fucking hypocritical is it
to presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? — none of
it would have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
Looks like our stable genius" pushed Putin against Erdogan and sided with Erdogan in the
process.
Notable quotes:
"... The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania, Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf. ..."
"... There is first President Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles, from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq. ..."
"... Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish troops. ..."
"... The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS, Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted, and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe. ..."
"... Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining American values. ..."
"... Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet without harming others. ..."
"... The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid situation. ..."
"... The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald Trump, has called the Democrats out on this. ..."
"... Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels (AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history is written in a few years all this will come out. ..."
"... ISIS formed in the chaos that was the Iraq War, neat how you guys never accept blame for anything. ..."
"... The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a 'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal. ..."
"... Our imperialists must have misread Tacitus, because it seems they aspire to making peaceful deserts. ..."
"... Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US politicians (Republican and Democrat). ..."
"... No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite. ..."
"Russia Assumes Mantle of Supreme Power Broker in the Middle East," proclaimed Britain's
Telegraph .
The article began:
"Russia's status as the undisputed power-broker in the Middle East was cemented as Vladimir
Putin continued a triumphant tour of capitals traditionally allied to the U.S."
"Donald Trump Has Handed Putin the Middle East on a Plate" was the title of yet another
Telegraph column. "Putin Seizes on Trump's Syria Retreat to Cement Middle East Role,"
declared the Financial Times .
The U.S. press parroted the British: Putin is now the new master of the Mideast. And woe is
us.
Before concluding that Trump's pullout of the last 1,000 U.S. troops in Syria is America's
Dunkirk, some reflection is needed.
Yes, Putin has played his hand skillfully. Diplomatically, as the Brits say, the Russian
president is "punching above his weight."
He gets on with everyone. He is welcomed in Iran by the Ayatollah, meets regularly with Bibi
Netanyahu, is a cherished ally of Syria's Bashar Assad, and this week was being hosted by the
King of Saudi Arabia and the royal rulers of the UAE. October 2019 has been a triumphal
month.
Yet, consider what Putin has inherited and what his capabilities are for playing power
broker of the Middle East.
He has a single naval base on the Med, Tartus, in Syria, which dates to the 1970s, and a new
air base, Khmeimim, also in Syria.
The U.S. has seven NATO allies on the Med -- Spain, France, Italy, Croatia, Albania,
Greece and Turkey, and two on the Black Sea, Romania and Bulgaria. We have U.S. forces and
bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Djibouti. Russia has no such
panoply of bases in the Middle East or Persian Gulf.
We have the world's largest economy. Russia's economy is smaller than Italy's, and not a
tenth the size of ours.
And now that we are out of Syria's civil war and the Kurds have cut their deal with
Damascus, consider what we have just dumped into Vladimir Putin's lap. He is now the man in the
middle between Turkey and Syria.
He must bring together dictators who detest each other. There is first President
Erdogan, who is demanding a 20-mile deep strip of Syrian borderland to keep the Syrian Kurds
from uniting with the Turkish Kurds of the PKK. Erdogan wants the corridor to extend 280 miles,
from Manbij, east of the Euphrates, all across Syria, to Iraq.
Then there is Bashar Assad, victorious in his horrific eight-year civil war, who is
unlikely to cede 5,000 square miles of Syrian territory to a permanent occupation by Turkish
troops.
Reconciling these seemingly irreconcilable Syrian and Turkish demands is now Putin's
problem. If he can work this out, he ought to get the Nobel Prize.
"Putin is the New King of Syria," ran the op-ed headline in Thursday's Wall Street
Journal.
The Syria of which Putin is now supposedly king contains Hezbollah, al-Qaida, ISIS,
Iranians, Kurds, Turks on its northern border and Israelis on its Golan Heights. Five hundred
thousand Syrians are dead from the civil war. Half the pre-war population has been uprooted,
and millions are in exile in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Europe.
If Putin wants to be king of this, and it is OK with Assad, how does that imperil the United
States of America, 6,000 miles away?
Wednesday, two-thirds of the House Republicans joined Nancy Pelosi's Democrats to denounce
Trump's decision to pull U.S. troops out of Syria and dissolve our alliance with the Kurds. And
Republican rage over the sudden abandonment of the Kurds is understandable.
But how long does the GOP believe we should keep troops in Syria and control the
northeastern quadrant of that country? If the Syrian army sought to push us out, under what
authority would we wage war against a Syrian army inside Syria?
And if the Turks are determined to secure their border, should we wage war on that NATO ally
to stop them? Would U.S. planes fly out of Turkey's Incirlik air base to attack Turkish
soldiers fighting in Syria?
If Congress believes we have interests in Syria so vital we should be willing to go to war
for them -- against Syria, Turkey, Russia or Iran -- why does Congress not declare those
interests and authorize war to secure them?
Our foreign policy elites have used Trump's decision to bash him and parade their
Churchillian credentials. But those same elites appear to lack the confidence to rally the
nation to vote for a war to defend what they contend are vital American interests and defining
American values.
If Putin is king of Syria, it is because he was willing to pay the price in blood and
treasure to keep his Russia's toehold on the Med and save his ally Bashar Assad, who would have
gone under without him.
Who dares wins. Now let's see how Putin likes his prize.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made
and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
Endless demonization of Putin by the elitist press is pure idiocy. Putin's aim is no
different from any decent leader. Do the best for your countrymen and countrywomen; yet
without harming others. At a recent interview with Arabic media a UAE journalist tried to
drive a wedge between Russia and Iran in favor of Saudi Kingdom by challenging Putin to
condemn Iran for alleged attacks on Saudi oil installations by Iran.
To which Putin
skillfully replied: "Russia will never be friends 'with one country against another' in the
Middle East". Nor would Putin condemn Iran unless he was presented with clear evidence - not
just accusations - of Iran's guilt. Point in case: Putin does it better than others; sure,
but why is that bad?
Oh of course envy and fear of one being exposed for inept leadership.
Time long overdue to shake hands with Putin and Russia.
https://www.rt.com/russia/o...
I haven't a concern for Russia in the middle east.
Russia is doing the US the biggest unasked favor proving where our friends and allies
loyalties in the middle east lay by forcing them to make choices in the face of shifting
alliances that they wouldn't reveal if the US continued its presence.
Russia is depopulating and it has choke points with China, with Central Asia, with the
middle east and Europe. Russia will eventually not have the population to defend all these
choke points and will eventually withdraw and focus on its own national security. At that
time, I think its possible to see Russia shift its relationship in eastern Europe while
distancing itself from Chinese expansionism that might one day want its old north pacific
territories back (like what is today Vladivostok and Sakhalin).
Depopulating? Where did you get that from? Population decrease in Russia stopped. By the
latest stats it is just about breaking even (death rates = birth rates). Moreover, population
is growing albeit very slowly. Sorry but Russkies won't die out like extinct species. As far
as its own national security; well, the old notion of "Russia is, more or less, a giant gas
station pretending to be a real country." is as dead as Senator McCain, who pretended to know
something about Russia; alas he was sadly and dangerously uninformed.
https://www.forbes.com/site...
The US has troops and a base or more in Syria?
I don't see any Syrian army bases in the US...
And, the US is telling/demanding where the Syrian army come and goes in...Syria?
What the hell is wrong with this picture?
You know!?
Oh, now hypocrite neo-con enabler Pelosi and some of the freaky other politicians are
concerned with human lives in Syria? Ha ha
But...not about the lives of children dying in Yemen and Afghanistan and Gaza?
How come?
And, the US is telling Turkey what it had better do with it's border? Also, friends and enemies o' mine,just which entity, nation and group is not a US ally?
Ally? What does that mean?
As if the American people know the hell that words means anymore and as if there's even a
meaning to that. And the American people do not watch the news, read magazines (news) as they
did before.
They don't know what is going on in the world, they gave up.
People under 50 automatically tune world news out, thanks mostly to the phonies at CNN and
the major, basically neo-con supporting networks confusing the public, purposely so that they
don't see the misery that is in the nations of the MId-East thanks to US invasions and
bombings. Just look at cnn-they spend all day talking about what Trump or some politician
said, no coverage of battles overseas, unless it benefits the continuing spinning of the news
for intervention and so on.
The US won't get a grip and stop threatening nation after nation
(while Russia does not) and so, people all over the world are thinking,
you now what, look at how dumb Americans are that they allow people from Obama, Hillary,
Schumer, Pelosi, Graham and more to conduct foreign policy that makes enemies for America
daily. And don't forget Cheney and that group, too from before. These people are actually an
insult to America.
Compare how the leaders of Russia and America talk and conduct themselves.
Russia has Lavrov, the gentleman diplomat, the US has Pompeo and the likes of Bolton and
Kushner, the Israeli lobbyist and the Presidents son in law.
How does a so-called Republic allow the President to have his daughter and Kushner, her
husband, to be security/foreign policy advisers. You're really losing it, America.
"But those same elites appear to lack the
confidence to rally the nation to vote for a war to defend what they
contend are vital American interests and defining American values."
No, they don't lack "confidence". They've got all the confidence in the world. What they
lack is competence, integrity, and credibility with the American people and the rest of the
world. They have dragged America through the mud in the Middle East for nearly two decades.
They transformed the once proud American military and diplomatic corps into a customer
service operation for Israel and Saudi Arabia.
We don't need more lectures and directives about "our interests" and "Western values" that
always turn out to be Israeli and Saudi Arabian interests and values. We need new foreign
policy elites, free of the current elite's miserable record of failure, corruption, and
subordination to foreign interests. Above all, we need to get out of the Mideast swamps that
the younger Bush and Obama pushed us into, bring our troops back to America, start defending
America and American interests again.
How simple and true what U've said. Sounds like a sound position and logical too. So why is
this not happening? The answer lies in the Military Industrial Complex (MIC). Sadly, today's
USA revenue to large extent dependent on militaristic revenue; even though most of that
revenue ends up in the coffers of the MIC, supported by the media that is sustained by the
MIC. Yet, I still believe that with a bit of pain Americans can turn around this horrid
situation.
The war in Syria and the growth of ISIS was entirely the result of actions by the Obama
administration - and it is an outrage that no one in a position of power, not even Donald
Trump, has called the Democrats out on this.
Oh yeah, Name you seem to have forgotten Obama authorizing CIA training the moderate rebels
(AKA Al qaida or moderate head choppers). By the way we handed the ME at least to Iran when
Bush invaded Iraq under the false pretenses. Saintly Obama wanted to look forward but not
backward on the false pretenses and he in turn engaged on the same BS as Bush. When history
is written in a few years all this will come out.
The people who are obsessed w/staying in Syria, just for the sake of denying Russia a
'victory', at admitting that they just want to be a spoiler. They want to keep Syria
partitioned into two weak states and not allow it to reform into a single state and heal.
Trump is indeed our Dorian Gray, he is just outwardly reflecting our narcissism, 'if we
don't get to do it then no one else can'.
Obvious Pat we have no consistent foreign policy in the region since we inherited the mantle
from the Brit Empire post WW 2. Oil and Israel were a marketable justification for our wars
and changing partners ( regime change ), for a long time. Now neither is relevant. We have
all the fossil fuels we need, and Israel is all powerful.. Long term I doubt the Russians
will make a difference, in the Muslim quest to resurrect the Ottoman Empire. We have lost too
many of our sons and daughters. get out.
Trump is a genius.
At the moment, Syria is a poisoned chalice to anyone accepting responsibility for it.
Russia is only there because they cannot get a naval base in any other Mediterranean
country.
When, or if peace is achieved in Syria, it will be the US that swoops in to market the
brands the Arabs love. The Syrians won't be buying Russian products.
Name an American brand the "Arabs love": Toyota, Lexis, Rollex, Sony, Nikon, Panasonic,
Samsung, iPhone (made in China)? Which one(s). While their infrastructure and basic
technology are and will continue to be Russian.
Putin is trusted in the middle east (and in most of the rest of the world) because he is an
intelligent, consistent and respected world leader. Now compare this to the clown show of US
politicians (Republican and Democrat).
No serious person can say that US politicians are better than Putin, which is also the
reason Putin is so demonized by the US political elite.
The Middle East is home to oil, terrorism, access points for maritime transportation (The Red
Sea, The Bosphorus, Suez Canal, Persian Gulf). It is strategically important. It was a
mistake for Obama to leave Iraq before there was a stable situation and it is a mistake for
Trump to leave before there is a stable situation.
To say, "Just let them all fight it out" is foolhardy and likely just a rationalization
for your mistake to support the narcissistic fool in the White House.
I don't think Putin is going to be unhappy about it. The various powers of the ME will now go
to him for favors, and he will get favors in return. I doubt US interests will be among them.
Putin said, I've got your no fly zone right here. After Russian deployment of the SA400's,
america had no choice but to begin withdrawal.
And kind of missing from Buchanan's list of
putin friends, is erdogan himself.
So, it will be interesting to see what happens now. Putin
holds all the cards and is in the best position of anybody on the planet to broker a deal
between assad and erdogan. Part of that deal will likely be very bad for those who threw
their lot in with the US.
Turkey is not a small country and has an enormous military.
Buchanan himself said that we should stay out of Syria and let the Turks deal with ISIS.
But
they were too smart for that, and had their own coup to worry about. I have always thought
that the US should have brokered a homeland for the kurds. It would have been hard, but now
it is impossible.
Turkey is now a client state of Russia much more than a member of NATO. At
least in appearance. They now buy SA400's and SU-57's from mother russia.
Who supplies and
maintains your best weapon systems indicates who your real allies are. What has the US lost?
I would say we lost anybody across the globe that we ever hoped would ally with us against
the new sino-russian superpower. Russia has unlimited space and resources. China has
unlimited people and no limits on its technical growth and markets. The US? We are the
biggest debtor third world nation that has ever existed. But hey, we have the most stable
genius as our president, and the sky is the limit for what he will accomplish other than
permanent tax cuts for corporations. Right? The right again.
Except for 2 wrongs, they
wouldn't even exist. Can faith overcome inconvenient truth? Real faith probably could by
accepting inconvenient truth. But real faith is mostly dead. It was replaced with tax free
religiosity and assault weaponry sponsored by corporate fascist government. I watched it
happen. And his story is being rewritten in days or weeks instead of years and decades.
It's not often that I would agree with Pat B. Essentially never.
But on this point, yes. If Putin wants the Middle East, by all means proceed.
That region has been messing up our politics for literally my whole life - It is most
decidedly not a Promised Land for the United States. Let the Saudis and the
Iranians and the Russians and the Turks fight it out. It should be lovely. The Israelis call
sell weapons to all of them.
Thank you for this small bit of obvious wisdom, Mr. Buchanan. Your insights are very common
sensical here, and thus, most valuable. Too bad they will mostly fall on the deaf ears of our
moronic "Elites".
I believe Obama said that Putin would be overwhelmed in Syria. However, Putin has overseen an
excellent strategy of picking an area of insurgents, militarily pounding them, then offering
them free passage to a safe area (Idlib). After doing this across Syria, he and Assad now
have all of the jihadist groups in one place where they can pound them senseless or just sit
back and wait for them to start shooting each other.
Trump did not screw up the Kurds' clearing of ISIS above the Euphrates. Now he has given
Putin and Assad the results of that. I expect the PA team will stabilize that area in short
order.
So, Idlib and NW Syria will be a cauldron for a while. Now Al Tanf is the only insurgent
holdout. Be interesting to see how that unfolds.
Lest Trumpland forget, there is a reason we got involved in the region. Jihadists can and
will use neglect to later come after us.
Putin shows us how its done. 3 billion or so, find good Muslims (anyone other than Sunni
islamists) and help them blow up, conquer, and occasionally repress the bad Muslims.
We spent several TRILLION ourselves and thousands of American lives for nothing. We never
had a single achievable objective in any of these conflicts.
Donald is a moron for selling out the Kurds, who it cost nothing to back, to Turkey but
the DC elites made this inevitable by refusing to cut a deal with Assad for the Kurds. He's
been the only realistic option for a long time now.
But its not just the US that is a war machine. Bourne's statement equally applies to _all_
states everywhere, past present and future.
If any state appears to not be making war on other countries at any particular time,
its only because it is too busy making war on its own citizens [ eg taxes, drug laws,
weapons/gun laws, religion laws, speech laws, environmental laws etc.etc. etc.], and has not
yet created enough fake money via its central bank to enable it to debt-fund consistent
overseas aggressions against others.
Wars by the US will never end because arms manufactures own Trump. Almost one half of the
US budget goes for the security of the state, domestic and abroad. New weapon development
would come to a halt if the US was not threatened. Fake news about China and Russia planning
to attack the US keeps the arms industry humming. Over a million national security workers
and their families would be devastated if Trump stopped fighting fake wars. God bless
imagined threat of wars.
This has strengthened the possibility of the revival of the Islamic State in Iraq and
the Levant (ISIL or ISIS). There are around 10,000 such ISIS fighters currently lodged in
prisons run by the SDF.
And with this, "the war on terror" is guaranteed to go on, and on, and on..
Just in case you hadn't heard the good news, the last man from the president's foreign
policy "team" still standing, Trump whisperer Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left
National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust.
June 27, 2018 Harvard Research Scholar Explains How America Created Al-Qaeda & The
ISIS Terror Group
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past 5
years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
What Trump wants to do and what he can do are two very different things. The MIC/Zionist rot
in DC is way too deep and entrenched for any one man to tackle.
Trump could make all his Schiffty problems go away by bombing Iran. Overnight, the man
would be lauded as the president we need and that aging hack Pelosi would suddenly drop that
phony impeachment hearing.
Trump is finding out that when making foreign policy, the safest route to take is to first
ask, "Is this good for Israel?"
I have always contended that the best way to use Trump is to support his ego. Let's
inundate him with praise for withdrawing from the Kurdish/Turkish quagmire. Sure, he hasn't
vacated Syria yet, however, he has no choice but to vacate or be evacuated. His ego will
opt for the former
@DESERT
FOX Exactly, with thousands of ISIS,ISIL(American/Israeli proxy forces)types now being
freed due to Turkey's incursions into Syria, these "rebels" will be free to re-group and
fight another day. Hence the need for American forces to STAY deployed in the Area. This is
nothing more than a distraction move by Trump, which will result in the opposite "intended"
actions of American forces being withdrawn from Syria. This will also guarantee the "need"
for a strong Soviet presence in Syria.
America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria, the only point of
contention between America/Israel and Russia was whether Assad was to be forced from power or
would be allowed to remain President as a puppet of Putin and the Russians. Syria was to
never remain a sovereign nation.
The US still hasn't acknowledged the Armenian Massacre by the Turks. Why should it care
about Kurds. US is the nation that said killing 500,000 kids in Iraq was worth it.
Syria, Iraq, Libya are now less of a threat to Israel than ever before so that is a kind
of peace.
Not really. All are still standing and not under US control. Iraq now leans even more
toward Iran and Syria toward Russia ..and that outcome in these countries has made Israel's
goal of destroying Iran much harder and less likely .
The curtailment of the Kurds, Israel's long time friends and proxy , is another blow to
Israel's plot.
It appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
@WJ
Right. But as Giraldi always points out, Trump almost attacked Venezuela. He said mean
words and rattled sabres! As opposed to Obama, who said no mean words ('cause he upheld the
"dignity of the office") but sent the fighter jets into Libya and turned that country from a
stable, secular regime into a human trafficking warzone. And also got an ambassador killed.
Here are some of Giraldi's gems from April 2011:
Libya is a humanitarian mission
it [the invasion] has no clearly stated objective except to protect Libyan
civilians
it is now clear that the rebels do not have any military organization to speak of and
Gaddafi has the whip hand
Nice analysis there, Mr. CIA lifer and Obama lickspittle. I can only assume Giraldi was
part of the crack CIA team of Sovietologists who were utterly blindsided when the Soviet
Union broke up. It's amazing how much slack he's given around here for his anti-Israel stuff.
It's like Teflon for him.
@Priss
Factor Agree, and the ZUS has killed millions in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya and
Syria, for their zionist masters, the only lives the ZUS cares about is zionists.
@NoseytheDuke
The only question you failed to address is what was the true motives of Putin's intervention
into the whole mess. A few good points:
As in Ukraine, Putin will stay in Syria until it no longer suits him. He has no
long-term strategic goals beyond creating chaos and weakening the alliances of the free
world wherever possible. This allows him to play the big man on the international stage, an
essential element of his domestic appeal. 24/7 propaganda and Soviet nostalgia have turned
Putin's invasion into a domestic hit in Russia. In contrast, Russians have no interest in
Syria or Assad, but who cares what they want? Unlike the leaders of Europe, the U.S., and
other democratic countries, Putin doesn't have to worry about how popular his foreign
adventures are at home. There are no checks and balances in the Russian government, no free
media to criticize him, and no popularity polls that matter more than ranks of well-armed
riot police.
Licks for Giraldi: Giraldi has been careless but not where he lists Trumps lies about ending
'silly' wars. from what Trump has actually done compared to what he says about ending
America's wars he is a liar of clear and complete proportions
"the military the only real source of pride the only thing Americans feel they excel at"
An insightful point. Politicians support the military and its deployments for economic
reasons, but the support of the public might derive from "what else is there?" Examples of
institutional and private-sector failure abound in the news over recent years, and every day.
The Boeing Max. The hotel collapse. 250,000 deaths per year from medical negligence. Power
shutoffs. Useless college. The dive boat. A relaxed performance standard. The demise of
meritocracy and rationality. During Katrina, every agency except the Coast Guard went into
gridlock. There are remaining islands of expertise, but the unraveling is contagious.
The dirty, filthy hand of the Jew is all over America's Mideast policy. Israel backs ISIS in
Syria with weapons. The Israeli-Occupied Government in Washington D.C. has even protected
ISIS in Syria at times. The Jew-owned media gives no credit to Iran and Russia for defeating
Jew and American-supported terrorists inside Syria. Now the Jew-owned government is aching
for war with Iran, which is not a threat to Gentile America.
The goal was to topple Assad. Remember Obama? Assad must go? Assad and the Assad regime
are still there. The losers are the U.S., Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
Replacing Assad was an Globalist goal, heavily pushed by Erdogan. We also remember the
failed presidency of Barak Hussein that never represented the citizens of the U.S. So it
would be more precise to say that:
-- George Soros, Erdogan, Obama, Wahhabism, and the Globalists are losing.
-- Putin, Trump, Assad, and Populism are winning.
The real test will be Putin getting all other foreign troops & proxies to leave. The
Globalist agenda is to keep the fight between Iran (Shia) and Turkey (Sunni) going, when they
both leave combatants in Syria. Hopefully, Putin will be able to fully rout the Globalists
and move out both Turkish and Iranian agitators.
@Johnny
Walker Read Maybe you don't know who the author of that article is .Garry Kasparov
Kasparov might be great at chess but in Russia he was big fail as a politician .couldn't
get any votes on his campaign to make Russia like America. He went into a self-imposed exile
in the West. claiming Putin ruined his political campaigning.
Now everything Putin does infuses all Kasparov's punditry
Kasparow's love for Bolton should clue you to what he is about.
Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) · Twitter
As I said about Bolton entering the Trump admin nearly 3 years ago, you may not agree with
his views as much as I generally do, but he puts US interests first, not Trump's. Can't say
same about Pompeo & the rest.
31 mins ago
The short story on Syria, Turkey, USAISRAEL, Russia –
Turkey-Syria offensive: Russia vows to prevent clashes with Assad forces
BBC
Takeaways
THEN .
"When the US decided to equip and train Syrian Kurds, as well as some Arabs, to fight IS,
they were aware of a potential problem, that their would-be Kurdish allies were regarded as
terrorists by their Nato ally, Turkey. Washington turned a blind eye to a problem that could
be kicked into the future. Now the future is here, and it has blown up."
NOW .
"On Sunday the Kurds announced a deal with the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad,
agreeing that its troops could advance into the zone that had not been controlled by Damascus
since 2012, right up to the border with Turkey. That is a big victory for the regime. The
troops moved quickly out of bases they maintained in the north-east. Assad loyalists dug out
regime flags.
It was a disastrous day for American Middle East policy. The alliance with the Kurds, and the
security guarantee safeguarding their self-governing slice of Syria, gave the Americans a
stake in the war's endgame. It was also a way of pushing against the backers of the Assad
regime: Russia and Iran. The departure of the Americans, and the advance of the Syrian army,
are victories for them too.
European governments, rattled in the way that happens when the problems of the Middle East
come knocking at their doors, are calling on Turkey to stop the offensive. Some Nato members
can see a nightmare scenario unfolding, with Syria, backed by Russian power, potentially
facing off against Turkey, a fellow Nato member. The Russians say they are in regular contact
with Turkey. But in a fluid, violent theatre of war. the chances for misperception, mistakes
and escalation are always present.
Perhaps what has happened in the last week simplifies the endgame of the Syrian war. Two
major players, the Americans and the Kurds, look to be out of the picture. And President
Assad, along with his allies from Russia and Iran, continue to solidify their victory in
Syria's catastrophic war."
WHAT IS BEING LEFT OUT OF THE CURRENT COMBING THRU THE ASHES OF THE SYRIAN WAR IS THE FACT
SAUDI STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR.
The discussion, if one might even call it that, regarding the apparent President Donald
Trump decision to withdraw at least some American soldiers from Syria has predictably
developed along partisan, ideologically fueled lines.
Not too sure where this partisan line is, Dr. G.
It looks like they're screeching from both sides of the isle.
Both powerful Republican Liz Cheney and Hillary called the pull out "sickening".
While Republican Senator Rand Paul applauds the decision, Tulsi Gabbard condemns it.
As for 'ideological', we all know that ideologically, the vast majority of all
congress-critters (99+%) from both sides of the isle, are motivated by the ideology of
doing "what's good for the Jew$"
NATO agreement stipulates that if an alliance member is threatened, other members must
support it in its defense. Turkey has not made that claim, but it is completely
plausible that it should do so .
Are you joking, Dr. G?
Hasn't Turkey been engaged in waging an aggressive war on Syria these last few years?
Wouldn't Turkey demanding military aid from NATO, (for a "threat" from the Kurds or
Syria), amount to the US demanding NATO aid for a "threat" from Iran?
IOW, it's Turkey that has been the murderous aggressor, and the Kurds and Syrians their
victims. Not to mention that Turkey's military could make mince-meat out of the Kurdish
"threat" in a New York minute.
So it seems to me that the only thing holding Turkey back, is orders from the ZUSA and
Russia. Russia is certainly a large part of this equation, IMHO.
did not understand the Turkish mindset regarding the Kurdish threat, which they regard
as existential.
'Existential'?
Would a limited autonomy Kurdish state on Turkey's southern border, perhaps incorporating
a small swath of Turkey, be the end of Turkey's existence?
When Nazi Germany invaded Poland, the world demanded that Germany sacrifice some of its
territory as recompense for its aggressive military imperialism.
If I were in a position to do so, I'd hand Syria a slice of Israel's and Saudi Arabia's
and Turkey's territory – as a punishment for their depraved attacks on an innocent and
unthreatening Syria.
Definitely the Hatay province, which arguably belongs to Syria anyways.
I'm sure Turkey would call that an existential! calamity, but I'd tell them 'karma's a
bitch'.
Finally, there is one other important issue that should be observed. Donald Trump's
actual record on ending useless wars is not consistent with his actions. He has sent more
soldiers to no good purpose in support of America's longest war in Afghanistan, has special
ops forces in numerous countries in Asia and Africa, has threatened regime change in
Venezuela, continues to support Saudi Arabia and Israel's bloody attacks on their neighbors
and has exited to from treaties and agreements with Russia and Iran that made armed
conflict less likely. And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in
Iraq, a country that the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity
and which is now experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds. Trump
is also assassinating more foreigners using drones based mostly on profile targeting than
all of his predecessors. These are not the actions of a president who seriously wants to
end wars
I remain you most loyal fan, Dr. G. But I confess this sounds to me like you think the
situation above started on the day of Trump's inauguration.
He inherited those things by the former ZUS regimes.
He has tried over and over again to disengage, only to be dragged back by the screeching
from the members of his own party. Not to mention the ((media)).
There are a lot of reasons to condemn the actions of Trump. The Golan Heights, for
instance. But it seem glaringly obvious to me at least, that Trump is not ideologically
committed to Eternal Wars.
As you put it, he threatened regime change in Venezuela.
He wanted to have talks with the Taliban, (and the whole deepstate and their ((media))
screeched)
He "continues to support Saudi Arabia" but as Pat Buchannan points out.. "The Saudis
got the message when the U.S., in response to a missile and drone strike from Iran or
Iranian-backed militias, which shut down half of Riyadh's oil production, did
nothing.
Said Washington, this is between Saudi Arabia and Iran."
And he has five thousand American soldiers sitting as hostages in Iraq, a country that
the United States basically destroyed as a cohesive political entity and which is now
experiencing a wave of rioting that has reportedly killed hundreds
You really do make it sound like all that is his fault.
I love your work Dr. G. And consider you one of the very best, most honorable and most
courageous writers out there.
But I confess, (like so many others!), it seems like to me that you have an irrational,
personal hatred for Donald Trump that colors your perspective.
IMHO.
I didn't have time to write this response well, have to go. Hope it's not too off
base..
@animalogicMore information on Trump & drone attacks would be useful & welcome.
There is a gigantic problem in America. It makes us dysfunctional. Certain news cannot get
to the American people.
Everyone in the know gets it – do not go to the NY Times with anti-Israel news. Do
NOT buck the AIPAC agenda – period. The darkest element of the ADL will be at your door
within minutes. The US government will soon follow.
It is obvious – when it comes to Jew matters, US government employees fear for their
jobs, if not their lives. Same for the MSM.
US President Donald Trump has lambasted American broadcaster ABC News for airing a video from
Knob Creek Gun Range in the town of West Point, Kentucky, claiming that the network used
footage from the facility to depict a Turkish attack on Kurdish civilians in northern Syria.
Trump called the mistake "a big scandal" and "a real disgrace".
"A big scandal at @ABC News. They got caught using really gruesome FAKE footage of the
Turks bombing in Syria. A real disgrace", the president wrote on Twitter early Tuesday
morning.
@renfro
The Crimean Peninsula was annexed by the Russian Federation in February–March 2014.
Despite all the protests about Crimea, the Donbass invasion using asymmetric tactics with
Putin out outright denying responsability, Ukraine is a vital interest for Putin, and he
would have been willing to confront America and Nato there because it is his home ground and
advantage. But Russia is powerful enough to; Putin only went into Syria after Obama decided
not to overthrow Assad. No one particularly cares about Syria and neither do they care about
the Kurds (despite them having as good a case as the Palestinians to be given a state) and
that is why jumped up Turkey can get away with invading Syria and attacking Kurds, just like
they INVADED Cyprus.
This whole thing is probably a a storm in a teacup, but if Turkey gets into trouble they
know, because they were already told very clearly over Cyprus, that if they play Lone Ranger,
Nato does not have their back. Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey
threatening to get their own nuclear weapons because Israel has them is not very good
diplomacy from Turkey's point of view. It is begining to experience delusions of its own
importance.
@renfroIt appears to me that Putin's idea is to force everyone back into their own countries and
borders .he may have shared that plan with Trump and that may have resulted in turning Turkey
loose to do that job.
Here is a very good video – Putin being interviewed. They asked him hard questions.
He came across as being very rational.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
People! The internet is there for you to verify/debunk any statement you question. Running a
website is a lot of work, why don't you guys collect the information you demand from Mr. Unz,
and share with us?
Or are you looking at others to supply you with ready-made opinions?
@onebornfree
Thanks for the link about Mr.Bourne and you correct about his statement applying to ALL
states.
They are more like progressive, merciful and humanitarian slave owners.
Be free
I wonder why the "high IQ" westerners have never deemed it fit to study their undeniable mass
psychopathy.
If they were indeed as smart as claimed, they would begin to admit it, and given the claim
to their innate highly civilised humanitarian inclinations *cough* , they would come to the
conclusion that this world needs less of their cursed kind.
Since that is not going to happen, I guess nature has its way
@Rev.
Spooner The point he makes is extremely vague. No specificity. None. Yet 10's of
thousands are dead. Ok, how about some evidence.
Why don't you go back to kindergarten, Rev?
@SafeNow
The support of the public for the military derives from constant and pervasive propaganda
particularly through movies and TV shows , David Sirota calls it the "Military
Entertainment
Complex".
Zero Hedge : " Documents expose how Hollywood promotes war on behalf of the Pentagon , CIA
& NSA ".
@Johnny
Walker Read I was making a rhetorical point. I don't think the U.S. can decouple from the
Middle East.
I do, however, think that Trump wants value for blood and treasure.
Long-term, America simply lacks the financial strength to continue to project power. The
MIC costs the U.S. a tremendous amount of money. Budget to the MIC will continue to be
slashed over time. The Deep State in the U.S. will contract simply due to financial
realities.
Israel will be less and less of a priority.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio relative to
the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
@Whitewolf
Yes, lack of talent and totall inane radical left wing proposals whiped up by the AOC wing
and swallowed by all the candidates 'hook, line and stinker '.
@OscarWildeLoveChild
After JFK's assassination, every successive president is/was shown a film clip of JFK's head
exploding from an angle nobody's ever seen.
It doesn't matter what party they're from; they'll tow TPTB's line. All of them.
US Foreign Policy = Occupied Palestine Foreign Policy.
That's all that's wrong with US foreign policies in a nutshell.
@Bragadocious
Whether he or his father served is irrelevant. Carter was in the Naval Academy, Reagan and
Bush 43 were in the reserves. Clinton had none and neither did Roosevelt, Hoover, Coolidge,
Harding, or Wilson.
What is telling, is the "alleged bone spurs", and "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf".
An allegation is an unproven accusation. What Giraldi is stating, is that Trump's physician
falsified records. You think old man Trump sent Donnie for a megadollar military academy
education so he could avoid the military?
As for Drumpf, I was acquainted with a couple of Schmidts who became Smith, a Bryjolfson who
became Byron, a Pachkowski who became Berry and, no one says Roosevelt's name was changed
from Rosenfeld. The snide commentary doesn't help.
I have said all along, that there is a lot not to like about Trump, but let's keep it in the
realm of reality. Whether he wants to end the stupid wars or not, he will never be allowed
to, as long as Giraldi's old employer is in business and making up non-existent bullshit
"threats to American interests", whatever they are.
@Sean
"Doing something Israel is not happy about and Turkey threatening to get their own nuclear
weapons because Israel has them is not very good diplomacy from Turkey's point of view"
Israel is known to puff and bluff . It is grandiose polemic or rabid canine barking. It
was not exposed by the west . But the west now knows it ,thanks to Hizbullah
@anon
Getting women to work had nothing to do with their 'liberation.'
Even though my mom had her own [private] school, my dad's salary was enough to provide for
all 5 of us, go on annual holidays abroad and put three kids through college, loan-free.
To TPTB, it's better to tax 2 people instead of 1.
To them it's just a number game, like the 'Torches of Freedom' gambit, all spiel, smoke
and mirrors, to fool us gullible idiots into believing we do have a say
We should really start to use our guns and rifles to free the country and rid it of the
rot that's smothering it.
Oh, look, another Cartra$$hian selfie butt shot on Instagram!!!!!!
It's very old habit.Very much ingrained . It is also generational . Increasingly and suddenly
religious also as the feckless toothless Evangelicals are rooting for 1 second fame .
But here is a short chronology–
1 Plans for mayhem in Syria have been on the imperial table since the 1950s (Operation
Straggle).
2 US general Wesley Clark gave the game away years ago when he revealed US intentions in
the Middle East after 9/11: seven countries were to be invaded
3 Seymour Hersh gave the game away too in his 2007 New Yorker article: "The Redirection".
In this piece he revealed how the US were hooking up once again with the Saudi/Sunni
fundamentalists in and around Syria.
4 France's ex-foreign minister Roland Dumas also gave the game away when he revealed that the
British State (a definite CIA asset) was preparing for a war on Syria two years before the
start of the Syrian Holocaust in 2011.
"This operation [in Syria]," said the former French foreign minister Roland Dumas in June,
"goes way back. It was prepared, pre-conceived and planned."
As we recently learned from former French Foreign Minister Dumas, it was also about that
time, that actors in the United Kingdom began planning the subversion of Syria with the help
of "rebels"' (Christof Lehmann, Interview with Route Magazine)
Between 2006 to 2010, the US spent 12 million dollars in order to support and instigate
demonstrations and propaganda against the Syrian government. 6,3 million dollars was funneled
to the Movement for Justice and Development, a Syrian dissident organization based in London.
The Movement operated the Barada satellite channel
@Johnny
Walker Read Quote: "America/Israel/Russia have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Reply: Kindly allow me to correct your statement.
"America/Israel have always wanted the partitioning of Syria "
Russia has a wet entrance into the Med via Syria.
Perhaps you've dozed off a bit over the past few years, but Russia has been destroying and
killing the FUKZUIS 'war' machine goons in Syria [aka the takfiri terrorist].
They're assisting in getting the country back [on its feet] as a whole again.
@anon
I'll keep it short. You can find the beginnings back in the 2012 coverage.
In 2012 Saudi sent Saudi Prince Bandar to Syria to be in charge of helping Syrian rebels
bring down Assad, an ally of Riyadh's biggest regional rival Iran.
They were originally created, set up and armed and financed by Saudi.
The Saudis were then joined by Israel and Qatari and finally by the US under Obama.
A new twist appeared in the Saudi rebels war with Assad when ISI appeared and joined the
fight.
This scared Saudi shitless as they thought this ISI version of ALQ might be a threat to them
and lead to an invasion of Saudi as ALQ always saw it as a' westernerized' Saudi.
Everyone doubled down on both fighting Assad and fighting ISI ..which was a FUBAR if there
ever was one.
Then enter the proxies, the Kurds, the PPK terrorist group all fighting for their own
agendas within and under cover of the original war on Assad.
What could possibility go wrong in all this? LOL
Then enter Russia. Which gave some pause to the US in how far they wanted to go to throw
Assad out for Saudi and Israel and open a gateway to get Iran.
So now we are headed to the ending of the Saud and others Syrian adventure which is probably
best expressed by the fable of the fox and his shadow.
"A fox arose in the morning and saw his large shadow cast in the morning sun and said " I
will have a camel for lunch today'. The fox hunted all day for the camel without success. As
he paused in the afternoon setting sun he saw his shadow was much smaller and said "A mouse
will do after all."
In 1992, Alexandra Zapruder began to collect diaries written by children during
the Holocaust. These diaries speak eloquently of both hope and despair.
[Alexandra said:] "Anne Frank's diary was the first diary that was published. And her
voice was so powerful that it captured the voices of all the children and all the people
who had been killed. That's the way it's framed. And that by reading her diary and sort of
taking her into our hearts, we could redeem her life. . . ." [US Holocaust Memorial Museum
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/alexandra-zapruder
]
Alexandra Zapruder is the author of Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the
Zapruder Film.
Her grandfather was Abraham Zapruder, who took a twenty-six second home movie of President
John F. Kennedy's assassination[1] -- now known as the Zapruder film.( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Zapruder
]
From a strategic point of view it is very noteworthy to observe that Kurdish troops are
fully positioned east of the Euphrates River. The Kurds are allies of Israel and a vital
proxy implemented to fracture Syria along the lines envisioned for Greater Israel (Oded Yinon
Plan).
It is perceived that Russia is an ally of Syria. However, Putin has not prevented Kurdish
troops from establishing themselves firmly within Syrian territory.
Israel along with their diaspora will never relent until their abomination of "Eretz
Yisrael" is achieved. It's not an accident that the ISIS flag is marked "All Jew."
@NoseytheDuke
Washingtonsblog : " Balkanizing the Middle East – The real goal of America and Israel :
shatter Iraq and Syria into many small pieces "
Thomas Harrington : " One of the prime goals of every empire is to foment ongoing internecine
conflict in the territories whose resources and/or strategic outposts they covet "
Sanchez : " Plan B is to Balkanize Israel is endorsing its plan B for Syria just when its
enemies are making it clear that its plan A (Assad must go) is not happening anytime soon ."
Pro-Israel America launched Tuesday endorsing 27 candidates -- 14 Democrats and 13
Republicans. All have long histories of working with the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee to advance the brand of pro-Israel legislation it favors. Its endorsements on its
website praise the named lawmakers for their actions favoring the legislative agenda closely
identified with the lobby: funding for Israel's defense, sanctions on Iran and its regional
proxies, and bills that seek to counter the boycott Israel movement.
They include Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Chris Coons, D-Del.; Rep. Steny Hoyer,
D-Md., the majority leader in the U.S. House of Representatives, and Rep. Kevin McCarthy,
R-Calif., the minority leader; Rep. Eliot Engel, D-N.Y., the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee, and Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, that committee's ranking Republican.
here are all of them listed .make sure you don't vote for one:
@barr
Blaming Saudi or Turkey or UAE has possibly some validity but as far as far the effect of the
independent move by any of them is concerned , it has less than zero effect on Syria on its
own.
It is like a hypothetical scenario where Florida and Alabama are independent countries .
Rest of America is splintered into 50 different states and Canada is trying to get rid of
Cuban regime for 50 years and only in last 5 years Florida and Alabama have joined the scheme
under dubious circumstances of pressure bribery and blackmail.
@NoseytheDuke
Israel was more powerful and also more favorite of the west across ideological drive until
2003
It is not a normal country . Somewhere that guilt and remorse of stealing and killing have
left a mark on its psyche . It doesn't know how to settle and be normal
It doesn't know the meaning of the power, advantage or gain . The paranoia drives to more
dangerous world of fear and insecurity . It can't rest . Even if it is left alone, he talks
to itself and bangs it head against wall . Recent election is the manifestation of more
madness . It's begging jaunt to Russia and screaming through US media show how badly weakened
the country is.
The countries that bow to Israel – UK, USA, Egypt, Saudi are finding themselves also
badly weakened ,
A seed was planted in 2006 in Lebanon . That tree is growing taller and establishing roots
, Israel will be a shrub hiding in the shadow of that tree in a few years time.
Soviet and Russia were both almost destroyed by Jews . Now they look for the Russian shadow
to hide .
@renfro
A pack of lions can bring down an adult elephant at night when they have the advantage, but
they are careful not to choose a really big strong one. Russia is fighting in the Ukraine its
traditional heartland and what H. Mackinder called the Heartland of the World Island. A
victory in Syria that only came because Obama chose to not crush Assad with a couple of days
of air raids is hardly evidence of the Empire falling.
The real meaning of Trump is the facing of the threat from China, and if the neocons want
to play games in the Middle East so what? There is a fight coming with China and it is a
match for the West led by giant Bull Elephant America, Backward ME shitholes all together
could not take down America in a thousand years.
And what were the Kurds in Iraq called?
Didn't Saddam use some type of gas on them and that's why we were siding with them? Who told
about the incubator babies, maybe some other terrorist group?
@renfro
Mmmm, okay, you must have meant something like 'organized shooting' when you said, "SAUDI
STARTED THE WHOLE FUCKING SYRIAN WAR." Sorry I bit on false advertising.
As you see from 'barr' at #119 above, your starting point is months, years, even decades
too late. For a fact (I've met some of the Syrians who met with Robert Ford in Damascus, now
here and still lobbying for regime-change), the US was meddling, encouraging, prompting the
anti-Assadists well before the 2011 demonstrations.
@Daniel
Rich Putin is not the nice guy we have been told he is. He is in Syria for a reason, and
that is not simply because he wants Syria returned to al-Assad. Syria is only one cog in the
wheel. World wide Communism marches on, if you hadn't noticed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=4sKxkY0Tz5s
LOL. My favourite rapid US evacuation was the CIA flying off the roof of the Saigon
Embassy while the Viet Kong were busting in through the door and running up the stairs.
who benefits from these wars – isn't it just one small but powerful segment of
America – AIPAC. Isn't it time to call these wars by the honest truthful term –
"AIPAC Wars?"
Except the main beneficiary of these wars is George Soros and his anti-Semitic Globalist
movement.
Soros intentionally orchestrated the ultra-weak, time limited JCPOA treaty to create a
nuclear arms race among Iran, SA, Turkey, and possibly other MENA nations. That way he and
his buddies with MIC investments could profit by selling weapons to all sides.
So let's put in everyone's face with a factual term
Trump confuses tweeting with taking action. How many times has he mentioned 'birthright
citizenship' and then done nothing about it?
A: Every time.
If Trump drives too hard, too early and the case arrives at the Supreme Court while it is
split 5-4 in favor of 'birthright citizenship' Is that a win? Or, a loss?
There is a huge difference between 'failed action' and 'successful action'.
Given the proven hostility of the deep state establishment, it makes a great deal of sense
to lay groundwork now (via tweets), but only launch the correct constitutional action once
the courts are prepared to support it.
With class, Philip Giraldi amused me by his article's mere title, "Trump wants to end the
"Stupid Wars?"
Oh yea! Thanks, Phil , & please continue with offering dashes of intelligent,
dissident, & unflappable humor. Haha. For example, "Trump's surname was changed from the
original German Drumpf and if there were any Drumpfs at Normandy, they were undoubtedly on
the German side."
(Zigh) The insatiable global tag team, M.I.C. and The Land of Bilk & Money , want "Big
Time" and more stupidly unnecessary & immoral wars. (Zigh) One sure path to a 2nd term
for President Bonespur is for him to get off the "low energy" Turkey/Syria skirmish, &
get on with real war against Iran , for Israel.
Thanks, Phil! Fyi, I think Senator Lindsey Graham wants to get Bolton back in The Blue
& White House, and sanction Camp Mar a Lago.
P.S.: For all commenters assembled here, linked below is Stephen Colbert's satiric
covering of President Drumpf's having followed Israel's yonder (fallen) , and establishing a
US Space Force Command! To that, Colbert quipped, "Trump can not join it because of his
galactic bonespur."
@9/11
Inside job Seven Nations to Destroy for the nine eleven false flag. Wesley Clark
mentioned the seven – Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran.
Seven Nations to Destroy for Yahweh's Israel – Deut. 7:1-2 –
Tanakh/OT.
Iraq 2003 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
Libya 2011 invaded Purim – shattered in pieces
How four other nations on the list that were destroyed.
Somalia –
Since 2006 it has been a mess with Israel/US Al-Qaeda running the show.
Bizarre article about US/Israel terrorists "worried" about the environment.
Somalia-based militant group Al-Shabab has reportedly announced a ban on the use of
single-use plastic bags in territories under its control.
The Al-Qaeda-affiliated organization, which has been blamed for thousands of deaths
since its inception in 2006, dubbed plastic a "serious threat to the well-being of both
humans and animals," the BBC reported, citing Al-Shabab's radio station Radio Andalus.
It even mentions that Osama Bin Laden, the puppet of Israel/US, was "worried" about the
environment too. It makes one wonder if this Climate Change thing and Imperialism terror are
connected.
Bin Laden wrote that Americans needed to save Obama from corporate and other nefarious
influences to empower him to "save humanity from the harmful gases that threaten its
destiny."
He added that the world would be better off fighting climate change than waging what he
claimed was a war against Islam.
Sudan
Divided in two in 2011. Israel/US is pushing for more divisions.
Asked about his demand for protection during his meeting with Putin, al-Bashir said we
wanted to highlight "the big U.S. pressure and conspiracy" on Sudan in Darfur crisis and
the huge pressure exerted on his government to separate the South Sudan.
"Now we have information that the American quest is to divide the Sudan into five
countries If we do not find protection and security. America took the world leadership and
devastated the Arab world. (See) what happened in Afghanistan, what happened in Iraq, what
happened in Syria, what happened in Yemen and what happened in Sudan," said al-Bashir.
Lebanon
Invaded by Israel in the summer of 2006. It made a mess out of Lebanon. Israel had a lot
of trouble fighting off Hezbollah. This is the reason that Israel fears going into Lebanon
again. After this adventure, Golems like US and its friends are the go to for Israel's war
adventures.
Initially, both Israel and Hezbollah claimed victory in the war, with Nasrallah
declaring that Hezbollah had achieved a "divine, historic and strategic victory". Some
international observers saw the fact that Hezbollah had survived the Israeli assault,
despite the asymmetrical power balance, as a PR victory for the group. According to
Reuters, the Lebanese government estimated direct war damage at $2.8 billion, and lost
output and income for 2006 at $2.2 billion. The economy also shrank five per cent, with
tourism effectively halted.
Six of the seven were messed up, destroyed. It leaves only Iran left. Iran is in the
"news" everyday for this reason.
Trump is flawed, ok then, but we had Clinton as the alternative. She would have been ten
times worse so what choice did the American people have? He's rolling up the Obama-Clinton
project in Syria which was a huge atrocity. Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have
ensued had the US backed jihadi cannon fodder actually succeeded in overthrowing Assad? It's
not a one man show and Trump has to go along with much of what has been taking place. Much of
this has been imposed upon the American people as well as on Trump.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish PKK. Why
so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have been resisting
for so long. But yet the mighty Turks are going to defeat the Kurds of Syria even as they
can't defeat the ones living in their own country? Perhaps they'll take on the inferior
Syrian army at the same time. After all, they're a big NATO ally with lots of weapons to dump
on lightly armed foes. Reality is they haven't fought anyone in a hundred years so who knows
how well they'd do.
Quit calling Afghanistan a "war". It's an occupation with anti-guerilla operations going on.
Apparently they don't like being occupied so they fight on.
Trump's name is Trump, not Drumpf. Or do we now refer to people by the family name used a
hundred years ago, or why not five hundred years ago?
Excerpt from
"Trump Mistake: Allowing Turkish Invasion of Northern Syria"
by Joel Skousen (there is no direct link to it but it is/was on his website World Affairs Brief ):
This week in a telephone conversation with Turkish dictator Recep Erdogan he [President
Trump] assented to Erdogan's demand from over a year ago to let them enter Turkey and
establish a buffer zone where Turkey can resettle the hundreds of thousands of Syrian
refugees that have burdened Turkey since the beginning of the US-created terror attacks on
Syria. But as part of that strategy, and without emphasizing that to Trump, Erdogan intends
to drive out or destroy the Syrian Kurds which occupy northern Syria. Erdogan calls them
terrorists because the US-backed YPG Kurds are affiliated with the homegrown Kurdistan
Workers Party (PKK) which represents about 20% of the Turkish population, and which has
been fighting for independence from Turkey. So while the Turkish Foreign Minister plays lip
service to Syrian sovereignty, Turkey has already begun the invasion and occupation of
northern Syria. While Trump claims he is fulfilling a campaign promise to remove troops
from Syria, this isn't really a pullout at all since only two observation posts in the path
of the Turkish invasion are pulling out. There are thousands of other US troops elsewhere
in Syria protecting US-backed terrorist rebels.
@Johnny
Walker Read H.E. Mr. Putin has clearly stated it's up to the Syrian population to choose
who leads them, not him.
Tartus has a port Russia needs and uses.
Khmeimim Air Base is also needed and used by the Russian AF.
These are military strategic assets and used to counter balance the FUKZUS 'war' machine's
bases dotted around the ME region. Of course, those you don't mention.
No president actually controls the government, least of all Trump. The Deep State controls
the government. Trump is a an interloper. Why does one have to remind the author of this
elementary fact? The threat to destroy the economy of Turkey was made by Stephen Israel
Mnuchin. Trump had to make noises as if it was his "decision" when in fact he had nothing to
do with it. What Trump wants to do, and what he can do, are entirely different things. And
anyone who has anything to do with Americans knows what happened to all the previous allies.
Mnuchin has clued in those Turks who may have had illusions.
@renfro
very bad US is indeed . It continues to sabotage ,cast evil eye,try to strangle ,and continue
to punish Cuba . That long history is really long punctuated by half hearted Obama attempt
.
Once empire decided a project,it becomes , NASA , Present Danger , PNAC or NED . The project
goes on losing the aim . The project goes on because the vested interest
,employees,pensioner,glory seeking men, arm merchant, politicians and expatriate find means
to rake up profit and launder dishonest living into honest lifestyle . Name is changed when
it suits the project . Aim is not lost. It becomes the final destination . It never stops
energegizing the dishonest, looter,profit seekers, and opportunists . Often the brains that
gather under the flag are not that intelligent or ideologically certain.
Money and corruption drive them.
It's truly amazing how much the consciousness of the planet has changed within the past
5 years alone, and it's not just happening within one topic, but in several different areas
ranging from health to geopolitics and everything in-between.
Going broke happens slowly at first, then quickly. The Western cities are going broke, as
are those in the Third World. Nothing else changes peoples minds like having their basic
income reduced or eliminated.
All the promises (including self-governmement and freedom and equality) have turned out to
be lies, smoke. Computers, which were supposed to be a seamless adjunct to human existence, a
source of education and information, and a liberation from the bad parts of part of reality,
have turned into (poor but cheap) entertainment, gossip, a drug substitute, and a propaganda
source. The result is shock and horror, sometimes followed by violent psychosis [1] (e.g.
antifa).
Once again, I recommend "Marat/Sade"
(1967). It gives you a feel for what a revolution is like once the revolution gets going.
Note the movie's final scene, which almost breaks the "fourth wall" convention. It was made
during our last revolution, and the director wanted to record the spirit of what he had
seen.
@Art I
like it, very catchy, original, Art said: "AIPAC Wars."
Oh yea, Art, thanks, and a "spade is a spade" when one manages to get the hell out of the
AIPAC shade.
Unfortunately tonight, millions of process estranged Amerikan Democrat & GOP voters
are now "beamed up" to an AIPAC-approved strange & hostile telescreen's DebateLand.
(Zigh) Across aisle, including a possible Beaming Bloomberg entry, , "winnable" 2020
presidential nomination contestants shall pick & choose, finagle & sell, an either/or
USrael foreign policy posture, as regrettably follows:
1.) The Zio-Democrat War to end the deplorable Trump's stupid call to end all Amerika's
endless Wars just for the paltry good of gradually achieving Greater Israel's unending
endgame. or,
2.) The Zio-GOP's War to end all Democrat Party hopefuls' stupid call to end all US endless
wars just because a lefty AIPAC-Branch put an Israel Labor Party "bug in their ear" about
having lowly dead-ender 'Merikan workers fucking pay for it.
Thanks again, Art, and "Good night America."*
* Phil Giraldi inhabits Sinatra's City That Never Sleeps.
The next financial crisis is already beginning. The U.S. has a massive debt ratio
relative to the Money Supply. It is now 5:1. Good luck with that. It will be needed.
Agree.
And the financial debt must be augmented by degradation of physical infrastructure
(especially in cities and city support infrastructure) and the degradation of human capital
by importation of low IQ populations and effective destruction of education. And the capital
misallocation that continues today.
The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as global
trade will end with it.
The brave Turks have been fighting a thirty year war against the "terrorist" Kurdish
PKK. Why so long? Maybe the Turks oppress them? There has to be a reason the Kurds have
been resisting for so long.
Turkish birth rate low (lower in cities than in hinterlands), Kurdish birth rate high.
Kurds replace Turks in a few decades. Kurds don't follow Turkish cultural norms, nor Turks
follow Kurdish. Kurds don't want to wait a few decades, want power _now_ (c.f. Black Power
and Whiteness in USA). Kurds use destructive commando raides ("terrorism") to get power now.
Turks don't like that, respond with same.
Long term: demography wins barring very large change.
Please correct parts of this that are wrong. I'm not following this conflict closely.
Latest TruNews godcast, E. Michael Jones: The Deception Facing the Church by Christian
Zionism
YT Description:
Today on TruNews, Dr. E. Michael Jones joins us to talk about the influence of modern
Christian Zionism upon the American Church, and how that has led to a dramatic
radicalization of US foreign policy in favor of one nation, Israel.
Prof. Jones takes the deluded xian Zionists to task, calling them "useful idiots." My
favourite passage starts @ 18:58:
.. which means you got a lot of Christians who don't understand the gospel. Because
there are plenty of Christians out there who are Christian Zionists. It's a simple fact of
life. I think it can be traced to Jewish influence in our culture Jewish influence over the
publishing industry, for example. How did the Scofield Bible end up being published by
Oxford University Press? Because it's a great scholarly work? No! Because of people like
Mr. Untermeyer pulled strings. This is the way this happened. It's the biggest issue facing
American politics, right now. The role that Zionism is playing right now, in corrupting the
government of the United States, in diverting American resources into a quagmire in the
Middle East, which doesn't serve the interests of the American people at all and is all
done in the name of Israel.
@Counterinsurgency
I'm kind of having a mental barrier with this now.
There is a guy in Vancouver who predicted the 2008 financial crisis, Jensen I believe (he
wrote to the Bank of Canada and a list of people in 2006). He argues that the fundamentals
are even worse now due to the failure to finance these foreign adventures and other factors
(expenditures on domestic expenses not matching tax income, etc.).
I haven't even taken the time to consider the knock on effects. Mentally, I've been more
focused on having to sit through the screaming match that is going to occur over who is to
blame and the lying that will go on with respect to needing to move to a sound money system
but having bankers et al try to argue for a rollover into a new currency. It is going to be
ugly, I can feel it. It will provide an opportunity for some serious structural change and
constitutional amendments. A whole host of reforms are open when you have a debt induced
currency collapse. I just know it could be really ugly and I've been dreading thinking
through how this will play out. I keep thinking that I never expected to live in a time like
this; I think back to being a teenager during the Reagan years and, despite the Cold
War-nuclear war scenario hanging over our heads, it seemed a much more optimistic time.
I am not optimistic. I'm very worried.
@Robjil
Somalia under a failing Siad Barre regime was going to the dogs with various warlords
cannibalising each other. Then the Americans were told in the flush of victory in the Gulf in
1991, that they should just kick the door in to save the dumb Muslims. It is not the fault of
the late senior Bush that Somalia is compounded of that specimen of humanity that emerges
like clockwork when African tribalism is married to Islamic fanaticism (but is there any
other kind?) . The Americans were minding their own business, but were told that it was the
humanitarian thing (and furthermore quite cheap to boot) to do at little cost to themselves
to save Muslim chillun'.
Afghanistan was no better : The idiot, the younger George Bush instead of bombing the the
hell out of Al-Queda and leaving was instead misled by mystagogues of various hues, including
his own self into sinking lives and treasure in a vain attempt to civilise the Afghans.
The truth is the further you keep away from Muslims, the better it is for your health and
sanity, notwithstanding the parallel machinations of various neocohens, for Islam is a
pernicious religion that breeds insanity, intolerance and bloodshed all by itself.
E. Michael Jones: a very wise man. He believes in free speech and is hated by Jews who, of
course, label him an 'anti-semite'. I would argue they are 'truth averse' fanatical
maniacs.
He makes a good case that 'Christian Zionism' is a heresy. I don't believe he uses that term
BUT I do.
It's just another bubbling that is bursting.
What will they do besides scream and throw tantrums? Is it time for another false flag 911
type event?
What the media never really exposed was how Syria, and every Middle East country that has
been attacked by the DeepStateZio monster, has seen the oldest Christian communities on the
planet under attack. Strange pattern. The rise of Islamic fundamentalism, initiated by the
British alliance with the Wahabi's and the Saud Family and furthered by the CIA/Mossad in
Afghanistan, has corresponded with the destruction and diasporas of the world's oldest
Christian communites.
Somehow, Europe has ended up with a bunch of Muslims when these Christians would have fit
into their societies much better.
I think that none of this just 'happened'. I strongly suspect that if we were to kick over
some rocks we would find the usual suspects: the Khazar/Black Nobility Alliance.
@renfro
How?????????????????????????????????????????
,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
I do think it was Mc Cain.
Concerning historically lazy Saudis I am entirely confident that they were only taking care
of payroll.
( I am not entirely confident but there is a possibility that CIA did channel some profits
from Afghanistan poppy fields for this noble cause.
@Counterinsurgency
Quote: "The world will be surprised at what happens when the US power projection ends, as
global trade will end with it."
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road project,
[IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global trade will
not nosedive along with it.
Too much a stake for the multinationals [not necessary a good thing, but alas].
Damascus had supported U.S. intelligence operations after 9/11 and it was Washington
that soured the relationship beginning with the Syria Accountability Act of 2003, which
later was followed by the Syrian War Crimes Accountability Act of 2015, both of which were,
at least to a certain extent, driven by the interests of Israel.
It's very challenging to come up with any foreign policy initiatives that do not serve
Zionist Israel's interests, first and foremost. Israeli interests have defined American
foreign policy objectives in the ME for much of the post-WWII era. Not at Israel's behest,
but on Israel's instructions and demands via pro-Zionist lobbies and the infestation of the
Administration with Israel First officials, Israeli citizens and spies. Add to that the
Israel First MSM.
@ivan
Is it methamphetamine instead of regular fentanyl ? Anyway, this logic and perverted emotion
make sense to you. Unfortunately it will reinforce your decision to switch . Business will
sure be coming back from China to rural America.
@A123 I
respectfully disagree on this particular matter. There is no US law bestowing birthright
citizenship. All that would change is recognition of what the law really says.
Trump waiting to win another 4 (still a gamble) AND for RBG's animatronics to fizzle out
AND for her replacement to not be another skunk like Roberts is foolish.
There is no underwater 38th-dimensional quantum chess being played here, and we still have
no wall.
Oops, I posted this under another writer. (Small wonder I got no answer.) Since then, someone
else remarked that at the end of WWI this land (northern Syria) was taken from Turkey. So
this is a long grievance, with deep sense of entitlement.
Rurik wrote, " .the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they
use Libya's stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring that
Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the team.
Maybe Phil can enlighten us:
We know that Robert Ford, US Embassador to Syria, was meeting privately with Syrian "civil
society" activists before the 2011 demonstrations.
-- Was Erdogan/Turkey also involved in infiltrating, inflaming those anti-Assad
elements?
-- How did Turkey involvement begin?
-- Was the CIA actively involved in Syria before the fall of Libya?
C'mon guys.
Using prior military service as some sort of litmus test to the right to critique involvement
and opinion sharing today plays to an audience mentality that encourages blind
patriotism.
There really are no necessary wars these days as they are all being fought for the banker
elite which holds no loyalty to country though it plays on ppl's ignorance to use such
loyalties for propaganda purposes.
There is no justification for US troops to be all over the world as a banker mercenary force
and this site acknowledges 911 was an Israeli- internationalist false flag which removes all
justifications for the meddling in Israeli neighbor's internal affairs.
Tolerating this to get air time with magazines that lie for power is encouraging this
negative behavior for personal advantage in a country and world striving to control the most
minute areas of our lives.
Going along to get along only brings the eternal boot down of the forehead forever@!
The fact that none of these bickering forces are targeting Israel who always was the
catalyst for the divisions there, is a huge clue that we and Israel are the problem causers
primarily. Of course we need false flags to excite the population to support the fake war on
terror within the US and Europe (as well as justify the reverse colonialism going on). Jews
for hundreds of years have counted on stupid goyim to do the fighting but now that Israel is
a supposed stand alone nation, that should be harder to accomplish but apparently total
corporate media control keeps the truth hidden from 85% of the public.
Reply: Given the vast sums of money set aside to implement China's 1 belt 1 road
project, [IMO] the global dollar trade will turn into a trickle over time, but the global
trade will not nosedive along with it.
I actually hadn't thought of that. Now that you point it out, of course the dollar trade
will decrease. Negative interest rates are, in a way, saying that nobody wants US Dollars
anymore, and trades that are not in US Dollars are being actively sought. The decrease will
happen a bit before the USN becomes ineffective. And that will be hard on the
multi-nationals, but I can't say I have much sympathy. They were firmly behind the move of
Western manufacturing to East Asia – what did they think would happen?
But I do disagree over the assertion that global trade will remain about as it is.
The New Silk Road. Interesting topic.
Well, first of all it's a reasonable thing for the PRC to do. Historically, the Silk
Road has paid off for China, at least in terms of precious metals, and being dependent on a
single transportation mode for one's raw materials is strategically undesirable. It's a
good move. It's also an attempt to realize McKinder's proposed making the World Island into
a unified state[1].
But a couple of points:
a) New Silk Road is much more expensive than sea transport [2]. If sea lanes are cut
off, China's raw materials costs increase by several times.
b) New Silk Road recapitulates the interaction of European empires of the 1800s through
1900s with ethnicities along the Silk Road. The Europeans were resented and eventually
ejected. The Chinese are having similar problems.
China has loaned money to various nations which have then spent that money on immediate
consumption and are attempting to repudiate the debt. The Chinese (who have no compunctions
about debt repudiation through currency devaluation) are apparently taking over completion
of the Silk Road facilities for which the natives can no longer pay (having spent the money
on other things). Local rulers are saying that this makes the Chinese foreign invaders (on
a very low level so far). Just like the Europeans.
Chinese society also does not mix well with either Islamic or African tribal society, yet
the Silk Road crosses both cultural territories.
So far as I know, the Chinese takeover of the Panama Canal since the US evacuation has gone
well. Last I heard, a few years back, Panama had started teaching Chinese in its public
schools. Chinese operations in South and Meso America are increasing, however, and I know
little about how they are going.
The nice thing about policed sea lanes is that shippers don't have to worry much about
the natives. Piracy is and has been a problem, but so far not a serious one. New Silk Road
goes overland, and that has (historically) always led to security problems with the locals,
whoever the locals may be.
So: Let's suppose that the USN were to become ineffective. Only the part of the Silk
Road guarded by the Russian Federation would remain secure. The rest would be subject to
local raids and extortion from the local government. Note that raw materials costs would
increase drastically for everybody (because of less shipping), so local governments and
bandits would have motives for confiscating goods.
This would be especially the case in Africa, which is largely dependent on food imports.
That conflict could become severe, as China is increasingly dependent on Africa for raw
materials (as is the rest of the world).
In other words, sole reliance on the New Silk Road (should that ever be necessary) would
be expensive in terms of shipping and in terms of security / warfare costs. China's
bellicose policy is, IMHO, counterproductive. China should be positioning itself to police
the sea lanes cooperatively but reluctantly with a declining USN, gradually assuming the
mantle of worldwide protection of the sea lanes that China needs so badly. Current efforts
to be able to interdict the sea lanes are not in the PRC's interest, as the PRC needs these
sea lanes open. It's sort of like developing a hyperbomb to make the Sun go nova. Under
what circumstances would you use such a device? Under what circumstances would China want
to cease shipping by sea?
So, what's likely to happen? The USN will decline because it needs recapitalization due
to age and a changing threat, and the US is instead devoting its income to debt repayment
and immediate social stability expenditures. The PRC, which has never been a naval power,
will still attempt to keep global trade alive. When that fails, the PRC will trade more
with the Russian Federation It will also take what sea and land it has, make an
expeditionary force out of it, and deploy it in some trading zones (possibly in countries
that have resources China needs) rather than see its population starve and itself
overthrown. That's the standard response from any H. Sap. political organization. Things
will get very messy.
And please remember that I'm like the weatherman: I report, I don't cause.
@Stan
Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for the
West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility. A
confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,
@Daniel
Rich What part of BOTH the US and Russia are only there to serve their own
interest don't people understand. My only point is Russia is not there out of the goodness of
their hearts. People who claim Russia is fighting the globalist juggernaut and is only in
Syria to "fight ISIS/ISL" and to make Syria "safe for Democracy" aren't seeing the big
picture. Russia is working hand in hand with China to make sure America is reduced to a
second rate global power. Assad has become nothing more than Putin's puppet on a string.
Syria will need money for re-construction, thanks to Russia destroying much of their
infrastructure, that money more than likely will come from China(China's version of "Economic
Hit Men"). All the while, lurking in the back ground, that little shit stain known as Israel.
This report will present the reality of Russia's Syrian campaign. Russia launched air
strikes on hospitals, water treatment plants, and mosques. Russia used cluster bombs.
Russia almost exclusively targeted non-ISIS targets. These are the truths that Russia will
not admit, and the truths that must be understood when negotiating with Russia as a
potential partner.
It's all about the "Belt and Road Initiative". There are no good guy's in this mess, and
the real losers in this conflict are the citizens of Syria. Russia is a main partner in
"Globalization".
One of the main problems of the People's Republic is to connect the "Belt" with the
"Road". For China it is crucial to be able to bypass the choke points represented by the
straits that separate the South China Sea from the Indian Ocean (Malacca, Sunda and Lombok)
that, being controlled by the US, prevent the Chinese maritime power to fully develop. A
first important asset in this sense is represented by the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor,
which connects by land Eastern China to the port of Gwadar in Pakistan, in turn connected
to the String of Pearls.
Why Syria?
In this perspective, Syria becomes a crucial junction within the BRI: a possible
development of its transport and port infrastructures, properly connected with each other
and with the Belt and Road Initiative, would allow China a further maritime outlet for its
land trade and a formidable trade post in the Mediterranean. A further advantage is
represented by the increased quantity of goods that China could deliver into the
Mediterranean, overcoming the further bottleneck of the Suez Canal.
Syria also has at least two important factors that represent opportunities to be
exploited by Beijing: the country's urgent need to obtain funds to be allocated to
reconstruction and development and the simultaneous disengagement of the United States from
the Middle East, an empty space not filled by the EU. Syria is therefore an extremely
interested and receptive partner to the proposals of the Chinese government, which finds
itself at the same time freed from any diplomatic controversy that could slow down its
action.
@Counterinsurgency
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and other
third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn sour for
them eventually.
@Abdul
Alhazred Thank you for that video. I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my
life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering to people like me,
but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said.
More on Trump by Shamir's recent article:
What is much worse for Israel, is Trump's intent to leave the region. There is a good
chance you haven't seen relevant tweets of the President, for the MSM doomed to surround it
by the wall of silence. That is what the President said while ordering withdrawal:
"Fighting between various groups that has been going on for hundreds of years. USA
should never have been in Middle East. The stupid endless wars, for us, are ending! The
United States has spent EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS fighting and policing in the Middle East.
Thousands of our Great Soldiers have died or been badly wounded. Millions of people have
died on the other side. GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE
HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY! Now we are slowly & carefully bringing our great soldiers
& military home. Our focus is on the BIG PICTURE!"
Just for this recognition "GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN
THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY" and for this promise "The stupid endless wars, for us, are
ending!" Trump deserves to be re-elected and remembered as the most courageous and
independent US President since Richard Nixon.
His efforts on withdrawing from the Middle East remind of Nixon's hard struggle to leave
Vietnam and to make peace with Russia and China. If he succeeds in this endeavour, he will
be rewarded by the American people in 2020..
If he succeeds, then he sure will have my support!
One of the main instigators of the Syrian imbroglio – Saudi Arabia – had
been beaten in Yemen and is no longer eager for battle; ditto Qatar and UAE. Europe is less
keen on removing "bloody dictators" than it was. CIA, Jewish Lobby and Clintonite Democrats
would keep Syria boiling, but mercifully they are not in full command in Washington. .
@A123
What is allegedly being built is the same worthless fence. The wall prototypes couldn't
legally be used per a clause in one of the terrible spending bills hastily signed by "Master
Negotiator" Trump.
Better than cacklin' cankles? Yes, but so is my last bowel movement.
Even if we got a real wall, Orangemeister wants legal gimmegrants in record numbers. We
just can't effing win.
Don't you think Trump was a tad premature in announcing "Only I can fix," to all these
problems?
Chinese seem very naive in their willingness to deal with and trust black Africans and
other third worlders to honour deals and not be corrupt, etc. I suspect it will all turn
sour for them eventually.
Every high value PRC project in Africa seems to come with as suspiciously large number of
military age, ethnic Han Chinese staff.
The PRC colonization effort is informed by the lessons of former Euro colonies. They have
built-in measures to make them very hard to displace. And, should they eventually be forced
out, the locals will get nothing but destroyed and poisoned lands.
@geokat62
Know more News with Adam News covers the Christian Zionist story. He is still on you
tube.
Jones was banned from that platform recently. He can still be heard on bitchute as well as
his own website, Culturewars.com
the Americans (Obama regime), created ISIS- with the intention that they use Libya's
stolen arms caches to hack and slaughter their way across Syria "
Yes, and that's why I'm skeptical of dumping of Erdogan. How eager was he for this
conflict? Did the Obama CIA promise him N. Syria for his complicity? Doubtless assuring
that Assad would fall quickly! Or maybe they dangled EU membership, if he joined the
team.
I have a metric that I use.
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.
Insofar as Erdogan has been aligned with Israel and its interests and agendas (the
destruction and carving up of Syria)- is the degree to which he has been a malefactor on the
world's stage.
/
Vs. the degree to which he's opposed to Israel's nefarious agendas;
– he's demonstrated actual statesmanship.
So that's my metric. That's why generally I don't have to pour over the minutia of every
action or issue with a fine tooth comb, rather I just ask, 'is this person or action aligned
with Israel's agenda.. (genocide, theft, murder, hegemony, strife ), and the question always
seems to answer itself!
Just consider the Obama regime. When I approved of what Obama was doing- peace with Iran-
it was when he was in Israel's crosshairs.
When I disapproved of Obama's treasons, it was when his actions were perfectly aligned
with Israel – destruction of Libya, destruction of Syria and so forth.
It really is a near perfect, if not perfect metric.
When Trump is betraying America and Americans, is when he's serving Israel – open
borders, drones, sanctions on Iran and Russia and others..
When he's acting like an actual American president, in the service of this nation, is when
he's in direct opposition to Israel's agenda – ending the Eternal Wars, making videos
about dead American soldiers, firing Bolton, talking about nationalism at the UN..
I'm really sort of waiting for this test to ever fail, it's been so reliably perfect for
so long.
So if you want to know if Erdogan is acting in good faith, just check to see if what he's
doing pleases Israel, and you'll know all you need to know!
Is a Kurdish state a good thing?
Well, what does the 'metric' say?
Is Turkey's incursion into Syria a good thing?
Here, a mouthpiece of Zion posits 'no'.
The Turkish government is no longer interested in helping Syrians liberate themselves
from Assad's murderous regime.
The video is very powerful, and this video linked in this link features Trump's speaking
with attendant images of the families of the soldiers and what they have to go through
.because of the lies of the warmongers.
@Rurik
As Commander in Chief tRump wanted to kill Syria President Basher Assad for having gassed his
own people & having to be restrained by his Generals, Amerikans now see another side to
their president which Rurik observed on video & gushed: "I've never been so proud of a
U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video. He may have been cynically pandering
to people like me, but I don't care. Even if he was pandering, he said what he said Thank
God. Peace."
Am sincerely glad you're "happy," Rurik, that Trumpstein moved to shed some of his
Adelson/Netantahu skin implants. Nonetheless, & I don't want to be a GOP Likud-Party
pooper, but am sticking with Philip Giraldi's advisory to, "Let's see what he actually
does."
At any rate, linked below (& fyr in ), is Brother Nathanael's latest video. In order
to stave off our nation's descent into Greater Sodom & Gomorrah, it's understandable to
me how Bro Nat prefers "The Chosen One" to continue as ZUS president over his uber-liberal
& decadent Zio-Democrat opponents.
Thanks Rurik, and enjoy the good times of tRump's proclamation of an end to endless wars
for Greater Israel while it lasts!
"Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue
for the West . . . A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons"
Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is at the heart of US
FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's
rise.
The wonderful context is, it's not up to Trump. It's not up to the US government. The world
will squeeze the CIA regime out of Syria. Russian doctrine of coercion to peace works equally
well on degenerate great powers, with the minor filip of face-saving subterfuge for routed US
functionaries.
Lindsay Graham gets to shake his tiny fist ineffectually at a sneering NATO ally instead
of shaking his tiny fist ineffectually at a nuclear power with overwhelming hypersonic
nonballistic missile capability. Much safer.
@Wally
The only way to change this cast of filthy charACTORs we have running this country is to have
a "NONE OF THE ABOVE" box located prominently at the bottom of every ballot. One I
would take the time and effort needed to check.
@Cloak And
Dagger Trump's problem is that he has very little support for his MAGA agenda in his own
party. People like Lindsey Graham who support him here and there will not hesitate to turn on
him if he takes positions that offend Sheldon Adelson. Trump's none-too-sophisticated,
none-too-affluent base is opposed by the media, academe, Wall Street, Silicon Valley, the FBI
and CIA, and the Rainbow Coalition assemblage of minority voices. Even Fox News (apart from
Tucker) opposes Trump's agenda even as it defends Trump against spurious charges of colluding
with the Russians. For example, Hannity regularly charges the Democrats with being in league
with Putin, in effect conceding that the Russians are evil enemies. Yet Trump's MAGA proposal
was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian) Russia.
At the end of the day, the 4D Chess view seems more right than wrong. While Trump's
commitment to the right is both shallow and wavery, in the present setting he cannot do more
than hold the enemy at bay and wait for reinforcements to show up. That means it's up to US,
his supporters, to find ways to weigh in on his side. As the fascists used to say, a bundle
of sticks can be strong even if the individual sticks are weak.
@Sean
My question to you is: a confrontation between who or what and China? To the extent that
America collapses into a post-Christian, post-European congeries of plutocrats and their
commercial interests, such a confrontation has no clear shape. The evolving character of
American society has been put on the table by the Trump/populist revolution, and the role of
Jews in our cultural evolution is part of that even if it is taboo to discuss it. The issue
over the Palestinians is the only way to challenge the successful assumption of moral carte
blanche by the secular Jewish community, which Jewish thought leaders have parlayed into an
effective assault on freedom of speech and assembly (particularly in Europe but also here),
and a campaign to stigmatize whiteness, Christianity, and the nuclear family.
Conclusion: The issue of Palestine is a proxy for the larger issue of whether secular
Judaism deserves its current status as moral hegemon. It is the only way to raise this issue
that is not instantly dismissed as neo-Nazism.
@SolontoCroesus
SolontoCroesus wrote: "Israel's overall shiftiness IS not at all a "side issue" to USA, it is
at the heart of US FP dysfunction.
According to the video below, Israel is firmly on board and participating in China's rise."
To All commenters,
Above, when SolontoCroesus speaks, I listen & learn.
When President Bonespur speaks, it pains to listen, & I can potentially become
deceived.
Will likely get friendly fire from Rurik, but I truly wish he reads your comment &
astutely watches the very informative linked Talpiot video. Hurts when I see good men (like
him) gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
Thanks for your patriotic servus, S2C!
P.S.: Behind D.C.'s Blue & White House curtain, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin licks his
choppers in anticipation of effectual ZUS sanctions, & the Chinese communist government's
finally granting Goldman Sachs Group permission to do "untethered" investment business" in
the mainland; the largest consumer market on the planet.
@Sean'Israel is a shitty little country but its treatment of the Palestinians is side issue for
the West, just as the way the Kurds are treated is unfortunate but hardly our responsibility.
A confrontation with burgeoning China beckons, and America needs to be united. Going off on
tangents to play Santa to peoples who lost the geopolitical game and are without a state
would weaken the West,'
As usual you've being dishonest. You agree Israel is a 'shitty little country' -- but
manage to insinuate we should continue to support it.
After all, we don't have to spend a penny to 'play Santa' to the Palestinians (as if we
had nothing to do with their expulsion.). It's the Israelis we subsidize and protect, not the
Palestinians.
In fact, we can help the Palestinians and save money too! Yank Israel off our tit and we
get to have our cake and eat it too. The Palestinians get their home back, and we save
billions every year. All we have to do is to stop funding their tormentors,
If a person or action is in anyway aligned with Israel, then that person or action is
suspect, at best.'
It is always wrong to support Israel.
In 2008, I voted for McCain instead of Obama. I told myself they'd both be equally
supportive of Israel, but I knew deep down inside that was a lie.
I voted for McCain because he wasn't black. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me is
that I allowed some other consideration to seduce me into supporting Israel -- however
trivially and as it turned out ineffectually.
If you establish 911 was a fraud then subsequent war on terror is a fraud. The West will
exhaust themselves waging war against Islam and the Muslims despite killing millions of
people. They will dig their own graves and cast themselves in hell fire for eternal damnation
for subscribing to Santa Claus lies and Jesus died for their evils by supporting the money
changer's ideology for greater Israel project to usher in their Anti-Christ as their Messiah.
Anti-Christ Dajjal will take them for a ride to hell. He will play them "By way of Deception"
just as they are playing the rest of the world "By way of Deception wage wars." So how many
of us are willing to sell our souls in exchange for the worldly gains and pay a penalty for
eternal damnation?
gush while listening to "The Chosen One's" tear jerking words.
"I've never been so proud of a U.S. president in my life, as I was watching that video.
"
Gushing?
Perhaps, I suppose, depending on your definition.
But when's the last time you heard a Z.U.S. president speak of the war dead with
compassion and pathos? Hell, when's the last time you heard them speak of these tragic
victims of American f0lly (treason and war crimes), and their families- at all?
He was saying 'enough of this madness!'
And from what I understand, American troops are indeed vacating Syrian bases.
BTW, leaving for a few days, so keep up the good fight, Brother Chuck!
@Wally
Wally likes to cheap shot P.G., haha, and once again futilely asked him: "Has Giraldi ever
stated which current candidate is his preference vs. Trump?"
Get on the ball, wailing Wall! (zzZigh) Likely, even some knowledgeable CODAH associates
will inform that YOU'LL get what Supremacist Jews give you.
Haha. The Zionized D.N.C. is presently fretting over which Jewish Lobby-approved
presidential 2020 candidate they should give to their "base" voters. Haha. Liberal tribe
chieftains are confident that even Mayor Pete Buttigieg will make incumbent, Trumpstein,
Tweet-out "endless" sweat on election night.
Nonetheless, had Amerika a real choice, , Ron Paul would be my #1 "anti-Chosen One"
alternative. Refer to his article below, wailing Wall?
Yet Trump's MAGA proposal was detente and friendly cooperation with (now-Christian)
Russia.
That's why the NeoCohens hate Putin so much, for re-establishing Russian Christian
Orthodoxy as the 'national' religion. Trump, on the other hand, admires Putin for his
nationalism and wants white Christian Russia to be friends with nominally Christian
America. Unfortunately he must bow down to the Satanic anti Christ power brokers, the Cabal,
that keeps him in power and checks his nationalist leanings. Hopefully he will overcome this
in a second term but I've been saying that about presidents for years!
@ChuckOrloski
Thanks ChuckOrloski.
Undeserved, tho -- I was just being a shepherd guiding the flock to other people's good work,
a practice I learned from your comment style.
I don't want to be in the business of educating you on un-American actions undertaken by
"Z.U.S. presidents." You really know better, but since Jacques Sheete, peace be upon him, is
M.I.A., I will now do my best.
No doubt, Trumpstein is different. Please pause momentarily and consider how he very
recently wanted to sell/provide nuclear weapons systems to Saudi Arabia. Fyi, and lucky for
the entire Middle East's general population, Trump's lack of "compassion" was overuled by
those higher in the ZUS's Blue & White House Lowerarchy. (Note: He ain't "The Decider,"
he is the ever useful & divisive Zion Tweet-Chord)
So given the U.R. Moderator sword is not activated, linked down below, is a joint radio
show, hosted by Dr. David Duke & Ryan Dawson. Ideally, this action will take the job of
trying to educate YOU from off my shoulders, Rurik. No reading needed, & just carefully
listen!
Fyi, Dr. Duke and Mr. Dawson will provide the means by which an anti-Zionist &
patriotic American can resist the evil sway dished-out daily by our "Homeland's" Zionist
Corporate Media. These largely demonized gentlemen/scholars explain how Zionized Republicans
& Democrats are curiously "on the same page" when it comes to humanely protecting the
Kurds.
But when it comes to supporting & defending The Land of Bilk & Money, they unite.
Yippie! On other hand, and when it comes to actually helping the restless & sorry lot of
dumb goyim working Amerikans, they fight like , er, "Tom and Jerry." (Zigh) Why Trumpstein
even moved to kill the underachieving & oft unaffordable "Affordable Care Act," a.k.a.,
Obamacare.
Enjoy your time off, my Brother Rurik, and I suggest, at minimum, partial evacuation from
the dug-in Jewish Corporate Media "bases."
@Rurik'That's a very honest act of self-reflection, Colin.
I voted for Ron Paul, (If I recall, I wrote in his name).
I would have preferred the racist commie to the war mongering scumbag, but only because by
then I understood the nature of McCain all too well '
Now you're reminding me of 2012. Of course, I was going to vote for Obama over Israel's
man-in-the-White House-to-be. An unpleasant choice, but there it was
So my wife and I were down in Alameda at a winery. Somewhat incongruously, the server was
right-wing, and started praising Romney. I stayed tactful, as I didn't want to kill my buzz,
but my wife -- who is easily influenced -- came out of there going 'Romney number one.
Yeah -- I'm going to vote for him!'
In an unusual display of wisdom, I bit my tongue. We'll see how this plays out
You need to understand my wife comes from a poor background. If you want to meet 'the
working poor,' go see her relatives.
So the very next day, Romney comes out with his '49%' remark. It was classic.
@Johnny
Walker Read Right. This happens every so often. I am not recommending de Sade or any of
his works.
I'm recommending the movie:
"The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the
Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade ", play 1963, movie 1967 [1].
The movie has very little to do with the writings of the original Marquis de Sade [2], but it
does do a good job of showing the spirit of revolutions.
de Sade had a good reputation with the revolutionaries. He was elected a delegate to the
French National Convention, but fell during the Reign of Terror [3]. He really did direct
publicly presented plays at Charenton starting in 1803, but was eventually arrested and
denied paper and pen in 1809. Died 1815, and several large manuscripts were subsequently
burned by his son, who apparently thought that de Sade had done quite enough harm
already.
Insofar as tje video has anything to do with the real de Sade, it is that the director
(fictional de Sade) manages to stage a small revolution himself in the final scene, _after_
demonstrating that the audience is little more sane than de Sade is ("15 glorious years"
scene). As in the link given by Read [4], de Sade acts as the philosophical godfather of
revolution and revolt as an end in itself.
The really pathetic attempt by ABC to pass off Kentucky gun range footage as a Syrian
conflict zone is a good example of the consequences of Congress' horrible 2013 decision
(that you may not have heard of) to totally legalize domestic propaganda. @_whitneywebb
In the age of legal, weaponized propaganda directed against the American people, false
narratives have become so commonplace in the mainstream media that they have essentially
become normalized, leading to the era of "fake news" and "alternative facts."
The bad and ugly shepherds persistently hit vulnerable & trusting Unzers with their
"best shot." For one example, the currently M.I.A. commenter, Maven Sam Shama.
Subsequently, I see no valid reason why intelligent & good men -- like you! -- should
not give their "best shot" and attempt to support & rescue lost sheeple who regularly
appear here.*
* Some lost sheep simply like it that way, and therefore, bad shepherds, for one example,
the featherweight commenter "Sean," get lots of practice at misguiding the flock.
@steinbergfeldwitzcohen
Right, what to do is the question now that everybody has been taken by surprise.
I'd say that the advice "get out of debt, get out of the major cities" is fairly good, and
fairly obvious, and has been so for some time. As to income, I just don't know. You might try
linking up to some group (non-Left) that seems to be cohesive and has _some_ plan of action
that isn't too weird. Under stress, cohesive groups can survive better than individuals.
You might also remember the rule of thumb that prophets can predict either what or when,
but not both. It's obvious that the US in general and cities in particular are in severe
decline, but _when_ the current system will cast off much of the population it now supports
is simply not known. Abandon it too soon and you end up extremely poor, so a sharp break is
extremely risky. I'd say that retiring debt, hardening your house against home invasion, and
finding some group as above, would be about all that would be justified right now. If your
neighborhood is deteriorating, it might be a good idea to go to another one that isn't, since
the deterioration is unlikely to reverse itself. If you're in with an ethnic group that
doesn't like your ethnic group, it might be a good idea to displace, if only to avoid the
unpleasantness.
@jack
daniels The current US system / world order will end within the next decade no matter
what Trump does. Trump is trying to shut it down with minimal casualties and replace it with
something viable, which is a good thing to do, but if Trump were to vanish tomorrow the
current US system / world order would still end within the next decade, maybe two decades if
things went very badly wrong.
Trump has the wind at his back, he's trying to do things that would do themselves (although
not as well) and that's why the appearance of 4D Chess. But, as you point out, Trump leads a
very small force of government officials, and would lose without the strength given by his
supporters. Continued support, in word and in deed, should reduce casualties (to include
Trump and his family) during the current transition.
MEANWHILE, Millions Hungry and Food Insecure in the US
"According to the US Department of Agriculture in 2018, food insecurity affects 37 million
Americans, including over 11 million children -- the numbers likely way understated."
"Around 40 million Americans experience hunger annually."
"At least 15 million US households endure food insecurity."
"Hunger is caused by poverty and inadequate financial resources, a nationwide
problem."
"Around 45 million Americans rely on food stamps, an eroding program providing inadequate
help."
"1 in 6 American children may not know where their next meal is coming from."
"22 million children in America rely on the free or reduced-price lunch they receive at
school, but as many as 3 million children still aren't getting the breakfast they need."
@Rurik
I applaud the sentiment too.
I'm hearing rumours that Trump has put a thousand troops into Saudi Arabia and claimed they
are paying for it.
Is it now America's lot to be not just Israel's but SA's mercenaries?
2020 can't come fast enough. I'd love to see a Trump super majority and some serious
reform.
It's pretty clear the Evangelical Zionist's are Israelis' b@tches.
America, it seems, must not only reclaim itself but also it's religion. EV is a heresy and
the leaders are on their knees f@llating Israel. It is disgusting to watch.
Yes, I agree, having trucks and trains go overland and via various countries comes with
the risk of conflicts erupting between 2 or more states participating in Chinese projects.
China burnt itself badly in Libya, where Hillary " We Came, We Saw, He Died! Haw, haw,
haw " Rotham Clingon ran amok.
China is actively setting up routes via the attic as well, so I think China carefully
weighs all its options, but doing business comes with certain risks, those are
unavoidable.
When I was in Africa [The Gambia and there about], I noticed a lot of Chinese merchandise
being sold all over the place. I heard stories of some Chinese being attacked and/or murdered
elsewhere in Africa, but haven't dealt with any Chinese businessman myself or heard their
stories in person.
Having been on that vast continent doesn't make me an expert whatsoever, but I see Africa
become a huge anchor around the world's neck. Can't use a single brush to paint entire
nations, I know, but what I saw didn't look good.
side note : I didn't live in a hotel with armed guards, I lived in a compound with
Africans, so it's not that I have no up close experience. Furthermore, I was always treated
with kindness, respect and warmth.
That's it, I quit. I can't be expected to compete with this.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
October 9, 2019
His Excellency
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
President of the Republic of Turkey
Ankara
Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of
people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy -- and I will.
I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.
1 have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make
a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make
concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy
of his letter to me, just received.
History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It
will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy.
Don't be a fool!
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
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Comments
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
"... I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against 'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans. ..."
"... This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a good description ..."
"... The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely two branches of the Business Party. ..."
"... Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points across at the same time. ..."
"... Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment. ..."
"... Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local. ..."
Hillary Clinton appeared to suggest that Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-Hawaii) is the "favorite of the Russians" to win the 2020 presidential
election and is being groomed by Moscow to run as a third-party candidate against the eventual Democratic nominee.
...
The Russians already have their "eye on somebody who's currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third-party
candidate," she said, in an apparent reference to Gabbard.
"She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her, so far," Clinton
told David Plouffe, the podcast's host and the campaign manager for former President Obama's 2008 campaign.
"And that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up, which she might not because she's also a Russian asset," Clinton added, referring
to the 2016 Green Party presidential candidate.
The responses were appropriate:
Tulsi Gabbard @TulsiGabbard - 22:20 UTC
· Oct 18, 2019
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that
has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy,
there has been a ...
... concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know -- it was always you, through
your proxies and ...
... powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine, afraid of the threat I pose.
It's now clear that this primary is between you and me. Don't cowardly hide behind your proxies. Join the race directly.
The Streisand effect of Clinton's shoddy remark will help Tulsi Gabbard with regards to name recognition. It will increase her
poll results. With Joe Biden faltering and Elizabeth Warren increasingly exposed as a phony Clinton copy, Bernie Sanders could become
the Democrats leading candidate. Then the “favorite of the Russians” smear will be applied to him.
Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party for damaging it's chances to regain the White House. But the Democratic
establishment would rather sabotage the election than to let one of the more progressive candidates take the lead.
Voters do not like such internal squabble and shenanigans. The phony Ukrainegate 'impeachment inquiry' is already
a gift for Trump. Messing with the candidate field on top
of that will inevitably end with another Trump presidency.
and Suspend her from what? a lamp post? That's a little bit harsh.
Hillary is actually doing something constructive for the first time in her career - by giving a boost to Tulsi Gabbard who
is the only candidate who challenges the military industrial complex, which has probably caused more death and destruction than
anyone else in history.
I suspect that Gabbard has very little chance of beating Trump because he is also campaigning - quite successfully - against
'endless wars', and Gabbard is too radical for most Americans.
But none of the other Democratic candidates stand a chance of beating Trump either. The two front-runners are medically unfit
for any important challenging job - Biden (senility) and Sanders (recent heart attack/stroke?).
Tulsi is urging Hillary to "enter the race" !! Hillary is foaming at the mouth with desire to enter the 2020 race. Is Tulsi
working for Hillary?
Behind the scenes it was decided to make HunterBidenGate the pretext for a Trump impeachment. This, it
was thought, would damage Trump AND Biden and make way for the resurrection of Hillary Clinton. There were so many other pretexts
available but they chose this one.
"Clinton should be suspended from the Democratic Party"
This sparks some interesting questions, such as, exactly who are party members, and how do they become members? The actual
structure and functioning of political parties in the US is seldom discussed, and I wonder why that is. "Opaque" seems to be a
good description. Even a quick review of the Wikipedia entry reveals little.
As best I can tell, a person is a party member by checking the box on the voter registration form. The few times I have registered,
I did not check a box for any party. It is none of the state's business who I associate with or vote for.
It is also not the state's business to supervise and fund the selection of party candidates. But that is what happens in the
US. The primary voting system is a huge financial subsidy to the two officially approved parties, which are, of course, merely
two branches of the Business Party.
"It didn't come much clearer nor more explicit than when Gabbard fired up the Democratic TV debate this week. It was billed
as the biggest televised presidential debate ever, and the Hawaii Representative told some prime-time home-truths to the nation:
"Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have
supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011 along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing
and cheer-leading this regime-change war."
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing
the government in Damascus."
Good for Tulsi. I love the way she punches. She not only decked Clinton in one, but she got a lot of other important points
across at the same time. The way she tries to finesse her stances on Iran, India and Israel is disturbing though.
Whenever she tries to curve her stance close to the establishment, she comes off as someone who is running for Secretary
of State or Secretary of Defense; as someone with her eyes on a high status job in the establishement.
When she's forthright, punches hard and says the things that many people are thinking but few dare say - as she did in her
statement on Syria, but didn't in her statement on Iran - she comes off as the first real candidate for President that I've seen
in my lifetime (I don't count the likes of Dennis Kucinich, who never seemed to actually want to win).
If Tulsi is serious about doing the world good, this is the path she needs to take. Speak the truths no one else is willing
to say; punch hard; stick with it. Yeah and be willing to die for it. If they can't stop you, which I don't think they can, they'll
come gunning for you...
Finally, at last, foreign affairs (i.e wars) has made it into a presidential campaign, and by a veteran, with veterans currently
being sanctified in the U.S. The women (Tulsi, Jill and Hillary) are getting down and dirty, too, which is always a good thing
and a feature of politics in time past, as in the Truman era. President Harry Truman: "If you can't stand the heat, get out of
the kitchen. If you cannot handle the pressure, you should not remain in a position where you have to deal with it."
Let's hope that they get into the details of Hillary's failures, including Libya, Somalia, and especially Syria. Let's get
it on! In the last election she never was forced to answer for her specific failures. Now's the time.
Hillary Clinton can't be thrown out of the Dem party because she in a sense IS the Dem party as it stands now, a long way
from its roots. The Dem party now has been fully integrated into the bureaucracy, the intelligence services and the corporate
media similar to how Tony Blair in the UK took the Labour Party to be deeply embedded in the UK establishment.
What Trump has successfully done from the right that Sanders/Gabbard (like Corbyn in the UK) are struggling to do from the
left is to attack the establishment that's in a permanent state of warfare abroad and at home against its "enemies" and unfettered
capitalism at home For a brief moment it was hoped by progressives that Obama - who defeated the faces of the establishment, Clinton
and McCain in 2008 - would really fight the establishment but he ended up becoming more of a celebrity politician like Trudeau
who talked a good game but was unable to effect real change on the ground which of course led to a large number or African Americans
not voting in 2016 and a lot of white blue collar Obama 2008 voters going for Trump.
The corporate media which has been totally corrupted and infiltrated by intelligence agencies - quote openly versus covertly
as in the past - is going to make every effort to shut down not just Gabbard but Sanders and ensure that Warren - a wannabe feel-gooder
like Obama - be completely neutered to effect real change.
Hillary is still around because she literally owns the Democrat party. Follow the funding: in 2016, almost all of it flowed
through HRC. Not just the presidential, but the state and significant part of the local.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the
author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of
unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. And as is the case in developing countries, what
we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was
not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. How the civil unrest spun out of control the second in ten years,
can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief is
false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent and
jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a communist
monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary would be more
adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations in which the US
was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or China are a to be
kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without tensions. But seriously,
as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
All so very true. The crux of the matter is the word competition. US doesn't like that, as a monopolist entity (the world would
be hegemonic power). So you get Cold War 2.0 in overdrive now. Just think Great Britain, Russia, and Germany, at the end of 19th
century beginning of 20th. All three monarchies, with cousins in power, with more or less parliamentarian structures in place,
competing for a place under sun. And UK fretting that will loose its place...
"... For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world." ..."
"... a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his "isolationism" ..."
"... Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things. ..."
Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen
Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.
"I don't think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest," said the former president according
to The Washington Post 's Josh Rogin, whose
brief Twitter thread on the subject appears
to be the only record of Bush's speech anywhere online.
"An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world," Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was
a shot at the sitting president.
"We are becoming isolationist and that's dangerous for the sake of peace."
For those who don't speak fluent neoconservative, "isolationist" here means taking even one small step in any direction other
than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and "We are becoming isolationist" here means "We have
hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and
we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world."
It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his
first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to
this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But
here we are.
From a certain point of view it's hard to say which is stranger:
(A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is
endangering peace with his "isolationism", or
(B) the claim that Trump is "isolationist" at all.
But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In
his farewell address to the nation , Bush said the following:
"In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism
and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity
at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led."
As we discussed
recently , use of the pro-war buzzword "isolationism" has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word
debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct
ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which
are two wildly
different things . Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the "isolationist" pejorative
are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions
which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an "isolationist" makes as
much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing
from the world.
Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real
purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness
that the opposite of "war" is no longer "peace", but "isolationism". By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the
political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt
to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is
of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.
It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal.
Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it's fun to
share a sporting arena suite or a
piece of hard candy or to
hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been
growing more and more popular with
Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like
Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John
Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don't start consulting this
man on matters of peace.
"... Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire. ..."
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
recently met in Minsk to revive the agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They
set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage of Ukrainian
legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong
opposition from nationalists, passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid
legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security
concerns. The U.S. and its allies should formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the
transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances, Moscow
would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine
protects local autonomy while Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted.
Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation, since the country would likely
be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of
Crimea while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent
referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object.
Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern
Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would certainly be
better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
"... As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians. ..."
"... The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly acquired ones. ..."
"... Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor Cohen ascribes to the US. ..."
"... We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU, or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay. ..."
"... Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an individual example with AP, but they all seem like that. ..."
Thanks for your sharing you views about Prof Cohen, a most interesting and principled
man.
Only after reading the article did I realize that the UR (that's you) also provided the
Batchelor Show podcast. Thanks.
I've been listening to these broadcasts over their entirety, now going on for six or so
years. What's always struck me is Cohen's level-headeness and equanimity. I've also detected
affection for Kentucky, his native state. Not something to be expected from a Princeton / NYU
academic nor an Upper West Side resident.
And once again expressing appreciation for the UR!
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Comments
How did the United States become so involved in Ukraine's torturous and famously corrupt
politics?
The short answer is NATO expansion <= maybe something different? I like pocketbook
expansion..
NATO Expansion provides cover and legalizes the private use of Presidential directed USA
resources to enable a few to make massively big profits at the expense of the governed in the
target area.
Behind NATO lies the reason for Bexit, the Yellow Jackets, the unrest in Iraq and Egypt,
Yemen etc.
Hypothesis 1: NATO supporters are more corrupt than Ukraine officials.
Hypothesis 2: NATO expansion is a euphemism for USA/EU/ backed private party plunder to
follow invade and destroy regime change activities designed to dispossess local Oligarchs of
the wealth in NATO targeted nations? Private use of public force for private gain comes to
mind.
I think [private use of public force for private gain] is what Trump meant when Trump said
to impeach Trump for investigating the Ukraine matter amounts to Treason.. but it is the
exactly the activity type that Hallmarks CIA instigated regime change.
A lot of intelligence agency manipulation and private pocketbook expanding corruption can
be hidden behind NATO expansion.. Please prove to me that Biden and the hundreds of other
plunders became so deeply involved in Ukraine because of NATO expansion?
The key question is what is the gain in separating Ukraine from Russia, adding it to NATO,
and turning Russia and Ukraine into enemies. And what are the most likely results, e.g. can
it ever work without risking a catastrophic event?
There are the usual empire-building and weapons business reasons, but those should
function within a rational framework. As it is right now, the most likely outcome of the
Western initiative in Ukraine will be substantially lower living standards than there would
be otherwise for most Ukrainians. And an increase in tensions in the region with
inevitable impact on the business there. So what exactly is the gain and for whom?
The Washington-led attempt to fast-track Ukraine into NATO in 2013–14 resulted in
the Maidan crisis, the overthrow of the country's constitutionally elected president Viktor
Yanukovych, and to the still ongoing proxy civil war in Donbass.
Which exemplifies the stupidity and arrogance of the American
military/industrial/political Establishment -- none of that had anything to do with US
national security (least of all antagonizing Russia) -- how fucking hypocritical is it to
presume the Monroe Doctrine, and then try to get the Ukraine into NATO? -- none of it would
have been of any benefit whatsoever to the average American.
According to a recent govt study, only 12% of Americans can read above a 9th grade level.
This effectively mean (((whoever))) controls the MSM controls the world. NOTHING will change
for the better while the (((enemy))) owns our money supply.
There was NO "annexation" of Crimea by Russia. Crimea WAS annexed, but by Ukraine.
Russia and Crimea re-unified. Crimea has been part of Russia for long than America has
existed – since it was taken from the Ottoman Empire over 350 yrs ago. The vast
majority of the people identify as Russian, and speak only Russian.
To annex, the verb, means to use armed force to seize sovereign territory and put it under
the control of the invading forces government. Pretty much as the early Americans did to
Northern Mexico, Hawaii, etc. Russia used no force, the Governors of Crimea applied for
re-unification with Russia, Russia advised a referendum, which was held, and with a 96%
turnout, 97% voted for re-unification. This was done formally and legally, conforming with
all the international mandates.
It is very damaging for anyone to say that Russia "annexed" Crimea, because when people
read, quickly moving past the world, they subliminally match the word to their held
perception of the concept and move on. Thus they match the word "annex" to their conception
of the use of Armed Force against a resistant population, without checking.
All Cohen is doing here is reinforcing the pushed, lying Empire narrative, that Russia
invaded and used force, when the exact opposite is true!!
@Carlton
Meyer One wonders if Mr. Putin, as he puts his head on the pillow at night, fancies that
he should have rolled the Russian tanks into Kiev, right after the 2014 US-financed coup of
Ukraine's elected president, which was accomplished while he was pre-occupied with the Sochi
Olympics, and been done with it. He had every justification to do so, but perhaps feared
Western blowback. Well, the blowback happened anyway, so maybe Putin was too cautious.
The new Trump Admin threw him under the bus when it installed the idiot Nikki Haley as UN
Ambassador, whose first words were that Russia must give Crimea back. With its only major
warm water port located at Sevastopol, that wasn't about to happen, and the US Deep State
knew it.
Given how he has been so unfairly treated by the media, and never given a chance to enact
his Russian agenda, anyone who thinks that Trump was 'selected' by the deep state has rocks
for brains. The other night, on Rick Sanchez's RT America show, former US diplomat, and
frequent guest Jim Jatras said that he would not be too surprised if 20 GOP Senators flipped
and voted to convict Trump if the House votes to impeach.
The deep state can't abide four more years of the bombastic, Twitter-obsessed Trump, hence
this Special Ops Ukraine false flag, designed to fool a majority of the people. The smooth
talking, more warlike Pence is one of them. The night of the long knives is approaching.
The US actions in Ukraine are typical, not exceptional. Acting as an Empire, the US
always installs the worst possible scum in power in its vassals, particularly in newly
acquired ones.
The "logic" of the Dem party is remarkable. Dems don't even deny that Biden is corrupt,
that he blatantly abused the office of Vice-President for personal gain. What's more, he was
dumb enough to boast about it publicly. Therefore, let's impeach Trump.
These people don't give a hoot about the interests of the US as a country, or even as an
Empire. Their insatiable greed for money and power blinds them to everything. By rights,
those who orchestrated totally fake Russiagate and now push for impeachment, when Russiagate
flopped miserably, should be hanged on lampposts for high treason. Unfortunately, justice
won't be served. So, we have to be satisfied with an almost assured prospect of this
impeachment thing to flop, just like Russiagate before it. But in the process incalculable
damage will be done to our country and its institutions.
Those who support the separation of Kosovo from Serbia without Serbian consent cannot
argue against separation of Crimea from Ukraine without the consent of Kiev regime.
On the other hand, those who believe that post-WWII borders are sacrosanct have to
acknowledge that Crimea belongs to Russia (illegally even by loose Soviet standards
transferred to Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1956), Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Soviet Union
should be restored, and Germany should be re-divided.
At least now I know why Ukraine is so essential to American national security. It's so even
more of my and my families' taxes can pay for a massive expansion of Nato, which means
American military bases in Ukraine. Greenland to the borders of China.
We're encircling the earth, like those old cartoons about bankers.
@Ron
Unz I had to stop listening after the 10th min. where the good professor (without any
push-back from the interviewer) says:
Victor Yanukovich was overthrown by a street coup . at that moment, the United States
and not only the United States but the Western European Governments had to make a decision
would they acknowledge the overthrow of Yannukovic as having been legitimate, and therefore
accept whatever government emerged, and that was a fateful moment within 24hours, the
governments, including the government of president Obama endorsed what was essentially a
coup d'etat against Yanukovich.
Has the good Professor so quickly forgotten about Victoria Nuland distributing cookies
with John McCain in the Maidan as the coup was still unfolding? Her claim at the think tank
in DC where she discusses having spent $30million (if I remember correctly) for foisting the
Ukraine coup ?
Has he forgotten the historical conversation of Nuland and Payatt picking the next
president of Ukraine "Yats is our guy" and "Yats" actually emerging as the president a week
later ? None of these facts are in any way remotely compatible with passive role professor
Cohen ascribes to the US.
These are not simple omissions but willful acts of misleading of fools. The good
professor's little discussed career as a resource for the secret services has reemerged after
seemingly having been left out in the cold during the 1st attempted coup against Trump.
No, the real story is more than just a little NATO expansion as the professor does
suggest, but more directly, the attempted coup that the US is still trying to stage in Russia
itself, in order to regain control of Russia's vast energy resources which Putin forced the
oligarchs to disgorge. The US desperately wants to achieve this in order to be able to
ultimately also control China's access to those resources as well.
In the way that Iraq was supposed to be a staging post for an attack on Iran, Ukraine is
the staging post for an attack on Russia.
The great Russian expert stirred miles very clear of even hinting at such scenarios, even
though anyone who's thought about US world policies will easily arrive at this logical
conclusion.
What about the theft of Ukraine's farmland and the enserfing of its rural population? Isn't
this theft and enserfing of Ukrainians at least one major reason the US government got
involved, overseeing the transfer of this land into the hands of the transnational banking
crime syndicate? The Ukraine, with its rich, black soil, used to be called the breadbasket of
Europe.
Consider the fanatical intervention on the part of Victoria Nuland and the Kagans under
the guise of working for the State Dept to facilitate the theft. In a similar fashion,
according to Wayne Madsen, the State Dept. has a Dept of Foreign Asset Management, or some
similar name, that exists to protect the Chabad stranglehold on the world diamond trade, and,
according to Madsen, the language spoken and posters around the offices are in Hebrew, which
as a practical matter might as well be the case at the State Dept itself.
According to an article a few years ago at Oakland Institute, George Rohr's NCH Capital,
which latter organization has funded over 100 Chabad Houses on US campuses, owns over 1
million acres of Ukraine farmland. Other ownership interests of similarly vast tracts of
Ukraine farmland show a similar pattern of predation. At one point, it was suggested that the
Yinon Plan should be understood to include the Ukraine as the newly acquired breadbasket of
Eretz Israel. It may also be worth pointing out that now kosher Ivy League schools'
endowments are among the worst pillagers of native farmland and enserfers of the indigenous
populations they claim to protect.
@Mikhail
Well, if we really go into it, things become complicated. What Khmelnitsky united with Russia
was maybe 1/6th or 1/8th of current Ukraine. Huge (4-5 times greater) areas in the North and
West were added by Russian Tsars, almost as great areas in the South and East taken by Tsars
from Turkey and affiliated Crimean Khanate were added by Lenin, a big chunk in the West was
added by Stalin, and then in 1956 moron Khrushchev "gifted" Crimea (which he had no right to
do even by Soviet law). So, about 4/6th of "Ukraine" is Southern Russia, 1/6th is Eastern
Poland, some chunks are Hungary and Romania, and the remaining little stub is Ukraine proper.
@anon
American view always was: "yes, he is a son of a bitch, but he is our son of a bitch". That
historically applied to many obnoxious regimes, now fully applies to Ukraine. In that Dems
and Reps always were essentially identical, revealing that they are two different puppets run
by the same puppet master.
Trump is hardly very intelligent, but he has some street smarts that degenerate elites
have lost. Hence their hatred of him. It is particularly galling for the elites that Trump
won in 2016, and has every chance of winning again in 2020 (unless they decide to murder him,
like JFK; but that would be a real giveaway, even the dumbest sheeple would smell the
rat).
@follyofwar
The only reason I can imagine that Putin/Russia would want to "take over" Ukraine and have
this political problem child back in the family might be because of Ukraine's black soil.
But it is probably not worth the aggravation.
Russia is building up its agricultural sector via major greenhouse installations and other
innovations.
@AP
Well, you are a true simpleton who repeats shallow conventional views. You don't ever seem to
think deeper about what you write, e.g. if Yanukovitch could beat anyone in a 1-on-1 election
than he obviously wasn't that unpopular and that makes Maidan illegal by any standard. You
say he could beat Tiahnybok, who was one of the leaders of Maidan, how was then Maidan
democratic? Or you don't care for democracy if people vote against your preferences?
Trade with Russia is way down and it is not coming back. That is my point – there
was definitely a way to do this better. It wasn't a choice of 'one or the other' –
actually EU was under the impression that Ukraine would help open up the Russian market. Your
either-or wasn't the plan, so did Kiev lie to EU? No wonder Ukraine has a snowball chance in
hell of joining EU.
@Skeptikal
Russia moved to the first place in the world in wheat exports, while greatly increasing its
production of meat, fowl, and fish. Those who supplied these commodities lost Russian market
for good. In fact, with sanctions, food in Russia got a lot better, and food in Moscow got
immeasurably better: now it's local staff instead of crap shipped from half-a-world away.
Funny thing is, Russian production of really good fancy cheeses has soared (partially with
the help of French and Italian producers who moved in to avoid any stupid sanctions).
So, there is no reason for Russia to take Ukraine on any conditions, especially
considering Ukraine's exorbitant external debt. If one calculates European demand for
transplantation kidneys and prostitutes, two of the most successful Ukrainian exports,
Ukraine will pay off its debt – never. Besides, the majority of Russians learned to
despise Ukraine due to its subservient vassalage to the US (confirmed yet again by the
transcript of the conversation between Trump and Ze), so the emotional factor is also
virtually gone. Now the EU and the US face the standard rule of retail: you broke it, you own
it. That infuriates Americans and EU bureaucrats more than anything.
@Sergey
Krieger "Demography statistic won't support fairy tales by solzhenicin and his kind."
-- What's your point? Your post reads like an attempt at saying that Kaganovitch was white
like snow and that it does not matter what crimes were committed in the Soviet Union because
of the "demography statistic" and because you, Sergey Krieger, are a grander person next to
Solzhenitsyn and "his kind." By the way, had not A. I. S. returned to Russia, away from the
coziness of western life?
S.K.: "You should start research onto mass dying of population after 1991 and subsequent
and ongoing demographic catastroph in Russia under current not as "brutal " as soviet
regime."
@AP
Maidan was an illegal coup that violated Ukrainian constitution (I should say all of them,
there were too many) and lots of other laws. And that's not the worst part of it. But it
already happened, there is no going back for Ukraine. It's a "yes or no" thing, you can't be
a little bit pregnant. We can either commiserate with Ukraine or gloat, but it committed
suicide. Some say this project was doomed from the start. I think Ukraine had a chance and
blew it.
@AnonFromTN
I usually refrain from labelling off-cycle changes in government as revolutions or coups
– it clearly depends on one's views and can't be determined.
In general, when violence or military is involved, it is more likely it was a coup. If a
country has a reasonably open election process, violently overthrowing the current government
would also seem like a coup, since it is unnecessary. Ukraine had both violence and a coming
election that was democratic. If Yanukovitch would prevent or manipulate the elections, one
could make a case that at that point – after the election – the population could
stage a ' revolution '.
AP is a simpleton who repeats badly thought out slogans and desperately tries to save some
face for the Maidan fiasco – so we will not change his mind, his mind is done with
changes, it is all about avoiding regrets even if it means living in a lie. One can almost
feel sorry for him, if he wasn't so obnoxious.
Ukraine has destroyed its own future gradually after 1991, all the elites there failed,
Yanukovitch was just the last in a long line of failures, the guy before him (Yushenko?) left
office with a 5% approval. Why wasn't there a revolution against him? Maidan put a cherry on
that rotting cake – a desperate scream of pain by people who had lost all hope and so
blindly fell for cheap promises by the new-old hustlers.
We don't know what happens next, but we know the following: Ukraine will not be in EU,
or Nato. It will not be a unified, prosperous country. It will continue losing a large part
of its population. And oligarchy and 'corruption' is going to stay.
Another Maidan would most likely make things even worse and trigger a complete
disintegration. Those are the wages of stupidity and desperation – one can see an
individual example with AP, but they all seem like that.
@AP
You intentionally omitted the second part of what I wrote: 'a reasonably democratic
elections', neither 18th century American colonies, nor Russia in 1917 or Romania in 1989,
had them. Ukraine in 2014 did.
So all your belly-aching is for nothing. The talk about 'subverting' and doing a
preventive 'revolution' on Maidan to prevent 'subversion' has a very Stalinist ring to it. If
you start revolutionary violence because you claim to anticipate that something bad might
happen, well, the sky is the limit and you have no rules.
You are desperately trying to justify a stupid and unworkable act. As we watch the
unfolding disaster and millions leaving Ukraine, this "Maidan was great!!!" mantra will sound
even more silly. But enjoy it, it is not Somalia, wow, I guess as long as a country is not
Somalia it is ok. Ukraine is by far the poorest large country in Europe. How is that a
success?
@Beckow
True believers are called that because they willfully ignore facts and logic. AP is a true
believer Ukie. Ukie faith is their main undoing. Unfortunately, they are ruining the country
with their insane dreams. But that cannot be helped now. The position of a large fraction of
Ukrainian population is best described by a cruel American saying: fool me once, shame on
you, fool me twice, shame on me.
@AnonFromTN
You are right, it can't be helped. Another saying is that it takes two to lie: one who lies,
and one to lie to. The receiver of lies is also responsible.
What happened in Ukraine was: Nuland&Co. went to Ukraine and lied to them about '
EU, 'Marshall plan', aid, 'you will be Western ', etc,,,'. Maidanistas swallowed it
because they wanted to believe – it is easy to lie to desperate people. Making promises
is very easy. US soft power is all based on making promises.
What Nuland&Co. really wanted was to create a deep Ukraine-Russia hostility and to
grab Crimea, so they could get Russian Navy out and move Nato in. It didn't work very well,
all we have is useless hostility, and a dysfunctional state. But as long as they serve
espresso in Lviv, AP will scream that it was all worth it, 'no Somalia', it is 'all normal',
almost as good as 2013 . Right.
@AP
I don't disagree with what you said, but my point was different:
lower living standards than there would be otherwise for most Ukrainians
Without the unnecessary hostility and the break in business relations with Russia the
living standards in Ukraine would be higher. That, I think, noone would dispute. One can
trace that directly to the so-far failed attempt to get Ukraine into Nato and Russia out of
its Crimea bases. There has been a high cost for that policy, so it is appropriate to ask:
why? did the authors of that policy think it through?
@AP
I don't give a flying f k about Yanukovitch and your projections about what 'would be growth'
under him. He was history by 2014 in any case.
One simple point that you don't seem to grasp: it was Yanuk who negotiated the association
treaty with EU that inevitably meant Ukraine in Nato and Russia bases out of Crimea (after a
decent interval). For anyone to call Yanuk a 'pro-Russian' is idiotic – what we see
today are the results of Yanukovitch's policies. By the way, the first custom restrictions on
Ukraine's exports to Russia happened in summer 2013 under Y.
If you still think that Yanukovitch was in spite of all of that somehow a 'Russian
puppet', you must have a very low opinion of Kremlin skills in puppetry. He was not, he was
fully onboard with the EU-Nato-Crimea policy – he implemented it until he got
outflanked by even more radical forces on Maidan.
@Beckow
Well, exactly like all Ukrainian presidents before and after him, Yanuk was a thief. He might
have been a more intelligent and/or more cautious thief that Porky, but a thief he was.
Anyway, there is no point in crying over spilled milk: history has no subjunctive mood.
Ukraine has dug a hole for itself, and it still keeps digging, albeit slower, after a clown
in whole socks replaced a clown in socks with holes. By now this new clown is also a
murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although so far he has committed fewer crimes
than Porky.
There is no turning back. Regardless of Ukrainian policies, many things it used to sell
Russia won't be bought any more: Russia developed its own shipbuilding (subcontracted some to
South Korea), is making its own helicopter and ship engines, all stages of space rockets,
etc. Russia won't return any military or high-tech production to Ukraine, ever. What's more,
most Russians are now disgusted with Ukraine, which would impede improving relations even if
Ukraine gets a sane government (which is extremely unlikely in the next 5 years).
Ukraine's situation is best described by Russian black humor saying: "what we fought for
has befallen us". End of story.
@Peter
Akuleyev How many millions? It is same story. Ukraine claims more and more millions dead
from so called Hilodomor when in Russia liberals have been screaming about 100 million deaths
in russia from bolsheviks. Both are fairy tales. Now you better answer what is current
population of ukraine. The last soviet time 1992 level was 52 million. I doubt you got even
40 million now. Under soviet power both ukraine and russia population were steadily growing.
Now, under whose music you are dancing along with those in Russia that share your views when
die off very real one is going right under your nose.
By now this new clown is also a murderer, as he did not stop shelling Donbass, although
so far he has committed fewer crimes than Porky.
Have you noticed that the Republicans, while seeming to defend Trump, never challenge the
specious assertion that delaying arms to Ukraine was a threat to US security? At first I
thought this was oversight. Silly me. Keeping the New Cold War smoldering is more important
to those hawks.
Tulsi Gabbard flipping to support the impeachment enquiry was especially disappointing.
I'm guessing she was under lots of pressure, because she can't possibly believe that arming
the Ukies is good for our security. If I could get to one of her events, I'd ask her direct,
what's up with that. Obama didn't give them arms at all, even made some remarks about not
inflaming the situation. (A small token, after his people managed the coup, spent 8 years
demonizing Putin, and presided over origins of Russiagate to make Trump's [stated] goal of
better relations impossible.)
Not really. Ukies are wonnabe Nazis, but they fall way short of their ideal. The original
German Nazis were organized, capable, brave, sober, and mostly honest. Ukie scum is
disorganized, ham-handed, cowardly, drunk (or under drugs), and corrupt to the core. They are
heroes only against unarmed civilians, good only for theft, torture, and rape. When it comes
to the real fight with armed opponents, they run away under various pretexts or surrender.
Nazis should sue these impostors for defamation.
Yanukovych signed an internationally brokered power sharing agreement with his main
rivals, who then violated it. Yanukovych up to that point was the democratically elected
president of Ukraine.
Since his being violently overthrown, people have been unjustly jailed, beaten and killed
for politically motivated reasons having to do with a stated opposition to the
Euromaidan.
Yanukovych refrained from using from using considerably greater force, when compared to
others if put in the same situation, against a mob element that included property damage and
the deaths of law enforcement personnel.
In the technical legal sense, there was a legit basis to jail the likes of Tymoshenko. If
I correctly recall Yushchenko offered testimony against Tymoshenko. Rather laughable that
Poroshenko appointed the non-lawyer Lutsenko into a key legal position.
@Beckow
The undemocratic aspect involving Yanukovych's overthrow included the disproportionate number
of Svoboda members appointed to key cabinet positions. At the time, Svoboda was on record for
favoring the dissolution of Crimea's autonomous status
@AP
Grest comment #159 by Beckow. Really, I'm more concerned with the coup against POTUS that's
happening right now, since before he took office. The Ukraine is pivotal, from the Kiev
putschists collaborating with the DNC, to the CIA [pretend] whistleblowers who now subvert
Trump's investigation of those crimes.
Tragic and pitiful, the Ukrainians jumped from a rock to a hard place. Used and abandoned
by the Clinton-Soros gang, they appeal to the next abusive Sugar-Daddy. Isn't this FRANCE 24
report fairly objective?
Revisited: Five years on, what has Ukraine's Maidan Revolution achieved?
@AP
This from BBC is less current. (That magnificent bridge -the one the Ukies tried to sabotage-
is now in operation, of course.) I'm just trying to use sources that might not trigger you.
@AP
"Whenever people ask me how to figure out the truth about Ukraine, I always recommend they
watch the film Ukraine on Fire by director @lopatonok and executive produced by
@TheOliverStone. The sequel Revealing Ukraine will be out soon proud to be in it."
– Lee Sranahan (Follow @stranahan for Ukrainegate in depth.)
" .what has really changed in the life of Ukrainians?"
@Malacaay
Baltics, Ukrainians and Poles were part of the Polish Kingdom from 1025-1569 and the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth 1569-1764.
This probably explains their differences with Russia.
Russia had this area in the Russian Empire from 1764-1917. Russia called this area the
Pale of Settlement. Why? This Polish Kingdom since 1025 welcomed 25000 Jews in, who later
grew to millions by the 19th century. They are the Ashkenazis who are all over the world
these days. The name Pale was for Ashkenazis to stay in that area and not immigrate to the
rest of Russia.
The reasoning for this was not religious prejudice but the way the Ashkenazis treated the
peasants of the Pale. It was to protect the Russian peasants. This did not help after 1917. A
huge invasion of Ashkenazis descended all over Russia to take up positions all over the
Soviet Union.
Ukraine US is like the Pale again. It has a Jewish President and a Jewish Prime
Minister.
Ukraine and Poland were both controlled by Tartars too. Ukraine longer than Russia. Russia
ended the Tartar rule of Crimea in 1783. The Crimean Tartars lived off raiding Ukraine,
Poland, and parts of Russia for Slav slaves. Russia ended this Slav slave trade in 1783.
That's it, I quit. I can't be expected to compete with this.
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
October 9, 2019
His Excellency
Recep Tayyip Erdogan
President of the Republic of Turkey
Ankara
Dear Mr. President:
Let's work out a good deal! You don't want to be responsible for slaughtering thousands of
people, and I don't want to be responsible for destroying the Turkish economy -- and I will.
I've already given you a little sample with respect to Pastor Brunson.
1 have worked hard to solve some of your problems. Don't let the world down. You can make
a great deal. General Mazloum is willing to negotiate with you, and he is willing to make
concessions that they would never have made in the past. I am confidentially enclosing a copy
of his letter to me, just received.
History will look upon you favorably if you get this done the right and humane way. It
will look upon you forever as the devil if good things don't happen. Don't be a tough guy.
Don't be a fool!
Leave aside that Trump should not have been compelled to make the transcript public . .
. .
It's tempting to view Trump's presidency as sui generis. With norms and seemingly
well-settled historical precedents broken, with the liability casually laid at his feet by
most observers, even if not wholly out to destroy him.
Knowing its intent was remove him from office, Trump nevertheless ordered unprecedented
cooperation with the Mueller investigation. A brilliant move in hindsight. I don't recall
very much handwringing about the bad precedent this set for presidential power.
Trump's insight, and in no small part it explains his continued survival, is his refusal
to accept the appearance of his fully possessing his Article II powers. Most especially in
the context of the National Security State.
Utz has written how even Eisenhower was foiled from negotiating to reduce tensions with
the Soviet Union/Krushchev. If they could derail the POTUS then doing so with those that
followed him should have been easy by comparison and, I think, was. The trend since, as the
USG's global power grew, was for president's to ever quickly give way upon after office to
the role of what I call Figurehead/Pitchman. It's a Safe Space, as was palpably obvious
through Obama's two terms.
While Figurehead/Pitchman versus Real POTUS is, of course, a spectrum not a dichotomy,
Trump for reasons I don't need to belabor has effectively constituted a sharp break.
So, decisions of his like the following, facially a diminution of his authority, which
passed without a great deal of notice, struck me as him protecting himself from his
authorizing military actions designed to end his presidency:
The longer Trump survives the further these highest order threats of nuclear war and to
our Constitutional Republic recede. Even if it doesn't seem that way at moments like
this.
It's childish nonsense the idea that any foreign state, including Russia, thought Trump
would win, much less wanted him to do so. It's equally juvenile, especially close to three
years hence, to not understand that foreign adversaries and allies alike awaited a resolution
of this factional war internally within the US, avoiding catastrophe in the meantime.
Thankfully, at least so far, since Trump took the oath, the foreign powers for which a
Hillary presidency would have been a geopolitical gift of historic proportions (e.g. China;
Iran), have largely made their peace with that lost opportunity.
Precious! After all those years Ukraine tried to force Gazprom to prolong transportation
contracts, including in western Courts, now it is EUROCOMMISSION that plays their 3rd Energy
Package card, but how!
After Zelensky so daringly kissed up to Trump and talk dirt about Merkel and Macron
– EC says the prolongation of Gazprom-NaftaGaz contract is "not legally possible" and
that Ukraine has to kill and "unbundle" NaftaGaz, and when they done – only then the
new pipes-only company would be free to try negotiate a new unrelated contract for gas
transportation.
The Holy Grail of Ukrainian foreign economics is dead, backstabbed by EU.
What a fine present to President Ze :-DDDD
"... Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor. ..."
"... I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil - they didn't. ..."
"... I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique. ..."
"... And as is the case in developing countries, what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot. ..."
"... How the civil unrest spun out of control the second time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement. ..."
Time to Extricate From Ukraine Kiev has become a drag on Trump, but if we don't watch out, it could turn into a geopolitical
threat to everyone. By Doug Bandow •
October 17, 2019
Recently Ukraine has been thrown into the spotlight as Democrats gear up to impeach President Donald Trump. More important, though,
is its role in damaging America's relations with Russia, which has resulted in a mini-Cold War that the U.S. needs to end.
Ukraine is in a bad neighborhood. During the 17th century, the country was divided between Poland and Russia, and eventually ended
up as part of the Russian Empire. Kiev then enjoyed only the briefest of liberations after the 1917 Russian Revolution, before being
reabsorbed by the Soviet Union. It later suffered from a devastating famine as Moscow confiscated food and collectivized agriculture.
Ukraine was ravaged during Germany's World War II invasion, and guerrilla resistance to renewed Soviet control continued for years
afterwards.
In 1991, the collapse of the U.S.S.R. gave Ukraine another, more enduring chance for independence. However, the new nation's development
was fraught: GDP dropped by 60 percent and corruption burgeoned. Ukraine suffered under a succession of corrupt, self-serving, and
ineffective leaders, as the U.S., Europe, and Russia battled for influence.
In 2014, Washington and European governments backed a street putsch against the elected, though highly corrupt, pro-Russian president,
Viktor Yanukovych. The Putin government responded by annexing Crimea and backing separatist forces in Eastern Ukraine's Donbass region.
Washington and Brussels imposed economic sanctions on Russia and provided military aid to Kiev.
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The West versus Russia quickly became a "frozen" conflict. Moscow reincorporated Crimea into Russia, from which it had been detached
in 1954 as part of internal Soviet politics. In the Donbass, more than a score of ceasefires came and went. Both Ukraine and Russia
failed to fulfill the 2016 Minsk agreements, which sought to end the conflict.
In excess of 13,000 people, mostly Ukrainians, are known to have died in this war, and some two million have been forced from
their homes. The economy of eastern Ukraine has collapsed. Ukraine has suffered through painful economic dislocation and political
division. Meanwhile, several hundred Russians are believed to have been killed fighting in the Donbass. Western sanctions have damaged
Russia's weak economy. And although the majority of Crimeans probably wanted to join Russia, opposition activists and journalists
have been abducted, brutalized, and/or imprisoned. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church has been closed and Tartars have been persecuted.
The most important geopolitical impact has been to poison Russia's relations with the West. Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine
cannot be justified, but the U.S. and Europe did much to create the underlying suspicion and hostility. Recently declassified documents
reveal the degree to which Western officials misled Moscow about their intention to expand NATO. Allied support for adding Georgia
and Ukraine, which would have greatly expanded Russian vulnerability, generated a particularly strong reaction in Moscow. The dismemberment
of Serbia with no consideration of Russia's interests was another irritant, along with Western support for "color revolutions" elsewhere,
including in Tbilisi. The ouster of Yanukovych finally triggered Putin's brutal response.
Washington and Brussels apparently did not view their policies as threatening to Russia. However, had Moscow ousted an elected
Mexican president friendly to America, while inviting the new government to join the Warsaw Pact, and worked with a coalition of
Central American states to divert Mexican trade from the U.S., officials in Washington would not have been pleased. They certainly
wouldn't have been overly concerned about juridical niceties in responding.
This explains (though does not justify) Russia's hostile response. Subsequent allied policies then turned the breach in relations
into a gulf. The U.S. and European Union imposed a series of economic sanctions. Moreover, Washington edged closer to military confrontation
with its provision of security assistance to Kiev. Moscow responded by challenging America from Syria to Venezuela.
It also began moving towards China. The two nations' differences are many and their relationship is unstable. However, as long
as their antagonism towards Washington exceeds their discomfort with each other, they will cooperate to block what they see as America's
pursuit of global hegemony.
Why is the U.S. entangled in the Ukrainian imbroglio? During the Cold War, Ukraine was one of the fabled "captive nations," backed
by vigorous advocacy from Ukrainian Americans. After the Soviet Union collapsed, they joined other groups lobbying on behalf of ethnic
brethren to speed NATO's expansion eastward. Security policy turned into a matter of ethnic solidarity, to be pursued irrespective
of cost and risk.
To more traditional hawks who are always seeking an enemy, the issue is less pro-Ukraine than anti-Russia. Mitt Romney, the Republican
Party's 2012 presidential nominee, improbably attacked Russia as America's most dangerous adversary. Hence the GOP's counterproductive
determination to bring Kiev into NATO. Originally Washington saw the transatlantic alliance as a means to confront the Soviet menace;
now it views the pact as a form of charity.
After the Soviet collapse, the U.S. pushed NATO eastward into nations that neither mattered strategically nor could be easily
protected, most notably in the Balkans and Baltics. Even worse were Georgia and Ukraine, security black holes that would bring with
them ongoing conflicts with Russia, possibly triggering a larger war between NATO and Moscow.
Ukraine never had been a matter of U.S. security. For most of America's history, the territory was controlled by either the Russian
Empire or the Soviet Union. Washington's Cold War sympathies represented fraternal concerns, not security essentials. Today, without
Kiev's aid, the U.S. and Europe would still have overwhelming conventional forces to be brought into any conflict with Moscow. However,
adding Ukraine to NATO would increase the risk of a confrontation with a nuclear armed power. Russia's limitations when it comes
to its conventional military would make a resort to nuclear weapons more likely in any conflict.
Nevertheless, George W. Bush's aggressively neoconservative administration won backing for Georgian and Ukrainian membership in
NATO and considered intervening militarily in the Russo-Georgian war. However, European nations that feared conflict with Moscow
blocked plans for NATO expansion, which went into cold storage. Although alliance officials still officially backed membership for
Ukraine, it remains unattainable so long as conflict burns hot with Russia.
In the meantime, Washington has treated Ukraine as a de facto military ally, offering economic and security assistance. The U.S.
has provided $1.5 billion for Ukrainian training and weapons, including anti-tank Javelin missiles. Explained Obama administration
defense secretary Ashton Carter: "Ukraine would never be where it is without that support from the United States."
Equally important, the perception of U.S. backing made the Kiev government, headed by President Petro Poroshenko, less willing
to pursue a diplomatic settlement with Russia. Thus did Ukraine, no less than Russia, almost immediately violate the internationally
backed Minsk accord.
Kiev's role as a political football highlights the need for Washington to pursue an enduring political settlement with Russia.
European governments are growing restless; France has taken the lead in seeking better relations with Moscow. Germany is unhappy
with U.S. attempts to block the planned Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline. In Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelensky has campaigned
to end the conflict.
Negotiators for Russia, Ukraine, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe recently met in Minsk to revive the
agreement previously reached in the Belarus capital. They set an election schedule in the contested east, to be followed by passage
of Ukrainian legislation to grant the region greater autonomy and separatists legal immunity. Despite strong opposition from nationalists,
passage is likely since Zelensky's party holds a solid legislative majority.
Many challenges remain, but the West could aid this process by respecting Russian security concerns. The U.S. and its allies should
formally foreclose Ukraine's membership in the transatlantic alliance and end lethal military aid. After receiving those assurances,
Moscow would be expected to resolve the Donbass conflict, presumably along the lines of Minsk: Ukraine protects local autonomy while
Russia exits the fight. Sanctions against Russia would be lifted. Ukrainians would be left to choose their economic orientation,
since the country would likely be split between east and west for some time to come. The West would accept Russia's control of Crimea
while refusing to formally recognize the conquest -- absent a genuinely independent referendum with independent monitors.
Such a compromise would be controversial. Washington's permanent war lobby would object. Hyper-nationalistic Ukrainians would
double down on calling Zelensky a traitor. Eastern Europeans would complain about appeasing Russia. However, such a compromise would
certainly be better than endless conflict.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. He is the author
of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire.
I credit Mr. Bandow for his largely fair and accurate description of the events in Ukraine of five years ago, and for his ultimate
policy proposal for the US to extricate itself from its close involvement in the area. However, I'm a little confused by what
exactly the author means by "Moscow's aggressions against Ukraine" and "Putin's brutal response" (aside from the treatment
of dissidents and journalists as he specifically mentioned) to the Maidan Revolution.
Was it aggressive and brutal for Russia to support separatists in the Donbass who were facing the prospect of legal discrimination
and violence by a criminal, neo-fascist government in Kiev, not to mention de-industrialization, the gutting of the agriculture
sector and the forced economic migration of an enormous number of its young workers (assuming that Ukraine's economic deal
with the EU followed the script of every other Easter European's country's deal with the EU)? If Yanukovych had fled to the
Donbass and proclaimed himself still the freely elected (though certainly corrupt) President of the nation, Russia's support
for the region would have even had a shiny brass legal fig leaf, wouldn't it?
As for the supposed "conquest" of Crimea, that's a rather strong word to use considering that all of two members of the
Ukrainian military were killed, and 60-80 of them detained, while 15,000 defected to Russia. Compared to the violence in Kiev
and Odessa, what happened in Crimea almost qualifies as a bloodless coup. But then Mr. Bandow shies away from using the word
"hegemony" to describe the foreign policy of the United States, figuratively putting the word in the mouths of those bad men
(which they are) in Moscow and Beijing. It's a pity that Mr. Bandow felt the need to make linguistic concessions to the foreign
policy establishment in what was otherwise a useful and balanced piece.
Even though the overall idea of ending the sponsoring of the conflict by Washington is plausible there are a number of shortcomings
in the article to put it mildly. I realize though that the author has to make Washington look innocent and Russia look bad
to escape the danger of being stigmatized as a pro-Russian traitor.
I understand why you want to thread the needle. After the invasions, having to add more failure or at the very least recognition
of dysfunction to our foreign policy choices and consequences is a bitter pill. But as you note had the US and the EU seriously
had the desire to add the Ukraine into the western European sphere of influence, they could have offered a better deal on oil
- they didn't.
I think we have got to stop accusing the then existing government of corruption. As your own article states, the history
of unstable governance with accompanying "corruption" seems a staple and nonunique.
And as is the case in developing countries,
what we call corruption is a cultural staple of how business and affairs are conducted. Whatever the issues, the Ukrainian
public was not overly beset by the results so as to spontaneously riot.
How the civil unrest spun out of control the second
time in ten years, can be linked directly to US and EU involvement.
It is a deeply held belief that democracy is a system that by definition a generally acceptable path forward. That belief
is false as democracy is still comprised of human beings. And democracy in their hands is no "cure all". It can be a turbulent
and jerky bureaucratic maze process that pleases no one and works over time.
The US didn't accomplish it without violence until after more than 130 years, when the native populations were finally subdued.
And as for a system that embodied equal treatment to similar circumstance -- we are still at it. But a violent revolution every
ten years certainly isn't the most effective road to take.
-----------------
Why we insistent on restarting the cold war is unclear to me save that it served to create a kind of strategic global clarity
Though what that means would troublesome because Russia's ole would now be as a developing democratic state as opposed to a
communist monolith. And that means unfettered from her satellites and empowered by more capital markets her role as adversary
would be more adroit. As time after time, Ores Putin has appeared the premier diplomat for peace and stability in situations
in which the US was engaged or encouraging violence.(the Ukraine). I certainly don't think that our relations with Russia or
China are a to be kumbaya love fests, there is still global competition and there's no reason to pretend it would be without
tensions. But seriously, as a democratic/capital market player -- there really was no way to contain Russia.
----------------------
Given what we experienced during 2007 --- corruption comes in a mryiad of guises.
The Ukraine situation is complex to be certain, but ending military aid and letting Russia clean up seems like a bad idea.
This week we saw Russian forces occupy US bases abandoned when Trump ordered our troops to withdraw from the Turkish border.
And now the author is arguing we should do something similar in the Ukraine.
When did Russian appeasement become so important to conservative foreign policy?
Mate, Russians were in Syria at the invitation of the Syrian government. US troops are there illegally (no Congress mandate,
no international mandate, no invitation). US is an occupying, destabilizing, terrorist protecting force in Syria and Americans
should look beyond their self esteem before commenting on this "shameful" retreat. US does not have the right to put its troops
wherever it fancies.
This win or loose mentality will be the death of you. Who do you think is threatening the US, when it has the biggest moats
protecting its shores? The only thing that is happening is that the hegemonic role, that of controlling everyone's economy
for its own elites benefit is being denied.
This is what you are complaining mate, the the rich Americans cannot get richer? Do you think they will share with you,
or that, like the good English boys of the past, you will not be able to land a job with East India Co. and despoil the natives
for a while?
If the US were smart then they would lead some sort of negotiation where eastern Europe and Ukraine and Russia were allowed
only mutually agreed defensive weapons systems. A demilitarization of say 200 miles on each side of the Russia border. The
strategy should be to encourage trade between Eastern Europe and Russia where Russia has influence but is not threatening.
It may be slow to build that trust but the real question is whether the US and Europe and NATO want peace with Russia or whether
they are using fear of Russia to keep eastern Europe united with the US and Europe. This may be the case but the future will
have China as a greater threat than Russia (China will even be a threat to Russia). Any shift in Russian relations will take
decades of building trust on both sides.
Good article and excellent history of facts. If I recall during the last Bush administration W hosted a Putin and his then
spouse, at a visit at his ranch. Putin informed W," the Ukraine belongs to Russia. end of sentence.
The author forgot the critical role of Sevastopol in the Crimea. It is Russia's only warm water port and there was no way that
it was going to allow this area to become a NATO naval base. Secretary of State Clinton and her sidekick for Ukraine, Victoria
Nuland should have known this before they started supporting the overthrow of the pro-Russia government in Kiev.
If you look at a historical atlas, you won't find an independent country called Ukraine before 1991. When my parents were
born, near what is now called Lviv, the area was called Galicia and Lemberg was its provincial capital. A gold medal issued
in 1916 in honor of Franz Josef's 85th birthday noted that he was the Kaiser of Austria, Hungary, Galicia and Lodomeria.
When the old Soviet Union agreed to allow East and West Germany to reunify, it was with the understanding that NATO would
not extend membership to former Soviet block countries and that there would be no NATO bases in these areas either. NATO and
the US broke their oral commitment to Russia a few years later.
The US should get out of the business of trying to spread democracy in third world countries and interfering in the affairs
of foreign governments. We can't afford to be the policeman of the world. We don't even have the ability to make many of our
own central cities safe for Americans. Think Baltimore, St. Louis, New Orleans and Detroit, all four of which appear on Wikipedia's
list of the 50 murder capitals of the world (per thousand population).
"... Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just 12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's Republic of China is that it is still with us. ..."
The 70th anniversary of the People's Republic of China was not a birthday I felt like
celebrating. As Dutch historian Frank Dikötter has shown in his searing three-volume
history of the Mao Zedong era, the Communist regime claimed the lives of tens of millions of
people: 2 million in the revolution between 1949 and 1951, another 3 million by the end of
the 1950s, up to 45 million in the man-made famine known as the "Great Leap Forward," and yet
more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution, Mao's campaign against the intelligentsia,
which escalated into a civil war.
Hitler's Third Reich was obliterated by massive military force in 1945. It lasted just
12 years. Stalin's Soviet Union bore the brunt of beating Hitler, but later succumbed to
economic sclerosis. It fell apart in 1991, after 68 years. The mystery of the People's
Republic of China is that it is still with us.
Now, I could give you a rather boring explanation of why I think China's bid to "catch up
and surpass" (ganchao) the United States will fail. But maybe a more interesting answer can
be found in Liu Cixin's astonishing 2008 novel, "The Three-Body Problem," which I read for
the first time last week.
The problem of the title is introduced to the reader -- and to the nanotechnology
scientist Wang Miao, one of the central characters -- as a virtual reality game, set in a
strange, distant world with three suns rather than the familiar one. The mutually perturbing
gravitational attractions of the three suns prevent this planet from ever settling into a
predictable orbit with regular days, nights, and seasons. It has occasional "stable eras,"
during which civilization can advance, but with minimal warning, these give way to "chaotic
eras" of intense heat or cold that render the planet uninhabitable The central conceit of
Liu's novel is that China's history has the same pattern as the three-body problem: periods
of stability always end with periods of chaos -- what the Chinese call dong luan. The other
key character in the book is Ye Wenjie, who sees her father, a professor at Tsinghua
University, beaten to death by a gang of teenage Red Guards during the Cultural
Revolution.
Banished from Beijing to a labor camp in benighted rural backwater, Ye is rescued when she
is given a lowly job in a mysterious observatory known as Red Coast. But nothing can undo the
emotional damage of witnessing her father's murder. Nor can she escape the chaos of
Communism. She watches in horror as the entire area around the observatory is deforested.
Everything -- even astrophysics -- is subordinated to Mao's warped ideology.
Disillusioned completely by the madness of mankind -- a sentiment reinforced by a chance
meeting with an American environmentalist -- Ye stumbles on a way of beaming a message from
Earth deep into space by bouncing it off the sun. When, after years of empty noise, a clear
message is received in reply, she does not hesitate. Even though the message is a warning not
to communicate with Trisolaris -- the name of a real planet with three suns -- Ye sends
another message, ensuring that the Trisolarians can locate Earth, and initiate their
long-planned relocation.
Rehabilitated in the political thaw that follows Mao's death, Ye Wenjie returns to
Beijing, following in her father's footsteps as a physics professor. But she leads a double
life, for she also becomes the Commander of the Earth-Trisolaris Movement, a radically
misanthropic organization dedicated to helping the Trisolarians conquer earth. Acute readers
will notice that this group's ideology is a subtle parody of Maoism.
"Start a global rebellion!" they shout. "Long live the spirit of Trisolaris! We shall
persevere like the stubborn grass that resprouts after every wildfire! ... Eliminate human
tyranny!"
Little do they know that the Trisolarians are even worse than humans. As one of the aliens
points out to their leader, because of their world's utter unpredictability, "Everything is
devoted to survival. To permit the survival of the civilization as a whole, there is almost
no respect for the individual. Someone who can no longer work is put to death. Trisolarian
society exists under a state of extreme authoritarianism." Life for the individual consists
of "monotony and desiccation." That sounds a lot like Mao's China.
There is one scene in "The Three-Body Problem" that sticks in the mind. An adult and a
child stand looking at the grave of a Red Guard killed during the factional battles that
raged during the Cultural Revolution. "Are they heroes?" asks the child. The adult says no.
"Are they enemies?" The adult again says no. "Then who are they?" The adult replies:
"History."
True, the hero of the story is the foul-mouthed, chain-smoking Beijing cop Shi Qiang.
Chinese readers doubtless relish the scene when he lectures a pompous American general about
how best to save the world.
But the deeper meaning of the book is surely that Trisolaris is China. The three bodies in
contention are not suns but classes: rulers, intellectuals, masses. Right now, China is in
one of its stable phases. But, as the contending forces shift, chaos will sooner or later
return. Perhaps it already has, in Hong Kong.
If it spreads, I -- and history -- will win that bet.
The Three-Body Problem is a hard science fiction novel by the Chinese writer Liu Cixin. It is
the first novel of the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, but Chinese readers generally
refer to the whole series by the title of this first novel. The second and third novels in
the trilogy are titled The Dark Forest and Death's End. The title of the first novel refers
to the three-body problem in orbital mechanics. ...
The English translation by Ken Liu was published by Tor Books in 2014. It was the first
Asian novel ever to win a Hugo Award for Best Novel, in 2015 and was nominated for the 2014
Nebula Award for Best Novel.
(An amazing trilogy. Inspired by Arthur Clarke (*). Looks like Niall has read the first
book.)
* 'The Songs of Distant Earth' is a 1986 science fiction novel by British writer Arthur C.
Clarke, based upon his 1958 short story of the same title. He stated that it was his
favourite of all his novels. ... The novel tells of a utopian human colony in the far future
that is visited by travellers from a doomed Earth, as the Sun has gone nova. The Songs of
Distant Earth explores apocalyptic, atheistic, and utopian ideas, as well as the effects of
long-term interstellar travel and extra-terrestrial life. (Wikipedia)
('Songs' is optimistic; 'Remembrance of
Earth's Past is not.)
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily
uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits
as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person
of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane
Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials
responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over
the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more
to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.
George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether
he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only
moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:
And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has
many deaths on his conscience:
Here's the money quote from her apologia:
"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio
audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be
kind to everyone."
This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it
should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still
have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end
of his days.
Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:
There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong,
and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion,
I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues
the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief
extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency
to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes
from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that
his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency
has to die.
DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity.
From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems
very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."
...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.
Tulsi Gabbard
Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago
.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear
us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha,
& work together for the people.
There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.
"... George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game: ..."
"... This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end of his days. ..."
"... DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity. From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power." ..."
"... There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect. ..."
"Comedian Ellen DeGeneres loves to tell everyone to be kind. It's a loose word, kindness; on her show, DeGeneres customarily
uses it to mean a generic sort of niceness. Don't bully. Befriend people! It's a charming thought, though it has its limits
as a moral ethic. There are people in the world, after all, whom it is better not to befriend. Consider, for example, the person
of George W. Bush. Tens of thousands of people are dead because his administration lied to the American public about the presence
of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and then, based on that lie, launched a war that's now in its 16th year. After Hurricane
Katrina struck and hundreds of people drowned in New Orleans, Bush twiddled his thumbs for days. Rather than fire the officials
responsible for the government's life-threateningly lackluster response to the crisis, he praised them, before flying over
the scene in Air Force One. He opposed basic human rights for LGBT people, and reproductive rights for women, and did more
to empower the American Christian right than any president since Reagan.
George W. Bush's presidency wasn't just morally bankrupt. In a superior reality, the Hague would be sorting out whether
he is guilty of war crimes. Since our international institutions have failed to punish, or even censure him, surely the only
moral response from civil society should be to shun him. But here is Ellen DeGeneres hanging out with him at a Cowboys game:
And here is Ellen DeGeneres explaining why it's good and normal to share laughs, small talk, and nachos with a man who has
many deaths on his conscience:
Here's the money quote from her apologia:
"We're all different. And I think that we've forgotten that that's okay that we're all different," she told her studio
audience. "When I say be kind to one another, I don't mean be kind to the people who think the same way you do. I mean be
kind to everyone."
This is what we say to children who don't want to sit next to the class misfit at lunch. It is not -- or at least it
should not -- be the way we talk about a man who used his immense power to illegally invade another country where we still
have troops 16 years later. His feet should bleed wherever he walks and Iraqis should get to throw shoes at him until the end
of his days.
Nevertheless, many celebrities and politicians have hailed DeGeneres for her radical civility:
There's almost no point to rebutting anything that Chris Cillizza writes. Whatever he says is inevitably dumb and wrong,
and then I get angry while I think about how much money he gets to be dumb and wrong on a professional basis. But on this occasion,
I'll make an exception. The notion that DeGeneres's friendship with Bush is antithetical to Trumpism fundamentally misconstrues
the force that makes Trump possible. Trump isn't a simple playground bully, he's the president. Americans grant our commanders-in-chief
extraordinary deference once they leave office. They become celebrities, members of an apolitical royal class. This tendency
to separate former presidents from the actions of their office, as if they were merely actors in a stage play, or retired athletes
from a rival team, contributes to the atmosphere of impunity that enabled Trump. If Trump's critics want to make sure that
his cruelties are sins the public and political class alike never tolerate again, our reflexive reverence for the presidency
has to die.
DeGeneres isn't a role model for civility. Her friendship with Bush simply embodies the grossest form of class solidarity.
From a lofty enough vantage point, perhaps Bush's misdeeds really look like minor partisan differences. Perhaps Iraq seems
very far away, and so do the poor of New Orleans, when the stage of your show is the closest you get to anyone without power."
...I am all in favor of Tulsi Gabbard's anti-war stance, but this comment shows me she is too childish to hold any power.
Tulsi Gabbard
Verified account @TulsiGabbard
22h22 hours ago
.@TheEllenShow msg of being kind to ALL is so needed right now. Enough with the divisiveness. We can't let politics tear
us apart. There are things we will disagree on strongly, and things we agree on -- let's treat each other with respect, aloha,
& work together for the people.
There is no reason that anyone should treat George Bush with respect.
"... "Is Apple guiding Hong Kong thugs?" the Chinese People's Daily newspaper wondered in an op-ed published on Wednesday. Beijing tore into the trillion-dollar company for offering HKmap.live, a map app that allows users to report and track police activity, warning the app "facilitates illegal behavior" and that Apple is hurting its reputation among Chinese consumers by "mixing business with politics and commercial activity with illegal activities." " ..."
"... This recklessness will cause much trouble for Apple ," the People's Daily declared, advising the tech firm to " think deeply ." ..."
"... Hong Kong's cheerleaders are rapidly finding out they may have bitten off more than they can chew. It's rarely a good idea, as a global business, to alienate 1.4 billion people living in the world's second-largest economy. ..."
"... More importantly, most Americans don't want a side of politics when they buy a smartphone or go to a basketball game. ..."
Beijing is angry at Apple for allowing a police-tracking map used by Hong Kong protesters in its App Store. Pressure grows on
US companies doing business in China to take a side, as virtue-signaling clashes with serving customers. "Is Apple guiding Hong
Kong thugs?" the Chinese People's Daily newspaper wondered in an op-ed published on Wednesday. Beijing tore into the trillion-dollar
company for offering HKmap.live, a map app that allows users to report and track police activity, warning the app "facilitates
illegal behavior" and that Apple is hurting its reputation among Chinese consumers by "mixing business with politics and commercial
activity with illegal activities." "
This recklessness will cause much trouble for Apple ," the People's Daily declared,
advising the tech firm to " think deeply ."
The majority of Apple's products are manufactured in China, and those that aren't are assembled in Texas from Chinese parts. China
is the second-largest market for Apple products, and CEO Tim Cook expects it will soon overtake the US as number one.
According to HKmap.live's developers, Apple initially rejected the app during a reviewing process, but reconsidered following
an appeal. It allows users to report not only the locations and movement of police, but also the use of tear gas and other protester-specific
features. The protests, which began in May over a now-shelved extradition bill, have grown quite violent, with some rioters turning
on ordinary citizens who merely express solidarity with the mainland.
It's not as if Apple has a track record of defying China's wishes – the company does not include the Taiwan flag emoji on its
Chinese devices, and this week has gone further by hiding the flag from users in Hong Kong and Macau. China does not recognize Taiwan
as a separate country.
Nor do people look to Apple as their moral guiding light. The Foxconn factories used by the company in China have become infamous
after a wave of worker suicides, so much that Apple had "suicide nets" installed to stop the employees from jumping to their
deaths.
So where did this sudden urge to stand up for rioters that have become the darlings of the West come from? Apple joins a lengthening
list of American corporate entities – including the makers of adult cartoon 'South Park', the manager of NBA team the Houston Rockets,
and Vans shoes – who've piled on China following the outbreak of the protests during the summer.
Virtue-signaling is almost expected of American companies in the Trump era. Celebrities who don't speak out against the president
are assumed to be secretly harboring pro-Trump sympathies, for example. China probably seems like an easier target than the president
– Beijing is halfway around the world and currently embroiled in a trade war with the US.
Hong Kong's cheerleaders are rapidly
finding out they may have bitten off more than they can chew. It's rarely a good idea, as a global business, to alienate 1.4 billion
people living in the world's second-largest economy. NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, who initially spoke up for Rockets manager Daryl
Morey's "freedom of expression" after he tweeted in support of the protests, has modified his statement to include understanding
that there are "consequences" to such freedoms and is scrambling to reach an understanding with China after the nation's largest
state-run TV station dropped NBA games in retaliation.
Look for Apple to do something similar if the government controlling its manufacturing and its second-largest market decides to
punish its insolence.
More importantly, most Americans don't want a side of politics when they buy a smartphone or go to a basketball game. The vast
majority of consumers – those who aren't on Twitter shrieking over the latest revelation that a CEO attended a Trump fundraiser –
are not interested in a company's ability to virtue signal. They want a product that works, not one that tells them what to think.
China’s embassy in France has slammed the country’s reaction to protests in Hong Kong, calling it hypocritical and arguing France
should show empathy as China did when Paris was trying to cope with Yellow Vests.
The diplomatic mission was commenting on a statement issued by the European Union, and swiftly repeated by the French Foreign
Ministry last week, after Hong Kong police used live ammunition against a protester in self-defense for the first time in four months
of demonstrations.
"... "Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War, (including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars -- emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted. ..."
"... While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for which Bush is condemned today. ..."
"... From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan, establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria – Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner. ..."
"... *Nobel Peace Drones™ ..."
"... "Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for the displacement and death of millions," ..."
Actor Mark Ruffalo was shredded for double standards after he posted a "callout" tweet
assailing George Bush for the sins of the Iraq War, with many netizens noting his aversion to
slamming Barack Obama's military adventures. Weighing into a controversy kicked off by TV
personality Ellen Degeneres, who came under fire for schmoozing it up with former President
George W. Bush at a football game last weekend, Ruffalo insisted no quarter or kindness should
be offered to perpetrators of heinous war crimes until they face consequences, including
Bush.
"Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness," the actor of Incredible Hulk fame tweeted.
Sorry, until George W. Bush is brought to justice for the crimes of the Iraq War,
(including American-lead torture, Iraqi deaths & displacement, and the deep scars --
emotional & otherwise -- inflicted on our military that served his folly), we can't even
begin to talk about kindness. https://t.co/dpMwfck6su
While some online were appreciative of the anti-Bush sentiment, many wondered aloud why
similar treatment was rarely afforded to Bush's successor, Barack Obama, who is largely given a
pass despite pursuing – in some cases escalating – many of the same policies for
which Bush is condemned today.
Claiming Bush is some monster while worshipping Obama even though they did the same things
abroad🤔
From a massive escalation of the Afghan war in 2009, ramping up drone bombings on Pakistan,
establishing a secret presidential "kill list" that included American citizens, leading
a NATO operation that left Libya in ruin, or arming violent Islamist militants in Syria –
Obama still has much to answer for, but is rarely asked to do so. Despite bragging that he'd
already bombed seven countries by 2015, liberal celebrities like Ruffalo have had few harsh
words for the Nobel Peace Prize winner.
"Woke Twitter, [including] Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call outs," one user
observed, noting the several occasions former first lady Michelle Obama posed affectionately
with Bush without facing a similar wave of outrage from figures like Ruffalo.
People ripping Jameela Jamil and the celebs in these screenshots but it was tumbleweed 101
when Michelle Obama was getting regular sweeties fixes from George W. Bush & going above
and beyond duty in friendly optics. Woke Twitter, incl Mark Ruffalo, are selective about call
outs. pic.twitter.com/snNYZEbAWM
It's funny how Mark Ruffalo can criticize Ellen, who was an actual person affected by
Bush's ignorance, but not a peep about Michelle Obama who admits to having a special
FRIENDSHIP with GW. https://t.co/9UM1BP8GpY
Another commenter seconded Ruffalo's views on Bush, but encouraged the actor to take his
criticism further, applying the same humanitarian standard evenly, regardless of the party in
power.
"Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible
for the displacement and death of millions," the user said.
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush.
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over.
Mark Ruffalo (correctly) calling out George Bush for being a war criminal, responsible for
the displacement and death of millions
The same is true for Obama. He started 5 wars and displaced even more people than Bush
However, Obama is a media darling who Mark gushes over
100% on Bush. You forgot to add Obama & Clinton though. No reason to root for justice
against one war criminal, while giving a free pass to others. It makes it partisan, rather
than ethical.
Hillary Clinton has threatened to enter the 2020 presidential race for president after
President Donald Trump suggested on Twitter that she throw her hat in the ring in an effort to
"steal it away" from Elizabeth Warren. Trump tweeted Tuesday that "Crooked Hillary"
should run for president again to deprive the "Uber Left" Warren of a shot at the White
House, but only on "one condition" to be subpoenaed to "explain all of her high
crimes and misdemeanors."
I think that Crooked Hillary Clinton should enter the race to try and steal it away from
Uber Left Elizabeth Warren. Only one condition. The Crooked one must explain all of her high
crimes and misdemeanors including how & why she deleted 33,000 Emails AFTER getting "C"
Subpoena!
Five hours after Trump's jab, Clinton replied: "Don't tempt me. Do your job."
Reaction to Clinton's warning was mixed, to say the least. While mainstream media outlets
seemed to love the idea, many social media users recoiled in horror at the thought of a 2016
re-run.
"I don't think my heart could take it" if Hillary really runs again, one fan
proclaimed on Twitter.
I did not vote for Trump, or for Hillary, but I firmly agree with analysis of Bacevich here:
> Honest people may differ on whether to attribute the Iraq War to outright lies or monumental hubris. When it comes to tallying
up the consequences, however, the intentions of those who sold the war don't particularly matter. The results include thousands
of Americans killed; tens of thousands wounded, many grievously, or left to struggle with the effects of PTSD; hundreds of thousands
of non-Americans killed or injured; millions displaced; trillions of dollars expended; radical groups like ISIS empowered (and
in its case even formed inside a US prison in Iraq); and the Persian Gulf region plunged into turmoil from which it has yet to
recover. How do Trump's crimes stack up against these?
> The Great Recession stemmed directly from economic policies implemented during the administration of President Bill Clinton
and continued by his successor. Deregulating the banking sector was projected to produce a bonanza in which all would share. Yet,
as a direct result of the ensuing chicanery, nearly 9 million Americans lost their jobs, while overall unemployment shot up to
10 percent. Roughly 4 million Americans lost their homes to foreclosure. The stock market cratered and millions saw their life
savings evaporate. Again, the question must be asked: How do these results compare to Trump's dubious dealings with Ukraine?
In one of the exchanges with US ambassador to the EU, Gordon Sondland, dated September 9, Taylor
spells out what would become the Democrats' argument for impeachment:
As I said on the phone, I think it's crazy to withhold security assistance for help
with a political campaign.
It's time Dems try to bring in Ambassador Bill Taylor.
Taylor *twice* texts about a direct quid pro quo between military aid and Ukraine helping Trump
rig our election.
There's a *reason* Taylor thought there was a quid pro quo.
Sondland's admonishment of Taylor –
"I believe you are incorrect about President Trump's
intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo's of any kind."
– is somehow being
held up as an admission of wrongdoing, along with his request for a phone call instead of continued
texts.
Just like that, all of a sudden, the controversy about the so-called
"whistleblower"
who
may have colluded with House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-California) before filing his
complaint – based on hearsay – is declared
"irrelevant"
and the texts are held up as the Holy
Grail of impeachment proceedings.
At this point, whistleblower complaint is irrelevant. Transcript of
Trump-Zelensky call and texts from Volker, Sondland et al released yesterday is all one needs to
show clearly Trump misconduct .
It's curious how the same treatment was not given a few months ago to the anti-Trump text messages
of FBI employees Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, when the entire media establishment twisted itself into
pretzels to explain that when Strzok said
"we'll stop"
Trump from becoming president what he
really meant, you see, was something totally innocuous and not sinister at all
.
House Republicans have blasted the diplomatic texts as "cherry-picked" by the other party, and
argued that the closed-doors testimony of Kurt Volker, former US special envoy to Ukraine who
participated in the exchanges, painted a completely different picture.
We noticed the original tweet was deleted after we posted our fact check.
Reading the
transcript
of Volker's opening statement, obtained and published Friday by investigative reporter
John Solomon and the Federalist, seems to back that claim. Volker testified he did not bring up the issue
of a hold on military aid with the Ukrainians until late August, when it was first reported in the media
– and long after the Trump-Zelensky phone call. Nor was he made aware of any reference to former VP Joe
Biden or his son until the transcript of the call was released on September 25.
Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani
"stressed that all he wanted to see was for Ukraine to investigate
what happened in the past and apply its own laws,"
Volker also explained.
On the issue of holding up military aid, Volker admits he was conducting his own policy, in line with
the consensus in Washington, rather than obeying the president who appointed him:
"I became aware of a hold on Congressional Notifications about proceeding with that assistance on
July 18, 2019, and immediately tried to weigh in to reverse that position I was confident that this
position would indeed be reversed in the end, because the provision of such assistance was uniformly
supported at State, Defense, NSC, the House of Representatives, the Senate, and the expert community in
Washington."
Yet the most overlooked text in the batch is from Volker to Giuliani, dated August 9, asking for a
phone call "to make sure I advise Z [Zelensky] correctly as to what he should be saying."
To the impeachment-bent Democrats, what's objectionable here is the substance of Volker's instruction
– namely, the alleged
"election meddling"
in investigating the Bidens (and Ukraine's role in
2016, which they are eager never to mention). What should be objectionable is the fact that a US diplomat
is stage-whispering to the freshly elected president of an ostensibly sovereign country. Not that it
would be the first time.
Way back in
April 2016
, President Barack Obama argued that the US stood for the
"principle that nations like
Ukraine have the right to choose their own destiny."
Left unsaid was that such choices would only be
honored if they aligned with US beliefs and objectives – and subject to
"color revolution"
and
regime change if not, which is just what happened in February 2014 in Kiev.
The fact that neither Democrats and Republicans are raising that issue with Volker's testimony and the
texts just goes to show that neither have a problem with the US acting like an empire, and Ukraine being
its vassal. That is what is truly damning about all of this, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
President Donald Trump has continued to hammer Democratic efforts to impeach him, this time
accusing the party of "continuing to interfere in the 2016 election" as well. "Not only are
the Do Nothing Democrats interfering in the 2020 Election, but they are continuing to interfere
in the 2016 Election," Trump tweeted on Saturday. "They must be stopped!"
Not only are the Do Nothing Democrats interfering in the 2020 Election, but they are
continuing to interfere in the 2016 Election. They must be stopped!
The president has called the impeachment investigation against him – which centers
around allegations he pressured Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky into reopening a
corruption investigation into Joe Biden's son Hunter's business dealings in the country –
"fake" and a "phony witch hunt," designed to oust him before the 2020 race.
Rather than suggesting that Democrats were traveling through time to meddle in the 2016
election all over again, the second half of the president's tweet refers to his belief that the
impeachment drive was concocted to distract from Attorney General William Barr's efforts to
investigate the origins of the counterintelligence probe against his campaign.
Trump has accused the US' intelligence agencies of "spying" on his 2016 campaign and
obtaining a FISA wiretapping warrant under false pretenses. Barr's office received a draft
report of this alleged FISA abuse from the Justice Department's Inspector General two weeks
ago.
Several top Democrats have released text messages between US officials which they claim
expose the Trump administration's drive to 'coerce' the Ukrainian government to target Joe
Biden, for purely political reasons obviously. The Democratic chairs of the House Intelligence,
Oversight and Foreign Affairs Committees released the messages in a letter to fellow
representatives late Thursday.
The
letter features over a dozen text messages between US diplomats – including former
Trump administration envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, Ukrainian embassy official Bill Taylor, EU
Ambassador Gordon Sondland, as well as the president's personal attorney Rudy
Giuliani.
"The president and his aides are engaging in a campaign of misinformation and
misdirection in an attempt to normalize the act of soliciting foreign power to interfere in our
elections," the chairmen wrote.
Even more astonishing, he is now openly and publicly asking another foreign power
– China – to launch its own sham investigation against the Bidens to further his
own political aims.
Last week, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Congress would launch an impeachment inquiry over
the allegations the president sought to "shake down" his Ukrainian counterpart, unifying
six separate committee probes under one umbrella.
This isn't about a Campaign, this is about Corruption on a massive scale! https://t.co/DOCvfM8eqi
President Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing amid the controversy, arguing that
there is nothing illicit about requesting an ally to investigate potential corruption. He has
stressed that Biden himself publicly bragged about threatening to withhold US loan
guarantees to Ukraine unless the country fired its head prosecutor, who happened to be
investigating the gas firm that hired Biden's son, Hunter.
What is fascinating in the texts is the 4 attempts that Bill Taylor made to entrap
Sondland-beginning less than a week after Shifty's staffer Thomas Eager met with Bill in
Ukraine.
A showdown between the White House and Democrats is in full swing with the former penning a
letter declaring it would not cooperate with an "illegitimate" and "unconstitutional"
impeachment inquiry conducted in secret. The
letter , published on Tuesday evening, condemned the impeachment initiative in the harshest
terms yet, arguing it deprived President Trump of "constitutionally mandated due
process," and that the inquiry lacked legal legitimacy, as it was never authorized by a
House vote.
Congressional Democrats have flouted the Constitution and all past bipartisan precedent
under the guise of an "impeachment inquiry."
You have denied the President the right to cross-examine witnesses, to call witnesses,
to receive transcripts of testimony, to have access to evidence, to have counsel present, and
many other basic rights guaranteed to all Americans.
"You have conducted your proceedings in secret. You have violated civil liberties and the
separation of powers," the letter continued "All of this violates the Constitution, the
rule of law, and every past precedent ." [emphasis in original]
The White House accused Democrats of using impeachment as a tool to not only "undo the
democratic results" of the previous election, but to "influence" the upcoming
contest as well, citing the words of Congressman Al Green (D-Texas), who in May expressed
concerns that "if we don't impeach the President, he will get reelected."
The letter also notes that ranking Republican committee members had not been granted the
same subpoena powers as the Democratic chairmen leading the impeachment process – as they
were during previous inquiries – slamming the process as unfair and
"one-sided."
Earlier on Monday, the Democratic committee chairs issued a subpoena to compel the testimony
of EU Ambassador Gordon Sondland, a key figure in the inquiry, after the White House signaled
that it would block his appearance before Congress. The Trump administration appears to be
doubling down on that move, arguing in the letter that it will simply not comply with future
subpoenas.
Given that your inquiry lacks any legitimate constitutional foundation, any pretense of
fairness, or even the most elementary due process protections, the Executive Branch cannot be
expected to participate in it.
Going along with the inquiry under its "current unconstitutional posture" would
"inflict lasting institutional harm on the Executive Branch and lasting damage to the
separation of powers," the letter said, adding that Democrats have "left the president
no choice" but to refuse to cooperate.
The missive is the White House's latest response to intensifying impeachment efforts
spearheaded by House Democrats, who launched the proceedings late last month accusing Trump of
pressuring the President of Ukraine to probe into the activities of former Vice President Joe
Biden and his son in the country.
Several Democratic opponents shot back at the document, some denouncing the move as an act
of obstruction.
"The White House letter is only the latest attempt to cover up his betrayal of our
democracy, and to insist that the President is above the law," said House Speaker Nancy
Pelosi in a statement on Tuesday, adding the president had "normalize[d]
lawlessness."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate. ..."
"... Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to support a write-in candidate instead. ..."
"... In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet. ..."
US cyber-security experts have blamed Russia for meddling in American elections since 2016.
Now it has emerged that authors of a Senate report on 'Russian' meddling actually ran a "false
flag" meddling operation themselves. A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee
released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting
African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household
name.
Described by the New
York Times as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has
ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies. Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan
previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agency. His partner, Ryan Fox,
is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for
the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract
the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company in 2018 alone. Morgan and Fox
have struck gold in the "Russiagate" racket, which sprung into being after Hillary
Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan, for example, is
one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that purports to monitor
and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. The dashboard is bankrolled by
the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats
and neoconservatives funded in part by NATO and USAID.
It is worth noting that the 600 "Russia-linked" Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard are not disclosed to the public, making it impossible to verify its claims. This
inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however.
From the way it was formed to the secrecy of its "methods" to the blatantly false
assumptions on which its claims rest, "Hamilton68" is probably the single most successful
media fraud & US propaganda campaign I've seen since I've been writing about politics.
It's truly shocking.
New Knowledge's victory lap was short-lived. On December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017
special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false
flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by
a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious
creation, Hamilton 68.
Ultimately, Moore ended up losing the race by a miniscule 1.5 percentage points –
making his opponent Doug Jones the first Democrat to represent Alabama in the US Senate in over
25 years.
Money trail and weak apologies
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Times piece,
had known about the meddling for months, because he spoke at an event where the organizers
boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hurt
Moore. He dubbed it "Project Birmingham."
This gets even weirder: NYT reporter @ScottShaneNYT , who broke the
Alabama disinfo op story, learned of it in early September when he spoke at an off-the-record
event organized by one of the firms that perpetrated the deception https://t.co/gIAytOh2yy
The money for the venture came from a $750,000 contribution to AET by Reid Hoffman, the
billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn and a big Democrat donor. Once that emerged, Hoffman offered
a public apology for his connection to the shady operation, but insisted that he didn't know
what his money was going towards.
" I find the tactics that have been recently reported highly disturbing ," Hoffman
said in a statement.
"For that reason, I am embarrassed by my failure to track AET -- the organization I did
support -- more diligently as it made its own decisions to perhaps fund projects that I would
reject."
As for Shane, he told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, but had
signed a nondisclosure agreement at the request of AET, so he could not talk about it
further.
Spin and denial
Shane's spin on the tale was that New Knowledge "imitated Russian tactics" as part of
an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 and had no effect on the
election. Yet these tactics are only considered "Russian" because New Knowledge and
similar outfits said so! Moreover, New Knowledge's budget in Alabama was greater than the
reported amount spent by "Russians" on the 2016 US presidential election, yet Moscow's
alleged meddling was supposed to be decisive, while New Knowledge's failed?
New Knowledge responded to the Times story by insisting that the "false flag"
operation was actually a benign research project. In a statement posted on Twitter, the
company's CEO claimed that its activities during the Alabama Senate race were conducted in
order to "better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media
disinformation."
Morgan emphasized that he in no way took part in an influence campaign, and warned people
not to mischaracterize his "research."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that
Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard to give his "false flag" more credibility
– misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was
fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which announced last
week that five accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been
suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
Meddlers
unmasked
The final nail in the coffin of Morgan's story came on Thursday, when the leaked secret
after-action report from "Project Birmingham" was published online, showing that those
behind the Alabama campaign knew perfectly well what they were doing and why.
BREAKING: Here's the after-action report from the AL Senate disinfo campaign.
So, it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy by "Russian bots."
Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat
operatives chiefly responsible for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria
over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Hong Kong police have seized weapons, armor and materials used to create Molotov cocktails,
which they said belonged to radical groups among the protesters labeled 'pro-democracy' by
western media. According to the police, on Monday and Tuesday they targeted 48 locations
throughout the city that they suspected were connected with violent protesters, who have been
waging street battles against the police force for several months.
The police arrested 51 people, including seven women, who were aged between 15 and 44, and
charged them with various crimes related to the rioting.
... ... ...
The authorities published
photos of the items they discovered during the raid, which include several suits of body armor,
various melee weapons as well as chemicals and glass bottles used in the manufacturing of
petrol bombs – a weapon routinely deployed by the protesters to cause chaos in Hong
Kong.
... ... ...
Mass anti-government protests first gripped the Chinese city in March, when thousands took
to the streets to protest an extradition bill that they deemed an attack on Hong Kong's
autonomy under the so-called "one country, two systems" arrangement. The bill has since been
revoked, but the protest movement's demands have continued to grow and it has become more
violent in its approach.
... ... ...
Peaceful protest demonstrations in Hong Kong, which have been the prime focus for Western
media coverage, take place against the backdrop of vandalism, harassment of businesses deemed
loyal to the central government and outright rioting.
Some interesting estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters that participated in the Donbass War
from 2014-2019 from a report [PDF]
by the Soufan Center. (h/t
Kholmogorov)
Kiev-controlled Ukraine served as a destination for would-be murderers seeking impunity for
years. However, inviting foreign scum will help it about as much as it helped ISIS. Maybe
even less: some foreign and domestic ISIS bandits had ideology beyond raping and looting,
Ukrainian bandits in Donbass do not. "True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away
from the front in Ukraine itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they
can be maimed or killed.
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure, on the battlefield and in bed.
@Korenchkin If
you go by quintessence of Nazi ideology "my tribe is better than your tribe", every nation
has its Nazis, including Russia.
To its credit, tribal nationalists never got more than ~7% electoral support in
Russia.
After Ukrainian experience showed that any country can be quickly ruined by primeval
tribal nationalism, their support in Russia dropped to below 2%. But it still isn't zero.
Then again, ~1% of any population are schizophrenics, 2-3% are gays/lesbians, etc., so single
digit representation of any kind of deviation is not threatening country's survival.
@Mr. Hack I
asked the questions first, but I'll be generous and explain this to you on the fingers.
1. I used the term "Banderists" in the context of Ukraine's volunteer battalions –
that is, where foreigners have the most realistic chance of getting accepted.
2. Polls show Ukrainians to generally be 50/50 on Bandera, but obviously, that number will be
much higher amongst the rather self-selected sample that are volunteer battalion members. At
least 80%, if not 90%.
3. Poles obviously couldn't care less for Bandera. Polish *nationalists* – even less
so.
4. Nationalists are the likeliest foreigners to participate in the Donbass.
5. Do you now see why this would be a pertinent point to mention in the specific context of
why 10x fewer Poles fight for the Ukraine relative to Georgians, despite having 10x the
population?
I'm not sure if 14 fighters is a big enough sample size to justify lumping Canada into the
dreaded "Russophobe" category. But the 10 pro-Ukrainians to 4 pro-Russians ratio closely
mirrors that of self-declared ethnic Ukrainians (1,359,655) to Russians (622,445) in Canada.
Though many, possibly even a majority of those "Russians" are actually Jews. The Ukrainian
lobby has been disturbingly powerful in Canada for a long time (multiculturalism was their
bright idea), while the Russian lobby is seemingly invisible.
There are signs and symbols of Ukrainian nationalism everywhere (banks, festivals, flags,
bumper stickers etc), while similar Russian symbols are basically non-existent. The Uke to
Russkie ratio may be only 10-4, but it feels more like 10-1, or even 100-1.
I expected more Russians from the Baltics. Apparently, they and Serbs were early arrivals in
Girkin's group. Perhaps the ethnic Russians were counted as Russian?
Quite a few White Russians emigrated to France. The Whites were well supported by ethnic
Russians in the Donbass during the Civil War.
Many Irish Nationalist commentators supported Russia (enemy's enemy) but the table shows
Ireland Pro Ukraine (anti-imperialist a stronger driver?). The Russian settlers in the
Donbass are such an obvious parallel to the Orangemen.
1. Chechens would be the obvious answer. I recall reading there were 2x as many Chechens
fighting for Ukrainians than for Russians.
2. Svidomy Ukrainians in Russia.
3. And, as mentioned, Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists (~60%-70% on Ukraine's side, at
least initially). The other brands of Russian nationalists were overwhelmingly
pro-Russian.
@AnonFromTN
More foreign "scum" on Donbas side than Ukrainian side. As one would expect. It's not all bad
however, Donbas should be kept apart from Ukraine.
"True believer" Ukies are in Canada, the US, or far away from the front in Ukraine
itself and studiously avoid getting into real fighting, where they can be maimed or
killed.
Ukrainian-American Paslawsky fought and died in the war.
A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and the only American known to have fought
alongside Ukrainian forces against pro-Russian separatists has been killed in eastern
Ukraine.
Mark Gregory Paslawsky, 55, died while fighting with the volunteer Donbas Battalion.
Paslawsky, who fought under the nom de guerre "Franko," was killed on August 19 during
fighting in the town of Ilovaysk, near the Ukrainian city of Donetsk, according to a Facebook
post by Ukrainian Interior Ministry adviser Anton Herashchenko.
Paslawsky was born in 1959 in New York and grew up in a tight-knit Ukrainian-American
family in New Jersey. He moved to Ukraine around two decades ago and informed his family
earlier this year that he planned to volunteer for the Ukrainian Army, according to his
brother, Nestor Paslawsky.
::::::::::::::
The American fighting for Donbas, "Cowb0y", meanwhile was some sort of petty criminal in
the USA. Like Motorola in Russia, of course.
@Philip Owen
Well the Serbs played a major role in the defence of the territory that is today the Donbas
(not particularly well known among modern Russians). So Serbian nationalists have an extra
cause in regards to the Donbas
Slavo-Serbia or Slaveno-Serbia, was a territory of Imperial Russia between 1753-64. It was
located by the right bank of the Donets River between the Bakhmutka River
(Бахмут) and Luhan
(Лугань) rivers. This area today constitutes the
territories of present-day Luhansk Oblast and Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. The
administrative centre of Slavo-Serbia was Bakhmut (Bahmut).
In contrast, many volunteers on the side of Donbass freedom fighters do have honest
beliefs and are not cowards avoiding combat. Not all, though: some just look for an
adventure
Not mutually exclusive. If you feel that you're leading a meaningless life and you are
looking for adventure, something radically different from a cubicle job or whatever, might as
well do something like join a war where you get to defend innocent people.
Considering ex ISIS fighters are often left to go free and claim benefits it was interesting
to see the fate of the fella who went to the Donbass and didn't even fight.
@anonymous
coward So was South Africa but didn't stop there being close ties between loyalists and
the apartheid government, a few Ulstermen were in the the government and there was the shared
settler Calvinist outlook. The IRA had quite close links to Croats, don't know if loyalists
had the same with Serbs. MP Ian Paisley junior is somewhat of a Russophile.
@SveVid This is
all true, but all those people are completely and utterly assimilated into Ukrainians /
Russians and have been for much longer than living memory. Most people in Serbia (except
history nerds etc) have no idea about this history. A much more plausible explanation for
Serbs going to fight in the Donbass would make some reference to Russian (and also Greek btw)
volunteer units fighting with the Serbs in the 1990s and contacts established during that
time.
@Anatoly Karlin
Mazepa is way up there and he joined the early 17th century Swedish invasion of Russia that
ended with the defeat at Poltava. That effectively ended Sweden as a great power. Seems like
Ukrainians have a thing for worshipping losers allied with anyone west of them, so there is
some hope for Porky's eventual rehabilitation.
Carl Bildt's ancestors were there in high stockings among the vanquished at Poltava
– the Bildts never forgave the humiliation, those Swedes can be sneaky. That explains
the persistent anti-Russian attitudes among the Nordics. Swedes also tend to be
simple-minded, nobody swallows the current globo-homo propaganda as eagerly or looks for
Russian submarines hiding behind every whale.
By and large Austria and Croatia are the only surprises – here, the history of the last
century is a bit complicated. "Altösterreicher" is a popular euphemism for "Galician
Jew" i.e. the current Kiew regime. The Croats are more probably channeling their recent
hatred for the Serbs. [Not really] funny what the separation of East and West Rome is still
doing to a people.
"... "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ." ..."
"... I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war. ..."
"... Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy. ..."
"... They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor. ..."
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in
power, all these people will come back from the cold & rain the bombs on the globally
deplorables.
Lily Lynch @lilyslynch
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."
"liberal internationalism in Obama's cabinet. That made her [Powers] a target for his
critics. Her openness to military intervention – she was against [W Bush?] it in Iraq
but for it in Libya – drew flak from the left."
How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post
modern?] favor military intervention?
Does it involve ignoring "state run industrial age mass murder"?
Does it see a rationalized outcome to justify state mass murder?
I think post modern morality goes more towards the means don't matter much less the end---
see Libya!
I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never
excuse war.
Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world
order to add to its Degeneracy.
"... "They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ." ..."
"... I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never excuse war. ..."
"... Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world order to add to its Degeneracy. ..."
"... They conflate PNAC strategy with US security and anyone not in to military intervention for the PNAC is a traitor. ..."
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
To [Samantha Power] applies Scott Fitzgerald's often cited comment. Once Biden is back in
power, all these people will come back from the cold & rain the bombs on the globally
deplorables.
Lily Lynch @lilyslynch
This is what institutional, "humanitarian" power looks like: Fluff pieces in liberal media
with zero input from people on the receiving end of your bombs; unchecked power to decide who
lives and who dies; and (most of all) never having to answer for it.
"They were careless people, Tom and Daisy -- they smashed up things and creatures and then
retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them
together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made . . . ."
"liberal internationalism in Obama's cabinet. That made her [Powers] a target for his
critics. Her openness to military intervention – she was against [W Bush?] it in Iraq
but for it in Libya – drew flak from the left."
How can a supposed liberal [Obama was not a liberal in a traditional sense, maybe post
modern?] favor military intervention?
Does it involve ignoring "state run industrial age mass murder"?
Does it see a rationalized outcome to justify state mass murder?
I think post modern morality goes more towards the means don't matter much less the end---
see Libya!
I have not always been a pacifist, but my view is "liberal internationalism" can never
excuse war.
Particularly, as US pushed "liberal internationalism" is maintaining a post WW II world
order to add to its Degeneracy.
Trump has opened the door to a
Turkish incursion into Syria:
Donald Trump has given the green light to a contentious Turkish military operation in
north-east Syria against the main US allies in the battle with Isis, triggering alarm in
Washington and Europe and plunging the campaign against jihadis into uncertainty.
The US has started withdrawing troops from the vicinity of a looming Turkish incursion,
following Mr Trump's phone call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey's president, on Sunday
night.
The White House said the US military, which has about 1,000 troops in Syria, would not
"support or be involved in the operation" that Turkey has repeatedly threatened to launch
against US-backed Kurdish militias. In a statement, it said US forces would "no longer be in
the immediate area".
Removing U.S. forces from the area avoids having them caught up in the Turkish military
operation. Unless the U.S. was prepared to oppose Turkey and defend the YPG, it's not clear
what purpose would be served by keeping those forces where they were. Our absurd Syria policy
has put us in the untenable position of trying to keep the peace between mutually hostile
"allies" for years, and eventually the U.S. was going to have to choose which "ally" it was
going to side with. It is worth remembering that Turkey is a treaty ally and the YPG is at most
a proxy that has proven to be useful over the last few years. If the U.S. is going to favor one
or the other, it was never likely that our government would take the side of the YPG over
Turkey.
This dilemma wouldn't exist if the U.S. hadn't been waging an illegal war in Syria for the
past five years, and this should teach us to think very carefully about whether we should
support armed groups in a conflict where we have few clear interests. The U.S. has a long
history of supporting and then discarding armed proxies, and this will keep repeating itself as
long as the U.S. gets involved in unnecessary wars that it will sooner or later quit. The
solution isn't to use U.S. forces as a buffer with no end in sight, as quite a few critics of
this decision seem to want, but to refrain from sending U.S. forces into conflicts that don't
matter for U.S. security in the first place. Eventually our forces are going to leave places on
the other side of the planet, and it is unrealistic and unfair to make promises of a more
enduring commitment that everyone has to know won't be kept.
Having said all that, the administration has handled all this very poorly. Like almost every
Trump decision, the decision was made hastily and without coordinating with any of the people
that would be affected by it. It isn't clear that all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Syria
anytime soon, so it is possible that the illegal deployment there will continue somewhere else.
And it wouldn't be a Trump foreign policy decision if it didn't involve making insane threats
about destroying a country if its government does something he doesn't like:
Trump clearly wants to have things both ways, but it won't work. He is obviously wrong to
threaten to "destroy and obliterate" the Turkish economy, and the language in his statement is
deranged. Anyone who refers to his own "great and unmatched wisdom" obviously doesn't have any
wisdom to speak of, and it shows in this unhinged threat. For one thing, the threat isn't
likely to deter Erdogan from ordering an attack on Kurdish forces. The Turkish government sees
the YPG as part of an intolerable threat, and they aren't going to be coerced into changing
their position on that. Following through on the threat would mean inflicting punishment on the
people of Turkey for something their government has done, which would both inflame hostility to
the U.S. and harm tens of millions of people without achieving anything.
These are all the
ugly results of an absurd Syria policy and an illegal war that Trump escalated when he came
into office. It should serve as a warning to future administrations about the pitfalls of
involving the U.S. in wars we don't need to fight and throwing our support behind "allies" that
we will eventually leave in the lurch.
Update: The movement of U.S. forces is just a redeployment inside Syria:
US troops are *not* leaving Syria and will simply be moved out of area Turkey may attack,
senior administration official says. Number moving is 50 special operators.
Rep. Justin Amash says it best:
He's not bringing home the troops. He's not ending any war. Stop falling for it.
"...if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off
limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I've done before!)."
WHO SAYS THIS?
Forget the self-aggrandizing wording, which is beyond satire... Turkey are a treaty
ally! He's casually musing and threatening, in public, about "obliterating" the economy of
a treat ally!
It's going to be fascinating to see what the American history books have to say about
this time we are living through.
BTW, just as background: apparently Trump's threat to "destroy and obliterate" the Turkish
economy relates to a massive fine the US is "entitled" to assess on some Turkish interests
regarding a huge money-laundering scheme to evade financial sanctions on dealing with Iran.
Which fine we have not yet officially levied out of the goodness of our hearts...
For China, the three principle points of potential military friction with the U.S. are
Taiwan, South Korea-Japan, and the South China Sea. Apart from South Korea and Japan, where the
U.S. has significant ground and air forces already forward deployed, the main threat to China
is maritime power projected by American aircraft carrier battlegroups and amphibious assault
ships. The Chinese response was to develop a range of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD)
capabilities designed to target American naval forces before they arrived in any potential
contested waters.
Traditionally, the U.S. Navy has relied on a combination of surface warships armed with
sophisticated air defense systems, submarines, and the aircraft carrier's considerable
contingent of combat aircraft to defend against hostile threats in time of war. China's
response came in the form of the DF-21D medium-range missile , dubbed the
"carrier killer." With a range of between 1,450 and 1,550 kilometers, the DF-21D employs a
maneuverable warhead that can deliver a conventional high-explosive warhead with a circular
error of probability (CEP) of 10 meters -- more than enough to strike a carrier-sized
target.
To compliment the DF-21D, China has also deployed the DF-26 intermediate-range missile , which
it has dubbed the "Guam killer," named after the American territory home to major U.S. military
installations. Like the DF-21, the DF-26 has a conventionally armed variant, which is intended
to be used against ships. Both missiles were featured in the 2015 military parade commemorating
the founding of the PRC.
As capable as they were, however, the DF-21D and DF-26 were not the shashoujian
weapons envisioned by Chinese military planners, representing as they did reciprocal
capability, as opposed to a game-changing technology. The unveiling of the true
shashoujian was reserved for last week's parade, and it came in the form of the DF-100
and DF-17 missiles.
The DF-100 is a vehicle-mounted supersonic cruise missile "characterized by a long range,
high precision and quick responsiveness," according to
the Chinese press . When combined with the DF-21/DF-26 threat, the DF-100 is intended to
overwhelm any existing U.S. missile defense capability, turning the Navy into a virtual sitting
duck. As impressive as the DF-100 is, however, it was overshadowed by the
DF-17 , a long-range cruise missile equipped with a hypersonic glide warhead, which
maneuvers at over seven times the speed of sound -- faster than any of the missiles the U.S.
possesses to intercept it. Nothing in the current U.S. arsenal can defeat the DF-17 -- not the
upgraded anti-missile ships, THAAD, or even the Ground Based Interceptors (GBI) currently
based in Alaska.
In short, in the event of a naval clash between China and the U.S., the likelihood of
America's fleet being sent to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean is very high.
The potential loss of the Pacific Fleet cannot be taken lightly: it could serve as a trigger
for the release of nuclear weapons in response. The threat of an American nuclear attack has
always been the ace in the hole for the U.S. regarding China, given that nation's weak
strategic nuclear capability.
Since the 1980s, China has possessed a small number of obsolete liquid-fuel intercontinental
ballistic missiles as their strategic deterrent. These missiles have a slow response time and
could easily be destroyed by any concerted pre-emptive attack. China sought to upgrade its ICBM
force in the late 1990s with a new road-mobile solid fuel missile, the DF-31 . Over the course of the next
two decades, China has upgraded the DF-31, improving its accuracy and mobility while increasing
the number of warheads it carries from one to three. But even with the improved DF-31, China
remained at a distinct disadvantage with the U.S. when it came to overall strategic nuclear
capability.
While the likelihood that a few DF-31 missiles could be launched and their warheads reach
their targets in the U.S., the DF-31 was not a "nation killing" system. In short, any strategic
nuclear exchange between China and the U.S. would end with America intact and China
annihilated. As such, any escalation of military force by China that could have potentially
ended in an all-out nuclear war was suicidal, in effect nullifying any advantage China had
gained by deploying the DF-100 and DF-17 missiles.
Enter the
DF-41 , China's ultimate shashoujian weapon. A three-stage, road-mobile ICBM
equipped with between six and 10 multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle (MIRV)
warheads, the DF-41 provides China with a nuclear deterrent capable of surviving an American
nuclear first strike and delivering a nation-killing blow to the United States in retaliation.
The DF-41 is a strategic game changer, allowing China to embrace the mutual assured destruction
(MAD) nuclear deterrence posture previously the sole purview of the United States and
Russia.
In doing so, China has gained the strategic advantage over the U.S. when it comes to
competing power projection in the Pacific. Possessing a virtually unstoppable A2/AD capability,
Beijing is well positioned to push back aggressively against U.S. maritime power projection in
the
South China Sea and the
Taiwan Straits .
Most who watched the Chinese military parade on October 1 saw what looked to be some
interesting missiles. For the informed observer, however, they were witnessing the end of an
era. Previously, the United States could count on its strategic nuclear deterrence to serve as
a restraint against any decisive Chinese reaction to aggressive American military maneuvers in
the Pacific. Thanks to the DF-41, this capability no longer exists. Now the U.S. will be
compelled to calculate how much risk it is willing to take when it comes to enforcing its
sacrosanct "freedom of navigation."
While the U.S. commitment to Taiwan's independence remains steadfast, its willingness to go
to war with China over the South China Sea may not be as firm. The bottom line is that China,
with a defense budget of some $250 billion, has successfully combined "Western technology with
Eastern wisdom," for which the U.S. has no response.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofseveral books,
most recently,Deal of the Century: How
Iran Blocked the West's Road to War (2018).
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record holders for 'second
chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives.", Stephen Walt
Actually, many of them should have been considered candidates for war criminals. "Waging the
war of agression" was part of the Nuremberg trials. This was the media called euphemistically
"the war of choice"!
"When it comes to U.S. foreign policy, the unchallenged world record
holders for 'second chances' and 'failing upward' are America's neoconservatives. Beginning in
the mid-1990s, this influential network of hard-line pundits, journalists, think tank analysts,
and government officials developed, purveyed, and promoted an expansive vision of American
power as a positive force in world affairs.
They conceived and sold the idea of invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein and insisted
that this bold move would enable the United States to transform much of the Middle East into a
sea of pro-American democracies.
What has become of the brilliant strategists who led the nation into such a disastrous
debacle? None of their rosy visions have come to pass, and if holding people to account were a
guiding principle inside the foreign policy community, these individuals would now be marginal
figures commanding roughly the same influence that Charles Lindbergh enjoyed after making naive
and somewhat sympathetic statements about Adolf Hitler in the 1930s.",
Walt, S. (2018). The Hell of good intentions: America's foreign policy elite and the decline
of US primacy. Straus and Giroux, p. 190.
You would have thought that these cheerleaders of invasion of Iraq and violation of the UN
charter would have run far, far away so that we never hear from them again--but no, they are
back explaining the world for us and making money doing that.
[ Milanovic was referring to a new column in Project Syndicate that I was confused by
before I noticed this reference to the column. Among the points of Milanovic, we find the
same self-defeating foreign policy being pushed by the same elite opinion-makers who hurt us
so much by taking us to war in Iraq and beyond.
"... Combat crews of S-400, in Astrakhan Region, held combat exercises against hypersonic target-missiles "Favorit PM" and destroyed all targets. The statement of the press-service of Western Military District announced. The crews of S-400 Triumphs were from the units of air-defense of Leningrad Army of Air Force and Air Defense of Western Military District. ..."
The Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke yesterday at the yearly Valdai
Discussion Club meeting in Sochi. A video with English translations and excerpts of the
transcript are here .
With regards to the global system Putin made an interesting historic comparison:
in the 19th century they used to refer to a "Concert of Powers." The time has come to talk in
terms of a global "concert" of development models, interests, cultures and traditions where
the sound of each instrument is crucial, inextricable and valuable, and for the music to be
played harmoniously rather than performed with discordant notes, a cacophony. It is crucial
to consider the opinions and interests of all the participants in international life. Let me
reiterate: truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only
built between independent and sovereign states .
Russia is sincerely committed to this approach and pursues a positive agenda.
The Concert of
Europe was the balance of power system between 1815 to 1848 and from 1871 to 1914:
A first phase of the Concert of Europe, known as the Congress System or the Vienna System
after the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), was dominated by five Great Powers of Europe:
Prussia, Russia, Britain, France and Austria. [...] With the Revolutions of 1848 the Vienna
system collapsed and, although the republican rebellions were checked, an age of nationalism
began and culminated in the unifications of Italy (by Sardinia) and Germany (by Prussia) in
1871. The German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck re-created the Concert of Europe to avoid
future conflicts escalating into new wars. The revitalized concert included France, Britain,
Austria, Russia, and Italy with Germany as the main continental power economically and
militarily.
Bismark's concert kept peace in a usually warring Europe for 43 years. If Putin wants to be
the new Bismarck I am all for it.
Russian president Vladimir Putin has said that Moscow is helping China build a system to warn
of ballistic missile launches.
Since the cold war, only the United States and Russia have had such systems, which involve
an array of ground-based radars and space satellites. The systems allow for early spotting of
intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Speaking at an international affairs conference in Moscow on Thursday, Putin said Russia
had been helping China develop such a system. He added that "this is a very serious thing
that will radically enhance China's defence capability".
His statement signalled a new degree of defence cooperation between the two former
Communist rivals that have developed increasingly close political and military ties while
Beijing and Washington have sunk into a trade war.
That is as good for China as it is for Russia. China has an immediate need for such a system
because the U.S. is taking a significantly more bellicose posture against it.
The U.S. left the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia to build a nuclear
missiles force in South Asia
that will aim at China. It is now looking for Asian countries in which it could station
such weapons. China is
using its economic might to prevent that but the U.S. is likely to succeed.
While China
has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has about 20
times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming first strike to
decapitate and destroy the Chinese state. An early warning system will give China enough time
to detect such an attack and to launch its own nuclear deterrent against the U.S. The warning
systems will thus checkmate the U.S. first strike capability.
Over the last two years Russia and China both unveiled hypersonic weapons. Currently the
U.S. has neither such weapons nor any defensive system that can protect against these.
Russia was smart enough to develop both - the super fast offensive weapon and a defense
against it. Via Andrei Martyanov we learn of a recent Russian press
notice:
Translation: Combat crews of S-400, in Astrakhan Region, held combat exercises against
hypersonic target-missiles "Favorit PM" and destroyed all targets. The statement of the
press-service of Western Military District announced. The crews of S-400 Triumphs were from
the units of air-defense of Leningrad Army of Air Force and Air Defense of Western Military
District.
And what this "Favorit PM" missile-target complex is? Very simple, it is deeply modernized
good ol' S-300 P series which allows to use missiles of types 5V55 which have their
explosives removed and are capable of atmospheric maneuverable flight with the velocities of
Mach=6 (in excess of 7,000 kilometers per hour). These are genuine hyper-sonic
missile-targets and, evidently, and I don't have any reasons to doubt it, S-400 had very
little problems shooting them down.
On top of the missile warning system China will also want to have that most capable air and
missile defense system. Russia will make it a decent offer.
Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov's talked a day earlier than Putin. His speech and the Q &
A with him are here
. The talk was mostly about the Middle East and Lavrov's tone was rather angry while he passed
through a long list of U.S. sins in the region and beyond. There were also some interesting
remarks about Turkey, Syria and the Ukraine. The most interesting passage was his response to a
question about U.S. sanction against Russia to which some senators want to add even more.
Lavrov said:
I have heard that Marco Rubio and Ben Cardin are two famous anti-Russia-minded members of the
US Congress. I don't think that this implies that they have any foresight. Those with a more
or less politically mature opinion of the situation should have realised long ago that the
sanctions don't work in the direction they wanted them to work. I believe that they will
never work. We have a territory and its riches that were bestowed on us by God and our
ancestors, we have a feeling of personal dignity, and we also have the armed forces. This
combination makes us very confident. I hope that economic development and all the investment
that has been made and continues to be made will also pay off in the near future.
The U.S. loves to dish out sanctions left and right and the Trump administration has
increased their use. But sanctions, especially unilateral ones, do not work. The U.S. has not
recognized that because it has never assessed whether those sanctions fulfill their aims. A
recent Government Accountability Office report found :
The Departments of the Treasury (Treasury), State (State), and Commerce (Commerce) each
undertake efforts to assess the impacts of specific sanctions on the targets of those
sanctions. [...] However, agency officials cited several difficulties in assessing sanctions'
effectiveness in meeting broader U.S. policy goals , including challenges in isolating the
effect of sanctions from other factors as well as evolving foreign policy goals. According to
Treasury, State, and Commerce officials, their agencies have not conducted such assessments
on their own.
The U.S. sanctions and sanctions and sanctions but never checked if sanctions work to the
intended purpose. The efforts to sanction Russia have surely led to some unintended
consequences. They are the reason why the alliance between China and Russia deepens every day.
The U.S. has the exorbitant privilege of having its own
currency being used as the international reserve. The sanctioning of U.S. dollar transactions
is the reason why the U.S. is now losing it :
Russia's Rosneft has set the euro as the default currency for all its new export contracts
including for crude oil, oil products, petrochemicals and liquefied petroleum gas, tender
documents showed.
The switch from U.S. dollars, which happened in September according to the tender
documents published on Rosneft's website, is set to reduce the state-controlled firm's
vulnerability to potential fresh U.S. sanctions.
Washington has threatened to impose sanctions on Rosneft over its operations in Venezuela,
a move which Rosneft says would be illegal.
Iran has taken comparable steps. It now sells oil to China and India in either local
currencies. Other countries will surely learn from this and will also start to use other
currencies for their energy purchases. As the transactions in dollars decrease they will also
start to use other currencies for their reserves.
But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China or
Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
Those states who, like Russia, have done their homework will profit from it.
Posted by b on October 4, 2019 at 18:03 UTC |
Permalink
next page " b: [Iran] now sells oil to China and India
Not to India, but India has said that that will change. India has to be deliberate because it
is angling for a permanent seat in the UNSC.
Russia is building a network of missile defense, early warning, electronic weapons systems
that will ring Greater Eurasia, not just the Russian Federation.
Russia may not produce smart phones and have their own Amazon or Alibaba scale e-commerce
platform, but they have the world class defenses and leading edge counter-strike weapons that
overwhelm anything the US has or will have for a decade to come.
Putin and Lavrov have laid out the diplomatic talking points for a safer, saner world.
And as the saying goes, if you don't talk to Lavrov, then you can talk with Shoigu
(MOD).
The Russians have warned the West. Maybe the West is hard of hearing.
But what is clear, the rest of the world has heard it and they are gravitating toward Russia
and China.
It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
A statement that deserves to be unpacked. I think at the core of the "mistakes" is a
certain exceptionalist attitude which carries with it a combination of greed and
hubris that promotes moral turpitude.
When the re-alignment of Russia and China started, I compared them to two soldiers, standing
back-to-back, defensively pointing their guns forward. This is becoming an integrated
continental defense now. Do you think that the two missile warning system will remain
separate? It is sad that it had to come to this, but the AngloZionist mindset of domination
and exploitation is what it is. Russia and China are not benevolent, but a big majority of
countries prefers their economic approach to the Western military - bombed and killed if you
do not comply with master's wishes. Simply, the West is a one-trick-pony in decline,
As the U.S.A.slowly petrifies into an ever more fragile state of existence will the blow that
finally causes it to fracture into a state of catastrophic impotence,( in it's eyes ) mean
that it will die with a whimper or a bang?
Will the politik of the U.S.A.wake up before it's demise and re-orientate it's ethos so as to
integrate with the new order instigated from the east or, like an enraged, immature being try
to bring the rest of the world down with it?
I hope wiser minds than those in the Senate prevail. However I'm not really that optimistic
that they are capable of serious self reflection.
Here is an article that looks at a WikiLeaks document that explains how the United States
Army is preparing to help Washington achieve its national strategic objectives:
This Army manual gives us a very clear view of how Washington uses manipulation through
its influence on the World Bank, IMF, OECD and other "global" groups to wage unconventional
warfare on any nation that doesn't share its view of how the world should function and that
threatens America's control of the globe, including nations like Venezuela, Iran, Russia and
North Korea.
While China has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has
about 20 times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming
first strike to decapitate and destroy the Chinese state.
b, in a nuclear exchange, all it takes is a tiny fraction of the US/China/Russia's nuclear
arsenals to finish off human civilisation, so numbers are irrelevant. Radiation knows no
borders.
Such contributors and Don Bacon, Grieved and Karlof1 might help me (dis)confirm this, but my
impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily defensive
weapons, to pretty much anyone ... with the effect and, say, the intent, to make wars of
aggression, particularly pre-emptive strikes, much less tempting.
By shifting the field advantage towards defense, can it be plausibly proposed that Russia
is working to make the world, overall, a safer place (even if their primary intent might be
to make it safer from attacks initiated by the Unipolar Axis)?
b: The U.S. sanctions and sanctions and sanctions . . .
It even sanctions itself, with tariffs. Free trade is dead!
Don, there's NEVER been free trade, ever, no matter how far back you look in history. Free
trade is imperial speak for the dominant economies dictating to the weaker.
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Oct 4 2019 18:46 utc | 9
my impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily
defensive weapons, to pretty much anyone ...
Isn't this exactly what they're doing. Martynov's writings reveal this proces in detail.
It's a process that has its origins in WWII, a process that also has economic implications
for Russia.
I agree with Barovsky in comment # 8 about the MAD nature of any nuclear war
I also want to posit that until China has its own air and missile defense system that
Russia will use its to insure that any nuclear attack on China will result in global MAD
@ b who wrote
"
But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China or
Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many mistakes.
"
it is not the US necessarily that has the sole financial superpower status but the cult of
global private finance ownership that is international and not just the US. And now that
financial superpower status is not just being challenged from outside the Western nations of
empire but from within as I continue to write about in the latest Open Thread. The US state
of California has instantiated public finance for the state...it was signed into law this
past Wednesday and the Western MSM has yet to report or comment on this game changing
initiative.....speaks volumes to the threat it creates to global private finance because
California has the 5th largest GDP in the world.
I had been leaning toward the scenario where the Empire would, eventually, have to be put
down in a violent confrontation, with a CBG sunk, but I am really feeling now, given the
Singapore deal in the EAEU with India and Iran in the wings and the missile-shield over PRC
and Rosneft selling product in Euros and Syria and Iran and Venezuela not being wiped out,
that maybe, just maybe, the Empire will be left in the dust, with no climactic confrontation
required. Maybe I am being naive, but there seems to be evidence to support that idea.
I wish since a while for an US American Gorbachov. This kind of person only is able to bring
down the still running war economy. You would expect some hero like spiritual leader is
necessary. The only thing what was special about the russian version for that job, he was
young. Able to imagine a world without that permanent pressure, that everybody can feel in
every cell of society. Of course, I hoped that trump maybe will do this, but he is twisted in
his own challenges, already old, no real love for the people around him in general. The
actual task is to lead down US from the sole position of power to become the most important
country in the world. I hope US Americans can fell save one day without spending half of
world's expanses on war, which equals that US budget is more than half for this reason. Who
will be able to explain to voters, this isn't a sound deal?
I'm loathe to posit this but if the US follows the demise of previous empires, then only
war will accomplish this but perhaps, just perhaps the mold (or is that mould?) has been
broken? After all, WWI and WWII came about because of competition between dominant economies
and ultimately a redivision of the world into new blocs. But then again, the emergence of the
USSR changed everything, the most momentous event of the 20th century. So perhaps we need a
new USSR but this time a transnational USSR?
My country is in a sorry state of affairs indeed, and listening to those around me, a common
theme occurs, a wish that that slow-coming line in the sand which will truly mark the end of
our illusion of exceptionalism would just get here and be done, so we, or those of us who are
left afterward, can work through those damnable five stages of grieving, and begin the
process of reconstruction and healing what remains.
Judging by comments made here, I've withdrawn hope of either party having anything to
present the citizenry as a way out of our demise, so coast toward that necessary line we do.
Is that too negative?
Slightly off topic, but is not the Western use of children for nefarious purposes increasing?
From the first Hong King rioter who got shot for attacking a policeman, at all of his 14
years of age, through Epstein's sexual use of young girls for blackmail, to Greta and the
climate change screaming kids. If you are younger than 18, and without or with weak parental
oversight due to challenging economic conditions (struggle to survive), you are a fair game
for the Western "elite". Earn some pocket money by burning down Hong Kong.
This will only increase, because it runs parallel to the tactics of turning adults against
each other to miss to notice the "elite's" hand in all of their pockets. Fight each other
people and send your children into the front lines. That is how they channel anger toward's
"elite's" alternative-model enemies (China) and away from the real perpetrators and the real
issues. This is why the images of Hong Kong riots overlap with the two minute hate from the
movie 1984.
Finally, the Communist elite used children too, to do the dying in revolutions, to report
their own parents the communist authorities and to severely punish ideological opponents. The
use of children is nothing new, but it shows total moral depravity.
@ Sally Snyder 7
Thank you for that! And I thought Special Forces was only interested in assassinations.
As you indicate, it's surprising that they put such self-damaging information in print.
They think they're invincible, so we need more Lavrovs to set them straight.
re Paul Damascene #9, I see mutually assured defense as a highly desirable strategy emerging
from Russia and China. If that new 'mad' is expanded to friendlies in the middle east then a
very large sector of the planets continents can be enclosed in a single defensive frame.
I see this as a mighty good potential to arrest the lunatic tendency to war constantly
being chanted by the five eyes and their vassal toadies.
Certainly the elimination of nuclear weapons entirely should be the global objective.
Failing that, the prevention of ground blasts with the consequent dust and threat of nuclear
winter is desirable in my view. High altitude interception may prevent premature detonation
of attacking warheads but it will most likely lead to highly contaminated hot spots on
ground.
There is an evil in warmongering that is utterly beneath contempt.
I see on AMN, the Syrian News site, an article speaking about a new KFC in terrorist-held
Idlib ...
If this isn't a statement about who is collaborating in these wars I don't know what is !!
It is partially about the globalists wanting to increase the extent of their reach (apart
from all the religious and cultural issues too)
...
...but my impression is that Russia is or could make a case for selling only or primarily
defensive weapons, to pretty much anyone ... with the effect and, say, the intent, to make
wars of aggression, particularly pre-emptive strikes, much less tempting.
By shifting the field advantage towards defense, can it be plausibly proposed that
Russia is working to make the world, overall, a safer place (even if their primary intent
might be to make it safer from attacks initiated by the Unipolar Axis)?
Posted by: Paul Damascene | Oct 4 2019 18:46 utc | 9
Imo that's a perfectly sane assessment. It's just an unfortunate prerequisite, and a sign
of the times, that M.A.D. had to be looming in the background before the wisdom could be
recognised and de-escalation could commence.
@ PD 9 shifting the field advantage towards defense
>Actually all nations are supposed to concentrate on defense. The US changed its War
Dept to Defense Dept. --( to throw us off? ) There are few nations that have an overwhelming
offensive capability. Its expensive and requires a lot of people, including mostly
draftees.
> The F-35 jet fighter now goes for about $150 million per copy, in large part because it
is stealthy and can get through enemy defenses. At least that's the plan. But after eighteen
years (and counting) of development, the F-35 still has not been approved for full
production. That's an offensive weapon.
> Another expensive piece of gear is the aircraft carrier, now going for $13 billion per
copy, and several of the newfangled complex features on the new carrier design don't work.
High maintenance, too. Of eleven carriers only two are deplorable currently, none on the east
coast. Carriers have been mostly used to facilitate bombing runs over defenseless third-world
countries. They need a cheap defense.
> Regarding soldiers, few countries have a draft, or a large draft, any longer. No more
major land armies, required for offense. People are expensive, and 70% of US youth don't
qualify for service.
> The US Marine Corps is now going through a change with a new commandant. The main US
enemy now is China, and there's no thought of any war on China itself, only on allied islands
they might grab. So the Marines want to back out of their land warfare stance and concentrate
on Iwo-Jima type operations like the good old days. New USMC Commandant Berger: "We are too
heavy, too cumbersome. We're built for another Desert Storm. We have to go on a diet. .
.we're not going to go head-to-head, tank-on-tank," he said
> The recent Houthi attack on Saudi Arabia was a wake-up call. Drones and missiles,
inexpensive unstoppable and effective.
> So there's a lot of work to do, but yes one can say there is a trend from offense to
defense, and little by little the world might be safer against offensive actions.
I see mutually assured defense as a highly desirable strategy emerging from Russia and
China. If that new 'mad' is expanded to friendlies in the middle east then a very large
sector of the planets continents can be enclosed in a single defensive frame.
Excellent observation Uncle! It's the Empire (and its vassals) versus the planet.
There will never be an American Gorbachev because the American system is completely
different from the Soviet system.
In the USSR, the Communist Party was everything and commanded all the sociometabolical
aspects of society through a centralized State. When the Gorbachev killed the Party, he
killed the USSR. That's why it simply collapsed overnight and in a relatively peaceful
way.
The USA is a pure-blood capitalist society. It functions through a confederation of
capitalists, who command and owns different parts of the means of production. The State,
albeit powerful, is just one instutition among many others in this free market anarchy. The
USA, therefore, is a relatively decentralized society (for its size, it is incredibly
decentralized). In this sense, the USA is more akin to the old Roman Empire than any other
recent liberal or late-feudal empire.
My guess is the USA will degenerate slowly and very violently and chaotically, with a
succession of weak POTUS over a course of at least many decades. It can or cannot lose
territory in this process (I don't think it ever will, unless you're talking about Puerto
Rico and other possessions in the Southwestern Pacific). It almost certainly will provoke
many more wars against foreign nations in the process. It will be a very dangerous period of
Humanity's History, if not mark its end (if a total nuclear war happens).
--//--
I don't think Putin wants to be "the next Bismarck". Bismarck's new Concert was a failure:
it didn't relieve pressure between the imperialist powers in Europe and only gathered
pressure overtime in order to create an even bigger meatgrinder (WWI), which generated an
even bigger revolution (1917). By all intents and purposes, Bismarck's foreign polices were
an abject failure. His domestic record, on the other side, is stellar, since he turned
Germany into a world superpower which, by 1900, had already surpassed the UK in industrial
terms to reach second place overall (behind only the much bigger USA).
..."But the U.S. is not losing its financial or sole superpower status because of what China
or Russia or Iran have done or do. It is losing it because its has made too many
mistakes."...
The cadaver that is the USA, a ruptured spleen of financial criminality, is in it's end
stage of sucking the life of the world, it's host. Russia, China, and like minded sovereign
states are backstopping the US buck into oblivion with their gold purchases. Gold continues
to show the absurdities of the financial status of the US dollar. Gold is inoculating these
states that are being sanctioned and financially harassed. The USA, is a drunken bum in the
gutter looking for his next drink. Time is running short as the world economies are now
contracting into a spiral down the toilet drain taking the great financial criminal with
it.
If any politicians on the global chessboard can rival the statesmanship and intellect in
strategy, it sure is Putin.
Before him maybe de Gaulle, Helmut Schmidt or Churchill. But now? No where in the western
states.
To the growing ties with China and Russia: Irony is, Putin warned the western world, that
if his and Russia's preference of joining the western states would be denied, Russia would be
forced into China's arms, even though they are culturally and religiously much more tied to
Europe and the western world.
US and NATO policy brought the Russians to see the former "yellow menace" as their only
hope; Equally China was forced into the arms of its Russian neighbor, despite the Chinese
tradition of seeing the Russians equally as a not much loved neighbor.
So the "social Imperialists" and "Barbarians" of Russia and the "Yellow Menace" were forced
to overcome their old prejudices.
De Gaulle once said: "One day the Russians will realize again that they are white."
Meaning, when the Soviet system would come crashing down, the Russians would realize, that
they and their culture are European, and not Asian.
When this prophecy actually came true, and Yeltsin and Putin tried to rebuild the bridges
back to their cultural fellow European states, the Neocons destroyed that historic chance of
healing decades and century old wounds.
Putin and Russia actually tried for over a decade to avert this. Only most recently the
fight in the Russian bureaucracy is leading into going into the partnership with China more
broadly. It still is a partnership not of love or true desire, but of simple survival. And
that won't likely ever change.
I am currently reading a great book of the legendary German-French journalists and author
Peter Scholl-Latour about the new cold war against Russia. he published it IIRC over 12 years
ago, with research since the 90s for it, and including previous reports from his visits in
Russia since 1958.
He saw what he discusses here 20 years ago. And the strategic consequences of this idiotic
rejection of Russia's wish to come back into the fold of European nations by the US will
haunt us for generations to come, if it is not fixed.
Only way to that would be if we would have politicians in the EU and Europeans states like
Putin; more concrete: With the backbone, strategic insight, and a strong stand on national
sovereignty.
But with the current politicians in the EU and its states? Certainly no one on the left,
as "sovereignty" is now seen as "Nazi", and left politicians at least here in Germany being
"educated" by NATO think tanks, supporting military "interventions". The only ones who
realize how important sovereignty is for any country, are the new right like Salvini, Le Pen,
and the Nigel Farage. Which maybe a big part of why they are so hysterically attacked by the
MSM and establishment.
But sovereignty is important for the left too, and historically e.g. the older generations
social democrats here knew that. People like Helmut Schmidt realized that no people can be
free, and exercise its self-determination as a nation, without true sovereignty.
But the time of politicians of this class and caliber in the west is long gone. Maybe
another reason, why our politicians hate Putin so much. ;)
It should be obvious to anyone that we're going to see some kind of a joint Sino-Russian
military organization like NORAD. I was wondering about this after Russia sold their S-400 to
China. However, I'm not sure if the Chinese, or Russia, would be open to a Warsaw Pact
version 2. IMO, the inevitable collapse would be like the Soviet Union as WMDs will prevent a
war fought directly between the larger powers. In the meantime, expect more proxy wars fought
globally.
Kiza | Oct 4 2019 19:49 utc | 20:
It's always been like this as that is the most impressionable stage of one's life. I don't
know if this is an increase or not, but I see these useful idiots as activation of sleeper
cells cultivated in educational institutions.
The "Concert of Powers" was marked by numerous wars. Great power conflict in Europe was
avoided in favor of colonial wars. England against Indians, Africans and Asians, but Russia
against Turks too. So much for "truly mutually respectful..." relations. Putin speaks
gibberish. Today, "sovereign" means claiming the right to wage war at will. This is not a
premise for solid relationships, but shifting alliances against the current enemy.
It is incidentally highly unlikely that a basket of currencies could possibly substitute
for a single reserve. If people couldn't make bimetallism work, making bi-, tri-, poly-fiat
currency work isn't happening either. The fluctuations in relative value will destabilize the
financial systems of smaller powers.
Don
I don't see possibility of India getting a UNSC permanent seat any time coming soon, it's a
permanent wishful thinking on India's part. India will need to resolve her problems with
Kashmir and Pakistan before even she be considered. Indian realist analyst know this well. As
matter of fact I don't see any hope that anytime soon we can see a structural change in UN.
It's more possible UN be dissolved like the League was before it be reformed. US and India
only can be short term tactical allies against China, and not even strategic allies since
they both have different postures toward the subcontinent's, Indian Ocean states.
Exactly, which is why I am both confused and frustrated by people taking a side in the
Ukraine-gate farce. Does it matter which flavor of evil is currently provably less corrupt?
They all have almost the same goals: peanuts and platitudes to placate the peasants at home
and Full Spectrum Imperial Dominance abroad. I get trying to figure out the Gordian Knot, but
the Make Believe of Good Cop/Bad Cop is annoying.
- Wars like WW 1 & WW 2 are not going to happen anymore because such wars have simply too
expensive. But instead we'll see a series of smaller wars or proxy wars.
I should think that one reason for the failure of the Second Concert of Europe was that
Britain was determined to eliminate Germany as an economic and political rival and as an
example of what centralised government economic and social planning could do to improve
people's lives and the conditions in which they lived and worked. The reforms that Bismarck
brought to Germany, if only to keep 1848-style revolutions at bay, challenged the prevailing
laissez-faire economic policies (precursor to neoliberalism in our day) in Britain that
favoured the landowning and military elites.
The period 1871 - 1914 was one in which British aristocracy "revitalised" itself (for want
of a better term) by taking brides from American families that made their wealth from
investing in railway development across the US and in new American industries. (Perhaps
"vampirising" American money is the better term.) The classic examples of such marriages are
those of Consuelo Vanderbilt, of the wealthy Vanderbilt family, marrying into the
Spencer-Churchill family; and of Winston Churchill's mother marrying his father. Acquiring
American wealth in this way was one way in which British elites could maintain enough power
to keep a grip on British politics and British colonial politics.
The same period was also one in which European powers competed to chop up Africa and Asia
into colonies or "spheres of influence". So in a sense, the Europeans were already at war
with each other (and the Second Concert was a facade, just as the Cold War of the late 20th
century was a facade): they conducted this war away from their own publics, in areas distant
and remote enough, that most incidents of mass violence or outright land theft could be
covered up. The major exception was Belgian King Leopold's treatment of the area that is now
the Democratic Republic of Congo / Congo (Kinshasa) as he ruled it in the manner of a
mediaeval feudal lord and the atrocities committed there by his government were on a scale
too huge to ignore.
@Paul Damascene #9
Not strictly true.
Two nations, one with sword and shield but the other with only a shield. The first nation can
attack with little fear of reprisal.
Russia is still not going to sell defensive weapons to anyone unless there is a clear overall
strategic benefit.
Ironic that the Great War had to wait until 1914, when Britain's Liberal government was
adopting many of Bismarck's social welfare measures.
I suspect that America's increasing hostility to China reflects a fear of contagion from
the more successful and fairer Chinese system. Just like Britain and Germany in 1914.
Two are listed as being good for target velocity up to 6,415 mph which is well into
hypersonic range.
Another two, target velocities up to 11,185mph - mach 14.7 according mph to mach
converter.
Helmut Schmidt's books on China are impressive, but it's striking that in the first one,
"Nachbar China," of 2006, he totally failed to anticipate the economic collapse of 2008.
Actually, that's not true. When the UK went to war in 1914, they discovered that their
soldiers were so undernourished and unfit to fight for the Empire, that a series of 'social
reforms' were enacted to improve the lot of the working class (or cannon fodder).
"While China has capable weapons and can defend itself against a smaller attack the U.S. has
about 20 times more nuclear warheads than China. It could use those in an overwhelming first
strike to decapitate and destroy the Chinese state."
B, I read your analysis of the China weapons parade and came away with the impression that
US air & sea superiority was over. I thought China already had the S-400 too. I had no
idea that the US was in possession of more nukes than China. I hope that China gets that
system set up quickly, as well as the S-400.
The US is a psychopathic control freak, whose mask has slipped, yet the only one who
doesn't know that is Washington, but when it realizes it, that's when it will become far more
dangerous and may think that their time for a US first nuke strike is running out. Let's hope
they are not that stupid.
Anybody that believes China have only 290 nukes are naive.
Look at all those DF-41 and JL-2/3 missiles they've made. Some of those missiles have MIRV
capability.
What point does lying that way about a deterrence weapon serve? China only has nukes to
deter America from attacking them. The nukes are not intended to ever actually be used, so
why would they lie and pretend to have less than they really have? That makes no sense. If
anything they would lie and pretend to have more than they really do to enhance their
deterrence.
Secret weapons do not make an effective deterrence.
On the other hand, like Japan China probably has big stockpiles of fissile materials
sufficiently enriched that they could make many hundreds of additional nukes in a matter of a
couple weeks, or maybe even just days, if they needed to.
Just to clarify, a 100kg solid chunk of iron traveling at hypersonic speeds and with
decent accuracy would ruin the day for an American aircraft carrier. No nuke is needed.
Furthermore, if China has only 290 nukes, but 5,000 launch vehicles, which ones out of
that 5,000 are armed and have to be destroyed if America does a first strike and wants to
avoid several dozen of its biggest cities being turned into glowing craters in response?
Hint: All 5,000.
So you see, China doesn't really need much more than 290 nukes to prevent America from
attacking, assuming Americans are not stupid. Unfortunately that could very well be a losing
bet.
Washington is not a nation. It is only a city. If the rest of the world wants an honest
glimpse of what this city intends, all it has to do is look at what it has done, and is still
doing, to America's population. Take an honest look, disregarding all testimony. When you
completely disregard the narrative of dc and the media, the picture becomes quite stark quite
quickly.
The reason for the constitutional crisis in Britain in 1910, which resulted in the House of
Lords losing most of its power, was that the Lords refused to approve Lloyd George's People's
Budget, which, according to Wikipedia, "introduced unprecedented taxes on the lands and
incomes of Britain's wealthy to fund new social welfare programs." The upshot of the crisis
was that the budget became law.
. . . picked this up on the web:
In his seminal work On War, Carl von Clausewitz famously declared that, in comparison to the
offense, "the defensive form of warfare is intrinsically stronger than the offensive."
The defender being in his homeland contributes to defensive strength. It's certainly
contributed to US offensive failures in the last fifty years. It took the mighty US Army four
years and over a thousand deaths to pacify Baghdad. So what to do, the US has reverted to
high-level aerial bombing and long-range artillery to kill foreigners. This increases US
opposition, creating more enemies. No shortage of them.
Gotta give you a big Shout-Out for providing that ultra important fact as that marked the
beginning of the reaction to Classical Economists in the UK which was already happening
within the Outlaw US Empire, thus the seed of UK's Neoliberalism was planted and watered. It
also brought the UK and US elite together mind-set-wise.
Josh @51--
Your observation is 100% on the mark! The utterly gross neglect of the USA's human
capital's been ongoing for decades, and was given a great boost by the adoption of
Neoliberalism as basic policy during Carter's presidency, which was subsequently turbocharged
by Reagan/Bush. Profit before people had always been present; but after the "Saving the
bond-holders" deliberately deep recession caused by Volker from 1979-1982, there would be no
more policies aimed at improving social welfare. Instead, they were targeted for destruction
as the Full Employment Act of 1946 was 100% ignored by both Rs & Ds as jobs went offshore
and the Rust Belt oxidized.
--//--
Today, the hollowed-out Outlaw US Empire is a mere Paper Tiger reduced to using terrorists
and terrorism as its policy tools. Slowly, the nations of the world are enacting a de facto
form of containment that will eventually result in the diminishment of The Empire's abilities
and force it to become a normal nation for the first time in its history--hopefully without a
nuclear conflagration.
Putin is a voice of reason in a very sick and twisted world, one that is dominated by an evil
empire whose only purpose seems to be global corporate hegemony.
@2 Red Ryder - Russia is building a network of missile defense, early warning, electronic
weapons systems that will ring Greater Eurasia, not just the Russian Federation.
Always good to see your sweeping strategic view from the commanding heights. I quoted your
opening sentence because it makes such total sense, and also sounds so good. Mackinder has no
need to turn in his grave - the heartland has upended the world to save him the trouble
;)
There will be the invulnerable Eurasia, and the outside.
~~
I'm enjoying all the comments jumping onto the notion of Mutual Assured Defense. It seems
a concept that many here can readily relate to - and sign me up for sure. Thanks to Paul
Damascene for the concept, and uncle tungsten for coining the phrase.
Sharmine Narwani in her recent interview with Ross Ashcroft cited a Twitter comment
somebody made, to the effect that the S-400 was Russia's foreign policy. She was struck by
how perfectly this actually works as a policy. In a world where everybody has an S-400, no
war. Mutually assured defense.
I have long theorized, without a grain of collateral to prove it, that there is only one
security strategy for Russia. If I had a border as extensive as Russia's, I would see that
the only security possible for me would rest in an entire world at peace.
Therefore Russia works towards peace. It's how she conquers the world. As we saw in
Chechnya and in Syria, Russia builds and not destroys. Syria in particular over a long period
showed us precisely how Russia fights - not to "win", not to destroy an enemy, but purely to
lock down the peace and make everything safe. Only those restless souls who would not become
still were killed.
China too shares this same understanding of the Tao - not surprisingly of course. The game
is not to crush the opponent but to render the fight unnecessary. If China conquers the world
it will mean the Mandate Of Heaven has come to rule everywhere. The fight will become
unnecessary.
~~
Federico Pieraccini in his latest
article had this to say about China's strategy:
Beijing's strategy seems to be designed to progress in phases, modulating according to the
reaction of the US, whether aggressive or mild; a kind of capoeira dance where one never
actually hits one's opponent even when one can.
I had to look it up, Brazil's amazing contribution to world peace, the capoeira. I had
never heard of it and now I will never forget it. A brilliant comment from Pieraccini.
Peace is coming to the world faster than war is being left room to break out. And this is
because peacemaking is as dynamic an activity as warmaking . But by its very
nature of not breaking things, it is far less visible.
. . .from Putin
Truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations can only built between
independent and sovereign states.
. . .from the UN Charter
The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members.
Putin is pointing backwards not forwards when you think it through.
No "souvereign" state can be independent in the age of global supply chains and markets,
refugees and global warming. The world is interdependent and always has been since the
evolution of the human species in Africa.
"Souvereignty" and statehood has always been achieved (and lost) by military power. It is
a recipe for war.
This is for the theory. Now for the practice. Of course, Russia has been intervening in
the affairs of other "souvereign" states. Of course Iran has been striving for dominance in
the Middle East. And of course Eastern European states feel squeezed between Russia, the US
and Germany. And of course China pressures Vietnam for the resources of the South China
Sea.
Putin is talking about being polite.
Europe will have neither economic nor political or military power dealing with Russia, the
US or China as individual "sovereign" states. And this is what this populist dance is
about.
The US has not lost influence because of the sanctions, they have lost influence because
they have no longer the technological edge and "souvereign states" have the alternative of
allying with Russia and China. That is a binary choice, not souvereinty.
ciue @ 41:
An intelligent observation, thanks. Though I find myself wondering if the world in which
everyone has a shield, and only one, a sword, is not, perhaps, a world quite changed.
In reading Don Bacon @ 58 and Grieved @ 57, something slid into place for me. As a child
of the Enlightenment, pained as I have been--for all its failings--to see it slip under the
waves, it has been especially painful to see the West despoiling its legacies of democracy
and universal human rights. Nothing has done these more damage than our corrupt, cynical
exploitation of them. When I look to the emergent multipolar model with not inconsiderable
relief, I see it as one in which democracy will not necessarily be a central value or form of
polity.
But if this multipolar principle of the sovereign equality among all of its members is
considered from a certain vantage point, the principle's equivalent in a democratic system of
individuals would be an acceptance of its various citizens as of fundamentally equal worth
regardless of their ideologies or beliefs.
Perhaps if that feature of our own systems were not so close to being lost, a glimpse of
this quality of an international comity wouldn't come to me now as a revelation.
I guess it is a Rorschach test. I don't see how anything in Syria has been resolved
peacefully, I just don't. I am not blaming Russia for it. Putin virtually waited until it
became clear that the US (Obama) would not intervene.
Russians had the worst WWI and WWII experience, plus Chechnya and Afghanistan. No Russian
leader would be able to motivate them for anything else but defense. It took the Moscow
apartment bombings to motivate them for the Chechen war.
weaponized economics USA says it has ability to affect the economic environment, says it can
influence international financial institutions .. says it can use such abilities and
influence to cement multinational coalitions for unconventional warfare campaigns or dissuade
adversary nation-state governments from supporting competitors"
financial blackmail .[nations either join/suffer], the stores of value can be exploited..
the economic space is a war zone the tax, interest rates, legal and bureaucratic measures
used locally, by target states, can be [manipulated] to persuade adversaries, allies, and
surrogates to modify their behavior.. Entire agencies specialize in identifying.
opportunities where financial weapon(s) can be used to provide leverage [to achieve goals]?
Thank you Sally Snyder @ 7 for that link and great explanation. I want to add that I see
evidence the USA uses that same strategy domestically against the leaders of its states, its
cities, its counties, its political parties and privately against the leaders and activist
the world over. Americans rarely have the opportunity you afforded @7 to understand why
things are happening in the USA the way they are.
new subject:
The Great War had to wait until 1914, when Britain's Liberal government was adopting many of
Bismarck's social welfare measures.to Lysias @ 43 <==I certainly do agree with your
reason.. Consider the following
The great war was on hold since 1897, waiting on the British and French bankers to
create a means to finance the war. That financing required the warriors in Europe to
invade and overthrow the US Constitutional prohibition (Article I, Section 9, paragraph 4)
which prohibited Capitation or other direct taxes, not based in proportion to the population.
Amendment 16 ratifed on February 3, 1913 reads, the Congress shall have power to lay and
collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the
several states, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
Within minutes after the US. Supreme court took up taking non proportional taxes from the
pockets of working Americans the privately owned Federal reserve bank was created, and made
by congress the central bank of the world (1913). So to recap, British adoption of Bismarck's
measures had little to do with the war in Europe, instead it was the the money to be taken by
taxation from the pockets of every American that satisfied the bankers requirement of
suitable and ample capital (Federal Reserve Act of 1913); USA taxes on Americans would
collateral the FR lending, and the USA would guarantee the taxes would be collected and
rendered as required. Once constitutional intent was thwarted, the federal Reserve could lend
to the global warriors who wanted to destroy Germany and take the oil rich land (entire
Middle East) from the Ottoman. It took two world wars and trillions of tax dollars, not to
mention millions of lives, for the pubic nations states to enable the private theft of the
oil rich Middle East lands owned by the Ottomans.
additionally .. Barovsky responded also to lysias @ 43 with "Actually, that's not true.
When the UK went to war in 1914, they discovered that their soldiers were so undernourished
and unfit to fight for the Empire, that a series of 'social reforms' were enacted to improve
the lot of the working class (or cannon fodder).by: Barovsky @ 46
@ somebody 61 I don't see how anything in Syria has been resolved peacefully, I just don't.
Russia's strategy of giving foes a choice of fighting or being bused elsewhere, a choice they
took, was a truly unique peaceful resolution. Never been done before, to my knowledge.
Revolutionary. Wonderful. Peaceful. I liked it.
If I may: A big part of national strategy is to have the populace focusing on "foreign
threats" which takes citizens' minds of their domestic problems. Part of "sovereign equality"
is (at the national level) to mind our own business, not somebody else's.
George Washington dedicates a large part of his farewell address to discussing foreign
relations and the dangers of permanent alliances between the United States and foreign
nations, which he views as foreign entanglements.
Later, we have "War is the Health of the State"
by Randolph Bourne (1918) . . here
". . .The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions.
What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through
since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the
sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men. With the shock of war,
however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people,
without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling,
the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other
Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. . ."
I think we are seeing more like russia/china using a strategy similar to Muhammad Ali's rope
a dope against the u.s. They are both spending their money wisely on building effective
military forces, both defensive and offensive, but they are not wasting their treasure on
imperialist adventures. At the same time, everywhere U.S. has tried to corner a market or
extend itself, they have been getting cut off at the knees by either Russia or China. Russia
put a monkey wrench in U.S. goals in Ukraine, Syria and Venezuela. U.S. went after Iran and
China stepped in with a huge oil purchase and development project. Now I'm reading that
Russia is getting ready to assist Cuba in a major way.
Was it napoleon who said, "when you see your enemy making mistakes, let him"? (paraphrase)
I think they are going to continue trying to avoid a fight while they wait for the U.S. to
either come to its senses, collapse or come to blows, but they won't be the instigator.
U.S. is capitalist and this kind of society is more likely to destruct through a financial
collapse or a civil war than declaring war on either China or Russia. Not that war with China
or Russia can be ruled out, but if it occurred I think it would probably start as a result of
U.S. accidental blowing something up with one of our smart missiles....
This (entertaining) article was written by some street fellow in ukraine around the time
Yanukovich was ousted, but the similarities between Ukraine and US shares a common
perspective of a lot of USA common folk. In usa,you don't ever get to own much (its all
leased or financed) and even if you do, its not hard for them to find a way to liberate it
from you.
I recall US journalist George Seldes remarking his observations as he met the UK
conscripts coming to the WW1 front. His on-the-scene notes of malnourishment and inability to
handle repetitive lifting of ammunition to feed mortars/small cannon, relative to German
conscripts, were telling. Explains the postwar emphasis on sports and diet just to prep for
the next war. Lessons perhaps also applied to American emphasis on spoprts may just be the
overt signs of underlying gov covert funding/subsidies and legislation enabling "league"
monopolies.
Why the understatement? It's the same reason why militaries don't showcase their latest
greatest hardware to the public. Secrecy provides maneuvering room and is only revealed when
appropriate. It's also about managing fear and public opinion in hopes of exerting some
influence over your adversary.
AFAIK, China have not officially stated their holdings. The 290 figure is really an
estimate given by various NGOs.
Time is on the side of the new eastern powers, that is, with each passing month the US
military (& economic) superiority shrinks.
I think that is why China has been able to exercise such restraint with HK, they can put up
with the tantrums till 2047.
The big danger is if those who own the USA try to use their advantage before they lose
it.
They already assume
that an apocalypse is inevitable;
When the elite retreat to bunkers and private islands in Hawaii, New Zealand, Tasmania or
Patagonia
, their main concern is how to keep the deplorable's grubby hands off their stuff when the
shit finally hits the fan.
...re China's invention of gun powder. IIRC Marco Polo brought it back to Europe in 1400s at
a time when China had already advanced it to hand-held-cannon status.
Note well that Europe itself was already in an advanced state of acquisitive madness, as
much as could be enabled by formations of swords and horses occasionally being an
overwhelming weapon .
With gunpowder, force-of-arms were now an overwhelming weapon in far more areas of the
continent.
Then, and only then, could a Columbus et al have set out on voyages of discovery with
confident ability to claim any "new" lands for some king who would fund the mission.
I submit, there is no way a Columbus could set-sail unless he had on-board such
overwhelming weapons.
Else, landing anywhere without such would only permit some sly smiling and trading and
scouting. Any overtly aggressive landing party would be slaughtered by the sheer numbers of
home-team locals.
Re "power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", gunpowder was the 1st
overwhelming weapon that enabled conquest.
The 2nd overwhelming weapon was the atom-bomb. But IMO, some heroic figures understood
the ramifications its overwhelming-nature; thus they felt motivated to force its sharing, bec
a monopoly guaranteed its use to permit limitless conquering.
Then at that point, science was funded by .govs to invent the next overwhelming weapon
and use it before any delicious target could duplicate it. We are here.
Lavrov: "Those with a more or less politically mature opinion of the situation should have
realised long ago that the sanctions don't work in the direction they wanted them to
work."
Oswald Spengler is good here. What he called Western 'money-thinking' is moving at the moment
in contrary, self-extinguishing, directions. Full spectrum dominance, bankrolled by reserve
currency status, seeks the whole enchilada and potentially once had the wherewithal to
achieve it --if not for the punitive subtractions necessitated by sanctions regimes.
Compounding matters, the exiled nations, having escaped the comforts of the lab, develop
fearsome powers of self-reliance (what North Korea proudly calls juche). Banded together,
these hardened exiles will some day go on to decimate the King's Army:
"Spengler, more poet than historian, offers the penetrating eye of the stranger. His
prescience for the Russian destiny is paraphrased by Kerry Bolton here:
The Russian soul is not the same as the Western Faustian, as Spengler called it, the
'Magian' of the Arabian civilization, or the Classical of the Hellenes and Romans. The
Western Culture that was imposed on Russia by Peter the Great, what Spengler called
Petrinism, is a veneer The Russian soul expresses its own type of infinity, albeit not that
of the Westerner's Faustian soul, which becomes enslaved by its own technics at the end of
its life-cycle."
Many of those 'technics' fall under what Spengler called "money-thinking". At the
twilight of its life-cycle the West threatens to withhold its toxicity from all those who
don't 'play fair', plying its financial sanctions like an overused tool-set: fractional
reserve banking, impudent debt-money that arrives ex nihilo seeking its keep from
God-knows-where, leverage that belabors ever-narrowing denominators of intrinsic
value."
The Western debt pyramid can ill-afford meting out the punishment of exile. On the
contrary it needs everything on Earth plus the minerals of passing meteors and Martian water.
However its petulance and hubris can't resist banishing nations that displease it. When its
petulance exceeds its own diminishing critical mass, the seesaw tips against it.
Re ""power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely", gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming
weapon that enabled conquest."
The history of empires is as long as the history of agriculture and herding, nearly ending
with the advent of nuclear weapons and MAD.
Only one country left trying that needs some sense knocking into it.
I don't think the bussing to Idlib was Russian strategy. The Syrian civil proxy war was a
lot about demographics, Hezbollah tried to save Shiites from mixed areas, dito the Syrian
state with their supporters. It was a local solution that was necessary as Jihadi fighters
come with huge families. Turkey might have had a part as their interest was to have the
Jihadis at the border to fight against the Kurdish groups. You may have noticed that the
Syrian government with support of Russia now attacks the Jihadi fighters in Idlib.
Russia's strategy was to force Turkey on its side without alienating Iran or Syrians. Iran
at one stage seemed ready to support a religious power share the type of Lebanon. The Russian
intervention stopped that idea.
Russia saved the Syrian state and the Syrian state insisted on being secular and getting
rid of all internal ennemies. That is a kind of peace but the peace of the graveyard.
Actually it is quite funny that Putin has started to go back to the 19th century, to
"development models, interests, cultures and traditions " and the "concert of power".
After the Congress of Vienna there was the Russio-Persian war, the Russio-Turkish war, the
battle of Warsaw against Poland, the Crimean war against the Ottoman empire, Britain and
France, advancement in Central Asia and one of the tsars banned Ukrainian language in print.
Never mind the tsars successfully fighting the rebellions of the Russian middle classes.
Though in 1861 Russian serfs were finally freed as they were needed in newly developing
industries. The century ended in 1900 with the Russification of Finland, making Russian the
official language.
@ Peter AU 1 who wrote about the history of empires
"
Only one country left trying that needs some sense knocking into it.
"
That is occurring as we write our textual white noise about the details but the approach is
not a Western knocking some sense into it but an Eastern Art of War approach.
It came to me today that instead of WWIII we need to think of what the world is going
through as a Civilization war or evolution, assuming we make it out the other side of the
conflict. The current empire is trying everything in its quiver of arrows short of MAD to
retain control over the form of social organization with private finance at its core.
But the social organization of the East does not think like that and wants to spread the
wealth and ownership broadly. The East has been taken advantage of and maligned by the West
for centuries and they are not going to continue to let that happen. So they have organized
themselves to beat the West at its own game but are doing so according to the Art of War meme
instead of trying to knock some sense into the West. Since the East is good at playing the
long game in relation to the West they are incrementally wearing down and constraining the
West until it collapses of its inability to bully and Might-Makes-Right itself forward.
As we are watching the end game of those efforts, IMO. I don't see the West holding its
control on empire for much longer because the East is giving example of a better and more
equitable way that will be and is winning over country after country that have been client
states of empire held in place by the jackboot of global private finance.
We are witnessing a Civilization war of our species and it is quite the spectacle, eh?
Another example of the ever sanctioning superpower is losing its status. "Whistleblower
accuses largest US military shipbuilder of putting 'American lives at risk' by falsifying
tests on submarine stealth coating" Another day, another example of failure of the MIC to
deliver.
Huntington Ingalls Industries, which spun-off from Northrop Grumman in 2011, "knowingly
and/or recklessly" filed falsified records with the Navy claiming it had correctly applied a
coating, called a Special Hull Treatment, to Virginia-class attack submarines which would
allow the vessels to elude enemy sonar, the Sept. 26 complaint alleges.
Instead, the complaint said, Huntington Ingalls' Newport News Shipbuilding facility in
Virginia took shortcuts that allegedly "plagued" the class of submarines with problems, and
then retaliated against the employee who spoke up about the issues. At this rate most of the
US navy will be tied up at their home port waiting for repairs.
According to the complaint, Lawrence, a senior engineer at Huntington Ingalls who has
worked there since 2001, has provided evidence of the alleged issues at the company's Newport
News Shipbuilding facility in Virginia. Stay safe Lawrence.
My thoughts also. And we do live in very interesting times for sure.
When I say knocking some sense into, that includes something along the lines of a soviet
style collapse which is the preferable option.
~By The Western debt pyramid can ill-afford meting out the punishment of exile.~
71 FSD
Yeah, it is curious. You would think, with an understanding of its own system - infinite
growth backed by debt - that empire would wisely choose to employ its tentacles, not deny
them. Especially with most states outside of North Korea being open for business in some
shape or form. At this rate the US Treasury will need to authorize the advance sale of
mortgages to the burgeoning colonies on the moon.
To navigate to the summit for the best part of a century. And to squander those gains
within the space of half a young lifetime.
Putin's concept of strong defense is sound. You don't attack if the other side can defend
itself. You negotiate. In Thailand, we rarely see street fights (except between drunk
foreigners).
Why? The national sport is lethal Muay Thai (kick boxing), so you never start a fight, since
the other side can fight, too. You talk it over, negotiate.
Lot of nonsense in this thread. From "gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming weapon that
enabled conquest." When it is trivially simple to argue that the trained, uniformed and
properly regimented Roman Army which came 1500 years earlier was both a better example and
likely not the first.
Equally facile is the claim that "It's the quest for power that corrupts" Whilst its
probably true that some have been corrupted reaching for power it is equally true that many
who for various reasons were not corrupted in the quest, either because they acquired it
through serendipity by way of hereditary or accident, came into power as naive or
ideologically principled upstarts yet as with every leader, they were corrupted by power as
they were convinced no one else could do it (be the bossfella) as well as they.
Emperor Claudius comes to mind as an earlyish big time boss destroyed by power, but callow
youths thrust into power as clan leader when dad and/or older bros were killed in battle and
went on to become bigger arseholes than Dad, are examples which go back to when us mob first
walked upright.
Barovsky
I quoted a sentence by chu teh and was replying to the piece about gunpowder.
As for the power corrupts part, take a look at the US prior to the fall of the Soviet
Union and then what it has become during the time it held virtually absolute power..
Yesterday night The Godfather was broadcasted in a foreign private channel....
I saw a comrade telling about that and arguing that this movie contains the world...and it
is that indeed it encompasses the history of the USA...
"I have "worked" all my life for the welfare of my family, and I have always refused to be
a puppet moved by the threads of the powerful. With you I had other projects Michael. I
thought that one day you could move those threads. Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone, or
more".
Even in the meeting of all the mafia families in New York for to reach a "pact of no
agression" someone states:
As for the power corrupts part, take a look at the US prior to the fall of the Soviet
Union and then what it has become during the time it held virtually absolute power
In the decades since the 1972 Watergate scandal, more charges of corruption have been
leveled against members of presidential administrations than in the preceding two
centuries. Perhaps the most lasting achievement of Ronald Reagan's presidency was the
astonishingly successful campaign to delegitimate government itself, at least in the eyes
of many citizens, and to enshrine individual economic self-interest, manifested in
unregulated "private enterprise," as the paramount value of American life. That
transformation, like the rise of so-called rational choice and utility maximization as the
governing paradigms in the social sciences, has encouraged citizens to seek wealth -- and
to avoid paying taxes or participating in civil society -- as the only sensible strategy.
As a result, the homely virtues of self-discipline, moderation, and reciprocity preached by
Enlightenment thinkers such as Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Abigail Adams now strike
many Americans as outmoded advice for suckers. If "greed is good," as the Wall Street
character Gordon Gekko asserted, then Donald J. Trump's career of swindling, debt dodging,
and tax evasion might serve as a model to emulate rather than an object lesson in the
mainstreaming of corrupt business practices.1
No one familiar with Alexander Hamilton, Roger "open the purses of the people" Morris or the
roots of the Shay's Rebellion, Whiskey Rebellion, North Carolina Regulator movement and other
people's movements and actions, or the 1787-88 counter-revolutionary coup carried out by the
Constitutional Convention for the purpose of centralizing economic and military power toward
social control and building a continental empire (anyone in any doubt about that should read
the proceedings and the Federalist Papers; Hamilton was especially forthcoming about the
imperial motivation), would have any illusions about how deeply corruption is inherent in the
US system.
Same for imperialism. And all subsequent US history starting and continuing with the
genocide of the First Nations bears this out.
With respect to sanctions, the EU central power ( i.e. Germany ) impossed harsh sanctions
that ended being implemented in full only by southern countries like Spain, who are those who
have seen their commercial excahnges with Russia diminished to the least with the conseuqent
loses for national business, while, in fact, German business continue their exchnage with
Russia as if nothing had happened...
Now that Trump impose import tariffs to Europe, the most affected are, again, those who
fulfilled the US sanctions plan towayds Russia at the letter, i.e. Spain and southern
countries...
If these Southern European Countries would have a sovereign government with any respect
for the people who vote them, they will extract the consequent lesson from all of this...and
would apply the recipe for all this with respect to Russia, Iran, and so on...
The lesson would translate like "the more you comply with US mandate on sanctions against
any other country you have nothing against, even at the price of harming badly your own
economy, the more sanctions/import tariffs will be impossed on yourself at the first
necessity...", which is the old lesson from primary school, "the more weak you would show in
front of a bully...more beating will come..., oor already in grown mafiosi, "more "special
tax" for "protection" to pay"...
Then it is Spain who hosts most of US nuclear deterrence and AFRICOM central command...If
Spain would have a sovereign government with a hint of respect for the people who vote it, an
ultimatum will be possed in front of the yankees, "eliminate import tariffs, stop meddling
with national economy, or pack your things and go home"
The Federal Reserve of the United States has injected about 278,000 million dollars in the
money market in four days. After injecting 53,000 million dollars earlier this week, the
Federal Reserve renewed these operations three times for astronomical amounts representing
75,000 million per day, and has already announced that it will continue to do so daily
until October 10.
The newspaper Le Figaro (1) describes as "astronomical" that jet of fiat money that,
however, does not seem to worry the New York Stock Exchange, with a Dow Jones index that
remained above 27,000 points throughout week. It is normal because, as the Efe agency says,
"Wall Street feeds on the flexibility of the Fed" (2), that is, the massive emissions of
paper money.
It has no different menu to nourish itself and, as specialists say, "the reasons that
lead to lower interest rates are usually not good."
The resistance of Wall Street is explained because these operations only affect the
interbank market, which is short of liquidity "temporarily". Banks that are financed on a
daily basis in this market would suffer a shortage of liquidity as a result of large debt
issues by the Treasury and a strong demand for liquidity from companies facing fiscal
maturities.
But there are more than enough reasons for speculators to worry. "The reasons may be not
only technical," says the newspaper. Some financial institutions have refused to make their
funds available to the market, indicating the possible vulnerability of a participant (bank
or companies) who may not be able to repay the amounts borrowed on a day-to-day basis. If
this situation is confirmed, which is synonymous with the loss of mutual trust in the
interbank market, it could be a more serious crisis than in 2008.
The President of the Federal Reserve, Jerome H. Powell, who took office in February last
year, has no different alternative. He has been a member of the board of governors of the
Federal Reserve since 2012 and knows nothing more than routine: since the late 1970s he is
the first president of the Federal Reserve that does not even have a bachelor's degree in
economics. Does he need it?
The question is whether the gigantic mass of fiat money that it has put into circulation
will be sufficient to avoid a collapse like that of 2007, or another even greater collapse
will occur.
Russ @ 86.. can you tell me more about the continental congress. where can the biographies
and histories be had which might shed some real light on John Hanson first president(1781-1783) of the
United States in Congress Assembled(1776-1789) .. and Samuel Huntington (Conn), and Thomas
McKeen (Delaware) and the others who were elected and served as Presidents of the
[Continental Congress<= the government that defeated the British and that existed between
1776 and 1789}, before the lobbyist imposed ratification to install the US Constitution {a
document that cut off (terminated) the right of self determination and denied bottom up
democracy to the people of the several nations that were in America at the time]. Before the
constitution, the people could and did impose democracy on those who were in charge of the
local, state and central governments (The Articles of Confederation, central government from
1776 to 1789] after the Constitution, [the governed were never heard from again. ]. ..
somebody @59 sez: ""Souvereignty" and statehood ... is a recipe for war."
This is the mindset of the hegemon (or the servant of hegemony, whatever). They cannot
even imagine "Truly mutually respectful, pragmatic and consequently solid relations"
between nations any more than they can imagine others seeking that. They assume that everyone
else is motivated to dominate as they are. They project their own damage from having been
born into an intensely competitive, egotistical, identity -obsessed culture onto the
rest of humanity out of sheer ignorance that things could possible be any different
elsewhere.
Western culture, with the purest expression being in the United States, exalts in the
individual. That sounds like a noble and wonderful thing on the surface, but the practical
effect is to atomize society into isolated and competing hermetic entities. Community is
displaced to accommodate the self. This environment favors the sociopath and the psychopath,
which is why in the West sociopaths and psychopaths most easily accumulate power and rise to
the tops of all of those societies' institutions. It is not surprising that those born into
such an environment imagine it to be the natural order and human nature because that is all
they know and experience.
But of course that is not human nature. The species would have died out far more than a
hundred thousand years ago if it were. Human nature is to build community, and given the
opportunity that is precisely what they do. Community, though, is a threat to the power of
the psychopaths who ascend to the top of capitalist society, so in all institutions in which
those psychopaths gain power they discourage and fight and dismantle community and replace it
with social order built around themselves.
This psycho-driven culture grew to dominate in the West because, like slave-based
societies before, it was economically progressive. Due to the immaturity of communication
technology, individual psychos could assemble and coordinate larger social organizations
directed at production than the population could naturally assemble on its own. But
technology progresses and naturally formed human communities grow in scale and scope over
time. This made slave-based economies obsolete, and is now in the process of obsoleting
psycho-centric economies. It should come as no surprise that this replacement is occurring
most rapidly in cultures where the psycho-centrism had not fully established itself.
Considering the above, my bet is that as we see China's BRI project mature in Africa, that
continent will experience a Renaissance of epic proportions, perhaps even dwarfing China's
accomplishments of the last half century. This is because African cultures are similar to the
Chinese and other Asian cultures in that they have not yet been fully assimilated into the
western worship of "individualism" , so their natural human tendencies towards
community-building are not yet corrupted and subverted.
If China's transition to the dominant progressive power on the planet doesn't shatter the
dangerous American myth of exceptionality, then big portions of Africa moving into first
world status surely will. That's still some decades away, but we should be able to see
undeniable signs of movement in that direction by about 2030 to 2040 (growth in industrial
output and movement up the value added chain, dramatic development of infrastructure, rapid
increases in academic attainment, significant declines in poverty, etc).
Naturally, that is something that few westerners, particularly Americans, can wrap their
heads around because they have a flawed (Hobbesian) understanding of human nature. As they do
with China now, westerners will deny the evidence from their own eyes with regards to Africa
for as long as they can.
wikipedia makes no mention of it but for a long time Thomas McKeen was famous as the villain
in William Cobbett's The Democratic Judge or The Equal Liberty of the Press.
McKeen was a very nasty piece of work-his origins in Delaware are coincidental
"...that is not human nature. The species would have died out far more than a hundred
thousand years ago if it were. Human nature is to build community, and given the opportunity
that is precisely what they do. Community, though, is a threat to the power of the
psychopaths who ascend to the top of capitalist society, so in all institutions in which
those psychopaths gain power they discourage and fight and dismantle community and replace it
with social order built around themselves..."
How true, if a little unfair to psychopaths.
Very interesting.
I don't think it's the use of fiat money itself that's so important but what it's used for.
The money you describe as being used to support Wall Street is a great example of the wrong
use. Supporting a derivative led financial speculation benefitting the 1% vs the belt and
road which is oriented to real economic development which would be a wise productive use of
fiat.
-------------
In a famous critical remark directed at China's heavy reliance on western-style, debt-led
growth – an anonymous author (thought to be Xi or close colleague), noted
(sarcastically) the notion that big trees could be grown 'in the air'. Which is to say: that
trees need to have roots, and to grow in the ground. Instead of the 'virtual', financialised
'activity' of the West, real economic activity stems from the real economy, with roots
planted in the earth. The 'Belt and Road' is just this: intended as a major catalyst to real
economics.When the music stops and the derivative structure starts unraveling showing
multiple claims on ownership who will prevail. I think that there's a new sheriff in town
with the power to back up the 'roots in the ground' team.Posted by: financial matters | Jan
22, 2019 8:46:28 AM | 100
The 1776 Constitution was on a vector. By contrast, the 1788 Constitution was designed to
foreclose any further democratic movement. On the contrary, its main vector was to
concentrate power and wealth up the hierarchy, and to help build an empire for this new
ruling class.] the empire class ...needed a constitution which would centralize government,
strongly concentrate it, turn it into a versatile and brutal weapon on behalf of finance
assaults, military aggression, and police repression. There's only one path forward: We must
resume the American Revolution. by Russ @ 90..
very interesting.. 2012 .. discussion.. your paper .thanks . but still no background on the
people who brought about the 1776 government. and who operated it between its inception 1776
and the Bankers coup that regime changed the 1776 government into the 1788 Constitution of
the United States of America.
As you said in your article, everyone should know about Article 6 in the constitution of the
United States of America (the 1788 government) it saved British and French Aristocracy
<=and kept in power the very people the Americans had sought to remove=> from the
Americans who fought the war. It says All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into,
shall be as valid against the US under this Constitution, as under the confederation (but no
where do I see court cases that say under the 1776 government, that claims to lands, granted
by foreign kings and Queens (land grant estates) were valid? In fact, what I see is that the
Articles of Confederation government was planning to deny title to, and confiscate the lands
which traced to the land grants (G. Washington owned half of West Virginia and all of
Virginia) and the AoC plan was to distribute the land grant lands so confiscated among the
people who lived in America equally?
@WG 91 . . . as we see China's BRI project mature in Africa, that continent will experience a
Renaissance of epic proportions
Yes, and they've got a head start:
African countries with GDP growth rates above 5% in 2018
Libya, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Ivory Coast, Djibouti, The Gambia, Senegal, Uganda, Burkina Faso.
Kenya, Guinea, Ghana, Egypt, Niger.
Also: China 6.5, US 2.8, France 1.5, Germany 1.4, UK 1.3 . . here
Lot of nonsense in this thread. From "gunpowder was the 1st overwhelming weapon that
enabled conquest."
Posted by: A User | Oct 5 2019 8:38 utc | 81
...re China's invention of gun powder. IIRC Marco Polo brought it back to Europe in
1400s at a time when China had already advanced it to hand-held-cannon status.
Posted by: chu teh | Oct 5 2019 4:51 utc | 69
Agree with the lot of nonsense bit, although there is also a lot of interest. It is true
that China discovered gunpowder, but not sure about the "hand-held-canon status". My version
of reality had it that due to differences of perspective between East and West, China
discovered gunpowder and used it for firecrackers, and (allegedly) never thought of using it
for weapons. Similarly knowledge of the configuration of the stars in relation to location
was discovered by the arabs, long before this knowledge was exploited by Europeans for
navigation. The claim being, that the practical Europeans put scientific discovery to use for
practical benefits while the East - which discovered important segments of that scientific
discovery long before - had "merely" put it to spiritual, cultural and other transcendent
uses.
I absorbed the above factoids (gunpowder and the stars) over half a century ago before I
would have looked at such claims sufficiently critically; to what extent such factoids might
be really true I am not quite sure, although I remain somewhat sceptical about the
"hand-held-canon" claim. The broader claim though about the application of scientific
discovery needs to be reexamined more impartially.
Ian2 @67: "Secrecy ... is only revealed when appropriate."
And the appropriate moment to reveal a strategic doomsday arsenal that only exists to
prevent attack is when that arsenal is fielded. This point is so obvious that it was raised
with humorous intent in the 1964 Kubrick movie Dr. Strangelove .
You only keep weapons systems secret that you intend to use in attacks in order to
surprise your victims. Since America is violently aggressive and regularly attacks other
countries, the US maintains this sort of policy. America is exceptional in this
regard, though. America's focus is on offensive weaponry to attack other countries
with, so keeping those weapons secret helps limit America's victims' abilities to prepare and
defend themselves. Military secrecy is therefore the tool of the aggressor intended to
facilitate sucker-punching its victims. Weapons intended to discourage such attacks
must be advertised loud and clear for their intended deterrence to succeed. This is
why Russia openly announces their new weapons and why China shows theirs off in parades.
China does not intend to use their nukes. They are not like America which is building
tactical nukes to make atomic weapons more palatable to use in practice. There are no
countries in the world that China has shown any interest in attacking anyway, unlike America
which maintains a list of target countries that it is working itself up to attacking.
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<BLOCKQUOTE>Text</BLOCKQUOTE>
< A HREF="http://www.aclu.org/">Headline (not the URL)</A> → Headline (not the URL)
"In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism, particularly
violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," said Kevin McAleenan, the
acting director of homeland security.
Homeland Security Dept. Affirms Threat of White Supremacy
After Years of Prodding https://nyti.ms/2oTNJmQ
NYT - Zolan Kanno-Youngs - October 1
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Homeland Security is beginning to address white
supremacist terrorism as a primary security threat, breaking with a decade of flagging
attention after bigoted mass shooters from New Zealand to Texas took the lives of nearly 100
people in the last six months.
In a little-noticed strategy document (*) published last month to guide law enforcement on
emerging threats and in recent public appearances by Kevin K. McAleenan, the acting secretary
of homeland security, the department is trying to project a new vigilance about violent white
nationalism, beating back criticism that the agency has spent a decade playing down the
issue.
"I would like to take this opportunity to be direct and unambiguous in addressing a major
issue of our time. In our modern age, the continuation of racially based violent extremism,
particularly violent white supremacy, is an abhorrent affront to the nation," Mr. McAleenan
said during an address last month, describing white nationalism as one of the most dangerous
threats to the United States.
The department's new stance contrasts that of President Trump, who has repeatedly
dismissed white supremacy as an insignificant fringe movement. But beyond words and
documents, many officials trying to combat the threat throughout the country remain skeptical
that the full weight of federal law enforcement is finally being used to give bigoted
domestic terrorism the attention it deserves. ...
* (Could be this.)
DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY STRATEGIC FRAMEWORK
FOR COUNTERING TERRORISM AND TARGETED VIOLENCE
"... Schiff's hate for Trump and hate for Russia, can be easily explained by the money he appears to received from his oligarch patron, who has an agenda to neo-liberalize Ukraine, and profit from the pillage started in Maidan in 2014. ..."
When in doubt follow the money. Congressman Schiff's When in doubt follow the money. Congressman Schiff's
well
documented Putin obsession may have something to do with his billionaire, military complex, oligarch patron from Ukraine.
In a Zerohedge post yesterday, chronicling the latest Adam Schiff idiocy, where the Democrat Congressman spoke to a crowd at
the University of Pennsylvania,
declaring Russian ads promoted the Second Amendment during the 2016 election "so we will kill each other" commenter
AlaricBalth linked some interesting information on Schiff's underlying motivation behind his Russia hysteria
Adam Schiff is an owned hatchet man of Ukrainian arms dealer Igor Pasternak. Schiff's anti-Russian narrative is carefully orchestrated
by his Ukrainian handlers Adam Schiff is an owned hatchet man of Ukrainian arms dealer Igor Pasternak. Schiff's anti-Russian narrative
is carefully orchestrated by his Ukrainian handlers
https://mobile.twitter.com/JackPosobiec/status/843864725062664197
"TASTE OF UKRAINE RECEPTIONfor Adam Schiff" "TASTE OF UKRAINE RECEPTIONfor Adam Schiff" "TASTE OF UKRAINE RECEPTIONfor Adam
Schiff" http://politicalpartytime.org/party/34974/ Pasternak,
who was raised and educated in Ukraine before immigrating to the United States, is a passionate promoter of Ukrainian culture
and business. He has been active in both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to support increased bilateral ties between the two
countries and has been especially active building awareness of Ukraine's strategic economic importance among Members of Congress.
Since political protests broke out across Ukraine in late 2013, Pasternak has worked to personally inform and educate Members
of Congress about the geostrategic importance of Ukraine to European and US security. Pasternak, who was raised and educated in
Ukraine before immigrating to the United States, is a passionate promoter of Ukrainian culture and business. He has been active
in both Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. to support increased bilateral ties between the two countries and has been especially
active building awareness of Ukraine's strategic economic importance among Members of Congress. Since political protests broke
out across Ukraine in late 2013, Pasternak has worked to personally inform and educate Members of Congress about the geostrategic
importance of Ukraine to European and US security. Pasternak, who was raised and educated in Ukraine before immigrating to the
United States, is a passionate promoter of Ukrainian culture and business. He has been active in both Los Angeles and Washington,
D.C. to support increased bilateral ties between the two countries and has been especially active building awareness of Ukraine's
strategic economic importance among Members of Congress. Since political protests broke out across Ukraine in late 2013, Pasternak
has worked to personally inform and educate Members of Congress about the geostrategic importance of Ukraine to European and US
security.
Jack Posobiec tweeted in March 2017 on Schiff's connection to Pasternak and George Soros Jack Posobiec tweeted in March 2017 on Schiff's
connection to Pasternak and George Soros
Hi @RepAdamSchiff! Why did Soros-tied Ukraninan Arms Dealer Igor Pasternak hold a fundraiser for you? #ComeyHearing Hi @RepAdamSchiff!
Why did Soros-tied Ukraninan Arms Dealer Igor Pasternak hold a fundraiser for you? #ComeyHearing
PIN IT Who is Who is Who is Schiff's patron, Igor
Pasternak? He is a Ukraine globalist, military industrialist who was curiously spotted in Maidan, Kiev in 2014 for "diplomatic
reasons" during the US/CIA sponsored coup.
PIN IT
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A Ukrainian billionaire oligarch, with military industrial complex contracts, funding Adam Schiff's campaign dinners at $2,500
a plate no wonder Schiff is pushing the Russia fear mongering so hard.
Schiff's hate for Trump and hate for Russia, can be easily explained by the money he appears to received from his oligarch
patron, who has an agenda to neo-liberalize Ukraine, and profit from the pillage started in Maidan in 2014.
Perhaps its time to shine a little bit of light on Adam Schiff's Ukraine collusion.
"... Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule. But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance. ..."
Giuliani has claimed the State Department directed him to act and has said he briefed Volker
and the U.S. ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, after his meetings with
Ukrainians.
On Friday, ABC News reported that Volker had resigned from his post with the State
Department. House Democrats still plan to interview him next week as part of their impeachment
inquiry, according to a congressional aide.
Giuliani planned to speak at a conference in Armenia next week, according to a schedule.
But he cancelled after news outlets reported that several Kremlin officials and Russian
President Vladimir Putin would also be in attendance.
Excellent points. As soon as all this started hitting the fan, I was reminded of the last
impeachment of a POTUS; that time the US illegally (and amorally) destroyed Yugoslavia and
ensured that religious fundamentalist terrorist proxies would have safe havens in Eastern
Europe.
I think you're on the right track vis a vis looming war against Iran.
You are all long too used to overlooking and excusing Putin when he jails and disqualifies
his political opponents from running against him. This is Trump's attempt to move towards
Russianising the US political system. If this gets excused there is no telling what comes
next.
Russia copies methods for dealing with opposition groups from the West, and when
donkeytale perceives similarities he/she calls it "Russianizing". For example, requiring some
number of signatures and having arcane standards for collecting them is a feature of New York
state. Police in the West that handles demonstrations has gloves, but they do not seem the be
made of velvet. Occasional suspicious deaths, in prisons and elsewhere, are a common feature
of USA and Russia (both have oversized prison populations, although USA to a larger extend).
"Conservative" attitudes to homosexuality and treating drug addiction in Russia resemble
Republican-dominated states in USA.
Pretending that Russia is some source of evil inventions is the true intellectual
dishonesty.
Similarly, "opposition research" is an art cultivated in USA for decades, and using the
high office for that purpose seems something that Trump, a political novice, observed in
Obama administration. if you have a reasonable suspicion that your political opponent
violated the law, you can apply law enforcement methods to determine the truth.
In turn, Democrats internalized methods used by Republicans agains Bill Clinton as
"normal". Something is rotten in that picture, but it is a wider phenomenon, not
"Putinization" or "Trumpification".
"... The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion ..."
"... there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there is. ..."
"... White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore. That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result. ..."
"... The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that psychic injury. ..."
"... White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another people's identity and future instead of their own. ..."
"... Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair in the white, Western mind. ..."
"... After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level . Israelis are optimistic about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving. ..."
"... that unwholesome obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots, learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said demand , ..."
"... Until whites have a story and a spirit of their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to extinction. ..."
The conservative movement's unwholesome obsession with Israel is not an entirely organic
obsession to be sure. There is a whole lot of dark kosher oligarch money lurking behind the
neoconservative cause, Christian Zionism, and the Reagan/Zioboomer battalion. Nevertheless,
whether organic or not, the boomer generation's excessive regard for Israel is today authentic
and undeniable. A strong fealty to Israel is deeply entrenched amongst boomer-generation
conservatives. Indeed, when it comes to defending Israel and its conduct, many of these types
are like samurais on meth. They don't seem to care at all if their entire state or city should
devolve into a semi-anarchic New Somalia, but god forbid some Somali congresswoman should
lambaste the sacred Jewish state. That simply can't be countenanced here in the land of the
free!
Mind you, this article is not meant to constitute a polemic against Israel, or Jewish
ethnopolitics for that matter. The BDS movement is just as wrongheaded as Ziocuckoldry, in my
humble opinion. Although there is much wrong with Israel, there is plenty right with it as
well. Despite what the modern left may believe, there is nothing inherently illegitimate about
a state like Israel, one rooted in history, in genes, in religion, and in race. States built
around a shared ethnicity or a shared religion (or, as in Israel's case, an ample helping of
both) are generally more stable and successful than diverse societies erected upon propositions
most people and peoples don't really accept, or leftist values that have ideological quicksand
for their foundations.
With that said, there is something awfully peculiar, almost disturbing about the old guard's infatuation with Israel. I
mean, why are American boomers so concerned about the Jewish state and its survival? How exactly does a tiny apartheidesque ethnostate half-way around the world
affect their everyday lives? Are they simply mind-slaves to a mainstream media dominated by
powerful Jews and powerful Jewish interest groups? Is this all really about scripture as
Christian radio likes to contend? Or is there something else afoot here? Well, in short, there
is.
White Westerners, white Americans in particular, are a thoroughly vassalized, deracinated
people. We aren't allowed to celebrate our own race's host of historic accomplishments anymore.
That would be racist. We aren't allowed to put our own people first either, as all other
peoples do. That would likewise be racist. White Western peoples aren't even allowed to have
nations of our own any longer, nations which exist to advance our interests, and which are
populated by and overseen by people like us, who share our interests and our attitudes. That
also would be, you guessed it, racist. Our very existence is increasingly little more than an
unfortunate, racist obstacle to a brighter, more diverse future, in the eyes of the Cultural
Marxist sociopaths who rule the Western World. Needless to say, most white Americans would
rather be dead than racist, and so we are naturally, quite literally dying as a result.
The white American psyche has been tamed, broken as it were. Ziocucking is a symptom of that
psychic injury. Because white boomers possess no group/tribal identity any longer, or
collective will, or sense of race pride, or civilizational prospects, because they have been enserfed by a viciously anti-white Cultural Marxist overclass, they have opted to live
vicariously through another race. White Americans can not, they must not, stake claim to an
identity or a future of their own, so they have essentially committed themselves to another
people's identity and future instead of their own. Indeed, just as the cuckold doesn't
merely permit another man to penetrate his wife, but actually takes a kind of perverse pleasure
in the pleasure of that other man, in large measure by fetishizing his dominance and sexual
prowess, the Ziocuck likewise doesn't merely allow his civilization to be debased, he takes an
equally perverse pleasure in the triumphs of other peoples and nations, and by so doing
imagines, mistakenly of course, that America itself is still as free and proud a nation as
those foreign nations he fetishizes.
Actually, Donald Trump's electoral victory is at least partially attributable to a very
similar psychological phenomenon. White Americans, who have largely lost the self-confidence to
stand behind their traditions and convictions, still had the gumption to vote for a man who
possesses in oodles and cringy oodles, the self-same self-confidence they lack. White Americans
are thus engaged in an almost unstated, indirect, vicarious defiance of Cultural Marxism via
Trump/Trumpism, a tangible, albeit somewhat incoherent, symbol of open revolt against Western
elites. The repressed group will of whites is longing for an authentic medium of civilizational
expression, but can only find two-bit demagoguery and Israel worship. The weather is not fair
in the white, Western mind.
Through this sordid, vicarious identitarianism, threats to Jewish lives become threats to
their own white lives. Jewish interests become tantamount to their own interests. It is a sad
sight to behold anyhow, a people with no sense of dignity or shame, too cowed by political
correctness to stand up for their own group interests, too brainwashed to love themselves, too
reprogrammed to be themselves, idolizing alien peoples. Nevertheless, the need for belonging in
place, time, and history, and for collective purpose, doesn't just go away because Western
elites say being white signifies nothing but "hate". As white civilization aborts and hedonizes
itself into extinction, as whites practice suicidal altruism and absolute racial denialism,
atomized white individuals seek out other histories, other stories, other peoples to attach
themselves to and project themselves onto.
White Americans have thus foolishly come to see their own destiny as inseparable from the
destiny of a people whose destiny they don't really share.
After all, the birthrates of Jews in Israel are at well above replacement level .
Israelis are optimistic
about the future. As whites in the West fall on their proverbial sword to atone for their
racist past, Jews in Israel are thriving.
As whites in America suffer from various epidemics of despair , their fellow white
Americans seem more interested in the imaginary plight of Israelis who can't stop winning
military skirmishes, embarrassing their Arab enemies, and unlawfully acquiring land and
resources in the Levant. The actual, visceral plight of their own people seems almost an
afterthought to most white Americans. The whole affair is frankly bizarre and shameful.
This peculiar psychological phenomenon of vicarious identitarianism is at least partially
responsible for the Zioboomer's undying devotion to Israel. Furthermore, that unwholesome
obsession will not dissipate until whites reclaim their own history, rediscover their roots,
learn to take their own side, and demand a place in the planet's future (yes, I said
demand , since the white race's many enemies have no intention of saving a place for
them or willingly handing them a say in that future). Until whites have a story and a spirit of
their own, they will only, and can only, live through the identities and triumphs of other
races. And perhaps most critically, they will continue to be a ghost people on the march to
extinction.
A related phenomenon is Russia-cucking. White American conservatives who have seen through
Jewish bullshit often seem to conclude that the racial predicament in America is hopeless, so
they switch to Russia-cucking. Being pro-Russia is obviously more sensible than being
pro-Israel, but it's nationalism by proxy all the same.
A presentation and reading by Hamilton Gregory, author of "McNamara's Folly: The Use of
Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam." Because so many college students were avoiding military service
during the Vietnam War, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara lowered mental standards to induct
354,000 low-IQ men. they were known as McNamara's "Moron Corps." Their death toll in combat was
appalling. Gregory indicates at the end of his talk that the situation didn't really change.
The same practice is taking place nowadays.
England patriot says:
September
24, 2019 at 5:27 pm GMT 100 Words A lot of people mistake low IQ brutishness for genuine
bravery and strength, which is why blacks are considered by many whites to be the toughest race
and probably why they are favoured by the military.
A big weakness of the US and UK militaries is the assumption that street thugs make the most
effective and capable troops, in reality such people are often the most useless and cowardly in
an actual war zone. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
Comments
The story is definitely true. Not only were there low moron troops but even the so called
West Point graduates with no experience in war were complete idiots. It was a two fold fiasco
because these graduates couldn't read coordinates on maps and the morons couldn't find them
and thus they often bombed our own troops.
There were a lot "friendly fire" deaths that were never reported. The carnage of Vietnam
was a disgrace from poor military strategies to morons and incompetents running them. We were
not prepared for the "Jungle Type Gorilla War" our leaders got us into and the results are
told forever on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington. What did they die for? Another
"Communist" are taking over Domino Policy when the true Communist Jews were running the stuff
in the USA and destroying us.
Two destroyers were recently collided into by slow-moving merchant ships. Someone said that
this is like a Chevy Corvette being struck by a bulldozer on the Bonneville Salt Flats while
a team of trained experts had the job of keeping the Corvette from being hit.
@A123
Any civilization that sends their Best and Brightest to the front lines is taking huge risks.
Cannon fodder troops generally come (and should come) from the lower tiers of society. This
promotes a nation's long-term health and vitality.
There is no starvation–only fasting–during Ramadan. Fasting occurs each day
from sunrise to sundown. On the other hand, Israel's high fertility rates among Orthodox and
Sephardic Jews has dysgenics written all over it. This explains why Israel's average IQ
average remains below 100. Highly religious and less-intelligent Jews are producing a
disproportionate number of the births inside Israel.
It's a lesson the US could've learned back in World War II. The US deployed black troops in
France, and instead of proving that the blacks were just as capable fighters as the whites,
the blacks engaged in typical black behavior of rape and thievery. It got so bad in areas
like Cherbourg that the local population preferred the Germans over their supposed
'liberators'.
The same thing happened earlier in the war when the Allies deployed Moroccan mercenaries
in Italy.
After the battle of Monte Cassino, these savages could rape Italian women with impunity, they
wouldn't be stopped by the French, the British or indeed the Americans, and as a result more
than 30.000 Italian women became victims of these vicious assaults.
But I bet it was all in good faith of course, after all the US was making Europe safe for
stali I mean, 'democracy'
Politicians did not want the war to become an issue among the affluent. It was the old adage
about wars: "Rich men start them; poor men fight them." There were plenty of chicken hawks
around.
The article and comments, so far, are interesting.
A military is a tool of the ruling class/caste/layer/whatever. What is moronic, or not, is
for them to decide. The only principle: is the tool good for the job?
There are several very good reasons to have "low-level IQ" troops in the military, a
modern war/combat in particular.
In an infantry company of, say, 160 men, a smart O.C. would love to have 10-20 of those
types. Plenty of jobs/assignments for them and definitely attributing to combat efficiency of
the unit.
Even better in logistics, especially in higher units/rear areas. Comparison:
warehouse/storage facilities employees in civvy street.
BTW, those guys, if/when properly treated (LEADERSHIP) can be utterly loyal and
dependable. For "experts" around, there are plenty of miserable, mind-numbing jobs/tasks in
the military, plus quite dangerous, which those guys shall do when others won't. If .treated
properly
And, one more element, especially in contemporary wars: certain moral attitude, "relaxed"
approach to human life and limb etc. Ability to commit acs of war other, more, say, smart,
"sensitive" troops, are reluctant to do.
Israel. IDF as the state tool to keep Palestinians under control.
Occupation forces of The Empire in Afghanistan and Iraq.
And one more thing: for suppressing possible internal unrest in a Western country ..For
that job you really don't want very intelligent/sensitive people.
Etc.
Big topic but, of course, not for this thread, for obvious reasons. Program.
Sorry for the interruption, guys. Feel free to resume the "bashing".
Infantry in Vietnam was known to be awful. Everyone in the military knew to avoid it. It was
openly used as a threat for non-compliance to troops elsewhere.
There were certainly exceptions. Some Marines, people wanting or needing to get their
ticket punched, etc. But before anything, Vietnam Infantry was getting the dregs. Not that I
doubt McNamera leaned into it as an opportunity.
Why in the world did they want or need all these troops? Westmorland kept asking for more
and more. After 500,000, per the pentagon papers, the JCS mood Westmorland that given US
presence in Europe, Japan, Korea, etc., there were no more extra troops.
Too bad that the US military has made a cottage industry out of revisionist accounts
regarding how it could have been "won". Showing a remarkable lack of insight into what it
means to win.
@A123
Interesting to see how a conniving Jew takes a piece about Vietnam and uses it to further his
objective of trying (quite unsuccessfully, one infers) to generate sympathy for the
Judenreich. He then doubles down with a further tangent leading somehow to Ramadan (!) It's
almost comical how transparent Jew scheming has become. It makes one wonder if the Hasbara
brigades have had to go low-IQ at this point?
Both in terms of IQ and class background, infantry in Vietnam were generally
representative of the general population. As one author assessed, "If they [soldiers in
combat units] were not the social and intellectual cream of American youth, neither were they
its dregs or castoffs."
nI saw the author of the book give at talk. I believe it was at a Tennessee Unversity. What
he described he saw as an enlisted man if I remember correctly. He was sent to OCS later and
sounded a very decent man. The conditions were awful for these guys. They were treated as
expendable by peers and officers alike.
I wonder how the IDF works this issue out. The Israelis are masters of the universe at
everything don't you know. They are utter geniuses.
Netanyahu's coalition was given the nod because they have 55 seats to the other side's
54.
There's still some question about whether Netanyahu can form a governing coalition.
But
Netanyahu now has 42 days to convince his former Defense Minister(!) Lieberman
(who heads the Yisrael Beiteinu Party) to join the coalition led by Likud.
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon,
administering the occasional rap on the knuckles
to those acting in bad faith"
". Meanwhile, the system's multilateral institutions,
especially the International Monetary Fund,
helped countries in dire need of funds,
provided they followed the rules."
Behind the escalating global conflict over trade and technology is a larger breakdown of the
postwar rules-based order, which was based on a belief that any country's growth benefits
all. Now that China is threatening to compete directly with the United States, support for
the system that made that possible has disappeared.
By RAGHURAM G. RAJAN
CHICAGO – Another day, another attack on trade. Why is it that every dispute –
whether over intellectual property (IP), immigration, environmental damage, or war
reparations – now produces new threats to trade?
For much of the last century, the United States managed and protected the rules-based
trading system it created at the end of World War II. That system required a fundamental
break from the pre-war environment of mutual suspicion between competing powers. The US urged
everyone to see that growth and development for one country could benefit all countries
through increased trade and investment.
Under the new dispensation, rules were enacted to constrain selfish behavior and coercive
threats by the economically powerful. The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering
the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith. Meanwhile, the system's
multilateral institutions, especially the International Monetary Fund, helped countries in
dire need of funds, provided they followed the rules....
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to
those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites
(neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination
and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy. Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic
for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to
bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on
Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie
were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at
this stage of history.
The truth is that the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely
unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external
threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly,
London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient
to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it
not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet
and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New
Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001. In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops
posted abroad.
Still as an imperial state that is the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on
financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire
experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of
further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed
to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the
2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never
ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation" phase)
Although currently with unhinged Trump at the helm the USA empire still going strong in
forcing vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA. Trump
currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic neoliberal
globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be successful in the
short run.
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during
triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel
tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the
USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in
check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the
dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the
level of external debt and required devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force
trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China,
India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly
in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by
Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA
empire. That's not much.
"If Russia allied with China the USA No.1 position "........
Think Italy moving into the Axis in 1937? Or the Soviet German Non Aggression Pact.
Nuclear weapons removes the incentive for large "rearmaments" or not?
Would the Britain to France 1938 relationship describe the US to EU? Thinking in 1939
(1914?) terms Europe is less stitched together than in 1936.
According to the Washington Post, Epstein's legal team is claiming that Sigal Mandelker is
one of the people at the DOJ who signed off on the lenient plea deal. This is eye popping,
because Donald Trump ended up appointing Mandelker as Under Secretary of the Treasury. Epstein
is also claiming that Alice Fisher signed off on the deal, which is also eye popping when you
consider that according to Politico, Donald Trump interviewed
Fisher to be FBI Director. Again, this is on top of Trump having appointed Alexander Acosta as
his Secretary of Labor.
Fisher is telling the Washington Post that she did not approve the Epstein deal. There's
obviously a paper trail for this kind of plea deal showing who was and was not involved, and
it'll surface. If Epstein is falsely accusing these people, it'll only make his legal troubles
even worse. What stands out is that Epstein and Trump clearly have conflicting goals
here
Jeffrey Epstein is trying to prove that some of the people currently running the federal
government are the same people who already gave him a plea deal, and thus they shouldn't get to
bring new charges against him for the same crimes. That's a feeble argument that's unlikely to
go anywhere, but it's all that Epstein has left. It just so happens that in the process,
Epstein is pointing to additional Trump people who were (allegedly) in on the original plot to
let Epstein off the hook. This whole thing is getting uglier by the minute.
Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for
some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has
shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up
stuff to drive events.
Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my
journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing
the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in
office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."
Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false
narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try
to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for
them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to
remind
reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in
daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.
The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump
wasn't the
Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media
literally accused the president of treason by
melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were
run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made
into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little
consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the
rubes would believe and then pile on.
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The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media
created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last
Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a
cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal
testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.
Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing
following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up
accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on
leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.
But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became
certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were
recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data
is public. See the pattern yet?
If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite,
upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for
personal gain via hotel fees.
At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as
the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not
going to divest
. But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could
not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional
.
Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the
Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts
from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last
time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over
gifts from the Imam of Muscat.
The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official
getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny
percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then
they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course
because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency
itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!
It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site
Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous
source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one
hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a
reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when
we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support
American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone
got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.
Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every
timeanyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited
one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the
privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in
their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms
(which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump
Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service
rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.
More?
T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence
federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the
president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked
up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.
Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from
third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed
building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was
accused of "
hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash
customers if they were potentates or princes (the
headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments
Clause").
And of course, there was the
Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged
its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air
Force had
used the airport and hotel
hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a
decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the
Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece
speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's
cornerstone financial
plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.
But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to
compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the
past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if
his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there
pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of
president?
Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury
all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was
$191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is
zero.
Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was
$15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a
$65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his
book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction
book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for
a young adult version of Dreams From My
Father .
Obama's books were huge sellers
in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom
money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000
worth of his books to distribute as gifts.
As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president
making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the
presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was
designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used
to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat
two very similar situations so very differently?
Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running
false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate
calls for
hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will
soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly
charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden --
will go.
Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation,
arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.
Columnist Max Boot in The Washington Post put into writing what we have all known for
some time: real journalism, Jefferson's informed citizenry and all that, is dead. The job has
shifted to aspirational writing, using manipulated droplets of facts and just plain made-up
stuff to drive events.
Boot writes to drive Trump from office and overturn the 2016 election. Max : "Much of my
journalism for the past four years has been devoted to critiquing President Trump and opposing
the spread of Trumpism. But no matter how many columns or sound bites I produce, he remains in
office . I am left to ask if all my work has made any difference."
Boot has spent the last several years creating and circle-supporting others who create false
narratives. They manufacture reasons for Trump to resign, press Democrats to impeach, and try
to persuade voters they otherwise hold in contempt that they don't know what's good enough for
them. We kind of figured this out after senior staff at the New York Times had to
remind
reporters that they were "not part of the f*cking resistance," but it is helpful to see it in
daylight. After all, democracy dies in darkness.
The uber-false narrative Max and others Frankensteined into existence was Russiagate. Trump
wasn't the
Manchurian Candidate and there was no quid pro quo for Russian election help. Yet the media
literally accused the president of treason by
melding together otherwise unrelated truthlets -- Trump wanted a hotel in Moscow, some ads were
run on Facebook -- that could be spun into a narrative to bring him down. Correlation was made
into causation in a purposeful freshman Logic 101 fail. What was true was of little
consequence; what mattered was whether the media could collectively create a story that the
rubes would believe and then pile on.
Advertisement
The critical flaw in Russiagate (other than that it didn't happen) was that the media
created an end-point they could not control. Robert Mueller was magic-wanded into the Last
Honest Man, the Savior of Democracy, as the narrative first unfolded and then fell apart like a
cardboard box in the rain. After his dismal
testimony, there was nowhere for the story to go.
Was it only a week ago Law and Order: Scotland SVU was the locus of the Next Big Thing
following Greenland? Because even as we race to catch up (debunking takes longer than making up
accusations,) a whole new Big Thing popped up over the Ukraine. Details are vague, based all on
leaks and persons familiar with some of it, but are as dire as they are lacking.
But as with every other outrage, leaks in the new phone call-gate instantly became
certainties, certainties became foreign influence in our elections, and demands to impeach were
recycled until Twitter voted for the death penalty. And all before a single piece of hard data
is public. See the pattern yet?
If the latest "gate" doesn't pan out, Democrats have already jumpstarted an old favorite,
upgraded for the 2020 election: Trump is now manipulating domestic and foreign policy for
personal gain via hotel fees.
At first glance, it seems like a non-starter. Trump's hotels are as much a part of him as
the extra pounds he carries. He campaigned as a CEO and announced early on that he was not
going to divest
. But with the first cold slap of his election victory, a narrative was being shaped: he could
not become president because of his business conflicts of interest; it was danged unconstitutional
.
Early proponents of this dreck dug around in the Constitution's closet and found the
Emoluments Clause , a handful of lines intended to bar officeholders from accepting gifts
from foreign sovereigns, kings, and princes to prevent influence buying. Pre-Trump, the last
time the issue was in actual contention was with President Martin Van Buren (no relation) over
gifts from the Imam of Muscat.
The media ran with it. They imagined out of whole cloth that any foreign government official
getting a room at any Trump hotel had been given a "gift." Then they imagined that any tiny
percentage of that room profit that actually went to Trump himself represented a bribe. Then
they imagined that despite the vast complexity of U.S. relations, Trump would alter course
because some guy rented a room. It was Joker -like in its diabolicalness, the presidency
itself merely a prank to hide an international crime spree. Pow!
It was ridiculous on its face, but they made it happen. The now-defunct leftist site
Think Progress ran what might be Story Zero before Trump even took office. An anonymous
source claimed that, under pressure, the Kuwaiti ambassador had canceled a major event at one
hotel to switch to Trump's own D.C. hotel. It turned out to be untrue. "Do you think a
reception of two hours in the Trump hotel is going to curry favors with the administration when
we host thousands of U.S. troops in Kuwait? When we have in the past and still do support
American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq?" the Kuwait ambassador asked when someone
got around to his side of the story. But no matter: the narrative was set.
Then it grew. Though the Emoluments Clause is quite specific, the media decided that every
timeanyone stayed at a Trump property, it was corruption. Even when Trump visited
one of his own homes, it was corruption, because the Secret Service paid Trump for the
privilege. Of course, the Secret Service has always paid for the facilities used in
their work because the government cannot commandeer private property or accept free rooms
(which, ironically, could be seen as a bribe), not from Marriott and not from the Trump
Organization. Even Joe Biden still has to charge the Secret Service
rent on a cottage he owns so they can protect him when he's home in Delaware.
More?
T-Mobile booked nine rooms at a Trump hotel, in media hive minds ostensibly to influence
federal approval of a $26 billion merger. Those rooms were worth about $2,700. Of course, the
president, who can influence the Dow with a tweet, prefers to make his illegal money off jacked
up hotel bills. Think small has always been a Trump trademark.
Reuters headlined how foreigners were buying condos from
third-party owners (i.e., not Trump or his company), but they were in a Trump-managed
building and maybe the monthly maintenance fees would qualify as mini-emoluments? Trump was
accused of "
hiding " foreign government income at his hotels when servers at the bar failed to ask cash
customers if they were potentates or princes (the
headline : "Trump Organization Says It's 'Not Practical' to Comply With the Emoluments
Clause").
And of course, there was the
Air Force crew staying at a Trump place in Scotland. No matter that the hotel had forged
its relationship with a nearby airport long before Trump became president, or that the Air
Force had
used the airport and hotel
hundreds of times before Trump became president (going back to World War II), or that a
decision by the Pentagon to have flights stop more frequently there was made under the
Obama administration. None of that stopped the media from proclaiming corruption. One piece
speculated that the $166 per night the Air Force pays for rooms was always part of Trump's
cornerstone financial
plan for the floundering multi-million golf course.
But to see how much the corruption narrative really is a media creation, you have only to
compare it to how the mainstream media covered what might have been a similar question in the
past. Imagine if journalists had treated every appearance by Obama as a book promotion. What if
his every speech had been slandered across the channels as corruption, Obama just out there
pimping his books? Should he have been impeached for commercializing the office of
president?
Follow the money, as Rachel Maddow likes to say. The Trump Organization pays to the Treasury
all profits from foreign governments. In 2018, that was
$191,000 . The year before, the amount was $151,470. So Trump's in-pocket profit is
zero.
Meanwhile, Obama's profit as an author during his time in office was
$15.6 million (he's made multiples more since, including a
$65 million book advance). In the two weeks before he was inaugurated, Obama reworked his
book deals to take advantage of his new status. He agreed not to publish another non-fiction
book during his time in office to keep anticipation high, while signing a $500,000 advance for
a young adult version of Dreams From My
Father .
Obama's books were huge sellers
in China, where publishing is largely government controlled, meaning he likely received Chicom
money in the Oval Office. His own State Department bought $79,000
worth of his books to distribute as gifts.
As with Trump, nothing Obama did was illegal. There are no laws per se against a president
making money. Yet no one bothered to raise ethical questions. No one claimed he sought the
presidency as a bully ATM machine. No one claimed his frequent messaging about his father was
designed to move books. No one held TV hearings on his profits or how taxpayer funds were used
to buy his books. It's not "everybody does it" or "whataboutism"; it's why does the media treat
two very similar situations so very differently?
Max Boot confessed why. The media has created a pitch-and-toss game with Democrats, running
false, exaggerated, and shallowly reported stories to generate
calls for
hearings , which in turn breathe life into the corruption stories they live off. We will
soon see how far last week's breathless drama -- unnamed "whistleblower" leaks supposedly
charging Trump with pressuring the Ukrainian president to investigate his rival Joe Biden --
will go.
Boot and his ilk are doing a new job. Journalism to them is for resistance, condemnation,
arousal, and regime change. And that's one way democracy does die.
"The Israeli military is armed with the latest fast jets and precision weaponry, yet it has
turned to its fleet of drones to hit targets in Iraq. Deniability has played a big factor
– the ability of drones to elude radar and therefore keep targets guessing about who
actually bombed them is playing well for Israeli leaders who are trying to prevent an
increasingly lethal shadow war with Iran from developing into an open conflict."
Right! If you get into the cui bono game, the list is pretty long including US shale oil
companies.
Russia, too. I'm surprised that the 'Russia dun it crowd' (Team Pelosi) hasn't blamed it
all on Putin. I mean, isn't everything bad that happened since Nov. 2016 Putin's fault.
But now it would appear that Iran is the villain du jour. Maybe they'll even get blamed
for Trump's reelection next year!
In terms of cui bono, you can group Wall Street investors and banksters in with shale oil
companies they desperately need the shale oil companies to finally start generating some
profits. What better way than to knock out shal oil's biggest competitor?
But, as I said, Iran has become the villain du jour, even though they have the deterrent
capability of closing the Strait of Hormuz and taking most ME oil off line. To hear the
neocons, even that deterrence is not enough to dissuade them from a war on Israel's behalf.
To them war is certainly preferable to trying to make room for Iranian sovereignty and assure
the flow of ME oil to world markets.
Could this be the sort of false-flag
op where explosives are planted by
non-foreign operators to make a lot of
smoke and minimal real damage, and make
it look like the work of 'enemy missiles',
sort of like the 'Wag The Dog' plot. It
might be well worth it to Certain Parties
to even do a modest amount of real damage.
Iran's Foreign Minister Vows 'All-Out War'
if US or Saudis Strike https://nyti.ms/2AxMgFi
NYT - Richard Pérez-Peña - September 19
A military strike against Iran by the United States or Saudi Arabia would result in "an
all-out war," Iran's foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said on Thursday, repeating his
government's denial of responsibility for an attack last week that damaged Saudi oil
facilities.
The Houthi rebel faction in Yemen -- supported by Iran in its fight against a Saudi-led
coalition -- claimed responsibility for the Saturday attack. But Saudi and American officials
blamed Iran, raising the threat of military retaliation. But so far it is not clear how they
will react.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out an "act of war" with the
aerial attacks, but President Trump has appeared reluctant to order a military strike.
...
----
Trump's National Security Aides to Meet on
Possible Iran Options https://nyti.ms/2QgO2pa
NYT - Eric Schmitt - September 19
WASHINGTON -- Senior national security officials from across the government are scheduled
to meet Thursday to refine a list of potential targets to strike in Iran, should President
Trump order a military retaliation for missile and drone attacks on Saudi Arabian oil fields
last weekend, officials said.
Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Joseph F. Dunford Jr., the chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, are to present the updated options to Mr. Trump at a National Security
Council meeting scheduled for Friday, a senior American official said.
In advance of being presented with the newest set of options, Mr. Trump has sent different
signals on his intentions. He has threatened to order "the ultimate option" of a strike on
Iran to punish the nation for its behavior, but also has made clear his continued opposition
to ordering the United States into another war in the Middle East.
The Pentagon is advocating military strikes that one senior official described as at the
lower end of options. The official said that any retaliation could focus on more clandestine
operations -- actions that military planners predict would not prompt an escalation by Iran.
...
"The Russian Foreign Ministry issued an immediate response to the new US measures
denouncing them as "illegitimate."
"This will not affect our approaches to Iran," said Zamir Kabulov, the director of the
Russian Foreign Ministry Second Asian Department. "As we planned, we will continue to
cooperate with Iran in the banking sector. This will have no effect [on Moscow's position]
"
While Beijing, which counts Saudi Arabia as its second-largest source of oil imports, was
somewhat more circumspect, it is highly unlikely that any new measures will affect its own
ties to Iran. China accounts for half of Iran's sharply reduced oil exports, and Beijing and
Tehran this month signed $400 billion worth of deals connected to Beijing's Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI) of which Iran is a key component.
The sanctions imposed by the Trump administration after ripping up the nuclear agreement
in May 2018 amount to an economic blockade, tantamount to a state of war. They have led to
shortages of food and medicines, leaving cancer patients to die."
"Tehran has vehemently denied these accusations. The Houthi rebels, who control the
bulk of Yemen, claimed responsibility, declaring the attacks an act of self-defense against
the murderous US-backed war that the Saudi monarchy has waged against Yemen for nearly
four-and-a-half years, killing nearly 100,000 Yemenis and driving 8 million more to the brink
of starvation."
"The cost of the Patriot missile defense systems run into the billions while the price of
each missile that they fire is estimated at $5 million. This massively expensive weaponry
proved useless in countering drones costing a few thousand dollars that devastated the
world's largest oil refining facility."
The comments
"Authoritarian Western governments like the US, the UK, and Sweden preach an enlightened,
exalted rhetorical reverence for "the rule of law" and absolute dedication to "justice",
civil rights and due process. Meanwhile, whenever it serves their interests, their actions
are heinously and ruthlessly tyrannical, brutal, hypocritical, and capricious.
As we have seen over and over with Julian Assange, governments and their ministers of
(ostensible) justice will simply run roughshod over any technicalities and niceties that
ordinarily compel the release of incarcerated persons."
Pepe Escoabar (via Saker) has an interesting take on the Houthis capabilities and potential.
He suggests that they could destabilize Saudi Arabia via a lightning grab of Mecca and an
uprising of Shia in the eastern provinces. The recent successful drone attacks certainly must
have brought a smile to the Shia in that region and shown the ineptness of the Saudi military
and their US backers.
It is amusing to watch the US squirm over the failure of its radars and missile systems to
detect the attack. Also, if there any doubt, it was clearly the Houthis's handiwork likely
with help from Hezbollah. There was a good story on the drone's technical capabilities which
IIRC, carries a 100 pound warhead, flies at about 120 miles per hour and has a 1,000 mile
range approximately. Presumably, it uses GPS for guidance. Here is the link to the Escobar
story:
Mecca and the Red Sea port city of Jeddah are well within the range of drone and missile
strikes by the Houthis. They are not much farther away from the Yemeni border than Abqaiq is.
The Abqaiq attack serves as a warning to Riyadh of how vulnerable Mecca and Jeddah are, and
that warning could even have been the original intention of the attack.
I notice that Andrei Martyanov says that the Patriot systems have blind zones since they are
restricted to operate 7 degrees above the horizontal. According to Martyanov, this is in
contrast to the Russian S-series AD systems where missiles are launched vertically and then
take "a ride on the beam" towards the target. (This seems to explain the launch pattern of
these missiles where they are "popped" out vertically, whence their engines ignite sending
the missile off, (often) very low and flat towards their targets. http://smoothiex12.blogspot.com/2019/09/why-would-you-ask.html
From what Martyanov writes, it would seem that the US stuff has very serious design flaws.
Thanks for posting, I LOVED this episode of Crosstalk, because it was so contentious.
That delicious catfight between the "Arab" and the "Persian".
Arab guy clearly a vicious moron.
Persian guy seemed rational and logical compared to Arab guy, and then he goes on that
delicious rant about "What we will do to you, fucking Saudis, if you attack us!"
And not only Saudi Arabia will descend into Dante's hell, but AmeriKKKa too!
In complete fairness, though, Peter does simply talk over panelists he doesn't like until
they have to stop talking, because listeners can't make sense of two people talking loudly at
the same time. CrossTalk has its own politics, and the Arab was never going to get equal time
or have his viewpoints uncritically aired. He should have been allowed the same courtesy
everyone else was. I disagree strongly with what he was saying, but the immediate rejection
of his views and shouting him down did absolutely nothing to make the Kingdom look like the
party in the wrong.
Washington now claims cruise missiles were involved as well as drones. What bullshit. (a) An
enemy who was able to strike the Saudi oil fields with cruise missiles sent over drones as
well? (b) The Saudis had 50% of their damaged capacity back online in only a day, driving the
oil price spike back down? After a cruise-missile strike? Did they carry a warhead the size
of an orange? The Saudi oil fields are defenseless against a cruise-missile attack?
It's hard to say because some stuff is clearly being held back from public scrutiny. We don't
even know which weapons were fired at what targets.
My only thoughts about the domes is that they only need to be punctured by a high speed
delayed incendiary. If it is a weight trade off for range fuel v. warhead, then range wins if
popping a hole and igniting the gas is the aim. I don't know enough about the other
targets.
As others have pointed out, what is the intent behind these attacks? Is it an 'act
of war', a 'warning shot' or other? There are games within games and bluffs within bluffs
being played here.
You know who I feel sorry for in Saudi Arabia right now? The Air Defense Forces officer
in charge of the short range air defenses at the Abqaiq oil facility. He'll be lucky to get
out of this with his life.
On the one hand, elements within the USA want war with Iran really, really badly. Of slightly
greater value, though, is the opportunity to portray Trump as weak and dithering because he
hesitates to commit to it. But usually if Washington claims to have 'evidence it cannot
reveal publicly' , that's because it is making it up. When it makes up evidence which it
claims clearly demonstrates this or that, it always has a reason. I'm not sure yet what it
is, but the USA is very serious about putting Iran in the frame for it. They may have had
something to do with it, but like the so-convenient 'chemical attacks' in Syria. Iran would
have been beyond foolish to do something like that right now, while their attitude suggests
if they had done it, they'd be quite happy to own it.
It was a mystery to me how cruise missiles, drones or whatever could have evaded detection,
much less engagement, by US-supplied air defense systems. Per MOA, it was easy – US
systems such as the Patriot stare in one direction.
The PAC-2 and PAC-3 systems are sector defenses as their radars do not rotate. They can
only see an arc of 120°. In the case of the Saudis those radars only look towards the
east to Iran whcih is the most likely axis of attack. That left the crude oil processing
plant in Abqaiq completely unprotected against attacks from any other direction. Neither
Saudi Arabia nor the U.S. know from where the attack really came.
The foregoing explains why the US is unsure where the missiles originated despite the
knee-jerk braying by Pompeo. Moreover, it be be assumed that US Navy ships in the Gulf
certainly were scanning the skies yet apparently detected nothing from Iran. So it really
does look like the missiles originated from Yemen way.
I'd be careful about blaming Iran, in view of the allegation that the US-supplied air
defenses are focused in that direction and apparently did not even see the attack coming. It
also casts doubt on American bellowing that they have loads of new evidence that Iran was
responsible. If they had, why didn't they try to stop it?
What I find really amazing in that paragraph quoted from MoA is that these radars have such a
limited capability in surveying the skies. A 120° arc is about the same as the vision
span / field of view of one human eye. Two eyes working together increase the span to
210° or just over. How is it that current US radar defence technology development can't
produce a system of radars so that each can rotate at least 180° and can be paired with
another radar to provide a full 360° range of surveillance?
MOA suggests that the US has become stuck in the mindset that it will be always on the
offense thus has no need for a real defensive capability. That sort of worked with Iraq and
Grenada but against a country that can hit back, not so much. That profoundly inept piece of
junk Patriot missile system is proof positive.
I am not sure that stupidity is ever amazing- after all, it is very easy to do stupid things.
(Think Singapore, 1941) In all this, what took me a long time to accept is how
technologically advanced the Russian missile technology is- for example, it seems that
frequent swarm attacks by drones on the Russian air base at all been destroyed. Many decades
of research have clearly gone into the development of this technology. I suspect that the key
to this development was the strategic decision made by the Soviets back in the 70's to
develop missiles to destroy US carrier groups. Over a long period of time their missiles
became supersonic, and eventually the manoeuvrable hypersonic missiles that they have today.
Putin seems very confident that it will take many years for the US to catch up. He might be
right: "even 9 women cannot produce a baby within a month".
Kalen • 16 hours ago
There is no doubt that growing global tensions provocative rhetoric, erratic reckless
behavior of leadership , irrationality in global diplomatic , political or economic relations
permeating official propaganda narratives serve overall purpose of stoking nationalism as
counteroffensive to exploding class struggle worldwide.
In case of Saudis though it is all about destabilization of outdated medieval regime by US
and Israel via enticing trained in cruelty MbS to unnecessary useless and most of all
un-winnable Yemen war that in fact presents existential threat to the very existence of Saudi
puppet regime itself.
It is likely that Saudis regime will be at some point swept from power in the name of
progressive .. nationalism in fact fascism one way or another via sort of Arab color
revolution, as this medieval circus of flaccid clowns is too easy target for socialist
revolution.
In fact Saudi Arabia is ironically the prime place with required conditions for socialist
revolution to erupt not only because class division is so sharp and visible even embedded
into state law but also because working class there is truly international from Philippines,
Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and entire MENA and level of their exploitation is horrific
practically amounts to slavery.
The fragility of Saudi regime was clearly shown by this attack on practically unprotected
critical oil infrastructure from low intensity warfare threat Saudi are engaged in fact by
proxy in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere, while spending $billions on useless junk that
in fact does not work at all as Houti ballistic missile attacks proved as while Soviet era
shor range ballistic missile missed the targets most of damage was done by falling patriot II
missiles falling down after missing their targets.
And hence Saudis and Turkey long wanted to buy Russian air defense systems already bought
by China, India and others triggering US sanctions against companies and individuals
involved.
US Empire is already a technical and scientific failure founded on fraud in military area
as well.
The question if quite primitive Houti forces were possibly able to pull of such attack of
about twenty armed drones (claimed by Houties 1500 km range) must be answered yes, with
recent technical support of Iranians (after reimposition of embargo) and local
spotters/controllers on the ground.
The similar swarm drone attacks was pulled by AQ terrorist affiliated forces (with US
training) several times against Russian Air and Navy base in Syria all unsuccessfully mostly
due to Russia electronic warfare capability and Panzir 2 system purposefully designed to
defend from drone swarm attacks.
The rather meek and balanced response of markets and politicians so far to this on its
face conditions imminent regional war involving nuclear powers tells me that there is no real
intention so far to start a war not because of better angel of ruling elites nature but
because they do not yet feel directly threatened by socialist revolution.
For them much valuable counterrevolutionary tool is inspiring nationalism simple threat of
war rather than war itself as it always unleashing law of unforeseen consequences and fuels
real political instability potentially threatening their own empires of domination.
Best way to prevent war is not defending national elites but engaging in international
socialist revolution.
jplotinus Kalen • 12 hours ago
In my view, the fact that Saudi Arabia's air defense system was unable to thwart an attack on
major oil infrastructure is quite damning and worthy of being the leading element of this
incident. However, as the Saudis have bought and paid for the very expensive but apparently
ineffective Patriot air defense system means that as little coverage as possible of this
aspect of the story will likely ensue in mainstream media.
I've noticed Putin has publicly offered to sell Saudi Arabia Russia's S-300 and S-400 air
defense systems. Hmmm
There will be no major war against Iran. The US will continue to try to strangle Iran but
success is becoming increasingly unlikely.
If there were to be a serious attack on Iran and Iran responded with its full capacity,
KSA could kiss its ass goodby. Desalination facilities would be targeted, oil infrastructure
would be destroyed including pipelines and loading facilities and power plants knocked out
all by missiles, US warships in the Gulf would be in dire straits as well. Yes, a social
revolution could then take place. I do wonder about the UAE. I hear that they are distancing
themselves from the Saudis lately.
The article and the comments..Absolute must read!!! (IMO)
e.g.
"Whatever the exact circumstances of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, they are being
exploited for the purpose of dragging the American people and all of humanity into a war that
can rapidly escalate into a regionwide and even global conflagration.
US strikes against Iran carried out under the pretext of retaliation for the attacks on
Saudi Arabia can trigger Iranian counterstrikes, sending US warships to the bottom of the
Persian Gulf and wreaking havoc on American military bases throughout the region.
The prospect of thousands of US soldiers and sailors dying as a result of Washington's
conspiracies and aggression carries with it the threat of the US government assuming
emergency powers and implementing police-state measures in the US itself in the name of
"national security."
This would, by no means, be an unintended consequence. The buildup to war is driven in
large measure by the escalation of social tensions and class struggle within the United
States itself, which has found fresh expression in the strike by 46,000 autoworkers against
General Motors. "
OR
"Charlotte Ruse • 12 hours ago
"If there is, as Washington claims, "no evidence' that the attacks were launched from Yemen,
one could, with equal if not greater justification, observe that there is likewise "no
evidence' that they were not launched by the US itself, or by its principal regional ally,
Israel.
If one proceeds from the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono? or Who benefits? Tehran is
the least likely suspect. There is clearly more to Washington's rush to judgment than meets
the eye."
Yes, Cui bono–who benefited most by this attack–all the usual neoconservative
warmongers who've been biting at the chomp for decades to go to War with Iran–the
"non-interventionist buffoon" may grant them their wish.
And undoubtedly, the usual Wall Street scum secured a financial "killing" as "Oil prices
rose 10 percent on Monday.
I think Tulsi Gabbard's tweet perfectly sums up who's in-charge of US foreign policy:
"Trump awaits instructions from his Saudi masters. Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's
bitch is not "America First." https://twitter.com/realDon
Iran having carried out the attack on the Abqaiq facilities from a southwest direction (when
it is to the northeast of the area of the attack) was a stunning achievement. How could Saudi
defences, aided by US satellites – and Israeli defences for that matter – have
possibly missed the Iranian drones or missiles as they circled around the entire Middle
Eastern region without being shot down before hitting those oil storage tanks?
"The barbaric war waged by Saudi Arabia on Yemen, with US military assistance, has been all
but omitted from the media coverage of the drone strikes. Since 2015, Saudi-led air strikes
on towns and cities in Houthi-held areas have killed tens of thousands of civilians, while
leaving 80 percent of the population in need of food aid and several million on the brink of
starvation.
Saudi war planes, armed with US and British bombs and provided with targeting information by
US officers based in Saudi Arabia, have carried out repeated attacks on civilian targets,
including schools, hospitals, residential areas, mosques and markets. Up to the end of last
year, the US also provided mid-air refueling for the Saudi-led onslaught.
Saudi Arabia has a huge military budget. Last year it ranked as the world's third highest
spender on military equipment, splurging for an estimated $67.6 billion. The ability of the
Houthi rebels to penetrate Saudi defences and strike crucial oil infrastructure has
heightened fears of further attacks."
(comment)
"Ric Size
The Trump administration & entire US political establishment must line-up behind the
narrative that Iran is responsible for this devastating drone strike. As noted in this
excellent article, Saudi Arabia now spends ~$68 billion annually on its military, and most of
this comes in the form of sophisticated weaponry from the US. But these expensive
instruments-of-death were unable to stop a coordinated drone attack from Yemeni rebels. This
calls into question the usefulness of Saudi Arabia-US alliance, and the sustainability of the
global petrodollar market.
A scapegoat is needed, and quickly. Look for an all-out war drive in the media, against Iran,
as a cover-up to this disaster. Gasoline prices will rise by at least a dollar a gallon
within a month, which is another embarrassment for political leaders during an election
cycle, and an added expense for workers who commute by vehicle."
"... The head of the White House, Donald Trump, declared that American policy towards the Ukraine was senseless of and added that Moscow should be a friend of Washington, and that no one cared about the Ukrainians. The day before, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said that the European Union was experiencing fatigue from the Ukraine. ..."
The head of the White House, Donald Trump, declared that American policy towards the
Ukraine was senseless of and added that Moscow should be a friend of Washington, and that no
one cared about the Ukrainians. The day before, Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid said that
the European Union was experiencing fatigue from the Ukraine.
US President Donald Trump considers US actions in the Ukraine senseless, which actions
at the same time aggravate relations with Russia, The Washington Post reports, citing a
former senior White House official.
According to the newspaper interlocutor, the president takes the position that
"Russians should be our friends".
"What we do in the Ukraine is pointless and annoying Russia", he said, describing the
president's opinion.
Earlier, former US Vice President Joe Biden called on Trump to publish a transcript of
a telephone conversation with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky.
"... Ukraine have never kept to the ceasefire and have been destroying settlements -- once they get control of the border – Donbass is finished. ..."
"... You mention the killing in Mariupol. The assassinations will continue and the people of Donbass will be made to pay. ..."
"... Five years has shown that real hatred has been unleashed – this is not going to go away. ..."
"... the Steinmeir formula is a con to hasten the end of Donbass. This was the guy who signed the agreement with Yanukovich on early elections etc and then stood back when he was overthrown. ..."
"... I also agree. This is a trap. No treaty should be signed unless DPR/LPR are guaranteed to control the border with Russia. ..."
"... The best defense against that would be the vote, which must take place first and under OSCE supervision, without Ukrainian meddling or coercion. If the vote indicated that a majority wants to return to Kiev's control, then that's what should happen. But I don't see it going that way. ..."
Major issue with this formula is "The transfer of the border"
Ukraine have never kept to the ceasefire and have been destroying settlements -- once they
get control of the border – Donbass is finished.
You mention the killing in Mariupol. The assassinations will continue and the people of Donbass will be made to pay.
Five years has shown that real hatred has been unleashed – this is not going to go
away.
Germany in my view plays a double game – they want this to happen – the Steinmeir formula is a con to hasten the end of Donbass. This was the guy who signed the
agreement with Yanukovich on early elections etc and then stood back when he was
overthrown.
We'll see. According to the Minsk Agreement, the elections and the autonomous status were
supposed to be settled before the border was returned to Ukrainian control. That has always
been an issue for Kuh-yiv. It wants to be trusted to have control over the Donbas before the
other elements are fulfilled. But as His Nibs Shaun Of The Dead Walker has pointed out before
now, 'the border' in that region is largely an illusion, and checkpoints are for those who
have to travel by road. Military units, especially heavy armor, do not.
I think what is most likely to happen is little troublesome uprisings across a broad
front, initiated by Azov Battalion and other Ukie militias and making use of 'loyal'
Ukrainians in Donbas and Lugansk.
This would create a governance problem for the regions, and
be portrayed in the western press as an earnest desire among the inhabitants to return to
Ukraine, 'now that the Russians have gone'.
The best defense against that would be the vote,
which must take place first and under OSCE supervision, without Ukrainian meddling or
coercion. If the vote indicated that a majority wants to return to Kiev's control, then
that's what should happen. But I don't see it going that way.
But what of the Russian army that has supposedly been entrenched in the Donbass these past
few years?
Surely, the Russian Army will not allow this ethnic cleansing to happen, for that surely
is what will happen, albeit "ethnic" is not the right word, even though the brain-dead Nazi
"true Slavs" from the West believe it is.
"Our actions have to become offensive and have the disintegration of the Russian
Federation as a conscious ultimate goal. This is the only effective long-term solution that
the vast majority of countries will benefit from.
attempts to pacify Russia lead only to the growth of its arrogance, as was was the case
with the return of the Russian delegation to the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of
Europe.
Attempts to reach an agreement in a civilised way with the Russian Federation are also
doomed to fail, "since such a decision contradicts the main expansionist thinking of the
Kremlin regime".
"The Russian Federation, in its present borders and with its present resources, is never
capable of becoming a normal civilised state", said the diplomat.
Aleksandrovich emphasises that "ways of disintegrating the Russian Federation don't demand
conducting military operations".
The ambassador lists a number of tools via which it is possible to "pacify Russia":
1. personal sanctions against bosses with the freezing of assets and a ban on
entrance;
2. tight restrictions for energy, bank, and financial-military and technical sectors;
3. a ban on the sale of modern technologies;
4 .a collapse in oil prices.
"There comes a time when the last evil empire has to fall," summarized the Ukrainian
diplomat.
In his recent interview, Oleksandr Oleksandrovych claimed Russia 'uses Serbia to
destabilize situation in Western Balkans and thereby destroy Europe'
09:15, 3 November 2017
Ukrainian ambassador's views on Russia-Serbia relations and Russia's role in
continental security, all the more expressed publicly, are unacceptable. Ivica Tonchev, the
State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Serbia said this as quoted by
Frontnews International, commenting on the statement recently made by the Ukrainian
diplomat.
'The main role of ambassadors is to do everything to improve bilateral relations,
primarily political and economic, as well as all other forms of cooperation. The Ambassador
of Ukraine to Serbia, Oleksandr Oleksandrovych, seems to be constantly forgetting this, since
all his activities are reduced to fruitless attempts to break relations between the Republic
of Serbia and the Russian Federation. In the latest series of scandalous interviews he gave,
he said that the Republic of Serbia does not pursue an independent foreign policy, that is,
it is in the hands of Russia, thus destabilizing the entire region of the Western Balkans,
thereby 'destroying Europe,' Tonchev said.
He also called on the Ukrainian government to take action on the Ambassador and his
unacceptable behavior so that Serbia 'was not forced to make the usual steps in such
situations.'
In recent interviews with Serbian media, Ukraine's Ambassador to Serbia Alexander
Alexandrovich said that Russia is using Serbia to destabilize the situation in the region, in
particular, encouraging separatism in Bosnia and trying to influence Macedonia. The
ambassador also mentioned the Serbian mercenaries fighting on the side of the Russian armed
formations in Donbas.
Oleksandr Oleksandrovych: he might be better suited to playing Count Dracula in horror
movies.
In fact, the ambassador stepped so much out of line in November 2017 that even
Rumpleklimkin, then Banderastan Foreign Minister, was forced to call him to hold
consultations in Kiev because of his statements to the Serbian media.
At the same time, Ivica Toncev, the State Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of
Serbia, stated that the Ukrainian Ambassador Oleksandr Oleksandrovych's statements concerning
Russian influence on Serbia were unacceptable and threatened him with possible consequences
in accordance with the Vienna Convention.
Novosad is a graduate of the humanitarian lyceum in Kiev, and in 2011 she ended a
bachelor degree at the National University "Kiyevo-Mogilyansky Academy" as a "political
scientist". Two years later she received a master's degree in the Dutch Maastricht. She
studied in Spain and the Czech Republic, and was a scholar of the Soros fund. In addition, as Novosad wrote on Facebook, she took part in the Ukrainian-Canadian administrative program,
within the framework of which she attended a special course ran by the Canadian
authorities.
I.e., as we see, Anna Novosad is the classical representative of the new "Ukrainian
elite", which was raised and brought up abroad and which already is almost not connected to
Ukraine even at the mental level. And the reset of the Ukrainian authorities in the form of
"Zelensky's victory" was started to a large extent for the mass invasion of such artificially
grown mankurts that are supposed to completely remove people with a Soviet past and any ties
(family, friendly, business) with Russia from the country's governance structures.
And they absolutely do not need either knowledge of Ukrainian, knowledge of national
history, or understanding of what's admissible. Even intellectual qualities aren't especially
required from them, because their task is relaying the will of their masters and to control
their implementation.
And Farion doesn't like her because she can't talk the shitkicker Slav dialect as good as
she can. In fact, it's debatable whether Novosad can talk Yukie with any competence at
all.
Yes, what's the matter with her? Real Ukrainians ride sturdy ponies and wear their hair in
the khokol style. Government superiors are referred to as 'Hetman'. And there's a lot of
kneeling. The age of machines is an utter betrayal of Kievan ideals.
Seeing that both the Canadian ambassador to Banderastan and his boss the Canadian Foreign
Minister having family histories rooted in western Ukraine / Banderastan Ground Zero –
Waschuk's father and Freeland's maternal grandmother both from Ivano-Frankivsk – what
thoughts are we expected to have on Waschuk's participation and Freeland's approval for him
to attend other than that cliche: "Birds of a feather flock together?"
Ivano-Frankivsk; formerly Stanyslaviv, Stanislau, or Stanisławów. Became part of
the UkSSR within the USSR as per the shifting of the pre-WWII Eastern Polish frontier (set by
the Treaty of Versailles, 1919, but ignored by Poland) westwards and the transference of the
Habsburg Austro-Hungarian Empire's Kronland of Galitsia, capital Krakow and
administrative language Polish and not German as in other Kronländer , with the
exception of Hungarian in the Hungarian part of the dual Hapsburg Empire.
Religion: Roman Catholic or Greek Uniate, depending whether you are a Polish Pan or a
Ruthenian peasant shitkicker.
Built in the mid-17th century as a fortress of the Polish Potocki family,
Stanisławów was annexed to the Habsburg Empire during the First Partition of
Poland in 1772, after which it became the property of the State within the Austrian
Empire.
The fortress was slowly transformed into one of the most prominent cities at the foothills
of the Carpathian Mountains. After World War I, for several months, it served as a temporary
capital of the West Ukrainian People's Republic.
Galitsia, as Porky Poroshenko said, is the essence of Banderastan the Ukraine.
"Higher Justice is always done Once again, using humanistic principles, I address the
enemies of the Ukraine: 'Surrender to Ukrainian law enforcement! Voluntarily go to Ukrainian
prisons and don't leave them! Because God's punishment will inevitably come! Glory to the
nation! Death to enemies!'" -- Dmitry Yarosh, commenting on his Facebook page on the
murder of a DPR militiaman in Mariupol.
What can be said about this? A day has already passed since this extremist statement
was made, but no human rights organisation or international observer has reacted. The murder
of a DPR militiaman in Mariupol is obviously on the hands of nationalist battalions, but this
case, like many others, will be registered as unsolved or fabricated. The fact of the
exemplary punishment of people who supported the creation of the People's Republics testifies
to the true attitude of Kiev towards the residents of Donbass. That is why Zelensky is
against amnesty and wants elections after the People's Militia lays down their arms. As soon
as the UAF come here, objectionable persons will be simply slashed and killed, and Yarosh
only confirms this
I'll say it again, the world's great democracies don't have a problem with little
nazis and extremists. After all, they can be put back in their boxes when time is due,
just as they did with Adolf Hitler and just as they did with ISIS in Syria.
You wonder how many times these countries go around this bush of backing 'small groups'
that they then 'lose control of' leading to a much larger conflagration.
Accidental? Unintended? Repetitive? You won't have the great and good democratic
institutions or the representatives of the great free press publicizing cause and
effect much at all. What a bunch of Britneys!
As I understand it if a scope equipped assault automatic weapon can be targeted at point A to
point B, its versatility enables it to operate the other way 'round..from B to A.
And as regards the "crimes" in the Ukraine that he mentions, I should not imagine that
amongst those he includes the very recent and public murder of a Mariupol "Vatnik" and the
praise for which crime the murderer/s has/have very publicly received in Banderastan.
The clipped paragraph in Boyes' Times article above reads:
Now we're at it again. Thirty-five Ukrainians, including a film director and two dozen
hapless sailors, were this month traded for some hardnut separatists including Vladimir
Tsemakh, the commander of a Russian-backed unit in Donetsk which shot down the civilian MH17
airliner in 2014.
Plenty of Dutch and Australian relatives of the victims of that Malaysian Airlines
flight are unhappy that Tsemakh is
Perhaps it seems to Trump that Putin is the lever that will raise his moral weight and
authority. Perhaps he seems to him to be a useful partner in times of extreme global
confusion and volatility. It is possible that, in the opinion of the American president, a
rapprochement with Putin will strengthen his reputation in the world, and will by no means
will look like a fatal retreat. However, the principle should be that relations with Russia
cannot return to normal, as long as it keeps the Crimea, cynically taken away from the
Ukraine five years ago.
The Kremlin will try to fool the new and inexperienced president of the Ukraine, hoping
that Western leaders will put pressure on him and forget a lot. However, the country where
Sergey Skripal and his daughter were poisoned right before everyone's eyes should not
silently watch this rehabilitation.
[back translation from the Russian]
Hear him, hear him, I say!
Let's hear it again for Great Britain!!!!
Those British are no fools and know full well what those damned Russkies are up to!
Wherever you may now be, eat your heart out La Russophobe !
I can't remember if I have mentioned this earlier, but last Sunday lunchtime, when I was
out in the sticks, I heard this snippet of information on the lunchtime radio news: Russian
secondary schools ("high schools" in US usage and literally "middle schools" in Russian) have
now been internationally recognized as the best in the world.
I have tried to follow it up on the Internet, but nothing there about it, so it must be
Russian propagandistic "fake news", mustn't it, because if it were true, then it would have
been announced in the Western news media -- wouldn't it?
Moscow State University came first again in the ICPC finals in 2019. Other universities in
the top 12 included two other Russian universities and universities in Poland (2), Hong Kong
(2), the two Koreas (1 each), Iran (1), Japan (1), Taiwan (1) and the United States (1).
Do I detect a University of Sydney prejudice here? You could have easily drawn attention to
the fact that my old institution came 6th. It seems UNSW didn't put a team in this year. I
have had an interest in Mathematical Olympiads for many years and a keen academic convenor is
necessary for success. As far as ME's comment about Russian secondary schools being the
World's best, I would love to have a reference. I find the claim hard to believe simply
because the parameters used to determine these rankings invariably depend on the most recent
(Western) fads in education. This is one reason why Russian universities have such mediocre
international rankings. On the other hand, I have noticed how enthusiastic Putin is about the
Russian education system.
That's right, folks! Lest you should forget, Russians are inveterate boozers!
The article has limited access, but here's its writer's opening line:
We can probably assume absolutist monarch Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and Vladimir
Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary who displaced him in 1917, didn't see eye to eye.
The Commie and the Autocrat, eh?
One small point: Lenin did not displace Nicholas II in October [OS] 1917, when the
Bolshevik coup took place.
In February [OS] 1917, Nicholas II was advised to abdicate by the army chief and two duma
deputies. He accepted their advice and abdicated.
Oh, and another thing: the Orcs aren't the top boozers in Europe.
The world top 10 countries as regards litres of pure alcohol consumption per capita
are:
Yesterday was the 80th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of eastern Polish territories.
I get sick to death of reading articles in Western rags and in comments to them, and of
the opinions of the ignorant on social networks, that the USSR and Nazi Germany jointly
invaded Poland on 1st September 1939, thereby triggering off WWII in Europe and that that war
was the result of the complicity of two totalitarian states.
The following article concerning this accusation was published in KP on 16 September of
this year :
Poland did everything for Stalin to attack it 17 days after Hitler
The September Red Army campaign in the west: was it for "the liberation of Old Russian lands"
or an occupation?
Our Slavic neighbours once again have a reason to attack Russia. Exactly 80 years ago, on
September 17, 1939, the Red Army crossed the Polish border and annexed to the USSR the
current territories of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus. This happened only 17 days after
the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland, thereby starting the Second World War, and just
three-and-a-half weeks after the conclusion of the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact.
So it turns out that "the dictators Stalin and Hitler together divided the freedom-loving
republic", and we are the same international criminals as were the German Nazis or are we?
"KP" and Dmitry Surzhik, a candidate for historical sciences and an expert on World War II,
have dissected the myths about that campaign.
Myth number 1. Stalin cynically attacked a democratic country.
On September 17, 1939, the troops of the Commonwealth [Poland -- ME] had already
been defeated by the Wehrmacht and the Polish government had fled abroad. Let me remind you
that Stalin himself acted quite differently during the critical days of the 1941 invasion
[of the USSR by Nazi Germany and its fascist allies -- ME] : his phone call to the army
was known to all: "The headquarters remains at the front, I remain in Moscow. Get hold of
shovels and dig graves for yourself". Why did he say this? Because everyone was well aware of
the fact that when there is no central government, then there is no state participating in a
war: it disappears in every sense of the word, including as a subject of international law.
This was understood even by the then Polish government. Caught in exile in France, it issued
its first document, the Angers Declaration, in which it stated that it was at war with the
Soviet Union but de jure it did not declare war, realizing, perhaps, that there were
no legal grounds for this.
Myth number 2. Poland fell victim to the collusion of two totalitarian regimes.
They like to reproach us with "the pre-war alliance of Stalin and Hitler": they recall
the joint parade of the Red Army and the Wehrmacht (held on September 21, 1939 in the former
Polish, and now Byelorussian Brest), but the chief satellite of Nazi Berlin in Eastern Europe
was only Warsaw. The Germans had concluded a non-aggression pact with Poland back in 1934 --
the so-called Pilsudski-Hitler Pact. Jozef Pilsudski was considered one of the founding
fathers of independent Poland; in Germany a translation of his memoirs had been pompously
published. And if we are going to talk about joint parades, such a parade was held in Warsaw
on November 11, 1938 in honour of the independence of Poland, when the German military was
present as guests of honour. There was even the likelihood of an "allied" Polish-German
invasion of the USSR -- such prospects had been analyzed in a spring of 1938 note made by the
Chief of the General Staff of the Red Army Boris Shaposhnikov made for the People's Commissar
of Defence. So for Warsaw to point its finger at us for concluding a "Soviet-German alliance"
is the height of cynicism.
Myth number 3. The USSR invaded the eastern parts of Poland (just as Germany had done
in the western parts).
The interwar relations between Moscow and Warsaw were really tense. The eastern policy
of Poland was the so-called "Prometheism" -- a plan for splitting up the USSR according to
the nationalities within it. To this end, Warsaw worked with anti-Soviet immigrants,
including Ukrainian and Georgian nationalists. The ultimate task was to create a "Poland from
sea to sea" (from the Baltic to the Crimea) at the expense of Russian lands. [In Soviet
times, it was not acceptable to talk about the pre-war "Prometheism" of fraternal socialist
Poland. In the West, however, this project has been well studied -- for example, in the
historical studies at the Hoover Institute in the USA - -- Ed.]. Moscow, of course, knew
about these plans. However, during its Polish campaign, the Red Army did not advance too
deeply, stopping only at the Curzon Line. This line, the ethnic border between the Poles, on
the one hand, and Ukrainians and Belarusians on the other, had been agreed upon by the
Entente after the First World War and was to have become the eastern border of Poland. But
Warsaw, because of the weakness of Soviet Russia after the civil war, had been able to seize
these territories.
Myth number 4. That invasion violated even international law then, not to mention
current international law.
They have now forgotten In the West that in 1938 Poland, together with Hitler,
participated in the partition of Czechoslovakia. The Teshinsky region was seized under the
pretext that many ethnic Poles lived there. The guarantor of Czechoslovak security under
international agreements was then the Soviet Union. On the 23rd of September, 1938, shortly
before the shameful partition of this Slavic country, the USSR presented an ultimatum to
Warsaw, namely that if it took part in this partition, then Moscow would withdraw its
obligation not to attack Poland in the future. But our neighbours remained silent, thereby
predetermining their fate by opening the "diplomatic gate" for a future Polish Red Army
campaign.
Here it is interesting to recall the words that Winston Churchill said after September
17, 1939:
"Russia pursues a cold policy in its own interests. We should prefer that the Russians
remain in their current positions (Curzon Lines in 1939 – Ed.) as friends and allies of
Poland, and not as invaders. But to protect Russia from the Nazi threat, it was clearly
necessary for the Russian armies to stay on this line", said one of the then key British
politicians. That is, at that time, for some reason, no one considered the actions of the
USSR to be a "crime", including even the "Western partners".
This Russian historian, in quoting Churchill above, is perhaps thinking of Churchill's
"riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma" speech, made when he was not prime minister of
the UK and still an "outsider", as it were, in his own Conservative party, which Churchillian
phrase is often quoted in the West and out of context, of course, but seldom given in
full:
"I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery
inside an enigma. But perhaps there is a key. That key is Russian national interest. It
cannot be in accordance with the interest or the safety of Russia that Germany should plant
itself upon the shores of the Black Sea, or that it should overrun the Balkan States and
subjugate the Slavonic peoples of South-Eastern Europe. That would be contrary to the
historic life-interests of Russia" -- broadcast in London , 1st October, 1939.
And the key question really is this: if the UK and France had promised that they would
declare war against Germany if it should invade Poland, then why did those countries not
declare war on 17th September, 1939, against Germany's "ally", the USSR, which state,
according to present day historical revisionists, was jointly responsible for the onset of
WWII?
How Poland, shoulder to shoulder with Germany, prepared for war against the
USSR
Best of friends?
Statement by the Soviet Government to the Polish Government
23 September 1938
The Government of the USSR has received reports from various sources that troops of the
Polish Government are concentrated on the border of Poland and Czechoslovakia, preparing to
cross the border and forcefully occupy part of the territory of the Czechoslovak Republic.
Despite the widespread and alarming nature of these reports, the Polish Government has not
yet refuted them. The Government of the USSR expects such a refutation to follow immediately.
Nevertheless, in the event that such a refutation does not follow and if, in confirmation of
these reports, Polish troops have really crossed the border of the Czechoslovak Republic and
occupied its territory, the Government of the USSR considers it timely and necessary to warn
the Government of the Polish Republic, on the basis of Art. 2 of the non-aggression pact
concluded between the USSR and Poland on July 25, 1932, the Government of the USSR, in view
of this act of aggression committed by Poland against Czechoslovakia, would be forced to
denounce the aforementioned agreement without warning.
Source: "Izvestia" No. 225 (6692). 26 September 1938
The statement was transmitted at about 4 a.m. on September 23, 1938, by Deputy People's
Commissar for Foreign Affairs of the USSR, V.P. Potemkin, to the Chargé d'Affaires of
Poland to the USSR, T. Yankovsky.
Note: the USSR, France and Czechoslovakia were bound by an agreement to give military
assistance to Czechoslovakia in the event of aggression by third countries against it. So the
USSR had every right to point out to Poland that it was acting aggressively.
Transcript of the Deputy People's Commissar of Foreign Affairs with the chargé
d'affaires of Poland to the USSR
23 September 1938
The Polish chargé d'affaires, who asked me for an appointment today at 7
o'clock, came to me with the following message from his government:
"1. The measures taken in connection with the defence of the Polish state depend solely
on the government of the Polish Republic, which is not obligated to give explanations to
anyone.
2. The Government of the Polish Republic certainly knows the texts of the treaties that
it has concluded".
The response of the Polish government was drawn up in Polish and handed to me and
signed by the chargé d'affaires. An exact Russian translation of this text was agreed
upon by both Yankovsky and me. After a written communication, the chargé d'affaires
made the following oral statement to me: "The Polish government is surprised by the current
démarche of the USSR government, because no measures have been taken by the Polish
government on the Polish-Soviet border".
To this I replied that the démarche of the Soviet government was caused by
events on the Polish-Czechoslovak border. If the same measures were carried out by the Polish
government on the border of Poland and the USSR, the likely consequence would be not
diplomatic démarches, but appropriate counter-measures by the USSR government.
My answer was recorded by Jankowski.
V. Potemkin
Source: "Documents and materials on the history of Soviet-Polish relations", vol. VI. M ..
1969. with 364.
The response of the Poles was quite arrogant by reason of the fact that they were
already preparing to conclude a Polish-German Pact against the Soviet Union. For example,
here is what the Polish Ambassador in Paris, Lukasiewicz, wrote to the Ambassador of the USA
on 5 September 1938:
"A religious war is beginning between fascism and Bolshevism, and if the Soviet Union
renders aid to Czechoslovakia, Poland is ready to fight shoulder to shoulder with Germany
against the USSR.
The Polish government is confident that within three months Russian troops will be
completely defeated and Russia will no longer be even a semblance of a state".
As a result, Poland, not paying attention to our warnings, invaded the Czech Republic
and captured the Tieszyn region.
Already in December 1938, a report by the 2nd (reconnaissance) department of the main
headquarters of the Polish Army stated in plain terms that:
"The dismemberment of Russia lies at the basis of Polish politics in the East
Therefore, our possible position will be reduced to the following formula: who will take part
in this dismemberment? Poland should not remain passive during this wonderfully historical
moment. The task is to prepare well, both physically and spiritually, in advance The main
goal is to weaken and defeat Russia".
Source: "Z dziejow stosunkow polsko-radzieckich. Studia i materialy", T.III. Warszawa,
1968, S. 262, 287.
From all these materials, it is clear that pre-war Poland was an extremely toxic
military dictatorship, which posed a danger not only to its neighbours, but to itself. As a
result, this hyena, imagining itself to be a large European predator, would pay for its sins
within a year. True, all the peoples of Eastern Europe would suffer from this, while the
runaway Polish government would sit in London .
By referring to Poland as a "hyena", the writer of the above (partly translated) article
has clearly been inspired by none other than Winston Churchill:
"And now, when every one of these aids and advantages has been squandered and thrown
away, Great Britain advances, leading France by the hand, to guarantee the integrity of
Poland -- that very Poland which with hyena appetite had only six months before joined in the
pillage and destruction of the Czechoslovak State."
Interesting and new to me as well. I do recall reading several articles that the Mig 15 was a
huge leap in military technology and the Mig 17 was the best subsonic fighter ever fielded.
"Thirteen drones moved according to common combat battle deployment, operated by a single
crew. During all this time the American Poseidon-8 reconnaissance plane patrolled the
Mediterranean Sea area for eight hours," he noted. Read also Three layers of Russian air defense at Hmeymim air base in
Syria When the drones met with the electronic countermeasures of the Russian systems, they
switched to a manual guidance mode, he said. "Manual guidance is carried out not by some
villagers, but by the Poseidon-8, which has modern equipment. It undertook manual control," the
deputy defense minister noted.
"When these 13 drones faced our electronic warfare screen, they moved away to some distance,
received the corresponding orders and began to be operated out of space and receiving help in
finding the so-called holes through which they started penetrating. Then they were destroyed,"
Fomin reported.
"This should be stopped as well: in order to avoid fighting with the high-technology weapons
of terrorists and highly-equipped terrorists it is necessary to stop supplying them with
equipment," the deputy defense minister concluded.
The Russian Defense Ministry earlier said that on January 6 militants in Syria first
massively used drones in the attack on the Russian Hmeymim airbase and the Russian naval base
in Tartus. The attack was successfully repelled: seven drones were downed, and control over six
drones was gained through electronic warfare systems. The Russian Defense Ministry stressed
that the solutions used by the militants could be received only from a technologically advanced
country and warned about the danger of repeating such attacks in any country of the
world.
The forum
The eighth Beijing Xiangshan Forum on security will run until October 26 in Beijing. It was
organized by the Chinese Ministry of Defense, China Association for Military Science (CAMS) and
China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS). Representatives for defense
ministries, armed forces and international organizations, as well as former military officials,
politicians and scientists from 79 countries are taking part in the forum.
"... As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with. And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of the population eventually fall on their own sword. ..."
"... And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with Iran and Islamic state jihadists.) ..."
"... So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role. ..."
"... It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed. ..."
"... So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite). ..."
"... The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how much money to bribe top officials. ..."
"... As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR. ..."
"... The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't care less about regular citizens and their sufferings. ..."
"... BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say. ..."
"... BTW few republics in former USSR space managed to achieve the standard of living equal to the best years of the USSR (early 80th I think) See https://web.williams.edu/Economics/brainerd/papers/ussr_july08.pdf ..."
"... Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe. ..."
"... Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is corruptible and can eventually change sides. ..."
"... But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie" state. ..."
This is a very complex issue. And I do not pretend that I am right, but I think Brad is way too superficial to be taken seriously.
IMHO it was neoliberalism that won the cold war. That means that the key neoliberal "scholars" like Friedman and Hayek and
other intellectual prostitutes of financial oligarchy who helped to restore their power. Certain democratic politicians like Carter
also were the major figures. Carter actually started neoliberalization of the USA, continued by Reagan,
Former Trotskyites starting from Burnham which later became known as neoconservatives also deserve to be mentioned.
It is also questionable that the USA explicitly won the cold war. Paradoxically the other victim of the global neoliberal revolution
was the USA, the lower 90% of the USA population to be exact.
So there was no winners other the financial oligarchy (the transnational class.)
As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with.
And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of
the population eventually fall on their own sword.
And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level
of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with
Iran and Islamic state jihadists.)
The degeneration started with the death of the last charismatic leader (Stalin) and the passing of the generation which remembers
that actual warts of capitalism and could relate them to the "Soviet socialism" solutions.
So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to
produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the
theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role.
With bolshevism as the official religion, which can't be questioned, the society was way too rigid and suppressed "entrepreneurial
initiative" (which leads to enrichment of particular individuals, but also to the benefits to the society as whole), to the extent
that was counterproductive. The level of dogmatism in this area was probably as close to the medieval position of Roman Catholic
Church as we can get; in this sense it was only national that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became a pope John Paul II -- he was very
well prepared indeed ;-).
It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level
of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created
the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed.
So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects
the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite).
The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how
much money to bribe top officials.
As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And
the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of
Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and
by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive
efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR.
Explosion of far right nationalist sentiments without "Countervailing ideology" as Bolshevism was not taken seriously anymore
was the key factor that led to the dissolution of the USSR.
Essentially national movements allied with Germany that were defeated during WWII became the winners.
The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal
West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't
care less about regular citizens and their sufferings.
And the backlash created conditions for Putin coming to power.
BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably
by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of
Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say.
The majority of the xUSSR space countries have now dismal standard of living and slided into Latin American level of inequality
and corruption (not without help of the USA).
Several have civil wars in the period since getting independence, which further depressed the standard living. Most deindustrialize.
Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse
of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe.
Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion
to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is
corruptible and can eventually change sides.
But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism
is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie"
state.
So in the worst case it is the USA which might follow the path of the USSR and eventually disintegrate under the pressure of
internal nationalist sentiments. Such a victor...
Even now there are some visible difference between former Confederacy states and other states on the issues such as immigration
and federal redistributive programs.
"Thirteen drones moved according to common combat battle deployment, operated by a single
crew. During all this time the American Poseidon-8 reconnaissance plane patrolled the
Mediterranean Sea area for eight hours," he noted. Read also Three layers of Russian air defense at Hmeymim air base in
Syria When the drones met with the electronic countermeasures of the Russian systems, they
switched to a manual guidance mode, he said. "Manual guidance is carried out not by some
villagers, but by the Poseidon-8, which has modern equipment. It undertook manual control," the
deputy defense minister noted.
"When these 13 drones faced our electronic warfare screen, they moved away to some distance,
received the corresponding orders and began to be operated out of space and receiving help in
finding the so-called holes through which they started penetrating. Then they were destroyed,"
Fomin reported.
"This should be stopped as well: in order to avoid fighting with the high-technology weapons
of terrorists and highly-equipped terrorists it is necessary to stop supplying them with
equipment," the deputy defense minister concluded.
The Russian Defense Ministry earlier said that on January 6 militants in Syria first
massively used drones in the attack on the Russian Hmeymim airbase and the Russian naval base
in Tartus. The attack was successfully repelled: seven drones were downed, and control over six
drones was gained through electronic warfare systems. The Russian Defense Ministry stressed
that the solutions used by the militants could be received only from a technologically advanced
country and warned about the danger of repeating such attacks in any country of the
world.
The forum
The eighth Beijing Xiangshan Forum on security will run until October 26 in Beijing. It was
organized by the Chinese Ministry of Defense, China Association for Military Science (CAMS) and
China Institute for International Strategic Studies (CIISS). Representatives for defense
ministries, armed forces and international organizations, as well as former military officials,
politicians and scientists from 79 countries are taking part in the forum.
The defense minister also stressed that the number of threats to Russia is not declining
MOSCOW, September 22. /TASS/. The United States' belief in its own superiority could lead to
various unreasonable ideas, posing a major threat to Russia and other states, Russian Defense
Minister Sergei Shoigu said in his
interview with Moskovsky Komsomolets published on Sunday.
"When you think - as the United States continues to believe so by inertia - that the
balance of power has developed in your favor, various ideas may come to your head, including
unreasonable ones. I consider this situation now as the main threat, and not only for Russia,"
Shoigu said.
Meanwhile, the recognition of your vulnerability and a wish to maintain balance and
universal equal security "makes you turn your head on," the defense minister said, also
stressing that the number of threats to Russia is not declining.
At the same time, Shoigu voiced hope that a full-scale war is not on the horizon.
The priority task now is to ensure information security, he stressed, noting that "at the
current level of informatization and automation, there is a high probability of errors in the
weapons control system.".
"... As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with. And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of the population eventually fall on their own sword. ..."
"... And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with Iran and Islamic state jihadists.) ..."
"... So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role. ..."
"... It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed. ..."
"... So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite). ..."
"... The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how much money to bribe top officials. ..."
"... As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR. ..."
"... The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't care less about regular citizens and their sufferings. ..."
"... BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say. ..."
"... BTW few republics in former USSR space managed to achieve the standard of living equal to the best years of the USSR (early 80th I think) See https://web.williams.edu/Economics/brainerd/papers/ussr_july08.pdf ..."
"... Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe. ..."
"... Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is corruptible and can eventually change sides. ..."
"... But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie" state. ..."
This is a very complex issue. And I do not pretend that I am right, but I think Brad is way too superficial to be taken seriously.
IMHO it was neoliberalism that won the cold war. That means that the key neoliberal "scholars" like Friedman and Hayek and
other intellectual prostitutes of financial oligarchy who helped to restore their power. Certain democratic politicians like Carter
also were the major figures. Carter actually started neoliberalization of the USA, continued by Reagan,
Former Trotskyites starting from Burnham which later became known as neoconservatives also deserve to be mentioned.
It is also questionable that the USA explicitly won the cold war. Paradoxically the other victim of the global neoliberal revolution
was the USA, the lower 90% of the USA population to be exact.
So there was no winners other the financial oligarchy (the transnational class.)
As for the USSR, the Soviet elite changed sides. I think Putin once said that Soviet system was "unviable" to begin with.
And that's pretty precise diagnosis: as soon as the theocratic elite degenerates, it defects; and the state and the majority of
the population eventually fall on their own sword.
And the USSR clearly was a variation of a theocratic state. That explain also a very high, damaging the economy, level
of centralization (the country as a single corporation) and the high level of ideology/religion-based repression (compare with
Iran and Islamic state jihadists.)
The degeneration started with the death of the last charismatic leader (Stalin) and the passing of the generation which remembers
that actual warts of capitalism and could relate them to the "Soviet socialism" solutions.
So after the WWII the ideology of Bolshevism was dead as it became clear that Soviet style theocratic state is unable to
produce standard of living which Western social democracies were able to produce for their citizens. Rapid degeneration of the
theocratic Bolshevik elite (aka Nomenklatura) also played an important role.
With bolshevism as the official religion, which can't be questioned, the society was way too rigid and suppressed "entrepreneurial
initiative" (which leads to enrichment of particular individuals, but also to the benefits to the society as whole), to the extent
that was counterproductive. The level of dogmatism in this area was probably as close to the medieval position of Roman Catholic
Church as we can get; in this sense it was only national that Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became a pope John Paul II -- he was very
well prepared indeed ;-).
It is important to understand that the Soviet elite changed sides completely voluntarily. Paradoxically it was high level
of KGB functionaries who were instrumental in conversion to neoliberalism, starting with Andropov. It was Andropov, who created
the plan of transition of the USSR to neoliberalism, the plan that Gorbachov tried to implement and miserably failed.
So the system exploded from within because the Party elite became infected with neoliberalism (which was stupid, but reflects
the level of degeneration of the Soviet elite).
The major USA contribution other then supplying the new ideology for the Soviet elite was via CIA injecting God know how
much money to bribe top officials.
As Gorbachov was a second rate (if not the third rate) politician, he allowed the situation to run out of control. And
the efforts to "rock" the system were fueled internally by emerging (as the result of Perestroika; which was a reincarnation of
Lenin's idea of NEP) class of neoliberal Nouveau riche (which run the USSR "shadow economy" which emerged under Brezhnev) and
by nationalist sentiments (those element were clearly supported by the USA and other Western countries money as well as via subversive
efforts of national diaspora residing in the USA and Canada) and certain national minorities within the USSR.
Explosion of far right nationalist sentiments without "Countervailing ideology" as Bolshevism was not taken seriously anymore
was the key factor that led to the dissolution of the USSR.
Essentially national movements allied with Germany that were defeated during WWII became the winners.
The brutal economic rape of the xUSSR space and generally of the whole former Soviet block by the "collective neoliberal
West" naturally followed. Which had shown everybody that the vanguard of Perestroika were simply filthy compradors, who can't
care less about regular citizens and their sufferings.
And the backlash created conditions for Putin coming to power.
BTW this huge amount of loot postponed the internal crisis of neoliberalism which happened in the USA in 2008 probably
by ten years. And it (along with a couple of other factors such as telecommunication revolution) explain relative prosperity of
Clinton presidency. Criminal Clinton presidency I should say.
The majority of the xUSSR space countries have now dismal standard of living and slided into Latin American level of inequality
and corruption (not without help of the USA).
Several have civil wars in the period since getting independence, which further depressed the standard living. Most deindustrialize.
Generally when the particular ideology collapses, far right nationalism fills the void. We see this now with the slow collapse
of neoliberalism in the USA and Western Europe.
Chinese learned a lot from Gorbachov's fatal mistakes and have better economic results as the result of the conversion
to the neoliberalism ("from the above"), although at the end Chinese elite is not that different from Soviet elite and also is
corruptible and can eventually change sides.
But they managed to survive the "triumphal march of neoliberalism" (1980-2000) and now the danger is less as neoliberalism
is clearly the good with expired "use by" date: after 2008 the neoliberal ideology was completely discredited and entered "zombie"
state.
So in the worst case it is the USA which might follow the path of the USSR and eventually disintegrate under the pressure of
internal nationalist sentiments. Such a victor...
Even now there are some visible difference between former Confederacy states and other states on the issues such as immigration
and federal redistributive programs.
"... Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends. I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons. ..."
"... Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water – apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious frauds we all know they are. ..."
"... These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be a "Cakewalk" ..."
"... What they do know for sure is that the military industrial complex will increase its budget during and after such a war. Follow the money! ..."
Who Launched That Mystery Attack? Eric Margolis September 21, 2019 700 Words
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The Mideast has its own variety of crazy humor. The Saudis have been blasting and bombing
wretched Yemen, one of this world's poorest nations, since 2015.
These US-supported attacks and a naval blockade of Yemen imposed by Saudi Arabia and its
sidekick ally, the United Arab Emirates, have caused mass starvation. No one knows how many
Yemenis have died or are currently starving. Estimates run from 250,000 to one million.
The black humor? The Saudis just claimed they were victims of Iranian `aggression' this past
week after the kingdom's leading oil treatment facility at Abqaiq was hit by a flight of armed
drones or cruise missiles. The usual American militarists, now led by State Secretary Mike
Pompeo after the demented warmonger, John Bolton, was finally fired, are calling for military
retaliation against Iran even though the attack was claimed by Yemen's Shia Houthi
movement.
This drama came at roughly the same time that Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, a
close ally of US president Donald Trump, vowed to annex Palestine's entire Jordan Valley if
elected. Not a peep of protest came from the US, which recently blessed Netanyahu's annexation
of Syria's Golan Heights while scourging Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, for annexing Crimea
– a Russian possession for over 300 years.
I studied US photos of the damaged Saudi oil installations. Its oil tanks appear to be
precisely hit at the same place. After the attack, the Saudis claimed half of their oil
production was knocked out; but a day later, they vowed production would be resumed within a
week. Parts of so-called drones were shown that appeared way beyond the technological
capabilities of Yemen or even Iran. The missiles may have been supplied by Ukraine.
The Saudis, like their patron in Washington, have a poor record for truthfulness. Remember
the Saudi denials about the murder of journalist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi? More
important, we have been waiting for more false flag attacks in the Gulf designed to justify a
US attack on Iran.
The pattern of so-called drone attacks against the Saudi oil installations is just too neat
and symmetrical. The Israelis have a strong interest in promoting a US-Saudi War. The attacks
in Saudi came ironically right after the anniversary of 9/11 that plunged the US into war
against large parts of the Muslim world.
As a long-time military observer, I find it very hard to believe that drones could be guided
over such long distances and so accurately without aircraft or satellites to guide them. In
Yemen, which is just creeping into the 12th century, changing a flat tire is a major
technological achievement. To date, Iran's missile arsenal has poor reliability and major
guidance problems.
Adding to the questions, the Saudis have spent billions on US-made air defense systems. They
failed to protect the oil installations. The Saudis would have been better off buying air
defenses from the Russians, at a quarter of the US selling price.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that surround
him to launch major attacks on Iran. Blasting Iran would not serve much purpose and would
expose US forces in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Somalia, and Syria to Iranian guerrilla
attacks. Saudi oil installations – after what we saw last week – are
vulnerable.
Attacking Iran, even if just from the air, risks a much wider Mideast war just as the Trump
administration – which originally campaigned against 'stupid' Mideast wars – faces
next year's elections. But the administration is under intense pressure from its pro-Israel
base to go after Iran.
Bombing Iran's oil infrastructure would be relatively easy and has been intensively planned
since early 2002. But what next? So-called 'regime change' (Washington's favorite euphemism for
overthrowing disobedient foreign governments) rarely works as planned and can get the US into
horribly messy situations. The CIA overthrew Iran's democratic government in 1953 and look
where we are today.
Perhaps the attacks on Abqaiq may cause the reckless Saudi leaders to stop devastating Yemen
and throttle back on their proxy war against Iran which has gone on since 1979. But don't count
on it.
The so called "Zionist Hawks" in Israel and Washington, who want to start a war between
the USA and Iran.
These Hawks are under delusional assumption that an American led war against Iran would be
a "Cakewalk", and that Iranians have no means to defend themselves, will capitulate –
these are of course delusional assumptions – only found in disturbed minds of a bunch
of Go-Getter Zionist Think-Tanks in Washington, DC who are eager to serve their own tribal
interests at the US expense.
The US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, and Iraq in 2003, both are still ongoing –
have long proven how delusional are these ridiculous assumptions – Iran will be at
least 10 times harder nut to crack than Iraq was under Saddam Hussein – at least not
without serious consequences to the security of Israel, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and the
US itself, along with serious ramification to the post WWII international order under the
USA; established since 1945.
By now, president Trump knows too well that he is being poorly served by these so called
"Zionist Hawks" – who have instigated the US unilateral withdrawal from the Iranian
Nuclear Agreement – but thanks to Trump's own instinct, and his close relationship with
Emmanuel Macron; Shinzo Abe; and of course Vladimir Putin – so far, Trump has resisted
the temptation of going to all out war against Iranians.
President Trump should ban these" Go-Getter Zionist Hawks" from the White House; they are
"Disloyal Jews" – who are eager to serve their own tribal interests at the US
expense.
Trump at least showed some wisdom by so far rejecting demands from the neocons that
surround him to launch major attacks on Iran.
He doesn't want to get involved in another Iraq (or worse) which makes excellent sense for
the US and himself on many levels.
However, if the US Deep State (with the Israelis) could set up 9/11 without President Bush
in the loop, then they could also arrange a False Flag attack on these oil installations,
without Trump's knowledge.
The CIA looks very much like an independent international criminal enterprise, and they're
used to working with their Israeli and Saudi friends.
This is a seriously flawed analysis of Yemen's and Iran's actual capabilities. We've already
seen Iran's precision strike capability in Iran and Syria and we've seen Yemen's homemade
drones and missiles do similar to this at slightly lesser differences. The parts shown by SA
are matches to Yemeni made missiles and drones such as Iran has been sharing around with
their allies. The reason they avoided the US defences was that they came from a direction
these do not cover, being pointed as they are at Iran. I'd say this was a Houthis attack and
as they say, more will be coming if the aggression from SA against Yemen does not stop. One
thing this attack has done is cool the heels of US, Saudi and Zionist warmongers. The damage
done here by relatively small attack and cheap means gives some inkling of what things might
look like after an attack on Iran. This was doubtless supported by Iran and as such a
masterstroke. We enter a new paradigm.
Saudi Arabian oil pipelines have always been vulnerable to attack. They are not well guarded
at all. This is well known by Security Experts worldwide but not well known, it would seem,
by hack 'journalists'.
Saudi Arabia is attacking Yemen as part of a long term plan to reroute it's oil pipelines
to the other side of it's country, the Red Sea side, so that it is no longer vulnerable at
the Strait of Hormuz 'choke point'. In order to get rid of the Iranian threat to it's oil as
it leaves port in the Persian Gulf, the Saudi's must sustain huge costs and PR losses to
"stabilize" Yemen by a brutal war and then transit it's oil via the Red Sea. This is also
well known by Security Experts but not 'hack journalist'.
Trump rejected neocon demands for a war with Iran as he saw his chances for re-election
vanish in the smoke of an US-Iran war. If Trump is reelected Americans will have to worry
every day about a US-Iran war.
I love this comment by Margolis, that the KSA & US have a "poor record for truthfulness"
Priceless. Apparently Genghis Khan had a poor record for brushing his feet on the mat
before entering a town for a bit of light shopping.
Margolis also says the KSA's US made air defences "failed" to protect their oil
installations. This maybe so. But apart from the fact that their air defences are orientated
away from Yemen there's a good chance the defences were turned OFF -- apparently this is
common practice in the KSA, esp on weekends.
I don't believe that Margolis's "mystery" is anywhere as deep as he suggests. The Houthis
have received weapons & training from Iran/Hezbollah & have demonstrated an ability
to hit KSA targets with unmanned aerial weapons.
Until better evidence appears, I'm willing to give it to the Houthis -- if for no other
reason than that they deserve to get in some good licks against that vile "Kingdom" (I'd
suggest they next hit the water purification plants that serve Riyadh with all its water
– apparently, the city has about 3 days of water stored. Evacuating 6 million from the
Capital, the Sauds would be exposed as the corrupt, negligent, incompetent, stupid, vicious
frauds we all know they are.
"... Today, barely a dozen American correspondents are based in Moscow. As a result, much of what we read about Russia is written in the United States and reinforces the paradigm of hostility in which Washington is so deeply invested ..."
"... The quality of Russian life has risen along with the quality of its cheese. Russians have decided to go their own way and not worry too much about us. We should return the favor. ..."
"... From what I read in US MSM it looks like Russia has huge economic problems due to consequences of the collapse of the USSR economic space (much as if the USA and China break diplomatic relations now). Recently ties with Ukraine were completely severed which hurts both countries. ..."
"... Economic difficulties were amplified by the US sanctions, and by design sliding standard of living feeds growing nationalism in the regions against the center. Which is supported by foreign money -- the classic scheme of political destabilization. ..."
"... In 2011-2012 the USA attempted the regime change in Russia and failed. From which point the relations went south. And I would think that after 2012 most Russians would consider the USA at least as an "adversary" if not completely hostile power, which wants the disintegration of their country and/or installation of a puppet regime a la Yeltsin. ..."
"... An interesting thing about regime change is that Russia is very vulnerable: you need to capture only the capital where most foreign companies have headquarters and thus Moscow has the highest concentration of neoliberal compradors (aka fifth column) in the country. ..."
Several Russians I met during my visit last month advised me to notice the cheese. Sure
enough, in Russia cheese is plentiful, tasty, and available in many varieties. Why is that
interesting? "Russian cheese was always terrible," a waitress in Novosibirsk explained. "All
good cheese was imported. Now, because of sanctions, we can't import cheese anymore. So we
started making our own, and after a few years, look what great cheese we have! Sanctions made
us more self-reliant."
Two weeks is laughably little time to take the measure of any country, let alone the
largest one on earth. Even more daunting -- and intriguing -- is Russia's century-old role as
the threatening "other" in the American imagination. My trip took me across five time zones
and included visits to cities whose names I had never heard (Ulan Ude?). Wherever I went, I
was struck by how different Russia is from our image of it. The Russia I found is vibrant,
self-confident, largely free, and hardly concerned about hostility from Washington.
During the seven decades of Communist rule in Russia, Americans were fed twin images: the
Russian people were poor, backward, and oppressed, while their leaders plotted relentlessly
to destroy the United States and human freedom on earth. Today we are told much the same. We
imagine a declining and unhappy land, "a gas station masquerading as a country," as the late
Senator John McCain put it. Yet we also place Russia at or near the top of our list of most
fearsome enemies and demonize President Vladimir Putin. Whenever we feel our indignation
rising -- which is lamentably often -- we impose a new sanction on Russia or stage a
provocative military maneuver near one of its borders. In Washington, any politician or
pundit who dares to urge better relations with Russia is quickly branded a Kremlin apologist
or Putin stooge.
Americans are conditioned to see Russia as a failing society governed by a
hyper-aggressive regime that wreaks havoc around the world. Russians, I found, see the United
States the same way. Their image of their role in the world strikingly mirrors our own. They
see their country as defending its reasonable interests, while being fully misunderstood by
an ignorant regime across the Atlantic.
My highly unscientific opinion sampling suggests that Russians like their president more
than we like ours. Paulinka, a 29-year-old woman I met while waiting for a traffic light to
change in Moscow, told me Russians are grateful to Putin because he brought Russia back to
life after a period of disastrous social collapse. "Every year since he has been in, life is
better than the year before," she told me. Yet like other Russians I met, she said Putin has
been in office long enough -- he has dominated Russia for 20 years -- and should make way for
someone else.
While I was in Moscow, opposition groups staged several protests after election officials
refused to register some of their candidates for city council. The protests drew tens of
thousands of people, were non-violent, and resulted in several arrests. Clearly the
government -- like all governments -- has set limits on the opposition it will tolerate.
People are free to speak their minds, and the media report world news much as do their
counterparts in the United States. Russia has been an authoritarian state for a thousand
years, though, and is not a law-governed democracy today. Its people are heirs to the
collective trauma of having their entire way of life shattered by social and political
revolution twice in less than a century. That breeds a powerful wish for stability. "In a big
country like this," a woman in Irkutsk told me, "you need a strong leader."
The Russian cities I visited are not pockmarked by wretched neighborhoods like those in
many American cities. Poverty exists -- the rate is comparable to that of the United States
-- but is concentrated in villages and the countryside. Provincial cities have been rebuilt,
some with dazzling success. In Kazan, where a complex of sports arenas is attracting a stream
of world-class athletic events and new apartment buildings line the Volga riverbank, one man
marveled: "This city has changed totally in the last 10 years."
Some Americans who visit Russia cannot help wondering why the United States insists on
seeing it as an enemy rather than a potential partner. Part of the reason has to do with
Russia's actions in Europe and the Middle East, which the United States considers hostile.
The deeper reason may have to do with the way our ingrained need for an enemy has come to
mesh with our century-old habit of hating and fearing Russia.
Today, barely a dozen American correspondents are based in Moscow. As a result, much of
what we read about Russia is written in the United States and reinforces the paradigm of
hostility in which Washington is so deeply invested.
The real Russia is a stable
quasi-democracy that defends its interests in the world no more aggressively than we do. In
2019 it is a happier, more socially cohesive, and more optimistic place than the United
States. The quality of Russian life has risen along with the quality of its cheese. Russians
have decided to go their own way and not worry too much about us. We should return the
favor.
This an interesting view from a respected journalist, which is drastically different from
typical neocon propaganda that dominates the US MSM Russia coverage.
From what I read in US MSM it looks like Russia has huge economic problems due to
consequences of the collapse of the USSR economic space (much as if the USA and China break
diplomatic relations now). Recently ties with Ukraine were completely severed which hurts
both countries.
Economic difficulties were amplified by the US sanctions, and by design sliding standard
of living feeds growing nationalism in the regions against the center. Which is supported by
foreign money -- the classic scheme of political destabilization.
In 2011-2012 the USA attempted the regime change in Russia and failed. From which point
the relations went south. And I would think that after 2012 most Russians would consider the
USA at least as an "adversary" if not completely hostile power, which wants the
disintegration of their country and/or installation of a puppet regime a la Yeltsin.
I would expect that they are very concerned about hostility from Washington, not "hardly
concerned about hostility from Washington."
Hopefully Stephen Kinzer is right.
An interesting thing about regime change is that Russia is very vulnerable: you need to
capture only the capital where most foreign companies have headquarters and thus Moscow has
the highest concentration of neoliberal compradors (aka fifth column) in the country.
I think the EU may have just fucked Nord Stream II. An EU General Court overturned the 2016
EU Commission decision to allow Gazprom to use more than 50% of the Opal pipeline, a critical
choke point for both legs of Nord Stream II to get gas to the hub. If that decision can't be
reversed again, a reasonable argument will be made that Nord stream II is not necessary, as
Nord Stream alone can easily supply 50% capacity. The kicker is they do not have any other
exporter who could make up the other 50% to use the pipeline to capacity. But this is a very
shrewd move, as the Opal pipeline was always the weak link.
Ukraine, of course, will be dancing in the streets with delight. But I wouldn't be too
quick to do that. Russia might still decline to renew the contract with Ukraine, and just let
Europe go short, to teach it a lesson. Past time, in my opinion. Of course Uncle Sam will see
that as the opportunity long looked for, and offer to step up with LNG imports. And that
might be good, too, for a couple of years – let the Yurrupeans pay extortionate gas
prices, and learn to be wary of America's temper tantrums translated to supply 'problems'
which can only be resolved by making political concessions. Russia has always pretty much let
Europe do its thing without pressuring it much, despite the hysterics you see in the media
about weaponization of energy.
It is absolutely typical of Europe to wait until the pipeline is almost complete to
offload that bomb. I suppose they figure Russia will have to agree to anything they say so as
not to waste all that work and money. It also showcases Europe's complete unreliability in
any business relationship, exactly in lock-step with American unreliability.
I saw that news too. But then remember the original Nord Stream had a cap that was then
lifted. If the EU insists on paying top $$$ for imported LNG from the US rather than lifting
any sort of cap, I'd be interested to see how they justify that to EU citizen consumers.
I think the point is, again, not to react immediately to whatever outrage Brussels or its
friends pick out of their ass. I could well imagine that NSII partners may well sue Brussels
about this, actually file the papers. Brussels would argue 'But it's not us, it's the court',
to which the lawyers would say 'We specifically asked you, and you came up with nothing in
law'.
I think we will find the general court has taken a certain 'interpretation' of competition
law that was 'advised' by Brussles. How NSII could get this far after all of these years and
have a court come out with such a ruling. Expect egg on face and 'It's not me!'. I don't see
how this 'ruling' can stand.
"The Europeans apply antitrust legislation, which is designed to develop the competition.
Why it is necessary to free up 50% of the gas pipeline's capacity? According to the idea of
the legislators, it has to allow competition to arise. But when nobody can physically come to
the start point of the OPAL gas pipeline, alternative suppliers have nowhere to come from.
There physically isn't and can't be another supplier in OPAL!!! It's like banning water from
being carried in full buckets!"
The very inspiration of competition is the introduction of anti-monopoly procedures to
establish a lowest price by pitting the competitors against one another. I am pretty
confident that Russia has always had the lowest prices, and can usually be induced to do a
deal for lower prices yet in exchange for other considerations. When other countries do it,
it's what dealing's all about – when Russia does it, it's weaponizing energy.
If you have a reliable supplier who has access to years of reserves and who consistently
sells to you at a reasonable price, why do you have to impose a raft of new rules to bring in
competitors who cannot match its prices and do not have access to plentiful supplies? Once
again, for Yurrupeans who do not get it, competition is to arrive at a low price. If you
start from a low price, it is stupid to mandate room for competitors who cannot get under
it.
I suspect the Poles are behind this latest charade. But why is Germany going along with
it? Opal lies entirely within Germany, and anything that risks constraining available supply
risks Germany's status as a gas hub.
Anyway, as I suggested earlier, it would do Europe a world of good for Russia to short
them gas for a little while and let them pay prices for outside supplies that would have
their hair on fire. A period of throwing money away when you know there is a cheaper supply
to which you cannot get access can be extremely educational. Uncle Sam would jump at the
chance to sell Europe LNG and, at least in the beginning, would cut prices to the bone in
order to establish market share. But it would still insist on making a profit, and it can't
do that and match Russian prices, while its lengthy logistic chain depends on a lot of
factors. If it became confident that its market share was both secure and relied upon,
Europeans would quickly see how it was leveraged against them to American advantage.
Helping the Ukraine in it's gas talks fit in my opinion. This 50% cap can be lifted,
reintroduced/whatever and whenever by Brussels. It's a gangsta move.
Well, actually, it can't. Be lifted and re-imposed willy-nilly, I mean. If it is, it would be
pointless to build the pipeline in the first place, as Opal would merely take the place of
Ukraine. The western tacticians want to keep Ukraine in the mix because they can use it to
introduce complications and problems in gas delivery from Russia, which can at the same time
be used to paint Russia as an unreliable partner. If Opal can't be relied upon to supply the
opportunity to transit major volumes, Russia will have to make a deal with Ukraine so as to
preserve a Plan B option. It would have been better to not build the pipeline, and still
cease transit through Ukraine, labeling it instead as the unreliable part of the logistics
chain, and Europe would just have to be satisfied with what it could get out of existing
pipelines – minus Ukraine – running flat-out. After all, Europe maintained that a
twin line for Nord Stream was not needed; mind you, when they said that, they were
envisioning continued transit through Ukraine, complete with the prima donna antics Ukraine
exhibits when it believes it has leverage.
The price of gas would go through the roof, and Russia would probably make just as much
money, while the Europeans were weeping and tearing out their hair.
Ukraine's offer for the gas talks is 60 Billion Cubic Meters transit annually for 10
years. Russia will tell them to go fuck themselves. They're basically asking for a contract
to transit the same amount they're transiting now, when there is no alternative, for ten more
years.
I wish I could be so sure. Brussels likes to think it is kleva (sic 'field pipes'/TAP
exemptions). I've looked for more details, and it is appealable (is that a word)?
For several years, Russia could use only 50% of the pipeline's capacity, as prescribed
in the EU's Third Energy Package. Gazprom asked for permission to use OPAL's 100%
capacity,
.In the summer of 2017, the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court decided to remove interim
measures on Gazprom's use of Opal's facilities imposed by the lawsuit. Poland finds that now
the decision of the European Court of Justice will not allow Gazprom to abandon gas transit
through the territory of Ukraine.
On September 10, on considering Poland's lawsuit, the EU Court of Justice overturned
the European Commission's decision of 2016, according to which Gazprom could fully use the
capacities of the OPAL gas pipeline. The Russian company reserves the right to use 50% of
OPAL's capacity, but it will no longer be able to participate in auctions for the remaining
40%.
####
So it is a continuation of previous legal ding-dongs.
The ruling is also important because of the reasoning behind it. The justices said the
main reason for their decision was not to preserve third-party access to pipelines that run
through Europe but to maintain the EU's energy-solidarity policy. This opens the door to
future litigation based on such policy
####
WTF? So it's not about allowing 3rd party access after all. The Court is ruling on
a completely different aspect! So this is about a different rule of the EU's Third Energy
Package that a) post dates the original Nord Stream; b) ignores that NSII follows the
same route and is not substantially different to NS1. The Third Energy Package entered in to
legislation in September 2009.* Excuse me, but 10 years late?
So it looks to me that the multipronged offensive against NSII though it has failed to
stymie off-shore NSII because it is almost completely outside the EU (well, we'll see what
happend with Denmark), it's temporarily struck gold with OPAL because it is on-shore EU.
Buuut, in leverageing against Russia to the benefit of Ukraine, it will directly impact
Russia-EU-Ukraine talks:
Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak "I think that, in terms of negotiations, this
situation will be taken into account," **
Yet: Šefčovič said the decision was still very fresh, that his
services were still studying it, and that it underlined how important the principle of energy
solidarity is for Europe.
The ECJ ruled that the 2016 decision is "in breach of the principle of energy
solidarity" because it failed to properly assess how to balance Germany's interests against
the negative impacts on other EU member states .
Šefčovič avoided a direct answer, but insisted in the need of
long-term contracts with Gazprom .
He explained that the Ukrainian side was willing to apply European law, saying this
would bring clarity, transparency and efficiency. The letters sent by the Commission to both
parties also stressed the importance of long-term contracts, he said . ***
Cake and eat it, Brussels? Kiev complying with 'European Law' when even EU member states
do not? Ha ha ha! It all rather looks like vague horseshit to me. Open to creative
interpretation a la Marcel Marceau.
When I said, "Actually, it can't", I didn't mean Europe can't do it, I meant that the
uncertainty it introduces will not likely prove satisfactory for Russia to play the game,
since Brussels could arbitrarily decide to apply the cap any time it wishes Russia to transit
more gas through Ukraine, and pay it more money. The only real solution for Russia is to make
it crystal clear to Brussels that it is not going to sign a big fat transit contract with
Ukraine, and then business as usual, with Ukraine getting up to its monkeyshines and
demanding cheaper gas against the possibility of restricting exports to Europe. Ukraine has
demonstrated that it is just like the United States in the sense that if it has any leverage
over you, it will use it for its own ends. The west has made it clear it approves of these
tactics, even when they cause a temporary shutdown of gas exports to Europe.
Brussels thinks it is being cute, and that Russia will now have to do as Brussels wants it
to. Russia has little choice but to play hardball, and let it be known that it has no
intention of signing a long-term agreement with Ukraine to transit the same volumes of gas it
always did – what the fuck was Nord Stream II all about? If Europe – and
especially those perfidious krauts – want to cap the amount going through the Opal line
at 50% of capacity, so be it. Europe will just have to adjust to 60 BcM less supply; maybe
Uncle Sugar can send a fleet of LNG tankers to make up the difference, at double the cost.
But if Russia signs on to transit 60 BcM annually through Ukraine, it is right back where it
started, and built an expensive pipeline for nothing. Stand firm, Russia. Europe does not
have an alternative gas supplier, and nothing would teach it that lesson like a year or so of
scraping to find enough gas, and paying through the nose for it. It's always chunnering about
alternative suppliers – go and find them!
Absolutely insane. The EU/Anglo/US fascists are making their last stand and forcing Russia
into a corner with the only way out to continue transit through Ukraine. Oh, the humiliation
will be so sweet!
I think the Russian reaction will be a big Fuck You. Its all about LNG and the need to
save the US gas frackers and their debt. Oh, and to drive a wedge to further separate Russia
from Europe. Perfect, Russia can now focus on its future and forget that rotting corpse of
Western civilization.
Oh, I think Nord Stream II will still go through anyway, in the end. But a great deal depends
on Russia not signing another 10-year gas deal with Ukraine for 60 BcM annually. If it does
that, then there really is no difference from today, and Nord Stream II would just be an
extra line for use in emergencies. I can't believe any of the partners want that, as there
would be little opportunity for them to profit, which is why I wonder why Germany is being so
passive. Have they been persuaded to take one for Team Ukraine? Again, I find that hard to
believe. It is essentially a question of Ukraine being Europe's gas hub, or Germany. And it
should be more than plain to Europe by now that Ukraine will happily toss a wrench in the
transit works any time Washington tells it to.
Europe needs Russian gas. But it wants it on entirely its own terms, with Brussels in
control. Apparently it is not obvious that Europe is already in control – it is the
buyer. If it doesn't want gas, it doesn't need to buy it. But it does want it. It just wants
to wave the rule-book around every time it makes a purchase. Which would be obvious to it, if
ever there came a time when it wanted it and couldn't get it.
"... Jolie King and Mark Firkin had been arrested relatively recently and charged with espionage. They had been apprehended while flying a drone around a military establishment not far from Tehran. ..."
"... They claim to be innocent civilians who had been flying their drone, taking vids with it and publishing them online in every country they drove through on the overland/sea jaunt from Darwin to London. ..."
"... Although the internet & associated cryptography has likely made such laws irrelevant, I cannot believe that a couple of months ago when the Grace II thing was kicking off any brit or australian could think flying drones around Iranian bases wouldn't get them into trouble. ..."
"... Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort Dietrick or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong? ..."
"... Well don't her specialties line up closely with another brit educated woman caught teaching local Iranians how to stir trouble online in Iran, one Zaghari-Ratcliffe convicted of espionage after now england PM, then secretary of foreign affairs B Johnson, slipped up and admitted she had been training Iranians, in Iran. ..."
"... This attempt to propagandize the arrests of spies may even succeed I suppose as most people just don't follow this stuff closely enough and the praised to the max western media is unlikely to disabuse them of their ignorance. ..."
"... The ruins of Angkor Wat Cambodia are a sacred place and you are warned that no drones are permitted, but you still are flying your drone and that all females must be fully covered, but you don't care, you just think you are untouchables, but you will fly your drone once too often in a restricted area and be caught. ..."
in response of how NK treats journalists, Eva Bartlett of Syria fame did a number of reports from NK and she said she had more
freedom than in many western countries. As long as you dont show fake propaganda and show the NK'ians in favorable ie real light,
they have no problems. They were not asked to take particular shots or taken to particular places but left to do everything themselves.
I remember cops pulling me over for taking pics of barns in south dakota.. Many such events.. I remember cops pulling me over
so many times I can write a book on it. Once for having a white bag on the front seat.. For looking too young.. For looking like
a car bugler because I was under the dash fixing speaker wires.. For having driving lights on before they had those on cars as standard..
For changing lanes to avoid police.. Free country my testicles..
I dunno how many have been following the issue of the 'brit-australian' trio who are in custody in Iran, but there are some oddities
about these cases which suggest MI6/
ASIS are moronic and barefaced
enough to try and propagandise the inevitable result of their own hamfisted stupidity.
No one had heard of Kylie Moore-Gilbert, Jolie King and Mark Firkin a week ago, then John Bolton copped the flick and suddenly
australians & englanders are told that Iran has more than British-Iranian Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe slotted up, that two pom/oz
types and a genuine Australian were also being held.
Jolie King and Mark Firkin had been arrested relatively recently and charged with espionage. They had been apprehended
while flying a drone around a military establishment not far from Tehran.
They claim to be innocent civilians who had been flying their drone, taking vids with it and publishing them online in
every country they drove through on the overland/sea jaunt from Darwin to London. Apparently both are University graduates
who claim they didn't see the harm in doing what they were doing . . . yeah right, I guess it is possible to be that stupid but
it is pretty unlikely. I'm old enough to remember that it wasn't that long ago when going into many of the nations between Oz
and Iran with a ghetto blaster that would allow you to record and which had an AM or FM radio receiver would get you into the
slammer quick smart.
Although the internet & associated cryptography has likely made such laws irrelevant, I cannot believe that a couple of
months ago when the Grace II thing was kicking off any brit or australian could think flying drones around Iranian bases wouldn't
get them into trouble.
Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort
Dietrick or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't
that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong?
But that is nothing cos up until today we have been told that nothing is known about another woman who has been in prison for
a year on 'unknown charges'.
According to
today's graun we still don't know the charges, but we do know she is another pom/oz type, Dr Kylie Moore-Gilbert, a Cambridge-educated
academic who we are told:
"The University of Melbourne's website lists Dr Moore-Gilbert on its "Find an expert" page as a lecturer at the university's
Asia Institute.
It says she "specializes in Middle Eastern politics, with a particular focus on the Arab Gulf states," and that she had
published work on the 2011 Arab uprisings, authoritarian governance, and on the role of new media technologies in political
activism."
Well don't her specialties line up closely with another brit educated woman caught teaching local Iranians how to stir
trouble online in Iran, one Zaghari-Ratcliffe convicted of espionage after now england PM, then secretary of foreign affairs B
Johnson, slipped up and admitted she had been training Iranians, in Iran.
This attempt to propagandize the arrests of spies may even succeed I suppose as most people just don't follow this stuff
closely enough and the praised to the max western media is unlikely to disabuse them of their ignorance.
Would anyone care to imagine what would happen to someone on holiday from Iran who got spotted flying a drone around Fort Dietrick
or similar? No matter how many posts they had made about doing the same in Chile, Peru, Colombia, Panama & Mexico. Wouldn't
that appear as if it were just cover lest something did go wrong?
They were well aware that using drones could get them into trouble, they said so themselves talking about Cambodia, so in no doubt
the same applied to Iran. https://www.instagram.com/p/BngpgAIHqpD/
The ruins of Angkor Wat Cambodia are a sacred place and you are warned that no drones are permitted, but you still are
flying your drone and that all females must be fully covered, but you don't care, you just think you are untouchables, but you
will fly your drone once too often in a restricted area and be caught.
"... Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example, in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'." ..."
It's become standard procedure for the US and its MSM to consider that Iran is totally
responsible for all anti-US events in the Middle East because of actions by Iran's "proxy
forces" in other countries. While these events usually have more diverse objectives, it's
often Iran did this and Iran did that. But there's no legal basis for that.
Here's some words on proxy relationships from DefenseOne: (excerpts)
Iran's proxy relationships have given it an extraordinary ability to impose costs on its
adversaries while obscuring its role. Doing so allows it to manage its risks while
politically constraining its adversaries' response. It might seem intuitive to simply
declare Iran responsible, and satisfying to retaliate against it directly. But
international law sets a high bar for holding a proxy's benefactor responsible for the
actions of its proxy, making it difficult to build the kind of international consensus
necessary to the legitimacy for any retaliation.
Under international law, a state is accountable for the unlawful actions of a proxy
only if an organ of the state ordered the proxy to commit the act. It is not sufficient
simply to have provided material support or even encouraged the unlawful act. For example,
in the 1980s, the International Court of Justice found the United States not liable for
Contra violations of international humanitarian law, even after concluding that the United
States had "financed, organized, trained, supplied, equipped and armed" the Contras, even
to the point of providing training materials that discussed "shoot civilians attempting to
leave a town, neutralize local judges and officials, hire professional criminals to carry
out 'jobs,' and provoke violence at mass demonstrations to create 'martyrs'."
Setting the bar so high establishes perverse incentives. A state that employs proxies is
discouraged from moderating their behavior, since any attempt at moderation could imply
effective control, and even from acknowledging the proxy relationships. So without proof
that the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which typically manages Iran's proxy
relationships, ordered or participated in the attacks, there is little for which Saudi
Arabia or the United States can hold Iran legally accountable.. .
here
In 2001, drones were just a distant dream. It also involves a chain of once in a lifetime
of human errors by at least three governmental institutions (CIA, FBI and Pentagon).
What the Houthi did in 2019 is not that far fetched. Drones are a much more developed and
cheap technology, and Saudi Arabia is a basket case of a country. Surprise is how much soft
power they did enjoy in the West, since many commenters here still insist Saudi Arabia is
some kind of fascist utopia that couldn't be tricked by a bunch of stone age cave dwellers
(which the Houthi aren't any way). Looks like the USA's aura of invincibility is
contagious.
Jackrabbit #16. Perhaps increased tensions are enough to get Nuttyahoo elected (which I think
fits with the supposition that this attack is false flag). However My guess is that the
Houthis will prosecute this war to the very doorsteps of the holy mosques in KSA and exact
immense retribution if they can. They are responding to 5 years of geocidal assault and
cannot but fight to the death.
Trump and his immaculate surrounds of holy zionists and pentecostal towel boys are in
thrall. Mesmerised by their inspired service to the holy writ. No doubt they consult daily
with their personal rabbi who talks through his fedora as O would have it. But they are
beholden to something evil and beneath the dignity of humankind.
Perhaps war will be avoided by dithering and too elaborate plotting but I still consider
that justice might manifest in a meteor strike on their heads.
"... Yet in spite of all this American sacrifice, the Taliban controls more territory than at any time since 2001. ..."
"... After all, President Trump hasn't even signed off on Khalilzad's draft deal, and even if he does, he could always change his mind. The ability of the Blob to swallow presidents is not to be underestimated -- and Trump is a case in point. For decades, reaching back to his career as a businessman, Trump had been a skeptic of foreign military engagements, and he explicitly campaigned against "endless wars" in 2016. ..."
"... Yet since then, the Blob has been extending pseudopods of keep-the-status-quo cajolery deep within his administration. Trump has thus been persuaded to keep the U.S. engaged, or, if one prefers, quagmired ..."
"... The Taliban are not an invading military force. The struggle as it is has been one of internal forces and players sharing the land and never having been but various communities that fought, lived and negotiated agreements all nearly all of the countries history, unlike Vietnam which has almost entire history had a North/South division. ..."
"... Quit calling the Kabul regime a "client". It's a puppet. The minute US forces leave Afghanistan, the puppet government in Kabul will fall. Don't be surprised if it collapses before the last US transport has its landing gear all the way up. Notwithstanding 2., yes, it's over. Time to pack up and move on. However, Trump can't do that. ..."
"... If Trump had really wanted to leave Afghanistan, the time to do it was when he first entered office. Blame his predecessors and wash his hands of the situation while the political price was at its lowest. But Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He listened to the generals, and the price of leaving has only risen and will only keep rising. ..."
"... They aren't much good for anything but staging, but Trump wants those Afghan outposts for the war on Iran that his Saudi owners and Israeli masters so crave. ..."
"... All the Democrats should be on the bandwagon for withdrawal yesterday because Trump's October Surprise could be announcing peace in our time and getting the hell out. It is a promise he can actually keep. It is not like he is getting his wall. ..."
"... Trump has become, himself, part of "the Blob." By hiring Pompeo and Bolton to head his foreign policy team he has abandoned any pretense of being an anti-war pro-restraint president. He's gone full neo-con and it's long past time conservatives stop pretending he hasn't. ..."
Needless to say, the news from Afghanistan is always murky, and the U.S. is far from gone.
Still, the BBC headline from September 3 tells us a lot:
"Afghanistan war: US-Taliban deal would see 5,400 troops withdraw." U.S. negotiator Zalmay
Khalilzad has hammered out an agreement, "in principle," with the Taliban.
He has now shared some of the details with the Afghan government -- which, revealingly,
hasn't been involved in the negotiations -- and with the world as well. In other words, the
U.S. has been bypassing its Kabul client regime in pursuit of a deal with the Taliban.
Obviously, the fact that our Afghan ally has been left out of the negotiations is not a good
sign for its relevance -- or its viability.
To be sure, even if those 5,400 American troops leave, another 8,600 would remain, plus an
unknown number of contractors and operatives. Yet it's obvious that if the U.S. couldn't pacify
Afghanistan with
100,000 troops at the beginning of this decade, it's not going to do much with a tiny
fraction thereof. In fact, our current dealings with the Taliban recall our dealings with North
Vietnam in the early '70s.
Back then, President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger were
looking to negotiate with North Vietnam to find a way out. Their hope was for "peace with
honor." Yet the appearance of "peace with honor" is not necessarily the same thing as
the reality . Behind the scenes, it was grubbier. Nixon and Kissinger understood that
the South Vietnamese government was deathly afraid of a U.S. deal with North Vietnam because
Saigon understood that any such agreement would leave it in the lurch, unable to defend itself.
North Vietnam, after all, was supported by both the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of
China. And so Nixon and Kissinger simply pushed South Vietnam out of the loop. Indeed, South
Vietnamese fears would have been fully confirmed had they heard Kissinger speaking to Nixon
inside the White House in October 1972, as recorded by the notorious secret taping system.
As Kissinger put it, the U.S. should be hoping for a
"decent interval" between the American departure and the inevitable fall of the Saigon
government. And that's what happened: the Paris Peace Accords were signed on January 27, 1973,
and barely more than two years later, on April 30, 1975, Saigon fell. Understandably, millions
of South Vietnamese sought to flee the communists, and that, again, is how D.C. -- and the U.S.
as a whole -- gained so many new restaurants. All that history is familiar to the policymakers
and pundits of today. And so inside the Beltway, the debate over the future of Afghanistan --
more precisely, U.S. involvement in the conflict -- is far from over.
As TAC contributor
Doug Bandow noted on August 29, the foreign policy establishment, a.k.a. "the
Blob," is perpetually in favor of staying in Afghanistan, because, well, establishments are
always perpetually in favor of doing everything that they're doing, perpetually. After all, who
wants to admit a mistake? Especially when establishmentarians can snugly oversee the war from
their armchairs in a Massachusetts Avenue think-tank? In the meantime, American losses continue
to mount. On August 29, another G.I. was killed in Afghanistan; that would be Army Sergeant
First Class
Dustin B. Ard of Idaho Falls, Idaho. He leaves behind his pregnant wife Mary and daughter
Reagan. Ard's death was the 15th this year, bringing the total of American military deaths in
Afghanistan to nearly 2,400
.
Yet in spite of all this American sacrifice, the Taliban controls more territory than at
any time since 2001. Indeed, the Taliban has proven its ability to strike anywhere,
including inside Kabul; just on September 3, suicide bombers struck an international compound,
killing at least 19. Tellingly, local Afghans now want the international residents out of their
neighborhood, because they know the presence of foreigners is a magnet for Taliban killers --
whom nobody seems able to stop.
We can pause to observe that such popular fatalism dooms a regime. It makes people --
especially those with links to the West -- likely to flee. To be sure, there's no telling
exactly when the Kabul government will crumble, as well as how, exactly, it will crumble.
After all, President Trump hasn't even signed off on Khalilzad's draft deal, and even if
he does, he could always change his mind. The ability of the Blob to swallow presidents is not
to be underestimated -- and Trump is a case in point. For decades, reaching back to his career
as a businessman, Trump had been a skeptic of foreign military engagements, and he explicitly
campaigned against "endless wars" in 2016.
Yet since then, the Blob has been extending pseudopods of keep-the-status-quo cajolery
deep within his administration. Trump has thus been persuaded to keep the U.S. engaged, or, if
one prefers, quagmired .
Remarkably, in August 2017, Trump even delivered a primetime speech on Afghanistan in which
he pledged
"victory." Even if Trump doesn't talk up victory anymore, nobody can say what exactly he
will do. Does he want to get credit for extricating the U.S., finally, from an unpopular
war?
Or does he not want to see a foreign capital fall on his watch? Whatever the case, it seems
evident that the remaining sand is running out of the Afghan hourglass.
In the two years since that go-get-'em speech, Trump has expended zero rhetorical effort in
support of the Afghan mission; instead he and his administration have shifted their focus to
China. (And yes, there's also that fascination with Iran, although there again, because Trump
is Trump, it's hard to know what will come of it. It could be anything from an armed conflict
to a Kim Jong-un-ish summit.) In the meantime, the Democrats, too, have moved on. It wasn't
that long ago that Barack Obama was referring to Afghanistan as the "good war," while surging
American troops; Obama, too, was pseudopod-ed by the Blob. And while the 44th president soon
enough realized that the new doctrine of counter-insurgency wasn't working any better than the
old doctrine of counter-terrorism, he chose not to get cross-wise with the Blob -- and so
American troops stayed. Yet today, nobody in the 2020 Democratic presidential field -- not even
Obama alum Joe Biden -- has any enthusiasm for the Afghan mission. So whether it's a re-elected
Trump or a newly elected Democrat in the White House in 2021, the U.S. is going to be looking
for that fig-leafy "decent interval." It could come in the form of a bilateral agreement, or
perhaps an international conference, complete with the promise of U.N. peacekeepers (although
unless they're Pakistani or Chinese "peacekeepers," any foreign force will likely wilt in the
face of the Taliban, which is nothing if not good at killing). Yes, it's intriguing to note
that Afghanistan has trillions of dollars' worth of natural
resources waiting to be mined. And so if a stable regime could ever be established in that
war-crossed land, great wealth could spring forth. But that's a manifest
destiny for someone else, not Uncle Sam. What we're going to get stateside when this
misadventure finally comes to an end is a lot of new refugees -- and a lot of new
restaurants.
James P. Pinkerton is an author and contributing editor at . He served as a White
House policy aide to both Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
IMHO, we should have left Afghanistan years ago. I'll settle for yesterday. To hell with the
Rare Earth and our warmongers running/ruining foreign affairs!
Too late. The "decent interval" ended well over fifteen years ago.
I'm actually surprised that Trump isn't getting us out of there. He's told a lot of lies
and broken a lot of promises, but that's one that would have been easy to keep, and he didn't
do it. No spine.
This all depends on one simple factor. The integrity of the Taliban verses the integrity of
the communists in North Vietnam.
And trying to hedge a "we lost in Vietnam" slip and slide assail has no more veracity
here than it had in 1975.
The Taliban are not an invading military force. The struggle as it is has been one of
internal forces and players sharing the land and never having been but various communities
that fought, lived and negotiated agreements all nearly all of the countries history, unlike
Vietnam which has almost entire history had a North/South division.
We are going to have foreign restaurants regardless, but interventions just invite more of
them.
Quit calling the Kabul regime a "client". It's a puppet. The minute US forces leave
Afghanistan, the puppet government in Kabul will fall. Don't be surprised if it collapses
before the last US transport has its landing gear all the way up. Notwithstanding 2., yes,
it's over. Time to pack up and move on. However, Trump can't do that.
a. If Trump were to order a withdrawal from Afghanistan, his political opponents would
pounce. Expect lots of cries of "Putin puppet", angry denunciations of "Who lost
Afghanistan?" and heart-rending images depicting the fates of suffering girls. Not to mention
the grisly fates those persons so foolish as to cooperate with the United States.
Let us not kid ourselves - some of these images will in fact be genuine.
Also, Sunni Islamicists will be emboldened. It took some 18 years, but in the end, they
sent the Americans home packing.
No matter how you spin it, they won and we lost. Yes, the much hyped and much bloated
United States military was unable to defeat some medieval farmers in flip flops, who cannot
boast so much as a Piper Cub to their name, much less a drone or a cluster bomb.
If Trump had really wanted to leave Afghanistan, the time to do it was when he first
entered office. Blame his predecessors and wash his hands of the situation while the
political price was at its lowest. But Trump is weak, stupid and easily manipulated. He
listened to the generals, and the price of leaving has only risen and will only keep
rising.
b. They aren't much good for anything but staging, but Trump wants those Afghan outposts
for the war on Iran that his Saudi owners and Israeli masters so crave.
Of course, eighteen odd years and countless dollars, only to be defeated by peasants
without a single fighter jet or drone is not exactly great PR for the folks trying to
convince us that they really can win this time, why, Iran will be a walk in the park!
Trump is an imbecile, of course, but he is doing about the only thing he can do in
Afghanistan, which is, to try and maintain a semblance of control over major population
centers and pretend we're not losing.
All the Democrats should be on the bandwagon for withdrawal yesterday because Trump's October
Surprise could be announcing peace in our time and getting the hell out. It is a promise he
can actually keep. It is not like he is getting his wall.
'Does he want to get credit for extricating the U.S., finally, from an unpopular war? Or does
he not want to see a foreign capital fall on his watch?'
Any politician with sense knows that the American public could not care less about the
fall of Kabul (what's a kabul?). That's the American people. Campaign contributions from the
MIC is a different matter.
Trump has become, himself, part of "the Blob." By hiring Pompeo and Bolton to head his
foreign policy team he has abandoned any pretense of being an anti-war pro-restraint
president. He's gone full neo-con and it's long past time conservatives stop pretending he
hasn't.
Who gets to decide how many "refugees" the US will get from Afghanistan? Some of us would
gladly forgo all these wonderful new restaurants to protect our communities from yet another
"refugee" surge.
"... One problem with these sanctions is that they are largely after-the-fact when it comes to laying underwater pipe. Turkstream is already done. Nord Stream is about 75% done, but Congress still believes they can stop it . ..."
"... That gas for chicken deal can't be right. Russia produces twice as much chicken meat as the world average. In fact, they're overproducing so much they've started slowing down production. ..."
"... The energy sector is down to 10% of the economy. However all three new pipelines will turn on by the end of the year generating huge cash streams. Russia has solid trading partnerships with nations representing the vast majority of the people and trade on the planet. Food in Russia is great, and I mean really great. It's also very eclectic with cuisine from all over the world and produced to extremely high standards. GMO is illegal. No weird proteins in your cereal in the morning. American fast food tastes better in Russia because it's made with locally grown produce. ..."
"... My impression is that Russia is a continuing work in process in construction and reconstruction, everywhere. The stuff that is done is above Western standards, it amazes in gigantic scope and innovativeness. ..."
"... Some day soon we will need Russia as a friend. At that point we will have to deal with the incredibly bad karma that we created, out of irrational pure hatred and meaness. ..."
"... So the xenophobes claim that Nord Stream 2 would allow Russia to manipulate Europe's gas supply for political and other devious purposes. I searched and could not find any example in the past. But I was using Google which has become increasingly useless when searching on a number of topics. I did find articles about the Ukraine stealing the gas. Russia needs the money. I highly doubt they will screw over their investment. ..."
gjohnsit on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 6:22pm Congress is looking to impose
new sanctions on
Russia and any company that works with Russia.
Two bills in the House and the Senate, instead of penalizing the major gas companies involved, would target a perceived weak link:
the specialized pipe-laying companies working on Nord Stream 2 (and on the Russian state-controlled gas company Gazprom's TurkStream
project, which will bring Russian gas across the Black Sea to Turkey and eventually to Europe). The bills would sanction pipe-laying
companies involved in the project, freezing their U.S. assets and prohibiting them from doing U.S. business.
One problem with these sanctions is that they are largely after-the-fact when it comes to laying underwater pipe. Turkstream
is already done. Nord Stream is about 75% done, but Congress still believes they
can stop
it .
President Donald Trump has recommended Germany buy U.S. liquefied natural gas. That would benefit Cruz's home state of Texas,
the country's largest producer of natural gas.
A second problem is that Germany doesn't want us dictating their foreign policy. According to a recent survey, only 19 percent
of Germans considered the United States a trustworthy partner (well behind Russia).
Pluto's Republic on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 6:42pm snoopydawg on Mon, 09/16/2019 - 7:27pm
Oleg D.....something had a part in the Russia Gate saga and so his aluminum factory was punished. But then Trump relaxed them
after Oleg sold his part. Now McConnell is allowing Oleg to build a huge aluminum plant in Kentucky so off course he too is under
Vlad's thumb. I recently found out that Oleg has had ties to Mueller and others in our intelligence agencies. I don't think there
is one supposed Russian bad man involved in Russia Gate that doesn't have connections to Mueller and his goons. Misfud, Halpern
(?), and too many other people who played "the spy who loved me" game. Most of them tried to entrap someone in Trump's campaign.
If Europe wants to spend more money importing our gas and make their citizens pay higher prices then they need to be voted
out. Do their citizens even know about this? Do the people in Ukraine know why they are expected to freeze this winter or pay
higher prices for gas? Russia does seem to be made of teflon. Nothing seems to stick to them.
Oleg D.....something had a part in the Russia Gate saga and so his aluminum factory was punished. But then Trump relaxed
them after Oleg sold his part. Now McConnell is allowing Oleg to build a huge aluminum plant in Kentucky so off course he too
is under Vlad's thumb. I recently found out that Oleg has had ties to Mueller and others in our intelligence agencies. I don't
think there is one supposed Russian bad man involved in Russia Gate that doesn't have connections to Mueller and his goons.
Misfud, Halpern (?), and too many other people who played "the spy who loved me" game. Most of them tried to entrap someone
in Trump's campaign.
If Europe wants to spend more money importing our gas and make their citizens pay higher prices then they need to be voted
out. Do their citizens even know about this? Do the people in Ukraine know why they are expected to freeze this winter or pay
higher prices for gas? Russia does seem to be made of teflon. Nothing seems to stick to them.
I remember TOP making a big point about the aluminium saying it was Trump really kowtowing to Putin as sanctions were lifted.
Turns about that the majority of production was in Western Europe in particular Ireland. Something like upwards of 30K people
would end up losing their jobs.
around the web that Russia has become self-sufficient in food following a push by government. Food, btw that has no GMOs by
law. I think even their food exports have grown greatly. If true, even when Europe shakes off the leash, EU farmers won't have
the Russian market anymore.
What I know for a fact is that conscious enemy moles hell-bent on destroying the US could all retire; comforted that job is
being done by swiftly and completely by our rulers (both visible and not).
between Russia and China. Russian oil and gas in exchange for Chinese chickens. At the time I wondered at a nuclear power that
can't raise chickens as any peasant in America (and China) can.
around the web that Russia has become self-sufficient in food following a push by government. Food, btw that has no GMOs
by law. I think even their food exports have grown greatly.
If true, even when Europe shakes off the leash, EU farmers won't have the Russian market anymore.
What I know for a fact is that conscious enemy moles hell-bent on destroying the US could all retire; comforted that job
is being done by swiftly and completely by our rulers (both visible and not).
That gas for chicken deal can't be right. Russia produces twice as much chicken meat as the world average. In fact, they're
overproducing so much they've started slowing down production.
As of early 2019, Russia was manufacturing 33.7 kg of poultry per capita, the fourth-highest rate in the world, said Elena
Stepanova, deputy director of Rosptitsesoyuz, speaking at the Russian Meat and Feed Industry conference in Moscow.
The world's 2019 average rate is 16.2 kg per capita, and current production in Russia was already equal to domestic demand,
Stepanova said.
"In 2019, we forecast some increase in production, but this growth will be attributed primarily to exports. We consider
the balance on the domestic poultry market as fully built," Stepanova said, adding that overall poultry production in Russia
in 2019 was expected to grow by 2.7% compared to the previous year, to 5.11 million tons.
@jim
p Russia really played the long game when Putin put a halt to all EU food imports. Besides the food ban, the Russian government
began an investment program to bolster domestic production of its own food replacements. Russian cheese anybody? And the programs
just did not go to Russia's version of Big Agriculture factory farms--it went to small farmers also.
around the web that Russia has become self-sufficient in food following a push by government. Food, btw that has no GMOs
by law. I think even their food exports have grown greatly.
If true, even when Europe shakes off the leash, EU farmers won't have the Russian market anymore.
What I know for a fact is that conscious enemy moles hell-bent on destroying the US could all retire; comforted that job
is being done by swiftly and completely by our rulers (both visible and not).
Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested Saudi Arabia should buy Russian air defense systems to protect its oil facilities
from drone attacks, pointing to Iran and Turkey, who operate S-300 and S-400 missiles, respectively.
"Saudi Arabia needs to make a smart decision, as Iran did by buying our S-300, and as Mr. Erdogan did by deciding to buy
the most advanced S-400 Triumph air defense systems from Russia," Putin told reporters in Ankara on Monday. "These kinds of
systems are capable of defending any kind of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia from any kind of attack."
Putin was answering a question about the recent drone attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities, which Washington has blamed
on Iran, though Yemen's Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility. A coalition led by Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen in 2015 and
has fought the Houthis there since.
the most advanced S-400 Triumph air defense systems
According to some, these are the advanced Trump air defense systems. Guaranteed to put out lots of hot air with stench of aftereffect.
He who dealt it.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has suggested Saudi Arabia should buy Russian air defense systems to protect its oil
facilities from drone attacks, pointing to Iran and Turkey, who operate S-300 and S-400 missiles, respectively.
"Saudi Arabia needs to make a smart decision, as Iran did by buying our S-300, and as Mr. Erdogan did by deciding to
buy the most advanced S-400 Triumph air defense systems from Russia," Putin told reporters in Ankara on Monday. "These kinds
of systems are capable of defending any kind of infrastructure in Saudi Arabia from any kind of attack."
Putin was answering a question about the recent drone attack on Saudi Arabian oil facilities, which Washington has blamed
on Iran, though Yemen's Houthi rebels have claimed responsibility. A coalition led by Saudi Arabia invaded Yemen in 2015
and has fought the Houthis there since.
... CLEAN ENERGY THAT OBSOLETIZES FOSSIL FUELS, ASSHOLES!!!
WE COULD LITERALLY SAVE THE WORLD, BE EVERYONE'S HEROES AGAIN, RESURRECT OUR ECONOMY, END OUR WARS, AND PULL THE FLOOR RIGHT
OUT FROM UNDERNEATH RUSSIA AND ALL THOSE GOSHAWFUL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS!
... CLEAN ENERGY THAT OBSOLETIZES FOSSIL FUELS, ASSHOLES!!!
WE COULD LITERALLY SAVE THE WORLD, BE EVERYONE'S HEROES AGAIN, RESURRECT OUR ECONOMY, END OUR WARS, AND PULL THE FLOOR RIGHT
OUT FROM UNDERNEATH RUSSIA AND ALL THOSE GOSHAWFUL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS!
@The
Liberal Moonbat to stop Islamist terrorists, we fund them to keep the forever wars going. I realize you know that, I just
could not help myself there. Whenever I hear we must "fight terrorism" my brain automatically goes back to all the things I have
read showing how we not only actively created those terrorists to fight our enemies who will not accept our American interests
dominating the world, but how many more we make every day we are there destroying their countries.
... CLEAN ENERGY THAT OBSOLETIZES FOSSIL FUELS, ASSHOLES!!!
WE COULD LITERALLY SAVE THE WORLD, BE EVERYONE'S HEROES AGAIN, RESURRECT OUR ECONOMY, END OUR WARS, AND PULL THE FLOOR RIGHT
OUT FROM UNDERNEATH RUSSIA AND ALL THOSE GOSHAWFUL ISLAMIC TERRORISTS!
The Russian economy is arguably the healthiest in the world. It's national debt barely shows as a blip on a bar graph with
other nations. She has enough cash to pay it off all her debt today. She sold almost all of her US government bonds.
Elvira Nabuillina, head of the Russian Bank, is perhaps the most competent national economic manager in the world. The
feeling in Russia is that she is too conservative and high interest rates are the major factor in slower economic growth.
Russia is the largest grower and exporter of wheat in the world, passing the US by a factor of two.
The energy sector is down to 10% of the economy. However all three new pipelines will turn on by the end of the year generating
huge cash streams. Russia has solid trading partnerships with nations representing the vast majority of the people and trade on
the planet. Food in Russia is great, and I mean really great. It's also very eclectic with cuisine from all over the world and
produced to extremely high standards. GMO is illegal. No weird proteins in your cereal in the morning. American fast food tastes
better in Russia because it's made with locally grown produce.
My impression is that Russia is a continuing work in process in construction and reconstruction, everywhere. The stuff
that is done is above Western standards, it amazes in gigantic scope and innovativeness.
I just visited the new aquarium in Vladivostok. It towers above the ones in Boston and LA, maybe by an order of magnitude.
The tallest building in Europe is in St. Petersburg, the next 5 tallest in Moscow City Center.
The longest bridge in Europe is in Russia. My impression is that Russia is a dynamic fast growing country and in contrast the
US can't do anything new. The US must have that gigantic defense budget, ten times that of Russia, to protect it from what? (hmmm).
There is nothing, I repeat nothing, that the US congress can do to slow down Russia today.
Some day soon we will need Russia as a friend. At that point we will have to deal with the incredibly bad karma that we
created, out of irrational pure hatred and meaness.
So the xenophobes claim that Nord Stream 2 would allow Russia to manipulate Europe's gas supply for political and other
devious purposes. I searched and could not find any example in the past. But I was using Google which has become increasingly
useless when searching on a number of topics. I did find articles about the Ukraine stealing the gas. Russia needs the money.
I highly doubt they will screw over their investment.
But to the Europeans I say, go fer it. You want to see manipulation of your energy: start up a heavy reliance on American LNG.
In 2013, Edward Snowden was an IT systems expert working under contract for the National
Security Agency when he traveled to Hong Kong to provide three journalists with thousands of
top-secret documents about U.S. intelligence agencies' surveillance of American citizens.
To Snowden, the classified information he shared with the journalists exposed privacy abuses
by government intelligence agencies. He saw himself as a whistleblower. But the U.S. government
considered him a traitor in violation of the
Espionage Act .
After meeting with the journalists, Snowden intended to leave Hong Kong and travel -- via
Russia -- to Ecuador, where he would seek asylum. But when his plane landed at Moscow's
Sheremetyevo International Airport, things didn't go according to plan.
"What I wasn't expecting was that the United States government itself ... would cancel my
passport," he says.
Snowden was directed to a room where Russian intelligence agents offered to assist him -- in
return for access to any secrets he harbored. Snowden says he refused.
"I didn't cooperate with the Russian intelligence services -- I haven't and I won't," he
says. "I destroyed my access to the archive. ... I had no material with me before I left Hong
Kong, because I knew I was going to have to go through this complex multi-jurisdictional
route."
Snowden spent 40 days in the Moscow airport, trying to negotiate asylum in various
countries. After being denied asylum by 27 nations, he settled in Russia, where he remains
today.
"People look at me now and they think I'm this crazy guy, I'm this extremist or whatever.
Some people have a misconception that [I] set out to burn down the NSA," he says. "But that's
not what this was about. In many ways, 2013 wasn't about surveillance at all. What it was about
was a violation of the Constitution."
Snowden's 2013 revelations led to changes in the laws and standards governing American
intelligence agencies and the practices of U.S. technology companies, which now encrypt much of
their Web traffic for security. He reflects on his life and his experience in the intelligence
community in the memoir Permanent Record.
On Sept. 17, the U.S. Justice Department filed suit to recover all proceeds from the book,
alleging that Snowden violated nondisclosure agreements by not letting the government review
the manuscript before publication; Snowden's attorney, Ben Wizner, said in a statement that the
book contains no government secrets that have not been previously published by respected news
organizations, and that the government's prepublication review system is under court
challenge.
"... Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments. "We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says. Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use. Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief. ..."
"... Sidney Gottlieb, can now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture. ..."
"... In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used as a tool for mind control. ..."
"... Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period? ..."
"... Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote, "I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me." ..."
"... And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him. ..."
"... The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research. ..."
"... For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation. So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them. ..."
"... CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions, but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation -- all the meantime bombarding them with questions, trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation. ..."
"... [Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important -- mind control, if it can be mastered, is the key to global world power. ..."
"... The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972, when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by [President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA ..."
"... Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records. ... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did, but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful. ..."
CIA chemist Sidney Gottlieb headed up the agency's secret MK-ULTRA program, which was charged with developing a mind control drug
that could be weaponized against enemies.
Courtesy of the CIA
During the early period of the Cold War, the CIA became convinced that communists had discovered a drug or technique that would allow
them to control human minds. In response, the CIA began its own secret program, called MK-ULTRA, to search for a mind control drug
that could be weaponized against enemies.
MK-ULTRA, which operated from the 1950s until the early '60s, was created and run by
a chemist named Sidney Gottlieb. Journalist Stephen Kinzer, who spent several years investigating the program, calls the operation
the "most sustained search in history for techniques of mind control."
Some of Gottlieb's experiments were covertly funded at universities and research centers, Kinzer says, while others were conducted
in American prisons and in detention centers in Japan, Germany and the Philippines. Many of his unwitting subjects endured psychological
torture ranging from electroshock to high doses of LSD, according to Kinzer's research.
"Gottlieb wanted to create a way to seize control of people's minds, and he realized it was a two-part process," Kinzer says.
"First, you had to blast away the existing mind. Second, you had to find a way to insert a new mind into that resulting void. We
didn't get too far on number two, but he did a lot of work on number one."
Kinzer notes that the top-secret nature of Gottlieb's work makes it impossible to measure the human cost of his experiments.
"We don't know how many people died, but a number did, and many lives were permanently destroyed," he says. Ultimately, Gottlieb
concluded that mind control was not possible.
Ultimately, Gottlieb concluded that mind control was not possible. After MK-ULTRA shut down, he went on to lead a CIA program
that created poisons and high-tech gadgets for spies to use.
Kinzer writes about Gottlieb and MK-ULTRA in his new book, Poisoner in Chief.
As part of the search for drugs that would allow people to control the human mind, CIA scientists became aware of the existence
of LSD, and this became an obsession for the early directors of MK-ULTRA. Actually, the MK-ULTRA director, Sidney Gottlieb, can
now be seen as the man who brought LSD to America. He was the unwitting godfather of the entire LSD counterculture.
In the early 1950s, he arranged for the CIA to pay $240,000 to buy the world's entire supply of LSD. He brought this to the
United States, and he began spreading it around to hospitals, clinics, prisons and other institutions, asking them, through bogus
foundations, to carry out research projects and find out what LSD was, how people reacted to it and how it might be able to be used
as a tool for mind control.
Now, the people who volunteered for these experiments and began taking LSD, in many cases, found it very pleasurable. They told
their friends about it. Who were those people?
Ken Kesey ,
the author of One Flew
Over the Cuckoo's Nest , got his LSD in an experiment sponsored by the CIA by MK-ULTRA, by Sidney Gottlieb. So did Robert Hunter,
the lyricist for the Grateful Dead, which went on to become a great purveyor of LSD culture.
Allen Ginsberg , the poet who preached the
value of the great personal adventure of using LSD, got his first LSD from Sidney Gottlieb. Although, of course, he never knew that
name.
So the CIA brought LSD to America unwittingly, and actually it's a tremendous irony that the drug that the CIA hoped would be
its key to controlling humanity actually wound up fueling a generational rebellion that was dedicated to destroying everything that
the CIA held dear and defended.
On how MK-ULTRA experimented on prisoners, including crime boss
Whitey Bulger
Whitey Bulger was one of the prisoners who volunteered for what he was told was an experiment aimed at finding a cure for
schizophrenia. As part of this experiment, he was given LSD every day for more than a year. He later realized that this had nothing
to do with schizophrenia and he was a guinea pig in a government experiment aimed at seeing what people's long-term reactions to
LSD was. Essentially, could we make a person lose his mind by feeding him LSD every day over such a long period?
Bulger wrote afterward about his experiences, which he described as quite horrific. He thought he was going insane. He wrote,
"I was in prison for committing a crime, but they committed a greater crime on me."
And towards the end of his life, Bulger came to realize the truth of what had happened to him, and he actually told his friends
that he was going to find that doctor in Atlanta who was the head of that experiment program in the penitentiary and go kill him.
On the CIA hiring Nazi doctors and Japanese torturers to learn methods
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration camps.
Stephen Kinzer, author of 'Poisoner in Chief'
The CIA mind control project, MK-ULTRA, was essentially a continuation of work that began in Japanese and Nazi concentration
camps. Not only was it roughly based on those experiments, but the CIA actually hired the vivisectionists and the torturers who had
worked in Japan and in Nazi concentration camps to come and explain what they had found out so that we could build on their research.
For example, Nazi doctors had conducted extensive experiments with mescaline at the Dachau concentration camp, and the CIA
was very interested in figuring out whether mescaline could be the key to mind control that was one of their big avenues of investigation.
So they hired the Nazi doctors who had been involved in that project to advise them.
Another thing the Nazis provided was information about poison gases like sarin, which is still being used. Nazi doctors came to
America to Fort Detrick in Maryland, which was the center of this project, to lecture to CIA officers to tell them how long it took
for people to die from sarin.
On the more extreme experiments Gottlieb conducted overseas
Gottlieb and the CIA established secret detention centers throughout Europe and East Asia, particularly in Japan, Germany and
the Philippines, which were largely under American control in the period of the early '50s, and therefore Gottlieb didn't have to
worry about any legal entanglements in these places. ...
CIA officers in Europe and Asia were capturing enemy agents and others who they felt might be suspected persons or were otherwise
what they called "expendable." They would grab these people and throw them into cells and then test all kinds of, not just drug potions,
but other techniques, like electroshock, extremes of temperature, sensory isolation -- all the meantime bombarding them with questions,
trying to see if they could break down resistance and find a way to destroy the human ego. So these were projects designed not only
to understand the human mind but to figure out how to destroy it. And that made Gottlieb, although in some ways a very compassionate
person, certainly the most prolific torturer of his generation.
On how these experiments were unsupervised
This guy [Sidney Gottlieb] had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around
the world and subject them to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over
his shoulder.
Stephen Kinzer
[Gottlieb] operated almost completely without supervision. He had sort of a checkoff from his titular boss and from his real
boss, Richard Helms, and from the CIA director, Allen Dulles. But none of them really wanted to know what he was doing. This guy
had a license to kill. He was allowed to requisition human subjects across the United States and around the world and subject them
to any kind of abuse that he wanted, even up to the level of it being fatal -- yet nobody looked over his shoulder. He never had
to file serious reports to anybody. I think the mentality must have been [that] this project is so important -- mind control, if
it can be mastered, is the key to global world power.
On how Gottlieb destroyed evidence about his experiments when he left the CIA
The end of Gottlieb's career came in 1972, when his patron, Richard Helms, who was then director of the CIA, was removed by
[President Richard] Nixon. Once Helms was gone, it was just a matter of time until Gottlieb would be gone, and most important was
that Helms was really the only person at the CIA who had an idea of what Gottlieb had been doing. So as they were both on their way
out of the CIA, they agreed that they should destroy all records of MK-ULTRA.
Gottlieb actually drove out to the CIA records center and ordered the archives to destroy boxes full of MK-ULTRA records.
... However, it turns out that there were some [records] found in other places; there was a depot for expense account reports that
had not been destroyed, and various other pieces of paper remain. So there is enough out there to reconstruct some of what he did,
but his effort to wipe away his traces by destroying all those documents in the early '70s was quite successful.
Sam Briger and Thea Chaloner produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan
Sullivan adapted it for the Web.
Correction Sept. 9, 2019
A previous photo caption incorrectly referred to the CIA's MK-ULTRA program as MS-ULTRA.
"... Or alternatively, Smolenkov might have been someone who was turned after recruitment or a genuine agent who was trying to respond to urgent demands from his controller in Washington, who was de facto ..."
"... Scott also believes, as do I, that the story was leaked because John Brennan and his associates knew that they were deliberately marketing phony intelligence on Russia to undermine Trump and are trying to preempt any investigation by Attorney General William Barr on the provenance of the Russiagate story. ..."
"... The reality is that spying is a highly creative profession, with operational twists and turns limited only by one's imagination. In this case, unless someone actually succeeds in interviewing Oleg Smolenkov and he decides to tell the complete truth as he sees it, the American public might never know the reality behind the latest spy story. ..."
The account that appeared in the mainstream media went something like this: A midlevel
Russian official named Oleg Smolenkov was recruited decades ago by the CIA. He eventually wound
up in an important office in the Kremlin that gave him access to President Vladimir Putin.
Smolenkov was the principal source of information confirming that Russia, acting on Putin's
instructions, was trying to interfere in the 2016 presidential election to defeat Hillary
Clinton and elect Donald Trump. It was claimed that Smolenkov was actually able to photograph
documents in Putin's desk. CIA concerns that a mole hunt in the Kremlin resulting from the
media revelations concerning Russian interference in the election might lead to Smolenkov
resulted in a 2016 offer to extract him and his family from Russia. This was successfully
executed during a Smolenkov family vacation trip to Montenegro in 2017. The family now resides
in Virginia.
The CNN story and other mainstream media that picked up on the tale embroidered it somewhat,
suggesting that although Smolenkov was the CIA's crown jewel, the US has a number of "high
level" spies in Moscow. It was also claimed that the timetable for the exfiltration was pushed
forward by CIA in 2017 after it was noted that Donald Trump was particularly careless with
classified information and might inadvertently reveal the existence of the source. The
allegation about Trump carelessness came, according to CNN, after a May 2017 meeting between
Trump and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in which the president reportedly shared
sensitive information on Syria and ISIS that had been provided by Israel.
Variants of the CNN story appeared subsequently in the New York Times headlined
C.I.A. Informant Extracted From Russia Had Sent Secrets to US for Decades , which confirmed
that the extraction took place in 2017 though it also asserts that the decision to make the
move came in 2016 when Barack Obama was still president.
Taibbi observes, correctly, that CNN and the other mainstream elements reporting the story
elaborated on it through commentary coming from anonymous "former senior intelligence
officials." As the networks have all hired ex-spooks, it raises the interesting possibility
that employees of the media are themselves providing comments on intelligence operations that
they were personally involved in, meaning that they might deliberately promote a narrative that
does not cast them in a bad light.
Next morning's Washington Post story
US got key asset out of Russia following election hacking touched all bases and also tried
hard to implicate Trump. It confirmed 2016 as the time frame for the decision to carry out the
exfiltration and also mentioned the president's talk with Lavrov in May 2017, though the
meeting itself was not cited as the reason for the move. As Taibbi observes, "So why mention
it?"
The Russians have denied that Smolenkov was an important official and have insisted that the
whole story might be something of a fabrication. And the alleged CIA handling of the claimed
top-level defector somewhat bears out that conclusion. Normally, a former top spy is resettled
in the US or somewhere overseas in a fake name to protect him or her from any possible attempt
at revenge by their former countrymen. In Smolenkov's case, easily public accessible online
county real estate records indicate that he bought a $1 million house in Stafford Virginia in
2018 using
his own true name .
If the Russians were truly conducting a mole hunt that endangered Smolenkov it may have been
because the US media and their anonymous intelligence sources have been bragging about how they
have "penetrated the Kremlin." A Washington Post June 2017 articled called "
Obama's Secret Struggle to Punish Russia for Putin's Election Assault is typical. In
that
article , the author describes how CIA Director John Brennan secured a "feat of espionage"
by running spies "deep within the Russian government" that revealed Russia's electoral
interference.
So, the Smolenkov story has inconsistencies and one has to question why it was deliberately
leaked at this time. The only constant in the media coverage is the repeated but completely
evidence-free suggestion that the mole was endangered and had to be removed because of Donald
Trump's inability to keep a secret. One has to consider the possibility that the story has been
leaked at least in part due to the continuing effort by the national security state to "get
Trump."
Highly recommended is former weapons inspector Scott Ritter's fascinating detailed
dissection of Smolenkov's career as well as a history of the evolution of CIA spying against
Russia . Scott speculates on why the leak of the story took place at all, examining a
number of scenarios along the way. Smolenkov, who, according to former CIA officer Larry
Johnson, has oddly
never been polygraphed to establish his bona fides , might have been a double
agent from the start, possibly a low level functionary allowed to work for the Americans so the
Russian FSB intelligence service could feed low level information and control the narrative. It
is a "dirty secret" within the Agency that many agents are recruited by case officers for no
other reason than to enhance one's career. Such agents normally have no real access and provide
little reporting.
Or alternatively, Smolenkov might have been someone who was turned after recruitment or
a genuine agent who was trying to respond to urgent demands from his controller in Washington,
who was de facto John Brennan, by producing a dramatic report that was basically
fabricated. Or the story itself might be completely false, an attempt by some former and
current officials at CIA to demonstrate a great success at a time when the intelligence
community is under considerable pressure.
Scott also believes, as do I, that the story was leaked because John Brennan and his
associates knew that they were deliberately marketing phony intelligence on Russia to undermine
Trump and are trying to preempt any investigation by Attorney General William Barr on the
provenance of the Russiagate story. If it can be demonstrated somehow that the claims of
Kremlin interference came from a highly regarded credible Russian source then Brennan and
company can claim that they acted in good faith. Of course, that tale might break down if
anyone bothers to interview Smolenkov.
Another theory that I tend to like is that the CIA might be making public the Smolenkov case
in an attempt to lower the heat on another actual high-level source still operating in Moscow.
If Russia can be convinced that Smolenkov was the only significant spy working in the Kremlin
it might ratchet down efforts to find another mole. It is an interesting theory worthy of spy
vs. spy, but one can be pretty sure that Russian counterintelligence has already thought of
that possibility and will not be fooled.
The reality is that spying is a highly creative profession, with operational twists and
turns limited only by one's imagination. In this case, unless someone actually succeeds in
interviewing Oleg Smolenkov and he decides to tell the complete truth as he sees it, the
American public might never know the reality behind the latest spy story.
If this not of the Biden run, I do not know what can be. He now has an albatross abound his neck in the form of interference
in Ukrainian criminal investigation to save his corrupt to the core narcoaddict son. Only the raw power of neoliberal MSM
to suppress any information that does not fit their agenda is keeping him in the race.
But a more important fact that he was criminally involved in EuroMaydan (at the cost to the USA taxpayers around five billions) is swiped under the carpet. And will never be discussed
along with criminality of Obama and Nuland.
As somebody put it "with considerable forethought [neoliberal MSM] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will
faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate and faithfully work for their employers for as low a
wage as possible."
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States after a whistleblower
lodged an 'urgent' complaint about something Trump promised another world leader - the details of which the White House has refused
to share.
Here's the scandal; It appears that Trump, may have made promises to newly minted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - very
likely involving an effort to convince Ukraine to reopen its investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, after Biden strongarmed
Ukraine's prior government into firing its top prosecutor - something Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have pursued for months
. There are also unsupported rumors that Trump threatened to withhold $250 million in aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists.
And while the MSM and Congressional Democrats are starting to focus on the sitting US president having a political opponent investigated,
The New
York Times admits that nothing Trump did would have been illegal , as "while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities
with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community
to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit."
Moreover, here's why Trump and Giuliani are going to dig their heels in; last year Biden openly bragged about threatening to hurl
Ukraine into bankruptcy as Vice President if they didn't fire their top prosecutor , Viktor Shokin - who was leading a wide-ranging
corruption investigation into a natural gas firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling,
Biden described
how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin. -
The Hill
"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them
and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the
conversation with Poroshenko.
" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired . And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on
Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
In short, there's both smoke and fire here - and what's left of Biden's 2020 bid for president may be the largest casualty of
the entire whistleblower scandal.
And by the transitive properties of the Obama administration 'vetting' Trump by sending spies into his campaign, Trump can simply
say he was protecting America from someone who may have used his position of power to directly benefit his own family at the expense
of justice.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are acting as if they've found the holy grail of taking Trump down. On Thursday, the House
Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interviewed inspector general Michael Atkinson, with whom the whistleblower
lodged their complaint - however despite three hours of testimony, he repeatedly declined to discuss the content of the complaint
.
Following the session, Schiff gave an angry speech - demanding that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire share
the complaint , and calling the decision to withhold it "unprecedented."
"We cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming
to Congress," said Schiff, adding "We're determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is to make sure
that the national security is protected."
According to Schiff, someone "is trying to manipulate the system to keep information about an urgent matter from the Congress
There certainly are a lot of indications that it was someone at a higher pay grade than the director of national intelligence," according
to the
Washington Post .
On thursday, Trump denied doing anything improper - tweeting " Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand
that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. "
"Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on
such a potentially 'heavily populated' call. "
Giuliani, meanwhile, went on CNN with Chris Cuomo Thursday to defend his discussions with Ukraine about investigating alleged election
interference in the 2016 election to the benefit of Hillary Clinton conducted by Ukraine's previous government. According to Giuliani,
Biden's dealings in Ukraine were 'tangential' to the 2016 election interference question - in which a Ukrainian court ruled that
government officials meddled
for Hillary in 2016 by releasing details of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's 'Black Book' to Clinton campaign staffer Alexandra
Chalupa.
And so - what the MSM doesn't appear to understand is that President Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden over something
with legitimate underpinnings.
Which - of course, may lead to the Bidens'
adventures in China , which Giuliani referred to in his CNN interview. And just like his
Ukraine scandal
, it involves actions which may have helped his son Hunter - who was making hand over fist in both countries.
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5
billion
Meanwhile, speculation is rampant over what this hornet's nest means for all involved...
The latest intell hit on Trump tells me that the deep-state swamp rats are in a panic over the Ukrainian/Obama admin collusion
about to be outed in the IG report. They're also freaked out over Biden's shady Ukrainian deals with his kid.
Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which
expanded to $1.5 billion
Lets clarify this a bit. The 1 billion came from the RED CHINESE ARMY, lets call spade a spade here. And why? To buy into (invest
in ) DARPA related contractors. The RED CHINESE NAVY was so impressed with little sonny's performance (meaning daddy's help),
that they handed over an additions 500,000.
Without daddy's influence as VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and that FREE PLANE RIDE on Air Force TWO with daddy holding
sonny's little hand, little sonny never would have gotten past the ticket booth.
"House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma."
LOL looking into someone looking into a crime that may have been committed by a Democrat... they're some big brained individuals
these dummycrats.
Putting him in the hot seat would be to ask why he sponsored a coup and backed a neo Nazi party. When he starts to lie, put
up images of the party he back wearing inverted Das Reich arm bands and flying flags. Now that would be real journalism.
The Bidens show precisely that power corrupts. They both need to be investigated and then jailed. To the countries of the world
that depend on the USA for any kind of help, they had to deal with Joe 'what's in-it-for-me' Biden? What a disgrace for America.
I think every sitting President, Vice President, senator, and representative needs a yearly lie-detector test that asks but
one question: "did you do anything in your official duties that personally benefited you or your family?"
Didn't you ever wonder how so many senators and representatives end up multi-millionaires after a couple terms in office?
Why the fuuk do we have have to put up with this jackass. All the talk on cable, etc, is all ********. Trump is a fuuking crook,
and Barr is his bag man,. He has surrounded hinmself with toadies, cowards , incompetents and a trash family. Rise up, call your
representatives, March on DC get this crook out of office.
Call anyone you can think of, challenge them to overcome their cowardice, including members of congress, cabinet, your governor
Same could be said for the Democrats and all their Russian collusion lies and Beto wants to FORCE people to sell their weapons
to the government, right.......
" ...The complaint <against the president> involved communications with a foreign leader and a "promise" that Trump made, which
was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official <who monitored Trumps call> who had worked at the White House went to the inspector
general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said. ..."
What this tells:
1. If president Trump is monitored this way our spooks know the number of hairs in our crotches...
2. If we convicted on promises most in congress would be hung by the neck til dead for treason for not following the constitution...
Anybody that thinks that Trump, having had Roy Cohn as his mentor, and working in cut-throat NY real estate for years, AND
having dealt with political snakes for many years..would allow himself to be taped saying something on a call that he KNOWS the
Intel Community is listening in, is not paying attention.
This will backfire on the Dems and the media. Trump set them all up again..
My guess is the Dems will be hounding the IC for the complaint, will call Barr and the DNI in an investigation ran live on
CNN and MSNBC..that will show how corrupt Biden was. Everytime you hear Alexandra Chalupa's name come up, look for the MSM to
go ballistic..she is the tell in this one also. It cannot be allowed for the plebes to find out how Manafort was setup, Ukraine
assisted the DNC in the fake Russian election interference farce..hey, guess what, guess who is an ardent Ukraininan nationalist?
The head of Crowdstrike. Chalupa and Alparovich, the names that will bring down more dirty Dems than anyone in history.
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States
Trump is a traitor, but he does not work for either Ukraine nor Russia but instead he works for Israel first and foremost!
He even admits it himself. Lol he doesn't even give a shite when Israel taps his phone :)
House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma.
This bunch of filthy swine should be looking up each others asses for answers. Actually the Ukrainians have been screaming
for over a year at the DOJ and FBI to take the evidence they have. But the rotten to the core Democrat socialist lefties wanted
to block it.
If this not of the Biden run, I do not know what can be. He now has an albatross abound his neck in the form of interference
in Ukrainian criminal investigation to save his corrupt to the core narcoaddict son. Only the raw power of neoliberal MSM
to suppress any information that does not fit their agenda is keeping him in the race.
But a more important fact that he was criminally involved in EuroMaydan (at the cost to the USA taxpayers around five billions) is swiped under the carpet. And will never be discussed
along with criminality of Obama and Nuland.
As somebody put it "with considerable forethought [neoliberal MSM] are attempting to create a nation of morons who will
faithfully go out and buy this or that product, vote for this or that candidate and faithfully work for their employers for as low a
wage as possible."
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States after a whistleblower
lodged an 'urgent' complaint about something Trump promised another world leader - the details of which the White House has refused
to share.
Here's the scandal; It appears that Trump, may have made promises to newly minted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - very
likely involving an effort to convince Ukraine to reopen its investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, after Biden strongarmed
Ukraine's prior government into firing its top prosecutor - something Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have pursued for months
. There are also unsupported rumors that Trump threatened to withhold $250 million in aid to help Ukraine fight Russian-backed separatists.
And while the MSM and Congressional Democrats are starting to focus on the sitting US president having a political opponent investigated,
The New
York Times admits that nothing Trump did would have been illegal , as "while Mr. Trump may have discussed intelligence activities
with the foreign leader, he enjoys broad power as president to declassify intelligence secrets, order the intelligence community
to act and otherwise direct the conduct of foreign policy as he sees fit."
Moreover, here's why Trump and Giuliani are going to dig their heels in; last year Biden openly bragged about threatening to hurl
Ukraine into bankruptcy as Vice President if they didn't fire their top prosecutor , Viktor Shokin - who was leading a wide-ranging
corruption investigation into a natural gas firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling,
Biden described
how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin. -
The Hill
"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them
and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the
conversation with Poroshenko.
" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired . And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on
Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
In short, there's both smoke and fire here - and what's left of Biden's 2020 bid for president may be the largest casualty of
the entire whistleblower scandal.
And by the transitive properties of the Obama administration 'vetting' Trump by sending spies into his campaign, Trump can simply
say he was protecting America from someone who may have used his position of power to directly benefit his own family at the expense
of justice.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are acting as if they've found the holy grail of taking Trump down. On Thursday, the House
Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interviewed inspector general Michael Atkinson, with whom the whistleblower
lodged their complaint - however despite three hours of testimony, he repeatedly declined to discuss the content of the complaint
.
Following the session, Schiff gave an angry speech - demanding that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire share
the complaint , and calling the decision to withhold it "unprecedented."
"We cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming
to Congress," said Schiff, adding "We're determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is to make sure
that the national security is protected."
According to Schiff, someone "is trying to manipulate the system to keep information about an urgent matter from the Congress
There certainly are a lot of indications that it was someone at a higher pay grade than the director of national intelligence," according
to the
Washington Post .
On thursday, Trump denied doing anything improper - tweeting " Virtually anytime I speak on the phone to a foreign leader, I understand
that there may be many people listening from various U.S. agencies, not to mention those from the other country itself. "
"Knowing all of this, is anybody dumb enough to believe that I would say something inappropriate with a foreign leader while on
such a potentially 'heavily populated' call. "
Giuliani, meanwhile, went on CNN with Chris Cuomo Thursday to defend his discussions with Ukraine about investigating alleged election
interference in the 2016 election to the benefit of Hillary Clinton conducted by Ukraine's previous government. According to Giuliani,
Biden's dealings in Ukraine were 'tangential' to the 2016 election interference question - in which a Ukrainian court ruled that
government officials meddled
for Hillary in 2016 by releasing details of Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort's 'Black Book' to Clinton campaign staffer Alexandra
Chalupa.
And so - what the MSM doesn't appear to understand is that President Trump asking Ukraine to investigate Biden over something
with legitimate underpinnings.
Which - of course, may lead to the Bidens'
adventures in China , which Giuliani referred to in his CNN interview. And just like his
Ukraine scandal
, it involves actions which may have helped his son Hunter - who was making hand over fist in both countries.
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now
Secret Empires discovered
that in 2013, then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two - and two weeks later, Hunter's
firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which expanded to $1.5
billion
Meanwhile, speculation is rampant over what this hornet's nest means for all involved...
The latest intell hit on Trump tells me that the deep-state swamp rats are in a panic over the Ukrainian/Obama admin collusion
about to be outed in the IG report. They're also freaked out over Biden's shady Ukrainian deals with his kid.
Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China , which
expanded to $1.5 billion
Lets clarify this a bit. The 1 billion came from the RED CHINESE ARMY, lets call spade a spade here. And why? To buy into (invest
in ) DARPA related contractors. The RED CHINESE NAVY was so impressed with little sonny's performance (meaning daddy's help),
that they handed over an additions 500,000.
Without daddy's influence as VICE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, and that FREE PLANE RIDE on Air Force TWO with daddy holding
sonny's little hand, little sonny never would have gotten past the ticket booth.
"House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma."
LOL looking into someone looking into a crime that may have been committed by a Democrat... they're some big brained individuals
these dummycrats.
Putting him in the hot seat would be to ask why he sponsored a coup and backed a neo Nazi party. When he starts to lie, put
up images of the party he back wearing inverted Das Reich arm bands and flying flags. Now that would be real journalism.
The Bidens show precisely that power corrupts. They both need to be investigated and then jailed. To the countries of the world
that depend on the USA for any kind of help, they had to deal with Joe 'what's in-it-for-me' Biden? What a disgrace for America.
I think every sitting President, Vice President, senator, and representative needs a yearly lie-detector test that asks but
one question: "did you do anything in your official duties that personally benefited you or your family?"
Didn't you ever wonder how so many senators and representatives end up multi-millionaires after a couple terms in office?
Why the fuuk do we have have to put up with this jackass. All the talk on cable, etc, is all ********. Trump is a fuuking crook,
and Barr is his bag man,. He has surrounded hinmself with toadies, cowards , incompetents and a trash family. Rise up, call your
representatives, March on DC get this crook out of office.
Call anyone you can think of, challenge them to overcome their cowardice, including members of congress, cabinet, your governor
Same could be said for the Democrats and all their Russian collusion lies and Beto wants to FORCE people to sell their weapons
to the government, right.......
" ...The complaint <against the president> involved communications with a foreign leader and a "promise" that Trump made, which
was so alarming that a U.S. intelligence official <who monitored Trumps call> who had worked at the White House went to the inspector
general of the intelligence community, two former U.S. officials said. ..."
What this tells:
1. If president Trump is monitored this way our spooks know the number of hairs in our crotches...
2. If we convicted on promises most in congress would be hung by the neck til dead for treason for not following the constitution...
Anybody that thinks that Trump, having had Roy Cohn as his mentor, and working in cut-throat NY real estate for years, AND
having dealt with political snakes for many years..would allow himself to be taped saying something on a call that he KNOWS the
Intel Community is listening in, is not paying attention.
This will backfire on the Dems and the media. Trump set them all up again..
My guess is the Dems will be hounding the IC for the complaint, will call Barr and the DNI in an investigation ran live on
CNN and MSNBC..that will show how corrupt Biden was. Everytime you hear Alexandra Chalupa's name come up, look for the MSM to
go ballistic..she is the tell in this one also. It cannot be allowed for the plebes to find out how Manafort was setup, Ukraine
assisted the DNC in the fake Russian election interference farce..hey, guess what, guess who is an ardent Ukraininan nationalist?
The head of Crowdstrike. Chalupa and Alparovich, the names that will bring down more dirty Dems than anyone in history.
For days we've been treated to MSM insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States
Trump is a traitor, but he does not work for either Ukraine nor Russia but instead he works for Israel first and foremost!
He even admits it himself. Lol he doesn't even give a shite when Israel taps his phone :)
House Democrats are also looking into whether Giuliani flew to Ukraine to 'encourage' them to investigate Hunter Biden and
his involvement with Burisma.
This bunch of filthy swine should be looking up each others asses for answers. Actually the Ukrainians have been screaming
for over a year at the DOJ and FBI to take the evidence they have. But the rotten to the core Democrat socialist lefties wanted
to block it.
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Stephen Wertheim explains
what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:
American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do
what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political
leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership."
A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire
itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.
U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at
the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to
use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military
force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.
Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and
intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts.
Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure,
but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:
Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate
deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the
idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous
goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse
for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we
have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become
an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived
as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."
Wertheim adds:
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned"
-- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in
itself.
Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also
become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the
U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck
won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.
Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership,
resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.
Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is
considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.
It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted
dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we
were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan.
We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and
starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.
Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've
never happened if we took that policy.
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only
from reward and punishment.
So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early
days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would
have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several
decades longer.
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?
How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for
Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances
and interests be damned!"
I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that
the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without
destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.
This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic
realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have
a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our
debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.
We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending
and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only
take counterfactuals so far.
I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/
hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.
The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled
congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.
It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The
money and power is too corrupting.
Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion)
that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be
curtailed or even better, changed.
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that
since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing
left to dominate or own.
Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists"
on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for
70 years.
China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive
purchase of their output.
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own
hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes.
Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India
nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant
US presence.
None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with
our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.
It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have
no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological
lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing,
our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic
voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs
and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking.
Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits.
War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big
wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled
profitably to be encouraged.
"... American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe. ..."
"... A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some ..."
"... U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is: ..."
"... Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be. ..."
"... Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts. ..."
"... The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. ..."
"... Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership, resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense. ..."
"... any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it. ..."
"... Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan. ..."
"... Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only from reward and punishment. ..."
"... I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power. ..."
"... Empires have a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion. ..."
"... What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure. ..."
"... We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt. ..."
"... I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/ hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets. ..."
"... The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged. ..."
"... It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The money and power is too corrupting. ..."
"... I'm not sure that most of the citizens in those European countries we occupy actually support our permanent military presence in their countries. ..."
"... The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking. ..."
Stephen Wertheim explains
what is required to bring an end to unnecessary and open-ended U.S. wars overseas:
American war-making will persist so long as the United States continues to seek military dominance across the globe.
Dominance, assumed to ensure peace, in fact guarantees war. To get serious about stopping endless war, American leaders must do
what they most resist: end America's commitment to armed supremacy and embrace a world of pluralism and peace.
Any government that presumes to be the world's hegemon will be fighting somewhere almost all of the time, because its political
leaders will see everything around the world as their business and it will see every manageable threat as a challenge to their "leadership."
A government that imagines that it has both the right and responsibility to police the entire planet will find an excuse to mire
itself in one or more conflicts on a regular basis, and if there isn't one available to join it will start some.
U.S. military dominance should have at least guaranteed that we remained at peace once our major adversary had collapsed at
the end of the Cold War, but the dissolution of the USSR encouraged the U.S. to become much more aggressive and much more eager to
use force whenever and wherever it wanted. Wertheim provides an answer for why this is:
Why have interventions proliferated as challengers have shrunk? The basic cause is America's infatuation with military
force. Its political class imagines that force will advance any aim, limiting debate to what that aim should be.
Using force appeals to many American leaders and policymakers because they imagine that frequent military action cows and
intimidates adversaries, but in practice it creates more enemies and wastes American lives and resources on fruitless conflicts.
Our government's frenetic interventionism and meddling for the last thirty years hasn't made our country the slightest bit more secure,
but it has sown chaos and instability across at least two continents. Wertheim continues:
Continued gains by the Taliban, 18 years after the United States initially toppled it, suggest a different principle: The profligate
deployment of force creates new and unnecessary objectives more than it realizes existing and worthy ones.
The constant warfare of the last two decades in particular has corroded our political system and inured the public to the
idea that it is normal that American soldiers and Marines are always fighting and dying in some foreign country in pursuit of nebulous
goals, but nothing could be more abnormal and wrong than this. Constant warfare achieves nothing except to provide an excuse
for more of the same. The longer that a war drags on, one would think that it should become easier to bring it to an end, but we
have seen that it becomes harder for both political and military leaders to give up on an unwinnable conflict when it has become
an almost permanent part of our foreign policy. For many policymakers and pundits, what matters is that the U.S. not be perceived
as losing, and so our military keeps fighting without an end in sight for the sake of this "not losing."
Wertheim adds:
Despite Mr. Trump's rhetoric about ending endless wars, the president insists that "our military dominance must be unquestioned"
-- even though no one believes he has a strategy to use power or a theory to bring peace. Armed domination has become an end in
itself.
Seeking to maintain this dominance is ultimately unsustainable, and as it becomes more expensive and less popular it will also
become increasingly dangerous as we find ourselves confronted with even more capable adversaries. For the last thirty years, the
U.S. has been fortunate to be secure and prosperous enough that it could indulge in decades of fruitless militarism, but that luck
won't hold forever. It is far better if the U.S. give up on hegemony and the militarism that goes with it on our terms.
Our establishment would rather give up their skin. They don't call it hegemony, they call it the post ww2 order, leadership,
resisting isolationism or some other such nonsense.
Truth be told, as your article states, any country that attempts to gain enough power to assert its own sovereignty is
considered a threat that must be crushed and we roll out all of the tools at our disposal to do it.
It makes us less safe. Isolationism did not cause 9/11. In the 90's when we were being attacked by Al Qaeda we were too distracted
dancing on Russia's bones to pay any attention to them. While Al Qaeda was attacking our troops and blowing up our buildings we
were bombing Serbia, expanding NATO and reelecting Yeltsin and sticking it to Iran.
It goes beyond that. Al Qaeda's attack on us was due to us using them as a tool to stop Russia's push into Afghanistan.
We later abandoned them when the job was done: a pack hound we trained, pushed to fight, then left in the forest abandoned and
starved. Then we wonder why it came back growling.
Isolationism may not be the most effective solution to things, but I'll admit a LOT of pain, on ourselves and others, would've
never happened if we took that policy.
Good luck with that. We are ruled by people who are functionally indistinguishable from sociopaths, and sociopaths learn only
from reward and punishment.
So far, they only have been rewarded for their crimes.
While I think the economic basis of the Soviet Union was faulty, and it had lost the popular support it might have had in early
days, the USSR's military aggression, particularly in Afghanistan, was a major precipitating factor in its downfall. It would
have eventually crumbled, I believe, anyway, but had they taken a less aggressive stance I think they would have lasted several
decades longer.
Is it really in our hands to actually disengage though? Is this politically feasible?
How does this work? The US gets up one day and says "We're pulling all of our troops out of Saudi and SK. No more funding for
Israel! No bolstering the pencil-thin government of Afghanistan. All naval bases abroad will be shut down. Longstanding alliances
and interests be damned!"
I sympathize very strongly with the notion that we must use military force wisely and with restraint, and perhaps even that
the post-WW2 expansion abroad was a mistake, but I do not see a politically feasible way to end our global empire without
destabilizing that same globe that has come to rely on our military power.
This is the world we live in, whether we like it or not, and barring some military or economic disaster that forces a strategic
realignment or retreat (like WW2 did for the old European powers) I don't know how you practically pull back. Empires have
a sort of inertia, and few in history voluntarily give up dominion.
What is unsustainable is the current rate of government spending. The current rate of military spending is driving up our
debt and making it impossible to reinvest in desperately needed infrastructure.
We have been coasting on the infrastructure investments of the 50's and 60's but if we don't start cutting military spending
and redirecting that money elsewhere we are going to be bankrupt.
Sure. That doesn't mean American withdrawal would create less instability in toto. Maybe it would. Who knows? We mortals can only
take counterfactuals so far.
I agree that it is almost impossible to conceive of any scenario whereby this "ideology" of so-called world order and/
hegemony would change in the US and in its puppets.
The deck is so totally stacked in favor of this ideology, the totally controlled MSM, the MIC, the corrupt and controlled
congress, and the presidential admin structure itself, would never allow this mantra to be challenged.
It is all about greed and power-the psychopaths pursuing and defending this 'ideology' would never ever go quietly. The
money and power is too corrupting.
Maybe, just maybe, however, as we are at $22 trillion in debt and counting (just saw a total tab for F-35 of $1.5 trillion)
that the money will run out, and zero interest rate financing is not all that awesome, this unsustainable mindlessness will be
curtailed or even better, changed.
It's not really hegemony. Old-fashioned empires took over territory in order to gain resources and labor. We haven't done that
since 1920. Especially since 1990 we've been making war purely to destroy and obliterate. When our war is done there's nothing
left to dominate or own.
Domestically we've been using politics and media and controlled culture to do the same thing. Create "terrorists" and "extremists"
on "two" "sides", set them loose, enjoy the resulting chaos. Chaos is the declared goal, and it's been working beautifully for
70 years.
China is expanding empire in Africa and Asia the old-fashioned way, improving farms and factories in order to have exclusive
purchase of their output.
Could not have said it better. "On our terms" would mean that Europe is forced to take matters of military security in it's own
hands, I hope. But chanches are slim, history shows empires must fall hard and break a leg or so first before anything changes.
Iran, Saudi-arabia, the greater ME, China, the trade wars and the world economy are coming together for a perfect storm it seems.
The problem with US hegemony is Israel. Look around the world. Neither Japan nor South Korea nor Vietnam nor Philippines nor India
nor Indonesia nor Australia (the same can be said for South and Central America, Mexico, Canada and Europe) require a significant
US presence.
None of them are asking for a greater presence in their country (except Poland) while being perfectly happy with
our alliance, joint defense, trade, intelligence and technology sharing.
It is only Israel and Saudi Arabia which are constantly pushing the US into middle eastern wars and quagmires that we have
no national interest. Trump sees the plain truth that the US is in jeopardy of losing its manufacturing and its technological
lead to China. If we (US) dont start to rebuild our infrastructure, our defense, our cities, our communities, our manufacturing,
our educational system then our nation is going to follow California into a 3rd world totalitarian state dominated by democratic
voting immigrants whose only affiliation to our country and our constitutional republic is a welfare check, free govt programs
and incestuous govt contracts which funnel govt dollars into the re-election PACs of democratic / liberal elected officials.
The new paradigm is that private militarism dominates government, turning it to its preferred priorities of moneymaking warmaking.
Defeat is now when war's income streams end. The only wars that are lost, are those that end, defeating the winning of war profits.
War, as a financial success story, has become an end in itself, and an empire that looks for more to wage means some mighty big
wages with more profit opportunities. Victory is to be avoided - red ink being spilled through peace detestable - and blood spilled
profitably to be encouraged.
Who says Mr Trump is unpredictable? Is there anybody expected anything else from Mr Trump
when it comes to picking his advisers or making thoughtful decisions? Let's be serious, Mr
Trump did not pick Mr Robert O'Brien. The Bolton, Pompeo, Pence triumvirate picked Trump's
NSA; naturally.
"... The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government -- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area. President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in April with Haftar and appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's stance. ..."
"... One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In her new book, The Education of an Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed, flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison correctly excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?" ..."
"... Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling! ..."
"... I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians. ..."
The United States cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials can't seem to
decide which faction they want to back.
The Western-created disaster in Libya continues to grow worse. Fighting between Field
Marshal Khalifa Haftar's so-called Libyan National Army (LNA) and the even more misnamed
Government of National Accord (GNA) has intensified in and around Tripoli. The LNA boasted on
September 11 that its forces had routed troops of the Sarraj militia, a GNA ally, killing
about two hundred of them. That total may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the
situation has become increasingly violent and
chaotic in Tripoli and other portions of Libya, with innocent civilians bearing the brunt
of the suffering.
An article in Bloomberg News provides a
succinct account of the poisonous fruits of the U.S.-led "humanitarian" military
intervention in 2011. "Libya is enduring its worst violence since the 2011 NATO-backed ouster
of Muammar el-Qaddafi, which ushered in years of instability that allowed Islamist radicals to
thrive and turned the country into a hub for migrants destined to Europe. Haftar had launched
the war as the United Nations was laying the ground for a political conference to unite the
country. It is now more divided than ever." The country has become the plaything not only of
rival domestic factions but major
Middle East powers , including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, and the United Arab
Emirates. Those regimes are waging a ruthless geopolitical competition, providing arms and in
some cases even launching airstrikes on behalf of their preferred clients.
The United States also cannot resist the urge to meddle. Worse, U.S. officials seemingly
can't even decide which faction it wants to back. Washington's official policy continues to
support the GNA, which the United Nations recognizes as the country's legitimate government
-- even though its writ extends to little territory beyond the Tripoli metropolitan area.
President Donald Trump, however, had an extremely cordial, lengthy telephone conversation in
April with Haftar and
appeared impressed with Haftar's professed determination to combat terrorist groups and
bring order and unity to Libya. Neither Libyan faction now seems certain about Washington's
stance.
Given the appalling aftermath of the original U.S.-led intervention, one might hope that
advocates of an activist policy would be chastened and back away from further meddling in that
unfortunate country. Yet, that is not the case. Neither the Trump administration nor the
humanitarian crusaders in Barack Obama's administration who caused the calamity in the first
place seem inclined to advocate a more cautious, restrained U.S. policy.
One poster child for such continuing arrogance is Samantha Power, an influential
national security council staffer in 2011 and later U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
her new book, The Education of an
Idealist , Power takes no responsibility whatever for the Libya debacle. Indeed,
flippant might be too generous a term for her treatment of the episode. "We could hardly expect
to have a crystal ball when it came to accurately predicting outcomes in places where the
culture was not our own," she contends. American Conservative analyst Daniel Larison
correctly
excoriates her argument as "a pathetic attempt by Power to deny responsibility for the
effects of a war she backed by shrugging her shoulders and pleading ignorance. If Libyan
culture was so opaque and hard for the Obama administration to understand, they should never
have taken sides in an internal conflict there. If the 'culture was not our own' and they
couldn't anticipate what was going to happen because of that, then how arrogant must the
policymakers who argued in favor of intervention have been?"
The answer to Larison's rhetorical question is "extraordinarily arrogant." It is not as
though prudent foreign-policy experts didn't warn Power and her colleagues about the probable
consequences of intervening in a volatile, fragile country like Libya. Indeed, as Robert Gates,
Obama's secretary of defense, confirms in his memoir, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War , the Obama
administration itself was deeply divided about the advisability of intervention. The Joint
Chiefs of Staff, Vice President Joe Biden, and Gates were opposed. Among the most outspoken
proponents of action were Power and her mentor, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Gates notes
further that Obama was deeply torn, later telling his secretary of defense that the decision
was a "51 to 49" call.
The existence of a sharp internal division is sufficient evidence by itself that Power's
attempt to absolve herself and other humanitarian crusaders of responsibility for the
subsequent tragedy is without merit. Indeed, it has even less credibility than Pontius Pilate's
infamous effort to evade guilt. They were warned of the probable outcome, yet they chose to
disregard those warnings.
Power, Clinton, Obama and other proponents of ousting Qaddafi turned Libya into a chaotic
Somalia on the Mediterranean, and the blood of innocents shed since 2011 is on their hands.
Given the stark split within the president's national security team, the Libya intervention was
especially reckless and unjustified. The default option in such a case should have been against
intervention, not plunging ahead.
The Trump administration should learn from the blunders of its predecessor and resist any
temptation to meddle further. America does not have a dog in the ongoing fight between Haftar
and the GNA, and we should simply accept whatever outcome emerges. Washington's arrogant
interference has caused enough suffering in Libya already.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at the National Interest , is the author of thirteen books and more than
eight hundred articles on international affairs. His latest book is NATO: The Dangerous Dinosaur .
The outcome in Libya is what the intent was - chaos, per the Yinon plan. The side effect
of mass immigration to Europe was warned by Gaddafi! All was known, yet the destabilization
war continued.
Obama and company not only destroyed Libya, they also helped to unleash a wave of jihadis
who are terrorizing vast swaths of west Africa, especially Mali and Burkina Faso. Their
stupidity and lack of foresight is mind-boggling!
Libya was and still is the case of a civil war into which foreign powers have intervened.
The major parties of that war have always been the Tripolitanian West and the Cyrenaican
East. Whoever is on top considers the others to be the rebels. That is how the demise of
Qaddafi began. For him Benghazi was the rebel's nest which needed some cleaning. Nothing has
changed. Haftar is the new Qaddafi.
I understand the role which the Obama administration played in getting the Libyan
intervention started. However the major destruction of Libya's fragile structure of
governance under Qaddafi was done by the French, Brits, and Italians.
You can always make things worse. It is one thing that Trump and friends are good at.
They don't consider that a criticism either, since they want what the rest of us consider
worse -- more war, more enemies, more inequality in outcomes at home, more desperation at
home giving more power to the haves over the have-nots.
Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is a timeless classic that still applies to articles
produced for electronic consumption. One of Adler's primary admonitions was to consider the
author's expertise, credibility, and potential biases. With regard to this article, scrolling
down to the end reveals the author's association with the Koch Brother financed Cato
Institute. The Koch Brothers and their money have done more to destroy American democracy
than any foreign tyrant or Presidential folly.
And oh, by the way, what did the Neocons and the Vulcans of the W Administration do to the
entire Middle East other than create a contiguous geographic belt of Iranian Shiite influence
from Tehran to Beirut?
Looks like Trump just increased his chances to lose to Warren in 2020 elections.
Notable quotes:
"... O'Brien advised the Romney 2012 campaign, and he also advised the short-lived Scott Walker campaign in the 2016 cycle. He is a typical hawkish Republican. ..."
"... Obviously, "Bolton lite" isn't much of an improvement over Bolton, and it seems unlikely that there will be any significant improvement in administration foreign policy over the next fifteen months. The summary of O'Brien's book confirms as much: ..."
"... Back in 2014, he was praising Romney for his "Churchill-like warning of a resurgent Russia," and I pointed out that Romney had said a lot of ignorant, knee-jerk things about Russia that were wrong. The fact that O'Brien thought and probably still thinks that "Romney was right" about anything related to foreign policy is more evidence that Trump made a very poor choice again. ..."
"... Let's be serious, Mr Trump did not pick Mr Robert O'Brien. ..."
Trump announced
the selection of his fourth National Security Advisor:
President Trump announced Wednesday that Robert O'Brien, the special envoy for hostage
affairs at the State Department, will be his next national security advisor.
O'Brien previously served in the Bush administration's State Department. Hugh Hewitt, who
wrote the foreword to O'Brien's
book , has
described him as a "long time colleague of John Bolton." Since the Bush years, O'Brien
advised the Romney 2012 campaign, and he also advised the short-lived Scott Walker campaign in
the 2016 cycle. He is a typical hawkish Republican. Curt Mills
referred to him in his recent report on the race to replace Bolton this way:
Robert O'Brien, the Trump hostage negotiator whose stock has risen in the administration
in recent months, is "Bolton lite," according to a source who has known O'Brien for
years.
Obviously, "Bolton lite" isn't much of an improvement over Bolton, and it seems unlikely
that there will be any significant improvement in administration foreign policy over the next
fifteen months. The summary of
O'Brien's book confirms as much:
The world has become steadily more dangerous under President Obama's "lead from behind"
foreign policy. The Obama Administration's foreign policy has emboldened our adversaries and
disheartened our allies. Indeed, Obama's nuclear deal with Iran is a 1938 moment. At the same
time, the U.S. military has been cut and risks returning to the hollow force days of the
1970s. O'Brien lays out the challenges and provides the common sense "peace through strength"
solutions that will allow the next president to make America great again.
There is nothing surprising in here, and a lot that is embarrassingly wrong, but it is
consistent with the GOP's bankrupt foreign policy worldview. A friendly review of the book
describes that worldview in boilerplate terms:
Robert writes from a series of beliefs and assumptions that I also hold: a deep belief in
American Exceptionalism, that peace comes through strength, that the United States is
stronger when it partners with its allies and when America is a reliable friend to its
allies, that the greatness of America comes from a people that respect tradition and the rule
of law, and that (yes) we are the good guys and there are some bad guys out there.
I have had occasion to criticize O'Brien's writings in the past. Back in 2014, he was praising Romney for his
"Churchill-like warning of a resurgent Russia," and I
pointed out that Romney had said a lot of ignorant, knee-jerk things about Russia that were
wrong. The fact that O'Brien thought and probably still thinks that "Romney was right" about
anything related to foreign policy is more evidence that Trump made a very poor choice
again.
O'Brien's most recent high-profile assignment was to be sent to Sweden as part of the
president's embarrassing fixation on the case of the rapper ASAP
Rocky , who had been detained in Sweden and was facing charges for assault. It would not
surprise me if this silly episode and waste of government resources was quite important in
winning the president's favor. O'Brien probably wasn't the worst choice Trump could have made,
but Trump's fourth choice for National Security Advisor is still a bad one.
Who says Mr Trump is unpredictable? Is there anybody expected anything else from Mr Trump
when it comes to picking his advisers or making thoughtful decisions? Let's be serious, Mr
Trump did not pick Mr Robert O'Brien. The Bolton, Pompeo, Pence triumvirate picked Trump's
NSA; naturally.
"... Someone should tell Mike that our credibility as a nation is further damaged with claims that are in need of supporting evidence. ..."
"... Did Fat Mike rub the head camel jockey's glowing orb? ..."
"... America is a bomb-happy empire - we kill illiterate peasants and destroy mud-walled villages. We are really good at it. ..."
"... Mike, it may be an "act of war" for Saudi Arabia but it's not an act of war for the United States. We weren't attacked, they were. Let them unfuck the situation. ..."
"... No more wars Mr. Trump, no more wars. Plus, we need to prepare to defend our Constitution on our own shores. ..."
Mike, it may be an "act of war" for Saudi Arabia but it's not an act of war for the United
States. We weren't attacked, they were. Let them unfuck the situation.
I am pro military and I have many friends who have served or currently serve. And I have
kids. I'm not sending my kids to kill Iranians for the Saudi's, for Israel or for any other
fucked-up nation in the Middle East. And I don't want 18-year-old American kids getting
killed or wounded for those ungrateful ***** either.
No more wars Mr. Trump, no more wars. Plus, we need to prepare to defend our Constitution
on our own shores.
Sep 16, 2019 Welcome
to the world where things don't add up. For instance, some people did some things to
the Saudi Arabian oil refinery at Abqaiq over the weekend. Like, sent over a salvo of cruise
missiles and armed drone aircraft to blow it up. They did a pretty good job of disabling the
works. It is Saudi Arabia's largest oil processing facility, and for now, perhaps months, a
fair amount of the world's oil supply will be cut off. President Trump said "[we] are waiting
to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of this attack, and under what
terms we would proceed!" Exclamation mark his.
How many times the past few years has our government declared that "we have the finest
intelligence services in the world." Very well, then, why are we waiting for the Kingdom of
Saudi Arabia to tell us who fired all that stuff into Abqaiq? Whoever did it, it was
unquestionably an act of war. And, of course, what are we going to do about it? (And what will
some people do about it?)
Let's face it: the USA has had a hard-on for Iran for forty years, ever since they overthrew
their shah, invaded the US embassy in Tehran, and took fifty-two American diplomats and staff
hostage for 444 days. On the other hand, the Arabians and Iranians have had a mutual hard-on
for centuries, long before the Saud family was in charge of things, and back when Iran was
known as Persia, a land of genies, fragrant spices, and a glorious antiquity (while Arabia was
a wasteland of sand populated by nomads and their camels). The beef was formerly just about
which brand of Islam would prevail, Sunni or Shia. Lately (the past fifty years) it has been
more about the politics of oil and hegemony over the Middle East. Since the US invaded Iraq and
busted up the joint, the threat has existed that Iran would take over Iraq, with its majority
Shia population, especially the oil-rich Basra region at the head of the Persian Gulf. The
presence of Israel greatly complicates things, since Iran has a hard-on for that nation, too,
and for Jews especially, often expressed in the most belligerent and opprobrious terms, such as
"wiping Israel off the map." No ambiguity there. The catch being that Israel has the capability
of turning Iran into an ashtray.
The world has been waiting for a major war in the Middle east for decades, and it might have
one by close of business today. Or perhaps some people will do nothing . The
Iran-backed Houthi rebels of Yemen supposedly claimed responsibility for the attack. That's
rich. As if that rag-tag outfit has a whole bunch of million-dollar missiles and the knowledge
and capacity to launch them successfully, not to mention the satellite guidance mojo. A
correspondent suggests that the missiles were fired from a pro-Iranian military base in Iraq,
with the Houthis brought in on flying carpets to push the launch buttons.
President Trump is trumpeting America's "energy independence," meaning whatever happens over
there won't affect us. Well, none of that is true. We still import millions of barrels of oil a
day, though much less from Saudi Arabia than before 2008. The shale oil "miracle" is hitting
the skids these days. Shale oil production has gone flat, the rig-count is down, companies are
going bankrupt, and financing for the debt-dependent operations is dwindling since the
producers have demonstrated that they can't make a profit at it. They're trapped in the
quandary of diminishing returns, frontloading production, while failing to overcome steep
decline curves in wells that only produce for a couple of years.
It's also the case that shale oil is ultra-light crude, containing little heavier
distillates such as diesel and aviation fuel (basically kerosene). Alas, American refineries
were all built before shale oil came along. They were designed to crack heavier oil and can't
handle the lighter shale. The "majors" don't want to invest their remaining capital in new
refineries, and the many smaller companies don't have the ability. So, this makes necessary a
high volume of oil swapping around the world. Without diesel and aviation fuel, US trucking and
commercial aviation has a big problem, meaning the US economy has a big problem.
With the new crisis in the Middle East, benchmark West Texas Intermediate oil is up from
around $55-a-barrel to just over $60 at the market open (European Brent crude is just above
$70). That's a pop, but not a spectacular one, considering that a whole lot more damage might
ensue in the days ahead. China, Korea, and Japan stand to lose bigly if the players in the
Middle East really go at it and bust up each other's assets. If that happens, the world will
never be the same. You can kiss the global economy goodbye for good. Let's hope some people
don't do something.
Not just the Saudi's. The Houthis support Palestine, and the Muslim Brotherhood.
They also control the Straits of Mandeb where most of Israel's oil transits to Asia.
Hence the war in Yemen an the problems in the Sudan. So its no wonder its not just
the Saudi's who are fighting the Houthis. The Houthis are fighting against the U.K.,
Germany, the U.S., Israel and the UAE, who are all supporting the Saudi's. Yemen, one
of the worlds oldest civilizations
Iran never said "wiping Israel off the map."It was Ahmadinejad that said "..wipe
the Zionist entity off the map".
This author should know better than to repeat Zionist lies.
Kunstler has some huge holes in his game. He seems to take many of the US MSM
talking points as good coin. Like, exhibit A, the "wipe Israel off the map" quote
which has long since been shown to be a mis-translation. Often his bigotry also slips
like when he dismisses Houthi capabilities and gets wrong what actually hit the
refineries. These were DRONES not missiles. That is why they were able to evade the
Saudi air defenses. But Houthis are to uncouth to pull of such an operation and
moreover how dare they defend themselves or accept assistance from Iran even if it
were true they are supplying the Houthis with weapons and intelligence. Of course, he
also fails to explain, following like a dog on a leash the US media, why Iran would
launch such an attack considering it may provoke the Israelis or the US. Sure they
may hate the Saudis but they certainly do not want a war where, though they would not
technically lose, would see their society destroyed. Again Cui Bono.
Kunstlers's roots are definitely showing here. His usual barbed wit has simply
disappeared and he seems to have bitten off and swallowed whole the officialbullshit , very unwise at this stage.
"A correspondent suggests" just doesn't cut it. Correspondents have suggested all
sorts of things and he should learn to ignore these voices and rely on facts
instead.
He forgets the fact that Saudi Arabia has been waging war on Yemen since 2015 and
that the damage inflicted upon the Saudi oil installations is only a tiny fraction of
the retribution that the Saudis deserve.
Kunstler predictably forgets the fact that Israel has been illegally attacking
Iranian interests in Syria for several years and that as a result many Iranians have
been killed by Israel in recent times. The fact is that these illegal forays are also
acts of war, which of course Kunstler forgets to tell us.
One other fact pertains to his boasting that Israel could wipe Iran off the map,
which is not just bad taste, but ignores the fact that Iran has enough conventional
power to do the same to its postage stamp sized and bellicose neighbour.
We now know that when the chips are down, Kunstler will simply revert to type and
tow the crooked official zio line. We don't need Kunstler for that, we all ready have
a zionist media, a craven Congress and Trump's government of crazies, very important
facts.
If the Yemenis are being assisted by Iran I say that's a good thing. The Saudi
beasts are being assisted by our jew rulers. If I was a Yemeni blowing up that oil
infrastructure would have been on top of my list. And Israel is the country that
would be turned into an ashtray. The US is gone, over run invaded, already lost.
"Let's face it:" says Kunstler. Iran started it forty years ago, "ever since they
overthrew their shah ..." Bad Iranians attacking the USA.
But if we go back a few decades further, we find USUKisrael smashing the elected
government of Iran and installing The Shah! So Kunstler is lying when he says "their
shah"; he should say OUR shah. I think he probably knows this. He's not accidentally
mixing things up.
Catastrophic or not the neocons are itching for a big confrontation and Iran fits
the bill.
Keep in mind that most collateral damage will be suffered by the Saudis.
The US is now the biggest producer of oil, just imagine the boost that the US shale
investors will get in an industry that was about to have its bubble burst.
No longer will it struggle to break even, no it will make a good profit, more
importantly the bubble will not hit the financial sector hard.
Now KSA will suffer a blow, but that will only serve the US - new loans and new
contracts will reverse the money stream and tie the Saudi regime even more to
Washington.
As a bonus it will please the Israelis when finally Iran will be taken out and
Hezbollah isolated.
Wild cards - how hard can Iran retaliate beyond KSA, is it able and willing to
strike against Israel? How hard can it strike US targets in the region? And finally
will they go full on against the Arabian energy infrastructure. If a couple of Houthi
cruise missiles in a single strike can drop total oil production by 5% and raise
prices by 20%, imagine what kind of havoc a real Iranian campaign can cause (again
ignoring the oil bonanza the US oil industry will score).
I really believe there is now a 50/50% that Washington will gamble a full blown
war against Iran, its perceived benefits outweighing the dangers.
If anything Israel will be the deciding factor, if Tel Aviv does not fear Iranian
retribution and gives the go ahead, we'll have a war on our hands,
The US is certainly stretched thin defending the national and security interest
across the globe - aka defending and expanding the empire.
However there is enough fire power to defeat the Iranian military as an organized
force and Teheran as a government, it all depends on the US rules of engagement and
how far they are willing to push this war.
But afterwards it will be no better than Iraq or Afghanistan.
That may actually be the excuse to do what some strategists have been itching to
do since the Korean war, that is to use a couple of tactical nukes - the ultimate
terror weapon of state.
The current NPR is a strong sign in favor of nuclear weapons in conflict as it
greatly reduces the threshold. Iran's perceived threat to global oil production could
be used to set an example.
In what condition will Saudi Arabia be in, after Iran has been subdued? Also the
plethora of US bases in the area will also be fat juicy targets for Iranian
missiles.
Did the condition of South East Asia other than the ubiquitous Domino Theory,
worry many when they went to war in Viet Nam, what about Iraq?
Oil and Israel are key.
Oil prices and Israel's safety.
They want to take out Iran, but this small attack shows how vulnerable the
regional energy infrastructure really is. That can be a temporary advantage, in
boosting US oil income, but that can be easily off set by the impact of rising oil
prices on all other sectors and the public.
That's why I think it is 50/50 at best, and slowly leaning to less likely we'll
see a major escalation.
Otoh, if I were the Houthis, I'd launch a couple of additional strikes to press
the message.
Saudi Arabia supplies oil to China, so to believe Iran was behind the drone attack
on Saudi oil is a bit of a stretch. The question is was it the U.S. and Israel
coordinating that attack? Israel's influence on the U.S. in the middle east is what
is getting America running in circles
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said recent drone attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure were
a proportionate Yemeni response to years of daily bombings carried out by a Saudi-led
coalition.
Speaking to reporters in Ankara following three-way talks between the presidents
of Turkey, Russia and Iran, Rouhani suggested the drone attacks were a legitimate act of
self-defense.
"On a daily basis Yemen is being bombarded and innocent civilians are dying so they have
to retaliate," Rouhani explained.
Yemeni people are exercising their legitimate right of defense the attacks were a
reciprocal response to aggression against Yemen for years.
Rouhani added his hope that the conflict in Yemen would be resolved through diplomacy, and
said that such a process might even mirror Syria's Astana talks.
Addressing the same question, Turkish President Recep Erdogan also pointed out that it was
Saudi Arabia who'd started the cycle of attacks. He said the international community should
inquire into the causes of Yemen's crisis, noting the country had been "basically
destroyed" during its four-year conflict, and called on other world powers to consider how
to rebuild Yemen "from scratch" and "put it back on its feet."
While Russia's President Vladimir Putin said the drone attacks had not been discussed at
Monday's meeting, he noted the "humanitarian catastrophe" in the country and urged a
diplomatic solution to the conflict.
The war in Yemen began in earnest in March 2015, when a coalition of states, led by Saudi
Arabia and backed by the US and Britain, launched a bombing campaign in an attempt to defeat
the rebel Houthi movement and restore the rule of President Mansour Hadi, who'd been ousted in
2014. In addition to tens of thousands killed in the fighting, the conflict has sparked one of
the world's worst humanitarian crises, leaving millions without food, water or healthcare, and
dependent on international aid.
Pat Lang won't let me post on his site, so I'll have to point this out here instead.
He has just posted an open letter to Trump regarding a war with Iran, and he points out
(correctly) that:
1) Iran can set its proxy forces in Syria and Iraq loose on US troops in those countries
2) Iran will fire every missile in its arsenal at any US troops within range
3) Iran will fire its AA missiles at any and all USAF planes
4) Iran will keep attacking the 5th fleet until they run out of boats
All true, and all well and good as far as it goes.
But Pat seems to have the same blind spot as all other US pundits, in that they apparently
have forgotten all about the Iranian Army.
They do have an Army, and can muster half a million fighting men.
Which, indeed, is probably ten times as many ground troops that CENTCOM possesses.
Seems to me that the Iranians can think of several good uses for such an army.
For one thing, they can launch an invasion of Afghanistan with the intention of killing each
and every GI who has the misfortune of being in-theatre.
They'll have at least a 10-to-1 advantage of men.
Not so much a fight as a slaughter.
Bernhard, excellent article, as usual, thank you. The recent situation in KSA is just a small
example of the collapse on classic warfare, we have seen it closely in Vietnam, Lebanon 2006,
then Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and for 2,500 years in Afghanistan, time and time again. The
supposed richer countries trying to impose their will and military power when facing
organized societies with, purpose and means to defend, do exactly that, they fend off the
aggressors.
In the case of Yemen, which has not been conquered due to the terrain and its people
(similar to Afghanistan), they, as few other cases, had friends that supplied means of
defense and attack, this is why Yemen/Houthis, after 5 years of war of aggression against
them, they can hit back, in a way that KSA is not able to defend, small drones, flying low
and hard to be spotted with a long range, this is the perfect weapon to demoralize arrogant
regimes, it creates terror and damages in highly explosive places. Yemen will not back down
until KSA leaves its aggressive policy and pay reparations, or Yemen will continue to inflict
damages, slowly bleeding KSA and demoralizing its corrupt leadership.
I my view a decision to remove the current royalty from KSA was already taken, I mean, The
Resistance will pursue it, slowly, will create situations for an internal coup, internal
revolts and so on, KSA's security is mostly done by foreigners, many from Pakistan, Sudan
etc...these people are treated as slaves, very badly, a time bomb when an opportunity arises,
and KSA is approaching that dangerous zone, few more well placed strikes that put KSA on its
knees and expose wide open its vulnerability will be the sign for the large & oppressed
Shia population to revolt, with it goes Bahrain as well.
Lets remember that Qatar is a mortal enemy for KSA, and has its own ambitions to expand
territory beyond its tiny area, KSA is playing with fire by bending to the US,Uk and Israel,
it is risking being retaliated in pieces.
Grieved @80 noted that "...these countries... are in fact in a coalition..."
The response to that from imperial loyalists is not unexpected: "Nooo! Primitive sand
people cannot put aside the identity politics differences that our empire cultivates in them
and unite against us!"
The imperial loyalists, despite considering themselves to be "woke" and
"inclusive" and unbigoted and moral, find it inconceivable that any peoples other than
those of northern European and anglo descent could unite in the face of an existential
threat. To be certain, these empire loyalists cannot even see themselves as being the
existential threat that is uniting peoples, despite having literally slaughtered millions of
innocents over the last half century or so. Their sense of moral and cultural superiority is
an axiom that must remain beyond question lest their all-important identities be
exposed as cheap narcissism, so they pour into the forum to promote conspiracy theories about
how the stunning successes of the coalition that Grieved notes above are actually convoluted
and inscrutably super-sophisticated moves on a Grand Chessboard . To maintain this
fiction they must overlook the fact that their empire's best strategists reached the limits
of their geostrategic talent playing the board game Risk . Consider that the imperial
mass media has begun to refer to pompous Pompeo as "the next Kissinger" , and recall
that even the former Kissinger was never really that bright but was just ruthless and totally
lacking a conscience.
Face reality, imperial loyalists: The Houthis, whom you cannot even credit with being
human, have just successfully wounded your lackeys in the Middle East. The Houthis
accomplished this with skill, intelligence, and determination.
"... And President Trump himself said Wednesday from the White House that it looks like Iran did it but that he still hopes to avoid war . He announced via a statement on Twitter that, "I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase Sanctions on the country of Iran!" -- ..."
"... Pompeo is in Jedda where he's expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to evaluate a possible response, where the are expected to "coordinate efforts to counter Iranian aggression in the region," according to a State Department statement . ..."
"... Wednesday's Saudi Def. Ministry press briefing showcasing missile and drone debris alleged "evidence" the Iranians were behind attack. ..."
"... The fact that Johnson's statement included the word "diplomatic" - along with Trump's emphasis on extending stronger sanctions - is a good sign however, that the White House is not prepping for war. ..."
What's the end game here? Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has just arrived in Jeddah for talks with Saudi leaders over a response
to the weekend attacks on two of the kingdom's major oil facilities.
After a prior press conference by the Saudi Defense Ministry
where it for the first time assigned public blame on Iran for the attacks which initially knocked out half of the kingdom's daily
oil output, saying the air attacks "unquestionably" had Iranian state sponsorship, Pompeo
has announced the Aramco attacks constitute
an "act of war" by Iran .
And President Trump himself said Wednesday from the White House that it looks like Iran did it but that he still hopes to avoid
war . He announced via a statement on Twitter that, "I have just instructed the Secretary of the Treasury to substantially increase
Sanctions on the country of Iran!" -- in what appears an alternative to launching a military response.
"I'm not looking to get into new conflict, but sometimes you have to," Trump told reporters Wednesday.
Pompeo's new "act of war" declaration indeed takes the potential for escalation right back to boiling point.
Pompeo is in Jedda where he's expected to meet with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to evaluate a possible response, where
the are expected to "coordinate efforts to counter Iranian aggression in the region," according to
a State Department
statement .
Meanwhile, if the 'military option' is being considered, it appears we could be in the beginning phases of an international coalition
response. UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced he and Trump held a phone call to discuss the need for a "united diplomatic response
from international partners" after the Aramco attacks.
The fact that Johnson's statement included the word "diplomatic" - along with Trump's emphasis on extending stronger sanctions
- is a good sign however, that the White House is not prepping for war.
"... the attack dented the image of invincibility of Aramco's infrastructure ..."
"... Saudi Military stated the Aramco facilites were attacked with 18 missiles and 7 drones. They state cruise missiles were used. However, now they state the attack was simply "backed" by Iran. The weapons were all Iranian design. ..."
"... That Iran is backing the Houthis we already knew and nobody doubts. But those drones and missiles didn't come from Iranian territory nor were they operated by Iranian personel. It's a free market world, and everybody can buy weapons from anybody. ..."
"... The GOAL of exaggerating the attack could be to simply increase oil prices or to justify war with Iran. Tensions with Iran will be elevated for weeks, if not months. That will mean higher oil prices than otherwise. ..."
"... The timing is also suspicious because it comes just before the Israeli election and just after John Bolton was dismissed. ..."
"... Russian oil experts say 3 to 6 months to repair damage from strike as components must come from Europe according to TASS. As the remains of the uavs have been recovered their effective range can be determined. I suspect they were launched from within Saudi territory. ..."
"... It is embarrassing to the Saudis because they scarcely bother to unpack the weapons the US sends them-at premium prices - and dare not allow any of their countrymen to learn how to use them. And it is embarrassing to the Americans because they understand all this and ship over arms that don't work simply to ensure that those petrodollars circulate. ..."
"... Hence the current campaign to convince us that Iran was responsible. Mind you, that propaganda is only effective so long as the American people don't really believe it because, if they did, they might demand war (you can imagine Pelosi, Schumer and Biden insisting on it) and Washington doesn't want that. Jingoism isn't about fighting it's about threatening. ..."
1) USA: that would only help if Trump was decided to go to a hot war against Iran. By his
declarations since yesterday, we already know that isn't going to happen. He didn't even jump
to the "Iran did it!" bandwagon right away. He said he increased sanctions against Iran --
but Iran is already sanctioned to the maximum by the USA, so that's empty rhetoric.
2) Israel: wars in Israel only work as an election boost to the incumbent Prime Minister when Israel emerges with a clear
victory. ...
3) Saudi Arabia: it has a 188 billion barrel reserve to cover up for the losses for a
couple of days, so they benefited a little bit from the 20% price rise. But so did everybody
else -- including enemies of the USA, such as Russia and Venezuela. Besides, the attack
dented the image of invincibility of Aramco's infrastructure, and Saudi Arabia's image as a
neofascist ideal State.
4) Iran: Iran can block the Hormuz Strait -- a much more benign and cheap way to stop
Saudi oil from being exported. If Iran attacks its neighbors' oil infrastructure, then it
kind of states it's fair game for its neighbors to attack theirs. This is bad move for Iran
from a purely game theory standpoint, let alone from the geopolitical one.
5) Masters of the Universe: yes, the oil price went up 20% in one day. But let's remember
that even a USD 100.00 a barrel isn't that impressive from a historical standpoint: when the
Iraq invasion happened, the barrel reached USD 300.00. Yes, a selected elite benefited a lot
from this, but the USA didn't become a capitalist utopia because of that. We must not
overestimate the effects of oil prices on capitalism and, specially, on the USA: the West is
in terminal decline for a myriad of factors, not because of one silver bullet. Higher oil
prices won't save the West.
My hypothesis is this: the USA/Saudi Arabia are too embarassed to admit their
anti-aircraft weapons and systems are useless against puny drones and created a big,
subterranean enemy in the form of Iran in order to avoid public embarassment.
The Houthis are telling the truth, and they will do more attacks if the Saudis don't stop
with theirs and settle for peace.
The headline calls that the Saudi Military stated the Aramco facilites were attacked with
18 missiles and 7 drones. They state cruise missiles were used. However, now they state the
attack was simply "backed" by Iran. The weapons were all Iranian design.
That Iran is backing the Houthis we already knew and nobody doubts. But those drones and
missiles didn't come from Iranian territory nor were they operated by Iranian personel. It's
a free market world, and everybody can buy weapons from anybody.
US and Saudis say that over 20 missiles and drones were used in the attack. They say that
this showed that Iran did the attack or participated in the attack because the Houthi only
claim to have used 10 drones.
Peter AU 1 and I have said that it's possible to account for the excess damage as an
attempt to exaggerate damage caused by the Houthi attack.
The GOAL of exaggerating the attack could be to simply increase oil prices or to justify
war with Iran. Tensions with Iran will be elevated for weeks, if not months. That will mean
higher oil prices than otherwise.
The timing is also suspicious because it comes just before the Israeli election and
just after John Bolton was dismissed.
And despite Trump's backing away from his asinine "locked and loaded" comment, war with
Iran is still very possible. The Iraq War started 18 months after 9-11.
Russian oil experts say 3 to 6 months to repair damage from strike as components must come
from Europe according to TASS. As the remains of the uavs have been recovered their effective
range can be determined. I suspect they were launched from within Saudi territory.
Their main argument is that the attacks came "from the north".
If that's true, then the question remains: why didn't the Saudi radars detect it? Either b
is lying, or the Saudi military is lying.
It's really hilarious at this point: the attack caught the West so low-guarded and stunned
them so much that they can't even come up with a unified official narrative.
Houthi Armed Forces Spokesman
is at this moment tweeting a series of statements explaining how the last attack was done
that includes drone capabilities and types of munitions used!!!!!!!!!!! An example:
"Drones have fission heads carrying four precision bombs."
Given that the entire relationship between the USA and the KSA is an elaborate protection
racket the failure of all those high priced systems to protect the oil fields against
Ansrullah drones is particularly embarrassing.
It is embarrassing to the Saudis because they scarcely bother to unpack the weapons the
US sends them-at premium prices - and dare not allow any of their countrymen to learn how to
use them. And it is embarrassing to the Americans because they understand all this and ship
over arms that don't work simply to ensure that those petrodollars circulate.
Hence the current campaign to convince us that Iran was responsible. Mind you, that
propaganda is only effective so long as the American people don't really believe it because,
if they did, they might demand war (you can imagine Pelosi, Schumer and Biden insisting on
it) and Washington doesn't want that.
Jingoism isn't about fighting it's about threatening.
And, now that 57 varieties of Israeli Fascism are squabbling about whether the Prime
Minister goes to jail for theft, even that distraction is no longer useful.
Statement from the Iranians "Saudi press conference shows they are clueless about how attack
was executed and know nothing about the military capabilities of their adversary".
Seems about right. Statement by bevin is on target.
The recent attacks on Saudi oil facilities by Yemeni Houthi forces demonstrate once again
that an aggressive foreign policy often brings unintended consequences and can result in
blowback. In 2015 Saudi Arabia attacked its neighbor, Yemen, because a coup in that country
ousted the Saudi-backed dictator. Four years later Yemen is in ruins, with nearly 100,000
Yemenis killed and millions more facing death by starvation. It has been rightly called the
worst humanitarian catastrophe on the planet.
But rich and powerful Saudi Arabia did not defeat Yemen. In fact, the Saudis last month
asked the Trump Administration to help facilitate talks with the Houthis in hopes that the war,
which has cost Saudi Arabia tens of billions of dollars, could finally end without Saudi crown
prince Mohammad bin Salman losing too much face. Washington admitted earlier this month that
those talks had begun.
The surprise Houthi attack on Saturday disrupted half of Saudi Arabia's oil and gas
production and shocked Washington. Predictably, however, the neocons are using the attack to
call for war with Iran!
Sen. Lindsay Graham, one of the few people in Washington who makes John Bolton look like a
dove, Tweeted yesterday that, "It is now time for the US to put on the table an attack on
Iranian oil refineries " Graham is the perfect embodiment of the saying, "when all you have is
a hammer, everything looks like a nail." No matter what the problem, for Graham the solution is
war.
Likewise, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – who is supposed to represent US diplomacy
– jumped to blame Iran for the attack on Saudi Arabia, Tweeting that, "Iran has now
launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply." Of course, he provided no
evidence even as the Houthis themselves took responsibility for the bombing.
What is remarkable is that all of Washington's warmongers are ready for war over what is
actually a retaliatory strike by a country that is the victim of Saudi aggression, not the
aggressor itself. Yemen did not attack Saudi Arabia in 2015. It was the other way around. If
you start a war and the other country fights back, you should not be entitled to complain about
how unfair the whole thing is.
The establishment reaction to the Yemeni oilfield strike reminds me of a hearing in the
House Foreign Affairs Committee just before the US launched the 2003 Iraq war. As I was arguing
against the authorization for that war, I pointed out that Iraq had never attacked the United
States. One of my colleagues stopped me in mid-sentence, saying, "let me remind the gentleman
that the Iraqis have been shooting at our planes for years." True, but those planes were
bombing Iraq!
The neocons want a US war on Iran at any cost. They may feel temporarily at a disadvantage
with the departure of their ally in the Trump Administration, John Bolton. However, the sad
truth is that there are plenty more John Boltons in the Administration. And they have allies in
the Lindsay Grahams in Congress.
Yemen has demonstrated that it can fight back against Saudi aggression. The only sensible
way forward is for a rapid end to this four-year travesty, and the Saudis would be wise to wake
up to the mess they've created for themselves. Whatever the case, US participation in Saudi
Arabia's war on Yemen must end immediately and neocon lies about Iran's role in the war must be
refuted and resisted.
"... Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen. Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution, they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi. ..."
"... "Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the region." ..."
"... "The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued. ..."
"... Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing a successful bill to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen. ..."
"... "It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest between the Saudis and Iranians." ..."
"... "Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.), who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran. ..."
"... "This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not a walk in the park." ..."
"... "In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's desulphurization capacity out of commission. ..."
"... "This little accident was designed to be maximally disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil in the long run. ..."
"... On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump understands." ..."
Retired Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis pointed out that the puncture marks do not actually show
the origin of the attack. "Missiles can fly from almost anywhere. They have the ability to
maneuver! And certainly drones can, too," the Defense Priorities senior fellow told the
National Interest . "There hasn't been the time to do an actual analysis on the
ground, so let's wait and see."
Mark Latham, managing partner at the London-based analysis firm Commodities Intelligence,
told the National Interest that the puncture marks pointed to a cruise missile with no
explosive warhead. Removing the payload would allow the missile to carry more fuel and launch
from farther away from its target.
... ... ...
"Mr. X is a sophisticated fellow. He's sourced some Iranian cruise missiles.
He's removed the explosive payload. He's replaced the explosive payload with fuel," he said.
"So this isn't your twenty dollar Amazon drone. This is a sophisticated military operation."
"The culprit behind the Abqaiq attack is most definitely the Islamic Republic, either
directly or through one of its proxies," argued Varsha Koduvayur, a senior research analyst at
the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.
"The attack fits the pattern of Iran signaling to the Gulf states that if it can't get its
oil out, it will cause their oil exports to become collateral damage," Koduvayur told the National Interest . "It's because of how strong our coercive financial tools are that
Iran is resorting to attacks like this: it's lashing out."
Violating an Obama-era agreement to regulate Iran's nuclear research program, the Trump
administration imposed massive sanctions on Iran's oil industry beginning in May 2018. The goal
of this "maximum pressure" campaign was to force Iran to accept a "better" deal. Since then,
Iranian forces have captured a British oil tanker and allegedly sabotaged tankers from other
countries.
There were some signals that Trump was planning to use the ongoing United Nations General
Assembly in New York to open a new
diplomatic channel with Iran, especially after the
firing of hawkish National Security Advisor John Bolton. But the weekend attack sent Trump
into reverse.
"Remember when Iran shot down a drone, saying knowingly that it was in their 'airspace'
when, in fact, it was nowhere close. They stuck strongly to that story knowing that it was a
very big lie," he said in a Monday morning Twitter post, referring to a June incident
when Iranian and American forces almost went to war. "Now they say that they had nothing to do
with the attack on Saudi Arabia. We'll see?"
He also hinted at a violent U.S. response.
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom as to who they believe was the cause of
this attack, and under what terms we would proceed!" Trump wrote on Sunday.
"Saudi Arabia is not a formal treaty ally of ours, so there are no international agreements
that obligate us to come to their defense," John Glaser, director of foreign-policy studies at
the CATO Institute, stated. "This does not amount to a clear and present danger to the United
States, so no self-defense justification is relevant. He would therefore need authorization
from Congress."
Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee had mixed reactions to the attack.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) proposed putting "on the table an attack on Iranian oil
refineries" in order to "break the regime's back." His press office did not respond to a
follow-up question from the National Interest asking whether the president would have
the authority to do so.
Amy Grappone, spokeswoman for Sen. Todd Young (R-Ind.), told the National Interest
that the Senator "will support an appropriate and proportionate response" after "studying the
latest intelligence pertaining to Iran's malign activities, including these recent attacks in
Saudi Arabia."
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, condemned the attack with
a backhanded insult towards Saudi Arabia. "Despite some ongoing policy differences with the
kingdom, no nation should be subjected to these kinds of attacks on it soil and against its
people," he wrote on Twitter, declining to name Iran as the culprit.
Committee members Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Vir.) explicitly announced
their opposition to war with Iran. And prominent war powers critic Sen.
Jeff Markley (D-Ore.) quipped that, "[b]ack when Presidents used to follow the Constitution,
they sought consent for military action from Congress, not foreign governments that murder
reporters," referring to the assassination of Saudi-American journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
"Diplomacy by Twitter has not worked so far and it surely is not working with Iran. The
president needs to stop threatening military strikes via social media," said Sen. Ben Cardin
(D-Mary.) in response to a question from the National Interest . "The attack on Saudi
Arabia is troubling whether it was perpetrated by Houthi rebels or Iran. The U.S. should regain
its leadership by working with our allies to isolate Iran for its belligerent actions in the
region."
"The U.S. should not be looking for any opportunity to start a dangerous and costly war with
Iran. Congress has not authorized war against Iran and we've made it crystal clear that Saudi
Arabia needs to withdraw from Yemen," he continued.
Asked how he would vote on a declaration of war, the senator told the National
Interest : "Let's hope it does not come to that. Congress has not authorized war against
Iran. The majority voted to engage them diplomatically to slow their nuclear ambitions. The
international community is ready to work with the U.S. again to ease economic pressure on Iran
in exchange for their restraint. We are at a dangerous precipice."
In a statement emailed to the National Interest and posted to Twitter, Sen. Tim
Kaine (D-Va.) was even more direct: "The US should never go to war to protect Saudi oil."
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has long been a critic of Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen, proposing
a successful bill
to cut off U.S. support for the Saudi-led war effort. (He did not have enough votes to override
the veto.) After the attacks, he wrote a long Twitter thread
explaining how "the Saudis sowed the seeds of this mess" in Yemen.
"It's simply amazing how the Saudis call all our shots these days. We don't have a mutual
defense alliance with KSA, for good reason. We shouldn't pretend we do," Murphy added. "And
frankly, no matter where this latest drone strike was launched from, there is no short or long
term upside to the U.S. military getting more deeply involved in the growing regional contest
between the Saudis and Iranians."
But the reaction did not fall neatly along party lines.
"Iran is one of the most dangerous state sponsors of terrorism. This may well be the thing
that calls for military action against Iran, if that's what the intelligence supports," said
Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) in a Monday interview with Fox News. Others pointed out that
attacking Iran would contradict Trump's own principles.
"Having our country act as Saudi Arabia's bitch is not 'America First,'" said Democratic
presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, invoking a popular Trump slogan. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ken.),
who had invoked Trump's antiwar message in a public feud
with Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) over the weekend, took to CNN to warn against striking Iran.
"This is a regional conflict, that there's no reason the superpower of the United States
needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran. It would be a needless escalation of this," he
told journalist Jake Tapper. "Those who loved the Iraq War, the Cheneys, the Boltons, the
Kristols, they all are clamoring and champing at the bit for another war in Iran. But it's not
a walk in the park."
Davis agreed with Paul's assessment. "There's too many people who have lost touch with
understanding what war is all about. They think it's easy," he told the National
Interest . "Just imagine this. What we go ahead and do this, and Iran makes good on their
threats, and American warships get sunk in the Gulf?" "This is not America's fight," he
concluded. "The American armed forces are not on loan as a Saudi defense force."
"There's another claim that the impact on oil markets is sufficient to impact the vital U.S.
interest in the free flow of energy coming out of that region, but that argument quickly
descends into absurdity when we remember that the Trump administration has been trying to
zero-out Iranian oil exports, for a host of spurious reasons," Glaser told the National
Interest . "Washington is also aggressively sanctioning Venezuela, making it harder for
Caracas to bring oil to market, too. If we really cared about the supply of oil, we wouldn't be
doing this."
In any case, the attack may not have affected oil markets in such a straightforward way.
Latham says that the attack struck an oil desulphurization facility. At the moment,
desulphurized fuel is in high demand from the shipping industry, which is rushing to comply
with new international environmental regulations.
"In order to have clean ships by the first of January next year, all the world's shipping
fleet from about now until the end of the year are busy emptying their tanks of heavy sulphur
fuel oil and filling their tanks with low sulphur fuel oil, which is the new standard," Latham
explained, claiming that the attack could have taken up to 20 percent of the world's
desulphurization capacity out of commission.
"This little accident was designed to be maximally
disruptive to the world's oil market. It could not have happened at a worse time." "But what is
really interesting is in Amsterdam this morning, I saw that for fuel oil -- the sulphurous
stuff -- the price went down," Latham continued, speculating that international powers might
delay the new environmental regulations by months and inadvertently drive down the price of oil
in the long run.
On Sunday, Trump tapped into emergency U.S. oil reserves, in order to stabilize prices. It's
not clear, however, that the United States has enough oil to cope with wider attacks on energy
infrastructure. "If the Iranians did this, they have shown they have pretty immense
capabilities clearly," Parsi told the National Interest . "In the case of a full-scale
war, imagine what this will do for the global economy. It's not that difficult to imagine what
that will do to Trump's re-election prospects. I think that is something Trump
understands."
Matthew Petti is a national security reporter at the National Interest.
Who says Mr Trump is unpredictable? Is there anybody expected anything else from Mr Trump
when it comes to picking his advisers or making thoughtful decisions? Let's be serious, Mr
Trump did not pick Mr Robert O'Brien. The Bolton, Pompeo, Pence triumvirate picked Trump's
NSA; naturally.
The conscientious judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a
fortnight ago which utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments
and media in the case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the
judgement in the mainstream media at all.
The myth is that Magnitskiy was an honest rights campaigner and accountant who discovered
corruption by Russian officials and threatened to expose it, and was consequently imprisoned
on false charges and then tortured and killed. A campaign over his death was led by his
former business partner, hedge fund manager Bill Browder, who wanted massive compensation for
Russian assets allegedly swindled from their venture. The campaign led to the passing of the
Magnitskiy Act in the United States, providing powers for sanctioning individuals responsible
for human rights abuses, and also led to matching sanctions being developed by the EU.
However the European Court of Human Rights has found, in judging a case brought against
Russia by the Magnitskiy family, that the very essence of this story is untrue. They find
that there was credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed engaged in tax fraud, in
conspiracy with Browder, and he was rightfully charged. The ECHR also found there was
credible evidence that Magnitskiy was indeed a flight risk so he was rightfully detained. And
most crucially of all, they find that there was credible evidence of tax fraud by Magnitskiy
and action by the authorities "years" before he started to make counter-accusations of
corruption against officials investigating his case.
This judgement utterly explodes the accepted narrative, and does it very succinctly:
Last month, the Council of Economic Advisers, an agency of the Trump White House, released
an extraordinary report titled "The Opportunity Costs of Socialism." The report begins with the
statement: "Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx's birth, socialism is making a
comeback in American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared
socialists are gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate."
The very fact that the US government officially acknowledges a growth of popular support for
socialism, particularly among the nation's youth, testifies to vast changes taking place in the
political consciousness of the working class and the terror this is striking within the ruling
elite. America is, after all, a country where anti-communism was for the greater part of a
century a state-sponsored secular religion. No ruling class has so ruthlessly sought to exclude
socialist politics from political discourse as the American ruling class.
The 70-page document is itself an inane right-wing screed. It seeks to discredit socialism
by identifying it with capitalist countries such as Venezuela that have expanded state
ownership of parts of the economy while protecting private ownership of the banks, and, with
the post-2008 collapse of oil and other commodity prices, increasingly attacked the living
standards of the working class.
It identifies socialism with proposals for mild social reform such as "Medicare for all,"
raised and increasingly abandoned by a section of the Democratic Party. It cites Milton
Friedman and Margaret Thatcher to promote the virtues of "economic freedom," i.e., the
unrestrained operation of the capitalist market, and to denounce all social reforms, business
regulations, tax increases or anything else that impinges on the oligarchy's
self-enrichment.
The report's arguments and themes find expression in the fascistic campaign speeches of
Donald Trump, who routinely and absurdly attacks the Democrats as socialists and accuses them
of seeking to turn America into another "socialist" Venezuela.
What has prompted this effort to blackguard socialism?
A series of recent polls in the US and Europe have shown a sharp growth of popular
disgust with capitalism and support for socialism. In May of 2017, in a survey conducted by
the Union of European Broadcasters of people aged 18 to 35, more than half said they would
participate in a "large-scale uprising." Nine out of 10 agreed with the statement, "Banks and
money rule the world."
Last November, a poll conducted by YouGov showed that 51 percent of Americans between the
ages of 21 and 29 would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country than in a capitalist
country.
In August of this year, a Gallup poll found that for the first time since the organization
began tracking the figure, fewer than half of Americans aged 18–29 had a positive view of
capitalism, while more than half had a positive view of socialism. The percentage of young
people viewing capitalism positively fell from 68 percent in 2010 to 45 percent this year, a
23-percentage point drop in just eight years.
This surge in interest in socialism is bound up with a resurgence of class struggle in
the US and internationally. In the United States, the number of major strikes so far this
year, 21, is triple the number in 2017. The ruling class was particularly terrified by the
teachers' walkouts earlier this year because the biggest strikes were organized by
rank-and-file educators in a rebellion against the unions, reflecting the weakening grip of the
pro-corporate organizations that have suppressed the class struggle for decades.
The growth of the class struggle is an objective process that is driven by the global
crisis of capitalism , which finds its most acute social and political expression in the
center of world capitalism -- the United States. It is the class struggle that provides the key
to the fight for genuine socialism.
Masses of workers and youth are being driven into struggle and politically radicalized by
decades of uninterrupted war and the staggering growth of social inequality. This process has
accelerated during the 10 years since the Wall Street crash of 2008. The Obama years saw the
greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top in history, the escalation of the wars
begun under Bush and their spread to Libya, Syria and Yemen, and the intensification of mass
surveillance, attacks on immigrants and other police state measures.
This paved the way for the elevation of Trump, the personification of the criminality and
backwardness of the ruling oligarchy.
Under conditions where the typical CEO in the US now makes in a single day almost as much
as the average worker makes in an entire year, and the net worth of the 400 wealthiest
Americans has doubled over the past decade, the working class is looking for a radical
alternative to the status quo. As the Socialist Equality Party wrote in its program eight
years ago, " The Breakdown of Capitalism and the
Fight for Socialism in the United States ":
The change in objective conditions, however, will lead American workers to change their
minds. The reality of capitalism will provide workers with many reasons to fight for a
fundamental and revolutionary change in the economic organization of society.
The response of the ruling class is two-fold. First, the abandonment of bourgeois democratic
forms of rule and the turn toward dictatorship. The run-up to the midterm elections has
revealed the advanced stage of these preparations, with Trump's fascistic attacks on
immigrants, deployment of troops to the border, threats to gun down unarmed men, women and
children seeking asylum, and his pledge to overturn the 14th Amendment establishing birthright
citizenship.
That this has evoked no serious opposition from the Democrats and the media makes clear that
the entire ruling class is united around a turn to authoritarianism. Indeed, the Democrats are
spearheading the drive to censor the internet in order to silence left-wing and socialist
opposition.
The second response is to promote phony socialists such as Bernie Sanders, the Democratic
Socialists of America (DSA) and other pseudo-left organizations in order to confuse the working
class and channel its opposition back behind the Democratic Party.
In 2018, with Sanders totally integrated into the Democratic Party leadership, this role has
been largely delegated to the DSA, which functions as an arm of the Democrats. Two DSA members,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Rashida Tlaib in Detroit, are likely to win seats in
the House of Representatives as candidates of the Democratic Party.
The closer they come to taking office, the more they seek to distance themselves from their
supposed socialist affiliation. Ocasio-Cortez, for example, joined Sanders in eulogizing the
recently deceased war-monger John McCain, refused to answer when asked if she opposed the US
wars in the Middle East, and dropped her campaign call for the abolition of Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The working class and youth are increasingly looking for a socialist alternative, but their
understanding of socialism and its history is limited. Here the role of the revolutionary
party, the Socialist Equality Party, is critical. It alone seeks to arm the emerging mass
movement of the working class with a genuine revolutionary, socialist and internationalist
program.
The SEP fights to mobilize and unite the working class in the US and internationally in
opposition to the entire ruling elite and all of its bribed politicians and parties. As our
program explains:
But socialism will be achieved only through the establishment of workers' power. This will
be a difficult struggle Socialism is not a gift to be given to the working class. It must be
fought for and won by the working class itself.
The task facing workers and youth looking for the way to fight against war, inequality,
poverty and repression is to join and build the Socialist Equality Party to lead the coming
mass struggles of the working class.
A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold
War and its dire consequences.
I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February,
after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in
Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police,
sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at
police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by
murder squads.
The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two
Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military
help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under
Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly
granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured
against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy
kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.
In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment
bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major
refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in
July 2014.
Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.
By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been
internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a
lesser extent Poland.
There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal
clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last
month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need
of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian
enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi
invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.
Flashpoint Syria
Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian
Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by
foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war
turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical
attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian
Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.
NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions
An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath,
England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50
personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in
the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)
Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to
the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous
brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles
were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are
easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.
Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired
in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that
Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that
render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we
can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has
returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly
what it means.
Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in
Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea
underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the
world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world
led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and
ASEAN.
Return to Moscow
In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well
beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers
like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com,
Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.
In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a
literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had
lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been
huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be
there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar
one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take
my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of
Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not
intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.
I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January
2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.
My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It
was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the
Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and
thought during the year.
I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I
happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three
independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and
authenticity.
Russophobia Becomes Entrenched
Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially
unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian
positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party
establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.
Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and
hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London
U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of
Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic
propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist
cover from October 2016 shows.
My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after
publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:
We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance
information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of
detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.
In the Thick of Information War
When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this
information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in
the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving
forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential
national security. I did not then know why, or how.
I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences
for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to
be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of
any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this
haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018
by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown
from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies
remain.
Truth, Trust and False Narratives
Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national
communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the
fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.
Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since
WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the
battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as
much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is
about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.
The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of
information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are
able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant
books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of
information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with
which to control their gullible populations.
The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter
in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda
narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and
Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the
Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy
ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell
tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But
because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.
We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world
that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information
control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to
generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the
three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.
People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the
armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to
be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career
prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral
issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for
people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were
expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:
Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the
non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books.
These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to
acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.
'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'
Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay
optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in
Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:
"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of
trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point,
many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."
Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough
public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.
The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted
voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks
in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.
" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able
to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens,
you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If
you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As
long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no
limit to the evils you can get away with."
The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of
hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough
clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the
lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible
false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.
Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for
the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with
false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in
Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.
It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent
people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone
print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse
and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements
about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?
We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and
SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate
on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian
social media sites.
Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is
used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story
was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President
Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.
The Skripals Gambit
The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted
Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans
returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.
How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical,
incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018
sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic
quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at
their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is
maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army
Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and
emergency treatment.
Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman
mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where
are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May
2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered
too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16
months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British
custody?
A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to
the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the
samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.
Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018
A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow
that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and
UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing
them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered
with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before
passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok,
which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high
volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez
lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure
rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.
Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.
'Boshirov and Petrov'
These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and
'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent
to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They
needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies
to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative
around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions.
British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole
British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games
based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.
The Douma False Narrative
I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely
alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came
close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of
Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.
The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons
against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims,
made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda
organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security
specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in
making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a
thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their
bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.
White Helmets
As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White
Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as
alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this
attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all
over the Western world.
Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from
his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a
fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his
testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.
In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report
from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the
air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole
in the roof.
I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often
they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if
they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute
them.
So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win
the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special
Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if
it were true. So, even, with MH17.
Managing Mass Opinion
This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically
directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies
provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed
malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.
So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington
and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same
establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the
science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way
that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media
messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in
order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts
enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.
Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct
Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington,
all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business,
and it works closely with the national security state.
Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by
the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they
hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the
activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative
(II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy
Corbyn.
We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation
networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK
government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel,
often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that
serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.
Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former
British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December
2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.
He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply
defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia.
He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under
attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to
'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.
Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of
warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the
issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third
dimension'.
He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.
We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being
recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism,
publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents
suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening
interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.
Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been
reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity
Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media
interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British
under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office
subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also
gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office
support in Britain's overseas embassies.
This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It
is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.
In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters
of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and
American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.
Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial
outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente;
and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West.
Do I have evidence for this? Yes.
It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my
sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with
[Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was
cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date;
that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return
to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of
them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited
to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or
institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the
ISAA.
My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published
in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation,
Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I
have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National
University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing
to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited
back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too
pro-Putin.
In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded
writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively
suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is
there.
This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order
to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to
put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence
laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their
careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next
promotion.
There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been
indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement
with Russia (or indeed, with China).
There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media,
including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given
an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like
last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by
Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.
The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified
in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after
the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor
of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré
dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio'
spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.
A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic
in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in
Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms
control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national
security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic
sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China
and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American
influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes
more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation
tool kit.
I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false
narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the
Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this
is how most Russians now see it too.
The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria
fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered
to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton,
who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018
and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates
Trump's foreign policy.
Self-Inflicted Wounds
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)
Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years –
self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me
list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds:
casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.
Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job
after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months
until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14
months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo.
Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign
chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.
Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an
invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable
Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly
lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos
and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that
people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial
wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as
a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S.
bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as
Russia is concerned .
Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under
way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been
other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial
rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.
False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed
at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of
audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis
from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor –
I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed
to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.
To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand
this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are
unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I
choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream
Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.
Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global
nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the
Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful
ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former
public servants and ex-military chiefs.
These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of
Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.
Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!
Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971,
and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to
Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.
Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58
Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the
narrative.
Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the
Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks
of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past
"mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then
scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with
details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a
version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a
scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The
government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of
which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous
government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national
security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.
The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long
time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket
playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely
ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.
When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.
Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a
voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal,
assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most
outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all
avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians
are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not
know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB
assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state
has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading
role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.
Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29
Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two
parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent
Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the
assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in
particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part
were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in
defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans.
The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from
Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian
mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state
institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the
Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and
confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey
were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution
and abduction of patriotic citizens began."
Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36
Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing
South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never
listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they
came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really
was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once
the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.
dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17
Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If
Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.
Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where
candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without
bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government
media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will
not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and
unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.
Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies.
Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as
Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd
think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into
the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia
prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.
John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18
judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which
utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the
case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the
mainstream media at all. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/
MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero
publicity.
I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left'
ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was
more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory
propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.
The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the
MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.
People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of
lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in
ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots
that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or
ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about
the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.
I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the
rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform
and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to
australistan.
Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21
Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population
by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his
administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his
article.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10
I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least
in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.
Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).
What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming
through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for
revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to
account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.
Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others
for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would
have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet
horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing
the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always
edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong
rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of
Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin
Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful
takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most
appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't
drop off their twigs disappointed.
This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate --
increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly
encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.
nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49
The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The
author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the
topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.
John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35
I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian
establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that
his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of
mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.
Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.
If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and
China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest
of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by
facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the
empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign
their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally
find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.
* * *
The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only
briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the
Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly
contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American
nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and
economic deep freeze.
While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the
enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and
sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help
their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked
their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West
shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door
again and the second cold war commenced.
* * *
The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It
enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total
dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.
Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a
truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their
eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their
adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of
the PetroDollar ponzi.
The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will
not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer
content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at
the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is
large enough to include their growing list of friends.
If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot
lucks.
John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11
Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.
Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33
Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble
Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone
??
Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58
WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN
An excellent article.
There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often
rely.
Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are
they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.
Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts
Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24
As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream
media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum.
Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history
(at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it
is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.
Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48
I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that
any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally
likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the
assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the
US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when
Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this
was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly
be true, or so we were told.
Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military
hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations
affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to
the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the
American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective
this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are
creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign
policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and
US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.
Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its
logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not
very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:
"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But
the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of
knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who
manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into
their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative.
They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei,
Martyanov)
Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the
US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.
John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15
The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days
of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia
and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging
China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed
enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic
Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.
Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will
consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and
quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is
preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians
have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge,
Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly
toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the
degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)
Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them
and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear
arsenal.
Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights
out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.
The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make
deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are
over.
Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).
Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36
Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01
Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech"
(e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically
elected" government) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and
have been for a long time.
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15
Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that
gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.
Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34
The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic
dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended
primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the
blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a
handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department,
FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved,
innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with
alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to
be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch
about what they are doing.
Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42
The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank
Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind".
– The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change
your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.
Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11
Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed
analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?
Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.
John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02
Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.
rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37
At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen
russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is-
a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not
prejudice.
If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary
of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on
it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal
poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's
fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26
As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.
Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46
Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most
important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to
tumble.
Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45
Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.
' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And
possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced
periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the
two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna,
to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One.
That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was
followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are
they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration
see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21
With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in
Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the
discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the
constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of
lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the
absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are
winning the propaganda war.
He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many
lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the
world.
Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine
is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine
Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia
propaganda. It's a true tell.
Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53
The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what
a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.
Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52
"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a
critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its
dissemination becomes self-sustaining."
This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years
late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color
revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power
throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was
imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing)
proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy
I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went
to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The
fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.
Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48
As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions,
like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my
book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive.
Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21
Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada,
coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism.
I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with
the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it).
And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in
distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.
Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44
This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate
history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.
Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17
Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have
concluded nonetheless.
Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10
Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative.
Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest
vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The
average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys
massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who
works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder-
OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC
controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.
Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48
?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world
from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative
subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals,
gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful
was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly
being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the
problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most
certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad,"
to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or
in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.
Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54
Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media
is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit
propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in
the West.
During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a
giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to
look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long
ago.
Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against
Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the
top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are
now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO
propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been
turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.
Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your
book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.
Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37
Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China,
precisely the same policies and forces are at work.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the
country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced
the end of the war
You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for
the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading.
The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing
but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state,
with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do
slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while
people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now.
Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.
Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08
Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't
yet read it.
The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to
CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.
Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52
I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy,
or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.
Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19
Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the
entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always
the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed
through our own self-immolation as a species.
Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54
As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should
do what Craig Murray has done start a website.
A retired Australian diplomat who served in Moscow dissects the emergence of the new Cold
War and its dire consequences.
I n 2014, we saw violent U.S.-supported regime change and civil war in Ukraine. In February,
after months of increasing tension from the anti-Russian protest movement's sitdown strike in
Kiev's Maidan Square, there was a murderous clash between protesters and Ukrainian police,
sparked off by hidden shooters (we now know that were expert Georgian snipers) , aiming at
police. The elected government collapsed and President Yanukevich fled to Russia, pursued by
murder squads.
The new Poroshenko government pledged harsh anti-Russian language laws. Rebels in two
Russophone regions in Eastern Ukraine took local control, and appealed for Russian military
help. In March, a referendum took place in Russian-speaking Crimea on leaving Ukraine, under
Russian military protection. Crimeans voted overwhelmingly to join Russia, a request promptly
granted by the Russian Parliament and President. Crimea's border with Ukraine was secured
against saboteurs. Crimea is prospering under its pro-Russian government, with the economy
kick-started by Russian transport infrastructure investment.
In April, Poroshenko ordered full military attack on the separatist provinces of Donetsk and
Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine. A brutal civil war ensued, with aerial and artillery bombardment
bringing massive civilian death and destruction to the separatist region. There was major
refugee outflow into Russia and other parts of Ukraine. The shootdown of MH17 took place in
July 2014.
Poroshenko: Ordered military attack.
By August 2015, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
estimates, 13,000 people had been killed and 30,000 wounded. 1.4 million Ukrainians had been
internally displaced, and 925,000 had fled to neighbouring countries, mostly Russia and to a
lesser extent Poland.
There is now a military stalemate, under the stalled Minsk peace process. But random fatal
clashes continue, with the Ukrainian Army mostly blamed by UN observers. The UN reported last
month that the ongoing war has affected 5.2 million people, leaving 3.5 million of them in need
of relief, including 500,000 children. Most Russians blame the West for fomenting Ukrainian
enmity towards Russia. This war brings back for older Russians horrible memories of the Nazi
invasion in 1941. The Russia-Ukraine border is only 550 kilometres from Moscow.
Flashpoint Syria
Russian forces joined the civil war in Syria in September 2015, at the request of the Syrian
Government, faltering under the attacks of Islamist extremist rebel forces reinforced by
foreign fighters and advanced weapons. With Russian air and ground support, the tide of war
turned. Palmyra and Aleppo were recaptured in 2016. An alleged Syrian Government chemical
attack at Khan Shaykhun in April 2017 resulted in a token U.S. missile attack on a Syrian
Government airbase: an early decision by President Trump.
NATO, Strategic Balance, Sanctions
An F-15C Eagle from the 493rd Fighter Squadron takes off from Royal Air Force Lakenheath,
England, March 6, 2014. The 48th Fighter Wing sent an additional six aircraft and more than 50
personnel to support NATO's air policing mission in Lithuania, at the request of U.S. allies in
the Baltics. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Emerson Nunez/Released)
Tensions have risen in the Baltic as NATO moves ground forces and battlefield missiles up to
the Baltic states' borders with Russia. Both sides' naval and air forces play dangerous
brinksmanship games in the Baltic. U.S. short-range, non-nuclear-armed anti-ballistic missiles
were stationed in Poland and Romania, allegedly against threat of Iranian attack. They are
easily convertible to nuclear-armed missiles aimed at nearby Russia.
Nuclear arms control talks have stalled. The INF intermediate nuclear forces treaty expired
in 2019, after both sides accused the other of cheating. In March 2018, Putin announced that
Russia has developed new types of intercontinental nuclear missiles using technologies that
render U.S. defence systems useless. The West has pretended to ignore this announcement, but we
can be sure Western defence ministries have noted it. Nuclear second-strike deterrence has
returned, though most people in the West have forgotten what this means. Russians know exactly
what it means.
Western economic sanctions against Russia continue to tighten after the 2014 events in
Ukraine. The U.S. is still trying to block the nearly completed Nordstream Baltic Sea
underwater gas pipeline from Russia to Germany. Sanctions are accelerating the division of the
world into two trade and payments systems: the old NATO-led world, and the rest of the world
led by China, with full Russian support and increasing interest from India, Japan, ROK and
ASEAN.
Return to Moscow
In 2013, my children gave me an Ipad. I began to spend several hours a day reading well
beyond traditional mainstream Western sources: British and American dissident sites, writers
like Craig Murray in UK and in the U.S. Stephen Cohen, and some Russian sites – rt.com,
Sputnik, TASS, and the official Foreign Ministry site mid.ru. in English.
In late 2015 I decided to visit Russia independently to write Return to Moscow , a
literary travel memoir. I planned to compare my impressions of the Soviet Union, where I had
lived and worked as an Australian diplomat in 1969-71, with Russia today. I knew there had been
huge changes. I wanted to experience 'Putin's Russia' for myself, to see how it felt to be
there as an anonymous visitor in the quiet winter season. I wanted to break out of the familiar
one-dimensional hostile political view of Russia that Western mainstream media offer: to take
my readers with me on a cultural pilgrimage through the tragedy and grandeur and inspiration of
Russian history. As with my earlier book on Spain 'Walking the Camino' , this was not
intended to be a political book, and yet somehow it became one.
I was still uncommitted on contemporary Russian politics before going to Russia in January
2016. Using the metaphor of a seesaw, I was still sitting somewhere around the middle.
My book was written in late 2015 – early 2016, expertly edited by UWA Publishing. It
was launched in March 2017. By this time my political opinions had moved decisively to the
Russian end of the seesaw, on the basis of what I had seen in Russia, and what I had read and
thought during the year.
I have been back again twice, in winter 2018 and 2019. My 2018 visit included Crimea, and I
happened to see a Navalny-led Sunday demonstration in Moscow. I thoroughly enjoyed all three
independent visits: in my opinion, they give my judgements on Russia some depth and
authenticity.
Russophobia Becomes Entrenched
Russia was a big talking point in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. As the initially
unlikely Republican candidate Donald Trump's chances improved, anti-Putin and anti-Russian
positions hardened in the outgoing Obama administration and in the Democratic Party
establishment which backed candidate Hillary Clinton.
Russia and Putin became caught up in the Democratic Party's increasingly obsessive rage and
hatred against the victorious Trump. Russophobia became entrenched in Washington and London
U.S. and UK political and strategic elites, especially in intelligence circles: think of
Pompeo, Brennan, Comey and Clapper. All sense of international protocol and diplomatic
propriety towards Russia and its President was abandoned, as this appalling Economist
cover from October 2016 shows.
My experience of undeclared political censorship in Australia since four months after
publication of 'Return to Moscow' supports the thesis that:
We are now in the thick of a ruthless but mostly covert Anglo-American alliance
information war against Russia. In this war, individuals who speak up publicly in the cause of
detente with Russia will be discouraged from public discourse.
In the Thick of Information War
When I spoke to you two years ago, I had no idea how far-reaching and ruthless this
information war is becoming. I knew that a false negative image of Russia was taking hold in
the West, even as Russia was becoming a more admirable and self-confident civil society, moving
forward towards greater democracy and higher living standards, while maintaining essential
national security. I did not then know why, or how.
I had just had time to add a few final paragraphs in my book about the possible consequences
for Russia-West relations of Trump's surprise election victory in November 2016. I was right to
be cautious, because since Trump's inauguration we have seen the step-by-step elimination of
any serious pro-detente voices in Washington, and the reassertion of control over this
haphazard president by the bipartisan imperial U.S. deep state, as personified from April 2018
by Secretary of State Pompeo and National Security Adviser Bolton. Bolton has now been thrown
from the sleigh as decoy for the wolves: under the smooth-talking Pompeo, the imperial policies
remain.
Truth, Trust and False Narratives
Let me now turn to some theory about political reality and perception, and how national
communities are persuaded to accept false narratives. Let me acknowledge my debt to the
fearless and brilliant Australian independent online journalist, Caitlin Johnstone.
Behavioural scientists have worked in the field of what used to be called propaganda since
WW1. England has always excelled in this field. Modern wars are won or lost not just on the
battlefield, but in people's minds. Propaganda, or as we now call it information warfare, is as
much about influencing people's beliefs within your own national community as it is
about trying to demoralise and subvert the enemy population.
The IT revolution of the past few years has exponentially magnified the effectiveness of
information warfare. Already in the 1940s, George Orwell understood how easily governments are
able to control and shape public perceptions of reality and to suppress dissent. His brilliant
books 1984 and Animal Farm are still instruction manuals in principles of
information warfare. Their plots tell of the creation by the state of false narratives, with
which to control their gullible populations.
The disillusioned Orwell wrote from his experience of real politics. As a volunteer fighter
in the Spanish Civil War, he saw how both Spanish sides used false news and propaganda
narratives to demonise the enemy. He also saw how the Nazi and Stalinist systems in Germany and
Russia used propaganda to support show trials and purges, the concentration camps and the
Gulag, anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, German master race and Stalinist class enemy
ideologies; and hows dissident thought was suppressed in these controlled societies. Orwell
tried to warn his readers: all this could happen here too, in our familiar old England. But
because the good guys won the war against fascism, his warnings were ignored.
We are now in Britain, U.S. and Australia actually living in an information warfare world
that has disturbing echoes of the world that Orwell wrote about. The essence of information
control is the effective state management of two elements, trust and fear , to
generate and uphold a particular view of truth. Truth, trust and fear : these are the
three key elements, now as 100 years ago in WWI Britain.
People who work or have worked close to government – in departments, politics, the
armed forces, or top universities – mostly accept whatever they understand at the time to
be 'the government view' of truth. Whether for reasons of organisational loyalty, career
prudence or intellectual inertia, it is usually this way around governments. It is why moral
issues like the Vietnam War and the U.S.-led 2003 invasion of Iraq were so distressing for
people of conscience working in or close to government and military jobs in Canberra. They were
expected to engage in 'doublethink' as Orwell had described it:
Even in Winston's nightmare world, there were still choices – to retreat into the
non-political world of the proles, or to think forbidden thoughts and read forbidden books.
These choices involved large risks and punishments. It was easier and safer for most people to
acquiesce in the fake news they were fed by state-controlled media.
'Trust, Truth and False Narratives'
Fairfax journalist Andrew Clark, in the Australian Financial Review , in an essay
optimistically titled "Not fake news: Why truth and trust are still in good shape in
Australia", (AFR Dec. 22, 2018), cited Professor William Davies thus:
"Most of the time, the edifice that we refer to as "truth" is really an investment of
trust in our structures of politics and public life' 'When trust sinks below a certain point,
many people come to view the entire spectacle of politics and public life as a sham."
Here is my main point: Effective information warfare requires the creation of enough
public trust to make the public believe that state-supported lies are true.
The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted
voices. Once a critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks
in: its dissemination becomes self-sustaining.
" Power is being able to control what happens. Absolute power is being able
to control what people think about what happens. If you can control what happens,
you can have power until the public gets sick of your BS and tosses you out on your ass. If
you can control what people think about what happens, you can have power forever. As
long as you can control how people are interpreting circumstances and events, there's no
limit to the evils you can get away with."
The Internet has made propaganda campaigns that used to take weeks or months a matter of
hours or even minutes to accomplish. It is about getting in quickly, using large enough
clusters of trusted and diverse sources, in order to cement lies in place, to make the
lies seem true, to magnify them through social messaging: in other words, to create credible
false narratives that will quickly get into the public's bloodstream.
Over the past two years, I have seen this work many times: on issues like framing Russia for
the MH17 tragedy; with false allegations of Assad mounting poison gas attacks in Syria; with
false allegations of Russian agents using lethal Novichok to try to kill the Skripals in
Salisbury; and with the multiple lies of Russiagate.
It is the mind-numbing effect of constant repetition of disinformation by many eminent
people and agencies, in hitherto trusted channels like the BBC or ABC or liberal Anglophone
print media that gives the system its power to persuade the credulous. For if so many diverse
and reputable people repeatedly report such negative news and express such negative judgements
about Russia or China or Iran or Syria, surely they must be right?
We have become used to reading in our quality newspapers and hearing on the BBC and ABC and
SBS gross assaults on truth, calmly presented as accepted facts. There is no real public debate
on important facts in contention any more. There are no venues for dissent outside contrarian
social media sites.
Sometimes, false narratives inter-connect. Often a disinformation narrative in one area is
used to influence perceptions in other areas. For example, the false Skripals poisoning story
was launched by British intelligence in March 2018, just in time to frame Syrian President
Assad as the guilty party in a faked chemical weapons attack in Douma the following month.
The Skripals Gambit
The Skripals gambit was also a failed British attempt to blight the Russia –hosted
Football World Cup in June 2018. In the event, hundreds of thousands of Western sports fans
returned home with the warmest memories of Russian good sportsmanship and hospitality.
How do I know the British Skripals narrative is false? For a start, it is illogical,
incoherent, and constantly changes. Allegedly, two visiting Russian FSB agents in March 2018
sprayed or smeared Novichok, a deadly toxin instantly lethal in the most microscopic
quantities, on the Skripals' house front doorknob. There is no video footage of the Skripals at
their front door on the day. We are told they were found slumped on a park bench, and that is
maybe where they had been sprayed with nerve gas? Shortly afterwards, Britain's Head of Army
Nursing who happened to be passing by found them, and supervised their hospitalisation and
emergency treatment.
Allegedly, much of Salisbury was contaminated by Novichok, and one unfortunate woman
mysteriously died weeks later, yet the Skripals somehow did not die, as we are told. But where
are they now? We saw a healthy Yulia in a carefully scripted video interview released in May
2018, after an alleged 'one in a million' recovery. We were assured her father had recovered
too, but nobody has seen him at all. The Skripals have simply disappeared from sight since 16
months ago. Are they now alive or dead? Are they in voluntary or involuntary British
custody?
A month after the poisoning, the UK Government sent biological samples from the Skripals to
the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons , for testing. The OPCW sent the
samples to a trusted OPCW laboratory in Spiez, Switzerland.
Lavrov Spiez BZ claims, April 2018
A few days later, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dramatically announced in Moscow
that the Spiez lab had found in the samples a temporary-effect nerve agent BZ, used by U.S. and
UK but not by Russia, that would have disabled the Skripals for a few days without killing
them. He also revealed the Spiez lab had found that the Skripal samples had been twice tampered
with while still in UK custody: first soon after the poisoning, and again shortly before
passing them to the OPCW. He said the Spiez lab had found a high concentration of Novichok,
which he called A- 234, in its original form. This was extremely suspicious as A-234 has high
volatility and could not have retained its purity over a two weeks period. The dosage the Spiez
lab found in the samples would have surely killed the Skripals. The OPCW under British pressure
rejected Lavrov's claim, and suppressed the Spiez lab report.
Let's look finally at the alleged assassins.
'Boshirov and Petrov'
These two FSB operatives who visited Salisbury under the false identities of 'Boshirov' and
'Petrov' did not look or behave like credible assassins. It is more likely that they were sent
to negotiate with Sergey Skripal about his rumoured interest in returning to Russia. They
needed to apply for UK visas a month in advance of travel: ample time for the British agencies
to identify them as FSB operatives, and to construct a false attempted assassination narrative
around their visit. This false narrative repeatedly trips over its own lies and contradictions.
British social media are full of alternative theories and rebuttals. Russians find the whole
British Government Skripal narrative laughable. They have invented comedy skits and video games
based on it. Yet it had major impact on Russia-West relations.
The Douma False Narrative
I turn now to the claimed Assad chemical weapons attack in Douma in April 2018.This falsely
alleged attack triggered a major NATO air attack on Syrian targets, ordered by Trump. We came
close to WWIII in these dangerous days. Thanks to the restraint of the then Secretary of
Defence James Mattis and his Russian counterparts, the risk was contained.
The allegation that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad had used outlawed chemical weapons
against his own people was based solely on the evidence of faked video images of child victims,
made by the discredited White Helmets, a UK-sponsored rebel-linked 'humanitarian' propaganda
organisation with much blood on its hands. Founded in 2013 by a British private security
specialist of intelligence background, James Le Mesurier, the White Helmets specialised in
making fake videos of alleged Assad regime war crimes against Syrian civilians. It is by now a
thoroughly discredited organisation that was prepared to kill its prisoners and then film their
bodies as alleged victims of government chemical attacks.
White Helmets
As the town of Douma was about to fall to advancing Syrian Government forces, the White
Helmets filled a room with stacked corpses of murdered prisoners, and photographed them as
alleged victims of aerial gas attack. They also made a video alleging child victims of this
attack being hosed down by White Helmets. A video of a child named Hassan Diab went viral all
over the Western world.
Hassan Diab later testified publicly in The Hague that he had been dragged terrified from
his family by force, smeared with some sort of grease, and hosed down with water as part of a
fake video. He went from hero to zero overnight, as Western governments and media rejected his
testimony as Russian and Syrian propaganda.
In a late development, there is proof that the OPCW suppressed its own engineers' report
from Douma that the alleged poison gas cylinders could not have possibly been dropped from the
air through the roof of the house where one was found, resting on a bed under a convenient hole
in the roof.
I could go on discussing the detail of such false narratives all day. No matter how often
they are exposed by critics, our politicians and mainstream media go on referencing them as if
they are true. Once people have come to believe false narratives, it is hard to refute
them.
So it is with the false narrative that Russian internet interference enabled Trump to win
the 2016 U.S. presidential elections: a thesis for which no evidence was found by [Special
Counsel Robert] Mueller, yet continues to be cited by many U.S. liberal Democratic media as if
it were true. So, even, with MH17.
Managing Mass Opinion
This mounting climate of Western Russophobia is not accidental: it is strategically
directed, and it is nourished with regular maintenance doses of fresh lies. Each round of lies
provides a credible platform for the next round somewhere else. The common thread is a claimed
malign Russian origin for whatever goes wrong.
So where is all this disinformation originating? Information technology firms in Washington
and London that are closely networked into government elites, often through attending the same
establishment schools or colleges like Eton and Yale, have closely studied and tested the
science of influencing crowd opinions through mainstream media and online. They know, in a way
that Orwell or Goebbels could hardly have dreamt, how to put out and repeat desired media
messages. They know what sizes of 'internet attraction nodes' need to be established online, in
order to create diverse critical masses of credible Russophobic messaging, which then attracts
enough credulous and loyal followers to become self-propagating.
Firms like the SCL Group (formerly Strategic Communication Laboratories) and the now defunct
Cambridge Analytica pioneered such work in the UK. There are many similar firms in Washington,
all in the business of monitoring, generating and managing mass opinion. It is big business,
and it works closely with the national security state.
Starting in November 2018, an enterprising group of unknown hackers in the UK , who go by
the name 'Anonymous', opened a remarkable window into this secret world. Over a few weeks, they
hacked and dumped online a huge volume of original documents issued by and detailing the
activities of the Institute for Statecraft (IfS) and the Integrity initiative
(II). Here is the first page of one of their dumps, exposing propaganda against Jeremy
Corbyn.
We know from this material that the IfS and II are two secret British disinformation
networks operating at arms' length from but funded by the UK security services and broader UK
government establishment. They bring together high-ranking military and intelligence personnel,
often nominally retired, journalists and academics, to produce and disseminate propaganda that
serves the agendas of the UK and its allies.
Stung by these massive leaks, Chris Donnelly, a key figure in IfS and II and a former
British Army intelligence officer, made a now famous seven-minute YouTube video in December
2018, artfully filmed in a London kitchen, defending their work.
He argued – quite unconvincingly in my opinion – that IfS and II are simply
defending Western societies against disinformation and malign influence, primarily from Russia.
He boasted how they have set up in numerous targeted European countries, claimed to be under
attack from Russian disinformation, what he called 'clusters of influence' , to
'educate' public opinion and decision-makers in pro-NATO and anti-Russian directions.
Donnelly spoke frankly on how the West is already at war with Russia, a 'new kind of
warfare', in which he said 'everything becomes a weapon'. He said that 'disinformation is the
issue which unites all the other weapons in this conflict and gives them a third
dimension'.
He said the West has to fight back, if it is to defend itself and to prevail.
We can confirm from the Anonymous leaked files the names of many people in Europe being
recruited into these clusters of influence. They tend to be significant people in journalism,
publishing, universities and foreign policy think-tanks: opinion-shapers. The leaked documents
suggest how ideologically suitable candidates are identified: approached for initial screening
interviews; and, if invited to join a cluster of influence, sworn to secrecy.
Remarkably, neither the Anonymous disclosures nor the Donnelly response have ever been
reported in Australian media. Even in Britain – where evidence that the Integrity
Initiative was mounting a campaign against [Labour leader] Jeremy Corbyn provoked brief media
interest. The story quickly disappeared from mainstream media and the BBC. A British
under-foreign secretary admitted in Parliamentary Estimates that the UK Foreign Office
subsidises the Institute of Statecraft to the tune of nearly 3 million pounds per year. It also
gives various other kinds of non-monetary assistance, e.g. providing personnel and office
support in Britain's overseas embassies.
This is not about traditional spying or seeking agents of influence close to governments. It
is about generating mass disinformation, in order to create mass climates of belief.
In my opinion, such British and American disinformation efforts, using undeclared clusters
of influence, through Five Eyes intelligence-sharing, and possibly with the help of British and
American diplomatic missions, may have been in operation in Australia for many years.
Such networks may have been used against me since around mid-2017, to limit the commercial
outreach of my book and the impact of its dangerous ideas on the need for East-West detente;
and efficiently to suppress my voice in Australian public discourse about Russia and the West.
Do I have evidence for this? Yes.
It is not coincidence that the Melbourne Writers Festival in August 2017 somehow lost all my
sign-and-sell books from my sold-out scheduled speaking event; that a major debate with
[Australian writer and foreign policy analyst] Bobo Lo at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne was
cancelled by his Australian sponsor, the Lowy institute, two weeks before the advertised date;
that my last invitation to any writers festival was 15 months ago, in May 2018; that Return
to Moscow was not shortlisted for any Australian book prize, though I entered it in all of
them ; that since my book's early promotion ended around August 2017, I have not been invited
to join any ABC discussion panels, or to give any talks on Russia in any universities or
institutes, apart from the admirable Australian Institute of International Affairs and the
ISAA.
My articles and shorter opinion commentaries on Russia and the West have not been published
in mainstream media or in reputable online journals like Eureka Street, The Conversation,
Inside Story or Australian Book Review . Despite being an ANU Emeritus Fellow, I
have not been invited to give a public talk or join any panel in ANU (Australian National
University) or any Canberra think tank. In early 2018, I was invited to give a private briefing
to a group of senior students travelling on an immersion course to Russia. I was not invited
back in 2019, after high-level private advice within ANU that I was regarded as too
pro-Putin.
In all these ways – none overt or acknowledged – my voice as an open-minded
writer and speaker on Russia-West relations seems to have been quietly but effectively
suppressed in Australia. I would like to be proved wrong on this, but the evidence is
there.
This may be about "velvet-glove deterrence" of my Russia-sympathetic voice and pen, in order
to discourage others, especially those working in or close to government. Nobody is going to
put me in jail, unless I am stupid enough to violate Australia's now strict foreign influence
laws. This deterrence is about generating fear of consequences for people still in their
careers, paying their mortgages, putting kids through school. Nobody wants to miss their next
promotion.
There are other indications that Australian national security elite opinion has been
indoctrinated prudently to fear and avoid any kind of public discussion of positive engagement
with Russia (or indeed, with China).
There are only two kinds of news about Russia now permitted in our mainstream media,
including the ABC and SBS: negative news and comment, or silence. Unless a story can be given
an anti-Russian sting, it will not be carried at all. Important stories are simply spiked, like
last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivistok, chaired by President Putin and attended by
Prime Ministers Abe, Mahathir and Modi, among 8500 participants from 65 countries.
The ABC idea of a balanced panel to discuss any Russian political topic was exemplified
in an ABC Sunday Extra Roundtable panel chaired by Eleanor Hall on July, 22 2018, soon after
the Trump-Putin Summit in Helsinki. The panel – a former ONA Russia analyst, a professor
of Soviet and Russian History at Melbourne University, and a Russian émigré
dissident journalist introduced as the 'Washington correspondent for Echo of Moscow radio'
spent most of their time sneering at Putin and Trump. There were no other views.
A powerful anti-Russian news narrative is now firmly in place in Australia, on every topic
in contention: Ukraine, MH17, Crimea, Syria, the Skripals, Navalny and public protest in
Russia. There is ill-informed criticism of Russia, or silence, on the crucial issues of arms
control and Russia-China strategic and economic relations as they affect Australia's national
security or economy. There is no analysis of the negative impact on Australia of economic
sanctions against Russia. There is almost no discussion of how improved relations with China
and Russia might contribute to Australia's national security and economic welfare, as American
influence in the world and our region declines, and as American reliability as an ally comes
more into question. Silence on inconvenient truths is an important part of the disinformation
tool kit.
I see two overall conflicting narratives – the prevailing Anglo-American false
narrative; and valiant efforts by small groups of dissenters, drawing on sources outside the
Anglo-American official narrative, to present another narrative much closer to truth. And this
is how most Russians now see it too.
The Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki in July 2018 was damaged by the Skripal and Syria
fabrications. Trump left that summit friendless, frightened and humiliated. He soon surrendered
to the power of the U.S. imperial state as then represented by [Mike] Pompeo and [John] Bolton,
who had both been appointed as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser in April 2018
and who really got into their stride after the Helsinki Summit. Pompeo now smoothly dominates
Trump's foreign policy.
Self-Inflicted Wounds
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo (Gage Skidmore)
Finally, let me review the American political casualties over the past two years –
self-inflicted wounds – arising from this secret information war against Russia. Let me
list them without prejudging guilt or innocence. Slide 20 – Self-inflicted wounds:
casualties of anti-Russian information warfare.
Trump's first National Security Adviser, the highly decorated Michael Flynn lost his job
after only three weeks, and soon went to jail. His successor H R McMaster lasted 13 months
until replaced by John Bolton. Trump's first Secretary of State Rex Tillerson lasted just 14
months until his replacement by Trump's appointed CIA chief (in January 2017) Mike Pompeo.
Trump's chief strategist Steve Bannon lasted only seven months. Trump's former campaign
chairman Paul Manafort is now in jail.
Defence Secretary James Mattis lasted nearly two years as Secretary of Defence, and was an
invaluable source of strategic stability. He resigned in December 2018. The highly capable
Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman lasted just two years: he is resigning next month. John Kelly
lasted 18 months as White House Chief of Staff. Less senior figures like George Papadopoulos
and Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen both served jail time. The pattern I see here is that
people who may have been trying responsibly as senior U.S. officials to advance Trump's initial
wish to explore possibilities for detente with Russia – policies that he had advocated as
a candidate – were progressively purged, one after another . The anti-Russian U.S.
bipartisan imperial state is now firmly back in control. Trump is safely contained as far as
Russia is concerned .
Russians do not believe that any serious detente or arms control negotiations can get under
way while cold warriors like Pompeo continue effectively to control Trump. There have been
other casualties over the past two years of tightening American Russophobia. Julian Assange and
Chelsea Manning come to mind. The naive Maria Butina is a pathetic victim of American judicial
rigidity and deep state vindictiveness.
False anti-Russian Government narratives emanating from London and Washington may be laughed
at in Moscow , but they are unquestioningly accepted in Canberra. We are the most gullible of
audiences. There is no critical review. Important contrary factual information and analysis
from and about Russia just does not reach Australian news reporting and commentary, nor –
I fear – Australian intelligence assessment. We are prisoners of the false narratives fed
to us by our senior Five Eyes partners U.S. and UK.
To conclude: Some people may find what I am saying today difficult to accept. I understand
this. I now work off open-source information about Russia with which many people here are
unfamiliar, because they prefer not to read the diverse online information sources that I
choose to read. The seesaw has tilted for me: I have clearly moved a long way from mainstream
Western perceptions on Russia-West relations.
Under Trump and Pompeo, as the Syria and Iran crises show, the present risk of global
nuclear war by accident or incompetent Western decision-making is as high as it ever was in the
Cold War. The West needs to learn again how to dialogue usefully and in mutually respectful
ways with Russia and China. This expert knowledge is dying with our older and wiser former
public servants and ex-military chiefs.
These remarks were delivered by Tony Kevin at the Independent Scholars Association of
Australia in Canberra, Australia on Wednesday.
Watch Tony Kevin interviewed Friday night on CN Live!
Tony Kevin is a retired Australian diplomat who was posted to Moscow from 1969 to 1971,
and was later Australia's ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. His latest book is Return to
Moscow, published by UWA Publishing.
Bruce , September 17, 2019 at 08:58
Excellent article. It's very interesting to see how the state and its media lackey set the
narrative.
Most of this comment relates to the Skripals but also applies to other matters (the
Skripals writing was some of Craig Murray's finest work in my opinion). One of the hallmarks
of a hoax is a constantly evolving storyline. I think governments have learned from past
"mistakes" with their hoaxes/deception where they've given a description of events and then
scientists/engineers/chemists etc have come in and criticised their version of events with
details and scientific arguments. Nowadays, governments are very reluctant to commit to a
version of events, and instead rely on the media (their propaganda assets) to provide a
scattergun set of information to muddy the waters and thoroughly confuse the population. The
government is then insulated from some of the more bizarre allegations (the headlines of
which are absorbed nonetheless), and can blame it on the media (who would use an anonymous
government source naturally). Together with classifying just about everything on national
security grounds, they can stonewall for as long as they want.
The British are masters of propaganda. They maintained a global empire for a very long
time, and the prevailing view (in the west at least) was probably one of tea-drinking cricket
playing colonials/gentlemen. But you don't maintain an empire without being absolutely
ruthless and brutal. They've been doing this for a very long time.
When we hear something from the BBC or ABC, we should think "State Media".
That's probably why its got a nice folksy nickname of "aunty" .build up the trust.
Society is suffering the extreme paradox; there is the potential for everyone to have a
voice, but the last vestiges of free speech have been whittled away. Fake news is universal,
assisted by the fake "left". It is impossible to get published any challenge to even the most
outlandish versions of identity politics. As the experience of Tony Kevin exemplifies, all
avenues for dissent against hegemonic orthodoxies are closed off.
Disinformation is now an essential weapon in waging hot and cold wars. Cold War historians
are well informed on false flags, "black ops", and other organised dirty tactics. I do not
know what happened to the Skripals, and while it is legitimate to bear in mind KGB
assassinations, despite the enormous resources at its disposal, the English security state
has been unable to construct a credible case. Surely scepticism is provoked by the leading
role being played by the notorious Bellingcat outfit.
Zenobia van Dongen , September 17, 2019 at 00:29
Here is part of an eyewitness account:
"After the Orange Revolution which began in Kiev, the country was divided literally into two
parts -- the supporters of integration with Russia and the supporters of an independent
Ukraine. For almost 100 years belonging to the Soviet Union, the propaganda about the
assistance and care from our "big brother" Russia, in Ukraine as a whole and the Donbass in
particular has borne fruit. At the end of February 2014, some cities of the Southeast part
were boiling with mass social and political protest against the new Ukrainian government in
defense of the status of the Russian language, voicing separatist and pro-Russian slogans.
The division took place in our city of Sloviansk too. Some people stood for separation from
Ukraine, while Ukrainian patriots stood for the unity of our country.
On April 12, 2014 our city of Sloviansk in the Donetsk region was seized by Russian
mercenaries and local volunteers. From that moment onward, armed assaults on state
institutions began. The city police department, the Sloviansk City Hall, the building of the
Ukraine Security Service was occupied. Armed militants seized state institutions and
confiscated private property. They threatened and beat people, and those who refused to obey
were taken away to an unknown destination and people started disappearing. The persecution
and abduction of patriotic citizens began."
Michael McNulty , September 16, 2019 at 11:36
Watching Vietnam news coverage as a kid in the '60s I noticed the planes carpet-bombing
South East Asia were American, not Russian. And as I only watched the footage and never
listened to the commentary (I was waiting for the kids programs that followed) the BS they
came out with to explain it all never reached me. I saw with my own eyes what the US really
was and is, and always believed growing up they were the belligerent side not Russia. Once
the USSR fell it was clear there were no longer any constraints on US excesses.
dean 1000 , September 15, 2019 at 18:17
Doublethink, not to mention doublespeak, is so apt to describe what is happening. If
Orwell was writing today it would have to be classified as non-fiction.
Free speech is impossible unless every election district has a radio/TV station where
candidates, constituents, and others can debate, discuss and speak to the issues without
bending a knee to large campaign contributors or the controllers of corporate or government
media. It may start with low-power pirate radio/TV broadcasts. No, the pirate speakers will
not have to climb a cell tower to broadcast an opinion to the neighborhood or precinct.
If genuine free speech is going to exist it will start as something unauthorized and
unlawful. If it sticks to the facts it will quickly prove its value.
Excellent article. The only exhibit missing was reference to Bill Browder's lies.
Browder's rubbish has been exposed by intrepid journalists and documentary makers such as
Andrei Nekrasov, Sasha Krainer and Lucy Komisar but to read or listen to our media, you'd
think BB was some sort of human rights hero. That's because BB's fairy tale fits nicely into
the MSM's hatred of Putin and Russia. Debunk Browder and a major pillar of anti-Russia
prejudice collapses. Therefore, Browder will never face any serious questions by the MSM.
John A , September 16, 2019 at 09:18
judges of the European Court of Human Rights published a judgement a fortnight ago which
utterly exploded the version of events promulgated by Western governments and media in the
case of the late Mr Magnitskiy. Yet I can find no truthful report of the judgement in the
mainstream media at all. https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2019/09/the-magnitskiy-myth-exploded/
MSM propaganda by omission. Anything that doesn't fit the government narrative gets zero
publicity.
I have stopped following australian mainstream media including the darlings of the 'left'
ABC/SBS over a decade ago, completely. My disgust with their 'coverage' of the 2008 GFC was
more than enough. Since 2008-9 things have deteriorated drastically into conspiracy theory
propaganda by omission la-la land *it seems*, given I don't tune in at all.
The author has a well supported view. I find it a little naive in him thinking that the
MSM has that much power over shaping public opinion in australia.
People who want to be informed do so. The half intelligent conformists on hamster wheel of
lifetime mortgage debt have 'careers' to hold onto, so parroting the group think or living in
ignorance is much easier. The massive portion of australian racists, inbred bogans and idiots
that make up the large LNP, One Nation etc. voting block are completely beyond salvation or
ability to process, and critically evaluate any information. The smarter ones drool on about
the 'UN Agenda 21' conspiracy at best. Utterly hopeless.
I don't expect things to change as the australian economy is slowly hollowed out by the
rich, and the education system (that has always been about conforming, wearing school uniform
and regurgitating what the teacher/lecturer says at best) is gutted completely. Welcome to
australistan.
Fran Macadam , September 14, 2019 at 19:21
Note that the prohibition against false propaganda to indoctrinate the domestic population
by the American government was lifted by President Obama at the tail end of his
administration. The Executive Order legalizes all the deceptive behavior Tony itemizes in his
article.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 04:10
I thought it was Reagan who did that by abolishing the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. At least
in terms of television and radio (?) broadcasts.
Thank you Tony for your thoughtful talk (and interview on CN Live! too).
What's encouraging is this cohort of what might be called 'millennial journalists' coming
through willing to do 'shoe-leather' journalism and stand up to smears and flack for
revealing uncomfortable facts and truth. They're the online 5th estate holding the 4th to
account (to steal Ray McGovern's apt view), and they're congealing against the onslaught.
Some include Max Blumenthal and Rania Kahlek (both now being pilloried by MSM and others
for visiting Syrian government held areas and reporting that life isn't hellish as MSM would
have everyone believe heaven forbid); Vanessa Bealey who's exposed a lot of White Helmet
horrors and false-flag attacks in Syria (and being attacked by all and sundry for exposing
the White Helmets in particular); Abby Martin whose Empire Files are excellent and always
edifying; Dan Cohen who has written the best expose of the actors behind the Hong Kong
rioting and co-authored the best expose of the background of Guaido et al.; Whitney Webb of
Mint Press whose series on Epstein is overwhelming and likely a ticking timebomb; Caitlin
Johnstone of course; and Aaron 'Buzzsaw' Mate who made his first mark with a wonderful
takedown interview of Russiaphobe MI6 shill Luke Harding. Others too of course, with most
appearing or having written pieces on CN. John Pilger, Robert Fisk, Greg Palast, et al. won't
drop off their twigs disappointed.
This, along with the fact that MSM -- that cowed and compromised fourth estate --
increasingly is held in such laughable contempt by most people under about 50 yr, is highly
encouraging indeed. Truth is the new black.
nwwoods , September 15, 2019 at 11:49
The Blogmire is an excellent resource for detailed analysis of the Skripal hoax. The
author happens to be a long-time resident of Salisbury, and is intimately familiar with the
topography, public services, etc., and a very thorough investigator.
John Wright , September 14, 2019 at 18:35
I'm not surprised that Mr. Kevin is being isolated and shunned by the Australian
establishment. Truth and truth tellers are always the first casualties of war. I do hope that
his experience will encourage him to increase his resistance to the corrosiveness of
mendacious propaganda and those who promulgate it.
Truth is the single best weapon when fighting for a peaceful future.
If Australia is to flourish in the 21st century, it really needs to understand Russia and
China, how they relate to each other, and how this key alliance will interface with the rest
of the world. Australia and Australians simply cannot afford to get sucked down further by
facilitating the machinations of the collapsing Anglo-American Empire. They have served the
empire ably and faithfully, but now need to take a cold hard look at reality and realign
their long-term interests with the coming global power shift. If not, they could literally
find themselves in the middle of an unwinnable and devastating war.
* * *
The first Anglo-American Russian cold war began with the Russian revolution and was only
briefly suspended when the West needed the Soviet people to throw themselves in front of the
Nazi blitzkrieg in order to save Western Europe. Following their catastrophically costly
contribution to the victory on the Continent, the Russians were greeted with an American
nuclear salute on their eastern periphery, signalling their return to the diplomatic and
economic deep freeze.
While the Anglo-American Empire solidified and extended its hold on the globe, the
enlarged but war-ravaged and isolated Soviet Union hunkered down and survived on scraps and
sheer will until its collapse in 1989. Declaring the cold war over, and with promises to help
their new Russian friends build a prosperous future, the duplicitous West then ransacked
their neighbors resources and sold them into debt peonage. The Russians cried foul, the West
shrugged and Putin pushed back. Unable to declaw the bear, the west closed the cage door
again and the second cold war commenced.
* * *
The first cold war was essentially an offensive war disguised as a defensive war. It
enabled the Anglo-American Empire to leverage its post-war advantage and establish near total
dominance around the globe through naked violence and monetary hegemony.
Today, with its dominance rapidly slipping away, the Anglo-American Empire is waging a
truly defensive cold war. On the home front, they fight to convince their subjects of their
eternal exceptionalism with ever more absurd and vile propaganda denigrating their
adversaries . Abroad, they disrupt and defraud in a desperate attempt to delay the demise of
the PetroDollar ponzi.
The Russians and the Chinese, having both been brutally burned by the Western elites, will
not be fooled into abandoning their natural geographic partnership. They are no longer
content to sit quietly at the kids' table taking notes. While they may not demand to sit at
the head of the table, it is clear that they will insist on a round table, and one that is
large enough to include their growing list of friends.
If the Americans don't smash the table, it could be the first of many peaceful pot
lucks.
John Read , September 15, 2019 at 02:11
Well said. Great comments. Thanks to Tony Kevin.
Mia , September 14, 2019 at 18:33
Thank you Tony for continuing to shine light on the pathetic propaganda information bubble
Australians have been immersed in .. you demonstrate great courage and you are not alone
??
Peter Loeb , September 14, 2019 at 12:58
WITH THANKS TO TONY KEVIN
An excellent article.
There is a lack of comments from some of the common writers upon whose views I often
rely.
Personally, I often avoid the very individual responses from websites as I have no way
of checking out previous ideas of theirs. Who funds them? With which organizations are
they
affiliated? And so forth and so on.
Peter Loeb, Boston, Massachusetts
Peter Sapo , September 14, 2019 at 10:24
As a fellow Australian, everything Tony Kevin said makes perfect sense. Our mainstream
media landscape is designed to distribute propaganda to folk accross the political spectrum.
Have you noticed that the ABC regurgitates stories from the BBC? The BBC has a long history
(at least since WW2) of supporting government propaganda initiatives. Based on this fact, it
is hard to see how ABC and SBS don't do the same when called upon by their minders.
Francis Lee , September 14, 2019 at 09:48
I just wonder where the Anglo-Zionist empire thinks it is going. It should be obvious that
any NATO war against Russia involving a nuclear exchange is unwinnable. It seems equally
likely the even a conventional war will not necessarily bring the result expected by the
assorted 'experts' – nincompoops living in their own fantasy world. The idea that the
US can fight a war without the US homeland becoming very much involved basically ended when
Putin announced the creation of Russia's set of advanced hypersonic missile system. But this
was apparently ignored by the 'defence' establishment. It was not true, it could not possibly
be true, or so we were told.
Moreover the cost of such wars involving hundreds of thousands of troops and military
hardware are massively expensive and would occasion a massive resistance from the populations
affected. It was the wests wars in Korea, and Indo-China that bankrupted the US and led to
the US$ being removed from the gold standard. The American military is rapidly consuming the
American economy, or at least what is left of it. From a realist foreign policy perspective
this is simply madness. Great powers end wars, they don't start them. Great powers are
creditor nations, not debtor nations. Such is the realist foreign policy view. But foreign
policy realists are few and far between in the Washington Beltway and MIC/NSA Pentagon and
US/UK/AUSTRALIAN MSM.
Thus the neo-hubris of the English speaking world is such that if it is followed to its
logical conclusion then total annihilation would be the logical outcome. A sad example of not
very bright people who face no domestic opposition, believing in their own bullshit:
"American elites proved themselves to be master manipulators of propaganda constructs But
the real danger from such manipulations arises not when those manipulations are done out of
knowledge of reality, which is distorted for propaganda purposes, but when those who
manipulation begin to sincerely believe in their own falsifications and when they buy into
their own narrative. They stop being manipulators and they become believers in a narrative.
They become manipulated themselves." (Losing Military Supremacy – Andrei,
Martyanov)
Or maybe just the whole thing is a bluff. Those policy elites maybe just want to loot the
US Treasury for more cash to be put their way.
John Wright , September 15, 2019 at 19:15
The self-serving Israeli Zionists know that the American cow is running dry and their days
of freely milking it are coming to an end. They have an historic relationship with Russia
and, leveraging their nuclear arsenal, know they can make a deal with the emerging
China-Russia-centric global paradigm to extort enough protection to maintain their armed
enclave for the foreseeable future. Their no so hidden alliance with the equally sociopathic
Saudis will become even more obvious for all to see.
Israel, like China and Russia, knows how to play a long game. Thus, Israel will
consolidate its land grab with the just announced expansion into the Jordan Valley and
quietly continue as much ethnic cleansing as possible while the rest of the world is
preoccupied with the incipient global power shift (True victims of history, the Palestinians
have no real friends). While they will bemoan the loss of their muscular American stooge,
Israel enjoyed a very lucrative 70 year run and will part with a pile of useful and deadly
toys. They're also fully aware that no one else will ever let them take advantage to the
degree they've been able to with the U.S.A. (Unlimited Stupidity of Arrogance?)
Eventually, the social schizophrenia that is the state of Israel will catch up with them
and they will implode. Let's hope that breakdown doesn't involve the use of their nuclear
arsenal.
Yes, the U.S. Treasury will continue to be looted until the last teller turns the lights
out or the electricity is shut off, whichever comes first.
The Western transnational financial elites will accept their losses, regroup and make
deals with the new bosses where they can; but their days of running the game unopposed are
over.
Today is a good day to learn Mandarin (or Russian, if you prefer to live in Europe).
Bill , September 16, 2019 at 03:36
Very well said and I agree with a lot of what you say.
Tiu , September 14, 2019 at 06:01
Won't be too long before writing articles like this will get you busted for "hate-speech"
(e.g. anything that is contrary to the official version prescribed by the "democratically
elected" government) https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-tony-blair-think-tank-proposes-end-free-speech
Personally I always encourage people to read George Orwell, especially 1984. We're there, and
have been for a long time.
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 01:15
Tony Kevin – Nice rundown of what ails society. You have a fine writing style that
gets the point across to the reader. Kudos and cheers.
Michael , September 13, 2019 at 22:34
The 'modernization' of the Smith Mundt Act in 2013 "to authorize the domestic
dissemination of information and material [PROPAGANDA] about the United States intended
primarily for foreign audiences" was a major nail in the Democracy coffin, consolidating the
blatant ruling of the US Police State by our 17 Intelligence Agencies (our betters). The
Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead to ownership of (>80%) of our media (the MSM by a
handful of owners, all disseminating the same narratives from above (CIA, State Department,
FBI etc) and squelching any dissenting views, particularly related to foreign policies.
Tony's article sadly just confirms the depth and breadth of our Global Stasi, with improved,
innovative and (mostly) subtle surveillance, and the controlling constant interference with
alternate viewpoints and discussions, the real basis for free societies. It is bad enough to
be ruled by neoliberal psychopathic hyenas and jackals, soon we won't be able to even bitch
about what they are doing.
Tom Kath , September 13, 2019 at 21:42
The most impressive article I have read in a very long time. I congratulate and thank
Tony.
I have myself recently addressed the issue of whether it is a virtue to have an "open mind".
– The ability to be converted or have your mind changed, or is it the ability to change
your own mind ?
Tony Kevin clearly illustrates the difference.
Litchfield , September 13, 2019 at 16:11
Great article.
Please keep writing.
Do start a website, a la Craig Murray.
There are people who are proactively looking for alternative viewpoints and informed
analysis.
How about starting a website and publishing some excerpts of your book there?
Or, sell chapters separately by download from your website?
You could also have a discussion blog/forum there.
John Zimmermann , September 13, 2019 at 16:02
Excellent essay. Thanks Mr. Kevin.
rosemerry , September 13, 2019 at 15:37
At least Tony Kevin was an Australian ambassador, not like Mike Morrell and the chosen
russop?obes the USA assumes are needed as diplomats!! Now he is treated as Stephen Cohen is-
a true expert called "controversial" as he dares to go by real facts and evidence, not
prejudice.
If instead of enemies, the West could consider getting to understand those they are wary
of, and give them a chance to explain their point of view and actually listen and reflect on
it.
(Dmitri Peskov valiantly explained the Russian official response as soon as the "Skripal
poisoning" story broke, but it was fully ignored by UK/US media, while all of Theresa May's
fanciful imaginings were respectfully relayed to the public).
geeyp , September 14, 2019 at 23:26
As you usually are with your comments, you are spot on again, rosemerry.
Martin - Swedish citizen , September 13, 2019 at 14:46
Excellent article!
I find the mechanics of how the propaganda is spread and the illusion upheld the most
important part of this article, since this knowledge is required to counter it.
When (not if) the fraud becomes more common knowledge, our societies are likely to
tumble.
Pablo Diablo , September 13, 2019 at 14:45
Whoever controls the media, controls the dialogue.
Whoever controls the dialogue, controls the agenda.
' The present risk of global nuclear war is as high as it ever was in the Cold War.' And
possibly higher. The Cold War, though dangerous, was the peace. The world has experienced
periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the
two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna,
to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One.
That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two. That was
followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the indications are
they will not prevent a third world war. The powers that are leading us towards conflagration
see this as a re-run of the first Cold War. They are dangerously mistaken. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Guy , September 13, 2019 at 13:21
With so many believing the lies ,how will this mess ever come to light . I don't reside in
Australia but anywhere in the Western world the shakedown is the same .In my own house ,the
discussion on world politics descends into absolute stupidity . As one can't get past the
constant programming that has settled in the minds of the comfortable with the status quo of
lies by our media. There are intelligent sources of news sources but none get past the
absolutely complete control of MSM.So the bottom line is ,for now ,the lies and liars are
winning the propaganda war.
He speaks the truth. Liars and dissemblers have won over the minds and hearts of so many
lazy shameful citizens who will not accept the truth Tony Kevin wants to share with the
world.
Washington resumes military assistance to Kyiv. According to American lawmakers, Ukraine
is fighting one of the main enemies. "Contain Russia": what the US pays for Ukraine
Anyone or article who spells Kiev as Kyiv can be safely ignored as western anti-Russia
propaganda. It's a true tell.
Robert Edwards , September 13, 2019 at 12:53
The Cold war is totally manufacture to keep the dollars flowing into the MIC – what
a sham . and a disgrace to humanity.
Cavaleiro Marginal , September 13, 2019 at 12:52
"The key tools are repetition of messages, and diversification of trusted voices. Once a
critical mass is created of people believing a false narrative, the lie locks in: its
dissemination becomes self-sustaining."
This had occurred in Brazil since the very first day of Lula's presidency. Eleven years
late, 2013, a color revolution began. Nobody (and I mean REALLY nobody) could realize a color
revolution was happening at that time. In 2016, Dilma Rousseff was kicked from power
throughout a ridiculous and illegal coup perpetrated by the parliament. In 2018 Lula was
imprisoned in an Orwellian process; illegal, unconstitutional, with nothing (REALLY nothing)
proved against him. Then a liar clown was elected to suppress democracy
I knew on the news that in Canada and Australia the police politely (how civilized ) went
to some journalist's homes to have a chat this year. Canadians and Aussies, be aware. The
fascism's dog is a policial state very well informed by the propaganda they call news.
Robert Fearn , September 13, 2019 at 12:48
As a Canadian author who wrote a book about various tragic American government actions,
like Vietnam, I can relate to the difficulties Tony has had with his book. I would mail my
book, Amoral America, from Canada to other countries, like the US, and it would never arrive.
Book stores would not handle it, etc. etc.
Josep , September 17, 2019 at 05:21
Not to disagree, but some years ago I read about anecdotes of anti-Americanism in Canada,
coming from both USians and Canadians, whether it be playful banter or legitimate criticism.
I believe it is more concentrated among the people than among the governmental elites (with
the exception of the Iraq War era when both the people and the government were against it).
And considering what you describe in your book and the difficulty you've faced in
distributing it abroad, maybe the said people are on to something.
Stephen , September 13, 2019 at 11:44
This interview by Abby Martin with Mark Ames is a little dated but is a fairly accurate
history. I post it to try and counter the nonsense.
Outstanding article and analysis. Thank you Sir! Jeremy Kuzmarov
Jeff Harrison , September 13, 2019 at 10:17
Thank you, sir. A far better peroration than I could have produced but what I have
concluded nonetheless.
Skip Scott , September 13, 2019 at 10:10
Fantastic article. Left unmentioned is the origin of the west's anti-Russia narrative.
Russia was being pillaged by the west under Yeltsin, and Russia was to become our newest
vassal. Life expectancy dropped a full decade for the average Russian under Yeltsin. The
average standard of living dropped dramatically as well. Putin reversed all that, and enjoys
massive popular support as a result. The Empire will never tolerate a national leader who
works for the benefit of the average citizen. It must be full-on rape, pillage and plunder-
OR ELSE. Keep that in mind as we watch the latest theatrical performances by our DNC
controlled "Commander in Chief" wannabes.
Realist , September 17, 2019 at 05:48
?The ongoing success of the "Great Lie" (that Washington is protecting the entire world
from
anarchy perpetrated by a few bad actors on the global stage) and all of its false narrative
subtexts
(including but far from limited to the Maidan, Crimea, Donbass, MH-17, the Skripals,
gassing
"one's own people," piracy on the high Mediterranean, etc) just underscores how successful
was
the false flag operation known as 9-11, even as the truth of that travesty is slowly
being
unraveled by relentless truth-seekers applying logic and the scientific method to the
problem.
Most Americans today would gladly concur, if queried, that Osama bin Laden was most
certainly
a perfidious tool of Russia and its diabolical leader, Mr. Putin (be sure to call him "Vlad,"
to
conjure up images of Dracula for effect). The Winston Smith's are rare birds in America or
in
any of its reliable vassal states. Never mind that the spooks from Langley (and the late
"chessmaster") concocted and orchestrated all these tales from the crypt.
Lily , September 13, 2019 at 07:54
Great summary of the developement of a new cold war. The narrative of the Mainstream Media
is dangerous as well as laughable. I am glad to hear the Russian reaction to this bullshit
propaganda. As often the people are so much wiser than their government – at least in
the West.
During the Football WM a famous broadcaster of the German State TV channel ARD, who is a
giftet propagandist, regrettet publicly the difficulty to convince the stubborn Germans to
look at Russia as an enemy because they have started to look at Russia as a friend long
ago.
Contrary to the people and the big firms who are completely against the sanctions against
Russia and 100 % pro Northstream the German government with Chancelor Merkel is one of the
top US vassalles. Even the Green Party which started as an environmental and peace party are
now against North Stream and in favour of the filthy US fracking gas thanks to NATO
propaganda although Russia has never let them down. Most of "Die Grünen" party have been
turned into fervent friends of our American occupants which is very sad.
Thank you Tony Kevin. It has been great to read your article. I cant wait to read your
book 'Return to Moscow' and to watch your interview on CN Live.
Godfree Roberts , September 13, 2019 at 07:37
Good summary of the status quo. From my experience of writing similarly about China,
precisely the same policies and forces are at work.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov announced the end of the war in Syria and the
country's return to a state of peace. "Syria is returning to normal life": Lavrov announced
the end of the war
You hit several nails squarely on the head with your excellent article Tony. Thank you for
the truth of how the media is in Australia. It is indeed chilling where all this is leading.
The blatant lies just spewed out as fact by both ABC and SBS. They, in my opinion are nothing
but stenographers for the Empire, of which Australia is a fully subservient vassal state,
with no independence.
I try to boycott all Australian presstitutes . Oops, I mean 'media' now. Occasionally, I do
slip up and watch SBS or The Drum or News on ABC.
Virtually all my news comes from independent news sites like this one.
I have been accused of being a 'Putin lover', a Russian troll, a conspiracy theorist, while
people I know have claimed that "Putin is a monster whose murdered millions of people".
On and on this crap goes. And the end result? Ask Stephen Cohen. Things are very surreal now.
Sadly, you've been made an Unperson Tony.
Robyn , September 13, 2019 at 04:08
Bravo, Tony, great article. I enjoyed your book and recommend it to CN readers who haven't
yet read it.
The world looks entirely different when one stops reading/watching the MSM and turns to
CN, Caitlin Johnstone and many others who are doing a sterling job.
Cascadian , September 13, 2019 at 03:52
I don't know which is worse, to not know what you are (reliably uninformed) and be happy,
or to become what you've always wanted to be (reliably informed) and feel alone.
Realist , September 14, 2019 at 00:19
Knowing the truth has always seemed paramount to me, even if it means realising that the
entire world and all in it are damned, and deliberately by our own actions. Hope is always
the last part of our essence to die, or so they say: maybe we will somehow be redeemed
through our own self-immolation as a species.
Deb , September 13, 2019 at 02:54
As an Australian I have no difficulty accepting what Tony Kevin has said here. He should
do what Craig Murray has done start a website.
"... The last three decades have seen the United States engaged in continuous and ever-expanding warfare under both Democratic and Republican administrations. The drive to conquer and subjugate the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia is a consensus policy of the American ruling class. The results have included over a million dead in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more across Afghanistan, Libya, Syria and Yemen. ..."
"... Meanwhile the Pentagon released a seemingly lunatic "joint doctrine" that goes well beyond Dr. Strangelove. It states: "nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the use of nuclear weapons will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and develop situations that call for commanders to win." ..."
"... There is a worried sense within ruling circles that three decades of war have only created a series of debacles, and that US imperialism is confronting what is termed, in military and foreign policy circles, as "strategic competition" from Russia and China. At the same time, ever-sharper conflicts are emerging between Washington and its erstwhile NATO partners, in particular Germany, against which the US fought in two world wars. ..."
"... Zakaria pays special tribute to the individual who popularized the concept of the "unipolar moment," the extreme right-wing columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote an article with that title, also in Foreign Affairs , in 1991. He promoted an unvarnished perspective of the unilateral use of US military aggression to assert the dominance of American capitalism around the globe. ..."
"... He further insisted that if US imperialism proved unable to maintain its unipolar moment it would be "not for foreign but for domestic reasons. ... stagnant productivity, declining work habits, rising demand for welfare state entitlements and new taste for ecological luxuries." He charged that while "defense spending declined, domestic entitlements nearly doubled." And, above all, he blamed "America's insatiable desire for yet higher standards of living without paying any of the cost." [3] ..."
"... For America's ruling elite, long at each other's throats, the path should be clearer now to reforming a working consensus about the US's world role. Some of the policy-making world's most divisive issues now look settled. Force is a legitimate tool of policy; it works. For the elites themselves, the message is America can lead, stop whining, think more boldly. Starting now. [5] ..."
"... We understood this editorial, by the mouthpiece of US finance capital, as an accurate reflection of the pathological triumphalism prevailing within the American bourgeoisie. ..."
"... A third of the population is functionally illiterate. Not even the mass media can avoid reporting on a daily basis some of the more spectacular 'horror stories' of lives destroyed by the impact of the social crisis: homeless people freezing in cardboard boxes, cancer victims being denied treatment because they have no medical insurance and unemployed workers and their families committing suicide ..."
"... This position dovetailed neatly with that of German imperialism, which was backing Croatian and Slovenian independence as part of a post-reunification reassertion of its power in Europe. German imperialism was returning to the scenes of its crimes in 1914 and 1941, unilaterally defying the United States, the United Nations and the European Commission. ..."
"... This was patently the case in Yugoslavia, where the first impulse to break up the existing federation came from Slovenia and Croatia, the wealthiest regions of the country, where local ruling elites calculated that they could fare better by breaking with the poorer republics and establishing their own independent ties to European governments, banks and corporations. ..."
"... In conclusion: the so-called "Unipolar Moment" of 1990 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the launching of the Gulf War, marked the collapse of the post-World War II equilibrium, established on the basis of the hegemony of American capitalism and the collaboration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. It signaled the beginning of a new period of uninterrupted war, the growth of inter-imperialist rivalries ..."
This lecture was delivered by Bill Van Auken, senior writer for the World Socialist Web Site , at the Socialist Equality
Party (US) Summer School on July 25, 2019.
It is now nearly three decades since the deliberate liquidation of the Soviet Union by the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy and the
launching of the First Persian Gulf War, which began in January 1991. This war, which involved the deployment of over half a million
US troops -- more than twice the number sent into the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- clearly marked a turning point in the development
of US and world imperialism.
It likewise marked a turning point for the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). Objective developments,
in particular the disintegration of Stalinism, intersected with the protracted struggle of the ICFI against Pabloite revisionism,
culminating in the 1985 split and the consolidation of control by the orthodox Trotskyists, for the first time since the founding
of the International Committee in 1953. This signaled a fundamental change in the relationship between the Fourth International and
the working class.
Grasping that change, the ICFI sought to shoulder the immense political responsibility of leading the international working class,
which found concrete expression in the convening of the extraordinarily important "World Conference of Workers against War and Colonialism"
held in Berlin in November 1991, to which we will return.
The sharp turn by US imperialism toward unilateralism and militarism, consummated in the Gulf War of 1991, was bound up with the
protracted crisis of American capitalism and the relative decline of its domination of the global economy. With the demise of the
USSR, US imperialism concluded that it could now offset the challenge that American corporations faced from rivals in Europe and
Japan, which had been growing since the 1970s, through the relatively untrammeled use of the US armed forces.
Demolished vehicles line Highway 80, also known as the "Highway of Death", the route fleeing Iraqi forces took as they retreated
fom Kuwait during Operation Desert Storm. [Credit: U.S. Air Force]
In the case of the Persian Gulf, the US military could be used to secure unchallenged American supremacy in the world's most important
oil-producing region, which would put Washington in a position to blackmail its oil-import-dependent European and Asian imperialist
rivals with the threat of cutting off their energy supplies. As President George H.W. Bush would declare, in the run-up to the Gulf
war, an attack on Iraq would give the US "persuasiveness that will lead to more harmonious trading relationships."
This was not a development that took us by surprise. In its 1988 Perspectives Resolution, the ICFI warned:
Despite the loss of its economic hegemony, the United States remains, militarily, the most powerful imperialist country, and
reserves to itself the role of global policeman. But the conditions which prevailed in 1945 at the beginning of the so-called
American Century have been drastically transformed. The loss of the economic preponderance which once made its word "law" among
the major capitalist nations compels the United States to place ever-greater reliance on the brute force of its military strength.
[1]
The resolution went on to declare that a prophecy made by Trotsky was about to be vindicated, quoting his War and the Fourth
International from 1934. "The world is divided? It must be re-divided. For Germany it was a question of 'organizing Europe.'
The United States must organize the world. History is bringing humanity face to face with the volcanic eruption of American imperialism."
This was confirmed in barely two years.
There is an obvious continuity between these events of nearly 30 years ago and the present global political situation. The struggle
to assert US hegemony over the Persian Gulf threatens to ignite a new and even more terrible war against Iran, a country with three
times the population and four times the landmass of Iraq. The outbreak of a military confrontation is only a matter of time.
The last three decades have seen the United States engaged in continuous and ever-expanding warfare under both Democratic
and Republican administrations. The drive to conquer and subjugate the lands of the Middle East and Central Asia is a consensus policy
of the American ruling class. The results have included over a million dead in Iraq and hundreds of thousands more across Afghanistan,
Libya, Syria and Yemen.
More and more these various conflicts threaten to metastasize into a Third World War. Preparations for a nuclear confrontation
with Russia and China were chillingly described recently by the incoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the military's
No. 1 priority. Meanwhile the Pentagon released a seemingly lunatic "joint doctrine" that goes well beyond Dr. Strangelove. It
states: "nuclear weapons could create conditions for decisive results and the restoration of strategic stability. Specifically, the
use of nuclear weapons will fundamentally change the scope of a battle and develop situations that call for commanders to win."
There is a worried sense within ruling circles that three decades of war have only created a series of debacles, and that
US imperialism is confronting what is termed, in military and foreign policy circles, as "strategic competition" from Russia and
China. At the same time, ever-sharper conflicts are emerging between Washington and its erstwhile NATO partners, in particular Germany,
against which the US fought in two world wars.
The contradiction between the interdependent character of the global economy and the capitalist nation-state system is leading
inexorably to a new world war.
Under these conditions, there have been several recent commentaries by US foreign policy analysts bemoaning the end of the "unipolar
moment" proclaimed nearly 30 years ago, and looking back upon it with a certain nostalgia.
Among them is a piece published in Foreign Affairs by CNN's multi-millionaire pseudo-intellectual charlatan Fareed Zakaria,
titled "The Self-Destruction of American Power." He writes:
Ever since the end of World War I, the United States has wanted to transform the world. In the 1990s, that seemed more possible
than ever before. Countries across the planet were moving toward the American way. The Gulf War seemed to mark a new milestone
for world order, in that it was prosecuted to uphold a norm legitimized by international law. [2]
The American way, world order, norms and international law: this is how these layers fondly recall a mass slaughter.
Zakaria pays special tribute to the individual who popularized the concept of the "unipolar moment," the extreme right-wing
columnist Charles Krauthammer, who wrote an article with that title, also in Foreign Affairs , in 1991. He promoted an unvarnished
perspective of the unilateral use of US military aggression to assert the dominance of American capitalism around the globe.
Our best hope for safety in such times is in American strength and will to lead a unipolar world, unashamedly laying down the
rules of world order and being prepared to enforce them," he wrote.
He went on to present the pretext for the next major US war: "There is no alternative to confronting, deterring and, if necessary,
disarming states that brandish and use weapons of mass destruction. And there is no one to do that but the United States."
He further insisted that if US imperialism proved unable to maintain its unipolar moment it would be "not for foreign but for
domestic reasons. ... stagnant productivity, declining work habits, rising demand for welfare state entitlements and new taste for
ecological luxuries." He charged that while "defense spending declined, domestic entitlements nearly doubled." And, above all, he
blamed "America's insatiable desire for yet higher standards of living without paying any of the cost." [3]
This, after a decade of unrelenting attacks on working class living standards in the wake of the breaking of the 1981 PATCO strike.
The message was clear: imperialist war abroad had to be accompanied by an intensification of social counterrevolution and class war
in the US itself.
Bush himself, in the run-up to the Gulf War, proclaimed that the unleashing of US military power, against a relatively defenseless
oppressed country, would inaugurate a "New World Order."
The content of this "new world order" was never explained. The only thing that was clear was that the old world order had broken
down and what was to replace it, in the first instance, was an eruption of US military violence.
The catastrophic breakdown of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union -- celebrated by facile bourgeois
intellectuals as the "end of history" and the "triumph of capitalism" -- had removed a key prop of the old post-World War II order.
Moreover, the very same forces of globalization of capitalist production and technological development that had fatally undermined
the autarchic Stalinist economies were driving the entire world capitalist order into profound crisis.
... ... ...
It justified this threat on the basis of the "overwhelming dependence of Western nations on vital oil supplies from the Middle
East." Carter's successor, Ronald Reagan, introduced the "Reagan corollary," vowing that the US would defend these vital oil interests
against internal threats to stability as well.
The US government deliberately manufactured the pretext for its military intervention in the Persian Gulf. Tensions between Iraq
and Kuwait had been growing since the end of the Iran-Iraq war, in which Washington had provided significant aid to the Iraqi regime
of Saddam Hussein. Kuwait's lowering of oil prices and its demand for debt payments had further undermined an Iraqi economy that
had been battered by the war, while Baghdad claimed that Kuwait was carrying out slant drilling into Iraq's Rumaila oil field, on
the border between the two countries.
The US ambassador to Iraq, April Glaspie, used a meeting on July 25, 1990 -- just weeks before Bush was to announce his "line
in the sand" and launch the drive to war -- to assure Saddam Hussein of US friendship and sympathy, while telling him that Washington
had "no opinion on the Arab-Arab conflicts like your border disagreement with Kuwait."
The trap having been laid, Saddam Hussein, driven by desperation over the mounting economic and social crisis in Iraq, quickly
walked into it.
Like every US imperialist war waged in the name of liberation and democracy, the Gulf War was based on deception and lies.
The attempt was made to equate Saddam Hussein, whom Washington had only recently courted as an ally, with Adolf Hitler. This demonization
would become a standard feature of every succeeding US war. It had, in fact, been used in what amounted to a dress rehearsal for
the Gulf War, less than two years earlier. In preparing the invasion of Panama, the US State Department compared the involvement
in the drug trade of Manuel Noriega -- a longtime CIA asset -- with Hitler's invasion of Poland.
A massive propaganda campaign was waged to sway US public opinion toward support for the Gulf war. This infamously included the
testimony given by a 15-year-old girl to Congress, in which she tearfully recounted seeing armed Iraqi troops invading a hospital
to steal incubators, throwing babies onto the floor to die. Only later was it revealed that the story was a complete fabrication.
The girl had not been in Kuwait before, during or after the Iraqi invasion. She was the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to Washington
and a member of the royal family, sent to read a script written by a major US PR firm.
Finally, Bush justified military intervention by claiming an imminent threat posed by Iraq's massing of 120,000 troops on Saudi
Arabia's border. Satellite images subsequently revealed that there was nothing on the Kuwait-Saudi border but desert sand.
A critically important part of the report to the Special Congress of the Workers League in 1990 was the clarification of our attitude
toward Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait. Initial responses within the International Committee had included its condemnation as
an "act of aggression" by the British section, in an initial article published in its newspaper. On the other hand, there was a suggestion
from within the Australian section, that we support the annexation of Kuwait as a "small step" in advancing "the unfulfilled national
and democratic tasks of the Arab revolution."
The report made clear that we had no reason to condemn Iraqi aggression. Given the economic warfare waged by Kuwait and Saudi
Arabia against Iraq in the run-up to the invasion, our concern was not who fired the first shot. Moreover, to take such a position
would be to support the territorial integrity of Kuwait, a Sheikdom created by British imperialism, carved out of the southern Iraqi
province of Basra, as a means of better dominating the Arabian Peninsula. The same is the case with virtually all the borders drawn
by imperialist powers in the Middle East.
At the same time, in response to the suggestion from a member of the Australian section that we support Kuwait's annexation, it
affirmed:
To attribute any progressive role to Hussein's invasion would lead the ICFI in a false direction and undermine the theoretical
and political gains that have been made since 1985, in our collective struggle against the WRP's betrayal of the program of world
socialist revolution.
Of course, this refers to the struggle waged against the Workers Revolutionary Party's abandonment of the Theory of Permanent
Revolution, particularly in relation to its opportunist relations with various Arab regimes, systematically subordinating the independent
struggle of the working class to the supposedly anti-imperialist stance of one or another bourgeois nationalist leader.
... ... ...
The US launched the Gulf War on January 16, 1991. Operation Desert Storm, as it was dubbed, consisted mainly of one of the most
intensive air bombardments in military history. Eighty-eight thousand tons of munitions were dropped on Iraq in the course of just
42 days. This is roughly equivalent to one-fourth of the total bomb tonnage dropped on Germany during the entire Second World War.
The Iraqi casualty totals were estimated at 135,000. Much of Iraq's conscript army was wiped out, with soldiers incinerated from
the air or buried alive in their trenches. Hundreds of thousands more Iraqis, of course, died as a result of the systematic destruction
of the country's infrastructure.
On the so-called Highway of Death, the US launched wave after wave of bombings against a defenseless, miles-long column of vehicles,
carrying Iraqi troops as well as civilians withdrawing from Kuwait on the orders of the Hussein government, which announced that
it was complying with a UN Resolution demanding the withdrawal.
As we stated in response to this war crime:
The US war against Iraq is among the most terrible crimes of the twentieth century, a slaughter that future generations will
look back on with shame. It has demonstrated that the ruling class of so-called democratic America is just as capable of mass
murder as the Nazis. [4]
The Wall Street Journal responded to the Gulf War with an editorial that stated:
For America's ruling elite, long at each other's throats, the path should be clearer now to reforming a working consensus about
the US's world role. Some of the policy-making world's most divisive issues now look settled. Force is a legitimate tool of policy;
it works. For the elites themselves, the message is America can lead, stop whining, think more boldly. Starting now. [5]
We understood this editorial, by the mouthpiece of US finance capital, as an accurate reflection of the pathological triumphalism
prevailing within the American bourgeoisie.
The 11th Plenum of the International Committee was held on March 5, 1991, less than a week after the end of the Gulf War. Its
opening report stated:
The American bourgeoisie is serving notice that American imperialism will seek through force to overcome problems arising from
the protracted economic decline of the US. For all the problems of American capitalism -- the decay of its industrial base, the
loss of its overseas markets, the massive trade deficits and budget deficits, the collapse of its banking system, the gangrenous
growth of social ills -- the bourgeoisie believes it has found an answer: Force!
The report quotes the extremely relevant passage from Anti-Dühring , written 113 years earlier, in which Engels delivered
a Marxist response to Dühring's claim that force was the decisive element in history:
...its own productive forces have grown beyond its control and, as if necessitated by a law of nature, are driving the whole
of bourgeois society towards ruin, or revolution. And if the bourgeoisie now make their appeal to force in order to save the collapsing
"economic situation" from the final crash, this only shows that they are laboring under the same delusion as Herr Dühring: the
delusion that "political conditions are the decisive cause of the economic situation"; this only shows that they imagine, just
as Herr Dühring does, that by making use of "the primary," "the direct political force," they can remodel those "facts of the
second order," the economic situation and its inevitable development; and that therefore the economic consequences of the steam-engine
and the modern machinery driven by it, of world trade and the banking and credit developments of the present day, can be blown
out of existence by them with Krupp guns and Mauser rifles. [6]
Substitute computerization for the steam engine and smart bombs and cruise missiles for Krupp guns and Mausers and this statement
stands as a fitting refutation of the triumphalist rantings of the US ruling class in the wake of the Gulf War.
... ... ...
Moreover, in the context of the Gulf War, the call for revolutionary defeatism from the standpoint of fighting the US military
to the last Iraqi was senseless and reactionary. The military balance of forces was such that -- outside of the revolutionary mobilization
of the masses of the Middle East and the working class in the US and beyond -- the military victory of the US was virtually assured.
More fundamentally, it betrayed a complete disdain for and hostility to the fight against war based upon the struggle of the working
class. It was entirely bound up with the Pabloite perspective that one or another form of "armed struggle," waged by non-proletarian
forces, was the substitute for the revolutionary mobilization of the working class internationally, and particularly in the advanced
capitalist countries.
The most decisive response of the ICFI to the Gulf War, US imperialism's "unipolar moment" and the march toward the restoration
of capitalism and dissolution of the USSR, was the calling of the Berlin Conference against imperialist war and colonialism.
... ... ...
The war ushered in a period of capitalist disequilibrium that would last for three decades, dominated by capitalist crisis and
overshadowed by the successful October 1917 Revolution in Russia, calling into question the very survival of the capitalist order.
The absence, however, of revolutionary parties -- particularly in Europe -- on a par with the Bolsheviks in Russia, allowed the
bourgeoisie to defeat a series of revolutionary struggles. But they were unable to create a new equilibrium to replace what was shattered
by 1914.
The rise of the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, led by Stalin, and the terrible degeneration of the Communist International as
it was subordinated to the Stalinist theory of "socialism in one country" and Moscow's maneuvers with imperialism, led to a series
of catastrophic defeats, above all in Germany. The coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, without a shot being fired, exposed the
counterrevolutionary character of Stalinism, leading Trotsky to found the Fourth International.
The document establishes that the ability of the bourgeoisie to achieve a new equilibrium in the aftermath of World War II, which
they could not do following World War I, was based not merely on the rise of US imperialism as a hegemonic power, but also the indispensable
role of Stalinism. It opposed and sabotaged the revolutionary struggles of the working class in the aftermath of the war, particularly
in Italy, France and Greece. In Eastern Europe, its establishment of so-called buffer states served not only to suppress the working
class and any genuine struggle for socialism, but also to pacify a fractious region that had been a source of European instability
since the dawn of the 20th century.
The equilibrium established at the end of World War II, however, as the document makes clear, was mined with its own contradictions.
Its revival of world trade and rebuilding of capitalism in Europe and Japan led to the gradual decline of US hegemony, leading to
mounting US deficits which, by 1985, had transformed America into a debtor nation.
Turning to the crisis in the United States, the manifesto sketches out a portrait that seems altogether contemporary:
Not a single significant piece of social legislation has passed through Congress in more than two decades [now we can say
five decades ]. Massive budget cuts have destroyed what remains of the old social programs. The crime statistics are merely
the most obvious symptoms of the malignant state of social relations. Amidst rapidly growing unemployment and, for those who still
have jobs, declining wages, the state of education, housing and medical care is nothing less than catastrophic.
A third of the population is functionally illiterate. Not even the mass media can avoid reporting on a daily basis some of
the more spectacular 'horror stories' of lives destroyed by the impact of the social crisis: homeless people freezing in cardboard
boxes, cancer victims being denied treatment because they have no medical insurance and unemployed workers and their families
committing suicide. [10]
... ... ...
The manifesto warned that these conflicts were being manipulated and exploited by the imperialist powers, while capitalism sought
to divert popular indignation over social inequality into the blind alley of national and ethnic conflict.
The ability of reactionary petty-bourgeois demagogues to agitate for communal violence it said, "is to be attributed not to the
intellectual and moral power of nationalism, but to the political vacuum left by the prostration of the traditional organizations
of the working class, which offer no way out of the crisis of the capitalist system."
Between the calling of the conference on May 1, 1991 and its convening on November 16, events moved very rapidly, with Croatia
and Slovenia both declaring their independence on June 25 of that year. Macedonia followed suit soon after, and the republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina
began its fragmentation into warring ethnic cantons. Armed clashes had broken out, particularly around the coastal city of Dubrovnik.
US Army combat engineer vehicle demolishes a Bosnian Serb bunker near Dubrave, January 1996
The promotion of virulent ethno-chauvinism and national separatism was led by former bureaucrats of Yugoslavia's ruling League
of Communists. They sought, on the one hand, to divide and suppress the Yugoslav working class, which had carried out a wave of mass
strikes against the austerity measures imposed by the IMF as part of capitalist restoration. On the other, they were driven to carve
out ethnic states in order to forge their own independent relations with imperialism as a new ruling class of comprador capitalists.
In his report to the conference, comrade North pointed to the attitude adopted by the Pabloite leader Ernest Mandel, who advocated
unconditional support for the self-determination of Croatia, regardless of the character of the regime. Mandel moreover issued a
call for direct imperialist intervention, denouncing Serbian chauvinism, while turning a blind eye to Croatian chauvinism.
This position dovetailed neatly with that of German imperialism, which was backing Croatian and Slovenian independence as part
of a post-reunification reassertion of its power in Europe. German imperialism was returning to the scenes of its crimes in 1914
and 1941, unilaterally defying the United States, the United Nations and the European Commission.
The Berlin conference adopted a resolution titled "On the Defense of the Working Class in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union"
which stated the following:
Everywhere rival capitalist cliques are stirring up nationalism and chauvinism, in order to incite the workers against each
other and to preempt an uprising against the old and new oppressors. The bloodbath in Yugoslavia is a result of these policies.
This war has nothing to do with the right of nations to self-determination. Serbian and Croatian nationalists are merely fighting
to secure for themselves a larger portion of the exploitation of the working class. [19]
The history of Yugoslavia, its rise and fall, could be the subject for an entire school, as could the national question and the
slogan of "self-determination." Clearly that cannot be accomplished in this lecture.
... ... ...
Not only the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the breakup of Yugoslavia, but more fundamentally, the development of capitalist
globalization, gave rise to a new type of nationalist movement, seeking the dismemberment of existing states -- including those that
emerged out of the previous national struggles against colonialism -- to further the interests of rival bourgeois factions in establishing
the most advantageous relations to imperialism and transnational capital.
This was patently the case in Yugoslavia, where the first impulse to break up the existing federation came from Slovenia and Croatia,
the wealthiest regions of the country, where local ruling elites calculated that they could fare better by breaking with the poorer
republics and establishing their own independent ties to European governments, banks and corporations.
Similar considerations have motivated a whole series of national separatist movements, including in Europe, in the cases of the
right-wing Northern League in Italy and Catalan nationalism in Spain.
... ... ...
In conclusion: the so-called "Unipolar Moment" of 1990 and 1991, with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the launching of
the Gulf War, marked the collapse of the post-World War II equilibrium, established on the basis of the hegemony of American capitalism
and the collaboration of the Moscow Stalinist bureaucracy. It signaled the beginning of a new period of uninterrupted war, the growth
of inter-imperialist rivalries, and inevitably, a global rise in the class struggle and socialist revolution.
... .. ...
Footnotes:
[1] The World Capitalist Crisis and the Tasks of the Fourth International, Perspectives Resolution of the International Committee
of the Fourth International , (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1988), p. 66.
[2] Fareed Zakaria, "The Self-Destruction of American Power," Foreign Affairs , Vol. 98, No. 4, (July/August 2019)
[3] Charles Krauthammer, "The Unipolar Moment," Foreign Affairs , Vol. 70, No. 1, (1990/1991), pp. 23–33
[4] The Bulletin , March 1, 1991, "Bush is Guilty of Mass Murder"
[5] Cited in Desert Slaughter, The Imperialist War Against Iraq , (Detroit: Labor Publications, 1991), p. 232.
[6] Karl Marx Frederick Engels, Collected Works , Vol. 25, p. 153.
[7] The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International, The Transitional Program , (New York: Labor
Publications, 1981), p. 20.
[8] Workers League Internal Bulletin, Vol. 4, No. 15, p. 31.
[9] Workers League Internal Bulletin , Vol. 5, No. 1, p. 2.
[10] Oppose Imperialist War & Colonialism, Manifesto of the International Committee of the Fourth International , (Detroit:
Labor Publications, 1991), p. 12.
[11] Ibid., p. 24.
[12] The Fourth International , Vol. 19, No. 1, Fall-Winter 1992, p. 11.
[13] Ibid., p. 7.
[14] Ibid., p. 9.
[15] Ibid., p. 10
[16] Ibid., p. 14
[17] Ibid., p. 13.
[18] Oppose Imperialist War & Colonialism , p. 16.
[19] The Fourth International , Vol. 19, No. 1, p. 38.
[20] On the Manifesto of the Armenian Social Democrats , Iskra, No. 33, Feb. 1, 1903, Lenin, Collected Works , Vol.
6, pp. 326–329.
Pompeo is just MIC lobbyst who got position of the Secretary of State due to Trump
incompetence of pressure from donors like Adelson. Nothing good can come from this strange choice
of warmonger and neocon hawk, not that different from Hillary Clinton.
Notable quotes:
"... It may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region have gone from being an intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic vulnerability. ..."
"... The first priority was to deny the Iranian leadership resources. Previous administration taken a different approach. It said olly olly oxen free, here's all the money you can possibly stand to build out your terror campaign, to build your nuclear weapons system, to take nuclear physicists, all of the things that money can deliver – terror against Israel out of Hizballah and from Syria. Our – the first proposition for our campaign was to deny wealth and resources for the Iranian leadership, and it has been enormously successful in doing so. You can see it. Hizballah is passing the tin cup. ..."
It may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf region have gone from being an
intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic vulnerability.
For hawks like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, American power, as the Bolshevik adage goes,
cannot fail, it can only be failed. For many of his ilk, the superiority of American power
means the willingness to project it is the only thing needed to earn the capitulation of foes
and the only way America loses is if it chooses to relent. Donald Trump, however, watched
George W. Bush's presidency burn in the Iraq war and is unlikely to embrace the chaos of war
heading into an election year. President Trump would be wise to heed the lessons of the most
recent volatile security episode in the Persian Gulf region, especially as it pertains to his
administration's campaign against Tehran.
... ... ...
Without the basic ability to guard against even crude air assets, any notion of the United
States empowering its regional network to dictate terms to Iranian allies with military action
seems impractical. The credibility of U.S. anti-missile capabilities were
already in question . For Saudi Arabia and hawks inside the U.S. government, the notion
that a tribal force like the Houthis could reach into their territory and engage in this kind
of tactical action is militarily embarrassing and practically discrediting from a policy
standpoint.
...If it is conceivable that Iranian cruise missiles -- the newest and least tested section
of Iran's missile fleet -- flew across the militarized Persian Gulf and evaded both Saudi and
American sensors and air-defenses to hit an oil facility, then how much safer are U.S. forces
in the region?
...Add to this the survivability and precision that Pompeo is now attributing to Iranian
missiles and the conclusion very well may be that U.S. military assets in the Persian Gulf
region have gone from being an intimidating tool of American coercion to a strategic
vulnerability.
... ... ...
Pompeo has been on a months-long media campaign promoting, among other
things, what he describes as the success of the "maximum pressure" campaign against Iran. But
Pompeo's primary argument for the success of the anti-Iran efforts centers on the narrative
that U.S. sanctions have severely damaged Iran's alliance network in the region. Consider the
way he framed
the issue to a right-wing talk show host in July:
The first priority was to deny the Iranian leadership resources. Previous administration
taken a different approach. It said olly olly oxen free, here's all the money you can possibly
stand to build out your terror campaign, to build your nuclear weapons system, to take nuclear
physicists, all of the things that money can deliver – terror against Israel out of
Hizballah and from Syria. Our – the first proposition for our campaign was to deny wealth
and resources for the Iranian leadership, and it has been enormously successful in doing so.
You can see it. Hizballah is passing the tin cup.
...The attack on the Saudi refiner disrupted Pompeo's public victory lap in a particularly
bright and striking way.
... ... ...
Simply put, Washington's hopes to stop Iran from supporting its allies by pressing the
Iranian economy is unlikely to work. Iran's support for its alliance network is largely
dismissed in Washington as a frivolous imperial project that Iran can simply choose to abandon.
But for Iran, its non-state allies are a core national-security issue and will, therefore, be
prioritized in budgetary considerations especially when tensions are high. Iran's support for
non-state actors, like Hezbollah, are also not financially intensive and therefore can continue
under sanctions.
Alireza Ahmadi is a researcher and analyst focused on U.S. foreign policy towards the
Middle East. His work has been published by the National
Interest ,
The
Hill and Al-Monitor
. Follow him on Twitter @AliAhmadi_Iran.
Casting itself once again as the world's judge, jury and executioner, US imperialism is
recklessly hurtling toward yet another war in the Middle East, with catastrophic
implications. This time, Washington has seized upon Saturday's attacks on Saudi installations
as its pretext for war against Iran.
The reaction of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to these attacks, which have cut the
kingdom's oil production by almost half and slashed global daily output by 6 percent, was as
noteworthy for its haste as for its peculiar wording.
"Iran has now launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply," Pompeo
tweeted late Saturday, adding, "There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
This
image provided on Sunday, Sept. 15, 2019, by the U.S. government and DigitalGlobe and
annotated by the source, shows damage to the infrastructure at Saudi Aramco's Abaqaiq oil
processing facility in Buqyaq, Saudi Arabia. (U.S. government/Digital Globe via AP)
The indictment of Iran for attacks that set off a series of fires which devastated two oil
facilities in eastern Saudi Arabia came without a shred of supporting evidence, outside of
the bald assertion that there was "no evidence" that they were launched from Yemen.
Yemen had to be discounted, according to the secretary of state's predatory logic, because
the Houthi rebels, who control most of the country, had claimed responsibility for the
attacks and had a clear motive -- given the kingdom's near-genocidal war against Yemen's
civilian population -- for carrying them out. The US mass media has by and large echoed
Pompeo's allegations as absolute truth. On Monday night, television news broadcasts quoted
unnamed intelligence sources, citing unspecified evidence, claiming Iranian responsibility
for the attacks. No doubt this "evidence" will prove just as compelling as that of the Gulf
of Tonkin in Vietnam and "weapons of mass destruction" in Iraq. These same media outlets have
made virtually no mention of Saudi crimes in Yemen.
For the last four and a half years, Saudi Arabia has waged a near-genocidal war against
Yemen, the Middle East's poorest country. The violence has claimed the lives of nearly
100,000 Yemenis outright -- the greatest share through a relentless bombing campaign against
civilian targets -- while pushing some 8 million more to the brink of starvation.
Washington is a direct accomplice in this bloodbath, providing the warplanes, bombs and
missiles used to carry it out, along with logistical support and, until the end of last year,
mid-air refueling that allowed Saudi bombers to carry out uninterrupted carnage. Meanwhile,
the US Navy has helped enforce a blockade that has starved Yemen of food and medicine.
If what the Yemeni Houthis say is true, that they sent a swarm of 10 weaponized drones to
attack the Saudi facilities, then the action was clearly an act of self-defense, far less
than proportionate to the slaughter inflicted by the Saudi regime against Yemen.
Meanwhile, Washington's new ambassador to the United Nations, Kelly Craft, repeated the
charges against Iran on Monday before a United Nations Security Council meeting on Yemen.
Providing no more proof than Pompeo did two days earlier, merely repeating the formulation
that "there is no evidence that the attacks came from Yemen," she described the damage to the
Saudi oil installations as "deeply troubling."
Like the government she represents, the UN ambassador -- the wife of billionaire Kentucky
coal baron Joe Craft and a top Republican donor -- clearly finds the spilt oil of the Saudi
monarchy far more upsetting than the spilt blood of tens of thousands of Yemeni men, women
and children.
On Saturday night, President Donald Trump made a call to Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman,
the kingdom's de facto ruler, offering his condolences and unqualified support to a man
exposed as a cold-blooded murderer. Bin Salman is responsible not only for the grisly
assassination and dismemberment of the Washington-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the
Saudi consulate in Istanbul nearly a year ago, but also the beheadings of at least 134 people
in just the first half of this year, 34 of them political activists slaughtered en masse on
April 23.
Trump subsequently announced that the US was "locked and loaded" to avenge Saudi oil with
military force. (This was a variation on his assertion in June that the Pentagon had been
"cocked and loaded" when he came, by his own account, within 10 minutes of launching
devastating attacks on Iran after it shot down an unmanned US spy drone over its
territory.)
If there is, as Washington claims, "no evidence" that the attacks were launched from
Yemen, one could, with equal if not greater justification, observe that there is likewise "no
evidence" that they were not launched by the US itself, or by its principal regional ally,
Israel.
If one proceeds from the age-old detective maxim of Cui bono? or "Who benefits?",
Tehran is the least likely suspect. There is clearly more to Washington's rush to judgment
than meets the eye.
The attack on the Saudi oil facilities provides a casus belli desired by a major
section of the US ruling oligarchy and its military and intelligence apparatus, which is
determined to prosecute a war for regime change in Iran. Such a war would be the latest
installment in Washington's protracted drive to reverse by military means the decline of US
imperialism's global hegemony, in particular by claiming unfettered US control over the
world's energy reserves and the power to deny them to its rivals.
The thinking within these layers was expressed in an editorial published Monday by the
Wall Street Journal, the mouthpiece of US finance capital. The Journal
warned that Iran was "probing Mr. Trump as much as the Saudis." It continued, "They are
testing his resolve to carry out his 'maximum pressure' campaign, and they sense weakness."
It pointed disapprovingly to Trump's failure to launch airstrikes in June following the
downing of the US drone.
The Journal approvingly cited calls by Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for
bombing Iranian oil refineries in order to "break the regime's back" and suggested that Trump
"apologize to John Bolton, who warned repeatedly that Iran would take advantage of perceived
weakness in the White House." Bolton, a long-time advocate of bombing Iran, resigned as
Trump's national security adviser last week, reportedly over differences on policy toward
Tehran.
The attack on the Saudi oil facilities also provides leverage for Washington in corralling
the Western European powers -- the UK, France and Germany -- behind US war aims. Signatories
to the Iranian nuclear accord that the Trump administration renounced, they have made feeble
gestures toward countering Washington's "maximum pressure" sanctions regime in an attempt to
salvage their own imperialist interests. While thus far failing to endorse US charges of
Iranian responsibility, they could, by means of the attack on Saudi Arabia, be swung behind
the US drive to war.
Israel and its beleaguered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also have ample motive to
stage a military action aimed at provoking war with Iran. On the eve of Tuesday's Israeli
election, the threat of a major war with Iran serves the political interests of Netanyahu,
whose political fortunes are inextricably tied to the escalation of military conflict in the
Middle East. The Israeli state, moreover, had become increasingly concerned over an apparent
cooling of the appetite of the ruling monarchies in both Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates for a confrontation with Iran.
Recent drone strikes against Shia militias in Iraq that had allegedly received Iranian
weapons were, according to a report by the web site Middle East Eye, staged by Israeli drones
operating out of bases controlled by the so-called Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), the main
US proxy force in Syria. A similar covert US-Israeli collaboration could easily have produced
the attacks on the Saudi oil installations.
Whatever the exact circumstances of the attacks on the Saudi oil facilities, they are
being exploited for the purpose of dragging the American people and all of humanity into a
war that can rapidly escalate into a regionwide and even global conflagration.
US strikes against Iran carried out under the pretext of retaliation for the attacks on
Saudi Arabia can trigger Iranian counterstrikes, sending US warships to the bottom of the
Persian Gulf and wreaking havoc on American military bases throughout the region.
The prospect of thousands of US soldiers and sailors dying as a result of Washington's
conspiracies and aggression carries with it the threat of the US government assuming
emergency powers and implementing police-state measures in the US itself in the name of
"national security."
This would, by no means, be an unintended consequence. The buildup to war is driven in
large measure by the escalation of social tensions and class struggle within the United
States itself, which has found fresh expression in the strike by 46,000 autoworkers against
General Motors. There is a powerful incentive for the US ruling class to direct these
tensions outward in the eruption of military conflict, while creating the pretext for mass
repression.
The threat of a US assault on Iran paving the way to a third world war must be answered
through a politically conscious and independent intervention of the working class to put an
end to imperialism and reorganize society on socialist foundations.
gjohnsit on Tue, 09/17/2019 - 3:10pm Remember in 2002 when the neocons in Washington
told us that we had to attack Iraq because of 9/11, eventhough Iraq had nothing to do with
it?
So now Iran is being blamed for the attack on Saudi oil fields, and
anonymous warmongers claim that they have proof.
The United States has identified the exact locations in Iran from which a combination of more
than 20 drones and cruise missiles were launched against Saudi oil facilities over the
weekend, a senior U.S. official told CBS News national security correspondent David Martin on
Tuesday. The official said the locations are in southern Iran, at the northern end of the
Persian Gulf.
What a coincidence! That also happens to be around Iran's major oil fields.
What's more, the Saudi air defenses would have stopped it if it came from Yemen.
Saudi Arabia's air defenses have been aimed south for months, to protect against missile
attacks launched by Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen, so they were useless against the
missiles and drones coming in from the north, the official told Martin.
Let's put a pin in that for now.
Washington immediately dismissed the Houthi's claim of responsibility for the attack. Why?
Because the Houthis don't have the
knowledge or the means to carry it out.
But U.S. officials have cast doubt on the Houthis’ claim, arguing that the
sophisticated nature of the attack suggested that it was beyond the capabilities of the rebel
group.
Analysts say this is what the Houthis appear to have used to hit the Abha International
Airport in southern Saudi Arabia a few months ago. But the Quds 1 lacks the range to get from
northern Yemen to the oil installations in Saudi Arabia.
The range, scale and precision of the latest attack — including the successful
penetration of Saudi air defenses and the avoidance of obstacles like power lines and
communication towers — far exceeds anything the Houthis have ever done.
So it's all wrapped up. The Houthis aren't capable of doing it, and we have proof that Iran
did it. We just can't show it to you.
It makes a good story if you have no long-term memory.
Because
this happened less than a month ago.
A drone attack launched by Yemen’s Houthi group on an oilfield in eastern Saudi Arabia
on Saturday caused a fire at a gas plant but had no impact on oil production, state-run oil
company Saudi Aramco said.
A Houthi military spokesman said earlier that the group had targeted the Shaybah oilfield
with 10 drones, in what he said was the “biggest attack in the depths” of the
kingdom, the world’s top oil exporter, by the Iran-aligned group.
Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih described Shaybah as a “vital
facility”.
That oilfield is 900 kilometres away from Yemen.
Literally everything about this Houthi attack is the same as Saturday's attack, except for
fewer explosions. So what the fuck is the NY Times talking about?
To make this even more interesting, I happened upon
this report by the UAE following the Houthi attack from last month.
The report also reveals critical Saudi defence weaknesses to the weaponised drones used by
the Houthis.
It reports that from January to May there were 155 such attacks against Saudi targets in
Yemen and throughout the Gulf, a much higher figure than previously admitted.
“The attack on the Lahj Military Base demonstrates a weakness in Saudi air defences
and the lack of capacity in electronic war if we take into account that these drones are
basic and are not launched on tarmac,” the report says.
“Air defences such as the Patriot are not capable of spotting these drones because
the systems are designed to intercept long and medium range Scud missiles.”
Najran airport has been hit repeatedly by Houthi drones despite being protected by a
Patriot battery, the report reveals.
155 drone attacks? U.S. Patriot missiles unable to detect and stop them?
Why that sounds a lot different than what we are being told.
Recall that the Houthis had brought
down a U.S. drone just a few weeks ago. That was the second U.S. drone they shot down just
this summer.
Recall that the Houthis have been
hitting Riyadh with missiles for over a year.
All the evidence points to the Houthis being more than capable of not just being responsible
for this attack, but for repeating this attack in a matter of weeks Mark F. McCarty
and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on board
the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable
evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do that.
Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world, the
last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.
We are going to have to show our allies totally verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those
drones, and it looks like we can't do that.
If we had proof it was Iran we would have shown it to someone by now.
Aren't we monitoring the airspace around Iran?
And what is Iran's motivation?
It's not worth the risk for Iran if they were caught.
OTOH, if Iran gives the weapons to the Houthis...that makes a Hell of a lot more
sense.
and probably most of the UN, they are going to have a harder time getting anyone on
board the Pompeo Holy War train. We are going to have to show our allies totally
verifiable evidence that Iran lobbed those drones, and it looks like we can't do
that.
Probably because they didn't do it! And once that starts looking clear to the world,
the last remnants of US credibility will fly away for good.
With the U.S, Russia, and China all jostling for position in Iraq's oil and gas industry both
north and south, Iraq's oil ministry last week reiterated its desire to have one or more foreign
partners in the Mansuriya gas field.
Situated in Diyala province, close to the Iran border,
Mansuriya is estimated to hold around 4.6 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, with plateau
production projected at about 325 million standard cubic feet per day
.
For the U.S., encouraging Iraq to optimise its gas flows so that it reduces its
dependency
for
power from Iran is the key consideration.
For Russia, Rosneft essentially bought control of the semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan in
northern Iraq in November 2017, so power in southern Iraq figuratively will complete the set.
Securing oil and gas contracts across all of Iraq will allow Russia to establish an
unassailable political sway across the entire Shia crescent of power in the Middle East, stretching
from Syria through Lebanon (by dint of Iran), Jordan, Iraq (also helped by Iran), Iran itself, and
Yemen (via Iran).
From this base, it can effectively challenge the U.S.'s vital oil, gas,
and political ally in the region – Saudi Arabia. China, in the meantime, is operating to its own
agenda in South Pars Phase 11 and its West Karoun holdings.
Iraq, like Turkey, is still – nominally at least – not committing to either the Russia
or the U.S.,
preferring to play each off against the other for whatever they can get, and
the same applies in microcosm to the field of Mansuriya. Turkey itself was a key player in this gas
field through its national oil company Turkiye Petrolleri Anonim Ortakligi (TPAO) until the middle
of last year – holding a 37.5 per cent stake – along with the Oil Exploration Company (25 per
cent), Kuwait Energy (22.5 per cent), and South Korea's KOGAS (15 per cent).
TPAO had signed the original development deal for Mansuriya back in 2011, promising Iraq's oil
ministry that it could be trusted to reach plateau production within 10 years at most, a senior
figure in the ministry told
OilPrice.com
last week. This was not an unreasonable schedule,
for which TPAO would be remunerated US$7.00-7.50 per barrel of oil equivalent, a relatively
generous amount compared to many of the previous awards from the ministry. TPAO agreed that the
first phase would mean production of at least 100 million cubic feet a day within 12 months from
the signing date.
Iran Rejects US Accusation It Is Behind
Saudi Attacks https://nyti.ms/30iNte7
NYT - Michael Wolgelenter - September 15
Iran on Sunday forcefully rejected charges by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that it was
responsible for drone attacks that caused serious damage to two crucial Saudi Arabian oil
installations, with the foreign minister dismissing the remarks as "max deceit."
The attacks on Saturday, which hold the potential to disrupt global oil supplies, were
claimed by Houthi rebels in Yemen. Mr. Pompeo said that Iran had launched "an unprecedented
attack on the world's oil supply," although he did not offer any evidence and stopped short
of saying that Iran had carried out the missile strikes.
The Houthis are part of a complex regional dynamic in the Middle East, receiving support
from Iran while the Saudis, Tehran's chief rival for supremacy in the region and the leader
of a coalition that is fighting the Houthis in Yemen, are aligned with the United States.
Seyed Abbas Mousavi, a spokesman for the Iranian Foreign Ministry, castigated the Saudis
for their role in the war in Yemen, where the Saudis have directed airstrikes that have
caused heavy civilian casualties and exacerbated a humanitarian crisis. He also ridiculed Mr.
Pompeo's comments.
The semiofficial Fars news agency reported on its English-language website that Mr.
Mousavi described Mr. Pompeo's allegations as "blind and fruitless remarks" that were
"meaningless" in a diplomatic context.
Saudi Arabia has yet to publicly accuse Iran of involvement in the attack. On Sunday, its
Foreign Ministry urged international action to preserve the world oil supply in response to
the attack, but it said nothing about assigning blame or striking back.
The developments come at a moment of rising tensions between Iran and the United States,
which have mounted since President Trump pulled out of the 2015 accord in which Iran agreed
with the West to restrict its nuclear program. Since the American withdrawal, Iran has
gradually pulled away from its some obligations under the agreement. ...
... "US & its clients are stuck in Yemen because of illusion that weapon superiority will
lead to military victory," Mr. Zarif wrote on Twitter. "Blaming Iran won't end disaster.
Accepting our April '15 proposal to end war & begin talks may.
The attack on Saturday, which the Houthis said involved 10 drones, represented the rebels'
most serious strike since Saudi Arabia inserted itself into the conflict in Yemen four years
ago. That the rebels could cause such extensive damage to such a crucial part of the global
economy astonished some observers. ...
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
"... Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in fact have been a missile strike ..."
"... But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's? ..."
"... Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed. ..."
"... In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu. ..."
"... That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS Liberty. ..."
"... Israel has the means, plus the motive (Bib's reelection), and might have taken the opportunity to attribute the attack to Iran and force Trump's hand. ..."
"... I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess. ..."
"... There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran and the United States. ..."
"... Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions. ..."
"... I do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone, neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any better. ..."
"... However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see. ..."
"... It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ (dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded" ..."
"... The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran but because they were brutalized for almost a century. ..."
"... One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi . According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on going attacks and the IPO proceeds? ..."
"... We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability. Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors. ..."
"... In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints behind - at least based on recent events. ..."
"... Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar soon to prove they are responsible. ..."
"... israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things. ..."
"... ''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup. And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day. ..."
"... And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE, and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment. ..."
"... Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made sense. We are so messed up. ..."
"... Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. ..."
"... It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing: ..."
"... "That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said "valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch (humint or cyber component to one attack vector). ..."
"... It cries out "sure, it's bad, but it is reversible." ..."
"... Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the curtailing of Iran's nuclear program. ..."
"... Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10 billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be strong action against the rogues. ..."
"... Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a UN investigation into the source of the attacks. ..."
"... "The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government coalition. ..."
What made this attack different from other recorded Houthi drone attacks was not only the
unprecedented amount of material damage caused but also lingering doubt about the nature and
the attribution of the attack. First,
a video allegedly showing flying objects entering Kuwaiti airspace led to speculation that
like a
previous "Houthi" drone attack this strike might actually have originated in Iraq or even
Iran. While the video remains unverified, the fact that the Kuwaiti government
launched a probe into the issue lends some credence to the idea that something might have
happened over Kuwait that day. Speculation about the origins of the attack was further fueled
by a tweet
by Mike Pompeo in which he claimed that there was no evidence the attacks came from
Yemen.
Then the question arose whether drones had been used at all, or whether the attack might in
fact have been a missile strike. Previous Houthi drone strikes against oil facilities tended to
result in quite limited damage which could be an indication that a different weapons system was
used this time. Indeed, Aramco
came to the conclusion that its facilities were attacked by missiles. Even more curious,
several pictures began to emerge on social media purportedly showing the wreckage of a missile
in the Saudi desert. While the images appear real, neither the date the photos were taken nor
their location can be verified.
Social media users quickly claimed the images showed a crashed
Iranian-made Soumar cruise missile. The Soumar and its updated version, the Hoveyzeh, are
Iran's attempts at reverse-engineering the Soviet-designed KH-55 cruise missile, several of
which the country
illegally imported from Ukraine in the early 2000s . Others claimed it was the Quds 1, a
recently unveiled Houthi cruise missile often claimed to be a rebranded Soumar."
armscontrolwonl
---------------
TTG raised the issue of whether or not this wave of strikes was done by UAVs or cruise
missiles. IMO this cruise missile could be built in Yemen with Iranian assistance. I am very
interested in the question of what the actual vector of the attacks was in this case. pl
The accuracy of the strikes in the spherical pressurized gas storage containers all being in
the same place relative to each target is the place to start for those who, unlike me, are
capable of analyzing these things.
But regardless, the game has escalated up one more rung up the ladder. How many more will
it take for the world to put its interests ahead of Israel's?
Next escalation rung: a loading dock for supertankers: either the port of Yanbu or Ra's
Tanura. Followed by desalination facilities, if Western politicians still pretend to turn a
blind eye and prefer to follow the dictates of their Israeli masters. Nuff Sed.
In asking the question, qui bono, you do have to include Netanyahu, who is up for reelection
tomorrow. There's nothing like striking fear into the heart of the electorate on the eve of
an election for firming up support for a proven incumbent. And if the US attacks Iran before
tomorrow, so much the better for Netanyahu.
That said, I don't think that Netanyahu's buddies in Riyadh would be amused if this were
proven. However, poking a friend in the eye never seemed to stop Israel before think USS
Liberty.
"The Israeli military is armed with the latest fast jets and precision weaponry, yet it has
turned to its fleet of drones to hit targets in Iraq. Deniability has played a big factor
– the ability of drones to elude radar and therefore keep targets guessing about who
actually bombed them is playing well for Israeli leaders who are trying to prevent an
increasingly lethal shadow war with Iran from developing into an open conflict."
The Samad 3 is laden with explosives that allow it to detonate a shaped charge which
explodes downwards towards its target. Footage provided to MintPress by Yemen's Operations
Command Center shows the Samad landing on an asphalt runway, confirming that the drone is
now capable of conducting operations and then returning to base.
There is a huge sea water desalination plant not far away that provides all the treated water
via pipeline for injection into the oil reservoirs to improve recovery of oil. Target that
and not only have you already impacted the processing of the oil produced but would then
impact the total volume of oil available for processing.
I can see no happy ending short of
negotiation between interested parties. MBZ looks to have already reached that conclusion in
respect of the UAE. what will be the self preservation response for the House of Saud
Could the Committee speculate on possible 'steps of retaliation' operating, for theoretical
purposes, at the moment, on the assumption that regardless of where the 'bullets' were fired
from, or from what 'gun' they were fired, Iran paid for deed. What steps are open for action?
I am assuming, myself, personally, this action was taken to prevent a meeting in NYC between
Trump and the President of Iran. That is my guess.
There was never going to be a meeting between Rouhani and Trump. I expect to be dead of old age before there would be any substantive meetings between Iran
and the United States.
Supreme Ayatollah Khamenei has said there will be no meeting until the U.S.ends sanctions.
I
do not for a moment believe Bolton would have stood for it, and even though he's gone,
neither will Pompeo or Pence. Both appear to be fanatically devoted to Israel. There may be
meetings between low level functionaries, and Trump seems to want one very much, but Rouhani
has said there is no way to trust America, so no point to talking. The situation may change
if Netanyahu loses the election, although I have no reason to believe Avigdor will be any
better.
With all due respect, I think one of us fails to grasp the true nature of Trump. If he puts
his mind to it, and thinks it will benefit him, nobody, not Bolton, not Pompeo, not the whole
Neocon cabal, Israeli govt, the present one or the next one, will stop him if he is President
and alive. He will do what is best for Trump.
And trust has nothing to do with this. Why in the hell should I trust Iran? Hell, why
should I trust the UK? I trust that people and nations have interests. That's all I trust.
But that does mean I could not reach a deal with them. Now, as to whether that deals
holds...that is another question. However, if Trump DOES cut a deal, he will not try and
fluff it off as an "Executive Agreement"....if Trump cuts a deal he knows he will have to
bring it to Congress. Thee Lobby may kill it there...or not. We'll see.
Babak, I value your input here. However, I hope you are wrong and that a meeting or meetings
(substantive or not) will start as soon as the dealbreaker is out of office, and the
sanctions are called off. But I would never wish you an early death. May you live a hundred years.
Thank you very kindly.
I would like to ask the following questions:
Will the United States restore sovereign immunity to Iran?
Will the United States Congress rescind all the laws against Iran that form the basis of
economic war against Iran?
Will the United States rescind the sanctions against Ayatollah Khamenei, Dr. Zarif,
General Soleimani, etc., etc. etc.?
Will the Protestant Christians in the United States ever tire of their unrequited love for
all things Old Testament?
In my opinion, the answer to all of these are "no". Unfortunately, even if a man with the caliber of an FDR or a Nixon is elected to the US
Presidency, he will not be able to accomplish much because of the difficulty, nay the
impossibility, of untangling the rules and regulations that US has woven against Iran.
In my opinion, all of that was predicated on the strategic defeat of Iran and her
surrender.
If I WERE ANSWERING. I got some demands of my own..but we can put them aside for the moment.
In general, I would be inclined to respond: Yes, to the "sovereign immunity" question.
Certainly. Regarding "economic warfare", you would have to give me your legal definition of
such a broad phrase, but in principle, yes. Whole heartedly yes. Sanctions against Iran, and
it individuals officers? Yes, absolutely. Sick of sanctions, in general. It is not in my
power to answer the "unrequited love" issue, but I do solemnly state that I would agree to
stop laughing--in public, anyway, at the question. Wanna meet?
Nassim Nicolaas Taleb, author of "Black Swan":
"SAUDI FIELDS It's not just Yemen. People forget there is an oppressed Shiite minority near the Aramco HQ
(dispossessed of the oil fields, located in their ancestral area & treated like
sub-sub-citizens); they get periodically beheaded"
The Al Saud gang, under the Clown Prince Muhammad Bone Saw, can not count on those Shiite
inhabitants of the oil rich region, not necessarily because of the latter's sympathy for Iran
but because they were brutalized for almost a century.
Why would Iran have done it? Just to show they can or to provoke a attack on Iran?
One to benefit from it that I see so far is Saudi's Aramco IPO which is critical to Saudi
. According to WSJ they were considering delaying it because of low oil prices, they needed
oil to reach $80 barrel to make it viable. The attack sent prices up but now market is
talking about risk if there are 'on going attacks'. What could we deduce if there are no on
going attacks and the IPO proceeds?
Only other beneficiary would be Israel if the attack actually does and likely has killed
any Trump-Iran meeting.
Yemenis claimed credit for it, Iran and Iraq said they didn't do it. First word out of US
mouth is Iran did it. The mouth I am least likely to believe is the US. I remember Iraq has
WMDs propaganda....and those it came from.
Oh well, if Iran says they did not do it.......the US govt lies. The Iranian govt lies, the
Saudis surely lie. This is not about innocents. That search is for children and mighty young
ones at that.
The Quds-1 cruise missile is a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). The remotely piloted aerial
vehicles, which are more commonly referred to as drones are also UAVs. The difference is in
the degree of autonomy in flight control. On board autonomous flight control negates the need
for LOS radio or satellite communications with the cruise missile. Cruise missiles, with
their autonomous control, were always characterized by their high degree of accuracy.
I've
started looking a little closer at the Arduino/RasberryPi and model aircraft hobbyist groups.
With the availability of affordable microcontrollers and sensors, along with the massive
library of open source software, I am convinced a hobbyist could put together a guidance
system in his garage workshop capable of doing what the Quds-1 just did in SA. I also agree
with Colonel Lang that an airframe like the Quds-1 could easily be built in war-torn Yemen. A
cave would make an outstanding workshop.
Even if Iran exported dual use components or even blue prints; it should be counted as part
of the unfortunate world weapons market & wouldn't be illegal.
Your point TTG was nicely illustrated in b's video of the Russian guy building in his
workshopa turbofan engine that flew . Providing there is a set of plans it can be constructed
and it only has to have a one time reliability.
Evidence for what delivered the strike will be found within the complex and there will be a
lot of skills on the ground looking for those answers. The projectiles that struck the
spheres looked to have had penetrating qualities rather than high explosive, putting a hole
in a pressure vessel is sufficient to destroy its usefulness. I would be interested to know
if the projectiles that struck the train were explosive to maximise damage there. Do we need
to be considering what could deliver multiple targeted projectiles or were there simply
multiple independent units or some combination as there were more strikes logged over two
target complexes than the ten delivery platforms mentioned in the Al Ansar press release. Was
there a flight controller and if so where were they located also comes to mind.
There is also the TJ200 built bij Polaris from Brazil with the following description::
"Turbine TJ200:
TJ200 was specially designed to be used in either small cruise missiles or small high
performance UAVs. The most important advantage of TJ200 engine is small diameter and a
relatively low SFC (Specific Fuel Consumption) when compared to other engines of the same
thrust, what makes TJ200 perfect to be used in long range small missiles."
http://www.polaristec.com.br/products.html
That's a pretty specific description. So there are a number of COTS engines out there.
I'd have more confidence in the reporting if I could match it up better with what I can see
in Google Maps/Earth.
The only two satellite pictures I've seen of "burning oil plants" disticntly show a large
plume of black smoke centered a little ways away from the actual refinery area, in some kind
of rectangular area outside the actual "plant". Are those wellheads burning? or adjacent
underground storage? or what?
And the pictured of a burning plant labeled "Haradh Gas Plant" is actually (according to
Google Maps & my eyeballs) the Hawiyah Gas Plant, about 60 miles NNE of Haradh.
In Google Maps/Earth, the Abqaiq facility is on the East side of the city/town of Buquaiq,
and the details match the recent pix. The plume lines up with an empty square patch of desert
at the end of a pipeline running SSE out of the plant.
I've looked all around Khurais, and haven't found anything which could possibly be the
"Oil/Gas Infrastructure at Khurais", as the pictures of the damaged facility there are
labeled.
Elkern, I was referring to the pictures of the cruise missile parts in the sand. Seems to me
they are old from previous attacks.
As far as I can tell the pics of damage at Buqaiq and Khurais are valid. With the
exception of the eleven spherical tanks, which I believe were NOT hit. But I've been wrong
before and am no expert on imagery analysis.
We know Yemen has the Quds-1 and has surprised us before with their technical capability.
Combine that with the video of Yahya Sari claiming full responsibility for the attack and I'm
not sure there is any reason to speculate about conspiracies involving other actors.
The Houthis are not an Iranian "proxy" and I highly doubt they would accept responsibility
for something they didn't do.
Moon of Alabama links some photos and has discussion that suggests very high precision
5-10 m. That is not easily achievable with commercial GPS absent a lot of additional
correction hardware. On the other hand, drones can easily do so. Further, it would be
negligent for SA not to have GPS jamming around such facilities.
In addition, the specificity of the targets hit suggests good intel. I would suspect that
Houthi's have linked with disaffected groups in SA (lots!) and improved their Humint. It
seems highly unlikely that Iran would do something like this AND leave their fingerprints
behind - at least based on recent events.
Never underestimate the feckless laziness of the Saudis. In my experience they turn off
all ATC and air defense systems that require manning or watch keeping when they find them
inconvenient as on the weekend. IMO if Ansarallah did this they will do something similar
soon to prove they are responsible.
imo, the saudi's and washington are going to have to take one for the team. the team being
the global oil based world economy and all the notional value FOR THE present ONLY oil
derivatives and interest rate derivatives burdening the western banking system.... think the
insolvent deutsche bank et al.
a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran
which both russia and china can not.. will not allow to die.
israel gets a lot of press and speculation on this board as well as everywhere else for
all their conspiracies and supposed omnipotent power and control but in this writers opinion
THEY have been punching way above their actual weight for years and current reality has
exposed how feckless and puny they really are in the scheme of things.
i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if
israel were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations
israel is viewed as responsible for.
''i suspect the whole 'jew' thing regarding israel is what animates people so much. if israel
were all zoroastrians i doubt the world would credit them with all the machinations israel is
viewed as responsible for.'' A Cult is a Cult regardless of it members makeup.
And Israel is looking more like a Jim Jones farm every day.
Only one tank appears to have minor sooting or scorching. As though they were emptied after
an initial strike then targeted in a second strike, but no reports of a second strike.
In the sat pic showing targets in red boxes, top square, the target appears to be smaller
spheres which do look darkened.
Several correspondents here, including Adrestia and b, seem to lack faith in an autonomous
navigation and terminal guidance system for these cruise missiles. They do not need a radio
or cell phone communication link. This could have been even without a GPS signal. Given that
the strikes appear to come from the west, the smartest route would be to fly north to the
pipelines and then east to the targets. Once the missiles are close to the target either a
visual terminal guidance system could take over or the targets are marked and the missiles'
terminal guidance systems just home in on the marked targets. The marks could be laser
illumination, small IR strobes or offset targeting devices. These offset targeting devices
are emplaced with the exact azimuth and distance to the desired target programmed into the
missiles' terminal guidance system. As I said before, we did this in the early 80s. In the
90s, I used the IR strobes. These were tiny lights snapped to the top of a 9V battery. You
could carry a dozen in your pocket. I personally like the idea of emplacing small IR strobes
on target or a set distance and azimuth from the target. The missiles could home on a spot
say due east and 100 meters from the strobe. I'm sure there are other methods I haven't
thought of yet. My educated guess is that this strike was well thought out with both
intelligence and operational support on and near the target site. Anyone who thinks the
Houthi and their Yemeni allies are incapable of planning and executing this is magnificently
ignorant.
GPS is not accurate enough for the last 10-30 feet. Another possiblity that doesn't need
any human terminal guidance could be a creative use of sensors.
Using CARVER select suitable targets. Pick something that is hot, big or fumes gas.
Then use a combination of gas-sensing, parking-sensors, heat-sensing sensors for the last
few feet.
I'm reading the manual for an FY41AP autopilot right now. About $250, made in china.
As for optical guidance, the attacks happened about 0400 - night or dawn?
This autopilot has a video link as well as autonomous and ground based control modes I think.
If the Yemenis had a guy with a transceiver near abqaiq, then maybe they could send these
things over from yemen using gps and a guy with transceiver provided terminal guidance. If
that were to happen the drones would need to be launched at set intervals.
Your last sentence is true enough as far as it goes, but also, if Israel were all
Zoroastrians (or any other group) the world would have dealt with their paranoid and
psychopathic behavior decades ago. The only reason they get away with everything is because
they are Jewish.
Bacevich in NYT op ed. Behind a paywall, here is a copy. Please do not post if it is too long or off topic
Iran Might Be America's Enemy, but Saudi Arabia Is No Friend
After last week's refinery attack, Trump should be careful about throwing America's weight
behind an unreliable "ally."
By Andrew J. Bacevich
Mr. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.
Sept. 16, 2019
Image The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987. The American frigate Stark, which was hit by two missiles fired from an Iraqi fighter
plane during the Iran-Iraq war in 1987.
In 1987, an Iraqi warplane attacked an American Navy frigate, the Stark, on patrol in the
Persian Gulf. Accepting Saddam Hussein's explanation that the attack, which killed 37
sailors, had been an accident, American officials promptly used the incident, which came at
the height of the Iran-Iraq war, to ratchet up pressure on Tehran. The incident provided the
impetus for what became a brief, and all but forgotten, maritime war between the United
States and Iran.
Last week, someone -- precisely who remains to be determined -- attacked two oil
refineries in Saudi Arabia. American authorities have been quick to blame Iran, and the
possibility of a violent confrontation between the two countries is once again growing.
Before making a decision on whether to pull the trigger, President Trump would do well to
reflect on that 1987 episode and its legacy.
Back then, the United States had become involved in the very bloody and seemingly
interminable Iran-Iraq war, which Hussein had instigated in 1980 by invading Iran. As that
war turned into a brutal stalemate, President Ronald Reagan and his advisers persuaded
themselves that it was in America's interests to come to Iraq's aid. Iran was the "enemy" so
Iraq became America's "friend."
After the Stark episode, American and Iranian naval forces in the Gulf began jousting, an
uneven contest that culminated in April 1988 with the virtual destruction of the Iranian
Navy.
Yet the United States gained little from this tidy victory. The principal beneficiary was
Hussein, who wasted no time in repaying Washington by invading and annexing Kuwait soon after
his war with Iran ground to a halt. Thus did America's "friend" become America's "enemy."
The encounter with Iran became a precedent-setting event and a font of illusions. Since
then, a series of administrations have indulged the fantasy that the direct or indirect
application of military power can somehow restore stability to the Gulf.
In fact, just the reverse has occurred. Instability has become chronic, with the
relationship between military policy and actual American interests in the region becoming
ever more difficult to discern.
In 2019, this now well-established penchant for armed intervention finds the United States
once more involved in a proxy conflict, this time a civil war that has ravaged Yemen since
2015. Saudi Arabia supports one side in this bloody and interminable conflict, and Iran the
other.
Under President Barack Obama and now President Trump, the United States has thrown in its
lot with Saudi Arabia, providing support comparable to what the Reagan administration gave
Saddam Hussein back in the 1980s. But American-assisted Saudi forces have exhibited no more
competence today than did American-assisted Iraqi forces back then. So the war in Yemen drags
on.
ImageSmoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco
oil facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.
Smoke billowing from one of the oil facilities hit by drone attacks on two Saudi Aramco oil
facilities in Abqaiq, in Saudi Arabia's eastern province, on Saturday.CreditAgence
France-Presse -- Getty Images
Concrete American interests in this conflict, which has already claimed an estimated
70,000 lives while confronting as many as 18 million with the prospect of starvation, are
negligible. Once more, as in the 1980s, the demonization of Iran has contributed to a policy
that is ill advised and arguably immoral.
I am not suggesting that Washington is supporting the wrong side in Yemen. I am
suggesting, however, that neither side deserves support. Iran may well qualify as America's
"enemy." But Saudi Arabia is not a "friend," regardless of how many billions Riyadh spends
purchasing American-manufactured weaponry and how much effort Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman invests in courting President Trump and members of his family.
The conviction, apparently widespread in American policy circles, that in the Persian Gulf
(and elsewhere) the United States is compelled to take sides, has been a source of recurring
mischief. No doubt the escalating rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran poses a danger of
further destabilizing the Gulf. But the United States is under no obligation to underwrite
the folly of one side or the other.
Supporting Iraq in its foolhardy war with Iran in the 1980s proved to be strategically
shortsighted in the extreme. It yielded vastly more problems than it solved. It set in train
a series of costly wars that have produced negligible benefits. Supporting Saudi Arabia today
in its misbegotten war in Yemen is no less shortsighted.
Power confers choice, and the United States should exercise it. We can begin to do so by
recognizing that Saudi Arabia's folly need not be our problem.
Andrew J. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the
author of the forthcoming "The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War
Victory."
"a war on iran will do every bit as much damage or MORE to the west as it does to iran"
And Iran has demonstrated that they can cause months worth of damage on the KSA, the UAE,
and Kuwait. I can't believe the number of Congressman who simultaneously believe that Iran
was able to glide over U.S. made air defenses without detection and also believe that we can
simply carpet bomb their refineries without any repercussion. How can one believe both things
at the same time? That Iran is responsible for a sophisticated ghost attack and that they are
incapable of retaliating in a target rich environment.
Not only did Graham say this but the loon from Maryland repeated it. These people are
insane but MSM hosts encourage it, just saw Cavuto snear at Ron Paul because he actually made
sense. We are so messed up.
use the pic released by USG of the damage to get an idea of the orientation of the incoming
projectiles, I used that rectangularish pond behind as an aid,
Everyone keeps misunderestimating the Yemenis. The Houthis are fighting as part of a coalition that includes a large part of the Yemeni
military and intelligence services. This coalition is carrying out a war under guerrilla
conditions, but that war is led by professional military men. Yemen had a serious air force
consisting mostly of missile systems before the war. Much of it was destroyed by the bombing
campaign carried out for Saudi Arabia, but the military organization survived. They have now
reconstituted the Yemeni air forces under fire and in the midst of famine, blockade and
invasion.
Stock up on popcorn, the show has only just begun.
Using my CAD and graphic tools and Google Earth along with the photo showing the four
perforated pressure tanks, I have estimated the four vectors as:
E1 280W. E2 279W, E3 281W and E4 273W. I have numbered the tanks from the most eastwards (the
furthermost away in the photo). Angles from true north (0/360 deg). This averages as 278N
with a STDEV of 3 degrees. Its almost due west. Must be very difficult for autopilots (or
real pilots) could perform more than one group-turning maneuver and still maintain final-run
accuracy to what was achieved.
p.s. I'm not specialist in this field apart from terrestrial navigation and drafting
experience.
RobW
The Czech company which produces the TJ100 does have strong links with Iran.
"2005 TPP Iranshahr Iran, the largest project in the company's history, a turnkey project
- four power plant units." But then again. Creating a crash site in the desert with some COTS components in it is
also easy to do. I would be surprised if Iran is launching missiles now. That would be pretty
stupid to do.
I know. I was attempting a comparison between the way most Americans perceive the desert
peoples and the way most Americans fail to extrapolate from their beliefs of one groups
capabilities and motivations and another group closer to home. The perfumed fops in Ryadh and
the Perfumed Princes in DC are very similar under the perfume.
I remember in the mid sixties how the "benighted" Vietnamese and VC were on their last legs,
unable to do anything militarily significant, that the war would be over in 67. This was that
generations perfumed princes attitude towards a people who had been fighting against invaders
since the 1850s. I remember 68 and the most unexpectedly successful operational and strategic
level victory by the NVA and the VC that was TET.
From an infotainment/Cronkite perspective
the important thing was that the Saigon embassy was broached. From and operational
perspective a "defeated" enemy launched several hundred simultaneous attacks all over South
Vietnam while holding down as a diversion the Dien Bien Phu look alike that was Khe San. 51
years 2 and 1/2 generations and today we make the exact same mistakes in evaluating the
current situation.
It is the benefit of being a perfumed prince or fop or neo-con that history has no meaning
because history ended sometime in the 90's. Somehow I hear the voice of a Rove lecturing:
"That's not the way the world really works anymore." He continued "We're an empire now, and
when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality --
judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can
study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you,
will be left to just study what we do."
I have seen articles over the last month or so (sorry, no links) saying that because they are
not able to send large amounts of material aid through the Saudi and U.S. Navy blockade of
Yemen, the Iranians sent blueprints and a few engineers and the Ansar Allah have been
building them in Yemen.
What looks like missile hits at identical positions on those spherical tanks are not.
They are the locations of pressure relief valvaes that blew when the towers hit, venting gas
up out and away.
I am in full agreement with your assessment Dave. I don't see any penetrations on those 11
spherical tanks. Look at the complete devastation on the three smaller spherical pressure
tanks.
Unless we get higher resolution pics that definitely show those tanks were pierced there
is no way I am going to believe those tiny scorch marks are UAV or missile hits. Much too
symmetrical! No amount of geometrical explaining of drone tracks will account for that
symmetry.
Yes indeed. Dave deserves hearty congratulations though we might add a caveat. The said
"valves" could have been blown out in advance via software or person throwing a switch
(humint or cyber component to one attack vector). Yes, tremors or shakes triggering sensor
which blows valve is possible, I suppose. But the thing that had me up at night was the
nagging sense that this was a prearranged message of sorts.
It cries out "sure, it's bad, but
it is reversible." So I had been wondering about invitation for pow-wows given UN upcoming
meeting in NY. I'm tending to lean toward an advance blowout rather than blowout in reaction
to stress. Why damage such delicate, custom equipment as those beautiful tanks? As you say,
it has to be something intrinsic/internal to the construction of the tanks. So - before or
after remains to be discussed. Assuming the pics are legitimate. But that's why I thought
especially there was a subtle message sent. If they are legit - see above. If not legit -
then it is howling reversibility or caution at the very least.
The processor trains are a linear series of stabilizer columns that help separate the sour
hydrogen sulfide gas from the crude oil. They are at the heart of the process and probably
the highest value target. They are to the left of the 11 pressure tanks in the pictures
shown, or perhaps just NNW of those tanks.
I buy the idea of HUMINT assets having collected target informatoin but the idea of
mini-strobes, etc. seems to me to be too difficult to do given the separation of the missile
force and the HUMINT assets. Very hard to coordinate.
Houthis have every reason to utilize their advanced weapons systems against Saudi targets to
bring the war to an end. As for Iran, seems they have been on a semi-successful diplomatic
campaign to counter US maximum pressure with their own maximum pressure on Europeans, Russia
and China to deliver on the economic benefits that are as important in JCPOA as the
curtailing of Iran's nuclear program.
Trump talking about meeting Rouhani in New York, Zarif
in China getting at least $50-100 billion in pledged economic support, Russia suggesting $10
billion investment in the Iranian energy sector: Why would Iran at this moment make a direct
move to turn the world fully against them? Perhaps a rogue faction of IRGC out to stop any
diplomatic action, but even that would have to come with OK from Khamenei--or there would be
strong action against the rogues.
Pressure on Trump to maintain the hardline against Iran following Bolton ouster? Pompeo
has been leading the diplomatic back channels and repeating Trump's goal of forcing Iran to
the table. Even the Saudis are for the moment hesitant to blame Iran, actually calling for a
UN investigation into the source of the attacks.
2) a general redirection of attention is achieved from 2 points:
- from Syria
In the issue of National Geographic Bulgaria of 04.2019, April 2019 number 4 (162),on p.29
there is a map of the migratory route of a bird - Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iraq,
Turkey, Bulgaria. BUT the name of Syria is missing, just an empty space within its current
borders.
Maybe, I sincerely hope not, it was just a part of a campaign of mass indoctrination - the
"former Syria" to be divided between neighbors with a US military base here and there or to
turn onto a No Man's land of lawlessness right there, flanking the EU, Russia's Muslim areas,
China's silk road etc
"The Iran did it" narrative as an attempt to keep on undermining the pro-Syrian government
coalition.
- from the temptation to mix with West's "rivals" internal issues
A strange coincidence that there was such a recent burst of "opposition" activity first in
Russia, then in China. The velvet revolution recipe of the Arabian spring, Ukraine, etc (if
it was such) didn't quite work however.
And the "empires strike back" - subtly and not so subtly. China offers for the London
stock exchange (let's not forget that the Chinese take-over of the London metal exchange went
without a fuss). Saudi Arabia next.
Maybe the message is "Just stay out of your ex-colonies"
Richard Gill, managing director of the UK company Drone Defence:
"But [drone defence is] military-grade technology and it's massively expensive. To install a
defensive system is extremely complex and the threat is evolving at such a rate that it's
very hard to keep up to date, because the adversaries change the type of technology they use
in a way that almost renders the defence moot."
The strikes, which unidentified U.S. officials have said involved at least 20 drones and
several cruise missiles, forced Saudi Arabia to shut down half its oil production capacity, or
5.7 million barrels per day of crude -- 5% of the world's global daily oil production.
The images, first obtained by The Associated Press, show that at least 19 strikes were
launched and 17 actually hit targets." CNBC
------------ --
I get a big kick out of those of you who think someone faked this attack for, what; An excuse to go to war with Iran?
An opening gambit to get the Iranians to talk to Trump at the UN? If so, that did not work.
Khamenei has said unequivocally that they are not going to talk to the US.
Mikey Pompeo is now going to travel to Saudi Arabia to see if he can jawbone the Saudis into
saying that it was undoubtedly the Iranians who done it. Would that be going on if the Saudis
had been in the plot?
So, some of you think that the Saudis blew up their own processing plant for some nefarious
reason.
Or, maybe the Izzies blew it up to start a war?Will wonders never cease? I mean you, not the attack. pl
"Iran has launched an unprecedented attack on the world's energy supply,"
declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.
Putting America's credibility on the line, Pompeo accused Iran of carrying out the devastating
attack on Saudi oil facilities that halted half of the kingdom's oil production, 5.7 million
barrels a day.
On Sunday, President Donald Trump did not identify Iran as the attacking nation, but did appear,
in a tweet, to back up the secretary of state:
"There is reason to believe that we know the culprit, are locked and loaded depending on
verification, but are waiting to hear from the Kingdom (of Saudi Arabia) as to who they believe
was the cause of this attack and under what terms we would proceed!"
Yemen's Houthi rebels, who have been fighting Saudi Arabia for four years and have used drones
to strike Saudi airport and oil facilities, claim they fired 10 drones from 500 kilometers away to
carry out the strikes in retaliation for Saudi air and missile attacks.
Pompeo dismissed their claim,
"There is no evidence the attacks came from Yemen."
But while the Houthis claim credit,
Iran denies all responsibility.
Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif says of Pompeo's charge, that
the U.S. has simply
replaced a policy of "maximum pressure" with a policy of "maximum deceit." Tehran is calling us
liars.
And, indeed, a direct assault on Saudi Arabia by Iran, a Pearl Harbor-type surprise attack on
the Saudis' crucial oil production facility, would be an act of war requiring Saudi retaliation,
leading to a Persian Gulf war in which the United States could be forced to participate.
Tehran being behind Saturday's strike would contradict Iranian policy since the U.S. pulled out
of the nuclear deal. That policy has been to avoid a military clash with the United States and
pursue a measured response to tightening American sanctions.
U.S. and Saudi officials are investigating the sites of the attacks, the oil production facility
at Abqaiq and the Khurais oil field.
According to U.S. sources, 17 missiles or drones were fired, not the 10 the Houthis
claim, and cruise missiles may have been used. Some targets were hit on the west-northwest facing
sides, which suggests they were fired from the north, from Iran or Iraq.
But according to The New York Times, some targets were hit on the west side, pointing away from
Iraq or Iraq as the source. But as some projectiles did not explode and fragments of those that did
explode are identifiable, establishing the likely source of the attacks should be only a matter of
time. It is here that the rubber meets the road.
Given Pompeo's public accusation that Iran was behind the attack, a Trump meeting with Iranian
President Hassan Rouhani at the U.N. General Assembly's annual gathering next week may be a dead
letter.
The real question now is what do the Americans do when the source of the attack is known and the
call for a commensurate response is put directly to our "locked-and-loaded" president.
If the perpetrators were the Houthis, how would Trump respond?
For the Houthis, who are native to Yemen and whose country has been attacked by the Saudis for
four years, would, under the rules of war, seem to be entitled to launch attacks on the country
attacking them.
Indeed, Congress has repeatedly sought to have Trump terminate U.S. support of the Saudi
war in Yemen.
If the attack on the Saudi oil field and oil facility at Abqaiq proves to be the work of Shiite
militia from inside Iraq, would the United States attack that militia whose numbers in Iraq have
been estimated as high as 150,000 fighters, as compared with our 5,000 troops in-country?
What about Iran itself?
If a dozen drones or missiles can do the kind of damage to the world economy as did those fired
on Saturday -- shutting down about 6% of world oil production -- imagine what a U.S.-Iran-Saudi war
would do to the world economy.
In recent decades, the U.S. has sold the Saudis hundreds of billions of dollars of military
equipment. Did our weapons sales carry a guarantee that we will also come and fight alongside the
kingdom if it gets into a war with its neighbors?
Before Trump orders any strike on Iran, would he go to Congress for authorization for his act of
war?
Sen. Lindsey Graham is already urging an attack on Iran's oil refineries to "break the
regime's back,"
while Sen. Rand Paul contends that "there's no reason the superpower of
the United States needs to be getting into bombing mainland Iran."
Divided again:
The War Party is giddy with excitement over the prospect of war
with Iran, while the nation does not want another war.
How we avoid it, however, is becoming difficult to see.
John Bolton may be gone from the West Wing, but his soul is marching on.
"... USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions... ..."
"... Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of its wealth. ..."
It's Monday September 16th, 2019 and the weeks starts off like this:
GM's UAW Strike
Yemeni Houti Rebels Drones wipe out 50% of Saudi Arabia's oil production
Trump tweets in response is "locked and loaded" implying a new US war in the ME
One of Trump's White House flunky's declared "it is better if Trump does not study an
issue" before making decisions (oh yea,"Stupid is what Stupid does")
Biden and S. Warren tied in the DEM race for 2020
Piketty's new Economics tome is out
PM Netanyahu is losing his re-election bid in Israel, to be determined by tomorrow's
Election
We live in interesting times...
...the question I pose for the times is 'Are the People are better lead by businessmen,
politicians, academics, or intellectuals?
Personally, I choose to be lead by people that do the right thing long term for the People,
not the most politically expedient or the one that makes the most money in the short run or
the smartest, etc.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions about USA
capability. Have not yet seen any press questions in that direction.
USA has been doing nearly everything in the Yemen war except pilot the planes. That Yemen can
sneak some drones into sensitive Saudi areas would seem to raise some questions...
Strategically what this means is that after wantonly bombing and attacking woefully poor
Yemen for years, rich Saudi Arabia is not capable of protecting almost the entire source of
its wealth.
The Americans have gotten themselves in a real bind with their maximum pressure campaign on Iran. This latest attack on Saudi
Arabia's oil production looks like an escalation of the previous attacks on shipping and the spy drone. It is not evident how
the Americans can respond to this latest attack.
As I see it their options are:
1. To let KSA respond to the Houthi attack and continue with their campaign to shut down Iranian oil production, without any
direct U.S. response to the attack. However this will achieve nothing, as next month Iran will up pressure again with another
attack on Middle-East oil assets, and we'll be back to the same place.
2. To bomb Iran's oil industry, as Pompeo and Graham suggest. However this risks blowing up the whole Middle East, as well
as the World's oil market and their own (Western) economies.
3. Forget about Iran and move the fight to maintain U.S. global hegemony to another front: back to Venezuela? Serbia? Hong
Kong? Taiwan? However the end result of such a move would more than likely be another humuliating defeat for the U.S.
4. Do as Stephen Wertheim / New York Times suggest and sue for peace. This will end the dream of U.S. World dominance, Globalization
and the current western based financial system. The U.S. will become no more than a heavily indebted regional power in a 'Multi-polar
World Order' led by China and Russia.
As I see it, the U.S. is out of options to continue their war for global dominance. #4 is the only viable option. But, as one
author argued in a recent paper (I don't have the reference), wars continue long after the victor is clear, because the loser
can't admit defeat (at heavy additional costs to the loser). I think that this is the position that the U.S. finds itself in now.
What the attack on Saudi oil infrastructure shows us, is that now Iran has united her proxys into one united front.
While they were cautious to not leave evidence of their involvment with the Houtis before, they now are putting their support
more and more into the open.
The attack seemed to have involved not only Houti drones (already build with help from Iran), but also Iranian backed forces
in Iraq, AND pro Iranian forces in Saudi Arabia itself. And maybe even other actors.
This is a major new development. Not only for the war on Yemen, but also in the context of Iran providing a credile detterence
against US+Saudi aggression.
They excalated with increasing levels, and one wonders, what could top this last attack off.
And i am pretty sure, we will find out sooner rather than later.
@ 27
WaPo: Abqaiq . .damaged on the west-northwest sides
That's it! It was Hezbollah for sure. (not)
Actually there were two targets, the Buqaiq (Abqaiq) oil processing plant and the Khurais oil field, both in the Eastern Province.
These attacks are not the first -- from longwarjournal:
Last month, the Houthis claimed another drone operation against Saudi's Shaybah oil field near the United Arab Emirates. At
more than 1,000 miles away from it's Yemen territory, that strike marked one of the Houthis farthest claimed attacks.
The Houthis also claimed a drone strike on the Abu Dhabi airport last year, but that has been denied by Emirati officials.
Additionally, a drone strike on Saudi's East-West oil pipeline near Riyadh earlier this year, which the Houthis claimed responsibility,
was allegedly conducted by Iranian-backed Iraqi militants. If accurate, that means the Houthi claim of responsibility acted
as a type of diplomatic cover for the Iraqi militants.
Since beginning its drone program last year, the Houthis have launched at least 103 drone strikes in Yemen and Saudi Arabia
according to data compiled by FDD's Long War Journal. . .
here . . .and more
here .
Really appreciated the write up on the Houthis attack.
Sounds like the attack left substantial damage. Another bigger issue underlying all of this, aside from Saudi inability to get
what it wants now from it's IPO, is the fact that the US Patriots did not detect this attack.
The Saudis spent billions last year on this defense system. Sounds like the clown Prince better give Russians a call about their
S-400.
But the US wouldn't appreciate that much, would they?
"... Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future "Russian aggression." ..."
"... That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro. ..."
"... When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy, warned that NATO expansion would be "the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .." ..."
"... As Matlock explains, the urgent transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could, as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen, "a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty and misery." ..."
"... The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but sometimes actually damaging." ..."
"... The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty], the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more." ..."
"... By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community. ..."
"... But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in, and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy. ..."
"... Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian people's choice of leaders. ..."
"... "Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers, drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996." ..."
"... Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals. ..."
When Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev received his peace prize in 1990, the Nobel Prize committee
declared that "the two mighty power blocs,
have managed to abandon their life-threatening confrontation" and confidently expressed that "It is our hope that we are now celebrating
the end of the Cold War." Recently, U.N. General Secretary António Guterres funereally closed the celebrations with the
realization that "The Cold War is back."
In a very short span of history, the window that had finally opened for Russia and the United States to build a new international
system in which they work cooperatively to address areas of common interest had slammed back closed. How was that historic opportunity
wasted? Why was the road from the Nobel committee's hope to the UN's eulogy such a short one?
The doctrinal narrative that is told in the U.S. is the narrative of a very short road whose every turn was signposted by Russian
lies, betrayal, deception and aggression. The American telling of history is a tale in which every blow to the new peace was a Russian
blow. The fact checked version offers a demythologized history that is unrecognizably different. The demythologized version is also
a history of lies, betrayal, deception and aggression, but the liar, the aggressor, is not primarily Russia, but America. It is the
history of a promise so historically broken that it laid the foundation of a new cold war.
But it was not the first promise the United States broke: it was not even the first promise they broke in the new cold war.
The Hot War
Most histories of the cold war begin at the dawn of the post World War II period. But the history of U.S-U.S.S.R. animosity starts
long before that: it starts as soon as possible, and it was hot long before it turned cold.
The label "Red Scare" first appeared, not in the 1940s or 50s, but in 1919. Though it is a chapter seldom included in the history
of American-Russian relations, America actively and aggressively intervened in the Russian civil war in an attempt to push the Communists
back down. The United States cooperated with anti-Bolshevik forces: by mid 1918, President Woodrow Wilson had sent 13,000 American
troops to Soviet soil. They would remain there for two years, killing and injuring thousands. Russian Premier Nikita Khrushchev would
later remind America of "the time you sent your troops to quell the revolution." Churchill would record for history the admission
that the West "shot Soviet Russians on sight," that they were "invaders on Russian soil," that "[t]hey armed the enemies of the Soviet
government," that "[t]hey blockaded its ports, and sunk its battleships. They earnestly desired and schemed for its downfall."
When the cause was lost, and the Bolsheviks secured power, most western countries refused to recognize the communist government.
However, realism prevailed, and within a few short years, by the mid 1920s, most countries had recognized the communist government
and restored diplomatic relations. All but the US It was not until several years later that Franklin D. Roosevelt finally recognized
the Soviet government in 1933.
The Cold War
It would be a very short time before the diplomatic relations that followed the hot war would be followed by a cold war. It might
even be possible to pin the beginning of the cold war down to a specific date. On April 22 and 23, President Truman told Soviet foreign
minister Vyacheslav Molotov to "Carry out his agreement" and establish a new, free, independent government in Poland as promised
at Yalta. Molotov was stunned. He was stunned because it was not he that was breaking the agreement because that was not what Roosevelt,
Churchill and Stalin had agreed to at Yalta. The final wording of the Yalta agreement never mentioned replacing Soviet control of
Poland.
The agreement that Roosevelt revealed to congress and shared with the world – the one that still dominates the textbook accounts
and the media stories – is not the one he secretly shook on with Stalin. Roosevelt lied to congress and the American people. Then
he lied to Stalin.
In exchange for Soviet support for the creation of the United Nations, Roosevelt secretly agreed to Soviet predominance in Poland
and Eastern Europe. The cold war story that the Soviet Union marched into Eastern Europe and stole it for itself is a lie: Roosevelt
handed it to them.
So did Churchill. If Roosevelt's motivation was getting the UN, Churchill's was getting Greece. Fearing that the Soviet Union
would invade India and the oil fields of Iran, Churchill saw Greece as the geographical roadblock and determined to hold on to it
at all cost. The cost, it turned out, was Romania. Churchill would give Stalin Romania to protect his borders; Stalin would give
Churchill Greece to protect his empire's borders. The deal was sealed on October 9, 1944.
Churchill says that in their secret meeting, he asked Stalin, "how would it do for you to have ninety percent predominance in
Romania, for us to have ninety percent predominance in Greece? . . ." He then went on to offer a fifty-fifty power split in in Yugoslavia
and Hungary and to offer the Soviets seventy-five percent control of Bulgaria. The exact conversation may never have happened, according
to the political record, but Churchill's account captures the spirit and certainly captures the secret agreement.
Contrary to the official narrative, Stalin never betrayed the west and stole Eastern Europe: Poland, Romania and the rest were
given to him in secret. Then Roosevelt lied to congress and to the world.
That American lie raised the curtain on the cold war.
The New Cold War
Like the Cold War, the new cold war was triggered by an American lie. It was a lie so duplicitous, so all encompassing, that
it would lead many Russians to see the agreement that ended the cold war as a devastating and humiliating deception that was really
intended to clear the way for the US to surround and finally defeat the Soviet Union. It was a lie that tilled the soil for all future
"Russian aggression."
At the close of the cold war, at a meeting held on February 9, 1990, George H.W. Bush's Secretary of State, James Baker, promised
Gorbachev that if NATO got Germany and Russia pulled its troops out of East Germany, NATO would not expand east of Germany and engulf
the former Soviet states. Gorbachev records in his memoirs that he agreed to Baker's terms "with the guarantee that NATO jurisdiction
or troops would not extend east of the current line." In Super-power Illusions , Jack F. Matlock Jr., who was the American
ambassador to Russia at the time and was present at the meeting, confirms Gorbachev's account, saying that it "coincides with my
notes of the conversation except that mine indicate that Baker added "not one inch." Matlock adds that Gorbachev was assured that
NATO would not move into Eastern Europe as the Warsaw Pact moved out, that "the understanding at Malta [was] that the United States
would not 'take advantage' of a Soviet military withdrawal from Eastern Europe." At the February 9 meeting, Baker assured Gorbachev
that "neither the President or I intend to extract any unilateral advantages from the processes that are taking place."
But the promise was not made just once, and it was not made just by the United States. The promise was made on two consecutive
days: first by the Americans and then by West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl. According to West German foreign ministry documents,
on February 10, 1990, the day after James Baker's promise, West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher told his Soviet counterpart
Eduard Shevardnadze "'For us . . . one thing is certain: NATO will not expand to the east.' And because the conversation revolved
mainly around East Germany, Genscher added explicitly: 'As far as the non-expansion of NATO is concerned, this also applies in general.'"
A few days earlier, on January 31, 1990, Genscher had said in a major speech that there would not be "an expansion of NATO territory
to the east, in other words, closer to the borders of the Soviet Union."
Gorbachev says the promise was made not to expand NATO "as much as a thumb's width further to the east." Putin also says mourns
the broken promise, asking at a conference in Munich in February 2007, "What happened to the assurances our Western partners made
after the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact? Where are those declarations today? No one even remembers them."
Putin went on to remind his audience of the assurances by pointing out that the existence of the NATO promise is not just the
perception of him and Gorbachev. It was also the view of the NATO General Secretary at the time: "But I will allow myself to remind
this audience what was said. I would like to quote the speech of NATO General Secretary Mr. [Manfred] Woerner in Brussels on 17 May
1990. He said at the time that: 'The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet
Union a firm security guarantee.' Where are those guarantees?"
Recent scholarship supports the Russian version of the story. Russian expert and Professor of Russian and European Politics at
the University of Kent, Richard Sakwa says that "[r]ecent studies demonstrate that the commitment not to enlarge NATO covered the
whole former Soviet bloc and not just East Germany." And Stephen Cohen, Professor Emeritus of Politics at Princeton University and
of Russian Studies and History at New York University, adds that the National Security Archive has now published the actual
documents detailing what Gorbachev was promised. Published on December 12, 2017, the documents finally, and authoritatively,
reveal that "The truth, and the promises broken, are much more expansive than previously known: all of the Western powers involved
– the US, the UK, France, Germany itself – made the same promise to Gorbachev on multiple occasions and in various emphatic ways."
That key promise made to Gorbachev was shattered, first by President Clinton and then subsequently supported by every American
President: NATO engulfed Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1999; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia
and Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009 and, most recently, Montenegro.
It was this shattered promise, this primal betrayal, this NATO expansion to Russia's borders that created the conditions and causes
of future conflicts and aggressions. When, in 2008, NATO promised Georgia and Ukraine eventual membership, Russia saw the threat
of NATO encroaching right to its borders. It is in Georgia and Ukraine that Russia felt it had to draw the line with NATO encroachment
into its core sphere of influence. Sakwa says that the war in Georgia was "the first war to stop NATO enlargement; Ukraine was the
second." What are often cited as acts of Russian aggression that helped maintain the new cold war are properly understood as acts
of Russian defense against US aggression that made a lie out of the promise that ended the Cold War.
When Clinton decided to break Bush's promise and betray Russia, George Kennen, father of the containment policy,
warned that NATO expansion would be
"the most fateful error of American foreign policy in the entire post-cold-war era." "Such a decision," he prophesied, "may be expected
to . . . restore the atmosphere of the cold war in East-West relations . . .."
The broken promise restored the cold war. Though it is the most significant root of the new cold war, it was not the first. There
was a prior broken promise, and this time the man who betrayed Russia was President H.W. Bush.
The end of the Cold War resulted from negotiations and not from any sort of military victory. Stephen Cohen says that "Presidents
Reagan and George H.W. Bush negotiated with the last Soviet Russian leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, what they said was the end of the
Cold War on the shared, expressed premise that it was ending 'with no losers, only winners.'"
The end of the Cold War and the end of the Soviet Union occurred so closely chronologically that it permitted the American mythologizers
to conflate them in the public imagination and create the doctrinal history in which the US defeat of the Soviet Union ended the
cold war. But the US did not defeat the Soviet Union. Gorbachev brought about what Sakwa calls a "self-willed disintegration of the
Soviet bloc." The Soviet Union came to an end, not by external force or pressure, but out of Gorbachev's recognition of the Soviet
Union's own self interest. Matlock flatly states that "pressure from governments outside the Soviet Union, whether from America or
Europe or anywhere else, had nothing to do with [the Soviet collapse]." "Cohen demythologizes the history by reinstating the chronological
order: Gorbachev negotiated the end of the cold war "well before the disintegration of the Soviet Union." The Cold War officially
ended well before the end of the Soviet Union with Gorbachev's December 7, 1988 address to the UN
Matlock says that "Gorbachev is right when he says that we all won the Cold War." He says that President Reagan would write in
his notes, "Let there be no talk of winners and losers." When Gorbachev compelled the countries of the Warsaw Pact to adopt reforms
like his perestroika in the Soviet Union and warmed them that the Soviet army would no longer be there to keep their communist
regimes in power, Matlock points out in Superpower Illusions that "Bush assured Gorbachev that the United States would not
claim victory if the Eastern Europeans were allowed to replace the Communist regimes that had been imposed on them." Both the reality
and the promise were that there was no winner of the Cold War: it was a negotiated peace that was in the interest of both countries.
When in 1992, during his losing re-election campaign, President Bush arrogantly boasted that "We won the Cold War!" he broke his
own promise to Gorbachev and helped plant the roots of the new cold war. "In psychological and political terms," Matlock says, "President
Bush planted a landmine under the future U.S.-Russian relationship" when he broke his promise and made that claim.
Bush's broken promise had two significant effects. Psychologically, it created the appearance in the Russian psyche that Gorbachev
had been tricked by America: it eroded trust in America and in the new peace. Politically, it created in the American psyche the
false idea that Russia was a defeated country whose sphere of interest did not need to be considered. Both these perceptions contributed
to the new cold war.
Not only was the broken promise of NATO expansion not the first broken American promise, it was also not the last. In 1997, when
President Clinton made the decision to expand NATO much more than an inch to the east, he at least signed the
Russia-NATO Founding Act , which explicitly
promised that as NATO expanded east, there would be no "permanent stationing of substantial combat forces." This obliterated American
promise planted the third root of the new cold war.
Since that third promise, NATO has, in the words of Stephen Cohen, built up its "permanent land, sea and air power near Russian
territory, along with missile-defense installations." US and NATO weapons and troops have butted right up against Russia's borders,
while anti-missile installations have surrounded it, leading to the feeling of betrayal in Russia and the fear of aggression. Among
the earliest moves of the Trump administration were the moving of NATO troops into Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria and nearby Norway.
Mikhail Gorbachev, who offered the West Russia and cooperation in place of the Soviet Union and Cold War, was rewarded with lies,
broken promises and betrayal. That was the sowing of the first seeds of the new cold war. The second planting happened during the
Yeltsin years that followed. During this stage, the Russian people were betrayed because their hopes for democracy and for an economic
system compatible with the West were both destroyed by American intervention.
The goal, Matlock too gently explains, "had to be a shift of the bulk of the economy to private ownership." What transpired was
what Naomi Klein called in The Shock Doctrine "one of the greatest crimes committed against a democracy in modern history."
The States allowed no gradual transition. Matlock says the "Western experts advised a clean break with the past and a transition
to private ownership without delay." But there was no legitimate private capital coming out of the communist system, so there was
no private money with which to privatize. So, there was only one place for the money to come. As Matlock explains, the urgent
transition allowed "privileged insiders[to] join the criminals who had been running a black market [and to] steal what they could,
as fast as they could." The sudden, uncompromising transition imposed on Russia by the United States enabled, according to Cohen,
"a small group of Kremlin-connected oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its
people into poverty and misery."
The rape of Russia was funded, overseen and ordered by the United States and handed over by President George H.W. Bush
to the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Much of their advice, Matlock says generously, "was not only useless, but
sometimes actually damaging."
Sometimes damaging? In the first year, millions lost their entire life savings. Subsidy cuts meant that many Russians didn't get
paid at all. Klein says that by 1992, Russians were consuming 40% less than they were the year before, and one third of them had
suddenly sunk below the poverty line. The economic policies wrestled onto Russia by the US and the transition experts and international
development experts it funded and sent over led to, what Cohen calls, "the near ruination of Russia." Russia's reward for ending
the Cold War and joining the Western economic community was, in Cohen's words, "the worst economic depression in peacetime, the disintegration
of the highly professionalized Soviet middle class, mass poverty, plunging life expectancy [for men, it had fallen below sixty],
the fostering of an oligarchic financial elite, the plundering of Russia's wealth, and more."
By the time Putin came to power in 2000, Cohen says, "some 75% of Russians were living in poverty." 75%! Millions and millions
of Russian lives were destroyed by the American welcoming of Russia into the global economic community.
But before Putin came to power, there was more Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin was a necessity for Clinton and the United States because
Yeltsin was the pliable puppet who would continue to enforce the cruel economic transition. But to continue the interference in,
and betrayal of, the Russian people economically, it would now be necessary to interfere in and betray the Russian democracy.
In late 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Boris Yeltsin won a year of special powers from the Russian Parliament: for
one year, he was to be, in effect, the dictator of Russia to facilitate the midwifery of the birth of a democratic Russia. In March
of 1992, under pressure from the, by now, impoverished, devastated and discontented population, parliament repealed the dictatorial
powers it had granted him. Yeltsin responded by declaring a state of emergency, re-bestowing upon himself the repealed dictatorial
powers. Russia's Constitutional Court ruled that Yeltsin was acting outside the constitution. But the US sided – against the Russian
people and against the Russian Constitutional Court – with Yeltsin.
Intoxicated with American support, Yeltsin dissolved the parliament that had rescinded his powers and abolished the constitution
of which he was in violation. In a 636-2 vote, the Russian parliament impeached Yeltsin. But, President Clinton again sided with
Yeltsin against the Russian people and the Russian law, backed him and gave him $2.5 billion in aid. Clinton was blocking the Russian
people's choice of leaders.
Yeltsin took the money and sent police officers and elite paratroopers to surround the parliament building. Clinton "praised the
Russian President has (sic) having done 'quite well' in managing the standoff with the Russian Parliament," as The New York Timesreported at the time.
Clinton added that he thought "the United States and the free world ought to hang in there" with their support of Yeltsin against
his people, their constitution and their courts, and judged Yeltsin to be "on the right side of history."
On the right side of history and armed with machine guns and tanks, in October 1993, Yeltsin's troops opened fire on the crowd
of protesters, killing about 100 people before setting the Russian parliament building on fire. By the time the day was over, Yeltsin's
troops had killed approximately 500 people and wounded nearly 1,000. Still, Clinton stood with Yeltsin. He provided
ludicrous cover for Yeltsin's
massacre , claiming that "I don't see that he had any choice . If such a thing happened in the United States, you would have
expected me to take tough action against it." Clinton's Secretary of State, Warren Christopher, said that the US supported Yeltsin's
suspension of parliament in these "extraordinary times."
In 1996, elections were looming, and America's hegemonic dreams still needed Yeltsin in power. But it wasn't going to happen without
help. Yeltsin's popularity was nonexistent, and his approval rating was at about 6%. According to Cohen, Clinton's interference in
Russian politics, his "crusade" to "reform Russia," had by now become
official policy . And so, America
boldly interfered directly in Russian elections . Three American political consultants, receiving "direct assistance from Bill
Clinton's White House," secretly ran Yeltsin's reelection campaign.
As Time magazine
broke the story , "For four months, a group of American political consultants clandestinely participated in guiding Yeltsin's
campaign."
"Funded by the US government," Cohen reports, Americans "gave money to favored Russian politicians, instructed ministers,
drafted legislation and presidential decrees, underwrote textbooks, and served at Yeltsin's reelection headquarters in 1996."
More incriminating still is that Richard Dresner, one of the three American consultants, maintained a direct line to Clinton's
Chief Strategist, Dick Morris. According to
reporting by Sean Guillory , in his book, Behind the Oval Office , Morris says that, with Clinton's approval, he received
weekly briefings from Dresner that he would give to Clinton. Based on those briefings, Clinton would then provide recommendations
to Dresner through Morris.
The US not only helped run Yeltsin's campaign, they helped pay for it. The US backed a $10.2 billion International Monetary Fund
(IMF) loan for Russia, the second-biggest loan the IMF had ever given. The New York Timesreported
that the loan was "expected to be helpful to President Boris N. Yeltsin in the presidential election in June." The Times explained
that the loan was "a vote of confidence" for Yeltsin who "has been lagging well behind in opinion polls" and added that the US Treasury
Secretary "welcomed the fund's decision."
Yeltsin won the election by 13%, and Time magazine's cover declared: "Yanks to the rescue: The secret story of how American
advisers helped Yeltsin win". Cohen reports that the US ambassador to Russia boasted that "without our leadership we would see a
considerably different Russia today." That's a confession of election interference.
Asserting its right as the unipolar victor of a Cold War it never won, betraying the central promise of the negotiated end
of the cold war by engulfing Russia's neighbors, arming those nations against its written and signed word and stealing all Russian
hope in capitalism and democracy by kidnapping and torturing Russian capitalism and democracy, the roots of the new cold war were
not planted by Russian lies and aggression, as the doctrinal Western version teaches, but by the American lies and aggression that
the fact checked, demythologized version of history reveals.
Ted Snider writes on analyzing patterns in US foreign policy and history.
Does he mean the treat of de-dollarization? The USA military is just an the enforcement arm
of Wall Street banks.
Notable quotes:
"... "It is increasingly clear that Russia and China want to disrupt the international order by gaining a veto over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions," ..."
"It is increasingly clear that Russia and China want to disrupt the international order
by gaining a veto over other nations' economic, diplomatic, and security decisions," Esper
said, seemingly unaware of the absurd hypocrisy of his words.
An Iranian parliamentary faction has come up with the idea of establishing a club of
sanctioned countries for concerted action against the US economic terrorism.
The chairman of the Parliament's faction on countering sanctions, Poormokhtar, gave a report
on the formation of the faction and its activities, as well as the ongoing efforts to establish
the club of sanctioned countries. Iran's FM, Zaraf, said this would be enhancing the already
existing alliance of Russia, China, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela against US economic
terrorism.
PressTV: Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, and Venezuela are among the nations that have
come out against the United States' use of sanctions to enforce its foreign policy around the
world. In what ways can they fight these US sanctions as a group?
Peter Koenig: Brilliant idea! Solidarity makes stronger and eventually will attract other
countries who are sick and tired of the US sanction regime, and since they have the backing of
Russia and China, that's a very strong alliance, especially an economic alliance. The sanction
regime can only be broken through economics, meaning decoupling from the western monetary
system. I said this before and say it again, at the risk of repeating myself.
After all, China is the world's largest and strongest economy in Purchasing Power GDP
measures which is the only comparison that really counts. I believe this solidarity alliance
against US sanctions is certainly worth a trial.
And personally, I think it will be a successful trial, as more countries will join, possibly
even non-sanctioned ones, out of solidarity against a common tyrant.
The countries in solidarity against sanctions, in addition to ignoring them -- and the more
they ignore them, the more other countries will follow-suit -- that's logical as fear
disappears and solidarity grows.
For example, Iran and Venezuela, oil exporting countries, could accompany their tankers by
war ships. Yes, it's an extra cost, but think of it as temporary and as a long-term gain. Would
"Grace I" have been accompanied by an Iranian war ship the Brits would not have dared
confiscating it. That's for sure.
PressTV: Many of the US sanctions have led to death of civilians in those particular
countries. At the same time, sanctions have also led to the improvement of these countries to
the point where domestic production in various fields advanced. Don't sanctions become
country-productive to US aims?'
PK: Of course, the sanctions are counter-productive. They have helped Russia to become
food-self-sufficient, for example. That was not Washington's intention and less so the
intention of the EU, who followed Washington's dictate like puppets.
Sanctions are like a last effort before the fall of the empire, to cause as much human
damage as possible, to pull other nations down with the dying beast. It has always been like
that starting with the Romans through the Ottoman's. They realize their time has come but can't
see a world living in peace. So they must plant as much unrest and misery as possible before
they disappear
That's precisely what's happening with the US.
Intimidation, building more and more military bases, all with fake money, as we know the
dollar is worth nothing – FIAT money – that the world still accepts but less
and less so, therefore military bases, deadly sanctions, and trade wars. Trump knows that a
trade war against China is a lost cause. Still, he can intimidate other countries by insisting
on a trade war with China or that's what he thinks.
PressTV: The more countries US sanctions, illegally, more people turn against the US:
doesn't that defeat the US so-called fight against terrorism and violence?
PK: Well, US sanction and the entire scheme of US aggression has nothing to do with fighting
terrorism, as you know. It's nothing but expanding US hegemony over the world, and if needed,
and more often than not, the US finances terrorism to fight proxy wars against their so-called
enemies, meaning anybody not conforming to their wishes and not wanting to submit to their
orders and not letting them exploit – or rather steal – their natural
resources.
Syria is a case in point. ISIL is funded and armed by the Pentagon, who buys Serbian
produced weapon to channel them through the Mid-East allies to Syrian terrorists, the ISIL or
similar kinds with different names -- just to confuse.
Venezuela too – the opposition consist basically of US trained, financed and armed
opposition "leaders" – who do not want to participate in totally democratic elections
– order of the US – boycott them. But as we have seen as of this day, the various
coup attempts by the US against their legitimate and democratically elected President,
Nicolás Maduro, have failed bitterly, and this despite the most severe sanctions regime
South American has known, except for Cuba, against whom the US crime has been perpetuated for
60 years.
So, nobody should have the illusion that Washington's wars are against terrorism. Washington
is THE terrorist regime that fights for world hegemony.
The collapse of neoliberalism naturally lead to the collapse of the US influence over the globe. and to the treats to the dollar
as the world reserve currency. That's why the US foreign policy became so aggressive and violent. Neocons want to fight for the
world hegemony to the last American.
Notable quotes:
"... US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational ..."
"... Bolton's brutal defenestration has raised hopes that Trump, who worries that voters may view him as a warmonger, may begin to moderate some of his more confrontational international policies. As the 2020 election looms, he is desperate for a big foreign policy peace-making success. And, in Trump world, winning matters more than ideology, principles or personnel. ..."
"... Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar international rules-based order. ..."
"... The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush's famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator, Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America's first rogue president. Whether or not he wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched. ..."
"... driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump's behaviour could become more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns Hopkins university. ..."
"... "The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible, intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed," Cohen wrote in Foreign Affairs journal . "Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] should not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy." ..."
"... This pending crisis stems from Trump's crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers. A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses the two. In Trump world, old rules don't apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible. ..."
"... The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled . It was classic Trump. He wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making, he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along. ..."
"... With Trump's blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq, Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria's Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever more likely. ..."
"... "the bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America's image – has failed and cannot be revived", ..."
With John Bolton dismissed, Taliban peace talks a fiasco and
a trade war with China, US foreign policy is ever more unstable and confrontational
It was by all accounts, a furious row.
Donald Trump was talking about relaxing sanctions on
Iran and holding a summit with its president, Hassan Rouhani, at this month's UN general assembly in New York. John Bolton, his hawkish
national security adviser, was dead against it and forcefully rejected Trump's ideas during a tense meeting in the Oval Office on
Monday.
...Bolton's brutal defenestration has raised hopes that Trump, who worries that voters may view him as a warmonger, may begin
to moderate some of his more confrontational international policies. As the 2020 election looms, he is desperate for a big foreign
policy peace-making success. And, in Trump world, winning matters more than ideology, principles or personnel.
The US president is now saying he is also open to a repeat meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong-un, to reboot stalled nuclear
disarmament talks. On another front, he has offered an olive branch to China, delaying a planned tariff increase on $250bn of Chinese
goods pending renewed trade negotiations next month. Meanwhile, he says, new tariffs on European car imports could be dropped, too.
Is a genuine dove-ish shift under way? It seems improbable. Since taking office in January 2017, Trump has not merely broken with
diplomatic and geopolitical convention. He has taken a wrecking ball to venerated alliances, multilateral cooperation and the postwar
international rules-based order. He has cosied up to autocrats, attacked old friends and blundered into sensitive conflicts he does
not fully comprehend.
The resulting new world disorder – to adapt George HW Bush's famous 1991 phrase – will be hard to put right. Like its creator,
Trump world is unstable, unpredictable and threatening. Trump has been called America's first rogue president. Whether or not he
wins a second term, this Trumpian era of epic disruption, the very worst form of American exceptionalism, is already deeply entrenched.
The suggestion that Trump will make nice and back off as election time nears thus elicits considerable scepticism. US analysts
and commentators say the president's erratic, impulsive and egotistic personality means any shift towards conciliation may be short-lived
and could quickly be reversed, Bolton or no Bolton.
Trump wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for a dramatic peace deal in Afghanistan with the Taliban, pushed ahead blindly,
then changed his mind at the last minute
Trump is notorious for blowing hot and cold, performing policy zigzags and suddenly changing his mind. "Regardless of who has
advised Mr Trump on foreign affairs all have proved powerless before [his] zest for chaos," the
New York Times noted last week
.
Lacking experienced diplomatic and military advisers (he has sacked most of the good ones), surrounded by an inner circle of cynical
sycophants such as secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and driven by a chronic desire for re-election, Trump's behaviour could become
more, not less, confrontational during his remaining time in office, suggested Eliot Cohen, professor of strategic studies at Johns
Hopkins university.
"The president has proved himself to be what many critics have long accused him of being: belligerent, bullying, impatient, irresponsible,
intellectually lazy, short-tempered and self-obsessed," Cohen wrote
in Foreign
Affairs journal . "Remarkably, however, those shortcomings have not yet translated into obvious disaster. But [that] should
not distract from a building crisis of US foreign policy."
This pending crisis stems from Trump's crudely Manichaean division of the world into two camps: adversaries/competitors and supporters/customers.
A man with few close confidants, Trump has real trouble distinguishing between allies and enemies, friends and foes, and often confuses
the two. In Trump world, old rules don't apply. Alliances are optional. Loyalty is weakness. And trust is fungible.
As a result, the US today finds itself at odds with much of the world to an unprecedented and dangerous degree. America, the postwar
global saviour, has been widely recast as villain. Nor is this a passing phase. Trump seems to have permanently changed the way the
US views the world and vice versa. Whatever follows, it will never be quite the same again.
Clues as to what he does next may be found in what he has done so far. His is a truly calamitous record, as exemplified by Afghanistan.
Having vowed in 2016 to end America's longest war, he began with a troop surge, lost interest and sued for peace. A withdrawal deal
proved elusive. Meanwhile, US-led forces
inflicted record civilian casualties .
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Pinterest The US and Israeli flags are projected on the walls of Jerusalem's Old City in May, marking the anniversary of
the US embassy transfer from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Photograph: Ahmad Gharabli/Getty
The crunch came last weekend when a bizarre, secret
summit with Taliban chiefs at Camp David was cancelled . It was classic Trump. He wanted quick 'n' easy, primetime credit for
a dramatic peace deal, pushed ahead blindly, then changed his mind at the last minute. Furious over a debacle of his own making,
he turned his wrath on others, notably Bolton – who, ironically, had opposed the summit all along.
All sides are now vowing to step up the violence, with the insurgents aiming to disrupt this month's presidential election in
Afghanistan. In short, Trump's self-glorifying Afghan reality show, of which he was the Nobel-winning star, has made matters worse.
Much the same is true of his North Korea summitry, where expectations were raised, then dashed when he got
cold feet
in Hanoi , provoking a backlash from Pyongyang.
The current crisis over Iran's nuclear programme is almost entirely of Trump's making, sparked by his decision last year to renege
on the 2015 UN-endorsed deal with Tehran. His subsequent "maximum pressure" campaign of punitive sanctions has
failed to cow
Iranians while alienating European allies. And it has led Iran to resume banned nuclear activities – a seriously counterproductive,
entirely predictable outcome.
Trump's unconditional, unthinking support for Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's aggressively rightwing prime minister – including tacit
US backing for his proposed annexation of swathes of the occupied territories – is pushing the Palestinians back to the brink, energising
Hamas and Hezbollah, and
raising tensions across the region .
With Trump's blessing, Israel is enmeshed in escalating, multi-fronted armed confrontation with Iran and its allies in Iraq,
Lebanon and Syria. Add to this recent violence in the Gulf, the disastrous Trump-backed, Saudi-led war in Yemen, mayhem in Syria's
Idlib province, border friction with Turkey, and Islamic State resurgence in northern Iraq, and a region-wide explosion looks ever
more likely.
The bipartisan consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it
in America's image – has failed and cannot be revived
Stephen Wertheim, historian
Yet Trump, oblivious to the point of recklessness, remains determined to unveil his absurdly unbalanced Israel-Palestine "deal
of the century" after Tuesday's Israeli elections. He and his gormless son-in-law, Jared Kushner, may be the only people who don't
realise their plan has a shorter life expectancy than a snowball on a hot day in Gaza.
... ... ...
...he is consistently out of line, out on his own – and out of control. This, broadly, is Trump world as it has come to exist
since January 2017. And this, in a nutshell, is the intensifying foreign policy crisis of which Professor Cohen warned. The days
when responsible, trustworthy, principled US international leadership could be taken for granted are gone. No vague change of tone
on North Korea or Iran will by itself halt the Trump-led slide into expanding global conflict and division.
Historians such as Stephen Wertheim say change had to come. US politicians of left and right mostly agreed that "the bipartisan
consensus forged in the 1990s – in which the US towered over the world and, at low cost, sought to remake it in America's image –
has failed and cannot be revived",Wertheim wrote earlier this year
. "But agreement ends there " he continued: "One camp holds that the US erred by coddling China and Russia, and urges a new competition
against these great power rivals. The other camp, which says the US has been too belligerent and ambitious around the world, counsels
restraint, not another crusade against grand enemies."
This debate among grownups over America's future place in the world will form part of next year's election contest. But before
any fundamental change of direction can occur, the international community – and the US itself – must first survive another 16 months
of Trump world and the wayward child-president's poll-fixated, ego-driven destructive tendencies.
Survival is not guaranteed. The immediate choice facing US friends and foes alike is stark and urgent: ignore, bypass and marginalise
Trump – or actively, openly, resist him.
Here are some of the key flashpoints around the globe
United Nations
Trump is deeply hostile to the UN. It embodies the multilateralist, globalist policy approaches he most abhors – because they
supposedly infringe America's sovereignty and inhibit its freedom of action. Under him, self-interested US behaviour has undermined
the authority of the UN security council's authority. The US has rejected a series of international treaties and agreements, including
the Paris climate change accord and the Iran nuclear deal. The UN-backed international criminal court is beyond the pale. Trump's
attitude fits with his "America First" isolationism, which questions traditional ideas about America's essential global leadership
role.
Germany
Trump rarely misses a chance to bash Germany, perhaps because it is Europe's most successful economy and represents the EU, which
he detests. He is obsessed by German car imports, on which protectionist US tariffs will be levied this autumn. He accuses Berlin
– and Europe– of piggy-backing on America by failing to pay its fair share of Nato defence costs. Special venom is reserved for Germany's
chancellor, Angela Merkel, most likely because she is
a woman who stands up to him . Trump recently insulted another female European leader, Denmark's
Mette Frederiksen, after she refused to sell him Greenland .
Israel
Trump has made a great show of unconditional friendship towards Israel and its rightwing prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, who
has skilfully maximised his White House influence. But by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem, officially condoning Israel's annexation
of the Golan Heights, and withdrawing funding and other support from the Palestinians, the president has abandoned the long-standing
US policy of playing honest broker in the peace process. Trump has also tried to exploit antisemitism for political advantage, accusing
US Democrat Jews who oppose Netanyahu's policies of "disloyalty" to Israel.
The USA might eventually pay the price for the economic rape and alienation of Russia by
criminal Clinton and his coterie
Notable quotes:
"... Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at this stage of history. ..."
"... The truth is that after the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became completely unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR. ..."
"... Still as an imperial state and the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more on financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country. ..."
"The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to
those acting in bad faith"
USA foreign policy since 70th was controlled by neocons who as a typical Trotskyites
(neoliberalism is actually Trotskyism for the rich) were/are hell-bent of world domination
and practice gangster capitalism in foreign policy.
Bolton attitude to UN is very symptomatic for the neocons as a whole.
Madeline "not so bright" Allbright was the first swan. As well as Clinton attempts to
bankrupt and subdue Russia and criminal (in a sense of no permission from the UN) attack on
Yugoslavia. Both backfired: Russia became permanently hostile. The fact he and his coterie
were not yet tried by something like Nuremberg tribunal is only due to the USA dominance at
this stage of history.
The truth is that after the dissolution of the USSR the USA foreign policy became
completely unhinged. And inside the country the elite became cannibalistic, as there was no
external threat to its dominance in the form of the USSR.
The USA stated to behave like a typical Imperial state (New Rome, or, more correctly,
London) accepting no rules/laws that are not written by themselves (and when it is convenient
to obey them) with the only difference from the classic imperial states that the hegemony it
not based on the military presence/occupation ( like was the case with British empire)
Although this is not completely true as there are 761 US Military Bases across the planet
and only 46 Countries with no US military presence. Of them, seven countries with 13 New
Military Bases were added since 09/11/2001.In 2001 the US had a quarter million troops posted
abroad.
Still as an imperial state and the center of neoliberal empire the USA relies more
on financial instruments and neoliberal comprador elite inside the country.
With the collapse of neoliberal ideology in 2008 the USA centered neoliberal empire
experiences first cracks. Brexit and election of Trump widened the cracks in a sense of
further legitimizing the ruling neoliberal elite (big middle finger for Hillary was addressed
to the elite as whole)
If oil price exceed $100 per barrel there will yet another crack or even repetition of the
2008 Great Recession on a new level (although we may argue that the Great Recession never
ended and just entered in Summers terms "permanent stagnation: phase)
Although currently with a bully at the helm the USA empire still going strong in forcing
vassals and competitors to reconsider their desire to challenge the USA that situation will
not last. Trump currently is trying to neutralize the treat from China by rejecting classic
neoliberal globalization mechanism as well as signed treaties like WTO. He might be
successful in the short run but in the "long run" that undermines the USA centered neoliberal
empire and speed up its demise. .
In the long run the future does not look too bright as crimes committed by the USA during
triumphal period of neoliberalism hangs like albatross around the USA neck.
EU now definitely wants to play its own game as Macron recently stated and which Merkel
tacitly supports. If EU allies with Russia it will became No.1 force in the world with the
USA No. 2. With severe consequences for the USA.
If Russia allied with China the USA Np.1 position will hinge of keeping EU vassals in
check and NATO in place. Without them it will became No.2 with fatal consequences for the
dollar as world reserve currency and sudden change of the USA financial position due to the
level of external debt and requires devaluation of the dollar.
Looks like 75 year after WWII the world started to self-organize a countervailing force
trying to tame the USA with some interest expressed by such players as EU, Russia, China,
India, Iran, Turkey, Pakistan and even Saudi Arabia. As well as ( in the past; and possibly
in the future as neoliberal counterrevolutions in both countries probably will end badly) by
Brazil and Argentina.
Only Canada, Australia and probably UK can be counted as the reliable parts of the USA
empire. That's not much.
"... Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the targeted regimes. ..."
"... At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion. In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million barrels. ..."
"... The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries. ..."
"... The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer, agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy supplies to Europe. ..."
"... As stated by Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program. ..."
"... The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage. ..."
"... In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach, increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is transited each day? ..."
"... It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump publicly and repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President. ..."
"... The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on systems that are controlled by the USA. ..."
"... Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a city. ..."
"... John Bolton is clueless. He's a throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an idiot. ..."
"... Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get their balance sheets under control. ..."
Yves here. Even though most
readers know the general point very well, that US trade and financial sanctions haven't brought
targets to their knees, and had instead pushed them to find allies, but it's useful to have
detail to flesh out the story. There are some bits one can quibble with, like the "annexation
of Crimea" bit, and the US objectives for its sanctions against Russia. At least under the
Obama Administration, the belief was that they would damage the economy severely and force a
regime change.
By Robert Berke, an energy financial analyst with experience as a government consultant
to the State of Alaska. Originally published at
OilPrice
Trade wars and sanctions are economic weapons against rival regimes, and like actual
military warfare, often lead to unanticipated and sometimes devastating blowback from the
targeted regimes.
A prime example was President Obama sanctioning Russia over its annexation of Crimea. The
sanctions were designed to block Russia from any access to western financing, aimed at causing
a dire financial and economic crisis in Russia that would force it to relinquish Crimea and end
support for Ukraine's breakaway territories.
In fact, the sanctions did cause Russia to enter a short-lived recession. But it also had
other, much more drastic results for the West. It forced Russia to move closer to China, and
Moscow saw Beijing as a great alternative to western financing for Russian industries.
At the same time, western companies were forced to withdraw from Russian mega-deals because
of sanctions. The best-known example was Exxon, forced by sanctions to walk away from an Arctic
joint venture with Russia's state-owned oil giant, Rosneft, where it had invested $3.2 billion.
In their very first effort, the partners successfully drilled oil wells containing 750 million
barrels.
As noted by Reuters, the withdrawal was costly:
Exxon will post an after-tax loss of $200 million as a result of pulling out of the
Rosneft deal, but the true costs for the company run much deeper. Exploring and developing
giant offshore fields in Russia was supposed to provide long-term growth for the company,
and, in recent years, has seen falling reserves.
But the opportunity losses are likely to be far higher for Exxon, the company that famously
missed the US shale revolution. The long-term deal with Rosneft, expected to continue for
decades, included exploration for oil in the Black Sea, enormous shale resources in Western
Siberia, and the development of three large blocks in the Arctic (Kara Sea).
The trade war with China that has led to tariffs on billions of dollars in Chinese exports
to the US, and as a result, Russia and China have moved even closer. It remains an absolute
mystery why no one in the west had foreseen the blowback from economic warfare leading to an
alliance between two of its most powerful adversaries.
China's major state-owned oil companies and its Silk Road fund each became 10% partners in
Russia's first major Arctic LNG (liquified natural gas), project in the Yamal Peninsula,
undertaken with Novatek, Russia's largest independent gas producer. The project offers great
prospects for enormous expansion.
The US acts as if it has been blind-sided by the Russian/China moves, even though years
before it undertook economic warfare against them, China, the world's largest energy importer,
agreed to finance oil and gas multi-billion-dollar pipelines in neighboring Russia. Now Russia
has become China's largest energy supplier, equaling or perhaps even surpassing its energy
supplies to Europe.
A similar scenario is taking place in the Persian Gulf where the US has withdrawn from the
Iran nuclear deal, while imposing economic sanctions on Iranian oil exports. The French energy
giant, Total, that in recent years has been a leading international oil company in that
country, was forced to withdraw because of sanctions, just like Exxon in Russia's Arctic, it
left billions of dollars on the table.
This may also answer the question as to why French Prime Minister Macron was so intent on
inviting the Iranian Foreign Secretary to the recent G7 meeting in France. It's also no secret
that French carmakers Peugeot and Renault are the main suppliers to Iran's auto assembly
plants.
As stated by
Global Village Space (GBS) , China and Russia rushed to aid Iran, with China replacing
Total, in a 25-year deal estimated to be worth some $400 billions. With that, China inherits a
bonanza, providing much needed finance and technology to a country that was and could again
become one of the world's leading energy producers. China is looking to finance $280 billion to
develop Iran's gas, oil and petrochemicals industries, along with $120 billion to improve
transport and manufacturing, making it a key partner in China's Road and Belt program.
The deal also gives China the right to buy any or all Iranian oil, gas, and
petrochemicals products at a minimum guaranteed 12% discount to global benchmarks, plus
an additional discount of 6-8% for risk adjusted compensation. Financing will proceed using
local currencies, avoiding the costs of converting to a hard currency like the US dollar or the
Euro, giving the Beijing yet another 10% cost advantage.
GBS further reports that the security for these projects will include up to 5,000 Chinese
security personnel on the ground in Iran to protects Chinese projects and to safeguard the
transit of energy products from Iran to China, including security for the very strategic Hormuz
Straits.
In direct defiance of US sanctions against Iran, China has stepped into the breach,
increasing its oil purchases from Iran while becoming Iran's major energy trade and finance
partner. Like Russia, it seems that Iran is moving towards a military alliance with China. If
the west worries about China's expansive moves in the South China Sea, along China's own
borders, what to make then of China moving in on Hormuz, where some 30% of world oil is
transited each day?
If these are considered winning policies for the West, one has to ask what failure looks
like.
The West is already slowly becoming aware of the blowback this disastrous policy has caused.
Evidence for this can be found in Macron's efforts to persuade Trump towards a peaceful
resolution with Iran.
It is well known that the US has been in secret meetings with Iran representatives, much to
the dismay of the Saudi Arabia and Israel. As Bloomberg reports, after the G7 meeting, Trump
publicly and
repeatedly stated he was ready to meet with Iran's President, Hassan Rouhani. Bloomberg
also reported that in a meeting with his Cabinet, Trump announced that he was ready to ease
sanctions as a possible way to open negotiations between the two countries. Treasury Secretary
Mnuchin agreed with the President, while National Security Advisor Bolton voiced strong
opposition, that only one day later, led to his firing. Secretary of State Pompeo stated that
Trump may meet on the sidelines of the upcoming UN meeting with Iran's President.
The firing of Bolton was
immediately followed by a fall in the price of oil and gold. Allowing Iran to continue to
increase supplies into already well supplied oil markets will add downward pressure on oil
prices. For the Trump administration, this is not necessarily a bad thing unhappy consumers at
the gas pump make for unhappy voters.
Similarly, the Trump Administration badly needs to move towards ending the trade war with
China in order to calm global markets. The recent announcement of the resumption of trade talks
between the US and China in October may provide an opportunity for a similar easing of tariffs
and a path towards further resolution.
Although these actions could help to quell global tensions, it may be too late to reverse
some of the serious damage caused by US-led economic warfare. Once China positions itself in
Iran, it will not likely be interested in withdrawing from its new strategic position in the
Middle East, that it gained as a result of US near sighted foreign policy.
Prior to the election, we may see a breakthroughs in the trade war, and the alleviation of
sanctions with Russia, Iran, China, and perhaps even North Korea, but the US will almost
certainly see the negative consequences from adversaries it helped to expand and
strengthen.
Can't speak much about the effects of the Chinese sanctions but I know a little bit about
the Russian ones. These Russian sanctions are biting hard but not the way they were intended
and it is not only the big oil companies that are losing big. Since they kicked in Russia has
lost about $50 billion in trade with the European Union which kinda stings. But in the same
time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion.
Considering that fact that these
sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US, that is a very
expensive price tag. The US lost only about $17 billion but I remember reading that after the
sanctions kicked in, trade between the U and Russia actually increased. Europe is a big loser
here, particularly with agriculture. When the EU sanctioned Russian products to the EU, the
Russians did the same to them a few weeks later which came as a shock. Since then Russia has
made huge investments into growing their own food crops and those markets will never come
back again for the EU. As an example, Russia is once more a world leader in the production of
wheat second only to the US and has learned the value of autarky.
You see these results in all sorts of areas as the country started phasing out imports and
replacing them with domestically made products. They even started making marine engines out
of necessity as they were denied purchase of foreign ones. People might remember how Russia
was going to buy two specially built ships from France but France reneged under pressure from
Washington.
France not only had to give back all the money the Russians paid but also had to
compensate Russia for all related costs that the Russians made. In the end France paid Russia
over a billion dollars which was triple what the Russians initially paid. And now the
Russians are constructing their own ships of this class in the Crimea using the knowledge
acquired from France. Perhaps it is things like this that has cause Macron to open up
contacts with Russia once more in spite of what Washington demands.
Add in the purchase of gold stocks, developing financial systems in case the US cuts
Russia off from the SWIFT clearance systems, the development of weaponry that makes the
deployment of nuclear missile systems in Europe futile, you realise that Washington has
massively underestimated the response of counties like Russia, China and Iran and depended on
unicorn wishes instead.
But in the same time frame, the European Union has lost about $240 billion. Considering
that fact that these sanctions were never for their benefit but for solidarity with the US,
that is a very expensive price tag.
Well, Looks like Donald Trump let "The Swamp(tm)" run loose and they went and over-torqued
the screws!
Some decision makers in within the EU have begun to see the US sanctions against
everything and everyone as having the true goals of ablating EU's influence on the world
while hampering EU-based businesses. There are initiatives and polices that hints at "cutting
the cord" are quietly being introduced.
The EU defence industry initiative, the ECB's money transfer service, the EU army (or
defence collaboration :) are all longer term policies aimed at reducing the EU's reliance on
systems that are controlled by the USA.
The 'North Stream' pipeline and keeping the Iran deal kinda alive are more immediate and
direct challenges, as was the total unwillingness to join in any of the planned military
adventures involving Syria and Iran.
France is being rather open about about it. Possibly to test out on behalf of the EU what
the USA is actually willing to do to exact revenge and enforce compliance, possibly also
because opposing the USA in France remains a reliable way to win votes.
It's not just Trump. Our Congress is totally at the beck of special pleaders such as LNG
exporters and arms companies. All seek to use the US economic weapon to further their own
interests.
Plus, Russia is determinedly GMO free. The more the US goes down the GMO route, the less
likely the food trade with the EU – the European dogs wont eat GMO dogfood.
Post Brexit perhaps, Britain will accept US foods, all the more reason to insist on a proper
border if NI remains part of the 'UK'.
It's not just GMO, but the level and quality of technocratic oversight. US government
agencies are incapable of regulating anything in the private sector. While the EU is still
greatly influenced by private money, it has not completely sold out.
What is ignored by media is the harm sanctions inflict on the people living in these
countries. I think it should be considered a crime against humanity and our leaders should be
prosecuted. Sanctions are a weapon that is just as harmful as weapons to kill. We only seem
to look at the economic effects and ignore the social effects.
Sanctions are the modern equivalent of siege warfare, only the target is a nation, not a
city.
I've known in a vague intuitive way that US sanctions would alienate nations and isolate
the US, it's useful seeing how exactly these sanctions are backfiring with more nuance!
What is the next step after you have sanctioned everything and everyone and the reaction
is a shrug and a work around? Sanctions do have their bite, but they are, or are becoming, a
more effective tool for global economic and political realignment than a means to accomplish
their stated purpose.
Good question. I am wondering the same thing. There is a vague pattern here with Russia,
the most resource-rich oil producer. We don't want Russia to take off too fast. What can be
left in the ground should be left in the ground. And maybe that was the existential threat
posed by Exxon – a private, profit seeking US corporation geared to do everything fast
in order to make their profits.
Just thinking about slamming the breaks on manufacturing and
consumption and how this can make a mess of the oil industry if it is going for profits
– race to the bottom (currently). Rather, anyone thinking straight would want to
conserve oil, control it's production and marketing. John Bolton is clueless. He's a
throwback to ruthless American competition and cowboy capitalism. And he appears to be an
idiot.
There was a discussion of China's role in manufacturing drugs for Big Pharma on the news
last night, truly frightening.
They've already been found to be selling us contaminated drugs, what happens when they
refuse to deliver anything other than fentanyl?
I find it hard to understand how we're going to recover from the damage done by the
short-sighted, wholesale outsourcing of our manufacturing to China.
Given the centrality of drugs to American life, we should categorize them as sensitive
items of national security and declare a war on foreign drugs. That would brilliantly combine
the failed policies of the past with the failed policies of the present. We could make
exceptions for most-favored nations like Colombia or Afghanistan.
As in military conflicts, the fog of geoeconomic war together with partisan lens and poor
leadership can prevent adversaries from developing an accurate assessment of reality. The
writer has raised some examples that support his view pertaining to pushback, and he could be
right as The Rev Kev so eloquently pointed out here WRT Russia. However, whether his article
provides an accurate overview of the current state of play remains an open question IMO.
Setting aside deeply troubling questions about our national values and whether sanctions
should ever be employed due to their very damaging effects on domestic populations, together
with their evident past failure to realize policy goals, there are credible accounts that
China is now confronting a U.S. dollar shortage; that China has significant issues in its
financial system and economy; and that the people of China are seeing sharply rising food
prices as a result of decreased supplies of pork and soybeans. These issues are being
perceived as sufficient to cause China's leaders to be receptive to negotiating resolution of
the current tariffs, trade, intellectual property, and investment impasse on terms favorable
to the U.S. Whether this will be so remains to be seen, of course.
A multi-polar world became a uni-polar world with the fall of the Berlin Wall and Francis
Fukuyama said it was the end of history. It was all going so well, until the neoliberals got to work. The US created an open, globalised world with the Washington Consensus. China went from almost nothing to become a global super power.
That wasn't supposed to happen, let's get the rocket scientists onto it. Maximising profit is all about reducing costs. China had coal fired power stations to provide cheap energy.
China had lax regulations reducing environmental and health and safety costs.
China had a low cost of living so employers could pay low wages.
China had low taxes and a minimal welfare state.
China had all the advantages in an open globalised world. "The Washington Consensus was always going to work better for China than the US"
the rocket scientists.
If the US left this running it would be China first and America second. PANIC!
It seems since about the Vietnam war era, US FP has been run by hubristic idiots with
delusions of grandeur. Its foreign policy 101 that you never, never, set policy to drive your
2 largest rivals to alliance.
Yet these morons did exactly that. Since Trump, there have been many retirements form the
State Dept.
And maybe that's not such a bad thing. They show no evidence of competence.
Russia is leasing out old collective farm lands that was abandoned in the eastern part of
the country to Asian countries to farm and grow the export food products needed. It seems the
collective farms were abandoned and now the Russian government is re-purposing the vast
amounts of land available.
"Russia is now considering requests from Asian firms to farm another 1 million hectares
(2.5 million acres) -- an area roughly the size of Jamaica, according to the head of a
government agency."
It may be said that Trump's tariffs are the best things that could have happened to China
and Russia.
Frankly, I think it has pushed up consumer spending and that is about it. In other words,
this economy has overcapacity problems in the auto sector and its relation to junk corporate
debt, is not good.
Consumer spending is going to struggle the rest of the year as it rebalances and
manufacturing is heading to a full blown recession by December as auto companies try and get
their balance sheets under control.
"... Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down. ..."
"... Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as whatever was most useful politically. ..."
"Carlson concluded by warning about the many other Boltons in the federal bureaucracy,
saying that "war may be a disaster for America, but for John Bolton and his fellow neocons,
it's always good business."
He went on to slam Trump's special representative for Iran and contender to replace Bolton,
Brian Hook, as an "unapologetic neocon" who "has undisguised contempt for President Trump, and
he particularly dislikes the president's nationalist foreign policy." Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif echoed Carlson hours later in a tweet, arguing that "Thirst for war
– maximum pressure – should go with the warmonger-in-chief." Reuters and
Haaretz
-------------
Yes, people tend to forget that Bolton and all the other neocons are worshipers at the altar
of a secular religion imported to the US by members of the Frankfurt School of Trotskyite
German professors in the 1930s. These people had attempted get the Nazis to consider them
allies in a quest for an ordered world. Alas for them they found that the Nazi scum would not
accept them and in fact began preparations to hunt them down.
Thus the migration to America and in particular to the University of Chicago where they
developed their credo of world revolution under that guidance of a few philosopher kings like
Leo Strauss, the Wohlstetters and other academic "geniuses" They also began an enthusiastic
campaign of recruitment of enthusiastic graduate students who carefully disguised themselves as
whatever was most useful politically.
They are not conservative at all, not one bit. Carlson was absolutely right about that.
They despise nationalism. They despise the idea of countries. In that regard they are like
all groups who aspire to globalist dominion for their particular ideas.
Ukraine is mainly the result of attempt of the USA to encircle Russia well as EU design for economic
Drang nach Osten -- attempt to displace Russia in xUSSR
republics.
So they pushed Ukraine into the pat that Baltic republic were already known for.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a "first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000 civilians. ..."
"... In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept. ..."
"... She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience." ..."
"... Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion" in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War. ..."
"... NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not just in the near abroad but within Russia itself." ..."
"... To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of [Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II." ..."
"... Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the 1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military. ..."
"... American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches emblazoned on their sleeves. ..."
On Saturday September 7, Russia and Ukraine agreed to a prisoner swap which has brought
hope of improved relations between the two countries and an end to the 5-year long conflict in
Eastern Ukraine.
A peace accord is being planned for later this month in Normandy involving Ukraine, Russia,
France and Germany.
Ukraine's newly elected comedian president Volodymyr Zelensky called the prisoner exchange a
"first step" in ending the war in Eastern Ukraine, which has killed an estimated 13,000
civilians.
The Ukraine War remains largely unknown to the American public even though the United States
has had a great stake in it.
The war started after a coup d'états in Ukraine in February 2014, which overthrew the
democratically elected pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovuch.
In a subsequent referendum, 89% in Donetsk and 96% in Luhansk in Eastern Ukraine voted for
independence, which the new government of Petro Poroshenko government did not accept.
The United States was a heavy backer of the coup and dirty war that unfolded in the
East.
Victoria Nuland, the head of the State Department's European desk, traveled to Ukraine three
times during the protests that triggered the coup, handing out cookies to demonstrators.
She told U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a telephone conversation that was tapped and
later leaked that Arseniy Yatsenyuk, neoliberal head of the "Fatherland" Party, should be Prime
Minister as he was thought to have the "economic" and "governing experience."
Nuland further revealed that the U.S. had invested over $5 billion in "democracy promotion"
in Ukraine since 1991 through the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was carrying on
the kind of work previously undertaken by the CIA during the Cold War.
Ukraine has long been considered an important bridge between Eastern and Western Europe and
holds lucrative oil and gas deposits.
NED president Carl Gershman called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step
towards toppling [Russian President Vladimir] Putin who "may find himself on the losing end not
just in the near abroad but within Russia itself."
To help achieve this end, the Obama administration pledged $1 billion in loan guarantees to
the post-coup government in Ukraine, which Putin considered as the "ideological heirs of
[Stephen] Bandera, Hitler's accomplice in World War II."
Swayed by a slick lobbying campaign backed by supporters of the Afghan mujahidin in the
1980s looking for a new cause and by the Senate's Ukraine Caucus, the Obama administration
further provided nearly $600 million in security assistance to the Ukrainian military.
It was supplied with counter-artillery radars, anti-tank systems, armored vehicles and
drones in a policy expanded upon by Trump.
Before and after the Ukrainian military's campaign began, Secretary of State John Kerry, CIA
Director John Brennan, and Vice President Joe Biden visited Kiev, followed by a flow of senior
Pentagon officials.
A back-door arms pipeline was set up through the United Arab Emirates and Blackwater
mercenaries were allegedly deployed.
American military advisers embedded in the Ukrainian Defense Ministry provided rocket
propelled grenades, carried out training exercises and planned military operations including
with members of the fascist Azov battalion, which had Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel patches
emblazoned on their sleeves.
Obama's National Security adviser, Samantha Power, claimed that the [Ukrainian] governments
"response [to alleged provocations by eastern rebels] [was] reasonable, it is proportional, and
frankly it is what any of our countries would have done."
The Ukrainian military and allied warlord and neo-Nazi militias were not acting reasonably
or proportionally, however, when they carried out artillery and air attacks on cities and
struck residential buildings, shopping malls, parks, schools, hospitals and orphanages in
Eastern Ukraine, and tortured and executed POWs in what amounted to clear war crimes.
NYU Professor Stephen Cohen notes that even TheNew York Times , which mainly
deleted atrocities from its coverage, described survivors in Slovyansk living "as if in the
Middle Ages."
That the American public knows nothing of these events is a sad reflection of the
superficiality of our media and decline in the quality of international news coverage.
It is also a testament to the failing of the political left, which has embraced the cause of
immigrant and Palestinian rights and fighting climate change, legitimately, but neglected the
plight of the Eastern Ukrainian people. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jeremy Kuzmarov
"... After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism. ..."
"... In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and by such means as we see fit." ..."
"... Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system." ..."
"... The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another. ..."
This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One based on the principle of non-interference,
respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual
cooperation. A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is possible and even though
there are currently players around the world who are striving in that direction we need look no further than our own history for
inspiration. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.
(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article provided below.) --
The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign policy was the politician Henry Wallace,
who served as vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the
Progressive Party.
After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace promoted a new vision for America's
role in the world that suggested that rather than playing catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with
partners to establish a new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a post-war world that offered "freedom
from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens, rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting that the Second World War was being
fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and
France give up their colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with a focus on peaceful cooperation.
In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine, had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in
war would allow the United States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see fit and
by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the God-given right to exploit other
nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there
must be neither military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was to be based on non-interference
in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core constituency for US foreign policy has been
corporations, rather than the "common man" either in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign
relations have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result the military was transformed
from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.
-- - Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but rather "economic assistance without
political conditions to further the independent economic development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high
"the principle of self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial areas." He saw the key
policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance
of the right of peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."
--
Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest internationalism in US foreign policy that
is in essence American. His approach was proactive not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who
can only suggest that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who embrace sanctions
and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.
Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce tensions between the North and the
South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many
other politicians of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against Trump), progressives should call for
a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions
and reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to NATO and the perpetuation of the
dangerous global rift between East and West that it perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough, progressives should seek to create new
synergies between China and the US economically, politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them," China's BRI proposes an open plan
for development that is not grounded in the models of French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and
science projects that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously ignored by American
and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment
China does not demand that free market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global
investment banks to ravish.
-- The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing
its political culture and kicking its addiction to a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying
on militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that the US work in conjunction with
nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable future rather than creating one failed state after another.
Thanks to Mattis and company, Trump's purported desire to withdraw from fruitless Middle
Eastern wars has been stifled, the result being business as usual for the
military-industrial-complex and national security state. And why not? Since resigning his post,
Mattis has burst through the "revolving door" of the arms industry,
reclaiming his seat on the board of the fifth largest defense contractor, General Dynamics.
Albert Einstein famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said , "The definition of insanity is
doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." He might just as
easily have been describing the career of James Mattis, who has been proven wrong again and
again and again, from Iraq to Afghanistan to Syria.
You have to be mad to let them rope you into that system for so long and so deep. Go and
join up, shoot a few people so you have something to brag about in the pub, but leave early
so the killing frenzies do not define you.
Tribalism is what he calls it? It's the minions pushing back America's policies and
monopolies. Costly for Americans, deadly slavery for others!
Usually a forum for anodyne statements about international cooperation and proper
environmental stewardship, the lid was blown off the latest Arctic Council meeting in May when
Pompeo delivered an unabashedly martial and provocative speech that deserves far more attention
than it got at the time. So let's take a little tour of what may prove a historic proclamation
(in the grimmest sense possible) of a new Washington doctrine for the Far North.
"In its first two decades, the Arctic Council has had the luxury of focusing almost
exclusively on scientific collaboration, on cultural matters, on environmental research," the
secretary of state began mildly. These
were, he said, "all important themes, very important, and we should continue to do those. But
no longer do we have that luxury. We're entering a new age of strategic engagement in the
Arctic, complete with new threats to the Arctic and its real estate, and to all of our
interests in that region."
In what turned out to be an ultra-hardline address, Pompeo claimed that we were now in a new
era in the Arctic. Because climate change -- a phrase Pompeo, of course, never actually uttered
-- is now making it ever more possible to exploit the region's vast resource riches, a scramble
to gain control of them is now officially underway. That competition for resources has
instantly become enmeshed in a growing geopolitical confrontation between the U.S., Russia, and
China, generating new risks of conflict.
On the matter of resource exploitation, Pompeo could hardly contain his enthusiasm.
Referring to the derision that greeted William Seward's purchase of Alaska in 1857, he
declared:
"Far from the barren backcountry that many thought it to be in Seward's time, the
Arctic is at the forefront of opportunity and abundance. It houses 13% of the world's
undiscovered oil, 30% of its undiscovered gas, and an abundance of uranium, rare earth
minerals, gold, diamonds, and millions of square miles of untapped resources."
Of equal attraction, he noted, was the possibility of vastly increasing maritime commerce
through newly de-iced trans-Arctic trade routes that will link the Euro-Atlantic region with
Asia. "Steady reductions in sea ice are opening new passageways and new opportunities for
trade," he enthused. "This could potentially slash the time it takes to travel between Asia and
the West by as much as 20 days Arctic sea lanes could come [to be] the 21st century's Suez and
Panama Canals." That such "steady reductions in sea ice" are the sole consequence of climate
change went unmentioned, but so did another reality of our warming world. If the Arctic one day
truly becomes the northern equivalent of a tropical passageway like the Suez or Panama canals,
that will likely mean that parts of those southerly areas will have become the equivalents of
uninhabitable deserts.
As such new trade and drilling opportunities arise, Pompeo affirmed, the United States
intends to be out front in capitalizing on them. He then began bragging about what the Trump
administration had already accomplished, including promoting expanded oil and gas drilling in
offshore waters and also freeing up "energy exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ," a pristine stretch
of northern Alaska
prized by environmentalists as a sanctuary for migrating caribou and other at-risk species.
Additional efforts to exploit the region's vital resources, he promised, are scheduled for the
years ahead.
A New Arena for Competition (and Worse)
Ideally, Pompeo noted placidly, competition for the Arctic's resources will be conducted in
an orderly, peaceful manner. The United States, he assured his listeners, believes in "free and
fair competition, open, by the rule of law." But other countries, he added ominously,
especially China and Russia, won't play by that rulebook much of the time and so must be
subject to careful oversight and, if need be, punitive action.
China, he pointed out, is already developing trade
routes in the Arctic, and establishing economic ties with key nations there. Unlike the United
States (which already has multiple military bases in the Arctic, including one at Thule in
Greenland, and so has a well-established presence there), Pompeo claimed that Beijing is
surreptitiously using such supposedly economic activities for military purposes, including,
heinously enough, spying on U.S. ballistic missile submarines operating in the region, while
intimidating its local partners into acquiescence.
He then cited events in the distant South China Sea, where the Chinese have indeed
militarized a
number of tiny uninhabited islands (outfitting them with airstrips, missile batteries, and the
like) and the U.S. has responded by
sending its warships into adjacent waters. He did so to warn of similar future military
stand-offs and potential clashes in the Arctic. "Let's just ask ourselves, do we want the
Arctic Ocean to transform into a new South China Sea, fraught with militarization and competing
territorial claims?" The answer, he assured his listeners, is "pretty clear." (And I'm sure you
can guess what it is.)
The secretary of state then wielded even stronger language in describing "aggressive Russian
behavior in the Arctic." In recent years, he claimed, the Russians have built hundreds of new
bases in the region, along with new ports and air-defense capabilities. "Russia is already
leaving snow prints in the form of army boots" there, a threat that cannot be ignored. "Just
because the Arctic is a place of wilderness does not mean it should become a place of
lawlessness. It need not be the case. And we stand ready to ensure that it does not become
so."
And here we get to the heart of Pompeo's message: the United States will, of course,
"respond" by enhancing its own military presence in the Arctic to better protect U.S.
interests, while countering Chinese and Russian inroads in the region:
"Under President Trump, we are fortifying America's security and diplomatic presence in the
area. On the security side, partly in response to Russia's destabilizing activities, we are
hosting military exercises, strengthening our force presence, rebuilding our icebreaker fleet,
expanding Coast Guard funding, and creating a new senior military post for Arctic Affairs
inside of our own military."
To emphasize the administration's sincerity, Pompeo touted the largest NATO and U.S. Arctic
military maneuvers since the Cold War era, the recently completed " Trident Juncture " exercise (which he
incorrectly referred to as "Trident Structure"), involving some 50,000 troops. Although the
official scenario
for Trident Juncture spoke of an unidentified "aggressor" force, few observers had any doubt
that the allied team was assembled to repel a hypothetical Russian invasion of Norway, where
the simulated combat took place.
Implementing the Doctrine
And so you have the broad outlines of the new Pompeo Doctrine, centered on the Trump
administration's truly forbidden topic: the climate crisis. In the most pugnacious manner
imaginable, that doctrine posits a future of endless competition and conflict in the Arctic,
growing ever more intense as the planet warms and the ice cap melts. The notion of the U.S.
going nose-to-nose with the Russians and Chinese in the Far North, while exploiting the
region's natural resources, has clearly been circulating in Washington. By August, it had
obviously already become enough of a commonplace in the White House (not to speak of the
National Security Council and the Pentagon), for the president to offer to buy Greenland.
And when it comes to resources and future military conflicts, it wasn't such a zany idea.
After all, Greenland does have abundant natural resources and also houses that U.S. base in
Thule. A relic of the Cold War, the Thule facility, mainly a radar base, is already being
modernized , at a cost of some $300 million, to better track Russian missile launches.
Clearly, key officials in Washington view Greenland as a valuable piece of real estate in the
emerging geopolitical struggle Pompeo laid out, an assessment that clearly wormed its way into
President Trump's consciousness as well.
Iceland and Norway also play key roles in Pompeo's and the Pentagon's new strategic
calculus. Another former Cold War facility, a base at Keflavik in Iceland has been reoccupied
by the Navy and is now being used in antisubmarine warfare missions. Meanwhile, the Marine
Corps has
stationed several hundred combat troops at bases near Trondheim, Norway, the first
permanent deployment of foreign soldiers on Norwegian soil since World War II. In 2018, the
Pentagon even
reactivated the Navy's defunct Second Fleet, investing it with responsibility for
protecting the North Atlantic as well as the Arctic's maritime approaches, including those
abutting Greenland, Iceland, and Norway. Consider these signs of heating-up times.
And all of this is clearly just the beginning of a major buildup in and regular testing of
the ability of the U.S. military to operate in the Far North. As part of Exercise Trident
Juncture, for example, the aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman and its flotilla of
support ships were sent into the Norwegian Sea, the first time a U.S. carrier battle group had
sailed above the Arctic Circle since the Soviet Union imploded in 1991. Similarly,
Secretary of the Navy Richard Spencer recently announced
plans to send surface warships on trans-Arctic missions, another new military move. (U.S.
nuclear submarines make such journeys regularly, sailing beneath the sea ice.) This article first appeared on TomDispatch. More articles by:Michael T. Klare
Iran sanction and the threat of war has nothing to do with its nuclear program. It is about
the USA and by extension Israel dominance in the region. and defencing interesting of MIC, against the interest of general public.
Which is the main task of neocons, as lobbyists for MIC (please understand that MIC includes intelligence agencies and large
part of Wall Street) .
That's why Israel lobby ( and Bloomberg is a part of it ) supports strangulation Iran economy, Iran war and pushes Trump administration into it.
the demand " Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination of Iran's nuclear
activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist
groups across the Middle East -- in exchange for readmission into the world economy" is as close to Netanyahu position as we can
get.
Notable quotes:
"... The Bloomberg editors urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran ..."
"... As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them to yield. ..."
"... They have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons. ..."
"... Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder to justify punitive measures against Iran without end ..."
The
Bloomberg editors
urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran:
Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination
of Iran's nuclear activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its
ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist groups across the Middle East -- in
exchange for readmission into the world economy.
This chance may never come again.
Bloomberg's latest advice to Trump on Iran is terrible as usual, but it is a useful window
into how anti-Iran hard-liners see things. They see the next year as their best chance to push
for their maximalist demands, and they fear the possibility that Trump might settle for
something short of their absurd wish list. If Trump does what they want and "holds out" until
Iran capitulates, he will be waiting a long time. He has nothing to show for his policy except
increased tensions and impoverished and dying Iranians, and this would guarantee more of the
same. The funny thing is that the "extended sunset" they deride is already an unrealistic goal,
and they insist that the president pursue a much more ambitious set of goals that have
absolutely no chance of being reached. As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests
of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them
to yield.
The Bloomberg editorial is ridiculous in many ways, but just one more example will suffice.
At one point it says, "Nor is there any doubt that Iran wants nuclear weapons." Perhaps
ideologues and fanatics have no doubt about this, but it isn't true. If Iran wanted nuclear
weapons, they could have pursued and acquired them by now. They gave up that pursuit and agreed
to the most stringent nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated to prove that they wouldn't
seek these weapons, but the Trump administration chose to punish them for their cooperation.
Iran has not done any of the things that actual rogue nuclear weapons states have done. They
have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the
Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels
needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons.
Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will
continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but
fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners
aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder
to justify punitive measures against Iran without end.
They don't want to resolve the crisis
with Iran, but rather hope to make it permanent by setting goals that can't possibly be reached
and insisting that sanctions remain in place forever.
Iran sanction and the threat of war has nothing to do with its nuclear program. It is about
the USA and by extension Israel dominance in the region. and defencing interesting of MIC, against the interest of general public.
Which is the main task of neocons, as lobbyists for MIC (please understand that MIC includes intelligence agencies and large
part of Wall Street) .
That's why Israel lobby ( and Bloomberg is a part of it ) supports strangulation Iran economy, Iran war and pushes Trump administration into it.
the demand " Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination of Iran's nuclear
activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist
groups across the Middle East -- in exchange for readmission into the world economy" is as close to Netanyahu position as we can
get.
Notable quotes:
"... The Bloomberg editors urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran ..."
"... As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them to yield. ..."
"... They have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons. ..."
"... Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder to justify punitive measures against Iran without end ..."
The
Bloomberg editors
urge Trump not to give up on brain-dead maximalism with Iran:
Rather than push for an extended sunset, Trump should hold out for a complete termination
of Iran's nuclear activities and an end to its other threatening behavior -- such as its
ballistic-missile program and its support for terrorist groups across the Middle East -- in
exchange for readmission into the world economy.
This chance may never come again.
Bloomberg's latest advice to Trump on Iran is terrible as usual, but it is a useful window
into how anti-Iran hard-liners see things. They see the next year as their best chance to push
for their maximalist demands, and they fear the possibility that Trump might settle for
something short of their absurd wish list. If Trump does what they want and "holds out" until
Iran capitulates, he will be waiting a long time. He has nothing to show for his policy except
increased tensions and impoverished and dying Iranians, and this would guarantee more of the
same. The funny thing is that the "extended sunset" they deride is already an unrealistic goal,
and they insist that the president pursue a much more ambitious set of goals that have
absolutely no chance of being reached. As always, hard-liners ignore the agency and interests
of the other government, and they assume that it is simply a matter of willpower to force them
to yield.
The Bloomberg editorial is ridiculous in many ways, but just one more example will suffice.
At one point it says, "Nor is there any doubt that Iran wants nuclear weapons." Perhaps
ideologues and fanatics have no doubt about this, but it isn't true. If Iran wanted nuclear
weapons, they could have pursued and acquired them by now. They gave up that pursuit and agreed
to the most stringent nonproliferation agreement ever negotiated to prove that they wouldn't
seek these weapons, but the Trump administration chose to punish them for their cooperation.
Iran has not done any of the things that actual rogue nuclear weapons states have done. They
have not left the Non-Proliferation Treaty. On the contrary, they have agreed to abide by the
Additional Protocol that has even stricter standards. They are not enriching uranium to levels
needed to make nuclear weapons. They certainly haven't built or tested any weapons.
Iran has jumped through numerous hoops to demonstrate that their nuclear program is and will
continue to be peaceful, and their compliance has been verified more than a dozen times, but
fanatics here and in Israel refuse to take yes for an answer. That is because hard-liners
aren't really concerned about proliferation risk, but seek to use the nuclear issue as fodder
to justify punitive measures against Iran without end.
They don't want to resolve the crisis
with Iran, but rather hope to make it permanent by setting goals that can't possibly be reached
and insisting that sanctions remain in place forever.
The problem is not Bolton. It is Trump. Bolton is a well known neocon, who pushed for Iraq
war (which makes his a war criminal) and founded PNAC. So his credentials as a warmonger were
clear. He was/is a typical MIC prostitute, or agent of influence in more politically correct
terms.
But any President who hired Bolton deliberately ositioned himself as a wrecking ball. Such an
art of the deal. Hiring Bolton to a large extent justified Russiagate, because such a President
is clear and present danger for the USA as a country. For the physical existence of this country
and civilization on this territory. All bets for a realistic foreign policy are off. They are
just wishful thinking.
Notable quotes:
"... Bolton would rather blow up Iran than talk to its leaders, engagement Trump has said numerous times he is more than happy to consider (maybe as soon as next week's U.N. General Assembly meeting). ..."
"... On Venezuela, Trump seems to have soured on pushing Nicolás Maduro from power, even as Bolton refers to Caracas as part of the "troika of tyranny." Bolton's obsession with getting North Korea denuclearized in one fell swoop -- an approach that came crashing down on Trump's head during his second summit with Kim Jong-un in February -- is far more likely to lead to an end of diplomacy than an end to Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program (an uphill climb if there ever was one). ..."
"... Bolton, prickly as a porcupine in dealing with colleagues, had long been under Trump's skin. NBC News reports that the two men had a shouting match behind closed doors the night before Bolton's resignation. ..."
"... Whatever finally pushed Bolton out the door, however, is far less relevant than where Trump goes from here. He will announce a new national security adviser next week, and the Washington parlor game is already swirling with names. ..."
"... We don't know who Bolton's replacement will be, but we do know what he or she needs to do: dump most of the previous regime's ideas in the garbage and start over with strategies that actually have a chance at success. ..."
"... Trump needs an adviser who is willing to engage in a pragmatic negotiation and be prepared for uncomfortable but necessary bargaining. He needs someone who will help him end wars -- like the 18-year-long quagmire in Afghanistan -- that have gone on aimlessly and without purpose. ..."
Bolton's is an extreme black-and-white view of the world: if you aren't an ally of the
United States, you are an adversary who needs a boot on your neck in the form of U.S. military
force or economic sanctions. The second- and third-order strategic consequences are no obstacle
in Bolton's mind. Why go through the humiliating spectacle of negotiations when you can simply
bomb Iran's
nuclear facilities or take out the Kim regime by
force ?
Diplomacy, after all, is for wimps, spineless State Department bureaucrats, and appeasers.
If the boss is insisting on diplomacy, then demand the moon, stars, and
everything in between before offering a nickel of sanctions relief.
This is how John Bolton made his career: as the proverbial wrecking ball of arms control
agreements -- and indeed agreements of any kind. And he makes no excuses for it. Indeed, he
takes prideful ownership of his views, seeing anyone who disagrees with him or who isn't on his
level as a weasel. Before Bolton joined the Trump administration as national security adviser,
he was the short-lived ambassador to the United Nations and the undersecretary of state for
arms control, where he attempted to get an intelligence analyst removed
for disagreeing with his position on Cuba's alleged biological weapons program.
All of this is why so many of us were worried and confused when President Trump asked Bolton
to serve as his national security adviser last year. The two men could not have more
fundamental disagreements on foreign policy. While both laugh at the U.N. and international
organizations more broadly, they diverge paths on some of the weightiest issues on the docket.
Bolton would rather blow up Iran than talk to its leaders, engagement Trump has said
numerous times he is more than happy to consider (maybe as soon as next week's U.N. General
Assembly meeting).
On Venezuela, Trump seems to have soured on pushing Nicolás Maduro from power,
even as Bolton refers to Caracas as part of the "troika of tyranny." Bolton's obsession with
getting North Korea denuclearized in one fell swoop -- an approach that came crashing down on
Trump's head during his second summit with Kim Jong-un in February -- is far more likely to
lead to an end of diplomacy than an end to Pyongyang's nuclear weapons program (an uphill climb
if there ever was one).
Trump grew tired of Bolton the same way he grew tired of other staffers. Rex Tillerson,
James Mattis, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, H.R. McMaster, and John Kelly were all liked by the
president at one time, only to be fired or convinced to resign. Bolton, prickly as a
porcupine in dealing with colleagues, had long been under Trump's skin. NBC News reports that
the two men had a shouting match behind closed doors the night before Bolton's
resignation.
Whatever finally pushed Bolton out the door, however, is far less relevant than where
Trump goes from here. He will announce a new national security adviser next week, and the
Washington parlor game is already swirling with names.
We don't know who Bolton's replacement will be, but we do know what he or she needs to
do: dump most of the previous regime's ideas in the garbage and start over with strategies that
actually have a chance at success.
Trump needs an adviser who is willing to engage in a pragmatic negotiation and be
prepared for uncomfortable but necessary bargaining. He needs someone who will help him end
wars -- like the 18-year-long quagmire in Afghanistan -- that have gone on aimlessly and
without purpose.
He needs someone who will hold those within the administration accountable when they refuse
to execute policy once it is cleared by the inter-agency. And above all, he or she should prize
restraint and think through all the options when the Beltway loudly urges immediate action.
All of this will be easier with Bolton off the team.
Daniel R. DePetris is a foreign policy analyst, a columnist at Reuters, and a frequent
contributor to The American Conservative.
This is all false. The goal was establish military bases in former soviet republics to encircle Russia and this goal was
achieved. Putin was probably not so wise giving 100% support to Bush invasion, which was a typical false flag invasion.
Taliban was the creation of the USA to fight Soviets, like political Islam in general so any complains are just pure
hypocity.
Notable quotes:
"... Afghanistan borders China. For that reason alone, we are never leaving whatever the cost in blood or treasure. The country is a very forward, strategic military base that can be used to launch air attacks on Chinese assets and impede China's Belt and Road initiative. ..."
"... Despite his bluster, Trump is very weak and knows the Taliban is winning and fears they will try to drive us out before the election, ushering in his defeat. Most of his time is spent cowering in his golf resorts, ranting and raving on a tiny little cellphone. ..."
"... The Blob will not allow any of his fears to shake the resolve of the Deep State to make Afghanistan a colony for a thousand years. ..."
"... American's negotiating position in every instances with rival nations is to dictate the terms for surrender regardless of the circumstances on the ground. It's an untenable position and guarantees perpetual war and occupation which is precisely the point. ..."
"... It seems to me that if one parsed reports from the Special Inspector General Afghanistan Reconstruction along with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime's "Afghanistan Opium Survey", any illusions as to what the reasons for the West's intervention in that country were, should dissipate rather speedily. ..."
"... we invaded Afghanistan so that we could steal the foreign aid money that we would give them and could sponsor the opium trade. ..."
"... Gramsci and his like stand vindicated. Capture the academies and the rest of us follow, often willingly. ..."
"... And just a few, of those in the public eye, standing up true and declaring "This emperor has no clothes!" ..."
Where we are now in Afghanistan- Editorial Opinion by PL
(Lt. Hamilton VC at Kabul where he commanded Sir Louis Cavangnari's escort)
A year or so after the US intervention in Afghanistan began in 2001 I perceived that there
was a danger that US public and government opinion might begin to favor the idea of "nation
building" in Afghanistan. From long experience in and study of the area of Islamicate
civilization and its history it seemed clear to me that such an effort would be doomed to
failure at any price that one should be willing to pay in; expended effort over time, money and
blood shed on all sides.
The basic problem with Afghanistan is that there "is no there there." Afghanistan is really
a geographical expression rather than a country in the sense understood of the word in the
post-Westphalian system of independent states.
Across the Islamicate world from Mauritania to BanglaDesh and beyond to Oceania there is a
pronounced tendency to atomization in group perception of identity. Arabs do not identify with
Berbers, etc., Tribes and clans within these groups regard all others as rivals and often
enemies unless they are needed as temporary allies.
The Islamic religion which holds unity to be an ideal is often thought to be a unifier
against the atomizing tendency in these cultures, but in fact there are many, many varieties of
Islam, each one believing that it is uniquely favored by God. This often cancels out whatever
unifying effect Islam, as religion, can have.
Afghanistan, created as a buffer between imperial Russia and British India, is an extreme
case of atomization among the inhabitants of a state which has recognition in the world
political system including membership in the UN. In spite of that status , a status that might
deceive one into believing that there is such a thing as "the Afghan People,"the population of
Afghanistan is actually made up of a number of different ethnic nations; Pushtuns, Hazzara,
Tajiks, Uzbeks, Turcomans, Arabs, etc. These different peoples all speak mutually
unintelligible languages which often have such extreme separation in dialect that this amounts
to uninteligibility as well. Some of these groups are Sunni and others Shia. This is yet
another factor in the separation of the segments of the population.
The country has little substantial physical infrastructure. What there is was largely
constructed in the 50s and 60s as part of Cold War competition between the USSR and the US.
There is very little legal or governmental infrastructure. A commercial company investing its
own or borrowed money in Afghanistan is taking a great risk of never being able to recover its
investment from the local "pirates." Government is generally predatory in its attitude toward
foreign investment funds. I tried to find a safe haven in Afghanistan for some of my company's
funds and could find none. Senior Afghan government people would typically respond to questions
about legal infrastructure with exhortations to "bring your project, all will be well."
Needless to say ...
US intervention in this place was inevitable after 9/11, but what was not necessary or wise
were repeated US decisions for a COIN nation building campaign. As this tendency began to be
evident I argued for a much more limited goal in which the US would keep about 20K troops in
country to maintain a government controlled enclave around Kabul and Bagram. This would enable
pursuit of located international terrorist groups through raiding operations from that base
area. The basis for this strategy was my conclusion that the US could never "pacify" all of the
territory of Afghanistan and that we would "break our teeth" trying.
I pressed this belief in various fora and with various individuals within the Obama
Administration even as Obama endlessly contemplated the entreaties of the COINista generals,
Petraeus, Mattis, McChrystal etc. for a country wide nation building COIN campaign. The most
interesting of these encounters was at an IQ2 debate at NYU in 2009 where I (and teammates)
argued that "The US can never win in Afghanistan." My side lost on points but the leader of the
other team recently told me that he knows now that we were completely correct. Obama gave in to
the generals, and gave them the COIN war that they wanted. I suppose that for "Barry" it was
immensely flattering to have them "butter him up."
It is clear now that the COIN strategy has failed miserable and totally. Afghanistan is not
one bit more united or modernized than it has ever been. The US has spent a sea of money there
and many brave people have perished or been wrecked in chasing the idea of Afghanistan as a
Central Asian Switzerland.
Trump has allowed Zalmai Khalilzad to attempt to achieve a negotiated peace with the
Taliban, the former salafi takfiri, Pushtun rulers of Afghanistan, in the apparent belief that
they could be "talked down out of the tree" just as his business competitors could always be
talked down to meet at a "closing" table where his supposed "closing genius' would bring a
DEAL.
Unfortunately this belief in his closing talent goes unrewarded in Palestine, Syria,
Turkey,Yemen, Iran, China (not yet), North Korea and Afghanistan. IMO his difficulty in finding
solutions lies in his entrapment within his own New York City business model, a model in which
everything is for sale if the deal is structured skillfully to advantage the stronger party
while all the while claiming that the party you are screwing is your friend.
Sadly for The Donald all those "stupid" foreigners do not understand that "everything is for
sale." Among them, the Taliban, an army and religio-political movement are notable for a lack
of belief in the commercial possibilities of selling out to Donald Trump for a "mess of
pottage" or thirty pieces of silver whichever reference you prefer. They want to win, and they
want to be seen to have driven the "crusaders" from Afghanistan and in the process to have
humiliated the US as the leading infidel state. To that end they lie, prevaricate and await the
day when they can crush the puny forces of "modernism" after the American departure. Zalmai
Khalilzad is an Afghan pushtun Sunni by birth and rearing. Did he not know that they could not
be trusted in dealings with the US? I do not blame the Taliban for being what they are. I blame
all the American and NATO fools for believing that they could make the Taliban either go away
or become "happy campers." They were never going to do either of those things. We should have
known that. Some of us did, but Americans are addicted to all the melting pot, right side of
history foolishness so common in "levelled" America,
What should the US do now that the scales have fallen from Trump's eyes and the time of
"good faith" negotiation with the Taliban is "dead?" The first thing to do is to fire
Khalilzad.
Last night, Col. (ret.) Douglas Macgregor told Tucker Carlson that the US should simply
leave, and should have never intervened. IOW we should get the hell out totally and forever.
This is a tempting thought. I have wrestled with the attractiveness of the idea but there are
certain problems with it.
1. We should not want to give the jihadi movements proof of our feckless defeatability. IMO
if we leave suddenly the Afghan government and armed forces will soon collapse. The country
will then further disintegrate into a welter of jihadi factions and regional tribal strongmen,
the strongest of which will be the Taliban.
2. We have encouraged modernist Afghan men, women and girls to emerge from the shadows.
Shall we leave them to their fates under the rule of the jihadis.
3. What about all the translators, base workers and other people who have cast their lots
with us. The Taliban and other jihadis will simply kill them as apostates. We abandoned a lot
of such people in Iraq. Will we do it again?
On balance I would say Macgregor is right that we must leave. The time for a small remaining
presence is past. The forces in the field are too strong for a small force to maintain itself
even with massive long range air support. Think of Sir Louis Cavangnari. No, we should leave,
but we should leave on a schedule that will enable us to control the timing of our going and to
protect the departure of those who wish to leave with us. pl
BTW, SWMBO says that no mutually understood languages = no country.
"We should not want to give the jihadi movements proof of our feckless defeatability."
Gee, like admit to reality?
My view: Acknowledge the U.S. is not omnipotent, and has very limited ability to
influence, let alone, control, other parts of the world other than those to which it has
extremely close ties, most especially the Five Eyes and other parts of what was once called
Western Civilization.
I just want to mention that about once a year I dig the IQ2 debate out and watch it again
in full. Call it a sanity check I suppose. It is clear that you were trying to be substantive
throughout, which was somewhat hampered by the amorphous premise of "success" undergirding
the debate question. The other side (Nagle in particular) was trying to "win" the debate by
defining success so broadly as to exclude questions over the "how," and they used that as an
excuse to dodge your indictment of COIN. But it is very clear who had the right of it, and it
is at least somewhat gratifying to hear that same admission was made to you.
I suspect that we will retain our forces in Afghanistan for the foreseeable future. To
understand why you've got to consider the politics rather than the pragmatics.
No president wants to be the one who "lost Afghanistan" (as though it were ours to lose)
or, worse yet, be the president who removed forces from a country from which an attack on the
U. S. would emanate afterwards or be staged from or planned from.
The greatest likelihood of our removing our forces from Afghanistan would be towards the
end of a president's second term, especially if that president were a Democrat and could
expect to take less heat from the media. In other words Obama should have removed our forces
from Afghanistan and if he wouldn't Trump won't, especially not before being re-elected.
These kind of wars seem to take 3 presidents to end. Trump is this war's Nixon and was
elected on a platform which included 'losing' Afghanistan. The media will howl once the
Taliban take over, but it will swiftly pass as they realize Americans have no interest in a
place where their countrymen are no longer dying.
No matter what the US government does or does not do, wouldn't Afghanistan revert to its
natural state as you have described it?
It seems Trump's "negotiated" deal with the Taliban would have been a good approach to
getting out but that's now no longer a possibility. Would supporting the Tajiks through
Russia and India as a counter-balance to the Taliban work to keep them from completely
dominating? Russia and India likely have an interest in preventing jihadis from using Taliban
dominated territory to infiltrate. Is it even worth any effort on the part of the US
government? It would seem Pakistan and China would continue working to influence events
there.
My longstanding belief is that Afghanistan to be 'tamed' requires the type of Steel that only
existed long ago.
The Modern World has modernized beyond the brutal realities that taming it likely
requires, and as such may lose a fraction of the Lives and Treasure as past - but cannot
sustain it politically or socially.
The next Question - If Afghanistan is simply a construct, why not forsake most of it and
develop the regions of Afghanistan that ARE more amiable and Homogenous?
A lot of the Tadzhiks and Uzbeks (varied Turkmen) I suspect could be far more easily
propped up and supported in their own Lands, which back to back with the Central Asian FSU
States is a more viable 'Nation Building' Exercise.
What ultimately tamed the 'Wilds'? The Development of strong local States, Force of Arms
and ultimately - Demographics. If you will not do it yourself, pick a unified Team and back them in doing it. Ironically the means to inflict harm on occupying Militaries seems to go down as those
Armies means to stomach it does also.
The next obvious Question. Is it worth considering (not necessarily for the US and Western
States - who will appear as desperate Losers the idea that Afghanistan if allowed to run as
strong Armed Islamic State, albeit modernized - might actually one day develop into one more
approachable to further modernization?
I agree we should unilaterally withdraw all our forces from Afghanistan. The military can
surely plan and carry out a unilateral withdrawal. Just do it. The Taliban are not al Qaeda
or the Islamic State. Their desires don't extend beyond the mountains of Afghanistan. Hell,
they're fighting IS. Let them do so and don't give them reason to go over to them.
The rub will be all those Afghanis who tied their futures to us. We should resettle them
here or somewhere more familiar to them as part of that withdrawal. The chance of that
happening under the Trump administration is nil.
That is the exact same argument I heard in 72 and again in 75. By early 76 no one cared.
There are in every country and in every involvement Quislings and main chancers who find the
short term gelt available to be worth the future risk of making the wrong and visible
choice.
In the case of most of these Afghanis the tie was a slip knot at best.
A "long, long, time ago" in "a land far away", Najibullah was deposed. Pat, you'll recall
that I was then serving as the chair of the Inter-agency Task Force on Afghanistan. Well, we
had our regular meeting at which a couple of the folks opined that this was a wonderful
development for the country and the folks would now all join hands, dance around the
campfire, and sign Kumbaya. To bring the group back to reality, I asked for someone to
identify the national sport of Afghanistan. One of the group said that, obviously, it was
buzkhasi. So I then asked for someone else to clarify how such a game unfolds and another
stalwart did so. This dialogue quickly brought everyone back to reality. For those unfamiliar
with the sport, buzkhasi consists of two nominal "teams" on horseback trying to get a
headless goat carcass across the opponent's goal line. All goes well at first, but ultimately
the teams disintegrate until it's every man for himself in mass mayhem. Thus, IMHO will go
Afghanistan.
Sadly enough this old quote seems especially true in the case of the "Afghan War" or whatever
it is. Our experts' obdurate insistence on pursuing "peace with honor" or some outcome we can
get our heads around and feel good about has become a receding horizon...
The only way we could "win" would be by waging a war of extermination with the goal of
totally depopulating the entire territory and building an impenetrable barrier around it. But
of course that would be a hard sell for a country with a good guy reputation to protect. And
then what would we do with the land? After all, we still haven't been able to settle most of
Nevada and Wyoming!
"History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about
by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools."
I said at the beginning of this mess that the one sure thing was that we would end up with
chains of Iraqi and afghan restaurants begun by the refugees who had to leave their countries
with us when we left. I just hope we have progressed from leaving behind card indexes of our
in-country supporters for the Taliban to discover, as allegedly happened in Vietnam.
I enjoyed the IQ2 debate you reference, particularly your coining of the word "Vermontize".
Incredible to think this conversation about an 8 year old war was 10 years ago - and we are
still having it. Here is the link for anyone interested:
I really enjoy these type of situational overview and analysis posts, thanks!
Although I see your point about Trump's crass business approach, let's face it... the
military and various US gov't orgs have had any many years to try various approaches to
"solving" (cough, cough) Afghanistan. After all the US has been in Afghanistan since 2001. We
had been in Afghanistan for 15 years before Trump was elected. After all those years of failure
by the Borg I have no problem whatsoever with Trump taking a shot at the situation in his own
way. Trump tried a certain tactic and it didn't work. Oh well, but lessons learned. He'll
regroup, get more advice and try something else. He's making more of an effort to resolve
things than previous presidents, and willing to think outside of the Borg box.
No, all Trump was doing was looking for a re-election publicity stunt and a shot at that
elusive Nobel like Obama got....he's done this kind of thing for the last 40 years - he isn't
going to change his personality now...
If the US leaves and I believe it should it doesn't have to mean the end of days. China,
Russia, Iran, India and Pakistan have all expressed interest in clearing the area of
terrorists. They have all been blocked by the US presence. Preferably the US would work a
deal with those players who are far better connected and prepared to clean up the
neighbourhood than the US is from the other side of the world. Russia was willing to act as
guarantor for the collapsed deal. Work a deal for one or more of them to move in as the US
moves out.
My concern is that with all the big players wanting a piece of the pie that it evolves into
an even worse proxy war. But China, Pakistan, Russia and Iran are all rowing in more or less
the same direction these days and India has bitten off all it can chew in Kashmir so this may
be the perfect time. Americans just have to get over that indispensable nation nonsense.
Thank you for thinking of the women and girls....and perhaps their little boys.
I've lived through the abandonment of Vietnam and the influx of refugees from that part of
the world, the mess after the Iraq War that included bringing to our country many who had
tied their fortunes to us. We can not this time decide to abandon any who have tied their
hopes to us after we came in and caused so much turmoil in their country.
I always thought it was hubris on our part to think we could do what the Soviets failed to
do.
If we bring these people here, my hope is that we examine how our bringing in Somalis has,
in many places, not been a successful effort in regard to integrating them into our society.
(Do not many of us, including Nancy Pelosi, regret the bringing in of at least one Somali
woman?) We need to prepare for their entry into our country in some way that will not mean
just dropping them somewhere and letting them fend for themselves.
I know the government has some sort of protocol for finding them places to live. Often,
however, the people seem to be dropped in and left in some ways to depend on themselves "as
strangers in a strange land." This should be our last time. Stop the "nation-building"
efforts.
I feel that most Americans are welcoming and friendly people, but they often just do not
understand how difficult it is for some to adapt to a very different way of life.
Afghanistan borders China. For that reason alone, we are never leaving whatever the cost in
blood or treasure. The country is a very forward, strategic military base that can be used to
launch air attacks on Chinese assets and impede China's Belt and Road initiative.
Despite his bluster, Trump is very weak and knows the Taliban is winning and fears they
will try to drive us out before the election, ushering in his defeat. Most of his time is
spent cowering in his golf resorts, ranting and raving on a tiny little cellphone.
The Blob will not allow any of his fears to shake the resolve of the Deep State to make
Afghanistan a colony for a thousand years.
They have been successful in implanting in the psyche of every American the incorrect
notion that the Taliban launched 9/11. That notion alone means there is no support for any
truce or treaty with our bete noir.
These lines from Rudyard Kipling immediately came to my mind:
"When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
Go, go, go like a soldier,
So-oldier of the Queen!"
We are never going to change Afghanistan so getting out and taking those who supported us
is appealing to me.
Maybe that's why Mr. Prince wanted Trump to make him the viceroy of Afghanistan.
What a career that would be - a former SEAL lieutenant, then mercenary, promoted to
something like a field marshal, bringing fabulous quarter numbers, strategy or something like
that, peace and freedom to the place by privatizing the war and fighting it more cost
effective for himself .
It is not a base. It is a sinkhole--A distinction without a difference.
Confusedponderer
Your reference to Mr. Prince was spot on. He understood what the long-term plans for
Afghanistan were and still are. A viceroy is the designated ruling representative of a
colonial power.
American's negotiating position in every instances with rival nations is to dictate the
terms for surrender regardless of the circumstances on the ground. It's an untenable position
and guarantees perpetual war and occupation which is precisely the point.
It seems to me that if one parsed reports from the Special Inspector General Afghanistan
Reconstruction along with the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime's "Afghanistan Opium
Survey", any illusions as to what the reasons for the West's intervention in that country
were, should dissipate rather speedily.
so, your belief is that we invaded Afghanistan so that we could steal the foreign aid money that we would give them and
could sponsor the opium trade. Funny! A joke right?
IMO Trump has no clarity of anyhthing in foreign policy. He is just trying to make a deal
in accordance with his experience of deal making and is not doing well. It will be
interesting to see if he and Trudeau can sell the USMCA to Pelosi. this is clearly a
gooddeal. Let's see how hard he pushes for it. With regard to the ME, have reached the
conclusion that his basic attitudes are formed in the culture of New York City Jewry. A
Christian Brother who had two PH.D.s in STEM and was a New York City guy once told me that I
had to understand that everyone in NY City is to some extent Jewish, even the cardinal
archbishop.
I spent several years in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2014. I was there, with a front row
seat, when the shift to nation-building began. The best days of my life were in Afghanistan,
spent amongst the finest men and women from many nations...including Afghanistan.
We lost the war a long time ago. By 2006, I could see we were losing. By 2008, I knew it
was lost. How many Afghans have hitched their horses to our wagon? More than enough. How many others
chose to live as free men and women because we were there? A significant part of the
population. They face a reckoning for living that hope out loud, in public.
The Afghan people are amazing, and a lot of them believed in us, and in a future where
women could be more than a piece of property. I can see why some would say we should walk
away, and, it's hard to argue against that.
I'll carry what we did in Afghanistan to my grave. DOL,
Colonel ...I agree with your Opinion on this matter of Withdrawal. I have read a Year by Year
timeline of The Millions spent. for the Training Of Afghanistan Military and Security
Forces and Like in Viet Nam..they will fail. Fail to defend themselves..
Their hearts wont be in it..and like Vietnam..It Just made The Communist North Vietnamese the Third Most Powerful
Conventional Weapons stockpile in the World..with all the Equipment we Left
behind...The..billions spent to keep our military presence there..
The millions Spent for VA
Resources to care for our wounded. Many with traumatic head injuries...The loss of Our People
there..Overt and Covert...The loss of Seal Team 6 in the Aftermath of Finally Getting Osama
Bin Laden...It will Never End...
There will always be those willing to die for JiHad..Forever..Over a Trillion Dollars..Plus all The Money we sent to
Pakistan. Which has
been Most of Our Foreign Aid..Its been a Tragic Blunder and there has never been such a
thing as "Mission Accomplished"..
This has been the second most Costly War since WWII.
..Bring Them Home.. ...
9/11/2001,,,,9/11/2019.A War of the Politicians..By The Politicians
For The Politicians.and the Military..Industrial Complex....and Their Egos..and Bank
accounts..Period...Thomas Jefferson Knew This was coming.
I know nothing about Doug Macgregor but he sounds really sane in this interview with
Tucker. If Trump does what he suggests it would be a welcome approach and drive the Borg
insane.
I agreed with sending SOF in to kill AQ being harbored by the Taliban. I said at the time,
"Go in, kill the people who need killing & get the hell out."
There is only one thing that can unify Afgan tribes, that's the presence of foreigners. A
very long history has resulted in the reference to "the graveyard of empires." I don't
believe that the Taliban is a threat to the US outside of Afghanistan. They are a threat to
any American in Afghanistan. Nation building in Afghanistan is domed to failure. The only
issue is what is to be the fate of the Afghani's who assisted us or bought into the idea of
westernization. Our recent history is to abandon these people.
Eventually we will join the list of Afghan invaders from Cyrus, to Alexander, to the
Brits. The only question is how we depart & how much more blood & treasure we
spend.
In my experience, nothing can unify Afghan tribes, or even the sub-tribes. There is a saying
amongst the Pashtun: "Me against my brothers, my brothers and I against my cousins, my
cousins and I against the world." The real Taliban (meaning the political entity, exiled to
the east, also known as "The Quetta Shura," have never been able to get "Taliban" factions in
Afghanistan to unite against anything. COL Lang is spot-on, there is no collective "Afghan"
identity.
Afghanistan is still run by warlords. The vast majority of folks referred to as "Taliban"
are really just warlords (and the warlords' minions) wrapping themselves in the Taliban flag,
as it suits them now. If the Taliban were to come back to controlling power in Afghanistan,
many of the warlords would switch to fighting the Taliban. True territorial gains in
Afghanistan are generally made when warlords switch sides. Afghan warlords are the most loyal
people money can buy...well, rent, anyway.
The IQ2 debate was significant for me personally when I first saw it. The arguments for
staying in Afghanistan were set out coherently and for perhaps the first time I caught a
glimpse of the immense intellectual effort, in the think tanks and the academies, that goes
into justifying the neocon position. That neocon position working through almost by osmosis
to the heavyweight newspapers and media outlets, and providing the narrative framework within
which the Intelligence Initiatives of this world right down to the little propaganda sites
work. Such varied figures as Charles Lister or Peter Tatchell have backup, and how.
It's an intellectual fortress, the whole, and for many of us in the general public
it confirms us comfortably in the neocon rationale. It gives us the arguments, and the
excuses, and as long as one declines to notice that those arguments and excuses do shift
around, we pay our taxes for this or that crazy neocon venture without complaint and often
gladly. Gramsci and his like stand vindicated. Capture the academies and the rest of us
follow, often willingly.
And just a few, of those in the public eye, standing up true and declaring "This emperor
has no clothes!"
Which happened, as I saw several years later when I got to view it, in that IQ2 debate.
Around that time I came across Major Stueber's documentary which had rather more than seven
minutes to lay out how hopeless it was for Western armies to fight alongside local forces,
when those local forces were so hopelessly factional, corrupt, and therefore ineffectual.
And a footnote just recently. I head a Swedish aid worker relating just how impossible it
was for him too to function in Afghanistan. Money put through to local groups swallowed up in
false invoicing, ghost workers whose salaries went to swell the pay packet of their
superiors, slush funds because that was the only way to get things done.
It was never a doable venture, Afghanistan. That was clear to a few in that debate ten
years ago and it's clear to more now. I hope it's possible to get out without leaving the
urban Westernised Afghans too much at the mercy of the rest.
And perhaps, also reflecting that the Rovean narratives that the academies and think tanks
conjure up for us, at such expense and at such effort, all crumble eventually when reality,
as it must finally, breaks through.
Repeating lies over and over makes old-fashioned Joseph Goebbels-type propaganda.
Repeating lies, then contradicting them; moving them from one government-paid think-tank to
another; footnoting a new lie to an older version; quoting policemen and gangsters saying
fatuities; adding slang and the words of pop songs -- this is still Goebbels-type but
stretched out and product-diversified to make its author more money. This is Mark Galeotti's
method .
####
The rest at the link and a deep dive on Galeotti himself.
Blok says the Ukrainian side offered to "postpone" the exchange to give Dutch
prosecutors the opportunity to interview Tsemach again, and adds that this questioning
subsequently took place
Investigators directing the criminal probe into MH17's loss have previously identified
four individuals – three Russians and a Ukrainian, none of which is Tsemach – who
they are seeking to prosecute over the attack.
####
'interview again '. To repeat the f/king obvious, surely if there was sufficient
intelligence/evidence/coffee grounds/magda the gypsy/whatever, then Tsemach would have been
handed over. Did they honestly thing that having another crack at him would have
provided something? Weak as piss.
Of course the Pork Pie New Networks despite being rather more careful than usual in their
reporting of this are having their cake and eating it, i.e. not using phraes like '
smoking gun ' but happy with 'key witness' with no qualifier or anything to
back this up. The insinuation is there, but not the actual words. Spineless mofos.
They're just having so much fun with the ridiculous narrative that Russia moved behind the
scenes to ensure he was included in the prisoner swap – before you know it, the entire
exchange will have been engineered to get Tsemakh out of Ukrainian hands. Why? Well, you know
– where there's smoke, there's a crashed airliner, wink, wink.
Moscow never mentioned Tsemakh; if they sent Ukraine a list of prisoners recommended for
exchange, he was not on it. But the western media planted the seed that his inclusion in the
slate of transferred prisoners was owed to Russian pressure, and it just gets wilder as it
goes along.
I'd have thought that the Dutch investigators would try to persuade the Banderites to keep
Tsemakh in custody on the pretence that his life would be in danger if he were to be returned
to Russia, because Lord Vlademort would be displeased that Tsemakh might have let something
valuable slip from his lips, let alone be inconsiderate enough as to be arrested in the first
place.
Later on in the distant future, after Tsemakh has been transported to The Hague or Rome,
as the court case date draws near, or when Tsemakh is supposed to appear as a "witness" in
court, he can always suddenly and unexpectedly expire in prison from some hitherto
undiagnosed heart condition.
Ukraine released him on bail before the prisoner swap. Obviously they either considered him
an insignificant flight risk – given how difficult it must be to collect a bail bond in
Ukraine – or knew that he had no information which would be useful to anyone. They
might even be using him to spread disinformation in Russia, and all the teeth-grinding from
the west all for show, to make the bait sweeter. You never know. But under normal
circumstances, when a European country said "Jump", Ukraine's response would be "How high"?
If you read the accident investigation report, on page 239 it clearly states that the
Ukrainian army was active with heavy anti-aircraft installations in the eastern part of the
Ukraine. The Ukrainian army has BUK rockets of the type that downed MH17.
The Ukraine had the means and a motive, they should have been treated as a criminal
suspect, yet without further investigation they were promoted to member of the JIT that does
the criminal investigation
"Saudi jets, armed with US and UK bombs and provided with targeting information by US
military intelligence officers stationed in Saudi Arabia, have continued to carry out
repeated attacks on civilian targets, including schools, hospitals, residential
neighborhoods, mosques, funerals and markets. The US had provided coalition jets with mid-air
refueling until the end of last year, ensuring maximum carnage."
Russia has no net public debt left
06:54 09/10/2019 (updated: 07:26 09/10/2019)
MOSCOW, Sep 10 – RIA News. The net public debt of Russia has become negative for
the first time since the introduction of the first sanctions for the annexation of the Crimea
and the fall in oil prices in 2014, RBC writes, with reference to Ministry of Finance and
Central Bank data.
As of August 1, the volume of public debt of the federal government, regions and
municipalities, including state guarantees for enterprise loans, amounted to 16.2 trillion
rubles.
At the same time, the liquid assets of the state – federal authorities, regions
and extrabudgetary state funds – totalled 17.6 trillion ruble son the same
date.
Thus, in the widest sense, the public debt since mid-2019 has become less than the
liquid assets of the "expanded government", the publication indicates.
As noted, this has became possible owing to record reserves that have fully covered the
state debt. That is to say, if Russia needed to immediately pay off all existing debts, this
could be done at the expense of only government deposits with the Central Bank and commercial
banks.
As the Minister of Economic Development, Maxim Oreshkin, emphasized, "what has been
done in Russian macroeconomics from 2014 to 2019 will definitely fall into the textbooks", At
the same time, the flip side of such a tough approach is the lack of fiscal incentives for
economic development.
Over to you Bloomberg, WSJ, FT etc., etc!
Waddya say to that, arseholes?
And think on this, you happy folk of the Exceptional Nation who prosper ever onwards:
MOSCOW, 16 August 2019/ Radio Sputnik . Russia
continues to reduce investments in US bonds in June, reducing their size to 10.8 billion
dollars, the United States Ministry of Finance has reported.
According to Finance Department data, 5,296 billion dollars of this amount is for
long-term securities and 5,552 billion are short – term.
For comparison, in may, the total amount was $ 12 billion.
As part of the de-dollarization course for Russia, other financial instruments are
gaining importance: gold and investments in European and Asian securities, chief expert of
FinEk agency Mikhail Belyaev said on Sputnik radio.
According to the economist, the instability of the US economy also contributes to the
withdrawal of Russian assets from it.
During the time I am away, KS does both a book review and coverage of Nina Khrushcheva? ))
Dr. Khrushcheva maintains a WordPress blog , which also doubles as her
official webpage for the New School. It is amusing?
Once, still in grad school and a misanthropic Russian to boot (given our totalitarian
history most Russians are unhappy), I wrote a very sad novel Small World, published in
Moscow and quickly out of print. But that was a fluke, living in New York I am much happier
now. And all in all, my favorite theme is political culture in Russia and America.
Politicians lie all the time, but culture never lies about politics. Culture and politics
are symbiotically linked like the famous double-headed Russian eagle that used to be on the
front of the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow and now is rotting in the backyard of the city's
museum of architecture. It is the perfect symbol of Russia's former political and cultural
grandeur and current decay. American eagle is just one-headed, of course, yet this country
is no less interesting in its own idiosyncratic relations between culture and politics.
I (with the architect colleague Srdjan Jovanovic Weiss) have curated an exhibition
titled Romancing True Power: D20. It ran February 12-26, 2015 at Parsons The New School for
Design, 66 Fifth Avenue (between 12th and 13th St). In the meantime my amazing research
assistant and student Yiqing Wang (who really should be running not-a-small country) and I
have produced a supplement to the exhibition, a D20 Journal, in which we put together
thoughts on true power, dicktatroship, dicktatorial fashion, economics, philosophy, body
count and other stats.
D20 (modeled on G20, group of most industrialized nations) is a selective list of leaders
from present and recent past across continents and different political systems. Romancing
True Power investigates an idea of power: autocratic, authoritarian and dictatorial. This
type of power–the Dick power–could be found in both dictatorships and
democracies. The exhibition looks at dicktatorial construct, its typology and trappings.
What constitutes a "strong leader"? Why does the public often prefer one? Since everyone's
list of dicktators is subjective, at the show visitors were invited to PYOD (Pick Your Own
Dick). For the Dick winners and more information check out the D20 Facebook page.
Other topics I am fond of include politics, and mostly Russian politics, and, of course,
movies. But whatever I do, all fits neatly into the last line of Billy Wilder's 1959
classic Some Like it Hot, the best ever, "Nobody's perfect."
(source: see hyperlink above)
I do not intend to slam the IMO legitimate topic – only the content and tone of this
"analysis." You have a PhD in Comp Lit (Princeton, 1998). You shouldn't be writing like a
second-year undergrad.
Hey, JT – welcome back, where you been? Yes, that attitude is familiar among the emigre
Russian Jews, the too-smart-to-believe Ashkenazim that make American jaws drop with their
brilliance: Russians in Russia are miserable and always unhappy, but put them in America and
they shine like diamonds, they're so fucking hap-hap-happy you'd better just get out of the
way. I don't believe Khrushchev was Jewish, but the complaining sounds just like all the
Jewish 'refugees' like Miriam Elder and Julia Ioffe; Russia was a drag, man – but New
Yawk, Dahling, now there's a city! It's almost as if they feel denigrating the country of
their birth is the price of acceptance. Perhaps it is – for a people who snap to
attention whenever they see the American flag, Americans are awfully smitten with Russians
who dump on Russia, as if it affirms their own beliefs.
Khrushcheva seems very stuck on herself, but perhaps she simply believes all the hype. For
my part, I find her mean-spirited and shallow, prone to go for the cheap laugh, and most
comfortable in a crowd of like-minded 'free thinkers'. It amazes me that anyone who
classified him/herself as a free thinker could see American-style democracy as the last word
in human development, but perhaps I'm just thick.
Between a
lecture Dr. Khruscheva gave at my university a year or so ago and an attempted reading of
her book, In Putin's Footsteps , I have concluded that she is the kind of writer who
takes advantage of an absence of consistent critical voices to let her opinions run wild,
untethered from factual backing, theory, or academic standards.
She lectured at my university with the backing of some powerful people within
"Russia-Watching" (quite literally in this case, as one sat behind her while she lectured).
Although she made her argument sloppily, painting in broad brushstrokes, no one challenged
the argument during Q&A.
Read the preview
of In Putin's Footsteps on A'zon. It's ridiculous. The same generalizing commentary as
before but sprinkled on what reads like an extended TripAdvisor review.
For whatever reason, academia and editors give her a free pass. The resulting writing,
while insightful re: how she thinks, is not useful [to me] in any professional sense.
--
Hey, JT – welcome back, where you been?
Haha I've been doing the blog equivalent of breathing into a brown paper bag. Now that I'm
back at uni with a capstone/distinction project, Russia Reviewed will hopefully regain its
previous sense of direction.
Yes, Russians are so miserable, never smile and are permanently depressed at thought of their
misfortune of having been born in Russia and, therefore, condemned to a life of woe under an
authoritarian regime.
I mean, just look at all those sad bastards who have been celebrating "Moskva Day" since
Thursday, 5 September this year.
I wish I could send you some clips that my permanently depressed because he is a Russian
son sent me late yesterday evening from Red Square: a big firework display and sad looking
Russians pretending to be enjoying themselves.
Most of them, I am sure, had been ordered to go to Tversksya Street and walk down to Red
Square.
Tverskaya has been closed to traffic since Thursday (the bogus celebrations end this
evening) and along its length are the usual Soviet-style distractions that the oppressed
multitudes pretend are so much fun.
Since 5 September until the 8th inclusive the city is celebrating the founding of Moskva
in 1147.
Well, not its founding, really, but the earliest date that they have a written record of a
place called "Moskva" – in a letter from the Prince of the city of Vladimir, Yuri
Dolgoruki, to his brother, inviting him to visit him in Moskva. (Remember, this was when Kiev
was the centre of world civilisation.)
It was during the first of these "Moskva Day" celebrations, held 22 years ago, when on 7
September 1997 I asked Mrs. Exile if she wished to marry me.
It was our first date.
I don't like to waste time over important matters.
She jumped at the offer, of course.
No holding her back!
Luckiest break she's ever had, I reckon, for my ebullient presence in her life has most
certainly rescued her from the pit of permanent gloom that would most certainly have
accompanied her living under this regime and from the likelihood of her being wed to a brute
of a balalaika strumming, vodka swilling Russian husband.
Limp-wristed, tea sipping Englishmen are much more preferable!
"... A kreakl is a Russian liberal, often the child or grandchild of Soviet-era intellectuals who believed they knew better than anyone else how the country should be run. ..."
"... "Continuing street protests in Hong Kong and Moscow have no doubt spooked the authoritarian duo of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Moscow protests, the largest in many years, must be keeping Mr. Putin up at night, or they wouldn't be dispersed with such unabated brutality." ..."
"... "This loss of nuclear competence is being cited by nuclear and national security experts in both the U.S. and in Europe's nuclear weapons states as a threat to their military nuclear programs. The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from unprofitable nuclear and coal plants. The memo states that the "entire US nuclear enterprise" including nuclear weapons and naval propulsion, "depends on a robust civilian nuclear industry." ..."
Nina Khrushcheva is a kreakl. We use that word here a lot, and perhaps not all the readers
know what it means. It is a portmanteau of "Creative Class", but makes use of the letter 'k',
because the letter 'c' in Russian has a soft 's' sound, so we use the hard 'k'. The Creative
Class, or so they styled themselves, were the intelligentsia of Soviet times; the free-thinking
liberals who were convinced Russia's best course lay in accommodating the west no matter its
demands, in hope that it would then bless Russia with its secrets for prosperity and all the
fruits of the American Dream.
A kreakl is a Russian liberal, often the child or grandchild of Soviet-era intellectuals
who believed they knew better than anyone else how the country should be run. They express
their disapproval of the current government in the most contemptuous way, interpret its defense
of family values as homophobia, and consider its leadership – uniformly described by the
west as 'authoritarian' – to be stifling their freedom. My position is that their often
privileged upbringing insulates them from appreciating the value of hard work, and lets them
sneer at patriotism, as they often consider themselves global citizens with a worldly grasp of
foreign affairs far greater that of their groveling, sweaty countrymen. Their university
educations allow them to rub shoulders with other pampered scions of post-Soviet affluence, and
even worse are those who are sent abroad to attend western universities, where they internalize
the notion that everyone in America and the UK lives like Skip and Buffy and their other
college friends.
Not everyone who attends university or college turns out a snobbish brat, of course, and in
Russia, at least, not everyone who gets the benefit of a superior education comes from wealth.
A significant number are on scholarships, as both my nieces were. Some western students are in
university or college on scholarships as well, and there are a good many in both places who are
higher-education students because it was their parents dream that they would be, and they saved
all their lives to make it happen.
But many of the Russian loudmouths are those who learned at their daddy's knee that he
coulda been a contendah, if only the money-grubbing, soulless monsters in the government hadn't
kept him down – could have been wealthy if it were not for the money pit of communism,
could have taken a leadership role which would have moved the country forward had the leader
who usurped power not filled all the seats with his cronies and sycophants.
Khrushcheva is somewhat an exception to the rule there, because her grandpa actually was the
leader of the Soviet Union – First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Nikita Khrushchev. It was he who oversaw the transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian SSR in 1954,
the same year the Soviet Union
applied to join NATO . Some references consider Khrushchev her grandfather, and some her
great-grandfather; it's complicated. Julia – Khrushcheva's mother – was the
daughter of Leonid, who was a fighter pilot in World War II and the son of Khrushchev. When he
was shot down in the war and did not return, Khrushchev adopted Julia. Nina Khrushcheva is
therefore his biological great-granddaughter, but his adoptive granddaughter.
Now, she's Professor of International Affairs at The New School, New York, USA, and a Senior
Fellow of the World Policy Institute, New York. As you might imagine, The New School is a
hotbed of liberal intellectualism; as its Wiki entry announces, " dedicated to academic freedom
and intellectual inquiry and a home for progressive thinkers". So let's see what a liberal and
progressive thinker thinks about the current state of affairs vis-a-vis Russia and China, and
their western opponents.
You sort of get an early feel for it from the title: "
Putin and Xi are Gambling with their Countries' Futures ". I sort of suspected, even before
I read it, that it was not going to be a story about what a great job Putin and Xi are doing as
leaders of their respective countries.
Just before we get into that a little deeper – what is the purpose of an 'Opinion'
section in a newspaper? If it was 'Facts', then it would be news, because the reporter could
substantiate it. As I best understand it, people read newspapers to learn about news –
things that happened, to who, and where, when and why, documented by someone who either saw
them happen, interviewed someone who did, or otherwise has researched the issue. 'Opinion'
sections, then, allow partisans for various philosophies to present their conclusions as if
they were facts, or to introduce disputed incidents from a standpoint which implies they are
resolved and that the author's view represents fact.
Well, hey; here's an example, in the first paragraph – "Continuing street protests
in Hong Kong and Moscow have no doubt spooked the authoritarian duo of Chinese President Xi
Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Moscow protests, the largest in many years,
must be keeping Mr. Putin up at night, or they wouldn't be dispersed with such unabated
brutality."
I suppose they have their fingers on the world's pulse at The New School, but I haven't seen
any indication at all, anywhere, that either Mr. Putin or Mr. Xi are 'spooked' about anything.
The protests in Hong Kong appear to be instigated at the urging of the USA – as usual
– with reports that the protesters are
receiving western funding , and photographs showing protest leaders apparently
meeting with the US Consul-General . Nonetheless, despite the aggressive violence displayed
by the protesters, who are certainly not peaceful, the issue seems to be mostly confined to
Hong Kong, and there have been no indications I have seen that Beijing is 'spooked' about it at
all. In fact, the position of the Chinese government seems fairly reasonable – it does
not want to see Chinese criminals escape justice by fleeing to Hong Kong.
As to whether either protests are representative of a large number of people, it is
difficult to say: organizers of the Hong Kong protests claim almost 2 million, while the police
– responsible for crowd control – say there were no more than a tenth of that
number. And if the Moscow protests really were the largest in years, those hoping to see Putin
overthrown might want to keep quiet about that; organizers claim about 50,000 people, and
organizers usually overestimate the crowd for their own reasons. Moscow is a city of over 13
million just within the city limits. So the massive crowd represents less than half of one
percent of the city's population. Polling of the protest crowd suggested more than half of them
were from outside Moscow, where who is on the city council is no concern of theirs, since they
cannot vote. And in an echo of the iconic Tahrir Square protests, an element of the 'Arab
Spring' – probably the first mass demonstrations managed by social media – the
Moscow protests appear to be
managed and directed via social media links, where it is possible to exercise
disproportionate influence on a targeted crowd of restless youth who have little or no personal
investment in the country, and just want to be part of what's cool.
Let's move on. According to Khrushcheva, the protests are 'being dispersed with unabated
brutality'. That so? Show me. Bear in mind that all these protests are unauthorized, and those
participating in them are breaking the law and in breach of the public peace. Flash violence is
an objective of the demonstrations, because otherwise their numbers are insignificant, and if
they play it by the book nobody pays them any mind. I've seen loads of pictures of the
protesters in Moscow being hauled away to the paddywagons, and nobody is bloody or has their
clothing ripped. Here are some examples (thanks, Moscow Exile).
None of those adolescents looks old enough to vote. A video clip of a Chinese policeman
using his beanbag gun to disperse protesters has been edited to omit the part where he was
swarmed by protesters who were punching him. No citizens who are in high dudgeon at what they
are being told is 'unabated brutality' would tolerate unauthorized protests by young hooligans
in their own towns for a second, and would scorn any suggestion that they are pursuing noble
goals such as freedom and democracy. Fellow demonstrators in these photos seem far more
interested in capturing every bit of the action on their phones than in assisting their
captured co-demonstrators.
By way of contrast, check out this clip of US police officers in New Jersey arresting a young woman on the
beach because there was alcohol – apparently unopened – on the same beach
blanket, which she claimed belonged to her aunt. A pretty small-potatoes issue, you would
think, compared with the fearless defense of freedom and democracy. Yet the police officers,
viewed here on their own body cameras, throw her to the ground and punch her in front of her
child although she is obviously not drunk and their breathalyzer test does not register any
alcohol on her breath. Bystanders gratuitously and repeatedly advise her, "Stop resisting".
People who complain about the way the girl is being handled are told, "Back off, or you'll be
locked up, too". For what? Which of these looks like a police state, to you? Nina Lvovna? I'm
talking to you.
The demonstrations, we are told, are a poignant sign of Putin's declining popularity. Yes,
poor old chap. In fact, Putin's approval
rating in 2019 was 64%; it was 70% in 2000, nearly 20 years ago. Just for info, Donald
Trump, the Leader Of The Free World, had an approval rating with his own voters of 44% in 2018,
and Macron was even worse at 26%. I guess a little Macron goes a long way – his
current approval rating is only 28%. His fortunes have not improved much, you might say.
Boris Johnson has not yet even properly taken the reins in the UK, but his people do not appear
optimistic; about 35% speculate
he is or will be a capable leader , while only 23% rate him more honest than most
politicians. Enjoy those, BoJo; they represent a zenith born of unreasonable hope –
The Economist describes these ratings as 'surprisingly high'. In 2018, the
Netherlands' Mark Rutte
had only 10% approval – and that was the highest of the ministers – while 34%
disapproved. Apparently about half just didn't care.
Look; Khrushcheva is talking out her ass. There just is no way to sugar-coat it. In 2015,
Vladimir Putin was
the most popular leader in the world with national voters. I daresay he is now, as well;
with the state of the world, I find it hard to imagine any other leader has an approval rating
higher than 64%. But feel free to look. Polling agencies carefully parse their questions so as
to push the results in the direction they'd like to see, but when the question is reduced to a
basic "Do you trust Putin? Yes or No?", his approval rating goes higher than it is right now.
Please note, that's the reference supplied by Khrushcheva to substantiate her statement that
fewer and fewer Russians now conflate their nation with its leader.
I don't personally recall Putin ever saying he hoped Trump would improve relations with
Russia, although it would not be an unreasonable wish had he said it. I think he was probably
glad Hillary Clinton did not win, considering her shrill Russophobic rhetoric and fondness for
military solutions to all problems, but Khrushcheva makes him sound like a doddering old fool
who barely knows what century he is living in. I think Russia always hoped for better relations
with America, because when any country's relations with America are very bad, that country
would be wise to prepare for war. Because that's how America solves its problems with other
countries. Washington already had a go at strangling Russia economically, and it failed
spectacularly, and we're getting down to the bottom of the toolbox.
Next, Khrushcheva informs us that Russia is in as weak a position to defeat the USA in a
nuclear war as it was when it was the USSR. That's true, in a roundabout way. For one, there
would be no victors or defeated in a nuclear war. It would quickly escalate to a full-on
exchange, and much of the planet would become uninhabitable. For another, Russia was always in
a pretty good position to wax America's ass in a nuclear exchange and it still is. Russia
still has about
6,800 nuclear weapons to the USA's 6,500 , and has continued to modernize and update its
nuclear arsenal through the years. A Russian strike would be concentrated on a country about a
third its size. If I were a betting man, I wouldn't like those odds. Mind you, if I were a
free-thinking liberal professor who did not have a clue what I was talking about, I would laugh
at the odds – ignorance seasoned with a superiority complex tends to make you act that
way. Just as well that betting men mostly run the world, and not jackhole liberal
professors.
The recent explosion at what was believed to be development of a new nuclear weapon in
Russia is assessed by Khrushcheva to be a clear sign of incompetence, which is quite a
diagnosis considering no investigation has even started yet. Somehow she missed the dramatic explosion of
Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, together with its multi-million-dollar satellite payload,
back in 2016. Oh, never mind – Musk quickly explained that it was 'an anomaly'. Well,
that clears it all up. Must have; the US government has continued to throw money at Musk as if
he were embarrassingly naked or something, and nobody seems prepared to suggest it was
incompetent. While we're on that subject, the whole reason SpaceX even exists is because the
USA continues to use Russian RD-180 rockets developed in the 1960s to launch its satellites and
space packages into orbit, because it doesn't have anything better. I'd be careful where I
tossed that 'incompetent' word around. Cheer up, though the news isn't all bad: just a bit more
than a year ago, the most advanced commercial reactor designs from Europe and the United States
just delivered their first megawatt-hours of electricity within one day of each other. Oh,
wait. It is bad news. Because
that took place in China . You know, that place where Xi in his unabated brutality is
trampling upon the fair face of democracy. In fact, according to nuclear energy consultant
Mycle Schneider, principal author of the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report, "The
Chinese have a very large workforce that they move from one project to another, so their skills
are actually getting better, whereas European and North American companies haven't completed
reactors in decades".
Is that bad? Gee; it might be. "This loss of nuclear competence is being cited by
nuclear and national security experts in both the U.S. and in Europe's nuclear weapons states
as a threat to their military nuclear programs. The White House cited this nuclear nexus in a
May memo instructing Rick Perry, the Secretary of Energy, to force utilities to buy power from
unprofitable nuclear and coal plants. The memo states that the "entire US nuclear enterprise"
including nuclear weapons and naval propulsion, "depends on a robust civilian nuclear
industry." You see, Ninushka, competence in nuclear weapons is directly related to
competence in nuclear engineering as a whole.
I hope she knows more about Russia than she does about China – in a single paragraph
she has the Chinese government threatening to send in the army to crush protests, and standing
aside while thugs beat up protesters – and both are bad. And of course, this threatened
action/inaction had to have been sanctioned by Xi's government. Why? Well, because everyone in
Hong Kong knows it. Much of the rest of her reasoning – free thinking, I guess I should
call it – on China is what Xi 'might be contemplating' or 'could be considering'.
Supported by nothing, apparently, except the liberal free-thinker's gift of clairvoyance.
Hong Kong was always Chinese. The Qing dynasty ceded it to the British Empire in the Treaty
of Nanjing, and it became a British Crown Colony. Britain was back for Kowloon in 1860, and
leased what came to be known as The New Territories for 99 years, ending in 1997. Time's up.
The people of Hong Kong are Chinese; it's not like they are some different and precious race
that China aims to extinguish. I was there a decade after it returned to Chinese control, and
it was largely independent; it had its own flag, the British street names were retained, and
you can probably still stop on Gloucester Road and buy a Jaguar, if you have that kind of
money. To a very large degree, China left it alone and minded its own business, but like I
said; it's Chinese. These ridiculous western attempts to split it off and make an independent
nation of it are only making trouble for the people of Hong Kong and, as usual, appeal mostly
to students who have never run anything much bigger than a bake sale, and 'free-thinking
liberals'.
China is not 'isolated diplomatically'. Beijing is host city to 167
foreign embassies . There are only 10 more in Washington, which considers itself the Center
of the Universe. Lately China has been spreading itself a little,
muscling into Latin America , right in Uncle Sam's backyard. Foreign Direct Investment into
China increased3.6 percent
year-on-year to $78.8 billion USD in January-July 2019, and has increased steadily since
that time, when it fell dramatically owing to Trump's trade war. That has proved far more
disastrous to the USA than to China, which is rapidly sourcing its imports from other suppliers
and establishing new trading relationships which exclude the United States, probably for the
long term. "China is isolated diplomatically" is precisely the sort of inane bibble-babble
liberal free-thinkers tell each other because they want to believe it is true. It is not.
Similarly – and, I would have thought, obviously – China is also not 'increasingly
regarded as an international pariah'. That's another place she's thinking
of.
There is nothing Russia or China could do to please the United States and its increasingly
lunatic governing administration, short of plucking out its eye and offering it for a bauble,
like Benton Wolf in The Age of Miracles. The type of 'reforms' demanded by the US State
Department suggest its current state is delusion, since they are patently designed to weaken
the government and empower dissident groups – is that the essence of democracy? It sure
as fuck is not. You can kind of tell by the way Washington pounces on its own dissident groups
like Mike Pompeo on a jelly roll; the FBI investigated
the Occupy Wall Street movement as a terrorist threat. Russia got a prescient preview of
the kind of treatment it could expect from the west when it applied to join NATO, as I
mentioned at the beginning of this post. The acceptance of the Soviet Union "would be
incompatible with its democratic and defensive aims."
So as most ordinary thinkers could have told you would happen, America's
hold-my-beer-and-watch-this hillbilly moves to split Russia and China apart have succeeded in
driving them closer together; the world's manufacturing and commercial giant and a major energy
producer – a great mix, unless you are the enemy. The rest of the world is kind of
watching America with its pants around its ankles, wondering what it will do next. It failed to
wreck the Russian economy, failed to depose and replace Bashar al-Assad in Syria, failed to
depose and replace Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela, and it will fail to prevent a Sino-Russian axis
which will reshape global trade to its own advantage at the expense of America. Because
whenever it has an opportunity to seize upon a lucid moment, to turn away from its destructive
course, it chooses instead to bullshit itself some more. To whisper what it wishes were true
into its own ear.
Ukraine appears not to have noticed that its backing for the United States to persuade Europe
to reject Nord Stream II is supporting American pressure for Europe to buy American LNG
instead. Would they be transiting that to Europe through Ukraine? Hardly.
President Trump has repeatedly criticized the project, saying it would make Germany
"captive" to Russian interests, and urging the Europeans to buy fuel from the U.S. instead.
During their talks in Kyiv this week, Danilyuk discussed this issue at length with Bolton,
and he urged the U.S. government to block the project by imposing economic sanctions against
it. "Bolton was very supportive," Danilyuk says. "He understands that Nord Stream 2 is bad
for the United States."
If – extremely unlikely – that initiative were ever successful, and the EU
blew off Nord stream II in favour of American imported LNG the Ukies would still be out $3
Billion a year in transit fees. The USA wants to replace Russian gas supplies to Europe, not
supplement them.
As usual, Ukraine is so eager to hurt Russia that it does not care if it hurts itself in
doing it. Just the sort of ally the USA loves.
If you think that Russia or China or Iran takes this clown show seriously or trusts in
word one Washington will follow through on what they say i have a bridge to sell you.
even during Obama's second term it was clear Putin and his staff did not trust the Obama
administration to tell the truth about the weather let alone anything important.
to get anything done now with Russia or China or Iran i suspect its become impossible. all
that's left between Washington, Moscow and Beijing is to avoid a nuclear ww3.
we have an impasse which is impossible to bridge. Russia and China are creating a new
world order for those that become a part that's philosophically, morally and economically
incompatible with the one Washington and its European vassals are trying to sustain.
only one winner will emerge from the struggle and i do not mean war although that is not
impossible once one side reaches denouement point of economic degradation.
Its said a reputation arrives on foot and departs on horseback and with ours all you
can see now is the tail wafting the air.
iv> I see the GLOBALIST shills are in full force on this video, trying to artificially
bring down the ratio from probably 99% Positive that such a bad man is gone. Doesn't matter,
the Silent Majority & good people everywhere know that Bolton was a poor candidate for
that job with a catastrophic failure record & everybody is better of with a more
competent person in that position.
John Bolton is owned by foreign powers like many in Washington. They get paid by their
lobby to push the neocon agenda which translates into robbing the US of it's $ to fight wars
that don't benefit the US.
War monger Bolton. How did that Libya thing work out for Europe ? Now after looking back,
I am sure the African invasion into Europe was planned by Obama and his boss Soros.
Tucker while I agree with you on the mess in Iraq and Afghanistan and Libya. But one thing
you left out Tucker. Foxnews hired John Bolton as a Contributer for over a decade. How do you
miss that part.
All the policies in the Middle East are complete and other failures. I'm so sick of neo
cons. You can't get rid of them. You can not get rid of them. It doesn't matter who you vote
for. Constant war. Like every regime couldn't be replaced around the world. Absolutely
ridiculous.
"In Washington, nobody cares what kind of job you did, only that you did the job. Nobody
there learns from mistakes, because mistakes are never even acknowledged. Ever." Yes, Tucker
DOES understand Washington!!!
xt" role="article"> If Bolton becomes a Fox News contributor: I will change the channel
immediately... I already do this when Jeff Epstein's, the child trafficker and rapist, good
buddy Alan Dershowitz comes on as a guest... Do not know why Fox News selects guest
contributors that have their morals/values in the wrong directions...
icle"> Bolton was signatory to PNAC- the project for a new american century, like other
progressives and neo-cons of his generation. They do not view the chaos left by taking out
Ghaddafi and Saddam as problems, rather the creation of failed states was their objective all
along. Members of the GOP went along with these plans where they coincided with their own
political and business objectives- the military industrial complex and the oilmen.
OK, lets' assume that neoliberal MSM are not lying. Then why Mueller did not include him in his report? He was already in the USA
since June 2017. It is unclear when he was fired by russians.
Also as Smolenkov for a long time lived in the USA he knew very well what the USA wants and could lie with impunity trying to earn
more money. In a way similar personality as Skripal.
Is the idea to create the second Skripals-style false poisoning hysteria to help to sustain RussiaGate?
Notable quotes:
"... The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister. ..."
"... My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch. He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity. ..."
"... MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA, although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up. ..."
"... In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote debacle on Libya ..."
"... A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh. ..."
"... We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling. ..."
"... The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016 ..."
"... I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016, Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia. ..."
"... Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report? The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have already noticed that he has done a runner. Check. ..."
"... What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA". ..."
"... Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process. Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the badly leaking ship of his own state. ..."
"... And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under his own name, for crying out loud! ..."
"... It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories. ..."
"... Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt? ..."
"... We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela? ..."
"... What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning? ..."
"... The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce? ..."
A point that appears to have missed by several is that an aide to an aide to the foreign minister is not likely to have access
to Putin's super-top-secret plans to use a few thousand dollars worth of utube and twit ads to change the course of multi-billion
dollar American election, nor would he have access to information that might be used to blackmail a potential foreign leader.
Both would be closely held secrets and apparently way above his pay grade. Often the FM wouldn't know of either, and both operations
would be compartmentalized into a close team Putin can trust.
The only way that he's the 'source' of the Steele fiction is if the whole thing was in the style of LeCarre's "The Tailor
of Panama" where everyone is lying and inflating what they know and people at the top are paying out good money for this because
it suits their little power games. But any Moscow tailor with a couple of important customers would be positioned to run that
scam as well as an aide to an aide to a foreign minister.
My personal guess, he made his money by the more typical corruption in Russia, which means he was working for an oligarch.
He lost his job, possibly during one of Putin's anti-corruption cleanup campaigns. He decided to move to DC with his oligarch
money because he'd served 10 years in the embassy there and he liked the area. He is buying property in his own name because he's
not part of any sort of witness/spy protection program and nobody in the USG is setting him up with a fake identity.
House likely bought by CIA and annual upkeep--taxes etc.--also paid by them.
MoA's investigators have fairly well established that Skripal was the most likely contributor to the Steele Dossier given
the overall web of established connections--that was most certainly an MI-6 operation in league with DNC/HRC officials, not CIA,
although CIA was involved in Russiagate Cover-up.
In examining Russia's foreign policy, where were the compromises generated by this alleged spy? Aside from the UNSC vote
debacle on Libya, I see nothing but a string of successes, although the Ukraine Coup wasn't debauched. IMO, Outlaw US Empire
policy toward Russia has failed spectacularly, and it is within the US government where I'd expect to find well placed spies.
Here's a tough problem for a counter-intelligence agent. Find the source of info for a fictional report.
Normally, after a link, one avenue of investigation would be to check who had access to the leaked information. But, if the
report is completely fictional, then there is no list of people who had access to information that didn't exist. Everyone or no
one had equal access to the non-existent information.
The Tailor of Moscow had the same access to the non-existent information as did Putin's closest personal aide. Who done it?
Headline in le Figaro: Ingérence russe :la CIA disposait d'une source haut-placée au Kremlin (Russian collusion: CIA had high
placed source at the Kremlin.)
A lot of commentators see the incongruence of this title and make jokes about it. Really,when
a superpower becomes a source of jokes and ridicule, than the end might be nigh.
Evidence-free accusations of Russian meddling. Now with extra sauce.
<> <> <> <> <> <>
We don't really know WHY this spy was extracted. Anyone that believes that Russiagate was deliberately planned as part
of the new Cold War is not surprised at yet another attempt to strengthen the nonexistent case for Russian meddling.
The first report in US Press about Putin personally involved was on Dec 14 2016.
Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked
material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for
U.S. allies, the officials said.
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said.
Notice the source is spies working for US Allies. Remember that the NSA did not sign off on the Russian interference/hacking
because they were concerned that too much critical info rested on intelligence from a single foreign country.
Sergei Skripal was not just an turncoat for UK he also worked for Estonian intelligence. It seems to me the poisoning fits
better as an Estonian job, to keep relations in Europe with Russia in very bad shape. It's easy to say that the Russians wouldn't
be so incompetent, also goes for the UK, which could have come up with something more compelling if they pre planned it as false
flag.
Notice how we have some sources saying concern grew after the Trump Putin meeting, where supposedly Trump gave Isreali intelligence
to Putin on Syria, I think they were concerned Trump would have no problem revealing a spy for another government, much like he
was free with foreign intelligence.
I don't think the exfiltration was the real source but someone to sacrifice, to protect the real source, who is working
for Estonian intelligence. To me this seems like it is possibly Anton Vaino, Chief of Staff of the Kremlin since August 2016,
Deputy Chief of Staff of Kremlin before that. This is not to say his info is accurate, but is in line with the foreign policy
of Estonia to alienate everyone with Russia.
Just out of curiosity, if what has been reported is true then what reason would Mueller have to exclude this from his report?
The dude is proof of the Russia-did-it!! narrative. Check. The dude has already been extracted. Check. The Russians must have
already noticed that he has done a runner. Check.
What would stop Mueller from producing a one-paragraph report that
starts with: "we know the following to be true because for the last decade everything that Putin did was being relayed to us by
an aide to the foreign policy advisor to the Kremlin, since extracted and now living in the USA".
Well, I just think Putin had more important things to think about than the charade that is now the US electoral process.
Probably he felt (I'm guessing of course) that the whole Russiagate scenario was a desperate move to throw a curtain over the
demise of American democracy that served his, Putin's, purposes very well because it kept the idiots busy while he shored up the
badly leaking ship of his own state.
And I go with Smiley@34 - no spy of even mediocre caliber would agree to being placed in such an exposed position under
his own name, for crying out loud!
This was a guy who had big money stashed away, wanted to be in a place where rich guys are held in high esteem, planned his
exit from a no-longer-friendly-to-rich-folk environment (if you had money in Russia these days, you should use it for the good
of the country).
It doesn't make sense that he would leave himself exposed if either in Russia or in the US he had undercover connections of
this sort. Just doesn't make sense. But that he was the best the US operatives could come up with right now simply speaks to further
deterioration of US ability to field persuasive stories.
And this gave me some amusement:
Putin's objectives were multifaceted, a high-level intelligence source told NBC News. What began as a "vendetta" against
Hillary Clinton morphed into an effort to show corruption in American politics and to "split off key American allies by creating
the image that [other countries] couldn't depend on the U.S. to be a credible global leader anymore," the official said. [Quote
from Goldman Kropotkin@43]
Putin hasn't had to worry about vendettas or showing corruption in American politics. Take a reliable poll. Who in the
US thinks our politics ISN'T corrupt?
We didn't need Putin, mastermind though he is, to 'create an image' of American unreliability. Was it Putin who reneged on
so many treaties? Was it Putin who antagonized the Koreas? Was it Putin who set up the trade war with China? Was it Putin who
threatened and sanctioned Russia, Iran, Venezuela?
We, our leaders, masterminded it all. Sorry, Mr. Putin - you lose that enviable title. We own it.
What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of Smolenkov by novichok or polonium
poisoning?
I know some here might say "Everyone would know it is a false flag if Smolenkov gets assassinated!" and that is certainly true
if by "everyone" one means the regular readers here and at a few other analysis sites that are not controlled by the empire.
The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially captured by the false narratives
pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays. Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some
Americans against the hard sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up the multi-channel
marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce?
What can the Russians do to get ahead of the narrative on the likely impending demise of
Smolenkov by novichok or polonium poisoning?
I know some here might say "Everyone would know it is a false flag if Smolenkov gets
assassinated!" and that is certainly true if by "everyone" one means the regular
readers here and at a few other analysis sites that are not controlled by the empire.
The concern is about the three hundred million other Americans who are at least partially
captured by the false narratives pumped out non-stop from their Plato's Cave displays.
Is there anything that the Russians can do now to inoculate some Americans against the hard
sell they will be facing when the corporate mass media ( Mighty Wurlitzer ) cranks up
the multi-channel marketing campaign for the United States' own Skripal farce?
Given that Washington continuously claims that Russians are responsible for the election of Donald Trump, here is an interesting
look at what Vladimir Putin had to say about why Donald Trump was elected:
While drawing links from economic class to voting patterns is difficult given that education impacts voting rates, it is pretty
clear that Vladimir Putin's observations about American society and the growing sense that middle class America is being left
behind is accurate. It is becoming increasingly clear that globalization benefits the few at the top and leaves behind the vast
majority of society who feel that their place in society is under threat.
"... Footage from the city also documented flagrant acts of vandalism targeting the infrastructure and public transportation. In one video, a staircase was spray-painted with an inspiring message, "fight for freedom," accompanied by a swastika. ..."
"... The protesters – many of them masked and armed with metal rods and clubs – also erected street barricades, which were then set ablaze. Police used tear gas to disperse the unruly crowds. ..."
"... Videos – not always publicized by the mainstream media – also show aftermath of vandalism as anti-government unrest enters its 14th week. ..."
"... Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of fueling the political turmoil, a claim that became more difficult to refute after a senior American diplomat was seen meeting with protest leaders. ..."
"... With their direct appeal to Trump, it appears that many of the protesters are not interested in negotiating directly with the government. Hong Kong had already officially withdrawn the controversial extradition bill with China that sparked the unrest. ..."
Hong Kong protesters rallied in their thousands and clashed with police in fresh unrest.
They even called on Washington to "liberate" them from Chinese rule, suggesting some may now
view the US as their patron. Thousands of demonstrators marched to the US Consulate in Hong
Kong on Sunday, in what they said was an appeal to President Donald Trump to intervene in the
weeks-long political turmoil. Videos of the rally show protesters waving American flags as they
sing the US national anthem and play 'The Star Spangled Banner' through the speakers on their
phones.
People also carried banners, urging Trump to "liberate" Hong Kong. American lawmakers
are currently mulling the so-called 'Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act'. The legislation
would require Washington to annually assess Hong Kong's level of autonomy from Beijing and
react with economic countermeasures if self-rule is compromised.
Some signs of protest used to drum up support for the cause have raised questions about the
factual accuracy of the messaging. According to the Global Times, a banner attached to an
overpass erroneously claimed that "China owes America $1 trillion."
#HK radical protesters
fail to get the facts right on a banner which states that "China owes US$1 trillion." Here is
a free lesson: As of May, the US owes China about $1.11 trillion, not the other way round.
#香港pic.twitter.com/hky6WCDJqA
Footage from the city also documented flagrant acts of vandalism targeting the
infrastructure and public transportation. In one video, a staircase was spray-painted with an
inspiring message, "fight for freedom," accompanied by a swastika.
The protesters – many of them masked and armed with metal rods and clubs – also
erected street barricades, which were then set ablaze. Police used tear gas to disperse the
unruly crowds.
Beijing has repeatedly accused Washington of fueling the political turmoil, a claim that
became more difficult to refute after a senior American diplomat was seen meeting with protest
leaders.
With their direct appeal to Trump, it appears that many of the protesters are not interested
in negotiating directly with the government. Hong Kong had already officially withdrawn the
controversial extradition bill with China that sparked the unrest.
Hong Kong protest figurehead Joshua Wong, who has been rocking up to 'pro-democracy'
meetings with various Western officials in recent weeks, has been spotted hanging out with the
chairman of the White Helmets in Berlin. Wong attended the 'Bild 100' summer party in Berlin
this week, where he seems to have bumped into White Helmets boss Raed Al Saleh. That's a tad
awkward, since the Syrian first-responders group operates solely in areas controlled by
anti-government fighters and has been heavily suspected of
links to Al Qaeda and US-sponsored jihadist militias – a fact that did not go
unnoticed on Twitter.
There was another familiar face in the snaps, too: Mayor of Kiev Vitaly Klitschko, who was,
for a time, himself a Western favorite when Ukraine was in Washington's regime-change
crosshairs.
But Wong has had some questionable high-level meetings, too. He also met German Foreign
Minister Heiko Maas at the event – with that tete-a-tete quickly slammed by Beijing.
These meetings come on the heels of photos showing Wong speaking to
Julie Eadeh, an official from the US consulate general in Hong Kong, which raised more
suspicions that Washington had a hand in the recent violent anti-China protests
"... As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become
lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime. ..."
"... By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order. ..."
"... Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist, but
he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and
relaxation of international tensions. ..."
"... The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater
the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than
hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's.... ..."
"... In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral aspects
of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity. ..."
Note to Self: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War *
Harry Dexter White... George Kennan... George Marshall... Arthur Vandenberg... Paul Hoffman... Dean Acheson... Harry S Truman...
Dwight D. Eisenhower... Gerald Ford... George Shultz
The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.
By George F. Kennan
The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership "won the cold war" is intrinsically
silly.
The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political
upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and
become lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime.
These thoughts found a place in my so-called X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, from which the policy of containment is
widely seen to have originated. This perception was even more clearly expressed in a letter from Moscow written in 1952, when
I was Ambassador there, to H. Freeman Matthews, a senior State Department official, excerpts from which also have been widely
published. There were some of us to whom it was clear, even at that early date, that the regime as we had known it would not last
for all time. We could not know when or how it would be changed; we knew only that change was inevitable and impending.
By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order.
Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist,
but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization
and relaxation of international tensions.
The downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960, more than anything else, put an end to this hope. The episode humiliated Khrushchev
and discredited his relatively moderate policies. It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on
a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.
The U-2 episode was the clearest example of that primacy of military over political policy that soon was to become an outstanding
feature of American cold war policy. The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles
over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the
greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to
delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's....
In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral
aspects of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity.
Early in my time in the service, when I had time to think being at a remote station I decided the west had the marked economic
advantage, particularly as the green revolution permitted some higher level of nutrition security.
Later on I recall discussions where the collapse of the Soviet Union was assured but would take in to the 21st century to occur.
The big question then was "would a nuclear exchange occur in the way of a peaceful collapse".....
The presence of the A Bomb in some ways prevented war in other encouraged intrigue and small scrapes in to each other's spheres.
There was a bit of the Divine in the world getting through the Cold War.
The Berlin wall came down as hoped but 25 years earlier than I expected.
KENNAN Was a lucky guy. He hit the right notes at the right time and then as he got second thoughts and better vision. Like yugoslaving
peoples China in 1949
He was side tracked and then sent out to ivy pastures
Nonsense. The moment to engage was 1953 -54 and yes a goo regime blocked it
But it was Truman that crossed the parallel in 1950 and tried to liberate north Korea
It was Kennedy that preferred brinksmanship to real engagement. Brush wars and regime change to accommodation. Missile racing
to sensible unilateralism
Yes LBJ was an ignorant oaf on foreign policy. But it was Nixon that finally used PRC as Yugo twenty years too late of course
The cold war was invented by democrats and exploited by republicans for domestic shindiggery. Tragicomedy cinescope scaled
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now, American historians were mistaken at the
end of the 1980s. There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was
about. If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet
ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking
policy steps to carry on the Cold War.
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
"... As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and become
lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime. ..."
"... By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order. ..."
"... Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist, but
he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization and
relaxation of international tensions. ..."
"... The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the greater
the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to delay rather than
hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's.... ..."
"... In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral aspects
of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity. ..."
Note to Self: The Ten Americans Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War *
Harry Dexter White... George Kennan... George Marshall... Arthur Vandenberg... Paul Hoffman... Dean Acheson... Harry S Truman...
Dwight D. Eisenhower... Gerald Ford... George Shultz
The G.O.P. Won the Cold War? Ridiculous.
By George F. Kennan
The claim heard in campaign rhetoric that the United States under Republican Party leadership "won the cold war" is intrinsically
silly.
The suggestion that any Administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political
upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish. No great country has that sort of influence
on the internal developments of any other one.
As early as the late 1940's, some of us living in Russia saw that the regime was becoming dangerously remote from the concerns
and hopes of the Russian people. The original ideological and emotional motivation of Russian Communism had worn itself out and
become lost in the exertions of the great war. And there was already apparent a growing generational gap in the regime.
These thoughts found a place in my so-called X article in Foreign Affairs in 1947, from which the policy of containment is
widely seen to have originated. This perception was even more clearly expressed in a letter from Moscow written in 1952, when
I was Ambassador there, to H. Freeman Matthews, a senior State Department official, excerpts from which also have been widely
published. There were some of us to whom it was clear, even at that early date, that the regime as we had known it would not last
for all time. We could not know when or how it would be changed; we knew only that change was inevitable and impending.
By the time Stalin died, in 1953, even many Communist Party members had come to see his dictatorship as grotesque, dangerous
and unnecessary, and there was a general impression that far-reaching changes were in order.
Nikita Khrushchev took the leadership in the resulting liberalizing tendencies. He was in his crude way a firm Communist,
but he was not wholly unopen to reasonable argument. His personality offered the greatest hope for internal political liberalization
and relaxation of international tensions.
The downing of the U-2 spy plane in 1960, more than anything else, put an end to this hope. The episode humiliated Khrushchev
and discredited his relatively moderate policies. It forced him to fall back, for the defense of his own political position, on
a more strongly belligerent anti-American tone of public utterance.
The U-2 episode was the clearest example of that primacy of military over political policy that soon was to become an outstanding
feature of American cold war policy. The extreme militarization of American discussion and policy, as promoted by hard-line circles
over the ensuing 25 years, consistently strengthened comparable hard-liners in the Soviet Union.
The more America's political leaders were seen in Moscow as committed to an ultimate military rather than political resolution
of Soviet-American tensions, the greater was the tendency in Moscow to tighten the controls by both party and police, and the
greater the braking effect on all liberalizing tendencies in the regime. Thus the general effect of cold war extremism was to
delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union at the end of the 1980's....
In the competition between major powers and/or alliances there are several somewhat complementary aspects of power: economic
or physical aspect to create things of "value" (added by the commerce and industry of the entity), the military power, and moral
aspects of the entity in terms of political and cultural resolve and unity.
Early in my time in the service, when I had time to think being at a remote station I decided the west had the marked economic
advantage, particularly as the green revolution permitted some higher level of nutrition security.
Later on I recall discussions where the collapse of the Soviet Union was assured but would take in to the 21st century to occur.
The big question then was "would a nuclear exchange occur in the way of a peaceful collapse".....
The presence of the A Bomb in some ways prevented war in other encouraged intrigue and small scrapes in to each other's spheres.
There was a bit of the Divine in the world getting through the Cold War.
The Berlin wall came down as hoped but 25 years earlier than I expected.
KENNAN Was a lucky guy. He hit the right notes at the right time and then as he got second thoughts and better vision. Like yugoslaving
peoples China in 1949
He was side tracked and then sent out to ivy pastures
Nonsense. The moment to engage was 1953 -54 and yes a goo regime blocked it
But it was Truman that crossed the parallel in 1950 and tried to liberate north Korea
It was Kennedy that preferred brinksmanship to real engagement. Brush wars and regime change to accommodation. Missile racing
to sensible unilateralism
Yes LBJ was an ignorant oaf on foreign policy. But it was Nixon that finally used PRC as Yugo twenty years too late of course
The cold war was invented by democrats and exploited by republicans for domestic shindiggery. Tragicomedy cinescope scaled
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now, American historians were mistaken at the
end of the 1980s. There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was
about. If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet
ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking
policy steps to carry on the Cold War.
What democracy they are talking about? Democracy for whom? This Harvard political prostitutes are talking about democracy for oligarchs
which was the nest result of EuroMaydan and the ability of Western companies to buy assets for pennies on the dollar without the control
of national government like happen in xUSSR space after dissolution of the USSR, which in retrospect can be classified as a color revolution
too, supported by financial injection, logistical support and propaganda campaign in major Western MSM.
What Harvard honchos probably does not understand or does not wish to understand is that neoliberalism as a social system lost its
attraction and is in irreversible decline. The ideology of neoliberalism collapsed much like Bolsheviks' ideology. As Politician like
Joe Boden which still preach neoliberalism are widely viewed as corrupt or senile (or both) hypocrites.
The "Collective West" still demonstrates formidable intelligence agencies skills (especially the USA and GB), but the key question
is: "What they are fighting for?"
They are fighting for neoliberalism which is a lost case. Which looks like KGB successes after WWIII. They won many battles and
lost the Cold war.
Not that Bolsheviks in the USSR was healthy or vibrant. Economics was a deep stagnation, alcoholism among working class was rampant,
the standard of living of the majority of population slides each year, much like is the case with neoliberalism after, say, 1991. Hidden
unemployment in the USSR was high -- at least in high teens if not higher. Like in the USA now good jobs were almost impossible to obtain
without "extra help". Medical services while free were dismal, especially dental -- which were horrible. Hospitals were poor as church
rats as most money went to MIC. Actually, like in the USA now, MIC helped to strangulate the economy and contributed to the collapse.
It was co a corrupt and decaying , led by completely degenerated leadership. To put the person of the level of Gorbachov level of political
talent lead such a huge and complex country was an obvious suicide.
But the facts speak for themselves: what people usually get as the result of any color revolution is the typical for any county
which lost the war: dramatic drop of the standard of living due to economic rape of the country.
While far form being perfect the Chinese regime at least managed to lift the standard of living of the majority of the population
and provide employment. After regime change China will experience the same economic rape as the USSR under Yeltsin regime. So in no
way Hong Cong revolution can be viewed a progressive phenomenon despite all the warts of neoliberalism with Chenese characteristics
in mainland China (actually this is a variant of NEP that Gorbachov tried to implement in the USSR, but was to politically incompetent
to succeed)
CHENOWETH: I think it really boils down to four different things. The first is a large and diverse participation that's
sustained.
The second thing is that [the movement] needs to elicit loyalty shifts among security forces in particular, but also other
elites. Security forces are important because they ultimately are the agents of repression, and their actions largely decide
how violent the confrontation with -- and reaction to -- the nonviolent campaign is going to be in the end. But there are other
security elites, economic and business elites, state media. There are lots of different pillars that support the status quo,
and if they can be disrupted or coerced into noncooperation, then that's a decisive factor.
The third thing is that the campaigns need to be able to have more than just protests; there needs to be a lot of variation
in the methods they use.
The fourth thing is that when campaigns are repressed -- which is basically inevitable for those calling for major changes
-- they don't either descend into chaos or opt for using violence themselves. If campaigns allow their repression to throw
the movement into total disarray or they use it as a pretext to militarize their campaign, then they're essentially co-signing
what the regime wants -- for the resisters to play on its own playing field. And they're probably going to get totally crushed.
Wai Sing-Rin @waisingrin • Aug 27
Replying to @ChrisFraser_HKU @edennnnnn_ and 2 others
Anyone who watched the lone frontliner (w translator) sees the frontliners are headed for disaster. They're fighting just
to fight with no plans nor objectives.
They see themselves as heroes protecting the HK they love. No doubt their sincerity, but there are 300 of them left.
"... A UN report published last week explicitly held the US, Britain and France liable for complicity in massive war crimes from their unstinting supply of warplanes, munitions and logistics to the Saudi and Emirati warplanes that have indiscriminately bombed civilians and public infrastructure. ..."
"... The infernal humanitarian conditions and complicity in war crimes can no longer be concealed by Washington's mendacity about allegedly combating "Iran subversion" in Yemen. The southern Arabian Peninsula country is an unmitigated PR disaster for official American pretensions of being a world leader in democratic and law-abiding virtue. ..."
"... After four years of relentless air strikes, which has become financially ruinous for the Saudi monarchy and its precocious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who conceived the war, the Houthis still remain in control of the capital Sanaa and large swathes of the country. Barbaric bombardment and siege-starvation imposed on Yemen has not dislodged the rebels. ..."
"... The defeat is further complicated by the open conflict which has broken out over recent weeks between rival militants sponsored by the Saudis and Emiratis in the southern port city of Aden. There are reports of UAE warplanes attacking Saudi-backed militants and of Saudi force build-up. A war of words has erupted between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. There is strong possibility that the rival factions could blow up into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supposed coalition allies. ..."
"... When the US starts to talk about "ending the war" with a spin about concern for "mutual peace", then you know the sordid game is finally up. ..."
The war was launched by the US-backed Saudi coalition, including the United Arab Emirates,
in March 2015, without any provocation from Yemen. The precipitating factor was that the
Houthis, a mainly Shia rebel group aligned with Iran, had kicked out a corrupt Saudi-backed
dictator at the end of 2014. When he tucked tail and fled to exile in Saudi capital Riyadh,
that's when the Saudis launched their aerial bombing campaign on Yemen.
The slaughter in Yemen over the past four years has been nothing short of a calamity for the
population of nearly 28 million people. The UN estimates that nearly 80 per cent of the nation
is teetering on hunger and disease.
A UN report
published last week explicitly held the US, Britain and France liable for complicity in massive
war crimes from their unstinting supply of warplanes, munitions and logistics to the Saudi and
Emirati warplanes that have indiscriminately bombed civilians and public infrastructure. The UN
report also blamed the Houthis for committing atrocities. That may be so, but the preponderance
of deaths and destruction in Yemen is due to American, British and French military support to
the Saudi-led coalition. Up to 100,ooo civilians may have been killed from the Western-backed
blitzkrieg, while the Western media keep quoting a figure of "10,000", which magically never
seems to increase over the past four years.
Several factors are pressing the Trump administration to wind down the Yemen war.
The infernal humanitarian conditions and complicity in war crimes can no longer be concealed
by Washington's mendacity about allegedly combating "Iran subversion" in Yemen. The southern
Arabian Peninsula country is an unmitigated PR disaster for official American pretensions of
being a world leader in democratic and law-abiding virtue.
When the American Congress is united in calling for a ban on US arms to Saudi Arabia because
of the atrocities in Yemen, then we should know that the PR war has been lost. President Trump
over-ruled Congress earlier this year to continue arming the Saudis in Yemen. But even Trump
must at last be realizing his government's culpability for aiding and abetting genocide is no
longer excusable, even for the most credulous consumers of American propaganda.
After four years of relentless air strikes, which has become financially ruinous for the
Saudi monarchy and its precocious Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who conceived the war, the
Houthis still remain in control of the capital Sanaa and large swathes of the country. Barbaric
bombardment and siege-starvation imposed on Yemen has not dislodged the rebels.
Not only that but the Houthis have begun to take the war into the heart of Saudi Arabia.
Over the past year, the rebels have mounted increasingly sophisticated long-range drone and
ballistic missile attacks on Saudi military bases and the capital Riyadh. From where the
Houthis are receiving their more lethal weaponry is not clear. Maybe from Lebanon's Hezbollah
or from Iran. In any case, such supply if confirmed could be argued as legitimate support for a
country facing aggression.
No doubt the Houthis striking deep into Saudi territory has given the pampered monarchs in
Riyadh serious pause for thought.
When the UAE – the other main coalition partner – announced a month ago that it
was scaling back its involvement in Yemen that must have rattled Washington and Riyadh that the
war was indeed futile.
The defeat is further complicated by the open conflict
which has broken out over recent weeks between rival militants sponsored by the Saudis and
Emiratis in the southern port city of Aden. There are reports of
UAE warplanes attacking Saudi-backed militants and of Saudi force build-up. A war of words has
erupted between Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. There is strong possibility that the rival factions could
blow up into a proxy war between Saudi Arabia and the UAE, supposed coalition allies.
Washington has doubtless taken note of the unstoppable disaster in Yemen and how its
position is indefensible and infeasible.
Like so many other obscene American wars down through the decades, Washington is facing yet another ignominious defeat in
Yemen. When the US starts to talk about "ending the war" with a spin about concern for "mutual peace", then you know the
sordid game is finally up.
"... "We're either pushing Russia into isolation, which increases tensions, or to ally itself with other major powers like China, which would not be in our interest," Macron said, calling for the "rethinking" of relations with Moscow. Otherwise, Europe will be stuck with being "a theater for strategic struggle between the US and Russia." ..."
"... France has long feared a Russia-China alliance, believes Evgeny Osipov, a senior fellow at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. What has changed recently is the nature of relations between Moscow and Paris. Macron's rhetoric has somewhat softened in recent months – to the point that during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, he vowed to do his best to rebuild trust between Russia and the EU. ..."
French President Emmanuel Macron has warned Western nations against the "strategic mistake"
of alienating Russia – but in doing so, he seeks a bigger role for himself in
international politics. "We are living the end of Western hegemony," Macron told
diplomats on Tuesday, after hosting the G7 meeting in the city of Biarritz on France's Atlantic
coast over the weekend. He named the rise of Beijing and Moscow as signs of a shift on the
world scene.
Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic mistake.
President Macron went further, even saying that the main problem in the world is no longer
Russia but instead the United States
"We're either pushing Russia into isolation, which increases tensions, or to ally itself
with other major powers like China, which would not be in our interest," Macron said,
calling for the "rethinking" of relations with Moscow. Otherwise, Europe will be stuck
with being "a theater for strategic struggle between the US and Russia."
France has long feared a Russia-China alliance, believes Evgeny Osipov, a senior fellow at
the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences. What has changed recently
is the nature of relations between Moscow and Paris. Macron's rhetoric has somewhat softened in
recent months – to the point that during talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin last
week, he vowed to do his best to rebuild trust between Russia and the EU.
The ties have "stabilized" over the past two years, Osipov, a PhD in history,
believes. "Moscow and Paris openly state their differences yet, they are now ready to
gradually promote dialogue and move forward towards full normalization of relations," he
said. Macron even called Russia a "deeply European" country with a future "tied"
with the rest of Europe.
All that does not necessarily mean Macron's actions are driven by a pure desire to see
Russia return to the "family." It might be more about the balance of power, according to
Osipov.
France is itself very active when it comes to relations with China, the historian explained.
What Macron cares about is that neither China nor Russia or the US become too powerful too soon
– and an alliance between Moscow and Beijing is most likely to tip the scales.
New
de Gaulle?
However, there might be more to Macron's call for rapprochement with Moscow. He might be
seeking ways to cement his position as a European leader – something he has arguably been
craving since he took office.
"Two years ago it was just a dream. Now, it is within reach," Osipov said. With
German Chancellor Angela Merkel facing mounting pressure at home and the UK's authority in
Europe shaken by Brexit, France might yet emerge as the most stable – and the most
powerful for that matter – of the European political grandees.
As he strives for this desired status, Macron seems to be trying to mimic France's iconic
leader – Charles de Gaulle, who sought to keep the balance between the West and the
Socialist Bloc in the 1960s. Now, Macron wants France to become a "bridge between the West
and Russia," Osipov said.
His role is unlikely to be limited to mediation, though. Macron apparently wants to take the
lead in shaping the West's – or at least Europe's – policies, and he has already
taken it upon himself to point out their mistakes:
The world order is being shaken like never before.
"It's being shaken because of errors made by the West in certain crises, but also by the
choices made by the United States in the past few years – and not just by the current
administration."
These "choices" are impacting "the conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere,
making it necessary to rethink military and diplomatic strategies," the president
noted.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
"... Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told the assembled envoys. ..."
"... Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute. ..."
"... Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way, he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House. ..."
"... who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason? ..."
"... Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the EU. ..."
"... The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. ..."
"... America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work. ..."
"... Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!! ..."
"... We are witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have your head examined! ..."
"... IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by the West to retain hegemony. ..."
"... The West has been hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. ..."
"... The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years. ..."
"... The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community. ..."
"... You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years ..."
"... As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on Netanyahu's face. ..."
"... Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs America. ..."
In desultory fashion over the past month or so, we have had indications that the policy
cliques in Washington are indeed reconsidering the Cold War II they set in motion during the
Obama administration's final years. And President Donald Trump, persistent in his effort to
reconstruct relations with Russia, now finds an unlikely ally in Emmanuel Macron. This suggests
a nascent momentum in a new direction.
"Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic mistake," the French president
asserted in a stunning series of
remarks to European diplomats immediately after the Group of 7 summit in Biarritz late last
month.
This alone is a bold if implicit attack on the hawkish Russophobes Trump now battles in
Washington. Macron then outdid himself: "We are living the end of Western hegemony," he told
the assembled envoys.
It is difficult to recall when a Western leader last spoke so truthfully and insightfully of
our 21 st century realities, chief among them the inevitable rise of
non–Western nations to positions of parity with the Atlantic world. You have nonetheless
read no word of this occasion in our corporate media: Macron's startling observations run
entirely counter to the frayed triumphalism and nostalgia that grip Washington as its era of
preeminence fades.
President Donald J. Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron in joint press conference in
Biarritz, France, site of the G7 Summit, Aug. 26, 2019. (White House/ Andrea Hanks)
There is much to indicate that the West's aggressively hostile posture toward Russia remains
unchanged. The Russophobic rhetoric emanating from Washington and featured daily in our
corporate television broadcasts continues unabated. Last month Washington formally abandoned
the bilateral treaty limiting deployment of intermediate-range ballistic missiles, signed with
Moscow in 1987. As anyone could have predicted, NATO now suggests it will
upgrade its missile defense systems in Poland and Romania. This amounts to an engraved
invitation to the Russian Federation to begin a new arms race.
But a counter-argument favoring a constructive relationship with Russia is now evident. This
is not unlike the abrupt
volte-face in Washington's thinking on North Korea: It is now broadly accepted that the
Korean crisis can be resolved only at the negotiating table.
The Times Are Changing
The New York Times seems to be on board with this this sharp turn in foreign policy.
It reported the
new consensus on North Korea in a news analysis on July 11. Ten days later it published another
arguing that it's time to put down the spear and make amends with Moscow. Here is the
astonishing pith of the piece: "China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to
American objectives over the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to
establish a sounder relationship with Russia and peel it away from China."
It is encouraging that the Times has at last discovered the well-elaborated alliance
between Moscow and Beijing. It took the one-time newspaper of record long enough. But there is
another feature of this article that is important to note: It was published as a lead
editorial. This is not insignificant.
It is essential, when reading the Times , to understand the close -- not to say
corrupt -- relations it has maintained with political power in Washington over many
generations. This is well-documented in histories of the paper and of institutions such as the
CIA. An editorial advancing a policy shift of this magnitude almost certainly reflects the
paper's close consultations, at senior levels of management, with policy-setting officials at
the National Security Council, the State Department, or at the Pentagon. The editorial is
wholly in keeping with Washington's pronounced new campaign to designate China as America's
most dangerous threat.
It is impossible to say whether Trump is emboldened by an inchoate shift of opinion on
Russia, but he flew his banner high at the Biarritz G–7. Prior to his departure for the
summit in southwest France he asserted that Russia should be
readmitted to the group when it convenes in the U.S. next year. Russia was excluded in
2014, following its annexation of Crimea in response to the coup in Kiev.
Trump repeated the thought in Biarritz, claiming there was
support among other members for the restoration of the G–8. "I think it's a work in
progress," he said. "We have a number of people that would like to see Russia back."
Macron is plainly one of those people. It was just after Trump sounded his theme amid
Biarritz's faded grandeur -- and what an excellent choice for a convention of the Western
powers -- that the French president made his own plea for repairing ties with Russia and for
Europe to escape its fate as "a theater for strategic struggle between the U.S. and
Russia."
Biarritz from the Pointe Saint-Martin, 1999. (Wikimedia Commons)
"The European continent will never be stable, will never be secure, if we don't pacify and
clarify our relations with Russia," Macron said in his
address to Western diplomats. Then came his flourish on the imminent end of the Atlantic
world's preeminence.
"The world order is being shaken like never before. It's being shaken because of errors
made by the West in certain crises, but also by the choices made by the United States in the
past few years -- and not just by the current administration."
Macron is an opportunistic main-chancer in European politics, and it is not at all certain
how far he can or will attempt to advance his new vision of either the West or Europe in the
Continent's councils of state. But as evidence of a new current in Western thinking about
Russia, the non–West in general, and Europe's long-nursed desire for greater independence
from Washington, the importance of his comments is beyond dispute.
The question now is whether or how soon better ties with Moscow will translate into
practical realities. At present, Trump and Macron share a good idea without much substance to
it.
Better US-Russia Ties May Be in Pipeline
But Trump may have taken a step in the right direction. Within days of his return from
Biarritz, he
put a hold on the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, a military aid program that was
to provide Kiev with $250 million in assistance during the 2019 fiscal year, which begins Oct.
1 and runs to Sept. 30, 2020. The funds are designated for weaponry, training and intelligence
support.
Trump has asked his national security advisers to review the commitment. The delay, coming
hard on his proposal to readmit Russia to a reconstituted G–8, cannot possibly be read as
a coincidence.
There will be other things to watch for in months to come. High among these is Trump's
policy toward the Nord Stream 2 pipeline linking Russian gas fields to terminals in Western
Europe, thereby cutting Ukraine out of the loop. Trump, his desire to improve ties with Moscow
notwithstanding, has vigorously opposed this project.
The Treasury Department has threatened sanctions against European contractors working on
it. If Trump is serious about bringing Russia back into the fold, this policy will have to go.
This may mean going up against the energy lobby in Washington and Ukraine's many advocates on
Capitol Hill.
To date, U.S. threats to retaliate against construction of Nord Stream 2 have done nothing
but irritate Europeans, who have ignored them, while furthering the Continent's desire to
escape Washington's suffocating embrace. This is precisely the kind of contradiction Macron
addressed when he protested that Europeans need to begin acting in their own interests rather
than acquiesce as Washington force-marches them on a never-ending anti–Russia
crusade.
Macron may prove a pushover, or a would-be Gaullist who fails to make the grade. Or he may
have just announced a long-awaited inflection point in trans–Atlantic ties. Either way,
he has put highly significant questions on the table. It will be interesting to see what
responses they may elicit, not least from the Trump White House.
Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International
Herald Tribune , is a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer. His most recent book is
"Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century" (Yale). Follow him on Twitter @thefloutist . His web site is Patrick Lawrence . Support his work via
his Patreon site .
Erelis , September 10, 2019 at 18:49
A few European countries may develop warmer relations .but reproachment with Russia will
not happen in our lifetimes. Macron offered nothing but rhetoric. The West continues economic
warfare and a militaristic stance toward Russia. Western institutions and interests are too
tied into Russo-phobia to give it up–it is a financial and emotional heroin to the
West. Break the Russian/Chinese alliance? Ain't gonna happen.
As for the NYTimes. They recently have published unsubstantiated accounts about some spy
close to Putin who swears by gawd that Putin personally ordered Trump's victory. How is it
going to be possible for Trump or even a new democratic president to engage Russia
diplomatically with such widely published and accepted propaganda?. Every leading democratic
party candidate have sworn to the Russiagate hoax and issued highly aggressive rhetoric. They
will be called traitors if they even speak with Putin unless they attempt to punch out
Putin.
Jim Glover , September 10, 2019 at 17:36
Now that the war monger Bolton is gone that is good news for pursuing Peace.
It is also good that Patrick points out what has been hiding in plain site from the divide
and conquer propaganda from the mass media that the Cold War and the old ones have always
been about the West against the East. Maybe the Trump challengers can join the new Pursuit of
Peace for the good of Humanity. It Can't hurt!
Stephen M , September 10, 2019 at 15:14
This is as good a time as any to point to an alternative vision of foreign policy. One
based on the principle of non-interference, respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity,
and, above all, international law. One based on peaceful coexistence and mutual cooperation.
A vision of the world at peace and undivided by arbitrary distinctions. Such a world is
possible and even though there are currently players around the world who are striving in
that direction we need look no further than our own history for inspiration. Ladies and
gentlemen, I give you one Henry A. Wallace, for your consideration.
(The following excerpts from an article by Dr. Dennis Etler. Link to the full article
provided below.) --
The highest profile figure who articulated an alternative vision for American foreign
policy was the politician Henry Wallace, who served as vice president under Franklin D.
Roosevelt from 1940-1944 and ran for president in 1948 as the candidate of the Progressive
Party.
After he became vice president in 1940, as Roosevelt was increasingly ill, Wallace
promoted a new vision for America's role in the world that suggested that rather than playing
catch up with the imperial powers, the United States should work with partners to establish a
new world order that eliminated militarism, colonialism and imperialism.
Wallace gave a speech in 1942 that declared a "Century of the Common Man." He described a
post-war world that offered "freedom from want," a new order in which ordinary citizens,
rather than the rich and powerful, would play a decisive role in politics.
That speech made direct analogy between the Second World War and the Civil War, suggesting
that the Second World War was being fought to end economic slavery and to create a more equal
society. Wallace demanded that the imperialist powers like Britain and France give up their
colonies at the end of the war.
In diplomacy, Wallace imagined a multi-polar world founded on the United Nations Charter with
a focus on peaceful cooperation. In contrast, in 1941 Henry Luce, publisher of Time Magazine,
had called for an 'American century,' suggesting that victory in war would allow the United
States to "exert upon the world the full impact of our influence, for such purposes as we see
fit and by such means as we see fit."
Wallace responded to Luce with a demand to create a world in which "no nation will have the
God-given right to exploit other nations. Older nations will have the privilege to help
younger nations get started on the path to industrialization, but there must be neither
military nor economic imperialism." Wallace took the New Deal global. His foreign policy was
to be based on non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries and mutual respect
for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty.
--
Sadly, since then, despite occasional efforts to head in a new direction, the core
constituency for US foreign policy has been corporations, rather than the "common man" either
in the United States, or the other nations of the world, and United States foreign relations
have been dominated by interference in the political affairs of other nations. As a result
the military was transformed from an "arsenal for democracy" during the Second World War into
a defender of privilege at home and abroad afterwards.
-- -
Foreign aid for Wallace was not a tool to foster economic dominance as it was to become, but
rather "economic assistance without political conditions to further the independent economic
development of the Latin American and Caribbean countries." He held high "the principle of
self-determination for the peoples of Africa, Asia, the West Indies, and other colonial
areas." He saw the key policy for the United States to be based on "the principles of
non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations and acceptance of the right of
peoples to choose their own form of government and economic system."
--
Wallace's legacy suggests that it is possible to put forth a vision of an honest
internationalism in US foreign policy that is in essence American. His approach was proactive
not reactive. It would go far beyond anything Democrats propose today, who can only suggest
that the United States should not start an unprovoked war with Iran or North Korea, but who
embrace sanctions and propagandist reports that demonize those countries.
Rather than ridiculing Trump's overtures to North Korea, they should go further to reduce
tensions between the North and the South by pushing for the eventual withdrawal of troops
from South Korea and Japan (a position fully in line with Wallace and many other politicians
of that age).
Rather than demonizing and isolating Russia (as a means to score political points against
Trump), progressives should call for a real détente, that recognizes Russia's core
interests, proposes that NATO withdraw troops from Russia's borders, ends sanctions and
reintegrates Russia into the greater European economy. They could even call for an end to
NATO and the perpetuation of the dangerous global rift between East and West that it
perpetuates.
Rather than attempt to thwart China's rise, and attack Trump for not punishing it enough,
progressives should seek to create new synergies between China and the US economically,
politically and socioculturally.
-- -
In contrast to the US policy of perpetual war and "destroying nations in order to save them,"
China's BRI proposes an open plan for development that is not grounded in the models of
French and British imperialism. It has proposed global infrastructure and science projects
that include participants from nations in Africa, Asia, South and Central America previously
ignored by American and European elites -- much as Wallace proposed an equal engagement with
Latin America. When offering developmental aid and investment China does not demand that free
market principles be adopted or that the public sector be privatized and opened up for global
investment banks to ravish.
--
The United States should be emulating China, its Belt and Road Initiative and Community of
Common Destiny, as a means of revitalizing its political culture and kicking its addiction to
a neo-colonial concept of economic development and growth. Rather than relying on
militarization and its attendant wars to spark the economy, progressives should demand that
the US work in conjunction with nations such as China and Russia in building a sustainable
future rather than creating one failed state after another.
Now it is clear why the CIA spilled the phony beans on a spy they had in Putin's inner
circle – to revive the anti-Russian animus that has been dying down.
Rob , September 10, 2019 at 12:00
But if there is a rapprochement between the U.S. and Russia, will that put the brakes on
the new arms race?Surely, the defense industry will fight that with every fiber of their
being. China alone is not so great a potential military adversary as to warrant so a great
expenditure. Or is it? I have little doubt that some interested parties will see it that
way.
David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:16
A breath of fresh air ?
Dare we hope?
Good luck peeling away Russia from China, they have some very solid bonds established.
Besides, who in their right mind would trust the U.S. anymore for any reason?
... ... ...
Vera Gottlieb , September 10, 2019 at 11:04
Well, for far too long has Europe allowed itself to be "run" by the US. And sadly, Europe
– up to now- has lacked the backbone to stand up to the Americans. Time to realize
that, even without the US, the sun will still rise in the East America this America the other
why should we have to wait until the US makes up it's mind on anything. We are grown up folks
who can manage very well by ourselves without constantly having to worry as to what the US
might do or say. Enough of this blackmail.
Insightful, Patrick. This new shift will present many new challenges and opportunities for
the US and Russia. I can see that if Trump is permitted (by deep state and NATO) as much
access to Putin as Netanyahu has had, I can see a far more balanced US foreign policy and
certainly a large step toward reducing world conflicts. Iran may be convinced to negotiate
with Trump for removal of sanctions coupled with a new nuclear deal. I have no idea if this
will impact the Iran-China oil/security agreement which is a (very expensive, unpopular but
necessary) lifesaver for Iran and huge investment opportunity for China (backed with up to
5000 Chinese military). Syria needs the removal of US sanctions to stabilize its economy, and
with the US onside, more pressure can be put on Turkey to stop arming the terrorists in
Idlib, enforce their removal/surrender, and accommodate the Kurds within Syria. Finally, with
EU participation, I can see rapid settlement of the civil war in Eastern Ukraine, and
normalization of trade with Russia. Until now, the conflict with Russia has resulted in the
conversion of the Ukrainian (and other formerly eastern bloc countries) economy from highly
industrial to a supplier of cheap labor, some agricultural products, and raw materials to the
EU.
AnneR , September 10, 2019 at 09:51
Mr Lawrence, apparently the tune has not changed re Russiagate, not really. That is if the
news item on the BBC World Service this a.m. is owt to go by.
This was all about some supposed CIA asset in the Kremlin that they got out in 2017
(Smolenkov according to RT and Sputnik) who played a role, so the BBC said in furtherance of
maintaining Russophobia, in providing said "reputable" secret agency (as now so viewed by the
Demrats and DNC) with info about Russian – nay, Putin's personal – interference
in the 2016 US presidential election. All of the (dis/mis) information that the MSM
presstitutes have been selling us on both sides of the pond re the "heinous" activities of
Russia-Putin were rehearsed again from Russiagate to Russian attempted and completed
assassinations of escaped/released ex-spies, Skripal among them.
They, the US-UK-IS deep states, will not let it go. And their stenographers in the MSM
continue to propagate the real dis/misinformation in order to keep the
corporate-capitalist-imperialist western dominance warmongering/war-profiteering status quo
in operation.
Meanwhile, NPR (and PBS doubtless) are to be headed by one John Lansing, who till now was
in charge of that dispenser of "the truth, whole and unadulterated" the Voice of America and
Radio Marti; and the BBC is partnering with DARPA-Mossad via Google, FB, Twit and the rest of
the internet behemoths, as they told us (well, they didn't advert to the underlying
structure, of course). Why is the BBC so doing? In order, they said, to ensure that we, the
plebeians, the mindless bewildered herd, are no longer subjected to, no longer have our
perspectives distorted by "Dis or Misinformation."
Heartening to know, ain't it, that they – the really existing state-funded and
controlled media – have our best interests at heart?
I'm v pleased you picked up on this shard of nonsense, AnneR, and then took the trouble to
write of it. I thought to do the same while reading this morn's New York Times. A flimsier,
more obvious propaganda ploy I have not seen in a while, and this is saying something. This
fellow must be Guccifer 2's in-law or something. My read: Those who recklessly over-invested
in the Russiagate universe thought it would go away the instant HRC was elected. They're now
stuck w/ it three years on, and this is another effort to keep it alive long enough to get it
into the histories. They'll never make it. Transparently horse-droppings. Tks again for
writing. Patrick.
Skip Scott , September 10, 2019 at 09:23
The empire's war machine always needs a boogeyman. Macron is proposing transitioning to a
multi-polar world, and ending its vassal status to empire. Good luck with that. We can only
hope that Putin's countering of our war machine keeps MAD a reality, and that the example
that Russia and China are setting in opposition to empire will encourage other vassals to
rebel. Waging peace in a multi-polar world is the only moral course of action. The war
machine, with its huge waste of manpower and resources, is the main factor in our current
path to extinction. Reining it in is the first step to ensure mankind's survival.
America has earned the mistrust of most of the world. Although establishing a good
relationship with Russia is a good idea, using it to isolate Russia probably will not work.
Meremark's comments puts it very well. Meeremark is on the mark.
Many of Patrick's observations are astute and well-reasoned. But he is ABSOLUTELY WRONG to
put any faith whatsoever in Trump being able to negotiate ANYTHING of importance, whether it
be with North Korea or Russia. Wake up! There is "no one home" in Donald Trump!!
We are
witnessing a severely incapacitated, mentally ill individual pretending to be a leader, who
is endangering the entire planet. If this doesn't scare the shit out of you, you need to have
your head examined!
The US has been fed b.s. for so long and it's hard to see getting the country in any
decent shape, foreign policy or otherwise. The Pentagon and alphabet agencies have been
calling the shots since the days of the Dulles bros. I can't see anything other than a top
heavy collapse since this long con. It's good to hear Macron saying this and good for Orange
Bejesus wanting to get along with Russia, but how far gone have humans gone before Mother
Nature gives us the swiftest kick due to our stupidity?
I agree with Patrick Lawrence's perceptive analyses of 'frayed triumphalism and nostalgia'.
An empire on the rise, for example modern China, is probably less dangerous than one in
decline. There are more of the latter type, making geopolitics dangerously unstable, and
increasingly difficult to prevent world war, where the pattern of history seems to be
pointing us. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
Moi , September 10, 2019 at 02:54
Zhu, if you are not aware, China has just delivered the biggest F.You to the US in geopolitical history by more or less
buying Iran oil.
China is to invest $US280 billion upgrading Iran's oil and gas sectors, unlocking a
further $500 billion of otherwise unrecoverable oil, upping it's own oil purchases, opening
factories to make "made in China" products, etc.
They also get to deploy 5,000 Chinese "security officers" so if the US attacks Iran they
could kill lots of Chinese military.
IMHO, it is a fool's errand for our policy makers to think that Russia can be "peeled away
from China", or that Russia and China has not seen through that strategy as another ploy by
the West to retain hegemony. As for inviting Russia back into the G-8 and Russia's response,
the following exchange at last week's Eastern Economic Forum in Vliadivostok is instructive
[Yandex/Google translation of the Russian text]:
Sergey Brilev: Mr Abe, I would like to ask you about this. When I just said, "the big
Seven" We all heard the report that President Trump was at the last summit of the "Seven" a
kind of lawyer [advocate] for the Russian Federation and Vladimir Putin. You've seen it from
the inside. Without breaking any obvious rules, after all it is a closed club, maybe you will
tell how it was? (Laughter.)
Shinzo Abe: As for the G–7, there used to be a G-8, there was a discussion that
creative influence on the international community is important. But as President Putin is
well aware, because he took part in the" G-8″, there are such rules: you can only quote
yourself, so other leaders can not be quoted. So I can't say exactly what President Trump
said there, for example. But I personally said that Russian influence, Russian creative
influence, plays an important role in solving international problems. Therefore, I raised the
issue of Russia's possible return to this format. (Applause.)
Sergei Brilev: if they call, will you go, Mr President?
Vladimir Putin: Where?
S. Brilev: The "G-8". In the States, I think it's next. There, however, will be the height
of Trump's campaign.
Vladimir Putin: At the time, the next "G-8" was to be held in Russia.
Sergei Brilev: In Sochi, yes.
Vladimir Putin: We are open. If our partners want to come to us, we will be happy.
(Applause.) But we did not postpone it, our partners postponed it. If they want to restore
the "Eight", please. But I think it's clear to everyone today, and President Macron just
recently said publicly that the West's leadership is coming to an end. I cannot imagine an
effective international organization that works without India and without China.
(Applause.)
Any format is always good, it is always a positive exchange of views, even when it is held
in a raised tone, as far as I understand, and it was this time in the "Seven", it is still
useful. Therefore, we do not refuse any format of cooperation.
Jeff Harrison , September 10, 2019 at 00:32
I have to object on several levels, Patrick.
"Are Western democracies, the U.S. and France in the lead, rethinking the hostility toward
Russia they conjured out of nothing since Moscow responded to the coup Washington cultivated
in Ukraine five years ago?" Good question but it beggars the truth that The West has been
hostile to Russia since its inception as a non-monarchy in 1917. The US refused to recognize
it until 1933. The classic phrase "godless communist hordes" was intended to drive home the
point that the commies were theoretically atheists and they were not capitalists. Russia
helped it along by trying to spread communism just as the US is trying to spread capitalism
now (we like to claim we're spreading democracy but that's bunk.) I'm not sure which is more
distasteful, having some foreign economic structure shoved down your throat (communism) or
some foreign political structure shoved down your throat (totalitarian dictatorship). Both
suck.
"China, not Russia, represents by far the greater challenge to American objectives over
the long term. That means President Trump is correct to try to establish a sounder
relationship with Russia and peel it away from China." I realize you're quoting the Times but
mind if I ask, what, precisely, are American objectives? If our objective was to simply live
peaceably with the other nations of the world and dazzle them with the brilliance of every
little thing we did, nobody, not Russia, not China, nobody could challenge that objective.
But that's not our objective, now is it? It could be best characterized by the weekly
exchange between Pinkie and The Brain. Pinkie: What are we going to do this week, Brain?
Brain: Same thing we do every week, Pinkie. Establish world domination. That's never going to
work. There are too many people in this world and too many countries in this world who will
not put up with diktats from somebody else for the Brain to succeed.
As for the G7 becoming the G8, as I've already said, it's not gonna happen. Putin has
already said that it should include India and China. The West won't accept that. Frankly, if
membership in "the club" can be lifted as easily as it was last time, why should Russia be
interested? As I've said, I think that Russia has turned eastward. If the west has something
on offer, great but they wouldn't be looking for it. Russia has managed to make the sanctions
regime very painful for the EU even though the EU doesn't seem to notice. Offering Russia a
very junior chair at the G7 whilst maintaining the sanctions and other visions of economic
warfare against Russia is not a calculus that Russia will be interested in.
This could turn into the one bridge too far for the Europeans.
Zhu , September 9, 2019 at 21:13
It'll be China, China, china, next. How dare they prosper! How dare they not submit and not
obey!
jaycee , September 9, 2019 at 20:07
The New York Times has played an effective Orwellian role in recent years, simply by
reflecting unannounced policy directives – notably the smooth shifts in designated
official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to China/Xi all in the space of six short years.
Judging by the Times' own comment sections, a fair number of the general public are quick to
internalize a hatred of the "enemy" without reflection on how/why the object of their ire can
be one day one villain, and then a whole new villain the next.
Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:11
The Times has become nothing but a bunch of stenographers for the Intelligence Community.
The days of them treating their sources with skepticism are LONG gone. I'm no fan of Ben
Rhodes, but that guy was spot-on when he referred to the Washington press corps as a bunch of
20-something know-nothings whose ignorance makes them easily manipulated into becoming an
echo chamber of support for whatever policies their government sources are pushing.
lysias , September 10, 2019 at 08:21
Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.
David Otness , September 10, 2019 at 11:01
" .. notably the smooth shifts in designated official enemies from ISIS to Russia/Putin to
China/Xi all in the space of six short years."
You nailed it in calling it Orwellian. ISIS as "official" enemy indeed is a classic
representation of 'doublespeak.' All of those *accidental* U.S. arms-drops on their
positions, helicopters showing up to rescue their leaders, the apparent invisibility of those
oil tanker fleets freely and blatantly running the highways into Turkey for several years.
(The Russians sure found them in a hurry.) As much of that oil was shipped to Israel by Erdogan's kid at below market prices, it was another testament to the duplicitous nature of
the entire scheme to bring Syria down. Fail. Epic fail. I love it. That egg looks great on
Netanyahu's face.
Brent , September 9, 2019 at 20:00
Trump and the establishment punish and sanction Russia but get along fine with MBS
Mohammad Bone Sawman. I voted for Trump but got Hillary's foreign policy. The Devil runs
America.
Tim , September 9, 2019 at 19:48
Yes Bob, it would be a good change, except, if Britain is co-opted by the US, then it will
be a wholly owned subsidy and block change in Europe.
Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 20:50
subsidiary
Tim Jones , September 9, 2019 at 19:40
Just hope Brexit is negotiated and Britain is not fully taken over by Washington as a new
investment opportunity.
Ikallicrates , September 10, 2019 at 10:57
US corporations did indeed anticipate that post Brexit UK would be a new investment
opportunity. The US health insurance industry, for example, was poised to swoop down on the
UK as soon as the Tories finished destroying the NHS. But thanks to BoJo's bungling of
Brexit, the Tories could lose the next general election, so they've reversed direction and
are appeasing angry Brits by promising to save the NHS. By bringing down the Tories, BoJo may
make Britain great again (#MBGA).
Meremark , September 9, 2019 at 19:18
RT said Putin says Russia in G-8 is improvident without China and India economies and
geo-strategies also figured in. A G-10 league?
Putin's chessmanship is operaticly clean. not to be confused with poker as people
generally do confuse. This lacks the bluffing of poker; in this the pieces of global power
projection are standing on the board, chess obvious.
Maybe not so easy to peel Russia apart from China, if that's Plan B kicking around the
Pentagon.
At some point maybe they can consider Plan Delta ? which stands for change.
Steve , September 10, 2019 at 07:03
Let's be honest, the G-7 is pretty outdated. Canada and Italy are pretty much out of their
league. America's hat and a fourth western European power seem unnecessary. Replace them with
China and India, and bring Russia back in to make it the G-8.
Thank you, Meremark. Putin does not take his directives from the NYT.
Daniel Rich , September 9, 2019 at 19:17
Macron, a Rothschild pawn, gives as much abut true Democrat as he does about the Yellow
Vests' protest
No, no, not the Hong Kong, US flags waving goons, but ordinary French citizens who're fed
up with the direction their government moves onward to, the ones you hear nothing about.
Bob Van Noy , September 9, 2019 at 17:25
Thank you Patrick Lawrence, if your analysis is correct it would be a turning point in
international relations and extremely significant. I like to think that the web has put us
about a week or two ahead of the headlines here at CN, so if the NYT is finally calling the
events accurately, it would by a stunning breakthrough
We have been in Afghanistan for how long? 16 years? It is our longest war. How much progress
have we actually made?
1. The government that we have tried so long to nurture controls a shrinking percentage of
both territory and population.
2. How much money have we poured into the pockets of crooks of all nationalities? In spite
of that the country is severely lacking in physical, social, legal, and business
infrastructure.
3. The country's armed forces have been expanded under NATO tutelage to such a size that the
small GDP will never be able to pay for them on its own. In spite of that they are unable even
to defend their own installations.
4. The country is still racked by tribal, ethnic and jihadi wars. It has always been thus
with the exception of a golden age when the last Afghan king ruled in the 50s and 60s. How did
he do that? He did it by careful inter-ethnic diplomacy and a minimum effort to "unify" his
realm.
5. Attacks on NATO personnel by Afghan soldiers and police continue.
6. The capital, Kabul, is not secured and is regularly attacked.
7. The much vaunted COIN doctrine has failed there as it has failed in so many places in the
world.
In spite of this the generals and the COIN nuts persist in trying to reverse Obama's policy
of withdrawal from the "country" (a geographical expression really). President Trump, who knows
nothing of things military or geo-political is about to begin the process of re-introducing US
combat and training forces into this blank space on the map, a space filled with hostile
tribesmen and religious fanatics. This blank space was given the dubious status of a state in
the international system of states because the Russians and the British wanted to establish a
buffer entity between the Tsar's empire and the Raj.
President Trump should be told that there is nothing there of real importance to the US,
nothing worth more vast quantities of our money and more rivers of our blood. Let the Afghans,
Chinese, Pakistanis, Iranians and Russians deal with the chaos. pl
These idiots don't hire themselves. The problem is Trump. It doesn't matter whether Bolton
(or Pompeo, or Hook, or Abrams) is in or out as long as Trump himself is in the White
House.
That realization has turned my 2016 protest vote for Trump into a 2020 protest vote for
Elizabeth Warren. The underlying principle is be the same, voting yet again for the lesser
of two evils.
The main achievement of neoliberal and imperial (warmongering) propaganda in the USA is that it achieved the complete,
undisputed dominance in MSM
Pot Calling the Kettle Black: "The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century."
Notable quotes:
"... Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left." ..."
"... The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites. ..."
"... Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media (The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world. ..."
Back in the 1960s, the CIA official Cord Meyer said the agency needed to "court the compatible left."
Right-wing and left-wing collaborators were needed to create a powerful propaganda apparatus that would be capable of hypnotizing
audiences into believing the myth of American exceptionalism and its divine right to rule the world.
The CIA therefore secretly worked to influence American and world opinion through the literary and intellectual elites.
Frances Stonor Saunders comprehensively covers this in her 1999 book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA And The World Of Arts
And Letters, and Joel Whitney followed this up in 2016 with Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers,
with particular emphasis on the complicity between the CIA and the famous literary journal, The Paris Review.
By the mid-1970s, as a result of the Church Committee hearings, it seemed as if the CIA, NSA, FBI, etc. had been caught in flagrante
delicto and disgraced, confessed their sins, and resolved to go and sin no more.
Then in 1977, Carl Bernstein wrote a long piece for Esquire – “The CIA and the Media” – naming names of journalists and media
(The New York Times, CBS, etc.) that worked hand-in-glove with the CIA, propagandizing the American people and the rest of the world.
It seemed as if all would be hunky-dory now with the bad boys purged from the American “free” press. Seemed to the most naïve,
that is, by which I mean the vast numbers of people who wanted to re-stick their heads in the sand and believe, as Ronald Reagan’s
team of truthtellers would announce, that it was “Morning in America” again with the free press reigning and the neo-conservatives,
many of whom had been “converted” from their leftist views, running things in Washington.
USAGM provides consistently accurate and compelling journalism that reflects the values of our society: freedom, openness,
democracy, and hope. Our guiding principles—enshrined in law—are to provide a reliable, authoritative, and independent source
of news that adheres to the strictest standards of journalism…
Russian Disinformation. And make no mistake, we are living through a global explosion of disinformation, state propaganda,
and lies generated by multiple authoritarian regimes around the world. The weaponization of information we are seeing today is
real. The Russian government and other authoritarian regimes engage in far-reaching malign influence campaigns across national
boundaries and language barriers.
The Kremlin’s propaganda and disinformation machine is being unleashed via new platforms and continues to grow in Russia and
internationally. Russia seeks to destroy the very idea of an objective, verifiable set of facts as it attempts to influence opinions
about the United States and its allies. It is not an understatement to say that this new form of combat on the information battlefield
may be the fight of the 21st century.
Then research the history of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, the Voice of America, Radio and Television Marti, etc. You will
be reassured that Lansing’s July testimony was his job interview to head National Propaganda Radio.
Edward Curtin writes, and his writing on varied topics has appeared widely over many years. He writes as a public
intellectual for the general public, not as a specialist for a narrow readership. He believes a non-committal sociology is an
impossibility and therefore sees all his work as an effort to enhance human freedom through understanding. His website is
edwardcurtin.com
"... And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues. ..."
"... is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our rifles on their corpses. Time to let off. ..."
Very well written and keeping focus on what's important. Very useful, revealing event with many issues remaining to be fully
considered regarding behaviors of
- the elected officials,
- the "intelligence" "community",
- the media,
- the public.
And behind it all, the demonization (demonetization) of Russia (and Putin) still continues.
There likely are cases where Russia is acting nefariously or in bad faith, but who could tell given all the b/s they are feeding
us.
So it's clear (to anyone interested) that they are misleading us, and (I think) clear why they are misleading us, but that
does stop the the constant stream of crap in the media - "news" and "entertainment".
Is their target audience the most obtuse among us?
While is admittedly so cool (given the advanced technology) to be dropping bombs on women and children for the uncountable
time, clearly we now know we are going broke killing the innocent. We are bludgeoning them to the point that we have broken our
rifles on their corpses. Time to let off.
Leaving aside the need to feed the war machine (particularly in light of slowing economy), many on both sides seemed to fear
that the public had succeeded in electing a populist and that could not be allowed. So they attacked him knowing the technocratic
state would support them. But Trump out-smarted them and went all in deep state, elitest and sooth the worried vested interests
and their owners. So that's all past us now. Still, kind of hard to over-look. Does Shiff take himself seriously?
"... Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive, writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party. ..."
"... History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[ 1 ] ..."
"... Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals. ..."
"... LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany. The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without arms." ) ..."
"... Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten. Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was a political choice of its own making. ..."
"... There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece of green paper backed by nothing. ..."
"... This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [ 12 ] ..."
"... A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior. The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent. ..."
"... Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over ..."
"... The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial . ..."
"... The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic price. ..."
"... All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements. ..."
"... The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank. ..."
"... The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted. ..."
"... Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes, basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced in cigarettes in postwar Germany. ..."
"... Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting that Guns will bring Butter. ..."
"... The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful global citizens. We can and must do better. ..."
"... American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them? ..."
"... American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny' was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering Military Industrial Complex. ..."
"... Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that was top dog. ..."
"... You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits) that have engineered the problems you point out. ..."
"... To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking. ..."
"Aftermath" is the latest addition to three previous publications by Rickards, Currency Wars (2011), The Death of Money (2014),
The Road to Ruin (2016). Together, with the present offering (Aftermath, 2019), the author uses the analogy of the Four Horsemen
of the Apocalypse to illustrate the themes of his four books. The latest book is thematic in its approach to the events which have
taken place in the world in general and the United States in particular during this period.
HIGH SOCIETY
Rickards had previously worked for the CIA (possibly still does – who knows?) but now seems to be a free-wheeling business executive,
writer and strategic analyst. He tends to circulate outside of the usual middle-ranking semi-elite circles preferring to consort
with the less observable, higher-ranking coteries of the inner-party. Moreover, he has nothing but disdain for the run-of-the-mill
talking heads to be found (in abundance) in the media and academia – the outer-party.
His observations of this social stratum are unapologetic and caustic:
History is the first casualty of media micro-second attention span. An army of pseudo-savants saturate the airways to explain
that tariffs are bad, trade wars hurt growth and mercantilism are a throwback to the 17th century. These sentiments come from
mainstream liberals and conservatives and tag-along journalists trained in the orthodoxy of so-called free-trade and the false
if comforting belief that trade deficits are the flipside of capital surpluses. So, what is the problem? The problem is that perpetual
trade deficits have put the United States on a path to a crisis of the US$."[
1 ]
As is apparent, his contempt is palpable.
It should be said that much of his writing and theorising is at times occasioned by a high level of sophistication, alas sadly
lacking in most of his contemporaries. But for all his refinement and eloquence that doesn't stop him being, from Off Guardian's
perspective (and mine), on the other side – the side of the Anglo-Zionist empire.
THE GREAT BETRAYAL
Throughout this book and previous books there runs a familiar leitmotif; a sense of betrayal by the present dominant section of
the US elite. This is not by any means an unusual political phenomenon and bears comparison with the stab-in-the-back myth – a notion
doing the rounds in Germany circa 1918.
It held that the German Army did not lose World War I on the battlefield but it was 'traitors' on the home front, especially the
traitorous republicans who overthrew the Hohenzollern monarchy in the German Revolution of 1918–19.
This precedent loosely corresponds to Rickards' belief in the perfidy of the current leadership of the US and his vitriol is directed
against this globalist faction who are firmly ensconced in both Democrat and Republican parties and whom, he argues, have sold the
pass in terms of America's strategic interests. He writes:
Obama, both Bushes, and Bill Clinton were globalists, defined as those willing to trade-off or compromise US interests for
the sake of a stronger global community even conservative hawks like Reagan and JFK were firmly in the globalist camp, as they
relied on NATO, the UN and the IMF to pursue their cold war goals.
However, all was not lost. As a result of
the Presidential election of 2016 when Donald Trump was sworn in on 17 January 2017 as the strongest nationalist since Theodore
Roosevelt. For the first time in 100 years a committed nationalist was sitting in the Oval Office." [
2 ]
The event was obviously political grist to Rickards' mill.
However, precisely how this liberation of the US from the domestic globalists' stranglehold was to be brought about wasn't made
clear, and in fact is barely touched upon by Rickards.
Trump, for all his bombast and promises to Make America Great Again (MAGA), and pursue a radical foreign policy of withdrawal
from globalist wars of choice and military adventurism, has been conspicuous by its absence.
Moreover, from the outset he has been beset by the ancien regime of neo-conservatives and neo-liberals – Bolton, Pompeo and Pence
– entrenched in key US institutions, as well as various think-tanks and media who are still doggedly set upon the realization of
neo-con foreign policy goals.
It seems odd that Rickards doesn't see fit to comment on this important development given that Trumps' campaign promises have
disappeared almost without trace since he entered the Oval Office.
IT'S THE ECONOMY STUPID
Rickards is on firmer ground, however, when dissecting the 8th wonder of the world – US economic policy. The US sovereign debt
(i.e., the debt of the Federal Government) to GDP is now at a record, this is unprecedented for a peacetime administration.
In addition, it is also worth noting the magnitude of US private debt and unfunded future liabilities, pensions, Medicaid, social
security and so forth.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign debt
and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according to many
– see David Stockman, John Mauldin et al).
According to Rickards, the present situation has been largely the result of excess spending by both Democratic and Republican
administrations. The spending has either been on 'Defence' – a Republican favourite – or social like L.B. Johnson's 'Great Society'
programme – a Democratic favourite.
LBJ's administration contrived to conduct the Vietnam War as well as an expensive social programme, simultaneously. A guns plus
butter economy. (The original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany.
The then Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels stated: "We can do without butter, but, despite all our love of peace, not without
arms." )
LBJ's guns-and-butter policies were enacted in the late sixties at the height of the Vietnam war and the Tet Offensive. The utopian
attempt to have the best of both worlds brought LBJ's administration to an end; more importantly, perhaps it was also the beginning
of the process which brought down the curtain on the post WW2 economic world order established at the Bretton Woods conference in
1944.
Because the costs of the Vietnam war were superimposed on the economy not far effectively from full employment, the US domestic
sector was severely destabilised.
Instead of taxing the nation to pay for the war, the government engaged in the more acceptable practice of deficit financing
Vietnam showed that neither the United States nor any other democratic nation can ever again afford the foreign exchange costs
of conventional warfare, although the periphery was still kept in line by American military initiatives most recently in Yugoslavia
and Afghanistan.
The lesson in the long term is that peace will be maintained only by governments refusing to finance the military and other
excesses of the increasingly indebted imperial power." [
3 ]
The figure for the US sovereign debt – began to rise relentlessly from the 1980s onwards approaching wartime levels by the time
of the 2008 blowout.
It has been estimated by some economic theorists that any sovereign Debt-to-GDP figure greater than 60% represents a tripwire
whereby governments should act to rein in government expenditures.
The EU Maastricht criteria, for example, stipulated that EU Debt-to-GDP should not go over 60% except in certain circumstances
and an annual budgetary deficit should not be more than 3%.
That is a pretty tight monetary and fiscal policy EU style, but not to be outdone the spendthrift US was to go on a wild binge
in both fiscal and monetary terms the result of which is a now an unpayable mountain of debt. This gives an indication of how far
US economic policymaking has drifted away from any viable economic strategy.
Rickards fulminates:
To see how America came to this pretty pass we, one needs to review almost 40 years of fiscal policy under Presidents Reagan,
Bush 1, Clinton, Bush 2, Obama and Trump from the period 1981-2019." [
4 ]
Under Reagan in 1981 US Debt-to-GDP ratio was 32.5%. The President was gung-ho for tax cuts and big spending increases, particularly
'defence' spending. This trend was continued under the tutelage of the Bushes and Clinton, and Debt-to-GDP ratio rose to 56.4% when
Bush Jr, took office and had risen to 82% by the time he left.
The Obama years saw the Debt-to-GDP rise to 100%. The diagram below 2009 debt-to-GDP was 82.3% This figure has risen inexorably
to over 100% in 2018. Yep, here we have the dreaded law of Diminishing returns. Every new dollar of input gives you 90 cents of output.
The above diagram illustrates the growth of debt vis-ŕ-vis National Income (GDP) since the 2008 blowout. Debt has been growing
progressively faster than National Income.
The US economy, like the US shale oil industry, has become a Ponzi scheme in all but name. The Fed's issuance of new debt to pay
off existing debt signals the key moment of the Minsky crisis.[
5 ]
There doesn't appear to be any viable way out this predicament short of a straight default. But Rickards argues that 'the United
States will never default on its debt because the Fed can simply print the money and to pay it off.' This will involve an engineered
inflation to wipe out the debt. But in fact, inflation is the default, a default by the back door. Getting paid in worthless currency
is in essence no different than not getting paid at all.
NO EXIT
As for solutions to a crisis which has seemingly reached the point of no return, all that Rickards can offer is a Japanese scenario
of low or zero growth punctuated by recession for the United States and by implication for the rest of the world. The United States
had its first long decade from 2007 to 2017 and is now into its second decade.
This growth pattern will persist absent of inflationary breakout which the Fed seems powerless to ignite in the short run;
a war; or severe depression perhaps caused by a new financial crisis.[
6 ]
Not much of a prospect for the average family then. But Rickards does give some useful advice to his more opulent readers on how
they should diversify their assets.
There are apparently "luxury bombproof bunkers built in former missile silos and expansive estates in New Zealand loaded with
rations and good wines."
Really? At this point one wonders if Mr Rickards is being serious or just smug.
SOCIAL IMMOBILITY AND THE RISE OF OLIGARCHY
The social and economic impact on levels of inequality in both the US and globally have been extremely deleterious and seem set
to continue. Inequality in income and wealth – a phenomenon identified and outlined by Thomas Piketty – is resulting in societies
which more and more resemble feudal economic and social structures rather than textbook capitalism. Social class is hardening into
social caste and rates of social mobility are decelerating at an alarming rate.
The liberal notion that the individual is the author of his/her own destiny has become a very dubious proposition when the drawbridges
of advantage, birth and preferment are drawn up. Moreover, high levels of income/wealth are not conducive to growth since the new
aristocracy owns most of the wealth/income which is hoarded rather than spent on investment and/or consumption. Stagnation, idled
capital and rent extraction becomes the economic norm.
Inequality is common in college admissions where the wealthy and connected continue to send their sons and daughters to elite schools
while the middle-class are restrained by sky-high tuitions and the burden of student loans.
It's true in the housing market where the rich picked up mansions on the cheap in foreclosure sales whilst the middle-class were
frozen in mortgage negative equity.
It's true in health care, where the rich could afford all the insurance they needed while the middle class were handicapped by
unemployment and the loss of job-related benefits. These disparities also affected the adult children of the middle-class. There
are no gold-plated benefits packages in the gig society
Research shows that fewer than 50% of all children aged 30 today earn more than their parents did at the same age. This 50% figure
compares with 60% who earned more in 1971, and 80% who earned more in 1950.
The American dream of each generation earning more than the prior generation is collapsing before our eyes The middle class is
getting poorer on a relative basis and lagging further behind the rich whose incomes absorb an increasing share of total GDP The
manner in which the rich become rich is variable.
It could be due to a number of unrelated factors Problems arise in the way that the rich stay rich become richer and pass on wealth
to their children and grandchildren." [
7 ]
It is a matter of common knowledge that the traditional techniques of preserving and creating wealth have been long established
in law, customs, education and socialization; these traditional methods being practised over decades, if not centuries, have produced
a system of elite self-recruitment, one moreover which endures through time.
Many of the richest US citizens – e.g., Buffet, Bezos, Zuckerberg – pay minimal tax demands. Much of the wealth of the richest
Americans is never taxed because they hold onto real estate and stocks and pass them onto their beneficiaries tax-free. This is one
of a perfectly legal method of avoiding tax; there are many more too numerous to cite which include various other examples of tax
avoidance/evasion.
Levels of income and wealth inequality within states are usually measured by what is called the Gini Co-efficient. This measure
is a commonly used measure of income inequality that condenses the entire income distribution for a country into a single number
between 0 and 1 or 0% to 100%: the higher the number, the greater the degree of inequality. A rough estimate of inequality is a figure
above 40%.
The United States and China are in the low forties, surrounded by underdeveloped and developing states such as The Democratic
Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Burundi and El Salvador. At the other end of the spectrum are Sweden, Norway and Iceland.
In this connection the by now well-known study carried out by two American academics at Princeton University Prof Martin Gilens
and North western University Prof Benjamin Page argue that the US is dominated by a rich and powerful elite.
Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organised groups representing business interests have substantial
independent impacts on US government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent
influence."
In plain English: the wealthy few move policy, while the average American has little power.
The two professors came to this conclusion after reviewing answers to 1,779 survey questions asked between 1981 and 2002 on public
policy issues. They broke the responses down by income level, and then determined how often certain income levels and organised interest
groups saw their policy preferences enacted.
Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association
and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organisations
and a small number of affluent Americans, then America's claims to be a democratic society are seriously threatened."
In summation, both gentlemen concluded that in essence the US was an oligarchy not a properly functioning democracy. All very
true but somewhat self-evident.
Rickards regards the present situation as being irreversible. He does not present any alternative to this trend other than some
vague hopes that the 'nationalist' President in the Oval Office will turn things around – MAGA in fact.
The golden age of post WW2 capitalism ended when Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971, which was in effect
a default by the US. Holders of surplus dollars in Europe who were no longer able to swap these dollars for gold but were merely
presented with other US$s with which they had to purchase US Treasurys (Bonds) debts which were never going to be repaid. In the
age of fiat currencies Europe and various other holders of US Treasuries were in fact subsidizing the United States.
POOR LITTLE AMERICA
At this point the book becomes one long whinge about how hard done-by America has been and how the rest of the world has taken
advantage of this benign gentle giant. This rather bizarre belief calls for further analysis. The US pays some of the bill for NATO
whilst European nations pay insufficient amounts for the 'defence' of their countries.
It should be pointed out, however, that in terms of military hardware the NATO alliance is standardized to American specifications.
This means large-scale purchasing of US war materiel which is a gift bonus to the US armaments industry.
Then Germany has the nerve to buy Russian gas transported to Europe via Nordstream 2 which is cheaper and more reliable than US
Liquified Natural Gas (LNG), when in fact they should be buying more expensive and less reliable US LNG. Apparently, Germany ought
really to be subsidising the US shale oil Ponzi racket. Bad, ungrateful Germany.
Then comes the incessant carping regarding trade policy and trade deals. The US in its speed to become a cool, post-modern, financialised
economy apparently forgot about the importance of production. In the automobile industry the once dominant US triad of General Motors,
Ford and Chrysler are no longer in the vanguard and Japan, with South Korea catching up, is now the leading country in the export
of auto vehicles, a position which the US once held. It was the Japanese auto industry which pioneered production methods including
just-in-time deliveries and lean production (Toyota). Was anyone stopping the Americans from innovating?
In rank order. Figures quoted in Global Shift – Peter Dicken.
Globally, the leading manufacturer of auto-vehicles is Volkswagen followed by Toyota. GM are 4th and Ford are 8th of ten.
Hardly market leaders anymore, but Rickards apportions the blame to 'unfair practices' by foreign manufacturers and argues instead
for tariffs. The same goes for other trade partners. Fact that the United States has to a large extent been deindustrialised was
a political choice of its own making.
If the US has lost ground in the competition for trade on world markets that is because of its own insular provincialism and hubris,
not foreign competitive malpractice. Moreover, much of its productive industry which remains has been outsourced to low cost venues
such as China. The US more than anyone should know that its competitors are simply using the same policies that it itself used during
the 19th century to break British trade hegemony.
It has been the same story with agriculture. Trade liberalization (this must rank as the greatest misnomer of trade theory) and
trade treaties have been an example of the blatant unfairness of such agreements. During the Uruguay round of 'talks' (1982-2000):
the United States pushed other countries to open up their markets to areas of 'our' (i.e. the US's) strength, but resisted, successfully
so, to efforts to make us reciprocate.
Construction and maritime services, the areas of advantage of many developing countries were not included in the new agreement.
Worse still, financial services liberalization was arguably even harmful to some developing countries: as large international (read
American) banks squelched local competitors denying them the funds they garnered would be channelled to the international firms with
which they felt comfortable, not the small and medium-sized local firms
As foreign banks took over the banking systems of like Argentina and Mexico worries about small and medium sized firms within
these countries being starved of funds have been repeatedly voiced.
Whether these concerns are valid or not, whether they are exaggerated or not, is not the issue: the issue is that countries should
have the right to make these decisions themselves, as the United States did in its own country during its formative years; but under
the new international rules that America had pushed, countries were being deprived of that right.
Suffice it to say that agriculture has always been a flagrant example of the double standards inherent in the US trade liberalization
agenda. Although we insisted that other countries reduce their barriers to our products and eliminate the subsidies for which those
products competed against ours, the United States kept barriers for the goods produced by the developing countries, and the US continued
massive subsidies to its own produce. [
8 ] EXORBITANT PRIVILEGE
Oh, I almost forgot: the imperial tribute that the world pays to the hegemon; aka the reserve status of the dollar. The role of
the US dollar in the world's political economy gives it advantages which the rest of the dollar surplus-states are dragooned into
accepting. In the late sixties early seventies, the US was on the verge of technical bankruptcy due to its spending profligacy at
home and military adventurism in Indochina. It had three choices of how to deal with this acute problem.
[The] 3 courses open to the US government on the collapse of the Gold Pool in London in 1968 were: immediately pull out of
the war in South-East Asia and cut back overseas and domestic military expenditure to allow the dollar to firm again on world
markets; to continue the war paying for its foreign exchange costs with further outflows of Fort Knox gold; or to induce the Europeans
and other payments surplus areas to continue to accumulate surplus dollars and dollar equivalents (US Treasuries) not convertible
into gold." [ 9 ]
Of course, it was option three that appealed and Nixon in his television broadcast was to announce a 'temporary' suspension of
gold sales by the US to its overseas 'partners'.
The date in question, 15 August 1971, marked the end of one epoch and the beginning of another. The temporary suspension soon
morphed into a permanent one and a global fiat currency regime based on the dollar came into being. This represented a culmination
of a situation in which the US manipulation of the dollar was termed the 'Exorbitant Privilege' by the senior French politician Valery
Giscard d'Estaing. And privilege it was.
The central political fact is that the dollar standard places the direction of the world monetary policy in the hands of a
single country which thereby acquires great influence over the economic destiny of others. It is one thing to sacrifice sovereignty
in the interests of interdependence; it is quite another when the relationship is one-way.
The difference is that between the EEC(EU) and a colonial empire. The brute fact is that the acceptance of a dollar standard
necessarily implies a degree of asymmetry in power which, although it actually existed in the early post-war years, had vanished
by the time that the world sliding into a reluctant dollar standard." [
10 ]
There were a number of advantages which accrued to the dollar contingent on the ending of gold convertibility which Eichengreen
listed these in his book. But the principle one was making the surplus nations of the world pay for America's wars with an unconvertible
currency. Instead of being paid for in gold, or at least a gold-backed currency the world produced goods and services for a piece
of green paper backed by nothing.
Quite a clever little racket when you think about it.
Better still is the way that the two biggest surplus nations, Japan and China, have been the US's main creditors, bankrolling
the US by buying its Treasuries. This had another intended, or perhaps unintended effect: long term interest rates on US bonds came
down (since bond prices and bond interest rates move in opposite directions) and enabled the property bubble to expand until the
inevitable blow-out in 2008.
In mafia terms the US dollar has been a 'made' currency enjoying a set of privileges and protection which it did not earn but
foisted upon others. This is a unique dispensation which is enjoyed by the US to which the rest of the world is excluded.
However, it is in the nature of things that privileges will ultimately get abused. In pushing its luck to the point of abuse the
US should be aware that initial signs are that the world is sloughing off the US dollar. As it proceeds in that direction, the US
currency will lose its position as the global reserve asset. Holders of trillions of dollar-denominated assets will become sellers
eventuating in a collapse of the currency.
The US economy lives like a parasite off its partners in the global system, with virtually no savings of its own. The World
produces whilst North America consumes. The advantage of the US is that of a predator whose advantage is covered, by what others
agree, or are forced, to contribute.
Washington uses various means to make up for its deficiencies: for example, repeated violations of the principles of liberalism,
arms exports, and the hunting-down of oil super-profits (which involves the periodic felling of producers; one of the real motives
behind the wars in Iraq and Central Asia).
But the fact is that the bulk of the American deficit is covered by capital inputs from Europe and Japan, China and the South,
rich oil-producing countries and comprador classes from all regions, including the poorest, in the third world, to which should
be added the debt-service levy that is imposed on nearly every country in the periphery of the global system. The US superpower
depends from day to day on the flow of capital which sustains its economy and society. The vulnerability of the United States
represents a serious danger to Washington's project." [
11 ]
In light of the above we may conclude that – in spite of the irritating name-dropping – Rickards' books are interesting well written
and well-argued; per contra they are very light on facts which have been left deliberately unexamined as well as counter-narratives
which have also been ignored.
This was to be expected quite simply because at bottom Rickards is a sophist much in the tradition of Protagoras, Gorgias
and Thrasymachus "I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger" [
12 ]
A view which Rickards would certainly endorse. Beneath the Upper Manhattan, polished chic, there resides a ruthless Cold Warrior.
The further one digs into the book, the more this becomes apparent.
NOTES:-
[1] Rickards – Aftermath – page.21
[2] Ibid., – page.65
[3] Michael Hudson – Super Imperialism – pp.298/99, 32.
[4] Rickards – Ibid. – page.66
[5] Hyman Minsky's theories about debt accumulation received revived attention in the media during the subprime mortgage crisis
of the late 2000s. The New Yorker has labelled it "the Minsky Moment". Minsky argued that a key mechanism that pushes an economy
towards a crisis is the accumulation of debt by the non-government sector. He identified three types of borrowers that contribute
to the accumulation of insolvent debt: hedge borrowers, speculative borrowers, and Ponzi borrowers.
The "hedge borrower" can make debt payments (covering interest and principal) from current cash flows from investments. For
the "speculative borrower", the cash flow from investments can service the debt, i.e., cover the interest due, but the borrower
must regularly roll over, or re-borrow, the principal. The "Ponzi borrower" (named for Charles Ponzi, see also Ponzi scheme) borrows
based on the belief that the appreciation of the value of the asset will be sufficient to refinance the debt but could not make
sufficient payments on interest or principal with the cash flow from investments; only the appreciating asset value can keep the
Ponzi borrower afloat.
[6] Rickards – Ibid., page.85
[7] Rickards – Ibid., page.239
[8] Joseph Stiglitz – The Roaring 90s – pp.206/207
[9] Gold Pool 1968. The price of one troy ounce of gold was pegged to US$35. The larger the gap, known as the gold window,
between free market gold price and the foreign exchange rate, the more tempting it was for nations to deal with internal economic
crises by buying gold at the Bretton Woods price and selling it in the gold markets. It couldn't last and it didn't.
[10] Michael Hudson – Ibid. – p.309
[11] Barry Eichengreen – Exorbitant Privilege – passim.
Frank Lee left school at age 15 without any qualifications,
but gained degrees from both New College Oxford and the London School of Economics (it's a long story). He spent many years as a
lecturer in politics and economics, and in the Civil Service, before retirement. He lives in Sutton with his wife and little dog.
Guy
Excellent article by Frank Lee. Many of us are aware of the problems of the USD but few are able to so succinctly explain
why and connect the dots to expose the true picture. The bottom line is that the lifespan of the USD as king is almost over
.There will not be any rabbit pulled out of the hat to make America great again.That is a feel good cliché used to further
induce the population to go back to sleep.
The US has been exposed, and so well said, as a predator nation .There must be a reason why China and Russia are buying
up as much gold as their economy will permit .The exchange medium used for trade since time immemorial .
FoodBowl
Measuring 'National Debt as a Portion of the US Economy' is for economics classes and for newspapers to publish. The Criminal
Elites look at things differently. They measure the National Debt as a Portion of the 'FEROCIOUS BOMBING POWER the US Possess'.
Also, 'Spreading Chaos Capabilities' is added to the Bombing Power.
From this point of view, they see enormous assets, and the debts becomes less worrying as they see less urgency to deal with
this ever growing liabilities.
Fair dinkum
No analysis required because it's always been the same. The few exploit the many. This has fed the cancers of psychopathy, messiah
complexes and endless wars.
We are rushing towards the midnight sun.
MASTER OF UNIVE
The Wall Street ethos has always been 'kill or be killed' where bears eat, and bulls eat, but pigs get slaughtered! The problem
with today's market & stock valuations is that they are as hyperinflated as Real Estate Commercial & Residential sectors are which
leaves no wiggle room for price discovery until there is a system wide crash that mean reverts the valuations back to a realistic
price.
Warren Buffett is currently sitting on $55 billion in cash so that he does not get destroyed on the upcoming systemic wide
crash. Buffett has never pulled this kind of bread from the table in his lifetime whilst waiting for a systemic crash & the inevitable
fat tail blowout that is poised to rip the face off of the USA & EU as their eyeballs get ripped out too.
Ripping a face off & ripping eyeballs out is day trader speak for kicking counterparties in the groin for the deal. The French
Revolution was all about teaching the financial elite predator class of monetary control freaks who the boss really is when the
gravy train slows during Financial Winter.
And if they can't take the heat they should get out of the kitchen!
RW
mark
All that is happening now is that Trump is trying to solve his country's intractable economic and financial problems by looting
the rest of the planet. This is not a new development, but Trump is at least refreshingly honest in his public pronouncements.
It has always been thus.
The Roman Empire imposed tribute on its subjects. You have to send us so much grain, cattle, so many slaves, so much timber
for shipbuilding, so much precious metal and base metal, so many wild beasts for our circuses. In return we won't kill you.
The Nazi Empire imposed tribute on its conquests in identical fashion. Send us your industrial output, agricultural
produce and raw materials. In return we'll give you a big credit balance at the Reichsbank.
Uncle Sugar says send me your BMWs, fine wines, electronic gadgets, oil and minerals. In return I'll give you some worthless
little pieces of green paper you can exchange for worthless IOUs called Treasury Bills.
The current (real) military budget is $1,134 billion, around 60% higher than the fictitious figure that is normally touted.
The trade deficit is $900 billion. The budget deficit $1,175 billion, over 20% of the overall budget.
America is borrowing around $4 billion a day from the rest of the world. Uncle Sam is the biggest scrounger, parasite, leech,
bludger, and panhandler in the history of the planet.
The official national debt of $22.5 trillion understates the true position by a factor of over ten. Every US man, woman, child,
and babe in arms is in hock to the tune of over $700,000.
The global economy is about to crash, yet again (because it's never really recovered from the 2008 crash)'. Answers on a postcard,
please (and one that doesn't involve giving the banksters eye-watering amounts of money).
Frank Lodge
Without reading the book in question, this seems like an thoroughly sound and incisive review. Just one thing, "cometh" takes
a singular subject.
BigB
Rickards attitude is famously: "Buy gold" to which he creates a fear porn scenario around the coming recession. His solution:
"Buy gold". Not, lets look at the conditions that are causing the underlying boom and bust business cycles and find a solution
that works for humanity. His solution: "Buy gold" which the likes of he and the others who are driving the business cyclical waves
of mutilation have already done to hedge their portfolios. Fuck Ricards. I have no time for those who wish to profit from the
overfinancial immiseration of humanity. And you know where you can stick your gold.
Good luck to anyone who produces gold in an actual collapse scenario. So you need to buy guns and bodyguards for self-protection
if you buy gold...
mark
Gold could form some kind of basis for exchange in a collapse setting. Other desirable barter items would be alcohol, cigarettes,
basic drugs like aspirin and paracetamol, electrical batteries, fuel and similar goods. Maybe ammunition as well. Goods were priced
in cigarettes in postwar Germany.
Gold would probably be of use. Gemstones, jewellery, would not. 99.9% of people are unable to distinguish a real diamond from
a piece of glass.
bevin
"he original version of the Guns versus butter argument was given in a speech on January 17, 1936, in Nazi Germany." Not for the
first time Wikipedia is wrong here. Bismarck is normally credited with the choice between Guns and Butter. Goebbels was suggesting
that Guns will bring Butter.
Martin Usher
Its nice to see this in a book but its really common knowledge. The only thing I'd dispute is this notion of an 'elite', there
is no such thing, its just greed holding the reins -- its like a mass FOMO, nobody's willing to take the long view because it
might mean they'll miss out on what they can grab right now.
The danger we face from this is that if a large enough economic bloc runs by more rational rules then its going to eventually
cream us economically. This forces us to destroy it. This is what's at the bottom of our problems with China. The USSR wasn't
strong or well organized enough to pose a real threat to us so it could be taken down primarily by economic means. The Chinese
learned their lesson from the Russian experience and 'played nice' which they built their country up -- we all heard the commentariat
from a few years ago about them 'not really being communists any more'. Now they're in a position to look us in the eye so we've
got to confront them, to take them down. (You'll notice that one of the conditions that will end the trade war is the 'liberalizing
of capital markets' -- that is, we need to take over their banking system and currency.) If -- when -- this fails then the only
recourse would be actual war.
The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- ultimately a wholly artificial concept -- we're wasting immense amounts
of resources and human potential, spreading misery and despoliation all over the planet and generally behaving like really awful
global citizens. We can and must do better.
wardropper
And we certainly must stop talking about "taking down" the Chinese, and instead actually try to understand where they come from,
with their roots in a far more ancient civilized society than ours.
American exceptionalism, for example, takes it for granted that we in the West are good, and therefore the East must become
more like us. But we are logically, and morally, obliged to look at this from the opposite perspective too: What if the Chinese
take it for granted that they are good, and therefore the West must become more like them?
I have been to China, and found the people there to consist of the same mixtures of honest, good, nondescript, sinister and
deplorable as we have here at home.
They also share exactly the same fundamental problem as we do: Their politicians and their people, like ours, are two entirely
separate things. Of course the origins of Chinese, or Russian, society are different from ours, but that is no reason to despise
them. Our origins are often pretty despicable too.
Antonym
The Chinese people are as materialistic or spiritual as any; it is the local deep state (CPC) totalitarian culture that needs
to change.
Robbobbobin
"The crime in all this is in the pursuit of money -- [w]e can and must do better."
Three thousand years?
He that loveth silver shall not be satisfied with silver; nor he that loveth abundance with increase: this is also vanity.
–Ecclesiastes 5:10
Two thousand years?
For the love of money is the root of all evil –1 Timothy 6:10
Surely the Anti Deceased Equine Distress Society has lobbied some sort of statute of limitations onto the books by now?
MASTER OF UNIVE
American parasitism writ large over the last half century has amply signified to the entire world that 'manifest destiny'
was merely a ruse to foist American hegemony onto all sovereign nations at the behest of an out-of-control American Oligopoly
that was power-tripping post WW2 & drunk on the souls of the poor sots all over the entire world with their power hungry warmongering
Military Industrial Complex.
Proof of their combined ignorance with respect to Cybernetics & Systems Theory was their willingness to follow the likes of
the Vietnam War architects that assumed incorrectly that they could impose a closed-looped cybernetic control system over world
finance & mercantilism throughout the entire world at the behest of academic failures like Macnamera who would not know a 'closed-looped
cybernetic' from an open-looped cybernetic if his life & legacy depended on it.
Simply put, American printing presses at the privately owned Federal Reserve cannot even remotely help or assist in anymore
financial profligacy for the Neoconservative or Neoliberal camps of the cerebrally sclerotic & Early Onset Dementia riddled, &
uneducated, financial buffoons that emanated out of the now defunct Chicago School headed up by Strauss et al. in the 60s & 70s.
All the macroeconomic indicators over the last two decades have clearly indicated that the Greenspan era of asset inflation
was nothing more than the undoing of Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker's hard won success during his tenure pre-Greenspan 'Maestro'
halcyon days of animal spirits run amok.
In brief, the United States of America can eat my shorts as it is solely responsible for manufacturing a finance control system
& requisite money pump fraud that is nothing more than a worldwide Ponzi scheme to defraud the entire world of disposable income
& discretionary income gain so that all gains accrue to the rentier class of speculative investors like Warren Buffett & Bob Paulson.
Bottom line is that Warren Buffett will have to purchase all the new automobiles, trucks, houses, mansions, cottages, farms,
cites, towns, railroads, roads, & precious metals as the emerging markets & first world markets all decouple just as Professor
Emeritus Benoit Mandelbrot hypothesized they would just before he died.
Go ahead, America, print the fake fiat greenbacks to infinity in vain hope of extricating yourselves from the intractable financial
muck & mire you are most assuredly going to find yourselves in this approaching October 2019.
Go ahead, Punk, make my day!
Are you feeling lucky, Punk?
RW
Martin Usher
Its not "American". We just happen to be the chosen host for this part of history. Before us it was the British Empire that
was top dog.
Money has no particular loyalty to a country. In pre-WW1 Europe the bourgeois were all intermarried, connected primarily by
wealth and power regardless of their nominal nationality, our present equivalent are similarly connected. Just like WW1 when the
chips are down we -- the ordinary people -- will be sacrificed on the alter of patriotism while they'll survive and prosper.
MASTER OF UNIVE
March 10th 2008 around 11:00am Bear Stearns time New York shitty was the virtual end of American hegemony worldwide forever more
into the obvious future of Macroeconomics & Macroprudential Policy as an ongoing concern. Debt-to-GDP of all sovereign Western
imperialist nations is intractably North of any semblance of sustainability vis-a-vis Finance worldwide or within Emerging Economies
or First World Developed Economies.
Intractable debt limits were broached when Nixon declared the bankruptcy of the Bretton Woods infrastructure of gold backed
USA Reserve Currency Status and then opted in ignorance for the petro-dollar bait & switch fiat USD Finance capture worldwide
which has now come home to roost across the rust belt of the heartland USA, and in places that were once bastions of manufacturing
for the middle class USA blue collar worker such as Detroit or Chicago. Today the business model of the USA is transnationalist
whereby places across the USA are not even remotely financed into that transnationalist Wall Street model of Finance that is wholly
parasitic to the point of crashing mainstreet USA across all sectors of the Service Sector Industries that were supposed to be
replacing the long lost USA Manufacturing Base that was offshored to the Third World sovereigns that would temporarly increase
profit margins for the transnationalist class of corporate parasites run amok to collectively destroy all life on Planet Earth
for centuries to come if we are lucky.
RW
martin
You have made the common mistake of asserting that it is America, instead of those who govern (the USA and its pundits)
that have engineered the problems you point out.
Why would the two parties in congress (Article II followers) and the two fellows with the Article II power, continue to [expand
the debt in fake, made up and useless expenses], unless they were controlled by external forces?
Maybe bankers and their high powered corporations are finding they can no longer easily dupe Americans into delivering their
resources into the pockets of the wealthy. Maybe the American people have drawn the line, no more, will they produce for the IMF,
world bank?
Maybe Americans have decided to refuse the tax burdens imposed to retire the fed debt? Maybe foreign nations have denied the
banks and their corporations access to their resources as a means to pay the USA debt? Maybe script has been recognized as a false
capital in-capable of ruling the world? Maybe organized criminals have taken up positions in the western governments and used
those positions to force on the governed many things? Maybe burdening the USA with debt is part of the plan to bankrupt America?
<==but why should the banks bankrupt America, why has access to education been limited, why has the USA spied on Americans? Why
have the governed Americans been denied access to the USA? Has the USA retired Americans from productive jobs, in order to accelerate
the demise of America? The USA has made Americans into debtors obligated to pay bankers in the form of taxes to be collected by
the USA and remitted to the bankers. <= just as is now occurring in Britain, Greece, France, and other places. Privatization,
monopolization and conversion from public to private franchising and ownership have served as the transforming agents that have
made the elite so wealthy.
Economic Zionism. as opposed to government regulated capitalism, condones no competition, allows no prisoners and either
takes or destroys all likely competitive elements (persons, corporations, or nations) Economic Zionism demands the government
that governs (as in USA governance over Americans) assist in rendering Americans broke. Is it because until Americans are broke,
the EZ bandits are hampered? Is scooping resources into private, monopoly powered, already wealthy hands, the goodies to be had
the goal? Maybe the USA is a privatizing agent instead of a benefactor serving Americans?
In USA governed America, there is much very-productive farm land, millions of tons of minerals, many productive seaports, and
tons and tons of money making monopolies (patents, copyrights, royalties, government franchised goodies, lucrative government
contracts, and plenty of government services and resources) to be privatized for profit. The goodies are located in thousands
of acres of rich farmland, the major ports and services attached thereto, and embedded within little domestic American companies
which the USA debt will eventually burden into bankruptcy. After all "scalping a bankruptcy" is historically a speciality of economic
zionism.
MASTER OF UNIVE
In 1994 JPMorgan management & traders went on a little holiday in Miami to concoct the Global Ponzi of debt & risk associated
with loans into what is known today as the Financialization Process whereby bank risk would be shuffled off of investment bank
balance sheets and onto those speculators that wanted to purchase all that risk involved in the bank portfolios en masse because
they knew how to offload that risk to unsuspecting greater fools that were always certain to come knocking in a climate of upward
growth and yield curve convexity. But the chink in their financial alchemy was obviously debt limits and the ability to track
the risk to the system as a whole given that all transactions in the derivatives world are dark & unregulated due to the helmsmen
like the Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson who previous to being nominated as Treasury Secretary was in fact the top man at Goldman
Sachs where he raked in approximately a smooth billion before traversing the revolving door between the Whore House & Goldman
Sachs New York shitty offices.
Casino Banking morphed into Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism when Bob Paulson wanted more Residential Mortgage Backed Security issuance
and pressured Goldman Sachs into providing more issuance via NINJA loans & Liar Loans after 05 when the Wall Street speculators
had to go bottom feeding for loan issuance in order to meet investor demand & apatite for their unhinged Gordon Gecko greed.
'Maestro' Greenspan emphasized his 'flaw' in his macroeconomic model of the world when the investor greed broached fat tails
on the order of a 10% crash of the power laws of distributions of loan issuance. Greenspan never assumed that the Financialization
Process would exceed a default scenario greater than 5-7% of no-performing loans in the subprime issuance tranche.
American exceptionalism via Henry Paulson USA Treasury Secretary 08 is what rendered American Late Stage Ponzi Capitalism wholly
defunct going forward into 2020 & beyond with a permanent lower bound CB Interest Rate Regime & specter of WW3 hot conflagration.
My money is on the pinko Commie bastards this time round the sovereign insolvency loop of domestic misery USA.
WELCOME to the New World Disorder!
RW
nottheonly1
To condense this lengthy essay: This ship is sinking.
This would include household debt, student debt, financial debt, corporate debt, and municipal debt. Add this to sovereign
debt and you get a figure roughly 5 times US sovereign debt, and even this is regarded as being a conservative figure according
to many
One – at least on this side of the screen – cannot but think that all this is by design. The cart is driven intentionally off
the cliff. To start off with a clean slate? Where the wealthy still have their wealth, but the suckers are depending on hand-outs?
An old proverb alledges that: To borrow brings sorrow.
To which only those who make loads of money from lending will disagree. Where are the solutions? No solutions, just listicles
as to how bad it all is? Sure, the West is reminiscent of the HMS Titanic – with the slight difference of the hole made by the
iceberg (debt) extending over the whole length of the ship. It is listing beyond dancing.
Well, I am willing to tell a secret (that isn't one anymore for quite some time):
Outlaw/prohibit Interest .
Prohibit capital gains . Or tax them with 99%.
Prevent under all circumstances a continuation of Performanceless Profits .
Make them punishable with prison time of no less than half of the age at which they were perpetrated. You're 30? You're going
in for 15. You're 65? Easy math.
Fact is, that there are solutions galore to save our souls. Problem is, those whose lives are depending on them, don't demand
them to be implemented. And why would the wealthy tax non-payers like Bezos et al want to change their 'winning team'? That is
a well known no-no. The only solution the masses of the little people can hope for is 'Force Majeur' that works to their benefit.
Shall we wait for that to happen?
Many voice conflicting judgments, but an impartial look back on history produces the unequivocal conclusion: yes,
mistakes and shortcomings were many, but without perestroika the world would have never been what it is today
MOSCOW, April 24. /TASS/. Thirty years after the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev embarked on a policy of
reforms that would go down in history under a name sounding very oddly to a foreign ear - perestroika - Russians are
discussing those events of their country's recent history again. Many voice conflicting judgements, but an impartial
look back on history produces the unequivocal conclusion: yes, mistakes and shortcomings were many, but without
perestroika the world would have never been what it is today.
On April 23, 1985 the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party gathered for its historic full-scale meeting to
set course towards what was described as fundamental reorganization and acceleration of the Soviet Union's economic
development after a long period of what was condemned as stagnation. The new course, originally expected to overhaul
and invigorate the Soviet system, ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
"The gist of what happened
then was simple: at the very top a decision was a made the people are free to express their thought in public and for
that they will neither risk losing their life or go to jail or even go jobless," says the founder of the Yabloko
party, Grigory Yavlinsky. "There emerged the freedom of speech. The feeling of fear vanished. Full stop. All other
processes that followed were nothing but consequences. The previous political system was built on falsehoods. The
advent of truth caused a lethal effect on that system, and it fell apart."
"Perestroika's worst problem was there was no strategic planning. The reform plan and its end goal were very
unclear all along," Sergey Filatov, the former chief of staff of Russia's first president Boris Yeltsin told TASS.
"Without a plan the policy was doomed to fail."
And still, Filatov said, perestroika caused a tremendous impact: it triggered reforms and showed the people that
changes were possible even under the old system.
"Perestroika was an intricate process," says Aleksei Makarkin, the first deputy president of the Political
Technologies Centre. "It was first a belated attempt to reform the economy, then the ensuing chaos, and ultimately an
attempt to defuse popular anger with political reform. The process eventually broke bounds. It all ended with the
collapse of the country. Gorbachev merely tried to make that process controllable more or less," Makarkin told TASS.
Gorbachev was forced to launch economic reforms, because the main engine that kept the Soviet economy going was
the export of oil. When oil prices slumped, something had to be done right away," Makarkin recalled. "His
predecessors had drawn up no strategic plans. Nobody dared touch the system. Later, when some steps began to be taken
at last, it turned out that no one had the slightest idea of how to go about that business. Conflicting decisions
followed in quick succession. First, an attempt was made to speed up economic development and diversify the economy
at a time when oil prices plummeted. In 1987 the attempt failed. Other remedies began to be tried. Some traces of a
free market economy began to develop, such as cooperatives in the services and public catering. Some components of a
controlled market economy cropped up."
The rapprochement with the West under Gorbachev was started with a far-reaching aim, Makarkin believes. In that
situation the Soviet economy was no longer capable of carrying the burden of the Cold War and the arms race. "Without
that no rapprochement might have ever happened. Also, there was the war in Afghanistan that had to be curtailed."
"In general, the Gorbachev era in home and foreign policies was that of haste, inconsistency, belated decisions
and forced moves. In the meantime, the people's living standards slumped and protest sentiment soared. Attempts to
woo the general public reached nowhere. In 1987-1988 social discontent soared and Boris Yeltsin emerged as its
embodiment."
"Hoping to ease tensions in society political reforms were declared only to cause centrifugal processes," Makarkin
recalls. "As a result, the Soviet republics began to drift ever farther apart - some before the August 1991 coup, and
others after. A counter-attempt to create something like a federation or confederation drew strong objections from
the hard-line conservatives, which led to the country's utter collapse.
But perestroika should not be painted only in dark colours, Makarkin said.
"One should remember that Gorbachev gave the people freedom - first, economic, and then political. For instance,
the freedom to travel out of the country and back: something everybody takes for granted. It was under Gorbachev that
the Church regained full legitimacy. Lastly, the freedom of speech, which has long become a fact of life."
"Also, Gorbachev largely takes the credit for avoiding a large-scale civil war and chaos and total chaos in a vast
country, however tragic the unrest in Tbilisi, Vilnius and Nagorno-Karabakh of those days may still look these days.
He decided against the extreme scenario implying the use of force, which many interpreted as a sign of weakness. It
should be remembered: those who dared use force merely accelerated the country's collapse."
The policy of perestroika proclaimed in the Soviet Union in 1985 has caused more harm than good, say 55% of
Russians, as follows from a Levada poll held in March. In contrast to this, ten years ago 70% said perestroika was a
bad choice.
To all the critics of appeasers at Munich: why did the Slovak army go in to Poland with the
German? And what did Britain and France do between Oct 1939 and May 1940, aside from wait to
be shocked and awed?
Reading "Strange Victory" by May, other side and much more access to records than "Strange
Defeat" by Marc Bloch written within occupied France.
Hitler convinced the Army they and the party were the TWO pillars of the Reich early on.
His "Blood night" eliminated the SA who implied they would be a party "army". Bought the
generals!
Then the personal oath of all officers was not different than loyalty oath to the person
of Frederick the Great.
A military coup was very remote from 1935 on......
Hitler's 7 point assessment of France in Oct 1939 was entirely accurate! Among the best
pieces of analysis leading to a victory not easily seen by materiel considerations.
War is 3 to 1 moral and in May 1940 the morale sided with the Wehrmacht.
A strength of a general is often luck. Guderian and Rommel had a lions share n Spring
1940.
"... There had been no winning of the Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was about. ..."
"... If the Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the Soviet Union and Soviet ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking policy steps to carry on the Cold War. ..."
Obviously since there is a determined American Cold War effort being waged right now,
American historians were mistaken at the end of the 1980s.
There had been no winning of the
Cold War, nor even a clear and shared understanding of what the Cold War was about.
If the
Cold War was only about balancing the Soviet Union and developing economically far beyond the
Soviet Union and Soviet ideas faltering, that happened. However, there was obviously more or
with no Soviet Union to counter we would not now be taking policy steps to carry on the Cold
War.
"... No, America lost the Cold War. We may be richer than when it started, but a larger portion of our incomes go to the government . Even worse, the United States now leads the world in imprisonment –not just by rate but in absolute terms as well, with 1 out of every 150 Americans behind bars. This is largely a consequence of the War on Drugs, which is a war the American government wages upon its own citizens. In the years of the Cold War and since, we have become substantially less free. ..."
As everyone should know by now but probably does not, this is the twentieth anniversary of
the fall of the Berlin Wall. The first breach in that wall set off a chain reaction that would
eventually topple Communist governments and liberate people across half of Europe. It would
also end the Cold War between the West and the Soviet Block, substantially diminishing the
possibility for nuclear annihilation. However, when people say that the West–or more
particularly, America–won the Cold War, I'm not exactly sure what they mean.
Of course, America still exists as a country while the Soviet Union does not, but in a war
that is supposedly about ideas and ideals, victory must me something more than outlasting your
opponent.
I think the more appropriate way to look at the matter is to ask: who has benefited the most
from the end of the Cold War? Clearly, it is the peoples of East Germany, Poland, Estonia, etc.
that have gained the most. They are far richer than they were twenty years ago, and more
importantly they are able to speak and think as they please without fear of imprisonment,
torture, and possibly death at the hands of their governments. Even Russia, which is still far
from free, is a much freer place than it was under the Soviets. Dissident journalists do still
turn up missing, but to be known as a dissident journalist in the Soviet Union was almost an
impossibility. The post-Communist states all have a long way to go to complete freedom, but
with few exceptions , they are all now much
closer to that ideal than they were twenty years ago.
But can we say that the people of the United States also won the Cold War? Sadly, I
do not believe so. After World War II, the United States' standing army likely would have
shrunk back to the small peacetime numbers that existed for most of our history if it weren't
for the Cold War. Instead, the U.S. military spread across the world, allegedly to keep the
country free from the horrors of Communism. Ironically, keeping the people of America free
required enslaving a large percentage of her young men through the country's first peacetime
draft. And of course, soldiers must be housed, equipped, fed, and paid, which required a higher
level of taxation than Americans were used to in peacetime. Twenty years ago, the United States
could have reversed this course and reaped the peace dividend, but instead the government
pressed ahead and extended American influence into the former Soviet Block–taking on new
powers and responsibilities along the way.
No, America lost the Cold War. We may be richer than when it started, but a larger portion
of our incomes go to the government .
Even worse, the United States now leads the world in imprisonment
–not just by rate but in absolute terms as well, with 1 out of every 150 Americans behind
bars. This is largely a consequence of the War on Drugs, which is a war the American government
wages upon its own citizens. In the years of the Cold War and since, we have become
substantially less free.
One right that is still largely intact is the Freedom of Religion, but most versions of
American Christianity today bear little resemblance to the teachings found in the Gospels. In
this country today, people tend to worship the American Jesus , more known for killing
"hajis" than offering salvation. Christianity has become a state religion in this country as it
was for the Roman Emperor Constantine, and it is put to the same use of justifying military
power. Perhaps even worse than using the Prince of Peace for war, the president (provided he is
of the right party, of course) is now viewed by most as an avatar of God on Earth if not God
himself. Many American Christians have rendered everything unto Caesar and have nothing left
for God.
The world is a far freer place than it was twenty years ago, but America is not. Kierkegaard
once wrote "What slave in chains is as unfree as a tyrant!" As the tyrant of the world,
America is enslaved to all. Truly, America has gained the world, but lost her soul.
And yet we had plenty of (perhaps more) morality laws before the War on
Drugs
Perhaps the problem is that the government does not defend its borders (well, that and the
intelligence agencies have long funded some operations with drug money look at
Afghanistan!)?
Not everything illegal has a special allure, it really depends on enforcement of the
law.
And, John, a lot of Eastern Europe is NOT better off than it was 20 years ago, particularly
now that their speculative bubbles have burst. The signs are shinier, there are more decent
restaurants, but many other economic, social, and moral declines. And East Europeans have
gained freedom in many ways, but lost it in others.
People forget that many of the anti-Communist movements like the New Forum activists in the
DDR or Solidarnosc in Poland claimed they were pro-socialist (just for a more democratic,
participatory regime). The original point was not joining NATO and mass privatisation, but
rather civil liberties, and, sometimes, true conservative principles (pro-church, rediscovering
a spiritual mission of their people). But church attendance has increased slightly while
(corporal, at least) immorality has increased significantly! What gain is that? Much of the
national infrastructure was stolen by oligarchs who took the money to Switzerland, much others
were sold to foreigners.
Basically, (most of) East Europe has been absorbed into the control of the international
financial elite (or NWO or whatever you prefer to term it).
There are some very secular, more generous welfare states with considerably more civil
liberties. Of course they have their own problems, but that is not the source of our War of
Terror, War on Drugs, USA Patriot Act, etc. Paleoconservatives are too often naifs in
suggesting, essentially, that some lead us on the road to Hell with good intentions. It is
actually direct corruption in our govt that is the source of all our greatest national
catastrophes.
I found a figure for Cuba. The 2005 official statistics put it at about 490 per 100K, so
about 70% the US rate – still high, but no cigar. Oh I see a more recent (2008?) rate of
531, but still keeping pace with the US at about 70% its rate. That is a British univeristy
study – they estimate the Sudanese rate about 1/20 the US rate (so they had a civil war,
but they aren't totalitarian, what did you think?). Zimbabwe is given as about 1/5 the US rate.
The link, if it works to post it here-
Thomas, were you referring to England and the continental welfare
states with their anti free speech laws, confiscatory taxation and intrusive regulation of
every stage of life? Welfare states must be coercive in order to function. That's why
conservatives off all types abhor them.
The percentage of population in incarceration can be a deceptive statistic. States lie about
these things for a start. Totalitarian states like Cuba and China have the option of simply
killing offenders and of course many people just flee state control.
The US has a large degree of incarceration due to the popularity of "Get tough on drug
offender" legislation. We have a large criminal underclass in this country and after decades of
revolving door justice, the public just got fed up. It may not be humane, but it works. That's
democracy for you.
By the way, there is no system more involved in the criminal justice system than our welfare
bureaucracy. Most criminals are born into to welfare, graduate to truancy and addiction and
then crime, all under the watchful eye of social workers, guidance counselors, school
psychologists, court appointed counselors and probation officers, etc. etc. But this shouldn't
take any of the luster off welfare states, right?
Actually, China records their executions, they do not just shoot
criminals on sight. Neither does Cuba. And neither of those countries would qualify as the top
10 or 20 draconian, authoritarian states (i.e., where citizens shake in fear of the police) at
the moment.
England is widely known to be the most surveillance over its population, but it also has the
weakest welfare state in Western Europe!!!! Scandinavia has much more freedom in general and
much stronger welfare. Your attempt to make some sort of correlation is ridiculous. None of
these countries has a PATRIOT ACT, where you can be deemed an enemy and held indefinitely.
Britain has tried several times to enact something similar, but the Lords always block it. It
would be absurd in Germany even.
The United States is simply no longer a beacon of civil liberties even compared with true
welfare states. Sorry.
And if you are worried about the existence of a criminal underclass, you can probably blame
the extreme inequalities of wealth, the co-existence of hyper-First World and quasi-Third World
elements. All of Latin America has the same, though their welfare states are rarely very
advanced. I think you would find the same trend in Africa.
Mind you, I don't want to be like Sweden. I would prefer America to return to the 50s (not
entirely, but overall it would be an improvement). In the 50s there was a more even
redistribution of wealth and less nanny statism because there was more direct dirigisme. The
State was more involved in industrial planning and regulated trade and financial institutions.
Individuals paid less tax because corporations paid more. If the economy is planned such that
productive employment is a priority, then you can maintain a stable working class. If you take
that away, like the US and UK have done, then you get a permanent underclass with no prospects
of a stable life.
The problem with the 1950's is that they inevitably evolve into the
1960's. And soon we're where we are now. That's the way of welfare states, they introduce such
dependency, indolence and corruption that they just grow. But hey they always have their
defenders. As for the lack of a Patriot Act in Europe, you must be kidding. The least you could
do is read the British press. British subjects can be criminally charged for suggesting that
heterosexual couples make better adoptive parents than homosexuals. The French police do as
they please, and always have. The British do have preventative detention.
Nobody said that the Chinese and or Cubans shot people out of hand. But they do shoot people
rather than feed them for long periods, as we do. You can believe their statistics if you want
to.
Our underclass remains a dangerous nuisance despite public education, taxpayer supported
charity care, a multitude of Federal and State programs and affirmative action. Of course we
are importing more every day, adding to the income disparity you speak of. Perhaps we should
deport people to level out the disparity a bit. What do you think?
I like your idea of our no longer being a beacon. It's attracting the wrong sort.
Yes, of course we should deport people. Illegal immigration is not the
source of the US socioeconomic problems, but it compounds them by a serious factor.
Being a former resident of Houston, where parts of the city (probably the most red-voting
major city in the US) were literally crawling with illegals who undercut everyone else's wages
(that's why they are here), I can attest a bit to the corrupting effect this has on everyone
involved.
"... Westad faults Truman for being unwilling or unable to extend Franklin Roosevelt's friendly policy toward the USSR. ..."
"... "The Soviet assistance program for China was not only the biggest Moscow ever undertook outside its own borders," Westad writes. "It was also, in relative terms, the biggest such program undertaken by any country anywhere, including the US Marshall Plan for Europe." Within a decade following this generosity, they almost fought a nuclear war. ..."
"... WESTAD ALSO wrote a book on the fall of détente, for which he distinctly blames Americans. "Nixon and Kissinger had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept," he writes. "Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in the 1970s or ever." This is where Gaddis's immersion in American documents might have been helpful. Most Americans, at least on the anti-détente side, were worried not that the Soviet Union was at parity with the United States, but that it had actually exceeded America's capabilities. However wrongheaded and overly alarmist that perspective was, its importance in explaining American behavior should not be overlooked. ..."
"... Westad will have none of it. "Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine," he writes. "On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. . . . The turn toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed unimaginable." Pages later, he adds, ..."
"... Eisenhower lacked the imagination and political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin's death. This is a provocative portrayal of Eisenhower, a welcome antidote to the revisionism that can approach hagiography. But it is undercut by Westad's slight documentation. ..."
"... Cold War triumphalism has had pernicious effects on American foreign policy. A straight line can be drawn from the idea that Ronald Reagan's military buildup and assertive rhetoric ended the Cold War to the fantasy that the United States could rebuild the Middle East. The prominence of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration was due largely to the widespread belief that they had been right in seeing the transformative potential of American power during the Cold War. Though Donald Trump was able, in the Republican primaries in 2016, to counter delusions of American omnipotence with delusions of American seclusion, the messianic streak still runs strong in the Republican Party and in segments of the Democratic Party. Its absence in current political debates should be seen as temporary. When it inevitably arises again, trouble will ensue. "We all lost the cold war," Gorbachev once said. The difficulty arises when one party thinks it won. ..."
Odd Arne Westad, The Cold War: A World History
(New York: Basic Books, 2017), 720 pp., $35.00.
IN 2005
, the Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis released his book,
The Cold War: A New History
. Glowing
reviews of the book followed in the
New York Times
and
Foreign Affairs
. Among the few dissenters was Tony Judt, a
New York University historian who died in 2010. Judt had opposed the Iraq War, when so many other intellectuals -- including
Gaddis -- joined in the delusions that George W. Bush could, should and would democratize the Middle East. By 2005, those fantasies
were discredited by events in Mesopotamia (though Gaddis was unchastened, arguing in the American Interest
as late as 2008
that the senior goal of American foreign policy should be "ending tyranny").
In the
New York Review of Books
, Judt argued that "John Lewis Gaddis has written a history of America's cold war: as
seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers." However brilliant his
works had been during the Cold War, Gaddis became an American triumphalist once the Berlin Wall collapsed. He had comparatively
little understanding of the Soviet experience and, most egregiously, didn't seem to care much about the enormous damage both
superpowers inflicted on what was then called the Third World. The result, Judt argued, was that the Cold War was "a story still to
be told."
With Odd Arne Westad's new book, the story is now told. Westad is the coauthor of several books on the Cold War, as well as
coeditor of the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War
. He also wrote
The Global Cold War: Third World
Interventions and the Making of Our Times
, which won the Bancroft Prize. As its title indicates,
The Global Cold War
suggested that the Cold War was very much a globe-spanning conflict, migrating into areas far beyond the borders of the two
superpowers.
His new book integrates that focus on the developing world with a more traditional emphasis on the great powers. It is aimed at a
general rather than a scholarly audience, with far fewer footnotes or archival research than his previous works (more on that
later).
The Cold War: A World History
is told chronologically, but unlike most books on the subject, it begins with the
right period.
THE FIRST
well-regarded book on the war written from a post–Berlin Wall perspective was Martin Walker's
Cold
War,
published in 1994. Like so many others to come, it began with the dissension in the Allied ranks in the closing years of
World War II. By beginning with an earlier period, Westad advances beyond that approach. He is able to devote some attention to the
ideological sources of the struggle, which began with Lenin's interpretation of communism, prioritizing global revolution and
antagonism toward the noncommunist world. "The Cold War was born from the global transformations of the late nineteenth century and
was buried as a result of tremendously rapid changes a hundred years later," he writes. Those changes include decolonization, the
ascension of the United States to world power and the gradual decline of scientific socialism, as well as the two world wars. "The
Great War jumpstarted the destinies of the two future Cold War Superpowers. It made the United States the global embodiment of
capitalism and it made Russia a Soviet Union, a permanent challenge to the capitalist world." Westad also makes the
thought-provoking claim, rather unusual in a book on the Cold War, that
it is therefore quite possible that the Cold War will be reduced in significance by future historians, who from their vantage
point will attach more significance to the origins of Asian economic power, or the beginning of space exploration, or the
eradication of smallpox.
Westad proceeds from there through all the stops along the way to the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. Separate chapters
examine India, China, the Middle East and Latin America, as well as summaries of Richard Nixon's diplomacy and the reigns of
Kennedy, Brezhnev and Gorbachev. That he manages to do all this in largely sequential fashion is doubly impressive.
The Cold War
evinces a lifetime of research and thought on the subject. Compelling ideas and valuable insights appear
frequently, such as: "In spite of their attractiveness on a global scale, neither the Soviet nor the US system was ever fully
replicated elsewhere." Or the explanation for communism's appeal in Vietnam: "One reason, ironically, was the integration of
Vietnamese elites into French culture and education, from whence the post-1914 generation took over the radicalization that was
prevalent among French youth, too." Or: "In Asia as in Europe, US policy in the early Cold War was more oriented toward the
expansion of capitalism as such than toward a unique preservation of US national economic advantage or the interests of specific US
companies."
Westad's assessment is that some sort of conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable once the common
foe of Nazi Germany was extinguished. "Leaders of the two countries had seen each other as adversaries ever since the Russian
Revolution of 1917, and in some cases even before that," he writes. Illustrative of his measured approach throughout the book,
Westad assigns blame for the conflict to both parties, though not so much that he is unable to make moral distinctions. Stalin's
determination to establish control in Eastern Europe, particularly in Poland, contributed greatly to the breakdown of good relations
with Britain and the United States. But, he writes, "it was containment that made postwar conflict into a Cold War." The United
States was unwilling to grant the Soviets a traditional sphere of influence, let alone see them as a comparable power deserving of
commensurate respect. Seen from 2017, it might seem absurd that so many Europeans, even in England, looked upon the Soviet Union
with admiration and gratitude. But, however much Americans like to forget it, it was the Red Army that "tore the guts out of the
German military machine," in Winston Churchill's colorful phrase.
Westad faults Truman for being unwilling or unable to extend Franklin Roosevelt's friendly policy toward the USSR. Stalin might
have hunkered down and developed foreign-policy paranoia regardless of Truman's behavior, he concedes. "But the intensity of the
conflict, including the paranoia that it later produced on both sides, might have been significantly reduced if more attempts had
been made by the stronger power to entice Moscow toward forms of cooperation." This is somewhat unfair to Truman. The day he was
sworn in as president after Roosevelt's death, Truman said in a statement he intended "to carry on as he believed the President
would have done." There is little reason to doubt his sincerity. In From Roosevelt to Truman
, University of Notre Dame
professor Wilson Miscamble credibly argued that Truman began his presidency with open-mindedness toward the Soviets but was
convinced by events that cooperation was impossible. He wasn't alone.
ASIA, MEANWHILE
, experienced rapid decolonization. Both the United States and the Soviet Union were resolutely
opposed to traditional European imperialism, however much they acted as imperialist powers in their own regions. Combined with the
destitution of the former colonial powers, this meant that Asian nations were freer to pursue their own destinies. Of course, in
Japan and Korea, those destinies were determined by their occupiers, who molded these societies in their own images. It is a sign of
Westad's attentiveness to facts that, without ever succumbing to anything resembling American chauvinism, he can write something as
direct as: "The Korean War came from Stalin's change of mind. If he had not given the go-ahead to Kim, there would have been no
war."
Westad betrays no romanticism toward the Soviet Union or its communist admirers -- that might seem like a low bar, but there are
still scholars like Bruce Cumings who look fondly on the Marxist regimes -- but the book makes the clear-eyed observation,
Only by industrializing fast could a country become socialist and modern. The policy had an obvious appeal: in countries on
the European periphery, where there was a profound sense of having fallen behind, and in countries outside of Europe, such as China,
Korea, and Vietnam, rapid industrialization seemed indeed to be the way forward.
Westad might have added that the Soviet Communist Party's untouchable command of power was similarly appealing to political
leaders and intellectuals worldwide.
Immediately prior to
The Cold War
, Westad's latest book was a study of China's foreign policy since 1750. His mastery of
the subject is evident in a chapter called "China's Scourge." It is valuable not only for a discussion of how the Chinese Communist
Party managed to win the civil war against the Nationalists, but also for a succinct reminder of why and how swiftly relations
dissolved between the CCP and the Soviets. "The Soviet assistance program for China was not only the biggest Moscow ever undertook
outside its own borders," Westad writes. "It was also, in relative terms, the biggest such program undertaken by any country
anywhere, including the US Marshall Plan for Europe." Within a decade following this generosity, they almost fought a nuclear war.
Similarly incisive here is a chapter on India. Often neglected in general histories of the Cold War, India was for a while the
leader of the Non-Aligned nations. Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru was progressive, but intent on keeping his newly independent
country truly independent. This, of course, infuriated the Americans, for whom any friendliness with the USSR was interpreted as
hostility to them. And yet, when India's moral purity conflicted with its conflict with China, nationalism prevailed, leading to a
brief war. "In spite of its many efforts, even a country as a significant as India was never able to fully break away from the
global conflict molding its policies," Westad concludes.
WESTAD ALSO
wrote a book on the fall of détente, for which he distinctly blames Americans. "Nixon and Kissinger
had gone further in attempting to manage the Cold War together with the Soviet Union than most Americans were willing to accept," he
writes. "Most Americans were simply not willing to tolerate that the United States could have an equal in international affairs, in
the 1970s or ever." This is where Gaddis's immersion in American documents might have been helpful. Most Americans, at least on the
anti-détente side, were worried not that the Soviet Union was at parity with the United States, but that it had actually exceeded
America's capabilities. However wrongheaded and overly alarmist that perspective was, its importance in explaining American behavior
should not be overlooked.
Indeed, Westad's decision to reduce the research shown to the readers in this book makes some of his unorthodox judgments
difficult to credit. Most conspicuously, Westad assesses Dwight Eisenhower harshly, but without offering enough support for his
claims. In the late 1950s and 1960s, the evaluation of Ike was decidedly mixed. He was too complacent, it was said, too moderate and
timid. He favored a strategic posture built around nuclear weapons that led to an arms race. He failed to confront Joe McCarthy and
McCarthyism. He initiated the first of many ill-considered CIA interventions in foreign countries, in Guatemala and Iran. And he
added a religious dimension to the Cold War, which elevated the conflict beyond the already-dangerous levels that existed when he
took power in 1953.
That perception gave way in the 1980s to a consideration that Eisenhower was not complacent, but subtle. The opening of archives
in the 1970s convinced many that his was, as the political scientist Fred Greenstein put it in his 1982 book of the same name, "the
hidden-hand presidency." The popular historian Stephen Ambrose did much to further this view, first in 1981's
Ike's Spies:
Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment
, and then in a biography, released in two volumes in 1983 and 1984. (Writing in the
New Republic
in 2006, the journalist John Judis observed that Ambrose's books "changed many a liberal's view of the general,"
counting himself among them.)
The revisionist view of Eisenhower has now become orthodoxy. He routinely numbers among historians' rankings of the top ten
presidents. Far from sharing the contemporary perception of him as popular but ineffectual -- "It's just like Eisenhower. The worse I
do, the more popular I get," JFK said after the Bay of Pigs disaster -- we like Ike as much as the people who wore his campaign
buttons. Celebrity architect Frank Gehry designed an Eisenhower memorial that Congress has funded to the tune of $100 million, to
sit across from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum, on Washington's Independence Avenue.
Most scholars lean toward the view that Ike was a first-rate Cold War strategist. He balanced the budget thrice, halting the
unsustainable economic and military buildup that resulted from the Korean War. He set diplomatic precedents by meeting with Soviet
leaders and organizing purposeful summits. And he outflanked domestic hysteria, establishing a bipartisan commitment to a strategy
of containment. Predominant is the view expressed by Robert Bowie and Richard Immerman in their book, Waging Peace: How
Eisenhower Shaped a Cold War Strategy
:
Later events . . . have enhanced appreciation of his prudent and sober judgment. In a turbulent and dangerous stage of
East-West relations, with an untested and erratic Soviet leadership and a changing strategic environment, Eisenhower managed a
succession of crises and set a course that preserved both security and peace.
Westad will have none of it. "Intent to move away from the Cold War as a national emergency, Eisenhower ended up
institutionalizing it as policy and doctrine," he writes. "On the Korean War, the new president simply got lucky. . . . The turn
toward a policy of massive nuclear retaliation meant preparing for strategic warfare on a scale that so far had seemed
unimaginable." Pages later, he adds,
If the president was not a Cold War hysteric, neither was he someone who could conceive of a world without the confrontation
with the Soviet Union. Eisenhower lacked the imagination and political will to think about ending the Cold War after Stalin's death. This is a provocative portrayal of Eisenhower, a welcome antidote to the revisionism that can approach hagiography. But it is
undercut by Westad's slight documentation.
Cold War triumphalism has had pernicious effects on American foreign policy. A straight line can be drawn from the idea that
Ronald Reagan's military buildup and assertive rhetoric ended the Cold War to the fantasy that the United States could rebuild the
Middle East. The prominence of neoconservatives in the George W. Bush administration was due largely to the widespread belief that
they had been right in seeing the transformative potential of American power during the Cold War. Though Donald Trump was able, in
the Republican primaries in 2016, to counter delusions of American omnipotence with delusions of American seclusion, the messianic
streak still runs strong in the Republican Party and in segments of the Democratic Party. Its absence in current political debates
should be seen as temporary. When it inevitably arises again, trouble will ensue. "We all lost the cold war," Gorbachev once said.
The difficulty arises when one party thinks it won.
Jordan Michael Smith is the author of the Kindle single
Humanity: How Jimmy Carter Lost an Election and Transformed the
Post-Presidency
.
There is nothing new about empires taking hostages and using them to put pressure on
whatever rebel group needs to reminded "who is boss". The
recent arrest in Italy of Alexander Korshunov , the director for business development at
Russia's United Engine Corporation (UEC), is really nothing new but just the latest in a long
string of kidnappings. And, as
I already mentioned in distant 2017 , that kind of thuggery is not a sign of strength but,
in fact, a sign of weakness. Remember Michael Ledeen's immortal words about how ""
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country
and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business "? Well, you could
say that this latest spat of kidnappings is indicative of the same mindset and goal, just on a
much smaller, individual, scale. And, finally, it ain't just Russia, we all know about the
kidnapping of Huawei's CFO
Meng Wanzhou by the Canadian authorities .
By the way, you might wonder how can I speak of "kidnapping" when, in reality, these were
legal arrests made by the legitimate authorities of the countries in which these arrests were
made? Simple! As I mentioned last
week , words matter and to speak of an "arrest" in this case wrongly suggest
that 1) some crime was committed (when in reality there is ZERO evidence of that,
hence the talk of "conspiracy" to do something illegal) 2) that this crime was investigated and
that the authorities have gathered enough evidence to justify an arrest and 3) that the accused
will have a fair trial. None of that applies to the cases of Viktor Bout , Konstantin Iaroshenko , Marina Butina or, for that
matter, Meng Wanzhou or Wang
Weijing . The truth is that these so-called "arrests" are simple kidnappings, the goal is
hostage taking with the goal to either 1) try to force Russia (and China) to yield to US
demands or 2) try to "get back" at Russia (and China) following some humiliating climb down by
the US Administration (this was also the real reason behind the uncivilized seizure of Russian
diplomatic buildings in the USA).
This is not unlike what the Gestapo and the SS liked to do during WWII and their kidnapping
of hostages was also called "arrest" by the then state propaganda machine. By the way, the
Bolsheviks also did a lot of that during the civil war, but on a much larger scale. In reality,
both in the case of the Nazi authorities and in the case of the imperial USA, as soon as a
person is arrested he/she is subjected to solitary confinement and other forms of psychological
torture (Manning or Assange anybody?!) in order to either make them break or to at least show
Russia and China that the US, being the World Hegemon gets to seize anybody worldwide, be it
by a CIA kidnapping
team or by using local colonial law enforcement authorities (aka local police forces).
US politicians love to "send messages" and this metaphor is used on a daily basis by US
officials in all sorts of circumstances. Here the message is simple: we can do whatever the
hell we want, and there ain't nothing you can do about it!
But is that last statement really true?
Well, in order to reply to this we should look at the basic options available to Russia
(this also applies to China, but here I want to focus on the Russian side of the issue). I
guess the basic list of options is pretty straightforward:
Frankly, in the case of the USA, options one and two are useless: the AngloZionist leaders
have long given up any hope of not being hated and despised by 99% of mankind and they have
long dropped any pretense of legality, nevermind morality: they don't give a damn what anybody
thinks. Their main concern is to conceal their immense weakness, but they fail to do so time
and time again. Truly, when wannabe "empires" can't even bring an extremely weakened country
such as Venezuela to heel, there ain't much they can do to boot their credibility. If anything,
this thuggery is nothing more than the evidence of a mind-blowing
weakness of the Empire.
But that weakness in no way implies that Russia and China have good options. Sadly, they
don't.
Russia can engage in various types of sanctions, ranging from the petty bureaucratic
harassment of US representations, diplomats, businessmen and the like to economic and political
retaliations. But let's not kid ourselves, there is very little Russia can do to seriously hurt
the USA with such retaliations. Many would advocate retaliation in kind, but that poses a
double problem for the Kremlin:
some are more equal than
others " and that that which is "allowed" to the World Hegemon is categorically forbidden
to everybody else. Thus if Russia retaliates in kind, there will be an explosion of
hysterical protests not only by the western legacy corporate and state ziomedia, but also
from the 5 th columnist in the Russian "liberal" press.
And yes, unlike the USA, Russia does have a vibrant, diverse and pluralistic media and each
time when Putin agrees to a press conference (especially one several hours long) he knows that
he will be asked the tough, unpleasant, questions. But since he, unlike most western leaders,
can intelligently answer them he does not fear them. As for Dmitrii Peskov and Maria Zakharova,
they have heard it all a gazillion during the past years, including often the most ridiculously
biased, mis-informed and outright ridiculous "questions" (accusations, really) from the western
presstitute corps in Russia.
So yes, Russia could, in theory, retaliate by arresting US citizens in Russia (or by staging
Cold War type provocations) or by kidnapping them abroad (Russia does have special forces
trained for this kind of operation). But this is most unlikely to yield any meaningful results
and it would create a PR nightmare for the Kremlin.
ORDER IT NOW
The truth is that in most of these cases we always come down to the fundamental dichotomy:
on one hand we have a rogue state gone bonkers with imperial hubris, arrogance and crass
ignorance (say, the USA and/or Israel) while on the other we have states which try to uphold a
civilized international order (Russia, China, Iran, etc.). This is by logical necessity a
lop-sided struggle in which the thugs will almost always have the advantage.
I see that not everyone believes in an eye for an eye. Bless your religion sir. If I had the
power to call down blessings, which I don't, I'd have to make that a double order. You are
twice blessed for saying, out loud, publicly and all, that the Soviet Union did not fall, nor
did anyone push it over. It was not about the price of oil or the cost of wheat or even the
darkness that lurks in the depths of mens souls. It was dismantled by its own chief executive
officers and it fell apart precisely because its officials still did their jobs. People have
all sorts of strong feelings about this, understandably so, yet is it well to stick to the
truth. I agree with you on this matter thought it's difficult to endure such provocative and
insulting evils. In past struggles with Europe, Russia has proven itself capable and willing
to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve its aims. A determined stance on the part of the
leaders puts a burden on the people. But as well, it empowers them to. In this way they
succeed.
Captain Hook to Captain Kumar of the runaway oil tanker lol peter pan clowns running the
State Department.
"This is Brian Hook . . . I work for secretary of state Mike
Pompeo and serve as the US Representative for Iran," Mr Hook wrote to Akhilesh Kumar on
August 26, according to several emails seen by the Financial Times. "I am writing with good
news."
"With this money you can have any life you wish and be well-off in old age," Mr Hook wrote
in a second email to Mr Kumar that also included a warning. "If you choose not to take this
easy path, life will be much harder for you."
Harry Dexter White: Treasury Assistant Secretary* who was the major force behind the
Bretton Woods Conference and the institutional reconstruction of the post-World War II world
economy. He accepted enough of John Maynard Keynes's proposals to lay the groundwork for the
greatest generation of economic growth the world has ever seen. It was the extraordinary
prosperity set in motion by the Bretton Woods' System and institutions--the "Thirty Glorious
Years"--that demonstrated that political democracy and the mixed economy could deliver and
distribute economic prosperity.
George Kennan: Author of the "containment" strategy that won the Cold War.
Argued--correctly--that World War III could be avoided if the Western Alliance made clear its
determination to "contain" the Soviet Union and World Communism, and that the internal
contradictions of the Soviet Union would lead it to evolve into something much less dangerous
than Stalin's tyranny.
George Marshall: Architect of victory in World War II. Post-World War II Secretary of
State who proposed the Marshall Plan, another key step in the economic and institutional
reconstruction of Western Europe after World War II.
Arthur Vandenberg: Leading Republican Senator from Michigan who made foreign policy truly
bipartisan for a few years. Without Vandenberg, it is doubtful that Truman, Marshall,
Acheson, and company would have been able to muster enough Congressional support to do their
work.
Paul Hoffman: Chief Marshall Plan administrator. The man who did the most to turn the
Marshall Plan from a good idea to an effective aid program.
Dean Acheson: Principal architect of the post-World War II Western Alliance. That
Britain, France, West Germany, Italy, and the United States reached broad consensus on how to
wage Cold War is more due to Dean Acheson's diplomatic skill than to any single other
person.
Harry S Truman: The President who decided that the U.S. had to remain engaged
overseas--had to fight the Cold War--and that the proper way to fight the Cold War was to
adopt Kennan's proposed policy of containment. His strategic choices were, by and large, very
good ones.
Dwight D. Eisenhower: As first commander-in-chief of NATO, played an indispensable role
in turning the alliance into a reality. His performance as President was less satisfactory:
too many empty words about "rolling back" the Iron Curtain, too much of a willingness to try
to skimp on the defense budget by adopting "massive retaliation" as a policy, too much trust
in the erratic John Foster Dulles.
Gerald Ford: In the end, the thing that played the biggest role in the rise of the
dissident movement behind the Iron Curtain was Gerald Ford's convincing the Soviet Union to
sign the Helsinki Accords. The Soviet Union thought that it had gained worldwide recognition
of Stalin's land grabs. But what it had actually done was to commit itself and its allies to
at least pretending to observe norms of civil and political liberties. And as the Communist
Parties of the East Bloc forgot that in the last analysis they were tyrants seated on thrones
of skulls, this Helsinki commitment emboldened their opponents and their governments'
failures to observe it undermined their own morale.
George Shultz: Convinced Ronald Reagan--correctly--that Mikhail Gorbachev's "perestroika"
and "glasnost" were serious attempts at reform and liberalization, and needed to be taken
seriously. Without Shultz, it is unlikely that Gorbachev would have met with any sort of
encouragement from the United States--and unlikely that Gorbachev would have been able to
remain in power long enough to make his attempts at reform irreversible.
*Also, almost surely
an "Agent of Influence" and perhaps an out-and-out spy for Stalin's Russia. If so, never did
any intelligence service receive worse service from an agent than Stalin's Russia did from
Harry Dexter White....
I'm reading "The
Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World
Order (Council on Foreign Relations Books (Princeton University Press))" by Benn Steil and
wanted to share this quote with you.
"As regards the economics White advocated, they were hardly Marxist. They were by this time
what would be described as thoroughly Keynesian. He insisted that government should take an
active role in supporting economic activity; certainly more so than was orthodox before the
Great Depression, but he never pushed for broad government control of the means of production.
His writings on international monetary affairs express a concern with the need to fashion a
system that "reduces the necessity of restrictions on private enterprise."As for White's
domestic politics, these were mainstream New Deal progressive, and there is no evidence that he
admired communism as a political ideology."
ReplyFebruary 15, 2019 at 12:49
jorgensen said...
Vannevar Bush pushed for government support of science after the Second
World War and should get some credit for America's scientific dominance through the Cold War.
ReplyFebruary 16, 2019 at 15:38
andres said... The above list is old hat, so to speak. I would add the following two
lists:
Russians Who Did the Most to Win the Cold War (for both sides):
1. Georgi Zhukov (Was an unbelievable s.o.b. during WWII, but did the right thing having the
Red Army side with Khruschev and Malenkov against Beria). 2. Nikita Khruschev (secret speech, ousting of Stalin's old cronies and final unwillingness to
go to war over Cuba outweigh Hungary and U-2 incident, imo). 3. Aleksandr Solshenitsyn (self-explanatory). 4. Boris Pasternak (Dr. Zhivago is a better read than The Gulag Archipelago). 5. Roy Medvedev (Let History Judge). 6. Vasili Arkhipov (Don't Push the Button I). 7. Andrei Sakharov (self-explanatory). 8. Stanislav Petrov (Don't Push the Button II). 9. Mikhail Gorbachev (glasnost plus withdrawal from Afghanistan). 10. Boris Yeltsin (lousy president, but energetic opposition to August 1991 coup was
vital).
Americans Who Tried Their Best to Make the U.S. Lose the Cold War.
1. Douglas MacArthur. 2. John Foster Dulles. 3. Allen Dulles. 4. Barry Goldwater. 5. Robert McNamara/McGeorge Bundy/Maxwell Taylor/W.W. Rostow (joint award for Vietnam) 6. William Westmoreland (made it even worse). 7. Richard Nixon (carpet bomber in chief, plus undermined 1968 Vietnam peace talks). 8. Henry Kissinger (took over from JF Dulles as military coup enabler in chief, and nearly
pushed India to Russia's side after giving a blank check to Pakistan). 9. Ronald Reagan (was clearly pointed toward WWIII before Schultz and GHW Bush brought him
around).
(There are lots more, but I've tried to limit the list to those who were either in the
executive branch or came close (Goldwater). LBJ could also be included, but it is still being
argued whether he led his cabinet or his cabinet led him into Vietnam).
ReplyFebruary 16, 2019 at 22:52
CC BY-SA 3.0 /
w:User:Coolcaesar /
United States Department of
JusticeUS 22:39 05.09.2019
(updated 23:51 05.09.2019) Get short URL
9 7 62 The US Department of Justice announced Thursday that Alexander Yuryevich Korshunov,
director for business development at Russia's United Engine Corporation, has been charged with
conspiring to steal trade secrets. The charge carries a potential prison sentence of 10 years.
Korshunov, 57, was arrested in Naples, Italy on August 30 alongisde 59-year-old Maurizio Paolo
Bianchi, on suspicion of industrial espionage. The court filing unsealed Thursday
in the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio charges that the two "conspired and
attempted ... to steal and convey the confidential and proprietary information constituting
trade secrets of the Ohio-based Company A."
Bianchi was once the former director of Avio Aero, an Italian subsidiary of GE Aviation and
one of the world's largest aircraft engine suppliers. However, after he left that job to work
at Italian aerospace firm Aernova, he allegedly established a relationship with Korshunov, who
then worked at the Russian-state-owned UEC. According to the filing, Aernova had a contract at
the time with a UEC subsidiary named Aviadvigatel, a firm that specializes in engines for
commercial aircraft.
"It is alleged that between 2013 and 2018, Bianchi – on behalf of Korshunov –
hired current or former employees of GE Aviation's Italian subsidiary to do consulting work
related to jet engine accessory gearboxes for Bianchi and Korshunov," the DOJ
press release announcing the charges states. "The employees' statements of work typically
stated that the 'the holders of patent and intellectual property obtained as a result of the
work are the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation.'"
"Throughout the consulting, employees allegedly used trade secrets owned by GE Aviation to
create the technical report. The effort focused on accessory gearboxes made by Avio Aero, which
are external engine components that provide power to systems such as hydraulic pumps,
generators and fuel pumps," the DOJ statement continues.
Following Korshunov's arrest Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin called it "a really
bad practice."
"In this case we're dealing with attempts at dishonest competition," he told reporters at
the Eastern Economic Forum in Vladivostok, noting the contract between the two firms is "a
normal global practice. It's open commercial work with European partners."
Following the Justice Department's announcement, the Russian Embassy in the US issued a
Thursday statement calling on the State Department to immediately recall its extradition
request for Korshunov.
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
TAIPEI, Taiwan -- If the United States gets embroiled in a war with China, it may begin
with the lights going out here in Taipei.
Tensions are rising across the Taiwan Strait, and there's a growing concern among some
security experts that Chinese President Xi Jinping might act recklessly toward Taiwan in the
next few years, drawing the United States into a conflict....
[ Nuttier and nuttier but there we are, and as Les Gelb explained, the foreign policy
community at such times have become incapable of independent thought. ]
Mission Unaccomplished: Meet the press -- and see why it failed at several crucial points
during the Iraq War
By Leslie H. Gelb with Jeanne-Paloma Zelmati - Council on Foreign Relations
My initial support for the war was symptomatic of unfortunate tendencies within the
foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentives to support wars to retain
political and professional credibility. We "experts" have a lot to fix about ourselves, even
as we "perfect" the media. We must redouble our commitment to independent thought, and
embrace, rather than cast aside, opinions and facts that blow the common -- often wrong --
wisdom apart. Our democracy requires nothing less.
This Is How a War With China Could Begin
First, the lights in Taiwan go out.
By Nicholas Kristof
[ Though this essay is nutty, the implications are really frightening to me. We have
reached a point where New York Times columnists are imagining the bombing of China. This, to
my imagination, was precisely what was imagined during the height of the supposedly won Cold
War. ]
The atomic scientists should move their clock half the distance to mid night.
A side benefit of the US finding an excuse to terminate Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty of 1987 is to ring China with INF banned weapon systems!
The new, made up, cold war has two major fronts, Europe and the Pac Rim, whereas the
Soviet based [my] cold war only had Russia ringed from Germany Belgium UK and Spain.....
""Certain key unknown figures in the Federal Reserve may have 'conspired' with key unknown
figures at the Bank of New York to create a situation where $240 billion in off balance sheet
securities created in 1991 as part of an official covert operation to overthrow the Soviet
Union, could be cleared without publicly acknowledging their existence. These securities,
originally managed by Cantor Fitzgerald, were cleared and settled in the aftermath of
September 11th
through the BoNY. The $100 billion account balance bubble reported by the Wall Street
Journalas being experienced in the BoNY was tip of a three day operation, when these
securities were moved from off-balance-sheet to the balance sheet.
"... The man was remarkable at one specific thing: pleasing his bosses and single-minded self-promotion. Sure he lacked anything resembling empathy, saw his troops as little more than tools for personal advancement, and his overall personality disturbingly matched the clinical definition of sociopathy. Details, details ..."
It has taken me years to tell these stories. The emotional and moral wounds of the
Afghan War have just felt too recent, too raw.
After all, I could hardly write a thing
down about my Iraq War experience for nearly ten years, when, by accident, I churned out a
book
on
the subject. Now, as the American war in Afghanistan – hopefully – winds to something approaching a
close, it's finally time to impart some tales of the madness. In this new, recurring, semi-regular
series, the reader won't find many worn out sagas of heroism, brotherhood, and love of country. Not
that this author doesn't have such stories, of course. But one can find those sorts of tales in
countless books and numerous trite, platitudinal Hollywood yarns.
With that in mind, I propose to tell a number of very different sorts of stories –
profiles, so to speak, in absurdity.
That's what war is, at root, an exercise in
absurdity, and America's hopeless post-9/11 wars are stranger than most. My own 18-year long quest
to find some meaning in all the combat, to protect my troops from danger, push back against the
madness, and dissent from within the army proved Kafkaesque in the extreme.
Consider what
follows just a survey of that hopeless journey...
The man was remarkable at one specific thing: pleasing his bosses and single-minded
self-promotion.
Sure he lacked anything resembling empathy, saw his troops as little more
than tools for personal advancement, and his overall personality disturbingly matched the clinical
definition of sociopathy. Details, details
Still, you (almost) had to admire his drive, devotion, and dedication to the cause of
promotion, of rising through the military ranks.
Had he managed to channel that
astonishing energy, obsession even, to the pursuit of some good, the world might markedly have
improved. Which is, actually, a dirty little secret about the military, especially ground combat
units; that it tends to attract (and mold) a disturbing number of proud owners of such personality
disorders. The army then positively reinforces such toxic behavior by promoting these sorts of
individuals – who excel at mind-melding (brown-nosing, that is) with superiors – at
disproportionate rates. Such is life.
Only there are
real
consequences,
real
soldiers,
(to say nothing of local civilians) who suffer under their commanders' tyranny.
Back in 2011-12, the man served as my commander, a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army.
As such, he led – and partly
controlled the destinies of – some 500 odd soldiers
.
Then a lowly captain, I commanded about one-fifth of those men and answered directly to the
colonel.
I didn't much like the guy; hardly any of his officers did.
And he didn't
trust my aspirational intellectualism, proclivity to ask "why," or, well,
me
in general.
Still, he mostly found this author an effective middle manager. As such, I was a means to an end
for him – that being self-advancement and some positive measurable statistics for his annual
officer evaluation report (OER) from his own boss. Nonetheless, it was the army and you sure don't
choose your bosses.
So it was, early in my yearlong tour in the scrublands of rural Kandahar province, that
the colonel treated me to one his dog-and-pony-show visits.
Only this time he had some
unhappy news for me. The next day he, and the baker's dozen tag-alongs in his ubiquitous entourage,
wanted to walk the few treacherous miles to the most dangerous strongpoint in the entire
sub-district. It was occupied, needlessly, by one of my platoons in perpetuity and suffered under
constant siege by the local Taliban, too small to contest the area and too big to fly under the
radar, this – at one point the most attacked outpost in Afghanistan – base just provided an
American flag-toting target. I'd communicated as much to command early on, but to no avail. Can-do
US colonels with aspirations for general officer rank hardly
ever
give up territory to the
enemy – even if that's the strategically sound course.
Walking to the platoon strongpoint was dicey on even the best of days. The route between
our main outpost and the Alamo-like strongpoint was flooded with Taliban insurgents and provided
precious little cover or concealment for out patrols.
On my first jaunt to the outpost, I
(foolishly, it must be said) walked my unit into an ambush and was thrown over a small rock wall by
the blast of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) with my apparent name on it. Since then, it was
standard for our patrols to the strongpoint to suffer multiple ambushes during the roundtrip
rotation. Sometimes our kids got wounded or killed; sometimes they were lucky. Mercifully, at
least, my intelligence section – led by my
friend
and
rebranded artillery lieutenant – did their homework and figured out that the chronically lazy local
Taliban didn't like to fight at night or wake up early, so patrols to the strongpoint that stepped
off before dawn had a fighting chance of avoiding the worst of ambush alley.
I hadn't wanted to take my colonel on a patrol to the outpost. His entourage was
needlessly large and, when added to my rotational platoon, presented an unwieldy and inviting
target for Taliban ambush.
Still I knew better than to argue the point with my
disturbingly confident and single-minded colonel. So I hedged. Yes, sir, we can take you along,
with one caveat:
we have to leave before dawn!
I proceeded to explain why, replete with
historical stats and examples, we could only (somewhat) safely avoid ambush if we did so.
That's when things went south.
The colonel insisted we leave at nine,
maybe even ten, in the morning, the absolute
peak
window for Taliban attack. This prima
donna reminded me that he couldn't possibly leave any earlier.
He had a "battle rhythm,"
after all, which included working out in the gym at his large, safe,
distant-from-the-roar-of-battle base each morning.
How could I expect him to alter that
predictable schedule over something as minor as protecting the lives and limbs of his own troopers?
He had "to set an example," he reminded me, by letting his soldiers on the base "see him in the
gym" each and every morning. Back then, silly me, I was actually surprised by the colonel's absurd
refusal; so much so that I pushed back, balked, tried to rationally press my point. To no avail.
What the man said next has haunted me ever since.
We would leave no
earlier than nine AM, according to his preference. My emotional pleas – begging really – was not
only for naught but insulted the colonel. Why? Because, as he imparted to me, for my own growth and
development he thought,
"Remember: lower caters to higher, Danny!"
That, he reminded me, was the way of the military world, the key to success and advancement. The
man even thought he was being helpful, advising me on how to achieve the success he'd achieved.
My heart sank forever, and never recovered.
The next day he was late. We didn't step off until nearly ten AM. The ambush, a massive
mix of RPG and machine gun fire, kicked off – as predicted – within sight of the main base. The
rest was history, and certainly could've been worse.
On other, less lucky, days it was.
But I remember this one profound moment. When the first rocket exploded above us, both the colonel
and I dove for limited cover behind a mound of rocks. I was terrified and exasperated. Just then we
locked eyes and I gazed into his proverbial soul. The man was incapable of fear. He wasn't scared,
or disturbed; he didn't care a bit about what was happening. That revelation was more terrifying
than the ongoing ambush and would alter my view of the world irreparably.
Which brings us to some of the discomfiting morals – if such things exist – of this
story.
American soldiers fight and die at the whims of career-obsessed officers as much they do
so at the behest of king and country.
Sometimes its their own leaders – as much as the
ostensible "enemy" – that tries to get them killed. The plentiful sociopaths running these wars at
the upper and even middle-management levels are often far less concerned with long-term, meaningful
"victory" in places like Afghanistan, than in crafting – on the backs of their soldiers sacrifices
– the
illusion
of progress, just enough measurable "success" in their one year tour to
warrant a stellar evaluation and, thus, the next promotion. Not all leaders are like this. I, for
one, once worked for a man for whom I – and all my peers – would run through walls for, a (then)
colonel that loved his hundreds of soldiers like they were his own children. But he was the
exception that proved the rule.
The madness, irrationality, and absurdity of my colonel was nothing less than a
microcosm of America's entire hopeless adventure in Afghanistan.
The war was never
rational, winnable, or meaningful. It was from the first, and will end as, an exercise in futility.
It was, and is, one grand patrol to my own unnecessary outpost, undertaken at the wrong time and
place. It was a collection of sociopaths and imbeciles – both Afghan and American – tilting at
windmills and ultimately dying for nothing at all. Yet the young men in the proverbial trenches
never flinched, never refused. They did their absurd duty because they were acculturated to the
military system, and because they were embarrassed not to.
The Major totally failed to mention
the Patriot Act and the removal of
US Constitutional rights from
Americans based on a false flag
attack that cold bloodily murdered
3,000 people and cost the taxpayers
over 10 trillion dollars.
Just to put it in perspective, the US has been in Afghanistan
for 18 years and has lost less than 3000 troops and just over
20000 wounded. The US was in Vietnam 20 years and loss nearly
60000 troops and 150000 wounded. This not to diminish the
misery of those that served in either war, but not really
comparable in scope.
You did what you had to do, Major. You were a good shabbos goy
for world financial oligarchy but now they don't need you any more
so go shoot heroin up your veins or jump off a ******* building,
but you dare not even so much as ask for a "thank you" from the
financial oligarchy!
Let's say it's
January 2021
, and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as
commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy
team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a
group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African
Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants.
The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives.
What should Bernie do?
For
Samantha Power
, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama's
second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her
life to promoting humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the United States, as the world's
"indispensable nation," has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or
halt atrocities. First as a war reporter covering the Balkans in the 1990s, then as the Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of "
A
Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
, and finally as a government official
herself, Power has insisted that the "responsibility to protect" innocents from slaughter is
sacrosanct, even if it means U.S. military adventurism or violating foreign nations' sovereignty.
When civilians are threatened, Power believes we must save them.
THE
EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by Samantha Power
Dey Street Books,
592 pp., $29.99
For this position, she has been both praised and
lambasted. Power's supporters see her as a
moral beacon
in a world focused on power politics at the expense of human rights. In the last
two decades, she has shaped the way a generation of liberal analysts and policymakers understand
international relations and their role within it: Barack Obama has
called her
"one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy," while Ben Rhodes has said she was
"who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington." Meanwhile, critics like the law professor
Aziz Rana
understand her as an unreconstructed "war hawk," who employs the discourse of human
rights to mask American imperialism. For them, Power embodies the contradictions of liberal
geopolitics, in which lofty rhetoric is used to justify military action in regions where the United
States has at best tangential interests.
Power's memoir arrives at a time when she and her approach have fallen from favor -- both with the
current administration, which has adopted a nakedly transactional approach to foreign affairs, and
with left-wing foreign policy thinkers, who want to dismantle U.S. military dominance. Against
these tides, Power's new book seems intended to rehabilitate both her agenda and her own
reputation, as she narrates in vivid and engaging prose her rapid rise to some of the most
influential positions in U.S. foreign policy-making. It's the story of a sympathetic protagonist
just trying to save innocent lives -- yet one that inadvertently demonstrates the lethality of good
intentions. The most startling thing about a book titled
The Education of an Idealist
is that Power appears not to have learned very much.
Power's early years exemplified the peripatetic privilege of the global bourgeoisie. She was
born in Ireland in 1970, the daughter of a doctor mother and a dentist father. In 1979, after her
father's alcoholism destroyed her parents' marriage, Power's mother moved with Samantha and her
brother to the United States. Power quickly acclimated to American life; she lost her Irish accent,
began a lifelong love affair with baseball, and started on her high school's basketball team. She
also studied hard for the SAT, and in 1988 was accepted to Yale University.
During Power's sophomore year, the
Berlin Wall
came
down, the Cold War ended, and she became a political junkie who quizzed herself on the news of the
day. In the summer of 1990, she took a trip to Europe that would transform her life. Power began
her journey with a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through the bleak Secret
Annex drove home to Power "the horror of Hitler's crimes," and after her visit she started to keep
a list of books she wanted to read on "what U.S. officials knew about the Holocaust and what they
could have done to save more Jews." Soon after, she traveled to Dachau, where she "wondered aloud
what the modern world would look like if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war."
(Ignoring, naturally, the Soviet Union's role in ending World War II, and that it was the Red Army
that liberated Auschwitz.)
Power's trip persuaded her that U.S. military force could legitimately be used to save innocent
lives. The Holocaust became for her the moral justification for American empire in an era in which
the United States no longer faced any perceived existential threats. Power concluded that if the
United States didn't rule the world, genocide was inevitable, and for the remainder of her career
she would view atrocities in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East through the prism of the
Holocaust: After all, if the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why
couldn't it do the same in the
1990s
,
2000s
, and
2010s
?
If the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the
1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?
The timing of Power's
trip was also crucial for her intellectual development. Before the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s, it was difficult to argue that the U.S. military could serve as a neutral
arbiter of human rights. Not only was the nation engaged in an avowedly political struggle with an
existential communist enemy, but the Vietnam War and several other failed interventions underlined
the dangers of using military force for ideological ends. Communism's collapse made it possible for
Power to imagine the U.S. military as a nonideological guarantor of broadly accepted human rights.
The empire could act for humanity, not politics. For Power -- and for many in her generation -- the U.S.
military was the base upon which the liberal international order of free markets, democracy, and
human rights would be constructed.
By her senior year at Yale, Power had determined that she "wanted to end up in a position to 'do
something'" about humanitarian crises. After graduating, she interned at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, where Mort Abramowitz, the endowment's president and a former ambassador to
Turkey, was turning his attention to the incipient Bosnian War. The more Power learned about the
conflict and its atrocities, "the more unnerved" she became. The war, she writes, provided her with
"a focus -- a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized." To publicize
their suffering, she decided to become a
war reporter
, and in late 1993 she moved to the Balkans, armed with little more than a laptop.
Power was in Zagreb, Croatia, when on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs mortared the
Markale
market
in Sarajevo, killing 68 civilians. As she watched news footage of "market vendors
carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends," she found herself "rooting for the
first time in [her] life for the United States to use military force." She spent the next year and
a half writing pieces on
civilian
suffering
that she hoped would engender a domestic outcry and convince President Bill Clinton
to forcibly end the siege of Sarajevo.
As time went on and Clinton refused to intervene (the U.S.-led NATO Operation Deliberate Force
would not commence until August 1995), Power began to consider a new track that was "less about
describing events and more about directly trying to shape them." The decisive moment came in July
1995, when she learned that the Bosnian Serb army
murdered
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The sheer brutality of the genocide
compelled Power to take up a place at Harvard Law School (she had applied and been accepted earlier
that year), with the intention of becoming a prosecutor "who could bring murderers to justice."
At Harvard, Power returned to the question that had haunted her at the Anne Frank House and
Dachau: Don't Americans, as citizens of the world's greatest power, have a personal responsibility
to save lives if we have the capacity to do so? She enrolled in a class on the ethics of using
force and, most important for her future career, she wrote a paper that examined "what U.S.
policymakers
themselves
were thinking" when they failed to respond to twentieth-century
genocides. This paper was her first step toward her 2002 book
"A Problem From Hell,"
which
codified a decade of liberal thinking about humanitarian intervention, and which transformed Power
into an
internationally renowned expert
on human rights and genocide prevention.
"A Problem From Hell"
had two main arguments. First, it claimed that throughout the
twentieth century "the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress
genocide" and, by not acting, had failed the people of Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, among other
places. Second, the book maintained that in the future, U.S. decision-makers should take steps to
prevent or halt atrocities along "a continuum of intervention" that would range "from condemning
the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force."
Power did not, as many critics later avowed, unthinkingly advocate military intervention; rather,
she considered intervention as the final in a series of graduated steps intended to avert or stop
genocide. But as Power herself would soon learn, when Americans were presented with the hammer of
military force, many atrocities began to look like nails.
Power's book was perfectly primed for the post-9/11 moment, during which the question on many
Americans' minds was not whether the United States should remake the world, but how.
"A Problem
From Hell"
quickly became a cudgel in the
debate
over invading Iraq; as Power notes, several pundits clamoring for war invoked her book, arguing
that the 1980s Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds gave the United States a casus belli.
Even though Power herself opposed the invasion, the writers who referenced
"A Problem From
Hell"
were not exactly misreading the book: Power
had placed
U.S. military intervention on the menu of options available to policymakers who said
they wanted to protect human rights.
In a moment defined by paranoia, revenge fantasies, and a sense of moral crusade, it is not
particularly surprising that
"A Problem From Hell"
was employed to rationalize war. The
book's relevance at the time, in fact, helps explain why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction in April 2003, one month after the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Samantha
Power in 2013 at an International Civil Society event with Secretary of State John Kerry and National
Security Adviser Susan Rice
Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Power got the chance to use her ideas to shape U.S.
policy more directly. Obama and Power first met in the spring of 2005, when Obama was an ambitious
junior senator from Illinois. They worked together for a year (Power volunteered to serve in his
office), and when Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008, he hired her as a foreign policy
adviser, later appointing her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral
affairs and senior director for human rights.
In government, Power swiftly learned that few officials cared about human rights; many, in fact,
deemed them a distraction from more important issues of power politics. Nevertheless, while at the
NSC, Power helped expand by $50 million U.S. aid to Iraqi refugees, increased the number of Iraqis
allowed to resettle in the United States, and doubled the government's refugee stipend. She also
advocated for the United States to run for a seat on the
U.N.
Human Rights Council
, which it won in 2009. From this perch, U.S. officials spurred a number of
resolutions focused on revealing human rights abuses in various nations, including Iran, Syria,
Sudan, and North Korea. Moreover, Power proudly emphasizes, the United States "succeeded in getting
the Human Rights Council to reduce by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel."
As this last comment indicates, for Power, protecting human rights means disciplining nations of
the Global South that are not U.S. allies. Throughout
The Education of an Idealist
, she
barely mentions Israel or Saudi Arabia -- she says nothing about Israel's occupation of the West Bank
or the Saudi war on women and LGBTQI+ people. These silences are deafening, because the type of
world Power wants to build will never be realized if only certain countries -- namely, those that
stand outside America's imperial sphere -- are held to account. Her approach does not make much sense
from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human
rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital
in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Meanwhile, Power completely ignores the human rights violations that took place in her own
country under Obama's watch; like many liberal interventionists, she is far more vexed by suffering
abroad. Nowhere does she address
police violence
against African Americans,
mass surveillance
,
refugee
detention
, or
mass
incarceration
. Nor does she give much thought to the colonial violence that defines American
history: In
The Education of an Idealist
, she recalls inviting a Serbian official to meet
with her in the so-called Indian Treaty Room, where she lectured him on the importance of
apprehending the war criminal Ratko Mladić. Somehow, Power overlooks the irony of championing
justice in a room named for repeatedly broken treaties that the U.S. government made with the
native population against which it committed genocide.
Power's most consequential decision during Obama's first term displayed a shortsightedness that
has often accompanied her faith in U.S. military power. With the outbreak of civil war in Libya,
Power began to advocate vociferously in favor of intervention to stop a potential massacre at
Benghazi. In particular, during a March 15, 2011, meeting, Power endorsed U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice's proposal to establish a
no-fly zone
over Libya and attack Muammar Qaddafi's forces. Obama approved Rice's plan, and on
March 19, a U.S.-led NATO coalition began
bombing Libya
,
initiating a process that concluded with Qaddafi's death. Despite the war's expansion and the chaos
that ensued, Power remains proud of her contribution. For her, "once the revolution spread, the
real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible -- or the
least bad -- outcome."
But was that the real question? Here are some other questions that are equally important and
that she should have taken more seriously before Obama commenced Operation Odyssey Dawn: Is the war
likely to expand? If the war expands and Qaddafi is deposed, who will govern Libya? Is the United
States -- especially the American public -- willing to commit itself to reconstruction efforts? What
precedent does the intervention potentially set? Power never really asked these questions, because
ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a
categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course). For this reason,
throughout her time in office Power regularly encouraged war.
In Obama's second term, Power left the NSC to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
this position, she won many admirable victories: She aided in establishing a U.N. post
dedicated
to monitoring global LGBT rights;
brought countries together
to end the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014; and promoted a resolution
that demanded the United Nations
deport
any peacekeeping units from countries in which U.N. soldiers were reported to have
committed sexual assault.
Yet it was also during Obama's second term that Power found herself less able to convince the
president of the moral necessity of intervention. In her memoir, she relates that when she first
learned that Bashar al-Assad's government had employed chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war,
she hoped "Obama would respond forcefully" and was disappointed when he didn't. Nevertheless, in
August 2013, Power was heartened to discover that Obama intended to answer the Syrian government's
murder of 1,400 people in a
chemical weapons attack
with airstrikes of military targets.
Power's expectations, however, were dashed when she was informed that Obama had decided to seek
congressional authorization for the airstrikes. "What happens if Congress doesn't support you?" she
asked the president. "Does that mean Assad could just keep using chemical weapons?" In the end,
Obama determined that Congress would rebuff his plan and
chose not
to go ahead with a vote; against Power's wishes, he also refused to intervene.
Instead, the president accepted Russia's offer to work together to disable Assad's chemical weapons
program. For her part, Power "shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort" to decrease Assad's
stockpile, despite the fact that U.S.-Russian collaboration provided an opportunity to build the
trust necessary to reach a political resolution of the conflict.
Power's recollection of the Syria debate highlights her meritocratic skepticism of democratic
politics. She writes that she "regretted that our administration had not ascertained whether we had
the votes
before
the President announced he was going to Congress. Had he known he would
fail, [she] did not believe he would have chosen the path he did." Power, in other words, wanted
Congress to rubber-stamp Obama's decision to intervene; she wasn't interested in having a real
public discussion about the potential benefits and drawbacks of using military force. In fact,
Power has the temerity to express disappointment with the U.S. public for refusing to support
intervention. Most Americans, she laments, "wanted no part of Syria. The student activists, civic
groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out
en masse
to demand help for
the people of Darfur [where in the mid-2000s a genocide erupted] were largely silent." Such a
statement evinces the privilege of an individual who has no reason to fear the
effects
another Middle Eastern intervention might have on her own family -- or on the people of
the Middle East.
The assumption running through Power's career is that the American empire is able to act as a
force for good in the world. At her memoir's end -- and in the wake of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria -- she affirms that "on issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the
table or else the problem worsened." Though this might be true in some cases, it is certainly not
the rule, especially when one considers the
disastrous effects
of the nation's wars in the Greater Middle East; its
pointless
antagonism
of China, Russia, and Iran; its unwillingness to take the business-unfriendly steps
required to arrest climate change; and its unhesitating promotion of a capitalist system that has
exploited the labor of untold millions. The last several decades have taught us that the world
needs far less American "leadership" than it has enjoyed.
If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely
philosophical inquiry: Is it right to save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of
course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a thought experiment; it takes
place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical
uncertainty. Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers
actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the
American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here
may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.
Simply maintaining an enormous military able to intervene anywhere in the world carries its own
set of malign consequences: endless wars, global arms proliferation, a militaristic political
culture, the diversion of resources from welfare to weapons, and the strengthening of the
military-industrial complex, to name just a few.
The Education of an Idealist
does not
account for these social ills, or consider that the only way we can avoid them is by giving up the
capacities that enable us (theoretically, if not in practice) to alleviate foreign suffering.
The historian Samuel Moyn has
warned
that we must be careful not to elevate "the narrow and rare problem of when to send the military to
help strangers into the decisive one around which the future of American foreign policy revolves."
Power's memoir shows how much the discourse of humanitarian intervention obscures. By focusing on
the question "Do we save innocent lives?" liberal interventionists like Power shift our attention
from an equally important query: "How do we change conditions so lives don't need to be saved?" A
world oriented around this last question would look very different from the one we have now.
Daniel Bessner is the Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington
and author of
Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
.
@ dbessner
"... It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception of the environment. ..."
"... literal medical necessity ..."
"... @humphrey ..."
"... My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs? ..."
Imagine if America had to answer for its war crimes
gjohnsit on Thu, 09/05/2019 - 5:25pm Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demonstrated what the term "ugly American" meant the
other day when he
bragged about his defeat of the International Criminal Court.
"Americanism means taking care of our own," said Pompeo.
"We stopped international courts from prosecuting our service members," Pompeo continued, adding that the potential probe "was
an outrage."
...
Pompeo confirmed earlier this year that the administration would revoke or deny visas for ICC personnel who try to investigate
or prosecute U.S. officials or key allies for potential war crimes. A month later, in April, the administration followed through
and revoked prosecutor Bensouda's visa for entry into the U.S.
Just because you defeated justice doesn't mean the crimes go away.
However, it does mean that there is no incentive to stop committing war crimes.
That brings us to today's news from Yemen .
The UK, US, France and Iran may be complicit in possible war crimes in Yemen over their support for parties to the conflict there,
UN experts say.
A new report warns the countries they could be held responsible for aiding or assisting the commission of violations.
The Western powers provide weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen's government, while Iran backs
the Houthi rebels.
...
The UN says the four-year conflict has claimed the lives of at least 7,290 civilians and left 80% of the population - 24 million
people - in need of humanitarian assistance or protection, including 10 million who rely on food aid to survive.
Yemen has gotten a significant amount of much needed attention in recent years, but just across the Gulf of Aden another
humanitarian disaster of gigantic size is happening in
near total silence and obscurity.
"In the absence of humanitarian assistance, up to 2.1 million people across Somalia face severe hunger through December," the
UN warned, citing the 2019 Post-Gu report's conclusion that this would bring the total number of Somalis expected to be food insecure,
to 6.3 million by year's end.
1 million children are expected to be malnourished in Somalia by year's end.
The United States may have committed war crimes as it bombed al-Shabab militants in Somalia, a new report Amnesty International
alleges...
They found that the airstrikes killed farmers, women and an eight-year-old girl, whom the group assessed had no ties to al-Shabab.
"Due to the nature of the attacks, the U.S. government is violating international humanitarian law and these violations may
amount to war crimes," Hassan said.
While the United States has been bombing Somalia for more than a decade, the Trump administration has accelerated the attacks.
The insurgency there is fueled by
Somali rage over now decades-long American interference in their country.
Why Americans cannot bring themselves to care about Somalia is something I will never understand.
Meanwhile in Libya things have gone from
bad to worse .
"Unless action is taken in the near term, it is highly likely that the current conflict will escalate into full civil war," Guterres
said on Thursday in his latest report on the UN Support Mission in Libya.
AFRICOM says that a civil war would "give existing terrorist elements in Libya oxygen."
The leading instigator of the fighting is General Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar, after the defeat of the Libyan troops he was commanding in 1987, he offered his services to
the CIA
, which backed him for years as he awaited the opportunity to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
Is it really any surprise that
Trump loves him
?
An airstrike by Khalifa Haftar's forces hit a migrant detention center east of Tripoli yesterday and killed at least 44 people
and wounded up to 130. Haftar and his forces are mainly backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and this airstrike is part
of the assault on the Libyan capital that Trump reportedly endorsed when it began. The Trump administration is now shielding Haftar
from condemnation by the Security Council by blocking the statement promoted by the U.K.
The
ICC plans to investigate these war crimes, but since the Trump Administration won't even allow a condemnation, and considering
how much Washington hates the ICC, i wouldn't count on this investigation going very far.
The idea that POMPEO is "outraged" is...well, he's a Nazi. So is anybody who thinks that way (lookin' at you, Dubya & Friends).
THEY ARE DETERMINED TO OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE 20TH CENTURY, THE CENTURY THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT PRECISELY BECAUSE, FOR A BRIEF
MOMENT IN TIME, IT CAST OFF AND STOOD AGAINST THAT VERY MENTALITY.
Men like him belong in their own torture-camps...or a short distance under them.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
NUREMBERG II: JUDGMENT DAY.
It is what they most dread.
It is the least they deserve.
It is what the entire world - the American people most of all - NEEDS NOW. It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception
of the environment.
FIAT JUSTICIA, RUUAT CAELUM: "Let there be Justice, though the Heavens may fall".
I believe that Justice (REAL Justice, not just the way it's been redefined by some as "goodies for my clique"), delivered in
a timely, precise, and reliable manner, is nothing short of a literal medical necessity - and the truth is, Caelum IS
Ruuating PRECISELY BECAUSE there has been no Justicia.
Our war crimes go way back and they continue to today.
Unfortunately, the US is the 800 lb gorilla on the world stage and no one is willing or courageous enough to challenge that
gorilla.
thank you. i look forward to reading it more carefully later, especially your link on somalia. i remember bill clinton's hypocritical
R2P only too well.. which precious Somalian mineral was the hegemon really after?
In the book The Ugly American, the ugly guy was actually the good guy who understood and respected local culture; he was just
ugly and unsmooth. The "pretty" Americans were the villains. IIRC, it's been over 50 years. Might be worth re-reading.
Are we surprised? This is the Pax (or Bellus?) Americana. Since the USSR folded, the UN is toothless and GodGun$Gut$ dominates
the world with endless war -- or thinks it does; after all, one in six humans is Chinese.
My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall
for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs?
Let's say it's
January 2021
, and President Bernie Sanders has just assumed office. On his second day as
commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, Bernie and his foreign policy
team are ushered into the White House Situation Room. After being seated at a long wooden table, a
group of diplomats and military officers informs Bernie that armed militants in the Central African
Republic have placed artillery around a town and are threatening to bombard its 10,000 inhabitants.
The townspeople have requested that the United States destroy the weapons and save their lives.
What should Bernie do?
For
Samantha Power
, who served as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during Barack Obama's
second term, this really is no question at all: You eliminate the weapons. Power has dedicated her
life to promoting humanitarian intervention -- the idea that the United States, as the world's
"indispensable nation," has the moral duty to use its awesome military capabilities to prevent or
halt atrocities. First as a war reporter covering the Balkans in the 1990s, then as the Pulitzer
Prize–winning author of "
A
Problem From Hell": America and the Age of Genocide
, and finally as a government official
herself, Power has insisted that the "responsibility to protect" innocents from slaughter is
sacrosanct, even if it means U.S. military adventurism or violating foreign nations' sovereignty.
When civilians are threatened, Power believes we must save them.
THE
EDUCATION OF AN IDEALIST: A MEMOIR by Samantha Power
Dey Street Books,
592 pp., $29.99
For this position, she has been both praised and
lambasted. Power's supporters see her as a
moral beacon
in a world focused on power politics at the expense of human rights. In the last
two decades, she has shaped the way a generation of liberal analysts and policymakers understand
international relations and their role within it: Barack Obama has
called her
"one of our foremost thinkers on foreign policy," while Ben Rhodes has said she was
"who I wanted to become when I moved down to Washington." Meanwhile, critics like the law professor
Aziz Rana
understand her as an unreconstructed "war hawk," who employs the discourse of human
rights to mask American imperialism. For them, Power embodies the contradictions of liberal
geopolitics, in which lofty rhetoric is used to justify military action in regions where the United
States has at best tangential interests.
Power's memoir arrives at a time when she and her approach have fallen from favor -- both with the
current administration, which has adopted a nakedly transactional approach to foreign affairs, and
with left-wing foreign policy thinkers, who want to dismantle U.S. military dominance. Against
these tides, Power's new book seems intended to rehabilitate both her agenda and her own
reputation, as she narrates in vivid and engaging prose her rapid rise to some of the most
influential positions in U.S. foreign policy-making. It's the story of a sympathetic protagonist
just trying to save innocent lives -- yet one that inadvertently demonstrates the lethality of good
intentions. The most startling thing about a book titled
The Education of an Idealist
is that Power appears not to have learned very much.
Power's early years exemplified the peripatetic privilege of the global bourgeoisie. She was
born in Ireland in 1970, the daughter of a doctor mother and a dentist father. In 1979, after her
father's alcoholism destroyed her parents' marriage, Power's mother moved with Samantha and her
brother to the United States. Power quickly acclimated to American life; she lost her Irish accent,
began a lifelong love affair with baseball, and started on her high school's basketball team. She
also studied hard for the SAT, and in 1988 was accepted to Yale University.
During Power's sophomore year, the
Berlin Wall
came
down, the Cold War ended, and she became a political junkie who quizzed herself on the news of the
day. In the summer of 1990, she took a trip to Europe that would transform her life. Power began
her journey with a visit to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. Walking through the bleak Secret
Annex drove home to Power "the horror of Hitler's crimes," and after her visit she started to keep
a list of books she wanted to read on "what U.S. officials knew about the Holocaust and what they
could have done to save more Jews." Soon after, she traveled to Dachau, where she "wondered aloud
what the modern world would look like if President Roosevelt had not finally entered the war."
(Ignoring, naturally, the Soviet Union's role in ending World War II, and that it was the Red Army
that liberated Auschwitz.)
Power's trip persuaded her that U.S. military force could legitimately be used to save innocent
lives. The Holocaust became for her the moral justification for American empire in an era in which
the United States no longer faced any perceived existential threats. Power concluded that if the
United States didn't rule the world, genocide was inevitable, and for the remainder of her career
she would view atrocities in the Balkans, Africa, and the Middle East through the prism of the
Holocaust: After all, if the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the 1940s, why
couldn't it do the same in the
1990s
,
2000s
, and
2010s
?
If the U.S. military had liberated victims of genocide in the
1940s, why couldn't it do the same in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s?
The timing of Power's
trip was also crucial for her intellectual development. Before the disintegration of the Soviet
Union in the early 1990s, it was difficult to argue that the U.S. military could serve as a neutral
arbiter of human rights. Not only was the nation engaged in an avowedly political struggle with an
existential communist enemy, but the Vietnam War and several other failed interventions underlined
the dangers of using military force for ideological ends. Communism's collapse made it possible for
Power to imagine the U.S. military as a nonideological guarantor of broadly accepted human rights.
The empire could act for humanity, not politics. For Power -- and for many in her generation -- the U.S.
military was the base upon which the liberal international order of free markets, democracy, and
human rights would be constructed.
By her senior year at Yale, Power had determined that she "wanted to end up in a position to 'do
something'" about humanitarian crises. After graduating, she interned at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, where Mort Abramowitz, the endowment's president and a former ambassador to
Turkey, was turning his attention to the incipient Bosnian War. The more Power learned about the
conflict and its atrocities, "the more unnerved" she became. The war, she writes, provided her with
"a focus -- a specific group of people in a specific place who were being pulverized." To publicize
their suffering, she decided to become a
war reporter
, and in late 1993 she moved to the Balkans, armed with little more than a laptop.
Power was in Zagreb, Croatia, when on February 5, 1994, Bosnian Serbs mortared the
Markale
market
in Sarajevo, killing 68 civilians. As she watched news footage of "market vendors
carrying away the bloodied remains of their mutilated friends," she found herself "rooting for the
first time in [her] life for the United States to use military force." She spent the next year and
a half writing pieces on
civilian
suffering
that she hoped would engender a domestic outcry and convince President Bill Clinton
to forcibly end the siege of Sarajevo.
As time went on and Clinton refused to intervene (the U.S.-led NATO Operation Deliberate Force
would not commence until August 1995), Power began to consider a new track that was "less about
describing events and more about directly trying to shape them." The decisive moment came in July
1995, when she learned that the Bosnian Serb army
murdered
more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. The sheer brutality of the genocide
compelled Power to take up a place at Harvard Law School (she had applied and been accepted earlier
that year), with the intention of becoming a prosecutor "who could bring murderers to justice."
At Harvard, Power returned to the question that had haunted her at the Anne Frank House and
Dachau: Don't Americans, as citizens of the world's greatest power, have a personal responsibility
to save lives if we have the capacity to do so? She enrolled in a class on the ethics of using
force and, most important for her future career, she wrote a paper that examined "what U.S.
policymakers
themselves
were thinking" when they failed to respond to twentieth-century
genocides. This paper was her first step toward her 2002 book
"A Problem From Hell,"
which
codified a decade of liberal thinking about humanitarian intervention, and which transformed Power
into an
internationally renowned expert
on human rights and genocide prevention.
"A Problem From Hell"
had two main arguments. First, it claimed that throughout the
twentieth century "the United States has consistently refused to take risks in order to suppress
genocide" and, by not acting, had failed the people of Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, among other
places. Second, the book maintained that in the future, U.S. decision-makers should take steps to
prevent or halt atrocities along "a continuum of intervention" that would range "from condemning
the perpetrators or cutting off U.S. aid to bombing or rallying a multinational invasion force."
Power did not, as many critics later avowed, unthinkingly advocate military intervention; rather,
she considered intervention as the final in a series of graduated steps intended to avert or stop
genocide. But as Power herself would soon learn, when Americans were presented with the hammer of
military force, many atrocities began to look like nails.
Power's book was perfectly primed for the post-9/11 moment, during which the question on many
Americans' minds was not whether the United States should remake the world, but how.
"A Problem
From Hell"
quickly became a cudgel in the
debate
over invading Iraq; as Power notes, several pundits clamoring for war invoked her book, arguing
that the 1980s Iraqi campaign of genocide against the Kurds gave the United States a casus belli.
Even though Power herself opposed the invasion, the writers who referenced
"A Problem From
Hell"
were not exactly misreading the book: Power
had placed
U.S. military intervention on the menu of options available to policymakers who said
they wanted to protect human rights.
In a moment defined by paranoia, revenge fantasies, and a sense of moral crusade, it is not
particularly surprising that
"A Problem From Hell"
was employed to rationalize war. The
book's relevance at the time, in fact, helps explain why it won the Pulitzer Prize for general
nonfiction in April 2003, one month after the George W. Bush administration invaded Iraq.
Samantha
Power in 2013 at an International Civil Society event with Secretary of State John Kerry and National
Security Adviser Susan Rice
Jin Lee/Bloomberg/Getty
With the election of Barack Obama in 2008, Power got the chance to use her ideas to shape U.S.
policy more directly. Obama and Power first met in the spring of 2005, when Obama was an ambitious
junior senator from Illinois. They worked together for a year (Power volunteered to serve in his
office), and when Obama won the Democratic primary in 2008, he hired her as a foreign policy
adviser, later appointing her to the National Security Council as senior director for multilateral
affairs and senior director for human rights.
In government, Power swiftly learned that few officials cared about human rights; many, in fact,
deemed them a distraction from more important issues of power politics. Nevertheless, while at the
NSC, Power helped expand by $50 million U.S. aid to Iraqi refugees, increased the number of Iraqis
allowed to resettle in the United States, and doubled the government's refugee stipend. She also
advocated for the United States to run for a seat on the
U.N.
Human Rights Council
, which it won in 2009. From this perch, U.S. officials spurred a number of
resolutions focused on revealing human rights abuses in various nations, including Iran, Syria,
Sudan, and North Korea. Moreover, Power proudly emphasizes, the United States "succeeded in getting
the Human Rights Council to reduce by half the share of country-specific resolutions on Israel."
As this last comment indicates, for Power, protecting human rights means disciplining nations of
the Global South that are not U.S. allies. Throughout
The Education of an Idealist
, she
barely mentions Israel or Saudi Arabia -- she says nothing about Israel's occupation of the West Bank
or the Saudi war on women and LGBTQI+ people. These silences are deafening, because the type of
world Power wants to build will never be realized if only certain countries -- namely, those that
stand outside America's imperial sphere -- are held to account. Her approach does not make much sense
from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending human
rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital
in a mostly quixotic attempt to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Meanwhile, Power completely ignores the human rights violations that took place in her own
country under Obama's watch; like many liberal interventionists, she is far more vexed by suffering
abroad. Nowhere does she address
police violence
against African Americans,
mass surveillance
,
refugee
detention
, or
mass
incarceration
. Nor does she give much thought to the colonial violence that defines American
history: In
The Education of an Idealist
, she recalls inviting a Serbian official to meet
with her in the so-called Indian Treaty Room, where she lectured him on the importance of
apprehending the war criminal Ratko Mladić. Somehow, Power overlooks the irony of championing
justice in a room named for repeatedly broken treaties that the U.S. government made with the
native population against which it committed genocide.
Power's most consequential decision during Obama's first term displayed a shortsightedness that
has often accompanied her faith in U.S. military power. With the outbreak of civil war in Libya,
Power began to advocate vociferously in favor of intervention to stop a potential massacre at
Benghazi. In particular, during a March 15, 2011, meeting, Power endorsed U.N. Ambassador Susan
Rice's proposal to establish a
no-fly zone
over Libya and attack Muammar Qaddafi's forces. Obama approved Rice's plan, and on
March 19, a U.S.-led NATO coalition began
bombing Libya
,
initiating a process that concluded with Qaddafi's death. Despite the war's expansion and the chaos
that ensued, Power remains proud of her contribution. For her, "once the revolution spread, the
real question became how to use the tools at our disposal to bring about the best possible -- or the
least bad -- outcome."
But was that the real question? Here are some other questions that are equally important and
that she should have taken more seriously before Obama commenced Operation Odyssey Dawn: Is the war
likely to expand? If the war expands and Qaddafi is deposed, who will govern Libya? Is the United
States -- especially the American public -- willing to commit itself to reconstruction efforts? What
precedent does the intervention potentially set? Power never really asked these questions, because
ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian intervention a
categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course). For this reason,
throughout her time in office Power regularly encouraged war.
In Obama's second term, Power left the NSC to become U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
this position, she won many admirable victories: She aided in establishing a U.N. post
dedicated
to monitoring global LGBT rights;
brought countries together
to end the deadly Ebola outbreak of 2014; and promoted a resolution
that demanded the United Nations
deport
any peacekeeping units from countries in which U.N. soldiers were reported to have
committed sexual assault.
Yet it was also during Obama's second term that Power found herself less able to convince the
president of the moral necessity of intervention. In her memoir, she relates that when she first
learned that Bashar al-Assad's government had employed chemical weapons in the Syrian civil war,
she hoped "Obama would respond forcefully" and was disappointed when he didn't. Nevertheless, in
August 2013, Power was heartened to discover that Obama intended to answer the Syrian government's
murder of 1,400 people in a
chemical weapons attack
with airstrikes of military targets.
Power's expectations, however, were dashed when she was informed that Obama had decided to seek
congressional authorization for the airstrikes. "What happens if Congress doesn't support you?" she
asked the president. "Does that mean Assad could just keep using chemical weapons?" In the end,
Obama determined that Congress would rebuff his plan and
chose not
to go ahead with a vote; against Power's wishes, he also refused to intervene.
Instead, the president accepted Russia's offer to work together to disable Assad's chemical weapons
program. For her part, Power "shuddered at the inadequacy of the effort" to decrease Assad's
stockpile, despite the fact that U.S.-Russian collaboration provided an opportunity to build the
trust necessary to reach a political resolution of the conflict.
Power's recollection of the Syria debate highlights her meritocratic skepticism of democratic
politics. She writes that she "regretted that our administration had not ascertained whether we had
the votes
before
the President announced he was going to Congress. Had he known he would
fail, [she] did not believe he would have chosen the path he did." Power, in other words, wanted
Congress to rubber-stamp Obama's decision to intervene; she wasn't interested in having a real
public discussion about the potential benefits and drawbacks of using military force. In fact,
Power has the temerity to express disappointment with the U.S. public for refusing to support
intervention. Most Americans, she laments, "wanted no part of Syria. The student activists, civic
groups, churches, mosques, and synagogues that had come out
en masse
to demand help for
the people of Darfur [where in the mid-2000s a genocide erupted] were largely silent." Such a
statement evinces the privilege of an individual who has no reason to fear the
effects
another Middle Eastern intervention might have on her own family -- or on the people of
the Middle East.
The assumption running through Power's career is that the American empire is able to act as a
force for good in the world. At her memoir's end -- and in the wake of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and
Syria -- she affirms that "on issue after issue, either the United States brought a game plan to the
table or else the problem worsened." Though this might be true in some cases, it is certainly not
the rule, especially when one considers the
disastrous effects
of the nation's wars in the Greater Middle East; its
pointless
antagonism
of China, Russia, and Iran; its unwillingness to take the business-unfriendly steps
required to arrest climate change; and its unhesitating promotion of a capitalist system that has
exploited the labor of untold millions. The last several decades have taught us that the world
needs far less American "leadership" than it has enjoyed.
If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely
philosophical inquiry: Is it right to save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of
course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a thought experiment; it takes
place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical
uncertainty. Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers
actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the
American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here
may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.
Simply maintaining an enormous military able to intervene anywhere in the world carries its own
set of malign consequences: endless wars, global arms proliferation, a militaristic political
culture, the diversion of resources from welfare to weapons, and the strengthening of the
military-industrial complex, to name just a few.
The Education of an Idealist
does not
account for these social ills, or consider that the only way we can avoid them is by giving up the
capacities that enable us (theoretically, if not in practice) to alleviate foreign suffering.
The historian Samuel Moyn has
warned
that we must be careful not to elevate "the narrow and rare problem of when to send the military to
help strangers into the decisive one around which the future of American foreign policy revolves."
Power's memoir shows how much the discourse of humanitarian intervention obscures. By focusing on
the question "Do we save innocent lives?" liberal interventionists like Power shift our attention
from an equally important query: "How do we change conditions so lives don't need to be saved?" A
world oriented around this last question would look very different from the one we have now.
Daniel Bessner is the Pyle Assistant Professor in American Foreign Policy at the University of Washington
and author of
Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual
.
@ dbessner
"... It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception of the environment. ..."
"... literal medical necessity ..."
"... @humphrey ..."
"... My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs? ..."
Imagine if America had to answer for its war crimes
gjohnsit on Thu, 09/05/2019 - 5:25pm Secretary of State Mike Pompeo demonstrated what the term "ugly American" meant the
other day when he
bragged about his defeat of the International Criminal Court.
"Americanism means taking care of our own," said Pompeo.
"We stopped international courts from prosecuting our service members," Pompeo continued, adding that the potential probe "was
an outrage."
...
Pompeo confirmed earlier this year that the administration would revoke or deny visas for ICC personnel who try to investigate
or prosecute U.S. officials or key allies for potential war crimes. A month later, in April, the administration followed through
and revoked prosecutor Bensouda's visa for entry into the U.S.
Just because you defeated justice doesn't mean the crimes go away.
However, it does mean that there is no incentive to stop committing war crimes.
That brings us to today's news from Yemen .
The UK, US, France and Iran may be complicit in possible war crimes in Yemen over their support for parties to the conflict there,
UN experts say.
A new report warns the countries they could be held responsible for aiding or assisting the commission of violations.
The Western powers provide weapons and logistical support to the Saudi-led coalition backing Yemen's government, while Iran backs
the Houthi rebels.
...
The UN says the four-year conflict has claimed the lives of at least 7,290 civilians and left 80% of the population - 24 million
people - in need of humanitarian assistance or protection, including 10 million who rely on food aid to survive.
Yemen has gotten a significant amount of much needed attention in recent years, but just across the Gulf of Aden another
humanitarian disaster of gigantic size is happening in
near total silence and obscurity.
"In the absence of humanitarian assistance, up to 2.1 million people across Somalia face severe hunger through December," the
UN warned, citing the 2019 Post-Gu report's conclusion that this would bring the total number of Somalis expected to be food insecure,
to 6.3 million by year's end.
1 million children are expected to be malnourished in Somalia by year's end.
The United States may have committed war crimes as it bombed al-Shabab militants in Somalia, a new report Amnesty International
alleges...
They found that the airstrikes killed farmers, women and an eight-year-old girl, whom the group assessed had no ties to al-Shabab.
"Due to the nature of the attacks, the U.S. government is violating international humanitarian law and these violations may
amount to war crimes," Hassan said.
While the United States has been bombing Somalia for more than a decade, the Trump administration has accelerated the attacks.
The insurgency there is fueled by
Somali rage over now decades-long American interference in their country.
Why Americans cannot bring themselves to care about Somalia is something I will never understand.
Meanwhile in Libya things have gone from
bad to worse .
"Unless action is taken in the near term, it is highly likely that the current conflict will escalate into full civil war," Guterres
said on Thursday in his latest report on the UN Support Mission in Libya.
AFRICOM says that a civil war would "give existing terrorist elements in Libya oxygen."
The leading instigator of the fighting is General Khalifa Haftar.
Haftar, after the defeat of the Libyan troops he was commanding in 1987, he offered his services to
the CIA
, which backed him for years as he awaited the opportunity to topple Muammar Gaddafi.
Is it really any surprise that
Trump loves him
?
An airstrike by Khalifa Haftar's forces hit a migrant detention center east of Tripoli yesterday and killed at least 44 people
and wounded up to 130. Haftar and his forces are mainly backed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, and this airstrike is part
of the assault on the Libyan capital that Trump reportedly endorsed when it began. The Trump administration is now shielding Haftar
from condemnation by the Security Council by blocking the statement promoted by the U.K.
The
ICC plans to investigate these war crimes, but since the Trump Administration won't even allow a condemnation, and considering
how much Washington hates the ICC, i wouldn't count on this investigation going very far.
The idea that POMPEO is "outraged" is...well, he's a Nazi. So is anybody who thinks that way (lookin' at you, Dubya & Friends).
THEY ARE DETERMINED TO OBLITERATE THE ENTIRE 20TH CENTURY, THE CENTURY THAT MADE AMERICA GREAT PRECISELY BECAUSE, FOR A BRIEF
MOMENT IN TIME, IT CAST OFF AND STOOD AGAINST THAT VERY MENTALITY.
Men like him belong in their own torture-camps...or a short distance under them.
I've said it before, I'll say it again:
NUREMBERG II: JUDGMENT DAY.
It is what they most dread.
It is the least they deserve.
It is what the entire world - the American people most of all - NEEDS NOW. It is what all people of knowledge and conscience must prioritize accomplishing over any and all other concerns with the exception
of the environment.
FIAT JUSTICIA, RUUAT CAELUM: "Let there be Justice, though the Heavens may fall".
I believe that Justice (REAL Justice, not just the way it's been redefined by some as "goodies for my clique"), delivered in
a timely, precise, and reliable manner, is nothing short of a literal medical necessity - and the truth is, Caelum IS
Ruuating PRECISELY BECAUSE there has been no Justicia.
Our war crimes go way back and they continue to today.
Unfortunately, the US is the 800 lb gorilla on the world stage and no one is willing or courageous enough to challenge that
gorilla.
thank you. i look forward to reading it more carefully later, especially your link on somalia. i remember bill clinton's hypocritical
R2P only too well.. which precious Somalian mineral was the hegemon really after?
In the book The Ugly American, the ugly guy was actually the good guy who understood and respected local culture; he was just
ugly and unsmooth. The "pretty" Americans were the villains. IIRC, it's been over 50 years. Might be worth re-reading.
Are we surprised? This is the Pax (or Bellus?) Americana. Since the USSR folded, the UN is toothless and GodGun$Gut$ dominates
the world with endless war -- or thinks it does; after all, one in six humans is Chinese.
My own take is that "America" is meaningless; world capital calls the shots. The US functions as a mercenary hiring hall
for the owners, ever since Iraq I. You think the owners will let anybody mess with their mercs?
This discussion avoids comparing society in the mid-19th century and today. It really isn't that long ago. I've lived through
almost half of it. Except for officers most of the soldiers I served with were conscripted or enlisted because of the draft. In
a war your choices are limited. If they were in the march, driving wagons, armed to the teeth, they were soldiers; no matter how
they got there.
Today's volunteer Army most of the soldiers and contractors are there because they couldn't get a better job unless they are
adrenaline junkies or psychopaths. The current neoliberal economy purposefully exploits people and the environment to make a profit.
Today's soldiers aren't too different than the slave legions of ancient Rome. Perhaps, "warriors" isn't that much of a misnomer.
"... But what happens when those "standards of excellence" lead to 20 years of fighting unwinnable wars on the peripheries of the planet? When do habits and practices turn into mental stagnation? ..."
"... You know when it comes to generals, whether they're Marines, whether they're Army, whether they're Mattis who's supposedly this "warrior monk," these guys talk tactics and then claim it's strategy. What they consider to be strategic thinking really is just tactical thinking on a broad scale . I think the biggest problem with all the four-star generals are they're "how" thinkers not "if" thinkers. ..."
"... This inability of America's elites (including its generals) to grapple with strategic concepts is a result of the United States' post-Cold War unipolar moment. When there's only one superpower, geopolitics and the need for international balancing fall by the wayside. ..."
"... Mattis, like virtually all of his four-star peers, is a reactionary, fighting every day against the forces of change in modern warfare ..."
"... "[W]hen you shave it all down, his problem with being the epitome of establishment Washington is that he sees the alliance as the end, not as a means to an end," says Davis. "The means should be to the end of improving American security and supporting our interests." ..."
"... "By clinging to unsustainable military solutions from the distant past, he has condemned future generations of soldiers and marines to repeat disasters like Pickett's Charge," says Macgregor. ..."
Last week, The Wall Street Journal published a lengthy
op-ed written by former secretary of defense James Mattis, his first public statement since
his resignation in December. The article is adopted from his forthcoming book, Call Sign
Chaos: Learning to Lead , out this week.
The former Pentagon chief opens a window into his decision making process, explaining that
accepting President Trump's nomination was part of his lifelong devotion to public service:
"When the president asks you to do something, you don't play Hamlet on the wall, wringing your
hands. So long as you are prepared, you say yes." Mattis's two years at DoD capped off 44 years
in the Marine Corps, where he gained a popular following as a tough and scholarly leader.
Mattis received widespread praise from the foreign policy establishment when he resigned in
protest over President Trump's directive for a full U.S. military withdrawal from Syria and a
partial withdrawal from Afghanistan. "When my concrete solutions and strategic advice,
especially keeping faith with our allies, no longer resonated, it was time to resign, despite
the limitless joy I felt serving alongside our troops in defense of our Constitution," he
writes.
But did Mattis really offer "concrete solutions and strategic advice" regarding America's
two decades of endless war? spoke with four military experts, all veterans, who painted a very
different picture of the man called "Mad Dog."
"I think over time, in General Mattis's case a little over 40 years, if you spend that many
years in an institution, it is extremely hard not to get institutionalized," says Gil
Barndollar, military fellow-in-residence at the Catholic University of America's Center for the
Study of Statesmanship. Barndollar served as an infantry officer in the Marine Corps and
deployed twice to Afghanistan. "In my experiences, there are not too many iconoclasts or really
outside-the-box people in the higher ranks of the U.S. military."
It's just that sort of institutionalized thinking that makes the political establishment
love Mattis. "[A] person with an institutional mind-set has a deep reverence for the
organization he has joined and how it was built by those who came before. He understands that
institutions pass down certain habits, practices and standards of excellence," wrote David
Brooks in a hagiographic New York Timescolumn .
But what happens when those "standards of excellence" lead to 20 years of fighting
unwinnable wars on the peripheries of the planet? When do habits and practices turn into mental
stagnation?
"The problem is, from at least the one-star the whole way through, for the last two decades,
you've seen them do nothing but just repeat the status quo over and over," observes Lieutenant
Colonel Daniel L. Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities, who served 21 years in the U.S.
Army and deployed four times to Iraq and Afghanistan. "I mean every single general that was in
charge of Afghanistan said almost the same boilerplate thing every time they came in (which was
nearly one a year). You see the same results, nothing changed."
"And if those guys took someone from a major to a two-star general, we'd probably have a lot
of better outcomes," he adds.
Major Danny Sjursen, who served tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan, agrees:
You know when it comes to generals, whether they're Marines, whether they're Army, whether
they're Mattis who's supposedly this "warrior monk," these guys talk tactics and then claim
it's strategy. What they consider to be strategic thinking really is just tactical thinking
on a broad scale . I think the biggest problem with all the four-star generals are they're
"how" thinkers not "if" thinkers.
Barndollar says: "The vast majority of military leaders, up to and including generals at the
three-, four-star level, are not operating at the strategic level, in terms of what that word
means in military doctrine. They're not operating at the level of massive nation-state
resources and alliances and things like that. They're at the operational level or often even at
the tactical level."
This inability of America's elites (including its generals) to grapple with strategic
concepts is a result of the United States' post-Cold War unipolar moment. When there's only one
superpower, geopolitics and the need for international balancing fall by the wayside.
The only component of national security policy Mattis discusses in his op-ed is America's
system of alliances, which he believes is the key to our preeminence on the world stage.
"Returning to a strategic stance that includes the interests of as many nations as we can make
common cause with, we can better deal with this imperfect world we occupy together," he
writes.
"Mattis, like virtually all of his four-star peers, is a reactionary, fighting every day
against the forces of change in modern warfare," counters Colonel Douglas Macgregor, who served
28 years in the U.S. Army. "He lives in denial of the technological breakthroughs that make the
World War II force structure (that he as SecDef insisted on funding) an expensive tribute to
the past."
Mattis muses that the Department of Defense "budget [is] larger than the GDPs of all but two
dozen countries." Yet having acknowledged that disparity, how can such underpowered foreign
nations possibly contribute to American security?
"He has that line in there about bringing as many guns as possible to a gun fight. What are
those guns?" asked Barndollar. For example, the British Royal Navy is the United States' most
significant allied naval force. But the United Kingdom has
only seven vessels stationed in the Persian Gulf and they're "stretched to the absolute
limit to do that."
"Our problem has been double-edged," says Davis of America's reliance on others. "On the one
hand, we try to bludgeon a lot of our allies to do what we want irrespective of their interests
as an asset. And then simultaneously, especially in previous administrations, we've almost gone
too far [in] the other direction: 'we'll subordinate our interests for yours.'"
"[W]hen you shave it all down, his problem with being the epitome of establishment
Washington is that he sees the alliance as the end, not as a means to an end," says Davis. "The
means should be to the end of improving American security and supporting our interests."
Sjursen says:
Mattis's view is the old Einstein adage: "doing the same thing over and over again and
expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." Well that's all he's proposed.
He has no new or creative solutions. For him, it's stay the course, more of the same, stay in
place, fight the terrorists, maintain the illegitimate and corrupt governments that we back.
That's what he's been talking about for 18 years. It's all the same interventionist dogma
that's failed us over and over again since September 12, 2001.
"In the two years he was in office, what did he do that changed anything? He was a caretaker
of the status quo. That's the bottom line," says Davis, adding, "you need somebody in that job
especially that is willing to take some chances and some risk and is willing to honestly look
at 18 consecutive years of failure and say, 'We're not doing that anymore. We're going to do
something different.' And that just never happened."
Barndollar is more generous in his estimation of Mattis: "He needs to be lauded for standing
for his principles, ultimately walking away when he decided he could no longer execute U.S.
national security policy. I give him all the credit for that, for doing it I think in a
relatively good manner, and for trying to do his best to stay above the fray and refuse to be
dragged in at a partisan level to this point."
Mattis ends his Wall Street Journal op-ed by recounting a vignette from the 2010
Battle of Marjah, where he spoke with two soldiers on the front lines and in good cheer. But
his story didn't sit well with Sjursen, who says it encapsulates Mattis' inability to ask the
bigger questions: "He never talks about how those charming soldiers with the can-do attitude
maybe shouldn't have been there at all. Maybe the mission that they were asked to do was
ill-informed, ill-advised, and potentially unwinnable."
All this suggests that a fair evaluation of Mattis is as a soldier who is intelligent but
unoriginal. A homegrown patriot, but one who'd like to plant the Stars and Stripes in Central
Asia forever. A public servant, but one who would rather resign than serve the cause of
restraint.
"By clinging to unsustainable military solutions from the distant past, he has condemned
future generations of soldiers and marines to repeat disasters like Pickett's Charge," says
Macgregor.
Hunter DeRensis is a reporter for The National Interest .Follow him on
Twitter@HunterDeRensis
.
"... It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016 presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1 threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent accusation. ..."
"... Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the election? ..."
"... Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996. ..."
"... Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began -- by whom, when, and why. ..."
"... Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? ..."
"... the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely culprits. ..."
"... First and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in Russiagate.) ..."
"... At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy. ..."
It must again be emphasized: It is hard, if not impossible, to think of a more toxic
allegation in American presidential history than the one leveled against candidate, and then
president, Donald Trump that he "colluded" with the Kremlin in order to win the 2016
presidential election -- and, still more, that Vladimir Putin's regime, "America's No. 1
threat," had compromising material on Trump that made him its "puppet." Or a more fraudulent
accusation.
Even leaving aside the misperception
that Russia is the primary threat to America in world affairs, no aspect of this allegation has
turned out to be true, as should have been evident from the outset. Major aspects of the now
infamous Steele Dossier, on which much of the allegation was based, were themselves not merely
"unverified" but plainly implausible.
Was it plausible, for example, that Trump, a longtime owner and operator of
international hotels, would commit an indiscreet act in a Moscow hotel that he did not own or
control? Or that, as Steele also claimed, high-level Kremlin sources had fed him damning
anti-Trump information even though their vigilant boss, Putin, wanted Trump to win the
election? Nonetheless, the American mainstream media and other important elements of the
US political establishment relied on Steele's allegations for nearly three years, even
heroizing him -- and some still do, explicitly or implicitly.
Not surprisingly, former special counsel Robert Mueller found no evidence of "collusion"
between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin. No credible evidence has been produced that
Russia's "interference" affected the result of the 2016 presidential election in any
significant way. Nor was Russian "meddling" in the election anything akin to a "digital
Pearl Harbor," as widely asserted, and it was certainly far less and less intrusive than
President Bill Clinton's political and financial "interference" undertaken to assure the
reelection of Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 1996.
Nonetheless, Russiagate's core allegation persists, like a legend, in American political
life -- in media commentary, in financial solicitations by some Democratic candidates for
Congress, and, as is clear from my own discussions, in the minds of otherwise well-informed
people. The only way to dispel, to excoriate, such a legend is to learn and expose how it began
-- by whom, when, and why.
Officially, at least in the FBI's version, its operation "Crossfire Hurricane," the
counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign that began in mid-2016 was due to
suspicious remarks made to visitors by a young and lowly Trump aide, George Papadopoulos. This
too is not believable, as I pointed out previously .
Most of those visitors themselves had ties to Western intelligence agencies. That is, the young
Trump aide was being enticed, possibly entrapped, as part of a larger intelligence operation
against Trump. (Papadopoulos wasn't the only Trump associate targeted, Carter Page being
another.)
But the question remains: Why did Western intelligence agencies, prompted, it seems
clear, by US ones, seek to undermine Trump's presidential campaign? A reflexive answer
might be because candidate Trump promised to "cooperate with Russia," to pursue a
pro-détente foreign policy, but this was hardly a startling, still less subversive,
advocacy by a would-be Republican president. All of the major pro-détente episodes in
the 20th century had been initiated by Republican presidents: Eisenhower, Nixon, and
Reagan.
So, again, what was it about Trump that so spooked the spooks so far off their rightful
reservation and so intrusively into American presidential politics? Investigations being
overseen by Attorney General William Barr may provide answers -- or not. Barr has already
leveled procedural charges against James Comey, head of the FBI under President Obama and
briefly under President Trump, but the repeatedly hapless Comey seems incapable of having
initiated such an audacious operation against a presidential candidate, still less a
president-elect. As I have long suggested, John Brennan and James Clapper, head of the CIA and
Office of National Intelligence under Obama respectively, are the more likely
culprits.
The FBI is no longer the fearsome organization it once was and thus not hard to investigate,
as Barr has already shown. The others, particularly the CIA, are a different matter, and Barr
has suggested they are resisting. To investigate them, particularly the CIA, it seems, he has
brought in a veteran prosecutor-investigator, John Durham.
Which raises other questions. Are Barr and Durham, whose own careers include associations
with US intelligence agencies, determined to uncover the truth about the origins of Russiagate?
And can they really do so fully, given the resistance already apparent? Even if so, will Barr
make public their findings, however damning of the intelligence agencies they may be, or will
he classify them? And if the latter, will President Trump use his authority to declassify the
findings as the 2020 presidential election approaches in order to discredit the role of Obama's
presidency and its would-be heirs?
Equally important perhaps, how will mainstream media treat the Barr-Durham investigation and
its findings? Having driven the Russiagate narrative for so long and so misleadingly -- and
with liberals perhaps finding themselves in the incongruous position of defending rogue
intelligence agencies -- will they credit or seek to discredit the findings?
It is true, of course, that Barr and Durham, as Trump appointees, are not the ideal
investigators of Intel misdeeds in the Russiagate saga. Much better would be a truly
bipartisan, independent investigation based in the Senate, as was the Church Committee of the
mid-1970s, which exposed and reformed (it thought at the time) serious abuses by US
intelligence agencies. That would require, however, a sizable core of nonpartisan, honorable,
and courageous senators of both parties, who thus far seem to be lacking.
There are also, however, the ongoing and upcoming Democratic presidential debates. First
and foremost, Russiagate is about the present and future of the American political system, not
about Russia. (Indeed, as I have repeatedly argued, there is very little, if any, Russia in
Russiagate.)
At every "debate" or comparable forum, all of the Democratic candidates should be asked
about this grave threat to American democracy -- what they think about what happened and would
do about it if elected president. Consider it health care for our democracy.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host ofThe John Batchelor Show
. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are atTheNation.com .
Stephen
F. Cohen Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New
York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his most recent book
War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback
and in an ebook edition. His weekly conversations with the host of The John Batchelor Show, now
in their sixth year, are available at www.thenation.com .
Libya war was a pure oil grab. Pretexts always can be found.
Notable quotes:
"... Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all. ..."
"... The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons. ..."
"... As Bessner notes, she doesn't have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently said nothing. ..."
"... And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice, all of them. ..."
Daniel Bessner has written a very interesting
review of Sar's memoir, The Education of an Idealist . Here he focuses on her narrow thinking about "humanitarian" intervention:
If you accept Power's premises, then humanitarian intervention boils down to a purely philosophical inquiry: Is it right to
save lives if one has the capacity to do so? The answer, of course, is yes. The problem, though, is that intervention is not a
thought experiment; it takes place in a world of brutal realities. In particular, humanitarian forces confront radical uncertainty.
Is intervention likely to impel more violence in the long term? Do policymakers actually know enough about the situation on the
ground to make the "right" decisions? Is the American public willing to commit itself to years-long reconstruction efforts? Honest
answers here may not sit well with idealism. In many instances, the most moral act is not to act at all.
Can military intervention ever be humanitarian? It may be possible in theory, but as Bessner notes it doesn't work that way in
practice. "Humanitarian" interventionists want the wars they support to be judged by their intentions to save lives and not by the
results of ensuing chaos, instability, and violence. Taking sides in foreign conflicts inevitably means deciding that our government
should end the lives of some people that have done nothing to us because we have concluded that it is the right thing to do. That
takes for granted that our government has the right to act as judge and executioner in other people's wars simply because we have
the power to affect the outcome. When we think about "humanitarian" intervention this way, we can see that it is driven by the worst
kind of arrogant presumption. The first question we should ask is this: what gives us the authority to interfere in another country's
internal conflict? We should also ask ourselves what gives us the right to cast aside international law whenever we deem it necessary.
Isn't "humanitarian" intervention in practice little more than international armed vigilantism?
The Libyan war is one example of just such a "good" intervention that pretty clearly caused more harm than it prevented. It also
violated most of the requirements of the "responsibility to protect" doctrine that was invoked to justify it. Like more than a few
other die-hard Libyan war supporters, Power remains convinced that it was the right decision, because she doesn't ask the questions
that would force her to confront the harm that the intervention did to Libya and the surrounding region. Bessner comments:
Power never really asked these questions, because ultimately, as the historian Stephen Wertheim has argued, she considers humanitarian
intervention a categorical imperative (as long as it doesn't involve U.S. allies, of course).
That last qualification is an important one, and it gets at the heart of what is wrong with "humanitarian" interventionism in
the U.S. and the West. If a government is considered to be on "our" side, it can commit war crimes with impunity, devastate whole
countries, and starve tens of millions of people, and the most vocal "humanitarian" interventionists will usually have nothing to
say about it. I have remarked on several occasions that "humanitarian" interventionists just ignored the catastrophe in Yemen despite
the fact that it was the world's worst man-made humanitarian disaster, and it has only been in the last year or two that any of them
have spoken up about it now that it is Trump's policy.
The most telling part of Power's career in government was that she served as ambassador to the U.N. at a time when the U.S. was
enabling and supporting the Saudi coalition war on Yemen, and as part of the administration she had nothing to say about the crimes
being committed against Yemeni civilians by coalition forces with U.S. military assistance and weapons.
As Bessner notes, she doesn't
have much to say about the abuses of U.S. clients in her book. She has been eager to advocate for using force against hostile or
pariah regimes when they commit atrocities, but when client states use American weapons to commit the same atrocities while enjoying
full U.S. backing Power didn't so much as utter a protest. After she left government and Trump became president, Power criticized
U.S. support for the war, but when she was in a position to challenge a monstrous policy from inside the administration she apparently
said nothing.
Bessner observes that railing against hostile and pariah states while letting clients off the hook makes no sense if the goal
is to minimize the harm to civilians:
Her approach does not make much sense from a pragmatic perspective either: U.S. officials have the highest likelihood of ending
human rights abuses in countries that depend on us; there is little point in spending political capital in a mostly quixotic attempt
to transform antagonists like North Korea.
Of course, it is much safer politically to denounce the states with which our government has no ties or influence, and it is much
easier to remain silent about the crimes of client states that have significant clout in Washington. The point here is not just that
Power failed her own test when she served in government, but that the impulse to intervene on "humanitarian" grounds amounts to agitating
for war against certain governments while giving U.S. clients a free pass to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity with our
government's blessing.
There's yet one more reason to why she wasn't saying anything about Yemen when in office beside the one that it were her guys
who directed that war then. Perhaps less phony, but, I'd rather say, more tragic. It's much easier to criticize someone for neglecting
his duties than not to neglect those duties when you've got them yourself.
I almost see those lemmings on her Twitter chirping:
'Oh, you're so brave, you're standing up to the Terrible Orange Tyrant.' (Not that the "Tyrant" was even aware that she's standing
up to him).
And no one with enough intellectual honesty to mention that she was among the greatest enablers of Yemenis' suffering
yet before the said "Tyrant" (who might be a tyrant to anyone but her social class) entered the office. Profiles in cowardice,
all of them.
This discussion avoids comparing society in the mid-19th century and today. It really isn't that long ago. I've lived through
almost half of it. Except for officers most of the soldiers I served with were conscripted or enlisted because of the draft. In
a war your choices are limited. If they were in the march, driving wagons, armed to the teeth, they were soldiers; no matter how
they got there.
Today's volunteer Army most of the soldiers and contractors are there because they couldn't get a better job unless they are
adrenaline junkies or psychopaths. The current neoliberal economy purposefully exploits people and the environment to make a profit.
Today's soldiers aren't too different than the slave legions of ancient Rome. Perhaps, "warriors" isn't that much of a misnomer.
"... Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.[a] ..."
"... The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge[b] of China. ..."
A structural crisis is chaotic. This means that instead of the normal standard set of
combinations or alliances that were previously used to maintain the stability of the system,
they constantly shift these alliances in search of short-term gains. This only makes the
situation worse. We notice here a paradox – the certainty of the end of the existing
system and the intrinsic uncertainty of what will eventually replace it and create thereby a
new system (or new systems) to stabilize realities .
Now, let us look at China's role in what is going on. In terms of the present system,
China seems to be gaining much advantage. To argue that this means the continuing functioning
of capitalism as a system is basically to (re)assert the invalid point that systems are
eternal and that China is replacing the United States in the same way as the United States
replaced Great Britain as the hegemonic power. Were this true, in another 20-30 years China
(or perhaps northeast Asia) would be able to set its rules for the capitalist
world-system.
But is this really happening? First of all, China's economic edge, while still greater
than that of the North, has been declining significantly. And this decline may well amplify
soon, as political resistance to China's attempts to control neighboring countries and entice
(that is, buy) the support of faraway countries grows, which seems to be occurring.
Can China then depend on widening internal demand to maintain its global edge? There are
two reasons why not. The present authorities worry that a widening middle stratum could
jeopardize their political control and seek to limit it.[a]
The second reason, more important, is that much of the internal demand is the result of
reckless borrowing by regional banks, which are facing an inability to sustain their
investments. If they collapse, even partially, this could end the entire economic edge[b] of
China.
In addition, there have been, and will continue to be, wild swings in geopolitical
alliances. In a sense, the key zones are not in the North, but in areas such as Russia,
India, Iran, Turkey, and southeastern Europe, all of them pursuing their own roles by a game
of swiftly and repeatedly changing sides. The bottom line is that, though China plays a
very big role in the short run, it is not as big a role as China would wish and that some in
the rest of the world-system fear. It is not possible for China to stop the disintegration of
the capitalist system. It can only try to secure its place in a future
world-system.
As far as Wallerstein's bottom line: The proof is in the pudding. That said, there seems to
be a tendency to regard Xi as all-powerful. IMNSHO, that's by no means the case, not only
because of China's middle class, but because of whatever China's equivalent of deplorables is.
The "wild swings in geopolitical alliances" might play a role, too; oil, Africa's minerals.
NOTES [a] I haven't seen this point made elsewhere. [b] Crisis, certainly. "Ending the
entire economic edge"? I'm not so sure.
The USA centered global neoliberal empire falls from grace at alarming speed.
Just the discussion of this possibility would be unthinkable in 90th -- the period of triumphal advance of neoliberalism all over
the globe. So thinks did change although it is unclear what is that direction of the social change -- neo-fascism or some kind of return
to the New Del Capitalism (if so who will replace previous, forged by Great Depression political alignment between trade unions and
management against the financial oligarchy, which financial oligarchy managed to broke using neoliberalism as the Trojan horse and bribing
CEOs)
Om a was original fascist movements were also a protest against the rule of financial oligarchy. Even anti-Semitism in Germany was
a kind of perverted protest against financial oligarchy as well. They were quickly subverted and in Germany anti-Semitism degenerated
into irrational hatred and genocide, , but the fact remains. Just looks at
NSDAP program of 1920 . Now we have somewhat
similar sentiments with Wexner and Meta group in the USA. To say that they do not invoke any sympathy is an understatement.
The problem with empires that they do not only rob the "other people". They rob their own people as well, and rob them hard. The
USSR people were really robbed by Soviet military industrial complex and Soviet globalist -- to the far greater extent then the USA
people now. People were really as poor as church rats. Epidemic of alcoholism in the USA resembles the epidemic of narcoaddtion in the
USA --- both are signs of desire then there is no jobs and now chances.
Like the collapse of the USSR was the result of the collapse of bolshevism, the collapse of the USA can be the result of the collapse
of neoliberalism. Whether it will take 10 or 50 years is unclear, but the general tendency is down.
The competitors has grown much strong now and they want their place under then sub. That means squeezing the USA. Trump did agrat
job in alientaing the US and that was probably the most important step is dismantling the USA empire that was taken. Add to that trade
war with China and we have the situation that is not favorable to the USA politically in two important parts of the globe.
Add to this Brexit and we have clear tendency of states to reassert their sovereignty, which start hurting the USA based multinationals.
The only things that work in favor of the USA is that currently there is no clear alternative to neoliberalism other then some kind
of restoration of the New Deal capitalism or neo-fasist dictatorship.
Notable quotes:
"... Self-discipline, self sacrifice and self restraint are the prices which must be paid for a civilization to survive, much less flourish, and Americans are increasingly unwilling to pay up. The America of a generation or two down the road will have the social cohesion of El Salvador. ..."
"... Being that history is always written by the tyrant of the time (which in our case was definitely behind the two last empires and a big player in Rome as and Spain as well) people are also led to believe that empire is a desireable state of cicumstance. It never was. Its the ambitions and conquistador actions of the collective psychopath. They feed on the strength of civilizations and utilize it for megalomaniac ambitions over power of others and power over everything. ..."
"... Those of you hoping for the end of American Empire need to think about what would replace it. ..."
"... You are completely delusional. The world is not better off under American stewardship. We don't need and shouldn't want anything to replace it. We don't need and shouldn't want any empire ruling the world. We would be better off without any state at all, so we could finally be free people. ..."
"... And no it probably wouldn't be better off under the Chinese. Although if the world stopped respecting American IP law, that would be a huge positive step forward. ..."
Years ago, Doug Casey mentioned in a correspondence to me, "Empires fall from grace with alarming speed."
Every now and then, you receive a comment that, although it may have been stated casually, has a lasting effect, as it offers
uncommon insight. For me, this was one of those and it's one that I've kept handy at my desk since that time, as a reminder.
I'm from a British family, one that left the UK just as the British Empire was about to begin its decline. They expatriated to
the "New World" to seek promise for the future.
As I've spent most of my life centred in a British colony – the Cayman Islands – I've had the opportunity to observe many British
contract professionals who left the UK seeking advancement, which they almost invariably find in Cayman. Curiously, though, most
returned to the UK after a contract or two, in the belief that the UK would bounce back from its decline, and they wanted to be on
board when Britain "came back."
This, of course, never happened. The US replaced the UK as the world's foremost empire, and although the UK has had its ups and
downs over the ensuing decades, it hasn't returned to its former glory.
And it never will.
If we observe the empires of the world that have existed over the millennia, we see a consistent history of collapse without renewal.
Whether we're looking at the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish Empire, or any other that's existed at one time, history
is remarkably consistent: The decline and fall of any empire never reverses itself; nor does the empire return, once it's fallen.
But of what importance is this to us today?
Well, today, the US is the world's undisputed leading empire and most Americans would agree that, whilst it's going through a
bad patch, it will bounce back and might even be better than ever.
Not so, I'm afraid. All empires follow the same cycle. They begin with a population that has a strong work ethic and is self-reliant.
Those people organize to form a nation of great strength, based upon high productivity.
This leads to expansion, generally based upon world trade. At some point, this gives rise to leaders who seek, not to work in
partnership with other nations, but to dominate them, and of course, this is when a great nation becomes an empire. The US began
this stage under the flamboyant and aggressive Teddy Roosevelt.
The twentieth century was the American century and the US went from victory to victory, expanding its power.
But the decline began in the 1960s, when the US started to pursue unwinnable wars, began the destruction of its currency and began
to expand its government into an all-powerful body.
Still, this process tends to be protracted and the overall decline often takes decades.
So, how does that square with the quote, "Empires fall from grace with alarming speed"?
Well, the preparation for the fall can often be seen for a generation or more, but the actual fall tends to occur quite rapidly.
What happens is very similar to what happens with a schoolyard bully.
The bully has a slow rise, based upon his strength and aggressive tendency. After a number of successful fights, he becomes
first revered, then feared. He then takes on several toadies who lack his abilities but want some of the spoils, so they do his
bidding, acting in a threatening manner to other schoolboys.
The bully then becomes hated. No one tells him so, but the other kids secretly dream of his defeat, hopefully in a shameful
manner.
Then, at some point, some boy who has a measure of strength and the requisite determination has had enough and takes on the
bully.
If he defeats him, a curious thing happens. The toadies suddenly realise that the jig is up and they head for the hills, knowing
that their source of power is gone.
Also, once the defeated bully is down, all the anger, fear and hatred that his schoolmates felt for him come out, and they
take great pleasure in his defeat.
And this, in a nutshell, is what happens with empires.
A nation that comes to the rescue in times of genuine need (such as the two World Wars) is revered. But once that nation morphs
into a bully that uses any excuse to invade countries such as Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria, its allies may continue to bow
to it but secretly fear it and wish that it could be taken down a peg.
When the empire then starts looking around for other nations to bully, such as Iran and Venezuela, its allies again say nothing
but react with fear when they see the John Boltons and Mike Pompeos beating the war drums and making reckless comments.
At present, the US is focusing primarily on economic warfare, but if this fails to get the world to bend to its dominance, the
US has repeatedly warned, regarding possible military aggression, that "no option is off the table."
The US has reached the classic stage when it has become a reckless bully, and its support structure of allies has begun to de-couple
as a result.
At the same time that allies begin to pull back and make other plans for their future, those citizens within the empire who tend
to be the creators of prosperity also begin to seek greener pastures.
History has seen this happen countless times. The "brain drain" occurs, in which the best and most productive begin to look elsewhere
for their future. Just as the most productive Europeans crossed the Pond to colonise the US when it was a new, promising country,
their present-day counterparts have begun moving offshore.
The US is presently in a state of suspended animation. It still appears to be a major force, but its buttresses are quietly disappearing.
At some point in the near future, it's likely that the US government will overplay its hand and aggress against a foe that either
is stronger or has alliances that, collectively, make it stronger.
The greatest (so called) threats to America- the Russians, Chinese, Iranians, North Koreans, ISIS, ( fill in the blank for
the latest overseas bogeyman-of-the-week ) pale into a wisp beside the ongoing disintegration of American traditional family life.
Self-discipline, self sacrifice and self restraint are the prices which must be paid for a civilization to survive, much less
flourish, and Americans are increasingly unwilling to pay up. The America of a generation or two down the road will have the social
cohesion of El Salvador.
You also cant warn people about the collapse of empire either. People notoriously go into denial about it and it shocks the
**** out of everybody. Since empires bluff and bluster at the end its all to easy for people want to believe.
Being that history is always written by the tyrant of the time (which in our case was definitely behind the two last empires
and a big player in Rome as and Spain as well) people are also led to believe that empire is a desireable state of cicumstance.
It never was. Its the ambitions and conquistador actions of the collective psychopath. They feed on the strength of civilizations
and utilize it for megalomaniac ambitions over power of others and power over everything.
Those of you hoping for the end of American Empire need to think about what would replace it. if you think that the world would
enter the age of Aquarius and peace will rule the planet you are extremely naive and stupid. If you think that the Chinese would
be more benign rulers you are mistaken. The only reason China doesn't use its military to dominate other countries is because
it is kept in check by the US.
You are completely delusional. The world is not better off under American stewardship. We don't need and shouldn't want anything
to replace it. We don't need and shouldn't want any empire ruling the world. We would be better off without any state at
all, so we could finally be free people.
And no it probably wouldn't be better off under the Chinese. Although if the world stopped respecting American IP law, that
would be a huge positive step forward.
In the real world, Chinese terrorists are just as bad as American terrorists. Despite the most popular hypnosis gripping the
American psyche, you can't have liberty or justice as long as either one is in charge. Whether the Chinese would be worse is debatable.
It's not like America has some great track record to compete against. Their reign has been a complete disaster for human rights.
If China became the new empire we wouldnt live under it. It would be at least 100 years out. This empire will screw everybody
epically first, plus we have decline weather patterns with super solar grand minimum. Also those people's who may see that next
empire will deal with whatever circumstances present themselves and they wont give one **** what we think about it.
Basically power has kept moving west. Nobody will forget the depravity of this one. If written about accurately this one will
be remembered most for the medical tyranny and intentional damage it did to human beings through injections and modified good
supply, as well as moral depravity and proxy sadistic terrorism. Remember empire backed terrorist groups trafficked children and
harvested organs. You can miss it if you want, few will.
I do not _hope_ for an end of the American Empire, and I dread what is going to replace it. Howsoever, no empire lasts forever,
and our empire is near its end. The Chinese are relentlessly cruel, and that's in their genotype. I probably won't live to see
them take over the scraps and bits and pieces of our former empire. Those who are alive and in the prime of their lives when that
happens will suffer unimaginably while they live, and their blood will cry out from the grave after they die. It makes me so heart-sick
I can't bear to think about it for long, but our progeny will be forced to live it without let or hindrance.
Lets find out the whole details of what they have done to our biology and our children's first before we say how cruel China
might be. For starters look at what US and British did in Africa compared to China and Russia's involvement there. They are doing
deals and not killing anybody, same with Venezuela.
Where else you going to go? What nation ISN'T broke? Europe is going to hell. So is South America. Africa has always been hell.
Asia? Look what's going down in Hong Kong. China's broke. Make no mistake, the USA is in decline. But so is the rest of the world...
regardless of what is printed China is not falling, they have a plan and have only advanced it. The debt side will not hurt
them because they have been poor before and they have a route to success. They do not have resources but the industrial side is
needed everywhere in the world. We are talking about a nation that literally prospered off of our garbage and resells it back
to us! Think about it we use something up and pay them to take it away, they recycle it and resell it to us again and moved a
nation 4x our population forward!
You really think debt will hurt them, especially the way the US determines debt! A huge portion of it is in the infrastructucture
in China and along the BRI which will have returns over time, just as if we in the states rebuilt all our infrastructure by living
wage employment rather than MIC investment!
Yes, all are broke. Assisted suicides of countries all over the world. Emphasise on "assisted".
Nations have been demoralized (the US most certainly, check Yuri Bezmenov) we are in destabilization phase already, collapse
has to be next, it is unavoidable now. This will not end well, ignore at your own risk!
I am not talking about countries, just some Life Hedge Regions left in the world. People with brains and resources, you don
need a Life Hedge Property! Away from Northern Hemisphere, away from Ring of Fire, etc... Get in touch. lifehedge(at)
protonmail.com
What got America into trouble was when Americans who thought of themselves as being "exceptional" became exceptionally stupid.
The best and the brightest have already left America. Any wonder why we now depend on Russia to send our astronauts up on their
rockets into space, or depend on China, South Korea, and Japan for our electronic products, or why better health care is found
in other places outside the U.S., why our educational system has become poorer than what it was 60 years ago, etc.,?
When we decided to financialize everything and make nothing but investments we crippled our advancement.
When we decided to take the brightest minds in the world and recruit them into the US and then rather than advance the world
with true science, we offer them lucrative money to enter financial markets to use their knowledge in that field.
We take the ones with morals and principles that choose to actually remain in science and then corrupt them over time with
money/fame to regurgetate whatever their contractor chooses or lose funding for their projects.
We have corrupted every aspect of advancement and now just use our fake printed money to force the desperate to bend to our
will.
Good read on the subject of empires Sir John Glubb - The fate of empires and Search for survival.
We are probably near the end of the American Empire. And a fascinating by product of the HK protests is that we may well be near the end of Chinese Communism.
Nothing moves forward in a straight line. They move up and down. Empires are no exception. The Romans had their ups and downs
throughout the course of their empire. You never know when a down cycle is the end but people who want it to end will always write
articles like this.
American dominance might be drawing to an end....or it might be gearing up to go another 200 years. Nobody knows so it's a
waste of time to speculate.
The current conflict between the West and Russia, which has pushed Russia into the waiting
arms of China began due to the arrogance and short sightedness of the West.
At the tail end of the Cold War, West Germany and East Germany wanted to reunite. The then
Soviet Union (now Russia) would need to give its permission before this happened in accordance
with the 1975 Helsinki Accords. On February 9, 1990
then-Secretary of State James Baker suggested to the Soviet leaders that in return for
allowing West Germany and East Germany to reunite after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and
allowing a reunited Germany to remain in NATO, that NATO would not move 1 inch eastward towards
the then border of the Soviet Union.
While no written guarantee was provided to the Russian leaders, less than a week later,
Premier Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to allow reunification talks to begin between West Germany and
East Germany. Then, less than 1 month later in March of 1990, the U.S.
began planning to organize Eastern Europe into a sphere of U.S. influence and expanding
NATO to the very borders of the Soviet Union.
Despite the promises made by the West, in 1999 NATO agreed to the admission of Poland,
Hungary, and the Czech Republic into NATO. This was done despite vehement protests by the
Russian government which accused the West of reneging on the agreement reached by the Soviet
Union with Western Europe and the United States. The admission of Poland, Hungary and the Czech
Republic was followed by the admission of several Eastern European countries in 2004. These
nations are Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Since then,
NATO in 2019 has threatened to expand its presence to the southern border of Russia by
officially recognizing Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, North Macedonia and Ukraine as aspiring
members of NATO. This is a direct threat to the national security of Russia by placing, what
Russia feels, are hostile forces reminiscent of the German invasion of southern Russia in
1942.
"Russia is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma." – Winston
Churchill
This famous quote by Sir Winston Churchill is puzzling, as he was a serious student of
history. A close look at the history surrounding the relations between Russia and the world
would easily explain the suspicion that Russia has of the outside world.
Probably the most decisive moment in the forming of Russian distrust of foreigners has its
roots in the occupation of Russia by the Mongol Horde from 1240 A.D. to 1480 A.D.
Before the rise of Moscow as the principal city of the Rus, Kyiv, now the capital of
Ukraine, was the center of Russian civilization. In 1240 A.D., the Mongol Army under the
nominal command of Batu Khan sacked Kyiv and opened the door to the Mongol conquest of Russia
and the invasion of Europe. From 1240 A.D. to 1480 A.D., the Golden Horde ruled Russia. It was
during this time that the city of Moscow surrounded by a fortress, called a Kremlin on the
banks of the Moscow river became the enforcers of the Mongol Horde, and from 1328 the Horde's
tax collection surrogates.
In November 1989 East German students sit atop the Berlin Wall at the Brandenburg Gate in
front of border guards. The destruction of the once-hated wall signaled the end of a divided
Germany.
The Tver rebellion in 1327 allowed Moscow to gain ascendancy over its rival cities in Russia
by supporting the Mongol's by putting down the Tver rebellion in 1328. As a result of Moscow's
support, the ruler of the Golden Horde granted the Russian cities of Novogorod and Kostroma as
duchies to Moscow, and later Tver itself after the leader of the rebellion was captured and
turned over to the Mongols; there he was quartered alive along with his son. The Mongols then
commissioned the Prince of Moscow to collect the yearly tribute that the Horde had imposed on
the subjugated cities, towns and villages of Russia.
This allowed Moscow to become the most powerful and principal city of Russia. Moscow was
able to increase its power over Russia by bringing under its controls those cities and areas
that were not able to meet their tax burden and adding them to the over lordship of Moscow.
This increased the power of Moscow so much that in 1480 A.D., at the Battle of the Ugra River,
The Duchy of Moscow under Ivan the Third was able to refuse payment of the required tribute to
the Golden Horde, and forced the Mongols to retreat. This battle marks the end of the rule of
Russia by the Golden Horde. The grandson of Ivan the III would at the age of 3 become the
Prince of Moscow, and upon reaching his majority he was crowned "Tsar of all the Russia's."
This was the first Tsar of Russia and the last competent ruler of the Rurikid line. Ivan the
4th was known as Ivan the Formidable and as Ivan the Fearsome in Russia. In the West, he is
known as "Ivan the Terrible."
In the last 200 years, Europe has invaded Russia 4 times.
There is a constant fear in Europe that Russia will invade Europe, and place Europe under
the domination of Moscow. Yet, if one reads the history of political relations between Russia
and Europe for the last 200 years, it is Russia that has had to fear Europe and with good
reason. Beginning with the Napoleonic invasion of Russia in 1812 to the Nazi invasion of 1941,
Russia has had to fight for her polity and her life many times. The most serious invasion of
these four invasions of Russia took place during the summer campaign in Southern Russia of
1942, lasting to the spring of 1943, which culminated in the Battle of Stalingrad.
So, unless there has been some serious change in the dynamics between Russia and the West,
Europe, with a population of 508 million and a GDP of
$18.8
trillion , has nothing to really fear conventionally from a Russia that has a population of
144.5 million people and a
GDP of
$1.578 trillion .
The Euromaidan movement and West's support for the Ukrainian revolution.
Euromaidan protestors. (Ivan Bandura)
The Euromaidan's Movement began as a result of the delay by the government of Viktor
Yanukovych of the association agreement with the European Union. The EU was offering Ukraine
$838 million in loans in return for major changes to Ukraine's laws and regulations. Russia was
offering $15 billion in loans and no demand for changes to its laws and regulations.
With Russia then being Ukraine's biggest trading partner, President Yanukovych at the last
minute decided to take Russia's offer and to remain outside the European Union. Europe, along
with the United States, launched a publicity campaign calling on the people of Ukraine to force
the government of Ukraine to change its position, and to sign the association agreement with
the EU.
In December of 2013, Senator's John McCain and Chris Murphy addressed Ukrainian crowds
urging them to continue to resist the government's decision to remain in the economic and
political orbit of Russia. On February 4th, 2014 Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland
and the American Ambassador to Ukraine in a leaked phone call discussed plans to help form an
interim government after the legitimate Ukrainian government had been dissolved.
In November of 2013, the EU Enlargement Commissioner, Štefan Füle, declared that
he was happy to see that democracy had reached a point where young people could demonstrate
peacefully and legally. On the same day, members of the European Parliament responsible for the
Eastern Partnership policy, Elmar Brok and Jacek Saryusz-Wolski, warned Ukraine not to use
force against the protestors or there "would be consequences."
Shortly thereafter on February 22, 2014, the legitimate Ukrainian government was overthrown,
and the elected president of Ukraine had to flee for his life. It was after the overthrow of
the elected government of Ukraine that Russia annexed the Crimea.
The Crimea in Russian History
The Crimea has been a part of Russia since 1783 when Catherine the Great defeated the
Ottoman Empire, absorbed the Crimea and then built the cities of Sevastopol which became the
center of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and later on Simferopol which became the center of the
Tauride province. From 1921 to 1945, Crimea was the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist
Republic until 1945 when it became an Oblast of the Russian SSR.
Later, in 1954, in a move that was done to help Nikita Khrushchev in his attempt to solidify
Russian control over Ukraine, the Crimea was transferred from the Russian SSR Oblast to UkrSSR.
Khrushchev was then struggling with Soviet Prime Minister Georgy Malenkov for control of the
Russian Communist Party and saw an opportunity to woo the support of the Ukrainian Communist
Party boss, Oleksiy Kyrychenko. It was not until 1955 that Khrushchev was able to fully
consolidate his control over the Communist Party and the rule of the Soviet Union.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine declared its independence from Russia,
and since the Crimea had been part of the Ukrainian Oblast, the Crimea became part of the new
nation of Ukraine.
Why the Crimea is important to Russia's national security and why a political solution is
necessary to end the Ukrainian crisis.
After the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution, and the establishment of a government hostile to
Russia, Vladimir Putin reacted to what he believed was an existential threat to the national
polity of Russia. A careful examination of recent history bears him out and explains why Russia
will not willingly allow the Crimea to fall under the political control of any other power.
The Crimea is the last natural militarily defensible obstacle to any invasion of southern
Russia. Before the German Army could begin its summer campaign in southern Russia in 1942, the
port city of Sevastopol in the Crimea had to be reduced in a long and costly siege. It is for
this reason that the summer campaign in southern Russia code-named " Blue ," was without the 11th Army when Blue was
kicked off on June 28, 1942.
The 11th Army was the Army that had been fighting in the siege of Sevastopol and had been
mauled so badly during the siege that 11th Army was prevented from participating in the 1942
summer campaign as had been planned for in Blue. This seriously weakened the 6th Army to where,
when it was locked in street to street fighting at Stalingrad later in the year, the 6th Army
did not have the 11th Army's strength and was unable to dislodge the Russian defenders from the
city.
Once past Crimea, there is no natural defense for Russian military forces until the Don
River to impede any invading force. From the Crimea to the Don there is only a flat plain that
is excellently suited for mechanized warfare. With NATO being so strategically aggressive, it
would be the height of military folly for Russia to allow the Crimea to be in the hands of any
foreign power.
With the West's actions being so strategically threatening to Russia since the fall of the
Berlin Wall, and the expansion of NATO to the political frontiers of Russia, Russia has
countered this by becoming closer economically and militarily closer to China, which is a more
long-range threat to Russia than the West is.
In order to repair the damage done to the relations between the West and Russia, a political
settlement is necessary to remove Russia from the embrace of China, settle the tensions between
the West and Russia, and bring Russia, finally, into the economic and political life of the
West.
If you're interested in writing for International Policy Digest - please send us an email
via [email protected]
"... By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50 percent(compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by half, and meat and dairy herds by 75 percent. . . . while epidemics of cholera and typhus . . . re-emerged, millions of children suffer[ed] from malnutrition and adult life expectancy . . . plunged." Several of the oligarchs were prosecuted and harassed by Putin's government between 2000 and 2004, before an unofficial agreement was struck to permit most of them to keep their lives and their fortunes as long as they demurred from opposing Putin's political power. ..."
Mikhail Khodorkovsky was found guilty of fraud related to his control of Siberian oil fields through his Yukos corporation and was
sentenced to nine years in prison on this date in 2005. Khodorkovsky, who was behind bars until Vladimir Putin pardoned him in 2013,
is half-Jewish (on his father's side).
Many of the Russian oligarchs, most of whom exploited their political connections during the privatization years under Boris Yeltsin's
highly corrupt government to become hugely wealthy, are similarly half-Jewish or Jewish, including Boris Berezovsky, who took over
Russia's main television channel and died under uncertain circumstances (likely suicide) in 2013; Alexander Abramov, a steel magnate;
Mikhail Fridman, a banker; Roman Abramovich, a younger billionaire investor; Viktor Vekselberg, an aluminum tycoon; and Leonid Mikhelson,
a natural-gas billionaire, and a half-dozen others.
The shock-capitalism that vaulted these men to the Forbes list of billionaires is known in Russia as the katastroika
and "brought in its wake mass pauperisation and unemployment," writes Seumas Milne in The Guardian , "wild extremes of
inequality; rampant crime; virulent antisemitism and ethnic violence; combined with legalised gangsterism on a heroic scale and precipitous
looting of public assets. . . .
By the late 1990s, national income had fallen by more than 50 percent(compare that with the 27 percent drop in output during
the great American depression), investment by 80 percent, real wages by half, and meat and dairy herds by 75 percent. . . . while
epidemics of cholera and typhus . . . re-emerged, millions of children suffer[ed] from malnutrition and adult life expectancy . .
. plunged." Several of the oligarchs were prosecuted and harassed by Putin's government between 2000 and 2004, before an unofficial
agreement was struck to permit most of them to keep their lives and their fortunes as long as they demurred from opposing Putin's
political power.
"The oligarchs, idiotically rich in a country that was largely poor, and given to parading their wealth in a manner that makes
American hip-hoppers look like an especially reticent community of Amish farmers, could certainly have given any former Soviet citizen
pause to wonder, as he queued for beetroot, what the proletarian revolution had been for. The oligarchs, not content with buying
companies, villas, yachts, planes and the most beautiful of Russia's beautiful women, also bought power. In 1996, they connived to
engineer the re-election of the politically and physically ailing Boris Yeltsin. In 2000, they helped steer Yeltsin's successor into
power -- Vladimir Putin, a saturnine former spook with the KGB, and its descendant organisation, the FSB. This, as Russian Godfathers
demonstrates, may have been the moment at which the oligarchs out-clevered themselves." –Andrew Mueller, The Guardian
"... Two weeks after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the east, with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin carving up Poland and the Baltic states based on a secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed Aug. 23, 1939. ..."
"... This week the Russian government put out a video that seeks to rehabilitate the pact, arguing that the USSR was forced into it by the failure of the West to stand up to Hitler's aggression and even blaming Poland for the war. ..."
WWII: A memory battleground on the 80th anniversary By VANESSA GERA yesterday FILE -
In this Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019 file photo, workers erect a stage ahead of upcoming ceremonies
marking the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II, in Warsaw, Poland. In Poland and
across Eastern Europe, many feel that their people's suffering has never been adequately
recognized, or that they have been unfairly tarnished for their behavior at that time,
grievances politicians have been exploiting to promote myths of national innocence in a new age
of nationalism. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski) FILE - In this Wednesday, Aug. 28, 2019 file
photo, workers erect a stage ahead of upcoming ceremonies marking the 80th anniversary of the
start of World War II, in Warsaw, Poland. In Poland and across Eastern Europe, many feel that
their people's suffering has never been adequately recognized, or that they have been unfairly
tarnished for their behavior at that time, grievances politicians have been exploiting to
promote myths of national innocence in a new age of nationalism. (AP Photo/Czarek Sokolowski)
WARSAW, Poland (AP) -- Commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the start of World War II
in Poland this weekend come as the war has become a messy battleground of memory.
In Poland and across Eastern Europe, many feel that their people's suffering has never been
adequately recognized, or that they have been unfairly tarnished for their behavior at that
time -- grievances politicians have been exploiting in a new era of nationalism.
For Americans and others, World War II might seem a black-and-white story of good defeating
evil, with the Allies fighting far from home to defeat Adolf Hitler's genocidal regime and open
a new era of peace and liberty.
But from the Baltics and Poland to Hungary and Russia, where fighting, deportations and mass
executions happened, there are many shades of gray: heroic resistance and martyrdom but also
collaboration -- and a liberation by Soviet forces that spelled the start of decades of
occupation and oppression for those behind the Iron Curtain.
That leaves a lot of room for differing ways to remember the war.
Sunday marks exactly 80 years since Nazi Germany invaded Poland, on Sept. 1, 1939, the
attack that triggered a nearly six-year world conflict that left more than 70 million people
dead before Germany and Japan surrendered in 1945.
U.S. President Donald Trump had been expected to attend but canceled to stay home and deal
with a hurricane barreling toward Florida, tapping Vice President Mike Pence to replace him.
Others leaders who are attending include German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.
"The anniversary celebrations are to be a warning to the world -- about the necessity of
peace, about the sovereignty of states, about not negotiating at the expense of others," said
Krzysztof Szczerski, top aide to Polish President Andrzej Duda.
Notably absent will be Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended 70th anniversary
commemorations in Poland in 2009 amid an attempted Russia-Western thaw at that time. He was not
invited this time because of his annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula, and is all the more
unwelcome due to a Russian rehabilitation in recent years of the Stalinist era.
In Moscow, some saw Trump's cancellation as part of a wider problem with the ceremonies.
"Trump found a reason not to come. The absence of the head of the USA for the anniversary is
a failure for Warsaw," said Alexei Pushkov, a member of the upper house of parliament whose
views on foreign affairs generally reflect Kremlin thinking. "The absence of the head of Russia
is a gross miscalculation."
Two weeks after Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland from the
east, with Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin carving up Poland and the Baltic states based on a
secret protocol in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact signed Aug. 23, 1939.
In 2009, Putin said that all pacts made with the Nazis "were unacceptable from the moral
point of view." But since then, Russia has returned to an earlier insistence that the USSR
shares no responsibility for starting the war. Russian schoolchildren are taught that what
Russia calls the "Great Patriot War" began not in 1939, but in 1941, when Nazi Germany attacked
the Soviet Union.
This week the Russian government put out a
video that seeks to rehabilitate the pact, arguing that the USSR was forced into it by the
failure of the West to stand up to Hitler's aggression and even blaming Poland for the
war.
"Today there are, unfortunately, many trying to falsify history," Duda said recently. "They
suggest that, in fact, World War II began in 1941. No -- the war began with the Nazi-Soviet
invasion of Poland in September 1939 based on the arrangements of the Molotov-Ribbentrop
Pact."
By war's end, nearly 6 million Polish citizens had been killed, 3 million of them Polish
Jews who made up half of all the European Jews killed in the Holocaust.
Unlike other countries occupied by Germany at the time, Poland never had a collaborationist
government. The prewar Polish government and military fled into exile, except for an
underground resistance army that fought the Nazis inside the country.
Duda and the other nationalist leaders in charge today often stress that heroism -- but they
too are accused of twisting war memories for political gain, with a tendency to focus only on
the good and play down uncomfortable chapters of that era.
Since the Law and Justice party came to power in 2015, it has pushed out the director of the
new Museum of the Second World War in Gdansk and changed the exhibition to push a narrative
more focused on Polish suffering and heroism, finding the original concept -- launched under a
more liberal government -- too international in spirit. One example includes a video in the exhibition that
historians say is so selective in the facts that it amounts to propaganda.
The party also passed legislation in 2018 making it illegal to falsely claim that Poland as
a nation collaborated in the Holocaust. The law caused a huge international controversy because
it was perceived as an attempt to suppress debate into cases where individual Poles denounced
or killed Jews, even though the government insists that was never the intention.
Duda and Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki over the past two years have also paid respects
to a far-right Polish resistance movement, the Holy Cross Mountains Brigade ,
which collaborated with Nazi Germany toward the end of the war in its struggle against the
Communists taking power then.
Pawel Machcewicz, a historian and the museum director pushed out in Gdansk, called it
"outrageous and shocking" that leaders today would pay tribute to a fringe collaborationist
unit.
"This is about courting the most extreme neo-fascist groups in Poland today. They are not
more than 5 to 6 percent of voters, but this small percentage could be crucial in the outcome
of the next election," Machcewicz said.
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Film 'Official Secrets' is the Tip of a Mammoth Iceberg August 29, 2019 •
37 Comments
A new film depicting the whistleblower Katherine Gun, who tried to stop the Iraq invasion,
is largely accurate, but the story is not over, says Sam Husseini.
T wo-time Oscar nominee Keira Knightley is known for being in "period pieces" such as "Pride
and Prejudice," so her playing the lead in the new film "Official Secrets," scheduled to be
released in the U.S. on Friday, may seem odd at first. That is until one considers that the
time span being depicted -- the early 2003 run-up to the invasion of Iraq -- is one of the most
dramatic and consequential periods of modern human history.
It is also one of the most poorly understood, in part because the story of Katharine Gun,
played by Knightley, is so little known. Having followed this story from the start, I find this
film to be, by Hollywood standards, a remarkably accurate account of what has happened to
date–"to date" because the wider story still isn't over.
Katharine Gun
worked as an analyst for Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the British equivalent
of the secretive U.S. National Security Agency. She tried to stop the impending invasion of
Iraq in early 2003 by exposing the deceit of George W. Bush and Tony Blair in their claims
about that country. For doing that she was prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act -- a
juiced up version of the U.S. Espionage Act, which in recent years has been used repeatedly by
the Obama administration against whistleblowers and now by the Trump administration against
WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange.
Gun was charged for exposing -- around the time of
Colin Powell's infamous testimony to the UN about Iraq's alleged WMDs – a top secret
U.S. government memo showing it was mounting an illegal spying "surge" against other U.N.
Security Council delegations in an effort to manipulate them into voting for an Iraq invasion
resolution. The U.S. and Britain had successfully
forced through a trumped
up resolution, 1441 in November 2002. In early 2003, they were poised to threaten, bribe or
blackmail their way to get formal United Nations authorization for the invasion. [See
recent interview with Gun .]
Katherine Gun The leaked memo, published by the British Observer , was big news in
parts of the world, especially the targeted countries on the Security Council, and helped
prevent Bush and Blair from getting the second UN Security Council resolution they said they
wanted. Veto powers Russia, China and France were opposed as well as U.S. ally Germany.
'Most Courageous Leak' It was the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy,
where I work ( accuracy.org ), Norman
Solomon, as well as Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg who in the U.S. most
immediately saw the importance of what Gun had done. Ellsberg would later comment: "No one else
-- including myself -- has ever done what Katharine Gun did: Tell secret truths at personal
risk, before an imminent war, in time, possibly, to avert it. Hers was the most important --
and courageous -- leak I've ever seen, more timely and potentially more effective than the
Pentagon Papers."
Daniel Ellsberg on the cover of Time after leaking the Pentagon Papers
Gun said: "I went to the local bookshop, and I went into the political section. I found two
books, which had apparently been rushed into publication, one was by Norman Solomon and Reese
Erlich, and it was called Target Iraq . And the
other one was by Milan Rai. It was called War
Plan Iraq . And I bought both of them. And I read them cover to cover that weekend, and
it basically convinced me that there was no real evidence for this war. So I think from that
point onward, I was very critical and scrutinizing everything that was being said in the
media." Thus, we see Gun in "Official Secrets" shouting at the TV to Tony Blair that he's not
entitled to make up facts. The film may be jarring to some consumers of major media who might
think that Donald Trump invented lying in 2017. Gun's immediate action after reading critiques
of U.S. policy and media coverage makes a strong case for trying to reach government workers by
handing out fliers and books and putting up
billboards outside government offices to encourage them to be more critically minded.
Solomon and Ellsberg had debunked Bush administration propaganda in real time. But Gun's
revelation showed that the U.S. and British governments were not only lying to invade Iraq,
they were violating international law to blackmail whole nations to get in line.
Mainstream reviews of "Official Secrets" still seem to not fully grasp the importance of
what they just saw. The trendy AV
Club review leads : "Virtually everyone now agrees that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a
colossal mistake based on faulty (at best) or fabricated (at worst) intelligence." "Mistake" is
a serious understatement even with "colossal" attached to it when the movie details the
diabolical, illegal lengths to which the U.S. and British governments went to get other
governments to go along with it.
Gun's revelations showed before the invasion that people on the inside, whose livelihood
depends on following the party line, were willing to risk jail time to out the lies and
threats.
Portrayal of The Observer
Other than Gun herself, the film focuses on a dramatization of what happened at her work; as
well as her relationship with her husband, a Kurd from Turkey who the British government
attempted to have deported to get at Gun. The film also portrays the work of her lawyers who
helped get the Official Secrets charge against her dropped, as well as the drama at The
Observer , which published the NSA document after much internal debate.
Observer reporter Martin Bright, whose strong work on the original Gun story was
strangely followed by an ill-fated stint at the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, has recently noted
that very little
additional work has been done on Gun's case. We know virtually nothing about the apparent
author of the NSA document that she leaked -- one "Frank Koza." Other questions persist, such
is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign governments to get UN votes or for other
purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with allegations made by former NSA analyst
Russ
Tice about the NSA having massive files on political people?
Observer reporter Ed Vulliamy is energetically depicted getting tips from former CIA
man Mel Goodman. There do seem to be subtle but potentially serious deviations from reality in
the film. Vulliamy is depicted as actually speaking with "Frank Koza," but that's not what he
originally
reported :
"The NSA main switchboard put The Observer through to extension 6727 at the agency
which was answered by an assistant, who confirmed it was Koza's office. However, when The
Observer asked to talk to Koza about the surveillance of diplomatic missions at the
United Nations, it was then told 'You have reached the wrong number'. On protesting that the
assistant had just said this was Koza's extension, the assistant repeated that it was an
erroneous extension, and hung up."
There must doubtlessly be many aspects of the film that have been simplified or altered
regarding Gun's personal experience. A compelling part of the film -- apparently fictitious or
exaggerated -- is a GCHQ apparatchik questioning Gun to see if she was the source.
Little is known about the reaction inside the governments of Security Council members that
the U.S. spied on. After the invasion, Mexican Ambassador Adolfo Aguilar Zinser spoke in blunt
terms about U.S. bullying -- saying it viewed Mexico as its patio trasero , or back yard
-- and was Zinser was compelled to resign by President Vicente Fox. He then,
in 2004 , gave details about some aspects of U.S. surveillance sabotaging the efforts of
the other members of the Security Council to hammer out a compromise to avert the invasion of
Iraq, saying the U.S. was "violating the U.N. headquarters covenant." In 2005, he tragically
died in a car crash
.
Documents
leaked by Edward Snowden and published by The Intercept in 2016 boasted of how the NSA
"during the wind-up to the Iraq War 'played a critical role' in the adoption of U.N. Security
Council resolutions. The work with that customer was a resounding success." The relevant
document specifically cites resolutions 1441 and 1472 and quotes John Negroponte ,
then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations: "I can't imagine better intelligence support
for a diplomatic mission." (Notably, The Intercept has never published a word on "
Katharine Gun ." )
Nor were the UN Security Council members the only ones on the U.S. hit list to pave the way
for the Iraq invasion. Brazilian Jose Bustani, the director-general of the international
Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. was ousted in an effective coup by John
Bolton in April of 2002 . Bolton is now national security adviser.
"Official Secrets" director Gavin Hood is perhaps more right than he realizes when he says
that his depiction of the Gun case is like the "tip of an iceberg," pointing to other deceits
surrounding the Iraq war. His record with political films has been uneven until now. Peace
activist David Swanson, for instance, derided his film on drones, " Eye in the Sky ." At a D.C. showing of "Official Secrets,"
Hood depicted those who backed the Iraq war as being discredited. But that's simply untrue.
Keira Knightley appears as Katherine Gun in Official Secrets (Courtesy of Sundance
Institute.)
Leading presidential candidate Joe Biden -- who not only voted for the Iraq invasion, but
presided over rigged
hearings on in 2002 – has recently falsified
his record repeatedly on Iraq
at presidential debates with hardly a murmur. Nor is he alone. Those refusing to be held
accountable for their Iraq war lies include not just Bush and Cheney, but John Kerry and
Nancy
Pelosi .
Biden has actually faulted Bush for not doing enough to get United Nations approval for the
Iraq invasion. But as the Gun case helps show, there was no legitimate case for invasion and
the Bush administration had done virtually everything, both legal and illegal, to get UN
authorization.
Many who supported the invasion try to distance themselves from it. But the repercussions of
that illegal act are enormous: It led directly or indirectly to the rise of ISIS, the civil war
in Iraq and the war in Syria. Journalists who pushed for the Iraq invasion are prosperous and
atop major news organizations, such as Washington Post editorial page editor
Fred Hiatt. The
editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The
Observer , Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News.
After Gun's identity became known, the Institute for Public Accuracy brought on Jeff Cohen,
the founder of FAIR, to work with program director Hollie Ainbinder to get prominent
individuals to support
Gun . The film -- quite plausibly -- depicts the charges being dropped against Gun for the
simple reason that the British government feared that a high profile proceeding would
effectively put the war on trial, which to them would be have been a nightmare.
Sam Husseini is an independent journalist, senior analyst at the Institute for Public
Accuracy and founder of VotePact.org .
Follow him on twitter: @samhusseini .
If you enjoyed this original article please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Before commenting please read Robert Parry'sComment Policy.
Allegations unsupported by facts, gross or misleading factual errors and ad hominem attacks,
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David G , August 31, 2019 at 19:49
Saw the film today. Solid work; recommended.
Did her ultimate court appearance really go down in such a dramatic fashion? I suppose I
shouldn't be surprised if it did: English courtroom proceedings may not deliver better
justice than U.S. ones, but they're definitely more entertaining.
William , August 31, 2019 at 19:06
U.S. Government officials should be indicted for war crimes. It is quite clear that U.S.
officials conspired to ensure that an invasion
of Iraq would take place. The U.S. and Britain -- George Bush and Tony Blair -- initiated a
war of aggression against Iraq, and under
international law should be tried for war crimes, just as numerous German officials were
tried and convicted of war crimes.
No U.S. politician has called for investigation, and the main stream media has not touched
this topic. It is unquestionably clear that
the U.S. congress is a collection of spineless, cowardly, corrupt, greedy men and women. They
have allowed the U.S. to become a rogue,
criminal nation.
Katherine Gun is awesome! I heard her speak as part of a panel of whistleblowers –
wish there were many more like her
michael , August 31, 2019 at 08:15
Inequality.org reports that the majority of our top 1% are corporate executives. Finance,
which reportedly accounted for 3% of our economy in 1980, now accounts for 30%. Many of the
US's 585 billionaires have monopolies in their business domain, no different from the Robber
Barons of the late 19th and early 20th century. "Stability is more important than democracy",
the market hates uncertainty, and our foreign policies, determined by think tanks staffed and
funded by our "allies" Israel and Saudi Arabia, will continue to push for the greed of our
Richest. "Democracy" is a just a hypocritical bon mot for stealing and destroying.
The Republicans have always supported these people. What is worrisome is that the Democrats
have come to the same place as the GOP, since donations– pay-to-play- lead to
re-elections. The Democrats have deserted the Poor and working class, since they have no
money for pay-to-play. Our 17 technologically advanced Stasis work in concert with Congress,
our entitled government bureaucrats, and their lapdog main stream media to "make things
happen" for our Richest. How long before people like Assange, Katherine Gunn, Chelsea
Manning, Edward Snowden, Binney, Kiriakou etc learn that it pays to keep their mouths shut?
Transparency and whistleblowing is punished. Maybe other approaches are needed?
Tony , August 31, 2019 at 07:26
Very interesting to see what inspired her to act the way that she did.
Of course, the supporters of the war had various motives.
But one motive behind President Bush's plan was revealed by Russ Baker in his book 'Family of
Secrets' page 423.
He recalls a conversation with Bush family friend and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. He
says that he told him:
"He (George W. Bush) was thinking about invading in 1999."
Bush apparently said:
"If I have a chance to invade if I had that much (political) capital, I'm not going to
waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed, and I'm going to have
a successful presidency."
So there we have it, he thought that a war would boost his presidency.
David G , August 31, 2019 at 05:16
"The editor who argued most strongly against publication of the NSA document at The
Observer, Kamal Ahmed, is now editorial director of BBC News."
That's a repulsive little nugget I would never have known otherwise.
Thanks to Sam Husseini for this account. The film is playing in my town, at least for this
coming week; I plan to get to it.
RomeoCharlie29 , August 30, 2019 at 19:24
This is a really interesting story and one I knew nothing about, although I was one who
opposed the Iraq war because to me it was obvious the whole WMD issue was bullshit. Now I
understand the perception that that war was an American/ Brit thing but you might recall that
America's deputy Sheriff in the Pacific, the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, was Gung
ho for the war and committed Australian troops to the ill-fated endeavour with the result
that our country has subsequently become a target for ISIS inspired terrorism. Australia's
Opposition Leader at the time, Simon Crean led a vocal opposition to the war but "Little
Johnny" as we called him was not to be denied. Incidentally I don't think he has ever
admitted being wrong on this.
Xander Arena , August 30, 2019 at 18:15
Tip of an iceberg is right. Iraq was the second big lie of the 21st century. I wonder how
the world will react to the University of Alaska Fairbanks report which proves fraud at NIST,
and arguably reveals aiding and abetting of treason by the contractors who wrote NIST's
analysis of the WTC7 destruction. The UAF report drops Tuesday 9/3/19, and chisels away at
the big lie that preceded all the related Iraq deceit. BTW great article :)
Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:49
I enjoyed the article and learned some things, but it does seem a bit of Hollywood
promotion at the same time.
If only Gun's sacrifice had stopped the invasion it would have been a sensation. As is,
the UN did not sanction the invasion, making that effort a bit moot, and since the reveal of
NSA bugging the world under Obama that dulls the sensibilities of those who might today have
otherwise been shocked, shocked like the Gary Powers U-2 spy plane downing over the USSR and
Ike being caught in a lie on TV.
But overall, knowing the downhill Gun's livelihood has taken over the 15 years makes the
story more of a warning for whistle blowers than inspiration. Maybe Gun will be well
compensated by the movie makers!
Neil E Mac , August 30, 2019 at 15:54
En fin!
bevin , August 30, 2019 at 14:13
One thing is certain: The Observer of 2019 would not publish a story like this. That is
one of the major changes since 2003: the capitalist media has tightened up. There are no
longer papers competing to attract readers at risk of cozy relations with the State. The
Observer/Guardian today – since the Snowden revelations- does what it is told.
Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:16
"In 2005, he tragically died in a car crash."
Unfortunately -- or fortunately? -- this no longer seems to be credible when it comes to
those who have gone ouit on a limb to challenge the Deep State, or the US version of the Deep
State.
Can Bush and Blair be charged with crimes? In connection with the Third Reich there is
AFAIK no statute of limitations on crimes against humanity. Well, Iraq was also full of
'humanity." These guys belong in The Hague. Or in Iraq, doing community service.
In connection with Ellsberg's reviewing the evidence and concluding there was no
evidentiary justification for invading Iraq -- I wanna say, you didn't need to be Ellsberg or
any kind of expert to see clearly that there was no evidence that justified invading Iraq.
Millions of common folk could see this clearly. That is why over 14 million people worldwide
demonstrated against the planned illegal invasion. That is why people like me when to NYC, to
Washington, and also the front our local US Post Office in small towns all over the country
to protest the country's being lied into war. And were greeted mostly with thumbs-up from the
passers- and drivers-by.
The people knew it was all a pack of lies. It was the gullible PRESS that ginned up this
show. Remember Judith what's her name at the NYT? These people also should be indicted as war
criminals.
Dan Anderson , August 30, 2019 at 16:19
Judith Miller, the NYTimes reporter who did maybe the most to make the invasion of Iraq,
is the last name you were seeking.
SteveF , August 30, 2019 at 12:22
The timescales are interesting, we have the alleged US blackmail to get this illegal war
'approved' by the UN and in the same timescale we have the Jeffery Epstein story unfolding
and the corresponding allegations that he was a CIA/Mossad agent operating honey traps to
entangle the rich and famous.
The evil machinations of our governments are indeed breathtaking.
As we can see from so very many modern instances, it matters not at all that truth is on
your side, if what you are doing is attacking those with money and power.
And there's an entire American establishment dedicated to keeping it just that way.
America's history of the last half century, at least so far as foreign relations and
control of an empire, is almost entirely an artificial construct.
Absolutely no truth in everything from John Kennedy's assassination, which was intimately
concerned with America's relationship with Cuba, and the despicable Vietnam War to 9/11 and
the despicable Neocon Wars in the Middle East.
From hundreds of millions of printed newspapers and television broadcasts to speeches from
prominent American politicians, you have tissue of lies not unlike that that was constantly
being created by Oceania's Inner Party in 1984.
That's not even the slightest exaggeration, but, truly, are Americans in general the least
concerned or bothered?
We have no evidence of significant concern. None.
The Democratic Party just weeded out the only candidate it had, brave and informed enough
to speak to truth in some of these matters.
The ten left just represent varying degrees of hopelessness. On and on with weaving dreams
about this or that creative social program while the resources and close attention dedicated
to destruction in a dozen lands make them all impossible.
At the sae time, there is an almost complete lack of information and courage about
anything that is happening in Syria, in Iraq, in Libya, in Israel, and in such massively
important countries as China, Russia, and Iran.
Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning are brave contemporary examples of the American
establishment's methods for shutting down truth and punishing severely those who reveal it.
While they have followers and supporters, I am always amazed at how relatively small their
numbers are.
And we have remarkably few individuals like Manning or Assange, especially when you
consider the scale and scope of America's many dark works. Mostly, we see only "willing
helpers" carrying on with their sensitive, secretive careers in government.
In the Democratic nomination contest, the "star" liberals, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren, are virtually no different in these absolutely critical matters than a confirmed old
puke of a war criminal like Joe Biden, someone who probably deserves recognition as father of
Obama's industrial-scale extrajudicial killing project with drones and Hellfire missiles
making legally-innocent people in a dozen countries just disappear. Biden has a long record
of smarmy deeds and lack of courage and principles. He is, of course, most likely to get the
nomination too.
Act, from America's CIA, no different in principle and in law to those of the old
Argentine military junta's massive efforts at dragging people off the streets, drugging them,
and throwing them out of planes over the ocean, something they did to thousands. Oh, and
during that wonderful project there were no objections from America, only silence.
Aimee , August 30, 2019 at 22:31
Excellent post. Agree completely. Tulsi was our only hope and she never had a chance. We
are doomed.
Coleen Rowley , August 30, 2019 at 23:29
Here are some of the reasons for the ever lessening concern over US-NATO-Israel-Saudi's
(aka our current Empire's) wars: https://consortiumnews.com/2018/02/04/recipe-concocted-for-perpetual-war-is-a-bitter-one/
By the way my co-author and I tried unsuccessfully to get this published in about 15
different US papers before Robert Parry posted it on Consortiumnews.
Robert Edwards , August 30, 2019 at 11:17
It's time these liers and war criminals are brought to Justice – I know that's
wishful , but sometimes wishes come true America must get back to a country run on integrity
and honesty, otherwise all will be lost in the spiral of evil
Sorry, but, oh please, America is lost. Has been so for a very long time.
Only tremendous outside influences like depression or war and the growth of competing
states and the loss of the dollar's privileged status, are going to change the reality.
America's feeble democratic system is capable of changing almost nothing. After all, it
was constructed with just that in mind.
john wilson , August 31, 2019 at 05:07
I think think the real worry is that these days they don't even bother to lie anymore and
they just do what they want. Think Venezuela.
Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:42
"Other questions persist, such is prevalent is this sort of U.S. blackmail of foreign
governments to get UN votes or for other purposes? How is it leveraged? Does it fit in with
allegations made by former NSA analyst Russ Tice about the NSA having massive files on
political people?"
This also stands out , as given what we now know is standard modus opendi of CIA / Mossad
operations ,due to the Epstein arrest and ensuing information , who knows what is used to
leverage other nations to follow along with US and in this case UK demands.Birds of a feather
fly together.
Very good report by Sam Husseini.
Litchfield , August 30, 2019 at 13:32
Absolutely. It is an obvious avenue now to investigate: How did the Epstein operation
impact on the decision to invade Iraq? How were teh votes wrung out for the war authorization
in October 2002?
Regarding Kerry, as a resident of Mass. I couldn't believe that Vietnam vet Kerry would
vote Yes on the war authorization act. I called his office a number of time to beg him to
vote no. Rumors emanated from within his office in Boston or wherever that phone calls from
constituents were running 180 to 1 urging him to vote NO. But he voted YES anyhow.
I simply believe that Yalie Kerry didn't see what was up with the obvious lying that drove
the runup to an illegal invasion. This is the kind of scenario where one now has to wonder --
and ask openly -- whether Kerry had been compromised in some way that made him vulnerable to
blackmail. Why the hell else would he vote so stupidly?
Recall that Scott Ritter ran afoul of some kind of sex trap and so he, one of the most
knowledgeable and outspoken critics of the fake WMD narrative, was effectively muzzled.
Did Kerry have a little skeleton in the closet somewhere?
The same could be asked of all the esp. Democratic legislators who voted YES. Because we
now understand which state in the EAstern Med wanted the war most and profited the most from
it. We now know how deep and how wide the tentacles of that state's intelligence service
intrude into our own national sphere, our Congress, our own intelligence services, our media,
and, most likely, our military. Epstein seems to been part f this web of pressure and
blackmail.
Epstein is gone, but Ghislaine Maxwell apparently still runs free.
Let's bring her in for questioning specifically about pressure applied on the Oct. 2002 vote.
(Although some speculate that she, too, is already dead.)
Guy , August 30, 2019 at 10:23
At a time when despair in political affairs is very depressing ,it is very refreshing to
see that the voices of reason are being vindicated.
I really want to see this film as this is the first time that I hear of the voice of
Katherine Gun .Bless her heart for standing up and her efforts to warn of deception . Does
the film make any mention of Dr.David Kelly's so-called suicide / murder ? Will have to wait
ans see.
Thank you CN for once again coming through for your excellent report.
Pablo , August 30, 2019 at 10:15
Lawrence Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff?) told me that Collin knew Bush was
fabricating, but went to the U.N. as a "loyal foot soldier".
AnneR , August 30, 2019 at 08:25
Thank you, Sam Husseini, for this overview of the background – real story – to
the film Official Secrets.
To be frank, I'd not heard of Katherine Gun's revelations at the time – not
surprising because I don't think that the US MSM gave the leak any oxygen. They were all too
gung-ho for the war.
While the film undoubtedly soft-pedals some of the story and likely doesn't reveal or make
explicit as much as we'd all hope, I really do hope that it receives at least as much
publicity (good) and viewing as that execrable film Zero dark Thirty which basically
supported the CIA and its torturers. But somehow I doubt that.
TomR , August 31, 2019 at 06:19
Zero Dark Thirty is just about the worst bullshit fake narrative put out by the CIA that
I've ever seen. I watched it but cringed with the dramatized fake narrative that the CIA is
famous for – think the bullshit 9/11 US govt. narrative – if you or anyone else
believes that totally bunkum govt. narrative – well, I feel sorry for you.
Druid , August 31, 2019 at 17:28
Im a good- movie buff. I avoided Zero Dark Thirty. Not a farthing for those lies
Sylvia Bennet , August 30, 2019 at 07:51
I applaud Keira Knightley and all who were involved in bringing this story to the public.
It is vital that more people who have the eyes and ears of the public speak out on these
issues. Sadly, most of them keep their heads below the parapet. With the Main Stream Media
colluding with corrupt corporations and governments to lie or distort the truth, we need
decent people with influence to step up before it is too late.
Toxik , August 30, 2019 at 02:42
Looked at my local theaters and Official Secrets will not be shown.
jmg , August 29, 2019 at 18:39
Katharine Gun's case can also be very relevant for Julian Assange's defense:
"Within half an hour, the case was dropped because the prosecution declined to offer
evidence. . . . The day before the trial, Gun's defence team had asked the government for any
records of advice about the legality of the war that it had received during the run-up to the
war. A full trial might have exposed any such documents to public scrutiny as the defence
were expected to argue that trying to stop an illegal act (that of an illegal war of
aggression) trumped Gun's obligations under the Official Secrets Act 1989. . . . In 2019 The
Guardian stated the case was dropped 'when the prosecution realised that evidence would
emerge that even British government lawyers believed the invasion was unlawful.'"
So Katharine Gun, like Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, etc., by revealing corruption and
crimes, maybe didn't obey the code of silence of organized crime, government sector, but
that's not a law.
For example, the US Executive Order 13526, Classified National Security Information,
explicitly outlaws any classification that covers up crimes or embarrassing information.
This means that whistleblowers like Katharine Gun or Chelsea Manning, and investigative
journalists like Julian Assange are the ones defending the law here, while the US and UK
governments are the criminals.
lindaj , August 29, 2019 at 22:10
Hear, Hear!
Me Myself , August 30, 2019 at 12:11
The espionage act has and would protect those who were responsible for the war I
believe.
If we could Abrogate the espionage act it would make are representatives more
accountable.
I was unaware of Katherine Gun she is clearly a standout person and will join the ranks of
are most respected truthers.
WTF Burkie , August 31, 2019 at 14:05
Our not are.b.c. burkhart
evelync , August 30, 2019 at 13:34
And the secrecy, apparently, is required in the name of "national security" .that's what I
was told by a Harvard JFK School of Government associate when I emailed 200+ of 'em to
express my outrage over their withdrawal of Chelsea Manning's honorary degree when Pompeo and
Morrell bullied them. I responded with – that's INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE at Harvard
– as a "respected" educational institution you should be front and center critiquing
foreign policy instead of helping to bury the wrongdoing ..no wonder voters didn't trust the
establishment candidates in 2016 but the DNC was too much a part of it all to see or care
what was going on. Except for Tulsi Gabbard who resigned at DNC VP in protest for what was
being done to the Sanders campaign and to endorse Sanders instead of Clinton. The DNC knee
capped the campaign of the one person who had won peoples' trust for his honesty.
We have incompetent people with no moral fiber making terrible decisions and burying the
mistakes under secrecy, a fear based "code of silence", as you say.
Biden touts his being chosen by Obama for VP; therefore "he's qualified".
Since Clinton and Biden were the most dangerously ambitious critics of Obama, I think he may
have chosen to add them to his administration as VP and Sec of State to practice "keep your
friends close and your enemies closer" .but his decision was very costly to the lives of
people around the world including the Caribbean and South American countries whose wealth our
oligarchs coveted.
And as far as Honduras is concerned those political choices by Obama sadly explains refugees
fleeing from that violent country even now ..thanks to our failing to declare the 2009 Coup a
"military coup". One of Clinton's "hard choices". Obama and Biden went along with that of
course.
Daniel Immerwahr's "How to Hide an Empire" tells the sordid tale of how waterboarding was
used long before Bush II – used on the freedom fighters for their independence in the
Philippines after the Spanish American War and we took over as imperialists ..
Most people, I think, don't know all the gruesome details of our aggression but they now know
enough to be troubled by it. Few political candidates have the backbone to criticize
wrongheaded foreign policy.
I'm disappointed that Tulsi Gabbard won't be permitted to join Bernie Sanders at the
September 12 2019 "debate" as the only ones who speak out on how wrong for this country and
the world our foreign policies have been. This courageous woman should be heard.
When Bernie was challenged in the 2016 Miami debate on his enlightened views on Cuba and
other Caribbean and South American countries, Clinton used Cold War rhetoric to attack him.
She was shocked, I tell you, shocked that he would not grind his heel on the Cuban people. I
wondered at the time whether she really believed the crap she was selling or just put on a
good political show for the national security state.
We so need transparency if we want to be a real democracy.
Sam F , August 30, 2019 at 21:06
Very true that transparency is essential to democracy. That also requires lifelong
monitoring of officials and their relatives for paybacks and other influence. But (for
example) Florida has an Sunshine Act that merely moves the bribes into other channels, and
may be the most corrupt state. I am investigating extensive racketeering there involving
state officials stealing conservation funds. They can be quire careless because their party
runs the entire state including state and federal judiciary, and instantly approves whatever
their rich "donors" want to steal. But the FBI and DOJ refuse to take action when given the
evidence on a silver platter – no doubt because they are appointed by the same party.
Theft is their sacred right and duty, to protect their country from its people.
michael , August 31, 2019 at 07:30
Florida's Sunshine laws were on display at Epstein's only trial, much of it still sealed
from public view.
Clinton’s vote to authorize the invasion of Iraq puts her in the cold-blooded
murderer class. By the standards of the Nuremberg Trials, many of the people in power at that
time were and are war criminals, and Clinton was certainly one of the people who could be
charged with war crimes. (But I suppose she could have pleaded ignorance, incompetence, and
indolence in mitigation.) All of this is completely out in the open.
I don’t know if it should be considered ‘corruption’, however. A crime
against humanity is not exactly corrupt if the perpetrators and almost everyone else believe
the perpetrators ought to be doing the crime, that it is their duty, their job. It might be
better if they were corrupt, if they slacked off. But Clinton, going by some of her other
well-known activities, seems to have been enthusiastically industrious at getting people
killed — or maimed, tortured, terrorized, raped, starved, impoverished, and the other
normal works of war. Not that this makes her much different from a lot of other people.
“We came, we saw, he died. Tee hee hee!”
“Did it have anything to do with your visit?”
“I’m sure it did.”
From a non-legal perspective at least, that makes her an accessory to murder, doesn’t
it?
It is apparent that the caricature of the Soviet Union in both productions is really a stand-in for the present-day Russian government
under Vladimir Putin. As only American exceptionalism could permit, Hollywood did not hold the same disdain for his predecessor,
Boris Yeltsin, whose legacy of high inflation and national debt have since been eliminated. In fact, most have forgotten that the
same filmdom community outraged about Russia's supposed interference in the 2016 U.S. election made a celebratory movie back in 2003,
Spinning Boris , which practically boasted about the instrumental role the West played in Yeltsin's 1996 reelection in Russia.
The highly unpopular alcoholic politician benefited from a near universal media bias as virtually all the federation's news outlets
came under the control of the 'oligarchs' (in America known simply as billionaires) which his economic policies of mass privatization
of state industry enriched overnight.
Yeltsin initially polled at less than 10% and was far behind Communist Party candidate Gennady Zyuganov until he became the recipient
of billions from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) thanks to his corrupt campaign manager, Anatoly Chubais, now one of the most
hated men in all of Russia. After the purging of votes and rampant ballot-box stuffing, Yeltsin successfully closed the gap between
his opponent thanks to the overt U.S. meddling.
Spinning Boris was directed by Roger Spottiswoode, who previously helmed an installment in the James Bond series, Tomorrow
Never Dies . The 1997 entry in the franchise is one of thousands of Hollywood films and network television shows exposed by journalists
Matthew Alford and Tom Secker as having been influenced or directly assisted by the Pentagon and CIA in their must-read book National
Security Cinema: The Shocking New Evidence of Government Control in Hollywood. Based on evidence from documents revealed in Freedom
of Information Act (FOIA) requests, their investigation divulges the previously unknown extent to which the national security complex
has gone in exerting control over content in the film industry. While it has always been known that the military held sway over movies
that required usage of its facilities and equipment to be produced, the level of impact on such films in the pre-production and editing
stages, as well as the control over non-military themed flicks one wouldn't suspect to be under supervision by Washington and Langley,
is exhaustively uncovered.
As expected, Hollywood and the military-industrial complex's intimate relationship during the Cold War is featured prominently
in Alford and Secker's investigative work. It is unclear whether HBO or Netflix sought US military assistance or were directly involved
with the national security state in their respective productions, but these are just two recent examples of many where the correlated
increase in geopolitical tensions with Moscow is reflected. The upcoming sequel to DC's Wonder Woman set to be released next
year , Wonder Woman 1984, featuring the female superhero " coming into conflict with the Soviet Union during the Cold War
in the 1980s ", is yet another. Reprising her role is Israeli actress and IDF veteran is Gal Gadot as the title character, ironically
starring in a blockbuster that will demonize the Eurasian state which saved her ethnicity from extinction. Given the Pentagon's involvement
in the debacle surounding 2014's The Interview which provoked very real tensions with North Korea, it is likely they are at
least closely examining any entertainment with content regarding Russia, if not directly pre-approving it for review.
Ultimately, the Western panic about its imperial decline is not limited to assigning blame to Moscow. Sinophobia has manifested
as well in recent films such as the 2016 sci-fi film Arrival where the extra-terrestrials who reach Earth seem more interested
in communicating with Beijing as the global superpower than the U.S. However, while the West forebodes the return of Russia and China
to greater standing, you can be certain its real fear lies elsewhere. The fact that Chernobyl and Stranger Things are
as preoccupied with portraying socialism in a bad light as they are in rendering Moscow nefarious shows the real underlying trepidation
of the ruling elite that concerns the resurgence of class consciousness. The West must learn its lesson that its state of perpetual
war has caused its own downfall or it could attempt a last line of defense that would inevitably conscript all of humanity to its
death as the ruling class nearly did to the world in 1914 and 1939.
"... Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has long pushed for Kiev to investigate Vice President Joe Biden's attempt in 2016 to get the country's top prosecutor removed at a crucial moment during an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings -- the Ukrainian natural gas company advised at the time by Biden's son Hunter. ..."
"... As the The New York Times reported previously, during the final year of the Obama presidency, Vice President Joe Biden "threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine's leaders did not dismiss the country's top prosecutor" -- Viktor Shokin -- "who had been accused of turning a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite." ..."
Also interesting is that Trump's personal attorney Rudy Giuliani has long pushed for
Kiev to investigate Vice President Joe Biden's attempt in 2016 to get the country's top
prosecutor removed at a crucial moment during an ongoing investigation into Burisma Holdings --
the Ukrainian natural gas company advised at the time by Biden's son Hunter.
As the The New York Times
reported previously, during the final year of the Obama presidency, Vice President Joe Biden
"threatened to withhold $1 billion in United States loan guarantees if Ukraine's leaders did
not dismiss the country's top prosecutor" -- Viktor Shokin -- "who had been accused of turning
a blind eye to corruption in his own office and among the political elite."
Crucially last week Giuliani was reported to have again raised the issue with Ukrainian
officials , according to CNN
.
As CNN cynically put it in its
latest report , this suggests "the former New York mayor is making a renewed push for the
country to investigate Trump's political enemies."
But then again maybe it's as simple as the US not actually having a deep national security
interest in propping up Ukraine's military at a moment when international missile treaties with
Russian are unraveling and the war in Donbass is at a bloody stalemate.
The looming potential for a controversial cut in aid to Ukraine will make Trump's upcoming
meeting with still relatively new "political outsider" President Volodymyr Zelenskyy set for
next week all the more interesting. A final decision on the military aid is expect after this
crucial meeting.
More reason for Pappy Biden to pull out of race. Now he does not stand a chance to defeat
Trump because Hunter corruption in Ukraine and China will be center stage during election.
Obviously "lock them up " will be the battle cry. With China's latest backpedaling on tariff
retaliation, Trump can only be defeated from within Republican party by new impeachable
revelations.
Wait, so does the US still want to split China and Russia?
At G7 Macron and Trump both were talking up Putin and wanting to allow Russia back into
G8.
Then i read another interesting article about Macron inviting Putin to France:
"The dynamics of the New
Cold War might undergo a dramatic transformation if the geopolitical game-changer of a
“New Detente” between Russia and the West succeeds, which is becoming
increasingly possible as proven by recent events.
President Putin’s meeting earlier this week with his French counterpart in Paris
saw Macron repeatedly emphasizing Russia’s European
identity in a clear sign that this rapprochement is making visible progress. Macron is
motivated to play the role of mediator between the US and Russia for two main reasons, namely
that he wants to position France as a possible replacement to inevitably post-Merkel Germany
as the EU’s leading country and also to reach an accommodation with Moscow in Africa
after the completion of the country’s “
African Transversal ” earlier this summer
began to
threaten Paris’ interests in the continent. Putin responded extremely positively and reminded Macron of their
two Great Powers’ decades-long shared desire to forge “a common Europe from
Lisbon to Vladivostok”, reaffirming that Russia regards itself more as a European
country than a “Eurasian” or Asian one, which has important implications for
International Relations.
Both the Mainstream and Alternative Medias
had hitherto exaggerated the nature of the Russian-Chinese Strategic Partnership for their
own reasons, with the former wanting to portray it according to the paradigm of the so-called
“Russian threat” in order to justify a more muscular American military buildup
against them while the latter imagined that the two were “allies” jointly working
together without any disagreements whatsoever in order to accelerate the emerging Multipolar
World Order that would presumably be “anti-American”. The reality of their
relations is a lot less sexy and it’s that Russia was pushed into reorientating its
strategic focus as a result of the West’s anti-Russian sanctions following
Crimea’s reunification, which served as the catalyst for Moscow’s decision to
embrace Beijing. Russia probably wouldn’t have undertaken this move had it not been for
American pressure, but it felt compelled to since it didn’t want to remain a
“junior partner” in the US’ “New World Order”, instead
endeavoring to return to its historical role as a Great Power among equals.
In pursuit of this, it’s much easier for Russia to simply reintegrate into a
reformed “New World Order” than to build an entirely new one from scratch
alongside China, which is why the possibility of a “New Detente” is so enticing
to its leadership, though provided of course that the West is sincere in finally treating
Russia as an equal Great Power"
BASTARDS! If i had a DIME for every time Obama EXPLOITED vulnerable Americans for his road
and pony show I would be a rich woman.
I'll never forget Obama interview in prison with a few younger African American kids.
Talkin to then as if he knew what they were going through. His black *** raised WHITE and who
had ZERO clue what it was to live black and supporting the very oppressive system that jailed
them in the first place. All that after he bailed out banks and then QE under the Fed for his
wealthy CITI, Goldman and *** friends.
The poorest country in Asia – Afghanistan – has totally collapsed
under NATO occupation.
Complete BS! It is the continued Pakistani ISI influence in
Afghanistan presently though their Haqqani Taliban network plus ISIS that is terrorizing Afghanistan,
including intentional bombings of wedding parties
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadahan_wedding_bombing
&
https://www.apnews.com
/b5ceb0cfb33d4d73aaaadf5eee19fe9d
The Pakistani army wants Afghanistan as "strategic depth" in case of a conflict with India.
Tony
Ah! So the US-led invasion, with it's endless stream of weak US-approved 'governments', has had
nothing to do with Afghanistan's continued instability then. Got it!!!
Pakistan is the only overland supply route available for the US military; roads via Iran and
Russia are politically out. All their fuel, ammo and food towards Afghanistan is under Pakistani
ISI control from 1978 till now, with the interruption of 2009 – 2015 .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NATO_logistics_in_the_Afghan_War#History
mark
Afghanistan has been the victim and playground for Neocon intrigue for years.
A liberal, progressive left wing regime that furthered women's rights and social provision was
destroyed by Uncle Sam in its own interests to weaken Russia.
Bin Laden and his splendid chaps were put on the CIA payroll for the purpose.
The result was a long running bloodbath with 28,000 Russian and 1,4 million Afghan dead.
Followed by years of civil war, US invasion and the imposition of a narco warlord puppet government
on the country.
Tony
Hasn't Afghanistan gone from having hardly any opium production prior to the US-led invasion, to
currently being the source of something like 99% of the world's source for heroin?
mark
The Cocaine Import Agency runs the coke trade out of South America.
Might as well run the heroin trade out of Afghanistan as well.
Martin Usher
Have you considered that the Pakistan of 1980 may not be the same country with the same players as
the Pakistan of 2019? Also, when you get a weak/chaotic government then its quite likely that
different factions or forces within a country may pursue widely different goals?
It has now come to the stage where NATO cannot fight a ground war against Russia, China,
or even Iran. Since firstly, there would be huge opposition to such another crackpot piece of
military adventurism, in both the US and more so in its vassals. The Korean, Vietnam
(Indo-China), and Iraq wars ended the era of massive ground conflicts in which hundreds of
thousands of ground troops were involved.
More importantly was the draft, which met with massive opposition in the US itself.
Secondly there was the enormous cost of such a dubious venture. The cost of these wars led to
a run on the dollar as other states were cashing in their surplus dollars for gold, all of
which resulted to Nixon taking the dollar off the gold standard in August 1971. Empires, as
the US is learning, are expensive little items, and as the British also found out during
their long retreat, beginning with India.
NATO, like the EU bureaucracy, is little more than a job creation scheme for the otherwise
unemployable. It must be difficult to dream up a scheme in which these otherwise redundant
individuals can be employed in doing useful. But NATO like the EU is a bureaucracy, and
bureaucracies by their nature strive to exist and expand with no particular goals or
objectives to realise. It is just a matter or going through the motions: the means, the
routine becomes and end in itself. As Joseph Alois Schumpeter observed: " That in Egypt a
class of professional soldiers formed during the war against the Hyksos, persisted, even when
those were over, along with its warlike instincts and interests this military grouping
created by wars that required it, now created the wars in required."
Bittersweet
Who will plan economies: Financial managers (Trump and Wall St), or democratic governments
(Bernie)?
Bonnie Faulkner: If there were pressures to create a New International Economic Order in
the 1970s, what was this new order looking to achieve?
Michael Hudson: Other countries wanted to do for their economies what the United States
has long done for its own economy: to use their governments' deficit spending to build up
their infrastructure, raise living standards, create housing and promote progressive taxation
that would prevent a rentier class, a landlord and financial class from taking over economic
management.
In the financial field, they wanted governments to create their own money, to promote
their own development, just like the United States does. The role of neoliberalism was the
opposite: it was to promote the financial and real estate sector and monopolies to take
economic management away from government.
So the real question from the 1980s on was about who would be the basic planning center of
society. Would it be the financial sector – the banks and bondholders, whose interest
is really the One Percent that own most of the banks' bonds and stocks?
Or, is it going to be governments trying to subsidize the economy to help the 99 Percent
grow and prosper? That was the social democratic view opposed by Thatcherism and
Reaganism.
I didn't know that. I always thought it stand for 'Venom of America'. Or worse.
Robbobbobin
'It might help, Glasshopper, if you identify your sources on "the longstanding and increasing
oppression of Uigurs in Xinjiang".'
Erm:
Have you travelled all over the region as i have? Do you have friends who've married
into the community?
Patient "anecdotal" evidence bad, identifiable textbook assertion definitive? Ever thought
of becoming a medic?
DunGroanin
The highwater mark for the centuries long Anglo Imperialism is constantly reached across the
globe. Indian subcontinent, Tibet, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia in the east. Afghanistan and
across back to the ME now the desperate bottom of the barrel petty caesars of the declining
Empire are now splashing around in the Med' – Boltons latest missive by twitter:
"All hands on deck in the campaign to stop Iran from funding terror, destabilizing the
globe, and breaking international sanctions. The illicit oil heading to Turkey on the Adrian
Darya 1 must not be allowed off-loaded in port or at sea."
!!!!!!!!!!!
How the fuck can anyone take the failing Empire at all seriously when one of its highly
placed unelected arseholes starts telling the World about what not to do with ONE fully laden
oil tanker, thoisands of miles from his homeland?? Who the fuck do they think they are
telling never mind talking to? And we are supposed to salute and say yes sir, will do,
whatever you say, massa.
Fuck 'em.
nottheonly1
Bolton is a mentally ill subject whose sense for reality is so much compromised,that he lives
in a fantasy world like anybody who believes to be Napoleon, or worse. He is constantly
projecting his own criminal activities onto others.
Part of his mental illness is that he is incapable to realize that nobody is taking him
serious anymore – but people that are mentally worse off then him. He and his fan base
belong into closed mental healthcare, where they can wear their Napoleon hats and hide their
hands under their jackets.
Father Beyond
My diagnosis of the life-condition of John Bolton is that he displays all the classic
attributes of the psychopath.
He tries to present a charming facade, behind which lies a
complete lack of empathy with human life, which to these warmongering delinquents, remains a
commodity to be disposed of in the satisfaction of their lusts and cravings for money, power,
influence and status, at the base of which lies a perversion of the dignity and worth of all
life, human or otherwise, which struggles to survive in the face of extinction on this
planet, which is the property of no-one yet the property of all.. He is a high priest of
Neo-liberalism and he expounds the "Monroe Doctrine" – which is but one of the
heretical doctrines of Imperialism. The criticisms being directed towards Andre Vitchek here
(and elsewhere) are unfounded and give the impression that these superior beings who mock him
from above, have never read any of his books, let alone given any serious consideration to
the issues he raises. I don't agree with all of his views, but it appears he displays more
courage and integrity than those who like to take cheap shots at him, seeking refuge in the
knowledge that few will even bother to challenge them. Just remember one thing – you
are as bad as the person you condemn. Looking into the mirror of your life-condition, you
will see the "clown", the 'muppet", the "idiot", the "racist" and the 'virtue signaller".
Call the next patient in please. . . . . .
Martin Usher
There are plenty more Boltons where he comes from. Most are a bit more subtle in their
approach but they still share the same goals.
I m
In all honesty and in reply to 'Father Beyond' i'm convinced these people are simply crazed
from watching too many superhero movies.
George
Another issue is what this means for the home populations of the Western nations. As the
Western ruling class finds it harder and harder to intimidate the countries it has been
bleeding, it will find its own formerly luxuriant position in danger and will start to demand
more and more from its lower classes. And since the threat of a worker's revolution (posed
very concretely by Russia and China in the first half of the 20th century) no longer applies,
the welfare state (formed as a concession to keep the proles in line) will become
increasingly decimated. Our ruling class no longer even has to pretend to care. In short, the
UK and US publics will start to become more and more like the foreign native populations
targeted by the West.
So it seems that the 'workers revolutions' were not 100% grassroots up risings, just as
today's "Colour Revolutions" often arise out of the hidden hand of various change agents and
NGO's whose cover is as providing humanitarian support etc.
The Welfare State may have been as you say a concession, but there could conceivably be
other reasons too maybe?
George
I think the Western governments, having had decades of practice and observation, know full
well not only to control the opposition and not only to lead it but to create it too. In a
way, all this is just an extension of capitalist consumerism. The idea is to find out what
everyone wants and then manufacture the image of it, but not the reality.
According to the Adam Curtis documentary, "Century of the Self", Edward Bernays, father of
the modern PR industry, was asked by cigarette manufacturers how to get women to smoke (in
those days it was considered a male activity and the cig industry figured it was missing out
on a huge potential market demographic). Bernays did a bit of research and found out that
what women wanted was to be more independent "like men". So Bernays staged a publicity stunt
whereby a number of young attractive women were to gather and light "torches of freedom"
– this info being delivered with maximum publicity throughout the media. So the day
comes, the women appear and light cigarettes and smoke them. You hear that and think, "Oh
come on now!" But it apparently worked. (Actually I don't think it was a simple case of
fooling the public but of signalling via the press that it was no longer "unseemly" for women
to smoke.) the point being that women wanted freedom, were delivered a "substitute" which
turned out to be little cancer sticks. That's the way capitalism works. And that's also the
way the propaganda system works too.
You could call this "the genius of capitalism". Capitalism says, "Whatever you want, we
can give! You want beauty? Here it is! You want ugliness? Have it! You want violence? Here!
You want rebellion? Here again! You want the overthrow of the capitalist system? No problem!"
Of course it doesn't intend the actual delivery of any of these. It simply drudges up more
commodities.
Thus we can expect the creation of any number of phoney oppositions. Now it may be
paranoia but I think that Dave McGowan's "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon" about the
deliberate manufacture of trendy rebellious pop music has got a lot of credibility. There's a
book called "A Century of Spin" all about the PR industry and how it works through
organisations that sound like worker's groups or concerned citizen groups but they are just
corporate hack entities. If these were easy enough to create in the pre-internet days, just
think how much easier it is to do now.
mark
Our ruling elite has run out of places to loot.
Unfortunately those pesky Russkies/ Chinks/ Eye-ranians won't play ball any more.
So they have to cannibalise their own societies, eat their own tail and loot their own
countries instead.
Wilmers31
For a one-son family no reason is good enough for war.
Since 'the pill' people adapt their family size to their financial or other means. This
results in one-son families at a significant percentage. Russia is quite an example. Due to
their housing restrictions they had (have) small families. When I heard in 1982 how
distraught Soviet mothers were who had to bury welded zinc coffins (coming from Afghanistan)
I knew the Soviet Union was on borrowed time – and then they threw the whole system
out.
"But it is too cowardly, too spoiled to risk the lives of its soldiers." No, mothers do
not like to see their one son used for war, war that serves the big corporations and not the
people who are told it is their fight.
Pulitzer Prize winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen put it best: "All wars are fought twice, the
first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory." Those second fights are often
longer, if less bloody, than the initial battles. The fights for memory and legacy often begin
before the guns have even fallen silent.
America's wars are no strangers to this dynamic. From Vietnam to the present, our wars have
always been refought by participants, journalists, scholars, and politicians. As we begin to
seriously debate ending America's quixotic campaigns in the Greater Middle East, one
particularly nasty narrative will be employed by the defenders of intervention and imperialism.
It recurs like clockwork every time America loses a war: that we were stabbed in the back.
Dolchstosslegende
The modern stab-in-the-back myth got its start in Germany exactly a century ago. Imperial
Germany was conceived of, created, and led by Prussia's military caste. Prussia, in Voltaire's
bon mot, was an army with a state, not a state with an army. And Prussia, after crippling
defeats by Napoleon at Jena and Auerstedt, had entered the First World War on a 50-year winning
streak.
But by the fall of 1918, Germany had lost the war. With its spring offensives failing and
fresh American troops flooding into France, final defeat was only a matter of time. While the
front lines were still on French and Belgian soil, the German Army had been decisively beaten
in the Hundred Days battles. After the Battle of Amiens, Germany's leaders, both military and
civilian, knew that the war's outcome was simply a math problem.
Germany did the only thing it could do and sued for a humiliating peace. The Kaiser was
forced to abdicate and flee, and a new civilian government signed an armistice and then the
Treaty of Versailles. Germany gave up land, people, and most of its army, and took on both
formal responsibility for the war and $5 billion in reparations.
Defeat was more than a bitter pill to swallow -- it was incomprehensible to millions,
especially those who had been at the front and had often experienced more (bloody) successes
than failures.
Germany's de facto military dictator, General Erich Ludendorff, was among the first to
embrace the idea that the country had been betrayed by communists, politicians, and most of
all, Jews. Though a wartime census showed that Jews were overrepresented in both the German
Army as a whole and in frontline units, the "Big Lie" stuck. Its propagation was aided by often
well-intentioned generals and politicians, who told the returning soldiers that "no enemy has
vanquished you."
When Adolf Hitler, a decorated veteran and budding demagogue, embraced this fiction, the
Dolchstosslegende (literally "dagger stab myth") was cemented. The German Army had not
lost. It had been betrayed by the home front and the politicians.
Vietnam
Korea, America's first war of the nuclear age, did not occasion charges of betrayal within.
Perhaps this was because outright defeat had been so close, both at the Pusan Perimeter in the
summer of 1950, and again six months later, when Chinese troops poured across the Yalu River
and drove the United Nations forces back over the 38th Parallel. A draw, especially with the
specter of nuclear war in the background, didn't seem so bad.
Vietnam was different. The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and
intercontinental bombers, lost to a Third World peasant army. Sure the U.S. won every battle,
dropping more bombs on South Vietnam than it had on either Germany or Japan in World War II,
whatever the cost. But they lost the war. The explanation: it was Jane Fonda and the hippies
that stabbed the army in the back , undermining support at home and turning the U.S.
tactical victory of 1968's Tet Offensive into a strategic defeat. As Vietnam veteran and former
Senator James Webb famously said of Fonda: "I wouldn't walk across the street to watch her slit
her wrist."
This narrative was buttressed by a wave of revisionist scholarship on Vietnam. Lewis
Sorley's A Better War posits counterinsurgency and pacification as a path to victory and
celebrates General Creighton Abrams's successes in the wake of the Tet Offensive. Mark Moyar, a
historian now working at USAID, penned Triumph Forsaken , an apology for South
Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem. Max Boot, never one to miss a chance to extol the white
man's burden, has weighed in with multiple volumes on "the road not taken."
Traditional historians make a few obvious counterpoints that are difficult to refute.
Foremost among them is this one: despite two decades of French and American partnership and
aid, the South Vietnamese state and army were unable to ever stand on their own. The Easter
Offensive of 1972, sometimes celebrated as the finest hour of the Army of the Republic of
Vietnam (ARVN), was defeated only with the aid of tremendous American fire support and at the
cost of heavy ARVN casualties. Three years later, North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon.
North Vietnam, for all its missteps and brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and
maintained the will to fight. The South did not.
Iraq
The Iraq war revisionist narrative is perhaps less plausible than that of Vietnam. True, the
Sunni tribes of Anbar Province turned against al-Qaeda and the Sunni-Shia civil war had
temporarily abated by 2008. These tactical realities led to absurd triumphalism from the
neoconservative crowd, especially those insiders who saw themselves as the brain trust of the
2007 troop surge.
The surge, a reinforcement of only 30,000 soldiers and Marines, was hailed as one of the
signal triumphs of American military history. General David Petraeus was celebrated as a
"savior general." The language of the sycophantic press corps would have made even Douglas
MacArthur blush. "The gold standard for wartime command," said then chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, describing Petraeus. America was told that its forces,
after initial missteps and much painful learning, had triumphed over terrorism in Iraq.
This victory, the story then goes, was squandered by President Barack Obama's pusillanimity
and inattention. U.S. troops marched out of Iraq as victors in 2011 and then had to march back
in three years later when the corrupt, sectarian Iraqi Army collapsed in the face of the ragtag
forces of the Islamic State: a pickup truck-borne reconnaissance-in-force of just 1,500
jihadists.
The reality is that the only thing America won in Iraq was "a decent interval," in Henry
Kissinger's infamous phrase. The surge had always been understood as merely a means to an end:
political reconciliation between Iraq's Shias, Sunnis, and Kurds. This manifestly failed to
occur. The security services became corrupt Shia fiefdoms, the Kurds intermittently plotted
their exit, and the Sunnis, feeling themselves excluded from post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, sought
new champions.
In a supremely cynical gambit, the Iraq war's architects flooded America's airwaves to blame
Obama for a squandered victory in Iraq, especially after the Islamic State's lightning
offensives of 2014. Obama and his defeatist cheerleaders in the media, we were told, had walked
away when Iraq was on the path to peace and prosperity.
Such a claim, regardless of the intricacies of intra-Shia politics and status of forces
agreements, rests on a foundation of hubris: the idea that America had the knowledge and skill
to dictate successful political outcomes to Iraqis. Nouri al-Maliki, the sectarian Shiite
leader blamed for setting conditions for the Islamic State's success, was plucked from
obscurity and installed as Iraq's prime minister under American sponsorship. Given the
inability and unwillingness of two U.S. presidents to curb or remove Maliki, and the
inescapable postwar Iranian influence in Shia-led Iraq, claims of a squandered victory are hard
to take seriously.
The late Michael Hastings put it best: the surge narrative was "perhaps the most impressive
con job in recent American history." Maybe a decent interval was worth the casualties and cost
of the surge. But deluding ourselves that "we won" is another matter.
Afghanistan
We are already seeing the new Dolchstosslegendes take shape in the debate over
Afghanistan, Syria, and once again Iraq. As both President Donald Trump and Democratic
presidential candidates make pledges about withdrawing from Afghanistan, the pushback is in
full force. Regional stability, women's rights, and terrorism are all cited as reasons to stay,
but the idea of stolen victory is also getting a workout.
Despite nearly 18 years of war and the deployment of nearly 100,000 U.S. troops at the war's
height, plus security and development assistance that far exceeds the Marshall Plan, the
Taliban today controls more of Afghanistan than at any point since their overthrow in 2002.
Opium cultivation, the primary funding source for the insurgents, sets new records year
after year. The situation has gotten so bad that in May the Pentagon stopped releasing its
district stabilization reports, which had been used to measure the security situation
throughout Afghanistan. Despite then-commander General John Nicholson's November 2017 statement
that the "most telling" metric of success is population control, the Department of Defense now
asserts that the reports are "of limited decision-making value."
Afghan security force casualties, probably the most important gauge of the war's progress,
are also unavailable, supposedly classified at the behest of the Afghan government. U.S.
Central Command's new chief, Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, Jr., recently acknowledged to the
Senate that Afghan army and police losses were unsustainable. A full third of the Afghan
security force has to be replaced every year due to casualties, desertion, and failures to
re-enlist. The trajectory of the war is pretty clear.
One could plausibly argue that America did win the Afghan war -- way back in 2002. The swift
initial campaign, fought mostly by the Afghan Northern Alliance with support from U.S. Special
Forces, CIA paramilitaries, and air power, toppled the Taliban government and shattered
al-Qaeda's network in Central Asia. Everything that came after, the argument goes, was mission
creep and utopian fantasy.
That case has its merits, but the war should be judged by America's professed goals there.
These quickly grew to include the establishment of a stable, secure, and centralizing Afghan
national government. By those lights, the war was, and is, an unwinnable quagmire.
Yet there are prominent national security professionals who will assert that Afghanistan was
never lost, and in fact can still be won. Paul D. Miller, a Georgetown professor and former
National Security Council staffer, made this case most recently in the pages of Foreign
Policy . Clinging to the life raft of the possible, however faint, Miller wrote that
"claiming the United States has failed is odd because the war is not over yet." After risibly
declaring that "Obama nearly won the war in 2012," Miller judged Afghanistan a secret success,
as a "mowing the grass" counterterrorism campaign.
After bemoaning the supposed hubris of those counseling withdrawal, Miller settled on a
maximalism that is jarring to even a casual observer of the war: "more resources, real
counterinsurgency, no deadline." Realist detractors, called out by name, are told to keep their
opinions to themselves, because their lack of faith undermines a necessary Forever War.
Syria
In Syria, unlike in Afghanistan, the insurgent enemy was decisively defeated on the
battlefield. The Islamic State's final sanctuary was destroyed in March. But after declaring a
conclusion to this successful punitive expedition, President Trump reluctantly reversed himself
and left a small residual U.S. force in place, ostensibly for counterterrorism purposes.
Trump had been relentlessly attacked by virtually the entire U.S. foreign policy
establishment for his supposed fecklessness for even suggesting a withdrawal. Senators voted
for an amendment rebuking the president by a margin of nearly 3-1. The secretary of defense,
former General James Mattis, resigned in protest. Pundits and purported experts across the
political spectrum inveighed against Trump's pullout plans.
The major U.S. papers are quick to report that the Islamic State is back, with fighters
slipping across the porous Iraq-Syria border and "seeding a new insurgency." Intermittent
attacks receive ample attention, as does the plight of Syria's Kurds, stuck between Assad's
regime and their Turkish enemies.
The Islamic State is likely to survive and return for the same reason it appeared in the
first place: victor's justice and the refusal of all parties to embrace political compromise
and power-sharing. Bashar al-Assad's forces are engaged in a campaign of repression and
violence in Sunni areas.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, under the supposedly less sectarian Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi, a
similar process grinds on. As The New Yorker 's Ben Taub detailed in a December piece,
the conviction rate in Iraq's terrorism courts is 98 percent. The average trial lasts less than
10 minutes. The families of many of those on trial are themselves detained indefinitely in
squalid desert camps. Despite American advisors, American aid, and American attention, Iraq's
problems can only be solved by Iraqis. They are in no hurry to do so.
One might hope that the common-sense Middle American voter would see through this shallow
sophistry. After all, the signature moment of Trump's insurgency within the GOP primaries was
in South Carolina, where he denounced the 43rd president and the Iraq war and was rewarded with
an easy victory and the dispatch of Jeb Bush, the squishy embodiment of GOP conventional wisdom
on Iraq.
Today even recent veterans believe these wars were for naught. A new Pew survey found that
64 percent of Iraq veterans and 58 percent of Afghanistan veterans believe their wars were "not
worth fighting." These men and women realize that we cannot fix foreign lands at the point of a
bayonet, however impressive our temporary tactical victories may be.
But despite $6 trillion spent on these failed wars, American foreign policy remains largely
the prerogative of elites. The stories of triumphs forsaken and troops stabbed in the back only
need to reach and convince a small audience.
America's Dolchstosslegendes , fueled mostly by optimism and hubris, are not those of
bitter German anti-Semites, looking for someone to blame. But our myths and rationalizations
are still pernicious and consequential -- and they aren't going away.
General H. R. McMaster, formerly national security advisor to President Trump and now
ensconced at one of the most influential think tanks in Washington, recently blamed "war
weariness" and "a defeatist narrative" for challenging the ongoing American military commitment
to Afghanistan. As we near a presidential election and perhaps a chance at some realism and
retrenchment overseas, the myths of back-stabbing and lost victory must be rejected. Until
Americans, and especially elites, accept the lessons of history and the limits of U.S. power,
we will be doomed to repeat our Sisyphean wars of choice.
Gil Barndollar is the Military Fellow-in-Residence at the Catholic University of
America's Center for the Study of Statesmanship. He served as a U.S. Marine Corps infantry
officer from 2009-2016.
It's hard to take any analysis seriously that starts out with the politically correct
mantra
" about how the US lost Vietnam. As one of those post WWII conflicts that actually had
some veracity as an effort on behalf of others one can say with some ease, we won that war
and there's little question that the US service members who fought it were in fact
betrayed.
And that betrayal continues with the nonsense about how we lost.
"North Vietnamese tanks rolled into Saigon. North Vietnam, for all its missteps and
brutality, endured over 1 million casualties and maintained the will to fight. The South did
not."
They rolled in with the support of the Soviet Union, China and North Vietnam. You sure
leave a lot out of your understanding of events at the time, Nevermind rethinking the matter
today.
Pay attention people; Prussia not Russia. Yes there was Prussia and it is not related to
Russia. I'm making this comment because one of my colleagues wanted to corrected TAC article
by claiming there must've been some misspelling. I wonder how many of my fellow homo sapiens
think as my colleague does. I also wonder how many homos are in fact sapiēns?
Syria
I thought that you were going to mention the myth that had Obama bombed Assad after his 'red
line' comment that moderate rebels would have taken over Syria and turned it into the Garden
of Eden. This bizzare narrative is passionately defended by the likes of Jack Keane and too
many others to count.
Even though Al Qaeda and ISIS were always, by far, the strongest factions, the
demonstration of U.S. force would put so much fear into their hearts that it would allow our
freedom fighters to walk into Damascus. After all that's what happened in Libya and we know
how easily cowed ISIS and Al Qaeda are by one off bombings. Those are the people who start
off battles using 1 - 3 VBIEDs (suicide vehicles).
"The U.S. military, armed with futuristic black rifles and intercontinental bombers, lost to
a Third World peasant army."
That's a myth within the myth. The North Vietnamese Army (NVA) was not a third world
peasant army and should not be confused with the Viet Cong. That's an insult to the the NVA.
They were highly trained and were equipped by the Soviet Union. The Viet Cong were virtually
wiped out and were no longer a factor after the 68 Tet offensive. The NVA also kicked China
back out of Vietnam in a border war in 1979, and destroyed the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia.
Germany was not decisively defeated on the battle field. Not one inch of Germany was occupied
by an allied soldier when the armistice was declared. Had the strike by the French military
been detected by the Germans the outcome would have been very different. The sacking of
Germany's wealth and infrastructure led to an economic collapse of the Weimar Republic. This
allied induced economic chaos led to the monster Hitler and his thugees. Might be worth
noting that prior to WW1 Germany and England were each other's best trading partners and the
Kaiser visited England regularly. The war party -- derided in history as the "yellow press
successfully lied about "the Hun" and got the war they wanted. Shades of 2003 Iraq;
mainstream media, a powerful foreign lobby, a spineless congress, and a compliant president.
Our decision makers have learned nothing from history except to follow the money. The neocons
have learned everything. Lies (main stream media) and political contributions will get you
endless wars. Just say NO! to Netanyahu.
I have nothing but questions after reading this article and concern about how gullible,
ignorant and loath we as a nation are when it comes to exposing the fallacy and ineptness of
your so-called anointed ones and foreign policy by the armed conflict. Why do we not learn
from our mistakes? Why do we continue to compound the mistakes we've made?
Part of the strategy in Afghanistan is nothing more than a rebranded "strategic hamlet"
strategy used in Vietnam. How well did that work out? Easy answer, it didn't, it just ceded
territory to the insurgency. Have we learned anything, not really, you still have some older
cadre teaching the new generation lessons learned from over 40 years ago and those lessons
haven't kept pace with developments in what we refer to as third world countries. We aren't
adapting militarily with the exception of the lethality of today's modern weapons. And
unfortunately should we engage in an armed conflict with a modernized advisary we'll still be
teaching the lessons learned and tactics used when fighting lesser equipped insurgencies.
I've gone off topic but watching the army I hold in esteem continue to do the same dumb s**t
is disheartening.
Thanks for the article, I enjoyed. You've done a really good job of making your point
without totally destroying the character of the perpetrators.
"... etanyahu bet the farm on Trump and Trump failed to deliver. They were countered at every turn by patient and scrupulous opponents who read the board better and didn't respond muscularly to repeated provocations. They let events come to them and waited for the moment of over-commitment. ..."
"... "Iraqi Intelligence: 'The Israeli drones that have been attacking our nation in the past few weeks are operating out of a base in YPG/SDF held areas in Syria and these operations are co-financed by Saudi Arabia. Israeli military personnel are on the ground in Northern Syria.'" ..."
Magnier on Nuttyahoo's escalating provocations encapsulates the most recent series of
events, although he doesn't attempt to link the actions to the upcoming elections. Hezbollah
threatened direct retaliation against Occupied Palestine; Iraq chose to blame the Outlaw US
Empire; Syria remained silent; the G-7 said nothing. The recent proposal by Iran to refurbish
one pipeline and build another to Syria's coastline would certainly become a Zionist target.
So, for the project to have the proper security, Occupied Palestine needs to be liberated.
Nasrallah isn't known as a bluffer, while Nuttyahoo's prone to be too aggressive. Do the
Zionists see the current situation as possibly the final time they have some sort of an
advantage as Magnier seems to imply and attack since they know the Outlaw US Empire won't?
But, in spite of the whole US paleo-conservative spectre, along with "alt-right", always
telling us it is Israel who forces the US to wage war in the ME...now, Israeli politics and
experts, say the last attacks on Irak, Syria and Lebanon have been made only as electoral
maneuver by Netanyahu and not only, but have stated that it is the US who wants Israel doing
their dirty job in the ME...This, reported by Al Manar ....not a Jewish source....
In his speech on August 25, the secretary general of Hezbollah made a double promise: the
Resistance will now attack the drones of Israel and attack the Israeli troops not in Shebaa
but in Lebanon itself. For those Israeli generals who experienced the 2006 war and the ups
and downs of Syria, these are not just warnings. These soldiers even seem to have been
sensitive to Nasraláh's warning that Netanyahu's attacks are intended to win votes
for the next election and avoid imprisonment. "The current threat to Israel, which is even
more serious than terrorism, missiles and Iran, is the collapse of the interior of Israel,"
warned former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.
"By the way, Netanyahu's air operations against Syria, Lebanon and Iraq pursue internal
political goals, which is very unfortunate", said Moshe Yaalon, a leader of the Blue and
White opposition coalition and former Israeli Minister of Military Affairs, according to
the agency Palestinian Maa.
"The threat of the collapse of the interior of Israel is even more serious than the
missiles and Iran. The destruction of democracy and corruption within government apparatus
will lead us to collapse", said Ehud Barak in a video posted on his Twitter page.
"The attack on Syria was not a preventive action and will harm Israel," Barak told
Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot, having apparently understood the warning issued by
Nasralá.
Other Israeli experts share this opinion. Yaari Ehud, an Israeli journalist and expert
in the Middle East said on Channel 12 of Israeli television that Netanyahu and his security
cabinet "perpetrated these attacks on behalf of the US" and run the risk of "exposing
Israel." "In fact, the missions that Americans refuse to do, they entrust them to Israel.
We have been commissioned to do the dirty work at the risk of jeopardizing our security,
"he added before saying", Tel Aviv will pay for it."
Who is lying? The Israelis or the Americans? Or both?
Mangier writes a follow-up to his post that I criticized @29. I think that his latest post
also falls well short of his vaunted reputation.
Magnier's interpretation of events lauds Netanyahu's chess playing. He compares
inconsequential attacks with past strategic actions (almost gleefully as he describes
those past glories at some length) .
He makes broad, unsupported statements like:
It should be recognized that Israel's assessment of the reaction of Iran's allies in
Syria and Iraq is spot on.
And repeats that Israel is hitting "hundreds" of sites FOUR TIMES. Making it
seem as though the Israeli campaign is much greater than it really is. AFAICT those attacks
have actually been spread out over more than a year.
Yet it's all preliminary to this gem:
Netanyahu forced Hezbollah's leader to threaten Israel ...
Forced?Really? AFAICT the red lines in Lebanon have been clear
for a long time. Each side will defend theirs.
Which leaves me scratching my head as to why Magnier isn't using his platform to point out
Netanyahu's irresponsible, self-serving actions. Netanyahu will NOT pay a price for his
craven machinations - which could mean Israeli dead and injured and/or another war in Lebanon
- when even "critics" like Magnier dress them up as heroic acts of patriotism.
Netanyahu's widening of Israel's war with Iran and its proxies into Lebanon and Iraq -- and
perhaps beyond -- and his acknowledgement of that wider war raise questions for both
nations.
Israel today has on and near her borders hostile populations in Gaza, Syria, Lebanon,
Iran, and Iraq. Tens of millions of Muslims see her as an enemy to be expelled from the
region.
While there is a cold peace with Egypt and Jordan, the Saudis and Gulf Arabs are
temporary allies as long as the foe is Iran.
Is this pervasive enmity sustainable?
As for America, have we ceded to Netanyahu something no nation should ever cede to
another, even an ally: the right to take our country into a war of their choosing but not
of ours?
On a not completely different subject-that of the Empire's demise- there is a Tom Luongo
article at Strategic Culture, which is pretty good. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/08/27/first-many-cauldrons-form-middle-east/
It ends
"So, the cauldron around Israel is forming. With the Saudis in deep trouble, Egypt refusing
to go along with any of Trump's plans – Arab NATO, the Kushner Deal of the Century
– the game board has fundamentally shifted against them.
"N etanyahu bet the farm on Trump and Trump failed to deliver. They were countered at
every turn by patient and scrupulous opponents who read the board better and didn't respond
muscularly to repeated provocations. They let events come to them and waited for the moment
of over-commitment.
"Now the counter attack will commence, I suspect, with brutal precision"
I don't quite agree with his assessment and conclusions. He is grossly underestimating the
axis of resistance and their will to push back. Also, Israelis are overestimating the
American support, no matter what. Not if it is going to cost them American lives. Hitting a
few ammo depots in isolation is one thing, but getting Americans to die for Israeli
intransigence is another. Not much stomach for that here in US, no matter how much they push
the special relationship.
Israelis are playing backgammon while Iran and axis playing chess, being a grandmaster at
that. Check mate will be ugly.
@177 Israel shouldn't take American support for granted. According to this article some
Evangelicals are starting to have second thought...
"Why do we have pro-abortion, pro-LGBTQ values, and we do not have more freedom to protect
our faith? We are persecuted now," Yanko says about evangelical Christians like herself.
"[Jews] say, 'We've got America. We control America.' That's what I know."
"Iraqi Intelligence: 'The Israeli drones that have been attacking our nation in the
past few weeks are operating out of a base in YPG/SDF held areas in Syria and these
operations are co-financed by Saudi Arabia. Israeli military personnel are on the ground in
Northern Syria.'"
Is it a feint to get SAA to cease Idlib Dawn and drive the Zionists out, or are Zionist
drones really being flown from there? Regardless, it's time to end the Kurd's games, drive
out the Outlaw US Empire and all other illegal forces and reclaim Syrian sovereignty. Iraq
must do the same.
Over the past several days, Israel has attempted to prevent attacks by Iranian forces
and their allies by striking targets in Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq.
Really? AFAIK, Israel hasn't described specific attacks that were thwarted.
Snyder then uses Iraqi and Hezbollah's anger at Israel's acts of war (cause, um ...
that's what they are) as examples of pre-crime hatred that justifies
Netanyahu's Israel's attacks.
Netanyahu's self-serving deviousness has blown up his face. Hasbara media assets are busy
trying to recover the high ground. IMO their attempt to do so will fail miserably as it's
transparent and thus digs the hole deeper. Leading to the question: Will Netanyahu accept
defeat at the polls or will he continue with the dirty tricks (at the risk of war)?
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
The above should be read in conjunction with my criticism of Magnier @29 and @148.
The US launched a land based Tomahawk nuclear-capable intermediate range cruise missile less
than 3 weeks after the US withdrew from the INF Treaty. Clearly, the missile was under
development for some time prior to the test; the sea-based variant launched by naval vessels
armed with the Aegis systems can carry a W80 variable yield warhead (5-150 kilotons).
The land-based Tomahawk was also launched by the multipurpose Mark 41 launch system, which
is deployed at the Aegis Ashore facility in Romania and soon-to-be-opened Aegis Ashore
facility in Poland. This clearly demonstrates the the Ballistic Missile "Defense" systems
deployed in Romania and Poland by the US/NATO can also be used to launch offensive nuclear
weapons. Because the missiles are deployed in closed cannisters, it is impossible for
observers to verify if the cannisters contain interceptor missiles or cruise missiles.
Putin specifically warned about this possibility in 2016.
Several days ago, Putin told his security
council that the BMD deployments are/were "a direct and material breach of the INF
Treaty." The Russians believe the US was planning all along to use the BMD facilities to
target Russia with both offensive and defensive weapons (defensive in the sense that US/NATO
BMD can be used as a mop-up system to take out remaining Russian nuclear forces after a US
first strike). US Neocons may believe that this will give them leverage in any confrontation
with Russia. I think they are wrong, I think it will simply tempt the Russians to take out
these facilities early on in the event of any direct military conflict with the US/NATO.
Putin is now explicity making the point that Russia will have to consider these BMD
facilities as a direct threat to Russia and will respond symmetrically, with at "tit-for-tat"
response. This may also include Russian missiles in Cuba and Venezuela.
Slavery had some good aspects for those chaps who had it rather good. A colonial setup is
the next best thing to slavery, and it also holds its attraction for people who knew how to
place themselves just below the sahibs and above the run-of-the-mill natives. The Hong Kong
revolt is the mutiny of wannabe house niggers who feel that the gap between them and the
natives is rapidly vanishing. Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable
mainland coolies; he spoke English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle
sucking wealth out of the mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands. But now
he has no advantage compared to the people of Shanghai or Beijing. There is huge swelling of
wealth in the big cities of Red China. The Chinese dress well, travel abroad, and they do not
need HK mediation for dealing with the West. Beijing had offered HK a fair deal of [relative]
equality; nothing would be taken from them, but the shrinking gap is not only unavoidable, but
desirable, too.
However, HK had been the imperial bridgehead in China for too long. Its people were
complicit, nay, willing partners in every Western crime against China, beginning with dumping
opium and sucking out Chinese wealth. Millions of opium addicts, of ruined families and
households nearly destroyed the Middle Kingdom, and each of them added to HK prosperity. The
blood, sweat and labour of all China abundantly supplied the island. HK was the first of the
Treaty Ports, and the last to return home. Its populace was not thoroughly detoxed; they
weren't ideologically prepared for a new life as equals.
Chairman Mao harboured hard suspicions against comprador cities, the cities and the people
who prospered due to their collaboration with the imperialist enemy. He cleansed them with
communist and patriotic re-education; recalcitrant compradors were sent to help peasants in
far-away villages in order to reconnect with the people. Mao's successors had a strong if
misplaced belief in Chinese nationalism as a universal remedy; they thought the Chinese of HK,
Macau and Taiwan would join them the moment the colonial yoke failed. This was an
over-optimistic assessment. The imperialist forces didn't give up on their former house slaves,
and the moment they needed to activate them against independent China they knew where to
look.
Their time came as the trade conflict between the US and China warmed up. The secret
government of the West aka Deep State came to the conclusion that China is getting way too big
for its boots. It is not satisfied with making cheap gadgets for Walmart customers. It is
producing state-of-art devices that compete with American goods and, what's worse, their
devices are not accessible for NSA surveillance. The Chinese company Huawei came under attack;
sanctions and custom duties followed in train. When the Yuan eased under the strain, the
Chinese were accused of manipulating their currency. It is a strong charge: when Japan was
attacked by the West in the 1990s and the Yen had eased as expected, this claim forced Tokyo to
keep the Yen high and take Japan into a twenty-year-long slump. But China did not retreat.
Then the supreme power unleashed its well-practiced weapon: they turned to foment unrest in
China and gave it a lot of space in the media. At first, they played up the fate of the Uygur
Islamists, but it had little success. The Uygur are not numerous, they are not even a majority
in their traditional area; their influence in China is limited. Despite headlines in the
liberal Western media proclaiming that millions of Uygur are locked up in concentration camps,
the impact was nil. No important Muslim state took up this cause.
The anniversary of Tiananmen came (in beginning of June) and went without a hitch. For good
reason: the alleged 'massacre' is a myth, as the Chinese always knew and we know now for
certain thanks to publication of a relevant US Embassy cable by Wikileaks.
There were no thousands of students flattened by tanks. A very few died fighting the army, but
China had evaded the bitter fate of the USSR. In China proper the event had been almost
forgotten. A few participants retell of their experiences to Western audiences, but the desired
turmoil did not materialise.
And then came the time for HK. It is an autonomous part of China; it had not been
re-educated; there are enough people who remember the good days of colonial slavery. The actual
spark for the mutiny, the planned extradition treaty, was exceedingly weak. For the last
decade, HK became the chosen place of refuge for mainland criminals, for HK had extradition
treaties with the US and Britain, but not with the mainland. This had to be remedied.
[The extradition treaty had played an important role in the Snowden case. An ex-CIA spy
Edward Snowden decided to reveal to the world the extent of the NSA surveillance we all are
subjects of. He chose the Guardian newspaper for his revelations, probably because of
the Wikileaks precedent. When he gave an extended interview to the Guardian in HK, his
identity had been revealed. The arrival of the US extradition request was imminent. The Chinese
authorities told Snowden that they would have to send him to a US jail, to torture and death;
that the extradition treaty left them no option in his case. Only the fast footwork of Julian
Assange's brave assistant Sarah Harrison prevented this grim finale and delivered Snowden to
safe Moscow.]
ORDER IT NOW
While HK authorities were obliged to extradite Snowden, they weren't and couldn't extradite
numerous criminals from the mainland. This was an obvious wrong that had to be urgently
corrected, in the face of rising tension. And then the sleeping agents of the West woke up and
activated their networks. They had practically unlimited funds, not only from the West, but
also from the criminals who weren't particularly impecunious and were afraid of extradition.
After the demonstrations started, the Western media gave them maximum coverage, magnifying and
encouraging the mutineers.
Hundreds of articles, leading stories and editorials in important newspapers cheered and
encouraged the HK rebels. The People's War Is Coming in Hong Kong , editorialised the
New
York Times today. An amazing fact (that is if you are a fresh arrival from Mars): the same
newspaper and its numerous sisters paid no attention to the real People's War raging in France,
where the Gilets Jaunes have continued to fight for forty weeks against the austerity-imposing
Macron regime. 11 people were killed and 2,500 injured in France, but the Western media just
mumbled about the GJ antisemitism. Nothing new, indeed. The same media did not notice the
one-million-strong
demonstration against the US war on Iraq, paid little attention to Occupy Wall Street,
disregarded protests against US wars and interventions. One hundred thousand people marching in
New York would get no coverage if their purpose did not agree with the desires of the Real
Government; and alternatively, three thousand protesters in Moscow with its 12 million
population would be presented as the voice of the people challenging Vlad the Tyrant.
In its peculiar way, the media fulfills its purpose of keeping us informed. If mainstream
media reports on something, it usually lies; but if media keeps mum, you can bet it is
important and you are not encouraged to learn of it. It is especially true in case of popular
protests. How do you know they are lying? – Their lips are moving.
The biggest lie is calling the HK rebels marching under the Union Jack, "pro-democracy".
These guys wish to restore colonial rule, to be governed by their strict but fair round-eyed
overlords. It could be a bad or a good idea, but democracy it ain't. The second biggest lie is
the slogan Make Hong Kong Great Britain Again.
Hong Kong was never a part of Great Britain. This was never on offer, so it can't become
that again. Even the most adventure- and diversity-prone British politician won't make seven
million Chinese in a far-away territory British citizens with full rights, members of an
imperfect but real British democracy. HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to
make HK colony again.
With all these differences taken into account, this is as true for Moscow demos as well.
Moscow protesters dream of a Russia occupied by NATO forces, not of democracy. They believe
that they, pro-Western, educated, entrepreneurial, would form the comprador class and prosper
at the expense of hoi polloi. Mercifully, they aren't plentiful: the Russians already tried to
live under benign Western occupation between 1991 and 2000, when the IMF directed their
finances and American advisers from Harvard ran the state machinery. Smart and ruthless Jews
like Bill Browder , Boris
Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were
reduced to poverty.
Not many Russians would like to return to the Roaring Nineties, but some would. It is a
matter for the majority to prevent this aspiring minority to achieve its aspirations. Those who
can't take it will flee to Israel, as young Mr Yablonsky
who discovered his Jewish roots after two nights of police detention. He landed in jail for
violently fighting erection of a church in his town.
The Chinese will likewise sort out their HK affliction. It can be done if the government
does not promise to restrict its counteractions to painless and bloodless measures. Only the
real and imminent threat of painful and bloody suppression can make such measures unnecessary.
Likewise, only the imminent threat of no-deal Brexit could bring some sense into the stubborn
heads of the EU leaders. A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did
the Ukrainian state under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be
ruined, if its rulers are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.
We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf of
the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the New
York Times. It is that simple.
I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew how to deal with Tiananmen,
they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary cruelty and without hesitation
and prevarication. They weren't dilly-dallying when the US tried to
send to HK its warships , but flatly denied them the pleasure. They will overcome.
China should do a 'Kashmir' on Hong Kong. Open it fully to all the Chinese. Let Chinese go
there and march against Hong Kong snobs and wanna-be-whites.
That said, let's cut the Anglos some slack. Brit empire did lots of bad things but also
lots of good things. While HK was set up as colonial outpost and cooperated in terrible opium
trade, it was also a center of innovation and change that introduced all of China to new
ideas. Also, the trajectory of Chinese history since the 80s shows that it had much to learn
from Hong Kong and Singapore. Maoism was a disaster, and it also spawned Khmer Rouge that was
worse than French imperialism(that wasn't so bad). Also, back then, it was obvious that the
West was indeed far freer and saner than communist China. HK and Singapore set the template
for big China to follow.
But that was then, this is now. West is free? UK imprisons people for tweets. The West is
sane? France and UK welcome African invaders while banning people like Jared Taylor who stand
for survival of the West. Also, the West, under Jewish power, has moved into neo-imperialist
mode against Russia, Iran, and Middle East. And US media are not free. It is controlled by
Zionist oligarchs who impose a certain narrative, even utterly bogus ones like Russia
Collusion while working with other monopoly capitalists to shut down alternative news
sites.
And when globo-homo-mania is the highest 'spiritual' expression of the current West, it is
now crazy land.
This is why China must now crush Hong Kong. Don't send in the tanks. Just open the gates
and send 10 million mainlanders to march down the streets accusing HK snobs of being
comprador a-holes. That will do the trick. Turn Hong Kong into No-Bull House.
And what happened to Taiwan under globo-homo regime? It has 'gay marriage'. Chinese need
to go there and use maximum force to wipe out the decadent scum.
Some in the West complain about China's social credit system, and I agree it's bad, but we
got the same shit here. Ask Laura Loomer and Jared Taylor. 1/4 of corporations will not hire
people based on their support of Trump. Also, Chinese term for people with bad social credit
is mild compared to what Jewish elites call dissident Americans: 'deplorables', 'white
supremacist scum', 'white trash', 'neo nazi', etc. It's all very ironic since globalist Jews
are the new nazis who spread wars for Israel to destroy millions of lives.
I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that 75,000
people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his lack of
sophistication or credibility. I was a Visiting Professor at the Peking Union Medical College
in 1989 and I always assumed that the numbers of dead and injured were greatly exaggerated. I
asked many fellow Professors and students in Beijing for their opinions over the years. Many
of these were working in the local hospitals at the time. On average the response to me was
between 300-500 dead and injured. I have never had any reason to question this estimate. The
Wikileaks memo confirms this.
I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that
75,000 people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his
lack of sophistication or credibility.
Actually, the dishonesty or incompetence of our MSM is *vastly* greater than you're making
it out to be.
Over twenty years ago, the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post published a long
piece in the Columbia Journalism Review publicly admitted that the supposed "Tiananmen Square
Massacre" was just a media hoax/error, and that the claims of the PRC government were
probably correct:
Under the circumstances, it's difficult to believe that most MSM journalists interested in
the subject aren't well aware of the truth, and I've noticed that they usually choose their
words very carefully to avoid outright lies, but still implying something that is totally
incorrect. I'd assume that these implied falsehoods are then wildly exaggerated by ignorant
demagogues such as Bannon.
It's really astonishing that our MSM still continues to promote this "Big Lie" more than
two decades after the CJR admission ran.
Everyone knows that large numbers of people, including some PRC soldiers, were killed or
injured in the violent urban riots elsewhere in Beijing. I think the official death toll
claimed by the PRC government at the time was something like 300 killed, which seems pretty
plausible to me.
So if I'm reading this article right–Communist China so gooooood– how about those
65,000,000 Mao and his "Leaders" er, basically sort of er, murdered? Lets hear what they have
to say about the great China "leaders"? Oh yeah, we can't they killed them . Is this the take
away quote from Mr. Shamir?: "I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew
how to deal with Tiananmen, they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary
cruelty and without hesitation and prevarication." Yes, they do know "how to deal with
minority unrest" historically–65,000, 000 corpses is some real "dealing" -- no
"unnecessary cruelty"? (I also read recently of the sexual torture of Falun Gong
practitioners–brutal gang rapes and with instruments of torture–this is recent
and well, happening now I read– Is this also how to deal with "minority
unrest"–Do we cheer on China for this too? No "unnecessary cruelty" at work here
either? I mean you could point out that yes, there is definitely some of the Colonial
backlash he cites as to Hong Kong at work without praising how great China is at "dealing
with minorites" I think, that would have played a bit better, to me anyway . https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sexual-torture-of-detained-falun-dafa-adherents-rampant-rights-lawyer_2807772.html
Interviews of actual Hong Kongers suggest that their principal objection to extradition is
that residents of HK would then be subject to People's Courts rather than to the British
style courts of HK with all the legal trappings of the Foreign Devils (presumption of
innocence, rules of evidence, no hearsay, no secret trials, no anonymous accusers – all
that folderol).
@getaclue China's not
a communist country except in name. The Epoch Times is a Falun Gong mouthpiece that makes
stuff up. I don't support Mao but he is irrelevant today.
The reasons you list might motivate some of the protesters, but it can't be responsible for
this many of them. There IS a homegrown problem here and China would be foolish to ignore it.
The protester's motivations and their implications, as I see it:
1. Loss of prestige – Irrelevant, they'll get used to it
2. Colonial nostalgia – Dead end, open to mockery
3. Housing/economic issues – Manageable with subsidies and regulations, but
HK will have to give up some autonomy
4. Regional tribalism/xenophobia – Manageable, not unique to HK
5. US intervention – Dangerous but manageable with better PR & soft
power
6. Genuine belief in liberal democracy – Very dangerous, will cause national
decline similar to the West
@Brabantian They are
the ideal rat traps.
Even if Wikileaks wasn't a set-up, undoubtably they would be under close surveillance and/or
be infiltrated and compromised.
Snowden has been suspect in my mind when he purportedly left so much info to just one
journalist belonging to a sketchy outfit, and only a trickle of info came forth, while he's
celebrated all over. Many of us already knew about such program from good people like William
Binney.
As you say, there are real whisleblowers, and they are ignored, jailed or dead.
Goddamn Israel, this is an excellent piece of writing. You hit every nail on the head when it
comes to explaining why the troublemakers in Hong Kong are a bunch of useful idiots being
used by imperialist powers. These bastards really are house niggers, the kind of people who
would side with a distant foreign power over their own countrymen. Hats off to you good sir,
thank you for your clarity of thought.
@Commentator Mike
Exactly. The Chinese use the deep state to keep order and suppress crime; Washington uses it
to spread disorder (Antifa) and protect crime (BLM). There is a difference, you see!
I see no real difference between the English colonies and the previous Chinese colonies in
Asia this would be "the pot calling the kettle black", just the usual hypocrisy of state
actors.
The local HK people who live on the edge of these power structures are not the seeming
profiteers of any of this they exist in frameworks they can neither control nor escape escape
from so blaming them for being in a place not of their choosing is being disingenuous.
All I read is someone blaming children for the sins of the father.
On HK riots, there are some interesting writers giving some insight into US gov, CIA, UK gov,
MI6, Canada, Germany involvement in collabration with treason HKies.
The ZUS has started to purge & shut down pro-China-Russia Truth teller in FB,
tweeters, Google,
Those can read HKies Cantonese writing, here's one site where these HK rioters recruit,
organize & discuss where to meet, how to attack police, activities, and payment. https://lihkg.com/category/1?order=now
This is the truth of white shirt(local residents West called mobsters) vs black
shirt(rioters West called peaceful protestors). The residents of Yuan Lan district demanded
the rioters not to mess up their place. The black shirt challenge white shirt for fight by
spraying fire host and hurling vulgarity, ended get beaten up.
Any way, I was permanent banned from Quora, FB, even I am not related to China, just
because I exposed some of ZUS-India axis evils & lies with evidences in other topics.
Censorship is fully in placed.
HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to make HK colony again.
I haven't followed this closely, but – why? Why would so many Chinese want that? I
understand a couple of tycoons, but why would ethnic Chinese want a foreign rule?
Perhaps they- just speculating – don't care about full democracy, but are scared of
China's Big Brother policy of complete surveillance & a zombie slavery society. No one
with a functioning mind- and the Chinese, whatever one thinks of their hyper-nationalism
& a streak of robotic- groupthink- conformist culture – wants to live in a chaos;
but also, no one wants to live in a dystopian nightmare which is the fundamental social
project of the new China.
The latest, apaprently, from The Mouth (Sauron .):
.Four police officers were filmed drawing their guns after demonstrators were seen
chasing them with metal pipes .
.senior police officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week that
officers had been targeted and exposed online even while there was temporary peace on the
streets. The police said officers' personal data, contact information, home addresses, and
more had been shared online, and accused protesters of threatening officers' families .
Is anyone there thinking that as soon as they "neutralize" the LOCAL police force
SOMETHING else will come into the fray?
Probably not. Feels good.
This time it won't be Communist era conscripts of the regular Army.
I'd say good luck to those protesters but really can't. Wouldn't make any sense.
A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did the Ukrainian state
under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be ruined, if its rulers
are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.
Thank you, Me Shamir.
Your analogy of the house nigger is spot on and a accurate portrayal of the slave
mentality held by these protestors. It is the epitome of shamelessness and insanity to beg to
be enslaved. As a Hker, I am happy to say none of the people I associate with support the
protestors and these British house niggers are the filth of HK society.
You are absolutely right to point out a state that is not ready to use force will fail and
I think the situation have reached a critical point where some blood must be shed and some
examples to be made. There is a Chinese saying " People don't cry until they see the coffin."
Time to bring it on.
I never understood Mao and why he had to kill all those millions of people, I do now
The protests are also driven by personal autonomy desires.
Look at the micro level. My sister teaches English in Chengdu. Google, Gmail, You Tube,
What's App and Facebook are all blocked in China.
You have to download a VPN before you land to use any of these sites.
Everything online in China is done by WeChat. *Everything* . From video calls to pay your
utilities to banking. It's an open joke that WeChat is heavily monitored by the Party. It's
the meat of your social credit score- WeChat data.
However, in HK, there are servers where you can hop on FB, Google products and the
like.
HK has a more laisse faire vibe that huge enormous China. If you have never been, that
point can't be overstated. To make blanket statements about anything in China is
misleading.
Because China is another planet. HK was/ is a cosmopolitan outpost that had its own
identity- It does not want to be swallowed up by clodhopper spitting burping mainlanders
completely.
Most comments are idiotic (as is the article). True, Western players certainly have fomented
much of this; true, many (most?) protesters are violent & obnoxius; true, Chinese
national identity planners want to unify, step by step, all mainland (and not only them) Han
Chinese under one rule, fearing of some disintegration in the future.
But, having in mind what kind of society mainland China was & has become, Wittfogel's
remark on oriental despotism becomes pertinent .
The good citizens of classical Greece drew strength from the determination of two of their
countrymen, Sperthias and Bulis, to resist the lure of total power. On their way to Suza, the
Spartan envoys were met by Hydarnes, a high Persian official, who offered to make them mighty
in their homeland, if only they would attach themselves to the Great King, his despotic
master. To the benefit of Greece-and to the benefit of all free men-Herodotus has preserved
their answer. "Hydarnes," they said, "thou art a one-sided counselor. Thou hast experience of
half the matter; but the other half is beyond thy knowledge. A slave's life thou
understandest; but, never having tasted liberty, thou canst not tell whether it be sweet or
no. Ah! hadst thou known what freedom is, thou wouldst have bidden us fight for it, not with
the spear only. but with the battle-axe."
"Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable mainland coolies; he spoke
English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle sucking wealth out of the
mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands."
HK is having trouble competing with it's closest peer competitor Singapore. Some of the
reason for that is a legal framework that disadvantages HK. The basis of HK real estate
market attractiveness over other locations in China and the world is a legal framework
separate from China. While the extraction treaty seems reasonable at first, remember HK's
extradition treaties have to compete with Singaporean, Taiwanese, and Australian extradition
treaties. A curiosity of the extradition treaty is HK is already in China, so why the need to
extradite people to somewhere else in China?
China might or might not be able to industrialize its economy through central planning.
But one industry they have not been able to centrally plan is movies and entertainment. How
is it that in the past with nothing HK had a top tier movie industry, Bruce Lee, but now
seems to have nothing.
IMO, mainland Chinese authorities just don't understand the HK economy and are mostly
chosing policies they consider convenient.
"Smart and ruthless Jews like Bill Browder, Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their
fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were reduced to poverty."
That is the way the WASP Empire, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, provides freedom.
Send your money to VDARE so it can call for more WASP Empire – which the WASP and
Jewish Elites will fill with as many non-whites as they can entice in order to smash the
white trash down forever, so that even more Jews become multi-billionaires. And we all can
delight in speaking English, the language of international Jewry since WW2.
@Wally "HK was taken
from China, China has the right to take it back."
Yes, but not until 2047, apparently:
"One country, two systems" is a constitutional principle formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the
Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), for the reunification of China
during the early 1980s. He suggested that there would be only one China, but distinct Chinese
regions such as Hong Kong and Macau could retain their own economic and administrative
systems, while the rest of the PRC (or "Mainland China") uses the socialism with Chinese
characteristics system. Under the principle, each of the two regions could continue to have
its own governmental system, legal, economic and financial affairs, including trade relations
with foreign countries, all of which are independent from those of the Mainland ."
" .Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom, ruled by a governor appointed by the
monarchy of the United Kingdom, for 156 years from 1841 (except for four years of Japanese
occupation during WWII) until 1997, when it was returned to Chinese sovereignty. China agreed
to accept some conditions, as is stipulated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, such as
the drafting and adoption of Hong Kong's "mini-constitution" Basic Law before its return. The
Hong Kong Basic Law ensured that Hong Kong will retain its capitalist economic system and own
currency (the Hong Kong Dollar), legal system, legislative system, and people's rights and
freedom for fifty years, as a special administrative region (SAR) of China for 50 years.
Set to expire in 2047, the current arrangement has permitted Hong Kong to function as its
own entity under the name "Hong Kong, China" in many international settings ."
Its, "interesting" that[ unless I somehow missed it], this important detail was completely
omitted from this very poorly written article, and from [at least] the first 56 comments in
the thread.
From the comments so far, I notice that the usual Zionist, pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli crew
around here (PeterAUS, Corvinus, Bardon Kaldian, TKK) also all happen to be virulently
anti-China.
Quite an interesting correlation. It seems to suggest something
We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf
of the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the
New York Times. It is that simple.
Well put Sir.
And spot on true.
It is really the perfect metric for understanding the underlying motivations and relative
merit, (or lack there of) for any geopolitical event or movement.
Should the people of Crimea be able to determine their own destiny?
Just look to the NYT to understand the nuances of that region and conflict. If they say
Crimea is foundering under Russian tyranny, then you can be 100% certain the opposite is the
truth.
Did the US foment democracy in (Yats is the guy) Ukraine? Read the NYT, and it all gets
spelled out. Assad's chemical attacks, moderate rebels.. From MH17 to 'Russian aggression',
you can find 'all the truth that's fit to print'. Only inversed.
Hong Kong, Donbas, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Charlottesville, Yellow Vests, Gaza, Russian
hacking and collusion.. and on and on and on. It's an invaluable tool for understanding our
times and the motivations and principles (or lack there of) being brought to bear.
And as you mention, for the really salient things, (like serial aggressive wars
based on lies, treasonous atrocities writ large, and assorted war crimes, DNC corruption, GOP
corruption, et al ad nauseam), one must listen to the crickets, who speak thunderously
of these things, with their telling silence.
Rampant white supremacists shooting people right and left, are bull-horned by the
screeching -silence over every POC who's a mass-shooter'.
By carefully not reporting some things, and outright lies and distortions with others, the
NYT has become an invaluable tool for glimmering the ((moral abomination)) of our times.
We should all be very grateful for their solid and predictable efforts.
– That agreement does not give complete independence & sovereignty to HK.
– That agreement does not allow rioters to engage in destructive, disruptive, violent
actions.
– That agreement mandates that the HK administration maintain order, which heretofore
they have not.
– Therefore that agreement has been violated, invalidated by the HK administration.
China has the right & responsibility to maintain order in HK. HK is theirs, they are
rightfully taking it back.
Slavery had some good aspects for those chaps who had it rather good. A colonial setup is
the next best thing to slavery, and it also holds its attraction for people who knew how to
place themselves just below the sahibs and above the run-of-the-mill natives. The Hong Kong
revolt is the mutiny of wannabe house niggers who feel that the gap between them and the
natives is rapidly vanishing. Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable
mainland coolies; he spoke English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle
sucking wealth out of the mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands. But now
he has no advantage compared to the people of Shanghai or Beijing. There is huge swelling of
wealth in the big cities of Red China. The Chinese dress well, travel abroad, and they do not
need HK mediation for dealing with the West. Beijing had offered HK a fair deal of [relative]
equality; nothing would be taken from them, but the shrinking gap is not only unavoidable, but
desirable, too.
However, HK had been the imperial bridgehead in China for too long. Its people were
complicit, nay, willing partners in every Western crime against China, beginning with dumping
opium and sucking out Chinese wealth. Millions of opium addicts, of ruined families and
households nearly destroyed the Middle Kingdom, and each of them added to HK prosperity. The
blood, sweat and labour of all China abundantly supplied the island. HK was the first of the
Treaty Ports, and the last to return home. Its populace was not thoroughly detoxed; they
weren't ideologically prepared for a new life as equals.
Chairman Mao harboured hard suspicions against comprador cities, the cities and the people
who prospered due to their collaboration with the imperialist enemy. He cleansed them with
communist and patriotic re-education; recalcitrant compradors were sent to help peasants in
far-away villages in order to reconnect with the people. Mao's successors had a strong if
misplaced belief in Chinese nationalism as a universal remedy; they thought the Chinese of HK,
Macau and Taiwan would join them the moment the colonial yoke failed. This was an
over-optimistic assessment. The imperialist forces didn't give up on their former house slaves,
and the moment they needed to activate them against independent China they knew where to
look.
Their time came as the trade conflict between the US and China warmed up. The secret
government of the West aka Deep State came to the conclusion that China is getting way too big
for its boots. It is not satisfied with making cheap gadgets for Walmart customers. It is
producing state-of-art devices that compete with American goods and, what's worse, their
devices are not accessible for NSA surveillance. The Chinese company Huawei came under attack;
sanctions and custom duties followed in train. When the Yuan eased under the strain, the
Chinese were accused of manipulating their currency. It is a strong charge: when Japan was
attacked by the West in the 1990s and the Yen had eased as expected, this claim forced Tokyo to
keep the Yen high and take Japan into a twenty-year-long slump. But China did not retreat.
Then the supreme power unleashed its well-practiced weapon: they turned to foment unrest in
China and gave it a lot of space in the media. At first, they played up the fate of the Uygur
Islamists, but it had little success. The Uygur are not numerous, they are not even a majority
in their traditional area; their influence in China is limited. Despite headlines in the
liberal Western media proclaiming that millions of Uygur are locked up in concentration camps,
the impact was nil. No important Muslim state took up this cause.
The anniversary of Tiananmen came (in beginning of June) and went without a hitch. For good
reason: the alleged 'massacre' is a myth, as the Chinese always knew and we know now for
certain thanks to publication of a relevant US Embassy cable by Wikileaks.
There were no thousands of students flattened by tanks. A very few died fighting the army, but
China had evaded the bitter fate of the USSR. In China proper the event had been almost
forgotten. A few participants retell of their experiences to Western audiences, but the desired
turmoil did not materialise.
And then came the time for HK. It is an autonomous part of China; it had not been
re-educated; there are enough people who remember the good days of colonial slavery. The actual
spark for the mutiny, the planned extradition treaty, was exceedingly weak. For the last
decade, HK became the chosen place of refuge for mainland criminals, for HK had extradition
treaties with the US and Britain, but not with the mainland. This had to be remedied.
[The extradition treaty had played an important role in the Snowden case. An ex-CIA spy
Edward Snowden decided to reveal to the world the extent of the NSA surveillance we all are
subjects of. He chose the Guardian newspaper for his revelations, probably because of
the Wikileaks precedent. When he gave an extended interview to the Guardian in HK, his
identity had been revealed. The arrival of the US extradition request was imminent. The Chinese
authorities told Snowden that they would have to send him to a US jail, to torture and death;
that the extradition treaty left them no option in his case. Only the fast footwork of Julian
Assange's brave assistant Sarah Harrison prevented this grim finale and delivered Snowden to
safe Moscow.]
ORDER IT NOW
While HK authorities were obliged to extradite Snowden, they weren't and couldn't extradite
numerous criminals from the mainland. This was an obvious wrong that had to be urgently
corrected, in the face of rising tension. And then the sleeping agents of the West woke up and
activated their networks. They had practically unlimited funds, not only from the West, but
also from the criminals who weren't particularly impecunious and were afraid of extradition.
After the demonstrations started, the Western media gave them maximum coverage, magnifying and
encouraging the mutineers.
Hundreds of articles, leading stories and editorials in important newspapers cheered and
encouraged the HK rebels. The People's War Is Coming in Hong Kong , editorialised the
New
York Times today. An amazing fact (that is if you are a fresh arrival from Mars): the same
newspaper and its numerous sisters paid no attention to the real People's War raging in France,
where the Gilets Jaunes have continued to fight for forty weeks against the austerity-imposing
Macron regime. 11 people were killed and 2,500 injured in France, but the Western media just
mumbled about the GJ antisemitism. Nothing new, indeed. The same media did not notice the
one-million-strong
demonstration against the US war on Iraq, paid little attention to Occupy Wall Street,
disregarded protests against US wars and interventions. One hundred thousand people marching in
New York would get no coverage if their purpose did not agree with the desires of the Real
Government; and alternatively, three thousand protesters in Moscow with its 12 million
population would be presented as the voice of the people challenging Vlad the Tyrant.
In its peculiar way, the media fulfills its purpose of keeping us informed. If mainstream
media reports on something, it usually lies; but if media keeps mum, you can bet it is
important and you are not encouraged to learn of it. It is especially true in case of popular
protests. How do you know they are lying? – Their lips are moving.
The biggest lie is calling the HK rebels marching under the Union Jack, "pro-democracy".
These guys wish to restore colonial rule, to be governed by their strict but fair round-eyed
overlords. It could be a bad or a good idea, but democracy it ain't. The second biggest lie is
the slogan Make Hong Kong Great Britain Again.
Hong Kong was never a part of Great Britain. This was never on offer, so it can't become
that again. Even the most adventure- and diversity-prone British politician won't make seven
million Chinese in a far-away territory British citizens with full rights, members of an
imperfect but real British democracy. HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to
make HK colony again.
With all these differences taken into account, this is as true for Moscow demos as well.
Moscow protesters dream of a Russia occupied by NATO forces, not of democracy. They believe
that they, pro-Western, educated, entrepreneurial, would form the comprador class and prosper
at the expense of hoi polloi. Mercifully, they aren't plentiful: the Russians already tried to
live under benign Western occupation between 1991 and 2000, when the IMF directed their
finances and American advisers from Harvard ran the state machinery. Smart and ruthless Jews
like Bill Browder , Boris
Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were
reduced to poverty.
Not many Russians would like to return to the Roaring Nineties, but some would. It is a
matter for the majority to prevent this aspiring minority to achieve its aspirations. Those who
can't take it will flee to Israel, as young Mr Yablonsky
who discovered his Jewish roots after two nights of police detention. He landed in jail for
violently fighting erection of a church in his town.
The Chinese will likewise sort out their HK affliction. It can be done if the government
does not promise to restrict its counteractions to painless and bloodless measures. Only the
real and imminent threat of painful and bloody suppression can make such measures unnecessary.
Likewise, only the imminent threat of no-deal Brexit could bring some sense into the stubborn
heads of the EU leaders. A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did
the Ukrainian state under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be
ruined, if its rulers are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.
We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf of
the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the New
York Times. It is that simple.
I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew how to deal with Tiananmen,
they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary cruelty and without hesitation
and prevarication. They weren't dilly-dallying when the US tried to
send to HK its warships , but flatly denied them the pleasure. They will overcome.
China should do a 'Kashmir' on Hong Kong. Open it fully to all the Chinese. Let Chinese go
there and march against Hong Kong snobs and wanna-be-whites.
That said, let's cut the Anglos some slack. Brit empire did lots of bad things but also
lots of good things. While HK was set up as colonial outpost and cooperated in terrible opium
trade, it was also a center of innovation and change that introduced all of China to new
ideas. Also, the trajectory of Chinese history since the 80s shows that it had much to learn
from Hong Kong and Singapore. Maoism was a disaster, and it also spawned Khmer Rouge that was
worse than French imperialism(that wasn't so bad). Also, back then, it was obvious that the
West was indeed far freer and saner than communist China. HK and Singapore set the template
for big China to follow.
But that was then, this is now. West is free? UK imprisons people for tweets. The West is
sane? France and UK welcome African invaders while banning people like Jared Taylor who stand
for survival of the West. Also, the West, under Jewish power, has moved into neo-imperialist
mode against Russia, Iran, and Middle East. And US media are not free. It is controlled by
Zionist oligarchs who impose a certain narrative, even utterly bogus ones like Russia
Collusion while working with other monopoly capitalists to shut down alternative news
sites.
And when globo-homo-mania is the highest 'spiritual' expression of the current West, it is
now crazy land.
This is why China must now crush Hong Kong. Don't send in the tanks. Just open the gates
and send 10 million mainlanders to march down the streets accusing HK snobs of being
comprador a-holes. That will do the trick. Turn Hong Kong into No-Bull House.
And what happened to Taiwan under globo-homo regime? It has 'gay marriage'. Chinese need
to go there and use maximum force to wipe out the decadent scum.
Some in the West complain about China's social credit system, and I agree it's bad, but we
got the same shit here. Ask Laura Loomer and Jared Taylor. 1/4 of corporations will not hire
people based on their support of Trump. Also, Chinese term for people with bad social credit
is mild compared to what Jewish elites call dissident Americans: 'deplorables', 'white
supremacist scum', 'white trash', 'neo nazi', etc. It's all very ironic since globalist Jews
are the new nazis who spread wars for Israel to destroy millions of lives.
I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that 75,000
people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his lack of
sophistication or credibility. I was a Visiting Professor at the Peking Union Medical College
in 1989 and I always assumed that the numbers of dead and injured were greatly exaggerated. I
asked many fellow Professors and students in Beijing for their opinions over the years. Many
of these were working in the local hospitals at the time. On average the response to me was
between 300-500 dead and injured. I have never had any reason to question this estimate. The
Wikileaks memo confirms this.
I saw Bannon on TV recently around the time of the Tiananmen anniversary. He said that
75,000 people were killed in the Tiananmen incident. This tells you something about his
lack of sophistication or credibility.
Actually, the dishonesty or incompetence of our MSM is *vastly* greater than you're making
it out to be.
Over twenty years ago, the Beijing bureau chief of the Washington Post published a long
piece in the Columbia Journalism Review publicly admitted that the supposed "Tiananmen Square
Massacre" was just a media hoax/error, and that the claims of the PRC government were
probably correct:
Under the circumstances, it's difficult to believe that most MSM journalists interested in
the subject aren't well aware of the truth, and I've noticed that they usually choose their
words very carefully to avoid outright lies, but still implying something that is totally
incorrect. I'd assume that these implied falsehoods are then wildly exaggerated by ignorant
demagogues such as Bannon.
It's really astonishing that our MSM still continues to promote this "Big Lie" more than
two decades after the CJR admission ran.
Everyone knows that large numbers of people, including some PRC soldiers, were killed or
injured in the violent urban riots elsewhere in Beijing. I think the official death toll
claimed by the PRC government at the time was something like 300 killed, which seems pretty
plausible to me.
So if I'm reading this article right–Communist China so gooooood– how about those
65,000,000 Mao and his "Leaders" er, basically sort of er, murdered? Lets hear what they have
to say about the great China "leaders"? Oh yeah, we can't they killed them . Is this the take
away quote from Mr. Shamir?: "I would not worry overmuch for China. The Chinese leaders knew
how to deal with Tiananmen, they knew how to deal with minority unrest, without unnecessary
cruelty and without hesitation and prevarication." Yes, they do know "how to deal with
minority unrest" historically–65,000, 000 corpses is some real "dealing" -- no
"unnecessary cruelty"? (I also read recently of the sexual torture of Falun Gong
practitioners–brutal gang rapes and with instruments of torture–this is recent
and well, happening now I read– Is this also how to deal with "minority
unrest"–Do we cheer on China for this too? No "unnecessary cruelty" at work here
either? I mean you could point out that yes, there is definitely some of the Colonial
backlash he cites as to Hong Kong at work without praising how great China is at "dealing
with minorites" I think, that would have played a bit better, to me anyway . https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/the-legacy-mao-zedong-mass-murder
https://www.theepochtimes.com/sexual-torture-of-detained-falun-dafa-adherents-rampant-rights-lawyer_2807772.html
Interviews of actual Hong Kongers suggest that their principal objection to extradition is
that residents of HK would then be subject to People's Courts rather than to the British
style courts of HK with all the legal trappings of the Foreign Devils (presumption of
innocence, rules of evidence, no hearsay, no secret trials, no anonymous accusers – all
that folderol).
@getaclue China's not
a communist country except in name. The Epoch Times is a Falun Gong mouthpiece that makes
stuff up. I don't support Mao but he is irrelevant today.
The reasons you list might motivate some of the protesters, but it can't be responsible for
this many of them. There IS a homegrown problem here and China would be foolish to ignore it.
The protester's motivations and their implications, as I see it:
1. Loss of prestige – Irrelevant, they'll get used to it
2. Colonial nostalgia – Dead end, open to mockery
3. Housing/economic issues – Manageable with subsidies and regulations, but
HK will have to give up some autonomy
4. Regional tribalism/xenophobia – Manageable, not unique to HK
5. US intervention – Dangerous but manageable with better PR & soft
power
6. Genuine belief in liberal democracy – Very dangerous, will cause national
decline similar to the West
@Brabantian They are
the ideal rat traps.
Even if Wikileaks wasn't a set-up, undoubtably they would be under close surveillance and/or
be infiltrated and compromised.
Snowden has been suspect in my mind when he purportedly left so much info to just one
journalist belonging to a sketchy outfit, and only a trickle of info came forth, while he's
celebrated all over. Many of us already knew about such program from good people like William
Binney.
As you say, there are real whisleblowers, and they are ignored, jailed or dead.
Goddamn Israel, this is an excellent piece of writing. You hit every nail on the head when it
comes to explaining why the troublemakers in Hong Kong are a bunch of useful idiots being
used by imperialist powers. These bastards really are house niggers, the kind of people who
would side with a distant foreign power over their own countrymen. Hats off to you good sir,
thank you for your clarity of thought.
@Commentator Mike
Exactly. The Chinese use the deep state to keep order and suppress crime; Washington uses it
to spread disorder (Antifa) and protect crime (BLM). There is a difference, you see!
I see no real difference between the English colonies and the previous Chinese colonies in
Asia this would be "the pot calling the kettle black", just the usual hypocrisy of state
actors.
The local HK people who live on the edge of these power structures are not the seeming
profiteers of any of this they exist in frameworks they can neither control nor escape escape
from so blaming them for being in a place not of their choosing is being disingenuous.
All I read is someone blaming children for the sins of the father.
On HK riots, there are some interesting writers giving some insight into US gov, CIA, UK gov,
MI6, Canada, Germany involvement in collabration with treason HKies.
The ZUS has started to purge & shut down pro-China-Russia Truth teller in FB,
tweeters, Google,
Those can read HKies Cantonese writing, here's one site where these HK rioters recruit,
organize & discuss where to meet, how to attack police, activities, and payment. https://lihkg.com/category/1?order=now
This is the truth of white shirt(local residents West called mobsters) vs black
shirt(rioters West called peaceful protestors). The residents of Yuan Lan district demanded
the rioters not to mess up their place. The black shirt challenge white shirt for fight by
spraying fire host and hurling vulgarity, ended get beaten up.
Any way, I was permanent banned from Quora, FB, even I am not related to China, just
because I exposed some of ZUS-India axis evils & lies with evidences in other topics.
Censorship is fully in placed.
HK was a colony; this is what the marchers aspire to, to make HK colony again.
I haven't followed this closely, but – why? Why would so many Chinese want that? I
understand a couple of tycoons, but why would ethnic Chinese want a foreign rule?
Perhaps they- just speculating – don't care about full democracy, but are scared of
China's Big Brother policy of complete surveillance & a zombie slavery society. No one
with a functioning mind- and the Chinese, whatever one thinks of their hyper-nationalism
& a streak of robotic- groupthink- conformist culture – wants to live in a chaos;
but also, no one wants to live in a dystopian nightmare which is the fundamental social
project of the new China.
The latest, apaprently, from The Mouth (Sauron .):
.Four police officers were filmed drawing their guns after demonstrators were seen
chasing them with metal pipes .
.senior police officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said this week that
officers had been targeted and exposed online even while there was temporary peace on the
streets. The police said officers' personal data, contact information, home addresses, and
more had been shared online, and accused protesters of threatening officers' families .
Is anyone there thinking that as soon as they "neutralize" the LOCAL police force
SOMETHING else will come into the fray?
Probably not. Feels good.
This time it won't be Communist era conscripts of the regular Army.
I'd say good luck to those protesters but really can't. Wouldn't make any sense.
A state that is not ready to use force will necessarily fail, as did the Ukrainian state
under Mr Yanukowych in 2014. Blood will be shed and the state will be ruined, if its rulers
are too squeamish to stop the rebellion.
Thank you, Me Shamir.
Your analogy of the house nigger is spot on and a accurate portrayal of the slave
mentality held by these protestors. It is the epitome of shamelessness and insanity to beg to
be enslaved. As a Hker, I am happy to say none of the people I associate with support the
protestors and these British house niggers are the filth of HK society.
You are absolutely right to point out a state that is not ready to use force will fail and
I think the situation have reached a critical point where some blood must be shed and some
examples to be made. There is a Chinese saying " People don't cry until they see the coffin."
Time to bring it on.
I never understood Mao and why he had to kill all those millions of people, I do now
The protests are also driven by personal autonomy desires.
Look at the micro level. My sister teaches English in Chengdu. Google, Gmail, You Tube,
What's App and Facebook are all blocked in China.
You have to download a VPN before you land to use any of these sites.
Everything online in China is done by WeChat. *Everything* . From video calls to pay your
utilities to banking. It's an open joke that WeChat is heavily monitored by the Party. It's
the meat of your social credit score- WeChat data.
However, in HK, there are servers where you can hop on FB, Google products and the
like.
HK has a more laisse faire vibe that huge enormous China. If you have never been, that
point can't be overstated. To make blanket statements about anything in China is
misleading.
Because China is another planet. HK was/ is a cosmopolitan outpost that had its own
identity- It does not want to be swallowed up by clodhopper spitting burping mainlanders
completely.
Most comments are idiotic (as is the article). True, Western players certainly have fomented
much of this; true, many (most?) protesters are violent & obnoxius; true, Chinese
national identity planners want to unify, step by step, all mainland (and not only them) Han
Chinese under one rule, fearing of some disintegration in the future.
But, having in mind what kind of society mainland China was & has become, Wittfogel's
remark on oriental despotism becomes pertinent .
The good citizens of classical Greece drew strength from the determination of two of their
countrymen, Sperthias and Bulis, to resist the lure of total power. On their way to Suza, the
Spartan envoys were met by Hydarnes, a high Persian official, who offered to make them mighty
in their homeland, if only they would attach themselves to the Great King, his despotic
master. To the benefit of Greece-and to the benefit of all free men-Herodotus has preserved
their answer. "Hydarnes," they said, "thou art a one-sided counselor. Thou hast experience of
half the matter; but the other half is beyond thy knowledge. A slave's life thou
understandest; but, never having tasted liberty, thou canst not tell whether it be sweet or
no. Ah! hadst thou known what freedom is, thou wouldst have bidden us fight for it, not with
the spear only. but with the battle-axe."
"Once, a HK resident was head and shoulders above the miserable mainland coolies; he spoke
English, he had smart devices, he had his place in the tentacle sucking wealth out of the
mainland, and some of that wealth stuck to his sweaty hands."
HK is having trouble competing with it's closest peer competitor Singapore. Some of the
reason for that is a legal framework that disadvantages HK. The basis of HK real estate
market attractiveness over other locations in China and the world is a legal framework
separate from China. While the extraction treaty seems reasonable at first, remember HK's
extradition treaties have to compete with Singaporean, Taiwanese, and Australian extradition
treaties. A curiosity of the extradition treaty is HK is already in China, so why the need to
extradite people to somewhere else in China?
China might or might not be able to industrialize its economy through central planning.
But one industry they have not been able to centrally plan is movies and entertainment. How
is it that in the past with nothing HK had a top tier movie industry, Bruce Lee, but now
seems to have nothing.
IMO, mainland Chinese authorities just don't understand the HK economy and are mostly
chosing policies they consider convenient.
"Smart and ruthless Jews like Bill Browder, Boris Berezovsky, Roman Abramovich made their
fortunes, but Russia was ruined and its people were reduced to poverty."
That is the way the WASP Empire, the Anglo-Zionist Empire, provides freedom.
Send your money to VDARE so it can call for more WASP Empire – which the WASP and
Jewish Elites will fill with as many non-whites as they can entice in order to smash the
white trash down forever, so that even more Jews become multi-billionaires. And we all can
delight in speaking English, the language of international Jewry since WW2.
@Wally "HK was taken
from China, China has the right to take it back."
Yes, but not until 2047, apparently:
"One country, two systems" is a constitutional principle formulated by Deng Xiaoping, the
Paramount Leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC), for the reunification of China
during the early 1980s. He suggested that there would be only one China, but distinct Chinese
regions such as Hong Kong and Macau could retain their own economic and administrative
systems, while the rest of the PRC (or "Mainland China") uses the socialism with Chinese
characteristics system. Under the principle, each of the two regions could continue to have
its own governmental system, legal, economic and financial affairs, including trade relations
with foreign countries, all of which are independent from those of the Mainland ."
" .Hong Kong was a colony of the United Kingdom, ruled by a governor appointed by the
monarchy of the United Kingdom, for 156 years from 1841 (except for four years of Japanese
occupation during WWII) until 1997, when it was returned to Chinese sovereignty. China agreed
to accept some conditions, as is stipulated in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, such as
the drafting and adoption of Hong Kong's "mini-constitution" Basic Law before its return. The
Hong Kong Basic Law ensured that Hong Kong will retain its capitalist economic system and own
currency (the Hong Kong Dollar), legal system, legislative system, and people's rights and
freedom for fifty years, as a special administrative region (SAR) of China for 50 years.
Set to expire in 2047, the current arrangement has permitted Hong Kong to function as its
own entity under the name "Hong Kong, China" in many international settings ."
Its, "interesting" that[ unless I somehow missed it], this important detail was completely
omitted from this very poorly written article, and from [at least] the first 56 comments in
the thread.
From the comments so far, I notice that the usual Zionist, pro-Jewish, pro-Israeli crew
around here (PeterAUS, Corvinus, Bardon Kaldian, TKK) also all happen to be virulently
anti-China.
Quite an interesting correlation. It seems to suggest something
We can distinguish a real people's rising and foreign-inspired interventions on behalf
of the compradors. The first one will be silenced while the second will be glorified by the
New York Times. It is that simple.
Well put Sir.
And spot on true.
It is really the perfect metric for understanding the underlying motivations and relative
merit, (or lack there of) for any geopolitical event or movement.
Should the people of Crimea be able to determine their own destiny?
Just look to the NYT to understand the nuances of that region and conflict. If they say
Crimea is foundering under Russian tyranny, then you can be 100% certain the opposite is the
truth.
Did the US foment democracy in (Yats is the guy) Ukraine? Read the NYT, and it all gets
spelled out. Assad's chemical attacks, moderate rebels.. From MH17 to 'Russian aggression',
you can find 'all the truth that's fit to print'. Only inversed.
Hong Kong, Donbas, Iran, Syria, Yemen, Charlottesville, Yellow Vests, Gaza, Russian
hacking and collusion.. and on and on and on. It's an invaluable tool for understanding our
times and the motivations and principles (or lack there of) being brought to bear.
And as you mention, for the really salient things, (like serial aggressive wars
based on lies, treasonous atrocities writ large, and assorted war crimes, DNC corruption, GOP
corruption, et al ad nauseam), one must listen to the crickets, who speak thunderously
of these things, with their telling silence.
Rampant white supremacists shooting people right and left, are bull-horned by the
screeching -silence over every POC who's a mass-shooter'.
By carefully not reporting some things, and outright lies and distortions with others, the
NYT has become an invaluable tool for glimmering the ((moral abomination)) of our times.
We should all be very grateful for their solid and predictable efforts.
– That agreement does not give complete independence & sovereignty to HK.
– That agreement does not allow rioters to engage in destructive, disruptive, violent
actions.
– That agreement mandates that the HK administration maintain order, which heretofore
they have not.
– Therefore that agreement has been violated, invalidated by the HK administration.
China has the right & responsibility to maintain order in HK. HK is theirs, they are
rightfully taking it back.
The main problem was the the USA elite after the dissolution of the USSR was hell-bent on world dominance. And Clinton
was in the vanguard of this trend.
Clinton has pretty destructive, toxic legacy, is not he? He and his administration
essentially acted as a short sited and greedy gangster and he sowed the teeth of dragon into US-Russia relations.
Clinton tried to exploit Russian weakness during this period to the fullest extent possible,. This is the policy similar to
policy of GB toward Germany after WWI. In short Clinton was a typical imperialist from the very beginning and like all subsequent
Presidents valued international treaties and obligation only when they benefited the USA. The stance that illegal bombing of
Serbia only confirmed. At this point by Nuremberg standards he and all top official ion his administration and first of all
Madeline not so bright Albright became war criminals. The fact they they were not prosecuted is just a historical aberration
stemming from the dominant USA position at this time.
Essentially Clinton transformed NATO into aggressive alliance which is an expansion of the USA military.
Notable quotes:
"... As President Bill Clinton repeatedly remarked, the two key questions about enlargement were when and how ..."
Newly available sources show how the 1993–95 debate over the best means of expanding
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization unfolded inside the Clinton administration. This
evidence comes from documents recently declassified by the Clinton Presidential Library, the
Defense Department, and the State Department because of appeals by the author.
As President Bill Clinton repeatedly remarked, the two key questions about enlargement
were when and how . The sources make apparent that, during a critical decision making
period twenty-five years ago, supporters of a relatively swift conferral of full membership to
a narrow range of countries outmaneuvered proponents of a slower, phased conferral of limited
membership to a wide range of states.
Pleas from Central and Eastern European leaders, missteps by Russian President Boris
Yeltsin, and victory by the pro-expansion Republican Party in the 1994 U.S. congressional
election all helped advocates of full-membership enlargement to win.
The documents also reveal the surprising impact of Ukrainian politics on this debate and the
complex roles played by both Strobe Talbott, a U.S. ambassador and later deputy secretary of
state, and Andrei Kozyrev, the Russian foreign minister.
Finally, the sources suggest ways in which the debate's outcome remains significant for
transatlantic and U.S.-Russian relations today.
... ... ...
In other words, the Bush administration performed the first “ratcheting down” of options, a process not without its costs. It
raised the question, controversial to this day, of whether the Bush administration promised Moscow that, in exchange for
tolerating the extension of NATO across a united Germany, the alliance would not seek further expansion eastward. Opinions on
this topic range from absolutely not to absolutely yes.15
... ... ...
Without advance warning, Yeltsin decided to vent his frustrations publicly at the Budapest summit with Clinton in attendance.
The Russian president accused the United States, in the interest of NATO expansion, of risking a “‘cold peace’” to follow the
Cold War.108
On the flight back from Budapest to Washington, Talbott recalled that the president “was furious at his foreign-policy team for
dragging him across the Atlantic to serve as a punching bag for Yeltsin.”
... ... ...
The shift in U.S. thinking unsurprisingly contributed to more tensions with Moscow, as evidenced by Talbott's subsequent
negotiations. Kozyrev tried to convince Talbott that a better idea would be to transform NATO into “a collective security
organization rather than a vehicle for containment” by amending the North Atlantic Treaty.122
Talbott rejected the idea, saying “no way are we going to entertain the possibility of redefining NATO in any way that
compromises its basic mission.”123
Put bluntly, “We're not in the business of having to ‘compensate’ Russia or buy it off. Russia is not doing us a favor by
allowing NATO to expand.”124
...Finally, interacting with the other five factors was President Clinton's increasing sympathy to the appeals of
CEE leaders, which inclined him toward those aides pushing for full Article 5 expansion, and his personal optimism that Russia
would eventually tolerate enlargement.
...In Perry's view, arms control—most notably, START II, which would have eliminated two-thirds of the U.S. and Russian
arsenals, but never went into effect—ended up being “‘a casualty of NATO expansion’” and of fighting between the Kremlin and the
Duma.139
START III suffered a similar fate, not even progressing to a signing. Looking back in 2015, Perry concluded: “The downsides of
early NATO membership for Eastern European nations were even worse than I had feared.”140
.... Viewed from twenty-five years on, with U.S.-Russian confrontation on the rise, democracy crumbling in Hungary
and Poland, and U.S. tanks returning to Europe, there is room for doubt. Given that the window of opportunity for changes is now
firmly shut, however, NATO must make the best of the status quo; for the foreseeable future, confrontation with Russia is once
again the order of the day.
This background text was prepared in the context of the Kuala Lumpur MH17 Conference
entitled MH17: The Quest for Justice, organized by JUST, the PGPF and the CRG.
The underlying objective is to examine the evidence, reveal the truth and uphold the rule
of law.
Today, August 17th 2019, our thoughts are with the families of the victims of the
Malaysian Airlines MH17 tragedy. The Conference is dedicated to the memory of the
victims.
It is also a national tragedy for the people of Malaysia. The downing of MH17 with 283
passengers and 15 crew on board, took place barely a few months following the mysterious
disappearance of Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 after departing on March 8, 2014 from Kuala
Lumpur for Beijing, with 227 passengers and 12 crew members on board.
It is worth recalling that immediately after the MH17 plane crash on July 17 2014, prior
to the conduct of a preliminary investigation, Secretary of State John Kerry and US Ambassador
to the UN Samantha Power pointed their finger at Moscow without a shred of evidence. In turn,
the allegations directed against Russia were used to justify the imposition of sweeping
economic sanctions against the Russian Federation.
I'm sure that had Michael Hudson accepted a position with the CIA, he would not have been
the first or the last person with Marxist, Trotskyist or even more extreme (for want of a
better description) socialist connections to have worked for the agency.
The level of "experts" is pretty dismal. While some quotes are apt, the general level is horrible for such an important
topic., Not a single one put Putin career in context of ascendance of neoliberalism from 1990 to 2007 and then crash and decline
with the USA economics entering the period of secular stagnation. not a single one.
Most of those are neocons or some king of imperialists who believe in God given right for the USA to dominate the globe.
That's another problem.
Notable quotes:
"... At the same time, with the demands of the Ukraine crisis on the Russian military, it will be stretched to sustain operations in Syria. Given the risks, the buildup is not likely a cynical play to whip up patriotic fervor and bolster Putin's domestic rating; it is rather an effort to defend Russian national interests. ..."
"... Putin and the Kremlin recognized Americans’ anger with the political establishment, because they are always on the alert for it at home. … Putin and the Kremlin seemed to recognize that this election was really a referendum on America’s future. The November 8 ballot, as Trump also understood, was more like the June 23 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. ..."
"... The demonization of Putin is a reflection of our declining confidence in our own capabilities. It's easier to blame Putin. He's pursuing Russian national interests, but he's not running world affairs ..."
"... Putin stands in the mainstream of a centuries-old Russian foreign policy tradition and worldview and he enjoys broad elite support and popular consent for his policies. Any approach premised mainly on "being tough" with Putin (as Hillary Clinton promises) or on charming him into making a deal (as Trump does) misses the point entirely. ( New York Times , 10.25.16) ..."
"... Putin was personally angered by events in Libya and the death of President Muammar Qaddafi at the hands of rebels as Qaddafi tried to flee Tripoli after NATO’s intervention in the civil war there. In Putin’s view (again expressed openly in his public addresses and in interviews), the United States was now responsible for a long sequence of revolutions close to Russia’s borders and in countries with close ties to Moscow. ( Brookings, 02.10.16 ) ..."
"... Henry Kissinger : “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” ( The Washington Post, 03.05.14 ) ..."
"... Russia's antipathy toward the general thrust of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly what Putin and his entourage came to see as Washington's excessive unilateralism and disposition to use force, also did more than its share of damage. ( Foreign Affairs , 07.01.2009) ..."
"... Putin has no reliable interlocutors in the West from his perspective, only a handful of intermediaries. And he simply does not trust anyone. ..."
"... Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to another foreign country that he balances with China and others. ( The Atlantic, 11.10.16 ) ..."
"... Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. ..."
"... In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. ( The Washington Post, 02.05.15 ) ..."
Angela Stent : The experience of the past sixteen years suggests that Putin is a
pragmatic leader willing to make deals if he believes they are in Russia's interest. (
Carnegie Moscow Center,
10.31.16 )
Fiona Hill : In Putin's mindset, the main threats to Russia right now lie inside
Russia, where Trojan horses and Fifth Columnists have been deployed by the West to exacerbate
and exploit Russia's internal contradictions and divisions. In the Russian worldview, the
sprawling multiethnic and multiconfessional states of the Russian empire and the Soviet Union
were always strong in territory, but weak politically. The Soviet Union was vulnerable because
of all the infighting among national elites, just as the Russian empire fell apart because of
separatist and popular revolts when it was embroiled in war. In each case, in Putin's view, the
West -- the Germans in World War I, the United States in the Cold War -- exploited internal
fissures to help bring the colossus to its knees. (
Bulletin of the Atomic
Sciences , 04.13.16)
Timothy Colton : There's a culturally ingrained view in Russia that in order for
this country to stay together and stay afloat, it has to have an effective state. And this is
Putin's core belief -- I think it drives everything else. ... And he has, to a considerable
extent, delivered on his promise. ( Interview with RT , 06.29.14, 25:55)
Dimitri
Simes : Putin is a strong Russian patriot who sees the state as a key driver of
society. He does not view democracy as an end, but rather as a means of government under
appropriate circumstances. (
Politico , 03.13.14)
Leon Aron : After
his election as president in 2000, Putin added to this agenda an overarching goal: the recovery
of economic, political and geostrategic assets lost by the Soviet state in 1991. Although he
has never spelled it out formally, Putin has pursued this objective with such determination,
coherence, and consistency that it merits being called the Putin Doctrine. (
Foreign
Affairs , 03.08.13)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Putin's favorite quote these days is, "We do not need
great upheavals. We need a great Russia," a paraphrase of Stolypin's famous rebuke to his
fellow Duma deputies in 1907: "You, gentlemen, are in need of great upheavals; we are in need
of a Great Russia." ( The National
Interest, 01.01.12 )
Henry Kissinger : Geopolitically, Putin governs a country with 11 time zones. Few
countries in history have started more wars or caused more turmoil than Russia in its eternal
quest for security and status. It is also true, however, that at critical junctures Russia has
saved the world's equilibrium from forces that sought to overwhelm it: from the Mongols in the
16th century, from Sweden in the 18th century, from Napoleon in the 19th century and from
Hitler in the 20th century. (
The
Atlantic, 11.10.16 )
Timothy Colton : Putin's political persona is very much based on a skepticism about
or a rejection of what happened to Russia in the 1990s. ( Speech at Wellesley College , 03.04.15, 34:57)
Henry Kissinger : Putin is a serious strategist -- on the premises of Russian
history. (
The Washington Post, 03.05.14 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : His family's harrowing tale from World War II fits
neatly into the national historical narrative -- one in which Russia constantly battles for
survival against a hostile outside world. The critical lesson from centuries of domestic
turbulence, invasion and war is that the Russian state always survives in one form or
another. Every calamity weathered reaffirms Russia's resilience and its special status in
history. This has been a rhetorical touchstone for Putin, as well as for many others from his
generation. Throughout his presidency, Putin has raised survivalism from the personal to the
national level. ( Foreign Policy,
02.15.13 )
Putin's personality
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Vladimir Putin needs to be taken seriously. He
will make good on every promise or threat -- if Putin says he will do something, then he is
prepared to do it; and he will find a way of doing it, using every method at his disposal. (
Brookings,
01.13.17 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : [C]ontrary to the prevailing external assessment,
Putin is a strategic planner. The notion that Putin is an opportunist, at best an improviser,
but not a strategist, is a dangerous misread. Putin thinks, plans, and acts strategically. (
Brookings,
01.13.17 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Putin is best understood as a composite of
multiple identities that stem from those experiences, and which help explain his improbable
rise from KGB operative and deputy mayor of St. Petersburg to the pinnacle of Russian power.
Of these multiple identities, six are most prominent: Statist, History Man, Survivalist,
Outsider, Free Marketeer, and Case Officer. … Putin has made a virtue of this outsider
status throughout his presidency, stressing his connections to “ordinary”
Russians and distancing himself from Moscow’s resented elites. … As a case
officer in the KGB, Putin had learned how to identify, recruit and run agents, and acquired
the patience to cultivate sources. He also learned how to collect, synthesize and use
information. These tools proved invaluable in bringing Russia’s oligarchs to heel. (
Foreign Policy,
02.15.13 )
Anatol
Lieven : The president’s personal abstemiousness and intense self-discipline
are part of the Putin image, an essential aspect of what makes him the
anti-Yeltsin—which makes him admired by a large majority of Russians. He gives no
impression of playing an assumed role. ( The Globalist , 12.03.07)
NATO-Russia relations:
Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon, referring to growing cooperation between Russia and
the U.S. and NATO in 2002 : Symbolically at least Russia was recognized as a great
power. As U.S.-Russian relations grew warmer, Putin toned down his objections to the U.S.
decision to withdraw from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the NATO decision to expand
to seven countries in Eastern Europe, including the three former Soviet Baltic states. But
the optimism proved short-lived. ( The Boston
Review , 09.12.17)
Fiona Hill : Ultimately, in pursuing Russia’s goals, Putin is a
pragmatist. He has to keep a watchful eye on the home front, and Russia does not have the
military or economic resources for the mass-army, total-mobilization approach that it adopted
during the Cold War to defend itself against the United States and NATO. Putin has to combine
conventional, nuclear and non-conventional, non-military—so-called
“hybrid”—means of defense. (
Brookings, 03.03.16 )
Fiona Hill : The preferred scenario for Russia in Europe, as Putin has
repeatedly made clear, would be one without NATO and without any other strategic alliances
that are embedded in the European Union’s security concepts. (
Brookings, 02.10.16 )
Olga
Oliker : Putin’s language on nuclear weapons is encouraging in that he speaks
of improving, not increasing, the force. Putin’s question to Trump about a New START
extension suggests an interest in keeping the agreement going at least until 2026—right
around the time Russia’s all-modern force can be expected to come into being. (
Arms
Control Association , May 2017)
Syria and MiddleEast
Fiona Hill : The religious wars in the Middle East are not a side show for
Russia.
Thousands of foreign fighters have flocked to Syria from Russia, as well as from Central
Asia and the South Caucasus, all attracted by the extreme messages of ISIS and other groups.
(
Brookings, 05.23.16 )
Thomas Graham : At the same time, with the demands of the Ukraine crisis on the
Russian military, it will be stretched to sustain operations in Syria. Given the risks, the
buildup is not likely a cynical play to whip up patriotic fervor and bolster Putin's domestic
rating; it is rather an effort to defend Russian national interests. (
The National Interest , 09.15.15)
Fiona Hill : Putin firmly opposes U.S. policy toward Syria and the threat of
force against Iran. But his opposition stems neither from anti-Americanism nor a desire to
back the Iranian mullahs or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad in their struggles with the West.
It is rooted in his obsession with stability. Helping Tehran secure a nuclear weapon and
keeping Assad in Damascus are not Putin’s goals. But an Israeli or U.S. attack on
Iran’s nuclear sites, and NATO or the United Nations intervening in Syria to forcibly
remove Assad, would increase global volatility. ( New
York Times, 02.04.13 )
Elections interference: (aka Russiagate false flag operation by CIA and MI6)
Fiona Hill : Putin and the Kremlin recognized Americans’ anger with the
political establishment, because they are always on the alert for it at home. … Putin
and the Kremlin seemed to recognize that this election was really a referendum on
America’s future. The November 8 ballot, as Trump also understood, was more like the
June 23 Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. (
Brookings, 11.11.16 )
Energy exports from the former Soviet Union:
Graham Allison: He has often expressed his deep conviction that the "greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century" was the disintegration of the Soviet Union. He
has reflected on the analysis by former Russian Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar that identifies
the squeeze on Soviet finances caused by the sharp drop in oil prices in the mid-1980s as the
primary proximate cause of that event. (
National Interest , , 11.11.14)
Angela Stent : Nowhere was the symbiotic relationship between the political and
the commercial more evident than in Russia’s rise as an energy power—arguably the
most significant aspect of Putin’s foreign policy, combining traditional geopolitics
with instruments from the world of globalization to implement them. ( Europe-Asia
Studies, 07.18.08 )
Robert Legvold : It is not easy to trace the precise connection between official
foreign policy and Russia's giant energy company Gazprom or its national electricity combine,
RAO UES. Yet there is little question that the less-than-gentle efforts of these and other
Russian corporate interests to acquire large equity stakes in pipelines, refineries, power
grids and other strategically significant economic entities accord well with Putin's desire
to increase Russia's influence throughout the post-Soviet space. (
Foreign Affairs , 09.01.2001)
U.S.-Russian relations in general:
Dmitri Trenin : [Putin] understands the vast asymmetries between Russia and
America. He knows that the arms race with the United States undermined the Soviet economy; a
repeat of it would kill Russia’s. He likely realizes that self-imposed isolation, via
sanctions on Western companies, would be much worse for Russia than any U.S.-driven attempt to
isolate it from without. He should see that fanning xenophobia and anti-Americanism at home
would hardly bring any benefits but instead would hurt relations with other countries, not just
the United States, and retard Russia’s development still further. The Soviet Union tried
to deal with the United States from a position of an equal, which it was not, and eventually
quit the stage; the Russian Federation, starting from a position of weakness, has to be
smarter. Putin, the judo fighter, certainly gets it. (
Foreign Policy , 07.31.17)
Paul Saunders
: Consider Russia’s policy toward the United States in the fall of 2001, immediately
following the September 11 attacks. Russian President Vladimir Putin is widely known as the
first foreign leader to contact President George W. Bush following the attacks. He appears to
have made a strategic decision to assist the United States in order to pursue a closer
relationship. If President Putin becomes convinced that he will never be able to build a
functional relationship with Washington—no matter what he does or who is in
power—American preferences will lose much of their remaining power in restraining
Russia’s conduct. ( Russia Matters ,
03.17.17)
Thomas Graham : The demonization of Putin is a reflection of our declining
confidence in our own capabilities. It's easier to blame Putin. He's pursuing Russian national
interests, but he's not running world affairs. (
NPR , 01.18.17)
Graham Allison : The objective of American policy is not to placate Russia or
please Putin. Rather, it is to advance vital U.S. national interests. As seen during
Obama’s second term, when treated primarily as a “foe,” Russia can undermine
important American objectives. If it can be persuaded to act more as a partner, within the
framework of a sustainable, if difficult, working relationship, Moscow can help advance U.S.
foreign-policy objectives in a number of ways. (
The
National Interest , 12.18.16)
Matthew Rojansky : First, we need to stop obsessing over Putin. Our problem is with
Russia. Putin stands in the mainstream of a centuries-old Russian foreign policy tradition and
worldview and he enjoys broad elite support and popular consent for his policies. Any approach
premised mainly on "being tough" with Putin (as Hillary Clinton promises) or on charming him
into making a deal (as Trump does) misses the point entirely. (
New York
Times , 10.25.16)
Matthew Rojansky : We are now simply seeing what it looks like when a major
power acts in furtherance of what it understands to be its interests, irrespective of U.S.
interests. ( Quartz , 08.19.16)
Fiona Hill : Putin was personally angered by events in Libya and the death of
President Muammar Qaddafi at the hands of rebels as Qaddafi tried to flee Tripoli after
NATO’s intervention in the civil war there. In Putin’s view (again expressed
openly in his public addresses and in interviews), the United States was now responsible for
a long sequence of revolutions close to Russia’s borders and in countries with close
ties to Moscow. (
Brookings, 02.10.16 )
Henry Kissinger : “For the West, the demonization of Vladimir Putin is not a
policy; it is an alibi for the absence of one.” (
The Washington Post, 03.05.14 )
Dmitri Trenin : Putin wants partnership, but not in the sense that he works on the
U.S. agenda and gets paid a commission for helping out. He understands the U.S. is much
stronger than Russia, but he nevertheless demands a relationship of equals. (
Carnegie
Moscow Center , 09.13.13)
Timothy Colton andHenry Hale : The message
of his [Putin’s] campaigns might thus be characterized as follows: Russia's future lies
in cooperation rather than conflict with the west, but the west is an unreliable partner that
frequently harbors ill or disrespectful intentions regarding Russia and that therefore must
constantly be kept in check at the same time that cooperation must still be pursued. (
Slavic Review ,
2009)
Robert Legvold : U.S.-Russian relations soured not only because of frictions
between Washington and Moscow over issues such as NATO enlargement, the status of Kosovo and
Washington's plans to place a ballistic missile defense system in central Europe. Russia's
antipathy toward the general thrust of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly
what Putin and his entourage came to see as Washington's excessive unilateralism and
disposition to use force, also did more than its share of damage. (
Foreign
Affairs , 07.01.2009)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Putin has no reliable interlocutors in the West
from his perspective, only a handful of intermediaries. And he simply does not trust anyone. (
Brookings,
01.13.17 )
Angela Stent : The eternal question of whether Russia really belongs to Europe
complicates the EU-Russia relationship. Putin has said "Russia is a natural member of the
'European family' in spirit, history and culture," though he has made it clear that Russia does
not seek to join the EU. But Russians have become disillusioned with Europe's lecturing of them
and remain divided over whether to join Europe or pursue a Eurasian path. Despite this mutual
ambivalence, and though Russia is a challenging partner, the EU as a whole remains committed to
encouraging the Kremlin to become more European. The alternative is a more obstructionist
Russia isolated from the West. (
The National Interest,
03.01.07 )
Paul Saunders : In short, while Putin is clearly eager to work with the United
States, he is prepared to do so only on terms that do not damage what he views as Russian
interests. Putin also has his eye on Russia's other options—China—and even the
capacity to play a central role in alternative institutions outside the West. (
The National Interest , 09.11.06)
Timothy Colton : The imposition of American and European Union sanctions over
Russian behavior in Ukraine gave Putin a chance to hold forth against an internal
“fifth column” of sympathizers with the West. (
Daedalus , Spring
2017)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Putin seeks a “New Yalta” with the West
in political and security terms. As he defines Moscow’s sphere of influence in this new
arrangement, that sphere extends to all the space in Europe and Eurasia that once fell within
the boundaries of the Russian Empire and the USSR. Within these vast contours, Putin and Russia
have interests that need to be taken into account, interests that override those of all others.
For Putin, Russia is the only sovereign state in this neighborhood. None of the other states,
in his view, have truly independent standing—they all have contingent sovereignty. The
only question for Putin is which of the real sovereign powers (Russia or the United States)
prevails in deciding where the borders of the New Yalta finally end up after 2014. … In
the meantime, until a “new Yalta” is thrashed out, Russia and the West will remain
at war. … This game of chicken will be a long one. Putin’s goal is security for
Russia and his system. The means to achieve that goal is deterrence. … [T]here is no
definitive endgame. He will keep on playing as long as he perceives the threat to last. (
Brookings,
01.13.17 )
Timothy Colton : Putin has had no shortage of the chances, time in position and
power levers at his fingertips to assemble an outright dictatorship in the Russian Federation.
Working from his platform within the state machine, given his rapport with his products of the
security and military services (the siloviki), and the fruits of pre-2014 growth being there
for the plucking, Putin, in my view, could have become the Francisco Franco or Omar al-Bashir
of Russia. He has chosen not to do so. (
Comparative
Politics , April 2018)
Matthew Rojansky : For Putin, dysfunction is useful since it reinforces the
longstanding narrative that Washington aims to contain Russia geopolitically and degrade it
economically, with the ultimate objective of regime change. This narrative yields one
inescapable conclusion for the majority of Russian voters: Only Vladimir Putin is capable of
guaranteeing their safety and wellbeing. (
The National Interest , 07.07.17)
Anatol Lieven : To judge by the elections and every opinion poll in this area, the
overwhelming mass of the Russian establishment and Russian people approve of Putin’s
foreign-policy record. If Western governments want to pursue reasonably good relations with
Russia, this is the reality with which they will have to work. For the foreseeable future, like
it or not, what we see is what we will get. … Consider, for a moment, if Putin were to
fail. There is no Thomas Jefferson waiting in the wings. Instead, he would almost certainly be
replaced by a figure and a movement that are just as authoritarian but more nationalist, more
anti-Western, more populist and less committed to market reform. (
The National
Interest , 04.03.12)
Timothy Colton, on Russia’s handling of the 2008-2009 financial crisis: I
would give them a pretty good grade… You see here the effects of some rather smart
things that the Putin people did: saving this money, putting it away in a fund that could be
used to get over hard times… I think you have to give them pretty good marks for
managing the crisis. But what the crisis has done, it seems to me, is revealed at a deeper
level the underlying structural problems. ( Interview with Russia Today , 09.16.10,
6:03)
Rawi
Abdelal : Over the past 10 years, during which time Putin has led the country as
president or premier, he has strengthened Russia’s nascent capitalist economy and
institutions.
... Putin recast the state’s relationship with the oligarchs, forcing some, such as
Boris Berezovsky, into self-imposed exile and sending others, notably Mikhail Khodorkovsky, to
prison. Other oligarchs quickly learned to play by Putin’s three rules: Do not get
involved in politics; do not buy politicians; and pay your taxes. (
Harvard
Business Review , February 2010)
Anatol Lieven : In the case of Russia, anyone professing to respect the views of
ordinary Russians must also recognize that a majority has supported Putin and his authoritarian
program because their experience of pseudo-democracy in the 1990s was so terrible. (
Carnegie
Endowment for International Peace , 01.14.05)
Ukraine
Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in
Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally
adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America
defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to
another foreign country that he balances with China and others. (
The
Atlantic, 11.10.16 )
Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had
masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the
candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress
rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. Putin believed it was part of the United
States’ larger effort to construct a unipolar world based on its values and interests, a
world that it could dominate with little regard for other major powers. In response Putin began
working to fortify Russia against Western influence and interference. (
The Boston
Review , 09.12.17)
Steven Pifer : Putin sees Russians & Ukrainians as one people. Said so in
Kyiv in 2013. Does not understand he thereby denies Ukrainian history, culture. (
Twitter ,
05.26.17)
Roger McDermott and Stephen Cimbala : Putin’s actions in Crimea were not
entirely sui generis : They were preceded by a context of demands upon Russia from
its post-Cold War military and geostrategic setting, compared to that of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s policy is not the result of psychodrama. It is the product of his having lived
in strategic history and his (and our) understanding of that history. ( The Journal of Slavic
Military Studies , 10.14.16)
Anatol Lieven : Russia’s restraint in Ukraine shows that there is no
serious reason to fear that Mr. Putin is ready to create a new, worse international crisis by
attacking the Baltic states or Poland. ( New York Times ,
03.18.16)
Steven Pifer : A weak Ukrainian government incapable of meeting the challenges
before it ensures that the Maidan model will have little attraction for the Russian populace.
This consideration could mean that Mr. Putin wants a failed Ukrainian state. (
Testimony before U.S.
Senate , 03.04.15)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : The logic of sending weapons to Ukraine seems
straightforward and is the same as the logic for economic sanctions: to change Vladimir
Putin’s “calculus.” … We strongly disagree [with calls on the West to
provide military support to Ukraine]. The evidence points in a different direction. If we
follow the recommendations of this report, the Ukrainians won’t be the only ones caught
in an escalating military conflict with Russia. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Our problem is that we do not fully understand
Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United
States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to
weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian
armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial
sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been
transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any
concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
"... [T]here has been some tendency, over many years, to exaggerate the relative conventional strength of the USSR and to underestimate Soviet awareness of the enormous costs and risks of any form of aggression against NATO. (co-author, Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82) ..."
"... On the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion : I think it is the beginning of a new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia. It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong. (Interview in New York Times , 05.02.98) ..."
The military policies and even more the rhetoric of these two great countries are on a
collision course, and I feel quite helpless in the face of this situation. About the Soviet
Union, I can do nothing. These people have indulged themselves for 60 years in the habit of
polemical exaggeration and distortion. It is as Russian as boiled cabbage and buckwheat
kasha. But what about my own government and its state of blind militaristic hysteria? It has
not only convinced itself of the reality of its own bad dreams, but it has succeeded in
half-convincing most of our allies, and that to such an extent that anyone who challenges
that view of the world appears to them as dangerously subversive. Our respective views of
reality are simply incompatible." (Entry dated 04.16.81, " The Kennan Diaries ," 2014)
[T]he lone battle I was waging in those years [1948-1958] -- a battle against the almost
total militarization of Western policy towards Russia -- was one which, had my efforts been
successful, would have, or could have, obviated the vast expenses, dangers and distortions of
outlook of the ensuing Cold War. (Entry dated 05.02.00, " The Kennan Diaries ," 2014)
Military issues, including NATO-Russia relations:
[T]here has been some tendency, over many years, to exaggerate the relative conventional
strength of the USSR and to underestimate Soviet awareness of the enormous costs and risks of
any form of aggression against NATO. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
The risk that an adventurist Soviet leader might take the terrible gamble of conventional
aggression [in Europe] was greater in the past than it is today, and is greater today than it
would be under no-first-use, backed up by an effective conventional defense. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
Soviet leaders would be most pleased to help the Alliance fall into total disarray, and
would much prefer such a development to the inescapable uncertainties of open conflict.
(co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
What the Alliance needs most today is not the refinement of its nuclear options, but a
clear-cut decision to avoid them as long as others do. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
The original American pledge [to NATO], expressed in Article 5 of the Treaty, was
understood to be a nuclear guarantee. It was extended at a time when only a conventional
Soviet threat existed, so a readiness for first use was plainly implied from the beginning.
To modify that guarantee now, even in the light of all that has happened since, would be a
major change in the assumptions of the Alliance, and no such change should be made without
the most careful exploration of its implications. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
The two superpowers are incapable of composing their differences and putting an end to
the arms race, or even mitigating its extent. For this, I put by far the greater part of the
blame on the United States. I see every reason to suppose that Gorbachev, if given any
reasonable amount of political consideration and collaboration from the American side, would
have been quite prepared to go in for fairly far reaching accommodations with respect to both
nuclear and conventional weapons. (Entry dated 07.01.86, " The Kennan Diaries ," 2014)
On NATO expansion : The view, bluntly stated, is that expanding NATO would be the
most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era. Such a decision may be
expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian
opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the
atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in
directions decidedly not to our liking Such a decision may be expected to inflame the
nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an
adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the Cold
War to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not
to our liking. And, last but not least, it might make it much more difficult, if not
impossible, to secure the Russian Duma's ratification of the START II agreement and to
achieve further reductions of nuclear weaponry. ( New York Times ,
02.05.97)
On rationale of NATO expansion: Why, with all the hopeful possibilities engendered
by the end of the Cold War, should East-West relations become centered on the question of who
would be allied with whom and, by implication, against whom in some fanciful, totally
unforeseeable and most improbable future military conflict? ( New York Times ,
02.05.97)
On the Senate's ratification of NATO expansion : I think it is the beginning of a
new Cold War. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect
their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. There was no reason for this whatsoever. No
one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the founding fathers of this
country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries,
even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way.
[NATO expansion] was simply a lighthearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in
foreign affairs. Our differences in the Cold War were with the Soviet Communist regime. And
now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution
in history to remove that Soviet regime. And Russia's democracy is as far advanced, if not
farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia. It shows so
little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course, there is going to be a
bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that
is how the Russians are -- but this is just wrong. (Interview in
New York Times , 05.02.98)
See also "Nuclear weapons and arms control" section.
Missile defense:
On the deployment of intermediate range U.S. missiles in Europe: The simplest and
intuitively the most persuasive claim is that these new weapons are needed as a counter to
the new Soviet SS-20 missiles; it may be a recognition of the surface attractiveness of this
position that underlies President Reagan's striking-but probably not negotiable-proposal that
if all the SS-20s are dismantled the planned deployments will be cancelled. Other officials
have a quite different argument, that without new and survivable American weapons which can
reach Russia from Western Europe there can be no confidence that the strategic forces of the
United States will remain committed to the defense of Western Europe; on this argument the
new missiles are needed to make it more likely that any war in Europe would bring nuclear
warheads on the Soviet Union and thus deter the aggressor in the first place. This argument
is logically distinct from any concern about the Soviet SS-20s, and it probably explains the
ill-concealed hope of some planners that the Reagan proposal will be rejected. Such varied
justifications cast considerable doubt on the real purpose of the proposed deployment.
(co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
Nuclear weapons and arms control:
[N]o one on either side could guarantee beyond all possible doubt that if conventional
warfare broke out on a large scale there would in fact be no use of nuclear weapons. We could
not make that assumption about the Soviet Union, and we must recognize that Soviet leaders
could not make it about us. As long as the weapons themselves exist, the possibility of their
use will remain. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
There is strong reason to believe that no-first-use can also help in our relations with
the Soviet Union. The Soviet government has repeatedly offered to join the West in declaring
such a policy, and while such declarations may have only limited reliability, it would be
wrong to disregard the real value to both sides of a jointly declared adherence to this
policy. [J]ust as a policy of no-first-use should reduce the pressures on our side for
massive new nuclear forces, it should help to increase the international incentives for the
Soviet Union to show some restraint of its own. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
It is important to avoid misunderstanding here. In the conditions of the 1980s, and in
the absence of agreement on both sides to proceed to very large-scale reductions in nuclear
forces, it is clear that large, varied and survivable nuclear forces will still be necessary
for nuclear deterrence. The point is not that we Americans should move unilaterally to some
"minimum" force of a few tens or even hundreds of missiles, but rather that once we escape
from the pressure to seem willing and able to use these weapons first, we shall find that our
requirements are much less massive than is now widely supposed. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
The Soviet government is already aware of the awful risk inherent in any use of these
weapons, and there is no current or prospective Soviet "superiority" that would tempt anyone
in Moscow toward nuclear adventurism. (All four of us are wholly unpersuaded by the argument
advanced in recent years that the Soviet Union could ever rationally expect to gain from such
a wild effort as a massive first strike on land-based American strategic missiles.)
(co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
Not least among the problems that we have to handle in our relations with the major
powers and some of the others as well is the continuing widespread development, cultivation
and proliferation of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. That is not
merely a regional problem; it is a global one that involves a little less than the whole
future of humanity and its stake in the future of civilization ... I believe that we, as the
first country to have developed those weapons and the only one to use them against another
population, and a largely helpless one at that, have a great and special responsibility and
even a duty to take the lead in bringing those weapons under eventual control either through
international organs or in having them eliminated from national arsenals. ( Speech at
National Committee on American Foreign Policy , 10.17.94)
As early as the 1950s it was recognized by both Prime Minister Churchill and President
Eisenhower that the nuclear strength of both sides [the U.S. and the Soviet Union] was
becoming so great that a nuclear war would be a ghastly catastrophe for all concerned. The
following decades have only confirmed and intensified that reality. The time has come for
careful study of the ways and means of moving to a new Alliance [NATO] policy and doctrine:
that nuclear weapons will not be used unless an aggressor should use them first. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
[T]he evolution of essentially equivalent and enormously excessive nuclear weapons
systems both in the Soviet Union and in the Atlantic Alliance has aroused new concern about
the dangers of all forms of nuclear war. The profusion of these systems, on both sides, has
made it more difficult than ever to construct rational plans for any first use of these
weapons by anyone. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
The purpose of both [Ford and Carter] administrations was to reinforce deterrence, but
the result has been to increase fear of nuclear war, and even of Americans as its possible
initiators. Intended as contributions to both rationality and credibility, these excursions
into the theory of limited nuclear war have been counterproductive in Europe. Any use of
nuclear weapons in Europe, by the Alliance or against it, carries with it a high and
inescapable risk of escalation into the general nuclear war which would bring ruin to all and
victory to none. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
President [Ronald] Reagan has already adjusted his views on the usefulness of early arms
control negotiations, even though we remain in a time of general stress between Washington
and Moscow. No administration should be held, and none should hold itself, to inflexible
first positions on these extraordinarily difficult matters. (co-author,
Foreign Affairs , 03.01.82)
Such is the destructive potential of advanced modern weapons that another great conflict
between any of the leading powers could well do irreparable damage to the entire structure of
modern civilization. Intimately connected with those problems, of course, is the necessity of
restraining, and eventually halting, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and of
achieving their eventual total removal from national arsenals. ( Foreign Affairs
, 03.01.95)
On November 30th 2015, Zerohedge reported, Russian Prosecutor General's Office issued
a statement in which it recognised George Soros's Open Society Institute and another
affiliated organisation as "undesirable groups", banning Russian citizens and organisations
from participation in any of their projects.
–prosecutors said the activities of the Open Society Institute and the Open
Society Institute Assistance Foundation were a threat to the foundations of Russia's
Constitutional order and national security.
...
The Law on Undesirable Foreign Organisations came into force in early June this year.
It requires the Prosecutor General's Office and the Foreign Ministry to draw up an official
list of undesirable foreign organisations and outlaw their activities. Once a group is
recognised as undesirable, its assets in Russia must be frozen, its offices closed and the
distribution of any of its materials must be banned.
Isn't it about time all other countries around the world enacted similar laws and
policies against foreign-funded WMD NGOs? HK and Venezuela particularly come to mind, of
course, and Brazil could have avoided the Bolsonaro nuclear explosion through such laws if
they had been put into effect in time.
The level of "experts" is pretty dismal. While some quotes are apt, the general level is horrible for such an important
topic., Not a single one put Putin career in context of ascendance of neoliberalism from 1990 to 2007 and then crash and decline
with the USA economics entering the period of secular stagnation. not a single one.
Most of those are neocons or some king of imperialists who believe in God given right for the USA to dominate the globe. That's
another problem.
Notable quotes:
"... Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to another foreign country that he balances with China and others. ( The Atlantic, 11.10.16 ) ..."
"... Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. ..."
"... In Putin’s view, the United States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. ( The Washington Post, 02.05.15 ) ..."
Henry Kissinger : Starting with American support for the Orange Revolution in
Ukraine in 2004, Putin has gradually convinced himself that the U.S. is structurally
adversarial. By “structural,” I mean that he may very well believe that America
defines its basic interest as weakening Russia, transforming us from a potential ally to
another foreign country that he balances with China and others. (
The
Atlantic, 11.10.16 )
Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon : In Moscow’s reading, the United States had
masterminded the revolution [in Ukraine] to install a pro-Western figure as president over the
candidate endorsed by Putin. Putin soon came to view the revolution in Ukraine as a dress
rehearsal for regime change in Russia itself. Putin believed it was part of the United
States’ larger effort to construct a unipolar world based on its values and interests, a
world that it could dominate with little regard for other major powers. In response Putin began
working to fortify Russia against Western influence and interference. (
The Boston
Review , 09.12.17)
Steven Pifer : Putin sees Russians & Ukrainians as one people. Said so in
Kyiv in 2013. Does not understand he thereby denies Ukrainian history, culture. (
Twitter ,
05.26.17)
Roger McDermott and Stephen Cimbala : Putin’s actions in Crimea were not
entirely sui generis : They were preceded by a context of demands upon Russia from
its post-Cold War military and geostrategic setting, compared to that of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s policy is not the result of psychodrama. It is the product of his having lived
in strategic history and his (and our) understanding of that history. (
The Journal of Slavic
Military Studies , 10.14.16)
Anatol Lieven : Russia’s restraint in Ukraine shows that there is no
serious reason to fear that Mr. Putin is ready to create a new, worse international crisis by
attacking the Baltic states or Poland. (
New York Times ,
03.18.16)
Steven Pifer : A weak Ukrainian government incapable of meeting the challenges
before it ensures that the Maidan model will have little attraction for the Russian populace.
This consideration could mean that Mr. Putin wants a failed Ukrainian state. (
Testimony before U.S.
Senate , 03.04.15)
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : The logic of sending weapons to Ukraine seems
straightforward and is the same as the logic for economic sanctions: to change Vladimir
Putin’s “calculus.” … We strongly disagree [with calls on the West to
provide military support to Ukraine]. The evidence points in a different direction. If we
follow the recommendations of this report, the Ukrainians won’t be the only ones caught
in an escalating military conflict with Russia. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy : Our problem is that we do not fully understand
Putin’s calculus, just as he does not understand ours. In Putin’s view, the United
States, the European Union and NATO have launched an economic and proxy war in Ukraine to
weaken Russia and push it into a corner. As Valery Gerasimov, chief of staff of the Russian
armed forces, has underscored, this is a hybrid, 21st-century conflict, in which financial
sanctions, support for oppositional political movements and propaganda have all been
transformed from diplomatic tools to instruments of war. Putin likely believes that any
concession or compromise he makes will encourage the West to push further. (
The Washington Post, 02.05.15 )
Nice plan, except it's too late. I don't think Russia will agree to this proposal. The
West is very antagonized both in Russian elites and common people. Even if some high
ranking officials will be happy to struck a deal common people will still perceive USA
and the west as enemies. On the contrary China's reputation and karma is not as tainted
as America's in the eyes of the majority in Russia. At this point any concession given to
West will be met with disdain.
Correct. NATO has thousands of troops on the Russian border and surrounds Western
Russia by land and sea ... meanwhile the US preparing new cruise missile programs to be
stationed in the EU... Putin would be a fool to play nice in the face of such a military
buildup... in fact, he'd be deposed if he tried. No... the die is cast... the
Russia-China Alliance is tightly cemented.
Doug Bandow gives fair and reasoned arguments. The current trend appears to be towards
war. The question of enticing Moscow away from Beijing is a logical one. But does Russia
fear China as an enemy more than it fears America? Who would benefit from hostilities
between these two – America? That would not serve Russia's strategic interests.
The challenge in the 21st century is not repeating the mistakes of the twentieth.
History shows vital interests drive nations to war: but it is in nobody's interest to
fight a third world war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
I don't think here in Russia we fear anyone. We live in an era of powerful
thermonuclear weapons. Russia has fully operational nuclear triad with thousands of
warheads. Any military scenario against us trigger a final judgement day for human
civilization. President Putin openly said that. At this point Russia is more or less
isolationist trying to sever itself from global production chains to be more independent.
The trade with US is minuscule, so basically US has the stick but lacks carrot. On the
other hand China lacks what Russia really needs, so it's more of an allie of convenience.
Basically all Russia needs is being left alone and being able to influence it's own
region. Vast natural resources and population can really provide this kind of
isolationism. But the US can't stop poking the bear, so enraged bear can really be pissed
and provide China a helping hand.
Isolated from US and vassals doesn't mean completelly isolated. As author mentioned G7
is only 1/10 of World's population. And France, Germany and Italy are eager to restore
pre-sanction relations. Also having China, power on the rise (contrary to declining West)
in your corner is a very good thing.
"However, Beijing's widespread, sometimes brutal crackdown at home, increasingly
threatening approach to both Hong Kong and Taiwan, and more aggressive stance toward
territorial disputes challenge common Western interests and values. "
What "brutal crackdown"? I presume he means HK but the response of the Chinese gov is
hardly brutal. On the contrary, the authorities there have been been far more passive and
restrained than the west would be. Try shutting down a major US airport with a
demonstration and see long it takes for US robo-cops to cover the tiled floors in
protester blood and fill jail cells with unconscious bodies. Consider the (mostly
unreported) brutality in France as M(i)cron orders his gendarmes to use force to suppress
growth of the Gilets Jaunes movement.
What "aggressive stance" to territorial disputes? Chinese aren't blockading any areas
of the SCS and are not preventing freedom of navigation. They have claimed a number of
SCS rocks and minor islands, but the fact remains that none of the largest 18 islands are
Chinese controlled yet no-one wants to level the same charges against Taiwan,
Philippines, Vietnam or Malaysia that control them. The Chinese maintain an active
military presence around their own bases in the SCS, but they don't act to stop other
traffic in the area, and no-one has any actual legitimate business with these isolated
rocks, either now or before the ChiComs claimed them.
Bandow is spinning a load of BS with these and other assertions of a fake reality. Its
just part of a superficial narrative intended to support the idea of a "benevolent and
democratic" US selflessly guarding the "free world" against an "authoritarian police
state" that is "challenging and undermining the global rules-based system". It a load of
baloney that well-expired but Bandow the organ-grinder keep turning the handle to make
the public monkies dance for the amusement and hidden agendas of Cato Institutes elites
paymasters.
"Kyiv would be left to forge whatever economic ties it desired east and west."
Really? When did the ruling elites of the US and EU change their policies? It was the
refusal of the Eurotrash to accept Ukraine accepting Russian cash and economic assistance
in 2014 that led to the Ultra-nationalist putsch with US/EU full support. Yanukovich
wanted a deal and the EU refused to give him one he could accept, then threw their weight
behind his forced removal and shut-out the possibility of Ukraine having economic
relations with its largest trading partner (Russia).
BTW in English we have always spelled the city as Kiev, not Kyiv. Bandow is clearly
pandering to the Ukropi nationalists and anti-Russia radicals.
"In return, Russia could abandon support for Donbas rebels in Ukraine, grant Kyiv full
navigational access in contested waters, and stop using natural gas as a weapon."
Russia isn't about to abandon Donbass while the Ukies show no regard for civilian
lives in their incessant shelling attacks and repeated violations of "truces". Kiev is
attacking Donbass and intent on advancing, not the other way around, so a cessation of
conflict is in their court, not Donetsk or Lugansk.
Kiev has full access to "contested waters" (presumably access to the Azov Sea) but
they need to follow protocols. It is their refusal to play by the rules (and the
deliberate provocations by the SBU) that is the crux of the problems.
Russia doesn't use natural gas as a weapon. She simply sells gas to willing customers
(who buy it from her due to good prices and a long established record as a reliable
supplier). Russia is understandably looking for alternative routes of transit to avoid
nations that are her traditional antagonists and who wish to use gas transit as leverage
over her. Why should Russia allow unfriendly nations to have the ability to shutdown her
gas exports? Ukraine was stealing gas for years which led to the cessation of gas
supplies while custody transfer violations were investigated and stopped. Why should
Russia maintain transit through unfriendly nations and allow them to gain transit fees?
If they cease their Russia-baiting BS things might change, but that is their decision to
make, and Russia will act in the meantime according to her interests.
Doug Bandow tries to play the moderate but he recycles the worst agitprop tropes about
Russia. To be expected from a minion of the Cato Institute I suppose...
I would highly recommend that Doug Bandow get a lecture in Russian Foreign Politics.
This is not just a market with a handful dollar. Bandow might be a visiting Student a
MGIMO for Russian Foreign Politics which is based on trust and reliability for years.
Besides, Peking is by far the largest economic Partner of Russia. President Putin is not
interested on G7 membership. It lacks results and is a further "bla, bla" Organisation
without any success. Economic sanctions are more an issue for western Europe. As example
Francs lost 50% of their Russian Trade about 12B USD.
US inferior Foreign Politics lacks all of it. It's an Ad-Hoc organised Ministry with
interference from the President.
Aren't these guys really stup!d? They are discussing should Russia be in G8 or not,
while Putin many times said that this organization is useless for Russia! :-)))
The net result on Ukrainian independence was the dramatic rise of political influence of western Ukraine which was suppressed in
the USSR. under Yutchenko they came to power and they regained it after Yanukovich demise. And their interests and their
desire to colonize Eastern Ukraine do not correlate will with the desires of the Eastern Ukrainian population. So Ukraine
remains a divided country with the differences being patched by continuing war in Donbass. So in way continuation of the
war is in the best political interests of Western Ukrainian nationalists. Kind of insurance which simplify for them to stay in
power. While politically they lost in recent Presidential elections the presence of paramilitary formations ensure that they
still have considerable political power including the power of veto.
Whether hardship inflicted on population after EuroMaydan will eventually help to restore the balance and raise political
influence of Eastern Ukraine because Western Ukrainian nationalists are now completely politically discredited due to the dramatic
drop in the standard of living after EuroMaydan is difficult to say. In any case Ukraine now is a debt slave and vassal of the
USA with the USA embassy controlling way to much to consider Ukraine to be an independent country. Few countries manage to dig
themselves out of this hole.
For such countries rise of anti-colonial movement is a possibility, but paradoxically Western Ukrainian nationalists side
with colonial power representing in a way fifth column (and they did played the role of fifth column during EuroMaydan giving
power to rabid neoliberals like Yatsenyuk, who was essentially an agent of the USA, who wanted to privatize everything for
cents on the dollar as long as he and his circle get cramps from it, ordinary Ukrainians be damned ). Understanding that the USA is
the most dangerous partner to have, in many ways no less dangerous then Russia is still pending for the Ukrainian neoliberal elite,
part of which ( Kushma, Victor Pinchuk) clearly are plain-vanilla
compradors.
Notable quotes:
"... Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently as war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest. ..."
"... The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious (and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration ..."
"... Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty that Ukraine needs to seek a European future. ..."
"... Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east. ..."
"... "People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda," says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections here in Mariupol. ..."
"... "When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to change the names of our streets and schools, honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ... ..."
"... "If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change our customs, our language, or our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?" ..."
"... But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to date, Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group. ..."
"... The war has done great and possibly irreparable damage to Ukraine's economy , and the longer it continues, the harder it may be to ever reintegrate the former industrial heartland of Donbass with the rest of the country. ..."
"... Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia. ..."
"... "Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered, had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time." ..."
"... But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine, and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea." ..."
"... Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road ..."
Almost every conversation in Ukraine these days will touch upon the grinding, seemingly endless war in the eastern region of Donbass.
People speak of overwhelming feelings of pain and weariness. And they express near-universal hopes that the new president, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, will finally do something to end it.
Here in Mariupol, where the front line is a 10-minute drive from downtown, those conversations tend to be intense.
But depending on whom you talk to, the path to peace can look very different.
Much of the population around here speaks Russian, is used to having close relations with nearby Russia, and can't imagine any
peace that would impose permanent separation. Many people have family, friends, and former business associates living just a few
miles away on the other side of the border. More than half of voters in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk Region, of which
Mariupol is the largest city, expressed those instincts in July 21 parliamentary elections by voting for two "pro-Russian" political
parties. Both of them would like to forge a peace on Moscow's terms and return at least this part of Ukraine to its historical place
as part of the Russian sphere of influence.
But there are also many who espouse an emerging Ukrainian identity, who see the 2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" as a breaking
point that gave Ukraine the chance to escape the grasp of autocratic Russia and embrace a European future. They want nothing to do
with Russian-authored peace plans, say there is no alternative to fighting on to victory in the Donbass war, and want to
quarantine Ukraine from its giant neighbor – at least until Russia changes its fundamental nature.
Despite the two groups' shared desire for peace, their starkly different visions for what that peace would entail could prove
a major obstacle for ending the war in eastern Ukraine.
Looking east, looking west
These divisions are rooted in Ukrainian history. The country's eastern regions have been part of Russian-run states for over 300
years. Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to
embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and
power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently
as
war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest.
The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War
II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious
(and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration. In 1990, living standards in Ukraine and
Poland were about equal. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, its living standards have doubled and it has become a vibrant
European state. Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty
that Ukraine needs to seek a European future.
The Party of Life, of which local businessman Maxim Tkach is a regional head, argues that peace can be achieved in eastern
Ukraine only by following a Russia-favored plan for the region.
Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions
on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east.
"People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away
from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda,"
says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections
here in Mariupol.
"When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending
oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to
change the names of our streets and schools,
honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ...
"If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change
our customs, our language, or
our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is
Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?"
"The majority who want to be Ukrainian"
Maria Podibailo, a political scientist at Mariupol State University and head of New Mariupol, a civil society group founded to
support the Ukrainian army, offers a completely different narrative. She originally came from Ternopil in western Ukraine and has
made Mariupol her home since 1991.
She says there were no separatist feelings in Mariupol, or the Donbass, until after the Maidan revolution when Russian agitators
started traveling around eastern Ukraine, spreading lies and stirring up moods that had never existed before. Local pro-Russian oligarchs
wielded their economic power to support separatist groups, while passive police and security forces allowed Russian-led separatists
to seize public buildings and hold anti-Ukrainian protests in Mariupol. It wasn't until the arrival of the Ukrainian army – first
in the form of the volunteer Azov Battalion – that the separatists were driven out and the front line was pushed back from the city
limits in 2014, she says.
"That is why we support the army, and only trust the army," she says.
Ms. Podibailo's university-sponsored opinion surveys in 2014, after the rebellion began, found that a three-quarters majority
of local people supported a future as part of Ukraine, not Russia. That majority was subdivided into several visions of what kind
of Ukraine it should be, but only 12% wanted to join Russia, and 8% wanted Donbass to be an independent republic – a point often
overlooked in the simplistic pro-Russian versus pro-Western scheme in which these events are frequently portrayed.
"That's when we knew we were on the right track," she says. "We were not a beleaguered minority at all. We were part of the majority
who want to be Ukrainian."
But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed
by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to
date,
Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group.
"We cannot talk to the leaders of these so-called republics. How could we possibly trust them?" says Ms. Podibailo. Her view is
that, after victory, the population of the republics should be sorted out into those who collaborated with the enemy and those who
were innocent victims, as happened after World War II.
"There is no way for this war to end other than in Ukrainian victory. I have never heard of a war that ends leaving things the
same way, or just through some talks. People say it might take a long time, and the threat will last forever because we have such
a neighbor.
"But we have the United States behind us, we have the West behind us, and they are attacking Russia from the other side with sanctions.
We will win," she says.
"These are our people"
Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want
is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia.
"Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps
we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered,
had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time."
But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine,
and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done
this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea."
One of the leaders of the Party of Life – which came in a distant second in the national parliamentary elections – is Ukrainian
oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who has strong connections to the Kremlin and whose daughter has Mr. Putin as her godfather. Attending
the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum along with Mr. Putin this spring, Mr. Medvedchuk was introduced as "a representative
of the Ukraine that can make a deal."
Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections
and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia
that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road.
The net result on Ukrainian independence was the dramatic rise of political influence of western Ukraine which was suppressed in
the USSR. under Yutchenko they came to power and they regained it after Yanukovich demise. And their interests and their
desire to colonize Eastern Ukraine do not correlate will with the desires of the Eastern Ukrainian population. So Ukraine
remains a divided country with the differences being patched by continuing war in Donbass. So in way continuation of the
war is in the best political interests of Western Ukrainian nationalists. Kind of insurance which simplify for them to stay in
power. While politically they lost in recent Presidential elections the presence of paramilitary formations ensure that they
still have considerable political power including the power of veto.
Whether hardship inflicted on population after EuroMaydan will eventually help to restore the balance and raise political
influence of Eastern Ukraine because Western Ukrainian nationalists are now completely politically discredited due to the dramatic
drop in the standard of living after EuroMaydan is difficult to say. In any case Ukraine now is a debt slave and vassal of the
USA with the USA embassy controlling way to much to consider Ukraine to be an independent country. Few countries manage to dig
themselves out of this hole.
For such countries rise of anti-colonial movement is a possibility, but paradoxically Western Ukrainian nationalists side
with colonial power representing in a way fifth column (and they did played the role of fifth column during EuroMaydan giving
power to rabid neoliberals like Yatsenyuk, who was essentially an agent of the USA, who wanted to privatize everything for
cents on the dollar as long as he and his circle get cramps from it, ordinary Ukrainians be damned ). Understanding that the USA is
the most dangerous partner to have, in many ways no less dangerous then Russia is still pending for the Ukrainian neoliberal elite,
part of which ( Kushma, Victor Pinchuk) clearly are plain-vanilla
compradors.
Notable quotes:
"... Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently as war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest. ..."
"... The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious (and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration ..."
"... Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty that Ukraine needs to seek a European future. ..."
"... Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east. ..."
"... "People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda," says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections here in Mariupol. ..."
"... "When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to change the names of our streets and schools, honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ... ..."
"... "If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change our customs, our language, or our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?" ..."
"... But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to date, Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group. ..."
"... The war has done great and possibly irreparable damage to Ukraine's economy , and the longer it continues, the harder it may be to ever reintegrate the former industrial heartland of Donbass with the rest of the country. ..."
"... Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia. ..."
"... "Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered, had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time." ..."
"... But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine, and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea." ..."
"... Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road ..."
Almost every conversation in Ukraine these days will touch upon the grinding, seemingly endless war in the eastern region of Donbass.
People speak of overwhelming feelings of pain and weariness. And they express near-universal hopes that the new president, Volodymyr
Zelenskiy, will finally do something to end it.
Here in Mariupol, where the front line is a 10-minute drive from downtown, those conversations tend to be intense.
But depending on whom you talk to, the path to peace can look very different.
Much of the population around here speaks Russian, is used to having close relations with nearby Russia, and can't imagine any
peace that would impose permanent separation. Many people have family, friends, and former business associates living just a few
miles away on the other side of the border. More than half of voters in the Ukrainian-controlled part of Donetsk Region, of which
Mariupol is the largest city, expressed those instincts in July 21 parliamentary elections by voting for two "pro-Russian" political
parties. Both of them would like to forge a peace on Moscow's terms and return at least this part of Ukraine to its historical place
as part of the Russian sphere of influence.
But there are also many who espouse an emerging Ukrainian identity, who see the 2014 Maidan "Revolution of Dignity" as a breaking
point that gave Ukraine the chance to escape the grasp of autocratic Russia and embrace a European future. They want nothing to do
with Russian-authored peace plans, say there is no alternative to fighting on to victory in the Donbass war, and want to
quarantine Ukraine from its giant neighbor – at least until Russia changes its fundamental nature.
Despite the two groups' shared desire for peace, their starkly different visions for what that peace would entail could prove
a major obstacle for ending the war in eastern Ukraine.
Looking east, looking west
These divisions are rooted in Ukrainian history. The country's eastern regions have been part of Russian-run states for over 300
years. Three decades of Ukrainian independence have brought little in the way of economic development or other strong reasons to
embrace a Ukrainian identity. At the same time, Russia has become a far more prosperous, orderly place that exudes confidence and
power since Vladimir Putin came to power. Millions of eastern Ukrainians have gone to Russia as guest workers – and more recently
as
war refugees . Today, the Ukrainian diaspora in Russia is by far the world's largest.
The western regions of Ukraine, on the other hand, were part of European states like Austria-Hungary and Poland until World War
II, when they were annexed by the Soviet Union. Now, people overwhelmingly speak Ukrainian as their first language, take a suspicious
(and historically grounded) view of Russia, and tend to look west for their inspiration. In 1990, living standards in Ukraine and
Poland were about equal. Since Poland joined the European Union in 2004, its living standards have doubled and it has become a vibrant
European state. Millions of Ukrainians go to Poland and beyond as guest workers, and their impressions help to fuel the certainty
that Ukraine needs to seek a European future.
The Party of Life, of which local businessman Maxim Tkach is a regional head, argues that peace can be achieved in eastern
Ukraine only by following a Russia-favored plan for the region.
Not coincidentally, the enthusiasm and conviction of western Ukrainians have disproportionately driven two pro-Western revolutions
on the Maidan in Kyiv in the past 15 years, with little visible support from populations in the country's east.
"People in the western Ukraine are different from us. It's not just language, or anything simple like that. They took power away
from a president our votes elected, and they want to rip us out of our ways, abandon our values, and become part of their agenda,"
says Maxim Tkach, regional head of the Party of Life, the pro-Russian group that was the front-runner in parliamentary elections
here in Mariupol.
"When they started that Maidan revolution, they said it was about things we could support, like fighting corruption and ending
oligarchic rule. But none of that happened. They betrayed every single principle they had shouted about. Instead, they want us to
change the names of our streets and schools,
honor 'heroes' like Stepan Bandera that our ancestors fought against. These are things we can't accept. ...
"If there had been no Maidan, we would still have Crimea. There would have been no war. There would be no pressure on us to change
our customs, our language, or
our church . It was this aggressive revolution, by just part of the country, that caused these problems," he says. "Russia is
Russia. It is acting in its own interests, but why do we need to antagonize it?"
"The majority who want to be Ukrainian"
Maria Podibailo, a political scientist at Mariupol State University and head of New Mariupol, a civil society group founded to
support the Ukrainian army, offers a completely different narrative. She originally came from Ternopil in western Ukraine and has
made Mariupol her home since 1991.
She says there were no separatist feelings in Mariupol, or the Donbass, until after the Maidan revolution when Russian agitators
started traveling around eastern Ukraine, spreading lies and stirring up moods that had never existed before. Local pro-Russian oligarchs
wielded their economic power to support separatist groups, while passive police and security forces allowed Russian-led separatists
to seize public buildings and hold anti-Ukrainian protests in Mariupol. It wasn't until the arrival of the Ukrainian army – first
in the form of the volunteer Azov Battalion – that the separatists were driven out and the front line was pushed back from the city
limits in 2014, she says.
"That is why we support the army, and only trust the army," she says.
Ms. Podibailo's university-sponsored opinion surveys in 2014, after the rebellion began, found that a three-quarters majority
of local people supported a future as part of Ukraine, not Russia. That majority was subdivided into several visions of what kind
of Ukraine it should be, but only 12% wanted to join Russia, and 8% wanted Donbass to be an independent republic – a point often
overlooked in the simplistic pro-Russian versus pro-Western scheme in which these events are frequently portrayed.
"That's when we knew we were on the right track," she says. "We were not a beleaguered minority at all. We were part of the majority
who want to be Ukrainian."
But while the two nearby separatist statelets, the Donetsk People's Republic and the Lugansk People's Republic, may be backed
by Russia, they emerged from deep local roots. That is a clear observation from one of the most exhaustive studies of the war to
date,
Rebels Without a Cause , published last month by the International Crisis Group.
"We cannot talk to the leaders of these so-called republics. How could we possibly trust them?" says Ms. Podibailo. Her view is
that, after victory, the population of the republics should be sorted out into those who collaborated with the enemy and those who
were innocent victims, as happened after World War II.
"There is no way for this war to end other than in Ukrainian victory. I have never heard of a war that ends leaving things the
same way, or just through some talks. People say it might take a long time, and the threat will last forever because we have such
a neighbor.
"But we have the United States behind us, we have the West behind us, and they are attacking Russia from the other side with sanctions.
We will win," she says.
"These are our people"
Mr. Tkach, the regional party head, says the idea of victory is a dangerous chimera, and what most people around here want
is peace and restoration of normal relations with Russia.
"Of course we need to negotiate directly with" the rebel republics, he says. "These are our people. We understand them. Perhaps
we need a step-by-step process, in which they are granted some special status. What would be wrong with that? They have also suffered,
had their homes shelled by Ukrainian forces, lost their loved ones. Trust needs to be restored, and that might take some time."
But he is adamant that those territories need to be recovered for Ukraine. "The task before us is to bring them back to Ukraine,
and Ukraine to them. It must be accomplished through compromise and negotiation, because everyone is tired of war. Once we have done
this, and have peace, then we can talk about Crimea."
One of the leaders of the Party of Life – which came in a distant second in the national parliamentary elections – is Ukrainian
oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk, who has strong connections to the Kremlin and whose daughter has Mr. Putin as her godfather. Attending
the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum along with Mr. Putin this spring, Mr. Medvedchuk was introduced as "a representative
of the Ukraine that can make a deal."
Mr. Tkach says so too. "We wish Zelenskiy well, but we really doubt that he can make peace happen. Our party has the connections
and the right approach, and we think it will be necessary to bring us into the process." He's talking about dealing with the Russia
that exists just across the Sea of Azov and a few miles down the road.
"... Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. ..."
"... As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.) ..."
"... After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy. ..."
Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq
war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which,
in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had
never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his
enthusiasm for military operations involving other people.
As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be
everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of
those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them
unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of
nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to
rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American
invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American
military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood,
treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)
After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then
picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted
mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as
those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in
Iraq had been a tragedy.
As the question settled, some of us who had grown tired of Max Boot chirping in our ears
began to wonder how he would respond. What might he say? Perhaps an abashed silence would do.
Or should he undertake a penitential retreat to an obscure college, where he might meliorate
his remorse with weed or alcohol? In less generous moments, we toyed with the idea that he
might simply walk into the surf, after leaving an abject note of apology pinned against the sea
breeze by a heavy shard of driftwood.
Our answer was a long time coming.
I am a heavy viewer of CNN, at both the airport and the barber shop, that is. One day last
year, as I was having my thinning locks trimmed, the network ran a banner headline: MAX BOOT
QUITS REPUBLICAN PARTY. I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Soon the entire shop -- the
sheeted customers, the startled barbers, the guys reading sticky magazines -- they were all
asking, along with the rest of America, who is this Max Boot? I tried to answer but I couldn't.
Each time I tried, I wound up laughing uncontrollably. CNN, which appears to have missed the
earlier and equally newsworthy story, MAX BOOT JOINS REPUBLICAN PARTY, had reached its summary
judgment: nothing had so become Max Boot's secret Republican career as the leaving of it.
(Seriously, one thing you can count on is the acuity of CNN's news judgment. By a remarkable
coincidence, both Arnold Thornbush of Ames, Iowa, and Phoebe Birdbath of Tempe, Arizona, had
quit the GOP that very same day, but the CNN desk, laser-focused, could not be distracted from
the big story.)
Ideas may or may not have consequences -- the debate rages -- but fake news most certainly
does. Shortly after CNN's blockbuster story, The Washington Post , or what used to be
The Washington Post , offered Max Boot a regular column. No, the Post
couldn't find the stones to cast him as a defense expert. The Max Boot beat is still a bit
undefined, but it seems to highlight his ad hominem attacks on former friends and
associates from his secret Republican career.
Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful.
I never really knew Max Boot's background. So, after reading this column, I looked up his
Wikipedia biography and it blew my mind. What on earth has this guy ever done to be
considered a "Defense Expert?" He did not serve in the military or even in a civilian defense
capacity. Nor does he seem to have any military related education - not a Service Academy, a
military school, or a War College. As near as I can tell, this guy has made a career out of
writing opinion pieces - jumping from a college newspaper to the Wall Street Journal to the
Weekly Standard. Essentially, he's a glorified blogger who convinced a lot people that
invading Iraq was a good idea. Unbelievable.
Have some compassion, people! When the Democratic establishment finally follows its
Republican counterpart to the oblivion, where all these poor unemployed people, these
suffering dullards representatives of the strata of society with insufficient access
to intellectual capacities go? On the other hand, ingenium mala saepe movent .
Perhaps, after that he finally gets over himself and finds that eldritch ability to say two
coherent words.
I like the last line. Max is an old fashioned imperialist who made a home with the GOP when
that seemed the most likely place for people of his views. Once Trump talked about walking
that back, he quit.
Something always missing from articles like this, is the context. Max Boot is a Zionist. That
is WHY he wants to destroy Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, ... anyone perceived as a threat to
Israel. He has not been a failure but a success, or at least a partial success, as indeed we
have destroyed Iraq, and Libya, and nearly destroyed Syria. You think he should be ashamed of
his failures. Of course he is not, because he has not failed.
That war mongering piece of filth should be loaded aboard a C 130 and sent on a one-way
flight to Ukraine, his original lair, where, parachute, bandolier, and all, he can be
jettisoned over Kiev.
As far as I can tell, neither Alfred Rosenberg nor Julius Striecher never fired a shot during
World War II, neither so much as harmed a single hair on the head of an "Untermensch",
combatant or not.
Both, however propagandized incessantly for aggressive war and genocide. Both men hanged
at Nuremberg, for crimes against peace, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity. (I think
Streicher only hanged for crimes against humanity, but the sentence was the same.)
In a group of brain dead walking/talking ziocon mouth pieces, max boot stands out as one of
most brain dead-does not have an original thought in his head.
"Putin's most innovative, and dangerous, weapon. The dogs will be handed out to Democrats
on election night, suppressing the vote and guaranteeing a second Trump term. Rachel Maddow,
where are you?"
"... Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which, in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his enthusiasm for military operations involving other people. ..."
"... As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood, treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.) ..."
"... After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in Iraq had been a tragedy. ..."
Max Boot first came to public notice, or at least to mine, during the run-up to the Iraq
war. He had persuaded a television producer somewhere to label him a "Defense Expert," which,
in the natural order of things, caused some people to mistake him for a defense expert. He had
never been involved in even minor military operations himself, but he seemed uncontained in his
enthusiasm for military operations involving other people.
As the country debated the merits of an expedition to Iraq, Max Boot seemed to be
everywhere. He was in every room. While he was rarely the most influential voice in any of
those rooms, he was almost always the loudest. Among his several asseverations, all of them
unburdened by either evidence or experience, were these: an American invasion would rid Iraq of
nuclear weapons. (Iraq had no nuclear weapons.) An American invasion would cause the Iraqis to
rise up and greet us as liberators. (They rose up and fought us as invaders.) An American
invasion would bring democratic stability to a troubled region. (It brought chaos.) An American
military victory would be quick and decisive. (After 16 years and incalculable losses in blood,
treasure, prestige, and morale, the American military is still in Iraq.)
After the heavy fighting had faded, a consensus began to form, slowly at first and then
picking up speed, that the invasion of Iraq had been one of the most disastrous self-inflicted
mistakes in the history of American foreign policy. For almost everybody involved, as well as
those many in the region who had hoped to remain uninvolved, the so-called discretionary war in
Iraq had been a tragedy.
As the question settled, some of us who had grown tired of Max Boot chirping in our ears
began to wonder how he would respond. What might he say? Perhaps an abashed silence would do.
Or should he undertake a penitential retreat to an obscure college, where he might meliorate
his remorse with weed or alcohol? In less generous moments, we toyed with the idea that he
might simply walk into the surf, after leaving an abject note of apology pinned against the sea
breeze by a heavy shard of driftwood.
Our answer was a long time coming.
I am a heavy viewer of CNN, at both the airport and the barber shop, that is. One day last
year, as I was having my thinning locks trimmed, the network ran a banner headline: MAX BOOT
QUITS REPUBLICAN PARTY. I couldn't help myself. I started laughing. Soon the entire shop -- the
sheeted customers, the startled barbers, the guys reading sticky magazines -- they were all
asking, along with the rest of America, who is this Max Boot? I tried to answer but I couldn't.
Each time I tried, I wound up laughing uncontrollably. CNN, which appears to have missed the
earlier and equally newsworthy story, MAX BOOT JOINS REPUBLICAN PARTY, had reached its summary
judgment: nothing had so become Max Boot's secret Republican career as the leaving of it.
(Seriously, one thing you can count on is the acuity of CNN's news judgment. By a remarkable
coincidence, both Arnold Thornbush of Ames, Iowa, and Phoebe Birdbath of Tempe, Arizona, had
quit the GOP that very same day, but the CNN desk, laser-focused, could not be distracted from
the big story.)
Ideas may or may not have consequences -- the debate rages -- but fake news most certainly
does. Shortly after CNN's blockbuster story, The Washington Post , or what used to be
The Washington Post , offered Max Boot a regular column. No, the Post
couldn't find the stones to cast him as a defense expert. The Max Boot beat is still a bit
undefined, but it seems to highlight his ad hominem attacks on former friends and
associates from his secret Republican career.
Forgive Max Boot. He's no idiot. He's just trying to make himself useful.
I never really knew Max Boot's background. So, after reading this column, I looked up his
Wikipedia biography and it blew my mind. What on earth has this guy ever done to be
considered a "Defense Expert?" He did not serve in the military or even in a civilian defense
capacity. Nor does he seem to have any military related education - not a Service Academy, a
military school, or a War College. As near as I can tell, this guy has made a career out of
writing opinion pieces - jumping from a college newspaper to the Wall Street Journal to the
Weekly Standard. Essentially, he's a glorified blogger who convinced a lot people that
invading Iraq was a good idea. Unbelievable.
Have some compassion, people! When the Democratic establishment finally follows its
Republican counterpart to the oblivion, where all these poor unemployed people, these
suffering dullards representatives of the strata of society with insufficient access
to intellectual capacities go? On the other hand, ingenium mala saepe movent .
Perhaps, after that he finally gets over himself and finds that eldritch ability to say two
coherent words.
I like the last line. Max is an old fashioned imperialist who made a home with the GOP when
that seemed the most likely place for people of his views. Once Trump talked about walking
that back, he quit.
Something always missing from articles like this, is the context. Max Boot is a Zionist. That
is WHY he wants to destroy Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, ... anyone perceived as a threat to
Israel. He has not been a failure but a success, or at least a partial success, as indeed we
have destroyed Iraq, and Libya, and nearly destroyed Syria. You think he should be ashamed of
his failures. Of course he is not, because he has not failed.
That war mongering piece of filth should be loaded aboard a C 130 and sent on a one-way
flight to Ukraine, his original lair, where, parachute, bandolier, and all, he can be
jettisoned over Kiev.
As far as I can tell, neither Alfred Rosenberg nor Julius Striecher never fired a shot during
World War II, neither so much as harmed a single hair on the head of an "Untermensch",
combatant or not.
Both, however propagandized incessantly for aggressive war and genocide. Both men hanged
at Nuremberg, for crimes against peace, aggressive war, and crimes against humanity. (I think
Streicher only hanged for crimes against humanity, but the sentence was the same.)
In a group of brain dead walking/talking ziocon mouth pieces, max boot stands out as one of
most brain dead-does not have an original thought in his head.
"... Palestinians are:- "beasts walking on two legs" (Begin), "drugged cockroaches in a bottle" (Eitan), "hungry crocodiles" (Barak), who "must be crushed like grasshoppers" (Shamir). ..."
"... We have fringe racist groups in the UK and US and elsewhere. But the KKK in the US just get drunk and burn a few crosses now and again. They are totally irrelevant. If they supplied ALL the heads of state, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Barak, Netanyahu, ALL the heads of the armed forces, ALL the religious leaders, and the media in the country, anyone with two brain cells to rub together would have to acknowledge there is a difference. ..."
"... You can't criticise ANY of these people because it "offends" AIPAC, the Board of Deputies, the Friends of Israel, and "hurts their feelings." You are not allowed to call them out without incurring unprecedented draconian penalties unless you have first solved world hunger, global warming, criticised every other nation on the planet, and obtained a written permit from the Board of Deputies specifying exactly what terms and language you are authorised to use. ..."
"... Why obsess about Talmudistan? Because it is the tail that wags the dog. It exercises a complete stranglehold over the politics and foreign policy of the US and its satellites like the UK. It incites endless wars which those countries are expected to prosecute on its behalf. ..."
mark
I'll give you some "truly horrible expressions of bigotry." Palestinians are:- "beasts walking on two legs" (Begin), "drugged cockroaches in a bottle" (Eitan), "hungry crocodiles" (Barak),
who "must be crushed like grasshoppers" (Shamir).
Truly horrible racist stuff. 8 -4 Reply Aug 22, 2019 1:39 AM Reader
Mandy Miller
What is it with you Mark, that you keep just bringing up the same four or six quotes from the most bigoted Jews you can find who
are mostly dead? I am curious what you think it proves about anything?
Sure there are lunatics and there are racists and some of both are Jews, just as some are not Jews. Taking the words of the
racist Jews and using that to fire up your own racist hate of all Jews, even those like me who think Begin was a one-eyed
lunatic, is a waste of your life and breeds nothing but more hate. I hope God grants you peace in your heart, Mark.
mark
These are not four random annoying saloon bar bores blowing off steam after one too many. They are three successive prime ministers
and the head of the armed forces. Four typical political and military leaders. You could say the same about any other political
and military figures. Or religious figures like the Chief Rabbi. This is normal and routine. There is a great deal that is far
worse, like "Justice" Minister Shaked, who called for all Palestinian mothers to be murdered so that no Palestinian children could
be born. Or a national newspaper called The Times of Israel openly advocating the extermination of the Palestinian people at concentration
camps in the desert, "When Genocide Is Justified." Or two leading rabbis calling for the murder of all Palestinian children.
Imagine that Cameron, or May, or Johnson, called Jews cockroaches or grasshoppers, let alone calling for Jews to be murdered.
And every leading UK politician and military figure had done the same as a matter of routine for decades. Imagine the outrage.
Rightly so.
I would never call Jews cockroaches. But ALL these Zionist figures ROUTINELY speak of Palestinians in these terms. This is
completely normal. And nobody so much as raises an eyebrow. It is perfectly okay for the Chosen Folk to do this.
That is the point. It would be of benefit to the world if there was a little peace in the hearts of these people as well.
Mandy Miller
I didn't say they were insignificant I said they were regarded by most sensible Jews that I know as lunatics.
Begin did not speak for most Jews while he was alive and certainly doesn't now he's dead. I'm sure he liked to think he did,
but why believe that racist schmuck? Ditto for Binyamin, who is as stupid and racist as he is crazy.
Like I said you might as well quote Hitler or Goebbels as being representative of today's Germany or claim they speak for all
gentiles everywhere unless individuals specifically state otherwise. I was born a Jew, my kids were born Jews, we didn't volunteer
to join! We should not need to officially repudiate Zionism or the crazy ravings of our leaders past or present in order to be
assumed good people, any more than you, Mark, should have to repudiate Nazism or Mr Churchill's racism or mr Johnson's anti-Russian
schtick to be considered a good person.
I would like to see a good study of Zionism here, I support the Palestinians in their struggle as again do many many Jews of
my acquaintance (though, sadly not all I will admit). But do you not see how alienating and hurtful it is to see comments such
as "the chosen people did 9/11", or (as was talked about a short while back) "Hebrews have a tendency toward pedophilia"? Please!
Have a little respect is all. Talk about the evils of Zionism but don't conflate that with Judaism or with everyone lucky or unlucky
enough to be born a Jew!
And all that oy vey goy stuff you do feels quite hurtful also, I am just curious what you think it brings to the conversation
by way of enlightenment, communication and brotherly love, Mark? It just looks like you are hating on Jewishness in the same way
those Nazi images of guys with hook noses etcetera did. It feels nasty. What does it achieve? Would it be a nice and helpful gesture
to at least drop all that?
mark
We have fringe racist groups in the UK and US and elsewhere. But the KKK in the US just get drunk and burn a few crosses now
and again. They are totally irrelevant. If they supplied ALL the heads of state, Begin, Shamir, Sharon, Barak, Netanyahu, ALL
the heads of the armed forces, ALL the religious leaders, and the media in the country, anyone with two brain cells to rub together
would have to acknowledge there is a difference.
You can't criticise ANY of these people because it "offends" AIPAC, the Board of Deputies, the Friends of Israel, and "hurts
their feelings." You are not allowed to call them out without incurring unprecedented draconian penalties unless you have first
solved world hunger, global warming, criticised every other nation on the planet, and obtained a written permit from the Board
of Deputies specifying exactly what terms and language you are authorised to use.
Why obsess about Talmudistan? Because it is the tail that wags the dog. It exercises a complete stranglehold over the politics
and foreign policy of the US and its satellites like the UK. It incites endless wars which those countries are expected to prosecute
on its behalf. It destabilises the entire planet causing indescribable suffering and human misery. It expects and receives
a free pass to commit genocide and possess a huge illegal arsenal of WMD it constantly threatens to use. It extorts unimaginable
amounts of tribute from other countries. It commits terrorist atrocities like 9/11 with complete impunity. Its endless intrigues
and subversion poison the whole public space in entire countries. The smear campaign against Corbyn and the Epstein organisation
are just two fairly trivial recent examples. Politicians and ordinary people are not required to swear loyalty oaths to Botswana
or Bolivia on pain of instant dismissal. That is the difference.
A bit of kvetching about all the above seems a little bit justified under the circumstances.
Mandy Miller
Ok, Mark, I understand that you think Israel is a bigger racist problem than the UK and all the NATO non-democracies, and I can
agree with you about that. Israel is for me and many (not all) of my family and friends a place of terrible evil and shame. I
hate that the suffering of so many Jews under the Nazis has been turned into an excuse to impose more suffering on other innocent
people simply because of their race. So, let's agree Israel is indefensible in its treatment of the Palestinians and in its appalling
foreign policy. Just awful.
My question is, how helpful is it to express those facts in racial terms? Why do you use these words that only have the effect
of turning people away from you and closing down there receptiveness?
Ok, what I'm saying is, if you try to tell the average non-political nice well meaning Jewish person or liberal, of which my
sister is a good example (both) that Israel is the aggressor nation in so many instances and if you tell them about the terrible
plight of the Palestinian people it will be hard for you to get them to listen even if you don't use words that make you sound
like a racist. But as soon as you start throwing around words such as Talmudistan and "chosen folk" and mockery of Yiddish with
your "oy vey goy" routine, you are giving them a route to the exit door., which is what they want. You are giving them permission
to ignore you! They can say "oh what a racist", and just leave the building.
So, my question is, why use that language? What good is it doing you that makes it worthwhile to lose so much credibility among
people you could perhaps convert if you approached it differently?
I guess my question is, what does this aggressive use of offensive terms do for you that you hold on to it to the point of
undoing any good you could do? Why not just say "Israel"? Why terms such as goy and chosen folk and language that can sound soooo
racist and threatening?
I believe you Mark that you don't entertain real racist thoughts, but can you communicate with me why you use that language
that makes it sound as if you do? Maybe you don't realize it but to a Jew it feels like a slap across the face. It triggers centuries
of dormant fears of persecution. I have to try hard to put that aside and approach you without fear or anger. So I'm asking you,
as a gesture toward understanding, to please not use those terms in our conversation? And maybe you might find you don't need
that armour, or comfort blanket or whatever it is to you. Maybe you will find your message, which as put above is something I
can get on board with, gets across more clearly.
Can we take that step, Mark? I am asking with peace and love in my heart.
While this is a Russian site with specific audience, comments show that people reject the USA policy which might creates problems
for the USA in the future. Not the USA neoliberal/neocon elite cares.
This decisions just had shown to the whole would that Trump is a clown capable of twitting, not much more. Other people make key
decisions for the county.
The deep state that controls the US are lying criminal psychopaths. Any agreements and treaties negotiated with them aren't
worth the time or paper they are written on.
all.putin wants world peace but the Americans whats to tell everyone what to do and start wars what.they.sould buid a wall.around
america stop them getting out
le"> We can certainly expect Poland and Romania to be targeted with Nuclear munitions at the very least. There will likely
be an official Russian announcement of this fact as well. In the event of a breakout of hostilities with Nato then Russia will
target the military infrastructure in both countries and vaporise them immediately. Unfortunately a very large number of Polish
and Romanian civilians will be caught in the blasts. That will be tragic of course.
I live in the Netherlands and I am on the side of Russia. Europe is disgusting for not condemning the USA intentions. Eu will
regret it. When bombs fall on Europe because of these incompetent leaders we will not forget.
icle"> The Western public MUST, MUST become very familiar pronto with the few intellectuals, scholars, journalists, writers
and authors who have been at the forefront for global peace and world justice for decades! It's our only hope! Right now the only
sane voice on the national stage is Tulsi Gabbard. People must start reading: John Pilger, James Petras, Diana Johnstone, Stephen
Lendman, Ray McGovern, Finian Cunningham, Andre Vltchek, Michael Parenti, Stephen Cohen, The Saker, Caitlin Johnstone, Paul Craig
Roberts.
USA a decadent nation run by global mafia . Cannot trust what they say , is proven by their actions Sold their soul to the
devil for money and power. Yet they will fail God is in charge!
e"> The double standard in the West is breathtaking. It's as simple as the Golden Rule: merely try to imagine the reaction
in New York, London, Washington, Paris, Chicago, Boston if Russia or China were to do the exact same thing in southern Canada
or the Caribbean. The Washington military empire builders could possibly destroy humanity with their reckless and imperial behavior.
They simply cannot accept any sovereign nation-states that 1.) give the finger to Wall Street or the idea of the uni-polar world
Washington's intent on establishing, or 2.) gives diplomatic support to the Palestinians or is even a mild thorn in the side of
Israel. For further reading, see the following scholars, intellectuals, journalists and writers: James Petras, Diana Johnstone,
John Pilger, Stephen Lendman, Michael Parenti, Finian Cunningham, Andre Vltchek and a few others I'm forgetting at the moment.
e"> Under Trump the USA are rapidly steering towards an open dictatorship, something they've been doing for years but more
covertly. The USA have always been shouting the loudest about democracy and freedom but that's just a façade while they bully
the world and their own people into submission. The curtain is falling faster and faster now. Oh, and ask the American Natives
what the Americans do with treaties...
The US does not want friendship with Russia, it seeks to either control it or destroy it. Since the first option isn't going
to happen, it's obvious what's next and it'll start with more sanctions, expanding NATO into Georgia and Ukraine and placing nuclear
missiles on Russia's Eastern and Western border.
"comment-renderer-text-content expanded"> All it takes, is 1 single warhead fired from ex. Poland to reach Moscow. How many
launchers do USA have placed in these countries near Russia? Is Moscow more than 500 KM away from any NATO border? If the enemy
sets up catapults outside your city walls, isn't that a clear sign the enemy intend to fire those catapults against your walls?
So what do you do? Do you sit and wait? Or do you take out the catapults before they break down your walls? As far as any strategist
see this, it can be only one solution for survival.
omment-renderer-text-content expanded"> During FDR's 'Pearl Harbor' speech he said, "It will be recorded that the distance
of Hawaii from Japan makes it obvious that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago." There are echoes
of this speech in Putin's words (
02:18 ) and the
type of treachery referred to by Roosevelt applies to the American exit from the INF. America has become a nation holding "a big
stick" and loudly shouting about it (contrary to an earlier Roosevelt's advice). The White House acknowledged (and the NYT reported)
that we are involved in seven wars right now (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, Niger). We have 38 "named" foreign
military bases as well as upwards of 600 overseas military installations of some sort including "lily pads," i.e., "cooperative
security locations" and an undisclosed number of "black" locations. Our military budget is pushing towards a trillion dollars
per year ($717 billion this year). We are threatening small countries such as Venezuela with military action (and yes, something
needs to be done for the good of the people there but that should not include an American military attack which President Trump,
our Secretary of State ("and his colleague") have said is "on the table." And now, we are dumping nuclear weapons treaties. We
have truly become a country which "lives by the sword." Good luck to us all.
Okay , so this is a broadcast of the President of Russia speaking to his security council right , this is official researched
factual intel ....has to be on that level ...right . Now to the few negative responses I have come across ,what intel do you have
and where did you get it...
Instead of addressing and trying to ameliorate this most dangerous development, let's instead focus on Trump's idiotic and
diversionary comments and tweets about buying Greenland or some such other nonsense.
"... The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' don't even have new or original ideas. Even the hyper-aggressiveness isn't exactly new but simply an expression of megalomania. ..."
"... That aside, that land based Tomahawks are an idea from the height of the cold war, iirc in response to the russian SS-20 (which, thanks to the INF, is gone now). ..."
"... In light of that, and the recent US tests, Russian concerns that US land based missile defense in Romania and Poland with Mk.41 & Mk.57 type vertical launchers (or the old trucks) could use to fire US GLCM is exactly rather rational. ..."
"... US cruisers and destroyers with VLS can use the same launcher systems to launch an ESSM, SM-2/3, VL ASROCK or a Tomahawk. Why just from there? ..."
"... It's GLCM again, just vertically launched this time, and with by now more accurate GPS. ..."
"... The problem for the anti-china and neocon nuts IMO is hat China legally allowed has plenty medium range missiles and was not in the INF treaty. Thus the INF treaty was an obstacle for 'hyper-aggressive nuts' when going after China with medium range missiles of which China has plenty. ..."
"... As the by now severely demented Rudy Giuliani put is so clearly (if there is a political interest) the ' reality is now not truth '. ..."
"... Likely Boltonists see any treaty as an unacceptable limitation of the freedom to handle at whits, as an ' indispensable nation ', or to rule by arbitrary tweets or other solo acts like presidential decrees as far as Trump is concerned. ..."
"... The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' are focused but are geographically disoriented. To hit China they kicked Russia. ..."
"The Associated Press ran a brief article asserting that:
"The U.S. military has conducted a flight test of a type of missile banned for more than
30 years by a treaty that both the United
States and Russia abandoned this month, the Pentagon said.
The Trump administration has said it remains interested in useful arms control but
questions Moscow's willingness to adhere to its treaty commitments."
This was stated within the first paragraph. The author failed to mention that it was the
United States that unilaterally abandoned the treaty. Russia only abandoned the treaty after
the U.S. did, despite numerous Russian efforts to keep the treaty alive. Russia only abandoned
the INF treaty when it became the only party to it, and treaties are quite pointless when they
do not actually have more than one party as a signatory. Russia had in fact adhered to the
restrictions imposed by the treaty, vague and unproven Pentagon leveled accusations aside.
Let's be honest, both Russia and the United States have had the technology and the guided
missile systems in service to field the intermediate range land-based missiles prohibited by
the INF treaty. Both field such systems on their naval warships. The only thing that kept them
from fielding such weapons was the INF treaty itself. Now that formal framework of prohibition
is gone.
Now that we can acknowledge the fact that the INF Treaty no longer exists because the United
States unilaterally abandoned it, let's take a look at the missile that the U.S. military
tested." SF
---------------
OK, pilgrims, first we bailed out of the JCPOA, an agreement that was accomplishing what it
was intended to do in impeding Iranian progress toward their supposed goal of a deliverable
nuclear weapon. Our claim, resoundingly approved by Israel, is that the JCPOA nuclear deal did
not restrict Iran to a role as a "hermit kingdom" producer of pistachio nuts and carpets. This
policy of the US is ridiculously servile to the Zionist interest.
Now, WE (the US) have walked away from the INF Treaty, an agreement that had been in place
since the dark days of the Cold War. Its purpose was to prevent the deployment of land based
intermediate range nuclear tipped missiles and it served that purpose well.
But, pilgrims, in the era of the triumph of the Trumpian neocon view of the world, we must
prepare for war. WAR! Any advantage that can be pursued against possible enemies must be
pursued. Pompeo, Bolton and the other hyper-aggressive nuts want total world dominance. Sooo,
we canceled the INF and now have tested a land based version of the navy's Tomahawk which has a
range of over 300 miles.
as for " a land based version of the navy's Tomahawk " ...
The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' don't even have new or original ideas. Even the
hyper-aggressiveness isn't exactly new but simply an expression of megalomania.
That aside, that land based Tomahawks are an idea from the height of the cold war, iirc in
response to the russian SS-20 (which, thanks to the INF, is gone now).
To re-vive that dead old program can use developed technology and is thus rather cheap, as
far as the volume of US military budget goes.
In light of that, and the recent US tests, Russian concerns that US land based missile
defense in Romania and Poland with Mk.41 & Mk.57 type vertical launchers (or the old
trucks) could use to fire US GLCM is exactly rather rational.
US cruisers and destroyers with VLS can use the same launcher systems to launch an ESSM,
SM-2/3, VL ASROCK or a Tomahawk. Why just from there?
It's GLCM again, just vertically launched this time, and with by now more accurate
GPS.
IMO the only reason why the 'hyper-aggressive nuts' killed the INF was not that Russia had
good missiles (which they had also before INF) or missiles violating the INF.
The problem for the anti-china and neocon nuts IMO is hat China legally allowed has plenty
medium range missiles and was not in the INF treaty. Thus the INF treaty was an obstacle for
'hyper-aggressive nuts' when going after China with medium range missiles of which China has
plenty.
Now, thanks to not being in INF the US can have their own.
That the US could perhaps lie here to get that is sadly rather plausible, considering the
BS story about Iraqi WMD used as an excuse to attack the country.
As the by now severely demented Rudy Giuliani put is so clearly (if there is a political
interest) the ' reality is now not truth '.
Indeed! And Trump is a 'stable genius' (and not the opposite) and earned the millions he
had at 8 years by extremely successfully distributing newspapers.
The US, being in the INF, were not allowed to have the desired medium range missiles, thus
... they perhaps arbitrily accused Russia of violating the INF to have an excuse to kill the
treaty and, now legally, get for themselves the medium range missiles they wanted.
Absurdly they did about exactly what they accused Russia of - violate the INF practically
(and not just in spirit). Alas ...
Likely Boltonists see any treaty as an unacceptable limitation of the freedom to handle at
whits, as an ' indispensable nation ', or to rule by arbitrary tweets or other solo
acts like presidential decrees as far as Trump is concerned.
The 'hyper-aggressive nuts' are focused but are geographically disoriented. To hit China
they kicked Russia.
Who knows, maybe in a year the US will have an orange Whitehouse and a president for life
with a crown - or - from folks still living in the cold war - a revived Strategic Defense
Initiative (SDI), a US Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) and perhaps Pershing
III?
Speaking after talks Wednesday with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto, Putin argued that the quick test
indicated the U.S. had begun work on the missile long before declaring its intention to withdraw from the pact.
"The Americans have tested this missile too quickly after having withdrawn from the treaty," Putin said. "That
gives us strong reason to believe that they had started work to adapt the sea-launched missile long before they
began looking for excuses to opt out of the treaty."
... ... ...
He said that for Russia that means "the emergence of new threats, to which we will react accordingly."
"Putin's most innovative, and dangerous, weapon. The dogs will be handed out to Democrats
on election night, suppressing the vote and guaranteeing a second Trump term. Rachel Maddow,
where are you?"
GG: Sure. And the success with
which they have done that, the skill with which they have done that shows me that they do have a
bigger lock than I thought that they did. Not even Israel has a bigger--not even in Israel does
the Zionist movement have a bigger lock than it does in the United States. So nothing compares to
that. But it does, and it's a trick, I know it's a trick because an Israeli Cabinet minister Shulamit Aloni giving me dinner in her house in Tel Aviv, literally told me that it was, it's a
trick she said, we always do it. And they do it obviously because it works. If someone stands up
for Palestinian rights, the first, the default position is to call them an anti-Semite. The fact
that someone like me with my politics and the basis of my politics so heavily Jewish from Marx
through Trotsky, through Chomsky, through, you know, half the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee
were Jewish. It was, according to the right wing, a Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy, that's what I was
involved, and the idea that I can be described as an anti-Semite is patently absurd [INDISTINCT]
Jeremy Corbyn who comes out of the same stable as me more or less. So, I like to think it doesn't
work but obviously to some extent it does. My own wife who's a person of color, an Indonesian
woman was abused in the street the other day as the--as the wife of an anti-Semite, as the wife
of a racist. It's absurd but effective but less effective I think than before, on the principle
that if you call everybody an anti-Semite then eventually nobody is an anti-Semite. The boy who
cried wolf is a parable of note for a reason.
CH: Well, the poison is that, you know, the real anti-Semites, the Christian right in the
United States who's become an ally, a political ally of Israel, you know, it's the equation of
anti-Semitism with the State of Israel, that's what's so dangerous and one of the biggest
racists in the Middle East is named Bibi Netanyahu. What do you...
GG: And there's worse than him waiting in the wings.
CH: And there is, Avigdor Lieberman and others. So, but let's talk about where we're going
because we may be going in a very frightening direction if things don't go right. What are
those forces out there that frighten you and what does the left have to do? How do we have to
wake up to make sure those forces, we don't end up like Hungary with Viktor Orban?
"... Throughout, the militias reportedly have committed serious human rights abuses, including numerous extrajudicial killings of civilians. CIA sponsorship ensures that their operations are clouded in secrecy. There is virtually no public oversight of their activities or accountability for grave human rights abuses. " ..."
Been reading an interesting report from
Brown University's Watson Institute about "the CIA army and [it's] threat to human rights
and an obstacle to peace in Afghanistan."
"Afghan paramilitary forces working with the United States Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) have long been a staple in the US war on terrorism in Afghanistan and the
border region with Pakistan. The problems associated with these militias take on new
significance given the recent momentum in talks between the US government and the
Taliban about the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan. Whose interests do the
militias represent? How can they be integrated into a peace agreement – if at all?
Will
their use value for the US in future counterterrorist operations outweigh the case for
closing them down in the service of human rights and a sustainable peace?
The
militias
are at least nominally controlled by their CIA paymaster, but to what extent will the
operations of the CIA be monitored and streamlined with overall US policy towards
Afghanistan?
The CIA-supported militias are a particularly troublesome version of the
regionally based militias in Afghanistan that have developed over the years around
local
strongmen with external support. The present units originate in the 2001 invasion,
when US military forces and the CIA organized Afghan militias to fight Islamist
militants.
Almost two decades later, the CIA is still running local militias in operations against
the
Taliban and other Islamist militants.
Throughout, the militias reportedly have
committed serious human rights abuses, including numerous extrajudicial killings of
civilians. CIA sponsorship ensures that their operations are clouded in secrecy. There
is
virtually no public oversight of their activities or accountability for grave human
rights
abuses. "
[My emphasis]
Appears making peace with Afghanistan will be as elusive as any of the other American
regime's various 'wars' and invasions.
"Afghanistan seems doomed to suffer from factionalism long after all NATO/CIA forces are
removed as the longstanding goal for the Outlaw US Empire is to deter Eurasian unity, which
is why Afghanistan was invaded in the first place."
Posted by: karlof1 | Aug 22 2019 23:32 utc | 58
I would say it is more about the drugs and minerals.
During the 1980s, the CIA's secret war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan helped
transform the Afghani-Pakistani borderlands into a launchpad for the global heroin trade. "In
the tribal area," the US state department reported in 1986, "there is no police force. There
are no courts. There is no taxation. No weapon is illegal Hashish and opium are often on
display."
By then, the process of guerrilla mobilisation to fight the Soviet occupation was
long under way. Instead of forming its own coalition of resistance leaders, the CIA had
relied on Pakistan's powerful Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and its Afghan
clients, who soon became key players in the burgeoning cross-border opium traffic.
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/jan/09/how-the-heroin-trade-explains-the-us-uk-failure-in-afghanistan
Ahmed Wali Karzai was a drug trafficker on the CIA payroll who happens to be the half
brother of Hamid Karzai the US puppet to lead Afghanistan
The fact that Afghanistan sits on lucrative natural resources was recognized indirectly back
in 2010 when the Afghan ministry of mines rolled out a $1b (!) estimate of what the country
might have, and The New York Times quoted a source in the US Administration as saying that
Afghanistan's list of reserves included copper, gold, cobalt, and even lithium on which the
present-day industry is heavily dependent. A Pentagon memo actually described Afghanistan's
potential lithium holdings as big enough to make it the "Saudi Arabia of lithium". Somehow,
the news flew below the radars of most watchers worldwide.
Afghanistan war was more about TAPI pipeline and securing a friendly government to sign
the contracts and then protect UNOCAL´s investment throughout. Also,ENRON at the time
had their eyes on this and had bet the farm on it before they folded, among other reasons.
That´s why as soon as the Taliban fell out of favor for one reason or another, Hamid
Kharzai and Zalmay Khalilzad, UNOCAL agents were placed in charge of the country.
It didn't come to be of course, since the Taliban had other ideas. This was also ensured
with a little help from friends in Russia and China. The article below is from 2002 but sheds
a lot of light on the actual events of the day.
Now the focus has shifted to stopping BRI. But US empire will never lose sight of their
original investment, nor the reserves in Caspian.
I agree to a degree that US will continue with their divide and conquer policies long
after they pull out. However, if the Taliban who will eventually rule the country can be
shown a different way of life by China and Russia which would lead to new roads, hospitals,
schools and normal farming as oppose to death an destruction, opium and Tribalism, we might
actually see a major change in Afghanistan.
Too optimistic? Perhaps, but the air is ripe.
TAPI might eventually be built, but not for UNOCAL. Have no doubt the Chinese will offer a
much sweeter deal all around.
"... EU is the power, that took part in creating narco-haven in Kosovo, murdering children of Iraq, building sex slaves markets in Libya, destroying what was left of democracy in Ukraine. EU power is diminishing? Let it crash and burn if you ask me. ..."
> Further US sanctions on Russia. Russian gdp growth is very low now, forecasts are
about mere 1,2 % per anum, and thus Russia's share of world GDP is declining.
Posted by: Passer by | Aug 20 2019 13:15 utc
You think "harming Russia" is a good answer to question "how does it boost USA the
hegemon?". Well, let's suppose it...
Problem then is, Russia does not care that much about nominal GDP and even about PPP GDP.
It is "average temperature in hospital", where some patients are in 41C fever and others in
4C morgue, but on average they all have that healthy 36,6C.
However, even for those sanctions that did hit Russia and EU hard (and those were enacted
mostly in 2015), under the "China-Russia double helix" model, economic soft power is Chinese
responsibility, so targetting EU and Russia economically was perhaps a mis-aiming, like would
be targetting China militarily.
Also, take a single line - "congress obliges Trump to enlist Russian officials for
sanctions" and do the search in both pro-Clinton Google and in DDG. first page of Google has
zero relebvant results. DDG however starts with
Trump Administration Sends Congress List of Possible Russia ...
www.nytimes.com/2017/10/26/us/politics/trump-russia-sanctions.html
Congress has tied Trump's hands on Russian sanctions - Vox
www.vox.com/2017/7/29/16061878/trump-russian-sanctions-sign
Congress Forces Trump to Sanction Russia - Fash the Nation
fashthenation.com/2018/03/congress-forces-trump-to-sanction-russia/
Trump Finally Imposes Russia Sanctions That Congress Ordered ...
www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/03/trump-finally-imposes-russia-sanctions-that-congress-ordered-months-ago/
Is 2017 so far ago that we already forgot it? Trump has no freedom of choice to sanction
Russia or not. It is not his authority to make this choice. Trump is ordered to sanction and
he would do. If he has any leeway, it is to how specifically sanction, but even that choice
is framed into UIS domestic politic fuel, as a vehicle to fry Trump over being "Putin's shil"
and looking "not enough" into evil Russians.
> China postponed for overtaking the US in gdp MER to 2032 from 2024.
Estimations are just that, estimations. Guesses into the future mixed with propaganda. If
you don't buy Trump's tweets about "China begging for deal" and Obama's about "Russian
economy in tatters" - why to buy these estimations?
> Indian growth downgraded - which taken together with China means slowing down Asia's
rise.
Pro-American Modi in power of India was a definite win for USA. But I do not think Trump
did it in 2016. Such events are grown for years and years of undercover works.
Same for the Brazil fiasco, which i perceive was much heavier blow upon BRICS than Modi.
But Brazilian coup was in preparation yet before Trump's oath. May 2016 was the FINAL act,
prepared months before:
nytimes.com/interactive/2016/world/americas/brazil-dilma-rousseff-impeachment.html
> Iran in recession - long term growth is low - it means that Iran's share of the world
economy is now declining. This will lower Iranian influence in the long term.
Long term? like Trump is planning for long term? Would he, like Putin, still be American
president in 2016+18=2034 ?
Well, maybe. However does it boost much US the hegemon position today?
Also notice how this pushes Iran back to Russian bucket. Before JCPOA Iran was flirting
with "Lesser Satan" a lot, promising to buy russian airliners, promising to barter Iranian
goods (oil and others) for Russian goods, thus de facto letting Russia be quasi-monopolistic
seller of Iranian goods on world market for any margin Russia would manage to extract. All
those hints and kinda-plans were squashed instantly after JCPOA. Iran rushed to trade with EU
directly, to buy Boeing and Airbis jets.... But was shot into the leg before it started. I
think China would also find their way to be "big helping brother" to Iranian economy, on some
conditions of course.
> Venezueala in deep recession
True, and this is again fitting the isolationist bill, to a degree. If Team Trump ready to
exclude USA from global trade - it would have to secure oil supply. Enslaving a nearby
oil-containing nation would do.
Additionally, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States–Venezuela_relations
lists 2014 as start of economic sanctions against Venezuela. So, Trump has inherited "office
of Venezuelan affairs" from Cinton/Obama. And... he brought it to light and headlines by
making that idiotic wannabe-coup. The sh*t that previously USA did silently pretending
whitegloved "shining beacon", Trump exposed.
Did it really made USA position better in 2018 than it was in 2014? I doubt. To me it
seemes more like T.T. accelerated things and "threw it all on the table" making Venezuela
"hit the rock bottom". Now Venezuela can adjust to the new brave world, while USA would
probably not be in position to tighten its grip - it already burned all the reserves and in
so clumsy way, that Bolton and Co became a laughing stock. If anything, it exposed that while
most gov't there would be paying lip service to USA, none would go with something material.
France invaded with USA Libya, Germany invaded with USA Serbia, but none enlisted to invade
Venezuela with USA.
> In Latin America most governments are now US puppet governments.
Brazil was indeed a huge blow into the BRICS dream. But i see it more of that indirect,
covert "soft power" that USA secret services prepared and rushed to implement before
Trump.
> Weakened the EU, via support for Brexit and other ways - it means that the euro will
not be a viable alternative for replacing the dollar
Basically turning EU elites against USA and splitting "Western Hegemony" into rivaling
factions.
From multipolar view circa 2010, would it be much difference for, say, Russia or China or
Iran, whether USD or EUR would be "reserve currency"?
After Alexander of Macedonia died his empire split to pieces, and some of those pieces
soon started warring. Did this enhance Greek hegemony or reduced it?
When COMECOM and Warsaw Pact disbanded did it enhanced Soviet hegemony over Eastern Europe
or reduced it? But it slashed exports of those lands, Bulgaria is not more agriculture
super-power it used to be, "Ikarus" bus is still often meet in Moscow street but in the
"remnants of old times still able to run" kind, Poland is no more producing ocean-grade
ships. So, was it enhancing USSR share of world economy then?
Also, didn't he kind of forced EU elites into Chinese OBOR camp? That said, similarly
Russia was forced towards China in 2013-2014 by Western lunacy, so i would not say it was
Trump's novelty to push EU eastwards.
EU was in with US in looting Libya, EU was in with US in looting Serbia, now US calls for
EU to join in "patrolling" Persian Gulf and response is... like the one about invading
Venezuela. Hegemon became stronger?
> Trade wars seem to be hitting EU's export dependent economy pretty hard.
And i wish to see more of those wars not less. Won't you? EU is the power, that took
part in creating narco-haven in Kosovo, murdering children of Iraq, building sex slaves
markets in Libya, destroying what was left of democracy in Ukraine. EU power is diminishing?
Let it crash and burn if you ask me.
> Turkey has serious economic problems - partly due to the US again - which again means
slowing down multipolarity
Wasn't in 2012 Turkey part of Hegemon entourage neck-deep in bloody ISIS affair?
Wasn't Turkey for decades be knockign into closed EU membership doors?
Wasn't Turkey send their people into Germany to intertwine and cross-influence?
Turkey as part of multipolarity? Maybe. But exactly because it was prohibited from what
they see their place in global western world. However i am not very sure that would West
offer "larger piece" to Turkey in their crippling hegemony, turkey would not turn back yet
again. Goog thing, it would be hard to do as few believe western promises today, but again,
didn't Trump (but other western politicians too, and including many pre-Trump) invested into
making West glaringly "not agreement-capable" in but everyone's view?
Trump could smash Turkey and instate Kudistan.
Trump could smash Kurds and make amends with Erdo.
Instead Trump is breaking pots with both. Neither Kurds not Turks no trust "the shining
beacon".
> Overall situation - the US share in the world economy is declining at slower rates
than before
Won't this mean Trump's economic policy is if limited success?
> the retarding of growth of everyone else, which means defacto slowing down
multipolarity and the replacement of the US dollar
That may be what some faction of Team Trump counting upon. But i have reservations.
Uni-polarity is not about economic growth. It is about trading on One True Market, hegemon's
one.
And when everything goes down, another factors start to weigh in. Like elasticity of demand
and replacement with cheaper substitutes. Like, if i need a tooling for my house, i would
perhaps want to purchase Japanese Makita or German Bosh. Those are famous brands with decades
of well earned reputation. But if i only can salivate on them, then perhaps i can go with
some cheaper Chinese knock-off? Or perhaps to blow the dust from my grandpa's old tool and
purchase nothing at all? If i can buy genuine American Levi's it is a fad, but if i can, then
perhaps i will make it in Turkey-made or China-made or Philipinnes-made or even Syria-made
jeans? You know, their cut is not that fitting as European or American, but perhaps we can
deal with it for the price? If in Russia i can no more buy Czech or German beer as before
2014, then perhaps i can sooth myself with apple cidre from semi-eastern Altai region of
Russia? And then, will my gov't still had the same need for USD for those adjusted trade
transactions, as it used to?
Because snoopydawg linked us to Craig Murray in an
essay yesterday, I happened
to see this important commentary.
Murray makes the point that much of the wealth controlling our obscenely corrupt system has come from the pillaging of Russian
resources during the Yeltsin period and that the motive for demonizing Putin is to keep that wealth out of the hands of the Russian
people.
(When shut out of the American system his sons so vaunt, Fred Koch went to the Soviet Union, which his sons so malign, to make
the Koch family fortune.)
This extended litigation effectively put Winkler-Koch out of business in the U.S. for several years. "Unable to succeed
at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union".[13] Between 1929 and 1932 Winkler-Koch "trained Bolshevik engineers[14] and
helped Stalin's regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries" in the Soviet Union. "Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged
several of Koch's Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration."[13] The
company also built installations in countries throughout Europe, the Middle East and Asia.[1] Koch partnered with William Rhodes
Davis to build the third-largest oil refinery serving the Third Reich, a project which was personally approved by Adolf Hitler.[15]
Koch President and COO David L. Robertson acknowledged that Winkler-Koch provided the cracking unit for the 1934 Hamburg refinery,
but said that it was but one of many "iconic" American companies doing business in Germany at the time.[16]
(When shut out of the American system his sons so vaunt, Fred Koch went to the Soviet Union, which his sons so malign, to
make the Koch family fortune.)
I was trying to warn away from hijacking the thread to make it about the Kochs instead of about Russia. Or about RUSSIA!, which
is how I've been referring to the nation since Russiagate began.
You open up markets and provide a fence for the local oligarchs to offload vital public infrastructure and national resources.
Selling rubles for dollars was a no brainer. Rinse, repeat.
Up until the 21st Century, this was only done to the 3rd world and those of the 2nd world who didn't play ball.
I've seen the model looming over America too. The hollowing out and offshoring of America, IMO, is quite similar to the pillaging
of Russia. It's just lacking the hard coup and cannon fire at the capitol.
The same banksters are financing and laundering the money to boot.
I guess sheep are just meant to be fleeced, eh?
Good on Murray for calling it out. I like that guy.
I've just begun reading it, and already there is mention of HSBC, which connects to Mueller, when he was FBI Director, and
Comey, who was a board member of some part of HSBC.
I kept telling them that, unless they dealt with the City, separating from Europe wasn't going to help them at all. It's not
internationalism that's hurting them: it's the depredations of international capital. Leaving the European Union won't fix that.
While I understand that they feel like they're losing their culture and feel threatened by immigration on that account, the
deeper sufferings of their lives, both economic and political, go back, not to some person with dark skin and less money speaking
a foreign tongue who immigrates to Britain, but to good upstanding upper-class British financiers. And the good upstanding upper-class
foreign financiers with whom those Brits have made deals.
>Problem then is, Russia does not care that much about nominal GDP and even about PPP
GDP
GDP does matter, lowering the GDP of certain country weakens the country. Other factors
matter too, such as demographics or landmass and natural resources.
>targetting EU and Russia economically was perhaps a mis-aiming
I would not call it misaiming, Europe has one of the largest economies in the world and
the Euro is the second most important currency in the World. As long as Russia and the EU
attack each other - it is a win for the US.
>Also, take a single line - "congress obliges Trump to enlist russian officials for
sanctions"
It is not simply Congress, the Trump Admin is hawkish on Russia by itself. Pompeo and
Bolton are anti-russian and were instrumental in the US leaving the INF. The pressure against
Nord Sream is greater than during the Obama Admin, Second Fleet was activated for containing
Russia, a russian consulate was captured in pretty brutal manner, etc. Recently, another set
of sanctions were enacted by the Trump Admin.
>Estimations are just that, estimations. Guesses into the future mixed with
propaganda.
I'm not dismissive of growth estimates and forecasts, this is the job of various
companies, organisations and universities. Overall things could be predicted roughly, for
example via demographics, median age of population, labour force growth, total factor
productivity. The OECD for example is an international organisation working on such
forecasts. They can get the rough shapes of growth patterns right - for example it is pretty
clear that India or China would be growing faster than, let say, Germany or the US. And this
is what their forecasts show. So these are not guestimates.
>Pro-American Modi in power of India was a definite win for USA. But i do not think
Trump did it in 2016. Such events are grown for years and years of undercover works.
This is not what i had in mind. While this is true, you did not take into account the
prefidy of the US Government, which is working to retard indian economic growth via tarrifs
and by trying to remove the WTO perks for developing countries. Even when Modi is frendly to
the US, this is still not enough, because the growth of Asia, including India, threatens the
dollar.
>Well, maybe. However does it boost much US the hegemon position today?
Iranian economy was booming after the JCPOA was signed. If the Plan remained, Iran would
be stronger than today. The whole point is to retard iranian economic growth, which would be
far stronger without the sanctions.
>Also notice how this pushes Iran back to Russian bucket
Even back in 2015, Iran did not stop being an israeli adversary, which means that the US
would have targeted it one way or another. Plus the US was not in position to gain much from
the iranian market, due to their still strained relations caused by the israeli lobby in the
US, which caused all types of sabotage in the Iran - US trade relations, the process of
removal of sanctions, etc. A big beneficiary from the JCPOA was the EU, and the main losses
from the sactions (outside from Iran) were for the EU again. Retarding the EU economy via
blocking its trade with Iran (or Russia) is a benefit for the US.
>Venezueala in deep recession. True, and this is again fitting the isolationist bill,
to a degree.True, and this is again fitting the isolationist bill, to a degree.
This isn't about isolationism, but about retarding the economy of the rest of the world,
and especially of still uncontrolled countries. The point is to preserve the share of
relative power the US has, or to slow down its decline as much as possible.
>Now Venezuela can adjust to the new brave world
The point is that Venezuela would be growing far faster without sanctions, thus the US is
weakening the independent multipolar world and slowing down its rise.
>Did it really made USA position better in 2018 than it was in 2014?
Obviously. Venezuela today, vis a vis the US, is weaker in relative power terms than in
2014. For the US its better to wreck Venezuela's economy than to allow it to flourish and
expand its influence.
>Basically turning EU elites against USA and splitting "Western Hegemony" into rivaling
factions.
They are not turning them against the US, that's the point. Europe is too much of a puppet
of the US. The US causes various conficts on Europe's perifery in order to turn it against
Russia and make it dependent on itself. Divide and Rule.
>would it be much difference for, say, Russia or China or Iran, whether USD or EUR
Yes, Europe is less hawkish than the US overall. If it was up to Europe JCPOA will still
be here and there would be no trade wars with China.
>Also, didn't he kind of forced EU elites into Chinese OBOR camp
Its more about economic weakness. Those in Europe with poor economy signed up for BRI -
such as eastern Europe and Italy. The big 3 - Germany, France and the UK refuse to join BRI
(which is different than AIIB) as of now. I do not see greater western european - China
cooperation today than before 5 years. The EU commission declared China a european rival.
>EU was in with US in looting Libya, EU was in with US in looting Serbia, now US calls
for EU to join in "patrolling" Persian Gulf and response is... like the one about invading
Venezuela. Hegemon became stronger?
The iranian issue has always been a red card for Europe as it fears a really big war in
the Gulf. There is nothing new in that. If you are going to talk about "now", the EU did join
the US against Syria, its sanctions against Syria still remain, and it does support removing
Maduro from power. It did put sanctions against Venezuela, although not at the same level as
the US. It is no friend of the Maduro Government.
>And i wish to see more of those wars not less. Won't you?
Currently the result of them is weakeing multipolarity by retarding growth in most of the
world. They have negative impact on the global economy.
>EU is the power, that took part in creating narco-haven in Kosovo, murdering children
of Iraq, building sex slaves markets in Libya, destroying what was left of democracy in
Ukraine. EU power is diminishing? Let it crash and burn if you ask me.
Yes, but the US does not want to crush and burn the EU, it simply wants to make it weak
and dependent on itself. A colony.
>Wasn't in 2012 Turkey part of Hegemon entourage neck-deep in bloody ISIS affair?
The more players around, the better. Strong Turkey will be more independent from the US,
the US understand that, this is why it want weak Turkey
>Trump could smash Turkey and instate Kudistan.
Trump can not directly smash Turkey, the moment an attempt like this is made is the moment
Turkey will invite Russia and China into the country. Rather, a hybrid war is being waged on
Turkey, with the aim of weakening Erdogan and replacing him with a reliable puppet.
> Overall situation - the US share in the world economy is declining at slower rates
than before Won't this mean Trump's economic policy is if limited success?
No. There is nothing better than this that could be done to stop the US relative decline,
it depends on the cards one has to play. Economic convergence process and technological
diffusion, driven by globalisation, means that it is impossible the fully stop the rise of
the developing world. But if the US did not react like it reacted, and just stayed on its
hands, i think its power would have been gone in 2 - 3 years.
>Uni-polarity is not about economic growth.
It is also about the economy and growth. You can't have unipolarity if you don't have the
largest economic, as well as military power. One needs to have the largest economy to rule
the world (among other things), or they will fail. You can't have it without the dollar
dominance as well.
While the USA run the show, EU was complicit in this war.
Notable quotes:
"... The American Conservative, ..."
"... In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts ..."
"... Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites." ..."
"... a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation. ..."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes
killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could
pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo were
slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million
Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton
empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities that included murdering persons to extract and
sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts .
Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor of a special European Union task force, declared
in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful
killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and
Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements of individuals from their homes and communities,
and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied
by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo
have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run
deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy
high posts in the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice
President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as
"the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative
report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because
politicians and pundits portrayed that war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent
presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over evil. Honest
assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
"... I see these actions as ... attempt to keep US hegemony for longer. ..."
"... Further US sanctions on Russia. Russian gdp growth is very low now, forecasts are about mere 1,2 % per anum, and thus Russia's share of world GDP is declining. ..."
"... Overall situation - the US share in the world economy is declining at slower rates than before, mainly due to the retarding of growth of everyone else, which means defacto slowing down multipolarity and the replacement of the US dollar. ..."
"... Take into account one more point: Trump personally can be a clinic idiot on the run form an asylum, it would not change much. Trump is a talking head for some movement, some semi-visible alliance, that managed to enthrone him against 1% election fraud, using pervasive MSM smear campaign and so forth. ..."
"... I think Trump, but not, let's say, Obama, fits well into an attempt by the most hawkish and revanchist elements in the US to destroy globalization and create a world of the jungle, where they estimate the US will have better chances. ..."
"... ok, I think I get it. So what Arioch and others are saying is that the U.S. empire uses the head choppers like attack dogs to do the dirty work and has some kind of indigenous recruiting stream that feeds the 'down and outs' from areas like western China, Chechnia, Arabia, Africa, Europe, America, etc, into a ragtag 'army'. ..."
> Same thing with China trade war - it was Trump who demanded more tariffs
This part fits well into "isolationist' bill actually.
This part can be interpreted as "controlled demolition of US foreign trade" - racing against
uncontrollable catastrophic demolition by sudden USD collapse.
So you are of the view that Trump is part of attempt to create a controlled demolition of
the US Empire?
I do not agree with that. I see these actions as a Cold War and attempt to keep US
hegemony for longer.
Interestingly enough, China overtaking the US in gdp MER has been postponed after the
start of the trade war. The 2016 forecasts were about 2024, and the latest are about 2032.
Developing countries growth is being downgraded as well.
This fits well into the view that the US is trying to sabotage the global economy and
particularly developing countries in order to slow down emerging multipolarity.
> I see these actions as ... attempt to keep US hegemony for longer.
Good. So then show me a list of Team Trump actions in foreign policy, since he got
enthroned, that enhanced US position as "world leader".
As for me, i do not see a single one.
And i do not buy "coincidence theory" that Trump tried to win all the encounters but lost
them all, with 100% efficiency, because he is a fool surrounded by idiots.
Would it be so, then by shear probability they would win at least something at least
sometimes. So, i seem Trump playing his idiocy card for the sake of plausible deniability.
Basically, if to employ the anthropic principle, what else can Trump do where he is (and
especially where he was in 2016) to do his dismantling and kept his office, freedom and
life?
It is possible that Trump tries to ruin US' standing in the world, to break some alliances,
and to piss off enough people that the US wouldn't be asked to help or intervene here and
there (though he'd be delusional or hypocritical not to realize that, often, the US likes to
be asked to meddle in other countries' business). That might be a way to ensure the US is far
more isolationist, and therefore goes further into self-reliance.
In which either he doesn't
see or doesn't care that it also means that a multi-polar world will come faster, because
other powers will take over the room left by the US. We'd be back to a system of spheres of
influence, more than a superpower acting as the world's hegemon.
Of course, that's trying to make sense of what might either be Trump not having a clue, or
having totally different plans.
Good. So then show me a list of Team Trump actions in foreign policy, since he got enthroned,
that enhanced US position as "world leader".
Posted by: Arioch | Aug 20 2019 12:51 utc | 76
Plenty.
Further US sanctions on Russia. Russian gdp growth is very low now, forecasts are about
mere 1,2 % per anum, and thus Russia's share of world GDP is declining.
China postponed for overtaking the US in gdp MER to 2032 from 2024.
Indian growth downgraded - which taken together with China means slowing down Asia's
rise.
Iran in recession - long term growth is low - it means that Iran's share of the world
economy is now declining. This will lower iranian influence in the long term.
Venezueala in deep recession - sanctions reduced gdp by 7 %, thus a serious weakening of
the influence of this country is to follow.
In Latin America most governments are now US puppet governments.
Weakened the EU, via support for Brexit and other ways - it means that the euro will not
be a viable alternative for replacing the dollar, and it is permanently threatened by italian
economic collapse. Trade wars seem to be hitting EU's export dependent economy pretty
hard.
Turkey has serious economic problems - partly due to the US again - which again means
slowing down multipolarity as turkish growth is now low. Empowering the kurds is further used
to stop the rise of Turkey as a regional power.
Overall situation - the US share in the world economy is declining at slower rates than
before, mainly due to the retarding of growth of everyone else, which means defacto slowing
down multipolarity and the replacement of the US dollar.
Take into account one more point: Trump personally can be a clinic idiot on the run form an
asylum, it would not change much.
Trump is a talking head for some movement, some semi-visible alliance, that managed to
enthrone him against 1% election fraud, using pervasive MSM smear campaign and so forth.
Focusing all the processes upon a single person and then glorifying or dehumanizing it is
east to swallow, causes Hollywoodesque thrills and resonates with our animal instincts to see
a biggest ape of the cave as natural leader (whether we would love or hate such a cave chief
is another question). And that is why it is loved by propaganda. Stalin was godlike figure
in USSR. And devil-like figure in the West, before and after WW2. And he was next door "Uncle
Joe" with x-mas candies - during WW2.
Well, d'oh, did USSR as a nation or as ideology changed
that much betweem 1932-1942-1952? Hardly so. Same thing about Syria - there is no such a
land, there is no such a nation, there is only Assad the Dictator, and no one else there.
Etc, etc.
Now in USA it is all about Trump the fascist wannabe, Trump the orange buffoon, Trump this
and Trump that. Like he was the last leaving person left in USA.
I think Trump, but not, let's say, Obama, fits well into an attempt by the most hawkish
and revanchist elements in the US to destroy globalization and create a world of the jungle,
where they estimate the US will have better chances.
ok, I think I get it. So what Arioch and others are saying is that the U.S. empire uses the
head choppers like attack dogs to do the dirty work and has some kind of indigenous
recruiting stream that feeds the 'down and outs' from areas like western China, Chechnia,
Arabia, Africa, Europe, America, etc, into a ragtag 'army'.
"... the Iranian economy is in a free fall with oil exports down as much as 90 percent from mid-2018 levels. As far as Iran is concerned, this means that it's already at war with the United States and has less and less to lose the longer the U.S. embargo goes on. ..."
"... MBS, as he's known, celebrated by launching an air war in neighboring Yemen two months later – and then disappearing on a week-long vacation in the Maldives – and by funneling hundreds of U.S.-made TOWs (anti-tank guided missiles) to Syrian rebels under the command of Al-Nusra, the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, for use in an offensive in that country's northwest province of Idlib. ..."
"... For the Saudis, it was a neo-medieval crusade whose goal was to topple two religio-political allies of Iran, the Alawite-dominated government in Damascus and Yemen's Houthis, who adhere to a non-Iranian form of Shi'ism that is no less anathema to the Sunni Wahhabist theocracy in Riyadh. ..."
"... Just two days after the start of the Saudi air assault in Yemen, Obama meanwhile telephoned Salman to assure him of U.S. support. When asked why America would back a war by one of the Middle East's richest countries against the very poorest, another anonymous U.S. official told The New York Times (April 2, 2015): ..."
"... "If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." ..."
"... The Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers and tone down criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say yes to Saudi aggression. ..."
"... The American empire was possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible clients. Even while making peace with Iran, Obama thus green-lit Saudi wars that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives in Syria and another 100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, the 2015 nuclear negotiations, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others. ..."
"... Announcing his presidential bid in June 2015, he launched into a typical Trumpian rant against China, Japan, Mexico – and Obama's nuclear talks. "Take a look at the deal he's making with Iran," he said. "He makes that deal, Israel maybe won't exist very long." A month later, he tweeted that the agreement, just inked in Vienna, "poses a direct national security threat." Two months after that, he told a Tea Party rally in Washington: ..."
"... Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all. Under intense pressure from neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats such as Russiagate attack dog Rep. Adam Schiff demanding stepped-up opposition with Iran , Trump did an about-face. In May 2017, he flew to Riyadh, announced an unprecedented $110-billion arms deal, and proclaimed himself the kingdom's newest BFF – best friend forever. ..."
"... He echoed the Saudis by accusing Iran of funding "terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread destruction and chaos across the region" and backed a Saudi blockade of neighboring Qatar. When ISIS launched a bloody assault on central Tehran in early June that killed 12 people and injured 42, the only White House response was to declare that "states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote." ..."
"... It was Democrats who, in a typical attempt to outflank Trump on the right, introduced legislation in June 2017 by forcing him to impose penalties on Russia, North Korea, and Iran as well. But after repudiating the JCPOA (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018, Trump upped sanctions even more in November – not only against the Iranian government but against some 700 individuals, entities, aircraft, and vessels. After Iran shot down a $130-million U.S. surveillance drone last month, Trump imposed sanctions on "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, his office, and his closest associates. Two weeks ago, he imposed penalties on Mohammad Javad Zarif , Iran's U.S.-educated foreign minister. ..."
"... It was a gesture of contempt for the very idea of diplomacy. So what happens next? The problem is that re-starting negotiations would not be enough. Instead, Iran has demanded that the U.S. remove all sanctions and apologize before agreeing to a new round of talks. Since this would be tantamount to re-authorizing the JCPOA, it's unlikely in the extreme. While Trump is known for changing his mind in a flash, a course correction of this magnitude is hard to imagine. ..."
"... The pro-Israel Lobby owns both Republican and Democrat Russiagate enthusiasts and is the source of near hysterical demands for opposition with Iran. ..."
"... But in June 1914, clearly there were multiple political and military leaders in Europe for whom war was far from inconceivable. War was simply a question of timing and so it would be better to have a war when the circumstances were most propitious. "I consider a war inevitable", declared senior German generals such as Helmuth von Moltke the Younger in 1912. "The sooner the better". ..."
"... such blatant and reprehensible behavior carries risks for everyone but mostly the targets of our barbaric behavior seems never to enter the President, his neocon handlers' and his rabid supporters' minds. ..."
"... "If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." That is unmitigated nonsense. Why not be honest. We don't want to stop it. ..."
"... To "stop it", Uncle Sam would have to first cease being a part of it. The bombing of Yemen came courtesy of U.S. mid-air refueling efforts, targeting "intelligence", and "made in America" weaponry. The blockade (starvation) of Yemen is also a duel accompaniment. It's supposed to look like a Saudi "thing", but in actuality, it's just more Uncle Sam doing his thing. Obama called it "leading from behind". ..."
T raffic accidents normally take just a second or two. But the coming collision in the
Persian Gulf, the equivalent of a hundred-vehicle pile-up on a fog-bound interstate , has been in the
works for years. Much of it is President Donald Trump's fault, but not all. His contribution
has been to take an insane policy and make it even crazier.
The situation is explosive for two reasons. First, the Iranian economy is in a free fall with oil exports down
as much as 90 percent from mid-2018 levels. As far as Iran is concerned, this means that it's
already at war with the United States and has less and less to lose the longer the U.S. embargo
goes on.
Second, after Trump denounced the 2015 Iranian nuclear accord from the moment he began his
presidential run , it's all but impossible at this point for him to back down. The result
is a classic collision between the immovable and the unstoppable with no apparent way out.
How did the world bring itself to the brink of war? The answer, ironically, is by bidding
for peace.
The process began in early 2015 just as the nuclear talks were entering their final stages.
Despite last-minute
hand-wringing , it was clear that success was in sight simply because the participants
– China, France, Russia, Germany, Britain, the European Union, Iran and the U.S. –
all wanted it.
Saudi Proxy War
But other regional players felt differently, Saudi Arabia first and foremost. The kingdom's
survival strategy depends on its special relationship with America, its patron since the 1940s.
Hence, it was panic-stricken by anything smacking of a U.S. rapprochement with its
long-standing arch-enemy Iran. The upshot was a proxy war in which the Saudis set out to roll
back Iranian power by striking out at pro-Iranian forces.
The offensive began after a new Saudi monarch ascended the throne in January 2015. King
Salman, a doddering 79-year-old reportedly suffering from
Alzheimer's , immediately handed over the reins to his favorite son, 29-year-old Muhammad
bin Salman, whom he named deputy crown prince and minister of defense. MBS, as he's known,
celebrated by launching an air war in neighboring Yemen two months later – and then
disappearing on a week-long vacation in the Maldives
– and by funneling hundreds of U.S.-made TOWs (anti-tank guided missiles) to Syrian
rebels under the command of Al-Nusra, the local Al-Qaeda affiliate, for use in an offensive in
that country's northwest province of Idlib.
For the Saudis, it was a neo-medieval crusade whose goal was to topple two religio-political
allies of Iran, the Alawite-dominated government in Damascus and Yemen's Houthis, who adhere to
a non-Iranian form of Shi'ism that is no less anathema to the Sunni Wahhabist theocracy in
Riyadh.
President Barack Obama went along. With regard to Syria, an unidentified "senior
administration official"
toldTheWashington Post that while the White House was "concerned that Nusra
has taken the lead," all he would say in response to U.S.-made missiles winding up in Al-Qaeda
hands was that it was "not something we would refrain from raising with our partners." (See "
Climbing into Bed with
Al-Qaeda ," May 2, 2015.)
Just two days after the start of the Saudi air assault in Yemen, Obama meanwhile
telephoned Salman to assure him of U.S. support. When asked why America would back a war by
one of the Middle East's richest countries against the very poorest, another anonymous U.S.
official told The New York Times (April 2, 2015):
"If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have been
allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they were
being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." But plainly the nuclear negotations were key. The Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers
and tone down criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say
yes to Saudi aggression.
The upshot has been Saudi wars claiming hundreds of thousands of lives in Syria and another
100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest
refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, Obama's efforts to
reach a nuclear deal with Iran, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others.
Over-Extended Empire
President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama with King Salman bin Abdulaziz at Erga
Palace in Riyadh, Jan. 27, 2015. (White House/Pete Souza/Flickr)
The American empire was possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible
clients. Even while making peace with Iran, Obama thus green-lit Saudi wars that claimed
hundreds of thousands of lives in
Syria and another
100,000 or so in Yemen while triggering a surge of international terrorism and the greatest
refugee crisis since World War II. While reducing tensions in some respects, the 2015 nuclear
negotiations, paradoxically, caused them to explode in others.
The results were so devastating in a region torn by war, sectarianism, and economic collapse
that Trump could not possibly make them any worse – except that he did.
Announcing his presidential bid in June 2015, he launched into a typical Trumpian rant
against China, Japan, Mexico – and Obama's nuclear talks. "Take a look at the deal he's
making with Iran," he said. "He makes that deal, Israel maybe won't exist very long." A month
later, he tweeted that the
agreement, just
inked in Vienna, "poses a direct national security threat." Two months after that, he
told a Tea Party
rally in Washington:
"Never, ever, ever in my life have I seen any transaction so incompetently negotiated as
our deal with Iran . They rip us off, they take our money, they make us look like fools, and
now they're back to being who they really are. They don't want Israel to survive, they will
not let Israel survive, [and] with incompetent leadership like we have right now, Israel will
not survive."
Iran's Landmark Concession
It was all nonsense. Rather than threatening the Jewish state, the treaty represented a
landmark concession on Iran's part, since Israel, with an estimated 80 to 90 nuclear warheads in its
arsenal and enough fissile material for a hundred more, would maintain its nuclear monopoly in
the Middle East indefinitely. As for "our money," the $150 billion in various foreign accounts
were actually Iranian assets that had been frozen for years – a sum, moreover, that was
closer to $56 billion once
Iran settled its foreign debts. Once sanctions were lifted, it was hardly unreasonable that
such assets be restored.
Still there was hope. While railing against Iran, Trump also taunted the Saudis for their
role in 9/11: "Who blew up the World Trade Center?" he told
Fox & Friends. "It wasn't the Iraqis, it was Saudi [Arabia]." He repeatedly assailed the
2003 invasion of Iraq – even if he exaggerated his own role
in opposing it – and criticized Obama for supporting Saudi-backed jihadis seeking to
topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
"Assad is bad," he said in an October 2015
interview . "Maybe these people could be worse."
Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all. Under intense pressure from
neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats such as Russiagate attack dog
Rep. Adam Schiff demanding
stepped-up opposition with Iran , Trump did an about-face. In May 2017, he flew to Riyadh,
announced an unprecedented $110-billion arms deal, and proclaimed himself the kingdom's newest
BFF – best friend forever.
He echoed the Saudis by
accusing Iran of funding "terrorists, militias, and other extremist groups that spread
destruction and chaos across the region" and backed a Saudi blockade of neighboring Qatar. When
ISIS launched a bloody assault on central Tehran in early June that killed 12 people and
injured 42, the only White House response was to declare
that "states that sponsor terrorism risk falling victim to the evil they promote."
But back in September 2003, some 60,000 Iranian soccer fans had observed a moment of silence
in honor of the victims of the World Trade Center while then-President Mohammad Khatami
declared on nationwide TV:
"My deep sympathy goes out to the American nation, particularly those who have suffered
from the attacks and also the families of the victims. Terrorism is doomed, and the
international community should stem it and take effective measures in a bid to eradicate
it."
Yet all the Trump administration could say was that Iran had it coming.
It was Democrats who, in a typical attempt to outflank Trump on the right, introduced
legislation in June 2017 by forcing him to impose penalties
on Russia, North Korea, and Iran as well. But after repudiating the JCPOA (the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018, Trump upped
sanctions even more in November – not only against the Iranian government but against
some 700
individuals, entities, aircraft, and vessels. After Iran shot down a $130-million U.S.
surveillance drone last month, Trump imposed sanctions on "supreme leader" Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei, his office, and his closest associates. Two weeks ago, he imposed penalties on
Mohammad
Javad Zarif , Iran's U.S.-educated foreign minister.
Crowd at Tea Party rally listening to Donald Trump denounce the Iran Nuclear Agreement,
Sept. 9, 2015. (YouTube)
It was a gesture of contempt for the very idea of diplomacy. So what happens next? The
problem is that re-starting negotiations would not be enough. Instead, Iran has demanded that
the
U.S. remove all sanctions and apologize before agreeing to a new round of talks. Since this
would be tantamount to re-authorizing the JCPOA, it's unlikely in the extreme. While Trump is
known for changing his mind in a flash, a course correction of this magnitude is hard to
imagine.
Thus, the confrontation is set to continue. Iran may respond by seizing more oil tankers or
downing more drones, but the problem is that the U.S. will undoubtedly engage in tit-for-tat
escalation in response until, eventually, some kind of line is crossed.
If so, the consequences are unpredictable. U.S. firepower is overwhelming ,
but Iran is not without
resources of its own , among them anti-ship ballistic missiles, mobile short-range rockets
that can hit naval targets, plus heavily-armed high-speed boats, mini-subs, and even "
ekranoplans ," floating planes designed to skim the waves at
115 miles per hour. Such weaponry could prove highly effective in the 35-mile-wide Strait of
Hormuz. Iran also has allies such as Lebanon's Hezbollah, which has an estimated 130,000
missiles and rockets in its own arsenal, Assad's battle-hardened military in Syria, Yemen's
Houthis, and pro-Iranian forces in Shi'ite-majority Iraq.
The upshot could be a war drawing in half a dozen countries or more. A confrontation on that
scale may seem inconceivable. But, then, war seemed inconceivable in the wake of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand's assassination in June 1914.
Daniel Lazare is the author of "The Frozen Republic: How the Constitution Is Paralyzing
Democracy" (Harcourt Brace, 1996) and other books about American politics. He has written for a
wide variety of publications from The Nation to Le Monde Diplomatique and blogs
about the Constitution and related matters at D aniellazare.com.
Jeff Davis , August 20, 2019 at 12:42
America is Israel's b*tch.
The American experiment is over. A variety of corporate/neoliberal interests and foreign
interests have hollowed it out, and soon, when every last bit of loot has been extracted, the
dried up husk of the Empire will collapse. There is no saving it because the looters are
still in control. Their control is unbreakable because buying Congress is such a minor and
manageable expense for them, and the Congressmen/women are simply incapable of setting aside
personal interest and personal ambition for the good of the country. Incapable, because if
they ever chose country over their own careers , the "owners" -- ie donors/looters -- would
find someone to replace them. There is no way out until it comes crashing down.
Don Bacon , August 20, 2019 at 11:33
Iran whipped the US in Syria, cementing the 'Shia crescent' from Tehran to Beirut, which
gives Iran the mantle of ME leadership. Washington had to respond to that fact because it
threatens the US and its Carter-Doctrine position as the predominate ME power. So don't blame
Israel.
Zhu , August 20, 2019 at 05:44
You forgot to mention pressure from Religious Right Republicans, eager for the Rapture,
the Return of Jesus, etv., etc. Christism Zionists in short.
Broompilot , August 20, 2019 at 01:19
I find it interesting that there is no mention of Netanyahu appearing before Congress or
the U.N. drawing silly looking pictures of bombs. Or Netanyahu claiming he had jacked some
new documents from Iran proving they had a nuclear weapons program. Or Netanyahu
disrespecting Obama with his appearance in Congress. Or Bibi's landing in L.A. with a
motorcade that screwed up traffic all over town to demonstrate who is really important in
this country. Reading this piece you would think this is 95% about Saudis and has very little
to do with Israel. There is no doubt that the gulf monarchies do not want successful
representative governments breaking out on their borders and giving their citizens ideas, but
I doubt they have anything resembling the Israeli lobbies and their influence operating in
the U.S. with the power to influence Iran policy.
AnneR , August 20, 2019 at 08:23
True, Broompilot. And I too awaited throughout the article for Mr Lazare to discuss the
really existing and marked part that Israel has played and is playing in all of the more
recent destruction in neighboring countries, and that illegitimate state's huge influence on
this country's politics, military actions (in the MENA countries when those actions might
benefit Israel), administration decisions (not to mention the cooperation among US and
Israeli secret services *and* electronic-internet companies which anyway themselves both
derive from the military and remain closely entwined with it).
Most US presidents – and seemingly all US Congresses – since WWII have aided
and abetted Israel and its appalling human rights record which never ends and continues with
impunity. But Trump is perhaps more so than most if only because his daughter, a convert to
Judaism, is married to an ardent Zionist, and buddy-buddy to Netanyahu. Lazare hints at
Trump's pro-Zionism (whatever its basis) but leaves it there.
Marko , August 19, 2019 at 22:50
"Trump's Persian-Gulf Car Crash"
When you view foreign policy as a Demolition Derby competition , as Trump and the neocons
do , this is called "Winning !"
Gregory Herr , August 19, 2019 at 20:44
The war of terrorism waged upon the people of Syria didn't come about because the U.S. was
"possibly so over-extended that it was at the mercy of its ostensible clients", or because
the "Obama administration was so anxious to smooth ruffled Saudi feathers and tone down
criticism of the impending Iranian accord that it felt it had no choice but say yes to Saudi
aggression."
Washington's Long War on Syria (Stephen Gowans) began well before Obama, Yahoo, Erdogan,
and Petraeus set up rat lines of weaponry and training for terrorists in Jordan and Turkey.
The current iteration of "topple thru terror" was in the offing, with or without Saudi
"impetus".
Syria stands in the way of Greater Israel and Wall Street/central bank dominance.
Obama "went along" alright. But it wasn't the Saudis he was "appeasing".
Obama should have normalised relations with Iran and disavowed all the b.s. rhetoric about
them. His "deal" had "made to be broken" written all over it because of his rhetoric. All
done in bad faith with the Path to Persia kept open.
Jeff Harrison , August 19, 2019 at 18:30
The big problem is that the US is convinced that it knows what it's doing when, in fact,
it is clueless. The US also is perpetually optimistic when it has nothing upon which to base
said optimism. It's not as if we've actually defeated anybody in the Middle East. Revoltin'
Bolton may think he's scaring people with aircraft carriers and B52s but you'll notice that
Iran snatched the British tanker and the Iraqi tanker after the US moved it's carrier and
bombers into the Gulf. They also shot down our drone in the same time frame.
We're playing a losing strategy.
Jeff Davis , August 20, 2019 at 12:11
We're playing a losing strategy because America is Israel's bitch.
The American experiment is over. A variety of corporate/neoliberal interests and foreign
interests have hollowed it out, and soon, when every last bit of loot has been extracted, the
dried up husk of the Empire will collapse. There is no saving it because the looters are
still in control. Their control is unbreakable because buying Congress is such a minor and
manageable expense for them, and the Congressmen/women are simply incapable of setting aside
personal interest and personal ambition for the good of the country. Incapable, because if
they ever chose country over their own careers , the "owners" -- ie donors/looters -- would
find someone to replace them. There is no way out until it comes crashing down.
Don Bacon , August 19, 2019 at 18:29
"It was all nonsense. Rather than threatening the Jewish state, the treaty represented a
landmark concession on Iran's part,. . ."
Calling the Obama agreement a treaty is nonsense, rather it was an agreement involving
only the executive branch and not the Senate as required by the Constitution for treaties.
Obama needed an achievement for his presidential library, so he waited until his term was
almost over to do what he could have done, with Brazil and Turkey, in 2010. Therefore Trump
had every right to overturn an agreement made by his hated predecessor, with the knowledge
that the Senate never would have approved it since they are all corrupted.
This is another example (Bush-43 on Iraq withdrawal was another) of what the US has come
to. This so-called "rules-based democracy" has become a stomping ground for the
"commander-in-chief" to display his executive privilege and do any damned thing he takes a
mind to, including war, with nary a peep from the so-called "checks and balance" folks who
are supposed to be looking after US democracy, but aren't.
"Trumpian isolationism was fleeting, if it ever existed at all."
It never existed.
A clueless Lazare has been repeatedly informed of the fact in the comments of his CN
articles.
Now he's feebly wondering "if".
"Under intense pressure from neoconservatives, the Zionist lobby, and pro-Israel Democrats
such as Russiagate attack dog Rep. Adam Schiff demanding stepped-up opposition with Iran,
Trump did an about-face."
The pro-Israel Lobby owns both Republican and Democrat Russiagate enthusiasts and is the
source of near hysterical demands for opposition with Iran.
Trump has never been under "intense pressure" and has not done "an about-face" because he
has always been avowedly "1000 percent" pro-Israel.
A worse than clueless Lazare has been repeatedly informed of the fact in the comments of
his CN articles.
Lazare apparently finds lots of things "hard to imagine", even "inconceivable".
But in June 1914, clearly there were multiple political and military leaders in Europe for
whom war was far from inconceivable. War was simply a question of timing and so it would be
better to have a war when the circumstances were most propitious. "I consider a war
inevitable", declared senior German generals such as Helmuth von Moltke the Younger in 1912.
"The sooner the better".
Current Israeli leadership holds such a view. The Trump administration foreign policy purchased by the pro-Israel Lobby reflects this
view.
But for the obviously very well informed but perpetually clueless Lazare, it all somehow
remains "inconceivable"
Trump has walked away from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and has
performed numerous other services, including threatening war on Iran, precisely because the
Israelis wanted them done.
Don't confuse Trump's servility to the pro-Israel Lobby for "isolationism".
The arrogant aggression of the Trump-Bolton-Pompeo troika is bought and paid for by
Israel.
Depressing. Having defended Trump because attacks were directed at the President of the
United States, any president, it is hard to support a man whose every move is a political
calculation. That such blatant and reprehensible behavior carries risks for everyone but
mostly the targets of our barbaric behavior seems never to enter the President, his neocon
handlers' and his rabid supporters' minds.
One comment in this depressing article caught my eye.
"If you ask why we're backing this, beyond the fact that the Saudis are allies and have
been allies for a long time, the answer you're going to get from most people – if they
were being honest – is that we weren't going to be able to stop it." That is unmitigated nonsense. Why not be honest. We don't want to stop it. The We, of
course, being our decision makers and a too large segment of our brainwashed electorate.
Gregory Herr , August 19, 2019 at 19:52
To "stop it", Uncle Sam would have to first cease being a part of it. The bombing of Yemen
came courtesy of U.S. mid-air refueling efforts, targeting "intelligence", and "made in
America" weaponry. The blockade (starvation) of Yemen is also a duel accompaniment. It's
supposed to look like a Saudi "thing", but in actuality, it's just more Uncle Sam doing his
thing. Obama called it "leading from behind".
Pat lost its touch with reality " Around the world, America is involved in quarrels, clashes
and confrontations with almost too many nations to count." That's what empires do. Why he can't
understand this simple fact?
Friday, President Donald Trump met in New Jersey with his national security advisers and
envoy Zalmay Khalilzad, who is negotiating with the Taliban to bring about peace, and a U.S.
withdrawal from America's longest war.
U.S. troops have been fighting in Afghanistan since 2001, in a war that has cost 2,400
American lives.
Following the meeting, Trump tweeted, "Many on the opposite sides of this 19 year war, and
us, are looking to make a deal -- if possible!"
Some, however, want no deal; they are fighting for absolute power.
Saturday, a wedding in Kabul with a thousand guests was hit by a suicide bomber who,
igniting his vest, massacred 63 people and wounded 200 in one of the greatest atrocities of the
war. ISIS claimed responsibility.
Monday, 10 bombs exploded in restaurants and public squares in the eastern city of
Jalalabad, wounding 66.
Trump is pressing Khalilzad to negotiate drawdowns of U.S. troop levels from the present
14,000, and to bring about a near-term end to U.S. involvement in a war that began after we
overthrew the old Taliban regime for giving sanctuary to Osama bin Laden.
Is it too soon to ask: What have we gained from our longest war? Was all the blood and
treasure invested worth it? And what does the future hold?
If the Taliban could not be defeated by an Afghan army, built up by the U.S. for a decade
and backed by 100,000 U.S. troops in 2010-2011, then are the Taliban likely to give up the
struggle when the U.S. is drawing down the last 14,000 troops and heading home?
The Taliban control more of the country than they have at any time since being overthrown in
2001. And time now seems to be on their side.
Why have they persevered, and prevailed in parts of the country?
Motivated by a fanatic faith, tribalism and nationalism, they have shown a willingness to
die for a cause that seems more compelling to them than what the U.S.-backed Afghan government
has on offer.
They also have the guerrillas' advantage of being able to attack at times and places of
their own choosing, without the government's burden of having to defend towns and cities.
Will these Taliban, who have lost many battles but not the war, retire from the field and
abide by democratic elections once the Americans go home? Why should they?
The probability: When the Americans depart, the war breaks out anew, and the Taliban
ultimately prevail.
And Afghanistan is but one of the clashes and conflicts in which America is engaged.
Severe U.S. sanctions on Venezuela have failed to bring down the Nicholas Maduro regime in
Caracas but have contributed to the immiseration of that people, 10% of whom have left the
country. Trump now says he is considering a quarantine or blockade to force Maduro out.
Eight years after we helped to overthrow Col. Moammar Gadhafi, Libya is still mired in civil
war, with its capital, Tripoli, under siege.
Yemen, among the world's humanitarian disasters, has seen the UAE break with its Saudi
interventionist allies, and secessionists split off southern Yemen from the Houthi-dominated
north. Yet, still, Congress has been unable to force the Trump administration to end all
support of the Saudi war.
Two thousand U.S. troops remain in Syria. The northern unit is deployed between our Syrian
Kurd allies and the Turkish army. In the south, they are positioned to prevent Iran and
Iranian-backed militias from creating a secure land bridge from Tehran to Baghdad to Damascus
to Beirut.
In our confrontation with Iran, we have few allies.
The Brits released the Iranian tanker they seized at Gibraltar, which had been carrying oil
to Syria. But when the Americans sought to prevent its departure, a Gibraltar court ruled
against the United States.
Iran presents no clear or present danger to U.S. vital interests, but the Saudis and
Israelis see Iran as a mortal enemy, and want the U.S. military rid them of the menace.
Hong Kong protesters wave American flags and seek U.S. support of their demands for greater
autonomy and freedom in their clash with their Beijing-backed authorities. The Taiwanese want
us to support them and sell them the weapons to maintain their independence. The Philippines
wants us to take their side in the dispute with China over tiny islets in the South China
Sea.
We are still committed to go to war to defend South Korea. And the North has lately
test-fired a series of ballistic missiles, none of which could hit the USA, but all of which
could hit South Korea.
Around the world, America is involved in quarrels, clashes and confrontations with almost
too many nations to count.
In how many of these are U.S. vital interests imperiled? And in how many are we facing
potential wars on behalf of other nations, while they hold our coat and egg us on?
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of "Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever."
"... Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them. ..."
"... The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best." That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history. ..."
"... As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion. ..."
"... Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before." ..."
"... The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans. ..."
"... As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq. ..."
"... Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security." He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous, to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question. ..."
"... The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes? ..."
"... Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic war. ..."
Gabbard calls out the betrayers; Dems try to forget their heroes Mueller and Biden are among them.
Estimates of the number of civilians who died during the war in Iraq range from 151,000 to 655,000. An additional 4,491 American
military personnel perished in the war. Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, toxicologist at the University of Michigan, has organized several
research expeditions to Iraq to measure the contamination and pollution still poisoning the air and water supply from the tons of
munitions dropped during the war. It does not require any expertise to assume what the studies confirm: disease is still widespread
and birth defects are gruesomely common. Back home, it is difficult to measure just how many struggle with critical injuries and
post-traumatic stress disorder.
The gains of war in Iraq remain elusive, especially considering that the justifications for invasion -- weapons of mass destruction,
Saddam Hussein's connection to al-Qaeda, the ambition to create a Western-style democracy at gunpoint -- remain "murky at best."
That's a quote from the 9/11 Commission's conclusion on the so-called evidence linking Iraq to Osama bin Laden's group, which actually
did carry out the worst terrorist attack in American history.
As far as stupid and barbarous decisions are concerned, it is difficult to top the war in Iraq. It is also difficult to match
its price tag, which, according to a recent Brown University study, amounts to $1.1 trillion.
Gore Vidal once christened his country the "United States of Amnesia," explaining that Americans live in a perpetual state
of a hangover: "Every morning we wake up having forgotten what happened the night before."
The war in Iraq ended only nine years ago, but it might as well have never taken place, given the curious lack of acknowledgement
in our press and political debates. As families mourn their children, babies are born with irreversible deformities, and veterans
dread trying to sleep through the night, America's political class, many of whom sold the war to the public, have moved on. When
they address Iraq at all, they act as though they have committed a minor error, as though large-scale death and destruction are the
equivalent of a poor shot in golf when the course rules allow for mulligans.
As the Robert Mueller fiasco smolders out, it is damning that the Democratic Party, in its zest and zeal to welcome any critical
assessment of Trump's unethical behavior, has barely mentioned that Mueller, in his previous role as director of the FBI, played
a small but significant role in convincing the country to go to war in Iraq.
Mueller testified to Congress that "Iraq's weapons of mass destruction program poses a clear threat to our national security."
He also warned that Saddam could "supply terrorists with radiological material" for the purposes of devising a nuclear bomb. Leaving
aside any speculation about Mueller's intentions and assuming he had only the best of motives, it is quite bizarre, even dangerous,
to treat as oracular someone who was wrong on such a life-or-death question.
Far worse than the worship of Mueller is the refusal to scrutinize the abysmal foreign policy record of Joe Biden, currently the
frontrunner in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Of the Democrats in the Senate at that time, Biden was the most
enthusiastic of the cheerleaders for war, waving his pompoms and cartwheeling in rhythm to Dick Cheney's music. Biden said repeatedly
that America had "no choice but to eliminate the threat" posed by Saddam Hussein. As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
his blustering was uniquely influential.
The former vice president now claims that his "only mistake was trusting the Bush administration," implying he was tricked
into supporting the war. This line is not as persuasive as he imagines. First, it raises the question -- can't we nominate someone
who wasn't tricked? Second, its logic crumbles in the face of Biden's recent decision to hire Nicholas Burns, former U.S. ambassador
to NATO, as his campaign's foreign policy advisor. Burns was also a vociferous supporter of the war. An enterprising reporter should
ask Biden whether Burns was also tricked. Is the Biden campaign an assembly of rubes?
Instead, the press is likelier to interrogate Biden over his holding hands and giving hugs to women at public events. Criticism
of Biden's "inappropriate touching" has become so strident that the candidate had to record a video to explain his behavior. The
moral standards of America's political culture seem to rate kissing a woman on the back of the head as a graver offense than catastrophic
war.
Polling well below Biden in the race is the congresswoman from Hawaii, Tulsi Gabbard. She alone on the Democratic stage has made
criticism of American militarism central to her candidacy. A veteran of the Iraq war and a highly decorated major in the Hawaii Army
National Guard, Gabbard offers an intelligent and humane perspective on foreign affairs. She's called the regime change philosophy
"disastrous," advocated for negotiation with hostile foreign powers, and backed a reduction in drone strikes. She pledges if she
becomes president to end American involvement in Afghanistan.
When Chris Matthews asked Gabbard about Biden's support for the Iraq war, she said, "It was the wrong vote. People like myself,
who enlisted after 9/11 because of the terrorist attacks, were lied to. We were betrayed."
Her moral clarity is rare in the political fog of the presidential circus. She cautions against accepting the "guise of humanitarian
justification for war," and notes that rarely does the American government bomb and invade a country to actually advance freedom
or protect human rights.
Gabbard's positions are vastly superior to that of the other young veteran in the race, Pete Buttigieg. The mayor of South Bend
recently told New York that one of his favorite novels is The Quiet American , saying that its author, Graham Greene,
"points out the dangers of well-intentioned interventions."
Buttigieg's chances of winning the nomination seem low, and his prospects of becoming a literary critic appear even lower.
The Quiet American does much more than raise questions about interventions: it is a merciless condemnation of American exceptionalism
and its attendant indifference to Vietnamese suffering.
Americans hoping for peace won't find much comfort in the current White House either. President Trump has made the world more
dangerous by trashing the Iran nuclear deal, and his appointment of John Bolton, a man who makes Donald Rumsfeld look like Mahatma
Gandhi, as national security advisor is certainly alarming.
America's willful ignorance when it comes to the use of its own military exposes the moral bankruptcy at the heart of its political
culture. Even worse, it makes future wars all but inevitable.
If no one can remember a war that ended merely nine years ago, and there's little room for Tulsi Gabbard in the Democratic primary,
how will the country react the next time a president, and the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, declare that they
have no choice but to remove a threat?
Norman Solomon, journalist and founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy, knows the answer to that question. He provides it
in the title of his book on how the media treats American foreign policy decisions: War Made Easy .
Where ae the people who told us that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction? Should they be tried for lying to the American public?
4500 troops killed and over $1.1 TRILLION wasted with no good results .With hundreds of thousands of Iraq's killed. .
Where are they, indeed? They are still running US foreign policy; that's where they are. They are pundits in all the major media;
that's where they are.
I cannot even imagine what historians will say about the uncanny persistence of these charlatans' influence in this era after
a consistent record of disastrous, abysmal misadventures.
You don't have to look too hard to find them. Bolton, Pompeo, and other neocons are hiding in plain sight. The Military Industrial
Complex is embedded in our foreign policy like a tick on a dog.
Because you'd be knocking out a storm trooper instead of the emperor, at least as far as Bush goes. Same for why the focus is
on Bolton rather than simply Trump.
I CAN see an argument that Trump/Bush knew what they were doing when they brought those people in though. f you feel that way
and see it more of an owner of a hostile attack dog then yeah, you'd want to include those two too.
Here stands Tulsi. A woman, who, unlike their conventional troupe, can win this election. They reject her because... what? Moar
war? She's not the member of the Cult? Or it's simply some sort of collective political death wish?
They reject her because she had the temerity to speak truth to power and supported Bernie Sanders in the 2016 race. She stepped
down from her position as Vice Chair of the DNC to endorse Sanders. She has real courage, and earned their wrath. She's not perfect
but she's braver and stronger than almost the entire field. Only Bernie is on par.
And Bernie is the one they also hate, maybe a little bit less openly. Thus they reject those who can win the election. It's either
a self-destructiveness or they think that it's better to keep on losing than to rebuild the party into what it needs to be.
Democrats and the Republican establishment, both, love war. It wasn't a coincidence that Hillary Clinton chose Madeleine Albright
to be a keynote speaker at "her" party convention ("we think the deaths of a half million children are worth it"). Liberals know
that there isn't really any "free" free, and that taxing the rich won't match their dreams -- it is the blood and bones of innocent
foreigners that must pay for their lust. Establishment Republicans are more straightforward: they simply profit off the death
and destruction.
This is why Trump is being destroyed, and why Tulsi is attacked. If only "she" (the one who gloated over Khameni's murder)
had been elected, we'd be in a proxy war with Russia now! A real war with Iran! This is what the American people want, and what
they'll likely get when they vote another chicken-hawk in come 2020.
Tulsi, like Sanders is a 'danger' to everything Israel wants.
So, all...all the main 'news' networks and online sites don't like them and give more coverage to the same old Dem bull peddlers
like ignorant Booker and the lousy opportunist low IQ Kamala Harris and Gillibrand.
Manafort and his ilk can be tried and convicted for their lies. I guess if the lie is big enough we grant a pass on any need for
prosecution. Justice for all? I don't think so.
Max Blumenthal posted a powerful piece at Consortium News (7/31/2019) about Biden's central and south American mis-adventures.
Biden still extols his own policies however disastrous. The hubris of the man is worse than nauseating.
Whether one thinks Gabbard has a shot at the nomination or not, it's important to keep her on the stage in the next round of debates.
Go to Tulsi2020.com
and give her just one dollar (or more if you can)
so she has enough unique contributors to make the next round. And if you get polled,early on give her your vote.
The total US costs related to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are expected to be considerably larger than $1.1 trillion, according
to this study:
https://www.hks.harvard.edu...
Try $4-$6 trillion, according to the author of the study.
Long after I, Andrew Bacevitch and Hillary Clinton have gone to our reward, there will still be thousands of wounded warriors
from these US Middle East adventures dependent on VA benefits for their survival and competing with civilian seniors for government
handouts. A war with Iran would make the US fiscal situation that much worse.
The religious folks who were so anxious to protect family values only a few years ago seem to have their heads in the sand
when it comes to the financial future of today's young Americans.
A few weeks ago, I made a token contribution to Tulsi Gabbard's campaign to help her qualify for the July Democratic debates.
She will need more new contributors to qualify for the next round of debates.
Tulsi hasn't a chance of the nomination, but she's exposing things and maybe more people will get a clue about what's really going
on with American lives and taxes being squandered for the profit of the few who benefit from these atrocities and wars abroad,
done in the name of all Americans.
Being a supporter of Tulsi Gabbard for the very reasons that the author writes, has me agreeing with everything he has promoted
in his piece.
However, to answer his own question as to why Americans are lured into commenting on such innocuous and foolish things in such
an important election such as Biden's touching of women, is answered by the author's own prose.
He states that Americans are only provided such nonsense from the press that is monitoring the election process. What else
can people talk about? And even if many Americans are clearheaded enough to understand the charade of the current Democratic debates,
what or who will actually provide legitimate coverage with the exception of online sites as the American Conservative, among others?
If most Americans were actually thinking individuals, Tulsi Gabbard would be a shoo-in for the presidency in 2020. However,
given the two factors of a highly corrupted mainstream press and too many Americans not studying enough civics to understand what
is going on around them, it is highly unlikely that Tulsi Gabbard will even get close to the possibility of being nominated...
Cheney, mentioned in the article, was pure evil. I voted for GB2 for two reasons. 1) He was a very good Texas governor. He actually
got anti-tax Texas to raise taxes dedicated to support education, in return for stricter standards for teachers. A good trade
since Texas public schools were awful. 2) Dick Cheney. I thought he was the adult in the room that would provide steady and reliable
guidance for Bush.
Boy was I wrong about Cheney. "Deficits don't matter". Just watch the movie Vice. Christian Bale does an incredible job portraying
the pure evil of Cheney and the Military Industrial Complex. The movie is chilling to watch. And it is basically true. Politifact
does a good job of scoring the accuracy of Cheney's role in the Bush administration as portrayed in the movie.
'Second officer was poisoned with Novichok in Salisbury incident, police reveal', ,
"Counter Terrorism Detectives, who are investigating the nerve agent attack in 2018, have confirmed that traces of Novichok have
been found in a blood sample which was taken at the time from a second police officer.
The officer from Wiltshire Police, who does not wish to be identified , was involved in the response to the poisoning of Sergei
and Yulia Skripal.
The Telegraph understands the male officer displayed signs at the time of the incident that indicated exposure to a very small
amount of Novichok .
He received appropriate medical treatment at the time and returned to duties shortly afterwards.
A police spokesman told the Telegraph the officer was part of the initial response.
Forensic examination of the officer's blood sample, taken in March 2018, has since been carried out by scientists at the Defence
Science and Technology Laboratory.
The forensic test – which uses a different method to that used to assess the clinical effects of nerve agent poisoning – has now
given detectives confirmation that traces of Novichok were present.
The officer, the fourth person to be confirmed through forensic testing as a victim of the initial Salisbury attack, has been
informed and continues to receive support from Wiltshire Police along with other officers and staff affected by the events in Salisbury
and Amesbury last year."
Well, now that number depends on Gina Haspel's report about
the
dead ducks and sick children poisoned by the Novichoked bread the Skripals had been tossing to the ducks, doesn't it? But Officer
Nick Baily was allegedly #5.
"The spokesman said: "some of the other police officers that attended the scene may have been exposed, but it is possible to find
forensic traces [of Novichok] in blood that have no health implications at the time". [snip]
"The UK
expelled
23 Russian diplomats and the US expelled 60 more in retaliation for poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in March last year,
blaming the Russian military intelligence service, the GRU, for the botched assassination attempt."
From the link above:
'British authorities are confident they know "everything worth knowing" about the assassination attempt on Sergei Skripal, including
a trail right up to Vladimir Putin."
"The Russian intelligence agency behind the Salisbury nerve agent attack has been
dismantled in the UK [<Moscow spins webb of lies] and will remain out of action for years to come, according to government sources.
The threat posed by the GRU, which carried out the attempted assassination of Skripal last March, has been severely curtailed
as a result of the counter-terror investigation that exposed the agents who carried out the attack.'
"Counter-terror police working with the intelligence services were able to piece together the plot to murder Colonel Skripal,
a former GRU officer who had sold secrets to MI6, using CCTV, including footage from the streets close to the Col Skripal's home
in Salisbury, and from passenger flight manifests and immigration data at the time of the attempted hit."
(with photos of GRU Boris and Natasha)
'Novichok Sickened 2nd British Officer, Police Say',
August
15, 2019 , nytimes.com, Anna Schaverien
"Another officer, Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey, became critically ill after going to Mr. Skripal's home to investigate the attack.
Mr. Skripal, a former colonel in Russia's military intelligence, and his daughter, Yulia, had been found unconscious and slumped
on a bench.
Sergeant Bailey, who made contact with the nerve agent through the house's door handle, made a full recovery. Last Sunday,
he ran a marathon to raise money for the intensive-care unit at the hospital where he was treated.
Two other people, Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley, also suffered high levels of exposure to Novichok as a result of the poisoning.
They were accidentally exposed to residue in Amesbury, a town near Salisbury, months after the initial episode .
Both were critically sickened on July 1 when Ms. Sturgess
sprayed
a substance that she thought was [Nina Ricci l'air du Novichoque ] perfume onto her wrist from a bottle that Mr. Rowley,
her boyfriend, had found. Investigators believe the vial was used to transport the Novichok that poisoned the Skripals. Mr. Rowley
survived, but
Ms. Sturgess died .
In the wake of the attack, tensions escalated to their highest pitch in decades between Britain and Russia, which London blamed
for the poisoning. Moscow denied any involvement." [snip]
"The European Union placed economic sanctions on the two suspects and two senior Russian military intelligence officials in January.
And this month President Trump signed an
executive
order imposing new sanctions on Russia over the episode."
From the Aug. 1 NYT : 'Mr. Trump has been reluctant to take punitive actions against Russia, instead seeking better
relations with Moscow despite its well-documented interference in the 2016 election.
But in recent weeks, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle have criticized his administration's delay in taking what they
have called legally mandated action to follow up on sanctions imposed last August.' [snip]
On Monday, the top Democrat and Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee sent a joint letter to the White House threatening
new congressional action to force the administration's hand.
"Failure by the administration to respond to Russia's unabashed aggression is unacceptable and would necessitate that Congress
take corrective action," wrote the members, Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York, and Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas.
The law provided the administration with numerous sanctions to choose from. The executive order released by the White House
on Thursday banned loans or other assistance to Russia by international financial institutions and prohibited most loans from American
banks to Russia's government."
"They are suspected groundlessly," the Kremlin's spokesman told reporters when the European Union imposed travel bans and asset
freezes on the suspects. " We have still not heard any evidence ."
A year after the poisoning, and after 13,000 hours of cleaning, the
British government announced that the decontamination of the former Skripal home was complete. But the investigation into the
attack continues.
"There are parts of the picture that we are continuing to piece together," the Metropolitan Police statement said."
All of which begs the question: what new sanctions will the US and UK levy on Russia? Of course we'll never know where Sergei
and Yulia are, will we?
And sure we remember when they raised a new roof because some of that Novichok gel (or was it a spray?) on the Skripal's front
door knob migrated upstairs into the attic or something
This may have been my favorite story, though: ' Public toilet in Salisbury 'may have been used by Russian agents to prepare deadly
Novichok', themirror.co./uk.com
, Aug. 4, 2018
"A public toilet may be where Russian agents mixed deadly Novichok used to try and assassinate ex-spy Sergei Skripal , according
to reports .
It is thought Met Police counter terror cops are investigating the likelihood that the assassins smuggled the components to the
nerve agent into the country then mixed it in a public toilet in Salisbury.
Forensic teams have discovered low-level contamination in toilets in the city's Queen Elizabeth Gardens."
But I'll turn it over to BBC news : 'BBC to dramatise Salisbury Novichok poisoning',
17 May 2019 , bbc.com/news
"The new drama is being written by Adam Patterson and Declan Lawn who said in a joint statement: "We feel extremely privileged
to be telling this story.
"Extensive, meticulous research is at the heart of how we like to work and we've been overwhelmed by the generosity of the people
of Salisbury who have opened up to us over the past few months and continue to do so."
Piers Wenger, controller of BBC Drama, added: "The poisonings in Salisbury shocked the nation and had a huge impact on an unsuspecting
community.
"This drama will capture the bravery, resilience and personal experience of the local people who faced a situation of unimaginable
horror, so close to home."
Casting for the drama is yet to be announced."
An historical bonus from the good Ambassador: ' Pure: Ten Points I Just Can't Believe About the Official Skripal Narrative', March
7, 2109, Craig Murray,
craigmurray .org; a few snippets:
"I still do not know what happened in the Skripal saga, which perhaps might more respectfully be termed the Sturgess saga. I cannot
believe the Russian account of Boshirov and Petrov, because if those were their real identities, those identities would have been
firmly established and displayed by now. But that does not mean they attempted to kill the Skripals, and there are many key elements
to the official British account which are also simply incredible.
Governments play dark games, and a dark game was played out in Salisbury which involved at least the British state, Russian agents
(possibly on behalf of the state), Orbis Intelligence and the BBC. Anybody who believes it is simple to identify the "good guys"
and the "bad guys" in this situation is a fool. When it comes to state actors and the intelligence services, frequently there are
no "good guys", as I personally witnessed from the inside over torture, extraordinary rendition and the illegal invasion of Iraq.
But in the face of a massive media campaign to validate the British government story about the Skripals, here are ten of the things
I do not believe in the official account:
3) Nursing Care
The very first person to discover the Skripals ill on a park bench in Salisbury
just happened to be the Chief Nurse of the British Army , who chanced to be walking past them on her way back from a birthday
party. How lucky was that? The odds are about the same as the chance of my vacuum cleaner breaking down just before James Dyson knocks
at my door to ask for directions. There are very few people indeed in the UK trained to give nursing care to victims of chemical
weapon attack, and of all the people who might have walked past, it just happened to be the most senior of them!
The government is always trying to get good publicity for its armed forces, and you would think that the heroic role of its off-duty
personnel in saving random poisoned Russian double agents they just happened to chance across, would have been proclaimed as a triumph
for the British military. Yet it was kept secret for ten months. We were not told about the involvement of Colonel Alison McCourt
until January of this year, when it came out by accident. Swollen with maternal pride, Col. McCourt nominated her daughter for an
award from the local radio station for her role in helping give first aid to the Skripals, and young Abigail revealed her mother's
identity on local radio – and the fact her mother was there "with her" administering first aid."
6) Mark Urban/Pablo Miller
The BBC's "Diplomatic Editor" is a regular conduit for the security services. He fronted much of the BBC's original coverage of
the Skripal story. Yet he concealed from the viewers the fact that he had been in regular contact with Sergei Skripal for months
before the alleged poisoning, and had held several meetings with Skripal.
This is extraordinary behaviour. It was the biggest news story in the world, and news organisations, including the BBC, were scrambling
to fill in the Skripals' back story. Yet the journalist who had the inside info on the world's biggest news story, and was actually
reporting on it, kept that knowledge to himself. Why? Urban was not only passing up a career defining opportunity, it was unethical
of him to continually report on the story without revealing to the viewers his extensive contacts with Skripal.
The British government had two immediate reactions to the Skripal incident. Within the first 48 hours, it blamed Russia, and it
slapped a D(SMA) notice banning all media mention of Skripal's MI6 handler, Pablo Miller. By yet another one of those extraordinary
coincidences, Miller and Urban know each other well, having both been
officers together in the Royal Tank Regiment,
of the same rank and joining the Regiment the same year."
Conclusion
I do not know what happened in Salisbury. Plainly spy games were being played between Russia and the UK, quite likely linked to
the Skripals and/or the NATO chemical weapons exercise
then taking place on Salisbury Plain yet another one of those astonishing coincidences."
Weird how literally every one of thes poisioning incidents keep happening less than 10 miles from the uk's largest and most
notorious deadly chemical weapons factory. The fascist uk regime should really stop murdering its own people with chemical weapons
https://t.co/zvIXrJ57eK
At first Novichok described as thee most deadilest chemical weapon in the world. It immediate kills anybody exposed to it and
any unprotected first responders.
It failed to immediately kill to anybody exposed to it.
Seems more like a bad flu instead.
Novichok degrades almost immediately.
Norvichock can stay around for months in a perfume bottle.
Only Russians can and did make it.
For a few bucks, university chem majors made a batch.
the nerve agent is a chimera in time, too! you can even pull it out of a hat, like a wabbit!
thanks for the great chuckle-worthy additions, Mr.Webster. ; )
p.s. it did kill dawn sturgess, as far as we've been told, but iirc, there were extenuating circumstances given her addiction
history. i love it that officer bailey ran a marathon recently, too.
and the saga continues....will it ever end?
At first Novichok described as thee most deadilest chemical weapon in the world. It immediate kills anybody exposed to it
and any unprotected first responders.
It failed to immediately kill to anybody exposed to it.
Seems more like a bad flu instead.
Novichok degrades almost immediately.
Norvichock can stay around for months in a perfume bottle.
Only Russians can and did make it.
For a few bucks, university chem majors made a batch.
xmas list, santa gator? looks like ya gotta either keep your eyes peeled for knock-offs, or head to the soviet union... light
bulb! maybe they left a few bottles hidden in the roof of that bog in the salisbury park!
are addin' up to a fistful of dollars and pound notes by now, aren't they? i'd call it humiliating, myownself.
i did dig out more from craig murray on pablo miller, orbus, et.al., cuz i'd needed a refresher: Where They Tell You Not to
Look , april 30, 2019
lots of tweets, plus this great aaron maté interview
w/ luke harding.
by the by, i finally heard from Rosette Sewali, Producer & Membership Relations Manager after i'd asked TRNN why is might be
that neither sharmini piries nor paul jay have been there since june 13; she wrote back:
'Thanks for your email. Paul and Sharmini have been on leave since early June. Updates will be available when we have more
information .'
??????
'At the very beginning of the of the Skripal incident, the security services blocked by D(SMA) notice any media mention
of Pablo Miller and told the media not to look at Orbis and the Steele dossier on Trump, acting immediately to get out their
message via trusties in the BBC and Guardian. Gordon Corera, "BBC Security Correspondent", did not name the source who told
him to say this, but helpfully illustrated his tweet with a nice picture of MI6 Headquarters.
'MI6's most important media conduit (after Frank Gardner) is Luke Harding of the Guardian.'
..................
'Given that the Steele dossier is demonstrably in large degree nonsense, it seems to me more probable the idea was to silence
Skripal to close the danger that he would reveal his part in the concoction of this fraud. Remember he had sold out Russian
agents to the British for cash and was a man of elastic loyalties. It is also worth noting that Luke Harding has a bestselling
book currently on sale, in large part predicated on the truth of the Steele Dossier.
Steele, MI6 and the elements of the CIA which are out to get Trump, all would have a powerful motive to have the Skripal
loose end tied.
Rule number one of real investigative journalism: look where they tell you not to look .'
"... The research reveals, for the first time, that around 4600 kilos of the chemical, zinc cadmium sulphide (now thought to be potentially carcinogenic, on account of its cadmium content) were dispersed from ships, aircraft and moving lorries between 1953 and 1964. ..."
"... Professor Schmidt's investigation – published on 9 July as a book, Secret Science – has revealed that commuters on the London underground were also used as guinea pigs on a substantially larger scale than previously thought. ..."
"... The new research reveals, for the first time, that in another British imperial possession, Nigeria, a location was found for chemical warfare field trials. In an area called Obanaghoro in southern Nigeria, four British Cold War scientific missions spent a total of around 15 months dispersing, and assessing the effects of, large quantities of experimental nerve gas weapons. The advantage of the location was that it permitted field trials to be carried out in a tropical environment – and, of course, that it was not in Britain or Australia. ..."
"... Ulf Schmidt's book, Secret Science, is published today on 9 July, by Oxford University Press. ..."
Substantial quantities were also dispersed across parts of the English Channel and the North Sea. It's not known the extent to
which coastal towns in England and France were affected.
The research reveals, for the first time, that around 4600 kilos of the chemical, zinc cadmium sulphide (now thought to be
potentially carcinogenic, on account of its cadmium content) were dispersed from ships, aircraft and moving lorries between 1953
and 1964.
Professor Schmidt's investigation – published on 9 July as a book, Secret Science – has revealed that commuters on
the London underground were also used as guinea pigs on a substantially larger scale than previously thought.
The new research has discovered that a hitherto unknown biological warfare field trial was carried out in the capital's tube system
in May 1964.
The secret operation – carried out by scientists from the government's chemical and biological warfare research centre at Porton
Down, Wiltshire - involved the release of large quantities of bacteria called Bacillus globigii. The scientists were keen to discover
whether 'long distance travel of aerosols' in the tube network 'was due to transportation within trains' or through the tube's air
ventilation systems.
At the time, the government thought that Bacillus globigii bacteria were harmless – but they are today regarded as a cause of
food poisoning, eye infections, and even septicaemia. It is not known whether the authorities attempted to properly test the bacterium
before releasing it into the tube system. An earlier series of tube field trials, in July 1963, has been known to historians for
many years.
However, the new research has now revealed that some of the British scientists involved had grave misgivings about the field trials
that had been carried out. Indeed some had long felt that it was not politically advisable to conduct large-scale trials in Britain
with live bacterial agents.
One particular test – involving live plague bacteria – was carried out off the west coast of Scotland in 1952. It's long been
known that a fishing vessel inadvertently passed through the cloud of bacteria and that the authorities were very worried that the
fishermen might contract the disease.
The plague bacteria field trials, though at sea, took place only a few miles from the Isle of Lewis which had a population of
several thousand.
The government scientists, carrying out the trials, banked on the fact that the prevailing wind normally blew away from the coast.
If, however, the wind had changed direction, thousands of Hebrideans would have been at risk from plague infection, says Professor
Schmidt.
Equipment for the isolation of patients in a germ free atmosphere, which was developed at Porton Down in collaboration with the
Institute of Child Health (Getty)
Following the fishing vessel incident, the scientists were eager to carry out any further potentially very hazardous field trials
outside the UK. Prime Minister Churchill therefore approved a plan to carry out tests in a British overseas territory, the Bahamas.
New research shows that the government scientists took the view that the Bahamas was the best place "on the surface of the globe"
to carry out tests "without restrictions".
In 1954, the British government sent Cold War biological warfare scientists to an area of sea near an uninhabited island in the
Bahamas to release clouds of dangerous Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis viruses. These organisms were capable of causing, in humans,
high fever, long term fatigue, headaches and occasionally death.
The new research reveals, for the first time, that in another British imperial possession, Nigeria, a location was found for
chemical warfare field trials. In an area called Obanaghoro in southern Nigeria, four British Cold War scientific missions spent
a total of around 15 months dispersing, and assessing the effects of, large quantities of experimental nerve gas weapons. The advantage
of the location was that it permitted field trials to be carried out in a tropical environment – and, of course, that it was not
in Britain or Australia.
The extent that local people (including locally employed field trial personnel) were affected by the nerve agents is not known.
Historians have so far been unable to find out who did the particularly hazardous work of 'hand-charging' the nerve agent artillery
shells, mortar bombs and aircraft cluster bombs. Likewise they have not been able to discover the extent to which local Nigerian
soils were contaminated or whether nearby villages and schools were affected by any of the toxic clouds that would have been blown
across the countryside.
"The government records I've been looking at are conspicuously silent on all this," said Ulf Schmidt.
"Officials had clearly good reasons as to why the kind of experiments undertaken in Nigeria were strictly prohibited on the British
mainland, which is why the files and photographic records surrounding Britain's post-war nerve agent testing in Africa were regarded
as particularly sensitive," he said.
Professor Schmidt's research has also revealed the vast scale of Cold War chemical warfare tests carried out on 'volunteer' British
service personnel here in the UK – involving numbers of people much greater than previously thought.
His investigation now suggests that up to 30,000 secret chemical warfare substance experiments were carried out, mainly at Porton
Down, on more than 14,000 British soldiers between 1945 and 1989. He believes that, in most cases, the servicemen were not given
sufficient information to allow them to give properly informed consent.
Ulf Schmidt's book, Secret Science, is published today on 9 July, by Oxford University Press.
Spreading diseases: 'Harmless' proxies
Aircraft, lorries and ships spread 4,600kg of cadmium sulphide in one decade
Zinc Cadmium Sulfide ultra-fine particles
. This inorganic compound was used by Cold War scientists in the UK and the US as a supposedly harmless proxy to simulate the behaviour,
in the lower atmosphere and on the ground, of biological warfare substances. However it is still not known whether particles of ZCS
that may have become embedded in people's lungs for decades could ultimately cause disease.
Bacillus globigii . This bacterium was used as a supposedly harmless proxy to simulate the behaviour, in terms of dispersal and
penetration, of biological warfare aerosols. Although not considered harmful when it was used in Cold War field trials, it is now
known to be capable of causing fevers, food poisoning (occasionally resulting in death), peritonitis and septicaemia .
Pasteurella pestis (now known as Yersina pestis) . Clouds of this highly infections bacterium were dispersed only over areas of
sea – but nevertheless very near to Lewis, a Scottish Island with thousands of inhabitants. In order not to infect the islands, it
appears that the scientists relied entirely on the wind not changing direction and speed. This bacterium is the one that has caused
plague epidemics worldwide in the past (including those of the medieval world's Black Death).
Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis. Clouds of this virus were dispersed over an area of sea close to an uninhabited island in the
Bahamas. The virus debilitates or kills horses and donkeys and can also cause severe fever and even death in humans. Mosquitos spread
the virus further by biting equines.
G-series nerve agents. Clouds of this chemical warfare weapon were dispersed during field trials in a small part of southern Nigeria,
some miles north of the town of Warri. G-series nerve agents were first developed by the Nazis before and during World War Two. The
group includes substances like sarin and attacks the human nervous system, causing loss of bodily function and normally death. Survivors
are likely to suffer long-term neurological damage and psychiatric disorders.
Late Justin
Raimondo was an astute analyst of events in Syria... This is his analysys from 2015. It is
still cogent as of August 2019.
Notable quotes:
"... "War on terrorism" turns into cold war against Russia ..."
"... By the way, according to the Pentagon's own testimony before a congressional committee, only sixty "vetted" fighters were sent into Syria to take on both Assad and ISIS. And while they denied, at first, that their pet "moderates" betrayed Washington and handed over most of their weapons and other equipment to al-Qaeda in return for "safe passage," the Pentagon later admitted it . ..."
"... [I]t is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms trade ..."
"... It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of them or somehow eliminate them. ..."
"... "I'd like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it's a big question: who's playing who here? The recent incident where the most 'moderate' opposition group handed over their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that. ..."
"War on terrorism" turns into cold war against Russia
Posted on August
19, 2019 August 18, 2019In both Yemen and Syria, the War Party has found an
ally that they can get behind, you know, one that really supports our values: al-Qaeda.
From time to time they have even managed to get President Trump to go along with this
nonsense – presumably due to the baleful influence of John Bolton. (See
Ron Paul's recent discussion of recent developments.) It is worth a look back at an
earlier high-points in this strange alliance between the West and al-Qaeda against Russia and
Syria. Justin's column from four years ago (October 2, 2015) analyzes it in depth.
Originally published October 2, 2015
As Russian fighter jets target al-Qaeda and ISIS in Syria, the Western media is up in arms
– and
in denial . They deny the Russians are taking on ISIS – and they are indignant that
Putin is
targeting al-Qaeda , which is almost never referred to by its actual name, but is instead
described as " al-Nusra ," or the more inclusive "
Army of Conquest
," which are alternate names for the heirs of Osama bin Laden.
And there are no ideological lines being drawn in this information war: both the left and
the right – e.g. the left-liberal Vox and the Fox News
network – are utilizing a map put out by
the neoconservative
"Institute for the Study of War" to "prove" that Putin isn't really attacking ISIS
– he's actually only concerned with destroying the "non-ISIS" rebels and propping up
the faltering regime of Bashar al-Assad.
The premise behind this kind of propaganda is that there really is some difference between
ISIS and the multitude of Islamist groups proliferating like wasps in the region: and that,
furthermore, al-Qaeda is "relatively" moderate when compared to the Islamic State. Yes,
incredibly, the US and British media are pushing the line that the al-Qaeda fighters in
Syria, known as al-Nusra, are really the Good Guys.
Didn't you know that we have always been at war with Eastasia?
There is
much whining , this [Thursday] morning, that a supposedly US-"vetted" group known as
Tajammu al-Aaza has felt Putin's wrath – but when we get down into the weeds, we
discover that this outfit is fighting alongside al-Qaeda:
"Jamil al-Saleh, a defected Syrian army officer who is now the leader of the rebel
group Tajammu al-Aaza,
told AlSouria.net that the Russian airstrikes targeted his group's base in
al-Lataminah, a town in the western Syrian governorate of Hama. That area represents one of
the farthest southern points of the rebel advance from the north and is therefore a crucial
front line in the war. An alliance of Syrian rebel factions, including both the al
Qaeda-affiliated al-Nusra Front and groups considered by Washington to be more
moderate, successfully drove Assad regime forces out of the northern governorate of Idlib
and are now pushing south into Hama."
By the way, according to the Pentagon's own testimony
before a congressional committee, only sixty "vetted" fighters were sent into Syria to take
on both Assad and ISIS. And while they denied, at first, that their pet "moderates"
betrayed Washington and
handed over most of their weapons and other equipment to al-Qaeda in return for "safe
passage," the Pentagon later
admitted it . Furthermore, we were told that these were the only "vetted" fighters
actually in the field, but now we are confronted with "Tajammu al-Aaza," which – it's
being reported – is deploying US-supplied missile guidance systems against Syrian
government forces.
So a handful of "vetted" fighters suddenly turns into an entire armed force – one
which, you'll note, has effectively merged with al-Qaeda.
The lies are coming at us so fast and thick in the first 24 hours of the Russian strikes
that we face a veritable blizzard of obfuscation. They range from the egregious –
alleged photos of "civilian casualties" that
turn out to be fake – to the more subtle: a supposed Free Syrian Army commander is
reported killed by a Russian air strike, and yet it appears that very same commander was
kidnapped by ISIS last year . We are told that the town of Rastan, the site of Russian
strikes, isn't under the control of ISIS – except it was when
ISIS was executing gay men there .
The Russians make no bones about their support of Assad: in his speech to the United
Nations, Putin stated his position clearly: "We think it's a big mistake to refuse to
cooperate with the Syrian authorities and government forces who valiantly fight terrorists on
the ground." On the other hand, the objectives of the Western alliance in Syria aren't so
clear: on the one hand, Washington claims to be directing the main blow against ISIS, but its
claims of success have been
greatly exaggerated . Yet we have spent many millions arming and training "vetted" rebels
who have been defecting to ISIS and al-Qaeda in droves.
It's almost as if we're keeping ISIS around so as to put pressure on Assad to get out of
Dodge. As Putin put it in his UN speech :
" [I]t is hypocritical and irresponsible to make declarations about the threat of
terrorism and at the same time turn a blind eye to the channels used to finance and support
terrorists, including revenues from drug trafficking, the illegal oil trade and the arms
trade .
" It is equally irresponsible to manipulate extremist groups and use them to achieve
your political goals, hoping that later you'll find a way to get rid of them or somehow
eliminate them.
"I'd like to tell those who engage in this: Gentlemen, the people you are dealing with
are cruel but they are not dumb. They are as smart as you are. So, it's a big question: who's
playing who here? The recent incident where the most 'moderate' opposition group handed over
their weapons to terrorists is a vivid example of that. "
The reality is that there are no "moderates" in Syria, and certainly not among the rebel
Islamist groups: they're all jihadists who want to impose Sharia law, drive out Christians,
Alawites, and other minority groups, and set up an Islamic dictatorship. These are our noble
"allies" – the very same people who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on
September 11, 2001, and against whom our perpetual "war on terrorism" was launched.
It's pretty clear. Saudi Arabia has lost, and,
notes Bruce Riedel, "the Houthis and Iran are the strategic winners". Saudi proxies in Aden
– the seat of Riyadh's Yemeni proto-'government' – have been turfed out by secular,
former Marxist, southern secessionists. What can Saudi Arabia do? It cannot go forward. Even
tougher would be retreat. Saudi will have to contend with an Houthi war being waged
inside the kingdom's south; and a second – quite different – war in Yemen's
south. MbS is stuck. The Houthi military leadership are on a roll , and
disinterested – for now – in a political settlement. They wish to accumulate more
'cards'. The UAE, which armed and trained the southern secessionists has opted out. MbS is
alone, 'carrying the can'. It will be messy.
So, what is the meaning in this? It is that MbS cannot 'deliver' what
Trump and Kushner needed, and demanded from him: He cannot any more deliver the Gulf 'world'
for their grand projects – let alone garner together the collective Sunni 'world' to
enlist in a confrontation with Iran, or for hustling the Palestinians into abject
subordination, posing as 'solution'.
What happened? It seems that MbZ must have bought into the Mossad 'line' that Iran was a
'doddle'. Under pressure of global sanctions, Iran would quickly crumble, and would beg for
negotiations with Trump. And that the resultant, punishing treaty would see the dismantling of
all of Iran's troublesome allies around the region. The Gulf thus would be free to continue
shaping a Middle East free from democracy, reformers and (those detested) Islamists.
What made the UAE – eulogised in the US as tough 'little Sparta' – back off? It
was not just that the Emirs saw that the Yemen war was unwinnable. That was so; but more
significantly, it dawned on them that Iran was going to be no 'doddle'. But rather, the US
attempt to strangulate the Iranian economy risked escalating beyond sanctions war, into
military confrontation. And in that eventuality, the UAE would be devastated. Iran warned
explicitly that a drone or two landed into the 'glass houses' of their financial districts, or
onto oil and gas facilities, would set them back twenty years. They believed it.
But there was another factor in the mix. "As the world teeters on the edge of another
financial crisis", Esfandyar Batmanghelidj has
noted , "few places are being gripped by anxiety like Dubai. Every week a new headline
portends the coming crisis in the city of skyscrapers. Dubai villa prices are at their lowest
level in a decade, down 24 percent in just one year. A slump in tourism has seen Dubai hotels
hit their lowest occupancy rate since the 2008 financial crisis – even as the country
gears up to host Expo 2020 next year. As Bloomberg's Zainab Fattah reported in November of last
year, Dubai has begun to "lose its shine," its role as a center for global commerce "undermined
by a global tariff war -- and in particular by the US drive to shut down commerce with nearby
Iran"".
An extraneous Houthi drone landing in Dubai's financial zone would be the 'final nail in the
coffin' (the expatriates would be out in a flash) – a prospect far more serious than the
crisis of 2009, when Dubai's real estate market collapsed, threatening insolvency for several
banks and major development companies, some of them state-linked – and necessitating a
$20 billion bailout.
In short, the Gulf realised MbS' confrontation project with Iran was far too risky,
especially with the global financial mood darkening so rapidly.
Emirati leaders faced off with MbZ, the confrontation ideologue – and the UAE came
out of Yemen formally (though leaving in situ its proxies), and initiated outreach to
Iran, to take it out of that war, too.
It is now no longer conceivable that MbS can deliver what Trump and
Netanyahu desired . Does this then mean that the US confrontation with Iran, and Jared
Kushner's Deal of the Century, are over? No. Trump has two key US constituencies: AIPAC
and the Christian Evangelical 'Zionists' to 'stroke' electorally in the lead up to the 2020
elections. More 'gifts' to Netanyahu in the lead into the latter's own election campaign are
very likely also, as a part of that massaging of domestic constituencies (and donors).
In terms of the US confrontation with Iran, it seems that Trump is turning-down the volume
on belligerence toward Iran, hoping that economic sanctions will work their 'magic' of bringing
the Islamic Republic to its knees. There is no sign of that however – and no sign of any
realistic US plan 'B'. (The Lindsay Graham initiative is not one).
Where does that leave MbS in terms of US and Israeli interests? Well, to be brutal, and
despite the family friendships 'expendable', perhaps? The scent of an eventual US
disengagement from the region is again hanging in the air.
The deeper meaning in the 'lost Yemen war', ultimately, is an end to Gulf hopes that
'magician' Trump would undo the earlier Gulf panic that the West would normalise with Iran
(through the JCPOA), thus leaving Iran as the paramount regional power. The advent of Trump,
with all his affinity towards Saudi Arabia, seemed to Gulf States to promise the opportunity
again to 'lock in' the US security umbrella over Gulf monarchies, protecting these states from
significant change, as well as leaving Iran 'shackled', and unable to assume regional
primacy.
A secondary meaning to Yemen is that Trump and Netanyahu's heavy investment in MbS and MbZ
has proved to be chimeric. These two, it turned out were 'naked' all along. And now the world
knows it. They can't deliver. They have been bested by a ragtag army of tough Houthi
tribesmen.
The region now observes that 'war' isn't happening (although only by the merest hair's
breadth): Trump is not – of his own volition – going to bomb Iran back to the
1980s. And Gulf States now see that if he did, it is they – the Gulf States – who
would pay the highest price. Paradoxically, it has fallen to the UAE, the prime agitator in
Washington against Iran, to lead the outreach toward Iran. It represents a salutary lesson in
realpolitik for certain Gulf States (and Israel). And now that it has been learned, it is hard
to see it being reversed quite so easily.
The strategic shift toward a different security architecture is already underway, with
Russia
and China proposing an international conference on security in the Persian Gulf: Russia and
Iran already have agreed joint naval exercises in in the Indian Ocean and Hormuz, and China is
mulling sending its warships there too, to protect its tankers and commercial shipping.
Plainly, there will be some competition here, but Iran has the upper hand still in Hormuz. It
is a powerful deterrent (though one best threatened, but not used).
Of course, nothing is assured in these changing times. The US President is fickle, and prone
to flip-flop. And there are yet powerful interests in the US who do want see Iran
comprehensively bombed. But others in DC – more significantly, on the (nationalist) Right
– are much more outspoken in challenging the Iran 'hawks'. Maybe the latter have missed
their moment? The fact is, Trump drew back (but not for the stated reasons) from military
action. America is now entering election season – and it is fixated on its navel. Foreign
policy is already a forgotten, non-issue in the fraught partisan atmospherics of today's
America.
Trump likely will still 'throw Israel a few bones', but will that change anything? Probably,
not much. That is cold comfort – but it might have been a lot worse for the Palestinians.
And Greater Israel? A distant, Promethean hope.
One just wonders (but I have read no-one raising this question) why Epstein stopped being useful, why was his "business" dismantled.
All further steps, "suicide" comprised, are standard operation.
The scandal is about the Mega Group [Bonfman and Wexner and the assorted group of other Israel-firsters with the ties to
Mossad], Maxwells [the old embezzler and his daughter the pimp, both tied to Mossad] and Mossad: "The Spy Story at the Heart
of the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal."
The end: blackmail the "elite" clients on behalf of a foreign intelligence service.
Thanks for posting this most interesting and edifying story about Israeli decade-long, standard practice, of using sex trafficking
to blackmail and control politicians.
Although Shulamit Cohen's story is highly embellished by official historiography, she herself started working as a prostitute.
The Syrian military she trapped was Adib Al Shishkali, who went on to become Syria's president.
The young girl she used to bait her "clients" was a 14-year Armenian youngster called Lucy Kobelian.
One of Mossad' main modes of operation is prostitution. Not surprising. The Jewish tribe is
exceptional in having as its heroines a set of prostituting women -- Esther, Judith, Dalila.
No wonder that the orthodox Jews treat women like filth. All within the national tradition.
In 1967, Shulamit Cohen, Rachel Raffoul and two of the Jewish prostitutes were released
in a secret prisoner exchange after the Six Day War: they were exchanged against three
officers of the Syrian air force (the official version states that they were exchanged for
"over 500 prisoners").
Today Shula is a national hero of Israel and her story has been whitewashed and made
"apt for public consumption". She lives in the neighborhood of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish
fundamentalists, the Haredim, who are probably ignorant of her past.
And if a man and a woman are drowning in a river, first they'll save the man, "who is
obligated to perform more commandments," whereas a woman's "wisdom is only in the spindle."
In fact, "words of Torah should be burned rather than being given to women."
A man must say three blessings every day during morning prayers: He thanks God "that He
didn't make me a gentile, that He didn't make me a woman, that He didn't make me an
ignoramus."
"The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs."
Where are death camps for the Jews? Where are racial laws that expel non-Ukrainians? Where
is the propaganda of eugenics and healthy lifestyle? Where are construction projects bringing
in jobs, and state-subsidized recreation tours?
Ukraine is a Jew-driven shithole that has nothing to do with National Socialism. They
don't even honour the sacrifice of the SS Galizien.
"but what they are genuinely fantasizing about is the territory, and only the territory.
As for the 2 million-plus virulently anti-Nazi people currently living on these lands, they
simply want them either dead or expelled)."
A lie. Currently, more than a half of those "expelled" have migrated inside Ukraine. A
stark contrast to Croatia where the Serbs were driven out of the country, and their land
given to Croats.
Again, Ukraine is suicidal and full of civic nationalism, nothing about it is
blood-based.
"They and their Polish supporters want Russia to break apart in numerous small state-lets
which they (or, in their delusional dreams, the Chinese) could dominate."
Why do you consider this as a negative for the Russian people? The current Russian state
is in its death throes as much as the US and France – the ethnic Russians are dying
out, fleeing and being replaced. Any alternative might prove out more hopeful.
"In contrast, the LDNR forces seem to be doing pretty well, and their morale appears to be
as strong as ever (which is unsurprising since their military ethos is based in 1000 years of
Russian military history)."
I have to remind you that the Donbass was colonized far more recently than Ukraine –
in the 18-19th centuries. What "ancient" traditions?
"but Novorussia also is a never healing wound in the side of Nazi-occupied Ukraine"
The Donbass has never been part of Novorussia which is to the west, from Dniepropetrovsk
to Odessa. Admittedly, Novorussia's colonists were mostly from Ukraine – it is clearly
seen on the language maps.
"The problem with this slogan is that there is simply no way the (relatively small)
Galician population can ever succeed in permanently defeating their much bigger (and,
frankly, much smarter) Jewish, Polish or Russian neighbors."
Khmelnitsky managed to do just that – 100k dead Jews. And he's on the Ukrainian
currency. Too bad modern "Nazi" Ukrainians have elected a Jew President. This is not the
Khmelnitsky uprising, this is Kiev under the Khazar Khaganate before Oleg came from the
North.
It's very sad that Ukraine is just a pawn in dirty geopolitical games of the USA, the EU and Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... In 3-5 years we could have an interesting scenario in Ukraine with land (its main wealth) owned by foreign investors and a large % of population with Russian or Polish and other EU passports. As always with ideology, the result is the exact opposite of what that ideology claims: the dictatorship of proletariat impoverished and killed proletariat, Nazis dramatically shrunk German lebensraum, liberals obsession with ' liberty and universal brotherhood ' is leading to censorship, suppression and group hostilities. But here we are and the ideological idiocy that Maidan-Ukrainians embraced might not be reversible. This is not good for anybody. ..."
"... For Ukraine these are all irreversible losses, but from Western perspective, these are little victories: Russia was forced to spend more. As the West does not give a hoot about Ukraine, the US and its vassals can freely celebrate these victories. ..."
"... So, it all depends on the point of view. The West never cared about aborigines, so their point of view does not come into its calculations. ..."
"... Currently prevailing mood in Russia is that Ukraine, whoever is the power there, gets nothing, nada, zilch. ..."
"... But Ukrainian authorities worked pretty hard to achieve it, and now Ukraine has to live with this new reality. It won’t be pretty. The US was simply following its standard policy: leave a pile of shit, declare victory, and leave, waiting for someone else to clean up. ..."
"... Now there is only one way Russia would clean up: if the EU pays full price for it. As this is unlikely, the aborigines are going to bear the brunt of the consequences. ..."
miscalculation that the rotten West will help them instead of use them to create a
festering sore on Russian border for just a few billion dollars in loans.
A possibly a fatal miscalculation for Ukraine, but there is also an ideology involved. In
Maidan-Ukrainians case that ideology is Ukrainian nationalism combined with a servile Western
worship of almost cargo-cult level. An odd combination that has led to odd result.
West wanted Zelensky to win, the question is why. Tactically, Zelensky neutralized large
Russia-leaning block of voters: the 70% vote would have gone somewhere and they were not
going to vote for Poroshenko or Tymoshenko. So that misdirection was successful. But what was
the point?
Let's look at what Zelensky is actually doing (not the throw-away comedy and
rhetoric): he is trying to allow sale of Ukrainian land to foreign investors. My guess is
that he will push it through and that will his main legacy. Buying up Ukrainian arable land
has been a wet dream for many in the West since 1991. Zelensky could deliver on it, and then
move on.
In 3-5 years we could have an interesting scenario in Ukraine with land (its main wealth)
owned by foreign investors and a large % of population with Russian or Polish and other EU
passports. As always with ideology, the result is the exact opposite of what that ideology
claims: the dictatorship of proletariat impoverished and killed proletariat, Nazis
dramatically shrunk German lebensraum, liberals obsession with ' liberty and universal
brotherhood ' is leading to censorship, suppression and group hostilities. But here we
are and the ideological idiocy that Maidan-Ukrainians embraced might not be reversible. This
is not good for anybody.
Why does the Saker think that Ze had any choice? He is a puppet, a stuffed shirt brought to
”power” by Kolomoisky and allied oligarchs. The only goal was to chase Porky and
allied thieves from the trough to be able to steal more.
Now, the people of Ukraine had choice. But they blew it again, like many times before:
each Ukrainian “president” is worse than his predecessor. As the saying goes,
“fool me once, shame on you…” Ukrainians let themselves be fooled six
times already, so there is no doubt where the shame goes.
It was said that the nationalism is the last resort of a scoundrel. But it isn’t the
only one. Nationalism, stupid unrealistic dreams to feed sheeple, fairy tales about
aggression, and the war create perfect smokescreen for blatant thievery. It continues
unabated, ever since 1991.
Russia does need to make its choice. But it is complicated by the role of Russian thieves
(polite word is oligarchs) in current Russian state. Putin kicked some out. The remaining
ones have enough brains to figure that they need a strong state to protect them, lest their
loot be stolen by Western thieves. So, they are a step ahead of Ukrainian thieves who did not
tumble even to this simple realization. But no more than one step ahead.
The economic reality is that Russian state does not have the resources to restore Ukraine,
even if sane forces come to power there. So, Ukraine would likely keep festering, losing
millions of working age people (like today), possibly losing chunks of territory (as the joke
has it, whoever remains in Ukraine pays off the debt). The problems of that huge Somalia can
only be solved by concerted effort of many European countries and Russia. This is not on the
cards, at least not until Ukies create yet another Chernobyl. Then the EU might decide to
send its US overlords to Hell and pay Russia to take the hand grenade away from the monkey. I
don’t think Putin will live long enough to see that happen.
…EU might decide to send its US overlords to Hell and pay Russia to take the hand
grenade away from the monkey.
How would EU go against its overlord? Even if EU would try, the existential nihilism in
Kiev will prevent compromise. Ideologues can’t admit that their ‘idea’
didn’t work, they prefer destroying everything around. West is also at this point
incapable of admitting an error – they literally can’t do it, the lying has to go
on. That means that even groundwork for any possible compromise can’t be put in place.
This is all the way down with fireworks and it won’t be pretty.
There is such a thing as a catastrophic error and the last 5 years in Ukraine comes pretty
close to it. That is not really fixable. The monkey night as well use the grenade.
Minsk agreement was an incredibly generous deal, if Poroshenko had half a brain he would
had jumped on it and today Donbas would be a remote backwater with autonomy.
That would be true if Porky was interested in Ukraine. As it is, his only interest and
loyalty was and is his personal loot. To keep stealing, he (and allied thieves) needed the
smokescreen of war, fairy tales of “aggression”, and pipe dreams of “greater
Ukraine” for the sheeple. He succeeded in his thievery for five years. Now another gang
of thieves pushed his gang from the trough. End of story.
Are you a teenager unaware of the history of the Maidan regime-change
“revolution?” Here are two most influential Ukranian parties-participants in the
“revolution:” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svoboda_(political_party)
The Svoboda Party was founded in 1991 as the Social-National Party of Ukraine … It
is widely considered a fascist..party….
Time has described it [the Right Sector Party] as a “radical right-wing group
… a coalition of militant ultra-nationalists” with an ideology that
“borders on fascism”.
Die Welt, The New York Times, and Le Monde Diplomatique have described some of
Right Sector’s constituent groups as radical right-wing, neofascist, or
neo-Nazi…
You are a pessimist (or a fatalist). I agree that EU is shamefully subservient to the US,
but when some of their core interests are at stake, even slavish EU can show some teeth. Just
think of Nord Stream-2: the US is jumping out of its skin to damage this project, but Germany
stands remarkably firm.
From Western point of view, Ukie provocation was not a complete failure (even though
it’s a catastrophic failure from Ukrainian point of view): Russia had to spend a lot to
develop the production of military things it used to import from Ukraine, like ships, ship
engines, helicopter engines, spaceship control systems, etc.
Now that it acquired the
capability to produce these things, there will be no going back regardless who rules Ukraine:
it’s industries that used to export to Russia are doomed. These include such giants as Nikolaev shipbuilding plant, Motor Sich in Zaparozie, Antonov aircraft building plant in Kiev,
etc. The same goes for transit.
It is not just natural gas transit everybody talks about.
Russia used to transport ammonia to Odessa, where it was partially exported and partially
converted into fertilizers. The plant that used to do that is dead.
Ukraine tried to sell it
for $5 billion under Yanuk and got no takers, about a year ago it tried to sell it for 10% of
that price, and got no takers again.
There also used to be substantial Russian payments for
transport via the railway going across Eastern Ukraine.
Russia built an alternative bypassing
Ukraine, so they might as well dismantle the rails on their route.
For Ukraine these are all
irreversible losses, but from Western perspective, these are little victories: Russia was
forced to spend more. As the West does not give a hoot about Ukraine, the US and its vassals
can freely celebrate these victories.
So, it all depends on the point of view. The West never cared about aborigines, so their
point of view does not come into its calculations.
That’s true, when it comes to resources, there are always alternatives how to spend
them.
Currently prevailing mood in Russia is that Ukraine, whoever is the power there, gets
nothing, nada, zilch.
Considering how closely Ukrainians are related to Russians, this feat
wasn’t easy.
But Ukrainian authorities worked pretty hard to achieve it, and now Ukraine
has to live with this new reality. It won’t be pretty. The US was simply following its
standard policy: leave a pile of shit, declare victory, and leave, waiting for someone else to
clean up.
Now there is only one way Russia would clean up: if the EU pays full price for it. As
this is unlikely, the aborigines are going to bear the brunt of the consequences.
Saker is naive and badly educated. It is stupid to call Ukraine an oligarchy. All countries on Earth are oligarchies.
The real question is which group of oligarchs is in power. In case of Ukraine those are privatization sharks, the worst kind
of neoliberal financial scum. Often real criminals.
Otto von Bismarck created a powerful German state which exists to this day. While vassal of the USA it is still a state
now. And Merkel role in EuroMaidan definitely reminds Drang
nach Osten in neoliberal packaging. Neocolonialism in its pure form
Ukraine is just a pawn in a bigger geopolitical game of the USA and EU against Russia. That explains in the current state of
Ukrainian economics and the level of Ukrainian population sufferings. Ukrainian
nationalist paradoxically served as the fifth column for the neoliberal oligarchy. The phenomenon similar to the US
nationalists role under Trump.
At the same time despite dismally low standard of living Ukrainian population is showing great resilience in the current
hardships and infrastructure while completely worn out still works. But Ukraine is now completely Latin-Americanized, which was
the goal of the USA from the very beginning for all Soviet space. Ukraine now is a debt slave of the West which
is completely opposite to any nationalist movement goals.
According to
Wikipedia just
5% of population lives of less than $5.50 a day. That's baloney. In reality the percentage is probably two-three times times
higher (average monthly pension is typically less then $1500 grivna which is less then $60) so most of pensioners live on
less then $2 a day. 8 million of the approximately 12 million of Ukrainian pensioners were receiving the minimum pension of
1312 (around $50) while medium pension amounted to 1886 UAH (Pensions
in Ukraine - Wikipedia) And 12 million is 28% of Ukrainian population (around 42-43 million total down from 45.55 before
EuroMaydan ). It is declining around 200 persons daily. On average there are 462,052 births and 662,571 deaths in Ukraine
per year.
While pensioners are definitely starving the situation at least stabilized with grivna around 25 per dollar (something like
300% after the EuroMaydan). So Nuland advantures cost dearly for average Ukrainian.
Notable quotes:
"... These guys are a minority, a pretty small one even, but they have enough muscle and even firepower to threaten any nominal Ukrainian leader. ..."
As I have indicated in a recent article , the Ukraine is not a
democracy but an oligarchy : ever since 1991 the most prosperous Soviet republic
was mercilessly plundered by an entire class (in the Marxist sense of the word) of oligarchs
whose biggest fear has always been that the same "horror" (from their point of view) which
befell Russia with Putin, would eventually arrive at the Ukraine.
Here we need to make something clear: this is NOT, repeat, NOT about nationality or
nationalism. The Ukrainian oligarchs are just like any other oligarchs: their loyalty is to
their money and nothing else. If you want to characterize these oligarchs, you could think of
them as culturally "post-Soviet" meaning that they don't care about nationality, and even
though their prime language is Russian, they don't give a damn about Russia or Russians (or
anybody else, for that matter!). Since many of them are Jews, they have a network of
supporters/accomplices in Israel of course, but also in the West and even in Russia. In truth,
these guys are the ultimate "internationalists" in their own, toxic, kind of way.
Some fine specimens of "ochlocrats"
The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs. Their power is not a democracy either, but an ochlocracy .
These guys are a minority, a pretty small one even, but they have enough muscle and even
firepower to threaten any nominal Ukrainian leader.
Can you stop with the Ukronazi crap, what kind of Nazi Government has a Jewish PM and Jewish
President ?
Azov guys dying in Donbass and the street thugs in Kiev are just cannon fodder, they don't
run shit
The majority of Ukranians don't want to be in this conflict, I don't see the point in
demonizing all of them because of some fascist larpers
People need to move on from the past and stop all that hating others for some past deeds.
Polish or Western Ukrainian hatred for Russians, Russian hatred for Germans, Chinese &
Korean hatred for the Japanese, Indian hatred for the British or the Chinese, Black South
African hatred for Afrikaners. All these are counter productive for the people and are
emotions which can be whipped up by the elites to have commoners die like cannon fodder at
worst or to take away attention towards a past historic enemy to hide their own corruption/
incompetence at best.
People need to see things from the other side as well.
As far as the Satanic Zio elite pigs, they will use any ideology as long as it serves
them. Democracy, Communism, anti-Communism, Islamic fundamentalism, anti-Islam, Jingoistic
Nationalism, Anti-Nationalism/One Worldism, feminism, Hindutva, Buddhist fundamentalism (Sri
Lanka BBS and the secret Zionist hand), Neo-Conservatism, Leftism, Colonialism,
anti-Colonialism as long it suits them. They use them and discard them away when needed. But
this seems to be the most extreme case ever. For the first time the Zio elites are using
National Socialism as an ideology to serve them. The ideology which was probably the greatest
enemy and threat to the Zio elites, in human history. Freakin crazy!!!
More grist for Saker's suckers. The Galicians (and Ukro-Nazi Jews) are behind
everything. In Saker's simplistic mind the Galicians have infiltrated all of Ukrainian
society and run the whole show, when in fact this is just a bunch of nonsense. Well, at least
Saker is putting to use his favorite Ukrainian pejorative do I really need to repeat it
again, ad nauseum?
"The other significant force in the Ukraine is the West Ukrainian (Galician) Nazi
death-squads and mobs."
Where are death camps for the Jews? Where are racial laws that expel non-Ukrainians? Where
is the propaganda of eugenics and healthy lifestyle? Where are construction projects bringing
in jobs, and state-subsidized recreation tours?
Ukraine is a Jew-driven shithole that has nothing to do with National Socialism. They
don't even honour the sacrifice of the SS Galizien.
"but what they are genuinely fantasizing about is the territory, and only the territory.
As for the 2 million-plus virulently anti-Nazi people currently living on these lands, they
simply want them either dead or expelled)."
A lie. Currently, more than a half of those "expelled" have migrated inside Ukraine. A
stark contrast to Croatia where the Serbs were driven out of the country, and their land
given to Croats.
Again, Ukraine is suicidal and full of civic nationalism, nothing about it is
blood-based.
"They and their Polish supporters want Russia to break apart in numerous small state-lets
which they (or, in their delusional dreams, the Chinese) could dominate."
Why do you consider this as a negative for the Russian people? The current Russian state
is in its death throes as much as the US and France – the ethnic Russians are dying
out, fleeing and being replaced. Any alternative might prove out more hopeful.
"In contrast, the LDNR forces seem to be doing pretty well, and their morale appears to be
as strong as ever (which is unsurprising since their military ethos is based in 1000 years of
Russian military history)."
I have to remind you that the Donbass was colonized far more recently than Ukraine –
in the 18-19th centuries. What "ancient" traditions?
"but Novorussia also is a never healing wound in the side of Nazi-occupied Ukraine"
The Donbass has never been part of Novorussia which is to the west, from Dniepropetrovsk
to Odessa. Admittedly, Novorussia's colonists were mostly from Ukraine – it is clearly
seen on the language maps.
"The problem with this slogan is that there is simply no way the (relatively small)
Galician population can ever succeed in permanently defeating their much bigger (and,
frankly, much smarter) Jewish, Polish or Russian neighbors."
Khmelnitsky managed to do just that – 100k dead Jews. And he's on the Ukrainian
currency. Too bad modern "Nazi" Ukrainians have elected a Jew President. This is not the
Khmelnitsky uprising, this is Kiev under the Khazar Khaganate before Oleg came from the
North.
It's a of nonsense as usual. This piece is quickly refuted:
ever since 1991 the most prosperous Soviet republic
People who spread this myth are ignorant or liars. It's a common one, though.
In 1990 Ukraine's per capita GDP was $1570.
Russia's was $3485.
Belarus was $2124.
So in Soviet times, Ukraine was the poorest of the three Slavic Soviet Republics. It still
is, the position hasn't changed. It's just fallen further behind.
::::::::
Everything else is just as nonsensical, I won't even bother to detail it, most of the
commenters here are as dumb/ignorant/dishonest (take your pick) as the author pretends to
be.
I don't know where Saker sources his history. Lenin had nothing to do with the creation of
Ukraine.
I live in Western Canada, where Ukrainians come starting in the late 19th century. I'm not
referring to the primarily German speaking Mennonites that left South Central Ukraine, in the
1870s, fleeing religious persecution. By WWI, more than 200,000 were in Western Canada from
all parts of Ukraine. They considered themselves Ukrainians, not Russians, or Galicians. They
were, and to a great extent, still are Ukrainian nationalists. There continues to be friction
with Polish and German local populations, although prior to the "rebirth" of Ukraine, it had
largely subsided. Recent Russian immigrants are shunned as much as the "Poles" and "Germans".
Politically, they are generally left of center, and have been since their arrival, although
in recent decades more have become "conservative" (whatever that means these days). A long
ago former Russian Jewish co-worker who was a late 60s "escapee" from the USSR, told me that
he would never vote for one of our political parties, because there were "too many
Ukrainians" in the party. I asked a "Ukrainian" friend, who I had known since grade school,
what that meant. His explanation was that there had always been tensions between Jews and
Ukrainians, for centuries, because of what Ukrainians believed was exploitation by the Jews.
Other "Ukrainians" and "Jews" have confirmed this.
The reality is, that most people in most countries just want to live their lives in peace,
with a job good enough to provide a decent home and food for the family. That 70% of
Ukrainians want that is not surprising, it's normal. That doesn't mean they aren't
nationalists, and it doesn't mean they are Nazis. However screwed up they are in trying to do
so, Ukrainians are struggling to retain their identity and culture. IMO, they are up against
internationalist forces from all sides, and none are interested in letting that happen.
@Curmudgeon
The Nazi name-calling is over the top, and not just with regard to Ukraine or Galicia.
Historical grievances or revisions are not 'Nazism'. Too many people look at Ukraine and
over-interpret the nostalgia for Bandera or simple national self-assertion.
But I think Saker is right about where this is going. Russian side has local dominance and
that will not change. The only game in town for the last 5 years has been to see if the
Western squeeze of Russia will work faster than the Russian squeeze of Ukraine. By now it is
obvious that it won't.
Kiev has made some fatal mistakes. E.g. Minsk agreement was an incredibly generous deal,
if Poroshenko had half a brain he would had jumped on it and today Donbas would be a remote
backwater with autonomy . So? The state would be intact, taxes would be paid,
passports centrally issued, etc The eastern European dynamic is that any population always
ends up disliking its immediate rulers – how long before local leaders in Donbas would
be challenged by some younger corruption fighters.
The whole Maidan thing was also terribly mismanaged – at its core it was about
getting the best potential deal for Ukraine with EU (and Russia). In the middle of the
negotiation suddenly Maidanistas decided that symbols are more important than reality and
basically folded in front of EU. Consequently Russia walked. Thus Kiev got justa bout the
worst possible combination on non-EU and deep hostility with Russia. Smarter guys would had
handled it much better, playing both sides against each other – raising the stakes.
And let's not even get started on Crimea, while Ukies ate stale cookies, they lost
overnight their most valuable possession – they couldn't anticipate it? Being able to
anticipate is a key to intelligence and in playing any game.
So we can talk about what or who is driving modern Ukraine, oligarchs, Galicians, Jews,
Kiev thugs, Canadians – it doesn't matter, what matters is that they are incompetent.
From Yushenko to Zelensky they are amateurs driven by emotion and greed. There is no
state-forming force, there is no true Ukrainian nationalism that would play up Ukraine's
strengths and manage its weaknesses. Saker is basically right – they are in a no-win
cul-de-sac, at this point any move will make their situation worse. Their best (only?) hope
is a collapse of Russia. Now, how likely is that?
@Felix
Keverich Autism of this degree does not pop out of nowhere
You had Cossacks and Mercenaries from the Ukraine joining up with the Poles, Swedes,
Napoleon, Germans and others. Calling diaspora nationalists stupid is all fine and dandy but
the constant bickering between people in current Ukraine and in Russia stinks of divide and
conquer (which is what Ukraine vs Russia conflicts always were)
Calling them stupid and calling their ethnicity fake(which they make an actual effort to
preserve, such as it is) stinks of hypocrisy when so many Great Russians were willing to tear
their country, religion and people apart in 1917 and join up with the Bolsheviks in the rape
and pillaging
You'd probably get far more progress calling them a branch of Russian civilization, you
can cite Belarus and Siberian Ukraine as examples
It's easy to dogpile on some poor Hohol since they will always be on the defensive, but it's
much harder to understand him and admit your own faults while not backing down from your
standpoint that you are both one people
Serbs often made the same mistakes with Montenegro, and the result is the modern day
shitfest where both it and Ukraine are run by hostile US puppets
The Saker is correct that reality and pragmatism are essential 'when trying to figure out
what is going on and what might happen next.' It is a hard calculation to make in a world
increasingly chaotic and dark. The Minsk Accord is probably the only glimmer of light for
Ukraine, but then all the lights – across the world – are going out. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
However screwed up they are in trying to do so, Ukrainians are struggling to retain
their identity and culture. IMO, they are up against internationalist forces from all
sides, and none are interested in letting that happen.
What you posted is called a generic "to be against everything bad, for everything good".
Living in a world of unicorns and having rainbows as result of bowel movement is, of course,
a worthy aspiration but reality with Ukraine is a teeny-weeny bit more complicated than mere
attempts to "retain their identity and culture". I'll give you a hint, vast swaths of
Ukrainian population (including in the East Ukraine) believe, as an example, that Ukrainian
civilization precedes a Sumerian one. Many, very many, also still believe that valiant
Ukrainian Armed Forces still fight, for the 5th year in a row, mighty Russian Army in the
East. We are talking here about down right mental breakdown on a national level, granted, as
I always say, modern Ukraine did happen, that is coalesced, as a political nation.
In the thirteenth century, both the Ukrainians and the Russians faced more dire threats
than each other.
In the 13th century there were no Ukrainians or Ukraine. There was Russia though, Rus'.
Imagine a US state becoming independent today, from the rest of the US.. like Ohio.. and
people are going to say "the first man on the moon was an Ohioan (Armstrong), not an
American. Sorry, doesn't work like that..
You have to admit that's an impressive combination.
Yes, but it wasn't the Saker who invented it; it does seem to reflect what's going on
there. My only criticism is that he has given more prominence to the Nazis than the Jews,
unless we consider "oligarchs" as a synonym for Jews.
Like you have said in the past he is taking the Russian side. I think it's a fairly good
analysis of the situation if you go beyond his propagandistic terminology and what he leaves
unsaid. Russia really doesn't want to engage directly in the conflict but its best policy
would be to bide its time and to encourage more pro-Russian separatism in Odessa and all
other regions along the coast so as to eventually cut off Ukraine from access to the sea
altogether. That would serve Russian interests best and strengthen its position against NATO,
the EU, and the rump Ukraine, for whatever is to follow. It's a shame for any real Ukranian
nationalists but then they should have been smarter than to join all those colour revolutions
on Maidan organised by the CIA, Soros, Jewish oligarchs, etc.
That's a frozen conflict for now. Let's have another article on UR about the latest from
the US sponsored colour revolution in Hong Kong and what are the best measures that PR China
can take to quell the riots. And it's about time they took back Formosa, but it won't be as
easy as the Russian takeover of Crimea, unless they can send a million Red Army guards there
disguised as tourists to stage a silent putsch.
@Bardon
Kaldian Neonazis is a good term for the people used in the Ukrainian ZUS coup. That is
the people that was used to gain control of Ukraine for ZUS.
This coup in Ukraine, woke me up.
V. Nuland's war cry to bless the coup was "F–k The EU"
She used Neonazis to take over Ukraine.
Wait. She is Jewish. I guess the 6 million story must be bogus. She admitted it, since if
the 6 million story was real. She would have a great fear of a tidal wave of anti-S'ism
overcoming her and her people. She had no fear. Thus, the 6 million story was proved to be
false by V. Nuland. Thanks V. Nuland for freeing the world of that nightmarish propaganda
that has saddled humanity for seventy odd years.
Secondly, she told the world the reality of J. Supremacism by stating " F..k the EU". The
world thought that ZUS loved the EU as its sister in world domination. I guess not. Would V.
Nuland ever say "F..k Israel"? I think not.
Thanks V. Nuland. A new Queen Esther or Queen Victoria.
Yep, agree with Saker – I lived there before , during and now after the Maidan and he's
spot on with most of everything – he has been, since the beginning. Zelinsky has a
dozen or more bosses and he has Zero experience in what he's doing. . Zionist Bankers and
their arms dealers, Nato, Banderas gang,Washington, US Navy, Monsanto/Bayer, Royal Dutch
{shell oil }, Dupont, Lilly Pharma, Cargill, and the list could go on. He'll be lucky if he
isn't in Diapers by the time his term is up, otherwise he will be rich. I see that
Poroshanster is being called out for taking 8 billion bucks out of Ukie-Ville. I wonder how
much Trump and his family will end up stealing?. Thanks Unz Review.
Thus Kiev got justa bout the worst possible combination on non-EU and deep hostility
with Russia. Smarter guys would had handled it much better, playing both sides against each
other – raising the stakes.
As usual, you nailed it Beckow.
Also, Saker often misunderstands things but he is right that Ukraine is in a one way street
mainly because of the out-of-this-World miscalculation that the rotten West will somehow help
them instead of use them to create a festering sore on Russian border for just a few billion
dollars in loans. It is the rest of Ukraine, excluding Donbas, that will have to pay off
these war loans already stolen by the oligarchs.
@Commentator
Mike I recall that at the time of the Zionist coup (We do remember Ms Noodleman's : "fuck
the EU" don't we?) Ukrainian Nazi's were a leading force in kicking things off.
@Mr.
Hack "In Saker's simplistic mind the Galicians have infiltrated all of Ukrainian society
and run the whole show, "
This was not what I read.
The Saker said that oligarchs and Nazi militia groups have enough power to impose their will
and their agenda on the rest of the population.
When I see words like "Nazis" in relation to Ukrainians, I know that article is sh!t
& not worth reading.
This is because you don't know what Raguli(stan) is and you cannot possibly know, because
there are no "books" written yet which would encapsulate this whole phenomenon. Of course,
Ukies have no relation to Fichte and Volkskrieg. Other than that you will find an attentive
audience among local ignoramuses.
We all know the Hypocrisy of that War. Clinton had to distract the masses from MonicaGate
and Hillary had to prove to the MIC that she could be beneficial to them.
Result : Those Kosovo Albanians had a state handed to them, and instead of building
it(with uncle Sam's and EU help) as prosperous country, they used their weapons and
"expertise" in becoming the low level gangsters of Europe. Every Europol analysis points to
the direction of Kosovo Albanians as the criminal thugs in prostitution and drug trade and
protection rackets. The largest percentage of a single ethnic group in European jails is that
of Albanians.
The most unjust and illegal of wars in the late 20c.
There was only one reason to bomb white Christian brothers in Serbia thereby aiding the
Muslim of Kosovo and Albania, and that was Russia, which by that stage had got its act
together and dealt with the traitorous oligarchs who had sold their country out to the
west.
Hillary and her cronies no doubt lost a lot of money when the Russians shut their rat
lines down.
I hope I live long enough to see those fuckers swing, and Tony Blair, Alistair Campnell
and Peter Mandelson as well.
Again, your Muslims are to blame for everything. Muslims are all different. And it is
necessary to separate the faithful Muslims from the bandits who are only covered by Muslim
slogans.
NATO and your godless government are to blame!
An Afghan Freedom Fighter in Donbass - ENG SUBTITLE
It happened at the time of the Lewinsky affair and the possible impeachment of Clinton.
They needed a distraction.
Milosevic btw. agreed to all conditions imposed on the FR of Yugoslavia except for one
condition that nobody would accept: the full and unhindered access to the territory of FRY by
NATO troops. That effectively meant an occupation. Nobody would agree to that. NATO and
Albright deliberately came up with that condition for they knew it was unacceptable. Even
Kissinger said that condition was over the top. NATO and Albright wanted that war. Serbia
btw. saved Albright twice when she was still a little Slovakian Jewish girl whose family
found refuge twice in Serbia. Once they escaped the Nazis that way and the second time the
communists.
NATO thought they would need 48 hours but they needed 78 days and Milosevic only gave in
after NATO switched from hitting military targets to civilian targets: Hospitals, commuter
trains, civilian industry, an open market, random houses in random villages. After Milosevic
pulled out his troops out of Kosovo, the KLA started killing Serbs and moderate Albanians,
not to mention engage in organ trafficking (...). As the article said, well over 200k Serbs,
moderate Albanians, Roma and other minorities were ethnically cleansed from Kosovo.
The US also used cluster bombs and DU weapons. Of the 4000 Italian KFOR troops that went
into Kosovo after the bombing, 700 are dead from cancer and leukemia with several hundreds
more seriously ill. The American KFOR troops wore hazmat suits. The Italians did not have
them and were not warned. Today, many people in southern Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo itself
are sick and dying.
yes just like USA tried to help Vietnam against communists... by killing 2 million
Vietnamese. and tried to help Korea by killing 20 % of the population. and by helping Iraq
get rid of "bad" Saddam Hussein by killing 2 million Iraqies.
Not disagreeing with you but lets remember that communists were killing a lot of people in
other areas not long before those wars in SE Asia. May have been a wash in the end.
Bring back the draft. On the whole Americans have no idea what the carnage of combat
produces. Combat vets do. And the ones that aren't natural psychopaths never want to
experience it again. This volunteer army we have is over loaded with a them. A military draft
will actually bring some sort civilian control.
Such ********. Do the millions we kill have any human rights? It's been going on for 4000
years. Ruthless pursuit of empire and fabricating phony justifications.
Hillary seems to enjoy killing people. If it wasn't Gaddaffi, it was all the people on her
body bag count, and now it's known she encouraged killing people in Serbia. Someone needs to
take that old cow out into the center of the town and burn her at the stake.
Partially true, otherwise as usually excellent Dr. Paul, ... The Pandora's box situation
was opened years before Clinton's bombing of Serbia, which was part of a larger scheme
started nearly a decade before.
That was when the US armed the religious extremists in Bosnia, in order to bring war,
"civil war" and chaos, and disintegration, the way they more recently tried to do with Syria,
or "succeeded" in doing in Libya, bringing chaos and open-air slave markets in a country that
was one of the most developed on the African continent under Gaddafi (a truth that was so
easily erased by propaganda).
And the whole neocon scheme started two decades before, with the Zbigniew Brzezinski
doctrine, when the US started arming the mujahedin in Afghanistan, provoking the trap for the
Soviet invasion of 1979, which was the real opening of US neocon's Pandora's box we are
regrettably so familiar with by now. We've all fallen in that old
neocon/military-industrial-congressional-complex trap by now. And there seems to be no end in
sight to those eternal wars "for civilization" (the old colonial trope dressed under new
fatigues). Unless serious societal and political changes take place in the US to put an end
to the US "imperial" death drive.
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
Former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko trace to Steele dossier is a real shocker.
Notable quotes:
"... On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled " WhosWho19Sept2016 ." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. ..."
"... If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI. ..."
"... What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr. ..."
"... FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble. ..."
"... It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day, Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from... ..."
"... So..the Timeline Indicates Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination.. ..."
"... I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos and Archey Declarations? ..."
"... So what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it? ..."
"... Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for his impeachment. ..."
"... They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose. ..."
"... Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'??? ..."
"... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort. ..."
"... So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign influence in a U.S. election! ..."
"... The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest and law enforcement, became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good. ..."
There are many moving pieces in the drama surrounding the Deep State attempt to kill the Trump Presidency. God Bless Judicial
Watch. I think most of the key evidence that has surfaced came courtesy of Tom Fitton, Chris Farrell and their team of tireless workers.
I want to bring you back to
Mr. Felix Sater . He was part of Bayrock, which worked closely with Donald Trump's organization and, most importantly of all,
was an FBI Confidential Human Source since December of 1998.
Thanks to Judicial Watch we have a new dump of Bruce Ohr emails, which include several from his wife, Nellie. There are 330 pages
to wade thru (you can
see
them here ). There
is one item in particular I encourage you to look at:
On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled "
WhosWho19Sept2016
." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures,
many of whom were Russians. This list of individuals allegedly "linked to Trump" include: a Russian involved in a "gangland
killing;" an Uzbek mafia don; a former KGB officer suspected in the murder of Paul Tatum; a Russian who reportedly "buys up banks
and pumps them dry"; a Russian money launderer for Sergei Magnitsky; a Turk accused of shipping oil for ISIS; a couple who lent their
name to the Trump Institute, promoting its "get-rich-quick schemes"; a man who poured him a drink; and others.
The spreadsheet starts on page 301. If you search the document for the name Felix Sater, he will pop up. Now here is the curious
and, I suppose, reassuring thing about this document--Nellie Ohr did not have a clue that Felix Sater was an active FBI informant.
We can at least give the FBI credit for protecting Sater's identity from Nellie Ohr and, more importantly, her husband, DOJ official
Bruce Ohr.
If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don
Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being
used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI.
One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or one of the
other "suspects" she exhaustively listed.
Shifting gears, there are two very important pieces recently posted at The Conservative Tree House that I encourage you to read:
What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the
investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr.
You can find this information in the
Bruce
Ohr 302s that Judicial Watch also secured. Marina Butina was unfairly and unjustly portrayed and prosecuted as a Russian intelligence
agent. It was a damn lie.
I do not ever want to hear another American complaining about an American State Department or CIA employee who is entrapped and
unfairly prosecuted in Russia.
We have done the same damn thing that we have accused the Soviets of doing. The same thing. It is shameful.
The
second piece is the ultimate feel good piece. Kudos to its author, Sundance.
He details how a Federal Judge, infuriated by the FBIs stupidity and mendacity, tells the Bureau to go pound sand. The FBI is
frantically trying to prevent the Archey Declarations from being revealed thanks to a lawsuit brought by CNN (finally, CNN did something
right).
The Archey Declarations provide a detailed description of the memos written and illegally removed from FBI Headquarters by that
sanctimonious twit, Jim Comey. More shoes will be dropping in the coming days.
It appears that Inspector General Horowitz is going to present at least one report on Jim Comey and one report on the FISA abuse
by the FBI.
FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal
into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble.
Finally, Gateway Pundit's Joe Hoft put up an important piece today (
see here ). Here is the bottomline, and keep this in mind as you read the piece, on June 20, 2016 the FBI signed off on a deal
with Hillary Clinton's attorney's that gave Hillary's team the right to destroy computers and emails.
It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day,
Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
The fix was in more than a month before Jim Comey appeared on camera to try to explain why he was not recommending prosecution
of Hillary for putting Top Secret information on her unclassified server.
Jim Comey lied when he declared that could not prove "intent."
I am sure that those of you who have never held a clearance and handled Top Secret material probably believed that lie.
But anyone who knows how the TS system is set up knows that the ONLY WAY, I repeat, the ONLY WAY to put TS material on an unclassified
server is to do so intentionally. There is no way to do this mistakenly.
Jim Ticehurst said in reply to Jim Ticehurst... ,
Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from...
So..the Timeline Indicates
Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates
for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination..
creating Phase 2..Operations..
"The Washington Free Beacon ".Has an Editor in Chief ..who is William Kristols Son In Law..And William Kristols ..Father....Irving
Kristol..is Called..."the God Father of Neo Conservatism". William Kristol..was a John McCain supporter..
Thus Fusion GPS..retained Nellie Ohr..(strangly..NO Wiki Profile) who apparently had to Use her husbnd Bruce Ohrs Clearances,,to
continue Her Collaberation with Fusion GPS..
By June 2016 the Strategy was to bring in Christopher Steele..who was know to Bruce Ohr back to 2006.. Strange.. NO early life
BIOS for Bruce or Nellie Ohr..
I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos
and Archey Declarations?
The Gateway Pundit item about the ridiculously unfair and unethical deals made in Hillary Clinton's email scandal investigation
is just further proof of how the Clinton taint infected the FBI. "Crooked" is a very apt epithet, that's for sure. I'd love to
know how much Bill and Hill raked in during her Sec'y. of State racketeering.
You say: "One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or
one of the other "suspects" she exhaustively listed."
This is true, but it is also true that Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make
false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for
his impeachment.
They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose.
Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'???
... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian
presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort.
Why is that significant? Tymoshenko and Hillary Clinton had a simpatico relationship after the former secretary of State
went out of her way in January 2013 to advocate for Tymoshenko's release from prison on corruption charges.
So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher
but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign
influence in a U.S. election!
...
The tales of Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, Yulia Tymoshenko, and those DEA and TSA agents raise a stark warning:
The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest
and law enforcement,
became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good.
The person responsible for securing the release of Yulia Tymoshenko was Chancellor Merkel. Further, that USA opposed Tymoshenko.
quote
As for one of the leaders of the war party in Kiev, Merkel has privately and publicly endorsed every claim of Yulia Tymoshenko,
promoting her release from prison and protecting her campaigns for war against Russia, even though – according to the high-level
German source – “they [Chancellery, Foreign Ministry] have known for years that [Tymoshenko] was a crook.”
endquote
There is a lot more detail Tymoshenko's corruption and Merkel's rescue here:
STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war,
the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he
began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow
of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened
within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo,
betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have
been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union
that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two
inches to the east.
Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they
become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily,
we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia
somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous,
warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military
alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership
is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.
AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement
with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about
Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's
net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary
titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder
appears to have first
started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in
his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own
estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.
Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains
to the Clinton campaign. Putin
retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had
been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount
of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.
The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe
Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.
Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems
to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be
dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other
interests, values, and goals.
Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice
of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment.
From the Russia Insider link:
Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from
Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these
funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000,
not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.
There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate
their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.
In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media
(again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies
never happens again.
It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse
now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.
Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct
of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly
desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent
the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.
we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe
Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need
to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather
than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like
Greenwald's definition of the term :
"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek
to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.
aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites
attempting to diss apostates and heretics.
The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level.
That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points
of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we
do.
Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up
arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly
threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such
an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?
You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?
You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's
by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has,
and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?
" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and
his oligarchs?"
The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that
deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance
was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.
Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's
debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting
the death of Russia.
So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.
I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute
power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation,
the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money.
Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two
hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.
I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only
of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or
getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but
who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.
There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The
world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals
which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but
that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.
Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits
and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting
soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the
Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from
the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.
The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's
what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin
is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore
he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.
The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal
and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the
rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.
But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.
Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes
Putin a dictator.
"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe
that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about
a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"
Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support
this basic assumption.
The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by
20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of
the rest of NATO or the US.
Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need
to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging
of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself,
he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?
"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't
as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."
What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?
Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship
of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian
Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient
of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National
Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant
for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian
(UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.
Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on
television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical
questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia
hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.
It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that
they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against
American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was
for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so
fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing
dragon's teeth – it never ends well.
The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace"
would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat"
except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.
Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact.
The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable
as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to
maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was
significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially
more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made
arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.
The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of
the native population. Your comparison is invalid.
"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato
bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director
of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor
of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion
of Nato was a fault and against international law!
Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example,
the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging
of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people,
spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer
Brennan;
o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican
patriots";
o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.
Former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko trace to Steele dossier is a real shocker.
Notable quotes:
"... On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled " WhosWho19Sept2016 ." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures, many of whom were Russians. ..."
"... If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI. ..."
"... What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr. ..."
"... FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble. ..."
"... It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day, Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton. ..."
"... Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from... ..."
"... So..the Timeline Indicates Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination.. ..."
"... I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos and Archey Declarations? ..."
"... So what did Barack Obama know, and when did he know it? ..."
"... Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for his impeachment. ..."
"... They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose. ..."
"... Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'??? ..."
"... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort. ..."
"... So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign influence in a U.S. election! ..."
"... The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest and law enforcement, became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good. ..."
There are many moving pieces in the drama surrounding the Deep State attempt to kill the Trump Presidency. God Bless Judicial
Watch. I think most of the key evidence that has surfaced came courtesy of Tom Fitton, Chris Farrell and their team of tireless workers.
I want to bring you back to
Mr. Felix Sater . He was part of Bayrock, which worked closely with Donald Trump's organization and, most importantly of all,
was an FBI Confidential Human Source since December of 1998.
Thanks to Judicial Watch we have a new dump of Bruce Ohr emails, which include several from his wife, Nellie. There are 330 pages
to wade thru (you can
see
them here ). There
is one item in particular I encourage you to look at:
On December 5, 2016, Bruce Ohr emailed himself an Excel spreadsheet, seemingly from his wife Nellie Ohr, titled "
WhosWho19Sept2016
." The spreadsheet purports to show relationship descriptions and "linkages" between Donald Trump, his family and criminal figures,
many of whom were Russians. This list of individuals allegedly "linked to Trump" include: a Russian involved in a "gangland
killing;" an Uzbek mafia don; a former KGB officer suspected in the murder of Paul Tatum; a Russian who reportedly "buys up banks
and pumps them dry"; a Russian money launderer for Sergei Magnitsky; a Turk accused of shipping oil for ISIS; a couple who lent their
name to the Trump Institute, promoting its "get-rich-quick schemes"; a man who poured him a drink; and others.
The spreadsheet starts on page 301. If you search the document for the name Felix Sater, he will pop up. Now here is the curious
and, I suppose, reassuring thing about this document--Nellie Ohr did not have a clue that Felix Sater was an active FBI informant.
We can at least give the FBI credit for protecting Sater's identity from Nellie Ohr and, more importantly, her husband, DOJ official
Bruce Ohr.
If you want to have more fun, search the pdf using the term "BAYROCK." You will discover that Nellie Ohr, like a female Don
Quixote, is searching desperately to link Trump and Sater to dirty Russian money. What she does not suspect is that Sater was being
used, via his company Bayrock, to try to gain access to Russians who were potential targets of the FBI.
One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or one of the
other "suspects" she exhaustively listed.
Shifting gears, there are two very important pieces recently posted at The Conservative Tree House that I encourage you to read:
What is not emphasized in the piece, and it is something I want to direct you to, is that the idea or impetus to launch the
investigation of Butina came courtesy of Christopher Steele, who was relaying rumor and conjecture to Bruce Ohr.
You can find this information in the
Bruce
Ohr 302s that Judicial Watch also secured. Marina Butina was unfairly and unjustly portrayed and prosecuted as a Russian intelligence
agent. It was a damn lie.
I do not ever want to hear another American complaining about an American State Department or CIA employee who is entrapped and
unfairly prosecuted in Russia.
We have done the same damn thing that we have accused the Soviets of doing. The same thing. It is shameful.
The
second piece is the ultimate feel good piece. Kudos to its author, Sundance.
He details how a Federal Judge, infuriated by the FBIs stupidity and mendacity, tells the Bureau to go pound sand. The FBI is
frantically trying to prevent the Archey Declarations from being revealed thanks to a lawsuit brought by CNN (finally, CNN did something
right).
The Archey Declarations provide a detailed description of the memos written and illegally removed from FBI Headquarters by that
sanctimonious twit, Jim Comey. More shoes will be dropping in the coming days.
It appears that Inspector General Horowitz is going to present at least one report on Jim Comey and one report on the FISA abuse
by the FBI.
FBI Director Christopher Wray reminds me of one of the workers in the bowels of the Titanic who was furiously shoveling coal
into the doomed boilers of the sinking ship. The FBI, like the Titanic, is in trouble.
Finally, Gateway Pundit's Joe Hoft put up an important piece today (
see here ). Here is the bottomline, and keep this in mind as you read the piece, on June 20, 2016 the FBI signed off on a deal
with Hillary Clinton's attorney's that gave Hillary's team the right to destroy computers and emails.
It also gave immunity to all of the people on Hillary's team that participated in obstruction of justice. On that same day,
Jim Comey signed off on a separate memo that decided not to prosecute Hillary Clinton.
The fix was in more than a month before Jim Comey appeared on camera to try to explain why he was not recommending prosecution
of Hillary for putting Top Secret information on her unclassified server.
Jim Comey lied when he declared that could not prove "intent."
I am sure that those of you who have never held a clearance and handled Top Secret material probably believed that lie.
But anyone who knows how the TS system is set up knows that the ONLY WAY, I repeat, the ONLY WAY to put TS material on an unclassified
server is to do so intentionally. There is no way to do this mistakenly.
Jim Ticehurst said in reply to Jim Ticehurst... ,
Larry..Fusion GPS has always refused to Reveal who where its Financial support came from...
So..the Timeline Indicates
Fusion GPS was hired by The "Washington Free Beacon" around October 2015 to background checks and Profiles of The Republican Candidates
for President.and that Fusion GPS continued to do so until May 2016..when it became clear that Donald Trump clinched the Nomination..
creating Phase 2..Operations..
"The Washington Free Beacon ".Has an Editor in Chief ..who is William Kristols Son In Law..And William Kristols ..Father....Irving
Kristol..is Called..."the God Father of Neo Conservatism". William Kristol..was a John McCain supporter..
Thus Fusion GPS..retained Nellie Ohr..(strangly..NO Wiki Profile) who apparently had to Use her husbnd Bruce Ohrs Clearances,,to
continue Her Collaberation with Fusion GPS..
By June 2016 the Strategy was to bring in Christopher Steele..who was know to Bruce Ohr back to 2006.. Strange.. NO early life
BIOS for Bruce or Nellie Ohr..
I wonder why AG Barr isn't forcing the FBI to comply sooner with Judge Boasberg's ruling to hand over unredacted Comey Memos
and Archey Declarations?
The Gateway Pundit item about the ridiculously unfair and unethical deals made in Hillary Clinton's email scandal investigation
is just further proof of how the Clinton taint infected the FBI. "Crooked" is a very apt epithet, that's for sure. I'd love to
know how much Bill and Hill raked in during her Sec'y. of State racketeering.
You say: "One point is clear--she uncovered no evidence implicating Trump working with the Russians, either thru Felix Sater or
one of the other "suspects" she exhaustively listed."
This is true, but it is also true that Nellie Ohr was working for a privately-owned firm that had employed her to make
false accusations about Trump's alleged connections to Russians in order to sabotage his presidency and lay the groundwork for
his impeachment.
They also hired foreign agent, Chris Steele to concoct a thoroughly-debunked dossier for the same purpose.
Can these people be charged with a crime or have we entered a new world of 'dirty tricks'???
... Examination of the Nellie Ohr documents given to the FBI shows some of her source material also came from former Ukrainian
presidential candidate Yulia Tymoshenko and a lawsuit she filed against Manafort.
Why is that significant? Tymoshenko and Hillary Clinton had a simpatico relationship after the former secretary of State
went out of her way in January 2013 to advocate for Tymoshenko's release from prison on corruption charges.
So, Bruce Ohr became a conduit of information not only for intelligence from Clinton's British opposition-researcher
but also from his wife's curation of evidence from a Clinton foreign ally and Manafort enemy inside Ukraine. Talk about foreign
influence in a U.S. election!
...
The tales of Bruce and Nellie Ohr, Christopher Steele, Yulia Tymoshenko, and those DEA and TSA agents raise a stark warning:
The lines between government officials and informants, unverified political dirt and real intelligence, personal interest
and law enforcement,
became too blurred for the Justice Department's own good.
The person responsible for securing the release of Yulia Tymoshenko was Chancellor Merkel. Further, that USA opposed Tymoshenko.
quote
As for one of the leaders of the war party in Kiev, Merkel has privately and publicly endorsed every claim of Yulia Tymoshenko,
promoting her release from prison and protecting her campaigns for war against Russia, even though – according to the high-level
German source – “they [Chancellery, Foreign Ministry] have known for years that [Tymoshenko] was a crook.”
endquote
There is a lot more detail Tymoshenko's corruption and Merkel's rescue here:
STEPHEN COHEN: I'm not aware that Russia attacked Georgia. The European Commission, if you're talking about the 2008 war,
the European Commission, investigating what happened, found that Georgia, which was backed by the United States, fighting with an
American-built army under the control of the, shall we say, slightly unpredictable Georgian president then, Saakashvili, that he
began the war by firing on Russian enclaves. And the Kremlin, which by the way was not occupied by Putin, but by Michael McFaul and
Obama's best friend and reset partner then-president Dmitry Medvedev, did what any Kremlin leader, what any leader in any country
would have had to do: it reacted. It sent troops across the border through the tunnel, and drove the Georgian forces out of what
essentially were kind of Russian protectorate areas of Georgia.
So that- Russia didn't begin that war. And it didn't begin the one in Ukraine, either. We did that by [continents], the overthrow
of the Ukrainian president in [20]14 after President Obama told Putin that he would not permit that to happen. And I think it happened
within 36 hours. The Russians, like them or not, feel that they have been lied to and betrayed. They use this word, predatl'stvo,
betrayal, about American policy toward Russia ever since 1991, when it wasn't just President George Bush, all the documents have
been published by the National Security Archive in Washington, all the leaders of the main Western powers promised the Soviet Union
that under Gorbachev, if Gorbachev would allow a reunited Germany to be NATO, NATO would not, in the famous expression, move two
inches to the east.
Now NATO is sitting on Russia's borders from the Baltic to Ukraine. So Russians aren't fools, and they're good-hearted, but they
become resentful. They're worried about being attacked by the United States. In fact, you read and hear in the Russian media daily,
we are under attack by the United States. And this is a lot more real and meaningful than this crap that is being put out that Russia
somehow attacked us in 2016. I must have been sleeping. I didn't see Pearl Harbor or 9/11 and 2016. This is reckless, dangerous,
warmongering talk. It needs to stop. Russia has a better case for saying they've been attacked by us since 1991. We put our military
alliance on the front door. Maybe it's not an attack, but it looks like one, feels like one. Could be one.
Real politik. Don't bring a knife to a gun fight. Don't start fights in the first place. The idea that American leadership
is any better than mid-Victorian imperialism, is laughable.
AARON MATE: We hear, often, talk of Putin possibly being the richest person in the world as a result of his entanglement
with the very corruption of Russia you're speaking about
Few appear to be aware that Bill Browder is single-handedly responsible for starting, and spreading, the rumor that Putin's
net worth is $200 billion (for those who are unfamiliar with Browder, I highly recommend watching Andrei Nekrasov's documentary
titled " The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes "). Browder
appears to have first
started this rumor early in 2015 , and has repeated it ad nauseam since then, including in
his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2017 . While Browder has always framed the $200 billion figure as his own
estimate, that subtle qualifier has had little effect on the media's willingness to accept it as fact.
Interestingly, during the press conference at the Helsinki Summit, Putin claimed Browder sent $400 million of ill-gotten gains
to the Clinton campaign. Putin
retracted the statement and claimed to have misspoke a week or so later, however by that time the $400 million figure had
been cited by numerous media outlets around the world. I think it is at least possible that Putin purposely exaggerated the amount
of money in question as a kind of tit-for-tat response to Browder having started the rumor about his net worth being $200 billion.
The stories I saw said there was a mistranslation -- but that the figure should have $400 thousand and not $400 million. Maybe
Putin misspoke, but the $400,000 number is still significant, albeit far more reasonable.
Putin never was on the Forbes list of billionaires, btw, and his campaign finance statement comes to far less. It never seems
to occur to rabid capitalists or crooks that not everyone is like them, placing such importance on vast fortunes, or want to be
dishonest, greedy, or power hungry. Putin is only 'well off' and that seems to satisfy him just fine as he gets on with other
interests, values, and goals.
Yes, $400,000 is the revised/correct figure. My having written that "Putin retracted the statement" was not the best choice
of phrase. Also, the figure was corrected the day after it was made, not "a week or so later" as I wrote in my previous comment.
From the Russia Insider link:
Browder's criminal group used many tax evasion methods, including offshore companies. They siphoned shares and funds from
Russia worth over 1.5 billion dollars. By the way, $400,000 was transferred to the US Democratic Party's accounts from these
funds. The Russian president asked us to correct his statement from yesterday. During the briefing, he said it was $400,000,000,
not $400,000. Either way, it's still a significant amount of money.
There's something weird about the anti-Putin hysteria. Somehow, many, many people have come to believe they must demonstrate
their membership in the tribe by accepting completely unsupported assertions that go against common sense.
In a sane world we the people would be furious with the Clinton campaign, especially the D party but the R's as well, our media
(again), and our intel/police State (again). Holding them all accountable while making sure this tsunami of deception and lies
never happens again.
It's amazing even in time of the internetz those of us who really dig can only come up with a few sane voices. It's much worse
now in terms of the numbers of sane voices than it was in the run up to Iraq 2.
Regardless of broad access to far more information in the digital age, never under estimate the self-preservation instinct
of American exceptionalist mythology. There is an inverse relationship between the decline of US global primacy and increasingly
desperate quest for adventurism. Like any case of addiction, looking outward for blame/salvation is imperative in order to prevent
the mirror of self-reflection/realization from turning back onto ourselves.
we're not to believe we're not supposed to believe we're supposed to believe
Believe whatever you want, however your comment gives the impression that you came to this article because you felt the need
to push back against anything that does not conform to the liberal international order's narrative on Putin and Russia, rather
than "with an eagerness to counterbalance the media's portrayal of Putin". WRT to whataboutism, I like
Greenwald's definition of the term :
"Whataboutism": the term used to bar inquiry into whether someone adheres to the moral and behavioral standards they seek
to impose on everyone else. That's its functional definition.
aye. I've never seen it used by anyone aside from the worst Hill Trolls.
Indeed, when it was first thrown at me, I endeavored to look it up, and found that all references to it were from Hillaryites
attempting to diss apostates and heretics.
The degree of consistency and or lack of hypocrisy based on words and actions separates US from Russia to an astonishing level.
That is Russia's largest threat to US, our deceivers. The propaganda tables have turned and we are deceiving ourselves to points
of collective insanity and warmongering with a great nuclear power while we are at it. Warmongering is who we are and what we
do.
Does Russia have a GITMO, torture Chelsea Manning, openly say they want to kill Snowden and Assange? Is Russia building up
arsenals on our borders while maintaining hundreds of foreign bases and conducting several wars at any given moment while constantly
threatening to foment more wars? Is Russia dropping another trillion on nuclear arsenals? Is Russia forcing us to maintain such
an anti democratic system and an even worse, an entirely hackable electronic voting system?
You ready to destroy the world, including your own, rather than look in the mirror?
You're talking about extending Russian military power into Europe when the military spending of NATO Europe alone exceeds Russia's
by almost 5-1 (more like 12-1 when one includes the US and Canada), have about triple the number of soldiers than Russia has,
and when the Russian ground forces are numerically smaller than they have been in at least 200 years?
" to put their self-interests above those of their constituents and employees, why can't we apply this same lens to Putin and
his oligarchs?"
The oligarchs got their start under Yeltsin and his FreeMarketDemocraticReformers, whose policies were so catastrophic that
deaths were exceeding births by almost a million a year by the late '90s, with no end in sight. Central to Yeltsin's governance
was the corrupt privatization, by which means the Seven Bankers came to control the Russian economy and Russian politics.
Central to Putin's popularity are the measures he took to curb oligarchic predation in 2003-2005. Because of this, Russia's
debt:GDP ratio went from 1.0 to about 0.2, and Russia's demographic recovery began while Western analysis were still predicting
the death of Russia.
So Putin is the anti-oligarch in Russian domestic politics.
I know of many people who sacrifice their own interests for those of their children (over whom they have virtually absolute
power), family member and friends. I know of others who dedicate their lives to justice, peace, the well being of their nation,
the world, and other people -- people who find far greater meaning and satisfaction in this than in accumulating power or money.
Other people have their own goals, such as producing art, inventing interesting things, reading and learning, and don't care two
hoots about power or money as long as their immediate needs are met.
I'm cynical enough about humans without thinking the worst of everyone and every group or culture. Not everyone thinks only
of nails and wants to be hammers, or are sociopaths. There are times when people are more or less forced into taking power, or
getting more money, even if they don't want it, because they want to change things for the better or need to defend themselves.
There are people who get guns and learn how to use them only because they feel a need for defending themselves and family but
who don't like guns and don't want to shoot anyone or anything.
There are many people who do not want to be controlled and bossed around, but neither want to boss around anyone else. The
world is full of such people. If they are threatened and attacked, however, expect defensive reactions. Same as for most animals
which are not predators, and even predators will generally not attack other animals if they are not hungry or threatened -- but
that does not mean they are not competent or can be dangerous.
Capitalism is not only inherently predatory, but is inherently expansive without limits, with unlimited ambition for profits
and control. It's intrinsically very competitive and imperialist. Capitalism is also a thing which was exported to Russia, starting
soon after the Russian Revolution, which was immediately attacked and invaded by the West, and especially after the fall of the
Soviet Union. Soviet Russia had it's own problems, which it met with varying degrees of success, but were quite different from
the aggressive capitalism and imperialism of the US and Europe.
The pro-Putin propaganda is pretty interesting to witness, and of course not everything Cohen says is skewed pro-Putin – that's
what provides credibility. But "Putin kills everybody" is something NOBODY says (except Cohen, twice in one interview) – Putin
is actually pretty selective of those he decides to have killed. But of course, he doesn't kill anyone, personally – therefore
he's an innocent lamb, accidentally running Russia as a dictator.
The most recent dictator in Russian history was Boris Yeltsin, who turned tanks on his legislature while it was in the legal
and constitutional process of impeaching him, and whose policies were so catastrophic for Russians (who were dying off at the
rate of 900k/yr) that he had to steal his re-election because he had a 5% approval rating.
But he did as the US gvt told him, so I guess that makes him a Democrat.
Under Putin Russia recovered from being helpless, bankrupt & dying, but Russia has an independent foreign policy, so that makes
Putin a dictator.
"Does any sane person believe that there will ever be a Putin-signed contract provided as evidence? Does any sane person believe
that Putin actually needs to "approve" a contract rather than signaling to his oligarch/mafia hierarchy that he's unhappy about
a newspaper or journalist's reporting?"
Why do you think Putin even needs, or feels a need, to have journalists killed in the first place? I see no evidence to support
this basic assumption.
The idea of Russia poised to attack Europe is interesting, in light of the fact that they've cut their military spending by
20%. And even before that the budgets of France, Germany, and the UK combined well exceeded that of Russia, to say nothing of
the rest of NATO or the US.
Putin's record speaks for itself. This again points to the absurdity of claiming he's had reporters killed: he doesn't need
to. He has a vast amount of genuine public support because he's salvaged the country and pieced it back together after the pillaging
of the Yeltsin years. That he himself is a corrupt oligarch I have no particular doubt of. But if he just wanted to enrich himself,
he's had a very funny way of going about it. Pray tell, what are these 'other interpretations'?
"The US foreign policy has been disastrous for millions of people since world war 2. But Cohen's arguments that Russia isn't
as bad as the US is just a bunch of whattaboutism."
What countries has the Russian Federation destroyed?
Here is a fascinating essay ["Are We Reading Russia Right?"] by Nicolai N. Petro who currently holds the Silvia-Chandley Professorship
of Peace Studies and Nonviolence at the University of Rhode Island. His books include, Ukraine
in Crisis (Routledge, 2017), Crafting Democracy (Cornell, 2004), The Rebirth of Russian Democracy (Harvard, 1995), and Russian
Foreign Policy, co-authored with Alvin Z. Rubinstein (Longman, 1997). A graduate of the University of Virginia, he is the recipient
of Fulbright awards to Russia and to Ukraine, as well as fellowships from the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the National
Council for Eurasian and East European Research, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington,
D.C., and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. As a Council on Foreign Relations Fellow, he served as special assistant
for policy toward the Soviet Union in the U.S. Department of State from 1989 to 1990. In addition to scholarly publications
on Russia and Ukraine, he has written for Asia Times, American Interest, Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, The Guardian
(UK), The Nation, New York Times, and Wilson Quarterly. His writings have appeared frequently on the web sites of the Carnegie
Council for Ethics in International Affairs and The National Interest.
Thanks for so much for this. Great stuff. Cohen says the emperor has no clothes so naturally the empire doesn't want him on
television. I believe he has been on CNN one or two times and I saw him once on the PBS Newshour where the interviewer asked skeptical
questions with a pained and skeptical look. He seems to be the only prominent person willing to stand up and call bs on the Russia
hate. There are plenty of pundits and commentators who do that but not many Princeton professors.
It has been said in recent years that the greatest failure of American foreign policy was the invasion of Iraq. I think that
they are wrong. The greatest failure, in my opinion, is to push both China and Russia together into a semi-official pact against
American ambitions. In the same way that the US was able to split China from the USSR back in the seventies, the best option was
for America to split Russia from China and help incorporate them into the western system. The waters for that idea have been so
fouled by the Russia hysteria, if not dementia, that that is no longer a possibility. I just wish that the US would stop sowing
dragon's teeth – it never ends well.
The best option, but the "American exceptionalists" went nuts. Also, the usual play book of stoking fears of the "yellow menace"
would have been too on the nose. Americans might not buy it, and there was a whole cottage industry of "the rising China threat"
except the potential consumer market place and slave labor factories stopped that from happening.
Bringing Russia into the West effectively means Europe, and I think that creates a similar dynamic to a Russian/Chinese pact.
The basic problem with the EU is its led by a relatively weak but very German power which makes the EU relatively weak or controllable
as long as the German electorate is relatively sedate. I think they still need the international structures run by the U.S. to
maintain their dominance. What Russia and the pre-Erdogan Turkey (which was never going to be admitted to the EU) presented was
significant upsets to the existing EU order with major balances to Germany which I always believed would make the EU potentially
more dynamic. Every decision wouldn't require a pilgrimage to Berlin. The British were always disinterested. The French had made
arrangements with Germany, and Italy is still Italy. Putting Russia or Turkey (pre-Erdogan) would have disrupted this arrangement.
The Crimea voted to be annexed by Russia by a clear majority. The US overran Hawaii with total disregard for the wishes of
the native population. Your comparison is invalid.
"Putin's finger prints are all over the Balkan fiasco".How is that with Putin only becoming president in 2000 and the Nato
bombing started way beforehand. It's ridiculous to think that Putin had any major influence at that time as govenor or director
of the domestic intelligence service on what was going during the bombing of NATO on Belgrad. Even Gerhard Schroeder, then chancellor
of the Federal Republic of Germany, admitted in an interview in 2014 with a major German Newspaper (Die Zeit) that this invasion
of Nato was a fault and against international law!
Can you concrete what you mean by "fingerprints" or is this just another platitudes?
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
o Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently absurd MSM propaganda. For example,
the meme that releasing factual information about actual election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging
of its own nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
o Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on and lying to the American people,
spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer
Brennan;
o Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples of "norms-respecting Republican
patriots";
o Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating Russian stooge.
I believe that the full and proper name of the psychiatric disorder in question is
Putin-Trump Derangement Syndrome [PTDS].
Symptoms include:
Eager and uncritical ingestion and social-media regurgitation of even the most patently
absurd MSM propaganda. For example, the meme that releasing factual information about actual
election-meddling (as Wikileaks did about the Dem-establishment's rigging of its own
nomination process in 2016) is a grave threat to American Democracy™;
Recent-onset veneration of the intelligence agencies, whose stock in trade is spying on
and lying to the American people, spreading disinformation, election rigging, torture and
assassination and its agents, such as liar and perjurer Clapper and torturer Brennan;
Rehabilitation of horrid unindicted GOP war criminals like G.W. Bush as alleged examples
of "norms-respecting Republican patriots";
Smearing of anyone who dares question the MSM-stoked hysteria as an America-hating
Russian stooge.
By all measures Clinton is a war criminal... Hilary is a female sociopath or worse.
Notable quotes:
"... Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of 1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end
of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" ..."
"... The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom
fighters" in 1999. ..."
"... Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA
is fighting for human rights and American values." ..."
"... Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo.
After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war
had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks. ..."
Twenty years ago, President Bill Clinton commenced bombing Serbia in the name of human rights, justice, and ethnic tolerance.
Approximately 1,500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest sham morality plays of the modern era. As British
professor Philip Hammond recently noted, the 78-day bombing campaign "was not a purely military operation: NATO also destroyed what
it called 'dual-use' targets, such as factories, city bridges, and even the main television building in downtown Belgrade, in an
attempt to terrorise the country into surrender."
Clinton's unprovoked attack on Serbia, intended to help ethnic Albanians seize control of Kosovo, set a precedent for "humanitarian"
warring that was invoked by supporters of George W. Bush's unprovoked attack on Iraq, Barack Oba-ma's bombing of Libya, and Donald
Trump's bombing of Syria.
Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo, and there is an 11-foot statue of him standing in the capitol, Pristina, on Bill Clinton Boulevard.
A commentator in the United Kingdom's Guardian newspaper noted that the statue showed Clinton "with a left hand raised, a
typical gesture of a leader greeting the masses. In his right hand he is holding documents engraved with the date when NATO started
the bombardment of Serbia, 24 March 1999." It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the
corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.
Bombing Serbia was a family affair in the Clinton White House. Hillary Clinton revealed to an interviewer in the summer of
1999, "I urged him to bomb. You cannot let this go on at the end of a century that has seen the major holocaust of our time. What
do we have NATO for if not to defend our way of life?" A biography of Hillary Clinton, written by Gail Sheehy and published
in late 1999, stated that Mrs. Clinton had refused to talk to the president for eight months after the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke.
She resumed talking to her husband only when she phoned him and urged him in the strongest terms to begin bombing Serbia; the president
began bombing within 24 hours. Alexander Cockburn observed in the Los Angeles Times,
It's scarcely surprising that Hillary would have urged President Clinton to drop cluster bombs on the Serbs to defend "our
way of life." The first lady is a social engineer. She believes in therapeutic policing and the duty of the state to impose
such policing. War is more social engineering, "fixitry" via high explosive, social therapy via cruise missile . As a tough therapeutic
cop, she does not shy away from the most abrupt expression of the therapy: the death penalty.
I followed the war closely from the start, but selling articles to editors bashing the bombing was as easy as pitching paeans
to Scientology. Instead of breaking into newsprint, my venting occurred instead in my journal:
April 7, 1999: Much of the media and most of the American public are evaluating Clinton's Serbian policy based on
the pictures of the bomb damage -- rather than by asking whether there is any coherent purpose or justification for bombing.
The ultimate triumph of photo opportunities . What a travesty and national disgrace for this country.
April 17: My bottom line on the Kosovo conflict: I hate holy wars. And this is a holy war for American good deeds
-- or for America's saintly self-image? Sen. John McCain said the war is necessary to "uphold American values." Make me barf!
Just another Hitler-of-the-month attack.
May 13: This damn Serbian war is a symbol of all that is wrong with the righteous approach to the world and to problems
within this nation.
The KLA
The Kosovo Liberation Army's savage nature was well known before the Clinton administration formally christened them "freedom
fighters" in 1999. The previous year, the State Department condemned "terrorist action by the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army."
The KLA was heavily involved in drug trafficking and had close to ties to Osama bin Laden. Arming the KLA helped Clinton portray
himself as a crusader against injustice and shift public attention after his impeachment trial. Clinton was aided by many congressmen
eager to portray U.S. bombing as an engine of righteousness. Sen. Joe Lieberman whooped that the United States and the KLA "stand
for the same values and principles. Fighting for the KLA is fighting for human rights and American values."
In early June 1999, the Washington Post reported that "some presidential aides and friends are describing [bombing] Kosovo
in Churchillian tones, as Clinton's 'finest hour.'" Clinton administration officials justified killing civilians because, it
alleged the Serbs were committing genocide in Kosovo. After the bombing ended, no evidence of genocide was found, but Clinton and
Britain's Tony Blair continued boasting as if their war had stopped a new Hitler in his tracks.
In a speech to American troops in a Thanksgiving 1999 visit, Clinton declared that the Kosovar children "love the United States
because we gave them their freedom back." Perhaps Clinton saw freedom as nothing more than being tyrannized by people of the same
ethnicity. As the Serbs were driven out of Kosovo, Kosovar Albanians became increasingly oppressed by the KLA, which ignored its
commitment to disarm. The Los Angeles Times reported on November 20, 1999,
As a postwar power struggle heats up in Kosovo Albanian politics, extremists are trying to silence moderate leaders with a
terror campaign of kidnappings, beatings, bombings, and at least one killing. The intensified attacks against members of the moderate
Democratic League of Kosovo, or LDK, have raised concerns that radical ethnic Albanians are turning against their own out of fear
of losing power in a democratic Kosovo.
American and NATO forces stood by as the KLA resumed its ethnic cleansing, slaughtering Serbian civilians, bombing Serbian
churches, and oppressing non-Muslims. Almost a quarter million Serbs, Gypsies, Jews, and other minorities fled Kosovo after Clinton
promised to protect them. In March 2000 renewed fighting broke out when the KLA launched attacks into Serbia, trying to seize
territory that it claimed historically belonged to ethnic Albanians. UN Human Rights Envoy Jiri Dienstbier reported that "the [NATO]
bombing hasn't solved any problems. It only multiplied the existing problems and created new ones. The Yugoslav economy was destroyed.
Kosovo is destroyed. There are hundreds of thousands of people unemployed now."
U.S. complicity in atrocities
Prior to the NATO bombing, American citizens had no responsibility for atrocities committed by either Serbs or ethnic Albanians.
However, after American planes bombed much of Serbia into rubble to drive the Serbian military out of Kosovo, Clinton effectively
made the United States responsible for the safety of the remaining Serbs in Kosovo. That was equivalent to forcibly disarming a group
of people, and then standing by, whistling and looking at the ground, while they are slaughtered. Since the United States promised
to bring peace to Kosovo, Clinton bears some responsibility for every burnt church, every murdered Serbian grandmother, every new
refugee column streaming north out of Kosovo. Despite those problems, Clinton bragged at a December 8, 1999, press conference that
he was "very, very proud" of what the United States had done in Kosovo.
I had a chapter on the Serbian bombing campaign titled "Moralizing with Cluster Bombs" in Feeling Your Pain: The Explosion
and Abuse of Government Power in the Clinton–Gore Years (St. Martin's Press, 2000), which sufficed to spur at least one or two
reviewers to attack the book. Norman Provizer, the director of the Golda Meir Center for Political Leadership, scoffed in the
Denver Rocky Mountain News, "Bovard chastises Clinton for an illegal, undeclared war in Kosovo without ever bothering to mention
that, during the entire run of American history, there have been but four official declarations of war by Congress."
As the chaotic situation in post-war Kosovo became stark, it was easier to work in jibes against the debacle. In an October 2002
USA Today article ("Moral High Ground Not Won on Battlefield") bashing the Bush administration's push for war against Iraq,
I pointed out, "A desire to spread freedom does not automatically confer a license to kill . Operation Allied Force in 1999 bombed
Belgrade, Yugoslavia, into submission purportedly to liberate Kosovo. Though Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic raised the white flag,
ethnic cleansing continued -- with the minority Serbs being slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground in the same way the
Serbs previously oppressed the ethnic Albanians."
In a 2011 review for The American Conservative, I scoffed, "After NATO planes killed hundreds if not thousands of Serb
and ethnic Albanian civilians, Bill Clinton could pirouette as a savior. Once the bombing ended, many of the Serbs remaining in Kosovo
were slaughtered and their churches burned to the ground. NATO's 'peace' produced a quarter million Serbian, Jewish, and Gypsy refugees."
In 2014, a European Union task force confirmed that the ruthless cabal that Clinton empowered by bombing Serbia committed atrocities
that included murdering persons to extract and sell their kidneys, livers, and other body parts. Clint Williamson, the chief prosecutor
of a special European Union task force, declared in 2014 that senior members of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) had engaged in "unlawful
killings, abductions, enforced disappearances, illegal detentions in camps in Kosovo and Albania, sexual violence, forced displacements
of individuals from their homes and communities, and desecration and destruction of churches and other religious sites."
The New York Times reported that the trials of Kosovo body snatchers may be stymied by cover-ups and stonewalling: "Past
investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses' fears of testifying in a small country
where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in
the government." American politicians almost entirely ignored the scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and
Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as "the George Washington of Kosovo." A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative
report tagged Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.
Clinton's war on Serbia opened a Pandora's box from which the world still suffers. Because politicians and pundits portrayed that
war as a moral triumph, it was easier for subsequent presidents to portray U.S. bombing as the self-evident triumph of good over
evil. Honest assessments of wrongful killings remain few and far between in media coverage.
This article was originally published in the July 2019 edition ofFuture of Freedom .
James Bovard is a policy adviser to The Future of Freedom Foundation. He is a USA Today columnist and has written
for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, New Republic, Reader's Digest, Playboy, American Spectator,
Investors Business Daily, and many other publications. He is the author of Freedom Frauds: Hard Lessons in American Liberty
(2017, published by FFF); Public Policy Hooligan (2012); Attention Deficit Democracy (2006); The Bush Betrayal
(2004); Terrorism and Tyranny (2003); Feeling Your Pain (2000); Freedom in Chains (1999); Shakedown (1995);
Lost Rights (1994); The Fair Trade Fraud (1991); and The Farm Fiasco (1989). He was the 1995 co-recipient of
the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought, and the recipient of the 1996 Freedom
Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. His book Lost Rights received the
Mencken Award as Book of the Year from the Free Press Association. His Terrorism and Tyranny won Laissez Faire Book's Lysander
Spooner award for the Best Book on Liberty in 2003. Read his blog . Send
him email .
In July 30, the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan reported
that the Afghan government and international military forces, primarily
the United States , caused most of the civilian deaths in Afghanistan during the first six
months of 2019. That's more killings than those perpetrated in the same time period by the
Taliban and ISIS combined.
Aerial operations were responsible for 519 civilian casualties (356 deaths and 156
injuries), including 150 children (89 deaths and 61 injuries). That constitutes a 39 percent
increase in overall civilian casualties from aerial attacks. Eighty-three percent of civilian
casualties from aerial operations were carried out by the international forces.
The targeting of civilians amounts to war crimes under the Rome Statute of the
International Criminal Court (ICC).
... ... ...
Team Trump's deadly actions are a continuation of the Bush and Obama
administrations' commission of the most heinous crimes in Afghanistan. On April 12, the ICC's
Pre-Trial Chamber found a "reasonable basis" to
believe that the parties to the Afghan conflict, including the U.S. military and the CIA,
committed war crimes and crimes against humanity, most of them occurring between 2005 and 2015.
They include "the war crimes of torture and cruel treatment, outrages upon personal dignity,
and rape and other forms of sexual violence pursuant to a policy approved by the U.S.
authorities."
The chamber, however, refused to open a formal investigation into those crimes, as
recommended by ICC prosecutor Fatou Bensouda. In concluding that "an investigation
into the situation in Afghanistan at this stage would not serve the interests of justice," the
chamber questioned the feasibility of such a probe. An investigation would be "very wide in
scope and encompasses a high number of alleged incidents having occurred over a long time
period," the chamber wrote. It noted the extreme difficulty in gauging "the prospects of
securing meaningful cooperation from relevant authorities for the future" and found "the
current circumstances of the situation in Afghanistan are such as to make the prospects for a
successful investigation and prosecution extremely limited."
Marjorie Cohn is professor emerita at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, former president of
the National Lawyers Guild, deputy secretary general of the International Association of
Democratic Lawyers and a member of the advisory board of Veterans for Peace. Her most recent
book is Drones and Targeted Killing: Legal, Moral, and Geopolitical Issues.
Racism is the belief in the superiority of one race over another. It may also
include prejudice ,
discrimination , or
antagonism directed against other people because they are of a different race or ethnicity , or the belief that
members of different races or ethnicities should be treated differently. [1][2][3] Modern
variants of racism are often based in social perceptions of biological differences between
peoples. These views can take the form of social actions , practices or beliefs, or
political systems
in which different races are ranked as inherently superior or inferior to each other, based on
presumed shared inheritable traits, abilities, or qualities. [2][1][4]
Notable quotes:
"... Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue ..."
During an interview with NBC's
Chuck Todd on May 28, Clapper said, "If you put that in context with everything else we
knew the Russians were doing to interfere with the election," he said. "And just the historical practices of the Russians, who
typically, are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So, we were concerned."
It's unclear what Clapper meant or what evidence he has to suggest that Russians are "almost
genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor." His comments are xenophobic towards an
entire ethnicity and are far beyond criticism of Putin and the Russian government.
His comments go far into neo-McCarthyist territory, which many critics and skeptics have
warned the Democratic Party and intelligence community against. Clapper jumped from explaining
the investigation into Russia's role in the election to propagating an unhealthy and unfounded
definition of the Russian people. These comments are the type of sentiments that provoke such
policies as deporting all Russians from the United States, severing all ties with Russians,
banning all multi-national corporations from engaging in business with Russians, dispelling the
Russian Embassy, and setting off a chain of events that exponentially increase the likelihood
of military conflict between two nuclear superpowers.
In the United States alone, nearly three million people claim
direct Russian ancestry and almost one million people speak Russian.
However, Russia's interference in the election and the current political climate have fostered
an environment in which Clapper could say this on national television without anyone batting an
eye. Chuck Todd ignored the comment and proceeded with the interview as though Clapper's
response was normal.
The mainstream media have contributed to this Russiophobic rhetoric by perpetuating,
elevating and sensationalizing the Russia narrative. Several hucksters and conspiracy theorists
have gained massive followings from crying Russia at every opportunity, such as British
Conservative Louise Mensch and
former Bill Clinton volunteer director Claude Taylo r, who continue duping followers into
believing they have exclusive sources or insight into the "smoking gun" on Trump's ties with
Russia. By interviewing them, the mainstream media have irresponsibly elevated these people as
reliable sources on the subject. The New York Times even published an op-ed by Mensch,
who has furthered baseless claims that Russia
was behind Anthony Weiner's sexting crimes and has called
Bernie Sanders a "Russian agent."
Given the Democratic Party's reliance on the Russia narrative, these types of comments
are likely to continue and worsen as the highly polarized investigations continue .
"... The field's distance from rebel-held territory in Yemen demonstrates the range of the Houthis' drones. U.N. investigators say the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500 kilometers (930 miles). That puts Saudi oil fields, an under-construction Emirati nuclear power plant and Dubai's busy international airport within their range. ..."
"... The outcome was a forgone conclusion. The smash, destroy, and destabilize campaign in the region could have only come from the most powerful lobby in the US. We all know who that is. ..."
Today Saudi Arabia finally lost the war on Yemen. It has no defenses against new weapons
the Houthis in Yemen acquired. These weapons threaten the Saudis economic lifelines.
This today
was the decisive attack:
Drones launched by Yemen's Houthi rebels attacked a massive oil and gas field deep inside
Saudi Arabia's sprawling desert on Saturday, causing what the kingdom described as a
"limited fire" in the second such recent attack on its crucial energy industry. ... The Saudi acknowledgement of the attack came hours after Yahia Sarie, a military spokesman
for the Houthis, issued a video statement claiming the rebels launched 10 bomb-laden drones
targeting the field in their "biggest-ever" operation. He threatened more attacks would be
coming.
New drones and missiles
displayed in July 2019 by Yemen's Houthi-allied armed forces bigger
Today's attack is a check mate move against the Saudis. Shaybah is some 1,200 kilometers
(750 miles) from Houthi-controlled territory. There are many more important economic targets
within that range:
The field's distance from rebel-held territory in Yemen demonstrates the range of the
Houthis' drones. U.N. investigators say the Houthis' new UAV-X drone, found in recent
months during the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, likely has a range of up to 1,500
kilometers (930 miles). That puts Saudi oil fields, an under-construction Emirati nuclear
power plant and Dubai's busy international airport within their range.
Unlike sophisticated drones that use satellites to allow pilots to remotely fly them,
analysts believe Houthi drones are likely programmed to strike a specific latitude and
longitude and cannot be controlled once out of radio range. The Houthis have used drones,
which can be difficult to track by radar, to attack Saudi Patriot missile batteries, as
well as enemy troops.
The attack conclusively demonstrates that the most important assets of the Saudis are now
under threat. This economic threat comes on top of a seven percent budget deficit
the IMF predicts for Saudi Arabia. Further Saudi bombing against the Houthi will now have
very significant additional cost that might even endanger the viability of the Saudi state.
The Houthi have clown prince Mohammad bin Salman by the balls and can squeeze those at will. There is a lesson to learn from that. But it is doubtful that the borg in Washington DC
has the ability to understand it.
The outcome was a forgone conclusion. The smash, destroy, and destabilize campaign in the
region could have only come from the most powerful lobby in the US. We all know who that
is.
I'm afraid the only lesson the Borg in Washington will learn is to continue squandering US
resources and manpower on pursuing and inflicting chaos and violence in the Middle East.
Clown prince Mohammed bin Salman will not learn anything either other than to bankrupt his
own nation in pursuing this war.
Israel has driven itself into its own existential hell by persecuting Palestinians over
70+ years and doing a good job of annihilating itself while denying its own destruction. If
Israel can do it, the Christian crusaders dominating the govts of the Five Eyes nations
supporting Israel will follow suit in propping up an unsustainable fantasy. Samson option
indeed.
I am sure that the Suads will be looking to their zionist allies to supply them with the Iron
Dome system that the US military just wasted millions of tax payer dollars and purchased
several days ago. The irony of that system is that is was overwhelmed several times when the
Palestinian freedom fighters launched a wave of home made rockets at Occupied Palestine. I
hope the Sauds learn a lesson..doubt it though.
let me throw something out there. Israel has entrenched itself in the US political and media
systems. There is no logical path to eliminate or reduce that influence, and thus perhaps the
plan that has been hatched is to strengthen Iran to the point that it can confront Israel.
I anticipated just this sort of event 2+ months ago to go along with the tanker sabotaging to
expand on b's thesis about Iran having the upper hand in the current hybrid Gulf War. The
timing of this new ability dovetails nicely with the recent Russian collective security
proposal, with the Saudis being the footdraggers in agreeing about its viability due to its
pragmatic logic. So, as I wrote 2 days ago, we now have an excellent possibility of seeing an
end to this and future Persian Gulf Crises along with an idea that can potentially become the
template for an entire Southwest Asian security treaty, whose only holdout would be Occupied
Palestine. The Outlaw US Empire is effectively shutout of the entire process. And as I also
wrote, it's now time for the Saudis to determine where their future lies--with Eurasia or
with a dying Empire.
So the U.S. bought the Iron Dome stuff from Israel? I guess that means we paid for it
twice, eh? Glad to know my tax dollars are hard at work "keeping us safe."
Wonder what they might be planning for with that one?
The Yemenese military had lots of technological capabilities remaining from the Cold War
along with factories, technicians and raw materials. For example, Yemen's aerospace forces
allied with the Houthi and are the ones producing and shooting the missiles and drones. One
doesn't need to import a complete drone; technical blueprints on a floppy, CD-ROM, DVD,
thumb-drive, are all that's required. The humanitarian crisis due to food and medicine
shortages played on the minds of people such that an image of a poor, backward,
non-industrial capable society was generated that wasn't 100% correct.
And of course, this makes the threat by Iran to hit back against military and industrial
installations on the other side of the Persian Gulf that much stronger.
It would be rich indeed if Iran were to be the entity that ultimately manages to loosen
the stranglehold that the Zionists have on the USA Congress, media, president, donors to
political parties, etc.
I can imagine the shale oil producers smiling right now...100 a barrel oil will be just
what they need! Cost-push inflation leading to a return of bell bottoms and leisure suits. No
wonder all these 70's band retreads are touring again :)
So, poor Yemen wasted via siege warfare waged by NATO since 2015 though its Saudi, UAE and
terrorist proxies that came very close to success, finds the initiative to counterattack with
what little it has at its disposal--All accusations of Iranian help have never been
proven --and thanks to the Outlaw US Empire's threats against Iran force UAE to
withdrawal and seek peace with Iran with Saudi soon to follow. And the situation is all
Iran's fault?! Note the date above--it precedes Trump's election, his illegal withdrawal from
the JCPOA and institution of the illegal sanctions regime against Iran.
Europe is on board with Russia's collective security proposal. Europe had representatives
at the meet between Khamenei and the Houthi negotiator. Europe--even the UK--still working to
salvage the JCPOA via the non-dollar trade conduit. And you conclude that the Outlaw US
Empire "might actually get European support to attack Iran."
First Afghanistan, then Yemen. Maybe the western media's imaging of these people as towel
headed, sandal wearing primatives is just a tad misguided......
"The Campaign Press: Members of the 10 Percent, Reporting for the One Percent" [Matt
Taibbi,
Rolling Stone ]. "Anyone who's worked in the business (or read Manufacturing Consent)
knows nobody calls editors to red-pencil text.
The pressure comes at the point of hire. If you're the type who thinks Jeff Bezos should
be thrown out of an airplane, or that it's a bad look for a DC newspaper to be owned by a
major intelligence contractor, you won't rise.
Meanwhile, the Post has become terrific at promoting Jennifer Rubins and Max Boots.
Reporters watch as good investigative journalism about serious structural problems dies on
the vine, while mountains of column space are devoted to trivialities like Trump tweets
and/or simplistic partisan storylines.
Nobody needs to pressure anyone. We all know what takes will and will not earn attaboys in
newsrooms. Trump may have accelerated distaste for the press, but he didn't create it. He
sniffed out existing frustrations and used them to rally anger toward 'elites' to his side.
The criticism works because national media are elites, ten-percenters working for
one-percenters.
The longer people in the business try to deny it, the more it will be fodder
for politicians. Sanders wasn't the first, and won't be the last."
• Yep. I'm so glad
Rolling Stone has Matt Taibbi on-board. Until advertisers black-list "the One Percent," I
suppose.
I'm experiencing a virulent case of deja vu here, that usually leads to hopelessness. I,
like many readers, eagerly devoured the news of the Scripals – every contradiction,
reframing, new bit of evidence. It's fair to say I was obsessed. Where are they now? Who
knows? Who asks? I expect the same here. Another step on our downward path, to be preempted
by yet another.
The best one can say is that with every one of these "incidents" we all become a little
less sure of our old assumptions, more skeptical. Leading where?
The most dangerous bit of theater involving sanctions initiated by the Trump administration
continues to focus on Iran. Last week, the White House elevated its extreme pressure on the
Iranians by engaging in a completely irrational sanctioning of Iranian Foreign Minister
Mohammad Javad Zarif. The sanctions will have no effect whatsoever and they completely
contradict Donald Trump's repeated assertion that he is seeking diplomacy to resolving the
conflict with Iran. One doesn't accomplish that by sanctioning the opposition's Foreign
Minister. Also, the Iranians have received the message loud and clear that the threats coming
from Washington have nothing to do with nuclear programs. The White House began its sanctions
regime over a year ago when it withdrew from the JCPOA and they have been steadily increasing
since that time even though Iran has continued to be fully compliant with the agreement.
Recently, the US took the unprecedented step of sanctioning the entire Iranian Revolutionary
Guard Corps, which is part of the nation's military.
American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has made clear that the sanctions on Iran are
intended to cause real pain, which, in fact, they have succeeded in doing. Pompeo and his
accomplice in crime National Security Advisor John Bolton believe that enough pressure will
motivate the starving people to rise up in the streets and overthrow the government, an
unlikely prospect as the American hostility has in fact increased popular support for the
regime.
To be sure, ordinary people in Iran have found that they cannot obtain medicine and some
types of food are in short supply but they are not about to rebel. The sanctioning in May of
Iranian oil exports has only been partially effective but it has made the economy shrink, with
workers losing jobs. The sanctions have also led to tit-for-tat seizures of oil and gas
tankers, starting with the British interception of a ship carrying Iranian oil to Syria in
early July.
Another bizarre escalation in sanctions that has taken place lately relates to the Skripal
case in Britain. On August 2 nd , Donald Trump
signed an executive order imposing a package of new sanctions against Moscow over the
alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in England in March
2018. The order "prohibit[s] any United States bank from making any loan or providing any
credit except for loans or credits for the purpose of purchasing food or other agricultural
commodities or products." The ban also includes "the extension of any loan or financial or
technical assistance by international financial institutions," meaning that international
lenders will also be punished if they fail to follow Washington's lead.
The sanctions were imposed under the authority provided by the US
Chemical and Biological Weapons Control and Warfare Elimination Act adopted in 1991, which
imposes penalties for use of chemical weapons. Novichok, which was reportedly used on the
Skripals, is a chemical weapon developed in the labs of the Soviet Union, though a number of
states are believed to currently have supplies of the agent in their arsenals. Russia can
appeal the sanctions with 90 days by providing "reliable assurance" that it will not again use
chemical weapons.
Russia has strenuously denied any role in the attack on the Skripals and the evidence that
has so far been produced to substantiate the Kremlin's involvement has been less than
convincing. An initial package of US-imposed sanctions against Russia that includes the export
of sensitive technologies and some financial services was implemented in August 2018.
Venezuela is also under the sanctions gun and is a perfect example how sanctions can
escalate into something more punitive, leading incrementally to an actual state of war. Last
week Washington expanded its sanctions regime, which is already causing starvation in parts of
Venezuela, to include what amounts to a complete
economic embargo directed against the Maduro regime that is being enforced by a naval
blockade.
The Venezuelan government
announced last Wednesday that the United States Navy had seized a cargo ship bound for
Venezuela while it was transiting the Panama Canal. According to a government spokesman, the
ship's
cargo was soy cakes intended for the production of food. As one of Washington's raisons
d'etre for imposing sanctions on Caracas was that government incompetence was starving the
Venezuelan people, the move to aggravate that starvation would appear to be somewhat capricious
and revealing of the fact that the White House could care less about what happens to the
Venezuelan civilians who are caught up in the conflict.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodriguez
condemned the move as "serious aggression," and accused the Trump Administration of trying
to impede Venezuela's basic right to import food to feed its people.
One of the most pernicious aspects of the sanctions regimes that the United States is
imposing is that they are global. When Washington puts someone on its sanctions list, other
countries that do not comply with the demands being made are also subject to punishment,
referred to as secondary sanctions. The sanctions on Iran's oil exports, for example, are being
globally enforced with some few exceptions, and any country that buys Iranian oil will be
punished by being denied access to the US financial and banking system. That is a serious
penalty as most international trade and business transactions go through the dollar denominated
SWIFT banking network.
Finally, nothing illustrates the absurdity of the sanctions mania as a recent report that
President Trump had
sent his official hostage negotiator Robert O'Brien to Stockholm to obtain freedom for an
American rap musician ASAP Rocky who was in jail after having gotten into a fight with some
local boys. The Trumpster did not actually know the lad, but he was vouched for by the likes of
Kim Kardashian and Kanye West, both of whom have had nice things to say about the president.
The negotiator was instructed to tell Sweden that if they did not release Rocky there would be
"negative consequences." Who can doubt that the consequences would undoubtedly have included
sanctions?
It has reached the point where the only country that likes the United States is Israel,
which is locked into a similar cycle of incessant aggression. To be sure Donald Trump's
rhetoric is part of the problem, but the indiscriminate, illegal and immoral use of sanctions,
which punish whole nations for the presumed sins of those nations' leaders, is a major
contributing factor. And the real irony is that even though sanctions cause pain, they are
ineffective. Cuba has been under sanctions, technically and embargo, since 1960 and its ruling
regime has not collapsed, and there is no chance that Venezuela, Iran or Russia's government
will go away at any time soon either. In fact, real change would be more likely if Washington
were to sit down at a negotiating table with countries that it considers enemies and work to
find solutions to common concerns. But that is not likely to happen with the current White
House line-up, and equally distant with a Democratic Party obsessed with the "Russian threat"
and other fables employed to explain its own failings.
Mueller Dragnet Snags Ex-Clintonista, Obama Lawyer
Greg Craig took money from a pro-Russian regime, just like jailed ex-Trump aide Paul Manafort. Welcome to the
swamp.
By
Barbara Boland
•
August 15, 2019
U.S. President Barack Obama (R) greets White House counsel Gregory Craig (L) during an event on January 21,
2009.(Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election has snagged its first high-profile
Democrat: Gregory Craig, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton during his impeachment and Barack Obama's
first White House counsel.
In a trial expected to last two weeks, a jury will hear how the former partner of the
prestigious Washington firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP allegedly made false statements to the U.S.
government and concealed the extent of his work for the pro-Russian Ukrainian regime. Due to a delay over jury
selection, opening arguments are
expected
to begin Friday.
The case against Craig is the latest in a series of prosecutions arising from the Department of Justice's revamped
enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which requires people to make fairly extensive disclosures if
they engage in political or quasi-political activities on behalf of foreign governments or officials. Almost all
high-profile cases against unregistered foreign agents in the last two years have stemmed from Mueller's investigation.
Previously, the law had been lightly enforced.
Mueller's probe led to FARA charges against Paul Manafort and his deputy Rick Gates. The charges against Manafort
stem from work he did on behalf of President Viktor Yanukovych and his pro-Russia party. Mueller's team convicted
Manafort, Gates, and former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn. Manafort received a seven and a half year
sentence for conspiracy and financial crimes, some of it related to his work for Yanukovych.
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With Craig, "the Justice Department is going after some high-profile scalps,"
says
Matthew T. Sanderson, a
defense lawyer who specializes in foreign lobbying cases for the law firm Caplin and Drysdale.
Prosecutors say Craig was engaged by the Ukrainian regime to conduct an independent inquiry into the fairness of
former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's 2011 conviction, with the hopes of quelling international concerns that it was
politically motivated by then-president and rival Yanukovych.
Manafort was also working with the regime to improve Yanukovych's image. Craig's law firm received $4.6 million for
his work.
After Craig briefed American journalists on the report, Manafort effusively praised him in an email.
"Well done," wrote Manafort to Craig. Officials in Kiev "are especially happy with the way the media is playing it.
You are 'THE MAN.'"
Journalists who published stories citing Craig's work would not have known that he had been paid to write the report
by a Ukrainian operative, as prosecutors now claim. Craig insists that he only discussed the document after it had
become public to "correct misinformation," according to court filings.
"I never discussed the findings of our report with any U.S. officials and certainly did not lobby any U.S. officials
on behalf of Ukraine," Craig said in a
statement
proclaiming his innocence. "I did not help Ukraine promote its spin when it released our report."
If journalists had known that the report had been paid for by Tymoshenko's rivals, it would have affected media
coverage, points out Ben Freeman, director of the Foreign Influence Transparency Initiative at the Center for
International Policy.
According to the indictment, although the report concluded that the evidence presented at Tymoshenko's trial
supported her conviction, in a memo for his own files, Craig wrote that the evidence against her was "virtually non
existent."
Craig backdated a letter and invoice to hide who had really paid for the report, which aided the Ukrainian
government's lies about its cost, prosecutors wrote in a 22-page indictment filed in April.
"I don't want to register as a foreign agent under FARA. I think we don't have to with this assignment, yes?" Craig
wrote
to another partner in the firm on February 13, 2012, reports
Bloomberg
.
In response to a partner's suggestion that another lawyer at the firm could decide whether he should register, Craig
wrote, "I don't really care who you ask but we need an answer from someone who we can rely on with a straight face."
Firms that take clients from countries with human rights abuses and other public relations difficulties don't appear
to have trouble attracting other clients, but they do charge a premium for that work, according to Freeman.
"Normally, if a Washington firm is going to write a report about a country, they can't get $4 million for it,"
Freeman says. "But a report written for someone who is friends with Vladimir Putin is going to cost more money."
Craig flouted FARA's reporting requirements and did not register because he did not want to limit his future career
prospects, according to prosecutors.
The idea that registering as a foreign agent is a stigma, a "scarlet letter" that will prevent agents from getting
other work, certainly prevails in Washington, "but the fact of the matter is, there's nearly 2,000 registered foreign
agents walking the streets of America," says Freeman. "They're not exactly a rare breed, and a lot of the firms that
work for foreign governments also work for domestic clients. They're lobbying for big American businesses too."
A big reason companies may prefer to register under the Lobbying Disclosure Act, as opposed to FARA, is that the
latter requires significantly more disclosure. With FARA, agents need to list the member's offices they visited,
everyone they spoke to, the days they met, and what issues were discussed -- and that's a lot of additional work, says
Freeman.
In January, Skadden agreed to register under FARA and pay a $4.6 million fine, an amount that equals what it paid for
the Ukraine report. Craig left the firm in April 2018.
The DOJ's renewed interest in investigating and prosecuting FARA crimes may make Washington insiders think twice
about concealing what foreign interests they represent. FARA registrations jumped 46 percent from 2016 to 2017, the year
after Mueller was appointed special counsel and former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's home was raided.
"I think the Craig case and the other cases like it change the calculus for folks who work for foreign entities or
are doing this type of lobbying and PR work," says Freeman. "It sends a clear message that if you're at all uncertain if
you should register under FARA, it behooves you to play it safe."
Barbara Boland is
's foreign policy and national security reporter. Follow her
on Twitter
@BBatDC.
KIEV: Ukraine 's gas transport company
Ukrtransgaz has upgraded several gas pumping stations so it can provide gas to eastern and
southern regions of the country if there is a disruption in supply from Russia, the company
said on Wednesday.
More than a third of Russia's gas exports to the European Union cross
Ukraine, providing Kiev with valuable transit income.
Ukraine traditionally uses some of the gas pumped by Russia to European consumers for its
own needs in eastern and central regions and then compensates for this by deliveries from gas
storage located in the west of the country.
But the Russia-Ukraine gas transit agreement is due to expire in January and Ukrainian
energy authorities are worried that Moscow could stop gas supplies
through Ukraine, leaving some Ukrainian regions without gas in winter.
"As of today, Ukrtransgaz has implemented all the necessary technical and regulatory
solutions to create a reliable reverse scheme and it is ready for regular operation and can be
activated immediately if necessary," Uktransgaz said in a statement.
It said Ukraine had already reversed gas flows in 2009 when Russian gas giant Gazprom halted gas
supplies to Ukrainian consumers because of a price dispute.
Last month, Russian energy minister and several sources said Russia wanted to strike a
short-term deal with Kiev on gas transit to Europe when the current 10-year agreement expires
to buy time to complete pipelines that will bypass Ukraine.
But Kiev and its European allies want guarantees that Ukraine will remain a transit route
for Russian gas to Europe.
In January, European Commission Vice President Maros Sefcovic floated a proposal for the two
countries to agree a new 10-year transit contract, with a guaranteed minimum yearly transit
volume of 60 bcm and 30 bcm of additional flexibility.
Ukraine's energy firm Naftogaz said last month Kiev was still counting on Sefcovic's
proposal.
The potential for problems with the transit agreement, which brings Kiev around $3 billion
revenue per year, prompted Ukraine to increase its winter gas reserves by 18% compared with
last year to 20 billion cubic meters (bcm).
Naftogaz said this week Ukraine had stored 16.6 bcm of gas by Aug. 10, up from 13.38 bcm at
the same time last year.
Ukraine consumed 32.3 bcm of gas in 2018, 10.6 bcm of which was imported from European
markets outside Russia.
Relations between Kiev and Moscow plummeted after Russia's annexation of Ukraine's Crimea
peninsula in 2014.
Ukraine halted its own purchases of Russian gas in 2015.
Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019
Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they
know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might
know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his
2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.
We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow.
"Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long
Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last
until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."
Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up
this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that
article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility
is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."
"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is
four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western
media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"
The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying
English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When
asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter
in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire
is a hysterectomy!"
We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa
said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids
but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a
playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central
America and Mexico."
Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know
what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal,
my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made
with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"
Grandpa Putin Loses Another Bet
TrueStory Gazette, Aug. 2019
Several anonymous, unverified, and possibly non-existent sources announced today that they
know, might know, or could possibly have heard from unknown others, who they suspect might
know or could have reasonably speculated that Vladimir Putin lost a bet he made with his
2-year old grandson, Vladimir, Jr.
We caught up with the young Putin as he emerged from his daycare school in central Moscow.
"Yes, he said, it is true. Grandpa lost the bet we made last week. We wagered about how long
Western media could cling to even a microcosm of credibility. Grandpa said it would last
until the end of this year, but I bet him that it would be gone much sooner than that."
Two-year old Putin, who is an avid reader of Moon of Alabama, said that when he woke up
this morning he read the latest article. He said, "I just rubbed Grandpa's face into that
article. He shrieked. He was so embarrassed. He had to admit that western media's credibility
is already totally kaput, not even a shred of credibility left, zero."
"Now Grandpa is the laughing stock of my daycare center. One of my classmates, who is
four, said 'how could your Grandpa be so dumb. Even a two-year old could see that western
media's credibility is in the dumpster. Your Grandpa is such a loser!'"
The young Putin, who stands only up to our reporter's waist, said that he is studying
English but still struggles with difficult words like "history." But he is not shy. When
asked what was the prevailing political view at his childcare center, he looked our reporter
in the eye, raised both fists, and loudly proclaimed, "All of us kids agree that U.S. Empire
is a hysterectomy!"
We asked Vladimir, Jr. about the stakes of his bet, what did he win? He said, "Grandpa
said I could have a place called Camp Pendleton in California to make a playground for kids
but I will have to wait a little while until he acquires it. I'm going to make it a
playground for Russian and American kids and we also will invite all of the kids from Central
America and Mexico."
Asked if he knew that Camp Pendleton was a U.S. military base, he replied, "I don't know
what it is now, but it's going to be a great playground for kids." And he added, "Look Pal,
my Grandpa loses lots of times. He loses his keys and his wallet and every bet he ever made
with me. But one thing about Grandpa, he ALWAYS KEEPS HIS PROMISES!"
"... “It would be contrary to our interests to give Moscow the impression,” Nixon wrote, “that we are prepared to help only as long as Russia remains on its knees. Russia is a great country that deserves to be treated with appropriate respect.” ..."
"... Nixon was either lying or was outright delusional. The collective West can not operate in terms of friendship. The only motive behind any western foreign policy has always been to gain absolute power with no limits or borders. It happens that Russia is viewed as the only nation that can stop that western culture of domination and offer a multi polar world order, respected national sovereignty and mutual trust. Therefore the animosity towards Russia is inevitable, no matter what, as long as Russia exists. Any other view is a sort of wishful thinking. ..."
"... The constantly escalated lie of America about Russia's aggression is needed to knock out 2% of the military budget from satellites for the purchase of actually American weapons, to support the American military industrial complex. ..."
"... Russia enjoys escalation dominance in its own sphere, all the way up to the use of nukes in defense. America cannot possibly justify using that same kind of escalation, which means America will be the first to blink and then withdraw. ..."
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton openly sided with opposition groups in Russia and expressed sympathy with mass anti-government
demonstrations whose organizers made no secret of their objective to remove Putin from power. In March 2011, Vice President Joe Biden
told Russian opposition leaders that it would be "bad for the country and for himself" if Putin attempted to run for president the
following year, according to the later murdered Putin critic Boris Nemtsov. I have spoken with people who were present at Biden's
meeting with the Russian opposition, and there was no question in their mind that Biden fully intended to pressure Putin not to run
again. Biden and Clinton were not acting out of turn; the Obama administration put its money where its mouth was, giving millions
of dollars to political opposition groups in Russia. Today, leading Democrats are demanding that Russia refrain from intervening
in the 2020 elections, but what implications do such demands have for America's own willingness to take sides in Russian political
disputes?
... ... ..
Last but not least, we must be willing to be clear that we are not beholden to shaping American policy exclusively to align with
the whims of our allies. Relationships between former iron curtain states are remarkably complex and fraught with centuries of painful
history, making them prone to conflict with one another. It is precisely these parochial European conflicts which George Washington
strongly advised against being involved in, stating in his farewell address that America should be wary of entangling, "our peace
and prosperity in the toils of European ambition, rivalship, interest, humor, or caprice."
WASHINGTON ALSO spoke about those, "ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens," who become so enamored with the causes of their
favorite countries that they not only lose perspective of American interests, but are even prepared to accuse those who disagree
with them of a lack of patriotism and, in modern times, of being a Putin lackey. One does not need to be a supporter of President
Trump to understand that these pseudo-patriots do not serve American interests or American values well. In April 2019, 73 percent
of the Ukrainian people rejected President Petro Poroshenko, who ran on a nationalist, anti-Russian platform. While few American
and European experts were willing to acknowledge that the Poroshenko government was corrupt, inept, and, according to Ukrainian media,
willing to use money to influence the American political process, they were suddenly willing to make such pronouncements as soon
as the election results were solidified. America cannot allow the designation of an "ally" to make any states immune from disagreement
or criticism. When the stakes are as high as nuclear war, America cannot afford to conduct foreign policy based on the whims of its
domestic constituencies or the sentiments of those very "deluded" citizens about whom Washington warned.
Great American presidents of the past knew how to be loyal allies, but to do it in a calibrated and deliberative fashion. President
Dwight D. Eisenhower fully understood the importance of the transatlantic alliance, having fought to preserve it in World War II,
yet in 1956 he refused to support Britain and France during the Suez Crisis when doing so went against America’s national interest.
Similarly, despite being a genuine friend to Israel, Ronald Reagan was willing to condemn it for going overboard in Lebanon in 1982.
But today, to suggest that America is not obliged to support with blood and treasure the actions of our allies and friends is considered
morally unacceptable. That is why whenever Baltic states, Georgia and Ukraine have any disagreement with Russia, America automatically
denounces Russia as the aggressor, regardless of the historical background, geopolitical context, and even, as in the case of Russia’s
war with Georgia in 2008, who attacked whose troops first.
America and Russia appear unlikely to resolve their hostilities any time soon. America has a long tradition of standing tall and
being prepared to be ruthless in the defense of its interests, but also in being careful not to unnecessarily entangle itself in
the conflicts of others. If the United States starts treating Putin’s Russia like it is Hitler’s Germany, moves from supporting Ukrainian
and Georgian sovereignty to encouraging these states to conduct hostile policies towards Moscow, and strengthens NATO’s military
position in the Baltics, Russia may feel confronted by an existential threat.
Dimitri K. Simes, publisher and CEO of the National Interest, is president of the Center for the National Interest.
“It would be contrary to our interests to give Moscow the impression,” Nixon wrote, “that we are prepared to help only
as long as Russia remains on its knees. Russia is a great country that deserves to be treated with appropriate respect.”
Nixon was either lying or was outright delusional. The collective West can not operate in terms of friendship. The only
motive behind any western foreign policy has always been to gain absolute power with no limits or borders. It happens that Russia
is viewed as the only nation that can stop that western culture of domination and offer a multi polar world order, respected national
sovereignty and mutual trust. Therefore the animosity towards Russia is inevitable, no matter what, as long as Russia exists.
Any other view is a sort of wishful thinking.
To save us all from the nuclear catastrophe it is important to remember what Putin once said:
""We are not interested in the world without Russia" (c)
The constantly escalated lie of America about Russia's aggression is needed to knock out 2% of the military budget from
satellites for the purchase of actually American weapons, to support the American military industrial complex. This lie began
with the already proven European aggression of Georgia against South Ossetia. And the RETURN of the Crimea during the anarchy
arranged by America coup in Ukraine. America uses Goebbels propaganda.
Part of the problem is that the establishment Republicans got heady beginning in the early 1990s, thinking that America is
omnipotent and can always get its way in the world. Nowhere was this sentiment stronger than the business elite. This arrogance
continues in our foreign policy with those like John Bolton who figure that firepower is always the answer. The good news is that
this sentiment peaked during the George W. Bush years, when Iraq taught the lesson that solutions are often not quick-and-easy.
I think the proper title of the article should be "Russia continue to be delusional about Ukraine"
Dimitri's is the perfect example of how Russian propaganda wants to cast events in the Ukraine: " In April 2019, 73 percent
of the Ukrainian people rejected President Petro Poroshenko, who ran on a nationalist, anti-Russian platform "
While it is obvious Ukrainians showed Poroshenko the location of the exit door, the main reason was not his so-called anti-Russian
nationalistic platform, but corruption and inability to accelerate necessary reforms.
If the resentment against so called nationalism and anti-Russian policies were material, then the pro-Russian block will have
significantly more votes than it managed to gain.
Dmitri here follows Russian dogma and equates pro Ukrainian to anti Russian. Any move in Ukraine to advance Ukrainian language,
history and culture - in a sense a sort of affirmative action policy - equates to anti Russian nationalism.
And this delusion needed to be fixed in order for Russia to be able to start moving back towards normalcy in relationship with
its neighbors.
Volo, you don't know how public perception works - if you pour dirt on somebody who has wide respect and sound reputation -
it backfires. By badmouthing Dimitri Simes you basically show how foolish you are. You may not feel like it in your little make-believe
Ukranian banderite world - but this is how it is in reality.
Besides, Volo, we both know you're Poroshenko supporter and you supported him because of his nationalistic anti-Russian stance.
So why pretend he's out because he's inefficient manager? Also, there is a so-called Fallacy of a Single Cause, which you seem
to follow. Obviously, there were many reasons for Poroshenko's fall, yet chief among them being ultra-nationalism and administrative
ineptitude
Yeap, educate yourself on the list of
logical fallacies . As I've said, I'm glad I'm a good influence on you
"And this delusion needed to be fixed in order for Russia to be able to start moving back towards normalcy in relationship
with its neighbors."
You can't have normalcy when Ukraine is still ruled on the streets by armed facist ultra-nationalist scumbags. Once these criminals
are disarmed and jailed awaiting trial then normalcy will have a chance.
Seriously?! You really not see the reality... you swallow everything Putin told you... take time and learn a bit about history,
stop to be the little good soldier and became a human!
Yes, seriously. The armed nationalists are a damngerous force in Ukraine and the elected politicans are quite rightly scared
of these radicals. People die in Ukraine if they speak out openly against the Nationalist militants, ask Oles Buzina... oh wait,
we can't cuz they killed him.
Speaking out against the Ukro nationalists in 2019 is like speaking out against the Russian mafia in the 90s and 00s. It's
a great way to get yourself killed.
"Russia’s grievances, real or imagined, are not justifications for the United States abandoning the pursuit of its own
interest and allowing Russian domination of Eurasia.
But the United States has no legitimate interests in the former Soviet Union. For the US to think otherwise is to be power
drunk and blinded by imperial greed.
It scares to me see that so many of my ignorant countrymen in America seem to have a sense of manifest destiny regarding the
former Soviet land mass. This myopic America policy is going to lead to disaster for the US. That's because Russia enjoys
escalation dominance in its own sphere, all the way up to the use of nukes in defense. America cannot possibly justify using that
same kind of escalation, which means America will be the first to blink and then withdraw.
It is amusing how Banderites always blame others for their own failures and utter irrelevance. You violently siezed Ukraine
and proceeded to make a slaughterhouse and a basket-case out of her, but its always someone elses fault... what a good little
empty-headed stormtrooper for Empire you are....
The author likes to write about US "defense of its interests" but what about when those "interests" are in direct opposition
to the real interests of the nations and peoples in those distant lands? Why should the self-declared and often selfish desires
of the US elites be used as justification for political, financial or outright military aggression? Are we really going to accept
law-of-the-jungle in global relations where the strong & wealthy get to attack the weak & impoverished simply because doing so
is ostensibly in their "interests"? A burglar ransacks your house while you're out and kills your dog in the process cuz its in
his "interest', but that doesn't make it OK.
Somewhere we need to accept that morality and ethics should be the primary guide as to how we interact with others. Unfortunately
the US elites have long since abandoned any such constraints or considerations as they aren't really compatible with building
a global hegemony and crushing all resistance to their rule.
"Putin is not blindly militaristic, but always considers the consequences of his actions, even if he has not always managed
to anticipate them correctly (as was the case with Russian interference in U.S. elections)."
"Russia’s interference in the American political process was serious and real"
Gimmee a break.... Russian "interference".... The author feels the need to insert this debunked shibboleth into his article?
Surely there isn't a free-thinking individual alive who still belives this hogwash?
Yeah, he did. Biden bragged about it. Stop this "Russia's paranoia" nonsense, you keep on clinging to it until it's proven
to be truth in some memoir of an ex-cia chief or US offical. Just like with NATO not expanding that was portrayed as a myth until
it appeared they really promised it to Gorbachev.
America and its European allies supported the ousting of Yanukovych in 2014
It was a lot more than simple "support". The U.S., led by State Department Nitwit Vulgarian Victoria Nuland and her barrel
of CIA monkeys directly organized and enabled the Maidan coup debacle. All the U.S. had to do was wait for the next presidential
election in Ukraine. But no, the Global Cop Gorilla had to stick its fat greasy thumb into someone else's soup yet again.
And the Russians knew that following the ham-fisted coup the U.S. would direct its new puppet President in Ukraine to eject
them from their historic naval base in Sevastopol that Russia had occupied for more than 200 years. Ironically, no U.S. facilitated
coup, no annexation of Crimea.
The Global Cop Gorilla wrecks everything that it touches. The one perverse benefit of the Trump presidency is that U.S. foreign
policy pathology is now so visible to the rest of the planet
"At the next revolution, the present rulers would either give up power peacefully or follow the fate of Chaushesqu or Qaddafi."
You mean Russians want NATO to bomb Moscow so that Russian people could get the honor of being sold on the slave markets like
Libyan people are today?
https://www.reuters.com/art...
Qaddafi is indeed a cautionary tale, just not the one you think it is.
Much of that crap appears to be Projection.
Putin's Polices Destroying Russian Farmers will probably be next since as you'll learn
once you click that it's the exact opposite. It looks quite possible that the opening up of
ag lands in Russia's Far East will see China cease its imports of soybeans from the Western
Hemisphere as it's already done so in response to Trump's Trade War. As the article notes:
"Net farm income in America has plunged by nearly half over the last five years from
$123.4 billion in 2013 to $63 billion last year. It plummeted by 16 percent last year
alone."
And with China's market closed, the result this year will be even worse. And it's all
Putin's fault!
And to make matters worse, Putin has weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's budget deficit,
forcing it to spend "more than twice as fast as tax collections" and now stands at $867
Billion through "the first 10 months of the budget year." (No link, from Business section
of today's newspaper.) IMO, that will be headlined as: Putin Loses Control Over Russia's
Budget as Deficit Skyrockets!
It's this one most of us are hopeful of reading soon:
Yes, we're in rich psychological terrain. Aberrant terrain, to the extent such things
can be extrapolated to system behavior.
It's a psychological projection. The Full Spectrum Dominance crowd feels their quest
receding into permanent incompletion. So they wishfully project their sense of loss onto
the opponent. Wanting everything, dominance perceives alternate visions as being nothing
less than obstinate escapees. Who knew they were in a figmentary prison in the first place?
Competing visions, through no real fault of their own, become weapon pointed at this
totalizing vision. Heck, they're not even competing. They're just living.
Dominance's blind spot is that it never stops to ask if others want to be dominated.
This makes it structurally myopic and prone to self-deception.
The same psychology is found in the sanctioning impulse. "In order to preserve our sense
of omnipotence, we hereby subtract you from the game board." But pariah nations, while
perhaps vanishing psychologically to the offended party ('you're dead to me now') don't
vanish in any existential sense. They re-gather under different umbrellas: SCO, OBOR, AIIB,
etc.
Too many subtractions and the subtractees acquire a critical mass all their own.
Subtraction adds up. There is an opportunity here to exploit the Empire's irrational
denialism -via the rational accumulation of estranged and heretofore 'banished'
interests.
One day, the lesser critical mass will achieve parity, then dominance or perhaps simply
multipolarity. Before that day, a ruinous world war could happen first. This latter
decision has already been taken since pre-kinetic versions of WW3 are popping up everywhere
at once as though instigated by some spanning Hidden Hand.
Putin is the Emmanuel Goldstein of the Neoliberal World Order, every bad decision, every
mistake, every failure, especially the ones that were obviously flawed from the start, are
the results of that dastardly Putin. It's amazing how in the Empire of the Lies, a
competent political leader of a sovereign country is becoming a Lex Luthor like
supervillain mastermind.
It's almost romantic that these Western elites spend so much time high up in their ivory
towers surrounded by the wastelands of their own making, clutching their pearls, thinking
about Putin and wondering how he will get to them.
We should note that Obama was the first to announce Putin would fail in Syria when the
Russians came to help out the Assad government against the US backed Takfaris. The results
of Russian support were quite spectacular. Of course, the war is still going on but there
is no question that Russia saved the Syrian state. Can anyone mention a single military
victory that the US has achieved since what? Grenada under Reagan and Bush I against Panama
?? Other than those two "victories" the US has lost every war it has engaged in since the
end of WWII.
It gets confusing, but that is the point of all this.
We should be scared of our hero, tragic anti-hero, uber villain and rolemodel.
Not just Russians under the bed, but THE Russian under the bed.
Or so many a lady (or not, as the case may be) might wish or be fearful of or both...
(In other news: Epstein dead? Highly unlikely, ever so doubtful, I do side with Aangirfan
on this)
I especially like how Putin lost in Crimea. One of his best losses, in my opinion.
Also, Masha and the Bear , Russia's
ultimate weapon in the war for the minds of the Western youth, continues its march across
the globe: the "Маша
плюс каша" episode is at 4.08 billion
views ( 4th most-viewed video on
YouTube ) and growing fast, set to overtake Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again" (4.20
billion) and Ed Sheeran's "Shape of You" (4.35 billion) in the coming weeks.
@Bemildred #10: What a great piece by Patrick Armstrong. Very logical and rational. Perfect
for deprogramming people brainwashed by the Mockingbird Media.
How much more do the lobotomized American Sheeple (generally not represented in this forum)
need to realize that the mainstream "news" media are the propaganda arms of the western
(Anglo-Zionist) power structure?
"Let us be clear here. It is the United States who has broken its word and treaties
consistently. We said we wouldn't move NATO up to Russia's borders and then we did. We
unilaterally walked away from the ABM treaty, we unilaterally walked away from the Iran
nuclear deal, we unilaterally walked away from the INF treaty and we will almost certainly
walk away from the nuclear test ban treaty. We always allege violations from the other side
but never provide any proof of said violations. The United States has invaded Afghanistan,
Iraq, Libya, and Syria - so far without consequences. The United States has fomented coups
in Ukraine (twice), Georgia, probably in Brazil, Venezuela (twice) - again, without
consequences. And people wonder why I gag when I listen to Pompous pontificate that Iran
needs to start acting like a normal nation."
Posted by: Jeff | Aug 13 2019 17:03 utc | 43
Clear, concise, and right on target. Should be on a handbill, and passed out to the
general public. Thanks Jeff!!
Breaking News : Putin has a private army now. How devilish. CNN is definitely a bunch of
clowns, that makes you laugh everytime they talk. Enjoy this one:
@JW #40
To be fair, the US has a fantastic record of f***ing up countries with aerial bombs. The part
which the Saudis failed to understand is that the US isn't next to any of these countries...
Yemen has a population slightly lower than Texas. Imagine, Washington bombing Texas, only
filled with Texans that have more and heavier weapons(?).
The question mark is because I am not entirely certain that Yemenis are more heavily armed
than Texans, but certainly they're at least as fierce defending themselves.
Wow, that is an outstanding tour d'horizon from Magnier you linked. This is a
keeper to show others who may be amenable to learning about today's Middle East balance of
forces, and how it has been arrived at.
Succinct yet very comprehensive, the piece not only catches up the histories of recent
years, but provides an analysis of today and the near-to-mid-term future - both military and
geopolitical. It speaks of the various lessons learned along the way, including the lessons
being absorbed in real time today as the confrontation between Iran and the US has barely yet
begun and yet racked up totally instructive scores.
The new war is essentially economic; it is a war of sanctions and limiting free movement of
ship movements around the globe. It is a war of tankers and oil platforms. It is a
starvation war where no one can threaten the enemy with a return to the "stone age"
because the firepower is now universally available . Yemen is the best example: the
threat of bombing Dubai forced the Emirates to seek Iranian mediation to prevent a missile
attack against them. The Houthis, despite years of Saudi bombing of Yemen, have also
managed to bomb Saudi airports, military bases and oil stations in the heart of Saudi
Arabia, using cruise missiles and armed drones. [My emphasis]
And Hezbolllah has cemented its standing with nations in the region, expanded its skill
from guerrilla and small-theater to nation-size theater, and this:
It has run intensive courses in the use of its drones, used its precision missiles with
accuracy, produced thousands of highly trained Special Forces and it has fought an enemy
(al-Qaeda) that is much more motivated to fight to the death than any Israeli Special
Forces units. [My emphasis]
Israel is essentially paralyzed. Even to the extent, as Magnier relates, of being careful
to warn Hezbollah drivers before bombing its supply trucks, because "Israel wanted to
avoid human casualties among Hezbollah officers, fully aware of the price of
retaliation. " My emphasis again.
The bad guys have fallen behind - as we know, but as Magnier illustrates so clearly in
this appraisal, with his review of the initial western strategies just a few years ago and
how they have all been rendered null. Even the US now is an antique target for modern missile
and drone technology - and the battle-hardened skill with these weapons definitely resides
with the Levant axis rather than with the imperialists and their dogs.
The future? This:
Gaza, along with Beirut, Damascus and Baghdad, are all highly equipped by Tehran with
sufficient missiles to inflict real damage on Israel and on US forces deployed in the
Middle East. Israel is playing around by targeting various objectives tactically but with
no real strategic purpose- only for Netanyahu to keep himself busy and train his Air Force,
and to gain publicity in the media. Soon, when Syria recovers and Iraq is stronger, the
Israeli promenade will have to cease. Hezbollah in Lebanon may also find a way in the near
future to keep its irregular but organised army busy by firing anti-air missiles against
Israeli jets and imposing new rules of engagement.
The U.S. Needs More Nukes: Russian cheating requires a strong response.
By Bret Stephens
AMS
Connecticut
August 10
Times Pick
Something like 38 years ago, Edward Teller published an opinion in the Times likening
increases in American nuclear weapons to installing seatbelts in cars (if I recall
correctly). My letter in opposition to teller was published not long afterward. I was a young
graduate student then; now I am approaching retirement. But again I must write in opposition
as we enter a new Cold War. More than enough is more than enough, as it always has been.
There was no bomber gap, and no missile gap, and we knew it (read Daniel Ellsberg for
details). There has never been a need for overkill. It is past time to stop.
Why is there surprise when some "loner" in America shoots up dozens of innocents?
Mass murder takes the place of the Circus Maximus' gladiators.
I served in USAF strategic defensive and offensive missions from early seventies through
early 80's, continued as a reserve officer and civil servant in technology acquisitions
through 20 teens.
I was somewhat familiar with the need and working of the INF treaty. It was a relief! A
step toward reduced fear.
I agree with the strongest opposition to a new cold war.
What kind of mind would order the kind of mass murder available from strategic and
intermediate range nuclear weapons? What purpose could justify the end of civilization? What
arcane image of defense?
I am eternally grateful and repentant that we never had to do our "jobs"!
In the early 1980's Catholic Bishops warned American Catholics about the immorality of
nuclear weapons ...... too many of us ignored them.
'The so-called logic of deterrence is clear:
It is necessary to have nuclear weapons and
be willing to use them, precisely so that
they will not be used. But is that morally
acceptable?
Deterrence has worked so far, but that's
no guarantee it will go on working forever.' ...
"We are at the limit of what is licit." In early December, Pope Francis offered that
assessment of nuclear deterrence during a question and answer session with reporters on the
plane back to Rome from Bangladesh.
A month before, the pope had suggested strongly that the "limit" already had been
exceeded. "The threat of their (nuclear weapons') use, as well as their very possession, is
firmly to be condemned," he said in a message to a Vatican-sponsored conference on nuclear
disarmament.
This wasn't the first time a pope has challenged the morality of nuclear deterrence. In a
message to the United Nations General Assembly in 1982, Pope John Paul II granted only a
grudging interim toleration to deterrence ("may still be judged morally acceptable") as a
stage on the way to the total elimination of nuclear weapons.
The American bishops relied on that judgment of conditional, temporary toleration of
deterrence in their 1983 collective pastoral letter, "The Challenge of Peace."
But it's now 35 years since St. John Paul delivered his judgment and the bishops repeated
it, and Pope Francis has just raised the moral bar a lot higher.
As well he might. Nuclear disarmament hasn't happened in these 35 years, and now North
Korea has joined the nuclear club, President Trump speaks of using these weapons, and the
U.S. and other nuclear powers are busy modernizing their stockpiles. The countries that now
have nuclear arms are the U.S., Russia, China, Great Britain, France, Israel, India, Pakistan
and North Korea. Several others are in a position to acquire them fairly quickly if they so
desire.
The so-called logic of deterrence is clear: It is necessary to have nuclear weapons and be
willing to use them, precisely so that they will not be used. But is that morally
acceptable?
Deterrence has worked so far, but that's no guarantee it will go on working forever. A
number of documented close calls already have occurred. The recent false alarm concerning a
supposedly imminent missile attack on Hawaii, although not in precisely the same category,
was the latest reminder that it's rolling the dice to assume we will always squeak through.
...
It is reputed that Stanley Kubrick read up on Schelling theory for Strangelove and that
Failsafe did as well. Kubrick got it right; to effect nuclear exchange you need a dark
comedy. Well, the US still has Kissinger spewing ridiculous about Iran rising if we don't
keep the Salafi doing their sidelight terrorizing. So let's keep al Nusra in Idlib!
A lot of nuclear deterrent "logic" comes from Thomas Schelling who had a stint with RAND
working early justification for ICBM's and related HW to do "strategy".
Alternative thought puts most of Schelling's "game theory" and math as lacking logic and
utterly immoral. See Anton Rappaport.
The letter head of Strategic Air Command had "Peace is Our Profession" as a footer The
motto, being 'our job was so terrible we are all for peace".
Now I believe there is no 'dishonorable' peace that can justify nuking anyone.
Schelling theory continues to make a lot of people a lot of money and even helps with
funding star wars as a potential nuclear tie breaker......
We end up spending huge sums on such weaponry
that must never be used, as it is so
horrific. Given the history of the
20th century, that is not such a
bad idea. Maybe cost effective?
One hopes so. Meanwhile, the US has
still chosen to spend huge sums on
less horrific weaponry that is
just as wasteful/unfinished/
undependable, but much
more 'useable'. Not
so cost-effective.
US Officials Suspect New Nuclear Missile in Explosion
That Killed 7 Russians https://nyti.ms/2Ktnz2z
NYT - David E. Sanger and Andrew E. Kramer - August 12
American intelligence officials are racing to understand a mysterious explosion that
released radiation off the coast of northern Russia last week, apparently during the test of
a new type of nuclear-propelled cruise missile hailed by President Vladimir V. Putin as the
centerpiece of Moscow's arms race with the United States.
American officials have said nothing publicly about the blast on Thursday, possibly one of
the worst nuclear accidents in Russia since Chernobyl, although apparently on a far smaller
scale, with at least seven people, including scientists, confirmed dead. But the Russian
government's slow and secretive response has set off anxiety in nearby cities and towns --
and attracted the attention of analysts in Washington and Europe who believe the explosion
may offer a glimpse of technological weaknesses in Russia's new arms program.
Thursday's accident happened offshore of the Nenoksa Missile Test Site and was followed by
what nearby local officials initially reported was a spike in radiation in the
atmosphere.
Late Sunday night, officials at a research institute that had employed five of the
scientists who died confirmed for the first time that a small nuclear reactor had exploded
during an experiment in the White Sea, and that the authorities were investigating the
cause.
Vyacheslav Solovyov, the scientific director of the Russian Federal Nuclear Center, said
in a video interview with a local newspaper that the institute had been studying "small-scale
sources of energy with the use of fissile materials."
But United States intelligence officials have said they suspect the blast involved a
prototype of what NATO calls the SSC-X-9 Skyfall. That is a cruise missile that Mr. Putin has
boasted can reach any corner of the earth because it is partially powered by a small nuclear
reactor, eliminating the usual distance limitations of conventionally fueled missiles.
...
... It has never been clear just how far along Mr. Putin's grand plans for the cruise missile
-- called the 9M730 Burevestnick by the Russians -- had gotten.
A missile-defense review published by the Pentagon -- after careful scrubbing to avoid
signaling to Moscow what American intelligence officials think they know -- notes that
"Russian leaders also claim that Russia possesses a new class of missile" that travels five
times faster than the speed of sound and moves "just above the atmosphere," in an evasive
pattern that would defeat American antimissile technology. But the report made no assessment
of whether they would work.
"I've generally been of the belief that this attempt at developing an unlimited-range
nuclear-powered cruise missile is folly,'' said Ankit Panda, a nuclear expert at the
Federation of American Scientists. "It's unclear if someone in the Russian defense industrial
bureaucracy may have managed to convince a less technically informed leadership that this is
a good idea, but the United States tried this, quickly discovered the limitations and risks,
and abandoned it with good reason."
Ivan Konovalov, director of the Center for Strategic Trends in Moscow and a military
analyst, characterized the experiments underway now as "pioneering" work on a new technology
and fraught with danger.
"When there are tests, anything can happen," he said in a telephone interview.
But for Mr. Putin, facing protests that reveal some public restiveness with his long rule,
the weapons programs have been part of his argument that he is restoring Russia to the
position the Soviet Union held as a great power. ...
BTW, burevestnik is a Russian name for the petrel,
popularized by Maxim Gorky's poem "The Song of the
Stormy Petrel". Petrels are tube-nosed seabirds
in the bird order Procellariiformes. (Wikipedia)
Is this the end of the neoliberal counterrevolution in Argentina ? Moor did its duty moor has
to go -- Macri converted Argentina into the Debt slave again and now to get out of this situation
is nest to impossible.
Argentine president suffers crushing defeat in key primaries ahead of general election
Argentina's President Mauricio Macri suffered a crushing defeat as people voted in party
primaries on Sunday ahead of October's general election.
Given that all of the recession-hit South American country's major parties have already
chosen their presidential candidates, the primaries effectively served as a nationwide
pre-election opinion poll.
Center-left nominee Alberto Fernandez led by around 15 points after partial results were
revealed. Center-right Pro-business Macri admitted it had been "a bad election."
The first round of the presidential election will be held on October 27, with a run-off
– if needed – set for November 24.
With 87 percent of polling station results counted, Fernandez had polled 47.5 percent with
Macri on a little more than 32 percent and centrist former finance minister Roberto Lavagna a
distant third on just 8.3 percent.
Macri had been hoping to earn a second mandate, but his chances appear all but over.
If Fernandez was to register the same result in October, he would be president as
Argentina's electoral law requires a candidate to gain 45 percent for outright victory, or 40
percent and a lead of at least 10 points over the nearest challenger.
Inflation and poverty
"We've had a bad election and that forces us to redouble our efforts from tomorrow," said
Macri, whose popularity has plunged since last year's currency crisis and the much-criticized
56 billion U.S.-dollar bail-out loan he secured from the International Monetary Fund.
"It hurts that we haven't had the support we'd hoped for," he added.
Argentina is currently in a recession and posted 22 percent inflation for the first
half of the year – one of the highest rates in the world. Poverty now affects 32
percent of the population.
Backed by the IMF, Macri has initiated an austerity plan that is deeply unpopular among
ordinary Argentines, who have seen their spending power plummet.
The peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year. The Buenos Aires stock
exchange actually shot up eight percent on Friday amid expectation that Macri would do well
in Sunday's vote.
An important task now is to understand why the IMF assistance to Argentina proved damaging to
the economy from the beginning; the data showed the damage being done. However, there was
almost no mention of the problems that developed outside Argentina and there was surprise
when the failure of the economy was reflected in the serious vote against the current
president.
Of course, Joseph Stiglitz watched the same sort of problems unfold in Argentina almost 20
years ago and was severely criticized for discussing them. How did the problems recur so
readily now? Why is IMF national assistance seemingly so dangerous economically?
This drive is being led by three nations in particular: namely Israel, Saudi Arabia and
America. All three are seeking to portray Iran as the major threat to regional stability. They
are also attempting to paint her as the major sponsor of anti-Western terrorism. This is
particularly laughable, given the fact that not one of the major attacks – that have
killed hundreds across the West in recent decades – can be traced back to her, which
cannot be said for Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E. or Qatar. The truth is that Iran is a major
threat to the regional hegemony of these powers. After Russia, it is principally Iran and her
allies in Hezbollah and the Houthi movement who have prevented the Americans, Israelis and
Saudis from imposing their will upon the region and removing regimes considered hostile to
their interests. At the same time, Iran is weaker than Russia and is probably regarded as a
suitable first target for elimination, after which, deprived of her main regional ally, Russia
might perhaps prove more 'amenable' to Western overtures.
Here in the West, the population, held captive by a deceptive media and a corrupt and
cynical political class, can only watch these developments with the hope that they do not
escalate further. However, if we at least attempt to apply logic and historical precedent to
the situation, we may be able to discern the hidden hands that are stirring tension across the
region. Then, perhaps, we can at least avoid being dragged into yet another foreign war in
defence of somebody else's national interests.
Charlie O'Neill is a freelance writer specialising in History and Geopolitics.
I think the idea that the USA and its few remaining allies are preparing to attack Iran is
laughable. The idea that Saudi Arabia has become a more tolerant society ridiculous. It is
all window-dressing.
The boot is now very much on the other foot. I suspect that Iran carried out the recent
false flags against tankers close to the UAE. They are doing exactly what the USA used to do
in order to initiate a war. They are not going to wait to be suffocated by the ongoing
embargoes and sanctions. It is very much to their advantage to move the date of the
inevitable hostilities forward. I suspect Russia and China are doing all they can to prevent
them from doing so. American bases in the region are hostage to Iran.
The Iranians have made it clear that in the event they are attacked, Israel would be
largely inoperable in 30 minutes. The Israelis have absolutely no ability to withstand any
losses. They have inflicted pain on others for decades and have forgotten what it feels like.
There would be a mass-exodus of the Jewish middle class – who mostly have 2nd
passports.
Qatar, where the biggest US military base in the region is based, is already an ally of
Iran in all but name. Bahrain, where the US navy is based, is a Shia stronghold. The UAE has
sent envoys to Iran to apologise for allowing a US spy plane – the one that got shot
down by the Iranians – to take off from one of their airfields. They are making
peace-overtures to Iran and withdrawing their forces from Yemen. Currently, the Saudi proxies
are fighting the Emirati proxies in Aden.
Here is something from the Irish Times – a paper that has yet to be bought up by
Zionists.
Here are the regional nations that have flipped to the side of Iran: Oman, UAE, Qatar,
Iraq and Turkey. These countries know full well that the USA and Israel are a spent force.
The Eastern province of Saudi Arabia – where the oil lies – is Shia. The Iranians
have no intention of destroying Saudi oil installations – because they might soon
control them.
The writer of this article would do well to peruse some local news sources and not rely so
heavily on the mainstream media.
Bad new for Trump, Netanyahu and Kushner's gang.
Crown Prince MbS is fading fast. His father the King has taken back some control. Other Arab
leaders are pulling out of his Yemen war. King Salman has refused to accept any plans for
Palestines except a 2 state solution and the Arab Peace Initiative offered before.
Mohammad bin Salman's Waning Influence
August 5, 2019Emile Nakhleh
So, Saudi Arabia is building its future by an alliance with women and Judaism. Good luck,
they'll need it.
As to the overall picture, the disorganization of the US into ethnic groups under Obama
and the continuation of that under Trump (who is, since the Federal government's permanent
staff opposes him, a weak president) has most groups betting, world wide, that the US won't
intervene in their local disputes. Consequently, they are fighting and cooperating as they
see fit, and a new equilibrium is forming. Also, the sun rises in the morning.
This trend is long established [1], and I doubt it can be changed.
Even the change in Saudi Arabia has to do with this trend. Saudi Arabia is apparently
betting that they can survive as a high income Arab state if they have a large qualitative
and economic superiority over their much more poor neighbors. I really hope their efforts
work better for them than did Russian efforts to Westernize.
Unfortunately here in Europe most if not all politicians and media are simply following the
U.S. line.
Large parts of european populations are also blindly trusting the mainstream narratives,
though some do due to religious reasons instead of political ones.
Whenever there is some "official resistance" to these policies it is mostly symbolic.
It is a sad state of affairs. At this point in time when most people have access to
unprecedented information recources, via the internet, there still seems to be not much
interest in actually utilizing these resources.
People are too used to being force fed their information. There are no critical thinking
abilities to speak of in the general population. The barrage of propaganda people are being
subjected to ( from every direction and at all times ) is simply impossible to withstand for
most.
Parts of the population that think of themselves as "woke", informed and as "The Resistance"
are just as misinformed and deceived ( if not more ) as the sheeplike masses they claim
superiority over
An excellent piece, but I was slightly surprised that it did not go on to examine the de
facto alliance that appears to be growing between Iran and Russia. Everything surely depends
on the scope and extent of this alliance. If it is firm and committed, then Zio-America is
stirring up a hornet's nest by its sabre-rattling. And is the Trump administration really
naïve, mad or stupid enough not to understand the consequences in the face of a strong
Russo-Persian alliance? The US body count will dwarf the combined total of all its recent
illegal and criminal undertakings on behalf of its puppet-masters. How will a six-figure sum
of American dead be sold to its public, when 'only' 58,000 American military personnel died
in the Vietnam conflict? Media control can only ever extend so far.
Russia may be Iran's main regional ally: but Iran is also vital to Russia's strategic
interests. It cannot allow Tehran to fall. That would destabilize Central Asia and the
Caucasus, Moscow's backyard. In that sense they are equal partners. While the US is allied
with Israel and Saudi Arabia in pursuit of regional hegemony, Washington has wider interests
threatening to bring it into confrontation with Russia, and China, which also has core
interests to protect. That confrontation will be a world, not a regional, war. The pattern of
history shows there is already historical precedent for such events leading to world war
– this time nuclear war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
"Made possible by a generous founding grant from Mr. Haim Saban of Los Angeles, the
Saban Center will permit the Brookings Institution to dramatically expand its research and
analysis of Middle East policy issues at a time when the region has assumed a dominant
position on the U.S. foreign policy agenda.
"After September 11, American interests in countering terrorism, promoting peace,
preventing proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and preserving regional stability
all converged on the Middle East," Armacost noted. "The generosity of Haim Saban will
enable Brookings to expand significantly its circle of experts who will conduct original
research and develop innovative programs to promote a better understanding of the policy
choices facing American decision-makers." "
A 2010 New Yorker magazine profile of Saban said:
His greatest concern, he says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United
States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall [2006] in Israel, Saban described his
formula. His "three ways to be influential in American politics," he said, were: make
donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets.
In 2007, Grant Smith, the Herculean head of Institute for Research: Middle East Policy
(IRMEP), wrote of Saban's action:
11/21/2007 Excerpt from the book "Foreign Agents" Why AIPAC took over Brookings
By targeting and taking over Middle East policy at Brookings in 2002, Saban and Indyk were
able to "leapfrog" AIPAC messaging from second to last in the think tank market (WINEP had
only 2%) to first place. Taking over Brookings also made it appear to Americans that there
was now an "expert consensus" from "right to left" on the key Middle East policy issue of
the year: the US invasion of Iraq on weapons of mass destruction pretexts. Brookings is
often portrayed as a "centrist to left think tank" in the corporate news media. According
to FAIR, "Progressive or Left-Leaning" media citations were a small but important segment
of the marketplace of ideas, but combined with "centrist", they represented the majority.
For Saban and Indyk, taking over Brookings Middle East policy in 2002 meant penetrating the
63% of the marketplace of ideas that was generally not beating a drum for war in Iraq.
Saban has supported Hillary Clinton financially and in other ways, probably since the
Clintons were in the White House, but demonstrably once the Clintons bought their house in
New York state in 2000 in preparation for Hill's successful run for the senate -- heavily
backed by Saban money. Team Clinton's Favorite Billionaire https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/haim-saban-hillary-clinton-donor-230711
Hillary has been Saban's creature throughout her-post Lewinsky life.
Sher glad we dodged that Hillary bullet & voted in tRump, say what.
Who will fight this war with iran? They wont go slowly into the night but fight tooth and
nail. Remember Hezbollah never even called up its reserves and the entire war was fought with
their regular forces already stationed there numbering a few thousand at most and only a few
hundred directly being engaged.
Before Iran goes, they will make sure the world economy will for ever be changed. With
regime changes in all ME and maybe even in other countries from unhappy populations.
Technologically, yes. It's also weaker economically.
OTOH, Iran has a rising population, totally different to Russia's ongoing demographic
crisis. The Iranian population increase occurs against a backdrop of policies to curb it,
which means that Iran could increase the increase to its population size (talking about the
second derivative here) at the drop of a hat. Russia could not even dream of being in such a
situation.
Unlike Russia, Iran is not officially a democracy either. Iran has a system of officially
limited democracy yielding to the supreme authority of a clerical elite, guarded by aptly
called revolutionary guards. This system has withstood decades of Western attempts to topple
it. Iran is much better able to hold its liberal, Westernized middle class in check than
Russia.
The biggest difference is the one in ideology. Iran has the Shia branch of Islam, what
does Russia have? The Putin government tries to ally itself with the Russian Orthodox church,
but the church has much less influence on Russian society than Shiite religiosity has on
Iran. Iran is a Shiite country through and through. The Iranian regime can count on millions
of committed followers to defend it to the death. Nothing of the same kind can be said about
the Putin government.
Unlike Russia, Iran also has geography on its side. Russia can be invaded from all
directions, Iran is a mountain fortress overlooking the straights of Hormuz to boot.
Russia and Iran have complementary strengths and weaknesses. Russia cannot allow Iran to
fail, but you have to wonder whether Iran should not lend a helping hand to Russia in dealing
with its fifth-column liberals.
In reality, America is ruled by an oligarchy, America's 60 families, a de facto government
according to Ferdinand Lundberg. This "shadow government" has controlled the top levels of
the US government for most of our nation's history.
May 18, 2019 The Truth-Teller: From the Pentagon Papers to the Doomsday Machine
The growth of the military-industrial complex poses an existential threat to humanity.
Daniel Ellsberg, peace activist and Vietnam War whistleblower discusses with Tellus Senior
Fellow Allen White the continuing existential threat posed by the military-industrial complex
-- and what needs to be done about it.
MARCH 13, 2019 'Imperialism on Trial' tour comes to Northern Ireland on March 19th and
21st
Next week, the Imperialism on Trial tour comes to Belfast, Northern Ireland, and will
include an impressive line-up of speakers, including two former British Ambassadors, a former
British soldier, an Irish Republican writer, and a veteran CIA analyst – each
presenting their own analysis of world events, and interrogating the role played at home and
abroad – by western powers.
@renfro
Saudi Arabia's "drift" to better relations with Israel started in 1975 when King Faisal, the
oil embargo anti-Israel, and pro Palestinian cause King, was assassinated by a nephew, who
had just returned from the US (purely co-incidental, of course).
It was Faisal, became King in his own bloodless coup, that started reforms in Saudi Arabia.
He was a pan-Islamist as opposed to Nassar's pan-Arabist, and was open to mending fences with
Shia while suppressing Wahabbism. Bin Salman is entirely a product of the CIA/MI-6/Mossad.
@RichardMunter
The days when the number of soldiers on each side was very important are over. Now, war is
much more automated and, as always, it is dependent on the training, intelligence and
motivation of the soldiers on each side.
The mercenaries of ISIS are certainly motivated, trained and well-equipped, but they seem
to be losing 10+ soldiers for each Syrian soldier lost. That is because they have no defence
against Russian and Syrian aviation.
Both the Russians and the Iranians would make formidable adversaries – because they
are defending their own peoples. The Israelis know that they don't belong there and the
Americans are really the tourists of militarism.
While the presentation of facts is accurate, reflecting events in the past years, there is no
actual analysis and explanations, other than local power struggle, but it is a bit more
complicated than that.
Egypt had first to be tamed and after loosing the Sinai peninsula, with the peace brokered
by US (plus a continuous dole of money/weapons), the biggest Arab nation that could have
engender any meaningful threats to Israel as a state (and nowadays to its expansionist
thrust) has been quashed. At that time Iran was a monarchy resting on US support (so Israel
had beautiful relations with the regime, which posed no threats).
Now comes the Iran Revolution which suddenly becomes a threat to US interests (oil,
dollar, oil flow), Israel's interests (provides strategic depth to Lebanon, Palestinians,
Syria, and Iraq), and all Arab monarchies around since it shows their own citizens that there
is a different way of running a country
As such KSA and other monarchies (Qatar seems to be fine though) would rather make peace
with the devil (Israel), than allow the idea of a Republic (especially Arab – see
untamed Syria, and soon, after US will leave, Iraq) in their midst.
Iran free to sell oil to whomever and on whatever currency is also able to buy and build
weapons and provide a modicum of well being to its citizens while allowing a modicum of
democracy to exist as well as supporting entities as Syria, Hezbollah is a mortal threat to
US, Israel, and many Arab monarchies around, especially KSA. This level of nationalism is
unacceptable for US geo-strategic and economic planners. Such a resource, as oil cannot be
allowed to benefit all citizens of a country but needs to be controlled and enrich the few.
This is why Venezuela, Russia, Libya, Syria, etc.
@Counterinsurgency
Absolutely, and schooling is the individual supply line of the drones aka patriots who will
scarifice themselves for the Empire. This has been planned shortly after the Federal Reserve
was founded and created.
"Rebuilding America's Defenses" – A Summary Blueprint of the PNAC Plan for U.S.
Global Hegemony
Some people have compared it to Hitler's publication of Mein Kampf, which was ignored
until after the war was over.
This film goes in detail through the untold history of The Project for the New American
Century with tons of archival footage and connects it right into the present.
@RichardMunter
I think you misrepresents a little bit the underpinnings of Iran's form of government. In the
US it is said that the three branches of government are independent and on equal footing.
Practice is showing that it is not true and that the operational arm (government/President)
has the upper hand in all goings and it is seldom or ever challenged.
In Iran the top is represented by the Law (Islamic law) with its guardians (supreme
ayatollah and the guardians). I don't think conceptually this is a bad thing (except as an
atheist I have some issues with the idea of divine law, especially when it punishes
unbelievers and such) and ultimately in theory everyone else is aspirationally saying that
their country is a country of law.
Iran, also called Persia, and officially the Islamic Republic of Iran republic
@Commentator
Mike Well said. the war against Gemal Abdulnasser and his brand of revolutionary
nationalism calling for Arab unity and establishing one Arab country for all Arabs is a great
example of imperialist intervention in the Arab world.
The west does not want nor tolerates Arab unity ,any of those leaders calling for such
idea are either ousted by coups or ending up dead .
@Hossein
Iran has been a miniature empire absorbing a large number of ethnically diverse peoples for a
very long time. They know very well how to balance the interests of its various components
– unlike the USA or the UK. Of course, outsiders such the British and Americans try to
fracture the country along its ethnic lines. There is nothing new there either. Divide and
Rule.
All ethnic groupings in Iran are well aware that they have much to lose should the USA
regain control of the country. They know their history.
The real irony of what is happening is that the USA and UK have imported large numbers of
foreigners from their de facto ex colonies and they have no idea as to how to absorb these
aliens. That has rendered the USA and the UK vulnerable to being fractured themselves.
Electing a Zionist Pakistani to be the mayor of London is hardly going to appease the
Pakistanis of the UK. He only represents himself.
The Arabs of Ahwaz have only to look across the Persian Gulf to see what is happening to
their ethnic cousins in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia to realise that they are quite
fortunate.
"Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power." ~Bertrand Russell
Fully applicable to any color revolution.
Notable quotes:
"... The president's top legislative ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), was far more direct: "Any violent crackdown would be completely unacceptable... The world is watching." ..."
"... One cannot help but recall that the same phrasing was used for Ukraine, during the Maidan protests of 2013 that culminated in a violent coup in February 2014 – and plunged that country into secession of Crimea and civil war in the Donbass. ..."
"... The impression is only reinforced by the images reminiscent of Kiev coming out of Hong Kong, showing helmeted protesters in black masks firing grenades and throwing firebombs at police – none of which has stopped the chorus of US media from calling the protesters "pro-democracy." ..."
"... There is even nationalism, albeit of a xeno variety: some protesters have brandished flags of Hong Kong's former colonial master, the UK. Others have embraced the US flag, telling reporters it stands for "freedom, human rights and democracy." ..."
"... All of this has been seen before, most recently in Kiev but also in other places. There was even the requisite meddling by the State Department: US diplomat Julie Eadeh was photographed meeting with protest leaders. It wasn't quite Victoria Nuland passing out cookies to the Maidan demonstrators, but it was enough to raise alarm. ..."
"... This is very very embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump protesters. ..."
"... " Our diplomat was doing her job and we commend her for her work," State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said at a news briefing last week. Ortagus then denounced what she said was publication of Eadeh's personal details, including the names of her children, in Chinese media as the action of a "thuggish regime." ..."
"... It is worth noting that the protests have already accomplished their original purpose, as the bill that would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China has been suspended. So now the demonstrators are calling for city officials to resign and broader political reforms, open-ended demands that will likely only grow with time. ..."
"... Color evolutions are a type of regime change technique developed by US strategists and executed by diplomats and non-governmental organizations. They rely on exploiting legitimate grievances of the local population, amplifying with money and marketing small groups of activists they either create or co-opt. The goal is to provoke the government into a violent crackdown, so as to destroy its legitimacy – whereupon it can be replaced in the name of "democracy and human rights." ..."
"... In the "best case" scenario, such as Serbia, the immediate body count is low but the country's democratic institutions are irreparably damaged and corrupted by this sort of fraud and manipulation. Ukraine, Syria, or Libya are what the worst-case scenario looks like: civil war or anarchy, with tens of thousands of deaths. ..."
If the iconography and tone of Hong Kong protests and the support from US diplomats weren't enough, Washington's words of concern
sure seem to suggest that the months-long demonstrations amount to a 'color revolution.' On Monday, the Trump administration urged
"all sides to refrain from violence." While carefully paying lip service to Hong Kong being an internal Chinese matter, the
unnamed White House official who spoke to the press said the US supported those "looking for democracy."
The president's top legislative ally, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), was far more direct: "Any violent
crackdown would be completely unacceptable... The world is watching."
The people of Hong Kong are bravely standing up to the Chinese Communist Party as Beijing tries to encroach on their autonomy
and freedom. Any violent crackdown would be completely unacceptable. As I have said on the Senate floor: The world is watching.
https://t.co/5VPm5P4PfB
One cannot help but recall that the same phrasing was used for Ukraine, during the Maidan protests of 2013 that culminated in
a violent coup in February 2014 – and plunged that country into secession of Crimea and civil war in the Donbass.
The impression is only reinforced by the images reminiscent of Kiev coming out of Hong Kong, showing helmeted protesters in black
masks firing grenades and throwing firebombs at police – none of which has stopped the chorus of US media from calling the protesters
"pro-democracy."
There is even nationalism, albeit of a xeno variety: some protesters have brandished flags of Hong Kong's former colonial master,
the UK. Others have embraced the US flag, telling reporters it stands for "freedom, human rights and democracy."
Hong Kong protesters in Hong Kong proudly sing US National anthem "The Star-Spangled Banner" O say can you see ... What so
proudly we hailed ...brings tears to my eyes 😂🤣💀 pic.twitter.com/CeM5zrA1Fe
All of this has been seen before, most recently in Kiev but also in other places. There was even the requisite meddling by the
State Department: US diplomat Julie Eadeh was photographed meeting with protest leaders. It wasn't quite Victoria Nuland passing
out cookies to the Maidan demonstrators, but it was enough to raise alarm.
The State Department did not deny the meeting, arguing that it was something "American diplomats do every single day around
the world."
This is very very embarrassing. Julie Eadeh, a US diplomat in Hong Kong, was caught meeting HK protest leaders. It would be
hard to imagine the US reaction if Chinese diplomat were meeting leaders of Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter or Never Trump
protesters. pic.twitter.com/JfiU2O2HZq
"Our diplomat was doing her job and we commend her for her work," State Department spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said
at a news briefing last week.
Ortagus then denounced what she said was publication of Eadeh's personal details, including the names of her children, in Chinese
media as the action of a "thuggish regime."
It is worth noting that the protests have already accomplished their original purpose, as the bill that would have allowed the
extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China has been suspended. So now the demonstrators are calling for city officials to
resign and broader political reforms, open-ended demands that will likely only grow with time.
Even though US President Donald Trump has steered clear of Hong Kong and made sure to describe is as an internal Chinese matter,
focusing his diatribes entirely on trade, the Chinese public is becoming increasingly convinced that Washington is instigating turmoil
in Hong Kong along the lines of "color revolutions" elsewhere.
HK media has the right to report on US diplomats who actively interfere in HK situation, and help people understand what they're
doing. The US administration is instigating turmoil in HK the way it stoked "color revolutions" in other places worldwide. This
is thuggish diplomacy. pic.twitter.com/4hkH7eYyEH
If this charge is in fact true, that is very bad news for the already strained Sino-American relations – but also for Hong Kong
itself.
Color evolutions are a type of regime change technique developed by US strategists and executed by diplomats and non-governmental
organizations. They rely on exploiting legitimate grievances of the local population, amplifying with money and marketing small groups
of activists they either create or co-opt. The goal is to provoke the government into a violent crackdown, so as to destroy its legitimacy
– whereupon it can be replaced in the name of "democracy and human rights."
The prototype for this approach was the October 2000 coup in Serbia, which US diplomats and the cheerleader media then invoked
in subsequent cases.
In the "best case" scenario, such as Serbia, the immediate body count is low but the country's democratic institutions
are irreparably damaged and corrupted by this sort of fraud and manipulation. Ukraine, Syria, or Libya are what the worst-case scenario
looks like: civil war or anarchy, with tens of thousands of deaths.
Neither of which matters to the US diplomats, media or politicians, though. They declare it a "victory for democracy" and
move on to the next target, to replay the scenario all over again.
Nebojsa Malic is a Serbian-American journalist and political commentator, working at RT since 2015
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
Look out for the bad reviews from The Fraudian's writers: Luke Harding can be relied on to
add his 2 cents' worth of conspiracy paranoid garbage, Shaun Walker will be parsing the book
for dill references and non-Russia experts like Marina Hyde and Natalie Nougat-head will want
a crack as well at reviewing the book.
Probably the only half-decent reviews will be from Mary Dejevski and Prof. Stephen Cohen
but theirs will be buried in a back page or inaccessible behind an Error 404 wall.
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it
6 (UK) Division is the new organisational home for the Army's "asymmetric edge",
comprising all things "Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Information Operations, Electronic
Warfare, Cyber and Unconventional Warfare".
Launched this morning, 6 Div is a rebranding of the formation formerly known as Force
Troops Command, which covered a hotchpotch of Royal Signals, Intelligence Corps and other
units, including the infamous 77 Brigade
####
Don't forget to hit the comments for hilarity!
Also, the timing of the announcement says plenty, i.e. slipping it in to the news stream
when people have already gone on holiday and all the BREXIT and other bollocks. I've not seen
this reported on the tv in the UK – which is currently facing severe flooding etc.
Is it just me or is all the PPNN reporting that 'Putin's support has dropped to levels
not seen since 2011!'. Of course they don't actually give you any numbers and cherry pick
dodgy poll numbers but there really is this Pavlovian reaction anytime there is a
demonstration in Russia, like undertakers gathering at an allegedly dangerous road crossing
waiting for some cyclist to be dragged under a trash lorry so that they can tut tut and then
profit from the cyclist's misfortune. Nix that, the PPNN are just professional versions of
MacBeth's witches, something which they don't understand is a story .
Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking
to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to
the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are
just going through the motions. The only group, and I mean the only one, that would benefit
from Putin's overthrow would be the disaffected kreakliy and the poncy forgotten
semi-intellectuals. They would be feted by the west as political visionaries, and perhaps
given minor government positions to satisfy their vanity. But who else would make out like a
bandit? The military? Hardly – the west, after years of giggling about Russia's
decrepit military, lapsed into an uneasy silence on the subject just about the time that
long-distance Kalibr cruise-missile attack took place from the Caspian Sea into Syria, and a
west given meddling-room would want to disband the Russian military, if anything, down to a
token force of absolutely-trustworthy sycophants who would probably be issued with American
weapons. The oligarchs? Hardly – western business would be snapping up former state
assets while simultaneously carrying out an 'anti-corruption drive' under the new President's
imprimatur. Small businesses? Hardly – corporate interest would be in melding large
state interests into the Corporate Borg, and their method is to squeeze out small business in
order to expand market share. The people? Hardly – Russia would be a convenient place
to move all the refugee immigrants from that entire hemisphere, while the stubborn loyalty of
the population to Putin would not be forgotten.
It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about
how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop
Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people
who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested.
They're just trying to get some mileage out of Olga what's-her-name, and make it look like a
drop in Putin's poll numbers happened exactly at the moment this young political firebrand
emerged. Pretty sad, really, but you can't tell 'em, and it wouldn't make any difference.
They have to try, it's the same instinct that makes a dog lick its nose if you smear cheese
on it. The western media would rush to interview and endorse a talking Russian toad if it
said "I hate Putin".
Yet again, lying by omission . Their 'Defense Correspondent' Jonathan Marcus notes
briefly that W. Bush pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and that Russia announce pulling
out of it in 2007 but does not explain why, i.e. the combination of the following:
a) expanding these 'defensive' ABM sites to the lo-land of Po-land & also Romania
b) the universal Mk.41 launchers can also fire nuclear capable Tomahawk cruise missiles at
Russia from much closer ranges = less reaction time = reduced deterrence effect =
increases the chance of nuclear first strike against Russia, and thus
c) denied/refused Russia any means to verify the non-use of nukes for the launchers just
saying 'Trust us!' which is complete bs considering all the previous promises made and
not kept.
None of the linked articles therein mention Russia's objections. But then Marcus is
only a 'Defence correspondent' (such small details clearly aren't important in the grand
scheme of things) and he can always get a future job at NATO as a Spokesman like previous BBC
journos Oana Lungescu & Mark Laity. In a fight between Jonathan Marcus & Mark Urban,
who do you think would replace Oana? Or someone else? They all do sterling government
service
Oooh, looky here! The BBC inches itself up the line which if crossed would constitute
journalism . Why don't they just jump on in? It's safe as long as your patrons –
Da Gov – and the intelligence services don't go after you (Hello 'Guardian'!):
In an earlier statement, Russia's foreign ministry said the US decision to withdraw was
"a grave mistake".
It also accused America of violating the treaty by deploying MK-41 launchers in Europe,
capable of firing intermediate-range cruise missiles
####
So the plus is, above they actually link to the Russian Foreign Ministry statement, but no
further. The big minus is that they wrote far, far more about Russia's 'violations'.
That t-Rump thinks Russia, let alone China is excited about joining a new deal,
hahahahahahahah!
We also discover that go to and favorite 'defense expert' (MGU Candidate of Sciences
Biology degree!) for the Pork Pie News Networks Pavel Felgenhauer is not dead!
"... The 77th brigade, Integrity Initiative members or just right wing sympathisers here and in America will pretend these sort of staged demonstrations are genuinely supported by Moscow citizens, when the opposite is actually true and the 'opposition leader' Navalny has a rating of 3% at most in Russia. Search the real Navalny on the internet and his true nature as an ultra fascist in the service of some western agencies becomes obvious, as this journalist certainly knows. ..."
"... Remember the scams of the 'Dusty Boy' of Syria, the Gay Girl of Damascus and the little 7 year old girl in Aleppo with perfect English, Bana Alabed, and you might start to wonder that the media are still so arrogant, trying to attract you to their agenda with such crude propaganda. ..."
"... The main stream media must think readers are still as gullible as they might have seemed before the arrival of the internet. ..."
"... The best thing to do is to hold to the law and enforce it impartially. It is well-known that the western press will try to stage embarrassing moments, like cute girl demonstrators who throw themselves to the ground and writhe about screaming that thugs are beating them up, or provocative photographs that capture a moment in which a girl is being restrained like that rock-throwing bitch a few years back. Only one side will ever be shown in the west, and it will be the side which makes Russia look the worst. Russia cannot afford to care what the west thinks. ..."
"... When she speaks to the reporter by the Yandex advertised taxi(?) she says (something like) "We gather here peacefully and they over they've gathered and are absolutely not peaceful." Bizarre. Apparently we cannot trust our eyes when we see that OMON is not doing anything but standing with discipline and waiting for orders. ..."
"... Is this like the Hong Kong thing where demonstrators rampage and destroy stuff, demanding it as their 'democratic right' yet when some nutters go and beat them or launch fireworks at them they are then up in arms demanding that the police protect them and enforce the peace? ..."
"... Everybody has learned a lot about colour revolutions, especially their likely targets, and Washington is helpful in that it continues to use the template long after an effective countering technique is available. The first time the Gene Sharp model was used, it was devastating, worked beyond the State Department's wildest dreams. ..."
"... The next time it worked pretty well, too, because everyone on the other side said "Wait; they're not using that same technique, are they?" By the time they got around to trying it on Lukashenko, he slammed the ball right back into their court by calling snap elections at the first sign of astroturfing, and steamrollered the fake opposition. ..."
"... That's probably true, but there is often inflexibility on the part of the protesters as well, and in cases where they believe they have international backing – spelled U.S.A. – their demands rarely allow much room for compromise. ..."
"... The government must step down and yield governing power, usually to a group of ideologues and liberal activists, and the next step is well-known to everyone. The American 'advisers' are sent in, and state institutions are rapidly dismantled and privatized for international investment, as happened in Yeltsin's Russia. ..."
"... When protesters claim to want "more democracy" but cannot even define what "democracy" means, then it's clear they don't know what they are talking about, and probably just American stooges. ..."
"... People in HK do have many grievances but many of their problems, like the insanely high property prices, the shortage of housing for people who are not billionaires, the pollution, the crappy infrastructure, the lack of jobs in any industry apart from buying and selling property, the dismal job prospects of people who have been through an education system that relies on rote learning and slaving through scads of homework, are problems arising from the capitalist system they still retain. Unfortunately, for most of its 20-year rule since the hand-back in 1997, the HK govt has been inept in handling most of these problems. ..."
"... Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are just going through the motions. ..."
"... It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested. ..."
"... The western media would rush to interview and endorse any talking Russian toad if it said "I hate Putin". ..."
"... However, if the Americans want to pin their new hopes for Putin's political immolation on some 17-year-old attention-junkie bint, they should knock themselves out. They are merely hardening Russian opinion against them, and they may not care but some day they will. And then they will wail, "Why do they hate us? It must be because of our freedom!" ..."
Olga Misik: Teenage girl reads constitution in front of Putin's riot police during
Moscow protestsShe is a lone teenage girl sat cross-legged and armed with nothing
more than the Russian constitution.
They are a line of Moscow's notoriously brutal riot police, equipped with shields,
batons and helmets.
But the image of a young pro-democracy demonstrator single-handedly defying Vladimir
Putin's security forces looks set to become one of the most powerful symbols of resistance to
the president's autocracy.
Olga Misik, 17, was photographed sitting in front of the officers reading out the
country's constitution – which affirms the right to peaceful gatherings – during
protests on Saturday.
Apparently unsure how to handle such a show of calm audacity, the police hold
back.
The image has gone viral across the world, being shared thousands of times, the
peaceful defiance central to the photo faintly reminiscent of that present in the the iconic
picture of Tiananmen Square's Tank Man. It is now being used by Russian opposition to rally
support in the face of continuing state oppression.
Putin's riot police?
Moscow's notoriously brutal riot police, equipped with shields, batons and helmets --
unlike those nice riot police in Paris?
Olga has "gone viral" -- and will be forgotten in a month.
As one commenter to the Independent advises, "watch the video and not the propaganda
'Independent'":
The continuous attempt to say how bad Putin is and how perverse is Russia is really
boring. I do not know of any country in which unauthorized demonstrations are allowed,
moreover, the attitude of the Russian police is very soft compared, for example, with the US
police against those of "occupy Wall Street".
The typical hypocrisy of the Anglo-Saxon press.By the way I´m not Russian,
because the easy answer is " you are a Russian troll".
But the usual "Kremlin Troll" comments dominate:
Prigozhin trolls were already contaminating this site almost before the article has
even been posted.
Why does the Indie allow this filthy scum to basically commandeer their websites; it can't
just be because Gore & Co. welcome their rabid, typically Russian anti-Semitism.
Or maybe it is.
Either way, whilst every other news online new outlet is desperately trying to excise
these crypto-fascist losers from their sites, the Indie and their so-called Mods spend most
of their time deleting all comments warning readers of their disruptive presence.
Why?
Similarly, any comment which runs counter to the Kremlin line – despite the fact
that we are in England – is flagged frantically by these hordes of Russian Putinite
goons and thus automatically deleted.
This means that virtually the entire comments sections in the Indie reflect the views
of Putin rather than their bone fide readers from Britain and Western Europe.
Leaving aside Gore & Co's infatuation with attracting "clicks", and their hatred of
Britain and the (white) British, is this really what the Indie wants?
To be the mouthpiece for a mass-murdering, homophobic, anti-democratic despot?
Because that's what this wokesome millennial whingers' comic has become.
Response from an alleged troll:
Funny. I don't see anyone commenting about "Putin and how wonderful Russia is and that
everybody lives in harmony". All I see are people recognising that the media is twisting
truth again, making it seem Russia is doing something 'undemocratic' that virtually all
Western countries do – enact and enforce laws against unauthorised demonstrations,
peaceful or otherwise.
Tell me the truth, if you are capable. Do we, or do we not, have laws in London
preventing unauthorised demonstrations? Do we, or do we not, have riot-uniformed police to
enforce those laws when necessary?
What is different then, about this situation in Moscow, except for the fact that Russia
actually has a real written constitution, and we don't?
Countered by:
I wonder what fate awaits Olga, Novichok on the doorhandle, a Public recant to save her
family, exile away from prying eyes, murdered by some Kremlin errand boys or depression and
an open window on the 7th floor? The only way to ensure her safety is publicity
Yes, I wonder? Cue "Prigozhin troll":
These 3 articles in 3 days on the subject of an unauthorised tiny demonstration over
the issue of disputed local signatures for the Moscow council candidates reveals the depths
the MSM will go to demonise Russia, even going so far to use the obviously staged photo of
this young woman to encourage sympathy for the poor citizens of Moscow, who in this case are
no more than the 5k ultra right followers of Navalny , who periodically uses these sort of
demos to disrupt main thoroughfares in order to arouse sympathy in the compliant western
media.
The 77th brigade, Integrity Initiative members or just right wing sympathisers here and
in America will pretend these sort of staged demonstrations are genuinely supported by Moscow
citizens, when the opposite is actually true and the 'opposition leader' Navalny has a rating
of 3% at most in Russia. Search the real Navalny on the internet and his true nature as an
ultra fascist in the service of some western agencies becomes obvious, as this journalist
certainly knows.
The aim, as always , is emotive publicity used to demonise the Russian government,
which is strange as this is a local Moscow council affair, nothing to do with Putin.
Remember the scams of the 'Dusty Boy' of Syria, the Gay Girl of Damascus and the little
7 year old girl in Aleppo with perfect English, Bana Alabed, and you might start to wonder
that the media are still so arrogant, trying to attract you to their agenda with such crude
propaganda.
Even this journalist and those here insisting this biased report is genuine, are
secretly aware of its real intent but as it suits their neocon purpose, so must be defended
as police brutality about to happen to a young woman, representing the downtrodden Moscow
citizenry.
Only 5k demonstrators in the largest city in Europe might suggest a different view of
this affair, when this article won't tell you that a 12k authorised demo went off last week
without incident.
BTW Indy, when's the next report on the much more widespread weekly demos in France
against Macron and your wonderful EU?
The main stream media must think readers are still as gullible as they might have
seemed before the arrival of the internet.
Is that whole sitting down and reading of the constitution by a stuttering schoolgirl
staged or not?
My god, they are scraping the bottom of the barrel with that picture. Calling it contrived
hardly touches its banality and fakeness. I wish i could unsee it.
I think they are trying for a Tiananmen Square moment; you know, innocent unarmed
demonstrator holds back massive force? If it was not actually staged, western reporters are
jumping on the opportunity to try to inspire protests and demonstrations, like they always
do.
The Russian government and authorities long ago learned to recognize the fundamentals of
a western-inspired regime-change action – if they try to put up tents, rip them down
because if you don't, a 'tent city' will appear like it did in Kuh-yiv on the occasion of the
Orange Revolution.
If they manage to embarrass the government into allowing the protesters to
do anything they want, the west will bring in rent-a-crowds and you will have a violent riot
on your hands.
Such actions can quickly – with the enthusiastic support of the western
media – snowball into a real problem.
The best thing to do is to hold to the law and
enforce it impartially. It is well-known that the western press will try to stage
embarrassing moments, like cute girl demonstrators who throw themselves to the ground and
writhe about screaming that thugs are beating them up, or provocative photographs that
capture a moment in which a girl is being restrained like that rock-throwing bitch a few
years back. Only one side will ever be shown in the west, and it will be the side which makes
Russia look the worst. Russia cannot afford to care what the west thinks.
When she speaks to the reporter by the Yandex advertised taxi(?) she says (something like)
"We gather here peacefully and they over they've gathered and are absolutely not peaceful."
Bizarre. Apparently we cannot trust our eyes when we see that OMON is not doing anything but
standing with discipline and waiting for orders.
Is this like the Hong Kong thing where demonstrators rampage and destroy stuff, demanding
it as their 'democratic right' yet when some nutters go and beat them or launch fireworks at
them they are then up in arms demanding that the police protect them and enforce the peace?
Cake and eat it.
The subsequent protest on Saturday was the latest in a rising tide of civil unrest
across Russia sparked by dissatisfaction over declining living standards that has led to
falling ratings for Russian President Vladimir Putin and the ruling United Russia
party.
Called by opposition leader Alexei Navalny to take place outside of City Hall, just a
stone's throw away from the Kremlin, the demonstration demanded that opposition candidates be
allowed on the ballot in September's Moscow City Duma elections.
Even though the number of votes that they may have possibly achieved in the election would
have been statistically insignificant and apart from the fact that their debarment from
standing for election occurred because they could not acquire a minimum number of signatures
of support in order to stand for election, which ruling just happens to be a matter of
law.
But it's Putin CLAMPDOWN!!!!!
Thank you, Moscow Times! And Moscow City Hall is about half a mile from the Kremlin. That's some stone's throw!
The Tiananmen Square moment was China's trial by fire. If the government had wavered, then
they would have been overthrown, and China would have become a British colony again.
Fortunately, the Chinese government figured out what it had to do.
Everybody has learned a lot about colour revolutions, especially their likely targets, and
Washington is helpful in that it continues to use the template long after an effective
countering technique is available. The first time the Gene Sharp model was used, it was
devastating, worked beyond the State Department's wildest dreams.
The next time it worked
pretty well, too, because everyone on the other side said "Wait; they're not using that same
technique, are they?" By the time they got around to trying it on Lukashenko, he slammed the
ball right back into their court by calling snap elections at the first sign of astroturfing,
and steamrollered the fake opposition.
I suppose eventually Washington will move on to
something else, but just like the myth of democracy, it's so hard to let go.
Check out this 'roadmap for peace' by Doug Bandow. Although he works for the Cato
Institute, I've usually found his writing quite reasonable and rational. He is an American,
and so that carries with it the annoying presupposition that no major decisions can be made
without American input – America is too important to be left out. I have my own
feelings on that, and I don't mind sharing that when America gets involved in a multinational
project, it usually insists on rules that will turn the whole thing to American advantage,
and insists on being the leader.
All that notwithstanding, I was amused to note that most of
the concessions Bandow's plan would have Moscow yielding are things it is not actually doing,
and therefore would be easy to give up.
For instance, in exchange for Moscow's promise to not ever again meddle with American
elections, Washington would acknowledge its past political meddling and foreswear future
interventions in Russian affairs, including funding private organizations involved in
political activities. Washington would have to stop funding Russian political NGO's and admit
its meddling.
Unfortunately, Russia would have to admit to meddling in the 2016 election;
something it actually didn't do, and the fact there is no real evidence of it would become
irrelevant. But it almost seems a small price to pay.
The west would agree to drop sanctions
on Russia, but retain the legal authority to re-impose them should it become necessary
– that seems quite a bit like legitimizing them, to me. There actually is no legal
authority to impose sanctions – and threaten all your allies as to what will happen to
them if they don't go along – without ever providing proof of the grounds for
establishing them.
On the whole, it's an interesting deal. Not that it will ever happen. Washington is not
interested in deals where it has to give up something, because everything it does is for a
lofty and holy reason.
The US has just announced more sanctions against Russia because of the alleged Skripal
poisonings.
The Skripals did not die -- or did they? Where are the Skripals? And what about sanctions for the poisoning to death of the alkie mother of
three?
Don't the lives of alkie Hampshire social inadequates count? Discrimination, that is!
Deal or No Deal:
If I were in charge in Russia, I would NOT take the deal. (Hint: IT'S A TRAP!)
Especially if it meant "admitting" to something I didn't do (like meddling in the 2016
elections). That is a typical pindos snare, as Gaddafi himself learned, too late.
It's also, by the way, how American cops operate to trick innocent people: "Sign this false
confession, and you'll be home for dinner "
20 years later, they are still rotting away in the pokey
Russia should offer counter-deal: You admit to all the meddling you did, and I admit to
nothing. You big fat bully.
I agree; I would not take the deal, either. Of course it would never actually be offered,
because America will never admit to 'meddling' in anyone's elections or politics –
they're 'spreading democracy', for which they will never apologize, since it is their duty as
the Exceptional Nation. It just amused me that Bandow slyly phrased it in such a way that
Moscow would not really have to give up anything; only promise to stop doing things it is not
and has not been doing.
Likewise, America is not ever going to enter into any sort of deal which would see broad
autonomy for Eastern Ukraine and the possibility of recognizing Crimea as Russian if it
passed a do-over referendum. That would mean why, that would mean losing!
I think the grievances of the students against the Chinese government had merit. Moreover
yielding to continuing the status quo ante or reversion to Brit colony status were not the
only possible outcomes. The former happens to be the case but things need not have gone
that way.
That's probably true, but there is often inflexibility on the part of the protesters as well,
and in cases where they believe they have international backing – spelled U.S.A.
– their demands rarely allow much room for compromise.
The government must step down
and yield governing power, usually to a group of ideologues and liberal activists, and the
next step is well-known to everyone. The American 'advisers' are sent in, and state
institutions are rapidly dismantled and privatized for international investment, as happened
in Yeltsin's Russia.
In this case, the students wanted 'more democracy', and that right there suggests they
really did not have any clear goals but change.
So true. When protesters claim to want "more democracy" but cannot even define what
"democracy" means, then it's clear they don't know what they are talking about, and probably
just American stooges.
People in HK do have many grievances but many of their problems, like the insanely high
property prices, the shortage of housing for people who are not billionaires, the pollution,
the crappy infrastructure, the lack of jobs in any industry apart from buying and selling
property, the dismal job prospects of people who have been through an education system that
relies on rote learning and slaving through scads of homework, are problems arising from the
capitalist system they still retain. Unfortunately, for most of its 20-year rule since the
hand-back in 1997, the HK govt has been inept in handling most of these problems.
The thing that sparked this year's protests was the proposed extradition bill that would
establish appropriate extradition arrangements between Hong Kong and every other state or
territory that it currently does not have extradition agreements with, and this included
Mainland China, Macau and Taiwan, in the wake of the 2018 St Valentine's Day murder in which
a 20-year-old HK woman was strangled by her 19-year-old HK boyfriend while holidaying in
Taiwan, who then stuffed her body into a suitcase and left it at a train station in Taiwan
while he returned to HK. The man is currently in jail on charges relating to stealing the
woman's money after her death (he took all her ATM cards and used them) and he is due to be
freed this coming October. The HK govt has currently delayed a second reading of the
extradition bill but haven't withdrawn it entirely, which was one of the protesters'
demands.
The fact that, even after the backdown on the extradition proposal, the protesters
continued escalating their demands to the point of demanding current HK leader Carrie Lam's
removal, demonstrates that there is far more to the protesters' agenda than the extradition
proposal. Add to that the fact that protesters receive cash payments for protesting (with the
amounts jacked up if protesters destroy or damage things) and a CIA operative, Brian Kern,
has been identified as a ring-leader, and it is apparent that a Color Revolution
regime-change operation is in full swing.
The cops in Hong Kong Crown Colony were unbelievably corrupt. I worked with a former Hong
Kong policeman, a British European (the HK Crown Colony police had British senior officers
and Chinese "other ranks") who joined the force "to see the world". He was an idealist and
resigned. He could not stand the corruption that he witnessed there. His father, by the way,
was the local cop where I lived: the "village bobby", so to speak, complete with standard
issue Raleigh bicycle and cycle clips, who was a decent, friendly bloke.
This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardise it
6 (UK) Division is the new organisational home for the Army's "asymmetric edge",
comprising all things "Intelligence, Counter-Intelligence, Information Operations, Electronic
Warfare, Cyber and Unconventional Warfare".
Launched this morning, 6 Div is a rebranding of the formation formerly known as Force
Troops Command, which covered a hotchpotch of Royal Signals, Intelligence Corps and other
units, including the infamous 77 Brigade
####
Don't forget to hit the comments for hilarity!
Also, the timing of the announcement says plenty, i.e. slipping it in to the news stream
when people have already gone on holiday and all the BREXIT and other bollocks. I've not seen
this reported on the tv in the UK – which is currently facing severe flooding etc.
Is it just me or is all the PPNN reporting that 'Putin's support has dropped to levels
not seen since 2011!'. Of course they don't actually give you any numbers and cherry pick
dodgy poll numbers but there really is this Pavlovian reaction anytime there is a
demonstration in Russia, like undertakers gathering at an allegedly dangerous road crossing
waiting for some cyclist to be dragged under a trash lorry so that they can tut tut and then
profit from the cyclist's misfortune. Nix that, the PPNN are just professional versions of
MacBeth's witches, something which they don't understand is a story .
Putin is in as much danger of being unceremoniously chucked out of office as he is of choking
to death on his grandmother's knitting. The west is ever hopeful, and dutifully rallies to
the glorification of every new dissident firebrand, but whether or not they know it, they are
just going through the motions.
The only group, and I mean the only one, that would benefit
from Putin's overthrow would be the disaffected kreakliy and the poncy forgotten
semi-intellectuals.
They would be feted by the west as political visionaries, and perhaps
given minor government positions to satisfy their vanity. But who else would make out like a
bandit?
The military? Hardly – the west, after years of giggling about Russia's
decrepit military, lapsed into an uneasy silence on the subject just about the time that
long-distance Kalibr cruise-missile attack took place from the Caspian Sea into Syria, and a
west given meddling-room would want to disband the Russian military, if anything, down to a
token force of absolutely-trustworthy sycophants who would probably be issued with American
weapons.
The oligarchs? Hardly – western business would be snapping up former state
assets while simultaneously carrying out an 'anti-corruption drive' under the new President's
imprimatur.
Small businesses? Hardly – corporate interest would be in melding large
state interests into the Corporate Borg, and their method is to squeeze out small business in
order to expand market share.
The people? Hardly – Russia would be a convenient place
to move all the refugee immigrants from that entire hemisphere, while the stubborn loyalty of
the population to Putin would not be forgotten.
It is no coincidence that it is always the same people who show up to bitch and carp about
how dreadful Putin is, and how Russia needs American-style freedom and democracy and non-stop
Pride parades and all the trappings of fresh admission to Club West. They are the only people
who would stand to benefit from driving Putin out. Nobody else is interested.
They're just trying to get some mileage out of Olga what's-her-name, and make it look like a
drop in Putin's poll numbers happened exactly at the moment this young political firebrand
emerged. Pretty sad, really, but you can't tell 'em, and it wouldn't make any difference.
They have to try, it's the same instinct that makes a dog lick its nose if you smear cheese
on it.
The western media would rush to interview and endorse any talking Russian toad if it
said "I hate Putin".
I think a lot of people DID see that coming, to the extent that the only behavior acceptable
today in the American political milieu is a rehash of that sophomore's question, "Can you say
in one sentence or less what makes America the Greatest Country In The World?" The American
media typically pleats that 'the system is broken', but not during election season.
Then,
America is the greatest and running on all cylinders, and the successful candidate is the one
who will convince voters that, rather than fix the whatever system, he/she/ze/zir (it's only
a matter of time) will take a system that is the best in the world and make it squeeze out
even more happiness and satisfaction for Americans. Anyway, if you go off-message with that,
you are under the soulless influence of the Russians.
Anyway, it looks as if the democrats have gone to the well too often with that Russian
bullshit, and people are starting to get impatient with the cop-out – it's just an
excuse for having no good answer. You can always say, "X is because Russia". I think Harris
just bit the dust, and will lose a lot of support over this and gradually drop out. I got a
kick out of the "Gabbard is a non-issue, and won't even make the second debates" or something
to that effect. Whoever smugly said that was apparently asleep when a Ukrainian comedian who
plays a president on TV won the presidency in a landslide. The incumbent once thought it was
safe to laugh politely at him, because he was a non-issue, too.
I saw this story also on the same site, although it was not necessary to click on it, for
obvious reasons.
"A salute to the bravery of Olga Misik, 17, who during recent bloody protests for free
Moscow elections sat before Putin's armed-to-the-teeth goons and calmly read aloud the
Russian constitution, including Article 31 affirming the right to peaceful political
assembly. She was later arrested and allegedly beaten. "Injustice always concerns everyone,"
said Olga, who takes the long view of repression. "Today the Moscow City Duma, tomorrow the
governor of the region It is only a matter of time."
'Bloody protests for free Moscow elections'?? They were bloody? Really? and the issue was
free Moscow elections? Not candidates being allowed to run despite having been disqualified
for not reaching the signatory threshold? The game of coming up with enough signatures to
demonstrate a valid support base is an old one, trawling the obituaries and all manner of
dodges to come up with enough for people who don't really have any support, but want a
soapbox from which to squawk their message and then say they were cheated of victory by the
Kremlin. Putin's armed-to-the-teeth goons? Really? American police called to control
demonstrations are unarmed? Since when? Does arming them make them goons? I can't see their
teeth – how does the reporter know they are armed to the teeth? Olga takes the long
view of repression, does she? From the jaded pinnacle of 17? I'm surprised they did not ask
her views on gay sex – she's old enough. Just.
Embarrassing western hyperbole – a Russian review of the PISA tests that descended
to the same level might read, "A salute to the simple-mindedness of the Amerikantsi
'students', who must have gone to school at a mental institution, or been taught by the
homeless lunatics that abound in and around Amerikantsi cities. Once again they managed to
score so poorly that one might reasonably wonder if they arrived at the testing institution
by accident, thinking instead that they were being taken to see one of the
violence-and-profanity-riddled Amerikantsi movies that pollute the television and cause the
Amerikantsi schoolchildren to shoot each other as if they lived inside a video game where it
is not real blood. It's difficult to imagine a sensible explanation for such a dismal
performance, in which they finished below the OECD average in every category."
But you won't see anything like that in a Russian newspaper, or hear it on a Russian news
program. Because they don't act like the country is run by hysterical 12-year-olds. However,
if the Americans want to pin their new hopes for Putin's political immolation on some
17-year-old attention-junkie bint, they should knock themselves out. They are merely
hardening Russian opinion against them, and they may not care but some day they will. And
then they will wail, "Why do they hate us? It must be because of our freedom!"
I was particularly intrigued by the mention of the Democrats getting caught fabricating
fake Russian troll accounts to pretend the Russians were trying to influence some state
election or other, I forget what, supposedly reported in the Times. I didn't see that, and I
don't recall anyone mentioning it here.
Yet again, lying by omission . Their 'Defense Correspondent' Jonathan Marcus notes
briefly that W. Bush pulled out of the ABM Treaty in 2002 and that Russia announce pulling
out of it in 2007 but does not explain why, i.e. the combination of the following:
a) expanding these 'defensive' ABM sites to the lo-land of Po-land & also Romania
b) the universal Mk.41 launchers can also fire nuclear capable Tomahawk cruise missiles at
Russia from much closer ranges = less reaction time = reduced deterrence effect =
increases the chance of nuclear first strike against Russia, and thus
c) denied/refused Russia any means to verify the non-use of nukes for the launchers just
saying 'Trust us!' which is complete bs considering all the previous promises made and
not kept.
None of the linked articles therein mention Russia's objections. But then Marcus is
only a 'Defence correspondent' (such small details clearly aren't important in the grand
scheme of things) and he can always get a future job at NATO as a Spokesman like previous BBC
journos Oana Lungescu & Mark Laity. In a fight between Jonathan Marcus & Mark Urban,
who do you think would replace Oana? Or someone else? They all do sterling government
service
Oooh, looky here! The BBC inches itself up the line which if crossed would constitute
journalism . Why don't they just jump on in? It's safe as long as your patrons –
Da Gov – and the intelligence services don't go after you (Hello 'Guardian'!):
In an earlier statement, Russia's foreign ministry said the US decision to withdraw was
"a grave mistake".
It also accused America of violating the treaty by deploying MK-41 launchers in Europe,
capable of firing intermediate-range cruise missiles
####
So the plus is, above they actually link to the Russian Foreign Ministry statement, but no
further. The big minus is that they wrote far, far more about Russia's 'violations'.
That t-Rump thinks Russia, let alone China is excited about joining a new deal,
hahahahahahahah!
We also discover that go to and favorite 'defense expert' (MGU Candidate of Sciences
Biology degree!) for the Pork Pie News Networks Pavel Felgenhauer is not dead!
KIEV (Reuters) - Detectives from Ukraine's state investigation bureau have summoned former
president Petro Poroshenko for questioning, the bureau said on Thursday.
"We confirmed that he will be questioned," a bureau spokesman said. He declined to give a
reason for the questioning, which will take place on July 17. A spokeswoman for Poroshenko had
no comment but said one might be available later.
James, 26 days ago
I am in Ukraine every year and all people know that Poroshenko used the war to make money. He
created companies that were then used by the Government to buy military equipment and
everyone knows this and waited for the opportunity to have him voted out. Most people here
want only to have a stable government that works for the people, but president after
president they put their hope in has only turned out to become wealthy at the expense of the
people.
There is hope that the new president will enact "real" reforms and government
acquisition reform that gives all businesses an fair opportunity to compete for work.
Poroshenko never got rid of the corrupt judicial officials that enabled crooks to keep doing
what they were doing.
James, 26 days ago
One has to wonder which Western/NATO intelligence agency Poroshenko represented. It was not
for the benefit of representing Ukraine or Russia that is for sure.
Bamboo, 26 days ago
Gee. It looks like the USA has lost its puppet regime. Is Joe Biden's son still getting a
piece of the Ukrainian Pie?
Peter, 26 days ago
Here's a question for poroshenko. What happened to the millions the US gave him to help the
people of his country?
THE AMERICANO, 26 days ago
And a very nice arrest warrant will magically appear out of no where IF he shows up.
David, 26 days ago
I'm wondering if poroshenko was smart enough to request an american passport as a part of
compensation for pushing the country into the democracy?
26 days ago
Poroshenko is a failure of the West meddling in another country's affair for the sole purpose
of hurting Russia.
26 days ago
A person who led Ukraine to prosperity, fighter with corruption, liberator from Russia, and
he is being questioned? How come? :-) I hope you get the sarcasm.
"... Poroshenko has previously been involved in eleven criminal cases, in particular, as regards his abuse of power and his official position in the distribution of posts in "Tsentrenergo", his treason in connection with the incident in the Kerch Strait, his usurpation of judicial power and his misappropriation of the TV channel "Direct", his falsification of documents in the formation of Deputy factions in 2016, and his illegal appointment of a government, and the seizure of power. ..."
"... In addition, as a witness, he was questioned about civilian deaths during the Euromaidan protests in 2014. ..."
"... I could see them having a quiet word with Zelenskiy, maybe leave the old man out of it, what do you say? But Washington is already accused – with substantial justification, I would say – of running the show in Ukraine, and there are limits to how much obvious interfering it can do; especially after Biden's bragging about getting the state prosecutor fired. ..."
Poroshenko has asked the US for help with criminal cases in the Ukraine, writes
media
05:31
MOSCOW, 1 Jul – RIA Novosti.The former President of the Ukraine Petro
Poroshenko is in Istanbul, where he has turned to American companies to lobby for protection
from criminal cases, reports "
Ukraine News " with reference to sources.
It has been noted that in the Ukraine changes have been made as regards the criminal
cases against Poroshenko. In particular, in May 2019, the former-president's lawyer Igor
Golovan stated that these criminal cases would not entail any legal consequences, but now
Poroshenko's entourage realizes that the criminal prosecution of the former president has
noticeably intensified and may have consequences.
Therefore, according to the newspaper, in Turkey Poroshenko has started to lobbying
U.S. companies, in particular, the BGR group, for assistance in resolving these
cases.
"He is well aware that everything that happens in the RRG (State Bureau of
investigation – trans. ed.) is taken very seriously, and he intends to defend himself
against attacks. He can, for example, be expecting public support in Washington if there is
an attempt made to arrest him", said the source.
In addition, the publication cites the words of Ukrainian political scientist Alexei
Yakubin, who has noted that Poroshenko could repeat the "Saakashvili scenario".
"For example, he'll leave for treatment in London, where part of his entourage has
entrenched itself. But this model complicates the public protection of his business assets
within the country, which assets might be seized", he said.
The case against Poroshenko
Poroshenko has previously been involved in eleven criminal cases, in particular, as regards
his abuse of power and his official position in the distribution of posts in "Tsentrenergo",
his treason in connection with the incident in the Kerch Strait, his usurpation of judicial
power and his misappropriation of the TV channel "Direct", his falsification of documents in
the formation of Deputy factions in 2016, and his illegal appointment of a government, and
the seizure of power.
In addition, as a witness, he was questioned about civilian deaths during the
Euromaidan protests in 2014.
Poroshenko himself, speaking at the party congress of "European Business", said that he
is responsible only before the Ukrainian people and is not afraid of persecution.
Quite right, old man; keep your chin up. I daresay they're staying in quite prestigious digs
in Istanbul, as befits visiting royalty. He seems to be labouring under a misapprehension
that he is valuable somehow to Washington, whereas that would only be true if Washington were
unwilling to work with Zelenskiy, and wanted him out of the way.
So far as I can see,
Washington is quite satisfied with Zelenskiy, while the people would not countenance a
Poroshenko return. So he's not really much use, is he? Especially if the USA wishes to
publicly support Zelenskiy's supposed battle with official corruption.
I could see them having a quiet word with Zelenskiy, maybe leave the old man out of it,
what do you say? But Washington is already accused – with substantial justification, I
would say – of running the show in Ukraine, and there are limits to how much obvious
interfering it can do; especially after Biden's bragging about getting the state prosecutor
fired.
Yes, I was sort of getting at the probability that Clan Poroshenko is just installed in a
very nice hotel. I doubt he will want to be plunking down money for an actual property so
long as the status of his assets still in Ukraine is still up in the air. I should imagine
the Ukrainian government will take steps, if it has not already, to prevent his simply
withdrawing their cash value.
The thing about the pindosi, though, is that they always hedge their bets .
I vangize that they will pressure Zel to pardon Porky. So that they have a spare.
I hope I am wrong, but I don't think I am.
I doubt it, simply because it would kick the timbers right out from under Zelenskiy's
anti-corruption platform, which is the issue on which he was voted in, and there would be no
way to do it under the radar. The Ukrainian people must be following Porky's flight with
great interest, and inferring that it means he has something to hide. Therefore an abrupt
discontinuing of the pursuit, and a refocusing elsewhere, would tell them accountability is
not attributed to the powerful and wealthy. Which is uhhh exactly the opposite of Zelenskiy's
message.
A person who led Ukraine to prosperity, fighter with corruption, liberator from Russia, and he is being questioned? How come?
:-) I hope you get the sarcasm.
"... India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya or Syria. ..."
"... Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America. ..."
"... America's Future Is with India and Israel: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-future-india-israel-21629 ..."
Imperial divide and conquer strategy. Global strife aids imperialists. Russia, China, Iran unity threatens global Anglo Zionists.
Consequently, the logical progression is to welcome India into Anglo Zionist alliance with more aid to their extremists (Modi)
Emboldening extremists is always the way to war.
It is not that simple as Saudi sells oil to China, and India, Saudi plus Israel are on speaking terms with Russia plus Saudi
bankrolls Pakistan and US policies might change completely if Trump loses 2020.
Of course all bets are off should Modi manage to provoke a Hindu-Moslim civil war involving Pakistan.
Since I was at the age of having a political opinion, Jammu and Kashmir were part of a collection of areas under constant
conflict.
...
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Aug 5 2019 18:13 utc | 44
Thanks for the reminder. Your use of the term 'constant conflict' reminded me of a military doctrine I stumbled upon in the
early Noughties which was called Constant Conflict. The only thing I could remember about it, today, was that it was written by
a psychopath and I did NOT like what the author was proposing.
It's dated 16.04.2016 and names the author as Retired Lieutenant Colonel of United States Army Ralph Peters and summarises
the crux of Peters' thesis and and his background/mission statement. It also provides enough info to find the original 1997 article
here... https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/97summer/peters.htm
The article concludes thus and there's a footnote...
...
"The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of
it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but
we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline."
--- Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for
future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate
of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several
years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has
published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books.
This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant
Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.
India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at
least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya
or Syria.
Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state
of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America.
So perhaps India should emulate its fellow "democratic" ally of America and adopt the same ethnic cleansing tactics in Kashmir
that the Land of the Free has deployed against Native tribes throughout the Indigenous lands that America currently occupies--from
the Trail of Tears of the past to the DAPL pipeline protests today.
"... Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. ..."
"... As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".) ..."
"... Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker. ..."
"... With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals. ..."
"... These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict. ..."
"... The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias. ..."
"... In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies. ..."
"... Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces. ..."
"... An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake. ..."
"... With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. ..."
"... Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran. ..."
In 2014 we were almost at the point of no return in Ukraine following the coup d'etat supported and funded by NATO and involving
extremist right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. The conflict in the Donbass risked escalating into a conflict between NATO and the Russian
Federation, every day in the summer and autumn of 2014 threatening to be doomsday. Rather than respond to the understandable impulse
to send Russian troops into Ukraine to defend the population of Donbass, Putin had the presense of mind to pursue the less direct
and more sensible strategy of supporting the material capacity of the residents of Donbass to resist the depredations of the Ukrainian
army and their neo-Nazi Banderite thugs. Meanwhile, Europe's inept leaders initially egged on Ukraine's destabilization, only to
get cold feet after reflecting on the possibility of having a conflict between Moscow and Washington fought on European soil.
With the resistance in Donbass managing to successfully hold back Ukrainian assaults, the conflict began to freeze, almost to
the point of a complete ceasefire, even as Ukrainian provocations continue to this day.
Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel,
France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. Russian
intervention in 2015 managed to save the country with no time to spare, destroying large numbers of terrorists and reorganizing the
Syrian armed forces and training and equipping them with the necessary means to beat back the jihadi waves. The Russians also ensured
control of the skies through their network of Pantsir-S1, Pantsir-S2, S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems, together with their
impressive jamming (Krasukha-4), command and control
information management system (Strelets C4ISR System) and electronic-warfare technologies (1RL257 Krasukha-4).
As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack
on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no
secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton
called
for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to "
pay a little price ".)
Since Trump became president, the rhetoric of war has soared considerably, even as the awareness remains that any new conflict
would sink Trump's chances of re-election. Despite this, Trump's bombings in Syria were real and potentially very harmful to the
Syrian state. Nevertheless, they were
foiled by Russia's electronic-warfare capability, which was able to send veering away from their intended target more than 70%
of the latest-generation missiles launched by the British, French, Americans and Israelis.
One of the most terrifying moments for the future of humanity came a few months later when Trump started hurling threats and abuses
at Kim Jong-un , threatening to reduce Pyongyang to ashes. Trump, moreover, delivered his fiery threats in a speech at the United
Nations General Assembly.
Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint
a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens
to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He
then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker.
With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different
results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have
had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies
were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer
has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies
have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.
The difference between the case of Iran and the aforementioned cases of Ukraine, Syria and North Korea is precisely the direct
involvement of these two lobbies in the decision-making process underway in the US.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the
cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated
by decades of conflict.
What readers can be assured of is that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and Iran, the US is unable to militarily impose
its geopolitical or economic will.
The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained
extensively
why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was
unthinkable
, bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO
somewhat refused
to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias.
In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed
in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously
contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover
and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies.
In North Korea, the country's tactical and strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence discourages any missile attack. Any overland
attack is out of the question, given the high number of active as well as reserve personnel in the DPRK army. If the US struggled
to control a completely defeated Iraq in 2003, how much more difficult would be to deal with a country with a resilient population
that is indisposed to bowing to the US? The 2003 Iraq campaign would really be a "cakewalk" in comparison. Another reason why a missile
attack on North Korea is impossible is because of the conventional power that Pyongyang possesses in the form of tens of thousands
of missiles and artillery pieces that could easily reduce Seoul to rubble in a matter of minutes. This would then lead to a war between
the US and the DPRK being fought on the Korean Peninsula. Moon Jae-in, like Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of Ukraine, did everything
in his power to prevent such a devastating conflict.
Concerning tensions between the US and Iran and the resulting threats of war, these should be taken as bluster and bluff. America's
European allies are heavily involved in Iran and depend on the Middle East for their oil and gas imports. A US war against Iran would
have devastating consequences for the world economy, with the Europeans seeing their imports halved or reduced. As Professor Chossudovsky
of the strategic think tank Global Research has so ably
argued , an attack on Iran is unsustainable, as the oil sectors of the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be hit and shut down. Exports
would instantly end after the pipelines going West are bombed by the Houthis and the Strait of Hormuz closed. The economies of these
two countries would implode and their ruling class wiped out by internal revolts. The state of Israel as well as US bases in the
region would see themselves overwhelmed with missiles coming from Syria, Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Iran. The Tel Aviv government
would last a few hours before capitulating under the pressure of its own citizens, who, like the Europeans, are unused to suffering
war at home.
Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against
the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic
resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication
of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to
withdraw from the
coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable
damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces.
An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't
want to cross, having so much at stake.
With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises.
The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its
own profits and controls global finance. And finally, US military planners do not intend to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iran
that would reveal the extent to which US military power is based on propaganda built over the years through Hollywood movies and
wars successfully executed against relatively defenceless countries. Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin
Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them
on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is telling that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh have to resort to numerous but ultimately useless
provocations against Iran, as they
can only rely on hybrid attacks in order to economically isolate it from the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, this strategy has had devastating consequences for the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency together with
the SWIFT system. In today's multipolar environment, acting in such an imperious manner leads to the acceleration of de-dollarization
as a way of circumventing sanctions and bans imposed by the US.
A reserve currency is used to facilitate transactions. If the disadvantages come to exceed the benefits, it will progressively
be used less and less, until it is replaced by a basket of currencies that more closely reflect the multipolar geopolitical reality.
The warmongers in Washington are exasperated by their continuing inability to curb the resilience and resistance of the people
in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Donbass, countries and regions understood by the healthy part of the globe as representing
the axis of resistance to US Imperialism.
America must always threaten someone with war. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, so many to choose from.
Conflicts must never be resolved; they must always kept simmering, so a hot war can be triggered quickly. All Presidents are
turned in the first three months after sworn in.
It's what happens as empires mature. Governance becomes bloated, corrupt and inept (often leading to wars). Maturity time has
become significantly reduced due to the rate of information technology advance. America is five years away from going insolvent
according to most models and forecasts. All new debt after 2024 will be used to pay the interest on existing debts and liabilities.
There is simply no stopping it. The US already pays close to 500 billion in annual interest on debts and liabilities. Factor in
a 600 billion or 700 billion dollar annual military budget, and unrestrained deficit spending clocking in at over a trillion,
and, well, it isn't going to work for long. Considering most new well paying jobs are government jobs... The end is either full
socialism / fascism (folks still don't get how similar these are), a currency crisis and panic, depression and institutional deterioration.
The only good news to libertarians I guess - if you can call it good - is that the blotted government along with the crony corporations
will mostly and eventually collapse. Libertarian governance might not be a choice by an electorate, it might simply become fact
in the aftermath.
I guess Trump eventually will understand this lesson in politics that friendship, mutual respect and helping each other accomplishes
way way more then threatening countries to be bombed back into the stoneage.
Noone likes to do a cutthroat deal enforced upon them by thuggery. Trump's got to learn that you can't run politics like you do
your bussinesses, it's not working unles that was his plan all this time, to destroy America.
"The Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy
goals.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at
the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been
devastated by decades of conflict."
America is increasingly looking like Ancient Rome towards the end. It is overstretched, nearly insolvent, fewer allies want
to be allies, it's population is sick, physically and mentally. Obesity, diabetes, drug use/addiction make it impossible for the
Pentagon to meet recruitment goal. Mental illness causes daily mass killing. The education system is so broken/broke that there
is little real education being done. Americans are among the most ignorant, least educated and least educate-able people in the
developed world.
Militarily, the USA can bomb but that's about it... defeats upon defeats over the past two decades demonstrate the US military
is a paper tiger of astonishing incompetence.
Boeing can't make planes anymore. Lockheed is not much better. Parts of the F-35 are made by Chinese subsidiaries. The most
recently built aircraft carrier cannot launch fighter jets.
Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds
ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like
parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.
I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think
of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don't want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population
is made up of children.
Seriously, why would Iran want to hijack a German ship? Iran took the UK one in retaliation for the Brits seizing the one at
Gibraltar. Had that not happened, no Brit ships in the Persian Gulf would have been touched. This is all a carefully engineered
USA provocation designed to, inter alia, increase tension in the Persian Gulf, put more nails in coffin of JCPOA...and most importantly
give UK an excuse, as remaining signatory, to call for the original UN sanctions on Iran to be snapped-back.
Federico, let me explain it simply: the U.S. is allied with Israel, and Iran hates Israel. Why, I don't know (nor do I care),
but that's why the U.S. needs to keep Iran in check.
Yet CONGRESS just passed the largest defense bill in history. The WAR industry is bankrupting us financially spiritually and
morally.
A war is coming. But upon whom this time (or STILL?), because with President Bolton and Vice President Adelson in power, China
Iran or Russia or maybe all three, are open options.
Interview with a Russian I saw 2 years ago "USA wants to create local conflicts on foreign shores, ...on our borders, we will
not allow that to happen and make the war international" I will translate: Russia will not be pulled in to some stupid small war
draining their resources while the US sits comfortable, they will throw their missiles around - no escape from nuclear winter.
If spending has reached the limit now, during peacetime....what will happen during a protracted war? Even if it stays conventional,
it would appear that a huge war effort, comparable to WWII, just won't be possible. The US seems to be in a pre-war Britain position,
but there isn't a friendly giant across the water to bail them out with both cash and resources.
Either things become insane in fairly short order, or wiser heads will prevail and the US will step back from the brink. Do
we have any wiser heads at the moment?
I keep seeing John Bolton's moustache, Andi am not filled with confidence.
I would not call this article decent. At best it is half-decent ;-) This is a typical NYT anti-Tulsi propaganda but it does make
several relent observation buried in the sea of anti-Tulsi crapola.
Notable quotes:
"... “We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather than with, you know, a police baton,” she says. ..."
"... While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American intervention abroad. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard Thinks We're Doomed by Nellie Bowles
Tulsi Gabbard is running for president of a country that she believes has wrought horror on the world, and she wants its
citizens to remember that.
She is from Hawaii, and she spends each morning surfing. But that is not what she talks about in this unlikely campaign.
She talks about the horror.
She lists countries: Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq. Failure after failure, she says. To drive the point
home, she wants to meet on a Sioux tribe reservation in North Dakota, where, she explains, the United States government committed
its original atrocity.
“These Indigenous people have been disrespected, mistreated with broken promises and desecrated lands,” Ms. Gabbard says.
... ... ...
But her run, and the unusual cross-section of voters she appeals to — Howard Zinn fans, anti-drug-war libertarians, Russia-gate
skeptics, and conservatives suspicious of Big Tech — signifies just how much both parties have shifted, not just on foreign
policy. It could end up being a sign that President Trump’s isolationism is not the aberration many believed, but rather a
harbinger of a growing national sentiment that America should stand alone.
To Ms. Gabbard, it is the United States that has been the cruel and destabilizing force.
... ... ...
“We should be coming to other leaders in other countries with respect, building a relationship based on cooperation rather
than with, you know, a police baton,” she says.
... ... ...
While she is the embodiment of this anti-interventionist message onstage, there is a much larger movement brewing. There
is big money in peace. Two billionaire philanthropists from opposite ends of the political spectrum — George Soros and Charles
Koch — came together this summer to fund the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a think tank to argue against American
intervention abroad.
... ... ...
Ms. Gabbard says she is driven by the feeling that death could come at any moment, which she realized at age 10 but which
became more intense in Iraq.
“My first deployment was at the height of the war in 2005. We were 40 miles north of Baghdad. And there was a huge sign
by one of the main gates that just read: ‘Is today the day?’” she says. “It was such a stark reminder that my time could come
at any moment. That any day could be my last.”
She is not sure who put the sign up or why. But it was this message of potentially imminent doom that she wanted to leave
the audience with at the second Democratic debate.
“As we stand here tonight,” she told the crowd. “There are thousands of nuclear missiles pointing right at us, and if we
were to get an attack, we would have 30 minutes, 30 minutes, before we were hit.”
Ms. Gabbard continued.
“There is no shelter. This is the warmonger’s hoax. There is no shelter. It’s all a lie.”
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter:
@nelliebowles
Former president of
Ukraine Petro Poroshenko went to the United Arab Emirates and Germany together with his family.
The politician's family had to use two planes to leave the country.
It is known that ex-president's wife Marina left Kiev for Munich on July 23 together with
her daughters and younger son Mikhail. Petro Poroshenko himself flew on a charter flight from
Kiev to Istanbul along with his eldest son Alexei. According to Izvestia newspaper, the former
head of state then took a flight to Dubai with the same board.
Petro Poroshenko has citizenship of five countries despite the ban for Ukrainian citizens to
have dual citizenship. The ex-president got several identification documents for different
names back in 1996.
"... India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya or Syria. ..."
"... Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America. ..."
"... America's Future Is with India and Israel: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/americas-future-india-israel-21629 ..."
Imperial divide and conquer strategy. Global strife aids imperialists. Russia, China, Iran unity threatens global Anglo Zionists.
Consequently, the logical progression is to welcome India into Anglo Zionist alliance with more aid to their extremists (Modi)
Emboldening extremists is always the way to war.
It is not that simple as Saudi sells oil to China, and India, Saudi plus Israel are on speaking terms with Russia plus Saudi
bankrolls Pakistan and US policies might change completely if Trump loses 2020.
Of course all bets are off should Modi manage to provoke a Hindu-Moslim civil war involving Pakistan.
Since I was at the age of having a political opinion, Jammu and Kashmir were part of a collection of areas under constant
conflict.
...
Posted by: Sunny Runny Burger | Aug 5 2019 18:13 utc | 44
Thanks for the reminder. Your use of the term 'constant conflict' reminded me of a military doctrine I stumbled upon in the
early Noughties which was called Constant Conflict. The only thing I could remember about it, today, was that it was written by
a psychopath and I did NOT like what the author was proposing.
It's dated 16.04.2016 and names the author as Retired Lieutenant Colonel of United States Army Ralph Peters and summarises
the crux of Peters' thesis and and his background/mission statement. It also provides enough info to find the original 1997 article
here... https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/articles/97summer/peters.htm
The article concludes thus and there's a footnote...
...
"The next century will indeed be American, but it will also be troubled. We will find ourselves in constant conflict, much of
it violent. The United States Army is going to add a lot of battle streamers to its flag. We will wage information warfare, but
we will fight with infantry. And we will always surprise those critics, domestic and foreign, who predict our decline."
--- Major (P) Ralph Peters is assigned to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, where he is responsible for
future warfare. Prior to becoming a Foreign Area Officer for Eurasia, he served exclusively at the tactical level. He is a graduate
of the US Army Command and General Staff College and holds a master's degree in international relations. Over the past several
years, his professional and personal research travels have taken Major Peters to Russia, Ukraine, Georgia, Ossetia, Abkhazia,
Armenia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Poland, Hungary,
the Czech Republic, Pakistan, Turkey, Burma, Laos, Thailand, and Mexico, as well as the countries of the Andean Ridge. He has
published widely on military and international concerns. His sixth novel, Twilight of Heroes, was recently released by Avon Books.
This is his eighth article for Parameters. The author wishes to acknowledge the importance to this essay of discussions with Lieutenant
Colonels Gordon Thompson and Lonnie Henley, both US Army officers.
India is allied with America and Israel and shares with these fascist "democracies" a national hatred of Muslims--well, at
least those Muslims who are not stupid enough to act as American/Israeli jihadist/terrorist assets around the world like in Libya
or Syria.
Moreover, India is a Hindu fundamentalist nation that has made common religious cause with the Zionist fundamentalist state
of Israel and the Christian fundamentalist state of America.
So perhaps India should emulate its fellow "democratic" ally of America and adopt the same ethnic cleansing tactics in Kashmir
that the Land of the Free has deployed against Native tribes throughout the Indigenous lands that America currently occupies--from
the Trail of Tears of the past to the DAPL pipeline protests today.
"... Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel, France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. ..."
"... As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton called for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to " pay a little price ".) ..."
"... Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker. ..."
"... With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals. ..."
"... These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated by decades of conflict. ..."
"... The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained extensively why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was unthinkable , bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO somewhat refused to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias. ..."
"... In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies. ..."
"... Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to withdraw from the coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces. ..."
"... An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't want to cross, having so much at stake. ..."
"... With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises. The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its own profits and controls global finance. ..."
"... Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran. ..."
In 2014 we were almost at the point of no return in Ukraine following the coup d'etat supported and funded by NATO and involving
extremist right-wing Ukrainian nationalists. The conflict in the Donbass risked escalating into a conflict between NATO and the Russian
Federation, every day in the summer and autumn of 2014 threatening to be doomsday. Rather than respond to the understandable impulse
to send Russian troops into Ukraine to defend the population of Donbass, Putin had the presense of mind to pursue the less direct
and more sensible strategy of supporting the material capacity of the residents of Donbass to resist the depredations of the Ukrainian
army and their neo-Nazi Banderite thugs. Meanwhile, Europe's inept leaders initially egged on Ukraine's destabilization, only to
get cold feet after reflecting on the possibility of having a conflict between Moscow and Washington fought on European soil.
With the resistance in Donbass managing to successfully hold back Ukrainian assaults, the conflict began to freeze, almost to
the point of a complete ceasefire, even as Ukrainian provocations continue to this day.
Tensions were then focused on Syria , where a mercenary army of at least 200,000 men, armed and trained by the US, UK, Israel,
France, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, almost managed to completely topple the country. Russian
intervention in 2015 managed to save the country with no time to spare, destroying large numbers of terrorists and reorganizing the
Syrian armed forces and training and equipping them with the necessary means to beat back the jihadi waves. The Russians also ensured
control of the skies through their network of Pantsir-S1, Pantsir-S2, S-300 and S-400 air-defence systems, together with their
impressive jamming (Krasukha-4), command and control
information management system (Strelets C4ISR System) and electronic-warfare technologies (1RL257 Krasukha-4).
As the Americans, British, French and Israelis conducted their bombing missions in Syria, the danger of a deliberate attack
on Russian positions always remained, something that would have had devastating consequences for the region and beyond. It is no
secret that US military planners have repeatedly argued for a direct conflict with Moscow in a contained regional theater. (Clinton
called
for the downing of Russian jets over Syria, and former US officials claimed that some Russians had to "
pay a little price ".)
Since Trump became president, the rhetoric of war has soared considerably, even as the awareness remains that any new conflict
would sink Trump's chances of re-election. Despite this, Trump's bombings in Syria were real and potentially very harmful to the
Syrian state. Nevertheless, they were
foiled by Russia's electronic-warfare capability, which was able to send veering away from their intended target more than 70%
of the latest-generation missiles launched by the British, French, Americans and Israelis.
One of the most terrifying moments for the future of humanity came a few months later when Trump started hurling threats and abuses
at Kim Jong-un , threatening to reduce Pyongyang to ashes. Trump, moreover, delivered his fiery threats in a speech at the United
Nations General Assembly.
Trump's dramatic U-turn following his historic meeting with Kim Jong-un (a public relations/photo opportunity) began to paint
a fairly comical and unreliable picture of US power, revealing to the world the new US president's strategy. The president threatens
to nuke a country, but only as a negotiating tactic to bring his opponent to the negotiating table and thereby clinch a deal. He
then presents himself to his domestic audience as the "great" deal-maker.
With Iran, the recent target of the US administration, the bargaining method is the same, though with decidedly different
results. In the cases of Ukraine and North Korea, the two most powerful lobbies in Washington, the Israeli and Saudi lobbies, have
had little to say. Of course the neocons and the arms lobbyists are always gunning for war, but these two powerful state-backed lobbies
were notably silent with regard to these countries, less towards Syria obviously. As distinguished political scientist John J. Mearsheimer
has repeatedly explained , the Israel and Saudi lobbies
have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy goals.
The difference between the case of Iran and the aforementioned cases of Ukraine, Syria and North Korea is precisely the direct
involvement of these two lobbies in the decision-making process underway in the US.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at the
cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been devastated
by decades of conflict.
What readers can be assured of is that in the cases of Ukraine, Syria, North Korea and Iran, the US is unable to militarily impose
its geopolitical or economic will.
The reasons vary with each case, and I have previously explained
extensively
why the possibilities for conflict are unthinkable. With Ukraine, a conflict on European soil between Russia and NATO was
unthinkable
, bringing to mind the type of devastation that was seen during the Second World War. Good sense prevailed, and even NATO
somewhat refused
to fully arm the Ukrainian army with weapons that would have given them an overwhelming advantage over the Donbass militias.
In Syria, any involvement with ground troops would have been collective suicide, given the overwhelming air power deployed
in the country by Russia. Recall that since the Second World War, the US has never fought a war in an airspace that was seriously
contested (in Vietnam, US air losses were only elevated because of Sino-Soviet help), allowing for ground troops to receive air cover
and protection . A ground assault in Syria would have therefore been catastrophic without the requisite control of Syria's skies.
In North Korea, the country's tactical and strategic nuclear and conventional deterrence discourages any missile attack. Any overland
attack is out of the question, given the high number of active as well as reserve personnel in the DPRK army. If the US struggled
to control a completely defeated Iraq in 2003, how much more difficult would be to deal with a country with a resilient population
that is indisposed to bowing to the US? The 2003 Iraq campaign would really be a "cakewalk" in comparison. Another reason why a missile
attack on North Korea is impossible is because of the conventional power that Pyongyang possesses in the form of tens of thousands
of missiles and artillery pieces that could easily reduce Seoul to rubble in a matter of minutes. This would then lead to a war between
the US and the DPRK being fought on the Korean Peninsula. Moon Jae-in, like Merkel and Sarkozy in the case of Ukraine, did everything
in his power to prevent such a devastating conflict.
Concerning tensions between the US and Iran and the resulting threats of war, these should be taken as bluster and bluff. America's
European allies are heavily involved in Iran and depend on the Middle East for their oil and gas imports. A US war against Iran would
have devastating consequences for the world economy, with the Europeans seeing their imports halved or reduced. As Professor Chossudovsky
of the strategic think tank Global Research has so ably
argued , an attack on Iran is unsustainable, as the oil sectors of the UAE and Saudi Arabia would be hit and shut down. Exports
would instantly end after the pipelines going West are bombed by the Houthis and the Strait of Hormuz closed. The economies of these
two countries would implode and their ruling class wiped out by internal revolts. The state of Israel as well as US bases in the
region would see themselves overwhelmed with missiles coming from Syria, Lebanon, the Golan Heights and Iran. The Tel Aviv government
would last a few hours before capitulating under the pressure of its own citizens, who, like the Europeans, are unused to suffering
war at home.
Because a war with Iran would be difficult to de-escalate, we can conclude that the possibility of war being waged against
the country is unlikely if not impossible. The level of damage the belligerents would inflict on each other would make any diplomatic
resolution of the conflict difficult. While the powerful Israeli and Saudi lobbies in the US may be beating the war drums, an indication
of what would happen if war followed can be seen in Yemen. Egypt and the UAE were forced to
withdraw from the
coalition fighting the Houthis after the UAE suffered considerable
damage from legitimate retaliatory missile strikes from the Yemen's Army Missile Forces.
An open war against Iran continues to be a red line that the ruling financial elites in the US, Israelis and Saudis don't
want to cross, having so much at stake.
With an election looming, Trump cannot risk triggering a new conflict and betraying one of his most important electoral promises.
The Western elite does not seem to have any intention of destroying the petrodollar-based world economy with which it generates its
own profits and controls global finance. And finally, US military planners do not intend to suffer a humiliating defeat in Iran
that would reveal the extent to which US military power is based on propaganda built over the years through Hollywood movies and
wars successfully executed against relatively defenceless countries. Even if we consider the possibility of Netanyahu and Bin
Salman being mentally unstable, someone within the royal palace in Riyadh or the government in Tel Aviv would have counseled them
on the political and personal consequences of an attack on Iran.
It is telling that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh have to resort to numerous but ultimately useless
provocations against Iran, as they
can only rely on hybrid attacks in order to economically isolate it from the rest of the world.
Paradoxically, this strategy has had devastating consequences for the role of the US dollar as a reserve currency together with
the SWIFT system. In today's multipolar environment, acting in such an imperious manner leads to the acceleration of de-dollarization
as a way of circumventing sanctions and bans imposed by the US.
A reserve currency is used to facilitate transactions. If the disadvantages come to exceed the benefits, it will progressively
be used less and less, until it is replaced by a basket of currencies that more closely reflect the multipolar geopolitical reality.
The warmongers in Washington are exasperated by their continuing inability to curb the resilience and resistance of the people
in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, North Korea and Donbass, countries and regions understood by the healthy part of the globe as representing
the axis of resistance to US Imperialism.
America must always threaten someone with war. Syria, Iran, Venezuela, China, Russia, so many to choose from.
Conflicts must never be resolved; they must always kept simmering, so a hot war can be triggered quickly. All Presidents are
turned in the first three months after sworn in.
It's what happens as empires mature. Governance becomes bloated, corrupt and inept (often leading to wars). Maturity time has
become significantly reduced due to the rate of information technology advance. America is five years away from going insolvent
according to most models and forecasts. All new debt after 2024 will be used to pay the interest on existing debts and liabilities.
There is simply no stopping it. The US already pays close to 500 billion in annual interest on debts and liabilities. Factor in
a 600 billion or 700 billion dollar annual military budget, and unrestrained deficit spending clocking in at over a trillion,
and, well, it isn't going to work for long. Considering most new well paying jobs are government jobs... The end is either full
socialism / fascism (folks still don't get how similar these are), a currency crisis and panic, depression and institutional deterioration.
The only good news to libertarians I guess - if you can call it good - is that the blotted government along with the crony corporations
will mostly and eventually collapse. Libertarian governance might not be a choice by an electorate, it might simply become fact
in the aftermath.
I guess Trump eventually will understand this lesson in politics that friendship, mutual respect and helping each other accomplishes
way way more then threatening countries to be bombed back into the stoneage.
Noone likes to do a cutthroat deal enforced upon them by thuggery. Trump's got to learn that you can't run politics like you do
your bussinesses, it's not working unles that was his plan all this time, to destroy America.
"The Israel and Saudi lobbies have unlimited funds for corrupting Democrats and Republicans in order to push their foreign-policy
goals.
These two lobbies (together with their neocon allies) have for years been pushing to have a few hundred thousand young Americans
sent to Iran to sacrifice themselves for the purposes of destroying Iran and her people. Such geopolitical games are played at
the cost of US taxpayers, the lives of their children sent to war, and the lives of the people of the Middle East, who have been
devastated by decades of conflict."
America is increasingly looking like Ancient Rome towards the end. It is overstretched, nearly insolvent, fewer allies want
to be allies, it's population is sick, physically and mentally. Obesity, diabetes, drug use/addiction make it impossible for the
Pentagon to meet recruitment goal. Mental illness causes daily mass killing. The education system is so broken/broke that there
is little real education being done. Americans are among the most ignorant, least educated and least educate-able people in the
developed world.
Militarily, the USA can bomb but that's about it... defeats upon defeats over the past two decades demonstrate the US military
is a paper tiger of astonishing incompetence.
Boeing can't make planes anymore. Lockheed is not much better. Parts of the F-35 are made by Chinese subsidiaries. The most
recently built aircraft carrier cannot launch fighter jets.
Recent estimates indicate that more than 550,000 people experience homelessness in the US on any given night, with about two-thirds
ending up in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs, and one-third finding their way to unsheltered locations like
parks, vehicles, and metro stations. According to the Urban Institute, about 25% of homeless people have jobs.
I find that it is difficult for me to wrap my head around pain and suffering on such an immense scale. Americans often think
of the homeless as drug-addicted men that don't want to work, but the truth is that about a quarter of the homeless population
is made up of children.
Seriously, why would Iran want to hijack a German ship? Iran took the UK one in retaliation for the Brits seizing the one at
Gibraltar. Had that not happened, no Brit ships in the Persian Gulf would have been touched. This is all a carefully engineered
USA provocation designed to, inter alia, increase tension in the Persian Gulf, put more nails in coffin of JCPOA...and most importantly
give UK an excuse, as remaining signatory, to call for the original UN sanctions on Iran to be snapped-back.
Federico, let me explain it simply: the U.S. is allied with Israel, and Iran hates Israel. Why, I don't know (nor do I care),
but that's why the U.S. needs to keep Iran in check.
Yet CONGRESS just passed the largest defense bill in history. The WAR industry is bankrupting us financially spiritually and
morally.
A war is coming. But upon whom this time (or STILL?), because with President Bolton and Vice President Adelson in power, China
Iran or Russia or maybe all three, are open options.
Interview with a Russian I saw 2 years ago "USA wants to create local conflicts on foreign shores, ...on our borders, we will
not allow that to happen and make the war international" I will translate: Russia will not be pulled in to some stupid small war
draining their resources while the US sits comfortable, they will throw their missiles around - no escape from nuclear winter.
If spending has reached the limit now, during peacetime....what will happen during a protracted war? Even if it stays conventional,
it would appear that a huge war effort, comparable to WWII, just won't be possible. The US seems to be in a pre-war Britain position,
but there isn't a friendly giant across the water to bail them out with both cash and resources.
Either things become insane in fairly short order, or wiser heads will prevail and the US will step back from the brink. Do
we have any wiser heads at the moment?
I keep seeing John Bolton's moustache, Andi am not filled with confidence.
In view of the anniversaries of bomb tests 2 and 3 (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) let's remember that
Groves said the bomb was to control Russia (said in March of 1944), not Japan.
And let's read fun stuff> (url is broken-up) http://blog. nuclearsecrecy.com/ 2017/04/10/president-bomb-iii/
Title> The President and the Bomb, Part III
The Plan to control Russia has evidently failed...
Oh yes, there's Coster-Mullin and his gadget... (look him up)
"... As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party–hardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crow–could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95) ..."
"... Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling. ..."
"... The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96) ..."
Andrew Bacevich
calls for
reckoning with the consequences of American colonial empire in the Philippines:
Yet the Philippines represented an altogether different case. By no stretch of the imagination did the archipelago fall within
"our backyard." Furthermore, the Filipinos had no desire to trade Spanish rule for American rule and violently resisted occupation
by U.S. forces. The notably dirty Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902 -- a conflict almost entirely expunged
from American memory today -- resulted in something like 200,000 Filipino deaths and ended in a U.S. victory not yet memorialized
on the National Mall in Washington.
Bacevich is right when he says that the Philippine War has been "almost entirely expunged from American memory today." It is significant
that one of the only times in recent years that the Philippine War was remembered was so that it could provide fodder for the counterinsurgency
fad among pro-war pundits. Max Boot was one of the chief advocates for counterinsurgency warfare, and he has cited the brutal occupation
campaign in the Philippines as an example of how to win such wars. Greg Bankoff counted the costs of the "small war" in the Philippines
that Boot praised in his book The Savage Wars of Peace , and he
described them in this response to a positive review of the book back in 2002:
Start with the description of the war itself as "small." Granted, the United States suffered only some 7,000 casualties, dead
and wounded. But estimates of Filipino mortality range from 200,000 persons upward. This is hardly small, especially considering
that the total Filipino population at the time was around seven million. Nor is it accurate to say the war ended in 1902, unless
one accepts the terms of President Theodore Roosevelt's November 1902 Brigandage Act, which redefined any band of more than three
men as bandits and subjected them to 20 years imprisonment or the death penalty. In fact, guerrilla warfare continued until 1907,
waged by popular revolutionary leaders who refused to accept the colonial yoke anew -- men such as Luciano San Miguel (who died
on the battlefield of Corral-na-Bato in March 1903), Macario Sakay (who was hanged on September 13, 1907) and Julian Montalan
(who was sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled to Palawan until 1921). No, the war did not actually end in 1902, but the U.S.
colonial authorities conveniently branded everything subsequent to that as ladronism, simple thievery.
Bankoff warned later in the same piece that "a distorted reconstruction of that past is likely to preview an equally distorted
future." Looking back seventeen years later at our multiple protracted wars, all of them enthusiastically supported by Boot and fellow
neo-imperialists, we have to conclude that the future was horribly distorted in part by this willingness to lionize and whitewash
the Philippine War as a model for U.S. foreign policy. Like that war, our ongoing wars have inflicted horrific losses on the local
populations, they are completely divorced from the security of the United States, and the people we are fighting are fighting us
because our forces are in their country.
If Boot's distorted history has contributed to the distortion of our foreign policy, we could do worse than to begin by finding
better reconstructions of the past. Daniel Immerwahr has done some important work in studying the consequences of our colonial empire
on the people in the territories that our government took over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His book
How to Hide an Empire recounts the history of how the U.S. obtained its overseas territories, how it abused them, and how
it has created a very different kind of empire over the last seventy years.
Immerwahr recounts some of the opposition to the Philippine War from members of the Anti-Imperialist League:
As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party–hardly a radical
organization in the age of Jim Crow–could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic
platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic
and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95)
He also describes the tactics that U.S. forces used in the war:
Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents
could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the
north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.
The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos
not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96)
If we hope to change U.S. foreign policy and repudiate empire, we have to remember first how we acquired it and the Americans
that organized to oppose it.
P.S. Another similarity between the Philippine War and the wars of the last two decades is the length of the actual fighting.
Immerwahr writes:
Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in
Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought. (p. 107)
Barr now has goods to jail major conspirators for life. It is unlikely happened but we can hope.
Notable quotes:
"... "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the 'Russiagate' investigation. ..."
"... The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss "our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference in US domestic politics. ..."
"... British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the report said. ..."
"... Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he said. ..."
"... Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic. ..."
"... In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel Robert Mueller. ..."
While hysteria raged about possible Russian "interference" in the 2016 US election, British
intelligence officials were secretly playing a "key role" in helping instigate investigations
into Donald Trump, secret texts have shown. "Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign
country interfering in American affairs," former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about
the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the
'Russiagate' investigation.
The Guardian reported on texts between former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe and Jeremy
Fleming, his then counterpart at MI5, who now heads GCHQ. The two men met in 2016 to discuss
"our strange situation" – an apparent reference to Russia's alleged interference
in US domestic politics.
British intelligence "appears to have played a key role in the early stages," the
report said.
Galloway said the revelation was not surprising because people "already knew" that
British intelligence had played a part in the Russia-related investigations in the US. He
recalled that it was former British spy Christopher Steele who drew up the now-infamous Steele
dossier, which made multiple unverifiable and salacious claims about Trump and has since been
largely discredited. Britain is "up to its neck in the whole Russiagate affair," he
said.
The texts also reveal that the Brexit vote was viewed by some in the FBI as something that
had been influenced by Russia.
Asked what the UK stood to gain by trying to implicate Russia in a US election scandal at a
time when then-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was dismissing baseless claims of Russian
interference in the Brexit campaign, Galloway noted that Johnson's comments on Russia have
appeared to strangely sway between friendly and antagonistic.
Johnson is like "a sofa that bears the impression of the last person to sit upon
him," the former MP quipped. What happens next will depend on who is leading the tango,
"the orange man in Washington or the blonde mop-head in London."
In June 2016, the FBI opened a covert investigation codenamed 'Crossfire Hurricane' into
Trump's now disproven collusion with Moscow, which was later taken over by special counsel
Robert Mueller.
Ultimately, the two-year-long probe that followed came up short, producing no evidence to prove a conspiracy or collusion
between Trump campaign officials and Russia
"... As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party–hardly a radical organization in the age of Jim Crow–could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95) ..."
"... Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling. ..."
"... The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96) ..."
Andrew Bacevich
calls for
reckoning with the consequences of American colonial empire in the Philippines:
Yet the Philippines represented an altogether different case. By no stretch of the imagination did the archipelago fall within
"our backyard." Furthermore, the Filipinos had no desire to trade Spanish rule for American rule and violently resisted occupation
by U.S. forces. The notably dirty Philippine-American War that followed from 1899 to 1902 -- a conflict almost entirely expunged
from American memory today -- resulted in something like 200,000 Filipino deaths and ended in a U.S. victory not yet memorialized
on the National Mall in Washington.
Bacevich is right when he says that the Philippine War has been "almost entirely expunged from American memory today." It is significant
that one of the only times in recent years that the Philippine War was remembered was so that it could provide fodder for the counterinsurgency
fad among pro-war pundits. Max Boot was one of the chief advocates for counterinsurgency warfare, and he has cited the brutal occupation
campaign in the Philippines as an example of how to win such wars. Greg Bankoff counted the costs of the "small war" in the Philippines
that Boot praised in his book The Savage Wars of Peace , and he
described them in this response to a positive review of the book back in 2002:
Start with the description of the war itself as "small." Granted, the United States suffered only some 7,000 casualties, dead
and wounded. But estimates of Filipino mortality range from 200,000 persons upward. This is hardly small, especially considering
that the total Filipino population at the time was around seven million. Nor is it accurate to say the war ended in 1902, unless
one accepts the terms of President Theodore Roosevelt's November 1902 Brigandage Act, which redefined any band of more than three
men as bandits and subjected them to 20 years imprisonment or the death penalty. In fact, guerrilla warfare continued until 1907,
waged by popular revolutionary leaders who refused to accept the colonial yoke anew -- men such as Luciano San Miguel (who died
on the battlefield of Corral-na-Bato in March 1903), Macario Sakay (who was hanged on September 13, 1907) and Julian Montalan
(who was sentenced to life imprisonment and exiled to Palawan until 1921). No, the war did not actually end in 1902, but the U.S.
colonial authorities conveniently branded everything subsequent to that as ladronism, simple thievery.
Bankoff warned later in the same piece that "a distorted reconstruction of that past is likely to preview an equally distorted
future." Looking back seventeen years later at our multiple protracted wars, all of them enthusiastically supported by Boot and fellow
neo-imperialists, we have to conclude that the future was horribly distorted in part by this willingness to lionize and whitewash
the Philippine War as a model for U.S. foreign policy. Like that war, our ongoing wars have inflicted horrific losses on the local
populations, they are completely divorced from the security of the United States, and the people we are fighting are fighting us
because our forces are in their country.
If Boot's distorted history has contributed to the distortion of our foreign policy, we could do worse than to begin by finding
better reconstructions of the past. Daniel Immerwahr has done some important work in studying the consequences of our colonial empire
on the people in the territories that our government took over in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His book
How to Hide an Empire recounts the history of how the U.S. obtained its overseas territories, how it abused them, and how
it has created a very different kind of empire over the last seventy years.
Immerwahr recounts some of the opposition to the Philippine War from members of the Anti-Imperialist League:
As Aguinaldo hoped, the Philippine War tapped a rich vein of anti-imperialism. Even the Democratic Party–hardly a radical
organization in the age of Jim Crow–could go a little spittle-flecked on this issue. The war was "criminal aggression," the Democratic
platform charged in 1900, born of "greedy commercialism" and sure to ruin the country. "No nation can long endure half republic
and half empire," it warned. "Imperialism abroad will lead quickly and inevitably to despotism at home." (p. 95)
He also describes the tactics that U.S. forces used in the war:
Now, with that spotlight switched off, MacArthur just wanted it over. He issued a new set of orders. Captured insurgents
could be killed. Towns supporting them could be destroyed. The preferred method was burning, and since nearly every town in the
north of the Philippines was aiding the rebels in some way, every one was potentially kindling.
The men needed little encouragement to carry out these orders. As MacArthur well knew, his soldiers regarded Filipinos
not at fellow Americans, but as irksome "natives." (p. 96)
If we hope to change U.S. foreign policy and repudiate empire, we have to remember first how we acquired it and the Americans
that organized to oppose it.
P.S. Another similarity between the Philippine War and the wars of the last two decades is the length of the actual fighting.
Immerwahr writes:
Stretching from the outbreak of hostilities in 1899 to the end of military rule in Moroland in 1913, it is, after the war in
Afghanistan, the longest war the United States has ever fought. (p. 107)
The war in
Afghanistan has reached new levels of insanity as a UN report shows US forces are killing more
civilians than ISIS and Taliban combined.
For the last several decades, the US government has openly funded, supported, and armed various
terrorist networks throughout the world to forward an agenda of destabilization and proxy war.
It is not a secret, nor a conspiracy theory -- America arms bad guys
. The situation has
gotten so overtly corrupt that the government admitted in May the Pentagon asked Congress for
funding to reimburse terrorists for their transportation and other expenses. Seriously. But that
was just the tip of the iceberg. A new report from the United Nations shows the US and its allies
in Afghanistan have killed more innocent men, women, and children than the group they claim are the
bad guys, the Taliban.
The now 18-year-old quagmire in Afghanistan is raising serious questions and once again,
it appears that the civilians are taking the brunt of the hit -- not the ostensible enemy.
In the first six months of the year, the conflict killed nearly 1,400 civilians and wounded
about 2,400 more. Afghan forces and their allies caused 52 percent of the civilian deaths
compared with 39 percent attributable to militants -- mostly the Taliban, but also the Islamic
State. The figures do not total 100 percent because responsibility for some deaths could not be
definitively established.
The higher civilian death toll caused by Afghan and American forces comes from their greater
reliance on airstrikes, which are particularly deadly for civilians. The United Nations said
airstrikes resulted in 363 civilian deaths and 156 civilian injuries.
"While the number of injured decreased, the number of civilians killed more than
doubled in comparison to the first six months of 2018, highlighting the lethal character of this
tactic,"
the United Nations report said, referring to airstrikes.
Naturally, the US military calls this report by the UN anti-American propaganda.
"We assess and investigate all credible allegations of noncombatant casualties in this
complex environment, whereas others intentionally target public areas, use civilians as human
shields and attempt to hide the truth through lies and propaganda," Colonel Sonny Leggett, a
spokesman for the United States military, said.
The line between the ostensible "good guys" and the "bad guys" has gotten so blurred
that the good guys are now openly supporting the bad while simultaneously killing more innocent
people than the bad ones.
It's a story straight out of The Onion, but in real life.
While the idea of the US government paying to support terrorists or killing more civilians than
terrorists may seem like a crazed notion it has become so overt in recent years that legislation
was specifically introduced for the sole purpose of banning the the flow of money to terrorist
organizations.
However, given the insidious history of the American empire and its creation and fostering of
terrorist regimes across the globe, it should come as no surprise that the overwhelming majority of
politicians would refuse to sign on to a law that requires them to
'Stop
Arming Terrorists.'
And, in 2017, that is exactly what happened.
The text of the bill was quite simple and contained no hidden agendas. It merely stated that it
prohibits
the use of federal agency funds to provide covered assistance to: (1) Al Qaeda, Jabhat Fateh
al-Sham, the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), or any individual or group that is
affiliated with, associated with, cooperating with, or adherents to such groups; or (2) the
government of any country that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI)
determines has, within the most recent 12 months, provided covered assistance to such a group or
individual.
The only thing the bill did was prohibit the US government from giving money and weapons to
people who want to murder Americans and who do murder innocent men, women, and children across the
globe. It is quite possibly the simplest and most rational bill ever proposed by Congress. Given
its rational and humanitarian nature, one would think that representatives would have been lining
up to show their support. However, one would be wrong and in the five months after it was proposed,
just 13 members of Congress signed on as co-sponsors.
Not only is the United States refusing to stop arming terrorists, but now they are
becoming more violent than the terrorists they claim to fight. At what point do the American people
wake up to this insanity?
Sadly, it appears that the American people couldn't care less about innocent men women and
children being slaughtered with their tax dollars on the other side of the planet. They only seem
to pay attention to the area when one of these people -- whose seen their children blown to a fine
red mist by a US drone strike -- acts out in a retaliatory way. But instead of understanding that
this is blowback caused by US foreign policy, Boobus Americanus thinks these people simply "hate
our freedom."
Terrorism is necessary for the state. War, is the health of the state.
Without the constant fear mongering about an enemy who 'hates our freedom', Americans begin
questioning things. They challenge the status quo and inevitably desire more freedom. However, when
they are told that boogeymen want to kill them, they become immediately complacent and blinded by
their fear.
While these boogeymen were once mostly mythical, since 9/11, they have been funded and supported
by the US to the point that they now pose a very real threat to innocent people everywhere. As the
horrific attacks earlier this year in Sri Lanka illustrate, terrorists are organizing and
spreading.
Terrorists groups have been exposed inside the UK as well for having ties to the British
government who allowed
them
to freely travel and train with ISIS-linked groups
because those groups were in opposition to
Muammar Gaddafi, who the West wanted to snub out.
It's a vicious cycle of creating terrorists, killing innocence, and stoking war. And,
unless something radical happens, it shows no signs of ever reversing.
The radical change that is necessary to shift this paradigm back to peace is for people to wake
up to the reality that no matter which puppet is in the White House, the status quo remains
unchanged.
Trump is proving that he can lie to get into power and his supporters ignore it. If you doubt
this fact, look at what
Trump
did by calling out Saudi Arabia for their role in 9/11
and their support for terror worldwide
prior to getting elected. He now supports these terrorists and his constituency couldn't care less.
This madness has to stop.
Humanity has to stop being fooled by rhetoric
read from teleprompters by puppets doing the bidding of their masters. If Americans aren't shaken
out of this stupor by the idea that the US military and its allies are now killing more innocent
people than the Taliban and ISIS -- combined -- perhaps
But we love them anyway. They are our heroes, bravely fighting for
our freedoms in Afghanistan. Unless we kill the Afghanis over
there, they'll come here to kill us. Sure, sometimes our boys kill
innocents, but come on, we all know there are no innocent Muslims.
Even if they're kids, they'll eventually grow up to be terrorists
so better to kill them sooner than later. USA! USA! Woof! Woof!
What kind of person, really, joins the US military today?
It was
shown long ago that the Iraq war was based upon lies. Killing
civilians, bombing hospitals, air attacks on weddings, stabbing
captured and unconscious enemy in the throat (and getting away
with it), clearly there is no threat to the US to justify the
killing ...
But the actual killers are getting a bit of a surprise. Women
are being promoted past them and over them. The PC rules are
ruining the boys club and even their language is monitored. The
officers don't give a damn other than progressing to full colonel
at least, retiring with a nice pension and then working for high
pay for the private defense companies. The killers think they
will be admired, but they are just tools and may even be pushed
out.
Interestingly, through all the US bombing and killing, the
population of Afghanistan has increased from about 19 million in
2001 to about 37 million today, nearly doubling during the
senseless US attacks on their culture and people.
Sometimes much can be learned by asking simple questions. Why?
Simple questions most often have answers. Complex questions emerge
because folks can't bear to hear the answers to the simple ones. A
simple question that would be good to ask now is. Why are we
fighting in Afghanistan?
http://quillian.net/blog/your-punishment-for-believing-lies/
Federico Pieraccini's provides a useful review of the global Big Picture where he implies
in conclusion that Washington, London, Tel Aviv and Riyadh are understood to be the unhealthy
part of the globe by the vast majority of nations, which is the context of how we should view
Russia's Persian Gulf Collective Security proposal and the SCO & ASEAN's increasingly
collaborative security efforts reported by Escobar as linked above.
Trump continues his tree sitting on the thin unstable branches he forced himself to
occupy. One wonders what he'll do next to force himself even higher. Given NordStreaam 2's
almost finished completion, I'd expect a last-ditch sanctioning of EU nations if they use the
product it conveys.
Meanwhile, TurkStream is on schedule to begin
shipping gas in the last Q of 2019, the exact time not yet announced. Both strings, one for
Turkey another for Southeast Europe, will have a "throughput capacity of 15.75 billion cubic
meters each."
As we've seen, the desire to control energy sources has driven much conflict and underlies
Geopolitics to a large degree. The big problem already existing is the Saudis and the
animosity they have for Iran and Qatar. For those two heavily NatGas endowed nations, the
most logical destination for their product is Africa via pipeline across Saudi, under Red Sea
and emerging in Eritrea and/or Egypt. Such a project won't be undertaken until there's a
drastic change in Saudi attitude/leadership. And since Iran and Qatar face the same
distribution challenges for their product, I expect to see more joint efforts by them now
that Qatar's leadership has come to its senses.
U.S. Ends Cold War Missile Treaty, With Aim of Countering China
Trump administration officials say that the treaty tied their hands on China and that Russia
was not complying with it, but its demise raised fears of a new arms race.
By David E. Sanger and Edward Wong
WASHINGTON -- The United States on Friday terminated a major treaty of the Cold War, the
Intermediate Nuclear Forces agreement, and it is already planning to start testing a new
class of missiles later this summer.
But the new missiles are unlikely to be deployed to counter the treaty's other nuclear
power, Russia, which the United States has said for years was in violation of the accord.
Instead, the first deployments are likely to be intended to counter China, which has amassed
an imposing missile arsenal and is now seen as a much more formidable long-term strategic
rival than Russia....
March 14, 2019 - Following U.S. withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces
(INF) Treaty later this year, the U.S. Department of Defense will begin testing new systems
that would previously have been prohibited.
According to comments by U.S. officials to the Associated Press, the United States will
begin testing two weapons -- both armed solely with a conventional payload. The tests are
expected to take place at or after August.
One project was described by the Associated Press, which spoke to Pentagon officials, as a
"low-flying cruise missile with a potential range of about 1,000 kilometers." The second
missile would be a "a ballistic missile with a range of roughly 3,000 to 4,000 kilometers."
...
One of Neoliberalism's assets as Hudson explains is "Intellectual Property" which is
another rent-seeking economic segment and part of Trump's Unilateral Pirate Ship. I think
you'll benefit from this Hudson paper detailing Cold War
2.0:
"The objective is to gain financial control of global resources and make trade 'partners'
pay interest, licensing fees and high prices for products in which the United States enjoys
monopoly pricing 'rights' for intellectual property. A trade war thus aims to make other
countries dependent on U.S.-controlled food, oil, banking and finance, or high-technology
goods whose disruption will cause austerity and suffering until the trade 'partner'
surrenders."
The Empire's dilemma is it's made education costs so high it can't get the domestic talent
it requires to continue its rapidly diminishing technological superiority, thus the need for
"more allies to bypass Huawei"--note the word usage, "bypass", not compete with or surpass,
the connotation being its removal as a rival, thus continuing dependency on US-based
tech.
Not entirely unrelated is my comment to vk at 8 above. The Outlaw US Empire is most
certainly classified as a Complex Society that tries to solve its problems with ever more
complex solutions that eventually lead to negative returns that further complicate the
problem. (Listen to the podcast
here by Joseph Tainter, author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies , where you
can also download a pdf copy!) With the USAF and the military as a whole, increasing amounts
of money are thrown at ever increasingly complex weapons systems yet performance in all
sectors deteriorates while the ability to recruit also degrades. The problems are widely
written about and are often cited here. And as we see with Iran and other examples, elegant
simplicity can defeat multilayered complexity. But Imperial policy makers continue to
double-down which further increases the complexity of the situation. Ouch!!
Somebody in the twitterverse asked the twits this question: "Name a job that you can
completely suck at and still keep your job?" Instantly answered by Max Blumenthal "Beltway
think tank senior fellow"
(First published at Strategic Culture Foundation, I put it here to see what the Committee
thinks about it)
Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country's military spending
will gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the "world gendarme," President
Vladimir Putin said. Moscow is not seeking to get involved in a "pointless" new arms race,
and will stick to "smart decisions" to strengthen its defensive capabilities, Putin said on
Friday during an annual extended meeting of the Defense Ministry board. "Intelligence,
brains, discipline and organization" must be the cornerstones of the country's military
doctrine, the Russian leader said. The last thing that Russia needs is an arms race that
would "drain" its economy, and Moscow sure does not want that "in any scenario," Putin
pointed out.
It's easy to forget it today, but the USSR was, in its time, an "exceptionalist" country. It
was the world's first socialist country – the " bright future "; it set an
example for all to follow, it was destined by History. It had a mission and was required by
History to assist any country that called itself "socialist". The USSR had bases and interests
all over the world. As the 1977 USSR Constitution said :
the Soviet state, a new type of state, the basic instrument for defending the gains of the
revolution and for building socialism and communism. Humanity thereby began the epoch-making
turn from capitalist to socialism.
A novus ordo seclorum indeed.
Russia, however, is just Russia. There is no feeling in Moscow that Russia must take the
lead any place but Russia itself. One of the reasons, indeed, why Putin is always talking about
the primacy of the UN, the independence of nation states, the impermissibility to interfere in
internal activities – the so-called " Westphalian "
position – is that
he remembers the exceptionalist past and knows that it led to a dead end . Moscow has no
interest in going abroad in search of internationalist causes.
Internationalism/exceptionalism and nationalism: the two have completely different
approaches to constructing a military. The first is obsessed with " power
projection ", " full spectrum superiority ", it
imagines that its hypertrophied interests are challenged all over the planet. Its wants are
expensive, indeterminate, unbounded. The other is only concerned with dealing with enemies in
its neighbourhood. Its wants are affordable, exact, finite. The exceptionalist/interventionist
has everything to defend everywhere; the nationalist has one thing to defend in one place. It
is much easier and much cheaper to be a nationalist: the exceptionalist/interventionist
USA spends
much more than anyone else but
always needs more ; nationalist Russia can cut its
expenditure .
The USSR's desire to match or exceed the USA in all military areas was a contributing factor
to the collapse of its alliance system and the USSR itself. Estimates are always a matter for
debate, especially in a command economy that hid its numbers (even when they were calculable),
but a common estimate is a
minimum of 15% of the USSR's production went to the military. But the true effort was
probably higher. The USSR was involved all over the world shoring up socialism's "bright
future" and that cost it at home.
Putin & Co's "bright future" is for Russia only and the world may do as it wants about
any example or counterexample it may imagine there. While Putin may occasionally indulge
himself by offering opinions about liberalism and oped writers gas on about the
Putin/Trump populism threat , Putin & Co are just trying to do what they think best for
Russia with, as their trust ratings suggest (in contrast with those of the rulers of the
"liberal" West), the support and agreement of most Russians.
The military stance of the former exceptionalist country is all gone. As the USSR has faded
away, so have its overseas bases and commitments: the Warsaw Pact is gone together with the
forward deployment of Soviet armies; there are no advisors in Vietnam or Mozambique; Moscow
awaits with bemusement the day next January when the surviving exceptionalist power and its
minions will have been in Afghanistan twice as long as the USSR was. The United States, still
exceptionalist, still imagining it is
spreading freedom and democracy, preventing war and creating stability , has bases
everywhere and thinks that it must protect "freedom of navigation" to and from China in the
South China Sea. It has yet to learn the futility of seeing oneself as The World's Example.
Putin & Co have learned: Russia has no World-Historical purpose and its military is just
for Russia. They understand what this means for Russia's Armed Forces:
Moscow doesn't have to match the US military; it just has to checkmate it.
And it doesn't have to checkmate it everywhere, only at home. The US Air Force can rampage
anywhere but not in Russia's airspace; the US Navy can go anywhere but not in Russia's waters.
It's a much simpler job and it costs much less than what Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnev were
attempting; it's much easier to achieve; it's easier to plan and carry out. The
exceptionalist/interventionist has to plan for Everything; the nationalist for One Thing.
Study the enemy, learn what he takes for granted and block it. And the two must haves
of American conventional military power as it affects Russia are 1) air superiority and 2)
assured, reliable communications; counter those and it's checkmated: Russia doesn't have to
equal or surpass the US military across the board, just counter its must haves .
Russia's comprehensive and interlocking air defence weaponry is well known and well
respected: it covers the spectrum from defences against ballistic missiles to small RPVs, from
complex missile/radar sets to MANPADS; all of it coordinated, interlocking with many
redundancies. We hear US generals complaining about
air defence bubbles and studies referring to Russia's " anti-access/area-denial
(A2AD) exclusion zones ". Russian air defence has not been put to the full-scale test but
we have two good indications of its effectiveness. The first was the coordinated RPV attack on
Russian bases in Syria last year in which seven were
shot down and six taken over , three
of them landed intact . Then, in the FUKUS attack of April 2018, the Russians say the
Syrian AD system (most of which is old but has benefited from Russian coordination) shot
down a large number of the cruise missiles. ( FUKUS' claims
are not believable ).
In the past two or three decades US air power has operated with impunity; it has assumed
that all GPS-based systems (and there are many) will operate as planned and that communications
will be free and clear. Not against Russia. With those certainties removed, the American war
fighting doctrine will be left scrabbling.
But AD and EW are not the only Russian counters. When President Bush pulled the USA out of
the ABM Treaty in
2001 , Putin warned that Russia would have to respond. Mutual Assured Destruction may
sound crazy but there's a stability to it: neither side, under any circumstance, can get away
with a first strike; therefore neither will try it. Last year we met
the response : a new ICBM, a hypersonic re-entry vehicle, a nuclear-powered cruise missile
with enormous flight time and a similar underwater cruise missile. No defence will stop them
and so MAD returns. A hypersonic anti-shipping missile will keep the US Navy out of Russian
waters. And, to deal with the US Army's risible ground forces in
Europe , with or without NATO's other feeble forces
, Russia has re-created the
First Guards Tank Army . Checkmate again.
No free pass for US air power, strained and uncertain communications, a defeated ground
attack and no defence against Russian nuclear weapons. That's all and that's enough.
And that is how Moscow does it while spending much less money than Washington. It studies
Washington's strengths and counters them: "smart decisions". Washington is starting to realise
Russia's military power but it is blinded and can only see its reflection in the mirror: the
so-called "
rising threat from Russia " would be no threat to a Washington that stayed at home.
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred
battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also
suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every
battle.
he is of course correct in his over all views. russian missile and EW technology is already,
today, at least a generation ahead of what the pentagon fields for combat. rendering
effective pentagon military power projection neutered against both russia and china as well
as any ally they choose to support (think syria for sure, iran?, venezuela?)
the problem washington faces is they sold out the federal government decades ago to
banking and corporate interest which as time has proven repeatedly are NOT aligned with the
best interests of the american citizenry, and like anyone who sups with the devil a bargain
is a bargain, once taken there is no going back.
the problem for washington is that banking and corporate interests require plunder to
operate properly as currently structured. maximize short term gain for private ownership
while either put off long terms costs (pollution etc) well into the future or like in 2008
socialize the losses across the entire tax payer (a euphemism for serf) base while handily
keeping all those fed vomited bailouts private.
as russia, china, iran, venezuela erect signs backed up by force saying.."this is a
plunder free zone" and, what with unencumbered assets becoming ever harder to locate for
anglo american capitalism a crisis is emerging as forward motion (real growth) slows to a
crawl or goes below zero which renders all the debt entangled corporations, especially
governments and citizens susceptible to gravity once the trigger of ''no confidence''' hits
the public consciousness. increasing debt is directly correlated to decreasing growth need to
sustain the debt load. like unsuccessfully dieting a vicious circle.
all russia and china have to do to prevail over washington and its empire at this point is
WAIT.... while keeping their swords bright and their domestic intentions true (by taking care
of their own).
gravity once widespread public no confidence emerges will do all heavy lifting.
Excellent analysis, Patrick. It shows what can be accomplished when you don't blow your whole
wad on force projection and seeking full spectrum dominance at the same time. Seeking
dominant capability at our borders and territorial waters is doable, but projecting that all
over the world is a losing proposition. The Russian strategy reminds me of the Swiss
defensive model.
BTW, while the Russian bears and our Grizzlies are both brown bears, they are different
species.
I've always been intrigued by Switzerland -- more guns than anywhere but pretty peaceful;
really understands neutrality (which is actually a pretty cold-blooded position). I remember
reading some time ago that Switzerland General Guisan (hah! name just came to me, ultimate
senility is at least a week away!) told the Germans that, if they invaded, the Swiss would
blow the tunnels thereby rendering Switzerland useless to an invader.
Never seen so many measelshafts as there. (You old Cold Warriors might recognise the term
from Germany back in The Day (not entirely sure of the spelling).
But definitely a country that minds its own business but makes sure its more expensive to
conquer than it's worth. Finland is (or was) another example. (Which is why it's so
disappointing to see the current rulers in Helsinki sucking up to NATO.)
Well, many of us will live to see whether that's correct or not. My assumption is that China
is so arrogant (Middle Kingdom means between Heaven and Earth) that they really don't care
what the rest of us do as long as business happens.
Got me there.
The western alliance - since the fall of the USSR - has been pretty useless if not downright
dangerous.
As for China, they may have gone too far in that "inscrutable oriental" act and begun to
believe their own BS.
Throughout its long history China has never tried to dominate foreign countries. It never
tried to conquer Japan, for example, which had some very productive silver and gold mines. On
the other hand, the Mongols tried twice (unsuccessfully) to invade Japan during their short
period of dominance. China did try meddle in Korean politics and use Korea as a buffer zone,
though a few times the Koreans threw them out. China also tried to secure buffer zones in the
west and south. Even now, though, they seem to feel that they are destined to be the world's
middle country, and they don't seem to have a hankering to invade or directly control foreign
areas to gain Lebensraum, even though they have a huge population. And they have no tradition
of global colonialism. It is not in the culture or the economic history.
As for the New Silk Road, it does not seem to be as self-serving and manipulative as the
DoS and Pompeo are constantly claiming. China has an ancient continuous culture, and the
Chinese seem to know full well by now that lasting prosperity only happens when all parties
prosper. Mutual dependence and mutual recognition are a deep part of Chinese and all east
Asian cultures, though the Japanese samurai ethic briefly went berserk and disregarded that
wisdom back in the 1930s! The Chinese spirit of innovation-within-tradition and dynamic
business management (including state management) is also likely to keep them confident in
their own ability to be creative and cutting edge, so they will probably be less likely to
try to suppress other economies the way Trump is trying to do. I imagine Chinese leaders are
hoping that mutual prosperity and interdependence will make ideologies like "full spectrum
dominance" risible relics of the past. Culture is long, turbulence happens.
Moscow will not engage in an exhausting arms race, and the country's military spending will
gradually decrease as Russia does not seek a role as the "world gendarme," President
Vladimir Putin said
While Vladimir Putin is one of the most astute observers of foreign policy in the world
(running circles around Obama and Trump), he is also a politician. I sincerely doubt that
Russia gradually plans on decreasing spending on their military in any meaningful way. That
is for home consumption because about 35-40 percent of Russians live on $300 per month or
less. Putin's popularity is also dropping even though it remains quite high (Paul Goble:
Window on Eurasia -- New Series: Nearly 40 Percent of Russians Subsist on Less than...
https://windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2019/02/nearly-40-percent-of-russians-subsist.html?spref=tw):
Thirty-seven percent of Russians life on 19,000 rubles or less a month, Rosstat says, a
figure that works out to a subsistence of ten US dollars or a less a day, 23.2 percent live
on less than 15,000 rubles a month (under seven dollars a day); and 12 percent have incomes
under 10,000 rubles a month (five dollars a day).
I'm coming to think that you are that rare species of a POLITE troll. Russians like VVP, they
trust him and buy the package. And they get it that Russia is under attack (they aren't
living in a news bubble. They see Western stuff.)
Nobody in the West comes anywhere close to his numbers.
PS Paul Goble just prints anti-Putin stuff and is mostly entertainment.
After 8 years of the governance of Boris Yeltsin & the Free Market Reformers, 30% of
Russians were living on $1.50/day or less as their country unstoppably descended into social
catastrophe & strategic irrelevance.
What happened to the USSR and it's empire should serve as a warning to the USA. We have two
huge oceans defending us, yet we spend more to maintain our far flung empire than the USSR
ever did. One day, the taxpayers of this country are no longer going to pay for an empire
that they don't profit from.
thanks for the analysis - a shame the general did not expand on what Russian capabilities iN
EW were eye watering.
Interesting "The first was the coordinated RPV attack on Russian bases in Syria last year
in which seven were shot down and six taken over, three of them landed intact." According to
the article, the drones were controlled from 100 km distant. This really doesnt sound like
jihadi technology. So very interesting that Russia was able to take over the RPVs which were
either US or Israeli...
The US (with those two oceans as its eastern and western boundaries) is a maritime power.
We are also still a sufficiently important maritime power that we have some level of
responsibility for maintaining freedom of the seas (as with the issues with the pirates
operating out of Puntland in southern Somalia in the late 2000s), a situation that has
existed (in some form) since the Roman Republic made the Med "Mare Nostrum."
Russia has always been (mostly) a land power.
Given this, the US (even if it does not "seek to fight monsters" in Nietzsche's terms) has
the Force Projection task thrust upon it in a way Russia doesn't.
Even if we sought to be non-interventionist (as I think we should), we still have more on
our plate than Russia. (The PRC has the same inherent problem.)
Since we have a force projection mission thrust upon us as a maritime power, full spectrum
dominance (in at least the areas where our ships operate) is an implied task.
So, I think the two thoughts I have about this article are:
1) we have broader defense needs than the Russians, based on being a maritime power;
and
2) since our plate is already full, it makes little sense to add to that burden.
Britain is an island. Australia, while designated a continent, is also an island. Please
compare their "maritime power" status to ours, their defense spending as a percentage of gdp
to ours, and their number of foreign bases to ours, and explain.
Please compare those things to similar sized maritime nations and evaluate this in the
context of the former preeminence of the Royal Navy and its adjunct forces.
For extra credit consider the likelihood that the Royal Navy is to some degree an adjunct
of the US Navy,
As, for example, the history of the Western Roman Empire indicates (with the possible
exception of the Five Good Emperors and the early Tetrarchy during and immediately following
the reign of Diocletian), authoritarian states have some problems with succession.
Putin seems to have more of a "read" than any other world leader on the global stage right
now, but the answer to who follows him is likely be: "To the strongest."
Putin has been a smarter, more discerning leader than most presently on the world stage
and that has lent credibility. He has an advantage, as a retired LTC in the old KGB of having
some level of training and experience in both geo-politics and reading people and assessing
strengths and weaknesses.
Even given that, Russia has a decided advantage over many places in terms of natural
resources and in controlling what may be thought of as "global key terrain" (Mackinder's
"Heartland").
They have a kind of lasting Jominian advantage. With BRI/OBOR, they are somewhat in the
position of the guy in the Western who owns the land the Railroad is going to come through
(or, possibly, not).
Given its size, position and history, it is questionable if Russia is ever "finished," but
while it has come back from its dire position 20 years ago, it still is notably weaker than
it was in the 1980s. As Mr. Armstrong's article indicates that may matter less than fact it
appears strong enough to advance its own interests.
According to spokesman Hogan Gidley, the new sanctions are being imposed because of the
last round of sanctions. In the previous sanctions the US demanded Russia offer them
assurances that they'd stop poisoning people.
Russia never made any such assurances, since they denied poisoning Skripal in the first
place. But not admitting guilt and offering the US promises, the US felt the need to impose
another round of sanctions, which are probably going to set the stage for more future
sanctions for the same reason.
Officials claim Russia is "required" to offer the US assurances about poisonings under US
law, and the White House insists these new sanctions prove that President Trump is harder on
Russia than anyone else has ever been at any time.
NATO expansion is the kind of immoral enterprise that justifies nearly any response from
Russia.
While David Warsh keys on Russia vis a vis the North Atlantic front of the US post WW II
world order it should not be considered in vacuum.
There is the Caspian Sea front of the US post WW II world order that is absorbing immense
US treasure and further moral decline (Libya, Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen....) which
fortunate for US post WW II world order Putin has been rather restrained.
There is also China and OBOR entering in the Caspian Sea front with high moral purpose and
economic weapons not bombs and special operators!
David Warsh has been on my weekly read list since I tacked my low quarters to a tree in
the backyard in the Boston area.
In Oct it will be 18 full years in Afghanistan. The US is not a learning organization.
If you trust the media, you trust the hugely funded propaganda machine that makes Goebbels
look stone age primitive.
I am a bit sensitive this week, I am finishing Gloria Emerson's "Winner and Losers"
scratching a lot of scars from Vietnam. Not easy reading if you changed your mind once the
blither was exposed.
Somewhere over Delong's it was recommended and amazon had a hardcover for
$1.56........
Bottomline from Winners and Losers: The blither is reminiscent and much of the news topics
the same.
"... The newly released documentary directed by Yana Yerlashova together with independent Dutch investigator Max van der Werff proves beyond a doubt that Ukraine and its Western partners did all that they could to cover up the true cause of MH17's tragic downing half a decade ago, introducing new evidence and testimonies that cast serious doubt on the "official" narrative of what really took place on that dreadful day. ..."
"... " MH17 – Call For Justice " sheds light on the dark truth of what happened immediately after the plane's downing, with journalist John Helmer's summary of the 28-minute-long documentary pointing out the key takeaways for those who don't have the time to watch it in full. The video powerfully includes a brief interview with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who had earlier spoken out about the cover-up and reaffirms that Russia was blamed for what happened even before any information was conclusively known about the incident. ..."
"... The Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad also revealed that the West tried to prevent his country's meaningful involvement in the investigation, which is extremely scandalous, to say the least. The Malaysians weren't going to be deterred in their quest for justice, however, as the documentary includes a testimony from Colonel Mohamad Sakri , the head of the Malaysian team, disclosing that he secretly took a small team to Donetsk to gather evidence from the site after Poroshenko's officials originally blocked them from doing so. ..."
The newly released documentary directed by Yana Yerlashova together with independent
Dutch investigator Max van der Werff proves beyond a doubt that Ukraine and its Western
partners did all that they could to cover up the true cause of MH17's tragic downing half a
decade ago, introducing new evidence and testimonies that cast serious doubt on the "official"
narrative of what really took place on that dreadful day.
***
The entire world is already aware of the two competing theories about MH17's downing half a
decade ago, with the West insisting that a supposedly Russian-supplied BUK surface-to-air
missile accidentally destroyed the passenger aircraft while Moscow has always maintained its
innocence and claimed that it's being framed as part of a politically motivated cover-up. Most
people have already made up their minds about what they think really happened on that dreadful
day, but those who doubt that an actual conspiracy took place might finally reconsider their
views after the newly released documentary by Yana Yerlashova together with Dutch investigator
Max van der Werff.
The "official" narrative blames Russia for this tragedy, but it's since been revealed
through the new evidence and testimonies that active efforts involving a broad array of
countries were undertaken from the get-go to paint Moscow as the culprit despite there being no
facts whatsoever to back up that provocative claim.
" MH17 – Call
For Justice " sheds light on the dark truth of what happened immediately after the plane's
downing, with
journalist John Helmer's summary of the 28-minute-long documentary pointing out the key
takeaways for those who don't have the time to watch it in full. The video powerfully includes
a brief interview with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir, who had earlier
spoken out about the cover-up and reaffirms that Russia was blamed for what happened even
before any information was conclusively known about the incident.
The Prime Minister of Malaysia Tun Dr. Mahathir Mohamad also revealed that the West tried to
prevent his country's meaningful involvement in the investigation, which is extremely
scandalous, to say the least. The Malaysians weren't going to be deterred in their quest for
justice, however, as the documentary includes a testimony from Colonel Mohamad Sakri , the head
of the Malaysian team, disclosing that he secretly took a small team to Donetsk to gather
evidence from the site after Poroshenko's officials originally blocked them from doing so.
Malaysia's possession of the black boxes ensured that the country would know the truth about
what really occurred, which explains why Colonel Sakri also said that both the FBI and the
Ukrainian government desperately tried to convince him to hand this evidence over to them
immediately afterwards. He rightly refused, and that's why his government never jumped on the
bandwagon of blaming Russia since they were aware that there's no conclusive evidence proving
its complicity in this affair. This carries immense normative weight that has unfairly been
ignored by the Mainstream Media when discussing this case, though it's understandable why they
wouldn't want to draw attention to it since that "inconvenient fact" dismantles their
anti-Russian infowar. It also would make more people across the world question why they weren't
made aware of any of this in the first place, which in today's populist-driven environment
could produce more anti-elite outrage than ever before.
Few independent investigators have done as much to reveal the truth about MH17 as Yana
Yerlashova and Max Van den Werff, who have done the entire world an enormous service
with their latest documentary which has proven once that the Mainstream Media narrative was
nothing but a politically motivated lie to blame Moscow while deflecting attention from Kiev
and its probable
culpability in causing this tragedy.
Those who already knew this won't be surprised, but there are nevertheless many more who had
no idea about this side of the story, which is why this documentary is a much-watch and should
be shared with as many people as possible, especially on social media so that others can become
aware of the evidence and testimonies that his work includes in order to finally make up their
minds about what really happened.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Andrew Korybko is an American Moscow-based political analyst specializing in the
relationship between the US strategy in Afro-Eurasia, China's One Belt One Road global vision
of New Silk Road connectivity, and Hybrid Warfare. He is a frequent contributor to Global
Research.
Stages of capitalist development explain more than white papers and
propaganda can conceal. The relevant comparative period is 1990 - present (China/Russia)
versus 1950-1980 (US/West).
Ex-communist countries like Russia and China have experienced the same decline in the share
of public property, but starting from a much higher level of public wealth. The share of
net public wealth was as large as 70–80 percent in both countries in 1980, and fell
to 20 percent (Russia) and 30–35 percent (China) in 2015.
The Chinese share is higher but not incomparable to that observed in Western high-income
countries during the "mixed economy" period (1950–1980).
In other words, China and Russia have ceased to be communist in that public ownership is
no longer the dominant form of property. However, these countries still have much more
significant public wealth than Western high-income economies, due largely to lower public
debts and greater public assets.
"... Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia. The 18 or so years of war following the 9/11 attacks have seen this ostensible republic sink to new lows of behavior. ..."
"Empires in decline tend to behave badly. Indeed, whether British, French or Russian, the
twilight years of imperialism often brought brutal repression of subjects abroad, the
suppression of civil liberties at home and general varieties of brutality toward foreigners, be
they refugees or migrants.
Aggressive wars abroad pollute the domestic political discourse and breed
hypernationalism, racism and xenophobia. The 18 or so years of war following the 9/11 attacks
have seen this ostensible republic sink to new lows of behavior.
Aggressive wars of choice have ushered in rampant torture, atrocities in Iraq's Abu Ghraib
prison, indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay, extraordinary rendition, drone assassinations,
warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the citizenry...
It's all connected. The empire -- all empires -- eventually come home."
Maj. Danny Sjursen, An American Tragedy: Empire at Home and Abroad
Regional experts had immediately suspected the possibility of an Israeli air raid after a
pro-Iranian militia arms depot in Iraq was obliterated during
a mysterious attack
on July 19
, and another reported follow-up attack this past Sunday.
The attack happened around 80 km from the Iranian border and 40 km north-east of Baghdad at Camp
Ashraf, former home to the Iranian exile group Mojahedin-e Khalq, but now reportedly in the hands
of Iranian intelligence and paramilitaries.
Speculation was rampant in the days that followed as to the source of the 'mysterious' air
strikes - or what was also initially reported as a drone strike - however, some pointed the finger
at an American operation targeting Iranian militants inside Iraq.
But now Israeli and regional media, citing western diplomats, have confirmed it was
a
nearly unprecedented Israeli operation on Iraqi soil
--
representing a major
escalation and expansion of Israel's anti-Iran operations.
Israel reportedly launched a total of two separate air strike operations on the camp using its
US-supplied F-35 stealth fighter jets.
Israel has expanded the scope of its anti-Iranian attacks and struck targets in Iraq
,
the London-based Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat reported Tuesday.
According to the report, which cites anonymous Western diplomats,
Israel
struck Iranian warehouses storing arms and missiles at Camp Ashraf
, north-east of
Baghdad, twice in the past month.
On July 19, the base was struck by an Israeli F-35 fighter jet, the sources added. The base
was allegedly attacked again on Sunday.
The report alleges the primary target included
a shipment of Iranian ballistic missiles
which recently entered Iraq via the nearby Iranian border.
And though not confirmed, the report further claimed that "Iranian advisers" had been injured in
the series of airstrikes.
Israel has over the past couple of years conducted "hundreds" of attacks inside Syria, which
defense officials have claimed were primarily against Iranian and Hezbollah bases, but if this
month's air strikes on Camp Ashraf are confirmed Israeli assaults, it would constitute a major
widening in terms of the scope of Tel Aviv's "anti-Iran" targeting operations.
The news is also sure to enrage officials in Baghdad, who will mount protests defending Iraqi
sovereignty. Israel hasn't mounted a known significant attack on Iraqi soil since the days of
former dictator Saddam Hussein.
A suspected killer (Tubes and cadavers documentary) and one of the most notorious post USSR collapse Mafioso as human rights
leader ;-) Wonders of propaganda.
When this neocon mentions Browder as another "human-rights campaigner" he exceeded the limits of even neocon propaganda.
Somehow I think about neocons like him as prairie dogs. Small but very dangerous for the ecosystem pests (actually rodents not
canine, despite the name) See
Why Prairie Dogs are American epidemcs in the same issue.
He is a human-rights leader these days, but he still has the air of a business titan, an air of command. This is accompanied by a
certain restlessness. At the same time, he is thoughtful -- so much so, in fact, that he will think for a long time before
answering a question. He does not fill the air with words as he's gathering his thoughts, as so many of the rest of us do
... ... ...
He now lives in Britain, and the very day he arrived here, the Russian state hit him with a murder charge -- the murder of a
Russian mayor in 1998. They do this, the Russian state, comical as it may seem to outsiders. When I ask him about the charge
against him, he says, with the aforementioned gallows humor, "I'm rather upset because Bill Browder has been accused of several
murders while I am charged with only one."
It's true. Browder -- the financial investor who turned human-rights campaigner -- stands accused of several murders, including the
one of his own lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky, whose murder by prison authorities turned Browder into a human-rights campaigner in the
first place.
The New Quincy Institute Seeks Warmongering Monsters to Destroy Andrew Bacevich on his new left-right group, which is
going hammer and tongs against the establishment on foreign policy. By
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos •
July 30, 2019
Andrew J. Bacevich participates in a panel discussion at the U.S. Naval War College in 2016. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication
Specialist 1st Class Christian S. Eskelund/Released) For the last month, the foreign policy establishment has been abuzz over the
new kid on the block: the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft , named
for John Quincy Adams. Adams, along with our first president George Washington,
warned of foreign entanglements and the urge to go
abroad in "search of monsters to destroy," lest America's fundamental policy "insensibly change from liberty to force
. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit ."
Those in the foreign policy Blob have had different reactions to the "upstart" think tank. These are the preeminent organizations
that stand imperious in size and square footage, but have lacked greatly in wisdom and clarity over the last 20 years. Quincy will
stand apart from them in two significant ways: it is drawing its intellectual and political firepower from both the anti-war Left
and the realist and restraint Right. And it is poised to support a new "responsible statecraft," one that challenges the conditions
of endless war, including persistent American militarism here and abroad, the military industrial complex, and a doctrine that worships
primacy and a liberal world order over peace and the sovereignty of other nations.
Quincy, which is rolling out its statement of principles this
week (its official launch will be in the fall), is the brainchild of Trita Parsi, former head of the National Iranian-American Council,
who saw an opening to bring together Left and Right academics, activists, and media disenchanted by both sides' pro-war proclivities.
Together with Vietnam veteran and former Boston University professor Andrew Bacevich (also a longtime TAC contributor), the
Carnegie Endowment's Suzanne DiMaggio, Columbia University's Stephen Wertheim, and investigative journalist Eli Clifton, the group
wants to serve as a counterweight to both liberal interventionists like the Brookings Institution and Council on Foreign Relations,
and the war hawks and neoconservatives of the Heritage Foundation and Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
They've already taken hits from both sides of the establishment, dismissed brusquely
as naive , or worse,
isolationist (that swipe from neoconservative Bill Kristol, whose now-defunct Weekly Standard once ran a manifesto headlined
"The Case for American Empire"
). The fact that Quincy will be funded by both George Soros on the Left and the Charles Koch Foundation on the Right has brought
some rebuke from unfriendlies and even some friendlies. The former hate on one or the other powerful billionaire, while the latter
are wary of Soros' intentions (he's has long been a financial supporter of
"soft-power"
democracy movements overseas, some of which have encouraged revolution and regime change).
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But Quincy's timing couldn't be more perfect. With a president in the White House who has promised to draw down U.S. involvement
overseas (with the exception of his Iran policy, he has so far held to much of that pledge), and national conservatives coming around
to TAC's long-held worldview on realism and restraint (and an increasing willingness to reach across the aisle to work with
like-minded groups and individuals), Quincy appears poised to make some noise in Washington.
According to the group's new statement of principles , "responsible
statecraft" 1) serves the public interest, 2) engages the world, 3) builds a peaceful world, 4) abhors war, and 5) is democratic.
Andrew Bacevich and Trita Parsi expanded on this further in a recent Q&A with TAC.
(Full disclosure: the author is on Quincy's steering committee and TAC also receives funding from the Charles Koch Foundation.)
TAC : Quincy's principles -- and thus it's name -- are rooted in the mission of "responsible statecraft." Can you give
me a sense of what that means in practical terms, and why you settled on this phrasing for the institute?
AB: With the end of the Cold War, policy elites succumbed to an extraordinary bout of hubris, perhaps best expressed in the claim
that history had designated the United States as its "indispensable nation." Hubris bred recklessness and irresponsibility, with
the Iraq war of 2003 as Exhibit A. We see "responsible statecraft" as the necessary antidote. Its abiding qualities are realism,
restraint, prudence, and vigorous engagement. While the QI is not anti-military, we are wary of war except when all other alternatives
have been exhausted. We are acutely conscious of war's tendency to produce unintended consequences and to exact unexpectedly high
costs.
TAC : Quincy is a trans-partisan effort that is bringing together Left and Right for common cause. Is it a challenge?
AB: It seems apparent to us that the myriad foreign policy failures and disappointments of the past couple of decades have induced
among both progressives and at least some conservatives a growing disenchantment with the trajectory of U.S. policy. Out of that
disenchantment comes the potential for a Left-Right coalition to challenge the status quo. The QI hopes to build on that potential.
TAC : Two of the principles take direct aim at the current foreign policy status quo: responsible statecraft abhors war,
and responsible statecraft is democratic (calling out a closed system in which Americans have had little input into the wars waged
in their names). How much of what Quincy aims to do involves upending conventional norms, particularly those bred and defended by
the Washington "Blob"?
AB: In a fundamental sense, the purpose of the QI is to educate the American people and their leaders regarding the Blob's shortcomings,
exposing the deficiencies of old ideas and proposing new ones to take their place.
TAC: That said, how much blowback do you anticipate from the Washington establishment, particularly those think tanks and
individuals whose careers and very existence depend on the wheels of militarism forever turning?
AB : Plenty. Proponents of the status quo are entrenched and well-funded. Breaking old habits -- for example, the practice of
scattering U.S. military bases around the world -- will not come easily.
TAC : There has been much ado about your two primary funders -- Charles Koch and George Soros. What do you say to critics
who suggest you will be tied to/limited by their agendas?
AB: Our funding sources are not confined to Koch and Soros and we will continue to broaden our support base. It's not for me to
speak for Koch or Soros. But my guess is they decided to support the QI because they support our principles. They too believe in
policies based on realism, restraint, prudence, and vigorous engagement.
TAC : Better yet, how did you convince these two men to fund something together?
TP: It is important to recognize that they have collaborated in the past before, for instance on criminal justice reform. This
is, however, the first time they've come together to be founding funders of a new entity. I cannot speak for them, but I think they
both recognize that there currently is a conceptual deficit in our foreign policy. U.S. elite consensus on foreign policy has collapsed
and the void that has been created begs to be filled. But it has to be filled with new ideas, not just a repackaging of old ideas.
And those new ideas cannot simply follow the old political alignments. Transpartisan collaboration is necessary in order to create
a new consensus. Koch and Soros are showing tremendous leadership in that regard.
TAC : The last refuge of a scorned hawk is to call his critics "isolationist." It would seem as though your statement of
principles takes this on directly. How else does Quincy take this often-used invective into account?
AB : We will demonstrate through our own actions that the charge is false.
TAC : Critics (including James Traub,
in his own piece on Quincy
) say that Washington leaders, once in office, are "mugged by reality," suggesting that the idea of rolling back military interventions
and avoiding others sounds good on paper but presidents like Barack Obama had no choice, that this is all about protecting interests
and hard-nosed realism. The alternative is a bit naive. How do you respond?
AB: Choices are available if our leaders have the creativity to recognize them and the gumption to pursue them. Obama's patient
and resolute pursuit of the Iran nuclear deal affirms this possibility. The QI will expose the "we have no choice" argument as false.
We will identify and promote choice, thereby freeing U.S. policy from outmoded habits and stale routines.
Kelley Beaucar Vlahos is e xecutive editor at . Follow her on Twitter
@Vlahos_at_TAC
QI is a welcome change from the endless, whining tirade of the old hawks.
I wish them well in gaining influence in DC.
I hope that they can give voice to the growing numbers of us who do not support illegal invasions, funding dissidents to
foment regime change and our flawed system of selecting key allies (regardless of their human rights records) and protecting
them and their interests at all cost. This has been a drain our economic resources and moral standing.
In this time, when nationalism and disaster capitalism seem to be winning on both sides of the Atlantic, it seems there
is little hope for peace, decency and diplomacy.
QI has a huge challenge to take on the parasitic organism that is the war machine, but any initiative is better than none.
If Quincy is to have any chance of success in its mission, it will have to tackle the issues surrounding Federal election campaign
financing. The current rules give a handful of American billionaires effective control over US Middle East policy. What is
good for donors like Sheldon and Miriam Edelson is not necessarily good for the American public. Donald Trump was elected president
of the US not Prime Minister of Israel.
I did read one of Mr. Basevich's books a few years ago and my take away remains valid today: The US cannot afford to be
the policeman of the world.
Ukraine became a geopolitical pawn. In signing up with the US and EU, there is one guaranteed loser – the Ukrainian people.
Notable quotes:
"... His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, ..."
"... But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. ..."
"... Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. ..."
"... Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question -- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War. ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . ..."
The election of Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who won decisively throughout
most of the country, represents the possibility of peace with Russia, if it -- and he -- are
given a chance. His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters
in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the
Donbass rebels and with Moscow, notably provisions associated with the European-sponsored Minsk
Accords. Zelensky, on the other hand, has made peace (along with corruption) his top priority
and indeed spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on July 11. The nearly
six-year war having become a political, diplomatic, and financial drain on his leadership,
Putin welcomed the overture.
But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in
Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say
quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a
Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian
citizens. (Washington has previously had some shameful episodes of
collusion with these Ukrainian neo-Nazis .) As for Putin, who does not fully control the
Donbass rebels or its leaders, he "can never be seen at home," as
I pointed out more than two years ago , "as 'selling out' Russia's 'brethren' anywhere in
southeast Ukraine." Indeed, his own implacable nationalists have made this a litmus test of his
leadership.
Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his
would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now
Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary
Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point
man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over
Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their
hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it
eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence.
Our hope should be that Trump breaks with that long-standing bipartisan policy, as he did
with policy toward North Korea, and puts America squarely on the side of peace in Ukraine. (For
now, Zelensky has set aside Moscow's professed irreversible "reunification" with Crimea, as
should Washington.) A new US policy must include recognition, previously lacking, that the
citizens of war-ravaged Donbass are not primarily "Putin's stooges" but people with their own
legitimate interests and preferences, even if they favor Russia. Here too Zelensky is embarking
on a new course. Poroshenko waged an "anti-terrorist" war against Donbass: the new president is
reaching out to its citizens even though most of them were unable to vote in the election.
Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably
architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking
regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question
-- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the
views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more
important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold
War.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host of The John Batchelor
Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .
Ukraine became a geopolitical pawn. In signing up with the US and EU, there is one guaranteed loser – the Ukrainian people.
Notable quotes:
"... His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the Donbass rebels and with Moscow, ..."
"... But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian citizens. ..."
"... Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence. ..."
"... Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question -- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold War. ..."
"... This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host of The John Batchelor Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . ..."
The election of Ukraine's new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, who won decisively throughout
most of the country, represents the possibility of peace with Russia, if it -- and he -- are
given a chance. His electorally repudiated predecessor, Petro Poroshenko, backed by supporters
in Washington, thwarted almost every preceding opportunity for negotiations both with the
Donbass rebels and with Moscow, notably provisions associated with the European-sponsored Minsk
Accords. Zelensky, on the other hand, has made peace (along with corruption) his top priority
and indeed spoke directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin, on July 11. The nearly
six-year war having become a political, diplomatic, and financial drain on his leadership,
Putin welcomed the overture.
But the struggle for peace has just begun, with powerful forces arrayed against it in
Ukraine, Moscow, and Washington. In Ukraine, well-armed ultra-nationalist -- some would say
quasi-fascist -- detachments are terrorizing supporters of Zelensky's initiative, including a
Kiev television station that proposed broadcasting a dialogue between Russian and Ukrainian
citizens. (Washington has previously had some shameful episodes of
collusion with these Ukrainian neo-Nazis .) As for Putin, who does not fully control the
Donbass rebels or its leaders, he "can never be seen at home," as
I pointed out more than two years ago , "as 'selling out' Russia's 'brethren' anywhere in
southeast Ukraine." Indeed, his own implacable nationalists have made this a litmus test of his
leadership.
Which brings us to Washington and in particular to President Donald Trump and his
would-be opponent in 2020, former vice president Joseph Biden. Kiev's government, thus now
Zelensky, is heavily dependent on billions of dollars of aid from the International Monetary
Fund, which Washington largely controls. Former president Barack Obama and Biden, his "point
man" for Ukraine, used this financial leverage to exercise semi-colonial influence over
Poroshenko, generally making things worse, including the incipient Ukrainian civil war. Their
hope was, of course, to sever Ukraine's centuries-long ties to Russia and even bring it
eventually into the US-led NATO sphere of influence.
Our hope should be that Trump breaks with that long-standing bipartisan policy, as he did
with policy toward North Korea, and puts America squarely on the side of peace in Ukraine. (For
now, Zelensky has set aside Moscow's professed irreversible "reunification" with Crimea, as
should Washington.) A new US policy must include recognition, previously lacking, that the
citizens of war-ravaged Donbass are not primarily "Putin's stooges" but people with their own
legitimate interests and preferences, even if they favor Russia. Here too Zelensky is embarking
on a new course. Poroshenko waged an "anti-terrorist" war against Donbass: the new president is
reaching out to its citizens even though most of them were unable to vote in the election.
Biden, however, has a special problem -- and obligation. As an implementer, and presumably
architect, of Obama's disastrous policy in Ukraine, and currently the leading candidate for the
Democratic presidential nomination, Biden should be asked about his past and present thinking
regarding Ukraine. The much-ballyhooed ongoing "debates" are an opportunity to ask the question
-- and of other candidates as well. Presidential debates are supposed to elicit and clarify the
views of candidates on domestic and foreign policy. And among the latter, few, if any, are more
important than Ukraine, which remains the epicenter of this new and more dangerous Cold
War.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host of The John Batchelor
Show . Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com .
"... Evidence has emerged that the U.S. State Department is tied to a child trafficking operation involving Billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. shared the tail number of his Bell Long Ranger 206L3 helicopter (tail number N474AW) with a U.S. State Department OV-10D Bronco ..."
"... . Descriptions of sex between adult males and underage females by XXX company employees in Bosnia in the 2000-2002 time frame coincides with descriptions of sex . on .. aircraft and [at] residences in Palm Beach, Florida; New Mexico; and on the island of Little Saint James in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Among the "Jane Does" filing suit against the U.S. government for concluding can anyone get the details of these suits? ..."
"... So so disgusting. First there was the catholic church pedophile scandal. Then there is the Epstein scandal ..."
Evidence has emerged that the U.S. State Department is tied to a child trafficking operation involving Billionaire pedophile
Jeffrey Epstein. shared the tail number of his Bell Long Ranger 206L3 helicopter (tail number N474AW) with a U.S. State Department
OV-10D Bronco. According to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) registration database. Descriptions of sex
between adult males and underage females by XXX company employees in Bosnia in the 2000-2002 time frame coincides with descriptions
of sex . on .. aircraft and [at] residences in Palm Beach, Florida; New Mexico; and on the island of Little Saint James in the
U.S. Virgin Islands. Among the "Jane Does" filing suit against the U.S. government for concluding can anyone get the details of
these suits?
"... Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA? ..."
"... The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers prediction come true in slow motion. ..."
"... Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that. ..."
"... I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up when he did, the way he did was very strange. ..."
"... If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all the lies? ..."
"... Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part. ..."
"... JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's government. ..."
"... In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others. ..."
"... Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats. ..."
"... If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break the Law if they ignored this? ..."
"... Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information that is being gathered ..."
"... The problem is that Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have "dirt"on Hillary. ..."
"... Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier. ..."
"... Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this, and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast. ..."
"... We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense. ..."
"... Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc? ..."
"... We do know that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt. ..."
"... Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what is in the report, if he actually answers questions ..."
"... The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop, that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is likely to become his downfall when he testifies. ..."
"... Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine. ..."
"... Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of "Special Counsel". ..."
"... At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it, Trump Tweets and all. ..."
"... He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison, and his boss is lionized as a hero. ..."
"... Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose ..."
"... I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the "players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!). ..."
"... Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means" rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert. ..."
She was also working with Fusion GPS and had nothing?
Trump Dossier Firm Also Supplied Info Used in Meeting of Russians, Trump Team
"The information that a Russian lawyer brought with her when she met Donald Trump Jr. in
June 2016 stemmed from research conducted by Fusion GPS, the same firm that compiled the
infamous Trump dossier, according to the lawyer and a source familiar with the matter."
Can anyone clarify the exact manner in which contractors for the State department become
operatives for CIA or are handled by CIA?
The entire Russia – Gate thing seems very CIA-ish . See CHALMERS JOHNSON'S "THE
SORROWS OF EMPIRE", seems like since I read it ~ 2004 I have been watching Chalmers
prediction come true in slow motion.
One thing about CIA being the most powerful entity in the U.S. when they screw up they
have no place to hide. except behind the skirt of Lady Justice!
Mr. Mueller are you back there also?
robert e williamson jr , July 5, 2019 at 13:53
I would wonder just how many files Mueller has gotten from ICIJ. Maybe we all need to call
bull shit on this entire affair.
Everyone says follow the money but no one seems to be able to do so here. Why not. ICIJ
sure as hell seems able to get info.
I'll state it again, I wonder just how much data Mueller got from ICIJ since CIA didn't
have it?
Bill Browder shows up in D.C and gets special booking to go before congress. Why? Because
he runs a hedge fund? B.S. there is much more to it than that.
I have written plenty about Browder's actions and I have always thought him showing up
when he did, the way he did was very strange. Whether what he claims to be true seems not to
have mattered to congress. Look at what the fools have done. Magnitski Act for what.
So did Bill, the DEEP STATE and CIA all get caught doing what they have always done in
third world countries for the last 70 years ?
If Bill didn't pay his taxes where did all that money go? Why is it DOJ is hog tied so
badly it cannot produce evidence? What is it that all the above want to keep secret? Why all
the lies?
It appears someone has gotten to DOJ. AGAIN!
I have some very bad news for many here. If what I witnessed here in the last couple of
years here is the only way for those who contribute and those who comment here to expose evil
doers we all are thoroughly screwed.
The county is running out of time. If Mueller has received data from ICIJ maybe we all
should be after someone to get the information about what files he got.
Lets us suppose that the CIA who has been in the money laundering business for years
and who likely wrote the book on the subject, had a plan. Maybe that plan was to have Browder
do exactly what he did,. Except for the getting caught part.
Just what do you suppose that carnage would look like.
Think about what the rest of the planet is thinking about the U.S. singing happy birthday
to it's self at such a chaotic time.
Isn't that something to be expected from 2 and 3 year old children?
JFK lamented that for a government to keep secrets from it's people because it feared
telling them the truth was not acceptable. Maybe he saw then what I see now, a public that increasingly threatened by it's
government.
We have the Trump mafia running the repugniklans and the Israeli mafia running the
dimocraps, and the DEEP STATE hoarding the proceeds.
"Off with their heads ", the Queen Shouted. She must have been familiar with the heads of
hedge funds!
In the 1990s I received an NNA – National Newspaper Award (Canada's top prize for
print journalism) for a series of newspaper articles first exposing the presence of Russian
mafia money laundering behind North American public and private co.s – and shut down
the YBM Magnex fraud – which led to Semion Mogilevitch being placed on the FBI's "Most
Wanted" list. The late Robert I. Friedman's "Red Mafiya" book (2000) included info from this
case – and he broke the word in the US via a 1998 feature in "The Village Voice".
I retired from active investigation of white collar / organized crime at the turn of the
century – and just last year became aware that the con-man Bill Browder, who, in the
1990s, was being mentored by another international scammer, Edmond Safra, is today falsely
portrayed as an "anti-corruption crusader". This geopolitical smoke-and-mirrors act is
maintained through the support of state actors and a western "legacy" media that is failed in
so many ways.
Fortunately, the inter-twined myths are all coming undone. To do my part, I've launched a
website "J'Accuse News" @ https://jaccuse.news
There is more than enough independent information – corporate, court, police+
records, employee interviews etc. – accessible on the public record for anyone that
chooses to know the truth of the "Magnitsky" campaign to do so.
In a recent newspaper column renowned Danish journalist and editor+ Flemming Rose examines
in detail some core, false, claims made by such propagators of the myth as Browder, his
connected supporters Jonathan Winer (USA), Irwin Cotler (Canada) and others.
"In his own words, Sergey Magnitsky was neither Bill Browder's lawyer nor a whistleblower.
It is in his witness statements." Rose concludes: "I salute the fight against human rights
abuses and personally was active in this fight in the former Soviet Union. But I fear that,
by relying on untruths, Browder's campaign could undermine this fight rather than support
it."
Fittingly, in Denmark, the land which gave the world Hans Christian Andersen, author of
"The Emperor's New Clothes", the Browder/Magnitsky con is unraveling and the naked truth is
revealed:
Editorial columns penned by Flemming Rose published by"Berlingske":
Danish investigative authors Birgitte Derykilde and Lars Abild have just announced their
book, which promises to reveal "The Emperor's New Clothes" of geopolitics, will be published
August12, 2019 (with a focus on the elements within that country eg. Danske Bank). The book's
title, "Troldmanden", translates fully into English as "The Wizard (master of trolls) –
the story about Danske Bank, money laundering and the man who deceived/fooled the world":
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOl9S0_jMEk
###
Zhu , July 5, 2019 at 05:22
Remeber the Historians' Rule, folks: Stupidity always trumps conspiracy.
John McCarthy , July 5, 2019 at 00:09
From your article:
" Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats.
The Mueller investigators appear not to have looked into her charges. "
If Law Enforcement Officers come across evidence of a crime during an investigation, are
they not obligated by Law to report it and to investigate it? Didn't the Mueller Team break
the Law if they ignored this?
Abby , July 4, 2019 at 21:06
One thing about this Russian lawyer who met with Trump Jr is that she originally couldn't
get into the country because she had problems with her passport. The Obama state department
had to fix it for her. And after the meeting she met with Simpson from Fusion GPS for
dinner.
Almost every person who ended up having contact with someone to make it look like they
were colluding with Russians was setup by the FBI or were members or connected to the
Clinton's foundation.
Russia Gate was created out of smoke by Hillary and her campaign and people in the Obama
administration and justice department. I'm hoping that Barr will release all the information
that is being gathered, but I doubt that he will let Obama be snared in it. Mueller took the
country on the biggest snipe hunt in history. Lots of people are thinking that they got lots
of snipes.
False. That is the disinformation spread by Fox News, John Solomon and Sara Carter, most
likely originating with Browder. Yes, she did meet Simpson on July 8, because he was hired by
US law firm Baker-Hostetler, who she hired to conduct the defence for her client Denis
Katsyv, in the Prevezon case.
In 2013, Browder had secretly passed US Attorney Preet Bharara a bundle of documents,
accusing Katsyv, wrongly as it turned out, of using proceeds of the alleged "Russian Tax
Fraud", central to his Magnitsky story. Browder was working with the State Dept's Jonathan
Winer, now his his personal lawyer, to have his Magnitsky story enshrined in US Case Law,
effectively giving the State the ability to confiscate any Russian property in the US by
linking it to the so called tax fraud.
The problems began for Browder, when his was discovered, and BH hired Simpson to check out
his story. Simpson recounts in his Senate Testimony, that they tracked Browder to Aspen,
Colorado, twice he evaded the subpoena, and again in New York, after he told the Judge Greisa
he would be overseas, he ran away from the server, after coming out of NBC studios plugging
his fictional book "Red Notice"
The Judge ordered Browder to appear on 15 April 2015, for a Deposition under oath. The
reason why he ran became clear, he couldn't substantiate any of the evidence he provided,
mostly complied by his staff, and he couldn't substantiate his Magnitsky Story either.
So what did he do? What he always does, attempt to shut down proceedings, on a thin
pretext, and his appeal was, guess what, in New York on morning of 9 June.
The meeting between NV and Simpson was about Browder's appeal, both have sworn to that
effect and there is zero evidence they setup the Trump Tower meeting. The also went to a full
defence team dinner a few days after, all above board.
However Browder always accuses others of his crimes, there is good evidence that Browder
was working with the State Dept's Robert Otto and Jonathan Winer, from Otto's leaked emails,
showing a menacing photograph of Veselnitskaya's Moscow home, the same day, she was granted a
work visa by the State Dept, 6 June 2016, three days before Browder's appeal. Same day,
Goldstone had Don Jr and Emin Agalarov agree on 9 June for Trump Tower. The problem is that
Goldstone invented most of the conversation, he told Veselnitskaya via Emin, that Don Jr
could help her arrange a Senate hearing about Browder, and told Don Jr she would have
"dirt"on Hillary.
Even if Browder has a good reason for this, it is still obstruction of Justice, most
likely can throw in Conspiracy to Interfere with the Election as a foreign agent by giving
Steele a fake meeting. Browder desperately wanted to discredit Simpson, and it's likely
Browder suggested Winer hire Simpson, so he can get embroiled with the Steele Dossier.
Haruspex , July 6, 2019 at 00:27
And the Phoenix tarmac meeting was about grandchildren and golf between two people who
never chatted socially. And you are trying to claim, the architect of the Steele dossier, had
nothing to do with Veselnitskaya meeting the Trump team? That it's coincidental? And it's
coincidental that Mike Isikoff runs into Jim Baker and warns him about the Steele dossier?
And it's coincidental that some unconnected oil industry specialist in London all of a
suddenly becomes the most courted man in Europe once it's determined he is associated with
Trump's campaign? And it's coincidental that Nellie Ohr gets a ham radio license the month
after Adm Rogers tossed her off all US intel data sites? And it's coincidental that Nellie is
married to the DoJ conduit between Steele and the FBI? Too many coincidences and in law
enforcement, they teach you there is no such thing as coincidences.
Garrett Connelly , July 4, 2019 at 20:03
Seemingly normal congressional representatives became obsessed with sanctions and passing
the Magnitsky Act.
Jeff Harrison , July 4, 2019 at 19:20
Mueller is a deep state spy who's "investigation" was nothing but an effort to cover up
the deep state's efforts to direct the outcome of the 2016 election. They get away with this,
and they'll be at it again in 2020. Our democracy is toast.
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 16:54
The excellent film by Andrei Nekrasov has been unavailable for at least a year. It shows
too clearly the falsity of the Browder charges, but somehow Browder is supported by those in
high places, since it is impossible to find the film anywhere. (I saw it twice online last
year before the complete blackout).
How many people here find the Skripal story in the UK to be as false? We have Theresa
May's word for all the relevant "facts" and that is all.
Experience tells us that US government/intel statements need to be backed up by perfect
evidence or they should be considered propaganda. With regards to Russia, the 5 Eyes have
told us nothing but lies for the last 5 years.
Stan W. , July 4, 2019 at 12:10
The Browder hoax would make a good sequel to the 1966 movie "The Russians Are Coming! The
Russians Are Coming!"
jsinton , July 4, 2019 at 10:15
We keep coming back to Browder. Browder is Russiagate is my sense.
Brian James , July 4, 2019 at 10:14
This will reveal their ultimate goal!
Jul 1, 2019 Democrat Calls On Tech Giants To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris
Debate
Elizabeth Warren Calls On Big Tech To Censor Conservatives Over Kamala Harris Debate.
You are right that censorship was one of the goals of Russia Gate. Because of it we got
Hamilton 68 that said they were able to tell us what tweets came from Russian trolls or
bots.
The Integrity Initiative is another company created during this time and they have stuck
around and then there's NewsGuard who is putting its buttons on Microsoft web browsers.
Facebook, Twitter and Google all changed their algorithms and alternative websites were so
downgraded that some lost up to 90% of their readership. This all came into being after
someone leaked the DNC computers and podesta emails and gave them to Wikileaks. Hillary's
campaign said that if they blamed it on Russia then no one would focus on their content. It
worked. The DNC rigging the primary is considered CT on many leftists sites.
Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:44
Thanks for another great article that gives us a glimpse behind the curtain. It would be
great if the truth regarding Browder were to make it into the mainstream, but I have my
doubts about that being possible. People like Mueller and the MSM lackeys are protectors of
the powerful. What Robert Parry called the "mighty Wurlitzer" keeps the truth drowned out
except for our small "sound proof free speech zone" here at CN and similar sites.
For people who wish to take a look at the "evil Rooskies" from a more realistic angle, I
highly recommend Stephen Cohen's "War with Russia?" I am just finishing it and it is a good
read.
Amazing how long the fraud has been going on, hiding in plain sight, Mueller a clear
player for the corrupt Deep State! We who read Consortium News have been informed about
Browder's fraudulent claims for the entire 2+ years of this ongoing chicanery. The swamp muck
is deep and thick, and Hillary Rodham Clinton is embedded in it. The confluence of swamp
creatures is odd, many don't even interact but they do in strange ways, all by lying. Thanks
for this article, hope for an end to the lies although the US truth decay is pretty far
advanced, maybe a sign it is collapsing ?!
Michael Collins , July 4, 2019 at 00:48
I think the Magnitsky Act is profoundly arrogant and not in our national interest.
I believe that Russia's intervention in Syria was essential and positive.
I'm not convinced that the Dutch report on MH17 has any persuasive power. This site had
the first insider source info that the missile was launched by the Ukrainians.
Having said that, I must say that this article is pure propaganda.
"Collusion" is a pure Republican propaganda term straight from Trump and his acolyte Barr.
The term is the straw man that forms the basis of the author's argument. The Mueller Report
outlines numerous contacts between Russians and the Trump campaign. Were they just chatting
about the weather or were the Russians trying to apply influence.
Whether or not Mueller could prove a conspiracy to commit a crime doe not take away from
the clear meddling by the Russians. In terms of outcome, Trump's performance in Helsinki is
the best argument for Russians influence. He was Putin's bot.
T,J , July 4, 2019 at 02:48
Michael, you got it right in your first three sentences but then, alas, you allowed your
imagination to run wild. The truth is that the Russians had little or no effect on the result
of the 2016 elections. The Democrats, alone, were responsible through their own incompetence
for the election result and even with their poor choice of candidate they could still have
won. The Mueller thing is just a distraction. By not admitting this, to themselves, they have
probably forfeited the 2020 election.
Mark Kelly , July 4, 2019 at 09:48
Quantity or quality? Has the FBI tracked the number of contacts other campaigns have with
foreigners, even Russians ? Obama, McCain, Bushes, Clinton's, Kerry, etc?
It would be rather
difficult for a campaign not to have documented contacts with foreign nationals, and the
Trump contacts like Sessions running into Kislack at receptions seem innocuous. We do know
that one campaign actually hired a foreign agent to obtain information from Russia about an
opponent and stated that highly placed Kremlin military and intelligence provided information
on Trump which was pitched to numerous media outlets.Of course, controlling a few hundred
million derived from a sale of control of uranium market is of no interest. These two events
seem a bit weightier than Mr. Goldstone's tee-shirt.
Mueller may have been a prisoner of his staff, we'll see how knowledgeable he is about what
is in the report, if he actually answers questions . ( Huddles with counsel "Cannot answer,
its classified .") Then wait for IG and Barr investigations .
Mr.Parry immediately smelled a great big rat using historical Russiaphobia
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:11
"Trump's performance in Helsinki is the best argument for Russians influence. He was
Putin's bot."
So the dropping of the INF Treaty and the continued massive arms build-up in the ex-Soviet
satellites is simply cover for Evil Vlad's real plans of world domination?
Same with Bolton's failed coup in Venezuela and our arming and training of Ukraine's fascist
Azov Battalion?
Michael,
Did you know Putin provided us our primary Afghan supply line and introduced us to
Afghanistan's Northern Alliance, all-the-while warning us of the real dangers of creating a
quagmire?
rosemerry , July 4, 2019 at 17:00
Pathetic conclusion. Pres.Putin, with all the faults cast upon him from the West, cannot
be considered to be stupid. All the "interference", which he denies (and unlike Trump he is
NOT a liar) would be uncharacteristic and counterproductive, like the alleged
novichok/perfume poisoning in the UK of someone already punished and exchanged, by alleged
"GRU operatives" botching the job.
bjd , July 3, 2019 at 21:08
What an excellent article!
The author provides another view –from a whole other angle yet again– showing
how the Mueller Report is more a work of uninspired wordsmithery and linguistic trickery
(with one or two –sometimes not even that carefully– hidden objectives), than an
unambiguous work of judicious scrutiny.
The more of this is revealed, the more the holy Mueller comes forth as an old, tired cop,
that has long lost the fine tricks of the trade, who was only still capable of the crude
tricks of the trade. His pathology and tragedy is that he doesn't see it himself; it is
likely to become his downfall when he testifies.
Most readers of Consortium News from around the Earth understand the immensity of the
Browder-Magnitsky scandal, and so then they are certainly hugely appreciative of Lucy
Komisar's years-long reporting on the scandal, plus thankful to Consortium News for
exhibiting the moral courage to publish Ms. Komisar's truly bombshell, Earth-shaking article.
Those people around the world yet unaware of this profound and historically important
situation will now, undoubtedly, become fully aware – and soon.
Every candidate from every political party in America running for the office of President
of the United States in 2020 will find it impossible to avoid this just-revealed
800,000,000-pound elephant standing in/on the living room known as planet Earth, as well as
find it impossible to respond in any manner but in 100% alignment with the truth. There are
nothing but positive consequences coming from this truly historic development – most
especially, the forthcoming global paradigm shift featuring exponentially greater
effectiveness of international law in deterrence of major criminality. It is a moving and
humbling experience to witness. Thank you sincerely.
Jerry L.! that was a tremendous piece of editorial writing! . I have been on the trail of
this " MAGNITZKY Sting thing Josef Mifsud is the key man of not so much mystery any more ! I
have been on this William Browder Grifter of the Hoover Institute _Stanford John Perkins .
Book " Confessions of a Economic Hitman " is eye opening . look into Edmond Safra his bizarre
demise or death in 1999' in the middle of Monaco Principality Párkinson had ravaged
Mr. SAFRA a third generation manifestation of Lebanon and Jewish Global financial markets
Financiers Of renowned Edmond Safra was from family heritage of movers and shakers of Global
financial markets and currency manipulators from the Middle Ages! Rick – Él
Cuban cowboy ( 702.767.0072)) hope all is well
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 19:12
This article, which I thank Consortium News for publishing, and its author, Lucy Komisar
for researching and writing, is very important for a number of reasons.
Those who know the history of what happened to Russia and the Russian people when U$
"experts", vulture capitalists and B-School grads, descended on Russia for a sportive
slaughter of its economy, all the better to create an oligarchic class and impoverish the
many while providing many of those "experts" lucrative, even obscenely lucrative rewards,
among them William Browder.
Those who have seen the film, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes.", by Andrei Nekrasov
know that Nekrasov had a sea-change experience, shared by viewers of the film who get a
front-seat, close-up look at what went on. That any who see the film could possibly retain a
favorable impression of Browder is very hard to imagine.
That so very much has been done to suppress any public or widespread showing of the film
speaks, eloquently and succinctly, to the motivations, if not expressly exposing the reasons,
for the suppression.
Clearly, when Congress passed the Magnitsky Act, in 2012, few of those who voted for that
law had seen the film or else they made no serious efforts to ascertain the actual facts.
Perhaps, they did not care to know the facts or, worse, do not care, at all, what the facts
actually were.
One hopes that among the questions posed to Robert Mueller will be several seeking clarity
about something he, rather obviously, got very wrong, about the infamous "meeting" at Trump
Tower.
Mueller's apparent lack of curiosity and equally apparent willingness to accept so very
many things at face value, based solely on what he was told, without, so it seems, any
genuine effort on his part to look more deeply, to actually investigate beyond what really is
hearsay, does not paint a picture of an intrepid, dogged pursuit of facts and actual
evidence, but rather a slipshod pretense while unctously playing the make believe role of
"Special Counsel".
His special guest appearance before Congress may well not be a reprise of a Cameo Role,
but an opportunity to win the Lifetime Oscar for Pusillanimous Leading Man.
The Democrats who have arranged this awards ceremony, thinking they are about to unearth
manifold riches, may well find that they have bitten off far more crow than they can possibly
chew.
Russiagate may yet become a dead albatross piece of neck ware for those banking on its
bonanza.
The "Ineffective Opposition" may soon confirm its utter uselessness, even as Robert
Mueller may find the very real need to embark on a costly "brand" restoration.
At least, this Second Coming, of Mueller will possibly provide a brief and hilarious
respite from the Democratic Debate Circus floperation. And the media is sure to love it,
Trump Tweets and all.
Seriously?
Once again, my appreciation for this timely and important article, which ties together a
plethora of peculiarities particularly perceptively well.
Nick , July 4, 2019 at 00:47
Mueller's lack of curiosity is something people in Boston are well aware of. He was the US
Attorney here when his FBI was covering up for Whitey Bulger, the murderous drug kingpin.
It's crazy, because now, to these same people in Boston, he's the saint who's gonna bring
down Trump. The fact that he got away in the late 90s when his FBI agents all came up filthy
with gifts from this gangster, and was subsequently able to work his way into an FBI
directorship, shows that this dude is a skillful liar, and more one of omission than
commission.
He'll turn up every rock looking for dirt on Trump, but if someone says 'Your
boy's dirt is under that rock,' he'll just pretend he didn't see it. There is no reason to
ever trust him at all. Dude is an awful investigator, and should have been disbarred when it
came to light that Agent John Connolly tipped off Whitey Bulger about a bug that State Police
put in the Lancaster St. Garage, which served as Whitey's office. John Connolly is in prison,
and his boss is lionized as a hero.
Seer , July 4, 2019 at 11:35
I too watched the film: subtle reminder- people ought to be sure to pay for it!
Seems to be similar to the well choreographed story of The White Helmets. The deception is
so widespread that it's nearly impossible to fully expose.
Seems that the Deep State HAS to
be involved in here somewhere: I've claimed that the CIA (and or FBI) was active in ensuring
Sanders wouldn't rise above HRC in the 2016 campaign; the trail was leading here so the
"players" unleashed the Russiagate circus (and we didn't even get any bread with it!).
Jerry Markatos , July 3, 2019 at 18:59
After watching the important film by Andrei Nekrasov, "The Magnitsky Act: Behind the
Scenes," I was embarrassed for the New Yorker and their running a puff piece with swindler
Browder anointing himself as a brave human rights hero standing up to the Russians. I hope
I'm not the only one who wrote the New Yorker editor urging a visit to Consortiumnews and an
evening with Nekrasov's docudrama. Robert Parry in a brief series of questions to people who
knew Sergei Magnitsky and an investigative reporter's nose for fraud, swiftly offered key
truths about the Magnitsky affair to readers of this site. If anyone else sees a possibility
of a mainstream magazine having an appetite either for detailing a fascinating and
consequential fraud or a willingness to eat crow, have at it!
Clark M Shanahan , July 4, 2019 at 10:48
The New Yorker and the lion's share of our MSM and late night talk shows (Colbert,
foremost) became collateral damage to Coronated-Hill's Clown-Car Fiasco.
Hill successfully projected her loss into the victimization of nearly half of the Nation.
Many of the enablers of this hoax must know better, using the "ends justify the means"
rationalization; as our self-appointed "protector" Colbert.
Robert Parry was clearly spot on about Browder and his fraud.
But the fraudster will not just go away, why should he, if he has been so successful in
his deception and fraud. Now we see that he is "leading" a charge against money laundering in
some of the European banks. If nothing else, the fraudster "continues:"
"... Liz Crokin of Townhall.com recently published an article titled "Why the MSM Is Ignoring Trump's Sex Trafficking Busts", discussing the arrests of sex criminals under Donald Trump's presidency and why it has been underreported by mainstream outlets. ..."
"... On October 8, 2012, Trump tweeted: 'Got to do something about these missing children grabbed by the perverts. Too many incidents – fast trial, death penalty. ..."
Liz Crokin of Townhall.com recently
published an article
titled "Why the MSM Is Ignoring Trump's Sex Trafficking Busts", discussing the arrests of sex criminals
under Donald Trump's presidency and why it has been underreported by mainstream outlets.
Since President Donald Trump has been sworn in on Jan. 20, authorities have arrested an unprecedented number of sexual predators
involved in child sex trafficking rings in the United States. This should be one of the biggest stories in the national news.
Instead, the mainstream media has barely, if at all, covered any of these mass pedophile arrests. This begs the question –
why?
It's been clear to me for awhile that Trump
would make human trafficking a top priority.
On October 8, 2012, Trump tweeted: 'Got to do something about these missing children grabbed by the perverts. Too many incidents
– fast trial, death penalty.
Bonanza media investigative team of independent journalists conduct exclusive interviews
with one of the suspects in the downing the MH17, the Malaysian prime minister, the colonel
that collected the black boxes and much more.
Eye-opening testimonies from witnesses and irrefutable evidence from experts. Exclusive
footage shot in Malaysia, the Netherlands and at the crash area in Ukraine.
This is a really bad thing and IMO it is altogether the result of the hyper-aggressiveness
displayed by the US toward Russia since the fall of the USSR. We had the option then of
offering a welcoming hand to Russia as it emerged from the nightmare of communist rule, but we
did not extend such a hand. Instead, our civilian and military policy elites insisted that
Russia was a necessarily an enemy for the US and was still the communist USSR in disguise.
We (the US) drove the eastern boundary of NATO absurdly far into Russia's "comfort zone,"
and actively recruited the former member countries of the Warsaw Pact into NATO. We have also
recruited many former Union Republics of the USSR into a specifically ant-Russian military
alliance.
We are now surprised that a weakened Russia, spurned by us, makes common cause with China?
What else were the Russians supposed to do? Fall on their knees before us and beg our pardon
for existing?
Neocon folly and a lack of any sort of policy thoughtfulness have brought us to this..
pl
It seems like the nation we should have reached out to first in the East was Russia in the
1990s, it has been an important part of Europe since (at least) the time of Peter the Great,
our remembering that would have been a good insight.
Colonel, As I recall (with admittedly dimming brain power) we explicitly promised at the
breakup of the Soviet Union not to do all the things which you outlined that we did. Clearly
we had an opportunity for world peace and we screwed it for national aggrandizement. We reap
what we sow.
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:
Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus
towards Russia.
"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe,
testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals
and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous
threat to that way of life."
As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016,
FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I
hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."
Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James
Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian
nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were
concerned."
In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped
oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was
about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across
our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia.
we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."
"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin
rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections
as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty
convincing....
My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of
"Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA
and NSA???
Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies???
And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???
"... "You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty convincing.... ..."
"... Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies??? And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system??? ..."
"... The Russians trying to rig the elections meme was a fallback for the failure of the “trump is a russianstooge" meme. ..."
Here are some insights into the minds of many movers and shakers in Russiagate:
Key US officials behind the Russia investigation have made no secret of their animus
towards Russia.
"I do always hate the Russians," Lisa Page, a senior FBI lawyer on the Russia probe,
testified to Congress in July 2018. "It is my opinion that with respect to Western ideals
and who it is and what it is we stand for as Americans, Russia poses the most dangerous
threat to that way of life."
As he opened the FBI's probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russians in July 2016,
FBI agent Peter Strzok texted Page: "fuck the cheating motherfucking Russians Bastards. I
hate them I think they're probably the worst. Fucking conniving cheating savages."
Speaking to NBC News in May 2017, former director of national intelligence James
Clapper explained why US officials saw interactions between the Trump camp and Russian
nationals as a cause for alarm: "The Russians," Clapper said, "almost genetically driven to
co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique. So we were
concerned."
In a May interview with Lawfare, former FBI general counsel Jim Baker, who helped
oversee the Russia probe, explained the origins of the investigation as follows: "It was
about Russia, period, full stop. When the [George] Papadopoulos information comes across
our radar screen, it's coming across in the sense that we were always looking at Russia.
we've been thinking about Russia as a threat actor for decades and decades."
"You have no evidence for the so-called Russian IO. It is a fabrication." In fact, Putin
rejects the claim many times publicly saying that Russia does not meddle in foreign elections
as a matter of policy. Maybe I'm gullible, but I find his disclaimer pretty
convincing....
My question for Larry Johnson requires some speculation on his part: How did the claims of
"Russia meddling" which began with the DNC and Hillary campaign, take root at the FBI, CIA
and NSA???
Is there an unseen connection between the Democrat leadership and the Intel agencies???
And --if there is-- does that mean we are headed for a one-party system???
uh Hillary Clinton stood with Bush and lied the world into war. Hillary and Obama brought
slavery back to Libya and ISIS and the largest refugee crisis since WW2 to Syria .
Dont forget genocide in Yemen ..
Hillary also supported disastrous free trade deals like NAFTA and CAFTA and {TPP that
brought back slavery} that harm workers on both sides of the borders
Hillary also toppled a democratically elected president in Honduras with Death Squads and
Obama killed 40,000 innocent t people with Sanctions in Venezuela
They are fleeing Hillary and Obama's Terror spree ..and cheer on worse WW3 with Russia
Reporter Quits NBC Citing Network's Support For Endless War
c.. Yes, Yes, Yes and Yes, Emma Peele, Without a Doubt – and I absolutely adore your
"Avengers" pseudonym !
Hillary's disgusting crimes, however, seem to me to be an attempt to ingratiate herself
(and the Democrats) with the Ultra Hawkish Bush Era Republicans.
Who can ever forgive & forget her ghoulish pronouncement, "We came, we saw, He
died!!"
(in reference to the ghoulishly brutal public murder of Libya's Qaddafi. {Qaddafi's "Green
Book" was a well imagined Socio-Economic plan for for the economic liberation of Africa from
the economic and cultural strictures of US, European Absolutist Brutal Dominion.} -- As it
was, Libya, under Qaddafi, was a liberal, socialist society with free education, free health
care for all citizens, and a nation with it's own currency , free from US/EURO manipulation
and control.
-- This Is Why We Killed Him. --
This is US Command and Control World-Wide POLICY ! ! ! --
-- Anglo-Saxon Command and Control of the Whole Wide World and all it's resources Owned and
Militarily Controlled by European Bankers
-- - EUROPEAN Bankers, Rothschild Criminal Banker WarMongers/ Wall Street and American
Military Power --
These are They which Evilly Rule the World and Disparage or Murder (annihilate) All Others
at their pleasure, and Trump is an evil antagonist with the personage of a King Leopold.
Please find "KING LEOPOLD'S GHOST' By Adam Hochschild
"... including Ukraine in the JIT and excluding Malaysia were enough clues that the investigation would be a fix ..."
"... I think the Ukrainian side shot it down but I don't know whether by accident ( wouldn't be the first time ) or whether there was government involvement (but those faked up intercepts were out pretty quickly, weren't they?) Helmer discusses ; the documentary . ..."
MH17. I have always thought the JIT "investigation" was rotten – see
this (port engine intake – BIG clue as to direction of missile). We now have a
documentary that reiterates Malaysia was excluded, a secret mission to get the black box first,
the intercepts are fakes, more people report seeing fighter planes, the radars were not down
for repair.
But including Ukraine in the JIT and excluding
Malaysia were enough clues that the investigation would be a fix . I'm sceptical that
it was a BUK (too few fragments); I think the fighter plane sighting reports should be looked
at. I think the Ukrainian side shot it down but I don't know whether by accident (
wouldn't
be the first time ) or whether there was government involvement (but those faked up
intercepts were out pretty quickly, weren't they?)
Helmer discusses ; the documentary .
MH17. Thanks for that link to the documentary. It laid out a clear case that the JIT
investigation stinks to high heaven. I think you may have participated in some of our
discussions on this years ago.
Judging by some of the eyewitness accounts in the documentary, I'm leaning more to a shoot
down by a Ukrainian SU-25. I was always puzzled by the change of direction of the airliner's
flight path before it broke up. A chase/strafing run and AA missile strike seems a more
likely explanation for that direction change that a sudden Buk strike.
I believe the Ukies had versions of the SU-25 with pressurized cockpits and refurbished to
handle the R-60, R-73 and Israeli Python missiles.
Do you know if anyone is still researching this scenario?
What about the MH-17 "conspiracy theories"? A recent video " MH17:
Call for Justice' (2019) " produced by Max van der Werff blows the lid off (just the tip
of the iceberg) of the propaganda put worth by the West.
A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and
forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying
by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US, and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed
aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first
time.
The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian – Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad
Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer in charge of the MH17 investigation for the
Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash on
July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian
Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.
...
The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness
testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the
Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a
Malaysian or other national or international court.
For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of
attempts the US was organizing during the first week after the crash to launch a NATO
military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane,
passenger bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was
aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the Donbass, and to move against
Russian-held Crimea.
The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the
MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them
After having read all of the comments, I like to ask a question.
Neither in the story, nor in the comment section, I found any remark about the Skripal
affair.
Have you all forgotten how BOJO leaned himself out of the window, outdoing himself and his
degenerate former boss by accusing Russia of poisoning the Skripals and whoever else with
'Novi-shock'?
And this pathetic liar and accuser of Russia with as much as ZERO evidence is now at the
helm of HMS Titanic?
No wonder people can't figure out what's really going on in the world. Considering his
rabid "The Russians did it" tripe as FM, he should have been barred from public office for
the rest of his life.
Unless, of course, it's all nothing but low grade ham theater, with everybody playing
their role - including the Russians. But I do remember the kind of actions this guy wanted to
take against Russia, for 'highly likely' having been behind this fairy tale of a double agent
and his daughter.
So, please humor me about how much you remember of the stellar performance of this utter
joke calling for sanctions and worse against Russia.
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace. ..."
Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless
the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some
efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and
say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.
A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster,
has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;
and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official
for the first time.
The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer
in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash
on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes
which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.
The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because
the airline manifest does
not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.
The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT),
against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT;
in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion
from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never
been explained.
The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and
telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution
in a Malaysian or other national or international court.
For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first
week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger
bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the
Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.
The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing
the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated
the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch
to call off the invasion on July 27.
The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and
co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full
here .
The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read
here .
Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the
first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops
to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged
Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read
this .
Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces
unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.
Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after
the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed
here and
here .
In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed
us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of
the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We
are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the
missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."
On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right)
announced agreements he had already
reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will
not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president has
pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part.
'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian
corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government
of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as
a medical team. But we must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."
The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence,
filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave
a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian
newspaper .
"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time
Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after
arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave
Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration
headed by Alexander Borodai .
With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead
of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian
state press agency ABC
reported their
military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans,
had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony
filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.
US sources told the
Wall Street
Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed
a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the
territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give
any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman
Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."
The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the
destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket
explosion." This was a fabrication – the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first
reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence
revealed .
Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country
to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning,
and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian
mission."
In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source:
https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian
control.
By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian
troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.
The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added
the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.
Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site
to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source:
https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.
Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special
monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over
the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said
no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot.
We cannot allow."
The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands,
Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.
Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and
his disclosures agreed with them in advance.
Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have
included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians;
for details, read
this .
Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services
, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine
the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the
Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read
here .
The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated.
The source of the tapes, according to the
JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The
Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van
der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.
Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the
June 19, 2019 , press conference of
JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.
Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has
been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min.
17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours
on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.
Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence
against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut
conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).
Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including
a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the
missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one,
possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.
Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three
years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported
where the missile she saw had been fired from.
This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to
point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site.
She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and
garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."
According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the
Ukrainian Army were there."
Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military
aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian
aircraft she also saw at the same time.
On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of
the MH17 crash.
Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist
Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller
for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety
Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of
the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.
Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking
off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the
three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There
[they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."
Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah
Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian
Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice
for the victims," Zakaria
said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose
of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?]
"Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions."
By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign
correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties.
Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia.
He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published
at
Dances with Bears
I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and
into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g.
here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?
(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")
Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder
pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved
airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in
tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.
Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist
masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad
before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?
Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down
Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.
If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your
questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'
Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians
have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed
false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no
interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all
any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'
It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy.
These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery
will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised
crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities
all around.
Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I
have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding
their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but
if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how
much they care about airplane crash investigations.
I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence
and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air
strike.
Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of
sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does
JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?
TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in
face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).
I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed
up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).
For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of
a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.
How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing
their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't
want hostile forces parked on its border.
Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink
and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short
of any evidence they were in charge.
Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:
That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were
seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.
This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written
– that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.
Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag
operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on
board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)
Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning
of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?
I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting
down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for
you.
Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing
more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility – the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think
be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.
And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right
after the shooting of the plane.
"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103
site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based
at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.
The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.
That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian
commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians.
The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the
hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians
came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link.
Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did
it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down
in high summer. And so it went on.
There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite
of the efforts of our government to stop them.Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was
being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were
seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings
of aircraft that went down and there is usually something – a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts – but here there was nothing.
That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would
have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking
about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister
of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and
may have been entertaining such thoughts.
My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over
$5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern
Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not
rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself – who benefited from this tragedy
and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations
should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.
Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they
had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a
fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the
rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.
Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as
in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the
western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting
of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News
before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".
If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired
by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's
evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.
Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't either–the fog of propaganda war.
The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according
to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will
begin to find peace.
Ukrainian nation is a separate nation with a distinct and rich culture. You can call them Southern Russians but still they are
distinct. That does not mean that Russian language should be suppressed and eliminated from schools, the policy
advocated and implemented by Western Ukrainian nationalists. a better policy would to introduce English language from the first
grade. Attempt to eliminate Russian is viewed by Eastern Ukrainians as the attempt of colonization (which it is) and in a
long run can have the opposite effect like any colonization project.
Two languages can coexist. Ireland and Canada does not stop being distinct countries because they use English language. And
very few people in Canada would support switching to French. Many prominent Russian writers have Ukrainian origin (Nikolai
Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov). Elimination of Russian destroy
common cultural space (which enriches all participating nations not only Russia) establishing during the USSR years and
shrink this common the cultural space.which for Ukraine mean complete domination in Ukrainian cultural space of US culture and
Hollywood with all its excesses and warts.
The break of economic cooperation with Russia after EuroMaydan was Washington policy with willing implementers in the
face of comprador column (Yatsenyuk, Poroshenko) and Western Ukrainian nationalists, which run the
government after EuroMaydan. Among other thing this implies the attempt of colonization of Eastern Ukraine (via forceful Ukrainization) which
backfired with the election of Zelensky.
Notable quotes:
"... Zelensky is of Jewish heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian. ..."
"... I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not interested ..."
"... But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?) ..."
"... Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by Kolomoisky. ..."
"... Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons, and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation... ..."
"... "A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign to replace Poroshenko." ..."
"... It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining countries that are not part of empire. look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded like a dirty rag. ..."
"... The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself). ..."
"... Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). ..."
"... Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky can safely be assumed. ..."
"... The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block. There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. ..."
"... Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has been blamed for the EU's Economic trap. ..."
"... what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer? ..."
"... The Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian industries. ..."
"... That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me ..."
"... As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would. ..."
"... "Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе за Украину" (which includes the interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here, https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html ..."
"... "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He will need their loyalty sooner than he might think." ..."
"... For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare (published in 2010; leaked in 2012): Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1994). ..."
"... The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949. ..."
"... While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated by a US embargo on wheat imports to China. ..."
"... Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS , no less. ..."
"... Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper. ..."
"... Is it a feature of the "rules based international order" that unelected NGOs can establish "red-lines" on policy and expect adherence? ..."
"... What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. ..."
"... there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al. ..."
"... This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control inter alia the University of Alberta. ..."
"... But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites, brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies. They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here. They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing, co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. ..."
"... "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?" They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to change. ..."
"... The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square. ..."
"... The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs & co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS! ..."
"... I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. ..."
"... Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of coverage. ..."
"... Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. ..."
"... Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist Empire". ..."
"... I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us. Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc. The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me. http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/ ..."
"... In 2014, if I presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome. ..."
"... My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire. ..."
"... Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great care. It would probably require a study in itself.) ..."
"... On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.) ..."
"... The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak ..."
"... Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine, including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia, still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak Russian. ..."
"... The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this. ..."
"... As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians. I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now". That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national. ..."
"... All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it! ..."
"... It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the 1930s. ..."
"... From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan. ..."
"... There's plenty of sources documenting the Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't fake news. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/ ..."
"... Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black" drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand. ..."
"... Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world -- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism) ..."
"... Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest. ..."
"... It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because, even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. ..."
"... To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in 1992: www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html ..."
"... Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place: 'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'. And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine. ..."
"... Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be a thorn in the flesh. ..."
"... Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire? ..."
"... Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests? If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests? ..."
"... The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev. The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests. ..."
Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color RevolutionVanWoland , Jul 22
2019 18:55 utc |
1
The Ukraine, translated as 'the borderlands, lies between core Russia and the Europe's
western states. It is a split country. Half the population speaks Russian as its first
language. The industrialized center, east and south are culturally orthodox Russians. Some of
its rural western parts were attached to the Ukraine only after World War II. They have
historically a different culture.
The U.S., supported by the EU, used this split - twice - to instigate 'revolutions' that
were supposed to bring the Ukraine onto a 'western' course. Both attempts were defeated when
the Ukrainians had the chance of a free vote.
The 2004 run-off election for the president of the Ukraine was won by Viktor Yanukovych.
The U.S. disliked the result. Its proxies in Ukraine alleged alleged fraud and instigated a
color revolution. As a result of the 'Orange Revolution' the vote was re-run and the other
candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was declared the winner. But five years later another vote
defeated the U.S. camp. Yanukovych was declared the winner and became president.
In 2014 the European Union made an attempt to bind the Ukraine to its side through an
association agreement. But what the EU offered to Ukraine was paltry and Russia countered it.
Unlike the Ukraine, which continues to get robbed by its oligarchs ever since its 1991
independence, Russia was economically back and in a much better position. It offered billions
in investments and long term loans. Much of Ukraine's industry depends on Russia and Russian
gas was offered to the Ukraine for less than the international market price. Yanukovych, who
originally wanted to sign the EU association, had no choice but to refuse it, and to take the
much better deal Russia offered.
The U.S. and the EU intervened. They again launched a color revolution, but this time it
was one that would use force. Militarily trained youth from Galicia in the west Ukraine was
bused into Kiev to occupy the central Maidan place and to violently fight the police. Snipers
from Georgia were brought in to fire on both sides. It was then
falsely
alleged that government forces were killing the 'peaceful protesters'.
Yanukovych lost his nerves and fled to Russia. After some
illegal political maneuvers new elections were called up and the oligarch Petro
Poroshenko, bought off by the 'west', was declared the winner. The unreconstructed fascists
from Galicia took over. The population in the industrial heartland in east Ukraine, next to
Russia's border, revolted against the new rulers. A civil war,
not a 'Russian
invasion' , ensued which the Ukrainian government largely lost. Lugansk and Donbas became
rebel controlled statelets which depend of Russia. Russia took back Crimea, which in 1954 had
been illegally gifted to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, himself a
Ukrainian.
To end the war in the east Ukraine, the French, German and Russian leaders pressed
Poroshenko to sign a peace agreement with the eastern leaders. But the Minsk agreement was
seen as a political defeat and Poroshenko never implemented it. The war in the east simmered
on ever since. The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan
coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak.
All opposition was harshly suppressed.
The oligarchs continue their plunder. Everything of value gets sold off to EU countries.
The U.S. is allowed to build bases. Corruption, already endemic, further increased. The
people came to despise Poroshenko.
In an attempt to regain support, Poroshenko
launched a military provocation in the Kerch Strait which is under Russian control. The
stunt
was too obvious . Russia nabbed the sailors Poroshenko had send and confiscated their
boats. No one came to Poroshenko's help.
One can watch the full story of the above in UKRAINE ON FIRE - The Real Story (vid), a
just released 90 minutes long Oliver Stone documentary. An updated version of the documentary
was supposed to run on the Ukraine TV station of pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. The
TV stations was
forced to cancel it after right-wing groups mortared its its building in Kiev.
On March 31 new elections were held. Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV comedian who played a
teacher who accidentally became president, won the first round. Zelensky is of Jewish
heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian.
An admirable summary.
What's next? There are three causes for cautious optimism
1. The elections were actually allowed to happen without Washington's interference; see 2
2. I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not
interested
3. EU has its own problems.
But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area
without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?)
But you're absolutely correct to see this as the voters gain rejecting a "colour
revolution"imposed from outside
Fine work here, Bernhard. Analysis as clear and cool as a mountain stream.
And now for the march of the Fascists led by the Iron Maidan of Galicia, Chrystia Freeland
employing all Canada's power and credibility to restore the Galician Nazis from whose loins
she came.
Excellent review b, thanks! With the political sea change, Ukraine has an opportunity to
progress, but somehow those pushing and believing their false narrative will need to be
neutralized. It appears the best way forward is to implement the Minsk2 agreements and go
forward from there.
Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst
other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property
confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably
wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated
to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been
started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by
Kolomoisky.
Kolomoisky will be looking for alternative sources of loot (eg reconstruction funds) which
will only happen if the Donbass situation is wound down. Zelensky has unexpectedly announced
that there will be a political solution to the issue of Russian sailors captured before the
Kerch incident (and one factor in Russia's response to it) in exchange for those held in
Russia. For all this to happen, the neo-Nazis will have to be defused, which may not be as
difficult as it would appear as they are funded and orchestrated by the Ukraine
oligarchs.
Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons,
and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation...
"A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears
to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian
policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian
President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign
to replace Poroshenko."
It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts
like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining
countries that are not part of empire.
look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college
free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded
like a dirty rag.
Ukraine needed to get out of the rut it has been in and look forward somehow, even if there
are no great changes that happen in the country, much of the previous political heaviness
seem gone, for now at least. It should be a good difference. Thanks for the report.
The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially
dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of
the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop
those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself).
Zelensky will have the same problem: he can pass how much bills he wants -- only those who
the neonazi militias want to be implemented will be enforced. He needs to assemble a brand
new Armed Forces -- with amateur volunteers if necessary -- if he wants to survive: his
Jewish origin alone is already a death certificate for him in the eyes of the neonazis.
The other ace Zelensky has in his hand is the Donbass (Lughansk + Donestk). Those happen
to be the most pro-Russian provinces and also, by far, the two most rich and industrialized
ones. To make things even better, they also happen to be the two provinces that border with
Russia. This peculiar geopolitic configuration is a gift of destiny that, for example,
Brazil, didn't have.
Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely
dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which
goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were
extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). Russia just needs to wait.
Note: as for the toppled Lenin statues. Please, continue: in one of his birthdays, the
Soviet population made a mass homage to him, gathering in the Red Square and writing him
poems. He was very embarrassed and hated it -- his rationalization was that the Revolution's
main actor was the poeple, not him, and that personality cult was the wrong way to perceive
reality of the times.
2 quibbles. Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky
can safely be assumed.
The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered
little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block.
There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. This is
why the Russians expected to be part of a negotiating group, and why eventually Yanukovych
belatedly realised that EU association would lead direct to dissociation with ex-Soviet
trading partners and an economic catastrophe for Ukraine. Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev
as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to realise the blatantly obvious.
Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has
been blamed for the EU's Economic trap.
Thing is, in Ukraine as much as in the US, EU, India, or wherever: For a Politician to make a
campaign for a high political position, let alone the highest, one NEEDS Money.
And where is a someone financing a politician, they make themselves vurnable. Thats the
nature of it: No one will give you even a penny, let alone dozens of millions of dollars, if
not for something in return.
So someone HAS to put the money into him, and Kolomoisky is reported not only by NATO, but by
Russian sources too.
Why do i say this? Because i want to have my point that everyone is corrupt, and the world
is dystopia. No, not today:
It is because those "civil organisations" already hinted, that they use Kolomoisky's
financing as the attack vector, should the Ukraine dare to stray off from NATO course.
They said something of the likes of: "We heard of the allegations that Kolomoisky is
having him in his pocket, and we always want to ensure that politics are not corrupted, so we
will watch it". They said that AFAIK some days before the recent threath, so maybe there has
been some signs he does not want to play ball with NATO.
But we will see.. With the US you never know, even more with Donald and his best buddy
neocons.
b says: "The Ukraine can not economically survive without good relations with Russia."
That is true, but what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space
between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer?
The
Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but
most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most
of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is
unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian
industries.
Ukraine can go crawling back home to Russia (home being the place where they take you back
in even after you've been a total jerk), but there will be no massive bailout and magical
recovery. Eastern Ukraine will benefit from a peace dividend, but western Ukraine will have
to be satisfied with European sex tourism, with Lvov remaining the gay prostitute capital of
the continent.
@B: One Correction if i see it right: I think linked Documentary "Ukraine on fire" is NOT the
new one, he already made a doc about Ukraine some time ago, and this is it.
The new one is Not released yet, i mean the one with the Interview you posted few days ago.
The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released.
Search your torrent search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on
youtube yet AFAIK.
Sorry, last post: Please barflies, for those you want to support those documentarys, vote for
them on IMDB and write reviews if you saw them. They are being attacked from NATO bots and
voted down to C-Movie level. If you dont want BS like Fast & Furious have better ranking
as those anti-mainstream docs, please take your time and support them!
They are pretty much the only documentarys in mainstream US media that tell the other side!
That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West
and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me. One that should be imposed from outside if
necessary, if some Ukrainians are foolish enough to pick a side - and, considering its
geographical position, specially if some Ukrainians people want to move "West" full speed
ahead, because the border with Russia will always be there.
As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour
revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should
seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very
badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of
the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would.
For example, I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people.
Putin adds that it's inevitable that Ukraine will eventually return to good relations with
Russia.
Look, when these lands that are now the core of Ukraine, joined Russia, there were just
three regions – Kiev, the Kiev region, northern and southern regions – nobody
thought themselves to be anything but Russians, because it was all based on religious
affiliation. They were all Orthodox and they considered themselves Russians. They did not
want to be part of the Catholic world, where Poland was dragging them.
Putin is correct, as usual. He is playing the Long Game, just as China has done with Hong
Kong and continues to do with Taiwan. The empire always uses divide and rule. But in the end, empires always bite the dust.
In Ukrainian politics my preferences are with the present Russian viewpoint and not at all
with the Ukrainian Nazis.
Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of
1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.
"Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе
за Украину" (which includes the
interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian
and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here,
https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html
b said; "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick
out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He
will need their loyalty sooner than he might think."
We'll all hope for the Zelensky people to salvage some sanity from another round of the
empire's attacks. They'll never relent.
One would hope the Stone documentary would be seen here, in the U$A, but that's a distant
dream. Should at least be on PBS, but, I doubt it.
As always b, thanks for the therapy, and historical background...
For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare
(published in 2010; leaked in 2012):
Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training
Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to
Democracy, 1994).
When used at the same time in the same place, they form what Korybko calls Hybrid Warfare
(see his book).
The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little
later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949.
While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was
under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to
be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated
by a US embargo on wheat imports to China.
Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because
they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of
Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting
for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under
the SS , no less.
Some allege that Zelensky is under influence of the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. But so far
there is little evidence to provide that.... Zelensky will likely try to move the country
back to a balanced positions between the 'west' and Russia.
There's reason to be skeptical.
Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish).
President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish). Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country? I'll
bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.
"Yats is the guy" ... until he isn't but will the new guy bring real change or just
pretend to?
Not just a bridge between Russia and the EU, the natural partnership that the US really
fears, but, look at the geography, it is the natural entry point into Europe for the new Silk
Road from China. Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port
in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper.
"Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of
1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians..."
The 'Holodomor' was not real. No such event occurred. There was no intention of starving
Ukrainians, on the part of the CPSU. In fact most of the Soviet Union suffered from famines
in these years, some regions much more than Ukraine. The causes of the famine were largely
economic sanctions.
It is quite true that the Collectivisation campaigns were, in many ways disastrous, and
carried out with great violence. But the Holodomor myth, invented by Nazi collaborators after
1945 and based on Goebbels's propaganda is Cold War anti-communist hate propaganda of the
worst kind.
Wikipedia is extremely unreliable on matters such as this.
2.As to comedians running governments Hoarsewhisperer, don't forget Italy.
3. What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some
of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. At a time in which the USA's ability to
dump grain on the world market is being employed to conduct terrorist economic warfare
against disobedient countries, the surpluses Ukraine could make available are of cardinal
importance. Then there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American
agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al.
" The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign
minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS, no
less."
c1ue@26
This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their
dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where
they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control
inter alia the University of Alberta.
But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites,
brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies.
They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here.
They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing,
co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. It was with
great relish that the Liberal Party used the former (and lifelong) Nazis to saplit the
community post 1945.
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"
They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind
you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to
change.
re "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the
country?"
(a) Is it true that the population of Ukraine is .2% Jewish?
(b) Is it true that the .2% segment runs the country?
(c) Is it considered racist to ask why you find the two subject sentences indications of
racism?
However, for sake of good order, the EU association agreement proposal to Ukraine of Mr
Baroso, was presented and rejected by Janukovitch beginning of November 2013. ( not 2014).
The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total
unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and
Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which
of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and
charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square.
The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by
their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs
& co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil
war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went
directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS!
I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I
remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the
fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi
Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. I searched in vain a couple years
later to find the archives of these films. Does anyone know if they still exist? I suspect if
the filming was done by a coup-friendly Kiev TV station they will be kept under wraps unless
some viewer recorded them, as there is a lot of incriminating evidence which could be
exposed.
Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright
lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any
pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and
the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false
narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of
coverage.
Here's hoping the pendulum has swung and we'll reclaim some sanity. Current trends don't
favor this, however, and the US may go for the Samson option before conceding to a more
multi-polar world. A smart lady (my wife) says we need 10% of people to accept a new idea or
narrative before a critical mass can occur and it become the dominant narrative. The more
people who understand the issues MOA and others educate about gives us a chance of countering
the Empire's narrative control. Thanks to all for spreading the message and keep sharing with
your friends.
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"
They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks
behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now
going to change.
No, he does not just say "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they
running the country?". He says:
Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish).
President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish).
Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?
I'll bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.
You can't ignore this "interesting" "fact" if it's the fact.
@21 and @26 - regarding the Holodomor, It is true. Millions of people did die, but from what
I can tell, it was a lot more complicated than how it is presented. Here's an article I found
on Counterpunch Holodomor
I am no specialist or anything, but I think the collectivization was a disaster and the war
on the kulaks didn't help anything, and that lead to the Holodomor which is more
genocide-porn used for the same purposes as a few other large scale killings I have heard
about - to make sure we never forget, and more importantly, we never really find out what
really happened, because it is S A C R E D.
I just finished an excellent book on the Ukraine crisis. Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New
Cold War by Kees Van Der Pijl. In the book he says that the Holodomor was used by the Reagan
administration in the second phase of the Cold War as a tool to demonize the Soviet Union.
Sound Familiar? The author says the second phase of the Cold War was launched when detente
was broken with the Soviet Union, any concessions made to domestic labor in the west was to
be dismantled and the goal was regime change in Moscow which happened in 1991. The author
really lays it out and explained the new, third phase of the Cold War which really kicked
into gear in Kiev in the winter or 2014. I found that to be very interesting. I had never
heard it put that way before.
I can't recommend the book enough.
I just started Frontline Ukraine by Sakwa.
Thank you, B and everyone in the MoA community. Please forgive any mistakes I may have made
in describing my interpretation of van Der Pijl's book.
Ukraine is such a unique disaster of a nation precisely because it is not really a nation at
all, just a cobbled together mishmash of people with no history. There is no such thing as a
Ukrainian ethnicity. Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, remnants of the poor souls conquered by
the Poles after the Mongol invasion and treated like dirt for centuries. All through that
horrid time they preserved their identity as Russian, but when the Polish state was removed
from the map, bitter Polish academics pushed the tale that these people were somehow separate
from Russians, i.e. Russia had no right to it's retaken territory. This new foreign composed
identity was forced on them by both carrot and stick in the Austrian Empire, that occupied
Galicia...leading to concentration camps for those who resisted it in WWI. And the saddest
part of the tragedy was when the Soviets founded a Ukrainian republic, lending undeserved
credence to this farce. There is no wonder the country is such a schizophrenic failure. They
have no clear identity and their recent history is nothing but sniveling shame. What is
really the difference between groveling before Nazi invaders or groveling before Nato
invaders? Not much, and the end is the same.
I think over 20% of Ukraine's population is "not Ukrainian".
Posted by: c1ue | Jul 22 2019 21:59 utc | 28
It is quite complicated. For example, Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to
be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. His first
language is Russian, and ancestry... Khazarian? If I recall, he shares first language,
hometown and ancestry with Kolomoysky who was also his employer. What I am trying to say is
that national identification is fluid in this region. You may have Russian nationalists who
speak Ukrainian dialect at home, Ukrainian nationalists with rather incomplete knowledge of
"their language" and many other combinations. That said, Ukrainian is a separate language
that may be hard to understand by someone who knows only Polish or only Russian (but rather
intelligible if you know both).
Occasionally I follow news on RusNext.ru, a news site that seems to be run by Donbass
supporters who fluently translate from Ukrainian and, I guess, use Ukrainian words here and
there.
BTW, the history of Ukraine is quite complicated, including "Polish Conquest" that in
actuality happened as very complex cleaving and coalescing of fragmented states with key
dynasties leaving no descendants BOTH in Poland and the Kingdom of Halich thus leaving both
to the rule of a Hungarian king, to be later partitioned between his two daughters, while the
less populated part of Ukraine was taken over by Lithuanians who had hard time defending
their holdings from Tatars etc. After that, the polity of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
adopted Polish as the common language of nobility, so most of the "cruel Polish lords" that
Ukrainians fought with in 17th century were of Ruthenian (Russian?) origin, some claiming
descent from Rurik (i.e. from the common dynasty of Rus lands). Compare with Irish and
Scottish nobility adopting a Saxon-French mix as their vernacular (now known as English).
I was just discovering the importance of internet world news information when the Maidan
crisis unfolded, and many Ukrainians were putting photos and videos on various blogs about
the horrible events leading up to and following the coup. Russia has made huge strides since
- but we cannot forget that ordinary people who had the ability to send out information as it
happened were to be highly praised for doing so. It wasn't sophisticated, I remember in one
city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the street, showing bodies
on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through the streets - vivid
shots of buildings on fire, a protest by a woman with a toddler at a speechgiving occasion.
Unforgettable.
Ukraine should be proud of being the historic heart of Russia itself, the place where the
State began. That's what Putin is talking about, and even more than Crimea Kiev is the
historical homeland capital city for all Russians; it's part of their heritage. It's as if
separatists in the US got themselves embedded in New York City and declared their
independence of the rest of the country, being more aligned with Canada. (Oh, and everyone in
that northern area now had to speak French.)
Wikipedia
tells us that Jews are 0.2% of the population in Ukraine.
'Jewish' is not a race. It's a religion. Do you think that Israel is a country for
semetic people ? LOL. No, it's a theocracy.
Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with
that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in
Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist
Empire".
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Leads me to wonder if the State Department's recent global antisemitism efforts are mostly
aimed at Ukraine.
If Ukraine itself made such efforts/expenditures it might would draw a backlash from the
Ukrainian people. So the US does it and slyly declares it to be global so no one
notices that it's directed at certain countries (mostly Ukraine?) that have Jewish leadership
that's backed by US/NATO.
As part of the effort to take over Ukraine, US/NATO forged an anti-Russian alliance that
included the anti-Jewish extreme-right in Ukraine as described by
Ukraine and the "Politics of Anti-Semitism" (2014) :
The US and the EU are supporting the formation of a coalition government integrated by
Neo-Nazis which are directly involved in the repression of the Ukrainian Jewish
community.
. . .
Within the Western media, news coverage of the Neo-Nazi threat to the Jewish community in
Ukraine is a taboo. There is a complete media blackout: confirmed by Google News search ...
What is not mentioned is that these "radical elements" supported and financed by the West
are Neo-Nazis who are waging a hate campaign against Ukraine's Jewish community.
. . .
According to the JP [Jerusalem Post] , the issue is one of "transition", which will
be resolved once a new government is installed .
"Despite his [Likhashov's] optimism fear pervades the local Jewish community, as it
does the entire Ukraine, during the transition period."
No doubt Jews would not feel safe with rightists leading the government so arrangements
were made (Democracy Works! LOL). We can surmise that the US State Dept has now
formalized this with funding for a propaganda campaign that seeks to change their views
and/or political slush fund to ensure election of Jewish candidates to high office?
Acar@39 The Globalists/Zionists Good 'Ole Pale of (re)Settlement included Crimea, home of the
Karaites, hence manipulation of the Rusyns, and Neo-fascist Galicians & Podolians. A
strange ethnic Divide et Impera nexus for sure..
"The pneumatics ("spiritual", from Greek πνεῦμα, "spirit")
were, in Gnosticism, the highest order of humans, the other two orders being psychics and
hylics ("matter"). A pneumatic saw itself as escaping the doom of the material world via the
transcendent knowledge of Sophia's Divine Spark within the soul."
No one is disputing that famines occurred in Soviet Ukraine. These famines also occurred
in Belarus and Russia. The extent to which the harsh form of collectivisation institutioned
under Stalin contributed as opposed to climatic and other factors (Western sanctions, crop
destroying pests etc) is a matter for debate. Grover Furr argues the latter forcefully in
'Blood Lies' (2014). The term "Holodomor" refers to an intentional policy of genocide against
the "Ukrainian Nation" by evil Russians/Commies/Jews via intentional starvation. As bevin @32
points out, this concept originated in Nazi ideology. So yes, famine(s) occurred, but the
"Holodomor" did not.
As for the author of the Counterpunch piece, Louis Proyect, he is an imperial apologist of
the worst sort who delights in trolling any forum where anti-imperialists gather. If this
appears to be an Ad Hominum attack, I think you have to be human to be a victim of one of
those.
I also can't recommend the Van der Pijl book enough. Usually if I see a book recommended
by someone who also links to a Louis Proyect article I would avoid it like the plague, but
barflies please don't be discouraged! Van der Pijl is one of the premier exponents of
(non-sectarian) Marxist International Relations, if you've been put off reading Marxist
authors thanks to the likes of Proyect he is the perfect antidote. His "Global Rivalries -
From The Cold War to Iraq" (2007) is also excellent, I would recommend you track that down if
Sakwa has nothing much to add.
Global Research has an extract from "Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War" here:
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Prime minister
. . .
He has played down his Jewish-Ukrainian origins , possibly because of the prevalence
of antisemitism in his party's western Ukraine heartland.
Yatsenyuk resigned in disgrace in April 2016 amid a massive corruption scandal that
first broke in February, when economy minister Aivaras Abromavicius stepped down,
complaining that the Yatsenyuk government was not genuinely committed to fighting
corruption .
One of the many corrupt projects was Yats' border wall, which critics have said
"wouldn't even stop a rabbit." LOL.
The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released. Search your torrent
search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on youtube yet AFAIK.
I just downloaded but got the Russian version without subtitles. I am unable to find the
English version. For those that understand Russian, the magnet link for the download is:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:cbfd33adbd1d2bf3d48aade83a60507fe9f74241
If anyone can find the English version, please post the magnet link or infohash value, but I
guess it has not yet been released.
by: bevin @ 32 < i am particularly interested to know the source of that 1932-1933
Holodomor propaganda.. .. claiming, not merely alleging, the genocidal deaths of 32 million
Ukrainians.. Seems to me these fake claims that appear everywhere, have generally the same
general sources, but are leaked at different places, in different formats, by different
faces.. .. ?
I would like to see if it is possible to prove the source to be a coordinated
amalgam of persons, and more particularly I am looking for the individual names that produce
fake propaganda for a living, where did they study, who trained them, who hired them and so
on.. Seems to me preparing, engineering or delivering fake anything that causes, or leads to
war and death and destruction is a crime against humanity (CAH) with universal application
because CAHs infringe inalienable human rights. There is a great need to make functional, on
a world wide basis, the ICC.. Additionally the ICC cases have the potential to deliver the
truth to History.
Iran, Russian, North Korea and China are positioned to impose ICC court jurisdiction,
Nuclear Non Weapon Proliferation, and 3 vetos required to overrule the findings and mandates
of a majority determination of the UN Security Council on all leaders and all nations and
ruling bodies in the world. War, and in fact the decimation and destruction of the universe,
is possible because these holes in the enforceable rule by law system exist. Fixing these
three holes could have a massive long term effect on the peace and income distribution
throughout the entire globe.
A forth such thing would be to internationalize all resources in the world, and to
allocate ownership to them based on population and finally, the most important change of all,
would be to internationalize education.. to grant one degree for all undergraduate education
based on international subject matter examinations ( does not matter where or how the
knowledge to pass is obtained, so universities and tutors can still play a massive part in
instructing the masses), and one professional degree in law, one in medicine and one in
engineering.. everyone would have to pass examinations and prove fluency in at least three
culturally different, geographically different languages, and prove competency in mathematics
at the differential and integral calculus level to be eligible to sit for an undergraduate
degree and lawyers, doctors, scientist and engineers would be eligible to practice anywhere
in the world, subject only to credential free, local regulation imposed because of local
experience. Local regulation <= not supported by local experience would be overturned.
None of this requires, demands, or needs a king or a president, it just needs to be a part of
the human experience in the earth environment.
Great summary b.
Needed somebody to just spell it out.
I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us.
Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back
of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc.
The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me.http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/
There's far more evidence Ukraine shot down MH17 than the Donbas rebels did. Go to
www.consortiumnews.com and search 'MH17'
Talking with friends something has shifted for the average Joe and Jane. In 2014, if I
presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but
seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist
etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and
desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome.
@21 David Park, @26 c1ue, @32 bevin, @34 Ghost Ship, @41 roza shanina, @54 Paora, @58 snake
My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union,
including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively
promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire.That alone should
tell you something of its reliability. Proyect's piece is interesting, but it doesn't touch
on the Western creation of the "Holodomor," the myth itself of the Soviet
genocide aimed at Ukrainians.
Unfortunately, I'm unable right now to put my hands/keyboard on a good reference for this.
If I'm able to locate one, I'll put it in a comment in an open thread.
Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A
reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population
grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great
care. It would probably require a study in itself.)
* * * *
On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to
be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion
of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but
it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but
their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.)
The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited
the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak.
That's a bald-faced lie. Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine,
including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia,
still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak
Russian.
The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is
the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a
country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There
is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this.
Stop spreading hate and lies. This is utter nonsense.
As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians.
I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of
course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and
stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and
tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now".
That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the
hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national.
You don't do anyone any favors by publishing lies.
All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a
certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how
that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems
to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it!
It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that
the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and
starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the
1930s.
From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern
Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan.
The issue though is not so much the details of what actually occurred then as in the
creation of a lie that deliberately equates Nazis with Soviets and thus Nazism with
Communism, and ultimately socialism. If Nazism led to the Holocaust, then Communism and
socialism must be demonstrated to have resulted in equally great horrors such as mass
famines, starvation or incarcerating people in concentration camps on the basis of their
religion. The current demonization of the Chinese govt over its supposed treatment of Falun
Gong followers or Uyghurs follows this pattern.
Accusing b of "spreading hate and lies"? There's plenty of sources documenting the
Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various
sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his
assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not
link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't
fake news.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/
> The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language.
...and the ONLY one.
...and the language undeveloped, that lacked words for many modern realities, from helicopter
to condom, so they all had to be invented rashly.
> It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya.
In Russia, Crimean Turks can teach their children, in beginner's school, in k'yrymchi
language. It is one of three official languages of Crimean region. In Ukraine it was impossible then and it is impossible still.
> It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language
...that is only native to less than 20% of the population? Well, it is indeed a nature - of OCCUPIED countries. Like, Norman invasion into England, when elites had one language and serfs - another. And
serf's language was slowly suffocated and replaced by foreign language of occupying
elites. "If to live in comfort you have to rename every major city and tear down every ,ajor
monument - you cam to live on someone's else land".
> whereby everyone in the country may communicate.
If that was the intention - then the language native to population's 83% would become
official, like it is in Ireland. But not in Ukraine.
> As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption.
He was. So you say this makes illegal coup less illegal and bandit Poroshenko less bandit. How
exactly? Or you just throw in irrelevant emotional hitpiece to accuse of "spreading lies" by which
you mean "not spreading your favorite grievances" ?
> Yanukovych.... had no choice but to refuse [Deep and Comprehensive EuroAssociation]
But he did not.
He asked to amend it, to re-negotiate it.
He asked to add there compensation clause from EU to Ukrainian industries. Russia also asked for it to be re-negotiated, but Russia wanted re-negotiation from
scratch into a trilateral treaty. Yanukovich only wanted money to support Ukrainian economic
until his re-election.
Bad for him, but money he asked for "coincidently" were the same, as money Europe promised
to Ukraine for removing of Nuclear weapon and Chernobyl nuclear power. When Ukraine delivered
and asked for money - the 2nd maidan (2004) happened and both Kuchma and his heir Yanukovich
flew down the drain. When Yanukovich was allowed to the throne in 2009 he conveniently forgot
about that story. But the moment he asked EU for money, albeit under pretext of Association
and markets, the 3rd maidan unleashed and Yanukovich went down the drain again. Guess, he had
to learn his lesson without repeats?..
> Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to
realise the blatantly obvious.
Posted by: Michael Droy | Jul 22 2019 20:03 utc | 12
Well, it took Russia to really START implementing trade inhibition, there were few rather
vibrant "scandals" in spring and summer 2014 with Russia banning this or that food/alcohol
form Ukraine, quoting safety hazards, to make Yanukovich understand this time it is for
real.
Most probably Yanukovich was like Saakashvili in 2008, totally programmed that "Russia
would not date" because "Russia is secretly ruled by Jews/NeoLibs/Washington/whatever".
Russia dared. And then Yanukovich understood he was not selected to be a hero bringing
Ukraine to Europe, but a scapegoat to absorb the fallout.
is biased also ? It isn't my argument at all, but I do understand that language is very
important in terms of identity. There is quite a lot of history in that article to take into
account, or argue over I suppose. As it is probably the "go to" reference for people outside
of the region wanting to understand the question of languages in Ukraine, its content is
relevant.
> I remember in one city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the
street, showing bodies on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through
the streets - vivid shots of buildings on fire
Posted by: juliania | Jul 23 2019 1:44 utc | 47
Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black"
drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed
in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand.
"In the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election he led his party to win 22 seats."
"In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election Lyashko lost his parliamentary seat"
One may also look for Olena Bilozerka, 2013 German "best international blogger."
She is open and vocal part of Right Sector, though allegations were she is inflating
political issues to hide marauding issues.
She blogged back in 2014-02-16 about "next day" meeting of Right Sector representatives with
Merkel "to report about implementation of our part of agreement and to be informed by Merkel
about implementing her part" and regardless of "checking the watches" about armed assault
upon government on 18.02, which indeed happened and was success.
Being open and vocal Nazi she then published many photo and video that were "omitted" by free
world's free media.
This "how many people did Communism killed" question is tiresome.
As I've already commented here in previous posts, there are essentially three methods an
historian can determine if a genocide happened:
1) mass graves (this requires archaeology);
2) written contemporary accounts, and
3) census
In the "Holodomor" case, we only have "2", the most popular one in the West being that
Welsh journalist who travelled to the USSR that time and, based on anecdotal evidence,
"covered" the famine.
Wikipedia's article about the "Holodomor" only mentions one source mentioning concrete
numbers: Wheatcroft, a rather obscure Australian academic who, to his merit, at least made up
the effort to talk with people who had access to the Soviet archives.
The quoted list of his article clearly indicates Wheatcroft bases his numbers on indirect
data. He uses the 1937 census in relation to 1926; in another article, he uses the quantity
of grain stock in 1932. I could go on, but the important thing here is that this guy doesn't
use any extraordinary sources. He certainly didn't go to the Ukraine to do archaeology. The
Ukrainians themselves probably didn't do it either, because, so far, we have no accounts of
mass graves in the region.
Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world
-- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad
crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism). The often occured in the
feudal world. They specially happened in tsarist Russia, which has a very peculiar and
hostile climate and land composition for agriculture (only 15% of the USSR's territory was
viable for agriculture even in the industrial era). They certainly are not a communist
invention. We must avoid the "Belle Époque syndrome", that is, adopt the illusion late
tsarist Russia was a paradise that was destroyed by evil Bolsheviks. Tsarist Russia was a
very brutal world, were peasants died like flies every day: Gogol (who lived in Ukrainian
territory) wrote a very funny and politically charged novel about it ("Dead Souls").
Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the
USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian
demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to
crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest.
Yes, forced collectivization probably caused excess deaths in 1932 -- but it's impossible
to calculate how much more it caused in relation to a "normal" famine. Just because a famine
happened during the Soviet era doesn't mean it was caused 100% because of socialism. Constant
excess food production is a very recent phenomenon in human History, to state famines are the
exception and not the rule is contemporary bias.
It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census
registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because,
even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had
time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. Worst
case scenario, this growth happened because birth rates were excessive in the urban areas at
the expense of the rural areas -- an unlikely scenario, since in this case, we would register
mass migration from the rural area to the urban area (because the hypothesis is that the
famine was artificial, so the grains would be in the cities): they would either mass migrate
or die trying, in which case we would have mass graves.
Mass graves are the decisive evidence for a genocide, indeed any mass extermination,
because that would mean death was sudden. When the death process is slow and not
synchronized, people have the time to bury/cremate their dead. That is the case even with
some plagues (e.g. Antonine Plague). Mass graves are an indication people were killed more or
less at the same time, in an artificial way, and in large quantities (since proper burials
are expensive). In a deprived economy like the USSR, it is very unlikely all those bodies
would be properly buried, let alone cremated, was a mass extermination taken place.
The holy grail of evidence for a genocide/mass extermination for any historian is when a
witness points the place of the event and then archaeology finds out a mass grave. This
evidently didn't happen in the case of "Holodomor".
Note: Gorbachev is a Russian who was born and raised in a village that borders modern
Ukraine. His grandparents and parents were victims of the 1932 famine (they all survived).
They continued committed with the Revolution and, according to Gorbachev's own accounts, he's
was not raised believing the 1932 famine was exceptional.
About the "Stalin is a genocidal psychopath" question: it's funny, because forced
collectivization was one of the few points where he and Trotsky agreed.
Whatever happened in macroeconomic reforms after Stalin consolidated power was a
collective work, not the designs of only one man. And, although we can argue against the
means, the fact was that they were successful: the USSR rose from the ruins of a second tier
imperial power (late tsarist Russia) to a global superpower.
To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know
about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New
American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in
1992:
www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html
Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as
upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place:
'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate
interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'.
And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the
mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine.
Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married
to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be
a thorn in the flesh.
Another important fact is the roman catholic church attack on Russia through ukraine &
the split of the church in ukraine from the Russian Orthodox Church.
> there are essentially three methods an historian can determine if a genocide happened
Four.
There can be comparison of available data in adjacent regions.
In this specific case - in Poland-occupied Western Ukraine. Just "across the line".
Anecdotal evidence states it also had famine, so the famine was not anchored in USSR
specific way of governing.
Some rare online archives of then Poland newspapers photos report some UK delegations raising
concerns, etc.
However, in USSR the famine was a state-acknowledge emergency. USSR prohibited moving
foods out of Ukrainian SSR (and wheat was not the only food! everyone talks about grains,
forgetting potato, fish, mushrooms, etc), broken many Western contracts to repay debts in
grains (West was denying being paid in other assets and was decrying USSR savageness of
refusing to export all the contracted grain with the same zeal it today decry USSR savageness
of exporting at least some of grain), started importing grain from Persia (now Iran). This
emergency let a lot of paper trail, which now is used to "prove" how evil Soviet government
was (and, specifically, not Ukrainian SSR government but central government in Kremlin; and
somehow this is stretched even further to "prove" murderous hatred being part of "Russian
character").
In Poland, well, a dull matter of fact. Bad lack to be peasant, yet worst to be Ukrainian
peasant. S-t happens.
No paper trail - no "historic event" - no accusations. Don't try to fix famines - and you will not be accused of being part of it.
Election apparatus is so easy to corrupt, yet people still vote! Crazy! And, so many
elections have been rigged this way: People are so dumb! Why does nobody insist on
independent, improved equipment? Conditioning makes people ignore the cheat under their
noses.
Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in
Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the
empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with
the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change
their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic
when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire?
By the way, do expect and don't be surprised when the same posters referred to above
defend the empire's lawfare coup in Brazil, the attempted lawfare coup in South Africa, and
the attempts to regime change Venezuela when b posts any articles on these issues.
As for holodomor, or the Maidan snipers, or the famine in China, one doesn't need details
to identify fictions. One simply needs to use logic and reason. We need only question simple
points if we suspect that the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate attempt to exterminate
Ukrainians: Was it successfully completed, and if not then why not?
There are obviously still Ukrainians, so it wasn't successful. If we assume the famine was
a deliberate attempt at extermination, then we must ask why was it stopped before it
finished? Did some external factor force Stalin to call off the extermination before it was
completed?
No, the famine was stopped by dramatically improved agricultural practices instituted by
the Soviet Union. This cannot be reconciled with the claim that the famine was a deliberate
attempt by the Soviet Union at extermination, so no matter how much we may cherish the myth
of holodomor, to remain rational individuals we must let that myth go.
Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers
were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If
that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests?
If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to
inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests?
The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev.
The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests.
It is good to dig deeper into the details of all of these false narratives that we in the
West have been fed, but those details are not absolutely necessary to know that the
narratives are false.
1. If forced collectivization would lead to famine, there would had be no famines in 1920-s
and in 1890-s, before the said collectivization but there were.
2. Before forced collectivization there were many years of attempts at unforced one. They
failed for at least two reasons.
a) many of poor peasants "saw themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires". While
being target of debt sharks (kulaks, public-devourers
(мироеды)) they still only imagined the life as
being sole owner of their however tiny patch of soil.
b) government attempts they saw as unwarranted advantages from aliens, city-dwellers,
trade partners of hated kulaks, that to be took advantage of using any loopholes. Government
tried to foster grassroots kolkhoz movements by offering bound credits - seeds, fertilizers,
agriculture tools. Peasants started organizing "ten men" kolkhozes in springs, taking those
credits, and then dissolving kolkhozes before gathering crops. "Faked bankruptcy" in modern
parley. If you can have good sides without having bad sides - why opt for bad sides too?
Specifically in Ukraine it could also be boosted by the "national character" formed as
dwellers of centuries-long battle ground between Poland, Russia and Turkey. No positive
long-term planning, everything for instant profits disregarding any consequences. Any
government are occupants and bandits, co-operating with them is futile and silly. We can see
it today marching over once most rich and developed Soviet Republic. Why couldn't the same
happen in 1930-s ?
3. However forced collectivization did achieved a lot. Remember the UK, where "sheep ate
people", for example. Remember latifundists in Latin America. It is largely the same!
a) hugely increased labor efficiency in "village to city" trade metrics.
"товарное
зерно"
b) hugely increased labor efficiency in "men / area" ratio. Use of mechanic tractors and
harvesters, etc. Unemployment among "just my hands" peasantry.
c) increased "capital concentration" provided for use of fertilizer, poisons, etc. Which
contributed to the prior point.
d) now unemployed peasants moved to cities, populating newly built factories. This process
was already going in 1900-s but much slower then. Emergent industrialization in the wake of
WW2 - and a very successful one.
e) end of rural famines. One of the reason 1931 famine is so hyped - it was the last in the
row. Would there be a comparable famine for example in 1970-s - and for political purposes it
would had been much more useful against USSR. But there were none. "Golodomor" was the last
famine, so it became the focal point.
e) end of city famines. Where atomized peasant families could not sustain even a horse or a
cow, one of famines reasons, joint companies (kolkhozes) just like huge private
agri-companies in UK or Argentina, relied upon chemistry and mechanizations, thus needed to
trade with cities, thus were supplying cities with food. All the champions of Golodomor
somehow overlook city famines that were cruel in early USSR in winters.
And one more quirk is almost total lack of photo-evidence behind "Golodomor".
When articles/books are illustrated, it is with photos from 1920-s famine in USSR or in USA,
misattributed.
Allegedly, it is because in Soviet cruel diktatura even NKVD death squads could not make
those photos even for secret important reports.
Reportedly it is because victims of "Goldomor" were dying "fatties", making less convincing
images. The theories were made explaining why it was so, however there seems to be no any
other famine known where those theories worked and people dying of hunger were abnormally
thick.
To Arioch @84, I apologize. You are absolutely correct. Leaving trolls' posts unchallenged
gives the casual reader the impression that those posts are unassailable; nevertheless, I
have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them out.
Posters such as yourself, vk, karlof1, etc who provide detailed and historically accurate
corrections to the false narratives are necessary for the edification of lurkers and casual
readers. I just hope that you don't measure the effectiveness of your posts by whether or not
you change the trolls' minds.
> I have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them
out
This can really work well with people sincerely lost by massive propaganda, people who
succumbed to illusion they know, why they do not.
Wikipedia: The Socratic method, also known as method of Elenchus, elenctic method, or
Socratic debate, is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based
on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and
underlying presuppositions. It is a dialectical method, involving a discussion in which the
defense of one point of view is questioned; one participant may lead another to contradict
themselves in some way, thus weakening the defender's point. This method is named after the
Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as
midwifery (maieutics) because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the
interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.
Sincere person, being guided by questions, would start researching and analyzing. And would
not feel coerced.
But you know, trolls just ignore the questions and keeps hammering talking points by
infinitely going back and repeating them "from starting point".
Avoiding positive argumentation, avoiding claiming something and limiting ourselves to
questioning their weak points, we help them to create another impression: they have a bad
theory when we have no theory at all. They are content with it.
So, putting out competing interpretation is no less important than showing their own
unhonesty.
t
people were able to look past the mistake and not overlook the van der pijl book. Thank you
for letting me know of Mr. Proyect's reputation.
Missing from the comments regarding Ukrainian/Russian dynamics is recognition of the numerous
attempts (dating back to the 17th century) of the Russification of the Ukraine, first by the
Russian Empire and then by the Soviets.
In 1863, minister of internal affairs Pyotr Valuyev issued the so-called Valuev
Circular, in which he stated that the Ukrainian language never existed, doesn't exist, and
cannot exist.
Under Stalin, "korenization" took second stage to the idea of a united Soviet Union,
where competing national cultures were no longer tolerated, and the Russian language
increasingly became the only official language of Soviet socialism
Russification of Soviet-occupied Ukraine intensified in 1938 under Nikita Khrushchev,
then secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, but was briefly halted during World War II,
when Axis forces occupied large areas of the country.
In the 1960s, the Ukrainian language began to be used more widely and frequently in spite
of these policies. In response, Soviet authorities increased their focus on early education
in Russian. After 1980, Russian language classes were instituted from the first grade
onward.
( a reason for so many Russian-speaking Ukrainians??)
In the regions of southern Russian SFSR (North Caucasus and eastern part of Sloboda
Ukraine included into RSFSR) Ukrainization was effectively outlawed in 1932.[18]
Specifically, the December 14, 1932 decree "On Grain Collection in Ukraine, North Caucasus
and the Western Oblasts" by the VKP(b) Central Committee and USSR Sovnarkom stated that
Ukrainization in certain areas was carried out formally, in a "non-Bolshevik" way, which
provided the "bourgeois-nationalist elements" with a legal cover for organizing their
anti-Soviet resistance. In order to stop this, the decree ordered in these areas, among other
things, to switch to Russian all newspapers and magazines, and all Soviet and cooperative
paperwork. By the autumn of 1932 (beginning of a school year), all schools were ordered to
switch to Russian. In addition the decree ordered a massive population swap: all "disloyal"
population from a major Cossack settlement, stanitsa Poltavskaya was banished to Northern
Russia, with their property given to loyal kolkhozniks moved from poorer areas of Russia.[19]
in the 1937 Soviet Census compared to the 1926 First All-Union Census of the Soviet
Union.[18]
This perhaps explains the predominance of Russian in eastern Ukraine.
"... Contrary to the official rationale, the detention of the Iranian tanker was not consistent with the 2012 EU regulation on sanctions against the Assad government in Syria. The EU Council regulation in question specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel "under the jurisdiction of a member state." ..."
"... The notice required the Gibraltar government to detain any such ship for at least 72 hours if it entered "British Gibraltar Territorial Waters." Significantly, however, the video statement by Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo on July 4 explaining the seizure of the Grace 1 made no such claim and avoided any mention of the precise location of the ship when it was seized. ..."
"... There is a good reason why the chief minister chose not to draw attention to the issue of the ship's location: it is virtually impossible that the ship was in British Gibraltar territorial waters at any time before being boarded. The UK claims territorial waters of three nautical miles from its coast, whereas the Strait of Gibraltar is 7.5 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. That would make the limit of UK territory just north of the middle of the Strait. ..."
"... But international straits must have clearly defined and separated shipping lanes going in different directions. The Grace 1 was in the shipping lane heading east toward the Mediterranean, which is south of the lane for ships heading west toward the Atlantic and thus clearly closer to the coast of Morocco than to the coast of Gibraltar, as can be seen from this live view of typical ship traffic through the strait . So it is quite implausible that the Grace 1 strayed out of its shipping lane into British territorial waters at any time before it was boarded. ..."
"... Such a move clearly violates the global treaty governing the issue -- the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea . Articles 37 through 44 of that agreement, ratified by 167 states, including the UK and the European Union, establish a "regime of transit passage" for international straits like the Strait of Gibraltar that guarantees freedom of navigation for merchant ships. The rules of that regime explicitly forbid states bordering the strait from interfering with the transit passage of a merchant ship, with very narrowly defined exceptions. ..."
"... The evidence indicates, moreover, that the UK's actions were part of a broader scheme coordinated with the Trump administration to tighten pressure on Iran's economy by reducing Iran's ability to export goods. ..."
"... On July 19, Reuters London correspondent Guy Falconbridge reported , "[S]everal diplomatic sources said the United States asked the UK to seize the vessel." ..."
"... Detailed evidence of Bolton deep involvement in the British plan to seize the Iranian tanker has surfaced in reporting on the withdrawal of Panamanian flag status for the Grace 1. ..."
"... The role of Panama's National Security Council signaled Bolton's hand, since he would have been the point of contact with that body. The result of his maneuvering was to leave the Grace 1 without the protection of flag status necessary to sail or visit a port in the middle of its journey. This in conjunction with the British seizure of the ship was yet another episode in the extraordinary American effort to deprive Iran of the most basic sovereign right to participate in the global economy. ..."
"... Back in 2013 2013 there was a rumour afoot that Edward Snowden, who at the time was stuck in the Moscow airport, trapped there by the sudden cancellation mid-flight of his US passport, was going spirited away by the President of Bolivia Evo Morales aboard his private jet. So what the US apparently was lean on it European allies to stop him. This they duly and dutifully did. Spain, France, and others denied overflight rights to the Bolivian jet, forcing it to turn back and land in Austria. There was even a report that once on the ground, the Spanish ambassador to Austria showed up and asked the Bolivian president if he might come out to the plain for a coffee--and presumably to have a poke around to see he could catch Snowden in the act of vanishing into the cargo hold. ..."
"... The rumor turned out to be completely false, but it was the Europeans who wound up with the egg on their face. Not to mention the ones who broke international law. ..."
"... Bolton persuaded the British to play along with the stupid US "maximum pressure" strategy, regardless of its illegality. (Maybe the British government thought that it would placate Trump after Ambassadorgate.) And then of course Pompeo threw them under the bus. It's getting hard to be a US ally (except for Saudi Arabia and Israel.) ..."
"... Spain lodged a formal complaint about the action, because it considers the sea around Gibraltar to be part of its international waters, "We are studying the circumstances and looking at how this affects our sovereignty," Josep Borell, Spain's acting foreign minister, said. So Gibraltar or Spanish waters? Gibraltar – Territorial Waters (1 pg): ..."
"... Worse than the bad behavior of Bolton, and the poodle behavior of Britain, is the utter failure of our press to provide us a skeptical eye and honest look at events. They've been mere stenographers and megaphones for power doing wrong. ..."
"... And this just in. A UK government official has just stated, related to the Iranian tanker stopped near Gibraltar, the UK will not be part of Trump's 'maximum pressure' gambit on Iran. We shall see if Boris Johnson is for or against that policy. ..."
"... John Bolton, war criminal. ..."
"... John Bolton has been desperate for a war with Iran for decades. This is just another escalation in his desperate attempt to get one. He's the classic neocon chicken hawk who is bravely ready to risk and sacrifice other people's lives at the drop of a hat. ..."
"... Since UK is abusing its control of Gibraltar by behaving like a thug, maybe it is better for the international community to support an independent state of Gibraltar, or at least let Spain has it. It will be better for world peace. ..."
"... While I agree with the gist of the article, remember that Bolton has no authority except that which is given to him. So stop blaming Bolton. Blame Trump. ..."
"... The provocations will go on and on until Iran shoots back and then Wash. will get the war it's been trying to start for some time now to pay back all those campaign donors who will profit from another war. ..."
"... The MIC needs constant wars to use up munitions so new ones can be manufactured. It's really just about business and politicians working together for mutual benefit to keep those contributions coming in. With all the other issues facing America, a war with Iran will just add to the end of the USA which is coming faster than you think. ..."
Did John Bolton Light the Fuse of the UK-Iranian Tanker Crisis? Evidence suggests he pressured the Brits to seize an
Iranian ship. Why? More war. By Gareth
Porter •
July 23, 2019
While Iran's seizure of a British tanker near the Strait of Hormuz on Friday was a clear response to the British capture of an
Iranian tanker in the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4, both the UK and U.S. governments are insisting that Iran's operation was illegal
while the British acted legally.
The facts surrounding the British detention of the Iranian ship, however, suggest that, like the Iranian detention of the British
ship, it was an illegal interference with freedom of navigation through an international strait. And even more importantly, evidence
indicates that the British move was part of a bigger scheme coordinated by National Security Advisor John Bolton.
British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt called the Iran seizure of the British-flagged tanker Stena Impero "unacceptable" and insisted
that it is "essential that freedom of navigation is maintained and that all ships can move safely and freely in the region."
But the British denied Iran that same freedom of navigation through the Strait of Gibraltar on July 4.
The rationale for detaining the Iranian vessel and its crew was that it was delivering oil to Syria in violation of EU sanctions.
This was never questioned by Western news media. But a closer look reveals that the UK had no legal right to enforce those sanctions
against that ship, and that it was a blatant violation of the clearly defined global rules that govern the passage of merchant ships
through international straits.
The evidence also reveals that Bolton was actively involved in targeting the Grace 1 from the time it began its journey in May
as part of the broader Trump administration campaign of "maximum pressure" on Iran.
Contrary to the official rationale, the detention of the Iranian tanker was not consistent with the 2012 EU regulation on
sanctions against the Assad government in Syria. The
EU Council regulation in question
specifies in Article 35 that the sanctions were to apply only within the territory of EU member states, to a national or business
entity or onboard an aircraft or vessel "under the jurisdiction of a member state."
The UK government planned to claim that the Iranian ship was under British "jurisdiction" when it was passing through the Strait
of Gibraltar to justify its seizure as legally consistent with the EU regulation. A
maritime news outlet has reported that on July 3, the day before the seizure of the ship, the Gibraltar government, which has
no control over its internal security or foreign affairs, issued
a regulation to provide what it would claim
as a legal pretext for the operation. The regulation gave the "chief minister" of the British the power to detain any ship if there
were "reasonable grounds" to "suspect" that it had been or even that it was even "likely" to be in breach of EU regulations.
The notice required the Gibraltar government to detain any such ship for at least 72 hours if it entered "British Gibraltar
Territorial Waters." Significantly, however, the video statement
by Gibraltar's chief minister Fabian Picardo on July 4 explaining the seizure of the Grace 1 made no such claim and avoided any
mention of the precise location of the ship when it was seized.
There is a good reason why the chief minister chose not to draw attention to the issue of the ship's location: it is virtually
impossible that the ship was in British Gibraltar territorial waters at any time before being boarded. The UK claims
territorial waters of three nautical miles from its coast, whereas
the Strait of Gibraltar is 7.5 nautical miles wide at its narrowest point. That would make the limit of UK territory just north of
the middle of the Strait.
But international straits must have clearly defined and separated shipping lanes going in different directions. The Grace
1 was in the shipping lane heading east
toward the Mediterranean, which is south of the lane for ships heading west toward the Atlantic and thus clearly closer to the
coast of Morocco than to the coast of Gibraltar, as can be seen from this
live view of typical ship traffic
through the strait . So it is quite implausible that the Grace 1 strayed out of its shipping lane into British territorial waters
at any time before it was boarded.
But even if the ship had done so, that would not have given the UK "jurisdiction" over the Grace 1 and allowed it to legally
seize the ship. Such a move clearly violates the global treaty governing the issue -- the
United Nations Convention
on the Law of the Sea . Articles 37 through 44 of that agreement, ratified by 167 states, including the UK and the European Union,
establish a "regime of transit passage" for international straits like the Strait of Gibraltar that guarantees freedom of navigation
for merchant ships. The rules of that regime explicitly forbid states bordering the strait from interfering with the transit passage
of a merchant ship, with very narrowly defined exceptions.
These articles allow coastal states to adopt regulations relating to safety of navigation, pollution control, prevention of fishing,
and "loading or unloading any commodity in contravention of customs, fiscal, immigration or sanitary laws and regulations" of bordering
states -- but for no other reason. The British seizure and detention of the Grace 1 was clearly not related to any of these concerns
and thus a violation of the treaty.
The evidence indicates, moreover, that the UK's actions were part of a broader scheme coordinated with the Trump administration
to tighten pressure on Iran's economy by reducing Iran's ability to export goods.
The statement by Gibraltar's chief minister said the
decision to seize the ship was taken after the receipt of "information" that provided "reasonable grounds" for suspicion that it
was carrying oil destined for Syria's Banyas refinery. That suggested the intelligence had come from a government that neither he
nor the British wished to reveal.
BBC defense correspondent Jonathan Beale reported: "[I]t appears
the intelligence came from the United States." Acting Spanish Foreign Minister Joseph Borrell commented on July 4 that the British
seizure had followed "a demand from the United States to the UK." On July 19, Reuters London correspondent Guy Falconbridge
reported , "[S]everal diplomatic sources said the United States asked the UK to seize the vessel."
Detailed evidence of Bolton deep involvement in the British plan to seize the Iranian tanker has surfaced in reporting on
the withdrawal of Panamanian flag status for the Grace 1.
Panama was the flag state for many of the Iranian-owned vessels carrying various items exported by Iran. But when the Trump administration
reinstated economic sanctions against Iran in October 2018, it included prohibitions on industry services such as insurance and reinsurance.
This decision was accompanied by
political pressure on Panama to withdraw Panamanian flag status from 59 Iranian vessels, many of which were owned by Iranian
state-affiliated companies. Without such flag status, the Iranian-owned vessels could not get insurance for shipments by freighter.
That move was aimed at discouraging ports, canal operators, and private firms from allowing Iranian tankers to use their facilities.
The State Department's Brian Hook, who is in charge of the sanctions,
warned those
entities last November that the Trump administration believed they would be responsible for the costs of an accident involving a
self-insured Iranian tanker.
But the Grace 1 was special case, because it still had Panamanian flag status when it began its long journey around the Southern
tip of Africa on the way to the Mediterranean. That trip began in late May, according to Automatic Identification System
data cited by Riviera Maritime Media . It was no coincidence that the Panamanian Maritime Authority
delisted the Grace 1 on May 29 -- just as the ship was beginning its journey. That decision came immediately after Panama's National
Security Council issued an alert
claiming that the Iranian-owned tanker "may be participating in terrorism financing in supporting the destabilization activities
of some regimes led by terrorist groups."
The Panamanian body did not cite any evidence that the Grace 1 had ever been linked to terrorism.
The role of Panama's National Security Council signaled Bolton's hand, since he would have been the point of contact with
that body. The result of his maneuvering was to leave the Grace 1 without the protection of flag status necessary to sail or visit
a port in the middle of its journey. This in conjunction with the British seizure of the ship was yet another episode in the extraordinary
American effort to deprive Iran of the most basic sovereign right to participate in the global economy.
Now that Iran has detained a British ship in order to force the UK to release the Grace 1, the British Foreign Ministry will claim
that its seizure of the Iranian ship was entirely legitimate. The actual facts, however, put that charge under serious suspicion.
Gareth Porter is an investigative reporter and regular contributor to The American Conservative . He is also the author
of Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare.
Honestly the Brits are such idiots, we lied them into a war once. They knew we were lying and went for it anyway. Now the are
falling for it again. Maybe it is May's parting gift to Boris?
Same EU legislation only forbids Syria exporting oil and not EU entities selling to Syria (albeit with some additional paperwork).
However, it doesn't forbid other non-EU states to sell oil to Syria. They are not behaving like the US. And this is also not UN
sanctioned. In fact, UK is also acting against the spirit of JPCOA towards Iran. Speak about Perfidious Albion (others would say
US lapdog).
Back in 2013 2013 there was a rumour afoot that Edward Snowden, who at the time was stuck in the Moscow airport, trapped
there by the sudden cancellation mid-flight of his US passport, was going spirited away by the President of Bolivia Evo Morales
aboard his private jet. So what the US apparently was lean on it European allies to stop him. This they duly and dutifully did.
Spain, France, and others denied overflight rights to the Bolivian jet, forcing it to turn back and land in Austria. There was
even a report that once on the ground, the Spanish ambassador to Austria showed up and asked the Bolivian president if he might
come out to the plain for a coffee--and presumably to have a poke around to see he could catch Snowden in the act of vanishing
into the cargo hold.
The rumor turned out to be completely false, but it was the Europeans who wound up with the egg on their face. Not to mention
the ones who broke international law.
Now we find that once again a European country had (apparently) gone out on a limb for the US--and wound up with egg on its
face for trying to show its loyalty to the US in an all-too-slavish fashion by doing America's dirty work.
Bolton persuaded the British to play along with the stupid US "maximum pressure" strategy, regardless of its illegality. (Maybe
the British government thought that it would placate Trump after Ambassadorgate.) And then of course Pompeo threw them under the
bus. It's getting hard to be a US ally (except for Saudi Arabia and Israel.)
The very fact that the UK tried to present its hijack of Iran Oil as an implementation of EU sanctions dovetail well with Bolton's
objective of creating another of those "international coalitions" without a UN mandate engaging in 'Crimes of Aggression".
The total lack of support from the EU for this UK hijack signals another defeat to both the UK and the neocons of America.
Too bad there isn't an international version of the ACLU to argue Iran's legal case before the EU body. What typically happens
is that Iran will refuse to send representation because that would in effect, acknowledge their authority. The EU will have a
Kangaroo court and enter a vacant decision. This has happened numerous times in the U.S.
Would anyone in the U.S. or EU recognize an Iranian court making similar claims? Speaking of which, the entire point of UN
treaties and international law is to prevent individual countries from passing special purpose legislation targeting specific
countries. Why couldn't Iran pass a law sanctioning EU vessels that tried to use their territorial waters, what is so special
about the EU, because it is an acronym?
Spain lodged a formal complaint about the action, because it considers the sea around Gibraltar to be part of its international
waters, "We are studying the circumstances and looking at how this affects our sovereignty," Josep Borell, Spain's acting foreign
minister, said. So Gibraltar or Spanish waters? Gibraltar – Territorial Waters (1 pg):
https://www.academia.edu/30...
Worse than the bad behavior of Bolton, and the poodle behavior of Britain, is the utter failure of our press to provide us
a skeptical eye and honest look at events. They've been mere stenographers and megaphones for power doing wrong.
Thanks for the investigative reporting. Trump has lied almost 11,000 times, so I think nobody expects the truth from The Trump
Administration anytime soon. Especially if it goes against the narrative.
And this just in. A UK government official has just stated, related to the Iranian tanker stopped near Gibraltar, the UK will
not be part of Trump's 'maximum pressure' gambit on Iran. We shall see if Boris Johnson is for or against that policy.
OK, so why did the Brits go along with it? Are they so stupid as to not figure out that Iran might respond in kind, or did the
Brits not also want war?
John Bolton has been desperate for a war with Iran for decades. This is just another escalation in his desperate attempt to
get one. He's the classic neocon chicken hawk who is bravely ready to risk and sacrifice other people's lives at the drop of a
hat.
Since UK is abusing its control of Gibraltar by behaving like a thug, maybe it is better for the international community to
support an independent state of Gibraltar, or at least let Spain has it. It will be better for world peace.
While I agree with the gist of the article, remember that Bolton has no authority except that which is given to him.
So stop blaming Bolton. Blame Trump.
The provocations will go on and on until Iran shoots back and then Wash. will get the war it's been trying to start for some time
now to pay back all those campaign donors who will profit from another war.
The MIC needs constant wars to use up munitions so
new ones can be manufactured. It's really just about business and politicians working together for mutual benefit to keep those
contributions coming in. With all the other issues facing America, a war with Iran will just add to the end of the USA which is
coming faster than you think.
"... For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable. ..."
"... A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time. ..."
"... Malaysia's exclusion from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never been explained. ..."
"... The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution in a Malaysian or other national or international court. ..."
"... The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch to call off the invasion on July 27. ..."
"... Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29. ..."
"... In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans, Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source: https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian control. ..."
"... Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians; for details, read this . ..."
"... Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the June 19, 2019 , press conference of JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU. ..."
"... Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. ..."
"... She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony." ..."
"... According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the Ukrainian Army were there." ..."
"... Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There [they] have it. In Ukraine they have it." ..."
"... Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice for the victims," Zakaria said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?] "Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions." ..."
"... Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g. here for others)? ..."
"... Why is no journalist raising these questions? ..."
"... Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh? ..."
"... That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. ..."
"... Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.) ..."
"... Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists? ..."
"... And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right after the shooting of the plane. ..."
"... "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103 site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight. ..."
"... I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link. Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down in high summer. And so it went on. ..."
"... Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were seriously not barking. ..."
"... That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. ..."
"... Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia". ..."
"... If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians. ..."
"... The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will begin to find peace. ..."
Yves here. Hoo boy. The idea that eastern Ukrainian insurgents or Russia would target a passenger plane never made any sense (unless
the plane had high-priority targets or cargo), although it's always been possible that the downing of MH17 was an accident, and some
efforts to explain what happened are based on that idea. For Malaysia, starting with Prime Minister Mahathir, to stand up and
say the US tried to cook the record to pin the crash on Russia is remarkable.
A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster,
has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes;
and lying by the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal Bureau of Investigation
(FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official
for the first time.
The sources of the breakthrough are Malaysian -- Prime Minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir; Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the officer
in charge of the MH17 investigation for the Prime Minister's Department and Malaysia's National Security Council following the crash
on July 17, 2014; and a forensic analysis by Malaysia's OG IT Forensic Services of Ukrainian Secret Service (SBU) telephone tapes
which Dutch prosecutors have announced as genuine.
The 298 casualties of MH17 included 192 Dutch; 44 Malaysians; 27 Australians; 15 Indonesians. The nationality counts vary because
the airline manifest does
not identify dual nationals of Australia, the UK, and the US.
The new film throws the full weight of the Malaysian Government, one of the five members of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT),
against the published findings and the recent indictment of Russian suspects reported by the Dutch officials in charge of the JIT;
in addition to Malaysia and The Netherlands, the members of the JIT are Australia, Ukraine and Belgium. Malaysia's exclusion
from the JIT at the outset, and Belgium's inclusion (4 Belgian nationals were listed on the MH17 passenger manifest), have never
been explained.
The film reveals the Malaysian Government's evidence for judging the JIT's witness testimony, photographs, video clips, and
telephone tapes to have been manipulated by the Ukrainian Security Service (SBU), and to be inadmissible in a criminal prosecution
in a Malaysian or other national or international court.
For the first time also, the Malaysian Government reveals how it got in the way of attempts the US was organizing during the first
week after the crash to launch a NATO military attack on eastern Ukraine. The cover story for that was to rescue the plane, passenger
bodies, and evidence of what had caused the crash. In fact, the operation was aimed at defeating the separatist movements in the
Donbass, and to move against Russian-held Crimea.
The new film reveals that a secret Malaysian military operation took custody of the MH17 black boxes on July 22, preventing
the US and Ukraine from seizing them. The Malaysian operation, revealed in the film by the Malaysian Army colonel who led it, eliminated
the evidence for the camouflage story, reinforcing the German Government's opposition to the armed attack, and forcing the Dutch
to call off the invasion on July 27.
The 28-minute documentary by Max van der Werff and Yana Yerlashova has just been released. Yerlashova was the film director and
co-producer with van der Werff and Ahmed Rifazal. Vitaly Biryaukov directed the photography. Watch it in full
here .
The full interview with Prime Minister Mahathir was released in advance; it can be viewed and read
here .
Mahathir reveals why the US, Dutch and Australian governments attempted to exclude Malaysia from membership of the JIT in the
first months of the investigation. During that period, US, Dutch, Australian and NATO officials initiated a plan for 9,000 troops
to enter eastern Ukraine, ostensibly to secure the crash scene, the aircraft and passenger remains, and in response to the alleged
Russian role in the destruction of MH17 on July 17; for details of that scheme, read
this .
Although German opposition to military intervention forced its cancellation, the Australians sent a 200-man special forces
unit to The Netherlands and then Kiev. The European Union and the US followed with economic sanctions against Russia on July 29.
Malaysian resistance to the US attempts to blame Moscow for the aircraft shoot-down was made clear in the first hours after
the incident to then-President Barack Obama by Malaysia's Prime Minister at the time, Najib Razak. That story can be followed
here and
here .
In an unusual decision to speak in the new documentary, Najib's successor Prime Minister Mahathir announced: "They never allowed
us to be involved from the very beginning. This is unfair and unusual. So we can see they are not really looking at the causes of
the crash and who was responsible. But already they have decided it must be Russia. So we cannot accept that kind of attitude. We
are interested in the rule of law, in justice for everyone irrespective of who is involved. We have to know who actually fired the
missile, and only then can we accept the report as the complete truth."
On July 18, in the first Malaysian Government press conference after the shoot-down, Najib (right)
announced agreements he had already
reached by telephone with Obama and Petro Poroshenko, the Ukrainian President. " 'Obama and I agreed that the investigation will
not be hidden and the international teams have to be given access to the crash scene.' [Najib] said the Ukrainian president has
pledged that there would be a full, thorough and independent investigation and Malaysian officials would be invited to take part.
'He also confirmed that his government will negotiate with rebels in the east of the country in order to establish a humanitarian
corridor to the crash site,' said Najib. He also said that no one should remove any debris or the black box from the scene. The Government
of Malaysia is dispatching a special flight to Kiev, carrying a Special Malaysia Disaster Assistance and Rescue Team, as well as
a medical team. But we must – and we will – find out precisely what happened to this flight. No stone can be left unturned."
The new film reveals in an interview with Colonel Mohamad Sakri, the head of the Malaysian team, what happened next. Sakri's evidence,
filmed in his office at Putrajaya, is the first to be reported by the press outside Malaysia in five years. A year ago, Sakri gave
a partial account of his mission to a Malaysian
newspaper .
"I talked to my prime minister [Najib]," Colonel Sakri says. "He directed me to go to the crash site immediately." At the time
Sakri was a senior security official at the Disaster Management Division of the Prime Minister's Department. Sakri says that after
arriving in Kiev, Poroshenko's officials blocked the Malaysians. "We were not allowed to go there so I took a small team to leave
Kiev going to Donetsk secretly." There Sakri toured the crash site, and met with officials of the Donetsk separatist administration
headed by Alexander Borodai .
With eleven men, including two medical specialists, a signalman, and Malaysian Army commandos, Sakri had raced to the site ahead
of an armed convoy of Australian, Dutch and Ukrainian government men. The latter were blocked by Donetsk separatist units. The Australian
state press agency ABC
reported their
military convoy, prodded from Kiev by the appearance of Australian and Dutch foreign ministers Julie Bishop and Frans Timmermans,
had been forced to abandon their mission. That was after Colonel Sakri had taken custody of the MH17 black boxes in a handover ceremony
filmed at Borodai's office in Donetsk on July 22.
US sources told the
Wall Street
Journal at the time "the [Sakri] mission's success delivered a political victory for Mr. Najib's government it also handed
a gift to the rebels in the form of an accord, signed by the top Malaysian official present in Donetsk, calling the crash site 'the
territory of the Donetsk People's Republic.' That recognition could antagonize Kiev and Washington, which have striven not to give
any credibility to the rebels, whose main leaders are Russian citizens with few ties to the area. State Department deputy spokeswoman
Marie Harf said in a briefing Monday that the negotiation 'in no way legitimizes' separatists."
The Australian state radio then reported the Ukrainian government as claiming the black box evidence showed "the reason for the
destruction and crash of the plane was massive explosive decompression arising from multiple shrapnel perforations from a rocket
explosion." This was a fabrication – the evidence of the black boxes, the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder, first
reported six weeks later in September by the Dutch Safety Board, showed nothing of the kind; read what their evidence
revealed .
Foreign Minister Bishop, in Kiev on July 24, claimed she was negotiating with the Ukrainians for the Australian team in the country
to carry arms. "I don't envisage that we will ever resort to [arms]," she told her state news agency, "but it is a contingency planning,
and you would be reckless not to include it in this kind of agreement. But I stress our mission is unarmed because it is [a] humanitarian
mission."
In Kiev on July 24, 2014, left to right: Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop; Dutch Foreign Minister Frans Timmermans,
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin. Source:
https://www.alamy.com/ The NATO intervention plan was still under discussion, but the black boxes were already under Malaysian
control.
By the time she spoke to her state radio, Bishop was concealing that the plan for armed intervention, including 3,000 Australian
troops, had been called off. She was also concealing that the black boxes were already in Colonel Sakri's possession.
The document signed by Sakri for the handover of the black boxes is visible in the new documentary. Sakri signed himself and added
the stamp of the National Security Council of Malaysia.
Col. Sakri says on film the Donetsk leaders expressed surprise at the delay of the Malaysians in arriving at the crash site
to recover the black boxes. "Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." Source:
https://www.youtube.com/ Min. 05:47.
Sakri goes on to say he was asked by the OSCE's special
monitoring mission for Ukraine to hand over
the black boxes; he refused. He was then met by agents of the FBI (Min 6:56). "They approached me to show them the black box. I said
no." He also reports that in Kiev the Ukrainian Government tried "forcing me to leave the black boxes with them. We said no. We cannot.
We cannot allow."
The handover ceremony in Donetsk, July 22, 2014: on far left, the two black boxes from MH17; in the centre, shaking hands,
Alexander Borodai and Mohamad Sakri.
Permission for Colonel Sakri to speak to the press has been authorized by his superiors at the prime ministry in Putrajaya, and
his disclosures agreed with them in advance.
Subsequent releases from the Kiev government to substantiate the allegation of Russian involvement in the shoot-down have
included telephone tape recordings. These were presented last month by the JIT as their evidence for indictment of four Russians;
for details, read
this .
Van der Werff and Yerlashova contracted with OG IT Forensic Services
, a Malaysian firm specializing in forensic analysis of audio, video and digital materials for court proceedings, to examine
the telephone tapes. The Kuala Lumpur firm has been endorsed by the
Malaysian Bar . The full 143-page technical report can be read
here .
The findings reported by Akash Rosen and illustrated on camera are that the telephone recordings have been cut, edited and fabricated.
The source of the tapes, according to the
JIT press conference on June 19 by Dutch police officer Paulissen, head of the National Criminal Investigation Service of The
Netherlands, was the Ukrainian SBU. Similar findings of tape fabrication and evidence tampering are reported on camera in the van
der Werff film by a German analyst, Norman Ritter.
Left: Dutch police chief Paulissen grins as he acknowledged during the
June 19, 2019 , press conference of
JIT that the telephone tape evidence on which the charges against the four accused Russians came from the Ukrainian SBU.
Minute 16:02 Right: Norman Ritter presented his analysis to interviewer Billy Sixt to show the telephone tape evidence has
been forged in nine separate "manipulations". One of the four accused by the JIT last month, Sergei Dubinsky, testifies from Min.
17 of the documentary. He says his men recovered the black boxes from the crash site and delivered them to Borodai at 23:00 hours
on July 17; the destruction of the aircraft occurred at 1320.
Dubinsky testifies that he had no orders for and took no part in the shoot-down. As for the telephone tape-recording evidence
against him, Dubinsky says the calls were made days before July 17, and edited by the SBU. "I dare them to publish the uncut
conversations, and then you will get a real picture of what was discussed." (Min. 17:59).
Van der Werff and Yerlashova filmed at the crash site in eastern Ukraine. Several local witnesses were interviewed, including
a man named Alexander from Torez town, and Valentina Kovalenko, a woman from the farming village of Red October. The man said the
missile equipment alleged by the JIT to have been transported from across the Russian border on July 17 was in Torez at least one,
possibly two days before the shoot-down on July 17; he did not confirm details the JIT has identified as a Buk system.
Kovalenko, first portrayed in a BBC documentary three
years ago (starting at Min.26:50) as a "unique" eye-witness to the missile launch, clarifies more precisely than the BBC reported
where the missile she saw had been fired from.
This was not the location identified in press statements by JIT. Van der Werff explains: "we specifically asked [Kovalenko] to
point exactly in the direction the missile came from. I then asked twice if maybe it was from the direction of the JIT launch site.
She did not see a launch nor a plume from there. Notice the JIT 'launch site' is less than two kilometers from her house and
garden. The BBC omitted this crucial part of her testimony."
According to Kovalenko in the new documentary, at the firing location she has now identified precisely, "at that moment the
Ukrainian Army were there."
Kovalenko also remembers that on the days preceding the July 17 missile firing she witnessed, there had been Ukrainian military
aircraft operating in the sky above her village. She says they used evasion techniques including flying in the shadow of civilian
aircraft she also saw at the same time.
On July 17, three other villagers told van der Werff they had seen a Ukrainian military jet in the vicinity and at the time of
the MH17 crash.
Concluding the documentary, van der Werff and Yerlashova present an earlier interview filmed in Donetsk by independent Dutch journalist
Stefan Beck, whom JIT officials had tried to warn off visiting the area. Beck interviewed Yevgeny Volkov, who was an air controller
for the Ukrainian Air Force in July 2014. Volkov was asked to comment on Ukrainian Government statements, endorsed by the Dutch Safety
Board report into the crash and in subsequent reports by the JIT, that there were no radar records of the airspace at the time of
the shoot-down because Ukrainian military radars were not operational.
Volkov explained that on July 17 there were three radar units at Chuguev on "full alert" because "fighter jets were taking
off from there;" Chuguev is 200 kilometres northwest of the crash site. He disputed that the repairs to one unit meant none of the
three was operating. Ukrainian radar records of the location and time of the MH17 attack were made and kept, Volkov said. "There
[they] have it. In Ukraine they have it."
Last month, at the JIT press conference in The Netherlands on June 19, the Malaysian representative present, Mohammed Hanafiah
Bin Al Zakaria, one of three Solicitors-General of the Malaysian Attorney General's ministry, refused to endorse for the Malaysian
Governnment the JIT evidence or its charges against Russia. "Malaysia would like to reiterate our commitment to the JIT seeking justice
for the victims," Zakaria
said . "The objective of the JIT is to complete the investigations and gathering of evidence of all witnesses for the purpose
of prosecuting the wrongdoers and Malaysia stands by the rule of law and the due process." [Question: do you support the conclusions?]
"Part of the conclusions [inaudible] – do not change our positions."
By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign
correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties.
Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia.
He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published
at
Dances with Bears
I always come back to the same three questions:
1. If all civilian and military radars were out of order, why was the flight not redirected out of the Ukrainian airspace and
into some territory with radar?
2. Why is the transcript of the Cockpit Voice Recorder kept a secret (see e.g.
here for others)?
3. Why is no journalist raising these questions?
(I got a partial answer to 3. "because only Kremlin trolls and conspiracy specialists doubt the official/Bellingcat version")
Re 1) active radar is not used that much in civilian flight control anymore, it's basically a back-up for passive transponder
pick up. Dnipro Control was monitoring the flight using passive (that's for example how they knew they were off their approved
airway L980 and asked them to get back, which, if there was no radar, they could not do). Passive (civilian) radar is no use in
tracking missiles or military planes with no transporder on.
Bellingcat? The fellow using the pseudonym is called Eliot Higgins and hails from the Midlands, not far from the Jihadist
masquerading as the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights above a take away shop. He was a regular BTL commentator at the Grauniad
before being paid to spout BS. Nice work if one can get it, eh?
Having grown up in a military family and knowing what precautions are taken, I am staggered at how Bell End Cat can track down
Russian secret servicemen with such ease and in their homeland.
If you watch the film, you'd learn that there were back-ups so not all were out of order. And if we knew the answer to your
questions, we'd likely know 'who done it.'
Undoubtedly there's something quite rotten afoot here, and I'll be sure to give this film a watch, but honestly the Malaysians
have zero credibility when it comes to airplane crashes involving their national airline, especially after they deliberately fed
false information to rescue and recovery teams concerning MH 370's flight path. Whatever they knew or didn't know they had no
interest in helping anyone find that airplane or discover what took place onboard before it vanished. They should spare us all
any sanctimony about 'justice for victims, truth, rule of law, etc.'
It seems the world has a real credibility crisis today, not many state actors I trust to tell the truth or not politicize tragedy.
These revelations certainly make it seem more likely Ukrainian forces were to blame for downing MH17, but at this point the mystery
will never be conclusively solved. Two warring factions with the exact same equipment/weaponry in close proximity, compromised
crash sites, tons of propaganda, lots of interested parties seeking to maximize the tragedy for political gain, corrupt authorities
all around.
Not an ideal situation for objective fact finding to say the least. With the 1MBD scandal and investigation still ongoing I
have no doubts the Malaysians are probably looking for leverage and bargaining chips where ever they can find them, further eroding
their objectivity and authority in my opinion. Getting to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination will be easier than MH17, but
if the truth does come out it will not be owed to the virtues of the Malaysian government. They've already shown the world how
much they care about airplane crash investigations.
I have to tell you, this is an ad hominem argument, which is a violation of our site Policies. You need to deal with the evidence
and not attack the source. With MH370, you had a crash of a plane under the control of the carrier, not as a result of an air
strike.
Quite apart from the ad hominem nature of JerryDenim's comment (and I disagree with Yves Smith; I think the credibility of
sources is relevant), what motive would Malaysia have for siding with Russia/east Ukraine against the west/west Ukraine? Does
JerryDenim know of one, or have any suggestions?
TBH, I have dire doubts on anything Malaysian government says, due to their handling of MH370 where they continue lying in
face of hard facts (that doesn't mean I believe any governments on this).
I believe that the most likely cause is an accidental shooting down, where an inexperienced and untrained separatist crew messed
up (this is what you get when even a semi-sophisticated equipment gets to untrained people who are keen to use it).
For me it fits Occam's razor the most, and is the only theory which explains the (documented) boasting of the separatists of
a large military plane being shot down immediately after the catastrophe.
How is "Russia did it" logical? That part of Ukraine was in the hands of separatists, not "Russia". "Russia" was not directing
their activities. Russia does not want to control the eastern part of Ukraine, which is an economic basket case. But it doesn't
want hostile forces parked on its border.
Sorry, that's irrelevant even if true. Even if "Russia" was formally providing troops, as opposed to engaged in a massive wink
and nod (a LOT of Russians had relatives in eastern Ukraine, a point you forget re motives and numbers), that's way way way short
of any evidence they were in charge.
Plus I was wrong on the key point, and it renders your argument moot. From Rev Kev below:
That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not rebels, and those launchers were
seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down.
This response is non-sensical. Have you been to the cemeteries you mention? Any picture can be posted and a caption written
– that is no proof of anything. Besides the point being irrelevant to the question of who shot down the plane.
Now that we have the crime and the five-year cover-up, the simplest explanation is actually the one of a likely false flag
operation. Asking 'cui bono,' how would Russia or the rebels benefit from shooting down a plane with bunch of Dutch people on
board? (Russia historically has had good relations with Holland, Malaysia, too.)
Lots of terrible stuff happened in Ukraine after the govt changed (courtesy of the west). Have we forgotten about the burning
of more than 40 people in Odessa? Or the murders of politicians and journalists?
I suppose if one believes the West's preferred version of Putin as some Bond type villain who takes great delight in shooting
down planes full of civilians, presumably while stroking a large white cat then I suppose the he dunnit version is the one for
you.
Personally I believe that Putin is not an idiot & would likely have been more interested in putting out that fire than throwing
more fuel onto it. As for who has any credibility – the Ukrainians under Porkyschenko with their Neo-Nazi element, would I think
be at the bottom of my list & that is without mentioning Neo-Cons with their Noble Lie BS.
And let's not forget the appearance of (coordinated) magazine covers of VVP as the devil incarnate – almost in unison, right
after the shooting of the plane.
"Why are you so late", [Borodai] said I think [that was] very funny." That sounds like what happened at the Pan Am 103
site. For some reason yet to be explained over thirty years later, the Royal Air Force air accident investigation team, based
at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, found an American military team on site when they landed by helicopter a bit before midnight.
The US team took charge even though they were on foreign soil.
That was a pretty gutsy move on the Malaysians to send in their own retrieval team for those recorders. I bet that those Malaysian
commandos would have a story to tell or two. The danger wasn't from the rebels however but from the west and their allied Ukrainians.
The rebels were more than glad to hand over the records that they found at first opportunity but the information, once in the
hands of the west, has been seeping out with all the speed of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I was following this story very closely at the time and you could see that something was "off" within days. The Russians
came out with a press conference and released radar tracks and full & total information. We in the west got – a YouTube link.
Seriously. This was just the beginning. There was one clip that came out showing moving trucks that proved that the Russians did
it – until someone woke up to the fact that the trees in the background were in the winter season whereas that jet was shot down
in high summer. And so it went on.
There was a very slow walk to stop people going to the crash site. One Australian couple who lost someone went there in spite
of the efforts of our government to stop them.Another time an official visit had to be cancelled as the area was
being shelled – by the Ukrainians. You don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to realize that there was a whole pack of dogs that were
seriously not barking. A link from this page talks about how there is a silence when MH17 got hit. I have heard recordings
of aircraft that went down and there is usually something – a bang, crumpling, warning calls, shouts – but here there was nothing.
That story about Australia wanting to send 3,000 troops was weird. That is a very large force for Australia and it would
have taken weeks to put together a joint US/Dutch/Australian Task Force to go into the rebel area but you would have been talking
about heavy casualties and risks of severe escalation with a nuclear Russia. Having said that, Tony Abbott was Prime Minister
of the time and Julie Bishop was his Foreign minister and they are both hard right politicians (now both thankfully gone) and
may have been entertaining such thoughts.
My belief is that this was an operation to try and retrieve the situation in the Ukraine for the west. The US alone spent over
$5 billion on this coup but Russia grabbed the crown jewels of Crimea (with its naval bases & off-shore gas fields) and eastern
Ukraine which has a border with Russia. That territory where the missile was fired from was in Ukrainian hands at the time, not
rebels, and those launchers were seen speeding rapidly west after the shooting down. Ask yourself – who benefited from this tragedy
and that will tell you where to go looking for answers. Maybe, like happened with the Meuller investigation, Russian legal representations
should show up in a court of law and start demanding the discovery process of all the evidence. Now that could get interesting.
Rebels were the first to respond to the crash scene, recording themselves with a camcorder. The rebels were convinced they
had shot down a Ukrainian fighter jet and were searching for a pilot that would have ejected. The rebels then thought a
fighter downed the airliner and they downed the fighter. Their commander speaking in both Russian and Ukrainian tells the
rebels to stop filming and clear the area of civilians. The footage was aired by News Corp Australia.
Yeah, I remember watching those films. I saw this big, bearded rebel pick up a child's doll, showed it to the camera as
in "Do you see this s***?", put it reverently back where he found it, and then crossed himself in a Orthodox blessing. So the
western media took a screen shot of that rebel holding that child's doll and put a caption underneath that the rebel was boasting
of the plane being shot down. As for that footage, I live in Oz and I am here to state that I would sooner trust CNN or Fox News
before would I put any trust in News Corp Australia, especially their propaganda unit "60 Minutes Australia".
If memory serves the late Robert Parry of Consortium News claimed to have USG sources who said the missile was a Buk fired
by Ukrainian, not separatist troops. And I believe that Russia has said the rocket engine serial number from the investigation's
evidence is for a Buk sold long ago to the Ukrainians.
Of course Western sources will say the Russians have no credibility but then they don't either–the fog of propaganda war.
The good news is that the criminal coup regime in Kiev seems to have been decisively defeated with Sunday's election according
to MOA in Links. Perhaps this particular branch of the New Cold War–which the Obama regime was so very much responsible for–will
begin to find peace.
Ukrainian nation is a separate nation with a distinct and rich culture. You can call them Southern Russians but still they are
distinct. That does not mean that Russian language should be suppressed and eliminated from schools, the policy
advocated and implemented by Western Ukrainian nationalists. a better policy would to introduce English language from the first
grade. Attempt to eliminate Russian is viewed by Eastern Ukrainians as the attempt of colonization (which it is) and in a
long run can have the opposite effect like any colonization project.
Two languages can coexist. Ireland and Canada does not stop being distinct countries because they use English language. And
very few people in Canada would support switching to French. Many prominent Russian writers have Ukrainian origin (Nikolai
Gogol, Mikhail Bulgakov). Elimination of Russian destroy
common cultural space (which enriches all participating nations not only Russia) establishing during the USSR years and
shrink this common the cultural space.which for Ukraine mean complete domination in Ukrainian cultural space of US culture and
Hollywood with all its excesses and warts.
The break of economic cooperation with Russia after EuroMaydan was Washington policy with willing implementers in the
face of comprador column (Yatsenyuk, Poroshenko) and Western Ukrainian nationalists, which run the
government after EuroMaydan. Among other thing this implies the attempt of colonization of Eastern Ukraine (via forceful Ukrainization) which
backfired with the election of Zelensky.
Notable quotes:
"... Zelensky is of Jewish heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian. ..."
"... I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not interested ..."
"... But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?) ..."
"... Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by Kolomoisky. ..."
"... Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons, and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation... ..."
"... "A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign to replace Poroshenko." ..."
"... It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining countries that are not part of empire. look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded like a dirty rag. ..."
"... The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself). ..."
"... Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). ..."
"... Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky can safely be assumed. ..."
"... The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block. There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. ..."
"... Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has been blamed for the EU's Economic trap. ..."
"... what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer? ..."
"... The Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian industries. ..."
"... That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me ..."
"... As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would. ..."
"... "Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе за Украину" (which includes the interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here, https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html ..."
"... "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He will need their loyalty sooner than he might think." ..."
"... For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare (published in 2010; leaked in 2012): Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to Democracy, 1994). ..."
"... The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949. ..."
"... While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated by a US embargo on wheat imports to China. ..."
"... Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS , no less. ..."
"... Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper. ..."
"... Is it a feature of the "rules based international order" that unelected NGOs can establish "red-lines" on policy and expect adherence? ..."
"... What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. ..."
"... there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al. ..."
"... This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control inter alia the University of Alberta. ..."
"... But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites, brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies. They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here. They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing, co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. ..."
"... "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?" They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to change. ..."
"... The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square. ..."
"... The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs & co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS! ..."
"... I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. ..."
"... Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of coverage. ..."
"... Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. ..."
"... Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist Empire". ..."
"... I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us. Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc. The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me. http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/ ..."
"... In 2014, if I presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome. ..."
"... My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union, including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire. ..."
"... Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great care. It would probably require a study in itself.) ..."
"... On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.) ..."
"... The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak ..."
"... Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine, including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia, still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak Russian. ..."
"... The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this. ..."
"... As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians. I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now". That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national. ..."
"... All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it! ..."
"... It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the 1930s. ..."
"... From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan. ..."
"... There's plenty of sources documenting the Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't fake news. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/ ..."
"... Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black" drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand. ..."
"... Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world -- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism) ..."
"... Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest. ..."
"... It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because, even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. ..."
"... To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in 1992: www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html ..."
"... Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place: 'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'. And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine. ..."
"... Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be a thorn in the flesh. ..."
"... Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire? ..."
"... Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests? If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests? ..."
"... The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev. The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests. ..."
Ukraine Election - Voters Defeat Second Color RevolutionVanWoland , Jul 22
2019 18:55 utc |
1
The Ukraine, translated as 'the borderlands, lies between core Russia and the Europe's
western states. It is a split country. Half the population speaks Russian as its first
language. The industrialized center, east and south are culturally orthodox Russians. Some of
its rural western parts were attached to the Ukraine only after World War II. They have
historically a different culture.
The U.S., supported by the EU, used this split - twice - to instigate 'revolutions' that
were supposed to bring the Ukraine onto a 'western' course. Both attempts were defeated when
the Ukrainians had the chance of a free vote.
The 2004 run-off election for the president of the Ukraine was won by Viktor Yanukovych.
The U.S. disliked the result. Its proxies in Ukraine alleged alleged fraud and instigated a
color revolution. As a result of the 'Orange Revolution' the vote was re-run and the other
candidate, Viktor Yushchenko, was declared the winner. But five years later another vote
defeated the U.S. camp. Yanukovych was declared the winner and became president.
In 2014 the European Union made an attempt to bind the Ukraine to its side through an
association agreement. But what the EU offered to Ukraine was paltry and Russia countered it.
Unlike the Ukraine, which continues to get robbed by its oligarchs ever since its 1991
independence, Russia was economically back and in a much better position. It offered billions
in investments and long term loans. Much of Ukraine's industry depends on Russia and Russian
gas was offered to the Ukraine for less than the international market price. Yanukovych, who
originally wanted to sign the EU association, had no choice but to refuse it, and to take the
much better deal Russia offered.
The U.S. and the EU intervened. They again launched a color revolution, but this time it
was one that would use force. Militarily trained youth from Galicia in the west Ukraine was
bused into Kiev to occupy the central Maidan place and to violently fight the police. Snipers
from Georgia were brought in to fire on both sides. It was then
falsely
alleged that government forces were killing the 'peaceful protesters'.
Yanukovych lost his nerves and fled to Russia. After some
illegal political maneuvers new elections were called up and the oligarch Petro
Poroshenko, bought off by the 'west', was declared the winner. The unreconstructed fascists
from Galicia took over. The population in the industrial heartland in east Ukraine, next to
Russia's border, revolted against the new rulers. A civil war,
not a 'Russian
invasion' , ensued which the Ukrainian government largely lost. Lugansk and Donbas became
rebel controlled statelets which depend of Russia. Russia took back Crimea, which in 1954 had
been illegally gifted to Ukraine by then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, himself a
Ukrainian.
To end the war in the east Ukraine, the French, German and Russian leaders pressed
Poroshenko to sign a peace agreement with the eastern leaders. But the Minsk agreement was
seen as a political defeat and Poroshenko never implemented it. The war in the east simmered
on ever since. The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan
coup, prohibited the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak.
All opposition was harshly suppressed.
The oligarchs continue their plunder. Everything of value gets sold off to EU countries.
The U.S. is allowed to build bases. Corruption, already endemic, further increased. The
people came to despise Poroshenko.
In an attempt to regain support, Poroshenko
launched a military provocation in the Kerch Strait which is under Russian control. The
stunt
was too obvious . Russia nabbed the sailors Poroshenko had send and confiscated their
boats. No one came to Poroshenko's help.
One can watch the full story of the above in UKRAINE ON FIRE - The Real Story (vid), a
just released 90 minutes long Oliver Stone documentary. An updated version of the documentary
was supposed to run on the Ukraine TV station of pro-Russian oligarch Viktor Medvedchuk. The
TV stations was
forced to cancel it after right-wing groups mortared its its building in Kiev.
On March 31 new elections were held. Volodymyr Zelensky, a TV comedian who played a
teacher who accidentally became president, won the first round. Zelensky is of Jewish
heritage and from the east Ukraine. He speaks Russian, not Ukrainian.
An admirable summary.
What's next? There are three causes for cautious optimism
1. The elections were actually allowed to happen without Washington's interference; see 2
2. I doubt that Trump cares about Ukraine so the main supporter of the coup is not
interested
3. EU has its own problems.
But Zelensky is a new guy without any tail moving into a poisonous and dangerous area
without allies (other than the voters of course, but how many guns do they have?)
But you're absolutely correct to see this as the voters gain rejecting a "colour
revolution"imposed from outside
Fine work here, Bernhard. Analysis as clear and cool as a mountain stream.
And now for the march of the Fascists led by the Iron Maidan of Galicia, Chrystia Freeland
employing all Canada's power and credibility to restore the Galician Nazis from whose loins
she came.
Excellent review b, thanks! With the political sea change, Ukraine has an opportunity to
progress, but somehow those pushing and believing their false narrative will need to be
neutralized. It appears the best way forward is to implement the Minsk2 agreements and go
forward from there.
Zelensky didn't 'accidentally' become president. He is a front for Kolomoisky who, amongst
other things, wants revenge on Poroshenko. Kolomoisky had vaste swathes of property
confiscated under Poroshenko. These were all returned a short while back. Kolomoisky probably
wants to dump all post-Maidan stuff on Poroshenko, especially MH17 (which Kolomoisky stated
to be 'a trifle' and 'the wrong plane was hit'). Lawsuits against Poroshenko have been
started. What happens depends on how much loyalty Poroshenko can buy versus that bought by
Kolomoisky.
Kolomoisky will be looking for alternative sources of loot (eg reconstruction funds) which
will only happen if the Donbass situation is wound down. Zelensky has unexpectedly announced
that there will be a political solution to the issue of Russian sailors captured before the
Kerch incident (and one factor in Russia's response to it) in exchange for those held in
Russia. For all this to happen, the neo-Nazis will have to be defused, which may not be as
difficult as it would appear as they are funded and orchestrated by the Ukraine
oligarchs.
Helmer on Kolomoisky and the vast money stolen with collaboration of Lagarde and Clintons,
and the resulting suit, which appears to be aimed at keeping Zelensky on the reservation...
"A new Delaware state court filing a month ago, triggering new US media reports, appears
to signal a shift in US Government policy towards Kolomoisky. Or else, as some Ukrainian
policy experts believe, it is a move by US officials to put pressure on the new Ukrainian
President, Volodymyr Zelensky, whom Kolomoisky supported in his successful election campaign
to replace Poroshenko."
It is interesting to read commenters not understanding the concept of colonial outposts
like HK, SK, Japan and the attempts to make the Ukraine such. To empire they represent outposts to challenge the adjoining
countries that are not part of empire.
look at Puerto Rico. Empire favored it and even paid for citizens to go to college
free.....until it didn't work to help make Cuba look bad....and so now it is being discarded
like a dirty rag.
Ukraine needed to get out of the rut it has been in and look forward somehow, even if there
are no great changes that happen in the country, much of the previous political heaviness
seem gone, for now at least. It should be a good difference. Thanks for the report.
The Gordian knot in Ukraine is that, after Maidan, the Ukrainian Armed Forces essentially
dissolved. The neonazi militias then became the only enforcing power for whatever was left of
the Ukrainian government -- that's why Poroshenko, albeit elected, could do nothing to stop
those militias from doing whatever they pleased (even though he not being a neonazi himself).
Zelensky will have the same problem: he can pass how much bills he wants -- only those who
the neonazi militias want to be implemented will be enforced. He needs to assemble a brand
new Armed Forces -- with amateur volunteers if necessary -- if he wants to survive: his
Jewish origin alone is already a death certificate for him in the eyes of the neonazis.
The other ace Zelensky has in his hand is the Donbass (Lughansk + Donestk). Those happen
to be the most pro-Russian provinces and also, by far, the two most rich and industrialized
ones. To make things even better, they also happen to be the two provinces that border with
Russia. This peculiar geopolitic configuration is a gift of destiny that, for example,
Brazil, didn't have.
Ukraine's economy is in absolute tatters. The Ukrainian government just didn't completely
dissolve after Maidan because the USA is using the IMF to artificially keep it afloat (which
goes completely against the IMF chart, as was the case with Macri's Argentina, where even the legal borrowing limits were
extrapolated by a more than 100% margin). Russia just needs to wait.
Note: as for the toppled Lenin statues. Please, continue: in one of his birthdays, the
Soviet population made a mass homage to him, gathering in the Red Square and writing him
poems. He was very embarrassed and hated it -- his rationalization was that the Revolution's
main actor was the poeple, not him, and that personality cult was the wrong way to perceive
reality of the times.
2 quibbles. Irrespective of evidence, this is Ukraine, and Kolomoisky's influence on Zelensky
can safely be assumed.
The issue with the association agreement offered by the EU was not just that it offered
little. As I recall it meant access for all EU products to the post-Soviet trading block.
There would be nothing to prevent EU exporting anything through Ukraine into Russia. This is
why the Russians expected to be part of a negotiating group, and why eventually Yanukovych
belatedly realised that EU association would lead direct to dissociation with ex-Soviet
trading partners and an economic catastrophe for Ukraine. Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev
as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to realise the blatantly obvious.
Needless to say, Yanukovych's real options have never been discussed much, and Russia has
been blamed for the EU's Economic trap.
Thing is, in Ukraine as much as in the US, EU, India, or wherever: For a Politician to make a
campaign for a high political position, let alone the highest, one NEEDS Money.
And where is a someone financing a politician, they make themselves vurnable. Thats the
nature of it: No one will give you even a penny, let alone dozens of millions of dollars, if
not for something in return.
So someone HAS to put the money into him, and Kolomoisky is reported not only by NATO, but by
Russian sources too.
Why do i say this? Because i want to have my point that everyone is corrupt, and the world
is dystopia. No, not today:
It is because those "civil organisations" already hinted, that they use Kolomoisky's
financing as the attack vector, should the Ukraine dare to stray off from NATO course.
They said something of the likes of: "We heard of the allegations that Kolomoisky is
having him in his pocket, and we always want to ensure that politics are not corrupted, so we
will watch it". They said that AFAIK some days before the recent threath, so maybe there has
been some signs he does not want to play ball with NATO.
But we will see.. With the US you never know, even more with Donald and his best buddy
neocons.
b says: "The Ukraine can not economically survive without good relations with Russia."
That is true, but what does Ukraine have to offer Russia? Aside from putting some space
between Russia and NATO, what is left of Ukraine after all of this that they can offer?
The
Soviet Union built up a large amount of high tech and high value industry in Ukraine, but
most of that has rusted away since 1991. Russia has found or developed new sources for most
of what they previously bought from Ukraine, and those sources are domestic so Russia is
unlikely to trade them in for products made from neglected and mostly defunct Ukrainian
industries.
Ukraine can go crawling back home to Russia (home being the place where they take you back
in even after you've been a total jerk), but there will be no massive bailout and magical
recovery. Eastern Ukraine will benefit from a peace dividend, but western Ukraine will have
to be satisfied with European sex tourism, with Lvov remaining the gay prostitute capital of
the continent.
@B: One Correction if i see it right: I think linked Documentary "Ukraine on fire" is NOT the
new one, he already made a doc about Ukraine some time ago, and this is it.
The new one is Not released yet, i mean the one with the Interview you posted few days ago.
The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released.
Search your torrent search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on
youtube yet AFAIK.
Sorry, last post: Please barflies, for those you want to support those documentarys, vote for
them on IMDB and write reviews if you saw them. They are being attacked from NATO bots and
voted down to C-Movie level. If you dont want BS like Fast & Furious have better ranking
as those anti-mainstream docs, please take your time and support them!
They are pretty much the only documentarys in mainstream US media that tell the other side!
That Ukraine has to be considered as both a bridge and a no alliance's land between the West
and Russia has always been a no-brainer to me. One that should be imposed from outside if
necessary, if some Ukrainians are foolish enough to pick a side - and, considering its
geographical position, specially if some Ukrainians people want to move "West" full speed
ahead, because the border with Russia will always be there.
As for Zelensky, he has the backing of the people, such a backing that a 3rd colour
revolution would be immediately opposed by a bigger counter-manifestation. Besides, he should
seek the backing of the rank and file of the Ukrainian army, just in case things go very
badly with the fascists; considering his vast support among the people, the upper echelons of
the military might not like or follow him, but if he gives orders, the core troopers would.
For example, I believe that Russians and Ukrainians are actually one people.
Putin adds that it's inevitable that Ukraine will eventually return to good relations with
Russia.
Look, when these lands that are now the core of Ukraine, joined Russia, there were just
three regions – Kiev, the Kiev region, northern and southern regions – nobody
thought themselves to be anything but Russians, because it was all based on religious
affiliation. They were all Orthodox and they considered themselves Russians. They did not
want to be part of the Catholic world, where Poland was dragging them.
Putin is correct, as usual. He is playing the Long Game, just as China has done with Hong
Kong and continues to do with Taiwan. The empire always uses divide and rule. But in the end, empires always bite the dust.
In Ukrainian politics my preferences are with the present Russian viewpoint and not at all
with the Ukrainian Nazis.
Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of
1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians.
"Revealing Ukraine" documentary aka "В борьбе
за Украину" (which includes the
interview in Kremlin released 19 July, minus the Skirpal comments) was released in Ukrainian
and Russian, 17, 19 July. The version in those languages is eg here,
https://my.mail.ru/mail/stelskov/video/235/5800.html
b said; "One hopes that Zelensky is smart enough to foresee a "third Maidan". He should kick
out all of them from the police and other forces. He should also raise the police pay. He
will need their loyalty sooner than he might think."
We'll all hope for the Zelensky people to salvage some sanity from another round of the
empire's attacks. They'll never relent.
One would hope the Stone documentary would be seen here, in the U$A, but that's a distant
dream. Should at least be on PBS, but, I doubt it.
As always b, thanks for the therapy, and historical background...
For newcomers, here is the TC-18-01, the American manual for Unconventional Warfare
(published in 2010; leaked in 2012):
Training">https://nsnbc.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/special-forces-uw-tc-18-01.pdf">Training
Circular No. 18-01: Special Forces Unconventional Warfare, For the color revolution manual, see Gene Sharp's famous book (From Dictatorship to
Democracy, 1994).
When used at the same time in the same place, they form what Korybko calls Hybrid Warfare
(see his book).
The Holodomor was real, but then again, so were Stalin's purges in that same era (a little
later) and Stalin's ethnic forced migrations from 1930 to 1949.
While this doesn't excuse these acts, people should keep in mind that the Soviet Union was
under tremendous external and internal pressure at the time. Acts of economic warfare tend to
be poorly documented in history - for example, China's famines in the 1960s were exacerbated
by a US embargo on wheat imports to China.
Ultimately, however, the main reason the Western Ukrainians don't like Russia is because
they've always believed Ukraine should be a nation in its own right. The large contingent of
Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign minister, were fighting
for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under
the SS , no less.
Some allege that Zelensky is under influence of the oligarch Igor Kolomoisky. But so far
there is little evidence to provide that.... Zelensky will likely try to move the country
back to a balanced positions between the 'west' and Russia.
There's reason to be skeptical.
Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish).
President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish). Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country? I'll
bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.
"Yats is the guy" ... until he isn't but will the new guy bring real change or just
pretend to?
Not just a bridge between Russia and the EU, the natural partnership that the US really
fears, but, look at the geography, it is the natural entry point into Europe for the new Silk
Road from China. Pre 2014 the Chinese were attracted by the opportunity of a deep water port
in Crimea, the sea is too shallow into Ukraine proper.
"Nevertheless, in these discussions there is never a mention of the Ukrainian Holodomor of
1932-1933 that caused the deaths of millions of Ukrainians..."
The 'Holodomor' was not real. No such event occurred. There was no intention of starving
Ukrainians, on the part of the CPSU. In fact most of the Soviet Union suffered from famines
in these years, some regions much more than Ukraine. The causes of the famine were largely
economic sanctions.
It is quite true that the Collectivisation campaigns were, in many ways disastrous, and
carried out with great violence. But the Holodomor myth, invented by Nazi collaborators after
1945 and based on Goebbels's propaganda is Cold War anti-communist hate propaganda of the
worst kind.
Wikipedia is extremely unreliable on matters such as this.
2.As to comedians running governments Hoarsewhisperer, don't forget Italy.
3. What Ukraine has to offer, William Gruff, if the Biden clan has not stolen it, is some
of the best agricultural land in the temperate world. At a time in which the USA's ability to
dump grain on the world market is being employed to conduct terrorist economic warfare
against disobedient countries, the surpluses Ukraine could make available are of cardinal
importance. Then there is the matter of saving those lands from the scourges of American
agriculture-GMOs, Roundup et al.
" The large contingent of Ukrainians in Canada, for example and including its present foreign
minister, were fighting for the Germans against Russia in World War 2 under the SS, no
less."
c1ue@26
This is certainly true: the survivors of the 14th Waffen SS Galicia Division and their
dependents, hangers on and sundry war criminals on the lam certainly came to Canada where
they sold their votes en bloc to the Federal Liberal Party. In Alberta they came to control
inter alia the University of Alberta.
But long before these people came over immigration from Ukraine, including Mennonites,
brought their traditional skills and agricultural knowledge to, most notably the Prairies.
They knew about growing wheat in the climatic conditions here.
They also brought traditions of collective organisation -- they tended to be very left wing,
co-operators and were among the founders of the Communist Party and the CCF. It was with
great relish that the Liberal Party used the former (and lifelong) Nazis to saplit the
community post 1945.
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"
They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks behind
you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now going to
change.
re "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the
country?"
(a) Is it true that the population of Ukraine is .2% Jewish?
(b) Is it true that the .2% segment runs the country?
(c) Is it considered racist to ask why you find the two subject sentences indications of
racism?
However, for sake of good order, the EU association agreement proposal to Ukraine of Mr
Baroso, was presented and rejected by Janukovitch beginning of November 2013. ( not 2014).
The main reason, but never disclosed by our corporate press in the West, was the total
unacceptable ( hence fullty understandable) of an either/or demand choosing between EU and
Russia cooperation btw the lines, as well as an article about military cooperation. Which
of course would also exclude Russian partnership. ... that set the stage the humble and
charming Mrs "Fuck EU" Nudelman and her cookies at Maidan square.
The very fundamental principles of peace, understanding and cooperation of EU was betrayed by
their President Baroso. When you add that to the financial rape of Greece by Goldman Sachs
& co on his watch, one should think he deserved being executed for high treason! Civil
war in Ukraine & and looting of the people of Greece... But guess what... He went
directly from EU to .. GOLDMAN SACHS!
I appreciate that good concise timeline and explanation of what has happened in Ukraine. I
remember finding online a live 24/7 camera feed from Kiev during the Maidan coup, and the
fascination but horror of watching the western backed Right Sector thugs wearing neo-nazi
Wolfsangel insignias carry out atrocities in real time. I searched in vain a couple years
later to find the archives of these films. Does anyone know if they still exist? I suspect if
the filming was done by a coup-friendly Kiev TV station they will be kept under wraps unless
some viewer recorded them, as there is a lot of incriminating evidence which could be
exposed.
Watching what happened live and then following western media disinformation and outright
lies was the final slap in the face for me that the corporate media had finally given up any
pretenses of journalistic standards. Winter 2013/2014 it finally gasped its last breath and
the last nails were hammered into the coffin. From then on we've had non-stop blatantly false
narratives presented, with the nutty bogus Russiagate fiction now consuming three years(!) of
coverage.
Here's hoping the pendulum has swung and we'll reclaim some sanity. Current trends don't
favor this, however, and the US may go for the Samson option before conceding to a more
multi-polar world. A smart lady (my wife) says we need 10% of people to accept a new idea or
narrative before a critical mass can occur and it become the dominant narrative. The more
people who understand the issues MOA and others educate about gives us a chance of countering
the Empire's narrative control. Thanks to all for spreading the message and keep sharing with
your friends.
"Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?"
They aren't, Jackrabbit. Grow up, for Christ's sake, and put these cheap racist cracks
behind you. Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. God willing that is now
going to change.
No, he does not just say "Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they
running the country?". He says:
Nuland (Jewish) picks Yats (rumored to be Jewish). Yats is succeeded by Groysman (Jewish).
President Poroschenko (Jewish) is succeeded by Zelinski (Jewish).
Jewish population of Ukraine is 0.2% of the whole! Why are they running the country?
I'll bet it's because Jewish support for integration with the West is very strong.
You can't ignore this "interesting" "fact" if it's the fact.
@21 and @26 - regarding the Holodomor, It is true. Millions of people did die, but from what
I can tell, it was a lot more complicated than how it is presented. Here's an article I found
on Counterpunch Holodomor
I am no specialist or anything, but I think the collectivization was a disaster and the war
on the kulaks didn't help anything, and that lead to the Holodomor which is more
genocide-porn used for the same purposes as a few other large scale killings I have heard
about - to make sure we never forget, and more importantly, we never really find out what
really happened, because it is S A C R E D.
I just finished an excellent book on the Ukraine crisis. Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New
Cold War by Kees Van Der Pijl. In the book he says that the Holodomor was used by the Reagan
administration in the second phase of the Cold War as a tool to demonize the Soviet Union.
Sound Familiar? The author says the second phase of the Cold War was launched when detente
was broken with the Soviet Union, any concessions made to domestic labor in the west was to
be dismantled and the goal was regime change in Moscow which happened in 1991. The author
really lays it out and explained the new, third phase of the Cold War which really kicked
into gear in Kiev in the winter or 2014. I found that to be very interesting. I had never
heard it put that way before.
I can't recommend the book enough.
I just started Frontline Ukraine by Sakwa.
Thank you, B and everyone in the MoA community. Please forgive any mistakes I may have made
in describing my interpretation of van Der Pijl's book.
Ukraine is such a unique disaster of a nation precisely because it is not really a nation at
all, just a cobbled together mishmash of people with no history. There is no such thing as a
Ukrainian ethnicity. Ukrainians are ethnic Russians, remnants of the poor souls conquered by
the Poles after the Mongol invasion and treated like dirt for centuries. All through that
horrid time they preserved their identity as Russian, but when the Polish state was removed
from the map, bitter Polish academics pushed the tale that these people were somehow separate
from Russians, i.e. Russia had no right to it's retaken territory. This new foreign composed
identity was forced on them by both carrot and stick in the Austrian Empire, that occupied
Galicia...leading to concentration camps for those who resisted it in WWI. And the saddest
part of the tragedy was when the Soviets founded a Ukrainian republic, lending undeserved
credence to this farce. There is no wonder the country is such a schizophrenic failure. They
have no clear identity and their recent history is nothing but sniveling shame. What is
really the difference between groveling before Nazi invaders or groveling before Nato
invaders? Not much, and the end is the same.
I think over 20% of Ukraine's population is "not Ukrainian".
Posted by: c1ue | Jul 22 2019 21:59 utc | 28
It is quite complicated. For example, Zelensky himself had to brush up on his Ukrainian to
be able to run a campaign, which he managed to do with his talents and scripts. His first
language is Russian, and ancestry... Khazarian? If I recall, he shares first language,
hometown and ancestry with Kolomoysky who was also his employer. What I am trying to say is
that national identification is fluid in this region. You may have Russian nationalists who
speak Ukrainian dialect at home, Ukrainian nationalists with rather incomplete knowledge of
"their language" and many other combinations. That said, Ukrainian is a separate language
that may be hard to understand by someone who knows only Polish or only Russian (but rather
intelligible if you know both).
Occasionally I follow news on RusNext.ru, a news site that seems to be run by Donbass
supporters who fluently translate from Ukrainian and, I guess, use Ukrainian words here and
there.
BTW, the history of Ukraine is quite complicated, including "Polish Conquest" that in
actuality happened as very complex cleaving and coalescing of fragmented states with key
dynasties leaving no descendants BOTH in Poland and the Kingdom of Halich thus leaving both
to the rule of a Hungarian king, to be later partitioned between his two daughters, while the
less populated part of Ukraine was taken over by Lithuanians who had hard time defending
their holdings from Tatars etc. After that, the polity of Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth
adopted Polish as the common language of nobility, so most of the "cruel Polish lords" that
Ukrainians fought with in 17th century were of Ruthenian (Russian?) origin, some claiming
descent from Rurik (i.e. from the common dynasty of Rus lands). Compare with Irish and
Scottish nobility adopting a Saxon-French mix as their vernacular (now known as English).
I was just discovering the importance of internet world news information when the Maidan
crisis unfolded, and many Ukrainians were putting photos and videos on various blogs about
the horrible events leading up to and following the coup. Russia has made huge strides since
- but we cannot forget that ordinary people who had the ability to send out information as it
happened were to be highly praised for doing so. It wasn't sophisticated, I remember in one
city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the street, showing bodies
on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through the streets - vivid
shots of buildings on fire, a protest by a woman with a toddler at a speechgiving occasion.
Unforgettable.
Ukraine should be proud of being the historic heart of Russia itself, the place where the
State began. That's what Putin is talking about, and even more than Crimea Kiev is the
historical homeland capital city for all Russians; it's part of their heritage. It's as if
separatists in the US got themselves embedded in New York City and declared their
independence of the rest of the country, being more aligned with Canada. (Oh, and everyone in
that northern area now had to speak French.)
Wikipedia
tells us that Jews are 0.2% of the population in Ukraine.
'Jewish' is not a race. It's a religion. Do you think that Israel is a country for
semetic people ? LOL. No, it's a theocracy.
Ukraine is being run by the US and NATO, the Empire. No. Ukraine is being run by it's West-leaning leadership and US/NATO is partnered with
that leadership. I'm suggesting that Jews are among the most reliably pro-Western people in
Ukraine. After all, the "Empire" that you refer to is known as the "Anglo-Zionist
Empire".
<> <> <> <> <> <>
Leads me to wonder if the State Department's recent global antisemitism efforts are mostly
aimed at Ukraine.
If Ukraine itself made such efforts/expenditures it might would draw a backlash from the
Ukrainian people. So the US does it and slyly declares it to be global so no one
notices that it's directed at certain countries (mostly Ukraine?) that have Jewish leadership
that's backed by US/NATO.
As part of the effort to take over Ukraine, US/NATO forged an anti-Russian alliance that
included the anti-Jewish extreme-right in Ukraine as described by
Ukraine and the "Politics of Anti-Semitism" (2014) :
The US and the EU are supporting the formation of a coalition government integrated by
Neo-Nazis which are directly involved in the repression of the Ukrainian Jewish
community.
. . .
Within the Western media, news coverage of the Neo-Nazi threat to the Jewish community in
Ukraine is a taboo. There is a complete media blackout: confirmed by Google News search ...
What is not mentioned is that these "radical elements" supported and financed by the West
are Neo-Nazis who are waging a hate campaign against Ukraine's Jewish community.
. . .
According to the JP [Jerusalem Post] , the issue is one of "transition", which will
be resolved once a new government is installed .
"Despite his [Likhashov's] optimism fear pervades the local Jewish community, as it
does the entire Ukraine, during the transition period."
No doubt Jews would not feel safe with rightists leading the government so arrangements
were made (Democracy Works! LOL). We can surmise that the US State Dept has now
formalized this with funding for a propaganda campaign that seeks to change their views
and/or political slush fund to ensure election of Jewish candidates to high office?
Acar@39 The Globalists/Zionists Good 'Ole Pale of (re)Settlement included Crimea, home of the
Karaites, hence manipulation of the Rusyns, and Neo-fascist Galicians & Podolians. A
strange ethnic Divide et Impera nexus for sure..
"The pneumatics ("spiritual", from Greek πνεῦμα, "spirit")
were, in Gnosticism, the highest order of humans, the other two orders being psychics and
hylics ("matter"). A pneumatic saw itself as escaping the doom of the material world via the
transcendent knowledge of Sophia's Divine Spark within the soul."
No one is disputing that famines occurred in Soviet Ukraine. These famines also occurred
in Belarus and Russia. The extent to which the harsh form of collectivisation institutioned
under Stalin contributed as opposed to climatic and other factors (Western sanctions, crop
destroying pests etc) is a matter for debate. Grover Furr argues the latter forcefully in
'Blood Lies' (2014). The term "Holodomor" refers to an intentional policy of genocide against
the "Ukrainian Nation" by evil Russians/Commies/Jews via intentional starvation. As bevin @32
points out, this concept originated in Nazi ideology. So yes, famine(s) occurred, but the
"Holodomor" did not.
As for the author of the Counterpunch piece, Louis Proyect, he is an imperial apologist of
the worst sort who delights in trolling any forum where anti-imperialists gather. If this
appears to be an Ad Hominum attack, I think you have to be human to be a victim of one of
those.
I also can't recommend the Van der Pijl book enough. Usually if I see a book recommended
by someone who also links to a Louis Proyect article I would avoid it like the plague, but
barflies please don't be discouraged! Van der Pijl is one of the premier exponents of
(non-sectarian) Marxist International Relations, if you've been put off reading Marxist
authors thanks to the likes of Proyect he is the perfect antidote. His "Global Rivalries -
From The Cold War to Iraq" (2007) is also excellent, I would recommend you track that down if
Sakwa has nothing much to add.
Global Research has an extract from "Flight MH17, Ukraine and the New Cold War" here:
Arseniy Yatsenyuk, Prime minister
. . .
He has played down his Jewish-Ukrainian origins , possibly because of the prevalence
of antisemitism in his party's western Ukraine heartland.
Yatsenyuk resigned in disgrace in April 2016 amid a massive corruption scandal that
first broke in February, when economy minister Aivaras Abromavicius stepped down,
complaining that the Yatsenyuk government was not genuinely committed to fighting
corruption .
One of the many corrupt projects was Yats' border wall, which critics have said
"wouldn't even stop a rabbit." LOL.
The new one will be named Revealing Ukraine, and is just released. Search your torrent
search engine or tracker of choice for it for a HD release. Not on youtube yet AFAIK.
I just downloaded but got the Russian version without subtitles. I am unable to find the
English version. For those that understand Russian, the magnet link for the download is:
magnet:?xt=urn:btih:cbfd33adbd1d2bf3d48aade83a60507fe9f74241
If anyone can find the English version, please post the magnet link or infohash value, but I
guess it has not yet been released.
by: bevin @ 32 < i am particularly interested to know the source of that 1932-1933
Holodomor propaganda.. .. claiming, not merely alleging, the genocidal deaths of 32 million
Ukrainians.. Seems to me these fake claims that appear everywhere, have generally the same
general sources, but are leaked at different places, in different formats, by different
faces.. .. ?
I would like to see if it is possible to prove the source to be a coordinated
amalgam of persons, and more particularly I am looking for the individual names that produce
fake propaganda for a living, where did they study, who trained them, who hired them and so
on.. Seems to me preparing, engineering or delivering fake anything that causes, or leads to
war and death and destruction is a crime against humanity (CAH) with universal application
because CAHs infringe inalienable human rights. There is a great need to make functional, on
a world wide basis, the ICC.. Additionally the ICC cases have the potential to deliver the
truth to History.
Iran, Russian, North Korea and China are positioned to impose ICC court jurisdiction,
Nuclear Non Weapon Proliferation, and 3 vetos required to overrule the findings and mandates
of a majority determination of the UN Security Council on all leaders and all nations and
ruling bodies in the world. War, and in fact the decimation and destruction of the universe,
is possible because these holes in the enforceable rule by law system exist. Fixing these
three holes could have a massive long term effect on the peace and income distribution
throughout the entire globe.
A forth such thing would be to internationalize all resources in the world, and to
allocate ownership to them based on population and finally, the most important change of all,
would be to internationalize education.. to grant one degree for all undergraduate education
based on international subject matter examinations ( does not matter where or how the
knowledge to pass is obtained, so universities and tutors can still play a massive part in
instructing the masses), and one professional degree in law, one in medicine and one in
engineering.. everyone would have to pass examinations and prove fluency in at least three
culturally different, geographically different languages, and prove competency in mathematics
at the differential and integral calculus level to be eligible to sit for an undergraduate
degree and lawyers, doctors, scientist and engineers would be eligible to practice anywhere
in the world, subject only to credential free, local regulation imposed because of local
experience. Local regulation <= not supported by local experience would be overturned.
None of this requires, demands, or needs a king or a president, it just needs to be a part of
the human experience in the earth environment.
Great summary b.
Needed somebody to just spell it out.
I recall watching the 2014 crisis and civil war in real time. Felt WW-III was upon us.
Couldn't believe the outright lies of all Western media and was the straw that broke the back
of any remaining faith I had in NYT, The Guardian, BBC, ABC (Australian) etc.
The Odessa Massacre was biggest turning point for me.http://stormcloudsgathering.com/the-odessa-massacre-what-really-happened/
There's far more evidence Ukraine shot down MH17 than the Donbas rebels did. Go to
www.consortiumnews.com and search 'MH17'
Talking with friends something has shifted for the average Joe and Jane. In 2014, if I
presented evidence against the official Western Ministry of Truth (yeah see the typo but
seems worth leaving) on Ukraine I'd get a righteous backlash and called a Putin apologist
etc. These days there's blank inward stare of cognitive dissonance, subtle agreement and
desire to change topic. Such is the nature of Stockholm Syndrome.
@21 David Park, @26 c1ue, @32 bevin, @34 Ghost Ship, @41 roza shanina, @54 Paora, @58 snake
My understanding is that of Paora and bevin; there were famines in the Soviet Union,
including in Ukraine. The Holodomor myth, if not started there, was massively
promoted in the 30s by ... drumroll ... the Hearst empire.That alone should
tell you something of its reliability. Proyect's piece is interesting, but it doesn't touch
on the Western creation of the "Holodomor," the myth itself of the Soviet
genocide aimed at Ukrainians.
Unfortunately, I'm unable right now to put my hands/keyboard on a good reference for this.
If I'm able to locate one, I'll put it in a comment in an open thread.
Note to snake: not 32 million, but around 5-7 million, probably laughable in itself. (A
reference I found for the Ukraine SSR in the 1930s indicates that the population
grew during the 1930-33 period, but that should probably be read with great
care. It would probably require a study in itself.)
* * * *
On another, but not entirely irrelevant matter, I've always found this wikipedia entry to
be vastly entertaining. It gives me a good chuckle to think of Ukrainization -- the promotion
of Ukrainian language and culture -- as a communist plot. (It's not a perfect analogy, but
it's close enough for a laugh, considering the present.) (And yes, I know it's Wikipedia, but
their prejudices lean generally in the other direction.)
The extreme right-wing politicians, who gained notoriety after the Maidan coup, prohibited
the use of the Russian language which more than 50% of the Ukrainians speak.
That's a bald-faced lie. Russian is still spoken in large parts of Ukraine,
including Odessa. The main tourist attraction in Odessa, a beach community known as Arcadia,
still uses the Russian word at its entrance. Street signs are still in Russian. People speak
Russian.
The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language. Everyone must learn it. It is
the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya. It is in the nature of a
country to have a universal language whereby everyone in the country may communicate. There
is nothing whatsoever radical or even unusual about this.
Stop spreading hate and lies. This is utter nonsense.
As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption. Even Russians.
I lived in Ukraine at that time - mostly in Sevastopol, which was then 90+% Russian (and of
course now is part of Russia). Everybody hated him and thought he was utterly corrupt and
stole from the people. His thugs would literally walk into a private business with guns and
tell the owner "I am buying half your business for $50, here are the papers, sign them now".
That is how he operated. Of course they did not want the L'viv folks staging a coup, but the
hatred for the corrupt Yanukovych was truly national.
You don't do anyone any favors by publishing lies.
All those who say that Zelenski is a puppet or front for Kolomoiski should remember that a
certain VV Putin came to power as a puppet or front for Boris Berezovski. And we all know how
that (BB) ended. So let's hope for the best - can't get much worse anyway. And Zelenski seems
to have acted very smartly so far. Good luck to him - he'll need it!
It's my understanding that those Ukrainians who most fervently believe in the Holodomor (that
the Soviet govt under Joseph Stalin deliberately targeted ethnic Ukrainians with famine and
starvation) live in that part of the modern Ukraine that was under fascist Polish rule in the
1930s.
From my own reading, the famines of the early 1930s affected large parts of eastern
Ukraine across southen European Russia into Kazakhstan.
The issue though is not so much the details of what actually occurred then as in the
creation of a lie that deliberately equates Nazis with Soviets and thus Nazism with
Communism, and ultimately socialism. If Nazism led to the Holocaust, then Communism and
socialism must be demonstrated to have resulted in equally great horrors such as mass
famines, starvation or incarcerating people in concentration camps on the basis of their
religion. The current demonization of the Chinese govt over its supposed treatment of Falun
Gong followers or Uyghurs follows this pattern.
Accusing b of "spreading hate and lies"? There's plenty of sources documenting the
Ukrainian laws passed since 2014 prohibiting or restricting Russian language in various
sectors, including official use, public education, even in films. b was correct in his
assessment, and I have no idea where the "hate" accusation came from. I would normally not
link to the awful Telegraph of UK, but I assume this story from just three months ago isn't
fake news.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/04/25/ukraine-passes-law-against-russian-language-official-settings/
> The only thing is they made Ukrainian the official language.
...and the ONLY one.
...and the language undeveloped, that lacked words for many modern realities, from helicopter
to condom, so they all had to be invented rashly.
> It is the same in Russia - everyone must learn Russian, even in Chechnya.
In Russia, Crimean Turks can teach their children, in beginner's school, in k'yrymchi
language. It is one of three official languages of Crimean region. In Ukraine it was impossible then and it is impossible still.
> It is in the nature of a country to have a universal language
...that is only native to less than 20% of the population? Well, it is indeed a nature - of OCCUPIED countries. Like, Norman invasion into England, when elites had one language and serfs - another. And
serf's language was slowly suffocated and replaced by foreign language of occupying
elites. "If to live in comfort you have to rename every major city and tear down every ,ajor
monument - you cam to live on someone's else land".
> whereby everyone in the country may communicate.
If that was the intention - then the language native to population's 83% would become
official, like it is in Ireland. But not in Ukraine.
> As to Yanukovych, he was widely hated by everyone for his total corruption.
He was. So you say this makes illegal coup less illegal and bandit Poroshenko less bandit. How
exactly? Or you just throw in irrelevant emotional hitpiece to accuse of "spreading lies" by which
you mean "not spreading your favorite grievances" ?
> Yanukovych.... had no choice but to refuse [Deep and Comprehensive EuroAssociation]
But he did not.
He asked to amend it, to re-negotiate it.
He asked to add there compensation clause from EU to Ukrainian industries. Russia also asked for it to be re-negotiated, but Russia wanted re-negotiation from
scratch into a trilateral treaty. Yanukovich only wanted money to support Ukrainian economic
until his re-election.
Bad for him, but money he asked for "coincidently" were the same, as money Europe promised
to Ukraine for removing of Nuclear weapon and Chernobyl nuclear power. When Ukraine delivered
and asked for money - the 2nd maidan (2004) happened and both Kuchma and his heir Yanukovich
flew down the drain. When Yanukovich was allowed to the throne in 2009 he conveniently forgot
about that story. But the moment he asked EU for money, albeit under pretext of Association
and markets, the 3rd maidan unleashed and Yanukovich went down the drain again. Guess, he had
to learn his lesson without repeats?..
> Not so much Russia dissuading Kiev as Kiev taking an inordinate length of time to
realise the blatantly obvious.
Posted by: Michael Droy | Jul 22 2019 20:03 utc | 12
Well, it took Russia to really START implementing trade inhibition, there were few rather
vibrant "scandals" in spring and summer 2014 with Russia banning this or that food/alcohol
form Ukraine, quoting safety hazards, to make Yanukovich understand this time it is for
real.
Most probably Yanukovich was like Saakashvili in 2008, totally programmed that "Russia
would not date" because "Russia is secretly ruled by Jews/NeoLibs/Washington/whatever".
Russia dared. And then Yanukovich understood he was not selected to be a hero bringing
Ukraine to Europe, but a scapegoat to absorb the fallout.
is biased also ? It isn't my argument at all, but I do understand that language is very
important in terms of identity. There is quite a lot of history in that article to take into
account, or argue over I suppose. As it is probably the "go to" reference for people outside
of the region wanting to understand the question of languages in Ukraine, its content is
relevant.
> I remember in one city in Donbass it was simply someone filming as he walked along the
street, showing bodies on the street corner, the official Ukraine military speeding through
the streets - vivid shots of buildings on fire
Posted by: juliania | Jul 23 2019 1:44 utc | 47
Most probably, Mariupol 2014-05-09. People wanted to celebrate V-Day, but "democratic" Oleg Lyashko and his "men in black"
drove in at attacked demonstration. Local police tried to protect citizens and was ambushed
in their own HQ (that very burning house), making last stand.
"In the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election he led his party to win 22 seats."
"In the 2019 Ukrainian parliamentary election Lyashko lost his parliamentary seat"
One may also look for Olena Bilozerka, 2013 German "best international blogger."
She is open and vocal part of Right Sector, though allegations were she is inflating
political issues to hide marauding issues.
She blogged back in 2014-02-16 about "next day" meeting of Right Sector representatives with
Merkel "to report about implementation of our part of agreement and to be informed by Merkel
about implementing her part" and regardless of "checking the watches" about armed assault
upon government on 18.02, which indeed happened and was success.
Being open and vocal Nazi she then published many photo and video that were "omitted" by free
world's free media.
This "how many people did Communism killed" question is tiresome.
As I've already commented here in previous posts, there are essentially three methods an
historian can determine if a genocide happened:
1) mass graves (this requires archaeology);
2) written contemporary accounts, and
3) census
In the "Holodomor" case, we only have "2", the most popular one in the West being that
Welsh journalist who travelled to the USSR that time and, based on anecdotal evidence,
"covered" the famine.
Wikipedia's article about the "Holodomor" only mentions one source mentioning concrete
numbers: Wheatcroft, a rather obscure Australian academic who, to his merit, at least made up
the effort to talk with people who had access to the Soviet archives.
The quoted list of his article clearly indicates Wheatcroft bases his numbers on indirect
data. He uses the 1937 census in relation to 1926; in another article, he uses the quantity
of grain stock in 1932. I could go on, but the important thing here is that this guy doesn't
use any extraordinary sources. He certainly didn't go to the Ukraine to do archaeology. The
Ukrainians themselves probably didn't do it either, because, so far, we have no accounts of
mass graves in the region.
Famines were common in the pre-industrial world. They occured often in the ancient world
-- where cities and villages literally disappeared in a matter of decades because of one bad
crop and/or one plague (plagues are a side-effect of sedentarism). The often occured in the
feudal world. They specially happened in tsarist Russia, which has a very peculiar and
hostile climate and land composition for agriculture (only 15% of the USSR's territory was
viable for agriculture even in the industrial era). They certainly are not a communist
invention. We must avoid the "Belle Époque syndrome", that is, adopt the illusion late
tsarist Russia was a paradise that was destroyed by evil Bolsheviks. Tsarist Russia was a
very brutal world, were peasants died like flies every day: Gogol (who lived in Ukrainian
territory) wrote a very funny and politically charged novel about it ("Dead Souls").
Wheatcroft uses the 1920s demographic tendency in order to infer "excess deaths" in the
USSR in 1932, but he misses the bigger picture: you have to take into account Russian
demographic movements in the long term, taking into consideration the cyclic famines. Just to
crop a short period from 1926-1932 is scientifically dishonest.
Yes, forced collectivization probably caused excess deaths in 1932 -- but it's impossible
to calculate how much more it caused in relation to a "normal" famine. Just because a famine
happened during the Soviet era doesn't mean it was caused 100% because of socialism. Constant
excess food production is a very recent phenomenon in human History, to state famines are the
exception and not the rule is contemporary bias.
It is very unlikely the 1932 famine was an extraordinary famine. The 1937 census
registered a population growth in relation to 1926. This alone discards genocide, because,
even though excess deaths ocurred (as is the rule in famines), that meant women still had
time and resources to biologically reproduce above the population replacement levels. Worst
case scenario, this growth happened because birth rates were excessive in the urban areas at
the expense of the rural areas -- an unlikely scenario, since in this case, we would register
mass migration from the rural area to the urban area (because the hypothesis is that the
famine was artificial, so the grains would be in the cities): they would either mass migrate
or die trying, in which case we would have mass graves.
Mass graves are the decisive evidence for a genocide, indeed any mass extermination,
because that would mean death was sudden. When the death process is slow and not
synchronized, people have the time to bury/cremate their dead. That is the case even with
some plagues (e.g. Antonine Plague). Mass graves are an indication people were killed more or
less at the same time, in an artificial way, and in large quantities (since proper burials
are expensive). In a deprived economy like the USSR, it is very unlikely all those bodies
would be properly buried, let alone cremated, was a mass extermination taken place.
The holy grail of evidence for a genocide/mass extermination for any historian is when a
witness points the place of the event and then archaeology finds out a mass grave. This
evidently didn't happen in the case of "Holodomor".
Note: Gorbachev is a Russian who was born and raised in a village that borders modern
Ukraine. His grandparents and parents were victims of the 1932 famine (they all survived).
They continued committed with the Revolution and, according to Gorbachev's own accounts, he's
was not raised believing the 1932 famine was exceptional.
About the "Stalin is a genocidal psychopath" question: it's funny, because forced
collectivization was one of the few points where he and Trotsky agreed.
Whatever happened in macroeconomic reforms after Stalin consolidated power was a
collective work, not the designs of only one man. And, although we can argue against the
means, the fact was that they were successful: the USSR rose from the ruins of a second tier
imperial power (late tsarist Russia) to a global superpower.
To understand the most important fact of what happened to Ukraine and why, you need to know
about the yank neocon PNAC, which trumps (excuse the pun) all: The Project for the New
American Century, and the original neocon (jew) wolfowitz doctrine, as revealed in the NYT in
1992:
www.nytimes.com/1992/03/08/world/us-strategy-plan-calls-for-insuring-no-rivals-develop.html
Russia at the moment is correctly perceived as the main opponent to the usa, china too as
upcoming, in line with the above, & PNAC is part of trying to keep Russia in its place:
'part of the American mission will be "convincing potential competitors that they need not
aspire to a greater role or pursue a more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate
interests."' And 'to deter any nation or group of nations from challenging American primacy'.
And 'a world in which there is one dominant military power whose leaders "must maintain the
mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role."' Note 'regional' insofar as it concerns Russia wrt ukraine.
Also this is why the USG used Maidan (with at least $5 bn - said nuland/jewland, married
to the co-founder of PNAC kagan, another jew) against Russia, to cause it problems and to be
a thorn in the flesh.
Another important fact is the roman catholic church attack on Russia through ukraine &
the split of the church in ukraine from the Russian Orthodox Church.
> there are essentially three methods an historian can determine if a genocide happened
Four.
There can be comparison of available data in adjacent regions.
In this specific case - in Poland-occupied Western Ukraine. Just "across the line".
Anecdotal evidence states it also had famine, so the famine was not anchored in USSR
specific way of governing.
Some rare online archives of then Poland newspapers photos report some UK delegations raising
concerns, etc.
However, in USSR the famine was a state-acknowledge emergency. USSR prohibited moving
foods out of Ukrainian SSR (and wheat was not the only food! everyone talks about grains,
forgetting potato, fish, mushrooms, etc), broken many Western contracts to repay debts in
grains (West was denying being paid in other assets and was decrying USSR savageness of
refusing to export all the contracted grain with the same zeal it today decry USSR savageness
of exporting at least some of grain), started importing grain from Persia (now Iran). This
emergency let a lot of paper trail, which now is used to "prove" how evil Soviet government
was (and, specifically, not Ukrainian SSR government but central government in Kremlin; and
somehow this is stretched even further to "prove" murderous hatred being part of "Russian
character").
In Poland, well, a dull matter of fact. Bad lack to be peasant, yet worst to be Ukrainian
peasant. S-t happens.
No paper trail - no "historic event" - no accusations. Don't try to fix famines - and you will not be accused of being part of it.
Election apparatus is so easy to corrupt, yet people still vote! Crazy! And, so many
elections have been rigged this way: People are so dumb! Why does nobody insist on
independent, improved equipment? Conditioning makes people ignore the cheat under their
noses.
Recall the posters in previous threads defending the empire's color revolution attempts in
Hong Kong and match the names up with posters here. Are they trying to offer defense of the
empire's color revolutions in Ukraine, or do you think they are off-duty now and posting with
the sincere intention of initiating open discussion? Do you honestly think you can change
their minds by engaging with them and pointing out the flaws in their facts and their logic
when it is their job to defend the actions of the empire?
By the way, do expect and don't be surprised when the same posters referred to above
defend the empire's lawfare coup in Brazil, the attempted lawfare coup in South Africa, and
the attempts to regime change Venezuela when b posts any articles on these issues.
As for holodomor, or the Maidan snipers, or the famine in China, one doesn't need details
to identify fictions. One simply needs to use logic and reason. We need only question simple
points if we suspect that the famine in Ukraine was a deliberate attempt to exterminate
Ukrainians: Was it successfully completed, and if not then why not?
There are obviously still Ukrainians, so it wasn't successful. If we assume the famine was
a deliberate attempt at extermination, then we must ask why was it stopped before it
finished? Did some external factor force Stalin to call off the extermination before it was
completed?
No, the famine was stopped by dramatically improved agricultural practices instituted by
the Soviet Union. This cannot be reconciled with the claim that the famine was a deliberate
attempt by the Soviet Union at extermination, so no matter how much we may cherish the myth
of holodomor, to remain rational individuals we must let that myth go.
Too complex? Let's try the Maidan snipers: We are expected to believe that the killers
were police or Berkut snipers. What was their motive? Presumably to stop the protests. If
that was their motive, then why did the snipers stop sniping before dispersing the protests?
If the snipers were trying to end the protests, then why did they shoot just enough to
inflame further protests, but not enough to discourage the protests?
The answer is simple: The police and/or Berkut were not the Maidan snipers in Kiev.
The snipers were provocateurs who intended to amplify the protests.
It is good to dig deeper into the details of all of these false narratives that we in the
West have been fed, but those details are not absolutely necessary to know that the
narratives are false.
1. If forced collectivization would lead to famine, there would had be no famines in 1920-s
and in 1890-s, before the said collectivization but there were.
2. Before forced collectivization there were many years of attempts at unforced one. They
failed for at least two reasons.
a) many of poor peasants "saw themselves temporarily embarrassed millionaires". While
being target of debt sharks (kulaks, public-devourers
(мироеды)) they still only imagined the life as
being sole owner of their however tiny patch of soil.
b) government attempts they saw as unwarranted advantages from aliens, city-dwellers,
trade partners of hated kulaks, that to be took advantage of using any loopholes. Government
tried to foster grassroots kolkhoz movements by offering bound credits - seeds, fertilizers,
agriculture tools. Peasants started organizing "ten men" kolkhozes in springs, taking those
credits, and then dissolving kolkhozes before gathering crops. "Faked bankruptcy" in modern
parley. If you can have good sides without having bad sides - why opt for bad sides too?
Specifically in Ukraine it could also be boosted by the "national character" formed as
dwellers of centuries-long battle ground between Poland, Russia and Turkey. No positive
long-term planning, everything for instant profits disregarding any consequences. Any
government are occupants and bandits, co-operating with them is futile and silly. We can see
it today marching over once most rich and developed Soviet Republic. Why couldn't the same
happen in 1930-s ?
3. However forced collectivization did achieved a lot. Remember the UK, where "sheep ate
people", for example. Remember latifundists in Latin America. It is largely the same!
a) hugely increased labor efficiency in "village to city" trade metrics.
"товарное
зерно"
b) hugely increased labor efficiency in "men / area" ratio. Use of mechanic tractors and
harvesters, etc. Unemployment among "just my hands" peasantry.
c) increased "capital concentration" provided for use of fertilizer, poisons, etc. Which
contributed to the prior point.
d) now unemployed peasants moved to cities, populating newly built factories. This process
was already going in 1900-s but much slower then. Emergent industrialization in the wake of
WW2 - and a very successful one.
e) end of rural famines. One of the reason 1931 famine is so hyped - it was the last in the
row. Would there be a comparable famine for example in 1970-s - and for political purposes it
would had been much more useful against USSR. But there were none. "Golodomor" was the last
famine, so it became the focal point.
e) end of city famines. Where atomized peasant families could not sustain even a horse or a
cow, one of famines reasons, joint companies (kolkhozes) just like huge private
agri-companies in UK or Argentina, relied upon chemistry and mechanizations, thus needed to
trade with cities, thus were supplying cities with food. All the champions of Golodomor
somehow overlook city famines that were cruel in early USSR in winters.
And one more quirk is almost total lack of photo-evidence behind "Golodomor".
When articles/books are illustrated, it is with photos from 1920-s famine in USSR or in USA,
misattributed.
Allegedly, it is because in Soviet cruel diktatura even NKVD death squads could not make
those photos even for secret important reports.
Reportedly it is because victims of "Goldomor" were dying "fatties", making less convincing
images. The theories were made explaining why it was so, however there seems to be no any
other famine known where those theories worked and people dying of hunger were abnormally
thick.
To Arioch @84, I apologize. You are absolutely correct. Leaving trolls' posts unchallenged
gives the casual reader the impression that those posts are unassailable; nevertheless, I
have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them out.
Posters such as yourself, vk, karlof1, etc who provide detailed and historically accurate
corrections to the false narratives are necessary for the edification of lurkers and casual
readers. I just hope that you don't measure the effectiveness of your posts by whether or not
you change the trolls' minds.
> I have been attempting to limit my engagement with the trolls to simply pointing them
out
This can really work well with people sincerely lost by massive propaganda, people who
succumbed to illusion they know, why they do not.
Wikipedia: The Socratic method, also known as method of Elenchus, elenctic method, or
Socratic debate, is a form of cooperative argumentative dialogue between individuals, based
on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking and to draw out ideas and
underlying presuppositions. It is a dialectical method, involving a discussion in which the
defense of one point of view is questioned; one participant may lead another to contradict
themselves in some way, thus weakening the defender's point. This method is named after the
Classical Greek philosopher Socrates and is introduced by him in Plato's Theaetetus as
midwifery (maieutics) because it is employed to bring out definitions implicit in the
interlocutors' beliefs, or to help them further their understanding.
Sincere person, being guided by questions, would start researching and analyzing. And would
not feel coerced.
But you know, trolls just ignore the questions and keeps hammering talking points by
infinitely going back and repeating them "from starting point".
Avoiding positive argumentation, avoiding claiming something and limiting ourselves to
questioning their weak points, we help them to create another impression: they have a bad
theory when we have no theory at all. They are content with it.
So, putting out competing interpretation is no less important than showing their own
unhonesty.
t
people were able to look past the mistake and not overlook the van der pijl book. Thank you
for letting me know of Mr. Proyect's reputation.
Missing from the comments regarding Ukrainian/Russian dynamics is recognition of the numerous
attempts (dating back to the 17th century) of the Russification of the Ukraine, first by the
Russian Empire and then by the Soviets.
In 1863, minister of internal affairs Pyotr Valuyev issued the so-called Valuev
Circular, in which he stated that the Ukrainian language never existed, doesn't exist, and
cannot exist.
Under Stalin, "korenization" took second stage to the idea of a united Soviet Union,
where competing national cultures were no longer tolerated, and the Russian language
increasingly became the only official language of Soviet socialism
Russification of Soviet-occupied Ukraine intensified in 1938 under Nikita Khrushchev,
then secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, but was briefly halted during World War II,
when Axis forces occupied large areas of the country.
In the 1960s, the Ukrainian language began to be used more widely and frequently in spite
of these policies. In response, Soviet authorities increased their focus on early education
in Russian. After 1980, Russian language classes were instituted from the first grade
onward.
( a reason for so many Russian-speaking Ukrainians??)
In the regions of southern Russian SFSR (North Caucasus and eastern part of Sloboda
Ukraine included into RSFSR) Ukrainization was effectively outlawed in 1932.[18]
Specifically, the December 14, 1932 decree "On Grain Collection in Ukraine, North Caucasus
and the Western Oblasts" by the VKP(b) Central Committee and USSR Sovnarkom stated that
Ukrainization in certain areas was carried out formally, in a "non-Bolshevik" way, which
provided the "bourgeois-nationalist elements" with a legal cover for organizing their
anti-Soviet resistance. In order to stop this, the decree ordered in these areas, among other
things, to switch to Russian all newspapers and magazines, and all Soviet and cooperative
paperwork. By the autumn of 1932 (beginning of a school year), all schools were ordered to
switch to Russian. In addition the decree ordered a massive population swap: all "disloyal"
population from a major Cossack settlement, stanitsa Poltavskaya was banished to Northern
Russia, with their property given to loyal kolkhozniks moved from poorer areas of Russia.[19]
in the 1937 Soviet Census compared to the 1926 First All-Union Census of the Soviet
Union.[18]
This perhaps explains the predominance of Russian in eastern Ukraine.
A new documentary from Max van der Werff, the leading independent investigator of the
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 disaster, has revealed breakthrough evidence of tampering and
forging of prosecution materials; suppression of Ukrainian Air Force radar tapes; and lying by
the Dutch, Ukrainian, US and Australian governments. An attempt by agents of the US Federal
Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to take possession of the black boxes of the downed aircraft is
also revealed by a Malaysian National Security Council official for the first time.
Putin was apparently explaining a fairly straightforward and, to many observers, valid
assessment of international politics. Namely, that Western establishments and institutions,
including the mainstream media, are experiencing a crisis in authority. That crisis has arisen
over several years due to popular perception that the governance of the political class is not
delivering on democratic demands of accountability and economic progress. That in turn has led
people to seek alternatives from the established parties, a movement in the US and Europe which
is denigrated by the establishment as "populist" or rabble rousing.
Putin was not advocating any particular politics or political figures. He was merely
pointing out the valid observation that the so-called liberal establishment has become
obsolete, or dysfunctional.
In her speech this week, May sought to lay on a sinister spin to Putin's remarks as being
somehow him egging on authoritarianism and anti-democratic politics.
Another example of distortion came from Donald Tusk, the European Council President, who
also said of Putin's interview:
"I strongly disagree with the main argument that liberalism is obsolete. Whoever claims
that liberal democracy is obsolete, also claims that freedoms are obsolete, that the rule of
law is obsolete and that human rights are obsolete For us in Europe, these are and will
remain essential and vibrant values. What I find really obsolete are: authoritarianism,
personality cults, the rule of oligarchs."
Tusk's depiction of Putin being anti-democratic, anti-human rights and anti-law is a
specious misdirection, or as May would say, "cynical falsehood".
Political leaders like May and Tusk are living in denial. They seem to suffer from a charmed
delusion that all is rosy with the state of Western democracy. That somehow Western states are
the acme of benign "liberalism".
By blaming evident deep-seated problems of poverty and apathy towards establishment politics
on "sinister" targets of "populism" and "authoritarian strong men" is a form of escapism from
reality.
In May's case, she has added good reason to escape from reality. Her political career is
ending in disaster and disgrace for having led Britain into a shambles over its Brexit
departure from the European Union. Of course, she would like a distraction from her abysmal
record, and she seemed to find one in her farewell speech by firing a dud diatribe at
Putin.
But let's re-examine her self-congratulatory claim more closely. "No one comparing the
quality of life or economic success of liberal democracies like the UK, France and Germany to
the Russian Federation would conclude that our system is obsolete."
There are two parts to that.
First, May is giving the usual establishment spiel about presumed superiority of Western
"liberal democracy" as opposed to politics and governance in Russia.
This week coming, May hands in her resignation as Conservative party prime minister to the
unelected head of state, Queen Elizabeth. The British monarch and her heirs rule as official
head of state by a presumed "divine order". Some democracy that is!
May's successor will either be Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt. The next prime minister of
Britain will be elected solely by members of Britain's Conservative party. As the Washington
Post noted this week, the Tory party represents less than one per cent of the British
population. So, the new leader of the United Kingdom is being decided not by a democratic
national mandate, but by a tiny minority of party members whose demographic profile is
typically rightwing, ardent nationalists, pro-militarist, white and elderly males. Moreover,
the "selection" of new leader comes down to a choice between two politicians of highly dubious
quality whose foreign policy tendency is to play sycophants to Washington. The way Johnson and
Hunt have, for example, lent support to Trump's reckless aggression towards Iran is a portent
of further scraping and bowing to American warmongering typical of Britain's "special
relationship".
In the second part of May's presumed virtuous liberal democracy, she hails the "quality of
economic success" of her nation as opposed to Russian society.
No-one, least of all Putin, is denying that reducing poverty is a social challenge for
Russia. In a recent nationwide televised Q&A, the "elected" (please note) head of the
Russian state called poverty reduction a priority for his government. However, Russia certainly
doesn't need advice from the United Kingdom or many other Western states on that issue.
A recent major
study in Britain found that some 21 per cent of the population (14 million people) are
living in poverty. Homelessness and aggravated crime figures are also off the charts due to
collapsing public services over a decade of economic austerity as deliberate government policy.
The inequality gap between super-rich and poverty among the mass of people has exploded to a
chasm in Britain, as in the US and other Western states.
These are some of the urgent issues that Putin was referring to when he asserted the
"liberal idea is obsolete". Can anyone objectively surveying the bankrupt state of Western
societies honestly dispute that?
Western states are fundamentally broken down because "liberalism" is an empty term which
conceals rapacious corporate capitalism and the oligarchic rule of an elite political class.
The advocates of "liberalism" like Britain's May, Johnson, Hunt or Tusk are the ones who are
anti-democracy, anti-human rights and anti-law. Their denial about the systemic cause of
poverty and injustice within their own societies and their complicity in American imperialist
warmongering in the Middle East or belligerence towards Russia and China is the true "quality"
of their "democratic principles".
If that's not obsolete then what is? And that's why May took a weird parting shot at Putin
in a desperate diversion from reality.
"... All in all, it has to be recognised that Washington has been inconsistent and quite often unpredictable in its actions. For this reason, trying to predict anything in our relations with the US is a fruitless task. Let me reiterate that as far as Russia is concerned we are ready to patiently work on improving our relations. Of course, this will be possible only if Russia's interests are respected, and based on equality and mutual respect. ..."
"... Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of "being friends against someone." In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force. ..."
"... The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United States. ..."
"... ran regularly reaffirms to us its interest in regional stability through dialogue with all the interested countries, including the Gulf Arab states. ..."
"... As far as Russia is concerned, we are taking steps to de-escalate tensions. We are proactive in promoting the concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf implying a stage-by-stage approach to resolving conflicts and devising confidence building and control mechanisms. ..."
Question: Can an improvement in the relations with the United States be expected in
the near future?
Sergey Lavrov: An improvement will hardly materialise any time soon, since it is
anything but easy to sort out the mess that our relations are in, which is not our fault.
After all, bilateral relations require reciprocal efforts. We have to meet each other half
way.
Russia is ready to move in this direction, as we have said on a number of occasions. We
proceed from the premise that Russia and the United States bear special responsibility. We
are the two largest nuclear powers, the founding members of the United Nations and permanent
members of its Security Council. Cooperation between our two countries is key to ensuring
stability and predictability in international affairs. However, not everything depends on us.
It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.
The situation is quite complicated on the American side. On the one hand, President Donald
Trump talks about seeking to be on good terms with Russia, but this attitude is far from
prevalent in Washington. We see this in unfriendly steps, such as various groundless
accusations Russia faces, imposing financial and economic sanctions, seizing diplomatic
property, kidnapping Russian nationals in third countries, opposing Russia's foreign policy
interests, as well as attempts to meddle in our domestic affairs. We are seeing system-wide
efforts to reach out to almost all countries around the world and persuade them to scale back
their relations with Russia.
Many US politicians are trying to outshine each other in ramping up anti-Russia phobias
and they are using this factor in their domestic political struggles. We understand that they
will only escalate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, we will not
give up in despair. We will continue to look for common ground with the US despite all the
challenges that there are.
It is essential that the Russian and US presidents both understand that there is a need to
end the deadlock in our relations. During their June meeting which took place in Osaka the
two leaders spoke out in favour of stepping up economic cooperation, combining efforts to
settle regional crises, resuming dialogue on strategic stability, and also said that they
appreciated dialogue on combatting terrorism. Vladimir Putin invited Donald Trump to Moscow
to take part in the events to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in WWII.
All in all, it has to be recognised that Washington has been inconsistent and quite
often unpredictable in its actions. For this reason, trying to predict anything in our
relations with the US is a fruitless task. Let me reiterate that as far as Russia is
concerned we are ready to patiently work on improving our relations. Of course, this will be
possible only if Russia's interests are respected, and based on equality and mutual
respect.
Question: Relations with Iran are essential for Russia's geopolitics. However, Iran
has indulged in unacceptable aggressive rhetoric against the state of Israel on numerous
occasions and went beyond words. How is Russia's position any different from that of European
countries in the 1930s when they encouraged Hitler's anti-Soviet stance?
Sergey Lavrov:Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel
and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free
from the principle of "being friends against someone." In our contacts with the leaders of
all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful
solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force.
The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of
Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is
flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic
Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The
responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United
States.
As for the historical aspect of your question, it is not appropriate to project what
happened in Europe in the 1930s on the current developments in the Middle East. As we all
know, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sought to appease Hitler in order to direct
the German military might against the USSR. We are not seeing anything of this kind
today.
I ran regularly reaffirms to us its interest in regional stability through dialogue
with all the interested countries, including the Gulf Arab states. In addition to this,
Tehran has always stressed that it did not intend to undertake any aggressive action.
As far as Russia is concerned, we are taking steps to de-escalate tensions. We are
proactive in promoting the concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf implying a
stage-by-stage approach to resolving conflicts and devising confidence building and control
mechanisms. We are working with our partners to preserve the multilateral agreements to
promote a settlement on the Iranian nuclear programme.
"... If I understand this article correctly, MH17 was not just a Ukrainian operation, but a NATO operation, with the objective of using it as a false-flag operation to justify the launching a 9000 troop NATO invasion to capture the rebel-held territories and Crimea. This operation was averted at the last minute because the Malaysians got to the crash site first, and signed an agreement with the Donbass rebels to take the black-boxes and secure the site, thus removing the excuse for the invasion (protect the evidence from destruction), and because the Germans would not go along with a NATO invasion. ..."
"... If this is true, it goes a long way to explain why the countries involved in the investigation have so vehemently been covering up for the Ukranian Nazis. Rather, they've been covering up their own tracks. ..."
If I understand this article correctly, MH17 was not just a Ukrainian operation, but a
NATO operation, with the objective of using it as a false-flag operation to justify the
launching a 9000 troop NATO invasion to capture the rebel-held territories and Crimea. This
operation was averted at the last minute because the Malaysians got to the crash site first,
and signed an agreement with the Donbass rebels to take the black-boxes and secure the site,
thus removing the excuse for the invasion (protect the evidence from destruction), and
because the Germans would not go along with a NATO invasion.
If this is true, it goes a long way to explain why the countries involved in the
investigation have so vehemently been covering up for the Ukranian Nazis. Rather, they've
been covering up their own tracks.
The IASPS conference study group leader was a Zionist named Richard Perle, who attended as a
delegate from the American Enterprise Institute; while another Jewish neocon named Douglas
Feith attended as a representative of Feith and Zell Associates.
Both these individuals then emerged as key players in the Bush administration: Perle was
Chairman of George Bush's Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee, and Feith became Under
Secretary of Defense and the Pentagon's Policy Advisor.
They were joined by a long list of similarly Israel-first Zionists in the Bush
administration:
Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Defense Secretary and campaign advisor;
Robert Satloff, US National Security Council Advisor;
Rabbi Dov Zekheim, Under Secretary of Defense and Comptroller;
Elliott Abrams, National Security Council Advisor;
Marc Grossman, Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs;
Richard Haass, Director of Policy Planning at the State Department and Director of
National Security Programs;
Henry Kissinger, former Secretary of State, a Pentagon advisor who sat on the Pentagon's
Defense Policy Board;
James Schlesinger, another Pentagon advisor who also sat on the Pentagon's Defense Policy
Board;
Robert Zoellick, the US's Trade Representative;
Mel Sembler, President of the Export-Import Bank of the United States;
Israeli citizen Ari Fleischer, official White House spokesman;
Joshua Bolten, Bush's Chief Policy Director;
Steve Goldsmith, Senior Advisor to the President and domestic policy advisor;
Mark Weinberger, the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury;
Samuel Bodman, Deputy Secretary of Commerce;
Bonnie Cohen, Under Secretary of State for Management;
Ruth Davis, the Director of the Foreign Service Institute;
Lincoln Bloomfield, Assistant Secretary of State for Political Military Affairs;
Jay Lefkowitz, General Counsel of the Office of Budget and Management;
David Frum, Bush's official White House speechwriter;
Ken Melman, White House Political Director; and
Brad Blakeman, White House Director of Scheduling.
The scene was now set: all they needed was an excuse to maneuver America into destroying
Iraq for the benefit of Israel, according to the plan which Perle and Feith had already helped
to map out.
"... That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential enemies. ..."
"... As Politico recently reported, "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight ..."
"... Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that DoD reform is way down on his bucket list. ..."
Like all those soon to occupy positions of power in the EU, von der Leyen did not run in the
recent European elections for the position she is about to hold. She did not participate in the
debates in front of various national electorates. But she was chosen -- after the elections --
by the political class in Brussels, ostensibly for her faith in and loyalty to the European
superstate, and personally to the German chancellor Angela Merkel.
Another
report by the Rand Corporation , a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany a month
to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States. Von der Leyen is
very unpopular in the German army , but very popular with the Eurocrats.
She's a fervent supporter of a European army and a "United States of Europe" -- the
ultimate qualification for being president of the European Commission.
But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico
recently reported , "an investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest
instrument that lawmakers can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative
contracts from her ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight, and
whether a network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."
The scent of corruption is a common element among those who are to hold key positions in the
European Union over the next few years. Josep Borrell, minister of foreign affairs for the
socialist government of Spain,
was fined 30,000 euros for insider trading. He is expected to hold the foreign policy post
in the European Commission.
Christine Lagarde, most recently chief of the IMF, was involved in the case of an
arbitration panel that awarded a massive payout to a French tycoon while she was the finance minister of
France. A special court for ministerial misconduct found her guilty of "negligence" but "waived
any punishment or criminal record, citing her 'international reputation' and role in dealing
with 'the international financial crisis.'" A marvelously L'état, C'est
Moi form of legal reasoning. Lagarde is expected to be the next president of the
European Central Bank.
The common threads of corruption, incompetence, and lack of accountability are what unites a
political class that has divorced itself from the concerns of the average European. In the last
days before her confirmation, von der Leyen pursued a charm offensive that included a commitment
to a "Green New Deal," a continuation of
an open borders policy , and a further deepening and enlargement of the European
superstate. This included the story of her having
offered hospitality to a Syrian immigrant who "now speaks German fluently."
Obviously von der Leyen would never have won the May elections running on an agenda like
that. But of course, she never had to run a campaign to win the votes of the peoples of Europe.
The campaign that she did run was premised on her having built "an extensive international
network in politics and business," as another Politico
story put it .
Von der Leyen thrived in the networking atmosphere of World Economic Forum meetings, where
she "serves on the organization's board of trustees," Politico noted, adding, "She's
also forged close ties to powerful figures outside the world of politics, most notably
Bertelsmann, Europe's largest media company, which owns RTL, the Continent's largest commercial
broadcaster, book publisher Random House and a stable of magazines."
A senior Green quoted for the article said her fluency in French has helped her establish a
rapport with the French political class that is unrivaled in Berlin.
It's clear that von der Leyen's domestic record appears to have had little effect on her
election -- what matters is that she is universally liked by the who's who. "What matters most
in these circles is the personal connection," said an adviser to the leader of one of the EU's
smaller member states.
Those who count and those who are to be ruled are not the same group of people. That seems
to be the essence of modern European politics: a political class and ideological cult that
masquerades as a competent technocratic elite, despite its long and disastrous history. Von der
Leyen's terrible record as defense minister meant nothing. Neither did Lagarde's record as head
of the IMF, where, for instance, the Greek debt crisis was transformed into a social
catastrophe. The deciding factor was their dedication to something that "those who count" are
committed to. Elections are merely a necessary, archaic ritual of legitimization.
Napoleon Linarthatos is a writer based in New York.
On Monday 22 July 1940, a major meeting was held at the Reich Economic Ministry in Berlin,
under the chairmanship of Minister Walther Funk, to discuss a directive issued by Hermann
Göring on 22 June, concerning the organization of a Greater European Economic Area under
German leadership. The Germans were well advanced with their plans for a post-war settlement.
One of the difficulties of planning lay in the fact that the Führer's aims and decisions
were not yet known and the military measures against Britain were not yet concluded.
What? A techno-managerial clique ruling the rest of us Great Unwashed (see "Deplorables")? It
couldn't happen here, could it? It's OK if they went to the right schools, isn't it?
Too much use if the word disastrous. Disastrous is what Wilhelm II did to the German empire.
This is not disastrous, but it is concerning like a rudderless ship.
Don't be asinine. Russia is not going to invade anything and has no claim on any part of
western Europe. The only thing the German military is good for is for sucking up additional
budgetary funds.
Another report by the Rand Corporation, a think tank, revealed that it would take Germany
a month to mobilize in the case of a Russian invasion of the Baltic States.
For the sake of completeness, the Rand Corporation is actually a marketing arm of the
Pentagon fully funded by the U.S. government.
That said, Germany's military readiness directly relates to the invasion threat from
Russia Europe actually faces. I.e., ZERO. Washington should take note but of course it won't
because there is no money in it for the American Merchants of Death. And the Generals inside
the Pentagon just have too much fun fear-mongering about illusory existential
enemies.
Of course that does not dismiss the charges of cronyism and corruption associated with
Ursula von der Leyen. But re:
But there is more to the von der Leyen story. As Politico recently reported, "an
investigative committee of the German parliament -- the toughest instrument that lawmakers
can use to probe government misdeeds -- is digging into how lucrative contracts from her
ministry were awarded to outside consultants without proper oversight , and whether a
network of informal personal connections facilitated those deals."
Yet another U.S. mirror image. Because that is exactly how inside baseball works in
the Pentagon acquisition system. von der Leyen as a European Hack is no worse than the
Washington / Pentagon Hacks on the other side of the Atlantic. Note, MIC lifer and Raytheon
parasite Mark Esper currently sitting in the Big Seat in the Pentagon. You can be sure that
DoD reform is way down on his bucket list.
The real story is that taxpayers on both NATO poles are played for chumps by the Power
Elites.
Russ,
1/Only last week the House of Representatives passed a motion calling on the Federal
Government to investigate the possibility that Lyme Disease arose after a biowarfare
experiment led to the accidental release of infected ticks into the wild.
2/ Re the mural. Someone very kindly posted a link to an article in a San Fran newspaper
which reveals the astonishing stupidity of the campaign against the mural which, of course,
has nothing, really to do with artistic merit and is all about preserving hypocrisies.
The notion that First Nations descendants ought to be protected from depictions of the
genocide practised against their race is American Hypocrisy of the first water. Ditto the
idea that Black people should not be made to endure reminders that their ancestors (or those
who did not rape slaves) were kidnapped and enslaved.
It is amazing that those insisting that the murals have the merit of depicting historical
realities, too often swept under carpets, are elderly white bigots is idiotic.
3/
On the subject of American Culture see 2 above- from those pretending that Epstein's
involvement in prostitution is inexplicable, to those arguing that Venezuela is being
attacked and an attempt to install a white dictatorship mounted in order to bring democracy
to the country's poor people, to the ID politicos in San Fran who have been responsible,
through the politicians they have supported for racist incarceration policies, decades of
bloody war and the lowering of living standards and life expectancy throughout the USA-all is
Hypocrisy, lies socially imposed.
Of course America has nothing that could be compared with culture in many other parts of
the world. Anything that could provide the present with historical context is erased,
bulldozed, or painted over. Even the remaking of "classic" movies is done in part to separate
people's sense of the present from America's past. What America has in place of culture is an
eternal now , with the past being ephemeral and contingent upon the needs of the
narratives of the moment. Iconic American food culture is just ground and pureed mystery
protein and carbonated corn syrup water. The consumer doesn't want to know where those
come from, and ten minutes after consuming them they have largely forgotten the
experience.
Since the Apollo missions are in the news lately I will point out that we should expect an
effort in the not too distant future similar to what we are seeing in San Francisco to erase
the reality of that part of America's history. After all, the Apollo astronauts were all
white men, and that is traumatizing for the feeble-minded neolibs.
But you know, it isn't a bad thing to want to try to develop genuine and historically
anchored culture.
After the cold war ended in the 1990s the US quickly became the worlds leading police
state with mass incarceration, more of its own people in jail and prison then any nation in
the history of mankind. Who are we now to preach about freedom to the world ?
The primary weaknesses of liberal democracy and the capitalist order come from the
decisions made by voters and captains of industry. When political and economic freedom create
impoverishment, income disparity, racial strife, and nationalist xenophobia, the fruits of a
free society die on the vine. I see the Yahoo News elderly guys and the Russian trolls are
mystified by this obvious state of world affairs.
The problem is that for many decades american "words" contradict american "deeds", and the
whole world can easily see american double standards. That's why american "alternative" is
negative, not positive. As an example (one of 100s) we can remember that famous 1939 phrase
"Somoza may be a son of a b.., but he's our son of a b..."
Institutionalized group-think is the Great Enemy of any Empire. It leads to complacency
and a refusal to see the world as it really it, and to view oneself as uniquely gifted and
therefore exceptional and eternal.
Eventually this will become the prevailing wisdom in post-hegemony US just as it became so
in post-Empire Britain or post-Soviet Russia.
Lets see, mistakes:
Iraq war, Kosovo war, NATO enlargement, let Russia economy crushed at 90's. Let Libya
completely, Syria partially destroyed. Become arrogent see non-western nations low. Etc.
etc.
We can tell post cold-war is about "end of freedom commercial" and get real "wild
capitalism." China was mis-calculation. They decided to use it as cheap workforce and a
not-formal colony which ended surprisingly otherwise.
All above talk is a naive try to turn back "freedom commercial" days. Best thing USA can
teach now, how to kill people in every imaginable way.
The post Cold War worst mistake of US was the EU enlargement, Russia could have become
less paranoid and nationalist and perhaps a more solid democratic culture would have been
established
"Democracy" is simply the rule of a small elite minority of organised people over a much
greater majority of disorganised people. Russian "democracy" delivers what its people want to
the same degree as US "democracy". In fact, judging by Putins much higher domestic approval
numbers that the Trumpster, I'd say it delivers more...
Democracy" is simply the rule of a small elite minority of organised people over a much
greater majority of disorganised people. This is "oligarchy", not "democracy", the regime
that is running in Russia,China,NK and similar heavens of dictators.
"The result was an economic boom, a wave of democratization, and victory in an existential
struggle against Communism without yet another great-power global war. "
Victory? I assume you guys are aware that the Chinese are Communists?
Surely you didn't think that global completion over ideology and nationhood was resolved
in the Cold War? That was just a single geopolitical skirmish, one game in a whole season. It
ain't over till it over.... and its ain't done by a long shot.
"...are Communists?" Labels don't mean anything. They're huge, getting richer, have an
historically motivated chip on their shoulder and want to assume the place in the world,
particularly Asia, they feel is their due. They are sensitive to their public's opinion That
we have a buffoon in charge is certainly an impediment; we're still involved in 'unforced
error' wars the last appointed, incurious executive began as
China is hard to classify in the traditional sense. Its government is what we would call
"Communist", but its ruling ethos is essentially Confucianist , its social ideology is
Socialist, but it uses market economics, mercantilism and Capitalism to generate wealth and
pay for it all.
The Chinese are not fools. They have taken the best aspects of many ideologies and wielded
them into a system that seems to work well for them. What Americans might feel about it is
utterly superfluous.
Whether realizing or not, the author, quoting the National Security Strategy report of
2018, ironically described the US to a T when they wrote "For today, the dictator (the US)
may be your friend, but tomorrow he will need you as an enemy (China)". & "... (the US)
seek lifetime tenure (hegemony), expanding territories (bases) total authority (MAGA) &
obedient subjects"!
.
The philanthropic & much admired champion has grown into an ugly dictator, bending the
world to its will through soft & strong power. The global revulsion towards the misuse of
hegemonic muscle is what caused the US to lose its place in the Global Order! Simple as
that!
To this panglossian peaen to the American imperial system and its promotion of democracy,
human freedom and all other nice things against the dark forces represented by those other
guys like Russia and China, let us consider a reality of American foreign policy that belies
this tripe: US support of Saudi Arabia from 1945 to the present moment. I suggest that if any
of what this writer proposes we believe is true about the motives underlying US foreign
policy, then the theocratic and medieval regime Saudi Arabia would no longer exist. Yet it
continues to exist and is a valued partner of America.
@Hippopotamusdrome The
Germans themselves estimated that roughly 600,000 Soviet POWs had died as of late February
1942. Here's a link to a document that was translated for the Nuremberg Trials, but
apparently wasn't entered into the evidence:
In this document, General von Gravenitz (chief of the Wehrmacht supply services) described
the causes of the high mortality like so to Reich Minister Dr. Goebbels:
Furthermore, the OKW counts 1,900,000 Soviet Prisoners of War in the zones of interior
and in other occupied areas. As of 1 February 1942, the OKW, according to their tabulation,
had available 685,000 Soviet Prisoners of war, and of those 323,000 were present in the
Reich. He gave the following reasons for the high mortality: In the great "Kessel" (kettle)
battles, the Soviets were contained up to 22 days without any supplies whatsoever. The
German armies stormed forward, covering incredibly large distances. The German supply
services could bring up to the front only the most necessary ammunitions and living
necessities of the fighting troops. Thus, it would have been necessary to feed the
Soviet Prisoners of War from supplies of the countryside . However, these supplies
had been totally destroyed by the Soviets during their flight-like retreats. The early
and abnormal winter did the rest.
In other words, the Soviet scorched earth tactics destroyed the food supplies the Germans
had planned to feed the Soviet prisoners with. So then they starved. No genocidal intent was
needed. In fact, later in the same document it says:
He [still General Gravenitz] quoted the order of the Fuehrer of September 1941 to
the effect that Soviet Prisoners of War should be kept in condition to enable them to
work .
Hitler, who according to the politically correct among our historians wanted to have a
genocide of all Russians, just because he was a horrible racist, actually ordered his army
that they should be fed adequately. Unless this top ranking German general was lying to
Goebbels in their top secret conference.
So in the end, as I already wrote, it's still true that great numbers of Soviet POWs did
die in the winter of 1941/42, and that IS and remains a great tragedy. But again, hundreds of
thousands of Axis soldiers on the Eastern Front also died in this same period, and even
modern politically correct historians don't claim that Hitler made his own soldiers a target
of genocide. They died because adequate food, fuel, housing and medical care simply wasn't
available when the German logistics system had almost collapsed under the impact of the
Russian winter.
@Truth3 I would
encourage to research the Polish Typhus epidemic of 1916-1919.
It gives more context, because typhus had occurred in eastern Europe way before WWII, the
Soviet "revolution" was the starting point of this epidemic.
In this context, the Patton diary also sheds some light on the hygiene of the eastern
European jews from the Shtetls. And yeah, its embarrassing for the Jews, but they have not
changed much in that regard. Ie jewish females are forbidden to clean themselves during
menstruation period in some of the jewish circles.
A little research on Ellis Island and its function as decontamination island before
entering NY is also highly informative. They used Zyklon B as well to disinfect clothes and
people. There is even film footage of Ellis Island on the internet, showing immigrants
getting fumigated with Zyklon.
Furthermore, the US also operated gas tunnels to disinfect trains.
The sad truth is, Zyklon B was used to save lives.
If Germany wanted to kill all the inmates of the camps, they would have just locked the camps
up and had them die of Typhus.
Btw, Auschwitz had only ~40% jewish inmates, the Auschwitz death records revealed it after
the collapse of the Soviet Union. It also revealed births in the camps.
Zyklon was used to fight the Typhus epidemic, which could otherwise spread
uncontrolled.
Typhus carrying lice do not care what belief a human has before biting and infecting the
human. These lice travel far with animals and humans.
Typhus is a danger to ground water and everything, ie you cannot bury typhus infected corpses
near settlements, it would contaminate the water supply, hence cremation.
http://www.unz.com/article/myth-and-the-russian-pogroms/
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The anti-Jewish riots, or "pogroms" of late 19th-century Russia represent
one of the most decisive periods in modern Jewish, if not world, history. Most obviously, the riots had
demographic implications for western countries – around 80% of today's western Diaspora Jews are descendants
of those Jews who left Russia and its environs during the period 1880–1910. But perhaps the most lasting
legacy of the period was the enhancement of Jewish "national self-awareness," and the accelerated
development of "modern, international Jewish politics."
[A1]
John
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011)
p.xiii.
Little or no historiography has been
dedicated to peeling back the layers of "refugee" stories to uncover what really happened in the Russian
Empire in the years before and during the riots. This lack of historical enquiry can be attributed at least
in part to a great reluctance on the part of Jewish historians to investigate the pogroms in any manner
beyond the merely superficial. In addition, historical enquiry by non-Jewish historians into the subject has
been openly discouraged. For example, when Ukrainian historians discovered evidence proving that
contemporary media reports of Jewish casualties in that nation were exaggerated, the Jewish genealogy
website 'JewishGen,'
responded
by stating: "We believe that [these facts] are more than irrelevant because it redirects
public attention from the major topic: the genocidal essence of pogroms."
It should suffice to state here that
this response contravenes the very essence of historical enquiry – to uncover history as it actually
happened, irrespective of the uncomfortable truths which may lie therein. The statement could be translated
as "Let's not let the facts get in the way of a good story." Also, as this paper will show, the tendency to
portray the riots as "genocidal" is completely lacking in foundation. University of California Los Angeles
Professor of Sociology, Michael Mann, has provided substantial evidence indicating that "most perpetrators
did not conceive of removing Jews altogether."
[A4]
Michael
Mann,
The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005) p.142.
JewishGen's allusion to genocide should
also be seen as part of a broader problem in modern Jewish historiography. Rather than seeing the pogroms as
products of specific local circumstances, in which Jews would play at least an implicit role, there has been
a tendency to use them for comparative purposes. John Klier states that when used in a comparative sense,
"examples are drawn almost exclusively from the 20th century, and these events are then read back into the
earlier period of 1881–2," making any objective historical enquiry difficult, and implying the presence of
some non-existent 'pan-European' malaise in anti-Jewish actions.
Nonetheless, this series of essays will
seek to peel back the myths, to tease a few threads of truth from the veil which covers these events.
Encouragingly, some work has already begun in this respect. I.M. Aronson's assertion that the pogroms were
"planned or encouraged to one degree or another, by elements within the government itself,"
[A5]
I.M.
Aronson, 'Geographical and Socioeconomic factors in the 1881 Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Russia,'
Russian
Review
, Vol.39, No.1 (Jan. 1980) p.18.
has been dealt a death blow in recent years through
the concerted work of a small number of non-Jewish historians, mostly notably, University College London's
Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies, John Doyle Klier. In his 2005 work,
Russians, Jews, and the
Pogroms of 1881–2
, Klier asserts that "contemporary research has dispelled the myth that Russian
officials were responsible for instigating, permitting, or approving the pogroms."
[A6]
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.xiv.
This series of essays will attempt to
move further, adhering to the belief that the facts of the events remain paramount to historical enquiry
rather than being a 'distracting' irrelevance. The series will begin with an explanation of the origins of
Russia's "Jewish Question." Subsequent articles will concern the pogroms themselves and how myth and
exaggeration have plagued our conception of them. Finally, I will examine why these myths were developed,
and the broader implications of the prevalence of myth in Jewish 'history.'
Investigations carried out by special
committees discovered that in the decades prior to partition, Polish Jewry had enjoyed a demographic
explosion, with Jews now representing almost 20% of the entire population. In addition, it was discovered
that Jews controlled a full 75% of Polish exports, and that many were now spilling out of over-populated
urban centres into the countryside, making a living by monopolising the sale of liquor to peasants.
[A11]
Ibid,
p.85.
(Israel Friedlander,
The Jews of Russia and Poland
, (New York: G.P. Putnam, 1915), p.84.)
By 1774, complaints were reaching Russian officials from non-Jewish merchants who argued that Jewish ethnic
networking was propping up the monopoly of exports, and that this monopoly would shortly have dire
implications for the consumer.
[A12]
Simon
Dubnow,
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland
, (Bergenfield: Avontayu, 2000), p.173
These revelations were the key motivating factors in the decision to expel Warsaw's Jews in 1775, and until
the early 19
th
century there was a kind of stand-off between Poles and Jews.
[A13]
Ibid.
(Simon Dubnow,
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland
, (Bergenfield: Avontayu, 2000), p.173)
Napoleon's establishment of the Duchy of Warsaw in 1807 did little to alter the situation, as Napoleon
acceded to local sentiment which held that Jews should not feel the benefit of the new constitution until
they had "eradicated their peculiar characteristics."
[A14]
Ibid,
p.87.
(Simon Dubnow,
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland
, (Bergenfield: Avontayu, 2000), p.173)
In 1813, the government of the Duchy moved to break the Jewish monopoly on liquor, banning all Jews from
selling alcohol in the villages, bringing an end to the activity of "tens of thousands" of Jewish liquor
merchants in the provinces. Not surprisingly, when the Duchy was dissolved in 1815 following Napoleon's
failed attempt to invade Russia, Polish Jewry shed no tears.
In late 1815, the Congress of Vienna
was held. The aim of the congress was to give its assent to the formation of a new autonomous Polish kingdom
under the sovereignty of Russia. Although the bulk of Polish Jewry remained within the newly established
kingdom, tens of thousands also poured forth into other areas of the Russian Empire, ushering in an
uncomfortable age of fraught Russian-Jewish relations. The immediate reaction of the Russian government to
the acquisition of such large, and unwanted, Jewish populations was to prevent the penetration of these
populations from intrusion into the old Russian territories, and the solution reached was one of
containment. A new kind of settlement was created in provinces along the western frontier, and it became
known as the "Pale of Settlement." Although a large amount of negative connotations have been attributed to
the Pale, it was not an impermeable fortress. Certain Jews were permitted to reside outside these provinces,
they could visit trade fairs, and Jews were even permitted to study at Russian universities provided they
did not exceed quotas. By 1860, more than half of world Jewry resided in the Pale.
Following the Congress of Vienna,
wherever Jews resided in the Russian Empire, they overwhelmingly "served in a variety of middleman roles."
In some cities, "the Jewish mercantile element was numerically superior to the Christian," and there was a
gradual move towards the reacquisition of the liquor trade.
[A15]
Simon
Dubnow,
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland
, (Bergenfield: Avontayu, 2000), p.173
According to Klier, by 1830 Belorussian Jews were found to be "totally dominating trade" in that country.
[A16]
John
Klier,
Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History
, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004) p.4.
It was largely Klier's work in the late 1980s which began to truly shed light
on the origins of Russian-Jewish relations prior to 1914. Klier, born into a Catholic family in Kansas,
"rejected what might be called the Fiddler on the Roof pieties and simplifications. In book after book, he
emphasised that what the tsars and their ministers wanted, above all else, was for the Jewish settlements to
be orderly and productive."
[A17]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/oct/26/guardian...uaries
Klier further stressed that the much-maligned Pale of Settlement was simply the only response that the
Russian administration could come up with, faced as they were with the "baffling question" of how to deal
with the "fanaticism of ultra-Orthodox Jewry" which was thoroughly "unassimilable to official purposes."
[A18]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/oct/26/guardian...uaries
In 1841, investigations were carried
out into Russia's Jewish communities, and the subsequent reports pointed to three significant problems. The
first was persistent Jewish difference in dress, language, and religious and communal organization. The idea
underpinning this aloofness from non-Jewish society, the 'Chosen' status of the Jews and an accompanying
ethnic chauvinism, was said to be particularly harmful to Jewish-Gentile relations, particularly when it was
reinforced through "a system of male education that was thought to inculcate anti-Christian interpretations
of the Talmud."
[A19]
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.3.
The second, related, problem was that
Jewish economic practices were also rooted in this aloofness. The Talmud "encouraged and justified
unreserved economic exploitation based on cheating and exploiting the non-Jews,"
[A20]
Ibid.
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.3.)
in a validation of Max Weber's
theory of 'internal' and 'external' ethics, whereby "members of a cohesive social unit observe different
moral standards among themselves compared with those observed in relation to strangers."
[A21]
Jacob
Katz,
Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1962) p.56.
The third aspect of the Russian 'Jewish Question,' was the
issue of Jewish loyalty. The Jews of the Russian Empire had evidently retained the
kahal
of
pre-partition Polish Jewry. The
kahal
was a formal system of Jewish communal leadership and
government, entirely separate from the Russian state. Although tacitly tolerated by the state for its tax
collection capabilities, Jewish loyalty to the
kahal
was absolute, going beyond the merely fiscal.
Almost all Jews continued to resort to Jewish courts.
John Klier states that following these
revelations, "state and society shared a consensus that Jews could be – and must be – reformed and
transformed into good subjects of the realm."
[A22]
Ibid.
(Jacob Katz,
Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962) p.56.)
Under Emperor Alexander I (1801–25) there had been
attempts to encourage Jews to pursue more productive economic activities. Generous concessions were made to
Jews in the hope that they would abandon their middleman roles, as well as the distilleries and taverns of
the provinces, and take up work in agricultural colonies. Klier states that the "embeddedness of the Jews in
the economic and social life of the imperial borderlands ensured that despite legislative initiatives,
Jewish economic life remained largely unchanged."
[A23]
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.4
In 1844, under Nicholas I, the Russian
government began a program of reforms and legislation designed to break down Jewish exclusivity and
incorporate the nation's Jews more fully into Russian society. Not surprisingly, the government first took
aim at the
kahal
, banning it as "an illegal underground structure."
[A24]
Ibid.
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.4)
The significance of the banning
of the
kahal
went beyond tackling the issue of Jewish loyalty. The mutual assistance offered by the
kahal
was felt to have had economic implications – "it was the mutual support provided by the
kahal
that ensured that Jews were more than a match for any competitor, even the arch-exploiter of the
Russian village, the kulak."
[A25]
Ibid.
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.4)
The civil rights of any "Jews
who were perceived to be engaged in productive undertakings" were extended, though there were few takers.
Nicholas I even conceived of, and supported, the establishment of state-financed Jewish schools, in the hope
that such establishments would lead to the development of a more progressive and integrative Russian Jewry.
Unfortunately for Nicholas, what his system produced was a cadre of Jewish intellectuals profoundly hostile
to the state.
Emperor Alexander II continued the
efforts of Mother Russia to gather in her Jews. He abolished serfdom in 1861. He relaxed efforts to change
the economic profile of Russian Jewry, extending the rights of educated Jews and large-scale merchants. His
was a program aimed at reconciliation, an abandonment of the stick in favour of the carrot. Education was
made fully open to Jews, and Jews could sit on the juries of Russian courts. Conditions on settlement and
mobility in the Pale were relaxed further. Klier states that "Jews even became the subject of sympathetic
concern for the leaders of public opinion. Proposals for the complete emancipation of the Jews were widely
mooted in the press."
[A26]
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.5
These measures, however, were also
accompanied by a growing uneasiness with the way the Jews of Russia took advantage of them. There was little
in the way of gratitude, and the measures did not bring about the great changes that had been hoped for. The
nationalist revolt of the Poles in 1863, and the fact that a large number of wealthy Jews were found to have
funded some of the rebels cast new doubts on Jewish loyalty. Having emancipated the peasantry and adopted a
paternalistic concern for the former serfs, the government also viewed with alarm the rapidity with which
the "Jews were exploiting the unsophisticated and ignorant rural inhabitants, reducing them to a Jewish
serfdom."
[A27]
Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.5
It also quickly became apparent that
despite new military legislation, Jews were noticeable in their overwhelming avoidance of military service.
In retaliation, the government clamped down on rural tavern ownership, and introduced more stringent
recruitment procedures specifically for Jews. It has been claimed that Jews were also banned from land
ownership at this time, but Klier provides evidence that Jews were still able to buy any peasant properties
sold at auction for tax arrears, as well as any property within the Pale not owned by Russian gentry.
[A28]
Ibid.
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.5)
By the end of Alexander II's reign,
disillusionment with the government's policy at handling the Jewish Question was widespread. The vast
majority of Jews had stubbornly persisted in the unproductive trades, continued in their antipathy to
Russian culture, and refused to make any meaningful contribution to Russian society. An air of resignation
swept the country. Some newspapers even advocated abolishing the Pale, if only to alleviate that region from
bearing the burden of the Jews alone. Other papers opposed this "fearing for the welfare of the peasantry at
a time when the cultural level of the peasantry made them an easy target for exploitation."
[A29]
Ibid,
p.6
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.5)
Meanwhile Jews were beginning to
swamp higher education establishments. In Odessa, there were reports that in school after school, Jews were
"driving Christians from the school benches," and "filling up the schools."
[A30]
Ibid.
(Klier,
Russians, Jews, and the Pogroms of 1881-2
, p.5)
On the eve of the assassination of
Alexander II, Russia's Jewish Question remained unanswered. Decades of legislation had done little to change
the nature of Russian Jewry, which remained ethnically, politically, and culturally homogenous. The new
Jewish intelligentsia had turned on the hand that fed it, failing to encourage the adaptation of their
fellow Jews, moving instead to defend them and advocate for their interests. In terms of educational and
social opportunities, Jews had been given an inch and taken a mile. They had swamped the schools, and added
to a group of emergent Jewish capitalists. In 1879 Russian authorities were being lobbied by a Rabbinic
Commission for full emancipation, an ominous prospect for those concerned about the well-being of Russian
peasantry.
The breaking point, when it came, did
not emerge from the ether, but from this historical background. In part two we will examine the more
immediate origins of the anti-Jewish riots and how the riots proceeded. We will do away with petty
distractions, dispelling myths with facts; and as we venture into the Pale, we now do so with a more
complete view of the Jew we find there.
Having grounded ourselves in the
history of Russia's Jewish Question, it is now time for us to turn our attention to the anti-Jewish riots of
the 1880s. The following essay will first provide the reader with the standard narrative of these events
advanced by Jewish contemporaries and the majority of Jewish historians -- a narrative which has
overwhelmingly prevailed in the public consciousness. The latter half of the essay will be devoted to
dissecting one aspect of the Jewish narrative, and explaining how events really transpired. Other aspects of
the Jewish narrative will be examined in later entries in this series. While a work like this can come in
for heavy criticism from certain sections of the population who may denounce it as 'revisionist,' I can only
say that 'revisionism' should be at the heart of every historical work. If we blindly accept the stories
that are passed down to us, we are liable to fall victim to what amounts to little more than a glorified
game of Chinese whispers. And, if we taboo the right of the historian to reinterpret history in light of new
research and new discoveries, then we have become far removed from anything resembling true scholarship.
In 1881 the 'Russo-Jewish Committee,'
(RJC) an arm of Britain's Jewish elite, mass-produced a pamphlet entitled "The Persecution of the Jews in
Russia," and began disseminating it through the press, the churches, and numerous other channels. By 1899,
it was embellished and published as a short book, and today digitized copies are freely available online.
[B1]
http://archive.org/stream/persecutionofjew00russ
By the early 20th century, the pamphlet had even spawned a four-page journal called
Darkest Russia – A
Weekly Record of the Struggle for Freedom
, ensuring that the average British citizen did not go long
without being reminded of the 'horrors' facing Russian Jews.
[B2]
Max
Beloff,
The Intellectual in Politics: And other essays
, (London: Taylor and Francis, 1970) p.135
The fact that these publications were
mass
produced should provide an indication as to their
purpose: It is clear that these publications represented one of the most ambitious propaganda campaign in
Jewish history, and combined with similar efforts in the United States, they were aimed at gaining the
attention of, and 'educating,' the Western nations and ensuring the primacy of the 'Jewish side of the
story.' Implicit in this was not only a desire to provoke anti-Russian attitudes, but also copious amounts
of sympathy for the victimized Jews -- sympathy necessary to ensure that mass Jewish chain migration to the
West went on untroubled and unhindered by nativists. After all, wasn't the bigoted nativist just a step
removed from the rampaging Cossack?
The first element of the narrative
advanced by the RJC is essentially a manipulation of the history of Russian-Jewish relations. It holds that
the Jews of Eastern Europe have been oppressed for centuries, their whole lives "hampered, from cradle to
grave, by restrictive laws."
[B3]
The
Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.3.
It was
claimed that the Russians had an unwritten law: "That no Russian Jew shall earn a living."
[B4]
Ibid,
p.4
(
The Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.3.)
Russian Jews, according to the Russo-Jewish Committee, have wanted nothing more than to participate in
Russian society, but have been rebuffed time and again as "heretics and aliens." The Pale is an impenetrable
fortress, where every Jew "must live and die." Implicit in this interpretation of the history of
Russian-Jewish relations in the belief that "the fount and origin of all the ills that assail Russian Jewry"
has nothing to do with the Jews themselves, but everything to do with the Church, the State, and the Pale.
In essence, the plight of the Jews was the result of nothing more than irrational hatred. Jews adopt a meek
and passive role in this narrative, having committed no wrong-doing other than being Jews. They are also
presented as the
only
victims of Russian violence. There is no acknowledgement of failed Russian
efforts to break down the Jewish walls of exclusivity and claim the Jews as brothers. In fact, there is no
reference at all to the walls of exclusivity. The pogroms themselves, according to the Jewish narrative,
broke out following the assassination of Alexander II, when shock, anger and a desire for revenge brought
this irrational, rootless hatred to the surface.
The second element of the Jewish
narrative is that the government and petty officialdom had some role to play in organizing and directing the
pogroms. Much disdain is heaped on the government, and petty officialdom, which was said to have been
afflicted with "a chronic anti-Semitic outlook." It was claimed that when the riots began, the government
was "not altogether sorry to let the excitement of the people vent itself on the Jews."
[B5]
The
Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.5
In reference
to the restrictive May Laws, the authors were forced to concede they had never really been enforced, but
maintained that "whether moderately or rigorously applied, the May Laws still remained on the Russian
Statute Book."
[B6]
Ibid,
p.8
(
The Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.5)
The third element of the Jewish
narrative is that the pogroms were genocidal, and that they had been organized and perpetrated by groups
seeking the extermination of the Jews. The 1899 edition of "The Persecution of the Jews in Russia" included
a copy of a lengthy letter written to the
London Times
by Nathan Joseph, Secretary of the RJC,
dated November 5th, 1890. In the letter, Joseph claimed that in the present circumstances "hundreds of
thousands could be exterminated,"
[B7]
Ibid,
p.36
(
The Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.5)
and
that Russian legislation in relation to Jews represented "an instrument of torture and persecution." In sum,
the Jews of Russia were claimed to be living under "a sentence of death," and it was further claimed that
"the executions are proceeding." The letter ends with an appeal to "Civilized Europe" to intervene, chastise
Russia, and aid the victimized Jews.
[B8]
Ibid,
p.38.
(
The Persecution of the Jews in Russia
, (London: Russo-Jewish Committee, 1899), p.5)
The fourth key element of the Jewish
narrative is that the pogroms were extremely violent in nature. Contemporary media reports especially were
the source of most of the atrocity stories, reportedly gleaned from newly-arrived 'refugees' who had given
statements to the Russo-Jewish Committee about the pogroms they had fled. In these reports, which were
carried very regularly by both the
New York Times
and the
London Times
, Russians were
charged with having committed the most fiendish atrocities on the most enormous scale. Every Jew in the
Russian Empire was under threat. Men had been ruthlessly murdered, tender infants had been dashed on the
stones or roasted alive in their own homes. During a British parliamentary consultation on the pogroms in
1905, a Rabbi Michelson claimed that "the atrocities had been so fiendish that they could find no parallel
even in the most barbarous annals of the most barbarous peoples."
[B9]
Anthony
Heywood,
The Russian Revolution of 1905: Centenary Perspectives
(New York: Routledge, 2005) p.266.
The
New York Times
reported that during the 1903 Kishinev pogrom "babes were literally torn to
pieces by the frenzied and bloodthirsty mob."
[B10]
"Jewish
Massacre Denounced,"
New York Times
, April 28, 1903, p.6
A common theme in most contemporary
atrocity stories was the brutal rape of Jewish women, with most reports including mention of breasts being
hacked off. There are literally thousands of carbon-copy reports in which it is claimed that mothers were
raped alongside their daughters. There is simply not enough space to cite extensively from these articles,
but they number in their thousands and are available to anyone with access to the digitized archives of any
major newspaper, or the microfilm facilities at major libraries. In addition, these articles claim that
whole streets inhabited by Jews had been razed, and the Jewish quarters of towns had been systematically
fired.
The RJC charged the government with
criminal sympathy, the local authorities generally with criminal inaction, and some of the troops with
active participation. The situation, they argued, was simply so hopeless and the possibility of
extermination was so great, that the only way out was for the civilized nations of the West to throw open
their doors and let in these poor 'Hebrews'.
And to a great extent this is exactly
what the churches, the politicians, and the media agreed to. This capitulation to manipulated conscience
ushered in the greatest migration in Jewish history, with profound consequences for us all. But there was
just one small problem -- the vast majority of this narrative was a calculated, designed, and expertly
promoted fraud, furthered by the willing participation of Russian-Jewish emigrants who wished to ease their
own access to the West and obtain "relief money from Western Europe and America."
[B18]
Albert
Lindemann,
Esau's Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews
(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997) p.291.
Let us first turn our attention to the
atrocity stories. Prior to any major reports of violence, the British public was already being primed to
hate the Russian government and accept the Jewish narrative. John Doyle Klier points out that the
Daily
Telegraph
was at that time Jewish-owned, and was particularly "severe" in its reports on Russian
treatment of Jews prior to 1881.
[B19]
John
Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.399
In the pages of this
publication, it was stated that "these Russian atrocities are only the beginning. [T]he Russian officials
themselves countenance these barbarities."
[B20]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.399)
Around this time in
Continental Europe, Prussian Rabbi Yizhak Rülf established himself as an "intermediary" between Eastern
Jewry and the West, and, according to Klier, one of his specialities was the spreading of "sensationalized
accounts of mass rape."
[B21]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.399)
Other major sources of pogrom atrocity
stories were the
New York Times
, the London
Times
, and the
Jewish World
. It would
be the
Jewish World
which furnished the majority of these tales, having sent a reporter "to visit
areas that had suffered pogroms."
[B22]
Ibid,
p.400
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.399)
Most of the other
papers simply reprinted what the
Jewish World
reporter sent them. The atrocity stories carried by
these newspapers provoked global outrage. There were large-scale public protests against Russia in Paris,
Brussels, London, Vienna, and even in Melbourne, Australia. However, "it was in the United States that
public indignation reached its height." Historian Edward Judge states that the American public was spurred
on by reports of "brutal beatings, multiple rapes, dismemberment of corpses, senseless slaughter, painful
suffering and unbearable grief."
[B23]
Edward
Judge,
Easter in Kishinev: Anatomy of a Pogrom
(New York: New York University Press, 1993) p.89.
Furthermore, Klier states that the
atrocity stories compiled by the
Jewish World
correspondent, which went on to be so influential in
manipulating Western perceptions of the events, must be treated with "extreme caution."
[B27]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
The reporter
"portrayed the pogroms dramatically, as great in scale and inhuman in their brutality. He reported numerous
accounts where Jews were burned alive in their homes while the authorities looked on."
[B28]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
There are hundreds
of instances where he references the murder of children, the mutilation of women, and the biting off of
fingers.
Klier states that "the author's most
influential accounts, given their effect on world opinion, were his accounts of the rape and torture of
girls as young as ten or twelve."
[B29]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
In 1881 he reported
25 rapes in Kiev, of which five were said to have resulted in fatalities, in Odessa he claimed 11, and in
Elizavetgrad he claimed 30.
[B30]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
Rape featured
prominently in the reports, not because rapes were common, but because rape "even more than murder and
looting" was known to "generate particular outrage abroad." Klier states that "Jewish intermediaries who
were channelling pogrom reports abroad were well aware of the impact of reports of rape, and it featured
prominently in their accounts."
[B31]
Ibid,
p.12
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
The two most
dramatic and gruesome accounts came from Berezovka and Borispol. In fact, as the year neared its end, the
reports became more and more gruesome and brutal in the details they conveyed.
There is, of course, a reason for this.
As the non-Jewish public began to tire of the reports and switched their minds to the coming Christmas
festivities, Klier states that records show the RJC made a conscious and calculated decision to "keep
Russian Jewry before the eyes of the public."
[B32]
Ibid,
p.404
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
A key component of
this strategy was to take the accounts of the Special Correspondent and publish them in a more widely
circulated and respected newspaper. They settled on the London
Times
, which was already predisposed
to "critical editorial faulting of the Russian government." Klier further states that these evidently false
reports "garnished with the prestige of
The Times
and devoid of any attribution, subsequently
published as a separate pamphlet, and translated into a variety of European languages became the
definitive Western version of the pogroms."
[B33]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
As increasingly lurid atrocity tales
again captured the attention of the Gentile public, the British Government found itself under pressure to
intervene. The British Government, however, adopted a more cautious approach and undertook its own
independent investigations into events in the Russian Empire. Its findings, published as a "Blue Book,"
"presented an account of events at great variance with that offered by
The Times
."
[B34]
Ibid,
p.405. (
Correspondence Respecting the Treatment of Jews in Russia, Nos. 1 and 2,
1882, 1883)
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.400)
The most notable
aspect of the independent inquiry is the outright denial of mass rape. In January 1882, Consul-General
Stanley objected to all of the details contained within reports published by
The Times
, mentioning
in particular the unfounded "accounts of the violation of women."
[B35]
John
Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405
He further stated that his
own investigations revealed that there had been no incidences of rape during the Berezovka pogrom, that
violence was rare, and that much of the disturbance was restricted to property damage. In relation to
property damage in Odessa, Stanley estimated it to be around 20,000 rubles, and rejected outright the Jewish
claim that damage amounted to over one million rubles.
Vice-Consul Law, another independent
investigator, reported that he had visited Kiev and Odessa, and could only conclude that "I should be
disinclined to believe in any stories of women having been outraged in those towns."
[B36]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405)
Another
investigator, Colonel Francis Maude, visited Warsaw and said that he could "not attach any importance" to
atrocity reports emanating from that city.
[B37]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405)
At Elizavetgrad,
instead of whole streets being razed to the ground, it was discovered that a small hut had lost its roof. It
was further discovered that very few Jews, if any, had been intentionally killed, though some died of
injuries received in the riots. These were mainly the result of conflicts between groups of Jews who
defended their taverns and rioters seeking alcohol. The small number of Jews who had been intentionally
killed had fallen victim to unstable individuals who had been drunk on Jewish liquor -- accusations of
murderous intent among the masses were simply unfounded and unsubstantiated by the evidence.
The revelations came at a bad time for
the RJC, which was at that time attempting to move the British Government to "act in some way on behalf of
persecuted Russian Jewry."
[B40]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405)
It resorted to
republishing (in the
Times
) its pamphlet on persecution in Russia twice in one month, presumably in
the belief that blunt repetition would suffice to overcome tangible evidence. Klier states that the pieces
were examples of "masterful" propaganda, as they attempted to undermine the credibility of the Government
consuls, while sycophantically appealing to "the wise and noble people of England," who "will know what
weight should be attached to such denials and refutations."
[B41]
Ibid,
p.406.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405)
The RJC offered its
own "corroborative evidence of the most undeniable kind," though of course the exact source of this evidence
was not specified beyond "persons occupying high official positions in the Jewish community" and "Jewish
refugees."
In essence, the people of western
nations were being asked to trust an anonymous Rabbi on the other side of the world rather than identifiable
representatives of their own government. The pieces, states Klier, "painted the familiar picture of murder
and rape," and despite the debunking statements of the consuls, "a number of mother/daughter rapes, which
had already done so much to outrage British public opinion, were again repeated."
[B42]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.405)
Although the move
for British government intervention failed, in the battle for public opinion "the RJC clearly won the day,"
and the
Times
and the RJC remained good bedfellows.
The Consuls were outraged. Stanley
reiterated the fact that his intensive investigations, which he carried out at great personal cost with a
serious leg injury, illustrated that "
The Times'
accounts of what took place at each of those
places contains the greatest exaggerations, and that the account of what took place at some of those places
is absolutely untrue."
[B43]
John
Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.407.
He related the fact that
a Rabbi in Odessa had "not heard of any outrages on women there," and that the object of almost every pogrom
he had investigated was simple "plunder."
[B44]
John
Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.408.
Enraged by the lies
circulating in Britain and America, Stanley "went right to the top," interviewing state rabbis and asking
for evidence and touring pogrom sites. In Odessa, where a wealth of atrocity stories had originated, he was
able to confirm "one death, but no looting of synagogues or victims set alight." There was no evidence that
a single rape had taken place. One state Rabbi admitted that he had not heard of any outrages of women in
Berezovka and further assured Stanley that he "could with a clear conscience positively deny that any deaths
or any violations had occurred there during the disturbances of last year."
[B45]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.408.)
He again sent this
report to his superior in London, with a note saying "This is in accordance with all the information I have
received and forwarded to your Lordship, and which I think more credible than anonymous letters in
The
Times
."
[B46]
Ibid.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.408.)
Despite Stanley's best efforts the
Jewish narrative advanced by the RJC, imbued with atrocity tales, has remained unalterably attached in
Western perceptions of the pogroms. The Blue Book was smothered by the more visible, and oft-repeated, tales
of the RJC and organisations like it around the globe. Only with the decade-long research of John Klier has
some revision of this narrative, grounded in scholarship and archival evidence, been possible. In light of
this evidence, one can only conclude that stories of rape, murder and mutilation were "more legendary than
factual."
[B47]
Ibid,
p. 13.
(John Doyle Klier,
Russians, Jews and the Pogroms of 1881-82
, p.408.)
However, the task
remains to further dismantle and analyse other aspects of the Jewish narrative, and to seek the true motives
behind its creation.
We continue our series of essays
examining the Russian Pogroms with this essay on the part played by Jews in provoking the disturbances. As
stated in Part Two, one of the key problems with existing historiography on the pogroms (and 'anti-Semitism'
generally) is that these narratives invariably argue that the plight of the Jews was the result of nothing
more than irrational hatred. Jews adopt a meek and passive role in this narrative, having committed no
wrong-doing other than being Jews. There is no sense of Jewish agency, and one is left with the impression
that Jews historically have lacked the capacity to
act
in the world. In almost every single
academic and popular history of the pogroms, the author blindly accepts, or willfully perpetuates, the basic
premise that Jews had been hated in the Russian Empire for centuries, that this hatred was irrational and
rootless, and that the outbreak of anti-Jewish riots late in the 19
th
century was a 'knee-jerk'
emotional response to the assassination of the Tsar and some blood libel accusations.
This is of course far from the truth,
but the prevalence of this 'victim paradigm' plays two significant roles. Firstly, Jewish historiography is
saturated with allusions to the "unique" status of Jews, who have suffered a "unique" hatred at the hands of
successive generations of Europeans. In essence, it is the notion that Jews stand alone in the world as the
quintessential "blameless victim." To allow for any sense of Jewish agency -- any argument that Jews may have
in some way contributed to anti-Jewish sentiment -- is to harm the perpetuation of this paradigm. In this
sense, the 'victim paradigm' also contributes heavily to the claim for Jewish uniqueness and, as Norman
Finkelstein has pointed out, one can clearly see in many examples of Jewish historiography the tendency to
focus not so much on the "suffering of Jews" but rather on the simple fact that "Jews suffered."
[C1]
Norman
Finkelstein, 'The Holocaust Industry,'
Index on Censorship
, 29:2, 120-130, p.124
As a
result, the paradigm offers no place to non-Jewish suffering. Simply put, the 'victim paradigm' is a form of
secular "chosenness." This aspect of the narrative is seen, quite rightly, as a useful tool in the here and
now. There is perhaps no race on earth which uses its history to justify its actions in the present quite
like the Jewish people. From seeking reparations to establishing nation states, Jewish history is one of the
foundation stones propping up Jewish international politics in the present. As such, Jewish history is
carefully constructed and fiercely defended. The interplay between Jewish history and contemporary Jewish
politics is plain to see -- I need only make reference to the terms "revisionist" and "denier" to conjure up
images of puppet trials and prison cells.
Secondly, the omission of the Jewish
contribution to the development of anti-Semitism (be it in a village setting or a national setting), leaves
the spotlight burning all the more ferociously on the 'aggressor.' Within this context, the blameless victim
is free to make the most ghastly accusations, basking in the assurance that his own role, and by extension
his own character, is unimpeachable. The word of this untainted, unique, blameless victim is taken as fact --
to doubt his account is to be in league with the 'aggressor.' In Part Two we explored the manner in which
the RJC took full advantage of this construct to purvey appalling, and unfounded, atrocity stories. More
generally, exaggerated tales of brutality by non-Jews are commonplace in Jewish literature and
historiography, and go hand in hand with images of dove-like Jews. For example, Finkelstein has pointed to
Jerzy Kosinski's
The Painted Bird
, a work now widely acknowledged as "the first major Holocaust
hoax," as an example of this "pornography of violence."
[C2]
Ibid.
(Norman Finkelstein, 'The Holocaust Industry,'
Index on Censorship
, 29:2, 120-130, p.124)
The twin concepts of Jewish blamelessness and extreme Gentile brutality are inextricably bound up together,
and supporters of one strand of the 'victim paradigm' are invariably supporters of the other. Take for
example that high priest of Jewish chosenness, Elie Wiesel, who praised Kosinki's pastiche of
sadomasochistic fantasies as "written with deep sincerity and sensitivity."
[C3]
Ibid,
p.125.
(Norman Finkelstein, 'The Holocaust Industry,'
Index on Censorship
, 29:2, 120-130, p.124)
Having clarified this theoretical
framework, we now turn our attention to deconstructing the second strand of the pogrom 'victim paradigm.' To
deal most effectively with the question of Jewish culpability in the souring of relations between Jews and
non-Jews, we will need to probe deeper, and with more focus, than we endeavored to do in Part One. This
essay will focus on specific examples of anti-Jewish disturbance in the Russian Empire prior to 1880, with a
particular focus on Jewish economic practices preceding these events.
For the reasons discussed above, the
majority of Jewish historians have long displayed an aversion to the idea that Jewish economic practices
have played a significant role historically in provoking anti-Semitism. For example, Leon Poliakov in
The History of anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner
, argues that the idea of economic anti-Semitism
is "devoid of real explanatory value."
[C4]
Leon
Poliakov
The History of anti-Semitism: From Voltaire to Wagner
(Pennsylvania: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2003) p.viii
Similarly, Jonathan Freedman has stated that, in explaining
anti-Jewish attitudes, economic anti-Semitism should play only a very "small explanatory role."
[C5]
Jonathan
Freedman,
The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America
(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002) p.60.
Both of these historians posit that theology, and by
extension Christianity (and therefore Western culture) is the fount and origin of anti-Semitism. Robert
Weinberg, in his 1998 article on
Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History
, explains anti-Semitic
outbreaks of violence in Eastern Europe by stating that they were the product of "the frustrations of
Russian and Ukrainian peasants, workers and town dwellers who, for the most part, spontaneously took out
their frustrations on a time-honored scapegoat, the Jews."
[C6]
Robert
Weinberg, 'Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History,'
Jewish History
, Vol.12 (1998), 71-92, p.72
Weinberg refrains from stating where precisely these 'frustrations' emerge from, but note again the
extremely passive Jewish role in his analysis.
Conversely, those historians who have
accepted that economic issues have played a role in provoking anti-Semitism fail to engage in actual case
studies of economically provoked anti-Jewish actions, preferring instead to probe "images" or stereotypes
which allegedly infuse the consciousness of non-Jews. For example Professor of Israel Studies at Oxford
University, Derek J. Penslar, has stated that economic anti-Semitism is nothing more than "a double helix of
intersecting paradigms, the first associating the Jew with paupers and savages and the second conceiving of
Jews as conspirators, leaders of a financial cabal seeking global domination."
[C7]
Derek
J. Penslar,
Shylock's Children: Economics and Jewish Identity in Modern Europe,
(Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2001) p.13.
By choosing to discuss "images" and concepts rather
than say, an actual incident such as the Limerick Anti-Jewish Riots, Penslar engages in a practice equally
duplicitous to that engaged in by Poliakov and Freedman. Penslar's thesis only superficially acknowledges
the economic role, while really lending more weight to the argument that European society has suffered some
kind of neurosis in relation to its Jews. Penslar deftly offers us an argument in which Jews and economics
play a role in the development of an anti-Semitic "image," without placing the Jew in anything but a passive
role. Penslar's "images" are also devoid of gradation -- Europeans, if they hold to economically motivated
anti-Semitism, either view Jews as pauper savages or global financiers. This despite the case that most
European peasants simply didn't
need
to have these extreme conceptions of Jews, and probably
didn't. Exploitative economic practices by local Jewish capitalists, the existence of local Jewish
monopolies on such items as alcohol, and the Jewish practice of in-group/out-group ethics would be more than
sufficient to provoke anti-Jewish resentment.
But references to
this
motivation for anti-Jewish action is entirely absent from Jewish historiography on the causes of
anti-Semitism, most likely because it comes extremely close to demolishing the 'victim paradigm.' This
essay, which focuses on actual case studies (in particular the city of Odessa), will argue that the
anti-Jewish riots of the 1880s, like many riots before them, were motivated by economic anti-Semitism, and
that this economic anti-Semitism had its origins not in the European psyche, but in the day to day economic
interactions of Jews had with the non-Jews of Odessa. It attempts to rediscover the Jewish role, and to
place it front and centre.
The first disturbance involving Jews to
occur in the Russian Empire, and which left sufficient documentation, was the 1821 Odessa pogrom. Weinberg
has painted a picture of Odessa as being some kind of multicultural heaven at this time. He states that the
city "benefited from the presence of German, Italian, French, Greek, and English residents whose cultural
and intellectual tastes influenced local life."
[C8]
Robert
Weinberg, 'Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History,'
Jewish History
, Vol.12 (1998), 71-92, p.73
By the 1820s street signs were written in Russian and Italian, the city's first newspaper appeared in
French. Odessa, according to Weinberg, had a thriving art scene, particularly in relation to theatre, music,
and opera.
Violence erupted in 1821 when, during
the Greek War of Independence, a group of Muslims and Jews murdered and then mutilated Gregory V, the Greek
Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul. In the aftermath, many Greeks fled with Gregory's remains from Istanbul to
Odessa, where his funeral procession was held. Surviving documents suggest that violence broke out when a
large contingent of Odessa's Jewish population showed open disrespect for the procession.
[C11]
John
Klier,
Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History
, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p.16.
How do we describe such events? In
light of the context of these disturbances, does the term "pogrom" or "anti-Jewish riot" withstand scrutiny?
Certainly not. Note my use of the terms "inter-ethnic violence" and "disturbance involving Jews." These
terms do not feature in Jewish historiography on these events. "Anti-Jewish riot" or "pogrom" is merely part
of the lexicon of the 'victim paradigm,' bequeathing passive status even through word use. To express it
flippantly, when Tom and Bill have a fight in the street, one does not describe it as "anti-Tom violence."
This automatically imparts passive, victim status to Tom, despite the fact that he may have started the
fight, and certainly threw as many punches. Weinberg, for example, describes the 1859 disturbance as
"anti-Jewish activity," but states that both "Jewish and gentile youths engaged in bloody brawls."
[C19]
Robert
Weinberg, 'Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History,'
Jewish History
, Vol.12 (1998), 71-92, p.74
This is an obvious contradiction in terms.
It is only in 1871, during a
particularly severe bout of disturbances, that we see the first Russian involvement in Odessa's inter-ethnic
violence. The late John Doyle Klier, formerly Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at Oxford University,
informs us categorically that Russian involvement in the 1871 Odessa ethnic conflict had its roots in real,
tangible economic grievances. Klier states that Russian participation was the result of "bitterness born of
the exploitation of their work by Jews and the ability of the latter to enrich themselves and manipulate all
manner of trade and commercial activity."
[C20]
John
Klier,
Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History
, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004) p.21
Similarly, Weinberg concedes that by 1871, there were "many others besides
Greeks who perceived Jews as an economic threat."
[C21]
Robert
Weinberg, 'Visualizing Pogroms in Russian History,'
Jewish History
, Vol.12 (1998), 71-92, p.75.
The roots of the 1871 disturbance are
quite tangible, and there is a tremendous amount of evidence suggesting it was the result of real
socio-economic grievances, rather than "images," "stereotypes," or any of the other usual suspects wheeled
out in Jewish historiography. Brian Horowitz, Chair of Jewish Studies at Tulane University argues that by
1870 Jewish economic and social cohesiveness had been further enhanced in Odessa by founding of a branch of
the Society for the Promotion of Enlightenment, an organization dedicated to in-group philanthropy as well
as "alternative politics" whereby members "did not contact the government as an intercessor."
[C22]
Brian
Horowitz,
How Jewish was Odessa
? : http://www.wilsoncenter.net/sites/default/files/OP3...age=17
In this respect, it was the
kahal
-lite, and it had a significant positive impact on the wealth of
Odessa Jewry. Klier states that under this organisation, the Jewish grip on the economic life of the city
grew stronger, and that Russian government reports from 1871 attribute the disturbance above all to the fact
that "the economic domination of the Jews in the area produced abnormal relations between Christians and
Jews."
[C23]
John
Klier,
Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History
, (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004) p.22
By 1871, Jewish economic domination had moved beyond grain exports. A US
consular report from that year reveals the extent of Jewish control over Odessa's economic life. It reports
that Jews in the city "occupy themselves with trade and favoring their own class or sect, that is that their
combinations, in a great many instances, amount almost to monopolies. The common remark, therefore, is that
'everything is in the hands of the Jews.' To sell or buy a house, a horse, a carriage, to rent a lodging or
contract for a loan, to engage a governess, and sometimes even to marry a wife the Jew gets his percent as a
"go between." The poor laborer, the hungry soldier, the land proprietor, the money capitalist, and in fact
every producer and every consumer is obliged in one way or another to pay tribute to the Jew."
[C24]
Evridiki
Sifneos, 'The Dark Side of the Moon: Rivalry and Riots for Shelter and Occupation Between the Greek and
Jewish Populations in multi-ethnic Nineteenth Century Odessa,'
The Historical Review
, Vol.3 (2006),
p.198
[C14]
Evridiki Sifneos, 'The Dark Side of the Moon: Rivalry and Riots for Shelter and Occupation Between
the Greek and Jewish Populations in multi-ethnic Nineteenth Century Odessa,'
The Historical Review
,
Vol.3 (2006), p.191
[C23]
John Klier,
Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History
, (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2004) p.22
[C24]
Evridiki Sifneos, 'The Dark Side of the Moon: Rivalry and Riots for Shelter and Occupation Between
the Greek and Jewish Populations in multi-ethnic Nineteenth Century Odessa,'
The Historical Review
,
Vol.3 (2006), p.198
[C25]
Evridiki Sifneos, 'The Dark Side of the Moon: Rivalry and Riots for Shelter and Occupation Between
the Greek and Jewish Populations in multi-ethnic Nineteenth Century Odessa,'
The Historical Review
,
Vol.3 (2006), p.193
Another attack on the jewish people by a white christian right liar thinly disguised as a historical
account.if it is not the palestinian cause then it is some other propaganda fantasy.
The truth is that these articles are an attempt to discredit judaism solely for the purposes of promoting a
modern crusade on behalf of chritianity.This is not about supporting the Palestinian cause or the arab
people who have been attacked in endless wars these past decade.
This is about christian right wing fundamentalists hoping to capture jerusalem.
I hope that there are those ordinary Christian who see through this charade of evil that speaks in there
name
It's an excellent book, which you'll only find online to read, since no publisher in the West has had the
audacity to print these truths so finely elaborated by Solzhenitsyn. You'll see that Russian Jews took
advantage of their nation, refusing to pay taxes or let their sons be drafted. Their main contribution to
Russia was money lending using usury and operating bars and stills.
As money lenders, they were ruthless, demanding full payment from farmers, even during bad crop seasons.
Add in the booze factor, and sooner or later, the local Russians would rise up and toss out the bankers,
sometimes rather violently.
Three different Czars that tried to right this malady wound up being assassinated, by whom you can
already guess. Naturally, even though its accurately documented, it's been branded as being anti-Semitic, as
many truths are.
Russians have always hated Jews, and for numerous good reasons.
The fact that Jews greatly exaggerated the
conflicts with Russian peasants is obvious for a whole host of reasons.
When the Bolshevik Jews overthrew the government and killed the Czar and Royal Family, the Russian people
were left helpless against the black leather coat wearing, pistol carrying, Russian peasant and Christianity
hating Jew Chekist.
Tens of Millions of Russian Christians were killed.
Pogroms? Hardly worth noting.
The situation is very much akin to Palestine.
Jews kill on the order of 100:1, but the propaganda would make you think otherwise.
"Little or no historiography has been dedicated to peeling back the layers of "refugee" stories to uncover
what really happened in the Russian Empire in the years before and during the riots."
Alexander
Solzhenitsyn did an exhaustive, balanced and masterful analysis of these years in his book "200 Years
Together".
For example, University of British Columbia Professor, Donald G. Dutton has asserted that the mobs
were not motivated by "the sudden rapid increase of the Jewish urban population, the extraordinary
economic success of Russian Jews, or the involvement of Jews in Russian revolutionary politics" but
rather by the "blood libel."
The author makes it sound like all over the Pale Russian peasants got upset because Jews were being
falsely libeled. The reality here is that Rabbi's were getting powerful and sloppy. They were getting caught
draining the blood from Christian boys and performing other satanic rituals, just as they have everywhere
else they have been allowed to form their colonies.
Violence erupted in 1821 when, during the Greek War of Independence, a group of Muslims and Jews
murdered and then mutilated Gregory V
Jews and Muslims working hand in hand to murder and mutilate Christians. Gods Chosen People and the
people of Gods Religion of Peace expose their true genocidal nature century after century after century.
It's hard for me to dig up so much as a shred of sympathy for muh pogroms when you compare it to the gentile
body count of genocidal jews from the Cheka all the way up to the modern IDF.
Cry me a river Shlomo.
"So harrible!!! Six million tears I swea-ahh!"
The poor laborer, the hungry soldier, the land proprietor, the money capitalist, and in fact every
producer and every consumer is
obliged
in one way or another to pay tribute to the Jew."
@mcohen
But Mr. Maga (aka Sunkist) has already handed over Jerusalem–and the Golan Heights, and, effectively the
West Bank–to the Jews. Yahweh works in mysterious ways, mon ami.
There was a grand total of about a couple of thousand deaths during all the late Imperial era pogroms, which
occurred precisely when state authority disappeared, as in 1905.
For comparison, that's about a week's worth of work for the (40% Jewish) NKVD in 1937-38.
"On the eve of the assassination of Alexander II, Russia's Jewish Question remained unanswered. Decades of
legislation had done little to change the nature of Russian Jewry, which remained ethnically, politically,
and culturally homogenous."
And that culture was expressed in Yiddish, in German. Russian-ruled Jews
remained linguistically Germanic by choice.
"... All in all, it has to be recognised that Washington has been inconsistent and quite often unpredictable in its actions. For this reason, trying to predict anything in our relations with the US is a fruitless task. Let me reiterate that as far as Russia is concerned we are ready to patiently work on improving our relations. Of course, this will be possible only if Russia's interests are respected, and based on equality and mutual respect. ..."
"... Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of "being friends against someone." In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force. ..."
"... The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United States. ..."
"... ran regularly reaffirms to us its interest in regional stability through dialogue with all the interested countries, including the Gulf Arab states. ..."
"... As far as Russia is concerned, we are taking steps to de-escalate tensions. We are proactive in promoting the concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf implying a stage-by-stage approach to resolving conflicts and devising confidence building and control mechanisms. ..."
Question: Can an improvement in the relations with the United States be expected in
the near future?
Sergey Lavrov: An improvement will hardly materialise any time soon, since it is
anything but easy to sort out the mess that our relations are in, which is not our fault.
After all, bilateral relations require reciprocal efforts. We have to meet each other half
way.
Russia is ready to move in this direction, as we have said on a number of occasions. We
proceed from the premise that Russia and the United States bear special responsibility. We
are the two largest nuclear powers, the founding members of the United Nations and permanent
members of its Security Council. Cooperation between our two countries is key to ensuring
stability and predictability in international affairs. However, not everything depends on us.
It takes two to tango, as the saying goes.
The situation is quite complicated on the American side. On the one hand, President Donald
Trump talks about seeking to be on good terms with Russia, but this attitude is far from
prevalent in Washington. We see this in unfriendly steps, such as various groundless
accusations Russia faces, imposing financial and economic sanctions, seizing diplomatic
property, kidnapping Russian nationals in third countries, opposing Russia's foreign policy
interests, as well as attempts to meddle in our domestic affairs. We are seeing system-wide
efforts to reach out to almost all countries around the world and persuade them to scale back
their relations with Russia.
Many US politicians are trying to outshine each other in ramping up anti-Russia phobias
and they are using this factor in their domestic political struggles. We understand that they
will only escalate in the run-up to the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, we will not
give up in despair. We will continue to look for common ground with the US despite all the
challenges that there are.
It is essential that the Russian and US presidents both understand that there is a need to
end the deadlock in our relations. During their June meeting which took place in Osaka the
two leaders spoke out in favour of stepping up economic cooperation, combining efforts to
settle regional crises, resuming dialogue on strategic stability, and also said that they
appreciated dialogue on combatting terrorism. Vladimir Putin invited Donald Trump to Moscow
to take part in the events to mark the 75th anniversary of Victory in WWII.
All in all, it has to be recognised that Washington has been inconsistent and quite
often unpredictable in its actions. For this reason, trying to predict anything in our
relations with the US is a fruitless task. Let me reiterate that as far as Russia is
concerned we are ready to patiently work on improving our relations. Of course, this will be
possible only if Russia's interests are respected, and based on equality and mutual
respect.
Question: Relations with Iran are essential for Russia's geopolitics. However, Iran
has indulged in unacceptable aggressive rhetoric against the state of Israel on numerous
occasions and went beyond words. How is Russia's position any different from that of European
countries in the 1930s when they encouraged Hitler's anti-Soviet stance?
Sergey Lavrov:Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel
and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free
from the principle of "being friends against someone." In our contacts with the leaders of
all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful
solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force.
The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of
Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is
flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic
Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The
responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United
States.
As for the historical aspect of your question, it is not appropriate to project what
happened in Europe in the 1930s on the current developments in the Middle East. As we all
know, Neville Chamberlain and Edouard Daladier sought to appease Hitler in order to direct
the German military might against the USSR. We are not seeing anything of this kind
today.
I ran regularly reaffirms to us its interest in regional stability through dialogue
with all the interested countries, including the Gulf Arab states. In addition to this,
Tehran has always stressed that it did not intend to undertake any aggressive action.
As far as Russia is concerned, we are taking steps to de-escalate tensions. We are
proactive in promoting the concept of collective security in the Persian Gulf implying a
stage-by-stage approach to resolving conflicts and devising confidence building and control
mechanisms. We are working with our partners to preserve the multilateral agreements to
promote a settlement on the Iranian nuclear programme.
....Russians believe that the Skripal affair has been much more damaging to HMG than it
has to Russia, and have no interest in removing the mystery surrounding it - the more people
delve, the more it stinks. Montreal @ 135 on Skripal thread.
I have heard similar, along the lines 'storm in a tea cup makes the Brits ridiculous',..
Putin knows what went down (or at least what didn't and the rough scenario.)
Remember when VP said in public that he encouraged the two Russians identified as
'culprits' (tourists in Salisbury..) to come forward - they promtly did so, correctly
figuring that this was a protection guarantee for them. They hated, were afraid, to do it,
and set stupid conditions with the Head of RT, trying to limit personal image damage. She
couldn't refuse because of VP's advice.
Putin could publicly wonder why Britain is keeping them incommunicado. What are the
Brits hiding? Even a devoted Empire supporter would have to agree that it is most peculiar.
Yet Putin claims to have no knowledge on the subject, which is almost certainly untrue.
Rob 136 that thread.
The Russians have made, and make, regular requests to have access to the Skripals via the
usual channels, int'l etc. (+ by Red Cross if need be.) They are turned down everytime, but
the situation is complex, as GB has various 'excuses' to hand: -> for protection of
Skripals -> Yulia has stated she does not want -> Sergei is a swapped spy and etc. etc.
(briefly and not 'legal' terms.) Conventional moves from the Russian side.
Putin has strenuously stated that traitors are the vilest scum, in harmony imho with his
general principles as presented to the public, so why should he do SFA to help, or stand by,
Sergei, who sold his country's 'secrets' for paltry sums and privileges .. (and Yulia, who is
most likely? involved somehow? - maybe not .. -) On the other hand, Sergei did his time, has
been pardoned, can do as he likes, where is the problem, the rule of law is such .. (alaff at
137 that thread makes that point forcibly..)
> The Russians sneer at this crazed hyped-up scenario of Novichok poisoning, re. some
minor incident, rightly so, imho. Which does NOT mean the Skripals weren't targeted with some
'substance', hospitalized, etc. nor that Dawn Sturgess didn't die, and Charlie survived but
has lost his agency and sense, nor that Porton Down was involved somehow.
The Skripals are kept incommunicado because they can't be allowed to speak out about what
happened. Clue: nothing to do with Novichok or anything of world importance.
These local minor stories, situations, which may even be fabricated or 'engineered', are
cynically upgraded to world-wide-media horrors by pols and the media, to manipulate the plebs
with movie-script scenarios they can understand and relate to and take sides on and
also at the same time 'be divided' endlessly discussing BS about this that the other and what
more etc. etc.
The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's
Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry
Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?
Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton,
Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?
The key problem for Trump is reaction of China and Russia... If Russia supports Iran the USA attack onIran might well be the
second Vietnam and KSA will probably seize to exit.
Notable quotes:
"... The bottom-line is this -- if Trump launches military strikes against Iranian military targets it is very likely he will ignite a series of events that will escalate beyond his control, expose him as a paper tiger full of empty bellicose threats and risk a war with other countries, including Russia and China. ..."
"... The "War" class in Washington and the media are exhorting tough action and doing all within their power to portray Iran as an imminent threat to the West. The mantra, "the must be stopped," is being repeated ad nauseam in all of the media echo changers. President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when it comes to employing military force. He reminds me of Lyndon Johnson during the early stages of the Vietnam War -- i.e., being exhorted to take action, increase forces and not back down rather than lose face on the international front. ..."
"... it is more likely the Brits intended this as a provocation, in coordination with some members of Trump's team, that would bait the Iranians to respond in similar fashion. Iran has taken the bait and given the Brits what Iran sees as a dose of its own medicine. ..."
"... There is a dangerous delusion within the Trump National Security team. They believe we are so dominant that Iran will not dare fight us. I prefer to rely on the sage counsel of Colonel Patrick Lang -- the Iranians are not afraid to fight us and, if backed into a corner, will do so. ..."
"... The tanker is too big to use the Suez canal and too big to discharge oil in a Syrian port. It was possibly going to a Mediterranean port, but Iran will not back-down to the UK. ..."
"... As the Saudi's appear to be losing their war with Yemen, the UAE has announced that they are not desirous of being in the middle of any US-Iran conflict. Qatar is doing a huge nat gas deal with Iran. ..."
"... A 50% reduction in oil & LNG output for greater than 3 months would crush already weakening Asian economies who are the manufactured products supply chain for most of the world and in particular the US. Will voters in Ohio, Wisconsin & Michigan cheer Trump's military strikes on Teheran when prices at Walmart double? ..."
"... I have no faith in Donald Trump when it comes to Israeli's interests. Embassy moved to Jerusalem check, Golan Heights check. Deal of the Century by his Anti-Christ Son-In-Law check. Not sure if that is a joke or not. ..."
"... "Trump's advisers have a demented obsession with Iran. They've been spoiling for a fight with Iran for decades. They have no idea how destructive it would be. It would make Iraq look like a tea party." ..."
"... Yes. A demented obsession that is not in US interests. Is it really in Saudi and Israeli interests when they may be hurt too? ..."
"... The same idiots running the show seem to believe that American oil and gas fracking makes it impervious to the loss of Middle Eastern oil (in fact, a secret motivation might be to save American frackers economically), but they forget that oil is a fungible commodity and always flows to the highest bidder. They could try of ban oil exports, but the Europe and Japan's economies would be utterly toast as there would be virtually no oil available to them, especially if Russia backed Iran and cut them off. ..."
"... Rather than blaming this on the media, neocons or the Pentagon, put the blame where it lies - with President Trump. Trump campaigned on tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement which he did once he was elected. The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions on Iran which are meant to inflict serious hardship on the Iranian people. Trump hired Bolton and Pompeo - both hawks from previous administrations. Trump is attempting to enforce the sanctions. Is there anyone else to blame but Trump? ..."
"... The use of the golden rule suggests problems with your logic. Would we sit still, for example, if Russia and/or China started fostering guerrilla movements in South America? Of course not. We would actively intervene in support of what we see as our local security imperatives. That appears to me to be all Iran is doing in its region. ..."
"... If the Gulf oilfields in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily rocketed and put out of commission along with tanker loading docks and pipeline infrastructure, there won't be any oil to ship out of the Gulf anyway. ..."
"... The primary damage from a war with Iran will be economic. Oil flowing through the Staits will come to a halt and that will hit China, Japan and the rest of Asia very hard and their buying power will decrease significantly hurting our exports. Even though the U.S is self-sufficient in oil if oil prices hit $100+ on the world market look for the U.S. oil companies to increase their prices to approach the world price driving gas prices into the $5.00+/gallon range. Trump will undoubtably prohibit U.S oil exports but the damage to the economies world wide will still negatively impact the U.S. ..."
"... Post Scriptum: Signs of a dying paradigm as the western elite have gone into total sclerotic mode. Dangerous as a rabid dog. ..."
Donald Trump appears to be on the verge of doing what the "Never Trumpers" could not--destroy his Presidency and make re-election
impossible. It all boils down to whether or not he decides to launch military strikes on Iran. The bottom-line is this -- if
Trump launches military strikes against Iranian military targets it is very likely he will ignite a series of events that will escalate
beyond his control, expose him as a paper tiger full of empty bellicose threats and risk a war with other countries, including Russia
and China.
The "War" class in Washington and the media are exhorting tough action and doing all within their power to
portray Iran as an imminent threat to the West. The mantra, "the must be stopped," is being repeated ad nauseam in all of the media
echo changers. President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when it comes to
employing military force. He reminds me of Lyndon Johnson during the early stages of the Vietnam War -- i.e., being exhorted to take
action, increase forces and not back down rather than lose face on the international front.
The media is busy pushing the lie that Iran launched an unprovoked "attack" on a British flagged ship. They ignore the British
action two weeks ago, when the British Navy seized an Iranian flagged tanker heading to Syria. Britain justifies its action as just
keeping the sanction regime in place. But it is more likely the Brits intended this as a provocation, in coordination with some
members of Trump's team, that would bait the Iranians to respond in similar fashion. Iran has taken the bait and given the Brits
what Iran sees as a dose of its own medicine.
There is a dangerous delusion within the Trump National Security team. They believe we are so dominant that Iran will not
dare fight us. I prefer to rely on the sage counsel of Colonel Patrick Lang -- the Iranians are not afraid to fight us and, if backed
into a corner, will do so.
I see at least four possible scenarios for this current situation. If you can think of others please add in the comments section.
"two weeks ago, when the British Navy seized an Iranian flagged tanker"
Via Associated Press:
Royal Marines took part in the seizure of the Iranian oil tanker by Gibraltar, a British overseas territory off the southern
coast of Spain. Officials there initially said the July 4 seizure happened on orders from the U.S." .......
It gets even better than on orders from the U.S.
"Britain has said it would release the vessel, which was carrying more than 2 million barrels of Iranian crude, if Iran could
prove it was not breaching EU sanctions"
We are supposed to believe that Syria is importing oil on ships which sail through the Straights of Gibraltar rather than getting
oil from, say, Russia! or going from Iran (it is Iranian oil, so they say) through the Suez Canal? What did they
do, sail around the continent of Africa to stage this?
So the brilliant minds at GCHQ that brought us Christopher Steele and the dossier have decided that they really, really, need
to get rid of the Orange Man and they don't care how many Iranian or American lives it takes. I wonder just how many people the
man not in the news, Jeffrey Epstein, had the dirty goods on and just which government was behind his operation.
The tanker is too big to use the Suez canal and too big to discharge oil in a Syrian port. It was possibly going to a Mediterranean
port, but Iran will not back-down to the UK.
Thanks for the comment. I did a bit more research. It seems strange to me that Iran would use a ship to large for the canal
to make such a shipment to Syria, if indeed that was where it was heading.
Larry, your intel about the JCS not advising caution is most disheartening. I wouldn't be surprised if the warmongers surrounding
Trump are also telling him that his rally attending base is all for taking it to the raghead terrorists. That may not be far off.
Sure those who support Trump for his professed aversion to adventurism will be appalled at war with Iran, but his more rabid base
may follow him anywhere. Trump has no ideological need for war, but he does have a psychological need for adoration. That's not
a good situation.
"...his rally attending base is all for taking it to the raghead terrorists.."
TTG
I have seen private surveys commissioned by a deep pocketed hedge fund of working class folks in the mid-west & the south.
When the consequences of a military confrontation with Iran are described the overwhelming majority oppose it.
Larry is spot on. Trump will lose his re-election bid if he kowtows to Bibi & MbS. The short-term financial & economic effects
would crush his base and the half-life of jingoism after Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, & Syria will be rather short. Trump will be
blamed by the "right" for cocking up teaching Iran a lesson and demonized by the "left "for getting us into another ME quagmire.
How does one wake POTUS Trump to the reality that his NEOCONS and Israel Firsters in his Cabinet will destroy his Presidency if
he doesn't jettison them out the door.
There is an effort underway to undermine Israeli influence in the US, and I think the calculus might be to use the exact thing
Israelis want most (war with Iran) to do that. I think the resurrection of the Epstein case is also part of that effort. Thus,
war with Iran is inevitable.
"There is an effort underway to undermine Israeli influence in the US"
Is it an organized effort? Where do I sign up?
Rick Wiles heads TruNews, a Christian evangelical network. He's been outspoken in his criticism of zionism, calls out Christian
zionists, and deplores that "the US has been taken over by zionists." To be sure, ADL has labeled Wiles an "antisemite." If TruNews
survives, it may be part of game-changing.
"From what I am hearing from knowledgeable sources [is that] no one on the Joint Chiefs of Staff at DOD are advising caution."
We should probably ignore the notion that the Joint Chiefs are bullish about a war with Iran -- the situation in the area is
terrible for us and the Joint Chiefs know it.
For example, Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan have military understandings with Iran and the former is now installing advanced S-400
Russian missiles to defend itself from us. Furthermore, Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkmenistan, Azerbajian and Armenia will not allow
transit of war materiel or aircraft en-route to Iran. So how does the US project anything into that country?
Then again, US Central Command is located in Iran friendly Quatar, which merely hosts us and could require us to leave. How
come? Wouldn't you know it, Quatar is developing a massive gas reserve with Iran in the Gulf, is now very, very friendly with
big-brother Turkey and presently negotiating with Russia for S-400 missiles -- clearly against us.
Well, what about our Navy?
Alas, recent improvements in missiles have rendered our deep water Navy a liability -- not that the narrow Persian Gulf / Sea
of Oman is deep in any case. (President Trump learned about our Navy's vulnerability to missile attack last year as the Pentagon
quickly pulled our three carrier group force from Korea and parked those impressive ships on the south coast of Australia! )
Then there is Iran's near east client / ally Hezbollah, which has made clear that any bombing of Iran, a huge country, would
trigger heavy missile attack on postage-stamp Israel.
The Neocons may have managed to silence public Pentagon doubts, but President Trump is clearly attempting to avoid military
adventures. "No, the Iran downed drone was old and not that expensive." "The UK captured an Iranian tanker and the Iranians have
reciprocated. The two should sit down and work the situation out."
I believe that Iran is going to want to avoid war if they can. Their program of adding precision guidance to Hezbollah missiles
in Lebanon means that the longer they postpone war, the better for them. If they get to a point where they have 10,000 precision
guided missiles in Lebanon then the next Israel-Lebanon war will force Israel into a humiliating defeat.
Eighty percent of Israel's water comes from water desalination plants - and then there are electricity generation plants, sewage
treatment plants, and numerous other infrastructure targets that can be hit. Israeli civilians are soft and will cry uncle as
soon as their air conditioning cuts out.
Why not, then, have the Americans initiate the deed now... destroy Iran and Lebanon, and then, with France, the UK, Germany,
Canada et al. spend billions to rebuild Israel, with the Palestinians being sent to Jordan (if not worse).
Israel has gambled on a broader war several times in the past, and they believe (despite the fiasco in Lebanon) that each was
a win.
When did this group, leading the charge overseas in D.C. for the past 20 years, once get it right, as far as assumptions and expectations
of military necessities or outcomes? I am beginning to think this creating a greater danger out of a lesser mess is a feature,
not a defect. If so, why? To what end? Or is the policy process that broken?
Saddam ain't around any more, neither is Muammar Gaddafi. The neocons take those as great victories since the sacred state
of Israel is safe from those two.
imo a war with iran is theatre and will not take place.
should iran be attacked imo you can kiss the UAE goodbye as well as most if not all of the Saudi oil infrastructre along the
gulf. i would also expect a massive direct bombardment of israeli cities and other important targets from hezbollah starting with
the massive ammonia storage system in haifa whose destruction would annihilate that entire region. all of useful israel is in
the middle to upper third of the country closest to lebanon and easy reach for all of hezbollahs missiles.
the persian gulf upon the start of the war becomes the hotel california for any warship within. none would likely escape. and
the coup de gra for iran is whether they have the ballistic missile reach and or can gain access to russian long range bombers
fitted with kalibr or better cruise missiles able to smash diego garcia absolutely critical american relaestate in the indian
ocean.
trump imo is not crazy and can read a map as well as anyone with help from his REAL pentagon military professionals.
we have not even gotten to what happens to all those oil and interest rate derivatives far out of the money right now in somewhat
normal times. if war starts they go from notional to real fast and the western financial system implodes even with a force majeure
declaration
An Iran war would indeed most probably kill off Trump's chance of re-election. The almost inevitable spike in the price of oil
which it would bring about would have two implications:
1/ ROTW xUS manufacturing is already in recession, with services close to joining it in many countries. The US is clearly slowing
down and appears headed on the same course. The global economy is in no shape to withstand even a relatively short-lived surge
in oil prices.
2/ There is no knowing what lurks out there in the oil derivatives market, but the banking system - particularly the European
banking system - is far too fragile to sustain another bout of counterparty risk aversion along the lines of 2007/08. (And amongst
the trillions of gross derivatives exposure, one has to wonder just how many US and other banks are sitting across from Deutsche
Bank oil positions and happily netting off the counterparty risk.)
Regretably, from my side of the Atlantic the US looks like a traditional imperial power, addicted to war and conquest and with
a significant proportion of the population fetishizing (probably not a real verb) all things military. Whether Trump can be truly
damaged by extending the 'forever war' to Iran depends very much on how it goes - and I doubt he has the knowledge required to
think through all the plausible scenarios. We can be a lot more confident that carrying the blame for an unnecessary recession
into the election campaign has a solid chance of sinking him.
Just what good has the past two decades of "war and conquest" done for America, whether flyover country, Jussie Smollett's
"Maga Country" section of Chicago or the homeless encampments of Seattle, LA or Portland?
As the Saudi's appear to be losing their war with Yemen, the UAE has announced that they are not desirous of being in the
middle of any US-Iran conflict. Qatar is doing a huge nat gas deal with Iran.
Bolton is heading to Japan to "mediate" the
current economic disagreements between Japan and S. Korea.
Pompeo is declaring that the Iranian Ballistic Missile program is suddenly on the table. It would appear that the whole Iranian
atomic bomb thing was smoke and mirrors and hasbara.
There is a deal available, preparation for making the deal will involve political kabuki, grand posturing, the beating of drums
without rhythm and the flooding of the Old American Infotainment outlets with much wailing and whining about "the only democracy
in the MENA."
A deal will eventuate that allows both the USA and Iran to move on, about a week before the 2020 presidential election. Or
maybe not.
I have a question for those of you well versed with Iranian military capability. What are the capabilities of Iranian ballistic
missiles in terms of range, precision and payload lethality?
As Col. Lang has noted in the transition to war, before the US
Navy gets its ducks in a row, that is the window of opportunity that Iran has to strike back. What damage could they inflict on
oil & gas infrastructure including LNG, port & pipelines across UAE, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia?
A 50% reduction in oil & LNG output for greater than 3 months would crush already weakening Asian economies who are the
manufactured products supply chain for most of the world and in particular the US. Will voters in Ohio, Wisconsin & Michigan cheer
Trump's military strikes on Teheran when prices at Walmart double?
As Larry notes "..President Trump, regrettably, is ignorant of military history and devoid of strategic intelligence when
it comes to employing military force.." , but I believe he has good political instincts and as his Reality TV/Twitter presidency
shows he has an excellent sense of how it plays both in the MSM and social media. He must know that while the "shock & awe" and
"boom-boom" videos may give him an instant boost the stock market that he has rested his presidency on may not soar but in fact
plummet. And he can't blame Jay Powell for that.
He must also instinctually know that November 2020 is a year away and a lot can go wrong as it is economically and in financial
markets since he's been harping at the Fed to lower rates in supposedly the best economy evah. Uncertainty spikes volatility and
the credit markets are already stressed particularly in offshore eurodollar funding which is an order of magnitude larger than
mortgage credit markets were in 2007.
Maybe Rand Paul is his counter to the ziocon fifth column? I don't think he's that foolish to pull the trigger on Iran and
sink his presidency when the Deep State & NeverTrumpers are out for his blood. He must know he'll lose immunity from legal jeopardy
when he's no longer POTUS.
As Col. Lang has repeatedly observed, the decisions to go to war do not necessarily follow economic, nor domestic political logic.
It is therefore better to speculate on the players state of mind rather than looking at the aforesaid rational drivers like economics
and votes.
I have no faith in Donald Trump when it comes to Israeli's interests. Embassy moved to Jerusalem check, Golan Heights check.
Deal of the Century by his Anti-Christ Son-In-Law check. Not sure if that is a joke or not.
Israeli wants Iran destroyed and their ability to pressure US Presidents to do their bidding all the way back to President
Truman is 100% success. Trump so cravenly promotes the Zionist interest that I see no reason he will not pursue regime change
in Iran to its logical conclusion.
The plan is ultimately Greater Israeli and the leaders of Iran are well aware of this.
Many comments say that Israeli will be badly damaged by any regional war. Why do you believe Israeli is just going to take
the blows? Analysis is not advocacy as Col. Lang says.
My fear is the ultimate weapons of mass destruction are introduced into the Middle East.
"Trump's advisers have a demented obsession with Iran. They've been spoiling for a fight with Iran for decades. They have no idea
how destructive it would be. It would make Iraq look like a tea party."
Option 1 - Diplomatic solution: The UK will do what it must do, ie what the US allows it to do. The GB Imperial project is no
more and the UK is riding along somewhere in the wake of the Imperial City. Whatever influence it exerts on power there is by
flattery or deception (Steele dossier.) Trump slapped the UK Ambassador out of Washington as if he were a fly. Moreover, the UK
alone carries no stick to wield against Iran. Iran is no Falklands.
Options 2 thru 4 - some degree of military attack on Iran:
as you point out, the return on investment for any kind of attack on Iran is highly unpredictable. It depends entirely on how
Iran chooses to respond and whether it decides to roll the dice, go all in, and endure the onslaught, and inflict what damage
it can where it can, which it very well may. Does anyone in Washington have an intel based fix on Iran's intentions when attacked?
I doubt it.
Not a single intervention in the last 18 years, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya resulted in the anticipated outcome. Do they
have rear view mirrors in Washington?
My weakly held expectation, especially now with the passing of a few days, is that Washington will decide to temporize and
tell the UK to accept the humiliation, in effect kicking the can down the road. Everyone will know it is only doing what it has
been told to do.
Of course they will announce more face saving sanctions. The Donald will hope that he will be able to gut it out to 2020 without
having to make a decision that could blow him up, and likely would - but who knows? Iran will hope to gut it out to 2020 and in
the interim pray to God that some Democrat floats back down to earth with some issues, like the Donald once espoused, that will
be used to beat the Donald and send him and his family back to the upper East Side.
With the escalation game fully in play, it's going to be a close call.
I find it a bit hard to believe that leaders like Dunford, Selva, Milley, Richardson, and the others on the Joint Chiefs are
not advising caution. Milley, the next Chairman, for sure has advised caution at his recent Senate hearing. Dunford has only pushed
for an international coalition Task Force to guard ships transiting the Strait. Selva and Richardson appear to be more worried
about China.
Let us all hope that your knowledgeable sources are wrong.
The real danger is if Fred Fleitz gets to be DNI. If that happens be prepared for another scam like the Office of Special Plans
a la Wolfowicz and Feith. Probably Bolton and/or PomPom already have one hiding in the basement ready to go.
Iran's FM Zarif made a peaceful impression during Fareed Zakaria's interview. But all the headlines focus on his one statement:
"Start a war with Iran and we will end it" . Although those were NOT his words, what he said was "We will never start
a war,...But we will defend ourselves, and anybody who starts a war with Iran will not be the one who ends it."
The question is whether he speaks for the hardliners.
You forgot to mention what will happen to the world economy if the Strait of Hormuz is closed to all shipping by Iranian missiles
an mines. Stock marks would collapse and a deep recession if not depression would ensue quickly.
The same idiots running the show seem to believe that American oil and gas fracking makes it impervious to the loss of
Middle Eastern oil (in fact, a secret motivation might be to save American frackers economically), but they forget that oil is
a fungible commodity and always flows to the highest bidder. They could try of ban oil exports, but the Europe and Japan's economies
would be utterly toast as there would be virtually no oil available to them, especially if Russia backed Iran and cut them off.
Rather than blaming this on the media, neocons or the Pentagon, put the blame where it lies - with President Trump. Trump
campaigned on tearing up the Iran nuclear agreement which he did once he was elected. The Trump administration re-imposed sanctions
on Iran which are meant to inflict serious hardship on the Iranian people. Trump hired Bolton and Pompeo - both hawks from previous
administrations. Trump is attempting to enforce the sanctions. Is there anyone else to blame but Trump?
Iran is also not entirely innocent in the affairs of the Middle East. Israel believes with some evidence that Iran is building
forward bases in Syria - an unacceptable condition for Israel considering the thousands of missiles owned by Hezbollah and the
ballistic missile testing by Iran. Iran is also supplying weapons directly to Hezbollah (as they always have). In addition, Iran
is supplying weapons and (likely) ballistic missile technology to the Houthis. The Houthis have used ballistic missiles to attack
the Saudis. Yemen is on the border of Saudi Arabia - and a (Shia) Houthi government is unacceptable to the Saudis. The Trump administration
tore up the nuclear agreement because of the destabilizing political agenda of Iran (to US interests).
Trump campaigned on a more isolationist foreign policy so option 1 is still the most likely possibility for the moment (IMO).
The use of the golden rule suggests problems with your logic. Would we sit still, for example, if Russia and/or China started
fostering guerrilla movements in South America? Of course not. We would actively intervene in support of what we see as our local
security imperatives. That appears to me to be all Iran is doing in its region.
Your third paragraph is a stretch. Iran's actions that you describe are realistic (in the strategic sense of the word) responses
to Israel's overt hostility, overwhelming superiority in air power and its possession of scores of nuclear weapons.
I'm wondering if in case of war, Iran would need to "close the Gulf" at all.
If the Gulf oilfields in Saudi Arabia and the UAE are heavily rocketed and put out of commission along with tanker loading
docks and pipeline infrastructure, there won't be any oil to ship out of the Gulf anyway.
The primary damage from a war with Iran will be economic. Oil flowing through the Staits will come to a halt and that will
hit China, Japan and the rest of Asia very hard and their buying power will decrease significantly hurting our exports. Even though
the U.S is self-sufficient in oil if oil prices hit $100+ on the world market look for the U.S. oil companies to increase their
prices to approach the world price driving gas prices into the $5.00+/gallon range. Trump will undoubtably prohibit U.S oil exports
but the damage to the economies world wide will still negatively impact the U.S.
Insurance on oil vessels will become almost impossible to get. The U.S will have to indemnify ship owners and I suspect
many will not trust the U.S. to come through with the money for claims. Trump has a history of this and thus many ships will stay
in port.
A war with Iran will not be won or lost militarily, but economically. Iran is 4 times the size of Iraq and has 3 times the
population and I simply do not think we can successfully occupy the country. That being the case, I don't think the U.S can permanently
prevent sabatoge in the Staits - meaning an oil induced recession will linger world wide for many years.
UNO: increased false flag incident instigated by the anglo-zionist
DUE:Increased takfiri movements in Idlib and provocatiev
attacks InnAleppo ,Hama Dara and Dier Ezurr as the Syrian Arab Army is consolidating around Northern Hama and Around Idlib .
TRE: More tanker siezures by the Nato cohorts and portraying Iran as breachoing the JCPCOA treaty. Nevr mentioning the breach
of contract from the western alliance from Pax-Americana and its Western European vassals
Quattro Russia and China will be either utilised as middle men or further labelled as agressors and Iranian?Syrian?Yemeni apologist.
Post Scriptum: Signs of a dying paradigm as the western elite have gone into total sclerotic mode. Dangerous as a rabid
dog.
"... Putin now confirms that Skripal was indeed willing to come back to Russia. Oliver Stone thinks Skripal wanted to present something to the press. If Skripal had publicly said that he made up and wrote the Steele dossier, the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign by the Clinton 'resistance' would have been over. The whole Mueller investigation nonsense would never have happened. ..."
"... The reality probably is thus: The Brits cold-bloodedly poisoned him and his daughter to tar the Russians. Then a straight British fabrication story that holds no water anywhere along the way. They did it, and he had no value to them, so why not? His daughter? She's Russian. Of no use to them. ..."
"... In the scheme of things, it was a trivial act of poisoning with a huge payoff, which they achieved. ..."
"... The Skripals were doped with BZ nerve agent. It is likely that Sergei has been maintained in a near vegetative state with psychotropic drugs since then as a means to keep him in storage. There was no novichok other than the fresh batch made at Porton Down and used to amateurishly spike the sample sent to the OPCW for analysis. ..."
"... The scenario b describes is the most probable of all that I've heard. Spook agencies such as the MI6 and CIA like to think of themselves as thrifty with their assets and thus accomplish multiple objectives with a single operation. They believe themselves to be clever that way. For this reason they would have been unlikely to have doped the Skripals for the sole purpose of implicating Russia. There are any number of other ways that they could have arranged an incident that makes Russia look bad. The operation would have had to serve other purposes as well, and silencing Sergei and preventing his embarrassing return to Russia would be suitable additional purposes. There were likely other objectives within the operation as well such as smoking out leakers. ..."
"... It would be well to remember that in early March last year, about the same time that the Skripals were found collapsed on the park bench in The Maltings shopping centre by Alison McCourt and her award-winning heroic teenage daughter, that the Syrian Arab Army liberated Douma / East Ghouta (or most of that area anyway) near Damascus and captured 300 terrorists. Among the captured fighters were found British and French "military advisors". The British government (and probably likely the French government: do people remember that Moscow also thumped Paris over its role in the Skripal poisoning saga?) needed a diversion from that sorry tale that would have exposed Britain and France's sordid roles in the failed US-led invasion of Syria and the overthrow of Syria's government. ..."
"... It is possible that Skripal, living alone in his house and his pets, and facing a lonely future in Britain after his daughter, the other surviving member of his family, started making wedding arrangements that would have meant fewer visits to Britain to see her father, had contemplated returning to Russia and had made known his wish to a few people he thought he could trust. ..."
"... It might very well be that - unfortunately for the Skripals - Skripal's handler and British government spook agencies were and are as much taken with conspiracy thinking and the conspiracy mind-set as Oliver Stone was (in his interview with Vladimir Putin) and those agencies feared that Skripal was going to spill the beans about his (possible) involvement in the Steele dossier and implicate them. ..."
"... Thanks b, a timely post. I sometimes suspect that the outing of Integrity Initiative and Institute for Statecraft was a Russian payback for the defaming antics perpetrated by the MI6 morons. I have no proof as it was meticulously anonymous. Its a comforting thought here in the gaslit studio of humanity. ..."
"... Putin states now openly it helped "to cause a scandal" supposedly for various geopolitical reasons. ..."
"... As I understood it, Sergei Skripal was more mercenary than spook, in the business of selling info because he could profit from it. In other words, more Aldrich Ames or Hanssen than Philby. ..."
"... He may have overplayed his hand - obviously, his plans leaked out - and UK intelligence (perhaps with the US involved) decided to stage the incident. Or perhaps - as is possible with someone who'll play both sides - Sergei was the leaker in an attempt to gain more currency with Moscow. ..."
"... The British police knew of the perfume bottle early on. The first theory of the poisoning presented to the public was that Yulia had brought the novichok from Russian in her luggage. There was even speculation that it was in a perfume bottle that Yulia had suddenly decided to open on the bench. (This did not sound plausible at the time as it would not explain how the novichok hit Sergei.) ..."
"... We know the police were all over looking for the missing perfume bottle. They could not find it, because Sergei had already dumped it in the charity bin. Maybe Sergei even told them where he put it, but Charlie had found it before MI6 could recover it. ..."
"... There is no Russian state component in it. Not even a Roque element. The claim is total BS. Short analysis shows, that management of this "case" is entirely in the realm of the UK. ..."
"... A lot of elements of this operation had to be prepared upfront and controlled while the operation is unfolding. It remains open, whether or not the skripals where in on the plot, probably not. But anyone asserting the "Russia did it/novichok" story does lack the sanity to be trusted with state matters. ..."
"... Both from interview transcripts and RT article it's clear that the part P. says he does not believe is that S. has been poisoned by the British services (in response to Stone's question floating such a possibility). ..."
"... if Skripal suspected that the bottle contained something dodgy, wouldn't you think the last place he'd dispose of it would be a charity bin, if he were an intelligent ex-spook? ..."
"... That remark by Putin was actually in response only to the question of whether UK spooks poisoned Skripal to stop him returning to Russia, not about whether Skripal wanted to return: ..."
"... However, since the "agent" found by Swiss was Agent BZ, it might be more interesting to hear what poster 101 has to say about synthesizing BZ... ..."
"... From what I have heard, the Russians believe that the Skripal affair has been much more damaging to HMG than it has to Russia, and have no interest in removing the mystery surrounding it - the more people delve, the more it stinks. ..."
"... As an inhabitant of the UK, I can say that a lot of us were very shocked when the Government was trying to stuff these obvious lies down our throats, and it is what got a few of us onto alternative media - sick to death as we already were of the Brexit poison in the MSM. So a belated thank you to b, and your colleagues, what would we do without you. ..."
"... Btw, just to remind - Boris Berezovsky also was going to come back from UK to Russia, he wrote a letter to Putin. But "suddenly" it happened so that Berezovsky committed a "suicide". We can only guess what he could tell if he returned to Russia. Someone really did not want this information to become known... ..."
"... The presence of HMG nurse on site, and the subsequent Monty Pythom-esque cover up, seems proof enough that the UK had foreknowledge and without question, worked to keep the Russophobia stoked high not only after the incident, but the later killed a UK citizen to continue the incident. Mr. P is being diplomatic. ..."
Putin Confirms: Sergei Skripal Wanted To Go Back To Russia
Filmmaker Oliver Stone recently interviewed the President of the Russian Federation,
Vladimir Putin. The transcript was published yesterday
evening. Most of the interview is about Ukraine. A separate piece will cover that country.
There is also a passage about the U.S. election.
But the most interesting bits from Putin are about the Skripal affair.
The British and Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Julia were impaired by
some chemical substance in early March 2018 in Salisbury. Britain blamed the incident on
Russia. CIA Director Gina Haspel, a former CIA station chief in London, used
fake pictures of the incident to deceive Trump and to push him to kick out 60 Russian
diplomats. (The NYT later
ran cover for Haspel.)
We have speculated since the very beginning of the Skirpal case that the 'former' spy wanted
to go back to Russia. Putin now confirms , to my knowledge for the first
time, that this was the case (underline added):
Oliver Stone: What has happened to Skripal? Where is he?
Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. He is a spy, after all. He is always in hiding.
Oliver Stone: They say he was going to come back to Russia. He had some information.
Vladimir Putin: Yes, I have been told that he wants to make a written request to come
back.
Oliver Stone: He knew still and he wanted to come back. He had information that he could
give to the world press here in Russia.
Vladimir Putin: I doubt it. He has broken the ranks already. What kind of information can
he possess?
The information Sergei Skripal possessed might have been related to the U.S. election and
the Steele dossier which alleged that Russia had dirt on Trump. On March 8 2018, only a few
days after the Sergei and Julia Skripal were allegedly poisoned, we discussed the connection in
our first
post on the Skripal affair :
[Christopher] Steele was an MI6 undercover agent in Moscow around the time when Skripal
was recruited and handed Russian secrets over to the MI6. He [later] ran the MI6 Russia desk
so anything about Skripal will have passed through him. It is very likely that they
personally knew each other. Pablo Miller, who worked for Steele's private company [Orbis],
lived in the same town as Skripal and they seems to have been friends since Miller had
recruited him. Miller or someone else attempted to cover up the connection to Steele by
editing his LinkedIn entry.
Here are some question:
Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about
Trump dirt?
Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?
If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me,
then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots
of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and
running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very
dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia
looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.
The British government issued a D-Notice which prohibited the British press from further
mentioning Pablo Miller.
We also speculated that Skripal wanted to go back to Russia:
The most curious point in the affair though is the visit of the daughter. She had just
come from Moscow to visit her lonely father when both were poisoned in a rather sensational
way. There must be some reason why she was involved in this.
Did she have a bad message for him?
Did they both decide that suicide was the only way out?
Was locally bought Fentanyl involved as the local press had reported?
or
Was the lonely old man Sergej Skripal preparing to go back to his homeland Russia?
Did he offer a some kind of "gift" as apology to the Russian government that his
trusted daughter would take to Moscow?
Did someone find out and stop the transfer?
The above questions are all highly speculative. But the connection between Steele and
Skripal is way too deep to be irrelevant here. It certainly deserves more digging.
Putin now confirms that Skripal was indeed willing to come back to Russia. Oliver Stone
thinks Skripal wanted to present something to the press. If Skripal had publicly said that he
made up and wrote the Steele dossier, the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign by the Clinton
'resistance' would have been over. The whole Mueller investigation nonsense would never have
happened.
Pablo Miller, the British spy, also
appeared in the papers of the shady Integrity Initiative :
There is additional
suspicion that the Integrity Initiative, whose primary function is to stoke
Russophobia, was one of the brains behind the Skripal incident.
The Initiative was also involved in the Steele dossier and the russophobic
anti-Trump campaign. Andrew Wood, a former British ambassador to Moscow, is employed by the
Institute for Statecraft , the shadowy parent organization of the Integrity
Initiative funded by the Ministry of Defense and Foreign Office. It was Andrew Wood who
helped
to disseminate the Steele dossier to U.S. Senator John McCain. McCain then gave the
dossier to FBI Director James Comey. The FBI used the dossier first to get FISA warrants to
spy on the Trump campaign, and, after Comey was fired, to
launch a counter-intelligence investigation (section 3) against Trump himself.
Here is a theory how all this may come together. Back in 2015 the Institute of
Statecraft and its russophobic director Colonel Donnelly
discussed how to increase sanctions on Russia. In 2016 the Steele dossier was created in
an attempt to connect Trump to Russia. Steele's colleague Pablo Miller and his spy Sergei
Skripal were quite likely involved in creating the dossier. The dossier was disseminated with
the help of Donnelly's Institute of Statecraft .
For some reason the Skripals had to be taken out. Sergei Skripal probably threatened to
spill the beans about the dossier after it became public. The highly scripted 'Novichok'
incident in Salisbury was staged to remove Skripal and to smear Russia with an alleged murder
attempt. Colonel McCourt, the trusted army nurse, was asked to help on the scene. After the
Skripal incident, and with no evidence shown, Russia was blamed and massive sanctions
followed. The Integrity Initiative , the propaganda arm of the Institute of
Statecraft , analyzes the media results of the Skripal affair and continues to stoke the
anti-Russia campaign.
It might be possible that Steele's 'dirty dossier', the Skripal case and the Integrity
Initiative operation are unrelated. But that chance for that now tends towards zero.
The weak part of that theory was always that we did not know for sure if Sergei Skripal
really wanted to go back to Russia. We now know that this was the case. Oliver Stone seems to
know that Skripal wanted to go public about something. That makes the theory fit even
better.
Putin does not
believe that the Skripals were poisoned to kill them:
Oliver Stone: Who poisoned him? They say English secret services did not want Sergei
Skripal to come back to Russia?
Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I do not quite believe this. I do not believe this is the
case.
Oliver Stone: Makes sense. You do not agree with me?
Vladimir Putin: If they had wanted to poison him, they would have done so.
Oliver Stone: Ok, that makes sense. I don't know. Who did then?
Vladimir Putin: After all, this is not a hard thing to do in today's world. In fact, a
fraction of a milligram would have been enough to do the job. And if they had him in their
hands, there was nothing complicated about it. No, this does not make sense. Maybe they just
wanted to provoke a scandal.
Oliver Stone: I think it is more complicated. You know, you think I am much too much of a
conspiracy guy.
Vladimir Putin: I do not believe this.
Oliver Stone: I have seen things. I do.
Vladimir Putin: You should not.
When and where will the Oliver Stone documentary about the Skripal affair have its
premiere?
--- Previous Moon of Alabama posts on the Skripal case:
Doubt that, Skripal's enemies is in Russia, Putin have earlier stated
Skripal was a traitor and should be treated as such. Why Skripal would go Russia after he
deliberately moved out of Russia after an assault most likely carried out by someone in
Russia, that makes no sense.
Doubt that, Skripal's enemies is in Russia, Putin have earlier stated Skripal
was a traitor and should be treated as such. Why Skripal would go Russia after he
deliberately moved out of Russia after an assault most likely carried out by someone in
Russia, that makes no sense.
Skripal was caught in Russia when he spied for the Brits. He went to jail for five or so
years. Then the Brits wanted to exchange him for a Russian agent they (or the U.S.) had
caught. Skripal was released from jail for having served most his time and exchanged. Russia
has no more interest in persecuting him. Skripal did not 'deliberately move out of Russia'.
There was no assault by Russia on him.
Zanon you statement it typical misinformation, you took only a part of Putin statement!Yes,
he said that, but he also said, that he already served his time for that so he is of no
interest to the authorities!
It's been a full year now since Yulia's last (controlled) appearance to the public. The
notion that the Skripals are in some kind of "witness protection program" has been suggested
but never confirmed. There's no indication as to what they may have been witness to, let
alone any statement of fact from them at all regarding the Salsbury events. This is highly
unusual since the UK government made such a high-profile international incident of it all. Is
Putin asked of the apparent forced disappearance of a Russian citizen (Yulia Skripal)?
This adds some weight to the theory that the two Russian "tourists" were delivering something
(paperwork? fake passports? ) that Skripal wanted, not trying to kill him. Or, perhaps, they
picked up something FROM Skripal?
The sentence where Putin confirms Stone's idea that Skripal wanted to go back to Russia is
oddly stated:
"Yes, I have been told that he wants to make a written request to come back."
1. Putin used present tense: Skripal "wants", rather than "wanted". Doesn't that imply
some communication since the "incident"?
2. The bit about the "written request" part is way more specific than I would have expected.
It sounds like Skripal wasn't just vaguely dreaming about going back to Mother Russia, but
was taking steps to do so. Were the "tourists" delivering the proper bureaucratic Form that
Skripal would need to fill out?
I may be reading way to much into this - it could just be idiosyncratic aspects of Putin
speaking in English, or bad translation.
Who would not poison him and his daughter? The Russians.
If he wanted to return, he would have to possess information that was worth taking him
back and letting him live out his life in peace.
Would the crap Trump wanted to know be that infrmation?
He was being handled by Mi6 and knew he had no way to communicate with the Russians.
He needed his daughter to cut a deal.
The Brits could have easily pierced Skirpal's communication with his daughter (even if it
was a whisper in her ear).
Would he risk his life and his daughter's life for such a long-shot 'deal'?
And the foundation question in all this is "Did Skirpal work on the Steele Dossier, and
what did he contribute to that document?"
It's all a MacGuffin.
The reality probably is thus: The Brits cold-bloodedly poisoned him and his daughter to tar the Russians. Then a
straight British fabrication story that holds no water anywhere along the way. They did it,
and he had no value to them, so why not? His daughter? She's Russian. Of no use to them.
In the scheme of things, it was a trivial act of poisoning with a huge payoff, which they
achieved.
Highly Likely it was a dirty trick by the Russophobic Brits. Nothing more. Sloppy Mi6
poisoning.
He speaks in the present, not in the past. And says 'he is a spy' meaning the guy kept
working for the Brits in the recent years. The Skripal affair was possibly used by May when
she was cornered during the Brexit negotiation. No doubt it had other effects as well, such
as forbidding any EU deal with the Russians over Syria.
Mina: Good catch.. IMHO all our speculations are futile anyway at this point. BOTH sides DO
NOT want to know us the whole truth. Only time will tell, when those people directly involve
actually talk and present hard evidence.
Addition: I would asume the Interview will be worth a watch anyway. The "Putin Interviews"
makes for an interesting watch.Though stone seems sometimes more taken away by his own world view and narrative. But he has
his hearth in the right place i assume, and provides some insights to western mass media
watchers that they would otherwise never get.
There was no poisoning ... nobody died of Novichok ... Skripal and his daughter are alive and
well ... the incident was staged ... it was a kabuki piece of anti - Russia malarkey poorly
executed
If Skripal had publicly said that he made up and wrote the Steele dossier, the
anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign by the Clinton 'resistance' would have been over. The whole
Mueller investigation nonsense would never have happened.
I doubt that. The Russiagate-mongers have always been totally proof against any and all
evidence of reality, from day one to today. In this case they would've just said he was
lying, either to suck up to Putin and/or because Putin threatened him.
Why has Skripal never given a public interview? Because he's dead? Nah, the idiots in the
Conservative government would have milked that dry. My best guess is that the British
government know that he'll say something very damaging to the Conservative government and
that can't be allowed to happen. What that something could be can only be guessed at, but it
could be that the Steele Report was authorised and approved by the Conservative government.
This is one event I get nowhere with. In fact the only piece of information that gives me any
info that I feel credible is how convinced a UK ambassador I am familiar with was about
Russia being behind it, not by details given in person to me but just how they went about in
reaction. There are ambassadors and ambassadors, and this one being a nicer person, quite
meticulous, and not one to purposefully lie. That proves nothing though :( .
"Filmmaker and conspiracy theorist Oliver Stone has made no secret of his admiration for
Russian President Vladimir Putin, but now he has taken it to a whole new level by trying to
make him his 22-year-old daughter's godfather. "
So, the question remains: Where in the world are the Skripals at this very moment? I do not
believe that Putin does not know the answer, but for reasons of his own, he is keeping it to
himself. Possibly, he wants the whole affair to disappear quietly down the memory hole. Of
course, the story may return to the public eye someday. Sort of like a cold-case murder that
finally gets solved.
@35 rob.... the skripals are being frozen out by the same means at the uk's D-notice... do
the math.. it is very clear.. it has nothing to do with putin, in fact they need to keep
skripals out of the picture forever, or until that is way past it's by use date - 30 years??
I don't think the Putin statement makes any difference. It confirms the Theory that the
Russians did it equally as well as it confirms that the Brits or Americans did it.
MRD applies.
And it won't convince anyone either.
And of course the "believe 10 incredible things before breakfast" claims in the straits of
Hormuz this month. We are getting close to the point where May or Trump is going to flat out call their own
intelligence services liars and creators of false flags.
The Skripals were doped with BZ nerve agent. It is likely that Sergei has been maintained in
a near vegetative state with psychotropic drugs since then as a means to keep him in storage. There was no novichok other than the fresh batch made at Porton Down and used to
amateurishly spike the sample sent to the OPCW for analysis.
Putin refers to Sergei being a spy in the present tense since Putin knows that once
someone is a spook they are always a spook. It is not a career one can retire from.
The scenario b describes is the most probable of all that I've heard. Spook agencies such
as the MI6 and CIA like to think of themselves as thrifty with their assets and thus
accomplish multiple objectives with a single operation. They believe themselves to be clever
that way. For this reason they would have been unlikely to have doped the Skripals for the
sole purpose of implicating Russia. There are any number of other ways that they could have
arranged an incident that makes Russia look bad. The operation would have had to serve other
purposes as well, and silencing Sergei and preventing his embarrassing return to Russia would
be suitable additional purposes. There were likely other objectives within the operation as
well such as smoking out leakers.
Do feel pity for the Atlantic Council trolls who are tasked with trying to subtly
reinforce the nonsense novichok narrative. Theirs is not an easy job.
The former Russian intelligence officer, who came to Britain in 2010 as part of a spy swap,
regretted being a double agent and wanted to visit his family, his friend Vladimir
Timoshkov told the BBC.
So HMG was embarrassed they could not protect their spy?
As for Putin's responses to Stone being more ambiguous than you would like, please consider
Putin's position. He is trying to be diplomatic and is unlikely to come out and make blunt
accusations even if he is certain about them beyond any shadow of doubt. He needs to leave
his "partners" in Britain and the US the wiggle room to climb down from their nonsense
if they come to their senses. Furthermore, if he gives signals that Russia is willing to
repatriate the Skripals then that could sign the Skripals' death warrant. Best for the
Skripals if the British and Americans feel confident that the Skripals are securely pinned
down.
You have to be careful what you say when dealing with psychopaths that you don't trigger
them into violence with a misplaced word.
It would be well to remember that in early March last year, about the same time that the
Skripals were found collapsed on the park bench in The Maltings shopping centre by Alison
McCourt and her award-winning heroic teenage daughter, that the Syrian Arab Army liberated
Douma / East Ghouta (or most of that area anyway) near Damascus and captured 300 terrorists.
Among the captured fighters were found British and French "military advisors". The British
government (and probably likely the French government: do people remember that Moscow also
thumped Paris over its role in the Skripal poisoning saga?) needed a diversion from that
sorry tale that would have exposed Britain and France's sordid roles in the failed US-led
invasion of Syria and the overthrow of Syria's government.
At the same time a military exercise in which troops apparently rehearsed a poisoning
incident had just been completed in the Salisbury / Porton Down area. McCourt had taken part
in that exercise.
It is possible that Skripal, living alone in his house and his pets, and facing a lonely
future in Britain after his daughter, the other surviving member of his family, started
making wedding arrangements that would have meant fewer visits to Britain to see her father,
had contemplated returning to Russia and had made known his wish to a few people he thought
he could trust. But whether he had information about his role (or no role) in cooking up the
stories in the Steele dossier that Oliver Stone suggested he had, that he was planning to
tell the Kremlin, is another thing. It might very well be that - unfortunately for the
Skripals - Skripal's handler and British government spook agencies were and are as much taken
with conspiracy thinking and the conspiracy mind-set as Oliver Stone was (in his interview
with Vladimir Putin) and those agencies feared that Skripal was going to spill the beans
about his (possible) involvement in the Steele dossier and implicate them.
These people are spies after all, and once a spook, always a spook. And spooks also look
for a scheme that can hit two (and more) birds with the one stone; any consequences that
arise, such as what to tell the public, can be dealt with later. Hence, the poisoning
incident, that can be blamed on Russia and justify further sanctioning and arms build-up and
expenditures (benefiting then PM Theresa May's husband financially), that deflects attention
away from what just happened in Syria, and which removes someone from (possibly) telling the
truth about supposed Russian involvement in the 2016 US Presidential elections, was a
concoction too good to pass up.
Thanks b, a timely post. I sometimes suspect that the outing of Integrity Initiative and
Institute for Statecraft was a Russian payback for the defaming antics perpetrated by the MI6
morons. I have no proof as it was meticulously anonymous. Its a comforting thought here in
the gaslit studio of humanity.
I had a good laugh at one poster who had it on good authority from a trustworthy
ambassador that the Skripals are in USA. The ambassadors of the world are usually well versed
in gaslighting. More on that subject at Corbet Report or Thomas Sheridan.
The big problem with Skripals etc was that they would reveal the complicity of the UK in
developing the Steele dirty dossier to get Hillary the vulgar elected. They backed the wrong
team and got caught playing dirty.
Finding ambiguity or evasiveness in President Putin's answers to Skripal-related questions is
not surprising - after all he knows that anything he says will automatically be discredited
by the MSM echo chambers. By keeping his answers open-ended he challenges the western public
to ask questions and find their own answers. Sadly, few will read or view with the open minds
often found here at MoA.
Russian and English transcripts are not identical. In the Russian version, they both speak in
the past sense, literally:
-It WAS said, that he would return to Russia, that he has some information
-Yes, I WAS told, he wants to write a paper, ask to return
-It WAS said that he intendED to return here and to provide some information to the press
From grammar, that was all said in the past, and was accurate as of that past moment (:
the present tense is used after "that")
The source was not explained by either of them (...and indeed FWIW it reminds of
Berezovsky...)
but it makes sense because they would be recognised everywhere in UK.
I don't get the insinuation from you Uncle T, I mean that is not what I said if it was me
you meant. Same goes for WG insinuating there are trolls on board, it puts an air of
uncertainty amongst commentators like they have to check what they say not to be called
troll, and that is trolling. Why not just criticise a commentator directly and allow the
discussion to continue from that instead if you are serious, of setting the whole board on
edge ?
When I linked to the Putin-Stone transcript yesterday on the open thread, I purposely omitted
the Skripal discussion and posted the bit about American culture. I did so because of its
convoluted nature, as many have noted. I read it 3-4 times and I still couldn't make sense of
it via my usual methods of discourse analysis. In fact, the entire transcript is a series of
convolutions. It would be better to see the filmed original and go from there. Of course, the
Kremlin seemed okay with the transcript's form otherwise it wouldn't have been published.
As for the kidnapping of the Skripals by the UK government, IMO that's now the real
scandal, but there seems no interest in it as BigLie Media has dumped the affair down its
memory hole. And the truth of the matter is yet another reason why the UK's Deep State cannot
allow Corbyn to gain power. Somehow, the UK citizenry must oust the Tories and Blairites,
install Corbyn, and regain control over their destiny. Until that happens, the Skripals's
fate and so much more will remain unanswered.
As for the UK-sponsored Lie Machines, Kit Klarenberg continues his
excellent work uncovering their schemes and continues to get his reporting published by
Sputnik , as with the item linked within the above tweet:
"A reminder of when Integrity Initiative's bff @haynesdeborah, who'd been writing about
#Skripal on an almost daily basis for over a year, believed an NYT story that totally
contradicted the official Salisbury narrative and her own reporting on the subject."
Kit's just one of a small army of excellent online investigators worthy of following on
Twitter and their publishing outlets.
"For some reason the Skripals had to be taken out".
Is in this case perhaps not the simplest provided reason not also the best candidate?
Skripal f#@&ed his old KGB buddies and he got payed back while of course, for dual use
purposes, Putin states now openly it helped "to cause a scandal" supposedly for various
geopolitical reasons. Russia already see itself at war, it's not "hoping".
Putin 2010" "Traitors will kick the bucket, believe me. Those other folks betrayed their
friends, their brother in arms" and "Whatever they got in exchange for it, those 30 pieces of
silver they were given, they will choke on them."
Putin 2019 (FT interview)" "Treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be
punished. I am not saying that the Salisbury incident is the way to do it. Not at all. But
traitors must be punished."
Now do we *really* need a complex theory when Putin calls it openly "the gravest crime
possible"? Of course, some parties could have used this tension but sometimes we should not
look for complexity when simpler solutions are there: motive, some evidence, perpetrator and
murder weapon. Just not very *refined* but efficiency in terms of killing was perhaps not
even the point being made. What is being demonstrated is willingness and means.
Oliver Stone. Well, at least he tries. His most brilliant film, in my opinion, was Natural
Born killers which was Kubrikesque as a sort of new take on A Clockwork Orange. But being a
great film director does not make you a great researcher and analyst.
Putin most definitely has a sense of humour and I think that's what keeps him going.
Just to throw it into the bubbling pot, there was that single report in May that Sergei
Skripal, like ET, had finally phoned home. IIRC, earlier (c. March or April) there was a
story with an audio clip about a telephone call between Yulia and her cousin in Russia.
I'm providing this link to a Telegraph article about the Sergei call just as a starting
point for anyone who may be curious. I certainly can't vouch for the Telegraph's veracity,
and of course have no rational way to assess the account's authenticity and significance.
True or not, like every other "development" in this riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside
an enigma of l'affaire Skripal, it raises far more questions than it answers.
FWIW, I think Putin's intellect and statesmanship is impressive. But he's undoubtedly a
bit of a Cheshire Cat.
As I understood it, Sergei Skripal was more mercenary than spook, in the business of selling
info because he could profit from it. In other words, more Aldrich Ames or Hanssen than
Philby.
He was selling info to MI6 in exchange for cash and a holiday home in Spain. He got
caught, spent some time in jail and Russia swapped him because there was no further damage he
could do.
It was probably that same mercenary spirit that made him want to go back and he would have
known he'd have to make his wares really appealing to Moscow to let him back in. I'd think
the Steele dossier and Russiagate seemed like a perfect opportunity for him to state - or
perhaps -- overstate the importance of his information.
He may have overplayed his hand - obviously, his plans leaked out - and UK intelligence
(perhaps with the US involved) decided to stage the incident. Or perhaps - as is possible
with someone who'll play both sides - Sergei was the leaker in an attempt to gain more
currency with Moscow.
I'd think that Putin knows exactly what went on and this would also explain why Russia
hasn't been making a stink about one of their citizens - Yulia - being held prisoner/hostage
in the UK for well over a year.
Let's take the famous Nina Ricci perfume bottle, laced with novichok, which was found in
a rubbish bin or charity bin by a homeless man and given weeks later to his woman friend,
who tragically died after spraying it on her wrist. The police/MI6 narrative is that this
perfume bottle was used to transport the novichok from Russia in the baggage of one of the
alleged GRU men caught on CCTV in Salisbury. The novichok was then sprayed on the door
handle of the Skripals' house. The assassins then callously threw away the bottle (which
they knew contained enough novichok to kill more people) in a dustbin or charity bin,
demonstrating their indifference to loss of life as well as their indifference to leaving
clues all over the place. There are problems with this narrative.
The homeless man claimed he had found the perfume bottle still in its box sealed in
cellophane, proof it was not reopened after it had been laced with novichok and
professionally repackaged. The bottle could not therefore have been used (as claimed) to
spray the novichok on the doorknob, or the cellophane seal would have been broken.
Assassins far from home don't usually carry around cellophane-wrapping machines to
repackage opened perfume bottles, especially when they are just going to chuck them in the
bin. Nor would they take the risk, having fitted the separate spray nozzle onto the bottle
and sprayed the doorknob, of disassembling it again to put it back in the box, knowing that
a drop on their skin would kill them. And where would they perform this delicate operation?
On the street? This poisoned perfume bottle was therefore never reopened, never used and it
affected nobody until it ended up in the hands of the homeless man. So who or what was it
intended for?
Ladies' perfume bottles are normally intended for women. How many women are there in
this story? Only one. The only possible explanation for the existence of this unopened,
unused bottle of perfume laced with novichok is that it was a poisoned gift meant for Yulia
Skripal. Why didn't she open it? Because she had a spy father who took one look at it and
said: "Don't touch it!"
So here is the alternative narrative. MI6 had the bright idea of putting novichok in a
Nina Ricci perfume bottle and sending it as a birthday present to Yulia Skripal at her
father's house. Her birthday was on 17th March, but the present was probably delivered on
the 3rd, the day she arrived, so as to nip their escape plan in the bud. It was meant to
seem like a present from her family or boyfriend. No doubt the parcel had Russian stamps on
it, designed to frame the Russian state when the Skripals were found dead in their house
with an open perfume bottle in Yulia's hands. Unfortunately for MI6, Sergei took one look
at this Nina Ricci perfume bottle and his spy instincts smelled danger. He refused to open
it, but instead went for a long walk with it and put it in a rubbish bin or charity bin
half-way across town. There it was found by the homeless man and given to his woman friend,
a victim of MI6's murderous callousness. Even after MI6 knew it had gone missing, they did
not warn the public to beware of picking up a Nina Ricci perfume bottle because they didn't
want to give themselves away as the assassins.
The British police knew of the perfume bottle early on. The
first theory of the poisoning presented to the public was that Yulia had brought the
novichok from Russian in her luggage. There was even speculation that it was in a perfume
bottle that Yulia had suddenly decided to open on the bench. (This did not sound plausible at
the time as it would not explain how the novichok hit Sergei.)
The nerve agent that poisoned the Russian spy Sergei Skripal was planted in his
daughter's suitcase before she left Moscow, intelligence agencies now believe.
Senior sources have told the Telegraph they are convinced the Novichok nerve agent was
hidden in the luggage of Yulia Skripal, the double agent's 33-year-old daughter.
They are working on the theory that the toxin was impregnated in an item of clothing or
cosmetics or else in a gift that was opened in his house in Salisbury,
meaning Miss Skripal was deliberately targeted to get at her father.
We know the police were all over looking for the missing perfume bottle. They could not
find it, because Sergei had already dumped it in the charity bin. Maybe Sergei even told them
where he put it, but Charlie had found it before MI6 could recover it.
Zanon: "Doubt that, Skripal's enemies is in Russia, Putin have earlier stated Skripal was
a traitor and should be treated as such."
He *was* a traitor, and he *was* treated as such: arrest, trial, conviction,
imprisonment.
But business is business. Once the Russians had let him rot away in prison for years then
there was still some residual value to be squeezed from him i.e. a spy-swap.
The rules of that game are very well-defined: you agree on the people, you do the
swap-over, and then you walk away.
The dude you hand over goes into anonymous retirement, and both sides are content that
they have done the right thing by their own.
Zanon: "Why Skripal would go Russia after he deliberately moved out of Russia after an
assault most likely carried out by someone in Russia"
Oh, pllllllllllease. That sentence makes no chronological sense.
This is the sequence of events that makes the most sense:
1) Skripal is recruited by Pablo Miller
2) Skripal spies on behalf of the British
3) Skripal is caught and imprisoned by the Russians
4) Skripal is swapped for some Russian spies
5) Skripal "retires" to Salisbury
6) Skripal and Miller concoct the entire "dossier" in a pub, laughing uproariously
7) Skripal sees The Shit Hit The Fan in the USA over that "dossier"
8) Skripal thinks "Oh, crap, this could end badly" and puts out some feelers
9) Skripal's daughter brings a message: Two men are coming in a few days to talk to you, you
can trust them, the deal they will propose is that you will be welcome back to Russia if you
agree dump on the "dossier" in a press conference.
The two dudes turn up, but no meeting took place because someone else "novichoked" Skripal
before he could get to that meeting.
Zanon: ", that makes no sense."
Pig's arse it doesn't. It. Makes. Perfect. Sense.
Skripal was swapped because as far as the Russians were concerned that was all the value
he had left to him.
Once he got involved in the "dossier" then his value to the Russians skyrocket i.e. he
could blow the lid off "Russiagate", but only if the Russians can get him back to Moscow.
They tried, and they failed. Someone else got to him first.
@49 Zanon "I am not here to post syncopath comments as you do, "
Zanon, baby, you are here for one purpose only: to suggest - time after tedious time -
that Vladimir Putin is to blame for everything that happens in this world.
A poisoning in Salisbury? Putin ordered the hit.
Israel bombs Syria? That was Putin's idea.
Iran is in Syria? Putin has already agreed to get rid of them. Blaming the Russians is your one and only trick.
Skripal was arrested and spent 5 years in a Russian prison. If "his old KGB buddies" had
wanted him dead then that's when he would have been killed.
Why on Earth would they swap him, watch him go into "retirement" in Salisbury, and only
then slap their foreheads and shout "Oh, shit, we gosh-darned forgot to kill him. Better send
some guys over there and bump him off".
Yesterday you posted an interesting heads up about state dept and Atlantic council
trolls working here. The context being crowing about the Panamanian deflagging of the Iranian
vessel.
They fear this blog that much to commit resources in order to change minds? I an
disappointed that Kissinger has not shown up yet. It makes me feel lowly and unimportant.
Even if Putin is perceived to be our enemy having a conversation would make some sense.
The West fears that they could not stand in a room with him openly and beat him in a debate.
His intellect would outclass them on every level. Minds would be changed and they fear that
hence the fear of even having a conversation about him.
This garbage works on many but I have noticed that people do eventually begin to think
differently if you softly point things out when the conversation turns that direction. They
fear open conversations like this unless they can tightly control and edit.
"The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is warning that Russian agents could seek
to further divide Americans by exploiting U.S. passions over whether pineapple belongs on
pizza.
It's a cheesy, playful warning -- but it's trying to deliver a serious message. Posted
online Wednesday by the department's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the
tongue-in-cheek warning aims to help Americans identify and protect against propaganda
campaigns from Russia and other foreign adversaries.
After all,
the DHS warning says, Russian agents are capable of simultaneously insisting online that
"Being anti-pineapple is un-American!" while also pushing out posts saying "Millennials are
ruining pizza!""
"
A recent survey of 3,000 kids found that being a YouTube star was a more sought-after
profession than being an astronaut among kids in the US and the United Kingdom.
Children ages 8 to 12 in the US, the UK, and China were recently polled in honor of the
50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission, which resulted in the first person to walk on the
moon.
Kids in the US and the UK were three times as likely to want to be YouTubers or vloggers
as astronauts, while kids in China were more likely to want to be astronauts."
Here's a simple hypothesis: Sergey Skripal was involved with the fabrication of the Steele
dossier (we know this). Therefore, he was a risk to the UK government and security services,
as well as the US "democrats". Quite possibly Skripal signalled that he wanted to return to
Russia, but if he didn't he was still a risk because of what he knew. So TPTB made up the
story that the "russians had poisoned the Skripals with Novichok". As always in these cases,
it serves more than one purpose. In this case they got rid of the Skripal risk and they could
blame Russia again.
Could it be that PD already made the stuf but did not want to take credit, just in case it
ever proved useful in blaming some Douma-style incident to Russia? But before that happened,
everyone and his cat must know what Novichok is and that only Russia can make it. It had to
be introduced to the public somehow. And then the wrong President got elected.
I understand Russian and I speak a language with a similar grammar, and I have no idea
how to say "he said that he wants" in a way that implies something different than a wish made
at the time of speaking ("he wants") or a wish that existed before he spoke ("he wanted").
Implication about wishing after the time of speaking would require some elaboration, you
cannot make it by selecting tenses.
In Russian, as I have written above, one reports the tense as used by the person whose
action one is reporting. Thus:
"I want to go back to Russia" [Я хочу
вернуться в
Россию] is reported in Russian literally as:
Он сказал, что
хочет
вернуться в
Россию [He said that he wants to go back to Russia],
whereas in English, one should say: He said that he wanted to go back to Russia.
However, in Russian, one can add, for example, the term
якобы in order to express one's doubts about the
veracity of that action which one is reporting:
Он сказал, что
хочет, якобы,
вернуться в
Россию [literally: He said that he, allegedly, wants to
go back to Russia].
I asserted that any credible organic chemist could make novichok nerve agents. Here is my
final exam in my 1st year graduate organic synthesis course. Only one kid of 15 lost any
points. Uniquely Russian technology my ass....
Stone asked the Russian leader if he believes in the theory that Sergei Skripal wanted to return to Russia and divulge some
secrets but was stopped by the British government.
"Honestly, I don't really believe it. I don't believe it," Putin replied.
Files from the Porton Down military laboratory were found in a trash can in Northern London.
It's the laboratory where, according to the British authorities, nobody could walk out with
the poison on the eve of the Skripal poisoning. Classified documents are a terrorist's dream,
according to British intelligence agencies. So, they managed to walk out with them but failed
to walk out with the poison?
The Trump administration has not imposed a second round of sanctions on Russia over the
poisoning of an ex-Russian spy in Britain more than eight months after telling Congress that
Moscow had triggered them.
State Department officials have repeatedly insisted the United States intends to impose
new sanctions, which are required under a law passed by Congress in 1991 on eliminating
chemical and biological weapons.
But several months have passed without news, and members of Congress say they have heard
little from the administration on the topic.
A former government official familiar with the matter told The Hill that the State and
Treasury departments finalized a proposed sanctions package by March at the latest, but top
officials have yet to sign off.
"Options have been ready to go for several months at this point and senior folks in the
administration haven't made the decision or given the green light to roll them out," the
former official said.
Bloomberg reported at the end of March that the White House had received the sanctions
package and that State and Treasury were waiting for the White House to sign off before they
issued the new punishment for the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in
Salisbury.
The reason for the lack of action is shrouded in mystery. The White House did not offer a
comment for this story.
C'mon guys, the handling of the case shortly after the event rules out any Russian induced
poisoning, circumstantial evidence does not fit a nerve agent. Its an utmost hilarious
propaganda narrative. The Russian state orders an attack with an internationally banned
weapon of mass destruction on the territory of a Nato member? For late revenge, hurt
feelings? Doesn't anybody realize how stupid that sounds? The scenario brought forward, with
the perfume bottle, could (thinking opsec) have easily involve thousands of innocent victims.
Imagine the opening of the bottle in a mall. There is no Russian state component in it. Not
even a Roque element. The claim is total BS. Short analysis shows, that management of this
"case" is entirely in the realm of the UK.
The opcw sampling, the coincidental first responder military nurse, Pablo Miller...
A lot of elements of this operation had to be prepared upfront and controlled while the
operation is unfolding. It remains open, whether or not the skripals where in on the plot,
probably not. But anyone asserting the "Russia did it/novichok" story does lack the sanity to
be trusted with state matters.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) condemns recent threats made by the London Metropolitan
Police to treat the publication of leaked information as a "criminal matter" - marking the
latest move to restrict press freedom in the UK in favour of national security.
Following a series of media reports containing details from leaked diplomatic cables
preceding the resignation of Sir Kim Darroch from his post as UK Ambassador to the US, the
London Metropolitan Police threatened to treat the publication of leaked documents as
criminal.
[...] On 12 July, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu
stated that "The publication of leaked communications, knowing the damage they have
caused or are likely to cause, may also be a criminal matter...I would advise all owners,
editors and publishers of social and mainstream media not to publish leaked government
documents that may already be in their possession, or which may be offered to them, and to
turn them over to the police or give them back to their rightful owner, Her Majesty's
Government."
The following day, 13 July, Basu appeared to partially back down, stating
that the Met "respects the rights of the media and has no intention of seeking to prevent
editors from publishing stories in the public interest in a liberal democracy. The media hold
an important role in scrutinising the actions of the state." However, Basu maintained that
publication "could also constitute a criminal offence, and one that carries no public
interest defence".
They are most likely in a black site lock up in Swest of England. Life sentence for
sure. There are plenty of suitable estates that are probable black sites. Every nation has
them I guess for their special prisoners. Julia and Sergei are prisoners of conscience, no
habeas corpus in UK.
Both from interview transcripts and RT article it's clear that the part P. says he does
not believe is that S. has been poisoned by the British services (in response to Stone's
question floating such a possibility).
On 24 March 2018 BBC posted a piecemeal-videoed interview with S. classmate named Vladimir
Timoshkov, who said that sometime in 2012 S. called him from London for about 30 minutes,
argued that he did not commit treason since his allegiance had been to the USSR, and "wrote
to Putin" (timing not provided) asking for full pardon to be able to return to Russia on
family grounds. Writing to Putin was denied by Kremlin to BBC, and by Peskov in Russian media
the next day.
Exact meaning is unclear. Timoshkov recollection is not very confident, he is not entirely
sure about the year when this conversation took place, or the exact wording. It's not
impossible that S. only planned to write such letter, not actually wrote it, and that such a
possibility is tentatively confirmed by P. (However Stone version is coming back with some
'information', not coming on family grounds).
It is also possible that S. wrote such letter few years earlier, around the time of the
spy swap in 2010. He had to write to Pres. Medvedev asking for pardon, at least formally, and
it is not impossible that he was retelling some bits from that earlier letter. (Pardon was
granted after it was requested).
The problem with Michael Antony's explanation is that the charity bin has to remain
untouched and unopened or emptied from about 5 March to about 5 July or the first week of
July at least. That would be roughly four months from the time Sergei Skripal pops the bottle
into the bin to the time Charlie Rowley finds the package and gives it to Dawn Sturgess who
then opens the package, applies the perfume to her wrists and promptly keels over.
Plus if Skripal suspected that the bottle contained something dodgy, wouldn't you think
the last place he'd dispose of it would be a charity bin, if he were an intelligent
ex-spook?
@somebody # 102 ,
RT is mixing two different questions in one sentence:
"Stone asked the Russian leader if he believes in the theory that Sergei Skripal wanted to
return to Russia and divulge some secrets but was stopped by the British government. "Honestly, I don't really believe it. I don't believe it," Putin replied."
That remark by Putin was actually in response only to the question of whether UK spooks
poisoned Skripal to stop him returning to Russia, not about whether Skripal wanted to
return:
Oliver Stone: Who poisoned him? They say English secret services did not want Sergei
Skripal to come back to Russia?
Vladimir Putin: To be honest, I do not quite believe this. I do not believe this is the
case.
b:"Filmmaker Oliver Stone recently interviewed the President of the Russian
Federation, Vladimir Putin. The transcript was published yesterday evening. Most of the
interview is about Ukraine. A separate piece will cover that country. There is also a passage
about the U.S. election."
The "passage" about Ukraine is no less interesting. For example,
Oliver Stone: I remember you were telling me about the Obama phone call, Obama and
you had an agreement that there would be no firing on the last day. And he gave you a promise
that he would
Vladimir Putin: You know, while Obama is no longer President, there are certain
things we do not discuss in public. At any rate, I can say that the US did not follow
through on the agreements that we reached during this phone call [ my emphasis ].
I will stop there without going into detail.
b:"Filmmaker Oliver Stone recently interviewed the President of the Russian
Federation, Vladimir Putin. The transcript was published yesterday evening. Most of the
interview is about Ukraine. A separate piece will cover that country. There is also a passage
about the U.S. election."
The "passage" about Ukraine is no less interesting. For example,
Oliver Stone: I remember you were telling me about the Obama phone call, Obama and
you had an agreement that there would be no firing on the last day. And he gave you a promise
that he would
Vladimir Putin: You know, while Obama is no longer President, there are certain
things we do not discuss in public. At any rate, I can say that the US did not follow
through on the agreements that we reached during this phone call [ my emphasis ].
I will stop there without going into detail.
@109 Insane scenario "C'mon guys, the handling of the case shortly after the event rules out
any Russian induced poisoning, circumstantial evidence does not fit a nerve agent."
I was always puzzled by how inept the British government's pronouncements were following
the poisoning of the Skripals.
But once Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were fingered then the penny dropped.
Here are my two hypotheses:
a) Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov were Russian intelligence officers sent to make
contact with Sergei Skripal to parlay a deal.
b) British intelligence knew all about their upcoming visit (perhaps Yulia had been
instructed to vouch for them, and was sloppy)
Easy-peasy: poison the Skripals at that park bench, then do some detective work to
"discover" that those two weaselly-looking Russians were in Salisbury at the exact some time
that Ol' Sergei was keeling over.
Open and shut case, m'lord.
Only the two Russians had left Salisbury (1:50pm) before the Skripals had even entered the
Mill Pub (2:20pm). Therefore they could not possibly have attacked Sergei and Yulia at that park bench
(4:15pm).
Shit, meet Fan.
Q: What do the Brits do once they find out that they had no fall-guy?
A: Scramble. Improvise. Wave their arms around like demented pigeons.
For starters, keep very quiet about Petrov and Boshirov until it is possible to come up
with some way to squeeze them into the narrative.
And, for goodness sake, squash any suggestion that the Skripals had been attacked at that
park bench. No, perish the thought, even if it is the obvious conclusion.
Errrr, how about the car! No, that's stupid. The poison was in Zizzi's? No, that doesn't
actually help. The ducks... no, get a grip man, that's dumber than the car... ummm.. umm..
umm..
Flunky: What about the doorknob?
Flustered: What?
Flunky: We can claim they smeared the poison on the doorknob.
Flustered: Oh, what the heck. OK, we'll go with that.
Flunky: And Petrov and Boshirov?
Flustered: Yes, yes [waves hand] release their pictures.
These are facts:
a) Petrov and Boshirov were on a train back to London by 2pm
b) Sergei and Yulia were found on that park bench around 4pm
c) The Brits therefore had to come up with a timeline that has the Skripals poisoned well
*before* 2pm but only collapsing *after* 4pm.
What we see now is the result of that need i.e. it is an insult to the intelligence, but
the only way for the Brits to pin the attack on their pre-planned fall-guys.
@ in re organic chem prof and novowhatever... The Prof is obviously correct, dd simple. There
are guys in jails, busted for dope, who could make novowhatever...
However, since the "agent" found by Swiss was Agent BZ, it might be more interesting to
hear what poster 101 has to say about synthesizing BZ...
"I asserted that any credible organic chemist could make novichok nerve agents. Here is my
final exam in my 1st year graduate organic synthesis course. Only one kid of 15 lost any
points. Uniquely Russian technology my ass...."
So, Professor Collum, speak, please, to matter of BZ, as this seems far more interesting
and congruent with observations.
Nothing wrong with paid work being tiring. It lets the employee know they have earned their
shekels, or benjamins as the case may be. It helps keep the "impostor syndrome" at bay.
I wonder if Sergei got impostor syndrome when he was writing up his part of the Steele
Dossier or if he was just enjoying an opportunity to be creative?
The weak part of that theory was always that we did not know for sure if Sergei Skripal
really wanted to go back to Russia.
b top post.
Iirc, Sergei's desire to do so was reported from various sources, Viktoria Skripal (niece)
in first place, Yulia perhaps as well. It was just a part of the story for those who were
gripped by it, incl. me. Getting the quotes together would take hours, in any case they might
be contested, be merely some 'option', etc.
Makes sense: his wife and son had died, his (one guesses beloved) daughter was established
in Russia, he never adapted except superficially, was never successful, in GB. (i can't speak
to steele dossier etc.)
Guardian, by Luke Harding, published an article stating that Sergei did not at first
believe that Russia 'poisoned him' - parts ring very true, and are counter to the MSM
narrative.
Theresa May should be installed in the Tower of London until she habeas the Scripal's corpses
or provides verifiable information as to their estate. Should said Theresa May expire in said
Tower of London, she can do so in knowledge and consolation that so many much better than
herself have done so already.
The Tower of London stands as the best monument to the liquidation of the British Monarchy
and their Royal Family as well as the Aristocracy that supports that enterprise. May it soon
be so dedicated. Maybe the lies will then stop.
"I tend to think they are deceased, or they would have been trotted out for more coerced
interviews."
I disagree with those. As it is, it seems literally no one in Britain cares about this
case. (I'm not there, but I'm assuming if there were a civil liberties group trying to make a
public issue of their disappearance, loudly demanding of the government, "Where are the
Skripals? Are you illegally imprisoning them?", that I would've read about it here at some
point.) So why remind the people of their bizarrely disappeared existence?
As for killing them, though, if the government were smart in this case (I know they're
stupid in general, yes), they'd still keep them alive just in case there somehow were public
pressure to produce them. Look at the mistake Richard III made.
Arioch @122 pointed out: "...maybe for Putin there is really nothing of importance
that Skrypal could know and tell."
This is an significant distinction. Does it really matter to Putin or Russian geostrategic
interests if Sergei Skripal wanted to announce that he was one of the authors of the Steele
Dossier, and that he just did it for fun and profit? To the British and the Americans this
would be a huge embarrassment, but aside from some sweet schadenfreude what would Russia gain
from it?
From Stone's perspective this issue would be very important, but from Putin's, not so
much. When assigning an issue importance, one must always consider to whom the issue
is important as importance is rarely universal.
russ @127: I said deceased, not killed by UK, that was some other posters.
The UK government has not showed a shred of intelligence for several decades now. They
take orders from us, and we are not really their friends, we intend to rule, not ally. you
can't get more naive than that. But I don't really care, like with Kashoggi, I want to know
where there are now, before I starting putting emotional weight behind any stories I'm being
told about how they got there.
(Not trying to get in your face, just like accurate representation of what I said.)
Actually, he would have quite a number of ways to "write to P", if he really wanted.
E.g. he could (a) send an electronic message directly using electronic letter submission
option on the official website, or (b) he could ask Yulia to do so for him, and she had a
social media account (that's how his classmate established a contact with him), + almost
surely a email address,+ able to visit (c) or similarly via Victoria (d) or that classmate
(e) or come to any Rus. consulate anywhere and ask for it to be done --and one of his UK
acquaintances was telling he visited the embassy 'often' (f) or do it in lots of other ways
he could easily come up with, given his background in intelligence, + contacts and
experience, even if his communications were monitored
From what I have heard, the Russians believe that the Skripal affair has been much more
damaging to HMG than it has to Russia, and have no interest in removing the mystery
surrounding it - the more people delve, the more it stinks.
As an inhabitant of the UK, I can say that a lot of us were very shocked when the
Government was trying to stuff these obvious lies down our throats, and it is what got a few
of us onto alternative media - sick to death as we already were of the Brexit poison in the
MSM. So a belated thank you to b, and your colleagues, what would we do without you.
@james (38) Not sure what your point is re Putin's silence on the Skripal's whereabouts.
Putin could publicly wonder why Britain is keeping them incommunicado. What are the Brits
hiding? Even a devoted Empire supporter would have to agree that it is most peculiar. Yet
Putin claims to have no knowledge on the subject, which is almost certainly untrue. His
reason for this is unclear, but Putin is nothing if not shrewd. In time, the story will come
out one way or another.
Doubt that, Skripal's enemies is in Russia, Putin have earlier stated Skripal was a traitor
and should be treated as such. Why Skripal would go Russia after he deliberately moved out
of Russia after an assault most likely carried out by someone in Russia, that makes no
sense.
It seems you just watch/read MSM too much.
"would go Russia", "moved out of Russia", "by someone in Russia" etc.
Russia, Russia, Russia...
The thing is that Russia has nothing to do with all this stuff (mean, "Skripal case").
Yes, Putin called Skripal a traitor. Why? Because Skripal is a traitor.
If you didn't know, Putin is used to calling a spade a spade, without prevarication or double
meanings.
"Why Skripal would go Russia"
You reason in categories that you understand, although in reality people may have dozens
of reasons to do what you do not understand.
Why Skripal would go Russia? Well, don't you think the answer may be that Skripal simply love
Russia? Because Russia is his Motherland, his home, his country. Because he has his
mother here, relatives, friends etc.
He can love Russia, his country, even in spite of the harm that has caused her by his
betrayal.
He may experience shame, remorse, and other feelings. Don't you think about it?
And you don't understand the main thing. Because of Western MSM propaganda it may seems to
people that something is "wrong" with living in Russia.
This is pure nonsense. Just to remind - Skripal was arrested, and he served his time in
Russian jail, according to law.
Then he was officially pardoned and was released free. Since that moment he was free to do
whatever he wanted.
The right to come back to Russia was/is his right.
There's no law in Russia that if you served prison term and was released, you can't come back
from another country.
So, i repeat, Skripal can do whatever he wants.
The fact that Putin called him a traitor does not matter. Traitors can come back, bastards
can come back, liars can come back etc.
If you have no problems with the law, the Russian state will have no complaints about
you.
Since 2011, when Skripal was pardoned, he is clean under Russian law, so can do whatever he
wants.
Btw, just to remind - Boris Berezovsky also was going to come back from UK to Russia, he
wrote a letter to Putin.
But "suddenly" it happened so that Berezovsky committed a "suicide".
We can only guess what he could tell if he returned to Russia.
Someone really did not want this information to become known...
The presence of HMG nurse on site, and the subsequent Monty Pythom-esque cover up, seems
proof enough that the UK had foreknowledge and without question, worked to keep the
Russophobia stoked high not only after the incident, but the later killed a UK citizen to
continue the incident.
Mr. P is being diplomatic.
The guy who said that Skripal has been visiting the embassy "monthly" is Valery Morozov, who
has a refugee status in the UK. He made the claim in interviews to Western and Russian
opposition media, saying that he did not like that and stopped his contacts with S.
PS. For the official website submission, one does not need to "authorize" it, one needs to
provide the full name, email, and phone number on electronic form, that's all. It may be not
the best way but the office is required to confirm receipt and to answer. Of course it may
not be the kind of answer which he sought...
Very easy, Skripal have not moved to Russia, nor has his daughter. he is not friend of Russian state, after the swap he
kept working with intelligence services in the whole of the west, giving them information on Russia. You don't go back to live
freely in the nation you repeatedly committed high treason against, then, you are just foolish, begging to be killed.
The Donald Trump Administration is looking more and more like George W. Bush's
Administration: a dumb clueless idiot surrounded by neocons.
Remember Donald Rumsfeld , Karl Rove, Condoleezza Rice, John Bolton , George Tenet, Henry
Paulson, Paul Wolfowitz , and **** Cheney from the George W Bush Administration?
Tell me Trumptards, what's so "different this time" about Donald Trump hiring Bolton,
Pompeo, Mattis/Shanahan/Esper, Haley, Haspel and Mnuchin?
Ursula von der Leyen arrives clouded in scandal and ready to implement radical economic
policies that will stifle growth.
like Jean-Claude Juncker, she arrives in Brussels with a record of negligence in her country
of origin. Whereas Juncker was accused of failing in his duty to inform the Luxembourg
Parliament of illegal wiretapping by the intelligence service, von der Leyen was denounced for
mismanagement. In October 2018, when she was still Germany's minister of defense,
she admitted that her department had made mistakes in awarding contracts to external
consultants, amounting to several hundred million euros.
In 2012, Josep Borrell, former president of the European Parliament and former minister in
various Spanish socialist governments, was forced to resign from his position as president of
the European University Institute (UIE) following allegations of conflicts of interest. At that
time, he was receiving €300,000 as a member of the board of directors of the Spanish
sustainable energy company Abengoa, while at the same time promoting biofuels through the
institute.
Nevertheless, alongside von der Leyen, Borrell is about to be confirmed as the new head of
EU diplomacy. Another perfect candidate.
The scandal in Berlin is not the only reason the vote for Von der Leyen was narrow. It was
also that socialists and environmentalists weren't given sufficient trade-offs (in their eyes).
The European Union is all about distributing the large number of positions and policy
priorities between the involved parties, and in this case, the left felt shafted.
A source from the PiS party (the ruling party in Poland) told journalist Oskar
Górzyński of the media company Wirtualna Polska that it was a call from Chancellor
Angela Merkel that tipped some Polish MEPs over. What did Mrs. Merkel promise them? More
agricultural subsidies? The abandonment of the Article 7 sanction procedure against judicial
reforms in Poland? Only Merkel knows that and she won't tell.
Bill Wirtz comments on European politics and policy in English, French, and German.
His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Washington Examiner, CityAM, Le Monde, Le Figaro, and
Die Welt.
Thursday, July 4, 2019"Loyalty to the Nation All the Time, Loyalty to the
Government When it Deserves It." Mark Twain wrote an essay back in 1905 called "The Czar's
Soliloquy" ( North American Review, Vol. 180.No. DLXXX). The essay was
triggered by a sentence in the London Times , reporting: "After the Czar's morning bath
it is his habit to meditate an hour before dressing himself." Twain imagined that the Czar,
standing naked in front of a mirror, was for a few moments honest with himself about the
injustices and cruelties that he had allowed and perpetrated, and hoped for a better future.
Imagining the Czar's words to himself, Twain wrote:
There are twenty-five million families in Russia. There is a man-child at every mother's
knee. If these were twenty-five million patriotic mothers, they would teach these
man-children daily, saying : "Remember this, take it to heart, live by it, die for it if
necessary: that our patriotism is medieval, outworn, obsolete; that the modern patriotism,
the true patriotism, the only rational patriotism, is loyalty to the Nation all the time,
loyalty to the Government when it deserves it.
On the Fourth of July in particular, it makes me sad to run into people whose
patriotism ebbs and flows according to what political party occupies the White House. There
ought to be a large and real line between support of whoever who is in government at a
particular time, and a broader patriotism. A country is a mixture of people, ideals, geography,
history, cultures, and more. It should be possible to love your country, whether your feelings
about the government are positive, negative, neutral, ambivalent, or don't-give-a-damn.
"... One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. ..."
"... We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. ..."
"... It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP. http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/ ..."
"... Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists. ..."
"... Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated" near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow, doubt it. ..."
"... This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia. ..."
"... Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat. ..."
"... Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." ..."
"... You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable. ..."
An article by Robert Berke in oilprice.com, which describes itself as "The No. 1 Source for Oil & Energy News," illustrates how interest
groups control outcomes by how they shape policy choices.
Berke's article reveals how the US intends to maintain and extend its hegemony by breaking up the alliance between Russia, Iran,
and China, and by oil privatizations that result in countries losing control over their sovereignty to private oil companies that
work closely with the US government. As Trump has neutered his presidency by gratuitously accepting Gen. Flynn's resignation as National
Security Advisor, this scheme is likely to be Trump's approach to "better relations" with Russia.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China. Should Putin fall for such a scheme, it would be a fatal strategic blunder
from which Russia could not recover. Yet, Putin will be pressured to make this blunder.
One pressure on Putin comes from the Atlanticist Integrationists who have a material stake in their connections to the West
and who want Russia to be integrated into the Western world. Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent
to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
We agree with President Putin that the sanctions are in fact a benefit to Russia as they have moved Russia in self-sufficient
directions and toward developing relationships with China and Asia. Moreover, the West with its hegemonic impulses uses economic
relationships for control purposes. Trade with China and Asia does not pose the same threat to Russian independence.
Berke says that part of the deal being offered to Putin is "increased access to the huge European energy market, restored western
financial credit, access to Western technology, and a seat at the global decision-making table, all of which Russia badly needs and
wants." Sweetening the honey trap is official recognization of "Crimea as part of Russia."
Russia might want all of this, but it is nonsense that Russia needs any of it.
Crimea is part of Russia, as it has been for 300 years, and no one can do anything about it. What would it mean if Mexico did
not recognize that Texas and California were part of the US? Nothing.
Europe has scant alternatives to Russian energy. Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology
is superior to that in the West. And Russia most certainly does not need Western loans. Indeed, it would be an act of insanity
to accept them.
It is a self-serving Western myth that Russia needs foreign loans. This myth is enshrined in neoliberal economics, which is
a device for Western exploitation and control of other countries. Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
The Russian central bank has convinced the Russian government that it would be inflationary to finance Russian development
projects with the issuance of central bank credit. Foreign loans are essential, claims the central bank.
Someone needs to teach the Russian central bank basic economics before Russia is turned into another Western vassal. Here is the
lesson: When central bank credit is used to finance development projects, the supply of rubles increases but so does output from
the projects. Thus, goods and services rise with the supply of rubles. When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money
supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into
its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence
of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.
Foreign capital is not important to countries such as Russia and China. Both countries are perfectly capable of financing their
own development. Indeed, China is the world's largest creditor nation. Foreign loans are only important to countries that lack the
internal resources for development and have to purchase the business know-how, techlology, and resources abroad with foreign currencies
that their exports are insufficient to bring in.
This is not the case with Russia, which has large endowments of resources and a trade surplus. China's development was given a
boost by US corporations that moved their production for the US market offshore in order to pocket the difference in labor and regulatory
costs.
Neoliberals argue that Russia needs privatization in order to cover its budget deficit. Russia's government debt is only 17 percent
of Russian GDP. According to official measures, US federal debt is 104 percent of GDP, 6.1 times higher than in Russia. If US federal
debt is measured in real corrected terms, US federal debt is 185 percent of US GDP.
http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2014/07/08/deteriorating-economic-outlook/
Clearly, if the massive debt of the US government is not a problem, the tiny debt of Russia is not a problem.
Berke's article is part of the effort to scam Russia by convincing the Russian government that its prosperity depends on unfavorable
deals with the West. As Russia's neoliberal economists believe this, the scam has a chance of success.
Another delusion affecting the Russian government is the belief that privatization brings in capital. This delusion caused the
Russian government to turn over 20 percent of its oil company to foreign ownership. The only thing Russia achieved by this strategic
blunder was to deliver 20 percent of its oil profits into foreign hands. For a one-time payment, Russia gave away 20 percent of its
oil profits in perpetuity.
To repeat outselves, the greatest threat that Russia faces is not sanctions but the incompetence of its neoliberal economists
who have been throughly brainwashed to serve US interests.
When Russia borrows foreign currencies from abroad, the money supply also increases, but so does the foreign debt. Russia
does not spend the foreign currencies on the project but puts them into its foreign exchange reserves. The central bank issues
the same amount of rubles to pay the project's bills as it would in the absence of the foreign loan. All the foreign loan does
is to present Russia with an interest payment to a foreign creditor.
Yes, correct. But this is an IMF rule, and Russia is an IMF member. To control its monetary policy it would have to get out.
Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important
to Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"!
This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to be lifted, because this will also force
us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been expanding by leaps and bounds for the last
two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder – 2-3% of the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St.
Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West, who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions
didn't work.
Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him
up?
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Another pressure comes from the affront that sanctions represent to Russians. Removing this insult has become important to
Russians even though the sanctions do Russia no material harm.
Oh dear, neolibs at their "finest"! This "theory" is simply not true. If anything, Russians don't want the sanctions to
be lifted, because this will also force us to scrap our counter-sanctions against the EU. The agro-business in Russia had been
expanding by leaps and bounds for the last two years. This persistent myth that "the Russians" (who exactly, I wonder - 2-3% of
the pro-Western urbanites in Moscow and St. Pete?) are desperate to have the sanctons lifted is a self-deception of the West,
who IS desparate of the fact that the sanctions didn't work.
Russia's most dangerous threat is the country's neoliberal economists.
Yes! Ulyukayev is, probably, feeling lonely in his prison. I say - why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him
up? ;)
I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?
Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated"
near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed. Too
bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against humanity
and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine face I, somehow,
doubt it.
If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign. At any
rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that fears gentile
nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.
This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is ... Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But
since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.
Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main
conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really
rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged
whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.
I say – why not send Chubais, Siluanov and Nabiulina to cheer him up?
Most of Russia's economic block has to be literally purged from their sinecures, some, indeed, have to be "re-educated"
near Magadan or Tyumen, or Saransk. Too bad, two of these places are actually not too bad. Others deserved to be executed.
Too bad this jackass Gaidar (actually no blood relation to Arkady whatsoever) died before he could be tried for crimes against
humanity and genocide. Albeit, some say he died because of his consciousness couldn't take the burden. Looking at his swine
face I, somehow, doubt it.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for.
It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom
why he hasn't done this already.
Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin a little
bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough to see
through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.
The Russians can't be flummoxed, they aren't children. Russia and China border each other so they have a natural mutual interest
in having their east-west areas be stable and safe, particularly when the US threatens both of them. This geography isn't going
to change. Abandoning clients such as Syria and Iran would irreversibly damage the Russian brand as being unreliable therefore
they'd find it impossible to attract any others in the future. They know this so it's unlikely they would be so rash as to snap
at any bait dangled in front of them. And, as pointed out, the bait really isn't all that irresistible. It's always best to negotiate
from a position of strength and they realize that. American policy deep thinkers are often fantasists who bank upon their chess
opponents making hoped-for predictable moves. That doesn't happen in real life.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy for.
It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot fathom
why he hasn't done this already.
I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this already.
Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block.
The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia–a strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within the
largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin adjusted
his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that many of
them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced to get down
from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a good hint on
where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but still–I personally am not convinced yet. We'll see.
In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains still being around–people
who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov. Let's not forget that
despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure as a Director of FSB,
Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his career. I know for a
fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry. Enough to mention
his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main ideologue behind Russia's
military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade) but who never served a day
in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing with the consequences.
This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creation–hardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy
for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot
fathom why he hasn't done this already.
He has not done it already because he just cannot let go of his dream to have it as he did in 2003, when Russia Germany and
France together blocked legality of US war in Iraq. Putin still hopes for a good working relationship with major West European
powers. Italy France and even Germany.
He still hopes to draw them away from the US. However the obvious gains from Import substitution campaign make it apparent
that Russia does benefit from sanctions, that Russia can get anything it wants in technology from the East rather than the West.
So the break with Western orientation is in the making. Hopefully.
You forgot to mention the "moderate" jihadis, including the operatives from NATO, Israel, and US. (It seems that the Ukrainian
"patriots" that have been bombing the civilians in East Ukraine, also include special "patriots" from the same unholy trinity:
https://www.roguemoney.net/stories/2016/12/6/there-are-troops-jack-us-army-donbass
). There has been also a certain asymmetry in means: look at the map for the number and location of the US/NATO military bases.
At least we can see that RF has been trying to avoid the hot phase of WWIII.
http://russia-insider.com/sites/insider/files/NATO-vs-Russia640.jpg
If the US continues to antagonize Russia, Russia will have to grow even more independent, nationalist, and sovereign.
At any rate, this issue cannot be addressed until we face that the fact that globalism is essentially Jewish Supremacism that
fears gentile nationalism as a barrier to its penetration and domination.
This is not a US vs Russia issue. The real conflict is Jewish Globalism vs Russian nationalism and American nationalism. But
since Jews control the media, they've spread the impression that it's about US vs Russia.
Same thing with this crap about 'white privilege'. It is a misleading concept to fool Americans into thinking that the main
conflict is between 'privileged whites' and 'people of color'. It is really to hide the fact that Jewish power and privilege really
rules the US. It is a means to hoodwink people from noticing that the real divide is between Jews and Gentiles, not between 'privileged
whites' and 'non-white victims'. After all, too many whites lack privilege, and too many non-whites do very well in America.
On the power and privilege that really rule the US:
"Sanctions – economic sanctions, as most of them are, can only stand and 'succeed', as long as countries, who oppose Washington's
dictate remain bound into the western, dollar-based, fraudulent monetary scheme. The system is entirely privatized by a small
Zionist-led elite. FED, Wall Street, Bank for International Settlement (BIS), are all private institutions, largely controlled
by the Rothschild, Rockefeller, Morgan et al clans. They are also supported by the Breton Woods Organizations, IMF and World Bank,
conveniently created under the Charter of the UN.
Few progressive economists understand how this debt-based pyramid scam is manipulating the entire western economic system. When
in a just world, it should be just the contrary, the economy that shapes, designs and decides the functioning of the monetary
system and policy.
Even Russia, with Atlantists still largely commanding the central bank and much of the financial system, isn't fully detached
from the dollar dominion – yet."
"I cannot fathom why he hasn't done this (nationalize the "central bank) already".
I read about a rumor a few years ago that Putin has been warned that nationalizing the now private Russian central bank will
bring absolutely dire consequences to both him and Russia. It is simply a step he cannot take.
How dire are the potential consequences? Consider that the refusal of the American government to reauthorize the private central
bank in the US brought about the War of 1812. The Americans learned their lesson and quickly reauthorized the private bank after
the war had ended.
Numerous attempts were made to assassinate President Andrew Jacksons specifically because of his refusal to reauthorize the
private central bank.
Here it is in audio form so you can just relax and just listen at your leisure.
*ALL WARS ARE BANKERS' WARS* By Michael Rivero https://youtu.be/WN0Y3HRiuxo
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than to
force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired
in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.
Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.
Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him),
Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.
You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted,
or destroyed.
If the Left really rules, why would this be?
Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians,
Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not
enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel?
American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans.
Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians
over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have
the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH
minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans,
Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers
flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)
So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American
can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth
Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of
the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't
discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines
the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the
main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to
be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by
Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.
We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really
about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism
is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want.
But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have
homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist
agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist
'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism
means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric
since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We
should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement.
Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?
Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind
the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal
if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!
300 Words @Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
This is rich from a Ukrainian nationalist ruled by Groysman/Kagans.
First, figure out who is your saint, a collaborationist Bandera (Babiy Yar and such) or a triple-sitizenship Kolomojski (auto-da-fe
of civilians in Odessa). If you still want to bring Holodomor to a discussion, then you need to be reminded that 80% of Ukrainian
Cheka at that time were Jewish. If you still think that Russians are the root of all evil, then try to ask the US for more money
for pensions, education, and healthcare – instead of weaponry. Here are the glorious results of the US-approved governance from
Kiev: http://gnnliberia.com/2017/02/17/liberia-ahead-ukraine-index-economic-freedom-2017/
"Liberia, Chad, Afghanistan, Sudan and Angola are ahead of Ukraine. All these countries are in the group of repressed economies
(49.9-40 scores). Ukraine's economy has contracted deeply and remains very fragile."
Here are your relationships with your neighbors on the other side – Poland and Romania:
"The right-winged conservative orientation of Warsaw makes it remember old Polish-Ukrainian arguments and scores, and claim its
rights on the historically Polish lands of Western Ukraine"
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/01/17/poland-will-begin-dividing-ukraine/
" the "Assembly of Bukovina Romanians" has recently applied to Petro Poroshenko demanding a territorial autonomy to the Chernivtsi
region densely populated by Romanians. The "Assembly" motivated its demand with the Ukrainian president's abovementioned statement
urging territorial autonomy for the Crimean Tatars."
https://eadaily.com/en/news/2016/06/30/what-is-behind-romanias-activity-in-ukraine
And please read some history books about Crimea. Or at least Wikipedia:
"In 1783, Crimea was annexed by the Russian Empire. In 1954, the Crimean Oblast was transferred to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist
Republic by Nikita Khrushchev (a Soviet dictator). In 2014, a 96.77 percent of Crimeans voted for integration of the region into
the Russian Federation with an 83.1 percent voter turnout." You see, the Crimeans do not like Nuland-Kagan and Pravyj Sector.
Do you know why?
100 Words @Seamus
Padraig Does PCR really think that Putin is stupid enough to fall for Kissinger's hair-brained scheme? I mean, give Putin
a little bit of credit. He has so far completely outmaneuvered Washington on virtually ever subject. I'm sure he's clever enough
to see through such a crude divide-and-rule strategy.
well it depends. if putin is just out for himself, I can see him getting in bed with kissinger and co. if he is about russia,
he would not. that is how I see it. it isn't about if putin is smart or stupid. just a choice and where his royalty lies.
100 Words @Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine.
How so? #Krymnash
Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves.
If by "decline" you mean "expects this year a modest growth as opposed to previous years" then you might be right.
I've been reading about Russia's imminent collapse and the annihilation of the economy since forever. Some no-names like you
(or some Big Names with agenda) had been predicting it every year. Still didn't happen.
Putin is almost down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid
now.
Can I see a source for that?
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
False equivalence.
P.S. Hey, Quart – how is Bezviz? Also – are you not cold here? Or are you one of the most racally pure Ukrs, currently residing
in Ontario province (Canada), from whence you teach your less lucky raguls in Nizalezhnaya how to be more racially pure? Well,
SUGS to be you!
@Quartermaster
Trump has not been neutered. Buchanan has the right on this and Flynn's actions.
Sorry, but Crimea is Ukraine. Russia is in serious economic decline and is rapidly burning through its reserves. Putin is almost
down to the welfare fund from which pensions are paid, and only about a third of pensions are being paid now.
If Sanctions are of benefit to Russia, then the sanctions against Imperial Japan were just ducky and no war was fought.
Roberts is the next best thing to insane.
Do you have any links to verify this that Russia is down to bedrock,from everything I read and have read Russia's do pretty
damn good, or is this just some more of your endless antiRussian propaganda,,
A scandal of a EU member Poland:
http://thesaker.is/zmiana-piskorski-and-the-case-for-polish-liberation/
Two days after he [Piskorski] publicly warned that US-NATO troops now have a mandate to suppress Polish dissent on the grounds
of combatting "Russian hybrid war," he was snatched up by armed agents of Poland's Internal Security Agency while taking his children
to school on May 18th, 2016. He was promptly imprisoned in Warsaw, where he remains with no formal charges to this day."
With the Poland's entry into EU, "Poland did not "regain" sovereignty, much less justice, but forfeited such to the Atlanticist
project Poland has been de-industrialized, and thus deprived of the capacity to pursue independent and effective social and economic
policies Now, with the deployment of thousands of US-NATO troops, tanks, and missile systems on its soil and the Polish government's
relinquishment of jurisdiction over foreign armed forces on its territory, Poland is de facto under occupation. This occupation
is not a mere taxation on Poland's national budget – it is an undeniable liquidation of sovereignty and inevitably turns the country
into a direct target and battlefield in the US' provocative war on Russia."
" it's not the Russians who are going to occupy us now – they left here voluntarily 24 years ago. It's not the Russians that
have ravaged Polish industry since 1989. It's not the Russians that have stifled Poles with usurious debt. Finally, it's not the
Russians that are responsible for the fact that we have become the easternmost aircraft carrier of the United States anchored
in Europe. We ourselves, who failed by allowing such traitors into power, are to blame for this."
More from a comment section: "Donald Tusk, who is now President of the European Council, whose grandfather, Josef Tusk, served
in Hitler's Wehrmacht, has consistently demanded that the Kiev regime imposed by the US and EU deal with the Donbass people brutally,
"as with terrorists". While the Polish special services were training the future participants of the Maidan operations and the
ethnic cleansing of the Donbass, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs made this official statement (02-02-2014): "We support
the hard line taken by the Right Sector The radical actions of the Right Sector and other militant groups of demonstrators and
the use of force by protesters are justified The Right Sector has taken full responsibility for all the acts of violence during
the recent protests. This is an honest position, and we respect it. The politicians have failed at their peacekeeping function.
This means that the only acceptable option is the radical actions of the Right Sector. There is no other alternative".
In short, the US has been the most active enabler of the neo-Nazi movement in Europe. Mrs. Clinton seemingly did not get a
memo about who is "new Hitler."
Do you happen to know anything about western financial giants' influence upon Russia's "Atlanticist Integrationists"?
It's low hanging fruit for me to take a pick, but I am thinking The Goldman Sachs Group is well ensconced among Russian "Atlanticist
Integrationists."
You guys are top seeded pros at uncovering Deep State-banker secrets. In contrast, I drive school bus and I struggle to even
balance the family Wells Fargo debit card!
However, since our US Congress has anointed a seasoned G.S.G. veteran, Steve Mnuchin, as the administration's Treasury Secretary,
he has become my favorite "Person of Interest" who I suspect spouts a Ural Mountain-level say as to how "Atlanticist Integrationists"
operate.
Speaking very respectfully, I hope my question does not get "flummoxed" into resource rich Siberia.
Berke reports that Henry Kissinger has sold President Trump on a scheme to use the removal of Russian sanctions to pry President
Putin away from the Russian alliance with Iran and China.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead.
Kissinger, like Dick Cheney or George Soros, will probably never be completely dead
.
Most likely the Spirit of Anti-Christ keeping them alive to do his bidding.
@Priss Factor
Here is proof that there is no real Leftist power anymore.
Voltaire once said, "To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize."
If the Left really rules America, how come it is fair game to criticize, condemn, mock, and vilify Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin,
Bakunin, Emma Goldman & anarchists, Castro, Che(even though he is revered by many, one's career isn't damaged by attacking him),
Tito, Ceucescu, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gramsci, Eurgene Debs, Pete Seeger, Abbie Hoffman, Bill Ayers, and etc.
You can say whatever you want about such people. Some will agree, some will disagree, but you will not be fired, blacklisted,
or destroyed.
If the Left really rules, why would this be?
Now, what would happen if you name the Jewish Capitalists as the real holders of power?
What would happen if you name the Jewish oligarchic corporatists who control most of media?
What would happen if you said Jews are prominent in the vice industry of gambling?
What would happen if you named the Jewish capitalists in music industry that made so much money by spreading garbage?
What would happen if you said Jewish warhawks were largely responsible for the disasters in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Ukraine?
And what would happen if you were question the MLK mythology and cult?
What would happen if you were to make fun of homos and trannies?
Now, keep in mind that blacks and homos are favored by Jews as their main allies.
(Some say the US is not a pro-minority nation, but it's still permissible to criticize, impugn, and vilify Chinese, Iranians,
Muslims, Mexicans, Hindus, and etc. Trump was hard on China, Iran, Muslims, and Mexicans, and he got some flak over it but not
enough to destroy him. Now, imagine what would have happened if he'd said such things about blacks, Africa, homos, Jews, and Israel?
American politics isn't necessarily pro-minority. If it is, it should favor Palestinian-Americans just as much as Jewish-Americans.
Actually, since there are fewer Palestinian-Americans than Jewish-Americans, the US, being pro-minority, should favor Palestinians
over Jews in America. In reality, it is AIPAC that draws all the politicians. America is about Pro-Power, and since Jews have
the Power and since Jews are a minority, it creates the false impression that the US is a minority-supremacist nation. But WHICH
minority? Jews would like for us think that all minorities are represented equally in the US, but do Eskimos, Hawaiians, Guatemalans,
Vietnamese, and etc. have the kind of power & protection that the Jewish minority has? Do we see politicians and powerbrokers
flock to such minorities for funds and favors?)
So, what does it about the real power in America? So many 'conservatives' say the Left controls America. But in fact, an American
can badmouth all true bonafide leftist leaders and thinkers(everyone from Lenin to Sartre). However, if an American were to badmouth
Sheldon Adelson as a sick demented Zionist capitalist oligarch who wants to nuke Iran, he would be blacklisted by the most of
the media. (If one must criticize Adelson, it has to be in generic terms of him a top donor to the likes of Romney. One mustn't
discuss his zealous and maniacal views rooted in Zionist-supremacism. You can criticize his money but not the mentality that determines
the use of that money.) Isn't it rather amusing how the so-called Liberals denounce the GOP for being 'extreme' but overlook the
main reason for such extremism? It's because the GOP relies on Zionist lunatics like Adelson who thinks Iran should be nuked to
be taught a lesson. Even Liberal Media overlook this fact. Also, it's interesting that the Liberal Media are more outraged by
Trump's peace offer to Russia than Trump's hawkish rhetoric toward Iran. I thought Liberals were the Doves.
We know why politics and media work like this. It's not about 'left' vs 'right' or 'liberal' vs 'conservative'. It is really
about Jewish Globalist Dominance. Jews, neocon 'right' or globo-'left', hate Russia because its brand of white gentile nationalism
is an obstacle to Jewish supremacist domination. Now, Current Russia is nice to Jews, and Jews can make all the money they want.
But that isn't enough for Jews. Jews want total control of media, government, narrative, everything. If Jews say Russia must have
homo parades and 'gay marriage', Russia better bend over because its saying NO means that it is defiant to the Jewish supremacist
agenda of using homomania as proxy to undermine and destroy all gentile nationalism rooted in identity and moral righteousness.
Russia doesn't allow that, and that is what pisses off Jews. For Jews, the New Antisemitism is defined as denying them the supremacist
'right' to control other nations. Classic antisemitism used to mean denying Jews equal rights under the law. The New Antisemitism
means Jews are denied the right to gain dominance over others and dictate terms.
So, that is why Jews hate any idea of good relations with Russia. But Jews don't mind Trump's irresponsible anti-Iran rhetoric
since it serves Zionist interest. So, if Trump were to say, "We shouldn't go to war with Russia; we should be friends" and "We
should get ready to bomb, destroy, and even nuke Iran", the 'liberal' media would be more alarmed by the Peace-with-Russia statement.
Which groups controls the media? 'Liberals', really? Do Muslim 'liberals' agree with Jewish 'liberals'?
Anyway, we need to do away with the fiction that Left rules anything. They don't. We have Jewish Supremacist rule hiding behind
the label of the 'Left'. But the US is a nation where it's totally permissible to attack real leftist ideas and leaders but suicidal
if anyone dares to discuss the power of super-capitalist Jewish oligarchs. Some 'leftism'!
What an amazing whoring performance for the war-manufacturers! And here is an interesting morsel of information about the belligerent
Frau der Leyen:
http://www.dw.com/en/stanford-accuses-von-der-leyen-of-misrepresentation/a-18775432
"Stanford university has said Ursula von der Leyen is misrepresenting her affiliation with the school. The German defense minister's
academic career is already under scrutiny after accusations of plagiarism." No kidding. Some "Ursula von der Leyen' values" indeed.
I doubt we'll see little change from the Trump administration toward Russia.
From SOTT:
Predictable news coming out of Yemen: Saudi-backed "Southern Resistance" forces and Hadi loyalists, alongside al-Qaeda of
the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), launched a new offensive against the Houthis in western Yemen on Wednesday.
This is not the first time Saudi-backed (and by extension, Washington-backed) forces have teamed up with al-Qaeda in Yemen
.
Yemen is quickly becoming the "spark that lights the powder keg". The conflict has already killed, maimed and displaced
countless thousands (thanks to the stellar lack of reporting from trustworthy western news sources, we can only estimate the
scale of Saudi/U.S. crimes in Yemen), but now it seems that elements of the Trump administration are keen on escalation, likely
in hopes of giving Washington an excuse to carpet bomb Tehran.
Apparently, we feel satisfied fighting with our old allies, al-Qaeda and Saudis.
I think that the authors may be underestimating Putin in his determination to keep Russia and the Russian economy independent.
For example, I find this rumoured offer of "increased access to the huge European energy market" very funny, for at least two
reasons:
1) US wants to sell hydrocarbons (LPG) to the European market at significantly higher prices than the Russian prices, and
2) the current dependence of EU countries on the Russian energy would have never happened if there were better alternatives.
In other words, any detente offer that the West would make to Russia would last, as usual, not even until the signature ink
dries on the new cooperation agreements. Putin does not look to me like someone who suffers much from wishful thinking.
The Russian relationship with China is not a bed of roses, but it is not China which is increasing military activity all
around Russia, it is the West. Also, so far China has shown no interest in regime-changing Russia and dividing it into pieces.
Would you rather believe in the reform capability of an addict in violence or someone who does not need to reform? Would the West
self-reform and sincerely renounce violence just by signing a new agreement with Russia?
The new faux detente will never happen, as long as Putin is alive.
Trump is an ultra-zionist for Sheldon Adelson and prolongs & creates wars for the Goldman banking crimesyndicat.
The only one stopping Trump is Putin or Russia's missile defenses.
Indeed, Putin's main inside enemy is Russia's central bank, or the Jewish oligarchs in Russia (Atlanticists). Also Russia needs
to foster and encourage small&medium enterprises, that need cheap credit, to create competitive markets, where no prices are fixed
and market shares change. These are most efficient resource users.
In the US, Wallstreet controls government = fascism = the IG Farben- Auschwitz concentration camps to maximize profits. This
is the direction for the US economy.
Meanwhile in the EU, the former Auschwitz owners IG Farben (Bayer(Monsanto), Hoechst, BASF) the EU chemical giants, who have
patented all natures molecules, are in controll again over EU. Deutsche bank et allies is eating Greece, Italy, Spain's working
classes, using AUSTERITY as their creed.
So what is new? Nothing, the supercorporate-fascist elites are the same families, who 's morality is unchanged in a 100 years.
I'm generally a big fan and admirer of Putin, but this is definitely one criticism of him that I have a lot of sympathy
for. It is long past time for Putin to purge the neoliberals from the Kremlin and nationalize the Russian Central Bank. I cannot
fathom why he hasn't done this already.
I would really love to like Putin and I am trying but him protecting all those criminals and not reversing the history greatest
heist of 90′s makes it impossible. While I am behind all his moves to restore Russian military and foreign policy, I am still
waiting for more on home front. Note, not only the Bank must be nationalized. Everything, all industries, factories and other
assets privatized by now must be returned to rightful owner. Public which over 70 years through great sacrifice built all of it.
Partially, because Putin himself is an economic liberal and, to a degree, monetarist, albeit less rigid than his economic block.
The good choices he made often were opposite to his views. As he himself admitted that Russia's geopolitical vector changed with
NATO's aggression against Yugoslavia--a strengthening of Russia has become an imperative. This comeback was impossible within
the largely "Western" monetarist economic model. Russia's comeback happened not thanks but despite Putin's economic views, Putin
adjusted his views in the process, his economic block didn't. But many of them still remain his friends, despite the fact that
many of them are de facto fifth column and work against Russia, intentionally and other wise. Eventually Putin will be forced
to get down from his fence and take the position of industrialists and siloviki. Putin's present for Medvedev's birthday was a
good hint on where he is standing economically today and I am beginning to like that but still--I personally am not convinced
yet. We'll see. In many respects Putin was lucky and specifically because of the namely Soviet military and industry captains
still being around--people who, unlike Putin, knew exactly what constituted Russia's strength. Enough to mention late Evgeny Primakov.
Let's not forget that despite Putin's meteoric rise through the top levels of Russia's state bureaucracy, including his tenure
as a Director of FSB, Putin's background is not really military-industrial. He is a lawyer, even if uniformed (KGB) part of his
career. I know for a fact that initially (early 2000s) he was overwhelmed with the complexity of Russia's military and industry.
Enough to mention his creature Serdyukov who almost destroyed Command and Control structure of Russia's Armed Forces and main
ideologue behind Russia's military "reform", late Vitaly Shlykov who might have been a great GRU spy (and economist by trade)
but who never served a day in combat units. Thankfully, the "reforms" have been stopped and Russian Armed Forces are still dealing
with the consequences. This whole clusterfvck was of Putin's own creation--hardly a good record on his resume. Hopefully, he learned.
Smoothie, you seem to have natural aversion towards lawyers
Albeit, the first Vladimir, I mean Lenin also was a lawyers by education still he was a rather quick study. Remember that military
communism and Lenin after one year after Bolsheviks took power telling that state capitalism would be great step forward for Russia
whcih obviously was backward and ruined by wars at the time and he proceeded with New Economic Policy and Lenin despite not being
industry captain realized pretty well what constituted state power hence GOELRO plans and electrification of all Russia plans
and so forth which was later turned by Stalin and his team into reality.
Now, Lenin was ideologically motivated and so is Putin. But he clearly has been trying to achieve different results by keeping
same people around him and doing same things. Hopefully it is changing now, but it is so much wasted time when old Vladimir was
always repeating that time is of essence and delay is like death knell. Putin imho is away too relax and even vain in some way,
hence those shirtless pictures and those on the bike. And the way he walks a la "Я Московский озорной гуляка". As you said it
looks like he is protecting those criminals who must be prosecuted and yes, many executed for what they caused.
I suspect in cases when it comes to economical development he is not picking right people for those jobs and it is his major
responsibility to assign right people and delegate power properly, not to be forgotten to reverse what constitutes the history
greatest heist and crime so called "privatization". Basically returning to more communal society minus Politburo.
There is a huge elephant in the room too. Russia demographic situation which I doubt can be addressed under current liberal
order. all states which are in liberal state of affairs fail to basically procreate hence these waves of immigrants brought into
all Western Nations. Russia cannot do it. It would be suicide which is what all Western countries are doing right now.
Russia does not need Western technology. Indeed, its military technology is superior to that in the West.
You write about Russia but have not done your homework. Russia is very dependent on Western technology and its entire high-tech
industry depends on the import of Western machinery. Without such machinery many Russian factories, including military ones, would
stall. Very important oil industry is particularly vulnerable.
Some home reading (sorry, they are in Russian, but one ought to know the language if one writes about the country).
"... "Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of 'being friends against someone.' In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force. ..."
"... "The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United States." ..."
Yesterday, I linked to the TASS summary of Lavrov's interview with Argumenty i
Fakty . Now here's
the translated transcript that provides a link to Russian original. The first question:
"Can an improvement in the relations with the United States be expected in the near
future?"
Lavrov's answer takes 6 paragraphs. The interview asks hard questions that many barflies
also ask. Lavrov does provide a few gems in his answers. Here's one:
"We are not afraid of anything. But we will not act like bandits either, because we
respect international law."
In stark contrast to the Outlaw US Empire's behavior.
And in answer (just partial as it's 5 paragraph's long) to the question most want asked,
Russia's Iranian policy:
"Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East
countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of 'being
friends against someone.' In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are
consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may
arise and renounce the use or threat of force.
"The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of
Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is
flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic
Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The
responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United
States."
In case you missed it since it's linked toward the previous thread's end,
here's Pepe Escobar's latest focusing on the China-Outlaw US Empire tiff and why the
latter holds a losing hand.
"... A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda. ..."
"... This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and according to its code "must not act in a way that unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests." ..."
"... Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service." ..."
"... Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn and his party. ..."
"... Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors. ..."
"... Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to democracy. ..."
"... Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of anti-Semitism. ..."
"... Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has also, as expected, been rejected by the government. ..."
"... If you enjoyed this original article, please consider making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this one. ..."
"... Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan." ..."
"... If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin', his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard against inflation from these snakes. ..."
"... This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of Britain too. ..."
"... This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that far. ..."
"... in 2015, an unnamed, serving British general was quoted saying that if a Corbyn government implemented his well-established anti-imperial and anti-nuke agenda, "there would be mass resignations at all levels [of the military] and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny." https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/british-army-could-stage-mutiny-under-corbyn-says-senior-serving-general-10509742.html ..."
"... As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of State in June 1947. From 'the middle of 1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one free world"'. ..."
"... . That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery. ..."
The 'Unconstitutional Animus' Against UK Labour Leader July 16, 2019 •
39 Comments
Johanna Ross spoke with David Miller, a propaganda researcher, after the recent publicity of
U.K. civil service murmurings about Jeremy Corbyn's "fitness."
By Johanna
Ross
in Edinburgh, Scotland Special to Consortium News
A couple of weeks ago, The Times of London published an
article about senior civil servants fearing U.K. opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn was "too
frail" to be prime minister. Reportedly they also thought he "lacks both a firm grasp of
foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
This is the same civil service that is supposed to maintain complete neutrality and
according to its code "must not act in a way that
unjustifiably favours or discriminates against particular individuals or interests."
Corbyn fought back, arguing that it was unacceptable that civil servants were briefing
newspapers on an elected politician. He demanded an independent inquiry into who was spreading
such fabrications in the press and "compromising the integrity of the civil service."
Controversial BBC graphic seeking to link Corbyn to Russia.
For David Miller, a professor of political sociology at the University of Bristol, who
investigates concentrations
of power and ways to hold them accountable, the idea that the British civil service may not be
impartial in its operations is hardly surprising.
Far from ever being objective, he told Consortium News that the civil service now
clearly has "an unconstitutional animus against a potential Corbyn government and has been
briefing against it one way or another through various agencies for some time now."
Catalog of Smears
Indeed, the anti-Corbyn bias within the establishment has been obvious in the catalog of
smears on Corbyn and his team since he came to the Labour leadership; from allegations of being
a "Soviet sleeper" to being "anti-Semitic" and now to questions about his overall fitness.
David Miller: Faction fight against Corbyn. (University of Bristol)
Miller said most of the allegations were created by a number of organisations and
individuals who are "involved in a faction fight with the Corbyn leadership."
Noam Chomsky, a leading U.S. social critic, is among those who have spoken out against what
he termed a "witch hunt" against the Labour leader and his supporters.
Whether or not anti-Semitism exists in the party, Miller said the accusations are out of
hand. "Almost everyone who says anything which is either critical of Israel or critical of the
party's response to the anti-Semitism crisis is denounced as an anti-Semite," Miller said. "The
question is how long will it be before everyone sees that the people who are involved in this
have overreached themselves."
Attempts to undermine potential socialist governments are of course, not new.
Miller gives the example of the Zinoviev case – when a fake letter was published in
the Daily Mail in 1924 just prior to the general election, suggesting Communists in
Britain were taking orders from Moscow. The goal was clearly to undermine the British Labour
movement.
Miller also points to the case of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. "Despite what may now
be said by some elements of the security state," Miller said that British agencies were engaged
in an active plot to
undermine Wilson's elected government.
As another example, Miller offered the "Information Research Department," first proposed in
1947 and sold to the cabinet as a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda
operation. In fact, Miller described it as a "secret, covert, anti-Communist propaganda
operation which in the 70s was engaged in undermining the Wilson government."
Today, Miller said, similar agencies in the U.K. government are doing the same thing.
Harold Wilson in 1986. (Allan Warren, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Integrity Initiative
As an example, Miller cites the Integrity Initiative; organized by the government's
Institute for Statecraft, which has a stated mission of countering "Russian disinformation and
malign influence by harnessing existing expertise and establishing a network of experts,
opinion formers and policy makers to educate national audiences in the threat and to help build
national capacities to counter it." Its website is incidentally now empty pending an
investigation into the "theft of its data" – after a hack exposed detail of the extent to
which the government-funded program was itself engaged in disinformation.
Miller, who runs the Bristol-based Organisation for Propaganda Studies, said the scheme was
found to be spreading its own disinformation and openly criticizing opposition leader Corbyn
and his party.
"Corbyn has recently said in relation to the most recent criticism from the civil service
that there are people in the establishment that are trying to undermine Corbyn, his office, his
advisors and supporters of him," Miller said. "And that's what the Integrity Initiative was
doing."
Cartoon published by Punch after the Zinoviev letter was released, depicting a Bolshevik
campaigning for Ramsay MacDonald, head of the short-lived Labour government of 1924. (Wikimedia
Commons)
Miller said this was clear from the very beginning of the Integrity Initiative when it was
regularly engaged in tweeting or retweeting attacks on Corbyn and his closest advisors.
Miller calls the use of taxpayers' money to interfere in domestic politics an affront to
democracy.
"A government-funded project was engaged in attacking the leader of the opposition," Miller
said, "which is unconstitutional and something the U.K. civil service should not be involved in
they crossed the line when they started attacking Corbyn. And when we look back on this period,
the Integrity Initiative, its funding by the Foreign Office and its base in British military
intelligence will be one of the strands of the activities which will be seen to have been a
secret state campaign against the elected leader of the Labour party."
Miller would like to see an investigation into the attacks on Corbyn and whether they had
been effectively funded by the Foreign Office, but doesn't hold out much hope of that
happening.
Six months ago, Shadow Home Secretary Emily Thornberry demanded answers to how this could
have happened, with no result.
And Chris Williamson, a Labour MP and Corbyn supporter who was trying to investigate the Integrity
Initiative, found himself suspended from the party after he was targeted with allegations of
anti-Semitism.
Corbyn's call for an independent investigation into the civil service leak to the press has
also, as expected, been rejected by the government.
Johanna Ross is a freelance journalist based in the United Kingdom.
If you enjoyed this original article, please consider
making a donation to Consortium News so we can bring you more stories like this
one.
Michael McNulty , July 18, 2019 at 05:52
After he won the second round to remain Labour Party leader Corbyn should have left the
party to form a new socialist party, taking his large following and their subscriptions with
him. He would have had three years behind him with a new movement, one which would not have
had the back-stabbers and poisoners he's having to deal with daily. It would have been quite
established now and a real political force. I think the Labour Party is so polluted that the
left must break away; it's the only way we can overturn the excesses and failures of
neo-liberalism which for most people is a truly dreadful system.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 15:02
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs,
neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists. That is what all of this is about: this is all a
campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to keep expandable,
pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt
slavery.
Hopelb , July 17, 2019 at 21:52
Upvote!
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 14:55
"lacks both a firm grasp of foreign affairs and the domestic agenda."
It makes me wonder how Teresa May and her Cabinet, including the next PM, fares in such
assessment. Nincompoops, loud mouths, poodles, and worshipers of woodoo economics.
I get it. Corbyn is Pro-Palestinian, anti-war and Pro-Worker so they are trying to get rid
of him.
All I see are articles attacking him. Are there people/forces behind him supporting him?
Is his support significant among other Labour MP's and the Public at large?
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:11
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic at this point and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rubble. No respect for monarchy, the Trident, necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory will unleashed the unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and he hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Piotr Berman , July 17, 2019 at 16:45
The problem is that UK public opinion is quite chaotic lately and "everything is
possible". At some point, four parties had roughly the same poll numbers: Tories, Brexit,
Labour and LibDems. However, in the last two weeks Labour and Tories gained with Labour
ahead. In a system with single seat districts, "anything can happen", and a recent
by-election suggested that Labour may have an advantage in "foot soldiers", volunteers who
walk around a district chatting up voters. The internal fights in Labour attracted many new
members, and from the point of view of "sensible folks in the Establishment", this is the
worst type of rabble. No respect for the monarchy, the Trident, the necessity of low taxes on
business and the rich and so on. And anti-Semitic to boot.
So the meaning of "Corbyn is frail" is that while he himself seems mild mannered, his
victory would unleashed unwashed hordes wrecking everything which is good and that we hold
dear, like the monarchy, the Trident and so on.
Jeff Ewener , July 17, 2019 at 13:26
Gob-smacking. To call a man with the intelligence, experience, sensitivity & integrity
of Jeremy Corbyn "unfit" to be the British Prime Minister, while a monstrosity like Boris
Johnson is standing on the doorstep of Number 10 – just takes the breath away.
rosemerry , July 17, 2019 at 15:45
Not to mention the former "New Labour" leaders whose policies fell far away from the
traditional policies Corbyn has held to and which caused so many Britons to support him as
leader.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 11:49
Integrity? Are you joking? Corbyn has been anti-EU for 40 years. In fact, he is the only
main party leader who voted leave in the last people's vote (aka the referendum). But he has
tried to hid that fact. He has been sitting on the fence and playing politics with the issue.
Many fools in Britain believe Corbyn is a remainer. A man of integrity would have explained
to the British people his long held position on the EU and Brexit. But he didn't do that
because he isn't a man of integrity. He wants to con his way into power and if he gets there
(looking unlikely right now), he and his Stalinist henchpeople will wield that power
ruthlessly.
Fascinating article. May we repost it on jvl.org.uk?
Eddie , July 17, 2019 at 12:36
Comment that I posted on the Malware article do not post.
Zenobia van Dongen , July 17, 2019 at 11:39
In English-speaking countries anti-Semitic is just a code word for pro-Islamic. Miller
himself is deeply involved in efforts to make extremist Islam respectable and justifying
terrorist indoctrination.
Okay, I'll take your comment as made in good faith but you will need to back it up with
good evidence. Where is it?
Qui? , July 18, 2019 at 03:22
Palestinians are semites, as the rest of the Arabs. So who is the real antisemite now?
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:37
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Hayman Fan , July 18, 2019 at 07:28
Is it indeed. Then your are a fool. Pol Pot was a communist who was against war and nukes
and massive inequality. But implementing totalitarism by force didn't turn out well for the
Cambodian people. And it wouldn't turn out well for the British people either. Except for
Corbyn and his henchpeople of course.
dean 1000 , July 17, 2019 at 10:42
Jews in Europe and the US have gone from being heavily discriminated against to having
much more influence on government than their numbers warrant. I'm going to tell the Netanyahu joke to make my point. Don't know who to credit. Kudos
anyway. "It is not anti-Semitic to disagree with Benjamin Netanyahu as he is as white as the Grand
Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan."
Given the influence of US and European Jews it is well past time for them to stop
screaming anti-semitism when someone has a divergent opinion. They should stop using Semitic
people as human shields.
The left also likes to hurl anti-Semitism at political opponents when they don't have a
relevant answer.
Unfounded criticism of Jews is anti-Jewish rather than anti-Semitic. Call it what it
is.
As Albert Einstein says Capitalism is an Evil supported by those who are terrified of
Jeremy Corbyn because like Jesus he is a true Socialist
Que Nelle , July 17, 2019 at 05:52
To be accused of antisemitism by zionists that champion the racist entity israel, is a
badge of honor.
Vivian O'Blivion , July 17, 2019 at 03:30
If the Integrity Initiative really is shut down, the little Simon Bracey-Lane will be free
to cross the pond and campaign for Bernie just like he did in 2015 / 2016. Nah, just kiddin',
his cover is blown. But seriously, campaign managers for Tulsi Gabbard best be on guard
against inflation from these snakes.
Hayman Fan , July 17, 2019 at 02:51
Guys be careful with this. Corbyn is a communist. He is surrounded by Stalinists. Their
modus operandi is entryism + free stuff + perpetual attacks on cultural norms. They used to
laud the USSR. Then Venezuala. Now China. If they ever manage to grab power, they will stamp
on individual liberty. Just like China does. The Muslim vote is very important to them and
whilst they despise conventional religions, they will happily 'buy' Muslim votes with anti
Israeli and anti Semitic rhetoric. The loudest voices speaking up against Corbyn and his
henchpeople are on the left. Be a little bit circumspect.
Truth first , July 17, 2019 at 11:36
A "communist" who is against war, nukes and massive inequality is OK by me.
Errr what ? Israel does enough on its own to show how anti-Arab and undemocratic it is
without the need for Jeremy Corbyn to add anything. I'm a socialist. I support what Mr Corbyn
is doing to promote socialism in the UK. There's not the slightest evidence he's an
anti-Semite, and the tiny amount of anti-Semitism in the Labour party is dwarfed by what's
emanating from the right against Jews and Muslims.
Just say no , July 17, 2019 at 13:58
This is a joke right. You say communist and you reference China, but in the last century
it was ok to ship nearly the entire industrial base of Western Democracies to China so that a
bunch of fat cat tycoons, investment bankers, hedge funders et al could become so rich they
finally had enough money to purchase the U.S. Government, and it looks like the government of
Britain too. That's where we are today.
There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly in
the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality. What has
happened to Jeremy Corbyn is horrifying and we have our own issues in the U.S. with the
endless smears and lies regarding the candidacy of Bernie Sanders. We live in a world of
fabrication, sanctions enough to go around for everyone. Even the little state of RI is
sanctioned by Moody's for having the effrontery to pass a bill which "gives too much away to
labor" but Moody's and the other ratings agencies gave triple AAA ratings to junk during the
"great recession" plain and simple, and no one cared. We need a Nuremburg trial for
Capitalism and all its practioners.
You are wrong is several ways. First, "There may be "communists" lurking somewhere mostly
in the imagination who are trotted out whenever a left person obtains a plurality." Corbyn
was observed to be a threat the moment he was elected Labour leader, something that stumped
large segments of "informed public". Due to the surprise element, the anti-Semitic angle was
not exploited properly, with possible exception of some Zionist whack jobs who harranged him.
Instead, two points were raised that really jolted my attention.
First, Corbyn was sooo
extreme that he advocated discontinuation of Trident program and even, horror!, the entirety
of British nuclear arms program. You could as well raise huge signs ?????? ?y???? ???????! on
English shores.
Second, his bicycling habits were compared to China during the orthodox
Communist year, when riding on non-descript bikes was heavily supported by pre-Capitalist
leadership.
Mind you, a person of note may ride a bike without shame, but not the cheap and
aged specimen favored by Corbyn. Finally, compromising photos were found showing Corbyn
relaxing and revealing his red socks.
Sounds like you just couldn't stand not posting a troll comment on an article about your
own activities, yes?
ToivoS , July 16, 2019 at 22:54
This incessant accusation of antisemitism against anyone who supports justice for
Palestinians does seem to be effective. A decade ago when I first noticed this smear tactic I
assumed it would be self defeating on the part of the Zionists and their backers. It sort of
seemed obvious that such a tactic would be self limiting with the broader world beginning to
reject such slander. However, it seems the smear is more effective today than it was ten
years ago. So depressing. Watching Corbyn's supporters ripping apart his own base in the
Labour Party in an effort to appease the Israelis is appalling -- it seems the more that is
conceded the more aggressive the Zionist become. Ten years ago it was proper to describe the
West Bank as "occupied territory", soon it will be considered antisemitic to even go that
far.
" the 'Information Research Department,' first proposed in 1947 and sold to the cabinet as
a bipartisan, anti-Communist and anti-American propaganda operation."
"Anti-American" is a slip, right? I assume it was pro-American (or pro-USAian).
My apologies, I was paraphrasing the work of Lyn Smith in her article on IRD in Millennium
in 1980. It should really be 'anti capitalist'. According Smith the founder of IRD (Christopher
Mayhew) put forward a plan to set up a cold war propaganda agency:
'Mayhew put forward his ideas: the campaign should be as positive as possible laying
stress on the merits of Social Democracy but, he pointed out "we shouldn't appear as
defenders of the status quo but should attack Capitalism and Imperialism along with Russian
Communism" In fact at this early stage, the idea was more of a "third force" propaganda
attacking Capitalism as well as communism (this, however, was not to last for, as later
documents reveal, anti Communism soon cam to the fore).'(Covert British Propaganda: The
Information Research Department: 1947-77, Millennium, 9(1), p68-9)
In fact the idea that it would be anti capitalist was a ruse used by Mayhew to deceive the
left members of the British cabinet. As my colleague and I Will Dinan summarised in our book
A Century of Spin (Pluto Press, 2008, p130-1):
IRD was not created with the knowing support of the Labour Cabinet. The author of the
paper which went to the cabinet –
Christoper Mayhew – was a Labour right winger and cold warrior. He dissembled to the
cabinet about the purpose and function of the IRD by claiming that it was to be a 'Third
Force' campaign, understood as policy intended by the left to be independent of both the US
and the USSR. According to Mayhew himself:
I thought it was necessary to present the whole campaign in a positive way, in a way which
Dick Crossman and Michael Foot would fi nd it hard to oppose. And they were calling for a
Third Force so I recommended in the original paper I put to Bevin that we call it a Third
Force propaganda campaign.
As Mayhew noted, 'the turning point' was the speech of George Marshall the US Secretary of
State in June 1947. From 'the middle of
1947 onwards, decisions were taken towards uniting the free world, at the expense of widening
the gap with the Communist world our immediate objective changed, from "one world" to "one
free world"'.
It is interesting, in this light, to reflect what might/will happen once a Corbyn
government is elected with – how should we put this – a minority of leftists in
the cabinet.
David G , July 17, 2019 at 15:27
Very interesting! I guess the propagandists back then had a little more finesse than the
idiotic bludgeoning the US/UK establishment is laying on us these days. Thanks for the clarification, David Miller!
Jeff Harrison , July 16, 2019 at 21:05
The British Political Class has the same problem as the American Political Class –
No integrity, No Honesty, No ethics. Just the sort of bozos we need running countries.
Maz Palmer , July 17, 2019 at 14:59
They are all much worse than bozos (or Bezos); they are all plutocrats, oligarchs, neo-liberal neo-fascist capitalists.
That is what all of this is about: this is all a campaign by capitalists, plutocrats, oligarchs, monarchs, aristocrats, to
keep expandable, pitiful average plebs from ever voting for something better than corporate serfdom and debt slavery.
"... "Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of 'being friends against someone.' In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may arise and renounce the use or threat of force. ..."
"... "The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United States." ..."
Yesterday, I linked to the TASS summary of Lavrov's interview with Argumenty i
Fakty . Now here's
the translated transcript that provides a link to Russian original. The first question:
"Can an improvement in the relations with the United States be expected in the near
future?"
Lavrov's answer takes 6 paragraphs. The interview asks hard questions that many barflies
also ask. Lavrov does provide a few gems in his answers. Here's one:
"We are not afraid of anything. But we will not act like bandits either, because we
respect international law."
In stark contrast to the Outlaw US Empire's behavior.
And in answer (just partial as it's 5 paragraph's long) to the question most want asked,
Russia's Iranian policy:
"Russia sees intrinsic value in its relations with Iran, Israel and all other Middle East
countries. Russia has a multipronged foreign policy that is free from the principle of 'being
friends against someone.' In our contacts with the leaders of all regional countries we are
consistent in calling on our partners to find peaceful solutions to the problems that may
arise and renounce the use or threat of force.
"The escalating tension in the region we are witnessing today is the direct result of
Washington and some of its allies raising the stakes in their anti-Iranian policy. The US is
flexing its muscles by seeking to discredit Tehran and blame all the sins on the Islamic
Republic of Iran. This creates a dangerous situation: a single match can start a fire. The
responsibility for the possible catastrophic consequences will rest with the United
States."
In case you missed it since it's linked toward the previous thread's end,
here's Pepe Escobar's latest focusing on the China-Outlaw US Empire tiff and why the
latter holds a losing hand.
Trailer Trash is exactly right about brittle supply chains. To "maximize Shareholder value"
(the Prime Directive from Wall Street), corporations are maximizing (not optimizing)
efficiency, at the expense of long-term priorities.
Summer Diaz is sorta right about what I might describe as US cultural/political obesity,
but I don't look forward to living here after the shit hits the fan. There are lotsa crazy
bastards with guns. We'll see real race war, starvation, all 4 Horsemen.
Re questions about Israel's fate in Marandi's scenario: I think it's smart that he/they
don't talk about retaliation against Israel. Everybody knows that Iran has the ability to
really hurt Israel (sans Nukes, they probably can't obliterate it); but this threat is much
better left unsaid, just hanging in the air. Threatening Israel would be bad PR, decreasing
chances that EU, Russia, & China can talk the US back from the brink of WWIII. And making
sure Israel knows they're in danger - without bragging about it - gets (non-crazy) Zionists
in USA to help prevent all-out war!
It's OK for Iran to talk about the threat to KSA, UAE, etc, because everybody hates them
anyway, and cutting off the world's energy supply is their Doomsday Bomb. They need to remind
the world that if the US attacks Iran, everybody loses.
Three main antagonists have aimed at post-revolution Iran: The Outlaw US Empire, Occupied
Palestine, and Saudi Arabia, the latter being the most recent and vulnerable, while the first
two have already waged varying degrees of war with the Empire's Economic War having existed
for 40+ years. The Levant's former Colonial powers--Turkey, France, UK--are feeble, and in
Turkey's case is allied with Iran while being spurned by NATO and EU. Lurking in the
background are Russia and China's designs for Eurasian Integration which only the Outlaw US
Empire seeks to prevent as such integration benefits Saudi Arabia, Occupied Palestine, France
and UK. Thus the only entity that might benefit from non-hybrid war with Iran is the Outlaw
US Empire--Occupied Palestine's interests actually lie with becoming part of an Integrated
Eurasia not in trying to impede it. And the same goes for the other nations occupying the
Arabian Peninsula--but they all need to come to their senses by deeply examining their actual
long term interests as Qatar seems to have done in its rapprochement with Iran.
But, just how would a non-hybrid conflict with Iran benefit the Outlaw US Empire if it
consumes its regional allies? Would it bring more riches or create greater debt atop the
human cost? Most analysts have pointed to the Empire's vulnerability upon the trashing of the
current global economic structure. Indeed, the only visible benefit might accrue from slowing
Eurasian Integration. Then there's the highly negative result to the Empire's global
credibility which is already scrapping rock bottom and the likely end of Dollar Hegemony and
the Free Lunch it's lived on for the past 70+ years. But what about the fulfillment of the
Christian Rapture Myth? Sorry, but there should be no need to answer that fantastical,
magical, thinking. Not a very good balance sheet is it as liabilities seem to vastly outweigh
assets. Unfortunately, such logic is ignored by ideologues drunk on magical thinking. And
these results don't take into consideration an escalation into global nuclear conflict that's
in nobody's interest.
But as noted, Trump's up a tree and keeps climbing higher onto ever thinner, more
precarious branches. Iran offered him a chance to climb down if he removes illegal sanctions
and returns to JCPOA, which Pompeo promptly replied to with a lie that Iran would negotiate
on its ballistic missiles, thus giving the overall goal away.
So, Trump can't/won't climb down and non-hybrid conflict would do great damage to Outlaw
US Empire interests, which is where we were at July's beginning.
Iran will respond to a limited military strike with a massive and disproportionate
counterstrike targeting both the aggressor and its enablers.
Which will be the green light for an even more violent & disproportionate counterstrike
on Iran. Make no mistake - there are plenty of gung-ho Washington & Tel Aviv power
brokers who want to trash Iran. And they will do it, given the chance. The above scenario is
precisely what the war gods are hoping for.
I don't know about that. The US and Israel would really be opening up a can of worms. Any
over reaction by the USA and Israel gives Russia, India, and China a precedent to follow.
China might it easy to settle their difficulties with Taiwan. Kiev might go up in a mushroom
cloud. The USA isn't the only country in the world with problems. If they don't play by the
rules it just leads to more rule breakers.
An Alternate Scenario
There is a saying in Persian language called "Namad Maali" translates as "feltman massag", it
means slow killing.
This proverb is very often used in contemporary Persian language but most of the people do
not know the actual origin of the proverb.
There is an interesting legend behind it. Holagu Khan, a Mongol ruler, the grandson of
Chengiz Khan conquered Baghdad on year 1258, and captured the Caliph Al-Mo'tasam, the last
Caliph of Abbasid dynasty. Holagu decided to execute the Caliph and finish the 500 years
Muslim caliphate.
Many statesmen begged him to hold on. They told him that the caliph is legitimate successor
of prophet Mohammad. Caliphate is the pillar of the world, if you remove this pillar there
will be sun eclipse, thunder storm and total darkness. Holagu, with his shamanistic believes
fearing sky revenge was yielding, but he consulted his prime minister a Persian mullah, Nasir
al-Din Tusi. Nasir told him do not worry, these are total nonsense, all of our great Shai
twelve imams were direct descendants of prophet Mohammad, they were inherently innocent,
while Abbasid are not direct descendants of prophet. See that our imams, eleven out of
twelve, were martyred, there was no sun eclipse, no thunder storm, no darkness of the
world.
Holagu was bold enough to carry out the execution. Other statesmen brought forward a group of
astrologists who searched through their horoscopes and studied signs of stars and concluded
that all the signs are catastrophic, if a drop of caliph's blood drops on earth, there will
be a devastating thunder storm, rain of bloods pours down from sky and end of world ...
Holagu consulted Nasi again. Nasir being a great humorist, told him not worry, we can devise
a pretty easy solution for your peace of mind, send the caliph to hot bath of feltman
workshop, order to be wrapped in felt, they will give him a hot water bath with soap, they
will roll him slowly over and over, as they are crafting a felt, his life will be ended
peacefully in massage, without a drop of blood, meanwhile I will assign one of my intelligent
apprentice who is familiar with sky ways ( Nasir was a great mathematician and Astronomer, he
founded a famous observatory, he was inventor of trigonometry), to sit on the roof top of the
feltman workshop, he will monitor any changes on sky if there is a minor change, he will
signal to the feltman to release the caliph.
President Vladimir Khan has been giving warnings to Ayatollah do not burn JCPOA, do not close
Strait of Hurmoz. Ayatollah is telling him do not worry we are giving a feltman massage. Just
tell Xi khan do not lean his back against the wall street pillar, clean up your hands from
future fund casino, the pillars are collapsing slowly.
the US and its allies are bluffing. don't get caught up in wars and rumors of it. the only
way it was going to happen was if syria and iraq fell and both of them didn't.
when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy.
@C I eh? #14
I don't see China as the same situation as Russia.
The Russians who have largely supported Putin despite economic ill-effects from sanctions
are, at best, 1 generation removed from 1991-1996 post-Soviet collapse privation. They
remember the bad times and how to get through them.
The mainland Chinese today are 2 generation removed from the famines in the 50s and 60s, and
furthermore there is a largely generational break due to the Cultural Revolution.
I don't see China collapsing, but I also don't see the mainstream population taking a
oil-starvation induced economic collapse well at all, because the deal is social repression
if the economy and standards of living continue to improve.
The difference is French cheese and EU fruits and vegetables - luxury goods vs. oil = energy
= everything.
There seems to be misconception about Kuwait, in particular.
Kuwaitis are fed up with the Saudis and are more Iranophile than anything. They see who is
a true regional power.
Recently, I happen to be invited to a diplomatic function, welcoming a new Kuwaiti
ambassador (Not in US). There were several businessmen associates of the new ambassador at
that function. In an impromptu conversation, they professed their love for anything Iranian
or Persian, from culture and history to food and the people, and their disdain for the Saudis
and their ruling family.
In fact, one of them, much to my shock, uttered the circulating rumor that the ruling
family in SA are actually Jews. He said everyone in the region knows about this open secret
but afraid to talk about. That was a revelation for me coming from a Kuwaiti since I never
did pay attention to those rumors.
I think in the event of a regional conflict, Kuwait will be spared by Iran. What would
happen to the ruling family will be another story.
thanks Seyed Mohammad Marandi.. i agree with your headline...
the usa is not agreement friendly.. everything is on their terms only... they rip up
contracts when a new president doesn't like it, and make endless demands of others under
threat, just like bullies do. they sanction countries and don't mind killing, starving and
subjecting people in faraway lands to their ongoing and desperate means of domination..
nothing about the usa is friendly... they spend all their money on the military not just
because it works so well for wall st and the corporations but because they think they can
continue to bully everyone and anyone indefinitely.. they get support from the obvious
suspects and all the other colonies of the usa - europe, canada and etc - turn a type of
blind eye to it all, fearful they might be next if they step out of line.. thus, all these
chattel countries fail in line with the usa regime sanctions...
basically, the prognosis isn't good.. none of the colonies are capable of speaking up to
the usa regime, largely because they lack strong leadership and independence of thought in
all this... we continue to slip towards ww3 and at present all the observing countries sit on
their hands waiting for the next shoe to drop.. that is where we are at present with regard
the ramp up to war on iran...
The Gulf states know they would be in the front lines in any conflict, Saudi and UAE
infrastructure destruction would mean Kings, Princes and Emir's scurrying from their
destroyed countries because of their inability to sell oil and feed their people, as one
Iranian General said.. the US bases in the region are not threats, "they are targets". Its
true Iran has an army of 500,000, they also have millions of military aged men who would form
militias and have the reputation of taking their shrouds with them into battle.
I think a major miscalculation by Trump, initiating this kind of scenario is unlikely, those
other whack jobs Pence, Pompeo and Bolton are a cause for concern, just hear this nutcase
Lindsey Graham threatening the Europeans....
"The United States should sanction "to the ground" European countries that continue to trade
with Iran under the 2015 nuclear deal and refuse to join America's pressure campaign against
the Islamic Republic, says top Republican Senator Lindsey Graham.
"I will tell the Europeans, 'If you want to side with the Iranians, be my guest, but you
won't use an American bank or do business with the American economy,'" Graham said".
https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/07/16/601067/US-Graham-Trump-Iran-JCPOA-EU-sanction-to-ground
Punitive sanctions against nations with a powerful military establishment have an incredibly
poor track record. Germany after WWI. Japan prior to Pearl Harbor. And one might add Russia
today. The more "effective" the sanctions, the closer to war.
But, of course, military planners in the U.S. and Israel have already picked out the
targets for nuclear strikes during the very first wave of attacks on Iran. It will be nuclear
first, ask questions later. Heil Trump has already said he will use nuclear weapons:
"obliterate". But will even that work? I doubt it. Iran must expect nuclear attacks in the
first wave. Yes, their urban populations will be destroyed, but their military? I doubt
it.
The folks who now are called Iranian once fought the most militaristic society ever - the
Spartans. There is likely a memory of that conflict still, and the lessons learned. They face
a military that no longer remembers Vietnam or its lessons. Sanctions are an act of war, not
military war but war against another who have been made into enemies nonetheless. Be mightily
careful who you make your enemy, one sage reminds that you become like them. Look at those
the U.S. has made enemy: Hitler and National Socialism; Mussolini and Fascism; Stalin and
State Authoritarianism; Franco and Military Repression; and the list continues substantially,
and then look at the U.S. in a distortion free mirror and what does one see?
Taking into consideration the novel Rand Paul intervention, the likely way forward is this,
and I'm sure it is what Putin (the master negotiator) has in mind: Trump blundered badly by
throwing out the JCPOA, but he needs a way out that allows him to save face and even turn it
into a partial "win". On the world stage (ie. for the public) it needs to look like Trump
accedes to reinstate the JCPOA IN EXCHANGE for Iran withdrawing from Syria! This will not
only save the nuclear deal, thereby reducing tensions, but it will force Israel to back down
and shut up. Israel can't complain and Trump can sell it as an achievement of his, "without
having to go to war". The US, of course will have to give Iran, Syria and Russia something in
exchange: Iran and Russia ultimately bolstered their forces in Syria in order to save Assad.
All things considered, Assad has won the war, so the reason for the bolstered Iranian and
Russian presence no longer applies. What the US must agree to is to suspend its efforts to
overthrow Assad (which Trump has been trying to do via the withdrawal of US troops in
northern Syria), thereby returning the country to the status quo ante. The wild card in all
of this, however, is Turkey's presence in Syria. Perhaps China can lend a helping hand on
that issue?
@35 "when it didn't. they resort back to the usual MO, look busy."
I agree with that comment, though I will add that for this Administration "looking busy"
has a Keystone Cops look about it.
I mean, let's be real here: Norman Schwarzkopf did not make a single move against Iraq
until he had well over 500,000 GI's at his command, and Tommy Franks was not willing to
restart the Crash Boom Bang until he had built up his army to just shy of 500,000
soldiers.
And Iraq then was nowhere near as formidable as Iran is now.
Where are the troop buildups? Where is the CENTCOM army?
Nowhere. And no sign of it happening.
There is a real possibility that Bolton might get his way and start his dinky little war,
only to find that the USA loses a great big war before he even manages to get out of bed.
CENTCOM is not ready for war, nowhere close to it, and for that reason alone Iran is
correct to tell the USA that if Trump launches a "limited strike" then their response will be
"it's on, baby".
@ William Herschel 61. If the U.S. or anyone else uses any type of Nuclear weapons against
Iran, a declared ally of Russia, it will result in an immediate and full scale Nuclear
retaliation. This is a recent statement made by Vladimir Putin. Pompeo, Bolton et all are
well aware of this. The U.S. might talk of using tactical nukes but despite their Hubris,
even the most pro war in the Pentagon know what the results of that type of planned
anihilation will have on the U.S. mainland. People like Lindsey Graham are merely empty
vessels making a lot of noise.
Why would Iran allow any Western nation to save face through negotiations or
otherwise?
Khamenei yesterday tweeted several statements that were later posted to his website:
"At this meeting, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran stressed that Western
governments' arrogant behavior is the main obstacle in establishing ties and maintained:
Western governments' major vice is their arrogance. If they face a weak government, their
arrogance will be effective. But if that country knows the truth about them and resists, the
Western governments will be defeated.
"Referring to problems rising between Iran and the European partners of the JCPOA,
Ayatollah Khamenei said: Now, in the matters between us and the Europeans, the problems
persist, because of their arrogance.
"The Leader of the Islamic Revolution highlighted Iran's commitment to the JCPOA -- also
known as the Iran Deal -- and criticized European dignitaries of the deal for breaching it,
saying: As stated by our Foreign Minister, who works hard, Europe has had eleven commitments,
none of which it has met. The Foreign Minister, despite his diplomatic considerations, is
clearly stating that. But what did we do? We acted based on our commitments, and even beyond
that.
"Ayatollah Khamenei reiterated that Iran continued to stay within the JCPOA despite the
fact that the EU partners of the JCPOA as well as the British government violated the
international plan of action and yet demanded Iran to stay with its promises: Now that we
have started to reduce our commitments, they step forward. They are very insolent, and they
have not abided by their eleven commitments. We have just started to reduce some of our
commitments, and this process will surely continue."
The hypothetical suggestion Zarif made in his interview with NBC News was just
that--hypothetical--as it had to spell out again for the
apparently illiterate, deaf or both SoS Pompeo and BigLie Media presstitutes.
In his arrogance, Trump climbed up the tree he's now stuck within; and as I've pointed out
again and again, Iran isn't going to help him in his climb down--they'll be no face saving
for the arrogant Western nations. I mean, how clear can the Iranians make that?! They quite
well understand the very real interests at stake I put forth in my comment @32. And the Turks
on their own have upped the stakes with Erdogan
assuring :
"that his country is prepared to leave NATO during a meeting with Russian Deputy Vladimir
Zhirinovsky.
"'I met twice with Turkish President Recep Erdogan and he told me personally that Turkey
was willing to withdraw from NATO,' Zhirinovsky wrote."
Trump seems desperate for a way to climb down from his tree. Controversial Kentucky
Senator Rand Paul apparently volunteered his services as an emissary
to Iran , which Trump okayed but Paul's office is being mum about. As noted, Iran isn't
going to talk unless tangible, visible concessions are made prior to any talks
occurring--concessions Zarif and Rouhani have already stated as the minimum required: Ending
all illegal sanctions and return to JCPOA.
Iran just announced that they would be open to talk about ballistic missiles when US stops
selling arms in the Middle East.
You have to hand it to the Iranians. In the one-up-manship game, they are a formidable
opponent. Obviously, there is less than zero chance that would ever happen, but they are
super smart in driving the message of US arrogance home. I am happy to see they don't take
any shit from the Empire.
"... Based on its own investigation, Russia's Defense Ministry earlier revealed that the serial number obtained from fragments of the Soviet-era Buk missile used to down the aircraft "indicate(d) that the engine was manufactured in the Soviet Union back in 1986." ..."
"... By 2011, missiles manufactured in that year "were withdrawn from service, written off or scrapped," adding: ..."
"... "The sole reason why the JIT stays quiet about the origin of the missile engine manufactured in 1986 is the missile more than likely belonged to the Ukrainian armed forces." ..."
"... A classic false flag, a longstanding US specialty, MH17's downing occurred in Ukrainian airspace at a time regime forces waging war on Donbass were being soundly beaten. ..."
"... Excluding Russia from the JIT probe let its member countries "fabricate evidence," credible information Russian investigators uncovered separately excluded from JIT findings. ..."
Not a shred of credible evidence suggests Russia or its nationals had anything to do with
downing Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) on July 17, 2014 in eastern Ukraine airspace, all
passengers and crew members perishing at the time.
So-called Joint Investigation Team (JIT) member countries Australia, Belgium, the
Netherlands, and Ukraine (US sponsored Kiev regime) in cahoots with the US and NATO falsely
claimed otherwise. Russia and Malaysia were excluded from the probe.
Based on its own investigation, Russia's Defense Ministry earlier revealed that the serial
number obtained from fragments of the Soviet-era Buk missile used to down the aircraft
"indicate(d) that the engine was manufactured in the Soviet Union back in 1986."
By 2011, missiles manufactured in that year "were withdrawn from service, written off or
scrapped," adding:
"The sole reason why the JIT stays quiet about the origin of the missile engine
manufactured in 1986 is the missile more than likely belonged to the Ukrainian armed
forces."
Clearly Russia had nothing to do with downing MH17, nor did Donbass freedom fighters. The
incident had US and Kiev fingerprints all over it.
A classic false flag, a longstanding US specialty, MH17's downing occurred in Ukrainian
airspace at a time regime forces waging war on Donbass were being soundly beaten.
Five years later, the Big Lie about what happened persists, ignoring what's obvious. What
possible reason would Russia have to down a commercial aircraft anywhere?
The Obama regime and Kiev putchists it installed clearly benefit from blaming Russia for
what no credible evidence suggests it had anything to do with.
Yet on Wednesday, the JIT falsely blamed three Russian nationals -- Igor Girkin (connected
to its Federal Security Service), military intelligence officials Sergei Dubinsky and Oleg
Pulatov , along with pro-Moscow Ukrainian Leonid Kharchenko for downing MH17.
Placed on an international want list, a show trial with them in absentia is scheduled for
March 9, 2020, the above individuals falsely charged with murder.
"(w)e are still gathering new data for investigation, because we will start prosecuting
now, but the investigation will continue."
Dutch chief prosecutor Fred Westerbeke said the following:
"Today, we will send out international arrest warrants for the four suspects that we will
prosecute," adding:
"They will also be placed on national and international wanted lists. Because of that, we
(are) reveal(ing) their full names show(ing) you their pictures" -- despite no credible
evidence of their involvement in what happened.
Russia categorically rejects the fabricated JIT accusations, calling them "absolutely
baseless." No credible evidence supports them.
Excluding Russia from the JIT probe let its member countries "fabricate evidence," credible
information Russian investigators uncovered separately excluded from JIT findings.
No Russian missile crossed the Ukrainian border, its Defense Ministry stressed, the missile
used given to Ukraine in 1986, identified by its serial number, as explained above.
The above-named JIT suspects are convenient patsies, wanting them and Russia blamed for what
the US and Kiev were responsible for.
... ... ...
Source: NYT
Russophobic NYT editors
jumped on the falsified JIT accusations. Turning truth on its head, they said the
following:
"In Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, lying -- willfully, methodically, shamelessly -- is the
default response to any accusations of wrongdoing" -- a longstanding US, NATO, Israeli
specialty, not how Putin's Russia operates.
It's also standard procedure for the Times and other establishment media, featuring managed
news misinformation and disinformation, suppressing hard truths on major issues, especially
geopolitical ones.
The Times: "Russia's involvement (in downing MH17) has long been clear" -- a bald-faced Big
Lie.
The Times: "(A) Russian missile launcher belonging to an active Russian military unit was
driven into eastern Ukraine and used to fire a Buk missile at the Malaysian jumbo jet" --
another bald-faced Big Lie.
Because of its global reach, the Times is the closest thing to an official US ministry of
propaganda, carpet-bombing its readers with falsified official narrative rubbish in lieu of
high journalistic standards the way they're supposed to be.
The Times and other establishment media abandoned them long ago, giving yellow journalism
they feature a bad name.
*
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Award-winning author Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago. He can be reached at [email protected] . He is a Research
Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). His new book as editor and contributor is titled "Flashpoint in Ukraine: US Drive for
Hegemony Risks WW III." http://www.claritypress.com/LendmanIII.html Visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com .
@AP East
Germany was certainly not 'dragged down to Soviet level'. It had a higher GDP/capita growth
rate than the Federal Republic every decade between 1950 and 1989, was always much richer than
the soviet union and by 1989 was the 19th highest HDI country in the world. They advanced from
40% of West Germany GDP in 1950 to 55-57% of West German GDP in 1989.
That said, yes the Soviets did massively strip the country of assets between 1945-1950, and
that probably did set it back for the entire course of its existence as a state, so its correct
to say they dragged it down somewhat. The way you present the situation is exaggerated and
misleading however. Central planning actually worked reasonably well in East Germany although
probably not as well as a mixed planning/market economy would have worked.
Unfortunately Angus Maddison doesn't have data for the separate Germanys, but East Germany
was at less than 40% of West Germany around 1990 according to the Federal Interior
Ministry.
Also as you yourself point out East Germany would have been more impacted by reparations to
the USSR.
@Greg Bacon
Agreed. Here's a place where the original author was wrong. The class struggle isn't over.
Income inequality is bigger than it's ever been. Identity politics are a misdirection used by
elites like Hitlery to divide us so we don't realize who the _real_ enemy is.
@Anatoly Karlinunemployment is not an issue for any minimally competent and conscientious worker in
countries with reasonable labor regulations.
The white working class in the US did not become incompetent and un-conscientious in one
generation. Employment at less than a living wage is not "employment."
Money, Money, Money,... Old Money, Factories, Russian Mercheant, German Industrialist,
American Slave owner... Nord Deutscheland, Bremen, was heavily Communist... Family would
understand the power of Communist Equality and Serfdom.
An old Soviet General said the EU is like the old Soviets , the leaders were not
elected, they were appointed by others mostly their friends and the EU process is the same,
fat cats appoint other fat cats instead of direct elections.
Mr Johnson,
This would tie in to your (correct imo) observations of apparent untruths in the Mueller
Dossier, and with Mr Habakkuk's comment above.
Re: The Trump Tower meeting and Russian attorney Veselnitskaya - journalist Lucy Komisar
interviewed Veselnitskaya twice Nov 2018 iirc, and has found another apparent untruth.
Komisar does not believe William Browder of Magnitsky Act fame, and Komisar's article backs
up that claim, relating that to the Trump Tower meeting and the Mueller Dossier.
FTA - "the (Mueller) report on this topic is deceptive...the report itself lies about the
issue the meeting addressed."
"It wasn't to provide dirt on Hillary Clinton...That was a ploy by Robert
Goldstone...(Goldstone) got the lawyer (Veselnitskaya) the meeting for her to lobby a
potentially incoming administration against the Magnitsky Act..."
"Veselnitskaya testified to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee in November 2017 that
Browder's major American client, the Ziff brothers, had cheated on American and Russian taxes
and contributed the "dirty money" to the Democrats."
You and Mr Habakkuk should be aware Jeff Carlson (Epoch Times) is a "Q" follower (Trust The
Plan), fwiw.
Aaron Mate, although a flaming Socialist Progressive, is top notch. imo
Thank you for your continuing research on this.
Thanks again to the Colonel for allowing the intrusion.
Regards.
If you have ever traveled in Russia outside of Moscow, you certainly have some horrible
stories to tell about its atrocious roads, food and lodging or rather lack thereof. Things have
changed greatly, and they keep changing. Now there are modern highways, plenty of cafés
and restaurants, a lot of small hotels; plumbing has risen to Western standards; the old pearls
of architecture have been lavishly restored; people live better than they ever did. They still
complain a lot, but that is human nature. Young and middle-aged Russians own or charter motor
boats and sail their plentiful rivers; they own country houses ("dachas") more than anywhere
else. They travel abroad for their vacations, pay enormous sums of money for concerts of
visiting celebrities, ride bikes in the cities – in short, Russia has become as
prosperous as any European country.
This hard-earned prosperity and political longevity allows President Putin to hold his own
in the international affairs. He is one of a few experienced leaders on the planet with twenty
years at the top job. He has met with three Popes of Rome, four US Presidents, and many other
rulers. This is important: 93-years old Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad who ruled his Malaysia
for 40 years and has been elected again said the first ten years of a ruler are usually wasted
in learning the ropes, and only after first twenty does he becomes proficient in the art of
government. The first enemy a ruler must fight is his own establishment: media, army,
intelligence and judges. While Trump is still losing in this conflict, Putin is doing fine
– by his Judoka evasive action.
Recently a small tempest has risen in the Russian media, when a young journalist was
detained by police, and a small quantity of drugs was allegedly discovered on his body. The
police made many mistakes in handling the case. Perhaps they planted the evidence to frame the
young man; perhaps they had made the obvious mistakes to frame the government. The response has
been tremendous, as if the whole case had been prepared well in advance by the opposition
hell-bent to annoy and wake up the people's ire against the police and administration. Instead
of supporting the police, as Putin usually does, in this case he had the journalist released
and senior police officers arrested. This prompt evasive action undid the opposition's build-up
by one masterly stroke.
Recently he openly declared his distaste for liberalism in the interview for the FT . This is a major
heresy, like Luther's Ninety-five Theses. "The liberals cannot dictate Their diktat can be seen
everywhere: both in the media and in real life. It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some
topics The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of
the overwhelming majority of the population." Putin condemned liberals' drive for more
immigration. He called Angela Merkel's decision to admit millions of immigrants a "cardinal
mistake"; he "understood" Trump's attempt to stop the flow of migrants and drugs from
Mexico.
Putin is not an enemy of liberalism. He is rather an old-fashionable liberal of the 19
th century style. Not a current 'liberal', but a true liberal, rejecting
totalitarian dogma of gender, immigration, multiculturalism and R2P wars. "The liberal idea
cannot be destroyed; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some things.
But it has no right to be the absolute dominating factor."
In Putin's Russia liberalism is non-exclusive, but presents just one possible line of
development. Homosexuals are not discriminated against nor promoted. There are no gay parades,
no persecution of gays, either. Russian children aren't being brainwashed to hate their
fathers, taken away from their families and given to same-sex maniacs, as it happened in the
recent Italian case . Kids aren't
being introduced to joys of sex in primary schools. People are not requested to swear love to
transgenders and immigrants. You can do whatever you wish, just do not force others to follow
you – this is Putin's first rule, and this is true liberalism in my book.
There is very little immigration into Russia despite millions of requests: foreigners can
come in as guest workers, but this does not lead to permanent residency or citizenship. The
Police frequently check foreign-looking people and rapidly deport them if found in breach of
visa rules. Russian nationalists would want even more action, but Putin is a true liberal.
... ... ...
Why does Putin care about the US? Why can't he just stop taking dollars? This means he is an
American stooge! – an eager-for-action hothead zealot would exclaim. The answer is, the
US has gained a lot of power; much more than it had in 1988, when Reagan negotiated with
Gorbachev. The years of being the sole superpower weren't wasted. American might is not to be
trifled with.
New York Times insinuated.
True, Russia is big enough to survive even that treatment, but Russians have got used to a
good life, and they won't cherish being returned to the year 1956. They took action to prevent
these worst-case scenarios; for instance, they sold much of their US debt and
moved out of Microsoft , but these things are time-consuming and expensive. Putin hopes
that eventually the US will abandon its quest for dominance and assume a live-and-let-live
attitude as demanded by the international law. Until it happens, he is forced to play by
Washington rules and try to limit antagonism.
An experienced broker came in, promising to deliver the deal. It is the Jewish state,
claiming to have the means to navigate the US in the desired direction. This is a traditional
Jewish claim, used in the days of the WWI to convince the UK to enter the deal: you give us
Palestine; we shall bring the US into the European war on your side. Then it worked: the Brits
and their Aussie allies stormed Gaza, eventually took over the Holy Land, issued the Balfour
declaration promising to pass Palestine to the Jews, and in return, fresh American troops
poured into the European theatre of war, causing German surrender.
This time, the Jewish state proposed that Putin should give up his ties with Iran; in
return, they promised to assist in general warming of Russo-American relations. Putin had a
bigger counter-proposal: Let the US lift its Iran sanctions and withdraw its armed forces from
Syria, and Russia will try to usher Iranian armed forces out of Syria, too. The ensuing
negotiations around Iran-Syria deal would lead to recognition of the US and Israel interests in
Syria, and further on it could lead to negotiations in other spheres.
This was a clear win-win proposal. Iran would emerge free of sanctions; Israel and the US
would have their interests recognised in Syria; the much-needed dialogue between Russia and the
US will get a jump-start. But Israel does not like win-win proposals. The Jewish state wants
clear victories, preferably with their enemy defeated, humiliated, hanged. Israel rejected the
proposal, for it wanted Iran to suffer under sanctions.
... ... ...
Russia certainly wants to live in peace with the US, but not at the price Mr Netanyahu
suggested. Mr Patrushev condemned the US sanctions against Iran. He
said that Iran shot down the giant American drone RQ-4A Global Hawk worth more than a hundred
million dollars over Iranian territory, not in the international airspace as the Pentagon
claimed. He stated that American "evidence" that Iran had sabotaged tankers in the Persian Gulf
was inconclusive. Russia demanded that the United States stop its economic war against Iran,
recognize the legitimate authorities of Syria, led by President Bashar Assad, and withdraw its
troops from Syria. Russia expressed its support for the legitimate government in Venezuela.
Thus, Russia showed itself at this difficult moment as a reliable ally and partner, and at the
same time assured the staggering Israeli leadership of its friendship.
The problem is that the drive for war with Iran is not gone. A few days ago, the Brits
seized an Iranian super-tanker in the Straits of Gibraltar. The tanker was on its way to
deliver oil to Syria. Before that, the United States had almost launched a missile attack on
Iran. At the last moment, when the planes were already in the air, Trump stopped the operation.
It is particularly disturbing that he himself unambiguously hinted that the operation was
launched
without his knowledge . That is, the chain of commands in the US is now torn, and it is not
clear who can start a war. This has to be taken into account both in Moscow and in Tehran.
... ... ...
Russia wants to help Iran, not out of sheer love to the Islamic Republic, but as a part of
its struggle for multi-polar world, where independent states carry on the way they like. Iran,
North Korea, Venezuela – their fight for survival is a part and parcel of Russia's
struggle. If these states will be taken over, Russia can become the next victim, Putin
feels.
... ... ...
In this situation, Putin tries to build bridges to the new forces in Europe and the US, to
work with nationalist right. It is not the most obvious partner for this old-fashioned liberal,
but they fit into his idea of multi-polarity, of supremacy of national sovereignty and of
resistance to the world hegemony of Atlantic powers. His recent visit to Italy, a country with
strong nationalist political forces, had been successful; so was his meeting with the Pope.
In the aftermath of the audience with the Pope, Putin strongly defended the Catholic Church,
saying that "There are problems, but they cannot be over-exaggerated and used for destroying
the Roman Catholic Church itself. I get the feeling that these liberal circles are beginning to
use certain problems of the Catholic Church as a tool for destroying the Church itself. This is
what I consider to be incorrect and dangerous. After all, we live in a world based on Biblical
values and traditional values are more stable and more important for millions of people than
this liberal idea, which, in my opinion, is really ceasing to exist". For years, the Europeans
haven't heard this message. Perhaps this is the right time to listen.
The author is referring to WWI and the Balfour Declaration of Nov 1917 which indeed was
drafted on behalf of Jewish Zionist interests who in return did their level best in bringing
Wilson, who was long backed by NYC banking interests (hence the Federal Reserve Act of 1913
enacted on his watch), into the war which materially changed its dynamics and outcome.
The Ukraine in all this? I would think it a far bigger concern for Russia in any
trilateral meeting.
Do not expect anything on the Ukraine in the near future. Trump wants the DNC to nominate
guaranteed loser Biden. Then he can beat him senseless using 'Ukrainian tampering with U.S.
elections' via Biden's family business interests (1).
_____
Now that the Mueller exoneration is complete, the door is open to improved U.S. –
Russia relations. The important thing is looking at Putin's and Trump's actions , more
so than their words.
Trump's words sound 'officially concerned' about Crimea. However, this is primarily for EU
consumption. What actions has the Trump administration taken about Crimea? Little or nothing
depending on how you score the matter. So tacit acknowledgement pending a quid pro quo
.
Putin administration words (but not Putin himself) have said strong sounding things about
Iran. However, there are no actions that support a deep relationship.
-- Russia sells munitions to Iran on a 'cash & carry' basis along with many other nations
including Turkey. Russia and Israel have much stronger ties on the military equipment basis.
Look at their recent joint sale of AWACS to India (2).
-- Russia continues to let the Israeli air force freely strike Iranian al'Hezbollah and
al'Quds targets in Syria.
It looks like the quid pro quo arrangement will be Crimea for an Iranian exit from
Syria. It's a deal that would help peace throughout the region.
But he is hampered by his "deep state", by Pompeo and Bolton; about the latter, Trump
himself said that he wants to fight with the whole world. Presidents can't always remove
the ministers from whom they want to get rid of – even the absolute monarchs of the
past did not always succeed.
Actually, Trump is using Bolton against the deep state.
First and foremost, it is and advanced and skillful form of ' Good Cop – Bad
Cop '. When Bolton says something and Trump openly disagrees, it places the Fake Steam
Media complex in an untenable position. If they treat the story fairly, they embrace the
anathema of saying positive things about Trump. But they do not have any options to twist the
facts into their desired anti-American propaganda.
Secondarily, it also cleverly drives a wedge between two DNC factions:
-1- The true Clintonista believer, stricken by Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS], will not
accept anything less than Impeachment. Preferably followed by turning him over to the Fascist
Stormtroopers of Antifa.
-2- Those with a less deranged view realise that a successful Impeachment process would
generate President Pence. And, he would be much more likely to accept Bolton's advice.
Perhaps Pence would pick Bolton to be Vice President.
Look at the circular firing squad that is forming up in the DNC nomination process to see
how Trump's deliberate agitation of various factions is working in his favor. The TDS faction
is winning and as a result the eventual DNC candidate will be unelectable.
@AghaHussain sts
plans have failed to materialise in Syria. The author here does a very good job of explaining
Russia's position and between his and Saker's analyses your argument is kaput and only fools
would buy it.
The Zionists went away empty handed with their visits to Russia and President Putin and if
anything Russia's resistance to the Zionists has hardened lately.
People who have two dimensional thinking and a limited box of clues seem to think it is as
simple as just saying no and digging their heels in but that way makes wars. Russia does not
have the sort of power nor an insane leadership that it would take for that.
The best hope for an internal Iranian solution is IRGC enlightened self interest. A fairly
bloodless replacement of Khameni with a general from the IRGC. It worked in Egypt and the
world welcomed that military solution. One can be 99% certain that replacing Khameni would be
just as welcome.
The new 'General Ayatollah in Chief' would have a free hand to disengage from Khameni's
extremism. The economic recovery from ending sanctions would guarantee internal popularity.
Think of it as MIGA, Make Iran Great Again , though they are unlikely to use that
exact phrase.
It's ludicrous to imagine that Russians are so wedded to the good life that they do not
dare antagonise Amerikastan. What "good life" is this? Ask the pensioners struggling on a few
thousand rubles a month how the hell they are supposed to manage. The luxuries enjoyed by the
yuppies in Moscow (most of whom, fluently English speaking and firmly pro-Amerikastani, are a
fifth column of Quislings) are not the life that the factory worker in Volgograd or the
farmer outside St Petersburg will recognise.
I want to sidetrack the thread to the matter of Edward Snowden.
Putin made a comment early on 'a strange young man'.
I understand exactly what he was saying. I am the same. No leaks. ht is a matter of
honour.
OTOH, confronted by wall-to-wal evil bullshit as he was, I think he was not in the wrong
(but have a little internal conflict on that, since the secrets 4 have to keep now are ooly
technical and at times commercial, such a dilemna never arises.
In no situation would such be ethical.
he was sorry for Sowden's girlfriend, he dumped her. but, not long after, she was with
him. Very romantic. Doubtless, Russian secret services had some role.
I like the happy ending there, it is very romantic.
Would make a great movie, but not possible from Hollywood, perhaps Russia could revive its
moribund film industry?
Oct 20, 2018 Putin: Russia Getting Rid Of US Dollar Matter Of National Security
Russian president Vladimir Putin: "That's what our American friends are doing. They're
undermining trust in the dollar as a universal payment instrument and the main reserve
currency."
@AmRusDebate t in
2014, and had gone so deep that there is no light at the end of the tunnel now. It is still
used by the Empire as an annoying sore right next to Russia, but that's all it can be. It did
not and could not deliver what the Empire was hoping for. The imperial planners never take
into account the critical condition for their "color revolutions" to bring US-friendly
compradores to power anywhere: the country in question must be rotten through and through.
Thus, instead of useful sharp tools they get worthless pieces of shit. They are still trying
to use an inevitable stink for their purposes, but that's the only use shit is good for.
It's not just Moscow yuppies. Visit any provincial city in Russia today and you'd see that
it looks way better than it ever did in the USSR. There are cafes everywhere and lots of
people in them spending serious money, because they can afford that. Drive on any road, in or
between the cities, and you can see that the roads are in a better shape than they ever were,
and there are lots of gas stations, cafes, and hotels along them, all doing brisk business.
Russians have ten times more cars now than they had in the USSR, and they drive a lot.
@A123 be deployed
right on Russia's border on yet another side. Russia would be readily bottled up and be
denied the freedom to navigate through the surrounding waters. And it would be more
vulnerable to land invasion from more points.
Russia should continue disentangling itself from US and US-Controller financial systems
and institutions. Keep becoming more able to sustain its people without so many imports of
foodstuffs and manufactured goods alike.
Far from giving up Crimea, Russia should bide its time and wait to retake the Donbass
region or more when Ukraine collapses, breaks up, and/or is outright occupied by the US.
I rather doubt you're in any position to judge whether Khameni is a sociopath.
And your fixation on regime change is noted. The ultimate expression of Western arrogance:
You, you benighted, retrograde, sociopathic worm, are not a fit chief executive of your
nation so we have decided you must go. If we have to kill hundreds of thousands of your
people that's just an unavoidable cost of our being the excellent people we are.
Liberalism in the West today is similar to communism in the SU in the late 80's: a
decrepit ideology that offers nothing to ordinary people and whose adherents are incapable of
anything but mouthing the same rubbish over and over. It will similarly die a well-deserved
death.
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by
Larry C Johnson
In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and
Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not
offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the
Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.
The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and
Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid"
intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first
hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a
prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned
a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to
show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered
from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has
transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and
Consulting.
To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7.
That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where
"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or
otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely
publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial
statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct
of a fair trial. . . .
The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense
from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny
opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence
in the case."
In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for
example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without
presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin
Stooge.
The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant
discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as
"fact" in the Mueller report.
On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney
General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public
that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special
Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public
statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and
expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.
Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in
contempt for violating rule 57.7.
Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:
Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that
contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has
entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the
government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential
sanctions.
But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the
Mueller Report and the actual indictment:
The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the
2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the
Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several
"government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges
only private conduct by private actors.
. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord
states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016
presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by"
Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to
"Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the
activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of,
the Russian government.
Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case
during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two
main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst"
involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the
Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and
social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials
associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and
emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.
The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible
evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its
conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the
2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by
the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as
"substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about
what actually occurred.
But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's
own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although
Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's
co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.
After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence
linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that
"[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared
together in public photographs."
Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that
the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.
Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put
that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce
evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the
Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.
Minor quibble: Judge
Friedrich is a woman.
I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by
Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.
Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was
Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission,
nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute
anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.
Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let
himself become a tool.
Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i
guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed
their targets were minions of satan.
I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They
believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election
by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.
It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law
enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is
unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him
tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.
The next time the IC &
law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to
exercise that power it will be a doozie.
The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I
suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more
totalitarian sooner.
I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of
evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a
great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others
– including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.
Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'.
So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions
that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to
Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with
Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html
.)
He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired
Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the
Russians.'
And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and
puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with
Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/
)
Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov
and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief
respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had
said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he
goes on to write:
'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's
guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin
shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did
they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'
If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me
like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between
with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said
to be 'also involved.'
As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political
technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role
for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.
The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and
also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos
when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not
have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.
All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times'
follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the
interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.
'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr.
Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in
the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three
people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that
the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he
passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'
Some observations prompted by all this.
Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has
been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that
Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but
everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including
that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'
In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so
many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play
double games – often for very good reasons.
To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that
these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the
assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets
controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious
standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her
judgement is so important.)
As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is
unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely
impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American
election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay
the information to Steele.
Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about
a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker,
does not seem particularly plausible.
A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have
conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2.
people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would,
obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage,
was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.
It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent
Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given
a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence
Committee in November 2017.
Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office
of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the
Committee:
'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I
was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over
both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin
now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is
believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the
Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives
them a level of deniability.'
A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in
what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to
provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium
poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a
veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB
Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified
Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal
security'.
This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:
'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known
in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties
the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the
Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially
assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most
dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all
power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow
establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people
in Moscow going down to the low offices.'
The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an
honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a
figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the
former with polonium.
A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the
fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late
Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an
informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John
Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).
Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important
figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's
'information operations' team.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian
island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private
sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was
later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study
'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson
in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information
operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.
A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the
CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a
very long way.
And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.
Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and
can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.
Looks like Mueller and his team were extremely sloppy and just milked the US government and try to feed rumors to the media.
Mueller emerged as a stooge of Clinton mafia.
Notable quotes:
"... In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin Stooge. ..."
"... The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as "fact" in the Mueller report. ..."
"... On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them. ..."
"... Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in contempt for violating rule 57.7. ..."
"... the Court has entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential sanctions. ..."
"... But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the Mueller Report and the actual indictment: ..."
"... By attributing IRA's conduct to "Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of, the Russian government. ..."
"... But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. ..."
"... Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence. ..."
"... I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out. ..."
"... The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more totalitarian sooner. ..."
"... a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html .) ..."
"... Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/ ) ..."
"... 'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr. Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.' ..."
"... Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.' ..."
"... It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence Committee in November 2017. ..."
"... Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding). ..."
"... Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's 'information operations' team. ..."
"... The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study 'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko. ..."
"... A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a very long way. ..."
Mueller Does Not Have Evidence That The IRA Was Part of Russian Government Meddling by
Larry C Johnson
In the criminal case against alleged Russian operatives--Internet Research Agency and
Concord Management and Consulting LLC--a Federal judge has declared that Robert Mueller has not
offered one piece of solid evidence that these defendants were involved in any way with the
Government of Russia. I think this is a potential game changer.
The world of law as opposed to the world of intelligence is as different as Mercury and
Mars. The intelligence community aka IC can traffic in rumor and speculation. IC "solid"
intelligence may be nothing more than the strident assertion of a source who lacks actual first
hand knowledge of an event. The legal world does not enjoy that kind of sloppiness. If a
prosecutor makes a claim, i.e., Jack shot Jill, then said prosecutor must show that Jack owned
a firearm that matches the bullets recovered from Jill's body. Then the prosecutor needs to
show that Jack was with Jill when the shooting took place and that forensic evidence recovered
from Jack showed he had fired a firearm. Keep this distinction in mind as you consider what has
transpired in the case against the Internet Research Agency and Concord Management and
Consulting.
To understand why Judge Friedrich ruled as she did you must understand Local Rule 57.7.
That rule: restricts public dissemination of information by attorneys involved in criminal cases where
"there is a reasonable likelihood that such dissemination will interfere with a fair trial or
otherwise prejudice the administration of justice." It also authorizes the court "[i]n a widely
publicized or sensational criminal case" to issue a special order governing extrajudicial
statements and other matters designed to limit publicity that might interfere with the conduct
of a fair trial. . . .
The rule prohibits lawyers associated with the prosecution or defense
from publishing, between the time of the indictment and the commencement of trial, "[a]ny
opinion as to the accused's guilt or innocence or as to the merits of the case or the evidence
in the case."
In short, the US Government cannot come out and declare that Concord Management, for
example, was acting on behalf or or in collaboration with the Russian Government without
presenting actual evidence. A prosecutor cannot simply claim that Concord is a Putin
Stooge.
The lawyers for Concord Management read the Mueller report and noted significant
discrepancies between what was alleged in the original complaint and what was asserted as
"fact" in the Mueller report.
On April 25, 2019, Concord filed the instant motion in which it argues that the Attorney
General and Special Counsel violated Local Rule 57.7 by releasing information to the public
that was not contained in the indictment. Concord's main contention is that the Special
Counsel's Report, as released to the public, and the Attorney General's related public
statements improperly suggested a link between the defendants and the Russian government and
expressed an opinion about the defendants' guilt and the evidence against them.
Concord's lawyers wanted Judge Friedrich to find Robert Mueller and Attorney General Barr in
contempt for violating rule 57.7.
Judge Friedrich gave Concord a partial victory:
Although the Court agrees that the government violated Rule 57.7 , it disagrees that
contempt proceedings are an appropriate response to that violation. Instead, the Court has
entered an order limiting public statements about this case moving forward and cautions the
government that any future violations of that order will trigger a range of potential
sanctions.
But the Judge did not stop there. She pointed out some glaring discrepancies between the
Mueller Report and the actual indictment:
The Special Counsel Report describes efforts by the Russian government to interfere with the
2016 presidential election. . . . But the indictment . . . does not link the defendants to the
Russian government. Save for a single allegation that Concord and Concord Catering had several
"government contracts" (with no further elaboration), id. ¶ 11, the indictment alleges
only private conduct by private actors.
. . . the concluding paragraph of the section of the [Mueller] Report related to Concord
states that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016
presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by"
Concord's co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA). By attributing IRA's conduct to
"Russia" -- as opposed to Russian individuals or entities -- the Report suggests that the
activities alleged in the indictment were undertaken on behalf of, if not at the direction of,
the Russian government.
Similarly, the Attorney General drew a link between the Russian government and this case
during a press conference in which he stated that "[t]he Special Counsel's report outlines two
main efforts by the Russian government to influence the 2016 election." . . . The "[f]irst"
involved "efforts by the Internet Research Agency, a Russian company with close ties to the
Russian government, to sow social discord among American voters through disinformation and
social media operations." Id. The "[s]econd" involved "efforts by Russian military officials
associated with the GRU," a Russian intelligence agency, to hack and leak private documents and
emails from the Democratic Party and the Clinton Campaign.
The Report explains that it used the term "established" whenever "substantial, credible
evidence enabled the Office to reach a conclusion with confidence." . . . It then states in its
conclusion that the Special Counsel's "investigation established that Russia interfered in the
2016 presidential election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by
the IRA." In context, this statement characterizes the evidence against the defendants as
"substantial" and "credible," and it provides the Special Counsel's Office's "conclusion" about
what actually occurred.
But the activities of the IRA and Concord Management are not established. In fact, Mueller's
own report undermines his claims, as noted in a recent article by Nation's Aaron Mate. Although
Mueller claims that it was "established that Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential
election through the 'active measures' social media campaign carried out by" Concord's
co-defendant, the Internet Research Agency (IRA), he provided no such evidence.
After two years and $35 million, Mueller apparently failed to uncover any direct evidence
linking the Prigozhin-controlled IRA's activities to the Kremlin. His best evidence is that
"[n]umerous media sources have reported on Prigozhin's ties to Putin, and the two have appeared
together in public photographs."
Mate's article, as I mentioned in a previous piece, does an excellent job of showing that
the Mueller Report is based on heartfelt beliefs but devoid of corroborating evidence.
Some readers will insist that Mueller and his team have actual intelligence but cannot put
that in an indictment. Well boys and girls, here is a simple truth--if you cannot produce
evidence that can be presented in court then you do not have a case. There is that part of the
Constitution that allows those accused of a crime to confront their accusers.
Minor quibble: Judge
Friedrich is a woman.
I expect that this will get no play from the MSM, since Judge Friedrich was appointed by
Trump, and "everyone" knows she's just covering up for him.
Under the conditions and in the environment that it was returned, this indictment was
Mueller and his partisan team throwing raw meat fo the media so as to prolong their mission,
nothing more. Once filed, no one involved ever expected to appear in a courtroom to prosecute
anyone, or defend any part of it. It was an abuse of process, pure and simple.
Consider it as a count against Mueller, his competence or his integrity, maybe both. He let
himself become a tool.
Johnson refers to "heartfelt beliefs" but i doubt Mueller believes his own bs. in this i
guess he distinguishes himself from earlier witch-hunters, who apparently sincerely believed
their targets were minions of satan.
I think Mueller, Weissman, et al did not expect Concord to contest their indictment. They
believed they could continue their PR effort that Russia changed the outcome of the election
by sending out tweets and Facebook posts without anyone calling them out.
It seems on the current trajectory both the Trump colluded with Russia and our law
enforcement & IC attempted a soft-coup will die on the vine. The latter because Trump is
unwilling to declassify. It seems for him it was all just another reality TV show and him
tweeting "witch hunt" constantly was what the script called for.
The next time the IC &
law enforcement who now must believe that they are the real power behind the throne decide to
exercise that power it will be a doozie.
The national security surveillance state is only going to get bigger and more powerful. I
suppose that is the real competition between the CCP & the USA who can get more
totalitarian sooner.
I think a large question is raised as to how far the kind of sloppiness in the handling of
evidence which Judge Friedrich identified in the Mueller report may have characterised a
great deal of the treatment of matters to do with the post-Soviet space by the FBI and others
– including almost all MSM journalists – for a very long time.
Unfortunately, one also finds this among some of the most useful critics of 'Russiagate'.
So, for example, in a very valuable recent piece in the 'Epoch Times' about the questions
that need to be put to Mueller, Jeff Carlson discusses some of the problems relating both to
Christopher Steele's involvement with Oleg Deripaska, and the involvement of Fusion GPS with
Natalia Veseltnitskaya which led to the Trump Tower meeting. (See https://www.theepochtimes.com/33-key-questions-for-robert-mueller_2988876.html
.)
He then however goes on to write: 'In other words, not only was the firm that hired
Steele, Fusion GPS, hired by the Russians, but Steele himself was hired directly by the
Russians.'
And Andrew McCarthy, in the 'National Review', picks up one of the most interesting, and
puzzling, moments in the fascinating notes by Kathy Kavalec of the conversation she had with
Steele when Jonathan Winer brought him to see on her in October 2016. (See https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/07/oleg-deripaska-fbi-russia-collusion-theory/
)
Commenting on the fact that, in her scribbled notes, beside the names of Vladislav Surkov
and Vyacheslav Trubnikov, who are indeed a top Putin adviser and a former SVR chief
respectively, Kavalec writes 'source', McCarthy simply concludes that she meant that he had
said that these were his – indirect – sources, and that this was accurate. And he
goes on to write:
'Deripaska, Surkov, and Trubnikov were not informing on the Kremlin. These are Putin's
guys. They were peddling what the Kremlin wanted the world to believe, and what the Kremlin
shrewdly calculated would sow division in the American body politic. So, the question is: Did
they find the perfect patsy in Christopher Steele?'
If you look at Kavalec's typing up of the notes, among a good deal of what looks to me
like pure 'horse manure' – including the claim that 'Manafort has been the go-between
with the campaign' – the single reference to Surkov and Trubnikov is that they are said
to be 'also involved.'
As it happens, Surkov is a very complex figure indeed. His talents as a 'political
technologist' were first identified by Khodorkovsky, before he subsequently played that role
for Putin. It would obviously be possible that he and Steele still had common contacts.
The suggestion in Kavalec's notes that Sergei Millian 'may be involved in some way,' and
also that, 'Per Steele, Millian is connected Simon Kukes (who took over management of Yukos
when Khodorkovsky was arrested)' is interesting, but would seem to suggest that he would not
have been cited to Kavalec as an intermediary.
All this is obviously worth putting together with claims made in the 'New York Times'
follow-up on 9 July to the Reuters report on the same day breaking the story of the
interviews carried out with Steele by the Inspector General's team in early June.
'Moreover, by January 2017, F.B.I. agents had tracked down and interviewed one of Mr.
Steele's main sources, a Russian speaker from a former Soviet republic who had spent time in
the West, according to a Justice Department document obtained by The New York Times and three
people familiar with the events. After questioning him, F.B.I. officials came to suspect that
the man might have added his own interpretations to reports from his own sources that he
passed on to Mr. Steele, calling into question the reliability of the information.'
Some observations prompted by all this.
Without wanting to prejudge things, it seems to me quite likely that what Horowitz has
been contemplating is a kind of 'limited hangout'. So, the idea could be to suggest that
Steele did have sources, that however these were not as reliable as he thought they were, but
everything was done in good faith etc etc. In the light of information coming out, including
that in the Friedrich ruling, he may however have decided to 'hold his horses.'
In trying to put together the accumulating evidence, it is necessary to realise, as so
many people seem to find it difficult to do, that in matters like these people commonly play
double games – often for very good reasons.
To say as Carlson does that Fusion and Steele were hired by 'the Russians' implies that
these are some kind of collective entity – and then, one is one step away from the
assumption that Veselnitskaya and Deripaska, as well as 'Putin's Cook', are simply puppets
controlled by the master manipulator in the Kremlin. (The fact that Friedrich applies serious
standards for assessing evidence to Mueller's version of this is one of the reasons why her
judgement is so important.)
As regards what McCarthy says, to lump Surkov and Deripaska together as 'Putin's guys' is
unhelpful. Actually, it seems to me very unlikely, although perhaps not absolutely
impossible, that, had he been implicated in any conspiracy to intervene in an American
election, Surkov would have been talking candidly about his role to anyone liable to relay
the information to Steele.
Likewise, however, the notion of a Machiachiavellian Surkov, feeding disinformation about
a non-existent plot through an intermediary to Steele, who swallows it hook, line and sinker,
does not seem particularly plausible.
A rather more obvious possibility is that the intermediaries who were supposed to have
conveyed a whole lot of 'smoking gun' evidence to Steele were either 1. fabrications, 2.
people whom without their knowledge he cast in this role, or 3. co-conspirators. It would,
obviously, be possible that Millian, although one can say no more than that at this stage,
was involved in either or both of roles 2. and 3.
It is important that the general pattern of assuming that Putin is some kind of omnipotent
Sauron-figure, which has clearly left Mueller open to a counter-attack by Concord, was given
a classic expression in the testimony which Glenn Simpson gave to the House Intelligence
Committee in November 2017.
Providing his version of what was going on following his move from the Washington office
of the 'Wall Street Journal' to its European headquarters in January 2005, Simpson told the
Committee:
'And the oligarchs, during this period of consolidation of power by Vladimir Putin, when I
was living in Brussels and doing all this work, was about him essentially taking control over
both the oligarchs and the mafia groups. And so basically everyone in Russia works for Putin
now. And that's true of the diaspora as well. So the Russian mafia in the United States is
believed bylaw enforcement criminologists to have – to be under the influence of the
Russian security services. And this is convenient for the security services because it gives
them a level of deniability.'
A bit less than two years after Simpson's move to Brussels, a similar account featured in
what appears to have been the first attempt by Christopher Steele and his confederates to
provide a 'narrative' in terms of which could situate the supposed assassination by polonium
poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko.
This came in a BBC Radio 4 programme, entitled 'The Litvinenko Mystery', in which a
veteran presenter with the Corporation, Tom Mangold, produced an account by the former KGB
Major Yuri Shvets, supported by the former FBI Agent Robert Levinson, and an 'Unidentified
Informer', who is told by Mangold that he cannot be identified 'reasons of your own personal
security'.
This figure, whose credentials we have no means of assessing, explains:
'Well it's not well known to Western leaders or Western people but it is pretty well known
in Russia. Because essentially it is common knowledge in Russia that by the end of Nineties
the so called Russian organised crime had been destroyed by the Government and then the
Russian security agencies, primarily the law enforcement and primarily the FSB, essentially
assumes the functions and methods of Russian organised crime. And they became one of the most
dangerous organised crime group because they are protected by law. They're protected by all
power of the State. They have essentially the free hand in the country and this shadow
establishment essentially includes the entire structure of the FSB from the very top people
in Moscow going down to the low offices.'
The story Mangold told was a pathetic tale of how Litvinenko and Shvets, trying to turn an
honest penny from 'due diligence' work, identified damning evidence about the links of a
figure close to Putin to organised crime, who in return sent Andrei Lugovoi to poison the
former with polonium.
A few problems with this version have, however, subsequently, emerged. Among them is the
fact that, at the time, Litvinenko himself, as well as having been a key member of the late
Boris Berezovsky's 'information operations team', was an agent, as distinct from an
informant, of MI6: accounts differ as to whether Steele was his personal 'handler' (John
Sipher), or had never met him (Luke Harding).
Also relevant is the fact that Shvets, a fanatical Ukrainian nationalist, and an important
figure in the original 'Orange Revolution', was also a key member of Berezovsky's
'information operations' team.
Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the disappearance of Levinson, on the Iranian
island of Kish, the following March, was not as was claimed for years related to his private
sector work. His entrapment and imprisonment – from which we now know Deripaska was
later involved in attempting to rescue him – related to an undercover mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
The account of his career by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier in his 2016 study
'Missing Man' is a tissue of sleazy evasions, not least in relation to the role of Levinson
in 'investigating' the notorious mobster Semion Mogilevich, a key figure in 'information
operations' against both Putin and Trump, and also the opponents of Yulia Tymoshenko.
A large question involved is how co-operation between not simply elements in MI6 and the
CIA, but also in the FBI, with the oligarchs who refused to accept Putin's terms goes back a
very long way.
And, among other things, that raises a whole range of questions about Mueller.
Great info, thanks. I admittedly don't watch the skeptics' comments closely enough, and
can be susceptible to twisted observations from guys like Carlson and Solomon.
"... I too am a studio engineer who has worked with DAWs since their inception for digital recording. The splicing is obvious...and the splicing alone is enough to prove that Kiev turned in fake audio files ..."
"... They turned them in 25 minutes after the plane went down therefore they were prepared in advance. In other words, it was premeditated intentional murder. It was not the rebels and it was not an accident. It was Kiev. ..."
"... I have read that the video was made public 5 hours later - not 25 minutes. Regardless, this strongly suggests that the doctored tape had been in preparation BEFORE the incident. ..."
"... if Ukraine were blameless in the incident, why would their security services have immediately attempted to bamboozle the world with a doctored tape? ..."
"... The Ukrainian secret police are said to have a particular animosity toward Commander Bes. How curious that, a day after SBU obtains a tape of Bes referring to a plane shoot down, MH-17 is mysteriously routed right over Bes' base - and then SBU tries to frame Bes within hours of the tragedy by releasing the misleading tape. Czech analyst Vladimir Suchan states that "this almost could be a smoking gun" of a false flag attack. ..."
"... An audio communication between deputies of Kolomoisky and of the Ukrainian Defense Minister, allegedly hacked by the Russian Kyber Berkut cybergroup, and cited in my old essay (gosh, this hacked communication is no longer available on-line - wonder why?), lends itself to the view that Ukrainian jets first cannonaded MH17, causing it to swerve, but - because the jets were flying at too high an altitude for their design - the BUK was then employed to complete the destruction of MH17. ..."
"... We are left with a conundrum - was the attack on MH17 a conscious false flag (almost too barbaric to contemplate), or was it a bungled attempt to shoot down a plane carrying Putin back from a trip to South America - the intent being to blame the shoot down on the rebels? ..."
"... The fact that, for unknown reasons, MH17 had been diverted by Ukraine air traffic control to fly right over the war zone near Commander Bes speaks for the former possibility. ..."
"... The conclusion by the JIT that Russia had been responsible for the shoot down is based on an implausible Rube Goldberg scenario concocted by the "independent investigative group" Bellingcat; it is alleged that a Russian BUK had been trundled into Ukraine (German satellite intelligence has ruled this out, but Germany wasn't invited to join the JIT), fired off one BUK to take down MH17, then returned (by an illogical route) the next day ..."
"... The JIT readily accepted Bellingcat's explanation because it is in effect a kangaroo court organized by Ukraine and representing the interests of NATO. (Malaysia does not accept this explanation, as its primary motivation is to determine what actually happened to its plane, as opposed to furthering NATO's geopolitical agenda vilifying Russia.) ..."
"... The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has called the decision by the Dutch-led investigative team to charge three Ukranians and a Russian with murder in the downing of MH17 "ridiculous" and "politically motivated." This, of course, has resulted in vigorous condemnations by the usual US sycophants. ..."
"... The US, of course, values Russia as a Goldilocks enemy, technically advanced enough to be sold as a threat, thereby helping to justify a ridiculous military budget, but not economically engaged with the US to an extent that maintaining them as an enemy would seriously cut into corporate profits. Every time I look seriously into a main stream media allegation of Russian wrong doing, it turns out to be propaganda unsupported by facts. While I know what is going on, the fact that we are being continuously lied to and the facts that the msm and the "serious" politicians buy into this dreck so readily is a great source of fear and frustration. ..."
Note this comment by "Valerie1" below - the kill shot:
I too am a studio engineer who has worked with DAWs since their inception for digital recording. The splicing is obvious...and
the splicing alone is enough to prove that Kiev turned in fake audio files.
Real conversations do not have overlapping samples/soundbytes and splices people. This video proves it hands down. Kiev
faked the files.
They turned them in 25 minutes after the plane went down therefore they were prepared in advance. In other words, it
was premeditated intentional murder. It was not the rebels and it was not an accident. It was Kiev.
I have read that the video was made public 5 hours later - not 25 minutes. Regardless, this strongly suggests that the
doctored tape had been in preparation BEFORE the incident.
In any case, if Ukraine were blameless in the incident, why would their security services have immediately attempted to
bamboozle the world with a doctored tape?
Here's an excerpt from an unpublished essay I wrote about 4 years ago (unpublished because I presumed it would be met with
mockery or indifference at DKos) that is pertinent:
Also curious is the fact that Ukrainian air traffic control directed MH-17 out of its usual path, so that it passed over
rebel-controlled area near Donetz. This is not known to have happened before. Immediately after the shoot-down, the Ukrainian
secret police (SBU) seized the air traffic control records for the flight, and have never released them. The new flight path
took the plane directly over the base of noted rebel commander Igor Bezler ("Bes"). Within five hours after the crash, SBU
released a video tape in which Bes appeared to be confirming that his forces had just shot down a plane; comments by other
rebels on the tape seem to imply that this plane was MH-17. Subsequent analysis indicated that Bes' comments had been taped
the day previous to the crash, and that he was referring to shoot down of a Ukrainian military plane; this was then spliced
to tape taken after the shoot down of MH-17, in which rebels referred to the crash site.
The Ukrainian secret police are said to have a particular animosity toward Commander Bes. How curious that, a day after
SBU obtains a tape of Bes referring to a plane shoot down, MH-17 is mysteriously routed right over Bes' base - and then SBU
tries to frame Bes within hours of the tragedy by releasing the misleading tape. Czech analyst Vladimir Suchan states that
"this almost could be a smoking gun" of a false flag attack.
With respect to deception by the Ukrainian government, the investigation by BND [German intelligence] indicated that photos
supplied by Kiev "have been manipulated"; however, they did not indicate what photos they were referring to. In any case, if
Ukraine was blameless in this affair, why wouldn't scrupulous honesty be their best policy? At this point, the balance of evidence
seems to point to the Ukrainian military – likely a rogue element controlled by neo-Nazis or an oligarch such as Kolomoisky
(who when interviewed referred to the MH-17 shoot down as "a trifle") -- acting without knowledge of the central government,
as the culprit. Parry cites several speculations regarding the motives of those involved. One theory is that the perpetrators
thought that they were shooting at Putin's plane returning from a recent trip to South America (he just had, but via a different
route). Another possibility is that they thought they were shooting at a Russian intruder returning to Russia. But the theory
that, according to Parry, is taken most seriously by elements of our intelligence community, is that the shoot-down was intended
as a false flag operation which could be blamed on the rebels or Russians. (These intelligence sources believe that the Ukrainian
central government was unaware of this plot.) If this is the case, then the ploy worked admirably, as the MH-17 shoot-down
was used to justify turning up the intensity of sanctions imposed on Russia – and most Americans still assume as a matter of
course that Russia or its rebel allies were responsible.
The most significant development since I wrote this is that the Russian-manufactured BUK whose fragments were found among the
wreckage and is presumed to have shot down MH17, was shown to have been transferred to the Ukrainian SSR prior to the dissolution
of the USSR, and hence must have been in the possession Ukraine when it became independent. This of course markedly strengthens
the case that Ukrainian forces were responsible for the shoot down.
There is however continued speculation that Ukrainian fighter jets also attacked MH17, as maintained by retired pilot Peter
Haisenko.
If we take it [a hacked audio conversation] seriously, it casts an interesting light on a once popular theory that Ukrainian
SU-25 jets, claimed by Russia to have tailed MH-17 (
https://www.rt.com/news/174412-malaysia-plane-russia-ukraine/
- this is disputed by BND), fired upon it. This was supported by the observation that some of the holes in the cockpit of the
MH-17 had an appearance suggestive of machine gun fire.
Nonetheless, this theory cannot explain the bulk of the holes in the cockpit, and the conclusion that a BUK missile was
mainly responsible for downing the plane appears sound. This hack suggests a scenario in which an SU-25 fired on the jet but
was unable to bring it down, in part because, as is well known, it is difficult for such jets to fly at the 33,000 foot altitude
at which MH-17 was flying. This might explain a report that the plane veered sharply before it plummeted to earth. As the jet
attack had failed in its objective, a BUK missile was required to bring MH-17 down.
An audio communication between deputies of Kolomoisky and of the Ukrainian Defense Minister, allegedly hacked by the Russian
Kyber Berkut cybergroup, and cited in my old essay (gosh, this hacked communication is no longer available on-line - wonder why?),
lends itself to the view that Ukrainian jets first cannonaded MH17, causing it to swerve, but - because the jets were flying at
too high an altitude for their design - the BUK was then employed to complete the destruction of MH17.
The fact that the fighter jet theory has received no attention from the Ukraine-organized JIT (Joint Investigation Team) tasked
with investigating the shoot down is hardly surprising, since involvement of Ukrainian jets would evidently point the finger at
Ukraine as the culprit. Incredibly, this UN-recognized JIT agreed up-front that Ukraine, one of the chief suspects in the tragedy,
would have veto rights over the JIT's report.
We are left with a conundrum - was the attack on MH17 a conscious false flag (almost too barbaric to contemplate), or was
it a bungled attempt to shoot down a plane carrying Putin back from a trip to South America - the intent being to blame the shoot
down on the rebels?
The fact that, for unknown reasons, MH17 had been diverted by Ukraine air traffic control to fly right over the war zone
near Commander Bes speaks for the former possibility.
The conclusion by the JIT that Russia had been responsible for the shoot down is based on an implausible Rube Goldberg
scenario concocted by the "independent investigative group" Bellingcat; it is alleged that a Russian BUK had been trundled into
Ukraine (German satellite intelligence has ruled this out, but Germany wasn't invited to join the JIT), fired off one BUK to take
down MH17, then returned (by an illogical route) the next day. This narrative is "supported" in the main by photos and audios
helpfully provided by Ukrainian intelligence, some of which have been found to be doctored. (Who wudda thunk it?!) The JIT
readily accepted Bellingcat's explanation because it is in effect a kangaroo court organized by Ukraine and representing the interests
of NATO. (Malaysia does not accept this explanation, as its primary motivation is to determine what actually happened to its plane,
as opposed to furthering NATO's geopolitical agenda vilifying Russia.)
Whenever the Western Deep State has a false narrative it wishes to push, Bellingcat can be relied on to concoct "evidence"
supporting it. It has been a key perpetrator of the hoax regarding "Assad gassing his own people". In particular, Bellingcat pushed
the discredited view that Assad's forces had gassed Douma. It has also been intent on blaming Russian intelligence for the attack
on the Skripals.
The Malaysian Prime Minister, Mahathir Mohamad, has called the decision by the Dutch-led investigative team to charge three
Ukranians and a Russian with murder in the downing of MH17 "ridiculous" and "politically motivated." This, of course, has resulted
in vigorous condemnations by the usual US sycophants.
The US, of course, values Russia as a Goldilocks enemy, technically advanced enough to be sold as a threat, thereby helping
to justify a ridiculous military budget, but not economically engaged with the US to an extent that maintaining them as an enemy
would seriously cut into corporate profits. Every time I look seriously into a main stream media allegation of Russian wrong doing,
it turns out to be propaganda unsupported by facts. While I know what is going on, the fact that we are being continuously lied
to and the facts that the msm and the "serious" politicians buy into this dreck so readily is a great source of fear and frustration.
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring
its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics
requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV"
badge?
Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.
Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western
world?
Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse
them..Hmmm?
Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of
politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he
spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in
Iraq?
How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?
"... The Epstein case has all the earmarks of CIA protection of an asset. ..."
"... Successful entry into politics requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV" badge? ..."
"... Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in Iraq? ..."
Journalism. =>has disclosed the tunnel, and a few of its investigators are exploring
its contents, expecting to find at the end of this tunnel Successful entry into politics
requires candidates to first "tag themselves" with a "corrupted and venerable" "CAV"
badge?
Wonder if this has traction in the persons involved in Grace I, the failure of JCPOA.
Is the CAV badge the weapon that has corrupted nearly every nation state in the western
world?
Politicians make promises, and then within hours for unexplained reasons, reverse
them..Hmmm?
Is the CAV Badge the weapon that has corrupted the intelligence services and stable of
politicians in nearly every nation in the world? Did Colin Powell flash a CAV badge as he
spoke to UN focus about the most likely presence of non existent WMDs that led to w__ in
Iraq?
How can CAV badge victims be identified and isolated from politics?
The CAV badge could explain so many USA positive, American negative events?
An Iranian general yesterday
confirmed Magnier's take (also
here ):
A senior Iranian general has revealed that Washington, through diplomatic channels,
recently asked Tehran to allow it to conduct a small-scale operation in the Iranian
airspace in order to save its face following the IRGC's shoot-down of a US spy drone.
Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali, the Head of Iran's Civil Defence Organization,
said Iran vehemently rejected the US request, saying that it will respond to any act of
aggression.
"The Islamic Republic of Iran responded that it views any operation as a war and will
give a crushing response to it. You may initiate a war but this is Iran which will finish
it," he said Sunday.
The idea that the U.S. would ask Iran to allow it to bomb some targets without hitting
back sounds crazy.
Dear Mr. Rouhani,
could you please name me three targets in your country that I am allowed to bomb?
It is urgent as I need to look tough on Iran.
Pretty please!
Donald Trump
But this is the Trump White House and the only thing Trump really seems to care for is his
own rating.
. . .that Trump be allowed to bomb one, two or three clear objectives, to
be chosen by Iran,
Trump has experience in such a charade, when empty buildings were struck with US rockets
after the fake Syrian "gas attack" in Douma, April 2018. Probably the details were worked out
between US and Russia in that case. That it wasn't possible this time is a clear indication
of Iran strength. Stronger than Russia! Imagine that.
That Trump would come begging hat in hand seeking for Tehran to let the US bomb the country
unimpeded does not strike me as surprising or implausible. It fits Trump's trademark MO of
"chaotic, incoherent" to a 't', with a heavy dash of megalomania thrown in as well. Just
another day in the office for Trump.
The seizure of the Grace 1 is more intriguing for its brazen illegality as well as the
reported circumstances (if one can believe the Brits in their claim of boarding 2.5 miles
from shore). Was this another avenue of "maximum pressure" cooked up by Iran?
As for Iran seeking US military targets in the region, those sitting ducks will be the last
targets sought. Not that they might not, but that certainly would be nuclear option for
Tehran. There is much lower hanging fruit to target that would cripple the lackey Gulf
states. Hitting the desalination plants of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain would ruin
those economies overnight without risking environmental fallout. Iran would be hammered in
the MSM, but would be no matter their course of action. Those countries would have strategic
reserves of water, so I wouldn't imagine people actually dying of thirst in the desert, but
the next day there would be a biblical exodus of the ex-pats that run those economies. The
UAE would grind to a halt, there would be a possible overthrow of the monarchy of Bahrain,
and massive unrest in Saudi Arabia, without risking immediate gloves-off war with the US.
The cartoon has an element of truth, but mainly Trump is doing the bidding of his
pro-Israel billionaire funders, Sheldon Adelson and Robert Mercer. They are frustrated that
Trump has not been forceful enough with Iran.
"... There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it. ..."
"... The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as related in a popular fairy tale. ..."
"... Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system. ..."
"... Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then. ..."
"... Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR. ..."
"... Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel to become the “western” power in the middle east. ..."
"... The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war. ..."
"... America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America. ..."
"... By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began. ..."
"... Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s absolute capitulation. ..."
"... For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations, but the US refused. ..."
"... Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention the most powerful Shia Muslim nation. ..."
>>US President Donald Trump’s ruthless use of the centrality of his country’s financial system and the dollar to force economic
partners to abide by his unilateral sanctions on Iran has forced the world to recognise the political price of asymmetric economic
interdependence.
Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?
Just spit-balling here: The Iranian leadership, with good cause, wants to diminish or eliminate the U.S. grip on the region
and this subversive, potentially destabilizing sentiment resonates among the citizenry of various Middle Eastern countries.
There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential
loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it.
The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear
an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as
related in a popular fairy tale.
This is hardly definitive and I’m sure others could elaborate.
Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to
control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system.
I’m sure this is obvious to most people at this kind of web site and is overly simplistic but i sense sometimes some people
are shocked about the conflict with Iran and don’t get that basic dynamic of this conflict.
Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?
Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important
for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR.
Mossadegh, by nationalising the oil supply until, played against the status and he was overthrown in a MI/CIA sponsored coup
in 1953, leaving the Shah as the sole ruler in Iran till the revolution of 1979 when Iran came under theocratic rule and basically
diminished the power the US had throughout the years of the Shah’s rule.
The US was also shown to be quite powerless -- short of an invasion -- to deal with the hostage crisis in the US embassy, which
was finally after more than a year resolved with the help of Canada.
Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel
to become the “western” power in the middle east.
The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with
the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war.
This U.S. approach towards Iran has been the result of its lack of an intrinsic interest in the country. The same was true
of Britain. The late Sir Denis Right, the UK’s ambassador to Iran in the 1960s, put it best by writing that Britain never considered
Iran of sufficient value to colonize it. But it found Iran useful as a buffer against the competing great power, the Russian
Empire. Thus, British policy towards Iran was to keep it moribund but not dead, at least not as long as the Russian threat
persisted.
America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance
to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But
Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America.
By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated
Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle
of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began.
Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s
absolute capitulation.
For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations,
but the US refused.
Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the
world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention
the most powerful Shia Muslim nation.
"... Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive -- that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. ..."
"... In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth) which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for everything they did in the name of the Revolution. ..."
"... They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged, brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the Revolution). ..."
"... So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. ..."
To this day, Maher's response still leaves me dumbfounded: "I would say that's a secular
religion." Before Douthat could ask what the hell a secular religion is, Maher changed the
subject. The meaning of Maher's nonsensical statement was clear: everything Maher doesn't
like is religion.
Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive --
that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. Sure, they didn't use God or angels or
miracles in their rhetoric, but that's just surface trappings.
In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They
had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth)
which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for
everything they did in the name of the Revolution.
They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to
join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his
death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged,
brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the
Revolution).
So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. No, they
didn't include personified invisible spirits in their ideology. But if it looks like a duck,
walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ....
"... There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it. ..."
"... The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as related in a popular fairy tale. ..."
"... Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system. ..."
"... Because Iran successfully booted out the CIA and CIA-imposed regime out of their country and successfully remained independent since then. ..."
"... Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR. ..."
"... Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel to become the “western” power in the middle east. ..."
"... The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war. ..."
"... America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America. ..."
"... By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began. ..."
"... Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s absolute capitulation. ..."
"... For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations, but the US refused. ..."
"... Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention the most powerful Shia Muslim nation. ..."
>>US President Donald Trump’s ruthless use of the centrality of his country’s financial system and the dollar to force economic
partners to abide by his unilateral sanctions on Iran has forced the world to recognise the political price of asymmetric economic
interdependence.
Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?
Just spit-balling here: The Iranian leadership, with good cause, wants to diminish or eliminate the U.S. grip on the region
and this subversive, potentially destabilizing sentiment resonates among the citizenry of various Middle Eastern countries.
There is at present no other powerful leadership group that is so adamantly unwilling to compromise with the U.S. The potential
loss of U.S. control over Middle East oil being at the root of it.
The Saudis et al have it, and Israel is a forward operating base for protecting it. The Saudi royal family rightly fear
an Iran-inspired popular uprising against them and Israel fears the loss of lands granted to them by their invisible friend as
related in a popular fairy tale.
This is hardly definitive and I’m sure others could elaborate.
Iran is a relatively large country with a semi independent foreign policy and banking,/ financial system, and they want to
control their own resources independent of western dictates about opening up their system to the neo liberal system.
I’m sure this is obvious to most people at this kind of web site and is overly simplistic but i sense sometimes some people
are shocked about the conflict with Iran and don’t get that basic dynamic of this conflict.
Why is Iran such a high priority for so many US elites?
Iran was after WW2 a client state of both the US and the UK, the latter installing the Shah as a ruler. Iran was important
for the US and the UK through its oil resources and its border with the USSR.
Mossadegh, by nationalising the oil supply until, played against the status and he was overthrown in a MI/CIA sponsored coup
in 1953, leaving the Shah as the sole ruler in Iran till the revolution of 1979 when Iran came under theocratic rule and basically
diminished the power the US had throughout the years of the Shah’s rule.
The US was also shown to be quite powerless -- short of an invasion -- to deal with the hostage crisis in the US embassy, which
was finally after more than a year resolved with the help of Canada.
Iran is still a major player when it comes to oil, but contrary to the Shah years quite hostile to the aspirations of Israel
to become the “western” power in the middle east.
The enmity clearest showed up when Israel and the USA supplied Saddam Hussein with intelligence and Germany and France with
the capability to produce chemical weapons during the Iraq/Iran war.
This U.S. approach towards Iran has been the result of its lack of an intrinsic interest in the country. The same was true
of Britain. The late Sir Denis Right, the UK’s ambassador to Iran in the 1960s, put it best by writing that Britain never considered
Iran of sufficient value to colonize it. But it found Iran useful as a buffer against the competing great power, the Russian
Empire. Thus, British policy towards Iran was to keep it moribund but not dead, at least not as long as the Russian threat
persisted.
America essentially followed the old British approach towards Iran: keep it semi-alive so that it can put up enough resistance
to the USSR until America’s more important and intrinsic interests, such as those in the Persian Gulf, were safeguarded. But
Washington never wanted to turn Iran into a strong ally that one day might be capable of challenging America.
By changing the international balance of power and removing the risk of Soviet penetration, the USSR’s fall eliminated
Iran’s value to the United States even as a buffer state. In fact, the fundamental shift to a US approach based on the principle
of no compromise, can be traced to 1987, when Gorbachev’s reforms began.
Since then, the United States has refused to accept any solution to the Iran problem that has not involved the country’s
absolute capitulation.
For instance, in 2003, Iran offered to put all the outstanding issues between the two countries on the table for negotiations,
but the US refused.
Because Iran refuses to be a second-class citizen in its own neighborhood. Theirs is an ancient culture whose legacy to the
world is enormous, their history is the stuff of legend, and they are the geopolitical power player in the region, not to mention
the most powerful Shia Muslim nation.
"... Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive -- that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. ..."
"... In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth) which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for everything they did in the name of the Revolution. ..."
"... They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged, brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the Revolution). ..."
"... So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. ..."
To this day, Maher's response still leaves me dumbfounded: "I would say that's a secular
religion." Before Douthat could ask what the hell a secular religion is, Maher changed the
subject. The meaning of Maher's nonsensical statement was clear: everything Maher doesn't
like is religion.
Maher was right. I've been saying for decades -- since Brezhnev was still alive --
that the Soviet Union was a functional theocracy. Sure, they didn't use God or angels or
miracles in their rhetoric, but that's just surface trappings.
In practice, the USSR behaved exactly like a brutal totalitarian theocracy would. They
had an impersonal god (the theory of history that would lead inevitably to heaven on Earth)
which the government treated as the source of their authority and their justification for
everything they did in the name of the Revolution.
They had a state church (the Communist Party -- no rivals allowed) that you needed to
join to get anywhere in society. They had prophets (look what they did with Lenin after his
death), saints (heroes of the Revolution), idols, sacred texts that could not be challenged,
brutal suppression of other religions, witch hunts for heretics (anyone who opposed the
Revolution).
So yes: the USSR turned "communism" into their de facto state religion. No, they
didn't include personified invisible spirits in their ideology. But if it looks like a duck,
walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ....
"... Same old, same old, same old, same old. Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be different. There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel. Honest. ..."
Like the "withdrawal from Syria", a typically fleeting idea?
Breaking a few treaties? Ratcheting up support of the carnage and starvation in Yemen?
The "comparatively great" side of Trump is attention deficiency disorder, so it is hard
for him to start a war, something that requires some degree of organization and coordinating
different branches of governments, different countries etc.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 17:02
Nailed it!
DJT is like a less-likeable Inspector Clouseau. Sometimes ineptitude is a blessing: this
was my only hope when refusing to vote for HRC.
mark , July 3, 2019 at 00:17
Same old, same old, same old, same old.
Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be
different.
There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel.
Honest.
Just like Dubya.
Just like Obomber.
Just like the Orange Baboon.
Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus.
Pretty superficial article, but some points are interesting. Especially the fact that the collapse of neoliberalism
like collapse of Bolshevism is connected with its inability to raise the standard of living of population in major Western
countries, despite looting of the USSR and Middle eastern countries since 1991. Spoils of victory in the Cold War never got to
common people. All was appropriated by greedy "New Class" of neoliberal oligarchs.
The same was true with Bolshevism in the USSR. The communist ideology was dead after WWII when it became clear that
"proletariat" is not a new class destined to take over and the "iron law of oligarchy" was discovered. Collapse happened
in 45 years since the end of WWII. Neoliberal ideology was dead in 2008. It would be interesting to see if neoliberalism
as a social system survives past 2050.
The level of degeneration of the USA elite probably exceeds the level of degeneration of Nomenklatura even now.
Notable quotes:
"... A big reason why liberal democracies in Europe have remained relatively stable since WWII is that most Europeans have had hope that their lives will improve. A big reason why the radical vote has recently been on the rise in several European countries is that part of the electorate has lost this hope. People are increasingly worried that not only their own lives but also the lives of their children will not improve and that the playing field is not level. ..."
"... As a result, the traditional liberal package of external liberalisation and internal redistribution has lost its appeal with the electorate, conceding ground to the alternative package of the radical right that consists of external protectionism and internal liberalisation ..."
"... Mr Mody said the bottom half of German society has not seen any increase in real incomes in a generation. ..."
"... The reforms pushed seven million people into part-time 'mini-jobs' paying €450 (£399) a month. It lead to corrosive "pauperisation". This remains the case even though the economy is humming and surging exports have pushed the current account surplus to 8.5pc of GDP." ..."
"... "British referendum on EU membership can be explained to a remarkable extent as a vote against globalisation much more than immigration " ..."
"... As an FYI to the author immigration is just the flip side of the same coin. Why were immigrants migrating? Often it's because they can no longer make a living where they left. Why? Often globalization impacts. ..."
"... The laws of biology and physics and whatever else say that the host that is being parasitised upon, cannot support the endless growth of the parasites attached upon it. The unfortunate host will eventually die. ..."
"... "negative effects of globalisation: foreign competition, factory closures, persistent unemployment, stagnating purchasing power, deteriorating infrastructures and public services" ..."
"... he ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people. ..."
"... One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future. ..."
"... "If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE (finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ~ Michael Hudson ..."
"... I'm surprised more people don't vote for neo-fascist parties like the Golden Dawn. Ordinary liberal politics has completely failed them. ..."
The more a local economy has been negatively affected by the two shocks, the more its
electors have shifted towards the radical right and its policy packages. These packages
typically combine the retrenchment against international openness and the liberalisation of the
internal market and more convincingly address the demand for protection by an electorate that,
after the austerity following the Crisis, no longer trusts alternatives based on more liberal
stances on foreign relations and the parallel promise of a stronger welfare state.
A big reason why liberal democracies in Europe have remained relatively stable since WWII is
that most Europeans have had hope that their lives will improve. A big reason why the radical
vote has recently been on the rise in several European countries is that part of the electorate
has lost this hope. People are increasingly worried that not only their own lives but also the
lives of their children will not improve and that the playing field is not level.
On the one hand, despite some progress in curtailing 'tax havens' in recent years, there has
never been as much wealth in tax havens as there is today (Zucman 2015). This is seen as unfair
because, if public goods and services (including those required to help the transition to a
'green economy') have to be provided in the regions where such hidden wealth comes from, lost
tax revenues have to be compensated for by higher taxes on law-abiding households.
On the other hand, fairness is also undermined by dwindling social mobility. In the last
decades, social mobility has slowed down across large parts of the industrialised world (OECD
2018), both within and between generations. Social mobility varies greatly across regions
within countries, correlates positively with economic activity, education, and social capital,
and negatively with inequality (Güell at al. 2018). Renewed migration from the South to
the North of Europe after the Crisis (Van Mol and de Valk 2016) is a testimony of the widening
relative lack of opportunities in the places that have suffered the most from competition from
low-wage countries.
Concluding Remarks
Globalisation has come accompanied by the Great Convergence between countries around the
world but also the Great Divergence between regions within several industrialised countries.
The same holds within the EU. In recent years, redistributive policies have had only a very
limited impact in terms of reversing growing regional inequality.
As a result, the traditional
liberal package of external liberalisation and internal redistribution has lost its appeal with
the electorate, conceding ground to the alternative package of the radical right that consists
of external protectionism and internal liberalisation.
This is both inefficient and unlikely to
lead to more regional convergence. What the political and policy debate in Europe is arguably
missing is a clearer focus on two of the main underlying causes of peoples' growing distrust in
national and international institutions: fiscal fairness and social mobility.
Right. It would be better to say "the traditional New Deal liberal package " has not lost
its appeal, it was killed off bit by bit starting with NAFTA. From a 2016 Thomas Frank essay
in Salon:
That appeal to [educated credentialed] class unity gives a hint of what Clintonism was
all about. To owners and shareholders, who would see labor costs go down as they took
advantage of unorganized Mexican labor and lax Mexican environmental enforcement, NAFTA held
fantastic promise. To American workers, it threatened to send their power, and hence their
wages, straight down the chute. To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who
weren't directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of
deferring to the correct experts -- economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a
statement declaring the treaty "will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms
of employment creation and overall economic growth."
The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what
eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the
victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the
opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in
the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty.
And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other:
employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers
organize. A surprisingly large number of them -- far more than in the pre-NAFTA days -- have
actually made good on the threat.
Twenty years later, the broader class divide over the subject persists as well.
According to a 2014 survey of attitudes toward NAFTA after two decades, public opinion
remains split. But among people with professional degrees -- which is to say, the liberal
class -- the positive view remains the default. Knowing that free-trade treaties are always
for the best -- even when they empirically are not -- seems to have become for the
well-graduated a badge of belonging.
The only internal redistribution that's happened in the past 25 – 30 yearsis from
the bottom 80% to the top 10% and especially to the top 1/10th of 1 %.
Not hard to imagine why the current internal redistribution model has lost its appeal with
the electorate.
I think there are two different globalizations that people are responding to.
1. Their jobs go away to somewhere in the globe that has lower wages, lower labor
protections, and lower environmental protections. So their community largely stays the same
but with dwindling job prospects and people slowly moving away.
2. The world comes to their community where they see immigrants (legal, illegal, refugees)
coming in and are willing to work harder for less, as well as having different appearance,
languages, religion, and customs. North America has always had this as we are built on
immigration. Europe is much more focused on terroire. If somebody or something has only been
there for a century, they are new.
If you combine both in a community, you have lit a stick of dynamite as the locals feel
trapped with no way out. Then you get Brexit and Trump. In the US, many jobs were sent
overseas and so new people coming in are viewed as competitors and agents of change instead
of just new hired help. The same happened in Britain. In mainland Europe with less inequality
and more job protection, it is more of just being overwhelmed by the sheer quantity of
newcomers in a society that does not prize that at all.
I saw the warning signs when Golden Dawn appeared in Greece
The liberals said it was just a one off, as they always do, until it isn't.
How did successful Germany turn into a country where extremism would flourish?
The Hartz IV reforms created the economic hardship that causes extremism to flourish.
"Germany is turning to soft nationalism. People on low incomes are voting against authority
because the consensus on equality and justice has broken down. It is the same pattern across
Europe," said Ashoka Mody, a former bail-out chief for the International Monetary Fund in
Europe.
Mr Mody said the bottom half of German society has not seen any increase in real
incomes in a generation. The Hartz IV reforms in 2003 and 2004 made it easier to fire
workers, leading to wage compression as companies threatened to move plants to Eastern
Europe.
The reforms pushed seven million people into part-time 'mini-jobs' paying €450
(£399) a month. It lead to corrosive "pauperisation". This remains the case even though
the economy is humming and surging exports have pushed the current account surplus to 8.5pc
of GDP."
This is a successful European country, imagine what the others look like.
"British referendum on EU membership can be explained to a remarkable extent as a vote
against globalisation much more than immigration "
As an FYI to the author immigration is just the flip side of the same coin. Why were
immigrants migrating? Often it's because they can no longer make a living where they left.
Why? Often globalization impacts.
Another recap about that really just mourns the lack of trust in the establishment, with
no answers. More "I can't believe people are sick to death of experts of dubious skills but
networking "
What it is just admitted that a system that can only work great for 20% of any given
population if they are born in the right region with the right last name just simply not work
except as an exercise in extraction?
And about the EU as if it could never be taken over by bigger authoritatians than the ones
already populating it.
Then see how much those who think it is some forever bastion of liberalism over sovereignity
likes it .
"Another recap about that really just mourns the lack of trust in the establishment,
with no answers."
Usually it involves replacing the establishment or creating an internal threat to
reinstate compliance in the establish (Strauss and Howe).
Strategies for initiate the former may be impossible in this era where the deep state can
read your thoughts through digital media so you would like it would trend to the latter.
Mmmmm, yes, migration, globalisation and such like.
But, unregulated migration into an established environment, say a country, say, UK, on one
hand furthers profits to those benefiting from low labour wages (mainly, friends of people
working for governments), but on the other leads to creation of parallel societies, where the
incoming population brings along the society they strived to escape from. The Don calls these
sh***hole societies. Why bring the f***ing thing here, why not leave it where you escaped
from.
But the real betrayal of the native population happens when all those unregulated migrants
are afforded immediate right to social security, full access to NHS and other aspects of
state support, services that they have not paid one penny in support before accessing that
particular government funded trough. And then the parasitic growth of their "family and
extended family" comes along under the banner of "human rights".
This is the damnation of the whole of Western Civilisation which had been hollowed out
from within by the most devious layer of parasitic growth, the government apparatus. The
people we pay for under the auspices that they are doing some work for us, are enforcing
things that treat the income generators, the tax paying society as serfs whose primary
function in life is to support the parasites (immigrants) and parasite enablers
(government).
The laws of biology and physics and whatever else say that the host that is being
parasitised upon, cannot support the endless growth of the parasites attached upon it. The
unfortunate host will eventually die.
Understanding of this concept is most certainly within mental capabilities of all those
employed as the "governing classes " that we are paying for through our taxes.
Until such time when legislation is enacted that each and every individual member of
"government classes " is made to pay, on an indemnity basis, through financial damages,
forced labour, organs stripping or custodial penalties, for every penny (or cent, sorry,
yanks), of damage they inflict on us taxpayers, we are all just barking.
This piece does an admirable job conflating globalisation and the ills caused by the
neoliberal capture of social democratic parties/leaders. Did people just happen to lose hope,
or were they actively betrayed? We are left to guess.
"negative effects of globalisation: foreign competition, factory closures, persistent
unemployment, stagnating purchasing power, deteriorating infrastructures and public
services"
Note that these ills could also be laid at the feet of the austerity movement, and the
elimination/privatisation of National Industrial Policy, both cornerstones of the neoliberal
infestation.
Not only is globalization not new, all of the issues that come with it are old news.
All of it.
Part of the problem is that the global economic order is still in service to the same old
same old. They have to rebrand every so often to keep the comfortable even more comfortable.
Those tasked with keeping the comfortable more comfortable have to present this crap as "new
ideas" for their own careerism or actually do not realize they haven't espoused a new idea in
500 years.
Putin's recent interview with Financial Times editor offers a clear-eyed perspective on
our changing global structure:
"What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said,
in the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the
people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the
overwhelming majority of the people.
Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is
never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to
create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a
better future.
You know, it seems to me that purely liberal or purely traditional ideas have never
existed. Probably, they did once exist in the history of humankind, but everything very
quickly ends in a deadlock if there is no diversity. Everything starts to become extreme one
way or another.
Various ideas and various opinions should have a chance to exist and manifest themselves,
but at the same time interests of the general public, those millions of people and their
lives, should never be forgotten. This is something that should not be overlooked.
Then, it seems to me, we would be able to avoid major political upheavals and troubles.
This applies to the liberal idea as well. It does not mean (I think, this is ceasing to be a
dominating factor) that it must be immediately destroyed. This point of view, this position
should also be treated with respect.
They cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do
over the recent decades. Diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life.
It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics. But why?
For this reason, I am not a fan of quickly shutting, tying, closing, disbanding
everything, arresting everybody or dispersing everybody. Of course, not. The liberal idea
cannot be destroyed either; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in some
things. But you should not think that it has the right to be the absolute dominating factor.
That is the point. Please." ~ Vladmir Putin
He's talking about the end of neoliberalism, the economic fascism that has gripped the
world for over 40 years:
"If you're not willing to kill everybody who has a different idea than yourself, you
cannot have Frederick Hayek's free market. You cannot have Alan Greenspan or the Chicago
School, you cannot have the economic freedom that is freedom for the rentiers and the FIRE
(finance, insurance, real estate) sector to reduce the rest of the economy to serfdom." ~
Michael Hudson
Let's get back to using fiscal policy for public purpose again, to granting nations their
right to self-determination and stopping the latest desperate neoliberal attempt to change
international norms by installing fascist dictators (while pretending they are different) in
order to move the world backwards to a time when "efforts to institutionalize standards of
human and civil rights were seen as impingements on sovereignty, back to the days when no one
gave a second thought to oppressed peoples."
Very interesting article, and even more interesting conversation! There is a type of
argument that very accurately points out some ills that need addressing, and then goes on to
spout venom on the only system that might be able to address those ills.
It may be that the
governing classes are making life easy for themselves. How to address that is the hard and
difficult issue. Most of the protection of the small people comes from government.
Healthcare, schools, roads, water etc.(I'm in scandinavia).
If the government crumbles, the
small people have to leave. The most dreadful tyranny is better than a failed state with
warring factions.
The only viable way forward is to somehow improve the system while it is
(still) running. But this discussion I do not see anywhere.
If the discussion does not
happen, there will not be any suggestions for improvement, so everything stays the same.
Change is inevitable – it what state it will catch us is the important thing. A cashier
at a Catalonian family vineyard told me the future is local and global: the next level from
Catalonia will be EU. What are the steps needed to go there?
Same old, Same old. Government is self-corrupting and is loath to change. People had
enough July fourth 1776.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty
and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted
among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever
any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to
alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such
principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to
effect their Safety and Happiness."
FWIW: The fireworks we watch every Fourth of July holiday are symbolic!!!!
The cashier seems to be envisioning a neoliberal paradise where the nation-state no longer
exists. But who, then, collects the taxes that will pay for infrastructure, healthcare,
education, public housing, and unemployment insurance? The European Parliament?
Will Germans
and Finns be willing to pay high taxes in order to pay for those services for Greeks and
Spaniards?
Look at the unemployment rate in Greece the Germans would simply say that the
Greeks are lazy parasites and don't want to work (rather than understand that the economic
conditions don't allow for job creation), and they would vote for MEPs that vote to cut taxes
and welfare programs.
But maybe this was the plan all along you create this neoliberal paradise, and slowly but
surely, people will dismantle all but the bare bones of the welfare state.
I believe that one of the fundamental flaws in the logic behind the EU is this assumption
of mobility. Proponents of the EU imagine society to be how it is described in economics
textbooks: a bunch of individual actors seeking to maximize their incomes that don't seem to
exist in any geographic context. The reality is that people are born into families and
communities that speak a language. Most of them probably don't want to just pack up all of
their things, relocate, and leave their family and home behind every time they get a new job.
People throughout history have always had a very strong connection to the land on which they
were raised and the society into which they were brought up; more accurately, for most of
human history, this formed the entire existence, the entire universe, of most people
(excluding certain oppressed groups, such as slaves or the conquered).
Human beings are not able to move as freely as capital. While euros in Greece can be sent
to and used instantly in Germany, it is not so easy for a Greek person to leave the society
that their ancestors have lived in for thousands of years and move to a new country with a
new culture and language. For privileged people that get to travel, this doesn't sound so
bad, but for someone whose family has lived in the same place for centuries and never learned
to speak another language, this experience would be extremely difficult. For many people over
the age of 25, it might not even be a life worth living.
In the past, economic difficulties would lead to a depreciation of a nation's currency and
inflation. But within the current structure of the Eurozone, it results in deflation as euros
escape to the core countries (mainly Germany) and unemployment. Southern Europeans are
expected to leave everything they have ever known behind and move to the countries where
there is work, like Germany or Holland. Maybe for a well-educated worldly 18 year old, that's
not so bad, but what about a newly laid-off working class 35 year-old with a wife and kids
and no college degree? He's supposed to just pick up his family and leave his parents and
relatives behind, learn German, and spend the rest of his life and Germany? His kids now have
to be German? Would he even be able to get a job there, anyway? Doing what? And how is he
supposed to stop this from happening, how is he supposed to organize politically to keep jobs
at home? The Greek government can hardly do anything because the IMF, ECB, and European
Commission (all unelected officials) call the shots and don't give them any fiscal breathing
room (and we saw what happened the last time voters tried to assert their autonomy in the
bailout deal referendum), and the European Parliament doesn't have a serious budget to
actually do anything.
I'm surprised more people don't vote for neo-fascist parties like the
Golden Dawn. Ordinary liberal politics has completely failed them.
"... Buying S400 and losing F35 is a win win. ..."
"... Trump administration currently sees Turkey is essentially as a lever in relation to Iran. He suspects Erdo & Trump have a deal since the G20 whereby S-400 sanctions may be held in abeyance, in return for Turkey's acquiescence to, or even assistance with the maximum pressure campaign. ..."
"... Erdogan is still in the regime-changers' sights, under siege in all areas and consequently in a very weak position. I think those forecasting a full-scale defection into Russia's orbit misunderstand the realities of the maximum pressure campaign on Turkey itself and much further it can be pushed if need be. IMO it is more likely NATO will eventually welcome the reluctant black sheep back into the fold. ..."
"... Turkey is going to get their $4.3 billion dollars back at about the same time that Iran gets all of its money back, and Venezuela gets its gold back from the Bank of England - that is to say, never. As soon as Turkey asks for its money back, the US govt will impose sanctions on Turkey and that will be that. ..."
"... Any energy corridor that goes from the Persian Gulf to Europe has to pass through Turkey and also has to pass through either Syria or Iraq. The fact that Syria and Iraq are now effectively in Russia's sphere of influence makes a Turkish-Russian alliance make all the more sense. ..."
"... Reports from several months ago indicate the S-400 was cheaper than the Patriot, more mobile, and Russia was willing to share the technology and the US wasn't. Could be the S-400 being a better deal value factored in there somewhere. Putin? He's a businessman too. ..."
What is most interesting to me, is that the Russian air force is actually pounding
Turkey's militant allies on the ground in Idlib, but both men (Erdogan and Putin) are still
strengthening their ties thru Turkstream, Russian tourism and building of a nuclear power
plant. Diplomacy seems to have surpassed conditions on the ground in Syria.
Also, Iran's leaders feel slightly betrayed by Putin's deference to Erdogan. They must
believe (as I do) that Putin has agreed to allow Turkey to occupy parts of Syria following
the war.
Turkey has been very consistent on this issue from the very beginning...and it has plans
to resettle parts of N Syria with the nearly 3 million refugees it is housing in S
Turkey.
Many critics will blame Putin for betraying Assad, but I think he is merely showing that
he is a master negotiator who recognizes the importance of 'good' relations with Turkey, and
knows he will not get everything he wants in Syria. Compromise with Turkey opens up a path to
ending the war and for pressuring US-Turkey relations which continue to worsen as Washington
continues to support a de facto Kurdistan in E Syria.
M K Bhadrakumar is a great source for following the frenetic pace of developments in
Eurasian geopolitics and he covered this very topic yesterday (see link).
His view of where the Trump administration currently sees Turkey is essentially as a
lever in relation to Iran. He suspects Erdo & Trump have a deal since the G20 whereby
S-400 sanctions may be held in abeyance, in return for Turkey's acquiescence to, or even
assistance with the maximum pressure campaign.
Whilst S-400 delivery is contrary to US/NATO wishes/policy, it makes sense to me that it
gets treated as a second order issue in this context. Turkey also wants Iran out of Syria,
but if pushed even further into a corner Turkey could make life difficult for the US on Iran
and therefore even potentially endanger Trump's re-election chances.
Erdogan is still in the regime-changers' sights, under siege in all areas and
consequently in a very weak position. I think those forecasting a full-scale defection into
Russia's orbit misunderstand the realities of the maximum pressure campaign on Turkey itself
and much further it can be pushed if need be. IMO it is more likely NATO will eventually
welcome the reluctant black sheep back into the fold.
The slippery Sultan has pushed it to the limit, but the anti-Iran coalition now needs him
- at least in the short term. My guess is he gets to keep his shiny new AD system.
Where
Turkey chooses to put it is a very interesting question; facing its ancient enemy in the
West, or perhaps sited to cover the Cyprus EEZ and its oil?
Does anyone understand the F35 deal between the participating partner nations.
Wikipedia say Turkey is a level 3 partner which cost it $4.3 billion and that sales are
handled via the Pentagon.
Who decides if a partner in the project can be denied the right to
buy their product? What I did not see is what F35 components were produced in Turkey and if
they stopped exports what redundancy their was in the system.
Can Turkey say fine I will take my $4.3 billion back as the Russians and Chinese have both
made me very attractive offers?
Turkey is going to get their $4.3 billion dollars back at about the same time that Iran
gets all of its money back, and Venezuela gets its gold back from the Bank of England - that
is to say, never. As soon as Turkey asks for its money back, the US govt will impose
sanctions on Turkey and that will be that.
Regarding #1 and #2: S-400 is already in Algeria. And it will be in India by next year.
Reuters claims that Trump's good buddy King Salman signed a deal with Russia to buy S-400s.
Reuters also reported that Qatar was considering an S-400 purchase. So why is Pom-Pom only
jumping on Turkey's back and not castigating the Saudis, Qataris, Algeriens, and Indians
about the S-400? Keeping F-35 stealth capability from snooping by S-400s is the stated reason
we don't want Turkey to have the S-400.
But when carrier based F35s are flying in the eastern Med, that stealth capability could
be snooped on by the Algerien systems (or by Russian "field service reps" in Algeria with
those systems). Ditto for the F35s in Italy. Could Israeli F35 stealth already be jeopardized
by Russian system at Khmeimim AB in Syria?
#3 Idiots. But they are being used by Trump. He puts them up to it, so that he can pull
back at the last minute and be Mr World Peace.
#4: State owned Rossiya TV lampooned Trump's Fourth of July celebration. Called it
фигня (pronounced as 'fignya' and translates as bullshit). They
mocked the tanks on display, said "the paint on these vehicles is peeling off. They have
no cannons, and the optics were pasted on with adhesive tape" . Host Yevgeny Popov called
the President "our Donald Trump" . Co-host Olga Skabeeva calls the parade "Putin's
America" .
#5: See #3
#6 & 7: I was hoping #6 would stall #7, but I have serious doubts.
Is the S-400 in Algeria already? I have found reports that it was scheduled to be
delivered in 2015 - but I can't find any reports on it actually being delivered. I don't
think the Russians would have sold it to anyone other than Belarus and China until they had
the S-500 ready to go.
Wiki says yes but their references to it are speculative.
Besides those there is a Business Insider article, German Edition, which claims Algeria
has the S-400. It was dated last November.
Plus there is a report on Sputnik re S-400 in Algeria. But that is based on a
MENAdefense.net article, which has photos (irrefutable they claim??) of several S-400
launchers in Algeria. Plus BAZ-64022 truck-tractors which are used with the S-400 and NOT the
S-300. So maybe they do and are trying to hide the fact in order to avoid sanctions? Or maybe
they have upgraded their S-300 PMU-2s to the PMU-3, which is a close match to the S-400. Or
perhaps it is all propaganda?
Regarding the F35 and the S400, the obvious thing to do is to let them have both and swap
information. We get S400 info and Russia gets F35 data.......except erdo will try and screw
both of us.
I believe Putin's goal is to transform Turkey from a NATO state into an integral part of
Russia's near abroad to eventually secure a guaranteed access to the Mediterranean and beyond
and have a reliable buffer between Russia and Middle East. It's ensuring peace of mind, not
rebuilding an empire.
I think Putin's goal is more about forming a partnership with Turkey to build an energy
corridor through Turkey to Europe. Control of this corridor, or at least membership in the
alliance that controls this corridor, is a big deal from a geopolitical standpoint.
Thus Russia and Turkey can form something along the lines of an "OPEC on steroids" -
Turkey can control who gets to pipe hydrocarbons to Europe and Russia can provide protection
to those who wish to join their alliance (as they have already done for Syria).
Any energy corridor that goes from the Persian Gulf to Europe has to pass through
Turkey and also has to pass through either Syria or Iraq. The fact that Syria and Iraq are
now effectively in Russia's sphere of influence makes a Turkish-Russian alliance make all the
more sense.
What Turkey has to gain from such an arrangement is not only transit fees for the
hydrocarbons, but also a chance to develop their economy - if Turkey is at the head of the
line for receipt of hydrocarbons to Europe, they are at the head of the line for building
industry and businesses which use those hydrocarbons as inputs (eg refineries, plastics,
aluminum, chemical production).
Access to the Med is already guaranteed by treaty just as is access to the Black Sea.
Access beyond the Med is controlled at the Suez and the pillars of Hercules.
Guaranteed during peacetime. During any hostilities you can throw that treaty out the
window.
Which is why TTG is correct that Putin's goal is to get Turkey out of NATO. And he may
doublecross Assad by blessing Turkey's permanent occupation (or annexation) of those four
districts of northern Aleppo Province (i.e. Afrin, Azaz, al-Bab, & Jarabulus). As payment
for getting out of NATO.
Until you fix the problem with, according to a poll, 56% of American parents not wanting
Arabic numerals taught to their children. I suspect that an equal number would not be able to
find any of the mentioned places on a map.
Where those with crystal balls find certainty, I find something much less. We do know that
containment polices can work very well, but any involvement in the world's longest contested
area is not worth the cost, nor the risk. The US has already spent a fortune, with very
little to show for it.
Reports from several months ago indicate the S-400 was cheaper than the Patriot, more
mobile, and Russia was willing to share the technology and the US wasn't. Could be the S-400
being a better deal value factored in there somewhere. Putin? He's a businessman
too.
Yosemite Sam Bolton is probably being told to go out there and do his thing, and suffering
from whip-lash when Trump yanks the carpet out from under them without apology. The poor dear
must be like...
Went on Kunstler's website with the tasteless name and read comment about Hannity
screaming to bomb Iran. And if Mr. Kunstler's facts are correct I imagine the Republicans
will be saving Mueller's answers for the next election. Whatever Mr. Kunstler has to say, he
says it well. What a mess. The way the bad guys have dug in and rigged the election process
and the "News" business, it is difficult to imagine anything can change.
The controls of our society have become so efficient it is tempting to say what the hell
and see if there is a good old film or an meaningful sporting event and let it go at
that.
In saying that, it brings to mind the other CN article about anti-war sentiment and
organizing against war and the war machine that has gone missing makes the point very well. I
do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests were
simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be.
Eddie S , July 4, 2019 at 10:01
"I do think the protest against the Iraq war was a watershed moment, when the protests
were simply ignored, and the in your face response by the powers that be."
Yes, I know that the whole Iraq War-crime episode was an extremely disheartening episode
to myself and millions of others who had marched in protest. It was horrible enough when the
neo-cons were able to blatantly orchestrate an illegal invasion (with the obeisance of the
long-cowed Democrats), but the RE-election of 'W' -- a year after the non-existence of the
WMDs was proven by our OWN invading military -- was in a political sense worse because it
showed that the majority of the US public was indifferent to illegal US invasions of other
countries, so there would be little resistance in the future to these 'wars'.
It was only when the media was portraying the deaths & bad injuries to US soldiers
occupying Iraq that a modest amount of public sentiment turned against the whole sordid
episode.
So the tacit message was pretty clear to powers that be -- - as long as US troops aren't
hurt, go-ahead and bomb-away those foreign men, women, and even children getting killed by
them don't matter, especially if our military leaders offer-up oh-so-sincere apologies and
state that 'these were unavoidable collateral civilian casualties because we only perform
surgical strikes on terrorists' (and said in a most serious, gravitas-laden tone, so you KNOW
they're telling the truth).
Windup , July 4, 2019 at 16:09
George wasn't 'elected' in the first place, let alone 're-elected'. I don't know if that
makes you feel better. Maybe it does- at least about the American public (at that point in
time anyway).
But it was certainly a forerunner to how we 'elect' our officials, which at this point is
more blatantly fraudulent. At least to those of us not reading/watching msm.
"... "Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization." ..."
"... Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army fell thousands of troops short of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017 Department of Defense poll that found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z. ..."
"... These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right alliance between two influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months, they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. ..."
"... In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill ultimately passed the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be vetoed by President Trump. That such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy." ..."
"... And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives, and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come. ..."
"... In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this." ..."
"... It is little recognized how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC while also taking heavy casualties. ..."
"... We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South. ..."
"... Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. ..."
"... President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions. ..."
Peace activism is rising, but that isn't translating into huge street demonstrations, writes Allegra Harpootlian.
W hen Donald Trump entered the Oval Office in January 2017, Americans took to the streets all across the country to protest their
instantly endangered rights. Conspicuously absent from the newfound civic engagement, despite more than a decade and a half of this
country's fruitless, destructive wars across the Greater Middle East and northern Africa, was antiwar sentiment, much less an actual
movement.
Those like me working against America's seemingly
endless
wars wondered why the subject merited so little discussion, attention, or protest. Was it because the still-spreading war on
terror remained shrouded in government secrecy? Was the lack of media coverage about what America was doing overseas to blame? Or
was it simply that most Americans didn't care about what was happening past the water's edge? If you had asked me two years ago,
I would have chosen "all of the above." Now, I'm not so sure.
After the enormous demonstrations
against the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the antiwar movement disappeared almost as suddenly as it began, with some even openly
declaring it dead. Critics
noted the long-term absence of significant protests against those wars, a lack of political will in Congress to deal with them,
and ultimately,
apathy on matters of war and peace when compared to issues like health care, gun control, or recently even
climate
change .
The pessimists have been right to point out that none of the plethora of marches on Washington since Donald Trump was elected
have had even a secondary focus on America's fruitless wars. They're certainly right to question why Congress, with the constitutional
duty to declare war, has until recently allowed both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump to wage war as they wished without
even consulting them. They're right to feel nervous when a national
poll shows that more Americans think we're fighting a war in Iran (we're not) than a war in Somalia (
we are ).
But here's what I've been wondering recently: What if there's an antiwar movement growing right under our noses and we just haven't
noticed? What if we don't see it, in part, because it doesn't look like any antiwar movement we've even imagined?
If a movement is only a movement when people fill the streets, then maybe the critics are right. It might also be fair to say,
however, that protest marches do not always a movement make. Movements are
defined by their ability to challenge the status
quo and, right now, that's what might be beginning to happen when it comes to America's wars.
What if it's Parkland students
condemning American imperialism or groups fighting the
Muslim Ban that are
also fighting the war on terror? It's veterans not only trying to take on the wars they fought in, but putting themselves on
the front lines of the
gun control
,
climate change , and police brutality debates. It's
Congress
passing the first War Powers Resolution in almost 50 years. It's Democratic presidential candidates
signing a pledge to end America's endless wars.
For the last decade and a half, Americans -- and their elected representatives -- looked at our endless wars and essentially
shrugged. In 2019, however, an antiwar movement seems to be brewing. It just doesn't look like the ones that some remember from
the Vietnam era and others from the pre-invasion-of-Iraq moment. Instead, it's a movement that's being woven into just about every
other issue that Americans are fighting for right now -- which is exactly why it might actually work.
An estimated 100,000 people protested the war in Iraq in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 15, 2007 (Ragesoss, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia
Commons)
A Veteran's Antiwar Movement in the Making?
During the Vietnam War of the 1960s
and early 1970s, protests began with religious groups and peace organizations morally opposed to war. As that conflict intensified,
however, students began to join the movement, then civil rights leaders such as
Martin Luther King, Jr. got involved,
then war veterans who had witnessed the horror firsthand stepped in -- until, with a seemingly constant storm of protest in the
streets, Washington eventually withdrew from Indochina.
You might look at the lack of public outrage now, or perhaps the
exhaustion of having been outraged
and nothing changing, and think an antiwar movement doesn't exist. Certainly, there's nothing like the active one that fought against
America's involvement in Vietnam for so long and so persistently. Yet it's important to notice that, among some of the very same
groups (like veterans, students, and even politicians) that fought against that war, a healthy
skepticism about America's 21st century wars, the Pentagon, the military industrial complex, and even the very idea of American
exceptionalism is finally on the rise -- or so the
polls tell us.
"Arlington West of Santa Monica," a project of Veterans for Peace, puts reminders of the costs of war on the beach in Santa Monica,
California. (Lorie Shaull via Flickr)
Right after the midterms last year, an organization named Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness
reported mournfully that younger Americans were "turning on the country and forgetting its ideals," with nearly half believing
that this country isn't "great" and many eyeing the U.S. flag as "a sign of intolerance and hatred." With millennials and Generation
Z rapidly becoming the
largest voting bloc in America for the next 20 years, their priorities are taking center stage. When it comes to foreign policy
and war, as it happens, they're quite different from the generations that preceded them. According to the
Chicago Council of Global Affairs ,
"Each successor generation is less likely than the previous to prioritize maintaining superior military power worldwide as a
goal of U.S. foreign policy, to see U.S. military superiority as a very effective way of achieving U.S. foreign policy goals, and
to support expanding defense spending. At the same time, support for international cooperation and free trade remains high across
the generations. In fact, younger Americans are more inclined to support cooperative approaches to U.S. foreign policy and more
likely to feel favorably towards trade and globalization."
Although marches are the most public way to protest, another striking but understated way is simply not to engage with the systems
one doesn't agree with. For instance, the vast majority of today's teenagers aren't at all interested in joining the all-volunteer
military. Last year, for the first time since the height of the Iraq war 13 years ago, the Army
fell thousands of troops short
of its recruiting goals. That trend was emphasized in a 2017
Department of Defense poll that
found only 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 24 said it was likely they'd serve in the military in the coming years. This has
the Army so worried that it has been refocusing its recruitment efforts on
creating an entirely new strategy aimed specifically at Generation Z.
In addition, we're finally seeing what happens when soldiers from America's post-9/11 wars come home infused with a sense of
hopelessness in relation to those conflicts. These days, significant numbers of young veterans have been returning
disillusioned and ready to lobby Congress
against wars they once, however unknowingly, bought into. Look no further than a new left-right
alliance between two
influential veterans groups, VoteVets and Concerned Veterans for America, to stop those forever wars. Their campaign, aimed specifically
at getting Congress to weigh in on issues of war and peace, is emblematic of what may be a diverse potential movement coming together
to oppose America's conflicts. Another veterans group, Common Defense, is similarly asking politicians to sign a
pledge to end those wars. In just a couple of months,
they've gotten on board 10 congressional sponsors, including freshmen heavyweights in the House of Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
and Ilhan Omar.
And this may just be the tip of a growing antiwar iceberg. A misconception about movement-building is that everyone is there
for the same reason, however broadly defined. That's often not the case and sometimes it's possible that you're in a movement and
don't even know it. If, for instance, I asked a room full of climate-change activists whether they also considered themselves part
of an antiwar movement, I can imagine the denials I'd get. And yet, whether they know it or not, sooner or later fighting climate
change will mean taking on the Pentagon's global footprint, too.
Think about it: not only is the U.S. military the world's
largest
institutional consumer of fossil fuels but, according to a
new report from Brown University's Costs of War Project, between 2001 and 2017, it released more than 1.2 billion metric tons
of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere (400 million of which were related to the war on terror). That's equivalent to the emissions
of 257 million passenger cars, more than double the number currently on the road in the U.S.
A Growing Antiwar Movement in Congress
One way to sense the growth of antiwar sentiment in this country is to look not at the empty streets or even at veterans organizations
or recruitment polls, but at Congress. After all, one
indicator of a successful movement, however
incipient, is its power to influence and change those making the decisions in Washington. Since Donald Trump was elected, the most
visible evidence of growing antiwar sentiment is the way America's congressional policymakers have increasingly become engaged with
issues of war and peace. Politicians, after all, tend to follow the voters and, right now, growing numbers of them seem to be following
rising antiwar sentiment back home into an expanding set of debates about war and peace in the age of Trump.
In campaign season 2016, in an op-ed in The Washington Post , political scientist Elizabeth Saunders wondered whether foreign policy would play a significant role
in the presidential election. "Not likely," she concluded. "Voters do not pay much attention to foreign policy." And at the time,
she was on to something. For instance, Sen. Bernie Sanders, then competing for the Democratic presidential nomination against Hillary
Clinton, didn't
even prepare stock answers to basic national security questions, choosing instead, if asked at all, to quickly pivot back to
more familiar topics. In a debate with Clinton, for instance, he was asked whether he would keep troops in Afghanistan to deal with
the growing success of the Taliban. In his answer, he skipped Afghanistan entirely, while warning only vaguely against a "quagmire"
in Iraq and Syria.
Heading for 2020, Sanders is once again competing for the nomination, but instead of shying away from foreign policy, starting
in 2017, he became the face of what could be a
new American
way of thinking when it comes to how we see our role in the world.
In February 2018, Sanders also became the first senator to risk
introducing a war powers resolution to end American support for the
brutal Saudi-led war in Yemen. In April 2019, with the sponsorship of other senators added to his, the bill
ultimately passed
the House and the Senate in an extremely rare showing of bipartisanship, only to be
vetoed by President Trump. That
such a bill might pass the House, no less a still-Republican Senate, even if not by a veto-proof majority, would have been unthinkable
in 2016. So much has changed since the last election that support for the Yemen resolution has now become what Tara Golshan at
Vox termed "a litmus test of the Democratic Party's progressive shift on foreign policy."
Nor, strikingly enough, is Sanders the only Democratic presidential candidate now running on what is essentially an antiwar platform.
One of the main aspects of Elizabeth
Warren's foreign policy plan, for instance, is to "seriously review the country's military commitments overseas, and that includes
bringing U.S. troops home from Afghanistan and Iraq." Entrepreneur Andrew Yang and former Alaska Senator Mike Gravel have
joined Sanders and Warren in signing a pledge to end America's forever wars if elected.
Beto O'Rourke has called for the repeal
of Congress's 2001 Authorization to Use Military Force that presidents have cited ever since whenever they've sent American forces
into battle. Marianne Williamson , one of the
many (unlikely) Democratic candidates seeking the nomination, has even proposed a plan to transform America's "wartime economy into
a peace-time economy, repurposing the tremendous talents and infrastructure of [America's] military industrial complex to the work
of promoting life instead of death."
And for the first time ever, three veterans of America's post-9/11 wars -- Seth Moulton and Tulsi Gabbard of the House of Representatives,
and South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg -- are running for president, bringing their
skepticism about American interventionism with them. The very inclusion of such viewpoints in the presidential race is bound
to change the conversation, putting a spotlight on America's wars in the months to come.
Get on Board or Get Out of the Way
When trying to create a movement, there are three likely
outcomes : you will
be accepted by the establishment, or rejected for your efforts, or the establishment will be replaced, in part or in whole, by those
who agree with you. That last point is exactly what we've been seeing, at least among Democrats, in the Trump years. While 2020
Democratic candidates for president, some of whom have been in the political arena for decades, are gradually hopping on the end-the-endless-wars
bandwagon, the real antiwar momentum in Washington has begun to come from new members of Congress like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
(AOC) and Ilhan Omar who are unwilling to accept business as usual when it comes to either the Pentagon or the country's forever
wars. In doing so, moreover, they are responding to what their constituents actually want.
As far back as 2014, when a
University of Texas-Austin Energy Poll asked people where the U.S. government should spend their tax dollars, only 7 percent
of respondents under 35 said it should go toward military and defense spending. Instead, in a "pretty significant political shift"
at the time, they overwhelmingly opted for their tax dollars to go toward job creation and education. Such a trend has only become
more apparent as those
calling
for free public college, Medicare-for-all, or a Green New Deal have come to
realize that they could pay for such ideas if America would stop pouring
trillions of dollars into wars that never should have been launched.
The new members of the House of Representatives, in particular, part of the youngest, most diverse crew
to date , have begun to replace the old guard and are increasingly signalling their readiness to throw out policies that don't
work for the American people, especially those reinforcing the American war machine. They understand that by ending the wars and
beginning to scale back the military-industrial complex, this country could once again have the resources it needs to fix so many
other problems.
In May, for instance, Omar tweeted , "We
have to recognize that foreign policy IS domestic policy. We can't invest in health care, climate resilience, or education if we
continue to spend more than half of discretionary spending on endless wars and Pentagon contracts. When I say we need something
equivalent to the Green New Deal for foreign policy, it's this."
A few days before that, at a House Committee on Oversight and Reform hearing, Ocasio-Cortez
confronted executives from military contractor TransDigm about the way they were price-gouging the American taxpayer by selling
a $32 "non-vehicular clutch disc" to the Department of Defense for $1,443 per disc. "A pair of jeans can cost $32; imagine paying
over $1,000 for that," she said. "Are you aware of how many doses of insulin we could get for that margin? I could've gotten over
1,500 people insulin for the cost of the margin of your price gouging for these vehicular discs alone."
And while such ridiculous waste
isn't news to those of us who follow Pentagon spending closely, this was undoubtedly something many of her millions of supporters
hadn't thought about before. After the hearing,
Teen Vogue
created a list of the "5 most ridiculous things the United States military has spent money on," comedian
Sarah Silverman tweeted out the AOC
hearing clip to her 12.6 million followers, Will and Grace actress
Debra Messing publicly expressed her gratitude
to AOC, and according to Crowdtangle, a social media analytics tool, the
NowThis clip of her in that congressional
hearing garnered more than 20 million impressions.
Ocasio-Cortez calling out costs charged by military contractor TransDigm. (YouTube)
Not only are members of Congress beginning to call attention to such undercovered issues, but perhaps they're even starting to
accomplish something. Just two weeks after that contentious hearing, TransDigm
agreed to return $16.1 million
in excess profits to the Department of Defense. "We saved more money today for the American people than our committee's entire budget
for the year," said House Oversight Committee Chair Elijah Cummings.
Of course, antiwar demonstrators have yet to pour into the streets, even though the wars we're already involved in continue to
drag on and a possible new one with Iran looms on the horizon. Still, there seems to be a notable trend in antiwar opinion and activism.
Somewhere just under the surface of American life lurks a genuine, diverse antiwar movement that appears to be coalescing around
a common goal: getting Washington politicians to believe that antiwar policies are supportable, even potentially popular. Call me
an eternal optimist, but someday I can imagine such a movement helping end those disastrous wars.
Allegra Harpootlian is a media associate at
ReThink Media , where she works with leading experts
and organizations at the intersection of national security, politics, and the media. She principally focuses on U.S. drone policies
and related use-of-force issues. She is also a political partner with the
Truman National Security Project . Find her on Twitter
@ally_harp .
"How Obama demobilized the antiwar movement"
By Brad Plumer
August 29, 2013
Washington Post
"Reihan Salam points to a 2011 paper by sociologists Michael T. Heaney and Fabio Rojas, who find that antiwar protests shrunk
very quickly after Obama took office in 2008 -- mainly because Democrats were less likely to show up:
Drawing upon 5,398 surveys of demonstrators at antiwar protests, interviews with movement leaders, and ethnographic observation,
this article argues that the antiwar movement demobilized as Democrats, who had been motivated to participate by anti-Republican
sentiments, withdrew from antiwar protests when the Democratic Party achieved electoral success, if not policy success in ending
the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Heaney and Rojas begin by puzzling over a paradox. Obama ran as an antiwar candidate, but his first few years in office were
rather different: "As president, Obama maintained the occupation of Iraq and escalated the war in Afghanistan. The antiwar movement
should have been furious at Obama's 'betrayal' and reinvigorated its protest activity. Instead, attendance at antiwar rallies
declined precipitously and financial resources available to the movement dissipated.""
Rob , July 4, 2019 at 14:20
The author may be too young to realize that the overwhelming driving force in the anti-Vietnam War movement was hundreds
of thousands of young men who were at risk of being drafted and sent to fight, die and kill in that godforsaken war. As the
movement grew, it gathered in millions of others as well. Absent the military draft today, most of America's youth don't seem
to give half a damn about the current crimes of the U.S. military. As the saying goes: They have no skin in the game.
bardamu , July 3, 2019 at 20:21
There has again been some shift in Sanders' public positions, while Tulsi Gabbard occupies a position that was not represented
in '16, and HR Clinton was more openly bent on war than anyone currently at the table, though perhaps because that much of her
position had become so difficult to deny over the years.
That said, Clinton lost to Obama in '08 because she could not as effectively deny her militarism. There was at the time within
the Democratic Party more and clearer movement against the wars than there is now. One might remember the run for candidacy
of Dennis Kucinich, for example. The 8 years of the Obama regime were a consistent frustration and disappointment to any antiwar
or anticorporate voice within the Democratic Party, but complaints were muted because many would not speak against a Blue or
a Black president. More than at any prior time, corporate media spokespersons could endorse radically pro-corporate positions
and imply or accuse their opposition of racism.
That leaves it unclear, however, what any antiwar voices have to do with the Democratic Party itself, particularly if we
take "the party" to mean the political organization itself as opposed to the people whom it claims to represent. The Party and
the DNC were major engines in the rigging of the 2016 Democratic nomination–and also, lest we forget, contributors to the Donald
Trump nomination campaign.
It should not escape us, as we search for souls and soulfulness among these remnants of Democratic Parties Past, that any
turn of the party against war is surely due to Hillary Clinton's loss to presumed patsy candidate Donald Trump in 2016–the least
and second-least popular major presidential contenders in history, clearly, in whichever order one wishes to put them.
There is some value in realism, then. So as much as one hates to criticize a Bernie Sanders in anything like the present
field that he runs in, his is not a consistently antiwar position: he has gone back and forth. Tulsi Gabbard is the closest
thing to an antiwar candidate within the Party. And under even under the most favorable circumstances, 2020 is at best not her
year.
Most big money says war. scorched earth, steep hierarchy, and small constitution. Any who don't like it had best speak up
and act up.
I am for Tulsi, a Senator from Hawaii not a rep as this article says. Folk Music was in when the peace movement was strong
and building, the same for Folk Rock who songs also had words you could get without Google.
So my way of "hoping" for an Anti-War/Peace Movement is to have a Folk Revival in my mind.
Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 14:11
The answer to the question why anti war movement is dead is so simple and obvious but apparently invisible to most Dems/libs/progressives
(excuse my inability to discern the distinctions between labels). The answer points to our onetime "peace" president Obama.
As far as foreign interventions go (and domestic spying, among other things) Obama had continued Baby Bush's policy. Even worse,
Obama had given a bipartisan seal of approval (and legality) to most of Baby Bush's crimes. In other words, for 8 years, meaning
during the "peace" president's reign, the loyal "lefty" sheeple have held their mouth when it came to war and peace.
Obama and the Dems have very effectively killed the ant war movement
The establishment will always be pro-war because there's so much money in it. Street demonstrations will never change that,
as we recently learned with Iraq. The only strategy that has a chance of working is anti-enlistment. If they don't have the
troops they can't invade anywhere, and recruitment is already a problem. It needs to be a bigger problem.
Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 11:51
Sorry, ALL of these Democrat wannabes save one is ignorant of foreign affairs, foreign policy and its destruction of what
they blather on about – domestic vote-getting sky pies. Oh yes, free everything: schools, health care, social justices and services.
It's as though the MIC has not stolen the money from the public's pockets to get rich by sending cheap fodder out there to get
killed and wounded, amputated physically and mentally.
Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't stand
the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men, because she drew a bad
one. Huma was better company. Since she didn't know anything beyond the superficial, she did whatever the "experts" whispered
in her ears: War! Obama was in the same boat. The target, via gaining total control of oil from Libya to Syria and Iran was
her Putin hate. So her experts set up the Ukraine. The "experts" are the MIC/CIA and our fearless, brainless, corrupt military.
They have whispered the same psychotic message since the Gulf of Tonkin. We've lost to everyone with whom we've crossed swords
and left them devastated and America diminished save for the few.
So I was a Sanders supporter until he backed the warrior woman and I, like millions of others backed off of her party. It's
still her party. Everyone just loves every victim of every kind. They all spout minor variations on the same themes while Trump
and his neocons quietly install their right wing empire. Except for one who I spotted when she had the independence to go look
for herself in Syria.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate to be the candidate who has a balance of well thought through, realistic foreign policy
as well as the domestic non-extremist one. She has the hurdle of being a too-pretty woman, of being from the remotest state,
and not being a screamer. Even this article, written about peace by a woman fails to talk about her.
Tulsi has the registered voter count and a respectable budget, but the New York Times which is policy-controlled by a few
of Hillary's billionaire friends has consistently shut her out, because Tulsi left the corrupt Hillary-owned DNC to back Sanders
and Hillary never forgave her.
If you want to know who is against Trump and war, take 5 minutes and listen to what she really said during the 1st debate
where the CBS folks gave her little room to talk. It will change your outlook on what really is possible.
Hi Anonymot; I also exited my Sanders support after over 100 cash donations and over a years painful effort. I will never
call him Bernie again; now it is Sanders, since Bernie makes him sound cute and cute was not the word that came into my mind
as Mr. Sanders missed his world moment at the democratic election and backed Hillary Clinton (I can not vote for EVIL). Sanders
then proceeded to give part of my money to the DNC & to EVIL Hillary Clinton.
So then what now? Easy as Pie; NO MORE DEMOCRATS EVER. The DNC & DCCC used Election Fraud & Election Crimes blatantly to
beat Bernie Sanders. Right out in the open. The DNC & DCCC are War Mongering more then the Republicans which is saying allot.
The mass media and major Internet Plateforms like Goggle & Facebook are all owned by Evil Oligarchs that profit from WAR and
blatantly are today suppressing all dissenting opinions (anti Free Speech).
I stopped making cash donation to Tulsi Gabbard upon the realization that the Democrats were not at all a force for Life
or Good and instead were a criminal organization. The voting for the lessor of two EVILs is 100% STUPID.
I told Tim Canova I could not support any Democrat ever again as I told Tulsi Gabbard. Tulsi is still running as a criminal
democrat. If she would run independent of the DNC then I would start to donate cash to her again. End of my story about Tulsi.
I do like her antiwar dialog, but there is no; so called changing, the DNC from the inside. The Oligarchs own the DNC and are
not supportive of "We The People" or the Constitution, or the American Republic.
The end of Tim Canova's effort was he was overtly CHEATED AGAIN by the DNC's Election Fraud & Election Crimes in his 2018
run for congress against Hillary Clinton's 100% corrupt campaign manager; who congress seated even over Tim's asking them not
to seat her until his law suites on her election crimes against him were assessed. Election crimes and rigged voting machines
in Florida are a way of life now and have been for decades and decades.
All elections must be publicly funded. All votes must be on paper ballots and accessible for recounts and that is just the
very minimums needed to start changing the 100% corrupted election system we Americans have been railroaded into.
The supreme Court has recently ruled that gerrymandering is OK. The supreme court has proven to be a political organization
with their Bush Gore decision and now are just political hacks and as such need to be ELECTED not appointed. Their rulings that
Money is Free Speech & that Corporations are People has disenfranchised "We the People". That makes the Supreme Court a tool
to be used by the world money elite to overturn the constitution of the United States of America.
No More War. No More War. No More War.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 16:40
Absolutely spot-on, superb comment, P .Brooks.
DW
Nathan Mulcahy , July 3, 2019 at 18:08
I saw the light (with what the Dems are really about) after Kucinich's candidacy. That made me one of the very few lefties
in my circle not to have voted for Obama even the first time around. I hear a lot of talk about trying to reform the party from
inside. Utter bu** sh**. "You cannot reform Mafia".
Ever since Kucinich, I have been voting Green. No, this is not a waste of my vote. Besides, I cannot be complicit to war
crimes – that's what it makes anyone who votes for either of the two parties.
Steven , July 3, 2019 at 13:56
Wow you said a mouthful. It's worse than that its a cottage industry that includes gun running, drug running and human trafficking
netting Trillions to the MIC, CIA and other alphabet agencies you can't fight the mark of the beast.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:01
I fully back/endorse Gabbard, but
The battering of Bernie is not fair. He is NOT a Democrat, therefore him being able to get "inside" that party to run AS
a Dem put him in a tenuous situation. He really had no option other than to support HRC lest his movement, everyone's movement,
would get extra hammering by the neocons and status quo powers. He wouldn't be running, again, had he not done this. Yeah, it's
a bad taste, I get it, but had he disavowed HRC would the outcome -Trump- been any different? The BLAME goes fully on the DNC
and the Clintons. Full stop.
I do not see AOC as a full progressive. She is only doing enough to make it appear so. The Green New Deal is stolen from
the Green Party and is watered down. Think of this as "Obama Care" for the planet. As you should know, Gabbard's Off Fossil
Fuels Act (OFF) actually has real teeth in it: and is closer to the Green Party's positions.
I support movements and positions. PRIMARY is peace. Gabbard, though not a pacifist, has the right path on all of this: I've
been around long enough to understand exactly how she's approaching all of this. She is, however, taking on EVERYONE. As powerful
a person as she is (she has more fortitude than the entire lot of combined POTUS candidates put together) going to require MASSIVE
support; sadly, -to this point- this article doesn't help by implying that people aren't interested in foreign policy (it perpetuates
the blockout of it- people have to be reeducated on its importance- not something that the MIC wants), people aren't yet able
to see the connections. The education will occur will it happen in a timely way such that people would elect Gabbard? (things
can turn on a dime, history has shown this; she has the makeup that suggests that she's going to have a big role in making history).
I did not support Bernie (and so far have not- he's got ample support; if it comes down to it he WILL get my vote- and I've
held off voting for many years because there's been no real "peace" candidate on the plate). Gabbard, however, has my support
now, and likely till the day I die: I've been around long enough to know what constitutes a great leader, and not since the
late 60s have we had anyone like her. If Bernie gets the nomination it is my prediction that he will have Gabbard high on his
staff, if not as VP: a sure fire way to win is to have Gabbard as VP.
I'm going to leave this for folks to contemplate as to whether Gabbard is real or not:
In a context in which Rio de Janeiro's evangelical churches have been accused of laundering money for the drug trafficking
gangs, all elements of Afro-Brazilian culture including caipoeira, Jango drumming, and participation in Carnaval parades, have
been banned by the traffickers in many favelas.
[end excerpt]
"caipoeria," is something that Gabbard has practiced:
"I trained in different martial arts since I was a kid including Capoeira -- an amazing art created by slaves in Brazil who
were training to fight and resist against their slave masters, disguising their training with music, acrobatics, and dance.
Yesterday I joined my friends Mestre Kinha and others at Capoeira Besouro Hawai'i for their batizado ceremony and some fun!
" – Tulsi Gabbard December 9, 2018
The GOAL is to get her into the upper halls of governing power. If the people cannot see fit to it then I'll support Sanders
(in the end) so that he can do it.
Harpootlian claims to see what's going on, but, unfortunately, she's not able to look close enough.
Anonymot, thank you for leading out here with Gabbard and her message.
michael , July 4, 2019 at 08:10
If Gabbard had the MSM coverage Buttigieg has received she probably be leading in the polls. It is surprising(?) that this
supposedly anti-war author mentions corporatist Mayor Pete but not Gabbard.
David , July 4, 2019 at 19:55
She DOES (briefly)mention Gabbard, but she missed the fact that Gabbard is the most strongly anti-war candidate. She gets
it entirely wrong about Buttigieg, who is strikingly pro-war, and supports getting in to a war with Iran.
And sadly, Ms. Gabbard is mired at the 1% mark in the polls, even after having performed so well in the debate.
This seems to me an indication of the public's lack of caring about our foreign wars.
antonio Costa , July 3, 2019 at 19:06
The reason she's "mired" is because a number of polls don't include her!! However they include, Marianne Williamson.
How's that for inverse totalitarianism par excellence .
Skip Scott , July 4, 2019 at 07:05
I did see one poll that had her at 2%. And given the reputation of many polling outfits, I take any professed results with
a grain of salt. Tulsi's press coverage (what little she gets) has been mostly defamatory to the point of being libelous. If
her strong performance continues in the primary debates despite all efforts to sabotage her, I think she could make a strong
showing. That said, at some point she will have to renounce the DNC controlled democratic party and run as an Independent if
she wants to make the General Election debates for 2020.
"Hillary signed the papers and talked the brainless idiocy that set the entire Middle East on fire, because she couldn't
stand the sight of a man with no shirt on and sitting on the Russian equivalent of a Harley. She hates men "
If I were to psychologize, I would conjecture more un-gendered stereotype, namely that of a good student. He/she diligently
learns in all classes from the prescribed textbooks and reading materials, and, alas, American education on foreign affairs
is dominated by retirees from CIA and other armchair warriors. Of course, nothing wrong about good students in general, but
I mean the type that is obedient, devoid of originality and independent thinking. When admonished, he/she remembers the pain
for life and strives hard not to repeat it. E.g. as First Lady, Hillary kissed Arafat's wife to emulate Middle East custom,
and NY tabloids had a feast for months.
Concerning Tulsi, no Hillary-related conspiracy is needed to explain the behavior of the mass media. Tulsi is a heretic to
the establishment, and their idea is to be arbiters of what and who belongs to the "mainstream", and what is radical, marginal
etc. Tulsi richly deserves her treatment. Confronted with taunts like "so you would prefer X to stay in power" (Assad, Maduro
etc.) she replies that it should not be up to USA to decide who stays in power, especially if no better scenario is in sight.
The gall, the cheek!
Strangely enough, Tulsi gets this treatment in places like The Nation and Counterpunch. As the hitherto "radical left" got
a whiff of being admitted to the hallowed mainstream from time to time, they try to be "responsible".
Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:39
Yes! Thank You I was gritting my teeth reading this article #Tulsi2020
Eddie , July 3, 2019 at 11:42
The end of the anti-war movement expired when the snake-oil pitchman with the toothy smile and dark skin brought his chains
we could beleive in to the White House. The so-called progressives simply went to sleep while they never criticized Barack Obama
for escalating W. Bush's wars and tax cuts for the rich.
The fake left wing in the US remained silent when Obama dumped trillions of dollars into the vaults of his bankster pals
as he stole the very homes from the people who voted him into office. Then along came the next hope and change miracle worker
Bernie Sanders. Only instead of working miracles for the working class, Sanders showed his true colors when he fcuked his constituents
to support the hated Hillary Clinton.
Let's start facing reality. The two-party dictatorship does not care about you unless you can pony up the big bucks like
their masters in the oligarchy and the soulless corporations do. Unless and until workers end to the criminal stranglehold that
the big-business parties and the money class have on the government, things will continue to slide into the abyss.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:33
An informed awareness of imperialism must also include an analysis of how "technology" is used and abused, from the use of
"superior" weaponry against people who do not have such weapons, from blunderbuss and sailing ships, to B-52s and napalm, up
to and including technology that may be "weaponized" against civilian populations WiTHIN a society, be it 24/7 surveillance
or robotics and AI that could permit elites to dispense with any "need", on the part of the elites, to tolerate the very existence
of a laborung class, or ANY who earn their wealth through actual work, from maids to surgeons, from machine operators to professors.
Any assumption, that any who "work", even lawyers or military officers, can consider their occupation or profession as "safe",
is to assume that the scapegoating will stop with those the highly paid regard as "losers", such comfortable assumption may
very well prove as illusory and ephemeral as an early morning mist before the hot and merciless Sun rises.
The very notions of unfettered greed and limitless power, resulting in total control, must be recognized as the prime drivers
of endless war and shock-doctrine capitalism which, combined, ARE imperialism, unhinged and insane.
michael , July 3, 2019 at 11:06
This article is weak. Anyone who could equate Mayor Pete or the eleven Democrat "ex"-military and CIA analysts who gained
seats in Congress in 2018 as anti-war is clueless. Tulsi Gabbard is anti-regime change war, but is in favor of fighting "terrorists"
(created mostly by our CIA and Israel with Saudi funding). Mike Gravel is the only true totally anti-war 'candidate' and he
supports Gabbard as the only anti-War of the Democrats.
In WWI, 90% of Americans who served were drafted, in WWII over 60% of Americans who served were drafted. The Vietnam War "peace
demonstrations" were more about the Draft, and skin-in-the-game, than about War. Nixon and Kissinger abolished the Draft (which
stopped most anti-war protests), but continued carpet bombing Vietnam and neighboring countries (Operations Menu, Freedom Deal,
Patio, etc), and Vietnamized the War which was already lost, although the killing continued through 1973. The abolition of the
Draft largely gutted the anti-war movement. Sporadic protests against Bush/ Cheney over Afghanistan and Iraq essentially disappeared
under Obama/ Hillary in Afghanistan and Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and Sudan. Since their National Emergency proclamations
no longer ever end, we are in a position to attack Venezuela (Obama), Ukraine (Obama), South Sudan (Obama), Iran (Carter, Clinton),
Libya (Obama), Somalia (Obama), Yemen (Obama), Nicaragua (Trump) and even Burundi (Obama) and the Central African Republic (Obama).
The continuing support of death squads in Honduras and other Latin American countries ("stability is more important than democracy")
has contributed to the immigration crises over the last five years.
As Pelosi noted about Democratic progressives "there are like five of them". Obama not only failed to reverse any of the police
state and warmongering of Bush/Cheney, he expanded both police state (arresting and prosecuting Chelsea Manning for exposing
war crimes, as well as more whistleblowers than anyone in history), and wars in seven Arab Muslim countries. Black Americans,
who had always been an anti-War bloc prior to Obama, converted to the new America. The Congressional Democrats joined with Republicans
to give more to the military budget than requested by Trump. (Clinton squandered the Peace Dividend when the Soviet Union fell,
and Lee Camp has exposed the $21 TRILLION "lost" by the Pentagon.)
The young author see anti-war improvements that are not there. The US is more pro-war in its foreign policies than at any time
in its history. When there was a Draft, the public would not tolerate decades of war (lest their young men died). Sanctions
are now the first attack (usually by National Emergencies!); the 500,000 Iraqi children killed by Clinton's sanctions (Madeline
Albright: "we think it was worth it!") is just sadism and psychopathy at the top, which is necessary for War.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 11:38
Superb comment, michael, very much agreed with and appreciated.
DW
Anonymot , July 3, 2019 at 12:06
You are absolutely right. Obama and Hillary were the brilliant ideas of the MIC/CIA when they realized that NO ONE the Republicans
put up after Bush baby's 2nd round. They chose 2 "victims" black & woman) who would do what they were told to do in order to
promote their causes (blacks & get-filthy rich.) The first loser would get the next round. And that's exactly what happened
until Hillary proved to be so unacceptable that she was rejected. We traded no new war for an administration leading us into
a neo-nazi dictatorship.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:04
Thank you for this comment!
Mickey , July 3, 2019 at 10:47
Tulsi Gabbard is the only peace candidate in the Democratic Party
Many current crises have the potential to escalate into a major confrontation between the nuclear powers, similar to the
Cuban missile crisis, though there is no comparable sense of alarm. Then, tensions were at boiling point, when a small military
exchange could have led to nuclear annihilation. Today there are many more such flashpoint – Syria, the South China Sea, Iran,
Ukraine to name a few. Since the end of the Cold War there has been a gradual movement towards third world war. Condemnation
of an attack on Iran must include, foremost, the warning that it could lead the US into a confrontation with a Sino-Russian
alliance. The warning from history is states go to war over interests, but ultimately – and blindly – end up getting the very
war they need to avoid: even nuclear war, where the current trend is going. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:36
Many truly superb, well-informed, and very enlightening comments on this thread.
My very great appreciation to this site, to its authors, and to its exceptionally thoughtful and articulate commenters.
DW
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 10:20
I appreciate this author's perspective, research, and optimism.
Clearly, the young ARE far more open to embracing a future less warlike and hegemonic, while far too many of my generation
are wedded to childish myth and fantasy around U$ driven mayhem.
However, I would suggest that vision be broadened beyond opposition to war, which opposition, while important, must be expanded
to opposition to the larger issue of imperialism, itself.
Imperialism is not merely war, it includes economic warfare, both sanctions, internationally, and predatory debt loads, domestically,
in very many nations of the world, as well as privatization of the commons (which must be understood to include all resources
necessary to human existence).
Perpetual war, which profits only the few, is driven by precisely the same aims as pitting workers against each other, worldwide,
in a "game" of "race to the bottom", creating "credit" rather than raising wages, thus creating life-long indebtedness of the
many, which only benefits monopolized corporate interests, as does corporate ownership of such necessities as water, food production,
and most channels of communication, which permits corporations to easily shape public perception toward whatever ends suit corporate
purposes while also ensuring that deeper awareness of what is actually occurring is effectively stifled, deplatformed, or smeared
as dangerous foreign fake news or as hidden, or even as blatant, racial or religious hatred.
Above all, it is critically important that all these interrelated aspects of deliberate domination, control, and diminishment,
ARE talked about, openly, that we all may have better grasp of who really aligns with creating serious systemic change, especially
as traditionally assumed "tendencies" are shifting, quickly and even profoundly.
For example, as many here point out, the Democrats are now as much a war party as the Republicans, "traditionally" have been,
even as there is clear evidence that the Republican "base" is becoming less willing to go to war than are the Democratic "base",
as CNN and MSNBC media outlets strive to incite a new Cold War and champion and applaud aggression in Syria, Iran, and North
Korea.
It is the elite Democratic "leadership" and most Democratic Presidential hopefuls who now preach or excuse war and aggression,
with few actual exceptions, and none of them, including Tulsi Gabbard, have come anywhere near openly discussing or embracing,
the end of U$ imperialism.
Both neoliberal and neocon philosophies are absolutely dedicated to imperialism in all its destructive, even terminal, manifestations.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:16
Exactly!
Gabbard has spoken out against sanctions. She understands that they're just another form of war.
The younger generations won't be able to financially support imperialist activities. And, they won't be, as the statements
to their enlistment numbers suggest, able to "man the guns." I'm thinking that TPTB are aware of this (which is why a lot of
drone and other automation of war machinery has been stepped up).
The recent alliance of Soros and Charles Koch, the Quincy Institute, is, I believe, a KEY turning point. Pretty much everything
Gabbard is saying/calling for is this institute's mission statement: and people ought to note that Gabbard has been in Charles
Koch's circle- might very well be that Gabbard has already influenced things in a positive way.
I also believe that all the great independent journalists, publishers (Assange taking the title here) and whistleblowers
(Manning taking the title here) have made a HUGE impact. Bless them all.
The US government consistently uses psychological operations on its own citizens to manufacture consent to kill anyone and
everyone. Meaningless propaganda phrases such as "Support Our Troops" and "National Security" and "War on Terror" are thrown
around to justify genocides and sieges and distract us from murder. There is no left wing or in American politics and there
has not been one since the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. All we have is neoconservatives and neoliberals representing the business
party for four decades. Killing is our business and business is good. Men are as monkeys with guns when it comes to politics
and religion.
One might be hard-pressed to find more outright perversions of reality in a mere two pages of text. Congratulations Congress,
you have indeed surpassed yourself.
So it's those dastardly Russians and Iranians who are responsible for the destabilization of the Middle East, "complicating
Israel's ability to defend itself from hostile action emanating from Syria." And apparently, it's the "ungoverned space" in
Syria that has "allowed" for the rise of terrorist factions in Syria, that (we must be reminded) are ever poised to attack "Western
targets, our allies and partners, and the U.S. homeland."
Good grief.
Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 08:29
Thank you Joe Lauria and Consortiumnews.
There is much wisdom and a good deal of personal experience being expressed on these pages. I especially want to thank IvyMike
and Dao Gen. Ivy Mike you're so right about our troops in Vietnam from 1965 to 1968, draftees and volunteers, they fought what
was clearly an internal civil war fought valiantly, beyond that point, Vietnam was a political mess for all involved. And Dao
Gen all of your points are accurate.
As for our legislators, please read the linked Foreign Affairs press release signed by over 400 leglislators On May 20th.,
2019 that address "threats to Syria" including the Russia threat. Clearly it will take action by the People and Peace candidates
to end this travesty of a foreign policy.
Vietnam a war triggered by the prevention of a mandated election by the USA which Ho Chi Minh was likely to win, who had
already recently been Premier of a unified Vietnam.
Sorry, being courageous in a vicious cause is not honorable.
Speaking a true history and responsibility is honorable.
Bob Van Noy , July 3, 2019 at 11:07
No need to be sorry James Clooney. I did not mention honor in my comment, I mentioned valiant (courage and determination).
American troupes ultimately fight honorably for each other not necessarily for country. This was the message and evaluation
of Captain Hal Moore To General Westmorland And Robert McNamera after the initial engagement of US troops and NVA and can be
viewed as a special feature of the largely inaccurate DVD "We Were Soldiers And Young).
The veterans group About Face is doing remarkable work against the imperial militarization that threatens to consume our
country and possibly the world. This threat includes militarization of US police, a growing nuclear arms race, and so-called
humanitarian wars. About Face is also working to train ordinary people as medics to take these skills into their communities
whose members are on the front lines of police brutality.
Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate with a strong, enlightened understanding of the costs of our many imperial wars Costs to
ourselves in the US and costs to the people we invade in order to "save" them. I voted for McGovern in 1972. I would vote for
Tuldi's Gabbard in 2020 if given the chance.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:35
Vote for her now by supporting her*! One cannot wait until the DNC (or other party) picks the candidate FOR us. Anyone serious
about peace ought to support her, and do it now and far into the future. I have always supported candidates who are champions
for peace, no matter their "party" or whatever: I did not, though I wish that I had, support Walter Jones -of Freedom Fries
fame- after he did a 180 (Gabbard knew Jones, and respected him); it took a lot of guts for him to do this, but his honest (like
Ron Paul proved) was proven and his voters accepted him (and likely shifted their views along with him).
* Yeah, one has to register giving money, but for a lousy $1 She has yet to qualify for the third debate (need 130k unique
donations): and yet Yang has! (nothing against him, but come on, he is not "Commander in Chief" material [and at this time it
is, as Gabbard repeats, the single most important part of being president]).
Mary Jones-Giampalo , July 4, 2019 at 00:43
Strongly agree Only Tulsi
triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:14
Not surprising there was little or no antiwar sentiment in the newfound civic engagement after Trump's election, since the
majority of those participating were supporters of the war criminals Obama, Clinton, and their corporate, war mongering DEM
party. Those same people today, support Obama-chaperone Biden, or one of the other vetted corporate DEMs, including socialist-in-name-only
Sanders, who signed the DEM loyalty oath promising to continue austerity for the poor, socialism for rich, deregulation, militarism,
and global war hegemony. The only party with an antiwar blank was the Green Party, which captured >2% of the ~130 million votes
in the rigged election- even though Stein is as competent as Clinton, certainly more competent than Trump, and the Green platform,
unlike Sanders', explained how to pay for social and environmental programs by ending illegal wars in at least 7 countries,
closing 1000 military command posts located all over earth, removing air craft carrier task forces from every ocean, cutting
defense spending.
I believe the CIA operation "CARWASH" was under Obama, which gave us Ultra fascism in one of the largest economies in the
world, Brazil.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:02
Superb comment, trieke, and I especially appreciate your mention of Jill Stein and the Green Party.
It is unfortunate that the the Green New Deal, championed by AOC is such a pale and intentionally pusillanimous copy of the
Green New Deal articulated by Stein, which pointedly made clear that blind and blythe economic expansion must cease, that realistic
natural constraints and carrying capacity be accepted and profligate energy squandering come to an end.
That a sane, humane, and sustainable economic system, wholly compatible with ecological responsibility can provide neaningful
endeavor, justly compensated, for all, as was coherently addressed and explained to any who cared to examine the substance of
that, actual, and realistic, original, GND.
Such a vision must be part of successfully challenging, and ending, U$ imperialism.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 14:53
And Trump likely signed a GOP pledge. It's all superficial crap, nothing that is really written in stone.
I LOVE Stein. But for the sake of the planet we have little time to wait on getting the Green Party up to speed (to the clasp
the levers of power). Unless Gabbard comes out on top (well, the ultimate, and my favorite, long-shot would be Gravel, but reality
is something that I have to accept) it can only really be Sanders. I see a Sanders nomination as being the next best thing (and,
really, the last hope as it all falls WAY off the cliff after that). He would most certainly have Gabbard along (if not as VP,
which is the best strategy for winning, then as some other high-ranking, and meaningful cabinet member). Also, there are a lot
of folks that would be coming in on his coattails. It is THESE people that will make the most difference: although he's got
his flaws, Ro Kana would be a good top official. And, there are all the supporters who would help push. Sanders is WAY better
than HRC (Obama and, of course, Trump). He isn't my favorite, but he has enough lean in him to allow others to help him push
the door open: I'll accept him if that's what it take to get Gabbard into all of this.
Sometimes you DO have to infiltrate. Sanders is an infiltrator (not a Dem), though he treads lightly. Gabbard has already
proven her intentions: directly confronted the DNC and the HRC machine (and her direct attack on the MIC is made very clear);
and, she is indirectly endorsed by some of the best people out there who have run for POTUS: Jill Stein; Ron Paul; Mike Gravel.
We cannot wait for the Dems (and the MIC) to disarm. We need to get inside "the building" and disarm. IF Sanders or Gabbard
(and no Gravel) don't get the nomination THEN it is time to open up direct "warfare" and attack from the "outside" (at this
time there should be enough big defectors to start swinging the tide).
Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:34
Yes trieke, I voted for Stein in 2016, and I plan on voting Green Party again in 2020. I see too many fellow progressives/liberals/leftists
(whatever the hell we want to call ourselves) agonizing about which compromised Democrat to vote-for, trying to weigh their
different liabilities, etc. I've come to believe that my duty as a voter is to vote for the POTUS candidate/party whose stances/platform
are closest to my views, and that's unequivocally the Green Party. My duty as a voter does NOT entail 'voting for a winner',
that's just part of the two-party-con that the Dems & Reps run.
jmg , July 3, 2019 at 07:06
The big difference is that, during the Vietnam years, people could *see* the war. People talked a lot about "photographs
that ended the Vietnam war", such as the napalm girl, etc.
The government noticed this. There were enormous pressures on the press, even a ban on returning coffin photos. Now, since
the two Iraq wars, people *don't see* the reality of war. The TV and press don't show Afghanistan, don't show Yemen, didn't
show the real Iraq excepting for Chelsea Manning and Julian Assange, who are in prison because of this.
And the wars go on:
"The US government and military are preventing the public from seeing photographs that depict the true horror of the Iraq
war."
For example, we all know that mainstream media is war propaganda now, itself at war on truth and, apart from some convenient
false flags to justify attacks, they very rarely let the very people suffering wars be heard to wake viewers up, and don't often
even show this uncensored reality of war anymore, not like the true images of this old, powerful video:
Happy Xmas (War Is Over! If You Want It)
So this is Xmas
And what have you done
-- John Lennon
mbob -- thank you -- has already put this very well, but it is above all the Dems, especially Obama and the Clintons, who
killed the antiwar movement. Obama was a fake, and his foreign policy became even more hawkish after Hillary resigned as SoS.
His reduction of Libya, the richest state in Africa, to a feudal chaotic zone in which slavery is once more prominent and his
attempt to demonize Syria, which has more semi-democracy and women's rights than any of the Islamic kingdoms the US supports
as its allies, and turn Syria into a jihadi terrorist hell, as well as Obama's bombing of other nations and his sanctions on
still other nations such as Venezuela, injured and killed at least as many people as did GW Bush's invasion of Iraq. Yet where
was the antiwar movement? In the 21st century the US antiwar movement has gained most of its strength from anti-Repub hatred.
The current uptick of antiwar feeling is probably due mostly to hatred of Trump. Yet Trump is the first president since Carter
not to invade or make a major attack on a foreign country. As a businessman, his policy is to use economic warfare instead of
military warfare.
I am not a Trump supporter, and strong sanctions are a war crime, and Trump is also slow to reduce some of Obama's overseas
bombing and other campaigns, yet ironically he is surely closer to being a "peace president" than Obama. Moreover, a major reason
Trump won in 2016 was that Hillary was regarded as the war and foreign intervention candidate, and in fact if Hillary had won,
she probably would have invaded Syria to set up her infamous "no-fly zone" there, and she might have bombed Iran by now. We
might even be in a war with Russia now. At the same time, under Trump the Dem leadership and the Dem-leaning MSM have pursued
an unabashedly neocon policy of attacking from the right Trumps attempts at detente with Russia and scorning his attempts to
negotiate a treaty with N Korea and to withdraw from Syria and Afghanistan. The main reason why Trump chose dangerous neocons
like Bolton and Pompeo as advisors was probably to shield himself a little from the incessant and sometimes xenophobic attacks
from the Dem leadership and the MSM. The Dem leadership seems motivated not only by hatred of Trump but also, and probably more
importantly, by a desire to get donations from the military-industrial complex and a desire to ingratiate itself with the Intel
Community and the surveillance state in order to get various favors. Look, for example, at Adam Schiff, cheerleader-in-chief
for the IC. The system of massive collusion between the Dem party elite and the US deep state was not as advanced during the
Vietnam War era as it is now. 2003 changed a lot of things.
The only Dem presidential candidates who are philosophically and securely antiwar are Gabbard and Gravel. Even Bernie (and
even more so, Warren) can't be trusted to stand up to the deep state if elected, and anyway, Bernie's support for the Russiagate
hoax by itself disqualifies him as an antiwar politician, while the Yemen bill he sponsored had a fatal loophole in it, as Bernie
well knew. I love Bernie, but he is neither antiwar nor anti-empire. As for Seth Moulton, mentioned in the article, he is my
Rep, and he makes some mild criticisms of the military, but he is a rabid hawk on Syria and Iran, and he recently voted for
a Repub amendment that would have punished Americans who donate to BDS organizations. And as for the younger generation of Dems,
they are not as antiwar as the article suggests. For every AOC among the newly elected Dems in 2018, there were almost two new
Dems who are military vets or who formerly worked for intel agencies. This does not bode well. As long at the deep state, the
Dem elite, and the MSM are tightly intertwined, there will be no major peace movement in the near future, even if a Dem becomes
president. In fact, a Dem president might hinder the formation of a true antiwar movement. Perhaps when China becomes more powerful
in ten or twenty years, the unipolar US empire and permanent war state will no longer look like a very good idea to a large
number of Americans, and the idea of a peace movement will once again become realistic. The media have a major role to play
in spreading truthful news about how the current US empire is hurting domestic living standards. Rather than hopey-hope wish
lists, no-holds-barred reporting will surely play a big role.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:05
Absolutely superb comment, Dao Gen.
DW
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:07
Another fine example of why I think there is hope! (some very sharp commentators!)
A strong leader can make all the difference. The example gets set from the top: not that this is my preference, just that
it's the reality we have today. MLK Jr. was such a leader, though it was MANY great people that were in his movement/orbit that
were the primary architects. I suppose you could say it's a "rally around the flag" kind of deal. Just as Trump stunned the
System, I believe that it can be stunned from the "left" (the ultimate stunning would be from a Gravel win, but I'm thinking
that Gabbard would be the one that has what it takes to slip past).
I really wish that people would start asking candidates who they think have been good cabinet members for various positions.
This could help give an idea of the most important facet of an administration: who the POTUS selects as key cabinet members
tells pretty much everything you need to know. Sadly, Trump had a shot at selecting Gabbard and passed on her: as much as I
detest Trump, I gave him room in which to work away from the noecon/neolib death squads (to his credit he's mostly just stalemated
them- for a rookie politician you could say that this has been an impressive feat; he's tried to instigate new wars but has,
so far, "failed" [by design?]).
geeyp , July 3, 2019 at 01:19
"We saved more money today for the American people ." – Elijah Cummings. Yea? Well then, give it to us!! You owe us a return
of our money that you have wasted for years.
mark , July 3, 2019 at 00:17
Same old, same old, same old, same old.
Prospective candidates spewing out the same tired old hot air about how, this time, it really, really, really, really will be
different.
There won't be any more crazy multitrillion wars for Israel.
Honest.
Just like Dubya.
Just like Obomber.
Just like the Orange Baboon.
Whilst simultaneously begging for shekels from Adelson, Saban, Singer, Marcus.
And this is the "new anti war movement."
Yeah.
Tom Kath , July 3, 2019 at 00:04
Every extreme elicits an extreme response. Our current western pacifist obsession is no exception. By prohibiting argument,
disagreement, verbal conflict, and the occasional playground "dust up" on a personal level, you seem to make the seemingly less
personal war inevitable.
Life on earth is simply not possible without "a bit of biff".
An aware person may not react extremely to a extreme. USA slaughtered 5 to 10 million Vietnamese for no apparent reason other
than projection of power yet the Vietnamese trade with the USA today.
Who prohibits argument? Certainly not those with little power; it's the militarily and politically powerful that crush dissent,
(Tinamen Square , Occupy Wall Street). How much dissent does the military allow? Why is Assange being persecuted?
I believe even the most militant pacifist would welcome a lively debate on murder, death and genocide, as a channel for education
and edification.
Antonio Costa , July 2, 2019 at 20:53
Weak essay. AOC hops from cause to cause. She rarely/ever says anything about US regime change wars, and the bombing of children.
She's demonstrated no anti-war bona fides.
Only Tulsi Gabbard has forthright called for an end to regime change wars, the warmongers and reduction in our military.
The power is with the powerful. We'll not see an end to war, nor Medicare for All or much of anything regarding student debt.
These are deep systemic problems calling for systemic solutions beginning with how we live on the planet(GND is a red herring),
the GDP must become null and void if we are to behave as if plundering the planet is part of "progress". It needs to be replaced
to some that focuses on quality of life as the key to prosperity. The geopolitics of the world have to simply STOP IT. It's
not about coalitions between Russia and China and India to off-set the US imperialists. That's an old game for an empty planet.
The planet is full and exceeding it capacity and is on fire. Our geopolitics must end!
Not one of these candidates come close to focusing on the systemic problem(s) except Gabbard's focus on war because it attacks
the heart of the American Imperial Empire.
Maxime , July 3, 2019 at 09:24
I agree with you that you americans will probably not see the end of your system and the end of your problems any time soon.
BUT I disagree on that you seems to think it's inevitable. I'm not american, I'm french, and reading you saying you think
medicare for all, no student debt and end to endless wars are systemic problems linked to GDP and the current economic system
is well, amusing. We have medicare for all, in fact even better than your medicare, we have no student cost for our educating
system, and still in both cases often better results than yours, even if we are behind some of our northern neighbors, but they
don't pay for these either. And we don't wage endless wars, even if we have ourselves our own big war problems, after all we
were in Lybia, we are in Syria, we are in Mali and other parts of Africa.
We also have a big militaro-industrial complex, in fact very alike the american one. But we made clear since much longer
than we would not accept as much wars, in part because the lesson we got from WW2 and Cold War was to learn to live together
with our hated neighbor. You know, the one the other side of the Rhine. Today France is a diplomatic superpower, often the head
of the european spear onthe subject, we got feared elite military, and we are proud of that, but we would not even accept more
money (in proportion) given to our military complex.
And you know the best news (for the americans)? we have an history of warmongering going back millenias. We learn to love
Caesar and the "Guerre des Gaules", his invasion of Gauls. We learn how Franks invaded their neighbors and built the first post-roman
Empire. We learn how crusaders were called Franks, how we built our nation and his pride on ashes of european continental english
hopes and german holy empire aspirations. We learn how Napolean nearly achieved to built a new continental Empire, how we never
let them passed at Verdun, and how we rose in the face of a tyran in 1944.
All of this is still in our history books, and we're still proud of it. But today, if most of us were to be asked what we
were proud about recent wars France got into, it would be how our president vetoed USA when they tried to got UN into Irak and
forced them to invade illegally, and without us.
I think my country's revelation was Algeria's independance war. One bloody and largely filled with war crimes and crimes against
humanity. We're ashamed of it, and I think we, as a nation, learned from it that stopping wars on our soil wasn't enough. I
still don't understand how americans can still wage wars after Vietnam, but I am not american. Still, even the most warmongering
nation can learn. Let's hope you will be quicker than us, because we got millennias of bloody history before even the birth
of USA.
Eddie S , July 3, 2019 at 23:15
Thanks Maxime for a foreign perspective! I'm often curious what people in foreign countries think of our current politics
in the US,especially when I read analysis/commentaries by US writers (even ones I respect) who say "Oh most of our allies think
this or that" -- - maybe they're right or maybe they're wrong or somewhere in-between, but it's interesting getting a DIRECT
opinion from a fellow left-of-center citizen from a foreign state.
I agree with your points that European countries like France almost all have their own bloody history including an imperial
period, but the two big World Wars that killed SO many people and destroyed so many cities in Europe were so tragic and wasteful
that I suspect they DO continue to act as a significant deterrent to the saber-rattling that the US war mongers are able to
engage-in. For too many US citizens 'war' is just something that's mentioned & sometimes displayed on a screen, just like a
movie/TV program/video-game, and there's a non-reality to it because it's so far away and seldom directly affects them. Geography
has famously isolated us from the major death & destruction of war and enables too many armchair warriors to talk boldly and
vote for politicians who pander to those conceits. In a not-so-subtle way, the US IS the younger offspring of Europe, where
Europe has grown-up due to some hard lessons, while the US is going through its own destructive stage of 'lesson-learning'.
Hopefully this learning stage will be over soon and won't involve a world war.
DW Bartoo , July 3, 2019 at 12:48
Tulsi Gabbard is, indeed,pointing at part of a major organ of imperialism, Antonio Costa, yet habeas corpus, having the whole
body of imperialism produced is necessary for the considered judgement of a people long terrorized by fictitious "monsters"
and "demons", if they are to understand that shooting warfate is but one part of the heart, while the other is economic warfare.
Both brutally destructive, even if the second is hidden from public awareness or dismissed as "a price worth paying". Imperialism
pays no price (except "blow-back", which is merely "religious extremism" as explained by a fully complicit MSM).
And the "brain" behind it all?
That is corporate/military/political/deep state/media greed – and their desperate need/ambition for total, and absolute,
control.
Only seeing the whole body may reveal the true size of the threat and the vicious nature of the real danger.
Some may argue that it is "too soon", "too early", or "too costly", politically, for Gabbard, even if she, herself, might
see imperialism as the real monster and demon, to dare describe the whole beast.
Frankly, this time, Tulsi's candidacy, her "run" for President, is not likely to see her become the Dem nominee, most likely
that will be Kamala Harris (who will happily do the bidding of brute power), rather, it is to lay the firm and solid foundation
of actual difference, of rational perspective, and thoughtful, diplomatic international behavior.
To expose the whole, especially the role of the MSM, in furthering all the rest of the lumbering body of Zombie imperialism,
would be far more effective in creating an substantial "opening" for alternative possibilities, even a new political party,
next time.
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:31
I'm figuring that Warren and Harris will take one another out. Climbing to the top requires this. But, Gabbard doesn't stop
fighting, and if there's a fighter out there it is her: mentally and physically she is the total package.
Sanders' 2016 campaign was ignored, he wasn't supposed to go anywhere, but if not for the DNC's meddling he would be POTUS
right now (I have zero doubt over that). So too was Obama's climb from nowhere: of course, Obama was pushed up by the System,
the System that is NOT behind Gabbard. And then there's the clown at the helm (Trump). I refuse to ignore this history.
Gababard is by no means out. Let's not speak of such things, especially when her campaign, and message, is just starting
to burst out: the MSM is the last to admit the state of things unfavorable to the wealthy, but out on the Internet Gabbard is
very much alive. She is the best candidate (with the best platform of visibility) for peace. She has all the pieces. One comment
I read out on the internet (someone, I believe, not in the US) was that Gabbard was a gift to the Americans. Yes, I believe
this to be the case: if you really look closely you'll see exactly how this is correct. I believe that we cannot afford to treat
this gift with other than the utmost appreciation. Her sincerity when she says that she was/is willing to die for her fellow
soldiers (in reference to LBGT folks, though ALL apply) is total. She is totally committed to this battle: as a warrior in politics
she's proven herself with her support, the loyalty, for Sanders (at risk to her political career- and now look, she's running
for POTUS, she continues to come out on top!).
IvyMike , July 2, 2019 at 20:14
I burned my draft card, grew my hair out, and smoked pot and was anti war as heck. But the peace demonstrations (and riots)
in the 60's and 70's did not have much effect on how the U.S. Government prosecuted the Vietnam War. It is little recognized
how hard American troops fought from 1965 to 1968. Our air mobile troops in particular made a great slaughter of NVA and VC
while also taking heavy casualties.
We were having such success that no one in the military thought the enemy could keep up the fight. Then, the Tet offensive
with the beaten enemy attacking every city in the South.
Then the politicians and Generals knew, given the super power politics surrounding the war, that we had lost. We had failed
to recognize that we had not intervened in a Civil War, in truth Vietnam as a whole was fighting for freedom from Imperialism
and we had no friends in the South, just a corrupt puppet government. Instead of getting out, Nixon made the unforgivable choice
to slowly wind the war down until he could get out without losing, Peace With Honor the ultimate triumph of ego over humanity.
Americans had a chance to choose a peace candidate in 1972, instead Nixon won with a big majority.
The military has never been able to admit they were defeated on the battlefield by North Vietnam, blaming it instead on the
Liberal Media and the Anti War movement. Believing that lie they continue to fight unwinnable wars in which we have no national
interest at stake. The media and the people no longer fight against war, but it never really made a difference when we did.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 05:17
I too hoped for a miracle and voted for George. But then I always voted for the loser in whatever state I happened to be
living in at the particular time. I think Carter was a rare winning pick by me but only once. I got disgusted with voting and
sat out the Clinton campaigns, only returning to vote against the Bush juggernaut. In retrospect, Perot should have won to make
a real difference. I sided with the winner in Obama, but the loser turned out to be America getting saddled with that two-faced
hypocrite. Nobel Peace Prize winner indeed! (What did he spend the money on?) When you listen to their campaign promises be
aware they are telegraphing how they plan to betray you.
triekc , July 3, 2019 at 07:45
American people in mass need to hit reset button. A yellow vest-like movement made up of tens of millions of woke people,
who understand the democrats and republicans are the left and right wing of the oligarch party,
US elections have been and continue to be rigged, and the US constitution was written to protect the property (such
as slaves) of oligarchs from the people, the founding oligarchs feared real democracy, evident by all the safeguards they built
into our government to protect against it, that remain in tact today.
We need a new 21st century constitution. Global capitalism needs to be greatly curtailed, or ended out right, replaced by
ecosocialism, conservation, restoration of earth focussed society
Seer , July 3, 2019 at 15:38
And just think that back then there was also Mike Gravel. The CIA did their work in the 60s to kill the anti-war movement:
killing all the great social leaders.
Why wars are "lost" is because hardly is there a time when there's an actual "mission statement" on what the end of a given
war will look like. Tulsi Gabbard has made it clear that she would NOT engage in any wars unless there was a clear objective,
a clear outcome lined out, and, of course, it was authorized by THE PEOPLE (Congress).
All wars are about resources. We cannot, however, admit this: the ruling capitalists won't allow that to be known/understood
lest they lose their power.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 04:59
Ya got all that right, especially the part about the analysts essentially declaring the war lost after Tet. I remember that
offered a lot of hope on the campuses that the war would soon end (even though we lost), especially to those of us near graduation
and facing loss of that precious 2S deferment. Yet the big fool marched on, getting my generation needlessly slaughtered for
four or five more years.
And, yes, the 2 or 3 million dead Vietnamese did matter, to those with a conscience. Such a price to keep Vietnam out of
Russia's and China's orbit. Meanwhile they set an independent course after kicking us out of their land and even fought a war
with China. We should still be paying reparations for the levels of death and destruction we brought to a country half a world
away with absolutely no means or desire to threaten the United States. All our wars of choice, starting with Korea, have been
similar crimes against humanity. Turkey shoots against third world societies with no way to do us any harm. But every one of
them fought ferociously to the death to defend their land and their people. Inevitably, every occupier is sent packing as their
empire crumbles. Obviously, Americans have been too thick to learn this from mere history books. We will only learn from our
tragic mistakes. I see a lot of lessons on the upcoming schedule.
USA did not "intervene" in a civil war. USA paid France to continue it's imperial war and then took over when France fled
defeated. USA prevented a mandated election Ho Chi Minh would win and then continued western imperial warfare against the Vietnamese
( even though Vietnamese was/is bulwark against China's territorial expansion).
mauisurfer , July 2, 2019 at 20:12
The Watson study says: "Indeed, the DOD is the world's largest institutional user of petroleum and correspondingly,
the single largest producer of greenhouse gases (GHG) in the world.4"
This is a gross UNDERcount of emissions. It includes ONLY petroleum burned.
It does NOT count explosions from bombs, missiles, rockets, rifles, etc.
Perhaps someone could provide an estimate of this contribution to greenhouse gases???
Don't worry, Elizabeth Warren has a plan to operate the military on renewables! (she can continue to make sure her constituency,
which is Raytheon, is well served)
Raytheon, one of the biggest employers in Warren's state, where it's headquartered, "has a positive relationship with Sen.
Warren, and we interact with her and her staff regularly," Michael Doble, a spokesman for the company, said.
jo6pac , July 2, 2019 at 20:12
This awful news for the merchants of death and I'm sure they're working overtime to stop silliness;-). I do hope this isn't
killed by those that love the endless wars.
Thanks AH
mbob , July 2, 2019 at 20:10
Perhaps there is no open anti-war movement because the Democratic party is now pro-war. Rather than support President
Trump's efforts to end the Korean War, to reduce our involvement in the Middle East and to pursue a more peaceful path with
Russia, the Democratic party (with very, very few exceptions) is opposed to all these things.
The Democratic party places its hatred for Trump above its professed love of peace.
President Obama, the Nobel peace prize winner, started a war with Libya, which had neither attacked nor threatened the
US and which, by many accounts, was trying to improve relations with the US. GW Bush unnecessarily attacked Iraq and Clinton
destroyed Haiti and bombed Yugoslavia, among other actions.
From a peace perspective, Trump looks comparatively great (provided he doesn't attack Iraq or invade Venezuela). But, since
it's impossible to recognize Trump for anything positive, or to support him in any way, it's now impossible for Democrats to
promote peace. Doing so might help Trump. It would, of necessity, require acknowledging Trump's uniqueness among recent US Presidents
in not starting new wars.
Realist , July 3, 2019 at 03:28
I agree. mbob makes perfect sense in his analysis.
The Democrats must be brought back to reality with a sound repudiation by the voters, otherwise they are of no use to America
and will have no long-term future.
Obama escalated Afghanistan when he had a popular mandate to withdraw. He facilitated the the Syrian rebellion in conjunction
with ISIS funding Saudi Arabia and Qatar. He instigated the Zalaya (primarily Hillary) and the Ukraine rebellion.
Trump supports the Yemeni genocide.
But yes citizens have been directed to hate Trump the man/symptom rather than the enduring Imperial predatory capitalistic
system.
Opps sorry; so many interventions and invasions, under Obama, special forces trained Malian general overthrew the democratically
elected president of Mali, result, more war,death and destruction.
Robert , July 3, 2019 at 10:48
You are correct in your analysis. Allegra Harpootlian is searching for the peace lobby among Democrat supporters, where it
no longer resides.
As a result of corporate-controlled mainstream media and their support for Democrat elites, Democrat supporters have largely
been brainwashed into hatred for Donald Trump and everything he stands for. This hatred blinds them to the far more important
issue of peace.
Strangely, there is huge US support to remove troops from the ME, but this support resides with the overwhelming majority
of Donald Trump voters. Unfortunately, these are not individuals who typically go to peace demonstrations, but they are sincere
in bringing all US troops home from the ME. Donald Trump himself lobbied on this, and with the exceptions of his anti-Iranian
/ pro-Israel / pro-Saudi Arabia stance and withdrawal from JCPOA, he has not only backed down from military adventurism, but
is the first President since Eisenhower to raise the issue of the influence of the military-industrial complex.
In the face of strong opposition, he is the first President ever to enter North Korea and meet with Kim Jong Un to discuss
nuclear weapons. Mainstream media continues its war-mongering rhetoric, attacking Trump for his "weakness" in not retaliating
against Iran, or in meeting "secretly" with Putin.
Opposition to Trump's peace efforts are not limited to MSM, however, but are entrenched in Democrat and Republican elites,
who attack any orders he gives to withdraw from the ME. It was not Trump, but Democrat and Republican elites who invited NATO's
Stoltenberg to speak to Congress in an attempt to spite Trump.
In essence, you have President Trump and most of his supporters trying to withdraw from military engagements, with
active opposition from Democrats like Adam Schiff, and Republican elites, actively promoting war and military spending.
DJT is like a less-likeable Inspector Clouseau. Sometimes ineptitude is a blessing. You also have a few Republicans, like
journalist Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and Democrats, like Tulsi Gabbard, actively pushing the message of peace.
Erelis , July 3, 2019 at 20:45
I think you got it. The author is right in the sense that there is an anti-war movement, but that movement is in many ways
hidden. As bizarre as it may seen counter to CW wisdom, and in some way ironically crazy, one of the biggest segments of anti-war
sentiment are Trump supporters. After Trump's decision not to attack Iran, I went to various right wing commentators who attacked
Trump, and the reaction against these major right wing war mongers was to support Trump. And with right wing commentators who
supported Trump, absolute agreement. These is of course based on my objective reading reading and totally subjective. But I
believe I am right.
This made me realize there is an untapped anti-war sentiment on the right which is being totally missed. And a lack of imagination
and Trump derangment syndrome which blocks many on the anti-war Left to see it and use it for an anti-war movement. There was
an article in The Intercept that looked research on the correlation between military deaths and voting preference. Here is the
article:
And the thing is that Trump was in many ways the anti-war candidate. And those areas that had high military death rates voted
for Trump. I understand the tribal nature of political affiliation, but it seems what I have read and this article, there may
be indeed an untapped anti-war stance with Trump supporters.
And it really just challenges my own beliefs that the major obstacle to the war mongers are Trump supporters.
mbob – I couldn't have said it better myself. Except to add that in addition to destroying Libya, the Nobel Peace Prize winner
Obama, ably assisted by Hillary Clinton, also destroyed Honduras and the Ukraine.
Anarcissie , July 3, 2019 at 11:55
Historically, the Democratic Party has been pro-war and pro-imperialism at least since Wilson. The hatred for Trump on their
part seems to be based entirely on cultural issues -- he is not subservient enough to their gods.
But as for antiwar demonstrations, it's been proved in the streets that they don't accomplish anything. There were huge demonstrations
against the war in Vietnam, but it ground on until conservatives got tired of it. At least half a million people demonstrated
against the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and no one important cared. Evidently more fundamental issues than the war of the moment
are involved and I think that is where a lot of people are turning now. The ruling class will find this a lot harder to deal
with because it's decentralized and widely distributed. Hence the panic about Trump and the seething hatred of Sanders.
mbob , July 3, 2019 at 18:15
I attempted to make three points in my post. First, Democrats are now pro-war. Second, solely regarding peace, Trump looks
better than all other recent Presidents because he hasn't started any new wars. Third, the inability of Democrats (or the public
as a whole) to give Trump the benefit of a doubt, or to support him in any way, is contrary to the cause of peace.
Democrats should, without reservation, support Trump's effort to end the Korean War. They should support Trump's desire to
improve relations with Russia. They don't do either of those things. Why? Because it might hurt them politically.
Your comment does not challenge the first two points and reinforces the third.
As for Yemen, yes, Trump is wrong. Democrats rightly oppose him on Yemen -- but remarkably tepidly. Trump is wrong about
a lot of things. I don't like him. I didn't vote for him. But I will vote for him if Democrats nominate someone worse than him,
which they seem inclined to do. (Gabbard is better than Trump. Sanders probably. Maybe Warren. Of the three, only Warren receives
positive press. That makes me skeptical of her.)
Trump stood up to his advisors, Bolton and Pompeo, regarding both Iran and Venezuela. Obama, on the other hand, did not.
He followed the advice of his advisors, with disastrous consequences.
>>In addition to Tuesday's sanctions, the Treasury Department issued an advisory to maritime shipping companies, warning
them off transporting oil to Syria or risking their property and money seized if kept with financial institutions that follow
U.S. sanctions law.
"The United States will aggressively seek to impose sanctions against any party involved in shipping oil to Syria, or seeking
to evade our sanctions on Iranian oil," said Sigal Mandelker, the Treasury undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence,
in a release. "Shipping companies, insurers, vessel owners, managers, and operators should all be aware of the grave consequences
of engaging in sanctionable conduct involving Iranian oil shipments."<<
Today British marines seized a tanker near Gibraltar for the crime of transporting oil to Syria. And Trumpian peaceful military
seized Syrian oil fields. Traditional war is increasingly augmented by piracy, which is less bloody, but trades outright carnage
for deprivation of civilians. Giving "measured praise" for that makes me barf.
Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing,
and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says,
an era of slow growth is here to stay.
In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a
"responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise
the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".
One curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely
the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism
and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But
free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the
most destabilising one.
... ... ...
The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton
Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation
would take place.
The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation,
with its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and
other currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series
of multinational "rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose
was never to maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations
doing their own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."
Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives,
within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they
found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel
industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination
from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their
own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average
of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden
era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."
Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system,
the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced
goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in
factories that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia,
much of Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and
commentators would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation:
"the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global
good."
The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging
growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's
five biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public
sectors and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but
impediments to it.
Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself
as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its
international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member
nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were
judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its
ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding
devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only
remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".
The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this
model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of
their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an
influential 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might
open and yet fail to grow."
But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across
Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus
to the letter, a grave crisis resulted in
2002 , precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising
reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties
took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation.
These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.
Rodrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary
of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow
Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may
be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.
"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost
touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in
that the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade."
He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity
of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather
than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."
In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox
, Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The
results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push
back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised
by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."
But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink
their commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's
changed: globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The
benefits of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good
times may be running out.
Statistics from Global Inequality
, a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation
have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms,
the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.
Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least
of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow;
in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no
means all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence,
Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked
to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about
the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.
Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it
once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest
model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked
up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected
to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did,
and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.
For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found
it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world
– at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited
his agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political
priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the
already compromised political stability of the western world.
Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced
by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill
Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who
are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that
she didn't have any credibility."
Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues
for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense
that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation
– which, you know, I think has come rather late."
"... The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers ..."
"... It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States ..."
"... American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose." ..."
"... The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president ..."
"... Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America. ..."
"... The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems ..."
"... The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss ..."
"... Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style. ..."
"... When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. ..."
"... Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products. ..."
"... Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. ..."
"... This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism. ..."
"... The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland ..."
"... The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution. ..."
"... America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other. ..."
"... You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. ..."
"... This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight. ..."
"... Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors. ..."
"... But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". ..."
"The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose
tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute,
or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries
play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing
and loss of life by soldiers."
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness
. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend,
a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
His most recent books include " and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance
to the Jubilee Year "; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy , and J Is for
Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
, among many other books.
We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson's seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire
, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on
food imperialism.
... ... ...
Bonnie Faulkner : In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ,
you write: "The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset." When was the World Bank set up and
by whom?
Michael Hudson : It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent
on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not
dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this
veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got
to lose."
The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant
Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60).
McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick
was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.
Bonnie Faulkner : What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is
there a difference?
Michael Hudson : Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development.
"Development" was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness
– opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system
on the dollar.
The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering
firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports
and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation
of European colonialism.
In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on "Imperialism in Africa" pointing out the fiasco of European railroad
investment in Africa: "Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must
open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions
of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry."
That is why, James explained "only governments can afford to operate them," while being burdened with heavy interest obligations.
[1] What was "developed" was Africa's
mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of "development" lending without
apology.
The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to
protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate
for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in
their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on
the domestic economy – while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client
oligarchies from loss.
The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes
its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring
on a depression – austerity – and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as "rationalizing labor markets." The rationalizing
is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim – and effect – is to prevent countries from essentially following
the line of development that had made the United States rich – by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public
subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting
and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding
heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there
were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?
MICHAEL HUDSON : When I went to work on Wall Street in the '60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan,
and we used the IMF's monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country's statistics would
be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market,
and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital
flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat
in Latin America.
The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital
outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments
problems.
The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency
to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out
of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a "stabilization" program. It is never effective
in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public
infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators
have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.
When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have
to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We're talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic
currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts – basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize
capital flight when that policy "fails" to achieve its pretended objective of growth.
All hyperinflations of Latin America – Chile early on, like Germany after World War I – come from trying to pay foreign debts
beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange
rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.
A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: "Okay, banks
and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can't pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic
development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we're going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid."
That's what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States
stemming from World War I.
Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within
the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries.
So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don't approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency
if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its
diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression
of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.
BONNIE FAULKNER : How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you're a millionaire, and you see that your
country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos,
escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the
dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.
This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the
Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a "sovereign high-yield
fund"). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45
percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos .
Scudders' salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy
it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third
World bonds and couldn't see how these countries could pay.
Merrill Lynch was the fund's underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments
in Scudder's these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy
it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized
that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges.
In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other
Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated
in hard dollars.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they
were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Well, countries don't pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn't want
to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told
that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.
Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor's wages. Other elements of
exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary
system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.
According to the IMF's ideological models, there's no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive
in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest
creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor
needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So you're saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt
, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism . These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously
anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.
BONNIE FAULKNER : With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity
MICHAEL HUDSON : They weren't junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren't
really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest.
Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, "You banks and the IMF have
made bad loans, and you've made them under false pretenses – a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity.
We're not going to pay." They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were
a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.
The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires
holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the "Legarde List." But the IMF said, in effect that its
loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the
bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and
wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF
so vicious an institution.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren't junk, because
they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?
MICHAEL HUDSON : The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of
these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds.
No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy
overrode democratic choice.
Investors didn't believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries
that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in
their own national interest. They didn't believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.
They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped
up by the United States. That's why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming
to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along
the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and
the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you
should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I've put together to ask
you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn't be written down.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their
not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would
only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.
The terms are being written down because it's obvious that Puerto Rico can't pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population
to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don't want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece
when their industry and economy was shut down, then you're going to have to provide stability or else you're going to have half
of Puerto Rico living in Florida.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?
MICHAEL HUDSON : A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It's
the antithesis of democracy, so it's never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United
States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous
waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: "We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American
war and you're an occupied country, and we're going to keep you that way." Obviously this is causing a political resentment.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You've already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary
of defense?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of
a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the
World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry,
agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic
game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.
In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages
in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia's President Putin said
that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia's population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is
the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land
to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?
MICHAEL HUDSON : One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports
and food exports. The aim is to buttress America's agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is
not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export
crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become
dependent on American farmers – and political sanctions.
In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain
export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export
controls and helped feed China.
The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and
other tropical products, and they won't feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy
does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from
its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it
from growing its own grain or food crops. It's completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper,
guano and other natural resources.
The idea is to create interdependency – one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being
self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, "We're going to starve
you by not feeding you." Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can't say, "We're going to let you freeze in the dark by
not sending you oil," because America's independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze
in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.
So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country
control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.
There's a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: "Don't do as we do. Do as we say." The only way it can
enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right
wing. For instance, when Hillary's State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed
the Hondurans, she said: "This person has to go." That's why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now,
because they can't live in their own country.
The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under
the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you're saying that they wouldn't,
and that's why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a concise way of putting it Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which
it is lending?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country
can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there's no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in
these foreign currencies.
Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its
own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called
back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system's interconnections
to stop payments from being made.
After America installed the Shah's dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under
the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came
due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense
Department, I don't know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was
in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah's puppet government had signed. America
simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest
under the agreement of 2016.
America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do
the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system
to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other.
This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans
to de-dollarize.
BONNIE FAULKNER : I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country's domestic currency be preferable to the country
taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you've explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would
be able to repay it.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes. You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if
U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis
in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap
in Korea and other Asian countries.
This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital
controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.
But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it's denominated
in dollars, Americans don't own most of this debt. It's their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin
America – to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad
to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting
it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You say that: "While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at
its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud." How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar
global system?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops
so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring
new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity
in American agriculture from the 1930s to '50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.
But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade
and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's
called "grandfathering". The Americans said: "We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country
can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops
and growing crops that we can't grow in the United States." That's what's so evil about the World Bank's development plan.
BONNIE FAULKNER : According to your book: "Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension
services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive." Why can't infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy's
overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you're a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you're doing business in domestic currency. It doesn't
help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent
countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they're not able to give price supports or provide government marketing
services for their agriculture.
America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists
that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the
economy. So it's a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are
called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.
This is what the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency
in food, realizing that if you're going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That's why the United
States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If a country takes out an IMF loan, they're obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can't they
take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?
MICHAEL HUDSON : You don't need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency.
There's no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don't these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Their leaders don't want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of
foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It's the mentality of foreign
central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that's
how to get ahead. Essentially, they're opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won't have socialist
central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So we're back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and
the power structure in these countries so that they don't rebel.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive,
this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I've talked to people
at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: "We simply buy
them off. They do it for the money." So you don't need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist
enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that "by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail." What
is food blackmail?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you pursue a foreign policy that we don't like -- for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we're
trying to smash up to grab its oil -- we'll impose financial sanctions against you. We won't sell you food, and you can starve.
And because you've followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you're dependent on us, the
United States and our Free World Ó allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States,
as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that: "World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency
above all on the United States as food supplier." Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other
reasons as well?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I'm not sure at what point this became
thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result.
They believed the free-trade junk economics that's taught in the schools' economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.
When we're dealing with economic planners, we're dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its
unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There's something autistic about most economists, which is
why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what
it's best at – not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we're in a real world of economic
and military warfare.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to
feed the peoples of developing countries?
MICHAEL HUDSON : World poverty is viewed as solution , not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced
labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World
Bank and IMF is an economic solution that's built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought
out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential
plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?
MICHAEL HUDSON : No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you
had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash
Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase
Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American.
That killed any alternative to the World Bank.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what
is the effect?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are
natural monopolies – the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them
with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business
in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and
its European allies.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow
from the World Bank?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank – to make
sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed
to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn't make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own
currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay
by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their
infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.
This is what John Perkins' book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was
to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required
breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF
encourage.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets,
so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren't.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. They'll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You've
dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution – the mining slag and
what Marx called the excrements of production.
This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally,
they call their "Development," but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank's client countries.
BONNIE FAULKNER : When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in
1972, how was it received?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from
the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have
me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid
per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.
I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said
I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the
White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.
The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise,
it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese.
He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was
received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish,
and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book
has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn't understand how
their own system worked?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went
by, you had an organization called "Fifty Years Is Enough." And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz
became the World Bank's chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find
that indeed it didn't work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If
he didn't understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get
through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive
the system is.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Michael Hudson, thank you very much.
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's always good to be here, Bonnie. I'm glad you ask questions like these.
I've been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr.
Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall
Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972
book, Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies
through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today's broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com.
He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson
acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at
gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join
our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at
[email protected]. Follow us
on Twitter at #gandbradio.
Over the last two years, a different, in some ways unrecognizable Larry Summers has been appearing in newspaper editorial pages.
More circumspect in tone, this humbler Summers has been arguing that economic opportunities in the developing world are slowing,
and that the already rich economies are finding it hard to get out of the crisis. Barring some kind of breakthrough, Summers says,
an era of slow growth is here to stay.
In Summers's recent writings, this sombre conclusion has often been paired with a surprising political goal: advocating for a
"responsible nationalism". Now he argues that politicians must recognise that "the basic responsibility of government is to maximise
the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global good".
One curious thing about the pro-globalisation consensus of the 1990s and 2000s, and its collapse in recent years, is how closely
the cycle resembles a previous era. Pursuing free trade has always produced displacement and inequality – and political chaos, populism
and retrenchment to go with it. Every time the social consequences of free trade are overlooked, political backlash follows. But
free trade is only one of many forms that economic integration can take. History seems to suggest, however, that it might be the
most destabilising one.
... ... ...
The international systems that chastened figures such as Keynes helped produce in the next few years – especially the Bretton
Woods agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (Gatt) – set the terms under which the new wave of globalisation
would take place.
The key to the system's viability, in Rodrik's view, was its flexibility – something absent from contemporary globalisation,
with its one-size-fits-all model of capitalism. Bretton Woods stabilised exchange rates by pegging the dollar loosely to gold, and
other currencies to the dollar. Gatt consisted of rules governing free trade – negotiated by participating countries in a series
of multinational "rounds" – that left many areas of the world economy, such as agriculture, untouched or unaddressed. "Gatt's purpose
was never to maximise free trade," Rodrik writes. "It was to achieve the maximum amount of trade compatible with different nations
doing their own thing. In that respect, the institution proved spectacularly successful."
Partly because Gatt was not always dogmatic about free trade, it allowed most countries to figure out their own economic objectives,
within a somewhat international ambit. When nations contravened the agreement's terms on specific areas of national interest, they
found that it "contained loopholes wide enough for an elephant to pass", in Rodrik's words. If a nation wanted to protect its steel
industry, for example, it could claim "injury" under the rules of Gatt and raise tariffs to discourage steel imports: "an abomination
from the standpoint of free trade". These were useful for countries that were recovering from the war and needed to build up their
own industries via tariffs – duties imposed on particular imports. Meanwhile, from 1948 to 1990, world trade grew at an annual average
of nearly 7% – faster than the post-communist years, which we think of as the high point of globalisation. "If there was a golden
era of globalisation," Rodrik has written, "this was it."
Gatt, however, failed to cover many of the countries in the developing world. These countries eventually created their own system,
the United Nations conference on trade and development (UNCTAD). Under this rubric, many countries – especially in Latin America,
the Middle East, Africa and Asia – adopted a policy of protecting homegrown industries by replacing imports with domestically produced
goods. It worked poorly in some places – India and Argentina, for example, where the trade barriers were too high, resulting in
factories that cost more to set up than the value of the goods they produced – but remarkably well in others, such as east Asia,
much of Latin America and parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where homegrown industries did spring up. Though many later economists and
commentators would dismiss the achievements of this model, it theoretically fit Larry Summers's recent rubric on globalisation:
"the basic responsibility of government is to maximise the welfare of citizens, not to pursue some abstract concept of the global
good."
The critical turning point – away from this system of trade balanced against national protections – came in the 1980s. Flagging
growth and high inflation in the west, along with growing competition from Japan, opened the way for a political transformation.
The elections of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were seminal, putting free-market radicals in charge of two of the world's
five biggest economies and ushering in an era of "hyperglobalisation". In the new political climate, economies with large public
sectors and strong governments within the global capitalist system were no longer seen as aids to the system's functioning, but
impediments to it.
Not only did these ideologies take hold in the US and the UK; they seized international institutions as well. Gatt renamed itself
as the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the new rules the body negotiated began to cut more deeply into national policies. Its
international trade rules sometimes undermined national legislation. The WTO's appellate court intervened relentlessly in member
nations' tax, environmental and regulatory policies, including those of the United States: the US's fuel emissions standards were
judged to discriminate against imported gasoline, and its
ban on imported shrimp caught without turtle-excluding
devices was overturned. If national health and safety regulations were stricter than WTO rules necessitated, they could only
remain in place if they were shown to have "scientific justification".
The purest version of hyperglobalisation was tried out in Latin America in the 1980s. Known as the "Washington consensus", this
model usually involved loans from the IMF that were contingent on those countries lowering trade barriers and privatising many of
their nationally held industries. Well into the 1990s, economists were proclaiming the indisputable benefits of openness. In an
influential 1995 paper, Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner wrote: "We find no cases to support the frequent worry that a country might
open and yet fail to grow."
But the Washington consensus was bad for business: most countries did worse than before. Growth faltered, and citizens across
Latin America revolted against attempted privatisations of water and gas. In Argentina, which followed the Washington consensus
to the letter, a grave crisis resulted in
2002 , precipitating an economic collapse and massive street protests that forced out the government that had pursued privatising
reforms. Argentina's revolt presaged a left-populist upsurge across the continent: from 1999 to 2007, leftwing leaders and parties
took power in Brazil, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador, all of them campaigning against the Washington consensus on globalisation.
These revolts were a preview of the backlash of today.
Rodrik – perhaps the contemporary economist whose views have been most amply vindicated by recent events – was himself a beneficiary
of protectionism in Turkey. His father's ballpoint pen company was sheltered under tariffs, and achieved enough success to allow
Rodrik to attend Harvard in the 1970s as an undergraduate. This personal understanding of the mixed nature of economic success may
be one of the reasons why his work runs against the broad consensus of mainstream economics writing on globalisation.
"I never felt that my ideas were out of the mainstream," Rodrik told me recently. Instead, it was that the mainstream had lost
touch with the diversity of opinions and methods that already existed within economics. "The economics profession is strange in
that the more you move away from the seminar room to the public domain, the more the nuances get lost, especially on issues of trade."
He lamented the fact that while, in the classroom, the models of trade discuss losers and winners, and, as a result, the necessity
of policies of redistribution, in practice, an "arrogance and hubris" had led many economists to ignore these implications. "Rather
than speaking truth to power, so to speak, many economists became cheerleaders for globalisation."
In his 2011 book The Globalization Paradox
, Rodrik concluded that "we cannot simultaneously pursue democracy, national determination, and economic globalisation." The
results of the 2016 elections and referendums provide ample testimony of the justness of the thesis, with millions voting to push
back, for better or for worse, against the campaigns and institutions that promised more globalisation. "I'm not at all surprised
by the backlash," Rodrik told me. "Really, nobody should have been surprised."
But what, in any case, would "more globalisation" look like? For the same economists and writers who have started to rethink
their commitments to greater integration, it doesn't mean quite what it did in the early 2000s. It's not only the discourse that's
changed: globalisation itself has changed, developing into a more chaotic and unequal system than many economists predicted. The
benefits of globalisation have been largely concentrated in a handful of Asian countries. And even in those countries, the good
times may be running out.
Statistics from Global Inequality
, a 2016 book by the development economist Branko Milanović, indicate that in relative terms the greatest benefits of globalisation
have accrued to a rising "emerging middle class", based preponderantly in China. But the cons are there, too: in absolute terms,
the largest gains have gone to what is commonly called "the 1%" – half of whom are based in the US. Economist Richard Baldwin has
shown in his recent book, The Great Convergence, that nearly all of the gains from globalisation have been concentrated in six countries.
Barring some political catastrophe, in which rightwing populism continued to gain, and in which globalisation would be the least
of our problems – Wolf admitted that he was "not at all sure" that this could be ruled out – globalisation was always going to slow;
in fact, it already has. One reason, says Wolf, was that "a very, very large proportion of the gains from globalisation – by no
means all – have been exploited. We have a more open world economy to trade than we've ever had before." Citing The Great Convergence,
Wolf noted that supply chains have already expanded, and that future developments, such as automation and the use of robots, looked
to undermine the promise of a growing industrial workforce. Today, the political priorities were less about trade and more about
the challenge of retraining workers , as technology renders old jobs obsolete and transforms the world of work.
Rodrik, too, believes that globalisation, whether reduced or increased, is unlikely to produce the kind of economic effects it
once did. For him, this slowdown has something to do with what he calls "premature deindustrialisation". In the past, the simplest
model of globalisation suggested that rich countries would gradually become "service economies", while emerging economies picked
up the industrial burden. Yet recent statistics show the world as a whole is deindustrialising. Countries that one would have expected
to have more industrial potential are going through the stages of automation more quickly than previously developed countries did,
and thereby failing to develop the broad industrial workforce seen as a key to shared prosperity.
For both Rodrik and Wolf, the political reaction to globalisation bore possibilities of deep uncertainty. "I really have found
it very difficult to decide whether what we're living through is a blip, or a fundamental and profound transformation of the world
– at least as significant as the one that brought about the first world war and the Russian revolution," Wolf told me. He cited
his agreement with economists such as Summers that shifting away from the earlier emphasis on globalisation had now become a political
priority; that to pursue still greater liberalisation was like showing "a red rag to a bull" in terms of what it might do to the
already compromised political stability of the western world.
Rodrik pointed to a belated emphasis, both among political figures and economists, on the necessity of compensating those displaced
by globalisation with retraining and more robust welfare states. But pro-free-traders had a history of cutting compensation: Bill
Clinton passed Nafta, but failed to expand safety nets. "The issue is that the people are rightly not trusting the centrists who
are now promising compensation," Rodrik said. "One reason that Hillary Clinton didn't get any traction with those people is that
she didn't have any credibility."
Rodrik felt that economics commentary failed to register the gravity of the situation: that there were increasingly few avenues
for global growth, and that much of the damage done by globalisation – economic and political – is irreversible. "There is a sense
that we're at a turning point," he said. "There's a lot more thinking about what can be done. There's a renewed emphasis on compensation
– which, you know, I think has come rather late."
Despite the lack of concrete results from the Trump-Putin meeting, Moscow does not appear
discouraged. Much of the Russian commentary after the meeting emphasized that meetings such as
the one in Osaka will sooner or later yield tangible results.
Leonid Kalashnikov, chairman of the Russian State Duma's Committee for the Commonwealth of
Independent States,
stated during a discussion on Russian state television, "As a result of some summit, we'll
somehow accomplish something one way or another. There's no escaping it."
He added, "[The Americans] roared and yelled after the 1917 revolution, but by 1930 almost
all diplomatic ties were restored. They will probably deal with Crimea the same way."
Professor Dmitry Suslov from the Higher School of Economics expressed a similar perspective
to the National Interest prior to the Trump-Putin meeting. He told me that Moscow is
confident that if it stays on course, then Washington will at some point come around.
"I don't think Russia will considerably harden its position; it most certainly will not make
any concessions," he said. "Russia will just wait until the United States will begin to change
its policy [towards Russia] by its own initiative for domestic- and foreign-policy
reasons."
Earlier this year, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, described Moscow's policy to Washington as
"strategic patience" in an interview with Russian foreign-policy monthly International
Affairs .
He stated that it was the Americans themselves, "who at one time used the term 'strategic
patience,' which seems appropriate to describe the line that, it seems, should be pursued in
relations with Washington for the foreseeable future," by Russia.
The term "strategic patience" was commonly used to describe the Obama administration's
approach towards North Korea. Under the policy, Washington would avoid escalating against
Pyongyang, but also refrain from making any concessions unless North Korea made the first
move.
According to Suslov, Russia's "strategic patience" approach is based on two assumptions.
First, political polarization inside the United States will eventually subside. Once a new
domestic consensus emerges in the United States, it will be easier for whoever is in the Oval
Office to pursue a normalization of ties with Russia.
Second, the United States will realize over the next five to ten years that it cannot
simultaneously confront both China and Russia. Beijing's growing economic and military power
will incentivize the United States to make a play for better relations with Russia.
What does Russia plan on doing until such a shift in Washington's attitude towards Moscow
occurs, assuming it happens at all? Suslov explained that Russia's primary objective for now is
damage control.
"It is essential that we work with the United States to control the conflict and prevent a
direct military confrontation," he said. "To do that, it is critical to meet to discuss
questions of strategic stability and regional conflicts."
In the case of Europe, there are some signs that Moscow's "strategic patience" game plan is
yielding some dividends. Last week, Parliamentary Association of the Council of Europe (PACE)
voted to reinstate Russia's membership without any concessions on the Kremlin's part.
Russia had been suspended from the European human-rights organization after its 2014 annexation
of Crimea.
Should allies of newly inaugurated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky triumph in the
country's parliamentary elections on July 21, the former comedian who ran on the platform of
restarting dialogue with Russia may feel emboldened
to move in that direction.
As the 2020 election season heats up, Washington is quite unlikely to pursue any significant
outreach towards Russia. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress view the Kremlin with
suspicion, and the
attitude of the general public is not much more favorable. Nevertheless, Moscow is betting
that somewhere down the line, Washington will change its mind about Russia. All it has to do is
keep the door open and wait.
Dimitri Alexander Simes is a contributor to the National Interest .
"... The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers ..."
"... It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent on the United States ..."
"... American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got to lose." ..."
"... The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president ..."
"... Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market, and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat in Latin America. ..."
"... The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments problems ..."
"... The IMF enables its wealthy constituency to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss ..."
"... Wall Street speculators have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style. ..."
"... When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. ..."
"... Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products. ..."
"... Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries. ..."
"... This control by the U.S. financial system and its diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism. ..."
"... The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires holding their money in Switzerland ..."
"... The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF so vicious an institution. ..."
"... America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other. ..."
"... You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap in Korea and other Asian countries. ..."
"... This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight. ..."
"... Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors. ..."
"... But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's called "grandfathering". ..."
"The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose
tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute,
or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries
play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing
and loss of life by soldiers."
I'm Bonnie Faulkner. Today on Guns and Butter: Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show: The IMF and World Bank: Partners In Backwardness
. Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend,
a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.
His most recent books include " and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance
to the Jubilee Year "; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy , and J Is for
Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception . He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
, among many other books.
We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson's seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire
, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on
food imperialism.
... ... ...
Bonnie Faulkner : In your seminal work form 1972, Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ,
you write: "The development lending of the World Bank has been dysfunctional from the outset." When was the World Bank set up and
by whom?
Michael Hudson : It was set up basically by the United States in 1944, along with its sister institution, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF). Their purpose was to create an international order like a funnel to make other countries economically dependent
on the United States. To make sure that no other country or group of countries – even all the rest of the world – could not
dictate U.S. policy. American diplomats insisted on the ability to veto any action by the World Bank or IMF. The aim of this
veto power was to make sure that any policy was, in Donald Trump's words, to put America first. "We've got to win and they've got
to lose."
The World Bank was set up from the outset as a branch of the military, of the Defense Department. John J. McCloy (Assistant
Secretary of War, 1941-45), was the first full-time president. He later became Chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank (1953-60).
McNamara was Secretary of Defense (1961-68), Paul Wolfowitz was Deputy and Under Secretary of Defense (1989-2005), and Robert Zoellick
was Deputy Secretary of State. So I think you can look at the World Bank as the soft shoe of American diplomacy.
Bonnie Faulkner : What is the difference between the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the IMF? Is
there a difference?
Michael Hudson : Yes, there is. The World Bank was supposed to make loans for what they call international development.
"Development" was their euphemism for dependency on U.S. exports and finance. This dependency entailed agricultural backwardness
– opposing land reform, family farming to produce domestic food crops, and also monetary backwardness in basing their monetary system
on the dollar.
The World Bank was supposed to provide infrastructure loans that other countries would go into debt to pay American engineering
firms, to build up their export sectors and their plantation sectors by public investment roads and port development for imports
and exports. Essentially, the Bank financed long- investments in the foreign trade sector, in a way that was a natural continuation
of European colonialism.
In 1941, for example, C. L. R. James wrote an article on "Imperialism in Africa" pointing out the fiasco of European railroad
investment in Africa: "Railways must serve flourishing industrial areas, or densely populated agricult5ural regions, or they must
open up new land along which a thriving population develops and provides the railways with traffic. Except in the mining regions
of South Africa, all these conditions are absent. Yet railways were needed, for the benefit of European investors and heavy industry."
That is why, James explained "only governments can afford to operate them," while being burdened with heavy interest obligations.
[1] What was "developed" was Africa's
mining and plantation export sector, not its domestic economies. The World Bank followed this pattern of "development" lending without
apology.
The IMF was in charge of short-term foreign currency loans. Its aim was to prevent countries from imposing capital controls to
protect their balance of payments. Many countries had a dual exchange rate: one for trade in goods and services, the other rate
for capital movements. The function of the IMF and World Bank was essentially to make other countries borrow in dollars, not in
their own currencies, and to make sure that if they could not pay their dollar-denominated debts, they had to impose austerity on
the domestic economy – while subsidizing their import and export sectors and protecting foreign investors, creditors and client
oligarchies from loss.
The IMF developed a junk-economics model pretending that any country can pay any amount of debt to the creditors if it just impoverishes
its labor enough. So when countries were unable to pay their debt service, the IMF tells them to raise their interest rates to bring
on a depression – austerity – and break up the labor unions. That is euphemized as "rationalizing labor markets." The rationalizing
is essentially to disable labor unions and the public sector. The aim – and effect – is to prevent countries from essentially following
the line of development that had made the United States rich – by public subsidy and protection of domestic agriculture, public
subsidy and protection of industry and an active government sector promoting a New Deal democracy. The IMF was essentially promoting
and forcing other countries to balance their trade deficits by letting American and other investors buy control of their commanding
heights, mainly their infrastructure monopolies, and to subsidize their capital flight.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Now, Michael, when you began speaking about the IMF and monetary controls, you mentioned that there
were two exchange rates of currency in countries. What were you referring to?
MICHAEL HUDSON : When I went to work on Wall Street in the '60s, I was balance-of-payments economist for Chase Manhattan,
and we used the IMF's monthly International Financial Statistics every month. At the top of each country's statistics would
be the exchange-rate figures. Many countries had two rates: one for goods and services, which was set normally by the market,
and then a different exchange rate that was managed for capital movements. That was because countries were trying to prevent capital
flight. They didn't want their wealthy classes or foreign investors to make a run on their own currency – an ever-present threat
in Latin America.
The IMF and the World Bank backed the cosmopolitan classes, the wealthy. Instead of letting countries control their capital
outflows and prevent capital flight, the IMF's job is to protect the richest One Percent and foreign investors from balance-of-payments
problems.
The World Bank and American diplomacy have steered them into a chronic currency crisis. The IMF enables its wealthy constituency
to move their money out of the country without taking a foreign-exchange loss. It makes loans to support capital flight out
of domestic currencies into the dollar or other hard currencies. The IMF calls this a "stabilization" program. It is never effective
in helping the debtor economy pay foreign debts out of growth. Instead, the IMF uses currency depreciation and sell-offs of public
infrastructure and other assets to foreign investors after the flight capital has left and currency collapses. Wall Street speculators
have sold the local currency short to make a killing, George-Soros style.
When the debtor-country currency collapses, the debts that these Latin American countries owe are in dollars, and now have
to pay much more in their own currency to carry and pay off these debts. We're talking about enormous penalty rates in domestic
currency for these countries to pay foreign-currency debts – basically taking on to finance a non-development policy and to subsidize
capital flight when that policy "fails" to achieve its pretended objective of growth.
All hyperinflations of Latin America – Chile early on, like Germany after World War I – come from trying to pay foreign debts
beyond the ability to be paid. Local currency is thrown onto the foreign-exchange market for dollars, lowering the exchange
rate. That increases import prices, raising a price umbrella for domestic products.
A really functional and progressive international monetary fund that would try to help countries develop would say: "Okay, banks
and we (the IMF) have made bad loans that the country can't pay. And the World Bank has given it bad advice, distorting its domestic
development to serve foreign customers rather than its own growth. So we're going to write down the loans to the ability to be paid."
That's what happened in 1931, when the world finally stopped German reparations payments and Inter-Ally debts to the United States
stemming from World War I.
Instead, the IMF says just the opposite: It acts to prevent any move by other countries to bring the debt volume within
the ability to be paid. It uses debt leverage as a way to control the monetary lifeline of financially defeated debtor countries.
So if they do something that U.S. diplomats don't approve of, it can pull the plug financially, encouraging a run on their currency
if they act independently of the United States instead of falling in line. This control by the U.S. financial system and its
diplomacy has been built into the world system by the IMF and the World Bank claiming to be international instead of an expression
of specifically U.S. New Cold War nationalism.
BONNIE FAULKNER : How do exchange rates contribute to capital flight?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's not the exchange rate that contributes. Suppose that you're a millionaire, and you see that your
country is unable to balance its trade under existing production patterns. The money that the government has under control is pesos,
escudos, cruzeiros or some other currency, not dollars or euros. You see that your currency is going to go down relative to the
dollar, so you want to get our money out of the country to preserve your purchasing power.
This has long been institutionalized. By 1990, for instance, Latin American countries had defaulted so much in the wake of the
Mexico defaults in 1982 that I was hired by Scudder Stevens, to help start a Third World Bond Fund (called a "sovereign high-yield
fund"). At the time, Argentina and Brazil were running such serious balance-of-payments deficits that they were having to pay 45
percent per year interest, in dollars, on their dollar debt. Mexico, was paying 22.5 percent on its tesobonos .
Scudders' salesmen went around to the United States and tried to sell shares in the proposed fund, but no Americans would buy
it, despite the enormous yields. They sent their salesmen to Europe and got a similar reaction. They had lost their shirts on Third
World bonds and couldn't see how these countries could pay.
Merrill Lynch was the fund's underwriter. Its office in Brazil and in Argentina proved much more successful in selling investments
in Scudder's these offshore fund established in the Dutch West Indies. It was an offshore fund, so Americans were not able to buy
it. But Brazilian and Argentinian rich families close to the central bank and the president became the major buyers. We realized
that they were buying these funds because they knew that their government was indeed going to pay their stipulated interest charges.
In effect, the bonds were owed ultimately to themselves. So these Yankee dollar bonds were being bought by Brazilians and other
Latin Americans as a vehicle to move their money out of their soft local currency (which was going down), to buy bonds denominated
in hard dollars.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If wealthy families from these countries bought these bonds denominated in dollars, knowing that they
were going to be paid off, who was going to pay them off? The country that was going broke?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Well, countries don't pay; the taxpayers pay, and in the end, labor pays. The IMF certainly doesn't want
to make its wealthy client oligarchies pay. It wants to squeeze ore economic surplus out of the labor force. So countries are told
that the way they can afford to pay their enormously growing dollar-denominated debt is to lower wages even more.
Currency depreciation is an effective way to do this, because what is devalued is basically labor's wages. Other elements of
exports have a common world price: energy, raw materials, capital goods, and credit under the dollar-centered international monetary
system that the IMF seeks to maintain as a financial strait jacket.
According to the IMF's ideological models, there's no limit to how far you can lower wages by enough to make labor competitive
in producing exports. The IMF and World Bank thus use junk economics to pretend that the way to pay debts owed to the wealthiest
creditors and investors is to lower wages and impose regressive excise taxes, to impose special taxes on necessities that labor
needs, from food to energy and basic services supplied by public infrastructure.
BONNIE FAULKNER: So you're saying that labor ultimately has to pay off these junk bonds?
MICHAEL HUDSON: That is the basic aim of IMF. I discuss its fallacies in my Trade Development and Foreign Debt
, which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism . These two books show that the World Bank and IMF were viciously
anti-labor from the very outset, working with domestic elites whose fortunes are tied to and loyal to the United States.
BONNIE FAULKNER : With regard to these junk bonds, who was it or what entity
MICHAEL HUDSON : They weren't junk bonds. They were called that because they were high-interest bonds, but they weren't
really junk because they actually were paid. Everybody thought they were junk because no American would have paid 45 percent interest.
Any country that really was self-reliant and was promoting its own economic interest would have said, "You banks and the IMF have
made bad loans, and you've made them under false pretenses – a trade theory that imposes austerity instead of leading to prosperity.
We're not going to pay." They would have seized the capital flight of their comprador elites and said that these dollar bonds were
a rip-off by the corrupt ruling class.
The same thing happened in Greece a few years ago, when almost all of Greece's foreign debt was owed to Greek millionaires
holding their money in Switzerland. The details were published in the "Legarde List." But the IMF said, in effect that its
loyalty was to the Greek millionaires who ha their money in Switzerland. The IMF could have seized this money to pay off the
bondholders. Instead, it made the Greek economy pay. It found that it was worth wrecking the Greek economy, forcing emigration and
wiping out Greek industry so that French and German bondholding banks would not have to take a loss. That is what makes the IMF
so vicious an institution.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So these loans to foreign countries that were regarded as junk bonds really weren't junk, because
they were going to be paid. What group was it that jacked up these interest rates to 45 percent?
MICHAEL HUDSON : The market did. American banks, stock brokers and other investors looked at the balance of payments of
these countries and could not see any reasonable way that they could pay their debts, so they were not going to buy their bonds.
No country subject to democratic politics would have paid debts under these conditions. But the IMF, U.S. and Eurozone diplomacy
overrode democratic choice.
Investors didn't believe that the IMF and the World Bank had such a strangle hold over Latin American, Asian, and African countries
that they could make the countries act in the interest of the United States and the cosmopolitan finance capital, instead of in
their own national interest. They didn't believe that countries would commit financial suicide just to pay their wealthy One Percent.
They were wrong, of course. Countries were quite willing to commit economic suicide if their governments were dictatorships propped
up by the United States. That's why the CIA has assassination teams and actively supports these countries to prevent any party coming
to power that would act in their national interest instead of in the interest of a world division of labor and production along
the lines that the U.S. planners want for the world. Under the banner of what they call a free market, you have the World Bank and
the IMF engage in central planning of a distinctly anti-labor policy. Instead of calling them Third World bonds or junk bonds, you
should call them anti-labor bonds, because they have become a lever to impose austerity throughout the world.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Well, that makes a lot of sense, Michael, and answers a lot of the questions I've put together to ask
you. What about Puerto Rico writing down debt? I thought such debts couldn't be written down.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's what they all said, but the bonds were trading at about 45 cents on the dollar, the risk of their
not being paid. The Wall Street Journal on June 17, reported that unsecured suppliers and creditors of Puerto Rico, would
only get nine cents on the dollar. The secured bond holders would get maybe 65 cents on the dollar.
The terms are being written down because it's obvious that Puerto Rico can't pay, and that trying to do so is driving the population
to move out of Puerto Rico to the United States. If you don't want Puerto Ricans to act the same way Greeks did and leave Greece
when their industry and economy was shut down, then you're going to have to provide stability or else you're going to have half
of Puerto Rico living in Florida.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Who wrote down the Puerto Rican debt?
MICHAEL HUDSON : A committee was appointed, and it calculated how much Puerto Rico can afford to pay out of its taxes.
Puerto Rico is a U.S. dependency, that is, an economic colony of the United States. It does not have domestic self-reliance. It's
the antithesis of democracy, so it's never been in charge of its own economic policy and essentially has to do whatever the United
States tells it to do. There was a reaction after the hurricane and insufficient U.S. support to protect the island and the enormous
waste and corruption involved in the U.S. aid. The U.S. response was simply: "We won you fair and square in the Spanish-American
war and you're an occupied country, and we're going to keep you that way." Obviously this is causing a political resentment.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You've already touched on this, but why has the World Bank traditionally been headed by a U.S. secretary
of defense?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its job is to do in the financial sphere what, in the past, was done by military force. The purpose of
a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the
World Bank was to recognize that it's not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry,
agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic
game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers.
In this case the loss of life occurs in the debtor countries. Population growth shrinks, suicides go up. The World Bank engages
in economic warfare that is just as destructive as military warfare. At the end of the Yeltsin period Russia's President Putin said
that American neoliberalism destroyed more of Russia's population than did World War II. Such neoliberalism, which basically is
the doctrine of American supremacy and foreign dependency, is the policy of the World Bank and IMF.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why has World Bank policy since its inception been to provide loans for countries to devote their land
to export crops instead of giving priority to feeding themselves? And if this is the case, why do countries want these loans?
MICHAEL HUDSON : One constant of American foreign policy is to make other countries dependent on American grain exports
and food exports. The aim is to buttress America's agricultural trade surplus. So the first thing that the World Bank has done is
not to make any domestic currency loans to help food producers. Its lending has steered client countries to produce tropical export
crops, mainly plantation crops that cannot be grown in the United States. Focusing on export crops leads client countries to become
dependent on American farmers – and political sanctions.
In the 1950s, right after the Chinese revolution, the United States tried to prevent China from succeeding by imposing grain
export controls to starve China into submission by putting sanctions on exports. Canada was the country that broke these export
controls and helped feed China.
The idea is that if you can make other countries export plantation crops, the oversupply will drive down prices for cocoa and
other tropical products, and they won't feed themselves. So instead of backing family farms like the American agricultural policy
does, the World Bank backed plantation agriculture. In Chile, which has the highest natural supply of fertilizer in the world from
its guano deposits, exports guano instead of using it domestically. It also has the most unequal land distribution, blocking it
from growing its own grain or food crops. It's completely dependent on the United States for this, and it pays by exporting copper,
guano and other natural resources.
The idea is to create interdependency – one-sided dependency on the U.S. economy. The United States has always aimed at being
self-sufficient in its own essentials, so that no other country can pull the plug on our economy and say, "We're going to starve
you by not feeding you." Americans can feed themselves. Other countries can't say, "We're going to let you freeze in the dark by
not sending you oil," because America's independent in energy. But America can use the oil control to make other countries freeze
in the dark, and it can starve other countries by food-export sanctions.
So the idea is to give the United States control of the key interconnections of other economies, without letting any country
control something that is vital to the working of the American economy.
There's a double standard here. The United States tells other countries: "Don't do as we do. Do as we say." The only way it can
enforce this is by interfering in the politics of these countries, as it has interfered in Latin America, always pushing the right
wing. For instance, when Hillary's State Department overthrew the Honduras reformer who wanted to undertake land reform and feed
the Hondurans, she said: "This person has to go." That's why there are so many Hondurans trying to get into the United States now,
because they can't live in their own country.
The effect of American coups is the same in Syria and Iraq. They force an exodus of people who no longer can make a living under
the brutal dictatorships supported by the United States to enforce this international dependency system.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So when I asked you why countries would want these loans, I guess you're saying that they wouldn't,
and that's why the U.S. finds it necessary to control them politically.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a concise way of putting it Bonnie.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why are World Bank loans only in foreign currency, not in the domestic currency of the country to which
it is lending?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's a good point. A basic principle should be to avoid borrowing in a foreign currency. A country
can always pay the loans in its own currency, but there's no way that it can print dollars or euros to pay loans denominated in
these foreign currencies.
Making the dollar central forces other countries to interface with the U.S. banking system. So if a country decides to go its
own way, as Iran did in 1953 when it wanted to take over its oil from British Petroleum (or Anglo Iranian Oil, as it was called
back then), the United States can interfere and overthrow it. The idea is to be able to use the banking system's interconnections
to stop payments from being made.
After America installed the Shah's dictatorship, they were overthrown by Khomeini, and Iran had run up a U.S. dollar debt under
the Shah. It had plenty of dollars. I think Chase Manhattan was its paying agent. So when its quarterly or annual debt payment came
due, Iran told Chase to draw on its accounts and pay the bondholders. But Chase took orders from the State Department or the Defense
Department, I don't know which, and refused to pay. When the payment was not made, America and its allies claimed that Iran was
in default. They demanded the entire debt to be paid, as per the agreement that the Shah's puppet government had signed. America
simply grabbed the deposits that Iran had in the United States. This is the money that was finally returned to Iran without interest
under the agreement of 2016.
America was able to grab all of Iran's foreign exchange just by the banks interfering. The CIA has bragged that it can do
the same thing with Russia. If Russia does something that U.S. diplomats don't like, the U.S. can use the SWIFT bank payment system
to exclude Russia from it, so the Russian banks and the Russian people and industry won't be able to make payments to each other.
This prompted Russia to create its own bank-transfer system, and is leading China, Russia, India and Pakistan to draft plans
to de-dollarize.
BONNIE FAULKNER : I was going to ask you, why would loans in a country's domestic currency be preferable to the country
taking out a loan in a foreign currency? I guess you've explained that if they took out a loan in a domestic currency, they would
be able to repay it.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Whereas a loan in a foreign currency would cripple them.
MICHAEL HUDSON : Yes. You can't create the money, especially if you're running a balance of payments deficit and if
U.S. foreign policy forces you into deficit by having someone like George Soros make a run on your currency. Look at the Asia crisis
in 1997. Wall Street funds bet against foreign currencies, driving them way down, and then used the money to pick up industry cheap
in Korea and other Asian countries.
This was also done to Russia's ruble. The only country that avoided this was Malaysia, under Mohamed Mahathir, by using capital
controls. Malaysia is an object lesson in how to prevent a currency flight.
But for Latin America and other countries, much of their foreign debt is held by their own ruling class. Even though it's denominated
in dollars, Americans don't own most of this debt. It's their own ruling class. The IMF and World Bank dictate tax policy to Latin
America – to un-tax wealth and shift the burden onto labor. Client kleptocracies take their money and run, moving it abroad
to hard currency areas such as the United States, or at least keeping it in dollars in offshore banking centers instead of reinvesting
it to help the country catch up by becoming independent agriculturally, in energy, finance and other sectors.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You say that: "While U.S. agricultural protectionism has been built into the postwar global system at
its inception, foreign protectionism is to be nipped in the bud." How has U.S. agricultural protectionism been built into the postwar
global system?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Under Franklin Roosevelt the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 called for price supports for crops
so that farmers could earn enough to invest in equipment and seeds. The Agriculture Department was a wonderful department in spurring
new seed varieties, agricultural extension services, marketing and banking services. It provided public support so that productivity
in American agriculture from the 1930s to '50s was higher over a prolonged period than that of any other sector in history.
But in shaping the World Trade Organization's rules, the United States said that all countries had to promote free trade
and could not have government support, except for countries that already had it. We're the only country that had it. That's what's
called "grandfathering". The Americans said: "We already have this program on the books, so we can keep it. But no other country
can succeed in agriculture in the way that we have done. You must keep your agriculture backward, except for the plantation crops
and growing crops that we can't grow in the United States." That's what's so evil about the World Bank's development plan.
BONNIE FAULKNER : According to your book: "Domestic currency is needed to provide price supports and agricultural extension
services such as have made U.S. agriculture so productive." Why can't infrastructure costs be subsidized to keep down the economy's
overall cost structure if IMF loans are made in foreign currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you're a farmer in Brazil, Argentina or Chile, you're doing business in domestic currency. It doesn't
help if somebody gives you dollars, because your expenses are in domestic currency. So if the World Bank and the IMF can prevent
countries from providing domestic currency support, that means they're not able to give price supports or provide government marketing
services for their agriculture.
America is a mixed economy. Our government has always subsidized capital formation in agriculture and industry, but it insists
that other countries are socialist or communist if they do what the United States is doing and use their government to support the
economy. So it's a double standard. Nobody calls America a socialist country for supporting its farmers, but other countries are
called socialist and are overthrown if they attempt land reform or attempt to feed themselves.
This is what the Catholic Church's Liberation Theology was all about. They backed land reform and agricultural self-sufficiency
in food, realizing that if you're going to support population growth, you have to support the means to feed it. That's why the United
States focused its assassination teams on priests and nuns in Guatemala and Central America for trying to promote domestic self-sufficiency.
BONNIE FAULKNER : If a country takes out an IMF loan, they're obviously going to take it out in dollars. Why can't they
take the dollars and convert them into domestic currency to support local infrastructure costs?
MICHAEL HUDSON : You don't need a dollar loan to do that. Now were getting in to MMT. Any country can create its own currency.
There's no reason to borrow in dollars to create your own currency. You can print it yourself or create it on your computers.
BONNIE FAULKNER: Well, exactly. So why don't these countries simply print up their own domestic currency?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Their leaders don't want to be assassinated. More immediately, if you look at the people in charge of
foreign central banks, almost all have been educated in the United States and essentially brainwashed. It's the mentality of foreign
central bankers. The people who are promoted are those who feel personally loyal to the United States, because they that that's
how to get ahead. Essentially, they're opportunists working against the interests of their own country. You won't have socialist
central bankers as long as central banks are dominated by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements.
BONNIE FAULKNER : So we're back to the main point: The control is by political means, and they control the politics and
the power structure in these countries so that they don't rebel.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. When you have a dysfunctional economic theory that is destructive instead of productive,
this is never an accident. It is always a result of junk economics and dependency economics being sponsored. I've talked to people
at the U.S. Treasury and asked why they all end up following the United States. Treasury officials have told me: "We simply buy
them off. They do it for the money." So you don't need to kill them. All you need to do is find people corrupt enough and opportunist
enough to see where the money is, and you buy them off.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that "by following U.S. advice, countries have left themselves open to food blackmail." What
is food blackmail?
MICHAEL HUDSON : If you pursue a foreign policy that we don't like -- for instance, if you trade with Iran, which we're
trying to smash up to grab its oil -- we'll impose financial sanctions against you. We won't sell you food, and you can starve.
And because you've followed World Bank advice and not grown your own food, you will starve, because you're dependent on us, the
United States and our Free World Ó allies. Canada will no longer follow its own policy independently of the United States,
as it did with China in the 1950s when it sold it grain. Europe also is falling in line with U.S. policy.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You write that: "World Bank administrators demand that loan recipients pursue a policy of economic dependency
above all on the United States as food supplier." Was this done to support U.S. agriculture? Obviously it is, but were there other
reasons as well?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Certainly the agricultural lobby was critical in all of this, and I'm not sure at what point this became
thoroughly conscious. I knew some of the World Bank planners, and they had no anticipation that this dependency would be the result.
They believed the free-trade junk economics that's taught in the schools' economics departments and for which Nobel prizes are awarded.
When we're dealing with economic planners, we're dealing with tunnel-visioned people. They stayed in the discipline despite its
unreality because they sort of think that abstractly it makes sense. There's something autistic about most economists, which is
why the French had their non-autistic economic site for many years. The mentality at work is that every country should produce what
it's best at – not realizing that nations also need to be self-sufficient in essentials, because we're in a real world of economic
and military warfare.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why does the World Bank prefer to perpetrate world poverty instead of adequate overseas capacity to
feed the peoples of developing countries?
MICHAEL HUDSON : World poverty is viewed as solution , not a problem. The World Bank thinks of poverty as low-priced
labor, creating a competitive advantage for countries that produce labor-intensive goods. So poverty and austerity for the World
Bank and IMF is an economic solution that's built into their models. I discuss these in my Trade, Development and Foreign Debt
book. Poverty is to them the solution, because it means low-priced labor, and that means higher profits for the companies bought
out by U.S., British, and European investors. So poverty is part of the class war: profits versus poverty.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In general, what is U.S. food imperialism? How would you characterize it?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Its aim is to make America the producer of essential foods and other countries producing inessential
plantation crops, while remaining dependent on the United States for grain, soy beans and basic food crops.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does World Bank lending encourage land reform in former colonies?
MICHAEL HUDSON : No. If there is land reform, the CIA sends its assassination teams in and you have mass murder, as you
had in Guatemala, Ecuador, Central America and Columbia. The World Bank is absolutely committed against land reform. When the Forgash
Plan for a World Bank for Economic Acceleration was proposed in the 1950s to emphasize land reform and local-currency loans, a Chase
Manhattan economist to whom the plan was submitted warned that every country that had land reform turned out to be anti-American.
That killed any alternative to the World Bank.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Does the World Bank insist on client governments privatizing their public domain? If so, why, and what
is the effect?
MICHAEL HUDSON : It does indeed insist on privatization, pretending that this is efficient. But what it privatizes are
natural monopolies – the electrical system, the water system and other basic needs. Foreigners take over, essentially finance them
with foreign debt, build the foreign debt that they build into the cost structure, and raise the cost of living and doing business
in these countries, thereby crippling them economically. The effect is to prevent them from competing with the United States and
its European allies.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Would you say then that it is mainly America that has been aided, not foreign economies that borrow
from the World Bank?
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's why the United States is the only country with veto power in the IMF and World Bank – to make
sure that what you just described is exactly what happens.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Why do World Bank programs accelerate the exploitation of mineral deposits for use by other nations?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Most World Bank loans are for transportation, roads, harbor development and other infrastructure needed
to export minerals and plantation crops. The World Bank doesn't make loans for projects that help the country develop in its own
currency. By making only foreign currency loans, in dollars or maybe euros now, the World Bank says that its clients have to repay
by generating foreign currency. The only way they can repay the dollars spent on American engineering firms that have built their
infrastructure is to export – to earn enough dollars to pay back for the money that the World Bank or IMF have lent.
This is what John Perkins' book about being an economic hit man for the World Bank is all about. He realized that his job was
to get countries to borrow dollars to build huge projects that could only be paid for by the country exporting more – which required
breaking its labor unions and lowering wages so that it could be competitive in the race to the bottom that the World Bank and IMF
encourage.
BONNIE FAULKNER : You also point out in Super Imperialism that mineral resources represent diminishing assets,
so these countries that are exporting mineral resources are being depleted while the importing countries aren't.
MICHAEL HUDSON : That's right. They'll end up like Canada. The end result is going to be a big hole in the ground. You've
dug up all your minerals, and in the end you have a hole in the ground and a lot of the refuse and pollution – the mining slag and
what Marx called the excrements of production.
This is not a sustainable development. The World Bank only promotes the U.S. pursuit of sustainable development. So naturally,
they call their "Development," but their focus is on the United States, not the World Bank's client countries.
BONNIE FAULKNER : When Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire was originally published in
1972, how was it received?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Very positively. It enabled my career to take off. I received a phone call a month later by someone from
the Bank of Montreal saying they had just made $240 million on the last paragraph of my book. They asked what it would cost to have
me come up and give a lecture. I began lecturing once a month at $3,500 a day, moving up to $6,500 a day, and became the highest-paid
per diem economist on Wall Street for a few years.
I was immediately hired by the Hudson Institute to explain Super Imperialism to the Defense Department. Herman Kahn said
I showed how U.S. imperialism ran rings around European imperialism. They gave the Institute an $85,000 grant to have me go to the
White House in Washington to explain how American imperialism worked. The Americans used it as a how-to-do-it book.
The socialists, whom I expected to have a response, decided to talk about other than economic topics. So, much to my surprise,
it became a how-to-do-it book for imperialists. It was translated by, I think, the nephew of the Emperor of Japan into Japanese.
He then wrote me that the United States opposed the book being translated into Japanese. It later was translated. It was
received very positively in China, where I think it has sold more copies than in any other country. It was translated into Spanish,
and most recently it was translated into German, and German officials have asked me to come and discuss it with them. So the book
has been accepted all over the world as an explanation of how the system works.
BONNIE FAULKNER : In closing, do you really think that the U.S. government officials and others didn't understand how
their own system worked?
MICHAEL HUDSON : Many might not have understood in 1944 that this would be the consequence. But by the time 50 years went
by, you had an organization called "Fifty Years Is Enough." And by that time everybody should have understood. By the time Joe Stiglitz
became the World Bank's chief economist, there was no excuse for not understanding how the system worked. He was amazed to find
that indeed it didn't work as advertised, and resigned. But he should have known at the very beginning what it was all about. If
he didn't understand how it was until he actually went to work there, you can understand how hard it is for most academics to get
through the vocabulary of junk economics, the patter-talk of free trade and free markets to understand how exploitative and destructive
the system is.
BONNIE FAULKNER : Michael Hudson, thank you very much.
MICHAEL HUDSON : It's always good to be here, Bonnie. I'm glad you ask questions like these.
I've been speaking with Dr. Michael Hudson. Today's show has been: The IMF and World Bank: Partners in Backwardness. Dr.
Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is president of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall
Street financial analyst and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His 1972
book, Super Imperialism : The Economic Strategy of American Empire , a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies
through the IMF and World Bank, the subject of today's broadcast, is posted in PDF format on his website at michael-hudson.com.
He is also author of Trade, Development and Foreign Debt , which is the academic sister volume to Super Imperialism. Dr. Hudson
acts as an economic advisor to governments worldwide on finance and tax law. Visit his website at michael-hudson.com.
Guns and Butter is produced by Bonnie Faulkner, Yarrow Mahko and Tony Rango. Visit us at
gunsandbutter.org to listen to past programs, comment on shows, or join
our email list to receive our newsletter that includes recent shows and updates. Email us at
[email protected]. Follow us
on Twitter at #gandbradio.
"... Kolomoisky is the man who controls the recently elected Jewish president Zelensky -- a comedian. ..."
"... Let's not forget that Theresa May is the one who has worked assiduously on trying to overcome the results of the British referendum. She does not believe in democracy. ..."
"... This man most certainly made a substantial offshore payment to Largarde or her companies or her lawyers. That is how it works everywhere. ..."
She robbed the French taxpayer of some 404 billion Euros. The fact that she is not in
prison while protesters are being injured weekly by the French police tells you a lot about
why these people are protesting.
Since then, she has continued with her corrupt behaviour by greatly enriching the
Ukrainian/Israeli oligarch Kolomoisky -- who robbed his own bank.
How Christine Lagarde, Clinton and Nuland Funded a Massive Ukrainian Ponzi
Scheme
Kolomoisky is the man who controls the recently elected Jewish president Zelensky -- a
comedian.
I think the writer pays too much to the attire of May and Lagarde -- The pearls, the tweed
and gingham suits -- when their corruption is totally 21st century. Let's not forget that
Theresa May is the one who has worked assiduously on trying to overcome the results of the
British referendum. She does not believe in democracy. Replies: @Logan
, @George F.
Held
One of the functions of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is imposing austerity
measures on the people of poor countries seeking bailouts, so perhaps choosing a corporate
lawyer to run it is fitting.
@Logan
ness tampering. After a high-profile case against public prosecutor Éric de
Montgolfier, he was sentenced in 1995 by the Court of Appeals of Douai to 2 years in prison,
including 8 months non-suspended and 3 years of deprivation of his civic rights.
Despite the lack of concrete results from the Trump-Putin meeting, Moscow does not appear
discouraged. Much of the Russian commentary after the meeting emphasized that meetings such as
the one in Osaka will sooner or later yield tangible results.
Leonid Kalashnikov, chairman of the Russian State Duma's Committee for the Commonwealth of
Independent States,
stated during a discussion on Russian state television, "As a result of some summit, we'll
somehow accomplish something one way or another. There's no escaping it."
He added, "[The Americans] roared and yelled after the 1917 revolution, but by 1930 almost
all diplomatic ties were restored. They will probably deal with Crimea the same way."
Professor Dmitry Suslov from the Higher School of Economics expressed a similar perspective
to the National Interest prior to the Trump-Putin meeting. He told me that Moscow is
confident that if it stays on course, then Washington will at some point come around.
"I don't think Russia will considerably harden its position; it most certainly will not make
any concessions," he said. "Russia will just wait until the United States will begin to change
its policy [towards Russia] by its own initiative for domestic- and foreign-policy
reasons."
Earlier this year, Russia's deputy foreign minister, Sergei Ryabkov, described Moscow's policy to Washington as
"strategic patience" in an interview with Russian foreign-policy monthly International
Affairs .
He stated that it was the Americans themselves, "who at one time used the term 'strategic
patience,' which seems appropriate to describe the line that, it seems, should be pursued in
relations with Washington for the foreseeable future," by Russia.
The term "strategic patience" was commonly used to describe the Obama administration's
approach towards North Korea. Under the policy, Washington would avoid escalating against
Pyongyang, but also refrain from making any concessions unless North Korea made the first
move.
According to Suslov, Russia's "strategic patience" approach is based on two assumptions.
First, political polarization inside the United States will eventually subside. Once a new
domestic consensus emerges in the United States, it will be easier for whoever is in the Oval
Office to pursue a normalization of ties with Russia.
Second, the United States will realize over the next five to ten years that it cannot
simultaneously confront both China and Russia. Beijing's growing economic and military power
will incentivize the United States to make a play for better relations with Russia.
What does Russia plan on doing until such a shift in Washington's attitude towards Moscow
occurs, assuming it happens at all? Suslov explained that Russia's primary objective for now is
damage control.
"It is essential that we work with the United States to control the conflict and prevent a
direct military confrontation," he said. "To do that, it is critical to meet to discuss
questions of strategic stability and regional conflicts."
In the case of Europe, there are some signs that Moscow's "strategic patience" game plan is
yielding some dividends. Last week, Parliamentary Association of the Council of Europe (PACE)
voted to reinstate Russia's membership without any concessions on the Kremlin's part.
Russia had been suspended from the European human-rights organization after its 2014 annexation
of Crimea.
Should allies of newly inaugurated Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky triumph in the
country's parliamentary elections on July 21, the former comedian who ran on the platform of
restarting dialogue with Russia may feel emboldened
to move in that direction.
As the 2020 election season heats up, Washington is quite unlikely to pursue any significant
outreach towards Russia. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress view the Kremlin with
suspicion, and the
attitude of the general public is not much more favorable. Nevertheless, Moscow is betting
that somewhere down the line, Washington will change its mind about Russia. All it has to do is
keep the door open and wait.
Dimitri Alexander Simes is a contributor to the National Interest .
In his interview with the FT' s Lionel Barber, Putin appeared as much an analyst of,
as an advocate for, the nationalism and populism that seems to be succeeding the 20th-century
liberalism of the West.
Why is liberalism failing? Several causes, said Putin. Among them, its failure to deal with
the crisis of the age: mass and unchecked illegal migration. Putin praised Trump's efforts to
secure the U.S. border:
"This liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of
the overwhelming majority of the population. This liberal idea presupposes that migrants can
kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be
protected."
Putin deplored Chancellor Angela Merkel's 2015 decision to bring into Germany a million
refugees from Syria's civil war.
His comments came as 10 Democratic candidates in the second presidential primary debate were
raising their hands in support of the proposition that breaking into the USA should cease to be
a crime and those who succeed in breaking in should be given free health care.
Putin also sees the social excesses of multiculturalism and secularism in the West as
representing a failure of liberalism.
In a week where huge crowds celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall "uprising" in
Greenwich Village, as it is now called, with parties and parades, Putin declared:
"Have we forgotten that all of us live in a world based on biblical values? I am not trying
to insult anyone because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia. But we have no
problem with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish."
He added, "But some things do appear excessive to us. They claim now that children can play
five or six gender roles."
Elton John pronounced himself "deeply upset."
Putin did not back off: "Let everyone be happy But this must not be allowed to overshadow
the culture, traditions and traditional family values of millions of people making up the core
population."
Putin took power, two decades ago, as this 21st century began. In recent years, he has
advanced himself not only as a foe of liberalism but a champion of populism, traditionalism and
nationalism.
Nor is he hesitant to declare his views regarding U.S. politics.
Of Trump, Putin says, "He is a talented person (who) knows very well what his voters expect
of him. Trump looked into his opponent's attitude toward him and saw changes in American
society."
Recalling his own controversial comment that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the
greatest tragedy of the 20th century, Putin said the tragedy was not the death of Communism but
the shattering of the Russian Federation into 15 separate nations.
The tragedy was the "dispersal of ethnic Russians" across the newly independent successor
states of the Soviet Union: "25 million ethnic Russians found themselves living outside the
Russian Federation. Is this not a tragedy? A huge one! And family relations? Jobs? Travel? It
was nothing but a disaster."
What may be said of Putin?
He is no Stalin, no Communist ideologue, but rather a Russian nationalist who seeks the
return of her lost peoples to the Motherland, and, seeing his country as a great power, wants
NATO out of his front yard.
While we have issues with him on arms control, Iran and Venezuela, we have a common interest
in avoiding a war with this nuclear-armed nation as we did with the far more menacing Soviet
Empire of the Cold War.
Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of Nixon's White House Wars: The Battles That Made and
Broke a President and Divided America Forever.
No quibbles at all. I hope more Americans see beyond superficial press coverage of the
whole Ukraine issue and understand that the US was perceived by Moscow - correctly - as being
deeply involved in the Ukraine 2014 debacle. James Brennan even came to call in April - very
odd move by a CIA Chief. I'll go one step farther. I think it possible that Trump's
association with Manafort was viewed by Brennan as threatening his narrative of Russia as an
aggressive villain - and that was one idea Brennan could not allow into the public arena. For
more on this line of thought, check some of the recent talks given by "realist" guru John
Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and his critique of liberal hegemony.
Putin is right. I have been impressed with several of Putin's speeches over the years.
Glad to read commentary on his speech here at TAC - this is the first place where I even
learned of this speech.
"The two joked about how both are afflicted with a media that generates constant fake
news." - Buchanan. In other words, we prefer the many lies mis-characterized as truth to fool
the uninformed and massage the base.
"Negotiations on Kim's nuclear weapons may be back on track." - Buchanan. Who doubts Kim
Jong Un is going to play Trump like a fiddle?
"This liberal idea presupposes that migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity
because their rights as migrants have to be protected." - Putin. More right wing propaganda
for the clueless.
"Putin declared: "Have we forgotten that all of us live in a world based on biblical
values? " Yeah, sure. Putin and Trump. Two devout saints just trying to make the world a
better place for all. Kumbaya, praise The Lord, and pass the wafers...
I think of Putin as "Catherine the Great" working to make Russia as great and powerful as
it can be. I think Pres. Trump probably could have greatly improved US-Russian relations had
his first term not been poisoned by this ridiculous collusion scam. Perhaps next term.
I am having some difficulty figuring out what is the point of this piece. Buchanan seems
to support the cause of populism, nationalism, and traditionalism, while at the same time
pointing out that the champions are imprisoning, oppressing, and killing innocents. Yay?
Buchanan also seems to take at face value Putin's supposed analysis of the West to a Western
journalist. Buchanan might wonder what Putin the Nationalist thinks of Ukrainian nationalism,
or Chechen nationalism.
Buchanan might also question Putin the Populist's fraudulent elections, murder of
journalists, and propaganda machine. He might also wonder what Putin the Anti-liberal meant
when he stated, in his speech at the opening of the largest mosque in Europe, "Right from its
creation, Russia has always been a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country. This mutual
enrichment of different cultures, traditions and religions has always been our country's
distinguishing feature and strength."
For those of you who would like to read Putin's speech, which could have just as easily
been delivered by Obama (just change the word "Russia" for "America"), here is the link:
http://en.kremlin.ru/events...
Patrick J Buchanan is right when he says about Russia: "We have a common interest in
avoiding a war with this nuclear-armed nation " But I would respectfully disagree that the
Cold War was a "far more menacing" time. The Cold War was the peace, a post-world war
environment: we now live in a pre-world war environment. Humanity has experienced long
periods of peace (or relative peace) throughout history. The Thirty Years Peace between the
two Peloponnesian Wars, Pax Romana, Europe in the 19th century after the Congress of Vienna,
to name a few. The Congress System finally collapsed in 1914 with the start of World War One.
That conflict was followed by the League of Nations. It did not stop World War Two.
That was followed by the United Nations and other post-war institutions. But all the
indications are they will not prevent a third world war.
https://www.ghostsofhistory...
Of course Vladimir Putin is right on the money as he has been about many other things but
he's been vilified and demonized in the Western media to the point that even if an average
Westerner (much less a politician) agrees with him they will never admit as such in
public.
"In the modern world, the decision is up to the woman herself," Russia's president said in
his annual marathon press conference on Wednesday, which ran to just shy of four hours. Any
attempt to suppress it, he added, would only push the practice underground, causing immense
damage to women's health.
Putin also cautioned against tightening the country's historically liberal laws on
abortion any further, saying that any decision on future regulation "must be careful,
considered and based on the general mood in society and the moral and ethical norms that have
developed in society."
"... The control of the energy corridors is of capital importance. By accusing Iran of attempting to " interrupt the flow of oil through the Straights of Hormuz ", Mike Pompeo announced that " the United States will defend freedom of navigation ". In other words, he has announced that the United States want to gain military control of this key area for energy supplies, including for Europe, by preventing above all the transit of Iranian oil (to which Italy and other European countries cannot in any case enjoy free access because of the US embargo). ..."
"... Natural gas might also have arrived directly in Italy from Russia, and from there be distributed to other European countries with notable economical advantages, via the South Stream route through the Black Sea. But the pipeline, already in an advanced stage of construction, was blocked in 2014 by the pressure of the United States and European Union itself, with heavy prejudice for Italy. ..."
"... In fact it was the reproduction of North Stream which continued, making Germany the centre of triage for Russian gas.. Then, on the basis of the " USA/EU strategic cooperation in the energy field " agreement stipulated in July 2018, US exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to the EU tripled. The triage centre was in Poland, from which was distributed the " Freedom Gas " which also arrived in Ukraine. ..."
"... Washington's objective is strategic – to hurt Russia by replacing Russian gas in Europe with US gas ..."
"... So what does Matteo Salvini have to say about all that? When he arrived in the " greatest democracy in the Western world ", he proudly declared - " I am part of a government which in Europe is no longer satisfied with breadcrumbs " ..."
Manlio Dinucci invites us to take a step back. He replaces the sabotage of these petrol tankers, for which Washington
accuses Teheran, in the context of the global energy policy of the United States. By doing so, he demonstrates that, contrary to
appearances, Mike Pompeo is not targeting Iran, but Europe.
While the United States prepared a new escalation of tension in the Middle East by accusing
Iran of attacking petrol tankers in the Gulf of Oman, Italian vice-Prime Minister Matteo
Salvini met with one of the artisans of this strategy in Washington, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, assuring him that " Italy wants to regain its place as the major partner on the
European continent of the greatest Western democracy ". Thereby he has allied Italy with the
operation launched by Washington.
The " Gulf of Oman affair " , a casus belli against Iran, is a carbon copy of the " Gulf of
Tonkin affair " of 4 August 1964, itself used as a casus belli to bomb North Vietnam, which was
accused of having attacked a US torpedo boat (an accusation which was later proved to be
false).
Today, a video released by Washington shows the crew of an alleged Iranian patrol boat
removing an unexploded mine from the hull of a petrol tanker in order to conceal its origin
(because the mine would allegedly have borne the inscription " Made in Iran ").
With this " proof " - a veritable insult to our intelligence - Washington is attempting to
camouflage the goal of the operation. It is part of the strategy aimed at controlling the world
reserves of oil and natural gas and their energy corridors [ 1 ]. It is no coincidence that Iran
and Iraq are in US crosshairs. Their total oil reserves are greater than those of Saudi Arabia,
and five times greater than those of the United States. Iranian reserves of natural gas are
approximately 2.5 times those of the USA. Venezuela finds itself targeted by the USA for the
same reason, since it is the country which owns the greatest oil reserves in the world.
The control of the energy corridors is of capital importance. By accusing Iran of attempting
to " interrupt the flow of oil through the Straights of Hormuz ", Mike Pompeo announced that "
the United States will defend freedom of navigation ". In other words, he has announced that
the United States want to gain military control of this key area for energy supplies, including
for Europe, by preventing above all the transit of Iranian oil (to which Italy and other
European countries cannot in any case enjoy free access because of the US embargo).
Low-cost Iranian natural gas might also have reached Europe by way of a pipeline crossing
Iraq and Syria. But the project, launched in 2011, was destroyed by the USA/NATO operation to
demolish the Syrian state.
Natural gas might also have arrived directly in Italy from Russia, and from there be
distributed to other European countries with notable economical advantages, via the South
Stream route through the Black Sea. But the pipeline, already in an advanced stage of
construction, was blocked in 2014 by the pressure of the United States and European Union
itself, with heavy prejudice for Italy.
In fact it was the reproduction of North Stream which continued, making Germany the centre
of triage for Russian gas.. Then, on the basis of the " USA/EU strategic cooperation in the
energy field " agreement stipulated in July 2018, US exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to
the EU tripled. The triage centre was in Poland, from which was distributed the " Freedom Gas "
which also arrived in Ukraine.
Washington's objective is strategic – to hurt Russia by replacing Russian gas in
Europe with US gas. But we have no guarantees, neither on the price, nor on the time-scale for
US gas extracted from the bituminous shale by the technique known as fracking (hydraulic
fracturation), which is disastrous for the environment.
So what does Matteo Salvini have to say about all that? When he arrived in the " greatest
democracy in the Western world ", he proudly declared - " I am part of a government which in
Europe is no longer satisfied with breadcrumbs ". Manlio Dinucci
With all due respect Mr. Smith things have really gone down hill after Bush Sr. I'm talking
about direct attacks on the rights of American citizens. Bush Sr. (R) with his CIA drug dealing
with the help of Noriega. He purchased weapons with the proceeds to arm terrorist guerrilla
groups in Nicaragua. Bill Clinton (D) helped Bush Sr. as governor of Arkansas by covering up
any investigation targeting the operation and laundering their money through a state owned
bank. Bush Jr. (R) secured lands in Afghanistan in order to restart athe heroine trade by
growing poppy fields to process and ship back to the US. Obama (R) made sure the Mexican drug
cartels were well armed in order to launch a drug war that supported the Merida Initiative,
which allowed armed DEA, CIA and Mercenaries into Mexican territory. Trump (R) will be the
clean up hitter that will usher in the dollar collapse.
Mr. Smith do you really believe it is a coincidence that Rep 8 yrs, Dem 8yrs, Rep 8yrs, Dem
8yrs, Rep 3 yrs are voted in? Please sir, don't fool yourself because in the next election I
will bet money the orange fool will be president for another 4 years unless the owners don't
want him there. But we can safely say that history tells us he will. All I'm saying that people
like you, waiting for someone to throw you a rope because you've fallen into deep water are
waiting on a rescue boat that doesn't care if you drown.
Your best bet for change was thrown away when Dr. Ron Paul failed to be nominated. Us dumb
asses in Mexico didn't need another election fraud this time around! The people started YouTube
channels that reported the "real" news (Chapucero – Quesadillas de Verdades –
Charro Politico – Sin Censura, etc.). Those channels made a big difference, countering
the negative reporting by Mexican and US MSM that the Presidential Candidate for MORENA as
"Leftist", "Communist", "Socialist", "Like Hugo Chavez", "Dangerous", etc.
With all of the US propaganda, Mexican propaganda, the negative MSM and Elite financing,
Mexicans knew they had to get out and vote in record numbers and they did! Otherwise a close
election was seen as another loss and the end of Mexico as a country. People were ready to
fight and die if necessary. They had seen the Energy Reforms forced down our throat by the
corrupt PRI/PAN parties (Mex version o DEM/REP), with the help of Hillary Clinton and the US
State Department. They drafting the changes needed to the Mexican Constitution to allow a vote.
Totally against the Law in Mexico and I'm sure the laws of the US.
There is a saying that goes something like, "If you're not ready to die for Freedom, take it
out of your Vocabulary"!
Wars are necessary for the maintaining and expanding the US controlled neoliberal empire. Wars is the health of military
industrial complex.
The Deep State will bury any candidate who will try to change the USA forign policy. Looks
what happened to Trump. He got Russiagate just for vey modest proposal of detente with Russia
(of course not only for that, but still...)
Notable quotes:
"... The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they lied us into. ..."
Those are interesting proposals but wishful thinking: wars are necessary for Electing Tulsi Gabbard as our next Commander in Chief will not solve our biggest problems
alone.
Her candidacy, I believe , must be augmented by two new laws which should be demanded by the
taxpayer and enforced by her administration on "day one".
The first is "The War Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ Retroactive to 2002, it states
that any and all individuals who conspired to defraud the United States into illegal war of
aggression should be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any and all
assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit . to pay down the cost of the wars they
lied us into.
If they lied us into war .they pay for it NOT the US taxpayer.
The second is " The Terror Fraud Accountability Act of 2020″ also retroactive to 2001,
it states that any and all individuals found to have engaged in plotting, planning, or staging
"false terror events" will be held accountable to the fullest extent of the law. Moreover, any
and all of the assets owned by these individuals shall be made forfeit to pay down the cost of
our War on Terror.
Americans should not have to sacrifice one cent of their tax dollars to pay for their own
defrauding by "staged" or "phony" terror events.
I believe that were Tulsi to be elected, she should set up two new task forces designed
especially for these reasons, Try to think of them as the " Office of Special Plans" IN
REVERSO.!.
Moreover she should hold weekly press briefings to notify the taxpayer of her progress, and
also how much of our 23 trillion in losses , FROM THEIR LIES, she has been able to recoup.
Getting these two initiatives up and running is the most potent force the taxpayers have in
cleaning out the fraud and larceny in DC, .ending our illegal wars overseas .. and
(finally)holding our "establishment elite " accountable for "LYING US INTO THEM"
It is way overdue for the American Taxpayer to take back control of our government from
those who ALMOST BANKRUPTED OUR ENTIRE NATION BY LYING US INTO ILLEGAL WARS.
It is not enough any more just to complain or "kvetch" about our problems .put on your
thinking caps .and start coming up with solutions and initiatives .start fighting for your
freedom, your finances and your future.
Elect the leaders YOU WANT and tell them exactly what you want them to do!
Tulsi has promised us all "SERVICE OVER SELF"
There you go !
I say that means not only ENDING our ILLEGAL, CRIMINAL WARS .but GETTING AS MUCH OF OUR
MONEY BACK from those who lied us into them !
ACCOUNTABILITY FOR WAR FRAUD it is $23,000,000,000,000.00. in "heinous debt" .overdue!
"... "Question: Mr President, you have given an extensive overview of different topics. A short time after you last met with Donald Trump, the Americans introduced new sanctions against Russia. Could you tell if you received some reassurances from Donald Trump that no new sanctions will follow this time, or do you think sanctions may be imposed again? Or are you confident that there will no more sanctions? ..."
"... "Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. This is not our business; it is up to the United States to think about how they should build relations with Russia. I think we have mutual understanding that we should somehow get out of the situation that has emerged so far. But this is the same as with our colleagues and partners from the UK. It is an abnormal situation, it must be simply rectified; we must somehow find the strength to turn the page, to move on and to look to the future. It is the same in relations with the United States. ..."
"... "Let me reiterate, I meet with US businesspeople, including at the St Petersburg Economic Forum. 550 people went there. They want to work. That means jobs, that means goals the President of the United State is trying to achieve. I actually said in that interview that after the globalisation processes led to such big growth of the world economy, even the middle class in the United States felt they were left behind. While large corporation made huge profits, their management got a lot of advantages as did their partners, the middle class did not, not very much. Wages remained the same, and the standard of living began to grow a little. Jobs are needed and conditions to raise real incomes of US citizens. To achieve that they need to expand cooperation and work with everyone, including Russia. ..."
"... "They restricted the operation of their companies in the Russian market. We made calculations across some European countries, and it really amounts to lost profits. Cutting exports (our imports are their exports) amounts to tens of billions of euros. That means jobs, either job cuts or jobs that were not created. The same applies to the United States. I hope that sanity will prevail in the end." ..."
"... That is a polite way of saying that sanity is not prevailing at the moment. Putin pointing out that there is nothing Russia can do about the current relationship between the US and Russia leaves no illusions as to who the insane party is. It is not within Russia's power to make America sane. There are no magic words they can utter to fix what ails the US. ..."
"... Globalization is simply a neoliberal economic substitute for colonialism. ..."
"... Neoliberals contrary to popular opinion do not believe in self-regulating markets as autonomous entities. They do not see democracy as necessary for capitalism. ..."
"... The neoliberal globalist world is not a borderless market without nations but a doubled world (economic -global and social- national) . The global economic world is kept safe from democratic national demands for social justice and equality, and in return each nation enjoys cultural freedom. ..."
"... Neoliberals see democracy as a real problem. Democracy means the unwashed masses can threaten the so called market economy (in fact manipulated and protected markets) with worker demands for living wages and equality and consumer demands for competitive pricing and safe products. Controlling both parties with money prevents that. ..."
"... In fact, neoliberal thinking is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes in one respect : "the market does not and cannot take care of itself". ..."
"... Neoliberals insulate the markets by providing safe harbor for capital, free from fear of infringement by policies of progressive taxation or redistribution. They do this by redesigning government, laws, and other institutions to protect the market. ..."
"... For example the stock market is propped up by the Feds purchases of futures, replacing the plunge protection teams intervention at an even more extreme level. Manipulation of economic statistics by the BLS also serve a similar purpose. ..."
"... What you described is precisely a symptom of falling profitability. Financialisation, for example, only increases when the "real economy" is not profiting enough anymore. ..."
"... "If you try to understand how so many jobs have disappeared, the answer that you come up with over and over again in the data is that it's not trade that caused that -- it's primarily technology," Eighty percent of lost jobs were not replaced by workers in China, but by machines and automation. That is the first problem if you slap on tariffs. What you discover is that American companies are likely to replace its more expensive workers with machines." ..."
"... More evidence for Marx's Law: the USA was a victim of its own success, not of its own failures, nor because of alien enemies. ..."
In case there are others aside from myself interested in the G-20 outcomes, here are a few
links to what IMO's important. Go here to get the links to the
three main documents G-20 produced: "G20 Osaka Leaders Declaration," "Osaka declaration on
digital economy," and "G20 Osaka leaders' statement on preventing exploitation of the
internet for terrorism and violent extremism conductive to terrorism (VECT)." Pepe
Escobar's recap . Transcript of Putin's post G20 news
conference.
I hoped when I added the presser link to the Putin interview thread and hinted there
were connections between them that another line of analysis would develop, but it seems
participants were way to immersed/invested in the liberalism debate to bother.
From the press conference, I'd like to point-out one of the Q&As related to the
illegal sanctions regime, economic development and how they interact with Trump's 2016
Campaign Pledges as we begin the 2020 election cycle:
"Question: Mr President, you have given an extensive overview of different topics.
A short time after you last met with Donald Trump, the Americans introduced new sanctions
against Russia. Could you tell if you received some reassurances from Donald Trump that
no new sanctions will follow this time, or do you think sanctions may be imposed again?
Or are you confident that there will no more sanctions?
"Vladimir Putin: I have no idea. This is not our business; it is up to the United
States to think about how they should build relations with Russia. I think we have mutual
understanding that we should somehow get out of the situation that has emerged so far.
But this is the same as with our colleagues and partners from the UK. It is an abnormal
situation, it must be simply rectified; we must somehow find the strength to turn the
page, to move on and to look to the future. It is the same in relations with the United
States.
"I told you that we reasserted our wish to support the business community's proposal
regarding tools for the support of business initiatives. But it shows that the incumbent
Administration has intentions to somehow continue with this abnormal situation. I spoke
about our trade with the United States and with some other partners. Obviously, $25
billion in trade does not meet our interests and does not reflect our potential.
"That is why I have no idea if they will do anything or not. At any rate, one thing is
sure – we are not going to ask for anything. No means no. And if there is interest,
we will respond in kind and will do everything we can to turn the situation around.
"Let me reiterate, I meet with US businesspeople, including at the St Petersburg
Economic Forum. 550 people went there. They want to work. That means jobs, that means
goals the President of the United State is trying to achieve. I actually said in that
interview that after the globalisation processes led to such big growth of the world
economy, even the middle class in the United States felt they were left behind. While
large corporation made huge profits, their management got a lot of advantages as did
their partners, the middle class did not, not very much. Wages remained the same, and the
standard of living began to grow a little. Jobs are needed and conditions to raise real
incomes of US citizens. To achieve that they need to expand cooperation and work with
everyone, including Russia.
"They restricted the operation of their companies in the Russian market. We made
calculations across some European countries, and it really amounts to lost profits.
Cutting exports (our imports are their exports) amounts to tens of billions of euros.
That means jobs, either job cuts or jobs that were not created. The same applies to the
United States. I hope that sanity will prevail in the end."
It appears that Trump needs to end his Trade and Sanctions Wars (although all the
illegal sanctions aren't his doing) in order to bolster his reelection chances. The
questions are, Will the sanction hawks like Mnuchin try to impede such a policy change
since it seems to be required for domestic politics and How will D-Party candidates treat
the issue, particularly as several are hooked on Russiagate Koolaid?
And do please note the question about the interview at the end, Putin's answer and how
he put in within the context of the G20!
Great quote of Putin by karlof1 @39. That final sentence says much, though:
"I hope that sanity will prevail in the end"
That is a polite way of saying that sanity is not prevailing at the moment. Putin
pointing out that there is nothing Russia can do about the current relationship between the
US and Russia leaves no illusions as to who the insane party is. It is not within Russia's
power to make America sane. There are no magic words they can utter to fix what ails the
US.
A minor correction to dh-mtl @59 where it was claimed "[The globalists] lost power from
the mid-1930s to 1980."
The globalists were never actually out of power in the US. Instead they were confronted
with a massive upsurge in radical organized labor that threatened to remove them from
power. The globalists had to make very significant concessions to buy time for that labor
uprising to subside. That happened to take almost half a century, but throughout that
period the globalists retained power, though in a somewhat weakened form. They are back at
full strength now
'But to say any one nation "produced" the current global market economic system is a bit
like saying Yahweh created all the heavens and the earth in 6 days.'
I never suggested that 'one nation' produced this global system.
What I was suggesting is that perhaps the financial elites who benefit from, as you
describe it, a 'financial system created by and for the wealthiest elites wherever they may
call home', and who controlled Reagan and Clinton and W and Obama, Blair and Cameron and
Macron and Merkel and Aznar in Spain, etc., etc., and hundreds of MEPs in the European
parliament, and who created the U.S. Deep State, control virtually all of western
main-stream media, and who place their people in control of institutions such as the World
Bank, and IMF, and UN and WTO and BIS, and who decide the fate of the world every year at
Davos and the Bilderberg conference, might have had something the do with creating the laws
and treaties that created that system.
This sounds like a pretty effective political system to me, though definitely not
democratic.
Carter agreed to appoint Volker in order to save the bondholders by destroying the
domestic economy with interest rates over 20% which is what actually cost him the 1980
election. In 1978, McNamara was sent off to the World Bank to work in tandem with IMF to
begin the imposition of the euphemized Structural Adjustment Programs--the globalized
version of Neoliberalism.
'the Trump-nationalists and Brexiteers do not offer an effective solution to problem of
wealth inequality which is your complaint'.
Wealth inequality is not my complaint. My point is that 'dictatorship', whether it be in
the hands of 'wealthy global elites', military or other, cannot achieve acceptable outcomes
for a large, complex, modern society, and that excessive wealth inequality is a sure
indicator of dictatorship.
The Trump-nationalists and Brexiteers may not have an effective solution. But they are
convinced that what has been going on in their societies over the past 30 plus years has
definitely not worked for them either. My analysis is that they are trying to return to the
conditions in which the outcomes were much better for them.
My own conviction is that acceptable outcomes for a society can only be achieved when
the political leaders are working on behalf of the society as a whole, rather than for a
narrow privileged group, and especially a group that has little or no allegiance to the
nation-state, whose boundaries define the society.
When the political leaders are truly working on behalf of the population as a whole,
there is a wide variety of policy options that can work. Trial and error over time will
ensure that the policy options that are most appropriate for a particular society and its
circumstances will eventually emerge.
Globalization is simply a neoliberal economic substitute for colonialism.
Neoliberals contrary to popular opinion do not believe in self-regulating markets as
autonomous entities. They do not see democracy as necessary for capitalism.
The neoliberal globalist world is not a borderless market without nations but a doubled
world (economic -global and social- national) . The global economic world is kept safe from
democratic national demands for social justice and equality, and in return each nation
enjoys cultural freedom.
Neoliberals see democracy as a real problem. Democracy means the unwashed masses can
threaten the so called market economy (in fact manipulated and protected markets) with
worker demands for living wages and equality and consumer demands for competitive pricing
and safe products. Controlling both parties with money prevents that.
In fact, neoliberal thinking is comparable to that of John Maynard Keynes in one respect
: "the market does not and cannot take care of itself".
The neoliberal project did not liberate markets so much as protect them by protecting
capitalism against the threat of democracy and to reorder the world where borders provide a
captive market
Neoliberals insulate the markets by providing safe harbor for capital, free from fear of
infringement by policies of progressive taxation or redistribution. They do this by
redesigning government, laws, and other institutions to protect the market.
For example the stock market is propped up by the Feds purchases of futures, replacing
the plunge protection teams intervention at an even more extreme level. Manipulation of
economic statistics by the BLS also serve a similar purpose.
Another example is getting government to accept monopoly capitalism over competitive
capitalism and have appointed judges who believe illegal collusion is nothing more than
understandable and legal "conscious parallelism"
What you described is precisely a symptom of falling profitability. Financialisation,
for example, only increases when the "real economy" is not profiting enough anymore.
It's important to highlight that the tendency of the profit rate to fall doesn't
necessarily means a company is losing money, but just that the profit rate is secularly
decreasing. Since it's a tendency, it also doesn't mean this fall happens linearly: capital
still operates in cycles. However, over the long term, profit rates will fall, no matter
what.
The biggest reason Trump can't bring back home these manufacturing jobs is because they
have been lost in large part to the success of 'efficiency' in the US Over the past
three-and-a-half decades, manufacturers have shed more than seven million jobs while
producing more stuff than ever. The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) reported in The
Manufacturing Footprint and the Importance of U.S. Manufacturing Jobs that
"If you try
to understand how so many jobs have disappeared, the answer that you come up with over
and over again in the data is that it's not trade that caused that -- it's primarily
technology," Eighty percent of lost jobs were not replaced by workers in China, but by
machines and automation. That is the first problem if you slap on tariffs. What you
discover is that American companies are likely to replace its more expensive workers with
machines."
More evidence for Marx's Law: the USA was a victim of its own success, not of its own
failures, nor because of alien enemies.
When we speak of unadulterated capitalism and capital, we start with the most basic
capital we have, our hands. If I go and LABOUR by planting a tree and caring for it, the
fruit I consider mine. I might give those away at choice, or exchange them for something
else of value. That something eventually became known as money, a commonly recognised unit,
it's strength being that it could not be replicated, and its worth accepted in a wider
market by others. The fruit of a persons labour was transmitted to descendants and family
in tradition, in a society that respected that tradition. The whole process is very very
personal, including where extended business starts appearing.
Now, you want me to both accept taxation, where to not compete is a losing proposition,
and to accept that finance is able to conjure up replica money using that taxation as
basis, with which I have to compete with own earnings that are steadily purposefully
diluted - I take it very very very personally. What are you going to offer me, subsidy from
the pooled value now under your control ? Because it is a social and "fair" management of
reality ? Communism and socialism do not work, they remove the most natural good incentives
a person can have to actually go out and achieve anything, they dull what are otherwise
lively common understandings, they diminish societies that otherwise have open appreciation
for the effort of others. They try to own those, and they end up as dictatorships to try to
impose an own ideological dream. The same can be said of crony capitalism, which approaches
fascism.
That is why I subscribe to minarchic classical liberal notions of organisation, with
hard money and transparency of finance, as compromise. You know Iran and Saudi are gold
backed, don't you. You can figure out from that part of what is going on, maybe.
https://cdn.districtm.io/ids/index.html Russia's oil production in June was 50,000 bpd below
the level Moscow had pledged under the OPEC and non-OPEC production cut agreement, Russian
Energy Minister Alexander Novak said on Monday, as carried by Russian news agency Interfax .
As part of the OPEC+ production cuts between January and June, Russia is taking the lion's
share of the non-OPEC cuts and pledged to reduce production by
230,000 bpd from October's post-Soviet record level of 11.421 million bpd, to 11.191
million bpd.
Washington's recent attempt t o use the tragic downing of Malaysian flight MH-17 over the
Donbass region of Ukraine, which occurred on July 17, 2014 is nothing short of pathetic.
Instead of making an attempt to bring to justice those responsible for this crime it tries
instead to unleash yet another wave of anti-Russian hysteria. In this situation, it's only
logical that this latest attempt has gone down in flames yet again.
It would seem that everything was done in accordance with a carefully drafted script. We've
had a major media show with the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) coming forward to announce that
the investigation was nearing closure. It's curious that among those countries that have sent
their representatives to JIT one can find Ukraine, a possible perpetrator of the attack on
MH-17, alongside the Netherlands, Australia, Malaysia, and Belgium. Then we had the typical bad
guy – Russia, that in the opinion of the JIT was most certainly responsible for the
downing of MH-17 and the untimely demise of 298 people. Western puppets would even go as far as
to release the names of four people allegedly responsible for the attack.
As for the puppeteers, they would use the head of the US Department of State, Michael Pompeo
for making appeals to Russia to immediately put in jail those people the JIT described as
perpetrators.
However, this entire propaganda push would only work on day-to-day consumers of American
media, who still believe that Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi "got what they deserved" and
that Iran and North Korea somehow represent some sort of threat to the international community.
However, there's an ever growing number of people in the world who wouldn't fall for such lies
anymore, as they've seen them all too often before.
There's little doubt that the Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad is among such
people, as he made it
pretty clear that there's no proof whatsoever of Russia's involvement in the downing of
MH-17. In fact, he would claim that:
" We are very unhappy because from the very beginning it became a political issue on
how to accuse Russia of the wrongdoing So far there is no proof. Only hearsay."
In turn, the founder of the conservative Dutch party Forum for Democracy, Thierry Baudet
would announce that he has no confidence whatsoever in the JIT and its impartiality, while
pointing out that Ukraine must be responsible for this attack.
According to Heise, there's
no doubt that Kiev is fully responsible for this tragedy, as it had failed to close the
airspace over the contested territories of Donbass and withheld evidence from the
investigation. It would add that the Dutch Safety Board was conducting its own investigation of
the downing and at some point was convinced that Kiev was behind this attack, however it left a
legal loophole for Kiev for it to escape any consequences. As for Russia, Heise argues, it was
decided to name it responsible for this tragedy, since Ukraine was acting on Washington's
behalf in this downing and it will continue enjoying its protection.
It's curious that t he JIT final report has left a lot of questions unanswered, most of them
emerge due to the absence of any actual evidence that could allow this body to allocate
responsibility for the catastrophe to some party and could be used in court. Yet, the
Netherlands and Australia were quick to announce that they had no doubt whatsoever, even though
JIT would cite pictures and messages taken from social media as their sources of information.
It didn't bother those behind the so-called final report that they had no access to the
Pentagon's satellite images and any sort of data from Ukrainian radars, even though those could
serve as actual evidence along with similar data Russia provided to shed light on the actual
perpetrators of the attack.
The claims that certain Western media sources would make, about the downing of MH17
"rallying the West against Russia" can only be described as laughable, even though it's clear
that this was Washington's initial intention which led to the release of the "final report"
Yet another attempt to present Russia as a bogeyman has garnered no sympathy in Europe,
especially against the backdrop of revelations London has recently made about the role of its
intelligence agencies in the downing of PA 103 three decades ago. Back then a bomb that
exploded on board Pan American Flight 103, en route from London to New York was used to
undermine Libya and warrant the overthrow of its leader – Muammar Qaddafi. What this
false-flag essentially required was the falsification of evidence and the conviction in a
rigged court proceeding of the wrong man. The extent of that operation has recently been
exposed in a partial release of British Government documents from the UK ' s National
Archives.
It's been noted that those archive disclosures also show that the same modus operandi has
been under way since 2014 to fabricate blame for the destruction of Malaysia Airlines Flight
MH17 over Ukraine, and justify global sanctions against Russia, plus operations to overthrow
Vladimir Putin.
That is why Malaysia must take the investigation into its own hands and receive all the
necessary assistance from the international community to establish who was responsible for the
MH17 downing. It's clear that the JIT was more concerned with pleasing Washington than
establishing the truth.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
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Grete Mautner is an independent researcher and journalist from Germany, exclusively for
the online magazine " New Eastern
Outlook. "
The hostess at the seaside restaurant had an eastern European accent, so he asked her where
she was from. She said, "Belgrade, Serbia." He told her he was sorry for what the U.S.
government led by Bill Clinton had done to her country and that he considered Clinton a war
criminal. She said the bombing in 1999 was terrifying, and even though she was young at the
time, she vividly remembered it.
It traumatized her, her parents, and her family. Then she smiled and said that in the month
she had been in the U.S. for her summer job, all the Americans she had met had been so
friendly. He welcomed her to the U.S., and as he was walking away, he remembered that Clinton's
savage bombing of Serbia that had killed so many Serbian children and other innocents had been
code-named "Operation Noble Anvil."
He wondered what kind of "noble" people would think of innocent children as anvils: "heavy
usually steel-faced iron blocks on which metal is shaped," and did the friendly Americans
accept Clinton's sick lies when he ended his March 24, 1999 war address to the American people
with these words: "Our thoughts and prayers tonight must be with the men and women of our armed
forces, who are undertaking this mission for the sake of our values and our children's future.
May God bless them, and may God bless America."
"... The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and international skepticism attests. ..."
"... Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown. ..."
"... Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something of an argument that began: ..."
"... He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out. Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf. They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share. Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. ..."
"... Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. ..."
"... There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were, they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack ..."
"... Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But he's not done with the disinformation exercise: ..."
"... The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification ..."
It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is
responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today. This assessment is based
on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation,
recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the
area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high degree of sophistication.
This is only the latest in a series of attacks instigated by the Islamic Republic of Iran
and its surrogates against American and allied interests, and they should be understood in
the context of 40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.
The secretary of state delivered this appallingly Orwellian official assessment of the US
government within hours of the five explosions on two tankers, well before any credible
investigation establishing more than minimal facts could be carried out. As is his habit, Mike
Pompeo flatly lied about whatever might be real in the Gulf of Oman, and most American media
ran with the lies as if they were or might be true. There is almost no chance that Mike Pompeo
and the US government are telling the truth about this event, as widespread domestic and
international skepticism attests.
Pompeo's official assessment was false even in its staging. For most of his four-minute
appearance, Pompeo stood framed by two pictures behind him, each showing a tanker with a fire
amidships. This was a deliberate visual lie. The two pictures showed the same tanker, the
Norwegian-owned Front Altair , from different angles. The other tanker, Japanese-owned
Kokuka Courageous , did not catch fire and was not shown.
First, what actually happened, as best we can tell five days later? In the early morning of
June 13, two unrelated tankers were heading south out of the Strait of Hormuz, sailing in open
water in the Gulf of Oman, roughly 20 miles off the south coast of Iran. The tankers were most
likely outside Iran's territorial waters, but within Iran's contiguous zone as defined by the
UN Convention on
the Law of the Sea . At different times, some 30 miles apart, the two tankers were attacked
by weapons unknown, launched by parties unknown, for reasons unknown. The first reported
distress call was 6:12 a.m. local time. No one has yet claimed responsibility for either
attack. The crew of each tanker abandoned ship soon after the explosions and were rescued by
ships in the area, including Iranian naval vessels, who took the Front Altair crew to an
Iranian port.
Even this much was not certain in the early afternoon of June 13 when Mike Pompeo came to
the lectern at the State Department to deliver his verdict:
It is the assessment of the United States Government that the Islamic Republic of Iran is
responsible for the attacks that occurred in the Gulf of Oman today.
Pompeo did not identify the unnamed intelligence entities, if any, within the government who
made this assessment. He offered no evidence to support the assessment. He did offer something
of an argument that began:
This assessment is based on intelligence .
He didn't say what intelligence. He didn't say whose intelligence. American intelligence
assets and technology are all over the region generating reams of intelligence day in, day out.
Then there are the intelligence agencies of the Arab police states bordering the Persian Gulf.
They, too, are busy collecting intelligence 24/7, although they are sometimes loath to share.
Pompeo didn't mention it, but according to CNN an unnamed US official admitted that the US had
a Reaper Drone in the air near the two tankers before they were attacked. He also claimed that
Iran had fired a missile at the drone, but missed. As CNN inanely spins it, "it is the first
claim that the US has information of Iranian movements prior to the attack." As if the US
doesn't have information on Iranian movements all the time . More accurately, this is the first admission that the US had
operational weaponry in the area prior to the attack. After intelligence, Pompeo continued:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used .
Pompeo did not name a single weapon used. Early reporting claimed the attackers used
torpedoes or mines, a claim that became inoperative as it became clear that all the damage to
the tankers was well above the waterline. There is little reason to believe Pompeo had any
actual knowledge of what weapons were used, unless one was a Reaper Drone. He went on:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation
The "level of expertise needed" to carry out these attacks on a pair of sitting duck tankers
does not appear to be that great. Yes, the Iranian military probably has the expertise, as do
the militaries of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel, or others with a stake
in provoking a crisis in the region. And those who lack the expertise still have the money with
which to hire expert surrogates. The number of credible suspects, known and unknown, with an
interest in doing harm to Iran is easily in double figures. Leading any serious list should be
the US. That's perfectly logical, so Pompeo tried to divert attention from the obvious:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping .
There are NO confirmed "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," and even if there were,
they would prove nothing. Pompeo's embarrassingly irrelevant list that follows includes six
examples, only one of which involved a shipping attack. The one example was the May 12, 2019,
attack on four ships at anchor in the deep water port of Fujairah. Even the multinational
investigation organized by the UAE could not determine who did it. The UAE reported to the UN
Security Council that the perpetrator was likely some unnamed "state actor." The logical
suspects and their surrogates are the same as those for the most recent attack.
Instead of "recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping," Pompeo offers Iran's decades-old
threat to close the Strait of Hormuz (which it's never done), together with three attacks by
the Houthis on Saudi Arabia, an unattributed rocket attack on the US Embassy in Baghdad, and an
unattributed car bomb in Afghanistan. Seriously, if that's all he's got, he's got nothing. But
he's not done with the disinformation exercise:
This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed
to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no
proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high
degree of sophistication.
The whole proxy group thing is redundant, covered by "the level of expertise needed"
mentioned earlier. Pompeo doesn't name any proxy group here, he doesn't explain how he could
know there's no proxy group that could carry out such an attack, and he just throws word
garbage at the wall and hopes something sticks that will make you believe – no evidence
necessary – that Iran is evil beyond redemption:
Taken as a whole, these unprovoked attacks present a clear threat to international peace
and security, a blatant assault on the freedom of navigation, and an unacceptable campaign of
escalating tension by Iran.
The attacks in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all been provoked by the US and its
allies. The US has long been a clear threat to international peace and security, except when
the US was actually trashing peace and security, as it did in Iraq, as it seems to want to do
in Iran. There is, indeed, "an unacceptable campaign of escalating tension," but it's a
campaign by the US. The current phase began when the Trump administration pulled out of the
multinational nuclear deal with Iran. The US wages economic warfare on Iran even though Iran
continues to abide by the Trump-trashed treaty. All the other signatories and inspectors
confirm that Iran has abided by the agreement. But Iran is approaching a point of violation,
which it has been warning about for some time. The other signatories allow the US to bully them
into enforcing US sanctions at their own cost against a country in compliance with its
promises. China, Russia, France, GB, Germany, and the EU are all craven in the face of US
threats. That's what the US wants from Iran.
Lately, Trump and Pompeo and their ilk have been whining about not wanting war and claiming
they want to negotiate, while doing nothing to make negotiation more possible. Iran has
observed US actions and has rejected negotiating with an imperial power with a decades-long
record of bad faith. Lacking any serious act of good faith by the US, does Iran have any other
rational choice? Pompeo makes absolutely clear just how irrational, how dishonest, how
implacable and untrustworthy the US is when he accuses Iran of:
40 years of unprovoked aggression against freedom-loving nations.
This is Big Lie country. Forty years ago, the Iranians committed their original sin –
they overthrew one of the world's most brutal dictatorships, imposed on them by the US. Then
they took Americans hostage, and the US has been playing the victim ever since, out of all
proportion to reality or justice. But the Pompeos of this world still milk it for all it's
worth. What about "unprovoked aggression," who does that? The US list is long and criminal,
including its support of Saddam Hussein's war of aggression against Iran. Iran's list of
"unprovoked aggressions" is pretty much zero, unless you go back to the Persian Empire. No
wonder Pompeo took no question on his statement. The Big Lie is supposed to be enough.
The US is stumbling down a path toward war with no justification. Democrats should have
objected forcefully and continuously long since. Democrats in the House should have put peace
with Iran on the table as soon as they came into the majority. They should do it now.
Democratic presidential candidates should join Tulsi Gabbard and Elizabeth Warren in
forthrightly opposing war with Iran. Leading a huge public outcry may not keep the president
from lying us into war with Iran any more than it kept the president from lying us into war
with Iraq. But an absence of outcry will just make it easier for this rogue nation to commit a
whole new set of war crimes.
Intellectually, the case for normal relations with Iran is easy. There is literally no good
reason to maintain hostility, not even the possibility, remote as it is, of an Iranian nuclear
weapon (especially now that Trump is helping the Saudis go nuclear). But politically, the case
for normal relations with Iran is hard, especially because forty years of propaganda demonizing
Iran has deep roots. To make a sane case on Iran takes real courage: one has to speak truth to
a nation that believes its lies to itself.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism,
and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from
Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an
Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. This article was first
published in Reader Supported
News . Read
other articles by William .
The New York Times is outraged, just outraged! -- that US anti-tank missiles have been found
in "unknown" Libyan rebel hands .
Of course, when tons of American military hardware was covertly sent to al-Qaeda linked
"rebels" fighting to topple Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and when those same weapons were later
transferred to the anti-Assad insurgency in Syria , many of them no doubt used by ISIS and
al-Nusra Front, the mainstream media didn't find much to complain about. But now the "scandal"
is being uncovered in 2019?
Currently, it's the UN-backed government in Tripoli which finds itself on the receiving end
of deadly accurate high-tech US-made weapons systems, according to
the Times :
Libyan government fighters discovered a cache of powerful American missiles , usually sold
only to close American allies, at a captured rebel base in the mountains south of Tripoli
this week.
The four Javelin anti-tank missiles, which cost more than $170,000 each, had ended up
bolstering the arsenal of Gen. Khalifa Hifter , whose forces are waging a military campaign
to take over Libya and overthrow a government the United States supports.
Markings on the missiles' shipping containers indicate that they were originally sold to
the United Arab Emirates, an important American partner, in 2008.
... ... ...
The Times report noted further, "If the Emirates transferred the weapons to
General Hifter, it would likely violate the sales agreement with the United States as well as a
United Nations arms embargo ."
Gen. Haftar -- who
solidified control of Eastern Libya over the past two years and swept through the south
early this year, has sought to capture Tripoli and seize military control of the entire
country, with the support of countries like the UAE and France, but is strongly opposed by
Turkey and most European countries.
Haftar has long been described by many analysts as "the CIA's man in Libya" -- given he
spent a couple decades living in exile a mere few minutes from CIA headquarters in Langley,
Virginia during Gaddafi's rule.
He was inserted back onto the Libyan battlefield before Gaddafi's eventual capture and field
execution at the hands of NATO supported Islamist fighters in 2011. The NYT offered further
details of the US weapons recovered this week
as follows :
Markings on the missile crates identify their joint manufacturer, the arms giants Raytheon
and Lockheed Martin , and a contract number that corresponds with a $115 million order for
Javelin missiles that was placed by the United Arab Emirates and Oman in 2008.
Again, isn't it a little late for the mainstream media to somehow only now discover and care
about the "scandal" of major US weapons systems in "unknown rebel hands" ?
For a trip down memory lane, and to review just what Obama and Hillary's original Libya war
has wrought, see Dan Sanchez's 2015 essay,
"Where Does ISIS Get Those Wonderful Toys?"
The CIA knows where these weapons are. All POTUS' know where these weapons are. The
Israelis know where these weapons are. The Saudis and UK know where these weapons are. What
is the problem?
" "We take all allegations of misuse of U.S. origin defense articles very seriously," a
State Department official
said in a statement following the Javelin anti-tank missile recovery.
"We are aware of these reports and are seeking additional information. We expect all
recipients of U.S. origin defense equipment to abide by their end-use obligations," the
statement continued. "
Hilarious. Do they expect the "unknown" rebels to just return them? If they're unknown,
how do tehy know they're rebels?
But i guess they're not worried under Obama thousands of these missiles were supplied to
Islamic Terrorists in Syria. And now Trump gave the green light to supply more missiles to
Turkish Islamic Terrorists in Syria. That are slaughtering Thousands of Syrian soldiers with
these missiles.
"... Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as 'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be the new Stalin. He also made international statements that made the US-USSR relations much worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence with the West and pressed on for more World Revolution. ..."
"... It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising. ..."
Abrams is giving the West too much credit for the Sino-Soviet rift of the late 5os and 60s.
That was NOT the doing of the CIA or Western Europe. It was 90% the fault of Mao who tried
to shove Khrushchev aside as the head of world communism. Because Stalin had treated Mao
badly, Khrushchev wanted to make amends and treated Mao with respect. But Mao turned out to
be a total a-hole. There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate friendly gestures and
those who seek kindness as 'weakness'.
It's like Hitler saw Chamberlain's offer as weakness and pushed ahead. Being kind is nice,
but one should never be kind to psychopaths, and Khrushchev was nice to the wrong person.
Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as 'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be
the new Stalin. He also made international statements that made the US-USSR relations much
worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence with the West and pressed on for more
World Revolution.
He also ignored Soviet advice not to attempt radical economic policies (that were soon to
bring China to economic ruin -- at least Stalin's collectivization led to rise of industry;
in contrast, Mao managed to destroy both agriculture and heavy industry).
When Stalin was alive, he didn't treat Mao with any respect, and Mao disliked Stalin but
still respected him because Mao understood Power. With Stalin gone, Khrushchev showed Mao
some respect, but Mao felt no respect for Khrushchev who was regarded as a weakling and
sucker.
It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's
impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his
mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could
lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising.
Anyway, Putin and Xi, perhaps having grown up in less turbulent times, are more stable and
mature in character and temperament than Mao and Khrushchev. They don't see the Russo-China
relations as a zero sum game of ego but a way for which both sides can come to the table
halfway, which is all one can hope for.
"... " China by contrast has historically conducted statecraft based on the concept of a civilization state – under which its strength is not measured by the weakness and subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. " ..."
"... In my view the Usa had an excellent opportunity to enact in a positive way after WW2 but blew it. The main reason was the failure to live up to the above quoted characterisation of the Chinese. To encourage potential achievers in the best sense of the word. ..."
"... Instead the Us oligarchy held back independent and creative thinking and brainwashed the population, in a way that weakened them. Jfk tried to encourage his countrymen but other forces prevailed. ..."
A.B. Abrams: In the introduction to this work I highlight that a fundamental shift in world
order was facilitated by the modernization and industrialization of two Eastern nations –
Japan under the Meiji Restoration and the USSR under the Stalinist industrialization program.
Before these two events the West had retained an effective monopoly on the modern industrial
economy and on modern military force. Russia's image is still affected by the legacy of the
Soviet Union – in particular the way Soviet proliferation of both modern industries and
modern weapons across much of the region was key to containing Western ambitions in the Cold
War. Post-Soviet Russia has a somewhat unique position – with a cultural heritage
influenced by Mongolia and Central Asia as well as by Europe. Politically Russia remains
distinct from the Western Bloc, and perceptions of the country in East Asia have been heavily
influenced by this. Perhaps today one the greatest distinctions is Russia's eschewing of the
principle of sovereignty under international law and its adherence to a non-interventionist
foreign policy. Where for example the U.S., Europe and Canada will attempt to intervene in the
internal affairs of other parties – whether by cutting off parts for
armaments ,
imposing economic sanctions or even launching military interventions under humanitarian
pretexts – Russia lacks a history of such behavior which has made it a welcome presence
even for traditionally Western aligned nations such as the Philippines, Indonesia and South
Korea.
While the Western Bloc attempted to isolate the USSR from East and Southeast Asia by
supporting the spread of anticommunist thought, this pretext for shunning Russia collapsed in
1991. Today the West has had to resort to other means to attempt to contain and demonize the
country – whether labelling it a human rights abuser or threatening its economic and
defense partners with sanctions and other repercussions. The success of these measures in the
Asia-Pacific has varied – but as regional economies have come to rely less on the West
for trade and grown increasingly interdependent Western leverage over them and their foreign
policies has diminished.
Even when considered as a Western nation, the type of conservative Western civilization
which Russia may be seen to represent today differs starkly from that of Western Europe and
North America. Regarding a Russia Pivot to Asia, support for such a plan appears to have
increased from 2014 when relations with the Western Bloc effectively broke down. Indeed, the
Russia's future as a pacific power could be a very bright one – and as part of the up and
coming northeast Asian region it borders many of the economies which appear set to dominate in
the 21 st century – namely China, Japan and the Koreas. Peter the Great is
known to have issued in a new era of Russian prosperity by recognizing the importance of
Europe's rise and redefining Russia as a European power – moving the capital to St
Petersburg. Today a similar though perhaps less extreme pivot Eastwards towards friendlier and
more prosperous nations may be key to Russia's future.
The Saker: We hear many observers speak of an informal but very profound and even
game-changing partnership between Putin's Russia and Xi's China. The Chinese even speak of a "
strategic comprehensive partnership of coordination for the new era ". How would you
characterize the current relationship between these two countries and what prospects do you see
for a future Russian-Chinese partnership?
A.B. Abrams: A Sino-Russian alliance has long been seen in both the U.S. and in Europe as
one of the greatest threats to the West's global primacy and to Western-led world order. As
early as 1951 U.S. negotiators meeting with Chinese delegations to end the Korean War were
instructed to focus on the differences in the positions of Moscow and Beijing in an attempt to
form a rift between the two. Close Sino-Soviet cooperation seriously stifled Western designs
for the Korean Peninsula and the wider region during that period, and it was repeatedly
emphasized that the key to a Western victory was to bring about a Sino-Soviet split. Achieving
this goal by the early 1960s and bringing the two powers very near to a total conflict
significantly increased prospects for a Western victory in the Cold War, with the end of the
previously united front seriously undermining nationalist and leftist movements opposing
Western designs from Africa and the Middle East to Vietnam and Korea. Both states learned the
true consequences of this in the late 1980s and early 1990s when there was a real risk of total
collapse under Western pressure. Attempts to bring an end to China's national revolution
through destabilization failed in 1989, although the USSR was less fortunate and the results
for the Russian population in the following decade were grave indeed.
Today the Sino-Russian partnership has become truly comprehensive, and while Western experts
from Henry Kissinger to the late Zbigniew Brzezinski among others have emphasized the
importance of bringing about a new split in this partnership this strategy remains unlikely to
work a second time. Both Beijing and Moscow learned from the dark period of the post-Cold War
years that the closer they are together the safer they will be, and that any rift between them
will only provide their adversaries with the key to bringing about their downfall. It is
difficult to comprehend the importance of the Sino-Russian partnership for the security of both
states without understanding the enormity of the Western threat – with maximum pressure
being exerted on multiple fronts from finance and information to military and cyberspace. Where
in the early 1950s it was only the Soviet nuclear deterrent which kept both states safe from
very real Western plans for massive nuclear attacks, so too today is the synergy in the
respective strengths of China and Russia key to protecting the sovereignty and security of the
two nations from a very real and imminent threat. A few examples of the nature of this threat
include growing investments in social engineering through social media – the results of
have been seen in Hong Kong, Taiwan and Ukraine, a lowering threshold for nuclear weapons use
by the United States – which it currently trains Western allies outside the NPT to
deploy, and even reports from Russian and Korean sources of investments in biological warfare
– reportedly being tested in
Georgia, Eastern Europe and South Korea .
The partnership between Russia and China has become truly comprehensive, and is perhaps best
exemplified by their military relations. From 2016 joint military exercises have involved the
sharing of extremely
sensitive information on missile and early warning systems – one of the most well
kept defense secrets of any nuclear power which even NATO powers do not share with one another.
Russia's defense sector has played a key role in the modernization of the Chinese People's
Liberation Army, while Chinese investment has been essential to allowing Russia to continue
research and development on next generation systems needed to retain parity with the United
States. There is reportedly cooperation between the two in developing next generation weapons
technologies for systems such as hypersonic cruise and anti aircraft missiles and new strategic
bombers and fighter jets which both states plan to field by the mid-2020s. With the combined
defense spending of both states a small fraction of that of the Western powers, which
themselves cooperate closely in next generation defense projects, it is logical that the two
should pool their resources and research and development efforts to most efficiently advance
their own security.
Cooperation in political affairs has also been considerable, and the two parties have
effectively presented a united front against the designs of the Western Bloc. In 2017 both
issued strong warnings to the United States and its allies that they would not tolerate an
invasion of North Korea – which was followed by the
deployment of advanced air defense systems by both states near the Korean border with
coverage of much of the peninsula's airspace. Following Pyongyang's testing of its
first nuclear delivery system capable of reaching the United States , and renewed American
threats against the East Asian country, China and Russia staged near simultaneous
exercises near the peninsula using naval and marine units in a clear warning to the U.S.
against military intervention. China's Navy has on several occasions deployed to the
Mediterranean for joint drills with Russian forces – each time following a period of high
tension with the Western Bloc over Syria.
In April 2018, a period of particularly high tensions between Russia and the Western Bloc
over Western threats both to take military action against the Syrian government and to
retaliate for an alleged but unproven Russian chemical weapons attack on British soil, the
Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe traveled to Russia and more explicitly stated that the
Sino-Russian partnership was aimed at countering Western designs. Referring to the Sino-Russian
defense partnership as "as stable as Mount Tai" he
stated : "the Chinese side has come to show Americans the close ties between the Armed
Forces of China and Russia, especially in this situation. We have come to support you." A week
later China announced
large-scale live fire naval drills in the Taiwan Strait – which according to several
analysts were scheduled to coincide with a buildup of Western forces near Syria. Presenting a
potential second front was key to deterring the Western powers from taking further action
against Russia or its ally Syria. These are but a few examples Sino-Russian cooperation, which
is set to grow only closer with time.
The Saker: The US remains the most formidable military power in Asia, but this military
power is being eroded as a result of severe miscalculations of the US political leadership. How
serious a crisis do you think the US is now facing in Asia and how do you assess the risks of a
military confrontation between the US and the various Asian powers (China, the Philippines, the
DPRK, etc,).
A.B. Abrams: Firstly I would dispute that the United States is the most formidable military
power in the region, as while it does retain a massive arsenal there are several indicators
that it lost this position to China during the 2010s. Looking at combat readiness levels, the
average age of weapons in their inventories, morale both publicly and in the armed forces, and
most importantly the correlation of their forces, China appears to have an advantage should war
break out in the Asia-Pacific. It is important to remember that the for the Untied States and
its European allies in particular wars aren't fought on a chessboard. Only a small fraction of
their military might can be deployed to the Asia-Pacific within a month of a conflict breaking
out, while over 95% of Chinese forces are already on the region and are trained and armed
almost exclusively for war in the conditions of the Asia-Pacific. In real terms the balance of
military power regionally is in China's favor, and although the U.S. has tried to counter this
with a military 'Pivot to Asia' initiative from 2011 this has ultimately failed due to both the
drag from defense commitments elsewhere and the unexpected and pace at which China has
expanded and
modernized its armed forces.
For the time being the risk of direct military confrontation remains low, and while there
was a risk in 2017 of American and allied action against the DPRK Pyongyang has effectively
taken this option off the table with the development of a viable and growing arsenal of
thermonuclear weapons and associated delivery systems alongside the modernization of its
conventional capabilities. While the U.S. may have attempted to call a Chinese and Russian
bluff by launching a limited strike – which seriously risked spiraling into something
much larger – it is for the benefit of all regional parties including South Korea that
the DPRK now has the ability to deter the United States without relying on external support.
This was a historically unprecedented event, and as military technology has evolved it has
allowed a small power for the first time to deter a superpower without relying on allied
intervention. Changes in military technology such as the proliferation of the nuclear tipped
ICBM make a shooting war less likely, but also alters the nature of warfare to place greater
emphasis on information war, economic war and other new fields which will increasingly decide
the global balance of power. Where America's answer to the resistance of China and North Korea
in the 1950s to douse them with napalm, today winning over their populations through soft
power, promoting internal dissent, placing pressure on their living standards and ensuring
continued Western dominance of key technologies has become the new means of fighting.
That being said, there is a major threat of conflict in the Asia-Pacific of a different
nature. Several organizations including the United Nations and the defense ministries of
Russia, Singapore and Indonesia among others have warned of the dangers posed by Islamic
terrorism to stability in the region. Radical Islamism, as most recently attested to by Saudi Arabia's crown prince , played a key
role in allowing the Western Bloc to cement its dominance over the Middle East and North Africa
– undermining Russian and Soviet aligned governments including Algeria, Libya, Egypt and
Syria – in most cases with direct Western support. CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller in
this respect referred to the agency's "policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping
them against our adversaries." Several officials, from the higher brass of the Russian, Syrian
and Iranian militaries to the former President of
Afghanistan and the President
of Turkey , have all alleged Western support for radical terror groups including the
Islamic State for the sake of destabilizing their adversaries. As the Asia-Pacific has
increasingly slipped out of the Western sphere of influence, it is likely that this asset will
increasingly be put into play. The consequences of the spread of jihadism from the Middle East
have been relatively limited until now, but growing signs of danger can be seen in Xinjiang,
Myanmar, the Philippines and Indonesia. It is this less direct means of waging war which
arguably poses the greatest threat.
The Saker: Do you think that we will see the day when US forces will have to leave South
Korean, Japan or Taiwan?
A.B. Abrams: Other than a limited contingent of Marines recently deployed to guard
the American Institute , U.S. forces are not currently stationed in Taiwan. The massive
force deployed there in the 1950s was scaled down and American nuclear weapons removed in 1974
in response to China's acceptance of an alliance with the United States against the Soviet
Union. Taiwan's military situation is highly precarious and the disparity in its strength
relative to the Chinese mainland grows considerably by the year. Even a large American military
presence is unlikely to change this – and just 130km from the Chinese mainland they would
be extremely vulnerable and could be quickly isolated from external support in the event of a
cross straits war. We could, however, see a small American contingent deployed as a 'trigger
wire' – which will effectively send a signal to Beijing that the territory is under
American protection and that an attempt to recapture Taiwan will involve the United States.
Given trends in public opinion in Taiwan, and the very considerable pro-Western sentiments
among the younger generations in particular, it is likely that Taipei will look to a greater
rather than a lesser Western military presence on its soil in future.
Japan and particularly South Korea see more nuanced public opinion towards the U.S., and
negative perceptions of an American military presence may well grow in future – though
for different reasons in each country. Elected officials alone, however, are insufficient to
move the American presence – as best demonstrated by the short tenure of Prime Minister
Hatoyama in Japan and the frustration of President Moon's efforts to restrict American
deployments of THAAD missile
systems in his first year. It would take a massive mobilization of public opinion –
backed by business interests and perhaps the military – to force such a change. This
remains possible however, particularly as both economies grow increasingly reliant on China for
trade and as the U.S. is seen to have acted increasingly erratically in response to challenges
from Beijing and Pyongyang which has undermined its credibility. As to a voluntary withdrawal
by the United States, this remains extremely unlikely. President Donald Trump ran as one of the
most non-interventionist candidates in recent history, but even under him and with considerable
public support prospects for a significant reduction in the American presence, much less a
complete withdrawal, have remained slim.
The Saker: Some circles in Russia are trying very hard to frighten the Russian public
opinion against China alleging things like "China want to loot (or even conquer!) Siberia",
"China will built up its military and attack Russia" or "China with its huge economy will
simply absorb small Russia". In your opinion are any of these fears founded and, if yes, which
ones and why?
A.B. Abrams: A growth in Sinophobic sentiment in Russia only serves to weaken the nation and
empower its adversaries by potentially threatening its relations with its most critical
strategic partner. The same is applicable vice-versa regarding Russophobia in China. Given the
somewhat Europhilic nature of the Russian state in a number of periods, including in the 1990s,
and the considerable European soft influences in modern Russia, there are grounds for building
up of such sentiment. Indeed Radio Free Europe, a U.S. government funded nonprofit broadcasting
corporation with the stated purpose of "advancing the goals of U.S. foreign policy," notably
published sinophobic content aimed at depicting the Russian people as
victims of Chinese business interests to coincide with the Putin-XI summit in June 2019.
However, an understanding of the modern Chinese state and its interests indicates that it does
not pose a threat to Russia – and to the contrary is vital to Russia's national security
interests. While Russia historically has cultural ties to the Western nations, the West has
shown Russian considerable hostility throughout its recent history – as perhaps is most
evident in the 1990s when Russia briefly submitted itself and sought to become part of the
Western led order with terrible consequences. China by contrast has historically conducted
statecraft based on the concept of a civilization state – under which its strength is not
measured by the weakness and subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. A powerful
and independent Russia capable of protecting a genuine rules based world order and holding
lawless actors in check is strongly in the Chinese interest. It is clear that in Russia such an
understanding exists on a state level, although there is no doubt that there will be efforts by
external parties to turn public opinion against China to the detriment of the interests of both
states.
The idea that China would seek to economically subjugate Russia, much less invade it, is
ludicrous. It was from Europe were the major invasions of Russian territory came – vast
European coalitions led by France and Germany respectively with a third American led attack
planned and prepared for but stalled by the Soviet acquisition of a nuclear deterrent. More
recently from the West came sanctions, the austerity program of the 1990s, the militarization
of Eastern Europe, and the demonization of the Russian nation – all intended to subjugate
and if possible shatter it. Even at the height of its power, China did not colonize the
Koreans, Vietnamese or Japanese nor did it seek to conquer Central Asia. Assuming China will
have the same goals and interests as a Western state would if they were in a similar position
of strength is to ignore the lessons of history, and the nature of the Chinese national
character and national interest.
The Saker: The Russian military is currently vastly more capable (even if numerically much
smaller) than the Chinese. Does anybody in China see a military threat from Russia?
A.B. Abrams: There may be marginalized extreme nationalists in China who see a national
security from almost everybody, but in mainstream discourse there are no such perceptions. To
the contrary, Russia's immense contribution to Chinese security is widely recognized –
not only in terms of technological transfers but also in terms of the value of the joint front
the two powers have formed. Russia not only lacks a history of annexing East Asian countries or
projecting force against them, but it is also heavily reliant on China in particular both to
keep its defense sector active and to undermine Western attempts to isolate it. Russian
aggression against China is unthinkable for Moscow – even if China did not possess its
current military strength and nuclear deterrence capabilities. This is something widely
understood in China and elsewhere.
I would dispute that Russia's military is vastly more capable than China's own, as other
than nuclear weapons there is a similar level of capabilities in most sectors in both
countries. While Russia has a lead in many key technologies such as hypersonic missiles, air
defenses and submarines to name a few prominent examples, China has been able to purchase and
integrate many of these into its own armed forces alongside the products of its own defense
sector. Russia's most prominent fighter jet for example, the Flanker (in all derivatives from
Su-27 to J-11D), is in fact fielded in larger numbers by China than by Russia itself –
and those in Chinese service have access to both indigenous as well as Russian munitions and
subsystems. Furthermore, there are some less critical but still significant sectors where China
does appear to retain a lead – for example it deployed combat jets equipped with a new
generation of active electronically scanned array radars and air to air missiles from 2017
(J-20 and in
2018 J-10C ) – while Russia has only done so this in July 2019 with the
induction of the MiG-35. Whether this is due to a Chinese technological advantage, or to a
greater availability of funds to deploy its new technologies faster, remains uncertain.
Russia's ability to provide China with its most vital technologies, and China's willingness to
rely so heavily on Russian technology to comprise so much of its inventory, demonstrates the
level of trust between the two countries
The Saker: Do you think that China could become a military threat to other countries in the
region (especially Taiwan, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, etc.)?
A.B. Abrams: I would direct you to a quote by Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Bin Mohamed
from March this year. He stated: "we always say, we have had China as a neighbor for 2,000
years, we were never conquered by them. But the Europeans came in 1509, in two years, they
conquered Malaysia." This coming from a nationalist leader considered one of the most
sinophobic in Southeast Asia, whose country has an ongoing territorial dispute with China in
the South China Sea, bears testament to the nature of claims of a Chinese threat. It is
critical not to make the mistake of imposing Western norms when trying to understand Chinese
statecraft. Unlike the European states, China is not and has never been dependent on conquering
others to enrich itself – but rather was a civilization state which measured its wealth
by what it could its own people could produce. A harmonious relationship with India, Vietnam,
the Philippines and others in which all states' sovereign and territorial integrity is
respected is in the Chinese interest.
A second aspect which must be considered, and which bears testament to China's intentions,
is the orientation of the country's armed forces. While the militaries of the United States and
European powers such as Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and France among others are heavily
skewed to prioritize power projection overseas, China's military has made disproportionately
small investments in power projection and is overwhelmingly tailored to territorial defense.
While the United States has over 300 tanker aircraft deigned to refuel its combat jets midair
and attack faraway lands, China has just three purpose-built tankers – less than
Malaysia, Chile or Pakistan. The ratio of
logistical to combat units further indicates that China's armed forces, in stark contrast
to the Western powers, are heavily oriented towards defense and fighting near their
borders.
This all being said, China does pose an imminent threat to the government in Taipei –
although I would disagree with your categorization of Taiwan as a country. Officially the
Republic of China (ROC- as opposed to the Beijing based People's Republic of China), Taipei has
not declared itself a separate country but rather the rightful government of the entire Chinese
nation. Taipei remains technically at war with the mainland, a conflict would have ended in
1950 if the U.S. had not placed the ROC under its protection. The fast growing strength of the
mainland has shifted the balance of power dramatically should the conflict again break out into
open hostilities. China has only to gain from playing the long game with Taiwan however –
providing scholarships and jobs for its people to live on the mainland and thus undermining the
demonization of the country and hostility towards a peaceful reunification. Taiwan's economic
reliance on the mainland has also grown considerably, and these softer methods of bridging the
gaps between the ROC and the mainland are key to facilitating unification. Meanwhile the
military balance in the Taiwan Strait only grows more favorable for Beijing by the year –
meaning there is no urgency to take military action. While China will insist on unification, it
will seek to avoid doing so violently unless provoked.
The Saker: In conclusion: where in Asia do you see the next major conflict take place and
why?
A.B. Abrams: The conflict in the Asia-Pacific is ongoing, but the nature of conflict has
changed. We see an ongoing and so far highly successful de-radicalization effort in Xinjiang
– which was taken in direct response to Western attempts to turn the province into 'China's Syria or
China's Libya,' in the words of Chinese state media, using similar means. We see a harsh
Western response to
the Made in China 2025 initiative under which the country has sought to compete in key
technological fields formerly monopolized by the Western Bloc and Japan – and the result
of this will have a considerable impact on the balance of economic power in the coming years.
We see direct economic warfare and technological competition between China and the United
States – although the latter has so far refrained from escalating too far due to the
potentially devastating impact reprisals could have. We further see an information war in full
swing, with Sinophobic stories often citing 'anonymous sources' being propagated by Western
media to target not only their own populations – but also to influence public opinion in
Southeast Asia and elsewhere. Influence over third parties remains vital to isolating China and
cementing the Western sphere of influence. Use of social media and social engineering, as the
events of the past decade have demonstrated from the Middle East in 2011 to Hong Kong today,
remains key and will only grow in its potency in the coming years. We also see a major arms
race, with the Western Bloc investing heavily in an all new generation of weapons designed to
leave existing Chinese and allied defenses obsolete – from laser air defenses to
neutralize China's nuclear deterrent to sixth generation stealth fighters, new heavy bombers,
new applications of artificial intelligence technologies and new hypersonic missiles.
All these are fronts of the major conflict currently underway, and the Obama and Trump
administrations have stepped up their offensives to bring about a new 'end of history' much
like that of the 1990s – only this time it is likely to be permanent. To prevail, China
and Russia will need to cooperate at least as closely if not more so as the Western powers do
among themselves.
The Saker: thank you very much for your time and answers!
That being said, there is a major threat of conflict in the Asia-Pacific of a different
nature. Several organizations including the United Nations and the defense ministries of
Russia, Singapore and Indonesia among others have warned of the dangers posed by Islamic
terrorism to stability in the region. Radical Islamism, as most recently attested to by
Saudi Arabia's crown prince, played a key role in allowing the Western Bloc to cement its
dominance over the Middle East and North Africa – undermining Russian and Soviet
aligned governments including Algeria, Libya, Egypt and Syria – in most cases with
direct Western support. CIA Deputy Director Graham Fuller in this respect referred to the
agency's "policy of guiding the evolution of Islam and of helping them against our
adversaries." Several officials, from the higher brass of the Russian, Syrian and Iranian
militaries to the former President of Afghanistan and the President of Turkey, have all
alleged Western support for radical terror groups including the Islamic State for the sake
of destabilizing their adversaries. As the Asia-Pacific has increasingly slipped out of the
Western sphere of influence, it is likely that this asset will increasingly be put into
play. The consequences of the spread of jihadism from the Middle East have been relatively
limited until now, but growing signs of danger can be seen in Xinjiang, Myanmar, the
Philippines and Indonesia. It is this less direct means of waging war which arguably poses
the greatest threat.
There is hardly such a thing called "Islamic Terrorism." In most egregious cases, such as
IS, etc., it can be shown that those lowlifes have been the mercenaries of the evil West and
their accursed implant in the ME (and nowadays the hindutvars too), collectively the avowed
enemies of true monotheism, Islam. I am including the recent Colombo attacks here.
How can any so-called "muslim" who is a tool-of-evil of the enemies of Islam, be a true
muslim? How then can it be termed "Islamic Terror"? Perhaps "Islamic Apostate Terror" would
be more suitable.
Of course, there are many other non-IS muslims who are called "terrorists." The
Palestinians, the Kashmiris, etc. For us muslims, they are simply freedom fighters.
Finally, there are a few muslims who do kill in the name Islam the Charlie Hebdo killers,
Bombay\Dhaka attackers, etc. Some of them are justified (due to intense provocations) and
others not at all. I will leave it for others to judge which falls under which category.
Perhaps the listed order will help decipher that.
It must be conceded, when it comes to setting the narrative of pure deceit, the West (and
its minions, the Jooscum and their lickspittle, the hindutvars), like in all things bad, can
be satanically good. We muslims are being decimated in the propaganda war.
We still got our True Monotheism though. The pagan/godless enemies of the Almighty One are
doomed to fail against it. God willing.
The American system ran on immigration that kept discontent about massive inequality under
control because a substantial proportion of the lowest SES were immigrants just glad to be in
the US. The tAmerican ruling class decided they could make more money by offshoring
everything that could be offshored and mass immigration to keep wags from going up in the non
offshorable parts of the economy.
China and America's venal globalising elite had converging agendas, but could not fool the
common people of America and their tribune . Even the military had began to get alarmed about
the economic growth and technological progress of China, which had been benefiting from
officially sanctioned preferential treatment by the US since Carter.
Free ride is over for China, we will see China's economic and military strength
progressively tested. What America built it can break.
China was made an economic superpower by the US elites. Not because they felt sorry for China
and wanted to speed up conversion to democracy by switching them to capitalist way of doing
business first.
They made them an economic superpower, because the US elites have lost their marbles. They
simply didn't see it coming. They wanted to turn China into one giant cheap sweatshop in
order to exploit their population with a low paying manufacturing jobs, which were never
supposed to make China reach.
But they did, because no matter how much the lost generation of the western elites were
foaming at their mouths about knowledge based economy, value added economy, high tech jobs
and the other crap, it is obvious that manufacturing remains a basis for any strong economy.
That doesn't look like it's going to change even when you add robots to the mixture.
I think that Napoleon was right when he warned the world about waking up the sleeping
dragon. First they made them an economic superpower, and now they want to contain them
militarily. Good luck with that.
There is a reason why China wants to build the silk road. Silk road implies land. The US
military has never been any good at land warfare. Neither where their predecessors –
the British. China, on the other hand, showed in Korea that even then, with a backward army,
equipped with handouts from the Soviet Union, they can pretty much trash the US army.
With the silk road initiative, China will seize the control of the entire Euro-Asian land
mass – the most populous and economically productive region of the world and will be
more than happy to let the US play pirates on the seas.
Abrams is giving the West too much credit for the Sino-Soviet rift of the late 5os and 60s.
That was NOT the doing of the CIA or Western Europe. It was 90% the fault of Mao who tried
to shove Khrushchev aside as the head of world communism. Because Stalin had treated Mao
badly, Krushchev wanted to make amends and treated Mao with respect. But Mao turned out to be
a total a-hole. There are two kinds of people: Those who appreciate friendly gestures and
those who seek kindness as 'weakness'.
It's like Hitler saw Chamberlain's offer as weakness
and pushed ahead. Being kind is nice, but one should never be kind to psychopaths, and
Khrushchev was nice to the wrong person.
Mao only understood power. He sensed Khrushchev as
'weak' and acted as if he wanted to be the new Stalin. He also made international statements
that made the US-USSR relations much worse. He berated Khrushchev for seeking co-existence
with the West and pressed on for more World Revolution.
He also ignored Soviet advice not to
attempt radical economic policies (that were soon to bring China to economic ruin -- at least
Stalin's collectivization led to rise of industry; in contrast, Mao managed to destroy both
agriculture and heavy industry).
When Stalin was alive, he didn't treat Mao with any respect,
and Mao disliked Stalin but still respected him because Mao understood Power. With Stalin
gone, Khrushchev showed Mao some respect, but Mao felt no respect for Khrushchev who was
regarded as a weakling and sucker.
It was all so stupid. China and Russia could have gotten along well if not for Mao's
impetuosity. Of course, Khrushchev could be reckless, contradictory, and erratic, and his
mixed signals to the West also heightened tensions. Also, he was caught between a rock and a
hard place where the Eastern Bloc was concerned. He wanted to de-Stalinize, but this could
lead to events like the Hungarian Uprising.
Anyway, Putin and Xi, perhaps having grown up in less turbulent times, are more stable and
mature in character and temperament than Mao and Khrushchev. They don't see the Russo-China
relations as a zero sum game of ego but a way for which both sides can come to the table
halfway, which is all one can hope for.
@Priss Factor You are probably right about Hitler seeing (Neville) Chamberlain as weak.
But Hitler was a dupe for Britains much smarter and devious elites, who successfully played
him to do their bidding. Hitler, along with the major members of the nazis, had been
significantly influenced by Neville's elder cousin who spurred the nazis towards 'the
ultimate solution'.
Instead of being weak in the manner Hitler may have thought, Neville saved Hitler from his
own generals.
In historical turns , when Britain has appeared weak, it mostly is a deliberate faint.
Be it in Gallipoli, St Petersburg in 1919, Norway or Singapore in WW2.
Commendable contribution by Mr Abrams to enlighten the confused western establishment.
" China by contrast has historically conducted statecraft based on the concept of a
civilization state – under which its strength is not measured by the weakness and
subjugation of others but by its internal achievements. "
In my view the Usa had an excellent opportunity to enact in a positive way after WW2 but
blew it. The main reason was the failure to live up to the above quoted characterisation of
the Chinese. To encourage potential achievers in the best sense of the word.
Instead the Us oligarchy held back independent and creative thinking and brainwashed the
population, in a way that weakened them.
Jfk tried to encourage his countrymen but other forces prevailed.
Americans cannot understand our relations with China by looking at events just the past 75
years. During the century before, European imperial powers and the United States treated
China as a open borders business opportunity backed by foreign military force. China was
infested by mini-colonies to profit from China's riches. The "Opium Wars" shock decent
Americans.
See better discussion at
platts.com "But US LNG could face problems of its own – the current low prices are forcing ever growing numbers of US producers
into bankruptcy. According to a recent report by Haynes and Boone, 90 gas and oil producers in the US and Canada have filed for bankruptcy
between January 2015 and the start of August 2016." So $2 price at Henry Hub should rise to at least $4 for companies to stay in business.
Notable quotes:
"... Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is produced domestically, the rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%. ..."
"... The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage. ..."
"... Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017. ..."
"... s mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines. This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources. ..."
"... This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe. ..."
"... Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG, a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security. ..."
"... The European countries do not appear to be dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" ..."
"... The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. ..."
One of the most important energy battles
of the future will be fought in the field of liquid natural gas (LNG). Suggested as one of the main solutions to
pollution , LNG offers the possibility
of still managing to meet a country's industrial needs while ameliorating environmental concerns caused by other energy sources.
At the same time, a little like the US dollar, LNG is becoming a tool Washington intends to use against Moscow at the expense of
Washington's European allies.
To understand the rise of LNG in global strategies, it is wise to look at a
graph (page 7)
produced by the International Gas Union (IGU) where the following four key indicators are highlighted: global regasification capacities;
total volumes of LNG exchanged; exporting countries; and importing countries.
From 1990 to today,
the world has grown from 220 million tons per annum (MTPA) to around 850 MTPA of regasification capacity. The volume of trade
increased from 20-30 MTPA to around 300 MTPA. Likewise, the number of LNG-importing countries has increased from just over a dozen
to almost 40 over the course of 15 years, while the number of producers has remained almost unchanged, except for a few exceptions
like the US entering the LNG market in 2016.
There are two methods used to transport gas.
The first is through pipelines, which reduce costs and facilitate interconnection between countries, an important example of
this being seen in Europe's importation of gas. The four main pipelines for Europe come from four distinct geographical regions:
the Middle East, Africa, Northern Europe and Russia.
The second method of transporting gas is by sea in the form of LNG, which in the short term is more expensive, complex and
difficult to implement on a large scale. Gas transported by sea is processed to be cooled so as to reduce its volume, and then
liquified again to allow storage and transport by ship. This process adds 20% to costs when compared to gas transported through
pipelines.
Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is
produced domestically, the
rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain
led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%.
The construction of infrastructure to accommodate LNG ships is ongoing in Europe, and some European countries already have a limited
capacity to accommodate LNG and direct it to the national and European network or act as an energy hub to ship LNG to other ports
using smaller ships.
"All of Europe's LNG terminals are import facilities, with the exception of (non-EU) Norway and Russia which export LNG. There
are currently 28 large-scale LNG import terminals in Europe (including non-EU Turkey). There are also 8 small-scale LNG facilities
in Europe (in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Gibraltar). Of the 28 large-scale LNG import terminals, 24 are in EU countries
(and therefore subject to EU regulation) and 4 are in Turkey, 23 are land-based import terminals, and 4 are floating storage and
regasification units (FSRUs), and the one import facility in Malta comprises a Floating Storage Unit (FSU) and onshore regasification
facilities."
The countries currently most involved in the export of LNG are Qatar (24.9%), Australia (21.7%), Malaysia (7.7%), the US (6.7%),
Nigeria (6.5%) and Russia (6%).
Europe is one of the main markets for gas, given its strong demand for clean energy for domestic and industrial needs. For this
reason, Germany has for years been engaged in the Nord Stream 2 project, which aims to double the transport capacity of gas from
Russia to Germany. Currently the flow of the Nord Stream is 55 billion cubic meters of gas. With the new Nord Stream 2, the capacity
will double to 110 billion cubic meters per year.
The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation
to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria,
Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies
like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction
of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to
derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage.
Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore
in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in
perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017.
ENI's discovery has generated important planning for the future of LNG in Europe and in Italy.
Problems have arisen ever since Donald Trump sought to oblige Europeans to
purchase LNG from the US in
order to reduce the trade deficit and benefit US companies at the expense of other gas-exporting countries like Algeria, Russia and
Norway. As mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines.
This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne
gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into
its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources.
This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports
to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant
decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe.
But Europe finds itself in a decidedly uncomfortable situation that cannot be easily resolved. The anti-Russia hysteria drummed
up by the Euro-Atlantic globalist establishment aides Donald Trump's efforts to economically squeeze as much as possible out of European
allies, hurting European citizens in the process who will have to pay more for American LNG, which costs about a fifth more than
gas from Russian, Norwegian or Algerian sources.
Projects to build offshore regasifiers in Europe appear to have begun and seem unlikely to be affected by future political vagaries,
given the investment committed and planning times involved:
"There are currently in the region of 22 large-scale LNG import terminals considered as planned in Europe, except for the planned
terminals in Ukraine (Odessa FSRU LNG), Russia (Kaliningrad LNG), Albania (Eagle LNG) – Albania being a candidate for EU membership
– and Turkey (FSRU Iskenderun and FSRU Gulf of Saros).
Many ofthese planned terminals, including Greece (where one additional import terminal is planned – Alexandroupolis), Italy
(which is considering or planning two additional terminals – Porto Empedocle in Sicily and Gioia Tauro LNG in Calabria) , Poland
(FSRU Polish Baltic Sea Coast), Turkey (two FSRUs) and the UK (which is planning the Port Meridian FSRU LNG project and UK Trafigura
Teesside LNG). LNG import terminal for Albania (Eagle LNG), Croatia (Krk Island), Cyprus (Vassiliko FSRU), Estonia (Muuga (Tallinn)
LNG and Padalski LNG), Germany ( Brunsbüttel LNG), Ireland (Shannon LNG and Cork LNG), Latvia (Riga LNG), Romania (Constanta LNG),
Russia (Kaliningrad LNG) and Ukraine (Odessa).
Nine of the planned terminals are FSRUs: Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the UK. "In
addition, there are numerous plans for expansion of existing terminals, including in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands,
Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK."
Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share
of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not
surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG,
a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security.
The European countries do not appear to be
dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been
evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" This, however, is not the case with
all allies. Germany is not economically able to interrupt Nord Stream 2. And even though the project has many high-level sponsors,
including former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the project constantly seems to be on the verge of being stopped – at least in Washington's
delusions.
Even Eni's discovery of the gas field in Egypt has annoyed the US, which wants less competition (even when illegal, as in the
case of Huawei) and wants to be able to force its exports onto Europeans while maintaining the price of the LNG in dollars, thereby
further supporting the US dollar as the world's reserve currency in the same manner as the
petrodollar .
The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's
behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. The Europeans appear
prepared to set whatever course the US has charted them, one away from cheaper gas sources to the more expensive LNG supplied from
across the Atlantic. Given the investments already committed to receive this LNG, it seems unlikely that the course set for the Europeans
will be changed.
I live in Europe. I can honestly say that the people I know here prefer Russian gas. People are very ticked off about how the
US meddled in their gas supply and the structuring of the pipelines. Most feel that even if US LNG WAS competitive with Russian
gas price for now, that the US would in some way either increase prices or use it in some other way to control or manipulate the
EU. And sentiment towards USA tends toward resentment and distrust. That's not to say they are necessarily pro-Russia, but definitely
a wave of anti US is present.
US LNG pricing is based on Henry Hub which today is under $2.30/mmbtu.
Even adding in liquefaction and shipping costs, the price to the end user is extremely low.
Henry hub is projected to be sub $3 for DECADES!
Combine the low price with spot deliveries (pipe usually demands long term contracting commitments), and US LNG actually has
strong rationale for being accepted.
The statement above that US LNG cannot compete against Australia in Asia is preposterously false due to the VERY high buildout
costs of the Aussie LNG infrastructure.
Next year, Oz's first LNG IMPORT terminal at Port Kembla may well be supplied with US LNG.
The US has shown itself to be unreliable as a supplier of anything. Political posturing will always take precedence over any
international transaction.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia in your post can be said of the U.S.
I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to
project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary warfare , and thereby influence
events abroad. Depending on their size and infrastructure, they can be used as
staging areas or for logistical, communications and
intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have resulted in overseas military bases being established in
large numbers by world powers and the existence of
bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The U.S. has 36 listed here with none
of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
Whilst the left wants to go full throttle towards Wind and Solar, no one knows that the natural gas lobby is behind these sources
because both sources need a backup. While everyone talks "carbon footprint" they never discusses plant efficiency ( or
in the terms of engines brake specific fuel consumption and turbine specific fuel consumption ) in terms of thermal efficiency.
You know the boring stuff that plant operators stress over to make sure when your wife wakes up @ 3 in the morning to feed the
baby, the lights do go on, and they are creating that wattage in an cost affective manner. With that said, the king of thermal
efficiency i.e. burning a fuel to create electricity, is the Combined Cycle Natural Gas Power Plant. These plants combines a stationary
gas turbine buring natural gas to spin a generator and a boiler on the back side capture the waste heat to create steam to spin
a turbine to again add an input to the generator for a current state of the art of 61% efficiency . That means only 39%
going up the stack or for steam cooling to get your "Delta T" for the steam cycle to work. This 61% is vs maybe in the mid 40's
for a coal, oil plant or in the case of Nuclear just waste heat with nothing going out a stack. The greater wattage per fuel burned,
and the modularization of these Combined Cycle Plants aka have a series of 100mw turbines and bring them on line as needed, make
this a win-win IMHO for a massive refurbishing of our Utility base, with a host of benefits, before Gen 3 & Gen 4 Nuclear truly
take off again. These plants could be a great stop gap before Gen 3 & 4 are a reality. All the macinations towards wind and solar
and their disavantages aka being bird vegamatics, vistas being spoiled and huge swaths of land being used for panels make no sense
vs energy density of efficient plants. We are the Natural Gas King, lets not flare it anymore, and really, really leverage it
here, help allies, and use it for bringing bad behaving children of the world to the table ifyou will, if you want the candy,
behave....
Why do we have to treat other countries like we're the parent? We aren't. They are equal and fully functioning countries quite
capable of determining their own political and economic future...which may involve not trading or interacting with the U.S. Particularly
if we demand of them conditions we ourselves would never accede.
The Lithuanian FSRU "Independence" which was delivered from Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2014 to the port of Klaipeda drove
energy costs for heating through the roof and perhaps is one of the reasons the Prime Minister at the time only came in third
in the latest presidential elections. You can stay reasonably warm, eat or have money for medicine and other necessities. Pick
2 ONLY. Thank you USSA
Brainsick as Pompeo the US Pork without character.
As Long as Russia dlivery theier gas constantly and for a much better price then Us-Shale idiots, the ziocons only can lose.
We Europeans are not very impressed.
The biggest Capitalist economy on the planet needs to use mob tactics to push its over priced wares- seems 'long term' is not
part of their hit-and-run operation.
Now as for the article; apart from a few Eastern European Countries (The Ukraine, Poland etc.), I have seen no proof whatsoever,
that Europe is shifting to US LNG.
As for "As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?""; I am sorry,
but I think those days are over..... this can be seen in our Iranian stance, the 2 Russian pipelines - 1 being Nordstream II and
the other Turk-stream, increased trade with Russia, joining the the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and so on and
so on......
Slowly but surely the anti-Russia propaganda is dying. You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some people
all of the time (libtards), but you can't fool all the people all of the time. Europeans (the citizens) will question why they
should pay 20-30% more for their natural gas just to please America. Politicians better have an answer or change of policy if
they want to be reelected.
You gotta love the SCI. This shallowly-disguised Russian propaganda arm writes in the most
charming awkward idiomatic English, bouncing from a "false neutral" tone to a jingoistic
Amercia-phobic argot to produce its hit pieces.
Russian propaganda acts like Claude Raines in "Casablanca" : "i am shocked, shocked to
discover (geopolitics) going on here!" Geeeee, Europe and the US are in a struggle to
avoid Europe relying on Russia for strategic necessities like fuel, even if it imposes costs
on European consumers. If you have a dangerous disease, and your pharmacist is known for
cutting off their customers' vital drugs to extort them, you might consider using another
provider who not only doesn't cut off supplies, but also provides the police department that
protects you from your pharmacist's thugs who are known to invade customers' homes using the
profits from their own business.
The US provides the protective umbrella that limits Putin's adventurism. Russia cuts of
Ukraine's gas supplies in winter to force them into submission. Gasprom is effectively an arm
of the Russian military, weaponizing Russia's only product as a geopolitical taser. Sure, it
costs more to transport LNG across the Atlantic and convert it back to gas, but the profits
from that business are routinely funneled back to Europe in the form of US trade,
contributions to NATO, and the provision of the nuclear umbrella that protects Europeans from
the man who has publicly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, called for the return of the
former SSRs, and violated the IRM treaty to place nuclear capable intermediate-range missiles
and cruise missiles within range of Europe and boasted about his new hypersonic weapons'
theoretic capability to decapitate NATO and American decision-making within a few minutes of
launch.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia
in your post can be said of the U.S. I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's
their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary
warfare , and thereby influence events abroad. Depending on their size and
infrastructure, they can be used as staging areas or for logistical,
communications and intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have
resulted in overseas military bases being established in large numbers by world powers and the
existence of bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and
military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The
U.S. has 36 listed here with none of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
Moscow Times is a neoliberal rag with small circulation and zero influence on public opinion and essentially NED
controlled/influenced content
Notable quotes:
"... The commitment of the inner circle often goes unquestioned, as the future of their massive business empires requires staying in Putin's good graces. But oligarchs coming from the intelligence services owe no particular allegiance and may be more interested in ensuring that the defense-industrial complex receives special treatment from the state. ..."
"In any case, it seems that any person who meets with Putin to discuss a possible
business venture that might require funding from the Russian government (or the Russian
government to assist in financing and building the necessary infrastructure for the venture
to go through) automatically becomes a favoured crony of his, in the eyes of Western
mainstream news media. "
Yes. You are not supposed to have to TALK to the president about this. It should have to
go through the Dóuma, the budget, there should be a process how to apply and
guidelines how to grant and if there is a public tender it should be regulated and the best
bid get it.
Your Wikipedia link goes to nowhere by the way. You are sure the Rotenberg Law did not
pass the Douma? First read seams to have been successful.
Understanding how these oligarchs built their wealth goes a long way in predicting their
future loyalty to Putin.
The commitment of the inner circle often goes unquestioned, as the future of their
massive business empires requires staying in Putin's good graces. But oligarchs coming from
the intelligence services owe no particular allegiance and may be more interested in
ensuring that the defense-industrial complex receives special treatment from the state.
Same for the holdovers from previous eras, who have suffered some attacks from the Putin
government over the years, mainly in the form of expropriation through politically
motivated court cases -- the state's main tool against the oligarchs.
They may be tiring of the uncertainty surrounding their property rights and have an
incentive to demand different political institutions to protect their assets. Coaxing these
groups to remain loyal requires the strategic use of rewards and repression.
...
First, the Russian government has spent incredible resources to directly compensate
oligarchs for their financial losses.
Massive infrastructure contracts such as bridges and pipelines find their way into the
hands of the connected elite, while import substitution policies in sectors such as
agriculture help create enormous profits for investors. Government bailouts to the tune of
tens of billions of dollars have stabilized balance sheets, while the state has also taken
over toxic assets such as those gone unused after the Sochi Olympics."
There maybe a process in Russia where oligarchs forced to repatriate get more interested
in regulations and a court system that protects their assets when they can no longer go to
London. But claiming that there are no longer oligarchs in Russia is an alternative
universe.
See better discussion at
platts.com "But US LNG could face problems of its own – the current low prices are forcing ever growing numbers of US producers
into bankruptcy. According to a recent report by Haynes and Boone, 90 gas and oil producers in the US and Canada have filed for bankruptcy
between January 2015 and the start of August 2016." So $2 price at Henry Hub should rise to at least $4 for companies to stay in business.
Notable quotes:
"... Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is produced domestically, the rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%. ..."
"... The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria, Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage. ..."
"... Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017. ..."
"... s mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines. This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources. ..."
"... This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe. ..."
"... Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG, a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security. ..."
"... The European countries do not appear to be dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" ..."
"... The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. ..."
One of the most important energy battles
of the future will be fought in the field of liquid natural gas (LNG). Suggested as one of the main solutions to
pollution , LNG offers the possibility
of still managing to meet a country's industrial needs while ameliorating environmental concerns caused by other energy sources.
At the same time, a little like the US dollar, LNG is becoming a tool Washington intends to use against Moscow at the expense of
Washington's European allies.
To understand the rise of LNG in global strategies, it is wise to look at a
graph (page 7)
produced by the International Gas Union (IGU) where the following four key indicators are highlighted: global regasification capacities;
total volumes of LNG exchanged; exporting countries; and importing countries.
From 1990 to today,
the world has grown from 220 million tons per annum (MTPA) to around 850 MTPA of regasification capacity. The volume of trade
increased from 20-30 MTPA to around 300 MTPA. Likewise, the number of LNG-importing countries has increased from just over a dozen
to almost 40 over the course of 15 years, while the number of producers has remained almost unchanged, except for a few exceptions
like the US entering the LNG market in 2016.
There are two methods used to transport gas.
The first is through pipelines, which reduce costs and facilitate interconnection between countries, an important example of
this being seen in Europe's importation of gas. The four main pipelines for Europe come from four distinct geographical regions:
the Middle East, Africa, Northern Europe and Russia.
The second method of transporting gas is by sea in the form of LNG, which in the short term is more expensive, complex and
difficult to implement on a large scale. Gas transported by sea is processed to be cooled so as to reduce its volume, and then
liquified again to allow storage and transport by ship. This process adds 20% to costs when compared to gas transported through
pipelines.
Less than half of the gas necessary for Europe is
produced domestically, the
rest being imported from Russia (39%), Norway (30%) and Algeria (13%). In 2017, gas imports from outside of the EU reached 14%. Spain
led with imports of 31%, followed by France with 20% and Italy with 15%.
The construction of infrastructure to accommodate LNG ships is ongoing in Europe, and some European countries already have a limited
capacity to accommodate LNG and direct it to the national and European network or act as an energy hub to ship LNG to other ports
using smaller ships.
"All of Europe's LNG terminals are import facilities, with the exception of (non-EU) Norway and Russia which export LNG. There
are currently 28 large-scale LNG import terminals in Europe (including non-EU Turkey). There are also 8 small-scale LNG facilities
in Europe (in Finland, Sweden, Germany, Norway and Gibraltar). Of the 28 large-scale LNG import terminals, 24 are in EU countries
(and therefore subject to EU regulation) and 4 are in Turkey, 23 are land-based import terminals, and 4 are floating storage and
regasification units (FSRUs), and the one import facility in Malta comprises a Floating Storage Unit (FSU) and onshore regasification
facilities."
The countries currently most involved in the export of LNG are Qatar (24.9%), Australia (21.7%), Malaysia (7.7%), the US (6.7%),
Nigeria (6.5%) and Russia (6%).
Europe is one of the main markets for gas, given its strong demand for clean energy for domestic and industrial needs. For this
reason, Germany has for years been engaged in the Nord Stream 2 project, which aims to double the transport capacity of gas from
Russia to Germany. Currently the flow of the Nord Stream is 55 billion cubic meters of gas. With the new Nord Stream 2, the capacity
will double to 110 billion cubic meters per year.
The South Stream project, led by Eni, Gazprom, EDF and Wintershall, should have increased the capacity of the Russian Federation
to supply Europe with 63 billion cubic meters annually, positively impacting the economy with cheap supplies of gas to Bulgaria,
Greece, Italy, Serbia, Hungary, Austria and Slovenia. Due to the restrictions imposed by the European Union on Russian companies
like Gazprom, and the continuing pressure from Washington to abandon the project and embrace imports from the US, the construction
of the pipeline have slowed down and generated tensions between Europe and the US. Washington is piling on pressure on Germany to
derail Nord Stream 2 and stop the construction of this important energy linkage.
Further tension has been added since ENI, an Italian company that is a leader in the LNG sector, recently discovered off-shore
in Egypt one of the largest gas fields in the world, with an estimated total capacity of 850 billion cubic meters. To put this in
perspective, all EU countries demand is about 470 billion cubic meters of gas in 2017.
ENI's discovery has generated important planning for the future of LNG in Europe and in Italy.
Problems have arisen ever since Donald Trump sought to oblige Europeans to
purchase LNG from the US in
order to reduce the trade deficit and benefit US companies at the expense of other gas-exporting countries like Algeria, Russia and
Norway. As mentioned, LNG imported to Europe from the US costs about 20% more than gas traditionally received through pipelines.
This is without including all the investment necessary to build regasification plants in countries destined to receive this ship-borne
gas. Europe currently does not have the necessary facilities on its Atlantic coast to receive LNG from the US, introduce it into
its energy networks, and simultaneously decrease demand from traditional sources.
This situation could change in the future, with LNG from the US seeing a sharp increase recently. In 2010, American LNG exports
to Europe were at 10%; the following year they rose to 11%; and in the first few months of 2019, they jumped to 35%. A significant
decrease in LNG exports to Asian countries, which are less profitable, offers an explanation for this corresponding increase in Europe.
But Europe finds itself in a decidedly uncomfortable situation that cannot be easily resolved. The anti-Russia hysteria drummed
up by the Euro-Atlantic globalist establishment aides Donald Trump's efforts to economically squeeze as much as possible out of European
allies, hurting European citizens in the process who will have to pay more for American LNG, which costs about a fifth more than
gas from Russian, Norwegian or Algerian sources.
Projects to build offshore regasifiers in Europe appear to have begun and seem unlikely to be affected by future political vagaries,
given the investment committed and planning times involved:
"There are currently in the region of 22 large-scale LNG import terminals considered as planned in Europe, except for the planned
terminals in Ukraine (Odessa FSRU LNG), Russia (Kaliningrad LNG), Albania (Eagle LNG) – Albania being a candidate for EU membership
– and Turkey (FSRU Iskenderun and FSRU Gulf of Saros).
Many ofthese planned terminals, including Greece (where one additional import terminal is planned – Alexandroupolis), Italy
(which is considering or planning two additional terminals – Porto Empedocle in Sicily and Gioia Tauro LNG in Calabria) , Poland
(FSRU Polish Baltic Sea Coast), Turkey (two FSRUs) and the UK (which is planning the Port Meridian FSRU LNG project and UK Trafigura
Teesside LNG). LNG import terminal for Albania (Eagle LNG), Croatia (Krk Island), Cyprus (Vassiliko FSRU), Estonia (Muuga (Tallinn)
LNG and Padalski LNG), Germany ( Brunsbüttel LNG), Ireland (Shannon LNG and Cork LNG), Latvia (Riga LNG), Romania (Constanta LNG),
Russia (Kaliningrad LNG) and Ukraine (Odessa).
Nine of the planned terminals are FSRUs: Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Poland, Russia, Ukraine and the UK. "In
addition, there are numerous plans for expansion of existing terminals, including in Belgium, France, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands,
Poland, Spain, Turkey and the UK."
Washington, with its LNG ships, has no capacity to compete in Asia against Qatar and Australia, who have the lion's share
of the market, with Moscow's pipelines taking up the rest. The only large remaining market lies in Europe, so it is therefore not
surprising that Donald Trump has decided to weaponize LNG,
a bit as he has the US dollar . This has only driven EU countries to seek energy diversification in the interests of security.
The European countries do not appear to be
dragging their feet at the prospect of swapping to US LNG, even though there is no economic advantage to doing so. As has been
evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?" This, however, is not the case with
all allies. Germany is not economically able to interrupt Nord Stream 2. And even though the project has many high-level sponsors,
including former chancellor Gerhard Schröder, the project constantly seems to be on the verge of being stopped – at least in Washington's
delusions.
Even Eni's discovery of the gas field in Egypt has annoyed the US, which wants less competition (even when illegal, as in the
case of Huawei) and wants to be able to force its exports onto Europeans while maintaining the price of the LNG in dollars, thereby
further supporting the US dollar as the world's reserve currency in the same manner as the
petrodollar .
The generalized hysteria against the Russian Federation, together with the cutting off of Iranian oil imports at Washington's
behest, limit the room for maneuver of European countries, in addition to costing European taxpayers a lot. The Europeans appear
prepared to set whatever course the US has charted them, one away from cheaper gas sources to the more expensive LNG supplied from
across the Atlantic. Given the investments already committed to receive this LNG, it seems unlikely that the course set for the Europeans
will be changed.
I live in Europe. I can honestly say that the people I know here prefer Russian gas. People are very ticked off about how the
US meddled in their gas supply and the structuring of the pipelines. Most feel that even if US LNG WAS competitive with Russian
gas price for now, that the US would in some way either increase prices or use it in some other way to control or manipulate the
EU. And sentiment towards USA tends toward resentment and distrust. That's not to say they are necessarily pro-Russia, but definitely
a wave of anti US is present.
US LNG pricing is based on Henry Hub which today is under $2.30/mmbtu.
Even adding in liquefaction and shipping costs, the price to the end user is extremely low.
Henry hub is projected to be sub $3 for DECADES!
Combine the low price with spot deliveries (pipe usually demands long term contracting commitments), and US LNG actually has
strong rationale for being accepted.
The statement above that US LNG cannot compete against Australia in Asia is preposterously false due to the VERY high buildout
costs of the Aussie LNG infrastructure.
Next year, Oz's first LNG IMPORT terminal at Port Kembla may well be supplied with US LNG.
The US has shown itself to be unreliable as a supplier of anything. Political posturing will always take precedence over any
international transaction.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia in your post can be said of the U.S.
I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to
project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary warfare , and thereby influence
events abroad. Depending on their size and infrastructure, they can be used as
staging areas or for logistical, communications and
intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have resulted in overseas military bases being established in
large numbers by world powers and the existence of
bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The U.S. has 36 listed here with none
of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
Whilst the left wants to go full throttle towards Wind and Solar, no one knows that the natural gas lobby is behind these sources
because both sources need a backup. While everyone talks "carbon footprint" they never discusses plant efficiency ( or
in the terms of engines brake specific fuel consumption and turbine specific fuel consumption ) in terms of thermal efficiency.
You know the boring stuff that plant operators stress over to make sure when your wife wakes up @ 3 in the morning to feed the
baby, the lights do go on, and they are creating that wattage in an cost affective manner. With that said, the king of thermal
efficiency i.e. burning a fuel to create electricity, is the Combined Cycle Natural Gas Power Plant. These plants combines a stationary
gas turbine buring natural gas to spin a generator and a boiler on the back side capture the waste heat to create steam to spin
a turbine to again add an input to the generator for a current state of the art of 61% efficiency . That means only 39%
going up the stack or for steam cooling to get your "Delta T" for the steam cycle to work. This 61% is vs maybe in the mid 40's
for a coal, oil plant or in the case of Nuclear just waste heat with nothing going out a stack. The greater wattage per fuel burned,
and the modularization of these Combined Cycle Plants aka have a series of 100mw turbines and bring them on line as needed, make
this a win-win IMHO for a massive refurbishing of our Utility base, with a host of benefits, before Gen 3 & Gen 4 Nuclear truly
take off again. These plants could be a great stop gap before Gen 3 & 4 are a reality. All the macinations towards wind and solar
and their disavantages aka being bird vegamatics, vistas being spoiled and huge swaths of land being used for panels make no sense
vs energy density of efficient plants. We are the Natural Gas King, lets not flare it anymore, and really, really leverage it
here, help allies, and use it for bringing bad behaving children of the world to the table ifyou will, if you want the candy,
behave....
Why do we have to treat other countries like we're the parent? We aren't. They are equal and fully functioning countries quite
capable of determining their own political and economic future...which may involve not trading or interacting with the U.S. Particularly
if we demand of them conditions we ourselves would never accede.
The Lithuanian FSRU "Independence" which was delivered from Hyundai Heavy Industries in 2014 to the port of Klaipeda drove
energy costs for heating through the roof and perhaps is one of the reasons the Prime Minister at the time only came in third
in the latest presidential elections. You can stay reasonably warm, eat or have money for medicine and other necessities. Pick
2 ONLY. Thank you USSA
Brainsick as Pompeo the US Pork without character.
As Long as Russia dlivery theier gas constantly and for a much better price then Us-Shale idiots, the ziocons only can lose.
We Europeans are not very impressed.
The biggest Capitalist economy on the planet needs to use mob tactics to push its over priced wares- seems 'long term' is not
part of their hit-and-run operation.
Now as for the article; apart from a few Eastern European Countries (The Ukraine, Poland etc.), I have seen no proof whatsoever,
that Europe is shifting to US LNG.
As for "As has been evident of late, whenever Washington says, "Jump!", European allies respond, "How high?""; I am sorry,
but I think those days are over..... this can be seen in our Iranian stance, the 2 Russian pipelines - 1 being Nordstream II and
the other Turk-stream, increased trade with Russia, joining the the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and so on and
so on......
Slowly but surely the anti-Russia propaganda is dying. You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some people
all of the time (libtards), but you can't fool all the people all of the time. Europeans (the citizens) will question why they
should pay 20-30% more for their natural gas just to please America. Politicians better have an answer or change of policy if
they want to be reelected.
"... That nearly five-year investigation has never provided any credible proof of Russian culpability, yet the Dutch-led investigators known as the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) continually level allegations that Russia supplied an anti-aircraft missile to Ukrainian rebels who purportedly blasted the Boeing 777 out of the sky. ..."
"... However, Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad denounced the report as "ridiculous hearsay" aimed at "scapegoating Russia". Tellingly, his comments were not widely reported in Western media. ..."
"... On the back of the MH17 imbroglio, as well as other slanders, Western governments have continued to impose economic sanctions on Russia. These sanctions have cost the Russian economy an estimated $50 billion. On top of that, Western states and their media portray Russia and President Putin as a rogue regime and pariah. ..."
"... There were two suspects: Russia and Kiev. The JIT not only included one of the suspects (Kiev) as part of the JIT, Kiev could also cancel any evidence that involved Kiev complicity in MH17. ..."
"... MH17 flight was normally a Southern route, but the route was changed to Northern, over the war zone between Rebels and Kiev. Guess who had authority to change the route of a plane entering their country. And, why would they change that route - hmmm. ..."
"... The lead investigator of JIT refused to consider any evidence presented by Russia. ..."
"... Western hypocrisy and duplicity. Tell us something we don't know. Like NATO's purpose being mutual defense. NATO's purpose is NWO recruitment. ..."
First there was the Dutch-led inquiry into downing of the Malaysian MH17 airliner, which put
the finger of blame on Russia for the disaster in 2014 when all 298 people onboard were
killed.
That nearly five-year investigation has never provided any credible proof of Russian
culpability, yet the Dutch-led investigators known as the Joint Investigation Team (JIT)
continually level allegations that Russia supplied an anti-aircraft missile to Ukrainian rebels
who purportedly blasted the Boeing 777 out of the sky.
Despite its evident failures of due process, nonetheless Western governments and media have
lent the JIT allegations (slanders) undue credibility. The US, Britain and other NATO members
last week called on Russia to comply with the JIT "investigation", smearing Moscow as guilty of
causing the MH17 deaths.
However, Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad denounced the report as "ridiculous
hearsay" aimed at "scapegoating Russia". Tellingly, his comments were not widely reported in
Western media.
For its part, Russia has vehemently
rejected allegations of involvement in the MH17 disaster, as have pro-Russian Ukrainian
rebels. Russia's repeated offers of contributing information to the probe have been rebuffed by
the Dutch-led JIT. By contrast, Russia's own investigation has uncovered credible radar and
forensic evidence that an anti-aircraft missile fired at the passenger jet actually came from
military forces under the Kiev regime's command. Russia's evidence has been steadfastly ignored
by Western media reports.
The credible suspect party -- Kiev political and intelligence authorities -- have been
allowed to participate in and frame the JIT probe to inculpate Russia. The US, European Union
and NATO back the Neo-Nazi dominated regime in Kiev, financially and
militarily , since it seized power in a violent coup d'état back in 2014. That
should be the real focus of scandal in the MH17 story.
On the back of the MH17 imbroglio, as well as other slanders, Western governments have
continued to impose economic sanctions on Russia. These sanctions have cost the Russian economy
an estimated $50 billion. On top of that, Western states and their media portray Russia and
President Putin as a rogue regime and pariah.
Now contrast the undue priority given to the above dubious JIT claims with two other reports
also out last week.
One was on the horrific death toll among civilians in
Yemen inflicted by the Western-backed Saudi-led war on that country. It is estimated that over
90,000 people have been killed in violence over the past four years, with most of the civilian
victims caused by indiscriminate Saudi air strikes.
It is an indisputable fact that the US, Britain, France, Germany and other NATO powers have
been arming the Saudi regime with warplanes, helicopters, missiles and logistics to carry out
this slaughter of Yemeni civilians. The Western states are complicit in war crimes.
President Trump continues to defy US lawmakers by ordering multi-billion-dollar arms sales
to Saudi Arabia, despite the carnage. The British government and wannabe prime minister Boris
Johnson claims that its weapons exports are not involved in killing Yemeni civilians, in
blatant denial of the facts.
A British court last week
ruled that UK weapons exports were in breach of its own supposed ethical codes protecting
civilian lives in conflicts. The British government is set to appeal the court ruling and will
likely ignore it anyway given the systematic relationship of Britain arming Saudi Arabia -- the
UK's biggest weapons export market -- year after year.
Western media last week, as usual, gave only minimal reporting on the shocking human
suffering in Yemen. The whole barbarity and Western governments' culpability is largely
hushed-up and omitted by the media.
... ... ...
Meanwhile, the US and its NATO allies impose sanctions on Russia based on unsubstantiated
allegations about MH17, Ukraine, Crimea, election meddling, the Skripal spy poisoning affair,
among other fabrications. Those sanctions -- based on flimsy innuendo -- are leading to
ever-worsening relations with Russia and international tensions between nuclear powers. Western
media do not expose the insanity, they foment it.
Such media are unwilling and incapable of pointing out this gross double standard. They
propagate the double standard.
The moral bankruptcy of Western governments must be covered up by a servile media. Because
the state, corporate power and media are all complicit.
Truth, justice and democracy, which they pontificate about, have nothing to do with the
functioning of Western capitalist power; they're mere illusions to distract from systematic
criminality. Last week was an object lesson for those willing to see it.
There were two suspects: Russia and Kiev. The JIT not only included one of the suspects
(Kiev) as part of the JIT, Kiev could also cancel any evidence that involved Kiev complicity
in MH17.
MH17 flight was normally a Southern route, but the route was changed to Northern, over the
war zone between Rebels and Kiev. Guess who had authority to change the route of a plane
entering their country. And, why would they change that route - hmmm.
The lead investigator of JIT refused to consider any evidence presented by Russia.
In Kiev, the "Khazar mafia" is strong, more precisely Chabad Lyubavichi (headquarters in
New York). Kolomoisky (a member of Chabad Lyubavichi and the owner of the Nazi death squads in the former Ukraine) ...
Western hypocrisy and duplicity. Tell us something we don't know. Like NATO's purpose
being mutual defense. NATO's purpose is NWO recruitment. The whore running the recruit victim
country is promised personal bribes, and the security services of the gang which it must also
support and pay for, in return for forgoing a degree of sovereignty. NATO is just another NWO
one centrally managed world scam.
"... Prosecutors are likely concerned with whether " broad cultural problems " pervade the entire company, including pressure to OK shoddy work in order to deliver planes on time, one source told the Seattle Times. The South Carolina plant manufactured 45 percent of Boeing's 787s last year, but its supersize -10 model is built exclusively there. ..."
"... Prosecutors are on the hunt for " hallmarks of classic fraud ," the source said, such as lying or misrepresentation to customers and regulators. Whistleblowers in the Charleston factory who pointed to debris and even tools left in the engine, near wiring, and in other sensitive locations likely to cause operating issues told the New York Times they were punished by management, and managers reported they had been pushed to churn planes out faster and cover up delays. ..."
"... A critical fire-fighting system on the Dreamliner was discovered to be dysfunctional earlier this month, leading Boeing to issue a warning that the switch designed to extinguish engine fires had failed in " some cases ." While the FAA warned that " the potential exists for an airline fire to be uncontrollable ," they opted not to ground the 787s, instead ordering airlines to check that the switch was functional every 30 days. ..."
Federal prosecutors are expanding their Boeing probe, investigating charges the 787
Dreamliner's manufacture was plagued with the same incompetence that dogged the doomed 737 MAX
and resulted in hundreds of deaths. The US Department of Justice has requested records related
to 787 Dreamliner production at Boeing's South Carolina plant, where two sources who spoke to
the Seattle Times said there have been allegations of " shoddy work ." A third source
confirmed individual employees at the Charleston plant had received subpoenas earlier this
month from the " same group " of prosecutors conducting the ongoing probe into the 737
MAX. Boeing is in the hot seat over alleged poor quality workmanship and cutting corners at the
South Carolina plant.
Prosecutors are likely concerned with whether " broad cultural
problems " pervade the entire company, including pressure to OK shoddy work in order to
deliver planes on time, one source told the Seattle Times. The South Carolina plant
manufactured 45 percent of Boeing's 787s last year, but its supersize -10 model is built
exclusively there.
Prosecutors are on the hunt for " hallmarks of classic fraud ," the source said, such
as lying or misrepresentation to customers and regulators. Whistleblowers in the Charleston
factory who pointed to debris and even tools left in the engine, near wiring, and in other
sensitive locations likely to cause operating issues told the New York Times they were punished
by management, and managers reported they had been pushed to churn planes out faster and cover
up delays.
The 737 MAX, too, was reportedly rushed to market amid much corner-cutting in order to beat
competitor Airbus' hot new model. Worse, the Federal Aviation Administration allegedly let
Boeing conduct many of the critical safety checks itself, and other countries' regulators took
the US safety certification as proof they did not need to conduct their own checks, culminating
in the Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines tragedies in October and March.
A critical fire-fighting system on the Dreamliner was discovered to be dysfunctional earlier
this month, leading Boeing to issue a warning that the switch designed to extinguish engine
fires had failed in " some cases ." While the FAA warned that " the potential exists
for an airline fire to be uncontrollable ," they opted not to ground the 787s, instead
ordering airlines to check that the switch was functional every 30 days.
"... The term multi-cultural is propaganda, the shift from "nation" to "culture" is used to atomise the perception of belonging that nation implies, into becoming one amongst many under the authority of state, which at this point has usually become an impersonal law and structure from which a bureaucratic elite govern and thrive off of private enterprise, where before a feudal lordship profited by taking a share of personal endeavour. The extremes might be Frankfurt school vs serfdom, with various combinations of philosophy in-between. ..."
"... The economic zionism you describe is via knowledge of finance, monetary theory, trade, weaknesses in society, political reality and more. It uses international realities as a tool. Where before international banking was a measure of trust in the clearing of accounts, this left room for manipulation, and the ability to pressure by holding control of that accounting. ..."
"... And although immigrants should feel free to speak their language at home and even in society, they will have to accept that the language of the law, commerce, education and civil authority is that of the host nation and it is up to them to learn it or at least learn how to work with or around it. ..."
"Nationality, is a named object, programmed by propaganda."
Nationality in the formal sense, derives from two or more feudal monopolies defining their
differences and according a separate recognition to the other, usually including geographical
markers. The extension of personal identity to national identity is product of the
recognition of belonging to one specific feudal hierarchy. This might be natural or imposed,
the theme of nation literally implies the environment or peoples one is born into.
The term multi-cultural is propaganda, the shift from "nation" to "culture" is used to
atomise the perception of belonging that nation implies, into becoming one amongst many under
the authority of state, which at this point has usually become an impersonal law and
structure from which a bureaucratic elite govern and thrive off of private enterprise, where
before a feudal lordship profited by taking a share of personal endeavour. The extremes might
be Frankfurt school vs serfdom, with various combinations of philosophy in-between.
The evolution of the above has been observed to occur by financial means, but is itself
also an ideology. The capitalist side to this ranges from the granting of favours (as per
permission to reside) through to fractional lending backed only by national debt (spending).
The taxation that must still occur to provide a sense of connectedness to real economy, and
hence to provide a sense of value to the currency, punishes the established and functional
society. The sum when mispent goes towards recruiting new nationals, and on paying the elite
bureaucracy for their pet projects. The old hierarchy tends to maintain much control the
private financial sphere, and works with the state by granting it a certain legitimacy, as
well as receiving positions, contracts and favours.
The economic zionism you describe is via knowledge of finance, monetary theory, trade,
weaknesses in society, political reality and more. It uses international realities as a tool.
Where before international banking was a measure of trust in the clearing of accounts, this
left room for manipulation, and the ability to pressure by holding control of that
accounting. The reality though is that nations (leaders) became weak or corrupted,
decided on grand enterprise they could not repay, and so broke trust in the old order by
resorting to or accepting manipulation of accounts (for example ending the original European
Monetary Union of the 19th century), and eventually resorting to war amongst themselves where
outward conquest was no longer profitable enough.
Were, or are they, clients of monopolies though ? Well no, because it is an illusion that
anyone holds monopoly of finance or money. However they did commit themselves to a system
without which they would then be left weak, where they would lose public honour and respect
if they did not produce a result of some kind. The resulting corruption between various sides
became a feature of national policy, a kind of symbiosis at elite levels. "Multiculturalism"
helps hide that reality, as well as serving in terms of having population with weakened
identity at their disposal.
The only monopoly states are truly client to is that of the use of force.
On a more social side, there are corners of the world where various cultures exist well
side by side, and where interaction is positive. This even within the boundaries of one
country. However it is not that country that makes that work, the different cultures tend to
hold a deeper respect and understanding for one another, but if you look you will find that
they do keep to themselves voluntarily, and simply reside next to each other peacefully. They
don't call themselves multiculti or anything. I expect multiculturalism theoretically could
exist, but because it is so artificial a concept, it seems more like an ersatz for loss of
own culture, so being sad cheap and empty once trying to celebrate it returns to common day
to day reality.
You are right about the correct form being a society that knows itself, that naturally
governs and watches over itself. This is often criticised as simplistic or idealised, and the
reason for that is that those who seek more centralised control only have the view of putting
down vast law as scripture and then forcefully imposing it, they love complexity so as to be
those that clarify it. If we live outside of that the rules, and life, are much simpler, and
fortunately most people have an innate understanding of right and wrong somewhere. The local
culture explains or represents the true form of interaction, so if that becomes confused, so
does society, and strife and unhappiness results.
Here is an interesting and very readable explanation on monetary theory, it gives a quite
clear explanation of how finance actually works in social and political terms
"Multiculturalism" is a loaded term: if it is used to mean different styles of food, music
and dress, then I am all for it. But it does not mean that the host nation should accept
misogyny, homophobia, honor killings or other "traditional values" that immigrants bring
along.
And although immigrants should feel free to speak their language at home and even in
society, they will have to accept that the language of the law, commerce, education and civil
authority is that of the host nation and it is up to them to learn it or at least learn how
to work with or around it.
You gotta love the SCI. This shallowly-disguised Russian propaganda arm writes in the most
charming awkward idiomatic English, bouncing from a "false neutral" tone to a jingoistic
Amercia-phobic argot to produce its hit pieces.
Russian propaganda acts like Claude Raines in "Casablanca" : "i am shocked, shocked to
discover (geopolitics) going on here!" Geeeee, Europe and the US are in a struggle to
avoid Europe relying on Russia for strategic necessities like fuel, even if it imposes costs
on European consumers. If you have a dangerous disease, and your pharmacist is known for
cutting off their customers' vital drugs to extort them, you might consider using another
provider who not only doesn't cut off supplies, but also provides the police department that
protects you from your pharmacist's thugs who are known to invade customers' homes using the
profits from their own business.
The US provides the protective umbrella that limits Putin's adventurism. Russia cuts of
Ukraine's gas supplies in winter to force them into submission. Gasprom is effectively an arm
of the Russian military, weaponizing Russia's only product as a geopolitical taser. Sure, it
costs more to transport LNG across the Atlantic and convert it back to gas, but the profits
from that business are routinely funneled back to Europe in the form of US trade,
contributions to NATO, and the provision of the nuclear umbrella that protects Europeans from
the man who has publicly lamented the fall of the Soviet Union, called for the return of the
former SSRs, and violated the IRM treaty to place nuclear capable intermediate-range missiles
and cruise missiles within range of Europe and boasted about his new hypersonic weapons'
theoretic capability to decapitate NATO and American decision-making within a few minutes of
launch.
Oh, for pity's sake, Laugher. Everything...absolutely everything you attribute to Russia
in your post can be said of the U.S. I'm not much of a Wiki fan, but for expediency, here's
their view on military bases.
The establishment of military bases abroad enables a country to project power , e.g. to conduct
expeditionary
warfare , and thereby influence events abroad. Depending on their size and
infrastructure, they can be used as staging areas or for logistical,
communications and intelligence support. Many conflicts throughout modern history have
resulted in overseas military bases being established in large numbers by world powers and the
existence of bases abroad has served countries having them in achieving political and
military goals.
And this link will provide you with countries worldwide and their bases.
Note that Russia, in this particular list, has eight bases all contiguous to Russia. The
U.S. has 36 listed here with none of them contiguous to the U.S.' borders.
Moscow Times is a neoliberal rag with small circulation and zero influence on public opinion and essentially NED
controlled/influenced content
Notable quotes:
"... The commitment of the inner circle often goes unquestioned, as the future of their massive business empires requires staying in Putin's good graces. But oligarchs coming from the intelligence services owe no particular allegiance and may be more interested in ensuring that the defense-industrial complex receives special treatment from the state. ..."
"In any case, it seems that any person who meets with Putin to discuss a possible
business venture that might require funding from the Russian government (or the Russian
government to assist in financing and building the necessary infrastructure for the venture
to go through) automatically becomes a favoured crony of his, in the eyes of Western
mainstream news media. "
Yes. You are not supposed to have to TALK to the president about this. It should have to
go through the Dóuma, the budget, there should be a process how to apply and
guidelines how to grant and if there is a public tender it should be regulated and the best
bid get it.
Your Wikipedia link goes to nowhere by the way. You are sure the Rotenberg Law did not
pass the Douma? First read seams to have been successful.
Understanding how these oligarchs built their wealth goes a long way in predicting their
future loyalty to Putin.
The commitment of the inner circle often goes unquestioned, as the future of their
massive business empires requires staying in Putin's good graces. But oligarchs coming from
the intelligence services owe no particular allegiance and may be more interested in
ensuring that the defense-industrial complex receives special treatment from the state.
Same for the holdovers from previous eras, who have suffered some attacks from the Putin
government over the years, mainly in the form of expropriation through politically
motivated court cases -- the state's main tool against the oligarchs.
They may be tiring of the uncertainty surrounding their property rights and have an
incentive to demand different political institutions to protect their assets. Coaxing these
groups to remain loyal requires the strategic use of rewards and repression.
...
First, the Russian government has spent incredible resources to directly compensate
oligarchs for their financial losses.
Massive infrastructure contracts such as bridges and pipelines find their way into the
hands of the connected elite, while import substitution policies in sectors such as
agriculture help create enormous profits for investors. Government bailouts to the tune of
tens of billions of dollars have stabilized balance sheets, while the state has also taken
over toxic assets such as those gone unused after the Sochi Olympics."
There maybe a process in Russia where oligarchs forced to repatriate get more interested
in regulations and a court system that protects their assets when they can no longer go to
London. But claiming that there are no longer oligarchs in Russia is an alternative
universe.
Miss Gabbard just served two tours in the ME, one as enlisted in the HI National Guard.
Brave Mr. Bolton kept the dirty communists from endangering the US supply of Chesapeake
crab while serving in the Maryland Guard. Rumor also has it that he helped Tompall Glaser
write the song Streets of Baltimore. Some say they saw Mr. Bolton single handily defending
Memorial Stadium from a combined VC/NVA attack during an Orioles game. The Cubans would have
conquered the Pimlico Race Course if not for the combat skill of PFC Bolton.
At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the
New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it
for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, who met
with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving
Washington that "there's no decision, but I think it's unlikely" the treaty would be
renewed.
Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed
because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery
systems. "So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into
account would be malpractice," he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.
Like all of his complaints about arms control agreements, Bolton's criticisms of New START
are made in bad faith. Opponents of New START have long pretended that they oppose the treaty
because it did not cover everything imaginable, including tactical nuclear weapons, but this
has always been an excuse for them to reject a treaty that they have never wanted ratified in
the first place. If the concern about negotiating a treaty that covered tactical nuclear
weapons were genuine, the smart thing to do would be to extend New START and then begin
negotiations for a more comprehensive arms control agreement. Faulting New START for failing to
include things that are by definition not going to be included in a strategic arms reduction
treaty gives the game away. This is what die-hard opponents of the treaty have been doing for
almost ten years, and they do it because they want to dismantle the last vestiges of arms
control. The proposal to include China as part of a new treaty is another tell that the Trump
administration just wants the treaty to die.
The article concludes:
Some experts suspect talk of a three-way accord is merely a feint to get rid of the New
Start treaty. "If a trilateral deal is meant as a substitute or prerequisite for extending
New Start, it is a poison pill, no ifs, ands or buts," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive
director of the Arms Control Association. "If the president is seeking a trilateral deal as a
follow-on to New Start, that's a different thing."
Knowing Bolton, it has to be a poison pill. Just as Bolton is ideologically opposed to
making any deal with Iran, he is ideologically opposed to any arms control agreement that
places limits on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The "flaws" he identifies aren't really flaws that
he wants to fix (and they may not be flaws at all), but excuses for trashing the agreement. He
will make noises about how the current deal or treaty doesn't go far enough, but the truth is
that he doesn't want any agreements to exist. In Bolton's worldview, nonproliferation and arms
control agreements either give the other government too much or hamper the U.S. too much, and
so he wants to destroy them all. He has had a lot of success at killing agreements and treaties
that have been in the U.S. interest. Bolton has had a hand in blowing up the Agreed Framework
with North Korea, abandoning the ABM Treaty, killing the INF Treaty, and reneging on the JCPOA.
Unless the president can be persuaded to ignore or fire Bolton, New START will be his next
victim.
If New START dies, it will be a loss for both the U.S. and Russia, it will make the world
less secure, and it will make U.S.-Russian relations even worse. The stability that these
treaties have provided has been important for U.S. security for almost fifty years. New START
is the last of the treaties that constrain the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and when it
is gone there will be nothing to replace it for a long time. The collapse of arms control
almost certainly means that the top two nuclear weapons states will expand their arsenals and
put us back on the path of an insane and unwinnable arms race. Killing New START is irrational
and purely destructive, and it needs to be opposed.
bolton is opposed to any treaty, to any agreement, whereby the other side can expect to
obtain equally favorable terms-he wants the other side on their knees permanently without
any expectation of compromise by the empire.
First, let's look at Bellingcat involvement in Ukraine.
On July 11th 2014 an event happened that shook my world, literally. Bellingcat
reported that the Russians attacked Ukrainian armed forces from across the border in
Zelenopillya. The Ukrainians suffered traumatic losses. Once again, Eliot Higgins provides the
data to determine this. Once again Bellingcat was wrong about the origin of the attack.
This single battle marked the turning point for the entire war. The Donbass militia went on
a large offensive for the first time and destroyed a big Ukrainian encampment with a rocket
attack.
How can I afford to be so assertive? At 4:30 in the morning on July 11th every house in my
town started shaking because of the massive explosions going on at Zelenopillya. I did say it
shook my world, didn't I?
I was between the Russian border and the camp. We could see the smoke from the rockets and
the
sky was lit with the explosions . The
explosions were loud enough to wake the dead that morning. There were no rockets flying
over my head. For Russia to fire them, that's exactly where they would have been.
At that point we were under Ukrainian occupation for a couple of months. Two days before the
attack on Zelenopillya happened, a Ukrainian army officer told the post master to get the
children out of town within 2 days. The army was pulling out and a cleansing battalion (Donbas
battalion) was coming in to weed out "separatists and supporters." That was when I came face to
face with Mark
Paslowsky, the American nazi . The article gives his background and tells what was going
on.
Bellingcat misidentifies the weapon as artillery. Grad rockets were fired at Zelenopillya by
the Rovenki militia that day. I spoke with the militia that fired them about 1 week after the
fact. In the linked articles the Ukrainians state plainly that it was militia using Grad
rockets.
The Ukrainians took some of their wounded across the border to Russia. It's not quite
something you do if Russia was really attacking you. The worst injuries were treated locally.
Donbass people ran there after the battle to help the wounded and the Ukrainian soldiers were
treated at local hospitals. Ukraine abandoned them.
The story got a lot of play in the west in the west as a Russian attack on Ukraine thanks to
this event. It was added to the list of reasons to sanction Russia. If the attack on
Zelenopillya didn't happen, I probably wouldn't be here to write this.
For the third time on an important event, Bellingcat shows it cannot identify the origin or
firing location of a weapon and misidentifies both the weapon type and the direction of fire in
media.
Getting the facts straight about the MH-17 shoot down is the difference between hundreds of
families getting justice and closure for those deaths or never seeing it. Convict the wrong
party and justice is never served. New victims are made with false or erroneous evidence.
Bellingcat's importance to the JIT (Joint Investigative Team) investigation of MH-17 is
apparent through all the media Higgins and Toler are quoted in media as the independent
experts.
That last statement should grab your attention. Bellingcat and its founders Elliot Higgins
and Aric Toler's credibility rests on the fact that they are independent researchers. If they
are working for an interested party in any investigation, Bellingcat's credibility is destroyed
and their research means nothing. After all, it's been paid for.
Bellingcat really grabbed the public's attention and imagination after the shoot down of
flight MH-17 over Ukraine. Independent researchers Higgins and Toler went to work to find the
missile launch site and the responsible parties, or did they?
As early as February 2014, Higgins showed the beginning of a clear pattern regarding
Ukraine. In the tweet below this OSINT expert researcher was linking to a
1 month old blog started by
Sviatoslav Yurash . What's special about Yurash at this time is that he was Ukrainian
ultranationalist Dimitry Yarosh's English language spokesman. If that well known fact wasn't
enough to caution Higgins, what was?
In the next article to follow, starting with Yurash as the first example, I'll show you how
all these volunteer experts including Higgins get paid. The article will further cement and
establish the relationships between Bellingcat, Weisburd, Watts and other intel and news
headline providers with each other as well as their employers.
For now, the admission made by the Ukrainian Information Ministry and Aric Toler will have
to be enough.
In
addition, already 21 November Dmitry Zolotukhin met with his US counterpart, team
representative Bellingcat Arik Toler , who conducted a similar training for journalists in Kyiv
on the invitation of Media Development Foundation. They also discussed the possibility of
holding a conference in Kiev on thematic instruments OSINT-use techniques in the modern media."
One of the Media Development Center's
sponsors is NATO . It is a project of the US Embassy in Kiev because of the association
with the embassy's diplomatic paper, the Kyiv Post.
If that isn't enough, let's see how close Bellingcat's Aric Toler views the
relationship.
According to both Information Policy Advisor Dmitry Zolotukhin and Toler, they are partners.
Eric Toler and Eliot Higgins(Bellingcat), along with Aaron Weisburd, Clint Watts, and
Joel
Harding have been working with the same Ukrainian Information Ministry that started the
"Mytorovyets" or Peacekeeper website.
They help the SBU geo-locate people in Ukraine. As shown above, they also train people to
geo-locate anyone considered anti-Maidan or anti-nationalist in Ukraine. They didn't
disappoint.
I think this pretty well sums up how independent Bellingcat's investigation has been. To add
insult to injury, Higgins and Toler work directly with previously identified Ukrainian
Intelligence hackers and Pravy Sektor members (ultra-nationalist Ukrainians) to get Bellingcat
"independent research" information.
InformNapalm and its hackers are Ukrainian Intel agents working for the Information
Ministry. In their own words – The main activities of the project are
collecting and analysing OSINT-information , found in open
sources, including social networks. InformNapalm's investigation of 53rd Artillery Brigade
commander colonel Sergei Muchkayev, suspected of killing the MH17 passengers, was used in
the report of the Bellingcat research team .
Who was the information source for independent researchers at Bellingcat? Dimitry Yarosh's
best friend, Valentyn Nalivaychenko was one of them. In the spring of 2014, he replaced
SBU(Ukraine's Security Service) personnel with ultra-nationalists because they had the right
ideology. Another was Anton Gerashchenko who is responsible for persecuting the press in
Ukraine.
In
few days and hours after the crash of MH17 Ukrainian officials widely publicly discussed
all that data (except the photo of "Paris Match") anonymously downloaded by someone to social
nets. For example on July 17 Gerashchenko (The ministry of internal affairs) showed the photo
of Buk at Torez; on July 18 Avakov (The ministry of internal affairs) showed the video of Buk
at Luhansk; also on July 18 Nalivaychenko (the chief of Ukrainian security service) showed the
video of Buk at Snizhne, and on July 19 Vitaliy Naida (Ukrainian security service) showed shot
fragment of video frame (not the video itself) from Zugres.
Under the best circumstances Bellingcat's research can only be seen as a Ukrainian
Intelligence production. If neither Higgins or Toler were actively engaged with Ukrainian
operations on the many levels that they are, their source material is still very tainted. When
all your research material comes from a party under investigation, you are no longer a neutral
party. You can't pee in a blood sample and call it evidence. Are Higgins and Toler credible?
You decide.
Max van der Werff has become a go-to resource for understanding information about MH-17. I
have spoken at length with Max and his fellow researchers @bellingmouse. This linked article shows the strength of research
these REAL volunteers have brought to the MH-17 investigation . I had to ask Max the great
who-dun-it question. His response was after thousands of hours of research, he didn't know. Too
many people were withholding information and remaining uncooperative on all sides.
What he was sure of is that Bellingcat's research is shoddy and a lot of the evidence
appears fabricated.
Max van der Werf has been interviewed by the JIT investigative team on 4 occasions, given
over 6 hours of recorded interviews to them, as well as over 14GB of data.
Examples of this include the fact that all of the images and video are such low quality and
resolution, it's impossible to make definite determinations from them.
One of the chase vehicles (jeep) in Bellingcat's BUK convoy is driving with the door open.
In another image of the BUK transport supposedly taken by a local resident, the apartment was
not occupied in the summer of 2014. There was no one there to take the image. It was again so
grainy and low quality that even a military vehicle substitution was not noticeable. None of
the neighbors that were there saw a BUK on a trailer.
The route of travel according to Bellingcat would have taken the BUK launcher toward the
conflict zone twice while battles were being fought across the region. Anyone familiar with the
area or that had a map would take a direct route which would have made it much less noticeable
driving through unpopulated areas.
Images taken after the shoot down are just as bad. Some unimportant parts of the image are
in focus while it's almost impossible to make out the BUK even though it's right beside the
photographer.
The so-called wire-tapped conversation was proven to be a Ukrainian SBU production. How is
it still a part of the evidence chain?
What van der Werff and @bellingmouse have proven unequivocally is that another investigation
needs to take place that looks for real evidence. The JIT, for their part had the impossible
task of investigating a hostile shoot-down of a jetliner with no previous airline disaster
investigation experience in a war zone that was active. The problem with it is objectivity was
thrown out the window as soon as Ukraine got the right to reject evidence and control what
would be made public.
What has looking for Ruskies done? In the eyes of Congress it made you and every publication
that strives for neutral information or even writing from their political slant a Ruskie. You
work for Vladimir Putin.
It has taken away any hope of justice for people in Syria and the families of MH-17 victims
unless real neutral investigations take place.
It's taken away real news from the masses and replaced it with policy pieces from people
that get paid to hate you. You are after all, the Russian interference that they talk
about.
It is interesting that Trump destiny now depends on geopolitical events he can't control namely actions of Iran and China.
Trump foreign policy appears to be driven by a combination of resentment and arrogance -- not a good combination for survival of
Trump and/or mankind
Was with Iran might result in high oil prices would kill the already anemic global growth and cause a recession (I guess
the volatility in oil prices will go through the roof at that point), Iran can destabilize the global economy by destroying most
of the oil production infrastructure around the gulf.
While Lyndon Johnson had chosen not running for reelection in 1968 because anti-war sentiment was high, G W Bush who was
reelected and the USA have now contractor army and casualties without draft does not matter much.
Notable quotes:
"... More likely they attack Saudi Arabia directly. Same impact, more justifiable if not outright popular. No one likes Prince Bone Saw. ..."
"... Iran could take those 10 million barrels a day away in 15 minutes. ..."
China will play a large roll in whether trump get re-elected.
If they decide they prefer his dysfunctional governance to his opponent, then they will engage
in a trade deal that will allow to trump to declare victory. It will likely be a very
superficial victory.
If they decide they would prefer to engage with a different administration, they will likely
refrain from a trade deal until after the election.
Have you asked yourself why Putin preferred trump? The answer is not pretty (for trump, or the
USA).
This is probably an absurd point of view. But in my opinion, it might be in Iran's interest
to drag the U.S into war, probably as indirectly as possible. That way they might
significantly reduce the chance of Trump being re-elected. (Obviously lives will be
sacrificed in this scenario)
The question is if it would work and would a Democrat president stop the war and go into the
same JCPOA deal again. Who knows. Very unpredictable.
Well, Mike, as absurd IMO is that Iran would risk self-destruction to get rid of Trump. He's
certainly a PITA for them, but closing the Strait of Hormuz to crash the global economy and
to blame it on Trump wouldn't work: Trump could blame it all on Iran while keeping on cooking
a controlled conflict with them, showing the world that the US doesn't depend on oil from any
other continent.
This would be a very difficult situation for a Democrat to step in and to
promise a better solution. The US would be relatively well off compared to Asia and Europe
and even could emerge out of such a constellation relatively more powerful.
But it could also
end up in a terrible mess. As you wrote: Who knows. Very unpredictable.
"... It seems that everyone is lying about the Skripal affair. The UK govt. version is riddled with inconsistencies. But it does seem that 2 GRU officers were wandering around Salisbury. Why? And the Russians are lying about that. ..."
"... The likelihood is that the GRU were there to discuss with Skripal his wishes to return to Russia. There is an alternative likelihood that they were there to quiz him on his contribution to the Dodgy Dossier. Both scenarios could well lead to the British secret services deciding to take Skripal out, even down, and blame it on the Russians. ..."
"... I would suggest that Skripal and his daughter are now either living somewhere else in Natoland under different identities and some money to keep them quiet, or else their existence became too awkward and risky and sadly they have been liquidated. ..."
In view of the latest revelations from the leaked report, which seem to prove that at least some elements of the Douma "chemical
attack" were entirely staged, we want to take look back at the chaotic events of Spring 2018.
What was the agenda behind the Douma false flag?
Why was the US response seemingly token and ineffective?
Why was the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired?
What agenda tied the Skripal case to the Douma attack?
The following is an extract from an article by Catte originally published April 14th last year, which takes on a greater weight
in light of certain evidence – not only that the Douma attack was faked, but that the OPCW is compromised.
The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the
Middle East.
Since at least 2001 and the launch of the "War on Terror" the US has led the way in finding or creating facile excuses to fight
oil wars and hegemonic wars and proxy wars in the region. But this time the dynamics look a little different.
This time it really looks as if the UK has been setting the pace of the "response".
The fact (as stated above) that Mattis was apparently telegraphing his own private doubts a)about the verifiability of the attacks,
and b)about the dangers of a military response suggests he was a far from enthusiastic partaker in this adventure.
Trump's attitude is harder to gauge. His tweets veered wildly between unhinged threats and apparent efforts at conciliation. But
he must have known he would lose (and seemingly has lost) a great part of his natural voter base (who elected him on a no-more-war
mandate) by an act of open aggression that threatened confrontation with Russia on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this Douma "initiative"
is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would be attempted in early
March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt no longer made any
sense.
A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled a possible
offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain the pressure
on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely vanquished and
nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time.
You can see why Mattis and others in the administration might be reluctant to take part in the false flag/punitive air strike
narrative if they saw nothing currently to be gained to repay the risk. They may have preferred to wait for developments and plan
for a more productive way of playing the R2P card in the future.
The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against the stupidity
of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about possible escalation.
The UK govt and media on the other hand has been much more homogeneous in advocating for action. No doubts of the type expressed
by Mattis have been heard from the lips of an UK government minister. Even May, a cowardly PM, has been (under how much pressure?)
voicing sterling certitude in public that action HAD to be taken.
Couple this with the – as yet unverified – claims by Russia of direct UK involvement in arranging the Douma "attack", and the
claims by Syria that the perps are in their custody, and a tentative storyline emerges. It's possible this time there were other
considerations in the mix beside the usual need to "be seen to do something" and Trump's perpetual requirement to appease the liberal
Russiagaters and lunatic warmongers at home. Maybe this time it was also about helping the UK out of a sticky problem.
The Skripal consideration
Probably the only thing we can all broadly agree on about the Skripal narrative is that it manifestly did not go according to
plan. However it was intended to play out, it wasn't this way. Since some time in mid to late March it's been clear the entire thing
has become little more than an exercise in damage-limitation, leak-plugging and general containment.
The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods and inexplicable
silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know.
The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect.
1) It lied again and again about the information Porton Down had given it
2) Its lawyers all but lied to Mr Justice Robinson about whether or not the Skripals had relatives in Russia in an unscrupulous
attempt to maintain total control of them, or at least of the narrative.
3) It is not publishing the OPCW report on the chemical analyses, and the summary of that report reads like an exercise in allusion
and weasel-wording. Even the name of the "toxic substance" found in the Skripals' blood is omitted, and the only thing tying it to
the UK government's public claims of "novichok" is association by inference and proximity.
Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this case) may
not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in Europe and America,
has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later).
None of the alleged victims of this alleged attack has been seen in public even in passing since the event. There is no film or
photographs of DS Bailey leaving the hospital, no film or photographs of his wife or family members doing the same. No interviews
with Bailey, no interviews with his wife, family, distant relatives, work colleagues.
The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to die.
Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful agency
of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all.
She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed
location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day.
Very little of this bizarre, self-defeating, embarrassing, hysterical story makes any sense other than as a random narrative,
snaking wildly in response to events the narrative-makers can't completely control.
Why? What went wrong? Why has the UK government got itself into this mess? And how much did the Douma "gas attack" and subsequent
drive for a concerted western "response" have to do with trying to fix that?
Is this what happened?
If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal poisoning,
a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of the questions
being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible superpower stand-off
in the Middle East.
So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed a false
flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack in Syria,
scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility?
Could it be this planned event was unexpectedly canceled by the leading players in the drama (the US) when the Russians called
them out and the rapid and unexpected fall of Ghouta meant any such intervention became pointless at least for the moment?
Did this cancelation leave the UK swinging in the wind, with a fantastical story that was never intended to withstand close scrutiny,
and no second act for distraction?
So, did they push on with the now virtually useless "chemical attack", botch it (again), leaving a clear evidence trail leading
back to them? Did they then further insist on an allied "response" to their botched false flag in order to provide yet more distraction
and hopefully destroy some of that evidence?
This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could no
longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on the
run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first.
It would explain why the US has been less than enthused by the idea of reprisals. Because while killing Syrians to further geo-strategic
interests is not a problem, killing Syrians (and risking escalation with Russia) in order to rescue an embarrassed UK government
is less appealing.
And it would explain why the "reprisals" when they came were so half-hearted.
If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have they
lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded" to it by
a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence to prove
some of the most egregious parts of this.
This is very bad.
But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists in Syria
prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval.
This is a major issue. She and her government should resign. But it's unlikely that will happen.
So what next? There is a sense this is a watershed for many of the parties involved and for the citizens of the countries drawn
into this.
Will the usual suspects try to avoid paying for their crimes and misadventures by more rhetoric, more false flags, more "reprisals"?
Or will this signal some other change in direction?
We'll all know soon enough.
andyoldlabour
D S Bailey was interviewed by the BBC after leaving the hospital, but that interview simply raised more questions. Why was his
family allowed in the hospital without hazmat suits when the hospital staff were wearing them?
We were originally told that Bailey was contaminated whilst wearing police issue gloves, yet the BBC article said he was wearing
a hazmat suit.
Nerve toxins kill thousands, yet only three people were initially contaminated and recovered.
Refraktor
It's beyond reasonable doubt that there was no Novichok: assuming that substance even exists. It could be that Sergei and Yulia
were stooges loyal to MI5. It could be they were whacked with bz or fentanyl (by MI5) in the restaurant. That's all it would take.
Of course army heads of nursing and CID officers would be circulating ready get a handle on developments. Perhaps it later became
necessary to kill someone after the complete non-lethality of Novichok was revealed. Perhaps this death was really caused by heroin
overdose or else something quite natural. Perhaps not. I concur that the most likely motive for this false flag was an attempt
to escalate in Syria. Given the total barking insanity of the Skripal Saga it might be that NATO genuinely contemplated war with
Russia at this time. When they lobbed those cruise missiles I thought their dreams were about to come true. Maniacs.
Stonky
Speaking of which, where on Earth IS Sergei Skripal?
Sergei was a double agent who could have had his finger in all sorts of dubious pies. There might easily be logical (if not
legitimate) reasons for keeping him under wraps. Surely the more pertinent question is: Where is Yulia?
Because even if you swallow every fragment of the official UK nonsense, you're still left with this oddity:
Yulia Skripal is a young woman who was the completely innocent victim of a dastardly assassination plot masterminded
by the evil Vlad. Having survived this attempt on her life, she has responded by deciding that she never again wants to see
or speak to anyone at all. Ever.
Nick
It seems that everyone is lying about the Skripal affair. The UK govt. version is riddled with inconsistencies. But it does
seem that 2 GRU officers were wandering around Salisbury. Why? And the Russians are lying about that.
Portonchok
Nick,
The likelihood is that the GRU were there to discuss with Skripal his wishes to return to Russia. There is an alternative
likelihood that they were there to quiz him on his contribution to the Dodgy Dossier. Both scenarios could well lead to
the British secret services deciding to take Skripal out, even down, and blame it on the Russians.
I would suggest that Skripal and his daughter are now either living somewhere else in Natoland under different identities
and some money to keep them quiet, or else their existence became too awkward and risky and sadly they have been liquidated.
Stonky
But it does seem that 2 GRU officers were wandering around Salisbury. .. Why?
Nick, even accepting that the two guys were Russian intelligence operatives, there are a million explanations for their presence
in Salisbury that day that make more sense than the official UK explanation: They came to assassinate Sergei Skripal by smearing
the world's deadliest nerve agent on his door handle in the middle of a Sunday afternoon, while wearing no protective clothing
Jen
There is no proof that the two Russian men Ruslan Boshirov and Alexander Petrov were GRU officers. The so-called "proof" for that
line of thinking comes from Bellingcat, a known propaganda outfit, who obtained the "proof" in highly suspect ways that suggest
it was given cherry-picked information made to fit the narrative.
It is far more likely that out of the many tourists to Salisbury – hundreds perhaps, and many of them from Russia as well –
these two men were picked out at random by UK government authorities as targets of suspicion because they happened to be travelling
together and must have fit a preconceived template in which secret Russian agents (like Dmitri Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoi before
them, when those two fellows were supposed to have poisoned Alexander Litvinenko back in 2006) are believed to travel in pairs.
John2o2o
Two Russians were wandering round Salisbury. That is all we know. Has it never occurred to you that the UK government and/or the
people who poisoned the Skripals might be using them as convenient scapegoats? It may even be that they were deliberately
lured to Salisbury to be set up in this way and had nothing to do with the poisoning.
OffG
Is there any solid evidence they were GRU? Has that ever been firmed up beyond Bellingcat's 'data dump' of largely unproven documents?
Seamus Padraig
The going theory is that the Russian agents were led into a trap. The GRU may have been made to believe somehow that Skripal intended
to re-defect, and that's why they really went to Salisbury–not to assassinate him, but to help him arrange his escape. That's
when the MI6 moved in for the kill, hoping to pin the crime on Russia.
To be sure, it's hard to get to the bottom of this cloak-and-dagger stuff when all we have access to is open-source information.
But one thing is pretty clear to me: the idea that Russia would have allowed Skripal to defect, then waited all those years and
taken crazy risks to kill him after having had him in their direct custody in a Russian prison for over 6 years, where they could
have easily killed him at any time, is ridiculous.
John2o2o
They are not proven to be Russian agents.
Reg
John2o2o
No, not proven but is it possible they were low level couriers in a meeting set up by Yulia where information was to be swapped
as the price as re-admittance to Russia for Sergei, particularly given Sergei's mothers advancing age.
It would explain the UK's panicked reaction as this was a meeting that must be stopped at all costs. How much would Sergei know
of UK security service operations if he was still active? It would also explained why Yulia as also targeted and why there turned
off their phones as they sought to shake off their UK handlers. A meeting is more credible in broad daylight than an assassination.
An assassination with an escape route involving a train from Salisbury on Sunday is not credible.
It could even be that the UK security services carried out the attack in the hope of blaming Russia if the could convince them
it was carried out by Russia. Having kept the OPCW away they could then interfere with the evidence at will with Novachock. They
could be filmed propped up in bed blaming Russia (like Litvinenko), but they didn't play ball so have been kept incommunicado
ever since apart from a a carefully scripted interview. The attacks on the other two months later could be to add credibility
to a narrative that was loosing all credibility even among the general public.
JudyJ
"Having kept the OPCW away "
I always considered it was highly suspicious that the UK was most reluctant to involve the OPCW right from the outset even
though that would be the normal internationally accepted practice in the circumstances; and when Russia was imploring them to
do so.
Significantly, the UK only brought them into the picture (reluctantly) when they were given legal advice that Russia were entitled
to invite the OPCW to investigate, and whoever issued the invitation first would have overall control of the final report (i.e.
they could liaise with the OPCW in the drafting, they could redact it, and decide who was to receive copies of the full report
as opposed to the summary report).
My suspicion now, knowing what we know about the OPCW Douma scandal, is that the UK were totally in cahoots with the US over
the Salisbury events and when the prospect of having no option but to call in the OPCW emerged the US simply said "Don't worry
about a thing. Just leave it with us. We'll sort things out".
Kathy
The British seem to me to act, hide and manipulate from behind the USA.
I think that Trump was really not meant to happen. Killery was supposed to take over the reins and continue the waging of wars
in the Middle East. Syria being the immediate agenda.
The two above events both link up in an attempt to force Trump into complying. One of the connections is the attempt to try to
smear Trump with the dodgy dossier. The chemical false flag was intended to provide the warmongers with enough pressure to force
Trump to act and involve America against his better judgement in an all out war in Syria. luckily this became a short term token
one off. Much to British annoyance.
It is the connection with the intelligence services that is key. All of these events seem to be designed to push Trump into compliance
and conformity. It is the knowledge of /and his probable involvement with Christopher Steele, that suggest poor Sergey knew to
much of both events, and so had to be silenced. The Skripal affair was, I think attempting a cherry on the cake demonizing of
Russia with the Skripal narrative. A twist of the knife while Trump was under investigation over his supposed puppet status by/
collusion with Russia.
It seems that the latest persecution of Assange is also mostly being pushed by Britain. Assange certainly did play a big part
in the narrative not playing out as planned.
crank
Remarkable that despite all that is known, an article (well, two really) like this does not meniton Israel once.
The extract from Catte's piece last year starts with the sentence, 'The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably)
regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the Middle East.'
The 'neocon faction' means what exactly ? Why not just say it ? It means Israel and the international power bloc aligned with
Israel.
Perhaps Douma and Salisbury make more sense if they are put into a context of Israel writing and running US (and by extension,
UK) foreign policies. And what of Russia's strange and often unmentioned relationship with Israel?
If anyone is serious about unwrapping the onion of lies and misdirection that passes for 'current events', then its time to consider
Israel and its networks of supporters as the central focal point.
9/11 only makes sense, I would say, with this in mind. Ditto the Kennedy killings. If you think these events have significance
in our present,and you genuinely stand against racist supremicism and crazed plans for world domination, then speak out about
Israel before such speech is criminalised everywhere.
Dissidents_unit
Well said Crank. I have always believed Mossad had a hand in the alleged assassination attempt of the Skripals as Israel does
have chemical weapons and has refused affiliation with the OPCW in order, I presume, to avoid inspections and having to decommission
the chemical weapons they have. If anybody is to be accused of meddling in other nation's elections, politics etc Israel is right
up there as the prime suspects – they obviously control Trump, they were caught on Video (at least a non diplomatic representative
from the Israeli Embassy in the UK who branded himself as managing 'special projects') offering Joan Ryan – a Labour MP – Ł1m
to run a smear campaign against Corbyn – which she gladly accepted. They have run continuous, spurious, ridiculous anti-Semitism
claims against Corbyn and Labour which has only served to turn the public more against them and they are massacring and murdering
Palestinians with impunity – all supported by the UK and USA.
I think Mossad were the Government (UK's) agents with respect to the Skripal affair. I am of the firm belief that the Skripals
are both dead – after all, the UK Government cannot afford to release them so to speak. I say this because Sergei used to speak
to his elderly mother in Russia if not every day, at least several times a week and he has not been in touch with her neither
has Yulia. Yulia had a flat, a fiancé, a job and a wedding to arrange back in Russia – I don't believe she just walked away from
all that.
Portonchok
And what of Russia's strange and often unmentioned relationship with Israel?
It's not strange at all. By far the largest group of immigrants into Israel are Russians.
John2o2o
Jews under the bed? I don't agree with your analysis. Israel has nothing to do with the Skripal poisoning. I understand your mistrust
of Israel, but it is not to blame for all the ills of the world.
crank
How do you know that 'Israel had nothing to do with the Skripal poisoning' ?
You don't.
I know of no connection directly linking the events to agents of the Israeli state, but what does that mean? We don't really know
any more than that the UK government story is a transparent fabrication.
If you conclude that Israel effectively runs US foreign policy then the Syrian situation has to be considered in that context.
(Likewise Iran).
It's not called the Anglo-zionist empire for nothing.
Catte's article was basically a theorised link between Douma and Salisbury. Douma is in Syria, which is under attack from Israel,
according to a plan drawn up in Israel decades ago, with proxy army from Neocon Washington (i.e. Israel)
mark
That's a good point. But I am struck by the leading role currently played by the UK in the recent litany of false flags and smear
campaigns. The UK was a prime mover in setting up the "White Helmets" and the various Syrian gas hoaxes. Litvinenko. Skripal.
The Steele Dirty Dossier. The Corbyn anti Semitism hoax. Admittedly probably with a large Zionist element.
crank
The Henry Jackson Society would be one obvious hub of neocon organisation within the UK political establishment. There surely
are others that we are as yet unaware of (NB the recent Facebook revelations of political interference around the globe.) In much the same way that the 'special relationship' between the US and Britain basically translates into Britain acting as
America's de facto diplomatic poodle, HJS has long seen itself as an outpost to disseminate US neoconservative ideology in the
British political establishment, media and civil society.
O/T I know, but on the subject of the esteemed (!) Henry Jackson Society, I had to laugh the other day when I read about the pending
departure of Alexander Yakovenko from the Russian Embassy in London.
A Dr Andrew Foxall, who (according to the Daily Mail) is the 'expert' Head of Russian Studies at the HJC, stated that it was
clearly a suspicious move because ambassadorial positions are normally held for 5 or 3 years, not for the 8 years that Yakovenko
had been there. He even spoon-fed us with the information that "8 is not divisible by 5 or 3" and therefore this has to be a forced
move. I suggest that Dr Foxall needs to stop and think just a touch longer if he is ever asked to comment in public in future
and not seriously damage whatever reputation he might claim to have. I ask you.
JudyJ
Sorry, should have made better use of my 'edit' time! HJC should of course read HJS. My proof-reading abilities are as questionable
as Dr Andrew Foxall's maths!
crank
If anyone has not reviewed Christopher Bollyn's case against Israel for 9/11, I would suggest that now is the time.
Only a widespread revelation of the role of Israel in 9/11 can stop their war on Iran from proceding.
There are only two viable theories about Skirpal IMO. The first is that his daughter had persuaded the old man to come home and
the englanders learned this at short notice.
Sergeant Nick Bailey the thug on call that day, really screwed up the attempt to off Skirpal even poisoning himself in order
to 'get' Skirpal before he met with the Russian officers who had been sent to negotiate his return home.
Proximity to English chemical weapons determined the method.
The second is also dependent on the proximity of English chemical weapons manufacturing base at Porton Downs. That is the English
were responsible for training Syrian headchoppers in chemical warfare and they taught their terrorists about Novichok to false
flag in Syria in a way that would make Russia appear culpable.
One of the trainee terrorists went to lunch and overheard the Skripals talking Russian & became so upset the invasion and war
had been lost, he decided to poison em.
The latter doesn't fit the known facts as well as the former, but it is more credible than anything the Englander spies have
offered.
Dissidents_unit
URKismet – just a comment – it turns out that the first responder apart from Nick Bailey was, in fact, the Head of Nursing of
the British Army! No coincidence there I think. Either she or Nick Bailey or both are surely suspects in the administration of
the toxic substance?
Wilmers31
Many people forget that Skripal took (according to wikipedia) approximately 300 other agents down with him when he was busted
in Moscow.
That makes about 600 individuals (only 1 relative for each) who must be his enemies. Someone was after revenge? Whether that
one was in Britain in exile or in Russia we don't know. People ignore such a large group of potential enemies.
Seamus Padraig
So why did the Russians allow the Skripals to emigrate to the UK in the first place? They had Sergei in prison for 6 years; they
could have had him bumped off at any time while he was their prisoner. But for some odd reason they chose not to. Strange
Wilmers31
It was a prisoner exchange before Skripal had completed his sentence. The UK must have had an asset which Moscow really wanted,
persons or . don't know. It is now time that these prisoner/spy exchanges no longer happen in secret. Why they let him out earlier
is not understandable from what we know at the moment.
Wilmers31
The one thumb down is surprising. If that is for the idea to cease prisoner/spy exchanges that is somewhat silly as these exchanges
do not make for happiness, as we have seen. If exchanges are so good, why not exchange Kevin Mallory with the Chinese? People
need to cop the complete punishment for their crimes, you do not exchange murderers or fraudsters, either.
If the criticism is about the hundreds of people who are tempted for revenge after their cover was blown through Skripal then
this is bizarre. What purpose does it serve to sweep it under the carpet that Skripal was only one person in a system? Maybe wikipedia's
figure of 300 was wrong – let's have the correct figure then.
We can read in memoirs like Brian Crozier's "Free Agent" and "Gold Warriors" (Seagraves) what operations there were in Chile,
Africa, Philippines etc but the many people who were involved are never mentioned. The individuals like Skripal or Crozier are
the visible tips of the icebergs and it is legitimate to ask who else was involved in the operations, covert or open, legal or
illegal, and who funded.
davemass
Profumo was jailed for lying to Parliament.
Surely May, and all accomplices should suffer the samne fate??
wardropper
I expect the US secret service just asked our secret service to take the initiative for once, since the US were beginning to look
like the bad guys
Paul Harvey
I have privately speculated that the raison d'etre of the Skirpal farce was simply to generate the belief system and memetic narrative
that Russia is currently producing chemical weapons/ nerve agents and is willing to openly use them on their perceived 'enemies'
abroad (and of course that the origin of these chemical weapons, ie Novichok can 'proved' to be exclusively of Russian providence.
Why is the above important? Because if there is ever a chemical weapons attack in Syria on civilians and hundreds die and the
nerve agent is 'proved' by the OPCW to be Novichok then of course Russia would get the blame for supplying the 'Assad regime'
with this chemical agent. (Sarin, anthrax etc cannot be exclusively traced back to Russia, only Novichok and it alone can be,
if we believe the prior Skirpal narrative).
As a side note – the story that Trump was shown images of dead English ducks and hospitalised English children in relation
to the Skirpal incident makes me wonder if this was an attempt by British psychological warfare operatives to pre-program Trump
and his team, so when videos eventually emerge of dead animals and hospitalised Syrian children, the link is already fixed in
their mind as to what a Novichok 'attack' looks like).
One has to admit the story that surfaced last month of dead ducks/hospitalised kids images shown to Trump in relation to the
Skirpal narrative was very strange to say the least.
Just as the Skirpal case 'fixed' the Novichok narrative in the MSM as exclusively of Russian providence, one can also speculate
that the Douma 'Barrel Bomb' meme (and the fake OPCW Report) was another key part of the narrative – if a speculative Novichok
attack occurs and footage emerges of similar containers as used in the the fake Douma chlorine attack, the OPCW can already point
to the providence of the delivery system as being exclusively of Syrian military origin and the Douma events as simply a precursor
to a current 'Novichok' attack (just as the Skirpal events would be used as a precursor to Russian culpability and perhaps even
the suggestion of active Russian involvement in a mass chemical attack on Syrian women and children using the agent Novichok.)
Maybe this is what the Russians mean by UK involvement in Douma – maybe they worked out that the Skirpal events were a precursor
to a wider false flag event to be staged down the line by elements of British military and state intelligence networks in conjunction
with elements within NATO and U.S. intelligence structures.
I know this is total speculation and I provide it as food for thought and grounds for further research in reference to this
article.
That is a tremendous piece of work. It should go down in history, but people are already forgetting Skripal's name. A truly
brilliant summary.
mark
Chemical weapons have been used against the Syrian military, inflicting casualties. They have also been used routinely by the
British taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters to terrorise civilians indiscriminately for years. As for "scant evidence
of jihadists weaponizing chemicals", they have been arrested in Turkey by the Turkish police in possession of canisters of sarin
nerve gas. Just one of many documented instances. But maybe this just comes from a "conspiracist mindset." Maybe it's totally
irrelevant to the issue when terrorists are arrested in Turkey in possession of nerve gas.
mark
The UK taxpayer funded head choppers and throat slitters routinely seize civilians as hostages, then murder them and blame it
on Assad. They have massacred entire villages then called in their chums in the BBC to film the evidence of "Assad's latest atrocity."
Like they film the devastation in Gaza and try to pass it off as rocket damage in Israel. All in a day's lying for the folks at
the Botty Bangers Club.
John
Isn't it odd that you used opcw findings when it matched what you want but it doesn't fit now so you're having a hissy fit! I
hope horrid things happen to you fake socialist
lundiel
isn't it odd that sarin gas or even chlorine has only been used to kill their own women and children rather than the Baathist
military?
No. Western media aren't going to get in a frenzy if some of Assad's soldiers are killed.
crank
isn't it odd that sarin gas or even chlorine has only been used to kill their own women and children rather than the Baathist
military?
– In a word, no. Anyone with even the slightest comprehension of how psychological warfare works would understand this.
Louis Proyec – 'reader'
Maybe read more widely, or start thinking more deeply, or stop bullshitting so lamely.
Loverat
I came across a similar post Louis made on another topic a while ago.
The political language and terms used in his posts always suggest his political position is his starting point then arranging
selective facts to support it. First, the classic line of attack is accusing others of 'conspiracy theorists' – a tactic used
by mainstream journalists and Bellingcat and el against the academics and experts of the Syria Working Group. As said below, that
does not cut it – especially now the 'conspiracy theorists' have for the umpteenth time been vindicated.
Louis, comes out with stuff like 'Baathist troops' (he uses the word 'Baathist' three times in his post as if it was somehow
relevant) whereas someone normal, of genuine intelligence and independent, would use the description 'Syrian Army'. Why would
you say 'Baathist troops' or use other pointless labels unless you are trying to distract from the real issues while attempting
to give the impression of having some knowledge. His political posturing offers nothing by way of getting to the truth and he
appears to be another self-serving armchair commentator.
mark
Maybe we could get him a job with Bellingcat.
OffG
You're embarrassing yourself, Louis. Throwing out stale ad homs like 'conspiracist' isn't enough any more. You need to up your
game, deal with the developing reality or retire.
Jen
We need the other anti-Assad troll back but the danger is I might get sick of hitting him again with Yassin al-Haj's article for
the New York Times where the Syrian activist admits to having stayed with the White Helmets in Ghouta in mid-2013 before fleeing
to Raqqa and leaving his wife Samira Khalil behind.
Ken
Take it easy on poor old Louis; what can one expect from a fellow who probably believes that 9/11 was not a false flag either?
And that one is a complete no-brainer to see.
Rhisiart Gwilym
Come on! Let's encourage the poor old fart to go on posting here. He's always good for an incredulous laugh. And he's a warning
too to anyone trying to make sense of Western criminal realpolitik, an object lesson in what happens to a supposed 'radical thinker'
– hah! – who drinks too deeply of the Western propaganda kool-aid, and holds the stuff down, too, until it comes time to regurgitate
it as if it were 'original thinking', the poor sucker. Don't off him. He's useful as light amusement.
PS: in case you think I'm being a bit ad-hominy, I'm a poor broken down old fart myself. But I still have my wits about me,
and I can still smell the stench of the West's Permanent Bullshit Blizzard when I meet it. Catch up soon Louis! Till then – thanks
for all the laffs! :O)
JudyJ
" isn't it odd that sarin gas or even chlorine has only been used to kill their own women and children rather than the Baathist
military?"
No, not at all odd.
1. To be clear, when you say "their own" I presume you mean the Syrian women and children who the (mainly non-Syrian) terrorists
hold as captives to ensure their men folk co-operate with them, or to be used in propaganda campaigns including 'false flag' scenarios.
2. In what form would you suggest the Jihadi murderers might be tempted to use chlorine in a way capable of killing opposition
soldiers? Chlorine is essentially an unpleasant irritant if misused. To kill, it would have to be administered in an enclosed
space where there was no means of escape for the victims.
3. We are constantly being fed the lie that the terrorists don't have sarin so it would be rather foolish of them to deploy
it against opposition soldiers. Even they've worked that one out.
4. The terrorists are mercenaries paid by western agencies whose primary function is to carry out acts to discredit the Assad
Government, thereby providing an ultimate excuse for military action to overthrow the Assad Government. The most obvious way to
do this is to murder, as you so sensitively express it, "a bunch of Syrians" in a way that the West finds appropriate to point
the finger at the Assad Government and its Russian allies.
This all makes a lot more sense than the idea that the Syrian Government assisted by the Russians would choose to murder innocent
Syrian civilians, not least by using outlawed chemical weapons, and incur the wrath of western powers at the point when they were
succeeding in defeating the terrorists with relative ease.
Over the last five pieces (
Part 1 ,
Part 2
,
Part 3 ,
Part 4 ,
Part 5 ) I have, slowly but surely, advanced a theory of what happened in the Skripal case. I must confess to having done so
with a fair amount of unease. I don't want to believe that my Government has been stating a case that is false. I don't
want to believe that the public have been lied to. I don't want to have to think that there has been a lot of effort made
to present an explanation that hides the truth.
And yet, given the fact that the Government story contains self-evident fallacies, and cannot be made to add up, I don't think
that there's much alternative than to be hugely sceptical about their claims. I stated the two main fallacies in
Part 1 , which are the claims that three people were poisoned by the nerve agent A-234, which is 5-8 times more toxic than VX,
and that because A-234 was developed in the Soviet Union, the Russian State is responsible for what happened. The first claim cannot
be true, because the three people are alive and well and have suffered no irreparable damage. The second claim is palpably untrue,
because A-234 has been synthesised in a number of countries.
Yet this is only the tip of the iceberg of the absurdities and anomalies. I don't intend to go through all of them, but would
simply point anyone who does believe the official story to concentrate on three words: The Door Handle. This was apparently where
the poison was poured, so allow me to pose five questions about this claim to those who believe it to be true:
During the "clean-up" operation, there were lots of military chaps wearing HazMat suits, which are designed to protect against exposure
to toxic chemicals. How, then, did the assassin apparently manage to pour this same lethal, military grade nerve agent on a door
handle, without wearing a HazMat suit? On the other hand, if he or she was wearing a HazMat suit when performing the operation, wouldn't
someone in Christie Miller Road have noticed and found it – shall we say – a bit odd? If the poison was administered to the door
handle, how exactly did both Sergei and Yulia Skripal manage to touch it (people don't normally both touch the door handle if they
go in the house together), and how did they manage to get exactly the right quantities on their skin so that they collapsed at exactly
the same time, some four hours later? The door handle theory only reared its head some three weeks after the poisoning, at which
point the substance was said to have been still present in a "highly pure" form. During this three weeks, many people went in and
out of Mr Skripal's house using the front door. How did they manage to do so without using the door handle, or if they did, how did
they manage not to succumb to poisoning? Part of the Government's alleged evidence pointing at the high likelihood of Russian involvement
in the case, is an FSB instruction manual showing – amongst other things – how to assassinate someone by pouring Novichok on a door
handle. Suspending our disbelief on this claim for a moment (and admittedly that is hard), did the Government have the manual when
they made their accusations against the Russian Government on 12th and 14th March, and if so, why did the door handle theory not
surface for more than a week after this?
Of course, a few moments consideration about the door handle theory will show that – like the rest of the official story – it
is simply wrong. And because it is so plainly wrong, that is why we can safely say that the real explanation lies elsewhere.
Nevertheless, I am aware that in advancing another explanation, there are likely to be many holes in it too. Whilst much of what
I have said throughout this series has been based on facts and eyewitness statements, the theory I have advanced from those facts
and witness statements remains unproven. And so I would ask that where I have got things wrong, you would forgive me, and where things
don't make sense, you would point them out.
Having said that, what I want to do in this final piece it to tie up a few loose ends and – most particularly – attempt to demonstrate
how the theory I have advanced explains some of the other anomalies in the case in a far more cogent and rational way than does the
official story. So here goes.
The Deafening Silence of Sergei Skripal
One of the least talked about points in the official story, yet one that really is very important, is that if it were a true account,
Mr Skripal would almost certainly have no more clue about who poisoned him than the average person in the street. If it were true
that an unknown assassin, appointed by the Russian Government, poured military-grade nerve agent onto his front door on 4th March,
before fleeing back to the Motherland, Mr Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, would be as much in the dark as to who did it than you
or I.
Now, if that were the case, two things would naturally follow. The first is that Mr Skripal would almost certainly be inclined
to believe the version of events given to him by the Metropolitan Police. Think about it. He wakes up one morning in a strange hospital
bed, and has absolutely no clue why he is there or what happened to him. Then a kindly policeman comes and explains that he was the
target of an assassination attempt using a lethal nerve agent, and that the British Government believes that it was ordered by the
Russian Government. What is he going to believe? Fairly obvious I would think. At least he would have no reason to disbelieve them.
The second thing that would naturally follow is that, as soon as he was able, he would want to release a statement, either on
paper, or in an interview, where he not only pledges his support for the Metropolitan Police and their ongoing investigation, and
no doubt hints at involvement of the Russian State, but also – and this is crucial – where he also gives the public some information
about what actually happened to him on 4th March: where he went, when he first started to feel ill, and what he last remembers.
Again, think about it. If you were in his shoes, wouldn't you want to catch the people who did it? And wouldn't you assume that
the more information you could give to the public, perhaps even clearing up some of the anomalies (such as the reason for the agitation
in Zizzis), the more chance there would be that someone's memory might be jogged and vital information given to the police?
Of course you would. And yet so far, Mr Skripal has released no such statement. Why?
It isn't that he is physically or mentally incapacitated. We know from Yulia Skripal's brief call to her cousin on April 5th (which
almost certainly wasn't "meant" to happen), that Sergei was by that time fine. In response to Viktoria's question about her father,
she said this:
"Everything is ok. He is resting now, having a nap. Everyone's health is fine, there are no irreparable things. I will be discharged
soon. Everything is ok."
That was nearly three months ago, and yet the Sergei Skripal who was fine on 5th April, having suffered no irreparable damage
from apparently being poisoned by the world's most deadly nerve agent, and who was discharged on 18th May, still has not spoken.
I put it that the theory I have advanced (see
Part 5 in
particular), suggests an obvious reason for his silence. Were he in the dark about the identity of those who poisoned him, as the
official story implies, his silence would be inexplicable. Don't you want to catch the perpetrators of this crime upon you and your
daughter, Sergei?
Yet, if we assume that actually he knows exactly who poisoned him and why they poisoned him – as would be the case according to
the theory I have advanced – then his silence is very easily explained. He cannot be allowed to be interviewed about what happened,
because he would blow the whole wretched business clean out of the water. He cannot be allowed to make an open statement, with the
press there to ask free questions, because it would come out that he had been meeting someone at the bench in The Maltings, and that
this someone whom he met was the person who poisoned him.
In addition, his (highly likely) authorship of the Trump Dossier would be revealed. And if this were to happen, not only would
it be seen that the foundation upon which the whole
Trump/Russia collusion hoax was based was made of straw, but it would become clear that the interference in the 2016 US Presidential
election was never really about Russian interference to get Trump elected; but rather about British interference to stop
Trump getting elected.
The deafening silence of Mr Skripal is therefore strong evidence of a number of things:
That the Government story, in which he was the unsuspecting victim of a Kremlin plot, is without foundation. That he well knows who
his poisoners were and why they poisoned him. That he cannot be allowed to speak freely because if he was, a scandal of monumental
proportions would be revealed. The Deafening Silence of Yulia Skripal
Deafening silence of Yulia? What am I talking about? She has released a number of statements through the Metropolitan Police,
and in the statement (not interview) she made to Reuters. So what do I mean?
Many have pointed out a number of remarkable things about her Reuters statement. For one, she looked remarkably well. For another,
the language of the statement she read was highly suggestive that it was first written in English – not by her – and then translated
into Russian (statements like "I do not wish to avail myself of their services" don't normally trip off the tongue of native English
speakers, let alone those who speak it as a second language).
But for me the most remarkable thing about all of her statements are not what they do say, but rather what they don't say. As
with Sergei's silence, Yulia has nothing whatsoever to say about the day of the poisoning. Isn't that odd? She notes that she and
her father survived an "attempted assassination". She notes that a nerve agent was used to do it. But she says nothing about her
and her father's movements that day. Nothing about what they did and where they went. Nothing about when they first succumbed to
the effects of the poisoning. Nothing to suggest that her father's agitation in Zizzis may have been caused by poisoning.
In short, she says nothing whatsoever about the poisoning itself. Zero. Diddly squat. Zilch. Nada. Nothing. Why?
As with Sergei's non-statements, this doesn't compute. If you happened to wake up in a hospital to be told that you had been the
victim of a nerve agent poisoning, you would almost certainly want to tell people as much as possible about your movements up to
the point of the poisoning. Wouldn't you? Of course. Especially if not only you had been poisoned, but also your dad. You'd at least
want to sound a bit more interested in actually catching the perpetrators than Yulia, who didn't so much as mention it, and instead
sounded like she just wanted to move on and forget it ever happened.
Once again, this total silence on something so crucial just doesn't fit at all with the official story. That narrative suggests
that Sergei and Yulia were innocent victims of a Kremlin-hired assassin. That narrative suggests they don't know who that Kremlin-hired
assassin was. But it also suggests that they of all people have a huge interest in giving details of what happened to them that day.
And yet there is silence.
Does it fit better with the theory I have proposed? You bet it does. If what I have suggested is anywhere close to the truth,
just like Sergei, Yulia cannot be allowed the freedom to give a proper interview where any question is allowed. She cannot be given
consular access by the Russian Embassy. Why not? Because she knows what her dad was up to; she knows why he was meeting people at
a park bench on Sunday 4th March; and she knows that the two of them were poisoned by the people who they were meeting.
Why did she agree to an interview? No doubt she realises what a difficult and vulnerable position she is in. Despite claims to
the contrary, she clearly has no contact with her family back in Russia, or indeed any contact with the outside world. She was almost
certainly pressured into making a statement, and yet -- as Tony Kevin convincingly argues
here -- it has many signs of being a compromise statement.
And so she agreed to making a fairly nebulous statement -- one which is almost inconceivable from the point of view of the official
narrative, but which fits perfectly with the narrative I have advanced.
The Deafening Silence of Nick Bailey
One final deafening silence that doesn't exactly do wonders for the official narrative, is the silence of Detective Sergeant Nick
Bailey. He has always been a big puzzle in this case, for a number of reasons. It was first said that he was poisoned at The Maltings.
However, the problem with this explanation is that there was absolutely no reason for him to have been there. The case was treated
by Salisbury District Hospital as a case of Fentanyl poisoning. Why would a member of the Criminal Intelligence Department (CID)
be called to a bench to an apparent opioid overdose?
It was then said by none other than Lord Ian Blair that DS Bailey was actually poisoned at Mr Skripal's house. But again, the
same question arises. Why would a member of CID be sent to the home of a person in a what looked like a case of opioid poisoning?
The story then swung backwards and forwards a number of times between a poisoning at the Maltings and a poisoning at Mr Skripal's
house. These anomalies are very important, but even more important is that they could have been put straight by DS Bailey himself.
If the official story was correct, not only would it have been super easy to have verified where DS Bailey was poisoned, but he himself
could have testified to it. And yet like the Skripals, there has been nothing!
Given the absurd changes to this particular part of the story – and it is perhaps the easiest of all parts to verify – my assumption
is that he was poisoned at neither The Maltings or Mr Skripal's house. Instead, just as I wrote in
Part 5 that
I believe it likely the Skripals were poisoned by an incapacitating nerve agent in the red bag that was then seen next to the bench,
I think it highly likely that DS Bailey was poisoned from the same source.
But where? The red bag was
removed from the scene by a police officer and placed in an evidence bag. Why would this have been done? Because the pair on
the bench were suspected of overdosing on an opioid, and the bag would naturally be removed by police so that its contents could
be examined. And whereas I think it unlikely that someone from CID would be called to the scene of a drug overdose, it seems quite
likely that they might receive and handle evidence taken from such a scene. Therefore my guess – and I stress that it is only a guess
– is that DS Bailey was the man who received the bag, and whilst looking inside to see its contents, was poisoned by the same incapacitating
agent as the Skripals (possibly something like 3-Quinuclidinyl Benzilate (BZ), but definitely not A-234).
Again, if the official story were true, what would prevent DS Bailey from giving a brief statement or interview, confirming exactly
what happened to him? But if the red bag theory is close to the mark, then it becomes plainly obvious why this hasn't yet happened.
Smokes and Mirrors
Which actually brings me on to the penultimate point I want to make in this piece, and indeed in this 6-part series. Everything
in the official story, no matter how absurd, seems designed to point our attention away from the most probable source, place and
type of poisoning: The red bag, at the bench, and an incapacitating nerve agent. And it does so because if our attention is focused
on them, then a very different story begins to emerge. Which cannot be allowed to happen.
As stated above, claims about A-234 being used just don't add up. Neither the time delay, nor the symptoms, nor the recovery of
the Skripals with no irreparable damage match up to what this deadly, military grade, high purity, lethal nerve agent that is so
much more toxic than VX, is meant to do. What the claim does, however, is points our attention away from what is far more likely
– an incapacitating agent administered to the Skripals between 3:45 and 4:00pm on 4th March.
As stated above, claims about the door handle just don't add up. Neither the fact that both Sergei and Yulia were poisoned, nor
the fact that others went in and out of the house before the door handle theory was put forward and didn't succumb, nor the fact
that the substance on it apparently remained of "high purity" weeks later – none of these things make any sense. What the claim does,
however, is directs our thoughts away from what is far more likely – that the substance used to poison the Skripals was administered
at the bench, and probably via the red bag.
The apparent motive put forward in the official narrative doesn't add up either. There is a general agreement among countries
that you do not target spies who have been part of a swap. Why? Because if you do, you can kiss goodbye to ever getting any other
spies swapped in the future. It's called shooting yourself in the foot big time! But what this frankly risible explanation for the
apparent motive behind the poisoning does, however, is to point our attention away from what Mr Skripal was really up to. And as
I set out in
Part 4 , this was very likely something to do with authoring the Trump Dossier.
Nothing about the official story makes sense. None of it adds up. It is riddled with holes. But I would submit that the only thing
that does make sense about it, is that the parts that go to make up the sum are all desperate attempts to divert attention. They
are smokes and mirrors, designed to stop us from considering some of the more obvious aspects of the case, and some of the more startling
aspects of the case – Mr Skripal's involvement with MI6; his likely involvement in or authorship of the Trump Dossier; the likelihood
that he was due to meet people at the bench in The Maltings; the probability that this is why he was agitated and in a hurry in Zizzis;
the likelihood that he knows who poisoned him and why.
And of course the reason that these things are not supposed to be considered is that if – and I acknowledge it is a big if – the
alternative explanation I have advanced is true, and if it became generally known, then it would cause just about the biggest political
crisis in British political history.
And Finally
Having said that, I have to say that I don't believe it at all likely that the British Government knew about any of this before
it occurred. I get the impression that the intelligence agencies on both sides of the Atlantic are a law unto themselves, and I think
it likely that some of their number wanted to send Mr Skripal a message, one which would look like an opioid overdose, one which
he would recover from reasonably quickly, and one which would be forgotten very soon.
However, I don't think that the poisoning of DS Bailey was meant to happen, but when it did, it set off a series of events that
quickly got out of control. I don't think the identity of Sergei Skripal as a Russian involved in a spy swap was ever meant to make
it into the press, but it did and very soon what looked like some kind of opioid poisoning quickly became an international spy saga.
The British Government's reckless and extraordinarily quick reaction to the case was, apart from being a travesty of the rule
of law, one of the biggest clues that the official narrative was not true. If it were true, they could have took their time, acted
calmly, and let the investigation run its course. Instead, what we got was a lawless, irrational and absurd response. It all smacked
of a panicked reaction, and whilst it made no sense in terms of the story they sold us, it makes perfect sense if the truth was that
they were desperate to prevent news getting out about who Skripal really was, what he had been up to, and how the poisoning might
well be connected with that work. And indeed the D-notices they slapped on the reporting of that stuff, and of Mr Skripal's connections
to Christopher Steele and Pablo Miller, are further evidence that it is so.
And so they very quickly decided to turn attention away from the big clues of the case, by invoking the scary sounding "Novichok"
and pinning the blame – without any evidence – on the Russian State. To this date, they have given us no evidence to back up their
claim, much less a suspect, but have unwittingly given us a bunch of absurdities that can be blown out of the water through the use
of simple reason and logic.
They should have remembered this:
"Do not be deceived: God is not mocked, for whatever one sows, that will he also reap" (Galatians 6:7)
But I have a feeling they don't believe it applies to them. I have a feeling that it does.
And so there's my case. As I say, there are bound to be a good many holes and no doubt many errors and inconsistencies in it.
Please do forgive me for those. As for the rest of it -- Make of it what you will.
' On Friday, Salisbury District Hospital's director of nursing Lorna Wilkinson announced Mr Rowley had been discharged and Public
Health England said he posed no risk to the community She said "I would also like to reassure everyone that, despite many people
seeking advice following these incidents, there have only ever been a total of five people who have been exposed to this nerve
agent and admitted to hospital for treatment"'.
This whole Salisbury saga is a complete riddle. The A&E consultant wrote to the Times saying nobody had ever been treated for
nerve agent poisoning, yet here we are months later and the director of nursing is totally contradicting him. Don't they talk
to each other at Salisbury District Hospital? Or, more likely, was the consultant going off-script?
JudyJ
Ross, Yes, considering Sergei and Yulia were placed in medical comas for several weeks supposedly to aid their recovery, Rowley's
treatment and speedy recovery appear to have inexplicably followed a completely different pattern. With regard to Dr Davies' letter
to the Times, have a look at 'The Blogmire' website where there has been posted in the past two or three days a brief report on
this, followed by interesting reader comments. Rob Slane, who also provides articles for this website, is 'Mr' Blogmire and he
managed to contact Dr Davies but really received less than convincing information.
"400 potentially contaminated items" is absolutely meaningless but sounds good. It is a useful means to imply that the police
are on top of things. Even if they found contamination on any of the items, I'm not sure what it would prove. Basically all they
mean is they have removed everything that Rowley and Sturgess might have touched since some randomly selected vague date or been
told by Rowley was the date he 'acquired' the 'bottle'. It could be all their clothing, everything in the fridge or kitchen cupboards,
everything in the bathroom etc etc If history repeats itself they won't even bother to test the items but will just incinerate
the lot.
D'Esterre
JudyJ: "400 potentially contaminated items"
I was puzzled at this. I remarked to a family member that it looks as if either somebody at Porton Down has been very careless,
or the spooks don't understand subtlety.
Mulga Mumblebrain
The brainwashed morons are impressed by big numbers.
D'Esterre
Jen: " .you have to explain why the UK authorities incinerated the Zizzi's Restaurant table where the Skripals had lunch ."
That's interesting. I hadn't known that. Curious though: if the authorities incinerated the table at which they had lunch,
how is it that the front desk – where presumably they paid the bill – wasn't also incinerated? Come to that, what about whatever
was on the table: cloth, utensils, plates and so on. Also waitstaff and kitchen staff: surely they'd have been contaminated as
well?
Truly, the more we're told about this incident, the more farcical it sounds. Ditto the incident with the unfortunate couple
in Amesbury. None of it makes sense.
Mulga Mumblebrain
When the Western kakistocracies and the Evil psychopaths who comprise them, in politics, the 'intelligence' apparatus and the
fakestream media brainwashing machine, lie about everything to do with Russia ie about Putin's legitimacy, the nature of Russian
society, the 'popularity' of fascist Quislings like Navalny, Russia' role in saving Syria from the takfiri death-squad armies
sent against it, about Russia's non-existent role in Western installation of fascists in power in Kiev, Russian 'meddling' in
US elections etc, etc, etc, on the balance of probabilities it is HIGHLY UNLIKELY that these pathological liars are telling the
truth about the Skripals. Particularly when we know that they are lying in asserting that ONLY Russia could make novichoks, only
Russia had any motive, that only Russia bumps off inconvenient people and that only Russia had anything to gain from it, on the
eve of the FIFA World Cup and with various Sorosian vermin braying that it be cancelled. How utterly galling it must be for these
psychopathic Russophobes that it was the greatest World Cup, on and off the field, for decades, perhaps ever.
Yulia Skripal's agreeing to convey the message concerning her possibly meeting with Russian authorities – "I do not wish to avail
myself of their services" -, raises suspicion that she and her father Sergei Skripal were "in on" an engineered false flag chemical
event from the start. Perhaps others have already done the investigative research and verified Yulia Skripal did indeed undergo
a tracheotomy, the neck scar seemingly over-exposed and the central focus for all who watched her short Reuters "interview". Has
this been confirmed by the doctor(s) who performed the surgical procedure, nurses assisting those surgeon(s) in the operating
room, medical photos, medical records, etc..
If Ms. Skripal indeed underwent surgical tracheotomy, our thought that the neck scar was the result of a covert conspirator
surgeon's making a simple incision and immediately sewing it up – to appear as if Ms. Skripal underwent a lifesaving surgical
procedure -, goes out the window.
Can anyone help in clarifying this? Has it been verified Ms. Skripal underwent the procedure and that her neck scar should
not be perceived as anything other than from a truly necessary lifesaving action?
Thank you.
vexarb
@thorella: "The uk legal system and uk forensics are second to none."
Dr. John Kelly, RIP. Assassinated by MI6 by order of Prime Miniister TB.Liar of Dodgy Dossier, interred without mandatory Crown
Coroners Inquest with Case Sealed for 70 years by order of Lord "Safe Pair of Hands"Hunt of Bloody
Sunday fame, and Dr.Kelly's bodily remains subsequently dug up and incinerated to destroy chemical evidence by order of Prime
Minister St Theresa of Porton Down.
"Second to none" in what?
Jen
The Russian Foreign Ministry and the Russian embassy in London are too busy having a laugh at seeing the whole affair collapse
under its own inconsistencies and at the British government and security services trying to prop up the whole mess and failing
to distract public attention away from the shit-heap that Theresa May has made of Brexit.
Why should the Russians bother commenting on it at all, when we can all see it's a false flag without the Russians having to tell
us?
This is a domestic UK issue about MI6 being out of control.
BigB
The main corroboration for the Steele Dossier was Christopher Steele: briefing the press at the Tabard Inn, Washington – to set
up a collaboration loop. Julian Assange tweeted that one of the journalists was Paul Wood who looks like a spook or an asset himself.
https://mobile.twitter.com/JulianAssange/status/976943588394323973
Another journalists was Michael Isikoff. His planted story war used to collaborate the Dossier as the basis of the FBI's FISA
warrant to surveill Carter Page.
The Nunes Memo also states that Steele back-chanelled additional allegations into the DOJ via Bruce Ohr.
Another corroboration was the Trump Tower meeting: ostensibly set up by Trump linked Araz Agalarov could verify the piss taking
allegations. It's well worth revisiting the Elizabeth Vos Disobedient Media article for background on this meeting set up Mifsud
et al: who are linked to London – not Moscow.
Anyway, all these "experts" – and Wikipedia – seem to have got their information from one source – Steele: who both wrote and
then corroborated his own dossier. With a little help from his intel friends
"Genuine" in the sense that it was really written by a KGB insider (which Skripal was), NOT in the sense that what he alleged
was true.
The point is that the source of the Steele-Clinton dossier would have been revealed and, of course, the source would have been
a proven consummate liar and traitor. This would blow Mueller's "investigation" out of the water.
But I'll not engage with you any further on this, since there's none so blind as those who will not see.
Thomas Peterson
why exactly does it seem likely Skripal was one of Steele's sources? did Steele even need any sources to write his ludicrous 'dossier'?
The Orbis report makes as if it knows all the ins-and-outs and comings-and-goings within Putin's impenetrable Kremlin. It
reports information from anonymous "trusted compatriots," "knowledgeable sources," "former intelligence officers," and "ministry
of foreign affairs officials." The report gives a fly-on-the-wall account of just about every conceivable event associated with
Donald Trump's Russian connections. It claims to know more than is knowable as it recounts sordid tales of prostitutes, "golden
showers," bribes, squabbles in Putin's inner circle, and who controls the dossiers of kompromat (compromising information).
There are two possible explanations for the fly-on-the-wall claims of the Orbis report: Either its author (who is not Mr. Steele)
decided to write fiction, or collected enough gossip to fill a 30-page report, or a combination of the two. The author of the
Orbis report has one more advantage: He knew that what he was writing was unverifiable. He advertises himself as the only Kremlin
outsider with enough "reliable" contacts to explain what is really going within Putin's office.
As someone who has worked for more than a decade with the microfilm collection of Soviet documents in the Hoover Institution
Archives, I can say that the dossier itself was compiled by a Russian, whose command of English is far from perfect and who
follows the KGB (now FSB) practice of writing intelligence reports, in particular the practice of capitalizing all names for easy
reference. The report includes Putin's inner circle – Peskov, Ivanov, Sechin, Lavrov. The anonymous author claims to have "trusted
compatriots" who knew the roles that each Kremlin insider, including Putin himself, played in the Trump election saga and were
prepared to tell him.
The Orbis report spins the tale of Putin insiders, spurred on by Putin himself, engaging in a five-year courtship of Donald
Trump in which they offer him lucrative real estate deals that he rejects but leaves himself open to blackmail as a result of
sexual escapades with prostitutes in St. Petersburg and Moscow (the famous "golden shower" incident). Despite his reluctance to
enter into lucrative business deals, Trump "and his inner circle have accepted regular intelligence from the Kremlin, including
on his Democratic and other political rivals," according to the Orbis report.
This story makes no sense. In 2011, when the courtship purportedly begins, Trump was a TV personality and beauty pageant
impresario. Neither in the U.S. or Russia would anyone of authority anticipate that Trump would one day become the presidential
candidate of a major U.S. political party, making him the target of Russian intelligence.
Sergei Skripal could fit the description of the "Russian" referred to in the third paragraph.
Thomas Peterson
I don't assume it. I see no reason to think Skripal had anything to do with the dossier. More likely in my view the sources, if
there were any, were Ukrainians and Americans.
There's a stink of Ukraine about it.
Mulga Mumblebrain
After a history of intelligence lying in the West that includes the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, the Warren Commission, 'yellow rain'
in Indochina, KAL 007, Lockerbie, Kuwaiti babies thrown from incubators, the USS Liberty, Saddam's WMD, Gaddafi's 'container-loads
of Viagra', MH17, the Russian 'invasion of Georgia', the Russian 'invasion of Ukraine', the Tian An Men Square 'massacre' etc
(I could go on ALL day), to credit ANYTHING that Western intelligence agencies state is sign either of intractable dementia, or
duplicity-or both, probably.
Jen
Yes I suppose a document based mostly on hearsay, rumour and guesswork, and with an accuracy of 60 – 70% (where? in spelling?),
ought to be taken seriously – to the kitty litter box.
I mentioned Paul Roderick Gregory and Craig Murray as two people who dismissed the dossier as fraudulent. What "experts" can
you put forward, GB, who support the dossier's contents as genuine or accurate? I suppose you think Luke Daniel Harding and Eliot
Higgins might qualify as experts supporting the dossier's contents as more or less accurate?
Jen
Gregory says the dossier fails the laugh test and is full of bizarre statements. Murray regards it as equivalent to the Hitler
Diaries hoax. Where do they not find anything wrong in the dossier?
bevin
If all that you have to go on for now is a dossier put together by a mercenary for the use of a political party in attack ads,
produced at great expense, and totally unsourced and uncorroborated, the world is in a worse way than you fear.
Or perhaps, it's not the world but you?
Mulga Mumblebrain
The utterly fraudulent 'dossier' was also used to gain an illegal FISA warrant to spy on the Trump campaign, as part of the conspiracy
to derail Trump's electoral bid, elect the blood-soaked feminazi Gorgon, Clinton, and further the hate campaign against Russia.
Three miles from Amesbury, six miles from Salisbury. 'Porton Down is the elephant in the room': former British ambassador who
visited Nukus plant where Novichok was tested, Craig Murray dismantles Amesbury poisoning
story on BCFMradio,
Porton Down : What is the experimental government facility in Wiltshire at the centre of recent poisonings?
The secretive laboratory has unintentionally become key in political developments and international relations
The major incident in Amesbury saw two people poisoned by the same nerve agent that almost killed the Skripals, government
scientists have confirmed. The attack turns attention once more to Porton Down, the mysterious laboratory that has unintentionally
become central to the response to the attacks.
The secretive government facility at Porton Down has been used for experiments involving deadly and often undisclosed weapons,
and in the wake of the Salisbury attack has become indelibly associated with the nerve agent used in the attack. The Met – whose
counter-terror police are now leading the investigation – confirmed that samples had been tested at the facility and that they
showed "show the two people have been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok".
Porton Down is often talked about in the singular, but is actually a site located near Porton village that is host to a whole
group of different organisations. The two key ones are the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, which is run by the Ministry
of Defence and usually referred to as Dstl, as well as Public Health England – both bodies have been involved in the response
to the recent poisonings, though it is the former laboratory whose activity is most mysterious.
Bullingdon Boris resigns, feigns matters of principle, limbers up for the top job he was promised at Eton. As 1922 committee
cheers for Theresa May ring out to the rafters, British government prepares for controlled demolition.
Three miles from Amesbury, six miles from Salisbury. 'Porton Down is the elephant in the room': former British ambassador who
visited #Nukus plant where #novichok was tested, Craig Murray dismantles #Amesbury poisoning story
https://youtu.be/LbbxNkPDNrQ on @BCFMradio
Porton Down: What is the experimental government facility in Wiltshire at the centre of recent poisonings?
The secretive laboratory has unintentionally become key in political developments and international relations
The major incident in Amesbury saw two people poisoned by the same nerve agent that almost killed the Skripals, government
scientists have confirmed. The attack turns attention once more to Porton Down, the mysterious laboratory that has unintentionally
become central to the response to the attacks.
The secretive government facility at Porton Down has been used for experiments involving deadly and often undisclosed weapons,
and in the wake of the Salisbury attack has become indelibly associated with the nerve agent used in the attack. The Met – whose
counter-terror police are now leading the investigation – confirmed that samples had been tested at the facility and that they
showed "show the two people have been exposed to the nerve agent Novichok".
Porton Down is often talked about in the singular, but is actually a site located near Porton village that is host to a whole
group of different organisations. The two key ones are the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory, which is run by the Ministry
of Defence and usually referred to as Dstl, as well as Public Health England – both bodies have been involved in the response
to the recent poisonings, though it is the former laboratory whose activity is most mysterious.
Bullingdon Boris resigns, feigns matters of principle, limbers up for the top job he was promised at Eton. As 1922 committee
cheers for Theresa May ring out to the rafters, British government prepares for controlled demolition.
There's another source of "deadly silence".
A doctor was reported (by the BBC on 8th May) to have given CPR to Julia for 30 minutes without being contaminated by the "novichok".
Indeed, the doctor reported to the BBC that she 'felt fine' afterwards.
No-one has seen nor heard from this doctor since, yet a doctor should be easy enough to trace.
mike nagel
Considering the mendacity of the media on this and other matters has anyone considered the possibility that no poisoning of any
kind took place in March? The whole story has been a giant load of road apples from day one. What we are expected to swallow by
the powers that be cannot possibly be so, perhaps the Skripals never sat on that bench in the first place.
I certainly have. My favourite part of the fairy tale is the cat and two guinea pigs.
Yonatan
The 'door handle' theory only arose as a means of explaining how the policeman was contaminated. He was allegedly present soon
after the Skripals were found, and became contaminated, while others, including a doctor who closely examined the Skripals, did
not. Occam's Razor suggests that the Skripals and the policeman were affected at the same time before other witnesses were present.
This implies that the policeman was a witness to the attack.
summitflyer
Thank you Rob Slane for this study of the Skripal case.As an outsider from another country I am grateful for your work .Your assumptions
are far more likely than what we have heard from the government officials .As ugly as the truth of the matter might be , it would
be better if they found a way to fess up .At this point it does not look good for the UK credibility .
Paul X
I'm intrigued by why the White House or the Administrstion hasn't asked why an ex-Senior spy, Steele, was given permission by
the British Secret Service to write his dossier at all, based as it was purportedly on his time as Head of the Russia Desk at
MI6, let alone pass it over to the Democrats while carefully leaking it to the media all with Steele's stated opinion that he'd
do anything to stop Trump getting elected. It's clear why the US Intelligence Services are unconcerned, they also deplored Trump's
election but why is there nothing about British interference in the election from Trump himself? Is it a row he's saving up or
does it does show that Trump v the Dark State is rubbish, they are all in it together?
The poisonings were most probably organised by the state within the state. This speech although almost twenty years old gives
some idea of the powers of the deep state and how the government relates to them http://zersetzen.wikispaces.com/file/view/Gerald+Reaveley+James.pdf
Paul X
Who knows whether the British had a motive to incapacitate Sergei and then keep him in custody so it's hard to see how it can
be said so categorically. If Sergei was serious about returning to Russia to see his mother before she died (a not unnatural sentiment
especially for such a sentimental man) then there may have been very pressing reasons to keep him here, notably what he would
say in his inevitable 'de-briefing' by ex-colleagues. It isn't denied that he continued to work with MI6 and may have had a hand
in the Steele dossier. Julia's arrival seems to have moved the game forward and 'action' became imperative. The story itself has
the hall marks of Eton and Trinity, a good 'wheeze'. Hastily put together it would have unraveled immediately without the D Notice.
Now they have to decide whether they can dare let either of them have their freedom; Julia has a long life ahead; is she to be
held incommunicado for decades?
I don't know if it has been asked before, but: why poison Yulia Skripal anyway? If this was some sort of professional hit, it
was very badly timed, given that Yulia was only visiting her father.
I personally do not believe that any of these 5 people had been poisoned by a nerve agent. And by that I mean an organophosphate
compound. BZ is not that class of compound. (I have a degree in chemistry).
Those compounds are exceedingly toxic. If their use (or rather non-use) is military then they must kill enemy troops quickly
and with minimal amount. Speed is crucial. Semi conscious enemy soldiers are dangerous.
What I find frustrating is that – because we are being so cynically lied to by our government – we have been seriously misled
about the toxicity of these chemicals. You really don't stand any sort of chance if you are poisoned by them.
Paul X
Julia's boyfriend is apparently in the Russian Secret Service and his mother is a senior figure in Russian Intelligence. She may
have been passing on Putin's reply to Sergei's request to return home to visit his seriously ill elderly mother? He was irritable
because he'd realised he'd have to decide, UK or Russia. And if it was to be Russia then he knew he'd have to spill the beans
on Steele; tough decision! I agree it would be odd to target her if she was 'just' his daughter on a brief visit. Julia may have
been as much a target as her father?
Paul Carline
If they were poisoned by a 'Novichok' nerve agent they would be dead.
Who 'identified' the supposed Novichok? Porton Down.
Who provided the sample for the OPCW? Porton Down.
Who has stocks of all known nerve agents? Porton Down.
Can the OPCW be trusted? No.
Can Brad Pitte II be trusted? No.
George
"The Western forces conspired to do it" = "conspiracy stuff".
"The Russian forces conspired to do it" = "not conspiracy stuff".
When is a conspiracy not a conspiracy?
bevin
Whether "Russia" had a motive is moot. But there is no evidence that "Russia" had any particular means than any other potential
culprit, such as MI6.
As to'precedent' the number of assassinations carried out abroad by Russian intelligence pales in comparison with those carried
out by Military Intelligence in the UK, the CIA and Mossad.
You are reduced to citing the very unlikely 'precedent' of Litivenko which every effort of The Establishment has failed to produce
anything more than a meaningless finding by a tame High Court judge. No legal proceedings have discovered any connection between
the death and the Russian state.
On the other hand 'western' intelligence agencies are notoriously engaged in assassinations and have been on an industrial scale
for seventy years. Cf The Committee chaired by Senator Church.
Let's see. An MI6 spy, known to be still actively working on MI6 deception, is involved in an incident in which a claim is made
that he's been poisoned with a deadly nerve agent by the Russians, which is disputed by hospital staff and Porton Down people
behind the scenes, and can't be checked out by investigative journalists in the mainstream media, because there aren't any investigative
journalists in the mainstream media, and immediately the Government knows that Russia did it. Doesn't that suggest to you that
Mr Skripal may have been part of the set-up right from the start?
As for his daughter, is that the same Yulia Skripal in the pictures after the event as the one in the restaurant before the
event?
Cherrycoke
Of course, Christopher Steele was also involved in the Litvinenko case:
"Steele's already dim view of the Kremlin darkened in November, 2006, when Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian K.G.B. officer
and a Putin critic who had been recruited by M.I.6, suffered an agonizing death in a London hospital, after drinking a cup of
tea poisoned with radioactive polonium-210. Moscow had evidently sanctioned a brazen murder in his own country. Steele was put
in charge of M.I.6's investigation. Authorities initially planned to indict one suspect in the murder, but Steele's investigative
work persuaded them to indict a second suspect as well."
Did Steele develop a 'dark view' of Thanatopolis DC after the years of rendition and torture, the illegal aggression and genocide
in Iraq, or the carnage of the drone missile terrorism, or the death-squad 'night raid' rampage by US Special Forces. If not,
why not?
Circumstances unknown and withheld from public knowledge oblige people in 'power' or positions of influence under such power to
act in ways that make no sense to anyone with sense.
News for mass consumption is a sideshow but also a conditioning to remain inside the framing of a narrative identity. The 'Western
intelligence' could not do a better job of damaging their credibility by the WAY they operate as well as the what of it.
However "No one understood better than Stalin that the true object of propaganda is neither to convince nor even to persuade,
but to produce a uniform pattern of public utterance in which the first trace of unorthodox thought immediately reveals itself
as a jarring dissonance." (Alan Bullock, in Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives).
While the what of it can be tested to some degree for congruency with itself and with all the factors involved, the WAY of
it speaks of either desperation of from a conviction that intellectual criticism is powerless in a post truth coup.
My sense is of either the leadership class being captive to powers they do not feel able to challenge or are cornered in some
way by their circumstance so as not to have any other recourse than – in this case – stirring up hatred in incitement to violence
with Russia. This could all be a brinkmanship of geopolitical 'poker' or it could be that the only 'escape' from such a mess as
we inherit and persist in is war.
My sense is that when we cannot or will not embrace change somewhat 'gracefully' or in some willingness – then we give power
to whatever external 'crisis' ripens to force it – and seek to 'survive' at the expense of those we abandoned or indeed conscripted
or made into targets for WMD.
Dictating terms to a world of 'united states' under broad spectrum dominance of a tyrannous rule is not justified by 'symbols
and stories' of freedom.
National and International security rests on honest communication, backed by supporting deeds so as to grow trust in place
of treachery. No one has a clean past, but if we persist in re-enacting it, we will forsake the presence of mind by which to choose
not to.
The nature of politics has had all its goalposts moved to a rigged system of finance and law that pre-empt any movement of
cultural development apart from corporate capture – and allow that corporations have only the power given them by such a systemic
'development'. No one HAS power but for an agenda larger than their own usefulness.
Worldly power has always operated a narrative control at some level – but technology has 'outsourced' our own will and consciousness
to systems and machinery of our own attempt and intent to replace Life with our own making. I see a larger 'script' than power
struggle – or rather I see an awakening 'script' running beneath the narrative identity conflict.
Whether we have a fated outcome or make our own (under a fatal condition), the framing of the physicalised sense of self is
the 'life in the world'. But this framing is not itself physical so much as conditioned association and reflex that is hidden
from sight while we engage within its framing as a sense of personal struggle under and driven by 'necessity' of survival in the
terms we set or are forcefully and fearfully identified in.
Deceit is simply a weapon in a world of war – including the claiming of a moral high ground whenever it suits an invalidating
of the 'other'. Loss of communication, trust and therefore integrity is the state of a lack of substance. However, 'claiming the
moral high ground' as a personal right to power is the same old story. The complexities of deceits and entanglements increase
with the persistence of identities and investments in them – which of course run as 'self-evident reality' by reactions that embody
the beliefs.
At the same time, the administration has signaled in recent days that it plans to let the
New Start treaty, negotiated by Barack Obama, expire in February 2021 rather than renew it
for another five years. John R. Bolton, the president's national security adviser, who met
with his Russian counterpart, Nikolai Patrushev, in Jerusalem this week, said before leaving
Washington that "there's no decision, but I think it's unlikely" the treaty would be
renewed.
Mr. Bolton, a longtime skeptic of arms control agreements, said that New Start was flawed
because it did not cover short-range tactical nuclear weapons or new Russian delivery
systems. "So to extend for five years and not take these new delivery system threats into
account would be malpractice," he told The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative outlet.
Like all of his complaints about arms control agreements, Bolton's criticisms of New START
are made in bad faith. Opponents of New START have long pretended that they oppose the treaty
because it did not cover everything imaginable, including tactical nuclear weapons, but this
has always been an excuse for them to reject a treaty that they have never wanted ratified in
the first place. If the concern about negotiating a treaty that covered tactical nuclear
weapons were genuine, the smart thing to do would be to extend New START and then begin
negotiations for a more comprehensive arms control agreement. Faulting New START for failing to
include things that are by definition not going to be included in a strategic arms reduction
treaty gives the game away. This is what die-hard opponents of the treaty have been doing for
almost ten years, and they do it because they want to dismantle the last vestiges of arms
control. The proposal to include China as part of a new treaty is another tell that the Trump
administration just wants the treaty to die.
The article concludes:
Some experts suspect talk of a three-way accord is merely a feint to get rid of the New
Start treaty. "If a trilateral deal is meant as a substitute or prerequisite for extending
New Start, it is a poison pill, no ifs, ands or buts," said Daryl G. Kimball, executive
director of the Arms Control Association. "If the president is seeking a trilateral deal as a
follow-on to New Start, that's a different thing."
Knowing Bolton, it has to be a poison pill. Just as Bolton is ideologically opposed to
making any deal with Iran, he is ideologically opposed to any arms control agreement that
places limits on the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The "flaws" he identifies aren't really flaws that
he wants to fix (and they may not be flaws at all), but excuses for trashing the agreement. He
will make noises about how the current deal or treaty doesn't go far enough, but the truth is
that he doesn't want any agreements to exist. In Bolton's worldview, nonproliferation and arms
control agreements either give the other government too much or hamper the U.S. too much, and
so he wants to destroy them all. He has had a lot of success at killing agreements and treaties
that have been in the U.S. interest. Bolton has had a hand in blowing up the Agreed Framework
with North Korea, abandoning the ABM Treaty, killing the INF Treaty, and reneging on the JCPOA.
Unless the president can be persuaded to ignore or fire Bolton, New START will be his next
victim.
If New START dies, it will be a loss for both the U.S. and Russia, it will make the world
less secure, and it will make U.S.-Russian relations even worse. The stability that these
treaties have provided has been important for U.S. security for almost fifty years. New START
is the last of the treaties that constrain the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals, and when it
is gone there will be nothing to replace it for a long time. The collapse of arms control
almost certainly means that the top two nuclear weapons states will expand their arsenals and
put us back on the path of an insane and unwinnable arms race. Killing New START is irrational
and purely destructive, and it needs to be opposed.
bolton is opposed to any treaty, to any agreement, whereby the other side can expect to
obtain equally favorable terms-he wants the other side on their knees permanently without
any expectation of compromise by the empire.
"... I am sure that this case will be resolved as follows:- Relations with Russia will be normalised; Rogue Ukrainian military officers and pilots will be found responsible; These rogue officers/pilots will be roundly condemned but they cannot be brought to justice because they're already dead (yes, they've already been killed - they just followed orders but they've already been killed). When you hear this in a year or two, please remind yourself that this was probably a war crime committed by America while Obama was President. ..."
What will prove to the real big lasting news over the last couple of week was when the
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad called the Joint Investigation Team's (JIT)
position on the MH17 case politically motivated and unproven:
"We are very unhappy, because from the very beginning it was a political issue on how to
accuse Russia of wrongdoing,"
This is tantamount to the Malaysian Prime Minster saying Russia was framed and is getting
really close to the likelihood that the shooting down of MH17 with 298 deaths was an
intentional American plan/act (Ukraine would not have done it without US instruction). There
are so many strange things about the shooting down of the MH-17 that it really is very
unlikely that Russia or the Donetsk or Luhansk rebels had anything to do with it.
Now think what that means. The MH-17 was shot down in 2014 very likely as part of a US
plan to frame Russia while Obama was President. And you Americans have no real concern about
this? You don't exert any kind of pressure on your representatives, you just don't think it's
important.
I am sure that this case will be resolved as follows:- Relations with Russia will be
normalised; Rogue Ukrainian military officers and pilots will be found responsible; These
rogue officers/pilots will be roundly condemned but they cannot be brought to justice because
they're already dead (yes, they've already been killed - they just followed orders but
they've already been killed). When you hear this in a year or two, please remind yourself
that this was probably a war crime committed by America while Obama was President.
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad is generally always outspoken and defies the
establishment... when i was in malaysia in 2016 i happened to pick up his autobiography which
i quite enjoyed.. i am happy to see he is back and speaking his mind.. it's always refreshing
even if a person doesn't agree with him.. he is also one of the few leaders in the world
today that i actually consider a 'leader'... the malaysians are lucky to still have him as pm
today...
From
Unz
comment: "Tangentially related, but check out this great interview with Putin:
https://www.ft.com/content/878d2344-98f0-11e9-9573-ee5cbb98ed36 The man's intelligence and seriousness is always impressive. The contrast with the nauseating rubbish that
comes out of Western politicians could not be more striking, no wonder they hate the guy."
Notable quotes:
"... "One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future ." ..."
"... Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0. ..."
"... From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way, I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle on world events and where they are leading. ..."
"... The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the theft? ..."
"... neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against the people. ..."
"... Look at the whine ass, crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians having a leader they can be proud of. ..."
"... Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS great,,, and they killed him. ..."
Putin said in an interview with the Financial Times Friday that the "[neo]liberal idea has
become obsolete," and referred to Germany's decision to welcome more than one million
refugees -- many fleeing savage urban warfare in Syria -- as a "cardinal mistake."
It is only the last part of the very long interview, where Putin indeed speaks of the
'obsolesce' of the '[neo]liberal idea', that seems to be of interest to the media. Most of the
interview is in fact about other issues. The media also do not capture how his 'obsolete'
argument is ingrained in the worldview Putin developed, and how it reflects in many of his
answers.
Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the
'[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international
(neo-)[liberalism'.
Putin explains why U.S. President Donald Trump was elected:
Has anyone ever given a thought to who actually benefited and what benefits were gained from
globalisation, the development of which we have been observing and participating in over the
past 25 years, since the 1990s?
China has made use of globalisation, in particular, to pull millions of Chinese out of
poverty.
What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US companies -- the
companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these benefits. [..] The
middle class in the US has not benefited from globalisation; it was left out when this pie
was divided up.
The Trump team sensed this very keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election
campaign. It is where you should look for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any
alleged foreign interference.
On Syria:
Primarily, this concerns Syria, we have managed to preserve Syrian statehood, no matter what,
and we have prevented Libya-style chaos there. And a worst-case scenario would spell out
negative consequences for Russia.
...
I believe that the Syrian people should be free to choose their own future.
...
When we discussed this matter only recently with the previous US administration, we said,
suppose Assad steps down today, what will happen tomorrow?
Your colleague did well to laugh, because the answer we got was very amusing. You cannot
even imagine how funny it was. They said, "We don't know." But when you do not know what
happens tomorrow, why shoot from the hip today? This may sound primitive, but this is how it
is.
On 'western' interventionism and 'democracy promotion':
Incidentally, the president of France said recently that the American democratic model
differs greatly from the European model. So there are no common democratic standards. And do
you, well, not you, but our Western partners, want a region such as Libya to have the same
democratic standards as Europe and the US? The region has only monarchies or countries with a
system similar to the one that existed in Libya.
But I am sure that, as a historian, you will agree with me at heart. I do not know whether
you will publicly agree with this or not, but it is impossible to impose current and viable
French or Swiss democratic standards on North African residents who have never lived in
conditions of French or Swiss democratic institutions. Impossible, isn't it? And they tried
to impose something like that on them. Or they tried to impose something that they had never
known or even heard of. All this led to conflict and intertribal discord. In fact, a war
continues in Libya.
So why should we do the same in Venezuela? ...
Asked about the turn towards nationalism and more rightwing policies in the U.S. and many
European countries, Putin names immigration as the primary problem:
What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in
the US? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the
people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the
overwhelming majority of the people .
Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is
never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to
create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a
better future.
There is also the so-called [neo]liberal idea, which has outlived its purpose. Our Western
partners have admitted that some elements of the [neo]liberal idea, such as multiculturalism,
are no longer tenable.
When the migration problem came to a head, many people admitted that the policy of
multiculturalism is not effective and that the interests of the core population should be
considered. Although those who have run into difficulties because of political problems in
their home countries need our assistance as well. That is great, but what about the interests
of their own population when the number of migrants heading to Western Europe is not just a
handful of people but thousands or hundreds of thousands?
...
What am I driving at? Those who are concerned about this, ordinary Americans, they look at
this and say, Good for [Trump], at least he is doing something, suggesting ideas and looking
for a solution.
As for the [neo]liberal idea, its proponents are not doing anything. They say that all is
well, that everything is as it should be. But is it? They are sitting in their cosy offices,
while those who are facing the problem every day in Texas or Florida are not happy, they will
soon have problems of their own. Does anyone think about them?
The same is happening in Europe. I discussed this with many of my colleagues, but nobody
has the answer. The say they cannot pursue a hardline policy for various reasons. Why
exactly? Just because. We have the law, they say. Well, then change the law!
We have quite a few problems of our own in this sphere as well.
...
In other words, the situation is not simple in Russia either, but we have started working to
improve it. Whereas the [neo]liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. The
migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants must be
protected. What rights are these? Every crime must have its punishment.
So, the [neo]liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the
interests of the overwhelming majority of the population. Or take the traditional values. I
am not trying to insult anyone, because we have been condemned for our alleged homophobia as
it is. But we have no problems with LGBT persons. God forbid, let them live as they wish. But
some things do appear excessive to us.
They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly
what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with
that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional
family values of millions of people making up the core population.
While Putin says that [neo]liberalism is 'obsolete' he does not declare it dead. He sees it
as part of a spectrum, but says that it should not have a leading role:
You know, it seems to me that purely [neo]liberal or purely traditional ideas have never
existed. Probably, they did once exist in the history of humankind, but everything very
quickly ends in a deadlock if there is no diversity. Everything starts to become extreme one
way or another.
Various ideas and various opinions should have a chance to exist and manifest themselves,
but at the same time interests of the general public, those millions of people and their
lives, should never be forgotten. This is something that should not be overlooked.
Then, it seems to me, we would be able to avoid major political upheavals and troubles.
This applies to the [neo]liberal idea as well. It does not mean (I think, this is ceasing to
be a dominating factor) that it must be immediately destroyed. This point of view, this
position should also be treated with respect.
They cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do
over the recent decades. Diktat can be seen everywhere: both in the media and in real life.
It is deemed unbecoming even to mention some topics. But why?
For this reason, I am not a fan of quickly shutting, tying, closing, disbanding
everything, arresting everybody or dispersing everybody. Of course, not. The [neo]liberal
idea cannot be destroyed either; it has the right to exist and it should even be supported in
some things. But you should not think that it has the right to be the absolute dominating
factor. That is the point. Please.
There is much more in the interview - about Russia's relations with China, North Korea, the
Skripal incident, the Russian economy, orthodoxy and the [neo]liberal attack on the Catholic
church, multilateralism, arms control and the G-20 summit happening today.
But most '[neo]liberal' media will only point to the 'obsolete' part and condemn Putin for
his rallying against immigration. They will paint him as being in an alt-right corner. But even
the Dalai Lama, held up as an icon by many [neo]liberals, says that "Europe is for
Europeans" and that immigrants should go back to their own countries.
Moreover, as Leonid Bershidsky
points out , Putin himself is, with regards to the economy and immigration, a staunch
[neo]liberal:
Putin's cultural conservatism is consistent and sincere.
...
On immigration, however, Putin is, in practice, more [neo]liberal than most European leaders.
He has consistently resisted calls to impose visa requirements on Central Asian countries, an
important source of migrant labor. Given Russia's shrinking working-age population and
shortage of manual workers, Putin isn't about to stem that flow, even though Central Asians
are Muslims – the kind of immigrants Merkel's opponents, including Trump, distrust and
fear the most.
What Putin is aiming at, says Bershidsky, is the larger picture:
[W]hat Putin believes has outlived its usefulness isn't the [neo]liberal approach to
migration or gender, nor is it [neo]liberal economics – even though Russia has, in
recent months, seen something of a shift toward central planning. It is the [neo]liberal
world order. Putin wants to keep any talk of values out of international politics and forge
pragmatic relationships based on specific interests.
...
Putin's drive to put global politics on a more transactional basis isn't easy to defeat; it's
a siren song, and the anti-immigrant, culturally conservative rhetoric is merely part of the
music.
There is in my view no 'siren-song' there and nothing that has to be defeated. It is just
that Putin is more willing to listen to the people than most of the western wannabe
'elite'.
The people's interest is simply not served well by globalization, [neo]liberal
internationalism and interventionism. A transactional approach to international policies, with
respect for basic human decency, is in almost every case better for them.
Politicians who want the people's votes should listen to them, and to Vladimir Putin.
Posted by b on June 28, 2019 at 01:50 PM |
Permalink
It is hard to exaggerate Putin's accomplishments. He almost single-handedly saved Russia from
the chaos of the Yeltsin era and near collapse. He has reestablished Russia as a major power.
In the face of the American world rampage, he has helped stabilize MENA. By merging Russia's
Eurasian Union with China's OBOR, he has helped to set Eurasia on a road to peaceful economic
development. He has even managed to get China, India, and Pakistan talking to one another and
cooperating in a variety of Eurasian projects.
I doubt he has more than 10 years left as a Russian leader, and maybe not even that. When
he finally passes, he will be remembered as another Churchill or Bismarck.
Hmmm... Putin says the problem is 'multi-culturalism', 'migrants'? What kind of bullshit is
this?
Putin doesn't mention that the migrant crisis was caused by Western resource wars, in
Syria, Libya and elsewhere. That neoliberalism's impact on the poor countries has led to
the vast exodus into Europe and N. America.
I have a feeling that Putin is playing the 'RT game', targeting those disaffected people,
who have, in turn been the target of racist, islamaphobic propaganda by Western states,
states that for obvious reasons (self-incrimination) won't state the real reasons for
the exodus.
The page on [neo]liberalism in the classic sense the way it was envisioned in the late 18th
and 19th century has long been passed. [neo]liberalism as in nurturing the human soul and
intellect and allowing each individual to draw on their qualities and contribute to society
with their fullest potential has been supplanted by material and physical liberties alone
(Gender, Sexuality, Free Trade, Free Migration aka Free Movement of Slave Labor etc). What
today is called [neo]liberalism, which I like to equate with neo-[neo]liberalism and social
'progressivism', are both parts of post-modernism, a societal model that is falling and
failing under its own weight of hubris and inconsistencies.
The 'Do as thou wilt' mindset pushed on the people by the elites is deliberate with the
only end goal of creating their 'ideal' world. A world not based on morality, spirituality
and absolute truths, but relativism, materialism, loss of basic notions such as gender,
family, belonging, in short loss of identity and purpose for mankind to obtain ever greater
control over the masses. People are beginning to notice it, however, even if only
subconsciously and start to push back against it. Putin knows this, and that is what he is
laying out in his interview.
"They claim now that children can play five or six gender roles. I cannot even say exactly
what genders these are, I have no notion. Let everyone be happy, we have no problem with
that. But this must not be allowed to overshadow the culture, traditions and traditional
family values of millions of people making up the core population.'
It has become la la land in the West in regards to gender...if a person wants to be gay,
be gay, but let's not force everyone else to pretend reality is not reality..nature choose
(dichotomy) for you to be male or female, sucks if that doesn't match your preferences but
better luck next life...accept the reality you are in and let's not force everyone one else
to pander to your delusions..
See also:
'Sex change' is biologically impossible," said McHugh. "People who undergo
sex-reassignment surgery do not change from men to women or vice versa. Rather, they become
feminized men or masculinized women. Claiming that this is civil-rights matter and
encouraging surgical intervention is in reality to collaborate with and promote a mental
disorder."
I'm reading the Kremlin's transcript I linked to at the Gabbard thread where I posted a very
short excerpt. I continue to read it but stopped to post another very short excerpt IMO is
very important:
"One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the
operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable
life for the people and to work towards a better future ." [My Emphasis]
Here are excerpts that show that the gist of Putin's 'obsolete' argument is not against the
'[neo]liberal idea', but against what may be best called 'international
(neo-)liberalism'.
Just a matter of academic rigour: liberalism is extinct; neoliberalism is
literally the "new liberalism", it's successor doctrine. Therefore, when we speak of
"liberalism" after 1945, we're automatically referring to neoliberalism.
neoliberalism was created at Mont Pelerin in the 1930s, and its founding narrative
states that everything that happened between/since the death of liberalism (1914-1918)
and their own hegemony (1974-75) was an abortion of History and should've never happened.
Hence the name "neoliberalism": the new liberalism (adapted to the system of fiat
currency instead of the gold standard); the revival of liberalism; the return of
liberalism (the [neo]liberals).
It's also important to highlight that neoliberalism is not an ideology, but a
doctrine (which encompass mainly policies, but may also encompass ideals). It is wrong, for
example, to compare socialism with neoliberalism (socialism as anti-neoliberalism):
socialism is a scientific theory, and, as a social theory, encompasses a new socioeconomic
system, a new set of ideologies, a new set of cultures and a new set of political doctrines.
Neoliberalism, therefore, is just one aspect with which the capitalist elites engage
against socialism historically (in the doctrinal "front").
Generic question: How many of the 2020 candidates for US President could hold up their end of
an interview with such knowledge and style?
Personally I was impressed by Putin's bluntness in stating Merkel had made a "cardinal
mistake" when she opened the borders to the hundreds of thousands of illegals. And also
this:
And we set ourselves a goal, a task -- which, I am certain, will be achieved -- to adjust
pensions by a percentage that is above the inflation rate.
Compare that to the deliberate US policy if doing the exact opposite.
Can you imagine Trump writing like this? Or Obama, for that matter? Or Bush the Dimmer, or
Clinton, or Bush the Spook, or Reagan, or Carter...Hell, you'd have to go back to JFK to find
this sort of skill with language and deep analysis. And maybe not then. "They" say you get
the leaders you deserve. In that case the Russians have been nice and we Americans have been
very, very naughty.
Putin has recognized the influence of our "regime change" wars on the immigrant problem in
Europe. He addressed it forcefully in his UN General Assembly speech in 2015 where he asks
NATO "Do you know what you've done?" with regards to creating the immigration problems in
Europe. Watch here https://youtu.be/q13yzl6k6w0.
From Putin's 2007 Munich speech to this 2015 UN speech and many interviews along the way,
I've learned to pay attention to what Putin says. He seems to have an extremely good handle
on world events and where they are leading.
In the west our governments call Mr Putin a thug, a gangster. But, I've never seen any of our
politicians sit down and frankly and comprehensively lay out there views, goals, thoughts and
musings. To be a good leader or politician you have do have vision, but in the west here i
just see talking heads and soundbites, no soul.
Oh, yeah, the "[neo]liberals" are indignant over his pointing out that mass migration causes
social disruption.
He racist!
The neoliberal economic plan is to suck the wealth out of the working class and funnel
it up to the top 10%, especially the 1%. How to keep the working class from noticing the
theft?
How about divide and conquer? That seems to work. Take the native working class and divide it
any way that works in that society. In the US, traditionally, it was race, but they added sex
a couple of decades ago, then opened the doors to immigration and threw in national origin,
and now, just for kicks and giggles, everybody gets to define their own gender and sexual
preferences. Awesome. The US is now divided into 243,000,000 separate categories of
specialness. And if you don't accept everything someone else tells you as gospel, you are a
bigot of some sort (depending on their self identification. It varies.)
They divided up Yemen and Libya by tribes, Iraq and Yugoslavia by religion, it works the same
in every country.
When the US blows, it's going to be spectacular.
I'm always impressed with Putin's grasp and breadth a la Chirac, whom he admires and
emulates.
I posted a few excerpts I felt very important to this and the Gabbard threads; and at the
latter I now insist this interview be read, not just suggested. That BigLie Media chose to
pounce on Putin's critique of the [neo]liberal Idea displays its agenda and its extremely
sorry attempt to discredit/smear Putin yet again. IMO, such media smeared itself. The
give-and-take was very productive and informative, containing many lessons, a few of which I
pointed to.
Putin's now at the G-20 and has already had one bilateral meeting with TrumpCo.
Sputnik offers this recap that includes links to its additional articles published
during the day. Much has occurred, and Trump has yet to storm out. Some of the photos are
priceless, the May/Putin handshake perhaps being the most telling.
That there is a Putin that today leads a great country like Russia seems like a miracle and
he appeared at the very moment that Russia needed him.
Part of the West elite hate of Putin is that compared to them he gives off an aura of
honesty and truthfulness that is absent from leaders in the West.
The "multi-cultural" issue, to the extent that it is an issue, is only an issue as an
effect of the actual problem. It is effectively a scapegoat. No one would care about
"multiculturalism" if there was a fair economic order in which living standards were
increasing.
The problem is that western capitalism wants it both ways, it sees the
demographic problem it faces and it wants the labor of migrants but it does not want to
improve society, it wants to keep its slice of the pie. Hence things will get economically
worse while migrants will be an easy "cause" at which to point for the unthinking person. In
that sense it becomes a problem insofar as it contributes to fascism, nothing else
changing.
Putin is right about China utilizing globalization to the benefit of society while
the west is only interested in globalization insofar as it opens markets and creates profit
for those who own social production. But of course Marx predicted this all long ago, so it is
not perhaps surprising that the Chinese Communist Party would be more intelligent here. There
is nothing more symptomatic or demonstrative here than the fact that, while western countries
debate over a few tens of thousands of immigrants being "too many", China is capable of such
feats as eradicating poverty and building incredible and modern infrastructure while being a
land of over a billion people.
Reading over the Gabbard comments, I was reminded of another big divide in the US by party.
Americans treat their parties like their tribes and viciously attack heretics of other
tribes. The media fans the flames and keeps the "elections" going for years, without a
break.
Meanwhile, our ruling overlords pick their next puppet, let us all "vote" on computerized
machines, and then the talking heads announce the "winner".
And it all starts over.
neo-liberalism (aka "crony capitalism") is about compromising the state and the society
that it protects in favor of wealthy, powerful interests. Thus, at it's core, it's against
the people.
To compensate and distract from this corruption, the people are presented with the
'fruits' of a [neo]liberal society: quasi"-freedoms" like gender rights, civil rights, and
human rights. I say "quasi-" because these rights are abridged by the powerful elite as they
see fit (witness rendition and torture, pervasive surveillance, and Assange).
We fight among ourselves about walls and bathrooms as elites destroy the Commons. In this
way, they pick our pockets and kneecap our ability to fight back at the same time.
Boy did Russia luck out. Yeltsin was smart picking this man.... Look at the whine ass,
crying, warmongering. narcissist psychopathic bullies we get. I am envious of the Russians
having a leader they can be proud of.
Been about 60 years since I have had a president to be proud of, back when America WAS
great,,, and they killed him.
I'm about halfway through Putin's financial Times interview and suggest it be read by
all. There is much to be gleaned from it with a view to the 2020 Election Cycle and
candidate's positions. Just consider the following very small excerpt and its implications
for policy formulation by candidates:
"What we should be talking about is not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure
the unconditional security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea
feel safe and protected by international law that is strictly honoured by all members of
the international community . This is what we should be thinking about." [My
Emphasis]
Putin's insights into Trump's 2016 election strategy, IMO, is very enlightening and
essential reading as the conditions that contributed to Trump's victory have worsened under
his tenure and can be used against him if wisely pursued.
"... If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran. ..."
"... Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution. ..."
"... OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running. ..."
If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism,
starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it
wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout
the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy
blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region,
not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and
Iran.
Take a good look at
this Smithsonian map of where the U.S.A. is "combating terrorism." Note how the U.S.
military (i.e., global capitalism's unofficial "enforcer") has catastrophically blundered its
way into more or less every nation depicted. Or ask our "allies" in Saudi Arabia, Israel,
Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and so on. OK, you might have to reach
them in New York or London, or in the South of France this time of year, but, go ahead, ask
them about the horrors they've been suffering on account of our "catastrophic blunders."
See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a
geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no "catastrophic
policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is
proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those
who wouldn't have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime
change.
Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years
of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been
a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people or the
"sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful. Global
capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for
business or not.
Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after
winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of
America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the
contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation
projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S.
government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review
the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have
benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many
of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without
assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution.
OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global
capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American
face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it
comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments
control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.
This is what Iran and Syria are up against. This is what Russia is up against. Global
capitalism doesn't want to nuke them, or occupy them. It wants to privatize them, like it is
privatizing the rest of the world, like it has already privatized America according to my
crackpot theory, of course.
if I were a geopolitical analyst, I might be able to discern a pattern there, and
possibly even some sort of strategy.
Sounds good.
Some other people did it before, wrote it down etc. but it's always good to see that
stuff.
it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the
collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately
started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East.
.there have been no "catastrophic policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The
Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The
regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn't have been regime-changed,
or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.
Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years
of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have
been a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people
or the "sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful.
Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open
for business or not.
Spot on.
Now .there IS a bit of oversight in the article re competing groups of people on top of
that "Global capitalist" bunch.
It's a bit more complicated than "Global capitalism".
Jewish heavily influenced, perhaps even controlled, Anglo-Saxon "setup" .. or Russian
"setup" or Chinese "setup".
Only one of them can be on the top, and they don't like each other much.
And they all have nuclear weapons.
"Global capitalism" idea is optimistic. The global overwhelming force against little
players. No chance of MAD there so not that bad.NOPE IMHO.
There is a chance of MAD.
That is the problem . Well, at least for some people.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies.
These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have
everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off
the proles.
I was a union man in my youth. We liked Capitalism. We just wanted our fair share of the
loot. The working class today knows nothing about organizing. They don't even know they are
working class. They think they are black or white. Woke or Deplorable.
ALL OF US non billionaires are coming up on serious hard times. Serious enough that we
might have to put aside our differences. The government is corrupt. It will not save us.
Instead it will continue to work to divide us.
Another great article by C J Hopkins.
Hopkins (correctly) posits that behind US actions, wars etc lies the global capitalist
class.
"Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open
for business or not"
This is correct -- but requires an important caveat.
Intrinsic to capitalism is imperialism. They are the head & tail of the same coin.
Global capitalists may unite in their rapacious attacks on average citizens the world over.
However, they will disunite when it comes to beating a competitor to a market.
The "West" has no (real) ideological differences with China, Russia & Iran. This is a
fight between an existing hegemon & it's allies & a rising hegemon (China) & it's
allies.
In many ways it's similar to the WW I situation: an established imperial country, the UK,
& it's allies against a country with imperial pretensions -- Germany (& it's
allies)
To put it in a nice little homily: the Capitalist wolves prefer to eat sheep (us) -- but,
will happily eat each other should they perceive a sufficient interest in doing so.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of
monopolies.
In most key sectors, competition ends up producing monopolies or their near-equivalent,
oligopolies. The many are weeded out (or swallowed up) by the few . The
situation is roughly the same with democracy, which historically has always resulted in
oligarchy, as occurred in ancient Rome and Athens.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies.
These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have
everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off
the proles.
You are right in expecting that in Capitalism there would be competition – the
traditional view that prices would remain low because of competition, the less competitive
removed from the field, and so on. But that was primitive laisser-faire Capitalism on a fair
playing field that hardly existed but in theory. Occasionally there were some "good"
capitalists – say the mill-owner in a Lancashire town who gave employment to the
locals, built houses, donated to charity and went to the Sunday church service with his
workers. But even that "good" capitalist was in it for the profit, which comes from taking
possession for himself of the value added by his workers to a commodity.
But modern Capitalism does not function that way. There are no mill-owners, just absentee
investor playing in, usually rigged, stock market casinos. Industrial capitalism has been
changed into financial Capitalism without borders and loyalty to worker or country. In fact,
it has gone global to play country against country for more profit.
Anyway, the USA has evolved into a Fascist state (an advanced state of capitalism, a.k.a.
corporatocracy) as Chomsky stated many years ago. Seen from abroad here's a view from the
horse's mouth ( The Guardian is official organ of Globalist Fascism).
"... If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region, not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and Iran. ..."
"... Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S. government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution. ..."
"... OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running. ..."
If I were a particularly cynical analyst, it might look to me like global capitalism,
starting right around 1990, freed by the collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it
wanted, more or less immediately started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout
the Greater Middle East. My cynical theory would kind of make sense of the "catastrophic policy
blunders" that the United States has supposedly made in Iraq, Libya, and throughout the region,
not to mention the whole "Global War on Terror," and what it is currently doing to Syria, and
Iran.
Take a good look at
this Smithsonian map of where the U.S.A. is "combating terrorism." Note how the U.S.
military (i.e., global capitalism's unofficial "enforcer") has catastrophically blundered its
way into more or less every nation depicted. Or ask our "allies" in Saudi Arabia, Israel,
Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and so on. OK, you might have to reach
them in New York or London, or in the South of France this time of year, but, go ahead, ask
them about the horrors they've been suffering on account of our "catastrophic blunders."
See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a
geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no "catastrophic
policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is
proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those
who wouldn't have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime
change.
Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years
of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been
a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people or the
"sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful. Global
capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for
business or not.
Take a look at that map again. What you're looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after
winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of
America (i.e., the "nation" most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the
contrary). I know it hurts to accept the fact that "America" is nothing but a simulation
projected onto an enormous marketplace but seriously, do you honestly believe that the U.S.
government and its military serve the interests of the American people? If so, go ahead, review
the history of their activities since the Second World War, and explain to me how they have
benefited Americans not the corporatist ruling classes, regular working class Americans, many
of whom can't afford to see a doctor, or buy a house, or educate their kids, not without
assuming a lifetime of debt to some global financial institution.
OK, so I digressed a little. The point is, "America" is not at war with Iran. Global
capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American
face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more "American" than the corporations it
comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments
control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.
This is what Iran and Syria are up against. This is what Russia is up against. Global
capitalism doesn't want to nuke them, or occupy them. It wants to privatize them, like it is
privatizing the rest of the world, like it has already privatized America according to my
crackpot theory, of course.
if I were a geopolitical analyst, I might be able to discern a pattern there, and
possibly even some sort of strategy.
Sounds good.
Some other people did it before, wrote it down etc. but it's always good to see that
stuff.
it might look to me like global capitalism, starting right around 1990, freed by the
collapse of the U.S.S.R. to do whatever the hell it wanted, more or less immediately
started dismantling uncooperative power structures throughout the Greater Middle East.
.there have been no "catastrophic policy blunders," not for global capitalism. The
Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The
regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn't have been regime-changed,
or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.
Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years
of wars, "strategic" bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have
been a pointless waste of lives and money but global capitalism doesn't care about people
or the "sovereign nations" they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful.
Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open
for business or not.
Spot on.
Now .there IS a bit of oversight in the article re competing groups of people on top of
that "Global capitalist" bunch.
It's a bit more complicated than "Global capitalism".
Jewish heavily influenced, perhaps even controlled, Anglo-Saxon "setup" .. or Russian
"setup" or Chinese "setup".
Only one of them can be on the top, and they don't like each other much.
And they all have nuclear weapons.
"Global capitalism" idea is optimistic. The global overwhelming force against little
players. No chance of MAD there so not that bad.NOPE IMHO.
There is a chance of MAD.
That is the problem . Well, at least for some people.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies.
These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have
everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off
the proles.
I was a union man in my youth. We liked Capitalism. We just wanted our fair share of the
loot. The working class today knows nothing about organizing. They don't even know they are
working class. They think they are black or white. Woke or Deplorable.
ALL OF US non billionaires are coming up on serious hard times. Serious enough that we
might have to put aside our differences. The government is corrupt. It will not save us.
Instead it will continue to work to divide us.
Another great article by C J Hopkins.
Hopkins (correctly) posits that behind US actions, wars etc lies the global capitalist
class.
"Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open
for business or not"
This is correct -- but requires an important caveat.
Intrinsic to capitalism is imperialism. They are the head & tail of the same coin.
Global capitalists may unite in their rapacious attacks on average citizens the world over.
However, they will disunite when it comes to beating a competitor to a market.
The "West" has no (real) ideological differences with China, Russia & Iran. This is a
fight between an existing hegemon & it's allies & a rising hegemon (China) & it's
allies.
In many ways it's similar to the WW I situation: an established imperial country, the UK,
& it's allies against a country with imperial pretensions -- Germany (& it's
allies)
To put it in a nice little homily: the Capitalist wolves prefer to eat sheep (us) -- but,
will happily eat each other should they perceive a sufficient interest in doing so.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of
monopolies.
In most key sectors, competition ends up producing monopolies or their near-equivalent,
oligopolies. The many are weeded out (or swallowed up) by the few . The
situation is roughly the same with democracy, which historically has always resulted in
oligarchy, as occurred in ancient Rome and Athens.
Globalists are not Capitalists. There is no competition. Just a hand full of monopolies.
These stateless corporate monopolists are better understood as Feudalists. They would have
everything. We would have nothing. That's what privatization is. It's the Lords ripping off
the proles.
You are right in expecting that in Capitalism there would be competition – the
traditional view that prices would remain low because of competition, the less competitive
removed from the field, and so on. But that was primitive laisser-faire Capitalism on a fair
playing field that hardly existed but in theory. Occasionally there were some "good"
capitalists – say the mill-owner in a Lancashire town who gave employment to the
locals, built houses, donated to charity and went to the Sunday church service with his
workers. But even that "good" capitalist was in it for the profit, which comes from taking
possession for himself of the value added by his workers to a commodity.
But modern Capitalism does not function that way. There are no mill-owners, just absentee
investor playing in, usually rigged, stock market casinos. Industrial capitalism has been
changed into financial Capitalism without borders and loyalty to worker or country. In fact,
it has gone global to play country against country for more profit.
Anyway, the USA has evolved into a Fascist state (an advanced state of capitalism, a.k.a.
corporatocracy) as Chomsky stated many years ago. Seen from abroad here's a view from the
horse's mouth ( The Guardian is official organ of Globalist Fascism).
'Christian Zionism' is the direct fruit of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism broadly understood. Over its
life, it has manifested itself in many ways. The beliefs were so powerful even before the
Puritan revolution that groups of English Dissenter/Low Church Protestants existed that taught
that the original natives of Britain, barbarians in every sense, had been uplifted by the
arrival of the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel – this was taught to prove that the English had
Hebrew blood and so were the Chosen Race, which meant that Anglophone Protestantism (Low
Church) was the true faith.
By the dawn of the Victorian age, standard Brit WASP Judaizing had become secular and had
discovered that Arabs are also Semites linguistically and culturally. That allowed many of the
Brit WASP Elites to adopt Arabs and/or Mohammedanism as their pet Semite to elevate over the
vast majority of British Isles natives that they despised.
The religiously pro-Jewish original focus of the culture produced by the Judaizing heresy
that was Anglo-Saxon Puritanism was still alive and very powerful at the dawn of the 20th
century. That is how the Oxford UP came to publish the Scofield Study Bible.
Churches across the South were remarkably free of any taint of overt Judaizing in the WASP
vein until well after WW2. The growth was slow but steady until after the Reagan years, when it
exploded. I have seen no signs of a regression in the 21st century.
You also are way off about the economic notions held by rural Evangelicals in the South.
"...as Stratfor, put it, "Trump, fearing a much bigger escalation, got cold feet."
One is reminded of the scene from Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), a General in the Joint
Chiefs comments disparagingly about Kennedy for keeping his finger "on the chicken switch"
with regard to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Lyndon Johnson in the White House with Henry Cabot Lodge in 1963 declares: "Gentlemen, I
want you to know I'm not going to let Vietnam go the way China did. I'm personally committed.
I'm not going to take one soldier out of there 'til they know we mean business in Asia (he
pauses) You just get me elected, and I'll give you your damned war ."
Another question exists: should the US resist the allure of military action against Iran,
what can Iran do?
US sanctions against Iran amount to an act of war. Iran can bust sanctions up to some point
-- but for how long? Will Iran suffer half a million dead children & elderly people as
Iraq did in the 90's ? SHOULD Iran have to suffer such a criminally imposed loss of life?
Where is the way out of this insanity?
Iran won't negotiate with the US for the very good reason that the US clearly wants to
sterilize Iranian sovereignty (ie the US won't accept ANY Iranian missiles -- that is, Iran
has no right to self defense).
Sad to say, Trump does not need to launch military action against Iran, merely continue to
economically terrorise Iran until it has NO choice but to initiate military action against
its tormentors.
The war on Iran will continue till kingdom come, until it falls. Its clear as day that both
Russia and China back their Iranian allies against US provocations. China hasn't flinched
under US threats to embargo Iranian crude, and continues to purchase it, and Russia has an
oil swap agreement with Iran, where it buys Iranian oil and sells it as Russian on the
international market. This must be a severe irritation to the imperialists in Washington and
London as it renders their Iran sanctions regime practically toothless.
The imperialists are not backing down in their quest for subduing Iran. Seems like the idea
here is to put as many large ships in harms way as possible....and provoke Iran to attack one
of these......This will ensure the probability of miscalculation and/ or accidents becomes
almost unavoidable. There must be regime change in Tehran, on the road to Beijing and Moscow:
Iran has every right to defend itself from US imperialisms constant violence, as is the case
with China and Russia. It is also pleasing to see the almighty war machine get a bloody nose.
But we should never lose sight of the fact that it is always the working class that
suffers the most in terms of death, injuries and destitution.
End all wars!
End production for profit and the Nation state upon which it is built!
America's history demonstrates that loss of (foreign) life is of little concern to those in
power.
The Manhattan Project was established, and mightily financed because of reasonably well
established fears that Nazi Germany was on track to build its own A-bombs.
With the defeat of Germany that fear was gone. Nevertheless, knowing full well that Imperial
Japan had no such program, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were vapourised. A clear demonstration that
they, atomic weapons, WMD, worked and a warning to the Soviet Union that it too could be
annihilated.
Robert Oppenheimer and others refused to take part in building an H-bomb for class and humane
reasons. This fell on Truman's deaf ears.
American Imperialism is indifferent to death and destruction of billions.
As WSWS has stated, Trumps announcement that the loss of 150 Iranian lives is the the reason
he pulled backs so much bilge.
Trump is in a catch 22. When push has come to shove , he simply cannot sell another war to
the US working class, and he knows it , and he's been well and truly spooked by the Iranian
response.
All the US garbage of itself as ''victim'', all the 'good cop bad cop' routines are
wearing thin. Nobody is buying it anymore , especially from a gangster.
Perhaps a predicted massive spike in global temperatures will clear out the collective
cobwebs further.
Good point about the possibility of Iran sinking a carrier. The Chinese have developed
advanced anti-ship weapons that, if the results of a RAND corporation war game can be
believed, will be able to neutralize carriers. This highlights the fact that, whatever the
salesmen of advanced weaponry might say, it will not win wars alone. All of the smart weapons
in the world have not ended the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan in the favour of American
imperialism.
We can see an historical precedent in the British development of the dreadnought, the
modern battleship, in the arms race that preceded WWI. Dreadnoughts were supposed to be the
decisive super weapons of the day, but the British and German battle fleets remained in their
moorings for most of the war for fear that these expensive ships would fall prey to torpedos.
The sinking of the HMS Formidable in 1915 is a case in point. The only major engagement
between dreadnoughts was at Jutland and it was inconclusive.
For all of the contemporary bluster about super weapons and the fetishism of smart bombs
and cyber weapons, they will not decisively win a war alone. As in the world wars of the last
century, the bourgeoisie will be forced to mobilize society for a war. This will mean
bringing the working class - against its will - into the maelstrom.
Yet again the WSWS demonstrates the incredible foresight and clarity of Marxist analysis. I
would like to extend my thanks to Comrade Andre and the editors of the WSWS for their
indefatigable efforts to impart Marxist consciousness to the masses. For all of the naysayers
who have attacked the WSWS as "sectarian" or as not involved in "practical work," need we
point to anything other than the WSWSs explanation of the connection between eruption of
American imperialism and the decline of the productive forces of that nation state? That
analysis has placed the WSWS in the position of being better prepared politically for the
consequences of war than the imperialists, as the latest farce in the Middle East
demonstrates.
A quote from Trotsky will further emphasize my point:
"We will not concede this banner to the masters of falsehood! If our generation happens to
be too weak to establish Socialism over the earth, we will hand the spotless banner down to
our children. The struggle which is in the offing transcends by far the importance of
individuals, factions and parties. It is the struggle for the future of all mankind."
The official story, as usual, is a bunch of hooey. Trump wouldn't bat an eye over the death
of 150 Iranians. In addition to the worries about losing an aircraft carrier: the military
high command probably let him know that the much vaunted, and outlandishly expensive, force
of F-35s, will quickly lose its effectiveness if exposed to probing by the high tech radars
the Russians have developed, and that are used in conjunction with at least the S-400
antiaircraft and antimissile defense system. So the question is, if the stealth advantage of
the F-35 is only good for a limited time, is this particular geostrategic confrontation worth
using up that particular asset??
Then there is the whole question of whether the Iranians would close the Straits of Hormuz
in response to a major air raid on their nuclear facilities; this leads to some much more
important issues. Despite the blathering about "international waters" and "freedom of
navigation" the facts are that the Straits of Hormuz are only 21 miles wide. So all the water
in them is either in Iranian territory to the north or Omani to the south. They would be
entirely within their rights, as elucidated in the International Law of the Sea, to close the
straits after some sort of military strike against them (for what that is worth, which is
something at least as far as public opinion outside of the U.S. is concerned). The Iranians
have stated that if and when they close the straits they will announce it publicly, no
subterfuge or secret operations will be involved.
Since nearly 30% of the World's oil moves through those straits cutting them off will
cause an immediate spike in oil prices. Prices of $100 - $300 a barrel would be reached
within a few days. If the Straits of Hormuz were closed for a longer period we could easily
see prices rise to $1,000 a barrel according to Goldman Sachs projections (see Escobar
article cited below). Anything over $150 a barrel would trigger an economic, industrial, and
financial crisis of immense proportions around the world. The financial and speculative house
of cards, that the ruling classes of the U.S.-led Finance Capital Bloc depends on for their
dominance of world capital and markets, would likely come tumbling down. The amount of
derivatives that are swirling about the planet and that are traded and created constantly is
estimated to be from $1.2 - $2.5 Quadrillion. That's right from $1,200 - $2,500 Trillion or
$1,200,000 - $2,500,000 Billion {remember Illinois Senator Everett Dirksen, who once said "a
billion here and a billion there and first thing you know, You're talking BIG MONEY!!} (See
"World Derivatives Market Estimated As Big As $1.2 Quadrillion Notional, as Banks Fight
Efforts to Rein It In", March 26, 2013, Yves Smith, "Naked Capitalism", at <
https://www.nakedcapitalism... >, and "Iran Goes for 'Maximum Counter-pressure' ",
June 21, 2019, Pepe Escobar, "Strategic Culture Foundation", at <
https://www.strategic-cultu... >, and "Global Derivatives: $1.5 Quadrillion Time
Bomb", Aug 24, 2015, Stephen Lendman, Global Research, at
<
https://www.globalresearch.... >). Just like during the 2007 - 2008 crisis the various
elements of shadow banking, and speculation would collapse. Remember that total world
production of and trade in actual products is only about about $70 - $80 Trillion, or perhaps
less than 1/31st the size of the Global Derivatives markets.
All the world's elite capitalists, be they Western or Asian or from elsewhere, maintain
homes in numerous places. One reason for this is so they have somewhere to go, if they need
to flee from environmental and/or socioeconomic disaster and the resultant chaos in their
primary place of residence. As we move ever deeper into this extremely severe and ongoing
Crisis of Capitalism, these issues will continue to become more acute.
So we can rest assured that; in addition to the crazed war-mongers Bolton and Pompeo (and
their supporters and backers) whispering in Trump's ear to "go ahead and attack the
Iranians"; and in addition to the somewhat more sober counsel of General Dunford and other
members of the top military command; that titans of finance capital were undoubtedly on the
phone warning "Bone-Spur Don" that his digs in Manhattan and Florida might not be entirely
safe if the worst were to happen in response to a military strike. The absurd story of Don
worrying about 150 Iranians is so ludicrous that it did not even pass the smell test with the
corporate controlled media for very long.
"Thirty years of endless war have created a veritable cult of militarism within the American
ruling elite, whose guiding assumption seems to be that wars can be waged without drastic
global consequences, including for the United States itself."
The military/security surveillance state is a trillion dollar enterprise that instigates
conflicts to expand its profits. Militarism works hand-in-hand with the neoliberal
corporatists who deploy the military to secure natural resources, wage slaves, and
geostrategic hegemony. It should be noted, that the US imperialist agenda left unhindered
after the dissolution of the Soviet Union only intensified.
However, in order for the US ruling class to achieve the "ultimate goal" of unilateral
hegemony in the Middle East the military must confront Iran a powerful sizable country with
economic and political ties to China and Russia. This is the dilemma confronting the
warmongering psychopaths
who are influenced by Israel and Saudi Arabia.
A significant military attack against Iran will NOT go unanswered and if the Iranian
Military destroys a US warship and kills hundreds of sailors it would unleash another major
war in the Middle East igniting the entire region and possibly leading to a world war.
What should traumatize the US population and awaken them from their hypnotic warmongering
stupur created by propaganda proliferated on FOX, MSNBC, and CNN is that the United States
came within minutes of launching a war whose military consequences it had NOT seriously
examined.
In light of these dangerous events it is obvious that a faction of the American ruling class
circles including Trump were not prepared to face the consequences of a strike against Iran.
That is precisely why Trump aborted the mission last Friday. Just yesterday Trump himself
admitted for the first time that if it was up to John Bolton then we would be fighting the
whole world. Today Pompeo has been sent to Middle East to broaden his alliance with Gulf
Monarchical regimes most notably Saudi Arabia and UAE. It is aimed to prepare the ground for
possible confrontation with Iran.
Trump's comment re Bolton that the US "would fight the whole world" sums up what the US is
really about. Take it from me, The US hates virtually every country save one: Israel. Illegal
US Sanctions regimes now extend to almost 50% of the world's population. The US does not even
like the advanced countries such as Europe and Japan. They tolerate them because of
diplomatic support and large investment and trade ties. Outside that they have no affinity or
connection. Until we all realise the true nature of The US and its exclusive cultural mindset
[NFL, NBA, MLB etc etc], populations will merely continue to enable the US to attack and
sanction everybody and anyone of their demented choosing. The tragedy is that if the other
countries became united and were committed to ending this US terror by eg dumping the US
Dollar as international reserve currency and sanctioning all US corporations, the US would
face severe turmoil and its reign of endless terror brought to a sudden end.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
I believe things simple didn't go as planned as an airplane was threatened to be taken
down. Bolton was in Israel after that to most likely assure Netanyahu that a new attack would
be conducted, Bolton Warned Iran Not to 'Mistake U.S. Prudence and Discretion for
Weakness'...
There needs to be a correction in the article on the older Raad system not having been used
but instead the newer, 'Third of Khordad' system which brought down the MQ-4C Triton.
Pictures/ Info on the Third of Khordad reveals that it is in effect an Iranian version of the
Soviet Buk-M2 of the MH-17 downing fame which the western backed Kiev junta used from its
hand me down Soviet weapons arsenal, to shoot down the ill fated Malaysian Airliner over the
Ukraine. The system also is stark evidence of the close defense relationship between the
Russians and the Iranians, confirming the suspicions in the west that whatever weaponry Putin
transfers to Syria or Iraq is by default also available to Iran.
Not to be outdone by his failure to bring Iran to its knees, Trump ordered a massive cyber
attack on Iran's missile batteries and its command and control centers after rescinding the
military order to physically attack Iran for downing the drone. The Iranians today announced
the failure of this desperate US cyber attack:
This is in addition to the CIA placing an agent within the Iranian oil ministry for
conducting sabotage. She has been arrested and faces the death penalty for espionage:
The deep State in the US will not stop trying to subdue Iran until it capitulates. Iran
must fall to Washington in order for the US to effectively counter and sabotage both Putin's
Eurasian Integration and president Xi's BRI projects.
Trump's alterration at this moment can be due to Iran's internal coherence against American
imperialism. With santions being reinforced, one can anticipate more and more impovershment
and quality of life geting lower unabated to the point that the basis for internal coherence
gets eroded substantially. We saw working class uprisings in Iran recently and leadership
accused imperialist as rabble-rousers to find a way out.That is why we need building
SEP/IYSSE in Iran to hatch revolutionary force in Iran for Iran to join the peer in the rest
of the world. Morsi in Egypt was overthrown by Sisi with the backing of US imperialism headed
by Obama at that time. So is the imperialism and it will continue to work to weaken Iran as a
force successfully confronting imperialism in the middle east currently. Let us therefore
empower international working class to empower it to overthrow imperialism on one hand and
Stalinism on the other hand. Russia too depend largely on its arms sale to maintain its
economy. But human needs, not wepons, but basic needs including clean environment. Long live
the socialist revolution in Iran and internationally. Death to imperialism. Thank you comrade
Andre Damon.
"The strikes were called off at the last moment, amid deep divisions at the highest levels of
the White House and the Pentagon over the consequences -- military, diplomatic and political
-- of what would likely be the single most dangerous and reckless action of the entire Trump
presidency."
Economically it would be Armageddon. Although some think America does not rely on Mideast
oil, the world economy does and America is a part of that despite what nationalists dream.
Bolton is making threats from Israel and clearly some believe they stand to gain from war but
militarily too it would be Armageddon. The Pentagon would answer the sinking of a carrier by
nuking Iran to preserve American "credibility" i.e. fear. China and Russia would have to
react, China at least to keep its oil supplied. India pushed against China could add more
mushroom clouds not to mention Pakistan. Israel itself with Tel Aviv bombarded from Lebanon
and maybe invaded unable to stop this might nuke Lebanon and maybe Tehran if any of it
remains and Damascus besides. Just as ww1 started because military train timetables had to be
followed there are nukewar plans in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing that won't take long. So
world workers need to start our plan before others begin. Preemptive general strikes, antiwar
and socialist revolutionary agitation and propaganda within imperialist rank and files and
human blockades of war material networks should happen at an early date like now. Now also
WikiLeaks should put out whatever it hasn't while people exist to read it. The rich are
determined to kill Assange anyway and full wartime censorship is not far off.
Some people have speculated that if the U.S. does attack Iran then Iran will launch missiles
at Saudi Arabia's oil fields which will then send oil prices skyrocketing to $130 dollars a
barrel. The article also notes that:
"While Trump's foreign policy team -- headed by National Security Advisor John Bolton and
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo -- 'unanimously' supported the attack, General Joseph Dunford,
the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, 'cautioned about the possible repercussions of a
strike, warning that it could endanger American forces,' the Times wrote."
Apparently the good general cannot get too worked up at the sight of thousands and
thousands of Iranian children, women, and old men who would be slaughtered and grievously
wounded by U.S. bombs and the water supply which would be contaminated when those bombs would
land at a nuclear power plant. But these horrific actions by the United States are of no
consequence because, as Madeline Albright observed on a television a few decades ago, the
deaths of a half million Iraqi children by the U.S. was worth it. It would appear that the
lives of foreigners are of little consequence to those who are in power. Threatening to start
a war against another country for the most specious of reasons is simply another reason why a
malignant narcissist like Trump needs to be removed from office as quickly as possible. Or
perhaps Trump believes that the best way to improve his low poll numbers is to start dropping
500 lb. bombs on a country which does not in any remote way pose a threat to the United
States.
"Almost all propaganda is designed to create fear. Heads of governments and their
officials know that a frightened people is easier to govern, will forfeit rights it would
otherwise defend, is less likely to demand a better life, and will agree to millions and
millions being spent on 'Defense'."-John Boynton Priestly [1894-1984], English writer
"Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill
everyone, and you are a god."-Jean Rostand [1894-1977], French philosopher and biologist
After Hezballah had booted Zionist colonizers out of Lebanon, Zionist apartheid had lost its
image of "invincibility".
Now even ghetto Gaza is fighting back.
The CIA payrolled press whores like CNN's Christiane Amanpour for example a prime warmonger
and there are countless others embedded in every western media source.
Ironically, Amanpour is Iranian background, an avowed revolution hater and a devoted Iranian
Pahlavi monarchist. She's on the record for saying that she wants to see the Shah's exiled
son back on the throne in Iran, serving US imperialism for the 'benefit of the Iranian
nation'.
The sinking of an aircraft carrier, especially one as well known as the USS Lincoln, would
have been one of the biggest PR disasters for both Trump and the military. It probably would
have sparked demands from the people to know how, despite pouring trillions of dollars into
the mouths of greedy defense contractors for decades, a supposedly inferior military could so
easily take down one of our ships.
Khrushchev once said of the Sverdlov class cruisers built in the early 1950's that their only
practical purpose was as targets for anti ship missile training because of how outdated they
where considering they where armed with guns.
Maybe the anti-ship missile now stands at the point where it can make carriers obsolete
similar to how the battleship was made obsolete by the carrier.
There are some who argue that surface navies became obsolete in the 1950's with the advent of
long range missiles. For many years now, China has been helping to build up Iranian area
defences...
Cold war weapons are unsuitable for countering Iran's asymmetric warfare doctrine. A dozen or
two highly advanced US warships are no match for a thousand missile boats and thousands of
Iranian anti-ship missiles in the narrow confines of the shallow gulf.
Minutes or hours, or Trump never signed on to them, as the accounts from different US media
outlets and Trump have differed at several points. Fog of war indeed.
The investigation into the crash of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane in East Ukraine was always compromised, right from the start.
The crash on July 17 2014 came shortly after the "Euromaidan revolution" in Kiev – which first began in November 2013 and culminated
in the ousting of elected president Yanukovich on 23 February 2014, happily helped along by John McCain, Victoria Nuland and then-US
ambassador to Ukraine (now ambassador to Greece) Geoffrey Pyatt for the USA, as well as various EU actors.
Russia reacted by "annexing"
Crimea – a large majority of whose people had voted for Yanukovich, thereby safeguarding its access to its only warm water port.
Not a shot was fired there, but it was very different in East Ukraine (Donbass), where people -of Russian origin- also didn't want
to be subjected to a new regime under Nuland's puppet Yatsenyuk -and later Poroshenko. They started a civil war which continues to
this day.
It was in that heated political climate that the MH17 came down, killing all its 298 passengers, 196 of whom had the Dutch nationality.
3 weeks later, on August 8, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was formed, which was to be led by Holland, and to also include representatives
from Australia, Belgium and Ukraine. Which is odd, since at that time, Ukraine certainly was a potential perpetrator of the downing.
Malaysia joined only in December, allegedly because only then did it finally agree to allow Ukraine, a nation that was a suspect,
a veto over any conclusions that the team would publish. Malaysia had already been handed the black boxes by pro-Russian rebels in
the area, and passed them on to the team in August. Summarized, the way the JIT was formed was highly curious. The countries even
signed a secret agreement.
Immediately after the crash, people like then-US VP Joe Biden, as well as Frans Timmermans, then-Dutch Foreign Minister and today
candidate for the EU top job, pointed the finger at Russia as the party responsible for shooting down the plane. Also curious, since
there had been no investigation and the plane crashed in a civil war zone where access was almost impossible. There was talk at the
time of the US having satellite images, but none have ever been produced.
In that atmosphere, the JIT yesterday, June 19 2019, held another press conference, in which it accused four men, three from Russia
and one from Ukraine, of being "involved" in shooting down the plane. But again, almost 5 years after the incident, the team produced
no evidence for its accusations, saying it will only be presented 9 months from now when a trial will start in the Netherlands.
It also again accused Russia of refusing to cooperate, though Russia has offered its help ever since the MH17 came down. It's
just not the help the people want who have accused the Russians since before there was any hint of evidence it was involved. And
there still is no evidence. Russia has filed long and detailed reports on the incident despite being ignored, but these reports have
been ignored.
The trial will take place starting March 9 2020 without the accused, since Russia doesn't extradite its citizens, and neither
does Ukraine. Moreover, the one Ukrainian who is accused is thought to be in the Donbass, where the government has no access.
So this will be a show trial. And one must wonder why it is staged. What's the use of a trial where defendants don't defend themselves?
Sure, the official line is they would love to have the men provide a defense, but that smells a bit too much like what has happened
to Julian Assange. What are the odds of a fair trial when so many conclusions have been drawn at such early times?
There is not a soul in Europe west of the Russian border who doesn't believe the Russians did it. The media take care of that.
Nor is there in the US. But the Malaysian PM himself yesterday, again, said the team has proven nothing, and only provided hearsay.
I kid you not, I read a piece on the BBC today that asked if the 93-year-old who lost 43 of his countrymen only said that because
he wanted to sell palm oil to Russia.
And in the meantime, the evidence is not there, and won't be for another 9 months, if ever, and the EU today added another year
to its Russia sanctions over Crimea, and 4 men can deny their involvement all they want, but they can make their case only in March
2020, and only at a show trial, with international search warrants hanging over their heads.
The four men in question, by the way, are not accused of firing the BUK missile that supposedly downed the MH17. They are only
accused of facilitating the transport of the missile and launcher from Russia to Ukraine -and back. The JIT Ukrainian team bases
the entire story of that transport on serial numbers it says it has found.
On September 17 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense in a YouTube response to a May 24 2018 JIT exhibition, said it had tracked
down those serial numbers, 8868720, and 1318869032, and 9M38, and said both the launcher and missile corresponding to the numbers
were purchased by Ukraine from Russia as far back as 1986, transferred there, and had never left the country since.
I get that information from a lengthy, deep-digging and highly recommended essay by Eric Zuesse, from December 2018,
MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine's Guilt Now Proven,
which I've been reading the past few days, in which Eric says: " if the JIT's supplied evidence is authentic - which the Ukrainian
team asserts it to be - then it outright convicts Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side."
Zuesse also details, in that article, contentions from multiple sources that, while the MH17 may have been hit with a BUK missile,
it certainly wasn't the only thing that hit it. There was at least one fighter jet seen close to the plane before it came down, as
multiple eye-witness reports claim, and it is alleged that they fired on the cockpit for sure and perhaps other parts of the plane.
It is an excellent article that is very well researched and chock-full of links to prove its points.
There are many things wrong with the MH17 investigation. Having the PM of one of your member investigative countries complain
that after 5 years you produce only hearsay and no evidence may be the least of the worries. The Netherlands, as main victim, leading
the investigation, is strange. How neutral could they be? Their Foreign Minister blamed Russia way before any investigating was done.
And Holland was a main sponsor in the "Euromaidan revolution", i.e. the ousting of an elected president.
Still, Ukraine's position in all this must be the biggest warning sign. They stood a lot to gain from committing atrocities and
then blaming Russia for them. Plus, Yatsenyuk and Nuland and the US and the EU were mightily angry that Russia had outsmarted them
all over Crimea.
But instead of keeping Ukraine out of the investigation, they became a major contributor, and were even given veto rights on anything
that came out of it, as far as we know the only party with such rights. If you present a crime novel or movie with ingredients like
that, nobody would believe you. Such things don't happen in real life.
"... Putin said: "[neo]liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have been attempting to do over the recent decades." ..."
"... Putin said: "What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US companies -- the companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these benefits. The middle class hardly benefited from globalization. The Trump team sensed this very keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election campaign. It is where you should look for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any alleged foreign interference." ..."
In an exclusive interview with FT on Thursday, Russian
President Vladimir Putin touted the growth of national populism in Europe and America while
saying that [neo]liberalism is "spent" as an ideology. He spoke on numerous issues at length,
which we have broken down here by topic.
[neo]liberal Governments
On the eve of the G20 summit, Putin said that the "[neo]liberal idea" had "outlived its
purpose" as the public has turned against immigration and multiculturalism. His push back on
[neo]liberalism aligns Putin with leaders like US president Donald Trump, Hungary's Viktor
Orban, Matteo Salvini in Italy, and the Brexit insurgency in the UK.
Putin said: "[neo]liberals] cannot simply dictate anything to anyone just like they have
been attempting to do over the recent decades."
Immigration and Refugees
He said that Chancellor Angela Merkel's decision to admit over 1 million refugees to German
was a "cardinal mistake" and praised President Trump for trying to stop migrants and drugs from
Mexico.
Putin said: "This [neo]liberal idea presupposes that nothing needs to be done. That migrants
can kill, plunder and rape with impunity because their rights as migrants have to be protected.
Every crime must have its punishment. The [neo]liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come
into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population."
On Election Interference
While Putin has been targeted in the U.S., namely for attempting to intervene in the
country's elections, Putin denied it and called the idea "mythical interference".
Putin said: "What happened in the US, and how did it happen? In the US, the leading US
companies -- the companies, their managers, shareholders and partners -- made use of these
benefits. The middle class hardly benefited from globalization. The Trump team sensed this very
keenly and clearly, and they used this in the election campaign. It is where you should look
for reasons behind Trump's victory, rather than in any alleged foreign interference."
The China/U.S. Trade War
With regard to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China, Putin called the situation
"explosive", blaming the issue on American unilateralism.
"Our relations with China are not motivated by timeserving political or any other
considerations. China is showing loyalty and flexibility to both its partners and opponents.
Maybe this is related to the historical features of Chinese philosophy, their approach to
building relations," Putin said.
A New Nuclear Arms Race
He also expressed concern about a new nuclear arms race.
"The cold war was a bad thing . . . but there were at least some
rules that all participants in international communication more or less adhered to or tried to
follow. Now, it seems that there are no rules at all," Putin said.
... ... ...
The Russian Economy
Speaking about his own country, Putin said: "Real wages are not in decline in Russia. On the
contrary, they are starting to pick up. The macroeconomic situation in the country is stable.
As for the central bank, yes, it is engaged in a gradual improvement of our financial system:
inefficient and small-capacity companies, as well as semi-criminal financial organizations are
leaving the market, and this is large-scale and complicated work."
From the little I know about Saudi Arabia's war on Yemen, Yemen is still subject to a land
/ sea / air blockade. Saudi warships are patrolling Yemeni maritime territory. So that would
probably nix any possibility of Iran sending any kind of support, humanitarian as well as
military.
The war has lasted over four years and the blockade has lasted almost as long. The Saudis
are relying on mercenaries from as far away as
South America ,
Nepal and parts of Africa. Yet not only are the Houthis still holding out but as you say,
there are signs of
Saudi collapse in Yemen.
My hunch is that huge numbers of soldiers are defecting from the Saudi forces and bringing
with them equipment, vehicles, ammunition, advice and logistics support to the Houthis. Among
other things, this would account for large losses of Saudi military equipment and the
enormous wastage. Perhaps some mercenaries have also switched sides. But as I have said here
in past MoA comments forums, I can't prove that defections are occurring. Maybe I'm not using
the "right" keywords on Google Chrome, DuckDuckGo or other search engines to find the
information, or perhaps this particular narrative is a no-go zone.
@ Jen 74
Thanks for your concern for Yemen, and reports from the area.
Please be aware that the outcome of military conflicts are more dependant upon the people
affected than anything. It took the US three years to "pacify" Baghdad, because Iraqis didn't
want Americans there, and they still don't as a matter of fact.
Yemenis don't want Saudi control of their land and that has more meaning than the Saudi
mercenaries can bring to the conflict.
In the US Army, the infantry is "the Queen of battle." That's a fancy way of saying that the
men engaged in the endeavor, on the ground, are the most important variable. That's why the
Houthis in their flip-flops can destroy so many Saudi units. They care. The human element.
"... Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book The Nationalist Revival , "is an essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity, and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different backgrounds from theirs." ..."
"... Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion." It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism in the proper direction. ..."
"... The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism: propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign policy. ..."
"... The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words, it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power. ..."
"... But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet famously denounced it in The Present Age: Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. ..."
"... Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class. It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes. Stay tuned. ..."
Just recently, John Judis, undisguisedly a political commentator of the Left, made an
important argument in favor of nationalism. "Nationalist sentiment," he writes in his book
The Nationalist Revival , "is an
essential ingredient of a democracy, which is based on the assumptions of a common identity,
and of a welfare state, which is based on the acceptance by citizens of their financial
responsibility for people whom they may not know at all, and who may have widely different
backgrounds from theirs."
Of course, nationalism can be "the basis of social generosity or of bigoted exclusion."
It is therefore important, according to Judis, that enlightened state leaders push nationalism
in the proper direction.
Judis points out that while "globalism" is a force that nationalists understandably oppose,
"internationalism" need not clash with nationalist sentiment. In a op-ed
in TheNew York Times last October, Judis praised his kind of nationalism as
being beneficial to a successful and growing welfare state and a happier world. It can
also be, he said, a stepping stone that leads beyond itself to international cooperation
.
For those who study European socialism, it is clear that Judis is reprising the position of
French sociologist Pierre
Bordieu , who argued for decades that a socialist regime must create some kind of social
glue to hold its subjects together. Judis is now transferring Bordieu's view to the American
political scene.
Advertisement
Now, a conference on "conservative nationalism," which will take place in Washington in July , may be
pushing a "nationalism" that is at least as adaptable as Judis's.
One featured speaker , Claire Lehmann, the founder of Quillette, will be talking about how
nationalism "is
the antidote to racism." Presumably the more inclusive the operative term, the less likely
will be the Left's attack on those wielding it.
The presence of Daniel Pipes and other neoconservatives at this gathering also suggests
that at least some of the panelists will be offering two approved concepts of nationalism:
propositional nationhood for the United States and solidarity with Israeli nationalism. In both
cases, however, the nationalism being advocated ends up tied to an aggressive foreign
policy.
Nationalism, in any case, means different things for different peoples. It doesn't hold the
same meaning for Estonians or Hungarians, who belong to ethnic, historic communities, as it
does for a pluralistic country with hundreds of millions of people and a constantly expanding
immigrant population.
In the latest issue of the Rassemblement National monthlyL'Incorrect ,
Steve Bannon speaks of the natural fit between European nationalism and the nationalist
movement that he has been promoting in the United States. Both these ideologies, Bannon says,
derive from the same national principle. In an interview with me in the same publication, I
treated Bannon's contention as wishful thinking. The United States has become too diverse and
too culturally disunited to fit a traditional national model. Our use of nationalism will
likely lead to something less quaint and less organic but more explosive than what comes from
the Baltic nationalists or Viktor Orbán.
The nationalist label has now fallen into the hands of the neocon establishment, which
has managed to identify it with international meddling and a creedal nation. In other words,
it's been appropriated by those who already wielded power.
The same protean label is also likely to wander onto the Left, given the nontraditional and
very pliable nature of our "nationalism." John Judis may in fact be the harbinger of a new
American Left that celebrates nationalism, provided that Left is allowed to define that term
for the rest of us. Indeed, it may be possible to frame LGBT rights and reparations for blacks
as "nationalist" issues. Nationalism also need not hinder us from letting in lots of
undocumented immigrants who are only trying to join our team and learn our values.
Men and women of the interwar Right, down to such later figures as Russell Kirk and Robert
Nisbet, were understandably critical of American nationalism. They identified it with social
engineering and centralized government and preferred localism and regionalism to any
justification for an expansionist administrative state.
But what makes American nationalism even more unpalatable now than when Robert Nisbet
famously denounced it in The Present Age:
Progress and Anarchy in Modern America is its rhetorical availability. It serves
different agendas, depending on which power bloc appeals to it. The hope once entertained
by Pat Buchanan that a nationalist cause would help slow down immigration and preserve
America's traditional moral and cultural identity has not worked out as planned. Those who
control our politics and culture determine the meaning of terms, which is as true of
nationalism as it is of other political labels like "freedom" and "equality."
Until recently, nationalism had portentous associations for much of the political class.
It signified, rightly or wrongly, ethnocentricity and dislike for outsiders. Now that's all
changing. Those in power have tamed the concept and are recycling it for their own purposes.
Stay tuned.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at
Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale
Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently Fascism: Career of a Concept and Revisions and Dissents .
Verbal electronic arrows have increased the amount of overall use of bandwidth but Trump's
King's still I check and must be protected, his "no boots on ground" is woefully
insufficient. As was discussed toward the end of the "Seeking Coalition" thread, how will
Iran respond to what now seems likely as a limited strike? Will it lash out at Trump's King
and take hostages beforehand either in Iraq, Kuwait or Afghanistan? Will Trump refrain from
acting until or during the G-20. Will Iran wait until the targets cross into its airspace? As
you can see the possibilities and their variables are as Pft @44 alludes to--almost infinite.
What was the substance of Bolton's report to Trump from Jerusalem and was it truthful?
Does Trump understand what it means for Iran to be considered under the aegis of Russia and
China, or does it matter since they remain the ultimate targets?
Sigh... Too many questions and not enough information to even provide an educated WAG. For
those that missed it, here's
the statement issued yesterday by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs after the
Jerusalem talks with Patrushev ended. It concludes:
"Russia stands in full solidarity with the friendly people of Iran and its government. The
US government should consider where such a reckless course of action might lead. Not only
could it destabilise the Middle East, it threatens to undermine the entire system of
international security."
I note Patrushev's absence from the meeting earlier today of Russia's Security Council . Surely his
report from Jerusalem was the primary topic.
This is just think tank swamp vapor. No real analysis, no real recommendation on adaption of the USA to the collapse of global neoliberal
system (aka the USA empire)
At the heart of the alignment between China and Russia is their shared interest in undermining U.S. influence globally. The two
countries are united in their mutual displeasure with the United States and the U.S.-dominated international order that they feel
disadvantages them. But while Russia and China may have initially banded together in discontent, their repeated engagement on areas
of mutual interest is fostering a deeper and enduring partnership.
It is clear that China will pose the greatest challenge to U.S. interests for the foreseeable future, but Beijing's increasing
collaboration with Moscow will amplify that challenge.
... ... ...
Washington must come to terms with this China-Russia alignment and work to address and manage it. To contain the depth of alignment,
Washington must look for opportunities to strain the seams in the Russia-China relationship. Russia and China may be drawing closer,
but their interests -- and especially their approaches -- are not identical. Russia and China compete in the Middle East, for example,
for military sales and nuclear energy deals. And their very different approaches to Europe could be a source of strain. In communicating
with Beijing, Washington should underscore how Russian interference in these countries could generate instability that threatens
China's growing economic interests.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is focused on combating China's unfair economic practices, a worthy undertaking. But any trade
war "victory" will be incomplete if Washington does not address Beijing's challenge, in collaboration with Moscow, to the very fabric
of the rules-based order that underpins continued U.S. global leadership and prosperity. Washington will be ineffective if it seeks
to go it alone. Pushing back against the illiberal influence of an aligned Russia and China will require the collective heft of Allies
and partners. The time is ripe to tackle this issue with America's European Allies. Europe has grown more attuned to -- and concerned
about -- the threat that China poses and shares the U.S. imperative to compete with Russia and China.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a senior fellow and director of the Center for New American Security's Transatlantic Security Center.
Contents of the article correlate extremely poorly with the title... I don't see even a semblance of a "containment plan" other
than a vague outline that US should ask EU countries something as of yet unspecified...
"... The control of the energy corridors is of capital importance. By accusing Iran of attempting to " interrupt the flow of oil through the Straights of Hormuz ", Mike Pompeo announced that " the United States will defend freedom of navigation ". In other words, he has announced that the United States want to gain military control of this key area for energy supplies, including for Europe, by preventing above all the transit of Iranian oil (to which Italy and other European countries cannot in any case enjoy free access because of the US embargo). ..."
"... Natural gas might also have arrived directly in Italy from Russia, and from there be distributed to other European countries with notable economical advantages, via the South Stream route through the Black Sea. But the pipeline, already in an advanced stage of construction, was blocked in 2014 by the pressure of the United States and European Union itself, with heavy prejudice for Italy. ..."
While the United States prepared a new escalation of tension in the Middle East by accusing
Iran of attacking petrol tankers in the Gulf of Oman, Italian vice-Prime Minister Matteo
Salvini met with one of the artisans of this strategy in Washington, Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo, assuring him that " Italy wants to regain its place as the major partner on the
European continent of the greatest Western democracy ". Thereby he has allied Italy with the
operation launched by Washington.
The " Gulf of Oman affair " , a casus belli against Iran, is a carbon copy of the " Gulf of
Tonkin affair " of 4 August 1964, itself used as a casus belli to bomb North Vietnam, which was
accused of having attacked a US torpedo boat (an accusation which was later proved to be
false).
Today, a video released by Washington shows the crew of an alleged Iranian patrol boat
removing an unexploded mine from the hull of a petrol tanker in order to conceal its origin
(because the mine would allegedly have borne the inscription " Made in Iran ").
With this " proof " - a veritable insult to our intelligence - Washington is attempting to
camouflage the goal of the operation. It is part of the strategy aimed at controlling the world
reserves of oil and natural gas and their energy corridors [ 1 ]. It is no coincidence if Iran and
Iraq are in US crosshairs. Their total oil reserves are greater than those of Saudi Arabia, and
five times greater than those of the United States. Iranian reserves of natural gas are
approximately 2.5 times those of the USA. Venezuela finds itself targeted by the USA for the
same reason, since it is the country which owns the greatest oil reserves in the world.
The control of the energy corridors is of capital importance. By accusing Iran of attempting
to " interrupt the flow of oil through the Straights of Hormuz ", Mike Pompeo announced that "
the United States will defend freedom of navigation ". In other words, he has announced that
the United States want to gain military control of this key area for energy supplies, including
for Europe, by preventing above all the transit of Iranian oil (to which Italy and other
European countries cannot in any case enjoy free access because of the US embargo).
Low-cost Iranian natural gas might also have reached Europe by way of a pipeline crossing
Iraq and Syria. But the project, launched in 2011, was destroyed by the USA/NATO operation to
demolish the Syrian state.
Natural gas might also have arrived directly in Italy from Russia, and from there be
distributed to other European countries with notable economical advantages, via the South
Stream route through the Black Sea. But the pipeline, already in an advanced stage of
construction, was blocked in 2014 by the pressure of the United States and European Union
itself, with heavy prejudice for Italy.
In fact it was the reproduction of North Stream which continued, making Germany the centre
of triage for Russian gas.. Then, on the basis of the " USA/EU strategic cooperation in the
energy field " agreement stipulated in July 2018, US exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG) to
the EU tripled. The triage centre was in Poland, from which was distributed the " Freedom Gas "
which also arrived in Ukraine.
Washington's objective is strategic – to hurt Russia by replacing Russian gas in
Europe with US gas. But we have no guarantees, neither on the price, nor on the time-scale for
US gas extracted from the bituminous shale by the technique known as fracking (hydraulic
fracturation), which is disastrous for the environment.
So what does Matteo Salvini have to say about all that? When he arrived in the " greatest
democracy in the Western world ", he proudly declared - " I am part of a government which in
Europe is no longer satisfied with breadcrumbs ".
It was Charles De Gaulle who once said, " In order to be the master, the politician poses
as the servant ." In the case of a US presidential election, his words should be amended to
read: " In order serve corporate America, the politician poses as the servant of the
people ."
With regard to ongoing US threats directed against Iran:
Whereas a "bloody nose" missile attack directed against specific targets in Iran cannot be
ruled out, a conventional war theatre including ground war operations directed against Iran is
almost an impossibility without the support of Turkey and Pakistan, both of which are "sleeping
with the enemy".
Turkey is a NATO heavyweight which is allied with Iran and Russia. Pakistan is allied with
China and Iran. Both Turkey and Pakistan have borders with Iran.
The Pentagon's policy of "encirclement" of Iran formulated in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War
is defunct. Iran has good relations with neighbouring countries including Turkey, Iraq and
Pakistan. All three countries have refused to collaborate with Washington.
Needless to say the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is also in crisis. America can no no
longer rely on its staunchest allies.
But this is just the tip of the iceberg.
America's largest military facility in the Middle East the Al-Udeid military base in Qatar
is now situated in a country which is (unofficially) a partner and de facto ally of Iran. Qatar
has switched sides. It has broken its relations with Saudi Arabia. While retaining good
bilateral relations with the US, Qatar is nonetheless aligned with Iran (and Turkey).
Moreover, since 2016, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is in jeopardy. The Sultanate of
Oman which together with Iran guards the Strait of Hormuz entry into the Persian Gulf is also
unofficially aligned with Iran.
US Central Command (USCENTCOM) in Enemy Territory
Moreover, while the US air force has relocated part of its capabilities to Saudi Arabia, the
Al-Udeid military base in Qatar still "officially" hosts the Middle East "forward headquarters"
of US Central Command (USCENTCOM) in a country which is de facto aligned with an enemy of the
United States of America.
The United States welcomed Qatar's generous offer to expand critical facilities at bases
used by US forces in the country and to align operating procedures at these bases with Nato
standards, thereby increasing the operational capability of US and coalition forces based in
Qatar.
Ironically, the US and Qatar signed an Memorandum of Understanding "enabling deeper
co-ordination on potential expansion at Al Udeid Air Base."
Not withstanding the rhetoric underlying official US-Qatar ties, The Atlantic Council, a
think tank, which has close ties to both the Pentagon and NATO confirms that Qatar is now a
firm ally of both Turkey and Iran:
Put simply, for Qatar to maintain its independence, Doha will have essentially no choice
but to maintain its strong partnership with Turkey, which has been an important ally from the
perspective of military support and food security, as well as Iran. The odds are good that
Iranian-Qatari ties will continue to strengthen even if Tehran and Doha agree to disagree on
certain issues On June 15, President Hassan Rouhani emphasized
that improving relations with Qatar is a high priority for Iranian policymakers. Rouhani
told the
Qatari emir that "stability and security of regional countries are intertwined" and Qatar's
head of state, in turn, stressed
that Doha seeks a stronger partnership with the Islamic Republic. (Atlantic Council, June
2019)
The structure of alliances is in jeopardy. The US cannot reasonably wage a full-fledged
conventional theatre war on Iran without the support of its longstanding allies which are now
sleeping with the enemy.
This of course does not exclude other forms of warfare, including
targeted missile attacks which could lead to escalation,
economic warfare and sanctions,
cyber warfare,
political destabilization and regime change,
the selective use of advanced weapons systems (e.g. electromagnetic warfare,
environmental modification techniques (ENMOD), climatic warfare, the use of biological and
chemical weapons)
Michel Chossudovsky, Global Research, June 22, 2019
***
A major and far-reaching shift in military alliances is unfolding.
While Turkey is still "officially" a member of NATO, president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan
has been developing "friendly relations" with two of America's staunchest enemies, namely Iran
and Russia. (see image right).
US-Turkey military cooperation (including US air force bases in Turkey) dates back to the
Cold War. Today Turkey is sleeping with the enemy. And Trump has ("rhetorically") declared war
on Turkey.
We are ready for war, says President Erdogan.
"The secret to successful states is their readiness for war. We are ready with everything
we have," (Erdogan's statement on August 12, 2018 meeting with ambassadors in Ankara)
Erdogan also accuses the US of waging a "financial warfare" against Turkey. Turkish banks are under attack. In turn, a banking crisis is unfolding in the European Union
largely hitting EU banks which hold substantial portions of Turkey's debt.
According to Turkey's president:
"It is everyone's observation that the developments in foreign currency exchange have no
financial basis and they are an attack on our country On the one hand you are a strategic
ally and the other you shoot (the country) in the foot. Is something like this acceptable?" (
Ahvalnews
)
While the media has its eyes riveted on the collapse of the Turkish Lira (which so far in
2018 has lost approximately 40 percent of its value in relation to the US dollar), NATO is in a
state of disarray, with one of its member states "at war" with another member state, namely the
United States of America.
Turkey by a long shot has the largest conventional forces (after the US) within NATO
outpacing France, Britain and Germany, (not to mention its tactical B61 nuclear weapons
capabilities).
#NATOExit
https://www.youtube.com/embed/7ib4syl7rno
Broadly speaking, the US-Turkey rift and its implications for the Atlantic Alliance are
either ignored or trivialized by the media. The entire structure of military alliances is
defunct. NATO is in a shambles.
Turkey is to acquire Russia's state of the art S-400 air defense system. Why?
Does this mean that Turkey which is a NATO member state will withdraw from the integrated
US-NATO-Israel air defense system? Such a decision is tantamount to NATOExit.
"On July 26, the US Congress decided to ban the shipment of F-35 aircraft to Turkey unless
Ankara refused to purchase S-400 anti-aircraft systems from Russia." (Pravda)
The US-Turkey-Israel "Triple Alliance" is Also Defunct
In 1993, Israel and Turkey signed a Memorandum of Understanding leading to the
creation of (Israeli-Turkish) "joint committees" to handle so-called regional threats. Under
the terms of the Memorandum, Turkey and Israel agreed "to cooperate in gathering intelligence
on Syria, Iran, and Iraq and to meet regularly to share assessments pertaining to terrorism and
these countries' military capabilities."
Image on the right: Sharon and Erdogan in 2004
The triple alliance was also coupled with a 2005 NATO-Israeli military cooperation agreement
which included "many areas of common interest, such as the fight against terrorism and joint
military exercises." These military cooperation ties with NATO were viewed by the Israeli
military as a means to "enhance Israel's deterrence capability regarding potential enemies
threatening it, mainly Iran and Syria."
The "triple alliance" linking the US, Israel and Turkey was coordinated by the US Joint
Chiefs of Staff. It was an integrated and coordinated military command structure pertaining to
the broader Middle East. It was based on close bilateral US military ties respectively with
Israel and Turkey, coupled with a strong bilateral military relationship between Tel Aviv and
Ankara. In this regard, Israel and Turkey have been close partners with the US in planned
aerial attacks on Iran since 2005. (
See Michel Chossudovsky, May 2005 )
Needless to say, that triple alliance is defunct. With Turkey siding with Iran and Russia,
it would be "suicide" for US-Israel to even consider waging aerial attacks on Iran.
Moreover, the NATO-Israel 2005 military cooperation agreement which relied heavily on the
role of Turkey is dysfunctional.
What this means is that US-Israeli threats directed against Iran are no longer supported by
Turkey which has entered into an alliance of convenience with Iran.
The broader Realignment of Military alliances
The shift in military alliances is not limited to Turkey. Following the rift between Qatar
and Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is in disarray with Qatar siding with Iran
and Turkey against Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Qatar is of utmost strategic significance because
it shares with Iran the world's largest maritime gas fields in the Persian Gulf. (see map
below)
The Al-Udeid military base near Doha is America's largest military base in the Middle East.
In turn, Turkey has now established its own military facility in Qatar.
The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO)
A profound shift in geopolitical alliances is also occurring in South Asia with the
instatement in 2017 of both India and Pakistan as full members of the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization (SCO). Inevitably, this historic shift constitutes a blow against Washington,
which has defense and trade agreements with both Pakistan and India. "While India remains
firmly aligned with Washington, America's political stranglehold on Pakistan (through military
and intelligence agreements) has been weakened as a result of Pakistan's trade and investment
deals with China." (
Michel Chossudovsky , August 1, 2017)
In other words, this enlargement of the SCO weakens America's hegemonic ambitions in both
South Asia and the broader Eurasian region. It has a bearing on energy pipeline routes,
transport corridors, borders and mutual security and maritime rights.
Pakistan is the gateway to Afghanistan and Central Asia, where US influence has been
weakened to the benefit of China, Iran and Turkey. China is involved in major investments in
mining, not to mention the development of transport routes which seek the integration of
Afghanistan into Western China.
Where does Turkey fit in? Turkey is increasingly part of the Eurasian project dominated by
China and Russia. In 2017-18, Erdogan had several meetings with both president Xi-Jingping and
Vladimir Putin. Erdogan has been contemplating becoming a member of the SCO since 2016 but
sofar nothing concrete has emerged.
The Antiwar Movement: #NATOExit People's Movement
Of crucial significance, the crisis within NATO constitutes a historic opportunity to
develop a #NATOExit people's movement across Europe and North America , a people's movement
pressuring governments to withdraw from the Atlantic Alliance, a movement to eventually
dismantle and abolish the military and political apparatus of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization.
The Centre of Research on Globalization grants permission to cross-post Global
Research articles on community internet sites as long the source and copyright are acknowledged
together with a hyperlink to the original Global Research article. For publication of Global
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[email protected]
Arms Dealers and Lobbyists Get Rich as Yemen Burns See the Top 4 U.S. contractors' profits explode, all while their
weapons have been used against civilian targets for years. •
June
25, 2019
And make no mistake: U.S. defense contractors and their lobbyists and supporters in government are getting rich in the process.
"Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International,
said
to CNBC in February. But his statement vastly understates the role that defense contractors and lobbyists play in Washington's
halls of power, where their influence on policy directly impacts their bottom lines. Since 2015, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab
Emirates have waged war against Yemen, killing and injuring thousands of Yemeni civilians. An estimated
90,000 people have been killed, according
to one international tracker.
Nearly 90
coalition airstrikes have hit
homes , schools, markets,
hospitals, and mosques since 2015, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2018, the coalition bombed a wedding, killing 22 people, including
eight children. Another strike hit a
bus , killing at
least 26 children.
American-origin munitions produced by companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics, and Raytheon were identified at
the site of over two dozen attacks throughout Yemen. Indeed, the United States is the single largest arms supplier to the Middle
East and has been for decades, according to a report by
the Congressional Research Service. From 2014 to 2018, the United States supplied 68 percent of Saudi Arabia's arms imports, 64 percent
of the UAE's imports, and 65 percent of Qatar's imports. Some of this weaponry was subsequently stolen or sold to
al-Qaeda linked groups in the Arabian Peninsula
, where they could be used against the U.S. military, according to
reports . The Saudi use of
U.S.-made jets, bombs, and missiles
against Yemeni civilian centers constitutes a war crime. It was an American laser-guided
MK-82 bomb that killed the children
on the bus; Raytheon's technology killed the 22 people attending the wedding in 2018 as well as a family traveling in their car;
and another American-made MK-82 bomb
ended the lives of at least 80 men, women, and children in a Yemeni marketplace in March 2016. Yet American defense contractors
continue to spend millions of dollars to lobby Washington to maintain the flow of arms to these countries.
"Companies like Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and other defense contractors see countries like Saudi Arabia and the UAE as huge
potential markets," Stephen Miles, director of Win Without War , told
TAC . "They see them as massive opportunities to make a lot of money; that's why they're investing billions and billions of dollars.
This is a huge revenue stream to these companies." Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics have all highlighted business with Saudi
Arabia in their shareholder reports.
"Operations and maintenance have become a very profitable niche market for U.S. corporations,"
said Richard Aboulafia, a vice president at Teal Group. He added that defense contractors can make as much as 150 percent more profit
off of operations and maintenance than from the original arms sale. U.S. weapons supply
57 percent of the military aircraft used by the Royal
Saudi Air Force, and mechanics and technicians hired by American companies repair and maintain their fighter jets and helicopters.
In 2018 alone, the United States made $4.5 billion worth of arms deals to
Saudi Arabia and $1.2
billion to the United Arab
Emirates , a report by William Hartung and Christina Arabia found.
From the report
: "Lockheed Martin was involved in deals worth $25 billion; Boeing, $7.1 billion in deals; Raytheon, $5.5 billion in deals; Northrop
Grumman had one deal worth $2.5 billion; and BAE systems had a $1.3 billion deal." "Because of the nature of U.S. arms control law,
most of these sales have to get government approval, and we've absolutely seen lobbyists weighing in heavily on this," Miles said.
"The last time I saw the numbers, the arms industry had nearly 1,000 registered lobbyists.
They're not on the Hill lobbying Congress about how many schools we should open next year. They're lobbying for defense contractors.
The past 18 years of endless wars have been incredibly lucrative for the arms industry, and they have a vested industry in seeing
these wars continue, and not curtailing the cash cow that has been for them." The defense industry
spent $125 million on lobbying
in 2018. Of that, Boeing spent
$15 million on lobbyists, Lockheed Martin spent
$13.2 million , General Dynamics
$11.9 million , and Raytheon
$4.4 million ,
according to the Lobbying
Disclosure Act website.
Writes Ben Freeman:
According to a new report firms registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act have reported receiving more than $40 million
from Saudi Arabia in 2017 and 2018. Saudi lobbyists and public relations professionals have contacted Congress, the executive
branch, media outlets and think tanks more than 4,000 times. Much of this work has been focused on ensuring that sales of U.S.
arms to Saudi Arabia continue unabated and blocking congressional actions that would end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition
in Yemen. Lobbyists, lawyers and public relations firms working for the Saudis have also reported doling out more than $4.5 million
in campaign contributions in the past two years, including at least $6,000 to Trump. In many cases, these contributions have gone
to members of Congress they've contacted regarding the Yemen war. In fact, some contributions have gone to members of Congress
on the exact same day they were contacted by Saudi lobbyists, and some were made to key members just before, and even on the day
of, important Yemen votes.
Over a dozen lobbying firms employed by defense contractors have also been working on behalf of the Saudi or Emiratis, efficiently
lobbying for both the arms buyers and sellers in one fell swoop .
One of these lobbying firms, the McKeon Group, led by former Republican congressman and chairman of the House Armed Services Committee
Howard McKeon, represents both Saudi Arabia and the American defense contractors Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Orbital ATK,
MBDA, and L3 Technologies. Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman are the biggest suppliers of arms to Saudi Arabia. In 2018, the McKeon
Group took $1,697,000 from 10 defense
contractors " to, among
other objectives, continue the flow of arms to Saudi Arabia," reports National Memo. Freeman
details multiple examples where lobbyists working on behalf of the Saudis met with a senator's staff and then made a substantial
contribution to that senator's campaign within days of a key vote to keep the United States in the Yemen war.
American Defense International (ADI) represents the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia's coalition partner in the war against
Yemen, as well as several American
defense contractors, including General Dynamics, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon, L3 Technologies, and General Atomics.
Not to be outdone by the McKeon Group, ADI's lobbyists have also aggressively pursued possible swing votes in the U.S. Senate
for the hefty sum of $45,000 a month, paid for by the
UAE . ADI lobbyists discussed
the "situation in Yemen" and the "Paveway sale to the UAE," the same bomb used in the deadly wedding strike, with the office of Senator
Martin Heinrich, a member of the Armed Services Committee, according to FARA
reports .
ADI's lobbyists also met
with Congressman Steve Scalise's legislative director to advise his office to vote against the congressional resolution on Yemen.
For their lobbying, Raytheon paid ADI
$120,000 in 2018. In addition to the
overt influence exercised by lobbyists for the defense industry, many former arms industry executives are embedded in influential
posts throughout the Trump administration: from former Airbus, Huntington Ingalls, and Raytheon lobbyist Charles Faulkner at the
State Department, who pushed Mike Pompeo
to support arms sales in the Yemen war ; to former Boeing executive and erstwhile head of the Department of Defense Patrick Shanahan;
to his interim replacement Mark Esper, secretary of the Army and another former lobbyist for Raytheon.
The war in Yemen has been good for American defense contractors' bottom lines. Since the conflict began, General Dynamics' stock
price has risen from about $135 to $169 per share, Raytheon's from about $108 to more than $180, and Boeing's from about $150 to
$360, according to In
These Times. Their analysis found that those four companies have had at least $30.1 billion in Saudi military contracts approved
by the State Department over the last 10 years. In April, President Donald Trump vetoed a resolution that would have ended American
support for the Saudi-UAE coalition war against Yemen. Such efforts have failed to meet the 60-vote veto-proof threshold needed in
the Senate. There are a few senators who didn't vote for the War Powers resolution "that will probably vote for the Raytheon sales,"
Brittany Benowitz, a lawyer and former adviser to a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told TAC. "I think you'll
continue to see horrific bombings and as the famine rages on, people will start to ask, 'Why are we a part of this war?' Unfortunately,
I don't think that will start to happen anytime soon." Barbara Boland is TAC's foreign policy and national security reporter.
Follow her on Twitter @BBatDC
Yes indeed, we are the #1 arms exporter and very proud about it. Meanwhile, Rubio, Pompeo, et. al. are also proud about how they
are finally clamping down on the nefarious arrangement that Venezuela and Cuba have to prop up their regimes.
Venezuela gives Cuba low cost oil and Cuba sends them about 25,000 doctors for free medical care to help prop up Maduro. Hmm
... sounds like one is exporting medical services in return for energy, pure, unabridged evil. Our second best export is misinformation
and lies.
I know, someone will give the State Dept line that the doctors are underpaid and the oil is below market price. The point is
that both countries export what they have more of in order to get what they need. This is the basics of any trade relationship.
Both countries are better off after the transaction and now both countries are suffering because of our benighted intervention.
I keep wondering when God is going to punish us for our appalling arrogance, pride, and our unwavering faith in our own righteousness.
God is certainly punishing me. I wish I was one of the blissfully ignorant.
The biggest business of America is war. The symptom of how all pervasive this has become is there is a new definition of defeat:
the only war that is lost, is one that ends. The new victory is now war without end.
If the Saudis have not yet routed the Houthis, I am doubt they ever will. Without invading the country and holding ground, I am
unclear of the point of constantly bombing.
The Houthis won their civil conflict, best allow them to constitute a government and deal with it.
The Saudis have invaded Yemen, but they and their mercenaries keep getting ambushed and ganked. The Yemeni tribes have a very
long and successful history of guerrilla warfare.
Admittedly, it's mostly the mercenaries, as the Saudis don't like a centralized military in particular and don't like fighting
opponents who can shoot back in general.
"Our role is not to make policy, our role is to comply with it," John Harris, CEO of defense contractor Raytheon International,
said to CNBC in February.
Yeah and Wells Fargo were just practicing "innovation" that the financial companies have told us they need to do.
The Republic is a total failure. It cares nothing for the Constitution the representatives are sworn to uphold and abide by. It's
all about the symbiosis of power in gov. and money in business. Those two factions exchange what they other needs to gain more
power and money at the expense of the taxpayers and countries abroad being destroyed. It's pretty simple if you ask 'cui bono'
and then follow the money. This time following the money may take the USA/world to thermo-nuclear war which psychos like Bolton,
Pompeo, Pence, Netanyahu, the MIC and all the other neo-cons want. Currently the war policy against Iran seems to be tied up in
Christian-Zionist eschatology to bring about the second coming of Jesus Christ. Does it get any more loony than this? Metaphysics
driving political and foreign policy is really a recipe for a disaster and may actually bring about loosing the Four Horseman
of the Apocalypse on the world, but that's OK I guess because Wash. sees the 'big picture.'
The official launch of Trump's campaign for re-election in 2020 invites us to ponder if the
Democrats are, as in 2016, going to help him win. " By seeking and blundering we learn,
" the renowned German thinker Johann Wolfgang von Goethe asserts is the recipe for progress.
It's just a pity he isn't around now to advise the Democratic Party on how to beat Trump,
because in its case the blundering hasn't stopped and the learning hasn't begun.
Putting it another way, if, as supporters of Bernie Sanders
allege , the DNC (Democratic National Committee, official governing body of the Democratic
Party) is intent on repeating its blunder of 2016, when it rigged its nomination process in
favour of Hillary Clinton's campaign, Trump's re-election is guaranteed.
This time round, not Hillary Clinton but Joe Biden is the DNC's preferred choice. And just
like Clinton before him, Biden is a product of a liberal establishment yet to wake up to the
fact that the thin gruel of political centrism belongs in the trashcan of history along with
its economic twin, neoliberalism.
'Honest Joe' is the latest in a long line of out-of-touch Democrats who believe that shadow
rather than substance is the way to the hearts of the American voting public. However, having
been fooled once by an all singing and all dancing Barack Obama, who didn't so much campaign in
poetry and govern in prose, as campaign in poetry and govern in graffiti, the same voting
public is yearning for a semblance of substance.
Joe Biden, as Obama did and as Clinton tried, claims to be on the side of the common man.
Example : "
We're going to build an economy that doesn't just reward wealth; we're going to build an
economy that rewards work. We're going to build an economy that works for everyone. "
This would be the same man who just this past week went straight from
appearing at a Poor People's Campaign forum in Washington to a Wall Street fundraising
event in New York. In attendance was a clutch of billionaires whom Biden showered in praise. "
You guys are great ," he told them, presumably while still wiping away the stench of the
poor people he just got done promising bread and roses to back in Washington.
Biden's refusal to confront the inextricable link between Wall Street billionaires and the
plight of the poor in America, and his effort to conceal this crucial link with platitudinous
guff of a type well known, is the acme of liberal ideology. It is precisely why Trump beat
Clinton in 2016 and why he will beat Biden in 2020.
When you have 40 million people living in
poverty in the richest country in the world, and a working class that has never had it so
bad under the asphyxiating pressure of neoliberalism, America needs a president who will tax
rather than court billionaires. And when you have a world struggling to breath under the weight
of US hegemony and unipolarity, responsible for creating the most dangerous period since the
Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, America and the world needs a president who will govern in the
interests of peace and stability, not conflict and chaos.
Joe Biden's record shows that he offers nothing but old wine in a new bottle. At a time when
radical transformation is needed in the land of the free, putting him in the White House would
be like placing a sticking plaster on the gangrenous wound of a society bursting at the seams
with economic and social dislocation.
Trump, who in his customary style refers to Biden as 'Sleepy Joe', will plough the same
furrow of base and crude rhetoric during his 2020 campaign that he did in 2016. It is meat to
his base, after all, predominantly made up of white working class men and women for whom Make
America Great Again (MAGA) really means 'make white people great again'.
The elephant in the room in 2020 will again be neoliberalism, an extreme variant of free
market capitalism that makes social cohesion an impossible dream and societal breakdown an
unavoidable reality. No amount of platitudes, offered up to the God of political failure, can
elide this fact either. And no candidate who isn't willing to slay this particular elephant can
credibly claim to stand for an escape from a grim past and present in pursuit of a better
future.
That America is a nation and empire in decline is not in doubt. Pulitzer Prize winning
author and journalist Chris Hedges eloquently explores and charts this decline in his 2010
article 'Do Not Pity the Democrats'.
" The menace we face does not come from the insane wing of the Republican Party but from
the institutions tasked with protecting democratic participation. Do not fear Glenn Beck or
Sarah Palin. Do not fear the Tea Party movement, the "birthers," the legions of conspiracy
theorists, or the militias. Fear the underlying corporate power structure, which no one, from
Barack Obama to the right-wing nut cases who pollute the airwaves, can alter. If the hegemony
of the corporate state is not soon broken, we will descend into a technologically enhanced age
of barbarism. "
A grim depiction of the future in 2010, I'm sure you'll agree, but one that in 2019 cannot
be gainsaid.
The battle raging between America and corporate America is a battle for the future. But it's
a strange fight this fight, in that up to now only one side, corporate America, knows who the
enemy is and what it's fighting for. The other America, meanwhile, continues to exist in a fog
of false consciousness, cultivated and sustained by a mainstream media that peddles happy talk
instead of serious analysis.
The soldiers fighting for corporate America are, with rare exception, the Republicans and
Democrats in Washington. And in a 2020 race involving Trump and Biden, each will go out of his
way to claim fealty to the primary victims of corporate America – the American people
– when the opposite is the case.
It was Charles De Gaulle who once said, " In order to be the master, the politician poses
as the servant ." In the case of a US presidential election, his words should be amended to
read: " In order serve corporate America, the politician poses as the servant of the
people ."
Joe Biden cannot win against Trump simply because Trump, unlike him, is America with its
mask of civility removed. And the liberation experienced by the removal of the mask is more
attractive than the prospect of it having to put it back on again.
The choice the American people need in 2020 is not a window or an aisle seat on a flight to
the same destination. What they need is a different flight to a whole new destination.
That destination is social and economic justice at home and multipolarity abroad.
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author
and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Joint Research Team (JIT) – etterforskningsteamet created in 2014 to investigate the
crash of Malaysian Airlines flight MH-17 over Eastern Ukraine on 17. July 2014, which resulted
in 298 deaths-announced the 19. June that the public prosecution in the Netherlands shall
criminally prosecute four persons for murder.
The four suspects – Igor Girkin, Sergeij Dubinskij, Oleg Juldasjevitsj (all three
russians) and Leonid Khartsjenko (Ukrainian citizen) – were, and are in some cases still
are, active as leaders of the Russian-supported separatism uprising in Donbass. They are now
facing international arrest orders and will be brought to justice on the 9th. March 2020. Since
the Netherlands cannot require extradiction from either Russia or Ukraine, it is likely that
the case will be brought, and that the defendants will be sentenced in absentia.
The four men, as well as the Russian government, claim that they did not at all have any
dealings with the plane crash. The Russian president Vladimir Putin reiterated Russia's
rejection of the JIT, the commission, and said during a "åpenlinje" the questioning at
the Russian TV last Friday that he was "completely disagree" with the evidence that the
commission promoted.
The Malaysian president Mahathir Mohamad condemned the charges as politically motivated:
"What the us concern, we will have evidence on skyldighet. But so far there is no evidence.
Just rumors."
The shooting down of the plane happened at the height of the crisis in Ukraine and civil war
in 2014, triggered by the united STATES - and Germany-supported the coup in Kiev in 2014, which
was led by fasciststyrker and parts of the Ukrainian oligarchat, in close collaboration with
Washington and Berlin. The Ukrainian and the us government, the EUROPEAN union and the
international bourgeois media rushed to accuse Russia for the shooting down of the plane, even
before any alleged evidence was presented. It was utilized as a new variant of "Gulf of
Tonkin", a vague and dubious military event that imperialistmaktene could use as a pretext for
war.
The MH-17 case has been out of limelight in recent years. The military structure toward
Russia, led by the united STATES and NATO, and the U.S.-led economic warfare against the
country, however, has accelerated.
The announcement last week about the criminal persecution came at the same time with an
escalation of both the Trump administration's krigsforberedelser against Iran, which could
trigger a direct conflict with Russia, and The democratic party's ongoing campaign against
Trump, focusing on his allegedly "soft" attitude to Russia. It also comes at the same time with
the growing conflicts between the united STATES and the european imperialistmaktene, especially
Germany, among others, of Russian gassforsyninger to Germany through the pipeline
NordStream2.
The western bourgeois press jumped on the announcement and produced a flood of comments,
which the New York Times' redaksjonsråd suggested that flystyrten was not less than
"state-sponsored murder". International media such as Der Spiegel essentially presented JIT's
announcement and "discovery" for its readers as facts.
The Washington Post wrote that the "international investigators" had "worked diligently to
uncover the truth" and "peel away Russia's lies about the downed Malaysian Airlines plane". The
newspaper rejected without further evidence presented by the Russian federation for a possible
Ukrainian involvement as "false".
In fact, JIT's announcement of the criminal prosecution of these four men is based on
ancient discoveries that have no credibility. JIT investigation are significantly biased and
part of a massive campaign to exploit the 298 men's tragic death in order to escalate the
antiRussland krigsforberedelser. After almost five years with this "investigation" has not been
presented any evidence of Russian state involvement, and significant evidence which points to a
potential Ukrainian involvement has been deliberately suppressed.
JITs "findings" that claim that a Russian SA-11 BUK-missile system allegedly was carried by
the Russian army to russiskstøttede østukrainske the separatists were
continuously referred to as "evidence" of Russian involvement.
An engraver report by journalist Robert Parry in 2016 pointed to several holes and
contradictions in this version. The other piece of "evidence" is barely audible phone calls,
supposedly avlytninger of the Russian military sources, which should indicate that the SA-11
BUK-missilsystemet was deliberately delivered to the separatists. These calls refers, however,
not at any point explicitly to the missle system or to transport across the Russian-Ukrainian
border.
The fact that not only Russian but also American and Dutch intelligence has found evidence
suggesting Ukrainian involvement, is entirely omitted from the official press coverage.
In October 2015 raised the Dutch intelligence service MIVD that the only
high-energy-antifly-missilsystemene in Eastern Ukraine could have shot down MH-17, where it was
flying at 33 000 feet altitude belonged to the Ukrainian military.
An anonymous u.s. intelligence analyst explained in 2015 that "finally, the analysis pointed
at a non-authorized Ukrainian operation, which involved a pro-regime oligarch. "Malaysian news
media reported as early as in august 2014 that the official representative for American
intelligence assumed that the aircraft had been shot down by a Ukrainian fighter jet. Official
Russian militærrepresentanter has also released radar data that seemed to show a
Ukrainian jetfighter of the type Sukhoi-25 behind the passasjerflyet MH 17 at the time it was
shot down.
JIT-etterforskningens primary goal has been to suppress and divert attention from any
evidence that suggests the Ukrainian rather than the Russian involvement. Not a single report
produced by the commission in the last five years have once tried to avsanne the evidence
pointing to the Ukrainian military involvement in the nedskyvningen of the aircraft. They were
simply ignored.
This is no coincidence. Contrary to the way it is presented by the media, JIT is not an
independent body of "international investigators". It includes representatives of the Dutch,
belgian, malaysian and Ukrainian government and the secret services. From the very beginning,
the Russian government has been excluded from participating in the investigations.
Although Ukraine itself should have been considered as a suspected part in any serious
investigation, not only the cooperation JIT with Kiev, but operated under an agreement that
made it possible for the Ukrainian government to veto the release of information. There could
hardly have been a more obvious case of disqualification.
The Ukrainian secret service (SBU), who was heavily involved in both the
imperialiststøttede fascistkuppet in Kiev in February 2014, and in subsequent operations
of the ytrehøyrekrefter in the civil war, was Ukraine's official representative in the
JIT. The SBU massively influenced the investigation.
An internal JIT report from 2016, said: "Since the first week in september 2014 has
investigators from the Netherlands and Australia worked here [in Kiev]. They work here in close
cooperation with Ukraine's security service (SBU). Immediately after the crash, the SBU gave
access to a large number of tapped phone calls and other data. ... While at first it was rather
formal, cooperation with the SBU has become more and more flexible. 'Particularly because of
the data analysis we were able to prove our added value,' says [the Dutch politirepresentaten]
Gert Van Doorn. 'Since then, we see in every way that they associate with us in an open way.
They share their questions with us, and think with, as much as they can.'"
It was, incidentally, also SBU who provided the avlyttede the phone calls and other
materials that are now being universally referred to as "evidence" for a Russian
involvement.
Despite these obvious contradictions and violations of the legitimate
etterforskningsprosedyre, presented JITs "findings" and the actions that are credible,
definitive "proof" for the "Russian guilt". This witness again to what lengths bourgeois media
and western imperialister is prepared to go, in their criminal and dangerous campaign against
Russia – a ruthless campaign that could trigger a war between the world's two largest
atomvåpenmakter.
"... Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. ..."
On September 21, The Guardian ran an absolutely sensational exclusive, based on disclosures made by "multiple" anonymous sources
to Luke Harding, one of the paper's leading journalists - in 2017, Russian diplomats allegedly held secret talks in London with associates
of Assange, in an attempt to assist in the Wikileaks founder's escape from the UK.
The dastardly conspiracy would've entailed Assange being smuggled out of the Ecuadorian embassy in Knightsbridge under cover
of Christmas Eve in a diplomatic vehicle and transported to Russia, where he'd be safe from extradition to the US, ending his eight-years
of effective arbitrary detention in the process.
In any event, the audacious plot was eventually aborted after being deemed "too
risky" -- even for the reckless daredevils of Moscow -- mere days before its planned execution date.
Rommy Vallejo, head of Ecuador's
intelligence agency, is said to have travelled to the UK around December 15 to supervise the operation, and left when it was called
off.
'Extraordinary, Deliberate Lies'
The Russian Embassy in London
was quick to condemn the
article on Twitter, calling the claims "another example of disinformation and fake news" in the UK mainstream media, and noting the
paper violated national media standards by failing to ask the Russian side for a comment prior to the report's release. "This publication
has nothing to do with the reality. The Embassy has never engaged with Ecuadorian colleagues, or with anyone else, in discussions
of any kind on Russia's participation in ending Assange's stay within the diplomatic mission of Ecuador.
We're puzzled by the sensational
attitude of the authors. As recently as September 18, Culture Secretary Jeremy Wright called for increased efforts to combat media
and online disinformation. [The] Guardian piece is a brilliant example of the kind of journalism British reader should be protected
from," a spokesperson added in an official statement.
In a subsequent statement
, the Russian Foreign Ministry slammed the article for containing a "whole series of similar anti-Russia innuendos, and once again
made clear Russian diplomats did not contact staff of the Ecuadoran Embassy in London or Assange's associates in order to assist
in his escape from the UK.
However,
a
far more damning indictment of the article's extraordinary, evidence-free claims was provided by Craig Murray, former UK Ambassador
to Uzbekistan, who denounced the "quite extraordinary set of deliberate lies" in a September 23 blog post. In doing so, he revealed
he and Fidel Narvaez -- a close confidant of Assange fingered as the key point of contact between the Ecuadorian embassy and Moscow
in the article -- had engaged in discussions with Assange in 2017 regarding a possible departure from the UK capital, and debated
possible future destinations for the embattled Wikileaks founder.
"It's not only the case Russia didn't figure in those plans, Julian directly ruled out the possibility of going to Russia. I know
100% for certain the entire story is a complete and utter fabrication. I cannot find words enough to express the depth of my contempt
for Harding and [Editor] Katherine Viner, who've betrayed completely the values of journalism. The aim of the piece is evidently
to add a further layer to the fake news of Wikileaks' non-existent relationship to Russia as part of the "Hillary didn't really lose"
narrative. I am, frankly, rather shocked," Murray
wrote
.
Friends in Spooky Places
The identities of Harding's alleged anonymous sources aren't even hinted at in the article, but Murray made a striking suggestion
-- he "strongly suspect[ed]" that "MI6 tool" Harding's informants were the UK security services. If true, this would make the article
"entirely black propaganda" produced by British spies. Whether MI6 agents are the source of the story or not, it's certainly true
Harding enjoys a very close relationship indeed with British intelligence services -- a bond he has frequently, openly and proudly
advertised in articles and books.
For instance, in his highly controversial 2017 book Collusion, Harding argued Donald Trump
had a relationship with the Russian 'deep state' dating back to the 1980s, and colluded with the Kremlin to subvert US democracy.
To support this conclusion, he frequently cited claims fed to him directly by Christopher Steele, the ex-MI6 spy turned 'business
intelligence' professional, who authored the utterly discredited 'Trump-Russia' dossier for Fusion GPS.
When challenged to provide any evidence whatsoever for his book's assertions by Aaron Mate of The Real News, Harding was left mumbling
and stuttering -- he was also unable to defend
his claim that an individual's use of an emoji was proof they were working for Russian intelligence, and terminated the interview
prematurely.
Harding's avowed contact with Steele may also have contributed to another high profile blunder in April this year. In the immediate
wake of the apparent poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, UK, the UK government
issued a D(SMA) notice , blocking mention of Pablo
Miller -- Skripal's MI6 recruiter -- in the media. Individuals who conducted internet searches for Miller afterwards quickly found
his LinkedIn profile, which identified him as a 'Senior Analyst' at Orbis Intelligence -- Steele's corporate espionage company.-
It is true, or was. As I say, this 2017 forum thread, which links to Pablo Miller's LinkedIn profile, states Orbis is listed on
Miller's CV -- https://t.co/Fx0vu1qorJ . Stop regurgitating anonymous claims
by your spook pals and do some research, Luke -- Kit Klarenberg (@KitKlarenberg)
March 12, 2018
Miller's page was quickly deleted though, and Harding took to Twitter to issue firm denials of a connection between Miller and the
firm, going so far as to suggest "someone" was using search engine optimization techniques to dishonestly associate Miller and Orbis.
However, enterprising Sputnik journalist Kit Klarenberg quickly and easily found an online forum thread dating from 2017 clearly
identifying Miller as an Orbis employee -- as of September, Harding is yet to respond, or retract his claims.
If we consider economics to be an objective science, its rules should also have universal
significance and use, despite differences in societal order. However, socialists of the materialist
camp are committed to the idea that common ownership of the means of production would change the
way economic laws unfold under socialism.
Basically, they reject the notion of the
universality and objectivity of economic rules by suggesting that the laws would change along with
a change to the social formation.
Thus,
communists adhered to the Marxian idea that socialism would rectify a "surplus
value" law, end the "exploitation" of workers, and efficiently regulate the production,
distribution, and consumption aspects of the economy.
They sought to eliminate the market
regulatory mechanism and replace it with directives of the central planning authority. Bolsheviks
enthusiastically got down to business: they eradicated private property, collectivized everything
and everyone, and implemented an official planned economy.
Did it effectively turn off market relations as they thought it would?
No. In contrast to the common perception, socialism has been unable to kill the market economy.
The market went underground and turned into a black market. Black markets existed in capitalist
countries as well, but they worked underground because they dealt in illegal commodities and
services. The black market under socialism served the same purpose, but the list of commodities and
services included mostly items of everyday and innocent consumption that people under capitalism
could easily purchase in stores. Virtually all groups of personal consumption products found their
way to the black market at some time and in some places. Everything from jar lids to toilet paper
was subject to black-market relations.
Despite the proclaimed planned economy, people were engaged in market relations on all levels
and trusted more the price of the goods and services that were established by the market and not
dictated by the government. The official exchange rate of the ruble to the dollar was 0.66 to 1 in
1980. But nobody except party nomenclature was able to enjoy such a favorable exchange rate. At the
same time, the black market offered 4 rubles for 1 American dollar.
There was no production of jeans in the Soviet Union, but like all their peers abroad,
Soviet youth wore jeans.
The price was 180–250 rubles for a pair depending on the brand,
which was almost twice as much as the monthly wage of an entry-level engineer. A visiting nurse
charged 1 ruble for one injection if a patient lived below the fifth floor. The price reached 1.5
rubles for patients who lived on the fifth floor and up. A plumber happily repaired a faucet for
just a bottle of vodka.
Two Prices for Everything
Therefore, in the Soviet Union, any significant goods had two price tags: one real and
another virtual.
The state set the first price through some obscure methods; the usual
mechanism of supply and demand established the second price on the market. If you were lucky, after
several hours of standing in a queue, you could purchase goods at the state price. However, due to
the chronic lack of everything for everyone, the same product could be bought on the black market
at a much higher price. The virtual price became real on the black market and reflected the actual
value of the goods for the buyer. The presence of two price tags is a confirmation of the thesis of
Ludwig von Mises regarding the impossibility of economic calculations under socialism. At the same
time, this is proof of the immortality and immutability of the economic laws of the free market,
even under a totalitarian regime.
Therefore, two economic systems and two sets of prices
co-exist under socialism.
People were forced to use the services of the black market,
even under the penalty of
severe punishment, including up to the death penalty.
Almost the entire society was
engaged in various corruption schemes to support a certain standard of living. There was a
paradoxical situation when the shelves of the supermarkets were empty, but refrigerators at home
were more or less full. The black market was filled with smuggled goods from abroad, as well as
commodities produced in underground workshops. But more often, everyday products were specifically
kept from retail to create a shortage and sell them on the black market at a speculative price.
Socialism had undermined the normal flows of production, distribution, and consumption by ignoring
the objective laws of economics. Nevertheless, an underground market and the intrinsic
entrepreneurial spirit of the people helped them survive the socialist madness.
Regardless of the proclaimed successes of the Soviet economy reported by Communist party
leaders, the socialist economy was unable to compete with its capitalist counterparts.
Communists decided to create a system that somehow mimicked the work that a free market had
successfully and automatically performed for centuries. Thus, they introduced socialist competition
that was supposed to replace free market competition. Surely enough, it was an inadequate and
unfortunate replacement.
The rewards for winners in the capitalist competition were far
higher than for the winners under socialism.
For example, the capitalist winner enjoyed a
significant increase in well-being.
Moreover, the principal winner of the free market competition was society as a whole. This is a
natural feature of a free market economy and the main reason why the evolution of human societies
selected this mode of production. A competition during socialism gave to the winners some
publicity, a certificate of honor, maybe a trip to a "sanatorium" (that is, a health spa), and
other bagatelles that people usually did not appreciate. But most importantly, society as a whole
did not enjoy a significant improvement in well-being.
People were not sufficiently stimulated and were underpaid, which explained the lower labor
productivity compared to capitalist countries. Moreover, this is despite the notion that the means
of production, at last, belong to the workers themselves. People had a famous saying that can be
considered the quintessence of Soviet-style socialism:
"They [the government] pretend
to pay, and we pretend to work."
Socialism is a set of systems that try to
artificially inhibit the free flow of
objective economic laws by creating subjective barriers in the form of specific legislation and
punitive policies
. Socialists mistakenly think that if they assault private property and
market relations, the economic laws will also change. They have taken up the task which, in
principle, has no rational solution. Nothing good comes from the idea of ignoring or violating the
fundamental laws of economics. These laws still exist, regardless of opinions and neglect to
recognize their real character and the impossibility of changing them.
Socialism disrupts the evolutionary process and leads society to a dead end.
The desperate economic situation of ordinary folks in
Venezuela
,
Cuba
,
and North Korea -- the remnants of socialist undertakings -- is a direct result of building a society
in defiance of the natural action of the fundamental law of economics. As a rule, socialist regimes
were buying time by employing slave labor, plunder, coercion, and everything else that an
aggressive totalitarian regime could offer. However, in the end, the means of socialistic life
support was exhausted, and than returning to the natural and healthy market relations, where the
laws of economics work for the benefit of the human race.
The same laws of market economics have worked in different human societies: from pre-historic to
post-industrial, but
still socialists continue to entertain the idea of tampering with
these forces of nature.
The evidence that Israel produces nuclear weapons was revealed more than thirty years ago by
Mordechai Vanunu , who had worked in the Dimona plant: published by The Sunday Times on October
5, 1986, after being screened by leading nuclear weapons experts. Vanunu, kidnapped by the
Mossad in Rome and transported to Israel, was sentenced to 18 years of hard jail time and,
after being released in 2004, subject to severe restrictions.
Israel has today (though without admitting it) an arsenal estimated at 100-400 nuclear
weapons, including new generation mini-nukes and neutron bombs, and produces plutonium and
tritium in such quantities as to build hundreds more.
The Israeli nuclear warheads are ready to launch on ballistic missiles, such as the Jericho
3, and on F-15 and F-16 fighter bombers supplied by the USA, to which the F-35 are now
added.
As confirmed by the numerous IAEA inspections, Iran has no nuclear weapons and commits not
to produce them, according to the agreement under strict international control.
However – writes former US Secretary of State Colin Powell on March 3, 2015 in an
email that has come to light –
"the boys in Tehran know Israel has 200 nuclear weapons, all targeted on Tehran, and we
have thousands".
The US European allies, which formally continue to support the agreement with Iran, are
basically aligned with Israel. Germany supplied Israel with six Dolphin submarines, modified so
as to launch nuclear cruise missiles, and approved the supply of three more.
Germany, France, Italy, Greece and Poland participated, with the USA, in the Blue Flag 2017,
the largest international aerial warfare exercise in Israel's history. Italy, linked to Israel
by a military cooperation agreement (Law No. 94, 2005), participated in the exercise with
Tornado fighters of the 6th Wing of Ghedi, assigned to carry US B-61 nuclear bombs (which will
soon be replaced by B61-12). The US participated with F-16 fighters of the 31st Fighter Wing of
Aviano, assigned to the same function.
The Israeli nuclear forces are integrated into the NATO electronic system, within the
framework of the "Individual Cooperation Program" with Israel, a country which, although not a
member of the Alliance, has a permanent mission to NATO headquarters in Brussels.
According to the plan tested in the US-Israel Juniper Cobra 2018 exercise, US and NATO
forces would come from Europe (especially from the bases in Italy) to support Israel in a war
against Iran. It could start with an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, like the one
carried out in 1981 on Osiraq nuclear reactor in Iraq. In the event of Iranian retaliation,
Israel could use a nuclear weapon by starting a chain reaction with unpredictable outcomes.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/Rh6OBut_bHk
Source: PandoraTV
*
This article was originally published by Il Manifesto.
Manlio Dinucci is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on
Globalization.
@ jayc 57 US Hook says Iran knew what getting into when struck deal
Yes they did, and now they regret it.
In 2013 Ali Khamenei said: "Certainly, we are pessimistic about the Americans. We do not
trust them. We consider the government of the United States of America as an unreliable,
arrogant, illogical, and trespassing government,"
The JCPOA was not a unilateral deal between USA and Iran, it was a multilateral
deal
That's correct de jure, but not de facto. The US all by itself is leading the current
attack on Iran, despite what the other members might think. Iran has not gotten any
significant support from other JCPOA participants.
Posted by: Don Bacon | Jun 24, 2019 5:10:10 PM |
66
The Trump administration's special envoy for Iran, Brian Hook...
______________________________________
Brian Hook is a "special" envoy in the sense that the "Special Olympics" are
special.
"... It is utterly bizarre to hear people who believe Trump is unfit to lead seem disappointed that he isn't taking us to war. ..."
"... This is a crisis of his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it. ..."
"... The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will change his mind after about the same amount of reflection. ..."
"... Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock and load" the American military in the future. For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk" advisors are getting closer and closer to hitting pay dirt. By the way, who are his "dove" advisors? ..."
"... If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his 10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching Tucker. ..."
"... Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine - first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he hears on Fox News to start it all over again. ..."
"... "It does not require Nostradamus-like skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop routine Trump appears to be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster." ..."
"... the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the Constitution. ..."
"... And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con. ..."
No matter how laudable averting war is, the fact is that we would have never been in this
situation if Trump had not unilaterally abandoned the Iran deal. This is a crisis of his
own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it.
The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is
quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will
change his mind after about the same amount of reflection.
I don't know. Maybe a wise president would not have appointed Bolton and Pompeo in the first
place. Nor would a wise president have had a $130 million drone flying over Iranian air space
(or right on its border).
Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets
enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock
and load" the American military in the future. For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk"
advisors are getting closer and closer to hitting pay dirt. By the way, who are his "dove"
advisors?
Please, he didn't even know about projected casualties until ten minutes before the attack
was to be launched, no doubt because he's too lazy smart to attend planning
meetings/briefings.
If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his
10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching Tucker.
Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine
- first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he
hears on Fox News to start it all over again.
But just because on this pass he happened to randomly bounce off of a "good" bumper, we're
supposed to congratulate him for finally "becoming President". The only thing bizarre here is
the contortions his supporters put themselves through to try to deny what is obvious to
everyone else.
If I go to my neighbors front yard with a gun, point it at their house, then don't shoot, I
am not practicing restraint. I should be arrested for brandishing a firearm. This article is
crop.
Lighten up, folks. Obviously, Antle's headline, "The Night Donald Trump Became President," is
a play on the same words that a lot of talking heads (not just unreconstructed
neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, but "mainstream" centrists like Fareed Zakaria) used when
Trump bombed Syria for the first time.
He's being facetious, not serious. He isn't praising Trump or his "B-Team" for their
restraint (on the contrary, they have created a crisis for no good reason and have brought us
to the brink of war as a result) so much as he's criticizing the media for its
warmongering.
The media is actually trying to bait the President into a unilateral act of war against
another country that hasn't attacked us and couldn't threaten us even if it did.
"It does not require Nostradamus-like skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop
routine Trump appears to be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster."
At this point, I am almost afraid to check the latest news-with tapeworm Bolton, it is a
matter of time before the situation blows up.
Re: "If Trump continues to break with this pattern, however, it will be less celebrated
in Washington than it would deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper
place would be a truly presidential act."
However, note that Trump refuses to concede any Imperial authority to wage war that
illegally violates the Constitution. He just chose not to start a war with Iran - this time.
(And also note that the Pentagon is always happy to oblige the Imperial President and kill
and destroy without question.)
So the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial
President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and
Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the
illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the
Constitution.
And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in
to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con.
"... This is a crisis of his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it. ..."
"... The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will change his mind after about the same amount of reflection. ..."
"... "If Trump continues to break with this pattern, however, it will be less celebrated in Washington than it would deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper place would be a truly presidential act." ..."
...This Administration's handling of Iran, as compared to the last, is anything but stupid.
Unless, of course, you're of the opinion we should be going to war, and you're pissed that
this President made the right decision at the right time. Nice try, because thinking the
way you are is stupid.
No matter how laudable averting war is, the fact is that we would have never been in this
situation if Trump had not unilaterally abandoned the Iran deal. This is a crisis of
his own making and he should get kudos for not making it any worse, but that's it.
The author seems to think this was some kind of well-considered decision, while Trump
is quoted as saying he "thought about it for a second". He could, and almost certainly will
change his mind after about the same amount of reflection.
I don't know. Maybe a wise president would not have appointed Bolton and Pompeo in the
first place. Nor would a wise president have had a $130 million drone flying over Iranian
air space (or right on its border).
Yes, Iran dodged a bullet in this instance. So did our country. Maybe if Trump gets
enough positive reinforcement from his last-second audible, he'll be less inclined to "cock
and load" the American military in the future.
For my part, I'm starting to think his "hawk" advisors are getting closer and closer to
hitting pay dirt.
Well, this article vanquished my very recent admiration for Michael Brendan Dougherty,
acquired by way of Mr. Dreher.
"articulates a classical Augustinian just war argument ..."
That's like claiming Mrs O'Leary's cow that kicked over the lantern and burned Chicago
to the ground was articulating the finer points of preventing forest fires originated by
Smokey the Bear.
Do the writers here do a little physical stretching before contorting yourselves into
pretzel shapes trying to justify every lantern Trump kicks over into poles of dry hay as he
goes along?
Of course conservative Christians hate pulling back from imminent, and possibly nuclear
war. When haven't they in American history?
Please, he didn't even know about projected casualties until ten minutes before the attack
was to be launched, no doubt because he's too lazy smart to attend planning
meetings/briefings.
If anyone believes the reason Trump gave for calling off the strike, I refer them to his
10,000+ lies since he's been in office. My guess is he changed his mind watching
Tucker.
Trump staggers through his presidency like a pinball bouncing its way through the machine -
first this side, then that side, then being flipped back up to the top by a comment he
hears on Fox News to start it all over again. But just because on this pass he happened to
randomly bounce off of a "good" bumper, we're supposed to congratulate him for finally
"becoming President". The only thing bizarre here is the contortions his supporters put
themselves through to try to deny what is obvious to everyone else.
If I go to my neighbors front yard with a gun, point it at their house, then don't shoot, I
am not practicing restraint. I should be arrested for brandishing a firearm. This article
is crop.
Lighten up, folks. Obviously, Antle's headline, "The Night Donald Trump Became President,"
is a play on the same words that a lot of talking heads (not just unreconstructed
neoconservatives like Bill Kristol, but "mainstream" centrists like Fareed Zakaria) used
when Trump bombed Syria for the first time. He's being facetious, not serious. He isn't
praising Trump or his "B-Team" for their restraint (on the contrary, they have created a
crisis for no good reason and have brought us to the brink of war as a result) so much as
he's criticizing the media for its warmongering. The media is actually trying to bait the
President into a unilateral act of war against another country that hasn't attacked us and
couldn't threaten us even if it did.
"It does not require Nostradamus-like
skills to anticipate how the good cop, bad cop routine Trump appears to
be trying with Bolton in particular could end in disaster."
At this point, I am almost afraid to check the latest news-with tapeworm bolton, it is a
matter of time before the situation blows up.
Re: "If Trump continues to break with this
pattern, however, it will be less celebrated in Washington than it would
deserve to be. Putting the unelected hawks in their proper place would
be a truly presidential act."
However, note that Trump refuses to concede any Imperial authority to wage war that
illegally violates the Constitution. He just chose not to start a war with Iran - this
time. (And also note that the Pentagon is always happy to oblige the Imperial President and
kill and destroy without question.)
So the entire U.S. foreign policy architecture remains hyper-busted. I.e., An Imperial
President, a feckless Congress that has abrogated its constitutional responsibilities, and
Pentagon Brass who think that they swore an oath to be mindless automatons obeying the
illegal orders of the Imperial President rather than being defenders of the
Constitution.
And Tucker Carlson aside, the MSM, sycophantic lapdog of the Pentagon, is still all in
to the illegal and unconstitutional Warfare State con.
This type of article is the reason I read The American Conservative. Thank you for
addressing this important issue from a cautious and realistic perspective.
Although Donald Trump and I are on opposite sides of the fence on nearly every issue, I
do prefer his restrained foreign policy instincts to the hawkish ones of Hillary
Clinton.
Goodness you people and your Nobel prize obsession. The last guy got one he didn't deserve
so I should get one too. Whether the decision was presidential or not is hinged on motive
in my view.
If it was an assessment that if our drone did in fly over US airspace, then it
represented a legitimate target for Iran - then certainly critical thinking as expressed
has some merit to sound management.
If the matter was decided on the messiness of conflict and calculating one's political
carreer, the level of sound management is simply not a factor.
THIS is what white supremacy looks like: Punish Iran because one day in the far off future
they may develop an atomic bomb but gift Israel $3 billion a year while it harbors hundreds
of nukes. Meanwhile, pat head choppers like Saudi Arabia on the head -- As long as they
buys billions in US weapons and force nations to use US dollars to buy oil.
Do you realize that Iran is an Aryan nation, which would make them white? Israel is a
Jewish nation, which most white supremacists hate. And Saudi Arabia is an Arab country,
which would not make it a white country.
So how in the world is this what white supremacy looks like?
It is interesting to listen to this speech again in view of Iran crisis, attempt to launch a
regime change in Venezuela and trade war with Chins lunched by Trump.
Notable quotes:
"... McCain and some other Western officials could barely contain themselves in there. They never forgive Putin for that speech. This was the decisive moment relations between the US. and Russia started to deteriorate. ..."
"... The Wikileaks cables showed how aggressively NATO was working to bring in Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance despite what was being said in public during that time. ..."
"... Look at the dirty bitch Victoria Nuland smirking at 11:43 . She knew what the US was about to do in Ukraine. ..."
"... this was the best anti NWO speech ever. The moment I saw it back then I knew Russia will have many problems coming for the NWO scum. You know what happened right? ..."
On February 10, 2007, Vladimir Putin delivered his keynote speech at the Munich Security
Conference, challenging the post-Cold War establishment. RT looks back a decade to see how
accurate his ideas were.
McCain and some other Western officials could barely contain themselves in there. They
never forgive Putin for that speech. This was the decisive moment relations between the US.
and Russia started to deteriorate.
The Wikileaks cables showed how aggressively NATO was working to bring in Georgia and
Ukraine into the alliance despite what was being said in public during that time.
'The Putin Interviews', where Putin is interviewed by Oliver Stone from 2015 - 2017,
brought me here. This iconic speech was referred to by Oliver Stone in the interviews. The
speech was certainly worth watching and I highly recommend watching 'The Putin Interviews'.
You won't regret it.
I'm not Russian but he is my hero, my President and my dad!!! ^_^ And proud of him. This
memorable speech was one of my favorites! He stood for what he believes in and he stayed true
to it.
Hahahahahahahahaha! You can see the Western leaders here were in a state of profound SHOCK
as they listened to this speech. They thought he was going to kow-tow to the West - and he
did the EXACT OPPOSITE! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
ment-renderer-text-content expanded"> wow awesome speech. words from a outstanding
leader. Acting and standing for true Peace and prosperity. Unlike the UN and NWO whos only
goal is to continue to create terrorism. create fear and drain any communities from being
independent and free from there False saftey taxes and sanctions. not using the world
currency exchange means there unable to falsely influence the world markets
American people should be highly alarmed
at NATO actions , they are inching closer to Russia's borders trying to encircle Russia with
military bases and missiles , this is done in preparation of an attack of the country being
encircled, nato is lying and misleading its citizens and they dont worry about consequence
of such a scenario which surely would trigger the third world war, American people and all nato member citizens should strongly push back against this , we need to consider the outcome
of a nuclear power attacking and invading another nuclear power
Russia would surely use
nuclear weapons to defend its country if overwhelmed, millions could perish in a day, we
have to condemn and protest Nato plans for another world war before its too late, it will be
our families suffering and dying not the elite that is pushing this conflict
Great speech from a great man, a man who truly loves fairness and democracy not the sugar
coated type offered by the west. Did anyone notice that by 9:50 into his speech, a good
number of them wanted out? McCain at some point couldn't even bring himself to look at Putin,
What a pitiful fellow McCain is!!!!!
This speech needs to be re-posted . and disseminated .. it is very very current , more than
ever... there is a section of world who simply do not know .
10 years passed and what Putin said back then is exactly what's happened and is
still happening. I have great respect for Russia and I have no respect for US and their
allies. Whole NATO sucks, is obsolete and is acting exactly like world's terrorists!
I have no respect for the majority of the American people as they are as responsible for the wars their corrupt capitalism
controlled US government has done. American people went along with it for all these decades and they fought these wars for
them anyway, they did not care if they bully other nations, kill innocent people...
this was the best anti NWO speech ever. The moment I saw it back then I knew Russia will
have many problems coming for the NWO scum. You know what happened right?
"... Pompeo is a rapture supremacist warmonger that is not good for anything. ..."
"... Not a fan of Pompeo, nor of any Secy of State that champions the cause of military adventurism instead of negotiations. We've had far too many Secys of State who have beat the drums of war instead of doing what the job entails.....being the nation's chief diplomatic negotiator. Pompeo is a bigger (chicken) hawk than the Secy of Defense for crying out loud. ..."
Furthermore, Hu had some particularly harsh words for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, labeling the Secretary of State a "troublesome"
figure in US-China relations and insisting that Pompeo "can no longer play the role of a top US diplomat between the two countries."
... ... ...
Beijing's attacks on the secretary of state come as Pompeo wrapped up a string of meetings in the Middle East with King Salman
of Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince.
Not a fan of Pompeo, nor of any Secy of State that champions the cause of military adventurism instead of negotiations. We've
had far too many Secys of State who have beat the drums of war instead of doing what the job entails.....being the nation's chief
diplomatic negotiator. Pompeo is a bigger (chicken) hawk than the Secy of Defense for crying out loud.
Regarding the JIT indictments, the JIT has dropped all pretense of
objectivity, which isn't surprising since it was a criminal co-conspiracy
from its inception. They have now revealed themselves as nothing but
a hit squad and lynch mob for the real perpetrators. Russia should
be building a case for a criminal referral of the JIT to the ICC.
It has a pretty solid case since the JIT investigation has devolved into
an obscene travesty involving reams of incriminating actions by the JIT,
which has willfully smothered all the hard, factual, scientific evidence
and fraudulently promoted all the fake, phony fabrications of the high perps.
Charging the JIT with collusion in mass murder may be a reach, but the indictments
of Strelkov et alia is so off the wall and batshit insane there surely must be
grounds for prosecutorial misconduct.
I agree the JIT has become a fraudulent enterprise. To publicly announce indictments while
simultaneously pleading for witnesses to step forward to help confirm the theory on which the
indictments are based - that is not a judicial procedure as commonly understood. The JIT has
taken like OPCW - a public relations arm of NATO concerned solely with filtering biased
information to western publics.
"... The Supreme Court Treason related to the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire. ..."
"The UNSC veto doesn't make the UN Charter null and void. Actions that violate it are
still illegal/unconstitutional and able to be challenged in domestic courts". I agree it does
not make the charter null and void, the question is how can aggressors be brought to book,
Tony Blair was accused of the crime of aggression but the Judges said he could not be
prosecuted see below. Thanks for the link to the Uniting for Peace resolution, I will read it
tomorrow.
"Tony Blair should not face prosecution for his role in the 2003 Iraq war, the high court has
ruled.
The lord chief justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, and another senior judge, Mr Justice
Ouseley, said on Monday that there was no crime of aggression in English law under which the
former prime minister could be charged.
Thanks for your reply! I recall what an absolutely incensed Craig Murray wrote about that decision about Tony Blair--well
beyond a travesty as it's a Capital Crime and not subject to statutes of limitation. The Supreme Court Treason related to
the 2000 election penned by the late Vincent T. Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the
Constitution and Chose Our President, and his The Prosecution of George W. Bush for Murder, provoke similar ire.
Going on 3 decades now, one of my primary questions is How to contain the Outlaw US Empire and make it into a law-abiding
nation without blowing up the world. I've always recognized that it would take a global coalition to arrive at a genuine
confrontation.
IMO, we're very close to that point; the G-20 will indicate just how close.
But even more importantly than the global coalition is the requirement for a political force within the Empire asking and
acting on my question. The Maximum Pressure must come from internal and external sources for any positive outcome to be
achieved. Since 2012, I've seen 2020 as THE inflection point. It seems I'm not alone.
So easy to say when you so blithely ignore the historical injustices, the inequality of
opportunity and the theft - the first person to claim a parcel of land as their own exclusive
property was committing an act of theft.
It's not entrepreneurial; it's base rent-seeking and
it was a violent act of forced approbriation by denying natural rights to others.
The
subsequent claims to title are enforced by the threat of violence through the emergence of a
pervasive state.
A modern example is the oligarchs who carved up the commons in a collapsing and
disintegrating Soviet Union. Their's was an act of theft committed against society and the
common good. Your definition of freedom is predicated on theft and is a denial of natural
freedoms,
The idiots in DC are literally talking about nuclear war with Russia right now in a defense
spending/policy hearing on CSPAN. Sickening. I'm not sure why I even turned on the TV.
The
"premise" is that Russia launches a "tactical" low yield weapon, and the consensus is that
we would not "measure" it and respond in kind, but start an all out nuclear war.
Everyone knows that actual discussions regarding policy are done in closed door
meetings (and several reps have referred to this happening at a later time).
So are we at that point in Idiocracy, where we believe our propaganda has some effect on
our enemy? Is it 1950? FFS
Tens of thousands of Venezuelans
have reportedly already died as a result of this administration's relentless assault on
their economy; those human beings are no less dead than they would have been if the US had
killed them by dropping cluster bombs on Caracas. Yet these deaths have received virtually no
mainstream media coverage, and Americans, while they
strongly oppose attacking Iran militarily , have had very little to say about Trump's
attacks on the nation's economy. The economy which people use to feed their children, to care
for their elderly and their sick.
I'm titling this essay "Starvation Sanctions Are Worse Than Overt Warfare", and I mean it. I
am not saying that starvation sanctions are more destructive or deadly than overt military
force in and of themselves; what I am saying is that the overall effect is worse, because
there's no public accountability for them and because they deliberately target civilians.
If the US were to launch a barrage of Tomahawk missiles into an Iranian suburb with the goal
of killing civilians, there'd be international outrage and the cohesion of the US-centralized
power alliance would take a major hit. Virtually everyone would recognize this as an
unforgivable war crime. Yet America will be able to kill the same number of civilians with the
same deliberate intention of inflicting deadly force, and it would suffer essentially no
consequences at all. There's no public or international pressure holding that form of violence
at bay, because it's invisible and poorly understood.
It reminds me of the way financial abuse gets overlooked and under-appreciated in our
society. Financial abuse can be more painful and imprisoning than physical or psychological
abuse (and I speak from experience), especially if you have children, yet you don't generally
see movies and TV shows getting made about it. In a society where people have been made to
depend on money for survival, limiting or cutting off their access to it is the same as any
other violent attack upon their personal sovereignty, and can easily be just as destructive.
But as a society we haven't yet learned to see and understand this violence, so it doesn't
attract interest and attention. That lack of interest and attention enables the empire to
launch deadly campaigns targeting civilian populations unnoticed, without any public
accountability. It's great that more people are starting to understand the cost of war, to the
extent that we're even seeing US presidential candidates make opposing it central to their
platforms, but this is happening at a time when overt warfare is becoming more obsolete and
replaced with something subtler and more sinister. We must as a society evolve our
understanding of what starvation sanctions are and what they do, and stop seeing them as in any
way superior or preferable to overt warfare.
The fact that people generally oppose senseless military violence but are unable to see and
comprehend a slow, boa constrictor-like act of slaughter via economic strangulation is why
these siege warfare tactics have become the weapon of choice for the US-centralized empire. It
is a more gradual way of murdering people than overt warfare, but when you control all the
resources and have an underlying power structure which maintains itself amid the comings and
goings of your officially elected government, you're in no hurry. The absence of any public
accountability makes the need for patience a very worthwhile trade-off.
So you see this siege warfare strategy employed everywhere by the US-centralized empire:
You see it with Iran and Venezuela.
You see it in Yemen, where in addition to deadly blockades the Saudis have been
deliberate targeting farms, fishing boats, marketplaces, food storage sites and
cholera treatment centers with US-assisted airstrikes.
You
saw it with Julian Assange , where Ecuador collaborated with the US to slowly make life
in the embassy more and more hellish in the hope that he'd step outside to be arrested by
British police.
You're
seeing it now with Chelsea Manning , who is currently racking up $500 a day fines for her
principled stand against a corrupt grand jury proceeding against Assange, fines which will
double next month to $1,000 a day.
The US-centralized power alliance is so powerful in its ability to hurt nations with
financial influence that in 1990 when Yemen voted against a UN Security Council Resolution
authorizing the attack against Iran, a senior US diplomat was caught on a hot mic telling the
Yemeni ambassador, "That will be the most expensive 'no' vote you ever cast." According to
German author Thomas Pogge , "The US stopped $70 million in aid to Yemen; other Western
countries, the IMF, and World Bank followed suit. Saudi Arabia expelled some 800,000 Yemeni
workers, many of whom had lived there for years and were sending urgently needed money to their
families."
That's real power. Not the ability to destroy a nation with bombs and missiles, but the
ability to destroy it without firing a shot.
It's no wonder, then, that the drivers of this empire work so hard to continue growing and
expanding it. The oligarchs and their allies in opaque government agencies no doubt envision a
world where all noncompliant nations like Iran, Russia and China have been absorbed into the
blob of empire and war becomes obsolete, not because anyone has become any less violent, but
because their economic control will be so complete that they can obliterate entire populations
just by cutting them off from the world economy whenever any of them become disobedient.
This is the only reason Iran is being targeted right now. That's why you'll never hear a
factually and logically sound argument defending Trump's withdrawal from the nuclear deal;
there is none. There was no problem with the JCPOA other than the fact that it barred America
from inflicting economic warfare upon Iran, which it needed for the purpose of toppling the
nation's government so that it can be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized empire.
And all the innocent human beings who die of starvation and disease? They don't matter.
Imperial violence only matters if there are consequences for it. The price of shoring up the
total hegemony of the empire will have been worth it .
"... "A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy" - Alexis de Toqueville ..."
The problem is that as De Toqueville realises (his quote below) most of the people
commenting here are simply living a parasitic existence benefiting from state largesse -
sucking the teat of a bloated and overburdened state caring not whether their sustenance is
remotely sustainable and just voting for ever more
"A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the
voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that
moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the
public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy" -
Alexis de Toqueville
"... Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets. ..."
"... "It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people." ..."
"... The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow the pain. ..."
"... But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress. Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent ..."
"... Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing. ..."
"... Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered by social programs. ..."
"... In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember. ..."
"... "We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'" ..."
"... "When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us. Poor people feel abandoned." ..."
On the ragged streets of the shantytown across the road, where stinking outhouses sit alongside shacks fashioned from rusted sheets
of tin, families have surrendered hopes that sewage lines will ever reach them.
They do not struggle to fashion an explanation for their declining fortunes: Since taking office more than three years ago, President
Mauricio Macri has broken with the budget-busting populism that has dominated Argentina for much of the past century, embracing the
grim arithmetic of economic orthodoxy.
Mr. Macri has slashed subsidies for electricity, fuel and transportation, causing prices to skyrocket, and recently prompting
Ms. Genovesi, 48, to cut off her gas service, rendering her stove lifeless. Like most of her neighbors, she illegally taps into the
power lines that run along the rutted dirt streets.
"It's a neoliberal government," she says. "It's a government that does not favor the people."
The tribulations playing out under the disintegrating roofs of the poor are a predictable dimension of Mr. Macri's turn away
from left-wing populism. He vowed to shrink Argentina's monumental deficits by diminishing the largess of the state. The trouble
is that Argentines have yet to collect on the other element the president promised: the economic revival that was supposed to follow
the pain.
Mr. Macri's supporters heralded his 2015 election as a miraculous outbreak of normalcy in a country with a well-earned reputation
for histrionics. He would cease the reckless spending that had brought Argentina infamy for defaulting on its debts eight times.
Sober-minded austerity would win the trust of international financiers, bringing investment that would yield jobs and fresh opportunities.
But as Mr. Macri seeks re-election this year, Argentines increasingly lament that they are absorbing all strife and no progress.
Even businesses that have benefited from his reforms complain that he has botched the execution, leaving the nation to confront the
same concoction of misery that has plagued it for decades. The economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and
joblessness is stuck above 9 percent.
Poverty afflicts a third of the population, and the figure is climbing.
Far beyond this country of 44 million people, Mr. Macri's tenure is testing ideas that will shape economic policy in an age of
recrimination over widening inequality. His presidency was supposed to offer an escape from the wreckage of profligate spending while
laying down an alternative path for countries grappling with the worldwide rise of populism. Now, his presidency threatens to become
a gateway back to populism. The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck
above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times
Image
The Argentine economy is contracting. Inflation is running above 50 percent, and joblessness is stuck above 9 percent. Poverty afflicts
a third of the population. Credit Sarah Pabst for The New York Times
As the October election approaches, Mr. Macri is contending with the growing prospect of a challenge from the president he succeeded,
Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, who faces a
series of criminal indictments for corruption . Her unbridled spending helped deliver the crisis that Mr. Macri inherited. Her
return would resonate as a rebuke of his market-oriented reforms while potentially yanking Argentina back to its accustomed preserve:
left-wing populism, in uncomfortable proximity to insolvency.
The Argentine peso lost half of its value against the dollar last year, prompting the central bank to lift interest rates to a
commerce-suffocating level above 60 percent. Argentina was forced to secure a $57 billion
rescue from the International
Monetary Fund , a profound indignity given that the fund is widely despised here for the austerity it imposed in the late 1990s,
turning an economic downturn into a depression.
For Mr. Macri, time does not appear to be in abundant supply. The spending cuts he delivered hit the populace immediately. The
promised benefits of his reforms -- a stable currency, tamer inflation, fresh investment and jobs -- could take years to materialize,
leaving Argentines angry and yearning for the past.
In much of South America, left-wing governments have taken power in recent decades as an angry corrective to dogmatic prescriptions
from Washington, where the Treasury and the I.M.F. have focused on the confidence of global investors as the key to development.
Left-wing populism has aimed to redistribute the gains from the wealthy to everyone else. It has aided the poor, while generating
its own woes --
corruption and depression in
Brazil , runaway inflation and financial ruin in Argentina. In Venezuela, uninhibited spending has turned the country with the
world's largest proven oil reserves into a land where
children starve .
Mr. Macri sold his administration as an evolved form of governance for these times, a crucial dose of market forces tempered
by social programs.
In the most generous reading, the medicine has yet to take effect. But in the view of beleaguered Argentines, the country
has merely slipped back into the rut that has framed national life for as long as most people can remember.
"We live patching things up," said Roberto Nicoli, 62, who runs a silverware company outside the capital, Buenos Aires. "We
never fix things. I always say, 'Whenever we start doing better, I will start getting ready for the next crisis.'"
Cultivating wealth
... ... ...
In the beginning, there was Juan Domingo Perón, the charismatic Army general who was president from 1946 to 1955, and then again
from 1973 to 1974. He employed an authoritarian hand and muscular state power to champion the poor. He and his wife, Eva Duarte --
widely known by her nickname, Evita -- would dominate political life long after they died, inspiring politicians across the ideological
spectrum to claim their mantle.
Among the most ardent Peronists were Néstor Kirchner, the president from 2003 to 2007, and his wife, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner,
who took office in 2007, remaining until Mr. Macri was elected in 2015.
Their version of Peronism -- what became known as Kirchnerism -- was decidedly left-wing, disdaining global trade as a malevolent
force. They expanded cash grants to the poor and imposed taxes on farm exports in a bid to keep Argentine food prices low.
As the country's farmers tell it, Kirchnerism is just a fancy term for the confiscation of their wealth and the scattering of
the spoils to the unproductive masses. They point to Ms. Kirchner's 35 percent tax on soybean exports.
"We had a saying," Mr. Tropini says. "'For every three trucks that went to the port, one was for Cristina Kirchner.'"
reduction in export taxes.
"You could breathe finally," Mr. Tropini, the farmer, says.
He was free of the Kirchners, yet stuck with nature. Floods in 2016 wiped out more than half of his crops. A drought last year
wreaked even more havoc.
"This harvest, this year," he says, "is a gift from God."
But if the heavens are now cooperating, and if the people running Buenos Aires represent change, Mr. Tropini is critical of Mr.
Macri's failure to overcome the economic crisis.
A weaker currency makes Argentine soybeans more competitive, but it also increases the cost of the diesel fuel Mr. Tropini needs
to run his machinery. High interest rates make it impossible for him to buy another combine, which would allow him to expand his
farm.
In the first years of Mr. Macri's administration, the government lifted controls on the value of the peso while relaxing export
taxes. The masters of international finance delivered a surge of investment. The economy expanded by nearly 3 percent in 2017, and
then accelerated in the first months of last year.
But as investors grew wary of Argentina's deficits, they fled, sending the peso plunging and inflation soaring. As the rout continued
last year, the central bank mounted a futile effort to support the currency, selling its stash of dollars to try to halt the peso's
descent. As the reserves dwindled, investors absorbed the spectacle of a government failing to restore order. The exodus of money
intensified, and another potential default loomed, leading a chastened Mr. Macri to accept a rescue from the dreaded IMF.
Administration officials described the unraveling as akin to a natural disaster: unforeseeable and unavoidable. The drought hurt
agriculture.
Money was flowing out of developing countries as the Federal Reserve continued to lift interest rates in the United States, making
the American dollar a more attractive investment.
But the impact of the Fed's tightening had been widely anticipated. Economists fault the government for mishaps and complacency
that left the country especially vulnerable.
.... ... ...
Among the most consequential errors was the government's decision to include Argentina's central bank in a December 2017 announcement
that it was raising its inflation target. The markets took that as a signal that the government was surrendering its war on inflation
while opting for a traditional gambit: printing money rather than cutting spending.
... ... ...
The government insists that better days are ahead. The spending cuts have dropped the budget deficit to a manageable 3 percent
of annual economic output. Argentina is again integrated into the global economy.
"We haven't improved, but the foundations of the economy and society are much healthier," said Miguel Braun, secretary of economic
policy at the Treasury Ministry. "Argentina is in a better place to generate a couple of decades of growth."
... ... ...
Their television flashes dire warnings, like "Danger of Hyper Inflation." Throughout the neighborhood, people decry the sense
that they have been forsaken by the government.
Trucks used to come to castrate male dogs to control the packs of feral animals running loose. Not anymore. Health programs for
children are less accessible than they were before, they said.
Daisy Quiroz, 71, a retired maid, lives in a house that regularly floods in the rainy season.
"When our president Cristina was here, they sent people to help us," she says. "Now, if there's problems, nobody helps us.
Poor people feel abandoned."
... ... ...
Daniel Politi contributed reporting from Buenos Aires. Peter S. Goodman is a London-based European economics correspondent.
He was previously a national economic correspondent in New York. He has also worked at The Washington Post as a China correspondent,
and was global editor in chief of the International Business Times. @
petersgoodman
Iran's envoy to the United Nations has called on the international community to end "unlawful destabilizing measures" by the US,
declaring that while Iran does not seek war, it "reserves the right to counter any hostile act."
Iranian envoy to the UN Majid Takht Ravanchi has condemned continuing US provocations that culminated Thursday morning in the
downing of an American surveillance drone by the Iranian air force over Hormozgan province.
The drone "had turned off its identification equipment and [was] engaged in a clear spying operation," Ravanchi confirmed in a
letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, adding that the aircraft had ignored "repeated radio warnings" in order to enter
Iranian airspace near the Strait of Hormuz.
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...
How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem
appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others,
deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist
violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues
to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to
be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States
and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears
convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For
instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military
and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and
even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben
Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United
Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than
other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson
administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's
Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against
Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with
Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no
better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial
overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never
passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if
outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those
most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon
of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington
adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to
create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated
into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to
make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had
killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant
those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary
to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died.
Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests
being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government.
This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the
full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone
campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious
hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the
Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand
Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state
could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington
expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against
the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials
anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own
interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed:
"She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination
of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more
than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established
by Washington's far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel
apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No
wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would
have an aneurysm."
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking
that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she
admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out
Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s
fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified
to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash
murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal
of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for
Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any
one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline
The Blob.
"... Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war. ..."
"... U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private. ..."
"... "Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii] ..."
"... As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern. ..."
"... Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: ..."
"... Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region. ..."
"... Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii] ..."
"... The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air. ..."
"... The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii] ..."
"... Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise. ..."
"... Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich ..."
Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for
war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government
and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind
the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext
for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised
of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky
. All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran
the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist
delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from
the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government
or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision
of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:
"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt
precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the
Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,
"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears
instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]
There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the
hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement
arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation.
Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official
in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when
she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout
the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic
Muslim members.
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members.
The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding
the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others
wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with
the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian
delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher
Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce
the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]
Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.
"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]
It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations
were saying in private.
Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.
"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't
want to listen to our arguments." [vi]
One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators,
inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.
"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really
like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]
According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,
"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'"
Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]
From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval
of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter."
[ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.
As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted
all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other
hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.
On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional
agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete
document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,
"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."
Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally
been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]
When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them.
Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three
new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation
that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact
Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting."
The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had
to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]
At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing
yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive
text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00
PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.
Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected
to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware
of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section
of the text states:
"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services,
and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace
negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.
The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation
of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power
to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate,
as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.
The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment
of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission
may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there
was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The
Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to
bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.
Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice
of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of
Kosovo or suffer the consequences.
Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months,
Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]
The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated
NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple
request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could
take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.
The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free
and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted
the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]
The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout
Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a
whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere
on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]
Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.
There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning,
Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery
to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's
borders to further break apart the nation.
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.
"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because
they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]
At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:
"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much
of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations."
[xxviii]
Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed
solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities."
But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about
troops and troops alone." [xxix]
While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so
that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to
unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media
would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation
when he said,
"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see
how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]
Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured
the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long
as it was concealed. [xxxi]
Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:
"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in.
You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]
That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite
such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation.
When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:
"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]
This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated
support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.
Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated
with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.
"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails
because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]
On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow
KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage
the Albanians to sign.
So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible"
that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications
to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]
The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented,
and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about
regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that
the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]
From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense
that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable
result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted
the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext
for war.
On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy,
condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including
reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already
been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation
to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO
if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a
topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]
Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United
States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.
In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence
of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity
to expand Western domination over other nations.
Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to
member nations.
Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial
interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations
in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.
*
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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is
a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for
Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of
Killing Democracy: CIA
and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force
to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is
https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
Andrew Bacevich
recalls Madeleine
Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.
Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks
was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other
countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority
to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that
she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered
one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:
I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam
Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered
and unconditional access.
Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons
of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American
hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans
and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.
A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led
to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not
only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future
threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the
existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John
Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.
"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory,
threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that
America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and
alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of
force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.
"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends
a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a
diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals
that cannot be reasoned with.
They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the
region, and Iran won't stand for that."
At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a
full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.
I was shocked-- but not surprised-- to see visibly-pained CBS Pentagon flack David Martin on
the boob tube this morning quoting an unnamed source that speculated that the reason Trump
cancelled the bombing of Iran was that he got "cold-feet."
Thank you, Vasili Arkhipov, for getting cold-feet, too! Madness, our nation is afflicted
with madness.
U.S. -- A new policy issued by the United States Department of Defense, in conjunction
with online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, will automatically enlist you to fight in a
foreign war if you post your support for attacking another country.
People who bravely post about how the U.S. needs to invade some country in the Middle East
or Asia or outer space will get a pop-up notice indicating they've been enlisted in the
military. A recruiter will then show up at their house and whisk them away to fight in the
foreign war they wanted to happen so badly.
"Frankly, recruitment numbers are down, and we needed some way to find people who are
really enthusiastic about fighting wars," said a DOD official. "Then it hit us like a drone
strike: there are plenty of people who argue vehemently for foreign intervention. It doesn't
matter what war we're trying to create: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea,
China---these people are always reliable supporters of any invasion abroad. So why not get
them there on the frontlines?"
"After all, we want people who are passionate about occupying foreign lands, not grunts
who are just there for the paycheck," he added.
Strangely, as soon as the policy was implemented, 99% of saber-rattling suddenly
ceased.
Note: The Babylon Bee is the world's best satire site, totally inerrant in all its
truth claims. We write satire about Christian stuff, political stuff, and everyday life.
The Babylon Bee was created ex nihilo on the eighth day of the creation week, exactly
6,000 years ago. We have been the premier news source through every major world event, from
the Tower of Babel and the Exodus to the Reformation and the War of 1812. We focus on just
the facts, leaving spin and bias to other news sites like CNN and Fox News.
If you would like to complain about something on our site, take it up with God.
Unlike other satire sites, everything we post is 100% verified by Snopes.com.
"... "Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory, threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible. ..."
"... "The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals that cannot be reasoned with. ..."
Demanding that the Middle Eastern nation retaliate immediately in self-defense against the
existential threat posed by America's military operations, National Security Adviser John
Bolton called for a forceful Iranian response Friday to continuing United States aggression.
"Iran cannot sit idly by as the American imperialist machine encroaches on their territory,
threatens their sovereignty, and endangers their very way of life," said Bolton, warning that
America's fanatical leadership, steadfast devotion to flexing their muscles in the region, and
alleged access to nuclear weapons necessitated that Iran strike back with a vigorous show of
force as soon -- and as hard -- as possible.
"The only thing these Westerners understand is violence, so it's imperative that Iran sends
a clear message that they won't be walked over. Let's not forget, the U.S. defied a
diplomatically negotiated treaty for seemingly no reason at all -- these are dangerous radicals
that cannot be reasoned with.
They've been given every opportunity to back down, but their goal is total domination of the
region, and Iran won't stand for that."
At press time, Bolton said that the only option left on the table was for Iran to launch a
full-fledged military strike against the Great Satan.
"... "Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?" ..."
"... "Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose? Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240 billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27 billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing our market... ..."
"... "Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis] ..."
"... Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance. ..."
"... What's happening is a titanic struggle to make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy. ..."
I'd like barflies to ponder the following thought/probability: Radar Saturated
Environment--radiation not from just individual, discreet, identifiable points, but from such
a vast multitude that no single point can be discerned.
To further my brainstorming de-escalation, I'd like to point out what Putin said in his
Direct Line
yesterday about the economic war being waged against Russia in accordance with the Ukraine
Coup in 2014. Pavel Zarubin asks:
"Let's go back to economic issues. Many people link these difficulties with the Western
sanctions. By the way, the European Union again extended them today. Sometimes, there are
appeals to make peace with everyone. If Russia complied with the West's demands and agreed to
everything, would this benefit our economy in any way?"
I thought this a capital question very similar to Iran's dilemma. Putin's response is
quite long, so I won't cite it all. Rather, I'll limit it to his initial reply and conclusion
as they both deal with the Big Picture:
"First, what does it mean 'to make peace'? We have not fought with anyone and have no
desire to fight with anyone.
"Second, what would this give us and what would it not give us, and what would we lose?
Look, according to expert analyses, Russia fell short by about $50 billion as a result of
these restrictions during these years, starting in 2014. The European Union lost $240
billion, the US $17 billion (we have a small volume of trade with them) and Japan $27
billion. All this affects employment in these countries, including the EU: they are losing
our market....
"Now to the question of whether some things would be different if we give in and abandon
our fundamental national interests. We are not talking about reconciliation here. Perhaps
there will be some external signals, but no drastic change. Look, the People's Republic of
China has nothing to do with Crimea and Donbass, does it? We are accused of occupying
Donbass, which is nonsense and a lie.
But China has nothing to do with it, and yet the tariffs for Chinese goods are rising,
which is almost the same as sanctions.
"Now, the attack on Huawei: where does it come from and what is its objective? The
objective is to hold back the development of China, the country that has become a global
rival of another power, the United States. The same is happening with Russia, and will
continue to happen , so if we want to occupy a worthy place under the sun, we must become
stronger, including, and above all, in the economy." [My Emphasis]
This year's Direct Line was as usual filled with domestic issues some that lead to foreign
policy issues. The overall scope and distinctness of the minutia are as vast as Russia. I've
followed these over the years and note they reveal Russia's strengths and fragilities. I'm
tempted to cite more but will leave it to the reader to pursue, but after 90 minutes you
still won't be finished because the transcript isn't yet complete, which while frustrating is
also amazing.
Dealing with Putin's bolded remark is a question not just for Russia, China and Iran; it's
a question for the entire world and harkens back to the words of George Kennan I cited a few
days ago about the USA needing a policy to continue its economic dominance of the planet he
uttered in 1947, the policy that became The Anti-Communist Crusade covering for its actual
Super Imperialism policy to retain that dominance.
What's happening is a titanic struggle to
make the Outlaw US Empire cease pursuing that policy.
Bolton is just Albright of different sex. The same aggressive stupidity.
Notable quotes:
"... Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob... ..."
"... How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem appropriate. ..."
"... Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity. ..."
"... Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela. ..."
"... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." ..."
"... Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe. ..."
"... Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states. ..."
"... Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. ..."
"... The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government. This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious hypocrisy and bias, and more. ..."
"... At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia. ..."
"... Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established by Washington's far-sighted leaders. ..."
"... When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." ..."
"... For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal of Albright and her peers in The Blob. ..."
Albright typifies the arrogance and hawkishness of Washington blob...
How to describe US foreign policy over the last couple of decades? Disastrous comes to mind. Arrogant and murderous also seem
appropriate.
Since 9/11, Washington has been extraordinarily active militarily -- invading two nations, bombing and droning several others,
deploying special operations forces in yet more countries, and applying sanctions against many. Tragically, the threat of Islamist
violence and terrorism only have metastasized. Although Al Qaeda lost its effectiveness in directly plotting attacks, it continues
to inspire national offshoots. Moreover, while losing its physical "caliphate" the Islamic State added further terrorism to its portfolio.
Three successive administrations have ever more deeply ensnared the United States in the Middle East. War with Iran appears to
be frighteningly possible. Ever-wealthier allies are ever-more dependent on America. Russia is actively hostile to the United States
and Europe. Washington and Beijing appear to be a collision course on far more than trade. Yet the current administration appears
convinced that doing more of the same will achieve different results, the best definition of insanity.
Despite his sometimes abusive and incendiary rhetoric, the president has departed little from his predecessors' policies. For
instance, American forces remain deployed in Afghanistan and Syria. Moreover, the Trump administration has increased its military
and materiel deployments to Europe. Also, Washington has intensified economic sanctions on Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, and
even penalized additional countries, namely Venezuela.
U.S. foreign policy suffers from systematic flaws in the thinking of the informal policy collective which former Obama aide Ben
Rhodes dismissed as "The Blob." Perhaps no official better articulated The Blob's defective precepts than Madeleine Albright, United
Nations ambassador and Secretary of State.
First is overweening hubris. In 1998 Secretary of State Albright declared that
"If we have to use force, it is because we are America: we are the indispensable nation. We stand tall and we see further than
other countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us."
Even then her claim was implausible. America blundered into the Korean War and barely achieved a passable outcome. The Johnson
administration infused Vietnam with dramatically outsize importance. For decades, Washington foolishly refused to engage the People's
Republic of China. Washington-backed dictators in Cuba, Nicaragua, Iran, and elsewhere fell ingloriously. An economic embargo against
Cuba that continues today helped turn Fidel Castro into a global folk hero. Washington veered dangerously close to nuclear war with
Moscow during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 and again two decades later during military exercises in Europe.
U.S. officials rarely were prepared for events that occurred in the next week or month, let alone years later. Americans did no
better than the French in Vietnam. Americans managed events in Africa no better than the British, French, and Portuguese colonial
overlords. Washington made more than its share of bad, even awful decisions in dealing with other nations around the globe.
Perhaps the worst failing of U.S. foreign policy was ignoring the inevitable impact of foreign intervention. Americans would never
passively accept another nation bombing, invading, and occupying their nation, or interfering in their political system. Even if
outgunned, they would resist. Yet Washington has undertaken all of these practices, with little consideration of the impact on those
most affected -- hence the rise of terrorism against the United States. Terrorism, horrid and awful though it is, became the weapon
of choice of weaker peoples against intervention by the world's industrialized national states.
The U.S. record since September 11 has been uniquely counterproductive. Rather than minimize hostility toward America, Washington
adopted a policy -- highlighted by launching new wars, killing more civilians, and ravaging additional societies -- guaranteed to
create enemies, exacerbate radicalism, and spread terrorism. Blowback is everywhere. Among the worst examples: Iraqi insurgents mutated
into ISIS, which wreaked military havoc throughout the Middle East and turned to terrorism.
Albright's assumption that members of The Blob were far-seeing was matched by her belief that the same people were entitled to
make life-and-death decisions for the entire planet. When queried 1996 about her justification for sanctions against Iraq which had
killed a half million babies -- notably, she did not dispute the accuracy of that estimate -- she responded that "I think this is
a very hard choice, but the price -- we think the price is worth it." Exactly who "we" were she did not say. Most likely she meant
those Americans admitted to the foreign policy priesthood, empowered to make foreign policy and take the practical steps necessary
to enforce it. (She later stated of her reply: "I never should have made it. It was stupid." It was, but it reflected her mindset.)
In any normal country, such a claim would be shocking -- a few people sitting in another capital deciding who lived and died.
Foreign elites, a world away from the hardship that they imposed, deciding the value of those dying versus the purported interests
being promoted. Those paying the price had no voice in the decision, no way to hold their persecutors accountable.
The willingness to so callously sacrifice so many helps explain why "they" often hate us, usually meaning the U.S. government.
This is also because "they" believe average Americans hate them. Understandably, it too often turns out, given the impact of the
full range of American interventions -- imposing economic sanctions, bombing, invading, and occupying other nations, unleashing drone
campaigns, underwriting tyrannical regimes, supporting governments which occupy and oppress other peoples, displaying ostentatious
hypocrisy and bias, and more.
This mindset is reinforced by contempt toward even those being aided by Washington. Although American diplomats had termed the
Kosovo Liberation Army as "terrorist," the Clinton Administration decided to use the growing insurgency as an opportunity to expand
Washington's influence. At the 1999 Rambouillet conference Albright made demands of Yugoslavia that no independent, sovereign state
could accept: that, for instance, it act like defeated and occupied territory by allowing the free transit of NATO forces. Washington
expected the inevitable refusal, which was calculated to provide justification for launching an unprovoked, aggressive war against
the Serb-dominated remnant of Yugoslavia.
However, initially the KLA, determined on independence, refused to sign Albright's agreement. She exploded. One of her officials
anonymously complained: "Here is the greatest nation on earth pleading with some nothingballs to do something entirely in their own
interest -- which is to say yes to an interim agreement -- and they stiff us." Someone described as "a close associate" observed:
"She is so stung by what happened. She's angry at everyone -- the Serbs, the Albanians and NATO." For Albright, the determination
of others to achieve their own goals, even at risk to their lives, was an insult to America and her.
Alas, members of the Blob view Americans with little more respect. The ignorant masses should do what they are told. (Former National
Security Adviser H.R. McMaster recently complained of public war-weariness from fighting in Afghanistan for no good reason for more
than seventeen years.) Even more so, believed Albright, members of the military should cheerfully patrol the quasi-empire being established
by Washington's far-sighted leaders.
As Albright famously asked Colin Powell in 1992:
"What's the use of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?" To her, American military personnel
apparently were but gambit pawns in a global chess game, to be sacrificed for the interest and convenience of those playing. No
wonder then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell's reaction stated in his autobiography was: "I thought I would
have an aneurysm."
When asked in 2003 about the incident, she said "what I thought was that we had -- we were in a kind of a mode of thinking
that we were never going to be able to use our military effectively again." Although sixty-five years had passed, she
admitted that "my mindset is Munich," a unique circumstance and threat without even plausible parallel today.
Such a philosophy explains a 1997 comment by a cabinet member, likely Albright, to General Hugh Shelton, then Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff: "Hugh, I know I shouldn't even be asking you this, but what we really need in order to go in and take out
Saddam is a precipitous event -- something that would make us look good in the eyes of the world. Could you have one of our U-2s
fly low enough -- and slow enough -- so as to guarantee that Saddam could shoot it down?" He responded sure, as soon as she qualified
to fly the plane.
For Albright, war is just another foreign policy tool. One could send a diplomatic note, impose economic sanctions, or unleash
murder and mayhem. No reason to treat the latter as anything special. Joining the U.S. military means putting your life at the disposal
of Albright and her peers in The Blob.
Anyone of these comments could be dismissed as a careless aside. Taken together, however, they reflect an attitude dangerous for
Americans and foreigners alike. Unfortunately, the vagaries of U.S. foreign policy suggest that this mindset is not limited to any
one person. Any president serious about taking a new foreign-policy direction must do more than drain the swamp. He or she must sideline
The Blob.
"... Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext for war. ..."
"... U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members. The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia. ..."
"... It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations were saying in private. ..."
"... "Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'" Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii] ..."
"... As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern. ..."
"... Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section of the text states: ..."
"... Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services, and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region. ..."
"... Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months, Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii] ..."
"... The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air. ..."
"... The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii] ..."
"... Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise. ..."
"... Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of Killing Democracy: CIA and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich ..."
Twenty years have passed since the U.S.-orchestrated NATO attack on Yugoslavia. As the United States readied its forces for
war in 1999, it organized a peace conference that was ostensibly intended to resolve differences between the Yugoslav government
and secessionist ethnic Albanians in Kosovo on the future status of the province. A different scenario was being played out behind
the scenes, however. U.S. officials wanted war and deliberately set up the process to fail, which they planned to use as a pretext
for war.
The talks opened on February 6, 1999, in Rambouillet, France. Officially, the negotiations were led by a Contact Group comprised
of U.S. Ambassador to Macedonia Christopher Hill , European Union envoy Wolfgang Petritsch , and Russian diplomat Boris Mayorsky
. All decisions were supposed to be jointly agreed upon by all three members of the Contact Group. In actual practice, the U.S. ran
the show all the way and routinely bypassed Petritsch and Mayorsky on essential matters.
Ibrahim Rugova , an ethnic Albanian activist who advocated nonviolence, was expected to play a major role in the Albanian secessionist
delegation. Joining him at Rambouillet was Fehmi Agani , a fellow member of Rugova's Democratic League of Kosovo.
U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright regularly sidelined Rugova, however, preferring to rely on delegation members from
the hardline Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which had routinely murdered Serbs, Roma, and Albanians in Kosovo who worked for the government
or opposed separatism. Only a few months before the conference, KLA spokesman Bardhyl Mahmuti spelled out his organization's vision
of a future Kosovo as separate and ethnically pure:
"The independence of Kosovo is the only solution We cannot live together. That is excluded." [i]
Rugova had at one time engaged in fairly productive talks with Yugoslav officials, and his willingness to negotiate was no doubt
precisely the reason Albright relegated him to a background role. Yugoslav Minister of Information Milan Komnenić accompanied the
Yugoslav delegation to Rambouillet. He recalls,
"With Rugova and Fehmi Agani it was possible to talk; they were flexible. In Rambouillet, [KLA leader Hashim] Thaçi appears
instead of Rugova. A beast." [ii]
There was no love between Thaçi and Rugova, whose party members were the targets of threats and assassination attempts at the
hands of the KLA. Rugova himself would survive an assassination attempt six years later.
The composition of the Yugoslav delegation reflected its position that many ethnic groups resided in Kosovo, and any agreement
arrived at should take into account the interests of all parties. All of Kosovo's major ethnic groups were represented in the delegation.
Faik Jashari , one of the Albanian members in the Yugoslav delegation, was president of the Kosovo Democratic Initiative and an official
in the Provisional Executive Council, which was Yugoslavia's government in Kosovo. Jashari observed that Albright was startled when
she saw the composition of the Yugoslav delegation, apparently because it went against the U.S. propaganda narrative. [iii] Throughout
the talks, Albright displayed a dismissive attitude towards the delegation's Albanian, Roma, Egyptian, Goran, Turkish, and Slavic
Muslim members.
U.S. mediators habitually referred to the Yugoslav delegation as "the Serbs," even though they constituted a minority of the members.
The Americans persisted in trying to cast events in Kosovo as a simplistic binary relationship of Serb versus Albanian, disregarding
the presence of other ethnic groups in the province, and ignoring the fact that while some ethnic Albanians favored separation, others
wished to remain in multiethnic Yugoslavia.
After arriving at Rambouillet, the secessionist Albanian delegation informed U.S. diplomats that it did not want to meet with
the Yugoslav side. Aside from a brief ceremonial meeting, there was no direct contact between the two groups. The Yugoslav and Albanian
delegations were placed on two different floors to eliminate nearly all contact. U.S. mediators Richard Holbrooke and Christopher
Hill ran from one delegation to the other, conveying notes and verbal messages between the two sides but mostly trying to coerce
the Yugoslav delegation. [iv]
Luan Koka, a Roma member of the Yugoslav delegation, noted that the U.S. was operating an electronic jamming device.
"We knew exactly when Madeleine Albright was coming. Connections on our mobile phones were breaking up and going crazy." [v]
It is probable that the U.S. was also operating electronic listening equipment and that U.S. mediators knew everything the delegations
were saying in private.
Albright, Jashari said, would not listen to anyone.
"She had her task, and she saw only that task. You couldn't say anything to her. She didn't want to talk with us and didn't
want to listen to our arguments." [vi]
One day it was Koka's birthday, and the Yugoslav delegation wanted to encourage a more relaxed atmosphere with U.S. mediators,
inviting them to a cocktail party to mark the occasion.
"It was a slightly more pleasant atmosphere, and I was singing," Koka recalled. "I remember Madeleine Albright saying: 'I really
like partisan songs. But if you don't accept this, the bombs will fall.'" [vii]
According to delegation member Nikola Šainović ,
"Madeleine Albright told us all the time: 'If the Yugoslav delegation does not accept what we offer, you will be bombed.'"
Šainović added, "We agreed in Rambouillet to any form of autonomy for Kosovo," but sovereignty remained the red line. [viii]
From the beginning of the conference, U.S. mediator Christopher Hill "decided that what we really needed was an Albanian approval
of a document, and a Serb refusal. If both refused, there could be no further action by NATO or any other organization for that matter."
[ix] It was not peace that the U.S. team was seeking, but war.
As the conference progressed, U.S. negotiators were faced with an alarming problem, in that the Yugoslav delegation had accepted
all of the Contact Group's fundamental political principles for an agreement, balking only at a NATO presence in Kosovo. On the other
hand, the secessionist delegation rejected the Contact Group's political principles. Something had to be done to reverse this pattern.
On the second day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the Yugoslav delegation with the framework text of a provisional
agreement for peace and self-rule in Kosovo, but it was missing some of the annexes. The Yugoslavs requested a copy of the complete
document. As delegation head Ratko Marković pointed out,
"Any objections to the text of the agreement could be made only after an insight into the text as a whole had been obtained."
Nearly one week passed before the group received one of the missing annexes. That came on the day the conference had originally
been set to end. The deadline was extended, and two days later a second missing annex was provided to the Yugoslav delegation.[x]
When the Yugoslavs next met with the Contact Group, they were assured that all elements of the text had now been given to them.
Several more days passed and at 7:00 PM on February 22, the penultimate day of the conference, the Contact Group presented three
new annexes, which the Yugoslavs had never seen before. According to Marković, "Russian Ambassador Boris Mayorsky informed our delegation
that Annexes 2 and 7 had not been discussed or approved by the Contact Group and that they were not the texts drafted by the Contact
Group but by certain Contact Group members, while Annex 5 was discussed, but no decision was made on it at the Contact Group meeting."
The Yugoslav delegation refused to accept the new annexes, as their introduction had violated the process whereby all proposals had
to be agreed upon by the three Contact Group members. [xi]
At 9:30 AM on February 23, the final day of the conference, U.S. officials presented the full text of the proposal, containing
yet more provisions that were being communicated for the first time. The accompanying note identified the package as the definitive
text while adding that Russia did not support two of the articles. The letter demanded the Yugoslav delegation's decision by 1:00
PM that same day.[xii] There was barely time enough to carefully read the text, let alone negotiate. In essence, it was an ultimatum.
Quite intentionally, U.S. mediators included provisions in the final version of the text that no sovereign nation could be expected
to accept. Neoliberal economic interests are always front and center when U.S. officials are involved, and they surely were not unaware
of Kosovo's abundant reserves of mineral resources, ripe for exploitation. The first point in Article 1 of the Economic Issues section
of the text states:
"The economy of Kosovo shall function in accordance with free market principles."
Western investors were favored with a provision stating that authorities shall "ensure the free movement of persons, goods, services,
and capital to Kosovo, including from international sources." [xiii] One may wonder what these stipulations had to do with peace
negotiations, but then the talks had far more to do with U.S. interests than anything to do with the needs of the people in the region.
The document called for a Western-led Joint Commission including local representatives to monitor and coordinate the implementation
of the plan. However, if commission members failed to reach consensus on a matter, the Western-appointed Chair would have the power
to impose his decision unilaterally. [xiv] Local representatives would serve as little more than window-dressing for Western dictate,
as they could adopt no measure that went against the Chair's wishes.
The Chair of the Implementation Mission was authorized to "recommend" the "removal and appointment of officials and the curtailment
of operations of existing institutions in Kosovo." If the Chair's command was not obeyed "in the time requested, the Joint Commission
may decide to take the recommended action," and since the Chair had the authority to impose his will on the Joint Commission, there
was no check on his power. He could remove elected and appointed officials at will and replace them with handpicked lackeys. The
Chair was also authorized to order the "curtailment of operations of existing institutions." [xv]Any organization that failed to
bend to U.S. demands could be shut down.
Chapter 7 of the plan called for the parties to "invite NATO to constitute and lead a military force" in Kosovo. [xvi]The choice
of words was interesting. In language reminiscent of gangsters, Yugoslavia was told to "invite" NATO to take over the province of
Kosovo or suffer the consequences.
Yugoslavia was required "to provide, at no cost, the use of all facilities and services required" by NATO. [xvii]Within six months,
Yugoslavia would have to withdraw all of its military forces from Kosovo, other than a small number of border guards. [xviii]
The plan granted NATO "unrestricted use of the entire electromagnetic spectrum" to "communicate." Although the document indicated
NATO would make "reasonable efforts to coordinate," there were no constraints on its power. [xix] Yugoslav officials, "upon simple
request," would be required to grant NATO "all telecommunication services, including broadcast services free of cost." [xx]NATO could
take over any radio and television facilities and transmission wavelengths it chose, knocking local stations off the air.
The plan did not restrict NATO's presence to Kosovo. It granted NATO, with its "vehicles, vessels, aircraft, and equipment, free
and unrestricted passage and unimpeded access throughout the FRY [Federal Republic of Yugoslavia]." [xxi] NATO would be "granted
the use of airports, roads, rails, and ports without payment of fees, duties, dues, tools, or charges." [xxii]
The agreement guaranteed that NATO would have "complete and unimpeded freedom of movement by ground, air, and water into and throughout
Kosovo." Furthermore, NATO personnel could not be held "liable for any damages to public or private property." [xxiii] NATO as a
whole would also be "immune from all legal process, whether civil, administrative, or criminal," regardless of its actions anywhere
on the territory of Yugoslavia. [xxiv]Nor could NATO personnel be arrested, detained, or investigated. [xxv]
Acceptance of the plan would have brought NATO troops swarming throughout Yugoslavia and interfering in every institution.
There were several other objectionable elements in the plan, but one that stood out was the call for an "international" (meaning,
Western-led) meeting to be held after three years "to determine a mechanism for a final settlement for Kosovo."[xxvi] It was no mystery
to the Yugoslav delegation what conclusion Western officials would arrive at in that meeting. The intent was clearly to redraw Yugoslavia's
borders to further break apart the nation.
U.S. officials knew the Yugoslav delegation could not possibly accept such a plan.
"We deliberately set the bar higher than the Serbs could accept," Madeleine Albright confided to a group of journalists, "because
they needed a little bombing." [xxvii]
At a meeting in Belgrade on March 5, the Yugoslav delegation issued a statement which declared:
"A great deceit was looming, orchestrated by the United States. They demanded that the agreement be signed, even though much
of this agreement, that is, over 56 pages, had never been discussed, either within the Contact Group or during the negotiations."
[xxviii]
Serbian President Milan Milutinović announced at a press conference that in Rambouillet the Yugoslav delegation had "proposed
solutions meeting the demands of the Contact Group for broad autonomy within Serbia, advocating full equality of all national communities."
But "agreement was not what they were after." Instead, Western officials engaged in "open aggression," and this was a game "about
troops and troops alone." [xxix]
While U.S. officials were working assiduously to avoid a peaceful resolution, they needed the Albanians to agree to the plan so
that they could accuse the Yugoslav delegation of being the stumbling block to peace. U.S. mainstream media could be counted on to
unquestioningly repeat the government's line and overlook who the real architects of failure were. U.S. officials knew the media
would act in their customary role as cheerleaders for war, which indeed, they did.
British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook revealed the nature of the message Western officials were conveying to the Albanian delegation
when he said,
"We are certainly saying to the Kosovo Albanians that if you don't sign up to these texts, it's extremely difficult to see
how NATO could then take action against Belgrade." [xxx]
Western officials were practically begging the secessionists to sign the plan. According to inside sources, the Americans assured
the Albanian delegation that disarmament of the KLA would be merely symbolic and that it could keep the bulk of its weaponry so long
as it was concealed. [xxxi]
Albright spent hours trying to convince Thaçi to change his mind, telling him:
"If you say yes and the Serbs say no, NATO will strike and go on striking until the Serb forces are out and NATO can go in.
You will have security. And you will be able to govern yourselves." [xxxii]
That was a clear enough signal that the intent was to rip the province away from Yugoslavia and create an artificial state. Despite
such assurances, Thaçi feared the wrath of fellow KLA members if he were to sign a document that did not explicitly call for separation.
When U.S. negotiators asked Thaçi why he would not sign, he responded:
"If I agree to this, I will go home and they will kill me." [xxxiii]
This was not hyperbole. The KLA had threatened and murdered a great many Albanians who in its eyes fell short of full-throated
support for its policy of violent secession and ethnic exclusion.
Even NATO Commander Wesley Clark , who flew in from Belgium, was unable to change Thaçi's mind. [xxxiv] U.S. officials were exasperated
with the Albanian delegation, and its recalcitrance threatened to capsize plans for war.
"Rambouillet was supposed to be about putting the screws to Belgrade," a senior U.S. official said. "But it went off the rails
because of the miscalculation we made about the Albanians." [xxxv]
On the last day at Rambouillet, it was agreed that the Albanian delegation would return to Kosovo for discussions with fellow
KLA leaders on the need to sign the document. In the days that followed, Western officials paid repeated visits to Kosovo to encourage
the Albanians to sign.
So-called "negotiations" reconvened in Paris on March 15. Upon its arrival, the Yugoslav delegation objected that it was "incomprehensible"
that "no direct talks between the two delegations had been facilitated." In response to the Yugoslavs' proposal for modifications
to the plan, the Contact Group informed them that no changes would be accepted. The document must be accepted as a whole. [xxxvi]
The Yugoslav position, delegation head Ratko Marković maintained, was that "first one needs to determine what is to be implemented,
and only then to determine the methods of implementation." [xxxvii]The delegation asked the Americans what there was to talk about
regarding implementation "when there was no agreement because the Albanians did not accept anything." U.S. officials responded that
the Yugoslav delegation "cannot negotiate," adding that it would only be allowed to make grammatical changes to the text. [xxxviii]
From the U.S. perspective, the presence of the Yugoslav delegation in Paris was irrelevant other than to maintain the pretense
that negotiations were taking place. Not permitted to negotiate, there was little the Yugoslavs could do but await the inevitable
result, which soon came. The moment U.S. officials obtained the Albanian delegation's signatures to the plan on March 18, they aborted
the Paris Conference. There was no reason to continue engaging with the Yugoslav delegation, as the U.S. had what it needed: a pretext
for war.
On the day after the U.S. pulled the plug on the Paris talks, Milan Milutinović held a press conference in the Yugoslav embassy,
condemning the Paris meeting as "a kind of show," which was meant "to deceive public opinion in the whole world." [xxxix]
While the United States and its NATO allies prepared for war, Yugoslavia was making last-ditch efforts to stave off attack, including
reaching out to intermediaries. Greek Foreign Minister Theodoros Pangalos contacted Madeleine Albright and told her that Yugoslav
President Slobodan Milošević had offered to engage in further negotiations. But Albright told him that the decision to bomb had already
been made. "In fact," Pangalos reported, "she told me to 'desist, you're just being a nuisance.'" [xl] In a final act of desperation
to save the people from bombing, Milutinović contacted Christopher Hill and made an extraordinary offer: Yugoslavia would join NATO
if the United States would allow Yugoslavia to remain whole, including the province of Kosovo. Hill responded that this was not a
topic for discussion and he would not talk about it. [xli]
Madeleine Albright got her war, which brought death, destruction, and misery to Yugoslavia. But NATO had a new role, and the United
States further extended its hegemony over the Balkans.
In the years following the demise of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, NATO was intent on redefining its mission. The absence
of the socialist bloc presented NATO not only with the need to construct a new rationale for existence but also with the opportunity
to expand Western domination over other nations.
Bosnia offered the first opportunity for NATO to begin its transformation, as it took part in a war that presented no threat to
member nations.
Bombing Yugoslavia was meant to solidify the new role for NATO as an offensive military force, acting on behalf of U.S. imperial
interests. Since that time, NATO has attacked Libya, and engaged in military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and a variety of nations
in Africa. Despite NATO's claim that it is "committed to the peaceful resolution of disputes," the record shows otherwise.
*
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Gregory Elich is a Korea Policy Institute associate and on the Board of Directors of the Jasenovac Research Institute. He is
a member of the Solidarity Committee for Democracy and Peace in Korea, a columnist for
Voice of the People , and one of the co-authors of
Killing Democracy: CIA
and Pentagon Operations in the Post-Soviet Period , published in the Russian language. He is also a member of the Task Force
to Stop THAAD in Korea and Militarism in Asia and the Pacific. His website is
https://gregoryelich.org . Follow him on Twitter at @GregoryElich
Andrew Bacevich
recalls Madeleine
Albright's infamous statement about American indispensability, and notes how poorly it has held up over the last twenty-one years:
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping.
Albright's statement is even more damning for her and her fellow interventionists when we consider that the context of her remarks
was a discussion of the supposed threat from Iraq. The full sentence went like this: "We stand tall and we see further than other
countries into the future, and we see the danger here to all of us." Albright was making a general claim about our supposed superiority
to other nations when it came to looking into the future, but she was also specifically warning against a "danger" from Iraq that
she claimed threatened "all of us." She answered
one of Matt Lauer's questions with this assertion:
I think that we know what we have to do, and that is help enforce the UN Security Council resolutions, which demand that Saddam
Hussein abide by those resolutions, and get rid of his weapons of mass destruction, and allow the inspectors to have unfettered
and unconditional access.
Albright's rhetoric from 1998 is a grim reminder that policymakers from both parties accepted the existence of Iraq's "weapons
of mass destruction" as a given and never seriously questioned a policy aimed at eliminating something that did not exist. American
hawks couldn't see further in the future. They weren't even perceiving the present correctly, and tens of thousands of Americans
and millions of Iraqis would suffer because they insisted that they saw something that wasn't there.
A little more than five years after she uttered these words, the same wild threat inflation that Albright was engaged in led
to the invasion of Iraq, the greatest blunder and one of the worst crimes in the history of modern U.S. foreign policy . Not
only did Albright and other later war supporters not see what was coming, but their deluded belief in being able to anticipate future
threats caused them to buy into and promote a bogus case for a war that was completely unnecessary and should never have been fought.
"... The crash on July 17 2014 came shortly after the "Euromaidan revolution" in Kiev – which first began in November 2013 and culminated in the ousting of elected president Yanukovich on 23 February 2014, happily helped along by John McCain, Victoria Nuland and then-US ambassador to Ukraine (now ambassador to Greece) Geoffrey Pyatt for the USA, as well as various EU actors. ..."
"... Malaysia joined only in December, allegedly because only then did it finally agree to allow Ukraine, a nation that was a suspect, a veto over any conclusions that the team would publish. Malaysia had already been handed the black boxes by pro-Russian rebels in the area, and passed them on to the team in August. Summarized, the way the JIT was formed was highly curious . The countries even signed a secret agreement. ..."
"... Immediately after the crash, people like then-US VP Joe Biden, as well as Frans Timmermans, then-Dutch Foreign Minister and today candidate for the EU top job, pointed the finger at Russia as the party responsible for shooting down the plane. Also curious, since there had been no investigation and the plane crashed in a civil war zone where access was almost impossible. There was talk at the time of the US having satellite images, but none have ever been produced. ..."
"... " if the JIT's supplied evidence is authentic -- which the Ukrainian team asserts it to be -- then it outright convicts Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side." ..."
"... Zuesse also details, in that article, contentions from multiple sources that, while the MH17 may have been hit with a BUK missile, it certainly wasn't the only thing that hit it. There was at least one fighter jet seen close to the plane before it came down, as multiple eye-witness reports claim, and it is alleged that they fired on the cockpit for sure and perhaps other parts of the plane. It is an excellent article that is very well researched and chock-full of links to prove its points. ..."
"... Still, Ukraine's position in all this must be the biggest warning sign. They stood a lot to gain from committing atrocities and then blaming Russia for them. Plus, Yatsenyuk and Nuland and the US and the EU were mightily angry that Russia had outsmarted them all over Crimea. ..."
"... The Malaysians - who should have had a leading role in the investigation - have been relegated to subservience, even treating their dead according to strictures laid down by 'the investigation' - ie no autopsies of the cabin crew. They, too, have raised the complaint of politics getting in the way of finding the truth. ..."
"... The Dutch government went in full MH17 cover-up mode. The Dutch minister of justice even declared that publicly disagreeing with the JIT MH17 report equals with undermining the democratic order of the country. But the JIT MH17 report is an easy to debunk farce. ..."
"... ...and most of us here at ZH regard any "official" story with suspicion. If it's a matter involving geopolitics, especially Russia, it's assumed to be ******** until proven otherwise. Unpatriotic? The ones who have betrayed the US are the ones who have dishonored by their actions and lies. ..."
"... Obammy and his merry band of neocunts ordered that plane shot out of the sky to justify sanctions on Russia. This is certainly one case where red/blue team were on the same team. ..."
"... Hromadske TV news channel was set up in the Ukraine in 2013 immediately prior to the Euromaidan overthrow of the Ukraine government. That TV news channel played an important role in the Euromaidan. The biggest funder of Hromadske TV was The Netherlands. ..."
"... So think about that when talking about the "neutrality" of The Netherlands in the MH17 investigation. ..."
"... How does Russia stand to gain from shooting down an airliner? Crickets. They don't say. What a bunch of ******* imbeciles. The pathological obsession with pinning it on the Russkies is evident. ..."
The investigation into the crash of the MH17 Malaysia Airlines plane in East Ukraine was always compromised, right from the start.
The crash on July 17 2014 came shortly after the "Euromaidan revolution" in Kiev – which first began in November 2013 and
culminated in the ousting of elected president Yanukovich on 23 February 2014, happily helped along by John McCain, Victoria Nuland
and then-US ambassador to Ukraine (now ambassador to Greece) Geoffrey Pyatt for the USA, as well as various EU actors.
Russia reacted by "annexing" Crimea – a large majority of whose people had voted for Yanukovich, thereby safeguarding its access
to its only warm water port. Not a shot was fired there, but it was very different in East Ukraine (Donbass), where people -of Russian
origin- also didn't want to be subjected to a new regime under Nuland's puppet Yatsenyuk -and later Poroshenko. They started a civil
war which continues to this day.
It was in that heated political climate that the MH17 came down, killing all its 298 passengers, 196 of whom had the Dutch nationality.
3 weeks later, on August 8, a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) was formed, which was to be led by Holland, and to also include representatives
from Australia, Belgium and Ukraine. Which is odd, since at that time, Ukraine certainly was a potential perpetrator of the downing.
Malaysia joined only in December, allegedly because only then did it finally agree to allow Ukraine, a nation that was a suspect,
a veto over any conclusions that the team would publish. Malaysia had already been handed the black boxes by pro-Russian rebels in
the area, and passed them on to the team in August. Summarized, the way the JIT was formed was highly curious . The countries even
signed a secret agreement.
Immediately after the crash, people like then-US VP Joe Biden, as well as Frans Timmermans, then-Dutch Foreign Minister and
today candidate for the EU top job, pointed the finger at Russia as the party responsible for shooting down the plane. Also curious,
since there had been no investigation and the plane crashed in a civil war zone where access was almost impossible. There was talk
at the time of the US having satellite images, but none have ever been produced.
In that atmosphere, the JIT yesterday, June 19 2019, held another press conference, in which it accused four men, three from
Russia and one from Ukraine, of being "involved" in shooting down the plane. But again, almost 5 years after the incident, the team
produced no evidence for its accusations, saying it will only be presented 9 months from now when a trial will start in the Netherlands.
It also again accused Russia of refusing to cooperate, though Russia has offered its help ever since the MH17 came down. It's
just not the help the people want who have accused the Russians since before there was any hint of evidence it was involved. And
there still is no evidence. Russia has filed long and detailed reports on the incident despite being ignored, but these reports have
been ignored.
The trial will take place starting March 9 2020 without the accused, since Russia doesn't extradite its citizens, and neither
does Ukraine. Moreover, the one Ukrainian who is accused is thought to be in the Donbass, where the government has no access.
So this will be a show trial. And one must wonder why it is staged. What's the use of a trial where defendants don't defend themselves?
Sure, the official line is they would love to have the men provide a defense, but that smells a bit too much like what has happened
to Julian Assange. What are the odds of a fair trial when so many conclusions have been drawn at such early times?
There is not a soul in Europe west of the Russian border who doesn't believe the Russians did it. The media take care of that.
Nor is there in the US. But the Malaysian PM himself yesterday, again, said the team has proven nothing, and only provided hearsay.
I kid you not, I read a piece on the BBC today that asked if the 93-year-old who lost 43 of his countrymen only said that because
he wanted to sell palm oil to Russia.
And in the meantime, the evidence is not there, and won't be for another 9 months, if ever, and the EU today added another year
to its Russia sanctions over Crimea, and 4 men can deny their involvement all they want, but they can make their case only in March
2020, and only at a show trial, with international search warrants hanging over their heads.
The four men in question, by the way, are not accused of firing the BUK missile that supposedly downed the MH17. They are only
accused of facilitating the transport of the missile and launcher from Russia to Ukraine -and back. The JIT Ukrainian team bases
the entire story of that transport on serial numbers it says it has found.
On September 17 2018, the Russian Ministry of Defense in a YouTube response to a May 24 2018 JIT exhibition, said it had tracked
down those serial numbers, 8868720, and 1318869032, and 9M38, and said both the launcher and missile corresponding to the numbers
were purchased by Ukraine from Russia as far back as 1986, transferred there, and had never left the country since.
I get that information from a lengthy, deep-digging and highly recommended essay by Eric Zuesse, from December 2018,
MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine's
Guilt Now Proven , which I've been reading the past few days, in which Eric says:
" if the JIT's supplied evidence is authentic -- which the Ukrainian team asserts it to be -- then it outright convicts
Ukraine. This is an evidentiary checkmate, against the Ukrainian side."
Zuesse also details, in that article, contentions from multiple sources that, while the MH17 may have been hit with a BUK
missile, it certainly wasn't the only thing that hit it. There was at least one fighter jet seen close to the plane before it came
down, as multiple eye-witness reports claim, and it is alleged that they fired on the cockpit for sure and perhaps other parts of
the plane. It is an excellent article that is very well researched and chock-full of links to prove its points.
There are many things wrong with the MH17 investigation. Having the PM of one of your member investigative countries complain
that after 5 years you produce only hearsay and no evidence may be the least of the worries. The Netherlands, as main victim, leading
the investigation, is strange. How neutral could they be? Their Foreign Minister blamed Russia way before any investigating was done.
And Holland was a main sponsor in the "Euromaidan revolution", i.e. the ousting of an elected president.
Still, Ukraine's position in all this must be the biggest warning sign. They stood a lot to gain from committing atrocities
and then blaming Russia for them. Plus, Yatsenyuk and Nuland and the US and the EU were mightily angry that Russia had outsmarted
them all over Crimea.
But instead of keeping Ukraine out of the investigation, they became a major contributor, and were even given veto rights on anything
that came out of it, as far as we know the only party with such rights. If you present a crime novel or movie with ingredients like
that, nobody would believe you. Such things don't happen in real life.
Malaysia has had combative relations Israel for decades. Mossad is the most likely culprit in the shoot down of MH-17. That's
how Israelis work. You don't do what they tell you to do, they stage a mass-shooting or a bombing....... or shoot down a plane
full of innocent civilians. No cost is too great for the chosenites.
" By Way of Deception Thou Shalt Do War" ...... pretty much all you need to know.
The investigation is much like that mock-up of the downed craft - 40 percent missing and 90 percent empty. What evidence there
is has been 'filtered' through Kyiv or 'created' by Bellingcat. The rest is the stuff of news conferences.
The Malaysians - who should have had a leading role in the investigation - have been relegated to subservience, even treating
their dead according to strictures laid down by 'the investigation' - ie no autopsies of the cabin crew. They, too, have raised
the complaint of politics getting in the way of finding the truth.
I would hope the upcoming trial is held in an open, preferrably international, venue where the 'evidence' will be tested instead
of being merely 'read into the court record'. If Russia-which has the most to lose - has anything to do with that - three Russian
citizens gave been charged - it will be.
The Dutch government went in full MH17 cover-up mode. The Dutch minister of justice even declared that publicly disagreeing
with the JIT MH17 report equals with undermining the democratic order of the country. But the JIT MH17 report is an easy to debunk
farce.
A jet fighter approached MH17 from the right side of MH17, firing for some secs (at 25 rounds/sec) at the cockpit then crossing
the MH17 track, approaching from the left side and firing again at the cockpit.
The publically available pictures of the MH17 left side cockpit wall show the effects of the powerful 30mm Grazyev-Shipunov
aircraft guns and the formidable kinetic energy of the bullets. Such bullets flew through the B777 airframe and exited through
the other side piercing everything in the way. The gun barrels must be replaced each time after firing 2000 rounds!!!
In the MH17 cockpit wall there are holes showing bullets flying into it from both directions, a feat never ever demonstrated
by one single warhead explosion because all shrapnels start flying from one point.
The attack clearly started by eliminating the pilots, so there was no Mayday call from MH17 or other distress signals. When
such a large B777 aiframe is hit by a misslie, it still continues to fly for some minutes and the pilots could eventually manage
to report the attack (by a jet fighter). The planners of this attack knew this stuff and prevented the pilots from sending emergency
calls by killing them first. Thereafter the jet fighter launched an air-to-air missile. All anti-air missiles aim not at the cockpit
(as JIT fraudulently reports about the BUK) but at the middle of the fuselage where they explode a few meters from the target.
This jet fighter air-to-air missile, launched after taking down the pilots, finished MH17.
The DSB / JIT MH17 BUK theory is a complete lie, clearly politically motivated and quite easy to debunk.
The NATO and EU expansion hit a snag in 2014 when Donbass rose up against the coup installed government in Kiev. A false flag
to blame the rebels was badly needed. How many innocents were to perish was nobody's concern when the attack on MH17 was planned.
Now it's all about the cover-up: JIT and their governments, Bellingcat, main stream media, all are tuned to hide the truth.
Next to enter the game is the Dutch "judiciary", an incredibly corrupt structure, especially in the Netherlands.
" There is not a soul in Europe west of the Russian border who doesn't believe the Russians did it. "
Not true, I live in a country next to Russia and I don't believe that Russians did it. Mainly because at the time I have read
what Russians have to say about it and looked at the presented evidence. Besides even some US based websites that are more independent
confirmed most of what Russkies had to say.
So I exclude that Russians did have a hand in that tragedy.
But on another hand I accuse Russians to at least have a knowledge and some of their proven beyond doubt actions points to
their guilt or co-guilt in downing Polish presidential plane at Smolensk few years ago. In that catastrophe entire Polish political
elite perished and it is beyond doubt that it was either sabotage or plane was shot down as parts of the plane fell on the ground
well before it hit anything on land. There were many people in Poland at that time that could do it and did have compelling motive
to do it but actions of Russian ground crew at the airport are highly suspicious as well. At a minimum they knew and aided whoever
was responsible for it and it definitely pilot mistake has to be excluded. Anyway Russians till today do not want to release wreck
of the plane and people who ruled Poland at the time were close to Russian regime.
...and most of us here at ZH regard any "official" story with suspicion. If it's a matter involving geopolitics, especially
Russia, it's assumed to be ******** until proven otherwise. Unpatriotic? The ones who have betrayed the US are the ones who have
dishonored by their actions and lies.
Obammy and his merry band of neocunts ordered that plane shot out of the sky to justify sanctions on Russia. This is certainly
one case where red/blue team were on the same team.
Hromadske TV news channel was set up in the Ukraine in 2013 immediately prior to the Euromaidan overthrow of the Ukraine government.
That TV news channel played an important role in the Euromaidan. The biggest funder of Hromadske TV was The Netherlands.
Thanks for the links. The Netherlands have done a disservice to themselves - the Russians, although not vindictive, do not
forget anything and especially do not forgive. On the part of the Dutch, it was extremely stupid. Well, it is clear they really
wanted to return their gold reserves from the United States.
Israeli crash plane carried sarin chemical - Israel has a private airfield in the Netherlands - not subject to Dutch scrutiny
- Jews OWN Netherlands - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/184288.stm
- ancient 1998 BBC article - Israeli cargo plane crashes into Amsterdam neighborhood -
"The state-run Israeli airline, El Al, has confirmed that an El Al cargo plane which crashed into a block of flats in Amsterdam
in 1992 was carrying a chemical used to produce the nerve gas sarin.... Up to 300 people are believed to be suffering from
the effects Since the crash, six years ago, many residents near the site of the crash have complained of mysterious illnesses.
A report published on Wednesday by the Dutch health ministry showed that local doctors believed up to 300 residents could be
suffering from effects caused by the accident. They range from depression and nervousness to fatigue and listlessness. Cargo
was heading to Israeli plant"
Even the Malaysians have come out and called this thing rigged. The West has its head buried up its own *** with short sighted
Russophobia. Its sad to see the Dutch being the errand boys of the evil empire on this one.
How does Russia stand to gain from shooting down an airliner? Crickets. They don't say. What a bunch of ******* imbeciles.
The pathological obsession with pinning it on the Russkies is evident.
Malaysia should consider recalling all the evidence back and restarting the investigation by an undisclosed independent party.
Without the truth, there will be no closure for the victims' families.
These two events happened during the former prime minister's term. He was compromised because he used the western banking system
for his corruption (1MDB scandal). By doing that, they owned him, and he couldn't do what's right for the nation/people.
Here's a thought: Russia doesn't behave like a ******* ****** hence not much to criticize. The ones making dumb mistakes get
criticized and they happen to be running the West at the moment.
Cuz Russia is not the country that meddles in most countries elections in the world - not Russia. What country has military
bases in most countries of the world - not Russia. What country has been effecting Regime Change in many, many countries around
the world for the last 50 years - not Russia. Kinda hard to write a lot about Russia when some other country is hogging
the corruption.
Fed-up with being Sick and Tired , 3 hours ago
link
" There is not a soul in Europe west of the Russian border who doesn't believe the Russians did it. " Why not simply
use this phrase: "Everyone has been convinced, through propaganda, that Russia did it."
A stellar example of International Rule of Law in action. Something the Chinese will be all too happy to emulate. Everything is done to manipulate the dumb sheeple. Hypocrisy Unlimited
John Helmer, the only independent Western journalist in Moscow, has always had the best write ups about MH-17 and the travesty
of the truth that this fake investigation is all about. And the scam of an inquest in Victoria, Australia.
MH17 PROSECUTION -- THE DUTCH FIRE THEIR BIG GUNS, THE SUBJUNCTIVE AND CONDITIONAL TENSES, PLUS UKRAINIAN SECRET SERVICE TAPES
MH17 shot down by the Ukraine, a major false flag. But it seems for neocons no amount of murder is too much for their false flags. It is a total ******* joke to think Russia in any way could benefit from shooting down a plane like that, for any reason.
1. In 2001, one month after 9/11 Ukraine shot down a Russian airliner (Siberian airlines flight 1812) and admitted it. (operator
error of the Buk system.)
"... The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US strategy for decades. ..."
"... By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction to US foreign policy. ..."
"... Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the Ukraine, and in Syria. ..."
"... This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons. ..."
"... The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis, their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who needs enemies. ..."
"... The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations goes back to that criminal act. ..."
The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US
strategy for decades.
... ... ...
...if war is the endgame of their escalation, what is the endgame of their war? Dominance --
perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States. That is
and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a Democrat, or a
reality-TV star has occupied the White House. America has, of course, often ensured this
domination by supporting friendly dictatorships.
But there is also a liberal version of the strategy. Liberal hegemony, or primacy, dictates
that the United States has the moral obligation and the strategic imperative to transform
anti–status quo non-democracies into liberal (pliant) democracies. According to this
grand strategy, the existence of such non-democracies is a threat to the United States and its
hegemony.
America cannot coexist with them but must ultimately transform them. Military force is
instrumental to this endeavor. As Max Boot wrote back in 2003, the pillars of liberal hegemony
must be spread and sustained " at gunpoint if need
be ."
While some advocates of liberal hegemony object to the more militaristic interpretation
preferred by neoconservatives, the difference between liberal interventionism and
neoconservatism is more a matter of nuance than core belief.
Neither can provide a solution to Washington's endless wars, because both operate within the
paradigm of primacy, which itself is a root cause of the country's perpetual conflicts. As long
as that paradigm remains the guiding principle of foreign policy, hawks like John Bolton, Tom
Cotton, and Lindsey Graham -- and their Democratic fellow travelers, too -- will continue to
steer America's engagement with the world, as it is their outlook that is compatible with
primacy, not that of those on the progressive left or the libertarian right, who have advocated
non-interventionism or negotiated settlements with those who challenge Pax Americana.
This is why the cards were stacked against the survival of the Iran nuclear deal even if
Trump had not been elected. By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like
Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American
hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony
in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction
to US foreign policy.
This contradiction has been particularly visible among Democrats who oppose Trump's Iran
policy but who still cannot bring themselves to break with our seemingly endless confrontation
with Iran. As long as such Democrats allow the debate to be defined by the diktat of US
primacy, they will always be on the defensive, and their long-term impact on US-Iran relations
will be marginal.
After all, the strategy of US primacy in the Middle East demands Iran's defeat...
Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that
goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and
Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the
Ukraine, and in Syria.
Liberals have to stop talking about "bad actors" (whenever they are
linked with competing powers, e.g. Iran, N.Korea, etc.) but welcome them as "allies" when
they are our faithful vassals (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.). Unfortunately, Obama
appeared to understand this with respect to Iran, but totally ignored it with respect to the
rest of the world.
Victor Sciamarelli says: June 21, 2019 at 1:57 pm
I completely agree with Trita Parsi's succinct description of the problem as, "Dominance
-- perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States.
That is and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a
Democrat, or a reality-TV star has occupied the White House." However, why not offer
alternative policies for debate?
Consider, for example, the idea of a "balance of power." It was for the same reason that the
British fought Napoleon, the Crimean War, entered the first world war, and also why they were
constantly engaged in diplomatic agreements in Europe. British policy demanded that they
prevent the rise of a hegemon on the continent.
Napoleon was never a threat to the English mainland and neither were the Germans in 1914.
Yet, they fought both because preventing a hegemon and maintaining a balance of power
pre-empted other considerations.
I would suggest that regardless of events since 1918 such as: the decline of the British
empire, Versailles, the world wide economic depression, the rise of fascism, the reaction to
communism, or the rise of a non-European super power like the US, thinking about a modern, up
to date form of the balance of power is useful.
Furthermore, we need an alternative policy because hegemony fails the world and the American
people, and the world faces two existential threats: climate change and nuclear war.
Moreover, the US has been a superpower for so long that nobody remembers what it is like not
to be a superpower. In addition, American elites seem unwilling or unable to grasp the real
limits of military power.
In a world where the five permanent members of the UN security council are nuclear powers,
and nuclear weapons are held by smaller nations, the major power centers of the world:
Europe, Russia, China, and the US, have no choice but to cooperate with each other and with
the countries of the ME.
The ME is a focal point for establishing cooperation because the world needs energy and the
ME needs stability and development, but it requires leadership and motive.
This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top
dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's
environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and
unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global
problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Pauline Hartwig says: June 21, 2019 at 1:38 pm
The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis,
their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who
needs enemies.
Gene Bell-Villada says: June 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm
The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing
Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations
goes back to that
criminal act.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called on Washington to weigh the possible
consequences of conflict with Iran and said a report in the New York Times showed the situation
was extremely dangerous.
U.S. President Donald Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for the
downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, but called off the attacks at the last minute, the report
said.
"... The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US strategy for decades. ..."
"... By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction to US foreign policy. ..."
"... Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the Ukraine, and in Syria. ..."
"... This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons. ..."
"... The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis, their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who needs enemies. ..."
"... The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations goes back to that criminal act. ..."
The real goal is domination of the Middle East -- and that's been a bipartisan US
strategy for decades.
... ... ...
...if war is the endgame of their escalation, what is the endgame of their war? Dominance --
perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States. That is
and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a Democrat, or a
reality-TV star has occupied the White House. America has, of course, often ensured this
domination by supporting friendly dictatorships.
But there is also a liberal version of the strategy. Liberal hegemony, or primacy, dictates
that the United States has the moral obligation and the strategic imperative to transform
anti–status quo non-democracies into liberal (pliant) democracies. According to this
grand strategy, the existence of such non-democracies is a threat to the United States and its
hegemony.
America cannot coexist with them but must ultimately transform them. Military force is
instrumental to this endeavor. As Max Boot wrote back in 2003, the pillars of liberal hegemony
must be spread and sustained " at gunpoint if need
be ."
While some advocates of liberal hegemony object to the more militaristic interpretation
preferred by neoconservatives, the difference between liberal interventionism and
neoconservatism is more a matter of nuance than core belief.
Neither can provide a solution to Washington's endless wars, because both operate within the
paradigm of primacy, which itself is a root cause of the country's perpetual conflicts. As long
as that paradigm remains the guiding principle of foreign policy, hawks like John Bolton, Tom
Cotton, and Lindsey Graham -- and their Democratic fellow travelers, too -- will continue to
steer America's engagement with the world, as it is their outlook that is compatible with
primacy, not that of those on the progressive left or the libertarian right, who have advocated
non-interventionism or negotiated settlements with those who challenge Pax Americana.
This is why the cards were stacked against the survival of the Iran nuclear deal even if
Trump had not been elected. By striking a compromise with a defiant non-democracy like
Iran, which for the past 40 years has defined itself as the foremost opponent of American
hegemony (liberal or otherwise), while signaling a desire to slowly dismantle American hegemony
in the Middle East (in order to pivot to Asia), Obama introduced an unsustainable contradiction
to US foreign policy.
This contradiction has been particularly visible among Democrats who oppose Trump's Iran
policy but who still cannot bring themselves to break with our seemingly endless confrontation
with Iran. As long as such Democrats allow the debate to be defined by the diktat of US
primacy, they will always be on the defensive, and their long-term impact on US-Iran relations
will be marginal.
After all, the strategy of US primacy in the Middle East demands Iran's defeat...
Excellent article, because it clearly exposes the central isssue - US hegemony. And that
goes has implications way beyond Iran, particularly with respect to relations with China and
Russia. Very similar geopolitical games are playing out in the South China Sea, around the
Ukraine, and in Syria.
Liberals have to stop talking about "bad actors" (whenever they are
linked with competing powers, e.g. Iran, N.Korea, etc.) but welcome them as "allies" when
they are our faithful vassals (e.g. Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, etc.). Unfortunately, Obama
appeared to understand this with respect to Iran, but totally ignored it with respect to the
rest of the world.
Victor Sciamarelli says: June 21, 2019 at 1:57 pm
I completely agree with Trita Parsi's succinct description of the problem as, "Dominance
-- perpetual dominance of the Middle East (and the globe as a whole) by the United States.
That is and has been Washington's grand strategy, regardless of whether a Republican, a
Democrat, or a reality-TV star has occupied the White House." However, why not offer
alternative policies for debate?
Consider, for example, the idea of a "balance of power." It was for the same reason that the
British fought Napoleon, the Crimean War, entered the first world war, and also why they were
constantly engaged in diplomatic agreements in Europe. British policy demanded that they
prevent the rise of a hegemon on the continent.
Napoleon was never a threat to the English mainland and neither were the Germans in 1914.
Yet, they fought both because preventing a hegemon and maintaining a balance of power
pre-empted other considerations.
I would suggest that regardless of events since 1918 such as: the decline of the British
empire, Versailles, the world wide economic depression, the rise of fascism, the reaction to
communism, or the rise of a non-European super power like the US, thinking about a modern, up
to date form of the balance of power is useful.
Furthermore, we need an alternative policy because hegemony fails the world and the American
people, and the world faces two existential threats: climate change and nuclear war.
Moreover, the US has been a superpower for so long that nobody remembers what it is like not
to be a superpower. In addition, American elites seem unwilling or unable to grasp the real
limits of military power.
In a world where the five permanent members of the UN security council are nuclear powers,
and nuclear weapons are held by smaller nations, the major power centers of the world:
Europe, Russia, China, and the US, have no choice but to cooperate with each other and with
the countries of the ME.
The ME is a focal point for establishing cooperation because the world needs energy and the
ME needs stability and development, but it requires leadership and motive.
This is not 1950 when the world economy was in collapse and the US was overwhelmingly the top
dog. Other countries are nearly equal to the US. Hegemony is unsustainable in today's
environment and one solution is a cooperative balance of power employing diplomacy, and
unprecedented cooperation on questions of energy and security in order to solve global
problems like climate change and the elimination of nuclear weapons.
Pauline Hartwig says: June 21, 2019 at 1:38 pm
The new world order - as this 'confrontation' suggests, the USA, supported by the Saudis,
their compatriots, and Israel. All renowned 'friends' of the USA. With friends like these who
needs enemies.
Gene Bell-Villada says: June 21, 2019 at 12:40 pm
The "confrontation" goes way back to 1953, when the CIA overthrew Mohammed Mossadegh (for his "sin" of nationalizing
Iranian oil) and labelled him a Communist. Everything that is adversarial in US-Iranian relations
goes back to that
criminal act.
Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov called on Washington to weigh the possible
consequences of conflict with Iran and said a report in the New York Times showed the situation
was extremely dangerous.
U.S. President Donald Trump approved military strikes against Iran in retaliation for the
downing of a U.S. surveillance drone, but called off the attacks at the last minute, the report
said.
The question about the causes of the collapse and destruction of the Soviet Union – is not idle. It does not lose its relevance
today, 22 years after occurred the death of the Soviet Union . Why? because some on the basis of this event concluded that, say,
the capitalist model of the economy more competitive, more efficient and has no alternatives. American political scientist
Francis Fukuyama after the collapse of the Soviet Union even hastened to declare that it was the "End of history": humanity has reached the
highest and last stage of its development in the form of a universal, global capitalism. The relevance of studying the shadow economy,
ssco opinion of this kind of political scientists, sociologists and economists, discussing the socialist economic model does not
deserve attention.
Better to focus on improving the capitalist model of the economy, i. E. A model that targets all members of society to the enrichment,
and a means of enrichment (profit) is the exploitation of one person by another. However, there are such "Natural" attributes of
the capitalist model of social and income inequality, competition, cyclical crises, bankruptcies, unemployment and the like. All
proposed improvements are aimed only at mitigating the inhuman consequences of capitalism that is reminiscent of utopian attempts
to limit the appetite of a wolf devouring a sheep. We proceed from the fact that the key socio-economic characteristics of the socialist
model are welfare for all members of society (goal), public ownership of the means of production (the main means), income generation
solely for labor, planned nature of the economy, centralization of management, command positions of the state in the economy, the
social consumption funds, the limited nature of commodity-money relations and so on. While this refers to the well-being not only
in the form of products and services that are vital (biological) needs of the person.
This would also include public safety and defense, education, culture, conditions of work and rest. Of course, socialism – not
only the economy and social relations. It also implies a certain type of political power, ideology, a high level of spiritually-moral
development of society and another. High moral and spiritual requests should assume that there are higher goals in relation to socio-economic
objectives.
But let's focus now is on the socio-economic aspect of the socialist model. So the erosion of the socialist model began long before
the tragic events of december 1991, when it signed the infamous agreement on the division of the ussr in the bialowieza forest. It
was already the final act of the political order. It is not only the date of death of the ussr, and date of full legalization of
a new socio-economic model, which is called "Capitalism". However, implicitly capitalism germinated in the depths of soviet society
for nearly three decades.
The soviet economy de facto has acquired the traits of a mixed. It combined socialist and capitalist structures. However, some
foreign researchers and politicians said that de facto in the Soviet Union there was a complete restoration of capitalism in the
1960-ies – 1970-ies. The restoration of capitalism was linked to the emergence and development in the bowels of the ussr the so-called
shadow or "Second" economy.
In particular, in the early 1960-ies member of the german communist party willy dickhut began publishing their articles, which
stated that since coming to power in our country n. With. Khrushchev happened (not started, but it happened!) the restoration of
capitalism in the ussr. The shadow economy functioned on the principles different from the socialist. Anyway, she was tied to corruption,
embezzlement of state property, receipt of unearned income, in violation of the laws (or use of "Holes" in the legislation). Not
to be confused with the shadow economy "Informal" economy, which is not contrary to the laws and principles of the socialist system,
but complemented the economy "Official".
First of all, this self-employment – for example, the work of the farmer on the plot or the citizen in his summer cottage. And
in the best of times (under stalin) widely developed the so-called fishing cooperation, which was occupied by production of consumer
goods and services. In the Soviet Union state and party authorities chose to ignore the phenomenon of the shadow economy. No, of
course, the police had uncovered and suppressed various operations in the sphere of the shadow economy. But the leaders of the ussr,
commenting on this kind of history, fobbed off with phrases such as "Exception", "Some shortcomings", "Defects", "Bugs" and the like.
For example, in the early 1960-ies of the then first deputy of the ussr council of ministers anastas mikoyan has identified black
market in the Soviet Union as "A handful of some dirty foam appearing on the surface of our society. "The shadow economy of the ussr:
acincinnati some serious research shadow ("Second") economy in the ussr was conducted until the late 1980-ies. Abroad, such studies
came first. First of all we should mention the work of american sociologist gregory grossman (university of california), which was
called "Destructive independence. The historical role of genuine trends in soviet society".
She became widely known after was published in 1988 in the book "The light at the end of the tunnel" (university of berkeley,
edited by stephen f. Cohen). However, the first article of grossman on this topic appeared in 1977 and was called "The second economy
in the ussr (journal problems of communism, september-october 1977). You can also mention the book emigrated to the United States
, the soviet lawyer konstantin simis "Corruption in the Soviet Union – the secret underground world of soviet capitalism", published
in 1982. The author in the 1970-ies is closely in contact with some shady businessman, a lawyer which he performed at the trials.
However, quantitative assessments of shadow ("Second") economy k. Simes does not. Later appeared the work of american sociologists
and economists of Russian origin Vladimir tremlia and michael alexeev. Since 1985, gregory grossman and Vladimir treml produce periodic
collections of the "Second economy" of the ussr. Releases continued until 1993, only 51 were published a study involving 26 authors.
Many studies represented surveys of families of immigrants from the Soviet Union (a total of 1061 family). To studies have also
used surveys of emigrants from other socialist countries, the official statistics of the ussr, publications in mass media and scientific
journals of the Soviet Union . Despite the differences in some quantitative estimates of the individual authors, these differences
were not fundamental. The differences arose due to the fact that some authors considered "Informal economy", the other – the shadow
economy; however, their definitions of both economies could not match. Here are some results of these studies. 1.
In 1979 the illicit manufacture of wine, beer and other alcoholic beverages, as well as speculative resale of alcoholic beverages
produced in the "First economy", provided the income, equal to 2. 2% of gnp (gross national product). 2. In the late 1970-ies in
the ussr was flourishing black market gasoline. From 33 to 65% of purchases of gasoline in urban areas of the country, individual
owners of cars had petrol sold by drivers of public enterprises and organizations (gasoline were sold at a price below the state).
3. In the soviet hairdresser 'left' incomes exceeded the amounts that customers have paid through cash.
This is just one example of what some state-owned enterprises de facto belonged to the "Second" economy. 4. In 1974 the share
of employment in private and home gardens accounted for almost a third of the total working time in agriculture. And this was almost
10% of the total working time in the soviet economy. 5. In the 1970-ies, about a quarter of agricultural products produced on private
plots, much of it was directed at kolkhoz markets. 6.
In the late 1970's, around 30% of all income of the urban population was obtained through various types of private activity –
both legal and illegal. 7. By the end of 1970-ies the proportion of people employed in the "Second economy", reached 10-12% of the
total workforce in the ussr. At the end of 1980-ies there appeared a number of works on the shadow and "Second" economy in the ussr.
First and foremost is the publication of the soviet economist tatyana results and director of the research institute of the state
planning commission valery rutgajzer. Here is the data from the t.
The results of the "Shadow economy of the ussr". The annual value of illegally produced goods and services in the early 1960-ies
amounted to about 5 billion rubles, and in the end of 1980-ies was already reached 90 billion rubles. At current prices, the gnp
of the ussr was (in billions of rubles): in 1960 – 195; in 1990, 701. Thus, the economy of the ussr for thirty years has increased
3. 6 times, and the shadow economy – 14 times.
If in 1960 the shadow economy relative to official gdp was 3. 4%, while by 1988 this figure rose to 20%. However, in 1990 it was
equal to 12. 5%. This decline was due to changes in soviet legislation, which transferred to discharge a legal a range of economic
activities, which were previously considered illegal. The number of employed in the shadow economy, estimated to be the results,
in the beginning of 1960-ies was 6 million people, and in 1974 their number increased to 17-20 million people (6-7% of the population).
In 1989, the such shadow was already 30 million people, or 12% of the population of the ussr. The threats and consequences of the
development of the shadow economy in sssri american and soviet researchers pay attention to some features of the shadow economy and
its impact on the overall situation in the Soviet Union .
Occasionally, a sharp question found a way through. About three hours in, one young man raised the issue of inflated military spending. "Who are you preparing us for war against?" he asked. The calibrated answer mixed belligerence with fiscal caution. Russian remained committed to nuclear parity, Mr Putin said, but it would do so with falling budgets.
Notable quotes:
"... Mr Putin's other rare forays into foreign policy centered on his traditional adversary, the United States. Washington was at the forefront of disrupting the world order and fanning tensions with Iran, he said. The prospect of armed conflict with Tehran was, he said, a "catastrophe" waiting to happen and risked an unpredictable "spike in violence". ..."
"... "Iran is a Shiite nation ready to defend their country to the hilt," he said. "It's very difficult to assess what will happen if military forces are engaged." ..."
Wanting peace meant preparing for war, he added, saying:
"Whoever doesn't want to feed his own army will end up feeding
someone else's."
Mr Putin's other rare forays into foreign policy centered on
his traditional adversary, the United States. Washington was at
the forefront of disrupting the world order and fanning tensions
with Iran, he said. The prospect of armed conflict with Tehran
was, he said, a "catastrophe" waiting to happen and risked an
unpredictable "spike in violence".
"Iran is a Shiite nation ready to defend their country to
the hilt," he said. "It's very difficult to assess what will
happen if military forces are engaged."
The US will provide Ukraine with $250 million worth of military equipment, training and
support, the Pentagon announced, saying Ukraine's Navy and marines would be among the
beneficiaries.
The Ukrainian military will get sniper rifles, grenade launchers, counter-battery radar
systems, night vision equipment and communication devices, the Pentagon statement said...
The statement said the package will bring total US security assistance to Ukraine to $1.5
billion since 2014, when a US-backed coup in Kiev ousted Ukraine's elected government.
The US campaign for a war against Iraq in 2003 serves as a cautionary tale against
saber-rattling and finger-pointing amid current tensions in the Persian Gulf, the Kremlin's
spokesperson has said.
"We didn't forget the vials with white powder. We remember and, therefore, have learnt
to show restraint in our assessments,"
Dmitry Peskov said on a TV show aired on 'Rossiya 1' channel on Sunday...
The Kremlin's spokesperson stated that no sufficient proof has yet been presented to
blame anyone. Jumping to conclusions and making hasty decisions could lead to dire
consequences, he said.
What happened is by-and-large known now and the conclusions already were made: instead of
the attempt to find the real culprits, West is engaged in politicized shamanism.This activily
does not represnt any intetrrest to the Russian society. . The US, the Europeans, particularly
the Netherlands, used MH17 story only as an excuse to once again poke a stick in the Russian
bear. Nothing less, nothing more. Everybody understadn tht thre real court trial is hopeless as
it is impossible to prove Russian guil based on availble evidence. But someone wants to
continue this propaganda campaign, to chew the poisoness mushroom so to speak and produce new
hallucinations. The last episode of this long-running "show" was so called "preliminary
announcement of the findings of the investigation."
Allowing Ukrainian participation is
like allowing a rabbit into the cabbage plantation Basically, for any normal person the
question of who would be most likely to shoot down MH17, long gone: it is made of the inept
Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners, who have at least one previous episode of shooting the
passenger aircraft. Remember downed Tu-154 in 2001, when a series of downright stupid human
errors lead to the rocket which failed to engage a low-flying targets captures and shooted down
a distant and high flying airliner.
Nobody checked checked that recapured occured and as the result all passenger died.
and Ukraine persistently refused to admit guilt. But at this point there were no "Maidan
Nazis" and other Post-maydan adventurists in power of the country. At this point it was
relatively "pro-Russian" president Kuchma in power. So this behaviour characterizes very well
the essence of Ukrainian "statehood": there can be no Pro-Russian government in Ukraine, only
somewhat less anti-Russian. Otherwise, the existence of this state somewhat lose its meaning.
In other words the purpose of "project Ukraine" is be ant anti-Russia dog barking at Russia's
front door, and it is desirable that Russia is paid for the barking.
For a normal person the most plausible version of "who shot down the airliner" is evident
and should be investigated to the fullest extent possible. Instead the Joint Investigation Team
(JIT) in the Netherlands was selected to have people with different ideas. In general, this is
a rather strange method of investigation to allow to participate in the investigation team the
representatives of the country, which is one of the main suspects. And the country is in any
case responsible for the accident that occurred over its territory. A country which failed to
blocked international air corridors over the combat zone, where several planes and helicopters
of the Ukranian armed forces was already actively shoot down And this country has been the fact
that comes up with "evidence" so to deflect blame from themselves. Let, in General, the rabbit
(or Ukraine) was allowed to guard the cabbage plantation.
Both Russia and Malaysia which could be countervailing force were excluded from the
investigation, as it would make harder to blame Russia for the incident.
I created you
from what was in hands at the moment The west so adamantly tried to create this political
fake, that it was incapable to do quality job with it. And why? Because it is based mainly on
"data networks", roughly and crudely "corrected" by Ukrainian "independent investigators". In
the photo these investigators anyone can enjoy online and make conclusions for themselves -- to
be Lombroso it is not necessary, there and so all is visible.
The information from another Western propaganda "investigative" outlet "Billingcat" have
even lower level of "reliability" and "impartiality". And also "radio intercepts" and
"wiretapping", were provided the same "genius intelligence" of the SBU. The real facts are
simply swept aside.
Unconvient facts that does not suit selected narrative are simply ignored. and we are
talking not about the fact that all the perpetrators are in the Donesk republic. Even if take
as at face value and assime that JIT version is correct the figures should have some
someconnection to anti-aircraft battries BUK and be trained to used them. But, it seems, JIT
picked up and charged basically people names of which were somehow leked to the West and which
are exposed in the Internet, in social networks and forums, such as the Arrows (Arrow, I.
Girkin), Gloomy (S. Dubinsky) and GURZA, who is also the Caliph (A. Pulatov), or Bat (L.
Kharchenko).
Well, those about whom the SBU bothered to created some fake "intercept conversations".
Anyone who is more or less aware of the course of events spring-summer 2014 from the national
republics, would be aware that these people are absolutely out of action in Dosetsk republic.
But as an insurance JIT mentioned other people, like BES (Bezler) and others. The enrolled in
this basically all Donetsk resistance commenders that existed at the time.
what is stragfe is that that fake interseption were only created up to the level of Surkov
and Aksenov. Bu this logic it would be instumental to concoct conversations with Shoigu,
Gerasimov and especially Putin. After all, every adept of svidomit faith believes in that in
all the political troubles of the Ukrainians and their state's are the fault, of course, Putin.
"Kremlin tyrant" constantly spoil the life of the Ukrainians, for example, he makes Ukranina
politicain to speal bnational wealth and hide money in the Western banks, to devalue the
national currentcy three times (300%) and to raise heating cost to the level whan the people
can;'t aford them, follow the destrive recommendation of the IMF and even burn the light bulbs
in the hallways.
And it is dangerous to question such a key symbol of Svidomit Faith. So it is very strange
that tthey faied to cook a conversation about how Putin orders to shoot down
MH17!
Investigators, blaming Russia, blaming Russian ait forces any conversantion now
can be faked using "deep fake" technology so thier vialue noww is questibale at best.
If additionally you remove "conversations in social networks", the originals of which no
longer exist (the service of "Vkontakte", for example, does not store logs of remote
correspondence for more than six months), and which can be editedt JIT does ot have any real
evidence.
and evidence like "the soldier talking 53-th separate anti-aircraft missile brigade with a
girl" should probably be expcluded taking into account there the name of the gil is unknown and
that that fact that converaion of genuane and not a fake is not given.
Trying to blame the Downing of MH17 equipment on the 53rd anti-aircraft missile brigade from
Kursk, they themselves have accused the Ukrainian anti-aircraft gunners. They are absolutely
correctly identified the type of the rocket which was used -- 9M38, which is obsolete and in
Russia on arms did not appear even a few years before the war, but in Ukraine such missiles
were not decomissioned.
Demonstrated JIT last spring, and fragments of the engine and nozzle 9M38 they identified
with serial numbers and symbols of objects (also allowing to define the engine and the nozzle
block, and the very missiles). Serial number in Russia was quickly determined the serial number
of most missiles, and its tail number. Passport to the nozzle block 9Д131 05 000 No.
830113 and form of the rocket engine 9Д131 factory No. 8869032 it was established that
the missile 9M38 were produced on 24 December 1986 and had a serial number 8868720. Because the
account for the movement of manufactured military products military acceptance is reflected in
the register of products that passed control of military acceptance, then you can set the date
and address of delivery.
The 9M38 missile with factory No. 8868720 in the journal acceptance made under the serial
number 74 and the missile was assigned side number 847379. In this case it is added to the
conventional number of the plant-the manufacturer of the product and the year of issue, and in
this form it is applied to the body site. That is, in this case, the room was 886847379.
In addition, the receiving magazine would be clarified and the contract number,
6ИТ-581, and where, under the order of GRAU USSR Ministry of defense were shipped
products. Under the order No. 561/4/001029 of February 28, 1987, this Suhr with tail number
886847379, was sent to in/h 20152, that is to say the 223-th separate anti-aircraft missile
brigade of the Transcarpathian MD of Terebovlya of Ternopil region of Ukraine. There were, of
course, recorded information about the date of the acceptance of these products in the in/h
20152, 19 may 1987, and the date when the manufacturer received this official confirmation on 4
June of the same year. This 223 srbr, "privatized" a nezalezhnikami, in 2000, became a regiment
with the same number. Now the regiment is stationed in Stryi in the Lviv region. The regiment
participated in the fighting in the Donbass, and in 2014 too, which is very important, was in
Donbass during the described period.
The Westen countries not not need the truth, what
the need is the pretext for the santions
logically the data about the production of the rocket should be decisive (as well as the
rest of the array of information provided by the Russian side), This is a solid evidence. which
indirectly expose the guilt of the Ukrainians.
Moreover Ukraniians refuse to provide the data means of objective control with radar as air
traffic control and the duty officers and military radar air defense RTV. Kiev refuses to
provide information about the location of the SAM "Buk-M1" on the day of the disaster -- why
would I, if the fault is not on them?
But Russia has its own data means of objective control (and in fact, given the concentration
of large groups of troops, air defense on the border was strengthened and radar was working
there a lot, and the aircraft a-50 will almost certainly at the moment is also patrolled
"preconflict" zone on our side of the border.
Russia has not yet published this information, but it can declassify it. However, in the
West again "not deemed compelling" given us information.
Assume that the intercept from the side of Russian electronic reconnaissance is also
possible not to consider, although it Ukrainian Colonel Robert Grinchuk, who commanded the
164-th radio brigade air defense openly said that in the event of unresolved technical problems
we "may down another Boeing." Theoretically it can be forged or you can declare it fake.
But the data about to whom the racket which shoot down Boeing belong it more difficult to
forge.
Where is the logic? It is Necessary, however, to say that the "independent
investigators" proded thier own version. Accring to which this rocket was shipped together to
the "Buk-M1" to Georgia shortly before the five-day war (where Ukrainian officers serviced
them), and then, they say, that rocket captured Russian.
And insidiously put obsolete and removed from service on the SAM missiles, sent to the
Donbass. But why? Is it only for the sake of "not getting caught" on the use of inauthentic
Ukraine weapons? Isn't it too difficult?
And why, given subsequent events in summer / autumn 2014? And indeed the "logic" Svidomits,
claiming that "to shoot down the airliner" Russian needed "to officially send troops to the
Donbas," is also flawed. None of this would not be necessary -- everything needed can be
shipped. Without any formal invasion.
Yes, in Georgia Russian Army was captured many trophies. But there are serious doubts that
someone would be put into service of outdated missiles from 9M38 "Buk-M1" with something as
extended operating life. Not to mention the fact that the missiles are known as kept, it is
impossible to exclude and a variety of microcracks as a result, for example, bumps or dropping
missiles in the closure height, above the legal operating rules.
Besides, there was no need for them in Russia as Russia was the modernization program of SAM
"Buk-M1" to "Buk-M1-2" with a replacement for 9M317 missile to 9M38M1. So there was no reason
fro Russia to prolong the life of the missiles. A similar undercurrent of deceit is to put the
warehouse dozens of unnecessary missiles to 7 years to shoot down one of them (completely out
periods of storage and with unpredictable results) on the adjacent territory the passenger
side. Such a version is more suitable to fiction. Trophy of the five-day war were often treated
much more carelessly and brutally -- part of the captured tanks (from for sure are more
valuable the Buk missle the reuse of the tanks is always possible to find), for example, were
simply blew up.
The same fate befell a number of other trophies that Russian army was unable or unwilling to
take.so much for the version of "the Georgian origin".
Not to mention the fact that even if we assume the participation of Russian SAM in events
specifically mid-July 2014 on the territory of Donbass (it would be wrong to suggest), then the
target identification from the SAM, based on the world's best air defense of Russia, there were
no problems. And qualification of the SAM calculations in the armed forces was and remains
high.
Ukrainians did not shot of the equipment entrusted to them -- and even now did not have
shooting practice or have then below the norms. but we are talking about 2014 when the Ukrain
arny was in complet disarray.
But does not concern someone in the West? No they preder to to shout about the lack of
democracy in Russia. With no noticeable effects -- the pressure on Russia seriously
useless.
And it is understood that the Netherlands will going to demand the extradition of the
accused (knowing that the answer will be negative), so the prospects for "the court trial"
which can determine the truth are zero, although in absentia they can condemn anyone, even
Godzilla.
But it is possible "to urge Russia to help ensure that the accused appeared before the
court" as did the state Department, or "to welcome the fact of placing the suspects" as
delivered by a talking head of NATO Secretary General Stoltenberg
also nobody said it better about the JIT investigation then the Prime Minister of Malaysia
Mahathir Mohammad.
"We are very unhappy. From the outset this investigation was politicized and was carried out
in order to find ways to accuse Russia of illegal actions", -- said the Prime Minister. He
added that investigators are still examining the case materials, said that Russia did.
"We need proof of Russian guilt in the incident. But so far there is no proof, only rumors.
It's funny: someone you can't see, shoot, and you immediately declare that you know who was
shot."
The purpose of the "investigation" is to hang the blame of three hundred corpses
and a plane to some random individuals (transferring the guilt from a sick head to healthy as
Russian saying goes).
In a pointed critique of President Trump's foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that "the American people deserve a
president who can more credibly justify war with Iran."
"What the American people need is a president who can make a much more convincing case for
going to war with Iran," said Schumer (D-NY), adding that the Trump administration's corruption
and dishonesty have "proven time and time again" that it lacks the conviction necessary to act
as an effective cheerleader for the conflict.
"Donald Trump is completely unfit to assume the mantle of telling the American people what
they need to hear in order to convince them a war with Iran is a good idea.
One of the key duties of the president is to gain the trust of the people so that they feel
comfortable going along with whatever he says. President Trump's failure to serve as a credible
advocate for this war is yet another instance in which he has disappointed not only his
colleagues in Washington, but also the entire nation."
Schumer later concluded his statement with a vow that he and his fellow Democrats will
continue working toward a more palatable case in favor of bombing Iran.
In a pointed critique of President Trump's foreign policy leadership, Senate Minority Leader
Chuck Schumer stated to members of the press Thursday that "the American people deserve a
president who can more credibly justify war with Iran."
"What the American people need is a president who can make a much more convincing case for
going to war with Iran," said Schumer (D-NY), adding that the Trump administration's corruption
and dishonesty have "proven time and time again" that it lacks the conviction necessary to act
as an effective cheerleader for the conflict.
"Donald Trump is completely unfit to assume the mantle of telling the American people what
they need to hear in order to convince them a war with Iran is a good idea.
One of the key duties of the president is to gain the trust of the people so that they feel
comfortable going along with whatever he says. President Trump's failure to serve as a credible
advocate for this war is yet another instance in which he has disappointed not only his
colleagues in Washington, but also the entire nation."
Schumer later concluded his statement with a vow that he and his fellow Democrats will
continue working toward a more palatable case in favor of bombing Iran.
"... ...What else did you expect other than the MIC/Intelligence Agencies/Pentagon/embedded war mongers handling this stuff? ..."
"... Gen. Buck Turgidson is most certainly going rogue. ..."
"... That's really the bigger story here. It has become a mainstream idea that it is a GOOD thing that an elected President is a figurehead with no real power. ..."
...That's really the bigger story here. It has become a mainstream idea that it is a GOOD thing that an elected President is
a figurehead with no real power.
Of course it's been true for a long time, but it's a fairly recent phenomenon that a large number
of Americans like it. Russiagate is another example.
Huge portions of America were cheering for the unseating of an elected President
by unelected police state apparatus because they don't like him.
Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the U.S. establishment for preventing an improvement in relations
between Moscow and Washington.
During his annual televised question-and-answer session with members of the
public, Putin was asked about the prospects for better ties if he met with President Donald Trump.
The Russian energy Ministry's department head Evgeny Grabchak, who faces U.S. sanctions, asked Putin on
air if he would "want to meet with Trump."
Putin replied that dialogue with the U.S. was "always good" adding that Russia was "ready for this
dialogue as long as our partners were too."
Putin went on: "But even if Trump wants to change anything, there are restrictions imposed by other
organs of power. There is a part of the American establishment that continues to invent fake news. We have
things to discuss with Trump in all areas, including the economy,"
Novaya Gazyeta
reported.
Good analysis, and thanks for including the drone-stalking cats photo. I only wish the
neighborhood "house cats" here would prey upon drones instead of using my tiny back yard and
its birdfeeders as their private hunting grounds.
One quibble, re: "But to blame Iran for it the U.S. will have to prove that its drone
did not enter Iranian air space."
This ought to be the case, certainly. But the bogus charges filed yesterday by the corrupt
and depraved Dutch authorities as part of the MH-17 downing cover-up is still another
reminder that authoritarian despots blithely and bumptiously run on fumes.
No one wishes more fervently than I that the multifarious Western Hegemony Big Lies kept
spinning in the air, as if juggled by a monstrous, malevolent Atlas, will ultimately be
punctured by laser-beams of truth. In the meantime, increasingly self-righteous repetitions
of the Big Lie will substitute for the required "proof".
Last year, the nation was confronted with a brief reminder of how Cold War-era nuclear panic
played out, after a state employee in Hawaii mistakenly sent out an emergency alert declaring
that a "ballistic missile threat" was "inbound." The message didn't specify what kind of
missile -- and, in fact, the United States Army Space and Missile Defense Command at two sites
in Alaska and California may have some capability to shoot down a few incoming ballistic
missiles -- but panicked Hawaii residents didn't feel protected. They reacted by careening cars
into one another on highways, pushing their children into storm drains for protection and
phoning their loved ones to say goodbye -- until a second message, 38 minutes later,
acknowledged it was an error.
Hypersonics pose a different threat from ballistic missiles, according to those who have
studied and worked on them, because they could be maneuvered in ways that confound existing
methods of defense and detection. Not to mention, unlike most ballistic missiles, they would
arrive in under 15 minutes -- less time than anyone in Hawaii or elsewhere would need to
meaningfully react. How fast is that, really? An object moving through the air produces an
audible shock wave -- a sonic boom -- when it reaches about 760 miles per hour. This speed of
sound is also called Mach 1, after the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach. When a projectile flies
faster than Mach's number, it travels at supersonic speed -- a speed faster than sound. Mach 2
is twice the speed of sound; Mach 3 is three times the speed of sound, and so on. When a
projectile reaches a speed faster than Mach 5, it's said to travel at hypersonic speed.
One of the two main hypersonic prototypes now under development in the United States is
meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20, or more than 11,400 miles per hour. This
means that when fired by the U.S. submarines or bombers stationed at Guam, they could in theory
hit China's important inland missile bases, like Delingha, in less than 15 minutes. President
Vladimir Putin has likewise claimed that one of Russia's new hypersonic missiles will travel at
Mach 10, while the other will travel at Mach 20. If true, that would mean a Russian aircraft or
ship firing one of them near Bermuda could strike the Pentagon, some 800 miles away, in five
minutes. China, meanwhile, has flight-tested its own hypersonic missiles at speeds fast enough
to reach Guam from the Chinese coastline within minutes.
One concept now being pursued by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency uses a
conventional missile launched from air platforms to loft a smaller, hypersonic glider on its
journey, even before the missile reaches its apex. The glider then flies unpowered toward its
target. The deadly projectile might ricochet downward, nose tilted up, on layers of atmosphere
-- the mesosphere, then the stratosphere and troposphere -- like an oblate stone on water, in
smaller and shallower skips, or it might be directed to pass smoothly through these layers. In
either instance, the friction of the lower atmosphere would finally slow it enough to allow a
steering system to maneuver it precisely toward its target. The weapon, known as Tactical Boost
Glide, is scheduled to be dropped from military planes during testing next year. Under an
alternative approach, a hypersonic missile would fly mostly horizontally under the power of a
"scramjet," a highly advanced, fanless engine that uses shock waves created by its speed to
compress incoming air in a short funnel and ignite it while passing by (in roughly one
two-thousandths of a second, according to some accounts). With its skin heated by friction to
as much as 5,400 degrees, its engine walls would be protected from burning up by routing the
fuel through them, an idea pioneered by the German designers of the V-2 rocket.
The unusual trajectories of these missiles would allow them to approach their targets at
roughly 12 to 50 miles above the earth's surface, in an attacker's sweet spot. That's below the
altitude at which ballistic missile interceptors -- such as the costly American Aegis
ship-based system and the Thaad ground-based system -- are now designed to typically operate,
yet above the altitude that simpler air defense missiles, like the Patriot system, can reach.
They would zoom along in the defensive void, maneuvering unpredictably, and then, in just a few
final seconds of blindingly fast, mile-per-second flight, dive and strike a target such as an
aircraft carrier from an altitude of 100,000 feet.
Officials will have trouble, moreover, predicting exactly where any strike would land.
Although the missiles' launch would probably be picked up by infrared-sensing satellites in its
first few moments of flight, Griffin says they would be roughly 10 to 20 times harder to detect
than incoming ballistic missiles as they near their targets. And during their flight, due to
their maneuverability, the perimeter of their potential landing zone could be about as big as
Rhode Island. Officials might sound a general alarm, but they'd be clueless about exactly where
the missiles were headed. "We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a
weapon against us," Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of United States Strategic Command, told the
Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2018. The Pentagon is just now studying what a
hypersonic attack might look like and imagining how a defensive system might be created; it has
no settled architecture for it, and no firm sense of the costs.
Developing these new weapons hasn't been easy. A 2012 test was terminated when the skin
peeled off a hypersonic prototype, and another self-destructed when it lost control. A third
hypersonic test vehicle was deliberately destroyed when its boosting missile failed in 2014.
Officials at Darpa acknowledge they are still struggling with the composite ceramics they need
to protect the missiles' electronics from intense heating; the Pentagon decided last July to
ladle an extra $ 34.5 million into this effort this
year.
The task of conducting realistic flight tests also poses a challenge. The military's
principal land-based site for open-air prototype flights -- a 3,200-acre site stretching across
multiple counties in New Mexico -- isn't big enough to accommodate hypersonic weapons. So fresh
testing corridors are being negotiated in Utah that will require a new regional political
agreement about the noise of trailing sonic booms. Scientists still aren't sure how to
accumulate all the data they need, given the speed of the flights. The open-air flight tests
can cost up to $100 million.
The Air Force's portion of this effort is being managed from its largest base, Eglin,
located in the Florida panhandle, under the direction of the 96 th Test Wing, whose
official slogan is "Make It Happen." But the most recent open-air hypersonic-weapon test was
completed by the Army and the Navy in October 2017, using a 36,000-pound missile to launch a
glider from a rocky beach on the western shores of Kauai, Hawaii, toward Kwajalein Atoll, 2,300
miles to the southwest. The 9 p.m. flight created a trailing sonic boom over the Pacific, which
was expected to top out at an estimated 175 decibels, well above the threshold at which noise
causes physical pain. The effort cost $160 million, comparable to 6 percent of the total
hypersonics budget proposed for 2020.
People, however, are supposed to have brains and are expected to be cognizant of what's
happening around them and able to assess its implications on their wellbeing. Unfortunately,
this rarely is the case, which may add credence to the theory that by settling into early
agrarian communities, humans became more caring and supportive of each other, thus undermining
the successful natural selection process by retaining idiot genes!
It is not as though the concept of danger is a new phenomenon. Ever since humans got over
the fear of carnivorous beasts and learnt how to kill them, they have concentrated on killing
each other. Hegemonic tendencies have existed for thousands of years; as early as the Sumerians
and Assyrians and continued through to the colonization monsters of the past few hundred
years.
STATUS OF HEGEMONY
Hegemonies come in different sizes; small, medium and big; an amusing "pecking order" whose
interaction can be observed on the daily news broadcasts. It also comes in different styles;
softly spoken but treacherous, generous with economic assistance but containing hidden strings
to hang you, belligerent with a viscous warmongering streak and lastly, schizophrenic;
oscillating between all the previous styles. There are also the would-be-hegemons if given half
a chance.
More recently, the hegemony arena has, though knock-out matches, been narrowed down to one
grand hegemon and a couple of runners-up, and the heat is now rising as the final tournament
approaches – Let us hope it will not be too bloody and Armageddon-ish.
Despite that, many nations continue to dream of becoming hegemons. But at the same time,
they continue to concentrate on their 'white dots' and disregard the likelihood that they are
already in the crosshairs of a bigger hegemon.
They seem oblivious to the hegemonic ploys that undermine their political and economic
structures through unending sanctions, onerous trade or military treaties, contemptuous
disregard for local and international laws, negative and false news reporting, regime change
tactics, false flag incidences, scaremongering, and outright threats that are occasionally
translated into destructive military action. Like the proverbial deer, they are frozen in the
headlights of the oncoming speeding car and wait until it is too late to save themselves.
What happened in Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Lebanon, Somalia, Grenada,
Venezuela, Argentine, Brazil, Cuba, Greece, Iran, North Korea and many other places are only
the tip of the iceberg. What is likely to happen elsewhere is still being baked in the oven and
will come out once done and ready. What is surprising is that, not only were the signs written
on all the walls but, again, the victims failed to comprehend the messages and continued to
stare at their 'white dots'!
Southeast Asia, South China Sea, Ex-Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South & Central
America and Africa are all candidates for destabilization and possible splintering into smaller
pieces – especially those that exhibit economic weakness or cracks in their demographic,
ethnic, religious makeup and are rife with internal disharmony.
Even the European EU is now beginning to feel the brunt of the hegemon pressure of tariff
and sanctions threats. Japan, Mexico, India and Canada too, have just got a taste of an ear
pinching to remind them to dance to the grand hegemon's tune. Who is left? Not even
Timbuktu!
What about the runner-up hegemons? What about the smaller hegemons? Well, all hegemons have
the same strain of nasty genes. However, they are dormant and only begin to grow as their
host's power increases. This, most likely, is a genetic relic from the early human
hunters-gatherers' need for viciousness to survive. Maybe natural selection and/or wisdom will
eventually weed out those nasty genes, but don't bet your farm or country on it.
IS ALL
LOST?
Not necessarily, because all hegemons (big and small) also suffer from the same weaknesses
and dis-harmonies that beset their victims, although they cunningly keep them secret. Powerful
mass media and propaganda are used extensively to camouflage all the ills that would otherwise
stumble their seemingly confident and steady footsteps. This means that they are as also
vulnerable to the same ploys that they have repeatedly used on others.
Also, history confirms that all empires eventually collapse and disappear, regardless of how
long they last. Some lasted over a thousand years, which may sound too long, but in the modern
world of technology, digital communications, social media and financialized economies, the
average lifespan of hegemons has been drastically cut short.
Empires and hegemons generally start with a strategic vision of expansion and moderate
usurpation of other nations' resources; then, gluttony takes over at a rapidly increased
pace.
But as the world and its resources are limited, they sooner or later bump into and clash
with other hegemons; and are forced to change their tactics. As matters heat up, their tactics
not only become shorter and shorter-term, but become ad hoc not fully thought through and, even
haphazard – until they begin to shoot themselves in the foot.
This usually is an early sign of their demise (compare this to the Roman/Byzantine, Safavid
Iran and Ottoman empires and their confusion with multi-front wars – in addition to their
poor governance systems and economic mismanagement).
WHAT TO DO
In all events, we cannot wait out the hegemons to die out as the dinosaurs did; it would
take far too long.
More realistically, we can address the modern hegemonic world threat via a two-pronged
approach. The first is individual effort and the second is collective action.
Individual effort means to treat the sources of weakness and internal disharmony that make
individual countries susceptible to hegemonic ploys. This requires the recreation of the
governance systems to tackle all the maladies that drag nations down, including poor economic
policies, corruption, inequality, ineffective representative systems, etc.
In short, seal the cracks that invite enemies to destabilize a country. It is not easy but
is certainly better than being sucked dry off your freedom, resources and future.
As for collective action, this means getting together with other small and medium nations to
form groups/alliances that can stand up to hegemons and resist, at least, their economic
sanctions and threats. The Non-Aligned Movement was, and still is a good idea, but needs more
teeth. Alternatively, new and more practical types of groupings could be envisaged and created
– always conditional that no one nation, big or small, is allowed to become the group's
hegemon.
Dominoes may be flimsy and unstable, but if laid in parallel rows and columns and closely
bonded (zero-spaced), they become much more difficult to topple. So, don't be a lone domino
dumbly staring at your 'white dots'!
I don't see the cracks being filled. I certainly don't see them being filled by
government. On the local level, our county has grown form a modest system that typically ran
out of money before the year was out to a behemoth. Now the support staff outnumbers the
teachers in our schools. The sheriff's office is massive. The child services center is huge.
The salaries get better and better. The pensions get better. And, the taxes go up. The county
is feeding off the retirees that have flooded in from the North. The fun starts when the
Northern pension plans fail and the boomer die off kills the golden calf.
The the push will be to raise taxes to sustain a bloated bureacracy.
As Hegemonies expand, the costs to maintain the expansion eventually outweigh the
financial rewards (look how much has been blown on Afghanistan). This is funded by neglecting
the infrastructure and systems that made the Hegemonic entity powerful in the first
place.
Hegemonies, as they reach peak expansion find that the costs of further expansion, let
alone retaining their current Vassal entities exceeds their return on investment inflicting
deficits. They rot from within as infrastructure decays and its citizens see no benefit. When
a Hegemony needs to use as much tyranny to ensure that its vassal states and its own citizens
are compliant...... its days are numbered.
Until mankind relearns what made civilization possible (cooperation), then there's no
hope. That's why Russia is advancing the Rule of Law (harmonious cooperation), and China,
advancing OBOR (Economic liberation), in order to avoid the usual causes of conflict,
economic deprivation.
They've both been there (empires), done it (hegemony), and got bruised badly too..
It'd be very difficult to practice hegemony now, in a densely interconnected world, but
that doesn't mean nations won't possess some influence over others, influence being the key
word, like a man's girlfriend possesses influence over him, or vice versa, but raw hegemony?
Not likely..
Anyhow, what really ails humanity, is alienation from Divinity. Rich, famous, and powerful
people have been known to terminally end their mortality despite having it all..
Our mission, is to restore that connection, so we can finally wake up, and ascend to
explore, and multiply amongst the stars. But first things first, charity begins right here,
on planet home, cheers...
The coming 'paradigm shift', means the West and all its debt will metamorphize into
Oceania, continue to fake its hegemony, and fool its population into thinking that they still
are, what they once were.
Excellent article! Beautifully crafted and simple to understand. A refreshing view that,
to my knowledge, has not been used before. Most importantly, an easy method for awakening the
zombie classes.
Now we have the tool, let's begin using it. Black dots, dead ahead!
Trouble is that the alpha hegemon and the larger of the betas, all have a trove of nuclear
weapons. I don't think the Sumerians and Assyrians had anything quite like that.
When today's promoters of hope and denial finally meet up with the invincible force of
reality, sad very sad
..Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration.
Look at what we in the US have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the
right. I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.
..Trump HAS drained the swamp,,, right into his administration.
Look at what we in the US have to look forward to,,, tyrants on the left,,, tyrants on the
right. I suppose we deserve this but it doesn't do well for my blood pressure.
"... What is the significance of this story, apart from what it tells us about the graver dangers of the new US-Russian Cold War, which now includes, we are informed, a uniquely fraught "digital Cold War"? Not so long ago, mainstream liberal Democrats, and the Times itself, would have been outraged by revelations that defense and intelligence officials were making such existential policy behind the back of a president. No longer, it seems. There have been no liberal, Democratic, or for the most part any other, mainstream protests, but instead a lawyerly apologia justifying the intelligence-defense operation without the president's knowledge. ..."
"... As I have often emphasized, the long historical struggle for American-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) détente, or broad cooperation, has featured many acts of attempted sabotage on both sides, though most often by US intelligence and defense agencies. ..."
"... Now the sabotaging of détente appears be happening again. As the Times article makes clear, Washington's war party, or perhaps zealous Cold War party, referred to euphemistically by Sanger and Perlroth as "advocates of the more aggressive strategy," is on the move. ..."
"... Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit, but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world. No American president can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks. What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on Russia's electric grid -- to shock US Democrats and others out of what has been called, not unreasonably, their Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes before midnight. ..."
Occasionally, a revelatory, and profoundly alarming,
article passes almost unnoticed, even when published on the front page of The New York
Times . Such was the case with
reporting by David E. Sanger and Nicole Perlroth , bearing the Strangelovian title "U.S.
Buries Digital Land Mines to Menace Russia's Power Grid," which appeared in the print edition
on June 16. The article contained two revelations.
First, according to Sanger and Perlroth, with my ellipses duly noted, "The United States is
stepping up digital incursions into Russia's electric power grid. Advocates of the more
aggressive strategy said it was long overdue " The operation "carries significant risk of
escalating the daily digital Cold War between Washington and Moscow." Though under way at least
since 2012, "now the American strategy has shifted more toward offense with the placement of
potentially crippling malware inside the Russian system at a depth and with an aggressiveness
that had never been tried before." At this point, the Times reporters add an Orwellian
touch. The head of the U.S. Cyber Command characterizes the assault on Russia's grid, which
affects everything from the country's water supply, medical services, and transportation to
control over its nuclear weapons, as "the need to 'defend forward,'" because "they don't fear
us."
Nowhere do Sanger and Perlroth seem alarmed by the implicit risks of this "defend forward"
attack on the infrastructure of the other nuclear superpower. Indeed, they wonder "whether it
would be possible to plunge Russia into darkness." And toward the end, they quote an American
lawyer and former Obama official, whose expertise on the matter is unclear, to assure readers
sanguinely, "We might have to risk taking some broken bones of our own from a counter response.
Sometimes you have to take a bloody nose to not take a bullet in the head down the road." The
"broken bones," "bloody nose," and "bullet" are, of course, metaphorical references to the
potential consequences of nuclear war.
The second revelation comes midway in the Times story: "[President] Trump had not
been briefed in any detail about the steps to place 'implants' inside the Russian grid" because
"he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials." (Indeed, Trump issued an
angry tweet when he saw the Times report, though leaving unclear which part of it
most aroused his anger.)
What is the significance of this story, apart from what it tells us about the graver dangers
of the new US-Russian Cold War, which now includes, we are informed, a uniquely fraught
"digital Cold War"? Not so long ago, mainstream liberal Democrats, and the Times itself,
would have been outraged by revelations that defense and intelligence officials were making
such existential policy behind the back of a president. No longer, it seems. There have been no
liberal, Democratic, or for the most part any other, mainstream protests, but instead a
lawyerly apologia justifying the intelligence-defense operation without the president's
knowledge.
The political significance, however, seems clear enough. The leak to the Times and
the paper's publication of the article come in the run-up to a scheduled meeting between
President Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin at the G-20 meeting in Japan on June
28–29. Both leaders had recently expressed hope for improved US-Russian relations. On May
4, Trump again
tweeted his longstanding aspiration for a "good/great relationship with Russia"; and this
month Putin lamented that relations "
are getting worse and worse " but hoped that he and Trump could move their countries beyond
"the games played by intelligence services."
As I have often emphasized, the long historical struggle for American-Russian (Soviet and
post-Soviet) détente, or broad cooperation, has featured many acts of attempted sabotage
on both sides, though most often by US intelligence and defense agencies. Readers may recall
the Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit meeting that was to take place in Paris in 1960, but which was
aborted by the Soviet shoot-down of a US spy plane over the Soviet Union, an intrusive flight
apparently not authorized by President Eisenhower. And more recently,
the 2016 plan by then-President Obama and Putin for US-Russian cooperation in Syria, which
was aborted by a Department of Defense attack on Russian-backed Syrian troops.
Now the sabotaging of détente appears be happening again. As the Times article
makes clear, Washington's war party, or perhaps zealous Cold War party, referred to
euphemistically by Sanger and Perlroth as "advocates of the more aggressive strategy," is on
the move. Certainly, Trump has been repeatedly thwarted in his previous détente
attempts, primarily by discredited Russiagate allegations that continue to be promoted by the
war party even though they still lack any evidential basis. (It may also be recalled that his
previous summit meeting with Putin was widely and shamefully assailed as "treason" by
influential segments of the US political-media establishment.)
Détente with Russia has always been a fiercely opposed, crisis-ridden policy pursuit,
but one manifestly in the interests of the United States and the world. No American president
can achieve it without substantial bipartisan support at home, which Trump manifestly lacks.
What kind of catastrophe will it take -- in Ukraine, the Baltic region, Syria, or somewhere on
Russia's electric grid -- to shock US Democrats and others out of what has been called, not
unreasonably, their Trump Derangement Syndrome, particularly in the realm of American national
security? Meanwhile, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has recently reset its Doomsday Clock to two minutes
before midnight.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the
host of The John Batchelor Show
. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at TheNation.com . Ad Policy Stephen F. Cohen is a
professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton
University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin
& Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook
edition.
"... Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and forensically impossible. ..."
"... Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. ..."
"... "War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war," video, as well as the bipartisan ( Hillary Clinton , John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an "act of war" equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the warmongering lunatic John Bolton, calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war." ..."
"... Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy": "We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial support provided by the enemy." ..."
"... The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all. We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted. ..."
It's a relentless economic, diplomatic, and ideological war, spiced with (so far) just a
dash of military war, and the strong scent of more to come.
I mean war with Russia, of course, although Russia is the point target for a constellation
of emerging adversaries the US is desperate to entame before any one or combination of them
becomes too strong to defeat. These include countries like Iran and China, which are developing
forces capable of resisting American military aggression against their own territory and on a
regional level, and have shown quite too much uppitiness about staying in their
previously-assigned geopolitical cages.
But Russia is the only country that has put its military forces in the way of a U.S. program
of regime change -- indirectly in Ukraine, where Russia would not get out of the way, and
directly in Syria, where Russia actively got in the way. So Russia is the focus of
attack, the prime target for an exemplary comeuppance.
Is it, then, a new Cold War, even more dangerous than the old one, as Stephen F. Cohen
says ?
That terminology was apt even a few months ago, but the speed, ferocity, and
coordination of the West/NATO's reaction to the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the
Skripals, as well as the formation of a War Cabinet in Washington, indicates to me that we've
moved to another level of aggression.
It's beyond Cold. Call it the Warm War. And the temperature's rising.
The Nerve of Them
There are two underlying presumptions that, combined, make present situation more dangerous
than a Cold War.
One is the presumption of guilt -- or, more precisely, the presumption that the presumption
of Russian guilt can always be made, and made to stick in the Western mind.
The confected furor over the alleged nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals demonstrates this
dramatically.
Theresa May's immediate conclusion that the Russian government bears certain and sole
responsibility for the nerve-agent poisoning of the Skripals is logically, scientifically, and
forensically impossible.
False certainty is the ultimate fake news. It is just not true that, as she says: "There is
no alternative conclusion other than the Russian state is culpable." This falsity of this
statement has been demonstrated by a slew of sources -- including the
developers of the alleged "Novichok" agent themselves, a thorough
analysis by a former UN inspector in Iraq who worked on the destruction of chemical
weapons, establishment Western scientific outlets like New Scientist ("
Other countries could have made 'Russian' nerve agent "), and the British government's own
mealy-mouthed, effective-but-unacknowledged disavowal
of that conclusion. In its own words, The British government found: "a nerve agent or
related compound," " of a type developed by Russia." So, it's absolutely,
positively, certainly, without a doubt, Russian-government-produced "Novichok" .or something
else.
Teresa May is lying, everyone who seconds her assertion of false certainty is lying, they
all know they are lying, and the Russians know that they know they are lying. It's a
It boggles the -- or at least, my -- mind how, in the face of all this, anyone could take
seriously her ultimatum, ignoring the procedures of the
Chemical Weapons Convention , gave Russia 24 hours to "explain" -- i.e., confess and beg
forgiveness for -- this alleged crime.
Indeed, it's noteworthy that France initially, and rather sharply, refused to assume Russian
guilt, with a government spokesman saying, "We don't do fantasy politics. Once the elements are
proven, then the time will come for decisions to be made." But the whip was cracked -- and
surely not by the weak hand of Whitehall -- demanding EU/NATO unity in the condemnation of
Russia. So, in an extraordinary show of discipline that could only be ordered and orchestrated
by the imperial center, France joined the United States and 20 other countries in the largest
mass expulsion of Russian diplomats ever.
Western governments and their compliant media have mandated that Russian government guilt
for the "
first offensive use of a nerve agent " in Europe since World War II is to be taken as flat
fact. Anyone -- like Jeremy Corbyn or Craig Murray -- who
dares to interrupt the "Sentence first! Verdict afterwards!" chorus to ask for, uh, evidence,
is treated to a storm of obloquy
.
At this point, Western accusers don't seem to care how blatantly unfounded, if not
ludicrous, an accusation is. The presumption of Russian guilt, along with the shaming of anyone
who questions it, has become an unquestionable standard of Western/American political and media
discourse.
Old Cold War McCarthyism has become new Warm War fantasy politics.
Helled in Contempt
This declaration of diplomatic war over the Skripal incident is the culmination of an
ongoing drumbeat of ideological warfare, demonizing Russia and Putin personally in the most
predictable and inflammatory terms.
For the past couple of years, we've been
told by Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Marco Rubio, and
Boris Johnson that Putin is the new Hitler. That's a particularly galling analogy for the
Russians. Soviet Russia, after all, was Hitler's main enemy, that defeated the Nazi army at the
cost of 20+ million of its people -- while the British Royal Family was not
un-smitten with the charms of
Hitlerian fascism , and British footballers had a poignant moment in 1938 Berlin
saluting the Fuhre.:
"War" is what they seem to want it to be. For the past 18 to 24 months, we've also been
inundated with Morgan Freeman and Rob Reiner's ominous "We have been attacked. We are at war,"
video, as well as the bipartisan (
Hillary Clinton ,
John McCain ) insistence that alleged Russian election meddling should be considered an
"act of war"
equivalent to Pearl Harbor . Indeed, Trump's new National Security advisor, the
warmongering lunatic John Bolton,
calls it , explicitly "a casus belli , a true act of war."
Even the military is getting in on the act. The nerve-agent accusation has been followed up
by General John Nicholson, the commander of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan, accusing Russia of arming the Taliban! It's
noteworthy that this senior American military general casually refers to Russia as "the enemy":
"We've had stories written by the Taliban that have appeared in the media about financial
support provided by the enemy."
Which is strange, because, since the Taliban emerged from the American-jihadi war against
Soviet forces in Afghanistan, and the Taliban and Russia have "enduring enmity" towards each
other, as Kate Clark of the Afghanistan Analysts Network puts it . Furthermore, the sixteen-year-long
American war against the Taliban has depended on Russia allowing the U.S. to move
supplies through its territory, and being "the principal source of
fuel for the alliance's needs in Afghanistan."
So the general has to admit that this alleged Russian "destabilising activity" is a new
thing: "This activity really picked up in the last 18 to 24 months When you look at the timing
it roughly correlates to when things started to heat up in Syria. So it's interesting to note
the timing of the whole thing."
Yes, it is.
The economic war against Russian is being waged through a series of sanctions that seem
impossible to reverse, because their expressed goal is to extract confession, repentance, and
restitution for crimes ascribed to Russia that Russia has not committed, or has not been proven
to have committed, or are entirely fictional and have not been committed by anyone at all.
We will only stop taking your bank accounts and consulates and let you play games with us if
you confess and repent every crime we accuse you of. No questions permitted.
This is not a serious framework for respectful international relations between two sovereign
nations. It's downright childish. It paints everyone, including the party trying to impose it,
into an impossible corner. Is Russia ever going to abandon Crimea, confess that it shot down
the Malaysian jet, tricked us into electing Donald Trump, murdered the Skripals, is secretly
arming the Taliban, et. al .? Is the U.S. ever going to say: "Never mind"? What's the
next step? It's the predicament of the bully.
This is not, either, an approach that really seeks to address any of the "crimes" charged.
As Victoria Nuland (a Clintonite John Bolton) put it on NPR, it's about, "sending a message" to
Russia. Well, as Russia's ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov
said , with this latest mass expulsion of diplomats, the United States is, "Destroying what
little remained of US-Russian ties." He got the message.
All of this looks like a coordinated campaign that began in response to Russia's
interruption of American regime-change projects in Ukraine and especially Syria, that was
harmonized -- over the last 18 to 24 months -- with various elite and popular motifs of
discontent over the 2016 election, and that has reached a crescendo in the last few weeks with
ubiquitous and unconstrained " enemization " [1] of Russia.
It's hard to describe it as anything other than war propaganda -- manufacturing the
citizenry's consent for a military confrontation.
Destroying the possibility of normal, non-conflictual, state-to-state relations and
constituting Russia as "the enemy" is exactly what this campaign is about. That is its
"message" and its effect -- for the American people as much as for the Russia
government. The heightened danger, I think, is that Russia, which has for a long time been
reluctant to accept that America wasn't interested in "partnership", has now heard and
understood this message, while the American people have only heard but do not understand
it.
It's hard to see where this can go that doesn't involve military conflict. This is
especially the case with the appointments of Mike Pompeo, Gina Haspel, and John Bolton -- a
veritable murderers' row that many see as the core of a Trump War Cabinet. Bolton, who does not
need Senate confirmation, is a particularly dangerous fanatic, who tried to
get the Israelis to attack Iran before even they wanted to, and has
promised regime change in Iran by 2019. As mentioned, he considers that Russia has already
given him a " casus belli. " Even the staid New York Timeswarns
that, with these appointments, "the odds of taking military action will rise dramatically."
The second presumption in the American mindset today makes military confrontation more
likely than it was during the Cold War: Not only is there a presumption of guilt, there is a
presumption of weakness . The presumption of guilt is something the American imperial
managers are confident they can induce and maintain in the Western world; the presumption of
weakness is one they -- or, I fear, too many of them -- have all-too blithely
internalized.
This is an aspect of the American self-image among policymakers whose careers matured in a
post-Soviet world. During the Cold War, Americans held themselves in check by the assumption,
that, militarily, the Soviet Union was a peer adversary, a country that could and would defend
certain territories and interests against direct American military aggression -- "spheres of
interest" that should not be attacked. The fundamental antagonism was managed with grudging
mutual respect.
There was, after all, a shared recent history of alliance against fascism. And there was an
awareness that the Soviet Union, in however distorted a way, both represented the possibility
of a post-capitalist future and supported post-colonial national liberation movements, which
gave it considerable stature in the world.
American leadership might have hated the Soviet Union, but it was not contemptuous of it. No
American leader would have called the Soviet Union, as John McCain called Russia, just "a gas
station masquerading as a country." And no senior American or British leader would have told
the Soviet Union what British Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson told Russia last week: to "go
away and shut up."
This is a discourse that assumes its own righteousness, authority, and superior power, even
as it betrays its own weakness. It's the discourse of a frustrated child. Or bully. Russia
isn't shutting up and going away, and the British are not -- and know they're not -- going to
make it. But they may think the Big Daddy backing them up can and will. And daddy may think so
himself.
Like all bullies, the people enmeshed in this arrogant discourse don't seem to understand
that it is not frightening Russia. It's only insulting the country, and leading it to conclude
that there is indeed nothing remaining of productive, non-conflictual, US-Russian "partnership"
ties. The post-Skripal worldwide diplomatic expulsions, which seem deliberately and desperately
excessive, may have finally convinced Russia that there is no longer any use trying. Those who
should be frightened of this are the American people.
The enemy of my enemy is me.
The United States is only succeeding in turning itself into an enemy for Russians. Americans
would do well to understand how thoroughly their hypocritical and contemptuous stance has
alienated the Russian people and strengthened Vladimir Putin's leadership -- as many of Putin's
critics warned
them it would. The fantasy of stoking a "liberal" movement in Russia that will install some
nouveau-Yeltsin-ish figure is dissipated in the cold light of a 77% election day. Putin is
widely and firmly supported in Russia because he represents the resistance to any such
scheme.
Americans who want to understand that dynamic, and what America itself has wrought in
Russia, should heed the passion, anger, and disappointment in this statement about
Putin's election from a self-described "liberal" (using the word, I think, in the intellectual
tradition, not the American political, sense), Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT TV
(errors in translation by another person):
Essentially, the West should be horrified not because 76% of Russians voted for Putin, but
because this elections have demonstrated that 95% of Russia's population supports
conservative-patriotic, communist and nationalist ideas. That means that liberal ideas are
barely surviving among measly 5% of population.
And that's your fault, my Western friends. It was you who pushed us into "Russians never
surrender" mode
[W]ith all your injustice and cruelty, inquisitorial hypocrisy and lies you forced us to
stop respecting you. You and your so called "values."
We don't want to live like you live, anymore. For fifty years, secretly and openly, we
wanted to live like you, but not any longer.
We have no more respect for you, and for those amongst us that you support, and for all
those people who support you.
For that you only have yourself to blame.
In meantime, you've pushed us to rally around your enemy. Immediately, after you declared
him an enemy, we united around him .
It was you who imposed an opposition between patriotism and liberalism. Although, they
shouldn't be mutually exclusive notions. This false dilemma, created by you, made us to chose
patriotism.
Even though, many of us are really liberals, myself included.
Get cleaned up, now. You don't have much time left.
In fact, the whole "uprising"/color revolution strategy throughout the world is over. It's
been fatally discredited by its own purported successes. Everybody in the Middle East has seen
how that worked out for Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and the Russians have seen how it worked out
for Ukraine and for Russia
itself . In neither Russia nor Iran (nor anywhere else of importance) are the Americans,
with their sanctions and their NGOs and their
cookies ,going to stoke a popular uprising that turns a country into a fractured client of
the Washington Consensus. More fantasy politics.
The old new world Washington wants won't be born without a military midwife. The U.S. wants
a compliant Russia ( and "international community") back, and it thinks it can force it
into being.
Fear Knot
Consider this quote from
The Saker , a defense analyst who was born in Switzerland to a Russian military family,
"studied Russian and Soviet military affairs all [his] life," and lived for 20 years in the
United States. He's been one of the sharpest analysts of Russia and Syria over the last few
years. This was his take a year ago, after Trump's cruise missile attack on Syria's Al Shayrat
airfield -- another instant punishment for an absolutely, positively, proven-in-a day, chemical
crime:
For one thing, there is no US policy on anything.
The Russians expressed their total disgust and outrage at this attack and openly began
saying that the Americans were
"недоговороспособны".
What that word means is literally "not-agreement-capable" or unable to make and then abide by
an agreement. While polite, this expression is also extremely strong as it implies not so
much a deliberate deception as the lack of the very ability to make a deal and abide by it.
But to say that a nuclear world superpower is "not-agreement-capable" is a terrible and
extreme diagnostic.
This means that the Russians have basically given up on the notion of having an adult,
sober and mentally sane partner to have a dialog with.
In all my years of training and work as a military analyst I have always had to assume
that everybody involved was what we called a "rational actor". The Soviets sure where. As
were the Americans.
Not only do I find the Trump administration "not agreement-capable", I find it completely
detached from reality. Delusional in other words.
Alas, just like Obama before him, Trump seems to think that he can win a game of nuclear
chicken against Russia. But he can't. Let me be clear here: if pushed into a corner the
Russian will fight, even if that means nuclear war.
There is a reason for this American delusion. The present generation of American leadership
was spoiled and addled by the blissful post-Soviet decades of American impunity.
The problem is not exactly that the U.S. wants full-on war with Russia, it's that
America does not fear it. [2]
Why should it? It hasn't had to for twenty years during which the US assumed it could bully
Russia to stay out of its imperial way anywhere it wanted to intervene.
After the Soviet Union broke up (and only because the Soviet Union disappeared) the
United States was free to use its military power with impunity. For some time, the U.S. had its
drunken stooge, Yeltsin, running Russia and keeping it out of America's military way. There was
nary a peep when Bill Clinton effectively conferred on NATO (meaning the U.S. itself) the
authority to decide what military interventions were necessary and legitimate. For about twenty
years -- from the Yugoslavia through the Libya intervention -- no nation had the military power
or politico-diplomatic will to resist this.
But that situation has changed. Even the Pentagon
recognizes that the American Empire is in a "post-primacy" phase -- certainly "fraying,"
and maybe even "collapsing." The world has seen America's social and economic strength
dissipate, and its pretense of legitimacy disappear entirely. The world has seen American
military overreach everywhere while winning nothing of stable value anywhere. Sixteen years,
and the mighty U.S. Army cannot defeat the Taliban. Now, that's Russia's fault!
Meanwhile, a number of countries in key areas have gained the military confidence and
political will to refuse the presumptions of American arrogance -- China in the Pacific, Iran
in the Middle East, and Russia in Europe and, surprisingly, the Middle East as well. In a
familiar pattern, America's resultant anxiety about waning power increases its
compensatory aggression. And, as mentioned, since it was Russia that most effectively
demonstrated that new military confidence, it's Russia that has to be dealt with first.
The incessant wave of sanctions and expulsions is the bully in the schoolyard clenching his
fist to scare the new kid away. OK, everyone's got the message now. Unclench or punch?
Let's be clear about who is the world's bully. As is evident to any half-conscious person,
Russia is not going to attack the United States or Europe. Russia doesn't have scores of
military bases, combat ships and aircraft up on America's borders. It doesn't have almost a
thousand military bases around the world. Russia does not have the military forces to rampage
around the world as America does, and it doesn't want or need to. That's not because of
Russia's or Vladimir Putin's pacifism, but because Russia, as presently situated in the
political economy of the world, has nothing to gain from it.
Nor does Russia need some huge troll-farm offensive to "destabilize" and sow division in
Western Europe and the United States. Inequality, austerity, waves of immigrants from
regime-change wars, and trigger-happy cops are doing a fine job of that. Russia isn't
responsible for American problems with Black Lives Matter or with the Taliban.
All of this is fantasy politics.
It's the United States, with its fraying empire, that has a problem requiring military
aggression. What other tools does the U.S. have left to put the upstarts, Russia first, back in
their places?
It must be hard for folks who have had their way with country after country for twenty years
not to think they can push Russia out of the way with some really, really scary threats, or
maybe one or two "bloody nose" punches. Some finite number of discrete little escalations.
There's already been some shoving -- that cruise missile attack, Turkey's downing of a Russian
jet, American attacks on Russian personnel (ostensibly private mercenaries) in Syria -- and,
look, Ma, no big war. But sometimes you learn the hard way the truth of the reverse Mike Tyson
rule: "Everyone has a game plan until they smack the other guy in the face."
Consider one concrete risk of escalation that every informed observer is, and every American
should be, aware of.
The place where the United States and Russia are literally, geographically, closest to
confrontation is Syria. As mentioned, the U.S. and its NATO ally, Turkey, have already attacked
and killed Russians in Syria, and the U.S. and its NATO allies have a far larger military force
than Russia in Syria and the surrounding area. On the other hand, Russia has made very
effective use of its forces, including what Reuters
calls "advanced cruise missiles" launched from planes,
ships , and
submarines that hit ISIS targets with high precision from 1000 kilometers.
Russia is also operating in accordance with international law, while the U.S. is not. Russia
is fighting with Syria for the defeat of jihadi forces and the unification of the Syrian state.
The United States is fighting with its jihadi clients for the overthrow of the Syrian
government and the division of the country. Russia intervened in Syria after Obama announced
that the U.S. would attack Syrian army troops, effectively declaring war. If neither side
accepts defeat and goes home, it is quite possible there will be some direct confrontation
over this. In fact, it's hard to imagine that there won't.
A couple of weeks ago Syria and Russia
said the U.S. was planning a major offensive against the Syrian government, including
bombing the government quarter in Damascus. Valery Gerasimov, head of Russia's General Staff,
warned: "In the event of a threat to the lives of our servicemen, Russia's armed forces will
take retaliatory measures against the missiles and launchers used." In this context,
"launchers" means American ships in the Mediterranean.
Also a couple of weeks ago, Russia announced a number of new, highly-advanced weapons
systems. There's discussion about whether some of the yet-to-be-deployed weapons announced
may or
may not
be a bluff, but one that has already been deployed, called Dagger ( Kinzhal, not the
missiles mentioned above), is an air-launched hypersonic cruise missile that files at 5-7,000
miles per hour, with a range of 1200 miles. Analyst Andrei Martyanov claims that: "no
modern or perspective air-defense system deployed today by any NATO fleet can intercept even a
single missile with such characteristics. A salvo of 5-6 such missiles guarantees the
destruction of any Carrier Battle Group or any other surface group, for that matter."
Air-launched. From anywhere.
The U.S. attack has not (yet) happened, for whatever reason (Sputnik reporter Suliman
Mulhem, citing "a military monitor," claims
that's because of the Russian warnings). Great. But given the current state of America's
anxiously aggressive "post-primacy" policy -- including the Russiamania, the Zionist-driven
need to destroy Syria and Iran, and the War Cabinet -- how unlikely is that the U.S. will, in
the near future, make some such attack on some such target that Russia considers crucial to
defend?
And Syria is just one theater where, unless one side accepts defeat and goes home, military
conflict with Russia is highly likely. Is Russia going to abandon the Russian-speaking people
of the Donbass if they're attacked by fascist Kiev forces backed by the U.S.? Is it going to
sit back and watch passively if American and Israeli forces attack Iran? Which one is going to
give up and accept a loss: John Bolton or Vladimir Putin?
Which brings us to the pointed question: What will the U.S. do if Russia sinks an American
ship? How many steps before that goes full-scale, even nuclear? Or maybe American planners (and
you, dear reader) are absolutely, positively sure that will never happen, because the U.S. has
cool weapons, too, and a lot more of them, and the Russians will probably lose all their ships
in the Mediterranean immediately, if not something worse, and they'll put up with anything
rather than go one more step. The Russians, like everybody, must know the Americans always
win.
Happy with that, are we? Snug in our homeland rug? 'Cause Russians won't fight, but the
Taliban will.
This is exactly what is meant by Americans not fearing war with Russia (or war in general
for that matter). Nothing but contempt.
The Skripal opera, directed by the United States, with the whole of Europe and the entire
Western media apparatus singing in harmony, makes it clear that the American producers have no
speaking role for Russia in their staging of the world. And that contempt makes war much more
likely. Here's The Saker again, on how
dangerous the isolation the U.S. and its European clients are so carelessly imposing on Russia
and themselves is for everybody:
Right now they are expelling Russian diplomats en mass e and they are feeling very
strong and manly.
The truth is that this is only the tip of a much bigger iceberg. In reality, crucial
expert-level consultations, which are so vitally important between nuclear superpowers, have
all but stopped a long time ago. We are down to top level telephone calls. That kind of stuff
happens when two sides are about to go to war. For many months now Russia and NATO have made
preparations for war in Europe. Very rapidly the real action will be left to the USA and
Russia. Thus any conflict will go nuclear very fast. And, for the first time in history, the
USA will be hit very, very hard, not only in Europe, the Middle-East or Asia, but also on the
continental US.
Mass diplomatic expulsions, economic warfare, lockstep propaganda, no interest whatsoever in
respectfully addressing or hearing from the other side. What we've been seeing over the past
few months is the "kind of stuff that happens when two sides are about to go to war."
The less Americans fear war, the less they respect the possibility of it, the more likely
they are to get it.
Ready or Not
The Saker makes a diptych of a point that gets to the heart of the matter. We'd do well to
read and think on it carefully:
1/ The Russians are afraid of war. The Americans are not.
2/ The Russians are ready for war. The Americans are not.
Russia is afraid of war. More than twenty million Soviet citizens were
killed in WWII, about half of them civilians. That was more than twenty times the number of
Americans and British casualties combined. The entire country was devastated. Millions died in
the 872-day siege of Leningrad alone, including Vladimir Putin's brother. The city's population
was decimated by disease and starvation, with some reduced to cannibalism. Wikileaks calls it "one of the
longest and most destructive sieges in history [and] possibly the
costliest
in casualties." Another million-plus died in the nine-month siege of Stalingrad.
Every Russian knows this history. Millions of Russian families have suffered from it. Of
course, there was mythification of the struggle and its heroes, but the Russians, viscerally,
know war and know it can happen to them . They do not want to go through it
again. They will do almost anything to avoid it. Russians are not flippant about war. They fear
it. They respect it.
The Americans are not (afraid of war). Americans have never experienced anything
remotely as devastating as this. About 620,000 Americans died in the Civil War, 150 years ago.
(And we're still entangled in that!) The American mainland has not been attacked by a
significant military force since the War of 1812. Since then, the worst attacks on American
territory are two one-off incidents (Pearl Harbor and 9/11), separated by seventy years,
totaling about six-thousand casualties. These are the iconic moments of America Under
Siege.
For the American populace, wars are "over there," fought by a small group of Americans who
go away and either come back or don't. The death, destruction, and aroma of warfare -- which
the United States visits on people around the world incessantly -- is unseen and unexperienced
at home. Americans do not, cannot, believe, in any but the most abstract intellectual sense,
that war can happen here , to them. For the general populace, talk of war is just more
political background noise, Morgan Freeman competing for attention with Stormy Daniels and the
Kardashians.
Americans are supremely insouciant about war: They threaten countries with it incessantly,
the government routinely sells it with lies, and the political parties promote it
opportunistically to defeat their opponents -- and nobody cares. For Americans, war is part of
a game. They do not fear it. They do not respect it.
The Russians are ready for war. The Nazi onslaught was defeated -- in Soviet Russia,
by Soviet Citizens and the Red Army -- because the mass of people stood and fought together for
a victory they understood was important. They could not have withstood horrific sieges and
defeated the Nazis any other way. Russians understand, in other words, that war is a crisis of
death and destruction visited on the whole of society, which can only be won by a massive and
difficult effort grounded in social solidarity. If the Russians feel they have to fight, if
they feel besieged, they know they will have to stand together, take the hits that come, and
fight to the finish. They will not again permit war to be brought to their cities while their
attacker stays snug. There will be a world of hurt. They will develop and use any weapon they
can. And their toughest weapon is not a hypersonic missile; it's that solidarity, implied by
that 77%. (Did you read that Simonyan statement?) They may not be seeking it, but, insofar as
anybody can be, they are ready to fight.
Americans are not (ready for war): Americans experience the horror of wars as a
series of discrete tragedies visited upon families of fallen soldiers, reported in
human-interest vignettes at the end of the nightly news. Individual tragedies, not a social
disaster.
It's hard to imagine the social devastation of war in any case, but American culture wants
no part of thinking about that concretely. The social imagination of war is deflected into
fantastic scenarios of a super-hero universe or a zombie apocalypse. The alien death-ray may
blow up the Empire State Building, but the hero and his family (now including his or her
gender-ambivalent teenager, and, of course, the dog) will survive and triumph. Cartoon
villains, cartoon heroes, and a cartoon society.
One reason for this, we have to recognize, is the victory of the
Thatcherite/libertarian-capitalist "no such thing as society" ideology. Congratulations, Ayn
Rand, there is no such thing as American society now. It's every incipient entrepreneur
for him or herself. This does not a comradely, fighting band of brothers and sisters make.
Furthermore, though America is constantly at war, nobody understands the purpose of it.
That's because the real purpose can never be explained, and must be hidden behind some facile
abstraction -- "democracy," "our freedoms," etc. This kind of discourse can get some of the
people motivated for some of the time, but it loses its charm the minute someone gets smacked
in the face.
Once they take a moment, everybody can see that there is nobody with an army threatening to
attack and destroy the United States, and if they take a few moments, everybody can see how
phony the "democracy and freedom" stuff is and remember how often they've been lied to before.
There's just too much information out there. (Which is why the Imperial High Command wants to
control the internet.) Why the hell am I fighting? What in hell are we fighting
for? These are questions everybody will ask after, and too many people are now asking
before, they get smacked in the face.
This lack of social understanding and lack of political support translates into the
impossibility of fighting a major, sustained war that requires taking heavy casualties -- even
"over there," but certainly in the snug. American culture might be all gung-ho about Seal Team
Six kicking ass, but the minute American homes start blowing up and American bodies start
falling, Hoo-hah becomes Uh-oh , and it's going to be Outta here .
Americans are ready for Hoo-hah and the Shark Tank and the Zombie Apocalypse. They
are not ready for war.
You Get What You Play For
"Russiagate," which started quite banally in the presidential campaign as a Democratic arrow
to take down Trump, is now Russiamania -- a battery of weapons wielded by various sectors of
the state, aimed at an array of targets deemed even potentially resistant to imperial
militarism. Trump himself -- still, and for as long as he's deemed unreliable -- is targeted by
a legal prosecution of infinite reach (whose likeliest threat is to take him down for something
that has nothing to do with Russia). Russia itself is now targeted in full force by economic,
diplomatic, ideological -- and, tentatively, military -- weapons of the state. Perhaps most
importantly, American and European people, especially dissidents, are targeted by a unified
media barrage that attacks any expression of radical critique, anything that "sows division" --
from Black Lives Matter, to the Sanders campaign, to "But other countries could have made it"
-- as Russian treachery.
The stunning success of that last offensive is crucial to making a war more likely, and must
be fought. To increase the risk of war with a nuclear power in order to score points against
Donald Trump or Jill Stein -- well, only those who neither respect, fear, nor are ready for war
would do such a stupid and dangerous thing.
It's impossible to predict with certainty whether, when, or with whom a major hot war will
be started. The same chaotic disarray and impulsiveness of the Trump administration that
increases the danger of war might also work to prevent it. John Bolton may be fired before he
trims his moustache. But it's a pressure-cooker, and the temperature has spiked
drastically.
In a previous
essay , I said that Venezuela was a likely first target for military attack, precisely
because it would make for an easy victory that didn't risk military confrontation with Russia.
That's still a good possibility. As we saw with Iraq Wars 1 (which helped to end the "Vietnam
Syndrome") and 2 (which somewhat resurrected it), the imperial high command needs to inure the
American public with a virtually American-casualty-free victory and in order to lure them into
taking on a war that's going to hurt.
But the new War Cabinet may be pumped for the main event -- an attack on Iran. Trump,
Pompeo, and Bolton are all rabid proponents of regime-change in Iran. We can be certain
that the Iran nuclear deal will be scrapped, and everyone will work hard to implement the
secret agreementthe Trump administration already has with Israel to "to deal
with Iran's nuclear drive, its missile programs and its other threatening activities" -- or, as
Trump himself expresses it: "cripple the [Iranian] regime and bring it to collapse." (That
agreement, by the way, was negotiated and signed by the previous, supposedly not-so-belligerent
National Security Advisor, H. R. McMaster.)
Still, as I also said in the previous essay, an attack on Iran means the Americans must
either make sure Russia doesn't get in the way or make clear that they don't care if it
does. So, threatening moves -- not excluding probing military moves -- against Russia will
increase, whether Russia is the preferred direct target or not.
The siege is on.
Americans who want to continue playing with this fire would do well to pay some respectful
attention to the target whose face they want to smack. Russia did not boast or brag or threaten
or Hoo-Hah about sending military forces to Syria. When it was deemed necessary -- when
the United States declared its intention to attack the Syrian Army -- it just did it. And
American10-dimensional-chess players have been squirming around trying to deal with the
implications of that ever since. They're working hard on finding the right mix of threats,
bluffs, sanctions, expulsions, "Shut up and go away!" insults, military forces on the border,
and "bloody nose" attacks to force a capitulation. They should be listening to their target,
who has not tired of asking for a "partnership," who has clearly stated what his country would
do in reaction to previous moves (e.g., the abrogation of the ABM Treaty and stationing of ABM
bases in Eastern Europe), whose country and family have suffered from wartime devastation
Americans cannot imagine, who therefore respects, fears, and is ready for war in ways Americans
are not, and who is not playing their game:
[2]
Though it's ridiculous that it needs to be said: I'm not talking here about the phony fear
engendered by the media presentation of the "strongman," "brutal dictator" Vladimir Putin. This
is part and parcel of comic-book politics -- conjuring a super-villain, who, we all know, is
destined to be defeated. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Jim Kavanagh
"... 'US hegemony contradicts aims of humanity's future' ..."
"... 'US dollar used as a pressure tool' ..."
"... 'Arms twisting and intimidation' ..."
"... "Waging first technological war of digital era" ..."
"... The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is also under fire from the US, despite being in line with the national interests of Russia and all participating European nations. "But it doesn't fit the logic and the interests of those, who got used to [their] own exceptionalism and permissiveness; who got used to their bills being paid by others." ..."
"... 'Unjust system will never be stable' ..."
"... Any system based on obvious injustice will never be stable and balanced. ..."
Vladimir Putin had a lot to say about the US at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, warning that Washington's
policies may turn global economy into battle royal and suggesting that dollar's role should be revised.
Even though the Russian president
didn't always identify the US or the Donald Trump administration by name, he didn't mince words about America's aggressive economic
policies either.
'US hegemony contradicts aims of humanity's future'
Washington's desperate attempts to maintain its hegemony on the international arena put the current globalist model of the
world at risk of "turning into a spoof, a parody of itself," the Russian president pointed out.
When universal international rules are replaced by laws; administrative and judicial mechanisms of a single country or
a group of influential states, like the US is now doing by extending its jurisdiction on the whole world – such model contradicts
not only the logic of international communications and the realities of the emerging multipolar world, but more importantly
– it doesn't fit the tasks of humanity's future.
'US dollar used as a pressure tool'
"Deep changes require adaptation of international financial organizations, reconsidering the role of the US dollar, which
after it became international reserve currency, turned into the tool of pressure of the country, which issues it, on the rest
of the world today," Putin said.
The US authorities "are themselves undermining their advantages, created by the Bretton Woods system. The trust in the dollar
is declining."
Another negative outcome of the policy of sanction and pressure pursued by the US could be "the fragmentation of the global
economic space; unrestricted economic egoism and attempts to push own interests forward through force."
This is the way to endless conflicts; to trade wars and maybe not only trade ones. Figuratively speaking, a fight without
rules – a battle royal.
'Arms twisting and intimidation'
The Americans and their allies got used to being privileged, but "when this comfortable system started shaking, when their
competitors grew some muscle, the ambitions and the desire to maintain its dominance at all cost got the better" of the West.
"States that previously advocated the principles of freedom of trade, fair and open competition, started speaking the language
of trade wars and sanctions, blatant economic raiding, arm twisting, intimidation, eliminating competitors by so-called non-market
methods."
"Waging first technological war of digital era"
Putin delved into "the situation around the company Huawei," which saw its products and services banned in the US over
unsubstantiated claims of spying for the Chinese government.
There are attempts being made not just to put it under pressure, but to brazenly force it out of the global market. In
some circles, this is even called the first technological war of the coming digital era.
The rapid digital transformation was seemingly aimed at "opening new horizons for everyone, who is ready for the change,"
but the moves by Washington show that "barriers are being erected here too" and it's a reason for serious concern.
The Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is also under fire from the US, despite being in line with the national interests of Russia
and all participating European nations. "But it doesn't fit the logic and the interests of those, who got used to [their] own
exceptionalism and permissiveness; who got used to their bills being paid by others."
'Unjust system will never be stable'
The US push for monopoly propels the problem of inequality to "a new level" both on state and individual level. "An attempt
is being made to create two worlds, separated from each other by a constantly expanding abyss. When one has access to state-of-the-art
systems of education and healthcare as well as modern technologies, while the others have no perspectives, no chance to even get
out of poverty and the third – simply left fighting for survival."
Any system based on obvious injustice will never be stable and balanced.
"... So perhaps the DNC was hacked by the CIA and it was blamed on the Russians. ..."
"... How can we trust any investigation when the investigation can be doctored to scapegoat Russia? This is embarrassing. ..."
"... Clapper is a known perjurer. ..."
"... Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source, it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in! ..."
With UMBRAGE and related projects the CIA cannot only increase its total number of attack types but also misdirect attribution
by leaving behind the "fingerprints" of the groups that the attack techniques were stolen from.
UMBRAGE components cover keyloggers, password collection, webcam capture, data destruction, persistence, privilege escalation,
stealth, anti-virus (PSP) avoidance and survey techniques.
So the CIA obtained FISA Warrants for the millions of devices hacked? Guess we now know how Trump Tower was wiretapped when
DNI Clapper said there was no such order given.
So! It now becomes clear what Obama and the Democrats were planning for the Trump Administration. They could hack away at anything
and everything and leave Russian "fingerprints" to make it appear that the Russians did it. It's really no telling what is already
planted. Thst's why some Democrat's seem so supremely confident that Trump will be impeached.
I don't think that it's really sunk in for most people that this was a plan for World Domination by a force more evil than
the average person could ever imagine. We're still in grave danger but thank Heaven for Julian Assange and Wikileaks. Not only
have they saved America but perhaps the whole world from domination that heretofore couldn't even be imagined except in science
fiction.
Our problem will now be how to build enough gallows to accomodate the traitors and seditionists who have participated in this
dark plan.
Hysteria in Oceania. The same goons blaming Russia for robbing the local candy store (without producing evidence) are robbing
the candy factory 24/7. All of a sudden, the MSM has found issues and terms like `non-verified documents` and `non-verifiable,
anonymous sources` to be of the utmost importance, in contrast to when they were copy-pasting the ` information` about Russian
hacking. I wonder how much time it takes for the Ministries of Information and their docile press-clowns to (again) turn the story
around and blame WikiLeaks for being a `Russian tool` to discard their own obvious crimes.
They wiretapped the entire Trump team thinking they would come up with an October surprise...and found NOTHING. If they had
ANYTHING, it would have been used prior to the election. And, since Hillary was supposed to win, the illegal wire taps would never
have been disclosed.
Now Trump has exposed the Obama admin and democrats are hyperventilating over Russia to deflect from the crimes they committed.
We always knew that, were told we were crazy, now we have proof. The MSM has been gas-lighting us. I wonder how many red pills
you have to swallow to get to the other side of this Rabbit Hole?
Well BO moved to Washington so it will be easy for the Press to shout these questions at him at his home or a restaurant or
a ballgame. We need answers BO, and right now. No BS. anymore. Or go back to Indonesia and hide out.
It's really not fun. The intelligence agencies are unaccountable and cloak their criminality with the secrecy of national security.
They're not going to back down. They're ruthless. And they kill people for sport. This will not end well unless the military is
called in to round them up, which has huge risks of its own...
TGFD here.
As far as I'm concerned. death becomes anyone in the effing CIA. Same goes for their parasitic family members. Death's image would
look good on them.
There is NO secret in the CIA that I would not expose if I could.
I never heard of the term, "Deep State" prior to 2 months ago, and I don't like what I hear, either. I pray that somehow, God
will enable TRUMP to vanquish all the filth in the deep state.
I knew it - the documents I looked over, the IP addresses I checked, the supposed "malware" that the US said "was the same
as we know Russia had used" and more - and it just did not add up.
Now to be sure the American population is dumb when it comes to technology - and they usually blindly believe what the CIA,
and media, tells them. But me - being in IT for some decades and having worked with Russian people for 6 years (in an electronics
engineering company founded by a Russian immigrant to the U.S.) and being a network security administrator for a small government
agency, something smelled odd.
The IP addresses - hahaha - really? Try again - up until the spring of 2016 American company Verizon routed 1 million stolen
IP addresses - used by cyber-criminals in the USA........ so guess where some of those IP addresses REALLY belonged. Further,
the "CIA" and other spooks included - honestly? TOR exit node addresses. If you use TOR browser, you will find some of those same
addresses in your own logs (unless you are smart and either purge or don't log, etc.)
So try again, U.S. spooks - the malware? HAHA - what a JOKE. Really. I mean older software that John Q. Public can download for
FREE? Sorry, Russians are far far smarter and they'd not use OLD software that works on WordPress based on PHP servers when the
target isn't based on blogging software.
Sorry, silly Americans - including and especially McCain and others in our congress who are, say what? members of INTELLIGENCE
committees? Really?
You help guide the intelligence and security operations of a major country and you fall for the BS that was presented to you?
Did you not ask questions? I did - I did my own research and I guess that proves I'm as smart or smarter than any member of and
house or Senate intelligence committee. Do these people even know where the power button is on their computer? Smart - they hire
unvetted IT people to take care of congressional computers....... and some of the equipment ends up missing, and these people
have full free access as admins to computers used by congressional members of armed services committees and more!
That's how smart our U.S. congress is. Hire your brother-in-laws IT geek, give 'em full admin access, let them come and go
freely........... and fall for intelligence reports about Russian hacking...... all the while our own CIA is doing MORE and WORSE.
While this topic is still fresh (thanks to the Democrats) - election interference - Election or campaign interference scores
according to political scientist Dov Levin of Carnegie Mellon University: Russia - 36 times, U.S.A - 81 times
The USA's score number doesn't include military coups and regime change efforts following the election of candidates the U.S.
didn't like, notably those in Iran, Guatemala and Chile. Nor does it include general assistance with the electoral process, such
as election monitoring.
So who exactly is it that interferes or "Helps" with elections? Yeah, I thought so.
President Vladimir Putin must go home each night shaking his head in disbelief at how gullible we are here.
By the way - Podesta was NOT HACKED. He fell for a simple phishing scam. Yes, the email wasn't even very well done. It appeared
more like it came out of Nigeria than any professional group, it was lame, didn't even look real, didn't sound real and the URL
or link was so obvious, geesh, a fool could have seen it was phishing. Oh, wait, we're talking Podesta here. The man gave away
his password (which for a while was indeed 'password'. Worse - he used what for his campaign work? Did you say GMAIL? You have
to be kidding! A free consumer email, based in the cloud, and not only that, at least 3 others had account access to his Gmail.
He kept documents, calendar, task lists and more in it. The phishing scammer got access to his Gmail inbox, sent items, attachments,
calendar, Google Drive, Google Docs, you name it! No hacking needed since this is CLOUD BASED. No one had to touch his computer
or iPad.
I really laughed when I found in those emails the admin credentials for his Wi-Fi, and even more funny - the admin credentials
for his building security system. Yes, all that in his cloud-based Gmail account. As Bugs Bunny would say- what a maroon!
No wonder he's mad and trying to blame everyone else. He has to know he was scammed and he fell for it and it was all HIS FAULT,
no one else but him. Using Gmail for such important work is STUPID as it is - but then to fall for phishing. He got what he deserved,
and if it was Russians, tell those teenagers congratulations! That's all it took to phish Podesta - the skill set of KIDS in their
early teens.
I could go on about the stupidity involved in all of this, but won't (I hear a collective sigh of relief!)
So, did the Russians hack the election? Or did the Obama CIA hack the election and just did a pizz-poor job of it? Or perhaps
Obama really did not want Hillary to win.
This might make those congressional investigations into the alleged hacking of the election by Russians a lot more interesting.
That is, of course, assuming that the investigations are really about finding the truth.
Obama Hates Hillary but could not openly control her. With Trump elected he could work openly to damage his administration,
and with the help of MSM demonize him, and make him look like a tool of the Russians as well as his appointees. Notice, there
was no talk of Russian hacking prior to the election. The "intelligence" agencies waited for the election results to come out
with their charges.
Use delaying tactics to prevent approval of appointees, attack and possibly remove approved appointees eroding confidence in
the current government. With the help of RINOs delay legislation. Pay protestors to protest everything Trump does using labels
such as sexist, racist, Nazi, etc.
Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get
the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary.
"Obama's and DNC's goal: Prevent any progress till the mid term elections and try and overturn the balance in Congress to get
the liberal agenda back on track. Get poised for the 2020 election and run a more palatable candidate than Hillary."
Let's unpack this. All those rumors about the Obama's hating the Clinton's? TRUE BUT, he couldn't let DOJ go through with indictment
so instead gets Clapper, Brennan and the boys to use Russian fingerprints to hack and then sits back and watches the chaos unfold.
When you go back to how he got his start in Chicago its exactly how he operates.
I am furious. I read the original re CIA attempting to influence French elections. But this is CLEAR TREASON by Obama Administration.
I NEVER trusted Brennen. violation for CIA to operate inside US.
Looks like this is an example of Obama/CIA preparation for Treason?
The thing that really pisses me off is that the factual basis for all of this criminal and treasonous activity by the Obama
Administration, that is being exposed today, remains covered-up by everyone in a position of responsibility to expose it. That
factual basis is that every identification document Obama has presented to prove he is a citizen of the USA is a forgery. Based
upon the totality of his record as president he is an agent of foreign Islamic allegiance and everything he has done in the Middle
East always ends up in favor of radical Islam and refuses to even acknowledge radical Islamic terrorism exists. The same goes
for his refusal to acknowledge domestic Islamic terrorism exists.
Factual answers for these three questions will clear up why we are having this treasonous activity. (1) Why does Obama have
and need a forged birth certificate as he posted on his POTUS website? (2) Why does Obama's first officially issued copy of his
Selective Service Registration Card have a forged 2 digit postal stamp? (3) Why is Obama using a SS# that was first issued to
someone else? These three questions must be answered by Congress as the researched information verifying forgery is readily available
and will expose the basis of this treason.
Let's not forget that logging into an email server because of a weak password and getting a copy of emails does not scream
CIA. Also John Podesta's email password was extremely weak. So it did not take a covert CIA hacking program to initiate. We keep
hearing Russia hacked our election. Yet have ZERO proof! First the majority of election machines are decentralized and not connected
to internet. There was not a single instance where vote the count was effected. This was also immediately stated by Obamas DNI.
Claiming they ran a propaganda attack on Hillary Clinton is pathetic. They are claiming the American people did not see who Hillary
Clinton truly was. The opposite is true.
Hillary Clinton had made her own propaganda against herself. She is who the American people see. Not what the Russians programmed
Us to see. The American people made a choice based on her actions no one else's. The liberals continually attacking someone with
false claims without proof is a standard Liberal / Alyinsky strategy. It requires no proof if all liberal extremist continually
repeat the same attack which is then amplified by the Liberal propaganda media (CNN, MSNBC, CBS, The New York Times, The Washington
Post, BBC, etc)
The Russian collusion claim is the exact same scenario. Make the claim which we already knew the Trump campaign speaks with
Russian diplomats. Most people in politics interact with all countries diplomat and ambassadors. So instantly the claim is impossible
to debunk. The Liberal party has become a party willing to use any and all tactics to avoid listening to the American people.
This whole Russian drama is created to go against what the American people voted for. The democrat party is as much a threat to
The United States as Communism ever was. It has been said if fascism ever comes back to the United States it will come in the
form of liberalism. So the American people have a choice.
Use common sense and stop the liberal extremist party from destroying our democracy or deal with the consequences of America
becoming ineffective and divided. The majority of the Democrat party and it's supporters have become so ideologically perverted
they have lost sight of morality and what America stands for.
The Russians have not hypnotized Americans to vote for Donald Trump. It wasn't possible for the Russians to manipulate voter
data and yes the Trump campaign speaks with Russian diplomats.
But it was the same Russian ambassador that Obama left in the country while expelling all others. The same Russian ambassador
Obama scheduled meetings with for Jeff sessions. The same rushing ambassador that all Democrat spend time with. Make a claim that's
true then find a way to turn it negative.
Typical Saul Alinsky. Everyone needs to remember anything the Liberals attack someone for the opposite is true.
And now you know that the CIA (via Obama's orders or tacit approval) was the one that created the ruse of Trump emailing a
Russian bank as a pretext to persuade FISA judges to sign off on the warrants to keep surveillance on him and his contacts.
If I were Obama I'd be seeking the nearest airport and fly to any country offering asylum... it's good night, good riddance
for him and the rest of the Deep State Globalists.
Kind of funny where this started. Remember Hillary stole a server from the government secure server facility and set it up
in her basement without proper security software and monitoring for hacking. Proven. And she had idiots in her staff so stupid
they used passwords like "p@ssword". Proven. So any 11 year old computer expert could have hacked that server.
And she lied about the content of the messages being transferred. Top secret and classified info was lost due to her illegal
actions. But Comey gave the pig a pass.
Of course it was the Obama CIA, pros like the Russians or Chinese, never leave behind "fingerprints" they are smart enough
to cover their tracks. As a cyber analyst I can tell you that when you see "fingerprints or breadcrumbs" leading to a source,
it's usually deceptive and intentional. Let that sink in!
The US was always the way Orlov describes its future. It only ever belonged to those who
could keep their heads above water. You go under, and you're gone forever, and very quickly
forgotten. I don't recommend it as a social system, but that's the system.
But the people, within that system. the people are great people, with remarkable moral
fiber, in situations they understand. Those who are breathing air and not water can
rightfully enjoy the company of these others, even though many of those others might lately
be breathing an air-water mixture – and perhaps even oneself.
It's a poignant thing, these United States. The people are as good as anywhere, but only
as trained as their culture tells them to be. Perhaps the future holds some spark of
brightness for the people. They were always a transcendent bunch, actually, in a culture
founded on spiritual independence – despite all the overlay of consumerist crap.
Somehow they uniquely evolved the means of ignoring that crap – playing the TV in the
background, for example, while reading college studies – in order to live decent
lives.
It's possible this long-remote karma of spiritual longing might still hold some embers.
Perhaps the people of the US might rediscover the power of sincere prayer? The power of
sincerity? Time alone will tell.
"... Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many conflicts. ..."
"... Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval required). ..."
"... Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process? ..."
"... In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped at least 26,172 bombs in seven countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital," the U.S. and its allies dropped more than 20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600 civilians, according to Amnesty International . ..."
"... U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945, which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least 600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term effects of cluster munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may well have exceeded one million.) ..."
"... the U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger , as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to yet more destruction. ..."
"... Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results. ..."
"... Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year. ..."
"... No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured," bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to end. ..."
"... A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror: the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh insurgents to strike. ..."
"... Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam. ..."
"... Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. ..."
"... Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational awareness ." ..."
"... Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial power projection than with national defense ..."
"... Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens wars rather than shortening them. ..."
"... Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures -- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those being bombed become more resilient and resolute. ..."
"... Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the moral high ground in war. ..."
"... all the happy talk about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results. ..."
"... War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own turf. ..."
From Syria to Yemen in the Middle East, Libya to Somalia in Africa, Afghanistan to Pakistan
in South Asia, an American aerial curtain has descended across a huge swath of the planet. Its
stated purpose: combatting terrorism. Its primary method: constant surveillance and bombing --
and yet more bombing.
Its political benefit: minimizing the number of U.S. "boots on the ground" and so
American casualties in the never-ending war on terror, as well as any public outcry about Washington's many
conflicts.
Its economic benefit: plenty of high-profit business for weapons makers for whom the president can now
declare a national security emergency whenever he likes and so sell their warplanes and
munitions to preferred dictatorships in the Middle East (no congressional approval
required).
Its reality for various foreign peoples: a steady diet of "
Made in USA " bombs and missiles bursting here, there, and everywhere.
Think of all this as a cult of bombing on a global scale. America's wars
are increasingly waged from the air, not on the ground, a reality that makes the prospect of
ending them ever more daunting. The question is: What's driving this process?
For many of America's decision-makers, air power has clearly become something of an
abstraction. After all, except for the 9/11 attacks by those four hijacked commercial
airliners, Americans haven't
been the target of such strikes since World War II. On Washington's battlefields across the
Greater Middle East and northern Africa, air power is always almost literally a one-way affair.
There are no enemy air forces or significant air defenses. The skies are the exclusive property
of the U.S. Air Force (and allied air forces), which means that we're no longer talking about
"war" in the normal sense. No wonder Washington policymakers and military officials see it as
our strong suit, our asymmetrical
advantage , our way of settling scores with evildoers, real and imagined.
Bombs away!
In a bizarre fashion, you might even say that, in the twenty-first century, the bomb and
missile count replaced the Vietnam-era body count as a metric of (false) progress . Using data
supplied by the U.S. military, the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that the U.S. dropped
at least 26,172 bombs in seven
countries in 2016, the bulk of them in Iraq and Syria. Against Raqqa alone, ISIS's "capital,"
the U.S. and its allies dropped more than
20,000 bombs in 2017, reducing that provincial Syrian city to
literal rubble . Combined with artillery fire, the bombing of Raqqa killed more than 1,600
civilians, according to
Amnesty International .
Meanwhile, since Donald Trump has become president, after claiming that he would get us out
of our various never-ending wars, U.S. bombing has surged, not only against the Islamic State
in Syria and Iraq but in
Afghanistan as well. It has driven up the
civilian death toll there even as "friendly" Afghan forces are sometimes mistaken for the
enemy
and killed , too. Air strikes from Somalia
to
Yemen have also been on the rise under Trump, while civilian casualties due to U.S. bombing
continue to be
underreported in the American media and
downplayed by the Trump administration.
U.S. air campaigns today, deadly as they are, pale in comparison to past ones like the Tokyo firebombing of 1945,
which killed more than 100,000 civilians; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki later
that year (roughly 250,000); the death toll against German civilians in World War II (at least
600,000); or civilians in the Vietnam War. (Estimates vary, but when napalm and the long-term
effects of cluster
munitions and defoliants like Agent Orange are added to
conventional high-explosive bombs, the death toll in Southeast Asia may
well have exceeded one million.) Today's air strikes are more limited than in those past
campaigns and may be more accurate, but never confuse a 500-pound bomb with a surgeon's
scalpel, even rhetorically. When " surgical " is applied to bombing in today's
age of lasers, GPS, and other precision-guidance technologies, it only obscures the very real
human carnage being produced by all these American-made bombs and missiles.
This country's propensity for believing that its ability to rain hellfire from the sky provides a
winning methodology for its wars has proven to be a fantasy of our age. Whether in Korea in the
early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s, or more recently in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, the
U.S. may control the air, but that dominance simply hasn't led to ultimate success. In the case
of Afghanistan, weapons like the Mother of All Bombs, or MOAB (the most powerful
non-nuclear bomb in the U.S. military's arsenal), have been celebrated as game changers even
when they change nothing. (Indeed, the Taliban only continues to grow stronger
, as does the branch of the Islamic State in Afghanistan.) As is often the case when it comes
to U.S. air power, such destruction leads neither to victory, nor closure of any sort; only to
yet more destruction.
Such results are contrary to the rationale for air power that I absorbed in a career spent
in the U.S. Air Force. (I retired in 2005.) The fundamental tenets of air power
that I learned, which are still taught today, speak of decisiveness. They promise that air
power, defined as "flexible and versatile," will have "synergistic effects" with other military
operations. When bombing is "concentrated," "persistent," and "executed" properly (meaning not
micro-managed by know-nothing politicians), air power should be fundamental to ultimate
victory. As we used to insist, putting bombs on target is really what it's all about. End of
story -- and of thought.
Given the banality and vacuity of those official Air Force tenets, given the
twenty-first-century history of air power gone to hell and back, and based on my own experience
teaching such history and strategy in and outside the military, I'd like to offer some air
power tenets of my own. These are the ones the Air Force didn't teach me, but that our leaders
might consider before launching their next "decisive" air campaign.
Ten Cautionary Tenets
About Air Power
1. Just because U.S. warplanes and drones can strike almost anywhere on the globe with
relative impunity doesn't mean that they should. Given the history of air power since World
War II, ease of access should never be mistaken for efficacious results.
2. Bombing alone will never be the key to victory. If that were true, the U.S. would
have easily won in Korea and Vietnam, as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq. American air
power pulverized both North Korea and Vietnam (not to speak of neighboring
Laos and Cambodia ), yet the Korean War ended in a stalemate and the Vietnam War in
defeat. (It tells you the world about such thinking that air power enthusiasts, reconsidering
the Vietnam debacle, tend to argue the U.S. should have bombed even more -- lots
more .) Despite total air supremacy, the recent Iraq War was a disaster even as the
Afghan War staggers on into its 18th catastrophic year.
3. No matter how much it's advertised as "precise," "discriminate," and "measured,"
bombing (or using missiles like the Tomahawk ) rarely is. The deaths of
innocents are guaranteed. Air power and those deaths are joined at the hip, while such
killings only generate anger and blowback, thereby prolonging the wars they are meant to
end.
Consider, for instance, the "decapitation" strikes launched against Iraqi autocrat Saddam
Hussein and his top officials in the opening moments of the Bush administration's invasion of
2003. Despite the hype about that being the beginning of the most precise air campaign in all
of history, 50 of those attacks, supposedly based on the best intelligence around, failed to
take out Saddam or a single one of his targeted officials. They did, however, cause "dozens"
of civilian deaths. Think of it as a monstrous repeat of the precision air attacks launched
on Belgrade in 1999 against Slobodan Milosevic and his
regime that hit the Chinese
embassy instead, killing three journalists.
Here, then, is the question of the day: Why is it that, despite all the "precision" talk
about it, air power so regularly proves at best a blunt instrument of destruction? As a
start, intelligence is often faulty. Then bombs and missiles, even "smart" ones, do go
astray. And even when U.S. forces actually kill high-value targets (HVTs), there are
always more HVTs out there. A paradox emerges from almost 18 years of the war on terror:
the imprecision of air power only leads to repetitious cycles of violence and, even when air
strikes prove precise, there always turn out to be fresh targets, fresh terrorists, fresh
insurgents to strike.
4. Using air power to send political messages about resolve or seriousness rarely
works. If it did, the U.S. would have swept to victory in Vietnam. In Lyndon Johnson's
presidency, for instance, Operation Rolling Thunder (1965-1968), a
graduated campaign of bombing, was meant to, but didn't, convince the North Vietnamese to
give up their goal of expelling the foreign invaders -- us -- from South Vietnam.
Fast-forward to our era and consider recent signals sent to North
Korea and
Iran by the Trump administration via B-52 bomber deployments, among other military
"messages." There's no evidence that either country modified its behavior significantly in
the face of the menace of those
baby-boomer-era airplanes.
5. Air power is enormously expensive. Spending on aircraft, helicopters, and their
munitions accounted for roughly half the cost of the Vietnam War. Similarly, in the
present moment, making operational and then maintaining Lockheed Martin's boondoggle
of a jet fighter, the F-35, is expected to cost at least
$1.45 trillion over its lifetime. The new B-21 stealth bomber will cost more than $100 billion
simply to buy. Naval air wings on aircraft carriers cost billions each year to maintain and
operate. These days, when the sky's the limit for
the Pentagon budget, such costs may be (barely) tolerable. When the money finally begins to
run out, however, the military will likely suffer a serious hangover from its wildly
extravagant spending on air power.
6. Aerial surveillance (as with drones), while useful, can also be misleading. Command
of the high ground is not synonymous with god-like "total situational
awareness ." It can instead prove to be a kind of delusion, while war practiced in
its spirit often becomes little more than an exercise in destruction. You simply can't
negotiate a truce or take prisoners or foster other options when you're high above a
potential battlefield and your main recourse is blowing up people and things.
7. Air power is inherently offensive. That means it's more consistent with imperial
power projection than with national defense . As such, it fuels imperial ventures, while
fostering the kind of "
global reach, global power " thinking that has in these years had Air Force generals in
its grip.
8. Despite the fantasies of those sending out the planes, air power often lengthens
wars rather than shortening them. Consider Vietnam again. In the early 1960s, the Air
Force argued that it alone could resolve that conflict at the lowest cost (mainly in American
bodies). With enough bombs, napalm, and defoliants, victory was a sure thing and U.S. ground
troops a kind of afterthought. (Initially, they were sent in mainly to protect the airfields
from which those planes took off.) But bombing solved nothing and then the Army and the
Marines decided that, if the Air Force couldn't win, they sure as hell could. The result was
escalation and disaster that left in the dust the original vision of a war won quickly and on
the cheap due to American air supremacy.
9. Air power, even of the shock-and-awe variety, loses its impact
over time. The enemy, lacking it, nonetheless learns to adapt by developing countermeasures
-- both active (like missiles) and passive (like camouflage and dispersion), even as those
being bombed become more resilient and resolute.
10. Pounding peasants from two miles up is not exactly an ideal way to occupy the
moral high ground in war.
The Road to Perdition
If I had to reduce these tenets to a single maxim, it would be this: all the happy talk
about the techno-wonders of modern air power obscures its darker facets, especially its ability
to lock America into what are effectively one-way wars with dead-end results.
For this reason, precision warfare is truly an oxymoron. War isn't precise. It's nasty,
bloody, and murderous. War's inherent nature -- its unpredictability, horrors, and tendency
to outlast its original causes and goals -- isn't changed when the bombs and missiles are
guided by GPS. Washington's enemies in its war on terror, moreover, have learned to adapt to
air power in a grimly Darwinian fashion and have the advantage of fighting on their own
turf.
Who doesn't know the old riddle: If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear
it, does it make a sound? Here's a twenty-first-century air power variant on it: If foreign
children die from American bombs but no U.S. media outlets report their deaths, will anyone
grieve? Far too often, the answer here in the U.S. is no and so our wars go on into an endless
future of global destruction.
In reality, this country might do better to simply ground its many fighter planes, bombers, and
drones. Paradoxically, instead of gaining the high ground, they are keeping us on a low road to
perdition.
In December of 2017, Daniel Ellsberg published a book,
"The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner" . Among many other things,
he revealed the actual Strangelovian nature of our military establishment. Most enlightening
is his revelation that many in the high command of our nuclear triggers do not trust, or even
have contempt for, civilian oversight and control of the military. They covertly regard the
presidential leadership as naïve and inept, though it would be professional suicide to
admit such an attitude openly.
Comes now 𝕿𝖍𝖊 𝕹𝖊𝖜
𝖄𝖔𝖗𝖐 𝕿𝖎𝖒𝖊𝖘 with the
revelation that the Pentagon's Cyber Command has attacked Russia's power grid with software
"implants" designed to destroy that grid the instant a mouse click is given, thereby possibly
initiating global war. Most alarmingly, the details of this secret action were kept from the
President, lest he countermand the operation or leak it to the Russians.
So now we have a general staff that is conducting critical international military
operations on its own, with no civilian input, permission or hindrances of any kind. A
formula for national suicide, executed by a tiny junta of unelected officers who decide to
play nuclear Russian roulette.
We seem to be ineluctably and irreversibly trapped in a state of national dementia.
Just remember this: The U.S. had the technological advantage in Viet Nam, and blasted that
country, along with Cambodia, and Laos, with 7.5 million tons of bombs, (more than the entire
WWII campaign of 2.25 million tons), and the Vietnamese were still able to kick our *** out
of the country by 1975.
There is a 11th tenet: air force operations need airports or aircraft carriers, and these
are very vulnerable to modern, high precision missiles. If the enemy has plenty of missiles,
your fighters and bombers can be impeded to take off and land, or even be destroyed. Modern
aircrafts need very sophisticated and working infrastructures to be operational.
In the case of a full war with Iran, I see all hostile bases and airports destroyed or
damaged by Iranian, Hezbollah and Syrian missiles. They have tens of thousand of them - it is
30 years they have been accumulating missiles in prevision of a possible forthcoming war.
You are right. Also, there are many nations with subs and probably more countries have
acquired nukes than are willing to admit. I strongly suspect Iran already has nukes. If North
Korea has them, I see no reason that Iran wouldn't be even further ahead. They have been
under threat of US attacks for my entire lifetime. Anyway, I would not put it past some other
countries to hit US coastal cities and then deny any knowledge about who did it. There are
many capable and many people have been made enemies by our foreign policy. Surely these
people have treaties to help each other should be attack. And why would they make these
treaties public and antagonize the US military further. I'm sure there are many well kept
secrets out there. We must evolve, or the US and Israel could find it is us against the
world.
War is hell. It has always been so. The failure here is that since World War II all US
wars have been fatuously political. Actions have not been taken to win but to posture about
moral greatness and the ability to force the enemy to deal without destroying his capacity to
resist.
How can you say the US lost in Vietnam when the entire country could have been removed
from the face of the Earth? Yes the price of such removal would have been very high but it
could have been done. Do such considerations mean that if one withdraws one has lost?
The US won the war in the Pacific but it is now considered an excessive use of force that
the US used nuclear weapons to conclude the war. Perhaps the US did not use enough force then
to successfully conclude the Vietnam war? Perhaps, it failed to field the right kind of
force?
The definition of lost is an interesting one. The practical answer is that the US did lose
in many places because it was unwilling to pay the price of victory as publicly expressed.
Yet it could have won if it paid the price.
So an interesting question for military types is to ask how to lower the price. What kind
of weapons would have been needed to quickly sweep the enemy into oblivion in Vietnam let us
say, given the limits of the war? Could the war have been won without ground troops and
choppers but with half a million computer controlled drones armed with machine guns and
grenades flying in swarms close to the ground?
The factories to produce those weapons could have been located in Thailand or Taiwan or
Japan and the product shipped to Vietnam. Since only machines would be destroyed and the
drones are obviously meant to substitute for ground troops then how about a million or two
million of the drones in place of the half a million ground troops? Could the US, with
anachronistic technology to be sure, have won the war for a price that would have been
acceptable to the US?
The idea here is that one constructs an army, robot or otherwise, than can destroy the
enemy it is going to fight at a price which is acceptable. This is actually a form of
asymmetric warfare which requires a thorough understanding of the enemy and his capabilities.
The US did not enter Vietnam with such an army but with one not meant to serve in Vietnam and
whose losses would be deeply resented at home. The price of victory was too high.
But this does not mean that the US cannot win. It only means that the commitment to win in
a poorly thought out war must be great enough to pay the price of victory. This may be a
stupid thing to do but it does not mean that it cannot be done. One cannot assume that the US
will never again show sufficient commitment to win.
Victory means you get to write your own ******** version of history.The most devastating
civilian bombing campaign in human history is not even mentioned in this article. The US fire
bombing of 30 major cities in Korea with the death toll estimated at between 1.2 million and
1.6 million. I bet most US citizens aren't even aware of this atrocity or that the military
requested Truman to authorize the use of nuclear warheads which he, thankfully, declined to
do.
What does the word "victory" mean? It means whatever the rulers want it to mean. In this
case, "victory" is synonymous with prolongation and expansion of warmaking around the world.
Victory does not mean an end to combat. In fact, victory, in the classic sense, means defeat,
at least from the standpoint of those who profit from war. If someone were to come up with a
cure for cancer, it would mean a huge defeat for the cancer industry. Millions would lose
their jobs. CEO's would lose their fat pay packages. Therefore, we need to be clearheaded
about this, and recognize that victory is not what you think it is.
Talked with a guy recently. He is a pilot. He flies planes over Afghanistan. He is a
private contractor.
The program began under the Air Force. It then was taken over by the Army. It is now a
private contractor.
There are approx 400 pilots in country at a time with 3 rotations. He told me what he gets
paid. $200,000 and up.
They go up with a NSA agent running the equipment in back. He state that the dumbass
really does not know what the plane is capable of. They collect all video, audio, infrared,
and more? (You have to sense when to stop asking questions)
I just wanted to know the logistics of the info gathered.
So, the info is gathered. The NSA officer then gets with the CIA and the State Dept to see
what they can release to the end user. The end user is the SOCOM. After it has been through
review then the info is released to SOCOM.
So with all of this info on "goatherders" we still cannot pinpoint and defeat the "enemy"?
No. Too many avenues of profit and deceit and infighting. It will always be. May justice here
and abroad win in the end.
Concentrate on the true enemies. It is not your black, or Jewish, or brown, or Muslim
neighbor. It is the owners of the Fed, Dow chemical, the Rockefellers, McDonnel Douglas and
on and on and on and on and on and on..............
The ROAD to perdition passes through APARTHEID Israhell.
"It does not take a genius to figure out that the United States... has no vital
interests at stake in places like Syria, Libya, Iran and Iraq. Who is driving the process
and benefiting? Israel is clearly the intended beneficiary... " – Philip Giraldi,
Former CIA officer.
Taiwan has become a new "eastern pivot" for Donald Trump. Against all international laws and UN
charters, he is approaching Taiwan, as indicating to the world that regardless of the
established world rules which make Beijing, the Peoples Republic of China (PRC), the official
and legitimate Authority of China, with Taiwan being a part of China – the self-styled
emperor, Mr. Trump, pretends he prefers dealing with Taiwan as an independent country. By doing
so, he intends to invite others to do likewise. Trump wants to make Taiwan an 'ally' –
dreaming of setting up a US base on the island, thus further encircling China. It is the old
game, divide to reign. But he can't be as ignorant as to believe it will actually work. It's
just one more thing to annoy PRC. Frankly, seen from a step back, it looks more like attempting
to dump one of those primitive Trumpish 'diplomatic' bombshells on PRC's back. Provoking the
Dragon?
Dragons can be lethal, especially if exposed to nonstop strings of insults and debasement,
attacks, and threats, sanctioned with trade wars, subjecting US$ 200 billion worth of Chinese
exports into the US with 25% import tax, and, mind you, Trump just issued a new threat
–raising the ante to US$ 300 billion, in case China refuses to attend the G20 summit in
Osaka, Japan on 28-30 June 2019. Can you imagine the insolence, ordering President Xi to attend
the G20 summit?!? The man has indeed no manners, diplomatic or otherwise.
On another front, Trump threatened Mexican's new President Andrés Manuel López
Obrador, AMLO for short, with a 5% tariff on Mexican agricultural exports to the United States,
if illegal immigration to the US would not stop. AMLO approached President Trump with an open
letter, saying that he seeks peace and not confrontation, dialogue not war, and that AMLO's
government will do whatever is in its power to stop illegal migration to the US.
He stated, correctly, that a trade war would do more harm than good to both nations. Trump
then dropped the threat, with worldwide publicity, to make sure his 'goodness' is recognized
the world over. However, just a few days ago, Trump threatened Mexico again with the 5% tax, in
case AMLO's promise doesn't hold and poor Mexicans keep illegally crossing the border into the
great Promised Land (no, not Israel, but the western extension of Israel).
Of course, this tariff has nothing to do with trade. It is punishment, a sheer demonstration
of supremacy. And, never mind, Trump probably doesn't understand that California's agriculture
thrives on the low-wage illegal Mexican and Central American immigrants.
It is nevertheless amazing that the (western) world stands by and dares say NOTHING. The
threats of sanctions seem to be effective. Anybody, or any nation that refuses to go along with
Washington's thuggish criminal behavior, may be subject to punishment, be it by trade and/or
financial sanctions, or outright military intervention. There is no international law, no rules
of the community of nations, no political common sense that is respected by Trump and his
handlers, and the world is afraid. Even though so far most of the threats have amounted to
nothing more than ridiculous blabber and saber rattling.
More threats were thrown at Iran, with more sanctions and economic strangulations if Iran
doesn't "behave". Actually there are hardly any explanations given what "good vs. bad behavior"
would mean for the US, other than Washington's repeated empty accusations of Iran being a
nuclear threat, disregarding the JointComprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), or
nuclear deal signed in 2015, freeing Iran of any further accusation of wanting to become a
nuclear power (which, by the way was a farce in the first place – the subject for another
essay).
This so-called nuclear deal was signed by the 5 UN Security Council members, including the
US. But as we know, under pressure from Netanyahu, Trump reneged last year from the deal
– and since then horrendous sanctions of economic strangulations and foreign asset
confiscations – outright theft, in clear text – were imposed by the US on Iran,
with ongoing pressure on the EU to do likewise. According to Trump – and his two minion
mouth-pieces, Pompeo and Bolton – more are to come.
To that, Iran's Foreign Minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, stated that Iran will not be
blackmailed and added the philosophical observation that Trump's economic wars around the globe
will eventually backfire. Well, yes. Trump's reckless playing with tariffs, sanctions and other
punishments around the globe will eventually drive everybody away from dealing and trading with
the US, including away from the western monetary system. It's the silver lining of the
dark-dark US cloud. It's economics 101.
Propelled by German business interests (but at the same time limited by Washington [and
Brussels] on what he is allowed to say), German Foreign Minister, Heiko Maas, visited Iran a
few days ago to seek a compromise for Germany and other EU members to still hold on to the
Nuclear Deal, because Germany's economy wants to deal with Iran, yet, seeking concessions from
Iran that may assuage Washington. But Iran's Foreign Minister, Zarif, didn't fall for it. The
meeting ended in nothing. Good so, because there is nothing, absolutely nothing, that any ally
(except Israel) could do to change the Bully's mind on Iran.
Frankly, does Trump seriously believe he possesses all that power over other world leaders?
Or is he, Trump, just a convenient lackey of a force much stronger behind him, a force that
controls both the Pentagon and, more importantly, the western financial and banking system
– the Zionist designed western dollar-based monetary system. This Ponzi scheme has been
able for the last 100 years or so – and as we witness, every day more – to usurp
the world, holding it hostage, with artificially created economic booms and busts, with
economic sanctions, strangulations, confiscation, with the theft of nations' foreign assets and
even their reserve funds, if they don't bend to the will of the self-proclaimed super power
USA.
Yes, it's a fading super power, but it still has control over its forced allies and vassals
– many of whom, by now are sick and tired of their ally- cum -vassal status, as
they realize what their losses are. They believed in economic, diplomatic and military
privileges, but are gradually awakening to reality. Progressively they see the empire as what
it is, a shiny, blustering, preposterous house of cards that may come crashing down at any
time. Their anger and courage of Washington's vassalic allies is slowly raising, and they will
eventually break out from their repressive situation. When that happens – and Trump is
hastening that moment with his erratic 'sanction-prone' behavior around the world – a
grand geopolitical shift for the better may take place.
With this partial backdrop of what the globe is facing – Taiwan is just becoming the
latest peon in the war for preparation of Washington's big WAR – dominating China and
Russia. Making Taiwan – which is legally and by all international rules part of PRC
– a US ally and vassal, would further close the US power circle around the East Asian
space. Trump may believe he is moving closer to 'checkmate', dominating the formidable
Russia-China alliance.
With all the flattering and roses the leaders of Taiwan may get from Trump, do they realize
that their role will just be that of one more enabler to enhance the empire's dominion and
increase the US's wealth by helping it steal more of the world's resources?
In the end, Taiwan may just become a mess, a chaotic island with lots of loose ends, with
people pulling in different directions, as they realize that their government has been "bought"
to give away their partial sovereignty and well-being, and they will raise up.
Taiwan, just look around the world! The latest example being Sudan. Orchestrated chaos is
controlling Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria? And look what is being planned, so far without
success, in Venezuela? Taiwan will just be another pawn on Zbigniew Brzezinski's legendary
Grand Geopolitical Chessboard.
The US has been fomenting worldwide hostility against China and Russia for the last 100
years, and especially since WWII, intensified by the fake and false Cold War, made possible
thanks to an all-western-dominating AngloZionist lie-propaganda machine.
We know about "Russia Gate", the never-ending bashing of President Putin and Russia. The
more subtle US attempts to destabilize China have started soon after China had become fully
self-sufficient and autonomous, when she gradually opened her borders to integrate into the
world with exports and attracting foreign investments in the 1980's. The so-called Nixon '
ouverture ' to China, Nixon's one-week trip in 1972 to Beijing, Hangzhou, and Shanghai,
was perhaps the first attempt by Washington to use the huge Chinese market for US exports, and
at the same time constraining China's rapid and foreseeable economic growth. Indeed, China grew
exponentially and in 1986 gained observer status at GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and
Trade), a precursor to WTO, and started negotiating membership of the World Trade Center of
which she eventually became a member in 2001.
Trade, Chinese highly competitive exports was then – and is today – a key issue
for the US goal of world hegemony. In anticipation or rather to prevent China from becoming a
world economic powerhouse, Tiananmen Square protests were introduced in 1989. The lead-up to
the so-called massacre was a huge false flag. A student protest movement, funded by the US
State Department, through the infamous NED (National Endowment for Democracy – an "NGO"
specialized in "regime change" operations – see also Venezuela). The 4th of June
crackdown had been prepared months before, guided by the bloody hands of US Secret Services,
CIA, NSA, and most probably MI6. The "students" had no common cause for the protest, just a
sudden desire for more "freedom", "reforming the communist party" without citing specifics they
wanted reformed.
The 4th of June 2019 anniversary of the 'massacre' 30 years ago, is used by the western media to propagate
against Chinese "tyranny". The news of the massacre was repeated every hour on the hour by
almost all radio and TV stations throughout Europe, lest you might forget, and the
too-young-to-remember – should learn and be prepared for the coming Chinese monster.
That's the goal of the corporate presstitute. And they may succeed, as sleeping people have no
clue of the truth, nor are they interested in abandoning their comfort and facing the
inconvenient truth.
Let's just juxtapose the forced memory of Tiananmen Square with real atrocities being
perpetrated by the west, as these lines go to press. Take Yemen, devastated by the west and its
proxies, chiefly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with weapons and funding from the US, the UK and
France. Yemen is a non-aggressive peaceful country. Tens of thousands of people have been
killed in the last 4 years of this atrocious war, most of them children and women, thousands
from cholera and other water and improper hygiene related diseases; two thirds of the
population suffer from famine. The related death toll is in the tens of thousands. This is
exacerbated by the Red Sea Port of Hudaydah , the gateway for most of Yemen's imports,
being shut by Saudi and Qatari armed forces, so that not even emergency aid enters the country.
The UN calls it the largest humanitarian crisis in recent history. You hardly hear anything in
the western news about this western-funded and executed atrocious mass killing.
False flags from Tiananmen Square , to 9/11, to
the Ukraine Maidan, to the sporadic string of terror killings in Europe and the United States,
by ISIS / IS Al-Qada and associated groups – all funded by the empire and its proxies and
vassals – to the more recent 'regime change' or Color Revolution type protests in Hong
Kong, the Umbrella Revolution of 2014 and street protests of the last week, with thousands of
protesters in the street against a Beijing initiated extradition law to be introduced by Hong
Kong's legislation are all US / western instigated, funded and guided so as to provoke and
destabilize China. And foremost, demonize China in the eyes of the western world. Most western
countries have extradition laws for criminals to be turned over to the jurisdiction of the
country where they may have committed the crime. But that's not mentioned by the corporate
lie-propaganda.
These permanent aggressions against the world power China, a world power with a pacific
non-expansive life philosophy, could badly backfire. Just imagine, Beijing may eventually get
sick and tired of Washington and its vassal-allies meddling in PRC's internal affairs, could
easily repeal Hong Kong's semi autonomy and incorporate the city fully into the territory of
the PRC – complete with Chinese laws, obligations and benefits. As simple as that. What
would Washington do? What would the west do? Scream murder? Well, they do that already, so it
couldn't be much worse. A military aggression on China? Hardly. The West wouldn't dare.
Attacking China is attacking Russia. There is a strong alliance between the two countries, one
that was made even stronger by several new agreements signed between Presidents Putin and Xi
during the recent St. Petersburg International Economic Forum.
Similar provocations are planned and take place with Taiwan. In April 2019 the US sent two
destroyers into the Taiwan Straits, claimed by mainland China as their territorial waters.
Germany, which according to their armistice status' obligation of non-confrontation and
non-aggression, is considering sending a war ship to join the US and French warships in an
attempt to demonstrate to the world that these are international waters.
What if such provocations, rather than gathering more world recognition of Taipei's
self-styled autonomy, they prompt President Xi Jinping to close in on Taiwan and actually
absorb the island as a PRC owned territory? This would just conform to what Taiwan nominally
already is since 25 October 1971, when the UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 declared The
Peoples Republic of China as the sole legal China.
Switch to another corner of the world with a different but very much connected scenario.
Early this morning, 13 June, in the Strait of Oman, about 25 km from the coast of Iran, a
Japanese-owned and a Norwegian oil tanker (the owner of which is an old friend of Iran's) were
attacked. Explosions and fire broke out, some seamen were injured, and 44 were actually rescued
in the Gulf of Oman by Iranian ships. As of now, it is not clear what happened and who the
perpetrators were. Never mind, Pompeo immediately accused Iran for the attacks – and
keeps doing so, stating falsely that video evidence – never offered to be seen by the
public – showed it was Iran. Why would Iran attack a Japanese oil tanker, while Japanese
Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, is visiting Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in Tehran
on Thursday, the very day of the attacks, for talks to maintain the treaties of the Nuclear
Deal?
World! Let's face it. Only an idiot will believe that Iranians are so idiotic as to attack
foreign vessels in the Gulf, clients and friends of Iran. If this smells like a false flag
– it is a false flag. Carried out by whom? Could be the Saudis, Israel, the Emirates,
Mossad, the CIA, MI6 any one of the puppet allies of the emperor.
People, where are we going? As a result of this incident oil prices rose immediately by up
to 4% for fear that worse might happen, namely that Iran might close the Strait of Hormuz
through which about 25% of the world's hydrocarbon are shipped. A closure could have oil prices
jump to USD$ 200 / barrel or more – and sink the world in the worst recession of recent
history. In the meantime, Wall Street bankers, notably Goldman Sachs, who have ample experience
with oil price manipulation, are already playing with oil futures which under such a scenario
could bring them hundreds of billions while the rest of the world goes belly up.
On another, but very much related topic: Many, especially unaligned countries, are losing
trust in the US and especially in the US-dollar. They are quietly switching their reserves to
Chinese yuans and / or gold. Trump's handlers know about it. They may be contemplating as a
last resort a new kind of gold standard. Losing out on dollar hegemony is one of the reasons
they are pushing The Donald into a trade war with China. The (US) expectation is that a trade
war with China would debase the Chinese currency, thereby discredit it and make it unattractive
as a reserve money.
Creating a conflict between PRC and Taiwan, might, from a US point of view, have the same
effect, degrading the yuan, in addition to bringing other Asian countries on board, those who
are themselves worried about their territorial waters; i.e., the Philippines, Malaysia,
Indonesia.
And yet, in an opposite corner of the world, namely in the swamp of Washington, the same
Pompeo who just found another reason to increase sanctions on Iran, is utterly upset that his
plans in Venezuela didn't work out, because the stupid opposition cannot unite, cannot be
trusted. That would leave only the 'military option' on the table – but that military
option is too risky with Venezuela being supported by her strong allies, Russia and China.
Friends – what you must be aware of – all the dots of conflicts, wars, threats,
harassments, false flags, sanctions and otherwise punishments, lies and lies and lies around
the world, are dots that must be connected. Only then will you get the Big Picture – and
to understand the Big Picture is crucial. It is at once hilarious for the phantasy it portrays
and catastrophic for the danger it presents. For the owners of this Big Picture, the Washington
Swamp and Israel, it represents the illusion and desire to achieve the US-Pentagon-Banking plan
within the PNAC (), a wishful thinking of Full Spectrum Dominance.
Leda Cosmides at the University of California, Santa Barbara, points to her work with her colleague
John Tooby on the use of outrage to mobilize people: "The campaign was more about outrage than
about policies," she says. And when a politician can create a sense of moral outrage, truth
ceases to matter. People will go along with the emotion, support the cause and retrench into
their own core group identities. The actual substance stops being of any relevance.
Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth University who studies false beliefs,
has found that
when false information is specifically political in nature, part of our political identity, it
becomes almost impossible to correct lies.
... ... ...
As the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain
put it, “The great master fallacy of the
human mind is believing too much.” False beliefs, once established, are incredibly tricky to correct. A leader who lies
constantly creates a new landscape, and a citizenry whose sense of reality may end up swaying far more than they think possible.
The RAND Corporation recently published a document entitled
Overextending
and Unbalancing Russia. Assessing the Impact of Cost-Imposing Options
. The study is the
collective effort of experienced diplomats, including former Assistant Secretary of State for
Europe and US Ambassador to the European Union James Dobbins; a professor (Brookings Institution,
American Enterprise Institute, National Defence University) and military intelligence branched
lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, Raphael Cohen; and seven other RAND researchers who
specialise in international relations, the military industry, intelligence, politics, and
technology.
It is a practical recommendation for how the
US can use Russia's weakness and vulnerability to further limit its political and economic
potential.
So what, exactly, are these influential political
analysts suggesting to the American establishment?
Their full spectrum of operations is divided into
four sections – economic, geopolitical, ideological and informational, and military measures. It is
clear that the experts approached the development of their strategy rationally by measuring the
potential costs for the US itself.
The economic section consists of four options that
Russia has already been directly affected by in previous years. The first of these is expanding the
production and export of US energy resources, which would affect global prices and therefore limit
Russia's profits. The second is strengthening sanctions, where the involvement of other countries
in such a process is seen as essential. Next is helping Europe find new gas suppliers, including
for LNG supplies. And, finally, encouraging migration from Russia to other countries, especially
with regard to skilled workers and educated young people. It is assumed that the first three
options would be the most beneficial to the US, although imposing deeper sanctions could bring
certain risks.
In the section on geopolitical measures, the
US experts propose six geopolitical scenarios aimed at weakening Russia.
They don't just
involve the Russian Federation, either, but neighbouring countries as well. Each scenario has
certain risks, costs, and an expected impact.
According to the Americans,
helping
Ukraine by supplying the country with weapons would exploit Russia's greatest vulnerability
.
But any increase in the supply of US weapons and advice to Ukraine would need to be
carefully calibrated in order to increase the costs to Russia of supporting its existing
commitments without provoking a much wider conflict in which Russia, by reason of proximity, would
have significant advantages.
Syrian Democratic Forces trainees, representing an equal number of Arab and Kurdish
volunteers, stand in formation at their graduation ceremony in northern Syria, August 9, 2017.
This is the first option. The RAND experts believe
that this will be the most beneficial, but that its possible realisation will also involve high
risks.
The second option is to increase support
to the Syrian rebels.
This could jeopardise other US policy priorities, however, such
as combating radical Islamic terrorism, and could destabilise the entire region even further. It
might not even be possible, given the radicalisation, fragmentation, and decline of the Syrian
opposition.
The RAND experts obviously understand all the
possible dangers involved in this scenario, but, reading between the lines, it is easy to see that
this option is basically implying the use of terrorist groups in the geopolitical interests of the
US. There is nothing new about this method in and of itself, but it can be rather costly to
implement and comes with considerable risks, and, in the best case scenario, the likelihood of
success is moderate. It could also upset America's traditional allies, as happened during the Iraq
invasion to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
The third option is promoting
liberalisation in Belarus.
The authors admit that this is unlikely to succeed,
however, and could provoke a strong response from Russia, which would lead to a general worsening
of the security situation in Europe and be a setback for US policy. As with the first option, it
comes with high risk, but the benefits could also be considerable. Needless to say that what is
really being referred to here is a colour revolution in the Republic of Belarus. The country's
leadership should pay attention to this recommendation by the RAND Corporation and ask the US
diplomats in Minsk for comment.
Expanding ties in the South Caucasus,
which competes economically with Russia, is the fourth option,
but it would be
difficult to implement because of geography and history.
The fifth scenario is reducing Russia's
influence in Central Asia,
which could also prove difficult and disproportionately
expensive for the US.
And the sixth, and final, scenario is
organising an uprising in Transnistria and expelling Russian troops, which would be a blow to
Russia's prestige.
This could also have the opposite effect, however, since Moscow
would save money, but it could well lead to additional costs for the US and its allies.
Muscovites protesting the war in Ukraine and Russia's support of separatism in the Crimea on
the Circular Boulevards in Moscow on March 15, 2014
It should be noted that all six scenarios are
aimed at Russia's neighbours. They are a kind of re-working of the old Anaconda strategy unleashed
on Russia's borders.
The section on ideological and informational measures
is aimed at the Russian Federation's domestic policies and is essentially interfering in the
country's affairs. There are just four scenarios, but they speak for themselves:
undermining faith in the electoral system; creating the idea that the political elite does not
serve the interests of society; instigating protests and non-violent resistance; and undermining
Russia's image abroad.
Tellingly, the proposed military measures against
Russia have the largest number of options and are separated into three strategic areas – air, sea,
and land.
It states that repositioning bombers to within
striking distance of key Russian strategic targets would have a high likelihood of success and
would undoubtedly attract Moscow's attention and cause unease. The costs and risks associated with
this option would be fairly low, as long as the bombers are based out of range of most of Russia's
ballistic and ground-based cruise missiles.
Marines assigned to the Thunderbolts of Marine Fighter Attack Squadron (VMFA) 251 remove a
training AGM-88 HARM from an F/A-18C Hornet on the flight deck of the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier
USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN 71).
Reposturing fighter jets so that they are closer to
their targets than bombers. Although the RAND experts believe that such actions could worry Moscow
more than the option with the bombers, the probability of success is low but the risks are high.
Since each aircraft would have to fly several sorties during a conventional conflict because of low
payload, there is a risk that they could be destroyed on the ground and their deployment airfields
could be shut down early on.
Deploying additional tactical nuclear weapons to
parts of Europe and Asia could increase Russia's worry, which could lead to a significant increase
in investment in its air defences. In combination with the 'bomber' option, it has a high
probability of success, but deploying a large number of these weapons could make Moscow react in
ways that go against the interests of the US and its allies.
Repositioning US and allied ballistic missile defence
systems to better deter Russian ballistic missiles would also make Moscow uneasy, but it would
probably be the least effective option since Russia has plenty of missiles that could be used for
any upgrades. US and allied targets would also remain at risk.
A U.S. sailor aboard the guided missile destroyer USS Mustin (DDG 89) fires a torpedo at a
simulated target during Valiant Shield 2014 in the Pacific Ocean September 18, 2014.
The report also suggests developing new
low-observable, long-range bombers or significantly increasing the number of those types that are
already causing unease in Moscow. There is also mention of high numbers of autonomous or remotely
piloted strike aircraft.
As the RAND experts point out,
the key risk
of these options is an arms race, which could lead to cost-imposing strategies directed against the
United States.
For example, investing in ballistic missile defence systems and space-based
weapons would alarm Moscow, but Russia could defend itself against such developments by taking
measures that would probably be considerably cheaper than the cost of these systems to the United
States.
With regard to a maritime confrontation, RAND
suggests increasing the presence of US and allied navies in those zones considered potentially
dangerous because of Russia. It is probably safe to assume that this is referring to the Baltic
Sea, the Arctic, and the Black Sea/Mediterranean Basin. The report also mentions increasing
investment in research and developing new types of weapons that could strike Russian nuclear
submarines. At the same time, it would be a good idea for the US itself to increase the fleet of
submarines in its nuclear triad. And, finally, with regard to the Black Sea, the report suggests
using NATO to develop an access denial strategy – probably through the deployment of long-range,
anti-ship missiles – in order to increase Russia's defence spending in Crimea.
On land, the report's authors believe that there
should be an increase in the number of European NATO troops deployed directly on the Russian
border. They also emphasise the importance of increasing the size and scale of NATO exercises in
Europe, which would send a clear signal to Russia. Another option is to develop intermediate-range
missiles but not deploy them, which would force Russia to upgrade its missile programme (an
additional cost). And, finally, the report suggests investing in new technologies (weapons based on
new physical principles such as lasers) aimed at countering Russian air defence systems.
Exercise Artemis Strike was a German-led tactical live-fire exercise with live Patriot and
Stinger missiles at the NATO Missile Firing Installation in Chania, Greece, from October 31 to
November 9, 2017
As can be seen, all four sections are complementary
in their diversity. The Pentagon has already been working on some innovations in the last few years
as part of the
Third Offset Strategy
, while
the current and new budget suggests that, one way or another, the US will continue to build up its
military power.
Together with other advisory documents for
high-level decision makers in the US, this report by RAND experts is evidence of a large-scale
campaign being carried out against Russia.
It is surprising, however, that all of the
recommendations, especially those included in the military section, are virtually pointing to the
preparation of a war with Russia. It calmly talks about what the US can do about existing arms
limitation treaties, how to use NATO, and how to use Ukraine in the war with Russia, especially on
land and in the Black Sea theatre of operations. There is no doubt that the recommendations
themselves were passed on to US decision-making centres a long time before April 2019, when the
monograph was published. All that remains is to monitor the implementation of these scenarios and
take the appropriate countermeasures.
"... The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians. The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets. The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen. ..."
WATCH: US economist urges covert violence to provoke war with Iran "I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically
go down – someday one of them might not come up." Admin
Many believe war with the Islamic Republic of Iran has been the dream of some hardcore neocons in Washington since at least 2001.
Back in 2012 former employee of the IMF and current economist for the World Bank,
Patrick Clawson , provided fuel for this belief when
he was videoed obliquely advocating using covert violence so that the US president "can get to war with Iran."
In a startlingly frank speech, Clawson makes it clear he believes (and apparently approves) that the US has a history of seeking
war for profit, and of using provocations to goad its perceived enemies into starting such wars. Clawson highlights in particular
the Confederate attack on Fort Sumter in 1861
, which, he says, was deliberately engineered by president Lincoln in pursuit of an excuse to launch a war on the Southern secessionist
states.
In light of the recent alleged attacks on two tankers in the Gulf of Oman, timed to coincide with the visit of the Japanese prime
minister to Iran, and in light of Secretary of State Capone Pompeo's precipitate and predictable claim the attacks were
likely perpetrated by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, this is an apposite time to recall this telling little incident.
Below see the transcript of Mr Clawson's remarks
Transcript
"I frankly think that crisis initiation is really tough and it's very hard for me to see how the United States president can get
us to war with Iran which leads me to conclude that if in fact compromise is not coming that the traditional way of America gets
to war is what would be best for US interests
Some people might think that mr. Roosevelt wanted to get us in to the World War two as David mentioned. You may recall we had
to wait for Pearl Harbor.
Some people might think mr. Wilson wanted to get us into World War One. You may recall he had to wait for the Lusitania episode
Some people might think that mr. Johnson wanted to send troops to Vietnam. You may recall they had to wait for the Gulf of Tonkin
episode.
We didn't go to war with Spain until the USS Maine exploded, and may I point out that mr. Lincoln did not feel he could call off
the federal army until Fort Sumter was attacked which is why he ordered the commander at Fort Sumter to do exactly that thing which
the South Carolinians had said would cause an attack.
So if in fact the Iranians aren't going to compromise it would be best if somebody else started the war
But I would just like to suggest that one can combine other means of pressure with sanctions. I mentioned that explosion on August
17th. We could step up the pressure. I mean look people, Iranian submarines periodically go down – someday one of them
might not come up.
Who would know why?
We can do a variety of things if we wish to increase the pressure. I'm not advocating that but I'm just suggesting that a it's
this is not a either-or proposition of, you know, it's just sanctions has to be has to succeed or other things.
DunGroanin
Always follow the money they made lots instantly from the firework display, it aint rocket science!
What do you expect from a Zionist Front like WINEP? They've been inciting wars for Israel for decades. "Getting the stupid goys
to fight Israel's wars for decades."
Jen
If Patrick Clawson is typical of the kind of economist employed at the IMF and then promoted to a leading position at the World
Bank, I dread to think of the calibre of people who also applied for his job in the past and were rejected. His speech is so garbled
and full of unconscious slip-ups.
andyoldlabour
The US has convinced itself of its own so called "exceptionalism", where they can say anything out in the open, reveal their greatest
desires, their unholy plans. There must be some "good" Americans who can stop this madness, or have they all become inflicted/infected
with some hate virus?
Milton
Interesting that this Israeli-First traitor Clawson mentions Lincoln and Ft. Sumter. He finally admits what genuine historians
of the Civil War long knew: Lincoln was a warmonger and tyrant, not an emancipator. The Civil war was fought to eliminate true
freedom and equality in this country and it has been downhill ever since. The working class and soldier-class in America today
are slaves in every sense of the word. Slaves to Zion. No wonder the certified warmonger and racist Lincoln is worshiped equally
by Left and Right today, whilst genuine American patriots like Robert E. Lee have their legacy torn down. Lincoln was the proto-Neocon.
Tom Dilorenzo summed up the real Lincoln when he wrote in Lincoln Unmasked:
"Imagine that California seceded from the union and an American president responded with the carpet bombing of Los Angeles,
San Diego, and San Francisco that destroyed 90 percent of those cities. Such was the case with General Sherman's bombardment of
Atlanta; a naval blockade; a blocking off of virtually all trade; the eviction of thousands of residents from their homes (as
occurred in Atlanta in 1864); the destruction of most industries and farms; massive looting of private property by a marauding
army; and the killing of one out of four males of military age while maiming for life more than double that number. Would such
an American president be considered a 'great statesman' or a war criminal? The answer is obvious.
A statesman would have recognized the state's right to secede, as enshrined in the Tenth Amendment, among other places, and
then worked diligently to persuade the seceded state that a reunion was in its best interest. Agreat statesman, or even a modest
one, would not have impulsively plunged the entire nation into a bloody war.
Lincoln's warmongering belligerence and his invasion of all the Southern states in response to Fort Sumter (where no one was
harmed or killed) caused the upper South -- Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas -- to secede after originally voting
to remain in the Union. He refused to meet with Confederate commissioners to discuss peace and even declined a meeting with Napoleon
III of France, who offered to broker a peace agreement. No genuine statesman would have behaved in such a way.
After Fort Sumter, Lincoln thanked naval commander Gustavus Fox for assisting him in manipulating the South Carolinians into
firing at Fort Sumter. A great statesman does not manipulate his own people into starting one of the bloodiest wars in human history."
mathias alexand
Here's a man who holds a press conference to announce a secret plan. Only in America.
False flags here, false flags there, false flags everywhere. All too further the aims of the 'masters of the universe'. We know
who was responsible for the tanker attacks. Who are the 3 countries absolutely desperate to take Iran down and install a completely
pliant puppet regime answerable to Washington, Tel Aviv and to a lesser extent Riyadh. And creatures like Clawson, and all the
other vermin can only see $$$$. Thats all they care about. Opening up more markets to further enrich themselves. I echo the other
commenters also. The evil men stoop to for greed, power and control. Psychopaths.
harry law
The Foreign Office issued a statement saying: "It is almost certain that a branch of the Iranian military – the Islamic Revolutionary
Guard Corps – attacked the two tankers on 13 June. No other state or non-state actor could plausibly have been responsible."
Unbelievable, The UK vassal will use this to as one more reason to evade their responsibilities in implementing the JCPOA.
Er . just a rough guess Bill going on the belligerent foaming at the mouth by people in those places along with the likes of Bolton
and Pompeo. In fact, you can probably go all the way back to about 1980 or so.
mark
I think the real giveaway was when all three rogue states openly stated their intention of doing this 1,000 times over the past
10 years. That was the crucial clue Sherlock Holmes was looking for.
Wilmers31
And who funds the Washington Institute? Last time I looked the International Crisis Group existed thanks to Soros and is usually
treated like a serious organisation.
Many Europeans are not in love with the idea of war with Iran, just to achieve obedience to the US. 90 million people is bigger
than Germany.
wardropper
These are the shysters, the spivs and the con men of bygone times. They are the ones who lurked at street corners, waiting for
someone to come along who was gullible enough to buy the Moon from them.
But, for some reason, they are all in politics today.
Now how could that be?
Only because there are people whom it currently suits to use shysters, spivs and con men in order to create enough chaos for
us to want to give up and just let those people have their way.
I agree with Rhys below. There is no more disgusting example of sub-humanity to be found on earth than these warmongers.
To deal with them, however, we will have to realize that their "philosophy", if you can call it that, runs very deep. It didn't
just enter their heads last week.
They are reared and trained in it.
It will be a tough battle.
wardropper
I should add that, in bygone times, the police and the law were usually able to deal with the shysters, spivs and con men, since
their lack of conscience often gave them away.
The modern version, however, which has moved into politics, was shrewd enough to use a few decades of bribery and threats in order
to build around itself a nice little shell, through which the law simply cannot penetrate, except on special occasions, mainly
for show.
Rhys Jaggar
There is a big cabal of warmongers who stoke the fuel but never see action. I find those people more disgusting than anyone on
earth.
Draft dodgers, academics, 'historians' etc etc.
Ball-less pricks is what I call them .
mark
All fully paid up members of the Bill Clinton Light Infantry.
andyoldlabour
The appeasers would include the US who fully supported Saddam Hussein in his war against Iran, who provided him with chemical
weapons and logistical help in using those weapons, which killed around 50,000 Iranian troops and Kurdish civilians.
The same appeasers armed and funded the Taliban (Mujahideen) against the Soviets.
The US are the single largest force for terrorism the World has ever seen.
William HBonney
The easiest, and perhaps best metric by which to judge a country, is 'do people aspire to live there? '.
I see you admire the Soviet Union, but at its dissolution, people were queuing to leave. And yet the US, and the UK, according
to you, iniquitous places of tyranny, are oversubscribed. Could it be, that for all your implied erudition, you are merely a bellend?
BigB
Well, even as a pacifist: if that is his sentiment – I hope he has sons or daughters in the military stationed in CENTCOM in Qatar.
I bet he hasn't, though.
Rhisiart Gwilym
He should be right there on the frontline himself. That would straighten the disgusting creep's ideas out about the 'usefulness'
of deliberately provoking war
"... Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south, and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not. ..."
"... Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist. ..."
"... Daesh are like another Gladio, but on steroids. ..."
Yes. Originally, creation of the "Arc of Crisis" was proposed by Bernard Lewis as a means to divide and rule, which has always
been the British Empire's mody operandi , and Zbigniew Brzezinski wanted to create an "Arc of Crisis" all along the southern
border of the USSR and later, Russia.
Except for Afghanistan, the "Arc of Crisis" hasn't been all that successful as far as creating instability to Russia's south,
and it hasn't been all that successful in promoting Anglo-American hegemony either. However, it has been wildly successful in
perpetuating the "arc of instability" that justifies US military spending, so the MIC is quite well satisfied with the policies
whether the broader interests and security of the British and American people are served well by the policy or not.
There are many different aspects to this, like from the moment that large numbers of prisoners on death row in S.A. were given
the ultimatum for joining the FSA or decline and face certain execution.
Too often regions are deliberately being exploited by greedy individuals and mixed into politics.
Interesting to note that Daesh only ever appear to be attacking the traditional enemies of the Zionist.
The Tax Justice Network, organized in 2003 to fight offshore tax evasion and corruption,
has censored a podcast its founding director recorded when I spoke at the Offshore Alert
Conference in November in London. I didn't write about this before now, because I though the
TJN leaders might change their minds. But it turns out they are either cowardly or
corrupt.
####
Browder's tentacles run far, but only as far as his backers allow him, which leads me to
ask 'what would it take for them to drop him'? Browder has a shelf-life and at some point he
will be surplus to requirement .
That's a very sad story. You can really only take on someone like Browder when you have
nothing to lose – it seems that as soon as you attract interest at an organizational
level, it turns out that organization is afraid of losing its funding, and bows to the power
which threatens to take it away. Note that he was not able to intimidate Nekrasov into not
making his film, but he was able to browbeat theatres into not showing it.
Sooner or later it will all come crashing down for Browder. But The USA will protect him
until they have something to replace the Magnitsky Act so they can continue to legally
discriminate against Russia. If Browder goes down, the act he worked so hard to get on the
books will be revealed as partisan bullshit, and nobody in the west wants that.
Despite
the deep schism that separates America's deranged political duopoly, they do share a common
foreign policy pet project, and that is to prevent Russia from ever shining again on the global
stage in all fields of endeavor.
One of Donald Trump's main pledges on the 2016 campaign trail was to rekindle the dying
embers of US-Russia relations, which had been undergoing a mini Ice Age under Barack Obama, his
ballyhooed 'reset' notwithstanding. But before Trump was ever put to the test of romancing
Russia, he was sidelined by one of the most malicious political stunts of the modern age.
It is only necessary to recall the 2016 Winter of Our Discontent when the Democratic leader
sent
35 Russian diplomats and their families packing just before New Year's Eve in retaliation for
Russia's alleged involvement in hacking the Democratic National Committee's computers. Before
Trump ascended the throne, those unfounded claims lit the fuse on 'Russiagate,' the debacle
which continues to undermine not just US-Russia relations, but the entire US political
system.
Yet would things have turned out any differently between Washington and Moscow had the
Democrats graciously accepted defeat in 2016 without feeling the need to blame remote Russia? I
am not sure.
Today, observers reason that
the US Republicans have no choice but to 'get tough' on Russia in an effort to dispel
Democrat-generated rumors of excessive coziness with the Kremlin. Last year, for example, Trump
bested Obama on the Russia front when he expelled 60 Russian diplomats in response to an
alleged assassination attempt on former British spy, Sergey Skripal; an astonishing move on the
part of the US conservative, but with so much riding on the line was it really a surprise?
And what was it exactly that was 'riding on the line'? Aside from good relations between the
world's two premier nuclear powers, not to mention thwarting nuclear Armageddon as Prime
Minister Theresa May very unwisely
issued an ultimatum to Russia over the matter, there is the question of hundreds of
billions of dollars of business contracts – from gas supplies to military hardware.
Tycoon Trump would sooner win over European gas supplies than the plains of Central Asia, for
example, the geopolitical lynchpin so dear to the hearts of US policymakers, like the late
Zbigniew Brzezinski. This is where so many people misread Donald Trump: His heart and mind is
devoted to the business deals, not the military steals. But that doesn't necessarily make his
moves are any less dangerous.
From President Trump's perspective, Russia is a 500-pound cigar-chomping guy at the
negotiating table with an ego and stature equal to his own that must be vanquished lest The
Deal be lost and he – Donald J. Trump, CEO and Founder of The Trump Organization –
look like a second-rate negotiator and fraud. Similar to the methods a belligerent globalist,
Trump the inveterate businessman will do anything to achieve leverage in the pursuit of
profit.
This is where Trump was only too happy to oblige the British with their extremely suspect
Skripal story because vilifying the Russians, once again, would give the US an upper hand in
stealing business away from Moscow, most notably in the realm of European gas supplies.
Presently, the Trump administration is trying hard to halt progress on Nord Stream 2, an
ambitious 11 billion euro ($12.4 billion) project to construct a gas pipeline under the Baltic
Sea from Russia to Germany.
Speaking from Kiev this week, US Energy Secretary Rick Perry
said Washington, once again endorsing the spirit of free competition and enterprise, was
preparing to introduce sanctions on foreign companies involved in the project.
But that's just the beginning.
To show how low the Americans would stoop to get a piece of this lucrative European market,
which the Russian's have been dutifully supplying for many decades, they've gone for some
dramatic
rebranding , calling LNG supplies "freedom gas." You know, the byproduct of 'freedom
fries.'
"Increasing export capacity from the Freeport LNG project is critical to spreading freedom
gas throughout the world by giving America's allies a diverse and affordable source of clean
energy," said US Under Secretary of Energy Mark W. Menezes.
Dmitry Peskov, official spokesman of the Russian president, scoffed at such cynical attempts
by Washington to strong-arm nations into accepting its preferred version of the 'free
market.'
"Instead of fair competition they prefer to act like in Wild West times," Peskov told RT's
Sophie Shevardnadze ahead of the St.
Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF). "They just show the gun and say that no,
you guys here in Europe, you are going to buy our natural gas and we don't care that it is at
least 30% more expensive than the gas coming from the Russians. This is the case."
Perhaps nowhere else is this effort to 'control the market' more evident than in the realm
of military spending, and particularly among NATO states. Currently, European countries spend
some $240 billion annually on military weapons and forces, while Russia spends just $66 billion
each year. Yet for businessmen like Trump, that is not good enough. Employing the vacuous claim
of an 'aggressive Russia,' Trump is passing around the proverbial hat, demanding
that NATO members contribute an ever-higher amount of their GDP to military spending. At the
same, the eastern border with Russia has become militarized like never before.
Here there is striking convergence on the part of the Democrats and Republicans when it
comes to Russia. The Democrats under Barack Obama, accepting the baton passed to them by the
Bush administration, dropped a US-made missile
defense system in Romania, a stone's throw from the Russian border. Obama's assurances that the
Russians would be allowed to participate in the project were casually forgotten. But the
Russians, who know a thing or two about military strategy, did not forget. Last year, Vladimir
Putin unveiled a number of
daunting military breakthroughs, including hypersonic weapons, which the Russian leader
explained were developed with the sole purpose of striking a strategic balance between the two
nuclear superpowers. And if the world needs more of anything these days, it is certainly
balance.
With such ploys in mind, it is easy to see why Moscow has little cause for celebration with
either a Democrat or Republican in the White House. Both political parties have long viewed
Russia not as a potential partner that could lend tremendous assistance in resolving some of
the planet's most intractable problems, but rather as some Cold War foe that needs vilified and
vanquished. Of course there is good reason for this decades-long duplicity. The double-pronged
attack by the Democrats and Republicans allows Washington to continue to make strategic inroads
against Russia, as well as China, while filling the corporate coffers at the same time. It is
an age-old strategy – albeit a foolhardy one in an age of nuclear weapons – which
is doomed to ultimate failure, if not disaster, if left unchecked. The views of individual
contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. Tags:
NATOPerryRussiaTrumpUS
He made a fortune in the chaotic world of 1990s Russian capitalism, then took a place at
the heart of the British establishment
Striding the halls of an English stately home, dressed in full costume as Victorian
prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, Len Blavatnik was celebrating his 60th birthday.
Grammy-winner Bruno Mars sang. Guests -- some in frock coats, others dressed as Leo Tolstoy,
Rasputin or Chinese emissaries -- mixed with rock stars, celebrities and business
tycoons.
Themed as an imaginary conference chaired by Disraeli, the June 2017 party was
emblematic of Blavatnik's extraordinary rise from his birth in Soviet Ukraine to one of the
UK's richest people
####
A lot more at the link.
So why did Abramovic get the bum rush? He's kept his head down, not made waves, behaved
himself and spent a lot of money in the UK (Chelsea FC) which the above FT article sniffs at
as unworthy (snobs), but the Brit government still stiffed his visa and he hasn't been back
to the UK even though he now also has I-sraeli citizenship that affords him visa-free entry
to the UK. Is it because the UK and others need some oligarchs on the side just in case their
dream comes true and they need to parachute in some reliable Russians? That wouldn't
surprise me. Government in waiting. Maybe Abramovic said "No." Wrong answer.
Леонид
Валентинович
Блаватник (Сэр
Леонард
Блаватник;
англ. Sir Leonard Blavatnik или Len Blavatnik;
род. 14 июня 1957,
Одесса --
американский и
британский
предприниматель
и промышленник
еврейского
происхождения.
В 2015 году
возглавил
список
богатейших
людей
Великобритании
Russian Wiki
Leonid Valentinovich Blavatnik (Sir Leonard Blavatnik or Len Blavatnik); born 14 June
1957, Odessa – American and British entrepreneur and industrialist of Jewish ancestry.
In 2015, headed a list of the richest people in Great Britain
By this stage I wonder if all the neighbours aren't all "ex" spooks from hither and yon.
Who else would tolerate the nonsense they've been subjected to without reaching out to their
learned friends? Good luck with putting a house on the market with that circus going on.
Such stringent measures would surely not be taken by HM govt and British security if they had
no evidence that those evil Russians had attempted to kill the Skripals with Novichok.
The whole premise just becomes more and more ridiculous – the house is now completely
shrouded in tarpaulins, the roof has been removed, it has undergone extensive
'decontamination' – all, all of it obviously for show, for the yokels, because for
weeks afterward police personnel guarded the residence while standing just feet away from the
door handle which was supposedly the locus of infection. No chemical-warfare protection
whatsoever was apparent; they didn't even wear gloves unless it was cold.
They might at least have made up some story that the Deadly Door Handle had been replaced,
or even the entire door. Because everyone who went in or out of that house, and there must
have been many, touched that door handle, at least some of them with their bare hand. And
what ever became of the intrepid detective, Nick what's-his-name? Wasn't the state going to
buy his home as well, even though he had scarcely been in it and had gone more or less
straight to the hospital after being 'infected'? Only to make a miraculous and complete
recovery in days, and then drop off the public radar?
Stupidity abounds. Yet the press just can't let it go, and let it mercifully drop out of
sight. It would just be too embarrassing to tacitly admit the British government made it up
from start to finish, the entire operation. If the Skripals actually were poisoned with
something, and not just acting a role for the British government, then that part must have
been HM-government-supplied as well, because nobody who has any experience with police
procedure is going to believe they had a culprit and a complete history of the crime in only
a couple of hours after its discovery, and a foreign state was responsible.
I don't want to be an alarmist but if I had to guess I would say our good friend Officer Nick
is probably partying it up with Sergei, Yulia, and their pets in Hades.
You never know. He sort of dropped out of the public eye, and of all of them he seemed to be
the one whose story would be picked apart first, although all of them were improbable. And
I'm sure many, many were interested in interviewing him and questioning him further.
He was released from hospital with no apparent ill effects more than a year ago, on March
23rd, 2018. According to the Telegraph , here,
he returned to active duty the beginning of 2019, but the story has his Chief confirming
this, it is not Bailey himself. That same story remembers that Dawn Sturgess "fell ill in
Amesbury months after the incident and died in hospital in July after coming into contact
with a perfume bottle believed to have been used in the attack on the Skripals and then
discarded." But the perfume bottle described as having been 'used in the attack on the
Skripals' was brand-new and still in its store packaging, not to any appearance unusual
except for that weird plastic aerator fastened to the bottle. Which, now that I think of it,
was supposed to have been not attached to the bottle at all; Charlie Rowley's tale was that
he broke the bottle trying to get the applicator on it, which is how he was exposed. But he
still gave it to his paramour as a gift, and she was still apparently able to use it to spray
herself.
Anyway, so far as I can make out, DS Nick Bailey returned to duty with his former police
department last winter, and since then not a peep has been heard from him. The Skripals are
still incognito, and Sergei has never been seen again since going into hospital.
Bailey's parents apparently threw a wobbler when the Beeb decided to run a two-part
television drama on the attacks, which would doubtless reinforce and reconfirm the government
line although it is meant to showcase the quiet courage and resourcefulness of 'ordinary
heroes'.
For those who still look in occasionally on what is happening with Nord Stream II, the
Americans are still blustering about killing it with new sanctions targeted against
pipelaying vessels and those who finance them, insure them, and so on. Its typical
dog-in-the-manger pressure is applied with a view to supplying Europe itself, with 'freedom
gas'. That, of course, is not using energy as a weapon – just so we're clear. It's
trying to force Europe to buy higher-priced American gas by using economics as a weapon.
Anyway, Germany is getting pretty fed up with it. Mutti Merkel has let the Americans know
that they are not going to be able to stop the project. She has let it be known that the
project already has European approval 'in principle', and that she is aware this is all about
Ukraine and forcing Russia to continue gas transit through it and supplement its budget with
transit fees. Germany's Ambassador to the United States, Emily Haber, has allegedly been even
more pointed than that.
"In particular, according to Bild, the German Ambassador to the United States, Emily
Haber, has sent a letter to the US Congress urging them to stop threatening Russian companies
PJSC NOVATEK and PJSC Gazprom, operating in Germany, with new sanctions. In her words, such
actions jeopardize the energy security of Germany and of the entire European Union.
In her letter, Emily Haber points out that since countries of the European Union have
adopted amendments to the Gas Directive, the issue of blocking the construction of the Nord
Stream-2 gas pipeline is closed for Europe: "All countries that criticized the Nord Stream-2
approved this document " . Given the situation, the German diplomat described any further
steps that Washington might take in order to hinder the development of the project as
counterproductive and potentially threatening the energy security of the EU."
Gosh; that reminds me – Chinese tariffs on American LNG more than doubled a couple
of weeks ago. As of June 1st, the tariff went from 10% to 25%. Not having much of an effect,
though – Chinese imports of American LNG have only dropped from 1.4 million tons during
the first 4 months of last year to .3 million tons over the same period this year. The
unclaimed LNG must be sold on the open market, and that drives the price down. Price has a
direct effect on American production, and if it goes too low production must be reined
in.
You're doing a great job, Mr. Trump – keep it up! Make America great again!
Astoundingly arrogant, not to mention immature. If Russia produced a study on how to destroy
America, there would be screams of rage at the unmitigated evil which must motivate a
national effort to wreck the economy of another, and cause misery and social collapse for
millions of people who were completely innocent. But only the Exceptional Nation can discuss
it impassively, as if the study were nothing more than a coffee-table book. Because, you
know, it is destined to rule and to triumph over all. So many parallels to Rome, yes, yes.
Americans were blessed with a wonderful, rich and bountiful country. Instead of being
content with it, the repellent US government has set its sights on world domination so as to
draw upon global wealth to increase American personal wealth and influence. It really sees
itself as sitting at the pinnacle of a global empire in which all other countries are either
vassals or resources. And the American people, while you could not really call them
complicit, are mostly sold on the notion that this is their birthright as Americans, and that
anyone who tries to forestall its unfolding in this fashion is trying to upset the natural
order of things. Americans cannot be content with simply having America – they have to
own and control it all. Oddly enough, the very ambition which was attributed to the
Communists.
Appears that wsws anticipated the concerns of you and others:
"The D-Day invasion came out of a protracted struggle between the US and Britain over the
course of the war and the opening of a "second front," which the Soviet Union had called for
over at least the previous two years.
One of the most striking features of the D-Day anniversary commemorations, in both the UK
and France, was the deliberate exclusion of Russia from the events. Whatever the undoubtable
role played by the Normandy invasion in the defeat of the Third Reich in World War II, the
overwhelming sacrifices and impact of the Red Army, which was responsible for 80 percent of
the casualties inflicted upon German forces is undeniable. While the combat deaths of nearly
300,000 US military personnel was staggering, their numbers pale in comparison to the
unfathomable toll of 26 million Soviet dead, military and civilian.
It was the victories of the Red Army -- and behind it the antifascist resistance of the
Soviet masses -- fighting along a front that extended over 1,000 miles, that pushed the US
and Britain to carry out the D-Day invasion and finally open up the second front demanded by
Moscow."
The largest offensive launched during WWII and which ended in a Soviet victory was Operation
Bagration, 23 June to 19 August 1944., in which the Soviet Union deployed 1,670,300 combat
and support personnel, approximately 32,718 artillery pieces and mortars, 5,818 tanks and
assault guns and 7,799 aircraft against the Nazis and, by doing so, inflicted the biggest
defeat in German military history in that the Red Army destroyed 28 out of 34 divisions of
Army Group Centre and completely shattered the German front line, thereby liberating
Belorussia and Polish territory from the invader.
Compare and contrast:
D Day landings, 6 june, 1944
5,000 landing and assault craft, 289 escort vessels, and 277 minesweepers participated in
the landings. Nearly 160,000 troops crossed the English Channel on D-Day,with 875,000 men
disembarking by the end of June.
By July 21, Caen, a major objective for the allies, had still not fallen.
If Bagration had not taken place or had not ended in a decisive victory, the Germans would
have wiped the floor with the allies in Normandy.
The German army never recovered from the crushing defeat that resulted from Bagration. The
materiel and manpower losses sustained during Bagration amounted to almost 25% of German
Eastern Front manpower, exceeding even the percentage of loss at Stalingrad.
These Nazi losses included many experienced soldiers, NCOs and commissioned officers,
which at this stage of the war the Wehrmacht could not replace. An indication of the
completeness of the Soviet victory is that 31 of the 47 German divisional or corps commanders
involved were killed or captured.
In short: a Soviet defeat in the east would have meant either no allied invasion from the
west or, if such an invasion had taken place without the Red Army being victorious in the
east, the Nazis would have made short work of any western allied landings.
With this comment by Rosenberg, the BBC man in Moscow:
Why does Russia see D-Day differently to the West?
Analysis by Steve Rosenberg, BBC News, Moscow
When countries argue about the present, they often disagree about the past, too. Take
D-Day – British Prime Minister Theresa May called it the day that "determined the fate
of generations to come". But Russia's Foreign Ministry sees things rather
differently.
"The Normandy landings did not have a decisive impact on the outcome of World War Two,"
said its spokesperson Maria Zakharova this week. "It was inevitable after the Red Army
victories at Stalingrad and Kursk."
Zakharova is not correct in saying that the allies were defeated in the Ardennes, though
they suffered a temporary reverse there. There was no way, however, that the Ardennes
offensive, the last in the West undertaken by the Nazis, would have resulted in victory for
the Hitlerites.
The allies were defeated at Arnhem though.
A total cock up resulting through poor intelligence work.
"Zakharova is not correct in saying that the allies were defeated in the Ardennes, "
Ahhhh ME..ya' beat me to it. I was just now upon reading her comment going to point
that out!!
General Weather-Blue Skies-enabled the Allies to get their Fighter bombers up and able to
wreak havoc on the SS panzer formations and supply vehicles some of which were stalled on the
roads having run out of petrol.
https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/daily/wwii/clear-skies-over-bastogne-pattons-prayers-answered/
That implication that Russia might see things differently if it had not been insulted by
Putin's not being invited was unworthy even of such a cheap-shot vehicle as the
state-sponsored BBC. Western re-jigging of historical events to its own benefit and to
assuming unto itself the role of modest hero relies on its readership being unable or
unwilling to comprehend cause and effect. Naturally every citizen everywhere wants to believe
his or her country was brave and resolute, and soldiers of the Allied nations indeed did
fight bravely against the Nazis; it's brave just to show up and keep pressing forward when
you know it is entirely possible and even likely that you will be killed. But there are
plenty of western historical stipulations to the fact that the Soviet Union took the brunt of
the Nazi attack, and was still taking it when the Normandy landings took place; during all
that time, whilst the Allies were dithering and some were making their own pacts with Hitler,
the Russians were getting pounded. Instead, the west and most offensively the British portray
the German campaign against the Soviet Union as a falling-out among thieves, and squeak about
the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact until you can't hear anything else. Wartime leaders among the
allies acknowledged the indispensable nature of the Soviet defense and counterattacks to the
eventual victory. But we have seen a slow airbrushing-out of the entire Soviet role in the
conflict. Which is cheap and unworthy. Once again, and mark my words, if it goers on it will
result in a smug certainty among western leaders that the inheritors of the Soviet mantle are
not really fighters, more sulkers, and would be a pushover in war. A cakewalk, you might say;
everyone will be home in time for supper, done and dusted. And the world will learn to its
grief, if it even survives such a cataclysm, where listening to bullshit led it.
I just had another brief look at the Conclusions in David Glantz's "August Storm" in
which General Winter again played a decisive role in Manchuria. Who can withstand the
General's icy grasp?
Quite a bit of research has confirmed British resistance to opening a second front for the
purpose of keeping Nazi pressure on the Soviet Union if not its outright defeat. Eisenhower
was, in particular, disgusted by the British describing their effort as a betrayal to the
allied war effort. The examples of British treachery are endless.
Top US military leadership to me seemed generally competent in WW II. Their abhorrence
of the nuclear attack on Japan reflected well on their morality and character.
The War Diaries of Allanbrooke (CIGS) are a good read.
The assessment of Stalin by Allanbrooke is worth wading through a load of nonsense
about Mme Chiang Kai Shek &c. And his recollection of Wavell making a poem about "No
Second Front in '43" aboard the flight back from Moscow.
"Their abhorrence of the nuclear attack on Japan reflected well on their morality and
character."
Now THAT.. I didn't know but appears as if you are spot on corrrect:
"Truman was advised not to use the atomic bombs by such figures as Adm. William D.
Leahy, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. We know from
Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's diaries and other documents that the rush to use atomic
bombs quickly, rather than follow other available courses, was intimately connected with the
desire to end the conflict before the Soviet Union entered it on Aug. 15, 1945, and with the
hope that the bomb would help in disputed European negotiations.
.But the central point was probably best put in General Eisenhower's blunt formulation: "It
wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." GAR ALPEROVITZ Washington, Oct. 4, 1988
The writer is author of "Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam."
There have been theories and rumours over the decades that the US exploded the atomic
bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a warning to the Soviet Union, and had little or nothing
to do with Japanese refusal to surrender (itself a lie – the Japanese had been offering
surrender to the US over previous months before August 1945, if they could keep Emperor
Hirohito, and the US flat-out rejected these surrender offers because it would only accept
surrender on the condition that Japan accept a total US makeover of its government including
the abolition of the monarchy which would effectively turn Japan into a US colony) or the
talk about a US invasion of Japan which might result in the deaths of several million US
servicemen.
At the time the Soviets had just declared war on Japan and were busy driving the
Japanese out of Manchuria. The Japanese Army collapsed before the Soviet forces (the Soviets
had better tank technology and Japan mainly relied on its navy rather than its army as its
major attacking and defence force) and it was this that led Japan to formally
surrender.
Updated – My take on the nuclear attack in the order of importance:
– Message to the Soviet Union
– Induce Japan to surrender to the US rather than to the Soviet Union
– Opportunity for a "medical" experiment
– Revenge/racism
That isn't even half of it. These military leaders expected that the nuclear attacks would
be considers as among the most barbaric war crimes of WW II. The NYT, however, was one of the
bigger cheerleaders on the attack. I wonder if the NYT will apologize for its 60 years of
support of a horrific war crime. Wait, what was I thinking? Of course not.
Interestingly, Freeman Dyson claims that it was not the use of the bomb that forced the
surrender of Japan. Instead, he claims that it was the Soviets' declaration of war on Japan
that decided the matter. He discusses this about 10 minutes into this lecture.
Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard took the media to task for what she called
biased and misleading coverage of her campaign, arguing the facts no longer matter to some
outlets. Speaking at an event in New York recently, Tulsi said the press had given up on any
semblance of balanced or accurate reporting, replacing news coverage with panels of jabbering
pundits.
Instead of factual reporting, she said: "We see opinions, we see panels of people on all
the news channels – I don't care which one you watch – sharing their
opinions."
tulsi mocking george stephanopoulos is one of the greatest things you'll hear from any
of the candidates pic.twitter.com/aIBxWyZ5t1
The 2020 hopeful also described what she said were intentional smear efforts against her
campaign in the media.
"Me and my campaign have been on the receiving end of very intentional smear efforts
trying to undermine our campaign coming through, you know, NBC News quoting articles that are
completely baseless," Gabbard said.
She referred to a recent interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, wherein the pundit
echoed the suggestion that Gabbard's campaign was boosted by "Putin apologists."
"Well, you know, this article in the Daily Beast says Putin supports your campaign,"
she said, imitating Stephanopolous's question in the interview.
An article "based on what?" she asked the audience in New York rhetorically.
"Nothing. Really, nothing."
The story in question intimated that Gabbard's presidential bid was backed by "Kremlin
sympathizers," such as the Nation magazine's Stephen F. Cohen, an expert in international
relations who argues for better ties between the US and Russia.
Gabbard has come under fire for her foreign policy positions, such as her call for detente
between the US and other nuclear-armed states like Russia. Tulsi's opposition to US regime
change policies have also made her a target in some quarters. After refusing to endorse
American efforts to topple the Syrian government, she was branded as an 'apologist' for Syria's
President Bashar Assad.
Looks like firms like 23andMe opened
the can of worms... Use of genetics to substantiate racist stereotypes
For almost two decades, Farber and his colleagues have advocated for this immigrant
community in the face of what they see as targeted discrimination. In cases of marriage, Farber
acts as a type of rabbinical lawyer, pulling together documentation and making a case for his
clients in front of a board of rabbinical judges. He fears that DNA testing will place even
more power in the hands of the Rabbinate and further marginalize the Russian speaking
community. "It's as if the rabbis have become technocrats," he told me. "They are using
genetics to give validity to their discriminatory practices."
Despite public outrage and
protests in central Tel Aviv, the Rabbinate have not indicated any intention of ending DNA
testing, and reports continue to circulate in the Israeli media of how the test is being used.
One woman allegedly had to ask her mother and aunt for
genetic material to prove that she was not adopted. Another man was asked to have his
grandmother, sick with dementia, take
a test.
Boris Shindler, a political activist and active member of the Russian speaking community,
told me that he believes that the full extent of the practice remains unknown, because many of
those who have been tested are unwilling to share their stories publicly out of a sense of
shame. "I was approached by someone who was married in a Jewish ceremony maybe 15, 20 years
ago, who recently received an official demand saying if you want to continue to be Jewish, we'd
like you to do a DNA test," Shindler said. "They said if she doesn't do it then she has to sign
papers saying she is not Jewish. But she is too humiliated to go to the press with this."
What offends Shindler most is that the technique is being used to single out his community,
which he sees as part of a broader stigmatization of Russian speaking immigrants in Israeli
society as unassimilated outsiders and second-class citizens. "It is sad because in the Soviet
Union we were persecuted for being Jewish and now in Israel we're being discriminated against
for not being Jewish enough," he said.
As well as being deeply humiliating, Shindler told me that there is confusion around what
being genetically Jewish means. "How do they decide when someone becomes Jewish," he asked. "If
I have 51% Jewish DNA does that mean I'm Jewish, but if I'm 49% I'm not?"
This is a typical Trump. He understands that "protection of Germany" is a profitable "protection racket" for the USA, but still lies.
Notable quotes:
"... U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction companies involved in the pipeline's construction. ..."
U.S. president reiterates threats over Nord Stream 2 project
Russia says efforts to block pipeline amount to 'blackmail'
'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on Pipeline,' says Trump 'Germany Is Making a Tremendous Mistake by Relying on
Pipeline,' says Trump Close Share
Donald Trump upped his criticism of Germany on
Wednesday as he threatened sanctions over Angela Merkel's continued support for a gas pipeline from Russia and warned that he could
shift troops away from the NATO ally over its defense spending.
Echoing previous threats about German support for the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, Trump said he's looking at sanctions to block the
project he's warned would leave Berlin "captive" to Moscow. The U.S. also hopes to export its own liquefied natural gas to Germany.
"We're protecting Germany from Russia, and Russia is getting billions and billions of dollars in money from Germany" for its gas,
Trump told reporters at the White House during a meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda.
The comments were the latest sign of how U.S.-German ties have eroded in recent years. The U.S. president has repeatedly rebuked
Merkel's government over the pipeline project, trade policies and defense spending. Germany, in turn, has criticized Trump's moves
to abandon international agreements, including on climate change and Iran.
Though he didn't say which companies or governments could potentially face sanctions, Trump's comments about the pipeline generated
a swift response from Moscow, which said the American president was engaging in "nothing other than blackmail and a form of unfair
competition," according to Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov.
Merkel and Trump met most recently last week during anniversary celebrations of the 1944 D-Day invasion. That gathering came days
after the EU's longest-serving leader took Trump to task at a commencement address at Harvard University, urging students to "tear
down walls" and not to treat "lies as truth." Without naming the U.S. leader, Merkel left little doubt as to whom she might mean
to a crowd who cheered her on.
U.S. opposition to the gas pipeline is bipartisan, out of concern that Russia could use its supplies of natural gas to exert pressure
on Western European nations dependent on the fuel. U.S. lawmakers also fear that with an added northern pipeline for its gas, Russia
could more easily cut off fuel to Ukraine, which is now a key transit country to Europe.
"Germany is making a tremendous mistake" by relying on the pipeline from Russia, Trump said during a joint news conference with
Duda.
Regardless of the political controversy, the Nord Stream 2 project has
faced delays and may not be ready to transport gas until the second half of 2020, according to a report made public by Denmark's
Energy Agency.
Nord Stream 2 organizers argue a new pipeline is needed to guarantee supplies will continue to flow in the coming decades as EU
domestic reserves shrink and import needs rise. Opponents of the project say it hurts the bloc's cohesion and weakens its Energy
Union strategy aimed at integrating the region's gas and power markets, diversifying energy supplies and improving security.
Uniper SE, Engie SA, Royal Dutch Shell Plc, OMV AG and BASF SE's Wintershall are European partners of Russia's Gazprom PJSC in
financing the project to expand Nord Stream by 55 billion cubic meters a year. Russia supplies a third of Europe's gas and has no
plans to give up its share to the expanding list of competitors from Norway to the U.S.
Trump, speaking during the news conference Wednesday, said that Poland signed a contract to purchase an additional $8 billion
of liquefied natural gas from U.S. companies, on top of $25 billion already under contract.
Trump said he'll meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Group of 20 summit in Japan at the end of the month, though
its not clear the pipeline project will be on their agenda.
2016 data. Source: Agency for the Cooperation of Energy Regulators
U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry said during a visit to Ukraine in May that he expected Congress to prepare legislation to sanction
companies involved in the pipeline's construction.
Senators Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, have drafted a bill that would target U.S.
sanctions at vessels laying the pipeline and deny U.S. visas to executives from companies linked to the ships. The legislation would
also block transactions in U.S.-based property or interests belonging to those individuals and would penalize entities that provide
insurance to the project.
In the latest sign of Trump's frustration over German defense spending, the president said he's discussed sending as many as 2,000
more U.S. troops to Poland -- and might take them from Germany since he believes Berlin isn't spending enough on defense as a partner
in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. There are more than 30,000 U.S. troops in Germany.
Under an agreement reached during the Obama administration, NATO members committed to spending 2% of GDP on defense by the mid-2020s,
a level only seven
nations were estimated to have reached in 2018.
"Germany's at 1%, they should be at 2%," Trump said. According to NATO documents, spent about 1.2 percent of GDP on defense in
2018.
The U.S. already has a few thousand troops in Poland as part of its role in NATO. Trump's move, if carried out, would add to that,
but it wasn't clear if the forces would be permanently based there or just rotated through.
-- With assistance by Daryna Krasnolutska, Nick Wadhams, Daniel Flatley, Stepan Kravchenko, Ewa Krukowska, and Vanessa Dezem
McFaul is a failure as a diplomat and as a Ambassador to Russia. Dismal failure. And the book bitter tone reflects McFaul
understanding of that. McFaul claim to fame was being at the center of "white color revolution of 2011-2012" which
was designed by Obama administration to prevent election of Putin.
Comparing to Jeffery Sachs who was instrumental in destroying the standard of living of Russianpeople in 1990th but migrated from his neoliberal views considerably, McFaul is
frozen in time. He is a still a stanch neoliberal and neocon, much like his former boss Obama. As such he provided zero value to
the reader. In other words the book is junk and should be priced ones cent like all such propaganda driven are in less then one
year.
He forgot nothing and learned nothing after 2011-2012 humiliation in Russia when Russians kicked him out for attempt of
staging the "regime change".
McFaul was instrumental in Obama administration attempt of "regime
change" in Russia in 2011-2012. This "diplomat" invited opposition leaders directly in his embassy helping to label
them as the US prostitutes (which they were). Russians were too polite and did not kick him out immediately (although aqt the time
it looks to me that Medvedev was sitting between two chairs) . This color revolution failed, money spend on it
(and probably tens of millions were injected to "facilitate change") lost, attitude to the USA in Russia changes
to highly negative. McFaul was forced to resign.
The boot itself is a propaganda exercise of a failed "color revolution" warrior. That's explains bitter attitude to Putin and
his mode of governance. This so called professor use a very simple recipe: any government that we do not like is autocratic by
definition. Such a fake religious fundamentalism, kind of fake "Church of Democracy". Nothing
interesting or original in it.
Obama actually was a very dangerous neocons and a war criminal. And his policies and neocolonial wars (Lybia, Syria, Ukraine )
negatively influenced the USA position in the world. Right now the USA is still protected by the power of his military
and economic might. But with time this will change and when cheap oil is over (let's say 20-50 years) chickens might come to
roost.
In a way the USA repeats the imperial path of Roman empire (with great acceleration) and the split into two states (North vs.
South along confederacy lines ) is not unconceivable.
Notable quotes:
"... What the story reveals to me is in the 90's how trusting Boris Yeltsin and associates where in allowing the masters of the Washington consensus to impose their notions of a post-Soviet Market Economy, polished up by Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard economics professor, Lawrence Summers, a colleague and implemented by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais to delivered, as 'shock therapy,' privatization and market determined prices without thought of the institutional issues of laws and governmental practices in place, as Joseph Stiglitz chief economist of the World Bank and others were later to heavily attack. A tragic mistake. ..."
"... The result of America's desire to remake Russia was to create a broken economy of Crony-Capitalism with Chubais becoming one of the richest men in Russia, joined by other oligarchs grabbing what they could. They live on, those who have not crossed Putin. ..."
"... When Putin ousted some of these groups from Russia stating they were aligned to overthrowing his government, McFaul thinks this was unreasonable. Despite McFaul writing a piece at Stanford in 2005 titled "American Efforts at Promoting Regime Change in the Soviet and then Russia: Lesson Learned" he thinks Putin is overly paranoid about the West's intentions. ..."
"... McFaul again is offended when someone ( Page 45 "Victor", someone McFaul insinuates is KGB) suggests he has access to Clinton administration when he is with NDI. Immediately after this denial he then in the next sentence admits he has the ear of Strobe Talbott, the deputy secretary of state, Tony Lake, the national security adviser, and Chip Blacker, the senior advisor to the administration on Russia, and his colleague at Stanford. ..."
"... McFaul's duties in the Obama administration I believe actively worsened relationships with Russia and the past three years of Russia hysteria are a result of the Democrat's excuses for failed geopolitical policies by the US. Russia serves as a scapegoat to many of America's abysmal meddling on the international stage. ..."
"... McFaul seems to have all the answers and Putin and Trump are criticized weekly in his twitter rants. How a man who was an active participant in so many foreign policy failures can throw so many stones will always remain a mystery to me. ..."
A little 'full disclosure' may help to explain this reviewer's critique of this work. I
developed an interest in Communism and in the Soviet Command Economy in the years of intense
anti-communism in the 1950's and 60's and majored in Comparative Economic Systems
specializing in Eastern Europe because I wish to see through the prevailing wisdom of the
time critically. I hoped not to judge but to understand the why and wherefore of what was
developing in that region, the underlying ideology a given, neither a 'threat' nor a
'promise;' the Soviet Union the prevailing model. To find a publication that moves into the
present of a non-Soviet democratic Russia – exciting.
Michael McFaul's love is 'Liberal Democracy' a somewhat fey item immersed in mythology
sometimes reducible as in Russia and elsewhere to "electoral" democracy with uncertain
outcomes.*
The book is a loose treatment of Russia in the post Soviet period centering on McFaul's
experiences as a participant and witness of the Washington foreign-policy establishment up
close. His self congratulatory style muddling sometimes the topic at hand, but rich in
revealing what policy makers were attempting to accomplish; the discrepancy between intent
and outcome glaring and reveling.
Many readers will enjoy seeing the policy construction process as it unfolded in the Obama
administration chasing "Reset" as it was called, from McFaul's experiences. An attempt to
draw Russia closer, more democratic, and accepting international standards while facilitating
desirably Obama administration goals.
What the story reveals to me is in the 90's how trusting Boris Yeltsin and associates
where in allowing the masters of the Washington consensus to impose their notions of a
post-Soviet Market Economy, polished up by Jeffrey Sachs, Harvard economics professor,
Lawrence Summers, a colleague and implemented by Yegor Gaidar and Anatoly Chubais to
delivered, as 'shock therapy,' privatization and market determined prices without thought of
the institutional issues of laws and governmental practices in place, as Joseph Stiglitz
chief economist of the World Bank and others were later to heavily attack. A tragic
mistake.
The result of America's desire to remake Russia was to create a broken economy of
Crony-Capitalism with Chubais becoming one of the richest men in Russia, joined by other
oligarchs grabbing what they could. They live on, those who have not crossed Putin.
**
It was not Communism not Socialism but Capitalism to the delight of Washington. Michael
McFaul's telling of that story is that it is democratic; there are elections, a parliament
and so far term limitations but not (yet?) 'Liberal Democracy.'
Looking at results independent of overlaying ideology I see little too cheer regarding
Reset. Russia may have pursued the same events that excited McFaul independent of his and
President Obama's efforts prior to Putin return as president.
For me the story suffers from centering heavily on McFaul's time in and out of government
and less about Russia, the ensuing high crime rates and low quality of life that was to
befall the general post-Soviet population, but it is a memoir.
America achieved little.*** But Michael is likeable and optimistic see his concluding
hopes for Reset.
3 1\2 Stars
*A liberal democracy is simply a political system that is both liberal and democratic --
one that both protects individual rights and translates popular views into public policy.
** Without American insistence on Market and privatization Russia could have stayed with
the original plan of enterprises going to workers and managers modeled on Yugoslavia
decentralized Workers Management economy – one that functioned until the country
destroyed but that is another story.
*** " -- Democracy! That's a funny word in Russia. "Putin the Democrat" is our shortest
joke."(p. 292) Alexievich, Svetlana. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets
...I was also amazed at how the Obama administration believed that by extending multiple
olive branches to Putin that he would accept the eastward expansion of NATO.
From Cold War to Hot Peace is McFaul's analysis of Russian/US relationships, and I would
guess to say, close to Obama's version as well. A good insight into the naivety of the
administration's views was during the Romney/Obama Presidential debate when Romney called
Russia a continued threat and Obama chastised him saying "the 80s called and want their
foreign policy back". This remark was stated after 4 years in office, so it is telling of
their idealism that Russian was our ally, or as Obama stated of Russian President Medvedev,
his friend.
McFaul admits to being a democratic activist in Russia at the same time as feigning outrage
on twitter for anyone suggesting this basic fact. I am blocked by McFaul on twitter so I will
leave my review of his book here. On Page 13, McFaul openly admits his employer, NDI
(National Democratic Institute), which he worked for in Russia was funded by the US
government and was a partisan group that promoted the US Democratic party agenda.
When Putin ousted some of these groups from Russia stating they were aligned to overthrowing
his government, McFaul thinks this was unreasonable. Despite McFaul writing a piece at
Stanford in 2005 titled "American Efforts at Promoting Regime Change in the Soviet and then
Russia: Lesson Learned" he thinks Putin is overly paranoid about the West's intentions.
When serving as Ambassador to Russia, McFaul again admits his dual track role as diplomat but
also an active supporter of opposition groups to Putin's Presidency which he invites to Spaso
House immediately upon his arrival to Russia.
McFaul again is offended when someone ( Page 45 "Victor", someone McFaul insinuates is KGB)
suggests he has access to Clinton administration when he is with NDI. Immediately after this
denial he then in the next sentence admits he has the ear of Strobe Talbott, the deputy
secretary of state, Tony Lake, the national security adviser, and Chip Blacker, the senior
advisor to the administration on Russia, and his colleague at Stanford.
I find McFaul's Forrest Gump moments a little too coincidental and do wonder if he is
being as transparent in his role as he innocently states in his book. I find his surface
level admission of always being connected closely to the narrative but then pretending he is
an innocent bystander to events just a little too naive for this reader.
Many examples come to mind as I read the book that made me question his role. For
instance, during the regime change in Kyrgyzstan, McFaul admits to knowing the very person
who replaces the leader of the country. What are the chances that US was not involved in this
regime change when McFaul is coincidentally close to the interim leader that replaces the
leader that is not pro Western. McFaul writes on page 187
"It was a stroke of good fortune for us that Roza Otunbayeva became the interim President of
Kyrgyzstan. I had known Roza for decades. In the 1990s she had served as Kyrgyzstan's foreign
minister, but had become an opposition leader as autocratic rule strengthened under Baikyev."
I mean, really? What are the chances ALL these coups are led by Western friendly leaders.
Surely meddling in other countries governance is something we should be outraged about,
right?
This happens time and time again with Western diplomats/NGO in Iraq, Ukraine, Libya,
Syria, Kyrgyzstan; and Putin warns the US their involvement with the opposition to the leader
will have negative consequences. Every time Putin is prescient on his predictions and McFaul
has to retreat from his idealism of US intervention and casually state the failed US
international policies under each President may have created more world chaos than stability
in most scenarios. McFaul is an active promoter of regime change meddling and then in the
next sentence will act like he is a passive player to the events that unfold with devastating
consequences to people of said countries. The lack of introspection to his cheerleading of
failed Obama policies baffles this particular reader.
McFaul's duties in the Obama administration I believe actively worsened relationships with
Russia and the past three years of Russia hysteria are a result of the Democrat's excuses for
failed geopolitical policies by the US. Russia serves as a scapegoat to many of America's
abysmal meddling on the international stage.
Does Russia deserve criticism as well? Absolutely, but the 180 degree turn McFaul does from
fawning over Medvedev to than viewing Putin as the enemy is the insight of a man who views
the world through a myopic lens . McFaul's idealism and staunch opinion of Jeffersonian
democracy is the only way forward for a country to improve is both not based in reality and
also doesn't translate well from the academic papers he has written.
Now, Trump is going after Putin's allies in the world, Iran and Venezuela, and McFaul will
not pause his incessant twitter rants on Trump being submissive to Russia long enough to
realize Trump is repeating mistakes from every other administration. If this was by design to
now have Democrats, who chastised Republicans for calling Russia a threat, to now being more
hawkish than Republicans have ever been, well, then, well played Deep State.
Many Americans may strongly dislike Trump or Obama, but it appears they are united in the
drumbeat for more meddling into countries governances, a policy McFaul will cheerlead once
again for the sake of human rights and Democracy of course. How we are repeating mistakes
from not long ago so quickly is the work of propaganda Putin could only dream about.
McFaul seems to have all the answers and Putin and Trump are criticized weekly in his
twitter rants. How a man who was an active participant in so many foreign policy failures can
throw so many stones will always remain a mystery to me. 450 pages of his diatribe I found
myself more sympathetic to Putin and Trump, and becoming more frustrated at his analysis of
historical events without an ounce of introspection of his role in any of these foreign
policy blunders. Person non grata to Russia should maybe be the student for once, instead of
the know it all Professor.
"... Article 2 (subsection 4)- "All members shall refrain .from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state ." ..."
"... During WWII, our notion of "settler colonialism" (from earlier era's) mutated into "Nazi Lebensraum" and subsequently became outlawed by the entire known world as a supreme evil. ..."
"... Yet to this day, NOT ONE academic, activist (left or right), or political thinker throughout the entire political spectrum refers to "territorial expansion through conquest" as odious and criminal . "Nazi Lebensraum". ..."
"... Today, when people refer to Israels "eastward" expansion (through conquest) of the Palestinian territories, .the term "Lebensraum" simply vanishes from the English vernacular. ..."
Is it " SETTLER COLONIALISM" or is it "LEBENSRAUM" ?
I am sure Mr. Shenker is a bright man , and I wonder how he would distinguish the
difference between these two ideas, don't you ?
Here is my understanding.
LEBENSRAUM (or literally "living space") was both the central and dominant principle
driving Nazi Germany throughout WWII. Hitler believed that Eastern Europe had to be
"conquered" in order to create a "Greater German Empire"otherwise known as " The Third
Reich".
[a note to specialists on WWII .. This is most generally the accepted narrative by most of
the world]
After WWII, both "war of aggression" and "territorial expansion through conquest" became
the "supreme crimes"of the civilized world . and were ratified as such, in Article two of the
UN charter.
Article 2 (subsection 4)- "All members shall refrain .from the threat or use of force
against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state ."
SETTLER COLONIALISM is best understood as the westward expansion of European Nations
throughout North (and South) America from the 15th century to the 19th century.
So what is the "essential" difference between the two ideas ?
The answer is simple "Dates"
When Europeans expanded "westward" into the "new world" three centuries ago , it wasn't
considered a "CRIME" to do so by anybody.
During WWII, our notion of "settler colonialism" (from earlier era's) mutated into "Nazi
Lebensraum" and subsequently became outlawed by the entire known world as a supreme evil.
Yet to this day, NOT ONE academic, activist (left or right), or political thinker
throughout the entire political spectrum refers to "territorial expansion through conquest"
as odious and criminal . "Nazi Lebensraum".
Why not ? Strange, ..isn't it ?
They, mysteriously, harken back (and utilize) the term "settler colonialism" as if to
soften and muddy the criminality of the act .. by referencing an earlier era when such
behavior wasn't considered a "crime".
Today, when people refer to Israels "eastward" expansion (through conquest) of the
Palestinian territories, .the term "Lebensraum" simply vanishes from the English
vernacular.
It just DISAPPEARS .
It is as though both its meaning , and the catastrophic horrors of WWII, never existed at
all.
Yet to this day, NOT ONE academic, activist (left or right), or political thinker
throughout the entire political spectrum refers to "territorial expansion through conquest"
as odious and criminal . "Nazi Lebensraum".
Very astute comment. "Chosen" semantics is part of the aggression war strategy.
Leaked documents reveal Russian effort to exert influence in Africa Exclusive: Kremlin ally Yevgeny Prigozhin leading push to turn continent into strategic
hub, documents show
by Luke Harding and Jason Burke
The only thing you really need to know about the exposé:
The leaked documents were obtained by the Dossier Center, an investigative unit based in
London. The centre is funded by Mikhail Khodorkovsky, the Russian businessman and exiled
Kremlin critic.
The Guardian obviously has no shame for publishing such an article but then it has never
explained the claims of Manafort meeting with Assange in the Ecuadorean embassy. As for the
article, my reaction was "so fucking what?".
The British French and Americans have fucked up
large parts of Africa while the Soviet Union/Russia was indirectly responsible for
eradicating that cancerous growth, the apartheid state of South Africa, a single act that was
better than all the good things that the United Kingdom, France and the United States have
ever done in Africa
"... Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sent shock waves in a public speech where he dismissed a Dutch "official" report blaming Russia for the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17 in July, 2014, weeks after a CIA-led coup toppled the elected President of Ukraine. Despite the downplaying in western mainstream media of the Malaysian leader's comments, it is creating a major new potential embarrassment for ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his Ukraine collaborators such as Igor Kolomoisky, in their flimsy effort to blame Russia for their own misdeeds. ..."
"... By recasting doubt on those Dutch JIT conclusions, Mahathir has potentially opened a can of deadly worms that could come to haunt the Ukrainian government at the time, especially Igor Kolomoisky , the billionaire Ukrainian financial backer of the newly elected Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky . It potentially could also implicate then-Vice President Joe Biden and many others. ..."
"... Independent investigators into the destruction of MH17 stress the fact that the Dutch-led JIT deliberately excluded Malaysia as well as Russia from their group, but included the CIA-backed coup regime in Ukraine, hardly an unbiased party. Further, all telephone taps the JIT has presented as proof of the guilt of the Russians came from the Ukrainian secret service SBU. Since the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, the SBU has been involved in repeated fake accusations aimed at Russia, including faked murder of a journalist later revealed to be quite alive . ..."
"... According to a Dutch site, Post Online, Eurocontrol, European Organisation for the Safety of Air Navigation, gave information to the Dutch Parliament about the status of Ukraine radar in 2016 informing that the Ukraine air traffic control organization UkSATSE failed to inform Eurocontrol in summer 2014 about the non-operational status of three radar systems in Eastern Ukraine, a grave violation of law. One of the three was taken in the wake of the CIA Ukraine coup in April by a masked band that destroyed the radar facility . ..."
"... Further, in another breach, the Ukrainian UkSATSE refused to permit their air traffic controller at Dnepropetrovsk, responsible for controlling flight MH17, to be questioned. According to Russian reports, the person "went on vacation" and never reappeared . ..."
"... Kolomoisky, who is notorious for hiring thugs and neo-nazis to beat up business and other opponents in Ukraine, reportedly secured the lucrative Burisma post for Hunter Biden, despite Biden's lack of any experience in Ukraine or in oil and gas, in return for Joe Biden lifting Kolomoisky's US visa travel ban. Joe Biden was the Obama Administration point person in charge of the 2014 CIA-orchestrated Maidan Square coup and toppling of the elected President Viktor Yanukovych. ..."
"... All these pieces of a very murky geopolitical puzzle underscore the dirty role that Ukraine and the Obama administration have played in demonizing Russia as well as the Trump Administration. Most recently, it appears that the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his staff, relied on a Ukrainian businessman named Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as the key figure supposedly linked to Russian intelligence, as a key figure to make the case of Russian collusion or interference in the 2016 US elections. ..."
"... Far from a Putin agent, however, new evidence shows that Kilimnik, since at least 2013 was a confidential Ukrainian informant to the US State Department, according to US journalist John Solomon. ..."
"... Increasingly it is looking like the Ukraine and not Russia is the more likely source for interference in the 2016 US election, and not in the way we have been told by the establishment media such as CNN. ..."
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad sent shock waves in a public speech where he
dismissed a Dutch "official" report blaming Russia for the downing of Malaysia Air Flight 17 in
July, 2014, weeks after a CIA-led coup toppled the elected President of Ukraine. Despite the
downplaying in western mainstream media of the Malaysian leader's comments, it is creating a
major new potential embarrassment for ex-Vice President Joe Biden and his Ukraine collaborators
such as Igor Kolomoisky, in their flimsy effort to blame Russia for their own
misdeeds.
During a dialogue with the Japanese Foreign Correspondent Club May 30, Mahathir challenged
the Dutch government to provide evidence for their claim that the civilian Malaysian FH17 jet
that crashed in Ukraine was shot down by a Russian-made BUK missile fired from a Russian
regiment based in Kursk. The Malaysian Prime Minister told the Japanese media,
"They are accusing Russia, but where is the evidence? We know the missile that brought
down the plane is a Russian type missile, but it could also be made in Ukraine."
The blunt-spoken Mahathir added,
"You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians; it could be by the rebels
in Ukraine, it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile ."
He went on to demand that the Malaysian government be allowed to inspect the black box of
the crashed plane, stating the obvious, that the plane belongs to Malaysia, with Malaysian
pilot and there were Malaysians passengers:
"We may not have the expertise but we can buy the expertise. For some reasons, Malaysia
was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened."
He went on to state,
"We don't know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we
see too much politics in it, and the idea was not to find out how this happened, but seems to
be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians ."
The Malaysian Air MH17 was en route from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur when it was shot down
over the conflict zone in eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014. Only in May 2018 the Dutch-led
Joint Investigation Team issued its report alleging that a BUK missile was used to shoot down
Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, claiming that it originated from the 53rd Anti-aircraft Brigade
of the Russian Federation, stationed in Kursk near the Ukraine border.
The Dutch Joint
Investigation Team (JIT) declared that it "has come to the conclusion that the BUK-TELAR that
shot down MH17 came from 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia,"
according to top Dutch investigator Wilbert Paulissen. Paulissen added, "We are convinced that
our findings justify the
conclusions "
The Dutch-led group presented no concrete forensic proof, and Moscow has repeatedly denied
involvement in an act that would make no military or political sense for them. In 2018 the
Russian Defense Ministry provided evidence that the BUK missile which had exploded to destroy
the Malaysian passenger jet had been manufactured in a Russian plant in 1986, and then shipped
to the Ukraine. Its last recorded location was at a Ukrainian military base.
By recasting doubt on those Dutch JIT conclusions, Mahathir has potentially opened a can
of deadly worms that could come to haunt the Ukrainian government at the time, especially Igor
Kolomoisky , the billionaire Ukrainian financial backer of the newly elected Ukrainian
president Volodymyr Zelensky . It potentially could also implicate then-Vice President Joe
Biden and many others.
Open Questions
Independent investigators into the destruction of MH17 stress the fact that the
Dutch-led JIT deliberately excluded Malaysia as well as Russia from their group, but included
the CIA-backed coup regime in Ukraine, hardly an unbiased party. Further, all telephone taps
the JIT has presented as proof of the guilt of the Russians came from the Ukrainian secret
service SBU. Since the CIA-backed coup in Ukraine in 2014, the SBU has been involved in
repeated fake accusations aimed at Russia, including faked murder of a journalist later
revealed to be quite
alive .
One of the central issues that the Dutch JIT group never addressed is why, at a time it was
a known warzone, and commercial international flights were told to avoid the airspace in
eastern Ukraine, the MH17 flight was reportedly ordered by Ukraine air traffic control
authorities in Dnepropetrovsk to change course and to fly directly into the war zone. According
to a Dutch site, Post Online, Eurocontrol, European Organisation for the Safety of Air
Navigation, gave information to the Dutch Parliament about the status of Ukraine radar in 2016
informing that the Ukraine air traffic control organization UkSATSE failed to inform
Eurocontrol in summer 2014 about the non-operational status of three radar systems in Eastern
Ukraine, a grave violation of law. One of the three was taken in the wake of the CIA Ukraine
coup in April by a masked band that destroyed the radar
facility .
Further, in another breach, the Ukrainian UkSATSE refused to permit their air traffic
controller at Dnepropetrovsk, responsible for controlling flight MH17, to be questioned.
According to Russian reports, the person "went on vacation" and never
reappeared .
The Kolomoisky Factor
Notably, at the time of the MH17 downing, the Ukrainian governor of the Dnepropetrovsk
Oblast or region, was Igor Kolomoisky. Kolomoisky, who is listed as the third richest man in
Ukraine with an empire in oil, coal, metals and banking, was also reported to be directly
linked via offshore entities to control of Burisma, the shady Ukrainian gas company that named
the son of then-Vice President Joe Biden to its
board .
Kolomoisky, who is notorious for hiring thugs and neo-nazis to beat up business and
other opponents in Ukraine, reportedly secured the lucrative Burisma post for Hunter Biden,
despite Biden's lack of any experience in Ukraine or in oil and gas, in return for Joe Biden
lifting Kolomoisky's US visa travel ban. Joe Biden was the Obama Administration point person in
charge of the 2014 CIA-orchestrated Maidan Square coup and toppling of the
elected President Viktor Yanukovych.
Notably, the Mahathir remarks have drawn attention anew to the mysterious circumstances
around the downing of Malaysian Air MH17 in 2014 and the potential role of Kolomoisky and
others, in that. The role of corrupt Ukraine officials backed by the Obama Administration, is
now under scrutiny.
Notably, the new President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky, is widely reported to be a
protégé of Igor Kolomoisky. Zelensky became a national name as a comedian on a
Ukraine TV station owned by Kolomoisky, and the latter reportedly provided funds and personnel
to run the comedian's victorious May 2019 election campaign in which he defeated incumbent
Petro Poroshenko, a bitter foe of Kolomoisky. Following Zelensky's election victory, Kolomoisky
returned to Ukraine after exile in Switzerland following a bitter falling out
with Petr Poroshenko in 2015.
All these pieces of a very murky geopolitical puzzle underscore the dirty role that Ukraine
and the Obama administration have played in demonizing Russia as well as the Trump
Administration. Most recently, it appears that the US Special Counsel Robert Mueller and his
staff, relied on a Ukrainian businessman named Konstantin Kilimnik, who worked for Trump
campaign chairman Paul Manafort, as the key figure supposedly linked to Russian intelligence,
as a key figure to make the case of Russian collusion or interference in the 2016 US
elections.
Far from a Putin agent, however, new evidence shows that Kilimnik, since at least 2013 was a
confidential Ukrainian informant to the US State Department, according to US journalist John
Solomon. Solomon cites FBI documents including State Department emails he has seen where Kilimnik is described as a "sensitive" intelligence source for the US State Department. The
Mueller report left that embarrassing detail out for some reason. Kilimnik worked for Paul
Manafort who before the 2014 Ukraine coup had served as a lobbyist for Ukrainian elected
president Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of the Regions.
Their shadowy acts in Ukraine may soon come to haunt key figures in Ukraine such as
Kolomoisky, as well as people like Joe Biden and family. From the true authorship of the
downing of MH17, which Dutch and other investigators believe was linked to Kolomoisky actors,
to the Ukraine business dealings of Hunter Biden to the true facts of the Mueller "Russiagate"
probe, all could well prove to be a far more revealing investigation for the US Justice
Department than the obviously biased Mueller probe has been.
Increasingly it is looking like
the Ukraine and not Russia is the more likely source for interference in the 2016 US election,
and not in the way we have been told by the establishment media such as CNN.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons above or below. Forward this article to your
email lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
F. William Engdahl is strategic risk consultant and lecturer, he holds a degree in
politics from Princeton University and is a best-selling author on oil and geopolitics,
exclusively for the online magazine "New
Eastern Outlook" where this article was originally published.
He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization.
"... It appears Israelis had tempted the Russians into the ambitious meeting by promising to take the US sanctions off Russian back. It is doubtful Israel can deliver on such a promise to start with. Putin is a very experienced statesman, and he won't accept a US promise in lieu of full delivery. Not after the Hanoi failure of Trump-Kim talks, and not before that, either. Anyway, Putin would like to be un-sanctioned, but not at the price the US asks. ..."
"... "Look, here's what I believe. It becomes obvious when you think about it. Judging by NATO's estimates, there won't be a large European war until about 2025. And by 2025, Ukraine, being a large anti-Russian foothold, will evolve into something that will begin dragging us into trouble, connected with various matters including transfer of power. It's not a coincidence that some of our neighbors are getting rid of the Russian inscriptions on their money in 2024. We see that and we should be ready. From where we get the approximate schedule of our actions." ..."
"... " Undoubtedly, the issue of de-Americanization of Europe is critical. There's no Soviet border anymore. I said that yesterday. And there's no line dividing Germany. We must get rid of it up to the Atlantic Ocean. The elimination of either the American presence or the NATO bloc in general. ..."
Last week, at 'Russian Davos', St Petersburg Economic Forum, President Putin
reiterated the main points of his memorable
Munich Speech . He voiced seven complaints leaving no doubt
he is unhappy with American heavy-handedness, with the US attempts to weaponise the dollar, Google, Facebook and knowhow as in case
of Huawei. "States that previously advocated the principles of freedom of trade, fair and open competition, started speaking the
language of trade wars and sanctions, blatant economic raiding, arm twisting, intimidation, eliminating competitors by so-called
non-market methods," – he said. This is not the language of a man who waits for a cue to join the US entourage.
Still, there are other, less pleasant signs.
The 'Russian Bolton', Mr Eugene Satanovsky, the head of pro-Israeli think tank, a former head of a Zionist Jewish body and a frequent
commentator on Russian TV had been appointed an adviser to the Russian Defence Minister Mr Sergey Shoygu. His nomination came
directly from Kremlin and surprised the ministry officials. A prominent Russian churchman, Fr Chaplin, expressed his satisfaction
with Israeli control of Jerusalem, in a column in the
Nezavisimaya Gazeta . At the same time, the Russian
S-300 did not respond to Israeli bombing runs in Syria.
It appears Israelis had tempted the Russians into the ambitious meeting by promising to take the US sanctions off Russian
back. It is doubtful Israel can deliver on such a promise to start with. Putin is a very experienced statesman, and he won't accept
a US promise in lieu of full delivery. Not after the Hanoi failure of Trump-Kim talks, and not before that, either. Anyway, Putin
would like to be un-sanctioned, but not at the price the US asks.
Israelis want to neutralise Iran, as the Islamic Republic is the only remaining defender of the al-Aqsa Mosque. Amman, ar-Riyad
and other Arab capitals will not fight Israel, if Netanyahu were to destroy the Mosque. The Palestinians will fight, but they have
no weapons. The last Jewish victim of a Palestinian attack had been wounded by scissors. Iran has weapons and cares for the Mosque.
Can Netanyahu convince Putin to neutralise Iran, or pressure Iran to stay away from Palestine? It would be a major feat worthy of
a magician.
And now we come to the important point. Instead of receiving two superpower envoys in splendour as [almost] the King of Jews,
Bibi Netanyahu will meet them as the head of a transitional government facing new elections and a possible trial. In such a status,
it is hard to convince your banker to give you a loan to buy a new car, let alone convincing Putin to switch alliance and Trump to
deny Christ.
In the same time, the baby-faced son-in-law Kushner had planned to execute his (and Trump's) Deal of the Century. Even an impregnable
Trump and unassailable Netanyahu would have a great difficulty to make this trick. Trump facing impeachment and Bibi facing elections
and police investigation have no chance. Probably it is good, too. Russia and China decided to stay away. Mahmud Abbas, the PNA President,
refused it, too, and this fraud's flop will preclude Palestine from being sanctioned.
The intended deal had not been officially disclosed; all we have is a
leak
in a newspaper close to Bibi Netanyahu and financed by Sheldon Adelson, saying it was leaked from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign
Affairs. Bear with me, gentle reader, and suspend your disbelieve! Though this piece of daydreaming looks like a project written
by high school kids during summer vacation time, it is not particularly good-natured.
It says the US will kill (that's right, k_i_l_l) Palestinian leaders that won't accept it, but before, it will sanction Palestine
to death and forbid all its allies to buy, sell, and donate or anything to Palestinians.
The deal envisages a permanently disarmed Palestinian entity that will pay Israel for its "protection". All Jewish settlements
remain inviolable, and are considered a part of Israel. Israel will control every arrival and departure from the entity called "New
Palestine". Jerusalem stays Jewish. Gaza will be connected to the West Bank by 30 km long bridge under Israeli control. This bridge
will be paid for by China. Desalination plant for Gaza will be paid by Japan. If not for the threat to kill the disobedient Arabs,
it would be plainly preposterous. So the demise of this bizarre 'deal' is not to be regretted.
President Trump understood that with Bibi facing trial and re-election there is no chance to advance on this project – or any
other project. "Israel is all messed up in their election," Trump told reporters. "They have to get their act together." "Bibi got
elected and now they have to go through the process again? We're not happy about that," Trump
said .
Thus, the two great plans of Bibi: the trilateral meeting in Jerusalem and Deal of the Century went down when Bibi failed to form
a government.
It says the US will kill (that's right, k_i_l_l) Palestinian leaders that won't accept it, but before, it will sanction
Palestine to death and forbid all its allies to buy, sell, and donate or anything to Palestinians.
The deal envisages a permanently disarmed Palestinian entity that will pay Israel for its "protection". All Jewish settlements
remain inviolable, and are considered a part of Israel. Israel will control every arrival and departure from the entity called
"New Palestine". Jerusalem stays Jewish. Gaza will be connected to the West Bank by 30 km long bridge under Israeli control.
And so we've leaders that we deserve,
dumbed-down goybeans, ready to serve,
boiled in the same old kettle of fish,
cooked to perfection, a vomitous dish.
' They say Lieberman did it following wily Putin's orders. Putin was not keen to be pushed by Netanyahu and Trump to act against
Iran; he didn't want to quarrel with these two leaders either. He activated Lieberman and torpedoed the new Netanyahu's government
'
There's a theory that Russia has something on Lieberman; that willingly or unwillingly, he's effectively a Russian agent.
The deal envisages a permanently disarmed Palestinian entity that will pay Israel for its "protection". All Jewish settlements
remain inviolable, and are considered a part of Israel. Israel will control every arrival and departure from the entity called
"New Palestine". Jerusalem stays Jewish. Gaza will be connected to the West Bank by 30 km long bridge under Israeli control.
This bridge will be paid for by China. Desalination plant for Gaza will be paid by Japan.
This is just hilarious. Did Kushner and Bolton think this one up with after an all-week meth-binge together?
'Hey, Beavis! Let's get the Palestinians to officially surrender and the Chinese and Japanese to pay for it. Heh, heh, heh!'
"The 'Russian Bolton', Mr Eugene Satanovsky .... outlined in a media interview a few short weeks ago, where he asserted:
"Look, here's what I believe. It becomes obvious when you think about it. Judging by NATO's estimates, there won't be a large
European war until about 2025. And by 2025, Ukraine, being a large anti-Russian foothold, will evolve into something that will
begin dragging us into trouble, connected with various matters including transfer of power. It's not a coincidence that some of
our neighbors are getting rid of the Russian inscriptions on their money in 2024. We see that and we should be ready. From where
we get the approximate schedule of our actions."
" Undoubtedly, the issue of de-Americanization of Europe is critical. There's no Soviet border anymore. I said that yesterday.
And there's no line dividing Germany. We must get rid of it up to the Atlantic Ocean. The elimination of either the American presence
or the NATO bloc in general.
I'm talking about any forms of elimination, not just peaceful methods and negotiations. The issue remains."
" America will pay with its territory, its military facilities, and it will be lucky if not with its civilian population, for
any anti-Russian activities in Europe. If America doesn't realize that, then you should replace the idiots that run your country.
They'll bury it. We're talking on the eve of that. Can't you see that? Don't you realize that?"
What delay, the Satanic Anti-Christ has arrived (one of them, anyway).
@sarz It seems
he's spent considerable time on Trade and Immigration issues. Russiagate was a hoax from the outset, and considerable resources
are being expended in an effort to deal with the criminal conduct of the previous administration. Jared has been given credit
for some accomplishments, nothing extraordinary. Most Americans see him and Ivanka for what they are, an indulgement of The Donald,
and as long as he keeps delivering for the American People, he will have their forbearance.
To claim Trump is a top Jew, is just a fabrication of what you want to believe. Jews aren't cause of the woes of the world,
the Devil is. Swiss templars control the world's finances. The rothies are but one of their client banks, which includes the houses
of saxe-coburg and saad, bolsheviks, chicoms, the vatican, and the deep state. Did I leave anything out?
Trump and the nationalist backlash against immigration in the EU and elsewhere are a pause in the banking cabals march to globalism.
What is needed is a debt reset. There will be a reset of the global financial system, what remains to be seen is what takes it's
place.
The jews are not a religion or a nationality. They are, and always have been a corporation of swindlers – nothing more. They always
have a back door escape route for when the Gentiles finally wake up and tire of their constant cheating and overall immoral behavior.
What is important here is the what(Bibi and company's evil plans have been sidelined-for now). The who and the how is less important,
but thanks to Israel Shamir for informing as it is good to know.
I'll bet John Hagee and his CUFI crowd are wiping their tears on their prayer shawls. LOL
"... Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies. ..."
"... An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened. ..."
"... The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order. ..."
The disappearance of the Soviet Union left a big hole. The "war on terror" was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes.
For the US, it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent. That was the
main conclusion I drew from this year's Bilderberg meetings.
Across-the-board
rivalry with China is becoming
an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.
Whether it is Donald Trump's organizing principle is less important. The US president has the gut instincts of a nationalist and
protectionist. Others provide both framework and details. The aim is US domination. The means is control over China, or separation
from China.
Anybody who believes a rules-based multilateral order, our globalised economy, or even harmonious international relations, are
likely to survive this conflict is deluded. The astonishing
white paper on the
trade conflict
, published on Sunday by China, is proof. The -- to me, depressing -- fact is that on many points Chinese positions are right.
The US focus on
bilateral imbalances is economically illiterate. The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US
is
questionable . The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World
Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.
Accusing China of cheating is hypocritical when almost all trade policy actions taken by the Trump administration are in breach
of WTO rules, a fact implicitly conceded by its determination
to destroy the
dispute settlement system .
A dispute over the terms of market opening or protection of intellectual property might be settled with careful negotiation. Such
a settlement might even help China, since it would lighten the heavy hand of the state and promote market-oriented reform.
But the issues are now too vexed for such a resolution. This is partly because of the bitter breakdown in negotiation. It is still
more because the US debate is increasingly over whether integration with China's state-led economy is desirable. The fear over Huawei
focuses on national security and technological autonomy.
[Neo]liberal commerce is increasingly seen as "trading with the enemy".
A framing of relations with China as one of zero-sum conflict is emerging. Recent remarks by Kiron Skinner, the US state department's
policy planning director (a job once held by cold war strategist George Kennan) are revealing. Rivalry with Beijing,
she suggested at a
forum organised
by New America , is "a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn't had
that before".
She added that this would be "the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian". The war with Japan
is forgotten.
But the big point is her framing of this as a civilizational and racial war and so as an insoluble conflict. This cannot be accidental.
She is also still in her job. Others present the conflict as one over ideology and power.
Those emphasising the former point to President Xi Jinping's Marxist rhetoric and the reinforced role of the
Communist party . Those emphasising the latter point to China's rising economic might. Both perspectives suggest perpetual conflict.
This is the most important geopolitical development of our era. Not least, it will increasingly force everybody else to take sides
or fight hard for neutrality. But it is not only important. It is dangerous. It risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship
into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason. China's ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union's
was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous.
An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the
Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives
might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened.
Moreover, the rise of China is not an important cause of western malaise. That reflects far more the indifference and incompetence
of domestic elites. What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy
to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is
illegitimate.
This certainly does not mean accepting everything China does or says. On the contrary, the best way for the west to deal with
China is to insist on the abiding values of freedom, democracy, rules-based multilateralism and global co-operation. These ideas
made many around the globe supporters of the US in the past.
They still captivate many Chinese people today. It is quite possible to uphold these ideas, indeed insist upon them far more strongly,
while co-operating with a rising China where that is essential, as over protecting the natural environment, commerce and peace.
A blend of competition with co-operation is the right way forward. Such an approach to managing China's rise must include co-operating
closely with like-minded allies and treating China with respect.
The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers,
attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order.
Today's attack on China is the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain. Alas, this is where we now are.
"... Across-the-board rivalry with China is becoming an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies. ..."
"... An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened. ..."
"... The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers, attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order. ..."
The disappearance of the Soviet Union left a big hole. The "war on terror" was an inadequate replacement. But China ticks all boxes.
For the US, it can be the ideological, military and economic enemy many need. Here at last is a worthwhile opponent. That was the
main conclusion I drew from this year's Bilderberg meetings.
Across-the-board
rivalry with China is becoming
an organising principle of US economic, foreign and security policies.
Whether it is Donald Trump's organizing principle is less important. The US president has the gut instincts of a nationalist and
protectionist. Others provide both framework and details. The aim is US domination. The means is control over China, or separation
from China.
Anybody who believes a rules-based multilateral order, our globalised economy, or even harmonious international relations, are
likely to survive this conflict is deluded. The astonishing
white paper on the
trade conflict
, published on Sunday by China, is proof. The -- to me, depressing -- fact is that on many points Chinese positions are right.
The US focus on
bilateral imbalances is economically illiterate. The view that theft of intellectual property has caused huge damage to the US
is
questionable . The proposition that China has grossly violated its commitments under its 2001 accession agreement to the World
Trade Organization is hugely exaggerated.
Accusing China of cheating is hypocritical when almost all trade policy actions taken by the Trump administration are in breach
of WTO rules, a fact implicitly conceded by its determination
to destroy the
dispute settlement system .
A dispute over the terms of market opening or protection of intellectual property might be settled with careful negotiation. Such
a settlement might even help China, since it would lighten the heavy hand of the state and promote market-oriented reform.
But the issues are now too vexed for such a resolution. This is partly because of the bitter breakdown in negotiation. It is still
more because the US debate is increasingly over whether integration with China's state-led economy is desirable. The fear over Huawei
focuses on national security and technological autonomy.
[Neo]liberal commerce is increasingly seen as "trading with the enemy".
A framing of relations with China as one of zero-sum conflict is emerging. Recent remarks by Kiron Skinner, the US state department's
policy planning director (a job once held by cold war strategist George Kennan) are revealing. Rivalry with Beijing,
she suggested at a
forum organised
by New America , is "a fight with a really different civilisation and a different ideology, and the United States hasn't had
that before".
She added that this would be "the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian". The war with Japan
is forgotten.
But the big point is her framing of this as a civilizational and racial war and so as an insoluble conflict. This cannot be accidental.
She is also still in her job. Others present the conflict as one over ideology and power.
Those emphasising the former point to President Xi Jinping's Marxist rhetoric and the reinforced role of the
Communist party . Those emphasising the latter point to China's rising economic might. Both perspectives suggest perpetual conflict.
This is the most important geopolitical development of our era. Not least, it will increasingly force everybody else to take sides
or fight hard for neutrality. But it is not only important. It is dangerous. It risks turning a manageable, albeit vexed, relationship
into all-embracing conflict, for no good reason. China's ideology is not a threat to liberal democracy in the way the Soviet Union's
was. Rightwing demagogues are far more dangerous.
An effort to halt China's economic and technological rise is almost certain to fail. Worse, it will foment deep hostility in the
Chinese people. In the long run, the demands of an increasingly prosperous and well-educated people for control over their lives
might still win out. But that is far less likely if China's natural rise is threatened.
Moreover, the rise of China is not an important cause of western malaise. That reflects far more the indifference and incompetence
of domestic elites. What is seen as theft of intellectual property reflects, in large part, the inevitable attempt of a rising economy
to master the technologies of the day. Above all, an attempt to preserve the domination of 4 per cent of humanity over the rest is
illegitimate.
This certainly does not mean accepting everything China does or says. On the contrary, the best way for the west to deal with
China is to insist on the abiding values of freedom, democracy, rules-based multilateralism and global co-operation. These ideas
made many around the globe supporters of the US in the past.
They still captivate many Chinese people today. It is quite possible to uphold these ideas, indeed insist upon them far more strongly,
while co-operating with a rising China where that is essential, as over protecting the natural environment, commerce and peace.
A blend of competition with co-operation is the right way forward. Such an approach to managing China's rise must include co-operating
closely with like-minded allies and treating China with respect.
The tragedy in what is now happening is that the administration is simultaneously launching a conflict between the two powers,
attacking its allies and destroying the institutions of the postwar US-led order.
Today's attack on China is the wrong war, fought in the wrong way, on the wrong terrain. Alas, this is where we now are.
"U.S Defence Secretary Patrick Shanahan says. There is a bipartisan plan in Congress to
impose sanctions on Turkey under the Anti-Enemies Act of America if Turkey gets the S400
deal."
Will Trump be smart enough to veto this bill, or is he ready to accept the loss of Turkey
as a NATO member and all the NATO bases it contains? Seems few within TrumpCo are capable to
thinking strategically, when they think at all.
Treatment of Putin as pariah is closely connected with the attempt to isolate and weaken Russia.
It is the part of the same strategy.
Notable quotes:
"... It seems to me the underlying issue here is is the U.S. oligarchy–and that's not monolithic by any means. There's very different interests within the most powerful circles, economic circles in the United States. ..."
"... So I think the Americans are, you might call it, ostrich-like. They don't think this challenge is going to be for real. ..."
"... The richest family in America, the WalMart Waltons, made most of their fortune as agents of communist China. They are allies of thé Chinese in destroying US productive capacity and impoverishing her workers. ..."
"... Richard Nixon must be rolling in his grave! Isn't this precisely why he 'went to China' and then worked out a détente with Russia? In order to prevent the US from having to fight both parties at once? Whose bright idea was this dual-containment strategy? ..."
"... Obama's. The pivot to Asia (which was code for China) combined with pressing Russia in Ukraine and Syria, along with the various sanctions was on his watch. In the end, Obama was a President who put the Libya intervention to a vote of his advisers instead of taking responsibility to make an informed position, right or wrong. ..."
PAUL JAY: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Paul Jay.
Big power rivalry is heading into very dangerous waters. The rise of China as an economic
and military superpower is threatening the global hegemony of the United States. Russia has
been pushed into an increasingly tighter relationship with China to balance the attempts by the
West to isolate it. President Trump, representing the most aggressive sections of American
capital, is responding with a trade war, and an unparalleled massive peacetime military budget
that was justified by his Secretary of Defense Shanahan with three words: China, China, and
China. Christine Lagarde, the IMF's managing director, said in a briefing note that taxing all
trade between the world's two largest economies would cause some $455 billion in gross domestic
product to evaporate. The report said this would be a loss larger than South Africa's entire
economy.
In a recent meeting between Russia's President Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping,
apparently the 29th such meeting in the last few years, it was announced with the two leaders
looking on that the Chinese tech company Huawei has struck a deal to build Russia's first 5G
wireless network. This is the same company that Trump has banned from developing the 5G network
in the United States, and is pushing Europe to do the same.
This is clearly just the early stages of what is already the defining big power contention
of the 21st century. When the two countries should be focused on the climate crisis, it's
looking more like the years before World War I. Of course, there were no nuclear weapons in
1914.
Now joining us to discuss the Chinese, Russian, and American rivalry is Rob Johnson. Rob is
the president of the Institute on New Economic Thinking. He was formerly a banking associate of
George Soros, and he's now leading the Commission on Global Economic Transformation, a project
of INET, co-chaired by Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Mike Spence. Thanks for joining
us, Rob.
ROB JOHNSON: Pleasure.
PAUL JAY: So just how dangerous is this trade war? When you listen to the, sort of
the business media, it goes anywhere from, well, they're all going to sort it out at a meeting
in June, to this is just the beginning of something that's going to get extremely messy.
ROB JOHNSON: I would say we can't know whether things will be what you might call
mended back together, or whether we're opening a very, very big and contentious hole in the
design of the world system. I was recently at a conference run by a man named John Mallery at
MIT, which was an outstanding collection of people from intellectual property rights, trade
representatives, artificial intelligence, machine learning experts, and from the intelligence
community.
... ... ...
PAUL JAY:It seems to me the underlying issue here is is the U.S. oligarchy–and
that's not monolithic by any means. There's very different interests within the most powerful
circles, economic circles in the United States. But are they willing to accept this is going to
be a multi-superpower world, certainly at the very least China and the United States? I would
say within a few decades it's not out of the question a country like India might even enter
those kinds of circles, when you start having populations of a billion and you start having
this technological evolution that's taking place in China. But there certainly seems to be
circles within United States that do not accept the idea that this will be anything but a
single-superpower world, and they're trying to do something about it.
ROB JOHNSON:
...And so this is a hard game. And the Chinese, circa 2001, were supposed to fall into line.
They were supposed to become part of our trading system. And that's not–that's not the
case. And with the advent of digital commerce, with the announcement of China 2025, they are
replacing, what I'll call, as they move up the value chain, the more complex activities.
They're not falling into line in a U.S.-led system where they make Nike tennis shoes or
assemble iPhones with low-cost labor or low environmental protections. They're not moving into
what I'll call changing their comparative advantage, because it's not based on what's buried in
the ground. It's based on human capital and evolution and training and R&D.
The other final thing where I think the United States has some real concern is we have been
talking about how the government doesn't play a role. We've been cutting government support to
things like basic science very drastically over the last 20 years as a percentage of GDP.
The
Chinese ultimately will have a population four to five times the size of America's. They
continue to develop their science budgets. And what you might call the locus of innovation may
shift from the United States in places like Silicon Valley to a place like Shenzhen in
China.
So I think the Americans are, you might call it, ostrich-like. They don't think this
challenge is going to be for real.
PAUL JAY: The global trading system, as you said, led by the United States, and also
in practice, is the various countries, part of it, play to some extent a subordinate role
within that system. And China is clearly positioning itself to be a direct competitor in many
markets. In Latin America and other places China has actually supplanted the United States as
the major trading partner. It's a fact of life. This is–I don't see how this is going to
change. But the way Trump's approaching this, the trade war and such, it's all being done in
the name of being good for American workers. It's being–it's all about American jobs. Is
it?
ROB JOHNSON: Well, this is my biggest concern. You hit the nail on the head, as far
as I see. The problems were originally that American-based multinational corporations, and for
that matter multinational corporations in Western Europe, moved in with foreign direct
investment in China, and then sold things back to the United States, whether through Toys R Us,
or Wal-Mart, or other things; consumer products or telephones. And that system imposed a real
adjustment on a very large portion of the American workforce. So firms didn't go out of
business, they responded by automating. But the pressure on labor intensive activity, the
downward pressure on wages, is very real. But what a Chinese leader would tell you, and I go
over there two, three times a year to meet with them, yes, those adjustments took place. But
the responsibility to alleviate that suffering belongs with the American government. The
transfers that–what I'll say, leaving orthodox economists probably said free trade is
great, because you can compensate people and nobody's worse off and some people are better off.
The problem is we don't have a political economy in America that's set up to make those
transfers. So the losers lose bad and the winners lobby to get their own taxes cut and keep
their money offshore.
... ... ...
PAUL JAY: And one of the sort of not real secrets, but sort of a dirty secret,
because people don't talk about it very much, is one of the things that in fact has been
subsidizing American workers as their jobs flee, both through going to China and such, and also
through automation, has been such incredibly cheap products coming from China. I mean, you go
to Wal-Mart and you can buy, you know, a dozen socks for, like, $3. That's a kind of subsidy
from cheap Asian labor for American workers which, one, the tariffs are going to eliminate, and
two, in the long term, American workers are going to be replaced by automation and they're
going to lose the cheap products from China.
ROB JOHNSON: Yes. Well, what I would say is cheap products from China are fine as
long as you have a trust fund. If you don't have a trust fund they can be as cheap as whatever;
making zero income you still can't buy them. And I think in the United States what I've talked
about transfers was income support and retraining support for people to evolve as, you might
all it, the shock of the development of China reoriented the pattern of trade.
Good thoughtful points raised in the discussion here, but they largely center around the
decline of the US-centered unipolar system. On the other hand, the conversation pretty much
completely begs the question re the headline topic:
"China-Russia-partnership-threatens-US-global-hegemony". That pretty much drops off the
agenda after the first few paragraphs.
So Huawei is building a 5G network in Russia. So what? Does that arrest Russia's resource
curse? aging population? underemployment and brain drain? public health and ecological
crises? Or merely bind China closer to the resource-rich Siberian lands it missed the chance
to claim and settle due to Western interference, starting in the 18th century? (part of that
'deep wounding' that's supposed to excuse all Chinese behaviour today, I suppose)
Also:
I would say we can't know whether things will be what you might call mended back
together, or whether we're opening a very, very big and contentious hole in the design of the
world system.
I find myself asking: should such a 'hole' be 'mended' at all? Should there still be a
'hegemon that provides global public goods'?
The richest family in America, the WalMart Waltons, made most of their fortune as agents
of communist China. They are allies of thé Chinese in destroying US productive capacity
and impoverishing her workers.
With a traitorous ruling class such as this it is no wonder the US is in decline. And note
Hillary Clinton was on the WalMart board for many years, aiding and abetting the sellout of
American workers in favor of foreigners. The party of American workers has been utterly
corrupted by these lying scum.
Richard Nixon must be rolling in his grave! Isn't this precisely why he 'went to China'
and then worked out a détente with Russia? In order to prevent the US from having to
fight both parties at once? Whose bright idea was this dual-containment strategy?
Obama's. The pivot to Asia (which was code for China) combined with pressing Russia in
Ukraine and Syria, along with the various sanctions was on his watch. In the end, Obama was a
President who put the Libya intervention to a vote of his advisers instead of taking
responsibility to make an informed position, right or wrong.
You know, it was not all that long ago that there was talk among some elites about the US
going into partnership with China in running the world. No, seriously.
This was back during
the Bush era and was referred to as the G-2 or Chimerica. Washington would provide the all
the strategic planning and China would provide the financial resources and maybe their
military manpower as well where needed. Between the two of them nobody would be able to
resist their power.
Not Russia, not the EU – nobody. Zbigniew Brzezinski was all for it
but that was just because he was evil. The historian Niall Ferguson was also all for it which
shows just how good a historian he is. And now look where we are-
Operation Bagration was the D-Day of the Eastern Front. In scope, size, scale and impact, it was a
remarkable feat of arms unmatched in WWII.
Crucially, Overlord (D-Day) and Bagration were planned and undertaken as part of a coordinated effort
on the part of the Grand Alliance to break the back of German resistance in Europe with a
determination that was equally held by the Soviets, British and Americans to force the unconditional
surrender of Hitler's Germany.
In his book 'Stalin's Wars' Geoffrey Roberts reveals that
"Soviet
plans for Operation Bagration were closely co-ordinated with Anglo-American preparations for the
launch of the long-awaited Second Front in France. The Soviets were informed of the approximate date
of D-Day in early April and, on 18 April, Stalin cabled Roosevelt and Churchill that, "as agreed in
Tehran, the Red Army will launch a new offensive at the same time so as to give maximum support to the
Anglo-American operation.'"
Though both operations were of immense military and strategic importance, Bagration dwarfed
Overlord. It began on 22 June, the third anniversary of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in
1941, with air attacks on enemy artillery positions and concentrations, guided by partisan units
operating behind German lines.
The main offensive began on 23 June along a 500-mile front, involving close to two million troops.
Operation Bagration was designed to complement D-Day, to effect the liberation of the Soviet
territory from the Nazis and destroy the Wehrmacht as a serious fighting force in the East. It
achieved all three of these objectives and more.
As British historian and author David Reynolds points out:
"In five weeks the Red Army advanced
450 miles, driving through Minsk to the outskirts of Warsaw and tearing the guts out of Hitler's Army
Group Centre. Nearly 20 German divisions were totally destroyed and another 50 severely mauled – an
even worse disaster than Stalingrad."
He goes on:
"This stunning Soviet success occurred
while Overlord was still stuck in the hedges and lanes of Normandy."
The famed Soviet journalist and author, Vasily Grossman, whose collection of wartime journalism, 'A
Writer At War', is a classic work that should be required reading for those interested in the reality
of war and conflict, describes with customary force and power the human toll of the Soviet offensive:
"Sometimes you are so shaken by what you've seen,"
he writes in one report from the front,
"blood rushes from your heart, and you know that the terrible sight that your eyes have just taken
in is going to haunt you and lie heavily on your soul all your life."
He continues:
"Corpses,
hundreds and thousands of them, pave the road, lie in ditches, under the pines, in the green barley.
In some places, vehicles have to drive over the corpses, so densely they lie upon the ground."
Despite the coordination of Operation Bagration with D-Day, and despite the former's ineffable
military and strategic importance, not one mention was made of it during the 75th D-Day anniversary
commemorations in Northern France. Such a glaring and unconscionable omission stands as just one of
many shameful examples of historical amnesia on the part of Western governments and ideologues in
recent years - people more concerned with politicising history than they are with respecting it.
The valor and courage of the 156,000 troops who landed on the Normandy beaches on 6 June 1944 is
not in question, nor is that of the thousands of sailors, airmen, and airborne troops who also took
part in D-Day. Operation Overlord was and will likely remain the largest amphibious military assault
ever mounted. In terms of its ambition, planning and the coordination of the combined military forces
of the multiple nations involved, it deserves the place in military history that it commands.
Soviet leader Joseph Stalin more than understood the importance and achievement of D-Day, which he
set out in a congratulatory telegram to Roosevelt and Churchill at the time:
"As is evident, the landing, conceived on a grandiose scale, has succeeded completely. My
colleagues and I cannot but admit that the history of warfare knows no other like undertaking from the
point of view of its scale, its vast conception, and its masterly execution."
Wind things forward 75 years and the parlous quality of statesmanship in the West, with the open
violation of the spirit of the Grand Alliance between East and West that is enshrined in Stalin's
telegram, has never been more lamentable. For example, French President Emmanuel Macron served up a
speech in commemoration of D-Day that drew deep from the well of Western exceptionalism. In lauding
NATO and the European Union as positive achievements of the war, he confirmed how deeply entrenched
the malaise of historical amnesia runs in Western European capitals.
The notion that the men who gave their lives on D-Day, and thereafter in Europe on the way to war's
end in 1945, did so in order to give birth to a continent dependent on Washington and in fear of
Moscow, is preposterous. The devastation that Russia suffered in the war, moreover, the magnitude of
losses the country incurred, demands the respect and reverence of everyone interested in drawing the
right lessons from this epic struggle of world-historical importance.
It is for this reason that the decision not to extend an invitation to Russian President Vladimir
Putin to attend the 75th D-Day anniversary celebrations is both a travesty and evidence of the gulf
that exists between those for whom history is a guide and those for whom it is a weapon.
A Europe liberated from fascism but divided by a Cold War that shattered forever the hopes for a
lasting and enduring peace of equals – for global stability and cooperation reflected in the war's
Grand Alliance between East and West – is nothing to celebrate. It reminds us that, although so much
was sacrificed and won by so many during the war, so much was thrown away and lost by so few after it.
Operation Bagration and Operation Overlord should never be spoken of separately. Both were mounted
at the same stage in the war by a Grand Alliance that contained within it the seeds of a future that,
if it had come to pass, would've met the scale of the sacrifice needed to emerge victorious.
The last word goes to Vasily Grossman:
"Nearly everyone believed that good would triumph, that
honest men, who hadn't hesitated to sacrifice their lives, would be able to build a good and just
life."
Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
Biden has faced
numerous mini-controversies since launching his campaign in April, as progressives challenged
his record and old videos resurfaced in which he made some fairly questionable statements.
He is taking serious heat from progressives over his role as a primary architect of the
infamous 1994 Crime Bill, which even Bill Clinton -- who signed it into law -- admitted had
made mass incarceration worse. In fact, it led to an explosion in the US prison population,
which doubled in just 10 years and disproportionately impacted minorities. Biden, however, is
still defending the bill, bragging about having written it and lying about its effects today.
How progressive?
There is just no other way to put it, the Crime Bill was catastrophic and lead to the
massive prison population, which is a majority of Black and Brown people. This was a known
fact then and Biden knew it, it was a strategy to get white voters from Republicans, he
should own it.
Fellow candidate Harris, a prosecutor who laughed and sneered about her own role in
threatening poor families with jail time over their kids truancy -- a punitive policy that does
nothing to help disadvantaged kids and families -- even took a swipe at Biden's '94 bill. Biden
was also an author of the Bush-era Patriot Act, which gave the go-ahead for the FBI to wiretap
Americans' calls and emails without a court order. Biden has repeatedly engaged in public
self-praise for his role in this debacle, too.
Where foreign policy is concerned, Biden is also a far cry from progressive. He voted for
the Iraq War, declaring that Saddam Hussein was seeking nuclear weapons and hailed George W.
Bush for his "moderation and deliberation" after the September 11 terror attacks. He's
also a fan of "decent
man" Dick Cheney and the late Zbigniew Brzezinski, who he said had a "brilliant strategic
mind." One wonders if Biden is referring to Brzezinski's support for arming the
mujahideen in Afghanistan ( "God is on your side," he told them) and helping create Al
Qaeda?
Biden also really likes to frame himself as a candidate of the workers, but lo' and behold,
this man of the people also likes the sound of cutting medicare and social security. He also
voted for NAFTA, TTP and the Wall Street Bailout -- hardly a record to be bragging to
progressive voters about. Forward-thinking Biden is also against the legalization of marijuana,
which he still believes is "a gateway drug," has
"no empathy" for young people and called whistleblower Julian Assange -- who faces life
in prison for exposing US crimes -- a "hi-tech terrorist." That's not to even mention
the creepy groping.
Biden voted for NAFTA; Bernie voted against it
Biden voted for the Iraq War; Bernie voted against it
Biden voted for a border fence; Bernie voted against it
Biden voted for the PATRIOT Act; Bernie voted against it
Biden voted for the Wall St. bailout; Bernie voted against it
Then there's climate change. Biden raised eyebrows last week when he claimed that he
"started this whole thing" on climate change activism back in the late 1987s. The
strange, tangent-y claim was a response to a question posed by an activist from the US Youth
Climate Strike group, who wanted to know if he would commit to a debate focused on climate
change (he didn't). This came just weeks after Biden's climate advisor Heather Zichal -- who
previously worked for a fracking company (yes, really) -- said he would seek a "middle
ground" approach to climate policy, enraging activists.
you'd think for a guy who so quickly cited his record, he'd have no problem agreeing to a
debate on climate change policy
There was once hope for a young Biden. Speaking 1974, he admitted that a system whereby
politicians need to beg for money from big donors does "produce corruption" and sounded
like he was genuinely interested in changing that.
"They always want something," the young Biden said of donors, adding that running for
office "you run the risk of deciding whether or not you're going to prostitute yourself to
give the answer you know they want to hear in order to get funded."
As the years passed, Biden seems to have mellowed out and instead of fighting to change the
system, found it easier to play by established rules. Like his fellow 2020 Democratic
candidates, he has pledged not to take cash from lobbyists and corporate PACs -- but his first
big 2020 fundraiser was hosted by lobbyists and donors and he has sneakily
taken donations from those special interests through a political action committee he set up
in 2017.
Yet, you'd hardly know anything about Biden's many failings if you were relying on
mainstream media, where there is a whole lot of fawning going on over his centrist ways and
folksy, gaffe-prone approach to politics.
Last week, Fortune Magazine published a head-scratcher of a piece headlined "Why Joe
Biden Is the Only True Progressive Candidate." The big, central argument of the article was
not that Biden was a genuine match for true progressives, but that -- no joke -- 'centrists'
are the real progressives.
As expected, the media is playing a role in amplifying establishment-favorite Biden and
praising his centrism as the best strategy to beat Donald Trump in 2020 -- but if they're not
careful, they might be in for a replay of 2016.
The voters who couldn't bear to vote for Clinton will be the same ones who would find it
hard to stomach voting for Biden -- and blaming Russia might not cut it the second time
around.
Danielle Ryan is an Irish freelance writer based in Dublin. Her work has appeared in
Salon, The Nation, Rethinking Russia, teleSUR, RBTH, The Calvert Journal and others. Follow her
on Twitter @DanielleRyanJ
Robert Mueller is special counsel no more, but he fired a parting shot during his televised
statement that has sent Democrats into a frenzy of calls for impeaching President Donald Trump,
whether by accident or by design. At a remarkable press conference on Wednesday – at
which he refused to take questions – Mueller sank the theory that Attorney General
William Barr somehow misinterpreted his report, and sent a clear message to House Democrats
eager to have him testify about the probe that "the report is my testimony."
Despite years of work, millions of dollars and near-unlimited powers, Mueller's special
prosecutors found zero evidence of collusion or conspiracy – and absent that underlying
crime, no grounds to charge the US president with obstruction of justice, even as they wrote up
240 pages of tortured reasoning as to why they wanted to. Case closed, conspiracies put to bed,
lots of people with egg on their face, time for the republic to move on, right?
Wrong!
Did you honestly expect people who have gone all in on a conspiracy theory about Russia
somehow "stealing" the election from Hillary Clinton – investing not just the past
three years, but their entire political and media capital into it – to give up just
because there isn't a grain of truth in it? Instead, they latched onto Mueller's carefully
weasel-worded declaration:
If we had confidence the President did not commit a crime, we would have said
so.
That was no mere misstep, either. Mueller followed that line up with a passage about how his
office did not make a determination whether Trump committed a crime because the standing policy
of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) is that a sitting president cannot be indicted. Not their
fault, you see, they had no choice.
Does the OLC guideline prevent a prosecutor from at least specifying chargeable conduct by
POTUS and recommending those charges? If not, why didn't Mueller do it?
The entirety of volume II is Mueller slinging innuendo at Trump without making a firm
commitment to anything
That strategic vagueness allowed Mueller to dodge the massive constitutional problems with
his obstruction theory
Which aggressively impinges on the President's power
-- Will Chamberlain
🇺🇸 (@willchamberlain) May 29,
2019
Except they did, and they had the avenue to make their claim – but chose not to,
knowing that Barr would shoot it down, because he disagreed with their interpretation of
obstruction laws long before he became AG. But those are details known to lawyers and honest
legal analysts, not the propagandists and conspiracy-peddlers who have spent years whipping the
American public into a hysteria not seen since the 1950s.
Mueller's was a weasel statement, worthy of former FBI boss and his personal friend James
Comey – who actually admitted to Congress that he hoped to force the appointment of a
special counsel by leaking the memos of his meetings with Trump to the press.
It also seems to have been a dog-whistle to Democrats, who have been arguing ever since the
Mueller report was published that it totally proved obstruction of justice and gave them the
pretext for impeachment. A variety of party luminaries, such as House Judiciary Committee Chair
Jerry Nadler (D-New York), presidential candidate Senator Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and
firebrand Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), now doubled down on the claim.
Read my statement following Special Counsel Robert Muller's press conference this morning
on the conclusion of the investigation into President Trump and his associates: pic.twitter.com/1FDMotIgiY
-- (((Rep.
Nadler))) (@RepJerryNadler) May 29,
2019
Robert Mueller's statement makes it clear: Congress has a legal and moral obligation to
begin impeachment proceedings immediately.
What happens next is anybody's guess: Democrats may hope enough Republicans will break ranks
to successfully impeach and convict Trump, though that's no more likely to succeed than any of
the schemes to overturn the 2016 election result so far. Or they might hope that impeachment
proceedings will mobilize their voters for 2020. Either way, the opposition party and the media
aligned with it are determined to keep flogging the dead horse of Russiagate, hoping it will
deliver them victory.
Those who believe Mueller's mission was to "get Trump" will no doubt be happy with
the former special counsel's last move. But Americans who hoped he would clear the air clogged
by endless conspiracy theories have every right to feel disappointed.
I demand a $35 million refund from Mueller and his staff. Their job was to add clarity. He
did exactly the opposite.
Democratic
presidential candidate Bernie Sanders took a swipe at neoconservative Bill Kristol for his
"foolish advocacy of the Iraq war," and questioned whether he had apologized to the country for
it yet. Sanders was responding to a tweet Kristol sent that said, "#Never Sanders," and
linked to a New York Times article about the longtime Vermont senator's opposition to war.
"Have you apologized to the nation for your foolish advocacy of the Iraq war?"
Sanders tweeted , adding he makes
"no apologies for opposing it."
Sanders' record of opposing wars like Vietnam and Iraq, and US meddling in Nicaragua, has
recently been highlighted by the media as the 2020 presidential primaries approach.
-- Meghan McCain's Tears™
(@Smedley_Butler) May 25,
2019
NBC's Meet the Press came under fire last week for tweeting , "Sanders
said he won't apologize for supporting anti-Vietnam War efforts and voting against the war in
Iraq," which sparked ridicule among social media users and inspired Sanders to release a
video in which he stood by his anti-war stance and promised to do everything to prevent a war
with Iran.
I was right about Vietnam.
I was right about Iraq.
I will do everything in my power to prevent a war with Iran.
Kristol tweeted his 'never Sanders' diss after the former Burlington mayor introduced a
petition to prevent "military action against Iran without congressional approval,"
something that likely upset Kristol, who has been calling for regime change in Iran for over 13
years.
Kristol refused to apologize over his comments, instead calling on Sanders to engage in a
"real debate on US foreign policy."
Nope. I dislike quasi-Stalinist demands for apologies. I've defended and will defend my
views on Iraq, and Syria, and Milosevic, and the Soviet Union, and more, as you defend
yours. How about a real debate on U.S. foreign policy--I'll ask for no apologies!--on a
campus this fall? https://t.co/AdC0CelINz
A co-founder of the neoconservative think tank the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC), Kristol called for regime change in Iraq in 1998 in a series of articles and a letter
to then-President Bill Clinton. Following 9/11, PNAC encouraged the George W. Bush
administration to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Kristol ardently supported the war in Iraq, which
he claimed would be a "two-month war" and repeatedly argued for sending more troops
there to rectify the failing invasion.
During the 2006 Lebanon war, Kristol suggested the US take the opportunity to strike Iran's
nuclear facilities, asking, "Why wait?"
"... Even more depressing, McMaster is author of the excellent book, "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam". Now he's retailing lies of his own in pursuit of another war. ..."
"... The "Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" subsists on donations intended to advance the foreign policy agendas of countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those are the kind of "democracies" they want America to "defend" ..."
McMaster then proceeds to mount a hypothetical -- nuclear blackmail. "This regime could say [if U.S. forces] don't go
off the Korean Peninsula, we're going to threaten the use of nuclear weapons," the retired general explained. And yet
this, too, is riddled with nonsense, the biggest objection being that making such an ultimatum would court the very
military confrontation with the United States he wants to avoid.
When McMaster was in the Trump administration, he
floated
many of the same arguments about why
attacking
North Korea should be an option. Those
arguments
didn't make any
sense
when he made them as National Security Advisor, and they haven't improved now that he has migrated to the
inaccurately named Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD). McMaster's latest statements confirm that his preventive
war talk wasn't just empty rhetoric on his part when he worked for Trump. He was apparently
deadly serious
about entertaining a U.S. attack on North Korea, and he continues to talk about it as though it were a reasonable and
legitimate policy option. The reporting that he and others in the administration had a
"messianic fervor"
about this seems to have been right.
It can't be stressed enough that launching an attack on North Korea would an outrageous act of aggression. It would
put the U.S. in clear violation of the U.N. Charter and make our government an illegal aggressor just like North Korea
was in 1950. McMaster was and still is promoting the idea that the U.S. should be willing to commit a massive crime
against another country. Unfortunately, talk of preventive war against certain states is not just tolerated in
Washington, but it is actively encouraged and embraced by many other hard-liners, including the current National
Security Advisor, who is also in favor of launching an attack on North Korea. These hard-liners dismiss the possibility
of deterring these states so that they can have an excuse to attack, but invariably the behavior they cite as evidence
that a state can't be deterred is proof that they desire self-preservation and regime security above all else.
Hard-liners also like to warn about "nuclear blackmail" from other states, but they can't ever produce an example of
a nuclear weapons state that has successfully engaged in such blackmail to extract concessions from others. It makes
even less sense when we consider what would happen to the blackmailing state if it followed through on the threat.
Threatening to launch a nuclear first strike to gain concessions from other governments wouldn't get that government
what it wants, and carrying out the threat would result in the state's certain annihilation. There is no upside to
engaging in "nuclear blackmail" and a huge downside. If "nuclear blackmail" worked, there would likely have been a lot
more blackmail attempts by nuclear weapons state over the last seventy-four years, and more states would want to acquire
nuclear weapons for this purpose. In reality, just about the only use that nuclear weapons have is to deter attacks from
others, and that is pretty clearly why North Korea built their nuclear arsenal. Threatening them with attack just
confirms them in their view that they have to retain them, and actually attacking them would be the only thing that is
likely to prompt them to use them.
There's a scene in the movie Dr. Strangelove where all the powerful men were sitting in the war room discussing
the possible state of the world after the nuclear attack. They start by lamenting the deaths of tens of
millions of Americans, and that they might be the only leaders left to rebuild America. They then worked their
way to moving to a bunker to make sure they were safe, then bringing in women who could help repopulate the
country, and then making sure the women were beautiful and that there would be enough to get started on having
lots of children right away. So in less than 2 minutes, they go from the end of civilization to having a harem
for each of them. When powerful people can see a disaster as a chance to gain even more power, they will take
it regardless of the consequences to anyone else. That's who they are.
I must have missed when our own official policy renounced nuclear first strike. As far as I know, it's still
"one of the options on the table." And now with the latest "low yield nuke" deployments in the pipeline, it
gives the illusion that nuclear war can be a winning option to defend the heartland or expand the empire's
overseas power.
Even more depressing, McMaster is author of the excellent book, "Dereliction of Duty: Johnson, McNamara, the
Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Lies That Led to Vietnam". Now he's retailing lies of his own in pursuit of
another war.
"the inaccurately named Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD)"
That name is a sick joke. The
"Foundation for the Defense of Democracies" subsists on donations intended to advance the foreign policy
agendas of countries like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those are the kind of "democracies" they want America to
"defend".
McMaster has literally gone off the edge since he was named as the head of a group over at the FDD group of
warmongers -- they literally on a daily basis call for more war, attacks on Iran, and NK -- more tragically, they have
access and influence with Bolton and Pompeo.
Sick beyond belief but that is where their money comes into play.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo doubled down on vilification of Сhinese telecoms giant Huawei as "an
instrument of government" suggesting that the company was a national security threat by acting as an
agent for Beijing.
Like his boss, President Trump, and many others in Washington, Pompeo seems blind to an alternative
glaring reality. The US government is the consummate instrument of American corporations. Its
congenital service to corporate profit-making is the real national security risk to American citizens
and a global security threat for all people of the world due to the wars that Washington unswervingly
pursues on behalf of US corporate interests.
The irony could not be richer. President Trump has
banned Huawei from US markets by executive order on the grounds that the company's smartphones could
be spying devices for the Chinese government. This move by a nation whose government espionage
agencies were
exposed
using every US telecom, tech and social media company as a conduit for their global
harvesting of private citizens' data as well as that of foreign heads of state.
Moreover, the White House claim that Huawei is an instrument of Beijing state authorities is a
risible form of guilt projection. The Trump administration's ban on Huawei is nothing more than US
government abusing its state power to hamper a Chinese competitor from outperforming American tech
corporations. Huawei's products are reputedly cheaper and smarter than US rivals. Some observers also
point out that the Chinese technology is invulnerable to hacking by the American spy agency, the NSA,
further adding to its consumer appeal. Outperformed on market principles, the US government takes a
legalistic, propagandistic sledge hammer to smash Huawei from the marketplace in order to bestow an
unfair advantage to inferior American corporations.
So, just who exactly is being an instrument for whom?
Governments in all nations of course use their legislative, fiscal and policy resources to try to
build up key companies for their national economic development. It's standard practice throughout
history and the world over. Governments can use subsidies and grants to boost companies, or tariffs to
shield them from foreign competition.
The US, however, is a stellar example of how government intervenes strenuously at every stage in
the market to benefit private corporations. Without massive injections of public money for grants, tax
deductions, subsidies, and so on, American corporations would not have risen to the scale they have,
as Michael Parenti documents in 'Democracy for the Few'. This relationship, of course, negates the
myth of US "
free market capitalism
." In reality, American corporations are publicly supported
entities whose profits go to private shareholders. The overarching agent for this process of
centrally-planned corporate capitalism is the American government.
From its earliest days as a European colony, it was the newfound federal authorities who rolled
back frontiers with the native Americans through genocidal wars in order to benefit cattle and cereal
companies, mining magnates, transport and telecoms, oil firms, and firearms manufacturers.
In its young years as an imperial power, it was Washington that organized and dispatched federal
troops to wage wars in the Caribbean and Latin America – all for the sole benefit of Wall Street and
the expanding agro-industry. Retired Marine Major General Smedley Butler, in his 1930s book 'War is a
Racket', described the American military as a henchman for US corporate profits. But without the
government acting as recruiter, financier and commander-in-chief, the US Army could not function as a
henchman for the corporations.
Let's take a few specific examples in history to illustrate the instrumental role of the US
government in advancing or defending corporate interests. In 1953, President Eisenhower authorized the
coup in Iran organized by the CIA and Britain's MI6. A main objective of that intervention was to
seize Iranian oil. Five US corporations subsequently exploited the Iranian feast, until the revolution
in 1979 kicked them out along with the American puppet dictator, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. It's a
fair bet that current military threats from the Trump administration against Iran are prompted by a
strategic desire to reclaim American corporate interests.
In 1954, Guatemala's elected leader Jacobo Arbenz set out to nationalize underused agricultural
land to benefit the rural poor. His land reforms involved expropriating properties belonging to the
American-owned United Fruit Company, as William Blum details in 'Killing Hope.' Acting on United's
interests, Washington intervened with a CIA-backed coup against Arbenz, which subsequently led to
decades of mass murder of indigenous Guatemalans under US-backed military dictatorships.
Following the Cuban revolution in 1959, one of the main protagonists for US military invasion of
the island and for covert sabotage operations was the American soft drinks industry, headed up by
Coca-Cola and Pepsi. They feared the nationalization of sugar plantations by the Castro government
would hit their profits.
There are also
suggestions
that President John F Kennedy may have been assassinated by powerful US state forces,
working in cahoots with American corporate interests, because he didn't adopt a sufficiently
aggressive policy towards Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961. Related to JFK's assassination
was his reluctance to go to war in Vietnam in the early 1960s, which big oil companies and weapons
manufacturers were all avidly pushing. His successor, the Texan Senator Lyndon Baines Johnson, who was
close to both industries, duly obliged by paving the way for all-out war in Indochina after 1964. Up
to two million Vietnamese were killed, as were some 58,000 US troops. Millions more maimed. The
corporations made huge profits from the decade-long slaughter. But the US economy began a long descent
that continues today from incurring fiscal debts over Vietnam, which prompted Washington to abandon
the gold standard, and heralded the age of funny money with the dollar acting as an overrated
international reserve currency.
Many more examples could be cited to illustrate how US government – both the White House and
Congress – are agents for corporate profits, often to the horrendous detriment of international peace
and the common good of ordinary Americans.
The 2003 war on Iraq – killing over one million civilians and maiming tens of thousands of
Americans – was widely seen as a pretext for grabbing Iraqi oil for US corporations like Halliburton,
for whom then vice president Dick Cheney was previously an executive board member.
The present warmongering towards Venezuela by Washington is openly touted by White House National
Security Advisor John Bolton as being about US corporate lust for the country's oil reserves – which
are reckoned to be the biggest on the planet.
Out of the top 12 corporate financial
donors
to politicians in Washington, three of them are weapons companies: Boeing, Lockheed Martin,
and Northrop Grumman; a fourth is oil titan Exxon-Mobil. There is an obvious correlation between
corporate bidding and foreign policies embarked on by US governments which leads to conflict and wars,
which in turn repays these corporations with soaring profits.
The American government is the best instrument that corporate money can buy.
Thus, when Trump, Pompeo and other Washington political (and media) prostitutes pontificate and
rail against Huawei, just remember: these talking heads are bought and paid for – lock, stock and
barrel.
Like this story? Share it with a friend!
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.
The majority of Boeing 737 MAX aircraft had a non-working alert for faulty sensor data. The
company scheduled the problem to be fixed three years after discovering it and didn't inform
the FAA until one of the planes crashed. Two Boeing 737 MAX airliners operated by Lion Air and
Ethiopian Airlines crashed five months apart, killing a total of 346 people, and leading to a
worldwide grounding of the new model. Both accidents were apparently caused by faulty data from
Angle of Attack (AoA) sensors, which made the aircraft software falsely detect impending
stalling and pushed the aircraft's nose down.
Pilots were supposed to be alerted about possible problems with the sensors by an AoA
Disagree alert, which should light up when data coming from two AoA sensors does not match. But
the alert required an optional set of indicators to be installed to actually work, and only 20
percent of the aircraft sold had them. Boeing learned about the situation in November 2017, but
considered it a low-risk issue and scheduled a fix for 2020, the company
reported to a House committee.
After Lion Air flight 610 crashed in October 2018, the company decided to accelerate its
timeline, Boeing said in response to a letter sent by Representatives Peter DeFazio and Rick
Larsen, who head a House committee that is investigating the crashes and possible mismanagement
by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regarding the rollout of the 737 MAX. Boeing first
informed the FAA about the faulty alert after one of the planes crashed.
The aviation giant reported
the issue earlier in May. Neither the Lion Air aircraft nor Ethiopian Airlines flight 302,
which crashed in March, had the optional feature that allows the alert to work, although it was
not immediately clear if the pilots could have averted the disasters if they had known that the
AoA sensors were failing.
The Lion Air aircraft, however, narrowly avoided a similar incident a day before its final
demise thanks to an off-duty pilot who was in the cockpit and instructed the crew to turn
off the anti-stalling system.
From
Moon of Alabama comments: "Somehow I do not believe the Ruskies allow idiots to con their warships...but about the US navy,
well..." ... "In the larger sense, both the captains were behaving irresponsibly if they were not under orders to manufacture this
sort of thing." ... "Ultimately, these games of chicken have been going on since, at least, the cold war."
"why hasn't the Navy made any mention beyond saying it was in the process of recovering it's helo, which was clearly in a
stand-off position filming the entire event" ... "Given that the USS Chancellorsville is part of a carrier group as the Russian
version says, and the fact that the US constantly lies... most likely the Russian version is what happened. The US ship broke of the
carrier group which was travelling parallel and turned onto a collision course with the Russian ship."
This is most likely why the US ship turned to intercept the Russian anti submarine ship.
This is the transcript of a radio conversation of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of
Newfoundland in October, 1995. Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We
are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course
15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this
ship.
From
Moon of Alabama comments: "Somehow I do not believe the Ruskies allow idiots to con their warships...but about the US navy,
well..." ... "In the larger sense, both the captains were behaving irresponsibly if they were not under orders to manufacture this
sort of thing." ... "Ultimately, these games of chicken have been going on since, at least, the cold war."
"why hasn't the Navy made any mention beyond saying it was in the process of recovering it's helo, which was clearly in a
stand-off position filming the entire event" ... "Given that the USS Chancellorsville is part of a carrier group as the Russian
version says, and the fact that the US constantly lies... most likely the Russian version is what happened. The US ship broke of the
carrier group which was travelling parallel and turned onto a collision course with the Russian ship."
This is most likely why the US ship turned to intercept the Russian anti submarine ship.
This is the transcript of a radio conversation of a US naval ship with Canadian authorities off the coast of
Newfoundland in October, 1995. Radio conversation released by the Chief of Naval Operations 10-10-95.
Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the North to avoid a collision.
Canadians: Recommend you divert YOUR course 15 degrees to the South to avoid a collision.
Americans: This is the Captain of a US Navy ship. I say again, divert YOUR course.
Canadians: No. I say again, you divert YOUR course.
Americans: This is the aircraft carrier USS Lincoln, the second largest ship in the United States' Atlantic fleet. We
are accompanied by three destroyers, three cruisers and numerous support vessels. I demand that YOU change your course
15 degrees north, that's one five degrees north, or countermeasures will be undertaken to ensure the safety of this
ship.
The Project for a New Middle East[1] is a Project for a New Holocaust. It is happening
now. The policy of "Creative Chaos"[2] underpins the "Middle East Holocaust". Empire willfully
destroys the sovereignty and territorial integrity of prey nations such as Libya, Iraq, Syria,
Yemen, Ukraine, and beyond. Genocidal ethnic cleansing, mass murder and destruction are
described benignly as "chaos" and as "creative".
Empire deploys meticulously planned strategies to fabricate sectarian and ethnic divides,
and to balkanize prey nations. The notion, as expressed by Condoleeza Rice , that the Middle
East should be divided into a "Sunni Belt" and a "Shia Belt"[3] objectifies peoples, diminishes
their humanity, turns them into fictional "stock characters" defined exclusively by perceived
religious affiliations, and deliberately fabricates ethnic and religious tensions, all of which
serve as preconditions for imperialists to create chaos and the disintegration of strong
nation-states into fractious vassal states, devoid of self-determination and sovereignty.
Empire sees non-compliant, self-governing, secular, pluralist, multi-confessional,
democratic states as enemies. Syria is all of the above, and therefore an "enemy". Empire
further destroys the "host" when it "opens the veins" of prey countries for resource plundering
and criminal occupation. The oil-rich, strategically-located area East of the Euphrates is one
such example.
When Empire supports the SDF against ISIS, it is polishing its fake image by creating the
perception that it opposes ISIS, even as it re-introduces "rebadged" ISIS into the same battle
grounds. Alternatively, as in the case of Raqqa, Empire "rescues" and redeploys ISIS elsewhere.
Both terrorists and civilians are expendable in these demonic operations.
Empire rounds civilians up in terrorist-controlled concentration camps[4]. It "weaponizes"
them by deliberately creating conditions of desperation which lend themselves to recruiting
opportunities for new terrorist proxies. Daesh will never disappear as long as Empire is in
control or seeking control globally.
As long as Western war propaganda remains ascendant, and Western populations remain
oblivious, Westerners will continue to believe that these wars are humanitarian or in their
national interests. In fact, the wars are anti-humanitarian, and they only represent narrow
"special interests."
NATO's strongest weapon is its apparatus of "Perception Management". Without it, NATO and
the imperialists would be exposed as the Supreme International War Criminals that they
are.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Mark Taliano is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG)
and the author of Voices from Syria , Global Research Publishers, 2017.
"... Last February, the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Gaza's protests concluded that "it has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately investigated by Israel." ..."
"... Article 12 of the Rome Statute allows for ICC's jurisdiction in two cases; first, if the State in which the alleged crime has occurred is itself a party of the Statute and, second, if the State where the crime has occurred agrees to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the court. ..."
The
Chief Military Advocate General of the Israeli army, Sharon Afek, and the US Department of
Defense General Counsel, Paul Ney,
shared a platform at the 'International Conference on the Law of Armed Conflict', which
took place in Herzliya, Israel between May 28-30.
Their panel witnessed some of the most misconstrued interpretations of international law
ever recorded. It was as if Afek and Ney were literally making up their own law on warfare and
armed conflict, with no regard to what international law actually stipulates.
Unsurprisingly, both Afek and Ney agreed on many things, including that Israel and the US
are blameless in all of their military conflicts, and that they will always be united against
any attempt to hold them accountable for war crimes by the International Court of Justice
(ICC).
Their tirade against the ICC mirrors that of their own leaders. While Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's
anti-ICC position is familiar, last April, US President Donald Trump virulently expressed
his contempt for the global organization and everything it represents.
"Any attempt to target American, Israeli, or allied personnel for prosecution will be met
with a swift and vigorous response," Trump
said in a writing on April 12.
While Trump's (and Netanyahu's) divisive language is nothing new, Afek and Ney were
entrusted with the difficult task of using legal language to explain their countries' aversion
for international law.
Prior to the Herzliya Conference, Afek addressed the Israel Bar Association convention in
Eilat on May 26. Here, too, he made some ludicrous claims as he absolved, in advance, Israeli
soldiers who kill Palestinians.
"A soldier who is in a life-threatening situation and acts to defend himself (or) others
(he) is responsible for, is receiving and will continue receiving full back-up from the Israeli
army," he
said .
The above assertion appears far more sinister once we remember Afek's views on what
constitutes a "life-threatening situation", as he had articulated in Herzliya a few days
later.
"Thousands of Gaza's residents (try) to breach the border fence," he said, with reference to
the non-violent March of Return at the fence separating besieged Gaza from Israel.
The Gaza protesters "are led by a terrorist organization that deliberately uses civilians to
carry out attacks," Afek said.
Afek sees unarmed protests in Gaza as a form of terrorism, thus concurring with an
earlier statement made by then-Israeli Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, on April 8,
2018, when he declared that "there are no innocents in Gaza."
Israel's shoot-to-kill policy, however, is not confined to the Gaza Strip but is also
implemented with the same degree of violent enthusiasm in the West Bank.
'No attacker, male or female, should make it out of any attack alive,'
Lieberman said in 2015. His orders were followed implicitly, as hundreds of Palestinians
were
killed in the West Bank and Jerusalem for allegedly trying to attack Israeli occupation
soldiers or armed illegal Jewish settlers.
Unlike democratic political systems everywhere, in Israel the occupation soldier becomes the
interpreter and
enforcer of the law.
Putting this policy into practice in Gaza is even more horrendous as unarmed protesters are
often being killed by Israeli snipers from long distances. Even
journalists and
medics have not been spared the same tragic fate as the hundreds of civilians who were
killed since the start of the protests in March 2018.
Last February, the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry on Gaza's protests
concluded
that "it has reasonable grounds to believe that during the Great March of Return, Israeli
soldiers committed violations of international human rights and humanitarian law. Some of those
violations may constitute war crimes or crimes against humanity, and must be immediately
investigated by Israel."
In his attack on the ICC at the Herzliya Conference, Afek contended that "Israel is a
law-abiding country, with an independent and strong judicial system, and there is no reason for
its actions to be scrutinized by the ICC."
The Israeli General goes on to reprimand the ICC by urging it to focus on "dealing with the
main issues for which it was founded."
Has Afek even read the Rome Statute? The first Article states that the ICC has the "power to
exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern, as
referred to in this Statute."
Article 5 elaborates the nature of these serious crimes, which include: "(a) The crime of
genocide; (b) Crimes against humanity; (c) War crimes; (d) The crime of aggression."
Israel has been accused of at least two of these crimes – war crimes and crimes
against humanity – repeatedly, including in the February
report by the United Nations Independent Commission of Inquiry.
Afek may argue that none of this is relevant to Israel, for the latter is not "a party to
the Rome Statute," therefore, does not fall within ICC's legal jurisdiction.
Wrong again.
Article 12 of the Rome Statute allows for ICC's jurisdiction in two cases; first, if the
State in which the alleged crime has occurred is itself a party of the Statute and, second, if
the State where the crime has occurred agrees to submit itself to the jurisdiction of the
court.
While it is true that Israel is not a signatory of the Rome Statute, Palestine has, since
2015, agreed to submit itself to the ICC's jurisdiction.
Moreover, in April 2015, the State of Palestine formally became a member of the ICC, thus
giving the court jurisdiction to investigate crimes committed in the Occupied Territories since
June 13, 2014. These crimes include human rights violations carried out during the Israeli war
on Gaza in July-August of the same year.
Afek's skewed understanding of international law went unchallenged at the Herzliya
Conference, as he was flanked by equally misguided interpreters of international law.
However, nothing proclaimed by Israel's top military prosecutor or his government will alter
the facts. Israeli war crimes must not go unpunished; Israel's judicial system is untrustworthy
and the ICC has the legal right and moral duty to carry out the will of the international
community and hold to account those responsible for war crimes anywhere, including Israel.
"... Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF. ..."
"... And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for torturing prisoners? ..."
"... A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons". ..."
"... Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael Gordon. ..."
"... Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow his example as they should have? ..."
"... The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual budgets. ..."
"... More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research. Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer. His job - pushing the war machine agenda. He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication. ..."
"... In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this intelligence operation. ..."
"... both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker ..."
"... At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of establishing global hegemony. ..."
"... Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their "operator" in spook-speak. ..."
"... CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control. ..."
"... If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway. ..."
"... What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is utter bullshit! ..."
"... I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and put pressure on the NY Times. ..."
"... Those who advocated the strong response to Russia are the intellectual authors of "Russia Gate" to thwart detente with Russia. ..."
A piece in the New York Times showed how in March 2018 Trump was manipulated by the
CIA and MI6 into expelling 60 Russian diplomats. Eight weeks after it was published the New
York Times 'corrects' that narrative and exculpates the CIA and MI6 of that manipulation.
Its explanation for the correction makes little sense.
On April 16 the New York Times published a report by Julian E. Barnes and Adam
Goldman about the relation between CIA Director Gina Haspal and President Donald Trump.
The piece described a scene in the White House shortly after the
contentious Skripal/Novichok incident in Britain. It originally said (emphasis added):
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She
outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the
president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the
only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She
then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by
the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
The 60 Russian diplomats were
expelled on March 26 2018. Other countries only expelled a handful of diplomats over the
Skripal incident. On April 15 2018 the Washington Post
reported that Trump was furious about this:
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials said. To
his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian officials --
far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on. The President, who seemed to believe
that other individual countries would largely equal the United States, was furious that his
administration was being portrayed in the media as taking by far the toughest stance on
Russia.
...
Growing angrier, Trump insisted that his aides had misled him about the magnitude of the
expulsions. 'There were curse words,' the official said, 'a lot of curse words.
In that context the 2019 NYT report about Haspel showing Trump dead duck pictures
provided by the Brits made sense. Trump was, as he himself claimed, manipulated into the large
expulsion.
The NYT report created some waves. On April 18 2019 the Guardian
headlined:
The report of the dead duck pictures in the New York Times was a problem for the CIA
and the British government. Not only did it say that they manipulated Trump by providing him
with false pictures, but the non-dead ducks also demonstrated that the official narrative of
the allegedly poisoning of the Skripals has some huge holes. As Rob Slane of the
BlogMirenoted
:
In addition to the extraordinary nature of this revelation, there is also a huge irony
here. Along with many others, I have long felt that the duck feed is one of the many achilles
heels of the whole story we've been presented with about what happened in Salisbury on 4th
March 2018. And the reason for this is precisely because if it were true, there would
indeed have been dead ducks and sick children .
According to the official story, Mr Skripal and his daughter became contaminated with
"Novichok" by touching the handle of his front door at some point between 13:00 and 13:30
that afternoon. A few minutes later (13:45), they were filmed on CCTV camera feeding
ducks, and handing bread to three local boys, one of whom ate a piece . After this they
went to Zizzis, where they apparently so contaminated the table they sat at, that it had to
be incinerated.
You see the problem? According to the official story, ducks should have died. According to
the official story children should have become contaminated and ended up in hospital. Yet as
it happens, no ducks died, and no boys got sick (all that happened was that the boys' parents
were contacted two weeks later by police, the boys were sent for tests, and they were given
the all clear).
After the NYT story was published the CIA and the British government had to remove
the problematic narrative from the record. Yesterday they finally succeeded. Nearly eight weeks
after the original publishing of the White House scene the NYT recanted and issued
a correction
(emphasis. added):
Correction: June 5, 2019
An earlier version of this article incorrectly described the photos that Gina Haspel
showed to President Trump during a discussion about responding to the nerve agent attack in
Britain on a former Russian intelligence officer. Ms. Haspel displayed pictures illustrating
the consequences of nerve agent attacks, not images specific to the chemical attack in
Britain. This correction was delayed because of the time needed for research.
The original paragraphs quoted above were changed into this:
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump. She
outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told the
president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel tried to demonstrate the dangers of using a nerve agent like Novichok in
a populated area. Ms. Haspel showed pictures from other nerve agent attacks that showed their
effects on people.
The British government had told Trump administration officials about early intelligence
reports that said children were sickened and ducks were inadvertently killed by the sloppy
work of the Russian operatives.
The information was based on early reporting, and Trump administration officials had
requested more details about the children and ducks, a person familiar with the intelligence
said, though Ms. Haspel did not present that information to the president. After this article
was published, local health officials in Britain said that no children were harmed.
So instead of pictures of dead ducks in Salisbury the CIA director showed pictures of some
random dead ducks or hospitalized children or whatever to illustrate the effects consequences
of nerve agent incidents?
That the children were taken to hospital but unharmed was already reported in Britishmedia on
March 24 2018, before the Russian diplomats were expelled, not only after the NYT piece
was published in April 2019.
Yesterday the author of the NYT piece, Julian E. Barnes, turned to Twitter to
issue a lengthy 'apology':
I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to
figure out where I went wrong. Here is the correction: 1/9
[...]
The intelligence about the ducks and children were based on an early intelligence report,
according to people familiar with the matter. The intelligence was presented to the US in an
effort to share all that was known, not to deceive the Trump administration. 7/9
This correction was delayed because conducting the research to figure out what I got
wrong, how I got it wrong and what was the correct information took time. 8/9
I regret the error and offer my apology. I strive to get information right the first time.
That is what subscribers pay for. But when I get something wrong, I fix it. 9/9
Barnes covers national security and intelligence issues for the Times Washington
bureau. His job depends on good access to 'sources' in those circles.
It is remarkable that the CIA spokesperson never came out to deny the original NYT
report. There was zero visible push back against its narrative. It is also remarkable that the
correction comes just as Trump is on a state visit in Britain.
The original report was sourced on 'people briefed on the conversation'. The
corrected version is also based on 'people briefed on the conversation' but adds 'a
person familiar with the intelligence'. Do the originally cited 'people' now tell a different
story? Are we to trust a single 'person familiar with the intelligence' more than those
multiple 'people'? What kind of 'research' did the reporter do to correct what he then and now
claims was told to him by 'people'? Why did this 'research' take eight weeks?
That the 'paper of the record' now corrects said 'record' solves a big problem for Gina
Haspel, the CIA/MI6 and the British government. They can no longer be accused of manipulating
Trump (even as we can be quite sure that such manipulations happen all the time).
In the end it is for the reader to decide if the original report makes more sense than the
corrected one.
---
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Posted by b on June 6, 2019 at 06:12 AM |
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Julian E. Barnes is obviously a long-term intelligence asset and his stories are not based on
independent research but are just a repetition of the yarn that the CIA want to spin. Julian
E. Barnes and the CIA obviously think Americans and other westerners are DAF.
Surely the time and effort Julian Barnes needed to check what information he had got wrong
and how he got it wrong should not have been as major as he makes out. Animals dying and
children falling sick to a toxin that could have killed them are incidents that should have
stuck out like sore thumbs and warranted careful checks with different and independent
sources before reporting that Gina Haspel apparently showed the US President pictures of dead
ducks and sick boys in Salisbury.
No wonder Barnes got such a roasting on Twitter after making his abject apology.
And should we be surprised that such false information about Gina Haspel and Donald Trump
puts Trump in a bad light and somehow humanises a CIA director with a reputation for
torturing prisoners?
During years I researched articles published in @nytimes we fact-checked BEFORE publication. Here it comes
AFTER bloggers, officials et al point out fatal flaws. That no children were poisoned, and no
ducks killed, by #novichok
in #Salisbury + was known
in Spring 2018. #propaganda
A week or 3 ago, a Barnes co-reported "article" flat out stated that Iran has a nuclear
weapons program. This was done by pretending to quote someone in the the US Defense
establishment as saying "we believe Iran will redouble its work on nuclear weapons".
Except in the Barnes construction it wasn't a quotation, or anything like a phrasing that
made clear that the Pentagon source was guessing, not stating, that Iran has a nuclear
weapons program.
This was NOT corrected.
Eric Schmitt was the other NY Times "reporter" who signed the article.
And here's what the two liars reported, pretending that an Iranian nuclear weapons program is
a real thing, first paragraph:
"Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan presented an updated military plan that envisions sending as many as 120,000 troops to the Middle East should Iran attack American forces or accelerate work on nuclear weapons, administration officials said."
So Julian Barnes is a well established liar. Sort of akin to Judith Miller and Michael
Gordon.
Barnes provides the truth then provides a lie about the truth....par for the course at
NYT.
(Remember Judith Miller?) A fake news organization spreading fake news with revised fake
news.
can't really get excited by the fact that not everything in this type of creative writing is
taken serious. Did anyone expect otherwise?
During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr.
Trump. She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and
told the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not the
only victims of Russia's attack.
It's pretty obvious that his/their narrative necessarily must be cobbled together by a lot
of sources. Some by phone. Those may not even share the same idea what image of the president
or Haspel they should convey. I always wonder with this type of newspaper reporting. Maybe
both writers should write novels.
Now the Washington post's narrative is quite colorful too. So Trump really was concerned
how many Russians Germany or France expelled? Why was he angry? The vassals did not follow
his example as they should have?
Superb analysis! Been coming here for 11 years now, and I just have to say that "b" is the
best propaganda analyst in the English language. He is the sturdiest anchor in these stormy
seas:)
The CIA and MI6 boys must have blanked out to let this one slip through the cracks. We pay
them billions to run false flag and cover-up operations. This makes those of us that believe
their lying narratives look stupid. I guess we need to add more billions to their annual
budgets.
Sarcasm is just about the last pleasure one can get from watching the horrific antics of
these morons.
More believable that Julian Barnes performs no cross-referencing and zero research.
Investigative reporting (or asking questions) is not the job of the modern MSM stenographer.
His job - pushing the war machine agenda.
He simply writes that which he is instructed to write. Probably emails all of his articles
to his CIA liason for approval prior to publication.
Perhaps, the liason can see what this fool types in real time. Who knows?
As the story of the dead ducks and sick children unraveled and fell apart, a sloppy patch
up had to be made. Now its fixed. Like a Boeing 737 MAX.
BoTh vErSioNs of the story (I checked with the "Wayback Machine") still include this
paragraph (6th paragraph of story):
Unusually for a president, Mr. Trump has publicly rejected not
only intelligence agencies' analysis, but also the facts they have gathered.
And that has created a perilous situation for the C.I.A.
As usual for the NYT, they did not publicly reject the intelligence agencies'
analysis,
but also the facts they had gathered.
That, of course, would have created a perilous situation for the NYT.
As the saying goes: "if it looks like a false-flag, walks like a false-flag, and talks like a
false-flag, it just might be a "duck."
In the Skripnal psyop one can readily assess that the only truly "dead ducks" are the MSM
journalists and the Western politicians who peddled this incredible slapstick nonsense story
in order to further the "demonization of Russia" narrative of Western oligarchy. That these
same media "dead ducks" appear to have not even the very slightest interest whatsoever in the
current whereabouts or safety of said Skripnals speaks volumes about the true nature of this
intelligence operation.
"I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure
out where I went wrong".
It was only when I found the horses head next to me in bed when I woke up, that I realized
what a stupid mistake I had made.
Gina Haspel has to be as dumb and incompetent as I suspected: someone is paying good money to
make her look like an ordinary sociopath, not a depraved tart who sucked cock to climb to the
head of the organisation.
Slane is ++ on the Skirpals. One 'fact' that emerged early on, made public by Slane, is that
the proposed 'official' time-line ( > press, Gvmt between the lines) of the Skripal
movements - trivial as in a town, drinkies, lunch, feeding ducks, etc. -- was never reported
correctly, obfuscated.
Idk the reasons, but it is a vital point.
___________________________________
Trump, we see, is treated like the zombie public, flashed random photos, sold tearful
narratives about babies, children, recall incubator babies, horrific bio-weapons
threats...
The PTB loathes him, Pres. are supposed to be complicit like Obama - or at least keep
their resistance toned down, be ready to compromise. .. Obama objected to, and refused to act
on, at least two engineered / fake Syria chem. 'attacks.' (Just looked on Goog and can't find
links to support.)
The only EU figure who stated there is no evidence that the Russkies novichoked
Sergei and Yulia was Macron, afaik. He didn't get the memo in time (the Elysée is
inefficient, lots of screw-ups there) but soon caught up! and expelled the minimum. -- I have
heard, hush hush, one in F was a receptionist - gofer (an excellent + extremely highly paid
position) who is now at the Emb. in Washington! Most likely merely emblematic story (see
telephone game) .. but telling.
I like this story. It makes Trump look like a naif which wouldn't bother President Teflon in
the least. On the other hand, both versions of the story expose Gina as a untrustworthy ratfucker.
I'm hoping she said "cross my heart and hope to die" when he queried her advice...
I'm glad I checked to see if anyone had mentioned this hack's article about Russia
restarting nuclear testing. Using his name as one search item I tried a number of current
issues. Like the fellows at local intersections holding up signs "will work for money",
Barnes might as well have a tattoo saying "I'll write anything if the price is right.
That it took so long to come up with a half-assed "explanation" shows he's not the brightest
bulb in the lamp. I suppose people whose jobs consist of slightly re-writing Deep State
dictation don't have to be especially clever.
That "apology" by Barnes is completely nonsensical. How would you know that there was
something wrong with your story, that there was an error in it, without knowing what it was?
If the CIA, various bloggers, commenters, etc., alerted him to the errors, it's unlikely they
would say, "There's something wrong in this story but I'm not going to say what it is. You'll
have to re-research they whole thing to figure it out." I don't think that's how people
usually point out errors.
"Which narrative is unraveling and which is gathering momentum?"psychohistorian@19
One thing that seems to be unravelling is the tight political cartel that controls Foreign
Policy in the UK.
If it does unravel and Labour turns to an independent foreign policy while it reverses the
disaster of 'austerity' and neo-liberalism, cases such as that of Assange and the Skripal
affair, both products of extremists within the Establishment who regard themselves as
privileged members of the DC Beltway, are going to be re-opened.
At the moment the UK is run by MI6 which sees itself as the real political directorate of the
CIA and the Deep State in the US. It seriously believes that it is on the verge of
establishing global hegemony. And this at a time when the UK is falling apart and its
population teeters on the brink of economic disaster. It has fallen into this delusion over
the years as it has been able to offer the CIA services which it is afraid to initiate
itself. Hence, most recently, the entire Russiagate nonsense which has British fingerprints
all over it. Hence too the new aggressiveness in DC towards Assange. Hence the disappearance,
without explanation, of the Skripals.
Julian Barnes is like Winston Smith without the intellectual curiosity. He quote happily goes
about his work. lol. What is the matter with you people? You are supposed to embrace the new
narrative!
From wikidpeida... A memory hole is any mechanism for the alteration or disappearance of
inconvenient or embarrassing documents, photographs, transcripts or other records, such as
from a website or other archive, particularly as part of an attempt to give the impression
that something never happened.[1][2] The concept was first popularized by George Orwell's
dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the Party's Ministry of Truth systematically
re-created all potentially embarrassing historical documents, in effect, re-writing all of
history to match the often-changing state propaganda. These changes were complete and
undetectable.
@37 bevin... maybe they will do with assange what they have done with the skripals... the uk
is more then pathetic at this point in time.. craig murray had more to say on the assange
case yesterday - A
Swedish Court Injects Some Sense
Julian E. Barnes' humble confession (a self-incrimination) sounds like one made in a Gulag.
failure of imaginati , Jun 6, 2019 2:23:10 PM |
35
Further down the memory hole is the side tale of the daughter of Brutish Army Chief Nurse
helping Skirpals and getting an award without contaminating the news. Was the girl's father
Pablo Miller,(of Orbis Dossier MFG) and a pal of Skirpal? There's debunk in their poor
narrative. The public has a photogenic memory.
There are 2 Julian Barneses (at the very least!), one is an English writer, the other has
mostly been writing for the WSJ ( https://www.wsj.com/news/author/julian-e.-barnes)
but since recently again for the NYTimes .
Trump is a drug-addled, brain-damaged, hollowed-out shell of the dull con man he once
was.
But, he perceives himself to be a brilliant mastermind - a stable genius. So, he might
indeed, be prone to making inquiries (generally these would induce the toadies around him to
stifle their laughter).
It makes sense that he might ask, while in GB, about the Skirpal incident, since he pulled
60 people from their posts and he remembered the fantasy he was lead to believe about sick
children and dead ducks.
The fact that he overreacted without sufficient evidence, may have inspired a tiny amount
of self-reflection simply because it may have embarrassed him to have been caught on his back
foot. He was lead to believe that his contemporaries intended to react in equal measure. They
did not. Therefore - he was "fooled" or tricked.
This is the only way to embarrass the buffoon. That is to have someone fool him
personally. And to make him look stupid.
He doesn't mind that he is a fat oaf, a greed head and a pig, but that is the stuff of his
own doing. He is comfortable in this. Money is the end-all, etc.
He bought Mar A Lago, making it his own club, because the Palm Beach Club and its elite
snobs would not let him join.
Trump was betrayed by Gina Haskell, the CIA and the NYT.
All of Western media has been compromised by the CIA and friends since at least the 50s.
Remember what late CIA director William Casey said in 1981; "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the US public believes is false".
They 'CIA' controls every talking head you can name. Believe no one. Sad isn't it.
Please note, everyone, that not all of these sad excuses for "journalists" are on the
CIA payroll. In fact, very few of them are. Most work with the CIA out of warped senses of
patriotism and duty to the empire. Most would never think of themselves as intelligence
agency assets, and no small number of them probably think their relationships with the CIA
are unique. They think that they are special and that their contacts on the inside at
the CIA are unusual. Few would guess that they are just another propaganda mule in the CIA's
stable, and that friendly guy who "leaks" to them is actually their handler; their
"operator" in spook-speak.
Of course, there is also the incentive provided by just having to take the story their CIA
"friend" gives them, edit it a little to fit their employer's style guidelines, and
then submit it as their own. A whole day's worth of work and they can have it finished in
half an hour. What's not to like about that?
CIA did not control many of the Vietnam era journalists that had their pieces printed in
mainstream media of the day. Not many left now and perhaps since the nineties they could no
longer get their articles published. Regan brought in perception management which eventually
brought all MSM 100% under US -CIA control.
If you're a CIA guy, you get the editor and the ombudsman on the payroll and he will make
certain that the desired propaganda gets published. If he's a Zionist, he's on the same page from the start, anyway.
The self-important "journalists" are controlled and in fact, they are flattered by their
special relationships with informants and the owner/managers. After one has sucked his or her way to the upper level, kissing up and kicking down... Laziness is a bonus.
I made a significant error in my April 16 profile of Gina Haspel. It took a while to figure
out where I went wrong.
What a strange construction. Doesn't the CIA have PR staff? A decent PR team would review
every item referencing their boss and issue clarifications and/or demand corrections
immediately. There should have been no need for Julian E. Barnes to figure anything out as
the CIA should have pointed out his mistake very quickly. This explanation/exculpation is
utter bullshit!
Every day when I turn on my computer, I am enticed with offers to "see how the Brady Bunch
kids look today" or "what do the stars of the 80s look like today?".
Apparently, there is quite a demand for updates on celebrities and their current well
being.
So why would Julian Barnes do an article about the Skirpals without showing us how they look
today? And just where are they living? Enquiring minds want to know!
I doubt that Trump asked questions about how those ducks and kids were doing. More likely
that MI5 was annoyed that they were exposed as the providers of the duck snuff pictures, and
put pressure on the NY Times.
Using ducks is easier. Gina Haspel could always ask one of the bottom-feeding subordinates
to nip down the road to one of those Chinese BBQ shops and
photograph the display of roast ducks hanging in the shop window . The photos can be
uploaded and altered to remove the background of the chef and the cashier and then the actual
ducks can be altered or colored appropriately before the pictures are sent to Haspel. Anyone
looking at the altered pictures would never guess their actual provenance.
:-)
I'm not sure where Haspel can find hippos or any other large animals that might topple on
top of someone (with dire consequences) were s/he to apply a whiff of nerve agent.
Thanks b for a good laugh at Barnes and Goldman's expense. I note Goldman is silent and I
guess that is because he would likely get his apology wrong and contradict Barnes BS.
Here's my profile of Gina Haspal: war criminal
Here's my profile of Julian Barnes: Fwit and BShitter
Here's my profile of Adam Goldman: Fwit and BShitter.
"... Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing , just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk. ..."
Trump's eunuchs are still guarding and serving their master I see. And
their master is a psychopath who is getting ready to pardon the tough guy kind of psychopath
he admires. Of course the Orange psychopath doesn't consider the fact that this kind of thing
, just like the Iraqi prison tortures , incentivizes the commission of war crimes by our
opponents and allies, and in doing so puts US service members at greater risk.
Here's Trump's hero ..
"One day, from his sniper nest, Chief Gallagher shot a girl in a flower-print hijab who
was walking w/ other girls on the riverbank. She dropped, clutching her stomach, & the
other girls dragged her away."
A mass murderer according to Senior Seals: "Would order needless risks, to fire rockets at
houses for no apparent reason. He routinely parked an armored truck on a Tigris River bridge
& emptied the truck's heavy machine gun into neighborhoods on twith no discernible
targets."
"Platoon members said he spent much of his time in a hidden perch with a sniper rifle,
firing three or four times as often as other platoon snipers. They said he boasted about the
number of people he had killed, including women."
Two other snipers said, the chief shot an unarmed man in a white robe with a wispy white
beard. They said the man fell, a red blotch spreading on his back."
Gallagher ordered a hatchet & a hunting knife" before 2017 deployment. He texted the
man who made them (a Navy Seal veteran) shortly after arriving in Iraq: "I'll try and dig
that knife or hatchet on someone's skull!"
May 2017, a SEAL medic was treating a wounded 15 y/o Islamic State fighter. "He's mine,"
Gallagher said. "Gallagher walked up without a word and stabbed the wounded teenager several
times in the neck and once in the chest with his hunting knife, killing him."
He didn't even try to hide the murder of the 15 y/o. He brought other seals around minutes
later & took a photo over the body. Later, he texted the photo to a fellow SEAL in
California: "Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife." https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/navy-seals-crimes-of-war.html
Now Trumpies bear in mind that Gallagher's own fellow Seals testified against him
that's how depraved this guy Trump is pardoning is.
Here's Gallagher if you live in a stand your ground state and run into him shoot the
bastard, he'll have his hunting knife on him so you can claim self defense.
The US government has a tendency to hijack and weaponize revolutionary innovations, Edward
Snowden said, noting that the natural human desire to communicate with others is now being
exploited on an unprecedented scale. "Our utopian vision for the future is never guaranteed
to be realized," Snowden told the audience in Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada via
live stream from Moscow this week, stressing that the US government "corrupted our
knowledge... towards a military purpose."
They took our nuclear capability and transformed it into the most horrible weapon that
the world had ever witnessed. And we're seeing an atomic moment of computer science... Its
reach is unlimited... but its safeguards are not!
The whistleblower, who in 2013 leaked a trove of highly classified information about global
spying operations by the National Security Agency, argued that, armed with modern technology
and with the help of social media and tech giants, governments are becoming
"all-powerful" in their ability to monitor, analyze, and influence behavior.
It's through the use of new platforms and algorithms that are built on and around these
capabilities that they are able to shift our behavior. In some cases, they are able to
predict our decisions and also nudge them to different outcomes.
The natural human need for "belonging" is being exploited and users voluntarily
consent to surrender virtually all of their data by signing carefully drafted user agreements
that no one bothers to read. "Everything has hundreds and hundreds of pages of legal jargon
that we're not qualified to read and assess and yet they are considered binding upon us,"
Snowden said.
And now these institutions, which are both commercial and governmental... have
structuralized and entrenched it to where it has become now the most effective means of
social control in the history of our species.
"... Tulsi: "While I agree that Russia is both directly and indirectly responsible for this downed plane shot down by the separatists, we've got to look at this in the bigger picture. We've got to look at Russia's incursion into Ukraine, Ukraine's sovereignty " ..."
"... "Not a single anti-aircraft missile system of the Russian Armed Forces has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border," ..."
"... "the determination of the Dutch-led investigation to justifying its conclusions by solely using images from social networks that have been expertly altered with computer graphic editing tools." ..."
"... had been previously displayed by the infamous British online investigative activist group, Bellingcat. ..."
"... "the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia". ..."
"... "the Dutch investigators completely ignore and reject the testimony of eyewitnesses from the nearby Ukrainian communities", according to the Defense Ministry. The testimonies, however, provided essential information "indicating the launch of a missile was carried out from a territory controlled by the Ukrainian Armed Forces." ..."
"... "comprehensive" ..."
"... "clearly indicate the involvement of the Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft system units" ..."
Who Shot Down Flight MH17 over Eastern Ukraine in 2014?
span ted by wendy davis on Sun, 06/02/2019 - 11:19am
Well of course it was the Evil Russians! Didn't Russians also shoot Roger Rabbit? We'd been discussing this 2014 interview with
Tulsi Gabbard on my post ' analyses of the leaked 'Deal of the Century'
I/P peace plan '
that I'd found that day and posted in comments, mainly wanting to feature her anti-Palestinian Hasbara. As I remember it, this 'blame'
started the horrific sanctions on Russia.
Tulsi: "While I agree that Russia is both directly and indirectly responsible for this downed plane shot down by the separatists,
we've got to look at this in the bigger picture. We've got to look at Russia's incursion into Ukraine, Ukraine's sovereignty "
TravelerXXX had bookmarked this Eric Zuesse exposé that I'd vaguely recalled and brought it in:
'MH17 Turnabout: Ukraine's Guilt Now Proven', December 31,
2018,
strategic-culture.org
It's about nine yards long with zillions of hyperlinks, so long I don't even guess I'd ever finished it, which makes it hard
to figure out what, if any, nuggets to feature, but he did link to this:
'MH-17: the untold story', 22
Oct,
2014, RT.com, including a 27-minute video documentary.
"Three months after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 was brought down over Ukraine, there are still no definitive answers about
what caused the tragedy. Civil conflict in the area prevented international experts from conducting a full and thorough investigation.
The wreckage should have been collected and scrupulously re-assembled to identify all the damage, but this standard investigative
procedure was never carried out. Until that's done, evidence can only be gleaned from pictures of the debris, the flight recorders
(black boxes) and eye-witnesses testimonies. This may be enough to help build a picture of what really happened to the aircraft,
whether a rocket fired from the ground or a military jet fired on the doomed plane."
I'd later added to that thread, including some photos of a beaming Netanyahu holding a map of the Golan Heights that Herr Trump
had signed with his approval (indicating the leaked plan just may be The Real Deal) when Up Jumped the Devil:
'Where
is the evidence?' Malaysian PM says attempts to pin MH17 downing on Russia lack proof', 30 May,
2019, RT.com
"Malaysia has accepted the Dutch report that a 'Russian-made' missile shot down its civilian airliner MH17 over eastern Ukraine
in 2014, but has yet to see evidence it was fired by Russia, said Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
"They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?" Mahathir told reporters at the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (FCCJ)
in Tokyo on Thursday.
"You need strong evidence to show it was fired by the Russians," the prime minister went on, according to the Malaysian state
news agency Bernama. "It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile."
"Mahathir was skeptical that anyone involved with the Russian military could have launched the missile that struck the plane,
however, arguing that it would have been clear to professionals that the target was a civilian airliner.
"I don't think a very highly disciplined party is responsible for launching the missile," he said.
The Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT), whose report last year blamed Moscow for shooting down MH17, barred Russia from
participating in the investigation, but involved the government of Ukraine. Although Malaysia is also a member of JIT,Mahathir
revealed that his country's officials have been blocked from examining the plane's flight recorders.
"For some reason, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened," he said. "We
don't know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it."
"This is not a neutral kind of examination," Mahathir added.
Rejecting the JIT accusations, Russia made public the evidence the Dutch-led researchers refused to look into, including the
serial number of the missile that allegedly struck MH17, showing that it was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986 and was in
the arsenal of the Ukrainian army at the time of the tragedy."
b of Moon of Alabama offered this whopping 55 minute press conference video with Malaysian PM Mahathir on Twitter
on May 31.
But aha! RT had later provided on the left sidebar:
May 24,
2018: 'No
Russian missile system ever crossed into Ukraine: MoD rejects Dutch MH17 claims', RT.com
"The Russian Defense Ministry has rejected new claims that flight MH17 over Ukraine was downed by a missile from a Russian unit,
urging the Dutch-led probe to focus on studying hard facts instead of social media images.
"Not a single anti-aircraft missile system of the Russian Armed Forces has ever crossed the Russian-Ukrainian border,"
the defense ministry said in statement.
The Russian military raised eyebrows over "the determination of the Dutch-led investigation to justifying its conclusions
by solely using images from social networks that have been expertly altered with computer graphic editing tools."
The ministry pointed out that
the images used in the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) press conference on Thursday were provided by the Ukrainian special
services and had been previously displayed by the infamous British online investigative activist group,
Bellingcat.
The Dutch-led probe announced that the missile that downed Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 in July 2014 came from a Russian military
Buk system that crossed into Ukraine and then returned to its base in western Russia.
Investigators claim the missile system involved came from "the 53rd Anti-aircraft Missile Brigade based in Kursk in Russia".
The JIT essentially just repeated the conclusion made by Bellingcat a year ago.
The alarming part in the JIT probe is that "the Dutch investigators completely ignore and reject the
testimony of eyewitnesses from the nearby Ukrainian communities", according to the Defense Ministry. The testimonies, however,
provided essential information "indicating the launch of a missile was carried out from a territory controlled by the Ukrainian
Armed Forces."
The Russian side said that it provided the international probe with "comprehensive"evidence, including field tests,
which "clearly indicate the involvement of the Ukrainian Buk anti-aircraft system units" in the destruction of the plane
with 283 passengers and 15 crew members onboard."
This video that Eric Zuesse had up may be part of the referenced eye witness testimony.
Have brought up Gabbard's sticking with the lies and false narratives regarding Russia and Ukraine, clearly one of her blind
spots in her "antiwar" political campaign, that along with the massive and unrelenting war OF terror. That letter is a rather disgusting
display of imperialist obfuscation by the duopoly political parties, fully supporting the lies about Maduro and what's happening
in VS and in effect providing cover for future actions. You can't claim to be against military action while also lying about the
reasons. Of course they can, that's how they prep the public for imperial advances. up 4 users have voted.
i totally endorse zuesse's theory, but oh my, he'd brought in a lot of moving parts at the time. paranoid conspiracy theory
or 'coincidence theory', as some brilliant mofo used to ask. (i'l think of his name later.) the russian defense ministry's contentions
are in conflict with zuesse's (buk missiles v. another jet with missiles), but i sure as hell know that the dutch report
decision in advance was bullshit. i'd think that one would have to be willfully blind to accept it at face value, esp.
if any of them like gabbard were on the defense and intel committees at the time. same with madurro's venezuela, to pretend
that it's not mainly the egregious sanctions and blockades that are responsible for the estimated 40,000 citizens who've died
for lack of medicines and food. and now their CLAP food delivery system is under attack...again.
i get that the intel they're fed is rubbish, but they all have the duty to look further than what lies they're spoon fed.
CEPR has been incredibly valuable a resource for one, and it's pretty mainstream.
but he's right about one thing: yanukovitch was overthrown due to his refusal to sign the EU association memo, and when Imperialists
speak of how 'russia stole crimea', or refuse to see why the separatists in the donbass formed their own independent nation-states,
it's utter hypocrisy.
thanks for reading and commenting, big al.
oh, and do you know if tulsi's FP is still at her house.gov site? i looked at all her press releases that were dated after
that offensive letter, but i'd found nothing new.
@wendy davis I mean, there's the establishment/government narrative and there's the truth, that's about all I need to
know. It's like that saying "trust, but verify". I say fuck that, "don't trust, and verify that".
I don't know about Gabbard's FP, she's done some housecleaning and avoided certain things since becoming the CFR's choice for
2024. Again, I've already done enough research, what, for over 3 years now?, to see what she's all about, something I failed
to do in 2007/8 regarding Obama. Lo and behold, all the clues were there just waiting to be uncovered, but I wasn't in the same
place as now.
...by the Russians, who were not allowed to participate in the Dutch investigation. The information and data was presented
to the Dutch and to the Western media in September 2018. Everything one could hope to see in physical evidence is here. There
is additional evidence not in this article that adds to the details and forensics presented here.
This information was not published in the West or in the Vassal State of Netherlands. The US possesses satellite photos of
the incident. But it has classified those photos and refuses to release them.
As for means, motive and opportunity:
• MH17 was shot down over Ukraine, not over Russia.
• It was shot down with a missile owned by Ukraine, not by Russia.
• It had propaganda value for Ukraine and its CIA masters, none for
• The missile was fired from territory controlled by the neo nazi Kiev regime.
But the best evidence of what took place, as far as I'm concerned, is right here:
Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 was shot down over eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, falling in the rebel-held part of
the country. The crash claimed the lives of 283 passengers and 15 crew members, most of them Dutch nationals. Russia
was blamed by Western media in the first days after the tragedy, even before any evidence had been collected on the ground.
and thank you. your memory is prodigious, and having the 2018 RT news is srsly helpful, as is your M,M, & O formula. blame
first, then fail to allow russia (and malaysia) to be able to run investigations. good to know as well that the malaysian minister
knew of the serial numbers and that ukraine owned the missiles.
eric zuesse had said that even dutch journalists were raising havoc with the JIT back in the day. but just think what this
false blame resulting in mega-sanctions began, then onto the skripals, russia-gate in many guises, and tra la la.
mr. wd laughed this mornin' and said he wishes he had a choice to vote for sergei lavrov for prez; i second that!
dunno if the EU still wants a compact with ukraine, but NATO sure wants the neo-nazi nation as a member. ping: if i have
the energy and time, i'll try to find in zuesse's tome admissions by snipers in 2014, as well.
Must admit I didn't hunt down her Ukraine position, but my personal take is Obummer and the CIA set out to foment problems
and managed to get a fascists regime elected in order to oppose Russia. The new Ukrainian president may take things in a more
pro-Russia direction?
site, at her election site. well, check out Russia , for now. and i do thank you; i was lookin' in all the wrong places.
; )i'll check out more soon as i have time, but zounds: russia: crimea, the nation's interference in our election, wooof. of
course jill stein raised boatloads of bucks for recounts in three states on the basis of russian interference, later 'foreign
interference' against the wishes of the green party board and her own running mate, so...there's that, but it was just a dodge
against trump winning, not hillary. sorry, tulsi.
for being in such a hurry i hadn't even registered your speculation about zelenskiy, but nah, he wants crimea and the donbass
self-declared republics that Putin stole from him...back. he's being lauded and applauded for 'standing up to KGB Putin'. ;
)
and the IMF's bailin' em out again so they have enough to pay their NATO dues and join the EU. (just saw that tryin' to remember
how to sorta spell the comic's name.)
maybe it was passengers', was returned to Malaysia ... but in a sealed coffin, that even family members were refused to open.
At the time an OSCE member was the first to arrive at the crash site. Some 20 minutes after the downing. The photos taken
by him, or so it was attributed, showed round holes (not shrapnel) shot in the pilot area. Sorry I don't have any links handy
on either of these, but I'm pretty sure this is correct.
as i understand it, the hole size was not in contention. but weather it had been the pilot or a passenger: '...but in a sealed
coffin, that even family members were refused to open.'
is that perhaps a malaysian custom? is the truth out there somewhere?
eric zuesse remind us, the holes in the cockpit were likely from machine guns on the ukrainian fighter jet sent to make sure
the ukie buk missiles had (omg) killed the plane, which if i'm getting it right (a big IF) was changing direction as it went
down. my apologies for not getting all the moving parts and claims right on this thread.
but the 21st century wire shows charts and evidence that the flight crew was ordered to change course by the air traffic
control tower (as per the later censored bbc plus recordings).
...was involved in the downing of MH17, which was the opinion of many aviation experts and others, who found bullet holes
in the cockpit, wings, and fuselage. This in addition to Buk damage.
Recordings were captured by multiple sources of a frightened and stressed Ukrainian pilot, who radioed, "I shot the wrong
plane!" He sounded as if he was commanded to shoot down a military target plane and was misled into shooting a passenger jet.
That pilot, named Voloshyn, later committed suicide.
The typical recollection of the incident is:
A fighter was also sent up to 'make sure' the target plane was shot down. If I remember rightly, the plane was hit, but
was still flying and it began to turn back. If the plane story (which I tend to believe) is true, it's at that point that
the fighter jet opened fire on the cockpit and wings.
That would also account for Buk damage to the Boeing, as well as fighter machine gun damage to the cockpit.
You can find many references to this incident along with transcripts of the conversation between the fighter pilot and the
ground base.
video confessions from the snipers at maidan (i assume ukrainians firing on protestors in front of the trades union building
that was eventually...burned to the ground.
but this?
"For instance, Moscow said a theory was never tested that the airliner could have been downed by a fighter jet spotted
by Russian radar stations near flight MH17. The theory was later proven false by the discovery of debris from the Buk rocket.
Though Russia doesn't possess those black boxes ( which, by chance, were handed by the pro-Russian separatists to the
Malaysian Government's representative, and yet that Government handed them to Netherland's Government instead of to Russia's
-- apparently trusting Netherlands more than trusting Russia or even themselves), Russia does possess, and publicly reveals,
evidence that's conclusive on its own; and it is 100% consistent with Haisenko's reconstruction of the event, regardless
whether a Buk was involved or not."
one of his links went to ' MH17 Verdict: Real Evidence Points to US-Kiev Cover-up of Failed False Flag '
July 25, 2014 , 21stcenturywire.com
"As MH17 moved into Ukrainian air space, it was moved by ATC Kiev approximately 200 miles north – putting it on a new
course, heading directly into a war zone, a well-known dangerous area by now – one that's hosted a number of downed military
craft over the previous 3 weeks. Robert Mark, a commercial pilot and editor of Aviation International News Safety magazine,
confirmed that most Malaysia Airlines flights from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur would normally travel along a route significantly
further south than the route MH17 was diverted onto.
Data on all airline flight records can be found here. The BBC reported on July 17th: " Ukraine's SBU security service
has confiscated recordings of conversations between Ukrainian air traffic control officers and the crew of the doomed airliner,
a source in Kiev has told Interfax news agency."
a great (and lengthy) collaborative investigation by 21st century wire. thanks, obomba, thanks, tulsi, thanks Pierre and
vickie nuland. and even the new guy can't control his neo-nazis. but then again, at least yulia tymoshenko didn't win.
but NATO will add them to the roster soon, which is one of the reasons that the atlantic council had recommended him: to
root out poroshenko's oligarchs' corruption.
but i almost wish i hadn't it's sooooo long and full of twists and turns, news reports, videos, but in general the theme
is that mikhail saakashvilli hired them, then stiffed them.
' The "Snipers' Massacre" in Kiev -- Another False Flag? ',
January
13, 2015 , granvillepost.com, eric zuesse
you may remember him best john Mccains buddy: 'today we are all georgians'? like ahmed chalabi, he's the proverbial bad penny
who keeps returning in whatever guise needed (after expulsions), and the
big news this week is that zelenskiy's reinstated his ukrainian
citizenship after promising to give up his former ambitions and work with the new prez.
"... Second, it is equally obvious that the pension reform is profoundly unpopular and that Putin's personal credibility has never recovered from this political fiasco. ..."
As predicted, Putin's popularity takes a nosedive.
This fact is not often discussed in the West, but the popularity of Vladimir Putin is in decline and has been so ever
since, following his reelection, he kept more or less the same (already unpopular) government while that government very
clumsily attempted to "sneak by" undetected a pension reform. Now
the
latest numbers are in
, and they are not good: only 31.7% of Russians trust Vladimir Putin, that is his worst
score in 13 years! His score last year was 47.4% (by the way, Shoigu got only 14.8%, Lavrov got 13%, and Medvedev got
7.6%. These are terrible scores by any measure!)
I have been warning about this for a while now (see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
and
here
),
and we now can try to understand what happened.
These are the faces most Russians are fed-up with
First, it is obvious that millions of Russians (including yours truly) were deeply disappointed that Putin did not
substantially reorganize the Russian government following his triumphant reelection last year. Putin himself is on
record saying two things about that: first, that he is generally happy with the performance of the government and,
second, that he needs an experienced team to implement his very ambitious reform program (more about that in a moment).
Second, it is equally obvious that the pension reform is profoundly unpopular and that Putin's personal credibility has
never recovered from this political fiasco.
Third, and this is the most overlooked and yet most interesting development – there is a
real
opposition
gradually emerging in Russia. What do I mean by "real"? First, I mean not a "pretend opposition" as we see in the
Russian Duma (which is a glorified rubber-stamping parliament). Second, I mean a
patriotic
opposition
which is neither financed nor controlled by Mr. Soros nor the CIA nor any of their innumerable offshoots. The problem is
that this opposition has many severe problems and that it completely fails to present an alternative to the current "Putinocracy."
Here we need to state something significant: Putin is indeed a "liberal," at least in terms of economic policies. When
he says that he is happy ("on the whole") with the performance of the Medvedev government, it is because he probably is.
Furthermore, while Putin apparently likes to listen to folks like Glaziev, he is clearly wary of implementing the more
"social" (or even "socialist") measures advocated by Glaziev and his supporters.
But if Putin is a liberal, is there really a 5
th
column
acting behind the scenes?
This being said, it would be wrong to jump to the primitive conclusion that there is no 5th column (or no "Atlantic
Integrationists") in the Kremlin or in the
Staraya
Square
. In fact, it would be impossible for such a 5th column not to exist. How do we know that? For three very
basic reasons
The AngloZionist leaders of the Empire absolutely
hate
Putin.
Those pretending to deny that are either terminally dishonest or fantastically stupid. Either way, they are wrong.
Simply put: by the late 1990s Russia as a country was quasi-dead, finished, something like the Ukronazi occupied
Ukraine today. Not only has Putin single-handedly saved Russia from collapse, he turned Russia into a power capable
of defeating the plans of the Empire not only in Syria but also in the rest of the Middle-East. Yes, all the
accusations of "collusion" and "hacking" are verbal
prolefeed
for
TV-watching intellectual midgets, but that does not mean that the leaders don't have real, factual and logical
reasons to fear Putin and Russia. They do. And they are doing everything in their power to weaken Russia and
overthrow Putin.
Most of the Russian elites achieved their elite status in the 1990s (some even in the 1980s!), and many of them hate
Putin for putting a stop to the total robbery bonanza which made it possible for these people to not only come to
power but also make a killing financially. As for the so-called "economic block" of the Russian government, it is
entirely made up of what I loosely call the "WTO/IMF/WB/etc." -Types: folks who sincerely endorse the so-called "
Washington
Consensus
." The very
least
one
could say about these folks is that their worldview and ideology are not only totally alien to traditional Russian
values, they are in fact
profoundly
anti-Russian
. For these folks to become the 5
th
column
is the most natural development.
The system which Putin inherited was one deeply integrated with the AngloZionist sphere of financial, economic,
political, and social influence. While western sanctions (and general political shortsightedness) severed many of
these ties (thank you to the Neocons for their life-saving sanctions and, especially, hysterically Russophobic
propaganda!), there are very few cases (if any) of Russians severing such ties. Some believe that Putin sincerely
wanted Russia to join NATO or/and the EU. I don't agree with that, but whether he was sincere or not, the fact is
that Putin did initially try to court the West. The fact that the West was too stupid to see the fantastic
opportunity this situation was offering is yet another powerful testimony of how incompetent western "area
specialists" have become.
Putin's 2007 "
Munich
speech
" should have acted like an urgent wake-up call to the leaders of the West, but they lacked the brains and
courage to listen to what Putin was saying. The same thing happened during
Putin's
2015 speech at the UNGA
. To his internal Russian audience, Putin bluntly said, when asked if the West was trying
to "humiliate" Russia: "
They
do not want to humiliate us, they want to subdue us, solve their problems at our expense
." Personally, I believe
that Putin, as any other officer of the First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the KGB always understood that
the West was a mortal enemy of Russia and that this has been true for at least 1000 years. Thus I think that it would be
naive to believe that Putin ever "trusted" the West. But did he deliberately give that impression for as long as it
could serve his purposes? Yes, absolutely. Now, this period is clearly over.
The one thing which the Russian 5th column cannot really be is any type of "opposition." First, the 5th column is
internal
to
the Kremlin, to the Presidential Administration, to the "United Russia" party and to all the other centers of power in
Russia. This forces the opposition to
pretend
loyalty
to Putin while sabotaging every effort at re-sovereignizing Russia (admittedly a tough task since Russia has been ruled
by foreign elites since at least the times of Peter I).
I am often asked why Russia Today and Sputnik publish what can only be called "trash" or even anti-religious
propaganda on their websites. The answer is simple: there are plenty of folks at RT and Sputnik (especially in the
teams operating their websites as opposed to the actual broadcasts) who are pure products of the AngloZionist
worldview and who love some sleazy sex story almost as much as they love to bash or ridicule the Orthodox church.
While there are plenty of terrific people in both of these media, there are also plenty who secretly would love
Russia to return to the 1990s or become a kind of "Poland" east of the Ukraine. This is also why these outlets make
a strenuous effort not to discuss the Israel lobby in the West (not only the USA), but they also stay away from any
discussion of 9/11. I know for a fact that any mention of the real events of 9/11 is strictly forbidden by some
"bigshot" editors in Moscow as my own interviews were censored that way.
One word of caution here: there are millions of Russians abroad, and many of them are what are now called "
вырусь
"
(vy-roos') in Russia: folks who might speak Russian, and even visit Russia from time to time, but who have completely
lost their "Russian-ness" and whose worldview does not extend beyond wishing that Russia was more like the US or
Germany. They think of Russia as "rashka," and they absolutely hate any genuine manifestation of Russian culture,
spirituality, traditions or religion. Some of them will join the Alt-Right movement and pretend that the racist
categories and ideology used by this movement have some traction in Russia (they don't). Some will try to impersonate
Orthodox Christians. In truth – they are still a pure product of the AngloZionst Empire. Some of them have clearly found
gainful employment in the Russian media where they keep a vigilant watch for any signs that the ideological dogma of the
West (we all know what they are) are being debunked by Russian patriots. These "vyroos" are yet another manifestation of
the Russian 5
th
column.
What about the official opposition to Putin?
Ukie Defense Minister Poltorak photoshops himself before an exploding Kremlin Tower. This is the kind of
nonsense that gets even Duma members angry.
Then there is the "official" Duma opposition, which is more or less a joke. Some Russian MPs are better than others, but
even the comparatively better ones are entirely unable to present a real challenge to the Russian government (we saw
that painfully illustrated by the Duma vote on the pension reform).
As for the ordinary people, most of them probably still trust Putin in foreign policy issues, but many are also getting
genuinely fed-up with an arrogant and condescending ruling elite which couldn't care less about the plight of regular
people and who live in an ivory tower of wealth, arrogance and power.
There is also a gradual realization that Putin in generally being "too soft" on the Empire and not proactive enough in
defense of Novorussia against the Ukronazi junta in Kiev. Sadly, I have to agree with them. Yes, there has been some
progress: the Russian ban on exporting energy to the Ukraine and the deliverance of Russian passports to the people of
Novorussia. Furthermore, the Kremlin has expressed precisely
zero
approval
of Zelenskii's election and, apparently, this was the correct move since even though the policies of Poroshenko were
categorically rejected by an absolute majority of the Ukrainian people, all the signs are that Zelenskii has already
wholly caved to the demands of the "collective West". Unless this trend towards "more of the same, only worse" is
reversed, it is likely that the popular pressure in Russia to be far more proactive against the regime in Kiev will only
increase. In recent months the Duma has been under pressure from the public to take a more forceful reaction to the
events in the Ukraine, and this has had some, albeit limited, effect: the totally lame Duma has now become a little bit
less lame, but not by much.
So what is this new opposition to Putin?
How our power structure is organized: This is the Kremlin. Putin is there. He issues decrees and ensures that
the Constitution is upheld; This is the Government building. Medvedev is there and he loots the budget of our
country; This is the Duma, Volodin is there and he adopts anti-popular laws; This is the Federation Council,
Matvienko and she approves anti-popular laws..
The distinguishing characteristic of this new opposition to Putin is that it sees itself as the truly patriotic segment
of Russian society. These are folks who blame Putin for being weak, indecisive and corrupt (including personally). They
believe that Putin sits on the top of an oligarchic pyramid which only pays lip service to Russian national interests,
but which in reality is interested only in wealth, power and influence. Frankly, much of their argumentation about
Putin's alleged corruption is based on a mix of disinformation and personal hatred for Putin himself. In contrast,
however, their arguments that Putin is too weak or indecisive are based on a completely rational and fact based analysis
of the events which have marked Putin's presidency. After all, the man has been in power for 20 years or so, he has
enjoyed tremendous bureaucratic power and the full support of the vast majority of the population. How then can he (or
his supporters) blame it all on a "bad system" or the power of a 5
th
column
whose existence some don't believe in in the first place?
On the right is a typical opposition "Internet poster".
While I personally don't agree with this point of view, I have to recognize that it is not self-evidently absurd or
solely based on propaganda. In other words, they do have a point, and much of their criticism is valid.
Alas, much of it is not, and that mix loses a lot in credibility when 50% of it is fact-based and logical, and 50% is
not.
What is even worse is that these patriots regularly find themselves in the same camp as the Soros/CIA -funded folks whom
the patriots claim to hate, but whose arguments they often recycle (about the personal corruption of Putin, for
example).
The other major weakness of this new opposition is that it lacks any kind of leader. This is why I did not bother
listing the names of the main representatives of this opposition: for most of those who will read this article, these
names will mean nothing.
Finally, this new patriotic opposition seems to lack an original worldview: much of their argumentation boils down to
"it was better in the Soviet era" (they typically tend to overlook how bad things indeed were, at least since the
1980s!).
So where do we go from here? Will Russia ever have a real, vibrant, opposition?
My short personal answer is, yes, Russia will have such an opposition. Here is why:
The official Duma opposition is both useless and hopeless.
The Soros/CIA financed opposition is discredited beyond rescue.
The 5
th
column
is fundamentally a fraud, and most Russians hate it.
The current "patriotic" opposition will grow due to the policies of the Russian government, and they will probably
learn from their mistakes.
Crises often (almost always) generate the appearance of new leaders
I hope that the newly emerging "patriotic" opposition will focus its wrath not on Putin as a person, but on the mistakes
of the Russian government wherever they happen: President, Prime Minister, Minister or below – it should not matter. If
the opposition succeeds in focusing on issues rather than venting its rage against specific individuals, then real
changes become possible, including personnel changes.
The latest opinion polls show that
all
the
members of the government are suffering from falling ratings, not just the Atlantic Integrationists. If this trend
maintains itself, the Eurasian Sovereignists will have a powerful incentive to cut their ties with the Atlantic
Integrationists. Who knows, maybe Medvedev and the so-called "economic block of the government" will be shown to the
door? If not, then the plunge in the polls will most likely continue, and social unrest becomes a real possibility.
Just full of unsupported assertions and with an overall lack of understanding about how countries, especially big ones,
really work.
Citing some polling on individual figures is meaningless without context and without any details about the nature of the
poll. Faked and/or incompetent polling happens regularly in the West."Push"polls are a constant gimmick used in the Western
press to give authority to assertions.
Any poll which shows Shoigu getting only 14.8%, Lavrov getting 13%, is highly suspect on its face. These are genuinely
super-capable individuals in their jobs, quite beyond any norms for performance.
When something smells as bad as this article, sharp reader knows something is going on beyond the mere speculations of an
amateur affairs analyst.
Показатель одобрения деятельности Президента стабилен и находится в рамках сформировавшегося коридора: по среднему
значению с 13 по 19 мая он составил 65,8%.
2. Svobodnaya Pressa (SP) is not exactly unbiased (or competent) source. Enough to take a look at such odious figures as
Boldyrev hanging out there as a "columnist";
3. Russia's so called opposition (mainly left) committed suicide when went with Grudinin. In general, they don't have anyone
of required scale and competence to even approach a vicinity of Putin.
In many respects, SP's commentaries are merely a tempest in the cup.
I suspect if they distrust Putin the diabolical skripal RT interview with the "Russian Tourists" may have something to do
with it.
Tens of Millions of Russians were ready to believe the false flag CIA / M16 setup explanation, then suddenly two idiots
popup, on national tv who just scream military / security looking men to say they were there just to check out the
cathedral spire of course!
I mean what a shot in the foot who authorised that interview to happen?
Some believe that Putin sincerely wanted Russia to join NATO or/and the EU. I don't agree with that, but whether he was
sincere or not, the fact is that Putin did initially try to court the West. The fact that the West was too stupid to see
the fantastic opportunity this situation was offering is yet another powerful testimony of how incompetent western "area
specialists" have become.
Washington would never allow Russia to join EU/NATO. Russia's too big for them to control, and might even end up partly or
entirely co-opting these organizations. No, their original plan was to break Russia up into bite-sized pieces first, then
induct those little statelets into NATO (or some other Washington-dominated 'alliance'), then use them to surround and
harass China–all very similar to the way they're using Ukraine and the Caucasus to surround and harass Russia now.
@JOHN CHUCKMAN
finance infrastructure and vital
technology that's what sovereign countries do but Russia is still acting like a banana republic
Neither Putin nor anyone in government has actual control of the central bank which 'independence' [read
absolute
dependence
on the global finance cabal] is enshrined in the US-written Yeltsin era 'Constitution'
Now there are some that argue that Putin has done very well just to fend off the ongoing financial, economic and
informational war on Russia and perhaps Russia cannot simply make a clean break with the western financial octopus with
which it's entangled
I don't know there may be some truth to that a gradual weaning off may be the more
prudent
course and
Putin is nothing if not that
When Putin gets too old to govern, the next leader will not come from some "vibrant" opposition. The next leader will be
hand-picked by Putin, same way he was hand-picked by that fool Yeltsin – the best move he ever made.
There are people in Russia who still believe that trying to emulate the western "democratic practices" will win them
approval and love from the west.
Leave the winning of love and approval by the west to the lesser Slavs like the Polaks and the Ukrainians.
The only time west "approved" of Russia was when they were doing self-harm to themselves – like in 1980's and 90's.
Listen carefully, my dear Russians – west will never love you, and it's not your fault. So don't worry about it. Choose your
own path and forget about "democracy". The whole thing is a sham anyway.
I am often asked why Russia Today and Sputnik publish what can only be called "trash"
Some of it is unbearable
these outlets make a strenuous effort not to discuss the Israel lobby in the West (not only the USA), but they
also stay away from any discussion of 9/11.
Ordinance fired in that direction is likely to ricochet – they do a pretty good job of demolishing the Ukraine
narrative; the "White Helmets" the Venezuelan coup etc as presented by MSM and they have taken a lot of punishment
for that already. And, yes
there are plenty of folks at RT and Sputnik (especially in the teams operating their websites as opposed to the
actual broadcasts) who are pure products of the AngloZionist worldview
There are people in Russia who still believe that trying to emulate the western "democratic practices" will win
them approval and love from the west.
Let's put it this way–the strata of these people is extremely narrow (thin) and consists mostly of human freaks such
as kreakls and some parts of large urban centers office plankton. Majority of Russians have no illusions about the
West anymore. The talk about new Iron Curtain (this time erected by Russia) is not just idle talk–Western degeneracy
is an issue which needs to be dealt with.
I agree. The "evidence" Saker bases this essay upon is extremely weak. He would have been better off just leaving it out and
writing the article as an opinion piece. But then, he would have been subject to evidence based rebuttals . I generally
look forward to his articles. This was disappointing
Why does Putin go along with neo-liberal economic policies in Russia? Does Putin really believe in this bullshit? I don't
believe Jeffrey Sachs with a very guilty conscience .. believes in this bullshit anymore.
@Yuritarasovych
iet ( or maybe sarcastic Soviet nostalgic) opposition, are sanguine about
the profound danger posed by China. As if not ironic enough, the right-wing Republicans in DC after two years
jostling with Trump, also came to the same conclusion.
5) The traditionalist "racist" "white guard" "monarchist" "Russian soul" type of right wing romanticist patriotic
opposition seems to suffer collective cognizance retardation when it comes to China. Saker has the same blindness.
This is also interesting. They are more stupid than their ancestors back in 1916-1918. The White Guards were as
responsible for Tsar's downfall as Miliukov or Kerensky. The cultural gene pool of Russia today will not permit the
growing up of people such as Lenin and Trotsky, with corresponding political genius, resoluteness, or maniacal
cruelty, whatever. Woe, tragedy of Russia.
Difficult to say how much of that difference is due to the sort of human resources they have to work with though. Xi
certainly had a much more functional country to start with. Overall, both of them are clearly among the most
impressive leaders currently on the world stage.
The Russian people should thank God for Putin and as an American I thank God that Putin has checkmated the unholy trinity ie
the US and Israel and Britain and their terrorists ie the CIA and the Mossad and MI6 the creators of AL CIADA aka ISIS and
all the offshoots thereof.
Putin is the only zane head of state on the world stage and has saved Syria from the Christian killing terrorists created
and supplied and supported by the unholy trinity.
The decline in Putin's approval rating/popularity is an emphatically positive indicator for Russia that the existential or
at least catastrophic geopolitical threats to Russia have greatly lessened.
Putin has been The Indispensable Man since he came to power. He is (very) roughly akin to FDR. While Putin is a vigorous
man, he strikes me as understanding that effecting the peaceful transition of power Russia-style, will seal his legacy as
among the greatest Russian rulers.
Get ready, because you and your readers' heads are about to pop . . . . .
Israel and Netanyahu were and remain in a similar position. The Obama Administration attempted to regime change Netanyahu
out. That's why Israelis engaged in a similar Better Safe Than Sorry the election previous to this most recent one.
Netanyahu barely won last time because the external threat had passed with the passing of the Obama Administration. The only
reason he got as close as he did to winning and being able to form a government is because of POTUS Trump.
The Saker lost his way due to what some call Trump Derangement Syndrome. I've never like that catchall term because the more
intelligent suffering from it are really blinded by resentment toward the man.
Whether any of you wish to get your minds around it or not, he has become the most powerful POTUS in modern memory. He
represents a sharp break from the increasingly Figurehead/Pitchman POTUSs of the post-Cold War period.
It's long past the time for you and many of your readers to knock it off with the folding table in front of the student
union wackiness. What with all the shouting about "AngloZionists" and such.
The Post-Cold War quarter century is effectively over. China won it, hands down. Now POTUS Trump is sufficiently able to
exercise his Article II powers for even those blinded by resentment toward him to see the US Sovereign is once again
coherently pursuing its geopolitical and geo-economic objectives.
For Russia/Putin this is altogether positive. The US Sovereign is now "Deal Capable/Ready."
Apr 24, 2019 Rand Corporation: How to Destroy Russia
Force the adversary to expand recklessly in order to unbalance him, and then destroy him. This is not the description of a
judo hold, but a plan against Russia elaborated by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank in the USA. With a
staff of thousands of experts, Rand presents itself as the world's most reliable source for Intelligence and political
analysis for the leaders of the United States and their allies.
I hope that the newly emerging "patriotic" opposition will focus its wrath not on Putin as a person, but on the mistakes
of the Russian government wherever they happen: President, Prime Minister, Minister or below – it should not matter.
If
the opposition succeeds in focusing on issues rather than venting its rage against specific individuals, then real
changes become possible
, including personnel changes.
Constructive political processes & loyal opposition are also entirely missing in the USA.
Putin did not save Russia single-handedly. He was and is just a front man for the forces that did. Even in the 1990s, when
the traitors ruled the roost in Russia, a lot of people sabotaged traitorous actions of Yeltsin and associated oligarchs.
Many ballistic missiles that were supposed to be destroyed were actually kept intact, as well as many production facilities.
That's the only reason Russia came back from what appeared to be the ashes so quickly. It is very likely that Putin's rise
to power was organized by those same forces. The most plausible scenario is that patriotic forces in the military, KGB, and
police, seeing wholesale treason of Yeltsin and his cronies, presented Yeltsin with an ultimatum: either he resigns,
promotes Putin, and gets off the hook, or he gets overthrown and prosecuted for his crimes. Remember, the first act of Putin
as president was a wholesale pardon to Yeltsin and his family.
As to real opposition, Russia does need it. Not the traitorous scum like Navalny, Khodorkovsky, or late unlamented Nemtsov,
but people with integrity, whose prime goal is to advance the interests of Russia, rather than just steal as much as
possible. What the Saker ignores is the fact that many Russian oligarchs (I have no illusions about them: they are all
mega-thieves, many are murderers, like Khodorkovsky) learned the lesson of Ukrainian oligarchs: unless you have a strong
state behind you, other equally unscrupulous thieves will gladly steal your loot.
Realistically, serious patriotic opposition in Russia will emerge when smarter oligarchs join forces with those fighting for
social justice. At that point leaders with savvy and charisma that makes them competitive with Putin have a chance of
emerging. The opposition won't be knights in shining armor, but it will be a force capable of ruling the country, not just
criticizing the rulers. The first task is really hard, whereas any moron can criticize any government making valid points.
The policies of the opposition must be mostly middle-of-the-road: limit (but not eliminate) the opportunities for oligarchs'
thievery, and use un-stolen resources to improve the life of ordinary people. In foreign policy, it must keep a strong
stance against the crumbling Empire, joining tactical alliances with all other anti-imperial countries and forces.
@FB
nd the loot ending up in England, Israel,
and who knows where else.
The fundamental strength of Chinese is that the country is being run by some kind of patriotic committee, that is
highly fault-tolerant and immune to Western interference. Xi, like his predecessors, is just a colorless bureaucrat:
the
Long
March
continues, no matter who the front man is. It is unthinkable that the Committee would allow someone like
Yeltsin to run the country into the ground.
Putin & Co need to solve this fundamental weakness of Russia, while he is in power and can change things. Otherwise,
another Yeltsin might come along and wreck everything.
Russia under Putin is the largest grain exporter in the world and has been for the last 3 years and if anyone doubts how
Russian farming has entered the modern world just go to youtube and watch the videos on Russian agriculture.
Seeing how Ukies managed to turn Ukraine into a pile of shit, the only way to profit by their advice is this: listen to what
they have to say and do exactly opposite.
@Avery
iullina just for a start then a number of banks and large private
corporations need to be nationalized after 20 years of playing the capitalist game, it's clear that this is a losing game
Russia needs to make domestic capital available for things like massive infrastructure projects and big science and
technology PCR, probably the most astute Russia 'hand', certainly on the subject of economics, has stated the obvious fact
that these kinds of state investments [and printing the money to do that] are NOT inflationary I keep waiting for that to
happen, but it never does I think Putin is just too cautious for big moves like that
The question is whether anyone else will do it ?
Russia needs an Uncle Joe but they just don't build them like that anymore
None of the commentators seem to show the minimum awareness of the following, except for the gent from Tennessee: 1)
the acute psychological and practical importance of social justice for basic Russian people; and 2) harder to define
to basically totalitarian capitalistic essence of the Chinese model. This shows that A) you all live in the West, B)
with good justification are obsessed with a burning hatred against Globalist empire and you throw out the baby of
basic values of freedom and democracy with the dirty water western propaganda bubble, C) you guys don't realize how
many Russians live on 30,000 rubles a month, and you project this rosy hope on them ( saving the west with
"conservative Christian values and brave fight against globalism" ) 4) you guys have not the remotest ideas of how
the petty Chinese traders and their large state corporations behave, when the other party happens to be not some
tall Anglo-saxon / Jew whose white asses the Chinese want to lick. Many Russians on the other hand, have such first
hand experience.
Yeltsin was legitimate until 1993. Dismissing vice president and shooting, and then dismissing parliament was
unconstitutional. He became even less legitimate when his goons falsified two rounds of the presidential elections in 1996,
making him a winner of the vote he lost badly. In addition, he was an alcoholic, traitor, and mega-thief. End of story.
"... Second, it is equally obvious that the pension reform is profoundly unpopular and that Putin's personal credibility has never recovered from this political fiasco. ..."
As predicted, Putin's popularity takes a nosedive.
This fact is not often discussed in the West, but the popularity of Vladimir Putin is in decline and has been so ever
since, following his reelection, he kept more or less the same (already unpopular) government while that government very
clumsily attempted to "sneak by" undetected a pension reform. Now
the
latest numbers are in
, and they are not good: only 31.7% of Russians trust Vladimir Putin, that is his worst
score in 13 years! His score last year was 47.4% (by the way, Shoigu got only 14.8%, Lavrov got 13%, and Medvedev got
7.6%. These are terrible scores by any measure!)
I have been warning about this for a while now (see
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
and
here
),
and we now can try to understand what happened.
These are the faces most Russians are fed-up with
First, it is obvious that millions of Russians (including yours truly) were deeply disappointed that Putin did not
substantially reorganize the Russian government following his triumphant reelection last year. Putin himself is on
record saying two things about that: first, that he is generally happy with the performance of the government and,
second, that he needs an experienced team to implement his very ambitious reform program (more about that in a moment).
Second, it is equally obvious that the pension reform is profoundly unpopular and that Putin's personal credibility has
never recovered from this political fiasco.
Third, and this is the most overlooked and yet most interesting development – there is a
real
opposition
gradually emerging in Russia. What do I mean by "real"? First, I mean not a "pretend opposition" as we see in the
Russian Duma (which is a glorified rubber-stamping parliament). Second, I mean a
patriotic
opposition
which is neither financed nor controlled by Mr. Soros nor the CIA nor any of their innumerable offshoots. The problem is
that this opposition has many severe problems and that it completely fails to present an alternative to the current "Putinocracy."
Here we need to state something significant: Putin is indeed a "liberal," at least in terms of economic policies. When
he says that he is happy ("on the whole") with the performance of the Medvedev government, it is because he probably is.
Furthermore, while Putin apparently likes to listen to folks like Glaziev, he is clearly wary of implementing the more
"social" (or even "socialist") measures advocated by Glaziev and his supporters.
But if Putin is a liberal, is there really a 5
th
column
acting behind the scenes?
This being said, it would be wrong to jump to the primitive conclusion that there is no 5th column (or no "Atlantic
Integrationists") in the Kremlin or in the
Staraya
Square
. In fact, it would be impossible for such a 5th column not to exist. How do we know that? For three very
basic reasons
The AngloZionist leaders of the Empire absolutely
hate
Putin.
Those pretending to deny that are either terminally dishonest or fantastically stupid. Either way, they are wrong.
Simply put: by the late 1990s Russia as a country was quasi-dead, finished, something like the Ukronazi occupied
Ukraine today. Not only has Putin single-handedly saved Russia from collapse, he turned Russia into a power capable
of defeating the plans of the Empire not only in Syria but also in the rest of the Middle-East. Yes, all the
accusations of "collusion" and "hacking" are verbal
prolefeed
for
TV-watching intellectual midgets, but that does not mean that the leaders don't have real, factual and logical
reasons to fear Putin and Russia. They do. And they are doing everything in their power to weaken Russia and
overthrow Putin.
Most of the Russian elites achieved their elite status in the 1990s (some even in the 1980s!), and many of them hate
Putin for putting a stop to the total robbery bonanza which made it possible for these people to not only come to
power but also make a killing financially. As for the so-called "economic block" of the Russian government, it is
entirely made up of what I loosely call the "WTO/IMF/WB/etc." -Types: folks who sincerely endorse the so-called "
Washington
Consensus
." The very
least
one
could say about these folks is that their worldview and ideology are not only totally alien to traditional Russian
values, they are in fact
profoundly
anti-Russian
. For these folks to become the 5
th
column
is the most natural development.
The system which Putin inherited was one deeply integrated with the AngloZionist sphere of financial, economic,
political, and social influence. While western sanctions (and general political shortsightedness) severed many of
these ties (thank you to the Neocons for their life-saving sanctions and, especially, hysterically Russophobic
propaganda!), there are very few cases (if any) of Russians severing such ties. Some believe that Putin sincerely
wanted Russia to join NATO or/and the EU. I don't agree with that, but whether he was sincere or not, the fact is
that Putin did initially try to court the West. The fact that the West was too stupid to see the fantastic
opportunity this situation was offering is yet another powerful testimony of how incompetent western "area
specialists" have become.
Putin's 2007 "
Munich
speech
" should have acted like an urgent wake-up call to the leaders of the West, but they lacked the brains and
courage to listen to what Putin was saying. The same thing happened during
Putin's
2015 speech at the UNGA
. To his internal Russian audience, Putin bluntly said, when asked if the West was trying
to "humiliate" Russia: "
They
do not want to humiliate us, they want to subdue us, solve their problems at our expense
." Personally, I believe
that Putin, as any other officer of the First Main Directorate (foreign intelligence) of the KGB always understood that
the West was a mortal enemy of Russia and that this has been true for at least 1000 years. Thus I think that it would be
naive to believe that Putin ever "trusted" the West. But did he deliberately give that impression for as long as it
could serve his purposes? Yes, absolutely. Now, this period is clearly over.
The one thing which the Russian 5th column cannot really be is any type of "opposition." First, the 5th column is
internal
to
the Kremlin, to the Presidential Administration, to the "United Russia" party and to all the other centers of power in
Russia. This forces the opposition to
pretend
loyalty
to Putin while sabotaging every effort at re-sovereignizing Russia (admittedly a tough task since Russia has been ruled
by foreign elites since at least the times of Peter I).
I am often asked why Russia Today and Sputnik publish what can only be called "trash" or even anti-religious
propaganda on their websites. The answer is simple: there are plenty of folks at RT and Sputnik (especially in the
teams operating their websites as opposed to the actual broadcasts) who are pure products of the AngloZionist
worldview and who love some sleazy sex story almost as much as they love to bash or ridicule the Orthodox church.
While there are plenty of terrific people in both of these media, there are also plenty who secretly would love
Russia to return to the 1990s or become a kind of "Poland" east of the Ukraine. This is also why these outlets make
a strenuous effort not to discuss the Israel lobby in the West (not only the USA), but they also stay away from any
discussion of 9/11. I know for a fact that any mention of the real events of 9/11 is strictly forbidden by some
"bigshot" editors in Moscow as my own interviews were censored that way.
One word of caution here: there are millions of Russians abroad, and many of them are what are now called "
вырусь
"
(vy-roos') in Russia: folks who might speak Russian, and even visit Russia from time to time, but who have completely
lost their "Russian-ness" and whose worldview does not extend beyond wishing that Russia was more like the US or
Germany. They think of Russia as "rashka," and they absolutely hate any genuine manifestation of Russian culture,
spirituality, traditions or religion. Some of them will join the Alt-Right movement and pretend that the racist
categories and ideology used by this movement have some traction in Russia (they don't). Some will try to impersonate
Orthodox Christians. In truth – they are still a pure product of the AngloZionst Empire. Some of them have clearly found
gainful employment in the Russian media where they keep a vigilant watch for any signs that the ideological dogma of the
West (we all know what they are) are being debunked by Russian patriots. These "vyroos" are yet another manifestation of
the Russian 5
th
column.
What about the official opposition to Putin?
Ukie Defense Minister Poltorak photoshops himself before an exploding Kremlin Tower. This is the kind of
nonsense that gets even Duma members angry.
Then there is the "official" Duma opposition, which is more or less a joke. Some Russian MPs are better than others, but
even the comparatively better ones are entirely unable to present a real challenge to the Russian government (we saw
that painfully illustrated by the Duma vote on the pension reform).
As for the ordinary people, most of them probably still trust Putin in foreign policy issues, but many are also getting
genuinely fed-up with an arrogant and condescending ruling elite which couldn't care less about the plight of regular
people and who live in an ivory tower of wealth, arrogance and power.
There is also a gradual realization that Putin in generally being "too soft" on the Empire and not proactive enough in
defense of Novorussia against the Ukronazi junta in Kiev. Sadly, I have to agree with them. Yes, there has been some
progress: the Russian ban on exporting energy to the Ukraine and the deliverance of Russian passports to the people of
Novorussia. Furthermore, the Kremlin has expressed precisely
zero
approval
of Zelenskii's election and, apparently, this was the correct move since even though the policies of Poroshenko were
categorically rejected by an absolute majority of the Ukrainian people, all the signs are that Zelenskii has already
wholly caved to the demands of the "collective West". Unless this trend towards "more of the same, only worse" is
reversed, it is likely that the popular pressure in Russia to be far more proactive against the regime in Kiev will only
increase. In recent months the Duma has been under pressure from the public to take a more forceful reaction to the
events in the Ukraine, and this has had some, albeit limited, effect: the totally lame Duma has now become a little bit
less lame, but not by much.
So what is this new opposition to Putin?
How our power structure is organized: This is the Kremlin. Putin is there. He issues decrees and ensures that
the Constitution is upheld; This is the Government building. Medvedev is there and he loots the budget of our
country; This is the Duma, Volodin is there and he adopts anti-popular laws; This is the Federation Council,
Matvienko and she approves anti-popular laws..
The distinguishing characteristic of this new opposition to Putin is that it sees itself as the truly patriotic segment
of Russian society. These are folks who blame Putin for being weak, indecisive and corrupt (including personally). They
believe that Putin sits on the top of an oligarchic pyramid which only pays lip service to Russian national interests,
but which in reality is interested only in wealth, power and influence. Frankly, much of their argumentation about
Putin's alleged corruption is based on a mix of disinformation and personal hatred for Putin himself. In contrast,
however, their arguments that Putin is too weak or indecisive are based on a completely rational and fact based analysis
of the events which have marked Putin's presidency. After all, the man has been in power for 20 years or so, he has
enjoyed tremendous bureaucratic power and the full support of the vast majority of the population. How then can he (or
his supporters) blame it all on a "bad system" or the power of a 5
th
column
whose existence some don't believe in in the first place?
On the right is a typical opposition "Internet poster".
While I personally don't agree with this point of view, I have to recognize that it is not self-evidently absurd or
solely based on propaganda. In other words, they do have a point, and much of their criticism is valid.
Alas, much of it is not, and that mix loses a lot in credibility when 50% of it is fact-based and logical, and 50% is
not.
What is even worse is that these patriots regularly find themselves in the same camp as the Soros/CIA -funded folks whom
the patriots claim to hate, but whose arguments they often recycle (about the personal corruption of Putin, for
example).
The other major weakness of this new opposition is that it lacks any kind of leader. This is why I did not bother
listing the names of the main representatives of this opposition: for most of those who will read this article, these
names will mean nothing.
Finally, this new patriotic opposition seems to lack an original worldview: much of their argumentation boils down to
"it was better in the Soviet era" (they typically tend to overlook how bad things indeed were, at least since the
1980s!).
So where do we go from here? Will Russia ever have a real, vibrant, opposition?
My short personal answer is, yes, Russia will have such an opposition. Here is why:
The official Duma opposition is both useless and hopeless.
The Soros/CIA financed opposition is discredited beyond rescue.
The 5
th
column
is fundamentally a fraud, and most Russians hate it.
The current "patriotic" opposition will grow due to the policies of the Russian government, and they will probably
learn from their mistakes.
Crises often (almost always) generate the appearance of new leaders
I hope that the newly emerging "patriotic" opposition will focus its wrath not on Putin as a person, but on the mistakes
of the Russian government wherever they happen: President, Prime Minister, Minister or below – it should not matter. If
the opposition succeeds in focusing on issues rather than venting its rage against specific individuals, then real
changes become possible, including personnel changes.
The latest opinion polls show that
all
the
members of the government are suffering from falling ratings, not just the Atlantic Integrationists. If this trend
maintains itself, the Eurasian Sovereignists will have a powerful incentive to cut their ties with the Atlantic
Integrationists. Who knows, maybe Medvedev and the so-called "economic block of the government" will be shown to the
door? If not, then the plunge in the polls will most likely continue, and social unrest becomes a real possibility.
Just full of unsupported assertions and with an overall lack of understanding about how countries, especially big ones,
really work.
Citing some polling on individual figures is meaningless without context and without any details about the nature of the
poll. Faked and/or incompetent polling happens regularly in the West."Push"polls are a constant gimmick used in the Western
press to give authority to assertions.
Any poll which shows Shoigu getting only 14.8%, Lavrov getting 13%, is highly suspect on its face. These are genuinely
super-capable individuals in their jobs, quite beyond any norms for performance.
When something smells as bad as this article, sharp reader knows something is going on beyond the mere speculations of an
amateur affairs analyst.
Показатель одобрения деятельности Президента стабилен и находится в рамках сформировавшегося коридора: по среднему
значению с 13 по 19 мая он составил 65,8%.
2. Svobodnaya Pressa (SP) is not exactly unbiased (or competent) source. Enough to take a look at such odious figures as
Boldyrev hanging out there as a "columnist";
3. Russia's so called opposition (mainly left) committed suicide when went with Grudinin. In general, they don't have anyone
of required scale and competence to even approach a vicinity of Putin.
In many respects, SP's commentaries are merely a tempest in the cup.
I suspect if they distrust Putin the diabolical skripal RT interview with the "Russian Tourists" may have something to do
with it.
Tens of Millions of Russians were ready to believe the false flag CIA / M16 setup explanation, then suddenly two idiots
popup, on national tv who just scream military / security looking men to say they were there just to check out the
cathedral spire of course!
I mean what a shot in the foot who authorised that interview to happen?
Some believe that Putin sincerely wanted Russia to join NATO or/and the EU. I don't agree with that, but whether he was
sincere or not, the fact is that Putin did initially try to court the West. The fact that the West was too stupid to see
the fantastic opportunity this situation was offering is yet another powerful testimony of how incompetent western "area
specialists" have become.
Washington would never allow Russia to join EU/NATO. Russia's too big for them to control, and might even end up partly or
entirely co-opting these organizations. No, their original plan was to break Russia up into bite-sized pieces first, then
induct those little statelets into NATO (or some other Washington-dominated 'alliance'), then use them to surround and
harass China–all very similar to the way they're using Ukraine and the Caucasus to surround and harass Russia now.
@JOHN CHUCKMAN
finance infrastructure and vital
technology that's what sovereign countries do but Russia is still acting like a banana republic
Neither Putin nor anyone in government has actual control of the central bank which 'independence' [read
absolute
dependence
on the global finance cabal] is enshrined in the US-written Yeltsin era 'Constitution'
Now there are some that argue that Putin has done very well just to fend off the ongoing financial, economic and
informational war on Russia and perhaps Russia cannot simply make a clean break with the western financial octopus with
which it's entangled
I don't know there may be some truth to that a gradual weaning off may be the more
prudent
course and
Putin is nothing if not that
When Putin gets too old to govern, the next leader will not come from some "vibrant" opposition. The next leader will be
hand-picked by Putin, same way he was hand-picked by that fool Yeltsin – the best move he ever made.
There are people in Russia who still believe that trying to emulate the western "democratic practices" will win them
approval and love from the west.
Leave the winning of love and approval by the west to the lesser Slavs like the Polaks and the Ukrainians.
The only time west "approved" of Russia was when they were doing self-harm to themselves – like in 1980's and 90's.
Listen carefully, my dear Russians – west will never love you, and it's not your fault. So don't worry about it. Choose your
own path and forget about "democracy". The whole thing is a sham anyway.
I am often asked why Russia Today and Sputnik publish what can only be called "trash"
Some of it is unbearable
these outlets make a strenuous effort not to discuss the Israel lobby in the West (not only the USA), but they
also stay away from any discussion of 9/11.
Ordinance fired in that direction is likely to ricochet – they do a pretty good job of demolishing the Ukraine
narrative; the "White Helmets" the Venezuelan coup etc as presented by MSM and they have taken a lot of punishment
for that already. And, yes
there are plenty of folks at RT and Sputnik (especially in the teams operating their websites as opposed to the
actual broadcasts) who are pure products of the AngloZionist worldview
There are people in Russia who still believe that trying to emulate the western "democratic practices" will win
them approval and love from the west.
Let's put it this way–the strata of these people is extremely narrow (thin) and consists mostly of human freaks such
as kreakls and some parts of large urban centers office plankton. Majority of Russians have no illusions about the
West anymore. The talk about new Iron Curtain (this time erected by Russia) is not just idle talk–Western degeneracy
is an issue which needs to be dealt with.
I agree. The "evidence" Saker bases this essay upon is extremely weak. He would have been better off just leaving it out and
writing the article as an opinion piece. But then, he would have been subject to evidence based rebuttals . I generally
look forward to his articles. This was disappointing
Why does Putin go along with neo-liberal economic policies in Russia? Does Putin really believe in this bullshit? I don't
believe Jeffrey Sachs with a very guilty conscience .. believes in this bullshit anymore.
@Yuritarasovych
iet ( or maybe sarcastic Soviet nostalgic) opposition, are sanguine about
the profound danger posed by China. As if not ironic enough, the right-wing Republicans in DC after two years
jostling with Trump, also came to the same conclusion.
5) The traditionalist "racist" "white guard" "monarchist" "Russian soul" type of right wing romanticist patriotic
opposition seems to suffer collective cognizance retardation when it comes to China. Saker has the same blindness.
This is also interesting. They are more stupid than their ancestors back in 1916-1918. The White Guards were as
responsible for Tsar's downfall as Miliukov or Kerensky. The cultural gene pool of Russia today will not permit the
growing up of people such as Lenin and Trotsky, with corresponding political genius, resoluteness, or maniacal
cruelty, whatever. Woe, tragedy of Russia.
Difficult to say how much of that difference is due to the sort of human resources they have to work with though. Xi
certainly had a much more functional country to start with. Overall, both of them are clearly among the most
impressive leaders currently on the world stage.
The Russian people should thank God for Putin and as an American I thank God that Putin has checkmated the unholy trinity ie
the US and Israel and Britain and their terrorists ie the CIA and the Mossad and MI6 the creators of AL CIADA aka ISIS and
all the offshoots thereof.
Putin is the only zane head of state on the world stage and has saved Syria from the Christian killing terrorists created
and supplied and supported by the unholy trinity.
The decline in Putin's approval rating/popularity is an emphatically positive indicator for Russia that the existential or
at least catastrophic geopolitical threats to Russia have greatly lessened.
Putin has been The Indispensable Man since he came to power. He is (very) roughly akin to FDR. While Putin is a vigorous
man, he strikes me as understanding that effecting the peaceful transition of power Russia-style, will seal his legacy as
among the greatest Russian rulers.
Get ready, because you and your readers' heads are about to pop . . . . .
Israel and Netanyahu were and remain in a similar position. The Obama Administration attempted to regime change Netanyahu
out. That's why Israelis engaged in a similar Better Safe Than Sorry the election previous to this most recent one.
Netanyahu barely won last time because the external threat had passed with the passing of the Obama Administration. The only
reason he got as close as he did to winning and being able to form a government is because of POTUS Trump.
The Saker lost his way due to what some call Trump Derangement Syndrome. I've never like that catchall term because the more
intelligent suffering from it are really blinded by resentment toward the man.
Whether any of you wish to get your minds around it or not, he has become the most powerful POTUS in modern memory. He
represents a sharp break from the increasingly Figurehead/Pitchman POTUSs of the post-Cold War period.
It's long past the time for you and many of your readers to knock it off with the folding table in front of the student
union wackiness. What with all the shouting about "AngloZionists" and such.
The Post-Cold War quarter century is effectively over. China won it, hands down. Now POTUS Trump is sufficiently able to
exercise his Article II powers for even those blinded by resentment toward him to see the US Sovereign is once again
coherently pursuing its geopolitical and geo-economic objectives.
For Russia/Putin this is altogether positive. The US Sovereign is now "Deal Capable/Ready."
Apr 24, 2019 Rand Corporation: How to Destroy Russia
Force the adversary to expand recklessly in order to unbalance him, and then destroy him. This is not the description of a
judo hold, but a plan against Russia elaborated by the Rand Corporation, the most influential think tank in the USA. With a
staff of thousands of experts, Rand presents itself as the world's most reliable source for Intelligence and political
analysis for the leaders of the United States and their allies.
I hope that the newly emerging "patriotic" opposition will focus its wrath not on Putin as a person, but on the mistakes
of the Russian government wherever they happen: President, Prime Minister, Minister or below – it should not matter.
If
the opposition succeeds in focusing on issues rather than venting its rage against specific individuals, then real
changes become possible
, including personnel changes.
Constructive political processes & loyal opposition are also entirely missing in the USA.
Putin did not save Russia single-handedly. He was and is just a front man for the forces that did. Even in the 1990s, when
the traitors ruled the roost in Russia, a lot of people sabotaged traitorous actions of Yeltsin and associated oligarchs.
Many ballistic missiles that were supposed to be destroyed were actually kept intact, as well as many production facilities.
That's the only reason Russia came back from what appeared to be the ashes so quickly. It is very likely that Putin's rise
to power was organized by those same forces. The most plausible scenario is that patriotic forces in the military, KGB, and
police, seeing wholesale treason of Yeltsin and his cronies, presented Yeltsin with an ultimatum: either he resigns,
promotes Putin, and gets off the hook, or he gets overthrown and prosecuted for his crimes. Remember, the first act of Putin
as president was a wholesale pardon to Yeltsin and his family.
As to real opposition, Russia does need it. Not the traitorous scum like Navalny, Khodorkovsky, or late unlamented Nemtsov,
but people with integrity, whose prime goal is to advance the interests of Russia, rather than just steal as much as
possible. What the Saker ignores is the fact that many Russian oligarchs (I have no illusions about them: they are all
mega-thieves, many are murderers, like Khodorkovsky) learned the lesson of Ukrainian oligarchs: unless you have a strong
state behind you, other equally unscrupulous thieves will gladly steal your loot.
Realistically, serious patriotic opposition in Russia will emerge when smarter oligarchs join forces with those fighting for
social justice. At that point leaders with savvy and charisma that makes them competitive with Putin have a chance of
emerging. The opposition won't be knights in shining armor, but it will be a force capable of ruling the country, not just
criticizing the rulers. The first task is really hard, whereas any moron can criticize any government making valid points.
The policies of the opposition must be mostly middle-of-the-road: limit (but not eliminate) the opportunities for oligarchs'
thievery, and use un-stolen resources to improve the life of ordinary people. In foreign policy, it must keep a strong
stance against the crumbling Empire, joining tactical alliances with all other anti-imperial countries and forces.
@FB
nd the loot ending up in England, Israel,
and who knows where else.
The fundamental strength of Chinese is that the country is being run by some kind of patriotic committee, that is
highly fault-tolerant and immune to Western interference. Xi, like his predecessors, is just a colorless bureaucrat:
the
Long
March
continues, no matter who the front man is. It is unthinkable that the Committee would allow someone like
Yeltsin to run the country into the ground.
Putin & Co need to solve this fundamental weakness of Russia, while he is in power and can change things. Otherwise,
another Yeltsin might come along and wreck everything.
Russia under Putin is the largest grain exporter in the world and has been for the last 3 years and if anyone doubts how
Russian farming has entered the modern world just go to youtube and watch the videos on Russian agriculture.
Seeing how Ukies managed to turn Ukraine into a pile of shit, the only way to profit by their advice is this: listen to what
they have to say and do exactly opposite.
@Avery
iullina just for a start then a number of banks and large private
corporations need to be nationalized after 20 years of playing the capitalist game, it's clear that this is a losing game
Russia needs to make domestic capital available for things like massive infrastructure projects and big science and
technology PCR, probably the most astute Russia 'hand', certainly on the subject of economics, has stated the obvious fact
that these kinds of state investments [and printing the money to do that] are NOT inflationary I keep waiting for that to
happen, but it never does I think Putin is just too cautious for big moves like that
The question is whether anyone else will do it ?
Russia needs an Uncle Joe but they just don't build them like that anymore
None of the commentators seem to show the minimum awareness of the following, except for the gent from Tennessee: 1)
the acute psychological and practical importance of social justice for basic Russian people; and 2) harder to define
to basically totalitarian capitalistic essence of the Chinese model. This shows that A) you all live in the West, B)
with good justification are obsessed with a burning hatred against Globalist empire and you throw out the baby of
basic values of freedom and democracy with the dirty water western propaganda bubble, C) you guys don't realize how
many Russians live on 30,000 rubles a month, and you project this rosy hope on them ( saving the west with
"conservative Christian values and brave fight against globalism" ) 4) you guys have not the remotest ideas of how
the petty Chinese traders and their large state corporations behave, when the other party happens to be not some
tall Anglo-saxon / Jew whose white asses the Chinese want to lick. Many Russians on the other hand, have such first
hand experience.
Yeltsin was legitimate until 1993. Dismissing vice president and shooting, and then dismissing parliament was
unconstitutional. He became even less legitimate when his goons falsified two rounds of the presidential elections in 1996,
making him a winner of the vote he lost badly. In addition, he was an alcoholic, traitor, and mega-thief. End of story.
The systemwide US Russophobia that reached its nadir with Russiagate has created a "catastrophe" for both domestic politics and
foreign relations that threatens the future of the American system, professor Stephen Cohen
tells RT.
War with Russia could easily break out if the US insists on pursuing the policy of " demonization " that birthed Russiagate instead
of returning to detente and cooperation, New York University professor emeritus of Russian history Stephen Cohen argues on Chris
Hedges' On Contact. While NATO deliberately antagonized post-Soviet Russia by expanding up to its borders, the US deployed missile
defense systems along those borders after scrapping an arms treaty, leaving President Vladimir Putin devoid of " illusions " about
the goodwill of the West – but armed with " nuclear missiles that can evade and elude any missile defense system ."
" Now is the time for a serious, new arms control agreement. What do we get? Russiagate instead ."
Cohen believes the conspiracy theory – which remains front-page news in US media despite being thoroughly discredited, both by
independent investigators and last month by special counsel Robert Mueller's report – is the work of the CIA and its former director,
John Brennan, who are dead set against any kind of cooperation with Russia. Attorney General William Barr, who is investigating
the FBI over how the 2016 counterintelligence probe began, should take a look at Brennan and his agency, Cohen says.
" If our intelligence services are off the reservation to the point that they can first try to destroy a presidential candidate
and then a president we need to know it ," Cohen says.
" This is the worst scandal in American history. It's the worst, at least, since the Civil War ."
And the damage wrought by this " catastrophe " hasn't stopped at the US border.
The idea that Trump is a Russian agent has been devastating to " our own institutions, to the presidency, to our electoral system,
to Congress, to the American mainstream media, not to mention the damage it's done to American-Russian relations, the damage it
has done to the way Russians, both elite Russians and young Russians, look at America today , " Cohen declares.
"Russiagate is one of the greatest new threats to national security. I have five listed in the book. Russia and China aren't
on there. Russiagate is number one."
And the potential damage it could still cause is enormous.
Amazing, 30 million dollars spent for an investigation that produced nothing and some believe that Russiagate is still reality.
This paranoia is unbelievable except for a psychotic public - pathetic.
If the neo-con/Nazi assholes embedded in the M.I.C. and the US government continue down this road of demonizing and antagonizing
Russia it is not going to end well for the people of the US. Putin and the rest of the Russian leadership have made it crystal
clear that they are only going to be pushed so far. The problem is when Russia snaps they are going to do their damdest to try
to cut the head of the snake off in one shot. There's a good chance they could actually pull that off.
"... However, Williamson was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under May's leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative program really began to flourish. Designed to "counteract Russian propaganda" it instead deceptively engaged in spreading disinformation about Russia and even the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when it came to discourse about Russia in the press. ..."
"... What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent "Russian threat" and are prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this. ..."
"... Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged in order to heighten the U.K. population's awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by British secret services. ..."
"... Staged or not, May's handling of the Skripal incident left much to be desired. Even her experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as home secretary hadn't taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, May was already issuing ultimatums to the Russian president. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was "highly likely" Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and became something of a household joke in Russia. ..."
"... So what can we expect from the next prime minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In terms of improving relations with Russia -- as long as the Tories remain in power, and the "deep state" or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda -- , we are unlikely to see any significant change in policy. ..."
"... The UK under May has continued to serve as a “coalition partner” in the US-Saudi-Israeli Axis engineered and perpetuated dirty war against the Syrian government and its Russian and Iranian allies. Let’s not forget Theresa May’s well practiced phrase, “like the United States, we believe”: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39591476 . May has consistently believed US claims about the April 2017 Khan Shaykhoun incident, the April 2018 Douma incident, and other alleged chemical “attacks” in Syria. ..."
"... The UK under May also has remained the base for two leading disinformation operations supporting the the assault against Syrian government: Rami Abdulrahman’s Syrian Observatory for Human Rights and Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat. ..."
"... As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the Al Qaeda allied White Helmets propaganda organization. In April 2018 the Trump administration suspended funding of the White Helmets. The US had provided more than $33 million to support the group since 2013. ..."
"... The British government remains a primary funder of the White Helmets propaganda organization. Posing as an impartial rescue force, the White Helmets work exclusively side-by-side armed militants including US State Department, UN, and EU designated foreign terrorist organizations. Their primary function is not “rescuing” anyone, but to manage a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public and political opinion, leveraging “humanitarian” sympathy worldwide ..."
"... In November 2016, video showed two White Helmets members staging a rescue operation for the Mannequin Challenge meme. In May 2017, video showed White Helmets members removing a man’s body following his execution by armed militants in Daraa. In June 2017, a member of the White Helmets was suspended indefinitely for assisting armed militants in the burial of mutilated corpses of Syrian government soldiers. ..."
"... Apropos, the last two paras about the Civil Service in Britain; Up until the last 2 decades or so, some of the brightest and best talents entered the Civil Service, good pay, good career prospects and good pension. Then this was hollowed out, everything ‘public sector’ was vilified and privatized and starved of funding. ..."
"... The race to the bottom is keenly contested. ..."
"... Without Russian money they are certainly not the world’s 6th largest economy and it appears that unless they want to side with China against the USA which is improbable, no impossible, they will lose Chinese Capital as well after Brexit. ..."
"... And again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called “privatization”… of poor mother Russia. ..."
"... The US has it’s own deep state problem of civil servants, especially alphabet soup agencies who are accustomed to operating in the dark and think that they, not the political appointees make policy ..."
UK Prime Minister Theresa May's political career officially ended in tears last Friday, as
the woman who declared that she would provide "strong and stable" leadership when she came to
power three years ago, but who proved in the end to be not quite so strong or stable as she
broke down in front of the press outside 10 Downing Street.
She had in fact, arguably one of the most disastrous records of a UK prime minister to date.
A total of 50 cabinet resignations since she
took office , far more than any of her recent predecessors; together with scandals such as
the Grenfell Tower
disaster , Windrush
scandal , hostile environment policy and record levels of homelessness and poverty. And
that's not to mention her inability to deliver Brexit, which effectively led to her demise.
Indeed however tempting it may be to feel sorry for May -- she has been surrounded by
political vultures all vying for her position for months now -- one is minded of the words of
British political commentator Owen Jones who, when asked
recently if he felt sorry for the prime minister, noted that May's tears were simply those of
self-pity and were absent at times when they would have been appropriate, such as in the
aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire, which claimed 72 lives.
'Permanent Crisis'
One may be inclined to think that if she was so unsuccessful on the domestic front, then
perhaps in the area of foreign policy May could have had a better record. No such luck. We only
have to look at the considerable deterioration in relations with Russia to understand that
under her leadership, Britain's standing in the world has diminished. Prominent British
journalist Patrick Cockburn has even gone as far to say that Britain is now "entering a period
of permanent crisis not
seen since the 17th century."
But arguably back in the 17th century the U.K. was more competent in the art of diplomacy
than it is now. May's defense minister, Gavin Williamson, with his comment that Russia should
"go away and shut up" epitomized the extraordinary lack of finesse and savoir-faire the May
government had when dealing with Russia.
His bellicose tone unfortunately went hand-in-hand with a completely misplaced notion of
Russia presenting to the UK some kind of genuine threat, as he argued earlier this year that
the UK had to "enhance its lethality" against such well-resourced states, as opposed to
concentrating its energies on Islamic terror groups. He was then accused by fellow politicians
of "sabre-rattling" in what were widely seen as misguided and provocative statements.
However, Williamson was not alone in his anti-Russian stance. It was under May's
leadership that the controversial government-funded Integrity Initiative program really
began to flourish. Designed to "counteract Russian propaganda" it instead deceptively engaged
in spreading disinformation about Russia and even the UK Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, by
hiring journalists, academics and commentators who would all sing from the same hymn sheet when
it came to discourse about Russia in the press.
What was most chilling about the revelations in the Integrity
Initiative hacked documents was the extent to which policy makers within the inner workings
of the establishment are apparently obsessed about an imminent "Russian threat" and are
prepared to go to considerable lengths to persuade the British population of this.
May with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Hangzhou, China, 2016. (Wikimedia Commons)
Uncanny Timing
Even more unnerving was the discussion that there was need for some event to be staged
in order to heighten the U.K. population's awareness of a Russian threat. The timing was
uncanny: this was not long before the poisoning took place of ex-double agent Sergei Skripal
and his daughter, which has, along with multiple discrepancies in the British narrative, led
some analysts to ask whether the whole incident was indeed orchestrated by
British secret services.
Staged or not, May's handling of the Skripal incident left much to be desired. Even her
experience of handling the Litvinenko affair as
home secretary hadn't taught her a great deal. Before any concrete evidence was produced to
implicate the Russian government in the poisoning, May was already issuing ultimatums to the
Russian president. Her infamous phrase that the government concluded it was "highly likely"
Russia was responsible for the poisoning even entered itself into the Russian vocabulary and
became something of a household joke in Russia.
The decision to publicly accuse another state of attempting murder on British soil with
evidence that only amounted to "a nerve agent of a type produced by Russia," was utterly
reckless, not only deeply harming relations with Russia, but undermining the credibility of the
U.K. as a whole. And despite it being an attempt to bolster the PM's position at a time when
desperately needed to generate support for her upcoming Brexit white paper – this itself,
given a delayed Brexit and divided country, proved fruitless.
So what can we expect from the next prime minister of the not-so-Great Britain? Whoever
it is has their work cut out not only to unite the Conservative party, but the country. In
terms of improving relations with Russia -- as long as the Tories remain in power, and the
"deep state" or civil service continues to push its aggressive anti-Russian agenda -- , we are
unlikely to see any significant change in policy.
One could hope that a certain Boris Johnson, himself named after a Russian
émigré, and the leading candidate to replace May, could seek to build bridges in
this regard, but his record on the Skripal case leaves room for doubt. The PM is after all a
figurehead, and the UK civil service remains a driving force of policy-making.
As former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair once said: "You cannot underestimate how much
they [the civil service] believe it's their job to actually run the country and to resist the
changes put forward by people they dismiss as 'here today, gone tomorrow' politicians. They
genuinely see themselves as the true guardians of the national interest, and think that their
job is simply to wear you down and wait you out."
Says it all really .
As one reads this article it is primarily remarkably how closely it resembles
America’s past, present and future. Of course, England has long been known as
Washington’s lap dog. Unsurprisingly, what we seem to be best at is sales and PR. The
UK is far from the only “ally” we have that has followed us off the cliff.
And as the various publics look down and see the snake pit into which our style of
“democracy” and Winners Take All capitalism actually means they want out.
Unfortunately, the winners and our leaders have taken all already, including not only the
money, but the power. The shameful scams of NATO and politicizing the EU turned out to be new
ways to suck the lifeblood out of the earths “Others,” both in our countries and
in the “Others” in Africa, Asia, and everything above and below our borders.
So how do we get out of this? We don’t. Every empire from Cyrus To Babylon,
Alexander’s to The Pharaohs’ and Heraclius, the Spanish, Portuguese, and British
have collapsed in the dust and led to long periods of darkness, inhabited by The Four
Horsemen of The Apocalypse.
If you look around us, still mostly living in luxury unknown to the ancient non-winners,
all of the signs are there. In the multiple-party system in most of “free” Europe
or our Two-party system there’s but decline. Boris won’t save England and none of
the truly potentially electable quacks in our Democrats list are going to get us out of this.
Clinton didn’t, Obama didn’t and what’s up won’t. No one but Tulsi
Gabbard even talks about or has a foreign policy beyond being for peace and plenty for all.
Sure. Dumb.
I hate to sound gloomy-doomy, because I’m not. I’m a writer and a writer is an
observer. Watching all of this, including my own 2008 economic demise, is fascinating.
Gabbard isn’t going to be elected. We’ll get our own Mrs. May maybe, or more
Trump, Bolt-on or the fat guy who will initiate some wars that we’ll win like we did
with Vietnam and Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ad nauseum. I’m not saying be dumb; I’m
saying be realistic, analytical, interested, and vocal, but come the collapse, be physically
and psychologically prepared (everything that Hillary wasn’t, for example.)
Abe , May 31, 2019 at 12:51
The UK under May has continued to serve as a “coalition partner” in the
US-Saudi-Israeli Axis engineered and perpetuated dirty war against the Syrian government and
its Russian and Iranian allies. Let’s not forget Theresa May’s well practiced phrase, “like the United
States, we believe”: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-39591476 . May has consistently believed US claims about the April 2017 Khan Shaykhoun incident, the
April 2018 Douma incident, and other alleged chemical “attacks” in Syria.
The UK under May also has remained the base for two leading disinformation operations
supporting the the assault against Syrian government: Rami Abdulrahman’s Syrian
Observatory for Human Rights and Eliot Higgins’ Bellingcat.
As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the Al
Qaeda allied White Helmets propaganda organization. In April 2018 the Trump administration
suspended funding of the White Helmets. The US had provided more than $33 million to support
the group since 2013.
The British government remains a primary funder of the White Helmets propaganda
organization. Posing as an impartial rescue force, the White Helmets work exclusively
side-by-side armed militants including US State Department, UN, and EU designated foreign
terrorist organizations. Their primary function is not “rescuing” anyone, but to
manage a public relations campaign aimed at swaying public and political opinion, leveraging
“humanitarian” sympathy worldwide.
As of 31 March 2018, the British government had provided £38.4m in funding to the
White Helmets. In April 2018 the Trump administration suspended funding of the White Helmets.
The US had provided more than $33 million to support the group since 2013.
In November 2016, video showed two White Helmets members staging a rescue operation for
the Mannequin Challenge meme. In May 2017, video showed White Helmets members removing a
man’s body following his execution by armed militants in Daraa. In June 2017, a member
of the White Helmets was suspended indefinitely for assisting armed militants in the burial
of mutilated corpses of Syrian government soldiers.
On the night of 21 July 2018, Israel allowed 422 people – 98 White Helmet volunteers
and their family members – to cross the Israeli annexed Syrian Golan Heights and into
Jordan. A Syrian government official condemned the evacuation of White Helmets as a
“criminal operation” that had revealed “the terrorist nature” of the
group. In September 2018, the UK granted asylum to about 100 White Helmet staff and relatives
that had been evacuated to Jordan.
AnneR , May 31, 2019 at 09:22
Good Riddance to very Bad Rubbish (mind you that also applies to the whole of the Tory lot
plus the Blairites).
Yes May’s government has much to make amends for – and not just for and to the
survivors of Grenfell Towers, the Windrush Generation families, but also to: the Yemenis, the
Chagossians, the Syrians. It would have behooved her to have a smaller wardrobe and a larger,
effective compassion for those the (imperialist) British have done over numerous times up to
and including today. Even small gestures of real compassion, of real recognition of the
ugliness of Britian’s imperial past wrongdoings by way of simple apology are apparently
beyond her and her government (including the Civil Service).
As for Britain’s “standing” – it is about bloody time that this
small island off the western Eurasian coast put up and shut up and retired. Why on earth
should it have any *standing*? What *good* has it ever done? (And I ask this as someone born
there, whose father was in the army helping to maintain the Raj – much to my much later
disgust, though, disgracefully, not his.)
Bob of Bonsall , May 31, 2019 at 05:11
To be fair, and as much as it pains me to do so, I must point out that the Grenfell
tragedy and Windrush fiasco were as much due to Labour decisions as they were to Tory
incompetence.
John A , May 31, 2019 at 03:01
Apropos, the last two paras about the Civil Service in Britain; Up until the last 2
decades or so, some of the brightest and best talents entered the Civil Service, good pay,
good career prospects and good pension. Then this was hollowed out, everything ‘public
sector’ was vilified and privatized and starved of funding.
For these reasons, most of
the ‘brightest and best’ now shun the Civil Service for a career in casino
banking and similar avenues instead. The calibre of Civil Service advice has nose-dived
accordingly.
As with everything else in Britain post Thatcher, everything is for sale, get rich quick,
plod along with little or no pay increases and less and less job security, or starve homeless
on the streets are the options available these days.
Zhu , May 31, 2019 at 04:51
Sounds like the USA!
Douglas Turnbull , May 30, 2019 at 22:20
The continuing barbaric capitalist nightmare and its sad psychopathic 1% and the destructive antics of its sycophants...
Tom Kath , May 30, 2019 at 20:13
“Something rotten” is not restricted to the state of Denmark, Britain, or USA.
It is not even restricted to the “West”, so we must seek more fundamentally for
the source of this world’s abject immoral disgustingness. The race to the bottom is
keenly contested.
KiwiAntz , May 30, 2019 at 20:09
At last, for the long suffering Brits? The Maybot has finally danced her “Robotic
Dance” off the World scene to the cheers & high fives of most of the British
people, who have thoroughly had a gutsful of her duplicitous behaviour & disastrous
mishandling of Brexit!
And the article lists her shameful record during the period she was
Prime Minister, especially the Glenfell Tower tragedy & her pathetic response along with
the criminal culpability of the disgusting Conservative Tory Party & its role in this
travesty?
Their murderous Policies & austerity directly led to this disgrace? So its good
riddance to a contemptible woman, a abject failure & a loser who was good for absolutely
nothing except walking on stages & doing really bad dance moves!
LJ , May 30, 2019 at 18:39
She was all the Tories could come up with to keep Corbyn out of the office of Prime
Minister. There should certainly have been a General Election after David Cameron crashed the
ship of state with Brexit.
Boris Johnson would certainly complete that job so someone else
will have to play dartboard until the next election. Despite what the Guardian and BBC and
the rest say. And in spite of the Zionist attack on Corbyn he will be Prime Minister. Long
Overdue. Britain is Great no more.
Without Russian money they are certainly not the
world’s 6th largest economy and it appears that unless they want to side with China
against the USA which is improbable, no impossible, they will lose Chinese Capital as well
after Brexit.
Good. I hope Scotland votes for Independence. Wales should as well. Britain
deserves to go to hell after their history as an Empire. London is 41% foreign born. Just who
are they anyway? The British? We here in the USA, or rather younger people here in the USA
should take a good look at what happens over the next 5 years there and put it your memory
banks.
elmerfudzie , May 30, 2019 at 17:37
Tainted tenure indeed! No one asks the right questions anymore. For example, where did all
that Brexit cash come from? As I commented previously at CONSORTIUMNEWS and it is redacted
here; “The Panama Papers signaled a need for radical change(s) in the EU banking laws.
Hiding money, legit or not from, fair and open taxation, has become increasingly difficult
for the upper crust….”
The BREXIT cash originated, no surprise folks, from a
Gibraltar based firm, where a Mr Arron Banks (big bucks Banks) a guy with money to burn, with
corporate holdings in the Isle of Man and too, one of his buddies, an Alan Kentish of the STM
group specializing in, oh you’ll love this, offshore wealth preservation! LOL
And
again, a Mr. Jim Mellon a for real billionaire, several times over I should think, the same
guy who carpetbagged Russia after the collapse of the CCCP. His gleanings were called
“privatization”… of poor mother Russia. Well, to make a long story short, Mr Kentish, the original pro-BREXITeer was arrested in Gibraltar under the UK’s Crime
Act for such suspicious money funneling(s). My oh my Ms May, what strange political
bedfellows you seem to have!
Jeff Harrison , May 30, 2019 at 17:37
Here today, gone to lunch as the late Douglas Adams put it. The US has it’s own deep
state problem of civil servants, especially alphabet soup agencies who are accustomed to
operating in the dark and think that they, not the political appointees make policy. Their
thinking is bolstered by Congresses who stonewall and delay approving personnel for
leadership positions in the civil service.
"... In unexpected statements Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has questioned the methodology behind Dutch investigators who produced what the West considers the authoritative report on the tragic shoot down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 while flying over war-torn eastern Ukraine. He criticized that the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) seems "to be concentrated on trying to pin it on the Russians" . ..."
"... The Malaysian PM further went so far as to point to Ukrainian pro-government forces as being prime suspects: "It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government because they too have the same missile," he said. ..."
"... Mahathir further slammed the decision to exclude Malaysian investigators from the black box examination: "We may not have the expertise but we can buy the expertise. For some reason, Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened," he said . ..."
"... "We don't know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we see too much politics in it and the idea was to find out how this happened but seems to be concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians." ..."
"... Russia has also rejected the conclusions of the European JIT report, saying the missile that struck the civilian airliner was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986, and was part of the Ukrainian army arsenal at the time of the shoot down. ..."
"... Tell Malaysia they cannot access the black-box on their plane that was shot down, and they will tell you where to put your authoritative report. ..."
In unexpected statements Malaysia Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has questioned the
methodology behind Dutch investigators who produced what the West considers the authoritative
report on the tragic shoot down of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17 in 2014 while flying over
war-torn eastern Ukraine. He criticized that the Dutch-led Joint Investigation Team (JIT) seems
"to be concentrated on trying to pin it on the Russians" .
The Malaysian leader told reporters at the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (FCCJ)
in Tokyo on Thursday "They are accusing Russia but where is the evidence?" Mahathir said
his country accepted that a "Russian-made missile" shot down its civilian airliner, killing all
283 passengers and 15 crew members on board, but that "You need strong evidence to show it was
fired by the Russians."
He ultimately questioned the objectivity of the investigators in what major regional media
described as a "jaw dropping speech" .
Australia's prime state run news service
ABC News noted the Malaysian PM's speech has sent shock waves through the region as it
questioned everything Australia's own leaders have said. "From the very beginning we see too
much politics in it," Mahathir said in reference to the official Dutch-led investigation.
A total of 38 Australians were killed in the Boeing-777 shoot down and crash, and the
majority were Dutch nationals. The ABC report summarized of the "bombshell"
charges leveled by PM Mahathir :
"Based on these findings, the only conclusion we can reasonably now draw is that Russia
was directly involved in the downing of MH17," Australia's then-prime minister and foreign
minister Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop said in a joint statement.
"The Russian Federation must be held to account for its conduct in the downing of MH17
over eastern Ukraine, which resulted in the tragic deaths of 298 passengers and crew,
including 38 people who called Australia home."
But in a bombshell speech to the Japanese Foreign Correspondents Club (JFCC) on Thursday,
Dr Mahathir was having none of it, accusing those who blamed Russia of scapegoating the
nation for "political" reasons .
The Malaysian PM further went so far as to point to Ukrainian pro-government forces as
being prime suspects: "It could be by the rebels in Ukraine; it could be Ukrainian government
because they too have the same missile," he said.
Interestingly, this has been Russia's position all along, which has already led some
international media sources to suggest of
the deeply contrarian Friday speech , "Dr Mahathir is known to enjoy a good conspiracy
theory."
Mahathir further slammed the decision to exclude Malaysian investigators from the black
box examination: "We may not have the expertise but we can buy the expertise. For some reason,
Malaysia was not allowed to check the black box to see what happened,"
he said .
"We don't know why we are excluded from the examination but from the very beginning, we
see too much politics in it and the idea was to find out how this happened but seems to be
concentrated on trying to pin it to the Russians."
The Malaysian PM's headline grabbing comments were made in English in response to a
reporter's question:
He concluded that, "This is not a neutral kind of examination" -- again questioning the
basis on which suspicions of pro-Kiev forces appeared to have been superficially ruled out from
the start.
"I don't think a very highly disciplined party is responsible for launching the missile," he
added, according to
Australia's ABC .
Russia has also rejected the conclusions of the European JIT report, saying the missile
that struck the civilian airliner was manufactured in the Soviet Union in 1986, and was part of
the Ukrainian army arsenal at the time of the shoot down.
The consensus of the "international community" is that the Russians are responsible.
Anything outside the consensus view is not permissible. That's how democracy works. And also
how science works.
I would trust the Dutch investigators about as much as I trust the OPCW with regard to
chemical weapons use.
Without Russia, ASSAD would be long gone and IRAN would have been bombed to oblivion, and
Greater Israhell would have been fulfilled and ruling over the MidEast.
Deep State had its hands all over that downed Aircraft, he who records History, creates
History, for proof compare schoolbooks from any different generations !
It shows everyone just how fucked up the world has gotten when a foreign leader has the
balls to speak some truth in public and what he said is instantly labeled "deeply
contrarian".
Keep this in mind when you hear anything negative about Russia coming out of the UK or out
of one of her spawn like Australia . . . Great Britain has had a total hard-on for Russia
going back over 200 years and to this day will do anything in their power to **** Russia over
any chance they get. It's primarily because of the actions of the UK that there's such an
anti-Russian push in the US right now.
The shoot down of MH17 was just another attempt to stick it to the Russians and there's
British finger prints all over that incident (for example, who still has the black boxes from
that flight and won't let the Russians or anyone else see them, hmm?).
I said it back then (er helped say it) - listen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWlAARb0fN4
. Ukrainian Su-25's strafed the pilots with bullets - it was no BUK missile
Another false flag from the evil cabal of blackhatted ZioNazi scum.The world needs to be
rid of this cancer...and to think that some of these Pentagram monsters are grandparents.
The litany of 'highly likely' accusations were so pervasive they were blacking out the sun
like a swarm of locusts. It's my hope that this is changing. More lies about Syria,
Venuzuala, Iran etc. told to save the liars with new war worries. Would be nice to see
normalcy come to the US, but maybe it must come completely apart first, I hope not. But the
empire is not looking too good lately.
Props to the Malay guy. Fragments of the missile used in the attack were found, and the
serial # recovered. The missile was made in Russia in the 80s, and shipped to Ukraine at that
time. There is an entire hand written inventory(it can be seen at Veteranstoday.com ) from date of manufacture up to it's
delivery to a missile battery in Ukraine. It remained there in the Ukraine until pieces of it
were recovered at the crash site. Check it out.
Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the
crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of
being biased and not transparent. Video at 40:56.
Just a few excerpts:
We should be involved in examining the black box. We may not have the expertise, but we can
buy expertise. But for some reason or other Malaysia was not allowed in to check on the
black box to see what happened.
<...>
They are accusing Russians of firing the missile but what is the evidence? We need
strong evidence to show that it was fired by the Russians, but it could have been the
rebels in Ukraine, it could even be the Ukrainian government because they too have the same
missile.
<...>
We don't know why we are excluded from the examination, but from the very beginning we
see too much politics in it. The idea was not to find out how this happened and all
that, but they seemed to be concentrated on trying to pin it on Russia . This is not a
neutral kind of examination.
<...>
Here we have parties who have some political interest in the matter and they
examine.
<...>
People from Russia - they are military people. Military people would know that it is a
passenger plane. <...> I don't think [that] discipline, very highly discipline party
would be responsible for launching the missile.
By the way, a year ago Malaysian Minister of Transport Anthony Loke
spoke about this. The JIT obviously found this "not very important". Who would doubt. The
task of covering up the Ukrainian regime that shot down the plane is still relevant. Just
wondering how many more years they will play this farce with an "investigation".
Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the
crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of
being biased and not transparent.
------------------------
Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the
crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of
being biased and not transparent. Video at 40:56.
Just a few excerpts:
We should be involved in examining the black box. We may not have the expertise, but we can
buy expertise. But for some reason or other Malaysia was not allowed in to check on the
black box to see what happened.
<...>
They are accusing Russians of firing the missile but what is the evidence? We need
strong evidence to show that it was fired by the Russians, but it could have been the
rebels in Ukraine, it could even be the Ukrainian government because they too have the same
missile.
<...>
We don't know why we are excluded from the examination, but from the very beginning we
see too much politics in it. The idea was not to find out how this happened and all
that, but they seemed to be concentrated on trying to pin it on Russia . This is not a
neutral kind of examination.
<...>
Here we have parties who have some political interest in the matter and they
examine.
<...>
People from Russia - they are military people. Military people would know that it is a
passenger plane. <...> I don't think [that] discipline, very highly discipline party
would be responsible for launching the missile.
By the way, a year ago Malaysian Minister of Transport Anthony Loke
spoke about this. The JIT obviously found this "not very important". Who would doubt. The
task of covering up the Ukrainian regime that shot down the plane is still relevant. Just
wondering how many more years they will play this farce with an "investigation".
Mahathir bin Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia, in an interview with FCCJ (Foreign
Correspondents' Club of Japan) stated that he did not believe in Russia's involvement in the
crash of the Boeing MH17. The politician, in fact, directly accused the so-called JIT of
being biased and not transparent.
------------------------
"... Pepe remarks on the formation of a new geopolitical grouping, NAM 2.0, about which the forum says: "A concept is being developed that can be called the Non-Aligned Movement 2.0. It suggests the emergence of a bipolar world with the opposing sides being US and China. The other big countries should not have to join either side on the front lines; the best tactic is to remain neutral." ..."
"... Given the outstanding misdirection by US-based stink tanks, it's no wonder Trump's efforts against Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, etc, produce failure upon failure. ..."
"... While I am not in a position to verify the authenticity of that report on Russia's economy I can easily see it it skewed in its presentation... With this clout, Russia is prepared to withstand the economic siege, that the US regime is hatching. ..."
"... Most importantly, Russia has the weapons which will wipe out any invading Western hordes at one fell swoop, if need comes. We refer to Russia's nuclear doctrine, which allows for the use of its nuclear weapons arsenal to defend against invading troops. ..."
"... I hope they are doing that well and I do not doubt some of the materiel presented is true. The lack of debt I certainly believe as they are not part of the Western debt based economic system. I just dislike this type of propagandists slant to a report. ..."
Pepe
Escobar's latest provides great detail about the ongoing effort to integrate BRI/EAEU by
linking to events from the "May 14-15, Third Russia-Kazakhstan forum held in Nur-Sultan. Over
the course of the two days, the Valdai Club, in partnership with the Kazakhstan Council on
Foreign Relations, held five sessions with the participation of experts from the two
countries." An overview
:
"It was important for Russian and Kazakhstani experts to "synchronise their watches" in
light of the latest (US-Chinese) events, and talk about the changes that China's well-known
rise has generated. The violent reaction of the United States in the form of the trade war
vividly demonstrates the Chinese-centric fears of the former hegemon, and indeed of the West
as a whole. Russia and Kazakhstan view the rapid rise of China a little differently,
although, as the forum revealed, not without some trepidation."
Pepe remarks on the formation of a new geopolitical grouping, NAM 2.0, about which the
forum says: "A concept is being developed that can be called the Non-Aligned Movement 2.0. It suggests
the emergence of a bipolar world with the opposing sides being US and China. The other big
countries should not have to join either side on the front lines; the best tactic is to
remain neutral."
The analysis provides a much different slant at the Sino/Russo relationship, although it's
mostly describing reality. At the end of the linked page is a link to a summary of the
discussion wherein it's proposed the current state of geopolitics represents, "According to
Andrei Sushentsov, Programme Director of the Valdai Discussion Club, what is happening now
cannot be called a 'Cold War'. It is rather a 'Phony Cold War' – there is no pronounced
aggressor, and no one sees an ideological component in the confrontation,'" a judgement to
which I totally disagree with--The Outlaw US Empire's clearly the aggressor and the
ideological component pits the Empire's Neoliberal Zero-sum philosophy against the China and
Russian adopted Win-Winism, which is amply displayed in Xi's Socialism With Chinese
Characteristics. What the summary does make clear is a disappointment over the pace of
Eurasian integration.
Another curious paper Pepe links to is one by Oleg
Barabonov : "China's Road to Global Leadership." Very much in contrast is
the recent Rand effort [PDF], "Overextending and Unbalancing Russia: Assessing the Impact
of Cost-imposing Options," the opening paragraph showing it was written by Rand's version of
Yeltsin:
"Today's Russia suffers from many vulnerabilities -- oil and gas prices well below peak
that
have caused a drop in living standards, economic sanctions that have furthered that
decline, an aging and soon-to-be-declining population, and increasing authoritarianism
under
Vladimir Putin's now-continued rule. Such vulnerabilities are coupled with deep-seated
(if
exaggerated) anxieties about the possibility of Western-inspired regime change, loss of
great
power status, and even military attack."
Given the outstanding misdirection by US-based stink tanks, it's no wonder Trump's efforts
against Russia, China, Syria, Venezuela, Iran, etc, produce failure upon failure.
A note about Syria. The 2019 wheat and barley harvest was one of the best ever, but
storage is tight thanks to many silos being destroyed by terrorists. As for Idlib's
terrorists, SAA has deployed @100,000 combat troops around Western Aleppo, while its Tiger
forces and their support continue to clear Hama and will soon enter Latakia. Yet, SAA still
had plenty of forces to send a battle group back to the Palmyra region to blunt the
anticipated disruption attack by terrorists based at al-Tanf. Iranian and Hezbollah forces
will be involved in the liberation of Idlib, a fact Zionists will loathe.
I'm well aware that most "information" about Russia that routinely appears in the Western
MSM and which the US government and think-tanks like the RAND Corporation rely on is actually
misinformation.
While I am not in a position to verify the authenticity of that report on Russia's economy
I can easily see it it skewed in its presentation... With this clout, Russia is prepared to withstand the economic siege, that the US
regime is hatching.
Most importantly, Russia has the weapons which will wipe out any invading Western
hordes at one fell swoop, if need comes. We refer to Russia's nuclear doctrine, which
allows for the use of its nuclear weapons arsenal to defend against invading troops.
This document is replete with comments like that. It does not sound like a dispassionate
analysis; it sounds like the writing of a Russian patriot.
I hope they are doing that well and I do not doubt some of the materiel presented is true.
The lack of debt I certainly believe as they are not part of the Western debt based economic
system. I just dislike this type of propagandists slant to a report.
OPSW proved to be a gang of a despicable, completely bought by the USA bottomfeeders. Looks like they are now a part
of "Intergity Initiative"
At this point credibility of the USA and UK experts on the topic is not zero, it is negative: they systematically generate
false flags.
Truth be told after Skripals affair the level of credibility of the UK government and expects is far below zero in any case.
This is just a gang of despicable warmongers.
Notable quotes:
"... If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only ones. ..."
"... Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position. ..."
Comments on official response to the release of the Engineering
Assessment of the Douma cylinders Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason, Piers
Robinson
This post comments on the response to our
release of the Executive Summary of the Engineering Assessment of the Douma cylinders on 13
May 2018. All emphases in quoted passages are added by us. After OPCW had confirmed the
document to be genuine, the story was covered extensively by Russian media.
An informed commentary by Professor
Hiroyuki Aoyama in Tokyo has been published on Yahoo News's Japanese site. The only coverage in
western corporate media has been by Peter Hitchens in the
Mail on Sunday , Robert Fisk in the
Independent and Tucker Carlson on
Fox .
Other journalists who have been in
touch with us have told us that their stories were spiked by editors. As expected, the story
has reached much larger numbers through websites and videos that have disseminated it.
2
OPCW's response to the release of the document
2.1 Official response
In an email dated 11 May and shown to us, Deepti Choubey, the head of OPCW Public Affairs,
wrote:
Thank you for reaching out to us. It is exclusively through the Fact-Finding Mission, set
up in 2014, that the OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of use of toxic chemicals
for hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic. On 1 March 2019, the OPCW has issued its
final and only valid official report, signed by the Director-General, regarding the incident
that took place in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. The document you shared with
us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM. The individual mentioned in the
document has never been a member of the FFM .
The OPCW establishes facts surrounding allegations of the use of toxic chemicals for
hostile purposes in the Syrian Arab Republic through the Fact-Finding Mission (FFM), which
was set up in 2014. The OPCW Technical Secretariat reaffirms that the FFM complies with
established methodologies and practices to ensure the integrity of its findings. The FFM
takes into account all available, relevant, and reliable information and analysis within the
scope of its mandate to determine its findings. Per standard practice, the FFM draws
expertise from different divisions across the Technical Secretariat as needed. All
information was taken into account, deliberated, and weighed when formulating the final
report regarding the incident in Douma, Syrian Arab Republic, on 7 April 2018. On 1 March
2019, the OPCW issued its final report on this incident, signed by the Director-General.
Per OPCW rules and regulations, and in order to ensure the privacy, safety, and security
of personnel, the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the
Technical Secretariat. Pursuant to its established policies and practices, the OPCW Technical
Secretariat is conducting an internal investigation about the unauthorised release of the
document in question. At this time, there is no further public information on this matter and
the OPCW is unable to accommodate requests for interviews.
This was taken as confirmation that the document was genuine.
2.2 Unofficial
briefings
Following OPCW's confirmation on 16 May that the document we had released was genuine, two
individuals in the UK whose communications have supported UK government policy on Syria
favoring regime change – Professor Scott Lucas of Birmingham University, and the former
Guardian journalist Brian Whitaker – began reporting that they had inside information on
how the Engineering Assessment had been excluded from the Final Report.
Henderson was writing what was, in effect, a dissenting assessment from that of most of
the OPCW's team and consultant experts. His findings were considered but were a minority
opinion as final report was written.
He followed this with a remarkably indiscreet
tweet asserting that "I know
how OPCW review process was conducted and what place Henderson's assessment had in it." When
challenged to explain his
connection to OPCW, Lucas did not answer. Hitchens
reported on 24 May that OPCW
Public Affairs had refused to comment on whether Lucas was receiving authorised briefings from
OPCW.
2.2.2 Whitaker
Whitaker was at first more circumspect about his sources,
reporting on 16 May that:
One story circulating in the chemical weapons community (though not confirmed) is that
Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given permission to do
some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM.
Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat extended Whitaker's version
with:
This reporting by @Brian_Whit on the leaked Douma report that the conspiracy theorists and
chemical weapon denialists are so excited about is consistent with what I'm hearing . Looks
like they all got played by a disgruntled OPCW employee.
In an
article
posted on 24 May, Whitaker was more explicit in reporting the spin of "an informed source" on
the Engineering Assessment.
an informed source has now shed some light on it. The key point here is the FFM's terms of
reference. Its basic role was to establish facts about the alleged attack, and it was not
allowed to apportion blame -- that is the job of the OPCW's newly-created Investigation and
Identification Team (IIT). Although the FFM determined that the cylinders were probably
dropped from the air, the published report (in line with its mandate) omitted any mention of
the obvious implication that they had been dropped by regime aircraft. According to the
informed source, when Henderson's assessment was reviewed there were concerns that it came
too close to attributing responsibility, and thus fell outside the scope of the FFM's
mandate. Whether or not that was the right decision, there was no doubt that Henderson's
assessment did fall within the mandate of the new Investigation and Identification Team. For
that reason, according to the source, he was advised to pass it to the IIT instead -- and he
did so.
Unless this account was entirely fabricated, it could only have come from someone with close
knowledge of how the Final Report had been prepared. A subsequent
tweet from Whitaker on 25 May,
presumably channelling the same source, confirmed that "Henderson and others" had been in
Douma:
Henderson and others did go to Douma to provide temporary support to the FFM, but they
were not official members of the FFM.
2.3 What the channelling of off-the-record briefings tells us
It is likely that (at least on this occasion) Lucas and Whitaker are telling the truth, and
that they have been briefed by someone with close knowledge of how the FFM Final Report was
prepared. If these briefings had not been authorised, OPCW Public Affairs could easily have
responded to Hitchens's question with a standard statement reiterating that "there is no
further public information on this matter" and that this extended to off-the-record briefings.
We would expect OPCW press officers to be reluctant to issue further statements that could
subsequently be shown to be false.
Like cellular biologists who perturb a complex system and measure its outputs, we can infer
from these observations the existence of a pathway. This pathway connects the production of
OPCW reports on alleged chemical attacks in Syria with a network of communicators in the UK who
in different ways have promoted the cause of regime change in Syria since 2012. It is evident
that Lucas and Whitaker are output nodes of this pathway. From August 2012, Whitaker as the
Guardian's Middle East editor
promoted Higgins from obscure beginnings as a blogger to become a widely-cited source on
the Syrian conflict. Whitaker was the first journalist to devote an
article to
attacking the Working Group, in February 2018 when its only collective output had been a brief
blog post.
It is of course possible that OPCW management for some procedural reason was unable to
provide further information on the record, and sought to disseminate an accurate version of
events via off-the-record briefings. But the choice of such highly partisan commentators as
Lucas and Whitaker as channels inevitably calls into question the good faith of whoever
provided these briefings, and undermines any remaining pretence to impartiality on the part of
OPCW management.
2.4 Discrepancies between versions of OPCW's response
An established method in investigative journalism is to compare official versions and to
infer from discrepancies what they are trying to hide. On 11 May OPCW Public Affairs stated
that "The document you shared with us is not part of any of the material produced by the FFM.
The individual mentioned in the document has never been a member of the FFM". After we pointed
out that these two statements were provably false – the external collaboration on the
engineering assessment of the Douma cylinders must have been authorised by OPCW, and Henderson
could hardly have been in Damascus on a tourist visa – they were not repeated on the
record. By 16 May OPCW Public Affairs had formulated a new policy: "Per OPCW rules and
regulations the OPCW does not provide information about individual staff members of the
Technical Secretariat." A more subtle version of Henderson's role was then channelled through
Lucas and Whitaker: "minority opinion", "on the sidelines" and elaborated by Higgins as
"disgruntled OPCW employee"'. Between 16 May and 25 May the story channelled through Whitaker
changed from "Henderson had wanted to join the FFM and got rebuffed but was then given
permission to do some investigating on the sidelines of the FFM." to admitting that "Henderson
and others" were in Douma "to provide temporary support to the FFM".
On 24 May Whitaker's informed source admits that "Henderson's assessment was reviewed" for
the Final Report, no longer attempting to maintain that the Engineering Assessment was not part
of the FFM's process. If we strip away the flannel from this latest story, it appears to be
accurate. The "informed source" tells us that the Engineering Assessment was excluded from the
Final Report not because its technical analysis had been rebutted, but because the conclusion
that the cylinders had been placed in position rather than dropped from the air would
necessarily have attributed responsibility for the incident to the opposition .
The argument that the mandate of the FFM prevented it from endorsing the Engineering
Assessment's conclusion is easily refuted as a matter of logic. Announcing the release of the
Final Report, OPCW
stated that "The FFM's mandate is to determine whether chemical weapons or toxic chemicals
as weapons have been used in Syria." In Douma this could be reduced to deciding between two
alternatives: (1) the gas cylinders were dropped from the air, implying that they were used as
chemical weapons; (2) the cylinders were placed in position, implying that the incident was
staged and that no chemical attack had occurred. Although to conclude that alternative (2) was
correct would implicate the opposition, this would not be attribution of blame for a chemical
attack but rather a determination that chemical weapons had not been used.
Clearly a verdict that the alleged chemical attack had been staged would have been
unacceptable to the French government, which had joined in the US-led missile attack on 14
April 2018. We can surmise that the Chief of Cabinet of OPCW, Sébastien Braha, who
(according to his Linkedin profile ) is still in post as
a French diplomat, would have been in a difficult position if he had allowed the FFM to release
a report that reached this conclusion. He would be in an even more difficult position if he
were to allow the newly-established
Investigation and
Identification Team (IIT), which also reports to him, to overturn the conclusions of the
Final Report and report that the alleged chemical attack was staged. Even if Braha's failure to
update his online profile with the date of leaving his diplomatic post is an oversight, this
would still be a conflict of interest based on the OECD definition of what "a reasonable
person, knowing the relevant facts, would conclude". As we have noted, OPCW appears to have no
arrangements for managing conflicts of interest. Until the governance and working practices of
OPCW are radically reformed, it is hard to see how neutral observers can have confidence in the
impartiality of the FFM or the IIT.
3 Government responses to an alleged chlorine attack on
19 May3.1 Reports of the alleged attack
Possible allusions to the release of the Engineering Assessment on 13 May can be
discerned in government responses to a report of an alleged chlorine attack in Idlib on 19
May. The earliest report , mentioning three missiles or
shells loaded with chlorine was from an Arabic-language website named ebaa.news at
11.01 am Syrian time. The location was given as Kubina Hill in Kabbana village, on the border
with Lattakia. At 12.46 am Syrian time Hamish de Bretton-Gordon (HdBG)
tweeted
Appears to be a chlorine attack from Regime artillery shells in Jose Al Shugour village -
4 casualties being evacuated for treatment
"Jose Al Shugour village" is presumably the town of Jisr Al-Shughour. Rami Abdulrahman's
Syrian Observatory for Human
Rights reported on 22 May that four fighters were treated in hospital after they
"suffocated in the intense and violent shelling by the regime forces, within caves and
trenches" but did not endorse the claims of a chlorine attack, noting that the source of this
story was "the Media platform of Hayat Tahrir al-Sham". The story was
elaborated in
a Fox News report on 23 May that quoted a "Dr Ahmad" from Idlib, who reported that he had
treated the casualties. Fox News also quoted Nidal Shikhani of the Chemical Violations Documentation
Centre Syria (CVDCS).
A possible match for the identity of "Dr Ahmad" is Dr Ahmad al-Dbis,
quoted by Reuters on 4 May 2019 as Safety and Security Manager for the Union of Medical
Care and Relief Organisations (UOSSM), describing airstrikes on Idlib and northern Hama. Since
2016 both HdBG
and the
CBRN Task Force that he set up in 2013 have been affiliated to UOSSM. A
report from 2014 quotes a "Dr Ahmad" described as a medic trained by HdBG for the CBRN Task
Force. CVDCS is an
NGO that has worked closely with the OPCW Fact-Finding Mission since 2015 to provide
purported eyewitnesses for interview in Syria, originally established in 2012 as the
Office of Documentation of the Chemical File in Syria , and later registered in Brussels as
a non-profit company named Same Justice. This company never complied with the legal requirement
to file accounts, and went into
liquidation on 27 February 2019.
The ebaa.news site appears to be closely linked to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS),
frequently quoting HTS spokesmen and sometimes reporting exclusive stories obtained from HTS.
On 31 May 2018 HTS was
designated
by the US Department of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and a Specially Designated
Global Terrorist. The Coordinator for Counterterrorism noted that this designation "serves
notice that the United States is not fooled by this al-Qa'ida affiliate's attempt to rebrand
itself." In conclusion, the provenance of this story of a chemical attack on 19 May is dubious,
and the extent to which the sources are independent of one another is not clear.
British experts are this morning investigating a suspected chlorine attack by al-Assad in
Idlib. If it is proved, will she lead the international response against the return of this
indiscriminate evil?
As expected, the Prime Minister gave a bellicose answer, but made no reference to OPCW.
We of course acted in Syria, with France and the United States, when we saw chemical
weapons being used there. We are in close contact with the United States and are monitoring
the situation closely, and if any use of chemical weapons is confirmed, we will respond
appropriately.
Woodcock's "British experts" appear to have included HdBG, who had suggested in a
tweet the day
before that Woodcock should ask the Prime Minister about Idlib, though not about a chemical
attack. In a subsequent tweet Woodcock stated that his
experts were "on the ground in Syria".
3.3 French response
The daily press from the French foreign ministry on 22 May responded to a question on the
alleged chemical attack on 19 May with:
We have noted with concern these allegations which must be investigated. We have full
confidence in the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons .
3.4 US response
A press
statement from State Department Spokesperson Morgan Ortagus on 21 May dealt with the
alleged chemical attack two days earlier:
Unfortunately, we continue to see signs that the Assad regime may be renewing its use of
chemical weapons, including an alleged chlorine attack in northwest Syria on the morning of
May 19, 2019. We are still gathering information on this incident, but we repeat our warning
that if the Assad regime uses chemical weapons, the United States and our allies will respond
quickly and appropriately.
She mentioned a " continuing disinformation campaign " to "create the false narrative that
others are to blame for chemical weapons attacks that the Assad regime itself is conducting".
The following day Mr James Jeffrey, the State Department's special representative to Syria,
testified to the House Foreign Affairs Committee that "So far we cannot confirm [the reports of
chemical weapons use] but we're watching it". The New York Times
reported
this to be a "carefully worded recalibration" of the announcement by Morgan Ortagus the day
before, and that American military officials had "expressed surprise over the State
Department's strong statement". 4 Comparison of the Engineering Assessment with the
published Final Report
A comparison of the Engineering Assessment and the Final Report have been reported in
outline form by McIntyre . As Larson has
noted
, there are indications in the
Final
Report that whoever drafted it had access to an earlier version of the Engineering
Assessment (the released version dated 27 February 2019 is marked Rev 1) and was attempting to
rebut it without overtly mentioning it. For instance the Engineering Assessment lists five
points supporting the opinion of experts that the crater at location 2 had been created by a
the explosion of a mortar round or artillery rocket rather than an impact from a falling
object. These points included:
"an (unusually elevated, but possible) fragmentation pattern on upper walls"
"(whilst it was observed that a fire had been created in the corner of the room) black
scorching on the crater underside and ceiling."
The Final Report states falsely that a fragmentation pattern, visible in open-source images,
was absent:
The FFM analysed the damage on the rooftop terrace and below the crater in order to
determine if it had been created by an explosive device. However, this hypothesis is unlikely
given the absence of primary and secondary fragmentation characteristic of an explosion that
may have created the crater and the damage surrounding it.
This is followed by a paragraph that notes the blackening of the ceiling and attributes it
to the fire set in the room. The Final Report's allusion to the possibility of an explosive
device, with mention of fragmentation pattern and the setting of a fire in the room appears to
be an attempt to explain away the argument made in the Engineering Assessment.
We note that several of the key findings of the Engineering Assessment are based only on
examination of the cylinders. For instance the Engineering Assessment reports that the cylinder
at Location 2 bears no markings that would be consistent with the frame with fins (lying on the
balcony) ever having been attached to it, let alone the markings that would be expected if the
frame had been stripped off by impact. The Final Report records that the Syrian government
insisted on retaining custody of the cylinders for criminal investigation purposes.
Accordingly:
On 4 June, FFM team members tagged and sealed the cylinders from Locations 2 and 4, and
documented the procedure.
A useful way to take forward the investigation of the Douma incident would now be for the
Syrian government to invite an international team of neutral experts to examine the cylinders,
to assess whether the observations support the findings of the Engineering Assessment or the
conclusions of the published FFM Final Report, and to publish their findings in a form that
allows peer review and reproducibility of results from data. The next step would be a criminal
investigation of this incident, focusing on where, how and by whom were the 35 victims seen in
images at Location 2 killed.
If SST readers are confused by OPCW's constantly shifting explanations for why the Final
Report on the Douma incident excluded the Engineering Assessment, they're not the only
ones.
Yesterday OPCW released its official response (dated 21 May) to Russian criticisms (dated
26 April) of the Final Report of the Fact-Finding Mission on the Douma incident. In this
response OPCW made, officially and on the record, the same argument as that made by
Whitaker's "informed source: that to assess how the cylinders arrived in their positions was
outside the mandate of the FFM.
Unfortunately for whoever thought up this defence, it is explicitly contradicted by both
the Interim Report (published last July) and the Final Report, which state that the objective
of the engineering studies was to evaluate how the cylinders arrived in position.
Peter Hitchens is on the case, and has listed these contradictions and requested an
explanation from OPCW.
UKRAINE ELECTION. He was invited everywhere, pressed the flesh with everyone, has a whole
wall of ego pictures; in the end he was defeated by Anybody-At-All. I have no idea what
Zelensky will turn out to be and I doubt anyone else does either. But the conclusion is that
the entire "revolution of dignity" fiasco has been rejected: whatever Ukraine the voters want,
it's not the one Nuland & Co gave them.
"... By putting Mr. Biden forward as the establishment presidential candidate, the Democrats affirm that they see themselves well-served by reactionary illiberalism. Otherwise, their rhetorical rejections of white nationalism and xenophobia could be supported by robust critiques of their own policies of the last four decades and a well-considered political program to counter their consequences could be put forward. But Mr. Biden is the antithesis of both. ..."
Two related tendencies have sown confusion over the crisis of liberalism that continues to
unfold across the U.S. and Europe. On the one hand, the forces of the political right are
ascendant. Right-wing leaders are being elected as an apparent rebuke of the serial failures of
neoliberalism. On the other, the will of the polity is increasingly irrelevant to the
formulation and concerns of nominally public policies.
In the U.S., the political establishment continues to put forward candidates which its
functionaries appear to believe can best perpetuate this illusion of democracy. Befuddlement at
the rise of reactionary forces is met with an increasingly strident insistence that there is
nothing to react against, that all is well if people would only shut up and follow the
directions of their betters.
Despite the conspicuous failures of the existing order here and abroad -- a series of
murderous vanity wars intermingled with economic crises of increasing scale and scope, the
seemingly unstoppable trajectory toward full-blown environmental crisis, nuclear weapons that
serve as background psychic violence and political economy that is organized to milk the polity
dry at every opportunity, the political powers-that-be seek to perpetuate this radically
dysfunctional status quo.
In this environment, the rise of illiberal, reactionary forces seems not only predictable,
but to be the ugly cousin of the neoliberal resolve that all is well. Adding insult to injury
is the insistence that the neoliberal order, the bi-partisan governance that fronts for the
oligarchs, bears no responsibility for the consequences of four decades of neoliberal rule. It
is the polity's unwillingness to comport with the dictates of rule by and for the oligarchs
that is the point of contestation, goes the chide.
An entire functionary class that smiled and nodded approvingly when Bill Clinton
launched his 1992 presidential bid at Stone Mountain, Georgia, birthplace of the twentieth
century KKK, while standing in front of neatly ordered black prisoners, is mystified by the
re-emergence of white nationalism. And while the Clinton / Biden
1994 Crime Bill wasn't exactly a white nationalist manifesto, it inflicted more racially
targeted human misery than the late twentieth century Klan ever could have hoped for.
If enacting punitive measures against the poor is separable from the full throated and
bi-partisan endorsement of the quasi-market -- heads, the rich win, tails, everyone else loses,
economics of neoliberalism, where is the evidence? And how, precisely, does this con recover
from the panicked giveaways of 2009 when the '
runway was foamed ' with the lives and livelihoods of tens of millions of working people
and poor to prevent oligarchs from losing their fifth yacht or their seventh vacation home?
The alternative to the vile misdirection of xenophobia would be for the oligarchs and their
servants in the political class to confess that their faux-market economics -- trade agreements that created the
asymmetry of mobile capital and immobilized labor, was a tragic mistake that displaced millions
of workers for the benefit of the oligarchs. With honest accounting of what happened and who is
responsible 'off the table,' xenophobia appears to be the preferred tactic of the
oligarchs.
The farce of Democratic Party functionaries shouting 'racist' at the thoroughly predictable
fruit of their labors has subsided with the political ascendance of Joe Biden to complicate the
line between white nationalism and liberal loathing of the audience it helped create. The
neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville were / are white nationalists. But what does this make
professional-class liberals who supported the Clinton / Biden 1994 'Crime' Bill under feigned
ignorance of its racial subtext?
The sub-textual connotation of the term 'dog whistle' behind the Crime Bill doesn't do
justice to the social violence of its facts. The subject-object relation of the political
panderer to his / her audience carries with it the moral formulation 1) we agree that overt
racism is objectionable because 2) if it weren't, we wouldn't be opaque expressing it. But how
is this not to assert that race represents a real, as opposed to manufactured, line of
division, something akin to the white nationalist's premise of its essential character?
The dog-whistle is, to the extent that there is an audience for it in the terms given,
politically motivated misdirection. The speaker won't be explicit if the audience is clear as
to the true meaning of what is being said. But isn't this even more insidious than the
straightforward (if ontologically implausible) claim of essential difference by race? The
rhetorical layer of 'crime' gives a social logic to a host of punitive consequences. With the
Crime Bill, the Clintons and Joe Biden grievously harmed the lives of hundreds of thousands, if
not millions, of human beings.
There is, of course, a long history behind this relation of law and racial repression. Law,
the legislative, judicial, policing and penal functions, was used to maintain the institution
of slavery and later, following the Civil War, to recreate its broad contours for purposes of
economic taking. Convict leasing, Black Codes, Jim Crow and mass incarceration are part of an
historical trajectory. However, to the point made by Adolph Reed, degree matters -- current
conditions aren't analogous to those of the Jim Crow South or slavery.
But with this history behind it, what legitimate basis is there for the sub-textual use of a
relation of race to criminality? As the patriarch of modern political marketing, did Bill
Clinton really believe that there was no racial subtext to his vile stunt at Stone Mountain?
More pointedly, through promoting the compound storyline of race and crime, how is Mr. Clinton
not promoting a slightly more complex, and insidious, version of white nationalist
'difference?' Alternatively, if crime has a social basis, why would proposed solutions be
punitive rather than restorative?
All of this could be ancient history if it didn't exist at the center of current travails.
Without an accounting of the failures of liberalism, these compound storylines from history
provide the rhetorical core of contemporary politics. It is hardly coincidental that Joe Biden
is 1) a dedicated corporatist, 2) a long-time purveyor of racist tropes, 3) the Democrats
latest, if improbable, hope for restoration of the neoliberal order.
Joe Biden opposed the racial integration of public schools. He wrote most of the Clinton's
1994 Crime Bill. He was an enthusiastic proponent of NAFTA. He joined the Clintons to support
George W. Bush's catastrophic war against Iraq. And he supported the TPP (Trans-Pacific
Partnership) until the very end. He authored many, if not most, of the policies of modern
liberalism / neoliberalism that are being contested.
By putting Mr. Biden forward as the establishment presidential candidate, the Democrats
affirm that they see themselves well-served by reactionary illiberalism. Otherwise, their
rhetorical rejections of white nationalism and xenophobia could be supported by robust
critiques of their own policies of the last four decades and a well-considered political
program to counter their consequences could be put forward. But Mr. Biden is the antithesis of
both.
The Democrats co-invented identity politics to defer blame for the consequences of their
policies. If they cared about combatting racism and xenophobia, none of the Democratic Party
establishment would be considered for public office. The rhetorical distinction between dog
whistles and white nationalism begs the question of what objective dog whistles are intended to
convey. These aren't precisely the same. Dog whistles are more insidious in that they include
compound storylines (e.g. race and criminality) that are more onerous to disentangle.
White nationalism is frightening for its direct ties to the history of racialized violence.
However, the scientific racism that served as the 'natural' basis for alleged racial difference
used by the Nazis was an American invention. Its proponents were the professional class of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century. And the intersection of these two tendencies, the
brutal, barely reflexive racial loathing of the Stone Mountain KKK and the educated, liberal
use of racist subtexts to facilitate 'respectable' racism amongst the modern professional
class, is the apparent point of Bill Clinton's 1992 photo op.
At what point is politics about leading rather than manipulating people via a shared
vocabulary? Phrased differently, how is this shared vocabulary not tied to consensus around the
logic it represents? So-and-so understands the logic of racism well enough to convey it through
coded language and still chooses to perpetuate it for political gain. Why not give his audience
the benefit of the doubt and use this understanding to challenge the logic?
The broader backdrop of an ascendant political right in Europe emerges from a similar
unwillingness / inability of European liberals / neoliberals to atone for the consequences of
their policies and develop alternative political programs. Xenophobia is portrayed as arising
from the shadows of twentieth-century European history as a moral failing of the polity rather
than the manufactured, and predictable, political crisis that it is.
As with the American refugee 'crisis' arising from U.S. military interventions in Central
America, the refugee crisis across Europe is the product of American / NATO led military
incursions in the region as well as economic dislocations emerging from the structure of the EU
(European Union). One reason why George H.W. Bush decided against occupying Iraq after the
first Gulf War was for fear of destabilizing the region. This fear was realized when George W.
Bush, with widespread support from the Democratic Party establishment, launched the U.S. war
and occupation of Iraq.
Furthermore, as has been addressed ad infinitum over the last decade, through the creation
of the EU, member nations exchanged fiscal sovereignty for membership in a trading bloc. When
crisis struck, the inability of member nations to respond with fiscal stimulus meant that
'externally' imposed austerity was the only alternative. This flawed structure supported the
interests of some member nations (Germany) against those of the European periphery. This
institutionalized class warfare, carried out under the cover of fiscal probity, has led to
widespread questioning of the nature and purpose of the liberal institutions the EU
represents.
Across the U.S. and Europe cottage industries have arisen proclaiming critiques of the EU,
globalism and liberalism / neoliberalism to be the work of nascent fascists and neo-fascists.
While historical parallels exist, missing is analysis of the parallel failures (then and now)
of neoliberal policies as well as a social accounting for the consequences of these
failures.
More pointedly, such claims require historical parsing that lacks a cohesive logic outside
of political posturing. American slavery and genocide against the indigenous population
constituted the initial conditions of American industrial success going into the early
twentieth century. Considered in combination with the scientific racism of eugenics,
contemporaneous American imperial endeavors and oligarchic control over the U.S. economy going
into the Great Depression, the Nazi political program looked
remarkably similar to the American program .
Additionally, the genesis of racialized violence in economic relations has been materially
misrepresented in current accounts of the rise of European fascism. This history is given
substance in Howard Zinn's
A People's History of the United States . Mr. Zinn provides evidence of race being
knowingly used by capitalists to divert attention away inconvenient class interests. This
history places the modern Democrat's use of identity politics in a different light. Dog
whistles and identity politics are premised in pre-existing and concrete racial divisions.
In contrast to white nationalism, these divisions can have a social basis, rather than in
'nature.' This would seem to make racial identity more malleable, and therefore more amenable
to being resolved. But as establishment Democrats demonstrated through their use of dog
whistles and racialized policies, rhetorical compounding can put a superficially respectable
face on racialized violence. The professional class can respond to 'crime' without considering
its history as a strategy of racialized economic taking, its genesis in capitalist class
relations, or the violence inherent in policing and incarceration.
The Democrat's apparent strategic confusion in putting Joe Biden forward as the
establishment candidate should put an end to identity politics as more than cover for the class
interests that the Democrats represent. The studied ignorance embedded in the question: 'If we
broke up the big banks tomorrow would that end racism' is oblivious to the relationship between
Bill Clinton's neoliberal programs and his racially targeted public policies. Given the
historical use of racial division as a tool of class control, the correct answer is yes,
breaking up the big banks would be a step toward ending racism.
None of this is to pick on the Democrats per se. Republicans have long fostered / aligned
with white nationalism. But again, given the historical genesis of the idea of race, what this
suggests is that both political parties serve the interests of capital. Moral distinctions
between pandering to white nationalists and the use of dog whistles and racially targeted
public policies depend on parsing history in ways that the political elevation of Joe Biden
calls into question.
The bitter rhetorical battle over the use, or even the theoretical coherence, of identity
politics, has had no apparent impact on the Western political establishment's march into the
abyss. A quick bet is that part of the political calculus behind the elevation of Mr. Biden is
that he wouldn't hesitate to use dog whistles, racially divisive language and xenophobia if he
thought it would help him win the election. The conceit that such would only be a tactic was
belied when Bill Clinton used it to craft punitive policies like ending welfare and the Crime
Bill.
The West, led by liberal / neoliberal establishments, is in a terrible way. As recent
European elections demonstrate, the rise of hard-right governments has followed serial public
disappointment with their liberal / neoliberal predecessors. Far from being irrational
rejection of functioning liberalism, it is the inability of liberals to accept and address the
consequences of their own mal-governance that is leading the move rightward.
Bill Clinton's answer to Reaganism was to triangulate Reaganite policies from the right. Joe
Biden is a product of this same time, place and ethos. Whomever the Democrat's choice for
president ends up being, without a fundamental redistribution of political power, the outcome
will be the same -- a long march into the political abyss.
Mueller put a great deal of emphasis on Russian interference with the election, which is
being both parroted and universally interpreted as a Russian hack of the DNC server - a
hack which could not possibly have taken place. https://consortiumnews.com/2017/07/24/intel-vets-challenge-russia-hack-evidence/
The "Russian interference" issue was ancillary to Mueller's investigation, yet it is a
focal point of his comments. Why was it so important that it merited that degree of
relative emphasis? If it was a download and not a hack, the only suspect is the late Seth
Rich. The only person (I assume) who can unequivocally prove where those materials came
from is Julian Assange. After years, suddenly asylum is revoked, and suddenly the US is
prosecuting for espionage. After years of disparagement, mainstream media is suddenly
rallying to Assange's case - yet truth be told nobody at CNN will ever face even
administrative sanction for the same sort of activity as Assange's. SOS Pompeo met with
FM Lavrov, came back to the US and said he had warned Lavrov about interfering with US
elections...and Lavrov and Russian press reported those statements were never made.
Apparently someone corrected Pompeo's errant failure, and at the next meeting he did in
fact warn Lavrov about such interference. Obviously it was a big deal - to someone that
was sufficiently powerful to tell the SOS what to do with great specificity - that this
official condemnation was publicly registered. It certainly was not Trump. Lavrov
responded with not only denial, but as Aaron Mate pointed out and was noted here, Lavrov
said he had a file on it and was prepared to discuss it. Pompeo was not prepared to
discuss whatever was in that file. Although it is patently obvious the Russians did not
hack the DNC server, and that the materials in question - which relate to HRC - were
downloaded, it is apparently an imperative of a very large number of powerful people to
maintain the official narrative of a Russian hack of the DNC computer. While that suits
other narratives, it also buries any questions as to who might have downloaded the
materials (and someone did). Which ends any inquiry as to what might have happened from
that moment in time, just as inquiry into Whitewater ended with Vince Foster's demise and
an incredibly "irregular" forensic inquiry. Boxes of documents were removed from Foster's
office that same evening - by HRC personally. Recall she wanted to drone strike Assange.
All of this is happening on the heels of the revelation that the Mueller investigation
was not going to take down Trump and end all potential for inquiry into any untoward DNC
related activity. Thank you in advance to any comments in response to this comment.
After reading numerous articles on "Russia gate," the 2016 presidential election and the
rise of Generalissimo Bone Spur and President Chief Kaiser to the US presidency, Donald
Trump, the 19th century British political historian and thinker Lord Acton summed it all
up best; namely "never underestimate the influence of stupidity on history." What else is
there to say?
Posted by: GeorgeV | May 29, 2019 5:24:48 PM |
29 @ Bruce # 29 with the Seth Rich questions about the DNC
You are correct in pointing out that the Mueller investigation is hiding DNC and
Clinton II crimes which is why I said above that the impeachment will not proceed.
Somewhere I read that Hillary is on tape having said that she/they were screwed if Trump
won.
The bottom line is that none of those folks are working in my best interest and are
committing crime after crime to stay in power.
"... They will be the ones to blackmail Europe and Germany if Europe becomes dependent on LNG from the U.S. So everything U.S. administrations are yelling at others is just projection, one knows immediately that it is in fact what the U.S. is doing under the veil or will be doing when the need/opportunity will arise. ..."
"... Trump is not an aberration, it is just how the U.S. always behaved, but now it is in the open, for all to see, the crassness and the bullying. ..."
"... Germany is the linchpin of the world and the U.S. (and others) is becoming hysterical at the possibility of not keeping the Germans down any longer… ..."
"... American Jewish intellectuals have really jumped the shark since the Iraq War. The most outlandish, slandering statements are stuffed into their essays and they trash whole peoples at the slightest “offence” to their worldview. ..."
If Daenerys Targaryen had announced her desire to use her last dragon to torch Moscow and
Saint Petersburg, the Neocons would have lionized her as the womanly exemplar of democracy
and wise foreign policy that produces peace and justice for all.
Neocons are very much the evil they call us to battle.
I had to rub my eyes with incredulity when I read that.
If Russia wants to weaken Ukraine, why did it ever build a pipeline through it in the first
place? Russia didn't stop using the Ukraine pipeline intially for political reasons. It was
because Ukraine was stealing gas meant for pass-through to other European countries and it
wasn't paying its bills. Don't pay your utility bills and see what happens.
Russia does not want to "control" Germany with Nord Stream, it wants to make money. And
Germany wants cheap gas. Strictly business.
And how can Russia control Germany with Nord Stream when it knows that the first time it
shuts off gas for political reasons would be the last. Because Russia knows that Germany will
find alternative suppliers and never come back. The Russians ain't stupid.
Russia wants bilateral trade with Europe without the Global Cop Gorilla perpetually in the
background arrogant calling the shots.
The final reconciliation of Europe and Russia should have occurred 25 years but didn't
because the ham-fisted United States threw up the fear-monger barriers. And that was because
its National Security States wants an existential "enemy" to justify its massive costs.
The sooner Europe ejects the U.S. War Machine from its territories the better. Better for
Europe, better for Russia and better for the American taxpayers.
I am with SteveM here. And I was shocked to see MarkVA’s comment. Mark has proved to
be a respectable commentator, especially on Rod’s Blog, with very astute and sensible
observations. It seems that tribalism is clouding his judgment when observing the world outside
the U.S.
It is well known that the Soviets and the Russians always keep their end of the bargain and
they know if they don’t do so they will end up loosing and being vilified. Whereas the
U.S. always breaks its agreements, it is not thrust worthy (not agreement capable). Imagine
depending on such an economic partner?!
They will be the ones to blackmail Europe and Germany if Europe becomes dependent on LNG
from the U.S. So everything U.S. administrations are yelling at others is just projection, one
knows immediately that it is in fact what the U.S. is doing under the veil or will be doing
when the need/opportunity will arise.
Trump is not an aberration, it is just how the U.S. always behaved, but now it is in the
open, for all to see, the crassness and the bullying.
Germany is the linchpin of the world and the U.S. (and others) is becoming hysterical at
the possibility of not keeping the Germans down any longer… And Germany is moving
ahead. It just sacrificed West Bank, and declared the BDS movement illegal as a soap to
Israelis, to burnish its credentials with those blackmailers, so that it will become free to
re-orient its politics and strategic configuration as it needs and wants.
fabian, May 23, 2019 at 2:33 pm
Gas? Where is the problem? Russian gas is cheaper that’s it. Furthermore, there is
another pipeline that’s going to bring gas from the Mediterranean to Europe and another
from Qatar.
And if all else fails and Russia flexes its muscles (which ones by the way) do you think
that the over-indebted America will not sell its gas to the Germans?
And yes, it’s not a good strategy to be too dependent on America. It quickly takes the
goods away when its interests are at stake.
Tiktaalik, May 24, 2019 at 5:14 pm
@MarkVA
>>The Nord Stream I and II gas pipe lines (aka Molotov-Ribbentrop Gas Lines), a
Gazprom initiative, has everything to do with weakening Ukraine and increasing German energy
dependence on Russia;
How could NS increase German energy dependence on Russia? It will be the very same gas which
at the moment flows through the Ukraine.
Surely, NS would decrease anybody’s dependence from the Ukraine. So what?
Tiktaalik, May 24, 2019 at 5:18 pm
@MarkVA
>>Oh, and some lesser European countries were partitioned by the important European
countries. So yes, Europe was quite busy spreading joy and happiness all around:
It’s a bit rich when it’s coming from an American. You’re still in
Plymouth, right?
Kouros, May 24, 2019 at 11:35 pm
@MarkVA (May 23, 2019 at 8:12 pm )
That was a hit with the posting on Ukraine…
To bad it wasn’t accompanied by the Recognition of the US administration that the
Golan Heights, taken from Syria by Israel after a war, against all worlds dictum, now belongs
to Israel.
At least in Crimea, which by administrative fiat was moved within USSR from Russia to
Ukraine in the 1950s, there was a referendum.
And for me, US is Devil Incarnate since it put a target of nuclear missiles on my mother
country. May the curse of a 1000 hells be upon it.
Josep, May 25, 2019 at 5:05 am
Reading sites like Russia Insider gave me the notion that Germany would be better off as
allies with Russia than with the USA. After all, Russia and Germany:
* are on the metric system
* have languages that use grammatical gender
* share the same 220-volt “Schuko” power plugs and sockets
* implement Civil Law, and most importantly
* aren’t separated by a whole ocean.
American Jewish intellectuals have really jumped the shark since the Iraq War. The most
outlandish, slandering statements are stuffed into their essays and they trash whole peoples at
the slightest “offence” to their worldview.
There are strong anti-German currents in American culture and politics, going back to at
least WW1 and also manifest today (no other treaty ally is treated with such dismissive
hostility by the Trump administration as Germany). But they are regarded as completely normal
and rarely get critical attention, whereas German anti-Americanism is treated as a pathology or
some kind of sacrilege…the German-American relationship (calling it
“friendship” is a lie) is profoundly asymmetrical.
Agreed in both counts. The casual anti-white racism thrown about by the likes of such people
(let’s not forget Davids Medienkritik, Little Green Footballs, Grouchy Old Cripple and
Dissident Frogman) is a lot scarier than any jumpscare I’ve encountered. And in the case of
German_reader’s comment, It’d be interesting to consider how Trump reconciles his
hostility towards Germany with his own German heritage.
At one point in the Iraq War, the German news outlet Der Spiegel had readers rate their
opinion of president Bush on their website on a scale of 1 (most favorable) to, if I recall
correctly, 6 (least favorable). After seeing public opinion of Bush in Germany overwhelmingly
“least favorable”, users of FreeRepublic went to this poll and attempted to
gerrymander the results by selecting “most favorable”, deleting their site cookies,
and repeating so as to make it look like more people in Germany supported Bush than opposed. This
was called “freeping”.
"... Merkel we shouldn't forget, grew up on the east side of Germany. She must have quite a understanding of her Russian counterparts. Putin on the other hand spent a portion of his KGB career in East Germany and both speak each other language. Both have little use for America. ..."
"... It’s good however to see it spelt out this clearly what’s the proper role for European countries in the world view of many Americans: obedient vassals. The mask keeps slipping. ..."
"... What if all political forces support pro-Russian sentiments, especially with regard to Ukraine? ..."
Often wondered, aside from what folks are told about Russians and Germans, Merkel we
shouldn't forget, grew up on the east side of Germany. She must have quite a understanding of
her Russian counterparts. Putin on the other hand spent a portion of his KGB career in East
Germany and both speak each other language. Both have little use for America.
The indirect link between Thomas Mann and "nationalism" is at variance with the historical
fact that Mann left Germany in the early thirties in PROTEST to the virulent nationalism
exhibited by the National Socialist regime.
And in reading this piece one can't help but chuckle at the notion that Putin is not only
fluent in German but is known to be something of a Germanophile.
German_reader, May 23, 2019 at 2:05 pm
“Europe, if it knows what’s good for itself, will continue to do well following the American lead.”
This self-righteousness and complete lack of self-awareness is absolutely bizarre given the American foreign policy
record of the last 30 years.
It’s good however to see it spelt out this clearly what’s the proper role for European countries in the world view of
many Americans: obedient vassals. The mask keeps slipping.
romegas, May 23, 2019 at 2:52 pm
MarkVA
what a poorly informed typically American centric view. One could easily pass you for a troll. sorry but I have no other
word. Please note that Russia (and the Soviet Union) was the VICTIM of repetitive invasions – Polish, French, German etc –
You would be hard pressed to find episodes where Russia ever threatened the West. After WWII in which the soviet union for
with which I have no ideological sympathy whatsoever, it was to expected after the USSR suffered 29,0000,000 deaths and
total devastation that they would enforced a buffer area – everyone would have done the same- it was the USSR that defeated
Hitler irrespective of the myths you choose to believe – but that is history.
The Russians have been allied with the French, the British, the Austrians and indeed the Prussians – Alliances shifted –
it was the consequence of a geopolitics called the balance of power. Indeed perhaps the Russians were the most naive of the
lot – being screwed by the British and the Austrians against the Ottomans, the Czar lost his crown and an empire to honour
his treaty with Britain and France in WWI when logic stated that he should have sued for a separate peace etc etc etc and
why after all should not Germans and Russians not feel greater affinity to each other (when not slaughtering one another)
than to the Americans – who are the Americans anyhow?
We in Europe associate Russia with Doestoevsky, Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekov – with Tchaikovsky, Stravinsky and
Rubinstein – with Bruleau, Treyakov and Aivazovsky – with Khomyakov, Kantemir, Merezhkovsky and so on and so forth – in
other words of great contributors to European civilisation.
What have you Americans given us? Hollywood? Disneyland? Stay out of Europe and the rest of the world for that matter –
we have nothing in common – and if we choose to slaughter each other – let us – we do not need your ‘altruism’ and ‘exceptionalism’.
Bannerman, May 23, 2019 at 5:12 pm
Given that one has a hard enough time comprehending American politics, it would be sheer presumption to attempt to
analyze the minds of Germans and Russians. Their lengthy and complicated history are quite bloody enough without Yankee
saber rattling. To accuse the Germans of “Russophilia” is at least, an absurd stretch, if not downright loony. But being
absurd and lunatic has never stopped a neocon in his tracks. I had a college acquaintanceship with Trotskyites in the
Sixties, and their legitimate children the Neocons are no less weird than the source material.
But regarding the taint of a stain of authoritarianism in Russia and Germany… hello, the XXth Century on Line One.
Adeline Tornton, May 27, 2019 at 6:47 am
The author is worried that pro-Russian sentiments are still heard in Europe. According to his russophobic ideology, it
happens due to the large-scale propaganda of the Russian media abroad.
In addition, the Germans, in his opinion, also have some kind of historically “irresistible craving for Russia.”
What if all political forces support pro-Russian sentiments, especially with regard to Ukraine?
"... McFaul's "reset" policy was intended to reassert American influence into the Russian body politic in a post-Putin Russia ..."
"... Under the "reset," the Obama administration, at McFaul's urging, provided funding through the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the NED, NDI, and other non-governmental organizations to Russian civil groups that had coalesced into a political opposition to Putin's 2012 presidential ambition. McFaul also encouraged Secretary of State Clinton to speak out in support of the Russian opposition. "We are supportive of the rights and aspirations of the Russian people," Clinton stated in December 2011, "to be able to make progress and realize a better future for themselves." ..."
"... When McFaul was appointed by Obama to serve as the U.S. ambassador to Russia in late 2011, one of his first actions was to invite the leaders of the various Russian opposition groups to the U.S. embassy to meet with him. After Putin won his bid for election in March 2012, he immediately set about to ban foreign funding for Russian non-governmental organizations . USAID, the NED, NDI, and other organizations used to channelling U.S. money to Russian political entities were evicted from Russia. ..."
"... McFaul, whose entire ambassadorial persona was built around the kind of societal engagement produced by these NGOs, never recovered. In February 2014, McFaul announced his resignation as U.S. ambassador , declaring that it was time for him to return to Stanford and resume his previous life of academia. ..."
"... Since leaving Moscow, McFaul has become one of the leading critics of Putin, writing prolifically on the topic, and frequently appearing as a talking head on television. Putin's Russia has provided McFaul with plenty of material to work with, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. ..."
"... In fact, scholars will one day rank the saga of America’s policy toward Russia after the Cold War very high on history’s list of stupendous follies: how, after winning an existential struggle against a totalitarian superpower accurately called by Reagan an Evil Empire, the best and the brightest in Washington set out to make a mortal enemy of the third-rate, humiliated nation that emerged from Soviet ashes — but bore little resemblance to the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The politicizing of the NGOs also led Putin to assume the Peace Corps volunteers in rural Russia were also involved, leading him to end that venture. Once again, ordinary poor Russians beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg lost out; and once again the only diplomatic “reset” for America was a return to our blissful ignorance of Russia. ..."
"... McFaul is painfully bad – emphasis on the present tense – and in many ways appears to be living in some kind of alternative reality. However the problematic Russia situation is ultimately a larger bi product of many bad actors in the Obama administration, most importantly those involved with the coup in Ukraine. 2014 was the point of no return: from that perspective McFaul was merely an irritant. ..."
President Obama is briefed by U.S. Ambassador Michael McFaul during a flight to Moscow, Russia, July 5, 2009. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Post-Mueller report insanity has gripped the nation. In between Presidential proclamations that the report provides proof of his exoneration, and Democratic declarations that the report contains evidence of crimes deserving of impeachment, lies the reality of U.S.-Russian relations, and the fact that these two nations live in a world where their combined nuclear arsenals can eliminate humanity as we know it.
While President Trump struggles to gain traction for his campaign promise to better relations, his political opponents are stuck in a time warp that has them reliving the 2016 Presidential election and its allegations of Russian interference.
Americans have every right to be concerned about the prospects of Russian interference in elections which serve as the foundation of American democracy. However, in seeking to find a solution to the problems that plague the relationship, it is imperative that the American people understand how we got to where we are today. You
can't solve a problem without first accurately defining the problem, and as such any examination of the Genesis of the he-said/she-said aspects of alleged Russian interference in 2016 must take into account the fact that, if anything, the Russians were reacting to a lengthy history of U.S. interference in their internal affairs since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.
One of the key players in this interference was Michael McFaul,
a a Stanford professor who, while serving as the U.S. Ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014, oversaw a policy of engagement with Moscow on behalf of the Obama administration and, when that policy failed, facilitated U.S. interference in the 2012 Russian Presidential election in an effort to keep Vladimir Putin out of office.
In October 2006
Michael McFaul was approached by people
close to Barack Obama to join a circle of experts who were advising the Illinois Senator on foreign policy issues in preparation for an anticipated presidential bid in 2008.
McFaul, who at that time was working as a professor in political science at Stanford University, agreed, and quickly became Obama's go-to expert on Russian issues. Following the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Obama picked McFaul as the special assistant to the president and senior director of Russia and Eurasia affairs at the National Security Council.
One of McFaul's first tasks was to formulate and implement a "reset" in U.S.-Russian relations. There was widespread acknowledgement
among Russia observers that, as of 2008, relations between Washington, D.C. and Moscow were at an all-time post-Cold War low. The
goal of a "reset",
McFaul believed
, was to "find cooperation with Russia on common interests" and "develop a multi-dimensional relationship with Russia" inclusive of
"societal contacts" that would be pursued through a policy of "active engagement."
For McFaul, however, the Russian "reset" wasn't about U.S.-Russian relations as much as it was about
building strong ties between the Obama administration and Dmitry Medvedev
, the former prime minister who had assumed the Russian presidency in 2008 from Vladimir Putin. Putin, who had succeeded Russian President Boris Yeltsin in 2000, had finished out his second term (the Russian Constitution forbade a president from serving more than two successive terms.) Putin became the prime minister, effectively trading places with Medvedev.
Obama's secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton, was scheduled to meet with her Russian counterpart, Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, in Geneva in March 2009. McFaul advised that it would be a good idea to publicly draw attention to the
"reset," and a State Department staffer came up with the idea of presenting a symbolic "button" that would be symbolic of the occasion. The staffer approached McFaul who, as the resident Russian expert in the NSC,
provided the translation for the word "reset" (
peregruzka
) and the correct spelling
. When Clinton presented the "reset button" to Lavrov, however,
he pointed out
that
peregruzka
did not mean "reset", but rather "overload", referring to putting too much power through an electrical system, leading to blown fuses, or even a fire.
While the embarrassing gaffe did not sink U.S.-Russian relations (this would happen on its own volition), it did underscore a level of amateurishness at the highest levels of American policy making by someone who was purported to be an expert on all things Russian.
McFaul's
academic credentials and training as a Russian specialist
are impressive. McFaul graduated from Stanford in 1986 with a B.A. in International Relations and Slavic Languages, and went on to get his master's degree, also from Stanford, in Russian and East European Studies, before heading off to Oxford, England, where he pursued his Doctorate in International Relations as a Rhodes Scholar. McFaul returned to the Soviet Union in 1990 as a visiting scholar at Moscow State University, where he finished up his doctoral dissertation (he was awarded his Ph.D. the next year.)
It was during his time as a visiting scholar that McFaul began to blur the line between pure academia and policy activist. In 1990, McFaul signed on as a consultant with the
National Democratic Institute (NDI)
, self-described as "a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental organization that has supported democratic institutions and practices
in every region of the world."
The NDI was founded in 1983 as an action arm of the National Endowment for Democracy (NEC), created by Congress under the eponymously named National Endowment for Democracy Act. The congressional action was in response to an executive decision on the part of President Ronald Reagan, promulgated under
National Security Decision Directive-77
, to promote so-called "public diplomacy" operations in furtherance of U.S. national security interests. McFaul dual-hatted as a visiting scholar and as NDI's official Field Representative in Moscow.
As the NDI's representative in Moscow, McFaul actively supported "Democratic Russia," a coalition of Russian politicians led by Boris Yeltsin, the president of the Russian Federation, even though the official U.S. policy at the time was to support Mikhail Gorbachev, the president of the Soviet Union. McFaul likened Yeltsin to the
"catalyst for the Cold War's end."
While recognizing Yeltsin as "the unquestioned leader of Russia's anti-Communist movement,” McFaul noted that Yeltsin's embrace of Democratic Russia was more a byproduct of the realization that such an alliance was needed to defeat the Soviet regime, rather than a genuine embrace of liberal ideas.
This realization seems absent, however, from McFaul's later apologia about the decade of corrupt, ineffective governance that defined Yeltsin's time as the president of Russia.
McFaul had become enamored with the concept of Russian "democracy" but he could not define it with any precision. In his 2001 book,
Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin
, McFaul throws the term "democracy" around freely, only acknowledging (in a footnote) that, in the context of Russia, it may not exist. The reality was that Yeltsin, far from an idealistic paragon of democratic virtue, was little more than the hand-picked puppet of the United States.
In 1999, Yeltsin, his health ravaged by alcohol and his legacy haunted by a decade of corruption and mismanagement, stepped aside ("peacefully and constitutionally,” according to McFaul) in favor of his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin. Within a period of less than two years (Putin assumed power on New Year's Eve in 2000, and
Russia's Unfinished Revolution
was released in 2001), McFaul declared that the former KGB officer had “inflicted considerable damage to democratic institutions" in Russia. There were, however, no genuine democratic institutions in Russia to inflict damage upon when Yeltsin stepped
asidea€"Russia's first president had seen to that by destroying the Russian Parliament in 1993 and rigging an election (with extensive American support) in 1996. It was everything Putin could do upon his accession to the presidency right the Russian ship of state, let alone reinvent something (Russian democracy) that had never existed to begin with.
McFaul's problem with Putin centered not on what he had
done
as president as much as the fact that he
was
a president. There was an inherent inconsistency between McFaul's theory of Russian "democracy" and the reality of Putin. Putin viewed the collapse of the Soviet Union as
"a major geopolitical disaster of the century." He had stood next to Yeltsin as he
debased himself and Russia in conversations with President Bill Clinton
. If one thing was for certain, Putin would never allow himself to behave in a similar manner.
McFaul's "reset" policy was intended to reassert American influence into the Russian body politic in a post-Putin Russia. As such, when Putin announced in 2011 that he would again run for president, McFaul's
"reset" policy collapsed. Under the "reset," the Obama administration, at McFaul's urging, provided funding through the auspices of the U.S. Agency for International Development, the NED, NDI, and other non-governmental organizations to Russian civil groups that had coalesced into a political opposition to Putin's 2012 presidential ambition. McFaul also encouraged Secretary of State Clinton to speak out in support of the Russian opposition.
"We are supportive of the rights and aspirations of the Russian people," Clinton stated in December 2011, "to be able to make
progress and realize a better future for themselves."
McFaul, whose entire ambassadorial persona was built around the kind of societal engagement produced by these NGOs, never recovered. In February 2014, McFaul
announced his resignation as U.S. ambassador
, declaring that it was time for him to return to Stanford and resume his previous life of academia.
Since leaving Moscow, McFaul has become one of the leading critics of Putin, writing prolifically on the topic, and frequently appearing as a talking head on television. Putin's Russia has provided McFaul with plenty of material to work with, including the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the military intervention in Syria in 2015, and the alleged meddling in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
A staunch supporter of Clinton, McFaul has turned his sights on Trump,
strongly criticizing Trump's own efforts
for a new "reset" with Russia as misguided. By McFaul's telling, the abysmal state of U.S.-Russian relations is the fault of Putin and Putin alone, and Trump's efforts at normalizing relations only plays into Putin's hands.
But it was McFaul's role in the U.S. interference in the Russian 2012 election that put in motion everything that followed. Perception makes its own reality, and the Russian perception is that McFaul and the Obama administration purposefully put their thumb on the scale of Russia's presidential election to keep Putin from winning. McFaul has been banned from traveling to Russia, and in 2018 Putin approached Trump for permission to have Russian intelligence officers question McFaul about alleged illegal activities conducted while he was ambassador. While the Russian claims are unsubstantiated allegations, and their request facially absurd, the fact remains that when it comes to apportioning blame for the sorry state of U.S.-Russian relations today, one need look no further than Michael McFaul and his decades-long effort to create Russian
"democracy" from whole cloth as laying the foundation for failure.a
For McFaul to today condemn the Russians for their alleged interference in the 2016 U.S. Presidential election is like an arsonist seeking to assign blame for a blaze sparked by the embers of his own handiwork.
a
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofa
Dealbreaker: Donald Trump and the Unmaking of the Iran Nuclear Deal (2018).
Why does the author try to sell a false narrative with the first line?
Let’s be real. In no substantial way did Russia “meddle” with our elections.
Those who propose that they did, such as the former(?) MI6 asset who wrote this article, ought to be considered suspects in the ONGOING coup conspiracy.
Good article but the issue goes far beyond Michael McFaul.
In fact, scholars will one day rank the saga of America’s policy toward Russia after the Cold War very high on history’s list of stupendous follies: how, after winning an existential struggle against a totalitarian superpower accurately called by Reagan an Evil Empire, the best and the brightest in Washington set out to make a mortal enemy of the third-rate, humiliated nation that emerged from Soviet ashes — but bore little resemblance to the Soviet Union.
It’s on par, in a way, with the allies’ treatment of Germany after World War I, when a shortsighted and punitive policy toward a shattered enemy helped pave the way for the rise of Hitler and the horrors of war and genocide that would follow. We can hope things don’t end in a similar vein for this generation, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it.
I keep thinking of a line ascribed to an ancient Greek playwright: whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. It seems spookily fitting these days.
The politicizing of the NGOs also led Putin to assume the Peace Corps volunteers in rural Russia were also involved, leading him to end that venture. Once again, ordinary poor Russians beyond Moscow and St. Petersburg lost out; and once again the only diplomatic “reset” for America was a return to our blissful ignorance of Russia.
McFaul is painfully bad – emphasis on the present tense – and in many ways appears to be living in some kind of alternative reality. However the problematic Russia situation is ultimately a larger bi product of many bad actors in the Obama administration, most importantly those involved with the coup in Ukraine. 2014 was the point of no return: from that perspective McFaul was merely an irritant.
My contention is Americans swayed by Russian intervention propaganda fill the population with un-informed people. The same demographic even believe the media, especially now fading CNN. One day I would expect owner AT&T to get involved .
Or, and hear me out here, Russia is a great power among others that, like all great powers, seeks to maximize power and position. Ergo any reset was likely doomed since it can’t take into account the inherently conflicting grand strategies of the American republic and the Russian federation.
"Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have lost an important instinct towards
group -- and thus genetic -- preservation. Once a society, as a whole, espouses
Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is acting against its own genetic
interests and will ultimately destroy itself."
Ed Dutton
Watching his incredibly entertaining Jolly Heretic You Tube channel, it's easy to
forget that Ed Dutton is also an extremely serious, and increasingly prolific, researcher,
author, and scientist. The recent publication by Arktos of Dutton's Race Differences in
Ethnocentrism follows closely in the wake of Dutton's At Our Wits' End: Why We're
Becoming Less Intelligent and What it Means for the Future (2018), How to Judge People
by What They Look Like (2018), J. Phillipe Rushton: A Life History Perspective
(2018), and The Silent Rape Epidemic: How The Finns Were Groomed to Love Their Abusers
(2019). In Race Differences in Ethnocentrism, Dutton, who has collaborated with Richard
Lynn on a number of occasions, builds impressively on the work of the latter and has offered,
in this text, one of the most informative, formidable, pressing, intriguing, and poignant
monographs I've read in years.
ORDER IT NOW
Dutton's book is a work of science underscored by an inescapable sense of social and
political urgency, and has been explicitly prompted into being by the need to address two
questions "particularly salient during a period of mass migration": 'Why are some races more
ethnocentric than others?' and, most urgently of all, 'Why are Europeans currently so low in
ethnocentrism?' In attempting to answer these questions, Dutton has designed a book that is
accessible to readers possessing even the most modest scientific knowledge, without
compromising on academic rigor or the use of necessary scientific language. The text is
helpfully replete with explanatory commentary and useful rhetorical illustrations, and its
opening four chapters are dedicated exclusively to placing the study in context and exploring
the nature of the research itself. This is a book that can, and should, be read by
everyone.
In the brief first chapter, Dutton explains ethnocentrism or group pride as taking two main
forms. The first, positive ethnocentrism, involves "taking pride in your ethnic group or nation
and being prepared to make sacrifices for the good of it." Negative ethnocentrism, on the other
hand, "refers to being prejudiced against and hostile to members of other ethnic groups."
Typically, a highly ethnocentric person or group will demonstrate both positive and negative
ethnocentrism, although it is very common for people and groups to be high in one aspect of
ethnocentrism but not in the other. It is also apparent that some countries and ethnic groups
are very high in both forms of ethnocentrism while others are extremely low in the same. The
author sets out to explore how and why such variations and differences have occurred, and are
still fluctuating. This is clearly a piece of very novel research. Dutton remarks that "there
exists no systematic attempt to understand why different ethnic groups may vary in the extent
to which they are ethnocentric." Dutton's foundation is built on a deep reading of existing
literature on the origins and nature of ethnocentrism, pioneered to some extent by R. A. LeVine
and D. T. Campbell in the 1970s, and built upon most recently by Australia's Boris Bizumic.
These scholars advanced the argument that ethnocentrism was primarily the result of conflict.
Another highly relevant theory in the study of ethnocentrism has been the concept of 'inclusive
fitness,' which argues that ethnocentrism provides a method for indirectly passing on one's
genes.
Dutton closes his introductory chapter by providing an interesting overview of historical
observations of differences in ethnocentrism. During the so-called 'Age of Discovery,'
Europeans encountered large numbers of different and distant tribes, and many remarked on the
reception they received from these groups. Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit
were noted as being extremely friendly, while the negrito tribes of the Andaman Islands, near
India, remain notoriously hostile to outsiders, shoot arrows at passing aircraft, and kill
intruding foreigners, including
an American missionary in November 2018 . The Japanese appear throughout history to have
combined a moderate level of negative ethnocentrism with very high levels of positive
ethnocentrism, resulting in a society typified by high levels of social harmony and in-group
co-operation, and willing sacrifice for the nation in times of war. By contrast, the
Yąnomamö tribe of Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in
positive ethnocentrism, resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor
social harmony, and an inability to form stable social structures of any kind. Differences in
general levels of ethnocentrism are important because, as Dutton points out, those societies
most welcoming of outsiders were subsequently colonized and fundamentally and permanently
changed by migration. Meanwhile, those societies that displayed extreme hostility to outsiders
have remained almost intact, and remain unchanged even centuries after the European 'Age of
Discovery.'
In the second chapter, Dutton answers the question 'What is 'Race'?' Although many of our
readers will be familiar with most of the material presented in this chapter, it is
nevertheless a very well-presented defense of the concept of race and its unabashed employment
as a scientific system for categorizing and studying humans. In Dutton's presentation, 'race'
is employed to refer to what in the animal kingdom would be a subspecies: a breeding population
separated from another of the same species long enough to be noticeably evolved to a different
environment but not long enough to be unable to have fertile offspring with the other group.
After discussing the processes through which different races or subspecies evolve, Dutton
offers a summary of historical taxonomies of race, before finally answering a number of
criticisms of the concept of race. In the third chapter, and following much the same framework,
Dutton sets out to answer the question, 'What is Intelligence?' Here Dutton answers a number of
criticisms of the concept of intelligence, particularly as they relate to Blacks, before moving
to a discussion of race differences in intelligence. The debt to Richard Lynn's research is
quite clear in this chapter, but Dutton presents past findings with style, conviction, and
novel context, meaning that familiar elements such as Cold Winters Theory are worth getting to
grips with once more.
The fascinating fourth chapter is where the study begins in earnest, and answers the
question 'What Are 'Ethnocentrism' and 'Ethnicity'?' It goes without saying that both terms
have entered, if not dominated, the lexicon of White advocacy, and I found it very refreshing
to become more familiar with the scientific basis for them. Dutton, referring to the work of
Bizumic, notes that the term 'ethnocentrism' was coined by the Polish sociologist Ludwig
Gumplowicz (1838–1909) before entering English with the work of the American economist
William Sumner (1840–1910). In order to better explain the nature of ethnocentrism,
Dutton lays out various lexical definitions of ethnicity and discusses competing schools of
thought in relation to the origins of ethnicity. The division between scholars of ethnicity can
be broadly discussed in terms of two camps: 'Primordialists,' and 'Constructivists' or
'Subjectivists.' Primordialists, representing an older school of thought, assert that ethnic
groups are extremely ancient and are ultimately based around common ancestry. Supporting this
position, Dutton, borrowing from Frank Salter, points out that genetic data shows that ethnic
groups really are distinct genetic clusters. Constructivists, on the other hand, assert that
ethnic identities are merely a product of culture and environment, and are therefore arbitrary
and subject to change. The author spends a great deal of time dissecting the arguments of the
Constructivists and, for me personally, one of the great pleasures of Race Differences in
Ethnocentrism is reading as Dutton prods and teases and the manifold weaknesses in the
Constructivist position.
The author closes the chapter with an extended discussion of the sociobiological origins of
ethnic identity, before providing a summary of proffered causes for ethnocentrism. These
include threat and conflict, psychodynamic theory as advanced by Freud, terror management (a
variation on the theme of threat and conflict), self-aggrandizement theories (ethnocentrism
boosts in-group self-esteem), Marxist theory (ethnocentrism is a tactic employed by one group
in order to gain power over, and exploit, another group), social dominance theory
(ethnocentrism as a side-effect of certain types of personality), socialization explanations
(children learn to be ethnocentric), and the sociobiological model (ethnocentrism is a product
of evolution and adaptation). Dutton argues convincingly that only the sociobiological model
offers answers which explain group behavior in both animals and humans, arguing that
"ethnocentrism is most parsimoniously understood via a partly biological theory wherein the
ethnic group is a kind of extended family."
In the fifth chapter, Dutton surveys recent evidence for the sociobiological model of
ethnocentrism and ethnicity. At the core of the chapter is J. Philippe Rushton's ' Genetic
Similarity Theory ,' which is treated with respect but also caution by the author, who
insists that "it does not fully explain all manifestations of ethnocentrism and, accordingly,
it needs to be nuanced and carefully developed." Put simply, ' Genetic Similarity Theory
' is the idea that animals will instinctively behave more pro-socially to those who share more
of their genes, and that ethnic groups, which are essentially extended families, will
demonstrate the same inclination towards the genetically similar in the form of ethnic
nepotism. It is this inclination to support the genetically similar that paves the way for
'inclusive fitness' -- indirectly passing on at least some of one's genes by supporting kin --
and thus provides some explanation for the origins of altruism. Rushton provided a great deal
of research strongly indicating that humans very much tend to marry, befriend, and otherwise
associate with those who are genetically similar to them, and this is succinctly explored. Some
controversy surrounds the issue of whether or not ' Genetic Similarity Theory ' is
applicable to circles beyond genealogical kin, and Dutton explores the work of Frank Salter in
support of the idea that it is indeed applicable. The only criticism of the concept that Dutton
concedes is that 'Genetic Similarity Theory' does not fully explain variations in ethnocentrism
and therefore does not appear to attribute sufficient weight to environmental factors,
especially external threats to the interests of the ethny -- a factor that has demonstrably
inflamed ethnocentrism throughout human history. Dutton also suggests that fluctuations in
ethnocentrism may also be rooted in the dynamics of human personality, both as humans age, and
as far as personality is influenced by 'Life History Strategy.'
ORDER IT NOW
The sixth chapter, 'Ethnocentrism, Personality Traits and Computer Modelling,' focuses in
detail on the issue of personality. Dutton explains that "we have to examine the concept of an
'ethnocentric personality' because there are race differences in modal personality. So, if
there is an 'ethnocentric personality,' then this would neatly explain why race differences in
ethnocentrism exist." Dutton ultimately dismisses the idea of an 'ethnocentric personality,'
particularly the work of Adorno on prejudice, as having very little relevance to meaningful
research on ethnocentrism. He concludes rather that it seems very likely that "ethnocentrism is
not the by-product of a series of partly heritable personality traits." Instead, "ethnocentrism
is a human universal and is significantly genetic, in the sense that propensity to genetic
similarity is partly genetic." The chapter then moves to the concept of 'group selection,'
during which is it explained and demonstrated that ethnocentric groups are more likely to win
the battle of group selection. "The more ethnocentric group should always triumph in battles of
group selection. This would mean that, all else being equal, races that were compelled, by the
nature of their environment, to combat other groups (by being internally cooperative by
externally hostile) would be more ethnocentric." Computer modelling of such battles has
demonstrated conclusively that ethnocentric strategies will always triumph, leading Dutton to
conclude that universalist humanitarianism is ultimately a losing strategy, "unable to sustain
high levels of in-group cooperation." Humanitarian groups invariably "waste their precious
reproductive potential helping out free riders who give them nothing in return."
In Chapter 7, one of the best and most provocative in the book, Dutton explores the genetics
of ethnocentrism. Dutton takes as his starting point the high level of positive and negative
ethnocentrism among Northeast Asians, and attempts to find candidate genes that may play a role
in producing this situation. Building on research suggesting that oxytocin may contribute to
in-group bias by motivating in-group favouritism and, to a lesser extent, out-group hostility,
Dutton points to scholarly findings that Northeast Asians disproportionately possess ("much
higher than Europeans") genes identified with fear of social exclusion and higher oxytocin
levels (A118G – OPRM1). Further research has indicated that the serotonin transporter
gene polymorphism (5-HTTLPR) combines with environmental factors to shape in-group bias. Dutton
cites studies showing that "70–80 percent of an East Asian sample carried the short form
of this gene, that is to say the form that makes you more ethnocentric. Only 40–45
percent of Europeans in the sample carried the short form of the gene. Indeed, it was found
that across twenty-nine nations, the more collectivist a culture was the more likely it was to
have the short form as the prevalent allele in the population." Dutton adds that his own work
found such correlations to be weak, and he is reluctant to attribute ethnocentrism to small
numbers of specific genes. He instead finishes the chapter with the suggestion that specific
genes such as these may play a small role, but only in conjunction with Life History Theory --
for example, he provides data suggesting that populations with Slow Life History strategies
(typified by higher intelligence, delayed gratification, and higher investment in children) are
likely to be higher in positive ethnocentrism.
In Chapter 8, Dutton presents data on race differences in ethnocentrism, and he then
explores the impact of cousin marriage and religion on ethnocentrism. The chapter opens with a
very interesting discussion of racial dating preferences derived from the OKCupid dating site.
The data suggest that, at least in sexual terms, White women were the most ethnocentric group,
overwhelmingly preferring to date men from their own ethnic group. By contrast, most non-White
groups seemed to have a preference for dating Whites. Dutton explains that this data cannot be
meaningfully employed in the study of ethnocentrism because the fact non-Whites want to have
sex with Whites merely means that "Whites have value." He continues: "this does not, of course,
mean that black people would be necessarily more inclined to lay down their lives for white
people, show preference for white interests over those of their own race, vote for whites over
members of their own race or any other behaviour of that kind that might be regarded as low in
ethnocentrism." Dutton instead utilizes the 'World Values Survey' as a more reliable indicator
of ethnocentric feeling, and finds that East Asians are among the most ethnocentric
populations. At this stage, the author returns to Genetic Similarity Theory, pointing out that
the East Asian gene pool is much smaller than the European gene pool -- in other words, two
random Japanese men will be more closely related than two random English men. This is important
because
any act of ethnic altruism by the Japanese man would have a greater payoff in terms of
inclusive fitness than would precisely the same act by an Englishman. As such, we would
expect higher levels of positive ethnocentrism among Northeast Asians than among Europeans.
By the same token, were a Japanese person to be confronted by a foreigner, this would
potentially damage his genetic interests to a greater extent than would be the case if a
European, from a larger gene pool, was confronted by a foreigner.
Genetic Similarity Theory, as outlined above, is particularly salient in Dutton's discussion
of ethnocentrism among Arabs and South Asians, populations with high levels of cousin marriage.
Arabs and South Asians are more ethnocentric than Europeans but, unlike East Asians, the nature
of Arab and South Asian ethnocentrism tends more towards negative ethnocentrism -- something
Dutton links to relatively lower average intelligence. Consanguineous marriage, itself a
response to a stressful and/or conflict-riven ecology and a means of developing a functioning
society in populations with Fast Life History strategies, will accelerate and deepen negative
ethnocentrism.
This phenomenon is deepened further by high levels of religiosity, which, Dutton argues, has
been demonstrated as boosting both positive and negative ethnocentrism. Among the aspects of
religion that contribute to ethnocentrism and group selection, Dutton cites high levels of
fertility, matrimony, physical punishment of children, bodily mutilation, honor killing,
martyrdom, celibacy, and intense violence or enmity directed at non-believers. I found Dutton's
work here to be especially interesting, though I was left with some significant questions about
the nature of modern Christianity, something disappointingly absent from Dutton's text despite
his rich background in the study of Christian fundamentalists. Why is modern Christianity so
entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of ethnocentrism? My own instinct is that it
has something to do with the development and spread of the belief in a "personal Jesus," a
largely nineteenth-century American innovation, rather than the older belief in folding oneself
into a community of believers under a more distant and overarching God of nations. But this
would require an essay, or several, to fully articulate, rather than an aside in a book review.
It should suffice to state here that more detail or illustration from Dutton in this regard
would have been most welcome.
Dutton spends several pages discussing Jewish ethnocentrism, and is appreciative of the work
of Kevin MacDonald in this area. Jews are clearly very high in positive ethnocentrism, as
demonstrated by very high levels of in-group philanthropy, belief in themselves as members of a
Chosen People with a special world-historical destiny, and the prolific production of
self-congratulatory and apologetic literature about themselves that is frequently accompanied
by a widespread refusal to make any concessions on negative aspects of the history of the
ethnic group. Jews have also distinguished themselves throughout history with very high levels
of negative ethnocentrism, including their genocides of other peoples (real or imagined) in
their religious texts, very negative portrayals of non-Jews in their religious commentaries,
frequent outbursts against Greek cultural influence in the Classical period, exploitative
economic relationships with Europeans since at least the Carolingian dynasty, the preference
for suicide over conversion in the Medieval period, high levels of culturally disruptive
behaviors among host populations in the modern period, and most recently their extraordinarily
hostile treatment of the Palestinians. This can be partly explained, as Dutton points out, by
the highly consanguineous nature of the Jews. For example, "it has been found that the world's
10 million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves
in Eastern Europe about the year 1400." High levels of inbreeding have led to the noted
prevalence of several genetic disorders among the Jews, including Tay-Sachs Disease, Gaucher's
Disease, and Riley-Day Syndrome. Dutton argues that Jews would have been more ethnocentric than
Europeans from the earliest stages of their settlement in Europe, and that this ethnocentrism
would have been deepened even further over historical time, in successive cycles, by their
continued breeding within a small gene pool (intensifying the impact of Genetic Similarity
Theory) and their presence in a high stress environment typified by periodic outbursts of
reactive persecution (resulting in "harsh selection" for the most ethnocentric Jews). Dutton
then discusses the findings of one study carried out by developmental psychologists, in which
it was found that Israeli infants displayed unusually intense fear reactions in response to
strangers when compared with North German infants. Whereas the North German infants had
relatively minor reactions to strangers, the Israeli infants became "inconsolably upset."
The author brings his eighth chapter to a close with a discussion of low ethnocentrism among
Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans. Low ethnocentrism among Africans is explained briefly via
their very pronounced r -strategy, resulting in low rates of consanguineous marriage and
a much broader gene
pool and genetic diversity . On the other hand, Europeans, argues Dutton, occupy a
'Goldilocks Zone' of very low ethnocentrism because they are less K -selected than East
Asians, have a larger gene pool, and their environment is less harsh, leading to lower levels
of group selection. There appears to be a position on the r – K spectrum,
lower than East Asian K strategies, where cousin marriage is selected for (boosting
ethnocentrism) and this position is occupied by Arabs and South Asians rather than Whites, who
instead occupy a position below East Asians but above Arabs and South Asians. The trade-off for
this relatively weakened position of Europeans is that for a population with moderate-to-high
intelligence, "low ethnocentrism would permit a greater ability to trade and pool resources and
so, ultimately, the creation of an extremely large coalition with a very large gene pool. This
group would be more likely than a smaller group to produce geniuses."
Dutton thus argues that, in a sense, some level of selection took place for low
ethnocentrism in Europeans -- a "genius" group evolutionary strategy. Dutton argues that groups
with high levels of genius but low levels of ethnocentrism will triumph over groups with high
levels of ethnocentrism but low levels of genius so long as certain conditions are met. The
most important condition is that the genius group should maintain a basic level of
ethnocentrism. Should this base level decline or collapse, the genius strategy would fail and
highly ethnocentric groups would eventually dominate. European ethnocentrism has clearly been
stronger in the past than it is at present, a fact the author very capably discusses within the
framework of broader fluctuations in ecology (especially the advent of the industrial
revolution) and ongoing evolutions in race itself.
In Chapter 9, Dutton explores in detail several variables that may impact ethnocentrism at
individual and group level. Highly stressful situations in which survival is at risk have been
shown to boost ethnocentrism, and researchers have found that playing violent video games is
even sufficient to increase aggression to perceived out-groups. Mortality salience, or the fear
of death, has also been shown to lead people to believe in a way which is highly defensive of
their in-group. Although Dutton does not explore the theme in any great depth, I was moved to
reflect on how anti-stress Western civilization has become during the last 60 or so years, not
only in terms of industrialization, radically lowered infant mortality, and medical advances
(all of which Dutton explores), but also in the extraordinary emphasis placed by modern culture
on individual transient pleasures and prolonging youth (and therefore delaying or avoiding
confronting death). Decadence, which is what such a culture essentially decays into, is
therefore obstructive or oppositional to the development of ethnocentrism, and 'weaponized
decadence' therefore strikes me as a particularly useful strategy that could be employed by a
highly ethnocentric group with significant cultural influence in a host society with
pre-existing moderate-to-low levels of ethnocentrism -- a way of pushing a stronger "genius
evolutionary strategist" into a fatally lower level of ethnocentrism and thus, ultimately, into
defeat and destruction. Other variables impacting upon levels of ethnocentrism, and discussed
by Dutton, include age, gender, pregnancy, intelligence and education, and ethnic
diversity.
ORDER IT NOW
I found the last of these the most salient. Dutton, following from Vanhanen and Salter,
argues that multi-ethnic societies are much less capable of successfully defending themselves
against incursion from outsiders. This is for three key interrelated reasons. The first is
lower levels of trust, as sapped confidence in one's group leads to radically fewer sacrifices
on behalf of the group. The second is that a multi-ethnic society will be able to draw on
significantly lower reserves of positive ethnocentrism. The third is that ethnic minorities
will tend to support immigration, essentially acting as a fifth column; allies to the outsiders
engaged in incursion. So much for the "diversity is our greatest strength" mantra.
In the penultimate chapter, Dutton makes the argument that the industrial revolution and its
consequences have been a disaster for European ethnocentrism. Industrialization has
significantly reduced human ecological stress in the West, and has accelerated the decline of
European religion -- one of the key supports for an already low level of European
ethnocentrism. Advances in medicine and developments in the welfare state have led to wholesale
dysgenic impacts such as the extraordinary rise in numbers of people with moderate to severe
genetic disorders (26 percent increase in hemophilia, 22 percent increase in cystic fibrosis,
and a 300 percent increase in phenylketonuria). The author posits that the increased
proliferation of unhealthy mutations has further precipitated the decline of healthy instincts
rooted in healthy genes that promoted survival (on a related note, it is interesting that those
identified as ethnocentric score very highly in
disgust sensitivity -- a trait associated with disease avoidance ). Dutton and some of his
colleagues have come to describe such negative mutations as "spiteful mutations" which "cause
people to act against their own genetic interests." He continues:
If [carriers of 'spiteful genes'] influence society, they can persuade even non-carriers
of these 'spiteful' genes to act in self-destructive ways and they can undermine structures
-- such as religion -- which help to promote group interests. Woodley of Menie et al. call
this 'social epistasis.' As a consequence, modern (liberal) religion and ideology -- far from
being an indirect means of genetic preservation -- would in fact reflect a sick society's
growing desire to destroy itself. An obvious example can be seen in the ideology of
Multiculturalism and Political Correctness.
In Dutton's reading of our present situation then, the worst of our traitors are in fact
what perhaps Nietzsche was referring to when he condemned "the botched and the bungled" --
malformed and maladapted offspring eager for self-destruction, and dragging the healthy down
with them.
The final, brief, chapter of Race Differences in Ethnocentrism offers a neat summary
of the findings and central arguments of the book before ending on a warning and offering some
meagre light at the end of the tunnel. The warning is clear:
Europe is increasingly allowing into its borders people who are extremely high in
ethnocentrism as predicted by their high levels of religiousness, low median age, their
practice of cousin marriage, low average intelligence, and (likely) low mutational load. We
have noted that the ethnocentric strategy will, eventually, tend to dominate all other
strategies in the battle for group survival. Alternate strategies can also work, such as the
development of large and highly inventive coalitions, but these cannot last if they promote
ideologies which are actively to the detriment of their genetic interests, as it happening
with Political Correctness, which actively promotes an effective destruction of European
people.
And yet this may be a night that is necessary before the dawn, as Europeans are once more
plunged into a cleaning cauldron of harsh, selective conditions:
We are now living under these conditions. But it will be the collapse of [European]
civilisation and power that will likely lead, many years hence, to their becoming more
ethnocentric once again.
It is the humbling, unenviable, and largely thankless task of websites like The
Occidental Observer
obwandiyag says: May 24, 2019
at 2:37 am GMT Oh, positive ethnocentrism is all well and good. It's just that you have
to ignore how rotten the actual individual members of your own group that you actually know
are. Then, it's pride all the way! Read More • Replies: @Endgame
Napoleon , @Anon ,
@Parsnipitous
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Colin Wright says:
• WebsiteMay 24,
2019 at 3:23 am GMT • 100 Words ' By contrast, the Yąnomamö tribe of
Venezuela are very high in negative ethnocentrism but very low in positive ethnocentrism,
resulting in a society riddled with lawlessness, extreme violence, poor social harmony, and
an inability to form stable social structures of any kind.'
It would be a cruder version of Israel, then. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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At least in the short term, this would seem questionable.
At one extreme, consider the US from 1780 to about 1970. By very willingly accepting and
incorporating newcomers, it increased in size roughly fifty-fold, and grew to be the most
powerful state in the world. Our subsequent history demonstrates that it's possible to have
too much of a good thing, but
At the other extreme, consider Jews -- a group very assiduously devoted to preserving
its group identity, and not at all interested in absorbing outsiders. Over the last
century, roughly a third have been exterminated, another third are rapidly being
assimilated in the US notwithstanding their efforts at self-preservation, and the last
third have decided the course of wisdom is to pack themselves into a strip of semi-desert
and attack all their neighbors without actually crushing any of them.
Whatever the failings of the strategy of the US, it's far from demonstrated that the
opposite course makes for an improvement. Read More • Replies: @Wally
, @notanon2
, @RobRich
, @John
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Ron
Unz says: May 24,
2019 at 4:01 am GMT • 200 Words Well, most of the article was pretty interesting.
But I'm quite skeptical about this claim:
Dutton instead utilizes the 'World Values Survey' as a more reliable indicator of
ethnocentric feeling, and finds that East Asians are among the most ethnocentric
populations.
This doesn't really make any sense. Until the last hundred years or so, I'd guess that
something like 99% of Han Chinese had almost never even *seen* a non-Han during their
entire lives, and that was also true for almost all of their ancestors for many, many
centuries. Probably the same for Japanese and Koreans.
But if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly
100% ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity
ever evolve or be maintained? Wouldn't they be about as useful as wings on a gopher?
In support of this theoretical framework, isn't it an empirical fact that China has
always been one of the most "absorptive" nations in the world, with some of the lowest
barriers to ethnic intermarriage and assimilation? That's why the Chinese have absorbed so
many other groups over the millennia, including all the groups that conquered them.
Moreover, there's that famous dictate by Confucius that foreigners who come to China and
act like Chinese should be considered Chinese. Indeed, I think you could make a reasonable
case that China is the world's oldest "Propositional Nation." Read More • Agree:
Godfree Roberts ,
Mr.
XYZ • Replies: @Thulean
Friend , @micheal8
, @AaronB
, @notanon2
, @Anon
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Colin Wright says:
• WebsiteMay 24,
2019 at 4:03 am GMT • 100 Words ' "it has been found that the world's 10
million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves
in Eastern Europe about the year 1400." '
Given the large Jewish populations expelled from Britain, France, and the German states
in previous centuries, this statement seems almost fantastically improbable. Surely there
were more than 350 Ashkenazim in Eastern Europe in 1400, and surely more than 350 of them
contributed to the genes of the modern population of Ashkenazim. This leaves aside the
visible resemblance of German Jews to Gentile Germans, of Polish Jews to Gentile Poles, etc
-- and the implications of that. Read More • Replies: @Ron
Unz , @Johnny
Rottenborough , @notanon2
, @Anon
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' "it has been found that the world's 10 million Ashkenazi Jews are all descended from
about 350 Ashkenazi Jews who found themselves in Eastern Europe about the year 1400."
'
Given the large Jewish populations expelled from Britain, France, and the German
states in previous centuries, this statement seems almost fantastically improbable.
I'm not up on the latest genetic research, but it does sound a little garbled
From what I recall seeing a decade or so ago, almost European Jews are descended from
the offspring of a few hundred Middle Eastern males and Northern Italian females who lived
around 500-800 AD (the date was disputed and it's also fuzzy in my memory).
However, by the time the Jews established themselves in Eastern Europe, perhaps around
1000 AD or later, there were probably some tens of thousands of them.
So maybe new scientific findings have updated the history or (more likely) the writer is
getting the two different foundation events mixed up. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Endgame Napoleon
says: May 24, 2019
at 4:42 am GMT@obwandiyag
Glorifying other groups doesn't help to purify your own group, either. Humans are "all too
human," as the man said. Where is BatMan when you need him? He is enjoying himself in Gotham
& Gomorra. Read More • LOL: Tusk Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [932] • Disclaimer says: May 24,
2019 at 5:42 am GMT@obwandiyag
Ignoring that is harder for some groups who are lousy with rotten members (nearly everyone).
Other groups merely have to deal with an unavoidable standard deviation that is part of the
human condition. Those groups invented advanced prison systems, long ago, along with the rest
of advanced civilization. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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Anon [932] • Disclaimer says: May
24, 2019 at 5:52 am GMT • 200 Words Ethnocentrism is about two things:
psychological health and political protection.
That humans require identity and belonging, things that by definition require barriers,
isn't debatable in terms of their salubrious effects on the individual's mental health.
Humans require political protection from other groups. Humans without political or other
protection that arises from the in-group traditionally had de facto or actual slave status
in the presence of other groups. The same is true today.
Slavers, with slaver religions, push for an end to out-group ethnocentrism for their
desired slaves because it eradicates that group's ability to politically or physically
defend themselves in an effective manner. Due to lack of effective in-group
cooperation.
Those resisting slavery should always work to build a deep and single ethnic culture and
the genetic in-group that it incubates over time.
Once this is formed, political power will follow via the deep in-group cooperation that
this genetically and culturally deeply linked group encourages.
Self-protection, independence, and self determination are all attainable thereafter. All
which are correctly seen as fundamental Human Rights.
Those that fail to cooperate effectively enough, even when allowed their ethnocentrism,
will continue to be controlled by out-groups. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More...
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A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today's
Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the
medieval era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today's sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews -- there
are more than 10 million around the world -- derived from just 350 people or so.
Read More • Replies: @res ,
@Colin
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How would one go about ranking groups, organizations, individuals, social networks and
publications by intensity or degrees of ethnocentrism?
Could one use automated methods to produce and update these rankings in real time by
tracking and mining social media and all media in general?
One obvious approach: count up the number of times an agent mentions its ethnic
identity, issues, problems, enemies, etc. in its communications.
Questions that would be interesting to answer: which are the most ethnocentric groups in
contemporary American politics? In contemporary European politics? In contemporary global
politics?
Which are the most significant and strategic ethnic conflicts in contemporary global
politics? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
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One issue here is that the effective population size may be (much) less than the census
population size at any given time. This page gives some reasons for that: http://www.uwyo.edu/dbmcd/molmark/lect07/lect7.html
It would be good to hear from a real population geneticist about this. This graphic from
the first link above seems to indicate much larger effective population sizes than the
other two links. Note that AJ = Ashkenazi Jewish and FL = Flemish.
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A model based on the genetic sequencing of 128 Ashkenazi Jews concludes that today's
Ashkenazim descend from the fusion of European and Middle-Eastern Jews during the medieval
era, between 600 to 800 years ago.
The math also indicates that today's sprawling community of Ashkenazi Jews -- there
are more than 10 million around the world -- derived from just 350 people or so.'
Then either (a) Haaretz inaccurately reported the results of the research, or (b)
the research itself was flawed.
Enough historical data exists so that we effectively know all Ashkenazim were not
descended solely from 350 ancestors living between 600 and 800 years ago.
If I announced that a genetic study showed that all whites currently living in America
were descended from four hundred Irishmen present in New York City in 1860, would you
believe it?
since most of us don't clearly understand genetics or how research into it is conducted,
there's a tendency to accept any stated result as certain truth, handed down at Mount
Sinai.
Actually, I suspect -- and some of the results proferred imply -- it's no more certain
than anything else. Read More • Disagree: Ron Unz Reply
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A bunch of dumbasses start being punished for their idiocy, forcing them to adapt and
become smart. Then they strut around the world like they own the place, but then relax,
become cucked and then regress to the start. At that point another group is on it's rise,
or it's a dark age until the same group starts over Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Dutton then discusses the findings of one study carried out by developmental
psychologists, in which it was found that Israeli infants displayed unusually intense
fear reactions in response to strangers when compared with North German infants. Whereas
the North German infants had relatively minor reactions to strangers, the Israeli infants
became "inconsolably upset."
Interesting.
By the way, a very good review &, as far as I can tell, an intriguing book. Read
More • Agree: Thulean Friend ,
anon19 • Replies:
@AaronB
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isn't it an empirical fact that China has always been one of the most "absorptive"
nations in the world, with some of the lowest barriers to ethnic intermarriage and
assimilation? That's why the Chinese have absorbed so many other groups over the
millennia, including all the groups that conquered them.
These foreigners have been Mongolians, Manchu etc. People who are closely related kin.
It's like various tribes of Europe absorbing each other and forming greater nations.
It's qualitively different when you talk about people who look radically different from
you, because that implies the genetic distance is also far greater. There is no reason to
assume that North East Asians are on par with Northern Europeans in their low
ethnocentrism, though it is likely lower than many assume since intermarriage rate with
Whites is quite high (but only really with Whites. Whereas Whites mix with a lot of
groups). Read More • Replies: @Ron
Unz , @david
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anon19 says: May 27,
2019 at 4:44 am GMT All races, except for brainwashed-by-Jews, unorganized whites are
extremely ethnocentric. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 5:03 am GMT • 200 Words I don't think I buy this theory about low European
ethnocentricity at all. I think it's all the rich degenerate elites who are to blame for
the "decline" in ethnocentricity.
The rich degenerates think that being rich is their ethnicity – and the only one
worth defending – not some genetic similarity with the great unwashed whom they
despise.
That's why they invented that most humane of all altruisms – multiculturalism
– because it defends their ethnicity based on money, to hell with genetically based
ethnicity.
I think that ordinary Europeans are as ethnocentric as they always were, someone else is
expanding their ethnic acceptance against their will in order to preserve their financial
ethnocentricity.
And first of all why blame the Europeans – like they were the ones who invented
multiculturalism? If European civilization is going to collapse – it's not going to
happen in Europe first – it's going to happen in the birthplace of multiculturalism.
Read More • Replies: @Wizard of
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, @Anon
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These foreigners have been Mongolians, Manchu etc. People who are closely related kin.
It's like various tribes of Europe absorbing each other and forming greater nations.
It's qualitively different when you talk about people who look radically different
from you, because that implies the genetic distance is also far greater.
At least with regard to China, I just don't think that's correct
As far as I know, Westerners who've moved to China and taken up Chinese wives and
Chinese customs have been absorbed as easily as other Asians.
And here's a notable historical example. For various reasons, Jews have traditionally
been exceptionally resistant to absorption into local populations, remaining as a distinct
group sometimes after thousands of years of living within a particular host population. But
China absorbed its Jews long ago, being just about the only documented case that easily
comes to mind. Read More • Replies: @jeff
stryker , @Wizard of
Oz , @Thulean
Friend , @j2 ,
@Anon ,
@AaronB
, @Anon
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at least in sexual terms, White women were the most ethnocentric group, overwhelmingly
preferring to date men from their own ethnic group.
So many Unzers BTFO here Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27, 2019
at 5:37 am GMT • 100 Words @Cyrano
Aren't you mistaken in attributing multiculturalism to the rich? Certainly they don't
participate in it as perhaps you imply when you say that being rich is their ethnicity. Mark
Zuckerberg and his wife are perhaps typical , and, I would suggest, not people of different
cultures but from one which is not that of the rich but of the upper middle class educated.
Perhaps you are suggesting that people like that underrate the importance of differences in
culture that isn't actually part of their experience and therefore rather softheadedly say
"each to his own" in libertarian style without understanding what they are thereby
encouraging amongst the lower classes. Could you spell out your case please? Read More •
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Ashkenazi Jews appear to be 40-50% Italian according to DNA tests on the female
side.
Which means at some point following the diaspora from Judea in Roman times there was a
massive degree of intermarriage between Jewish men and Roman women prior to the fall of
Rome.
Also, considering that Jews trace their origins through their mothers, one would think
that they would all consider themselves Italians.
So they Jews had to absorb non-Jews into their gene pool at some point.
As for Westerners assimilating into Chinese culture, this is relatively commonplace. A
small number of Portuguese live in Macau and of course there are more recent examples. Read
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27, 2019
at 6:05 am GMT • 300 Words @Ron Unz
I have hardly even a vague knowledge of China's absorption of Jews (and haven't, I confess,
asked Google an obvious, let alone probing, question). But what you say raises the question
of how much more impressed with Chinese culture, custom and governance the Jews in China were
than the Jews elsewhere. Dark Ages Europe (and the ME) with Christian mobs destroying ancient
art and learning may not have looked good compared with Tang or Sung dynasty China (though I
invite someone to tell me about differences within China in those times). Alternatively one
might ask whether the Jews in Europe were only clinging to Judaism through desperately strict
reliance on the/a Talmud which helped maintain separation whereas the Jews in China may have
been free of that limiting influence. Compare indeed the rapidity with which Jews in America,
not least, I believe, the poor of Eastern Europe, began to assimilate at least in so far as
intermarriage implies assimilation. To that plenty of grouches would no doubt point to Jewish
corruption of what the grouches would like to think of as the culture they were assimilating
with (whereas I am more a "Jewish Century" interpreter) but my emphasis would tend to be
rather on the division and, for a time, arrested development, of American Jewry by the
creation of Israel and its drawing on people's need for tribalism and at least equal need to
have an object or ideal beyond themselves. (Isn't being a good American enough? Well, hardly,
when you are a prosperous part of the one superpower .). I suspect assimilation is going to
win. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Ghali says: May 27,
2019 at 6:06 am GMT Dutton's book has NO science. It is a fabricated lie that relies on
racism and prejudice. Multicultural societies are the opposite of monocluturals; they are
rich in diversity and culture. Just like monoagriculture, monocultural societies are empty of
all the organic ingredients. Read More • Disagree: Robert Dolan •
Replies: @Anon
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Westerners who've moved to China and taken up Chinese wives and Chinese customs have
been absorbed as easily as other Asians.
What percentage are they of the total population? 0.01%? Hardly relevant as an
example.
China absorbed its Jews long ago, being just about the only documented case that
easily comes to mind.
Jews in China were always an extremely small minority, several orders of magnitudes
lower than in leading Western countries as a percentage of the population. Harder to build
buffers in such an environment. Also, I would take issue with your characterisation of Jews
as unable to assimilate. Non-Orthodox Jews in the US have an intermarriage rate of 72%. The
rabbis are constantly reminding us of the 'silent holocaust'. Read More Reply
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Why is modern Christianity so entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of
ethnocentrism?
50+ years of sustained media attack.
the only defense against television is a television station of your own. Read More Reply
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notanon2 says: May 27,
2019 at 7:02 am GMT@Colin
Wright with Jews very concentrated in urban areas i would have thought the Black Death
could have caused a bottleneck like that (as the plague didn't reach Poland for some
reason).
map of spread of black death
note big gap in Poland Read More • Replies: @Republic
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At least in the short term, this would seem questionable.
the simulations used to study this set a level playing field so it won't be true in all
real world situations. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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j2 says:
May 27,
2019 at 8:10 am GMT • 400 Words @Ron
Unz Ron, the claim, when correctly understood, is correct also concerning China.
Chinese are especially negative towards Blacks, anybody with dark skin color. (They think
Blacks smell bad.) They appreciate white skin color. They avoid tanning and use whitening
creams. Yes, they absorb Whites, including Jews, but they are ethnocentric towards other
peoples.
I have this kind of a small theory why this is so. Consider a trait, like intelligence,
being not a product of additive gene alleles, but by a combination of favorable alleles of
several genes. We can assume the combinations are mostly two gene combinations. Assume a
population has two alleles of each two genes (A,a and B,b) with A,a and B,b being each of
50% frequency, and one combination AB raises the trait. Thus, 1/4 of the population has AB.
Mixing this population with a population with two other alleles for these genes, D,d and
E,e, produces a population where the trait increasing combinations, AB and DE, occur in 1/8
of the population. Thus, the average of the trait decreases from mixing.
From this one can conclude that populations with a large number of alleles increasing
the trait has a lower average on the trait, like IQ in Sub Saharan Africa. In SSA genetic
diversity is high and thus there are many alleles of all genes. While in East Asia genetic
diversity is lower than in Europe and the IQ trait is higher. Indeed, if we plot genetic
diversity against average IQ we should get more or less a Piffer plot, a straight line.
This would come from a PGS being not additive but a combination of pairs of two (or more)
IQ genes. To support this idea, notice that additive positive alleles should make a sweep
and become fixed and the variance at the both ends of the trait should be small because the
distribution converges to normal. But this is not so, we do not have populations with
average IQ of 150, while we have very tall or very short dog races produced by selection.
It indicates that the height trait is additive but IQ is not additive.
From this idea it follows that ethnocentrism is higher in populations with low genetic
diversity, average values of traits are higher in populations with low genetic diversity
(as natural selection cannot act if diversity is high: descendants too seldom inherit the
trait of the parents). It would follow that East Asians are ethnocentric, have a higher IQ
and low diversity. They would still like to mix with people possessing the trait they
admire (white skin), so it is not a contradiction. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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RobRich says: •
WebsiteMay 27, 2019
at 8:36 am GMT • 100 Words @Colin
Wright Good point. As libertarians point out the US grew 30-fold with relatively open
borders then tripled that with variations of the current more restrictive but open to
extended family/high achievers (Have a close relative, great invention or a million bucks to
invest in the US? To the head of the line! Otherwise take a number, BTW the waiting list is
100 years long–good luck!) still pretty open compared to most countries. By 1970 is was
near a 100-fold, not 50-fold, growth, so your case is even better. Read More Reply
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Some, such as the natives of Hawaii and the Inuit were noted as being extremely
friendly,
Didn't Capt.Cook get killed and eaten by those "friendly," natives of Hawaii? Read More
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micheal8 says: May 27, 2019
at 12:32 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron Unz
There are lots of apocryphal data saying many things about the Chinese over history.
Of course, in the US of 330 million people at least 46.6 million are foreign born (by far the
highest number of any country, according to Wikipedia).
China has a population of a billion or so, but less than a million foreign born. This despite
the dramatic improvement in their culture and economics.
So over 14% of the US population are foreign born vs 0.1% of Chinese. One can argue as to the
basis for this difference, but almost all nations are restrictive on accepting immigrants,
unless they provide value.
Would seem the Chinese are similar to the Japanese (who are now absorbing more foreigners due
to a shortage of young workers), who will not tolerate big changes in their society or mores
unless brought about internally. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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Catiline says: May 27, 2019
at 12:36 pm GMT Andrew Joyce are you back on Twitter? Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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While coming from a similarly ancient civilization I suspect Jews found less ability to
trade or profit in China than Europe which is why less of them gravitated there than to
Europe.
Jews did not really make much of an impact in India either.
I suspect that because money-lending was never a crime in China or India, there was not
much of living in either of those countries for Jews compared to Europe where they
thrived.
Jews in America arrived as Edison was inventing the film camera and industrialization
required many lawyers, bankers and so on. China never needed these. Read More •
Replies: @Wizard of
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david fields says:
May 27,
2019 at 12:56 pm GMT • 200 Words @Thulean
Friend I tend to agree with Unz, that Chinese are quite open to mixing with and/or
assimilating other ethnic groups. Apart from the well-known examples of Manchus and
Mongols, a large community of Jews migrated to China during the Middle Ages and settled in
Kaifeng, China where they gradually and non-violently assimilated. If one observes the
behavior of Chinese-Americans in the U.S., a large plurality if not a majority marry
Caucasians within one or two generations, usually with little opposition from their
families.
For a literary work that touches on of this Chinese cultural trait, I refer readers to
James McKenna's excellent novel, "The Sandpebbles", which was based on his experience in
the U.S. Navy in China in the 1920s. At that time was not unusual for retiring navy
enlisted men to settle down in China, often with a Chinese woman. To paraphrase a line from
the novel, 'For the Chinese, it's quite natural for a foreigner to become a Chinese'. Read
More • Replies: @the grand
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Ethnocentrism is not a directly selected for thing – it is unfortunate that HBD
promoters no longer understand second-order effects.
To HBD people, every trait is a simplistic directly selected for thing, not a second or
third order effect of some other trait.
This is a sign of the declining intelligence of our times, this inability to think
complexly.
Anyways, ethnocentrism is a second order effect of egoism – you love yourself, you
love your group. Your group is just a version of yourself.
An ethnocentric society is also a highly competitive and stratified by status one
internally, because it is a society with a high level of egoism – when whites were
ethnocentric, it was the same way with them. And it's the same way in other ethnocentric
societies like China.
The reason whites went from being an intensely ethnocentric group to not being one in
the space of less than a century has nothing to do with genetics, of course, but because
they lost the egocentric perspective – partly as a result of loss of religion, which
inculcated positive self image (one is in a relationship with God), and partly as a result
of the so called objectivity and neutrality required by science, which makes you lose touch
with your natural self love.
If whites ever become ethnocentric again, there will have to be a general rise in
competitiveness also.
Of course, the picture is not one dimensional, and is balanced out by warmth,
camaraderie, and brotherhood. Israelis are fiercely competitive with each other but also
extremely brotherly and helpful to anyone in need.
And whites will be the same way if they become ethnocentric again – but let there
be no illusions about the bad side as well. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Anon [282] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 2:28 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron
Unz It all depends if the other group is thought to be *higher* or *lower* , higher and
lower meaning what they quite universally mean in human business.
See how well a vast number of races are absorbed in China
(Corollary 1: a group seeing itself as *above* all others will avoid intermixing with
every other group).
I don't venture into saying this is wrong this is right these are better those are
worse. Behind the surface, everyone agrees to the rules of the game. Read More Reply
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 2:53 pm GMT • 100 Words @Ron
Unz Individual Jewish communities, especially in extremely remote locations without
connections to the rest of the world, have disappeared. That's not at all unusual. And Jews
have been assimilating into gentile populations throughout history.
Plus, the Jews of Kaifeng have not entirely disappeared.
But I agree with your point that Chinese can and do assimilate racial outsiders –
all ethnocentric groups do. There are Chinese and Indian looking Jews in Israel, and of
course conversion to Judaism is a very real thing.
I cannot think of any ethnocentric group that isn't prepared to assimilate racial
outsiders in the right numbers, provided they demonstrate commitment to the culture –
skin in the game – and aren't numerous enough to rapidly alter the racial character.
Read More • Replies: @jeff
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We do see a detente in politics. Jews and Irish-Americans initially distrusted and
disliked one another. Southern Democrats, who produced Clinton and Carter, obviously
harbored anti-Jewish feelings (The word anti-Semite refers more to Arabs).
However, Irish-Americans and Jews and Southerners worked together in the Democrat party.
Without the Jewish vote, Clinton would never have been elected (He was undone by his
involvement with one, however).
In this sense, ethnocentrism was replaced by politics.
As for the white identity in America, it was always based upon a value system. Whites
were from all corners of Europe and never bound by blood but by a sense of political and
moral identity.
Once this was gone, whites had no cultural anchor. Asians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and
Italian-Americans to a lesser extent always had a cultural anchor of sorts. White
Americans, for whatever reason, did not seem to. When drugs swept through America,
encouraged by Jews (As well as by Irish-Americans like Timothy Leary and Charles Manson of
course) they ravaged whites and not Jews. BEASTIE BOYS were the first "whiggers" but Jews
never sought to imitate them. Ron Jeremy and Sarah Silverman and Al Goldstein all espoused
sexual freedom and promiscuity but the out-of-wedlock birth rate never soared among
Jews.
Similarly, Asians-Americans and Hindus and Muslims have not really be affected by the
media like whites.
These are only a few of the reasons. But I agree with you that science (Rationalism and
passivity) somehow eroded belief systems essential to European-Americans. Read More •
Replies: @John
Gruskos , @AaronB
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In a number of societies Jews did not particularly thrive. For example, in Calcutta the
Iraqi Jews failed completely and most moved to Israel simply in order to survive
economically (Not due to persecution).
I knew Jews in Kerala personally and they had fared slightly better by intermarrying
with Brahmin women to become the so-called St. Thomas Christians.
But Jews have come and gone from several major civilizations without making a great
impact.
European Jews were, you remember, just that. Sometime after the Diaspora they
intermarried with Roman women at a time when Rome was in the late stages of its glory and
the Askenazi Jews as a race began and subsequently found themselves in the Rhineland as
this rose in prominence.
Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
This is debatable. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
, @notanon2
, @Anon
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By very willingly accepting and incorporating newcomers, it increased in size roughly
fifty-fold, and grew to be the most powerful state in the world.
Wrong!
Most of the increase was due to high birth rate among old stock Americans, which was in
turn due to affordable family formation (low land prices / high wages).
The highest % increases ever recorded in the decennial census occurred 1790-1830, during
a period of very low immigration levels.
America would have become the world's greatest economic and military power, even if the
total number of immigrants from 1780 to 1970 had been precisely 0. Read More • Agree:
Ron
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for whatever reason . . . somehow eroded belief systems essential to
European-Americans
Read Culture of Critique .
American (aka real American, aka un-hyphenated American, aka old-stock American, aka
White American) ethnocentrism was deliberately attacked and destroyed by a series of Jewish
intellectual and political movements, with the intention of facilitating the group
interests of Jews.
The education system, news media and entertainment industry are all viscerally hostile
to American ethnocentrism, but supportive of the ethnocentrism of diaspora peoples living
among the Americans, especially the Jews. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This
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Wizard of Oz says:
May 27,
2019 at 3:45 pm GMT • 100 Words @jeff
stryker It may be pedantically logical to say so, but I think what you are effectually
doing is to deny significance to what Ron said by saying there weren't really very many of
them (because of lack of opportunity for exercosing their particular skills).
As to your last paragraph, what bearing do you think it has on the assimilation, past,
present and future, in America. It could be said that the value added by lawyers and
bankers in industrialising America was very different from the activities in Eastern Europe
which, with or without justice, aroused antagonism. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 4:07 pm GMT • 300 Words @jeff
stryker I'm not sure about that. I believe the Iraqi Jews who traded in India were very
successful, and Iraqi Jews in Israel have a good reputation. I believe the extremely
wealthy British Sasoon family were Iraqi Jews who made their fortune in the India trade.
Interestingly, Iraqi Jews took over many Indian dishes like curry and mango chutney
(known as amba in Israel, and put on schwarma).
The Syrian and Persian Jewish community were also very successful, and Jews had a Golden
Age in Spain.
You are correct though that nowhere did the Jews achieve the same level of prominence as
in post 18th century Europe – and the reason is obviously the European Enlightenment,
which enshrined the rule of Reason and destroyed healthy traditions that allowed Europeans
to compete against Jews.
Before this period, Jewish success in Europe was on par with their performance in Syria
or Persia – successful, but nothing amazing.
And yes, Ashkenazi Jews are indeed actually 50% European (90% and up on the mothers
side), Italian, to be specific, with northern European admixture.
There is a surprising number of Hasidic Jews who look Aryan – tall, blond, and
blue eyed. And if you stroll through the Hasidic areas of Brooklyn you will see lots of
blond kids with blue eyes and pale skin. But there are lots of darker Med types as
well.
The truth is that each Jewish community mixed heavily with the local population –
very heavily – and Jews are anything but a pure ethnic group.
There is an ethnic core, to be sure – but what really shapes them and unites them
is the culture and religion. That's what it takes to make a people and nation. Read More
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 4:19 pm GMT • 300 Words @jeff
stryker This isn't quite true. I grew up in the modern orthodox community in Brooklyn
in the 90s, and heavy drug use was extremely widespread even among kippa wearing religious
Jews, and indeed all sorts of dysfunction including wild parties and sex. It was truly wild
times – today's kids are so much tamer all across America.
Perhaps it wasn't as bad as in the white community today, and the drugs were different
but not always, but Jews are not magically insulated from social trends.
However, most of these guys that I knew are married with kids and jobs today –
Jewish culture, with its traditions, social cohesiveness, and general rejection of abstract
Enlightenment culture, provided a level of protection and resilience that deracinated and
de-culturalized whites do not have, tragically.
These are only a few of the reasons. But I agree with you that science (Rationalism
and passivity) somehow eroded belief systems essential to European-Americans.
This really key to understanding what's going on with whites, and you understand this
because you live in Asia, and can see a more organic culture first hand.
The solution is simple but very daring and bold – simply relax the role of
rational and abstract thought in life, and an organic culture based on intuition and
different ways of engaging with the world will begin to spontaneously regenerate itself
among whites.
Simply acknowledge human powerlessness and dependence on God.
But this is extremely difficult to do for people addicted to ego and control, and
probably a real collapse is needed before they are willing to accept the help of a higher
power. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Grace Poole says:
May 27,
2019 at 5:02 pm GMT • 200 Words I listened closely to several of Dutton's videos
-- he's gifted and highly knowledgeable; it would be great to see Dutton & E Michael
Jones at a grand conference, UNZpac USA.
re his, Why do the Irish have a low IQ? (93 compared to British 100)
Among other things, he argues that
a. it takes intelligence to migrate
b. the Potato famine induced massive migration; -- the best Irishmen left Ireland
At the same time, I'm trying to get some work done on a house, and in my region, only
Hispanics/Latinos do this work. I'd hire an English-speaking tradesman if I could find
same, but I can't.
The painter, electrician and wannabe carpenters working on my property do not speak
English and understand only rudimentary English; they neither read nor write -- preparing a
prioritized list for their use is pointless. They possess a certain group canniness -- the
painter suggests the electrician, etc., and they are diligent about their work. But
Honduras is not experiencing a brain-drain based on these men.
So I wonder if Dutton got it wrong in some fundamental way: Was the Potato famine
pursued and prolonged by the British precisely to drive cheap labor to Anglo-America, and /
or to pursue the Talmudic dictum, Kill all the best gentiles?
That is pretty close to what we are slowly slowly discovering happened to the German
(and Italian -- thanks, Guido Preparata) people and nation.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/TFqCiJOpWhk?feature=oembed @notanon2
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AaronB says: May 27,
2019 at 5:05 pm GMT • 100 Words @Bardon
Kaldian Presumably, those Israeli children are seeing racially similar people. So the
response was not to different race people, but to strangers.
Secondly, Israeli culture is no doubt quite different, closely at war with a neighboring
people and subject to periodic terrorist attacks, and infants are conditioned differently
at an early age.
This does not say anything about genetic differences. Read More Reply
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Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
nepotism is one aspect of ethnocentrism.
if group A is more nepotistic than group B then they gain an advantage in small scale
competition (e.g. business) .
Jews in India/China etc hit a wall cos their competitors was the same as them –
this is the thing, Jewish nepotism isn't unusual, most peoples are like that, WEIRD peoples
are the odd ones out.
(this is why they're starting to get out-competed in the US particularly by Indians)
nb ethnocentrism operates at different scales – in peacetime most "ethnic"
competition is very small scale i.e. two extended families competing over a business
opportunity. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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But if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly
100% ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity
ever evolve or be maintained? Wouldn't they be about as useful as wings on a gopher?
But most people across the world lived like this, so the whole genetic ethnocentrism or
non ethnocentrism thing seems like it doesn't really make sense. Most Swedish people
probably never saw a non European, and most Anatolian Turks probably never saw a non Turk,
and most Omani Arabs likewise.
Only a very few groups would have had the chance, for relatively short periods, to live
in cosmopolitan cities are areas with clear racial fault lines.
Ethmocentrism is surely a second-order effect and an acquired cultural trait. It also
doesn't make sense that Europeans went from being intensely ethnocentric to very little in
the space of a century. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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anonymous [145] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 5:14 pm GMT • 200 Words It is not a race/ethnicity specific thing; it
is an in-group thing. It is also very much tied to cultural unity.
Why is modern Christianity so entirely lacking in ability to promote any kind of
ethnocentrism?
Europeans lost faith in Christianity after WW2. In 1945, Europe was in ruins with
millions dead, after having fought yet another war that supposedly nobody ever wanted.
People turned inwards and reflected on the past 500 years of European history. There were
numerous wars between Christian states and between Christians and non-Christians. There was
the age of exploration, slavery, colonialism, conquistadors, etc. Christianity itself was
not necessarily blamed, but it didn't need to be; it was just enough that it was associated
with the entire time period. And in 1945, whether rightly or wrongly, these associations
were overwhelmingly negative. Christianity has remained in Europe, of course, but these
days certain aspects are emphasized ("love thy neighbor", "turn the other cheek") over
others. Even secular Europeans still retain certain Christian values which are then
conveniently incorporated into their acceptance of mass immigration.
In comparison, Christianity in the US still retains an aspect of being a force for local
unity in a way that has been lost in Europe. Recent American conflicts have usually been
subtly framed as being a triumph of Christian America over atheist commies or Muslims. Of
course, I am sure that it is just a coincidence that this exists to the benefit of a
certain tribe. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter Display All
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I don't think I buy this theory about low European ethnocentricity at all. I think
it's all the rich degenerate elites who are to blame for the "decline" in
ethnocentricity.
my understanding of ethnocentricity is although it's always there, unless people are
under a direct threat it is a relatively weak force except at the scale where people are
most related e.g. extended family, clan etc and to be a big factor at higher scales it
needs cultural reinforcement.
in the past western elites promoted that cultural reinforcement whereas now they do the
opposite.
so i think euros did gradually get less ethnocentric but it was disguised because the
elites compensated for it artificially with patriotic cultural reinforcement and then when
the elites suddenly stopped (from WW1 onwards) the underlying low ethnocentricity remained.
Read More • Replies: @Cyrano
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re his, Why do the Irish have a low IQ? (93 compared to British 100)
based on personal experience i both believe and disbelieve this data.
one of the things you notice if you ever work in areas with lots of blue collar
immigrants is the kids are taller and smarter than the parents even if they're marrying
other immigrants from the same place.
keyword: same?
i worked construction (a long time ago) with people from rural Ireland so yeah i can see
where the 93 figure comes from but at the same time I worked with the kids or grand kids of
same and they were "normal" so i think there's a rural inbreeding effect which is being
missed – not inbreeding in the sense of actively marrying close cousins but a long
term effect of people in the same valley marrying each other for so many centuries they're
all effectively close cousins and all it takes to get rid of negative homozygous effects is
marrying someone from the next valley.
i think there's potentially big jumps in average IQ between rural and urban for this
reason and differences in average IQ between genetically similar populations may often be
the result of differences in the ratio of urban : rural : mountain rural. Read More Reply
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Anon [421] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 5:41 pm GMT@Colin
Wright English:
"a language is a dialect with an army and navy"
Yiddish:
"a shprakh iz a dyalekt mit an armey aum yam – flot
German:
Eine Sprache ist ein Dialekt mit einer Armee und einer Marine
A comparison of three Germanic languages; where's the supposed Slavic? Read More Reply
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 5:51 pm GMT • 300 Words @Wizard of
Oz Multiculturalism was invented in lieu of real Socialism – in order to avoid
it. They even borrowed the main mantra from socialism – "We are all equal".
Socialism is about equality, not capitalism. When you hear capitalist talk about
equality you have to know that there is some kind of scam involved.
The whole idea of multiculturalism stinks of Nazi Germany influence. They were the first
to use the term "socialism" for propaganda purposes and the same thing is with the
multiculturalism – it was created for purely propaganda purposes to portray the west
as progressive and liberal – in order to prevent demand for social improvements.
What makes things funnier is that both the Nazis and present day "democracies" were
sworn enemies of socialism – as being the "evil" system, yet when they want to fake
humanization of their system, they borrow elements from socialism. Is than irony or
what?
They are obviously lying about socialism being the "evil" system, because with their
actions they admit that the only way capitalism can progress – is toward socialism.
Now, I am not advocating conversion towards total socialism – that has been tried
– it didn't quite work out. But the improvements that need to be made in capitalism
have to be borrowed from socialism – the only other option is to borrow from
feudalism and that's not going to work either.
"Real" socialism advocated equality among nations and among people within a nation
– provided they stayed where they are. The modern Frankenstein of socialism that they
created in the West with chopped up body parts of socialism, misaligned them and breathed
into the monster the holy spirit of capitalism and they expected it to work.
How can you achieve "equality" by bringing hordes from the 3rd world when you haven't
achieved equality among the original, native born population? But that's the whole point
– isn't it – to pretend that you are striving for some kind of equality,
because you don't want the native born population to move one inch closer to being equal
with the rich elites. Read More • Replies: @notanon2
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if you and almost all of your ancestors have lived all of their lives in a nearly 100%
ethnically-pure social environment, how would any tendencies toward ethnocentricity ever
evolve or be maintained?
i think people are assuming the "ethno" part of ethnocentricity developed at and for the
ethnic group scale whereas i think it mostly came into being at the clan or extended family
level.
those evolved traits can then be culturally reinforced to operate at the ethnic group
level depending on various factors
– inclination of elites to promote that cultural reinforcement
– how actually related the group is at the group level
– peace or war Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 6:13 pm GMT • 100 Words @notanon2
So what are you saying, that in order to strengthen ethnic bonds, they should organize
pow-wows? Ethnic bonds are as strong as ever in Europe.
The rich elites are ruining societies in order to preserve their personal wealth.
If they want to test how strong are the ethnic ties, why not one single country which is
now under threat of multiculturalism has organized a referendum on immigration? Then you'll
find out how strong the ethnic bonds are.
But I guess "democracy" was only designed to let you choose which clown from the deep
state you want to entertain you in the next 4 years. You were never asked for opinion on
things that really matter.
Every western country should organize "Brexit" style referendum on such a crucial issue
which threatens the survival of the state – immigration. Read More • Replies:
@notanon2
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Multiculturalism was invented in lieu of real Socialism
the multicult was invented cos slavery was abolished and Emma Lazarus' family needed a
new source of cheap labor. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This
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That is the general area where The Pale of Settlement was established hundred of years
later by the Jews Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread
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So what are you saying, that in order to strengthen ethnic bonds, they should organize
pow-wows?
the elites used to actively promote patriotism to reinforce ethnocentricity but now they
promote anti-nationalism.
Ethnic bonds are as strong as ever in Europe.
they're still strong in south and east Europe but less so in NW Europe.
The rich elites are ruining societies in order to preserve their personal wealth.
yes partly that but also partly an anti-nationalist reaction to the world wars because
Europeans developed technology that made war dysgenic even for the winners.
If they want to test how strong are the ethnic ties, why not one single country which
is now under threat of multiculturalism has organized a referendum on immigration? Then
you'll find out how strong the ethnic bonds are.
imo the level of overt ethocentricity displayed by a population will be a combination
of
– baseline level
– the level of elite reinforcement (or not)
– the level of external threat
so yes even with a low baseline and the elites actively suppressing the normal reaction
to being replaced in your own homeland, being replaced is clearly enough of a threat to get
people to vote against it in a referendum but so far not enough to force politicians to put
it to a referendum.
so far all most people do is move away. this may change when there's nowhere left to
run. Read More • Replies: @Vianney
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Vianney says: May 27,
2019 at 8:48 pm GMT • 100 Words @notanon2
The trials by NY Jewish lawyers of Alt Right protesters in Charlottesville COULD serve as a
referendum if a few, or better yet, a group or Law School summoned the cajones to argue on
the side of American heritage.
It's Thomas Jefferson's city, fer chrissake, that is being reduced to "remember Munich"
status.
No mere happenstance.
Is there no one left in Charlottesville with enough pride to snatch up and raise high
the American flag rather than the blue 6-star? Read More • Replies: @notanon2
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notanon2 says: May 27, 2019
at 9:12 pm GMT@Vianney
given the education system only went fully anti-white c. 10 years ago the people who
understand what is happening and have (or will have) the skills to fight back in the courts
are probably still in college or only recently left. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 10:16 pm GMT • 300 Words @Ron
Unz Chinese have lived in Southeast Asia since the 1800's, yet in virtually all SEA
countries, they remain distinct as an ethnic group, rarely intermarry with non-Chinese.
Growing up as an ethnic Chinese minority in Malaysia, I was taught to believe that the
Chinese were the superior race, compared to the lazy, low IQ Malays or Indians.
Since immigrating to the US in my teens in the 80's, I have watched with alarm how much
immigration from mainland China has grown in the US in the last 2 decades. My mixed race
kids tell me the Chinese kids in school tell them their mainland Chinese parents always
tell them "China #1!", and they wonder why their parents moved to the US (the answer:
because they are all corrupt and need to get out with their ill gotten gains before they
get thrown in jail). Chinese ethnocentrism is real and it is ugly.
However, as with all generalization, there are always exceptions and I am one such. I've
grown to despise my own tribe over the last 4 decades. I see how the Chinese behave the
world over, whether they are the majority or minority, they are greedy, selfish, dishonest,
rude, loud, clannish and have excessive ethnic pride, which causes many to completely lack
introspection. They are also a filthy tribe who does not take care of their environment,
their yard, and lack any kind of civic mindedness. The Cantonese are an especially
obnoxious tribe among the Chinese, absolutely abominable.
I think fewer Chinese is a good thing for the world. My tribe needs to die out, either
through childlessness or intermarriage. The world will be a better place. Read More Reply
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mcohen says: May 27,
2019 at 10:30 pm GMT • 100 Words "Those who advocate Multiculturalism seem to have
lost an important instinct towards group -- and thus genetic -- preservation. Once a
society, as a whole, espouses Multiculturalism as a dominant ideology then the society is
acting against its own genetic interests and will ultimately destroy itself."
Ed Dutton
Bullshit.inbreeding leads to retardation and genetic diseases
As defined
inbreed
/ɪnˈbriːd/
verb
gerund or present participle: inbreeding
breed from closely related people or animals, especially over many generations.
"persistent inbreeding has produced an unusually high frequency of sufferers from this
disease" Read More • Replies: @anon
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the grand wazoo says:
May 27, 2019
at 10:33 pm GMT • 100 Words @david
fields I doubt the Chinese, or Asians in general are quick to assimilate by marriage. How
many mixed couples, i.e. Asian/White, Asian/Black, do we see. Not many and closer to none,
even here in liberal metro LA. I was at a party in Palos Verdes, Ca. the other day. There
were a number of Asian couples present, but not 1 mixed. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 10:38 pm GMT • 200 Words @Cyrano
Lack of ethnocentrism in whites is almost entirely caused by the last 5 decades of
relentless Jewish brainwashing and browbeating through their control of the media and the
education establishment. Jews have beaten white guilts into the white psyche to the point
where whites are either afraid to express their true feelings or are completely brainwashed
into believing in their own evilness. It's a real shame as Northern Europeans especially
from Germany and Scandinavia are probably the best race: intelligent, industrious, and
quite possibly the only truly honest people on earth.
European countries are the most beautiful places on earth not because they are the
richest -- many Europeans actually live quite modestly by American standards, they live in
small apartments or homes and don't make that much money compared to many upper middle
class professionals in the US, but they take care of their environments. They build
beautiful homes, grow beautiful gardens and yards, keep their environments clean and tidy,
and obey the law. It makes their societies look rich by comparison.
People in other parts of the world need to take a page from the Northern Europeans and
take better care of their environments. Beautiful places put people in better moods, and
make them want to be better people, e.g. more honest and law abiding. Read More •
Replies: @Cyrano
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anon [297] • Disclaimer says: May 27,
2019 at 10:46 pm GMT@mcohen I
agree, therefore all Jews should be forced to interbreed exclusively with Nigerians to solve
their severe inbreeding problem. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter
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For various reasons, Jews have traditionally been exceptionally resistant to
absorption into local populations, remaining as a distinct group sometimes after
thousands of years of living within a particular host population.
Throughout ancient Europe, Jews were not allowed to own land and were often despised as
the money lenders throughout the diaspora. I don't know how hard it would've been for the
Jews to ditch Judaism, adopt Christianity, intermarry and completely assimilate with the
native Europeans, but at least the Spaniards had tried to get them to do that, to no avail.
I can only surmise that the Jewish religion is a very strong religion that keeps the Jews
believing out of fear or a strong sense of kinship.
However, many Jews in the US have become secular, yet continue to identify as Jews.
Perhaps this is because membership has its privileges, Jews help out other Jews in
business, academia, politics etc. But lately I'm thinking it has a lot to do with Israel.
There seems to be more and more "Holocaust Museums" being built all over the west. Who is
building them? Nearly 80m died in WWII, yet all we ever hear about are the 6m. Israel
depends on support from the diaspora to survive, esp. those in the US, both financially and
politically, so they continue to fan up the Holocaust to keep Jews loyal to the tribe, even
as the influence of Judaism wanes. As such, as long as Israel is still around, Jews will
never fully assimilate to whichever country they live in, because Israel wouldn't let them.
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Anon [427] • Disclaimer says: May
27, 2019 at 11:05 pm GMT@Ghali
Multicultural societies are all failed societies, dysfunctional, chaotic, dog-eat-dog,
every man for himself, everybody hates everybody. Just look at Malaysia or Brazil.
The US is turning into Brazil x 10, with nukes. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc.
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Parsnipitous says:
May 27, 2019
at 11:07 pm GMT@obwandiyag
You're such an idiot, Obi Wan. I don't mind the leftist/antiracist bent, but you're making
such poor arguments. What is your connection here? You getting paid? Read More Reply
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Cyrano says: May 27,
2019 at 11:20 pm GMT • 100 Words @Anon
Here we go about the Jews again. Can we leave them out of at least one conversation?
Ethnocentrism is "losing strength" today because it's actively suppressed by the elites.
They do this by equating ethnocentrism with racism and accusing only the deplorables of
being racists, while they – the rich degenerates are so above it.
The elites implemented multiculturalism because it's the cheapest form of "socialism".
Cheapest for them – it didn't cost them a penny, in the long run Multiculturalism is
going to be the most expensive and destructive form of phony socialism for each country
that embraced it. Read More • Replies: @Time to
Wake Up , @Vianney
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Jews probably NEVER fared as well in Spain or India or China or Persia as they did in
Europe. Why?
Jews did well in Europe because the native Europeans are honest and easy to rip off. The
dishonest always make the honest look stupid by comparison.
But the Spaniards, Indians, Chinese, Persians are as dishonest and unscrupulous as the
Jews, so they have no advantage over these groups. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Time to Wake Up says:
May 27, 2019
at 11:58 pm GMT@Cyrano
Yep, the (((elites))) wanted multiculturalism. When every group is an outgroup, (((they)))
will no longer stick out as the only outgroup and be easily called out for all their
treacheries. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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Vianney says: May 28,
2019 at 12:23 am GMT • 100 Words @Cyrano
Jewish-designed, intended and enforced brain washing -- they, themselves, call it
psychological warfare, is an historical fact and a present reality.
There may be other groups or causal factors responsible for breakdown of
ethnocentricism, but Jewish ideology and praxis ranks at or near the top of the list.
It's foolish and self-destructive to ignore an accurate diagnosis out of fear of
'offending the Jew.' That is a Jewish defense mechanism. A soldier does not refrain from
dispatching an adversary just because the adversary calls him names. Read More Reply
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Agathocles says:
May 28,
2019 at 12:25 am GMT • 300 Words We should recognise that within Europe there is
significant disparities in levels of ethno-centrism. For example, the Greek belief in the
superiority of its culture compared to others (somewhat of a proxy of ethno-centrism) is
through the roof compared to northern and western Europe.
Despite being one of history's most important trading people, being in a part of the
world which is not isolated and also having been colonised by Muslim Turks for 400 or so
years, Greeks have retained remarkable consistency in their genetic composition with only
relatively small intrusions of Slavic ancestry primarily in Macedonia and some Levantine
intrusions in Cyprus.
The key to ethnocentricity, which is not addressed by many, is a strong and stable
family structure as ethnicity is largely passed on by genes and family education. Of
course, state education is also critical. And Greeks again show some of the healthiest
signs in the developed world on this front. Children born out of wedlock in the two
Hellenic states of Greece and Cyprus are very low.
Of course, even the Greek family is not immune to modern lifestyle-related diseases as
witnessed by the low birthrate.
As for state education, although the Greek state has sometimes been disorganised,
wherever Greeks go, they establish two things first: a church and school often with the
support of the Greek state. Both institutions are key vehicles for the perpetuation of
ethno-centric values Read More • Replies: @utu
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utu
says: May 28, 2019
at 12:44 am GMT@Agathocles
And Greeks have been ranked with the highest in Europe anti-Semitism index by ADL. Read More
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Similarly Chinese cannot get over on Koreans or Japanese like they can on Southeast
Asians. Why? Because they have the same characteristics as Chinese.
Makes sense the Jews fared less well in Southern Europe getting over on wary and shrewd
Sicilians or Spanish. Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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But I agree with your general point – Jewish dominance after the Enlightenment is
only because northern Europeans made themselves vulnerable to group competition.
This is undoubtedly correct. Read More • Replies: @jeff
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Jews had their Abbie Hoffmans (A real charmer who once doled out advice on how crash Bar
Mitzvah's in STEAL THIS BOOK) and their whiggers (BEASTIE BOYS made EMINEM look positively
sophisticated) and their sexual degenerates (Goldstein, Ron Jeremy, Sarah Silverman).
But Jews never regarded these people as examples of any kind. They merely regarded them
as degenerates who HAPPENED to be Jewish.
Similarly, crack cocaine's popularity affected Jews in the boroughs of New York as well.
But statistically less.
As for wild teenage behavior among whites or Jews, this seemed to reach a peak in the
post-70's period of FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH and by 1983 dissipated during the Reagan
Revolution.
When one watches the original KARATE KID today their first thought is "where are the
police? Where's the principal?" Read More • Replies: @AaronB
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AaronB says: May 28,
2019 at 1:32 am GMT@jeff
stryker I have always despised the Beastie Boys, I can tell you that. Utterly talentless,
vulgar, hacks. Read More Reply Agree/Disagree/Etc. More... This Commenter This Thread Hide
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Spain is ostensibly easy to explain. There was less animosity between Muslims and Jews
at that time than between Muslims and Catholics, provided the Jews paid their taxes. Same
as the Maghreb. Which the Catholics were aware of and so expelled the Jews along with the
Muslims.
In addition to the Enlightenment is the European class system, from which Jews were
relatively free.
Whereas in Southern Europe, trade had existed in Rome for a long time. There was also
the issue of usury.
Whilst you are at it, prove that the Skripal poison / Novichok case was a fascicle fake
and blame Theresa May categorically, show proof, throw her in prison and throw away the
key.
Russiagate is definitely connected to military industrial complex. But it is also connect to
the attempt of neoliberal elite to cements cracks in the neoliberal facade of the US global
empire by using external scapegoat. British elite was traditionally Russophobic as they competed
for influence with Russia and tried to prevent alliance of Germany and Russia.
Notable quotes:
"... The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting evidence". ..."
"... Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned America's foreign policy in Ukraine. ..."
"... That's when this "Putin's candidate" stuff started among both Republicans and Democrats " egged on by Ukrainians " who almost certainly fed Steele the fake kompromat " in the dossier. ..."
"... Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who started this nonsense. ..."
Attorney General William Barr has turned the attention of the Russia probe to its origin.
Who started this and why? The answer, as in all the best crime dramas, is probably hiding in
plain sight.
The British aristocracy has a condescending view of the hoi polloi who voted for
Brexit, regarding them as easily manipulated Pygmalion-like by smarter people. They assumed
Vladimir Putin was somehow playing Professor Henry Higgins to the flower girls who voted to
reject the EU, because that's how they see the world. Among the Cambridge class, this simple
prejudice renders Russian collusion a first principle with no need for supporting
evidence".
Without supporting evidence to prove their fantastical worldview, the global elite set out
to manufacture some.
...
President Eisenhower " the furthest thing from a conspiracy theorist America has ever
produced " famously warned in his farewell address to beware "the military industrial
complex"
The great funding pipeline that makes Washington D.C. the wealthiest region in America feeds
mostly on military spending which still, nearly thirty years removed from the Cold War,
requires a Russian enemy.
Unconventional candidate Donald Trump " rattled Washington " to
its core in March 2016 when he wondered about NATO's continued relevance and questioned
America's foreign policy in Ukraine.
Russia may be a convenient boogeyman that serves as a necessary foil to both sides in
the Washington establishment. But, for once, let's fight the real enemy: the global elites who
started this nonsense.
Why all the fuss about Russia? Liberal elites – who tended to love the Soviet
Union – hate present day Russia, which dares to assert nationality and culture
against the pieties of the one-world-order crowd.
I can confirm. This is what American Leftist Operatives who travel to Russia to organize
coops, etc have told me.
Also note that, while Russia is the designated Villain, the real threat since the 1980s
onward has actually been the Chinese. But the up until now had managed to co-opt both Parties
via the doctrine of constructive engagement and NeoLiberal Free Trade.
"Make China prosperous and the factory of the world and then it will adopt Republican
Democracy!", they said.
Ya. Not so much.
Russia was the excuse to build the high tech fighters but no one dared to name China for
fear of losing financial support coming from industries now dependent on the good graces of
the Chinese Communist Party.
Thank your lucky stars that someone had the ability and ego to step in and expose this
mess for what it was.
The word "hysteria" isn't used nearly enough in analyses like these. Hysteria is almost
defined by the complete absence of thought or rationality, which characterizes the useful
idiots who are the target of this propaganda.
Our government is too easily manipulated to serve narrow interest groups (with money)
rather than the interest of the nation (as constuted) or of the people (who generally dont
have money). Also the legal system does not seem to be serving the law - has dispensed with
the concept of intent.
Those who strive to serve and benefit from interests of industry or foreign governments
should be investigated and tried for treason (where warranted)
The Bushes and Cheney and Hitlary should be tried for war crimes.
It is unclear whether May really wanted to implement Brexit deal but at least she negotiated several EU offers. It was UK
Parliament that rejects the offers.
I think May claim to fame might be not her failure in Brexit negotiation, but orchestration of infamous Skripals poisoning
false flag and the bout of Russophobia, as well as her attempt to interfere with the 2016 elections in the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... History will not be kind to Theresa May. By the standards she forthrightly set herself at the outset of her premiership, she has been a dismal failure. ..."
"... she became, in George Osborne's devastating phrase, "a dead woman walking". ..."
"... a political nonentity of such crushing mediocrity and insignificance that even when standing in direct sunlight she casts no shadow. A third-rate office manager elevated light years beyond her intellectual capacity, professional capabilities and pay grade. A national embarrassment and global laughing stock ..."
"... When May was elected Tory leader and hence prime minister, the field of choice was notable for its lightweight uniformity. ..."
"... the quality of leadership of the party has been modest at best for years. Among Tory leaders since the war, only Margaret Thatcher has managed to catch the climate of her time and impose her personality on a discernible period, however much one may deplore that climate and that period. ..."
"... What is striking about Conservative politics is that those who wish to hold onto power and wealth for their own class and who have the ambition and talent and imagination to make a difference do not go into politics. They become entrepreneurs, traders, speculators. There is too much regulation and self-abnegation in politics for such people. Look back over the leadership of the Tory party and you get to Harold Macmillan before you encounter anyone who came from a (brief) career in business. ..."
"... We are now told that she is "a patriot" – the last refuge of a political scoundrel – and that she has "tried her best", which was clearly grossly inadequate to the task ..."
"... The wars are over for Britain. Become a global reliable trading nation that honors contracts and business ties, the very elements that made Britain Great. It sure has not been the Wars especially the poodle wars. You laugh at May's tears and under performance but you may as well be looking at yourselves. ..."
"... Why should Britain be holding Venezuela Gold on behalf of Donald Trump? There is no yield in this, there is no value but a soiled reputation as an unreliable trader. Banks in Britain should be honest dealers not playing politics with contracts. ..."
"... It's not clear that all MI5/MI6 operatives are remainers. I suspect they are as divided as everyone else. The gang who attacked Trump simply did it because it was business and not personal. They even outsourced to Steele because they thought it might be cheaper. Outsourcing is perceived as cool in government circles and makes people feel good about themselves. It's the deep state offering value for money. ..."
"... May has done precisely what she was tasked to do by the Establishment: First to "negotiate" a Withdrawal deal that "Only the loser of a major war would agree to" after wasting two years, then do everything else possible to delay Brexit as long as possible and water it down to the point that the UK would even with a "delivered Brexit" still essentially be bound to the EU indefinitely. ..."
"... The final irony here is that it is ultimately only Parliament's duplicity and treachery, in spite of the fact that Parliament desperately wanted to ensure the UK "Remain", which has prevented her and the Globalists from achieving their goals through what they believed to be a process of "subtle subterfuge". ..."
"... She will indeed go down in history as a footnote of no significance or perhaps as the PM who showed the greatest betrayal of the British people on behalf of the Establishment ..."
History will not be kind to Theresa May. By the standards she forthrightly set herself
at the outset of her premiership, she has been a dismal failure. She proposed that,
contrary to most impartial expectation, she would be a socially liberal prime minister who
would strive to relieve the economic pressure on the poorest members of British society (the
briefly famous "just about managing"), but the only small concessions towards the relief of
poverty that have been wrung from her government have done nothing to reduce the incidence of
homelessness, food banks and wage rates that undershoot the demands made by private landlords,
services starved of funds and price rises.
And that's without even mentioning Brexit.
Following the self-inflicted disaster of the 2017 general election, in which May utterly
failed to project herself with any conviction as "strong and stable", she became, in George
Osborne's devastating phrase, "a dead woman walking".
That campaign was the most complacent, least effective ever fought by a major political
party in Britain, and the only explanation for the media's astonishment at the result can be
that editors and columnists had so convinced themselves that they had rendered Jeremy Corbyn,
in their description of choice, "unelectable" that they could see no outcome other than a
thumping Tory victory. What they could not see was that Corbyn is an inspired and inspiring
campaigner, while May is as dull as ditchwater.
The social media commentator Aidan Daley summed her up admirably: "Mayvis: a political
nonentity of such crushing mediocrity and insignificance that even when standing in direct
sunlight she casts no shadow. A third-rate office manager elevated light years beyond her
intellectual capacity, professional capabilities and pay grade. A national embarrassment and
global laughing stock ".
This unsparing but unarguable buttonholing raises a historical problem for the Conservative
Party that shows no sign of quick resolution. When May was elected Tory leader and hence
prime minister, the field of choice was notable for its lightweight uniformity. Given the
length of her cabinet experience, May clearly outshone her rivals, if not in charisma (a
quality conspicuously lacking from the field). But the quality of leadership of the party
has been modest at best for years. Among Tory leaders since the war, only Margaret Thatcher has
managed to catch the climate of her time and impose her personality on a discernible period,
however much one may deplore that climate and that period.
What is striking about Conservative politics is that those who wish to hold onto power
and wealth for their own class and who have the ambition and talent and imagination to make a
difference do not go into politics. They become entrepreneurs, traders, speculators. There is
too much regulation and self-abnegation in politics for such people. Look back over the
leadership of the Tory party and you get to Harold Macmillan before you encounter anyone who
came from a (brief) career in business.
Comparing May with Thatcher and Macmillan is instructive.
May has failed to create any sort of arresting public persona for herself. Aside from the
tiresome bromide "Brexit means Brexit", she has turned no phrase that immediately summons her
to mind. Who could essay her political philosophy, other than hanging on grimly against
insuperable odds and paying heed to no advice?
She has no imagination, no resourcefulness, no wit and no management skills. When pressed,
she retreats to prepared responses, regardless of their irrelevance to the question in hand.
We are now told that she is "a patriot" – the last refuge of a political scoundrel
– and that she has "tried her best", which was clearly grossly inadequate to the
task .
The mainstream media will be eternally grateful to her for betraying emotion at the end of
her resignation statement, thereby providing the "human interest" angle that cements the moment
in history and will be trotted out in every story about the May premiership for ever after,
much like Thatcher's tear-stained face in the back of the limo as it pulled away from Downing
Street for the last time. Whether this emotion sits appropriately with the "dignity" that her
admirers are rushing to credit to her is a question for others to ponder.
Attention now turns to her successor. Vast though the field is, it is again notable for its
lightweight nature. Smart money will be on Rory Stewart, already a media darling and a
politician unusually capable of sounding thoughtful and candid. He also has the advantage of
having led a colourful pre-politics life, thereby bringing instincts to his politics from
beyond the confines of career consultants and spads. But most speculation centres on Boris
Johnson, despite the high level of suspicion that he generates among Tory MPs. He is said to be
enthusiastically supported at the grassroots.
In this as in other aspects, he brings to mind Donald Trump. If Rory Stewart would offer a
safe pair of hands, Johnson would suggest a Trump-like level of gaffes and embarrassments,
thrills and spills.
Britain's Chief problem is that it has become a US poodle for nothing. Essentially
insolvent and small Britain indulges in middle East Wars and US Sanctions and Boycotts. What
do they get in return? Nothing at all.
This is a giant hangover from WWII. It wasn't enough that WWII destroyed Britain, the US
had to take advantage of it in the Anglo American loan and Bretton Woods.
Anyone that has studied WWII knows it was the Russians that killed Germany, not the US and
most certainly not Britain, though cracking the Enigma was certainly useful. But it was Brute
force of the Russians a KURSK that laid waste to Germany.
The US came out of the War essentially unscathed. Britain was bombed out rubble. The US
took full advantage with hard terms in their Anglo American Loan.
The relationship of the US to Britain is more like Abusive parent to abused child. It is
anything but equals. The US only calls on Britain for British Intelligence, or military
support to do something stupid like engage in the Iraq war. The poodle does as told.
ARM was founded in Britain. Now sold to Softbank in Japan. It was the INTEL giant killer.
Had Britain not been a poodle to the US, this one company would have been a driving force in
5G. But the Abusive parent, essentially told the Brits who could and could not associate with
ARM. Now in an even more abused poodle Japan, the world's most emasculated nation. Brits take
their marching order from Donald Trump a bloody moron.
The Tide is out on the British Empire. It is irrelevant at this point what happens with
Brexit. Stall long enough and nobody will care. Instead of branching out and leading in 5G,
they are following their abused parent into the dark ages.
Britain should be making its own deals with China while the US is foundering under Turmp.
Some businesses are such as Rolls Royce that is offering a Rolls Royce jet engine plant to
forward China's local and narrowbody jets. Britain can come in and be a reliable partner with
Huawei and get access to the largest markets in global history China and Asia. Instead the
Gov. wants the UK to be just a US poodle lucky to get a few scraps.
Protectionism can NEVER work in Britain. The Isles NEED TRADE. They cannot survive without
out it. Yet here they are with their brilliant engineering taking orders from Donald Trump
the idiots idiot.
May was just a symptom of the Poodle problem. Do as told, show no spine and live in the
shadow of the USA abuser parent. That is why NO PM in the UK casts a shadow. They are under
the oppressive shadow of the US. Taking orders, Killing off British soldiers for nothing.
The wars are over for Britain. Become a global reliable trading nation that honors
contracts and business ties, the very elements that made Britain Great. It sure has not been
the Wars especially the poodle wars. You laugh at May's tears and under performance but you
may as well be looking at yourselves.
Brexit under the shadow of the USA just strengthens the choke chain in Trump's insane
hand. You become dependent on an unreliable country with the most unreliable administration
in US History. As they do now, they dictate where you may trade and to whom you may sell your
products... and you go along with it like an obedient abused child seeking approval of the
Parent Abuser.
Get some spine and break ties with the USA that are carrying you into the abyss. Why
should Britain be holding Venezuela Gold on behalf of Donald Trump? There is no yield in
this, there is no value but a soiled reputation as an unreliable trader. Banks in Britain
should be honest dealers not playing politics with contracts. Every country in the world is
looking at this British poodle conduct. No country wants to deal with a poodle that refuses
to return assets or that weaponizes Trade. You are cutting your throats for any future global
investment FOR NOTHING!
It's not clear that all MI5/MI6 operatives are remainers. I suspect they are as divided as
everyone else. The gang who attacked Trump simply did it because it was business and not
personal. They even outsourced to Steele because they thought it might be cheaper.
Outsourcing is perceived as cool in government circles and makes people feel good about
themselves. It's the deep state offering value for money.
May achieved what she set out to do being a BREMAINER from the outset.
To block, stall and prevent at all costs BREXIT.
As a BREXIT supporter thank you May because you created a new party in the process as an
alternative to the fake" Conservative BREXIT party" and the EU Labour Custom Union slaves". I
swear Labour = Democrats in the US and their belief in social slavery to them.
When can we get them EU election figures ... as this is going to be such fun if the BREXIT
party manages to achieve an overwhelming vote it is like a 2nd referendum on the previous
referendum. ... Fingers crossed here though because you just know MI5 / MI6 and all the other
mercenaries are going to be ballot stuffing like **** and with no exit polls to prevent the
electoral fraud they will be carrying out on the orders of their paymasters.
Spare the tears, **** you got exactly what you deserved for your betrayal of British
democracy whilst constantly lying and pretending to support both UK AND US values.
May has done precisely what she was tasked to do by the Establishment: First to
"negotiate" a Withdrawal deal that "Only the loser of a major war would agree to" after
wasting two years, then do everything else possible to delay Brexit as long as possible and
water it down to the point that the UK would even with a "delivered Brexit" still essentially
be bound to the EU indefinitely.
The final irony here is that it is ultimately only Parliament's duplicity and treachery,
in spite of the fact that Parliament desperately wanted to ensure the UK "Remain", which has
prevented her and the Globalists from achieving their goals through what they believed to be
a process of "subtle subterfuge".
The ONLY way forward now is a "Hard" Brexit because Parliament has rejected everything
else, it is still the legal default position which does NOT legally require approval by
Parliament and it restores the negotiating position with the EU that May deliberately pissed
away over two years. And the lesson here to other countries wanting to get out of the
clutches of Brussels is this; If you want to leave the EU, JUST LEAVE. Let the Bureaucrats
work out the details later; they aren't that important.
She will indeed go down in history as a footnote of no significance or perhaps as the PM
who showed the greatest betrayal of the British people on behalf of the Establishment
**** off and go away to enjoy the corrupt benefits of your service to the Globalists until
you RIP.
May fits in with the other Prime Ministers of the Paedoph Isles:
"Rules which bar sex offenders from working with children are 'unfair' and even convicted
paedophiles should have the right to adopt, a leading legal academic has said."
"... No other country in the Middle East is as important in countering America's rush to provide Israel with another war than Iraq. Fortunately for Iran, the winds of change in Iraq and the many other local countries under similar threat, thus, make up an unbroken chain of border to border support. This support is only in part due to sympathy for Iran and its plight against the latest bluster by the Zio-American bully. ..."
"... For the Russo/Sino pact nations, or those leaning in their direction, the definition of national foreign interest is no longer military, it is economic. Those with resources and therefore bright futures within the expanding philosophy and economic offerings of the Russo/Sino pact have little use any longer for the "Sorrows of Empire." These nation's leaders, if nothing more than to line their own pockets, have had a very natural epiphany: War is not, for them, profitable. ..."
"... Lebanon and Syria also take away the chance of a ground-based attack, leaving the US Marines and Army to stare longingly across the Persian Gulf open waters from Saudi Arabia or one of its too few and militarily insignificant allies in the southern Gulf region. ..."
"... As shown in a previous article, "The Return of the Madness of M.A.D," Iran like Russia and China, after forty years of US/Israeli threats, has developed new weapons and military capabilities, that combined with tactics will make any direct aggression towards it by American forces a fair fight. ..."
"... When Trump's limited political intelligence wakes up to the facts that his Zio masters want a war with Iran more than they want him as president, and that these forces can easily replace him with a Biden, Harris, Bernie or Warren political prostitute instead, even America's marmalade Messiah, will lose the flavor of his master's blood lust for war. ..."
"... I do particularly agree that elimination of Sadam was the greatest mistake US committed in Middle East. Devastating mistake for US policy. In the final evaluation it did create the most powerful Shi_ite crescent that now rules the Levant. Organizing failing uprising in Turkey against Erdogan was probably mistake of the same magnitude. Everything is lost for US now in the ME. ..."
"... The article evaluating the situation in ME is outstanding and perfect. Every move of US is a vanity. There is no more any opportunity to achieve any benefit for US. Who is responsible for all those screw ups ? US or Israel? ..."
"... However, the other side of the military coin is economic -- specifically sanctions on Iran (& China). Here ( I suspect) the US has prospects. Iran has said it has a "PhD" in sanctions busting. I hope that optimism is not misplaced. That US sanctions amount to a declaration of war on Iran is widely agreed. Sadly, it seems the EU in its usual spineless way will offer Iran more or less empty promises. ..."
"... I don't know if Russia and China have been showing restraint or still don't feel up to taking Uncle on very publicly or even covertly. The author assumes they might be willing to step up now for Iran, but the action in places like Syria suggests they might not. ..."
"... "War is a Racket" by Gen Smedley Butler (USMC – recipient of two Medals of Honor – no rear echelon pogue) is a must read. As true today as it was back when he wrote it. ..."
"... "The Axis of Sanity" – I like it, I like it! Probably quite closely related to the "reality-based community". ..."
"... "Karim al-Mohammadawi told the Arabic-language al-Ma'aloumeh news website that the US wants to turn Ain al-Assad airbase which is a regional base for operations and command into a central airbase for its fighter jets. ..."
"... He added that a large number of forces and military equipment have been sent to Ain al-Assad without any permission from the Iraqi government, noting that the number of American forces in Iraq has surpassed 50,000. ..."
"... Sea assault? Amphibious troop deployment? Are you serious? This is not WWII Normandy, Dorothy. That would be an unmitigated massacre. Weapons have improved a bit in the last 70 years if you have not noticed. ..."
"... first is a conspiracy of Israeli owned, Wall Street financed, war profiteering privatizing-pirate corporations These corporations enter, invade or control the war defeated place and privatize all of its infrastructure construction contracts from the defeated place or state (reason for massive destruction by bombing) and garner control over all the citizen services: retail oil and gas distribution, food supplies, electric power, communications, garbage and waste collection and disposal, street cleaning, water provisioning. traffic control systems, security, and so on.. Most of these corporations are privately owned public stock companies, controlled by the same wealthy Oligarchs that control "who gets elected and what the elected must do while in sitting in one of the seats of power at the 527 person USA. ..."
"... This article by Mr. Titley is the most hopeful article I've yet read demonstrating the coming death of US hegemony, with most of the rest of the civilized world apparently having turned against the world's worst Outlaw Nation. ..."
"... Netanyahu and the Ziocons better think twice about their longed for dream of the destruction of Iran. The Jews always push things too far. Karma can be a bitch. ..."
No other country in the Middle East is as important in countering America's rush to provide Israel with another war than Iraq.
Fortunately for Iran, the winds of change in Iraq and the many other local countries under similar threat, thus, make up an unbroken
chain of border to border support. This support is only in part due to sympathy for Iran and its plight against the latest bluster
by the Zio-American bully.
In the politics of the Middle East, however, money is at the heart of all matters. As such, this ring of defensive nations is
collectively and quickly shifting towards the new Russo/Sino sphere of economic influence. These countries now form a geo-political
defensive perimeter that, with Iraq entering the fold, make a US ground war virtually impossible and an air war very restricted in
opportunity.
If Iraq holds, there will be no war in Iran.
In the last two months, Iraq parliamentarians have been exceptionally vocal in their calls for all foreign military forces- particularly
US forces- to leave immediately. Politicians from both blocs of Iraq's divided parliament
called
for a vote to expel US troops and promised to schedule an extraordinary session to debate the matter ."Parliament must clearly
and urgently express its view about the ongoing American violations of Iraqi sovereignty," said Salam al-Shimiri, a lawmaker
loyal to the populist cleric
Moqtada al-Sadr
.
Iraq's ambassador to Moscow, Haidar Mansour Hadi, went further saying that Iraq "does not
want a new devastating war in the region." He t old a press conference in Moscow this past week, "Iraq is a sovereign
nation. We will not let [the US] use our territory," he said. Other comments by Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi agreed.
Other MPs called for
a timetable for complete US troop withdrawal.
Then a motion was introduced
demanding
war reparations from the US and Israel for using internationally banned weapons while destroying Iraq for seventeen years and
somehow failing to find those "weapons of mass destruction."
As Iraq/Iran economic ties continue to strengthen, with Iraq recently signing on for billions of cubic meters of Iranian natural
gas, the shift towards Russian influence- an influence that prefers peace- was certified as Iraq sent a delegation to Moscow to negotiate
the purchase of the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft system.
To this massive show of pending democracy and rapidly rising Iraqi nationalism, US Army spokesman, Colonel Ryan Dillon, provided
the kind of delusion only the Zio-American military is known for, saying,
"Our continued presence in Iraq will be conditions-based, proportional to need, in coordination with and by the approval of
the Iraqi government."
Good luck with that.
US influence in Iraq came to a possible conclusion this past Saturday, May 18, 2019, when it was reported that the Iraqi parliament
would vote
on a bill compelling the invaders to leave . Speaking about the vote on the draft bill, Karim Alivi, a member of the Iraqi parliament's
national security and defense committee, said on Thursday that the country's two biggest parliamentary factions -- the Sairoon bloc,
led by Shia cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, and the Fatah alliance, headed by secretary general of the Badr Organization, Hadi al-Ameri --
supported the bill. Strangely, Saturday's result has not made it to the media as yet, and American meddling would be a safe guess
as to the delay, but the fact that this bill would certainly have passed strongly shows that Iraq well understands the weakness of
the American bully: Iraq's own US militarily imposed democracy.
Iraq shares a common border with Iran that the US must have for any ground war. Both countries also share a similar religious
demographic where Shia is predominant and the plurality of cultures substantially similar and previously living in harmony. Both
also share a very deep seeded and deserved hatred of Zio- America. Muqtada al-Sadr, who, after coming out first in the 2018 Iraqi
elections, is similar to Hizbullah's Hassan Nasrallah in his religious and military influence within the well trained and various
Shia militias. He is firmly aligned with Iran as is Fattah Alliance. Both detest Zio- America.
A ground invasion needs a common and safe border. Without Iraq, this strategic problem for US forces becomes complete. The other
countries also with borders with Iran are Armenia, Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, Turkey, Afghanistan and Pakistan. All have several good
reasons that they will not, or cannot, be used for ground forces.
With former Armenian President Robert Kocharian under arrest in the aftermath of the massive anti-government 2018 protests, Bolton
can check that one off the list first. Azerbaijan is mere months behind the example next door in Armenia,
with protests increasing and indicating
a change towards eastern winds. Regardless, Azerbaijan, like Turkmenistan, is an oil producing nation and as such is firmly aligned
economically with Russia. Political allegiance seems obvious since US influence is limited in all three countries to blindly ignoring
the massive additional corruption and human rights violations by Presidents Ilham Aliyev and
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow .
However, Russian economic influence pays in cash. Oil under Russian control is the lifeblood of both of these countries.
Recent developments and new international contracts with Russia clearly show whom these leaders are actually listening to.
Turkey would appear to be firmly shifting into Russian influence. A NATO member in name only. Ever since he
shot down his first-
and last – Russian fighter jet, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has thumbed his nose at the Americans. Recently
he refused to succumb to pressure and will receive Iranian oil and, in July, the Russian S-400 anti-aircraft/missile system. This
is important since there is zero chance Putin will relinquish command and control or see them missiles used against Russian armaments.
Now, Erdogan is considering replacing his purchase of thirty US F-35s with the
far superior Russian SU- 57 and a few S-500s for good measure.
Economically, America did all it could to stop the Turk Stream gas pipeline installed by Russia's Gazprom, that runs through Turkey
to eastern Europe and will provide $billions to Erdogan and Turkey
. It
will commence operation this year. Erdogan continues to purchase Iranian oil and to call for Arab nations to come together against
US invasion in Iran. This week, Turkish Defense Minister Hulusi Akar renewed Turkey's resolve, saying his country
is preparing for potential American
sanctions as a deadline reportedly set by the US for Ankara to cancel the S-400 arms deal with Russia or face penalties draws
near.
So, Turkey is out for both a ground war and an air war since the effectiveness of all those S-400's might be put to good use if
America was to launch from naval positions in the Mediterranean. Attacking from the Black Sea is out since it is ringed by countries
under Russo/Sino influence and any attack on Iran will have to illegally cross national airspace aligned with countries preferring
the Russo/Sino alliance that favours peace. An unprovoked attack would leave the US fleet surrounded with the only safe harbours
in Romania and Ukraine. Ships move much slower than missiles.
Afghanistan is out, as the Taliban are winning. Considering recent peace talks from which they walked out and next
slaughtered a police station near the western border with
Iran, they have already won. Add the difficult terrain near the Iranian border and a ground invasion is very unlikely
Although new Pakistani President Amir Khan has all the power and authority of a primary school crossing guard, the real power
within the Pakistani military, the ISI, is more than tired of American influence
. ISI has propagated the Taliban for years and often gave
refuge to Afghan anti-US forces allowing them to use their common border for cover. Although in the past ISI has been utterly mercenary
in its very duplicitous- at least- foreign allegiances, after a decade of US drone strikes on innocent Pakistanis, the chance of
ground-based forces being allowed is very doubtful. Like Afghanistan terrain also increases this unlikelihood.
Considerations as to terrain and location for a ground war and the resulting failure of not doing so was shown to Israel previously
when, in 2006 Hizbullah virtually obliterated its ground attack, heavy armour and battle tanks in the hills of southern Lebanon.
In further cautionary detail, this failure cost PM Ehud Olmert his job.
For the Russo/Sino pact nations, or those leaning in their direction, the definition of national foreign interest is no longer
military, it is economic. Those with resources and therefore bright futures within the expanding philosophy and economic offerings
of the Russo/Sino pact have little use any longer for the "Sorrows of Empire." These nation's leaders, if nothing more than to line
their own pockets, have had a very natural epiphany: War is not, for them, profitable.
For Iran, the geographic, economic and therefore geo-political ring of defensive nations is made complete by Syria, Lebanon and
Iraq. Syria, like Iraq, has every reason to despise the Americans and similar reasons to embrace Iran, Russia, China and border neighbour
Lebanon. Syria now has its own Russian S-300 system which is already bringing down Israeli missiles. It is surprising that Lebanon
has not requested a few S-300s of their own. No one knows what Hizbullah has up its sleeve, but it has been enough to keep the Israelis
at bay. Combined with a currently more prepared Lebanese army, Lebanon under the direction of Nasrallah is a formidable nation for
its size. Ask Israel.
Lebanon and Syria also take away the chance of a ground-based attack, leaving the US Marines and Army to stare longingly across
the Persian Gulf open waters from Saudi Arabia or one of its too few and militarily insignificant allies in the southern Gulf region.
Friendly airspace will also be vastly limited, so also gone will be the tactical element of surprise of any incoming attack. The
reality of this defensive ring of nations means that US military options will be severely limited. The lack of a ground invasion
threat and the element of surprise will allow Iranian defences to prioritize and therefore be dramatically more effective. As shown
in a previous article, "The Return
of the Madness of M.A.D," Iran like Russia and China, after forty years of US/Israeli threats, has developed new weapons
and military capabilities, that combined with tactics will make any direct aggression towards it by American forces a fair fight.
If the US launches a war it will go it alone except for the few remaining US lapdogs like the UK, France, Germany and Australia,
but with anti-US emotions running as wild across the EU as in the southern Caspian nations, the support of these Zionist influenced
EU leaders is not necessarily guaranteed.
Regardless, a lengthy public ramp-up to stage military assets for an attack by the US will be seen by the vast majority of the
world- and Iran- as an unprovoked act of war. Certainly at absolute minimum Iran will close the Straits of Hormuz, throwing the price
of oil skyrocketing and world economies into very shaky waters. World capitalist leaders will not be happy. Without a friendly landing
point for ground troops, the US will either have to abandon this strategy in favour of an air war or see piles of body bags of US
servicemen sacrificed to Israeli inspired hegemony come home by the thousands just months before the '20 primary season. If this
is not military and economic suicide, it is certainly political.
Air war will likely see a similar disaster. With avenues of attack severely restricted, obvious targets such as Iran's non-military
nuclear program and major infrastructure will be thus more easily defended and the likelihood of the deaths of US airmen similarly
increased.
In terms of Naval power, Bolton would have only the Mediterranean as a launch pad, since using the Black Sea to initiate war will
see the US fleet virtually surrounded by nations aligned with the Russo/Sino pact. Naval forces, it should be recalled, are, due
to modern anti-ship technologies and weapons, now the sitting ducks of blusterous diplomacy. A hot naval war in the Persian Gulf,
like a ground war, will leave a US death toll far worse than the American public has witnessed in their lifetimes and the US navy
in tatters.
Trump is already
reportedly
seething that his machismo has been tarnished by Bolton and Pompeo's false assurances of an easy overthrow of Maduro in Venezuela.
With too many top generals getting jumpy about him initiating a hot war with Iraq, Bolton's stock in trade-war is waning. Trump basks
in being the American bully personified, but he and his ego will not stand for being exposed as weak. Remaining as president is necessary
to stoke his shallow character. When Trump's limited political intelligence wakes up to the facts that his Zio masters want a war
with Iran more than they want him as president, and that these forces can easily replace him with a Biden, Harris, Bernie or Warren
political prostitute instead, even America's marmalade Messiah, will lose the flavor of his master's blood lust for war.
In two
excellent articles in Asia times by Pepe Escobar, he details the plethora of projects, agreements, and cooperation that are
taking place from Asia
to the Mid-East to the Baltics . Lead by Russia and China this very quickly developing Russo/Sino pact of economic opportunity
and its intentions of "soft power" collectively spell doom for Zio-America's only remaining tactics of influence: military intervention.
States, Escobar:
"We should know by now that the heart of the 21 st Century Great Game is the myriad layers of the battle between
the United States and the partnership of Russia and China. The long game indicates Russia and China will break down language and
cultural barriers to lead Eurasian integration against American economic hegemony backed by military might."
The remaining civilized world, that which understands the expanding world threat of Zio-America, can rest easy. Under the direction
of this new Russo/Sino influence, without Iraq, the US will not launch a war on Iran.
This growing Axis of Sanity surrounds Iran geographically and empathetically, but more importantly, economically. This economy,
as clearly stated by both Putin and Xi, does not benefit from any further wars of American aggression. In this new allegiance to
future riches, it is Russian and China that will call the shots and a shooting war involving their new client nations will not be
sanctioned from the top.
However, to Putin, Xi and this Axis of Sanity: If American wishes to continue to bankrupt itself by ineffective military adventures
of Israel's making, rather than fix its own nation that is in societal decline and desiccated after decades of increasing Zionist
control, well
That just good for business!
About the Author:Brett Redmayne-Titley has published over 170 in-depth articles over the past eight years for news
agencies worldwide. Many have been translated and republished. On-scene reporting from important current events has been an emphasis
that has led to his many multi-part exposes on such topics as the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations, NATO summit, Keystone XL
Pipeline, Porter Ranch Methane blow-out, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Erdogan's Turkey and many more. He can be reached at: live-on-scene
((at)) gmx.com. Prior articles can be viewed at his archive: www.watchingromeburn.uk
When Trump's limited political intelligence wakes up to the facts that his Zio masters want a war with Iran more than they
want him as president, and that these forces can easily replace him with a Biden, Harris, Bernie or Warren political prostitute
instead, even America's marmalade Messiah, will lose the flavor of his master's blood lust for war.
I believe you are far
too generous in your estimation of his ability to distinguish between flavors of any type. Otherwise, your analysis is insightful
and thorough.
The U.S. is in the same position today that we were aboard Nimitz back in 1980. Too far from Tehran to start a war or even to
find our people. We are perhaps in even a far worse position in that today, Iran holds no hostages. There's nothing so 'noble'
as 44 hostages to inspire war today. This here is merely at the behest of Israel and the deep state profit centers for mere fun
and games and cash and prizes. Iran, overall, is nothing. Obama put Iran away for what, a billion-five? And Jared, Bolton and
Pompeo dredged it all back up again? Care to guess the first-night expense of a shock and awe on Tehran? It's unthinkable.
I used to like Israel. The Haifa-Tel Av-iv-Jerusalem-Galili loop was pretty cool. The PLO hadn't quite started their game,
we could move freely about the country. It's where the whole thing started. And, unlike Italy and Spain, they treated us Americans
ok. They were somewhat war torn. But now? They're a destructive monolith, they're good at hiding it and further, they make disastrous
miscalculations. Eliminating Saddam was huge. Turns out, Saddam was the only sane one. The last vestiges of Saddam's nuclear program
went up in the attacks on the Osirak reactor that Israel bombed in 1981. Why did they push for the elimination of Saddam afterwards?
Why the lies? Miscalculation.
This here with Iran won't travel further than threats and horseshit. I hope. Lots of bleating and farting. Someone agrees.
Oil dropped three or four bucks today.
"the resulting failure of not doing so was shown to Israel previously when, in 2016 Hezbollah virtually obliterated its ground
attack, heavy amour and battle tanks in the hills of southern Lebanon."
I do particularly agree that elimination of Sadam was the greatest mistake US committed in Middle East. Devastating mistake
for US policy. In the final evaluation it did create the most powerful Shi_ite crescent that now rules the Levant. Organizing
failing uprising in Turkey against Erdogan was probably mistake of the same magnitude. Everything is lost for US now in the ME.
Threatening Iran is now simply grotesque.
Concerning the article. The article evaluating the situation in ME is outstanding and perfect. Every move of US is a vanity.
There is no more any opportunity to achieve any benefit for US. Who is responsible for all those screw ups ? US or Israel?
However, the other side of the military coin is economic -- specifically sanctions
on Iran (& China). Here ( I suspect) the US has prospects. Iran has said it has a "PhD" in sanctions busting. I hope that optimism
is not misplaced. That US sanctions amount to a declaration of war on Iran is widely agreed. Sadly, it seems the EU in its usual
spineless way will offer Iran more or less empty promises.
Is the author unaware of the nation of Saudi Arabia and the fact that they are new BFFs with Israel. They have come out quite
openly they'd like to see Iran attacked. That whole Sunni Wahabism vs. Shia thing is a heck of alot older than this current skirmish.
Being that SA has a border w/ the Persian Gulf and that Kuwait who is even CLOSER may be agreeable to be a staging area, why
the hand wringing about this nation & that nation, etc. The US would be welcome to stage an air and sea assault using Saudi bases
followed up by amphibious troop deployment if need be. But given the proximity they could probably strong arm Kuwait to act as
a land bridge, in a pinch.
So will we expect the follow up article discussing this glaring omission, or am I missing some great development re: S.Arabia's
disposition and temperament regarding all this.
The transformed relationship between Russia and Turkey illustrates perfectly the shifting sands of strategic alliances as we cross
the desert towards destiny. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
I don't know if Russia and China have been showing restraint or still don't feel up to taking Uncle on very publicly or even
covertly. The author assumes they might be willing to step up now for Iran, but the action in places like Syria suggests they
might not.
As for the costs of taking on Iran, while one cannot underestimate the cocksuredness of Uncle to take on Iran with a 2003 "Iraq
will be a cakewalk" attitude, the resulting air war will likely not be as costly to Uncle as the author believes, but the thought
of flag-draped coffins in the thousands will certainly deter a land invasion. If there is any action at all, it will be air interdiction
and missile attack.
It is curious that Uncle has not already resorted to his favorite tactic of declaring a No-Fly zone already but instead merely
hinted that airliner safety cannot be guaranteed; this is likely just another form of sanction since Iran receives money for each
airliner that transits its airspace, and a couple of Uncle's putative allies supply Iran with ATC equipment and services.
Uncle's Navy has already demonstrated a willingness to shoot down an airliner in Iranian airspace, so it is no idle threat,
kind of like the mobster looking at a picture of your family and saying, "Nice family you have there; it would be a shame if anything
happened to them."
"War is a Racket" by Gen Smedley Butler (USMC – recipient of two Medals of Honor – no rear echelon pogue) is a must read.
As true today as it was back when he wrote it.
If the US launches a war it will go it alone except for the few remaining US lapdogs like the UK, France, Germany and Australia,
but with anti-US emotions running as wild across the EU as in the southern Caspian nations, the support of these Zionist influenced
EU leaders is not necessarily guaranteed.
Stasi " Merkel muss weg " (Merkel must go) is too weak to even think about taking Germanstan into such a foolish adventure.
Maybe the Kosher Kingdom of simpletons, especially under American-born Turkish "Englishman" (((Boris Kemal Bey))), another
psycho like (((Baron Levy's))) Scottish warmonger Blair.
Iraqi MP: US after Turning Ain Al-Assad into Central Airbase in Iraq
FARSNEWS
"Karim al-Mohammadawi told the Arabic-language al-Ma'aloumeh news website that the US wants to turn Ain al-Assad airbase
which is a regional base for operations and command into a central airbase for its fighter jets.
He added that a large number of forces and military equipment have been sent to Ain al-Assad without any permission from
the Iraqi government, noting that the number of American forces in Iraq has surpassed 50,000.
Al-Mohammadawi said that Washington does not care about Iraq's opposition to using the country's soil to target the neighboring
states.
In a relevant development on Saturday, media reports said that Washington has plans to set up military bases and increasing
its troops in Iraq, adding the US is currently engaged in expanding its Ain al-Assad military base in al-Anbar province."
The US would be welcome to stage an air and sea assault using Saudi bases followed up by amphibious troop deployment if
need be. But given the proximity they could probably strong arm Kuwait to act as a land bridge, in a pinch.
Sea assault? Amphibious troop deployment? Are you serious? This is not WWII Normandy, Dorothy. That would be an unmitigated
massacre. Weapons have improved a bit in the last 70 years if you have not noticed.
Also minor point, LOL, but Kuwait is a "landbridge" between Saudi Arabia and Iraq Unless you are proposing the US attacks
Iraq (again!) which it would have to do to achieve a "landbridge" to Iran. Another good reason Iraq is acquiring the S-400.
More minor points: 1. South Iraq is ALL shiite. 2. Kuwait is SMALL i.e. a BIG target for thousands of missiles
@Ilyana_Rozumova
your question of responsibility is very intuitive.. two general answers.. both need deep analysis..
first is a conspiracy of Israeli owned, Wall Street financed, war profiteering privatizing-pirate corporations These corporations
enter, invade or control the war defeated place and privatize all of its infrastructure construction contracts from the defeated
place or state (reason for massive destruction by bombing) and garner control over all the citizen services: retail oil and gas
distribution, food supplies, electric power, communications, garbage and waste collection and disposal, street cleaning, water
provisioning. traffic control systems, security, and so on.. Most of these corporations are privately owned public stock companies,
controlled by the same wealthy Oligarchs that control "who gets elected and what the elected must do while in sitting in one of
the seats of power at the 527 person USA.
2nd is the impact of the laws that deny competition in a nation sworn to a method of economics (capitalism) that depends on
competition for its success. Another group of massive in size mostly global corporations again owned from Jerusalem, NYC, City
of London, etc. financed at wall street, use rule of law to impose on Americans and many of the people of the world, a blanket
of economic and anti competitive laws and monopoly powers. These monopolist companies benefit from the copyright and patent laws,
which create monopolies from hot thin air. These laws of monopolies coupled to the USA everything is a secret government have
devastated competitive capitalism in America and rendered American Universities high school level teaching but not learning bureaucracies.
Monopolies and state secrets between insider contractors were suppose to deny most of the world from competing; but without
competition ingenuity is lost. Monopoly lordships and state secrets were supposed to make it easy for the monopoly powered corporations
to overpower and deny any and all would be competition; hence they would be the only ones getting rich.. But China's Huawei will
be Linux based and Tin not Aluminium in design, far superior technology to anything these monopoly powered retards have yet developed
especially in the high energy communications technologies (like 5G, Artificial Intelligence, and Robotics). In other words copyrights,
patents and the US military were suppose to keep the world, and the great ingenuity that once existed in the person of every American,
from competing, but the only people actually forced out of the technology competition were the ingenious, for they were denied
by copyright and patents to compete. Now those in power at the USA will make Americans pay again as the corporations that run
things try to figure out how to catch up to the Chinese and Russian led Eastern world. Modi's election in India is quite interesting
as both China and Russia supported it, yet, Modi says he is going to switch to the USA for copyrighted and patented stuff?
on the issue of continued USA presence in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Lebanon, ..
"Our continued presence in Iraq will be conditions-based, proportional to need, in coordination with and by the approval of
the Iraqi government." <that's a joke, first off, I never desired to be in Iraq, and I do not desire USA military or American
presence in Iraq, do You? <blatant disregard for the needs of America.. IMO. Bring the troops home. If the USA would only leave
Iraq to the Iraqis and get to work making America competitive again they would once again enjoy a great place in the world. But
one thing i can tell you big giant wall street funded corporations, and reliance on degree credentials instead of job performance,
will never be the reason America is great.
This article by Mr. Titley is the most hopeful article I've yet read demonstrating the coming death of US hegemony, with most
of the rest of the civilized world apparently having turned against the world's worst Outlaw Nation.
Trump has allowed madmen
Bolton and Pompeo to get this country into an awful mess – all for the sake of Israel and the Zionists.
He needs to find a face-saving
way to get out before Washington gets its long needed comeuppance. But how can Trump accomplish this as long as Bolton, in particular,
continues to be the man who most has his ear? If Titley is correct, then Trump had better start listening to his military leaders
instead.
Netanyahu and the Ziocons better think twice about their longed for dream of the destruction of Iran. The Jews always push
things too far. Karma can be a bitch.
Scripals's poisoning connected Prime Minister soon will be gone for good.
Novichok has lasting effects on British PM ;-) Now it will be much easier to investigate her role in spying on Trump,
British government role in creation of Steele dossier, and in launching neo-McCarthyism campaign against Russia (aka
Russiagate).
Notable quotes:
"... During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes. ..."
"... Crying May. What a Loser. Plus, she may have well co-conspired against Trump. ..."
May, the second - but certainly not the last - female prime minister in the UK, will
abandon her supremely unpopular withdrawal agreement instead of trying to force it through
the Commons for the fourth time. May's decision to call for a fourth vote on the withdrawal
agreement, this time packaging it in a bill that could have opened to door to a second
confirmatory referendum, was more than her fellow conservatives could tolerate. One of her
top cabinet ministers resigned and Graham Brady, the leader of the Tory backbenchers,
effectively forced May out by rounding up the votes for a rule change that would have allowed
MPs to oust her.
During her tumultuous tenure as PM, May survived two no-confidence votes.
Though May will stay on as caretaker until a new leader can be chosen, the race to succeed
May begins now...odds are that a 'Brexiteer' will fill the role. Whatever happens, the
contest should take a few weeks, and afterwards May will be on her way back to
Maidenhead.
"It is and will always remain a deep regret for me that I was not able to deliver
Brexit...I was not able to reach a consensus...that job will now fall to my successor," May
said.
Between now and May's resignation, May still has work to do: President Trump will travel
to the UK for a state visit, while Europe will also celebrate the 75th anniversary of
D-Day.
It's fitting that May touted the virtues of her moderate approach to governance during her
resignation speech, considering that her attempts to chart a middle path through Brexit ended
up alienating hard-core Brexiteers and remainers alike. Her fate was effectively sealed
nearly two years ago, after she called for a general election that cost the Tories their
majority in Parliament and emboldened Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The pound's reaction was relatively muted, as May's decision to step down had been
telegraphed well in advance.
She didn't cry for syrians when she declared bombing Syria and using the firm her
husband is involved in,. They made billion, and she didn't cry over her makeover afterwards
new hair clothes and big jewels and cuddles with her husband in the media.
Many women in esteemed positions are just affirmative action or window dressing to
placate the masses with supposed maternal love but they end up being wicked as heck.
Perhaps, but it's worse than that:
They are part of the Divide & Conquer strategy, while (((Global-lusts))) are
plundering the Wealth Of Nations and taking over the real reigns of power.
Americants are easily distracted or fooled.
ps. "...wicked as heck." Wicked? Heck? What's up with the careful avoidance of "cuss
words"? It's ok, you're safe... No "ladies or preachers" (bitches or scammers) nearby. And
the Tylers or NSA won't rat you out.
"... However, nothing in the actual piece talks about security concerns. (I point this out because I perceive a trend towards such misleading summaries and headlines which contradict what the actual reporting says.) ..."
"... These companies do not have security concerns over Huawei. But the casual reader, who does not dive down into the actual piece, is left with a false impression that such concerns are valid and shared. ..."
"... South China Morning Post ..."
"... This move by Google-USG is mostly a propaganda warfare move. Huawei doesn't depend on smartphone sales to survive. It's American market was already small, while China's domestic market is huge. China is not Japan. ..."
"... Trump's heavy handed move against Huawei will backfire. The optic is unsettling; the US looks to be destroying a foreign competitor because it is winning. ..."
"... Until the reserve currency issue favoring the "exceptional" nation changes, the economic terrorism will continue.. ..."
"... What is funny in all these stories, is that there is little to no Huawei equipment (not the end-user smart phone, home router and stuff, but backbone routers, access equipment,..) anywhere in the US -- they are forbidden to compete. Most telcos are quite happy to sell in the US, as the absence of these Chinese competitors allows for healthy margins, which is no longer true in other markets. ..."
"... The US is trying desperately to quash tech success / innovation introduced by others who are not controlled by (or in partnership with) the US, via economic war, for now just politely called a trade war - China no 1 adversary. ..."
"... Attacking / dissing / scotching trade between one Co. (e.g. Huawei) and the world is disruptive of the usual, conventional, accepted, exchange functioning, and throws a pesky spanner in the works of the system. Revanchard motives, petty targetting, random pot-shots, lead to what? ..."
"... The war against Huawei is only one small aspect within the overall Trade War, which is based on the false premise of US economic strength. Most of the world wants to purchase material things, not financial services which is the Outlaw US Empire's forte and most of the world can easily forego. Trump's Trade War isn't going as planned which will cause him to double-down in a move that will destroy his 2020 hopes. ..."
However, nothing in
the actual piece talks about security concerns. (I point this out because I perceive a trend towards such misleading summaries
and headlines which contradict what the actual reporting says.)
The British processor company ARM, which licenses its design to Huawei, cites U.S. export controls as the reason to stop cooperation
with Huawei:
The conflict is putting companies and governments around the world in a tough spot, forcing them to choose between alienating
the United States or China .
Arm Holdings issued its statement after the BBC reported the firm had told staff to suspend dealings with Huawei.
An Arm spokesman said some of the company's intellectual property is designed in the United States and is therefore " subject
to U.S. export controls ."
Additionally two British telecom providers quote U.S. restrictions as reason for no longer buying Huawei smartphones:
BT Group's EE division, which is preparing to launch 5G service in six British cities later this month, said Wednesday it would
no longer offer a new Huawei smartphone as part of that service. Vodafone also said it would drop a Huawei smartphone from
its lineup. Both companies appeared to tie that decision to Google's move to withhold licenses for its Android operating software
from future Huawei phones.
These companies do not have security concerns over Huawei. But the casual reader, who does not dive down into the actual
piece, is left with a false impression that such concerns are valid and shared.
That the Trump administration says it has security reasons for its Huawei ban does not mean that the claim is true. Huawei
equipment is as good or bad as any other telecommunication equipment, be it from Cisco or Apple. The National Security Agency
and other secret services will try to infiltrate all types of such equipment.
After the sudden ban on U.S. entities to export to Huawei, chipmakers like Qualcomm temporarily stopped their relations with
Huawei. Google said that it would no longer allow access to the Google Play store for new Huawei smartphones. That will diminish
their utility for many users.
The public reaction in China to this move was quite negative. There were many calls for counter boycotts of Apple's i-phones
on social media and a general anti-American sentiment.
The founder and CEO of Huawei, Ren Zhengfei, tried to counter that. He gave a
two hour interview (vid, 3 min excerpt with subtitles)
directed at the Chinese public. Ren sounds very conciliatory and relaxed. The Global Times and the South China Morning
Post only have shortexcerpts
of what he said. They empathize that Huawei is well prepared and can master the challenge:
I do not believe this is precisely what will happen. Huawei already has its licenses purchased. In addition they could decide
to disrespect the IP if this was the case.
Huaweis's suppliers in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan (ROC), and Britain are examining if they can continue to make business with
Huawei, while some have already declared a suspension in cooperation.
The issue is that these non-American companies nonetheless use some American components of technology, and if they proceed
they will be sanctioned by the US themselves.
It is the same reason why Russia's Sukhoi did not in the end sell its SSJ-100 airliners to Iran -- East Asian tech companies
can hardly be expected to be more gung-ho on defying the US than Russia's leading defense plant......
@p #2 - Huawei surely has their processors *as of now*.
That - if USA would not ban Huawei (HiSilicon) processors, because of using that ARM technology. Thing is, Huawei would be
isolated from next-generation ARM processors. They are locked now in their current generation.
Even Qualcomm today, for what I know, bases their processors on ARM's "default" schemes, instead of doing their development
"from scratch", in a totally independent way. It would push for slow but steady decline as "top" smartphone vendor into "el cheapo"
niche.
Boeing is the counter-part in the contest to destroy Huawei. China has great leverage over Boeing's future. It is the nation with
the biggest market now and downstream for 10-20 years. China need planes, thousands of them.
As for Huawei's chief doubting the prowess of the Chinese students, he only needs to look at the rapidity of the conversion
of his nations' economy to a 98% digital economy. All that conversion was done by local, entrepreneurial innovators in the software
and hardware tech sector. It happened only in China and completely by Chinese young people who had phones and saw the future and
made it happen.
It has been Chinese minds building Chinese AI on Chinese Big Data.
Yes, they need Russian technologists and scientists. Those Russian minds in Russia, in Israel, in South Korea are proven difference
makers.
The need China now has will meet the solution rapidly. For five years, the Double Helix of Russia-China has been coming closer
in education and R&D institutes in both nations. China investors and Chinese sci-tech personnel are in the sci-tech parks of Russia,
and Russians are in similar facilities in China. More will happen now that the Economic War against China threatens.
Huawei will have solutions to replace all US components by the end of the year. It will lose some markets. but it will gain
hugely in the BRI markets yet to be developed.
In the long run, the US makers will rue the day Trump and his gang of Sinophobes and hegemonists took aim at Huawei and China's
tech sector.
This move by Google-USG is mostly a propaganda warfare move. Huawei doesn't depend on smartphone sales to survive. It's American
market was already small, while China's domestic market is huge. China is not Japan.
Besides, it's not like Europe is prospering either. Those post-war days are long gone.
And there's no contradiction between what the CEO said and the Government line: both are approaching the same problem from
different points of view, attacking it from different fronts at the same time. "Patriotism" is needed insofar as the Chinese people
must be prepared to suffer some hardships without giving up long term prosperity. "Nationalism" ("politics") is toxic insofar
as, as a teleological tool, it is a dead end (see Bannon's insane antics): the Chinese, after all, are communists, and communists,
by nature, are internationalists and think beyond the artificial division of humanity in Nation-States.
Talking Digital and security in the same sentence is laughable.... NOTHING Digital is 'secure',,, never has,,, never will.
Digital destroys everything it touches. At present, excepting for now the low wage States, it is destroying economies ever
so slowly one sector at a time. This has nothing to do with security and everything to do with the dying West, especially the
USA which is trying desperately to save what's left of its production whether it be 5G, Steel plants or Nord Stream. The West
created China when it happily allowed and assisted Western corporations to move the production there in order to hide the inflation
that was being created for wars and welfare and now has to deal with the fallout which eventually will be their undoing.
A full-blown trade war was probably inevitable, driven by geopolitical concerns as much or more than economics.
One wonders what each of China and US has been doing to prepare. It seems like the answer is "very little" but since it's USA
that is driving this bus, I would think that USA would've done more to prepare (than China has).
PS It's not just Boeing. China also supplies the vast majority of rare earth minerals.
Her captivity and probable imprisonment in the US explain his attitude. She is a high profile pawn. The US must convict her
in order to justify what they have done to her so far. She may not serve time, in the US prisons, but she will be branded a guilty
person, guilty of violating the Empire's rules (laws).
Imagine Ivanka in the same situation. Her daughter singing in Mandarin would be little help. The Trump Family will be a number
one target for equal treatment long after "45" leaves office.
The US Empire is wild with Power. All of that Power is destructive. And all the globe is the battlefield, except USA. But History
teaches that this in-equilibrium will not last long.
We've seen how Europe caved to US pressure to stop trading with Iran. Now Japan and others are caving to pressure to stop trading
with China. There is already pressure and negotiation to stop Nordstream. And all of the above leads to questions about Erdogan's
resolve.
Trump's heavy handed move against Huawei will backfire. The optic is unsettling; the US looks to be destroying a foreign competitor
because it is winning.
The ramifications of trade war with China (where the supply and manufacturing chain of most consumer electronics is these days)
is disruptive. Trump has created uncertainty for many manufacturers since there is Chinese part content is just about everything
these days. Some manufacturers might relocate production to the US but most will try to simply decouple from the US entirely.
Exposure to the US is really the problem not exposure to China.
The trade war with Iran was also unlikely to persist. But it has persisted, and deepened as European poodles pretended to resist
and then pretended not to notice that they didn't.
A new Bloomberg opinion piece agrees with that view
No, it doesn't b. You say USA trade war will fail because it lacks international support. Bloomberg says USA should get international
support to make it more effective. The difference is that it is highly likely that USA will get international support. It already
has support from Japan.
USA has proven that it can effectively manipulate it's poodle allies. Another example is Venezuela where more than two dozen
countries recognized Guido only because USA wanted them to.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
It's not Trump but the US Deep State that causes US allies to fall in line. Any analysis that relies on Trump as President
is bound to fail as his public persona is manipulated to keep Deep State adversaries (including the US public) off-balance.
Like President's before him, Trump will take the blame (and the credit) until another team member is chosen to replace him
in what we call "free and fair elections".
What is funny in all these stories, is that there is little to no Huawei equipment (not the end-user smart phone, home router
and stuff, but backbone routers, access equipment,..) anywhere in the US -- they are forbidden to compete. Most telcos are quite
happy to sell in the US, as the absence of these Chinese competitors allows for healthy margins, which is no longer true in other
markets.
So the Huawei ban hits first and foremost the US' partners.
China can only undo the US-exceptionalsim if and when it can visibly project military power. The only way to achieve
that is tt has to make great haste in building a few fleets of aircraft carriers, fregats and destroyers, etc. It must
build a grand, visibly magnificent Chinese Navy.
Modi wins in India, another victory for the world oligarchs. Exactly mimicking conditions in the U$A. Media and governmental
capture by the uber wealthy...
The US is trying desperately to quash tech success / innovation introduced by others who are not controlled by (or in partnership
with) the US, via economic war, for now just politely called a trade war - China no 1 adversary.
Afaik, the entire smart-phone industry is 'integrated' and 'regulated' by FTAs, the WTO, the patent circuit, the Corps. and
Gvmts. who collaborate amongst themselves.
Corps. can't afford to compete viciously because infrastructure, aka more encompassing systems or networks (sic) are a pre-requisite
for biz, thus, Gvmts. cooperate with the Corps, and sign various 'partnerships,' etc.
sidebar. Not to mention the essential metals / components provenance, other topic. see
Attacking / dissing / scotching trade between one Co. (e.g. Huawei) and the world is disruptive of the usual, conventional,
accepted, exchange functioning, and throws a pesky spanner in the works of the system. Revanchard motives, petty targetting, random
pot-shots, lead to what?
As I wrote in the Venezuela thread, major US corps are already belt tightening by permanently laying off managers, not already
cut-to-the-bone production staff, and another major clothing retailer is closing its 650+ stores. And the full impact of Trump's
Trade War has yet to be felt by consumers. As Wolff, Hudson and other like-minded economists note, there never was a genuine recovery
from 2008, while statistical manipulation hides the real state of the US economy. One thing that cannot be hidden is the waning
of revenues collected via taxes which drives the budget deficit--and the shortfall isn't just due to the GOP Congress's tax cuts.
The war against Huawei is only one small aspect within the overall Trade War, which is based on the false premise of US economic
strength. Most of the world wants to purchase material things, not financial services which is the Outlaw US Empire's forte and
most of the world can easily forego. Trump's Trade War isn't going as planned which will cause him to double-down in a move that
will destroy his 2020 hopes.
Data for 2019 is probably slightly different, but the trends should keep on. That data also does not separate Android-based
phones from non-Android phones. So, segmenting Android into Google and China infrastructures would mean
1) Huawei retains a $152B market - China
2) Huawei retains an unknown share in $87B market - APAC
3) Huawei loses a $163,9B market - all non-China world.
At best Huawei looses 40,7% of world market. That if all APAC population would voluntarily and uniformly drop out of Google
services into Huawei/China services (which they would not). At worst Huawei retains 37,7% of the marker (if APAC population would
uniformly follow Google, which they would not either).
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake
up. By Robert W. Merry •
May 22,
2019
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday,
November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. (
Official White House Photo
by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out
in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in
a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain,
from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win
world are gone.
For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a
wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The
trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on
almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential
threat."
Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge,"
released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has
mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there."
The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United
States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."
The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more
intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."
... ... ..
Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American
alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability
to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain
its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.
The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted,
it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it
feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been
part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.
Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing
assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within
Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to
accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli
-- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.
Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be
sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that
allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's
strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.
NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on
that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist.
The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as
well.
So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's,
while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does
anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as
in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient
to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.
This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led,
not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform
us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever
a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked,
should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization
itself.
And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations
in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course,
any Russian provocations.
Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar
to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by
his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.
But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of
far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:
From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we --
not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant
to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living
in or near Washington, D.C.
If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could
explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.
Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification
for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore
required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).
"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because
we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated
and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate
change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into
the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that
wrong.
Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global
leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers,
including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent
counted for nothing.
Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful
run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely
approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall,"
provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether
irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.
There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense
the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider
neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)
In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia
and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when
the USSR existed.
I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat
suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in
China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)
"... The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war." ..."
"... From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we -- not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living in or near Washington, D.C. ..."
"... Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever). ..."
"... Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers, including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent counted for nothing. ..."
"... Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall," provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help ..."
"... There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.) ..."
"... In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when the USSR existed. ..."
"... I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA) ..."
The Great Power Game is On and China is Winning If America wants to maintain any influence in Asia, it needs to wake
up. By Robert W. Merry •
May 22,
2019
President Donald J. Trump participates in a bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People, Thursday,
November 9, 2017, in Beijing, People's Republic of China. (
Official White House Photo
by Shealah Craighead) From across the pond come two geopolitical analyses in two top-quality British publications that lay out
in stark terms the looming struggle between the United States and China. It isn't just a trade war, says The Economist in
a major cover package. "Trade is not the half of it," declares the magazine. "The United States and China are contesting every domain,
from semiconductors to submarines and from blockbuster films to lunar exploration." The days when the two superpowers sought a win-win
world are gone.
For its own cover, The Financial Times ' Philip Stephens produced a piece entitled, "Trade is just an opening shot in a
wider US-China conflict." The subhead: "The current standoff is part of a struggle for global pre-eminence." Writes Stephens: "The
trade narrative is now being subsumed into a much more alarming one. Economics has merged with geopolitics. China, you can hear on
almost every corner in sight of the White House and Congress, is not just a dangerous economic competitor but a looming existential
threat."
Stephens quotes from the so-called National Defense Strategy, entitled "Sharpening the American Military's Competitive Edge,"
released last year by President Donald Trump's Pentagon. In the South China Sea, for example, says the strategic paper, "China has
mounted a rapid military modernization campaign designed to limit U.S. access to the region and provide China a freer hand there."
The broader Chinese goal, warns the Pentagon, is "Indo-Pacific regional hegemony in the near-term and displacement of the United
States to achieve global pre-eminence in the future."
The Economist and Stephens are correct. The trade dispute is merely a small part of a much larger and even more
intense geopolitical rivalry that could ignite what Stephens describes as "an altogether hotter war."
... ... ..
Russia: Of all the developments percolating in the world today, none is more ominous than the growing prospect of an anti-American
alliance involving Russia, China, Turkey, and Iran. Yet such an alliance is in the works, largely as a result of America's inability
to forge a foreign policy that recognizes the legitimate geopolitical interests of other nations. If the United States is to maintain
its position in Asia, this trend must be reversed.
The key is Russia, largely by dint of its geopolitical position in the Eurasian heartland. If China's global rise is to be thwarted,
it must be prevented from gaining dominance over Eurasia. Only Russia can do that. But Russia has no incentive to act because it
feels threatened by the West. NATO has pushed eastward right up to its borders and threatened to incorporate regions that have been
part of Russia's sphere of influence -- and its defense perimeter -- for centuries.
Given the trends that are plainly discernible in the Far East, the West must normalize relations with Russia. That means providing
assurances that NATO expansion is over for good. It means the West recognizing that Georgia, Belarus, and, yes, Ukraine are within
Russia's natural zone of influence. They will never be invited into NATO, and any solution to the Ukraine conundrum will have to
accommodate Russian interests. Further, the West must get over Russia's annexation of the Crimean peninsula. It is a fait accompli
-- and one that any other nation, including America, would have executed in similar circumstances.
Would Russian President Vladimir Putin spurn these overtures and maintain a posture of bellicosity toward the West? We can't be
sure, but that certainly wouldn't be in his interest. And how will we ever know when it's never been tried? We now understand that
allegations of Trump's campaign colluding with Russia were meritless, so it's time to determine the true nature and extent of Putin's
strategic aims. That's impossible so long as America maintains its sanctions and general bellicosity.
NATO: Trump was right during the 2016 presidential campaign when he said that NATO was obsolete. He later dialed back on
that, but any neutral observer can see that the circumstances that spawned NATO as an imperative of Western survival no longer exist.
The Soviet Union is gone, and the 1.3 million Russian and client state troops it placed on Western Europe's doorstep are gone as
well.
So what kind of threat could Russia pose to Europe and the West? The European Union's GDP is more than 12 times that of Russia's,
while Russia's per capita GDP is only a fourth of Europe's. The Russian population is 144.5 million to Europe's 512 million. Does
anyone seriously think that Russia poses a serious threat to Europe or that Europe needs the American big brother for survival, as
in the immediate postwar years? Of course not. This is just a ruse for the maintenance of the status quo -- Europe as subservient
to America, the Russian bear as menacing grizzly, America as protective slayer in the event of an attack.
This is all ridiculous. NATO shouldn't be abolished. It should be reconfigured for the realities of today. It should be European-led,
not American-led. It should pay for its own defense entirely, whatever that might be (and Europe's calculation of that will inform
us as to its true assessment of the Russian threat). America should be its primary ally, but not committed to intervene whenever
a tiny European nation feels threatened. NATO's Article 5, committing all alliance nations to the defense of any other when attacked,
should be scrapped in favor of language that calls for U.S. intervention only in the event of a true threat to Western Civilization
itself.
And while a European-led NATO would find it difficult to pull back from its forward eastern positions after adding so many nations
in the post-Cold War era, it should extend assurances to Russia that it has no intention of acting provocatively -- absent, of course,
any Russian provocations.
Pragmatic isolationalism is a better deal then the current neocon foreign policy. Which Trump is pursuing with the zeal similar
to Obama (who continued all Bush II wars and started two new in Libya and Syria.) Probably this partially can be explained by
his dependence of Adelson and pro-Israeli lobby.
But the problem is deeper then Trump: it is the power of MIC and American exeptionalism ( which can be viewed as a form of
far right nationalism ) about which Andrew Bacevich have written a lot:
From the mid-1940s onward, the primacy of the United States was assumed as a given. History had rendered a verdict: we --
not the Brits and certainly not the Germans, French, or Russians -- were number one, and, more importantly, were meant
to be. That history's verdict might be subject to revision was literally unimaginable, especially to anyone making a living
in or near Washington, D.C.
If doubts remained on that score, the end of the Cold War removed them. With the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse
of communism, politicians, journalists, and policy intellectuals threw themselves headlong into a competition over who could
explain best just how unprecedented, how complete, and how wondrous was the global preeminence of the United States.
Choose your own favorite post-Cold War paean to American power and privilege. Mine remains Madeleine Albright's justification
for some now-forgotten episode of armed intervention, uttered 20 years ago when American wars were merely occasional (and therefore
required some nominal justification) rather then perpetual (and therefore requiring no justification whatsoever).
"If we have to use force," Secretary of State Albright announced on morning television in February 1998, "it is because
we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future."
Back then, it was Albright's claim to American indispensability that stuck in my craw. Yet as a testimony to ruling class
hubris, the assertion of indispensability pales in comparison to Albright's insistence that "we see further into the future."
In fact, from February 1998 down to the present, events have time and again caught Albright's "we" napping. The 9/11 terrorist
attacks and the several unsuccessful wars of choice that followed offer prime examples. But so too did Washington's belated
and inadequate recognition of the developments that actually endanger the wellbeing of 21st-century Americans, namely climate
change, cyber threats, and the ongoing reallocation of global power prompted by the rise of China. Rather than seeing far into
the future, American elites have struggled to discern what might happen next week. More often than not, they get even that
wrong.
Like some idiot savant, Donald Trump understood this. He grasped that the establishment's formula for militarized global
leadership applied to actually existing post-Cold War circumstances was spurring American decline. Certainly other observers,
including contributors to this publication, had for years been making the same argument, but in the halls of power their dissent
counted for nothing.
Yet in 2016, Trump's critique of U.S. policy resonated with many ordinary Americans and formed the basis of his successful
run for the presidency. Unfortunately, once Trump assumed office, that critique did not translate into anything even remotely
approximating a coherent strategy. President Trump's half-baked formula for Making America Great Again -- building "the wall,"
provoking trade wars, and elevating Iran to the status of existential threat -- is, to put it mildly, flawed, if not altogether
irrelevant. His own manifest incompetence and limited attention span don't help.
There is no countervailing force within the USA that is able to tame MIC appetites, which are constantly growing. In a sense
the nation is taken hostage with no root for escape via internal political mechanisms (for all practical purposes I would consider
neocons that dominate the USA foreign policy to be highly paid lobbyists of MIC.)
In this sense the alliance of China, Iran, Russia
and Turkey might serve as an external countervailing force which allows some level of return to sanity, like was the case when
the USSR existed.
I agree with Bacevich that the dissolution of the USSR corrupted the US elite to the extent that it became reckless and somewhat
suicidal in seeking "Full Spectrum Dominance" (which is an illusive goal in any case taking into account existing arsenals in
China and Russia and the growing distance between EU and the USA)
Provoking a disastrous worldwide confrontation with mighty China by seizing and
imprisoning one of its leading technology executives reminds me of
a comment I made several years ago about America's behavior under the rule of its current
political elites:
Or to apply a far harsher biological metaphor, consider a poor canine infected with the
rabies virus. The virus may have no brain and its body-weight is probably less than
one-millionth that of the host, but once it has seized control of the central nervous system,
the animal, big brain and all, becomes a helpless puppet.
Once friendly Fido runs around foaming at the mouth, barking at the sky, and trying to
bite all the other animals it can reach. Its friends and relatives are saddened by its plight
but stay well clear, hoping to avoid infection before the inevitable happens, and poor Fido
finally collapses dead in a heap.
We should actually be a bit grateful to Prince Mohammed since without him America would
clearly have the most insane government anywhere in the world. As it stands, we're merely tied
for first.
"... The Iranian goal is to break the resolve of the US, given American military retreats from the Middle East in the past – Lebanon (1984), Iraq (2011), and Syria (presently) – and to increase the cost of Iranian oil sanctions on the global economy through additional disruptions to supply. ..."
"... This is obviously a dangerous game that could lead to real war, not just proxy war. As a result, it is important to explore the potential impact of both on the world oil market, despite the latter being significantly more likely than the former. ..."
"... On the deterrence front, the US has moved numerous military assets to the Persian Gulf region since the Trump administration's "no waiver" oil sanctions came into effect. These include: hastening the arrival of a carrier strike group; deployment of a bomber task-force; additional Patriot missiles; and as reported by The New York Times, drawing up plans to send up to 120,000 US troops to the Middle East, if Iran attacks US forces or rushes to develop nuclear weapons. ..."
As tensions between Iran and the US continue to escalate, analysts have begun to consider the likelihood and consequences of an
Iran war. There has been much talk of an Iran War in recent weeks, but the likelihood of a war, whether intentional or accidental,
is relatively small for the simple reason that the leaders of Iran and the US don't want one. President Donald Trump, who has been
remarkably faithful to his campaign promises, to the chagrin of many, doesn't want another Iraq-like war – with a quick victory
followed by a long defeat. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader of Iran, doesn't want his revolution and country crushed by the
massive military might of America.
This is not to say there aren't powerful individuals in the Trump administration – such as National Security Advisor John Bolton
and possibly Secretary of State Mike Pompeo – and regional allies – Israel, Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates (UAE) – who want a
war to bring about regime change in Iran, and who are willing to stir the pot in an attempt to make it happen.
Trump's personal preference for Iran may also be regime change, with a negotiated neutering of the Islamic Republic his next best
outcome. But he probably would settle for long-term containment of Iran through his
"maximum pressure"
campaign, accepting that the Iranian regime would likely be able to sustain itself though skirting sanctions.
Iran has made huge geopolitical gains in the Middle East since the US inadvertently pushed Shiite-majority Iraq into the Iranian
sphere of influence by imposing democracy on the country following the 2003 war. Tehran now directly or indirectly controls an arc
of territory north of Saudi Arabia – Iraq, Syria and Lebanon – while supporting Houthi rebels to the south of the kingdom in Yemen.
Although US sanctions on Iran's oil and metal exports are unlikely to bring about regime change, they will make it significantly
more difficult for the Islamic Republic to consolidate its territorial gains and sustain its regional proxy network, as the
government will have to prioritize domestic spending to maintain social stability. Simply put, the sanctions make it more difficult
for Iran to directly challenge its regional enemies, Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE and score additional foreign policy victories.
Despite an aversion to war with the US, it appears Khamenei has given Qassem Suleimani, leader of Iran's powerful Quds Force and
national hero, permission to encourage foreign militias aligned with Tehran to cause mischief for US and allied forces in the Middle
East, and if possible, disrupt the flow of oil from the region through non-attributed actions.
The Iranian goal is to break the resolve of the US, given American military retreats from the Middle East in the past –
Lebanon (1984), Iraq (2011), and Syria (presently) – and to increase the cost of Iranian oil sanctions on the global economy through
additional disruptions to supply.
This is obviously a dangerous game that could lead to real war, not just proxy war. As a result, it is important to explore
the potential impact of both on the world oil market, despite the latter being significantly more likely than the former.
US Perspective
Pompeo laid out the Trump administration's rationale and strategy for dealing with the Islamic Republic in
"Confronting Iran,"
an article in the November-December 2018 issue of
Foreign Affairs
. He argued the deal the Obama administration and international community struck with Iran in 2015 – the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA) – was fundamentally flawed as it failed to end the country's nuclear weapons ambition. Instead, the deal
simply postponed Iran's nuclear ambitions while the regime continued its ballistic missile program to allow it to deliver a nuclear
payload.
At the same time, the deal gave
"Tehran piles of money, which the supreme leader has used to sponsor all types of terrorism throughout the Middle East (with few
consequences in response) and which have boosted the economic fortunes of a regime that remains bent on exporting its revolution
abroad and imposing it at home."
The core of the Trump administration's maximum pressure campaign are economic sanctions designed to
"choke off revenues"
to Iran to force its government to negotiate a
"new deal"
covering its nuclear activities, ballistic missile program and
"malign behaviour"
across the Middle East, while providing sufficient military deterrence to keep Tehran from lashing out at US forces and allies
in the region.
Trump withdrew the US from the Iran nuclear deal in May 2018, and has since ratcheted up economic sanctions on the Islamic
Republic in August and November of last year, while going the full monty on Iranian crude and condensate exports at the beginning of
May.
On the deterrence front, the US has moved numerous military assets to the Persian Gulf region since the Trump
administration's
"no waiver"
oil sanctions came into effect. These include: hastening the arrival of a carrier strike group; deployment of a bomber
task-force; additional Patriot missiles; and as reported by The New York Times, drawing up plans to send up to 120,000 US troops to
the Middle East, if Iran attacks US forces or rushes to develop nuclear weapons.
It should be noted that a military buildup of this size would take months, and the 120,000 number is widely viewed as
insufficient for a full-scale invasion of Iran. The Islamic Republic has been planning and building up asymmetric military
capabilities to thwart a US attack since the 1990s, while the country is larger in size and population than Iraq. The US military
plan reported by the New York Times did not call for a land invasion of Iran.
On May 14, Trump denied the New York Times report, but in characteristic fashion appeared to up the ante.
"Now, would I do that? Absolutely,"
Trump said.
"But we have not planned for that. Hopefully we're not going to have to plan for that. If we did that, we would send a hell of a
lot more troops than that."
But in the Foreign Affairs
article Pompeo wrote that Trump does not want the US to go to war with Iran:
"President Trump does not want another long-term US military engagement in the Middle East -- or in any other region, for that
matter. He has spoken openly about the dreadful consequences of the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2011 intervention in Libya."
Iranian Perspective
On May 14, Khamenei explicitly said that Iran does not want to go to war with the US, and suggested the same of America, as a war
would be in neither country's interest.
"There won't be any war,"
he said.
"Neither we nor they seek war. They know it will not be in their interest."
In terms of Iran's current situation, David Petraeus, ex-CIA director and America's former top general in the Middle East,
possibly put it best.
"Certainly, if Iran were to precipitate that [a war], it would be a suicide gesture,"
Petraeus said on May 9.
"It would be very, very foolhardy. And they know that."
The Islamic Republic has done an excellent job of marshaling relatively limited financial and military resources to expand its
influence and control through the Middle East since 2003, but its defense budget of about US$16 billion – or a mere 3.7 percent of
GDP – falls considerably short compared to regional rivals Israel, Saudi Arabia and UAE on an individual basis, let alone a
collective one. The military capabilities of the US dwarf those of Iran on every conceivable measure, which should come as no
surprise since America's most recent defense budget is a massive US$686 billion.
Khamenei also said his country has no desire to negotiate with the US, given the Trump administration's extreme demands and
unilateral breaking of the nuclear pact, and suggested the current crisis will likely be a long one, a view supported by Hassan
Rouhani, the democratically elected president of Iran.
"The Iranian nation has chosen the path of resistance,"
Khamenei said.
Rouhani was even more explicit. Speaking to activists from a wide range of political factions on May 12, he said Iran is facing
"unprecedented"
pressure from US sanctions and suggested economic conditions may become worse than during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War.
"The pressures by enemies is a war unprecedented in the history of our Islamic revolution,"
Rouhani said, according to the state news agency IRNA.
"But I do not despair and have great hope for the future and believe that we can move past these difficult conditions provided
that we are united
."
Jake
says: Next New Comment May 22, 2019 at 3:27 pm
GMT 100 Words This is good writing: "The KGB plotters of 1991 had thought that
post-Communist Russia would be treated by the West like the prodigal son, with a fattened calf
being slaughtered for the welcome feast. To their disappointment, the stupid bastards
discovered that their country was to play the part of the fattened calf at the feast, and they
were turned from unseen rulers into billionaires' bodyguards.
U.S. ships are involved in provocative "freedom of navigation" exercises in the South China
Sea and other ships gather ominously in the Mediterranean Sea while National Security Advisor
John Bolton and Secretary of State Michael Pompeo along with convicted war criminal Elliot
Abrams conspire to save the people of Venezuela with another illegal "regime change"
intervention. But people are drawn to the latest adventures of Love and Hip-Hop, the Mueller
report, and Game of Thrones. In fact, while millions can recall with impressive detail the
proposals and strategies of the various players in HBO's latest saga, they can't recall two
details about the pending military budget that will likely pass in Congress with little debate,
even though Trump's budget proposal represents another obscene increase of public money to the
tune of $750 billion.
This bipartisan rip-off could not occur without the willing collusion of the corporate
media, which slants coverage to support the interests of the ruling elite or decides to just
ignore an issue like the ever-expanding military budget.
The effectiveness of this collusion is reflected in the fact that not only has this massive
theft of public money not gotten much coverage in the mainstream corporate media, but also it
only received sporadic coverage in the alternative media. The liberal-left media is distracted
enough by the theatrics of the Trump show to do the ideological dirty work of the elites.
Spending on war will consume almost 70% of the budget and be accompanied by cuts in public
spending for education, housing, the environment, public transportation, jobs trainings, food
support programs like food stamps and Meals on Wheels, as well as Medicare, Medicaid, and
Social Security. Most of the neoliberal candidates running in the Democratic Party's electoral
process, however, haven't spoken a word in opposition to Trump's budget.
The public knows that the Democratic Party's candidates are opposed to Trump's wall on the
southern border, and they expect to hear them raise questions about the $8.6 billion of funding
the wall. But while some of the Democrats may oppose the wall, very few have challenged the
details of the budget that the
U.S. Peace Council indicates . For example:
"$576 billion baseline budget for the Department of Defense; an additional $174 billion
for the Pentagon's Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), i.e., the war budget; $93.1 billion
for the Department of Veterans Affairs; $51.7 billion for Homeland Security; $42.8 billion
for State Department; an additional $26.1 billion for State Department's Overseas Contingency
Operations (regime change slush fund); $16.5 billion for the Department of Energy's National
Nuclear Security Administration (nuclear weapons budget); $21 billion for NASA (militarizing
outer space?); plus $267.4 billion for all other government agencies, including funding for
FBI and Cybersecurity in the Department of Justice."
The Peace Council also highlights the following two issues: First, the total US military and
war budget has jumped from $736.4 billion to $989.0 billion since 2015. That is a $252.6
billion (about 35%) increase in five years. Second, thesimultaneous cuts in the government's
non-military spending are reflected in the proposed budget.
Here are some of biggest proposed budget cuts:
+ $1.5 trillion in cuts to Medicaid over 10 years, implementing work requirements as well
as eliminating the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act. The budget instead adds
$1.2 trillion for a "Market Based Health Care Grant" -- that is, a block grant to states,
instead of paying by need. It's not clear whether that would be part of Medicaid.
+ An $845 billion cut to Medicare over 10 years. That is about a 10 percent cut .
+ $25 billion in cuts to Social Security over 10 years, including cuts to disability
insurance.
+ A $220 billion cut to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program(SNAP) over 10 years ,
which is commonly referred to as food stamps, and includes mandatory work requirements. The
program currently serves around 45 million people.
+ A $21 billion cut to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families , an already severely
underfunded cash-assistance program for the nation's poorest.
+ $207 billion in cuts to the student loan program, eliminating the Public Service Loan
Forgiveness program and cutting subsidized student loans.
+ Overall, there is a 9 percent cut to non-defense programs , which would hit Section 8
housing vouchers, public housing programs, Head Start, the Women, Infants, and Children (WIC)
nutrition program, and Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program , among others.
The working classes and oppressed peoples of the U.S. and around the world can no longer
afford the unchallenged ideological positions of the Pentagon budget and the associated
expenditures for so-called defense that are considered sacrosanct in the U.S. They cannot
afford that much of the U.S. public is not concerned with issues of so-called foreign policy
that the military budget is seen as part.
The racist appeals of U.S. national chauvinism in the form of "Make America Great" and the
Democrats' version of "U.S. Exceptionalism" must be confronted and exposed as the cross-class,
white identity politics that they are. The fact that supposedly progressive or even "radical"
politics does not address the issue of U.S. expenditures on war and imperialism is reflective
of a politics that is morally and political bankrupt. But it also does something else. It
places those practitioners firmly in the camp of the enemies of humanity.
The objective fact that large numbers of the public accept that the U.S. can determine the
leadership of another sovereign nation while simultaneously being outraged by the idea of a
foreign power interfering in U.S. elections demonstrates the mindboggling subjective
contradictions that exist in the U.S. For example – that an Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez can
assert that she will defer to the leadership of her caucus on the issue of Venezuela or that
Barbara Lee can vote to bring Trump's budget proposal out of committee or that Biden can
proudly support Trump's immoral backing of a neo-fascist opposition in Venezuela and
they will all get away with those positions – reveals the incredible challenge that we
face in building an alternative radical movement for peace, social justice and
people(s)-centered human rights.
So, we must join with
U.S. Peace Council and the other members of the Anti-war, pro-peace, and anti-imperialist
communities in the U.S. to "resist and oppose this military attack on our communities, our
livelihoods and our lives." This is an urgent and militant first step in reversing the cultural
support for violence and the normalization of war that currently exists in the U.S. Now is the
moment to demand that Congress reject and reverse the Trump Administration's military budget
and the U.S. Government's militaristic foreign policy. But now is also the moment to commit to
building a powerful countermovement to take back the power over life and death from the
denizens of violence represented by the rapacious 1%. Join the debate on
Facebook More articles by: Ajamu Baraka
Ajamu Baraka is the national organizer of the Black Alliance for Peace and was the 2016
candidate for vice president on the Green Party ticket. He is an editor and contributing
columnist for the Black Agenda Report and contributing columnist for Counterpunch
magazine.
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the
right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a
minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks
Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news
mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's
almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill
Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire
continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda
techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their
assigned puppets.
Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State
controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the
masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of
this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.
Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and
successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion,
pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP),
rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in
corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their
corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.
There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social
issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The
real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it
appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the
Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare.
Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort
whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The
proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as
the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of
Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out
"legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions.
The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote
against a defense spending increase.
Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing
from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too
Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy
in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as
people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.
When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are
bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed
billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge
tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in
every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no
legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.
I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line,
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative
doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals
will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses,
thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true
libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public.
There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last
election by referencing another famous cynic.
"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one
who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking
and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks
Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey,
John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure
her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and
subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump
was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator
at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.
As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be
good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV
ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The
vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed
this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and
disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over
Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.
I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since
2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way.
I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign
stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I
don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not
their words.
Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news
CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The
Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He
provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is
difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.
I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal
judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive.
Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and
renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep
energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing
to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have
gotten it done when he controlled both houses.
The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating
tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets
better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the
Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global
recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life
and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global
recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.
I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle
class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to
mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received
little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many
cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.
With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their
coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a
massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock
to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave
themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered
winning in present day America.
The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises
unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards
as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard
response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with
a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being
a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the
day. Truthfulness not required.
The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the
performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has
become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies
permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant
criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to
corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the
land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human
trait over two hundred years ago.
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental
lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity
of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less
than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over
300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths
occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches,
and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.
These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans.
They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't
care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others.
They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their
unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of
controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every
politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head,
MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the
president.
The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question
will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning.
What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding
Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused
by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I
don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and
their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard,
Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of
personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama
years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.
In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine
whether he can defeat the Deep State.
"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant
step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over
nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the
status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one
has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus,
despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will
probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and
manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism,
cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general
relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here,
too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the
Trumpeteers
That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does
not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of
it, but they're still pissed.
These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is
for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.
Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm
swallowing it.
I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to
include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to
distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?
"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."
If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at
this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself
one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".
If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I
would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real
leadership and not another political hack.
The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side"
you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand
for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and
trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the
minute they become them and not one of us.
Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire
complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before
I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.
Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at
Arkancide.com and start counting the
bodies.
Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of
fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that
situation.
Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of
**** as my governor for 12 years.
NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and
shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped
bafoon.
I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been
nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to
Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.
Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..
Great theater..
Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked
with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream,
vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely
concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now.
If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin
immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.
Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest,
but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect
.. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.
Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" /
current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic
posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..
Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds
Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for
Trump and they were laughing their asses off.
The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were
immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned
nightmare..
Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive
& risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.
I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life,
own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore,
laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to
live in poverty & homelessness in.
At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not
= a financial death sentence.
Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no
electricity.....no running water......no roads....
There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have
given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.
The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare
because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want
to puke.
There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.
This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the
poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents
represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his
reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power
network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's
dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a
proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army
The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot
compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful
countries
Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced
is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire
history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds
of obedient citizens.
This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or
paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful
ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions
The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy,
and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries
have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.
The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd
be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle
leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them
barely read, though they probably can
I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem
gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.
If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What
should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even
mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen
the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants,
liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny
continues to grow and fester as a cancer.
You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is
quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.
If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are
already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your
life.
I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless
without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king
George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's
God.
I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then
pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life.
There are worse things than dying.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing
from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke!
this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.
Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.
We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of
England and the issued of the British-pound currency.
George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed
George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way
of the phony revolution.
Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks,
Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The
same parasite remains within our government.
It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of
rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to
manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the
Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution,
and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.
To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional
books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for
dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while
they are being manipulated.
"... There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the truth. ..."
"... There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare. Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out "legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions. The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote against a defense spending increase. ..."
"... Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus. ..."
"... When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed. ..."
"... I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. ..."
"... If the Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global recession is a certainty. ..."
"... These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the president. ..."
"... The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want to puke. ..."
"I'll show you politics in America. Here it is, right here. "I think the puppet on the
right shares my beliefs." "I think the puppet on the left is more to my liking." "Hey, wait a
minute, there's one guy holding out both puppets!"" – Bill Hicks
Anyone who frequents Twitter, Facebook, political blogs, economic blogs, or fake-news
mainstream media channels knows our world is driven by the "Us versus Them" narrative. It's
almost as if "they" are forcing us to choose sides and believe the other side is evil. Bill
Hicks died in 1994, but his above quote is truer today then it was then. As the American Empire
continues its long-term decline, the proles are manipulated through Bernaysian propaganda
techniques, honed over the course of decades by the ruling oligarchs, to root for their
assigned puppets.
Most people can't discern they are being manipulated and duped by the Deep State
controllers. The most terrifying outcome for these Deep State controllers would be for the
masses to realize it is us versus them. But they don't believe there is a chance in hell of
this happening. Their arrogance is palatable.
Their hubris has reached astronomical levels as they blew up the world economy in 2008 and
successfully managed to have the innocent victims bail them out to the tune of $700 billion,
pillaged the wealth of the nation through their capture of the Federal Reserve (QE, ZIRP),
rigged the financial markets in their favor through collusion, used the hundreds of billions in
corporate tax cuts to buy back their stock and further pump the stock market, all while their
corporate media mouthpieces mislead and misinform the proles.
There are differences between the parties, but they are mainly centered around social
issues and disputes with little or no consequence to the long-term path of the country. The
real ruling oligarchs essentially allow controlled opposition within each party to make it
appear you have a legitimate choice at the ballot box. Nothing could be further from the
truth.
There has been an unwritten agreement between the parties for decades where the
Democrats pretend to be against war and the Republicans pretend to be against welfare.
Meanwhile, spending on war and welfare relentlessly grows into the trillions, with no effort
whatsoever from either party to even slow the rate of growth, let alone cut spending. The
proliferation of the military industrial complex like a poisonous weed has been inexorable, as
the corporate arms dealers place their facilities of death in the congressional districts of
Democrats and Republicans. In addition, these corporate manufacturers of murder dole out
"legal" payoffs to corrupt politicians of both parties in the form of political contributions.
The Deep State knows bribes and well-paying jobs ensure no spineless congressman will ever vote
against a defense spending increase.
Of course, the warfare/welfare state couldn't grow to its immense size without financing
from the Wall Street cabal and their feckless academic puppets at the Federal Reserve. The Too
Big to Trust Wall Street banks, whose willful control fraud nearly wrecked the global economy
in 2008, were rewarded by their Deep State patrons by getting bigger and more powerful as
people on Main Street and senior citizen savers were thrown under the bus.
When these criminal bankers have their reckless bets blow up in their faces they are
bailed out by the American taxpayers, but when the Fed rigs the system so they are guaranteed
billions in risk free profits, they reward themselves with massive bonuses and lobby for a huge
tax cut used to buy back their stock. With bank branches in every congressional district in
every state, and bankers spreading protection money to greedy politicians across the land, no
legislation damaging to the banking cartel is ever passed.
I've never been big on joining a group. I tend to believe Groucho Marx and his cynical line,
"I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member". The "Us vs. Them" narrative
doesn't connect with my view of the world. As a realistic libertarian I know libertarian ideals
will never proliferate in a society of government dependency, willful ignorance of the masses,
thousands of laws, and a weak-kneed populace afraid of freedom and liberty. The only true
libertarian politician, Ron Paul, was only able to connect with about 5% of the voting public.
There is no chance a candidate with a libertarian platform will ever win a national election.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Bill Hicks somewhat foreshadowed the last
election by referencing another famous cynic.
"I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one
who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking
and screaming into the White House." ― Bill Hicks
Hillary Clinton wanted to be president so badly, she colluded with Barack Obama, Jim Comey,
John Brennan, James Clapper, Loretta Lynch and numerous other Deep State sycophants to ensure
her victory, by attempting to entrap Donald Trump in a concocted Russian collusion plot and
subsequent post-election coup to cover for their traitorous plot. I wouldn't say Donald Trump
was dragged kicking and screaming into the White House, but when he ascended on the escalator
at Trump Tower in June of 2015, I'm not convinced he believed he could win the presidency.
As the greatest self-promoter of our time, I think he believed a presidential run would be
good for his brand, more revenue for his properties and more interest in his reality TV
ventures. He was despised by the establishment within the Republican and Democrat parties. The
vested interests controlling the media and levers of power in society scorned and ridiculed
this brash uncouth outsider. In an upset for the ages, Trump tapped into a vein of rage and
disgruntlement in flyover country and pockets within swing states, to win the presidency over
Crooked Hillary and her Deep State backers.
I voted for Trump because he wasn't Hillary. I hadn't voted for a Republican since
2000, casting protest votes for Libertarian and Constitutional Party candidates along the way.
I despise the establishment, so their hatred of Trump made me vote for him. His campaign
stances against foreign wars and Federal Reserve reckless bubble blowing appealed to me. I
don't worship at the altar of the cult of personality. I judge men by their actions and not
their words.
Trump's first two years have been endlessly entertaining as he waged war against fake news
CNN, establishment Republicans, the Deep State coup attempt, and Obama loving globalists. The
Twitter in Chief has bypassed the fake news media and tweets relentlessly to his followers. He
provokes outrage in his enemies and enthralls his worshipers. With millions in each camp it is
difficult to find an unbiased assessment of narrative versus real accomplishments.
I'm happy he has been able to stop the relentless leftward progression of our Federal
judiciary. Cutting regulations and rolling back environmental mandates has been a positive.
Exiting the Paris Climate Agreement and TPP, forcing NATO members to pay their fair share, and
renegotiating NAFTA were all needed. Ending the war on coal and approving pipelines will keep
energy costs lower. His attempts to vet Muslims entering the country have been the right thing
to do. Building a wall on our southern border is the right thing to do, but he should have
gotten it done when he controlled both houses.
The use of tariffs to force China to renegotiate one sided trade deals as a negotiating
tactic is a high-risk, high reward gamble. If his game of chicken is successful and he gets
better terms from the Chicoms, while reversing the tariffs, it would be a huge win. If the
Chinese refuse to yield for fear of losing face, and the tariff war accelerates, a global
recession is a certainty. Who has the upper hand? Xi is essentially a dictator for life
and doesn't have to worry about elections or popularity polls. Dissent is crushed. A global
recession and stock market crash would make Trump's re-election in 2020 problematic.
I'm a big supporter of lower taxes. The Trump tax cuts were sold as beneficial to the middle
class. That is a false narrative. The vast majority of the tax cut benefits went to
mega-corporations and rich people. Middle class home owning families with children received
little or no tax relief, as exemptions were eliminated and tax deductions capped. In many
cases, taxes rose for working class Americans.
With corporate profits at all time highs, massive tax cuts put billions more into their
coffers. They didn't repatriate their overseas profits to a great extent. They didn't go on a
massive hiring spree. They didn't invest in new facilities. They did buy back their own stock
to help drive the stock market to stratospheric heights. So corporate executives gave
themselves billions in bonuses, which were taxed at a much lower rate. This is considered
winning in present day America.
The "Us vs. Them" issue rears its ugly head whenever Trump is held accountable for promises
unkept, blatant failures, and his own version of fake news. Holding Trump to the same standards
as Obama is considered traitorous by those who only root for their home team. Their standard
response is that you are a Hillary sycophant or a turncoat to the home team. If you agree with
a particular viewpoint or position of a liberal then you are a bad person and accused of being
a lefty by Trump fanboys. Facts don't matter to cheerleaders. Competing narratives rule the
day. Truthfulness not required.
The refusal to distinguish between positive actions and negative actions when assessing the
performance of what passes for our political leadership by the masses is why cynicism has
become my standard response to everything I see, hear or he read. The incessant level of lies
permeating our society and its acceptance as the norm has led to moral decay and rampant
criminality from the White House, to the halls of Congress, to corporate boardrooms, to
corporate newsrooms, to government run classrooms, to the Vatican, and to households across the
land. It's interesting that one of our founding fathers reflected upon this detestable human
trait over two hundred years ago.
"It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental
lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity
of his mind as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has
prepared himself for the commission of every other crime." – Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine's description of how moral mischief can ruin a society was written when less
than 3 million people inhabited America. Consider his accurate assessment of humanity when over
300 million occupy these lands. The staggering number of corrupt prostituted sociopaths
occupying positions of power within the government, corporations, media, military, churches,
and academia has created a morally bankrupt empire of debt.
These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats or Republicans.
They are not beholden to a country or community. They care not for their fellow man. They don't
care about future generations. They care about their own power, wealth and control over others.
They have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are meaningless in their
unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal and kill to achieve their goal of
controlling everything and everyone in this world. This precisely describes virtually every
politician in Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government agency head,
MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and blood sucking advisor to the
president.
The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them. The answer to that question
will strongly impact the direction and intensity of the climactic years of this Fourth Turning.
What I've noticed is the shunning of those who don't take an all or nothing position regarding
Trump. If you disagree with a decision, policy, or hiring decision by the man, you are accused
by the pro-Trump team of being one of them (aka liberals, lefties, Hillary lovers).
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the Trumpeteers. I
don't want to be Us or Them. I just want to be me. I will judge everyone by their actions and
their results. I can agree with Trump on many issues, while also agreeing with Tulsi Gabbard,
Rand Paul, Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi on other issues. I don't prescribe to the cult of
personality school of thought. I didn't believe the false narratives during the Bush or Obama
years, and I won't worship at the altar of the Trump narrative now.
In Part II of this article I'll assess Trump's progress thus far and try to determine
whether he can defeat the Deep State.
"The scientific and industrial revolution of modern times represents the next giant
step in the mastery over nature; and here, too, an enormous increase in man's power over
nature is followed by an apocalyptic drive to subjugate man and reduce human nature to the
status of nature. Even where enslavement is employed in a mighty effort to tame nature, one
has the feeling that the effort is but a tactic to legitimize total subjugation. Thus,
despite its spectacular achievements in science and technology, the twentieth century will
probably be seen in retrospect as a century mainly preoccupied with the mastery and
manipulation of men. Nationalism, socialism, communism, fascism, and militarism,
cartelization and unionization, propaganda and advertising are all aspects of a general
relentless drive to manipulate men and neutralize the unpredictability of human nature. Here,
too, the atmosphere is heavy-laden with coercion and magic." --Eric Hoffer
If you don't agree with everything Trump does or says, you are dead to the
Trumpeteers
That's not true. When Trump kisses Israeli ***, most "Trumpeteers" are outraged. That does
not mean they're going to vote for Joe "I'm a Zionist" Biden, or Honest Hillary because of
it, but they're still pissed.
These predators (((them))) need to fear the Victims, us! That is what the 2ND Amendment is
for. It's coming, slowly for now, but eventually it speeds up.
Any piece like this better be littered with footnotes and cited sources before I'm
swallowing it.
I'll say it again: this is the internet, people. There's no "shortage of column space" to
include links back to primary sources for your assertions. Otherwise, how am I supposed to
distinguish you from another "psy op" or "paid opposition hit piece"?
"The question pondered every day on blogs, social media, news channels, and in households
around the country is whether Trump is one of Us or one of Them."
If you still ponder this question, then you are pretty frickin' thick. It is obvious at
this point, that he betrayed everything he campaigned on. You don't do that and call yourself
one of "us".......damn sure aren't one of "me".
If I couldn't keep my word and wouldn't do what it takes to do what is right.....then I
would resign. But I would not go on playing politics in a world that needs some real
leadership and not another political hack.
The real battle is between Truth and Lie. No matter the name of your "team" or the "side"
you support. Truth is truth and lies are lies. We don't stand for political parties, we stand
for truth. We don't stand for national pride, we take pride in a nation that is truthful and
trustworthy. The minute a "side" or "team" starts lying.....and justifying it.....that is the
minute they become them and not one of us.
Any thinking person in this country today knows we are being lied to by the entire
complex. Until someone starts telling the truth.....we are on our own. But I be damned before
I am going to support any of these lying sons of bitches......and that includes Trump.
Dark comedy. All the elections have been **** choices until the last one. Take a look at
Arkancide.com and start counting the
bodies.
Anyone remember the news telling us how North Korea promised to turn the US into a sea of
fire?? Trump absolutely went to bat for every single American to de-escalate that
situation.
Don't tell me about Arkancide or the Clintons. I grew up in Arkansas with that sack of
**** as my governor for 12 years.
NK was never a real threat to anyone. Trump didn't do ****. NK is back to building and
shooting off missiles and will be teaming up with the Russians and Chinese. You are a duped
bafoon.
I don't think anybody thought NK was an existential threat to the US. It has still been
nice making progress on bringing them back into the world and making them less of a threat to
Japan and S. Korea. Trump did that.
Dennis Rodman did that, or that is to say, Trump an extension thereof ..
Great theater..
Look, i thought it was great that Trump went Kim Unning. I mean after all, i had talked
with a few elderly folks that get their news directly from the mainstream of mainstream,
vanilla news reportage. Propaganda central casting. I remember them being extremely
concerned, outright petrified about that evil menace, kim gonna launch nukes any minute now.
If the news would have been announced a major troop mobilization, bombing campaigns, to begin
immediately they would have been completely onboard, waving the flag.
Frankly, it is only a matter of time, and folks can speculate on the country of interest,
but it is coming soon to a theater near you. So many being in the crosshairs. Iran i suspect
.. that's the big prize, that makes these sociopaths cream in their panties.
Probably. In the second term .. and so far, if ones honestly evaluates the "brain trust" /
current crop of dimwit opposition, and in light of their past 2 plus years of moronic
posturing with their hair on fire, trump will get his second term ..
Until the last one? You are retarded, the last election was a masterpiece of Rothschilds
Productions. The Illuminati was watching you at their private cinema when you were voting for
Trump and they were laughing their asses off.
The author does not realize that everyone in America, except Native American Indians, were
immigrants drawn towards the false promise of hope that is the American Dream, turned
nightmare..
Owning your own home, car, & raising a family in this country is so damn expensive
& risky, that you'd have be on drugs or an idiot to even fall for the lies.
I don't see an us vs them, I see the #FakeMoney printers monetized every facet of life,
own everything, & it truly is RENT-A-LIFE USSA, complete with bills galore, taxes galore,
laws galore, jails & prisons galore, & the worst fkn country anyone would want to
live in poverty & homelessness in.
At least in many 3rd world nations there is land to live off of & joblessness does not
= a financial death sentence.
Sure. Lets all go back to living in huts.....off the land....no cars.....no
electricity.....no running water......no roads....
There is a price to pay for things and it is not always in the form of money. We have
given up some of our freedom for the ease and conveniences we want.
The problem is we have gone too far. The "American Dream" has become a grotesque nightmare
because people by the millions sit around and dream about being a Kardashian. Makes me want
to puke.
There is a balance. Don't take the other extreme or we never find balance.
This article is moronic. One can easily prove that Trump is not like all the others in the
poster. Has this author been living under a rock for the last 2.5 yrs? The past 5 presidents
represent a group that has been literally trying to assassinate Trump, ruin his family, his
reputation, his buisness and his future, for the audacity to be an ousider to the power
network and steal (win) the presidency from under their noses. He's kept us OUT of war. He's
dissolved the treachery that was keeping us in the middle east through gaslighitng and a
proxy fake war that is ISIS, the globalists' / nato / fiveys / uk's fake mercenary army
The greatest threat to the USA is its own dumbed down drugged up citizens who cannot
compete with anyone. America is a big military powerhouse but that doens't make successful
countries
Notice how modern narrative is getting manipulated. What is being reported and referenced
is completely different from how things are. And knowing that we can assume that the entire
history is a fabricated lie, written by the ruling class to support its status in the minds
of obedient citizens.
This article is garbage propaganda that proves that they think we aren't keeping score or
paying attention. The gaslighting won't work when it relies on so much counterthink, willful
ignorance, counterfacts and weaponized omissions
The reality is the de-escalation of wars, the stability of our currency and our economy,
and the moral re-grounding of our culture does not occur until we do what over 100 countries
have done over the centuries, beginning in Carthage in 250AD.
The congress are statusquotarians. If they solved the problems they say they would,they'd
be out of a job. and that job is sitting there acting like a naddler or toxic post turtle
leprechaun with a charisma and skill level of zero. Their staff do all the work, half of them
barely read, though they probably can
I still think 1st and 2nd ammedment is predicated on which party rules the house. If a Dem
gets into the WH, we're fucked. Kiss those Iast two dying amendments goodbye for good.
If we rely on any party to preserve the 1st or 2nd Amendments, we are already fucked. What
should preserve the 1st and 2nd Amendments is the absolute fear of anyone in government even
mentioning suppressing or removing them. When the very thought of doing anything to lessen
the rights advocated in these two amendments, causes a politician to piss in their pants,
liberty will be preserved. As it is now citizens fear the government, and as a result tyranny
continues to grow and fester as a cancer.
You may very well be right. I still hold out hope, but upon seeing what our society is
quickly morphing into, that hope seems to fade more each and every day.
If you think the 1st and 2nd amendments are reliant on who is in office, then you are
already done. Why don't you try growing a pair and being an American for once in your
life.
I will always have a 1st and 2nd "amendment" for as long as I live. Life is meaningless
without them.....as far as I am concerned. Good thing the founders didn't wait for king
George to give them what they "felt" was theirs.....by the laws of Nature and Nature's
God.
I hope the democrats get the power......and I hope they come for the guns......maybe then
pussies like you will finally have to **** or get off the pot......for once in your life.
There are worse things than dying.
This country cannot be fixed through the ballot box. Unless we get rid of *** influencing
from abroad and domestically. Getting rid of English King few hundred years ago was a joke!
this would be a challenge because dual-citizens masquerading as locals.
Last revolution (1776) we targeted the WRONG ENEMY.
We targeted King George III instead of the private bankers who owned of the Bank of
England and the issued of the British-pound currency.
George III was himself up to his ears in debt to them by 1776, when the bankers installed
George Washington to replace George III as their middleman in the American colonies, by way
of the phony revolution.
Phony because ownership of the central bank and currency (Federal-Reserve Banks,
Federal-Reserve notes) we use, remains in the same banking families' hands to this day. The
same parasite remains within our government.
It is this strangely incomplete calculus that creates the shifting Loser world of
rifts and alliances. By operating with a more complete calculus, Sociopaths are able to
manipulate this world through the divide-and-conquer mechanisms. The result is that the
Losers end up blaming each other for their losses, seek collective emotional resolution,
and fail to adequately address the balance sheet of material rewards and losses.
To succeed, this strategy requires that Losers not look too closely at the non-emotional
books. This is why, as we saw last time, divide-and-conquer is the most effective means for
dealing with them, since it naturally creates emotional drama that keeps them busy while
they are being manipulated.
That was an interesting article on psychological vs sociological storytelling and it makes
a good companion piece when thinking about how the US media personalizes US geo-political
conflicts with the heads of rival state (Putin, Xi, Castro, Kim Jong-un, Khomeini, Gaddafi).
If you believe the US media if they just removed Putin, Russia would go back to being a good
little puppet state just like under Yeltins.
Which is a shockingly naïve way to look at international relations. States have
permanent interests and any competent head of State will always represent those interests to
the best of their ability. True, you could overthrow the government and replace every senior
government figure with a compliant puppet (which the US always tries to do), but the
permanent interests that arise from the inhabitants of the State will always rise up and
(re)assert themselves. When the State leadership is bribed or threatened into ignoring or
acting against these needs it ultimately creates a failed State.
Even the US media seems to subconsciously understand this, when they talk of "overly
ambitious US goals of remaking societies", however, they never make the logical next step of
investigating why these States do not wish to be remade as per the US imagined ideal, what
the interests of these actually are and how diplomacy can resolve conflicts. According to the
US media everything boils down to the US = good, anyone who disagrees with our policies = bad
and diplomacy is just a measure of how vulgar our threats are during talks. I'm specifically
thinking of the US Ambassador to Russia, John Huntsman's boast of a US aircraft carrier in
the Mediterranean as being 100,000 tons of diplomacy to Russia - of all the ridiculous and
stupid things to says to Russia when supposedly trying to "ease" tensions (I still can't
believe Huntsmen, former Ambassador to China under Obama, is regarded a "serious"
professional ambassador within the State departments when compared to all the celebrity
ambassadorships the US President for fundraiser).
Pepe ESCOBAR
Even veiled by thick layers of diplomatic fog, the overlapping meetings in Sochi between US
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov still
offer tantalizing geopolitical nuggets.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov did his best to
smooth the utterly intractable, admitting there was "no breakthrough yet" during the talks but
at least the US "demonstrated a constructive approach."
Putin told Pompeo that after his 90-minute phone call with Trump, initiated by the White
House, and described by Ushakov as "very good," the Russian president
"got the
impression that the [US] president was inclined to re-establish Russian-American relations and
contacts to resolve together the issues that are of mutual interest to us."
That would imply a Russiagate closure.
Putin told
Pompeo, in no uncertain terms, that Moscow never interfered in the US elections, and that the
Mueller report proved that there was no connection between the Kremlin and the Trump
campaign.
This adds to the fact Russiagate has been consistently
debunked
by
the best independent American investigators such as the VIPS group.
'Interesting' talk on Iran
Let's briefly review what became public of the discussions on
multiple (hot and cold) conflict fronts – Venezuela, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran.
Venezuela – Ushakov reiterated the Kremlin's position: "Any steps
that may provoke a civil war in the country are inadmissible." The future of President Maduro
was apparently not part of the discussion.
That brings to mind the recent Arctic Council summit. Both Lavrov
and Pompeo were there. Here's a significant exchange:
Lavrov:
I believe you don't represent the South American
region, do you?
Pompeo:
We represent the entire hemisphere.
Lavrov:
Oh, the hemisphere. Then what's the US doing in
the Eastern Hemisphere, in Ukraine, for instance?
There was no response from Pompeo.
North Korea – Even acknowledging that the Trump administration is "generally ready to
continue working [with Pyongyang] despite the stalemate at the last meeting, Ushakov again
reiterated the Kremlin's position: Pyongyang will not give in to "any type of pressure," and
North Korea wants "a respectful approach" and international security guarantees.
Afghanistan – Ushakov noted Moscow is very much aware that the
Taliban are getting stronger. So the only way out is to find a "balance of power." There was a
crucial trilateral in Moscow on April 25 featuring Russia, China and the US, where they all
called on the Taliban to start talking with Kabul as soon as possible.
Iran – Ushakov said the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, was "briefly
discussed.".He would only say the discussion was "interesting."
Talk about a larger than life euphemism. Moscow is extremely
uneasy over the possibility of a destabilization of Iran that allows a free transit of jihadis
from the Caspian to the Caucasus.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Diplomatic sources –
from Russia and Iran – confirm, off the record, there have been secret talks among the three
pillars of Eurasian integration – Russia, China and Iran – about Chinese and Russian guarantees
in the event the Trump administration's drive to strangle Tehran to death takes an ominous turn.
This is being discussed at the highest levels in Moscow and
Beijing. The bottom line: Russia-China won't allow Iran to be destroyed.
But it's quite understandable that Ushakov wouldn't let that
information slip through a mere press briefing.
Wang Yi and other deals
On multiple fronts, what was not disclosed by Ushakov is way more
fascinating than what's now on the record. There's absolutely no way Russian hypersonic weapons
were not also discussed, as well as China's intermediate-range missiles capable of reaching any
US military base encircling or containing China.
The real deal was, in fact, not Putin-Pompeo or Pompeo-Lavrov in
Sochi. It was actually Lavrov-Wang Yi (the Chinese Foreign Minister), the day before in Moscow.
A US investment banker doing business in Russia told me: "
Note
how Pompeo ran like mad to Sochi. We are frightened and overstretched."
Diplomats later remarked: "Pompeo looked solemn afterwards.
Lavrov sounded very diplomatic and calm." It's no secret in Moscow's top diplomatic circles that
the Chinese Politburo overruled President Xi Jinping's effort to find an accommodation to
Trump's tariff offensive. The tension was visible in Pompeo's demeanor.
In terms of substance, it's remarkable how Lavrov and Wang Yi
talked about, literally, everything: Syria, Iran, Venezuela, the Caspian, the Caucasus, New Silk
Roads (BRI), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), missiles,
nuclear proliferation.
Or as Lavrov diplomatically put it:
"In
general, Russia-China cooperation is one of the key factors in maintaining the international
security and stability, establishing a multipolar world order. . . . Our states cooperate
closely in various multilateral organizations, including the UN, G20, SCO, BRICS and RIC
[Russia, India, China trilateral forum], we are working on aligning the integration potential of
the EAEU and the Belt and Road Initiative, with potentially establishing [a] larger Eurasian
partnership."
The strategic partnership is in sync on Venezuela, Syria, Iran,
Afghanistan – they want a solution brokered by the SCO. And on North Korea, the message could
not have been more forceful.
After talking to Wang Yi, Lavrov stressed that contacts between
Washington and North Korea "proceeded in conformity with the road map that we had drafted
together with China, from confidence restoration measures to further direct contacts."
This is a frank admission that Pyongyang gets top advice from the
Russia-China strategic partnership. And there's more: "We hope that at a certain point a
comprehensive agreement will be achieved on the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula and on
the creation of a system of peace and security in general in Northeast Asia, including concrete
firm guarantees of North Korea's security."
Translation: Russia and China won't back down on guaranteeing
North Korea's security. Lavrov said: "Such guarantees will be not easy to provide, but this is
an absolutely mandatory part of a future agreement. Russia and China are prepared to work on
such guarantees."
Reset, maybe?
The indomitable Maria Zakharova, Russian Ministry of Foreign
Affairs spokeswoman, may have
summed
it all up
. A US-Russia reset may even, eventually, happen. Certainly, it won't be of
the Hillary Clinton kind, especially when current CIA director Gina Haspel is shifting most of
the agency's resources towards Iran and Russia.
Top Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov was way more
scathing
.
Russia
won't break with China, because the US "
doesn't have any more a
geopolitical currency to 'buy' Russia – she is out of [the] price range for the US."
That left Ushakov with his brave face, confirming there may be a
Trump-Putin meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka next month.
"We can organize a meeting 'on the go' with President Trump.
Alternatively, we can sit down for a more comprehensive discussion."
Under the current geopolitical incandescence, that's the best
rational minds can hope for.
asiatimes.com
The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture
Foundation.
Tags:
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Print this article
Editor's Choice
May 16, 2019 |
Editor's Сhoice
What Putin and Pompeo Did Not Talk About
Russia is uneasy over the destabilization of Tehran, and on other hotspots the
powers' positions are clear
Pepe ESCOBAR
Even veiled by thick layers of diplomatic fog, the overlapping meetings in Sochi between
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and President Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov
still offer tantalizing geopolitical nuggets.
Russian presidential aide Yury Ushakov did
his best to smooth the utterly intractable, admitting there was "no breakthrough yet"
during the talks but at least the US "demonstrated a constructive approach."
Putin told Pompeo that after his 90-minute phone call with Trump, initiated by the
White House, and described by Ushakov as "very good," the Russian president
"got
the impression that the [US] president was inclined to re-establish Russian-American
relations and contacts to resolve together the issues that are of mutual interest to us."
That would imply a Russiagate closure.
Putin
told Pompeo, in no uncertain terms, that Moscow never interfered in the US elections,
and that the Mueller report proved that there was no connection between the Kremlin and
the Trump campaign.
This adds to the fact Russiagate has been consistently
debunked
by
the best independent American investigators such as the VIPS group.
'Interesting' talk on Iran
Let's briefly review what became public of the discussions
on multiple (hot and cold) conflict fronts – Venezuela, North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran.
Venezuela – Ushakov reiterated the Kremlin's position: "Any
steps that may provoke a civil war in the country are inadmissible." The future of
President Maduro was apparently not part of the discussion.
That brings to mind the recent Arctic Council summit. Both
Lavrov and Pompeo were there. Here's a significant exchange:
Lavrov:
I believe you don't represent the South
American region, do you?
Pompeo:
We represent the entire hemisphere.
Lavrov:
Oh, the hemisphere. Then what's the US
doing in the Eastern Hemisphere, in Ukraine, for instance?
There was no response from Pompeo.
North Korea – Even acknowledging that the Trump administration is "generally ready to
continue working [with Pyongyang] despite the stalemate at the last meeting, Ushakov again
reiterated the Kremlin's position: Pyongyang will not give in to "any type of pressure,"
and North Korea wants "a respectful approach" and international security guarantees.
Afghanistan – Ushakov noted Moscow is very much aware that
the Taliban are getting stronger. So the only way out is to find a "balance of power."
There was a crucial trilateral in Moscow on April 25 featuring Russia, China and the US,
where they all called on the Taliban to start talking with Kabul as soon as possible.
Iran – Ushakov said the JCPOA, or Iran nuclear deal, was
"briefly discussed.".He would only say the discussion was "interesting."
Talk about a larger than life euphemism. Moscow is
extremely uneasy over the possibility of a destabilization of Iran that allows a free
transit of jihadis from the Caspian to the Caucasus.
Which brings us to the heart of the matter. Diplomatic
sources – from Russia and Iran – confirm, off the record, there have been secret talks
among the three pillars of Eurasian integration – Russia, China and Iran – about Chinese
and Russian guarantees in the event the Trump administration's drive to strangle Tehran to
death takes an ominous turn.
This is being discussed at the highest levels in Moscow and
Beijing. The bottom line: Russia-China won't allow Iran to be destroyed.
But it's quite understandable that Ushakov wouldn't let
that information slip through a mere press briefing.
Wang Yi and other deals
On multiple fronts, what was not disclosed by Ushakov is
way more fascinating than what's now on the record. There's absolutely no way Russian
hypersonic weapons were not also discussed, as well as China's intermediate-range missiles
capable of reaching any US military base encircling or containing China.
The real deal was, in fact, not Putin-Pompeo or
Pompeo-Lavrov in Sochi. It was actually Lavrov-Wang Yi (the Chinese Foreign Minister), the
day before in Moscow.
A US investment banker doing business in Russia told me: "
Note
how Pompeo ran like mad to Sochi. We are frightened and overstretched."
Diplomats later remarked: "Pompeo looked solemn afterwards.
Lavrov sounded very diplomatic and calm." It's no secret in Moscow's top diplomatic
circles that the Chinese Politburo overruled President Xi Jinping's effort to find an
accommodation to Trump's tariff offensive. The tension was visible in Pompeo's demeanor.
In terms of substance, it's remarkable how Lavrov and Wang
Yi talked about, literally, everything: Syria, Iran, Venezuela, the Caspian, the Caucasus,
New Silk Roads (BRI), Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU), Shanghai Cooperation Organization
(SCO), missiles, nuclear proliferation.
Or as Lavrov diplomatically put it:
"In
general, Russia-China cooperation is one of the key factors in maintaining the
international security and stability, establishing a multipolar world order. . . . Our
states cooperate closely in various multilateral organizations, including the UN, G20,
SCO, BRICS and RIC [Russia, India, China trilateral forum], we are working on aligning the
integration potential of the EAEU and the Belt and Road Initiative, with potentially
establishing [a] larger Eurasian partnership."
The strategic partnership is in sync on Venezuela, Syria,
Iran, Afghanistan – they want a solution brokered by the SCO. And on North Korea, the
message could not have been more forceful.
After talking to Wang Yi, Lavrov stressed that contacts
between Washington and North Korea "proceeded in conformity with the road map that we had
drafted together with China, from confidence restoration measures to further direct
contacts."
This is a frank admission that Pyongyang gets top advice
from the Russia-China strategic partnership. And there's more: "We hope that at a certain
point a comprehensive agreement will be achieved on the denuclearization of the Korean
Peninsula and on the creation of a system of peace and security in general in Northeast
Asia, including concrete firm guarantees of North Korea's security."
Translation: Russia and China won't back down on
guaranteeing North Korea's security. Lavrov said: "Such guarantees will be not easy to
provide, but this is an absolutely mandatory part of a future agreement. Russia and China
are prepared to work on such guarantees."
Reset, maybe?
The indomitable Maria Zakharova, Russian Ministry of
Foreign Affairs spokeswoman, may have
summed
it all up
. A US-Russia reset may even, eventually, happen. Certainly, it won't
be of the Hillary Clinton kind, especially when current CIA director Gina Haspel is
shifting most of the agency's resources towards Iran and Russia.
Top Russian military analyst Andrei Martyanov was way more
scathing
.
Russia
won't break with China, because the US "
doesn't have any more a
geopolitical currency to 'buy' Russia – she is out of [the] price range for the US."
That left Ushakov with his brave face, confirming there may
be a Trump-Putin meeting on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Osaka next month.
"We can organize a meeting 'on the go' with President
Trump. Alternatively, we can sit down for a more comprehensive discussion."
Under the current geopolitical incandescence, that's the
best rational minds can hope for.
The bombing of Dresden remains one of the deadliest and morally most-problematic raids of
World War II. Three factors make the bombing of Dresden unique: 1) a huge firestorm developed
that engulfed much of the city; 2) the firestorm engulfed a population swollen by refugees; and
3) defenses and shelters even for the original Dresden population were minimal.
[1] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc.,
1984, p. 275. The result was a high death toll and the destruction of one of Europe's most
beautiful and cultural cities.
While exact figures of deaths in the Dresden bombings can never be obtained, some
Revisionist historians estimate a death toll at Dresden as high as 250,000 people. Most
establishment historians state that a death toll at Dresden of 250,000 is an absolute
impossibility. For example, Richard Evans states:
Even allowing for the unique circumstances of Dresden, a figure of 250,000 dead would have
meant that 20% to 30% of the population was killed, a figure so grossly out of proportion to
other comparable attacks as to have raised the eyebrows of anyone familiar with the
statistics of bombing raids even if the population had been inflated by an influx of refugees
fleeing the advance of the Red Army.
[5] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158.
Population of Dresden
Historians generally agree that a large number of German refugees were in Dresden during the
night of February 13-14, 1945. However, the estimate of refugees in Dresden that night varies
widely. This is a major reason for the discrepancies in the death toll estimates in the Dresden
bombings.
Marshall De Bruhl states in his book Firestorm : Allied Airpower and the
Destruction of Dresden :
Nearly every apartment and house [in Dresden] was crammed with relatives or friends from
the east; many other residents had been ordered to take in strangers. There were makeshift
campsites everywhere. Some 200,000 Silesians and East Prussians were living in tents or
shacks in the Grosser Garten. The city's population was more than double its prewar size.
Some estimates have put the number as high as 1.4 million.
Unlike other major German cities, Dresden had an exceptionally low population density, due
to the large proportion of single houses surrounded by gardens. Even the built-up areas did
not have the congestion of Berlin and Munich. However, in February 1945, the open spaces,
gardens, and parks were filled with people.
David Irving states in The Destruction of Dresden :
Silesians represented probably 80% of the displaced people crowding into Dresden on the
night of the triple blow; the city which in peacetime had a population of 630,000 citizens
was by the eve of the air attack so crowded with Silesians, East Prussians and Pomeranians
from the Eastern Front, with Berliners and Rhinelanders from the west, with Allied and
Russian prisoners of war, with evacuated children's settlement, with forced laborers of many
nationalities, that the increased population was now between 1,200,000 and 1,400,000
citizens, of whom, not surprisingly, several hundred thousand had no proper home and of whom
none could seek the protection of an air-raid shelter.
[7] Irving, David, The Destruction of Dresden , New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1964, p. 98.
Frederick Taylor states in his book Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 that Dresden
had been accepting refugees from the devastated cities of the Ruhr, and from Hamburg and
Berlin, ever since the British bombing campaign began in earnest. By late 1943 Dresden was
already overstretched and finding it hard to accept more outsiders. By the winter of 1944-1945,
hundreds of thousands of German refugees were traveling from the east in an attempt to escape
the Russian army.
[9] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York: HarperCollins,
2004, pp. 134, 227-228.
The German government regarded the acceptance of Germans from the east as an essential duty.
Der Freiheitskampf , the official German organ for Saxony, urged citizens to offer
temporary accommodation:
However, Taylor states that it was general policy in Dresden to have refugees on their way
to the west to continue onwards within 24 hours. Fleeing the Russians was not a valid
justification for seeking and maintaining residence in Dresden. Taylor states that the best
estimate by Götz Bergander, who spent time on fire-watching duties and on refugee-relief
work in Dresden, was that approximately 200,000 nonresidents were in Dresden on the night of
February 13-14, 1945. Many of these refugees would have been living in quarters away from the
targeted center of Dresden.
[11] Ibid. , pp. 229, 232.
(Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York: HarperCollins, 2004,
pp. 134, 227-228.)
ORDER IT NOW
The Dresden historian Friedrich Reichert estimates that only 567,000 residents and 100,000
refugees were in Dresden on the night of the bombings. Reichert quotes witnesses who state that
no refugees were billeted in Dresden houses and that no billeting took place in Dresden's parks
or squares. Thus, Reichert estimates that the number of people in Dresden on the night of the
bombings was not much greater than the official figure of Dresden's population before the war.
[12] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 174.
Reichert's estimate of Dresden's population during the bombings is almost certainly too low.
As a RAF memo analyzed it before the attack:
Every household had its large quota of refugees, and many more had arrived in Dresden that
day, so that the pavements were blocked by them, as they struggled onwards or simply sat
exhausted on their suitcases and rucksacks. For these reasons, no one has been able to put a
positive figure to the numbers of the dead, and no doubt no one ever will.
[14] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984, p. 177.
The report prepared by the USAF Historical Division Research Studies Institute Air
University states that "there may probably have been about 1,000,000 people in Dresden on the
night of the 13/14 February RAF attack."
[15] http://glossaryhesperado.blogspot.com/2008/04/facts....html. I think the 1 million
population figure cited in this report constitutes a realistic and conservative minimum
estimate of Dresden's population during the Allied bombings of February 13-14, 1945.
Did Only 25,000 People Die?
If the 25,000 death-toll estimate in Dresden is accurate, we are left with the odd result
that Allied air power, employed for textbook purposes to its full measure and with no
restrictions, over an especially vulnerable large city near the end of the war, when Allied air
superiority was absolute and German defenses nearly nonexistent, was less effective than Allied
air power had been in previous more-difficult operations such as Hamburg or Berlin. I think the
extensive ruins left in Dresden suggest a degree of complete destruction not seen before in
Germany.
Dresden also lacked an effective network of air-raid shelters to protect its inhabitants.
Hitler had ordered that over 3,000 air-raid bunkers be built in 80 German towns and cities.
However, not one was built in Dresden because the city was not regarded as being in danger of
air attack. Instead, the civil air defense in Dresden devoted most of its efforts to creating
tunnels between the cellars of the housing blocks so that people could escape from one building
to another. These tunnels exacerbated the effects of the Dresden firestorm by channeling smoke
and fumes from one basement to the next and sucking out the oxygen from a network of
interconnected cellars.
[18] Neitzel, Sönke, "The City under Attack," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A.,
(eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp.
68-69.
The British were fully aware that mass death and destruction could result from the bombing
of Germany's cities. The Directorate of Bombing Operations predicted the following consequences
from Operation Thunderclap:
If we assume that the daytime population of the area attacked is 300,000, we may expect
220,000 casualties. Fifty per cent of these or 110,000 may expect to be killed. It is
suggested that such an attack resulting in so many deaths, the great proportion of which will
be key personnel, cannot help but have a shattering effect on political and civilian morale
all over Germany."
[22] Hastings, Max, Bomber Command , New York: The Dial Press, 1979, pp.
347-348.
A raid that closely resembles that on Dresden was carried out 10 days later on February 23,
1945 at Pforzheim. Since neither Dresden nor Pforzheim had suffered much damage earlier in the
war, the flammability of both cities had been preserved.
[25] Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany , New York, Columbia
University Press, 2006, p. 94. A perfect firestorm was created in both of these defenseless
cities. These cities also lacked sufficient air-raid shelters for their citizens.
The question is: If more than 30% of the residents of Pforzheim died in one bombing attack,
why would only approximately 2.5% of Dresdeners die in similar raids 10 days earlier? The
second wave of bombers in the Dresden raid appeared over Dresden at the very time that the
maximum number of fire brigades and rescue teams were in the streets of the burning city. This
second wave of bombers compounded the earlier destruction many times, and by design killed the
firemen and rescue workers so that the destruction in Dresden could rage on unchecked.
[28] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden , New
York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 210. See also McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's
Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 112. The raid on Pforzheim, by
contrast, consisted of only one bombing attack. Also, Pforzheim was a much smaller target, so
that it would have been easier for the people on the ground to escape from the blaze.
The only reason why the death-rate percentage would be higher at Pforzheim versus Dresden is
that a higher percentage of Pforzheim was destroyed in the bombings. Alan Russell estimates
that 83% of Pforzheim's city center was destroyed versus only 59% of Dresden's.
[29] Russell, Alan, "Why Dresden Matters," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.),
Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 162. This
would, however, account for only a portion of the percentage difference in the death tolls.
Based on the death toll in the Pforzheim raid, it is reasonable to assume that a minimum of 20%
of Dresdeners died in the British and American attacks on the city. The 2.5% death rate figure
of Dresdeners estimated by establishment historians is an unrealistically low figure.
If a 20% death rate figure times an estimated population in Dresden of 1 million is used,
the death-toll figure in Dresden would be 200,000. If a 25% death-rate figure times an
estimated population of 1.2 million is used, the death toll figure in Dresden would be 300,000.
Thus, death-toll estimates in Dresden of 250,000 people are quite plausible when compared to
the Pforzheim bombing.
How Were the Dead Disposed Of?
Historian Richard Evans asks:
And how was it imaginable that 200,000 bodies could have been recovered from out of the
ruins in less than a month? It would have required a veritable army of people to undertake
such work, and hundreds of sorely needed vehicles to transport the bodies. The effort
actually undertaken to recover bodies was considerable, but there was no evidence that it
reached the levels required to remove this number.
[30] Evans, Richard J., Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158.
Richard Evans does not recognize that the incineration of corpses on the Dresden market
square, the Altmarkt, was not the only means of disposing of bodies at Dresden. A British
sergeant reported on the disposal of bodies at Dresden:
They had to pitchfork shriveled bodies onto trucks and wagons and cart them to shallow
graves on the outskirts of the city. But after two weeks of work the job became too much to
cope with and they found other means to gather up the dead. They burned bodies in a great
heap in the center of the city, but the most effective way, for sanitary reasons, was to take
flamethrowers and burn the dead as they lay in the ruins. They would just turn the
flamethrowers into the houses, burn the dead and then close off the entire area. The whole
city is flattened. They were unable to clean up the dead lying beside roads for several
weeks.
[31] Regan, Dan, Stars and Stripes London edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5, No.
156.
Historians also differ on whether or not large numbers of bodies in Dresden were so
incinerated in the bombing that they could no longer be recognized as bodies. Frederick Taylor
mentions Walter Weidauer, the high burgomaster of Dresden in the postwar period, as stating
[T]here is no substance to the reports that tens of thousands of victims were so
thoroughly incinerated that no individual traces could be found. Not all were identified, but
-- especially as most victims died of asphyxiation or physical injuries -- the overwhelming
majority of individuals' bodies could at least be distinguished as such."
[32] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York: HarperCollins,
2004, p. 448.
Other historians cite evidence that bodies were incinerated beyond recognition. Alexander
McKee quotes Hildegarde Prasse on what she saw at the Altmarkt after the Dresden bombings:
What I saw at the Altmarkt was cruel. I could not believe my eyes. A few of the men who
had been left over [from the Front] were busy shoveling corpse after corpse on top of the
other. Some were completely carbonized and buried in this pyre, but nevertheless they were
all burnt here because of the danger of an epidemic. In any case, what was left of them was
hardly recognizable. They were buried later in a mass grave on the Dresdner Heide.
[33] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984, p. 248.
Marshall De Bruhl cites a report found in an urn by a gravedigger in 1975 written on March
12, 1945, by a young soldier identified only as Gottfried. This report states:
I saw the most painful scene ever .Several persons were near the entrance, others at the
flight of steps and many others further back in the cellar. The shapes suggested human
corpses. The body structure was recognizable and the shape of the skulls, but they had no
clothes. Eyes and hair carbonized but not shrunk. When touched, they disintegrated into
ashes, totally, no skeleton or separate bones.
I recognized a male corpse as that of my father. His arm had been jammed between two
stones, where shreds of his grey suit remained. What sat not far from him was no doubt
mother. The slim build and shape of the head left no doubt. I found a tin and put their ashes
in it. Never had I been so sad, so alone and full of despair. Carrying my treasure and crying
I left the gruesome scene. I was trembling all over and my heart threatened to burst. My
helpers stood there, mute under the impact.
[34] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden ,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 253-254.
Historians also differ on whether or not bodies are still being recovered in Dresden. For
example, Frederick Taylor states: "Since 1989 -- even with the extensive excavation and
rebuilding that followed the fall of communism in Dresden -- no bodies have been recovered at
all, even though careful archaeological investigations have accompanied the redevelopment."
[37] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York: HarperCollins,
2004, p. 448.
Marshall De Bruhl does not agree with Taylor's statement. De Bruhl notes that numerous other
skeletons of victims were discovered in the ruins of Dresden as rubble was removed or
foundations for new buildings were dug. De Bruhl states:
One particularly poignant discovery was made when the ruins adjacent to the Altmarkt were
being excavated in the 1990s. The workmen found the skeletons of a dozen young women who had
been recruited from the countryside to come into Dresden and help run the trams during the
war. They had taken shelter from the rain of bombs in an ancient vaulted subbasement, where
their remains lay undisturbed for almost 50 years.
[38] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden ,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 254.
Conclusion
The destruction from the Dresden bombings was so massive that exact figures of deaths will
never be obtainable. However, the statement from the Dresden Commission of Historians that
"definitely no more than 25,000" died in the Dresden bombings is probably inaccurate. An
objective analysis of the evidence indicates that almost certainly far more than 25,000 people
died from the bombings of Dresden. Based on a comparison to the Pforzheim bombing and the other
similar bombing attacks, a death toll in Dresden of 250,000 people is easily possible.
Endnotes
[1] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984, p. 275.
[2] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 177.
[3] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York:
HarperCollins, 2004, p. 354.
[12] Evans, Richard J., Lying about Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 174.
[13] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York:
HarperCollins, 2004, pp. 3, 406. See also River, Charles Editors, The Firebombing of
Dresden: The History and Legacy of the Allies' Most Controversial Attack on Germany ,
Introduction, p. 2.
[14] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984, p. 177.
[16] Cox, Sebastian, "The Dresden Raids: Why and How," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy
A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp.
44, 46.
[17] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden ,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 204-205.
[18] Neitzel, Sönke, "The City under Attack," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A.,
(eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp.
68-69.
[20] Cox, Sebastian, "The Dresden Raids: Why and How," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy
A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, pp.
52-53.
[21] Davis, Richard G., Carl A. Spaatz and the Air War in Europe , Washington, D.C.:
Center for Air Force History, 1993, p. 557.
[22] Hastings, Max, Bomber Command , New York: The Dial Press, 1979, pp.
347-348.
[23] Cox, Sebastian, "The Dresden Raids: Why and How," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy
A., (eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p.
57.
[24] Overy, Richard, The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War over Europe,
1940-1945 , New York: Viking Penguin, 2014, p. 314.
[25] Friedrich, Jörg, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany , New York, Columbia
University Press, 2006, p. 94.
[26]Ibid. , p. 91. See also DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and
the Destruction of Dresden , New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 255.
[27] Neitzel, Sönke, "The City under Attack," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A.,
(eds.), Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 77.
[28] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden ,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, p. 210. See also McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The
Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 112.
[29] Russell, Alan, "Why Dresden Matters," in Addison, Paul and Crang, Jeremy A., (eds.),
Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945 , Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006, p. 162.
[30] Evans, Richard J., Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust, and the David Irving
Trial , New York: Basic Books, 2001, p. 158.
[31] Regan, Dan, Stars and Stripes London edition, Saturday, May 5, 1945, Vol. 5,
No. 156.
[32] Taylor, Frederick, Dresden: Tuesday, February 13, 1945 , New York:
HarperCollins, 2004, p. 448.
[33] McKee, Alexander, Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton,
Inc., 1984, p. 248.
[34] DeBruhl, Marshall, Firestorm: Allied Airpower and the Destruction of Dresden ,
New York: Random House, Inc., 2006, pp. 253-254.
[35] Alexander McKee cites estimates of 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit (McKee, Alexander,
Dresden 1945: The Devil's Tinderbox , New York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1984, p. 176).
on another thread and added the following comment:
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-how-hitler-saved-the-allies/#comment-3216306
During the war authorities were often lowering the losses so not to give reasons for
defeatism. People did not know the true scale of losses. It was not in newspaper. Goebbels
decided that playing a victim to the world public opinion would not work anymore but it
only would have negative effect on the spirit of German public. Yet police reports from
Dresden show very high figures. Much, much higher than 25k And these reports are not post
WWII prepared by DDR authorities that liked to talk about American terror bombings in
Vietnam. And then several years ago after the reunification some British and Germans
historians got together, Dresden became a sister city of Coventry, the Brits helped to
rebuild the church in Dresden, the slogans 'never again' were repeated ad nausea and the
number of dead became 25k. It is still way too high to be a sister city of Coventry.
A key element is to look at the war situation when this bombing occurred. Wiki has a great
series of wartime maps, and here is February 1, 1945. The Soviet were closing in on Berlin.
Dresden was not in the Soviet path to Berlin nor in the path of the Allies to the Elbe. So
it wasn't bombed for military reasons. Note that the USA not only firebombed the Germans and
Japanese, the USA firebombed Chinese cities too:
In every case regardless of number of casualties, although I do believe in higher number the
deed was a definition of war crime. Germans were loosing the war anyway -and the bombing had
no strategic significance.
The purpose was to kill as many Germans as possible, by burning and suffocating people.
Not very pleasant death.
Proof of bestiality of English.
The consent factory has permanently put black hats on the Germans, and put white hats on
themselves.
Facts be damned, so does the number really matter?
Even many Jews and other prisoners in cams have died because supply of food to camps become
practically impossible by railways. So they have died of starvation.
This is why Britain is experiencing things like Rotherham. It's all related and karmic.
Dresden is emblematic of the Anglo's betrayal of Europe, and for that reason Britain will
soon be extinguished forever.
I can't say I'm sad about that.
By current standards of international law the fire bombing of cities is a war crime and crime
against humanity unless attack focuses solely on strategic targets and all efforts taken to
minimize civilian casualties. Interesting as well, a major line of thought is that using
nuclear weapons against cities is a war crime since no effort could be taken to minimize
civilian casualties as fully as possible
"AS the day draws on I come across a document which I only half-suspected I might ever
find. In 1961, when I was writing my first book "The Destruction of Dresden", I was
confidentially approached by a German schoolteacher, Hanns Voigt; he said that after the
horrific British air raid, he was put in charge of Dresden's Missing Persons Bureau,
Abteilung Tote – the Deceased Section. He built an immense card index, and he kept a
diary; and he estimated for me that the final death toll in Dresden would have reached
135,000. This was the figure that I, and after me Kurt Vonnegut and others, always used.
Other city officials gave the same kind of estimates. (Later this year I shall post on my
website a full dossier on the Dresden death toll.)
Voigt's estimate was a thorn in the side of both German Governments -- both east and west.
They had always played down, even trivialised, the air raid casualty figures caused by the
British saturation bombing (even as they hyped the numbers killed in the Jewish tragedy).
Only last year a German Government commission consisting of, not just conformist but
kow-towing, line-toeing, bowing-and-scraping historians and Nickeseln, agreed that the death
roll in the two hour man-made 1945 holocaust in Dresden was far lower, "only 25,000" (or, if
possible, even less).
Without doing any in-depth research -- such scholars are far too important for that --
they relied on the police chief's early March 1945 report (which in fact I was the first to
find), because it indicated lower figures than Hanns Voigt's for dead and missing.
In the Deborah Lipstadt Trial, her highly-paid chief expert Professor Richard "Skunky"
Evans (left) vilified Voigt; he implied that Voigt was a liar, he questioned whether the
Missing Persons bureau had ever existed, and he called him a Nazi with an agenda. (Voigt had,
we now know, been given a good post-war position in the Soviet Zone before emigrating legally
to the West, so the "Nazi" allegation seems unlikely.) Aping Evans, Mr Justice Gray accused
me in his 333-page Judgment of falsifying history.
I was not invited to make any submissions to the Dresden Commission. No surprises there.
This afternoon, my quiet patience is rewarded. I have come across this new secret document,
signed by the police chief of Dresden, and decoded by the British some weeks after the
war."
translation:
At 5:55 p.m. on March 24, 1945 -- the day in fact when I turned eight, I remember it
vividly -- the Dresden Polizeipräsident reported in code to SS Oberführer Dr.
Dietrichs:
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons
and nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person
notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person
notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty
thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly
only later.
"So Voigt was telling the truth.
Even the "hundred thousand" figure for those reported missing must be an under-estimate.
There were over half a million homeless refugees in the streets of Dresden, fleeing the Red
Army siege of Breslau to the East. Whole refugee families must have been engulfed by the
Dresden holocaust, with nobody surviving to report them as "missing".
Another thing seems brutally clear: those listed as "missing" -- in addition to those
bodies formally identified and buried or incinerated by this date -- were never going to
return. To use the words of the telegram I found yesterday (see above) they were dead,
"carbonised," and unidentifiable.
What do these decoded messages tell us about our own lazy and conformist historians, and
about "Skunky" Evans in particular? He, and they, would never have found them. It has taken
me these many years. Go the extra mile. Eventually, as this morning's Welshman said, "You
will be proved right in the end"."
@anon19 The Allies needed to deflect from their barbarity such as Dresden, which is
simply one example, hence their desperate embrace of the fake & impossible 'gas chambers'
and the easily debunked '6,000,000 Jews' & '5,000,000 others' propaganda.
While no survivor has ever reported the actual temperature reached during the Dresden
firestorm,
How could they?
many historians estimate that temperatures reached 1,500° Centigrade (2,732°
Fahrenheit) .
A 'historian' estimating temperature?
Since temperatures in a cremation chamber normally reach only 1,400 degrees to 1,800
degrees Fahrenheit,
How hot an (essentially) open air fire can get and whether or not eg such a fire can melt
steel was and is part of the 9-11 discussion -- on 9-11 it was jet fuel -- at Dresden it was
incendiary bombs -- still it is a little hard to believe even incendiary bombs could result
in open air fires with sustained temperatures vastly higher than what are normally
seen during cremation -- ??
A raid that closely resembles that on Dresden was carried out 10 days later on February
23, 1945 at Pforzheim.
There's more than one way to destroy a German city:
The bombing of Dresden was a war crime because it was UNNECESSARY !!
Absolutely no military reason for it ..records in US Historian office of meetings of the
Soviets, UK and US between Feb 5th to 8th show that they knew the war was over and were
deciding on what 'official date" they would use to declare it.
They burned bodies in a great heap in the center of the city, but the most effective
way, for sanitary reasons, was to take flamethrowers and burn the dead as they lay in the
ruins. They would just turn the flamethrowers into the houses, burn the dead
You mean, an actual Holocaust?
Wasn't the only one, either.
Burning German civilians alive (Japanese also) was official policy of "moral" U.S. and their
allies, the lovely British.
Hamburg, Berlin, Köln, in fact just about any German city of any size. Nearly all were
destroyed by fire by the end of the war. Most people here probably already know this, but
just for the record
Dresden downplaying is one of the only forms of WWII "revisionism" promoted by the
establishment. My impression is the drive towards deflating Dresden began in the mid 2000s,
which is when David Irving began a years-long running section on his website
about Dresden and its death toll
controversy.
Irving wrote the book that brought the incident to worldwide awareness in the 1960s and
partly inspired Kurt Vonnegut to write his breakout novel ( Slaughterhouse Five , as a
commenter mentions above) which had sections that were quasi-autobiographical. Vonnegut was a
U.S. POW in the city on that night, held in the basement of a building whose address was
Schlachtof Fuenf , "No.5 Slaughterhouse St." (The irony was not lost.)
As far as I know, Irving's current estimate is that 100,000 is either the likely figure
itself (most conservative reasonable estimate), or (more likely) the lower bound for the true
death toll. This is according to primary documents he has discovered. The 135,000 figure was
from local official Hanns Voigt, in charge of the missing persons bureau. He was meticulous.
Irving tracked him down in 1961 during research for the original Dresden book.
This afternoon [April 24, 2009], my quiet patience is rewarded. I have come across this
new secret document, signed by the police chief of Dresden, and decoded by the British some
weeks after the war.
At 5:55 p.m. on March 24, 1945 -- the day in fact when I turned eight, I remember it
vividly -- the Dresden Polizeipräsident reported in code to SS Oberführer Dr.
Dietrichs:
Re: Missing Persons Situation in Dresden Air Raid Defence region.
The Lord Mayor of Dresden City has established (a) a Central Bureau for Missing Persons and
nine Missing Persons registries; (b) eighty- to one-hundred thousand missing-person
notifications are estimated to have been registered so far; (c) 9,720 missing-person
notifications have been confirmed as fatalities; (d) to date, information on twenty
thousand missing person cases has been given out; (e) accurate statistical data possibly
only later.
So Voigt was telling the truth.
Even the "hundred thousand" figure for those reported missing must be an under-estimate.
There were over half a million homeless refugees in the streets of Dresden, fleeing the Red
Army siege of Breslau to the East. Whole refugee families must have been engulfed by the
Dresden holocaust, with nobody surviving to report them as "missing".
DESCRIPTION: Pathetic chalked messages on the ruins of survivors seeking information on
missing wives, mothers, family buried in the ruins.
Last pic:
DESCRIPTION: On the following day, March 23, 1962, Mr Irving (aged 27 still) interviewed
Marshal of the RAF Sir Arthur Harris at his home in Oxfordshire, about the Dresden
raids.
Dresden has a special meaning for me.
Ten years after this sadistic event, I became a friend of a fellow Air Force trainee at
Keesler AFB. He had been brought to the US as an orphan from Germany. All of his relatives
had died in the Dresden inferno. He had been sent on an errand outside of the city and was
the only survivor of his whole family. ALL dead except him. No mother. No father. No bother
or sister or grandparent. All dead.
He was a gentle soul, but a basket case mentally. He was a fellow Lutheran and I believe he
wanted to be in heaven with his family. I tried my best to help him. He could not keep track
of anything. He lost his pay records transferring. I bought him soap and other little
necessities he needed to get by. But he did not last very long and was gone, unable to
concentrate and cope. He certainly was a casualty, but uncounted, of this dishonorable,
deplorable sadism.
With a city of 1.2 million with refugees, 25,000 dead would be a mere 2% casualty rate.
Look at that picture again. Where in that picture could one have survived?
I skimmed the article, but I don't think I saw any reference to the autobiographical-fiction
first-hand account written by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five:
In Vonnegut's words: "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in
troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."
Thanks for another article to expose another tabu of WWII history.
I want to introduce an important angle here that might not be common to nongerman
readers:
Watching any popular history program in this country, you any time across raping and
plundering Red army soldiers. It is common place.
Try to mention Dresden and anything down that line and you will be taken for a deranged
Neonazi. A lot of the present vilification of Saxony in todays PC german media has to do with
the fact that Saxony has its own culture of war crime remembrance.
Sorry, dum dum. The 'English' were not in charge of the UK government at the time.
Churchill had a Jewish mother, half the House of Lords were officially Jews, the banking
establishment was Jewish, the war profiteers were Jewish, etc.
Did you know that Churchill's Jewish handler, Frederick Lindemann, was the one who
directed Churchill to attack working class neighbourhoods in raids in order to maximize
civilian deaths.
@Wally Good work Wally. You may be impervious to some ideas but are a reliable source to
debunk official lies.
It amazes me how the German people have been so indoctrinated to accept the occupation of
their country by the mass murderers 74 years after the greatest single-incident crime in
human history. Only human beings are capable of that monstrous viciousness. Or may be only
some ?
It is heartening to see and read this article here. Recently I was in a brief back-and-forth
with another commenter about this subject. I quoted from Private Kurt Vonnegut's letter to
his parents thus:
On or about February 14th, the Americans came over, followed by the R.A.F. Their
combined labors killed 250,000 people in 24 hours and destroyed all of Dresden -- possibly
the world's most beautiful city. But not me.
After that we were put to work carrying corpses from Air-Raid shelters; women, children,
old men; dead from concussion, fire or suffocation. Civilians cursed us and threw rocks as
we carried bodies to huge funeral pyres in the city.
-- Kurt Vonnegut, letter to parents, May 29, 1945
The other commenter replied with the standard 25,000 number of dead. My response was that
his number, the "mainstream" accepted one, seems too small, while Vonnegut's seems too
large.
It is interesting to note the reasons why some people would want us to believe such a
ridiculously small number as 25,000 for Dresden.
This article makes my point clear, and it even makes 250,000 sound plausible. I wish to
thank the writer, John Wear, and our publisher here, Ron Unz, for providing it.
"Historians also differ on whether or not large numbers of bodies in Dresden were so
incinerated in the bombing that they could no longer be recognized as bodies. Frederick
Taylor mentions Walter Weidauer, the high burgomaster of Dresden in the postwar period, as
stating
[T]here is no substance to the reports that tens of thousands of victims were so
thoroughly incinerated that no individual traces could be found. Not all were identified, but
-- especially as most victims died of asphyxiation or physical injuries -- the overwhelming
majority of individuals' bodies could at least be distinguished as such."[32]"
Hmmm, isn't the point that you DON'T recognize remains as being human? In other words you
can't distinguish them as such?
If you can't determine they are human remains you won't even realize you are looking at human
remains when you seen them and consequently have no reason to question whether they might be!
And off course you won't report them as such.
Reminds me of an incident with a friend of mine years ago. We were walking down the main
shopping street. Background music was playing along the street. He was a bit of a sound
perfectionist and complained that the drums in the music playing were electronic and not
played by a human. He claimed he could always tell. I called bullshit. I asked him whether he
had ever bothered to check if his opinion was right. Off course he never had. He genuinely
believed he could tell the difference, being a sound freak, so he never bothered to check.
What did happen was that he kept reinforcing his own ingrained belief, "wow, I'm good, I even
can tell the difference in this song"!
Now, he probably was right most of the time. But he certainly wasn't right all of the time
yet he truly believed he was. The fun of confirmation bias.
So it makes complete sense that the high burgomaster would believe, incorrectly, that
there were no indistinguishable corpses. If you know they are a corpse, or what's left of it,
it's distinguishable. Indistinguishable means they are by definition not countable, only
estimable (based on total numbers before and after).
Surprisingly the article does not mention the strafing of the survivors from the firestorm. I
first knew about Dresden when I read the revelations of an eyewitness US POW then in that
city. Many thousands of survivors sought refuge from the heat in the Elbe River but that
became an easy target for the US Mustang fighter-bombers. An unimaginable evil and all the
more shocking by the fact that their countries' (UK/US) civilian populations had been spared
the horrors inflicted on Soviet people.
And that duo were planning to do the same thing to dozens of Soviet cities – but
with atomic bombs for good measure. We have always been ruled by the most despicable
monsters, the true reflection of Western "democracy". Am I unique in saying that, were I a
"Bomber" Harris's pilot, I would refuse to fly the damned plane or, at least, unload the
cargo in a harmless place? I can't understand it Makes one ashamed of belonging to this
species.
On an earlier thread on which the subject came up, commenter Germanicus posted this document:
It is a memo by the Dresden city administration, to the effect that Dresden police records
as of 20.3.1945 state a number 200,000 dead recovered, mostly women and children, projecting
a final death toll of 250,000 to 300,000.
This was before the new and improved number of 25,000 was rolled out. You can rely on
official western historiography to never, ever tell the truth about anything.
If you say the WASPs did a bad thing, you are insane. No more gentle, kind, compassionate,
empathic, anti-imperialistic people ever lived. Why, WASP war is the very antithesis of any
possibility of war crime or genocidal desire.
Dresden downplaying is one of the only forms of WWII "revisionism" promoted by the
establishment. My impression is the drive towards deflating Dresden began in the mid
2000s
I wish we knew more about it beyond speculations how this process was initiated, what
characters were involved on both sides to give the push for it. Then finding the willing
'historians' to do the actual work was not a problem. There are many willing 'historians' out
there.
@jbwilson24 The 'English' lost major control of their government no later than the
Cromwell years. WASP culture is finalized, is made complete, by the Puritan Revolution. WASP
culture was born of the Judaizing heresy Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.
The Anglo-Zionist Empire was born directly from Anglophone Reformation and the resulting
politics, which from the outset acted to inflict at least cultural genocide on all local
British cultures that did not assimilate to the presiding civic form of the Judaizing heresy
of Anglo-Saxon Puritanism.
Anglo-Zionist Empire is WASP Empire, and it did not begin between the 2 World Wars, nor
with Disraeli, nor with the founding of Freemasonry (which featured Jewish funding and
socially and morally directed the British Empire from then on), nor even with the Jewish
financially backed coup by William of Orange. It goes back 100% to Cromwell, whose
antecedents were long and deep in the ethnically 'pure' Anglo-Saxon parts of England.
same thing to dozens of Soviet cities – but with atomic bombs
The atomic bombs were intended to be used on German cities.
Unfortunately for those who designed and built them, the war in Europe ended before the bombs
were ready, and they had to be tested on the Japanese.
I have no idea about the political tilt of this publication and do not care since they are
all nakedly pushing an agenda, including this article near the end. Reminder: Although they
weren't exquisite Baroque buildings, the full-to-the-brim-with-humans Twin Towers in New
York, NY were fire bombed by any other name, resulting in predictable acts of retaliatory
warfare, meeting horrific with horrific.
However, this account of a 91-year-old British survivor of the Dresden bombing is searing.
It sounds like he thinks the war was started by his country. Ugh, the parts about the boiling
reservoir and the explosive tar "escape" routes are horrific-cubed. The photos of this
battle-hardened career military man are telling, too. In addition to the first-person
interview, it cites academic sources.
It's good that fire bombing has been outlawed. But it's too late for these people, mostly
old people and kids holed up in the center of an intricately carved Baroque city while the
men were at war, and many of the women were probably working the munitions factories in the
outer suburbs. So, why bomb the city's architectural jewels, where no war-making tools were
under construction?
Thanks to revisionist historians like John, the horrible truths of WWII are now becoming main
stream. Did the Allies out Hitler Hitler? My answer would be a resounding yes.
@renfroThe bombing of Dresden was a war crime because it was UNNECESSARY !!
That last thing I want to do here is defend what was done to Dresden (it was indefensible)
-- but I think you would have a hard time defining what is 'necessary' during wartime vs what
isn't -- especially when the war isn't over yet, and one of your goals has to be to minimize
your own casualties, even if it means (perhaps unnecessarily) maximizing the enemy's -- as
Patton said: 'The goal of war is not to die for your your country, but to make the other
bastard die for his' -- oder etwas ähnlich.
Years ago I read the following piece and afterward had a brief email exchange with the
author:
The issue she addresses -- the indiscriminate bombing of largely civilian targets (cities)
during WWII vs today's use of 'precision' weapons (which back then did not exist) designed to
minimize "collateral damage" -- is probably familiar to most.
@White Monkey I recently, over the past month, read the book by David Irving on
Dresden.
He recounts that after the war German authorities estimated, from records, missing persons
accounts, and more, that the death toll was 125,000 on that night. I believe this was
compiled into the early 50s to that result. It might have been more, but I doubt it was less.
@Buzz Mohawk The figure of 250,000 is quite believable My dad was a RAF Intelligence
S/Ldr at the time and he always maintained the casualty figure, based on RAF estimates at the
time of the raid, was 250,000.
Should one choose to make it (not that I would ever do that), there is something of a
'Holocaust' connection to the aftermath in Dresden, where corpses were burned on makeshift
pyres -- the immediate purpose was to carbonize the flesh to inhibit the spread of disease
(ie not necessarily to turn a human body into ash and bones, as during cremation) -- but the
truth is, hardly more is possible with such an open air pyre -- there is simply not enough
heat -- the corpses are still recognizably human (there are other examples of this from
around the time the war ended) -- compare to the claims made about eg Treblinka, where
allegedly all traces of hundreds of thousands of murdered Jews were eliminated by doing
something similar -- and this after they were dug up after months (if not longer)
underground.
@crimson2 Yea, but not nearly as many as the number of Jews killed by the Romans:
Earlier "Holocaust" franchises, because the bs undoubtedly goes back further
Talmud: Gittin 57b claims that four billion Jews were killed by the Romans in the city
of Bethar.
Gittin 58a claims that 16 million Jewish children were wrapped in scrolls and
burned alive by he Romans.
Plus the endless Six Million Kvetching from the mid-1800s up to WWII.
A few days after the bombing the Gaulitier of Dresden sent a message to Berlin stating that
they had recovered 240,000 bodies and asked for instructions as to what to do next.
Apparently the reply was to stop counting.
@White Monkey My first knowledge of the Dresden atrocity came when I read Vonnegut's
novel "Slaughterhouse Five" when in college in the '70's. If I recall correctly, seems that
he and other American POW's were spared by hiding in some kind of large refrigerator. I
believe what he encountered there, which included helping to bury the dead, scarred him for
life, but, ironically, made him a better novelist.
The take away quote
"
Wang also reiterated the principled stand against the "long-arm jurisdiction" imposed by
the United States.
"
Empire is having its hand slapped back in Venezuela, Iran, Syria, ???
Where are they going to get their war on?
I see empire as a war junkie and they are starting to twitch in withdrawals which is
dangerous but a necessary stage. Trumps latest tweets show that level of energy.
The
spinning plates of empire are not wowing the crowds like before.....what is plan Z?
"First published From Parameters, Summer 1997, pp. 4-14: US Army War College: "There will
be no peace. At any given moment for the rest of our lifetimes, there will be multiple
conflicts in mutating forms around the globe. Violent conflict will dominate the headlines,
but cultural and economic struggles will be steadier and ultimately more decisive. The de
facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open
to our cultural assault. To those ends, we will do a fair amount of killing."
"Excerpts From Pentagon's Plan: 'Prevent the Re-Emergence of a New Rival':
"Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the
territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that
posed formerly by the Soviet Union.
This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional defense strategy and
requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose
resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These
regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and
Southwest Asia.
There are three additional aspects to this objective: First, the U.S. must show the
leadership necessary to establish and protect a new order that holds the promise of
convincing potential competitors that they need not aspire to a greater role or pursue a
more aggressive posture to protect their legitimate interests.
Second, in the non-defense areas, we must account sufficiently for the interests of the
advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership or seeking
to overturn the established political and economic order. Finally, we must maintain the
mechanisms for deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or
global role. An effective reconstitution capability is important here, since it implies
that a potential rival could not hope to quickly or easily gain a predominant military
position in the world."
... access to vital raw materials, primarily Persian Gulf oil"
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
The Minister of foreign Affairs of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin tried to advertise in press the
fact that he that wrote the resignation which will send to the Verkhovna Rada on May 20 -- the
day of inauguration of the newly elected President of the country Vladimir Zelensky.
The Deputy of the Ukrainian Parliament Evgeny Balitsky told in an exclusive interview to
Federal News Agency that everything that occurs in his homeland recently, reminds flight of
rats from the ship.
"Now all run up, the administration leaves all systems, they, figuratively speaking, take
away even the coffee, slippers and caps from the bar, -- he noted. -- We have never seen such a humiliating
transition of power. It all. We saw similar episodes after (Viktor) Yushchenko and (Viktor)
Yanukovich, but never this behaviour was such rabid, widespread and ugly"
Such, as the representative of party "Oppositional block" called it, "swine behaviour", you know,
"digging out dirt from under nails in public" never occurred before. He noted that the current President of Ukraine
Petro Poroshenko, leaving, appointed new people to several departments.
"He does, you know, things that are not what the President, but any decent man would never
do because this is just too ugly to do - complained the MP. -- It make sense to go beautifully,
humanly, with dignity! And today that rats like Klimkin make statements how much they have done
for people. For us, it's a lost five years. Just lost."
The deputy stressed that Klimkin hardly ashamed of their work. "These people don't know the
word 'shame,' -- Balitsky said. -- These are people who for five years in the country destroyed
the relations with all neighbors. I'm talking not only about the Russian Federation! We
quarreled with Hungarians, Poles, Belarusians! We now have a conflict even with the Americans.
You see, how much harm this gang of American henchmen, have done to our poor country!"
The Deputy of Rada explained that "all these people" -- are corrupt businessmen who used
Ukraine to earn quick money.
"They invested money in the Maidan and came to power to get a royal return on the investment, -- Balitsky added.
-- For these people the word "shame" does not exists, this is a completely foreign concept. And they are now leaving, are trying
figuratively speaking to take the last pair of Slippers from their rooms, everything from the bar, grab from the buffet a couple
of sandwiches, as Zelensky said."
The MP concluded that this is a very humiliating process for all Ukrainians, and he is
personally ashamed of the power and statehood of his country.
President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko by his decree released Oleksandr Turchynov from the
post of Secretary of the national security and defense Council of Ukraine. This was reported on
the website of the presidential administration.
"To release Turchynov Alexander Valentinovich from the post of Secretary of the national
security and defense Council of Ukraine," the decree says.
Turchynov resigned the day before. The reason for dismissal - termination of powers of the
acting President of Ukraine who appointed Turchinov.
Secretary of the NSDC Turchinov has been working since December 2014. Prior to that, he
worked in the Verkhovna Rada, in the spring of the same year, acting President of Ukraine.
Google has reportedly suspended its licences and product-sharing agreements with Chinese
communications giant Huawei, as Washington accuses the company of spying for Beijing. The
Silicon Valley tech giant has cut its business deals with Huawei that involve the transfer of
hardware and software, Reuters and The Verge report. Following the move, Huawei will lose
access to Android operating system updates, and its forthcoming smartphones will be shut out of
some Google apps, including the Google Play Store and Gmail apps. The Chinese firm however will
still have access to the open source version of the Android operating system.
We have confirmed this is genuine.
Huawei will only be able to use the public version of Android, and won't get access to
proprietary apps and services from Google
Huawei will have to create their own update mechanism for security patches https://t.co/7eTi4JvWsE
Washington repeatedly accused Huawei of installing so-called 'backdoors' into its products
on behalf of the Chinese government. The heads of six US intelligence agencies warned
American citizens against using Huawei products last year, and the Chinese company's phones
were banned from US military bases shortly afterwards.
"... In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire, who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts. ..."
"... Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones. ..."
"... The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy. ..."
"... Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was thought to be now. ..."
"... The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami. It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions. ..."
"... The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through austerity to make up for the loss of money. ..."
During the last days a right wing politician in Austria was taken down by using an elaborate sting. Until Friday Heinz-Christian
Strache was leader of the far right (but not fascist) Freedom Party of Austria (FPOe) and the Vice Chancellor of the country. On
Friday morning two German papers, the Sueddeutsche Zeitung and Der Spiegelpublished
(German)
reports (English) about an old video that was made to take Strache down.
The FPOe has good connections with United Russia, the party of the Russian President Putin, and to other right-wing parties in
east Europe. It's pro-Russian position has led to verbal attacks on and defamation of the party from NATO supporting and neoliberal
circles.
In July 2017 Strache and his right hand man Johann Gudenus, who is also the big number in the FPOe, get invited for dinner to
a rented villa on Ibiza, the Spanish tourist island in the Mediterranean. They are told that the daughter of a Russian billionaire
plans large investments in Austria. It was said that she would like to help his party. The alleged daughter of the Russian billionaire,
who is actually also Austrian, and her "friend" serve an expensive dinner. Alcohol flows freely. The pair offers a large party donation
but asks for returns in form of mark ups on public contracts.
Unknown to Strache the villa is professionally bugged with many hidden cameras and microphones.
A scene from the video. Source: Der Falter (vid,
German)
During the six hour long party several schemes get proposed by the "Russian" and are discussed. Strache rejects most of them.
He insists several times that everything they plan or do must be legal and conform to the law. He says that a large donation could
probably be funneled through an endowment that would then support his party. It is a gray area under Austrian party financing laws.
They also discuss if the "Russian" could buy the Kronen Zeitung , Austria's powerful tabloid, and use it to prop up his party.
The evening goes on with several bottles of vodka on the table. Starche gets a bit drunk and boosts in front of the "oligarch
daughter" about all his connections to rich and powerful people. He does not actually have these.
Strache says that, in exchange for help for his party, the "Russian" could get public contracts for highway building and repair.
Currently most of such contracts in Austria go to the large Austrian company, STRABAG, that is owned by a neoliberal billionaire
who opposes the FPOe. At that time Strache was not yet in the government and had no way to decide about such contracts.
At one point Strache seems to understand that the whole thing is a setup. But his right hand man calms him down and vouches
for the "Russian". The sting ends with Strache and his companion leaving the place. The never again see the "Russian" and her co-plotter.
Nothing they talked about will ever come to fruition.
Three month later Strache and his party win more than 20% in the Austrian election and form a coalition government with the
conservative party OeVP led by Chancellor Sebastian Kurz. Even while the FPOe controls several ministries, it does not achieve much
politically. It lacks a real program and the government's policies are mostly run by the conservatives.
Nearly two years after the evening on Ibiza, ten days before the European parliament election in which Strache's party is predicted
to achieve good results, a video of the evening on Ibiza is handed to two German papers which are known to be have strong transatlanticist
leanings and have previously been used for other shady 'leaks'. The papers do not hesitate to take part in the plot and publish extensive
reports about the video.
After the reports appeared Strache immediately
stepped down and the conservatives
ended the coalition with his party. Austria will now have new elections.
On Bloomberg Leonid Bershidsky
opines
on the case:
Strache's discussion with the Russian oligarch's fake niece shows a propensity for dirty dealing that has nothing to do with idealistic
nationalism. Nationalist populists often agitate against entrenched, corrupt elites and pledge to drain various swamps. In the
videos, however, Strache and Gudenus behave like true swamp creatures, savoring rumors of drug and sex scandals in Austrian politics
and discussing how to create an authoritarian media machine like Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban's.
I do not believe that the people who voted for the FPOe (and similar parties in other countries) will subscribe to that view.
The politics of the main stream parties in Austria have for decades been notoriously corrupt. Compared to them Strache and his party
are astonishingly clean. In the video he insists several times that everything must stay within the legal realm. Whenever the "Russian"
puts forward a likely illegal scheme, Starche emphatically rejects it.
Bershidsky continues:
Strache, as one of the few nationalist populists in government in the European Union's wealthier member states, was an important
member of the movement Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini has been trying to cobble together ahead of the European Parliament
election that will take place next week. On Saturday, he was supposed to attend a Salvini-led rally in Milan with other like-minded
politicians from across Europe. Instead, he was in Vienna apologizing to his wife and to Kurz and protesting pitifully that he'd
been the victim of a "political assassination" -- a poisonous rain on the Italian right-winger's parade.
...
This leaves the European far right in disarray and plays into the hands of centrist and leftist forces ahead of next week's election.
Salvini's unifying effort has been thoroughly undermined, ...
This is also a misreading of the case. The right-wing parties will use the case to boost their legitimacy.
Strache was obviously set up by some intelligence services, probably a German one with a British assist. The original aim was
likely to blackmail him. But during the meeting on Ibiza Strache promised and did nothing illegal. Looking for potential support
for his party is not a sin. Neither is discussing investments in Austria with a "daughter of a Russian oligarch." Some boosting while
drunk is hardly a reason to go to jail. When the incident provided too little material to claim that Strache is corrupt, the video
was held back until the right moment to politically assassinate him with the largest potential damage to his party. That moment was
thought to be now.
But that Strache stepped down after the sudden media assault only makes him more convincing. The right-wing all over Europe will
see him as a martyr who was politically assassinated because he worked for their cause. The issue will increase the right-wingers
hate against the 'liberal' establishment. It will further motivate them: "They attack us because we are right and winning." The new
far-right block Natteo Salvini
will setup in the European Parliament will likely receive a record share of votes.
Establishment writers notoriously misinterpret the new right wing parties and their followers. This stand-offish sentence in the
Spiegel story about Strache's party demonstrates the problem:
In the last election, the party drew significant support from the working class, in part because of his ability to simplify even
the most complicated of issues and play the common man, even in his role as vice chancellor.
The implicit thesis, that the working class is too dumb to understand the "most complicated of issues", is not only incredibly
snobbish but utterly false. The working class understands very well what the establishment parties have done to it and continue to
do. The increasing vote share of the far-right is a direct consequence of the behavior of the neoliberal center and of the lack of
real left alternatives.
Last week, before the Strache video appeared, Craig Murray
put his finger on the wound:
The massive economic shock following the banking collapse of 2007–8 is the direct cause of the crisis of confidence which is affecting
almost all the institutions of western representative democracy. The banking collapse was not a natural event, like a tsunami.
It was a direct result of man-made systems and artifices which permitted wealth to be generated and hoarded primarily through
multiple financial transactions rather than by the actual production and sale of concrete goods, and which then disproportionately
funnelled wealth to those engaged in the mechanics of the transactions.
...
The rejection of the political class manifests itself in different ways and has been diverted down a number of entirely blind
alleys giving unfulfilled promise of a fresh start – Brexit, Trump, Macron. As the vote share of the established political parties
– and public engagement with established political institutions – falls everywhere, the chattering classes deride the political
symptoms of status quo rejection by the people as "populism". It is not populism to make sophisticated arguments that undermine
the received political wisdom and take on the entire weight of established media opinion.
If one wants to take down the far right one has to do so with arguments and good politics for the working class. Most people,
especially working class people, have a strong sense for justice. The political assassination of Christian Strache is unjust. What
was done during the 2007-8 banking crisis was utterly corrupt and also unjust. Instead of going to jail the bankers were rewarded
with extreme amounts of money for their assault on the well being of the people. The public was then told that it must starve through
austerity to make up for the loss of money.
While I consider myself to be a strong leftist who opposes the right wherever possible, I believe to understand why people vote
for Strache's FBOe and similar parties. When one talks to these people issues of injustice and inequality always come up. The new
'populist' parties at least claim to fight against the injustice done to the common men. Unlike most of the establishment parties
they seem to be still mostly clean and not yet corrupted.
In the early 1990s Strache actually flirted with violent fascists but he rejected their way. While he has far-right opinions,
he and his like are no danger to our societies. If we can not accept that Strache and his followers have some legitimate causes,
we will soon find us confronted with way more extreme people. The neoliberal establishment seems to do its best to achieve that.
Posted by b on May 19, 2019 at 01:10 PM |
Permalink
Presumably, RF has been falsely accused in Salisbury. Presumably, RF and Syria have been
falsely accused in Douma. Presumably, Russia and Syria have been falsely accused over Khan
Seikhoun. Presumably, RF has been falsely accused and PUNISHED over the athletes drug doping.
Presumably, RF has been falsely accused over MH17 tragedy. Presumably, the US/EU/NATO/GCC
know all this, and still they carry on?
There can be only ONE reaction from President Putin.
ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
NO MORE MR NICE GUY.
How this translates into action is up to him and the Russian people. Godspeed to the
mighty Russian Federation, who have become MORE Christian than the US. (I observe this as a
British Indian Hindu).
This reminds me of the moment when the Gita is revealed to Arjuna by Lord Krishna, on the
verge of a war he had done everything to avoid. Lord Krishna revealed how Arjuna had to do
his duty, his dharma, no matter what his attachment. Godspeed President Putin and the RF
military leaders and brave soldiers!
The US objective is to sustain US tech prominence by stifling Chinese plans to advance its
economy. Of course China will never agree to that.
from CFR..
The Chinese government has launched "Made in China 2025," a state-led industrial policy
that seeks to make China dominant in global high-tech manufacturing. The program aims to
use government subsidies, mobilize state-owned enterprises, and pursue intellectual
property acquisition to catch up with -- and then surpass -- Western technological prowess
in advanced industries.
For the United States and other major industrialized democracies, however, these tactics
not only undermine Beijing's stated adherence to international trade rules but also pose a
security risk. . . here
Blooming Barricade , May 17, 2019 3:32:07 PM |
link
A bit off topic, I thought b and barflies would find it in their wheelhouse...
French researchers have completed their Map of Neoconservative Networks. It's interactive
and gives links to each neocon/neocon group. Most of who you would expect feature
prominently: Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, BHL, but it also connects neoconservatives to the
Great Replacement theorists showing strong links between them and fascists. https://anticons.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/anticons9.pdf
Along similar lines, Swiss Propaganda Research released the Media Navagator earlier this
year. b will be happy to know that MoA ranks in the hard anti-establishment camp alongside
MintPress and the WSWS. There is also a European version
"... Things have indeed moved on since the Skripal affair, not at least in terms of the prime minister Teresa May. It must now be clear to even the most dimwitted that she is a lunatic of note. This is obviously not something that has only come as a response to Brexit. However Brexit has shown her up as an utter idiot. ..."
"... Only a person of this caliper might be able to make any sense of the Skripal affair, and even if it makes perfect sense in her diseased mind, ..."
"... Teresa May has been the common denominator in many of the sick things happening in the UK, ..."
"... "And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words. "Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the then-vice president of the United States. "We can't accept your management style." ..."
"... Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you." ..."
"... There was a pause. "We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York."" ..."
"... The Brits have gone nuts. Maybe it is Karma for all the centuries of bad actions towards the rest of the world. Now that their DS manipulation is being exposed, what else are they going to do? Try to influence Putin? ..."
"... I don't think they've gone nuts. I think the UK is the center of the globalist cabal, and the cabal is on the back foot and getting desperate. 6 hours ago And the more desperate they are the more dangerous they become. And the Satanic head of this globalist cabal are the Rothschilds, who belong to the powerful Chabad Lubavitch cult, and who "made the modern banking system and the Fed that made Zionism, the world wars, the European Union, and so on." ..."
"... Between 2003 and 2013 "the Jared Khushner family foundation donated a total of $342,500 to various institutions and projects associated with the movement... in addition the Donald J Trump Foundation has donated $11,550 to three Chabad institutions." -- Kushners Belong to Jewish Supremacist Doomsday Group (that prophesies WWIII after which the Jews will rule). ..."
"... what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community "needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister influences of foreign powers. ..."
"... the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE, Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down", reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of people. ..."
===
all of this is entirely irrelevant .... the World and his mother know that the us is a rat infested terrorist regime that NOBODY
else in the World REALLY trusts or believes .... "that is all ye know on Earth ... and all ye need to know" (Keats - if you are
American
you will need to do a search -NOT the Goggle NSA one - on that )
===
Looks like everyone in the DS did not get their dead ducks in a row....... get it. Skipals were feeding ducks after they were
poisioned but the ducks did not die.
===
The starting assumption is false: "The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind
much of the western aggression in the Middle East."
BOTH parties have meddled incessantly in the middle east, so the idea
of meddling being unique to neocons of provably false. Clinton and Obama did not reduce our footprint in the middle east, Hillary's
behavior under Obama was particularly meddlesome and irrational. Worse than the Republicans based on results.
===
Democrat, Republican, Conservative, Labour. What`s the difference ?; NONE. They are all part of the Establishment owned Western
Political Cartel. 31 minutes ago You presume that there are no neocons among Democrats, an erroneous presumption. However, the neocons
among the Democrats don't call themselves "neocons" and toe the line on domestic Democrat insanity, just as the neocons infesting
the Republican party toe the line on Republican domestic insanity. Why not? The purpose of neocons (Republican or Democrat) is to
create chaos and disaster to further Israel's monstrous agenda.
If you pay attention to what they do and not to what they
call themselves , life becomes much simpler.
===
...The UK Government is up to its neck in the Trump collusion plot, and on its dealings with Syria.
It is all going to come out very soon. It is also more likely than not that MI6 were involved in the Litvinenko assassination -as
suggested by his father.
===
Things have indeed moved on since the Skripal affair, not at least in terms of the prime minister Teresa May. It must now be
clear to even the most dimwitted that she is a lunatic of note. This is obviously not something that has only come as a response
to Brexit. However Brexit has shown her up as an utter idiot.
Only a person of this caliper might be able to make any sense of the Skripal affair, and even if it makes perfect sense in her
diseased mind, it does not by implication make sense to anyone else.
Teresa May has been the common denominator in many of the sick things happening in the UK,
In the interest of any sane person in that Kingdom, get her removed!
Granted that May is the poster girl for idiotic
behavior but David Cameron and Tony Blair didn't do too bad at giving blow jobs to Uncle Shmuel. Shmuel should have told May, "Suck,
dammit! Blow is just a figure of speech."
===
Who was complicate in the Lie ... Nicky Haley, the US White House, the US Media, the US Military, the UK Government, the UK Media and possibly Saudia Arabia and Israel. That's a Youge conspiracy for just ONE Lie. And NOBODY is going to be held accountable.
===
If Theresa May ever taught us anything, it's that if you suspect a building is a chemical weapons facility, bomb it
===
It's a very simple lesson really...
NEVER TRUST a single word uttered by these corrupt nations EVER... Works for
me... and has been 100% right for years now
===
The OPCW is indeed compromised.
In 2002, John Bolton directly threatened then director Jose Bustani for negotiating with Saddam Hussein to allow OPCW inspectors
to conduct unannounced visits to Iraq, which would undermine the US plans to attack.
...
"And, according to Bustani, Bolton didn't mince words. "Cheney wants you out," Bustani recalled Bolton saying, referring to the
then-vice president of the United States. "We can't accept your management style."
Bolton continued, according to Bustani's recollections: "You have 24 hours to leave the organization, and if you don't comply
with this decision by Washington, we have ways to retaliate against you."
There was a pause. "We know where your kids live. You have two sons in New York.""
===
Why did Trump select Bolton, anyway? I no longer buy the 3D chess nor the genius of Trump theories. Yes, I will still support
him but he needs to look alive.
===
Trump didn't select Bolton... the Boss did
===
Very good and correct points apart from :
"This time they might even receive greater support from France this time around – since Macron is facing a revolution at home
and would kill (possibly literally) for a nice international distraction."
The beginning of the paragraph is probably right. The media in France followed the lead of Macron concerning both Douma, & The
Skripals and they would probably defend their positions by defending also the next false flag event in Syria or in Britain.
However the nonsense that "Macron is facing a revolution at home and would kill (possibly literally) for a nice international
distraction" is pure hyperbole worthy of a false news site like Breitbart or, in this case, Russia Today. Nothing like a revolution
is happening in France. Macron has the same support as he has had since the last election and the Yellow Vest have to a large degree
gone home. Some 18.500 participated throughout France in the last demonstration and anyway, very few of them want a "revolution".
They want more social welfare and better pensions.
===
The yellow vests indeed do want more social welfare and better pensions, but they also want lower taxes - ON PETROL.
Breitbart has been known to push false narratives (just like CNN or MSNBC or Fox News) but can you point out any fake stories
from RT? I ask because they've been a reliable factual counterweight to the Western media lies over the past 3 years at least.
Your comment reads like standard issue NATO ********.
===
Same reason the deep state is worried about the nano thermite found in the ashes of 9/11. With a widespread catastrophe there
is always an outsider doing their own research on the remnants of the disaster. You can bet your bottom dollar, assuming this story
is even close to being accurate, that someone would have done an analysis on the isotopes, especially if the war drums against Russia
were beating.
===
The Brits have gone nuts. Maybe it is Karma for all the centuries of bad actions towards the rest of the world. Now that
their DS manipulation is being exposed, what else are they going to do? Try to influence Putin?
===
I don't think they've gone nuts. I think the UK is the center of the globalist cabal, and the cabal is on the back foot and
getting desperate. 6 hours ago And the more desperate they are the more dangerous they become. And the Satanic head of this globalist
cabal are the Rothschilds, who belong to the powerful Chabad Lubavitch cult, and who "made the modern banking system and the Fed
that made Zionism, the world wars, the European Union, and so on."
Between 2003 and 2013 "the Jared Khushner family foundation donated a total of $342,500 to various institutions and projects associated
with the movement... in addition the Donald J Trump Foundation has donated $11,550 to three Chabad institutions." -- Kushners Belong
to Jewish Supremacist Doomsday Group (that prophesies WWIII after which the Jews will rule).
===
Britain is a police state.
===
(Edited)
Putin shot down MH17!!!!
Remember that gem? They really have to stretch the truth with this one.
Assad using chemical weapons right before he cleaned out Damascus from the cockroaches. Ah ha, yeap. Makes perfect sense if you
have **** for brains. Which are the sort of people the empire relies on these days.
Joos and Zios running things is working out real well. This is the kind of work you'd expect from an office clerk with a bad attitude,
certainly not from god's chosen. 7
===
Yes, and wasn't it the same ******** fake news source, Bellingcat, pushing that lie that also pushed some of the false flag
Syria chemical attack lies?
===
Couple of factors not mentioned. one is Israel and the other is more sinister still and tied
to the conclusions to be drawn from the Mueller report.
it may be true that Skripal helped Steele with some elements of the dossier compiled by
Steele, via SKripals handler Pablo Miller. It may be true that Skripal went "stir crazy" and an
attempt was made to silence him and his daughter - permanently, because they simply cold not be
trusted. a similar motivation could be drawn up against Russia - with the two Russians visiting
Salisbury used as diversionary "stool pigeons". It may be true that the "poisoning" was self
inflicted and was in fact a murder/suicide attempt as a result of depression along the ines
"what's the point of it all".
what is true is that May was judge, jury and executioner in convicting Russia of the
poisoning and refused to follow an evidence based discovery process that lies at the heart of
the UK justice system - by hiding behind those powers that the UK intelligence community
"needs" in order to protect british (not russian, british) citizens from the sinister
influences of foreign powers.
what ought to be apparent is
- the same tactics used by the special prosecutor to investigate the "Russia collusion"
smoke screen erected by the howler monkeys in the US intel agencies (aided and abetter by
howler monkeys in UK intel agencies) to stymie the US executive branch (Trump) are likely to be
used by the the UK government and some more as well - in true Le Carre fashion, but with much
dumber and less principled actors than Smiley's people.
these tactics prevented (and continue to prevent) investigation and prosecution of heinous
corruption within the obama administration of the previous 8 years - these howler monkey
intelligence agency tactics include(d) entrapment, honeypots, racketeering, blackmail, de facto
kidnapping (in the case of Skripals), bribery, wire fraud, unauthorized wire-tapping, breach of
authorized intel agency activities (like the FBI operating overseas and the CIA operating
domestically in the US, false and unverified claims in FISA warrants, NSA providing unauthorized
information to the CIA and FBI etc)
- given the howler monkey activities of the alphabet soup, it is not beyond the imagination
to draw parallels with the CIA's reporting and analysis of situations on the ground wherever
they operate to provide intel ahead of military activity. the DOD has already proved complicit
by hiring Halper (for hundreds of thousands of dollars) to assist with the entrapment of Trump
operative Papadopoulos. Mifsud is likely a CIA, not a Russian, asset.
- given that we have ample evidence of the howler monkeys in the alphabet soup seeking to
facilitate a coup against a sitting US president, it is certainly plausible that - as with the
US goverment sponsoring the mujaheedin, isis and al qaeda in afghanistan to fight the russians
in late 80's early 90's, Iraq yellow cake and WMD - that the howler monkeys paid the white
helmets to ovethrow assad and foment civil war in Syria - thus causing the migration of some 5
million syrians into europe, iraq, turkey, jordan, turkey and lebanon.
so , the case is that howler monkey activity in intel agencies of the UK and US (add
(F)rance to get FUKUS) are guilty of the manufacture of human conflict by fabricating evidence,
breaking the laws (certainly of the targeted countries, but also of the UK and US), providing
shitty analysis (howler monkeys are only good at swinging in trees and flinging ****) and
generally operating as evil actors on the dark side of humanity.
this can only be brought into sharp relief if howler monkey activities were instead shown to
be powers for good rather than the geo-political risks that persist in Iran, North Korea,
Venezuela, Yemen, Libya and so on and so forth.
Never mind how much past conflicts in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan and so on relied on
evidence and analysis thrown at us by the howler monkeys in the tree tops, how much of what we
we are doing now is a fabrication causing needless suffering by civilian (not politicians or
military engaged in conflict) populations?
the criminal activities of howler monkeys, like Strzok, Page, Brennan, McCabe, SUSAN RICE,
Comey, Ohr, BIDEN, OBAMA, etc in the USA are bad enough (whilst hardly impacting civilian life
in the US - BUT - the tactics used have been deployed to starve, cause disease, "dumb down",
reduce life chances all over the middle east and elsewhere for countless millions of
people.
there are equivalents of strzok, page, ohr right throughout the US and UK government
"machines" operating overseas. think about that. crimes exposed by Barr et al in the US -
against a sitting president - are replicated wherever howler monkeys operate overseas as well.
===
Excellent post! And my brain keeps wobbling around the recent revelation that the former heads of the CIA and FBI are both
avowed COMMUNISTS, Brennan and Comey, TRUMP, OFF YOUR ***!!!!
===
exactly.
the liars, cheaters and stealers (aka howler monkeys) ALWAYS project their own crimes onto any opposition - meaning that when
they accuse Trump of collusion with Russia, it is in fact the howler monkeys doing the collusion.
they should be investigated to the same degree that Trump and his assocaites have been - plus China collusion and Ukrainian
collusion. All I can say is " watch your back "..
===
The 'Keystone Cops' outcome of these two events show the utter desperation of the Deep State to continue on with their one world
agenda. Hopefully that is a good sign of weakening. Someone in total control wouldn't make so many amateur mistakes. This proves
that Putin is putting the west in a sort of Jujitsu 'choke hold' where you slowly cut off their oxygen until they tap out. In the
meantime, the opponent flails about throwing useless, wild punches trying to escape the inevitable outcome. That's how I'm reading
it and I hope I'm right.
===
I hope you're right too - but I also fear the other case - they've simply rid themselves of so many perceived challenges that
they no longer bother to be as cautious as before. Along with the new guard just not being as competent and organized, coming from
the "everyone gets a trophy" crowd.
===
(Edited) These false flags would be readily accepted by the public if not for the internet. Which, I believe, is the primary
factor behind the growing government push to censor those who question the "official" narratives.
===
The biggest false flag of all is 9/11. You have to be a moron not to have noticed the controlled explosion of the twin towers
on videos available on youtube and the downing of tower no 7 that was hit by nothing.
===
(Edited) 99.99% false flag inside job done by government/intel agency collaboration - US/Israel/Saudi to lead the US into the
Middle East.
The beastly trid of evil willing to murder 3000 innocent Americans for this sick agenda. And then millions more in the Middle
East. 8
===
I have a very good friend who watched as two sons went off to Afghanistan and Iraq after 9/11 to "fight terrorism". I have
presented all the evidence of 9/.11 being a false flag, who did it and how it was done. He refuses to believe it. I assume a large
part of society clings to the notion, as he, that "our people" wouldn't do such a thing. They make the classic error of assuming
that the psychopaths amongst us think and reason as they do.
Here's a great article on the nature of psychopathy. It's a long read but good insight into the minds (I'd say hearts .... but
they have none) of these 6% who 'lead" us.
===
I've had some run-ins with real psychopaths--I worked for one for a few years. The reason they are so effective is that they
blindside people. Because they are such a minority, we don't run into them very often and even if we do, we don't "get it." We have
internal models of what people are. Those models comprise our "normalcy bias" and we shape our experience to fit. So, for the
psycho/sociopaths, it's like clubbing baby seals. Maybe that's why they get arrogant and sloppy.
===
Psychopaths have low impulse control. That said, Reality is there are powers beyond psychopath.
===
The Skripal event was fabricated ( two months before the start of the WC) to try and get public support and outrage - enough
- so that the 'people' would support a boycott of Russia's World Cup !!
It ******* failed !! - Like everything else they attempt !!! Try keeping the Brits away from their soccer - the chaos would make the 'yellow vests' ******* blush !!!
===
Their Jihadi buttboys eventually escaped through the Golan and off to Canada, the UK and the rest of the ""Assad Must Go" world
for residency, in exchange for thier services to the (((criminal enterprise))).
===
The obvious fact that the Owners are choosing political frontmen of undaunted stupidity, unable to plan more than 2 steps ahead
is a very hopeful sign. Now they have to shut down the internet through their buttboys false frontmen of social media like Fuckerturd
and Dorsey.
===
Back to today...
...and while things have moved on, we're still puzzling over all the same issues.
What was the purpose of the Skripal attack? TO CLOSE DOWN THE UK END OF THE STEELE REPORT
What was the original plan of the Douma attack? TO COW RUSSIA INTO LEAVING SYRIA
Is there, as it appears, an internal power struggle in the Trump administration? NO...TRUMP HSS NO REAL POWER
Has that resolved? Who is running the United States? THE HIGHEST ECHELONS OF THE OCCULT GROUPS HAVE ALWAYS RUN AMERICA
Seeing as the OPCW has been shown to cover-up evidence in Douma, can we trust them on Skripal? Or anything else? THE OPCW
ARE A POLITICALLY, SCIENTIFICALLY, ETHICALLY AND MORALLY COMPROMISED ORGANISATION.......SO NO IS THE ANSWER!
Speaking of which, where on Earth IS Sergei Skripal? IMO..... SERGI SKRIPAL IS DEAD AND HIS DAUGHTER YULIA iS HELD UNDER
DRUG INDUCED HOUSE ARREST IN THE UK TO AID AND INDUCE "STOCKHOLM SYNDROME" IN HER BEFORE RELEASE CAN BE CONSIDERED
===
skripal was to be the conduit for funneling Novichok, conveniently produced at porton down and the white helmets for the next
false flag event...
Rob Slane and all the forum contributors have flogged and dissected SKRIPAL to death.
Sensible and informed people understand what actually happened.
===
The fun really starts when the deep state decides that it no longer needs public approval.
===
Or indeed 90% of it's subjects.
===
i know, i totally agree. the official story is complete bunkum. not one fact to back it up. in fact, it's contradicting itself
every time new "facts" are belched out by HMG
===
It used to be that we had to "read between the lines" to find the truth. Now, we have to "read between the lies".
The OPCW is obviously compromised and is not an independent organisation.
The 'clowns' really are stupid - they keep showing us how they do it!
===
(Edited) They've bragged and played their hand one too many times, exposing the deception for all the world to see.
Problem (false-flag) - Reaction (provoke an emotional response) - Solution (violate civil liberties/privacy, consolidate power,
sanctions, war, etc.)
The emperor has no clothes and is running around naked.
===
(Edited) The fact that the term "false flag" has entered the every day lexicon of the English language is a tremendous setback
for our Owners.
I suspect the Yulia Skripal is occupying the cell next to Julian Assange.
===
"The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect"
Lies & evasion are TM's specialties, along with distraction politics.
===
(Edited) And the extortion empire moves on to new victims to prey on.
It was quite a spectacle watching $100 million burn up on firing missiles on empty runways though. Boy that was a great use of US
tax payers money.
===
(Edited) This is a long long piece about not much of anything without a single introduction of new information or proof? It
is entirely without substance and is entirely speculative opinion as it stands without evidence.
That is NOT to say that the narrative is not entirely correct, I believe that it is, just that speculation doesn't really prove
what we may all believe to be the truth. There is a need for facts, probably supported by leaks, in the Skripal case as has been
the case with OPCW and Douma.
===
We'll do yourself a favor then and read the linked articles as well as the source docs. If you haven't, then expressing skepticism
here is a disservice to the hard and thankless work these brave journalists have been doing, to put it mildly.
"... The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression in the Middle East. ..."
"... Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt no longer made any sense. ..."
"... A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time. ..."
"... The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about possible escalation. ..."
"... The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know. ..."
"... The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect. ..."
"... Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later). ..."
"... The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all. ..."
"... She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day. ..."
"... If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible superpower stand-off in the Middle East. ..."
"... So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility? ..."
"... This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first. ..."
"... If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded" to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence to prove some of the most egregious parts of this. ..."
"... But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval. ..."
"... The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing much in the end. ..."
"... Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make her position as unstable as ever. ..."
"... In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea, and even war with Iran. ..."
"... The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate media. ..."
In view of the latest revelations from the leaked report, which seem to prove that at least some elements of the Douma "chemical
attack" were entirely staged, we want to take look back at the chaotic events of Spring 2018.
What was the agenda behind the Douma false flag?
Why was the US response seemingly token and ineffective?
Why was the Secretary of State Rex Tillerson fired?
What agenda tied the Skripal case to the Douma attack?
The following is an extract from an article by Catte originally published April 14th last year, which takes on a greater weight
in light of certain evidence – not only that the Douma attack was faked, but that the OPCW is compromised.
The neocon faction in the US is usually (and reasonably) regarded as the motivator behind much of the western aggression
in the Middle East.
Since at least 2001 and the launch of the "War on Terror" the US has led the way in finding or creating facile excuses to fight
oil wars and hegemonic wars and proxy wars in the region. But this time the dynamics look a little different.
This time it really looks as if the UK has been setting the pace of the "response".
The fact (as stated above) that Mattis was apparently telegraphing his own private doubts a)about the verifiability of the
attacks, and b)about the dangers of a military response suggests he was a far from enthusiastic partaker in this adventure.
Trump's attitude is harder to gauge. His tweets veered wildly between unhinged threats and apparent efforts at conciliation.
But he must have known he would lose (and seemingly has lost) a great part of his natural voter base (who elected him on a no-more-war
mandate) by an act of open aggression that threatened confrontation with Russia on the flimsiest of pretexts.
Granted the US has been looking for excuses to intervene ever more overtly in Syria since 2013, and in that sense this
Douma "initiative" is a continuation of their longterm policy. It's also true Russia was warning just such a false flag would
be attempted in early March. But in the intervening month the situation on the ground has changed so radically that such an attempt
no longer made any sense.
A false flag in early March, while pockets of the US proxy army were still holding ground in Ghouta would have enabled
a possible offensive in their support which would prevent Ghouta falling entirely into government hands and thereby also maintain
the pressure on Damascus. A false flag in early April is all but useless because the US proxy army in the region was completely
vanquished and nothing would be gained by an offensive in that place at that time.
You can see why Mattis and others in the administration might be reluctant to take part in the false flag/punitive air strike
narrative if they saw nothing currently to be gained to repay the risk. They may have preferred to wait for developments and plan
for a more productive way of playing the R2P card in the future.
The US media has been similarly, and uncharacteristically divided and apparently unsure. Tucker Carlson railed against
the stupidity of attacking Syria. Commentators on MSNBC were also expressing intense scepticism of the US intent and fear about
possible escalation.
The UK govt and media on the other hand has been much more homogeneous in advocating for action. No doubts of the type expressed
by Mattis have been heard from the lips of an UK government minister. Even May, a cowardly PM, has been (under how much pressure?)
voicing sterling certitude in public that action HAD to be taken.
Couple this with the – as yet unverified – claims by Russia of direct UK involvement in arranging the Douma "attack", and the
claims by Syria that the perps are in their custody, and a tentative storyline emerges. It's possible this time there were other
considerations in the mix beside the usual need to "be seen to do something" and Trump's perpetual requirement to appease the
liberal Russiagaters and lunatic warmongers at home. Maybe this time it was also about helping the UK out of a sticky problem.
THE SKRIPAL CONSIDERATION
Probably the only thing we can all broadly agree on about the Skripal narrative is that it manifestly did not go according
to plan. However it was intended to play out, it wasn't this way. Since some time in mid to late March it's been clear the entire
thing has become little more than an exercise in damage-limitation, leak-plugging and general containment.
The official story is a hot mess of proven falsehoods, contradictions, implausible conspiracy theories, more falsehoods
and inexplicable silences were cricket chirps tell us all we need to know.
The UK government has lied and evaded on every key aspect.
It lied again and again about the information Porton Down had given it
Its lawyers all but lied to Mr Justice Robinson about whether or not the Skripals had relatives in Russia in an unscrupulous
attempt to maintain total control of them, or at least of the narrative.
It is not publishing the OPCW report on the chemical analyses, and the summary of that report reads like an exercise in
allusion and weasel-wording. Even the name of the "toxic substance" found in the Skripals' blood is omitted, and the only thing
tying it to the UK government's public claims of "novichok" is association by inference and proximity.
Indeed if current claims by Russian FM Lavrov turn out to be true, a "novichok" (whatever that precisely means in this
case) may not have been the only substance found in those samples, and a compound called "BZ", a non-lethal agent developed in
Europe and America, has been discovered and suppressed in the OPCW report (more about that later).
None of the alleged victims of this alleged attack has been seen in public even in passing since the event. There is no film
or photographs of DS Bailey leaving the hospital, no film or photographs of his wife or family members doing the same. No interviews
with Bailey, no interviews with his wife, family, distant relatives, work colleagues.
The Skripals themselves were announced to be alive and out of danger mere days after claims they were all but certain to
die. Yulia, soon thereafter, apparently called her cousin Viktoria only to subsequently announce, indirectly through the helpful
agency of the Metropolitan Police, that she didn't want to talk to her cousin – or anyone else – at all.
She is now allegedly discharged from hospital and has "specially trained officers helping to take care of" her in an undisclosed
location. A form or words so creepily sinister it's hard to imagine how they were ever permitted the light of day.
Very little of this bizarre, self-defeating, embarrassing, hysterical story makes any sense other than as a random narrative,
snaking wildly in response to events the narrative-makers can't completely control.
Why? What went wrong? Why has the UK government got itself into this mess? And how much did the Douma "gas attack" and subsequent
drive for a concerted western "response" have to do with trying to fix that?
IS THIS WHAT HAPPENED?
If a false flag chemical attack had taken place in Syria at the time Russia predicted, just a week or two after the Skripal
poisoning, a lot of the attention that's been paid to the Skripals over the last month would likely have been diverted. Many of
the questions being asked by Russia and in the alt media may never have been asked as the focus of the world turned to a possible
superpower stand-off in the Middle East.
So, could it be the Skripal event was never intended to last so long in the public eye? Could it be that it was indeed
a false flag, or a fake event, as many have alleged, planned as a sketchy prelude to, or warm up act for a bigger chemical attack
in Syria, scheduled for a week or so later in mid-March – just around the time Russia was warning of such a possibility?
Could it be this planned event was unexpectedly canceled by the leading players in the drama (the US) when the Russians called
them out and the rapid and unexpected fall of Ghouta meant any such intervention became pointless at least for the moment?
Did this cancelation leave the UK swinging in the wind, with a fantastical story that was never intended to withstand close
scrutiny, and no second act for distraction?
So, did they push on with the now virtually useless "chemical attack", botch it (again), leaving a clear evidence trail leading
back to them? Did they then further insist on an allied "response" to their botched false flag in order to provide yet more distraction
and hopefully destroy some of that evidence?
This would explain why the UK may have been pushing for the false flag to happen (as claimed by Russia) even after it could
no longer serve much useful purpose on the ground, and why the Douma "attack" seems to have been so sketchily done by a gang on
the run. The UK needed the second part to happen in order to distract from the first.
It would explain why the US has been less than enthused by the idea of reprisals. Because while killing Syrians to further
geo-strategic interests is not a problem, killing Syrians (and risking escalation with Russia) in order to rescue an embarrassed
UK government is less appealing.
And it would explain why the "reprisals" when they came were so half-hearted.
If this is true, Theresa May and her cabinet are currently way out on a limb even by cynical UK standards. Not only have
they lied about the Skripal event, but in order to cover up that lie they have promoted a false flag in Syria, and "responded"
to it by a flagrant breach of international and domestic law. Worst of all, if the Russians aren't bluffing, they have some evidence
to prove some of the most egregious parts of this.
This is very bad.
But even if some or all of our speculation proves false, and even if the Russian claims of UK collusion with terrorists
in Syria prove unfounded, May is still guilty of multiple lies and has still waged war without parliamentary approval.
This is a major issue. She and her government should resign. But it's unlikely that will happen.
So what next? There is a sense this is a watershed for many of the parties involved and for the citizens of the countries drawn
into this.
Will the usual suspects try to avoid paying for their crimes and misadventures by more rhetoric, more false flags, more "reprisals"?
Or will this signal some other change in direction?
We'll all know soon enough.
* * *
Back to today...
...and while things have moved on, we're still puzzling over all the same issues.
What was the purpose of the Skripal attack?
What was the original plan of the Douma attack?
Is there, as it appears, an internal power struggle in the Trump administration?
Has that resolved? Who is running the United States?
Seeing as the OPCW has been shown to cover-up evidence in Douma, can we trust them on Skripal? Or anything else?
Speaking of which, where on Earth IS Sergei Skripal?
All these questions stand, and are important, but more important than all of that is the lesson: They tried it before, and just
because it didn't work doesn't mean they won't try it again.
Last spring, the Western powers showed they will deploy a false flag if they need too, for domestic or international motives.
And they have the motives right now.
The UK were the most vocal about Syria, and desperately tried to drum up support over Skripal, but it all came to nothing
much in the end.
Theresa May's political career still hangs by a thread, and her "Falklands moment", at best, staved off the inevitable for
a few months. A washout in the EU elections, a very real threat from Farage's Brexit party, and rumblings inside her own party, make
her position as unstable as ever.
Britain had the most to gain, of all NATO countries, and that is still true. We don't know what they might do.
This time they might even receive greater support from France this time around – since Macron is facing a revolution at home and
would kill (possibly literally) for a nice international distraction.
In the US, generally speaking, it seems that the Trump admin – or at least whichever interested parties currently have control
of the wheels of government – have called time on war in Syria. Instead, they've moved on to projects in Venezuela and North Korea,
and even war with Iran.
That's not to say Syria is safe, far from it. They are always just one carefully place false-flag away from all-out war. Last
year, Mattis (or whoever) decided war with Syria was not an option – that it was too risky or complicated. That might not happen
next time.
Clearly, the US hasn't totally seen sense in terms of stoking conflict with Russia – as seen by the decision to pull out of the
INF Treaty late last year. And further demonstrated by their attempts to overthrow Russia's ally Nicolas Maduro. Another ripe candidate
for a false flag.
The failure of the Douma false flag to cause the war it was meant to cause, and the vast collection of evidence that suggests
it was a false flag, should be spread far and wide. Not just because it's a truth which vindicates the smeared minority in the alternate
media.
But because recognising what they were trying to do last time , is the best defense when they try it again next time .
So, what is the representative of Allmighty Nation doing un Russia? Why bothering to hint
on better relations? Noted in the press conference was the absence of Pompeo's moralizing,
limiting itself on US position on issues. What is the point in this flying back and
forth?
Yes, Iran -- and arms control. Venezuela -- and arms control. North Korea -- and arms
control. I think they are paranoid about Russian weapons. And if Iranians by any chance have
some of the new weaponry, providing perfect testing ground, would Russia own to that? What
was obvious, no concessions on any issue from Moscow. Not even softened language.
This time,
it is different. The economic and military power has shifted east, Europeans forever without
a spine this time are spineless in all directions, and it will come as a shock to the
establishment that the presumed animosity towards Iran in Gulf, will nowhere to be found. Wil
Saudis host US troops against Iran, Doubt that deeply.
Boeing and Hollywood are two week stops that China can hit with impunity.
Notable quotes:
"... China has outspent the US on R&D since 2009 and now invests three times as much each year. ..."
"... The issue with these chips highlights just how ridiculous the American position is. The chips referred to are Intel processors they use in servers and qualcomm (arm core) processors in cell phones. Funny thing is, these processors are not even made in the US, and their replacement isn't that much of an issue, not for a company with the resources Huawei possesses. ..."
"... For government and other high security uses China has options like the MIPs based Loongson but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to x86 and windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like AMD markets, and it wouldn't take that long to do. ..."
"... The United States attacked China's largest telecom equipment maker Huawei. If China decides to retaliate, it could target chip giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which rely heavily on it for revenue, or tech giant Apple, which depends on them for iPhone manufacturing. ..."
"... Huawei's competitors Nokia and Ericsson would stand to win from the above ban as the United States and its allies would resort to them for 5G deployment. Nokia's and Ericsson's stocks rose more than 4% and 2% in early trading on May 16. . . here ..."
"... Chip fab is the only remaining significant technological lead that America retains anymore, but the raw engineering brainpower behind that industry in the US is mostly imported from China anyway. The Chinese have no shortage of brilliant engineers, they just have not really had the need to do without Intel and AMD before. Now they do. ..."
"... Within a year or so China will be producing chips as good as America's. Another year after that and America will be eclipsed in that industry. No longer will people be looking for "Intel Inside!" stickers on products but rather "Huawei Inside!" . ..."
"... What doesn't seem to be clear, or else ignored/excused here -- China is today just as globalist as the US and in fact the multinational corporations in control of both countries are inextricably linked, especially in the high tech sector currently under the intense MoA thread microscope. ..."
"... By our standards exploitation of workers in China is a grim picture , which compares with the grim blue collar conditions in the US, the equal and opposite result of the globalist equation wrt offshoring factory jobs endemic to capitalist production. ..."
"... MoA China "experts" should study the reality of globalization after removing the rose colored glasses if you wish to be considered analysts instead of merely wishful thinkers/cheerleaders of groupthink delusion. ..."
@William Gruff #75: China is already producing world-class ARM chips. HiSilicon 's latest Kirin
processors are on par with Qualcomm's Snapdragon and Samsung's Exynos processors. Apple's
A-series is ahead of them all, but what does it matter if Apple's rising prices and falling
quality are going to kill Apple anyway?
Per Reuters, Huawei spends $11b on US components, and its ability to withstand this hit will
vary by segment: "Huawei being unable to manufacture network servers, for example, because
they can't get key U.S. components would mean they also stop buying parts from other
countries altogether," said an executive at a Huawei chip supplier.
"They can relatively better manage component sourcing for mobile phones because they have
their own component businesses for smartphones. But server and network, it's a different
story," the executive said.
Are there any articles on how dependent Apple and Boeing are on Chinese components? This
strategy seems incredibly short-sighted.
Remember the "Asian pivot"? Did Huawei and other critical tech companies start making
independent chips back then? Or before? When were the tariffs planned? Speculation, anyone?
The issue with these chips highlights just how ridiculous the American position is. The chips
referred to are Intel processors they use in servers and qualcomm (arm core) processors in
cell phones. Funny thing is, these processors are not even made in the US, and their
replacement isn't that much of an issue, not for a company with the resources Huawei
possesses.
Huawei already has its own arm based soc's it uses in it's high end phones and they can
replace processors in it's low end phones with lesser versions of these.
The Intel processors will be tougher to do for the commercial market because of software
compatibility issues.
For government and other high security uses China has options like the MIPs based Loongson
but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to x86 and
windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like AMD markets, and it
wouldn't take that long to do.
The United States attacked China's largest telecom equipment maker Huawei. If China
decides to retaliate, it could target chip giants like Qualcomm and Broadcom, which rely
heavily on it for revenue, or tech giant Apple, which depends on them for iPhone
manufacturing.
Huawei uses Qualcomm's modems in its high-end smartphones and has been in settlement talks
with the chip supplier over a licensing dispute. Tensions between the United States and
Huawei could delay this licensing settlement, sending Qualcomm's stock down 4.4% on May
16.
Huawei's competitors Nokia and Ericsson would stand to win from the above ban as the
United States and its allies would resort to them for 5G deployment. Nokia's and Ericsson's
stocks rose more than 4% and 2% in early trading on May 16. . .
here
"Soon U.S. chip companies will have lost all their sales to the second largest
smartphone producer of the world. That loss will not be just temporarily, it will become
permanent." --b
This is a crucial and important development. So long as China is just developing their
domestic chip designs as an academic exercise they will forever trail behind the market
leaders by at least one technological iteration. Why try so hard with chip designs that will
only ever just be used in college degree theses papers and proof of concept models? Real
innovation comes from scratching an itch; from fulfilling an actual need. Chip fab is the
only remaining significant technological lead that America retains anymore, but the raw
engineering brainpower behind that industry in the US is mostly imported from China anyway.
The Chinese have no shortage of brilliant engineers, they just have not really had the need
to do without Intel and AMD before. Now they do.
In the short term the transition will be painful for China. The first few iterations of
their replacement chip designs will be buggy and not have the features of chips they could
have bought for cheaper from the US. They will also have problems ramping up capacity to meet
their needs. Typical growing pains, in other words. In the long term, though, this will be
seen as the point at which the end started for America's chip tech dominance. Within a
year or so China will be producing chips as good as America's. Another year after that and
America will be eclipsed in that industry. No longer will people be looking for "Intel
Inside!" stickers on products but rather "Huawei Inside!" .
Isnt it clear the US is globalist? Uhhm, well, yes, it's only been clear for the prior 75
years at least. In fact Lenin laid it all out during WWI so one could
say it's been clear for 100 years.
What doesn't seem to be clear, or else ignored/excused here -- China is today just as
globalist as the US and in fact the multinational corporations in control of both countries
are inextricably linked, especially in the high tech sector currently under the intense MoA
thread microscope.
Why aren't Huawei making making more smartphone chips in production? Because so many
Chinese component manufacturers are still heavily invested in churning out product for Apple.
These companies employ millions in "relatively high paying" factory jobs and account for a
large slice of Chinese export income and stock market capitalization. These corporate
oligarchs supported by the Chinese government retain a vested interest in the status quo.
This is not to minimize Huawei or Chinese growing ability to compete at the design and
innovation level as well as production, it is simply rightsizing the perspective to fit the
reality. Huawei production is growing worldwide but this doesn't mean Apple or Samsung will
evaporate or fall by the wayside and the Chinese need Apple and its markets too . In
fact, Huawei is now willing for the first time to sell microchips to third party cell phone
producers including Apple. Successful capitalist growth for China depends on increasing
production into new products, technologies and markets not replacing current platforms with
new. The product cycle will take care of itself in time anyway.
China is still in the industrial growth phase of its capitalist development, although
beginning to transition to the higher phase for sure. Of course.
MoA China "experts" should study the reality of globalization after removing the rose
colored glasses if you wish to be considered analysts instead of merely wishful
thinkers/cheerleaders of groupthink delusion.
Trump calculation is probably that neoliberalism in China already corrupted Communist Party enough for US being able to
destabilize the country buy depriving it of export revenue. And it is true that influence neoliberal Fifth column in china exists
and can compete with Communist Party for power. If Trump timing is correct China will be crushed. If this in incorrect the
USA might be crushed. This is a very high stake game as Trump burn bridges way too easily (being reckless and arrogant all his
life). Bulling as a negotiating tactics might be OK for New York real estate market is not that good in negotiating with
countries such as China.
Both countries are neoliberal countries but Chinese have more flexibility as remnants of Communist Party control remain in
place. But the same remnants are also a bog danger, as China might find itself in the position of the USSR when the US
crushed oil price and deprived it of much of its export revenue. In this case Communist Party will be blamed for social
disruptions and might lose power due tot he power of Chine Fifth column of
nouveau riche like happened in the USSR (opposition was supported by huge cash injections from the USA). I hope they study the
USSR experience very carefully and will not repeat Gorbachov mistakes (although it is difficult, as it is very difficult to find a
more stupid politician then Gorbachov, unless we assume that he was a traitor). Also the level of nationalism in China is
much higher and that might help. In any case this uncharted territory for both China and the USA.
The Trump administration seems to have the illusion that if you raise the stakes high enough, other countries will cave to US
demands. There might also be an element of creating foreign adversary in order to unite the domestic front. If Chinese will hold
their position tight despite the pain, Trump might lose the election in 2020 as he will be unable to protect the economy for
more then a year and the first signs of reception nullify his changes, as he will be blames for it.
Notable quotes:
"... This article titled 'Face' by Walrus over at SST is well worth a read alongside b's piece. https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/2019/05/face-by-walrus.html ..."
"... Both these articles give a very clear picture of what the drunken louts 'Team Trump' are up against in their so called trade war. Very much like a drunken spectator climbing into the ring thinking he can take on a professional boxer. ..."
"... The US attack on China did not start with Trump. This is what Obama's military "Pivot to Asia" was about, as was the TPP, which explicitly was designed to develop an economic alliance that left China out. Capitalist trade wars are also not new, as are hot wars. They are part of capitalism. ..."
"... "Intellectual property" is a laughable assertion, an audacious attempt by the US to corner all human advances and claim them as the property of US capitalists, to be only used for their profits. As if! ..."
"... What an appalling ruling elite in the USA. Blamers and punishers. Never take any responsibility for their murderous acts ..."
"... The U.S. talks about pressuring China until they give in. China talks about a solution that respects the dignity of each party. ..."
"... I had the sudden realisation that US politics is essentially monarchist in its nature, for all the complicated legal and constitutional structures that have been built around it over the past 240+ years. US politics and culture are fixated on one individual with extreme powers; the superhero obsession in Hollywood is one symptom of that. ..."
"... In a way the US now resembles the Ottoman empire during that empire's Sultanate of Women period (late 1500s to mid-1700s) when sultans' power was dominated by their mothers, viziers and sometimes the janissaries who became a hereditary class during that period. ..."
"... Idolatry is universal. People always gravitate towards Alpha personalities. ..."
"... In looking into US culture and why it gives rise the type of leadership it has, I think it may be the belief in exceptionalism. Exceptionalism may also carry with it the belief that all other peoples want to be like them and all they (Americans) have to do is free those peoples from the nasty dictators ruling over them. ..."
"... Patrick Armstrong in one of his articles has said that in his dealings with US officials as Canadian ambassador or diplomat, is that American officials genuinely believed that all they had to do was overthrow the evil dictator and the people would welcome Americans or willingly join the US system. ..."
"... But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town square. ..."
"... We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it, Doublethink. ..."
"... The British court said, no patent, no copyright and no monopoly can last longer than 7 years. that was 1787-89, and it explains the for a short time clause in the USA constitution. ..."
"... I don't think the US sees the world's nations as commanded by their senior politician. Far from it, but to keep the US public locked in a child's mentality, the govt and its MSM present every political event/action/reaction as between personalities. Can't have reason and logic breaking out among the minions can we? ..."
"... China's "competitive advantages" are too big for a confederation of micro-countries in the Pacific to overcome. ..."
"... b said;" the U.S. economic system is based on greed and not on the welfare of its citizens." Bingo! Jrabbit @ 52 said;"US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20 years." Maybe the last 100 yrs.? Demonize countries people and rulers, and take their stuff, but why not? We are, don't ya' know, the exceptional nation, doing gods work. Manifest Destiny, isn't it great? ..."
"... Smacking down China is a strategic priority for the Deep State. ..."
"... the neocons in the US believes it is now or never to defend the USA unique position as world power. They believe, that if they don't fight now, they will have lost. I say, they already have. ..."
"... Trust the UnitedSnake to blame the Chinese for reneging on an agreement ! Fact is, Trump's team Add in last minute conditions that are totally unacceptable to China. Chinese commentators are fuming at the audacity of the demands. 'WTF, Do they think we'r their gawd damned 51st state ?' ..."
"... Typical UnitedSnake's 'negotiation' tactics, designed to fail ! Thats how Clinton justity his bombing of ex Yugo, by blaming Belgrade for the breakdown of negotiation ,to justify its 78 days of aerial arsons against Yugo. ..."
Both these articles give a very clear picture of what the drunken louts 'Team Trump' are
up against in their so called trade war. Very much like a drunken spectator climbing into
the ring thinking he can take on a professional boxer.
@ Peter AU 1 | May 17, 2019 4:33:54 PM |
1 5 Trump
demanded concessions on trade
banned Huwei
made military [plans with Taiwan
saber rattled in the China Sea
Trump wants improved trade conditions for improved economic climate in the U.S.
But there are others in the admin who want something else.
But still: "backup chips it has independently developed"
That's a good one Mr Moon.
The US attack on China did not start with Trump. This is what Obama's military "Pivot to
Asia" was about, as was the TPP, which explicitly was designed to develop an economic
alliance that left China out.
Capitalist trade wars are also not new, as are hot wars.
They are part of capitalism.
"Intellectual property" is a laughable assertion, an audacious attempt by the US to corner
all human advances and claim them as the property of US capitalists, to be only used for
their profits.
As if!
What an appalling ruling elite in the USA. Blamers and punishers. Never take any
responsibility for their murderous acts.
Rise up people, these are dangerous, stupid leaders and elites.
B says: Whatever face is at the top is only representing the layers below.
Yes, this is the case when complex governmental systems are functioning properly. In
this case power is distributed throughout the system, based on the role each individual
within the system. People must have a collaborative culture for complex systems to function
properly.
People of an authoritarian nature hate complex systems and distributed power, as such
systems limit the freedom of action of the authoritarian leader. The corollary to this is
that systems must be kept simple to accommodate authoritarian leaders. And simple systems
are much less powerful and effective than complex systems.
My observation is that, in the U.S., authoritarianism is the dominant culture, as
opposed to a collaborative culture of the Chinese that is implied by B's comment.
Indeed we see many signs in these negotiations that the U.S. is operating based on a
culture of authoritarianism, whereas China is operating based on a culture of
collaboration. Among the signs:
The tendency that B. noted of Americans to assign all power to the leader.
(This is not the first time, and in fact it is a common mistake of the U.S. and one of the
reasons that their regime change efforts almost never achieve a result that is favorable
for the U.S.)
The U.S. talks about winning and losing. China talks equity.
The U.S. talks about pressuring China until they give in. China talks about a
solution that respects the dignity of each party.
The principle behind negotiations for people of a collaborative culture is 'Win-Win or
No-Deal'. For Authoritarians, Win-Win is a compromise, and compromise is the equivalent of a
loss. My conclusion is that there is only a very low probability that the U.S. and China will
successfully negotiate a trade deal. The cultures of the authoritarian Americans and the
collaborative Chinese are too divergent. China will only accept Win-Win and the U.S. cannot
accept Win-Win.
Classic US empire strategy.
Build up a supplier and when they start to be serious a competitor take them down.
Asian Tiger crisis,forcing occupied Japan into the Plaza Accord etc.
They left it too long with China, way too long.
China has not recycled its trade dollars surplus into USTs since 2014.
No replacement suppliers like Vietnam or Indonesia etc will do either, no more vendor
finance
for the US.
It will have to live within its means, no wonder the neocohens are going
insane.
We are watching the death of the $ as GRC first hand.
NO jared, Trump is in charge, fully responsible and yet totally irresponsible. He hires
and fires, he barks the orders, Trump is not captive. You may desperately wish to believe
that but NO, Trump wants it like this and NO dissent.
This is Henry Kissinger's plan implemented by Trump. A war criminal implementing a
sociopath war criminal's plan. Trump is a killer and an oligarchs stooge and he like the
rewards.
See the fabulous Aaron Mate discussion previously linked in the last thread.
I'd be curious to know what other MoA barflies think of the US tendency to personalize
other countries' governments and political systems and reduce them all to monarchies of one
sort or another, and what this says about the American psychology generally. So much of the
US slather and accusations against Russia and China and what those nations are supposedly
doing look like psychological projection of the US' own sins and malevolent behaviour.
I was in hospital nearly 20 years ago for a major operation and some of my recuperation
there was spent watching a few old "Star Trek: Next Generation" episodes. Watching those
shows, I was struck by how much "power" the Star Trek captain Jean-Luc Picard appeared to
wield. Every one of his subordinates deferred to his decisions and very few challenged
him.
I know this is an old TV show with scripts that emphasise individual action over
collective action and delineating a whole culture on board the Starship fleet (this is a
long time before "Game of Thrones") but I had the sudden realisation that US politics is
essentially monarchist in its nature, for all the complicated legal and constitutional
structures that have been built around it over the past 240+ years. US politics and culture
are fixated on one individual with extreme powers; the superhero obsession in Hollywood is
one symptom of that.
In a way the US now resembles the Ottoman empire during that empire's Sultanate of Women
period (late 1500s to mid-1700s) when sultans' power was dominated by their mothers,
viziers and sometimes the janissaries who became a hereditary class during that period.
@ dh-mtl 21
You provided an excellent analysis of two very different kinds of people, westerners and
Asians (Chinese). Americans who believe that Chinese are pretty much like them, and respond
to people, to pressures and and to situations in the same way, are badly mistaken.
I would add another: Westerners want instant results and quick profits whereas Chinese take
the long view. Heck, they've been around for five thousand years so why not.
I'm glad you raise the issue of increased prices for US consumers, b. I have been looking
in vain for a mention of this even in alternative media. Nobody appears to be talking about
it.
If I can go off track for a moment the events surrounding Boeing are highly significant
and a parallel to what is happening generally in the US. Here is a something I wrote for
naked capitalism but did not send - Yves is too fierce and I don't trust her. A bit like a
feminine Colonel what's his name Laing...
Because of the prestige of Boeing Wall Street left its dimantling until quite late -
1997. GE and Ford had already produced their versions of the 737 Max in the 1960s with the
Corvair and the Pinto respectively as finance people started to take over the running of US
companies. There is something very sad in watching a once magnificent company reduced by
bankers to a shadow of its former self.
There has been a trade imbalance for quite a while but it didn't seem to matter much. The
Chinese raised their standard of living, Americans got cheap stuff, surplus dollars went
into treasuries to fund the deficit.
It all worked pretty well until Trump and MAGA. Somehow he thinks he'll bring the jobs
back but no Americans are going to make sneakers and circuit boards for $2 an hour.
I have just replied to Karlof1 in I think the previous thread and I link into this. In
looking into US culture and why it gives rise the type of leadership it has, I think it may
be the belief in exceptionalism. Exceptionalism may also carry with it the belief that all
other peoples want to be like them and all they (Americans) have to do is free those
peoples from the nasty dictators ruling over them.
Patrick Armstrong in one of his articles has said that in his dealings with US officials as
Canadian ambassador or diplomat, is that American officials genuinely believed that all
they had to do was overthrow the evil dictator and the people would welcome Americans or
willingly join the US system.
All the economic momentum is in Eurasia, centering on China, India, and Russia.
China is spearheading this drive and re-assuming its historical status as the richest
land in the world. Instead of resisting, Washington should be working with projects like
the BRI that help enrich everyone. (Indeed, why doesn't Washington announce a BRI for North/South America, perhaps a Yellow
Brick Road? But that's an aside...)
And concerns about Chinese spying through their companies should be equaled with
internal reflection about the practice in the United States. Perhaps it would be wise for
both countries to develop and practice international standards that respect human rights in
an Everything's Connected world.
Given how the US and China frequently treat "different" people with disdain, that's a
lot to ask. But no country or people is spotless regarding abusing human rights and some
wisdom with power would be welcome from both governments.
You point out that our entertainment industry focuses its plots on strong leaders, and Good
Guys vs Bad Guys, and we definitely internalize that, especially when our overlords want to
demonize another country, and use our entertainment-induced perspective as a shortcut.
They tell us that the leader of the targeted country is a Bad Guy and we must kill the
people in order to save them. And Americans nod and comply. Except for the 5% that prefers
peace, and they argue that the leader is not a Bad Guy, so we shouldn't kill the people to
save them.
No American ever thinks to argue international law or basic morality, we just argue about
the plot lines.
But, at the same time, on another level, Americans understand that the president is a
puppet and must obey orders, or have his brains blown out in bright daylight, in the town
square.
We hold both these views simultaneously, hence, as Orwell called it, Doublethink.
China has succeeded because it does not honor copyright and patent monopolies. Western
civilization is failing because it imposes the feudal monopoly by rule of law system.. The
state will make sure a few fat cats are lords and the masses are their slaves.
---
It is almost asking the change of China's political system." <= no its not, the struggle
today is freedom, human rights and the right to self determination not socialism vs
capitalism.. it the struggle today is capitalism vs monopolism.. because monopolism aims to
make every single human being alive its slave to a very few monopoly powered corporate
giants.. China is a clear example of what can be if the masses are allowed to compete
without the shackles of copyrights, patents and other thin air monopolies.
Some aspects of China's trade behavior can and should be criticized.
Why? Because of that "intellectual property" stuff? Japan basically built itself from the
ground up in the post-war through allowed and unallowed intellectual property theft. Canon
and Nikon, for example, essentially fac-similed Leica during that period; after the
transition to digital, they erased their theft past, but it doesn't change the objective
truth both wouldn't exist without stealing technology from a defeated country (Germany). It
did the same with missile reentrance technology it stole from the USSR after the Cold
War.
< Technology is a product of the human mind.. copyright and patents are thefts of the
products of the human mind.. and human mind assets do not belong to anyone, to any
country.. Instead, copyright and patents (intellectual property) are and should be in the
public domain (but the scum that write the laws have created from thin air; rights which do
not exist, and given the rights they fabricated to their feudal lords and the corporations
owned by such lords. So the lawmaking scum have made it possible for a few (feudal lords)
to establish and maintain a monopoly in the good life, over the masses in the world. ..
Just as in the in England, France and Switzerland, where only the rich, corrupt
politicians, and criminal few hung out and traded copyright and patent monopolies in the
coffee houses, (much like stocks and bonds are traded today, monopoly trading was a game
between fat cats (today's the fat cats are wall street barons), ..monopolies allow rich and
wealth to support their royal life styles at the price of enslaving the masses to poverty.
Luckily a court in England, threaten by an angry crowd of the masses, denied the wealthy
their perpetual lifetime patents and copyright demands, no longer could the fat cats
squeeze ownership of an intellectual creation from its creator, convert it to intangible
property, and use the intellectual property to monopolize the world.
The British court
said, no patent, no copyright and no monopoly can last longer than 7 years. that was
1787-89, and it explains the for a short time clause in the USA constitution.
I don't think the US sees the world's nations as commanded by their senior politician. Far
from it, but to keep the US public locked in a child's mentality, the govt and its MSM
present every political event/action/reaction as between personalities. Can't have reason
and logic breaking out among the minions can we?
As for Trump being in charge, I rather doubt it, no US president has been "in charge" of
any thing except possibly what is for lunch since Washington.
Too many policies Trump began, such as negotiations with NK, have been trashed by his
"teams" who I believe are actually his minders put in place by the Deep State.
Is Trump a great guy? A NY developer by their very nature is not a great guy. But I do
think he wants to be seen as a great president. To do that he has to pull off some deals
that will be remembered which is why he wanted the deal with NK, that Pompeo blew up.
I also think that the govt is preparing for the time when the dollar is no longer the
reserve currency. And to do that you need to pull manufacturing back from abroad (from
China), seize critical assets (from Venezuela),break any and all treaties that require you
to spend money you won't have (making NATO (pay as you go).
All things the govt is doing, admittedly with the most horrific management team since
Taft's. But they are moving on all fronts to circle the wagons of US commerce.
They know what is coming, some of them may see war as the way to bilk a few more
trillions out of the treasury, but I don't think the military will let them. For they know
that if they go up against a nation that Russia and China support and botch it, that
R&C will go for the throat and that, more so than the currency crash would be the end
of the US.
These moves we see are very serious because the end game is for the continued existence
(or death)of the US. And many of these tactical moves are very high risk because they
hasten the end of the dollar. I give the dollar five years more, tops. Then it will be just
one in a basket of currencies until the yuan makes its way to the top.
And where that strange UN Agenda 21 fits in this I don't know, its plan for the US is
for drastically reduced population (70% loss, from what?)the remaining population in mega
cities and truly vast areas of no go set aside for the "environment." It reads like a
National Parks program on crack with a side of Hunger Games.
The next five years are going to be really critical and I personally think the US will
only make it by the skin of its teeth.
@ Jen. Another thought. The era in which the current state of America was conceived.
British colonies in a war of separation or independence against the British. Europe and
Britain at that time mostly ruled by hereditary monarchs nobles and lords ect.
Americans which I take it at that time would have been mostly British ancestry had done
away with hereditary monarchs and so forth. It would have been somewhat exceptional at the
time. In the targeting of the leader of a nation as the source of all evil, I wonder if
that relates back to doing away with hereditary leadership especially monarch.
President Trump has declared a national emergency due a threat to the US from "the ability
of foreign adversaries to create and exploit vulnerabilities in information and
communications technology or services, with potentially catastrophic effects, and thereby
constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy,
and economy of the United States," so various actions and prohibitions have been stipulated
here .
I think war reporting rules are in place with China, and Trade war has started.
Every month that passes without a crisis is a success for China right now as it over takes
US in GDP, tech, and trade links.
Key issues are bringing Europe in - the Huawei ban extended to Europe is battlefield #1,
Northstream (gas link to Russia) is #2.
First get Europe on board, the US can up things a lot further.
If Trump gets this right, he can delay outright defeat by China under well beyond his 8
years are up. (Bush or Obama early on could have won, or could have found a peaceful
solution).
A president doesn't have to obey the orders of the powers that be just because they
threaten to kill him otherwise. A brave president would defy them to do their worst. If
they went ahead and killed him, he would still have accomplished something important. By
exposing the nature of the system, he would have robbed it of its legitimacy and brought a
revolution much closer.
You've all been trained very well to ignore the class warfare.
China's "peaceful rise" was convenient when it enriched the Western elite.
But when China makes a play for equal footing, the must be smacked down. In each case (rise, smack-down) ordinary people (like yourselves) get f*cked. Kissinger's NWO? It's for the children.... No, not YOUR children. Welcome to the rabbithole.
Best example of a country stealing foreign inventions and protecting its 'uneconomical'
industries with tariffs is the USA.
It was notorious that in the C19th American publishers pirated authors and musicians from
Europe, particularly of course from Britain where the intellectual properties of Dickens
and his contemporaries laid the basis for many an American publishing fortune.
Among the primary victims were American authors who couldn't compete against stolen
imports.
I am not so sure the conclusions of the article are correct. Tariffs on Chinese factories
will force production to other countries in the area like Vietnam where costs are not going
to be much higher than China.
Granted, the US may be pissed off that Huawei is placing back doors in their systems but
I suspect that they are only copying what the US has done for years with US companies like
Microsoft.
My daughter managed 5 factories located in China of a clothing manufacture based in the
US some years ago. She said there was constant chaos as the workers were continually on
strike. Bad air, dangerous machines, poor wages. few bathrooms, bad water, childcare is
chaining you child to a fence for the day, and the like. Her boss flew to China and asked
for the cheapest costs possible. They showed him a factory full of little children cranking
out production. He left crying his eyes out. He was a cold hearted bastard but even that
was too much for him to see.
I viewed first hand the destruction trade agreements like NAFTA caused to good union
wages and benefits in the US. Hell, that is what got Trump elected. It is tough to watch
your children go into the same profession and make 50% less in wages and fringes 30 years
later.
Intellectual property and patents? No so sure about that, the views here are new to me.
I always supported them but I guess I need to dig deeper on that one.
In the net I think China is the loser, fewer jobs, higher food costs, their markets are
down 30%, ours are peaking and are seen as a safe haven for money. Export numbers for China
are dropping as is the trade balance.
At this point it is not a trade war but a re balancing of markets IMHO. If it was a real
trade war things would be far worse. Middle supplier countries will be hurt, US farmers,
some markets win some lose. If it was business as usual then it would be business as usual.
Trump is stirring the pot and what the endgame is is anyone's guess. Did anyone really
believe China would just bend over and accept any demands from the US?
All that being said China can easily wait it out and hope Trump loses and the policy is
reversed which I am sure his policies will be reversed if anyone else gets elected.
Your link about Boeing is a good one. Today at Naked Capitalism was a
story about a possible 'payback' link between Huawei and Boeing. China has the option
of causing a great deal of pain to both the US and Boeing in retaliation.
They could declare the recertified 737-MAX to be unsafe, so much so they're cancelling
all orders and forbidding any landings in or overflights of China. If Canada hadn't screwed
up so badly, the local Bombardier airplane might have been substituted for the 737. But
Canada did goof in a major way.
There is no way that the US could subsidize the growth of a larger population base
forever.
China sends vast amounts of manufactured goods to the United States; the US pays for all
this with dollars it can effortlessly print. So who is subsidizing whom?
The National Basketball Association Inc. is hiring its first head of government and
public affairs in China as it seeks to protect its most important international market at
a time of high tension in the U.S.-China relationship.
What I don't like about Chas Freeman's article is his tone-deafness.
He has been around government enough to know better. Smacking down China is a strategic
priority for the Deep State. But Chas says:
There is no longer an orderly policy process in Washington to coordinate, moderate, or
control policy formulation or implementation. Instead, a populist president has
effectively declared open season on China.
It's a bit disturbing to see people here read Kissinger's 2014 Op-Ed (finally) but say
nothing about Chas Freeman's assertion that it's all made up by a "populist" President.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <>
If the above hurt your feeling please feel free to retreat to your happy place. We'd all
be better off.
Not happy, just learned to live with it. I think I get your point. The policy really
means little, the underlying issues will never change.
Been in the rabbit hole for a really long time. If more people jump in maybe things will
really start to change.
I am not so sure the conclusions of the article are correct. Tariffs on Chinese factories
will force production to other countries in the area like Vietnam where costs are not
going to be much higher than China.
First of all, this is not a new phenomenon: low wages, low technology industries are
already being transferred to India and SE-Asia. The Chinese know this and there are
innumerous articles on the internet you can find about it.
But even if this process accelerates, that won't solve the manufacturing problem of the
USA: it will continue to be abroad. Besides, China's "competitive advantages" are too big
for a confederation of micro-countries in the Pacific to overcome. It has a socialist
economy (centrally planified economy, under the hegemony of the working class); it has 1.5
billion people that will only peak in 2030; it is decades ahead in built infrastructure; it
has a huge scale economy advantage (e.g. infrastructure projects that are required to reach
a certain desired productive level, which are profitable in China, may not be profitable in
e.g. Malaysia simply because it is too small); its financial sector is not dominant over
production. But then, I repeat: even if the USA nukes China, manufacturing still won't go
back to American soil.
America's problem is a secular fall of its profit rates, not manufacturing capacity: it
can import whatever and how much products it needs simply because it can print world money
(Dollar system).
b said;" the U.S. economic system is based on greed and not on the welfare of its
citizens." Bingo! Jrabbit @ 52 said;"US foreign policy has been remarkably consistent for over 20
years." Maybe the last 100 yrs.? Demonize countries people and rulers, and take their stuff, but
why not? We are, don't ya' know, the exceptional nation, doing gods work. Manifest Destiny, isn't it great?
I know next to nothing about the "Huawei" business, so a new
article about it is something to grab at. Pretty cut and dried, huh? Hauwei is pure
evil, and no 'ifs' or 'buts' about it.
But who is this guy. A couple of quick searches turned up some more of his output.
'It's now or never': The untold story of the dramatic, Canadian-led rescue of Syria's
White Helmets
How Israel became a defender of the Syrian people
Just another neocon hack peddling BS, so I'm back to square one.
China will wait it out until Trump is out of office. The Chinese leadership is pretty
smart and had at least three years to prepare for the worst case scenario. Once Chinese
industries as a whole follow Huawei's footsteps (i.e. Plan B), there will be no turning
back. They'll set off Plan B once they see Trump winning 2020.
Are we to asume from "Some aspects of China's trade behavior can and should be criticized"
that the United States are shining example of trade (and all other) policies,all others to
follow?
For government and other high security uses China has options like the mips based
Loongson but that wouldn't work in the commercial environment so hopelessly devoted to
x86 and windows. Probably the best solution would be to make an x86 analog like amd
markets, and it wouldn't take that long to do.
Chinese-Taiwanese joint venture Zhaoxin has been making x86 processors since
2013, based on VIA Technologies' x86 license. These processors are manufactured by
Taiwanese TSMC, but may switch to Chinese SMIC
once it launches its 14nm process later this year.
"Whatever face is at the top is only representing the layers below." --b
The truth of this is also why so many in America hate Trump so much. He is too perfect a
reflection of what America truly stands for. Trump accurately represents America, from
America's bloated, over-inflated sense of self-importance and worth to America's
pussy-grabbing foreign policy. Trump-hate is really self-hate.
Delusional American Russiagater Trump Derangement Syndrome victims will protest, but
such people are incapable of taking a good hard look at themselves.
Hmm... "delusional" and "American" are redundant adjectives here. I should
be more careful with my writing style.
Mr. Gruff you have it almost correct, Americans and the USA are not one in the same and
they never have been.
I still don't think you guys get it.. The 7 article constitution of the USA apportions the
power to rule between two branches and separates the masses from their personal political
powers and their human rights. Its result is not a democracy, but a few people rule
republic. 100% of the authority to rule (operate and make decisions) is vested in one
person (Art. II, rule and decide: President w/VP backup), subject only to the powers
distributed to the two bodied legislative structure ( Art. I, pass law and raise money: 450
house+100 senate persons). Critical to understand => one person makes all decisions, and
directs the day to day government. Article III thru VII defines the judiciary and clarifies
various situations. (525 popularly elected + 2 electoral college appointed <=paid
governors) vs. 350,000,000 powerless governed persons entitled only to 3 votes/voter
[Senator(1), House members(2)] and allowed one vote/voter for each President(1) and VP(1)
<=but both Art. II persons are appointed by the electoral college).
The USA is about delivering to the ownership of a very few, all of the assets, all of
the power, and all of the services once possessed by the many. The demand for all of the
possessions of the many, to be delivered to the few, has expanded over time from 13 colony
America to earth and now space. No one but the few are entitled to anything and the USA and
other governments are there to be sure of it. But how is 'total possession vested in the
few' to be maintained? By rule of law!
But what law would transfer everyone's possessions into the ownership of a few? Ah, the
laws of monopoly.. so rule of law, from thin air , generates=> monopoly powers
and rights of ownership.. Examples of laws that bear monopoly powers and that transfer
ownership rights are copyright laws, patent laws, as they convert monopoly powers that once
the many shared (via governments) now belong to the few. The transfer is called
privatization. Oil is controlled for the benefit of the private few by ownership laws and
right to produce contracts. All in all the function of t he USA has been to make a few very
wealthy at the expense of the many.
The trade issues, sanctions, wars, tariffs, race wars, oil wars, religious wars etc. are
about which people are going to be the few. Until the form and function of governments are
determined by the masses from the bottom, instead of by the few from the top, nothing will
ever change. The masses will suffer or prosper according to which government is the
winner.
US factories moved to China because the US economy is based on greed?!! US government greed
for the company's money maybe. US factories moved to China because it was cheaper to
produce products there and then pay the expense to ship them all the way back. The US has
one of the highest federal tax rates on earth, and add in high state taxes for an
unacceptable situation. US fiat paper money is the base problem.
William Gruff @ 72 & snake 71
I was just about to say the very same thing !
Delusions of grandeur ! And now major self-harm systems !
But are these degenerates above the law ? They are after all genocidal mass murder's!
String um up I say or shall we fry um ?
Right now the brain dead American public are like something out of -- - -
'The invasion of the body snatchers ' film
@58, JackRabitt, Smacking down China is a strategic priority for the Deep State.
the first time I got some type of glimpse of the average American Mind on China, as it
filtered down from "the deep state" to the more fearfully ill-informed quarters of society
no doubt, was in the post 9/11 universe. The person or persons pushing the meme, may have been a bit confused by all the
conspiracy theories about 9/11 unfolding at the time.
Anyway, Chinese troops he/she/they asserted readers were close to the Mexican border
approaching, advancing swiftly.
In hindsight, maybe accidentally, although I doubt, Trump combines the elements of that
narrative perfectly. And it is not my intention to argue right or wrong here. But
apparently down at the border there is this "invasion" on the other hand there's also the
Yellow Peril.
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , May 18, 2019 9:58:41 AM |
link
Well, the chinese system of power has always been the thoughest to understand for any
outsider. It has been this way, but in the last years it seems the so called age of
information has lead to erode the curtains of this complex mechanism. At least for those
who want to look behind those curtains, and not use them to project their propaganda.. ;)
And it is a good sign that while Xi tired to establish himself in such a unique position
of power like Mao, and openly tried to put himself into the historic succession of the old
emperors (like Mao did too), that the will of the people and party still tips the scale of
power.
It means the chinese confucian tradition and its consequences for a ruler even today still
matter. Even though they are anyway lost on someone who is not of Asian origin.
What to westerners look like a dictator, is of a different nature as one can even
imagine with western eyes. Every ruler has to strive for balance, for harmony, which in
turns makes hearing of the peoples popular will be a necessity.
Even though many Chinese say, they like any other people only strive for what they need
most ;) (like harmony and compromise). Though many also say, that the chinese will always
choose stability and security over freedom. And i guess that is what many from the western
world dont get about China, and also about the Putinists.
I say let them and every one else have their choice. Just like i say let the US do theirs,
and reap what they seeded.
For those able to read German check out the Books of Peter Scholl-Latour on China. The
most telling and authorative books from a journalist who has reported first had for over 60
years, and has always defended and honored his own perspective;
While the western so called reporters were trapt in their professional delusion of pro-NATO
propaganda, and while the SDS praised the culture revolution as a democratic means, when
whole china was terrorized and millions slaugtherd.
Hard to walk that middle ground, while being attacked from ideological drones from both
sides i guess..
Anyway, the neocons in the US believes it is now or never to defend the USA unique
position as world power. They believe, that if they don't fight now, they will have
lost.
I say, they already have.
Short of pulling a Hitler on China, meaning a total annihilation of the Chinese people,
there is nothing they can do. And even Bolton will have a hard time trying to push through
a clear cut genocide ;)
We will see China rise. Those who feared of this will see that china will not be half as
bad as thought, and those who gloirfy china and put them into a good (vs bad US) black-wide
scheme will learn of the faults of the Chinese power and its projection (Like its own
believe of supremacy, of racism (a reason why china in the cold war was pretty
unsuccessful in Africa, where most knew who deeply racist Chinese treated their fellows as
workers, guest students,..).
All in all, what we need is a true and functional global community of nations and
people, where goverments truely work together to balance out the stronger world powers. And
with the pressure of Chinas rise and its strugle with the US, we may finally have a better
chance for this to at least partially succed.
I hope.. ;) Or of course it nuclear winter time. We will see.
China now, Japan in the 1980s - it's "deja vu all over again!"
"AFTER ITS DEFEAT in World War II, Japan was content to take foreign inventions -- the
transistor, the laser, the videotape player -- and convert them into products that it could
market around the world. Japan acquired much of its base of Western technology, most of it
American, perfectly legally through licensing, careful study of scientific papers and
patents, and imitation. But when the U.S. wasn't willing to share, some Japanese companies
simply copied with little regard for patents and other intellectual property rights that
the courts have only recently begun to define in many areas of high technology.
The U.S.,
confident of its technical superiority, ''sold out to the Japanese,'' says G. Steven Burrill, head of the high-technology consulting group at Arthur Young, a Big Eight
accounting firm. ''We let them share our brain.''
Now, belatedly awake to the recognition
that Japan has been eating their breakfast, lunch, dinner, and bedtime snack, American
companies are stirring. IBM vs. Fujitsu over computer software, Honeywell vs. Minolta over
automatic focusing, Corning Glass vs. Sumitomo Electric over fiber optics -- these are only
the latest, best-publicized complaints that Japan has stolen American technology.
Even as
those legal battles are fought out, the copycat cliche is becoming obsolete. A series of
studies financed by the U.S. government since 1984 warn that Japan has caught up with the
U.S. or passed it in the development of integrated circuits, fiber optics, computer
hardware engineering, and advanced materials like polymers. It is pressing hard in some
areas of biotechnology, and lags primarily in computer software.
Already there are signs
that the Japanese, buoyed by their new prowess, have assumed the arrogance of the U.S.
along with its technology."
"A MEASURE of Japan's progress can be found in the number of patent filings in the U.S.,
Japan's most important export market. ..."
"THE FACT that Americans now worry about their access to Japanese technology is an
acknowledgment of Japan's new scientific competence. When the Japanese were known primarily
as copycats, the flow of technology was essentially in one direction. It was also cheap.
Aaron Gellman, president of a consulting firm, says that for years U.S. firms licensed
technology to the Japanese without asking for a grant-back, the right to use any
improvements they made. Says Gellman: ''This was very arrogant and implied that no one
could improve on our technology.''"
"U.S. scientists and companies have failed to take advantage of opportunities to tap
Japanese academic research. ''What's wrong here is pure laziness,'' says Martin Anderson,
an analyst with the MAC Group, a consulting firm in Cambridge, Massachusetts."
Trust the UnitedSnake to blame the Chinese for
reneging on an agreement ! Fact is, Trump's team Add in last minute conditions that are totally unacceptable to
China.
Chinese commentators are fuming at the audacity of
the demands.
'WTF, Do they think we'r their gawd damned 51st state ?'
Typical UnitedSnake's 'negotiation' tactics, designed to fail ! Thats how Clinton justity his bombing of ex Yugo,
by blaming Belgrade for the breakdown of negotiation ,to justify its 78 days of aerial
arsons against Yugo.
How the UnitedSnake destroyed Toshiba and took over its crown jewel chip tech,... Toshiba was severely punished for breaking fukus
sanction on USSR, by selling state of art milling
machine to the Soviets. the unitedsnake slapped a heavy fine, demanded
the resignation of Toshiba CEO, imposed a ten
years ban on Toshiba products, FORCED the Japs
to share their latest chip tech with Merikkans. Toshiba never recovered from that disaster.
An excellent summary of many aspects of a serious and deteriorating situation. In the end, China has a lot of brainpower to apply to situations like this.They are used to speaking and writing one of the world's most difficult languages. They are used to playing Go, one of the world's most difficult board games. And their national endowment of analytical skills immensely surpasses that of the United
States.
They are said to have eight times as many students in math and science and engineering
in their universities. Xi himself is very bright, having earned degrees in difficult subjects at demanding
universities, and he is calm and very forward-thinking. Just consider that magnificent
long-term Silk Road Project. When I think of Trump with his constant mock-heroic poses and foot-high signatures on
every silly memo and his gang of noisy, pompous thugs in top appointments, I can't help
thinking I know how this will turn out in the end.
China's
yuan slide risks trolling Trump It's good to remember that would not be the first time. After the first round of
tariffs, China devalued the Renminbi and it basically
wiped out the tariffs . In fact, it didn't even need to devalue that much: 1 Renminbi
is now US$ 0.14 -- just a little over the Government max upwards band of 1:7.
In 2013, the CEO of French hi tech co Alstom
was arrested by FBI, while changing flight at
New York.
His 'crime', breaking MERIKKAN anti corruption
law by bribing govn officials in INDONESIA ! Such is the LONG arm of merikkan extra territorial jurisdiction, rings a bell ...
Ms meng ?
Just like Toshiba, the French paid a very heavy price. The CEO went to jail, Allstom,
the crown
jewel of French industry, was FORCED to sell off its core business to its main rival, GE.
!
What did Ian Fleming's fundamental law of probability says....
ONCE IS HAPPENSTENCE, TWIC IS COINCIDENCE...
US MegaCos. outsourced and 'globalised' with the blessing, nay encouragement! of the Pol.
Class. Cheaper labor and lax environmental rules, in comparison with 'home' (US, W countries,
etc.) is a mantra. That is of course good enough, and one can track, say, sh*t-clothes
factories transiting from Bangladesh, to China, to Malaysia, to Mexico, etc.
Other motives, the first is lack of responsibility and involvement which allows
domineering and rapacious behavior. Foreign co. implant can just leave, relocate, if
whatever. A random /racist term/ exploited worker in the 3rd world is not voting in US
elections.
Deadly industrial pollution is outsourced, and energy use etc. at home while not
curtailed or significantly diminished is not as high as one might see under condition of
the industries returning home - a sort of 'greener' environment can be touted.
The PTB simply cannot grasp why some US citizens, who live high on the hog, house, 2
cars, 3 kids, endless dirt cheap consumer goods, etc. produced by 'slaves' abroad,
complain. If the 'stuff' was produced at home, it would cost much more, the pay would be
going to 'low-level' US labor -- in a more closed economic circuit there would be more
'equality' as things stand today in the US - *not* claiming it's a general rule.
Trump had some confused? thoughts about turning the present situation around, and
relocating industrial - some extractive - manufacturing - jobs back home, say 1960s, with
decent pay, to ppl who would then vote for him.
The stumbling block is that profits to shareholders, oligarchs, chief CEO's, asset
trippers, usurers, Mafia types, Banks and other Fin, and Politicians who in the US are
highly paid lackeys, etc. is set to diminish, as 'the pie' can no longer be grown much to
accomodate all these grifters. Due to energy constraints, disruption of climate change,
etc.
Brit and Dutch spooks now concur with Trump the charlatan's claim of Huawei security risk ! Trust the Brits to doublecross the Chinese, after they've been given the huawei source
codes to examine and declared it free of bugs. As for the Dutch , they seems to be the goto guys these days, whenever the 5liars need
some loyal poodles to corroborate their B.S., cue the M17 'investigation'.
So, what is the representative of Allmighty Nation doing un Russia? Why bothering to hint
on better relations? Noted in the press conference was the absence of Pompeo's moralizing,
limiting itself on US position on issues. What is the point in this flying back and
forth?
Yes, Iran -- and arms control. Venezuela -- and arms control. North Korea -- and arms
control. I think they are paranoid about Russian weapons. And if Iranians by any chance have
some of the new weaponry, providing perfect testing ground, would Russia own to that? What
was obvious, no concessions on any issue from Moscow. Not even softened language.
This time,
it is different. The economic and military power has shifted east, Europeans forever without
a spine this time are spineless in all directions, and it will come as a shock to the
establishment that the presumed animosity towards Iran in Gulf, will nowhere to be found. Wil
Saudis host US troops against Iran, Doubt that deeply.
"... "Zainab Ahmad has concluded her detail with the Special Counsel's Office but will continue to represent the office on specific pending matters that were assigned to her during her detail," special counsel spokesperson Peter Carr said in a statement. Yahoo News reports ..."
"... Ahmad has had a role in the Russia investigation from almost the very beginning, well before Robert Mueller's appointment. ..."
"... Ahmad and Brandon Van Grack together signed Flynn's guilty plea agreement in November 2017. They secured an admission from Flynn, the president's first national security adviser, that he had committed a felony during the Trump administration's early days in the White House, concealing from FBI agents back-channel talks he had with the Russian ambassador during the transition. ..."
"... Prior to joining the probe, Ahmad was a terrorism prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn. ..."
"... Her departure comes after another high-profile prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, is set to leave the probe. Weissmann, often referred to as Mueller's "legal pit bull," headed up the special counsel's case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who faces seven and one-half years in prison after judges in Virginia and Washington, D.C. handed down sentences of 47 months and 43 months in jail, respectively. ..."
The prosecutor who oversaw retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn's case is leaving special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe in the
latest sign that the investigation into collusion between the 2016 Trump campaign and the Kremlin is drawing to a close.
"Zainab Ahmad has concluded her detail with the Special Counsel's Office but will continue to represent the office on specific
pending matters that were assigned to her during her detail," special counsel spokesperson Peter Carr said in a statement. Yahoo
News
reports
:
Ahmad has had a role in the Russia investigation from almost the very beginning, well before Robert Mueller's appointment.
[ ]
Ahmad and Brandon Van Grack together signed Flynn's
guilty plea agreement in November 2017. They secured an admission from Flynn, the president's first national security adviser,
that he had committed a felony during the Trump administration's early days in the White House, concealing from FBI agents back-channel
talks he had with the Russian ambassador during the transition.
As part of his guilty plea, Flynn also admitted to failing to
register his work as a lobbyist for Turkey's interests at the same time he was serving on the Trump campaign and lying to the
Department of Justice in an after-the-fact registration.
Ahmad will take an unspecified role at the Justice Department, but will still have oversight of Flynn's case and other duties
that were assigned to her while a special counsel investigator, said Carr. Prior to joining the probe, Ahmad was a terrorism prosecutor
in the U.S. Attorney's Office in Brooklyn.
Her departure comes after another high-profile prosecutor, Andrew Weissmann, is set to leave the probe. Weissmann, often referred
to as Mueller's "legal pit bull," headed up the special counsel's case against former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who
faces seven and one-half years in prison after judges in Virginia and Washington, D.C. handed down
sentences of 47 months
and 43 months in jail, respectively.
Weissmann will both teach and study at New York University and undertake several public service projects, which include preventing
wrongful convictions by boosting the court system's forensic science standards, two unnamed sources
told NPR.
News of Ahmad's exit also comes as Washington is abuzz with speculation about when Mueller's long-awaited report will finally
be released. Ty Cobb, one of Trump's former personal attorneys in the Russia investigation, recently
told ABC News that he would suspect the report's release would occur "no later than mid-March."
However, some lawmakers are concerned Mueller and Co. may decide on withholding key details of the report, which could prompt
high-profile Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee chair Adam Schiff (D-CA), to take matters into their own hands.
"We will obviously subpoena the report. We will bring Bob Mueller in to testify before Congress; we will take it to court if necessary.
And in the end, I think the [Justice] Department understands they're going to have to make this public," Schiff
said during a February appearance on ABC's This Week .
The special counsel's office has yet to comment on the report's release date.
US foreign policy under President Trump is remarkably similar to what it would have been
under Hillary...
except even she wouldnt have put a Chabad Orthodox *** in charge of a mideast 'peace'
plan, let alone a 'solution' for the illegal immigration crisis which Trump did nothing about
when the GOP controlled both House and Senate
I do not think Putin is an idiot...he has consistently made good decisions and judgements
and outsmarted both Obama and Trump on every occasion. For some reason I am worried that he
is palling up to the wrong guy. Trump and the US cannot be trusted to observe any agreement
or treaty and have displayed this over and over again.
Putin should be aligning with China who can be trusted to honour deals made. A military
alliance between Russia and China with mutual aid of attacked by a third party would make the
best strategic sense. If Putin doesn't;t do this he will get weakened economically and then
when he is weak, the US will invade.
As quoted by the Moon Of Alabama Lavrov claimed there were back channels between the US
and Russia from 2013 to Trumps taking office. Lavov claims these communications would shed
lots of light on the Russians not interfering in the election and other stuff the Russians
have been falsely accused of. Russia wants to release these communications and will only do
so if the US agrees which they have not. Pompeo was silent.
Following talks with Pompeo, Lavrov called for dispelling "suspicions and prejudices" as a
way to "start building a new constructive relationship," adding:
"Russia is interested in normalizing our dialogue. We are convinced that it is possible
and realistic if the dialogue is based on mutual respect and consideration for
interests."
"I hope that today we will be able to try to work out concrete proposals aimed at pulling
Russia-US relations out of their current sad state in which they find themselves due to a
variety of objective and subjective reasons."
"The fact that we are meeting for the second time in the past two weeks inspires certain
optimism. Let's give it a try and see what happens."
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called talks "very" constructive,
claiming they showed mutual interest in restoring normal bilateral relations.
Following his meeting with Pompeo, Putin said the following:
"(W)e have said many times that we would like to restore (normal) relations I hope that the
necessary conditions for this are being created now since" the Mueller report found no evidence
Trump/Russia collusion which we described as sheer nonsense from the very start."
"There was no, nor could there be any interference on our part in the US election at the
government level. Nevertheless, regrettably, these allegations have served as a reason for the
deterioration of our interstate ties."
On this issue, Lavrov said "(i)t's clear that such insinuations are absolute fiction."
Nothing suggests that the US position on this and other major bilateral differences will
change.
Putin failed to explain that the Mueller report falsely accused Russia of US election
meddling -- based on the fabricated US intelligence community assessment, echoed endlessly by
Western establishment media, undemocratic Dems, and most others in Washington.
Nor did he stress that US hostility toward Russia is longstanding, going way beyond false
accusations of election meddling.
Washington and its Western partners falsely accused the Kremlin of an array of offenses it
had nothing to do with -- including nonexistent aggression in Ukraine, MH 17's downing, the
Skripal incident, and much more.
All of the above plus Russia's intervention in Syria to combat US-backed terrorists, its
support for Iranian and Venezuelan sovereignty, its opposition to Washington's imperial agenda,
and promotion of multi-world polarity are why irreconcilable differences separate both
countries on these and other major world issues.
The US considers Russia an existential threat to its longstanding aim for unchallenged
global dominance. Bilateral relations are more dismal than any time in modern memory.
Nothing in prospect suggests improvement. Talks on Tuesday with hardline extremist Pompeo by
Putin and Lavrov accomplished nothing to improve things, just the illusion of possible change
for the better.
Russia seeks world peace and stability. The US wages endless wars of aggression and other
hostile actions against nations it wants transformed into client states.
The Kremlin seeks mutual cooperation with other nations and multi-world polarity. The US
aims for dominion over planet earth, its resources and populations -- by brute force if
pressure, bullying, intimidation, and/or bribes don't work.
Moscow opposes US wars of aggression, the imperial scourge cutting to the heart of its
geopolitical agenda, what it has no intention of changing -- the Russian Federation, China,
Iran, and Venezuela prime targets for regime change.
Pompeo warned against Russian interference in the US 2020 elections -- knowing claims about
2016 election meddling were and remain bald-faced Big Lies.
Since first made by the US intelligence community in 2016, not a shred of evidence supports
the accusation because there is none. Claims without credible hard facts backing them are
baseless.
Election meddling is a US specialty, not how the Russian Federation operates. What Pompeo
knows well he didn't explain -- instead saying Russian interference in the US 2020 elections
"would put our relationship in an even worse place than it has been."
It can't get much worse than already -- unless US forces attack Russia. What's unthinkable
is possible, maybe inevitable. The same thing goes for China.
The risk of war between the world's dominant nuclear powers is reason enough for their
authorities to step back from the brink.
Neither Russia or China wants war with the US or any other nations. If aggressively
attacked, they're prepared to defend themselves with overwhelming force.
Russian super-weapons exceed the Pentagon's best, developed at a small fraction of the cost.
The US notoriously pours countless trillions of dollars down a black hole of waste, fraud and
abuse, feeding its military, industrial, security complex at the expense of vital homeland
needs gone begging and world peace.
Pompeo and Bolton are militantly hostile toward Russia, accusing the Kremlin of "malign
ends," Pompeo earlier saying Moscow doesn't "have the values of freedom and liberty, of the
rule of law that we do, and they're using their energy to destroy ours."
He lied claiming Russia's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project aims to exert "leverage over
Europe."
He threatened to cut off Britain's access to US intelligence if it grants Chinese tech giant
Huawei access to its 5G network, falsely claiming it'll help Beijing spy on nations doing
business with the firm.
He said "Donald Trump had been sent by God to save Israel from Tehran's mullahs."
Bolton earlier called Vladimir Putin a liar, saying "Trump got to experience Putin looking
him in the eyes and lying to him, denying Russian interference in the (2016) election,"
adding:
Russia "attempt(s) to undermine America's Constitution a casus belli, a true act of war (I)t
should be a fire-bell-in-the-night warning about the value Moscow places on honesty, whether
regarding election interference, nuclear proliferation, arms control or the Middle East:
negotiate with today's Russia at your peril."
The above remarks and many similar ones show the Trump regime and Russia remain world's
apart on major geopolitical issues -- notably on Syria, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, and
Ukraine, Pompeo saying in Sochi:
"We're looking for Iran to behave like a normal country," falsely accusing the country of
state terrorism, assassinations, and developing offensive weapons for war, adding:
The Trump regime doesn't "seek war with Iran," but will respond "appropriately" to any
Iranian actions that interfere with US regional interests.
All of the above are how the US operates, not the Islamic Republic, promoting regional peace
and stability, seeking normalized relations with other countries.
On Venezuela, Pompeo demanded that Russia not interfere in the nation's political situation,
adding:
"The time has come for Nicolas Maduro to go (sic). He has brought nothing but misery to the
Venezuelan people (sic), and we hope that Russian support for Maduro will end (sic)."
As he said many times before, Lavrov stressed that Venezuelans (and people of all nations)
alone should decide who'll lead them -- free from foreign interference, adding:
"The threats that we hear against the Maduro government, threats that come from the mouths
of US officials this has nothing in common with democracy."
On Ukraine, Pompeo said the Trump regime won't recognize Crimea as Russian territory -- even
though its people voted overwhelmingly by national referendum to join the Russian Federation,
wanting a historic mistake corrected, Putin accommodating their wishes legally.
Pompeo stressed that US sanctions on Russia won't be eased -- over numerous irreconcilable
differences between both countries.
He was less than candid, saying the Trump regime "stands ready to find common ground" with
Russia.
Actions by him, John Bolton, the vast majority of congressional members, and supportive
media have been polar opposite -- no evidence showing the US wishes to turn a page for improved
bilateral relations.
Geopolitical differences between both countries are too divergent to reconcile on most
issues. Putin and Lavrov believing otherwise is unrealstic wishful thinking.
"... Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with Peters - and Tucker takes him on ..."
"... Max Boot is an example of someone who takes himself so seriously that they become a joke. ..."
"... Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist! Dangerous! ..."
Fox News contributor Ralph Peters suggested Tucker was like a Nazi sympathizer for wondering
whether Russia and the US should work together against ISIS. Another critic mostly agrees with
Peters - and Tucker takes him on
Max Boot is never right! He had so many idiotic opinions! A man who wants to intervene in
every part of the world and sod the consequences! He's a real neo con extremist!
Dangerous!
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a low level female warmonger (similar to Kogan and Max Boot ) from the Center for a New American
Security (CNAS). She wrote more junk then Shulman in this magazine and mostly about Russia. DAVID
SHULLMAN is another neocon chickenhawks. He holds the positions of the Senior Adviser at the
International Republican Institute and an Adjunct Senior Fellow in the Transatlantic Security
Program at the Center for a New American Security. Those two also wrote
How Russia and China Undermine Democracy so it is clear who they are and their level of
competence. While their views are probably to the right of the US political spectrum but
unfortunately they do represent dominant for the State Department line of thinking about Russia
and China.
Of course the USA has a God given right to dominate the world (American exceptionalism).
Silly article. Neoliberalism undermined the USA and it might even lead to it eventual social
unrest with high oil prices the USA economy can't leave the state of "secular stagnation" and
lower standard of living fuels nationalism.
In a way RussiaGate was dirty and failed attempt to patch crashes in the USA neoliberal
facade by using uniting the nation against external scapegoat.
Also the dominance of neocon in the USA foreign policy is a disaster for the USA and that
country will pay dearly for their policies sooner or later. Already they have Iraq under their
belt with by some estimates two trillion dollar tag. Add to this Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and
that total will be probably be cose to six trillion.
Notable quotes:
"... Still, Washington should seek to stoke tensions between the two and strain the seams in their relationship. ..."
"... U.S. policymakers will also have to take care not to drive Russia and China together and consider how policies designed to confront one country could inadvertently hinder efforts to confront the other. The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, for example, was designed to deter Russian aggression by limiting the Kremlin's revenue from arms exports. Yet these sanctions have prevented some countries, including India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, from purchasing the Russian arms they need to deter China. ..."
"... Even if analysts can't agree on the likelihood of a Russian-Chinese entente, the impact that such a scenario would have on U.S. interests means that policymakers cannot afford to write off the possibility. ..."
Washington needs to prepare for the possibility that Russia and China's
partnership will only get stronger. There are no easy fixes to this situation. Efforts to split
Moscow and Beijing are unlikely to be effective. From the Kremlin's perspective, the United
States is a far less predictable partner than China, and Putin's anti-Western views run deep.
Xi, for his part, views Russia as useful in undermining U.S. global dominance and countering
U.S. efforts to limit Chinese leverage in multilateral institutions. Still, Washington
should seek to stoke tensions between the two and strain the seams in their relationship.
In communicating with Beijing, Washington should underscore Russia's proclivity for wreaking
havoc in democracies that oppose its interests. These interference campaigns will increasingly
conflict with China's preference for stability in the many countries where it is engaged
economically. Identifying and exploiting potential points of friction will require U.S.
intelligence, policy, and military minds to consider Russia and China both together and as
separate entities. Until now, the United States has cultivated expertise on Russia and
expertise on China but has made limited efforts to study the nexus of their capacities and
interests or generate strategies to counter them.
U.S. policymakers will also have to take care not to drive Russia and China together and
consider how policies designed to confront one country could inadvertently hinder efforts to
confront the other. The Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, for example,
was designed to deter Russian aggression by limiting the Kremlin's revenue from arms exports.
Yet these sanctions have prevented some countries, including India, Indonesia, and Vietnam,
from purchasing the Russian arms they need to deter China.
The United States must not find itself alone in a world where Russia and China collaborate
to achieve common ends and undermine U.S. interests. In this era of great-power competition,
the United States must strengthen its own partnerships -- those with allies who share American
concerns about an international order reshaped by authoritarians. U.S. allies in Europe,
including Germany and France, have grown more sober in their assessment about the threat that
China poses and share the U.S. imperative to compete with Russia and China and curtail the
reach of their partnership.
Even if analysts can't agree on the likelihood of a Russian-Chinese entente, the impact
that such a scenario would have on U.S. interests means that policymakers cannot afford to
write off the possibility. The United States should work now to both prevent and prepare
for growing synergy and coordination between Russia and China.
Andrea Kendall-Taylor is a Senior Fellow and Director of the Transatlantic Security Program
at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). She works on national security challenges
facing the United States and Europe, focusing on Russia, populism and threats to democracy, and
the state of the Transatlantic alliance.
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to
have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe."
[80] Ibid .,
229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014),
250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name)
and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network
consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism."
[81] Ibid .,
230. Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist
purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant
reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small
minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism.
[82] Ibid .
The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public
were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning
about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism
since World War Two."
[83] Ibid .,
257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American
(and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish
overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during
the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation
in leftist politics with particular concern.
Neoconservatism
Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s
would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of
Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish
leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community.
[84] Ibid .,
22.
Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between
modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed
Jewish dependence from international to national forces."
[85] Ibid .,
viii. With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas
of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left
as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions."
[86] Ibid .,
235.
The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over
the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies
(i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been
anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish
leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:
There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and
misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly
arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their
head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth.
[87] Ibid
., 236-37
The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist,
rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of
"another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout
the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million
dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish
population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally.
750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,
there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption
took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion
of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause.
[88] Ibid
., 238.
The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic
Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish
relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations
like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to
advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future.
[89] Ibid .,
243.
This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans
and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated
factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than
from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as
abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are
anathema to many Jews."
[90] Ibid .,
287.
Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of
their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds
with the more liberal opinions of most Jews."
[91] Ibid .,
239.
Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their
ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their
personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic
status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which
historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This
"middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing
beliefs no longer exists."
[92] Ibid .,
239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended."
[93] Ibid .,
241.
Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left
Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain
a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their
impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid.,
287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s
were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the
founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of
the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,”
no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid.,
286.
The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly
for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political
spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:
With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews
seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage,
the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led
Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This
fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American
Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish
teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman
(2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust
into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous
rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid.,
288-89.
This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical.
While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews
have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the
great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations
of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within
their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising
Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.
The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are
reflected in comments by
Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could
turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in
Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political
engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American
Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.”
Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If
Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”
Jewish writer David Cole recently
questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism.
He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:
For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with
Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S.
That’ll
save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white
supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.
Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against
each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad.
… But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy
to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …
And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the
Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and
a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind
every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…
In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally
get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy,
but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad
strategy.
In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism
is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish
activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.
Conclusion
While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue
of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same
apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity
and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous
actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of
Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish
apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback
position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern
Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants,
Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth
century.
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an
unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as
chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as
far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles
class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama --
Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April
2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit
pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget
was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent
of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.
According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn
to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and
Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents
for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe
drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through
diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty
alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.
Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's
website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is
propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:
"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for
national security and urgent military needs".
He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the
government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense
– go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the
next fiscal year".
"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"
He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is
antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and
inaccessible to those who need it most.
The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more
spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US
economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far
exceeding the tax revenues.
In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK
stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$
45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO
member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to
4 percent in five years.
According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases
China retains twelve military bases;
France runs nine military bases including in Germany, Lebanon and UAE;
Germany has two military bases in France and United States;
India has seven bases including in Tajikistan and Maldives;
Israel possesses one military base in Syria's Golan Heights;
Pakistan has a military center with 1,180 personnel in Saudi Arabia;
Russia runs eight military facilities including in Armenia, Georgia, Syria and some
Central Asian countries;
UK controls ten military bases including in Bahrain, Canada, Germany, Singapore and
Qatar;
t he US is leading nearly 800 military bases across the world that run in full swing with
the highest budget.
In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The
Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a
military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this
planet.
The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and
running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases
abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to
address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.
In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi
Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan
and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.
In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to
taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces,
US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.
But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in
Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for
American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US
troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the
US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.
In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9
trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and
nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.
The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include
Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the
Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to
US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010
with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards
trend in the later years.
Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently
decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish
expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.
According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$
126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for
security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly
budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have
pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders
is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.
With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is
ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or
unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict
causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy
remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of
population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.
The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one
takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be
immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made
government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt
country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of
that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan
officials.
Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than
it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US
invasion.
Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000
representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million
(equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only
symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under
poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
lists. Crosspost on your blog site, internet forums. etc.
Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to
Global Research.
"... While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena. ..."
"... Jewish writer David Cole recently questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism. He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters ..."
"... In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations. ..."
Despite the Jewish domination of the American Left in the post-War period, Mendes notes that "most Americans do not appear to
have adhered to the same anti-Semitic assumptions about Jewish links with communism that dominated public opinion in parts of Europe."
[80] Ibid .,
229.
(Philip Mendes, Jews and the Left: The Rise and Fall of a Political Alliance (Melbourne, Victoria; Palgrave MacMillian, 2014),
250.) As evidence of this, Mendes cites the decidedly muted public response to the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg for selling atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. Despite the recognizably Jewish identity of the couple (given their name)
and of all of their co-conspirators (David Greenglass, Ruth Greenglass, and Morton Sobell), and the fact the Rosenberg spy network
consisted almost exclusively of Jews from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, the case "provoked remarkably little overt anti-Semitism."
[81] Ibid .,
230. Nor, he observes, did the "significant number of Jews -- including teachers and Hollywood actors -- who were victims of anti-communist
purges" and the prominence of Jews amongst those subpoenaed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, lead to a significant
reaction. All public opinion polls conducted during this period showed a consistent decline in "anti-Semitism," and only a small
minority of those surveyed (about 5 percent) identified Jews with communism.
[82] Ibid .
The lack of any real backlash to Jewish prominence in the New Left is ascribed to various factors: that many members of the public
were not aware of the Jewish background of many of the radical leaders; that these Jewish radicals were ostensibly "not campaigning
about any specifically Jewish issues that would have focused attention on Jews per se;" and to the "general decline in anti-Semitism
since World War Two."
[83] Ibid .,
257. This latter shift in public opinion (unsurprisingly) coincided with the Jewish seizure of the commanding heights of American
(and Western) culture in the 1960s, and the growing emergence of the culture of "the Holocaust." The combined effect was to banish
overt critical discussion of Jewish power to the margins of public discourse. While Americans rejected communist activities during
the Cold War, unlike in Europe, they did not widely equate communism with Jews (at least publicly), or view Jewish participation
in leftist politics with particular concern.
Neoconservatism
Neoconservative leaders were among those who feared that the Jewish prominence in the New Left of the late 1960s and early 1970s
would fuel a conservative backlash against Jewish radicalism. For example, Norman Podhoretz, the editor of
Commentary magazine, attacked leading Jewish
leftists as alleged self-hating Jews and completely unrepresentative of the Jewish community.
[84] Ibid .,
22.
Mendes ascribes the defection of many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism in the 1970s to a growing misalignment between
modern Leftist politics and Jewish ethnic interests: the key factor being "the creation of the State of Israel which transformed
Jewish dependence from international to national forces."
[85] Ibid .,
viii. With the advent of the state of Israel, Jewish interests were no longer exclusively represented by the universalistic agendas
of the Left. According to Mendes: "Most Jews have lost their faith in universalistic causes because they do not perceive the Left
as supportive of Jewish interests, and have turned instead to nationalist solutions."
[86] Ibid .,
235.
The creation of a Jewish national entity featuring (thanks to US taxpayers) a strong and powerful army meant that Jews all over
the world could look to the Zionist state to safeguard their interests, rather than depending on internationalist movements and ideologies
(i.e. communism and the Soviet Union) which had often proven to be unreliable allies. Even many left-wing Jews, who might have been
anti-Zionist prior to World War Two, shifted their position after the birth of Israel. For example, the long-time Austrian Jewish
leftist Jean Amery commented in 1976:
There is a very deep tie and existential bond between every Jew and the State of Israel Jews feel bound to the fortunes and
misfortunes of Israel, whether they are religious Jews or not, whether they adhere to Zionism or reject it, whether they are newly
arrived in their host countries or deeply rooted there The Jewish State has taught all the Jews of the world to walk with their
head high once more Israel is the virtual shelter for all of the insulted and injured Jews of the earth.
[87] Ibid
., 236-37
The perceived anti-Zionism of the New Left from the 1967 onwards served to alienate many Jews and confirm their commitment to nationalist,
rather than internationalist solutions. An additional factor was the 1967 Six Day War in the Middle East, which provoked fears of
"another Holocaust," and galvanized even non-Zionist Jews in support of Israel. There were rallies in support of Israel throughout
the Western world accompanied by large donations. American Jews held massive fundraising campaigns and reportedly raised 180 million
dollars. Numerous volunteers travelled to Israel to support the Jewish State. In Australia, more than 20 per cent of a total Jewish
population of 34,000 in Melbourne -- attended a public rally to express their support for Israel, and 2500 attended a youth rally.
750 young Jews volunteered to go to Israel. According to Taft,
there was a widespread, almost universal, absorption in the Middle East Crisis of June among the Jews of Melbourne. This absorption
took the form of extreme concern about the safety of Israel, emotional upsets, obsessive seeking of news, constant discussion
of events and taking spontaneous actions to support Israel's cause.
[88] Ibid
., 238.
The rise of left-wing anti-Zionism after the Six Day War furthered alienated sections of Western Jewry from the social democratic
Left. Another factor that pushed American Jews in a neoconservative direction, identified by Mendes, was the decline in Black–Jewish
relations. The emergence of the Black Power movement in the mid-1960s led to the removal of Jews from the leadership of organizations
like the NAACP. Black hostility was viewed by some Jews as evidence of the failure of the strategy of courting non-White groups to
advance Jewish interests. This ostensible failure prompted many Jews to concentrate on a narrower ethnic self-interest in the future.
[89] Ibid .,
243.
This, in turn, contributed to the creation of "pragmatic alliances" with conservative political parties such as the Republicans
and evangelical groups such as Christians United for Israel which "have been consistent supporters of Israel in the USA." An associated
factor was that pro-Israel perspectives within Western countries increasingly emanated from mainstream conservatives, rather than
from the moderate or radical Left. This occurred despite "many in these groups hold socially conservative views on issues such as
abortion, homosexuality, the environment, multiculturalism, state support for the poor and disadvantaged, and refugees, which are
anathema to many Jews."
[90] Ibid .,
287.
Mendes makes the point that "These alliances were based solely on the latter's position of support for Israel, irrespective of
their conservative views on social issues such as abortion, homosexuality and the welfare state, which were often sharply at odds
with the more liberal opinions of most Jews."
[91] Ibid .,
239.
Despite the defection on many Jews from the radical left to neoconservatism, the great majority of American Jews still see their
ethnic interests as basically aligning with the Democratic Party. Their willingness to prioritize their ethnic interests over their
personal economic interests is reflected in the fact that "high numbers of affluent Jews compared to others of the same socioeconomic
status still vote for moderate left parties that do not seem to favor their economic interests." Today, the structural factors which
historically drew many Jews to the Left no longer exist. Most Jews sit comfortably in middle- or even higher-income categories. This
"middle-classing" of Jews throughout the West has meant that the "Jewish proletariat that motivated Jewish identification with left-wing
beliefs no longer exists."
[92] Ibid .,
239. Consequently, "the specific link between Jewish experience of class oppression and adherence to left-wing ideology has ended."
[93] Ibid .,
241.
Most Western Jews still support parties on the Left
Despite the widespread break with the radical Left over support for Israel, Jews nevertheless remain
a “massively significant presence” in the Left in terms of their numbers and fundraising, their organizational capacity, and their
impact on popular culture.[94]Ibid.,
287. It was estimated that about a quarter of the world’s leading Marxist and radical intellectuals in the 1980s
were still Jews, including Ernest Mandel, Nathan Weinstock, Maxime Rodinson, Noam Chomsky, Marcel Liebman, Ralph Miliband, and the
founder of deconstructionism, Jacques Derrida. Despite continuing to comprise much of the intellectual and financial backbone of
the Left, today’s Jews, “an influential and sometimes powerful group, with substantial access to politics, academia and the media,”
no longer must “rely on the Left to defend their interests and wellbeing.”[95]Ibid.,
286.
The primary reason most Western Jews still vote overwhelmingly
for parties on the left is the perceived threat posed by the “social conservatism” of parties further to the right of the political
spectrum in nations whose majorities are European-derived and nominally at least Christian:
With the possible exception of ultra-orthodox groups, Jews
seem to prefer social liberal positions on issues such as religious pluralism, abortion, feminism, illicit drugs, same-sex marriage,
the science of climate change and euthanasia. Another significant factor is the long history of Christian anti-Semitism has led
Jews to remain suspicious of any attempts by Christian religious groups to undermine the separation of church and state. This
fear of organized religion [and of the White people who practice it] seems to explain the continued strong support of American
Jews for the Democratic Party in presidential elections. A further complicating factor is the growing universalization of Jewish
teachings and values, including the lessons of the Holocaust, in support of social liberal perspectives. … For example, Berman
(2006) presents evidence that the younger Jewish generation in Australia have been influenced by the experience of the Holocaust
into taking a strong stand against any forms of racial or religious discrimination. Many are active in campaigns for indigenous
rights, and to support refugees from Afghanistan, Sudan, and Middle Eastern countries seeking asylum in Australia.[96]Ibid.,
288-89.
This advocacy is, of course, entirely hypocritical and cynical.
While promoting pluralism and diversity and encouraging the dissolution of the racial and ethnic identification of Europeans, Jews
have simultaneously endeavored to maintain precisely the kind of intense group solidarity they decry as immoral in others and the
great majority support an ethno-nationalist Israel. They have initiated and led movements that have discredited the traditional foundations
of Western society: patriotism, the Christian basis for morality, social homogeneity, and sexual restraint. At the same time, within
their own communities, they have supported the very institutions they have attacked in Western societies. This is ruthless, uncompromising
Darwinian group competition played out in the human cultural arena.
The ideological preoccupations of organized Jewry today are
reflected in comments by
Boston Globe writer, S.I. Rosenbaum, who insisted the main lesson of “the Holocaust” is “that white supremacy could
turn on us at any moment,” and the strategy of appealing to the White majority “has never worked for us. It didn’t protect us in
Spain, or England, or France, or Germany. There’s no reason to think it will work now.” The central question of Jewish political
engagement in Western societies, she insists, is “how we survive as a minority population,” where the one great advantage American
Jewry enjoys is that “unlike other places where ethno-nationalism has flourished, the U.S. is fast approaching a plurality of minorities.”
Presiding over a coalition of non-Whites groups to actively oppose White interests is the Jewish ethno-political imperative: “If
Jews are going to survive in the future, we will have to stand with people of color for our mutual benefit.”
Jewish writer David Cole recently
questioned the wisdom of this strategy of using non-Whites as “golem” to protect the Jews from a recrudescence of National Socialism.
He notes that many of the Jews’ non-White pets (like Ilhan Omar) have a disconcerting tendency to turn on their Jewish masters:
For decades, leftist Jews have been flooding the West with
Third World immigrants, “Hey here’s a plan—lets dump a hundred thousand Somalis in the whitest parts of the U.S.
That’ll
save us from Fargo Hitler!” Inundating the West with non-White immigrants is seen by Jews as an insurance policy against “white
supremacy.” The idea is that these immigrants will act as a wedge, diluting “white power” while remaining small enough to be manageable.
Jews have done this everywhere—playing two groups against
each other as a way of assuring Jewish security. Let’s play Hamas against the Palestinian authority. Let’s play ISIS against Assad.
… But today we live in a world in which even the lowliest bark-eater in the Kalahari can have internet access. It’s not as easy
to fool entire groups anymore (individuals, sure, but not an entire race, ethnicity or faction). …
And now we Jews, so worried that Minnesota might become the
Frozen Fourth Reich if left in the hands of evil whites, have created for ourselves a good old-fashioned golem in Ilhan Omar (and
a bunch of the other Third World freshman congressthingies). Yeah, Omar hates whites. Yeah, she thinks white supremacy lurks behind
every glass of milk and “OK” finger sign. But she hates Jews a hell of a lot more…
In a perfect world, the Rabbinical Rain Men would finally
get the fuck over the Holocaust and end their war of hostility against the West. They’d see that whites are no longer the enemy,
but indeed the opposite. They’d see that importing foreign mud to mold golem in traditionally white regions of the U.S is bad
strategy.
In the minds of Jewish leaders and activists nurtured since birth on the cult of “the Holocaust,” White nationalism
is still the most ominous threat to Jewish survival. This is reflected in the unquestioning commitment of the vast majority of Jewish
activists and intellectuals (Cole excepted) to mass non-White immigration and multiculturalism in all historically White nations.
Conclusion
While Jews and the Left offers a useful catalogue
of Jewish involvement in radical political movements throughout the world over the last two centuries, it recycles many of the same
apologetic tropes that permeate the work of other Jewish historians and intellectuals. Mendes mischaracterizes the Jewish identity
and affiliations of important Jewish communist leaders (like Lazar Kaganovich), and offers no examination of their often-murderous
actions. He provides feeble apologies for the Jewish practices that engendered hostility among the native peasantry in the Pale of
Settlement. The inherent weakness of his position necessitates specious argumentation and desperate resort to that evergreen of Jewish
apologetic historiography: the innate irrationality and malevolence of the European mind and character. This is the invariable fallback
position in any quest to exculpate Jews from responsibility for the crimes of communism in the Soviet Union and throughout Eastern
Europe. Though less inclined than Brossat and Klingberg in Revolutionary Yiddishland to glorify Jewish communist militants,
Mendes is equally keen to evade, whitewash and excuse disproportionate Jewish involvement in some of the worst crimes of the twentieth
century.
Trump provided to be another Obama -- master of "bait and switch". His promise to disengage from foreign wars remains an
unfulfilled promise. Due to thefact that he is owned by pro-Israel lobby he broung into his administrations such rabid neocons as
chickenhawk Bolton and smug ruthless careerist masquerading as
far-right zealot as Pompeo (and before them Haley). His promises to raise the standard of living of middles
class (which is impossible without cutting the military budget) remains fake. He is a fake. The second fake after obama --
Republican Obama.
Notable quotes:
"... While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April 2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come. ..."
"... According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through diplomacy and humanitarian aid. ..."
"... In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$ 45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to 4 percent in five years. ..."
While the national debt of the United States was recorded at 22.03 trillion as of April
2019, Washington's going ahead with its hawkish policies worldwide with recent NATO summit
pushing for further unity against China, Russia and Iran. NATO's annual overall military budget
was US$ 957 billion in 2017 where the US's share was US$ 686 billion, accounting for 72 percent
of the total. This number is pressed by the US to rise in the years to come.
According to The Guardian, Trump takes more than $1tn in taxpayer money and allocates $750bn
to the military. In other words, out of every taxpayer dollar, 62 cents go to the military and
Department of Homeland Security and seven cents to Veterans affairs. It leaves just 31 cents
for all the rest: education, job training, community economic development, housing, safe
drinking water and clear air, health and science research and the prevention of war through
diplomacy and humanitarian aid.
The Trump budget finds vast billions for militarization, while it cuts "smaller" poverty
alleviation projects and other programs, claiming the goal is to save money.
Rutherford Institute's founder and director John W. WhiteHead writes in his institute's
website that the American nation is being preyed upon by a military industrial complex that is
propped up by war profiteers, corrupt politicians and foreign governments. He remarks:
"Don't be fooled into thinking that your hard-earned tax dollars are being used for
national security and urgent military needs".
He writes "you know what happens to tax dollars that are left over at the end of the
government's fiscal year? Government agencies – including the Department of Defense
– go on a 'use it or lose it' spending spree so they can justify asking for money in the
next fiscal year".
"We are talking about $97 billion worth of wasteful spending"
He maintains that the nation's educational system is pathetic, the infrastructure is
antiquated and growing more outdated by the day and the health system is overpriced and
inaccessible to those who need it most.
The tax cuts on super-rich, outflow of huge sums in interest payment for debt and more
spending are plunging the US economy into a new crisis, according to many authors. The US
economy faces a deficit which means the spending especially on military and defence is far
exceeding the tax revenues.
In 2017, US spent US$ 685,957 billion with 3.6 of its GDP on military spending while the UK
stood second at US$ 55,237 billion with 2.1 per cent of GDP. France and Germany allocated US$
45,927 billion and 45,472 billion respectively with 1.8 and 1.2 percent of their GDPs. The NATO
member states are pressured for raising their defense spending to 2 percent and gradually up to
4 percent in five years.
According to a study regarding world powers' overseas military bases
China retains twelve military bases;
France runs nine military bases including in Germany, Lebanon and UAE;
Germany has two military bases in France and United States;
India has seven bases including in Tajikistan and Maldives;
Israel possesses one military base in Syria's Golan Heights;
Pakistan has a military center with 1,180 personnel in Saudi Arabia;
Russia runs eight military facilities including in Armenia, Georgia, Syria and some
Central Asian countries;
UK controls ten military bases including in Bahrain, Canada, Germany, Singapore and
Qatar;
t he US is leading nearly 800 military bases across the world that run in full swing with
the highest budget.
In other words, the US possesses up to 95 per cent of the world's military bases . The
Department of Defense says that its locations include 164 countries. Put another way, it has a
military presence of some sort in approximately 84 percent of the nations on this
planet.
The annual cost of deploying US military personnel overseas, as well as maintaining and
running those foreign bases, tops out at an estimated US$ 150 billion annually. The US bases
abroad cost upwards of US$ 50 billion only for building and maintenance, which is enough to
address pressing needs at home in education, health care, housing and infrastructure.
In 2017 and 2018, the world's largest military spenders were the United States, China, Saudi
Arabia, Russia and India. The UK took over France as sixth largest spender in 2018 while Japan
and Germany stood at eighth and ninth positions.
In early 2018, Pentagon released a report saying that Afghan war costs US$ 45 billion to
taxpayers in the preceding year. Of this amount, US$ 5 billion has been spent on Afghan forces,
US$ 13 billion towards US forces in Afghanistan and the rest on economic aid.
But these costs are far lower than the time when the US military was highly engaged in
Afghanistan. With nearly 100,000 soldiers in the country from 2010 to 2012, the price for
American taxpayers surpassed US$ 100 billion each year. For now, there are around 16,000 US
troops in Afghanistan. Despite hundreds of billions of dollars have gone into Afghanistan, the
US admits it failed in war against militants in Afghanistan.
In November 2018, another study published by CNBC reported that America has spent US$ 5.9
trillion on wars in the Middle East and Asia since 2001 including in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Syria. The study also reveals that more than 500,000 people have been killed in the wars and
nearly 10 million people have been displaced due to violence.
The US has reportedly spent US$ 1.07 trillion in Afghanistan since 2001 which include
Overseas Contingency Operations funds dedicated to Afghanistan, costs on the base budget of the
Department of Defense and increase to the budget of the Department of Veteran Affairs.
In Afghanistan, the US costs of war in 2001 commenced with US$ 37.3 billion that soared to
US$ 57.3 billion in 2007 and US$ 100 billion in 2009. The year with record spending was 2010
with US$ 112.7 billion that slightly plummeted to US$ 110.4 billion in 2011 but took downwards
trend in the later years.
Due to skyrocketing military costs on the US government, Trump Administration recently
decided to pack up some of its military bases in Afghanistan and Middle East to diminish
expenditures, though it doesn't mean the wars would end at all.
According to Afghanistan Analysts Network, the US Congress has appropriated more than US$
126 billion in aid for Afghanistan since financial year 2002, with almost 63 percent for
security and 28 percent for development and the remainder for civilian operations, mostly
budgetary assistance and humanitarian aid. Alongside the US aid, many world countries have
pumped millions of dollars in development aids, but what is evident for insiders and outsiders
is that a trickle of those funds has actually gone into Afghanistan's reconstruction.
With eighteen years into Afghan war, the security is deteriorating; Afghan air force is
ill-equipped; poppy cultivation is on the rise; roads and highways are dilapidated or
unconstructed; no mediocre hospital and health care has been established; weekly conflict
causalities hit 150-250; electricity is still imported from Central Asian countries; economy
remains dependent upon imports; unemployment rate is at its peak; more than three quarters of
population live under poverty line and many, many more miseries persist or aggravate.
The US boasts of being the largest multi-billion dollar donor for Afghanistan, but if one
takes a deeper look at the living standards of majority and the overall conditions, it can be
immediately grasped that less than half of that exaggerated fund has been consumed. The US-made
government of Afghanistan has deliberately been left behind to rank as the first corrupt
country in the world. Thanks to the same unaddressed pervasive corruption, a hefty amount of
that fund has been either directed back to the US hands or embezzled by senior Afghan
officials.
Afghanistan's new Living Conditions Survey shows that poverty is more widespread today than
it was immediately after the fall of Taliban regime, or in other words, in the early days of US
invasion.
Next month, Kabul will host a Consultative Loya Jirga attended by around 2,000
representatives from Afghanistan which will cost the Afghan Ministry of Finance AF 369 million
(equivalent to five million US$). Even as the past has proved that these events are only
symbolic and further complicating the achievement of peace, a country with great majority under
poverty line doesn't deserve to organize such costly gatherings.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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Masud Wadan is a geopolitical analyst based in Kabul. He is a frequent contributor to
Global Research.
It seems as if British Jewish pressure groups have achieved their goal: anti-Semitism is now
a mass movement in the UK. The rabid Zionist
Algemeiner reports that "Antisemitism and virulent Israel-hatred were rife on Saturday at a
pro-Palestinian demonstration in London."
The Jewish press seems to be upset by a pro-Palestinian march that assembled at the offices
of the BBC, not too far from a synagogue. I guess that the rationale is simple: once London is
dotted with synagogues, human rights enthusiasts will be pushed out of the city. They will have
to gather somewhere out of the green belt.
Jewish outlets complain that participants brandished 'antisemitic badges and placards,' such
as "Israel provokes anti-Semitism." I am puzzled. Is this really an anti-Semitic statement? If
anything, it is an attempt to identify the cause of anti-Semitism.
Jewish outlets are also upset by images of the Star of David crossed with a swastika. To
start with, those who equate Israel with Nazi Germany actually contemplate the memory of the
Holocaust and are by no means 'deniers.' I guess that the time is ripe for Zionists and
supporters of Israel to accept that in consideration of the ongoing Israeli racist crime in
Palestine, the Star of David has become a symbol of evil in the eyes of many.
The Jewish press is upset by the slogan "from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free"
that calls for Israel's destruction. I would actually expect Jews who seem to be upset by the
Hitlerian concept of an 'Aryans-only state' to accept that the concept of a 'Jews-only state'
is equally disturbing.' They should support Israel becoming 'a state of its citizens' and
accept that sooner or later this state will evolve into Palestine, from the river to the
sea.
The Jewish press is totally irritated by Jewish Voice for Labour's Secretary Glyn Secker,
who claimed that pro-Israel Labour officials were a "fifth column" in the party and asked,
"What on earth are Jews doing in the gutter with these rats?" I would remind my readers that
Jewish Voice for Labour (JVL) is itself a Jewish racist exclusive
political body that wouldn't accept non-Jews into its ranks. I have wondered more than once how
it is possible that the anti-racist Jeremy Corbyn is willing to be associated with such a body.
However, in his statement (if quoted correctly by the Jewish press), secretary Glyn Secker
actually expresses the most disturbing tribal supremacist view. He looks down at a bunch of
labour MPs whom he labels 'rats' and call for his Jewish brethren to disassociate from these
low creatures. Glyn, in practice, sustains the Jew/Goy binary divide. He should actually
receive the Kosher weekly award rather than be abused by the Zionist league.
But we can be reassured. Campaign Against Antisemitism has already confirmed that they are
"reviewing the evidence that we gathered today. Where crimes have been committed, we will work
with the authorities to ensure that there are arrests and prosecutions."
ORDER IT NOW
The facts on the ground are undeniable. The more Jewish bodies campaign against
anti-Semitism the more opposition to Jewish politics is detected. The relentless Zionist
campaign against Corbyn didn't hurt him, as he is still leading in most
national election polls . Branding Nigel Farage as an
anti-Semite didn't touch the man whose party is
polling higher than the Tories and Labour combined in the coming European Parliament
election. One way to look at it is to argue that Brits are not moved by the Jewish
anti-Semitism hysteria. Another way to look at it is to conclude that Brits are actually
grossly disturbed by the anti-Semitism frenzy. Being hated by the Zionist lobby has become a
badge of honour, an entry ticket to Britain's political premiership.
The facts on the ground are undeniable. The more Jewish bodies campaign against
anti-Semitism the more opposition to Jewish politics is detected. The relentless Zionist
campaign against Corbyn didn't hurt him, as he is still leading in most national election
polls.
In contrast to the 1960's Israel is starting to look unfashionable. Young people feel
embarrassed to be associated with Jewish activism and Zionism.
Being unfashionable is a very serious state of affairs. Many failing businesses will
testify to this. You do all the tried and tested stuff, and it just doesn't work.
@Grace
Poole Why is a Jewish only state disturbing? It is surrounded by 32 Apartheid muslim only
countries.
Could I move to Iran?
If Israel becomes a theocracy not a democracy, who cares. Look at the neighborhood.
If not Jewish only then what a Jihad state like the rest of the Arab world?
Give Israel the razor blade.
All you dog noses who claim the Jews made a banquet from the holocaust. Just look at the meal
the Arabs made from those original 750,000 refugees created by the State of Israel founding
war.
Cry me a river. They have an entire UN agency devoted to their every need, and status to 3rd
and 4th generation children of the originals not living in the country, who have citizenship
else where, How does that add up to the 5 million diaspora pals.
It is all such a game to see Israel go down mostly thru jealously that the Jews came from the
ashes of near by extension to create the best country over there.
I would pay each one of the Pals 2 million to move to Jordan from the West Bank, and Gaza
to the Sinai with joint ownership with Egypt. But that is a good idea and would solve the
problem. No one wants to solve the problem they just want to see the Jews go down. Gilad
licks his lips over it.
@Fran
Taubman "There's always kind of a calming feeling I tell folks when I think of the
Holocaust, and the tragedy of the Holocaust, and the fact that it was my ancestors --
Palestinians -- who lost their land and some lost their lives, their livelihood, their human
dignity, their existence in many ways, have been wiped out, and some people's passports,"
said Tlaib.
"And just all of it was in the name of trying to create a safe haven for Jews, post-the
Holocaust, post-the tragedy and the horrific persecution of Jews across the world at that
time. And I love the fact that it was my ancestors that provided that, right, in many ways.
But they did it in a way that took their human dignity away and it was forced on them."
Because Jews hold the establishment of Israel to be a prerequisite for the destruction of
all other nations in a final world war, which the Jews seem intent on instigating with Islam.
Zohar Shemot 32a.
After which Israel is slated to be the only remaining national power (everyone else being
destroyed).
Do not forget your books. We don't.
Why is a non-Jewish European-only State disturbing to you and other Jews?
You have your own state but refuse the same to others. You are not Europeans (Brits,
Germans, etc) as these were originally ethnic-racial categories before you interfered. Yet
you claim them your yourselves as well, and in doing so deny everyone else an exclusive
identity.
Jews only allow themselves an exclusive identity, because your "god" (the writing of Jews)
only gave Judea a nation. Correct?
Asking moronic questions at this point, which everyone knows the answer to, is insulting.
You people are not innocent, are not dumb, and you know precisely why people are hostile to
your mass genocidal, supremacist tribe.
I would pay each one of the Pals 2 million to move to Jordan from the West Bank, and
Gaza to the Sinai with joint ownership with Egypt. But that is a good idea and would solve
the problem.
At a cost of $9 trillion. Who is going to pay?
Realistically, offer $100,000 per person, or $450 billion total. Double that to include
the diaspora Pals, and close the refugee camps. If the resettlement took place over a decade,
it would cost $90 billion a year, which could come from the US Defense budget. The latter
could be wound down over the same decade, as it would no longer be needed to fight wars on
behalf of Israel. Israel would get land and peace; Palestinians would be well compensated;
and the USA would be relieved of its duty as a Middle-Eastern warmonger. Everybody wins.
What's not to like?
However, to gain approval for the plan in the USA, it would be necessary to show that the
expenditure is both worthwhile and an improvement over the status quo . This would
mean explaining what the status quo actually is; and how and why it has come about.
Unfortunately, this information is so inflammatory that it can never be publicly
discussed.
I don't think this is true. A few years back, Daniel Finkelstein of the (London) Times
characterised British anti-semitism as "background noise".
The pro-Palestinian demonstrations are the "exception that proves the rule". Their support
has two cores: radical Muslims, and political activists on the Left. Neither is a mass
movement.
The British Left tends to support people who have the most "victim points". Rightly or
wrongly, they believe that Palestinians have a lot of victim points and, as the Holocaust
moves from living memory into history, that Israelis and diaspora Jews have very few.
Furthermore, the Left particularly seeks ogres who are white and Western. Paradoxically,
they dislike Israel because Israelis are similar to Britons, not because they are different.
In contrast, massacres by Saddam Hussein, ISIS, or Rwandans never attracted much opprobrium
from the Left. The idea of holding people to a lower moral standard, the less they look or
sound like oneself, is obviously racist; but it is followed by people who genuinely believe
that they are the least racist people on earth.
@nicholas
nicola I hope the collective Ummah looks at:
Somalia
All of Africa
China
Myamar
All of Arabia
Slave labor in Libya
Women's rights in the Islamic world
Genital mutilation
beheadings
The entire muslim population in Israel has quadrupled since 1948. I guess the slaughtering
of Muslims is not going so well.
You are deranged and delusional.
Jews demand their own exclusive state (subsidized by goyim), the privilege to cleanse
their sacred (and expanding) Jews-Only territory of native gentiles, and the right to travel
(and live) among the goyim as they see fit.
And don't you dare complain about these privileges. That's anti-Semitism!
And then there's the matter of speech.
Jews not only enjoy top tier access to the MSM (since they've conspired to buy up most of
it for the undisclosed purpose of advancing pan-Zionist hegemony) but they actively and
openly form teams, lobbies and NGOs to limit the right and opportunity of others to speak
freely and assemble lawfully for the purpose of expressing their own political
grievances.
Resistance and resentment to the entrenched double-standards that favor Jews, and
state-sponsored lawlessness that empowers Israel, is routinely decried as anti-Jewish
'bigotry'. It is also mislabeled as 'anti-Semitism'. This keeps the opposition weak and
off-balance.
How very clever. How very diabolical.
Why not call 'anti-Semitism what it is?
So-called 'anti-Semitism' is simply anti-Jewishness (or counter-Jewisness). It is merely
an attitude.
Depending upon the circumstances, this attitude might be right or it may be wrong. But
'anti-Semitism' is all about Jews, their behavior, and their impact on non-Jews. Why not
focus on this inescapable fact?
And since 'anti-Semitism' is not about 'Semites' at all, the very term itself is something
of a canard.
On the other hand, organized Jewry is truly powerful. Sometimes it does real damage.
Sometimes it does real harm. Sometimes it destroys. Why can't we talk about it openly?
Calling morally-grounded opposition to the real damage and real harm done by Jews
'anti-Semitism' is a calculated libel.
On the other hand, identifying and castigating organized Jewry for its various sins is
vital, courageous, and healthy. So do the right thing.
When I was much younger and in Graduate School I hosted three British students who were on a
summer sabbatical at the medical college I was attending.
There was no particular reason that the Jews in America came up over beers, many beers
(Texans and the British like beer equally well). But they told me that there was and
expression among common British about Jews, and, no it's not that the only good Jew is a dead
Jew.
It was that "antisemitism is when one hates the Jews more than is absolutely
necessary".
"Jewish outlets complain that participants brandished 'antisemitic badges and placards,' such
as "Israel provokes anti-Semitism." I am puzzled. Is this really an anti-Semitic statement?
If anything, it is an attempt to identify the cause of anti-Semitism."
Yep, absolutely true.
It's not their religion about which folks object. It's not their race, if you want to call
it a race.
IT'S THEIR
BEHAVIOR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Wrong. At the time, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, was a supporter
and ally of Hitler. When the two met, al-Husseini told Hitler that they shared the same
enemies: "the English, the Jews, and the Communists." The two went on to scheme about how
best to set upon and destroy the Jews of the Middle East. What's more, the Arabs regularly
massacred Jews in Mandatory Palestine.
Lies are the lifeblood of anti-Semitism, and there's a purpose to Tlaib's false history.
It serves to bolster the lie that the Jews waged war on a friendly and welcoming people,
stole their land, and condemned them to ruin. Anti-Semitism depends on lies because its
very motive is to hide the truth of one's own failings and lay blame on the Jews. The
history of anti-Semitism is, in a sense, a history of wicked fabrications: From Jewish
deicide, to the blood libel, to the claims of Jewish sorcery, to The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, to the idea that Jews were tipped off about 9/11, to the claim that Jews
push the U.S. into wars, to the outrage over Jews supposedly buying politicians, to lies
about Israel's founding.
Tlaib and Omar are exemplars of this tradition, peddlers of anti-Semitic folktales. In
addition to spouting revisionist history, Tlaib has accused America's Israel-supporters of
dual loyalty. Omar has done that and more, claiming that Israel has hypnotized the world
into not seeing the evil it perpetrates, and stating that America's pro-Israel policies are
simply purchased by those who support the Jewish state.
It is a very powerful and accurate expression to say that Israel is "unfashionable" –
it is also true that most young people today feel no connection to the holocaust – when
Rashida uses the word "comforting" to refer to her people's sacrifice for the Jews, I feel
that the customary Zionist response to call these expressions "canards" will also be seen as
an unfashionable response. Thank God for brave people like Tlaid and Omar who express
distaste for the unfashionable and vulgar behavior of Israel and Zionists. Omar and Tlaib
have already emboldened millions of others who share their ambivalence and horror, when they
read about the Israel colonist settlers and their brutality to the Palestinians they displace
.
It is surrounded by 32 Apartheid muslim only countries.
Not so. Lebanon, Syria, and even Egypt have Christian minorities that have been protected
over the years. Jordan has a few, but not many. Iraq, prior to Israel's proxy war on Saddam
had plenty of Christians, including Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam's ministers.. Palestine has/had
Christians that were killed by Israelis in the same way Muslims were.
Could I move to Iran?
I don't know, I'm not in charge of the Iranian immigration policy. Why not ask the Jews
who are members of the Majles? You know, the legislative body with seats reserved for Jews
and other minorities.
Like most Zionists, you seem to ignore the part where T.E. Lawrence got the go ahead from
the British government to promise Arabs, which included Palestine, freedom from the Ottomans
and self rule, in exchange for a revolt against them. That promise was never kept. The
philo-Semite mass murderer Churchill is alleged to have organized Lawrence's
assassination. http://www.criminalelement.com/the-murder-of-lawrence-of-arabia-tony-hays/
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and his Russian counterpart Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov discussed a broad number of security
related issues in Sochi on Tuesday ranging from nuclear arms control to ratcheting US tensions with Iran to Venezuela to Ukraine.
Importantly, the two top diplomats traded warnings against election meddling and interference in their respective countries -- though
we might add that Lavrov's message was packed with more sarcasm following the Mueller report clearing Trump of "collusion".
In response to Pompeo's reportedly warning Russia to never interfere in what he described as America's "sacred" elections, specifically
warning against any 2020 presidential election interference, Lavrov shot back with: "We can discuss this topic forever, but until
we have cold hard facts on the table, we cannot have a grown-up discussion about it," according to Russia's
RT .
Speaking to reporters afterward, Lavrov said proudly that he had handed Pompeo a "memorandum" on US interference in Russia but
didn't reveal its precise contents, only saying, "we're prepared to talk on this topic."
Though both expressed hope for improved ties between Washington and Moscow, Reuters characterized it as a testy and impatient
exchange :
Visiting Russia for the first time as secretary of state, Pompeo publicly clashed with Lavrov on issues from Ukraine to Venezuela.
After their meeting, both men said they had been far apart on many issues .
"I made clear to Foreign Minister Lavrov... that interference in American elections is unacceptable. If the Russians were engaged
in that in 2020 it would put our relationship in an even worse place than it has been ," he said.
"I'd encourage them not to do that. We would not tolerate that."
However, soon after the summit, Russian President Putin in public statements indicated his belief that "Trump is in the mood to
restore ties with Russia."
He also indicated it's his own desire to "fully restore" Russia-US ties, according to the AP, and interestingly also praised the
"quite objective" Mueller report in statements to reporters
.
"As you know, just a few days ago, I had the pleasure of talking with the US president on the phone," Putin told Pompeo during
the Tuesday summit in Sochi. "I got the impression that the [US] president was inclined to re-establish Russian-American relations
and contacts to resolve together the issues that are of mutual interest to us."
Pompeo, for his part, appeared to say as much following the meeting, saying, "The United States stands ready to find common ground
with Russia as long as the two of us can engage seriously on those issues."
President Trump has made clear that his expectation is that we will have an improved relationship between our two countries.
This will benefit each of our peoples. And I think that our talks here today were a good step in that direction.
However, Pompeo still went through a litany of disagreements he had with Russia, especially centering on multiple hot spots around
the globe where the Trump administration has exercised a big stick approach.
At Lavrov-Pompeo presser, around 28:30, Lavrov says something significant: Russia recently offered to publish info from a US-Russia
channel on cyberspace that he claims would address the allegations of Russian election meddling. He says the US declined:
https://t.co/o4MbqQlwCy
Below is a brief run-down of key points to the two briefed reporters on afterwards.
Nuclear treaty
At the top of the agenda, Lavrov signaled Russia could be open to a new arms control treaty after the recent US withdrawal from
the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, countered by Russia suspending its obligations under the Reagan-era pact which
crucially served to keep missile build-up out of Europe.
Pompeo stressed China had to be part of any future sweeping deal, also considering rapid advances in defense technology. Lavrov
expressed hope that any future agreements will be "positively received by both nations."
The New START nuclear arms reduction treaty will expire in February of 2021, giving greater impetus for both sides to work through
the current impasse.
No common ground on Venezuela
Predictably the Venezuela hawk Pompeo slammed Russia's "interfering" in the Latin American country's internal affairs, adding
also to that list China, Cuba and Iran.
"Maduro has brought nothing but misery to the Venezuelan people," Pompeo stated. "We hope that Russian support for Maduro will
end." Lavrov defended the right of Venezuelans to choose their own president and refused to recognize US-declared "Interim President"
Juan Guaido.
"Democracy cannot be done by force," Lavrov told reporters. "The threats that we hear against the Maduro government, threats that
come from the mouths of US officials this has nothing in common with democracy."
* * *
No desire for war with Iran
"We fundamentally do not see a war with Iran," Secretary of State Pompeo said, but added: "We've made it clear to the Iranians
that if American interests are attacked, we will certainly respond in an appropriate fashion."
On Tuesday President Trump denied a prior
New York
Times report which alleged the White House was planning to send up to 120,000 troops to the Middle East should conflict erupt
between Iran and the United States. The president called the report "fake news" but still added that should war actually break out
he would send "a hell of a lot more," according to Reuters.
Lavrov stated that Russia hopes "reason will gain the upper hand," and added that Moscow opposed the US pullout of the 2015 Iran
nuclear deal (JCPOA), and further that Europe is right in attempting to stick to the deal.
Ukraine standoff
Pompeo informed Lavrov that the US hadn't budged in its position regarding Moscow's "illegal" annexation of the Crimea in 2014,
saying economic sanctions would remain in place until Russia reverses course.
Following the Ukrainian election of comedian turned unlikely politician Volodymyr Zelensky, Pompeo said Russia should now "work
with Ukraine's new president-elect to bring peace to eastern Ukraine," according to a paraphrase of Pompeo's words by Reuters, and
further that Russian authorities should release Ukrainian sailors captured in last year's dangerous
Kerch Strait incident .
"... The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today. ..."
"... "Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all "respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?" ..."
"... Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning leaked it in the first place. As she said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as 'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers." ..."
Yves
here. Even though this post covers known territory, it seems worthwhile to encourage those of
you who haven't watched the "Collateral Murder" footage to view the full version. It's
important not only to keep the public (and that includes people in your personal circle)
focused on what Assange's true hanging crime is in the eyes of the officialdom .and it ain't
RussiaGate. That serves as a convenient diversion from his real offense. That effort has a
secondary benefit of having more people watch the video.
Before
and after images of the van that came to pick up the bodies of eleven men shot to death by
circling American helicopters in Iraq in 2007. Both children in the van were wounded. "Well,
it's their fault for bringing their kids to a battle," said one of the pilots. "That's right,"
replies another. From the videoCollateral Murder.
Below is a full video version of Collateral Murder , the 2007 war footage that was
leaked in 2010 to Wikileaks by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. This version was posted to the Wikileaks YouTube
channel with subtitles. It will only take about 15 minutes of your life to view it.
It's brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a
special kind of murder -- murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine
guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges
of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are
dead.
The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S.
military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting,
then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the
Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who
matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead. They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we're watching today.
"Everyone" in this case includes every major newspaper that published and received awards
for publishing Wikileaks material; all major U.S. televised media outlets; and all
"respectable" U.S. politicians -- including, of course, Hillary Clinton, who was rumored (though
unverifiably) to have said, "Can't we just drone this guy?"
Yes, Julian Assange the person can be a giant douche even to his supporters, as this exchange
reported by Intercept writer Micah Lee attests. Nevertheless, it's not for being a
douche that the Establishment state wants him dead; that state
breeds, harbors and honors douches everywhere in the world . They want him dead for
publishing videos like these.
Please watch it. The footage shows not only murder, but bloodlust and conscienceless
brutality, so much of it in fact that this became one of the main reasons Chelsea Manning
leaked it in the first place. As she
said at her court-martial : "The most alarming aspect of the video for me, was the
seemingly delight of bloodlust they [the pilots] appeared to have. They dehumanized the
individuals they were engaging with, and seemed to not value human life in referring to them as
'dead bastards,' and congratulating each other on the ability to kill in large numbers."
The Wikileaks page for the video is here . A transcript is here .
This was done in our name, to "keep us safe." This continues to be done every day that we
and our allies are at "war" in the Middle East.
Bodies pile on bodies as this continues. The least we can do, literally the least, is to
witness and acknowledge their deaths.
Below is the second half and conclusion of "Afghanistan,
the Forgotten Proxy War". While the previous sections examined the economic roots of
imperialism, as well as the historical context of the Cold War within which to situate the
Mujahideen, the following explores the anatomy of proxy warfare and media disinformation
campaigns which were at the heart of destabilizing Afghanistan. These were also a large part of
why there was little to no opposition to the Mujahideen from the Western 'left', whose
continued dysfunctionality cannot be talked about without discussing Zbigniew Brzezinski. We
also take a look at what led to the Soviet Union's demise and how that significantly affected
the former Democratic Republic of Afghanistan and many other parts of the world. The United
States has been at war in Afghanistan for four decades now, and it will reach its 40th year on
July 3, 2019. The original "moderate rebel"
One of the key players in the anti-Soviet, U.S.-led regime change project against
Afghanistan was Osama
bin Laden , a Saudi-born millionaire who came from a wealthy, powerful family that owns a
Saudi construction company and has had close ties to the Saudi royal family. Before becoming
known as America's "boogeyman", Osama bin Laden was put in charge of
fundraising for the Mujahideen insurgents, creating numerous charities and foundations in
the process and working in coordination with Saudi intelligence (who acted as liaisons between
the fighters and the CIA). Journalist Robert Fisk even gave bin Laden a glowing review, calling
him a "
peace warrior " and a philanthropist in a 1993 report for the Independent . Bin
Laden also provided recruitment for the Mujahideen and is believed to have also received
security training from the CIA. And in 1989, the same year that Soviet troops withdrew, he
founded the terrorist organization Al Qaeda with a number of fighters he
had recruited to the Mujahideen. Although the PDPA had already been overthrown, and the Soviet
Union was dissolved, he still maintained his relationship with the CIA and NATO, working with
them from the
mid-to-late 1990s to provide support for the secessionist Bosnian paramilitaries and the
Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in the destruction and dismantling of Yugoslavia.
The United States would eventually turn Bin Laden into a scapegoat after the 2001 terrorist
attacks, while still maintaining ties to his family and providing arms, training, and funding
to Al Qaeda and its affiliates (rebranded as "moderate rebels" by the Western media) in its
more recent regime change project against Syria, which started in 2011. The Mujahideen not only
gave birth to Al Qaeda, but it would set a precedent for the United States' regime-change
operations in later years against the anti-imperialist governments of Libya and Syria.
Reagan entertains Mujahideen fighters in the White House.
With the end to the cycle of
World Wars (for the time being, at least), it has become increasingly common for the United
States to use local paramilitaries, terrorist groups, and/or the armed forces of comprador
regimes to fight against nations targeted by U.S. capital interests. Why the use of proxy
forces? They are, as Whitney Webb
describes , "a politically safe tool for projecting the U.S.' geopolitical will abroad."
Using proxy warfare as a kind of power projection tool is, first and foremost, cost-effective,
since paid local mercenaries or terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda will bear the burden of
combat and casualties rather than American troops in places like Libya and Syria. For example,
it costs much less
to pay local paramilitaries, gangs, crime syndicates, terrorist groups, and other reactionary
forces to perform the same military operations as U.S. troops. Additionally, with the advent of
nuclear weapons it became much more perilous for global superpowers to come into direct combat
with one another -- if the Soviet Union and the United States had done so, there existed the
threat of "mutually assured destruction", the strong possibility of instantaneous and
catastrophic damage to the populations and the economic and living standards of both sides,
something neither side was willing to risk, even if it was U.S. imperialism's ultimate goal to
destroy the Soviet Union. And so, the U.S. was willing to use any other means necessary to
weaken the Soviet Union and safeguard its profits, which included eliminating the Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan even if it had neither the intent nor the means of launching a military
offensive on American soil. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union had the means of producing a
considerably large supply of modern weapons, including nuclear deterrents, to counter the
credible threat posed by the United States. To strike the Soviet Union with nuclear missiles
would have been a great challenge for the United States, since it would have resulted in
overwhelming retaliation by the Soviet Union. To maneuver this problem, to assure the
destruction of the Soviet Union while protecting the U.S. from similar destruction, the CIA
relied on more unconventional methods not previously thought of as being part of traditional
warfare, such as funding proxy forces while wielding economic and cultural influence over the
American domestic sphere and the international scene. Furthermore, proxy warfare enables
control of public opinion, thus allowing the U.S. government to escape public scrutiny and
questions about legal authorization for war. With opposition from the general public
essentially under control, consent for U.S.-led wars does not need to be obtained, especially
when the U.S. military is running them from " behind the scenes " and
its involvement looks less obvious. Indeed, the protests against the war on Vietnam in the
United States and other Western countries saw mass turnouts.
And while the U.S.-led aggression in Vietnam did involve proxy warfare to a lesser degree,
it was still mostly fought with American "boots-on-the-ground", much like the 2001 renewed
U.S.-led aggression against Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In contrast, the U.S.
assault on Afghanistan that began in 1979 saw little to no protest. The Mujahideen even
garnered support from large portions of the Western left who joined the chorus of voices in the
Western mainstream media in demonizing the PDPA -- a relentless imperialist propaganda campaign
that would be repeated in later years during the U.S. wars on Libya and Syria, with the
difference being that social media had not yet gained prominence at the time of the initial
assault on Afghanistan. This leads to the next question: why recruit some of the most
reactionary social forces abroad, many of whom represent complete backwardness?
In Afghanistan, such forces proved useful in the mission to topple the modernizing
government of the PDPA, especially when their anti-modernity aspirations intersected with U.S.
foreign policy; these ultra-conservative forces continue to be deployed by the United States
today. In fact, the long war on Afghanistan shares many striking similarities with the long war
on Syria, with the common theme of U.S. imperialism collaborating with violent Sunni extremists
to topple the secular, nationalist and anti-imperialist governments of these two former 'Soviet
bloc' countries. And much like the PDPA, the current and long-time government of the Ba'ath
Arab Socialist Party in Syria has made many strides towards achieving national liberation and
economic development, which have included: taking land from aristocratic families (a majority
of whom were Sunni Muslims while Shia Muslims, but especially Alawites, traditionally belonged
to the lower classes and were treated as second class citizens in pre-Ba'athist Syria) and
redistributing and nationalizing it, making use of Syria's oil and gas reserves to modernize
the country and benefit its population, and upholding women's rights as an important part of
the Ba'athist pillars.
Some of these aristocratic landlords, just like their Afghan counterparts, would react
violently and join the Muslim Brotherhood who, with CIA-backing, carried out acts of terrorism
and other atrocities in Hama as they made a failed attempt to topple the government of Hafez al
Assad in 1982.
The connection between the two is further solidified by the fact that it was the Mujahideen
from which Al Qaeda emerged; both are inspired by Wahhabist ideology, and one of their chief
financiers is the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (as well as Israel, a regional imperial power and a
key ally of the United States). In either case, these Wahhabi-inspired forces were vehemently
opposed to modernization and development, and would much rather keep large sections of the
population impoverished, as they sought to replace the PDPA and the Ba'athists with Sunni
fundamentalist, anti-Shia, theological autocracies -- Saudi-style regimes, in other words.
These reactionary forces are useful tools in the CIA's anti-communist projects and
destabilization campaigns against independent nationalist governments, considering that the
groups' anti-modernity stance is a motivating factor in their efforts to sabotage economic
development, which is conducive to ensuring a favourable climate for U.S. capital interests. It
also helps that these groups already saw the nationalist governments of the PDPA and the Syrian
Ba'ath party as their 'archenemy', and would thus fight them to the death and resort to acts of
terrorism against the respective civilian populations.
Zbigniew Brzezinski stated in a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur in response
to the following question:
Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given
arms and advice to future terrorists?
[Brzezinski]: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the
collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe
and the end of the cold war?
Once again, he makes it clear that the religious extremism of the Mujahideen fighters was
not an issue for Washington because the real political value lay in eliminating the PDPA and
putting an end to Soviet influence in the Greater Middle East, which would give the U.S. the
opportunity to easily access and steal the country's wealth. And in order to justify the U.S.
imperialist intervention in Afghanistan, as well as to obscure the true nature of the
Mujahideen fighters, the intervention needed to be accompanied by a rigorous mass media
campaign. The Reagan administration -- knowing full well that American mainstream media has
international influence -- continued the war that the Carter administration started and saw it
as an opportunity to "step up" its domestic propaganda war, considering that the American
general public was still largely critical of the Vietnam War at the time.
As part of the aggressive imperialist propaganda campaign, anyone who dared to publicly
criticize the Mujahideen was subjected to character assassination and was pejoratively labelled
a "Stalinist" or a "Soviet apologist", which are akin to labels such as "Russian agent" or
"Assadist" being used as insults today against those who speak out against the U.S.-backed
terrorism in Syria. There were also careful rebranding strategies made specifically for Osama
bin Laden and the Mujahideen mercenaries, who were hailed as "revolutionary freedom fighters"
and given a romantic, exoticized "holy warrior" makeover in Western media; hence the title of
this section. The Mujahideen mercenaries were even given a dedication title card at the end of
the Hollywood movie Rambo III which read, "This film is dedicated to the brave
Mujahideen fighters of Afghanistan"; the film itself added to the constructed romantic image as
it portrayed the Mujahideen fighters as heroes, while the Soviet Union and the PDPA were
portrayed as the cartoonish villains. The Rambo film franchise is well known for its
depiction of the Vietnamese as "savages" and as the aggressors in the U.S. war on Vietnam,
which is a blatant reversal of the truth .
The Hollywood blockbuster franchise would be used to make the Mujahideen more palatable to
Western audiences, as this unabashed, blatantly anti-Soviet propaganda for U.S. imperialism
attracted millions of viewers with one of the largest movie marketing campaigns of the time. Although
formulaic, the films are easily consumable because they appeal to emotion and, as Michael
Parenti states in Dirty Truths , "The entertainment industry does not merely give the
people what they want: it is busy shaping those wants," (p. 111). Rambo III may
not have been critically
acclaimed , but it was still the second most commercially successful film in the
Rambo series, grossing a total of $189,015,611 at the box
office . Producing war propaganda films is nothing new and has been a long staple of the
Hollywood industry, which serves capitalist and imperialist interests. But, since the
blockbuster movie is one of the most widely available and distributed forms of media,
repackaging the Mujahideen into a popular film franchise was easily one of the best ways
(albeit cynical) to justify the war, maintaining the
American constructed narrative and reinforcing the demonization campaign against Soviet
Russia and the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. Now, outside of the cinema, CBS News went as
far as to air fake battle footage meant to help perpetuate the myth that the Mujahideen
mercenaries were "freedom fighters"; American journalists Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould,
although decidedly biased against the Soviet Union and its allies, documented this ruse
in which the news channel participated. In terms of proxy warfare, these were just some of the
ways used to distract from the fact that it was a U.S.-led war.
The dedication title card as it originally appeared at the end of the film Rambo III.
In Afghanistan, proxy forces provided a convenient cover because they drew attention away
from the fact that U.S. imperialism was the root cause of the conflict. The insurgents also
helped to demonize the targets of U.S. foreign policy, the PDPA and the Soviet Union, all the
while doing the majority of the physical combat in place of the American military. In general,
drawing attention away from the fact that it has been the United States "pulling the strings"
all along, using proxy forces helps Washington to maintain
plausible deniability in regard to its relationship with such groups. If any one of these
insurgents becomes a liability, as what had happened with the Taliban, they can just as easily
be disposed of and replaced by more competent patsies, while U.S. foreign policy goes
unquestioned. Criminal gangs and paramilitary
forces are thus ideal and convenient tools for U.S. foreign policy. With the rule of
warlords and the instability (namely damage to infrastructure, de-industrialization, and
societal collapse) that followed after the toppling of the PDPA, Afghanistan's standard of
living dropped rapidly, leading to forced mass migrations and making the country all the more
vulnerable to a more direct U.S. military intervention -- which eventually did happen in
2001.
Zbigniew Brzezinski: godfather of colour revolutions and proxy wars, architect of the
Mujahideen
The late Brzezinski was a key figure in U.S. foreign policy and a highly influential figure
in the Council on Foreign Relations. Although the Polish-American diplomat and political
scientist was no longer the National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan's presidency, he
still continued to play a prominent role in enforcing U.S. foreign policy goals in upholding
Washington's global monopoly. The liberal Cold War ideologue's signature strategy consisted of
using the CIA to destabilize and force regime-change onto countries whose governments actively
resisted against Washington. Such is the legacy of Brzezinski, whose strategy of funding the
most reactionary anti-government forces to foment chaos and instability while promoting them as
"freedom fighters" is now a longstanding staple of U.S. imperialism.
How were the aggressive propaganda campaigns which promoted the Mujahideen mercenaries as
"freedom fighters" able to garner support for the aggression against the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan from so many on the Western left who had previously opposed the war on
Vietnam? It was the through the CIA's use of 'soft-power' schemes, because leftist opinion also
needed to be controlled and manipulated in the process of carrying out U.S. foreign and public
policy. Brzezinski mastered the art of targeting intelligentsia and impressionable young people
in order to make them supportive of U.S. foreign policy, misleading a significant number of
people into supporting U.S.-led wars.
The CIA invested money into programs that used university campus, anti-Soviet "radical
leftist activists" and academics (as well as artists and writers) to help spread imperialist
propaganda dressed up in vaguely "leftist"-sounding language and given a more "hip",
"humanitarian", "social justice", "free thinker" appeal. Western, but especially American,
academia has since continued to teach the post-modernist "oppression theory" or "privilege
theory" to students, which is anti-Marxist and anti-scientific at its core. More importantly,
this post-modernist infiltration was meant to distract from class struggle, to help divert any
form of solidarity away from anti-imperialist struggles, and to foster virulent animosity
towards the Soviet Union among students and anyone with 'leftist' leanings. Hence the
phenomenon of identity politics that continues to plague the Western left today, whose strength
was effectively neutered by the 1970s. Not only that, but as Gowans mentions in his book,
Patriots, Traitors and Empires: The Story of Korea's Struggle for Freedom :
"U.S. universities recruit talented individuals from abroad, instill in them the U.S.
imperialist ideology and values, and equip them with academic credentials which conduce to
their landing important political positions at home. In this way, U.S. imperial goals
indirectly structure the political decision-making of other countries." (pp. 52-53)
And so we have agencies and think-tanks such as the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)
which has scholarly appeal and actively interferes in elections abroad -- namely, in countries
that are targets of U.S. foreign policy. Founded in 1983 by Reagan and directed by the CIA, the
agency also assists in mobilizing coups and paid "dissidents" in U.S.-led regime change
projects, such as the 2002 failed attempt against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, as well as helping
to create aggressive media campaigns that demonize targeted nations. Another instance of this
"soft power" tactic of mobilizing U.S.-backed "dissidents" in targeted nations are the number
of Sunni Islamic fundamentalist
madrassas (schools) sponsored by the CIA and set up by Wahhabi missionaries from Saudi
Arabia in Afghanistan -- which started to appear in increasing numbers during the 1980s,
reaching over 39,000 during the decade. Afghanistan's public education institutions were
largely secular prior to the fall of Kabul in 1992; these madrassas were the direct,
ideological and intellectual antitheses to the existing institutions of education. The
madrassas acted as centres for cult-like brainwashing and were essentially CIA covert
psychological operations (psy-ops) intended to inspire divisiveness and demobilize younger
generations of Afghans in the face of imperial onslaught so that they would not unite with the
wider PDPA-led nationalist resistance to imperialism.
The NED's founding members were comprised of Cold War ideologues which included Brzezinski
himself, as well as Trotskyists who provided an endless supply of slurs against the Soviet
Union. It was chiefly under this agency, and with direction provided by Brzezinski, that
America produced artists, "activists", academics, and writers who presented themselves as
"radical leftists" and slandered the Soviet Union and countries that were aligned with it --
which was all part of the process of toppling them and subjugating them to U.S. free market
fundamentalism. With Brzezinski having mastered the art of encouraging postmodernism and
identity politics among the Western left in order to weaken it, the United States not only had
military and economic might on its side but also highly sophisticated ideological instruments
to help give it the upper hand in propaganda wars.
These "soft power" schemes are highly effective in masking the brutality of U.S.
imperialism, as well as concealing the exploitation of impoverished nations. Marketing the
Mujahideen mercenaries as "peace warriors" while demonizing the PDPA and referring to the
Soviet assistance as an "invasion" or "aggression" marked the beginning of the regular use of
"humanitarian" pretexts for imperialist interventions. The Cold War era onslaught against
Afghanistan can thus be seen as the template for the NATO-led regime change projects against
Yugoslavia, Libya, and Syria, which not only involved the use of U.S.-backed proxy forces but
also "humanitarian" pretexts being presented in the aggressive propaganda campaigns against the
targeted countries. It was not until 2002, however, that then-American UN representative
Samantha Powers, as well as several U.S.-allied representatives, would push the United Nations
to officially adopt the "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P) doctrine into the Charter -- which
was in direct contradiction to the law that recognizes the violation of a nation's sovereignty
as a crime. The R2P doctrine was born out of the illegal 78-day NATO
air-bombing of Yugoslavia from March 24 to June 10, 1999. And although plans to dismantle
Yugoslavia go as far back as 1984, it was not until much of the 1990s that NATO would begin
openly intervening --
with more naked aggression -- starting with the funding and support for secessionist
paramilitary forces in Bosnia between 1994-1995. It then sealed the 1999 destruction of
Yugoslavia with with the balkanization of the Serbian province of Kosovo . In addition
to the use of terrorist and paramilitary groups as proxy forces which received CIA-training and
funding, another key feature of this "humanitarian" intervention was the ongoing demonization
campaigns against the Serbs, who were at the centre of a vicious Western media propaganda war.
Some of the most egregious parts of these demonization campaigns -- which were tantamount to
slander and libel -- were the claims that the Serbs were "
committing genocide " against ethnic Albanians. The NATO bombing campaign was illegal since
it was given no UN Security Council approval or support.
Once again, Brzezinski was not the National Security Advisor during the U.S.-led campaign
against Yugoslavia. However, he still continued to wield influence as a member of the Council
on Foreign Relations, a private organization and Wall Street think tank. The Council on Foreign
Relations is intertwined with highly influential NGOs who are essentially propaganda
mouthpieces for U.S. foreign policy, such as Human Rights Watch, which has fabricated stories
of atrocities allegedly committed by countries targeted by U.S. imperialism. Clearly,
unmitigated U.S. imperial aggression did not end with the destruction of the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan, nor with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. The post-Cold War years
were a continuation of U.S. imperialism's scramble for more spheres of influence and global
domination; it was also a scramble for what was left of the former 'Soviet bloc' and Warsaw
Pact. The dismantling of Yugoslavia was, figuratively speaking, the 'final nail in the coffin'
of whatever 'Soviet influence' was left in Eastern Europe.
The demise of the Soviet Union and the "Afghan trap" question
Image on the right: Left to right: former Afghan President Babrak Karmal, and former Soviet
leader Leonid Brezhnev. Karmal took office at around the same time (December 1979) the PDPA
requested that Moscow intervene to assist the besieged Afghanistan.
The sabotage and subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union meant that only one global
hegemon remained, and that was the United States. Up until 1989, the Soviet Union had been the
barrier that was keeping the United States from launching a more robust military intervention
in Afghanistan, as well as in Central and West Asia. While pulling out did not immediately
cause the defeat of Kabul as the PDPA government forces continued to struggle for another three
years, Mikhail Gorbachev's decision to withdraw Soviet troops arguably had a
detrimental impact on Afghanistan for many years to come. Although there was no Soviet
military assistance in the last three years of Najibullah's presidency, Afghanistan continued
to receive aid from the USSR, and some Soviet military advisers (however limited in their
capacity) still remained; despite the extreme difficulties, and combined with the nation's
still-relatively high morale, this did at least help to keep the government from being
overthrown immediately. This defied U.S. expectations as the CIA and the George H.W. Bush
administration had believed that the government of Najibullah would fall as soon as Soviet
troops were withdrawn. But what really hurt the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan's army was
when the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991; almost as soon as the dissolution happened and
Boris Yeltsin (with U.S. backing) took over as Russia's president, the aid stopped coming and
the government forces became unable to hold out for much longer. The U.S. aggression was left
unchecked, and to this day Afghanistan has not
seen geopolitical stability and has since been a largely impoverished 'failed state',
serving as a training ground for terrorist groups such as ISIS and Al Qaeda. It continues to be
an anarchic battleground between rival warlords which include the ousted Taliban and the U.S.
puppet government that replaced them.
But, as was already mentioned above, the "Afghan trap" did not, in and of itself, cause the
dismantling of the Soviet Union. In that same interview with Le Nouvel Observateur ,
Brzezinski had this to say in response to the question about setting the "trap":
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself
desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?
[Brzezinski]: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we
knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Likewise with Cuba and Syria, the USSR had a well-established alliance with the
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan, one of mutual aid and partnership. Answering Kabul's
explicit request for assistance was a deliberate and conscious choice made by Moscow, and it
just so happened that the majority of Afghans welcomed it. For any errors that Leonid Brezhnev,
the General Secretary at the time, may have made (which do deserve a fair amount of criticism,
but are not the focus of this article), the 1979 decision to intervene on behalf of Afghanistan
against U.S. imperialism was not one of them. It is true that both the Soviet and the U.S.
interventions were military interventions, but the key difference is that the U.S. was backing
reactionary forces for the purposes of establishing colonial domination and was in clear
violation of Afghan sovereignty. Consider, too, that Afghanistan had only deposed of its king
in 1973, just six years before the conflict began. The country may have moved quickly to
industrialize and modernize, but it wasn't much time to fully develop its military defenses by
1979.
Image below: Mikhail Gorbachev accepts the Nobel Peace Prize from George H.W. Bush on
October 15, 1990. Many Russians saw this gesture as a betrayal, while the West celebrated it,
because he was being awarded for his capitulation to U.S. imperialism in foreign and economic
policy.
Other than that, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the Soviet Union imploded due
to an accumulating number of factors: namely, the gradual steps that U.S. foreign policy had
taken over the years to cripple the Soviet economy, especially after the deaths of Brezhnev and
Yuri Andropov. How Gorbachev responded during the U.S.-led onslaught against Afghanistan
certainly helped to exacerbate the conditions that led to the dissolution. After the deaths of
Brezhnev and Andropov, the Soviet Union's economy became disorganized and was being liberalized
during much of the 1980s. Not only that, but the Reagan administration escalated the arms race,
which intensified after they had scrapped the 'detente' that was previously made in the
mid-1970s. Even prior to Reagan's hardline, bombastic rhetoric and escalation against the USSR,
the Soviet Union was already beginning to show signs of strain from the arms race during the
late-1970s. However, in spite of the economic strains, during the height of the war the
organized joint operations between the Soviet army and the Afghan army saw a significant amount
of success in pushing back against the Mujahideen with many of the jihadist leaders either
being killed or fleeing to Pakistan. Therefore, it is erroneous to say that intervening in
Afghanistan on behalf of the Afghan people "did the Soviet Union in."
In a misguided and ultimately failed attempt to spur economic growth rates, Gorbachev moved
to end the Cold War by withdrawing military support from allies and pledging cooperation with
the United States who promised "peace". When he embraced Neoliberalism and allowed for the USSR
to be opened to the U.S.-dominated world capitalist economy, the Soviet economy imploded and
the effects were felt by its allies. It was a capitulation to U.S. imperialism, in other words;
and it led to disastrous results not only in Afghanistan, but in several other countries as
well. These include: the destruction of Yugoslavia, both wars on Iraq, and the 2011 NATO
invasion of Libya. Also, Warsaw Pact members in Eastern Europe were no longer able to
effectively fight back against U.S.-backed colour revolutions; some of them would eventually be
absorbed as NATO members, such as Czechoslovakia which was dissolved and divided into two
states: the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Without Soviet Russia to keep it in check, the United
States was able to launch an unrestrained series of aggressions for nearly two decades. Because
of his decision to withdraw from the arms race altogether, in a vain attempt to transform the
Soviet Union into a social democracy akin to those of the Nordic countries, Gorbachev had
deprived the Russian army of combat effectiveness by making significant cuts to its defense
budget, which is partly why they were forced to evacuate. Not only that, but these diplomatic
and military concessions with the United States gave them no benefit in return, hence the
economic crisis in Russia during the Yeltsin years. Suffice to say, the Gorbachev-Yeltsin years
are not remembered fondly in Russia and many regard Gorbachev as a traitor and Western agent
who helped to bring the Soviet Union to its collapse. In more recent years,
efforts are being made to assess the actions taken by Gorbachev with regards to
Afghanistan; this includes going against and revising the resolution put forth by him which
suggested that the USSR intervention was "shameful".
In short, Afghanistan did not cause the Soviet Union's demise even if it required large
military spending. More accurately: it was Gorbachev's impulsive decision to quickly discard
the planned economy in favour of a market economy in order to appease the United States, who
made the false promise that NATO would not expand eastward. If there was a real "trap", it was
this and Gorbachev played right into the hands of U.S. imperialism; and so, the Soviet Union
received its devastating blow from the United States in the end -- not from a small, minor
nation such as Afghanistan which continues to suffer the most from the effects of these past
events. For many years, but especially since the end of WWII, the United States made ceaseless
efforts to undermine the USSR, adding stress upon stress onto its economy, in addition to the
psychological warfare waged through the anti-Soviet propaganda and military threats against it
and its allies. Despite any advances made in the past, the Soviet Union's economy was still not
as large as that of the United States. And so, in order to keep pace with NATO, the Soviet
Union did not have much of a choice but to spend a large percentage of its GDP on its military
and on helping to defend its allies, which included national liberation movements in the Third
World, because of the very real and significant threat that U.S. imperialism posed. If it had
not spent any money militarily, its demise would most likely have happened much sooner. But
eventually, these mounting efforts by U.S. imperialism created a circumstance where its
leadership under Gorbachev made a lapse in judgment, reacting impulsively and carelessly rather
than acting with resilience in spite of the onslaught.
It should also be taken into account that WWII had a profound impact on Soviet leadership --
from Joseph Stalin to Gorbachev -- because even though the Red Army was victorious in defeating
the Nazis, the widespread destruction had still placed the Soviet economy under an incredible
amount of stress and it needed time to recover. Meanwhile, the convenient geographical location
of the United States kept it from suffering the same casualties and infrastructural damage seen
across Europe and Asia as a result of the Second World War, which enabled its economy to
recover much faster and gave it enough time to eventually develop the U.S. Dollar as
the international currency and assert dominance over the world economy. Plus, the U.S. had
accumulated two-thirds of the world's gold reserves by 1944 to help back the Dollar; and even
if it lost a large amount of the gold, it would still be able to maintain Dollar supremacy by
developing the fiat system to back the currency. Because of the destruction seen during WWII,
it is understandable that the Soviet Union wanted to avoid another world war, which is why it
also made several attempts at achieving some kind of diplomacy
with the United States (before Gorbachev outright capitulated). At the same time, it also
understood that maintaining its military defenses was important because of the threat of a
nuclear war from the United States, which would be much more catastrophic than the Nazis'
military assaults against the Soviet Union since Hitler did not have a nuclear arsenal. This
was part of a feat that U.S. imperialism was able to accomplish that ultimately overshadowed
British, French, German, and Japanese imperialism, which Brzezinski reveals in his book, The
Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives : an unparalleled
military establishment that, by far, had the most effective global reach which allowed the U.S.
to "project forces over long distances", helping it to assert its global domination and impose
its "political will". And what makes the American Empire distinct from the Japanese Empire,
British Empire, and other European empires is that one of the bases for its ideology is the
socially constructed international hierarchy of nations, and not races as was the case with the
other aforementioned empires. This constructed international hierarchy of nations is more
effective because it means not only greater expansionism, but also the greater ability to
exercise global primacy and supremacy. More specific to Central Asia and the Middle East, the
Wahhabist and Salafist
groups propped up by the CIA were always
intended to nurture sectarianism and discord in order to counter a mass, broad-based united
front of nations against imperialism -- an example of divide-and-conquer, which is an age-old
tradition of empire, except this time with Neoliberal characteristics.
Therefore, the
Mujahideen against Afghanistan should not be thought of simply as "the Afghan trap", but rather
as the U.S. subjugation and plundering of West and Central Asia and an important milestone
(albeit a cynical one) in shaping its foreign policy with regards to the region for many years
to come. If one thing has remained a constant in U.S. foreign policy towards West and Central
Asia, it is its strategic partnership with the oil autocracy of Saudi Arabia, which acts as the
United States' steward in safeguarding the profits of American petroleum corporations and
actively assists Western powers in crushing secular Arab and Central Asian nationalist
resistance against imperialism. The Saudi monarchy would again be called on by the U.S.
government in 2011 in Syria to assist in the repeated formula of funding and arming so-called
"moderate rebels" in the efforts to destabilize the country. Once again, the ultimate goal in
this more recent imperial venture is to contain Russia.
Cold War 2.0? American Supremacy marches on
The present-day anti-Russia hysteria is reminiscent of the anti-Soviet propaganda of the
Cold War era; while anti-communism is not the central theme today, one thing remains the same:
the fact that the U.S. Empire is (once again) facing a formidable challenge to its position in
the world. After the Yeltsin years were over, and under Vladimir Putin, Russia's economy
eventually recovered and moved towards a more dirigiste economy; and on top of that, it moved
away from the NATO fold, which triggered the old antagonistic relationship with the United
States. Russia has also decided to follow the global trend of taking the step towards
reducing reliance on the
U.S. dollar , which is no doubt a source of annoyance to the U.S. capitalist class. It
seems that a third world war in the near future is becoming more likely as the U.S. inches
closer to a direct military confrontation against Russia and, more recently, China. History
does appear to be repeating itself. When the government of Bashar al Assad called on Moscow for
assistance in fighting against the NATO-backed terrorists, it certainly was reminiscent of when
the PDPA had done the same many years before. Thus far, the Syrian Arab Republic has continued
to withstand the destabilization efforts carried out by the Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist
groups and Kurdish militias at the behest of the United States, and has not collapsed as Libya,
Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan did.
But what often gets overlooked is the repeated Brzezinskist formula of funding highly
reactionary forces and promoting them as "revolutionaries" to Western audiences in order to
fight governments that defy the global dictatorship of the United States and refuse to allow
the West to exploit their natural resources and labour power. As Karl Marx once said , "Men
make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under
self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted
from the past." Such a phenomenon is no accident or a mere mistake. The geopolitical
instability that followed after the overthrow of the PDPA ensures that no sound, united, and
formidable opposition against U.S. imperialism will emerge for an indefinite number of years;
and it seems that Libya, where the Brzezinskist-style of regime change also saw success and
which is now a hotbed for the slave trade, is on the same path as Afghanistan. This is all a
part of what Lenin calls moribund capitalism
when he discussed the economic essence of imperialism; and by that, he meant that imperialism
carries the contradictions of capitalism to the extreme
limit . American global monopoly had grown out of U.S. foreign policy, and it should go
without saying that the American Empire cannot tolerate losing its Dollar Supremacy, especially
when the global rate of profit is falling. And if too many nations reject U.S. efforts to
infiltrate their markets and force foreign finance capital exports onto their economies in
order to gain a monopoly over the resources, as well as to exploit the labour of their working
people, it would surely spell a sharp decline in American Dollar hegemony. The fact that the
United States was willing to go as far as to back mercenaries to attack the former Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan and fight the Soviet Union, as well as to spend billions of dollars on
a highly elaborate but effective propaganda campaign, shows a sign of desperation of the
American Empire in maintaining its global hegemony.
Since the end of World War II the United States has been, and is by and large still, the
overwhelming world-dominating power. It is true that the American Empire is in decline, in
light of increasing trends towards "de-Dollarization," as well as the rise of China and Russia
which pose as challenges to U.S. interests. Naturally, Washington will desperately try to cling
on to its number one position in the world by accelerating the growth of its global monopolies
-- whether it is through placing wholly unnecessary tariffs against competitors such as China,
or threatening to completely cut
Venezuelan and Iranian oil out of the global market -- even if it means an increasing drive
towards World War III. The current global economic order which Washington elites have been
instrumental in shaping over the past several decades reflects the interests of the global
capitalist class to such an extent that the working class is threatened with yet another world
war despite the unimaginable carnage witnessed during the first two.
When we look back at these historical events to help make sense of the present, we see how
powerful mass media can be and how it is used as a tool of U.S. foreign policy to manipulate
and control public opinion. Foreign policy is about the economic relationships between
countries. Key to understanding how U.S. imperialism functions is in its foreign policy and how
it carries it out -- which adds up to plundering from relatively small or poorer nations more
than a share of wealth and resources that can be normally produced in common commercial
exchanges, forcing them to be indebted; and if any of them resist, then they will almost
certainly be subjected to military threats.
With the great wealth that allowed it to build a military that can "project forces over long
distances," the United States is in a unique position in history, to say the least. However, as
we have seen above, the now four decade-long war on Afghanistan was not only fought on a
military front considering the psy-ops and the propaganda involved. If anything, the Soviet
Union lost on the propaganda front in the end.
From Afghanistan we learn not only of the origins of Al Qaeda, to which the boom in the
opioid-addiction epidemic has ties, or why today we have the phenomenon of an anti-Russia
Western "left" that parrots imperialist propaganda and seems very eager to see that piece of
Cold War history repeat itself in Syria. We also learn that we cannot de-link the events of the
2001 direct U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and what followed from those of 1979;
Afghanistan's colonial-feudal past, its break from that with the 1978 Saur Revolution, and the
U.S.-led Mujahideen are all as much of a part of its history (and the Greater Middle East, by
extension) as the events of 2001. It cannot be stressed enough that it is those historical
conditions, particularly as they relate to U.S. foreign policy, that helped to shape the
ongoing conflict today.
Obviously, we cannot undo the past. It is not in the interests of the working class
anywhere, in the Global South or in the Global North, to see a third world war happen, as such
a war would have catastrophic consequences for everyone -- in fact, it could potentially
destroy all of humanity. Building a new and revitalized anti-war movement in the imperialist
nations is a given, but it also requires a more sophisticated understanding of U.S. foreign
policy. Without historical context, Western mass media will continue to go unchallenged,
weaning audiences on a steady diet of "moderate rebels" propaganda and effectively silencing
the victims of imperialism. It is necessary to unite workers across the whole world according
to their shared interests in order to effectively fight and defeat imperialism and to establish
a just, egalitarian, and sustainable world under socialism. Teaching the working class
everywhere the real history of such conflicts as the one in Afghanistan is an important part of
developing the revolutionary consciousness necessary to build a strong global revolutionary
movement against imperialism.
*
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Originally published by LLCO.org on March 30, 2019. For the full-length article and
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"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging
their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything
Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's
direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine
and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' (
5 ).
Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country,
their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was
the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald
Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).
By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin
concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study
this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any
entente between Moscow and Washington.
Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump
and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe
an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails
fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' (
8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.
The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their
middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture (
9 ). So they were searching for any information
or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone
had his particular motive for striking the same victim.
The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such
as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects
of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During
the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because
he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton (
10 ).
Ambitions of a 'deep state'?
The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military
crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press
criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though
that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying
the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.
Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass
surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had
become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with
hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as
well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing
-- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging
those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).
The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'.
'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in
Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president
on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about
Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur (
12 ).
Covert opposition to Trump
The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has
transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative
bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert
opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.
This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses
the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia.
Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no
one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but
by the Obama administration?
The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director
James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II.
That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose.
Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.
The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor
in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance
of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy'
and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time
in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'
Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining
resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President
Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute
to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.
No longer getting his way
But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers
(trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation
of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike
Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'
At this stage, it doesn't
matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own
conclusions.
"... Historians will study this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any entente between Moscow and Washington. ..."
"... Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' ( 8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts. ..."
"... This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia. Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but by the Obama administration? ..."
"... Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute to Montenegro, NATO's newest member. ..."
"... At this stage, it doesn't matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own conclusions. ..."
Trump was after a good deal from Russia. A new partnership would have reversed deteriorating relations between the powers by encouraging
their alliance against ISIS and recognising the importance of Ukraine to Russia's security. Current US paranoia about everything
Kremlin-related has encouraged amnesia about what President Barack Obama said in 2016, after the annexation of the Crimea and Russia's
direct intervention in Syria. He too put the danger posed by President Vladimir Putin into perspective: the interventions in Ukraine
and the Middle East were, Obama said, improvised 'in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp' (
5 ).
Obama went on: 'The Russians can't change us or significantly weaken us. They are a smaller country, they are a weaker country,
their economy doesn't produce anything that anybody wants to buy, except oil and gas and arms.' What he feared most about Putin was
the sympathy he inspired in Trump and his supporters: '37% of Republican voters approve of Putin, the former head of the KGB. Ronald
Reagan would roll over in his grave' ( 6 ).
By January 2017, Reagan's eternal rest was no longer threatened. 'Presidents come and go but the policy never changes,' Putin
concluded ( 7 ). Historians will study
this period when there was a convergence in the objectives of the US intelligence agencies, the leaders of the Hillary Clinton wing
of the Democratic Party, the majority of Republican politicians and the anti-Trump media. That common objective was stopping any
entente between Moscow and Washington.
Each group had its own motive. The intelligence community and elements in the Pentagon feared a rapprochement between Trump
and Putin would deprive them of a 'presentable' enemy once ISIS's military power was destroyed. The Clinton camp was keen to ascribe
an unexpected defeat to a cause other than the candidate and her inept campaign; Moscow's alleged hacking of Democratic Party emails
fitted the bill. And the neocons, who 'promoted the Iraq war, detest Putin and consider Israel's security non-negotiable' (
8 ), hated Trump's neo-isolationist instincts.
The media, especially the New York Times and Washington Post, eagerly sought a new Watergate scandal and knew their
middle-class, urban, educated readers loathe Trump for his vulgarity, affection for the far right, violence and lack of culture (
9 ). So they were searching for any information
or rumour that could cause his removal or force a resignation. As in Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, everyone
had his particular motive for striking the same victim.
The intrigue developed quickly as these four areas have fairly porous boundaries. The understanding between Republican hawks such
as John McCain, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the military-industrial complex was a given. The architects
of recent US imperial adventures, especially Iraq, had not enjoyed the 2016 campaign or Trump's jibes about their expertise. During
the campaign, some 50 intellectuals and officials announced that, despite being Republicans, they would not support Trump because
he 'would put at risk our country's national security and wellbeing.' Some went so far as to vote for Clinton (
10 ).
Ambitions of a 'deep state'?
The press feared that Trump's incompetence would threaten the US-dominated international order. It had no problem with military
crusades, especially when emblazoned with grand humanitarian, internationalist or progressive principles. According to the press
criteria, Putin and his predilection for rightwing nationalists were obvious culprits. But so were Saudi Arabia or Israel, though
that did not prevent the Saudis being able to count on the ferociously anti-Russian Wall Street Journal, or Israel enjoying
the support of almost all US media, despite having a far-right element in its government.
Just over a week before Trump took office, journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Edward Snowden story that revealed the mass
surveillance programmes run by the National Security Agency, warned of the direction of travel. He observed that the US media had
become the intelligence services' 'most valuable instrument, much of which reflexively reveres, serves, believes, and sides with
hidden intelligence officials.' This at a time when 'Democrats, still reeling from their unexpected and traumatic election loss as
well as a systemic collapse of their party, seemingly divorced further and further from reason with each passing day, are willing
-- eager -- to embrace any claim, cheer any tactic, align with any villain, regardless of how unsupported, tawdry and damaging
those behaviours might be' ( 11 ).
The anti-Russian coalition hadn't then achieved all its objectives, but Greenwald already discerned the ambitions of a 'deep state'.
'There really is, at this point,' he said 'obvious open warfare between this unelected but very powerful faction that resides in
Washington and sees presidents come and go, on the one hand, and the person that the American democracy elected to be the president
on the other.' One suspicion, fed by the intelligence services, galvanised all Trump's enemies: Moscow had compromising secrets about
Trump -- financial, electoral, sexual -- capable of paralysing him should a crisis between the two countries occur (
12 ).
Covert opposition to Trump
The suspicion of such a murky understanding, summed up by the pro-Clinton economist Paul Krugman as a 'Trump-Putin ticket', has
transformed the anti-Russian activity into a domestic political weapon against a president increasingly hated outside the ultraconservative
bloc. It is no longer unusual to hear leftwing activists turn FBI or CIA apologists, since these agencies became a home for a covert
opposition to Trump and the source of many leaks.
This is why the Democratic Party data hack, which the US intelligence services allege is the work of the Russians, obsesses
the party, and the press. It strikes two targets: delegitimising Trump's election and stopping his promotion of a thaw with Russia.
Has Washington's aggrieved reaction to a foreign power's interference in a state's domestic affairs, and its elections, struck no
one as odd? Why do just a handful of people point out that, not long ago, Angela Merkel's phone was tapped not by the Kremlin but
by the Obama administration?
The silence was once broken when the Republican representative for North Carolina, Tom Tillis, questioned former CIA director
James Clapper in January: 'The United States has been involved in one way or another in 81 different elections since World War II.
That doesn't include coups or the regime changes, some tangible evidence where we have tried to affect an outcome to our purpose.
Russia has done it some 36 times.' This perspective rarely disturbs the New York Times 's fulminations against Moscow's trickery.
The Times also failed to inform younger readers that Russia's president Boris Yeltsin, who picked Putin as his successor
in 1999, had been re-elected in 1996, though seriously ill and often drunk, in a fraudulent election conducted with the assistance
of US advisers and the overt support of President Bill Clinton. The Times hailed the result as 'a victory for Russian democracy'
and declared that 'the forces of democracy and reform won a vital but not definitive victory in Russia yesterday For the first time
in history, a free Russia has freely chosen its leader.'
Now the Times is in the vanguard of those preparing psychologically for conflict with Russia. There is almost no remaining
resistance to its line. On the right, as the Wall Street Journal called for the US to arm Ukraine on 3 August, Vice-President
Mike Pence spoke on a visit to Estonia about 'the spectre of [Russian] aggression', encouraged Georgia to join NATO, and paid tribute
to Montenegro, NATO's newest member.
No longer getting his way
But the Times, far from worrying about these provocative gestures coinciding with heightened tensions between great powers
(trade sanctions against Russia, Moscow's expulsion of US diplomats), poured oil on the fire. On 2 August it praised the reaffirmation
of 'America's commitment to defend democratic nations against those countries that would undermine them' and regretted that Mike
Pence's views 'aren't as eagerly embraced and celebrated by the man he works for back in the White House.'
At this stage, it doesn't
matter any more what Trump thinks. He is no longer able to get his way on the issue. Moscow has noted this and is drawing its own
conclusions.
There were some reports quoted in Alexander Mercouris has a much rosier
view of Trump's intentions
that the US military brass are vigorously apposed to the Bolton and Pompeo efforts to provoke war against Iran. The Pentagon has found
its niche pounding upon third world countries which can't defend themselves, and that's not Iran.
@Endgame Napoleon Americans
probably don't understand Russia. Americans don't even mostly understand their own history. "
and they inquire why they hate us .
Don Bacon | May 11, 2019 11:56:00 AM | 23
@ ToivoS 16
the US military brass are vigorously apposed to the Bolton and Pompeo efforts to provoke war against Iran.
Yes, for the reasons I noted in my 4 above. The Pentagon has found its niche pounding upon third world countries which can't
defend themselves, and that's not Iran. The recent US defeats in Iraq and Syria also sent a message. So the Pentagon is now content
with aerial bombing of Afghanistan and Somalia while spending big bucks to (supposedly) contend with Russia and China, which of
course is also out of the question when it comes to execution.
The Pentagon materiel acquisition system is riddled with corruption and poor management, the army is handicapped by low recruiting,
drugs and obesity, the navy suffers from performance and maintenance problems, and the air force has been decimated by personnel
problems and by an overly zealous procurement of useless F-35 prototypes. So bombers dropping bombs on villages in poor countries
is as far as the Pentagon can go.
On May 14/2019 Pompeo is to meet Lavrov in Sochi! ..."Pompeo is scheduled to meet with Putin and Lavrov, the Russian foreign
minister, in Sochi on May 14 to “discuss the full range of bilateral and multilateral challenges.” Before that, he will meet with
officials at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow."...
A messenger boy on the errant trip overseas from his handlers. Something to tell in person, mano a mano no less.
..."“On May 13, he will arrive in Russia to meet with his team at U.S. Embassy Moscow before meeting with U.S. business leaders
and U.S. exchange alumni. Secretary Pompeo will lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,” State Department spokeswoman
Morgan Ortagus said."... That's rich, a nobody faces an unknown.
A couple of years ago I happened to be
reading the World War II memoirs of Sisley Huddleston, an American journalist living in France. Although
long since forgotten, Huddleston had spent decades as one of our most prominent foreign correspondents, and
dozens of his major articles
had appeared in
The Atlantic Monthly
,
The New Republic
,
and
Harpers
, while he had authored some nineteen books. Given such eminence, his personal
relationships reached far into elite circles, with one of his oldest and closest friends being William
Bullitt, the American ambassador to France, who had previously opened our first Soviet embassy under FDR.
Huddleston's credibility seemed
impeccable, which is why I was so shocked at his firsthand account of wartime Vichy, totally contrary to
what I had absorbed from my introductory history textbooks. While I had always had the impression that
Petain's collaborationist regime possessed little legitimacy, this was not at all the case. Near unanimous
majorities of both houses of the duly-elected French parliament had voted the elderly field marshal into
office despite his own deep personal misgivings, regarding him as France's only hope of a unifying national
savior following the country's crushing 1940 defeat at Hitler's hands.
Although Huddleston's sympathies were
hardly with the Germans, he noted the scrupulous correctness they exhibited following their overwhelming
victory, policies that continued throughout the early years of the Occupation. And although he had on a
couple of occasions performed minor services for the nascent Resistance movement, when the 1944 Normandy
landings and the subsequent German withdrawal suddenly opened the doors of power to the anti-Petain forces,
they engaged in an orgy of ideological bloodletting probably without precedent in French history, far
surpassing the infamous Reign of Terror of the French Revolution, with perhaps 100,000 or more civilians
being summarily butchered on the basis of little or no evidence, often just to settle personal scores. Some
of the worst of the bloodshed came at the hands of the Communist exiles of the Spanish Civil War, who had
found shelter in France after their defeat and now eagerly took an opportunity to turn the tables and
massacre the same sort of "bourgeois" class-enemies who had defeated them in that previous conflict just a
few years earlier.
As I sought to weigh Huddleston's
testimony against the traditional narrative of wartime France I had always fully accepted, most of the
factors seemed to point in his favor. After all, his journalistic credentials were impeccable and as a very
well-connected direct observer of the events he reported, his statements surely counted for a great deal.
Meanwhile, it appeared that most of the standard narrative dominating our history books had been constructed
a generation or so later by writers living on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, whose conclusions may
have been substantially influenced by the black-and-white ideological framework that had become rigidly
enshrined at elite American universities.
However, I couldn't help noticing one
huge, gaping flaw in Huddleston's account, an error so serious that it cast grave doubts upon his entire
credibility as a journalist. Towards the beginning of his book, he devotes a page or so to casually
mentioning that in the early months of 1940, the French and British were preparing to launch an attack
against the neutral Soviet Union, using their bases in Syria and Iraq for a strategic bombing offensive
meant to destroy Stalin's Baku oil fields of the Caucasus, one of the world's leading sources of that vital
commodity.
Obviously, all military organizations
produce a wealth of hypothetical contingency plans covering all possible situations and opponents, but
Huddleston had somehow misunderstood such possibilities or rumors as outright fact. According to him, the
Allied bombing of the Soviet Union had been scheduled to begin March 15th, but was initially delayed and
rescheduled for various political reasons. Then a few weeks later, the German panzer divisions swept through
the Ardennes forest, surrounded the French armies, and captured Paris, aborting the planned Allied
bombardment of Russia.
Given that the USSR played the leading
role in Germany's eventual defeat, an early Allied attack upon the Soviet homeland would surely have changed
the outcome of the war. Although Huddleston's bizarre fantasies had somehow gotten the best of him, he was
hardly incorrect in exclaiming "What a narrow escape!"
The notion that the Allies were
preparing to launch a major bombing offensive against the Soviet Union just a few months after the outbreak
of World War II was obviously absurd, so ridiculous a notion that not a hint of that long-debunked rumor had
ever gotten into the standard history texts I had read on the European conflict. But for Huddleston to have
still clung to such nonsensical beliefs even several years after the end of the war raised large questions
about his gullibility or even his sanity. I wondered whether I could trust even a single word he said about
anything else.
However, not long afterward I encountered
quite a surprise in a 2017 article published in
The National Interest
, an eminently respectable
periodical. The short piece carried the descriptive headline
"In the Early Days of World War II, Britain and France Planned to Bomb Russia."
The contents absolutely
flabbergasted me, and with Huddleston's credibility now fully established -- and the credibility of my standard
history textbooks equally demolished -- I went ahead and substantially drew upon his account for my long
article
"American Pravda: Post-War France and Post-War Germany."
I hardly regard myself as a specialist
on the history of World War II, but I initially felt deeply embarrassed to have spent my entire life
completely ignorant of that crucial early turning-point in the huge conflict. However, once I had carefully
read that
National Interest
article, my shame quickly dissipated, for the it was obvious that the
author, Michael Peck, along with his editors and readers had been equally unaware of those long-buried
facts. Indeed, the article had originally run in 2015, but was republished a couple of years later due to
enormous reader demand. As near as I can tell, that single 1100 word essay constituted the first and only
time the momentous events described had received significant public attention in the seventy years since the
end of the war.
Peck's discussion greatly fleshed out
Huddleston's brief, offhand remarks. The French and British high commands had prepared their enormous bomber
offensive,
Operation Pike
, in hopes of destroying Russia's oil resources, and their unmarked
reconnaissance flights had already overflown Baku, photographing the locations of the intended targets. The
Allies were convinced that the best strategy for defeating Germany was to eliminate its sources of oil and
other vital raw materials, and with Russia being Hitler's leading supplier, they decided that destroying the
Soviet oil fields seemed a logical strategy.
However, Peck emphasized the severe
errors in this reasoning. In actual fact, only a small fraction of Hitler's oil came from Russia, so the
true impact of even an entirely successful campaign would have been low. And although the Allied commanders
were convinced that weeks of continuous bombardment -- apparently representing the world's largest
strategic-bombing campaign to that date -- would quickly eliminate all Soviet oil production, later events in
the war suggested that those projections were wildly optimistic, with vastly larger and more powerful aerial
attacks generally inflicting far less permanent destruction than expected. So the damage to the Soviets
would probably not have been great, and the resulting full military alliance between Hitler and Stalin would
surely have reversed the outcome of the war. This was reflected in the original 2015 title of the same
article
"Operation Pike: How a Crazy Plan to Bomb Russia Almost Lost World War II."
But although hindsight allows us to
recognize the disastrous consequences of that ill-fated bombing plan, we should not be overly harsh upon the
political leaders and strategists of the time. Military technology was in tremendous flux, and facts that
seemed obvious by 1943 or 1944 were far less clear at the beginning of the conflict. Based upon their World
War I experience, most analysts believed that neither the Germans nor the Allies had any hope of achieving
an early breakthrough on the Western front, while the Soviets were suspected of being a feeble military
power, perhaps constituting the "soft underbelly" of the German war machine.
Also, some of the most far-reaching
political consequences of an Allied attack upon the Soviet Union would have been totally unknown to the
French and British leaders then considering it. Although they were certainly aware of the powerful Communist
movements in their own countries, all closely aligned with the USSR, only many years later did it become
clear that the top leadership of the Roosevelt Administration was honeycombed by numerous agents fully loyal
to Stalin, with the final proof awaiting the release of the Venona Decrypts in the 1990s. So if the Allied
forces had suddenly gone to war against the Soviets, the total hostility of those influential individuals
would have greatly reduced any future prospects of substantial American military assistance, let alone
eventual intervention in the European conflict.
Thus, if the Germans had for any reason
delayed their 1940 assault on France for a few weeks, the pending Allied attack would have brought the
Soviets into the war on the other side, ensuring their defeat. It seems undeniable that Hitler's fortuitous
action inadvertently saved the Allies from the disastrous consequences of their foolish plans.
Although exploring the dramatic
implications of the 1940 outbreak of an Allied-Soviet war may be an intriguing instance of alternative
history, as an intellectual exercise it has little relevance to our present-day world. Far more important is
what the account reveals about the reliability of the standard historical narrative that most of us have
always accepted as real.
The first matter to explore was whether
the evidence for the planned Allied attack on the Soviets was actually as strong as was suggested by the
National Interest
article. The underlying information came from
Operation Pike
, published in
2000 by Patrick R. Osborn in an academic series entitled
Contributions in Military Studies
, so I
recently ordered the book and read it to evaluate the remarkable claims being made.
Although rather dry, the 300 page
monograph meticulously documents its case, with the overwhelming bulk of the material being drawn from
official archives and other government records. There seems not the slightest doubt about the reality of the
events being described, and the Allied leaders even made extensive diplomatic efforts to enlist Turkey and
Iran in their planned attack against the Soviet Union.
While the primary Allied motive was to
eliminate the flow of necessary raw materials to Germany, there were broader goals as well. Forced
collectivization of Soviet agriculture during the 1930s had led to the widespread slaughter of farm animals,
which were then replaced by tractors requiring gasoline. The Allied leadership believed that if they
succeeded in eliminating the Soviet oil supply, the resulting fuel shortage would lead to a collapse in
agricultural production, probably producing a famine that might sweep the Communist regime from power. The
Allies had always been intensely hostile to the Soviets, and the planned operation was actually named for a
certain Col. Pike, a British officer who had died at Bolshevik hands in the Caucuses during a previous
military intervention twenty years earlier.
This anti-Soviet planning rapidly
accelerated after Stalin's brutal attack upon tiny Finland in late 1939. The unexpectedly fierce Finnish
resistance led the Western powers to expel the USSR from the League of Nations as a blatant aggressor, and
inspired widespread demands for military intervention among both the political elites and the general
public, with serious proposals being considered to send several Allied divisions to Scandinavia to fight the
Russians on behalf of the Finns. Indeed, during much of this period Allied hostility seems to have been far
greater towards the Soviets than towards Germany, despite the nominal state of war against the latter, with
French sentiments being particularly strong. As one British elected official remarked, "One has the
impression that France is at war with Russia and merely on very unfriendly terms with Germany."
The Allies intended to use Polish exile
forces in their ground combat against the Soviets, perhaps even sparking a Polish uprising against the hated
Communist occupiers of their homeland. Osborn notes that if word of this plan had leaked to Stalin, that
might explain why it was at this time that he signed the official orders directing the NKVD to immediately
execute the 15,000 Polish officers and police whom he already held as POWs, an incident eventually known as
the Katyn Forest Massacre, which ranks as one of the world's worst wartime atrocities.
All of these military plans and
internal discussions by the British and French were kept entirely secret at the time, and their archives
remained sealed to historians for many decades. But in the opening of his fascinating account, Osborn
explains that after the victorious German armies moved towards Paris in 1940, the French government
attempted to destroy or evacuate all its secret diplomatic files, and a trainload of this very sensitive
material was captured by German forces 100 miles from Paris, including the complete record of the plans to
attack the USSR. In hopes of scoring an international propaganda coup, Germany soon published these crucial
documents, providing both English translations and facsimile copies of the originals. Although it is unclear
whether these disclosures received any significant Western media coverage at the time, Stalin surely became
aware of this detailed confirmation of the information he had already gotten in bits and pieces from his
network of well-placed Communist spies, and it must have deepened his distrust of the West. The story would
also have quickly become known to all well-informed observers, explaining why Huddleston was so confident in
casually mentioning the planned Allied attack in his 1952 memoirs.
After Hitler's
Barbarossa
invasion of the USSR in June 1941 suddenly brought the Soviets into the war on the Allied side, these
highly-embarrassing facts would have naturally dropped into obscurity. But it seems quite astonishing that
such "politically correct" amnesia became so deeply entrenched within the academic research community that
virtually all traces of the remarkable story disappeared for the six decades that preceded the publication
of Osborn's book. More English-language books may have been published on World War II during those years
than on any other subject, yet it seems possible that those many tens of millions of pages contained not a
single paragraph describing the momentous Allied plans to attack Russia in the early days of the war,
perhaps even leaving Huddleston's brief, offhand remarks in 1952 as the most comprehensive account. Osborn
himself notes the "precious little attention" given this matter by scholars of the Second World War, citing
a 1973 academic journal article as one of the very few notable exceptions. We should be seriously concerned
that events of such monumental importance spent more than two generations almost totally excluded from our
historical records.
ORDER IT NOW
Moreover, even the release of Osborn's
massively-documented academic study in 2000 seems to have been almost completely ignored by World War II
historians. Consider, for example,
Absolute War
published in 2007 by acclaimed military historian
Chris Bellamy, an 800 page work whose glowing cover-blurbs characterize it as the "authoritative" account of
the role of Soviet Russia in the Second World War. The detailed 25 page index contains no listing for "Baku"
and the only glancing reference to the indisputable Allied preparations to attack the USSR in early 1940 is
a single obscure sentence appearing 15 months and 150 pages later in the aftermath of
Barbarossa
:
"But on 23 June the NKGB reported that the Chief of the British Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, had suggested
cabling the commands in India and the Middle East ordering them to stop planning to bomb the Baku oilfields,
which, it had been feared, might be used to supply the Germans." Osborn's revelations seem to have vanished
without a trace until they were finally noticed and publicized 15 years later in
The National Interest
.
While it is quite easy to understand
why historians avoided the subject for the first couple of decades following the end of the Second World
War, once a generation or two had passed, one might reasonably expect to see some reassertion of scholarly
objectivity.
Operation Pike
was of the greatest possible importance to the course of the war, so
how could it have been almost totally ignored by virtually every writer on the subject? Allied preparations
in early 1940 to unleash the largest strategic bombing offensive in world history against the Soviet Union
hardly seems the sort of boring, obscure detail that would be quickly forgotten.
Even if the first generation of war
chroniclers carefully excluded it from their narratives to avoid ideological embarrassment, they must surely
have been aware of the facts given German publication of the documents. And although their younger
successors had seen no mention of it in the books they studied, one would expect that their mentors had
occasionally whispered to them about some of the "hidden wartime secrets" left out of the standard
narrative. Moreover, Osborn notes that discussion of the facts did very occasionally appear in professional
academic journals, and one might assume that a single such instance would have spread like wildfire within
the entire academic community. Yet even after Osborn's massively documented volume appeared in a respectable
academic series, the silence remained absolutely deafening. The case of
Operation Pike
demonstrates
that we must exercise extreme caution in accepting the accuracy and completeness of what we have been told.
Such conclusions have obvious
consequences. My website tends to attract a large number of commenters, of widely varying quality. One of
them, an immigrant from Soviet Armenia calling himself "Avery" seems quite knowledgeable and level-headed,
though intensely hostile to Turks and Turkey. A couple of years ago, one of my articles on World War II
provoked
an intriguing comment
from him:
During the Battle of Stalingrad,
Turkey, which was officially neutral but was secretly cooperating with Nazi Germany, had assembled a huge
invasion force at the border of USSR (Armenia SSR). If Germans had won at Stalingrad, Turks were going to
invade, race to Baku and link up with the German forces there, coming down from Stalingrad to grab the
oilfields.
When Paulus's army was surrounded and annihilated, Turks quickly left the border for their barracks.
Stalin never forgot the Turk treachery
and never forgave.
When Germany surrendered, Stalin
assembled huge armies in Armenia SSR and Georgia SSR. The plan was to invade and throw the Turks out of
East Turkey/West Armenia.
The detonation of two American atomic
bombs convinced Stalin to stand down. Some believe US detonated the two bombs not to force Japan's
surrender, but as a message to Stalin.
When questioned, he admitted he was
unaware of any reference in a Western source,
but added
:
It was common knowledge in Armenia
SSR, where I am originally from.
WW2 war vets, old timers, discussed it all the time ..seeing more Red Army troops and military hardware
assembling near the borders of Armenia SSR and Georgia SSR than they'd ever seen before. Then, they were
all gone .
Under normal circumstances, weighing the
universal silence of all Western historians against the informal claims of an anonymous commenter who was
relying upon the stories he'd heard from old veterans would hardly be a difficult choice. But I wonder
The official documents discussed by
Osborn demonstrate that the British made considerable efforts to enlist Turkish forces in their planned
attack upon the USSR, with the Turks going back and forth on the matter until Britain finally abandoned the
project following the Fall of France. But if the Turks had strongly considered such a military adventure in
1940, it seems quite plausible that they would have been far more eager to do so 1942, given the huge losses
the Soviets had already suffered at German hands, and with a very formidable German army approaching the
Caucasus.
Soon after the war, Turkey became one of
America's most crucial Cold War allies against the Soviets, given a central role in the establishment of the
Truman Doctrine and the creation of NATO. Any hint that the same Turkish government had come very close to
joining Hitler's Axis and attacking Russia as a Nazi ally just a few years earlier would have been extremely
damaging to US interests. Such facts would have been scrupulously excluded from all our histories of the
war.
Until a couple of weeks ago, I still
probably would have leaned towards favoring the united front of all Western historians against the causal
remarks of a single anonymous commenter on my website. But after reading Osborn's book, I now think the
anonymous commenter is more likely correct. This is a rather sad personal verdict upon the current
credibility of our historical profession.
These important considerations become
particularly relevant when we attempt to understand the circumstances surrounding
Operation Barbarossa
,
Germany's 1941 attack upon the Soviet Union, which constituted the central turning point of the war. Both at
the time and during the half-century which followed, Western historians uniformly claimed that the surprise
assault had caught an overly-trusting Stalin completely unaware, with Hitler's motive being his dream of
creating the huge German land-empire that he had hinted at in the pages of
Mein Kampf
, published
sixteen years earlier.
But in 1990 a former Soviet military
intelligence officer who had defected to the West and was living in Britain dropped a major bombshell.
Writing under the pen-name Viktor Suvorov, he had already published a number of highly-regarded books on the
armed forces of the USSR, but in
Icebreaker
he now claimed that his extensive past research in the
Soviet archives had revealed that by 1941 Stalin had amassed enormous offensive military forces and
positioned them all along the border, preparing to attack and easily overwhelm the greatly outnumbered and
outgunned forces of the
Wehrmacht
, quickly conquering all of Europe.
As I summarized the Suvorov Hypothesis
in
an article
last year:
And so, just as in our traditional
narrative, we see that in the weeks and months leading up to Barbarossa, the most powerful offensive
military force in the history of the world was quietly assembled in secret along the German-Russian
border, preparing for the order that would unleash their surprise attack. The enemy's unprepared airforce
was to be destroyed on the ground in the first days of the battle, and enormous tank columns would begin
deep penetration thrusts, surrounding and trapping the opposing forces, achieving a classic
blitzkrieg
victory, and ensuring the rapid occupation of vast territories. But the forces preparing
this unprecedented war of conquest were Stalin's, and his military juggernaut would surely have seized
all of Europe, probably soon followed by the remainder of the Eurasian landmass.
Then at almost the last moment,
Hitler suddenly realized the strategic trap into which he had fallen, and ordered his heavily outnumbered
and outgunned troops into a desperate surprise attack of their own on the assembling Soviets,
fortuitously catching them at the very point at which their own final preparations for sudden attack had
left them most vulnerable, and thereby snatching a major initial victory from the jaws of certain defeat.
Huge stockpiles of Soviet ammunition and weaponry had been positioned close to the border to supply the
army of invasion into Germany, and these quickly fell into German hands, providing an important addition
to their own woefully inadequate resources.
Although almost totally ignored in the
English-language world, Suvorov's seminal book soon became an unprecedented bestseller in Russia, Germany,
and many other parts of the world, and together with several follow-up volumes, his five million copies in
print established him as the most widely-read military historian in the history of the world. Meanwhile, the
English-language media and academic communities scrupulously maintained their complete blackout of the
ongoing worldwide debate, with no publishing house even willing to produce an English edition of Suvorov's
books until an editor at the prestigious Naval Academy Press finally broke the embargo nearly two decades
later. Such near-total censorship of the massive planned Soviet attack in 1941 seems quite similar to the
near-total censorship of the undeniable reality of the massive planned Allied attack on the Soviets in the
preceding year.
Although the Suvorov Hypothesis has
inspired decades of fierce academic debate and been the subject of international conferences, it has been
scrupulously ignored by our Anglophone authors, who have made no serious attempt to defend their traditional
narrative and refute the vast accumulation of persuasive evidence upon which it is based. This leads me to
believe that Suvorov's analysis is probably correct.
A decade ago, a solitary writer first
drew my attention to Suvorov's ground-breaking research, and as an emigrant Russian Slav living in the West,
he was hardly favorable to the German dictator. But he closed his review with a remarkable statement:
Therefore, if any of us is free to
write, publish, and read this today, it follows that in some not inconsequential part our gratitude for
this must go to Hitler. And if someone wants to arrest me for saying what I have just said, I make no
secret of where I live.
For almost thirty years, our
English-language media has almost entirely suppressed any serious discussion of the Suvorov Hypothesis, and
this is hardly the only important aspect of Soviet history that has remained hidden from public scrutiny.
Indeed, on some crucial matters, the falsehoods and distortions have greatly increased rather than
diminished over the decades. No example is more obvious than in the ongoing attempts to conceal the enormous
role played by Jews in the Bolshevik Revolution and worldwide Communism generally. As
I wrote last year
:
In the early years of the Bolshevik
Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming role of Jews in that event, nor their similar
preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For
example, former British Minister
Winston Churchill in 1920
denounced the "terrorist Jews" who had seized control of Russia and other
parts of Europe, noting that "the majority of the leading figures are Jews" and stating that "In the
Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing," while lamenting the horrors these
Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.
Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton,
former Russia correspondent of the
Times of London
, provided a very detailed summary of the
enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book
Russia's Agony
and 1920 book
The Last Days of the
Romanovs
, although one of the most explicit chapters of the latter
was apparently excluded from the English language edition
. Not long afterward, the facts regarding
the enormous financial support provided to the Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff
and Aschberg were widely reported in the mainstream media.
Jews and Communism were just as
strongly tied together in America, and for years
the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish
. When they were
finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable
fraction of America's Communist spies came from that ethnic background.
A personal anecdote tends to confirm
these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent
computer scientist, with whom I'd become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he
happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name,
I expressed my surprise, saying that I'd thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He
said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not,
which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always
sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were
Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a "token."
However, once Communism sharply fell
out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading "Red Baiters" such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went
to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many
years later
Richard Nixon casually spoke in private
of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators
had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were
Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even
though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.
This last point is an important one,
since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of
the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as "conspiracy
theories." Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia provides an entire 3,500 word article
attacking the notion of
"Jewish Bolshevism"
as an "antisemitic canard."
In
a subsequent article
, I summarized several of the numerous sources describing this obvious reality:
Meanwhile, all historians know
perfectly well that the Bolshevik leaders were overwhelmingly Jewish, with three of the five
revolutionaries Lenin named as his plausible successors coming from that background. Although only around
4% of Russia's population was Jewish, a few years ago Vladimir Putin stated that
Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government
, an estimate fully consistent with the
contemporaneous claims of
Winston Churchill
,
Times of London
correspondent
Robert Wilton
, and the officers of
Alexander Solzhenitsyn
,
Yuri Slezkine
, and
others
have all painted a very similar picture. And prior to World War II, Jews remained enormously
over-represented in the Communist leadership, especially dominating the Gulag administration and the top
ranks of the dreaded NKVD.
Perhaps the most utterly explosive and
totally suppressed aspect of the close relationship between Jews and Communism regards the claims that Jacob
Schiff and other top international Jewish bankers were among the leading financial backers of the Bolshevik
Revolution. I spent nearly all of my life regarding these vague rumors as such obvious absurdities that they
merely demonstrated the lunatic anti-Semitism infesting the nether-regions of Far Right anti-Communist
movements, thereby fully confirming the theme of Richard Hofstadter's famous book
The Paranoid Style in
American Politics
. Indeed, the Schiff accusations were so totally ridiculous that they were never even
once mentioned in the hundred-odd books on the history of the Bolshevik Revolution and Soviet Communism that
I read during the 1970s and 1980s.
Therefore, it came as an enormous shock
when I discovered that the claims were not only probably correct, but had been almost universally accepted
as true throughout the first half of the twentieth century.
Potent international financial
interests were at work in favour of the immediate recognition of the Bolshevists. Those influences had
been largely responsible for the Anglo-American proposal in January to call Bolshevist representatives to
Paris at the beginning of the Peace Conference -- a proposal which had failed after having been
transformed into a suggestion for a Conference with the Bolshevists at Prinkipo. The well-known American
Jewish banker, Mr. Jacob Schiff, was known to be anxious to secure recognition for the Bolshevists
the prime movers were Jacob Schiff,
Warburg, and other international financiers, who wished above all to bolster up the Jewish Bolshevists in
order to secure a field for German and Jewish exploitation of Russia.
Schiff's own family later confirmed this
widely-accepted history. The February 3, 1949
Knickerbocker
column of the
New York
Journal-American
, then one of the city's leading newspapers, reported the account: "Today it is
estimated by Jacob's grandson, John Schiff, that the old man sank about 20,000,000 dollars for the final
triumph of Bolshevism in Russia." The present-day value of the figure quoted is probably some $2 billion, a
very substantial sum.
Despite this enormous volume of
convincing evidence, for the next half-century or more, Schiff's name almost entirely vanished from all
mainstream texts on Soviet Communism. As
I wrote
last year:
ORDER IT NOW
In 1999, Harvard University
published the English edition of
The Black Book of Communism
, whose six co-authors devoted 850
pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a
total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that
the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I
examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names
are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the
world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place.
Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden,
who played such an important role
in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early
years of their threatened regime, and even founded
the first Soviet international bank
.
Perhaps the extreme caution and timorous
silence exhibited by nearly all Western historians on these sensitive elements of World War II and the
Bolshevik Revolution should not entirely surprise us given the professional and personal risks they might
face if they strayed from orthodoxy.
Consider the very telling example of
David Irving. During the first half of his professional career, his string of widely-translated best-sellers
and his millions of books in print probably established him as the most internationally successful British
historian of the last one hundred years, with his remarkable archival research frequently revolutionizing
our understanding of the European conflict and the political forces behind it. But as he repeatedly
demonstrated his lack of regard for official orthodoxy, he attracted many powerful enemies, who eventually
ruined his reputation, drove him into personal bankruptcy, and even arranged his imprisonment. Over the last
quarter-century, he has increasingly become an un-person, with
the few occasional mentions of his name in the media
invoked in the same talismanic manner as references
to Lucifer or Beelzebub.
If a historian of such towering stature
and success could be brought so low, what ordinary academic scholar would dare risk a similar fate? Voltaire
famously observed that shooting an admiral every now and then is an excellent way to encourage the others.
The destruction of Irving's stellar
career came at the hands of Jewish activists, who were outraged at his balanced treatment of Hitler and his
ongoing commitment to investigating many of the widely-accepted wartime myths, which he hoped to replace
with what he called "real history."
In the introduction
to his new edition of
Hitler's War
, he recounts how a journalist for
Time
magazine was having dinner with him in New York in 1988 and remarked "Before coming over I read
the clippings files on you. Until
Hitler's War
you couldn't put a foot wrong, you were the darling of
the media; after it, they heaped slime on you."
As Irving was certainly aware, the
unreasonably harsh vilification of enemy leaders during wartime is hardly an uncommon occurrence. Although
it has largely been forgotten today, during much of the First World War and for years afterward, Germany's
reigning monarch, Kaiser Wilhelm, was widely portrayed in the Allied countries as a bloodthirsty monster,
one of the most evil men who had ever lived. This vilification came despite Wilhelm having been the beloved
eldest grandchild of Britain's own Queen Victoria, who according to some accounts died in his arms.
Moreover, although Allied propaganda
routinely portrayed Wilhelm as a relentless warmonger, he had actually avoided involving Germany in a single
major military conflict during the first twenty-five years of his reign, while most of the other leading
world powers had fought one or more wars during that same period. Indeed,
I recently discovered
that only a year before the Guns of August began firing,
The New York Times
had published a lengthy profile marking the first quarter-century of his reign and lauded him as one of the
world's foremost peacemakers:
Now he is acclaimed everywhere as
the greatest factor for peace that our time can show. It was he, we hear, who again and again threw the
weight of his dominating personality, backed by the greatest military organisation in the world – an
organisation built up by himself – into the balance for peace wherever war clouds gathered over Europe.
'('William II, King of Prussia and German Emperor, Kaiser 25 years a ruler, hailed as chief peacemaker,'
New York Times
, 8 June, 1913)
That brief excerpt from the
Times
encomium points to another matter than I have never seen mentioned. I devoted much of the 2000s to
digitizing and making available the complete archives of hundreds of America's leading publications of the
last 150 years, and when I occasionally glanced at the contents, I gradually noticed something odd. Although
the English-language world today invariably refers to Germany's wartime ruler as "Kaiser Wilhelm," that was
only rarely the case prior to the outbreak of war, when he was generally known as "Emperor William." The
latter nomenclature is hardly surprising since we always speak of "Frederick the Great" rather than
"Friedrich der Grosse."
But it is obviously much easier to
mobilize millions of citizens to die in muddy trenches to defeat a monstrously alien "Kaiser" than "Good
Emperor William," first cousin to the British and Russian monarchs. The NGram viewer in Google Books
shows the timing of the change quite clearly
, with the Anglophone practice shifting as Britain became
increasingly hostile toward Germany, especially after the outbreak of war. But "Emperor William" was only
permanently eclipsed by "Kaiser Wilhelm" after Germany once again became a likely enemy in the years
immediately preceding World War II.
Actual publications of the period also
reveal numerous discordant facts about the First World War, matters certainly known to academic specialists
but which rarely receive much coverage in our standard textbooks, being relegated to a casual sentence or
two if even that. For example, despite its considerable military successes, Germany launched
a major peace effort
in late 1916 to end the stalemated war by
negotiations
and thereby avert oceans of additional bloodshed. However, this proposal was fiercely
rejected by the Allied powers and their advocates
in the pages of the world's leading periodicals
since they remained firmly committed to an ultimate
military victory.
War fever was certainly still very
strong that same year in Britain, the leading Allied power. When prominent peace-advocates such as Bertrand
Russell and Lord Loreborn urged a negotiated end to the fighting, and were strongly backed by the editor of
the influential London
Economist
, they were harshly vilified and the latter was forced to resign
his position. E.D. Morel, another committed peace advocate, was imprisoned for his activism under such harsh
conditions that it permanently broke his health and led to his death at age 51 a few years after his
release.
As an excellent antidote to our severely
distorted understanding of both wartime sentiments and the domestic European politics that had produced the
conflict, I would strongly recommend the text of
Present Day Europe
by Lothrop Stoddard, then one of America's most influential public
intellectuals. Written prior to America's own entry into the conflict, the work provides the sort of
remarkable scholarly detachment which would soon became almost impossible.
Although the demonic portrayal of the
German Kaiser was already being replaced by a more balanced treatment within a few years of the Armistice
and had disappeared after a generation, no such similar process has occurred in the case of his World War II
successor. Indeed, Adolf Hitler and the Nazis seem to loom far larger in our cultural and ideological
landscape today than they even did in the immediate aftermath of the war, with their visibility growing even
as they become more distant in time, a strange violation of the normal laws of perspective. I suspect that
the casual dinner-table conversations on World War II issues that I used to enjoy with my Harvard College
classmates during the early 1980s would be completely impossible today.
To some extent, the transformation of
"the Good War" into a secular religion, with its designated monsters and martyrs may be analogous to what
occurred during the final decay of the Soviet Union, when the obvious failure of its economic system forced
the government to increasingly turn to endless celebrations of its victory in the Great Patriotic War as the
primary source of its legitimacy. The real wages of ordinary American workers have been
stagnant for fifty years
and most adults
have less than $500 in available savings
, so this widespread impoverishment may be forcing our own
leaders into adopting a similar strategy.
But I think that a far greater factor
has been the astonishing growth of Jewish power in America, which was already quite substantial even four or
five decades ago but has now become absolutely overwhelming, whether in foreign policy, finance, or the
media, with our 2% minority exercising unprecedented control over most aspects of our society and political
system. Only a fraction of American Jews hold traditional religious beliefs, so the twin worship of the
State of Israel and the Holocaust has served to fill that void, with the individuals and events of World War
II constituting many of the central elements of the
mythos
that serves to unify the Jewish
community. And as an obvious consequence, no historical figure ranks higher in the demonology of this
secular religion than the storied Fuhrer and his Nazi regime.
However, beliefs based upon religious
dogma often sharply diverge from empirical reality. Pagan Druids may worship a particular sacred oak tree
and claim that it contains the soul of their tutelary dryad; but if an arborist taps the tree, its sap may
seem like that of any other.
Our current official doctrine portrays
Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany as one of the cruelest and most relentlessly aggressive regimes in the history
of the world, but at the time these salient facts apparently escaped the leaders of the nations with which
it was at war.
Operation Pike
provides an enormous wealth of archival material regarding the secret
internal discussions of the British and French governmental and military leadership, and all of it tends to
suggest that they regarded their German adversary as a perfectly normal country, and perhaps occasionally
regretted that they had somehow gotten themselves involved a major war over what amounted to a small Polish
border dispute.
Although our standard histories would
never admit this, the actual path toward war appears to have been quite different than most Americans
believe. Extensive documentary evidence from knowledgeable Polish, American, and British officials
demonstrates that
pressure from Washington
was the key factor behind the outbreak of the European conflict. Indeed,
leading American journalists and public intellectuals of the day such as John T. Flynn and Harry Elmer
Barnes had publicly
declared
that they feared Franklin Roosevelt was seeking to foment a major European war in hopes that it
would rescue him from the apparent economic failure of his New Deal reforms and perhaps even provide him an
excuse to run for an unprecedented third term. Since this is exactly what ultimately transpired, such
accusations would hardly seem totally unreasonable.
And in an ironic contrast with FDR's
domestic failures, Hitler's own economic successes had been enormous, a striking comparison since the two
leaders had come to power within a few weeks of each other in early 1933. As iconoclastic leftist Alexander
Cockburn
once noted
in a 2004
Counterpunch
column:
When [Hitler] came to power in 1933
unemployment stood at 40 per cent. Economic recovery came without the stimulus of arms spending There
were vast public works such as the autobahns. He paid little attention to the deficit or to the protests
of the bankers about his policies. Interest rates were kept low and though wages were pegged, family
income increased by reason of full employment. By 1936 unemployment had sunk to one per cent. German
military spending remained low until 1939.
Not just Bush but Howard Dean and the
Democrats could learn a few lessons in economic policy from that early, Keynesian Hitler.
By resurrecting a prosperous Germany
while nearly all other countries remained mired in the worldwide Great Depression, Hitler drew glowing
accolades from individuals all across the ideological spectrum. After an extended 1936 visit, David Lloyd
George, Britain's former wartime prime minister,
fulsomely praised the chancellor
as "the George Washington of Germany," a national hero of the greatest
stature. Over the years, I've seen plausible claims here and there that during the 1930s Hitler was widely
acknowledged as the world's most popular and successful national leader, and the fact that he was selected
as
Time Magazine'
s Man of the Year for 1938 tends to support this belief.
Only International Jewry had remained
intensely hostile to Hitler, outraged over his successful efforts to dislodge Germany's 1% Jewish population
from the stranglehold they had gained over German media and finance, and instead run the country in the best
interests of the 99% German majority. A striking recent parallel has been the enormous hostility that
Vladimir Putin incurred after he ousted the handful of Jewish Oligarchs who had seized control of Russian
society and impoverished the bulk of the population. Putin has attempted to mitigate this difficulty by
allying himself with certain Jewish elements, and Hitler seems to have done the same by endorsing
the Nazi-Zionist economic partnership
, which lay the basis for the creation of the State of Israel and
thereby brought on board the small, but growing Jewish Zionist faction.
In the wake of the 9/11 Attacks, the
Jewish Neocons stampeded America towards the disastrous Iraq War and the resulting destruction of the Middle
East, with the talking heads on our television sets endlessly claiming that "Saddam Hussein is another
Hitler." Since then, we have regularly heard the same tag-line repeated in various modified versions, being
told that "Muammar Gaddafi is another Hitler" or "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another Hitler" or "Vladimir Putin
is another Hitler" or even "Hugo Chavez is another Hitler." For the last couple of years, our American media
has been relentlessly filled with the claim that "Donald Trump is another Hitler."
During the early 2000s, I obviously
recognized that Iraq's ruler was a harsh tyrant, but snickered at the absurd media propaganda, knowing
perfectly well that Saddam Hussein was no Adolf Hitler. But with the steady growth of the Internet and the
availability of the millions of pages of periodicals provided by my digitization project, I've been quite
surprised to gradually also discover that Adolf Hitler was no Adolf Hitler.
It might not be entirely correct to
claim that the story of World War II was that Franklin Roosevelt sought to escape his domestic difficulties
by orchestrating a major European war against the prosperous, peace-loving Nazi Germany of Adolf Hitler. But
I do think that picture is probably somewhat closer to the actual historical reality than the inverted image
more commonly found in our textbooks.
This was true about Iraq war. This is true about Venezuela and Syria.
Notable quotes:
"... In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books , Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. ..."
"... Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. ..."
"... Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back to 1959 . ..."
"... Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.) ..."
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small c rappy little country and
throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
- Michael
Ledeen , holder of the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute
Actually, the U.S. had been beating Iraq's head against the wall for a dozen years, with
sanctions and bombing. The
sanctions alone killed over a million Iraqis, far more than have been done in by weapons of
mass destruction throughout history. But Ledeen's indiscreet remark, delivered at an AEI
conference and reported by Jonah Goldberg in National Review Online , does capture some
of what the war on Iraq is about.
And what is this "business" Ledeen says we mean? Oil, of course, of which more in a bit.
Ditto construction contracts for Bechtel. But it's more than that - nothing less than the
desire, often expressed with little shame nor euphemism, to run the world. Is there anything
new about that?
The answer is, of course, yes and no. In a rather odd article in the London Review of Books ,
Perry Anderson argued that there wasn't, and wondered aloud why the U.S. war on Iraq had
excited such unprecedented worldwide opposition - even, in all places, within the U.S. - when
earlier episodes of imperial violence hadn't. Anderson, who's edited New Left Review for years, but who has almost no
connection to actual politics attributed this strange explosion not to a popular outburst of
anti-imperialism, but to a cultural antipathy to the Bush administration.
Presumably that antipathy belongs to the realm of the " merely cultural ," and is of no great
political significance to Anderson. But it should be. U.S. culture has long been afflicted with
a brutally reactionary and self-righteous version of Christian fundamentalism, but it's never
had such influence over the state. The president thinks himself on a mission from God, the
Attorney General opens the business day with a prayer meeting, and the Pentagon's idea of a
Good Friday service is to invite Franklin Graham , who's pronounced Islam a "wicked and
evil religion," to deliver the homily, in which he promised that Jesus was returning soon. For
the hard core, the Iraq war is a sign of the end times, and the hard core
are in power.
Lots of people, in the U.S. and abroad, recognize that and are alarmed. And lots also
recognize that the Bush regime represents an intensification of imperial ambition. Though the
administration has been discreet, many of its private sector intellectuals
have been using the words "imperialism" and " empire " openly and with
glee. Not everyone of the millions who marched against the war in the months before it started
was a conscious anti-imperialist, but they all sensed the intensification, and were further
alarmed.
While itself avoiding the difficult word "empire," the Bush administration has been rather
clear about its long-term aims. According to their official national security strategy and the
documents published by the Project
for a New American Century (which served as an administration-in-waiting during the Clinton
years) their goal is to assure U.S. dominance and prevent the emergence of any rival powers.
First step in that agenda is the remaking of the Middle East - and they're quite open
about this as well. We all know the countries that are on the list; the only remaining issues
are sequence and strategy. But that's not the whole of the agenda. They're essentially
promising a permanent state of war, some overt, some covert, but one that could take
decades.
Imperial returns?
Why? The answers aren't self-evident. Certainly the war on Iraq had little to do with its
public justifications. Iraq was clearly a threat to no one, and the weapons of mass destruction
have proved elusive. The war did nothing for the fight against terrorism. Only ideologues
believe that Baghdad had anything to do with al Qaeda - and if the Bush administration were
really worried about "homeland security," it'd be funding the defense of ports, nuclear
reactors, and chemical plants rather than starting imperial wars and alienating people by the
billions. Sure, Saddam's regime was monstrous - which is one of the reasons Washington
supported it up until the invasion of Kuwait. The Ba'ath Party loved to kill Communists - as
many as 150,000 according to some estimates - and the CIA's relationship with Saddam goes back
to 1959
.
Iraq has lots of oil , and there's little doubt that that's why
it was at the first pole of the axis of evil to get hit. (Iran does too, but it's a much
tougher nut to crack - four times as big, and not weakened by war and sanctions.)
It now looks
fairly certain that the U.S. will, in some form, claim some large piece of Iraq's oil. The
details need to be worked out; clarifying the legal situation could be very complicated, given
the rampantly illegal nature of the regime change. Rebuilding Iraq's oil industry will be very
expensive and could take years. There could be some nice profits down the line for big oil
companies - billions a year - but the broader economic benefits for the U.S. aren't so clear. A
U.S.-dominated Iraq could pump heavily and undermine OPEC, but too low an oil price would wreck
the domestic U.S. oil industry, something the Bush gang presumably cares
about. Mexico would be driven into penury, which could mean another debt crisis and lots of
human traffic heading north over the Rio Grande. Lower oil prices would be a boon to most
industrial economies, but they'd give the U.S. no special advantage over its principal economic
rivals.
It's
sometimes said that U.S. dominance of the Middle East gives Washington a chokehold over oil
supplies to Europe and Japan. But how might that work? Deep production cutbacks and price
spikes would hurt everyone. Targeted sales restrictions would be the equivalent of acts of war,
and if the U.S. is willing to take that route, a blockade would be a lot more efficient. The
world oil market is gigantic and complex, and it's not clear how a tap could be turned in
Kirkuk that would shut down the gas pumps in Kyoto or Milan.
Writers like David Harvey argue
that the U.S. is trying to compensate for its eroding economic power by asserting its military
dominance. Maybe. It's certainly fascinating that Bush's unilateralism has to be financed by
gobs of foreign money - and he gets his tax cuts, he'll have to order up even bigger gobs. But
it's hard to see what rival threatens the U.S. economically; neither the EU nor Japan is
thriving. Nor is there any evidence that the Bush administration is thinking seriously about
economic policy, domestic or international, or even thinking at all. The economic staff is
mostly dim and marginal. What really seems to excite this gang of supposed conservatives is the
exercise of raw state power.
Jealous rivals
And while the Bushies want to prevent the emergence of imperial rivals , they may only be encouraging that. Sure, the EU
is badly divided within itself; it has a hard enough time picking a top central banker , let alone deciding on a common
foreign policy. German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder is already semi-apologizing to Bush for
his intemperate language in criticizing the war - not that Bush has started taking his calls.
But over the longer term, some kind of political unification is Europe's only hope for acting
like a remotely credible world power. It's tempting to read French and German objections to the
Iraq war as emerging not from principle, but from the wounded narcissism of former imperial
powers rendered marginal by American might. Separately, they'll surely hang. But a politically
united Europe could, with time, come to challenge U.S. power, just as the euro is beginning to look like a credible rival to the dollar.
(Speaking of the euro, there's a theory circulating on the net that the U.S. went to war
because Iraq wanted to price its oil in euros, not dollars. That's grossly overheated
speculation. More on this and related issues when LBO begins an investigation of the
political economy of oil in the next issue.)
An even more interesting rivalry scenario would involve an alliance of the EU and Russia.
Russia is no longer the wreck it was for most of the 1990s. The economy has been growing and
the mildly authoritarian Putin has imposed political stability. Russia, which has substantial
oil interests in Iraq that are threatened by U.S. control, strongly opposed the war, and at
least factions within the Russian intelligence agency were reportedly feeding information
unfriendly to the U.S. to the website Iraqwar.ru . There's a lot recommending an EU-Russia
alliance; Europe could supply technology and finance, and Russia could supply energy, and
together they could constitute at least an embryonic counterweight to U.S. power.
So the U.S. may not get out of Iraq what the Bush administration is hoping for. It certainly
can't want democracy in Iraq or the rest of the region, since free votes could well lead to
nationalist and Islamist governments who don't view ExxonMobil as the divine agent that Bush seems to. A
New York Times piece celebrated the outbreak of democracy in Basra, while conceding that
the mayor is a former Iraqi admiral appointed by the British. The lead writers of the new
constitution are likely to be American law professors; Iraqis, of course, aren't up to the task
themselves.
Certainly the appointment of Lt. Gen. Jay M. Garner (Ret.) - one of the
few superannuated brass not to have enjoyed a consulting contract with a major TV network - to
be the top civilian official guiding the postwar reconstruction of Iraq speaks volumes. A
retired general is barely a civilian, and Garner's most recent job was as president of
SY Technology , a military
contractor that worked with Israeli security in developing the Arrow antimissile system. He
loves antimissile systems; after the first Gulf War, he enthused about the Patriot's
performance with claims that turned out to be nonsense. He's on record as having praised
Israel's handling of the intifada. If that's his model of how to handle restive subject
populations, there's lots of trouble ahead.
lightness
In the early days of the war, when things weren't going so well for the "coalition,"
it was said that the force was too light. But after the sandstorm cleared and the snipers
were mowed down, that alleged lightness became a widely praised virtue. But that force
was light only by American standards: 300,000 troops; an endless rain of Tomahawks,
JDAMs, and MOABs; thousands of vehicles, from Humvees to Abrams tanks; hundreds of
aircraft, from Apaches to B-1s; several flotillas of naval support - and enormous
quantities of expensive petroleum products. It takes five gallons of fuel just to start
an Abrams tank, and after that it gets a mile per gallon. And filling one up is no
bargain. Though the military buys fuel at a wholesale price of 84¢ a gallon, after
all the expenses of getting it to the front lines are added in, the final cost is about
$150 a gallon. That's a steal compared to Afghanistan, where fuel is helicoptered in,
pushing the cost to $600/gallon. Rummy's "lightness" is of the sort that only a $10
trillion economy can afford.
The Bush gang doesn't even try to keep up appearances, handing out contracts for Iraq's
reconstruction to U.S. firms even before the shooting stopped, and guarding only the oil and
interior ministries against looters. If Washington gets its way, Iraq will be rebuilt according
to the fondest dreams of the Heritage Foundation staff, with the educational system reworked by
an American contractor, the TV programmed by the Pentagon, the ports run by a rabidly antiunion
firm, the police run by the Texas-based military contractor Dyncorp , and the oil taken out of
state hands and appropriately privatized.
That's the way they'd like it to be. But the sailing may not be so smooth. It looks like
Iraqis are viewing the Americans as occupiers, not liberators. It's going to be hard enough to
remake Iraq that taking on Syria or Iran may be a bit premature. But that doesn't mean they
won't try. It's a cliché of trade negotiations that liberalization is like riding a
bicycle - you have to keep riding forward or else you'll fall over. The same could be said of
an imperial agenda: if you want to remake the world, or a big chunk of it, there's little time
to pause and catch your breath, since doubt or opposition could gain the upper hand. Which
makes stoking that opposition more
urgent than ever.
Losing it all
There's a feeling around that Bush is now politically invulnerable . Certainly the atmosphere
is one of almost coercive patriotism. That mood was nicely illustrated by an incident in
Houston in mid-March. A teenager attending a rodeo failed to stand along with the rest of the
crowd during a playing of Lee Greenwood's "Proud to be an American," a dreadful country song
that has become a kind of private-sector national anthem for the yahoo demographic, thanks to
its truculent unthinking jingoism. A patriot standing behind the defiantly seated teen started
taunting him, tugging on his ear as an additional provocation. The two ended up in a fight, and
then under arrest.
There's a lot of that going around, for sure. Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins get disinvited
from events, websites nominate
traitors for trial by military tribunal, and talk radio hosts organize CD-smashings. But things
aren't hopeless. A close analysis of Greenwood's text might suggest why. The song's core
argument is contained in its two most famous lines: "I'm proud to be an American/where at least
I know I'm free." But the oft-overlooked opening reads: "If tomorrow all the things were
gone/I'd worked for all my life," the singer would still be a grateful patriot. That's
precisely the condition lots of Americans find themselves in. More than two million jobs have
disappeared in the last two years. Millions of Americans have seen their retirement savings
wiped out by the bear market, and over a million filed for bankruptcy last year. Most states and
cities are experiencing their worst fiscal crises since the 1930s, with massive service cuts
and layoffs imminent. In the song, such loss doesn't matter, but reality is often less
accommodating than a song.
As the nearby graphs show, W's ratings are much lower than his father's at the end of Gulf
War I, and his disapproval ratings much higher. Their theocratic and repressive agenda is
deeply unpopular with large parts of the U.S. population. Spending scores of billions on
destroying and rebuilding Iraq while at home health clinics are closing and teachers working
without pay is potentially incendiary. Foreign adventures have never been popular with the
American public (much to the distress of the ruling elite). An peace movement that could draw
the links among warmongering, austerity, and repression has great political potential. Just a
month or two ago, hundreds of thousands were marching in American streets to protest the
imminent war. Though that movement now looks a bit dispirited and demobilized, it's unlikely
that that kind of energy will just disappear into the ether.
The Russian Foreign Ministry called the 18-month prison sentence for student Maria Butina a
"politically motivated" decision "in the spirit of McCarthyism," adding that her only crime was
being a Russian citizen in the US. "From the moment of her arrest we have pointed out that
the accusations against her of attempting to influence internal American political processes
were completely contrived and fabricated, " the ministry said in a statement on Friday. "
Her confession, which was coerced through harsh imprisonment conditions and threats of a
lengthy sentence, changes nothing."
Butina was sentenced on Friday to 18 months in
prison and deportation from the US by a federal judge in Washington, DC. She was arrested by
the FBI in June last year and charged with being an unregistered foreign agent. The nine months
she has already spent in jail – much of it in solitary confinement – will count
towards her sentence.
The American University graduate who sought to make connections with the National Rifle
Association ended up pleading guilty in December to
failing to register as an agent of the Russian government. Moscow has repeatedly said it had
nothing to do with Butina, who prior to her studies in the US campaigned for American-style gun
laws in Russia.
" Our compatriot's only crime was being a citizen of Russia. She became a victim of a
bitter battle between political forces inside the US, and an unbridled anti-Russian campaign in
the spirit of McCarthyism," the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, describing Butina's
sentence as a "shameful stain on the American judicial system " that put itself in the
service of a blatantly political agenda.
Butina's arrest came at the height of 'Russiagate' hysteria, as special counsel Robert
Mueller investigated claims by Democrats that President Donald Trump and his campaign
"colluded" with Russia during the 2016 US presidential election. Mueller's report, made public
last week, found no collusion, but claimed – without evidence –
that Russia did interfere in the election. Butina was not mentioned anywhere in its 448 pages
.
Breathless media reports about Butina's indictment smeared her as a spy who traded sex for
influence in order to embed herself into the US political establishment. That allegation
persisted
in the media even after prosecutors quietly dropped it and apologized for misreading one
of her text messages.
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that
control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the
possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is
guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence
agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign
government can influence foreign policy.
Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN
security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime
change wars.
Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn,
Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to
colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something
fulfilling.
What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks
Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers.
Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So
Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA
more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home,
Gringo stay home is chanted once more.
The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is
great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he
appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove.
Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act
together to address.
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6
trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving
Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic
presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the
primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her
rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states.
Thanks for anything you can do.
Jim R2 months ago
President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military
complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.
chickendinner2012, 2 months ago
End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't
waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three
of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to
stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.
asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual
Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the
debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary
issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and
contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.
carol wagner sudol2 months ago
Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a
concentration camp.
Tom Hall, 2 months ago
All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What
would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration.
The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true
beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.
A really interesting discussion. the problem with discussion on new direction of the USA foreign policy is that forces that
control the current forign policy will not allow any changes. Russiagate was in part a paranoid reaction of the Deep State to the
possibility of detente with Russia and also questioning "neoliberal sacred truth" like who did 9/11 (to suggest that Bush is
guilty was a clear "Red Flag") and critical attribute to forrign wars which feed so many Imperial servants.
BTW Trump completely disappointed his supporters in the foreign policy is continuing to accelerate that direction
Here is how you chart a Progressive foreign policy stop treating the US intelligence
agencies of the CIA and FBI as orgs of integrity. Ban all foreign lobbying so no foreign
government can influence foreign policy.
Disband the Veto powers that the US holds over the UN
security council. Prosecute former Presidents and Government officials for the illegal regime
change wars.
Connect with other progressive politicians around the world such as Jeremy Corbyn,
Jean Luc Melenchon and Moon Jae In. End the arms race and begin a peaceful space race to
colonize the moon diverting funds from the military industrial complex into something
fulfilling.
What BULL while world under the fog of Berlin wall down, USA VP Bush attacks
Panama 8000 Marines kills 3500 panamanians , gives the banks to CIA, therefore Panama papers.
Another coup in Latin America. When V.P. Bush "we had to get over the Vietnam Syndrome". So
Killing 3500 people , to get over the loser spirit, suicidal influence from Vietnam. SHAME USA
more hate for Americans. And Now Venezuela, more Shame and Hate for Americans. Yankee go home,
Gringo stay home is chanted once more.
The audio is a little off especially for a couple speakers but this discussion is
great. Trump ran on a non-interventionist platform, but in his typical dishonest fashion, he
appointed people who are developing usable nukes like characters out of Dr. Strangelove.
Nuclear weapons and climate change are both existential threats that all the world needs to act
together to address.
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6
trillion wars and the $750 billion annual Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving
Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the debate between Democratic
presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the
primary issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her
rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states.
Thanks for anything you can do.
Jim R2 months ago
President Eisenhower's farewell address warned us of the very thing that is happening today with the industrial military
complex and the power and influence that that entity weilds.
chickendinner2012, 2 months ago
End the wars, no more imperialism, instead have fair trade prioritizing countries that have a living wage and aren't
waging war etc. No more supporting massive human rights abusers like Saudi Arabia, Israel, UAE etc. and we need to get three
of the most aggressive countries the F UK US coalition that constantly invades and bombs everyone they want to steal from to
stop doing war, stop coups, stop covert sabotage, stop sanctions.
asbeautifulasasunset, 2 months ago
17 plus years later some people are finally starting to talk about the $6 trillion wars and the $750 billion annual
Defense Department Budget.... Please consider giving Tulsi Gabbard at least a $1 contribution so she can be part of the
debate between Democratic presidential candidates. She has made ending the wars on terrorism and regime change the primary
issue of her candidacy. She is an Iraq vet and currently in the National Guard. Her rank is Colonel. She needs $62,500 and
contributions from 200 people in each of 20 states. Thanks for anything you can do.
carol wagner sudol2 months ago
Israel today has become a nazi like state. period. That says it all. This is heart-breaking. Gaza is simply a
concentration camp.
Tom Hall, 2 months ago
All our post WWII foreign policy has been about securing maintaining and enhancing corporate commercial interests. What
would seem to progressives as catastrophic failures are in fact monumental achievements of wealth creation and concentration.
The billions spent on think tanks to develop policy are mostly about how to develop grand narratives that conceal the true
beneficiaries of US foreign policy and create fear, uncertainty and insecurity at home and abroad.
It is all really simple: if the Ukrainians will give passports to Russian citizens, and
we in Russia will be handing out passports to the Ukrainians, then sooner or later will will
reach the expected result: everybody will have the same citizenship. This is something which
we have to welcome.
Vladimir Putin
It appears that the Kremlin is very slowly changing its approach to the Ukrainian issue and
is now relying more on unilateral actions. The first two measures taken by the Russians are
maybe not "too little too late", but certainly "just the bare minimum and at that, rather
late". Still, I can only salute the Kremlin's newly found determination. Specifically, the
Kremlin has banned the export of energy products to the Ukraine (special exemptions can still
be granted on a case by case basis) and the Russians have decided to distribute Russian
passports to the people of Novorussia. Good.
Zelenskii's reaction to this decision came as the first clear sign that the poor man has no
idea what he is doing and no plan as to how to deal with the Russians. He decided to crack a
joke, (which he is reportedly good at), and declare that the Ukrainian passport was much better
than the Russian one and that the Ukraine will start delivering Ukrainian passports to Russian
citizens. Putin immediately replied with one of his typical comebacks declaring that he
supports Zelenskii and that he looks forward to the day when Russians and Ukrainians will have
the same citizenship again. Zelenskii had nothing to say to that :-)
Zelenskii finally finds something common to Russia and the Ukraine
I have been thinking long about this "a lot in common" between Ukraine and Russia. The
reality is that today, after the annexation of the Crimea and the aggression in the Donbas,
of the "common" things we have only one thing left – this is the state border. And
control of every inch on the Ukrainian side, must be returned by Russia. Only then will we be
able to continue the search for [things in] "common"
Vladimir Zelenskii
Well, almost. He did eventually make a Facebook post in which he declared that all that
Russia and the Ukraine had in common was a border. This instantly made him the object of jokes
and memes, since all Russians or Ukrainians know that Russia and the Ukraine have many old
bonds which even 5 years of a vicious civil war and 5 years of hysterically anti-Russian
propaganda could not sever. They range from having close relatives in the other country, to
numerous trade and commercial transactions, to a common language. The closest thing to a real
Ukrainian language would be the Surzhik which is roughly 50/50 in terms of vocabulary and whose
pronunciation is closer to the south Russian one than to the Zapadenskii regional dialect
spoken in the western Ukraine and which is used (and currently imposed) by the Ukronazi junta
in Kiev.
Neoconservativsm is a distinct ideology brought into being by U of Chicago professor Leo
Strauss and his ex-Trotskyist acolytes. It is American exceptionalism on steroids and its
core tenet is that American society needs elite rulers to guide the retarded masses who are
too stupid to know what their best interests are.
To keep them in line the masses need to be fed grandiose myths they can believe in and
rally around.
This is where America the Good as the shining beacon on the hill, slaying evil wherever it
is found to make the world safe for freedom comes in.
George H.W. Bush, Dubya's daddy, called them "the crazies in the basement."
First, the neocons and some Israeli strategists had long seen the Shia as "outsiders"
opposed to the mainstream Arab (read: Sunni) nationalist current, and over decades had
developed an affinity for the Shia as potential allies in the region, much as they saw the
Lebanese Maronite Christians and other minorities in the Arab world.
"There existed a supercilious 'Shiaphilia' among certain academics, Iraqi political
exiles, policy wonks and policymakers linked to the Bush administration," wrote Ahmed
Hashim, author of Insurgency and Counter-insurgency in Iraq and a professor of strategic
studies at the U.S. Naval War College. At the American Enterprise Institute and among
partisans of Chalabi's INC, it was routine to speak of "de-Arabizing" Iraq after the fall
of Saddam Hussein, a favorite theme of the INC's favored intellectual, Kanan Makiya.
Second, the neocons had been seduced by Chalabi, who convinced them that Iraq's Shia
leaders would abandon their ties to Iran and rush to embrace a secular, pro-American
political culture. Vali Nasr, author of The Shia Revival and a professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School, attributes this to the neocons' "reading of the Israeli experience in
the invasion of south Lebanon in 1982. That's why they had this vocabulary of 'They're
going to greet us with flowers,' because that's what happened in south Lebanon -- the
Israeli army was greeted by Shia villagers with flowers and rice."
Third, the neocons believed that moderate, nonpolitical Shia in Iraq would establish
Najaf, the Iraqi shrine city that is the holiest place in Shia Islam, as a new center of
gravity that would overpower Qom, the clerical powerhouse city in Iran. They believed that
the "good Shia," supposedly "quietist" ayatollahs such as Ali al-Sistani, would emerge to
present a frontal challenge to Iran's militant "bad Shia," followers of the Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini. A leading proponent of this theory was David Wurmser, a radical neocon
who is currently Vice President Cheney's top Middle East adviser. "They deluded themselves
into thinking that these links operated only one way -- with Najaf undermining Qom," says
Nasr. "They assumed that it was Iraq that would influence Iran, not that Iran would
influence Iraq."
span y gjohnsit on Fri, 05/10/2019 - 11:48am The Trump Administration made it
perfectly clear: no more waivers on Iranian sanctions.
No exceptions .
"We're going to zero. We're going to zero across the board," US Secretary of State Mike
Pompeo told reporters after the White House made the announcement in a statement. "There are
no (oil) waivers that extend beyond that period, full stop," he said, adding that there would
be no grace period for those economies to comply.
Got it? No exceptions. This is about values and principles. This is about Iranian terrorism
(or some such nonsense).
Wait a sec. What happened to 'no more waivers, no exceptions'?
Well, ya see, a funny
thing happened along the way.
Iraq will soon finalize a large-scale, long-term deal for the development of oil fields in
the South with Exxon and PetroChina. The 30-year contract will involve investments of US$53
billion and potential returns for Baghdad of as much as US$400 billion over its lifetime,
Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi told media this week.
I know what you are thinking, but I am here to tell you conclusively that the timing is all
a coincidence. Billions of dollars in Exxon profits
have no effect on our foreign policy decisions.
Iraqi Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said on Tuesday there was no link between an initial
oil agreement his government was about to sign with Exxon Mobil and its receipt of waivers
from the United States exempting it from sanctions on Iran.
There you go. A deeply corrupt Iraqi politician denies that the two events are related. What
more proof do you want?
I know what you are thinking, but I am here to tell you conclusively that the timing is all a
coincidence. Billions of dollars in Exxon profits have no effect on our foreign policy
decisions.
Of course it's a coincidence! Have you never heard about America's great humanitarian wars,
a phrase which we owe to great patriot Susan Powers? And, do you not fail to realize that
Barack Hussein O'Bama* was our greatest president since Franklin Pierce?
*You know also that BHO is a black Irishman (groan).
The US is an oil company masquerading as a
country .
Iraq should have said that they will buy Iranian oil for as long as they want in exchange
for signing the agreement. But I'm guess that the guy who inked the deal is one of our
puppets?.
@snoopydawg
Iranian oil as their own, ad infinitum?
Iraq should have said that they will buy Iranian oil for as long as they want in
exchange for signing the agreement. But I'm guess that the guy who inked the deal is one of
our puppets?.
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks
to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment
and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source
and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.
You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from
a document dump that is almost
entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact
Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the
period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.
These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important
for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source.
This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the
meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.
What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive
contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?
The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA)
and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps
who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").
We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking
of the DNC in 2015).
This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests,
https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but
then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public
is skeptical of their claims'.
The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their
hand on the scale.
Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are
trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the
mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't
support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.
I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in
the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.
What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the
Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance
with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them
to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie
that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.
From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole
thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews
by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national
security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got
their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.
Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered
to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.
Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was
not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?
The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law
enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as
'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.
It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of
agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'
It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely,
both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately
involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information
to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.
An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back
channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.
A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the
supposed termination.
When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue
to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:
"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be
forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."
At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me
a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would
it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance
of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?
Another crucial paragraph:
'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in
London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence
probes in American history.'
The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.
As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he
created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments
of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.
I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large
measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures
close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication
which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.
The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky
Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.
(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at
http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who
sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)
The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent
'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'
Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No
mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian
Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether
the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson
were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important
issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.
Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including
McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense.
So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.
Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem
to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with
the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted
his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation
culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian
Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was
potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get
'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously
I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt
on Trump...how is this not the same...?
Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential
candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact
the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him?
Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this
have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence
source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation
that may have already begun?
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete),
his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated
desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting
others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has
not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too
big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing
agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant
thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)?
'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's
"raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they
would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,
" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching
him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "
That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance
authorization?.
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the
NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws
they have that prohibits spying on their people.
Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about
a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered
as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years
ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In
my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them
are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these
people think they are.
It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and
Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy
Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what
happened.
* * *
The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory
information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in
the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton
campaign and DNC.
But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other
information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to
a fascinating report from The New York Times.
American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump
material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to
The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those
tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including
indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.
Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for
the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.
After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to
the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.
The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump
associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the
documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public
domain.
The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video
purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to
the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised
questions about its authenticity.
The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was
Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the
Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.
The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut
ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about
Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.
The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western
Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S.
officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.
The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said
that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying
dirt on the president.
The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation
on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government
has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the
CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.
The Times report also has other new details.
Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to
sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the
article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian
intelligence agencies.
The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the
Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped
around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of
the Steele report.
According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt
to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information
from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.
He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney
Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of
State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October
2016.
Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated
within the State Department.
Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a
"hoax" and "crap."
* * *
On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony
secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be
paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is
all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have
originate with him. Tags PoliticsCommercial Banks
Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The
15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump,
and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than
by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady
foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?
Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you
sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir
are.............
According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp
levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the
USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.
Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he
left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone
got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.
If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of
the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best
interests of themselves.
Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?
I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the
country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing?
They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.
And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles
Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting.
The Agency hasn't looked back since.
Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton,
given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the
Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil
Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did
not pay for this shit.
With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now.
They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible
deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming
he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before
being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help
themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia
is still being stoked no matter what.
Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does
that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine,
McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to
Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the
rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.
Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to
have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone
that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire
people who will launch real investigations.
Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.
If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that
sticks on the guy.
All the evidence thus far states
Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments
(U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less
failed).
They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how
many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back
searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker
room talk lol
People have to just face it.
Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your
government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming
president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes.
Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to
you or anyone else.
To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did
anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the
swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless
topics and insignificant factoids.
Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to
give us the government they want?
It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to
rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's
for our own good.
Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such
bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it
must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out
how little he impresses anyone who knows him.
"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can
call off the hounds.
Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of
power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this
himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...
As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos
for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.
Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US
intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on
their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own
treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big
bad russkies tricked us.
my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because
they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act
as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or
female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night
my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every
photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.
of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would
prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela
with a pizza.
the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of
taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.
'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the
Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it
hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly
elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope.
Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a
long shot.
i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds.
this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to
trump.
Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I
copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a
cloth."
And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but
my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.
So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and
more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers
for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?
I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.
You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but
Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are
you blind?!!
He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has
have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright
criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few
months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every
day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the
point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.
"... Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. ..."
"... Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out? ..."
"... Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet services. ..."
"... This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line. The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans. ..."
"... If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff. ..."
"... How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. ..."
"... According to Esquire.com , Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work. ..."
"... Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016. ..."
"... According to Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. ..."
"... The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. ..."
"... What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security? ..."
"... Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers. ..."
"... When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. ..."
"... Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other? ..."
"... Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network ..."
"... In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency." ..."
"... Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list. ..."
"... This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention. ..."
"... Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike? ..."
"... What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts. ..."
"... The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated. ..."
"... According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have." ..."
"... While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine. ..."
In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing the
2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial
to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security firm Crowdstrike
that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is
an "as is" statement showing this.
The difference between Dmitri Alperovitch's claims which are reflected in JAR-1620296 and
this article is that enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific
parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to
be investigated for real crimes.
For instance, the malware used was an out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one
other interesting point is that the Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe
is from Ukraine . How did Crowdstrike miss this when it is their business to know?
Later in this article you'll meet and know a little more about the real "Fancy Bear and Cozy
Bear." The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words
like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution.
The article is lengthy because the facts need to be in one place. The bar Dimitri
Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to
trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian
involvement?
The December 29th JAR adds a flowchart that shows how a basic phishing hack is performed. It
doesn't add anything significant beyond that. Noticeably, they use both their designation APT
28 and APT 29 as well as the Crowdstrike labels of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear separately.
This is important because information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of
rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to
be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's that
every private actor in the information game was radically political.
The
Hill.com article about Russia hacking the electric grid is a perfect example of why this
intelligence is political and not taken seriously. If any proof of Russian involvement existed,
the US would be at war. Under current laws of war, there would be no difference between an
attack on the power grid or a missile strike.
According
to the Hill "Private security firms provided more detailed forensic analysis, which the FBI
and DHS said Thursday correlated with the IC's findings.
"The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by
security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators
of compromise and malicious infrastructure
identified during the course of investigations and incident response," read a statement. The
report identities two Russian intelligence groups already named by CrowdStrike and other
private security firms."
In an interview with Washingtonsblog , William Binney, the creator of the NSA global
surveillance system said "I expected to see the IP's or other signatures of APT's 28/29 [the
entities which the U.S. claims hacked the Democratic emails] and where they were located and
how/when the data got transferred to them from DNC/HRC [i.e. Hillary Rodham Clinton]/etc. They
seem to have been following APT 28/29 since at least 2015, so, where are they?"
According to the latest Washington Post story, Crowdstrike's CEO tied a group his company
dubbed "Fancy Bear" to targeting Ukrainian artillery positions in Debaltsevo as well as across
the Ukrainian civil war front for the past 2 years.
Alperovitch states in many articles the Ukrainians were using an Android app to target the
self-proclaimed Republics positions and that hacking this app was what gave targeting data to
the armies in Donbass instead.
Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with McAfee.
Asked to comment on Alperovitch's
discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his
experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
As he told RT, "if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the
Russians."
How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is probably,
maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "
Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin
'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks."
The public evidence never goes beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or
using facts, Crowdstrike insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian
losses. NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant
for NBC.
According to NBC the story reads like this."
The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report
publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is
Shawn Henry, a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News.
"But the Russians used the app to turn the tables on their foes, Crowdstrike says. Once a
Ukrainian soldier downloaded it on his Android phone, the Russians were able to eavesdrop on
his communications and determine his position through geo-location.
In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian intelligence
agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers call Cozy Bear, is
believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other, known as Fancy Bear, is
believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called the GRU."
The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to be."
According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post adds that
"intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin
'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks."
Because Ukrainian soldiers are using a smartphone app they activate their geolocation to use
it. Targeting is from location to location. The app would need the current user location to
make it work.
In 2015 I wrote an article that showed many of the available open source tools that
geolocate, and track people. They even show street view. This means that using simple means,
someone with freeware or an online website, and not a military budget can look at what you are
seeing at any given moment.
Where Crowdstrike fails is insisting people believe that the code they see is (a) an
advanced way to geolocate and (b) it was how a state with large resources would do it. Would
you leave a calling card where you would get caught and fined through sanctions or worse? If
you use an anonymous online resource at least Crowdstrike won't believe you are Russian and
possibly up to something.
If you read that article and watch the video you'll see that using "geo-stalker" is a better
choice if you are on a low budget or no budget. Should someone tell the Russians they
overpaid?
According to Alperovitch, the smartphone app
plotted targets in about 15 seconds . This means that there is only a small window to get
information this way.
Using the open source tools I wrote about previously, you could track your targets all-day.
In 2014, most Ukrainian forces were using social media regularly. It would be easy to maintain
a map of their locations and track them individually.
From my research into those tools, someone using Python scripts would find it easy to take
photos, listen to conversations, turn on GPS, or even turn the phone on when they chose to.
Going a step further than Alperovitch, without the help of the Russian government, GRU, or FSB,
anyone could
take control of the drones Ukraine is fond of flying and land them. Or they could download
the footage the drones are taking. It's copy and paste at that point. Would you bother the FSB,
GRU, or Vladimir Putin with the details or just do it?
In the WaPo article Alperovitch states "The Fancy Bear crew evidently hacked the app,
allowing the GRU to use the phone's GPS coordinates to track the Ukrainian troops'
position.
In that way, the Russian military could then target the Ukrainian army with artillery and
other weaponry. Ukrainian brigades operating in eastern Ukraine were on the front lines of the
conflict with Russian-backed separatist forces during the early stages of the conflict in late
2014, CrowdStrike noted. By late 2014, Russian forces in the region numbered about 10,000. The
Android app was useful in helping the Russian troops locate Ukrainian artillery positions."
In late 2014,
I personally did the only invasive passport and weapons checks that I know of during the
Ukrainian civil war.
I spent days looking for the Russian army every major publication said were attacking
Ukraine. The keyword Cyber Security industry leader Alperovitch used is "evidently."
Crowdstrike noted that in late 2014, there were 10,000 Russian forces in the region.
When I did the passport and weapons check, it was under the condition there would be no
telephone calls. We went where I wanted to go. We stopped when I said to stop. I checked the
documents and the weapons with no obstacles. The weapons check was important because Ukraine
was stating that Russia was giving Donbass modern weapons at the time. Each weapon is stamped
with a manufacture date. The results are in the articles above.
Based on my findings which the CIA would call hard evidence, almost all the fighters had
Ukrainian passports. There are volunteers from other countries. In Debaltsevo today, I would
question Alperovitch's assertion of Russian troops based on the fact the passports will be
Ukrainian and reflect my earlier findings. There is no possibly, could be, might be, about
it.
The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that
Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment . Although subtitles aren't on it, the former
Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine would have
been in deep trouble.
How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this wrong on easily checked detail and
still get this much media attention? Could the investment made by Google and some
very large players have anything to do with the media Crowdstrike is causing?
According to Alperovitch, the CEO of a $150 million dollar cyber security company "And when
you think about, well, who would be interested in targeting Ukraine artillerymen in eastern
Ukraine who has interest in hacking the Democratic Party, Russia government comes to mind, but
specifically, Russian military that would have operational over forces in the Ukraine and would
target these artillerymen."
That statement is most of the proof of Russian involvement he has. That's it, that's all the
CIA, FBI have to go on. It's why they can't certify the intelligence. It's why they can't get
beyond the threshold of maybe.
Woodruff then asked two important questions. She asked if Crowdstrike was still working for
the DNC. Alperovitch responded "We're protecting them going forward. The investigation is
closed in terms of what happened there. But certainly, we've seen the campaigns, political
organizations are continued to be targeted, and they continue to hire us and use our technology
to protect themselves."
Based on the evidence he presented Woodruff, there is no need to investigate further?
Obviously, there is no need, the money is rolling in.
Second and most important Judy Woodruff asked if there were any questions about conflicts of
interest, how he would answer? This is where Dmitri Alperovitch's story starts to unwind.
His response was "Well, this report was not about the DNC. This report was about information
we uncovered about what these Russian actors were doing in eastern Ukraine in terms of locating
these artillery units of the Ukrainian army and then targeting them. So, what we just did is
said that it looks exactly as the same to the evidence we've already uncovered from the DNC,
linking the two together."
Why is this reasonable statement going to take his story off the rails? First, let's look at
the facts surrounding his evidence and then look at the real conflicts of interest involved.
While carefully evading the question, he neglects to state his conflicts of interest are worthy
of a DOJ investigation. Can you mislead the federal government about national security issues
and not get investigated yourself?
If Alperovitch's evidence is all there is, then the US government owes some large apologies
to Russia.
After showing who is targeting Ukrainian artillerymen, we'll look at what might be a
criminal conspiracy.
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary Clinton the
election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in Ukraine. If Dimitri
Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US
Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years.
Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows
for evidence doesn't just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a
reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to
carry this out?
Real Fancy Bear?
Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian
positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they
didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and
most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet
services.
These are normal people fighting back against private volunteer armies that target their
homes, schools, and hospitals. The private volunteer armies like Pravy Sektor, Donbas
Battalion, Azov, and Aidar have been cited for atrocities like child rape, torture, murder, and
kidnapping. That just gets the ball rolling. These are a large swath of the Ukrainian
servicemen Crowdstrike hopes to protect.
This story which just aired on Ukrainian news channel TCN shows the SBU questioning and
arresting some of what they call an army of people in the Ukrainian-controlled areas. This news
video shows people in Toretsk that provided targeting information to Donbass and people
probably caught up in the net accidentally.
This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line.
The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target
the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans.
The first person they show on the video is a woman named Olga Lubochka. On the video her
voice is heard from a recorded call saying " In the field, on the left about 130 degrees. Aim
and you'll get it." and then " Oh, you hit it so hard you leveled it to the ground.""Am I going
to get a medal for this?"
Other people caught up in the raid claim and probably were only calling friends they know.
It's common for people to call and tell their family about what is going on around them. This
has been a staple in the war especially in outlying villages for people aligned with both sides
of the conflict. A neighbor calls his friend and says "you won't believe what I just saw."
Another "fancy bear," Alexander Schevchenko was caught calling friends and telling them that
armored personnel carriers had just driven by.
Anatoli Prima, father of a DNR(Donetsk People's Republic) soldier was asked to find out what
unit was there and how many artillery pieces.
One woman providing information about fuel and incoming equipment has a husband fighting on
the opposite side in Gorlovka. Gorlovka is a major city that's been under artillery attack
since 2014. For the past 2 1/2 years, she has remained in their home in Toretsk. According to
the video, he's vowed to take no prisoners when they rescue the area.
When asked why they hate Ukraine so much, one responded that they just wanted things to go
back to what they were like before the coup in February 2014.
Another said they were born in the Soviet Union and didn't like what was going on in Kiev.
At the heart of this statement is the anti- OUN, antinationalist sentiment that most people
living in Ukraine feel. The OUNb Bandera killed millions of people in Ukraine, including
starving 3 million Soviet soldiers to death. The new Ukraine was founded
in 1991 by OUN nationalists outside the fledgling country.
Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If it's
done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be investigated? If
unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side isn't enough, we should
look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia influencing the election and DNC
hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch
and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the
skills, motivation, and reason are exposed.
In the last article exploring the
DNC hacks the focus was on the Chalupas . The article focused on Alexandra, Andrea, and
Irene Chalupa. Their participation in the DNC hack story is what brought it to international
attention in the first place.
According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "
After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter
to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within
the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the Russians,"
said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the
hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her to stop her
research."" July 25, 2016
If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister
Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking
investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the
work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and
obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror
Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff.
How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should
have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election
in a new direction.
According to Esquire.com ,
Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the
past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said
the measures taken were directly because of his work.
Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with
the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state
supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that
tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
In my
previous article I showed in detail how the Chalupas fit into this. A brief bullet point
review looks like this.
The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard to start
a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the
Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other statements
were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera
wing) called for" What is OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform
that was developed in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera. When these people go to a Holocaust
memorial they are celebrating both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed
There is no getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and
want an authoritarian fascism.
Alexandra Chalupa- According
to the Ukrainian Weekly , "The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following
the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra
Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money
for the coup. This was how the Ukrainian
emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi, Dima
Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan and
Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper
Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows
clearly detailed evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that
show who created the "heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital
Maidan by both Chalupas is a
clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25
year prison sentence attached to it because it ended in a coup.
Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa described
Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young activist that
founded Euromaidan
Press . Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say is who he actually is. Sviatoslav
Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian
nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy Director
position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev .
In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the
foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh
Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had
to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.
At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on
videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to
speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.
Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice is Irene
Chalupa. From her bio – Irena
Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center.
She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has
worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the
Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the
news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian
emigre leader.
According to
Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in
a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main
goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the
CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with
Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you
willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support
throughout the campaign.
What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the
Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship
status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict
of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton
needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland
Security?
When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that could
change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked heavily to
groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it opens up criminal
conspiracy.
If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants a
major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic Council and
clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of his work affects
the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri Alperovitch's case, he
found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a crime.
Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups
is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet
for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of
a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm
and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for
the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be
investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other?
Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC
hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and
Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service Crowdstrike offers?
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he
writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This
image shows Crowdstrike in their network.
Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network
In an interview with
Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA
amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a
quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon
Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets
site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. This is something you do when you don't
want to be too obvious. Here is another example of that.
Ukrainian Intelligence and the real Fancy Bear?
Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for
Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence.
The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates
journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could
be on the list.
Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence)
tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian
Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter.
Trying to keep it hush hush?
This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of
Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him
and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared.
If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared
heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves
and not draw unwanted attention.
These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the
portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and
directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to
promote the story of Russian hacking.
Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike?
When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the
hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy
Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the
Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say" Let's understand that
Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian
hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA I don't know, why would we
need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don't think that the USA or
any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics."
What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out
for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian
language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the
tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US
intel efforts.
The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war
between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst.
Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he
and these hackers need to be investigated.
According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the
government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal
in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have,
the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I
have."
While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is
not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict
with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests.
He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.
The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of
interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics.
By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of
the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.
From the Observer.com , " Andrea
Chalupa -- the sister of DNC
research staffer Alexandra Chalupa -- claimed on
social media, without any evidence, that despite Clinton
conceding the election to Trump, the voting results need to be audited to because
Clinton couldn't have lost -- it must have been Russia. Chalupa hysterically
tweeted to every politician on Twitter to audit the vote because of Russia and claimed the TV
show The Americans
, about two KGB spies living in America, is real."
Quite possibly now the former UK Ambassador Craig Murry's admission of being the involved
party to "leaks" should be looked at. " Now both Julian
Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia . Do we credibly
have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access
to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access.
After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for
truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has
released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for
inconvenient truth telling."
"... Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years. ..."
"... Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to carry this out? ..."
"... Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet services. ..."
"... This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line. The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans. ..."
"... If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff. ..."
"... How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election in a new direction. ..."
"... According to Esquire.com , Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said the measures taken were directly because of his work. ..."
"... Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016. ..."
"... According to Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia. ..."
"... The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support throughout the campaign. ..."
"... What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland Security? ..."
"... Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers. ..."
"... When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government. ..."
"... Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other? ..."
"... Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network ..."
"... In an interview with Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets site, Informnapalm analytical agency." ..."
"... Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence. The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could be on the list. ..."
"... This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared. If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves and not draw unwanted attention. ..."
"... Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike? ..."
"... What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US intel efforts. ..."
"... The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst. Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he and these hackers need to be investigated. ..."
"... According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have, the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I have." ..."
"... While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests. He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine. ..."
In the wake of the JAR-16-20296 dated December 29, 2016 about hacking and influencing the
2016 election, the need for real evidence is clear. The joint report adds nothing substantial
to the October 7th report. It relies on proofs provided by the cyber security firm Crowdstrike
that is clearly not on par with intelligence findings or evidence. At the top of the report is
an "as is" statement showing this.
The difference between Dmitri Alperovitch's claims which are reflected in JAR-1620296 and
this article is that enough evidence is provided to warrant an investigation of specific
parties for the DNC hacks. The real story involves specific anti-American actors that need to
be investigated for real crimes.
For instance, the malware used was an out-dated version just waiting to be found. The one
other interesting point is that the Russian malware called Grizzly Steppe
is from Ukraine . How did Crowdstrike miss this when it is their business to know?
Later in this article you'll meet and know a little more about the real "Fancy Bear and Cozy
Bear." The bar for identification set by Crowdstrike has never been able to get beyond words
like probably, maybe, could be, or should be, in their attribution.
The article is lengthy because the facts need to be in one place. The bar Dimitri
Alperovitch set for identifying the hackers involved is that low. Other than asking America to
trust them, how many solid facts has Alperovitch provided to back his claim of Russian
involvement?
The December 29th JAR adds a flowchart that shows how a basic phishing hack is performed. It
doesn't add anything significant beyond that. Noticeably, they use both their designation APT
28 and APT 29 as well as the Crowdstrike labels of Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear separately.
This is important because information from outside intelligence agencies has the value of
rumor or unsubstantiated information at best according to policy. Usable intelligence needs to
be free from partisan politics and verifiable. Intel agencies noted back in the early 90's that
every private actor in the information game was radically political.
The
Hill.com article about Russia hacking the electric grid is a perfect example of why this
intelligence is political and not taken seriously. If any proof of Russian involvement existed,
the US would be at war. Under current laws of war, there would be no difference between an
attack on the power grid or a missile strike.
According
to the Hill "Private security firms provided more detailed forensic analysis, which the FBI
and DHS said Thursday correlated with the IC's findings.
"The Joint Analysis Report recognizes the excellent work undertaken by
security companies and private sector network owners and operators, and provides new indicators
of compromise and malicious infrastructure
identified during the course of investigations and incident response," read a statement. The
report identities two Russian intelligence groups already named by CrowdStrike and other
private security firms."
In an interview with Washingtonsblog , William Binney, the creator of the NSA global
surveillance system said "I expected to see the IP's or other signatures of APT's 28/29 [the
entities which the U.S. claims hacked the Democratic emails] and where they were located and
how/when the data got transferred to them from DNC/HRC [i.e. Hillary Rodham Clinton]/etc. They
seem to have been following APT 28/29 since at least 2015, so, where are they?"
According to the latest Washington Post story, Crowdstrike's CEO tied a group his company
dubbed "Fancy Bear" to targeting Ukrainian artillery positions in Debaltsevo as well as across
the Ukrainian civil war front for the past 2 years.
Alperovitch states in many articles the Ukrainians were using an Android app to target the
self-proclaimed Republics positions and that hacking this app was what gave targeting data to
the armies in Donbass instead.
Alperovitch first gained notice when he was the VP in charge of threat research with McAfee.
Asked to comment on Alperovitch's
discovery of Russian hacks on Larry King, John McAfee had this to say. "Based on all of his
experience, McAfee does not believe that Russians were behind the hacks on the Democratic
National Committee (DNC), John Podesta's emails, and the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign.
As he told RT, "if it looks like the Russians did it, then I can guarantee you it was not the
Russians."
How does Crowdstrike's story part with reality? First is the admission that it is probably,
maybe, could be Russia hacking the DNC. "
Intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin
'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to Wiki Leaks."
The public evidence never goes beyond the word possibility. While never going beyond that or
using facts, Crowdstrike insists that it's Russia behind both Clinton's and the Ukrainian
losses. NBC carried the story because one of the partners in Crowdstrike is also a consultant
for NBC.
According to NBC the story reads like this."
The company, Crowdstrike, was hired by the DNC to investigate the hack and issued a report
publicly attributing it to Russian intelligence. One of Crowdstrike's senior executives is
Shawn Henry, a former senior FBI official who consults for NBC News.
"But the Russians used the app to turn the tables on their foes, Crowdstrike says. Once a
Ukrainian soldier downloaded it on his Android phone, the Russians were able to eavesdrop on
his communications and determine his position through geo-location.
In June, Crowdstrike went public with its findings that two separate Russian intelligence
agencies had hacked the DNC. One, which Crowdstrike and other researchers call Cozy Bear, is
believed to be linked to Russia's CIA, known as the FSB. The other, known as Fancy Bear, is
believed to be tied to the military intelligence agency, called the GRU."
The information is so certain the level of proof never rises above "believed to be."
According to the December 12th Intercept article "Most importantly, the Post adds that
"intelligence agencies do not have specific intelligence showing officials in the Kremlin
'directing' the identified individuals to pass the Democratic emails to WikiLeaks."
Because Ukrainian soldiers are using a smartphone app they activate their geolocation to use
it. Targeting is from location to location. The app would need the current user location to
make it work.
In 2015 I wrote an article that showed many of the available open source tools that
geolocate, and track people. They even show street view. This means that using simple means,
someone with freeware or an online website, and not a military budget can look at what you are
seeing at any given moment.
Where Crowdstrike fails is insisting people believe that the code they see is (a) an
advanced way to geolocate and (b) it was how a state with large resources would do it. Would
you leave a calling card where you would get caught and fined through sanctions or worse? If
you use an anonymous online resource at least Crowdstrike won't believe you are Russian and
possibly up to something.
If you read that article and watch the video you'll see that using "geo-stalker" is a better
choice if you are on a low budget or no budget. Should someone tell the Russians they
overpaid?
According to Alperovitch, the smartphone app
plotted targets in about 15 seconds . This means that there is only a small window to get
information this way.
Using the open source tools I wrote about previously, you could track your targets all-day.
In 2014, most Ukrainian forces were using social media regularly. It would be easy to maintain
a map of their locations and track them individually.
From my research into those tools, someone using Python scripts would find it easy to take
photos, listen to conversations, turn on GPS, or even turn the phone on when they chose to.
Going a step further than Alperovitch, without the help of the Russian government, GRU, or FSB,
anyone could
take control of the drones Ukraine is fond of flying and land them. Or they could download
the footage the drones are taking. It's copy and paste at that point. Would you bother the FSB,
GRU, or Vladimir Putin with the details or just do it?
In the WaPo article Alperovitch states "The Fancy Bear crew evidently hacked the app,
allowing the GRU to use the phone's GPS coordinates to track the Ukrainian troops'
position.
In that way, the Russian military could then target the Ukrainian army with artillery and
other weaponry. Ukrainian brigades operating in eastern Ukraine were on the front lines of the
conflict with Russian-backed separatist forces during the early stages of the conflict in late
2014, CrowdStrike noted. By late 2014, Russian forces in the region numbered about 10,000. The
Android app was useful in helping the Russian troops locate Ukrainian artillery positions."
In late 2014,
I personally did the only invasive passport and weapons checks that I know of during the
Ukrainian civil war.
I spent days looking for the Russian army every major publication said were attacking
Ukraine. The keyword Cyber Security industry leader Alperovitch used is "evidently."
Crowdstrike noted that in late 2014, there were 10,000 Russian forces in the region.
When I did the passport and weapons check, it was under the condition there would be no
telephone calls. We went where I wanted to go. We stopped when I said to stop. I checked the
documents and the weapons with no obstacles. The weapons check was important because Ukraine
was stating that Russia was giving Donbass modern weapons at the time. Each weapon is stamped
with a manufacture date. The results are in the articles above.
Based on my findings which the CIA would call hard evidence, almost all the fighters had
Ukrainian passports. There are volunteers from other countries. In Debaltsevo today, I would
question Alperovitch's assertion of Russian troops based on the fact the passports will be
Ukrainian and reflect my earlier findings. There is no possibly, could be, might be, about
it.
The SBU, Olexander Turchinov, and the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense all agree that
Crowdstrike is dead wrong in this assessment . Although subtitles aren't on it, the former
Commandant of Ukrainian Army Headquarters thanks God Russia never invaded or Ukraine would have
been in deep trouble.
How could Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike be this wrong on easily checked detail and
still get this much media attention? Could the investment made by Google and some
very large players have anything to do with the media Crowdstrike is causing?
According to Alperovitch, the CEO of a $150 million dollar cyber security company "And when
you think about, well, who would be interested in targeting Ukraine artillerymen in eastern
Ukraine who has interest in hacking the Democratic Party, Russia government comes to mind, but
specifically, Russian military that would have operational over forces in the Ukraine and would
target these artillerymen."
That statement is most of the proof of Russian involvement he has. That's it, that's all the
CIA, FBI have to go on. It's why they can't certify the intelligence. It's why they can't get
beyond the threshold of maybe.
Woodruff then asked two important questions. She asked if Crowdstrike was still working for
the DNC. Alperovitch responded "We're protecting them going forward. The investigation is
closed in terms of what happened there. But certainly, we've seen the campaigns, political
organizations are continued to be targeted, and they continue to hire us and use our technology
to protect themselves."
Based on the evidence he presented Woodruff, there is no need to investigate further?
Obviously, there is no need, the money is rolling in.
Second and most important Judy Woodruff asked if there were any questions about conflicts of
interest, how he would answer? This is where Dmitri Alperovitch's story starts to unwind.
His response was "Well, this report was not about the DNC. This report was about information
we uncovered about what these Russian actors were doing in eastern Ukraine in terms of locating
these artillery units of the Ukrainian army and then targeting them. So, what we just did is
said that it looks exactly as the same to the evidence we've already uncovered from the DNC,
linking the two together."
Why is this reasonable statement going to take his story off the rails? First, let's look at
the facts surrounding his evidence and then look at the real conflicts of interest involved.
While carefully evading the question, he neglects to state his conflicts of interest are worthy
of a DOJ investigation. Can you mislead the federal government about national security issues
and not get investigated yourself?
If Alperovitch's evidence is all there is, then the US government owes some large apologies
to Russia.
After showing who is targeting Ukrainian artillerymen, we'll look at what might be a
criminal conspiracy.
Crowdstrike CEO Dmitri Alperovitch story about Russian hacks that cost Hillary Clinton the
election was broadsided by the SBU (Ukrainian Intelligence and Security) in Ukraine. If Dimitri
Alperovitch is working for Ukrainian Intelligence and is providing intelligence to 17 US
Intelligence Agencies is it a conflict of interest?
Ukraine has been screaming for the US to start a war with Russia for the past 2 1/2 years.
Using facts accepted by leaders on both sides of the conflict, the main proof Crowdstrike shows
for evidence doesn't just unravel, it falls apart. Is Ukrainian Intelligence trying to invent a
reason for the US to take a hard-line stance against Russia? Are they using Crowdstrike to
carry this out?
Real Fancy Bear?
Meet the real Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear, part of the groups that are targeting Ukrainian
positions for the Donetsk and Lugansk People's Republics. These people were so tech savvy they
didn't know the Ukrainian SBU (Ukrainian CIA/internal security) records every phone call and
most internet use in Ukraine and Donbass. Donbass still uses Ukrainian phone and internet
services.
These are normal people fighting back against private volunteer armies that target their
homes, schools, and hospitals. The private volunteer armies like Pravy Sektor, Donbas
Battalion, Azov, and Aidar have been cited for atrocities like child rape, torture, murder, and
kidnapping. That just gets the ball rolling. These are a large swath of the Ukrainian
servicemen Crowdstrike hopes to protect.
This story which just aired on Ukrainian news channel TCN shows the SBU questioning and
arresting some of what they call an army of people in the Ukrainian-controlled areas. This news
video shows people in Toretsk that provided targeting information to Donbass and people
probably caught up in the net accidentally.
This is a civil war and people supporting either side are on both sides of the contact line.
The SBU is awestruck because there are hundreds if not thousands of people helping to target
the private volunteer armies supported by Ukrainian-Americans.
The first person they show on the video is a woman named Olga Lubochka. On the video her
voice is heard from a recorded call saying " In the field, on the left about 130 degrees. Aim
and you'll get it." and then " Oh, you hit it so hard you leveled it to the ground.""Am I going
to get a medal for this?"
Other people caught up in the raid claim and probably were only calling friends they know.
It's common for people to call and tell their family about what is going on around them. This
has been a staple in the war especially in outlying villages for people aligned with both sides
of the conflict. A neighbor calls his friend and says "you won't believe what I just saw."
Another "fancy bear," Alexander Schevchenko was caught calling friends and telling them that
armored personnel carriers had just driven by.
Anatoli Prima, father of a DNR(Donetsk People's Republic) soldier was asked to find out what
unit was there and how many artillery pieces.
One woman providing information about fuel and incoming equipment has a husband fighting on
the opposite side in Gorlovka. Gorlovka is a major city that's been under artillery attack
since 2014. For the past 2 1/2 years, she has remained in their home in Toretsk. According to
the video, he's vowed to take no prisoners when they rescue the area.
When asked why they hate Ukraine so much, one responded that they just wanted things to go
back to what they were like before the coup in February 2014.
Another said they were born in the Soviet Union and didn't like what was going on in Kiev.
At the heart of this statement is the anti- OUN, antinationalist sentiment that most people
living in Ukraine feel. The OUNb Bandera killed millions of people in Ukraine, including
starving 3 million Soviet soldiers to death. The new Ukraine was founded
in 1991 by OUN nationalists outside the fledgling country.
Is giving misleading or false information to 17 US Intelligence Agencies a crime? If it's
done by a cyber security industry leader like Crowdstrike should that be investigated? If
unwinding the story from the "targeting of Ukrainian volunteers" side isn't enough, we should
look at this from the American perspective. How did the Russia influencing the election and DNC
hack story evolve? Who's involved? Does this pose conflicts of interest for Dmitri Alperovitch
and Crowdstrike? And let's face it, a hacking story isn't complete until real hackers with the
skills, motivation, and reason are exposed.
In the last article exploring the
DNC hacks the focus was on the Chalupas . The article focused on Alexandra, Andrea, and
Irene Chalupa. Their participation in the DNC hack story is what brought it to international
attention in the first place.
According to journalist and DNC activist Andrea Chalupa on her Facebook page "
After Chalupa sent the email to Miranda (which mentions that she had invited this reporter
to a meeting with Ukrainian journalists in Washington), it triggered high-level concerns within
the DNC, given the sensitive nature of her work. "That's when we knew it was the Russians,"
said a Democratic Party source who has been directly involved in the internal probe into the
hacked emails. In order to stem the damage, the source said, "we told her to stop her
research."" July 25, 2016
If she was that close to the investigation Crowdstrike did how credible is she? Her sister
Alexandra was named one of 16 people that shaped the election by Yahoo news. The DNC hacking
investigation done by Crowdstrike concluded hacking was done by Russian actors based on the
work done by Alexandra Chalupa? That is the conclusion of her sister Andrea Chalupa and
obviously enough for Crowdstrike to make the Russian government connection. These words mirror
Dimitri Alperovitch's identification process in his interview with PBS Judy Woodruff.
How close is Dimitri Alperovitch to DNC officials? Close enough professionally he should
have stepped down from an investigation that had the chance of throwing a presidential election
in a new direction.
According to Esquire.com ,
Alperovitch has vetted speeches for Hillary Clinton about cyber security issues in the
past. Because of his work on the Sony hack, President Barrack Obama personally called and said
the measures taken were directly because of his work.
Still, this is not enough to show a conflict of interest. Alperovitch's relationships with
the Chalupas, radical groups, think tanks, Ukrainian propagandists, and Ukrainian state
supported hackers do. When it all adds up and you see it together, we have found a Russian that
tried hard to influence the outcome of the US presidential election in 2016.
In my
previous article I showed in detail how the Chalupas fit into this. A brief bullet point
review looks like this.
The Chalupas are not Democrat or Republican. They are OUNb. The OUNb worked hard to start
a war between the USA and Russia for the last 50 years. According to the
Ukrainian Weekly in a rare open statement of their existence in 2011, "Other statements
were issued in the Ukrainian language by the leadership of the Organization of Ukrainian
Nationalists (B) and the International Conference in Support of Ukraine. The OUN (Bandera
wing) called for" What is OUNb Bandera? They follow the same political policy and platform
that was developed in the 1930's by Stepan Bandera. When these people go to a Holocaust
memorial they are celebrating both the dead and the OUNb SS that killed
There is no getting around this fact. The OUNb have no concept of democratic values and
want an authoritarian fascism.
Alexandra Chalupa- According
to the Ukrainian Weekly , "The effort, known as Digital Miadan, gained momentum following
the initial Twitter storms. Leading the effort were: Lara Chelak, Andrea Chalupa, Alexandra
Chalupa, Constatin Kostenko and others." The Digital Maidan was also how they raised money
for the coup. This was how the Ukrainian
emigres bought the bullets that were used on Euromaidan. Ukraine's chubby nazi, Dima
Yarosh stated openly he was taking money from the Ukrainian emigres during Euromaidan and
Pravy Sektor still fundraises openly in North America. The "Sniper
Massacre" on the Maidan in Ukraine by Dr. Ivan Katchanovski, University of Ottowa shows
clearly detailed evidence how the massacre happened. It has Pravy Sektor confessions that
show who created the "heavenly hundred. Their admitted involvement as leaders of Digital
Maidan by both Chalupas is a
clear violation of the Neutrality Act and has up to a 25
year prison sentence attached to it because it ended in a coup.
Andrea Chalupa-2014, in a Huff Post article Sept. 1 2016, Andrea Chalupa described
Sviatoslav Yurash as one of Ukraine's important "dreamers." He is a young activist that
founded Euromaidan
Press . Beyond the gushing glow what she doesn't say is who he actually is. Sviatoslav
Yurash was Dmitri Yarosh's spokesman just after Maidan. He is a hardcore Ukrainian
nationalist and was rewarded with the Deputy Director
position for the UWC (Ukrainian World Congress) in Kiev .
In January, 2014 when he showed up at the Maidan protests he was 17 years old. He became the
foreign language media representative for Vitali Klitschko, Arseni Yatsenyuk, and Oleh
Tyahnybok. All press enquiries went through Yurash. To meet Dimitri Yurash you had
to go through Sviatoslav Yurash as a Macleans reporter found out.
At 18 years old, Sviatoslav Yurash became the spokesman for Ministry of Defense of Ukraine
under Andrei Paruby. He was Dimitri Yarosh's spokesman and can be seen either behind Yarosh on
videos at press conferences or speaking ahead of him to reporters. From January 2014 onward, to
speak to Dimitri Yarosh, you set up an appointment with Yurash.
Irene Chalupa- Another involved Chalupa we need to cover to do the story justice is Irene
Chalupa. From her bio – Irena
Chalupa is a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council's Dinu Patriciu Eurasia Center.
She is also a senior correspondent at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), where she has
worked for more than twenty years. Ms. Chalupa previously served as an editor for the
Atlantic Council, where she covered Ukraine and Eastern Europe. Irena Chalupa is also the
news anchor for Ukraine's propaganda channel org She is also a Ukrainian
emigre leader.
According to
Robert Parry's article At the forefront of people that would have taken senior positions in
a Clinton administration and especially in foreign policy are the Atlantic Council. Their main
goal is still a major confrontation with nuclear-armed Russia.
The Atlantic Council is the think tank associated and supported by the
CEEC (Central and Eastern European Coalition). The CEEC has only one goal which is war with
Russia. Their question to candidates looking for their support in the election was "Are you
willing to go to war with Russia?" Hillary Clinton has received their unqualified support
throughout the campaign.
What does any of this have to do with Dimitri Alperovitch and Crowdstrike? Since the
Atlantic Council would have taken senior cabinet and policy positions, his own fellowship
status at the Atlantic Council and relationship with Irene Chalupa creates a definite conflict
of interest for Crowdstrike's investigation. Trump's campaign was gaining ground and Clinton
needed a boost. Had she won, would he have been in charge of the CIA, NSA, or Homeland
Security?
When you put someone that has so much to gain in charge of an investigation that could
change an election, that is a conflict of interest. If the think tank is linked heavily to
groups that want war with Russia like the Atlantic Council and the CEEC, it opens up criminal
conspiracy.
If the person in charge of the investigation is a fellow at the think tank that wants a
major conflict with Russia it is a definite conflict of interest. Both the Atlantic Council and
clients stood to gain Cabinet and Policy positions based on how the result of his work affects
the election. It clouds the results of the investigation. In Dmitri Alperovitch's case, he
found the perpetrator before he was positive there was a crime.
Alperovitch's relationship with Andrea Chalupa's efforts and Ukrainian intelligence groups
is where things really heat up. Noted above she works with Euromaidanpress.com and Informnapalm.org which is the outlet
for Ukrainian state-sponsored hackers.
When you look at Dimitri Alperovitch's twitter relationships, you have to ask why the CEO of
a $150 million dollar company like Crowdstrike follows Ukrainian InformNapalm
and its hackers individually . There is a mutual relationship. When you add up his work for
the OUNb, Ukraine, support for Ukraine's Intelligence, and to the hackers it needs to be
investigated to see if Ukraine is conspiring against the US government.
Alperovitch and Fancy Bear tweet each other?
Crowdstrike is also following their hack of a Russian government official after the DNC
hack. It closely resembles the same method used with the DNC because it was an email hack.
Crowdstrike's product line includes Falcon Host, Falcon Intelligence, Falcon Overwatch and
Falcon DNS. Is it possible the hackers in Falcons Flame are another service Crowdstrike offers?
Although this profile says Virginia, tweets are from the Sofia, Bulgaria time zone and he
writes in Russian. Another curiosity considering the Fancy Bear source code is in Russian. This
image shows Crowdstrike in their network.
Crowdstrike is part of Ukrainian nationalist hacker network
In an interview with
Euromaidanpress these hackers say they have no need for the CIA. They consider the CIA
amateurish. They also say they are not part of the Ukrainian military Cyberalliance is a
quasi-organization with the participation of several groups – RUH8, Trinity, Falcon
Flames, Cyberhunta. There are structures affiliated to the hackers – the Myrotvorets
site, Informnapalm analytical agency."
In the image it shows a network diagram of Crowdstrike following the Surkov leaks. The
network communication goes through a secondary source. This is something you do when you don't
want to be too obvious. Here is another example of that.
Ukrainian Intelligence and the real Fancy Bear?
Although OSINT Academy sounds fairly innocuous, it's the official twitter account for
Ukraine's Ministry of Information head Dimitri Zolotukin. It is also Ukrainian Intelligence.
The Ministry of Information started the Peacekeeper or Myrotvorets website that geolocates
journalists and other people for assassination. If you disagree with OUNb politics, you could
be on the list.
Trying not to be obvious, the Head of Ukraine's Information Ministry (UA Intelligence)
tweeted something interesting that ties Alperovitch and Crowdstrike to the Ukrainian
Intelligence hackers and the Information Ministry even tighter.
Trying to keep it hush hush?
This single tweet on a network chart shows that out of all the Ukrainian Ministry of
Information Minister's following, he only wanted the 3 hacking groups associated with both him
and Alperovitch to get the tweet. Alperovitch's story was received and not retweeted or shared.
If this was just Alperovitch's victory, it was a victory for Ukraine. It would be shared
heavily. If it was a victory for the hacking squad, it would be smart to keep it to themselves
and not draw unwanted attention.
These same hackers are associated with Alexandra, Andrea, and Irene Chalupa through the
portals and organizations they work with through their OUNb. The hackers are funded and
directed by or through the same OUNb channels that Alperovitch is working for and with to
promote the story of Russian hacking.
Pravy Sektor Hackers and Crowdstrike?
When you look at the image for the hacking group in the euromaidanpress article, one of the
hackers identifies themselves as one of Dimitri Yarosh's Pravy Sektor members by the Pravy
Sektor sweatshirt they have on. Noted above, Pravy Sektor admitted to killing the people at the
Maidan protest and sparked the coup.
Going further with the linked Euromaidanpress article the hackers say" Let's understand that
Ukrainian hackers and Russian hackers once constituted a single very powerful group. Ukrainian
hackers have a rather high level of work. So the help of the USA I don't know, why would we
need it? We have all the talent and special means for this. And I don't think that the USA or
any NATO country would make such sharp movements in international politics."
What sharp movements in international politics have been made lately? Let me spell it out
for the 17 US Intelligence Agencies so there is no confusion. These state sponsored, Russian
language hackers in Eastern European time zones have shown with the Surkov hack they have the
tools and experience to hack states that are looking out for it. They are also laughing at US
intel efforts.
The hackers also made it clear that they will do anything to serve Ukraine. Starting a war
between Russia and the USA is the one way they could serve Ukraine best, and hurt Russia worst.
Given those facts, if the DNC hack was according to the criteria given by Alperovitch, both he
and these hackers need to be investigated.
According to the Esquire interview "Alperovitch was deeply frustrated: He thought the
government should tell the world what it knew. There is, of course, an element of the personal
in his battle cry. "A lot of people who are born here don't appreciate the freedoms we have,
the opportunities we have, because they've never had it any other way," he told me. "I
have."
While I agree patriotism is a great thing, confusing it with this kind of nationalism is
not. Alperovitch seems to think by serving OUNb Ukraine's interests and delivering a conflict
with Russia that is against American interests, he's a patriot. He isn't serving US interests.
He's definitely a Ukrainian patriot. Maybe he should move to Ukraine.
The evidence presented deserves investigation because it looks like the case for conflict of
interest is the least Dimitri Alperovitch should look forward to. If these hackers are the real
Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, they really did make sharp movements in international politics.
By pawning it off on Russia, they made a worldwide embarrassment of an outgoing President of
the United States and made the President Elect the suspect of rumor.
From the Observer.com , " Andrea
Chalupa -- the sister of DNC
research staffer Alexandra Chalupa -- claimed on
social media, without any evidence, that despite Clinton
conceding the election to Trump, the voting results need to be audited to because
Clinton couldn't have lost -- it must have been Russia. Chalupa hysterically
tweeted to every politician on Twitter to audit the vote because of Russia and claimed the TV
show The Americans
, about two KGB spies living in America, is real."
Quite possibly now the former UK Ambassador Craig Murry's admission of being the involved
party to "leaks" should be looked at. " Now both Julian
Assange and I have stated definitively the leak does not come from Russia . Do we credibly
have access? Yes, very obviously. Very, very few people can be said to definitely have access
to the source of the leak. The people saying it is not Russia are those who do have access.
After access, you consider truthfulness. Do Julian Assange and I have a reputation for
truthfulness? Well in 10 years not one of the tens of thousands of documents WikiLeaks has
released has had its authenticity successfully challenged. As for me, I have a reputation for
inconvenient truth telling."
A foreign intelligence asset was used to justify surveillance of Trump[ and some of his associates
Notable quotes:
"... What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent? ..."
"... The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA) and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant"). ..."
"... The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their hand on the scale. ..."
"... Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power. ..."
"... I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors. ..."
"... if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know? ..."
"... Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost. ..."
"... Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance. ..."
"... From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. ..."
"... He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI. ..."
"... its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered. ..."
"... Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this? ..."
"... A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as 'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies. ..."
"... It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries ..."
"... If, as seems likely, both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary. ..."
"... An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him ..."
"... A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the supposed termination ..."
"... 'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence probes in American history.' ..."
"... I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief. ..."
"... Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it. ..."
"... Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense. So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs. ..."
"... Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly: ..."
"... Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. ..."
"... One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get 'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt on Trump...how is this not the same...? ..."
"... What role did Stefan Halper and Mifsud play as Confidential Human Sources in all this? ..."
"... Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation that may have already begun? ..."
"... British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete), his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy. ..."
"... British Intelligence is verifiably the foreign source with the most extensive and effective meddling in the 2016 election. Perfidious Albion. ..."
"... Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, ..."
"... I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws they have that prohibits spying on their people. ..."
"... still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources ..."
"... I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia. ..."
"... Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these people think they are. ..."
"... It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things ..."
The revelations from US Government records about the FBI/Intel Community plot to take out Donald Trump continue to flow thanks
to the dogged efforts of Judicial Watch. The latest nugget came last Friday with the release of FBI records detailing their recruitment
and management of Britain's ostensibly retired Intelligence Officer, Christopher Steele. He was an officially recruited FBI source
and received at least 11 payments during the 9 month period that he was signed up as a Confidential Human Source.
You may find it strange that we can glean so much information from
a document dump that is almost
entirely redacted . The key is to look at the report forms; there are three types--FD-1023 (Source Reports), FD-209a (Contact
Reports) and FD-794b (Payment Requests). There are 15 different 1023s, 13 209a reports and 11 794b payment requests covering the
period from 2 February 2016 thru 1 November 2016. That is a total of nine months.
These reports totally destroy the existing meme that Steele only came into contact with the FBI sometime in July 2016. It is important
for you to understand that a 1023 Source Report is filled out each time that the FBI source handler has contact with the source.
This can be an in person meeting or a phone call. Each report lists the name of the Case Agent; the date, time and location of the
meeting; any other people attending the meeting; and a summary of what was discussed.
What is clear from the new records is that Christopher Steele, a foreign intelligence officer, had frequent and extensive
contacts with the FBI. Who was his FBI Case Agent?
The main thing I want to know is WHEN was the decision made to tar Trump with Russia - both at the FBI (and likely CIA)
and at the DNC (over the leak) - and WHO was the deciding entity - Comey, Brennan, Clinton, Obama or someone else? And perhaps
who came up with the idea in the first place (at the DNC, it was very likely Alexandra Chalupa, the Ukrainian-American DNC "consultant").
We can be pretty sure this predates any alleged Russian "hacking" (unless it occurred as a result of alleged Russian hacking
of the DNC in 2015).
This needs to be pinned down if anyone is to be successfully prosecuted for creating this treasonous hoax.
A very closely related topic, Victor Davis Hanson is onto something but it is darker than he suggests,
https://www.nationalreview.... Paraphrasing, he gives the typical, rally around the flag we must stop the Russians intro but
then documents how govt flaks abused their power to influence our elections and then makes the point, 'this is why the public
is skeptical of their claims'.
The bad thing is that our MSM is so reverent of our Intel agencies that I see them encouraged to increasingly put their
hand on the scale.
Recently, I saw arm flailing by a Congressman, Dan Coats, and Mueller about how the Russians are still at it. They are
trying to disrupt or influence the 2018. Really, then I demand to get a list of the pro-Kremlin candidates. How long before the
mere threat of being outed as a Kremlin agent is used to punish elected officials if they are not sufficiently hawkish or don't
support certain programs. Unchallenged claims by Intel agencies gives them a lot of political power.
I am skeptical. Russia has a lot of fish to fry, why would they expend resources on midterm elections. Now everyone in
the U.S. hates them, both traditional hawk Republicans and born again uber-hawk Democrats. There is a tiger behind both doors.
What I can't figure out is: if Steele had been a CHS since at least February of 2016, what was the purpose of passing the
Dossier to the FBI through Fusion GPS? Why not just going to his FBI handler? Was Steele collaboration with Fusion even in compliance
with FBI regulations? Did the FBI know?
Because part of the plan was to leak the information in order to damage Trump. FBI could not do that. Would have exposed them
to some real legal jeopardy. This was a dual track strategy. Diabolical almost.
Don't forget the Nellie Ohr (Fusion GPS) -> Bruce Ohr (DOJ) back channel. The husband & wife tag team. Yes, the same Nellie
that was investigating using ham radio to communicate to avoid NSA mass surveillance.
From the very beginning that information about all this was slowly leaking from the Congressional investigation, this whole
thing smelled very fishy. Then add intense effort at DOJ & FBI to obstruct and obfuscate. And the unhinged tweets and interviews
by Brennan, Clapper & Comey. And of course the media narrative that Rep. Nunes, Goodlatte and others were endangering "national
security" by casting aspersions on the "patriotic" law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
He was working with FBI and GPS at the same time. GPS was in the dark supposedly about his work with the FBI and Steele got
their approval to hand over what he had delivered to GPS to the FBI as a cover for his work with the FBI.
Of course, he had most likely already done so and its also likely FBI had some input into the content of what was delivered
to GPS, and more importantly what was not delivered.
Re the 'standing agreement to not recruit each other's intelligence personnel for clandestine activities.' As Steele was
not by this time a current employee of MI6, was the FBI in technical violation of this?
The point is not merely a quibble. A central question in regard to Steele, as with quite a number of former intelligence/law
enforcement/military people who have started at least ostensibly private sector operations, is how far these are being used as
'cover' for activities conducted on behalf of either the state agencies for which they used to work, or other state agencies.
It is at least possible that one advantage of such arrangements may be that they make it possible to evade the letter of
agreements between intelligence agencies in different countries.
Another related matter has to do with the termination of Steele as a 'Confidential Human Source.'
It has long seemed to me that it was more than possible that this was not to be taken at face value. If, as seems likely,
both current and former top FBI and DOJ people – very likely Mueller as well as Comey, Strzok and many others – were intimately
involved in the conspiracy to subvert the constitution, then a means of making it possible for Steele to combine feeding information
to the FBI while also engaging in 'StratCom' via the MSM could have been necessary.
An obvious means of 'squaring the circle' would have been to issue a formal 'termination' to Steele, while creating 'back
channels' to those who were officially supposed not to be talking to him.
A report yesterday by John Solomon in 'The Hill' quotes from messages exchanged between Steele and Bruce Ohr after the
supposed termination.
When on 31 January 2017 – well after the publication of the dossier by BuzzFeed – Ohr provided reassurance that he could continue
to help feed information to the FBI, Steele texted back:
"If you end up out though, I really need another (bureau?) contact point/number who is briefed. We can't allow our guy to be
forced to go back home. It would be disastrous."
At that point, Solomon tells us that 'Investigators are trying to determine who Steele was referring to.' This seems to me
a rather important question. It would seem likely, although not certain, that he is talking about another Brit. If he is, would
it have been someone else employed by Orbis? Or someone currently working for British intelligence? What is the precise significance
of 'forced to go back home', and why would this have been 'disastrous'?
Another crucial paragraph:
'In all, Ohr's notes, emails and texts identify more than 60 contacts with Steele and/or Simpson, some dating to 2002 in
London. But the vast majority occurred during the 2016-2017 timeframe that gave birth to one of the most controversial counterintelligence
probes in American history.'
The earlier contacts may be of little interest, but there again they may not be.
As it happens, it was following Berezovsky's arrival in London in October 2001 that the 'information operations' network he
created began to move into high gear. It is moreover clear that this was always a transatlantic operation, and also fragments
of evidence suggest that the FBI may have had some involvement from early on.
I have just finished taking a fresh look at Sir Robert Owen's travesty of a report into the death of Litvinenko. In large
measure, this develops claims originally made in Christopher Steele's first attempt to provide a convincing account of why figures
close to Putin might have thought it made sense to assassinate that figure, and to do so with polonium. The sheer volume of fabrication
which has been deployed in an attempt to defend the patently indefensible almost beggars belief.
The original attempt came in a radio programme broadcast by the BBC – which was to become known to some of us as the 'Berezovsky
Broadcasting Corporation' – on 16 December 2006, presented by Tom Mangold, a familiar 'trusty' for the intelligence services.
(A transcript sent out from the Cabinet Office at the time is available on the archived 'Evidence' page for the Inquiry, at
http://webarchive.nationala... , as HMG000513. There is an interesting and rather important question as to whether those who
sent it out, and those who received it, knew that it was more or less BS from start to finish.)
The programme was wholly devoted to claims made by the former KGB operative Yuri Shvets, who was presented as an independent
'due diligence' expert, without any mention of the rather major role he had played in the original 'Orange Revolution.'
Back-up was provided by his supposed collaborator in 'due diligence', the former FBI operative Robert 'Bobby' Levinson. No
mention was made of the fact that he had been, in the 'Nineties, a, if not the lead FBI investigator into the notorious Ukrainian
Jewish mobster Semyon Mogilevich.
The following March Levinson would disappear on the Iranian island of Kish, on what we now know was a covert mission on behalf
of elements in the CIA.
Just as a question arises as to whether Steele is essentially acting on behalf of MI6, a question also arises as to whether
the FBI leadership were knowledgeable about, and possibly involved with, the various shenanigans in which Shvets and Levinson
were involved. Given that claims about Mogilevich have turned out to be central to 'Russiagate', that seems a rather important
issue, and I am curious as to whether Ohr's communications with Steele may cast any light on it.
Apparently the FBI got Deripaksa to fund the rescue of Levinson from Iran. Furthermore apparently FBI personnel maybe including
McCabe visited with Deripaksa and showed him the Steele dossier. He supposedly had a nice guffaw and dismissed it as nonsense.
So on the one hand while they make Russia out to be the most evil they play footsie with Russian oligarchs.
Thinking about "Christopher Steele was terminated as a Confidential Human Source for cause.", something that doesn't seem
to have gotten as much attention is that Peter Strzok failed his poly:
Steele's relationship with the FBI extends far further back than February 2016. Shortly after he left MI6, he contracted with
the Football Association to investigate possible FIFA corruption. Once he realized the massiveness of this corruption he contacted
his old friends at the FBI Eurasian Crimes Task Force in 2011. Thus began his association with the FBI as a CHS. That investigation
culminated in the 2015 FIFA corruption indictments and convictions. His initial contact with old friends at the FBI Eurasian
Crime Task Force is awfully similar to his contacting these same friends in 2016 after deciding his initial Trump research was
potentially bigger than mere opposition research.
One thing I don't understand...we have the anti-Trumpers saying that Donald Junior meeting with a Russian national to get
'dirt' on Hillary is illegal...due to some law about candidates collaborating with foreigners or something like that...[obviously
I'm foggy on the technical details]... Yet we know that the Hillary campaign worked with a foreign national, Steele, to get dirt
on Trump...how is this not the same...?
Even worse is that the FBI was using this same foreign agent that a presidential
candidate had hired to get dirt on an opponent... Even knowing nothing about legalities this just doesn't look very good...
Stupid question? As the Col. has explained, the President can declassify any document he pleases. So, why doesn't Donaldo unredact
the redacted portions of these bullcrap docs? What is he afraid of? That the Intel community will get mad and be out to get him?
Isn't time for him to show some cojones?
Why was British Intelligence allegedly collecting and passing along info about Donald Trump in the first place? Or could this
have been a pretext created to give cover and/or support to the agenda here in the US to insure his defeat? Could a foreign intelligence
source such as this trigger/facilitate/justify the US counterintelligence investigation of Trump, or give cover to a covert investigation
that may have already begun?
British intelligence was collecting / passing on info about Trump because of his campaign stance on NATO (he said it was obsolete),
his desire to end regime change wars (he castigated the fiasco in Iraq, took Bush to task over it etc.), and his often stated
desire to get along with Russia (and China). Trump also talked of ending certain economic policies (NAFTA, TPP, etc.) and reenacting
others (Glass-Steagall, the American System of Economics i.e. Hamilton, Carey, Clay), If Trump had acted on those, which he has
not so far, he would changed the entire world system, a system in place since the end of WW II, or earlier. That was a risk too
big to take without some kind of insurance policy - I believe Christopher Steele was that insurance policy.
Or, GSHQ was hovering up signint on Trump campaign early-on (using domestics US resources and databases via their 5-Eyes "sharing
agreement" with NSA) cuz Brennan asked them to do it? And therefore without having to mess about with any formal FISA warrant
thingy's ... But, then use what might be found (or plausibly alleged) to try to get a proper FISA warrant later on (July 2016)?
'Parallel Discovery' of sorts; with Fusion GPS also a leaky cut-out: channelling media reports to be used as confirmation of Steele's
"raw intelligence" in the formal FISA application(s)?
Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching him, they
would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates,
" Trump announced his run for President in 2015. I'm pretty sure that every intel service on the planet was watching
him, they would be derelict not to. GCHQ may have been collecting intel on all the candidates, "
That's a good question, could it legally enable an end run around the FISC until enough evidence was gathered for a FISC surveillance
authorization?.
I've heard that the Echelon system is used by the Five Eyes IC to do something similar. The Brits spy on US, and give the
NSA the data so the NSA can evade US laws prohibiting spying on us, and we return the favor to help them evade what (few) laws
they have that prohibits spying on their people.
Only a matter of time until someone figured out the same method could be used to "meddle" in national affairs.
I understand, but still wonder why the US would need to rely so much on British intelligence sources such as Steele about
a very high profile American citizen and businessman -- aren't our intelligence services competent enough to have known and discovered
as much if not more about Trump than other countries' intelligence services? I've read that Steele's cover was blown 20 years
ago and he hasn't even been to Russia since, so I wonder why he was considered such a reliable source by both the US and UK? In
my opinion as an absolute naif about such things, Steele seems like he may be a has-been when it comes to Russia.
Here is a simple explanation from someone who knows almost nothing about how any of the people in power work: Most of them
are not as clever and smart as they think they are. And most of the regular people who are just citizens are smarter than these
people think they are.
It's simply that their arrogant assessment of their own superiority caused them to do really stupid things.
This "shadowy Russian" might well be Sergey Skripal. This suggests that Steele dossier was CIA operation with British MI6 as transfer mechanism and
Steele as a cover. And implicates Brennan. So this is next level of leaks after "Stormy Daniel"...
Another NYT leak out of a set of well coordinated leans from anonymous intelligence officials ;-) Poor Melania...
Notable quotes:
"... But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to a fascinating report from The New York Times. ..."
"... If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7 during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries. ..."
"... More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia is still being stoked no matter what. ..."
"... Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine, McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down. ..."
"... the CIA has to turn America into a criminal totalitarian regime in order to make the world safe for democracy ..."
"... How much you wanna bet that Brennan, Obama's CIA Director, was behind ..."
"... You mean the same Brennan who is the godfather of ISIS? ..."
"... "U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can call off the hounds. ..."
"... Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it... ..."
"... Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big bad russkies tricked us. ..."
"... 'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope. Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a long shot. ..."
"... i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds. this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to trump. ..."
"... Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a cloth." ..."
"... And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works ..."
"... So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers for procurers of hosebags for him to screw? ..."
When they said "Russian collusion", few expected it to be between the CIA and a "shadowy
Russian operative." And yet, according to a blockbuster NYT report, that's precisely what
happened.
* * *
The CIA paid $100,000 last year to a Russian operative who claimed to have derogatory
information about President Trump, including a video tape of the Republican engaged with
prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room. If the video showed Trump, it would support claims made in
the infamous Steele dossier, the salacious opposition research report financed by the Clinton
campaign and DNC.
But U.S. intelligence officials have reason to doubt the veracity of the video and other
information about Trump associates provided by the Russian, according to
a fascinating report from The New York Times.
American spies made contact with the Russia early in 2017 after he offered to sell the Trump
material along with cyber hacking tools that were stolen from the NSA that year, according to
The Times. U.S. intelligence officials told The Times they were so desperate to retrieve those
tools that they negotiated with the operative for months despite several red flags, including
indications that he was working in concert with Russian intelligence.
Another red flag was the Russian's financial request. He initially sought $10 million for
the information but dropped the asking price to $1 million.
After months of negotiations, American spies handed over $100,000 in cash in a brief case to
the Russian during a meeting in Berlin in September.
The operative also offered documents and emails that purported to implicate other Trump
associates, including former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page. But The Times viewed the
documents and reported that they were mostly information that is already in the public
domain.
The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers, showed the video
purported to be Trump to a Berlin-based American businessman who served as his intermediary to
the CIA. But according to the Times, the footage and the location of the viewing raised
questions about its authenticity.
The 15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was
Trump, and there was no audio. The Russian also showed the video to his American partner at the
Russian embassy in Berlin, a sign that the operative had ties to Russian intelligence.
The Russian stonewalled the production of the cyber tools, and U.S. officials eventually cut
ties, according to The Times. After the payout in Berlin, the man provided information about
Trump and his associates of questionable veracity.
The Americans gave him an ultimatum earlier in 2018 to either play ball, leave Western
Europe, or face criminal charges. He left, according to The Times, which interviewed U.S.
officials, the American intermediary and the Russian for its article.
The Times' U.S. sources -- who appear to paint the American side in a positive light -- said
that they were reluctant to purchase information because they did not want to be seen buying
dirt on the president.
The officials also expressed concern that the Russian operative was planting disinformation
on behalf of the Russian government. U.S. officials were worried that the Russian government
has sought to sow discord between U.S. intelligence agencies and Trump. The revelation that the
CIA purchased dirt on him would likely do the trick.
The Times report also has other new details.
Four other Russians with ties to the spy world have surfaced over the past year offering to
sell dirt on Trump that closely mirrors allegations made in the dossier, according to the
article. But officials have reason to believe that some of sellers have ties to Russian
intelligence agencies.
The Times also provides new details on Cody Shearer, a notorious operative close to the
Clintons. Shearer was recently revealed to have shopped
around a so-called "second dossier" prior to the campaign which mirrored the sex allegations of
the Steele report.
According to The Times, he has criss-crossed Europe over the past six months in an attempt
to find video footage of Trump from the Moscow hotel room. Shearer claimed to have information
from the FSB, Russia's spy service, that a video existed of Trump with prostitutes in a Moscow
hotel room.
He shared a memo making the allegations with his friend and fellow Clinton fixer, Sidney
Blumenthal. Blumenthal in turn passed the memo to his friend, Jonathan Winer, a Department of
State official. Winer then gave the information to Steele who provided it to the FBI in October
2016.
Steele also provided information to Winer, who wrote up a two-page memo that was circulated
within the State Department.
Trump has denied allegations that he used prostitutes in Moscow. He has called the dossier a
"hoax" and "crap."
* * *
On Saturday morning, Trump tweeted that "according to the @nytimes, a Russian sold phony
secrets on "Trump" to the U.S. Asking price was $10 million, brought down to $1 million to be
paid over time. I hope people are now seeing & understanding what is going on here. It is
all now starting to come out - DRAIN THE SWAMP!
Of course, if Trump really wants to "drain the swamp", any such decision would have
originate with him. Tags PoliticsCommercial Banks
Release the pee pee video now! No one pee peed in the $100,000 video in question. The
15-second clip showed two women speaking with a man. It is not clear if the man was Trump,
and there was no audio. And how can anyone be more fascinated by the prospect of pee pee than
by the fact that US intelligence agencies were buying bad information from extremely shady
foreigners in an attempt to overthrow the President of the United States?
Trump is starting to assume that the people are dumber than Obowel did. Earth to Don, you
sir have the drain pump, you sir have surrounded yourself with Swamp creatures.... You sir
are.............
According to this, the Russians stole the hacking tools needed to cut through the Swamp
levee, which were developed by the NSA, and now the CIA cannot buy them back. Now, since the
USA wanted its Swamp, the Russians are more than happy to let the USA drown in its swamp.
Anyone have a link for the Qanon posts. I haven't seen them in a couple of weeks since he
left 8chan where he was posting. I don't want the Youtube BS, I just want the link... anyone
got one. Its strangely not googleable... LOLZ.
If you think that the CIA is a U.S. intelligence agency working on the best interests of
the United States, you better wake up and smell the treason. They only work for the best
interests of themselves.
Here is a question. Why does the CIA not come out and clear the air re: Trump?
I mean they were even paying people to come up with dirt. He is now your president and the
country is a fucking mess. Should the CIA not come out and say we tried but we got nothing?
They do have the ability to fix all this Trump shit and yet crickets.
And the best interests of clients. The CIA started out is the muscle for the Dulles
Brothers clients who were being booted out of various countries they were super-exploiting.
The Agency hasn't looked back since.
Nobody got whizzed on. That lurid fantasy came soley out of the head of Hillary Clinton,
given to Blumenthal, passed around and made to look like it came from Russia.
It IS remarkable the stuff people believe when all logic goes against it. Like Oswald
firing magic bullets from an old Italian Carcano...and jet fuel melting steel beams...and a
building collapsing through the path of greatest resistance into its own footprint after NOT
being hit by an airplane...and Kennedy being shot from behind, but his head snapping
backwards from the impact...and Oswald picking the worst possible shooting location, but in
front of Kennedy were two intersecting highways going in any direction...and terrorist
passports floating gently down from the sky.
RFK and Nixon knew immediately the assassination of JFK was a CIA hit job because they had
CHAIRED those hit squad operations themselves for Cuban Operations. They saw the CIA- Cuban
hit squad fingerprints all over the kill. RFK had personally fired Wm Harvey, Dulles' chief
of assassinations. However, RFK was silenced because he and Jack had been tag-teaming Marilyn
Monroe.
The reason JFK was killed was a) his openly stated determination to shatter the CIA into a
thousand pieces so they could no longer operate as a dangerous, renegade private army; and b)
in the Spring of '63 JFK delivered his famous American U address calling for the end of the
Cold War...
Oswald was always a patsie... the WC documents how his rifle was inoperable... scope
needed parts just to be be sited and take aim... even after parts installed the rifle
attributed to Oswald remained highly inaccurate... Military sharpshooters couldn't even hit
stationary targets reliably.
Drain the swamp! Townsquare justice for Odumbo and Hitlery! George Soros to bathe in the
Amazon River with 1 million Piranha Fish until it completely disappears. Drain the evil
Dumorat swamp. Drain the banana republic CIA and FBI. Our tax dollars and constitution did
not pay for this shit.
With today's technology, the CIA is most likely working on a fake video for you right now.
They might release it on Vimeo or Netflix to cover the costs and give themselves plausible
deniability. To add a finishing touch they will make a fake video of Julian Assange claiming
he is releasing it. You'll be in hog heaven. Which is where folks like you go just before
being slaughtered by your owners and turned into spam.
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
Of course the story is a plant to introduce the hacking tools to cover the payment to
Russians for dirt on a sitting POTUS by his own Intel Agency...
And CNN, MSNBC, etc are still wall to wall Trump impeachment... they no longer even
pretend. Brain dead Erin Burnett opened with "the Republicans are at it again" to night (in
my regular 30 secs of checking in for a laugh)!
No shit, this is what I tell every Libtard when they cry the tired "Trump is corrupt and
evil" meme. If there was ANYTHING on Trump, it would have oversaturated the airwaves 24/7
during his candidacy, and he would have never made it out of the primaries.
So which is it? Is he the world's greatest evil retard idiot, or a 9000+ IQ genius that is
so slick and underhanded that he was able to collude with Putin, hide all evidence, and pull
off the biggest caper in the history of the United States by sneaking into the Presidency?
You can't have it both ways.
We must also give credit to the army of Russian bots that tell us how to think and act all
day, where would we be without them?
More than you know, whenever Russian is stated, replace with Ukrainian. TPTB cannot help
themselves but push forward on another agenda as the current one falls apart. The Russophobia
is still being stoked no matter what.
Steele was a double agent, maybe triple. British,Ukrainian and probably American. Does
that start to make a little more sense ? Those huuuge donations to the CF from Ukraine,
McStains involvement, Steele's early retirement from MI6, Brennan's frequent trips to
Ukraine, State Dept.s role. Investigate the Chalupa sisters to find out who the rest of the
rats are.Lee Stranahan started before he was shut down.
Good point in the last sentence. If someone is going to "drain the swamp" it is going to
have to be the president of the United States. I think I'm correct that he can fire anyone
that works in the executive department for cause. He can also order investigations or hire
people who will launch real investigations.
Mr. President, if you want to "drain the swamp," drain it.
If there was a video it would of been leaked during the election, they have nothing that
sticks on the guy.
All the evidence thus far states
Obama Hillary the FBI, DNC, CIA all spied on Trump and colluded with foreign governments
(U.K. , Ukraine , Russia) to try and dig up dirt to use against Trump (and they more or less
failed).
They turned over every rock they could, look at that stupid hot-mic video in the bus, how
many hours of video did they have to go through to dig up that crumb? they went back
searching through 30+ years of content and thats all they could come up with.... some locker
room talk lol
People have to just face it.
Your government was and still is corrupt and its a weaponized system of control, Your
government colluded with the enemy in a desperate attempt to stop Trump from becoming
president. Your government started a sham "Russia investigation" to cover up its own crimes.
Your government applied a different standard of justice to the clintons than it would have to
you or anyone else.
To date ZERO evidence has been brought forward that Trump or anyone in his campaign did
anything wrong, and the only people that have done anything wrong so far were picked by "the
swamp" to fill positions..... all the others fell into petty perjury Traps on meaningless
topics and insignificant factoids.
Isn't it lovely to find out that your money and mine is being used by government agents to
give us the government they want?
It's sort of like a thug robbing you and using part of your money to pay another thug to
rough you up from time time to time if you ask any questions with the thugs believing it's
for our own good.
Thanks, Hillary, for looking out for us. You and your best buds are the best. Such
bighearted givers! Meanwhile, give our regards to your partner in slime Obama, although it
must pain you to have been bested by 'Beavis' who thinks so much of himself to balance out
how little he impresses anyone who knows him.
"U.S. intelligence officials told The Times" Sounds like the Donald is finally learning to cooperate better with his masters. They can
call off the hounds.
Ok - so we have yet another (likely factual) story here of overt, in-your-face abuse of
power and agency aimed directly at American citizens for political gain. And tomorrow? Probably another. And then another. Until: 'Bimbo Fatigue' Remember that phrase. If real justice isn't thrown down soon, you can forget it. Looks to me like (possibly) Trump imploring for public support - i.e., he can't do this
himself, or it's too dangerous and he knows it...
As taxpayers can we sue the CIA for misusing our funds? Pretty sure that buying sex videos
for commercial release isn't part of the CIA's lawful mandate even at bargain prices.
Why is the CIA trying to purchase dirt on a sitting President in 2017! Because they have nothing on him! And they are desperate to not all hang by the neck. The times are trying to portray this as Russian intelligence sowing discord between the US
intelligence agencies and Trump...Wrong! The US Intel agencies are sowing that discord all on
their fucking own. They weren't fooled at all, they created this fucking mess for their own
treasonous reasons and now want us to believe that hey...if we fucked up its because the big
bad russkies tricked us.
my sauces tell me that pink pussyhat wearing hollywood types have been called in because
they have a doppelganger for trump and access to 30,000 sexually abused victims that can act
as Russian prostitutes for just ten bucks each. snapchat has a trump emoji that can be transplanted onto any porn video star - male or
female - thus confirming that trump is a serial (serious?) user of ladies of the night
my sauces also tell me that the CIA offers a reward of 100,000 bucks (or 10 BTC) for every
photo-shopped (snap-shopped or porn-shopped) material.
of course, the CIA already owns many many porn movie studios and films, but it would
prefer third "party" movies - not from epstein's island where its operatives choose to rela
with a pizza.
the CIA "pink" budget for such movies is limited to just 5,000 clips or 5 billion of
taxpayers funds, whichever is the higher.
'The Russian, who has ties to organized criminals and money launderers' wtf! So far the
Russians are playing our CIA like a bunch of amateurs. And the deep state/dem's bought it
hook, line and sinker. Trump was right again. Dem's and Russia are colluding against a duly
elected Presidential candidate. I guess it's safe to say we need another order for more Rope.
Dem's and deepshit state just can't get enough of hanging themselves. This ain't over by a
long shot.
i call bullshit. you dont 'buy back' a software program that can be copied in 30 seconds.
this whole story is a fabrication just like the dossier. made up to inflect bad info on to
trump.
Yeah, I loved that one. "Here. I'm giving you back that software I ripped off from you. I
copied it to this CD and then deleted it from my computer... You know: wiped it with a
cloth."
And I love that the CIA thinks they can get away with a tale like that when everyone but
my 90-year-old mother-in-law knows how a digital file works.
So were these "patriotic" CIA superheroes interested in Bill Clinton's rapes, rapes and
more rapes? Were they concerned that he was snorting coke and using Arkansas state troopers
for procurers of hosebags for him to screw?
I mean if they're so concerned about Trump and a couple of hookers... Better put some ice on that, CIA.
You all are so ridiculous and fooled with your "drain the swamp" bs. It's a great idea but
Trump doing it is a joke, I mean just look at who he has hired, what's wrong with you all are
you blind?!!
He can't even fill 1/3 of the government positions he's supposed to and the ones he has
have no business holding the positions given to them and are so incompetent, downright
criminal or just personally horrendous humans that they can't stay in office more than a few
months. All their blatant and moronically concocted lies are backing them into corners every
day that they just try and lie out of again. America is over if we really have gotten to the
point that a group like Trump's has support, it's just astonishing.
"... In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well. ..."
"... Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote Ukraine. According to the embassy's website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko, who discussed "Ukraine's fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas," and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign. ..."
"... Almost as quickly as Chalupa's efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas. ..."
"... Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center "put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort." ..."
"... In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she'd been "working with for the past few weeks" with Isikoff "and connected him to the Ukrainians" at the event. ..."
"... A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's political department, not a researcher. She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms. ..."
"... Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country's head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that "only one part of the black ledger appeared." He asked, "Where is the handwriting analysis?" and said it was "crazy" to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington with Trump allies, and said, "of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign." ..."
"... Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a "clown" and asserting that Trump is "an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism." ..."
"... Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the "diagnosis of a dangerous misfit," according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called Trump "dangerous for Ukraine and the US" and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader "fled to Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?" ..."
Manafort's work for Yanukovych caught the attention of a veteran Democratic operative named Alexandra Chalupa, who had worked
in the White House Office of Public Liaison during the Clinton administration. Chalupa went on to work as a staffer, then as a consultant,
for Democratic National Committee. The DNC paid her $412,000 from 2004 to June 2016, according to Federal Election Commission records,
though she also was paid by other clients during that time, including Democratic campaigns and the DNC's arm for engaging expatriate
Democrats around the world.
A daughter of Ukrainian immigrants who maintains strong ties to the Ukrainian-American diaspora and the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine,
Chalupa, a lawyer by training, in 2014 was doing pro bono work for another client interested in the Ukrainian crisis and began researching
Manafort's role in Yanukovych's rise, as well as his ties to the pro-Russian oligarchs who funded Yanukovych's political party.
In an interview this month, Chalupa told Politico she had developed a network of sources in Kiev and Washington, including investigative
journalists, government officials and private intelligence operatives. While her consulting work at the DNC this past election cycle
centered on mobilizing ethnic communities -- including Ukrainian-Americans -- she said that, when Trump's unlikely presidential campaign
began surging in late 2015, she began focusing more on the research, and expanded it to include Trump's ties to Russia, as well.
She occasionally shared her findings with officials from the DNC and Clinton's campaign, Chalupa said. In January 2016 -- months
before Manafort had taken any role in Trump's campaign -- Chalupa told a senior DNC official that, when it came to Trump's campaign,
"I felt there was a Russia connection," Chalupa recalled. "And that, if there was, that we can expect Paul Manafort to be involved
in this election," said Chalupa, who at the time also was warning leaders in the Ukrainian-American community that Manafort was "Putin's
political brain for manipulating U.S. foreign policy and elections."
he said she shared her concern with Ukraine's ambassador to the U.S., Valeriy Chaly, and one of his top aides, Oksana Shulyar,
during a March 2016 meeting at the Ukrainian Embassy. According to someone briefed on the meeting, Chaly said that Manafort was very
much on his radar, but that he wasn't particularly concerned about the operative's ties to Trump since he didn't believe Trump stood
much of a chance of winning the GOP nomination, let alone the presidency.
That was not an uncommon view at the time, and, perhaps as a result, Trump's ties to Russia -- let alone Manafort's -- were not
the subject of much attention.
That all started to change just four days after Chalupa's meeting at the embassy, when it was reported that Trump had in fact hired
Manafort, suggesting that Chalupa may have been on to something. She quickly found herself in high demand. The day after Manafort's
hiring was revealed, she briefed the DNC's communications staff on Manafort, Trump and their ties to Russia, according to an operative
familiar with the situation.
A former DNC staffer described the exchange as an "informal conversation," saying "'briefing' makes it sound way too formal,"
and adding, "We were not directing or driving her work on this." Yet, the former DNC staffer and the operative familiar with the
situation agreed that with the DNC's encouragement, Chalupa asked embassy staff to try to arrange an interview in which Poroshenko
might discuss Manafort's ties to Yanukovych.
While the embassy declined that request, officials there became "helpful" in Chalupa's efforts, she said, explaining that she
traded information and leads with them. "If I asked a question, they would provide guidance, or if there was someone I needed to
follow up with." But she stressed, "There were no documents given, nothing like that."
Chalupa said the embassy also worked directly with reporters researching Trump, Manafort and Russia to point them in the right
directions. She added, though, "they were being very protective and not speaking to the press as much as they should have. I think
they were being careful because their situation was that they had to be very, very careful because they could not pick sides. It's
a political issue, and they didn't want to get involved politically because they couldn't."
Shulyar vehemently denied working with reporters or with Chalupa on anything related to Trump or Manafort, explaining "we were
stormed by many reporters to comment on this subject, but our clear and adamant position was not to give any comment [and] not to
interfere into the campaign affairs."
Both Shulyar and Chalupa said the purpose of their initial meeting was to organize a June reception at the embassy to promote
Ukraine. According to the embassy's website, the event highlighted female Ukrainian leaders, featuring speeches by Ukrainian parliamentarian
Hanna Hopko, who discussed "Ukraine's fight against the Russian aggression in Donbas," and longtime Hillary Clinton confidante Melanne
Verveer, who worked for Clinton in the State Department and was a vocal surrogate during the presidential campaign.
Shulyar said her work with Chalupa "didn't involve the campaign," and she specifically stressed that "We have never worked to
research and disseminate damaging information about Donald Trump and Paul Manafort."
But Andrii Telizhenko, who worked as a political officer in the Ukrainian Embassy under Shulyar, said she instructed him to help
Chalupa research connections between Trump, Manafort and Russia. "Oksana said that if I had any information, or knew other people
who did, then I should contact Chalupa," recalled Telizhenko, who is now a political consultant in Kiev. "They were coordinating
an investigation with the Hillary team on Paul Manafort with Alexandra Chalupa," he said, adding "Oksana was keeping it all quiet,"
but "the embassy worked very closely with" Chalupa.
In fact, sources familiar with the effort say that Shulyar specifically called Telizhenko into a meeting with Chalupa to provide
an update on an American media outlet's ongoing investigation into Manafort.
Telizhenko recalled that Chalupa told him and Shulyar that, "If we can get enough information on Paul [Manafort] or Trump's involvement
with Russia, she can get a hearing in Congress by September."
Chalupa confirmed that, a week after Manafort's hiring was announced, she discussed the possibility of a congressional investigation
with a foreign policy legislative assistant in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who co-chairs the Congressional Ukrainian
Caucus. But, Chalupa said, "It didn't go anywhere."
Asked about the effort, the Kaptur legislative assistant called it a "touchy subject" in an internal email to colleagues that
was accidentally forwarded to Politico.
Kaptur's office later emailed an official statement explaining that the lawmaker is backing a bill to create an independent commission
to investigate "possible outside interference in our elections." The office added "at this time, the evidence related to this matter
points to Russia, but Congresswoman Kaptur is concerned with any evidence of foreign entities interfering in our elections."
•••
Almost as quickly as Chalupa's efforts attracted the attention of the Ukrainian Embassy and Democrats, she also found herself
the subject of some unwanted attention from overseas.
Within a few weeks of her initial meeting at the embassy with Shulyar and Chaly, Chalupa on April 20 received the first of what
became a series of messages from the administrators of her private Yahoo email account, warning her that "state-sponsored actors"
were trying to hack into her emails.
She kept up her crusade, appearing on a panel a week after the initial hacking message to discuss her research on Manafort with
a group of Ukrainian investigative journalists gathered at the Library of Congress for a program sponsored by a U.S. congressional
agency called the Open World Leadership Center.
Center spokeswoman Maura Shelden stressed that her group is nonpartisan and ensures "that our delegations hear from both sides
of the aisle, receiving bipartisan information." She said the Ukrainian journalists in subsequent days met with Republican officials
in North Carolina and elsewhere. And she said that, before the Library of Congress event, "Open World's program manager for Ukraine
did contact Chalupa to advise her that Open World is a nonpartisan agency of the Congress."
Chalupa, though, indicated in an email that was later hacked and released by WikiLeaks that the Open World Leadership Center
"put me on the program to speak specifically about Paul Manafort."
In the email, which was sent in early May to then-DNC communications director Luis Miranda, Chalupa noted that she had extended
an invitation to the Library of Congress forum to veteran Washington investigative reporter Michael Isikoff. Two days before the
event, he had published a story for Yahoo News revealing the unraveling of a $26 million deal between Manafort and a Russian oligarch
related to a telecommunications venture in Ukraine. And Chalupa wrote in the email she'd been "working with for the past few weeks"
with Isikoff "and connected him to the Ukrainians" at the event.
Isikoff, who accompanied Chalupa to a reception at the Ukrainian Embassy immediately after the Library of Congress event, declined
to comment.
Chalupa further indicated in her hacked May email to the DNC that she had additional sensitive information about Manafort that
she intended to share "offline" with Miranda and DNC research director Lauren Dillon, including "a big Trump component you and Lauren
need to be aware of that will hit in next few weeks and something I'm working on you should be aware of." Explaining that she didn't
feel comfortable sharing the intel over email, Chalupa attached a screenshot of a warning from Yahoo administrators about "state-sponsored"
hacking on her account, explaining, "Since I started digging into Manafort these messages have been a daily occurrence on my yahoo
account despite changing my password often."
Dillon and Miranda declined to comment.
A DNC official stressed that Chalupa was a consultant paid to do outreach for the party's political department, not a researcher.
She undertook her investigations into Trump, Manafort and Russia on her own, and the party did not incorporate her findings in its
dossiers on the subjects, the official said, stressing that the DNC had been building robust research books on Trump and his ties
to Russia long before Chalupa began sounding alarms.
Nonetheless, Chalupa's hacked email reportedly escalated concerns among top party officials, hardening their conclusion that Russia
likely was behind the cyber intrusions with which the party was only then beginning to grapple.
Chalupa left the DNC after the Democratic convention in late July to focus fulltime on her research into Manafort, Trump and Russia
. She said she provided off-the-record information and guidance to "a lot of journalists" working on stories related to Manafort
and Trump's Russia connections, despite what she described as escalating harassment.
... ... ...
•••
While it's not uncommon for outside operatives to serve as intermediaries between governments and reporters, one of the more damaging
Russia-related stories for the Trump campaign -- and certainly for Manafort -- can be traced more directly to the Ukrainian government.
Documents released by an independent Ukrainian government agency -- and publicized by a parliamentarian -- appeared to show $12.7
million in cash payments that were earmarked for Manafort by the Russia-aligned party of the deposed former president, Yanukovych.
The New York Times, in the August story revealing the ledgers' existence, reported that the payments earmarked for Manafort were
"a focus" of an investigation by Ukrainian anti-corruption officials, while CNN reported days later that the FBI was pursuing an
overlapping inquiry.
Clinton's campaign seized on the story to advance Democrats' argument that Trump's campaign was closely linked to Russia. The
ledger represented "more troubling connections between Donald Trump's team and pro-Kremlin elements in Ukraine," Robby Mook, Clinton's
campaign manager, said in a statement. He demanded that Trump "disclose campaign chair Paul Manafort's and all other campaign employees'
and advisers' ties to Russian or pro-Kremlin entities, including whether any of Trump's employees or advisers are currently representing
and or being paid by them."
A former Ukrainian investigative journalist and current parliamentarian named Serhiy Leshchenko, who was elected in 2014 as part
of Poroshenko's party, held a news conference to highlight the ledgers, and to urge Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively
investigate Manafort.
"I believe and understand the basis of these payments are totally against the law -- we have the proof from these books," Leshchenko
said during the news conference, which attracted international media coverage. "If Mr. Manafort denies any allegations, I think he
has to be interrogated into this case and prove his position that he was not involved in any misconduct on the territory of Ukraine,"
Leshchenko added.
Manafort
denied receiving any off-books cash from Yanukovych's Party of Regions, and said that he had never been contacted about the ledger
by Ukrainian or American investigators, later telling POLITICO "I was just caught in the crossfire."
According to a
series of memos reportedly compiled for Trump's opponents by a former British intelligence agent, Yanukovych, in a secret meeting
with Putin on the day after the Times published its report, admitted that he had authorized "substantial kickback payments
to Manafort." But according to the report, which was
published Tuesday
by BuzzFeed but remains unverified. Yanukovych assured Putin "that there was no documentary trail left behind which could provide
clear evidence of this" -- an alleged statement that seemed to implicitly question the authenticity of the ledger.
The scrutiny around the ledgers -- combined with that from
other stories about his
Ukraine
work -- proved too much, and he
stepped down from the
Trump campaign less than a week after the Times story.
At the time, Leshchenko suggested that his motivation was partly to undermine Trump. "For me, it was important to show not only
the corruption aspect, but that he is [a] pro-Russian candidate who can break the geopolitical balance in the world," Leshchenko
told the Financial Times about two weeks after his news conference. The newspaper noted that Trump's candidacy had spurred "Kiev's
wider political leadership to do something they would never have attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a U.S. election,"
and the story quoted Leshchenko asserting that the majority of Ukraine's politicians are "on Hillary Clinton's side."
But by this month, Leshchenko was seeking to recast his motivation, telling Politico, "I didn't care who won the U.S. elections.
This was a decision for the American voters to decide." His goal in highlighting the ledgers, he said was "to raise these issues
on a political level and emphasize the importance of the investigation."
In a series of answers provided to Politico, a spokesman for Poroshenko distanced his administration from both Leshchenko's efforts
and those of the agency that reLeshchenko Leshchenko leased the ledgers, The National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine. It was created
in 2014 as a condition for Ukraine to receive aid from the U.S. and the European Union, and it signed an evidence-sharing agreement
with the FBI in late June -- less than a month and a half before it released the ledgers.
The bureau is "fully independent," the Poroshenko spokesman said, adding that when it came to the presidential administration
there was "no targeted action against Manafort." He added "as to Serhiy Leshchenko, he positions himself as a representative of internal
opposition in the Bloc of Petro Poroshenko's faction, despite [the fact that] he belongs to the faction," the spokesman said, adding,
"it was about him personally who pushed [the anti-corruption bureau] to proceed with investigation on Manafort."
But an operative who has worked extensively in Ukraine, including as an adviser to Poroshenko, said it was highly unlikely that
either Leshchenko or the anti-corruption bureau would have pushed the issue without at least tacit approval from Poroshenko or his
closest allies.
"It was something that Poroshenko was probably aware of and could have stopped if he wanted to," said the operative.
And, almost immediately after Trump's stunning victory over Clinton, questions began mounting about the investigations into the
ledgers -- and the ledgers themselves.
An official with the anti-corruption bureau told a Ukrainian newspaper, "Mr. Manafort does not have a role in this case."
And, while the anti-corruption bureau told Politico late last month that a "general investigation [is] still ongoing" of the ledger,
it said Manafort is not a target of the investigation. "As he is not the Ukrainian citizen, [the anti-corruption bureau] by the law
couldn't investigate him personally," the bureau said in a statement.
Some Poroshenko critics have gone further, suggesting that the bureau is backing away from investigating because the ledgers might
have been doctored or even forged.
Valentyn Nalyvaichenko, a Ukrainian former diplomat who served as the country's head of security under Poroshenko but is now affiliated
with a leading opponent of Poroshenko, said it was fishy that "only one part of the black ledger appeared." He asked, "Where is the
handwriting analysis?" and said it was "crazy" to announce an investigation based on the ledgers. He met last month in Washington
with Trump allies, and said, "of course they all recognize that our [anti-corruption bureau] intervened in the presidential campaign."
And in an interview this week, Manafort, who re-emerged as an informal advisor to Trump after Election Day, suggested that the
ledgers were inauthentic and called their publication "a politically motivated false attack on me. My role as a paid consultant was
public. There was nothing off the books, but the way that this was presented tried to make it look shady."
He added that he felt particularly wronged by efforts to cast his work in Ukraine as pro-Russian, arguing "all my efforts were
focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West." He specifically cited his work on denuclearizing the country and on the
European Union trade and political pact that Yanukovych spurned before fleeing to Russia. "In no case was I ever involved in anything
that would be contrary to U.S. interests," Manafort said.
Yet Russia seemed to come to the defense of Manafort and Trump last month, when a spokeswoman for Russia's Foreign Ministry charged
that the Ukrainian government used the ledgers as a political weapon.
"Ukraine seriously complicated the work of Trump's election campaign headquarters by planting information according to which Paul
Manafort, Trump's campaign chairman, allegedly accepted money from Ukrainian oligarchs," Maria Zakharova said at a news briefing,
according to a transcript of her remarks posted on the Foreign Ministry's website. "All of you have heard this remarkable story,"
she told assembled reporters.
•••
Beyond any efforts to sabotage Trump, Ukrainian officials didn't exactly extend a hand of friendship to the GOP nominee during
the campaign.
The ambassador, Chaly, penned an op-ed for The Hill, in which he chastised Trump for a confusing series of statements in which
the GOP candidate at one point expressed a willingness to consider recognizing Russia's annexation of the Ukrainian territory of
Crimea as legitimate. The op-ed made some in the embassy uneasy, sources said.
"That was like too close for comfort, even for them," said Chalupa. "That was something that was as risky as they were going to
be."
Former Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseny Yatseniuk warned on Facebook that Trump had "challenged the very values of the free world."
Ukraine's minister of internal affairs, Arsen Avakov, piled on, trashing Trump on Twitter in July as a "clown" and asserting that
Trump is "an even bigger danger to the US than terrorism."
Avakov, in a Facebook post, lashed out at Trump for his confusing Crimea comments, calling the assessment the "diagnosis of a
dangerous misfit," according to a translated screenshot featured in one media report, though he later deleted the post. He called
Trump "dangerous for Ukraine and the US" and noted that Manafort worked with Yanukovych when the former Ukrainian leader "fled to
Russia through Crimea. Where would Manafort lead Trump?"
The Trump-Ukraine relationship grew even more fraught in September with reports that the GOP nominee had snubbed Poroshenko on
the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, where the Ukrainian president tried to meet both major party candidates,
but scored only a meeting with Clinton.
Telizhenko, the former embassy staffer, said that, during the primaries, Chaly, the country's ambassador in Washington, had actually
instructed the embassy not to reach out to Trump's campaign, even as it was engaging with those of Clinton and Trump's leading GOP
rival, Ted Cruz.
"We had an order not to talk to the Trump team, because he was critical of Ukraine and the government and his critical position
on Crimea and the conflict," said Telizhenko. "I was yelled at when I proposed to talk to Trump," he said, adding, "The ambassador
said not to get involved -- Hillary is going to win."
This account was confirmed by Nalyvaichenko, the former diplomat and security chief now affiliated with a Poroshenko opponent,
who said, "The Ukrainian authorities closed all doors and windows -- this is from the Ukrainian side." He called the strategy "bad
and short-sighted."
Andriy Artemenko, a Ukrainian parliamentarian associated with a conservative opposition party, did meet with Trump's team during
the campaign and said he personally offered to set up similar meetings for Chaly but was rebuffed.
"It was clear that they were supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy," Artemenko said. "They did everything from organizing meetings
with the Clinton team, to publicly supporting her, to criticizing Trump. I think that they simply didn't meet because they thought
that Hillary would win."
Shulyar rejected the characterizations that the embassy had a ban on interacting with Trump, instead explaining that it "had different
diplomats assigned for dealing with different teams tailoring the content and messaging. So it was not an instruction to abstain
from the engagement but rather an internal discipline for diplomats not to get involved into a field she or he was not assigned to,
but where another colleague was involved."
And she pointed out that Chaly traveled to the GOP convention in Cleveland in late July and met with members of Trump's foreign
policy team "to highlight the importance of Ukraine and the support of it by the U.S."
Despite the outreach, Trump's campaign in Cleveland gutted a proposed amendment to the Republican Party platform that called for
the U.S. to provide "lethal defensive weapons" for Ukraine to defend itself against Russian incursion, backers of the measure charged.
The outreach ramped up after Trump's victory. Shulyar pointed out that Poroshenko was among the first foreign leaders to call
to congratulate Trump. And she said that, since Election Day, Chaly has met with close Trump allies, including Sens. Jeff Sessions,
Trump's nominee for attorney general, and Bob Corker, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, while the ambassador
accompanied Ivanna Klympush-Tsintsadze, Ukraine's vice prime minister for European and Euro-Atlantic integration, to a round of Washington
meetings with Rep. Tom Marino (R-Pa.), an early Trump backer, and Jim DeMint, president of The Heritage Foundation, which played
a prominent role in Trump's transition.
•••
Many Ukrainian officials and operatives and their American allies see Trump's inauguration this month as an existential threat
to the country, made worse, they admit, by the dissemination of the secret ledger, the antagonistic social media posts and the perception
that the embassy meddled against -- or at least shut out -- Trump.
"It's really bad. The [Poroshenko] administration right now is trying to re-coordinate communications," said Telizhenko, adding,
"The Trump organization doesn't want to talk to our administration at all."
During Nalyvaichenko's trip to Washington last month, he detected lingering ill will toward Ukraine from some, and lack of
interest from others, he recalled. "Ukraine is not on the top of the list, not even the middle," he said.
Poroshenko's allies are scrambling to figure out how to build a relationship with Trump, who is known for harboring and prosecuting
grudges for years.
A delegation of Ukrainian parliamentarians allied with Poroshenko last month traveled to Washington partly to try to make inroads
with the Trump transition team, but they were unable to secure a meeting, according to a Washington foreign policy operative familiar
with the trip. And operatives in Washington and Kiev say that after the election, Poroshenko met in Kiev with top executives from
the Washington lobbying firm BGR -- including Ed Rogers and Lester Munson -- about how to navigate the Trump regime.
Weeks later, BGR reported to the Department of Justice that the government of Ukraine would pay the firm $50,000 a month to "provide
strategic public relations and government affairs counsel," including "outreach to U.S. government officials, non-government organizations,
members of the media and other individuals."
Firm spokesman Jeffrey Birnbaum suggested that "pro-Putin oligarchs" were already trying to sow doubts about BGR's work with Poroshenko.
While the firm maintains close relationships with GOP congressional leaders, several of its principals were dismissive or sharply
critical of Trump during the GOP primary, which could limit their effectiveness lobbying the new administration.
The Poroshenko regime's standing with Trump is considered so dire that the president's allies after the election actually reached
out to make amends with -- and even seek assistance from -- Manafort, according to two operatives familiar with Ukraine's efforts
to make inroads with Trump.
Meanwhile, Poroshenko's rivals are seeking to capitalize on his dicey relationship with Trump's team. Some are pressuring him
to replace Chaly, a close ally of Poroshenko's who is being blamed by critics in Kiev and Washington for implementing -- if not engineering
-- the country's anti-Trump efforts, according to Ukrainian and U.S. politicians and operatives interviewed for this story. They
say that several potential Poroshenko opponents have been through Washington since the election seeking audiences of their own with
Trump allies, though most have failed to do do so.
"None of the Ukrainians have any access to Trump -- they are all desperate to get it, and are willing to pay big for it," said
one American consultant whose company recently met in Washington with Yuriy Boyko, a former vice prime minister under Yanukovych.
Boyko, who like Yanukovych has a pro-Russian worldview, is considering a presidential campaign of his own, and his representatives
offered "to pay a shit-ton of money" to get access to Trump and his inaugural events, according to the consultant.
The consultant turned down the work, explaining, "It sounded shady, and we don't want to get in the middle of that kind of stuff."
"... As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part. ..."
"... But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference. ..."
"... Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the presstitutes ..."
"... Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking. This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real. ..."
"... The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump. ..."
"... The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia. ..."
"... Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened by any move toward peace between nuclear powers. ..."
"... Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition. ..."
"... That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else. ..."
"... Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism. Mueller Report ..."
One is to prevent President Trump from endangering the vast budget and power of the
military/security complex by normalizing relations with Russia.
Another, in the words of James Howard Kunstler, is "to conceal the criminal conduct of US
government officials meddling in the 2016 election in collusion with the Hillary Clinton
campaign," by focusing all public and political attention on a hoax distraction.
The third is to obstruct Trump's campaign and distract him from his agenda when he won the
election.
Despite the inability of Mueller to find any evidence that Trump or Trump officials colluded
with Russia to steal the US presidential election, and the inability of Mueller to find
evidence with which to accuse Trump of obstruction of justice, Russiagate has achieved all of
its purposes.
Trump has been locked into a hostile relationship with Russia. Neoconservatives have
succeeded in worsening this hostile relationship by manipulating Trump into a blatant criminal
attempt to overthrow in broad daylight the Venezuelan government.
Hillary's criminal conduct and the criminal conduct of the CIA, FBI, and Obama Justice (sic)
Department that resulted in a variety of felonies, including the FBI obtaining spy warrants for
partisan political purposes on false pretexts from the FISA court, were swept out of sight by
the Russiagate hoax.
The Mueller report was written in such a way that despite the absence of any evidence
supporting any indictment of Trump, the report refused to clear Trump of obstruction and passed
the buck to the Attorney General. In other words, Mueller in the absence of any evidence kept
the controversy going by setting up Attorney General Barr for cover-up charges.
It is evidence of Mueller's corruption that he does not explain just how it is possible for
Trump to possibly have obstructed justice when Mueller states in his report that the crime he
was empowered to investigate could not be found. How does one obstruct the investigation of a
crime that did not occur?
As Kunstler puts it, "The Special Prosecutor's main bit of mischief, of course, was his
refusal to reach a conclusion on the obstruction of justice charge. What the media refuses to
accept and make clear is that a prosecutor's failure to reach a conclusion is exactly the same
thing as an inability to make a case, and it was a breach of Mr. Mueller's duty to dishonestly
present that failure as anything but that in his report -- and possibly an act of criminal
prosecutorial misconduct" on Mueller's part.
But this is not the only dishonesty in Mueller's report. Although Mueller's report clearly
obliterates the Russiagate conspiracy theory peddled by the military/security complex, the
Democrats, and the presstitutes, Mueller's report takes for granted that Russia interfered in
the election but not in collusion with Trump or Trump officials. Mueller states this
interference as if it were a fact without providing one drop of evidence. Indeed, nowhere in
the report, or anywhere else, is there any evidence of Russian interference.
Mueller simply takes Russian interference for granted as if endless repeating by a bunch of
presstitutes makes it so. For example, the Mueller report says that the Russians hacked the DNC
emails, a claim for which no evidence exists. Moreover, it is a claim that is contradicted by
the known evidence. William Binney and other experts have demonstrated that the DNC emails
were, according to their time stamps, downloaded much more quickly than is possible over the
Internet. This fact has been carefully ignored by Mueller, the Democrats and the
presstitutes.
One reason for ignoring this undisputed fact is that they all want to get Julian Assange,
and the public case concocted against Assange is that Assange is in cahoots with the Russians
who allegedly gave him the hacked emails. As there is no evidence that Russia hacked the emails
and as Assange has said Russia is not the source, what is Mueller's evidence? Apparently,
Mueller's evidence is his own political indictment of Russian individuals who Mueller alleged
hacked the DNC computers. This false indictment for which there is no evidence was designed by
Mueller to poison the Helsinki meeting between Trump and Putin and announced on the eve of the
meeting.
Indictments do not require evidence, and Mueller had none. Moreover, Mueller could not
possibly know the identities of the Russian intelligence agents who allegedly did the hacking.
This was of no concern to Mueller. He knew he needed no evidence, because he knew there would
be no trial. The indictment was political propaganda, not real.
The myth of Russian interference is so well established that even Glenn Greenwald in his
otherwise careful and correct exposition of the Russiagate hoax buys into Russian interference
as if it were a fact. Indeed, many if not most of Trump's supporters are ready to blame Russia
for trying, but failing, to ensnare their man Trump.
The falsity of Russiagate and the political purposes of the hoax are completely obvious, but
even Trump supporters tip their hats to the falsehood of Russian interference so that they do
not look guilty of excessive support for Trump. In other words, Russiagate has succeeded in
constraining how far Trump's supporters can go in defending him, especially if he has any
remaining intent to reduce tensions with Russia.
Russiagate has succeeded in criminalizing in the American mind any contact with Russia. Thus
has the military/security complex guaranteed that its budget and power will not be threatened
by any move toward peace between nuclear powers.
The Democratic Party and the presstitutes cannot be bothered by facts. They are committed to
getting Trump regardless of the facts. And so is Mueller, and Brennan, and Comey, and a slew of
other corrupt public officials.
A good example of journalistic misconduct is James Risen writing in Glenn Greenwald's
Intercept of all places, "WILLIAM BARR MISLED EVERYONE ABOUT THE MUELLER REPORT. NOW DEMOCRATS
ARE CALLING FOR HIS RESIGNATION." Quoting the same posse of "hang Trump high" Democrats, Risen,
without questioning their disproven lies, lets the Democrats build a case that Mueller's report
proves Trump's guilt. Then Risen himself misrepresents the report in support of the Democrats.
He says there is a huge difference between Barr's memo on the report and the report itself as
if Barr would misrepresent a report that he is about to release.
Length is the only difference between the memo and the report. This doesn't stop Risen from
writing: "In fact, the Mueller report makes it clear that a key reason Mueller did not seek to
prosecute Trump for obstruction was a longstanding Justice Department legal opinion saying that
the Justice Department can't indict a sitting president." This is something Mueller threw in
after saying he didn't have the evidence to indict Trump. It is yet another reason for not
indicting, not the reason. Risen then backs up his misreport with that of a partisan Democrat,
Renato Mariotti who claims that Mueller could have indicted Trump except it is against US
Justice Department policy. Again, there is no explanation from Risen, Mariotti, or anyone else
how Mueller could have indicted Trump for obstructing what Mueller concludes was a crime that
did not happen.
Just as Mueller indicted Russian intelligence agents without evidence, he could have
indicted Trump without evidence, but a case against a president that is without evidence is not
one a prosecutor wants to take to court as it is obviously an act of sedition.
That the Democrats and the presstitutes want Trump indicted for obstructing a crime that did
not occur shows how insane they have been driven by their hatred of Trump. What is operating in
the Democratic Party and in the American media is insanity and hatred. Nothing else.
Risen also alleges that the unproven Russian hacks were passed over by Barr in his memo on
the report. Not only is this incorrect, but also Risen apparently has forgot that the
investigation was about Trump's collusion with Russia to do something illegal and the
investigation found that no such thing occurred. Risen, like the rest of the presstitutes and
even Greenwald himself, takes for granted that the unproven Russian hacks happened. Again we
see that the longer a lie is repeated the more it becomes true. Not even Greenwald can detect
that he has been bamboozled.
At one time James Risen was an honest reporter. He won a Pulitzer prize, and he was
threatened with prison by the Department of Justice when he refused to reveal his source for
his reporting on illegal actions of the CIA. But Risen discovered that in the new world of
journalism, telling the truth is punished while lying is rewarded. Risen, like all the others,
decided that his income was more important than the truth.
Journalists who lie for the Establishment have no need of the First Amendment. Perhaps this
is why they have no concern that Washington's attack on Julian Assange will destroy the First
Amendment. They are helping Washington destroy Assange so that their self-esteem will no longer
be threatened by the fact that there is a real journalist out there doing real journalism.
Mueller Report
Paul Craig Roberts has had careers in scholarship and academia, journalism, public service,
and business. He is chairman of The Institute for Political Economy.
Stop fear-mongering and engaging in "acceptable" bigotry.-- Jimmy Dore , comedian, host of the Jimmy Dore Show
When Keith Olbermann
pounded his fist on his table, screaming, "SCUM! RUSSIAN SCUM!!!" I couldn't help but
thinking, that's the only nationality he could insert there and get away with it. He couldn't
scream "Mexican scum" or "Chinese scum" or "Indian scum." Russian bigotry is, I think, the only
acceptable bigotry among the liberal media. Totally acceptable to the liberal media.
Rachel Maddow
telling her audience in the middle of a polar vortex that Russia controls their power grid
and could freeze them all to death at a moment's notice was by far the most egregious example
of fear-mongering. But that's not the only bad thing the media's done. They're currently
pushing regime-change wars in Syria and Venezuela.
The corporate news will never regain my trust or redeem itself, because they are owned and
funded by the people they're supposed to be investigating and exposing, like the richest man in
the world, for instance, Jeff Bezos. He controls 51 percent of all the internet sales in the
United States, sits on a Pentagon board and has a $600 million deal with the CIA. That's the
guy running the news!
"... Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is available in paperback and in an ebook edition. ..."
"... What we are witnessing now is the almost complete ignorance in the MSM and among people like Clapper about the extraordinary damage done to the Russian economy under Clinton in the 1990s, a story well told by Mr. Cohen in the book "Failed Crusade." The immense hypocrisy of accusing Russia of interference in 2016 leaves me breathless. The US has been interfering in the affairs of every major country on earth, beginning with War of 1812 ..."
"... I recall an interesting comment by Mao Zedong about the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Mao said that Nikita Khrushchev was stupid to put missiles in Cuba and he was a coward to take them out. ..."
"... Based on the recent conversations between Stephen Cohen and John Batchelor, I'll paraphrase Mao's comment to say that the intelligence agencies were stupid to originate Russiagate and the Democrats and their media allies are cowards not to stop it. ..."
"... Pompous comes out and says the US is back and we're a force for good. This in the face of widespread destruction all over the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of dead, the creation of numerous groups of crazy zealots that we created, cultivated, and supported to be our proxies in the overthrow of elected governments. All of that death and destruction, including that perpetrated by our proxies is 100% the fault and responsibility of the United States. But Pompous and the American people in general are so myopic that they don't see all that. Thank you, worthless press. If the press actually told the American people what was being done in their name, I think most of us would be disgusted but they don't. They cheer lead for the beltway and their imperial pretensions. ..."
"... If Clapper and Brennan actually created a sting operation against the Trump Campaign, would you denounce that act? If Obama had approved such an operation, would you believe he was ethically entitled to do such? ..."
N ow in its third year, Russiagate is the worst, most corrosive, and most fraudulent
political scandal in modern American history. It rests on two related core allegations: that
Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an "attack on American democracy" during the 2016
presidential campaign in order to put Donald Trump in the White House, and that Trump and his
associates willfully colluded, or conspired, in this Kremlin "attack." As I have argued from
the outset -- see my regular commentaries posted at
TheNation.com and my recent book War With
Russia? -- and as recently confirmed, explicitly and tacitly, by special prosecutor
Robert Mueller's report, there is no factual evidence for either allegation.
Nonetheless, these Russiagate allegations, not "Putin's Russia," continue to inflict grave
damage on fundamental institutions of American democracy. They impugn the integrity of the
presidency and now the office of the attorney general. They degrade the many Democratic
members of Congress who persist in clinging to the allegations and thus the Democratic Party
and Congress. And they have enticed mainstream media into one of the worst episodes
of journalistic malpractice in modern times .
But equally alarming, Russiagate continues to endanger American national security by
depriving a US president, for the first time in the nuclear age, of the diplomatic
flexibility to deal with a Kremlin leader in times of crisis. We were given a vivid example
in July 2018, when Trump held a summit with the current Kremlin occupant, as every president
had done since Dwight Eisenhower. For that conventional, even necessary, act of diplomacy,
Trump was widely accused of treasonous behavior, a charge that persists. Now we have another
alarming example of this reckless disregard for US national security on the part of
Russiagate zealots.
On May 3, Trump called Putin. They discussed various issues, including the Mueller report.
(As before, Putin had to know if Trump was free to implement any acts of security cooperation
they might agree on. Indeed, the Russian policy elite openly debates this question, many of
its members having decided that Trump cannot cooperate with Russia no matter his intentions.)
A major subject of the conversation was unavoidably the growing conflict over Venezuela,
where Washington and Moscow have long-standing economic and political interests. Trump
administration spokespeople have warned Moscow against interfering in America's neighborhood,
ignoring, of course, Washington's deep involvement for years in the former Soviet republics
of Ukraine and Georgia. Kremlin representatives, on the other hand, have warned Washington
against violating Venezuela's sovereignty. Increasingly, there is talk, at least in Moscow
policy circles, of a Cuban Missile–like crisis, the closest the United States and
Russia (then Soviet Russia) ever came to nuclear war.
To the extent, however remote, that Venezuela might grow into a Cuba-like US-Russian
military confrontation, would Trump be sufficiently free of Russiagate allegations to resolve
it peacefully, as President John Kennedy did in 1962? Judging by mainstream media commentary
on the May 3 phone conversation, the answer seems to be no. Considering the mounting
confrontation in Venezuela, Trump was right, even obligated, to call Putin, but he got no
applause, only condemnation. To take some random examples:
§ Democratic Representative David Cicilline asked CNN's Chris Cuomo rhetorically on
May 3, "Why does the president give the benefit of doubt to a person who attacked our
democracy?" while assailing Trump for not confronting Putin with the Mueller report.
§ The same evening, CNN's Don Lemon editorialized on the phone call: "The president
of the United States had just a normal old call with his pal Vladimir Putin. Didn't tell him
not to interfere in the election. Like he did in 2016, like he did in 2018, like we know he
is planning to do again in 2020 . You just don't seem to want us to know exactly what was
said . Nothing to see when the president talks for more than an hour with the leader of an
enemy nation. One that has repeatedly attacked our democracy and will do so again." (Lemon
did not say on what he based the expanded, serial charges against Putin and thus against
Trump or his allegation about the 2018 elections, which congressional Democrats mostly won,
or his foreknowledge about 2020 or generally and with major ramifications why he branded
Russia an "enemy nation.")
§ We might expect something more exalted from James Risen ,
once a critical-minded investigative reporter, who found it suspicious that "Trump and Putin
were both eager to put the Mueller report behind them," even for the sake of needed
diplomacy.
§ Senator Amy Klobuchar and Representative Eric Swalwell, both candidates for the
2020 Democratic presidential nomination, also
expressed deep suspicion regarding the Trump-Putin phone talk. Swalwell was sure it meant
that Trump "acts on their behalf," that he "is putting the Russians' interests ahead of the
United States' interests." (Voters may wonder if these candidates and quite a few others who
continue to promote extremist Russiagate allegations are emerging American statesmen.)
§ Not surprisingly,
a Washington Post opinion writer argued that the phone call meant "Trump is
counting on Russian help to get reelected."
None of these "opinion leaders" mentioned the danger of a US-Russian military
confrontation over Venezuela or elsewhere on the several fraught fronts of the new Cold War.
Indeed, retired admiral James Stavridis, once supreme allied commander of NATO forces and
formerly associated with Hillary Clinton's campaign, all but proposed war on
Russia in retaliation for its "attack on our democracy," including "unprecedented
measures" such as cyberattacks.
Russiagate's unproven allegations are an aggressive malignancy spreading through America's
politics to the most vital areas of national security policy. A full nonpartisan
investigation into their origins is urgently needed, but US intelligence agencies were almost
certainly present at their creation, which is why I have long argued that
Russiagate is actually Intelgate . If so, James Comey, then FBI director, was present at
the creation, though initially in a lesser role than were President Barack Obama's CIA
Director John Brennan and intelligence overlord James Clapper.
Comey recently deplored Attorney General William Barr's declaration that US intelligence
agencies resorted to "spying" on the Trump campaign. (In fact, Barr mischaracterized what
happened: The agencies, first and foremost Brennan's CIA, it seems, ran an entrapment
operation against members of the campaign.) Comey warned
Barr that he will discover that Trump "has eaten your soul."
It would be more accurate to say -- and certainly more important -- that baseless
Russiagate allegations are eating America's national security.
This commentary is based on Stephen F. Cohen's most recent weekly discussion with the host
of The John Batchelor Show. Now in their sixth year, previous installments are at
TheNation.com .
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies and politics at New York University and Princeton
University. A Nation contributing editor, his new book War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate is
available in paperback and in an ebook edition.
Phillip Sawicki says: May 9, 2019 at 7:52 pm
What we are witnessing now is the almost complete ignorance in the MSM and among people
like Clapper about the extraordinary damage done to the Russian economy under Clinton in the
1990s, a story well told by Mr. Cohen in the book "Failed Crusade." The immense hypocrisy of
accusing Russia of interference in 2016 leaves me breathless. The US has been interfering in
the affairs of every major country on earth, beginning with War of 1812.
In case people have
forgotten, The US sought to annex Canada. The Canadians resisted, and so then the US set up a
false flag attack in 1845 to start the Mexican-American War. Hundreds of interventions in
other countries, but if someone is alleged to have done so to us, it's a capital crime. What
arrogance!
Victor Sciamarelli says: May 9, 2019 at 4:17 pm
I recall an interesting comment by Mao Zedong about the Cuban Missile Crisis in which Mao
said that Nikita Khrushchev was stupid to put missiles in Cuba and he was a coward to take
them out.
Based on the recent conversations between Stephen Cohen and John Batchelor, I'll paraphrase
Mao's comment to say that the intelligence agencies were stupid to originate Russiagate and
the Democrats and their media allies are cowards not to stop it.
Another point is that the downside of the policy elites' belief in "American exceptionalism"
is that it is also a trap. They claim our "indispensable nation" rests upon values and
principles such as the rule of law, respect for human rights, and freedom of speech, even
though reality often tells us something different.
Thus, if Putin is a thug, if not a murderer, who attacked the US, undermined our democracy,
and is an autocrat who cares nothing about our values and principles, then what place is
there for diplomacy because you can't negotiate or compromise our immutable principles and
values.
Another observation is we often hear the statement that, "All options are on the table." This
sounds tough to an American mind because it includes nuclear weapons. All options means all
options. Nonetheless, someone else might interpret this to mean you are not confident or
certain that your conventional forces are capable of doing the mission and you are more
likely or willing to resort to a nuclear weapon. This can make any confrontation whether in
Venezuela, Ukraine, Syria, or Iran more dangerous that it needs to be.
In addition, Trump has sent an aircraft carrier group to the Middle East. The Guardian on May
6, 2019, stated that according to one report, information passed on by Israeli intelligence
contributed to the US threat assessment.
If we are now approaching war based on Israeli intelligence then I think we are also
approaching our Dr. Strangelove moment.
Jeffrey Harrison says: May 9, 2019 at 11:55 am
Arrogance, myopia. Those two words define the US today.
Pompous comes out and says the US is back and we're a force for good. This in the face of
widespread destruction all over the Middle East, hundreds of thousands of dead, the creation
of numerous groups of crazy zealots that we created, cultivated, and supported to be our
proxies in the overthrow of elected governments. All of that death and destruction, including
that perpetrated by our proxies is 100% the fault and responsibility of the United States.
But Pompous and the American people in general are so myopic that they don't see all that.
Thank you, worthless press. If the press actually told the American people what was being
done in their name, I think most of us would be disgusted but they don't. They cheer lead for
the beltway and their imperial pretensions.
This Stavridis bozo is a prime example. "all but proposed war on Russia in retaliation for
its "attack on our democracy," including "unprecedented measures" such as cyber attacks." I
realize that we are in a post proof world where any claim, no matter how inane, is
automatically taken as proven. No actual proof required. The "attack on our democracy" is
based on this totally bogus claim (never proven) that Russia hacked into the DNC's e-mails
(on a server that no law enforcement agency ever inspected to prove the claim of hacking)
that undermined our democracy by revealing how corrupt and slimy the DNC actually is. All the
while we're so myopic that we don't see the Republican party destroying our democracy from
within with voter ID requirements for a non-existent problem, gerrymandering themselves into
a permanent majority of a minority, voter suppression schemes such as purging voter rolls,
closing polling places, and generally making it difficult for people to vote.
But this Stavridis bozo wasn't done yet. The Russians he claims perpetrated unprecedented
measures such as cyber attacks. Really? The only cyber attacks that I'm actually aware of in
the US were actually perpetrated by the Department of Homeland Security who was playing
bureaucratic turf games. The admiral's ignorance is in full display when he forgets the
STUXTNET worm that absolutely was a cyber attack on Iran by the US and Israel, and that the
NSA hacked the personal cell phone of Angela Merkel, the Prime Minister of Germany, and the
trick revealed by Ed Snowden that the NSA would open computer boxes destined for certain
countries and install chips that would allow us to control the server, or that the only known
backdoor in a piece of Hauwei equipment was installed there by the NSA.
I'm suspecting that we need to clean up our act a lot more that most of the rest of the
world.
J McCormick says: May 8, 2019 at 11:57 pm
So much scorn heaped on members of the opposition party and the media and what I hear here
is a call for respect for and deference to the office of the presidency.
If there is cause for concern and worry , and I fervently believe that there is , I leave
it to others to offer up what they believe that cause might be.
History records that that the Congress relinquished powers that were properly theirs
(trade, war powers) and now they so far appear impotent in the face of executive overreach
when an effective check on the executive branch is critically needed.
Even if your opinion runs counter to mine I am reasonably certain we agree that
dysfunction and chaos rule the day in Washington and beyond.
Clark Shanahan says: May 9, 2019 at 6:26 pm
"So much scorn heaped on members of the opposition party and the media"
Tell me, J., do you believe Russia is our adversary?
If so, when did they become such?
If Clapper and Brennan actually created a sting operation against the Trump Campaign,
would you denounce that act?
If Obama had approved such an operation, would you believe he was ethically entitled to do
such?
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We
know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS)
by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those
reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry
Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.
The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer
of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive
steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives,
the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie
Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified
the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This
information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting."
This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.
One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was
CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka
the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.
This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel
and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.
For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey
of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially,
his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone
unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump
and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert),
a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately
2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later
contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee
of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency
put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the
direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from
a registered FBI informant.
By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign
Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:
" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: "
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."
The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research.
This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition
research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets--
Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about
with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against
Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry
Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6
[British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI
for launching the investigation into
George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that
led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's
associates conspired," The Times reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially,
he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client
cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation
of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.
Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET
intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation
mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so
enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what
I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that
he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect
that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?
The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which
can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but,
there again, they may 'compose', which is not.
Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law
enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses
to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should
be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.
Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial
misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution"
to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance.
But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.
I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump
to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently
writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But
it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still
believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing
Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns
though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos'
ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation
that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked
a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved.
No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes
spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before
the country move forward on any front.
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele
via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something
important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured
that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't
been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?
"... The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives, the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting." This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program. ..."
"... One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely. ..."
"... I am confident that a survey of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially, his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone unless their name is in an intelligence report. ..."
"... Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from a registered FBI informant. ..."
"... That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, ..."
"... Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ..."
"... Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's Henry Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6 [British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking " ..."
"... I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI for launching the investigation into George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's associates conspired," The Times reported. ..."
"... Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially, he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network reported in a January 2016 exclusive: ..."
"... I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government? ..."
"... Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution. ..."
"... Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before the country move forward on any front. ..."
"... So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal. ..."
Do not focus on July 2016 as the so-called start of the counter intelligence investigation of Donald Trump. That is a lie. We
know, thanks to the work of Judicial Watch, that the FBI had signed up Christopher Steele as a Confidential Human Source (aka CHS)
by February of 2016. It is incumbent on Attorney General Barr to examine the contact reports filed by Steele's FBI handler (those
reports are known as FD-1023s). He also, as I have noted in a previous post, needs to look at the FD-1023s for Felix Sater and Henry
Greenberg. But these will only tell a small part of the story. There is a massive intelligence side to this story.
The CIA, with the knowledge of the Director of National Intelligence, worked with British counterparts starting in the summer
of 2015 to collect intelligence on Republican and at least one Democrat candidate. John Brennan was probably hoping that his proactive
steps to help the Hillary Clinton campaign would ensure him taking over as DNI in the new Clinton Administration. Regardless of motives,
the CIA enlisted the British intelligence community to start gathering intelligence on most major Republican candidates and on Bernie
Sanders. This initial phase of intelligence gathering goes beyond opposition research. The information being gathered identified
the key personnel in each campaign and identified the people outside the United States receiving their calls, texts and emails. This
information was turned into intelligence reports that then were passed back to the United States intel community as "liaison reporting."
This was not put into normal classified channels. This intelligence was put into a SAP, i.e. a Special Access Program.
One person who needs to be called on the carpet and asked some hard questions is current CIA Director Gina Haspel. She was
CIA Chief of Station in London at the time and was a regular attendee at the meeting of the Brit's Joint Intelligence Committee aka
the JIC. I suppose it is possible she was cut out of the process, but I believe that is unlikely.
This initial phase of intelligence collection produced a great volume of intelligence that allowed analysts to identify key personnel
and the people they were communicating with overseas. You don't have to have access to intelligence information to understand this.
For example, you simply have to ask the question, "how did George Papadopoulos get on the radar." I am confident that a survey
of NSA and CIA liaison reporting will show that George Papadopoulos was identified as a possible target by the fall of 2015. Initially,
his name was "masked." But we now know that many people on the Trump campaign had their names "unmasked." You cannot unmask someone
unless their name is in an intelligence report. We also know that Felix Sater, a longtime business associate of Donald Trump
and an FBI informant since December 1998 (he was signed up by Andrew Weismann), initiated the proposal to do a Trump Tower in Moscow.
Don't take my word for it, that's what Robert Mueller reported:
In the late summer of 2015, the Trump Organization received a new inquiry about pursuing a Trump Tower project in Moscow. In approximately
September 2015, Felix Sater . . . contacted Cohen (i.e., Michael Cohen) on behalf of I.C. Expert Investment Company (I.C. Expert),
a Russian real-estate development corporation controlled by Andrei Vladimirovich Rozov. Sater had known Rozov since approximately
2007 and, in 2014, had served as an agent on behalf of Rozov during Rozov's purchase of a building in New York City. Sater later
contacted Rozov and proposed that I.C. Expert pursue a Trump Tower Moscow project in which I.C. Expert would license the name and
brand from the Trump Organization but construct the building on its own. Sater worked on the deal with Rozov and another employee
of I.C. Expert. (see page 69 of the Mueller Report).
Sater's communication with Rozov were intercepted by western intelligence agencies -- GCHQ and NSA. I do not know which agency
put it into an intel report, but it was put into the system. The Sater FD-1023 will tell us whether or not Sater did this at the
direction of the FBI or acted on his own initiative. The key point is that the "bait" to do something with the Russians came from
a registered FBI informant.
By December of 2015, the Hillary Campaign decided to use the Russian angle on Donald Trump. Thanks to Wikileaks we have Campaign
Manager John Podesta's email exchange in December 2015 with Democratic operative Brent Budowsky:
" That's good, sooner it's clarified the better, and the stronger the better, " Budowski replies, later adding: "
Best approach is to slaughter Donald for his bromance with Putin , but not go too far betting on Putin re Syria ."
The program to slaughter Donald Trump using Russia as the hatchet was already underway. This was more the opposition research.
This was the weaponization of law enforcement and intelligence assets to attack political opponents. Hillary had covered the opposition
research angle in London by hiring a firm comprised of former MI6 assets--
Hakluyt: there was a second, even more powerful and mysterious opposition research and intelligence firm lurking about
with significant political and financial links to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her 2016 campaign for president against
Donald Trump.
Meet London-based Hakluyt & Co. , founded by three former British intelligence
operatives in 1995 to provide the kind of otherwise inaccessible research for which select governments and Fortune 500 corporations
pay huge sums. . . .
Hakluyt is described by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism's
Henry
Williams as " one of the more secretive firms within the corporate investigations world " and as "a retirement home for ex-MI6
[British foreign intelligence] officers, but it now also recruits from the worlds of management consultancy and banking "
I do not believe that it is a mere coincidence that Australian diplomat, Alexander Downer, was the one credited by the FBI
for launching the investigation into
George Papadopolous : It was Downer who told the FBI of Papodopoulos' comments, which became one of the "driving factors that
led the FBI to open an investigation in July 2016 into Russia's attempts to disrupt the election and whether any of President Trump's
associates conspired," The Times reported.
Downer, a long-time Aussie chum of Bill and Hillary Clinton, had been on Hakluyt's advisory board since 2008. Officially,
he had to resign his Hakluyt role in 2014, but his informal connections continued uninterrupted, the News Corp. Australian Network
reported in a January 2016 exclusive:
But it can be revealed Mr. Downer has still been attending client conferences and gatherings of the group, including a client
cocktail soirée at the Orangery at Kensington Palace a few months ago.
His attendance at that event is understood to have come days after he also attended a two-day country retreat at the invitation
of the group, which has been involved in a number of corporate spy scandals in recent times.
Much remains to be uncovered in this plot. But this much is certain--there is an extensive documentary record, including TOP SECRET
intelligence reports (SIGINT and HUMINT) and emails and phone calls that will show there was a concerted covert action operation
mounted against Donald Trump and his campaign. Those documents will tell the story. This cannot be allowed to happen again.
Having watched interviews of Papadopoulos on TeeVee I would say that this creature would be easy to manipulate. His ego is so
enormous that a minimal effort would be required.
I'm curious why they went after minor characters in the Trump campaign and not Jared or one of Trump's sons? From what
I've read of Hoover, it seems he was constantly building "dossiers" of the powerful and those he considered "subversives" so that
he would remain preeminent. Then there was the Church Committee investigation. Is this qualitatively different? Can we ever expect
that law enforcement & intelligence with so much secretive power are not the 4th branch of government?
The guts of the matter was well expressed by Judge T.S. Ellis when he made the distinction between different results which
can be expected from exerting pressures on witnesses: they may 'sing' - which is, commonly, in the interests of justice - but,
there again, they may 'compose', which is not.
Also involved - and I think Judge Ellis was very well aware of this - is a fundamental distinction relating to what law
enforcement authorities are trying to achieve. If Mueller was honestly - even of perhaps misguidedly - trying to get witnesses
to 'sing', that is hardly a mortal sin. If he was trying to get them to 'compose', then the question becomes whether he should
be under indictment for subversion of the Constitution.
Yes, indeed, many a composition have been elicited by prosecutors in criminal cases. The issue is there is no penalty for prosecutorial
misconduct while the advancement points ratchet up with each conviction. The incentives are aligned perfectly for the "institution"
to run rough shod on ordinary Americans. Only those wealthy enough to fight the unlimited funds of the government have a chance.
But of course in matters relating to national security there is the added twist of state secrets that protects government malfeasance.
I don't know how the national security state we continue to build ever gets rolled back. A small victory would be for Trump
to declassify all documents and communications relating to the multifaceted spying on his campaign and as Larry so eloquently
writes to frame him as a Manchurian Candidate. At least the public will learn about what their grandchildren are paying for. But
it seems that Trump prefers tweeting to taking any kind of action. Not that it would matter much as half the country will still
believe that Trump deserves it until the tables are turned on their team. While most Americans will say to use Ben Hunt's phrasing
Yay! Constitution. Yay! Liberty. they sure don't care as the state oligarchy tighten their chokehold.
Yes, he seems young and ambitious enough to be easy (and willing) prey. Having been involved in some local political campaigns
though, I've observed that more and more than before, young people like him are hyper-concerned with networking. Papadopoulos'
ego aside, of course he and many people who sign on hope to make self-serving connections. Not only that, it's also been my observation
that casual sexual hook-ups go with the territory, and not only among young, single guys like him. I have to say I've been shocked
a few times by how risky and cavalier some liaisons have been that've come to my attention, considering "public figures" are involved.
No doubt that's why a "honeypot" was dispatched to try to help entrap Papadopoulos.
Why aren't the MSM having a hissy fit about the real, documented election interference by the British Commonwealth/5 Eyes
spooks in the 2016 campaign (and before)? The hoax of projecting onto Putin what they themselves have done must be exposed before
the country move forward on any front.
So, was Skripal one of Steele's so-called Kremlin insiders? I see Pablo Miller is connected to both Porton Down and Steele
via the ironically titled II's media pods. And Miller is certainly connected to Skripal.
Papadopolos was very young hence the nativity getting sucked in. The ego helped for sure. Probably exciting to be part of something
important probably for the first time since he started working for Trump campaign
One thing that's always concerned me about Larry's informative and insightful essays on these matters is how can we be assured
that the IC documentation mentioned has been filled out honestly and accurately -- or that the forms even still exist and haven't
been conveniently "lost" or surreptitiously destroyed?
"It is the ultimate irony that how the old Soviet Union's judiciary used to function is
now becoming standing operating procedure in the United States."
When you consider how many of today's Democrat luminaries were self described as dedicated
Communists in the 60's, 70's, and 80's it is not surprising at all.
If, the information in this article is true, I feel bad for this young lady getting hemmed
up in international shenanigans.
If a person loves her country (her home), wants the opportunity for fellow citizens to be
free with a right to bare arms, and seeks out the assistance of the USA both as a model for
having the 2nd Amendment, and an organization that leads in advocating for personal firearms
ownership, the NRA, how is she committing any crime? She should not be locked up for pursuing
God given, inalienable rights for her fellow countrymen. She should be encouraged and
sponsored by Pro2A groups and manufacturers. Again, if the information as presented is
true.
Thank you DOJ. There's no need for guns in Russia. These people intoxicated by the alcohol
and hard drugs will kill one another by the thousands. I feel for Masha Butina, but as far
away she is from Russia, as better for this poor country. Luckily she is in US and even
better in prison. Thank you Russophobes, warmongers and sheep that neocons will send to the
slaughterhouse, you can not do any better.
Our courts are totally corrupt. There's a prosecutor/FBI/judge cabal which convicts 98+%
of its victims at trials. The excessive long sentences are used to convince the large
majority unable to afford a slightly possible defense to bargain a plea. The Exceptional
morons selected for juries think, why would the FBI lie. They lie to be promoted. What do you
think happens to an agent whose testimony aids the defense?
Kangaroo courts would be more honest in their convictions.
If a case is merely "plausible", that's not enough to indict.
Based on that thread-bare criterion, the FBI could probably come up with "plausible" cause
to indict half the US population for something or other. Never mind Russians, all of whom
might "plausibly" be suspected as secret agents for the Kremlin because they know other
Russians.
The true criminals are attempting to cover their tracks through diversion. The magnitude
of the scheme they are executing now is commensurate with the magnitude of their own crimes
against the United States.
I agree, it was much more scary in the 80's hiding under our desks at school and learning
each week how many times one country could blow up the world, multiple times over. Now, so
many people around the world call ********, not because MAD doesn't exist, but everyone
realized no matter the quality of your bunker and fortitude of cement, those things only mean
you die slower than those outside near the big flash. Hypersonic weapons seem like a step
backwards in the whole 'my missile is bigger than your missile' game of Coldwar 2.0.
Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate"
media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite
are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss
NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.
Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".
Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free
Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing
to expose the outright lies out there.
These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis
only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.
Chris Hedges, host of "On Contact," joins Rick Sanchez to discuss the role of the Democratic establishment in the "Russiagate"
media frenzy. He argues that it was an unsustainable narrative given the actions of the White House but that the Democratic elite
are unable to face their own role in the economic and social crises for which they are in large part to blame. They also discuss
NATO's expansionary tendencies and how profitable it is for US defense contractors.
Years ago I kept hearing from the newsmedia that Russia was the "enemy".
Frontline had a show about "Putin's Brain". Even Free
Speech TV shows like Bill Press and "The Nation" authors like Eric Alterman push the Hillary style warmongering and do nothing
to expose the outright lies out there.
These are supposed to be thought outside of the corporate mainstream newsmedia. The emphasis
only on Trump and Fox News is totally hypocritical.
The US and Great Britain are trying to economically cripple Syria via cutoff of oil
supplies as "The Syrian government is scrambling to deal with its worst fuel crisis since
the war began in 2011, aggravated by U.S. sanctions targeting oil shipments to
Damascus." https://www.apnews.com/a99a22ad2598474ca39a7d8cde560c31
"Under the sanctions imposed by the U.S. and Great Britain, no Iranian oil tankers are
allowed to transit the Suez Canal if they are destined for a Syrian port, a Syrian military
source told Al-Masdar News this morning."
Thus the Egyptian government is apparently technically lying about their role in the
sanction when they state "Egypt's government denied Wednesday banning the passage of oil
tankers to Syria through the Suez Canal. Navigation in the canal is going according to
international conventions and treaties that guarantee the right of safe navigation to all
tankers without discrimination."
https://syrianobserver.com/EN/news/49720/cairo-denies-syrian-accusations-on-banning-iranian-oil-tanker-passage.html
Consequently, Iran is shipping Syria oil via tanker trucks.
"1200 Iranian tankers loaded with oil products reached Syria through Iraq in the past
week," Al- Iraqia reports, adding, "The number of Iranian oil tankers are expected to reach
1500 per week, and after providing current Syrian needs, they will be fixed at 500 tankers
per week."
Those that oppose US and Israeli world domination has to buy time and promote economic
collapse within the Empire. Eventually the Sparta like militarism will bankrupt both
countries. The wild card is Venezuela - if they can get their hands on this oil they, and
their allies, can continue to spread chaos for a couple more decades. As it now stands the US
proven oil reserves are between 36-39 billion barrels and the US is consuming that oil at a
rate of about 4.3 billion barrels/year.
The US is also putting pressure on Turkey in hopes of deposing the current government that
supports the GNA in Libya and opposes the gulf states and Saudi Arabia. Turkey needs the
Iranian heavy crude for its Tupras refinery. Substituting heavy crude from Russia is an issue
as Russia has already contracted with Italy and Greece to supply heavy crude to their
refineries. https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/04/turkey-iran-usa-ankara-seeks-alternative-sources-iranian-oil.html
B wrote "The Syrian oilfields, which could produce enough to keep the country running, are under
control of the U.S. proxy forces. The U.S. prohibited to sell that oil to the Syrian
government."
It is about the money. It is another spinning plate trying to be war just like Iran,
Venezuela, etc. And when the money music stops (which is only when enough nations stop buying
US Treasuries) the elite are going to say that the poor should pay for those attempts at
war.
I like the comment by frances above about the drunk on the canal boat and China/Russia/et
al are trying to keep us alive, hoping the drunk passes out.....and we all get to watch and
learn how not to run a world where the drunk owns the punch bowl.
"... On Tuesday, a New York Times article by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel described Hunter Biden's lucrative dealings with a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company at a time when his father was mediating U.S. policy towards Ukraine. According to the Times , the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings paid Hunter Biden "as much as $50,000 per month in some months" for his work as a board member, despite the fact that he "lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been discharged from the Navy Reserve after testing positive for cocaine." ..."
"... A Ukrainian corruption probe into Burisma Holdings was scuttled in 2016, when Vice President Biden threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire the prosecutor who launched the corruption investigation. Withholding the loans would have thrown the former Soviet republic into insolvency at a time when it was fending off attacks from Vladimir Putin's Russia. ..."
"... Schweizer's research on Hunter Biden has already triggered Democrat strategists worried that Joe Biden's 2020 campaign could suffer the same fate as Clinton's. The similarities between the two candidates are hard to dismiss: both are Democrat establishment favorites , both are Obama administration alums , and both are tainted by accusations that they used their authority as government officials to benefit their family to the potential detriment of U.S. foreign policy. ..."
A $1.5 billion sweetheart deal Hunter Biden's private equity firm secured from the state-owned Bank of China is
"looming on the horizon" as a potential line of attack against his father's 2020 presidential campaign, according to
Vanity
Fair's
Tina Nguyen.
This comes days after a
New York Times
article
renewed interest in the revelations exposed in Peter Schweizer's 2018 bestseller
Secret Empires
concerning the sweetheart deals Hunter Biden's private equity firm secured while his father, Joe
Biden, was vice president.
But the
Times'
article "may be just the first volley in what is likely to become a broader war over Joe
Biden's conduct and record,"
Vanity Fair's
Nguyen
writes
:
Past speculation about Biden family drama has centered on Hunter's documented struggle with drug use and his
recently ended relationship with his late brother's widow. But the bigger threat might actually be Hunter's past
business enterprises. Already, there's another attack line looming on the horizon: in his latest book,
Secret
Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends
, Breitbart
editor-at-large Peter Schweizer
describes
how
a private-equity firm managed by Hunter Biden, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, negotiated a $1.5 billion investment
deal with the state-owned Bank of China at the same time that his father, then the vice president, was conducting
high-level diplomacy with Beijing. (On one of his trips, Hunter allegedly made use of Air Force Two.)
Whether or not
the Chinese hoped to curry favor with Hunter's father, Trump allies are sure to make note of the issue, especially
given Joe Biden's
controversial
remark this week
downplaying China as an economic competitor. (A spokesman for Hunter Biden disputed Schweizer's
claims to the
Journal
.)
In a March interview with Fox News Channel's Laura Ingraham, Peter Schweizer
explained
the troubling circumstances surrounding Hunter Biden's lucrative deal with the Chinese government at a time when his
father was negotiating U.S. policy with the regime.
"In December of 2013, Hunter Biden flies on Air Force 2 to Beijing, China, with his father," Schweizer said. "His
father meets with Chinese officials, he's very soft on Beijing. The most important thing that happens [is] 10 days after
they return. And that's when Hunter Biden's small, private equity firm called Rosemont Seneca Partners gets a $1 billion
private equity deal with the Chinese government, not with the Chinese corporation, with the government. And what people
need to realize is Hunter Biden has no background in China. He has no background in private equity. The deal he got in
the Shanghai free-trade zone, nobody else had -- Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Blackstone, nobody had this deal."
"There's no question when you chart what Joe Biden is doing with China -- the meetings he's having and the deals that
his son is procuring at the same time -- that they are buying off Biden through his son. I think it's crystal clear,"
Schweizer added.
In an interview last year with SiriusXM's
Breitbart News Tonig
ht, Schweizer
explained
China's foreign influence peddling tactic.
"The Chinese government has figured out that the way to get favorable treatment from policymakers in Washington, DC,
is by, basically, signing sweetheart deals with the children of politicians because they think by doing so, they'll get
better policy positions from our government," Schweizer said. "And the history indicates in the Obama administration
that that's exactly what happens."
He noted that Joe Biden's 2013 trip to Beijing came at a crucial moment for U.S.-China relations when the communist
regime's behavior was increasingly and openly menacing to U.S. allies in the region, a fact which made the former vice
president's decision to go "soft on China" all the more remarkable.
"To put this into context, in 2013, the Chinese have just exerted air rights over the South Pacific, the South China
Sea," Schweizer
said
. "They basically have said, 'If you want to fly in this area, you have to get Chinese approval. We are claiming
sovereignty over this territory.' Highly controversial in Japan, in the Philippines, and in other countries. Joe Biden
is supposed to be going there to confront the Chinese. Well, he gets widely criticized on that trip for going soft on
China. So basically, no challenging them, and Japan and other countries are quite upset about this."
On Tuesday, a
New York Times
article by Kenneth Vogel and Iuliia Mendel
described
Hunter Biden's lucrative dealings with a Ukrainian oligarch-owned energy company at a time when his father
was mediating U.S. policy towards Ukraine. According to the
Times
, the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings paid
Hunter Biden "as much as $50,000 per month in some months" for his work as a board member, despite the fact that he
"lacked any experience in Ukraine and just months earlier had been
discharged
from the Navy Reserve
after testing positive for cocaine."
A Ukrainian corruption probe into Burisma Holdings was scuttled in 2016, when Vice President Biden
threatened
to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees to the country if the Ukrainian government did not fire
the prosecutor who launched the corruption investigation. Withholding the loans would have thrown the former Soviet
republic into insolvency at a time when it was fending off attacks from Vladimir Putin's Russia.
Schweizer, the president of the nonpartisan Government Accountability Institute and a senior editor-at-large for
Breitbart News, wrote the bestselling 2015 exposé
Clinton
Cash
, which is widely
credited
for its instrumental impact on Hillary Clinton's failed 2016 presidential campaign due to Schweizer's
copious
documentation
of the former secretary of state's history of amassing wealth from donors seeking favorable actions
from her State Department.
Schweizer's research on Hunter Biden has already
triggered
Democrat strategists worried that Joe Biden's 2020 campaign could suffer the same fate as Clinton's. The
similarities between the two candidates are hard to dismiss: both are Democrat
establishment favorites
, both are Obama administration
alums
, and both are tainted by accusations that they used their authority as government officials to benefit their
family to the potential detriment of U.S. foreign policy.
A largely unreported footnote in Special Counsel Robert S. Mueller's final report raises immediate
questions about the Obama-era FISA warrant obtained to monitor the communications of Carter Page, a tangential
adviser to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.
Mueller's report explained that his team did not find evidence that can be used to charge anyone from the Trump
campaign as acting as an agent of a foreign government. It says the FISA warrant to spy on Page was obtained using a
"different (and lower) standard" of evidence claiming Russian involvement.
Mueller's team utilized the standards
outlined
in the
Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), which "requires persons acting as agents of foreign principals in a political
or quasi-political capacity to make periodic public disclosure of their relationship with the foreign principal."
The report stated:
The investigation did not, however, yield evidence sufficient to sustain any charge that any individual
affiliated with the Trump Campaign acted as an agent of a foreign principal within the meaning of FARA or, in
terms of Section 951, subject to the direction or control of the government of Russia, or any official thereof. In
particular, the Office did not find evidence likely to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Campaign officials
such as Paul Manafort, George Papadopoulos, and Carter Page acted as agents of the Russian Government – or at its
direction control, or request-during the relevant time period.
That paragraph contained a footnote about the FISA warrant to conduct surveillance on Page, which was obtained
based on warrant applications that cited as evidence against Page information from the infamous, largely-discredited,
Clinton-funded anti-Trump dossier.
The footnote says the Page FISA warrant was obtained from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) court
utilizing a "different (and lower) standard than the one governing" governing Mueller's office.
States the footnote:
On four occasions, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issued warrants based on a finding of
probable cause to believe that Page was an agent of a foreign power. 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801 (b), 1805(a)(2)(A). The
FISC's probable-cause finding was based on a different (and lower) standard than the one governing the Office's
decision whether to bring charges against Page, which is whether admissible evidence would likely be sufficient to
prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Page acted as an agent of the Russian Federation during the period at issue.
Cf United States v. Cardoza, 713 F.3d 656, 660 (D.C. Cir. 2013) (explaining that probable cause requires only "a
fair probability," and not "certainty, or proof beyond a reasonable doubt, or proof by a preponderance of the
evidence").
In late October 2016, then-FBI director James Comey signed the first of three successful FISA applications to
obtain warrants to spy on Page. The second and third were renewal applications since a FISA warrant must be renewed
every 90 days.
All three applications reportedly cited as key evidence against Page the dossier produced by the controversial
Fusion GPS firm which was paid for its anti-Trump work by Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign and the Democratic National
Committee via the Perkins Coie law firm.
According to Republican House
characterizations
,
the FISA applications signed by Comey withheld key information raising questions about the dossier, including that it
was financed by Clinton and the DNC and had known credibility issues.
During a Sunday interview on New York AM 970 radio's "The Cats Roundtable," Rep. Peter King (R-NY) slammed FBI
special counsel Robert Mueller for how he handled the almost two-year investigation into alleged collusion between
President Donald Trump and Russia in the 2016 presidential election.
King said it "couldn't have taken Bob Mueller that long" to find out if there was collusion.
"The reports we get are that they knew a year ago there was no collusion. Well, didn't [Mueller] have an
obligation to tell the president of the United States that? To let the world know? The president has gone off to
negotiate with Kim Jong-un. He is involved, obviously, in very sensitive negotiations all the time in the Middle
East," King told host John Catsimatidis.
He continued, "I think that the Mueller people had an obligation to tell the president, to tell the country, to
tell the world that there was no collusion whatsoever as soon as they found out there was none. This isn't like
you're dealing with some local drug dealer or something. You're talking about, whether you like him or not, he is the
leader of the country. The leader of the free world. And they let this hang over him for at least a year It was
wrong not to make it known."
Pentagon serves Wall Street and is controlled by CIA which is actually can be viewed as a
Wall Street arm as well.
Notable quotes:
"... This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. ..."
"... General It-Doesn't-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because his tanks and troops could "mop the floor" with the Russians, in a battle that "wouldn't even be close." It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general -- who clearly longs for the Cold War fumes that defined his early career -- overestimating the Russian menace and underestimating Russian military capability . ..."
"... The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don't think strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations -- deploying massive formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they get promoted past their respective levels of competence. ..."
"... If America's generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers, they'd have spoken out about -- and if necessary resigned en masse over -- mission sets that were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive . Their oath is to the Constitution, after all, not Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It's all symptomatic of the disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. ..."
"... Let's start with Mattis. "Mad Dog" Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian Gulf that President Barack Obama removed him from command of CENTCOM. ..."
"... Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, "intellectual" " warrior monk " chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump's altogether reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria. ..."
The two-star army general strode across the stage in his rumpled combat fatigues, almost
like George Patton -- all that was missing was the cigar and riding crop. It was 2017 and I was
in the audience, just another mid-level major attending yet another mandatory lecture in the
auditorium of the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas.
The general then commanded one of the Army's two true armored divisions and had plenty of
his tanks forward deployed in Eastern Europe, all along the Russian frontier. Frankly, most
CGSC students couldn't stand these talks. Substance always seemed lacking, as each general
reminded us to "take care of soldiers" and "put the mission first," before throwing us a few
nuggets of conventional wisdom on how to be good staff officers should we get assigned to his
vaunted command.
This time, though, the general got to talking about Russia. So I perked up. He made it
crystal clear that he saw Moscow as an adversary to be contained, checked, and possibly
defeated. There was no nuance, no self-reflection, not even a basic understanding of the
general complexity of geopolitics in the 21st century. Generals can be like that --
utterly "in-the-box," "can-do" thinkers. They take pride in how little they discuss policy and
politics, even when they command tens of thousands of troops and control entire districts,
provinces, or countries. There is some value in this -- we'd hardly want active
generals meddling in U.S. domestic affairs. But they nonetheless can take the whole "aw shucks"
act a bit too far.
General It-Doesn't-Matter-His-Name thundered that we need not worry, however, because
his tanks and troops could "mop the floor" with the Russians, in a battle that "wouldn't even
be close." It was oh-so-typical, another U.S. Army general -- who clearly longs for the Cold
War fumes that defined his early career -- overestimating the Russian menace and
underestimating Russian military
capability . Of course, it was all cloaked in the macho bravado so common among
generals who think that talking like sergeants will win them street cred with the troops.
(That's not their job anymore, mind you.) He said nothing, of course, about the role
of mid- and long-range nuclear weapons that could be the catastrophic consequence of an
unnecessary war with the Russian Bear.
I got to thinking about that talk recently as I reflected in wonder at how the latest
generation of mainstream "liberals" loves to fawn over generals, admirals -- any flag officers,
really -- as alternatives to President Donald Trump. The irony of that alliance should not be
lost on us. It's built on the standard Democratic fear of looking "soft" on terrorism,
communism, or whatever-ism, and their visceral, blinding hatred of Trump. Some of this is
understandable. Conservative Republicans masterfully paint liberals as "weak sisters" on
foreign policy, and Trump's administration is, well, a wild card in world affairs.
The problem with the vast majority of generals, however, is that they don't think
strategically. What they call strategy is really large-scale operations -- deploying massive
formations and winning campaigns replete with battles. Many remain mired in the world of
tactics, still operating like lieutenants or captains and proving the Peter Principle right, as they
get promoted past their respective levels of competence.
If America's generals, now and over the last 18 years, really were strategic thinkers,
they'd have spoken out about -- and if necessary resigned en masse over -- mission sets that
were unwinnable, illegal (in the case of Iraq), and counterproductive . Their oath is to
the Constitution, after all, not
Emperors Bush, Obama, and Trump. Yet few took that step. It's all symptomatic of the
disease of institutionalized intellectual mediocrity. More of the same is all they know:
their careers were built on fighting "terror" anywhere it raised its evil head. Some, though no
longer most, still subscribe to the faux intellectualism of General Petraeus and his legion of
Coindinistas
, who never saw a problem that a little regime change, followed by expert counterinsurgency,
couldn't solve. Forget that they've been proven wrong time and again and can count
zero victories since 2002. Generals (remember this!) are never held accountable.
Flag officers also rarely seem to recognize that they owe civilian policymakers more than
just tactical "how" advice. They ought to be giving "if" advice -- if we invade Iraq,
it will take 500,000 troops to occupy the place, and even then we'll ultimately destabilize the
country and region, justify al-Qaeda's worldview, kick off a nationalist insurgency, and become
immersed in an unwinnable war. Some, like Army Chief General Eric Shinseki and CENTCOM head
John Abizaid, seemed to
know this deep down. Still, Shinseki quietly retired after standing up to Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Abizaid rode out his tour to retirement.
Generals also love to tell the American people that victory is
"just around the corner," or that there's a "light at the end of the tunnel." General
William Westmoreland used the very same language when predicting imminent victory in Vietnam.
Two months later, the North Vietnamese and Vietcong unleashed the largest uprising of the war,
the famed Tet Offensive.
Take Afghanistan as exhibit A: 17 or so generals have now commanded U.S. troops in this,
America's longest war. All have commanded within the system and framework of their
predecessors. Sure, they made marginal operational and tactical changes -- some preferred
surges, others advising, others counterterror -- but all failed to achieve anything close to
victory, instead laundering failure into false optimism. None refused to play the same-old game
or question the very possibility of victory in landlocked, historically xenophobic Afghanistan.
That would have taken real courage, which is in short supply among senior officers.
Exhibit B involves Trump's former cabinet generals -- National Security Advisor H.R.
McMaster, Chief of Staff John Kelley, and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis -- whom adoring and
desperate liberals took as saviors and canonized as the supposed adults
in the room . They were no such thing. The generals' triumvirate consisted ultimately of
hawkish conventional thinkers married to the dogma of American exceptionalism and empire.
Period.
Let's start with Mattis. "Mad Dog" Mattis was so anti-Iran and bellicose in the Persian
Gulf that President Barack Obama
removed him from command of CENTCOM.
Furthermore, the supposedly morally untainted, "intellectual" " warrior
monk " chose, when he finally resigned, to do so in response to Trump's altogether
reasonable call for a modest troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria.
Helping Saudi Arabia terror bomb Yemen and starve 85,000 children to death? Mattis rebuked
Congress and
supported that. He never considered resigning in opposition to that war crime. No, he fell
on his "courageous" sword over downgrading a losing 17-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not to
mention he came to Trump's cabinet straight from the board of contracting giant General
Dynamics, where he collected hundreds of thousands of military-industrial complex dollars.
Then there was John Kelley, whom Press Secretary Sarah Sanders implied
was above media questioning because he was once a four-star marine general. And there's
McMaster, another lauded intellectual who once wrote an interesting book and taught history at
West Point. Yet he still drew all
the wrong conclusions in his famous book on Vietnam -- implying that more troops, more
bombing, and a mass invasion of North Vietnam could have won the war. Furthermore, his work
with Mattis on Trump's unhinged
, imperial National Defense Strategy proved that he was, after all, just another devotee of
American hyper-interventionism.
So why reflect on these and other Washington generals? It's simple: liberal veneration for
these, and seemingly all, military flag officers is a losing proposition and a formula for more
intervention, possible war with other great powers, and the creeping militarization of the
entire U.S. government. We know what the generals expect -- and potentially
want -- for America's foreign policy future.
Just look at the curriculum at the various war and staff colleges from Kansas to Rhode
Island. Ten years ago, they were all running war games focused on counterinsurgency in the
Middle East and Africa. Now those same schools are drilling for future "contingencies" in the
Baltic, Caucasus, and in the South China Sea. Older officers have always lamented the end of
the Cold War "good old days," when men were men and the battlefield was "simple." A return to a
state of near-war with Russia and China is the last thing real progressives should be
pushing for in 2020.
The bottom line is this: the faint hint that mainstream libs would relish a Six Days in May– style military coup is more than a little disturbing, no matter what you think
of Trump. Democrats must know the damage such a move would do to our ostensible republic. I
say: be a patriot. Insist on civilian control of foreign affairs. Even if that
means two more years of The Donald.
Danny Sjursen is a retired U.S. Army Major and regular contributor to Truthdig . His
work has also appeared in Harper's, the Los Angeles Times , The Nation , Tom Dispatch , and The
Hill . He served combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and later taught history at his alma
mater, West Point. He is the author of Ghostriders of
Baghdad: Soldiers, Civilians, and the Myth of the Surge . Follow him on Twitter @SkepticalVet .
[ Note: The views expressed in this article are those of the author, expressed in an
unofficial capacity, and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of
the Army, Department of Defense, or the U.S. government.]
As soon as nations learn to avoid dollar transactions that will dramatically weaken the USA
neoliberal empire. Bulling using technology transfer prohibitions is not effective as Germany and
Japan are now fully recovered from WWII destruction and post immediate threat to the USA
technological hegemony.
We the people needn't worry about our vote for president in as much as we the people
should investigate the people who surround our president's. Trump has been overtaken from his
campaigns foreign policy rhetoric by the same cabal of those who have captured the other
previous presidents from they're living up to their promises, whether by choice or by
compromise. I wish that a presidential campaign requirement were that each presidential
candidate would divulge the cabinet choices they would make as secretary's of our national
agencies. I wish for a lot of things that never will happen but still it would be nice to
know such substantial appointments as opposed to knowing about their personality disorders
wish are always disclosed for further review and constant discussion.
I've said it before that the US is going to sanction itself into obscurity. These
sanctioned nations are many and still growing if you include our allies. It's all sticks and
no carrots. When it all collapses the collapse may be blamed on US arrogance and profit.
Correct Sam. From The Art of War to win one must know the enemy like one knows ones self.
There were terrible consequences for the failure of the West to know Hitler's intentions and
fail to act appropriately. England and France were duped by themselves into a policy of
submission until it was almost too late. England held on by a thread and somehow managed to
break the appeasement strategy and go on to total war. You know the "We shall fight them on
the Beaches" speeches which were the defining moments after the failed diplomacy that changed
the course of history.
But there is a problem with hindsight. Every hammer sees a problem as a nail. Our past
victories are, in the end, no prediction of our future successes. We need to evaluate every
emerging condition as an entirely new problem to be solved with no preconceptions. We need to
cast a wide net and explore multiple paths for the successful defense of the Nation. We need
to be able to correctly see the future and take actions.
This is where we have failed believing we have no existential threat we are willing to
admit to ourselves except for the old threadbare reasons we find solace and comfort in
dusting off the old playbook for World actions believing that the old plans will somehow
guarantee success.
We need to move beyond a model of our preeminence and our position as the leading nation
in the World which still relies on our former dominance and our ability to direct the course
of foreign nations.
The entire population of the Planet is growing stronger and more diverse. The voices from
emerging nations are growing louder. China is investing the cash they got from the West to
implement new strategies to provide basic services to developing nations. Their aim is not
philanthropy but eventual control.
We can no longer afford to expect that some foreign devil nation will rear its ugly head
so we can chop it's head off like we did in WWII. Instead we should be preparing for the new
frontier where former adversaries and allies are making inroads in building the new economies
of the future.
There is only one option. We need to stop focusing on our past victories and the methods
we used to achieve those victories and begin to correctly assess the opportunities out there
where we can still influence the rest of the World in positive ways. China and Russia are not
waiting for us to catch up.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:20
I have read that after WW II, the Soviets made overtures to the Truman government, but
those were rejected in favor of hostility. It seems the capitalists' fear of socialism
overcame good sense.
DW Bartoo , May 1, 2019 at 11:59
Truman knew Russia posed no threat to the U$, Tedder, but chose, like many a predecessor,
to create a monster, an enemy of fearful dimension and ruthless intent, to keep the highly
profitable militarization of the U$ going. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not
done to bring the Japanese to their knees, they were already there, it was to send a message
to the Soviet Union.
All that remained was to stoke domestic fear, inculcate loathing, and extend military
empire, as evidenced by what soon transpired on the Korean Peninsula.
U$ history courses omitt so very much, being most often hagiographic exercises designed to
impart unquestioning patriotism.
Truman instituted the peace-time draft for precisely the same reason, and Hollywood
supplied the fictive depictions designed to instill a manly notion of ass-kicking which would
dictate policy henceforth.
Truman and Eisenhower both knew that anti-communism was a lark, but it persuaded JFK to
begin the war against Vietnam (and Cambodia and other hapless nearby nations). Vietnam
presented no more threat to the U$ than had North Korea. Both were attacked to intimidate
China and the Soviet Union.
The claim was that the wars were necessary to stop the spread of "monolithic communism"
when, in fact, China and the Soviet Union were hardy bosom buddies and deeply distrusted each
other.
But it was FDR who really sought what has become the US empire.
Though you will find no mention of that in most U$ history courses, any more than you will
find but passing mention, if any at all, of General Smedley Butler, who made clear that his
task had not been to protect the people of the U$, in his foreign engagements, but to open
doors for banking and corporate interests.
We are at the tail end of a long series of provoked wars and fake news (when William R.
Hearst found a day without news, he simply invented it -- imagine what that means if today's
young historians seek to research the past by looking at "old" newspaper accounts).
Jeff Harrison , April 30, 2019 at 23:59
I would like to point out that the useless UN has repeatedly caved to US violations of
international law, the UN charter, and any number of UN sanctioned treaties. How, exactly, is
this any different than the League of Nations and Nazi Germany?
Zhu , April 30, 2019 at 01:31
Whoever moves into the White House, post ritual election, nothing much ever changes. As a
society, we are committrd to constant warfare. It pleases our national vanity.
Sam F , April 29, 2019 at 21:03
It is a very good thing that "extremist ideologues accelerate America's already evident
decline as a global power." It has long been apparent that US democracy cannot be saved from
the tyranny of the rich, who now control all of its tools of democracy: its elections, mass
media, and judiciary. Jefferson wrote that "the tree of liberty must be watered with the
blood of tyrants" every 20 years or so, now long overdue. Certainly the US can only be
rebuilt from a very low state, when the rich have been controlled and prohibited, if it is to
be saved from violent revolution or conquest. So its economic destruction by imbecile
demagogues is a blessing indeed, every step of the way. Let them take America to the
recycling center, the sooner to be reworked as a real democracy for the new century.
Roberto , April 30, 2019 at 08:13
It's kind of like "Planet of The Apes", in the sense that the underlings support the
process as religious fanatics, who are servants of an oligarchy.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:22
Sam, climate disruption will probably interfere with everything; hopefully, America's
decline will be an intelligent response to actuality. I won't hold my breath.
KiwiAntz , April 29, 2019 at 19:35
America should be booted out of the United Nations & the Organization moved to another
Country, outside of the US? Because this Country doesn't obey International Laws, there's no
point in the US being part of it? Its a pariah, rogue State & must be treated as such
& designated a Terrorist Nation! America is a AIDS virus infecting & poisoning the
World & must be isolated & contained, like any deadly virus? Attempts by the
International community to wean their economies away from the US Dollar system, must be
accelerated & all the other Nations who rely on Iranian Oil, & others, need to stand
together & say with one united voice, we reject your threats, your sanctions & your
War crimes behaviour! This Global Bully called America, who thinks it can threaten every
Nation on Earth with sanctions & threats in order to get its own way, must be stopped?
Trumps geriatric, old white guy, hopeless Presidency & his lunatic appointment's of
Bolton & Pompeo has exposed the true rotten face of US Imperialism, its benevolent face
shown to be a complete lie & farce & thanks to Trump & his cronies, everyone can
now see this Nation for what it really is? It's a criminal, Mafia, gangster Nation shaking
down other Nations for oil & loot? Lashing around like a drunken buffoon on his last
legs, America's last desperate effort to maintain its Hegemonic status is slipping through
its fingers like water, in a increasingly multipolar World lead by Russia, China & every
other Nation that's abandoning the suicidal, Western model of the US in favour of the One
Belt, One Road Initiative & economic model of the future, leaving America behind in its
wake as a has been, decaying Empire in its death throes, living on its past glories!
dfnslblty , April 30, 2019 at 13:12
"America should be booted out of the United Nations & the Organization moved to
another Country, outside of the US? Because this Country doesn't obey International Laws,
there's no point in the US being part of it?"
Excellent idea that points to usa's hypocracy and attendant violence.
JohnP , April 29, 2019 at 19:35
Besides the influence of Pompeo and Bolton upon Trump, there is Kershner and I sense
Trump's desire to gift powerful Zionists who can then promote his business and his ego.
Israel wants the Golan Heights it said, because it is defensive, however that may be true,
there is also gas and oil there, and they are already taking it away from Syria, just as they
deny the Palestinians the energy just off the Gaza shore.
As thick as Trump is, he has an ability to use vulnerable people to his advantage. I just
wish they could or would see that.
JohnP , April 29, 2019 at 19:48
I meant to say at the start that I think it is Israeli influences through his advisors
including Trumps son-in-law that have set the Iranian policy. They are the ones who helped
Hizballah get Israel out southern Lebanon which Israel considers part of Greater Israel.
Twice they have kicked Israel out of Lebanon.
Zhu , April 30, 2019 at 01:37
Christian Zionists, like Pompeo & Pence, have the political clout. We Americans are
responsible for our own follies, not scapegoats in any other country.
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:24
And Golan has water, worth more than gas and oil
boxerwar , April 29, 2019 at 19:28
NORTH KOREA BEGS, ON BENDED KNEES FOR AMERICAN EASE OF SANCTIONS
SO THAT N. KOREAN PEOPLE CAN HAVE ADEQUATE FOOD SUPPLIES, MEDICAL SUPPLIES, FERTILIZER FOR
FARMS, OPEN COMMERCE WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THE WAR SHOOTING WITH KOREA CAME TO AN END DECADES AGO!!!!!!
WHY THE RUCK ARE WE STILL, IN EFFECT, HOLDING THAT NATION OF PEOPLE AS PRISONERS-OF-WAR
FIFTY + FU-KEN YEARS AFTER OUR ABSOLUTELY TOTAL DESTRUCTION OF ALL THEIR INFRASTRUCTURE,
ROADS, DAMS, FARMS, HOSPITALS, UTILITIES, LEAVING THEM ABSOLUTELY DEPENDENT ON THE SMALL
CHARITY FROM COMPASSIONATE NATIONS.
THAT QUESTION 60 FRIGG'EN YEARS AFTER WE BOMBED THEM INTO HOLY CRAP AND'VE FORBIDDEN OTHER
NATIONS, FOR NOW SIXTY YEARS, FROM DOING ANY SORT OF FREE TRADING ??? !!!
WHO THE G UCK ARE WE???? TO ENSHRINE AND ENFORCE SUCH TERRORISM UPON A PEOPLE WHOM'VE HAD
NOT-A-THING TO DO WITH A WAR FRAUGHT UPON THEM SIXTY FRIGGIN YEARS AGO !!!!!!???????!!!!
ARE YOU (we) SO-CALLED PATRIOTS -- OR FRIGGEN PARTICIPANTS IN THE CONTINUED MASS MURDER OF
CIVILIAN HUMAN BEINGS, STRUGGLING & STARVING UNDER OUR HOSTAGE INTERNATIONAL BULLYING /
BARRIERS, I REPEAT ! AFTER NOW 70 FULL YEARS OF SANCTIONS/EMBARGOES and CRIMINAL BEHAVIOR
AGAINST INNOCENT CIVILIANS . !!!!!!
dfnslblty , April 30, 2019 at 13:16
boxerwar:
Excellent plea and challenge ~ keep Protesting and Writing!
IRRATIONAL -: adverse, unfavorable, improper, pernicious, noxious, EVIL, and, so on -- in
terms of ruthless,or, imprudent bully-ism.
Such behavior is typical in the life of our unscrupulous, narcisistic Flim-Flam remorseless
fiend, the American POTUS Trump.
WHAT BRUTAL HARMS HAVE BEEN INFLICTED ANYWHERE THIS WORLD BY THE PEOPLE/NATION OF IRAN ? ?
? ?
(as compared to Saudi Arabia and/or Israel ==== Both Our "Allies " whom have NO Compunction
against bombing civilians )
Repeat the words of Secretary of State Condelezza Rice, "WHAT WE SEE NOW ARE THE BIRTH
PANGS OF A NEW MIDDLE EAST."
(other officials stated openly that our intent in fomenting war in the Middle East was/is the
purpose of "OPENING MARKETS.")
don't be fooled by love songs (patriotic) and/or lonely hearts (deceitful men)our
'leaders' are rapaciously greedy, evil persons /
why don't they reveal the un-redacted Mueller Report?! -- Same reasons for JFK report and
Saudi's allowed to fly after 9/11.
Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying to say?
Boxerwar , April 30, 2019 at 15:17
"Such behavior is typical in the life of our unscrupulous, narcisistic Flim-Flam
remorseless fiend, the American POTUS Trump"
JOHN CHUCKMAN -- "Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying
to say?
++++ "The US Moves on Iran's Oil Market as an Expression of an Irrational Foreign Policy"
++++
Mr. Chuckman; Recognize and Rationalise POTUS Trump in his narcissistic mind-set as the
(a) 21st century NERO .
A neurotic / egotistical Fool, CONTROLLING Levers of World Economy,Commerce and Military
POWER.
Mr. Chuckman; add to that the Power and Authority to OWN foreign government
banks/politicians/sovereign Right of Control over THEIR NATIONAL RIGHT TO OWN AND CONTROL
THEIR OWN ECONOMIES !!! ???
Mr. Trump is the face of an International Interloper, and/or is the shocking spearpoint of
the brave-new-world of
Sentient Androids / Robots / Artificial Intelligence / TransHumanism. (wake up
everybody!)
George Gilder warned of this in his 1989 book MICROCOSM
"BEWARE THE SENTIENT ANDROID" says Ian McEwan' book, "Machines Like Me"
Which Have -- NO HUMAN FEELING
No Human Feeling / No Compassion/ No Mercy --
This is Trumpian Nomenclature/ his Conclave'
his Obsequious blindness to the "android-istic
Inhuman-istic selfishness of his Personal Character.
Trump and his ilk would not fit well with the
human characters met in Theodore Sturgeon
likelyMore less in the sermons of Spurgeon.
boxerwar , April 30, 2019 at 15:46
Get it right, Chuckman,
Trump is a man out of place
in this period of time
But a Fool Out of his own
Place and Time w/ Robots
and CRISPER DNA Splicing .
Our next Future POTUS,
Aware of Trans humanism
will be Empowered by
Emerging Science and the
Robotic / Android world
seen by A. Turing & A. Toffler
My second reply, Mr. Chuckman, (my first reply apparently hasn't been approved)
In regard to what I'm 'trying to say' --
The decrepit history of our Brutally Arrogant and Obsequiously Religious belief in The
NATIONAL EXCEPTIONALISM,
that affords us the RIGHT to Construct 'wars' with Enemies-Of-Our-Choice, solely at the call
of Oil Company Executives, or WarPlane execs, or Trade War Expansionists or Bomb Makers or
corporatists like Iraq War Apologist Donald Rumsfeld, who championed and pushed through U S
and international markets, the killer sugar substitute Nutrasweet to millions and millions of
Overweight and/or Diabetic sufferer's. -- -- -- -- -- -- Rumsfeld, who championed The Iraq
War, where MILLIONS of innocent humans were Slaughtered or Displaced by the FALSE ACCUSATION
THAT SADDAM HUSSEIN was the culprit of the 9/11 WTC Event.
Like the Gulf of Tonkin CREATED EVENT and our CIA and DEA cocaine involvement in Central
America that created the DRACONIAN Crack Epidemic of Death and Imprisonment in American
'Inner-Cities' -- that also introduced the exorbitant overflow of firearms inside densely
populated Black & Latino neighborhoods. -- These were Planned Events, with planned
purpose -- AN EVIL PLAN.
God Bless America, right !! ?
What lies ahead is ever encroaching Artificial Intelligence -- Robots, Sentient Androids,
Gene Splicing, Trans Humanism, DNA Networks, " A Crack In Creation" -- CRISPER and the
ability to change the genetic makeup of humans -- -- Non-Human Minds interacting with IDIOT
NUMB-SCULLS like POTUS Trump !
Perhaps you need to take a little time to explain what you were trying to say?
CHUCKMAN; In Morse Code it would be -- -- --
Tedder , April 30, 2019 at 15:27
When the Crazies state somehow that Iran is the greatest purveyor of terrorism in the
world, I cringe. I follow the news, and I have not noticed one incidence of Iranian terrorism
in many years -- perhaps the Embassy Takeover after the Revolution, but that can be excused
as a defense against the CIA.
"At the same time, Trump's desire to negotiate with adversaries -- Russia, Iran, North
Korea -- is entirely defensible. But the "down to zero" Iran policy to take effect this week
can be read as a signal of the president's failure to counter the foreign policy Manicheans
who surround him."
Not sure if I agree with Lawrence on this point. Trump indeed always wanted to negotiate
with Russia and NK. However , a distinction must be made when it comes to Iran specifically.
Trump has always been a staunch hawk toward Iran, always; he didn't need any cajoling from
Bolton or Pompeo Maximus. He's merely continuing his hostility against Iran. (Cue Sheldon
Adelson of course.)
David G , April 30, 2019 at 04:43
Dead right. The same can be said for Venezuela.
I don't know how much credit Trump deserves for his gaseous musings about better relations
with Russia and North Korea, and about disengagement from war in Syria and Afghanistan --
swamped and overturned as they have been by the Beltway consensus -- but whatever you want to
grant him with respect to those countries, there's no public evidence that his brutal
hostility toward Iran and Venezuela required any convincing.
rosemerry , April 30, 2019 at 16:31
The brutal hostility is of course entirely unjustified. His "choice" of advisers just
makes the whole problem worse-it would be difficult to find worse people than Pompass, Bolton
and Abrams.
earthling1 , May 1, 2019 at 13:18
The plan is to regime change Venezuela and steal their oil. Blockade Iran from selling
their oil and use Venezuelas oil to maintain low gas prices. Regime change Iran and move
missiles to Russias southern flank.
Blow up Russian pipelines/blockade export of Russian oil. Regime change Russia and
complete "containment" of China's northern flank. Regime change China.
"... US global power is built on several significant facts. These include: the US victory in World War II, its subsequent advanced economy and dominant military position throughout five continents. ..."
"... The US advanced its dominance through a series of alliances in Europe via NATO; Asia via its hegemonic relationship with Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Taiwan as well as Australia and New Zealand in Oceana; Latin America via traditional client regimes; Africa via neo-colonial rulers imposed following independence. ..."
"... The most significant advance of US global power took place with the demise and disintegration of the USSR, the client states in Eastern Europe, as well as the transformation of China and Indo-China to capitalism during the 1980's. ..."
US global power in the Trump period reflects the continuities and changes which are
unfolding rapidly and deeply throughout the world and which are affecting the position of
Washington.
Assessing the dynamics of US global power is a complex problem which requires examining
multiple dimensions.
We will proceed by:
Conceptualizing the principles which dictate empire building,
specifically the power bases and the dynamic changes in relations and structures which shape
the present and future position of the US. Identifying the spheres of influence and power and
their growth and decline. Examining the regions of conflict and contestation. The major and
secondary rivalries. The stable and shifting relations between existing and rising power
centers. The internal dynamics shaping the relative strength of competing centers of global
power. The instability of the regimes and states seeking to retain and expand global power.
Conceptualization of Global Power
US global power is built on several significant facts. These include: the US victory in
World War II, its subsequent advanced economy and dominant military position throughout five
continents.
The US advanced its dominance through a series of alliances in Europe via NATO; Asia via its
hegemonic relationship with Japan, South Korea, Philippines and Taiwan as well as Australia and
New Zealand in Oceana; Latin America via traditional client regimes; Africa via neo-colonial
rulers imposed following independence.
US global power was built around encircling the USSR and China, undermining their economies
and defeating their allies militarily via regional wars.
Post WWII global economic and military superiority created subordinated allies and
established US global power, but it created the bases for gradual shifts in relations of
dominance.
US global power was formidable but subject to economic and military changes over time and in
space.
US Spheres of Power: Then and Now
US global power exploited opportunities but also suffered military setbacks early on,
particularly in Korea, Indo-China and Cuba. The US spheres of power were clearly in place in
Western Europe and Latin America but was contested in Eastern Europe and Asia.
The most significant advance of US global power took place with the demise and
disintegration of the USSR, the client states in Eastern Europe, as well as the transformation
of China and Indo-China to capitalism during the 1980's.
US ideologues declared the coming of a unipolar empire free of restraints and challenges to
its global and regional power. The US turned to conquering peripheral adversaries. Washington
destroyed Yugoslavia and then Iraq – fragmenting them into mini-states. Wall Street
promoted a multitude of multi-national corporations to invade China and Indo-China who reaped
billions of profits exploiting cheap labor.
The believers of the enduring rule of US global power envisioned a century of US imperial
rule.
In reality this was a short-sighted vision of a brief interlude.
The End of Unipolarity: New Rivalries and Global and Regional Centers of Power: An
Overview
US global power led Washington into 'overreach', in several crucial areas: it launched a
series of costly prolonged wars, specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan, which had three negative
consequences: the destruction of the Iraq armed forces and economy led to the rise of the
Islamic State which overtook most of the country; the occupation in Afghanistan which led to
the emergence of the Taliban and an ongoing twenty year war which cost hundreds of billions of
dollars and several thousand wounded and dead US soldiers; as a result the majority of the US
public turned negative toward wars and empire building
The US pillage and dominance of Russia ended, when President Putin replaced Yeltsin's vassal
state. Russia rebuilt its industry, science, technology and military power. Russia's population
recovered its living standards.
With Russian independence and advanced military weaponry, the US lost its unipolar military
power. Nevertheless, Washington financed a coup which virtually annexed two thirds of the
Ukraine. The US incorporated the fragmented Yugoslavian 'statelets' into NATO. Russia countered
by annexing the Crimea and secured a mini-state adjacent Georgia.
China converted the economic invasion of US multi-national corporations into learning
experiences for building its national economy and export platforms which contributed which led
to its becoming an economic competitor and rival to the US.
US global empire building suffered important setbacks in Latin America resulting
from the the so-called Washington Consensus. The imposition of neo-liberal policies
privatized and plundered their economies, impoverished the working and middle class, and
provoked a series of popular uprising and the rise of radical social movements and center-left
governments.
The US empire lost spheres of influence in some regions (China, Russia, Latin America,
Middle East) though it retained influence among elites in contested regions and even launched
new imperial wars in contested terrain. Most notably the US attacked independent regimes in
Libya, Syria, Venezuela, Somalia and Sudan via armed proxies.
The change from a unipolar to a multi polar world and the gradual emergence of regional
rivals led US global strategists to rethink their strategy. The Trump regime's aggressive
policies set the stage for political division within the regime and among allies.
The Obama – Trump Convergence and Differences on Empire Building
By the second decade of the 21 st century several new global power alignments
emerged: China had become the main economic competitor for world power and Russia was the major
military challenger to US military supremacy at the regional level. The US replaced the former
European colonial empire in Africa. Washington's sphere of influence extended especially in
North and Sub Sahara Africa: Kenya, Libya, Somalia and Ethiopia. Trump gained leverage in the
Middle East namely in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Emirates, and Jordan.
Israel retained its peculiar role, converting the US as its sphere of influence.
But the US faced regional rivals for sphere of influence in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq and
Algeria.
In South Asia US faced competition for spheres of influence from China, India, Afghanistan
and Pakistan.
In Latin America sharp and abrupt shifts in spheres of influence were the norm. US influence
declined between 2000 – 2015 and recovered from 2015 to the present.
Imperial Power Alignments Under President Trump
President Trump faced complex global, regional and local political and economic
challenges.
Trump followed and deepened many of the policies launched by the Obama- Hillary Clinton
policies with regard to other countries and regions . However Trump also radicalized and/or
reversed policies of his predecessors. He combined flattery and aggression at the same
time.
At no time did Trump recognize the limits of US global power. Like the previous three
presidents he persisted in the belief that the transitory period of a unipolar global empire
could be re-imposed.
Toward Russia, a global competitor, Trump adopted a policy of 'rollback'. Trump imposed
economic sanctions, with the strategic 'hope' that by impoverishing Russia, degrading its
financial and industrial sectors that he could force a regime change which would convert Moscow
into a vassal state.
At the beginning of his Presidential campaign Trump flirted with the notion of a business
accommodation with Putin. However, Trump's ultra-belligerent appointments and domestic
opposition soon turned him toward a highly militarized strategy, rejecting military –
including nuclear – agreements, in favor of military escalation.
Toward China, Trump faced a dynamic and advancing technological competitor. Trump resorted
to a 'trade war' that went far beyond 'trade' to encompass a war against Beijing's economic
structure and social relations. The Trump regime-imposed sanctions and threatened a total
boycott of Chinese exports.
ORDER IT NOW
Trump and his economic team demanded China privatize and denationalize its entire state
backed industry. They demanded the power to unilaterally decide when violations of US rules
occurred and to be able to re-introduce sanctions without consultations. Trump demanded all
Chinese technological agreements, economic sectors and innovations were subject and open to US
business interests. In other words, Trump demanded the end of Chinese sovereignty and the
reversal of the structural base for its global power. The US was not interested in mere 'trade'
– it wanted a return to imperial rule over a colonized China.
The Trump regime rejected negotiations and recognition of a shared power relation: it viewed
its global rivals as potential clients.
Inevitably the Trump regime's strategy would never reach any enduring agreements on any
substantial issues under negotiations. China has a successful strategy for global power built
on a 6 trillion-dollar world-wide Road and Belt (R and B) development policy, which links 60
countries and several regions. R and B is building seaports, rail and air systems linking
industries financed by development banks.
In contrast, the US banks exploits industry, speculates and operates within closed financial
circuits. The US spends trillions on wars, coups, sanctions and other parasitical activities
which have nothing to do with economic competitiveness.
The Trump regime's 'allies' in the Middle East namely Saudi Arabia and Israel, are parasitic
allies who buy protection and provoke costly wars.
Europe complains about China's increase in industrial exports and overlook imports of
consumer goods. Yet the EU plans to resist Trump's sanctions which lead to a blind alley of
stagnation!
Conclusion
The most recent period of the peak of US global power, the decade between 1989-99 contained
the seeds of its decline and the current resort to trade wars, sanctions and nuclear
threats.
The structure of US global power changed over the past seven decades. The US global empire
building began with the US command over the rebuilding of Western European economies and the
displacement of England, France, Portugal and Belgium from Asia and Africa.
The Empire spread and penetrated South America via US multi-national corporations. However,
US empire building was not a linear process as witness its unsuccessful confrontation with
national liberation movements in Korea, Indo China, Southern Africa (Angola, Congo, etc.) and
the Caribbean (Cuba). By the early 1960's the US had displaced its European rivals and
successfully incorporated them as subordinate allies.
Washington's main rivals for spheres of influence was Communist China and the USSR with
their allies among client state and overseas revolutionaries.
The US empire builders' successes led to the transformation of their Communist and
nationalist rivals into emergent capitalist competitors.
In a word US dominance led to the construction of capitalist rivals, especially China and
Russia.
Subsequently, following US military defeats and prolonged wars, regional powers proliferated
in the Middle East, North Africa, South Asia and Latin America. Regional blocs competed with US
clients for power.
The diversification of power centers led to new and costly wars. Washington lost exclusive
control of markets, resources and alliances. Competition reduced the spheres of US power.
In the face of these constraints on US global power the Trump regime envisioned a strategy
to recover US dominance – ignoring the limited capacity and structure of US political ,
economic and class relations.
China absorbed US technology and went on to create new advances without following each
previous stage.
Russia's recovered from its losses and sanctions and secured alternative trade relations to
counter the new challenges to the US global empire. Trump's regime launched a 'permanent trade
war' without stable allies. Moreover, he failed to undermine China's global infrastructure
network; Europe demanded and secured autonomy to enter into trade deals with China, Iran and
Russia.
Trump has pressured many regional powers who have ignored his threats.
The US still remains a global power. But unlike the past, the US lacks the industrial base
to 'make America strong'. Industry is subordinated to finance; technological innovations are
not linked to skilled labor to increase productivity.
Trump relies on sanctions and they have failed to undermine regional influentials. Sanctions
may temporarily reduce access to US markets' but we have observed that new trade partners take
their place.
Trump has gained client regimes in Latin America, but the gains are precarious and subject
to reversal.
Under the Trump regime, big business and bankers have increased prices in the stock market
and even the rate of growth of the GDP, but he confronts severe domestic political instability,
and high levels of turmoil among the branches of government. In pursuit of loyalty over
competence, Trump's appointments have led to the ascendancy of cabinet officials who seek to
wield unilateral power which the US no longer possesses.
Elliot Abrams can massacre a quarter-million Central Americans with impunity, but he has
failed to impose US power over Venezuela and Cuba. Pompeo can threaten North Kore, Iran and
China but these countries fortify alliances with US rivals and competitors. Bolton can advance
the interests of Israel but their conversations take place in a telephone booth – it
lacks resonance with any major powers.
Trump has won a presidential election, he has secured concessions from some countries but he
has alienated regional and diplomatic allies. Trump claims he is making America strong, but he
has undermined lucrative strategic multi-lateral trade agreements.
US 'Global Power' does not prosper with bully-tactics. Projections of power alone, have
failed – they require recognition of realistic economic limitations and the losses from
regional wars.
This is a fine synopsis but it leaves out the most fundamental of issues.
The American People don't want to be an Empire, .never asked to be an Empire and despise,
to the core, our ruling elites who defrauded us into becoming one.
We do live in an Empire now, to our chagrin, but it is (in truth) a malevolent empire .an
Empire of Fraud, Belligerence .. and Heinous
F#cking Debt .
Show me one American, anywhere, who is happy about it .
Our ruling elites have "lied" us into multiple wars of "never ending" criminal aggression
..wars which have all but exterminated the solvency of the nation and reaped untold carnage
and misery on tens of millions of people who never attacked us (and never intended to).
This "War Fraud", foisted upon us , has been a catastrophic disaster for our country and
the world.
A "mind -bending, catastrophic, . disaster".
Every single belligerent "oligarch" , "plutocrat" and "establishment elite", who conspired
to defraud us into these "illegal wars", should be rounded up and thrown in federal prison
Every single penny of their assets should be seized to pay down the cost of wars they lied us
into.
This is , hands down, the most meaningful step we could take, as a nation.
Not only would it change the direction of the world, almost overnight, but it would lay
the groundwork for the United States to rebuild itself.
Once we make "Accountability for War Fraud" our nations highest priority, we can repair
and rebuild.
If we don't, we won't and(tragically) might never be able to.
Sanctions are the foreign policy equivalent of obstruction of justice traps. Sanctions
are initiated in the hope the sanctioned country then commits some actionable trepidation, a
Casus belli. They say the first casualty of war is the truth but that casualty comes way
before war starts and continues long after war ends.
"... Trump *escalated* US-Iran and US-Venezuela conflicts and intensified the sabre rattling towards both countries, according to all analysts. For the first time a POTUS openly said direct US invasion to Venezuela "is on the table" and his Adelson bought appointment for USNSA Bolton publicly showed in a notebook the writing "5000 troops to Colombia" openly suggesting a direct invasion was imminent. For the first time the White House asked the Pentagon to draw up options for military strikes against Iran. ..."
"... Trump's administration declared a whole branch of the Iran armed forces (IRGC) as a terrorist organisation. This is an escalation and according to most analysts, considered an act of war. ..."
"... Trump administration heavily increased sanctions to Iran, Russia and Venezuela and in the latter case even instigated a failed uprising and coup d'etat, going as far as to declare a virtual political Venezuelan nobody the "official" president of the country, which is in itself unbelievable and has no historic precedent. Another act of war actually. ..."
"... Trump administration also escalated the tensions with China, ordered the arrest and de facto kidnapping of Chinese corporate executives and openly used the US legal apparatus to attack and hinder a foreign corporation. ..."
"... Trump has been, objectively, the most neocon Israel-firster POTUS in US history. ..."
"... Friendly reminder that voting for Republicans and expecting US Jewish lobby/Corporate America promoted policies such as open borders and US imperialist interventions to stop is moronic beyond belief. Republicans are the most pro corporate pro US Jewish lobby of the two parties by far. At least there is talk and critique about how the Israel Lobby owns the USG in the Dem party. Nothing of the sort going on in the GOP. ..."
The U.S. missile strike on Shayrat Airbase on 7 April 2017 was the first time the U.S.
became a deliberate, direct combatant against the Syrian government and marked the start of
a series of deliberate direct military actions by U.S. forces against the Syrian government
and its allies in May -- June 2017 and February 2018.
Trump *escalated* the war from covert support to insurgents to direct intervention and
official *invasion* in Syria. This is the equivalent of going from financing and supporting a
faction in a so called proxy war in say Vietnam to leading the US to go full Iraq WMD and
become a warring and invading faction in the conflict. Again, this is an escalation.
The number of boots on the ground vs Obama's is data you just took out of your bottom.
Sources for your cheap PR shilling? You don't have any because this statement of yours is a
blatant lie.
Trump *escalated* US-Iran and US-Venezuela conflicts and intensified the sabre rattling
towards both countries, according to all analysts. For the first time a POTUS openly said
direct US invasion to Venezuela "is on the table" and his Adelson bought appointment for
USNSA Bolton publicly showed in a notebook the writing "5000 troops to Colombia" openly
suggesting a direct invasion was imminent. For the first time the White House asked the
Pentagon to draw up options for military strikes against Iran.
Trump's administration declared a whole branch of the Iran armed forces (IRGC) as a
terrorist organisation. This is an escalation and according to most analysts, considered an
act of war.
Trump's administration ended the Iran deal without any objective reasons, ie Obama's
effort to deescalate the Israel firsters driven Iran-US conflict
Trump administration heavily increased sanctions to Iran, Russia and Venezuela and in
the latter case even instigated a failed uprising and coup d'etat, going as far as to declare
a virtual political Venezuelan nobody the "official" president of the country, which is in
itself unbelievable and has no historic precedent. Another act of war actually.
Trump administration declared Golan Heights part of Israel brought US embassy to
Jerusalem, increasing the tensions and animosity towards the US in the ME.
Trump administration will declare Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation, increasing
the animosity from Arab countries in the ME to unbelievable levels. This includes non Arab
country Turkey also, a traditional ally until neocon Trump took power.
Trump administration also escalated the tensions with China, ordered the arrest and de
facto kidnapping of Chinese corporate executives and openly used the US legal apparatus to
attack and hinder a foreign corporation.
Trump has been, objectively, the most neocon Israel-firster POTUS in US history.
Friendly reminder that voting for Republicans and expecting US Jewish lobby/Corporate
America promoted policies such as open borders and US imperialist interventions to stop is
moronic beyond belief. Republicans are the most pro corporate pro US Jewish lobby of the two
parties by far. At least there is talk and critique about how the Israel Lobby owns the USG
in the Dem party. Nothing of the sort going on in the GOP.
Immigration restrictionism is a traditional pro working class, leftist policy.
Non intervention and "pacifist" policies the same. How many GOP supporters were against
the Vietnam and Iraq war? Not many yeah.
Trump has dropped more bombs and missiles on Middle Eastern countries in a comparable
period of time than any modern U.S. President. Presidents Bush, Obama and now [2017] Trump
have dropped nearly 200,000 bombs and missiles on Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, Pakistan,
Yemen and Somalia. Trump's rate of bombing eclipses both Bush and Obama; and Trump is on a
pace to drop over 100,000 [180,000 to be precise] bombs and missiles on Middle Eastern
countries during his first term of office -- which would equal the number of bombs and
missiles dropped by Obama during his entire eight-year presidency.
Here's more perspective:
The United States Government, under the Trump administration, reportedly drops a bomb
every 12 minutes, which means that 121 bombs are dropped in a day, and 44,096 bombs per year.
The Pentagon's data show that during George W. Bush's eight years he averaged 24 bombs
dropped per day, that is, 8,750 per year. Over the course of Obama's time in office, his
military dropped 34 bombs per day, 12,500 per year. This shows that even though American
presidents are all war criminals, Trump is the most vicious of them all.
Yes, Trump is dropping almost FOUR TIMES MORE BOMBS than Barack Obama and over FIVE TIMES
MORE BOMBS than G.W. Bush -- which included military invasions of two countries.
We also know that Trump expanded America's wars in Afghanistan and Syria (and, no, he is
NOT bringing U.S. troops home from Syria) and is ramping up America's war machine against
Venezuela, Iran, China and Russia. And this does not even take into account the way Trump has
given Benjamin Netanyahu's raunchy racist regime the green light to expand its wars against
the Palestinians, Lebanon, Syria and Iran or the U.S./Israeli proxy war (with Saudi Arabia
taking the lead) in Yemen.
Then there is Somalia:
In the age of Donald Trump, wasn't that [the Battle of Mogadishu -- Black Hawk Down] a
million presidencies ago? Honestly, can you even tell me anymore what in the world it was all
about? I couldn't have, not without looking it up again. A warlord, starvation, U.S.
intervention, 18 dead American soldiers (and hundreds of dead Somalis, but that hardly
mattered) in a country that was shattering. President Clinton did, however, pull out those
troops and end the disastrous mission -- and that was that, right? I mean, lessons learned.
Somalia? Africa? What in the world did it all have to do with us? So Washington washed its
hands of the whole thing.
And now, on a planet of outrageous tweets and murderously angry white men, you probably
didn't even notice, but more than two years into the era of Donald Trump, a quarter-century
after that incident, American airstrikes in yep, Somalia, are precipitously on the rise.
Last year's 47 strikes, aimed at the leaders and fighters of al-Shabaab, an Islamist
terror outfit, more than tripled the ones carried out by the Obama administration in 2016
(themselves a modest increase from previous years). And in 2019, they're already on pace to
double again, while Somali civilians -- not that anyone (other than Somali civilians) notices
or cares -- are dying in significant and rising numbers.
And with 500 troops back on the ground there and Pentagon estimates that they will remain
for at least another seven years, the U.S. military is increasingly Somalia-bound, Congress
hasn't uttered a peep on the subject, and few in this country are paying the slightest
attention.
So consider this a simple fact of the never-ending Global War on Terror (as it was once
called): the U.S. military just can't get enough of Somalia. And if that isn't off the
charts, what is? Maybe it's even worth a future book (with a very small print run) called not
Black Hawk Down II but U.S. Down Forever and a Day.
And now that I've started on the subject (if you still happen to be reading), when it
comes to the U.S. military, it's not faintly just Somalia. It's all of Africa.
After all, this country's military uniquely has a continent-wide Africa Command (aka
AFRICOM), founded in 2007. As Nick Turse has often written for TomDispatch, that command now
has its troops, thousands of them, its planes, and other equipment spread across the
continent, north to south, east to west -- air bases, drone bases, garrisons, outposts,
staging areas, you name it. Meanwhile, AFRICOM's outgoing commanding general, Thomas
Waldhauser, only recently told Congress why it's bound to be a forever outfit -- because,
shades of the Cold War, the Ruskies are coming! ("Russia is also a growing challenge and has
taken a more militaristic approach in Africa.")
And honestly, 600-odd words in, this wasn't meant to be a piece about either Somalia or
Africa. It was meant to be about those U.S. wars being off the charts, about how the Pentagon
now feeds eternally at the terror trough, al-Shabaab being only a tiny part of the slop it
regularly digests.
And, while America's wars are way up, according to Gallup, church attendance in America is
way down:
As Christian and Jewish Americans prepare to celebrate Easter and Passover, respectively,
Gallup finds the percentage of Americans who report belonging to a church, synagogue or
mosque at an all-time low, averaging 50% in 2018.
U.S. church membership was 70% or higher from 1937 through 1976, falling modestly to an
average of 68% in the 1970s through the 1990s. The past 20 years have seen an acceleration in
the drop-off, with a 20-percentage-point decline since 1999 and more than half of that change
occurring since the start of the current decade.
Most interesting is this Gallup observation:
Although the United States is one of the more religious countries, particularly among
Western nations, it is far less religious than it used to be. Barely three-quarters of
Americans now identify with a religion and only about half claim membership in a church,
synagogue or mosque.
The rate of U.S. church membership has declined sharply in the past two decades after
being relatively stable in the six decades before that. A sharp increase in the proportion of
the population with no religious affiliation, a decline in church membership among those who
do have a religious preference, and low levels of church membership among millennials are all
contributing to the accelerating trend.
Obviously, America's Jewish and Muslim populations pale compared to its Christian
population. The vast decline of attendance to religious services, therefore, primarily means
church attendance. Notice, also, that this steep decline commenced at the beginning of this
century (2000) -- when G.W. Bush became President of the United States.
I tried to warn readers -- and listeners to my nationwide radio talk show -- that due to
his insatiable war fever, G.W. Bush was going to forever warp the perception in people's
minds of Christianity. And, sadly, I was absolutely right. After eight years of the
warmongering G.W. Bush in the White House, millions of Americans came to associate
Christianity with wars of aggression. As a result, the exodus out of America's churches began
in earnest.
Enter Donald Trump.
As noted above, Trump has expanded Bush's war fever exponentially. But Trump has done more
than that: He has aggressively put the United States smack dab in the middle of Israel's
wars. It could even be argued that Donald Trump has turned the U.S. military into a proxy
army for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
Don't get me wrong: I am very cognizant of the fact that G.W. Bush's "war on terror" was
nothing more than a proxy war for Israel. But the Israeli connection was covert and
completely covered up. Not anymore. Donald Trump is unabashedly and explicitly partnering the
mission of the U.S. military with that of the IDF. No wonder Benjamin Netanyahu promises to
name a community in the Israel-seized, Israel-occupied Golan Heights after Donald Trump.
(Trumplinka would fit Netanyahu's concentration-style occupation nicely.)
So, not only are millions of Americans now associating Christianity with G.W. Bush's wars
of aggression, they are associating Christianity with Donald Trump's wars of aggression for
the racist apartheid State of Israel. The result: the steepest decline in church attendance
and church affiliation in U.S. history.
The longer evangelical Christians continue to support Donald Trump's radical pro-Israel,
pro-war agenda, the deeper America will plunge into an anti-Christian country.
The good news is that all over America, people are waking up to the Israel deception.
Support for the erroneous doctrine of dispensational eschatology is in a giant free fall; the
myth of Zionist Israel being a resurrected Old Testament Israel is being repeatedly exposed;
the attempts by Israel's toadies to characterize people whose eyes are open to the truth of
Zionism as being "anti-Semitic" is losing more and more credibility by the day; and more and
more people are becoming aware of the utter wickedness of the Zionist government in Israel.
Plus, more and more people are beginning to understand the plight of the persecuted people
(including Christian people) in the Israeli-occupied territories of Palestine.
Ron, maybe your shipmates on the USS LIBERTY didn't die in vain after all.
From an historical perspective, overextended wars are the downfall of any empire; from a
financial perspective, warfarism is the precursor to an economically depressed middle class;
and from a Scriptural/spiritual perspective, God cannot and will not bless a warmongering
nation.
Let's be clear: God is not building a "Greater Israel." God is not building a third Jewish
temple. God is not speaking through phony prophets who are attributing some sort of divine
calling to Trump's pro-Israel warmongering. God is not blessing America because we are
blessing Zionist Israel. Just the opposite: The more America aligns itself with Israel's
belligerence, bullying and bombing of innocent people, the more God will deliver us over to
becoming an antichrist country. After all, one cannot idolize and partner with antichrists
without becoming one himself.
Burning down the house. Driving like a madman on the road to nowhere has put the nation on a
path to its own demise. Our foreign policy is a disaster that does nothing to promote
democracy anywhere in the world. Our military has provided nothing but instability in the
world since the end of world war 2. Ask yourself, why are we involved in so many useless wars
that don't make the world a better place?
Don't you feel like we are being used by war hawks who see every skirmish as a threat to our
national security? Why can't we cut out all the military BS and just trade with with nations
that want to trade, and ignore those who want to kill each other. Let them figure it out on
their own. Social Capitalism is the only policy we should be supporting.
"All statements of Trump do not count. All Trump statements are results from stress of
torture by Democrats, and deep state."
When this president stated during the campaign,
that christians don't have to forgive their enemies, I rolled my eyes stated he wrong, and
understood well he doesn't know what christianity means and supported him anyway
that he supported same sex marriage, I rolled my eyes, rebuffed the the silliness of his
comments and understood, he is not a conservative and beyond that he doesn't know what
christianity means
when it was uncovered that he had in fact had relations outside of marriage, I rolled my
eyes, and understood that alone could be a disqualifying factor in light of the competition
and supported him anyway
when some of the most respected departments of government leaders said he colluded with
Russians, based on the evidence, I said "poppycock" and supported him anyway
when media swirled with tales of Russian bath houses and carousings abounded, I thought
nonsense and supported hum anyway
when the rumors of underage girls and same sex parties and orgies seped into the main, I
rolled my eyes and supported him anyway . . .
when he spouted off about Charlottesville prematurely, I supported him anyway . . .
when became clear he actually advocated torture, I choked, spat and supported him anyway,
afterall he's not schooled in international relations and the consequences for our service
personnel, much less apparently the basics of tortures effectiveness, especially in large
scale strategies such as the US is engaged in
when it came to light he was completely ignorant of how our criminal justice system gets
it wrong as exampled by the Cen 5 case, I supported him anyway . . .
I supported him in spite of his comments about the poor and people like me who supported
him
There's a long list of tolerance is support of this president based on his advocacy
regarding turning the attention to the US welfare . . .
And when he actually agreed that the Russians had sabotaged the US elections and even
engaged in murder in the states of our European allies -- I knew, that in all liklihood the
turn inward was dead.
Here' a man who beat all the odds because of stalwart support of people like me, who
repeatedly bit the sides of our cheeks in the understanding that the returns would exceed the
price only to discover that the man who beat the odds doesn't seem to have a spine to stand
on ideologically which were the foundations of my advocacy: national security, less reckless
spending, holding business and financial organizations accountable for misbehavior, investing
in the US citizen, restructuring our trade deals to benefit the US, not merely shooting up
tarrifs that would in turn be priced to the citizens the supposed tarrifs were intended to
protect, tax cuts that actually gave middle americans less, no evidence of a draw down in our
careless ME behaviors, i even gave him some room to deal with israel as perhaps a new way
forward -- it's a new way alright – no pretense of acting as honest brokers –
that's new, Immigration is worse and by worse he might as well be serving tea and crumpets at
the border welcoming illegals . . .
If the man you elected to turn the corner actually becomes the vehicle for of what you
elected him to reject and change, eventually one has to acknowledge that fact. he beat the
deep state, he just either had not the courage, the integrity, or the ability, perhaps all
three to withstand the victory and do the work. Of course he had opposition and not much of
it very fair and nearly all of it damaging to the country. But he had support to stand
against it -- he chose an easier path.
And while I support him still, I have no intention of pretending that he is fulfilling the
mandate for which he was elected. I would be lying to myself and doing a disservice to
him.
I have not changed, I knew he was a situational leader, I knew what that meant, but I
voted for a particular agenda, he left the reservation on his own accord and the "deep
state", the establishment", the democrats, the liberals, the libertarians, can only be held
to blame for so much --
But several weeks ago, on top of a complete failure to ensure US order security, the armed
forces paid homage to Mexicans on US territory by relinquishing their weapons and
surrendering -- and given the tenure thus far -- - it devastatingly fitting that this
occurred under this admin.
And in the midst of all this, he is pandering to those engaged in same sex behavior --
– deep state my eye . . .
the path of least resistance. I cling to the belief that having voting for any of the
other candidates -- matters would have been far worse.
I make no apologies for being a conservative and Christian and holding a loyalty to the
US.
I reject your whine, it had legs and even some salience still, but at this stage, very
little.
Now he is bed with Sen. Rubio, Sen. Cruz and others on mucking around in SA -- I can only
consider your comments as an attempt at humor.
Lindemann told the site kp.ru that personally saw letters of bodies of justice of the
self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk national republics (DNR and LNR) according to which 90% of
shells arrived to Donbass from the territory of Ukraine.
"The reports serve as the purest proof that Poroshenko did not want peace for Donbass," the
Deputy concluded.
He told that the Ukrainian army strongly damaged the bridge in the Village Lugansk. Now
through its destroyed spans are thrown wooden stairs, which have to pass civilians, including
the elderly, said Lindemann. According to the Deputy, the authorities can't repair the bridge,
as in this case the Ukrainian army will destroy it again. The politician called Kiev's position
on this issue terrible: the European countries were going to allocate money for repair of the
bridge, but the Ukrainian authorities didn't allow to make it.
Lindemann emphasized that the Tribunal for Poroshenko and his colleagues guilty of a
situation in Donbass, has to be fair. In world history, there were no cases when the current
President fell under the international court of justice with such accusations, so it can only
be possible after Poroshenko will resign the powers of the head of state in May, the Deputy
said.
The German politician called Poroshenko a military junta leader who stole resources from the
armed conflict for personal enrichment. Lindemann expressed the hope that with the coming to
power in Ukraine a new people, the confrontation in the Donbass will cease.
"... As much as Trump has proven to be a disaster with his appointments of Bolton/Pompeo/E Abrams, things could still be worse. We could have wound up with Little Marco, the John McCain of his generation. All praise to Tucker for having the guts to go against the grain. ..."
"... The answer here is simple. When the President of of the US stated that he believed Russia under the instructions of Pres. Putin attempted to sabotage the democratic process, and from the mouths many of our leadership -- was successful he made a major power on the world stage a targeted enemy of the US. When that same president accused Pres. Putin of plotting the same in Europe and ordered the murders inside those sovereign states -- ..."
"... He essentially stated that our global strategic interests include challenging the Russian influence anywhere and everywhere on the planet as they are active enemies of the US and our European allies. What ever democratic global strategic ambitions previous to the least election were stifled until that moment. ..."
"... Sanctions and blockades are acts of war. Try doing it to Washington or one of its vassals, and watch the guns come out. ..."
"... Historically, sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are a prelude to it. Sanctions are how Uncle Scam generally softens up foreign countries in preparation for an invasion or some sort of 'régime-change' operation. ..."
"... All of this is smoke in mirrors. The real story is that Washington is headed for default on it's 22 trillion dollar debt and the Beltway Elites are losing it. They are desperate to start a conflict anywhere, but especially with an oil rich nation like Venezuela or Iran install their own puppets and keep this petro-dollar scam running a little while longer. ..."
"... Syria, Iraq and Libya were not destroyed for oil. Oil provided cover for the real reason. In fact, oil companies opposed war for oil. It doesn't benefit the US or those companies. Those three countries were and are Israel's primary enemies and neighbors and that is why they were destroyed. Only if you stick your head in the sand and ignore the enormous power of Israel and their Jewish supporters which is constantly on full display constantly can someone not see that. ..."
"... Venezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. I'm pretty sure there are still lots of guns around. They're not using rocks to kill one another. The U.S. military richly deserves to get itself trapped in a Gaza type situation of house to house fighting in the favellas above Caracas. ..."
"... Trump is a Trojan horse under zionist control who had 5 draft deferments but now is the zionists war lord sending Americans to fight and die in the mideast for Israel just like obama and bush jr. , same bullshit different puppet! ..."
"... America is Oceania , war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and I would add to what Orwell said, war in the zio/US is perpetual for our zionist overlords. ..."
"... Imperialists always see themselves as spreading good things to people who will benefit from them. And imperialists necessarily always dilute their own culture. ..."
"... If the imperialist culture is already rootless cosmopolitan, it will see no downside to the above. If the Elites of a culture have become cosmopolitans divorced from any meaningful contact with their own people (i.e. those of their own blood and history), then they will lead their people into ever more cultural pollution and perversion. ..."
"... Remember. The choice was between Trump and Clinton. Not Trump and Jesus. ..."
"... The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed at articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime change wars. ..."
"... I'm not sure what "Alt-Right" or "2.0 movement" really means in the current shills-vs-people wars but all the best and the brightest in our ranks are clearly against the globalists. ..."
Venezuela illustrates why a 3.0 movement is necessary.
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed at
articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and
international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime change
wars.
The Trump administration's interventions in Syria and Venezuela are victimizing mainly poor
brown people in Third World countries. And yet, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is extremely
animated and stirred up in a rage at the neocons who are currently running Blompf's foreign
policy. Similarly, it has cheered on the peace talks between North Korea and South Korea.
Isn't it the supreme irony that the "racists" in American politics are the real
humanitarians
while the so-called "humanitarians" like Sen. Marco Rubio and Bill Kristol are less adverse
to bloodshed and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die than the
"racists"?
It is ironic. There is also the issue of economic-based US interventionism, particularly in
the oil-gifted nations mentioned. It's their oil. Since the US economy is oil-dependent --
and since fracking is a short-lived "miracle" of unprofitable companies that have already
extracted the easy pickings -- it is the role of US leaders to make sure that we can buy oil
from nations like Venezuela, keeping relations as good as possible for those means. But US
leaders have no business telling them who should rule their country, much less stirring up
trouble that can end up in bloodshed.
There's a comment on here about US forces and the Kurds in Syria, helping themselves to
oil, while Syrians wait in long lines for gas in a country that is an oil fountain. I have no
idea whether or not it is true, and since the US press would rather gossip than report, we'll
probably never know. But since oil prices have gone up recently in the USA, it might be true,
especially since politicians always want to pacify the serfs facing other unaffordable
expenses, like rent. If true you can see how that would make the people in an oil-rich
country mad.
Isn't it the supreme irony that the "racists" in American politics are the real
humanitarians while the so-called "humanitarians" like Sen. Marco Rubio and Bill Kristol
are less adverse to bloodshed and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people
die than the "racists"?
There is nothing ironic about your simple statement of fact. The humanitarians you mention
are about as much interested in human rights as John Wayne Gacy. There is gold in them there
hills, and their "friends" no longer control that gold. So we must go to war.
Rubio is running neck and neck in my mind as one of the most disgusting political whores
of all time.
As much as Trump has proven to be a disaster with his appointments of Bolton/Pompeo/E Abrams,
things could still be worse. We could have wound up with Little Marco, the John McCain of his
generation. All praise to Tucker for having the guts to go against the grain.
How is that working out now?
Those are rocks those guys are throwing..right?
Why not let THEM do the fighting and keep the guys from Ohio and Alabama here?
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela
What Trump administration military intervention? Number of Boots on the ground:
Syria -- Reduced vs. Obama, at most a few thousand
Iran -- ZERO
Venezuela -- Again ZERO
It is quite amazing that Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS] can take ZERO troops and falsely
portray that as military intervention. In the real, non-deranged world -- Rational thought
shows ZERO troops as the absence of military intervention.
Trying to use non-military sanctions to convince nations to behave better is indeed the
exact opposite of military intervention. If the NeoConDem Hillary Clinton was President. Would the U.S. have boots on the ground in
Iran And Venezuela?
Why is the Trump Derangement Syndrome [TDS] crowd so willing to go to war for Hillary
while misrepresenting TRUMP's non-intervention?
Those who pathologicially hate Trump are simply not rational.
The answer here is simple.
When the President of of the US stated that he believed Russia under the instructions of
Pres. Putin attempted to sabotage the democratic process, and from the mouths many of our
leadership -- was successful he made a major power on the world stage a targeted enemy of the
US. When that same president accused Pres. Putin of plotting the same in Europe and ordered
the murders inside those sovereign states --
He essentially stated that our global strategic interests include challenging the Russian
influence anywhere and everywhere on the planet as they are active enemies of the US and our
European allies. What ever democratic global strategic ambitions previous to the least
election were stifled until that moment.
Until that moment foreign policy could have been shifted, but after that moment
Don't forget the genocide in Yemen. Wanting to exclude Yemenis from the USA means you're an
evil racist, but turning a blind eye to mass murder is A-OK.
Gold, Black Gold and Pirates : all about wealth and people getting in the way of the 21st
Century Privateers who will stop at nothing including overthrowing governments in Syria,
Libya, Iraq and elsewhere.
@A123Historically, sanctions are not an alternative to war; they are a prelude to it.
Sanctions are how Uncle Scam generally softens up foreign countries in preparation for an
invasion or some sort of 'régime-change' operation.
I appreciate the fact that Team Trump has not actually sent in the tanks yet, whereas
Hellary probably would have by now. Believe me, that is probably one of the very few good
arguments in favor of Trump at this point. But if we want to make sure that he never does
attack, then now is the time to make some noise– before the war starts.
All of this is smoke in mirrors. The real story is that Washington is headed for default on
it's 22 trillion dollar debt and the Beltway Elites are losing it. They are desperate to
start a conflict anywhere, but especially with an oil rich nation like Venezuela or Iran
install their own puppets and keep this petro-dollar scam running a little while longer.
If we weren't on the brink of economic collapse I could never see the Washington Elites
risking it all with a game of nuclear chicken with Russia and China over Ukraine and
Taiwan.
This commentator lost me when he decided Guaido was as socialist as Maduro. Nope. He would
not have US backing were that the case.
I checked out Telesur on Youtube on April 30 – its continued functioning was one sign
the coup attempt had failed. The comments section was full of Guaido supporters ranting about
how much they hated Chavistas and socialists and some were asking where Maduro was, probably
trying to sustain the myth that he had fled.
"When was the last time we successfully meddled in the political life of another country" The
answer to that, Tucker, depends on who you ask. While Syria, Iraq and Libya were "failures"
because we were told we would bring peace and prosperity to those countries, that was not the
goal of the architects of those wars, neither was it oil. The primary goal was to pacify
these countries and neuter them so they would not stand up to their neighbor and enemy
Israel. And if they had to be destroyed to accomplish that, that's fine. Minus Egypt, those
three countries were Israel's primary enemies in the three Arab-Israeli wars. Venezuela is
not "another" war for oil, but it might be the first.
Syria, Iraq and Libya were not destroyed for oil. Oil provided cover for the
real reason. In fact, oil companies opposed war for oil. It doesn't benefit the US or those
companies. Those three countries were and are Israel's primary enemies and neighbors and that
is why they were destroyed. Only if you stick your head in the sand and ignore the enormous
power of Israel and their Jewish supporters which is constantly on full display constantly
can someone not see that.
@EliteCommInc.
The russians are not the ennemies of the europeans , the russians are europeans , the yankees
are nor european .
If the yankees were the allies of the europeans , why they should need hundreds of
military occupation bases in Europe ? why they should impose on europeans self defeating
trade sanctions against Russia ? , strange " allies " .
@conatus
you are late conatus , the russians are building in Venezuela a factory of Kalasnikov rifles
, and Maduro is traing a militia of two million men , to help the army .
@conatusVenezuela has one of the highest murder rates in the world. I'm pretty sure there are still
lots of guns around. They're not using rocks to kill one another.
The U.S. military richly deserves to get itself trapped in a Gaza type situation of house
to house fighting in the favellas above Caracas.
@War
for Blair Mountain{If JFK were alive ..and POTUS in 2019 he would give the order to
overthrow the Maduro Goverment .}
JFK was alive way back then, when he gave the order to overthrow Castro and the result was
the Bay of Pigs disaster. And – for better or worse – Cubans are still running
their own country, not some foreign installed puppet.
'The order to overthrow Maduro' today would have the same disasterous end.
It should be obvious by now, that despite all the hardships, majority of Venezuelans don't
want a foreign installed puppet.
Carlson is right on Venezuela but was wrong on 911 truthers which he said back in September
2017, that 911 truthers were nuts! 911 which was done by Israel and the zionist controlled
deep state lead to the destruction of the mideast for Israel and the zionist NWO!
Trump is a Trojan horse under zionist control who had 5 draft deferments but now is the
zionists war lord sending Americans to fight and die in the mideast for Israel just like
obama and bush jr. , same bullshit different puppet!
America is Oceania , war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength and I would
add to what Orwell said, war in the zio/US is perpetual for our zionist overlords.
One more thing, if Venezuela did not have oil the zio/US would not give a damn about
it!
Imperialists always see themselves as spreading good things to people who will benefit from
them. And imperialists necessarily always dilute their own culture.
If the imperialist culture is already rootless cosmopolitan, it will see no downside to
the above. If the Elites of a culture have become cosmopolitans divorced from any meaningful
contact with their own people (i.e. those of their own blood and history), then they will
lead their people into ever more cultural pollution and perversion.
Jews are a people who fit the opening sentence of the preceding paragraph. The WASP Elites
fit the second sentence.
If "no one is more opposed to destructive regime-change wars than the Alt-Right", it means
that the Alt-Right are traditional conservatives, paleo-(as opposed to neo)conservatives.
Real conservatives have always opposed getting into foreign wars that posed no threat to the
U.S. They opposed Wilson lying us into WW1, Roosevelt lying us into WW2. When the
neo-conservatives (American Jews loyal to Israel) got Washington under their thumb, we
started our decades of disastrous regime-change wars based on lies, starting with the
invasion of Iraq. Those neocon mf ers are still in charge.
An Alt Right 2.0 concept that is compassionate with the damage done by US war and economic
exploitation against the poorest people of the world who are mostly brown people is an
interesting concept.
But I think it will ultimately fail, since so many of the white people who make up the Alt
Right are angry with minorities and see them as a lower race. And these white people are more
interested in playing the victim card anyways.
@A123
You speak truth and cite facts, these loons go bananas.
Thank God they have no real power.
Hopefully they don't even own a hamster . probably would make the little fella read Mien
Kempf.
Because a hamster reading is just as cogent and linear as their arguments.
They are frustrated they cannot find a way to blame the Jews! for Maduro being a greedy
murdering sweathog who lets zoo animals starve while he looks like animated male
cellulite.
Funny- in their prostrations to dictators ( these retards actually defend and admire
Jong-Un) they conveniently have omitted Putin is cutting Russia from the WWW- the
Internet.
They will have a Russia intranet.
Pointing out to the obtuse daily commenters that under the tyrants that practically
fellate- they would be arrested and tortured for their Unz hissy fits and word diarrhea
Nationwide radio talk show? Wow! What's the station name, number and air time?
If you listen to people with actual media shows, they don't call people TROLL just because
they have a different opinion. They don't engage in female hysterical ranting because someone
has a different idea about the mechanics of the world.
Who are your sponsors? I can't imagine you would not want the free publicity .
I agree, there is irony in labels, in trying to tell who is more disposed towards 'bloodshed
and destructive wars in which hundreds of thousands of people die'. Why do we fight? It is
for power. Power (manifested as interest) has been present in every conflict of the past
– no exception. It is the underlying motivation for war. Other cultural factors might
change, but not power. Interest cuts across all apparently unifying principles: family, kin,
nation, religion, ideology, politics – everything. We unite with the enemies of our
principles, because that is what serves our interest. It is power, not any of the above
concepts, that is the cause of war. And that is what is leading the world to nuclear
Armageddon. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
@TKK
My sponsors are truth and America first. All Zionist hucksters are on my hit list. Again, I
suggest you and yours consider "making aliyah". https://www.nbn.org.il/
Number of Boots on the ground:
-- Syria -- Reduced vs. Obama, at most a few thousand
-- Iran -- ZERO
-- Venezuela -- Again ZERO
We will see in the future. Trump has to stir the pot. The foaming at the mouth media and his political opposition, in
both parties, need something to blather on about. Jus like rasslin'. Remember. The choice was between Trump and Clinton. Not Trump and Jesus.
@TKK
Oh, I see a point there, and it's an interesting one – openly Christian presidents
discredit their Christianity by engaging in non-righteous wars. After contemplating the
point, I don't think the foreign policy of W or Trump is anywhere close to being the primary
factor in the decline in church attendance. After all, the Catholic Church and other
denominations are mired in myriad sex scandals, the internet pulls people from God with
private depravity, science offers compelling hows if not whys, entertainment options abound,
and so on. Nonetheless, an orthodox and faithful Christian president committed to peace and
not fighting for oil or foreign interests would be a thing to behold. With caveats relating
to perceived sanity, that person would get my vote.
"The russians are not the ennemies of the europeans , the russians are europeans , the
yankees are nor european . "
These comments don't make any sense to me based on what I wrote. My comments have no
bearing on whether the Russians are an actual threat or not. I see them as competitors with
whom there are some places to come to some agreements. They doesn't mean I truth them.
Furthermore, my comments have no bearing on the territorial nature of Russian ethos.
That's not the point. Europeans have been at each other since there were Europeans. From the
Vikings and before to Serbia and Georgian conflicts. But none of that has anything to do with
my comments.
You might want to read them for what they do say as opposed to what you would like them to
say.
Jul 26, 2017 CIA director hints US is working to topple Venezuela's elected government
CIA Director Mike Pompeo indirectly admitted that the US is pushing for a new government
in Venezuela, in collaboration with Colombia and Mexico.
Feb 22, 2019 An Ocean of Lies on Venezuela: Abby Martin & UN Rapporteur Expose
Coup
On the eve of another US war for oil, Abby Martin debunks the most repeated myths about
Venezuela and uncovers how US sanctions are crimes against humanity with UN investigator and
human rights Rapporteur Alfred De Zayas.
"After all, the Catholic Church and other denominations are mired in myriad sex scandals . .
."
Not even to the tune of 4%, and I am being generous. The liberals have managed to make the
Church look a den of NAMBLA worshipers -- hardly. In the west the Churches are under pressure
from the same sex practitioners to reject scriptural teachings on the behavior, but elsewhere
around the world, Catholic institutions, such as in Africa -- reject the notion.
@TKK
Thanks. Ignoring mindless trolls is a necessary skill for the site.
____
Given the end of the Mueller exoneration, both Trump and Putin are looking to strengthen
ties. Thus it is:
-- Unlikely that Putin is heavily committed to helping Maduro. The numbers are too small
for that. Also, what would Putin do with Maduro? The last thing Putin needs is a spoiler to
the developing detente.
-- Much more likely the troops have a straightforward purpose. Brazilian
military/aerospace technology would jump ahead 20 years if they could grab an intact S-300
system. Russia doesn't want a competitor in that market, so they have a deep interest in
reclaiming or destroying S-300 equipment as Maduro goes down.
@EliteCommInc.
You are certainly right. I have no doubt that the vast majority of priests are good men
innocent of these charges, and that there are more public school sex scandals (by both raw
numbers and percentage) then similar Church scandals. The scandals do have public currency
and legs, though, and are one reason often cited as to why the pews are empty. I am at fault
for helping to keep this ruinous perception alive with my online rhetoric, and thank you for
pointing it out.
' It's the oil ' canard has always been the excuse cultivated for suckers, and boy
do suckers fall for it.
US oil companies have not received the big oil deals in countries where the US, at the
behest of "that shitty little country", have interfered militarily. However, Russia, China,
& to a limited degree, a few European companies have.
@PeterMX
Bibi's biggest enemy, his main prize, has always been Iran. He is afraid that, if Trump
refuses to do his bidding now, it may well be too late in an election year. One way or
another Bolton and Pompeo are going to convince their token boss to green light a massive
bombing campaign, especially if Iran attempts to shut down the Straits of Hormuz. It will
happen this year if Trump fails to come to his senses.
@Scalper
In the first place, your bizarre partisan rant is a little out of place. There aren't too
many QAnons here at Unz, and there are probably a fair number of regulars here who wouldn't
even identify as Republicans or 'conservatives' (whatever that term means today).
Secondly, some of your talking points aren't even accurate:
Trump administration will declare Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organisation,
increasing the animosity from Arab countries in the ME to unbelievable levels. This
includes non Arab country Turkey also, a traditional ally until neocon Trump took
power.
If Trump were truly to declare the Brotherhood to be a terrorist organization, a lot of
Arab rulers would actually thank him. You see, the Brotherhood is actually illegal in
most Arab countries today, precisely because it has a history of collaborating with foreign
intelligence services such as MI6, the CIA and Mossad. More recently, it was strongly
associated with failed régime-change projects in countries like Egypt and Syria; so
with a few exceptions (like Qatar), the Brotherhood is not well liked by Arab rulers.
Immigration restrictionism is a traditional pro working class, leftist policy.
Traditionally leftist? Sure up until the Hart-Celler Act of 1965! The sad fact is,
we don't an anti-immigration party in the US at all today. Neither the Republicans nor the
Democrats have any interest whatsoever in halting–or even just slowing
down–immigration.
@PeterMX
It's obvious that FOX is giving Tucker a lot of latitude. They continued to support him when
advertisers left, and when accusations of racism emerged from a radio interview he'd done
years ago with a shock jock. They dare not fire him as he has the largest and most fervent
base of supporters on cable news. But Tucker knows that there is one big issue, the Elephant
in the room, of which he dare not speak. It's that shitty little country calling the shots,
whose name begins with an I.
@Anonymous
I think there may be more alt-righters opposed to foreign wars and exploitative 'free' trade
treaties than you assume. Most of the alt-righters I know oppose the current régime's
"invade the world, invite the world" policies (to borrow a phrase from our own Steve Sailer).
But unlike the anti-imperialist left (with whom they often do ally), they usually argue
against such policies based on popular self-interest rather than abstract universal morality.
They usually choose to argue that being a mighty world empire has worked to the
detriment of the majority of people in America; that the whole thing is just a scam to
enrich and empower a small, corrupt élite.
what goes unremarked here and elsewhere is the ethnic composition of Venezuela. From a few
searches, Whites are only about one-third of V.
The Tipping Point for chaos is clear. Brazil is half White, Argentina is near 100 % White,
ditto Chile.
(Argentina ca. 1900 exterminated a large number its "Indigenous." )
The most stable of Latin America is Costa Rica, which is apparently about three quarters
White.
Meanwhile the jewyorktimes reports the narco-traffickers in the Maduro administration.
Hopeless. Any Brown or Black Country is doomed. Brazil works cuz Whites know how to
control the 45% mulattos and 5 % Blacks. For now anyway. Mexico is a narco-state with the
only 9% Whites able to control the half breeds and Indigenous thru co-option. Wait for Mexico
to blow up.
The funny thing is, the Alt-Right or the 2.0 movement is united to a man on opposing the
Trump administration's military interventions in Syria, Iran and Venezuela, but has failed
at articulating its own ardent opposition to imperialism and its commitment to humanity and
international peace. No one in American politics is more opposed to destructive regime
change wars.
That's an amazing point. I'm not sure what "Alt-Right" or "2.0 movement" really means in the current
shills-vs-people wars but all the best and the brightest in our ranks are clearly against the
globalists.
@Avery
The Deep state/CIA did the Bay of Pigs. JFK was not informed about it before it happened. JFK
was fighting the CIA and deep state throughout his presidency. He wanted to shatter the CIA
into a million pieces. Read "JFK and the Unspeakable" by James W. Douglass. His peace speech
on June 10, 1963 was too much for our deep state. That speech was the biggest triggers that
set the motion for his assassination.
Whatever anyone thinks about the Alt-Right it did expose a lot of things about our current
era, our history, our politics, and power paradigms that once seen can not be unseen.
And what are you going to do about it? What can anyone really do, honestly?
Not too much at least in America. Eastern Europe still has a good chance.
In America, the trajectory and machinations of power have been set for a long time and
revolutionary romanticism tends to work better for the Left than the Right. A quick look at
the data easily reveals this.
So what do you do when you realize how so much of everything that's presented as real and
true isn't real or true? And there are so many truly bad human beings with major power over
our culture, politics, and society?
Well, when has that not been the case in human history? At some point, acknowledging all
the black pills is sort of like accepting your human limits, your finitude, your genetics,
the unanswered mysteries of existence, the nothingness of Earth in the grand scheme, and just
basic gravity.
You could become a courageous online revolutionary and eventually trigger some unstable
person to get things shut down and deplatformed.
Or you could organize with socially and psychologically healthy and mature adults who try
to prioritize attainable and realistic goals and gain some moralizing victories that can
buffer against the demoralizing defeats.
Luckily, out of the winter of our discontent have emerged many healthy tendrils of new
growth.
The new millennium has seen a marked increase in parties and movements which appeal to racial
and ethnic nationalism. What's behind it? I have an idea.
Economic globalization could be a factor, as multinational corporations have shifted
operations and production around the globe, to places where labor is cheaper and there's less
official concern for public well-being. That's meant the loss of skilled-labor jobs in a
number of countries with relatively high wages and state regulation in the name of public
interest. There's doubtless anger that such jobs have been lost to Mexicans, Chinese,
Filipinos, and people of other nations. But there's also evidence that this racial-ethnic
anger is local and less abstract. Something else has triggered highly authoritarian
Conservatives, I think.
The studies of Conservatives and authoritarians which I've cited in previous essays [
here
and here ]
suggested that these individuals are more sensitive to, and more alarmed by, conditions which
present them with uncertainty. Any change from the status quo will do that. Consequently, any
perceived deviation from the traditional order, with its established culture and hierarchies,
will cause them to band together and fight for the status quo ante.
It's my hypothesis that, in many nations around the world, the 21st Century brought with
it the increased presence and upward mobility of populations which Conservative/authoritarian
citizens considered non-traditional and lower status. Conservative/authoritarian citizens
would have viewed these social changes as threats to their traditional cultures and
hierarchies, and they would have taken political actions intended to conserve or restore
their traditional orders [e.g., to "Make America Great Again"].
Between 2000 and 2015, estimated global
migration increased from about 173 million migrants to 244 million migrants, a jump of
41% (if I did the math correctly). Here are the top 10 countries to which they migrated:
Vasyl Golovanov : ...We live with this President for 5 years. Whether you expected
such result and what, in your opinion, to expect from Vladimir Aleksandrovich.
Viktor Medvedchuk : Vasily, this result was expected. At least he was predictable,
because Poroshenko should not have become and did not become President. And the reason for this
is his policy, which our party has repeatedly spoken about. And not only our party, but
actually opposition forces which in the majority United in questions of criticism of mister
Poroshenko. And they talked about peace in the Donbass, and the cessation of hostilities,
talked about the tariff genocide, national radicalism, the impoverishment of millions of
citizens, criminal lawlessness, social injustice and many other circumstances that pointed to
what characterizes this regime Poroshenko, which for some reason they called "Euro-reformist",
which actually ruined the country in the economy, social sphere, in the crisis of the political
sphere.
And all this had to end, naturally, with Poroshenko's defeat. And this defeat took
place.
... ... ...
In 1991, when Kravchuk became President, he scored 61.6%. It was a record that was never
broken until actually here on April 21, 2019, when Zelensky won. And it is a great
responsibility, to a great deal. Indeed, our country will live with a new President, with a new
power, I hope, I am far from the idea that this power will remain. And what is happening today
- a new team is being formed - comes with the fact that Mr. Zelensky is preparing to take
office. I think she is facing very relevant challenges. The first was the resignation of the
Cabinet of Ministers. Because with incompetent, untrained professionally, populist government
of Mr. Groisman, actually is can be called the government of Mr. Yatsenyuk, the country is
unable to live any longer.
And if Zelensky, who received such massive support, does not change the team, which, of
course, what is expected of him, he will not be able to realize his election promises.
And therefore - this is the main task that must be performed. It's strategic. And that is
what stands before him now and will be for 5 years. It is necessary to justify the trust that
he received. To meet these expectations, and they are very high. Which means the requirements
will be too high. He must be aware of that.
Vasily Golovanov: We will talk about Vladimir Zelensky later. I would also like to
mention Pyotr Alekseevich. In your words, Poroshenko's complete failure is the people's
response to his Russophobic policy. In your opinion, what will Zelensky's policy be?
Viktor Medvedchuk: it Is difficult to talk about what Zelensky's policy will be, but
I do not think he will repeat the mistakes that Mr Poroshenko made. That is, Mr. Poroshenko,
especially in the last months of the election campaign, the last months of activity as
President, really elevated to the rank of the state policy of anti-Russian hysteria and caveman
level Russophobia. This is a fact. He built the whole campaign on that. And here is even his
slogan: "Army. Faith. Language" -- these words and these meanings for the country, for the
Ukrainian people, they are very important. But what he did with them his manipulation of people
psychology and his perversion of populism exceptional - they led to a backlash.
You will notice how Mr. Zelensky won, where he won the most votes. He scored them in the
East - 88%, in the South - 86%. Do you know how much he scored in the Luhansk region? 90%. Do
you know that Luhansk region has always been the most Russian-speaking region after Crimea in
all the years of independence? Tell me, why did it vote?
Vasily Golovanov : It concerns cities, in villages there are Ukrainian speakers too,
even in the Luhansk region.
Viktor Medvedchuk : The Question is different - their attitude. Of course, I am far
from believing that the votes he received are votes only for him, votes against Poroshenko in
the first place.
Vasily Golovanov : The Question of Peter Alekseevich and language is one of the
slogans of his election campaign. We remember: about two weeks before the election he was a
guest of "Freedom of speech" on ICTV, where he said to the question about the language:
"Actually, I am Russian-speaking".
Viktor Medvedchuk : Of course, we know that.
Vasily Golovanov : And how did it happen that the person who hangs out on all boards
- "Army. Faith. Language, " puts the emphasis on it, and it's one of the priorities of his
campaign, at some point... It's as if he confessed to a different faith...
Viktor Medvedchuk : How did it happen that he admitted this during the election
campaign just before the second round? Why would he do that? Perhaps he was beginning to
realize the strategic mistake he had made when he spoke of language.
Because are there any Ukrainians today who are against the fact that the status of Ukrainian
as the only state language is strengthened, developed and provides those opportunities in which
the Ukrainian language should be, first of all, competitive, attractive and have other
qualities that could allow it? No! But at the same time, we cannot ignore or discriminate
against the Russian language and the language of other national minorities.
Moreover, he would not have succeeded, because the Constitution in article 10 has the status
and part 3 of article 10 says that the territory of Ukraine guarantees the free development,
use and protection of Russian and other languages of national minorities.
Why did he come, as you say, on Monday, before the second round, and told that he was
Russian-speaking? And who did not know that Mr. Poroshenko was Russian-speaking? Do you think
it is that, in different situations spoke in the Ukrainian language? I never spoke with him in
Ukrainian, only in Russian. Well, maybe it's not an indicator, but it means not just focus, not
just the attractiveness of a person, including in the use of language. This is a direct
indication that a person has it inside. Why are you ignoring this?
Yes, you must develop the Ukrainian language. You are the President of Ukraine, but you
should not allow disrespect, mockery and discrimination of other languages, including Russian.
And so this reaction is also a response to what he was doing. That's direct result of his
policies.
Mr. Zelensky, get right and do it! Then, if the Cabinet of Ministers does not listen to you
and sets its resolutions, and even more increases the cost of gas, the cost of utilities, block
its activities! Any decision of the Cabinet can be stopped, blocked and appealed to the
constitutional court for reasons of non-compliance with the Constitution! It's the President's
right! So do not talk about the fact that it is impossible!
And when we talk about reducing tariffs, you will study the structure of these tariffs. My
advice. Although, I do not advocate giving advice and this is not advice, and my vision. And
you ask about the pricing structure of utility tariffs, including the cost of gas. You'll see
that what's in there is props. And it's in the derivatives. About what, about what you said:
Rotterdam+... When this involves the cost of coal, and in parallel or, more precisely, directly
coal is electricity and is laid in tariffs. Dusseldorf + - the cost of gas. And it is laid in
the tariffs for gas, which means - for hot water and heat. And much more, where the derivative
is gas. That's all she wrote. No need to tell stories and send somewhere. It is necessary to
send to itself and as promised, to do so that it would be possible to improve life of our
people.
Vasily Golovanov: Then I also want to talk about gas and coal... If we make this
detour now, or pretend that we are not buying Russian gas, although we are buying Russian gas,
it is simply more expensive in Europe. Then why do we buy fuel? Why is our government so.
Viktor Medvedchuk: Because we buy Russian gas directly. In fact, look, I listened in
one of Your programs, in the "Ukrainian format" somewhere right after the second round, it
seems that you had a discussion, very interesting. Professionals told about it, but they do not
fully understand this scheme. I'm just saying it because I know it. But it said about Velky
kapushany. Look here - Russia, - Ukraine, but the Ukrainian border with Slovakia...That is, in
Europe, velki kapushany, where there is a so-called accounting station. What is done? What's
happening? Gas comes from the territory of Russia, comes to Ukraine - it is a gas
transportation system. It dissolves in this system and goes to different needs. We don't have a
line Russia - Europe on which there is the gas transit, which is operators, recipients and
consumers of Europeans.
No! He's spent here, but it automatically comes to this border and Wielkie Capuano should
count on the Ukrainian side, where they say the gas is out! There is 100 million cubic meters.
And the other counter, here, suggests that the gas came to Europe. So what did? You imagine the
Scam of this scheme. They closed this square. Moreover, this is not the worst thing... That's
when I listened to what was said in the "Ukrainian format", I thought, well, now... The person
who spoke, he, in principle, the professional. I thought he was gonna tell me what it was
about. And he says: "They there gas this drive. Maybe he doesn't even exist." No, not that.
They closed the circle. And this gas in one volume chases on this pipe. Why this is done? In
order to show on the counter that he went to Europe.
For example, his buyer, on paper, is a French operator, gas operator. It is the papers I
wrote - I got 100 million, because this counter is reflected and all - no complaints. And this
gas when came, it already here 100 million, and we already used it here, but bought allegedly
there. And then, when they say: here is the gas on the reverse. What reverse? What is the
reverse? If the gas goes in one direction, how can it go in the opposite direction? Think about
it! Well, gas goes to Europe, we put 89 billion there last year, the year before, left 94
billion there, it goes in one... How can you go, then stop, and go back? Or what? That is,
those who talk about it, just do not know, and those who "vtyuhivayut" us, trying to bend in
the understanding of all, to deceive. This is pure insanity.
It's not just a scheme. They also provide the price Dusseldorf+,1500 km. And these $42,
shoulder the logistics they put into the scheme. That is, in pricing - it's net earnings. Then
they are transferred into the rates and our people are paying. At attention. And so utility
costs are rising, because the cost of gas is growing.
Well I'm still not talking about fraud handled by the NAK "Naftogaz" and Ukrgazdobycha.
Because gas is produced, its cost there 2 700 - 2 900 UAH, up to a hundred dollars. And NAK
"Neftegaz" buys from ukrgasvydobuvannya it under 6 thousand. What is this 100 % profitability?
And where is it? In a poor, impoverished, economically underdeveloped country? 100%
profitability?
I can say: no, this is on the development! For development wells on production growth, as we
have said Groisman pathetic. It is as if he speaks out and says: "For 5 years we need to
increase production so that we do not buy anything." This, approximately, as you can say - it
is necessary to increase the retail space in the Vinnitsa market, here I understand. Here is
indeed for 5 years can be their increase in 2 times. But it is impossible to increase gas
production!
And where did you grow up in production? It produced 15.7 billion. In General, the country
produced 21 billion in 2014, and we have now produced 20.7 billion with private companies by
the end of 2018. So where is this increase in production? And where do you invest? What new
wells, new production? Groysman, who is talking about this, at least interested in this?
Vasily Golovanov: what does the message of the Russian Federation on the ban on the
entry of Russian oil and oil products into our country show us?
Viktor Medvedchuk: You put the question absolutely correctly. What does that mean? I,
Vasily, will expand your question, because the essence of the question is wider. We say that
Russia has imposed sanctions against Ukraine and banned the import of coal, petroleum products
and oil.
Well, about oil - this is a relative understanding, because oil from Russia has not been
supplied since 2007. And for this purpose there were the reasons in which mister Yanukovych and
many others is guilty. We will not talk about this now, but oil products and coal are another
issue. Now, this is a response. After all, what is the economic problem between Russia and
Ukraine? It consists in the fact that Ukraine at some stage joined the sanctions of the
European Union, and Russia introduced counter-sanctions against Ukraine.
Even earlier, we entered the free trade zone with the EU, thereby cutting off the path of
interaction and cooperation within the CIS zone and trade relations with Russia. All of this
has led to the complex that has existed in recent years. When we lose 7 billion export
potential of our products and services in the markets of the Russian Federation.
Now that we are there is limited, what caused such reaction of Russia. They took and banned
what is vital. We are an energy-dependent state. I can say that we depend on two States - on
Russia and Belarus, almost equally.
TRUMP: Well, I think it's incredible when you hear it. These are great reporters, all three,
and when you have them on your trail, that's a problem. These are people that should be getting
Pulitzers, not the ones that got the Pulitzers that got everything wrong.
If you listen to them, they got everything wrong. Go back and read some of their early and
mid articles. They didn't have a clue what was going on and they win Pulitzer Prizes. These are
the ones that should be winning.
It sounds like big stuff. It sounds very interesting with Ukraine. I just spoke to the new
president a little while ago, two days ago, and congratulated him on an incredible race.
Incredible run. A big surprise victory. That's 75 percent of the vote.
But that sounds like big, big stuff. I'm not surprised.
HANNITY: Mr. President, Ukraine is offering this evidence to the United States. Would you
like the United States -- with all this talk about collusion, they are saying they included on
behalf of Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016. Does America need to see that information in
spite of all of the attacks against you on collusion?
TRUMP: Well, I think we do. And, frankly, we have a great new attorney general who has done
an unbelievable job in a very short period of time. And he is very smart and tough and I would
certainly defer to him. I would imagine he would want to see this.
People have been saying this whole -- the concept of Ukraine, they have been talking about
it actually for a long time. You know that, and I would certainly defer to the attorney
general.
And we'll see what he says about it. He calls them straight. That's one thing I can tell
you.
"... Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies. ..."
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens
the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations
as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
America's hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist
organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted
countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State
property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.
The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These
military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific
countries in all major regions of World.
Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization.
Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which
consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.
In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995,
evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely
into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the
developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland,
etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.
The global economic crisis is intimately related to America's hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget
backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. "War is Good for Business": the powerful financial groups which routinely
manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war.
A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.
Beyond the Globalization of Poverty
Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic
reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the
"globalization of poverty": countries are transformed in open territories,
State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad
sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads
to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire
populations (refugee crisis).
This "second stage" goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial
institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction
of human life.
In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force
of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.
The New World Order
Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are
Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds
and secret accounts,
the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major "defense contractors", security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits,
on contract to the Pentagon;
the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,
The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;
Big Pharma,
The Communication Giants and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.
There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.
These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state
structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the "Deep State", integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks,
secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate
interests.
In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, trade unions, political parties.
What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy
to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.
Media Propaganda
The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops
oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian
narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.
Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.
Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus
at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding
the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.
Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development
There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era,
the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as
well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.
In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union.
Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.
The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial
apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial
trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar
speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians,
civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It's called corruption, co-optation, fraud.
Latin America: The Transition towards a "Democratic Dictatorship"
In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e.
a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded.
They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.
Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin America region.
In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup
in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated
in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the "Dirty war" and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.
The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged.
Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.
Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of "dirty tricks" including acts of
infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social
divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate
and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money
laundering and the protection of the drug trade.
The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua,
May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky
by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)
"... If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president is ..."
"... Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals' laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians. ..."
"... The fact of a Jewish president -- in addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the detriment of Ukraine's interests. ..."
"... The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014. ..."
... Zelenskii himself is likely to fight corruption, to be sure, but he is unlikely to challenge the ultranationalists,
neofascists, and their militarized combat organizations. ... Zelenskii is unlikely to offer concessions
that the DNR, LNR or Moscow will find acceptable for resolving the Donbass civil war.
Zelenskii's Victory and the Presidential Elections
Zelenskii's victory signified some decline in the acceptability overall in Ukraine of the
Galician/Western line backed by Poroshenko countrywide' fueled largely by a full rejection in
the east and south. Zelenskii made it a central point of his campaign to bring the ostracized
south and east back in to Ukraine and end the discrimination against the Russian language
fostered by Poroshenko legislation. Thus, Zelenskii won more than 80 percent of the vote in
each of the 11 more Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine and nearly 90
percent in several of them. Poroshenko took only nationalistic Lviv. In the rest of western
Ukraine won, in many of these regions only by a slim majority, but he won nevertheless. He even
took some 60 percent in Poroshenko's native Volhyn region (
https://elections.dekoder.org/ukraine/en?fbclid=IwAR36OdD3lrXL3EKKy9Zfdhk8k36Azgr6nNWLeYH3sYiYX9Ci51O86GVDhow
). To the extent Zelenskii received great support in the east, his election represents a desire
for an end of the slow-burning civil war in Donbass, of the east-west polarization inside the
country, and of alienation of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians as well as for a
normalization of Kiev's relations with Russia. Poroshenko's narrow but nevertheless defeat in
almost all the western regions reflects the Galicians disenchantment with corruption far more
than any significant rejection of Galician Ukrainian nationalism, ultrnationalism and
neofascism in the west.
... ... ...
The Nature of Maidan Ukraine's Hybrid Regime
However, the problem in Ukraine has often been less with its elections being unfree or
unfair ( https://gordonhahn.com/2015/06/21/one-day-in-the-life-of-ukrainian-democracy/
). Most often the problem has been with the rule of law, massive corruption, the theft of the
state by various powerful oligarchs, the lack of a cohesive national identity, and a deeply
polarized society. It is these aspects of Ukraine's authoritarian side, its 'stateness problem'
and political polarization and instability which are rarely understood in the West [see Gordon
M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold War' (Jefferson:
McFarland, 2018)].
The absence of the rule of law in Maidan Ukraine was in full display on
the eve of the election as the siloviki chose sides in the vote. The SBU supported
Poroshenko by trumping up the noted fake news of hacked emails never shown but allegedly
showing that Zelenskii was Putin's Manchurian candidate ala 'Trump's collusion with the
Kremln.' Doing the bidding of Yiliya Tymoshenko's campaign, the MVD, headed by ultranationalist
Arsenii Avakov, uncovered Poroshenko vote buying schemes.
Similarly, the present and former
Ukrainian general prosecutors' charges of interference in corruption investigations by US Vice
President Joseph Biden and the present US ambassador to Ukraine underscored the point.
Also,
the release of former Maidan war hero Nadia Savchenko also demonstrated this quite clearly.
Either her arrest a little over a year ago for allegedly planning a massive terrorist attack
that would have left many Maidan Rada deputies and civilians dead was based on wholly trumped
up charges or some among the authorities are protecting an ultranationalist terrorist.
Ironically, three days after the presidential vote, a Kievan was arrested on the basis of
charges reminiscent of Russian law as many Maidan regime laws remind one of. Thus, the arrestee
was charged with spreading on the Internet calls for 'separatism' and the overthrow of the
Maidan regime that was established by an illegal and violent seizure of power (
https://vesti-ukr.com/kiev/334060-zhitelju-kievskoj-oblasti-hrozit-10-let-tjurmy-za-posty-v-sotssetjakh
).
A shocking level of official corruption has been characteristic of the Maidan regime's
oligarchical side and was demonstrated even more forcefully during the presidential campaign. Poroshenko's failure to divest himself or 'trustify'
his businesses established a fundamentally corrupt oligarch-presidency...
... ... ...
Historically
speaking, some in the west -- Stepan Bandera's OUN and UPA fascists -- were allied with the
Nazis in World War II; while the grandparents of many in the east fought for the Red Army
against Hitler's forces and after the war repressed the OUN and UPA Banderites. This translates
into a deep societal polarization with the west displaying considerable support for and
tolerance of Galician-Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and neofascism in domestic politics a
pro-Western foreign policy stance and the east supporting a more leftist, quasi-Soviet domestic
order and pro-Russian foreign orientation. This divided has been repeatedly reflected in
presidential and parliamentary elections throughout the history of post-Soviet Ukraine; hence
the political upheavals often surrounding national elections, in particular in the 2004 'Orange
revolution,' precursor to the 2013-14 Maidan revolt. This polarization has helped drive some of
the lack of rule of law, corruption, and stealing of the state as oligarchs scramble to protect
and expand their holdings on the background of deep political polarization between western
Ukraine's Galicia and southeastern Ukraine and regime shifts from western Ukrainian-dominated
governments to southeastern Ukrainian-dominated governments. All this explains and/or is
explained by the Maidan regime's birth event – its original sin -- the 20 February 2014
snipers' terrorist false flag massacre.
Weeks later, Zelenskii commented: "People whom came to power on blood are profiting on
blood" (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/26/7207718/). It appears he understands the essence of
the Maidan regime's original sin. This poses a grave threat to some of the most powerful men in
the regime including the likely organizer of the snipers' plot, Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy,
and perhaps Poroshenko himself, who appears to have played a role in helping smuggle the
snipers out of Maidan Square, though he appears to have opposed the shooting as a video from
the Maidan headquarters demonstrates.
This issue has the potential to bring the whole
Western-backed house of cards tumbling down.
Maidan v. the People
The magnitude and centrality
of the terrorist snipers' attack coverup for both the Maidan regime and the West's 'new cold
war' narrative portend a bitter and brutal battle to prevent an objective investigation. Thus,
the election of the politically unknown Zelenskii and the prospects of his inauguration and
rule as president have sparked a cold civil war in Kiev. The Maidan regime's forces about to be
relegated to the opposition, particularly after the victory of Zelenskii's new political party
(Servant of the People in September's Rada elections, are poised and are already moving to do
almost everything and perhaps everything to prevent his assuming the powers in Ukraine's
semi-presidential system. Poroshenko and his allies and temporary allies in the Rada have
undertaken several first steps against Zelenskii and his presidency. The most important may be
the a draft law that would institute changes in the balance of power in the political system in
favor of the prime minister and Rada against the president's office. Many of the proposed
changes would empower the prime minister to a level nearly equal to that of the president.
Thus, Article 35 of the new law would require the president to nominate a candidate for the
post of prime minister indicated by a coalition of factions in the Rada. In other words, the
Rada would nominate prime ministerial candidates, and the president would simply submit the
same name much like the king or queen of England plays a purely formal role in the formation of
the UK cabinet
[https://samopomich.ua/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/project.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2QSRvRtMsWcWY-eR4ys0O6x0n_Doy21398U0VenM6J9jw21Hhy1E8sias
(from here on cited as 'Draft Law'), p. 16].
Similarly, the president would be deprived by
Article 36 in the new law of the power to independently submit to the Rada candidates for
nomination to the posts of defense minister and foreign minister, the candidate nomination of
which would have to be agreed upon before submission to the Rada again by a coalition of
deputies' factions ( Draft law, pp. 16-17) . These clauses in the new law appear to be a direct
violation of the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 106, which gives the President the
unrestricted power to make such nominations.
The Rada is also boosted by the draft law's
Article 85.1, which stipulates that in the event of the president's removal from office under
an impeachment process the Rada's chair will execute the office of the presidency (Draft law,
p. 42). This violates the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 112, which gives the role of acting
president in such a case to the PM. At the same time, the PM would receive a series of new
powers in the draft law. Article 39.3 of the draft law stipulates that the president "shall
hold mandatory consultations with the Prime Minister regarding the formation of the personnel
of the National Security and Defense Council" (SNBO), and Article 39.4 allows the Prime
Minister to "initiate a decision before the President on formation of the personnel" of the
SNBO and make changes to it (Draft law, p. 18).
Acting or temporary holders of the offices of
Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, SBU chairman, and National Bank head are to be nominated by
the PM under certain circumstances (Articles 30.4, 30.5, 40.6, and 42.5, respectively, Draft
law, pp. 16-17, 19, and 20, respectively). Also, under the draft law the PM would also receive
the new right to be consulted by the president in cases where two-thirds of a regional
parliament has voted 'no confidence' in the region's administration head, which allows the
president to dismiss him (Article 49. 3, Draft law, p. 24).
Although the President would retain
the power to submit nominations to the posts of Prosecutor General and SBU chair, there is no
mention of his power to appoint and dismiss regional prosecutors and SBU chiefs. The new law
also appears to deprive the Ukrainian President of his present power to appoint the membership
of the National Commission for Implementation of Regulation of Energy and Housing Services
(NKREKU), the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), and other regulators. Also,
the president would be barred from creating any state administrative bodies such as a
presidential apparatus or chancellery with powers anything more than advisory.
Thus under the
new law the office of the president is deprived of its most important power -- appointment of
the PM -- which now belongs to the majority in the Rada.
Thus, this new law on the presidency
if adopted by the Rada and signed by Poroshenko as he leaves office would effectively transform
Ukraine's semi-presidential system into a parliamentary republic with a powerful PM, whose
authority rivals that of the President.
In and of itself this is not problematic and could even
be regarded as a step in the direction of greater democracy in the sense of strong republican
rule by a legislature of elected representatives of the people, it becomes anti-democratic and
a violation of the rule of law by dint of the facts that several of the law's statutes violate
the constitution. More importantly perhaps, the law violates the spirit of election by
abrogating the recently expressed will of the people who elected a candidate to a particular
office of the president of Ukraine as it existed on the day of the election, with all the
powers the constitution vests in that office.
The imminent 'Maidan-in-opposition' has
undertaken a series of other highly questionable measures to prepare to block or hamper his
presidency. When presidential candidate Hrytsenko criticized the draft law on the presidency
days after its posting on the site of the Galicia-based nationalist party 'Self-Help', led by
the mayor of Lviv (Lvov) Andriy Sadoviy, the Lviv branch of the SBU opened an investigation
against his wife's opinion polling company (www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213427/ and
http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213432/
).
Although the delay is not prohibitive yet it risks preventing Zelenskii from calling new
Rada elections as soon as he assumes office as he has reportedly planned to do. Mid-term
elections cannot be called less than six months before the end of a Rada's convocation. The
present Rada's term ends in early November. The delay of the inauguration may also provide time
for investigative processes against Zelenskii to be completed and used to block his assumption
of office. Thus, three days after the election, the corrupt anti-corruption body, NABU, opened
an investigation int Zelenskii production company (
https://strana.ua/news/198188-nabu-nachalo-rassledovanie-po-kompanii-zelenskoho-iz-za-vozmozhnoj-rastraty-sredstv-hoskino-sytnik.html
).
The new draconian language law adopted by the Rada four days after the voting excludes from
civil service those not fluent in Ukrainian. Zelenskii is not fluent in Ukrainian, and
Poroshenko has vowed to sigh the law; one he himself helped draft and then submitted to the
Rada before the election. Tentative Conclusions and Some Black Swans The Ukraine is on the edge
of a constitutional crisis.
The country remains badly divided between the newly elected and at
present popular president and his support base in the east and south, on the one hand, and Maidan's outgoing president, government and Rada with its support base largely in the west. As
at the beginning of the Maidan protests in fall 2013, there are many Ukrainians who want
positive democratic change. Unfortunately, they are countered by a powerful
oligachic-ultranationalist coalition that has been stealing the state, dividing Ukrainians
along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines in order to stay in power, and is about
to be relegated to the position of the Maidan-in-opposition.
For now, Zelenskii is the new
Yanukovych minus the corruption and pro-Russian inclinations. His positive image with the
voters can be destroyed with new framing that can come with the ravaging of time in office as
the elan of the victory in the presidential election fades and by effective
Maidan-in-opposition propaganda. With Rada elections set for September, the first five-six
months of Zelenskii's presidency -- should Poroshenko and the Rada radicals allow it to
commence -- will be bogged down in a bitter power struggle that can easily spin out of control.
There is good reason to believe that the Rada leadership, the siloviki , and the
ultranationalists and neofascists in Ukraine's frequently uncivil society will be willing to
repeat a use of violence of February 2014 in order to preserve their power and avoid the risk
of Zelenskii investigations into their corruption and the Maidan's original sin of that
February 2014 snipers' terrorist attack. Zelenskii may very well forego a serious investigation
of the Maidan terrorist attack and a crackdown on the illegal armed formations and activity of
ultranationalists and neofascists like the National Corps and C14. A bridge too far for any
Ukrainian leader, given the weak state and powerful extremist element on the streets.
There are black swans on the horizon. One is Vladimir Putin. He 'welcomed' Zelenskii by
issuing a decree easing requirements for immigration to Russia and the receipt of Russian
passports and pension payments for residents in civil war-torn region of the separatist DNR and
LNR. In this way, he seemed to remind Zelenskii of Russia's now limited, albeit, direct
military presence in the war zone. He further signaled his intent to run a hard bargain by
refusing to congratulate Zelenskii on his presidential election victory unlike in 2014 when
Putin congratulated Poroshenko.
If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the
former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president
is. Russians fear both revolution and foreign interference far more than they do Putin. More
importantly for Ukraine, such a stance will make a resolution of the Donbass conflict impossible.
Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the
absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of
ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals'
laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians.
The fact of a Jewish president -- in
addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in
the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the
economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the
detriment of Ukraine's interests.
The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of
such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the
potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the
ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not
to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the
Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California,
www.cetisresearch.org ; an expert
analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com ; and an analyst at Geostrategic
Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), www.geostrategicforecasting.com .
Dr. Hahn is the author of the four books, most recently Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia,
the West, and the 'New Cold War . Previously, he has authored three well-received books:
The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond
(McFarland Publishers, 2014), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and
Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet
Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002). He also has published numerous
think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian
language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco
State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and
has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.
"... Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies. ..."
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens
the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations
as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
America's hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist
organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted
countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State
property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.
The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These
military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific
countries in all major regions of World.
Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization.
Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which
consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.
In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995,
evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely
into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the
developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland,
etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.
The global economic crisis is intimately related to America's hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget
backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. "War is Good for Business": the powerful financial groups which routinely
manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war.
A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.
Beyond the Globalization of Poverty
Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic
reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the
"globalization of poverty": countries are transformed in open territories,
State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad
sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads
to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire
populations (refugee crisis).
This "second stage" goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial
institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction
of human life.
In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force
of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.
The New World Order
Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are
Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds
and secret accounts,
the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major "defense contractors", security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits,
on contract to the Pentagon;
the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,
The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;
Big Pharma,
The Communication Giants and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.
There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.
These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state
structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the "Deep State", integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks,
secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate
interests.
In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, trade unions, political parties.
What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy
to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.
Media Propaganda
The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops
oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian
narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.
Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.
Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus
at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding
the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.
Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development
There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era,
the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as
well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.
In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union.
Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.
The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial
apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial
trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar
speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians,
civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It's called corruption, co-optation, fraud.
Latin America: The Transition towards a "Democratic Dictatorship"
In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e.
a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded.
They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.
Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin America region.
In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup
in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated
in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the "Dirty war" and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.
The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged.
Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.
Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of "dirty tricks" including acts of
infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social
divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate
and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money
laundering and the protection of the drug trade.
The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua,
May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky
by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)
"... If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president is ..."
"... Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals' laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians. ..."
"... The fact of a Jewish president -- in addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the detriment of Ukraine's interests. ..."
"... The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014. ..."
... Zelenskii himself is likely to fight corruption, to be sure, but he is unlikely to challenge the ultranationalists,
neofascists, and their militarized combat organizations. ... Zelenskii is unlikely to offer concessions
that the DNR, LNR or Moscow will find acceptable for resolving the Donbass civil war.
Zelenskii's Victory and the Presidential Elections
Zelenskii's victory signified some decline in the acceptability overall in Ukraine of the
Galician/Western line backed by Poroshenko countrywide' fueled largely by a full rejection in
the east and south. Zelenskii made it a central point of his campaign to bring the ostracized
south and east back in to Ukraine and end the discrimination against the Russian language
fostered by Poroshenko legislation. Thus, Zelenskii won more than 80 percent of the vote in
each of the 11 more Russian-speaking regions in eastern and southern Ukraine and nearly 90
percent in several of them. Poroshenko took only nationalistic Lviv. In the rest of western
Ukraine won, in many of these regions only by a slim majority, but he won nevertheless. He even
took some 60 percent in Poroshenko's native Volhyn region (
https://elections.dekoder.org/ukraine/en?fbclid=IwAR36OdD3lrXL3EKKy9Zfdhk8k36Azgr6nNWLeYH3sYiYX9Ci51O86GVDhow
). To the extent Zelenskii received great support in the east, his election represents a desire
for an end of the slow-burning civil war in Donbass, of the east-west polarization inside the
country, and of alienation of Russian speakers and ethnic Russians as well as for a
normalization of Kiev's relations with Russia. Poroshenko's narrow but nevertheless defeat in
almost all the western regions reflects the Galicians disenchantment with corruption far more
than any significant rejection of Galician Ukrainian nationalism, ultrnationalism and
neofascism in the west.
... ... ...
The Nature of Maidan Ukraine's Hybrid Regime
However, the problem in Ukraine has often been less with its elections being unfree or
unfair ( https://gordonhahn.com/2015/06/21/one-day-in-the-life-of-ukrainian-democracy/
). Most often the problem has been with the rule of law, massive corruption, the theft of the
state by various powerful oligarchs, the lack of a cohesive national identity, and a deeply
polarized society. It is these aspects of Ukraine's authoritarian side, its 'stateness problem'
and political polarization and instability which are rarely understood in the West [see Gordon
M. Hahn, Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the 'New Cold War' (Jefferson:
McFarland, 2018)].
The absence of the rule of law in Maidan Ukraine was in full display on
the eve of the election as the siloviki chose sides in the vote. The SBU supported
Poroshenko by trumping up the noted fake news of hacked emails never shown but allegedly
showing that Zelenskii was Putin's Manchurian candidate ala 'Trump's collusion with the
Kremln.' Doing the bidding of Yiliya Tymoshenko's campaign, the MVD, headed by ultranationalist
Arsenii Avakov, uncovered Poroshenko vote buying schemes.
Similarly, the present and former
Ukrainian general prosecutors' charges of interference in corruption investigations by US Vice
President Joseph Biden and the present US ambassador to Ukraine underscored the point.
Also,
the release of former Maidan war hero Nadia Savchenko also demonstrated this quite clearly.
Either her arrest a little over a year ago for allegedly planning a massive terrorist attack
that would have left many Maidan Rada deputies and civilians dead was based on wholly trumped
up charges or some among the authorities are protecting an ultranationalist terrorist.
Ironically, three days after the presidential vote, a Kievan was arrested on the basis of
charges reminiscent of Russian law as many Maidan regime laws remind one of. Thus, the arrestee
was charged with spreading on the Internet calls for 'separatism' and the overthrow of the
Maidan regime that was established by an illegal and violent seizure of power (
https://vesti-ukr.com/kiev/334060-zhitelju-kievskoj-oblasti-hrozit-10-let-tjurmy-za-posty-v-sotssetjakh
).
A shocking level of official corruption has been characteristic of the Maidan regime's
oligarchical side and was demonstrated even more forcefully during the presidential campaign. Poroshenko's failure to divest himself or 'trustify'
his businesses established a fundamentally corrupt oligarch-presidency...
... ... ...
Historically
speaking, some in the west -- Stepan Bandera's OUN and UPA fascists -- were allied with the
Nazis in World War II; while the grandparents of many in the east fought for the Red Army
against Hitler's forces and after the war repressed the OUN and UPA Banderites. This translates
into a deep societal polarization with the west displaying considerable support for and
tolerance of Galician-Ukrainian ultra-nationalism and neofascism in domestic politics a
pro-Western foreign policy stance and the east supporting a more leftist, quasi-Soviet domestic
order and pro-Russian foreign orientation. This divided has been repeatedly reflected in
presidential and parliamentary elections throughout the history of post-Soviet Ukraine; hence
the political upheavals often surrounding national elections, in particular in the 2004 'Orange
revolution,' precursor to the 2013-14 Maidan revolt. This polarization has helped drive some of
the lack of rule of law, corruption, and stealing of the state as oligarchs scramble to protect
and expand their holdings on the background of deep political polarization between western
Ukraine's Galicia and southeastern Ukraine and regime shifts from western Ukrainian-dominated
governments to southeastern Ukrainian-dominated governments. All this explains and/or is
explained by the Maidan regime's birth event – its original sin -- the 20 February 2014
snipers' terrorist false flag massacre.
Weeks later, Zelenskii commented: "People whom came to power on blood are profiting on
blood" (www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/02/26/7207718/). It appears he understands the essence of
the Maidan regime's original sin. This poses a grave threat to some of the most powerful men in
the regime including the likely organizer of the snipers' plot, Rada Chairman Andriy Parubiy,
and perhaps Poroshenko himself, who appears to have played a role in helping smuggle the
snipers out of Maidan Square, though he appears to have opposed the shooting as a video from
the Maidan headquarters demonstrates.
This issue has the potential to bring the whole
Western-backed house of cards tumbling down.
Maidan v. the People
The magnitude and centrality
of the terrorist snipers' attack coverup for both the Maidan regime and the West's 'new cold
war' narrative portend a bitter and brutal battle to prevent an objective investigation. Thus,
the election of the politically unknown Zelenskii and the prospects of his inauguration and
rule as president have sparked a cold civil war in Kiev. The Maidan regime's forces about to be
relegated to the opposition, particularly after the victory of Zelenskii's new political party
(Servant of the People in September's Rada elections, are poised and are already moving to do
almost everything and perhaps everything to prevent his assuming the powers in Ukraine's
semi-presidential system. Poroshenko and his allies and temporary allies in the Rada have
undertaken several first steps against Zelenskii and his presidency. The most important may be
the a draft law that would institute changes in the balance of power in the political system in
favor of the prime minister and Rada against the president's office. Many of the proposed
changes would empower the prime minister to a level nearly equal to that of the president.
Thus, Article 35 of the new law would require the president to nominate a candidate for the
post of prime minister indicated by a coalition of factions in the Rada. In other words, the
Rada would nominate prime ministerial candidates, and the president would simply submit the
same name much like the king or queen of England plays a purely formal role in the formation of
the UK cabinet
[https://samopomich.ua/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/project.pdf?fbclid=IwAR2QSRvRtMsWcWY-eR4ys0O6x0n_Doy21398U0VenM6J9jw21Hhy1E8sias
(from here on cited as 'Draft Law'), p. 16].
Similarly, the president would be deprived by
Article 36 in the new law of the power to independently submit to the Rada candidates for
nomination to the posts of defense minister and foreign minister, the candidate nomination of
which would have to be agreed upon before submission to the Rada again by a coalition of
deputies' factions ( Draft law, pp. 16-17) . These clauses in the new law appear to be a direct
violation of the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 106, which gives the President the
unrestricted power to make such nominations.
The Rada is also boosted by the draft law's
Article 85.1, which stipulates that in the event of the president's removal from office under
an impeachment process the Rada's chair will execute the office of the presidency (Draft law,
p. 42). This violates the Ukrainian Constitution's Article 112, which gives the role of acting
president in such a case to the PM. At the same time, the PM would receive a series of new
powers in the draft law. Article 39.3 of the draft law stipulates that the president "shall
hold mandatory consultations with the Prime Minister regarding the formation of the personnel
of the National Security and Defense Council" (SNBO), and Article 39.4 allows the Prime
Minister to "initiate a decision before the President on formation of the personnel" of the
SNBO and make changes to it (Draft law, p. 18).
Acting or temporary holders of the offices of
Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, SBU chairman, and National Bank head are to be nominated by
the PM under certain circumstances (Articles 30.4, 30.5, 40.6, and 42.5, respectively, Draft
law, pp. 16-17, 19, and 20, respectively). Also, under the draft law the PM would also receive
the new right to be consulted by the president in cases where two-thirds of a regional
parliament has voted 'no confidence' in the region's administration head, which allows the
president to dismiss him (Article 49. 3, Draft law, p. 24).
Although the President would retain
the power to submit nominations to the posts of Prosecutor General and SBU chair, there is no
mention of his power to appoint and dismiss regional prosecutors and SBU chiefs. The new law
also appears to deprive the Ukrainian President of his present power to appoint the membership
of the National Commission for Implementation of Regulation of Energy and Housing Services
(NKREKU), the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), and other regulators. Also,
the president would be barred from creating any state administrative bodies such as a
presidential apparatus or chancellery with powers anything more than advisory.
Thus under the
new law the office of the president is deprived of its most important power -- appointment of
the PM -- which now belongs to the majority in the Rada.
Thus, this new law on the presidency
if adopted by the Rada and signed by Poroshenko as he leaves office would effectively transform
Ukraine's semi-presidential system into a parliamentary republic with a powerful PM, whose
authority rivals that of the President.
In and of itself this is not problematic and could even
be regarded as a step in the direction of greater democracy in the sense of strong republican
rule by a legislature of elected representatives of the people, it becomes anti-democratic and
a violation of the rule of law by dint of the facts that several of the law's statutes violate
the constitution. More importantly perhaps, the law violates the spirit of election by
abrogating the recently expressed will of the people who elected a candidate to a particular
office of the president of Ukraine as it existed on the day of the election, with all the
powers the constitution vests in that office.
The imminent 'Maidan-in-opposition' has
undertaken a series of other highly questionable measures to prepare to block or hamper his
presidency. When presidential candidate Hrytsenko criticized the draft law on the presidency
days after its posting on the site of the Galicia-based nationalist party 'Self-Help', led by
the mayor of Lviv (Lvov) Andriy Sadoviy, the Lviv branch of the SBU opened an investigation
against his wife's opinion polling company (www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213427/ and
http://www.pravda.com.ua/rus/news/2019/04/24/7213432/
).
Although the delay is not prohibitive yet it risks preventing Zelenskii from calling new
Rada elections as soon as he assumes office as he has reportedly planned to do. Mid-term
elections cannot be called less than six months before the end of a Rada's convocation. The
present Rada's term ends in early November. The delay of the inauguration may also provide time
for investigative processes against Zelenskii to be completed and used to block his assumption
of office. Thus, three days after the election, the corrupt anti-corruption body, NABU, opened
an investigation int Zelenskii production company (
https://strana.ua/news/198188-nabu-nachalo-rassledovanie-po-kompanii-zelenskoho-iz-za-vozmozhnoj-rastraty-sredstv-hoskino-sytnik.html
).
The new draconian language law adopted by the Rada four days after the voting excludes from
civil service those not fluent in Ukrainian. Zelenskii is not fluent in Ukrainian, and
Poroshenko has vowed to sigh the law; one he himself helped draft and then submitted to the
Rada before the election. Tentative Conclusions and Some Black Swans The Ukraine is on the edge
of a constitutional crisis.
The country remains badly divided between the newly elected and at
present popular president and his support base in the east and south, on the one hand, and Maidan's outgoing president, government and Rada with its support base largely in the west. As
at the beginning of the Maidan protests in fall 2013, there are many Ukrainians who want
positive democratic change. Unfortunately, they are countered by a powerful
oligachic-ultranationalist coalition that has been stealing the state, dividing Ukrainians
along regional, ethnic, linguistic, and religious lines in order to stay in power, and is about
to be relegated to the position of the Maidan-in-opposition.
For now, Zelenskii is the new
Yanukovych minus the corruption and pro-Russian inclinations. His positive image with the
voters can be destroyed with new framing that can come with the ravaging of time in office as
the elan of the victory in the presidential election fades and by effective
Maidan-in-opposition propaganda. With Rada elections set for September, the first five-six
months of Zelenskii's presidency -- should Poroshenko and the Rada radicals allow it to
commence -- will be bogged down in a bitter power struggle that can easily spin out of control.
There is good reason to believe that the Rada leadership, the siloviki , and the
ultranationalists and neofascists in Ukraine's frequently uncivil society will be willing to
repeat a use of violence of February 2014 in order to preserve their power and avoid the risk
of Zelenskii investigations into their corruption and the Maidan's original sin of that
February 2014 snipers' terrorist attack. Zelenskii may very well forego a serious investigation
of the Maidan terrorist attack and a crackdown on the illegal armed formations and activity of
ultranationalists and neofascists like the National Corps and C14. A bridge too far for any
Ukrainian leader, given the weak state and powerful extremist element on the streets.
There are black swans on the horizon. One is Vladimir Putin. He 'welcomed' Zelenskii by
issuing a decree easing requirements for immigration to Russia and the receipt of Russian
passports and pension payments for residents in civil war-torn region of the separatist DNR and
LNR. In this way, he seemed to remind Zelenskii of Russia's now limited, albeit, direct
military presence in the war zone. He further signaled his intent to run a hard bargain by
refusing to congratulate Zelenskii on his presidential election victory unlike in 2014 when
Putin congratulated Poroshenko.
If Zelenskii sees himself as the spark or leader of a wave of color revolutions in the
former USSR, he will find the going with Russia tough, regardless of who the Russian president
is. Russians fear both revolution and foreign interference far more than they do Putin. More
importantly for Ukraine, such a stance will make a resolution of the Donbass conflict impossible.
Another black swan is that Ukraine now has a Jewish president. This is not evidence of the
absence of anti-Semitism, which is robust among Ukraine's substantial number of
ultranationalists and neofascists. Anti-semitism has been overshadowed by such radicals'
laser-like focus of their xenophobia on ethnic Russians.
The fact of a Jewish president -- in
addition to the present PM being Jewish -- poses the risk of an uptick in anti-Semitism and in
the appeal of the ultranationalist/neofascist message if Zelenskii fails to improve the
economy, cut corruption, and/or appears to be 'caving in' to Russian or Western demands to the
detriment of Ukraine's interests.
The Jewish president will be a prime scapegoat in the case of
such failure. These two dynamics – the inexperienced Zelenskii's possible failure and the
potential political repercussions of his Jewish roots -- could tip the scales in favor of the
ultranationalist wing of the Maidan-in-opposition and shape its calculus as to whether or not
to undertake a coup, repeating what worked once in February 2014.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
About the Author – Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is a Senior Researcher at the
Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group, San Jose, California,
www.cetisresearch.org ; an expert
analyst at Corr Analytics, http://www.canalyt.com ; and an analyst at Geostrategic
Forecasting Corporation (Chicago), www.geostrategicforecasting.com .
Dr. Hahn is the author of the four books, most recently Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia,
the West, and the 'New Cold War . Previously, he has authored three well-received books:
The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia's North Caucasus and Beyond
(McFarland Publishers, 2014), Russia's Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and
Russia's Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet
Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction Publishers, 2002). He also has published numerous
think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian
language media.
Dr. Hahn also has taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco
State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and
has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and the Hoover Institution.
"... Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization. Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies. ..."
The world is at a dangerous crossroads. The United States and its allies have launched a military adventure which threatens
the future of humanity. Major military and covert intelligence operations are being undertaken simultaneously in the Middle East,
Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia and the Far East. The US-NATO military agenda combines both major theater operations
as well as covert actions geared towards destabilizing sovereign states.
America's hegemonic project is to destabilize and destroy countries through acts of war, covert operations in support of terrorist
organizations, regime change and economic warfare. The latter includes the imposition of deadly macro-economic reforms on indebted
countries as well the manipulation of financial markets, the engineered collapse of national currencies, the privatization of State
property, the imposition of economic sanctions, the triggering of inflation and black markets.
The economic dimensions of this military agenda must be clearly understood. War and Globalization are intimately related. These
military and intelligence operations are implemented alongside a process of economic and political destabilization targeting specific
countries in all major regions of World.
Neoliberalism is an integral part of this foreign policy agenda. It constitutes an all encompassing mechanism of economic destabilization.
Since the 1997 Asian crisis, the IMF-World Bank structural adjustment program (SAP) has evolved towards a broader framework which
consists in ultimately undermining national governments' ability to formulate and implement national economic and social policies.
In turn, the demise of national sovereignty was also facilitated by the instatement of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995,
evolving towards the global trading agreements (TTIP and TPP) which (if adopted) would essentially transfer state policy entirely
into the hands of corporations. In recent years, neoliberalism has extend its grip from the so-called developing countries to the
developed countries of both Eastern and Western Europe. Bankruptcy programs have been set in motion. Island, Portugal, Greece, Ireland,
etc, have been the target of sweeping austerity measures coupled with the privatization of key sectors of the national economy.
The global economic crisis is intimately related to America's hegemonic agenda. In the US and the EU, a spiralling defense budget
backlashes on the civilian sectors of economic activity. "War is Good for Business": the powerful financial groups which routinely
manipulate stock markets, currency and commodity markets, are also promoting the continuation and escalation of the Middle East war.
A worldwide process of impoverishment is an integral part of the New World Order agenda.
Beyond the Globalization of Poverty
Historically, impoverishment of large sectors of the World population has been engineered through the imposition of IMF-style macro-economic
reforms. Yet, in the course of the last 15 years, a new destructive phase has been set in motion. The World has moved beyond the
"globalization of poverty": countries are transformed in open territories,
State institutions collapse, schools and hospitals are closed down, the legal system disintegrates, borders are redefined, broad
sectors of economic activity including agriculture and manufacturing are precipitated into bankruptcy, all of which ultimately leads
to a process of social collapse, exclusion and destruction of human life including the outbreak of famines, the displacement of entire
populations (refugee crisis).
This "second stage" goes beyond the process of impoverishment instigated in the early 1980s by creditors and international financial
institutions. In this regard, mass poverty resulting from macro-economic reform sets the stage of a process of outright destruction
of human life.
In turn, under conditions of widespread unemployment, the costs of labor in developing countries has plummeted. The driving force
of the global economy is luxury consumption and the weapons industry.
The New World Order
Broadly speaking, the main corporate actors of the New World Order are
Wall Street and the Western banking conglomerates including its offshore money laundering facilities, tax havens, hedge funds
and secret accounts,
the Military Industrial Complex regrouping major "defense contractors", security and mercenary companies, intelligence outfits,
on contract to the Pentagon;
the Anglo-American Oil and Energy Giants,
The Biotech Conglomerates, which increasingly control agriculture and the food chain;
Big Pharma,
The Communication Giants and Media conglomerates, which constitute the propaganda arm of the New World Order.
There is of course overlap, between Big Pharma and the Weapons industry, the oil conglomerates and Wall Street, etc.
These various corporate entities interact with government bodies, international financial institutions, US intelligence. The state
structure has evolved towards what Peter Dale Scott calls the "Deep State", integrated by covert intelligence bodies, think tanks,
secret councils and consultative bodies, where important New World Order decisions are ultimately reached on behalf of powerful corporate
interests.
In turn, intelligence operatives increasingly permeate the United Nations including its specialized agencies, nongovernmental
organizations, trade unions, political parties.
What this means is that the executive and legislature constitute a smokescreen, a mechanism for providing political legitimacy
to decisions taken by the corporate establishment behind closed doors.
Media Propaganda
The corporate media, which constitutes the propaganda arm of the New World Order, has a long history whereby intelligence ops
oversee the news chain. In turn, the corporate media serves the useful purpose of obfuscating war crimes, of presenting a humanitarian
narrative which upholds the legitimacy of politicians in high office.
Acts of war and economic destabilization are granted legitimacy. War is presented as a peace-keeping undertaking.
Both the global economy as well as the political fabric of Western capitalism have become criminalized. The judicial apparatus
at a national level as well the various international human rights tribunals and criminal courts serve the useful function of upholding
the legitimacy of US-NATO led wars and human rights violations.
Destabilizing Competing Poles of Capitalist Development
There are of course significant divisions and capitalist rivalry within the corporate establishment. In the post Cold War era,
the US hegemonic project consists in destabilizing competing poles of capitalist development including China, Russia and Iran as
well as countries such as India, Brazil and Argentina.
In recent developments, the US has also exerted pressure on the capitalist structures of the member states of the European Union.
Washington exerts influence in the election of heads of State including Germany and France, which are increasingly aligned with Washington.
The monetary dimensions are crucial. The international financial system established under Bretton Woods prevails. The global financial
apparatus is dollarized. The powers of money creation are used as a mechanism to appropriate real economy assets. Speculative financial
trade has become an instrument of enrichment at the expense of the real economy. Excess corporate profits and multibillion dollar
speculative earnings (deposited in tax free corporate charities) are also recycled towards the corporate control of politicians,
civil society organizations, not to mention scientists and intellectuals. It's called corruption, co-optation, fraud.
Latin America: The Transition towards a "Democratic Dictatorship"
In Latin America, the military dictatorships of the 1960s and 1970s have in large part been replaced by US proxy regimes, i.e.
a democratic dictatorship has been installed which ensures continuity. At the same time the ruling elites in Latin America have remoulded.
They have become increasingly integrated into the logic of global capitalism, requiring an acceptance of the US hegemonic project.
Macro-economic reform has been conducive to the impoverishment of the entire Latin America region.
In the course of the last 40 years, impoverishment has been triggered by hyperinflation, starting with the 1973 military coup
in Chile and the devastating reforms of the 1980s and early 1990s.
The implementation of these deadly economic reforms including sweeping privatization, trade deregulation, etc. is coordinated
in liaison with US intelligence ops, including the "Dirty war" and Operation Condor, the Contra insurrection in Nicaragua, etc.
The development of a new and privileged elite integrated into the structures of Western investment and consumerism has emerged.
Regime change has been launched against a number of Latin American countries.
Any attempt to introduce reforms which departs from the neoliberal consensus is the object of "dirty tricks" including acts of
infiltration, smear campaigns, political assassinations, interference in national elections and covert operations to foment social
divisions. This process inevitably requires corruption and cooptation at the highest levels of government as well as within the corporate
and financial establishment. In some countries of the region it hinges on the criminalization of the state, the legitimacy of money
laundering and the protection of the drug trade.
The above text is an English summary of Prof. Michel Chossudovsky's Presentation, National Autonomous University of Nicaragua,
May 17, 2016. This presentation took place following the granting of a Doctor Honoris Causa in Humanities to Professor Chossudovsky
by the National Autonomous University of Nicaragua (UNAN)
Villains of the day: Random Guy, Pompeo, and nefarious band of willie, barovsky etc.
Pompeo is perhaps green with envy, why Boris Johnson should keep the mantle of the most
clownish top diplomat of a major state? He can do better! But once the tall tale was said, it
was duly echoed in supine media. NYT made a paragraph, and actually noted how Pompeo
explained his alleged knowledge of Maduro preparing for departure: >>Pressed about the
source of this information, Mr. Pompeo said it was drawn from "open-source material," and
conversations with "scores and scores of people on the ground," including members of the
military and opposition leaders. "He was headed for Havana," he said of Mr. Maduro.<<
The Guardian made a separate article on the topic, with no notes of caution, damn the
torpedoes, copy with full speed!
So "people on the ground" could have reliable, ha ha, info on the conversations between
Maduro and "Russians". "Scores of people" were interviewed, hm., seems that the wily Maduro
eschew a usual step of information blockade, letting the little golpistas -- and him -- look
silly. I actually do not believe in those "scores of interviews", Most generously, there were
that many conversations from which his people could "draw" a rumor prepared ahead of time,
probably by his own Department.
Finally, the nefarious long linkers. Is it really THAT hard to learn how to make neat
links this
one ? Join lines and remove all spaces from the text below
"... The Empire is not weak, this is poor analysis. India and Europe stopped buying Iranian oil. 1 billion $ of Iranian oil stays blocked in China, no one wants to touch it. Even Khamenei admitted that Europe left the JCPOA in practice. ..."
"... Iran is in deep recession. Venezuela is in deep recession and is surrounded. ..."
"... Iraq? US troops are staying there. Syria? US troops are staying there long term. 1 third of the country containing the biggest oil fields is under US control. There is fuel shortage crisis due to sanctions. Europe is not stopping its sanctions either. ..."
"The Empire only appears to be strong. In reality it is weak, confused, clueless"
The Empire is not weak, this is poor analysis. India and Europe stopped buying Iranian oil. 1 billion $ of Iranian oil stays blocked in
China, no one wants to touch it. Even Khamenei admitted that Europe left the JCPOA in
practice.
Iran is in deep recession. Venezuela is in deep recession and is surrounded. Almost
all of Latin America now has pro-US governments. CIA linked Bolsonaro took over in Brazil.
Turkey is in deep recession and Erdogan lost the big cities.
India is moving closer to the US. Europe remains a vassal. Russian economic growth is
weak. The US won the trade war against China as Andrei Martyanov himself admitted.
Iraq? US troops are staying there. Syria? US troops are staying there long term. 1 third
of the country containing the biggest oil fields is under US control. There is fuel shortage
crisis due to sanctions. Europe is not stopping its sanctions either.
There is no doubt that they will be weaker in the future, but they will fight hard to stop
this and gain time.
The Following text is Section 6 of The 70 Years of NATO: From War to War,
by the Italian Committee No War No NATO
*
Documentation presented at the International Conference on the 70th Anniversary of NATO,
Florence, April 7, 2019
In the course of the next two weeks, Global Research will publish the 16 sections of this
important document, which will also be available as an E-book.
*
Contents
1. NATO is born from the Bomb
2. In the post-Cold War, NATO is renewed
3. NATO demolishes the Yugoslav state
4. NATO expands eastward to Russia
5. US and NATO attack Afghanistan and Iraq
6. NATO demolishes the Libyan state
7. The US/NATO war to demolish Syria
8. Israel and the Emirates in NATO
9. The US/NATO orchestration of the coup in Ukraine
10. US/NATO escalation in Europe
11. Italy, the aircraft carrier on the war front
12. US and NATO reject the UN treaty and deploy new nuclear weapons in Europe
13. US and NATO sink the INF Treaty
14. The Western American Empire plays the war card
15. The US/NATO planetary war system
16. Exiting the war system of NATO
***
1. Multiple factors make Libya important in the eyes of the United States and the European
powers. It has the largest oil reserves in Africa, precious for its high quality and low cost
of extraction, and large reserves of natural gas. On these, the Libyan state maintains strong
control, leaving limited profit margins to US and European companies. In addition to black
gold, Libya has white gold: the immense reserve of fossil water from the Nubian aquifer, which
extends under Libya, Egypt, Sudan and Chad. Relevant are the sovereign funds, the capital that
the Libyan state has invested abroad, in particular to provide Africa with its own financial
bodies and its own currency.
2. On the eve of the 2011 war, the United States and the European powers "froze", or seized,
the Libyan sovereign funds, delivering a mortal blow to the entire project. The emails of
Hillary Clinton (Secretary of State of the Obama administration in 2011), which came to light
later, confirmed the real purpose of the war: to block Gaddafi's plan to use Libyan sovereign
funds to create autonomous financial bodies of the African Union and an African currency as an
alternative to the dollar and the CFA franc (the currency that 14 African countries, ex-French
colonies are forced to use). It was Clinton – the New York Times would later document
– who had President Obama sign "a document authorizing a covert operation in Libya and
the supply of weapons to the rebels".
3. Tribal sectors hostile to the government of Tripoli and Islamic groups that had until a
few months before been defined as terrorists were financed and armed. At the same time special
forces infiltrated Libya, including thousands of easily disguised Qatari commandos. The entire
operation was led by the United States, first through the African Command, then through NATO
under US command.
4. On 19 March 2011, Libya's air-sea bombing began. In seven months, US/NATO air forces
carried out 30,000 missions, of which 10,000 were attacks involving the use of over 40,000
bombs and missiles. Italy participated in this war using its military bases and forces and
tearing up the Treaty of Friendship, Partnership and Cooperation between the two countries. For
the war on Libya, Italy made seven air bases (Trapani, Gioia del Colle, Sigonella, Decimomannu,
Aviano, Amendola and Pantelleria) available to the US/NATO forces, providing technical
assistance and supplies. The Italian Air Force participated in the war by carrying out over a
thousand missions, and the Italian Navy engaged on several fronts.
5. With the US/NATO war of 2011, the Libyan state was demolished and Gaddafi himself
assassinated. That State was demolished which, on the southern shore of the Mediterranean
facing Italy, maintained "high levels of economic growth" (as the World Bank itself documented
in 2010), recording "high indicators of human development" including universal access to
primary and secondary education with 46% of the population at university level. Despite the
disparities, the standard of living of the Libyan population was considerably higher than that
of other African countries. This was evidenced by the fact that over two million immigrants,
mostly Africans, found work in Libya.
6. Sub-Saharan African immigrants were also affected by the war, who, persecuted on charges
of collaborating with Gaddafi, were imprisoned or forced to flee. Many, driven by desperation,
attempted the crossing of the Mediterranean towards Europe. Those who lost their lives were
also victims of the war in which NATO demolished the Libyan state.
*
Sections 7-16 of the 70 Years of NATO, From War to War, forthcoming on Global Research
This text was translated from the Italian document which was distributed to participants at
the April 7 Conference. It does not include sources and references.
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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This distant relative on Nikita Krushchev is a despicable and clueless neocon. She does not even understand that under
Poroshenko the standard of living of population dropped more then twice and changes for heating role more then 5 times.
Notable quotes:
"... Zelensky is far from the first charismatic non-politician to win political power in recent years. The most obvious example is the real-estate developer and reality-TV showman Donald Trump. ..."
"... Most Ukrainians now support radical changes to economic, social, and foreign policy. ..."
Ukraine Sends in the Clown Apr 30, 2019
Nina L. Khrushcheva Most Ukrainian voters
arguably know that the comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, whose only claim to fame up to now was playing a teacher-turned-president in
a popular TV series, will not be the real-life president of their dreams. So why did nearly three-quarters of them back him?
KYIV – In the 2000s, The West Wing was everybody's favorite television show about an aspirational US administration – one
that fought terrorism without waging war on an entire region or religion, refused to trample on the rule of law, and generally made
decisions that were in the country's best interest. Many wished the show's calm and collected fictional president, played by Martin
Sheen, could replace America's cowboy president, George W. Bush, and his war-mongering sidekick, Dick Cheney.
In a sense, that is exactly what is happening now in Ukraine. The comedian Volodymyr Zelensky, whose only claim to fame up to
now was playing a teacher-turned-president in the popular TV series Servant of the People , won the presidency in a landslide
earlier this month. But, far from the fantasy of an idealized president, this is yet another example of a distorted reality – all
too familiar to Ukrainians – in which characters, not leaders, define politics.
Zelensky is far from the first charismatic non-politician to win political power in recent years. The most obvious example is
the real-estate developer and reality-TV showman Donald Trump. But in Austria, Hungary, Italy, Russia, and elsewhere, characters
have also used populist rhetoric to appeal to ordinary people who feel ignored by the elites. Another comedian, Beppe Grillo, co-founded
Italy's Five Star Movement, which is now the senior government party, though he stepped aside in January 2018, weeks before the election
that brought his creation to power.
There are nuances to this trend. After Trump won the 2016 presidential election in the United States, I
recalled Brave New World , in which Aldous Huxley conjured a future in which humanity had been destroyed by ignorance
and lust for mindless entertainment. Trump, feasting on burgers as he binge-watches Fox News stories about himself, embodies this
disposition.
Whereas a combination of too much amusement and too little knowledge contributed to Americans' choice of Trump, Ukrainians were
reacting to politicians' betrayal of the ideals of the 2013-14 Maidan Square protests, which sought to get Ukraine out from underneath
Russia's thumb. Chief among the turncoats was President Petro Poroshenko, a Maidan hero who ended up as a manifestation of the old
oligarchic system. Most Ukrainians now support radical
changes to economic, social, and foreign policy.
Thus, with nothing but an appealing TV persona, Zelensky was able to convince voters that his inexperience would be a better bet
than another term of Poroshenko's corrupt leadership. Despite having no political team or discernable policy platform, he won 73%
of the vote – a share normally attained by authoritarians
who stifle their opponents and stuff ballot boxes.
... ... ...
Another Ukrainian friend, a middle-aged scientist, observed that Zelensky's most direct antecedent may be Andriy Danylko – Ukraine's
best-known entertainer, a musical comedian who performs in drag under the stage name Verka Serduchka. In 2007, Danylko tried, unsuccessfully,
to form his own political party.
According to this friend, Ukrainians' embrace of Zelensky was driven by the same revolutionary urge that fueled the protests in
2004 and 2013-14. While the pro-Western Tymoshenko would have delivered the change that Ukrainians want, he explained, this year
voters wanted even more to reject the existing system entirely. The fact that Trump is presiding over a booming US economy only strengthened
their willingness to gamble on a TV character.
But even Zelensky may not be the rebellious choice he seems to be. Some have questioned his relationships with oligarchs – in
particular Igor Kolomoisky, the owner of the TV channel that broadcasts his show. Many suggest that Kolomoisky effectively bought
the election so that he himself could rule Ukraine from behind the scenes....
... ... ...
Ukraine is a symptom, not a specimen. In a world that increasingly resembles Huxley's dystopia...
"... It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables. ..."
"... The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same way. ..."
"... {A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result of their personality or experience} ? ..."
"... They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism. In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the evidence - or at least they can make that claim. ..."
"... So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going. ..."
"... we're talking 1 and a half million dead so far in Iraq and Afghanistan...and that's being conservative. ..."
"... Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the Empire will be obliged to come in and "help". ..."
"... I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince targets. ..."
"... Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud. ..."
"... Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot. ..."
"... Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video." ..."
"... A history of Wahhabism which is a problem for the globe; https://ahtribune.com/religion/155-a-history-of-wahhabism.html The KSA, whose ass the empire kisses daily, is the main funder for these clowns. ..."
What's the Wonder my dear?
Duh!
He is in CIA safe house in Al-Anbar.
ISI is looking for this CIA's "Patsy" hide out. Watch this space, he has blood of 14
Pakistani soldiers on his hands via Iran hit. We will end this MOSSAD Agent.
The one hundred thousand people that died in Iraq and Afghanistan due to terrorist
activities would certainly agree that the trillions of dollars that have been spent on the
War on Terror has done very little to remove the spectre of terrorist activities from their
homes, cities and nations.
Sally Snyder: The war on terror is a war of terror and in that sense, though morally
reprehensible and costly, has been success. Regime change and the destabilization of the
Middle East has been the goal.
It's the US ruling elite that are the true deplorables.
War on terror was the war on an entire civilization. Association/Replacement of the word
terror was just for the public consumption. It's a simple strategy that makes the
aggressors appear like the good guys who are there to defend themselves or the values they
hold.
The war on civilization is never a failure for as long as the invader wins. Winning in
this case means toppling a government, destabilizing an economy and dividing a population
then leaving a country in chaos. It's not a foreign policy failure for the U.S. That is the
policy working exactly as intended. All the talk later, where they claim that they had "bad
intel" or they "made mistakes" or "miscalculated" is complete bullshit. They know what
they're doing. If they didn't, they wouldn't keep doing it over and over in the exact same
way.
War on the civilizations yields massive benefits. It's the shortcoming of the model of
the western civilization that it continuously requires massive input that can't be achieved
by the legal means of business and trade.
Auntie Gina the tit ular head of Al-CIA-duh/ Al Qaeda/ ISIS?
{A titular ruler, or titular head, is a person in an official position of leadership
who possesses few, if any, actual powers. Sometimes a person may inhabit a position of
titular leadership and yet exercise more power than would normally be expected, as a result
of their personality or experience} ?
They'd follow the money if they really wanted to end the terrorism.
In that regard, bombing Raqqa to hell was sure convenient as USA destroyed all the
evidence - or at least they can make that claim.
So he gets trotted out just in time to revive the "ISIS threat", and take the blame for
various recent funny-smelling terrist attacks, people going to odd places like New Zealand
and Sri Lanka to vent their spleens at Muslims and Christians, respectively. I have
half-a-suspicion somebody is trying to get a religious war of some sort going.
They don't seem to be having that much success with getting that war going, so I expect
the attacks will go on.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, self declared caliph of ISIS, appeared in new video
published today.
Where? Where was it published? On what platform? Is it really that hard to trace the
IPs? Turkey is really determined to get those S-400s. The Empire first threatened to withhold
F-35s, then to impose sanctions, then to expel Turkey from NATO, then to move its bases to
Greece. Still, Turkey wouldn't budge. Time to deploy some good old terrorism, so that the
Empire will be obliged to come in and "help".
I have long believed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi actually is associated either with Moss ad
or the CIA. That's why he's had so many miracle escapes. That's why they never catch him and often don't even know where he is. And we know that his ISIS never, never attacks Israeli targets or fat Saudi Prince
targets.
Those would in fact be the targets of choice for any genuine jihad movement. Not Syria
or Iraq, which are two states Israel has wanted to harm or eliminate for years. ISIS has always been a fraud, a very complex and deadly one, but a fraud.
Many years ago, even before this character posed as a "Syrian rebel" who was photographed
meeting with John McCain, he was outed as a Mossad agent by the name of Simon Elliot.
The guy in recent picture looks like one of Rita Katz's actors.
It is a show to threaten Turkey with the same as Sri Lanka (where they refine lots of
Iranian crude...and more...look it up). Many ties to Iran/Sri Lanka....and to Turkey.
Typical nazi thugs....bribes, arson, dynamite...and patsies...in this case maybe mossad
actor? Why not> Cui Bono?
As to the locus of the actor? Paramount? Warner Bros? Probably not. Does it matter?
They're parading a ringer...don't fall for the gag. Erdo won't fall for it either.
Baghdadi has nice toys by his side and not just the AK-47 with the camo bit over the
barrel. It looks like a camo case on night vision gear (or vidcam?) just below that, too.
To quote the Joker: "Where does he get those wonderful toys?"
Ahh a new game of "where in the world is ..." except instead of bin Laden (or his
stand-in) the guest in Pakistan living near a military base we have Baghdadi. Maybe
Baghdadi lives in that area, too. (awaiting his execution for the media and masses). I
doubt it though. I'm thinking Turkey or even Saudi Arabia.
... This move by Baghdadi could backfire in a big way. Got my popcorn ready. Posted by: Jackrabbit | Apr 29, 2019 5:06:26 PM | 19
It does seem unnecessarily cheeky/ fishy.
If 'they' had fiendishly brilliant plan, why wouldn't they'd just do it and leave it to the
intel wonks to figure out what went wrong?
It's big news in the J-C International media.
Al Jazeera "can't confirm the authenticity of the video."
"... Promotion of myths about rich natural resources in the territory, where the ethnic group lives ..."
"... In large, this situation has become possible due to a de-facto inaction of or even unofficial ideological protection from authorities. If one takes a detailed look at the Russian elite, he will find that a significant part of it consists of westernized adherers to "liberal democratic order" while another consists of representatives of national family clans. ..."
"... Many of these persons do not associate themselves with the ordinary population and consider the territory of Russia only as a source to increase their personal wealth. ..."
Bugajski's ideas are not new at all. Globalist think tanks have been advancing the same for
decades.
Mud-slinging in order to undermine Russian statehood aims at fueling radicalism, nationalism
and regionalism. It has the wave-like behavior. The previous wave top targeted pretty much the
same regions: the North Caucasus, Middle Volga, Siberia and the Far East. Tricks and methods
employed are not divers. The only difference between them is geographical location and names of
the influenced ethnic groups.
These approaches could be provisionally marked as the "Polish style". This term has no links
to modern Poland. We employ it only because the approaches provided below, except for the first
point, Poland really has a great written history, are quite similar to the ones that were first
used to fuel Polish nationalism in the 19 th and 20 th centuries and
applied to the same geopolitical area.
The main ideas of this model are:
Creation of a pseudo-history of a nation or ethnic
group. Usually this pseudo-history is dated back to the ancient world and legendary times. This
"history" is based on pseudo-historical works and research papers composed by authors unknown
to the world academic community. Promotion of ideas of exceptionalism among members of the
nation or ethnic group. These ideas argue that the nation or ethnic group is superior to
neighbors and instigate a grotesque sense of national identity (exceptionalism based on
ethnicity). Creation of the myth of a historical archenemy, who has been oppressing the nation
or ethnic group, often attempting to eliminate its "exceptional" culture. This historical
archenemy is described as the reason for the group's undoing and thus its poor state in the
modern world. The historical archenemy can be constructed from various states existing in
different periods of history but, through which a historical succession or links can be traced.
For example, the Golden Horde, the Moscow state, the Russian Empire, the USSR and the Russian
Federation. The myth is actively fueled by speculation regarding historical events, which can
neither be confirmed nor denied using factual data. Creation and promotion of the idea of the
nation as once great but now defective, where this position of greatness had been stolen from
it. Instigation of religious or intra-religious tensions, if the nation or ethnic group has a
similar religion to that of its neighbors. The main approaches employed are:
Promotion and
creation of religious cults, including heathen customs, which are allegedly linked to the
"ancient history" of the nation or ethnic group;
Promotion of discords or sectarianism within
the main religion of the nation. For example, for Orthodox Christianity: the Old Believers or Schismatical cults; for Islam: Sunni sects or Shia branches;
Instigation of religions tensions
between the religion of the ethnic group and other religions of the state. For example:
Islam/Christianity or Orthodox Christianity/Catholicism.
Promotion of myths about rich natural
resources in the territory, where the ethnic group lives. Therefore, if this ethnic group were
to rule this area "independently", its wealth would grow and grow. A part of this effort is
propaganda against government actions concerning the use of natural resources from the
territory, where this ethnic group lives. The negative impact on the ecological situation is nightmarized by dissemination of myths about the barbaric exploitation of nature. A vivid
example is the disseminated information about the alleged irreparable damage to Lake Baikal
that is harmed by the plant producing bottled mineral water.
Instigation of territorial and
intraregional economic disputes between the neighboring nations or ethnic groups.
Discredit of
everything linked with the dominating state culture, language and history. For example, bashing
everything "Russian", the creation and promotion of offensive language and terms (Russian
– Vatnik), a wide spread of derogatory language and the mutilation of words, terms and
names.
The previous wave of information onslaught on nations and ethnic groups of Russia was aimed
at the following targets:
The Northern Caucasus. The influence was mostly aimed at the Kabardians living in the
Kabardino-Balkar Republic, the Karachay-Cherkess Republic, Stavropol Krai and the Republic of
Adygea. The Ossetians in the Republic of North Ossetia – Alania were also targeted.
Recently the Ingushs living in the Republic of Ingushetia, Moscow and St. Petersburg were again
considered as a priority goal in "the Northern Caucasus target list".
The Southern Federal District. The main effort was to instigate nationalism, regionalism and
separatism among the Cossacks, mostly in Rostov Oblast. The Cossacks are not an ethnic group.
However, they are a large social group, which makes them a likely target.
The Northwestern Federal District. The goal was to instigate regional nationalism among
Finno-Ugric ethnic groups. Another point of pressure was to create nationalism tendencies among
ethnic Russian population in the Republic of Karelia and Arkhangelsk Oblast in order to form a
new large ethnosocial group. For example, in April, the city of Arkhangelsk experienced a
series of rallies held in breach of law. This situation happened under the passive eye of
regional authorities. Furthermore, initial reactions and attitude of the regional authorities
played a notable role in fueling the protest moods. These protests, caused by a project of
landfill site in the nearby area, is being actively exploited by the so-called non-system
opposition and "liberal media" to fuel tensions between the different groups of local
population as well as the regional government.
Separate efforts were contributed to influence the population of Saint Petersburg, which in
terms of culture is one of the most westernized city of Russia alongside with Kaliningrad.
There was also an attempt to instigate local separatism using the concept of Ingermanland.
The Volga region. Ethnic nationalism and religious radicalism were instigated among the Kalmyks, Bashkirs and Tatars. Small ethnic groups and nations, often described as Russians: the
Mokshas and Erzyas also became the target of foreign influence. Among small ethnic groups and
nations, local nationalism can take ugly forms.
Western Siberia. The goal was to create a separate ethnic-social group describing itself as
the citizens of Siberia and separating itself from the rest of Russian citizens. The main
targets were the Altai Republic, Novosibirsk Oblast and the city of Novosibirsk (the capital of
the Siberian Federal District). The foreign influence achieved notable successes in these
areas.
Eastern Siberia. The campaign in this region was aimed mostly at Buryats and Tuvans. Yakuts
were also a target.
The Far East. Local regionalism and separatism were actively fueled in Khabarovsk Krai and
Primorsky Krai, especially in the cities of Khabarovsk and Vladivostok. Besides this, the
foreign influence is actively exploiting simultaneously both pro-Chinese intentions and the
myth of the Chinese threat.
It should be noted that the article "Managing Russia's dissolution" published by The
Hill points to the same regions for further operations designed to dismantle Russia. These
operations will be more dangerous than the previous ones because they will exploit the
successes already achieved in some fields. For example:
the nationalism and religion issues
in the North Caucasus; the nationalism of ethnic groups in the Volga region – Bashkirs,
Tatars, Erzyas, Moshkas; the nationalism and regionalism of Buryats in eastern Siberia. the
creation of a new separate pro-western identity by a good part of the people living in the
cities of Saint Petersburg and Kaliningrad, that distance itself from the rest of Russia; the
creation of a separate ethnic-social identity in Western Siberia:
The regions have been targeted by multiple campaigns undermining and discrediting nationwide
traditions and behaviors, for example the New Year traditional family holidays, social events
of Soviet or Old Russian origin as well as common history of Russia. Individualism, neoliberal
attitudes and values are successfully promoted in Saint Petersburg, Kaliningrad and Western
Siberia. Education is simplified and westernized. Meanwhile stakeholders describe these
tendencies as ugly and hostile examples to residents of the North Caucasus, southern Russia and
other regions, promoted ultra-hardline or far right ideology. Local regionalism and ideology
tensions are being successfully fueled.
In large, this situation has become possible due to a de-facto inaction of or even
unofficial ideological protection from authorities. If one takes a detailed look at the Russian
elite, he will find that a significant part of it consists of westernized adherers to "liberal
democratic order" while another consists of representatives of national family clans.
Many of
these persons do not associate themselves with the ordinary population and consider the
territory of Russia only as a source to increase their personal wealth.
The term "new
aristocracy", which has recently got spread in Russian media, has initially appeared as a proud
self-designation among Russian elite families emphasizing exceptionality of their members.
Nonetheless, supporters of Bugajski ideas do not consider the aforementioned tendencies as
sufficient for dismantling Russian statehood without additional strivings. While on the
regional level they have achieved some results, the identified nationwide goals have not been
accomplished. The system of Russia has not yet come close to an imbalance, that is, to the
condition where destructive trends are already beginning to grow on their own, without
additional artificial influence.
The negative tendencies so far set in motion could still be
stopped and reversed. In this situation, we may expect a new wave of information onslaught
toward Russia, traditionally backed by Western funds.
This is pure projection.
All the faults and failings and problems listed apply far more to the United Snakes and EU
than to Russia.
There is a remarkable continuity in western aggression towards Russia from Hitler till the
present day.
Carve up Russia into artificial mini states and loot its resources.
Bismarck used to say, Russia is not as strong as it seems. But it's not as weak as it seems
either.
People point to the discrepancy in GDP and military spending. US v. Russia $21 trillion and
$1.6 trillion, and $1,134 billion and $49 billion respectively.
That's true so far as it goes, but money buys 3 x as much in Russia. So that 1.6 figure is
more like 4 plus, or around the size of the German economy.
Then there is the artificial dollar yardstick. The US organized a speculative attack on the
rouble, driving it down from 30 to 80 to the dollar. So in dollar terms, the economy was
reduced to less than half its previous size. But they were producing just as many cars and
just as much oil and wheat as before. Exports were cheaper. The rouble was allowed to float
back to around 55. Gold and foreign currency reserves were not wasted defending it, as
Washington wanted. There was a great boost in domestic production. America can bankrupt
itself with its endless wars and bloated inefficient war machine if it wants.
And if you look at the US economy, 40% is unproductive, rent seeking finance, Wall Street
spivs pushing around worthless derivatives toilet paper and pretending it is worth trillions.
Or the bloated rent seeking of the drug and insurance companies, 17% of the economy, charging
$5,000 per hospital journey and $750 for a pill that costs a few cents to produce. So much
else is accounted for by the military boondoggles.
When you take that into account, the figures are more like 8 trillion v. 4 trillion.
So much US wealth is eaten up by the gargantuan level of graft and corruption.
It is the US and EU that are at far greater risk of collapse – maybe a lot sooner than
anyone realises.
Anti Russian policies really took off in the 1780's when Catherine the Great was moving South
(including taking Crimea). The British saw Russia as a threat to its business empire in India
and possibly replacing parts of the Ottoman Empire if that was to finally crumble. The icing
on the cake for the Russophobes came with Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. Russian soldiers
bedded down on Parisian streets in 1814 got the paranoid juices flowing, from that time on
the narrative has been that Russia is expanding aggressively and intends to dominate Europe
while destroying European colonies in Asia.
The Revolution just increased Western paranoia;
Russia was no longer just Russia but a Communist State and one immensely stronger with the
formation of the USSR. When the Union collapsed and Russia was suddenly so much smaller and
less powerful it was no surprise that plans developed to finally divide it up while hostility
continues unabated.
It's almost as if the West needs the threat but not the war. In 250 years
Britain has only once attacked Russia head on, during the French, Turkish, British attempt to
seize Crimea in the 1850's. Although Sevastopol was destroyed the Allied forces had to
withdraw.
Usually Britain has fought with Russia, against Napoleon and then the Germans in both World Wars.
In global terms , Russia is particularly stable but, for reasons best known to itself –
is risking global contagion due to its own neoliberal ideology (see below: reply to TTIC).
Other than that, it is the whole integrated system that is susceptibly fragile to contagion.
Russia and America are separated only by discourse – as revealed by capital flows.
And
the epicentre of debt inertia could just as easily be the East – centred on China. For
the precise reason that China built its way out of GFC 1.0. It won't build its way out of GFC
2.0 – which is likely to be many times the magnitude of the first one due to the debt
hangover. We will discover what moral hazard and contagion really mean this time. And there
will be no easy restart – negative interest rates and massive credit stimulus to
reinflate the "mother of all bubbles'?
There are so many contradictions and fragilities, that predicting the where and when is a
mugs game. But neither will there be any morality or false karmic retribution to it. The
deliberately impoverished poor, sucked dry of their life essence by BOTH America and Russia
(and Britain and China – see below) will suffer the most. The best thing humanity could
do is reject as ecologically and evolutionarily redundant the entire hierarchical tributary
system of globalised debt and death.
Entropically and ecologically, we can't afford it any
more. But, psychologically, we probably won't. Some people seem to like it too much. They are
not all American or European though. Even in their home countries – humanity has been
left behind.
The M$M lies: everyone knows its main purpose is para-state political propaganda – the
integrated Fourth Estate. But it does not lie without purpose – there is the
Herman/Chomsky model of controlling consent and consensus in the debatable public forum of
acceptable discourse the Overton Window that focuses on the liberal democratic 'extreme
centre'. It creates the spectacle of electoral politics – including Brexit and its
transatlantic equivalent 'Obstructiongate'. This political 'bread and circuses' spectacle is
extended into the fantasy imaginal of East/West geopolitcs. So is there intracapitalist
inter-relational tensions and contradictions between East and West? Of course, ones that
might get us all killed if they develop. But it also obscures what is happening beneath the
radar – within and without the trained and political propaganda focused microscope
– which is an International World Capitalism that is killing us all softly while our
gaze is averted and focused on simulated and superficial spectacle elsewhere.
After the other day, I thought I better wind my neck in and do some actual research into
international loans and FDI. There is plenty, if anyone wants to substantiate what I have
said – there is no East and West to International World Capitalism (IWC). This should
be obvious, but it isn't because the focus is on the ripples – sometimes large –
on the surface of the pond. IWC works below the surface as integrated flows and counter-flows
– round-tripping for treaty, tax, and money-laudering of illicit flows purposes. All of
this is deregulated – and occurs 'elsewhere' beneath the public radar, and beneath the
created spectacle that is deliberately narratively constructed to conceal it.
Nick Shaxson is a prime source, and one of the few journalists that cover the 'spiders
web'. A web that is still centred on the City of London Corporation – that controls 25%
of world trade. The other main centres are NY and Switzerland (Zurich – the BIS is
'elsewhere' to). Analysis of actual capital flows is not easy – deliberately so, as it
is deliberately made to conceal the capital origination and through a series of accounting
measures – make it look as it originated 'elsewhere'. But what analysis is available
consolidates Wallerstein's World Systems Theory of a core, semi-periphery, and deliberately
pauperised periphery.
Like it or not, (and downvotes won't change anything), it also shows that the 'network
core' is the aforementioned ZUSUK ('Z' for Zurich) extended alliance of 'Pax Americana' and
the City's post-colonial 'British Empire' – supported by a sub-imperial semi-periphery
of the 'Eastern Block' and 'Greater China' as this paper shows.
So my unpopular proposal is that IWC is a parasitical hierarchical tributary system based
on interest bearing debt, and Compounded Annual Rates of Growth (CAGR) that are are drawing
the entire world into a deflationary death spiral. ZUSUK is the imperialist network core:
with Russia/China as the sub-imperial, semi-periphery – drawing on the rest of the
world. One that costs the poorest countries $1.2tn pa (in 2008). It is not a dynamic that
anyone can do anything about, particularly when it is deliberately kept as a stealth dynamic
– below the public radar. You can thank the media for that. But then, that's their job.
Our job is to expose the lies and the underlying dynamics of death. It is globalised and
integrated – and arranged hierarchically – not hemispherically. There is no East
and West to capitalism not beneath the surface.
As Wallerstein has said: to understand World Systems – you have to forget what we
have been inculcated with about the nation-state. We do not live in that regulated space
anymore. The real world was deregulated for capital decades ago – though the neoliberal
restructuring is ongoing. As soon as humanity realises that the teleology for capital
accumulation is not an Ecological Civilisation – but deregulated Global Governance it
may be able to consolidate the considerable anti-globalisation pushback growing in every
country. Maybe, if and when we stop pretending the East has a capitalised Eco-Shangri-La
rising. That, I'm afraid is capitalist propaganda.
"... Deputy Chief Anton Hrushetskiy reported findings of 2004 respondents to the question "Which of the following should the president do in the first 100 days?" ..."
"... The list is meaningfully desperate and vengeful against state officials: a touch under 40% wish a slash in utility rates; 35.5% demand a removal of immunity for lawmakers, judges and the president; 32.4% wish for an opening of investigations and a speeding up of current ones into corruption-related crimes and abuses; 23.3% hope for commencing talks with Russia; 18.4% demand a reduction of wages of top officials. All this stands to reason: Zelenskiy offers something others have not: a tabula rasa upon which voters can impose their vision. In contrast, Poroshenko, candy billionaire with an acid aftertaste, offered the usual cluttering: Army, language, faith. ..."
"... Poroshenko offered an ideal target: divisive, army hugging entho-nationalist, with an anti-Russian fixation ..."
"... In the words of head spokesperson at Zelinskiy's election headquarters, Dmitry Razumkov, "The return of the occupied territories of the Donbass and Crimea must proceed exclusively on Ukraine's terms. Russia, as always, is trying to turn everything on its head and do everything backwards – by holding elections first." ..."
"... The stage in Ukraine has been going to seed for some years, manuring away in decay and poverty, bleeding in the Donbass region and plundered by self-enriching elites. ..."
"... For one, parliamentary elections are due in October, leaving the virgin premier with six months of potential obstruction. Poroshenko, for his part, promises to be a vulture in the galley, awaiting any slipups: "I am leaving office, but I want to firmly underline that I am not leaving politics." ..."
Hope is often a devalued currency, but its vigorous circulation can be gathered in the
measurements of public opinion by the Kyiv-based International Institute of Sociology (KIIS)
conducted this month. Deputy Chief Anton Hrushetskiy reported
findings of 2004 respondents to the question "Which of the following should the president
do in the first 100 days?"
The list is meaningfully desperate and vengeful against state officials: a touch under 40%
wish a slash in utility rates; 35.5% demand a removal of immunity for lawmakers, judges and the
president; 32.4% wish for an opening of investigations and a speeding up of current ones into
corruption-related crimes and abuses; 23.3% hope for commencing talks with Russia; 18.4% demand
a reduction of wages of top officials. All this stands to reason: Zelenskiy offers something
others have not: a tabula rasa upon which voters can impose their vision. In contrast,
Poroshenko, candy billionaire with an acid aftertaste, offered the usual cluttering: Army,
language, faith.
The broom for cleaning is being readied. Remarks had been made, some floated from the
quarters of Poroshenko, that the new administration would include elements of the old regime.
Former Finance Minister and advisor to Zelenskiy, Oleksandr Danyliuk, was
adamant on Ukraine's ICTV this would not be the case: "Regarding the comment that Volodymyr
Zelenskiy's new team will include old staff of the Presidential Administration, the Cabinet of
Ministers I'd like to say this is absolutely not true, this is one of the fake news and
bogeyman stories that your [Petro Poroshenko's] headquarters is spreading."
Political regulars and strategists have brought out their calculators and have been left
wanting. Moscow, along with other readers of political entrails, did not see this victory in
the offing. Poroshenko offered an ideal target: divisive, army hugging entho-nationalist, with
an anti-Russian fixation. He could therefore be, over time, worn down, his country packaged as
resoundingly anti-Semitic, fascist and hateful of the Soviet Union's exploits against Nazi
Germany.
Preference would have been for Yuriy Boyko, backed by the pro-Russian Viktor Medvedchuk.
The results did give their party 16% of the vote, making them second behind Zelenskiy's Servant
of the People, which received 26%. Not quite happy days, but perhaps less anxious ones.
From what can be gathered from the new president, some measure of rapprochement towards
their fraternal, giant neighbour might be in the offing, even if accompanied by what he terms
"a very powerful information war" to end the eastern conflict. Baby steps include lifting
restrictions on the use of Russian in the country, which would also entail an end to blocking
cultural exchanges and restrictions on accessing Russian social media networks. But to perceive
a total change on that front would be to wonder in the realms of fantasy. In the
words of head spokesperson at Zelinskiy's election headquarters, Dmitry Razumkov, "The
return of the occupied territories of the Donbass and Crimea must proceed exclusively on
Ukraine's terms. Russia, as always, is trying to turn everything on its head and do everything
backwards – by holding elections first."
The stage in Ukraine has been going to seed for some years, manuring away in decay and
poverty, bleeding in the Donbass region and plundered by self-enriching elites.
It took Zelenskiy to come to the fore by stepping off the screen and, quite literally, onto a live
stage. Whether he is capable of directing his own show, mastering his own brief, as it were,
will be a wonder.
For one, parliamentary elections are due in October, leaving the virgin
premier with six months of potential obstruction. Poroshenko, for his part, promises to be a
vulture in the galley, awaiting any slipups: "I am leaving office, but I want to firmly
underline that I am not leaving politics."
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at
RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected] More articles by: Binoy Kampmark
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and
brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences
agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There
were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign
policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such
is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The
atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons
Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky
killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a
marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised
by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and
diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible
to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the
traitor /
puppet / asset in the
White House
.
The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations
it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report
does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction.
It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton,
and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired
with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what
Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what
amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.
1. Russiagate Without Russia
The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the
report's release, The New York
Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin
intermediaries and the Trump campaign."
Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence
that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian
ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen
began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful
Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect."
If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with,
perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between
Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where
Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to
the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting
with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track
every
known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit
interacted with " the Russians ," or
someone who can be linked
to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic
about implying as much.
2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere
The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation.
During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George
Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its
way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted
for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an
intermediary between
Trump and Russia
.
But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial
connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections.
Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that
is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that
Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators
when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that
sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.
3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election
were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of
Jeff Sessions, then attorney
general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were
brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's
much –
ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing
mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention,
Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."
The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions"
in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was
that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an
election-related payoff or "
quid pro quo
" with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents
was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration,
and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting
the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive
to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."
4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow
The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy,
for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's
failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that "
Trump is compromised by
Russia ," " full stop ."
But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen,
the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with
financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov,
spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall
any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office
identify any evidence of direct follow-up."
5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It
The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also
rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News
reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to
Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that
Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow
project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an
acknowledgment
of Mueller's conclusion .
6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"
The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was
widely
dubbed
the
" Smoking
Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part
of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead
from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure
the meeting, because in reality,
as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."
Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist
candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]."
The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste
of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional
efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election
In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and
discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller,
the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed
" the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual
collusion " and even the "
Russian collusion smoking gun ."
Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling
data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian
government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing"
the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated
by proving his financial value to former and future clients.
Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First,
Mueller did not join
media pundits in asserting such about
Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller
offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's
Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently
told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.
8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction
The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia
criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in
its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent
politicians ,
pundits , and
media
outlets promoted it as
credible .
The Mueller report,
The New York Times
noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared
to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent
stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing
the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other
individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the
Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."
The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy
reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later
denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."
After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform
that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that"
the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."
9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks
In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress
about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone
had no communications with WikiLeaks
before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were
trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with
WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.
Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending
trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign,
and Stone -- and came up empty. New
reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted
time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack
Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing,
cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post
reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to
ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."
10. There Was No Cover-Up
The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years;
it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a
cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was
somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence
, while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.
One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does
"not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees,
it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged,
extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the
report's contents.
In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and
media establishments to be a work of
fiction . The American public
was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the
countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated
claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence
in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy
theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.
"Russiagate without Russia" actually means "Isrealgate". This individual points that he mentions below does not matter. Russiagate was a carefully planned and
brilliantly executed false flag operation run by intelligences
agencies (with GB agencies playing an important in some episodes decisive role) and headed probably by Obama himself via Brennan. There
were two goals: (1) to exclude any possibility of detente with Russia and (2) to block any Trump attempts to change the USA foreign
policy including running foreign war that enrich Pentagon contractors and justify supersized budget for intelligence agencies. As such
is was a great success.
The fact that no American was indicted and that Mueller attempt to prosecute Russian marketing agneces failed does not matter. The
atmosphere is now posoned for a generation. Americans are brainwashed and residue of Russiagate will stay for a long, long time. Neocons
Bolton and Pompeo now run Trump administration foreign policy with Trump performing most ceremonial role in foreign policy domain.
In this sense Skripals poisoning was another false flag operation, which was the logical continuation of Russiagate. And Magnitsky
killing (with Browder now a primary suspect) was a precursor to it. Both were run from Great Britain.
It is actually interesting how Mueller report swiped under the carpet the role of Great Britain in unleashing the Russiagate hysteria.
Two important foreign forces in the 2016 US Presidential elections was the Israel lobby and Great Britain. Trump proved to be a
marionette not of Russia but of Israeli lobby. so sad...
Notable quotes:
"... Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later). ..."
For more than two years, leading US political and media voices promoted a narrative that Donald Trump conspired with or was compromised
by the Kremlin, and that Special Counsel Robert Mueller would prove it. In the process, they overlooked countervailing evidence and
diverted anti-Trump energies into fervent speculation and prolonged anticipation. So long as Mueller was on the case, it was possible
to believe that " The Walls Are Closing In " on the
traitor /
puppet / asset in the
White House
.
The long-awaited completion of Mueller's probe, and the release of his redacted report, reveals this narrative -- and the expectations
it fueled -- to be unfounded. No American was indicted for conspiring with Russia to influence the 2016 election. Mueller's report
does lay out extensive evidence that Trump sought to impede the investigation, but it declines to issue a verdict on obstruction.
It presents no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with an alleged effort by the Russian government to defeat Hillary Clinton,
and instead renders this conclusion: "Ultimately, the investigation did not establish that the [Trump] Campaign coordinated or conspired
with the Russian government in its election-interference activities." As a result, Mueller's report provides the opposite of what
Russiagate promoters led their audiences to expect: Rather than detailing a sinister collusion plot with Russia, it presents what
amounts to an extended indictment of the conspiracy theory itself.
1. Russiagate Without Russia
The most fundamental element of a conspiracy is contact between the two parties doing the conspiring. Hence, on the eve of the
report's release, The New York
Times noted that among the "outstanding questions" that Mueller would answer were the nature of "contacts between Kremlin
intermediaries and the Trump campaign."
Mueller's report does answer that question: There were effectively no "Kremlin intermediaries." The report contains no evidence
that anyone from the Trump campaign spoke to a Kremlin representative during the election, aside from conversations with the Russian
ambassador and a press-office assistant, both of whom were ruled out as having participated in a conspiracy (more on them later).
It should be no surprise, then, to learn from Mueller that, when "Russian government officials and prominent Russian businessmen
began trying to make inroads into the new administration" after Trump's election victory, they did not know whom to call. These powerful
Russians, Mueller noted, "appeared not to have preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with senior officials around the President-Elect."
If top Russians did not have "preexisting contacts and struggled to connect with" the people that they supposedly conspired with,
perhaps that is because they did not actually conspire.
To borrow a phrase from Nation contributing editor Stephen F. Cohen, when it comes to the core question of contacts between
Trump and the Russian government, we are left with a "Russiagate without Russia." Instead we have a series of interactions where
Trump associates speak with Russian nationals, people with ties to Russian nationals, or people who claim to have ties to
the Russian government. But none of these "links," "ties," or associations ever entail a member of the Trump campaign interacting
with a Kremlin intermediary. Russiagate promoters have nonetheless fueled a dogged media effort to track
every
known instance in which someone in Trump's orbit
interacted with " the Russians ," or
someone who can be linked
to them . There is nothing illegal or inherently suspect about speaking to a Russian national -- but there is something xenophobic
about implying as much.
2. Russiagate's Predicate Led Nowhere
The most glaring absence of a Kremlin intermediary comes in the case that ostensibly prompted the entire Trump-Russia investigation.
During an April 2016 meeting in Rome, a London-based professor named Joseph Mifsud reportedly informed Trump campaign aide George
Papadopoulos that "the Russians" had obtained "thousands of emails" containing "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. That information made its
way to the FBI, which used it as a pretext to open the "Crossfire Hurricane" probe on July 31, 2016. Papadopoulos was later indicted
for lying to FBI agents about the timing of his contacts with Mifsud. The case stoked speculation that Papadopoulos acted as an
intermediary between
Trump and Russia
.
But Papadopoulos played no such role. And while the Mueller report says that Papadopoulos "understood Mifsud to have substantial
connections to high-level Russian government officials," it never asserts that Mifsud actuall y had those connections.
Since Mifsud's suspected Russian connections were the purported predicate for the FBI's initial Trump-Russia investigation, that
is a conspicuous non-call. Another is the revelation from Mueller that
Mifsud made false statements to FBI investigators
when they interviewed him in February 2017 -- but yet, unlike Papadopoulos, Mifsud was not indicted. Thus, even the interaction that
sparked the Russia-collusion probe did not reveal collusion.
3. Sergey Kislyak Had "Brief and Non-Substantive" Interactions With the Trump Camp
Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak's conversations with Trump campaign officials and associates during and after the 2016 election
were the focus of intense controversy and speculation, leading to the recusal of
Jeff Sessions, then attorney
general, and to the indictment of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn.
After an exhaustive review, Mueller concluded that Kislyak's interactions with Trump campaign officials at public events "were
brief, public, and non-substantive." As for Kislyak's
much –
ballyhooed meeting which Sessions in September 2016, Mueller saw no reason to dispute that it "included any more than a passing
mention of the presidential campaign." When Kislyak spoke with other Trump aides after the August 2016 Republican National Convention,
Mueller "did not identify evidence in those interactions of coordination between the Campaign and the Russian government."
The same goes for Kislyak's post-election conversations with Flynn. Mueller indicted Flynn for making "false statements and omissions"
in an interview with the FBI about his contacts with Kislyak during the transition in December 2016. The prevailing supposition was
that Flynn lied in order to hide from the FBI an
election-related payoff or "
quid pro quo
" with the Kremlin. The report punctures that thesis by reaffirming the facts in Flynn's indictment: What Flynn hid from agents
was that he had "called Kislyak to request Russian restraint" in response to sanctions imposed by the outgoing Obama administration,
and that Kislyak had agreed. Mueller ruled out the possibility that Flynn could have implicated Trump in anything criminal by noting
the absence of evidence that Flynn "possessed information damaging to the President that would give the President a personal incentive
to end the FBI's inquiry into Flynn's conduct."
4. Trump Tower Moscow Had No Help From Moscow
The November 2018 indictment of Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, was widely seen as damning, possibly impeachment-worthy,
for Trump. Cohen admitted to giving false written answers to Congress in a bid to downplay Trump's personal knowledge of his company's
failed effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow. To proponents of the collusion theory, Cohen's admitted lies were proof that "
Trump is compromised by
Russia ," " full stop ."
But the Mueller report does not show any such compromise, and, in fact, shows there to be no Trump-Kremlin relationship. Cohen,
the report notes, "requested [Kremlin] assistance in moving the project forward, both in securing land to build the project and with
financing." The request was evidently rejected. Elena Poliakova, the personal assistant to Kremlin Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov,
spoke with Cohen by phone after he e-mailed her office for help. After their 20-minute call, the report says, "Cohen could not recall
any direct follow-up from Poliakova or from any other representative of the Russian government, nor did the [Special Counsel's] Office
identify any evidence of direct follow-up."
5. and Trump Didn't Ask Cohen to Lie About It
The Mueller report not only dispels the notion that Trump had secret dealings with the Kremlin over Trump Tower Moscow; it also
rejects a related impeachment-level "bombshell." In January, BuzzFeed News
reported that Mueller had evidence that Trump "directed" Cohen to lie to Congress about the Moscow project. But according to
Mueller, "the evidence available to us does not establish that the President directed or aided Cohen's false testimony," and that
Cohen himself testified "that he and the President did not explicitly discuss whether Cohen's testimony about the Trump Tower Moscow
project would be or was false." In a de-facto retraction, BuzzFeed updated its story with an
acknowledgment
of Mueller's conclusion .
6. The Trump Tower Meeting Really Was Just a "Waste of Time"
The June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower was
widely
dubbed
the
" Smoking
Gun ." An e-mail chain showed that Donald Trump Jr. welcomed an offer to accept compromising information about Clinton as "part
of Russia and its government's support for Mr. Trump." But the pitch did not come from the meeting's Russian participants, but instead
from Rob Goldstone, a British music publicist acting on their behalf. Goldstone said that he invented "publicist puff" to secure
the meeting, because in reality,
as he told NPR , "I had no idea what I was talking about."
Mueller noted that Trump Jr.'s response "showed that the Campaign anticipated receiving information from Russia that could assist
candidate Trump's electoral prospects, but the Russian lawyer's presentation did not provide such information [emphasis mine]."
The report further recounts that during the meeting Jared Kushner texted then-Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort that it was a "waste
of time," and requested that his assistants "call him to give him an excuse to leave." Accordingly, when "Veselnitskaya made additional
efforts to follow up on the meeting," after the election, "the Trump Transition Team did not engage."
7. Manafort Did Not Share Polling Data to Meddle in the US Election
In January, Mueller accused Manafort of lying to investigators about several matters, including sharing Trump polling data and
discussing a Ukraine peace plan with a Ukrainian-Russian colleague, Konstantin Kilimnik, during the 2016 campaign. According to Mueller,
the FBI "assesses" that Kilimnik has unspecified "ties to Russian intelligence." To collusion proponents, the revelation was dubbed
" the closest we've seen yet to real, live, actual
collusion " and even the "
Russian collusion smoking gun ."
Mueller, of course, reached a different conclusion: He "did not identify evidence of a connection between Manafort's sharing polling
data and Russia's interference in the election," and, moreover, "did not establish that Manafort otherwise coordinated with the Russian
government on its election-interference efforts." Mueller noted that he "could not reliably determine Manafort's purpose in sharing"
the polling data, but also acknowledged (and bolstered) the explanation of his star witness, Rick Gates, that Manafort was motivated
by proving his financial value to former and future clients.
Mueller also gave us new reasons to doubt the assertions that Kilimnik himself is a Russian intelligence asset or spy. First,
Mueller did not join
media pundits in asserting such about
Kilimnik. Second, to support his vague contention that Kilimnik has, according to the FBI, "ties to Russian intelligence," Mueller
offered up a list of " pieces of the Office's
Evidence" that contains no direct evidence. For his part, Kilimnik has repeatedly stated that he has no such ties, and recently
told The Washington Post that Mueller never attempted to interview him.
8. The Steele Dossier Was Fiction
The Steele dossier -- a collection of Democratic National Committee-funded opposition research alleging a high-level Trump-Russia
criminal relationship -- played a critical role in the Russiagate saga. The FBI relied on it for leads and evidentiary material in
its investigation of the Trump campaign ties to Russia, and prominent
politicians ,
pundits , and
media
outlets promoted it as
credible .
The Mueller report,
The New York Times
noted last week , has "underscored what had grown clearer for months some of the most sensational claims in the dossier appeared
to be false, and others were impossible to prove." Steele reported that low-level Trump aide Carter Page was offered a 19 percent
stake in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft if he could get Trump to lift Western sanctions. In October 2016 the FBI, citing
the Steele dossier, told the FISA court that it "believes that [Russia's] efforts are being coordinated with Page and perhaps other
individuals associated with" the Trump campaign. The Mueller report, however, could "not establish that Page coordinated with the
Russian government in its efforts to interfere with the 2016 presidential election."
The Steele dossier claimed that Michael Cohen visited Prague to meet Russian agents in the summer of 2016. In April 2018, McClatchy
reported to much fanfare that Mueller's team "has evidence" that placed Cohen in Prague during the period in question. Cohen later
denied the claim under oath, and Mueller agreed, noting that Cohen "never traveled to Prague."
After reports emerged in August 2016 that the Trump campaign had rejected an amendment to the Republican National Committee platform
that called for arming Ukraine, Steele claimed that it was the result of a quid pro quo. The Mueller report "did not establish that"
the rejection of the Ukraine amendment was "undertaken at the behest of candidate Trump or Russia."
9. The Trump Campaign Had No Secret Channel to WikiLeaks
In January, veteran Republican operative and conspiracy theorist Roger Stone caused a stir when he was indicted for lying to Congress
about his efforts to make contact with WikiLeaks. But Mueller's indictment actually showed that Stone
had no communications with WikiLeaks
before the election and no privileged information about its releases . Most significantly, it revealed that Trump officials were
trying to learn about the WikiLeaks releases through Stone -- a fact that underscored that the Trump campaign neither worked with
WikiLeaks nor had advance knowledge of its e-mail dumps.
Mueller's final report does nothing to alter that picture. Its sections on Stone are heavily redacted, owing to Stone's pending
trial. But they do make clear that Mueller conducted an extensive search to establish a tie between WikiLeaks, the Trump campaign,
and Stone -- and came up empty. New
reporting from The Washington Post underscores just how far their farcical efforts went. The Mueller team devoted
time and energy to determine whether far-right conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi, best known for promoting the false claim that Barack
Obama was born outside the United States, served as a link between Stone and WikiLeaks. Mueller's prosecutors "spent weeks coaxing,
cajoling and admonishing the conspiracy theorist, as they pressed him to stick to facts and not reconstruct stories," the Post
reports. "At times, they had debated the nature of memory itself." It is unsurprising that this led Mueller's prosecutors to
ultimately declare, according to Corsi's attorney, "We can't use any of this."
10. There Was No Cover-Up
The Mueller report does not just dispel the conspiracy theories that have engulfed political and media circles for two years;
it puts to rest the most popular, recent one: that Attorney General William Barr engaged in a
cover-up . According to the dominant narrative, Barr was
somehow concealing Mueller's damning evidence
, while Mueller, even more improbably, stayed silent.
One could argue that Barr's summary downplays the obstruction findings, though it accurately relays that Mueller's report does
"not exonerate" Trump. It was Mueller's decision to leave the verdict on obstruction to Barr and make clear that if Congress disagrees,
it has the power to indict Trump on its own. Mueller's office assisted with Barr's redactions, which proved to be, as Barr had pledged,
extremely limited. Despite containing numerous embarrassing details about Trump, no executive privilege was invoked to censor the
report's contents.
In the end, Mueller's report shows that the Trump-Russia collusion narrative embraced and evangelized by the US political and
media establishments to be a work of
fiction . The American public
was presented with a far different picture from what was expected, because leading pundits, outlets, and politicians ignored the
countervailing facts and promoted maximalist interpretations of others. Anonymous officials also leaked explosive yet uncorroborated
claims, leaving behind many stories that were subsequently discredited, retracted, or remain unconfirmed to this day.
It is too early to assess the damage that influential Russiagate promoters have done to their own reputations; to public confidence
in our democratic system and media; and to the prospects of defeating Trump, who always stood to benefit if the all-consuming conspiracy
theory ultimately collapsed. The scale of the wreckage, confirmed by Mueller's report, may prove to be the ultimate Russiagate scandal.
Despite Joe Biden's popularity among Democrat voters, strategists in the party think Biden running for the
presidential nomination is a "bad, bad idea."
"This last election cycle, we've seen a whole new level of energy that has emerged through a lot of fresh faces,
and the party has moved in that direction and wants to hear new ideas and different messages," Norm Sterzenbach, a
former executive director of the Iowa Democratic Party who now is a consultant,
told
McClatchy.
"I'm not convinced Biden is the right way to go at this point in time," Jim Manley, a Democrat operative said in
the McClatchy report.
The folks I've talked to are a little taken aback" with his interest in running, Manley said. According to
McClatchy:
McClatchy interviewed 31 Democratic strategists -- pollsters, opposition research experts, media consultants,
ex-party officials, and communications specialists -- from across the country about a potential Biden campaign.
Nine agreed to speak on the record; all others quoted anonymously do not plan to be affiliated with any candidate
running in the presidential primary.
Strikingly, these conversations yielded a similar view: The Democratic political community is more broadly and
deeply pessimistic about Biden's potential candidacy than is commonly known. While these strategists said they
respect Biden, they cited significant disadvantages for his campaign -- from the increasingly liberal and non-white
Democratic electorate to policy baggage from his years in the Senate and a field of rivals that includes new,
fresh-faced candidates.
McClatchy quotes an anonymous source when comparing a Biden presidential bid with Hillary Clinton's failed
campaign.
"We heard it with Hillary, and we saw it happened," the source said. "And there's a lot of reason to think he
would wind up a significantly weaker candidate than Hillary."
"Many of these strategists say that if Biden did win the nomination, they don't think he would have a better
chance of defeating Donald Trump than other top-tier contenders such as Kamala Harris or Kirsten Gillibrand,"
McClatchy reported, adding that this is despite the fact that many Democrats see Biden as the "safe choice."
A strategist who is named in the McClatchy piece puts identity politics into the analysis of Biden's chances to
finally make it to the White House.
"Let's be honest: He's an older white guy," said Jim Cauley, a Kentucky-based Democratic strategist. "Does he
connect with the base?"
But experience counts, another Democrat pollster said in the McClatchy report.
"He was Barack Obama's vice president," Celinda Lake said. "And so there's no question in people's minds he can
handle the job, knows the job, can do a good job."
But sometimes the longer one's record, the more problematic the campaign trail can be.
"He brings a lot to the table in terms of strengths," Mike Mikus, a Pittsburgh-based Democratic strategist said.
"But because of his long record in the Senate, unlike a lot of the other candidates, he has a lot more pitfalls that
he faces."
But according to a CNN
poll
, rank and file Democrats like the idea of a Biden candidacy:
More than six in 10 Democratic and Democratic-leaning voters say former Vice President Joe Biden should make a
run for president, according to a recent CNN poll conducted by
SSRS
, and half of all
Americans say they would be at least somewhat likely to back him should he run for the White House.
Among Democrats, Biden has greater support than anyone else tested: 44 percent say they are very likely to
support him, 32 percent say so of Harris, 30 percent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, 21 percent Massachusetts Sen.
Elizabeth Warren, 19 percent New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, and 15 percent former Texas Rep. Beto O'Rourke.
President Trump on Monday attacked former vice president Joe Biden as "another low I.Q. individual," pointing to comments
the Democrat inadvertently made Saturday night suggesting he had already launched a 2020 White House bid. "Joe Biden got tongue
tied over the weekend when he was unable to properly deliver a very simple line about his decision to run for President," Trump
said in a tweet. "Get used to it, another low I.Q. individual!"
My god.. You seriously can't make this stuff up... Trump takes clueless to a whole other level... There really is not a word that
describes the lack of self awareness Trump has... How can anyone take this man seriously???
BobinMinnesota, 1 month ago
So according to Trump this weekend, McCain teamed up with the Democrats, Hillary, Obama, Steele, Buzzfeed (and other news
media, except Fox) along with the FBI (Comey, Strzok, McCabe) and CIA (Clapper and Brennan) to try and get Hillary elected by
posting a fake dossier report in the news media? But they didn't succeed, so now they are trying to continue to ruin Trump using
Mueller and Saturday Night Live too.
"... A missile launched from Snezhnoye could not have inflicted damage to the Boeing's left side, and not a single element would have hit the aircraft's left wing and engine, said the Almaz-Antey experts. ..."
Dutch investigators have published a much-awaited final report into the causes of the MH17 plane crash in eastern Ukraine, while
Russian BUK producer Almaz-Antey has revealed the results of its experiments.
Here are eight crucial points from both reports.
Follow Live Updates
The Dutch Safety Board (DSB) has been leading
the investigation
into the causes of the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17. The crash killed nearly 300 passengers and crew members on
July 17, 2014 in eastern Ukraine. The DBS investigation is aimed at providing technical details about the crash, while another probe
carried out by the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) is expected to determine who was responsible for the incident by the end of this
year.
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Almaz-Antey conducted research which included two experiments simulating
explosions, with the second one using a decommissioned Ilyushin Il‐86 aircraft, similar to a Boeing 777 in its aerodynamic, technical
and physical attributes, as well as its fuselage design. The company's detailed technical presentation of the findings on Tuesday
lasted for about three hours. Here are the three key conclusions they drew: 1.BUK 9М38 hit the plane The plane was hit by
an earlier generation of the 9M38 Buk missile complete with warhead 9N314 ("without I-beams"), Almaz-Antey said in its presentation
on Tuesday. According to the arms producer, the particles which hit the plane were cube-shaped, not bow-shaped. The last missile
of this type was produced in the Soviet Union in 1986, and its life span is 25 years including all prolongations. All missiles of
this type were decommissioned from the Russian Army in 2011, it said.
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Learn More 2. Missile
exploded on left side "The sub-munitions primarily damaged the left side of the MH17 Boeing, primarily its cockpit, left wing,
left engine, and the left side of the tail, " the company said.
3. Missile fired from Kiev-controlled area? Based on the angle of the damage to MH17, the BUK producer established that the
most probable location of the missile launch was the area to the south of the village of Zaroshchenskoe in the Donetsk region in
eastern Ukraine. The arms producer refuted earlier claims that the missile had been launched from Snezhnoy, controlled by rebel forces
and located near Torez – the MH17 crash site.
A missile launched from Snezhnoye could not have inflicted damage to the Boeing's left side, and not a single element would have
hit the aircraft's left wing and engine, said the Almaz-Antey experts.
The Dutch Safety Board said on Tuesday that it would study
the results of the two experiments presented by BUK manufacturer Almaz-Antey, adding that the MH17 investigation will not be
completed in 2015. LI
The intensity and sophistication of propaganda campaign, as well as the fact that it was started immediately raised really
strong suspicions about possible western involvement. But if there is a Western trace then the missile should probably be fired for
aircraft not from the ground.
The MH17 case shocked the world as it happened and caused an escalation of
the war in Ukraine. Although many accusations have been leveled over responsibility for the
tragedy, the panel investigating the incident continues to search for the identities of the
perpetrators. However, all focus has centered around the culprits being either Ukrainian or
Russian, both of whom did not have incentive to further aggravate the Ukrainian conflict.
An examination of the facts, the connections of various state and non-state actors pushing
disinformation about MH17 along with knowledge about historical intelligence playbooks and foreign
mercenary involvement in Ukraine would in fact suggest that the party responsible for shooting the
aircraft down may have been a team with ties to transatlantic American groups allied with certain
Western European interests.
I. Investigation Results
In 2014, the Dutch Safety Board (DSB) published its
initial findings
as part of the Joint Investigation Team (JIT) seeking to determine who was at
fault for the attack on MH17. These findings established that a BUK 9M38-series missile was fired
at MH17 and that the missile was shot from somewhere inside east Ukraine in an area where control
was contested by government and rebel forces. At the same time, BUK missile producer Almaz-Antey
gave a
press conference
where they stated that based on the shape of the shrapnel particles which hit
MH17, the missile prototype was last produced by the Soviet Union in 1986. Since the missiles have
a life span of 25 years, they were decommissioned by the Russian Army in 2011.
In 2016,
Stratfor
released analysis of satellite imagery from DigitalGlobe that they claimed showed the missile
launcher which fired the BUK at MH17. As
Disobedient
Media
has previously reported, DigitalGlobe is an American vendor of satellite imagery founded
by a scientist who worked on the US military's
Star
Wars
ICBM defense program under President Ronald Reagan. DigitalGlobe began its existence in
Oakland, CA and was seeded with money from Silicon Valley sources and corporations in North
America, Europe and Japan.
Headquartered
in
Westminster CO, DigitalGlobe works extensively with
defense
and intelligence programs
. In 2016, it was
revealed
that
DigitalGlobe was working with CIA chipmaker NVIDIA and
Amazon
Web Services
to create an AI-run satellite surveillance network known as
Spacenet
.
Their photos have repeatedly been used in propaganda attempts to undermine negotiations between
North Korea and the United States.
In May 2018, the JIT gave an
update
on their
investigation where they "presumed" that the BUK missile which was used against MH17 came from the
Russian 53rd Anti Aircraft Missile brigade. This presumption appears to be a rehash of claims made
by "independent" investigative organization
Bellingcat
in
2014. Nonetheless, investigators left open the possibility that the missile had been
fired by another party
.
In September 2018, the Russian military gave a
press conference
where they said the missile that shot down MH17 came from a Ukrainian army arsenal. This belief was
based on a study of military archives after the JIT had made the serial number of the missile
public. The JIT
responded
that they would need Russia to submit information supporting their claims, despite
the fact that Dutch investigators could have also reached out to Ukrainian authorities in an
attempt to verify whether or not the serial number was in fact from a missile part transferred
during the Soviet era.
II. Nation-State Narrative Pushing
In the aftermath of the JIT's 2018 update,
the governments of the Netherlands and Australia issued a
statement
blaming
Russia for the incident. They were
supported
by
Britain's Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, who echoed a previous
British
intelligence report
claiming without evidence that they also knew the Russian military
"supplied and subsequently recovered" the missile launcher. This manner of nation-state propaganda
has pervaded the investigation process since MH17 went down in 2014 and does not match the
assertions of the JIT, who have consistently left open the possibility that a party other than
Russia was responsible.
It is little surprise to see the Netherlands working in lockstep with the United Kingdom and
Australia, who are both members of the
UKUSA
Agreement
popularly known as Five Eyes (FVEY). The UK in particular has been shown to have been
involved with operations alongside the Netherlands. Both the British and Dutch governments have
been
tied to Cheollima Civil Defense
, who sought a coup in North Korea before they were targeted by
American law
enforcement
.
Integrity
Initiative
, an organization supported financially by UK intelligence and the Foreign Office,
also maintained a
Netherlands
cluster
. Members of this cluster include
Yevhen Fedchenko
,
the Ukrainian co-founder and chief editor of stopfake.org and multiple members of
The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies
(HCSS), an "independent" think tank that works with the
Dutch Ministries of Security and Justice, Foreign Affairs and Defense as well as NATO. British
intelligence assets have also been exposed among the staff of the
Voice of Europe
, a right wing publication located in the Netherlands.
Interestingly,
Malaysia
, whose aircraft was shot down, has said that there is no conclusive evidence showing
that Russia was responsible for downing MH17. The
US State Department
additionally declined to issue a statement they had prepared in 2018 criticizing Russia's alleged
role in the event.
III. Intent
In criminal law, establishing intent to commit the crime in question is often an essential
element to convicting a guilty party . In the case of MH17, neither Russia or Ukraine had an
incentive to shoot down the airliner. The event dashed any immediate hopes of a "
Novorussia
"
state or an
early end
to the Ukrainian war. It similarly created a disadvantage to Ukraine, who has lost
thousands
of their
own citizens in the conflict due to its failure to conclude quickly. Neither country has a good
cause to continue fighting for as long as they have. The MH17 tragedy ensured that both countries
would remain mired in a struggle.
Both parties
mutually denied
involvement in the attack. Russia's kneejerk reaction was to incorrectly claim
a
Ukrainian jet
was
responsible, likely because of
accusations
that
air-to-air missiles had brought down Ukrainian military aircraft in recent days. The Russian
information warfare strategy did not take into account that
Western media
and certain
Ukrainian officials
were already blaming a BUK launcher as the cause for the attack. This kind
of confusion and failure to prepare narratives is a sign that Russian officials did not anticipate
the incident beforehand.
Europeans and American factions who support initiatives such as the European Union and NATO do
have such a cause. Confrontation between Ukraine and Russia serves not only as a distraction to
Russia, but
pushes
Ukraine into the arms of Western interests
.
IV. British Intelligence Propaganda Efforts
The pervasive involvement of British intelligence propaganda operations surrounding the MH17
incident further indicates that European and allied American groups are using the incident to stoke
the Ukrainian conflict. British website
Bellingcat
was founded after the downing of MH17 and immediately began to focus on providing
"evidence" they hoped would be of value to investigators. It would appear that their efforts have
been met with success after the JIT appeared to lend credence to some of their claims that the BUK
missile used against MH17 came from the Russian military.
Leaks from 2018 have established, however, that Bellingcat is a propaganda operation with ties
to organizations funded by British intelligence.
Documents
from the Integrity Initiative list both Bellingcat and the Atlantic Council, a think
tank known for engaging in
pay-to-play behavior
with foreign donors, as "partner organizations."
Bellingcat author
Dan Kaszeta
, who was involved with narrative formation surrounding the
Skripal assassination
attempt
, was forced to issue an
unconvincing denial
that he worked for British intelligence after it emerged that he also wrote for Integrity
Initiative. Integrity Initiative's now-censored
website
itself
featured a page dedicated to combatting what they branded as "disinformation" surrounding MH17.
In addition to spreading propaganda in Europe, Bellingcat also runs operations targeting other
locations as well. Canada-based Venezuelan anti-government blog
In
Venezuela
is run by a Bellingcat member. The organization has also promoted
Bana Alabed
, a
Syrian girl who supposedly worked with her English-speaking mother in Aleppo to send out perfectly
worded tweets requesting NATO intervention in Syria during the siege of the city by government
forces.
The pervasive involvement of the Integrity Initiative-connected Bellingcat in pushing
pro-British propaganda into the MH17 investigation process provides a strong indication that
official narratives about the tragedy are inaccurate.
V. Clues To Identity Of Perpetrators
If neither Ukrainian or Russian forces were responsible for the downing of MH17, who else could
be?
Creating false attribution during military attacks is a very old tactic. The
Gleiwitz incident
at the start of Work War Two and the
Gulf of Tonkin
are
two historical examples of occasions where false attribution occurred for political purposes. In
the 1960's, the United States looked seriously at staging incidents of harassment or outright
attacks against civilian airliners as part of
Operation Northwoods
.
The attacks would be falsely attributed to the Cuban government by using procured MiG fighters or
creating replicas that would fool observers.
Internal documents
from the CIA show a number of configurations that would withstand varying
degrees of scrutiny were being considered.
Interestingly, the JIT used a
US-made missile
in tests meant to model the impact to MH17. BUK producer Almaz-Antey claimed
that this meant the missile differed from their version in crucial features such as flight path.
There is also evidence that American mercenaries were on the ground in parts of eastern Ukraine
that were held by rebel forces as fighting intensified in the months leading up to the MH17 crash.
In March 2014,
Bild am
Sonntag
cited German government sources who claimed that over 400 American mercenaries working
for Academi affiliate
Greystone
were operating in Ukraine. The article was sparked by
videos
which had
recently emerged online showing armed men said to be Americans on the streets on Donetsk, Ukraine.
Academi issued a
statement
denying that any of their direct employees were in Ukraine but did not comment on the
nature of their relationship to Greystone.
On May 4, 2014,
Bild
am Sonntag
claimed that CIA and FBI agents were in Kiev to "advise" the Ukrainian government,
citing unnamed German security sources. The next day,
The
Independent
noted that locals in east Ukraine believed British or US forces might be active in
the region after discovering items such as a British military jacket along with American rations
and ammunition casings.
The evidence that Western mercenaries were present in Ukraine during the months leading up to
the downing of MH17 should not be discounted and merits serious examination by investigators.
Russian mercenaries
have created headaches for their home nation in locations such as Syria due
to potentially taking contracts for private clients while deployed in conflict zones. The
involvement of Americans in Ukraine similarly raises questions about whether or not their services
could have been exploited to aggravate an already contentious conflict that did not benefit either
Ukraine or Russia.
Given the heavy involvement of British intelligence in narrative formation surrounding MH17 and
clear attempts to induce the JIT to adopt the research of intelligence-connected investigative
groups one must ask if the international panel investigating the case is missing the bigger picture
by focusing on Ukraine and Russia alone. The evidence in fact points to a far different reality
than the one presented by the international media. Will the JIT seek true justice? Or will they
give the world easy and expected answers to their questions about MH17?
Tags
Politics
Time to Foreclose on the Churchill Cult
He's a religious faith that no one is allowed to question without forfeiting membership in Western
civilization.
By
Paul Gottfried
•
October 15, 2018
In a
recent broadside
in
National Review
against "ill-informed critics of Churchill," Ben Shapiro mocks his opponents by reminding them that
they "would be speaking German if he (Churchill) had not led the fight against Hitler." If that's the worse that would
have happened had the Third Reich prevailed, it would have been an exceedingly small price to pay for such an outcome.
I offer this comment as someone who grew up speaking German and who still regards it as
his second mother tongue. According to Shapiro, those who dare criticize Churchill are mostly "a variety of groups
ranging from Indians to Sudanese to Asian tribes." These quibblers, he writes, are fixated on Churchill's "racial
comment" which "have taken out of context to slander his achievements." Supposedly those who dwell on Churchill's
imperialist ideas or slurs about lesser breeds are uniformly on the left and mistakenly believe that "an ounce of sin
washes away a lifetime of heroism."
But Shapiro never demonstrates that Churchill spent his entire life engaged in heroic
action. He properly recognizes his heroism in standing up to Nazi Germany; and he notes that Churchill "successfully led
Great Britain through the most dangerous time in her history." But was this a more dangerous period than when
Churchill's ancestor the
Duke of Marlborough
opposed the expansive despotism of Louis XIV, which threatened both
England and the European continent in the early 18th century? What about the heroism of
William Pitt the Younger,
Britain's very young prime minister who kept his country fighting on against Napoleon and his empire after other
countries had deserted the cause?
It's also not clear in what way we attack the West "by savaging the civilizational
history" that Churchill embodied. Are we not allowed to write critically about someone whom Shapiro, and presumably
National Review,
want us to admire for his presumed "lifetime of
heroism"?
Unfortunately there was a lot in Churchill's life that was not particularly heroic -- it's
striking that our current conservative establishment is willing to "contextualize" away "bigoted" statements made by
Churchill, while ranting against Churchill contemporary H.L. Mencken, when he made his own.
But then Mencken supposedly
took the wrong side in World War One
, in which he was effusively pro-German, while Churchill did everything
in his power to poison Anglo-German relations before that cataclysm, which he regarded as inevitable. This came after
Churchill helped foment the Boer War in South Africa, which enabled the British Empire to swallow up the Transvaal and
other parts of South Africa. Later as First Lord of the Admiralty, he imposed on Imperial Germany a starvation blockade
that resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. This blockade wasn't lifted until several months after the hostilities
had ended. In the Second World War Churchill supported the terror
bombing of German cities
, at a
time when these population centers could no longer defend themselves and when the war was all but lost.
In March 1946 at Fulton, Missouri,
Churchill warned
about an "iron curtain" descending on Eastern Europe, but during the war he had been at
least as willing as FDR to accommodate Stalin. At Yalta the prime minister worked to preserve the British Empire by
shamelessly praising Stalin and the Soviet Empire. His positions in trying to hold on to British India in the face of
widespread native opposition receive ample treatment from John Charmley,
Roy
Jenkins
, and other non-authorized biographers. Eventually this preoccupation became Churchill's stubborn
obsession.
Perhaps the most staggering catalogue of Churchill's sins can be found in a long essay
and a number of lectures produced by a Taft Republican and visceral isolationist
Ralph Raico
. Contrary to what Shapiro tells us, the most passionate critics of Churchill
have been on the pre-neoconservative Right; and Raico, a trained German historian, comes out of that venerable
conservative tradition. Churchill was certainly not the hero of the Right before the neoconservatives elevated him to
that eminence. Not all the praise bestowed on him is of course baseless. Much of it stems from Churchill's opposition to
a Nazi regime that almost managed to exterminate European Jewry.
Unfortunately what is admirable about Churchill is blown up into a "lifetime of heroism,"
with sometimes embarrassing effects.
For example, Churchill's belligerent
opposition to the Kaiser's Germany is seen through lenses shaped by his later resistance to Hitler. During and before
the First World War the British and Americans --
we
are led to believe
-- were already combatting
a German evil
that eventually spawned Hitler's regime. Furthemore, if Churchill later urged treating colonial subjects a bit roughly,
it may be explained that he was just trying to prepare the natives for Anglo-American democracy. What Canadian
political theorist
Grant Havers ridicules
as "the Churchill cult" has been transformed into a religious faith that no one is
allowed to question without forfeiting his membership in Western civilization.
Trying to look at the historical problem more dispassionately, it seems to me that great
political figures are usually morally flawed; and this was doubtless true of Churchill. According to
his biographer Charmley
, Churchill "exulted" at the opportunity of going to war. On the eve
of the Great War, he prepared for a European-wide conflict "not only in the sense of making sure the Fleet was ready but
also in trying to influence opinion in that direction within the Cabinet." His passion for armed conflict was almost
insatiable. Needless to say, one could find the same defects in other historical luminaries on whom we confer the
appellation "great."
Not all political greats have won the struggles they engaged in. Although one can admire
the aristocratic character of Robert E. Lee, this was a commander who lost a war he never wanted.
A fervent
admirer of Lee
, Churchill might also have seen himself on the losing side of history.
Charmley
maintains that his subject symbolized his country's "end of glory." Throughout his life, he stood for the British
Empire, British independence, and an "anti-socialist vision of England." In the end, Churchill watched all three vanish.
Paul Gottfried is Raffensperger Professor of
Humanities Emeritus at Elizabethtown College, where he taught for 25 years. He is a Guggenheim recipient and a Yale
Ph.D. He is the author of 13 books, most recently
Fascism: Career of a Concept and
Revisions and Dissents
.
I do not know what PAUL GOTTFRIED wants to say.
What does Gallipoli have to due with his review of the respect that Churchill earned over the stand he took
aginst NAZI GERMANY? Or his colonial mentality for that matter, or any other flaw or error that Churichill
committed.,
WINSTON CHURCHILL WAS A MAN IN POWER, he was not a saint and not free of error. He made many errors, some on
his own and some with the help of others. And some of them are the worst sort of error; those that cost other
people their lives.
ALL LEADERS throughout history, the best of them and the worst of them made mistakes and many times those
mistakes cost people their lives.
WINSTON CHURCHILL is a man who earned our respect because when he took the stand against NAZI GERMANY, he took
the stand with great courage. He knew that you could not trust the Nazi;s to keep their word, he knew that
there was no way that peace could be made with Hitler., Unlike Halifax who would have tried to take the easy
way out and essentially surrender to Hitler, Churchill with almost no army (they were all trapped in Dunkirk,
made a decision that he would stand against ABJECT EVIL; an evil so heinous that it rose straight from the
bowels of hell.
This is why we respect him. And while he took his stand he gave his people and indeed people ariound the world
hope that they would prevail. It is very hard to give people hope when there is no hope in sight; one must dig
down deep to come up with a level of courage and hope that one believes in so deeply that other people know
clearly that it is not false bravado or politically motivated.
As far as speaking German, the author says that if that was to be the worst of it, that would not have been so
bad. It appears that the author has little understanding of what culture is and how big a part language with
all its intonations plays in culture. To progress, a group of people must have a culture and be proud of it.
How could one be British and be proud of ones culture if one is forced to speak German and salute the Nazi flag
flying over Parliament?
Paul says he does not mind speaking German, that it is his 2nd motther tongue. Does he also not mind that he
would have had to wear a German uniform and swear loyalty to the madman Hitler? And once you take that step,
not be bothered by the next step; the order to exterminate men, women and children!
I do not belong to a "Churchiill Cult" and certainly would not give Sir Winston a perfect report card in every
area. I do not like his policy regarding India and it weighs heavy on our memory of him. And there are other
decisions that he made that were incorrect; that is one of the reasons he was voted out of office right after
the war ended.
However, in the final analysis, ALL THAT I HAVE ENJOYED IN THIS LIFE is due to the courage of Sir Winston as
well as others who fought against Nazi Germany and also to the many thousands of young men and women who gave
their lives so that we may have a future free of any part of HITLER'S plan for world domination.
If Paul Gottfried "forecloses" on the Churchill cult, he denegrates the memory of all of those who served so
gallantly.
That he calls it a cult, tells me that his motives are not academnic research to help clarify the record, but
rather his desire to revise history to suit his own political mindset. Cult is not a word devoid of "baggage".
His intent is clearly to denigrate the greatness of Sir Winston Churchill.
A very silly article, full of historic fallacies .(
e.g. he never praised the USSR nor their methods. nobody
fought against them like he did. he praised Stalin personality for his strong character and personality. that's
totally different. and the bombing of 'helpless german civilians'? after what they did to London? give us all a
break
all the other attacks on Churchill here are just as nonsensical.
"But if you were to take every statement Churchill made on race, and compare it to every statement from Lee
(who lived a century before), I think you'd see that Lee was not only ahead of his times on racial issues, but
even ahead of Churchill."
I was going to let this rest, however,
this is simply a nonstarter. PM Churchill did not take up arms against his own country. Whatever his bias's
he never raised an army in an effort to sever the nation that bore him.
What Gen Lee did has no excuse. He is and was a traitor the US and I care not honor weswt point, the
president, congress or the country want to bestow on his honor and skill.
He and everyone who took up arms against the US should have treated for the treasonous culprits there were.
It's hard to square him as a man of honor who trounces his oath to serve.
"In 1907, Britain launched the Lusitania, "the greyhound of the sea,"
the fastest passenger ship afloat. In 1913, Churchill called in the head of Cunard and said Lusitania would
have to be refitted for a war he predicted would break out in September 1914.
The Lusitania, writes Windchy, was "refitted as a cargo ship with hidden compartments to hold shells and
other munitions. By all accounts there were installed revolving gun mounts."
On Aug. 4, 1914, after war was declared, Lusitania went back into dry dock. More space was provided for
cargo, and the vessel was now carried on Cunard's books as "an auxiliary cruiser."
Churchill visited the ship in dry dock and referred to Lusitania as "just another 45,000 tons of live bait."
When war began, German submarine captains, to save torpedoes, would surface and permit the crews of cargo
ships to scramble into lifeboats, and then they would plant bombs or use gunfire to sink the vessels.
Churchill's response was to outfit merchant ships with hidden guns, order them to ram submarines, and put
out "Q-ships," disguised as merchant ships, which would not expose their guns until submarines surfaced.
German naval commanders began to order submarines to sink merchant ships on sight. First Sea Lord Sir John
("Jackie") Fisher said he would have done the same.
Churchill, seeing an opportunity to bring America into Britain's war, wrote the Board of Trade: "It is most
important to attract neutral shipping to our shores, in the hope especially of embroiling the United States
with Germany. We want the traffic -- the more the better -- and if some of it gets into trouble, the better
still."
Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan wanted to warn Americans not to travel aboard British ships. But
President Woodrow Wilson, writes Windchy, "said that American citizens had a right to travel on belligerent
ships with impunity, even within a war zone," a defiance of common sense and an absurd interpretation of
international law.
On May 1, 1915, Lusitania set sail from New York. As Windchy writes, the ship "secretly carried munitions
and Canadian troops in civilian clothes, which legally made it fair game for (German) U-boats.
"After the war, Churchill admitted that the Lusitania carried a 'small consignment of rifle ammunition and
shrapnel shells weighing 173 tons.' New York Customs Collector Dudley Malone told President Wilson that
'practically all her cargo was contraband of various kinds.'"
Future Secretary of State Robert Lansing knew that British passenger ships carried war materiel. German
diplomats in New York warned American passengers they were in danger on the Lusitania. And instead of sailing
north of Ireland to Liverpool, the Lusitania sailed to the south, into waters known to be the hunting ground of
German submarines.
Lusitania blew up and sank in 18 minutes. Munitions may have caused the secondary explosion when the torpedo
hit. Some 1,200 people perished, including 128 Americans. America was on fire, ready for war when the next
incidents occurred, as they would in 1917 with the sinking of U.S. merchant ships in similar waters.
Had Wilson publicly warned U.S. citizens not to sail on the ships of belligerent nations and forbidden
U.S.-flagged merchant ships to carry contraband to nations at war, America might have stayed out of the war,
which might have ended in a truce, not a German defeat.
There might have been no Adolf Hitler and no World War II.
Re WWII, may I recommend Peter Hitchens' new book, 'The Phoney Victory' for a debunking of most aspects of the
orthodox narrative regarding Churchill's leadership at the time, whilst praising his determination to fight on.
"In a recent broadside in National Review against "ill-informed critics of Churchill," Ben Shapiro mocks his
opponents by reminding them that they "would be speaking German if he (Churchill) had not led the fight against
Hitler." If that's the worse that would have happened had the Third Reich prevailed, it would have been an
exceedingly small price to pay for such an outcome."
Actually, if Germany had not attacked Russia in 1941,
the West would be most likely speaking Russian.
Churchill didn't do anything remarkable as Prime Minister during WWII except make a bunch of speeches, which
has been recently shown in studies to have accomplished nothing in terms of raising citizen morale.
The greatness of a leader is among others measured by the degree of his or her insight in the forces which
shape the destinies of their nations as well as of the world as a whole during their tenures. When I then
compare Churchill and Chamberlain's understanding of the state of British colonialism and the rise of Japan's
power I cannot fail to conclude that Chamberlain who supported independence for India within a Commonwealth was
a far greater leader during the 1920's than Churchill.
Even after WW2 with anti-colonial uprisings raging in East Asia Churchill stubbornly clung to the now untenable
Empire solution. Mao made him a midget.
Another courageous leader during WW2: the Queen of the Netherlands!
"... The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with Iran. ..."
"... We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they are ready to pull out from the deal. ..."
"... He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition. ..."
It's hard to foresee how US efforts to bring Iranian oil exports to zero will play out in
future, Vladimir Putin admitted, saying OPEC members should live up to their obligation to keep
output as low as possible if it comes true. Russia has an agreement with the Organization of
the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut their output by 1.2 million barrels per day,
which remains in effect until July of this year, Putin said. But the US waivers – which
gave a host of countries an exemption from the existing anti-Iran sanctions – expire much
earlier, he reminded.
I don't imagine how the global energy market will react to that.
In November, the US re-imposed sanctions on Iran's energy, shipbuilding and banking sectors
in a bid to deprive Tehran of its main sources of revenue. But it simultaneously issued waivers
to China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey – the main importers of Iranian crude
– so that they can find alternative vendors of oil.
The waivers expire in May, meaning that those countries could potentially face US sanctions
beyond that deadline. China and Turkey, on their part, have strongly condemned the American
restrictions, arguing the US is not in a position to intervene in their trade ties with
Iran.
Commenting on the issue, Putin said he hopes the market will eventually avoid the deficit of
Iranian oil and that Iran will still be able to sell it. The comment came on the heels of
conflicting reports that Donald Trump persuaded Riyadh to ramp up oil output this lowering fuel
costs; these reports were denounced by OPEC officials.
Nevertheless, there is "no evidence" that any country is going to withdraw from the
OPEC+ agreement to drop oil outputs, Putin said.
We don't have any information from our Saudi partners or other OPEC members that they
are ready to pull out from the deal.
He assured that Moscow is "fulfilling its commitments" to the production cuts agreed
by OPEC and several non-OPEC producers in December. Saudi Arabia is also "unlikely" to
withdraw, being the driving force behind the wider coalition.
(The purpose of this article is not to describe Trotsky's accomplishments
and failures and subsequent assassination, but to describe his relationship
with his fellow Jews and Judaism).
One of the most influential people in the Russian revolution was Leon Trotsky.
He was born on November 7, 1879, in the Ukraine with the name Lev Davidovich
Bronstein but changed his name to avoid being known as a Jew. Briefly speaking,
Trotsky was a great intellectual and political thinker. He rose to the second top
position under Lenin and was responsible (amongst other credits) for the
development of the Red Army.
He had a basic disagreement with Stalin as to the nature of Communism. Simply
speaking, Stalin's view was that securing the Russian Communistic state was of
chief importance whereas Trotsky, who considered himself an
Internationalist and did not like the concept of individual and
nationalistic states, felt that Communist revolution must unite all workers and
abolish territorial borders – to Trotsky, it was the small nationalistic
states that were the causes of wars.
* * *
His father David Leontievich Bronstein was a farmer and although quite clever
and prosperous as a farmer, he was illiterate. However it did not stop him from
hiring local peasants to work his lands benefiting greatly from their labor. This
usage of poor peasants to become wealthy bothered the young Trotsky, who felt
deeply the pain of the poor.
At the age of seven, young Bronstein was sent to cheder (Jewish religious
school) in a nearby village where he learned Torah in Hebrew in the old traditional
manner by reciting the verse in Hebrew with a translation into Yiddish. He was
quite aware of the restrictions placed on Jews at the time and he too was subjected
to the anti-Semitic prejudices which were accepted by the local Christians and
prevalent at the time, such as not being welcome in the homes of his Christian
neighbors.
His parents were not strictly observant but on the holy days would travel to the
synagogue in the nearby village. His mother would refrain from menial work on the
Shabbat.
Trotsky was born and raised during the period which saw many of the ghastly
pogroms that swept the Ukraine area. To Trotsky, like many of the Jews, a solution
must be found that would prevent such deliberate pillaging and wanton killings. He
developed an intense dislike of injustice and tyranny. The existing concept of
national inequality was one of the great underlying causes of his dissatisfaction
with the existing order.
Young Trotsky
Later he rationalized that the pogroms were a result of the degenerate social
structure of serfdom. Only by the Tsar's overthrow and the establishment of a new
justice ruling system would the brutal massacres stop. He attributed the pogroms to
a need of a governmental scapegoat to allay the complaints of the masses. Only by
fighting against the bankers and speculators would the confidence of the poor
working classes be changed. Trotsky put his trust in his concept of
Internationalism to solve all of mankind's problems, including the Jewish
problems.
When Trotsky was nine he traveled to Odessa to continue studies at St. Paul's
realschule , and at the same time, continuing his attendance at Jewish
religious classes. It was during those years that Trotsky became an atheist totally
rebelling against religion which he considered pure superstition.
Trotsky fought with his father and his way of life. Against his father's desires
he married a Jewish girl, Alexandra Lvovna Sokolovskaya, who was six years his
senior, while his was imprisoned for his activist activities. She bore him two
daughters but later on he abandoned her and their children. He later took Natalia
Sedova as his common-law wife in 1903. She gave him two sons who used her last name
so they not be identified with him.
Trotsky's relations with his parents remained hostile, but during his years of
exile they would go to visit him. His mother died in 1910 at the age of sixty. When
the October Revolution came, Trotsky's father was a relatively wealthy man, only to
be ruined by the revolution. Yet his son would not come to his aid, commenting that
"my father has no shoes and with so many people around who have no shoes, how could
I possible request shoes for my father?" Deserted by his son, he was forced to fend
for himself in his old age. When his father died and requested to be buried with a
Jewish burial, Trotsky refused to bury him in the Jewish cemetery, instead had him
buried in the garden of his house. This has been widely regarded as a clear action
by Trotsky to openly exhibit his disdain for his Jewish heritage.
The Mendel Beilis trial in 1917 shocked the world. Trotsky also protested the
miscarriage of justice and in an open letter to A. S. Zarudny, the minister of
justice, he protested against the "deliberate attempt at moral assassination."
Instead of identifying with the Jew, Beilis, he used the trial to denounce the
Tsarist government and its despicable methodology to garner popular support for the
Tsar.
In his years in exile in Vienna he became a correspondent for one of Russia's
great newspapers. He reported on the active anti-Semitism in Rumanian, stating that
in Rumania "anti-Semitism has established itself as a state religion " Some three
hundred thousand Rumanian Jews were not recognized as Rumanian citizens even though
their fathers and grandfathers were born in Rumania. Trotsky was intimately
knowledgeable of the plight of Rumanian Jews, but instead of identifying with the
Jews as his own people, he used them as a piece of propaganda to further his idea
of internationalist communistic solutions to achieve social equality.
During the early period of revolutionary polemics, the General Jewish Workers'
Union, better known as the ' Bund' , offered the Jewish workers its
answer to exploitation and pogroms. The Bund dealt only with the Jewish workers who
shared a common cultural background. The Bund was essentially anti-religious but
pro-Yiddish which had emerged at that time as a popular culture. The Bund claimed
to be the sole representative of the Jewish working class and exerted a great
secularizing influence on the Jewish masses, but it did not try to take away the
distinct Jewish-Yiddish character of the Jewish workers. They repudiated Jewish
national holidays as phantasies which are useless for human society, believing that
they will soon vanish together with the old social systems.
Both Lenin and Trotsky criticized the Bund for its separatist and chauvinistic
approach to workers' liberation. Trotsky was an assimilationist, the Bundist were a
nationalist-Yiddishist anti-religious movement within the Jewish people. Trotsky
resented them since nationalistic movements were the opposite of his own
internationalist philosophy. Trotsky refused to see the Jewish problem as the Jews
saw it, but rather as a problem that arises due to nationalistic tendencies amongst
peoples.
Trotsky felt as Marx that "religion is the opium of the people. Whoever fails to
struggle against religion is unworthy of bearing the name of a revolutionary." In a
letter written less than six months before his assassination he stated that "for
forty-three years of my life I have remained a revolutionary. I shall die a
proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and consequently
an irreconcilable atheist." Nevertheless in the first Soviet government following
the October Revolutions, Trotsky was the only Jew included in the ruling elite.
Incidentally, in the second government another Jew was appointed as commissar of
justice, a Jew by the name of Steinberg who was a strictly religious Jew who when
he was arrested prior to the revolution would wear tephilin in his cell and
even celebrate the Passover Seder there. Needless to say, Trotsky and Steinberg
disagreed on several issues.
The Evsektsa was the 'Jewish Section" of the Communist party and was
charged with dealing with the large Jewish population of three million
non-assimilated people. Unlike other nationals living in the Soviet Union, the Jews
were viewed as a separate national group, but they lacked a territory of their own.
The Soviet Union had to modify its stance toward the Jews and 'grant' them a
fictional nationality.
The Evseksia had a definite task, to eliminate the Jewish private trader
and to bring the cultural Yiddish life in line with the Communist party line. The
Evseksia was basically staffed by Jews who "had to be more Catholic than the
Pope". Many of the members of the Evseksia were former members of the Bund.
Their work wrought havoc on the Jews, especially the observant Jews. The
Evseksia fought the Jewish religion with great fury trying to eradicate any
practice.
Trotsky was completely indifferent to the actions of the Evseksia . He
would not intercede on behalf of his Jewish brethren and they were forced to look
for help in other less powerful quarters.
Trotsky referred to himself not as a Jew, but as an Internationalist. His name
change from Bronstein would mean that he would be forever identified as a Jew to
which he was opposed. He took the name of Trotsky from his non-Jewish jailer, but
everyone knew that Trotsky was a Jew - Stalin would never let him forget it and he
used it to his advantage. Trotsky often expressed his disdain for Jews in the
Communist Party; this was partly credited because of his dealings with the Bund.
How could a person be a Jew, meaning exposing a national class and still be a
Communist, believing in the fraternity of men? To Trotsky, the Jew always reverted
back to being a Jew.
Yet later in life as he lived his exile from Stalin, he tried working with them
instead of against them. He began to exhort the Jewish Communists to abandon
Yiddish and learn the local languages. He hoped that the Jewish worker would act as
a catalyst to convert the local workers. Yet he failed to realize that most Soviet
Jews were ruined financially by the revolution, lived in poverty and misery for
many years and were skeptical that Communism could revolutionize the world. Even
though many Jews reached high ranks in the Communist Party after the revolution, it
was only a small minority. In his own locale where he was born, he was hated
intensely and accused of robbing and plundering the Jews
It is related that the chief Rabbi of Moscow, Rabbi Jacob Maze, once appeared
before Trotsky to plead on the behalf of the Russian Jews. Trotsky answered him, as
he had done on various occasions, that he was a Communist and did not consider
himself a Jew. To this Rabbi Maze replied: " Trotsky makes the revolutions, and
the Bronsteins pay the bills. "
Churchill was quoted as saying that so great was the contribution that Trotsky
made to the Red Army, that he deserved to be made Dictator of Russia, save but one
obstacle: He was a Jew. He was still a Jew and nothing could get him passed it. It
is difficult when you have deserted your family, repudiated your race, spat upon
the religion of your fathers, only to be denied the great prize of being considered
a non-Jew.
Stalin never publicly admitted his hatred for Jews. Officially anti-Semitism was
illegal in the Soviet Union. Yet Stalin was wary of Jews in high places and could
not trust them always believing that perhaps there was a conspiracy brewing. His
daughter, Svetlana, said that she believes Stalin's excesses against the Jews stem
from his years of power struggle with Trotsky gradually transferring itself from a
political power struggle to a racial hatred of all Jews.
In regards to Zionism, Trotsky showed only the smallest interest. He understood
the movement to be a reactionary utopian unrealizable dream. Since Trotsky believed
that the proletariat has no fatherland, the concept of a Jewish nation seemed
antiquated since according to Marx, the state is bound to wither away heralding the
classless society. The Bund also was opposed to Zionism which viewed Zionism as a
distraction that took the Jewish worker's mind away from social action at home. Yet
to Trotsky, the only difference between the Bund and the Zionist were the choice of
territory or as one writer of the period commented, "The only difference between
the Zionists and the Bundists is that the Bundists are Zionists who are afraid of
sea sickness." (Attributed to Plenkhanov in a conversation with Jabotinsky)
Dr. Chaim Weitzmann related in his autobiography that: "My resentment of Lenin
and Plekhanov and the arrogant Trotsky was provoked by the contempt with which they
treated any Jew who was moved by the fate of his people and animated by a love of
its history and its tradition." It was only much later in life, in the late 1930's
when Trotsky was visited by an Israeli Communist who described the socialist way of
life and the kibbutz experience that he began to show any interest in Zionism.
He explained that he had felt that with the spread of Communism with its
inherent integration of equality amongst workers that the Jewish workers would lose
their Jewishness as the gentiles lost their need for anti-Semitism. However, he
acknowledged that with the danger of Hitler and his revival of anti-Semitism, the
possibility of the assimilation of the Jewish worker into the Communist work force
was diminished. It seemed that he was willing to concede the need for a Jewish
territorial nationality. Had he lived to see the horrors of World War II, perhaps
he would concede more of his philosophy. He was assassinated on August 20, 1940 by
an agent of Stalin.
Today Trotsky's name is hardly remembered. His ideas have been discarded and
discredited. All of his energies to transform the world into a paradise have been
laid waste. Yet the heritage that he rebelled against and denied, the heritage that
he felt certain would fade into a worker's paradise, is blossoming and is once
again vibrant.
Perhaps this can be a lesson for all who think that Judaism and its belief in
God is a mere cultural passing, like opium. We are witnesses that in spite of all
opposition, the Jewish people continue to grow and develop.
Comedian Volodymyr Zelensky won the Ukrainian presidential elections Sunday with over 73
percent of the vote, in a massive repudiation of the incumbent president, Petro Poroshenko, and
the imperialist-orchestrated 2014 coup that brought him to power.
The "chocolate oligarch" Poroshenko became president in the wake of the operation in
February 2014 that toppled the pro-Russian government of Viktor Yanukovich. Behind the coup
stood the major imperialist powers, above all the US and Germany. Basing themselves on sections
of the Ukrainian oligarchy and upper middle class, they mobilized fascist forces to install a
puppet regime that would be immediately subservient to their economic interests and war
preparations against Russia.
The bourgeois media hailed this fascist-led coup as a "democratic revolution." They were
joined by the middle-class left, including organizations such as the now-defunct International
Socialist Organization, which systematically worked to downplay the role played by the extreme
right and the US State Department in the creation of this "revolution."
The results of the 2014 coup for the working class have been nothing less than
catastrophic. In the past five years, the Poroshenko regime has stood at the forefront of the
imperialist military buildup against Russia. Ukrainian military spending has risen to a
staggering 6 percent of GDP.
The systematic ratcheting up of tensions with Russia by the Kiev regime, most recently with
its reckless provocation in the Azov Sea, have dramatically heightened the danger of a
full-scale war in Europe, which could quickly escalate into another world war. The ongoing
civil war in the Eastern Ukraine has cost the lives of over 13,000 people.
At the same time, the Ukrainian oligarchy has undertaken the most far-reaching attacks on
the already low living standards of the Ukrainian working class since the restoration of
capitalism. Almost one million Ukrainians are now living on the brink of starvation; tens of
thousands are left to freeze in the winter .
For the implementation of these policies, the Poroshenko regime mobilized fascist forces
such as the notorious Azov battalion. The glorification of the Nazi collaborators of the UPA
and the OUN-B, which massacred thousands of Jews, Poles and Ukrainians during World War II, has
become official state policy. References to communism and symbols of the Soviet Red Army, which
defeated the Nazis in the war, have been criminalized. Russian artists and works of art have
been banned from entering the country.
It is these conditions that propelled the vast majority of the Ukrainian population to
either abstain from the elections -- the voter turnout was just 62 percent -- or vote for
Zelensky. Poroshenko was unable to garner any significant support outside a small province in
West Ukraine and the district in Kiev where the country's super rich reside.
Yet whatever his appeals to antiwar sentiments and the enormous anger about social austerity
during the campaign, Zelensky will defend the interests of the Ukrainian oligarchy against the
working class, and work in alliance with imperialism.
Throughout the entire election campaign, Zelensky deliberately concealed his real political
and economic agenda. He instead relied almost exclusively on demagogic appeals to the
widespread hatred of Poroshenko. During the campaign, Zelensky made promises to enter direct
negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin for a peaceful settlement of the war in East
Ukraine. Yet in an interview published days before the election, he called Putin an "enemy" and
stated that it was "perfectly fine and great" that people considered the Nazi collaborator
Bandera as a "hero."
On April 12, Zelensky met with French President Emmanuel Macron. His team has hired a PR
firm in Washington to arrange meetings with officials of the Trump administration and
influential think tank figures. Zelensky also maintains close connections to the oligarch Ihor
Kolkomoisky, and now seeks to work together with Mikheil Saakashvili, the former president of
Georgia, who had been installed through a US-backed "color revolution."...
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University –
his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
"... The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth, along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks. ..."
"... Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper policy motivation: why it was done. ..."
"... President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office, Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth, and the truth would set them free. ..."
"... The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street, or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence, ..."
"... According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. ..."
"... This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. ..."
"... Hannigan abruptly resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage control. ..."
"... In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine. Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department. ..."
"... The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA. ..."
"... As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the National Endowment for Democracy. ..."
"... Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda, against Russia. ..."
"... The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department. Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly, in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected. ..."
"... This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest. ..."
"... Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did you know: ..."
"... War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff. ..."
"... The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages. ..."
"... That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony Blair are lyers and mass murderers. ..."
The British Role in 'Russiagate' Is About to Be Fully Exposed April 8, 2019
20190408-russiagate-exposed-brits.pdf
The "fake news" media has now dropped its pretense of having ever had any intention of allowing the truth -- as documented in
U.S. Attorney General Barr's summary of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's report, exonerating President Donald Trump of having
"conspired or coordinated with the Russian government" -- to thoroughly refute the Russiagate "Big Lie." Soon, however, it is certain
that the deliberate, British Intelligence-originated, military-grade disinformation campaign carried out against the United States,
including to this day, will be exposed.
The truth is, that a foreign government did indeed meddle in the American Presidential election, in a failed attempt to fix
the outcome, but it was not Russia. It was the City of London, and the Five Eyes imperial intelligence services of the British Commonwealth,
along with treasonous, "Tory" American elements. If that admission is forced to the surface, through the vigorous actions of all
that oppose the presently dominant Big Lie tyranny, that revelation will shock and liberate people all over the world. The mental
stranglehold of "fake news" media outlets can be permanently broken. That is the task of the next days and weeks.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if there is no cat," says the Chinese proverb. Yet, although the Mueller
report was called a "nothing burger," it was not: it still presented the potentially lethal lie that twelve Russian gremlins, code-named
Guccifer 2.0, hacked the DNC. Sundry media meatheads thus continue to blog and broadcast about "what else is really there."
The false Russian hack story, still being repeated, marches on, undeterred, like the emperor without any clothes. One lame-brained
variation, promoted in order to cover up the British role, states that Hillary Clinton, rather than Trump, colluded with the Russians.
It is being repeated by Republicans and Democrats alike, some of them malicious, some of them confused, and all of them completely
wrong. The media, such as the failed New York Times and various electronic media, must be forced to either admit the truth,
or be even more thoroughly discredited than they already have been. They must stop their constant repetition of this Joseph Goebbels-like
Big Lie. There must be a vigorous dissemination of the truth by all those journalists, politicians, activists and citizens that love
truth more than their own assumptions, including about President Trump, or other dearly-held systems of false belief.
Apart from documenting the presence of "former" British intelligence agent Christopher Steele, former MI6 head Sir Richard
Dearlove, and former GCHQ head Robert Hannigan at the center of the Russiagate campaign against President Trump for the past several
years, we must, in order to expose this successfully, identify not only what was actually done and who was doing it, but the deeper
policy motivation: why it was done.
A New Cultural Paradigm
The world is actually on the verge of ending the military conflicts among the major world powers, such as Russia, China, the United
States, and India. These four powers, and not the City of London, are the key fulcrum around which a new era in humanity's future
will be decided. A new monetary and credit system brought into being through these four powers would foster the greatest physical
economic growth in the history of humanity. In addition, discussions involving Italy working with China on the industrialization
of the African continent (discussions which could soon also involve the United States) show that sections of Europe want to join
China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and leave the dying trans-Atlantic financial empire behind.
The recent announcement of a United States commitment to return to the Moon by 2024 can, in particular, become the basis for a
proposal to other nations -- for example, China, Russia, and India, all of whom are space powers of demonstrated capability -- to
resolve their differences on Earth in a higher, joint mission. As Russia's Roscosmos Director Dmitry Rogozin said in a recent interview:
"I am a fierce proponent of international cooperation, including with Americans, because their country is big and technologically
advanced, and they can make good partners Especially since personal and professional relations between Roscosmos and NASA at the
working level are great."
There is also the possibility of ending the danger of thermonuclear war. President Trump, speaking on April 4 of the prospects
for world peace, stated:
"Between Russia, China, and us, we're all making hundreds of billions of dollars worth of weapons, including nuclear, which is
ridiculous. I think it's much better if we all got together and didn't make these weapons those three countries I think can come
together and stop the spending and spend on things that are more productive toward long-term peace."
This is a statement of real importance. Such an outlook is a rejection of the "perpetual crisis/perpetual war" outlook of the
Bush-Obama Administration, a four-term "war presidency" which was abruptly, unexpectedly ended in 2016. The British were not amused.
It is to stop this new cultural paradigm, pivoted on the Pacific and the potential Four Powers alliance, that British imperial
forces have deployed. The 2016 election of President Trump, and his personal friendship with President Xi Jinping and desire to work
with President Putin, are an intolerable strategic threat to the eighteenth-century geopolitics of the British empire. They have
repeatedly used Russiagate to disrupt the process of deliberation among Presidents Xi, Trump, and Putin, thus increasing the danger
of war. Russiagate, in the interest of international security, must be ended by exposing it for the utter fraud that it is.
The Truth Set Free
President Donald Trump has no vested interest in protecting the British "special relationship." From his second day in office,
Trump declared that he would clean out the intelligence agencies. If Trump were to do that, however, the real, tragic history of
America's last 50 years would be exhumed from that swamp. Shining a light into that darkness would illuminate the world. The American
people would stop playing Othello to the City of London's Iago. They would denounce the British "special relationship," never again
to fight imperial wars for the greater glory of the British Empire. They would learn the true story of Vietnam, of Iraq 1991 and
Iraq 2003, of Libya 2011, and many other conflicts, special operations, and assassinations. The American people would know the truth,
and the truth would set them free.
The current insurrection against the United States Presidency is part of a global strategic battle: will a conspiracy of republican
forces overcome the modern day British imperial system, centered in the hot money centers of the City of London and Wall Street,
or will the oligarchical system once again triumph, immiserating all but the very wealthy? That is the real issue of the insurrection
against the maverick American president being conducted by the London and NATO-centered enforcers of the old world. To paraphrase
the American Declaration of Independence,
"The history of the present Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the
undermining of the United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world."
DOCUMENTATION
While Robert Mueller found that there was "no collusion" between Donald Trump or the Trump Campaign and Russia, he also filed
two indictments regarding alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. The first alleges that 12 members of Russian Military
Intelligence hacked the DNC and John Podesta and delivered the purloined files to WikiLeaks for strategic publication before the
July 2016 Democratic National Convention and in October 2016, one month before the election. The second indictment charges the Internet
Research Agency, a Russian internet merchandising and marketing firm, with running social media campaigns in the U.S. in 2016 designed
to impact the election. When the fuller version of the Mueller report becomes public, it is certain to recharge the claims of Russian
interference based on the so-called background "evidence" supporting these indictments.
The good news, however, is that investigations in the United States and Britain, have unearthed significant contrary evidence
exposing British Intelligence, NATO, and, to a lesser extent, Ukraine, as the actual foreign actors in the 2016 U.S. presidential
election. We provide a short summary of the main aspects of that evidence to spark further investigations of the British intelligence
networks, entities, and methods at issue, internationally. More detailed accounts concerning specific aspects of what we recite here
can be found on our website.
The Russian Hack That Wasn't
The Veterans Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, an association of former U.S. intelligence officials, have demonstrated that
the Russian hack of the DNC alleged by Robert Mueller, was more likely an internal leak,
rather than a hack conducted
over the internet. William Binney, who conducted the main investigations for the VIPS, spent 30 years at the National Security Agency,
becoming Technical Director. He designed the sorts of NSA programs that would detect a Russian hack if one occurred. Binney conducted
an actual forensic examination of the DNC files released by WikiLeaks, and the related files circulated by the persona Guccifer 2.0,
who Robert Mueller claims is a GRU creation. Binney has demonstrated that the calculated transfer speeds and metadata characteristics
of these files are consistent with downloading to a thumb drive or storage device rather than an internet-based hack. This supports
the account by WikiLeaks of how it obtained the files. According to WikiLeaks and former Ambassador Craig Murray, they were obtained
from a person who was not a Russian state actor of any kind, in Washington, D.C. WikiLeaks offered to tell the Justice Department
all about this, and actual negotiations to this effect were proceeding in early 2017, when Senator Mark Warner and FBI Director James
Comey acted to sabotage and end the negotiations.
Further, as opposed to the hyperbole in the media and in Robert Mueller's indictment, analysis of the Internet Research Agency's
alleged "weaponization" of Facebook in 2016 involved
a paltry total of $46,000 in Facebook
ads and $4,700 spent on Google platforms . In an election in which the major campaigns spend tens of thousands of dollars every
day on these platforms, whatever the IRA thought it was doing in its amateurish and juvenile memes and tropes was like throwing a
stone in the ocean. Most of these activities occurred after the election and never mentioned either candidate. The interpretation
that these ads were designed to draw clicks and website traffic, rather than influence the election, must be considered.
The "evidence" for Mueller's GRU hacking indictment was provided, in part, by CrowdStrike, the DNC vendor that originated the
claims that the Russians had hacked that entity. CrowdStrike is closely associated with the Atlantic Council's Digital Research Lab
(DRL), an operation jointly funded by NATO's Strategic Communications Center and the U.S. State Department, to counter Russian "hybrid
warfare." CrowdStrike has been caught more than once falsely attributing hacks to the Russians and the Atlantic Council's DRL is
a font of anti-Russian intelligence operations.
The British Target Trump
According to CIA Director John Brennan's Congressional testimony, the British began complaining loudly about candidate Trump
and Russia in late 2015. Brennan's statements were echoed in articles in The Guardian . According to Brennan, intelligence
leads about Trump and Russia had been forwarded to Brennan from both British intelligence and from Estonia. The former head
of the Russia Desk for MI6 and protégé of Sir Richard Dearlove, Christopher Steele, fresh from working for British Intelligence,
the FBI, and U.S. State Department in the 2014 Ukraine coup, assembled in 2016 a phony dossier called Operation Charlemagne, claiming
widespread Russian interference in European elections, including in the Brexit vote. By the spring of 2016, Steele was contributing
to a British/U.S. intelligence task force on the Trump Campaign which had been convened at CIA headquarters under John Brennan's
direction.
This task force targeted Trump campaign volunteers Carter Page and George Papadopoulos in entrapment operations on British
soil, using British agents, during the spring and summer of 2016. The personnel employed in these operations all had multiple
connections to the British firm Hakluyt, to Steele's firm Orbis, and to the British military's Integrity Initiative. Sometime in
the summer of 2016, Robert Hannigan, then head of GCHQ, flew to Washington to brief John Brennan personally. Hannigan abruptly
resigned from GCHQ shortly after the election, sparking widespread speculation that the British were making an attempt at damage
control.
Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort were already on the radar and under investigation by the same British, Dearlove-centered intelligence
network and by Christopher Steele specifically. Flynn had been defamed by Dearlove and Stefan Halper, as a possible Russian agent
way back in 2014 because he spoke to Russian researcher Svetlana Lokhova at a dinner sponsored by Dearlove's Cambridge Security Forum.
Or, at least that was the pretext for the targeting of Flynn, who otherwise defied British intelligence by exposing Western support
for terrorist operations in Syria and sought a collaborative relationship with Russia to counter ISIS. Manafort was under FBI investigation
throughout 2014 and 2015, largely in retaliation for his role in steering the Party of the Regions to political power in Ukraine.
In 2016, the Manafort investigation migrated to the Democratic National Committee with direct assistance provided by Ukrainian
state intelligence. This effort was led by Alexandra Chalupa, an admirer of Stepan Bandera and other heroes of Nazi history in Ukraine.
Chalupa also had deep connections to British-oriented networks at the U.S. State Department.
In or around June 2016, Christopher Steele began writing his dirty and bogus dossier about Trump and Russia. This is the dossier
which claimed that Trump was compromised by Putin and that Putin was coordinating with Trump in the 2016 election. The main "legend"
of this full-spectrum information warfare operation run from Britain, was that Donald Trump was receiving "dirt" on Hillary Clinton
from Russia. The operations targeting Page and Papadopoulos consisted of multiple attempts to plant fabricated evidence on them which
would reflect what Steele himself was fabricating in the dirty dossier. At the very same time, the infamous June 2016 meeting at
Trump Tower was being set up. That meeting involved the Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, who, it was alleged in a series of
bizarre emails written by British publicist Ron Goldstone to set up the meeting, could deliver "dirt" on Hillary Clinton direct from
the Russian government. Veselnitskaya didn't deliver any such dirt. But the entire operation was being monitored by State Department
intelligence agent Kyle Parker, an expert on Russia. Parker's emails reveal deep ties to the highest levels of British intelligence
and much chatter between them about Trump and Russia.
A now-changed version of the website for Christopher Steele's firm, Orbis, trumpeted an expertise in information warfare operations,
and the networks in which Steele runs are deeply integrated into the British military's Integrity Initiative. The Integrity Initiative
is a rapid response propaganda operation using major journalists in the United States and Europe to carry out targeted defamation
campaigns. Its central charge, according to documents posted by the hacking group Anonymous, is selling the United States and Western
Europe on the immediate need for regime change in Russia, even if that involves war.
Much has been made by Republicans and other lunkheads in the U.S. Congress of Steele's contacts with Russians for his dossier.
They claim that such contacts resulted in a Russian disinformation operation being run through the duped Christopher Steele. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
MI6's Dirty Dossier on Donald Trump: Full-Spectrum Information Warfare
On its face, Steele's dossier would immediately be recognized as a complete fabrication by any competent intelligence analyst.
He cites some 32 sources inside the Russian government for his fabricated claims about Trump. What they allegedly told him is specific
enough in time and content to identify them. To believe that the dossier is true or that actual Russians contributed to it, you must
also believe that that the British government was willing to roll up this entire network, exposing them, since the intention was
for the dossier's wild claims to be published as widely as possible. By all accounts, Britain and the United States together do not
have 32 highly placed sources inside the Russian government, nor would they ever make them public in this way or with this very sloppy
tradecraft. Steele's fabrication also uses aspects of readily available public information, such as the sale of 19% of the energy
company Rosneft, (the alleged bribe offered to Carter Page for lifting sanctions) to concoct a fictional narrative of high crimes
and misdemeanors.
Other claims in the dossier were published, publicly, in various Ukrainian publications. The famous claim that Trump directed
prostitutes to urinate on a bed once slept upon by Barack Obama seems to be plagiarized from similarly fake 2009 British propaganda
stories about Silvio Berlusconi spending the night with a prostitute in a hotel room in Rome, "defiling" Putin's bed. According to
various sources in the United States, this outrageous claim was made by Sergei Millian. George Papadopoulos has stated that he believes
Millian is an FBI informant, recounting in his book how a friend of Millian's blurted this out when Millian, Papadopoulos and the
friend were having coffee.
The final nail in this case has been provided by The Hill 's John Solomon. He says that Steele told former Associate
Attorney General Bruce Ohr about the sources for the dirty dossier. According to Solomon, Ohr's notes reveal one main source, a former
senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States. But, as anyone familiar with the territory would know, there is
no such retired senior Russian intelligence official living in the United States whose entire life is not controlled by the CIA.
Despite its obvious fake pedigree, Steele's dossier was laundered into the Justice Department repeatedly, by the CIA and State
Department and the Obama White House. It was used to obtain FISA surveillance warrants turning key members of the Trump Campaign
into walking microphones. It was circulated endlessly by the Clinton Campaign to a network of reporters in the U.S. known to serve
as scribes for the intelligence community. John Brennan used it to conduct a special emergency briefing of the leading members of
the U.S. Congress charged with intelligence responsibilities in August of 2016 and to brief Harry Reid, who was Senate Majority Leader
at the time. All of this activity meant that the salacious accusation that Trump was a Putin pawn and the FBI was investigating the
matter, leaked out and was used by the Clinton Campaign to defame Trump for its electoral advantage. When Trump won, Steele's nonsense
received the stamp of the U.S. intelligence community and official currency in the campaign to take out the President.
As a result of Congressional investigations of Russiagate, it has become abundantly clear that the British operation against
Trump was aided and abetted by the Obama White House, the State Department, the CIA, the FBI, and personalities associated with the
National Endowment for Democracy. The individuals involved might be named Veterans of the 2014 Ukrainian Coup, since all of
them also worked on this operation. It is no accident that Victoria Nuland, the case agent for the Ukraine coup, played a major role
in bolstering Steele's credentials for the purpose of selling his dirty dossier to the media and to the Justice Department. This
went so far as Steele giving a full scale briefing on his fabricated dossier at the State Department in October 2016.
Out of the Ukraine coup, an entire military-centered propaganda apparatus arose, first through NATO, and then out from there
to military units and diplomatic centers in the U.S., Europe, and Britain, to run low intensity operations, and black propaganda,
against Russia.
The British end of the operation includes the Integrity Initiative, the 77th Brigade, and NATO's Strategic Communications
Center. In the United States, the Integrity Initiative has been integrated into the Global Engagement Center at the U.S. State Department.
Most certainly, this operation is poised again to intervene in the U.S. elections; the British House of Lords have stated explicitly,
in their December 2018 report, British Foreign Policy in a Shifting World Order, that Donald Trump must not be re-elected.
This is why the British are yelping that under no circumstances can the classified documents concerning their role in the
attempted coup against Donald Trump be declassified. It would end their leverage over the United States and much of Europe. That
is why these documents must indeed be declassified, and parallel investigations by citizens and government officials concerned with
ending the imperial system, otherwise known as the current "war party," must begin in earnest.
"in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe"
Perhaps add mainstream media to the list of such sincere believers, they will fire their own real journalists.
David Walters , April 24, 2019 at 13:14
"This doesn't mean that Russia would never use hackers to interfere in world political affairs or that Vladimir Putin is some
sort of virtuous girl scout, it just means that in a post-Iraq invasion world, only herd-minded human livestock believe the unsubstantiated
assertions of opaque and unaccountable government agencies about governments who are oppositional to those same agencies."
Absolutely correct.
Anyone who still believes what the IC says if a moron. As Pompeo recently said to the student body of Texas A&M University,
my alma matta, the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steel. He went on the explain that the CIA has courses to teach their agent
that dark "art".
Right, David Walters, and see Pompous Pompeo now. The only truths he's told was to a student body of Texas A&M University –
his own alma mater – the CIA's job is to lie, cheat and steal.
Even though he's left his post as CIA Director and assumed his current post of Secretary of State. Pompous Pompeo continues his
CIA traits of lying, cheating, and stealing. It's in a way similar to a phrase, "A leopard never changes its spots". This is why
the DPRK govt issued a Persona Non Grata on Pompous Pompeo – that he isn't a bona fide diplomat, but a CIA official.
CWG , April 22, 2019 at 17:15
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably, Putin would have favored Clinton, since
she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT a FISA warrant. They only obtained
that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That was apparent ever after Devin Nunes
did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason) they needed to cover that up as quickly
as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying till this very day. The same lie through
which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump through lying to the FISA Court, which
again, is treason. According to the Constitution, lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the Attorney General. At all costs, they
needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire story. It was only later on that Sarah
Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a crime that had ANYTHING to with with
the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many people as possible. 'Russian Collusion,
Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia. Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about. Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire regime in order to let Clinton win the
Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence' that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question 'why did Obama spy on the Trump
Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push? The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP
the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately
proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing anything wrong, it would show us all
THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon still don't seem to see all
that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is simply not true. It's a Mueller created
LIE.
That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and would find out they were illegally spying
on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which seems to be succesfull, the Deep
State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is
that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the
overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not
have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
boxerwars , April 22, 2019 at 17:13
RE: "A Russian Agent Smear"
:::
Was Pat Tillman Murdered?
JUL 30, 2007
I don't know, but it seems increasingly conceivable. Just absorb these facts:
O'Neal said Tillman, a corporal, threw a smoke grenade to identify themselves to fellow soldiers who were firing at them. Tillman
was waving his arms shouting "Cease fire, friendlies, I am Pat [expletive] Tillman, damn it!" again and again when he was killed,
O'Neal said
In the same testimony, medical examiners said the bullet holes in Tillman's head were so close together that it appeared the
Army Ranger was cut down by an M-16 fired from a mere 10 yards or so away.
The motive? I don't know. It's still likeliest it was an accident. But there's some mysterious testimony in the SI report about
nameless snipers. A reader suggests the following interpretation:
News this weekend said that there were "snipers" present and the witnesses didn't remember their names. I believe that's code
in the Army–these guys were Delta. In the Tillman incident, these snipers weren't part of the unit and they were never mentioned
publicly before. That's a key indicator that they weren't supposed to be acknowledged.
If you've ever read Blackhawk Down, Mark Bowden explains how he grew frustrated because interviewed Rangers kept referring
to "soldiers from another unit" while claiming they didn't know the unit ID or the soldiers' names. It took him months to crack
the unit ID and find people from Delta who were present at the fight.
Randy Shugart and Gary Gordon, the Delta operators who earned Medals of Honor in Mogadishu, have always been identified as
snipers, too.
If my theory is correct, the Delta guys could have fired the shots – a three-round burst to the forehead from 50 yards is impossible
for normal soldiers and Rangers, but is probably an easy shot for those guys. But because Delta doesn't officially exist and Tillman
was a hero, nobody in the Army would want to have to explain exactly how the event went down. Easier just to claim hostile fire
until the family forced them to do otherwise.
This makes some sense to me, although we shouldn't dismiss the chance he was murdered. Tillman was a star and might have aroused
jealousy or resentment. He also opposed the Iraq war and was a proud atheist. In Bush's increasingly sectarian military, that
might have stirred hostility. I don't know. But I know enough to want a deeper investigation. My atheist readers will no doubt
admire the way Tillman left this world, according to the man who was with him:
As bullets flew above their heads, the young soldier at Pat Tillman's side started praying. "I thought I was praying to myself,
but I guess he heard me," Sgt. Bryan O'Neal recalled in an interview Saturday with The Associated Press. "He said something like,
'Hey, O'Neal, why are you praying? God can't help us now."'
(Maybe the Congress can )
////// The USA is aghast with "smears" and "internal investigations" and promised but never produced "White Papers" 'as the
world turns' and circles continents Dominated by American Military Power / Predominantly Barbarous / Uncivilized Use of Force
/ and Arrogantly Effective in it's use of Dominating Military Power.
\\\\ The Poorer Peoples of the World accept their lots-in-life with some acceptance of reality vis-a-vis the "lot-in-life"
they've been alleged/assigned.
/// But How Do We Accept The Fact that our Self-Sacrificiing Hero,Pat Tillman, was slaughtered in Afghanistan,
(WITH POSITIVE PROOF) – by his own Fellow American soldiers – ???
!!!! What i'm say'n is, if Tillman represents the Life Surrendering "American Hero"
WHY DID HIS FELLOW "AMERICAN SOLDIERS" ASSASSINATE & MURDER HIM ???????
AND WHY IS THIS STORY BURIED ALONG WITH MANY OTHER SMEAR Stories
that provide prophylactic protection for all the Trump pianist prophylaxis cover
Up for the Right Wing theft of American Democracy under FDR
In favor of Ayn Rand's prevalent OBJECTIVISM under Trump.
"Capitalism and Altruism
are incompatible
capitalism and altruism
cannot coexist in man,
or in the same society".
President Trump represents
Stark & Total Capitalism
Just as "Conservative Party"
Core is in The Confederacy
AKA; The RIGHT WING
The Right Wing of US Gov't
Is All About PRESERVING
Confederate States' Laws
Written by Thomas Jefferson
Prior to The Constitution, which
became the Received/Judicial
Constitutional Law of the Land in
The Republic of the "United States"
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to deteriorate the more his actions
and statements are attacked and countered? You know what happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them
down? They get weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the least being he's clearly mentally unfit.
Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation".
Nancy Pelosi stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda "for now". She's now
making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are: noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one issue to run on next year: getting
rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters,
the same ones they were positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip service to progressive
policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions once the donations start coming, but the common underlying
theme was and continues to be "Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because
Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton
campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they
disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November.
Eddie S , April 24, 2019 at 21:14
Exactly right, EKB -- - you can't ballroom dance without a partner! Also reminds me of the couples you occasionally run into
where one partner repeatedly runs-down the other, and you get the feeling that the critical partner doesn't have much going on
in his/her life so they deflect that by focusing on the other partner
Johnny Ryan S , April 22, 2019 at 13:38
Why did the DNC not allow the FBI to investigate the so-called" Russian hacked" emails? Rather, they hire CrowdStrike did
you know:
1)Obama Appoints CrowdStrike Officer To Admin Post Two Months Before June 2016 Report On Russia Hacking DNC
2) CrowdStrike Co-Founder Is Fellow On Russia Hawk Group, Has Connections To George Soros, Ukrainian Billionaire
3) DNC stayed that the FBI never asked to investigate the servers – that is a lie.
4) CrowdStrike received $100 million in investments led by Google Capital (since re-branded as CapitalG) in 2015. CapitalG is
owned by Alphabet, and Eric Schmidt, Alphabet's chairman, was a supporter of Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. More than just
supporting Clinton, leaked emails from Wikileaks in November 2016 showed that in 2014 he wanted to have an active role in the
campaign.
-daily caller and dan bongino have been bringing these points up since 2016.
Deniz , April 22, 2019 at 12:36
The Right is currently salivating over the tough law enforcement rhetoric coming out of Barr and Trump.
It reminds me of when Obama was running for office in 2008 when everyone, including myself, was in awe of him. What kept slipping
into his soaring anti-intervention speeches, was a commitment to the good war in Afghanistan, which seemed totally out of place
with the rest of his rhetoric. The fine print was far more reflective of his administration actions as the rest of it his communications
turned out to be just telling people what they wanted to hear.
War with Afghanistan was Obama's payoff to the MIC, just as Russia is now Trump's payoff.
The argument about not inserting Rich and the download is a good one as a defense strategy but doesn't help with finding the
truth about the emails. We can only hope that pursuing the truth and producing it will have a cumulative effect and the illusory
truth effect will include this truth.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:00
>>> ". . . doesn't help with finding the truth about the emails."
The important truth about the emails is in their authenticity and in the contents. No one has even attempted to claim that
they are not authentic or that the contents we've seen are other than the actual contents of the authentic messages.
Why should we much care how they were acquired and provided to the publisher?
Lily , April 22, 2019 at 17:55
That is what i think. People should not concentrate on how, who and where. This is just a smokescreen to avoid talking about
the content of the emails and Hillary Clinton's disgusting actions. She is a criminal and a murderess just like Obama and Tony
Blair are lyers and mass murderers.
All three of them are free, earning millions with their publicity whereas two brave persons who were telling the truth have
been tortured and are still in jail. Reality has become like the most horrible nightmare. Everything simply seems to have turned
upside down. No writer would invent such a primitive plot. And yet it is the unbelievable reality.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out
JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John
Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be
a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create.
A clown beat a high profile member of the established political class, due most likely to the
voters being disgusted by said political class? Uhmm, where have we seen this before?
So oil prices with rise which threaten Trump bid in 2020. Interesting times.
Notable quotes:
"... As is now known, however, appearances can be very misleading, and in actuality the same country that was vowing to "defy" the US actually ended up quietly implementing its new patron's will. ..."
The announcement by India's Oil Minister that his country will replace US-sanctioned
Iranian oil imports with those from "major oil-producing countries" despite the dramatic Bollywood show that New Delhi has made up until this point out of "defying" US sanctions makes
one seriously wonder whether India's preparing to ditch Russia next if the US imposes CAATSA
sanctions against it over the S-400s.
Shattering The "Indian Illusion"
The "
Indian Illusion " has been shattered after India's Oil Minister tweeted that his country will
replace US-sanctioned Iranian oil imports with those from "major oil-producing countries" such
as the Islamic Republic's hated GCC foes of Saudi
Arabia and the UAE that America said will
step up their exports in order to stabilize global prices after Washington announced that
it won't renew its anti-Iranian oil sanction waivers. New Delhi made a dramatic Bollywood-like
show over the past year out of "defying" US sanctions, with External Affairs Minister Sushma
Swaraj announcing last May that India will
only obey UNSC sanctions and not those unilaterally imposed by the US in contravention of
international law.
The Oil Minister himself said back in October before the waivers were issued that India will
continue buying Iranian oil in spite of the US sanctions, later
crediting Prime Minister Modi a month later when the US eventually granted it the waiver.
Adding "credibility" to the illusion that India's perception managers were masterfully
creating, it was then reported that the country will
use rupees instead of dollars when trading with Iran, a bold move that even fooled an RT
columnist who headlined his op-ed on this development as a " response to US global
bullying ".
As is now known, however, appearances can be very misleading, and in actuality
the same country that was vowing to "defy" the US actually ended up quietly implementing its
new patron's will.
Some pretty strange ideas if we are taking about oil. What they are smiling at RAND?
Notable quotes:
"... That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms. ..."
"... of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is all so very sad.. ..."
"... No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian ethos.) ..."
"... I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced. ..."
"... Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give “free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets? ..."
According to RAND the best option to overextend and unbalance is to produce more oil:
Expanding U.S. energy production would stress Russia's economy, potentially constraining its government budget and, by extension,
its defense spending. By adopting policies that expand world supply and depress global prices, the United States can limit Russian
revenue. Doing so entails little cost or risk, produces second-order benefits for the U.S. economy, and does not need multilateral
endorsement.
That evaluation is quite strange. The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make
a profit. Increasing production beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers. All recent new U.S. production
comes from shale oil. Optimistic estimates put the break even point for good shale oil fields
at around $50 per barrel. Few fields can produce at lower costs. Most shale oil fields have a higher break even point. There
is also a danger in suppressing oil prices. Many oil producing countries have U.S. friendly regimes. They need high oil prices to
survive. Ruining them will not come cheap for the U.S. in geopolitical terms.
The second best option says RAND is to increase sanctions of Russia. This also doesn't make much sense. Russia can produce everything
it needs and it has free access to the world's largest markets, China and India.
The best military options listed by RAND are all useless. All the new weapon systems Russia has revealed over the last two years
are way more capable than anything the U.S. is able to field. If the U.S., as RAND advocates, invest more in certain fields, it will
only be to catch up. That does not impose any new costs on Russia.
... ... ...
In all I find it a bit impertinent to publicly argue for "overextending and unbalancing Russia". Where is the need to do such?
The study demonstrates again that strategic analysis by U.S. think tanks is woefully shallow-minded. The "experts" writing these
have no deep understanding of Russia, or even of the economic-political complexity of the real world.
Four of the eight best options the RAND study found start with the words "Invest more in ...". It is a sign that the foremost
motive its writers had in mind is to grab more taxpayer money. Fine. Give it to them already. Overextending and unbalancing the U.S.
by more abstruse expenditure for weapon systems that do not work will neither hurt me nor Russia.
thanks b.. of the 8 most promising suggestions - 6 of them are military... it seems to me these think tanks are great pr tools
for the military industrial complex... who cares if the usa continues to move into 3rd world status as a nation, so long as more
money for weapons can be acquired?? that is what these think tanks - rand and etc seem to want to foist on the public... it is
all so very sad..
@1 steven.. well, as i read you, you are essentially supporting a continuation of the usa pouring endless
money into the military then, regardless the accuracy of the accounts on the new Russian weapons.. do i have that right?
No, I think most US weapons procurement gives weapons that don't work as advertised, and wouldn't win wars anyway. I think
it's one reason why the US military is largely only capable of spoiler wars, not actually conquering any place. (The other is
the general unreliability of mercenary forces, which the US army basically is, however much they try to cultivate a militant Christian
ethos.)
However, since I also do not believe spoiler wars help the country as a whole (as opposed to some of the owners) I think
pretty much all a burden, immoral to boot and should be massively reduced.
>> The U.S. government does not produce oil. Private companies do so but only if they can make a profit. Increasing production
beyond the global demand will decrease the oil price for all producers.
Even if you’re sure those companies are entirely private, if you print the current global reserve currency, can you not give
“free” money to frackers and thereby make them more competitive than global peers? Sure, that’s flooding the market with an illegal
subsidy. But, who can conduct proper accounting in opaque markets?
Of course, the money is not “free”. Depreciating the currency, an inflation tax, shows up in lower-quality goods (like frankenfood—
we cannot afford healthy food any more) and higher prices in everything. But, again, who’s counting? The BLS and the media? Yep.
That completely wrong. You can't prevent the "march of history" even if you understand that it is directed against you.
The collapse of the USSR put in motion forces for the revolution of the results of WWII. And EuroMaydan like previously Baltic
states "Maidans" were the direct result of this dissolution and changed balance of power in Europe with EU now being the
dominant force and the USA dominant geopolitical force.
Still it is true that Ukraine EuroMaydan was the major Putin's defeat and the major victory of the US neocons in general and
Obama as the President in particular. It might well be that this was inevitable as the
trajectory of post-soviet republic is reliable move toward anti-Russian stance as a side effect
of obtaining the independence, but still this was a defeat. It was actually Yanukovich who encouraged and helped to organized and
finance far right forces and the Party in Ukraine. such a pro-Russian President as fame news media in the USA and GB like to
describe him
Poroshenko was the USA SOB. The USA allowed Zelensky to run for office, and allowed him to win. Zelensky is most probably
another USA SOB, although only time will tell. Comedians are usually are people with very high IQ who see the absurdity of
the current life in Ukraine and Poroshenko regime more clearly then others. The question is whether he will be allowed to do
something about it by the USA and EU, who control Ukraine both politically and financially. Biden story of dismissal of the
General Prosecutor of Ukraine (who tried to procedure the firm Biden son got money from ) with ease tells us something about the
nature of the current governance of Ukraine: is is not even a vassal state -- it is a colony.
Nuland success in pushing Ukrainian nationalists to arm uprising against Yanukovich (pissing EU which signed a treaty with
Yanukovich about holding elections, which he would certanly lose, a day before) also can be explained that at this point the USA
controlled vital centers of Ukrainian political power including intelligence agencies, several oligarchs (Poroshenko is one;
Timoshenko is another) and, especially, media. In Ukraine Western NGO have the status of diplomatic missions (with
corresponding immunity), so in no way such a country can be independent in any meaningful sense of this word.
But craziness, aggressiveness and recklessness of the US neocons, who now practice old imperial "might makes right" mode
of operation, gives the world some hope. They most probably will burn the USA geological power it acquired after the
dissolution of the USSR sooner then many expect. Like look at Bolton and Pompeo recent actions.
Notable quotes:
"... "For better or for worse, Putin has put an end to oligarch rule in Russia. Members of Putin's inner circle may be immensely rich, but they know to whom they owe their wealth. By imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin sent a clear message to the all-powerful oligarchs that controlled Russia during former president Boris Yeltsin's time: stay out of politics." ..."
The main feeling about the entire topic of the Ukraine is one of total disgust, a
gradual and painful realization of the fact that our so-called "brothers" are brothers only
in the sense of the biblical Cain and the acceptance that there is nobody to talk to in
Kiev.
Russia likes to fashion itself as a "great power". A real great power should have been
able to insert itself in Ukrainian politics, regardless of any brotherly feelings – you
know, like US did.
As a Russian, I feel disgust at our leaders who squandered all of Russia's historic
influence on the Ukraine and gave up – poor neo-Soviet dinosaurs got completely
outmaneuvered.
@Kiza
Read
Try to understand
Read it again
Try to understand
Read it again
Try to understand
"For better or for worse, Putin has put an end to oligarch rule in Russia. Members of
Putin's inner circle may be immensely rich, but they know to whom they owe their wealth. By
imprisoning Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Putin sent a clear message to the all-powerful oligarchs
that controlled Russia during former president Boris Yeltsin's time: stay out of
politics."
Vladimir Golstein, professor of Slavic studies at Brown University. He was born in Moscow
and emigrated to the United States in 1979.
Russia's Irkut aircraft manufacturer has posted the first video of a direct flight by its
MS-21-300 airliner from Irkutsk to Ulyanovsk-Vostochny Airfield.
The brand-new Russian passenger craft is designed to transport up to 211 people over a
distance of 6,400 kilometres.
There are competitors out there, and they can't be fended off by "sanctions" forever.
Allowing unwatched & unregulated companies to run amok is going to hurt us all in the
long term.
Thanks b and bravo for the image. It is priceless.
On Zachary Smith #5 and Russian Irkut flight test. One of the immediate consequences of
sanctions being splattered about the globe by dumb USA and its minion states is that there
will be replacement strategiss. Perhaps they will be permanent and more jobs go offshore and
other technology developed.
I doubt we have heard the end of the Max8 fiasco as it is managed by diametrically opposed
systems with the automaton having overpowering control of the hydraulics. If the MCAS is
disengaged to make it 'safe' then the Max8 is excluded from many airports due to altitude
factors.
steven t johnson , Apr 28, 2019 11:37:43 AM |
link
<
Rhisiart Gwilym@30 seems to think that Putin boasting means it's real. This is incorrect.
There is a great deal of historical experience with new weapons. About the only one that was
unanswerable was the chariot and heavy cavalry (with armored rider.) But that was because of
the difficulty in finding large enough horses. The bow spread rapidly. Iron weapons spread
more slowly, although it is easier to transport iron ore than to raise cavalry horses. But
not even iron weapons made the Hittites invincible. They beat the Egyptians, but their empire
still fell, and Egypt's didn't. >
In more recent times, again, the usual experience of new weapons is that they always take
much time to incorporate successfully. And they never make the old armies obsolete. The
modern weapon that came closest to actually winning the war was, as near as I can tell, the
submarine, at least against island nations needing large imports. (Submarine warfare against
Japanese shipping is unsung, but was quite important as I understand it.) The machine gun,
the hydraulic recoil artillery, the flamethrower, the grenade, the barbed wire, the tank, the
plan...none of them compensated for weakness. In the end, however much the new weapons
changed, skilled leadership and determined soldiers who kept their morale could compensate.
And none of these weapons ever compensated for the caste arrogance of incompetent officers or
the demoralization of conscripts used as cannon fodder.
Now that is reality. This reality will crush a Putin press conference.
@steven t johnson #1
I don't know for a fact that the new Russian weapon systems are real, but the technological
breakthroughs behind them are very believable.
Instead of a "magic" stealth capability via ginormous spending as the F-35 is supposed to be
able to do - on top of which it can do via jump jet, carrier based, air superiority, ground
attack, etc etc all at once, the Russian systems are based on a single nuclear engine plus
some civilian grade autonomous guidance capability.
The tidal torpedo is this engine, running underwater, and autonomously guided. The Russian
military has always had very interesting underwater tech including the fastest sub ever
actually built plus the hyperspeed underwater missile/torpedo - which actually creates an
underwater air bubble and travels in it, a tech which the US, I believe, has no idea how to
replicate.
The hyperspeed missile, the same nuclear engine at max power.
The world-spanning cruise missile, the same nuclear engine at long duration plus
autonomous vehicle tech including GLONASS and terrain following - which existing Russian
anti-ship and cruise missile systems must already have.
We do know that Russian tech is very advanced in terms of rocketry; Russian nuclear
systems have also been progressing for decades - unlike in the US where 3 Mile Island stopped
pretty much all nuclear tech development, outside of bombs, for 4 decades.
From my view, it is very possible that this engine exists.
I'd also note that the new systems are primarily deterrence. Yes, a hyperspeed nuclear
missile could be used for first strike, but none of these systems are really useful for
colonialist domination or beating down of "terrorists" with AK47s and sandals.
The new systems aren't for land control - which all of your examples are used for. They're
intended for deterrence/defense.
Land control weapons are different because they require enormous scale.
The theory of air superiority as demonstrated by WW2, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq1, Iraq2,
Afghanistan, Syria, Libya etc is a good example where the theory is that the ability to
destroy the enemy's industry and "will to fight" would be able to replace the need to
actually field soldiers and armies.
American hagiography falsely believes it is the strategic bombing in WW2 that defeated the
Germans; the reality was clearly 20 million dead Russians, millions of live ones in tanks
which eventually took down the Wehrmacht at its peak.
Vietnam was an outright failure - ginormous amounts of bombs, napalm and Agent Orange
failed to break the Vietnamese people's will to fight.
Korea - it worked until it didn't. The US bombed the crap out of the entire country but
ultimately the Chinese manpower turned the tide (note many of these Chinese "volunteers" were
ex-Nationalists sent out to die).
Iraq1 worked - a quick demonstration strike against a 3rd rate military that thought it
was 2nd rate, but Iraq2 showed that just taking down the official military isn't enough to
actually win on the ground.
Afghanistan - ditto. Bombs everywhere for 17+ years, and the Taliban is stronger than ever
before.
Libya - I suspect Gaddafi never thought he'd get stabbed in the back like he did, and was
woefully unprepared, but again US and French/British bombers were used to take down
strongpoints so that the various tribes could roll into town.
Lastly Syria: the presence of Russian military tech stopped the one-sided use of airpower,
and a literal handful of Russian attack jets turned the tide for the entire conflict despite
hundreds of millions of dollars in weaponry poured into Syria by the UAE, Qatar, Turkey and
Saudi Arabia.
It seems the lessons you are trying to teach are simply the wrong ones: Japanese
shipping/American submarines - the reality was that Japan didn't have the manpower or the
oil. Japan had 73 million people in 1940 vs. the US @132M (Germany had 90M). Japan was
significantly behind industrially, economically and technologically. Yes, the US was
participating in Europe - but Japan was also attacking China (population 825M).
For that matter, it is very clear that Japan had significant provocation prior to Pearl
Harbor in the form of an oil embargo imposed by the US US State Dept web site
documenting embargo on Japan (sound familiar? US sanctions aren't anything new)
"... The fish rots from the head; or so it's said. That does however, exactly describe the rolling disaster, earstwhile known as U.S. foreign policy; there isn't any! Just guns, more guns, bigger guns; but it's not working... ..."
"... Bolten, Pompeo, and Pense are in panic mode. Generally not known to produce clear, logical thinking. But their ideological positions also corrupt their cognitive skills(?)/conclusions. Buckle up; its going to be one hell of a ride... ..."
The RAND Corporation think-tank report is of a piece with Janusz
Bugajski's flight into fancy with his January 2019 article for The Hill, "Managing Russia's
Dissolution" , which portrays Russia as a failing nation with a repressive authoritarian
government, a predatory political elite that steals energy and mineral resources from
colonial territories in Siberia and the Far East regions, decaying infrastructure and falling
standards of living. At least Bugajski's article lays out a strategy for the US to infiltrate
Russia and hasten its break-up which, surprise of all surprises, turns out to be a
regime-change strategy it has pursued in Syria and other parts of the world, past and
present. It is the same kind of regime-change strategy the US chased in Russia when Boris
Yeltsin first became Russian President in the early 1990s, and all of a sudden conflicts
around the country's border regions (especially in Chechnya and Dagestan) began to spring
up.
That such pieces as Bugajski's article and the RAND Corporation report have appeared about
the same time is in itself a suggestion that the US Deep State truly exists on another plane
of unreality. I wouldn't be surprised if a third hit-piece advocating regime change in Russia
were to come out soon, either in the US or in the UK, but if that happens then we'll know
we're really on a path to self-destruction.
RAND produced a paper because it was contracted to produce a paper. There wasn't any demand
that the paper be useful; rather, all that was wanted was the product--then paper. Now RAND
can work on the next paper it's contracted to produce. I heard this next one does come with a
requirement that its pages have perforations for easy tearing, absorbency, and be
biodegradable.
Wait, this idiot isn't considering Siberia seceding from Russia? If that's the case, it's not
just they live in their own reality, it's also that they're terminally stupid and completely
ignorant of basic facts. From the Urals to Bering Straits, the bulk of the population is
Russian, there's just no local ethnicity that can hope to go into guerrilla mode and secede.
And since there's actually a continuum of Russian population going from Vladivostok to St.
Petersburg, there's no sense of being a far away colony, like the US could have in 1770; it
would be as if Florida felt to be a colony from Washington DC.
And the Russians I've met who
came from Siberia felt very much Russian, belonging to Mother Russia, and didn't feel Moscow
or Peter were a world of alien oppressive occupiers, they knew it was their country and their
culture - with the classical shift between those who prefer and feel more alike to Moscow or
to St. Petersburg (as most Russians, most Siberians I met feel akin to Moscow).
They should stick with the old plan of carving up the Caucasus, it's pretty much the only
place where that can work and where secession can gain traction. It's a border region after
all. The other major ethnies, Mordvins, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvash would all be enclaves
inside Russia.
Well, there's always Tuva, but that wouldn't mean much as long as Russia has
good relations with Mongolia, that's a small quite irrelevant area, and Defense Minister
Shoygu is half-Tuvan so there's barely any way for a significant independance movement there
for probably decades.
Trump will be fuming when he hears what the Big Girls and the Naughty Little Girls at RAND
are day-dreaming about now. Like any sane observer of the effects AmeriKKKan Foreign Policy,
he knows Russia is just one of The Swamp's many imaginary "enemies of convenience."
He also
knows that The Swamp, and its Global Judeo-Christian partners in crime and corruption, are
the root cause of most of the military strife AND ter'rist insanity in the world.
In some ways this tosh can be seen as an extension of Richard Perle's Oafus Mawkish - A
Clean Break - A Strategy For Securing The Realm.
The fish rots from the head; or so it's said.
That does however, exactly describe the rolling disaster, earstwhile known as U.S. foreign
policy; there isn't any!
Just guns, more guns, bigger guns; but it's not working...
Bolten, Pompeo, and Pense are in panic mode. Generally not known to produce clear, logical
thinking.
But their ideological positions also corrupt their cognitive skills(?)/conclusions.
Buckle up; its going to be one hell of a ride...
That such pieces as Bugajski's article and the RAND Corporation report have appeared about
the same time is in itself a suggestion that the US Deep State truly exists on another plane
of unreality. I wouldn't be surprised if a third hit-piece advocating regime change in Russia
were to come out soon, either in the US or in the UK, but if that happens then we'll know
we're really on a path to self-destruction.
@Jen | Apr 27, 2019 5:38:18 PM | 19
It's easy to be mesmerised into focusing on Fink Tank drivel instead of the stuff
happening outside the stale atmosphere of their unventilated tanks. The French peasants seem
to have woken up to the fact that the Macron NeoLib govt has betrayed them and is only
pretending to listen. It's only a matter of time until the Gillet Jaunes remember the words
of jocular Neoliberal poster-boy Grover Norquist about "government small enough to drown in
the bathtub."
Of course, when funny-man Grover said that he meant govt too small to responsibly oversee
and administer all of its obligations to The People, thereby necessitating the 'outsourcing'
of the juiciest govt obligations to Private Profiteers. Unfortunately, when a govt becomes
too small and pompous to listen and respond to the legitimate concerns of The People, it runs
the risk of having its size compared with the size of the Disenchanted demographic and,
eventually, drowned. Hopefully metaphorically, although History says that when the French
neglect reform for too long, metaphorical solutions tend to be neglected too.
Parachuting Harvard mafia on Russia was a more powerful weapon and led to more destruction of Russian economy then direct
bombardment would
Notable quotes:
"... Concerning the capability of wrecking finances of other states, USA is not a slouch, the most powerful weapon is economic advise. If I interpret news correctly, it were experts of Goldman Sachs that help Greek government to borrow about twice as much as they could handle in the long run. The wreckage in Russia was as impressive, but, alas, hard to repeat, so now it remains to carp about their "bad behavior". ..."
I think that at least some weapon systems that USA makes or develops can be indeed
superior. The most acute loss from the approach of "invest in over-extending and un-balancing
the opponent" is that USA, while powerful, cannot do everything in the same time.
My favorite comparison chart is timeliness of subway systems in major metropolitan areas.
Honestly, I cannot find it, because the search is swamped with the tales of woe of subway
commuters in NYC. As befits the greatest financial center, cultural metropolis etc. etc., NYC
has a transportation system that is comparable in its extend to other metropolitan areas like
Tokyo, Paris or London. However, the performance is uninspiring. On the chart in NYT that I
can't find out at the moment, only Mexico City had a lower percentage of train rides delayed
by less than 10 minutes. I checked Moscow that has a larger subway system (compared to NY)
and which was not on the chart. They pride themselves with frequency of delays that is 5
times smaller than in Paris (50 times smaller than in NYC?). Moscovites can actually plan
their daily lives assuming that their commutes will arrive on time.
This is the most glaring example of a lost opportunity to take care of domestic needs, but
the quality of education, healthcare etc. is mediocre compared with the rest of OECD,
although there is always the southern neighbor that saves USA from being dead last.
Incidentally, NYC subway is not exactly underfunded, instead, it may have the most
irrational management among major metropolitan areas which accurately reflects deficiencies
of American political system. Bloated costs are pervasive across many areas, surely in
military, healthcare and broadly meant policing, and their originate in lobbo-cracy, a
plethora of lobbies grabbing chunks of monies either directly spent or (mis)regulated by the
government. The activity of these lobbies is tightly regulated by elaborate rules, but the
end effect is as if USA were pathetically corrupted (say, half as corrupted as Nigeria).
Concerning the capability of wrecking finances of other states, USA is not a slouch, the
most powerful weapon is economic advise. If I interpret news correctly, it were experts of
Goldman Sachs that help Greek government to borrow about twice as much as they could handle
in the long run. The wreckage in Russia was as impressive, but, alas, hard to repeat, so now
it remains to carp about their "bad behavior".
Sanctions are also powerful when directed at small/medium size economies. Russia, although
disparaged as "a smaller economy than Italy", but in actuality, Italy has "GDP per capity
PPP" that is 40% larger than Russia, and Russia has 2.4 times larger population, so quite a
bit larger economy in terms of "purchasing parity", and the most glaring domestic production
deficiency are fruit and vegetables that, according to latest news, have a number of
potential suppliers that are most glad when they can sell their produce.
Journalist Aaron Mate has eviscerated MSNBC's Rachel Maddow for peddling "Trump-Russia
conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo," after Maddow threw a tantrum when YouTube
dared to recommend an RT video. Mate, a longtime skeptic of the mainstream media's beloved
'Russiagate' narrative, was the subject of a recent interview with RT. When MSNBC's
Russiagater-in-chief Rachel Maddow found out that YouTube's algorithm had actually suggested
the interview to viewers, she saw more Russian meddling and proclaimed the recommendation
"death by algorithm."
Death by algorithm. "YouTube recommended Russia Today for understanding Mueller report."
https://t.co/q6McajcNo3
Mate unloaded on Maddow on Sunday, systematically destroying the MSNBC host for her two
years as "the leading purveyor of now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods
& innuendo." Buckle up.
1/ If YouTube were to recommend your show, it'd be recommending the leading purveyor of
now debunked Trump-Russia conspiracy theories, falsehoods & innuendo of the last 2+
years. Here's a sample:
"Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience," he began.
"You claimed Barr was handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right
below -- told viewers the truth, that Mueller was in fact 'assisting' w/ the
redactions."
2/ Just recently you were caught in real-time lying to your audience. You claimed Barr was
handling the redactions by himself. But the chyron -- on screen right below -- told viewers
the truth, that Mueller was in fact "assisting" w/ the redactions: pic.twitter.com/rTSAABngp2
With Maddow seemingly content to lie on live television, it fell upon her show's producers
to flash the truth on viewers' screens.
Mate then recalled the time Maddow suggested that Russian President Vladimir Putin would use
the 'pee tape' (the most far-fetched allegation in the Democrat-commissioned, internet-sourced Steele
dossier) to force Trump into withdrawing US troops stationed near Russia. Of course, this never
happened, and Trump recently announced plans to ramp up deployments to Poland. A swing and a
miss for Maddow.
3/ There was that time in Jan 2017 when you speculated that Putin may use the pee tape
& other kompromat to force Trump into withdrawing US troops near Russia. How did that one
turn out? pic.twitter.com/XuXXagyCNb
Maddow contradicted herself on the 'pee tape' only last week, telling viewers she
"refused" to let herself "think about" the possibility of these tapes
existing.
4/ BTW, just last week you falsely said that "the one thing I refused to let myself think
about" was that Putin had tapes of Trump -- the very prospect you had previously floated to
posit that Putin may blackmail Trump into withdrawing troops. pic.twitter.com/xMC4uPrjSK
"Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold
temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?"
Mate continued, mocking Maddow's claim that the Kremlin could "kill the power" and
freeze Americans to death.
5/ Who could forget that time this past winter when you seized on life-threatening cold
temperatures to fear-monger that Russia could kill Americans by knocking out their heat?
pic.twitter.com/deo2H4SBBQ
"There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin 'gives orders' to
his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting," Mate continued. "Do you think Putin ordered
Trump to stage a coup in Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF
treaty?"
6/ There was that time when you explored the scenario under which Putin "gives orders" to
his puppet Trump at an upcoming meeting. Do you think Putin ordered Trump to stage a coup in
Venezuela/try to kill the German-Russia gas pipeline/nix the INF treaty? pic.twitter.com/cbSrGt2xR3
Mate ridiculed Maddow for suggesting that the Trump campaign set aside funds to pay for the
services of "Russian hackers."
7/ How about that time when you speculated -- citing the Steele dossier -- that Cohen
billed Trump $50k for "tech services" to pay off Russian hackers? It was actually to pay a US
firm ( https://t.co/GGK6FQLvRJ ).
pic.twitter.com/TcqdN8mC4z
And that the existence of an Albanian Bernie Sanders fan page on Facebook was an act of
"international warfare against our country."
14/ Looking back, do you think maybe that declaring that a fake Bernie Sanders fan page
run out of Albania amounted to "international warfare against our country" was perhaps a
little hyperbolic? pic.twitter.com/5Meg0xLNqg
Despite peddling baseless conspiracies and flagrant Russophobia every night, Maddow remains
one of the US' most popular news anchors, and one of the best paid. The MSNBC host regularly
vies with Fox News' Sean Hannity for the top spot on the cable news ratings, and earns a cool
$7 million per year for her work.
Although Maddow has been perhaps the most fervent promoter of Russiagate hysteria on
television, her ratings have clumped after Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report put most of
her theories to bed last month. Maddow's show slipped from its number one position after the
report dropped, and lost half a million
viewers in the space of a week.
Mate, although reporting to a far smaller audience, has received an Izzy Award for his
"meticulous reporting" that "challenged the way the public was being informed about
the Mueller investigation."
"... "Death by algorithm," a despondent Maddow commented. The video in question – an episode of On Contact, which is hosted by Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist Chris Hedges – features an interview with Canadian journalist Aaron Mate. A fierce critic of the Trump-Russia collusion theory promoted by mainstream media, Mate recently received an Izzy Award for his contrarian reporting on Russiagate. ..."
"... While Maddow was apparently horrified by the thought of impressionable Americans watching a video of two acclaimed journalists discussing current events, others were more perturbed by the MSNBC host's melodramatic tweeting. ..."
"... Actually, the entire premise of Maddow's outrage is highly suspect. The Washington Post report quietly notes that the RT video in question has accumulated "only about 55,000 views," and that the interview was by far from the most recommended Mueller-related video. "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" was recommended more than five million times, WaPo reported, while other channels, such as Fox and PBS NewsHour, received hundreds of thousands of recommendations for their Russiagate videos. ..."
"... In fact, the Washington Post story was so shaky that it had to issue a clickbait-deflating correction: An earlier version of their report had erroneously claimed that YouTube had recommended RT's take on the Mueller report more often than other networks' programming. ..."
Russiagate guru Rachel Maddow has caught wind of the latest Kremlin-linked outrage: YouTube recommended an RT video about the
Mueller report! And now social media users have lined up to laugh at her.
The MSNBC host ascended her Twitter pulpit to share a shocking Washington Post article
detailing how YouTube allegedly recommended an RT video "hundreds of thousands of times" to users seeking information
about the recently released report by special counsel Robert Mueller.
Death by algorithm. "YouTube recommended Russia Today for understanding Mueller report."
https://t.co/q6McajcNo3
"Death by algorithm," a despondent Maddow commented. The video in question – an episode of On Contact, which is hosted
by Pulitzer prize-winning American journalist Chris Hedges – features an interview with Canadian journalist Aaron Mate. A fierce
critic of the Trump-Russia collusion theory promoted by mainstream media, Mate recently received an Izzy Award for his contrarian
reporting on Russiagate.
While Maddow was apparently horrified by the thought of impressionable Americans watching a video of two acclaimed journalists
discussing current events, others were more perturbed by the MSNBC host's melodramatic tweeting.
"This YouTube [video] is so much better than the war mongering conspiracy lunacy that comes from you. You should be
ashamed to smear good people & good content in such a base & McCarthyite way," replied one disappointed Twitter user.
Chris Hedges won a Pulitzer prize, Aaron Maté just won an Izzy. This YouTube is so much better than the war mongering conspiracy
lunacy that comes from you. You should be ashamed to smear good people & good content in such a base & McCarthyite way.
Others took issue with Maddow's bizarre suggestion that YouTube's algorithm could somehow bring about "death."
"'Death?' No one's lives were threatened by a conversation between two award winning journalists about the massive disinformation
campaign you're waged on the minds of suggestible Democrats. But they are endangered by the Cold War you've helped to stir up,"
Max Blumenthal, editor of the Grayzone Project, noted.
"Death?" No one's lives were threatened by a conversation between two award winning journalists about the massive disinformation
campaign you're waged on the minds of suggestible Democrats. But they are endangered by the Cold War you've helped to stir up.
https://t.co/Z0lQlGjHQS
Mate himself joined the chorus of criticism directed at Maddow.
"I was interviewed on RT by the Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges about Russiagate. YouTube recommended it. How fitting
then that the leading Russiagate conspiracy theorist calls this 'death by algorithm' – to a propagandist, dissent from orthodoxy
is 'death' indeed," he wrote.
I was interviewed on RT by the Pulitzer-winning journalist Chris Hedges about Russiagate. YouTube recommended it. How fitting
then that the leading Russiagate conspiracy theorist calls this "Death by algorithm" -- to a propagandist, dissent from orthodoxy
is "Death" indeed: https://t.co/dFa8B815js
Actually, the entire premise of Maddow's outrage is highly suspect. The Washington Post report quietly notes that the RT video
in question has accumulated "only about 55,000 views," and that the interview was by far from the most recommended Mueller-related
video. "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert" was recommended more than five million times, WaPo reported, while other channels,
such as Fox and PBS NewsHour, received hundreds of thousands of recommendations for their Russiagate videos.
To make matters even less scary, YouTube disputed the article's core claims, which were originally made by media watchdog group
AlgoTransparency. YouTube said it could not reproduce the group's data allegedly showing that the RT video had been recommended hundreds
of thousands of times by the site's algorithm.
In fact, the Washington Post story was so shaky that it had to issue a clickbait-deflating correction: An earlier version
of their report had erroneously claimed that YouTube had recommended RT's take on the Mueller report more often than other networks'
programming.
WaPo runs with this fabricated imperial xenophobia -- all while contradicting and correcting its own claims!
As Blumenthal observed, the WaPo story appears to be yet another tired attempt to shame anyone who doesn't regurgitate narratives
promoted by US corporate media.
The real problems with the @aaronjmate interview
are identified in the body of the article:
1. It contains content that offends professional Cold Warriors and Russiagate hustlers
2. It was not published by a "verified" (read: US-approved corporate or mainstream) news source
pic.twitter.com/Sn87ZUUvkZ
There are several crimes for which Poroshenko can be investigated and the USA can do nothing
about: one is Odessa massacre which supposedly was financed by Poroshenko. And Kolomysky was also
involved so it remain to be seen if this issues will be raised. Also the power of far right
forces in Ukraine is such that just raising this question might be equal to treason in the eyes
of Ukrainian nationalists. Because such powerful figures as Avakov and Parubiy were also
involved.
Notable quotes:
"... Ukrainians don’t give a shit about the Poro regime, and are perfectly willing to see it incarcerated. Nor do NatsBatalions really crave to be seen as puppets of DC, Kolo, or Israel, or Brussels. Your take is really simplistic here. ..."
The West is concerned with protecting Poro. Based on WSJ editorials, obsequious legations to
manlet Macron. None of that means jack shit.
DC will have to exercise real power to prevent a cleaning of the house. Word are words.
Rumors are rumors. Z. will act within his mandate and limits placed by rabid opposition. He
will act in keeping with rational need to not fight a US-backed congress, to get shot in the
streets for things too radical. Majority of Ukrainians will be happy to see Poro in prison. DC
can keep this from happening not with words, but with bullets. Strana can claim what it wants,
its claims are patent garbage.
Ukrainians don’t give a shit about the Poro regime, and are perfectly willing to
see it incarcerated. Nor do NatsBatalions really crave to be seen as puppets of DC, Kolo, or
Israel, or Brussels. Your take is really simplistic here.
... ... ...
Z. does have a party. The elections for the Ukranian Parliament is in September. His party,
as a matter of fact, is leading in opinion polls. https://ria.ru/20190416/1552741067.html And it is
doing so together with the party of Boiko.
Logically then, given enough time/space Z. should be in a position to pursue necessary
policies end of the year.
‘The truth is nobody knows what will happen next…There are just too many
parameters to consider, and the real balance of power following this election has not
manifested itself yet’, as The Saker forebodingly warns. The pattern of history
suggests the continent is heading for another world war. https://www.ghostsofhistory.wordpress.com/
The course of events in Europe and globally predict things will only get worse. Like The
Saker, ‘I also very much hope that I am wrong.’
"... Finally, there is Vladimir Groisman, the current prime minister who has kept a very low profile, ..."
"... He might make a much more effective Ukrainian Gauleiter for the Empire than either Poroshenko or Zelenskii. ..."
"... And let's not forget Avakov and Parubii, who are both soaked in innocent blood, and who will try to hold on to their considerable power by using the various Nazi death-squads under their control. ..."
"... there is still the formidable (and relatively popular) Iulia Timoshenko whose political ambitions need to be kept in check. Thus, Poroshenko with his immense wealth and his connections can still be a useful tool for the Empire's control of the Ukraine. ..."
"... The western calculus might also be wrong: for one thing, Zelenskii cannot deliver anything meaningful to the Ukrainian people, most definitely not prosperity or honesty. Pretty soon the Ukrainian people will wake up to realize that when they elected the "new face" of Zelenskii, they ended up with the "not new" face of Kolomoiskii and everything that infamous name entails. ..."
"... Poroshenko's power base is very rapidly eroding because nobody wants to go down with him. I tend to believe that Poroshenko has outlived his usefulness for the AngloZionists because he became an overnight political corpse. But this is the Ukraine, so never say never. ..."
"... Russians have been extremely cautious, and nobody seems to harbor any illusions about Zelenskii. In fact, just a day after his election Zelenskii is already making all sorts of anti-Russian statements. ..."
"... Slap further economic sanctions on the Ukraine (Russia has just banned the export of energy sources to the Ukraine – finally and at last!). ..."
"... The truth is that nobody knows what will happen next, not even Kolomoiskii or Zelenskii himself. There are just too many parameters to consider, and the real balance of power following this election has not manifested itself yet. As for the true aspirations and hopes of the people of the Ukraine, they were utterly ignored: Poroshenko will be replaced by Kolomoiskii, wearing the mask of Zelenskii. Hardly a reason to rejoice ..."
"... But will Zelenskii turn out to be any better? I very much doubt it, even though I also very much hope that I am wrong. ..."
As everybody predicted, Poroshenko completely lost the election. As I wrote in my previous column, this is both amazing (considering
Poro’s immense and extensive resources and the fact that his opponent was, literally, a clown (ok, a comic if you prefer). His defeat
was also so predictable as to be almost inevitable: not only is the man genuinely hated all over the Ukraine (except for the Nazi
crackpots of the Lvov region), but he made fatal blunders which made him even more detestable than usual.
Now one could sympathize with Poroshenko: not only did this “Putin the boogeyman” appear to work fantastically well with the main
sponsors of the Ukronazi coup and with the legacy Ziomedia, but nobody dared to tell Poroshenko that most Ukrainians were not buying
that nonsense at all. The suggestion that all the other candidates are Putin agents is no less ridiculous. The thin veneer of deniability
Poroshenko had devised (the poster was not put up by the official Poroshenko campaign but by “volunteers”) failed, everybody immediately
saw through it all, and this resulted in Poro’s first big campaign faceplant.
Again, this was not officially Poroshenko’s campaign which made this video, but everybody saw through this one too. The quasi-open
threat to murder Zelenskii was received with horror in the Ukraine, and this PR-disaster was Poro’s second faceplant.
Then the poor man “lost it.” I won’t list all the stupid and ridiculous things the man said and did, but I will say that his performance
at the much-anticipated debate in the stadium was a disaster too.
The writing had been on the wall for a while now, and this is why the two candidates were summoned to speak to their masters (face
to face in Germany and France, by phone with Mr. MAGA) and they were told a few things:
Poroshenko was told in no uncertain terms that he could not trigger a war, organize a last-minute false flag, murder Zelenskii
or engage in any other “creative campaign methods.”
The western calculus is simple: try to keep Poroshenko alive (figuratively and politically) and to see how much of the Rada he
can keep. Furthermore, since Zelenskii is extremely weak (he has no personal power base of any kind), Kolomoiskii will have him do
exactly as he is told and Kolomoiskii can easily be told to behave by the Empire.
Finally, there is Vladimir Groisman, the current prime minister who has kept a very low profile, who does NOT have blood
on his hands (at least when compared to thugs like Turchinov or Avakov) and who has not made any move which would blacklist him with
the Kremlin. Groisman is also a Jew (Israel and the Ukraine are now the two countries on the planet in which both the President and
the Prime-Minister are Jews; ironic considering the historical lovefest between Jews and Ukrainian nationalists ). He might make
a much more effective Ukrainian Gauleiter for the Empire than either Poroshenko or Zelenskii. For the time being, Goisman
has already ditched Poroshenko's party and is creating his own.
And let's not forget Avakov and Parubii, who are both soaked in innocent blood, and who will try to hold on to their considerable
power by using the various Nazi death-squads under their control. Finally, there is still the formidable (and relatively
popular) Iulia Timoshenko whose political ambitions need to be kept in check. Thus, Poroshenko with his immense wealth and his connections
can still be a useful tool for the Empire's control of the Ukraine.
The western calculus might also be wrong: for one thing, Zelenskii cannot deliver anything meaningful to the Ukrainian
people, most definitely not prosperity or honesty. Pretty soon the Ukrainian people will wake up to realize that when they elected
the "new face" of Zelenskii, they ended up with the "not new" face of Kolomoiskii and everything that infamous name entails.
Zelenskii might not have another option than to jail Poroshenko, which he semi-promised to do during the stadium debate. Except
that now Zelenskii is saying that he will consult with Poroshenko and might even use him in some official capacity. Yes, campaign
promises in the Ukraine are never kept for more than the time it takes to make them. Finally, Poroshenko's power base is very
rapidly eroding because nobody wants to go down with him. I tend to believe that Poroshenko has outlived his usefulness for the AngloZionists
because he became an overnight political corpse. But this is the Ukraine, so never say never.
Finally, the Empire is also pushing for a reform of the Ukrainian political system to give less powers to the President and more
to the Rada. Again, this makes sense considering that Zelenskii is an unknown actor and considering the fact that Rada members are
basically on the US payroll (across all parties and factions).
What about Russia in all this?
Well, the Russians have been extremely cautious, and nobody seems to harbor any illusions about Zelenskii. In fact, just a
day after his election Zelenskii is already making all sorts of anti-Russian statements. Truly, besides the logical implication
of Poroshenko's poster (that a defeat for him would mean a victory for Putin), nobody in Russia is celebrating. The main feeling
about the entire topic of the Ukraine is one of total disgust, a gradual and painful realization of the fact that our so-called "brothers"
are brothers only in the sense of the biblical Cain and the acceptance that there is nobody to talk to in Kiev. Thus Russia will
have to embark on a policy of unilateral actions towards the Ukraine. These could include:
Decide whether to recognize the outcome of the election or not. I think that it is more likely that Russia will recognize
the fact that most Ukrainians did vote for Zelenskii, but that recognition will imply nothing more than that: the recognition
of a fact.
Accelerate the pace of distribution of Russian passports to citizens of the DNR and LNR republics.
Slap further economic sanctions on the Ukraine (Russia has just banned the export of energy sources to the Ukraine – finally
and at last!).
Declare that since millions of Ukrainians did not vote (inside the Ukraine, in the DNR/LNR and in Russia, and since the Minsk
Agreements are dead (they are de facto if not de jure yet) Russia does not recognize this election and, instead,
recognizes the two people's republics. I don't think that the Kremlin will do that short of an Ukronazi attack on Novorussia (in
which case the Russians will do what they did following Saakashvili's attack on South-Ossetia).
So far, Russian spokespeople have just said that they "respected the vote of the Ukrainian people" and that they will judge Zelenskii
"on his actions, not his words". This approach sure seems balanced and reasonable to me.
Conclusion:
The truth is that nobody knows what will happen next, not even Kolomoiskii or Zelenskii himself. There are just too many parameters
to consider, and the real balance of power following this election has not manifested itself yet. As for the true aspirations and
hopes of the people of the Ukraine, they were utterly ignored: Poroshenko will be replaced by Kolomoiskii, wearing the mask of Zelenskii.
Hardly a reason to rejoice
In spite of the large number of electoral candidates, the people of the Ukraine were not given a meaningful choice. So they did
the only thing they could do: they voted to kick Poroshenko out. And that sure must have felt great.
But will Zelenskii turn out to be any better? I very much doubt it, even though I also very much hope that I am wrong.
A clown beat a high profile member of the established political class, due most likely to the
voters being disgusted by said political class? Uhmm, where have we seen this before?
"... The real test for having an “unprecedentedly high level” relationship would be to coordinate diplomatic campaigns against U.S. policies. Working together they are more likely to split off American allies and friends from unpopular initiatives, such as unilateral sanction campaigns. ..."
"... Lets all mindlessly repeat the platitudes of Thinktankistan entities like CATO... Russian economy is smaller than new York... Russian relies on oil sales and doesn't make anything.... These sock puppets must think we are imbeciles. ..."
"... He's an Atlantacist fool. Senior fellow at the CATO institute, pretty much says it all. His style is to drop the odd truth-bomb (like criticizing the ill-advised NATO expansion and US geopolitical belligerence) but he still sticks to the main planks of Euro-Atlantic narratives. ..."
...Beijing and Moscow share one very big objective: resist U.S. dominance. Washington
expanded NATO up to Russia's borders; America's navy patrols the Asia-Pacific and treats those
waters as an American lake. Elsewhere there is no issue upon which Washington fails to
sanctimoniously pronounce its opinion and piously attempt to enforce its judgment.
Unfortunately, for quite some time Washington has seemed determined to give both China and
Russia good cause for discontent. Instead, in response, Washington should do its best to
eliminate behaviors which bring its two most important competitors together. Then the United
States wouldn't need to worry what Presidents Putin and Xi were saying to one another
.
Thus, Washington has done much to bring its two leading adversaries together. However,
hostility is a limited basis for agreement. There is no military alliance, despite Chinese
participation in a Russian military exercise last fall. Neither government is interested in
going to war with America and certainly not over the other’s grievances. A shared sense
of threat could change that, but extraordinarily sustained and maladroit U.S. policies would be
required to create that atmosphere.
When the two countries otherwise act for similar purposes, it usually is independently, even
competitively, rather than cooperatively. For instance, both are active in Cuba, contra
Washington’s long-failed policy of starving the regime into submission. Beijing and
Moscow also are both supporting Venezuela’s beleaguered Maduro government. However, China
and Russia appear to be focused on advancing their own government’s influence, even
against that of the other.
Both nations have a United Nations Security Council veto, though the PRC traditionally has
preferred to abstain, achieving little, rather than cast a veto. However, working together they
could more effectively reshape allied proposals for UN action. They could do much the same in
other multilateral organizations, though usually without having a veto.
The real test for having an “unprecedentedly high level” relationship would
be to coordinate diplomatic campaigns against U.S. policies. Working together they are more
likely to split off American allies and friends from unpopular initiatives, such as unilateral
sanction campaigns. Europe is more likely to cooperate if the PRC, valued for its economic
connections, joined Russia, still distrusted for its confrontation with Ukraine and
interference in domestic European politics. So far this former communist “axis” has
been mostly an inconvenience for the United States, rather than a significant hindrance,
Still, that could change if the Trump administration makes ever more extraordinary
assertions of unilateral power. Washington officials appear to sense the possibilities, having
periodically whined about cooperation between China and Russia, apparently ill-prepared for any
organized opposition to U.S. policies.
... ... ...
Doug Bandow is a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to
President Ronald Reagan. He is the author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.
"China appears poised to absorb Russia’s sparsely populated east."
Good Lord, but when does this endless BS end? Seriously, no-one really believes this
yet these clowns and fools keep trotting out these absurd canards.
"In a sense, the Putin-Xi meeting was much ado about nothing. The relationship
revolves around what they are against, which mostly is the United States. They would have
little to talk about other than the latest grievance about America to express or American
activity to counter."
Yeah sure... no reason why Putin and Xi wouldn't want to talk about economic links
given that Russia-China trade is now over $100B per year equivalent.... a figure reached
more than 5 years earlier than Western "experts" had predicted, and which is growing very
strongly.
Lets all mindlessly repeat the platitudes of Thinktankistan entities like CATO...
Russian economy is smaller than new York... Russian relies on oil sales and doesn't make
anything.... These sock puppets must think we are imbeciles.
Orwell predicted "It is a warfare of limited aims between
combatants who are unable to destroy one another, have no material cause
for fighting and are not divided by any genuine ideological difference."
He's an Atlantacist fool. Senior fellow at the CATO institute, pretty much says it
all. His style is to drop the odd truth-bomb (like criticizing the ill-advised NATO
expansion and US geopolitical belligerence) but he still sticks to the main planks of
Euro-Atlantic narratives.
Zelensky doers not matter much. Other people will define Ukraine both internal and foreign policy.
Notable quotes:
"... The ordinary Ukrainian people are so sick and tired of the militaristic nationalism as well as endemic corruption in Kiev that they voted for someone, anyone, who appears slightly more reasonable. ..."
"... Zelensky has called for direct talks with Russia to help bring about a political settlement. Potentially, this apparently more engaged attitude in Kiev could be key to restoring peace in the region and furthermore resume normal relations with Russia. Moscow has given a cautious welcome to these developments. His landslide victory is certainly a stunning popular repudiation of the anti-Russian mentality of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko. ..."
"... This suggests that the new Ukrainian president is a "Poroshenko-Lite". The only change is a softening of the anti-Russian rhetoric that has so dominated the Kiev regime since the 2014 CIA-backed coup which ushered in Poroshenko's presidency ..."
"... Moscow is therefore correct to express caution in the political significance of the new Ukrainian president. The Kremlin said it will await substantive action and policy changes, rather than basing its judgment on the vapid words of a TV star-turned-politician ..."
"... Perhaps the clearest conclusion to be drawn is that Ukrainian citizens expressed not so much support for Zelensky – how could they when his manifesto was so utterly vacuous? – but rather his landslide victory was a massive repudiation of the incumbent president and the anti-Russia mentality in Kiev that was such a hallmark of Poroshenko's presidency. ..."
"... For the past five years, the Kiev-dominated Ukrainian state has been nothing but a puppet regime for Washington, NATO and to a lesser extent the European Union. It has served as a spearhead against Russia with vile provocations and slander. It is in fact an abomination of international law and democratic principles. ..."
"... The problem lies in Kiev being a puppet regime for Washington which functions to push an anti-Russia geopolitical agenda. Zelensky is not a solution; his turn at the presidency is merely an intermission break from the ongoing calamity that is Ukraine. ..."
"... The views of individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture Foundation. ..."
The ordinary Ukrainian people are so sick and tired of the militaristic nationalism as
well as endemic corruption in Kiev that they voted for someone, anyone, who appears slightly
more reasonable.
The stunning victory of TV funny man Vladimir Zelensky in Ukraine's presidential elections
has tempted notions of a new opportunity to resolve the conflict in eastern Donbas region. The
ongoing war has crippled the entire country, caused over 13,000 deaths and resulted in nearly
one million people displaced from their homes.
Zelensky has called for direct talks with Russia to help bring about a political settlement.
Potentially, this apparently more engaged attitude in Kiev could be key to restoring peace in
the region and furthermore resume normal relations with Russia. Moscow has given a cautious
welcome to these developments. His landslide victory is certainly a stunning popular
repudiation of the anti-Russian mentality of his predecessor, Petro Poroshenko.
But there are so many contradictions and paradoxes in Ukraine's recent presidential election
and its outcome that expectations should be reserved.
For a start, the 41-year-old Zelensky who is a popular TV comedian is a complete political
novice. His entire election campaign was vacant in any policy detail. Yes, he did say he wanted
to hold direct talks with Moscow to end the nearly five-year war in eastern Ukraine between
state forces and pro-Russian separatists. But then only days before his election, Zelensky
disparaged Russia as an "aggressor" and described Russian President Vladimir Putin as an
"enemy".
The move this week by Russia to grant citizenship to ethnic Russian people from Ukraine's
breakaway Donbas region was roundly condemned by Washington and the European Union as
undermining Ukraine's sovereignty. Moscow said it was merely fulfilling internationally
recognized legal rights of people with Russian heritage. In any case, Zelensky also joined in
the ill-considered condemnations against Russia over its passport move.
This suggests that the new Ukrainian president is a "Poroshenko-Lite". The only change is a
softening of the anti-Russian rhetoric that has so dominated the Kiev regime since the 2014
CIA-backed coup which ushered in Poroshenko's presidency.
Zelensky has talked previously about implementing the Minsk peace accords signed in 2015,
yet he has also contradicted himself by saying he will not grant the Donbas political autonomy
or accede to an amnesty for combatants – meaning the war against the ethnic Russian
population by the Russophobic Kiev regime will continue. He also – shamefully –
made public comments apparently valorizing the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera and the
latter's fascist followers.
Moscow is therefore correct to express caution in the political significance of the new
Ukrainian president. The Kremlin said it will await substantive action and policy changes,
rather than basing its judgment on the vapid words of a TV star-turned-politician. There is an
analogy here with US President Donald Trump and how his ascent to the White House changed
nothing in Washington's hostile policy towards Russia.
Perhaps the clearest conclusion to be drawn is that Ukrainian citizens expressed not so
much support for Zelensky – how could they when his manifesto was so utterly vacuous?
– but rather his landslide victory was a massive repudiation of the incumbent president
and the anti-Russia mentality in Kiev that was such a hallmark of Poroshenko's
presidency.
In other words, the ordinary Ukrainian people are so sick and tired of the militaristic
nationalism as well as endemic corruption in Kiev that they voted for someone, anyone, who
appears slightly more reasonable. Even if that candidate is a comedian with no political
vision.
For the past five years, the Kiev-dominated Ukrainian state has been nothing but a puppet
regime for Washington, NATO and to a lesser extent the European Union. It has served as a
spearhead against Russia with vile provocations and slander. It is in fact an abomination of
international law and democratic principles.
There is no sign that things will change fundamentally under this new president in spite of
his seemingly more reasonable rhetoric. The hopes of Ukrainians for economic improvement,
elimination of corruption by oligarchs and normalization of relations with their compatriots in
Donbas and with Russia will likely be dashed. Voting for comedian Vladimir Zelensky as some
kind of savior for their numerous woes could turn out to be a very cruel joke.
The problem lies in Kiev being a puppet regime for Washington which functions to push an
anti-Russia geopolitical agenda. Zelensky is not a solution; his turn at the presidency is
merely an intermission break from the ongoing calamity that is Ukraine.The views of
individual contributors do not necessarily represent those of the Strategic Culture
Foundation.
In January, 2016, the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to discuss
several ongoing matters
under the guise of coordinating "anti-corruption efforts," reports
The
Hill
's John Solomon.
The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos,
brought some of Ukraine's top corruption prosecutors and investigators face to face with
members of former President Obama's National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department and
Department of Justice (DOJ).
The agenda suggested the purpose was training and coordination. But Ukrainian participants
said it didn't take long -- during the meetings and afterward -- to realize
the Americans'
objectives included two politically hot investigations: one that touched
Vice
President Joe Biden's family
and one that involved a lobbying firm linked closely to
then-candidate Trump
. -
The
Hill
The
Obama officials
- likely knowing that lobbyist Paul Manafort was about to
join President Trump's campaign soon (he joined that March),
were interested in reviving a
closed investigation into payments to US figures from Ukraine's pro-Russia Party of Regions
- which both Paul Manafort and Tony Podesta did unregistered work for, according to former
Ukrainian Embassy political officer Andrii Telizhenko.
The 2014 investigation focused heavily on Manafort
, whose firm was tied to
Trump through his longtime partner and Trump adviser, Roger Stone.
Agents interviewed Manafort in 2014 about
whether he received undeclared payments
from the party of ousted Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych
, an ally of Russia's
Vladimir
Putin
, and whether he engaged in improper foreign lobbying.
The FBI shut down the case without charging Manafort
Telizhenko and other attendees
of the January, 2016 meeting recall DOJ
employees asking Ukrainian investigators from their National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) if they
could
locate new evidence about the Party of Regions' payments to Americans
.
"It was definitely the case that led to the charges against Manafort and the leak to U.S. media
during the 2016 election," said Telizhenko - which makes the January 2016 gathering in DC one of
the earliest documented efforts to compile a case against Trump and those in his orbit.
Nazar Kholodnytskyy,
Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor
, told me he
attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn't remember the
specific cases, if any, that were discussed.
But he said
he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of
political
meddling in the U.S. election
.
Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort
-- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions
-- was known to Ukrainian
authorities since 2014
but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU
,
after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman.
"Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the
U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious," said Kholodnytskyy - who specifically instructed NABU not
to share the "black ledger" with the media.
"I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they
had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding
Paul Manafort," he added. "For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that
there is some external influence in this case. And there is some other interests in this case not
in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial."
Manafort joined Trump's campaign on March 29, 2016 and became campaign manager on May 19, 2016.
The ledger's existence leaked on May 29, 2016, while Manafort would be fired from the Trump
campaign that August.
NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S.
media the ledgers showed payments to Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the
campaign in August 2016.
A Ukrainian court in December concluded
NABU's release of the ledger was an illegal attempt
to influence the U.S. election. And
a member of Ukraine's parliament has released a
recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger
to help Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign.
Kostiantyn Kulyk - deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general's international affairs office,
said that
Ukraine also had evidence of other Western figures receiving money from
Yanukovych's party
- such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig - but the
Americans weren't interested.
"They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else," said
Kulyk.
Another case raised at the January 2016 meeting
involved the Bidens
-
specifically Burisma Holdings; a Ukrainian energy company which was under investigation at the time
for improper foreign transfers of money.
Burisma allegedly paid then-Vice President Joe
Biden's son Hunter more than $3 million in 2014-15 as both a board member and a consultant,
according
to
bank
records
.
According to Telizhenko,
U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that
Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over
. The Ukrainians did not
agree. But then
Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to
fire
Ukraine's chief prosecutor
in March 2016
, as I previously reported. The Burisma
case was transferred to NABU, then shut down.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested
the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.
Last Wednesday on
Fox and Friends,
Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani said "
I ask you
to keep your eye on Ukraine
," referring to collusion to
help Hillary Clinton in
the 2016 election
.
What's more,
DOJ documents support Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort
case as the 2016 election ramped up -
including communications between Associate Attorney
General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele, as Solomon writes.
Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by
Clinton's campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump.
Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant to spy on the
Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion
to the DOJ
through
her husband
during the election.
DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ
prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger"
documents that led to Manafort's prosecution.
"Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions' Black Cashbox," Nellie Ohr
wrote
to her husband and federal prosecutors
Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching
a
news article
on the announcement of NABU's release of the documents.
Politico reported previously that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted the Hillary
Clinton campaign through a DNC contractor, while the Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges that it got
requests from a DNC staffer
to find dirt on Manafort
(though it denies providing
any improper assistance."
As Solomon concludes: "what is already confirmed by Ukrainians
looks a lot more like
assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in
the
Mueller report
."
Colonel, I would appreciate your comments about John Huntsman and his remarks " each of the
carriers operating in the Mediterranean as this time represent 100,000 tons of
international diplomacy", "Diplomatic communication and dialogue, coupled with the strong
defenses these ships provide, demonstrate to Russia that if it truly seeks better relations
with the United states, it must cease its destabilizing activities around the world."
Strange words coming from a "diplomat". It might be informative to see the kind of a
reception he will get when he returns to Russia as "ambassador". Ishmael Zechariah
The Alarming Rise of Ukraine's Neo-Nazi MPs Since the 2014 "Pro-democracy Revolution"
By Shane Quinn
Global Research, April 26, 2019 Region: Europe Theme: History In-depth Report:
UKRAINE
REPORT
Less than two years ago, the Ukraine's parliament (Verkhovna Rada) voted to outlaw the St
George's Ribbon, an emblem often worn to commemorate those who liberated the Soviet Union from
Hitler's rule. Up to seven million Ukrainian infantrymen comprised part of the Red Army during
their struggle against Nazi Germany, as Hitler was finally broken in the east.
By winter 1943, the once apparently indestructible Wehrmacht was spinning on its tail, their
officers with their heads turning about westward, as they gradually retreated towards the
German frontiers. Come the spring of 1945, about 2.5 million dead Ukrainian soldiers lay strewn
across central and eastern Europe, many of their bodies never to be recovered.
The decision by an increasingly far-right Ukrainian parliament to ban remembrance symbols
which commemorate those who fought against the Third Reich is, therefore, a desecration of
their memory. It is an attempt to wash over that awful suffering the Ukrainian state endured
during the Nazi occupation, with Hitler outlining plans to turn the country into a servile
colony of Germanic dominion.
Over elapsing time from the February 2014 US-instituted "pro-democracy revolution", an ever
expanding group of neo-Nazis has been elected to office. Notable amid these menacing figures is
the far-right military commander Yuriy Bereza (image on the right), an MP since November 2014
who was elected under the title "People's Deputy of Ukraine".
Bereza is a member of fascist-infiltrated party, People's Front, which counts among its
prominent MPs the neo-Nazi Andriy Parubiy , Chairman of the Ukrainian parliament since April
2016. In the early 1990s, Parubiy co-founded the far-right Social-National Party of Ukraine
with fellow extremist Oleh Tyahnybok, that later became known as the Svoboda (Freedom)
party.
When, in May 2017, a few of the Ukraine's conscientious MPs objected to moves in banning the
St George's Ribbon, Bereza roared down from his parliamentary seat that he would like to "grab
a machine gun and shoot those bast*rds". Bereza cuts an intimidating figure. He is a tall man
routinely clad in full army fatigues, with tightly-cropped hair, broad shoulders and stern
expression.
In December 2018, Bereza punched in the face Nestor Shufrych , an MP with the centre-left
party For Life, after the latter removed a poster from the parliamentary podium which accused
wealthy Ukrainian politician, Viktor Medvedchuk (image on the left), of being a Kremlin
"agent". Medvedchuk is said to be an associate of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Bereza is familiar with the use of arms. Since April 2014, he has held the position of
Dnipro Battalion leader: A fascist-linked unit which has fought Moscow-backed separatists in
eastern Ukrainian regions such as the Donetsk Oblast, an area which rests directly upon
Russia's south-western border, and is a mere 400 miles from Volgograd (Stalingrad). The Dnipro
Battalion is subordinated to the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine, which among other
things implements state policy.
Bereza and his regiment were involved in fighting during the autumn 2014 Battle of Ilovaisk,
ending in decisive victory for the Moscow-supported Donetsk People's Republic.
Bereza's cause has drawn sympathy and backing from commercial media outlets like the Los
Angeles Times, which
wrote how his unit "survived on grass and rainwater as they braved five days of incessant
sniper fire". The LA Times also quotes Bereza and, despite a heightened risk of nuclear war,
the newspaper calls for increased funding to be granted to the far-right battalions.
Over Christmas 2014, Bereza's regiment was accused of war crimes by human rights groups,
such as the deliberate starvation of Ukrainian civilians. His battalion has received more than
$10 million of financial support from billionaire businessman Ihor Kolomoyskyi . There are
photographs of the oligarch shaking hands amiably with Bereza in spring 2014.
Kolomoyskyi has provided critical support too for Volodymyr Zelensky , the Ukraine's
president-elect, by guaranteeing him widespread exposure on television networks that the tycoon
owns. Kolomoyskyi is one of the most powerful and affluent Ukrainians in the world. His
corporate influence extends from the Caucasus of Eurasia to the Appalachian mountains of North
America.
In a plot befitting a Hollywood film noir, Kolomoyskyi is presently under investigation by
the FBI regarding claims of "ordering contract killings" and "financial crimes", including
money laundering and embezzlement. In 2016, Kolomoyskyi was accused of defrauding the Ukraine's
largest bank (PrivatBank) of hundreds of millions of dollars.
Also that year a criminal case was opened in Russia against Kolomoyskyi, purporting that he
had organized the killings of civilians. He has been compelled to deny other allegations in the
past relating to bribery and abduction.
Kolomoyskyi, who lived in the US for a period and retains vast business interests in states
like Ohio and West Virginia, moved to Israel last September – which may well complicate a
potential extradition to America, as he also possesses part Israeli citizenship.
Kolomoyskyi has bankrolled other far-right regiments fighting in eastern Ukraine, such as
the Azov, Aidar and Donbas battalions. These armed groups have been cited by human rights
activists for committing an array of offences, including war crimes – which have gone
unpunished – like torture, abductions, possible executions, unlawful detention, sexual
assault, etc.
An alarming number of neo-Nazis have indeed been elected to office in the Ukrainian
parliament. Over the past five years of what the Washington Post calls "fledgling democracy",
the following fascist figures have all enjoyed work as Ukrainian MPs, and they each comprise
past and current members of the neo-Nazi Svoboda party: Oleh Tyahnybok, Ihor Mosiychuk, Oleh
Osukhovskyi, Yuriy Bublyk, Oleksandr Marchenko, Oleh Makhnitskyi, Andriy Ilyenko, Ruslan
Koshulynskyi, Mykhailo Holovko, Yuriy Levchenko, Igor Miroshnychenko, Pavlo Kyrylenko and
Eduard Leonov.
The above's presence in the corridors of power has been almost undocumented in mass media
reporting. There are other fascists receiving continued employment in the Ukrainian parliament
– like Andriy Biletsky , co-founder of the now defunct white supremacist Social-National
Assembly. Since late 2016, MP Biletsky has held the leadership of National Corps, a far-right
party. This organization is reported to be expanding steadily with Biletsky saying
last month that,
"we see how successful our movement is Ukraine is tired of the chaos, it needs new people
who will protect the country".
Source: Euronews
For over two years from May 2014 Biletsky commanded the Azov Battalion, which enjoyed tacit
Western support whilst fighting Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine. Azov Battalion
soldiers can be seen in photographs giving Nazi salutes, while flanked with swastikas and other
symbols based on SS insignia.
More far-right individuals are holding seats like Andrey Artemenko, a Canadian citizen and
MP since November 2014, who claims to be a "neo-conservative" and has membership of the
fascist-led Radical Party. The Radical Party leader and MP is far-right extremist Oleh Lyashko
, whose militant activities in the east of Ukraine were condemned by human rights
organizations, in which he was described as "one particularly errant MP". Lyashko has been
accused in preceding months of corruption relating to "illicit enrichment", which he
denies.
Among the Radical Party MPs is the briefly above-mentioned Ihor Mosiychuk, a neo-Nazi who is
a past member of both the Svoboda party and Social-National Assembly. Mosiychuk, sworn to
office in November 2014, is also a journalist and editor-in-chief of the hardline newspaper
Vechirnaya Vasilkov.
Serhiy Melnychuk , former leader of the Aidar Battalion, is likewise a Radical Party MP, as
he has been since November 2014. Melnychuk is currently under investigation over allegations
regarding a false assets declaration, while he has previously been the subject of multiple
legal cases and accused of abduction. Melnychuk was stripped of his parliamentary immunity in
June 2015.
There are further far-right Ukrainian MPs embedded in seemingly respectable parties like the
People's Front. Among them is Ihor Lapin, a multi-decorated militant commander who comprised
part of the Aidar Battalion, which draped Nazi-style insignia over its armoured vehicles.
Holding membership of the People's Front too is the aforementioned Parubiy, who has enjoyed
trips to America and Canada, and is acquainted with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg .
The far-right military figure, Mykhailo Havryliuk , is himself a People's Front member and MP,
with Yuriy Bereza as stated also claiming a position in that party.
There are in addition fascists posing as "independents" in parliament such as Volodymyr
Parasyuk, a former soldier in the Dnipro Battalion, commanded by Bereza. Parasyuk is a past
member of the neo-Nazi party, Congress of Ukrainian Nationalists. He was elected in November
2014, and still enjoys a place as MP more than four years on. Parasyuk has a reputation for
physically assaulting people he does not like, including cowardly attacks on statesman
Oleksandr Vilkul and security chief Vasyl Hrytsak, kicking the latter in the head while he was
seated.
Boryslav Bereza is a separate extreme right-wing independent MP, and was elected in November
2014; he is a former spokesperson for Right Sector, a fascist party, and despite his surname he
is no relation to Yuriy Bereza.
Boryslav Bereza is an open admirer of the Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera , speaking warmly
of his "three classic principles" in interviews. Moreover, in December 2014 Boryslav Bereza
acknowledged that during the fighting in eastern Ukraine, Right Sector provided important
assistance for Biletsky's notorious Azov Battalion.
MP Dmytro Yarosh , the one-time head of Right Sector, is yet another neo-Nazi who in the
past was placed on Interpol's international wanted list, acceding to the Kremlin's request.
Since late 2014, Yarosh constitutes a Ukrainian MP, and for many years he has been leader of
the Tryzub (Trident) paramilitary group, whose full title is the Stepan Bandera All-Ukrainian
Organization.
In Western establishment dialogue – pertaining to regimes they support – the
terms "neo-Nazi" and "fascist" have been virtually erased from official records and reporting.
These unequivocal labels are instead replaced with descriptions like "ultra-conservative",
"nationalist" and "maverick". The latter ambiguous words blur the lines of neo-Nazism and
fascism, sowing seeds of doubt and confusion in the reader's mind. A fascist now becomes an
ultra-conservative or nationalist.
There are other post "revolution" MPs who have been part of fascist regiments, like Nadiya
Savchenko, an Iraq War veteran and former instructor in the Aidar Battalion. Savchenko is a
far-right extremist, and had been held in a Ukrainian jail for over a year until her unexpected
release last week – after being suspected of planning a terrorist attack on the Ukrainian
parliament building, and intending to overthrow the government. Savchenko still faces trial
regarding these claims, and prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko said her departure from prison suggests
that the country's court apparatus is "gravely ill".
In June 2014, Savchenko was arrested by Russian authorities, placed on trial, and after long
deliberation was charged in March 2016 with complicity in the killing of two state journalists.
President Petro Poroshenko championed Savchenko's cause, describing her as "a symbol of the
struggle for Ukraine"; and in March 2015 he awarded her the title "Hero of Ukraine", the
highest honour that can be bestowed upon a Ukrainian citizen.
Semen Semenchenko , the far-right Donbas Battalion commander, was sworn in as a Ukrainian MP
in November 2014. Semenchenko's election to parliament came weeks after his regiment was
accused by a UN monitoring mission of executing war crimes on Ukrainian civilians, such as
torture, beatings and sexual assault.
In September 2014, Semenchenko had arrived in Washington where he met Congress and Pentagon
representatives. That same month he publicly called for US military backing, and enjoyed
further visits to America later that year, while he is himself an admirer of Israel. In June
2017, an appeal was expounded against Semenchenko by former Donbas Battalion soldiers, who
wanted an investigation conducted after accusing him of criminal acts.
In December 2018, Semenchenko was detained in Tbilisi, Georgia and suspected of "illegal
possession and acquisition of arms". He was not arrested due to having a diplomatic passport,
and thereafter travelled by airplane to an unknown destination.
*
Note to readers: please click the share buttons below. Forward this article to your email
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Shane Quinn obtained an honors journalism degree. He is interested in writing primarily
on foreign affairs, having been inspired by authors like Noam Chomsky. He is a frequent
contributor to Global Research.
03/28/2016 With the increasing propaganda wars, we thought a reminder of just how naive many
Westerners are when it comes to their news-feed. As
Arjun Walia, of GlobalResearch.ca, notes, Dr. Ulfkotte went on public television stating
that he was forced to publish the works of intelligence agents under his own name, also adding
that noncompliance with these orders would result in him losing his job.
He recently made an appearance on RT news to share these facts:
I've been a journalist for about 25 years, and I was educated to lie, to betray, and not
to tell the truth to the public.
But seeing right now within the last months how the German and American media tries to
bring war to the people in Europe, to bring war to Russia -- this is a point of no return and
I'm going to stand up and say it is not right what I have done in the past, to manipulate
people, to make propaganda against Russia, and it is not right what my colleagues do and have
done in the past because they are bribed to betray the people, not only in Germany, all over
Europe.
"... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
"... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
"... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
"... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a
final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to
explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start
the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the
Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that
could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the
Harvard Law School,
are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts
of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in
anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited
from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's
cooperation with it."
Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some
Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or
cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like
Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian
activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale
and basically ineffective.
One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has
generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed
that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the
Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one
as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would
be taking a very hard line against Moscow.
The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an
Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among
them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be
sentenced tomorrow .
Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe
that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association
(NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the
intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy.
Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun
ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence
front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active
membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can
own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to
Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been
charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was
arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed
to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a
Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and
return home.
FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to
registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while
deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to
advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and
assessing."
Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment,
hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the
nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities,
turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal
investigators before and after her guilty plea.
Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where
her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her
in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals
ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to
be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with
FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.
Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the
wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was,
ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to
the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump
Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should
have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law
Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.
Kushner reportedly aggressively
pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United
Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United
Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed
when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice
and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York
City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.
Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser
George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately
determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that
Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli
government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to
do nothing about it.
As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in
American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel.
Noam Chomsky
described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as
compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu
goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama
and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress
trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And
that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."
Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered
security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior
advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access
to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but
recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by
Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.
"... FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts. Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and assessing." ..."
"... Selective enforcement of FARA was, ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned. ..."
"... Kushner reportedly aggressively pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government. ..."
"... Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to do nothing about it. ..."
The Mueller Special Counsel inquiry is far from over even though a
final report on its findings has been issued. Although the investigation had a mandate to
explore all aspects of the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US election, from the start
the focus was on the possibility that some members of the Trump campaign had colluded with the
Kremlin to influence the outcome of the election to favor the GOP candidate. Even though that
could not be demonstrated, many prominent Trump critics, to include Laurence Tribe of the
Harvard Law School,
are demanding that the investigation continue until Congress has discovered "the full facts
of Russia's interference [to include] the ways in which that interference is continuing in
anticipation of 2020, and the full story of how the president and his team welcomed, benefited
from, repaid, and obstructed lawful investigation into that interference and the president's
cooperation with it."
Tribe should perhaps read the report more carefully. While it does indeed confirm some
Russian meddling, it does not demonstrate that anyone in the Trump circle benefited from it or
cooperated with it. The objective currently being promoted by dedicated Trump critics like
Tribe is to make a case to impeach the president based on the alleged enormity of the Russian
activity, which is not borne out by the facts: the Russian role was intermittent, small scale
and basically ineffective.
One interesting aspect of the Mueller inquiry and the ongoing Russophobia that it has
generated is the essential hypocrisy of the Washington Establishment. It is generally agreed
that whatever Russia actually did, it did not affect the outcome of the election. That the
Kremlin was using intelligence resources to act against Hillary Clinton should surprise no one
as she described Russian President Vladimir Putin as Hitler and also made clear that she would
be taking a very hard line against Moscow.
The anti-Russia frenzy in Washington generated by the vengeful Democrats and an
Establishment fearful of a loss of privilege and entitlement claimed a number of victims. Among
them was Russian citizen Maria Butina, who has a court date and will very likely be
sentenced tomorrow .
Regarding Butina, the United States Department of Justice would apparently have you believe
that the Kremlin sought to subvert the five-million-member strong National Rifle Association
(NRA) by having a Russian citizen take out a life membership in the organization with the
intention of corrupting it and turning it into an instrument for subverting American democracy.
Maria Butina has, by the way, a long and well documented history as an advocate for gun
ownership and was a co-founder in Russia of Right to Bear Arms, which is not an intelligence
front organization of some kind. It is rather a genuine lobbying group with an active
membership and agenda. Contrary to what has been reported in the mainstream media, Russians can
own guns but the licensing and registration procedures are long and complicated, which Right to
Bear Arms, modeling itself on the NRA, is seeking to change.
Butina, a graduate student at American University, is now in a federal prison, having been
charged with collusion and failure to register as an agent of the Russian Federation. She was
arrested on July 15, 2018. It is decidedly unusual to arrest and confine someone who has failed
to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938 (FARA) , but she has not been granted bail because, as a
Russian citizen, she is considered to be a "flight risk," likely to try to flee the US and
return home.
FARA requires all individuals and organizations acting on behalf of foreign governments to
registered with the Department of Justice and to report their sources of income and contacts.
Federal prosecutors have claimed that Butina was reporting back to a Russian official while
deliberating cultivating influential figures in the United States as potential resources to
advance Russian interests, a process that is described in intelligence circles as "spotting and
assessing."
Maria eventually pleaded guilty of not registering under FARA to mitigate any punishment,
hoping that she would be allowed to return to Russia after a few months in prison on top of the
nine months she has already served. She has reportedly fully cooperated the US authorities,
turning over documents, answering questions and undergoing hours of interrogation by federal
investigators before and after her guilty plea.
Maria Butina basically did nothing that damaged US security and it is difficult to see where
her behavior was even criminal, but the prosecution is asking for 18 months in prison for her
in addition to the time served. She would be, in fact, one of only a handful of individuals
ever to be imprisoned over FARA, and they all come from countries that Washington considers to
be unfriendly, to include Cuba, Saddam's Iraq and Russia. Normally the failure to comply with
FARA is handled with a fine and compulsory registration.
Butina was essentially convicted of the crime of being Russian at the wrong time and in the
wrong place and she is paying for it with prison. Selective enforcement of FARA was,
ironically, revealed through evidence collected and included in the Mueller Report relating to
the only foreign country that actually sought to obtain favors from the incoming Trump
Administration. That country was Israel and the individual who drove the process and should
have been fined and required to register with FARA was President Donald Trump's son-in-law
Jared Kushner. As Kushner also had considerable "flight risk" to Israel, which has no
extradition treaty with the United States, he should also have been imprisoned.
Kushner reportedly aggressively
pressured members of the Trump transition team to contact foreign ambassadors at the United
Nations to convince them to vote against or abstain from voting on the December 2016 United
Nations Security Council Resolution 2334 condemning Israeli settlements. The resolution passed
when the US, acting under direction of President Barack Obama, abstained, but incoming National
Security Adviser Michael Flynn did indeed contact the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak twice
and asked for Moscow's cooperation, which was refused. Kushner, who is so close to Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that the latter has slept at the Kushner apartment in New York
City, was clearly acting in response to direction coming from the Israeli government.
Another interesting tidbit revealed by Mueller relates to Trump foreign policy adviser
George Papadopoulos's ties to Israel over an oil development scheme. Mueller "ultimately
determined that the evidence was not sufficient to obtain or sustain a conviction" that
Papadopoulos "committed a crime or crimes by acting as an unregistered agent of the Israeli
government." Mueller went looking for a Russian connection but found only Israel and decided to
do nothing about it.
As so often is the case, inquiries that begin by looking for foreign interference in
American politics start by focusing on Washington's adversaries but then comes up with Israel.
Noam Chomsky
described it best "First of all, if you're interested in foreign interference in our
elections, whatever the Russians may have done barely counts or weighs in the balance as
compared with what another state does, openly, brazenly and with enormous support. Netanyahu
goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with
overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president's policies -- what happened with Obama
and Netanyahu in 2015. Did Putin come to give an address to the joint sessions of Congress
trying to -- calling on them to reverse US policy, without even informing the president? And
that's just a tiny bit of this overwhelming influence."
Maria Butina is in jail for doing nothing while Jared Kushner, who needed a godfathered
security clearance due to his close Israeli ties, struts through the White House as senior
advisor to the president in spite of the fact that he used his nepotistically obtained access
to openly promote the interests of a foreign government. Mueller knows all about it but
recommended nothing, as if it didn't happen. The media is silent. Congress will do nothing. As
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi put it "We in Congress stand by
Israel. In Congress, we speak with one voice on the subject of Israel." Indeed.
"... Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016 Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed. ..."
"... But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious." ..."
"... "I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort." ..."
"... Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party. But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else." ..."
"... According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut down. ..."
"... The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016, but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions. ..."
"... But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher Steele. ..."
"... DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution. ..."
"... The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as preposterous. ..."
"... Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled. ..."
"... But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed in the Mueller report . ..."
As Donald Trump began his meteoric rise to the presidency,
the Obama White House summoned Ukrainian authorities to Washington to coordinate ongoing anti-corruption efforts inside Russia's
most critical neighbor.
The January 2016 gathering, confirmed by multiple participants and contemporaneous memos, brought some of Ukraine's top corruption
prosecutors and investigators face to face with members of former President Obama's National Security Council (NSC), FBI, State Department
and Department of Justice (DOJ).
That makes the January 2016 meeting one of the earliest documented efforts to build the now-debunked Trump-Russia collusion narrative
and one of the first to involve the Obama administration's intervention.
Spokespeople for the NSC, DOJ and FBI declined to comment. A representative for former Obama national security adviser Susan Rice
did not return emails seeking comment.
Nazar Kholodnytskyy, Ukraine's chief anti-corruption prosecutor, told me he attended some but not all of the January 2016
Washington meetings and couldn't remember the specific cases, if any, that were discussed.
But he said he soon saw evidence in Ukraine of
political meddling in the U.S. election . Kholodnytskyy said the key evidence against Manafort -- a ledger showing payments from
the Party of Regions -- was known to Ukrainian authorities since 2014 but was suddenly released in May 2016 by the U.S.-friendly
NABU, after Manafort was named Trump's campaign chairman: "Somebody kept this black ledger secret for two years and then showed it
to the public and the U.S. media. It was extremely suspicious."
Kholodnytskyy said he explicitly instructed NABU investigators who were working with American authorities not to share
the ledger with the media. "Look, Manafort's case is one of the cases that hurt me a lot," he said.
"I ordered the detectives to give nothing to the mass media considering this case. Instead, they had broken my order and published
themselves these one or two pages of this black ledger regarding Paul Manafort."
"For me it was the first call that something was going wrong and that there is some external influence in this case. And there
is some other interests in this case not in the interest of the investigation and a fair trial," he added.
Kostiantyn Kulyk, deputy head of the Ukraine prosecutor general's international affairs office, said that, shortly after Ukrainian
authorities returned from the Washington meeting, there was a clear message about helping the Americans with the Party of the Regions
case.
"Yes, there was a lot of talking about needing help and then the ledger just appeared in public," he recalled.
Kulyk said Ukrainian authorities had evidence
that other Western figures , such as former Obama White House counsel Gregory Craig, also received money from Yanukovych's party.
But the Americans weren't interested: "They just discussed Manafort. This was all and only what they wanted. Nobody else."
Manafort joined Trump's campaign on March 29, 2016, and then was promoted to campaign chairman on May 19, 2016.
NABU leaked the existence of the ledgers on May 29, 2016. Later that summer, it told U.S. media the ledgers showed payments to
Manafort, a revelation that forced him to resign from the campaign in August 2016.
A Ukrainian court in December concluded NABU's release of the ledger was an illegal attempt to influence the U.S. election. And
a member of Ukraine's parliament has released a recording of a NABU official saying the agency released the ledger to help Democratic
nominee Hillary Clinton's campaign.
The other case raised at the January 2016 meeting, Telizhenko said, involved
Burisma Holdings , a
Ukrainian energy company under investigation in Ukraine for improper foreign transfers of money. At the time, Burisma allegedly was
paying then-Vice President Joe Biden's son Hunter as both a board
member and a consultant. More than $3 million flowed from Ukraine to an American firm tied to Hunter Biden in 2014-15,
bank records show .
According to Telizhenko, U.S. officials told the Ukrainians they would prefer that Kiev drop the Burisma probe and allow the
FBI to take it over. The Ukrainians did not agree. But then Joe Biden pressured Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to
fire Ukraine's chief prosecutor in March 2016, as I previously reported. The Burisma case was transferred to NABU, then shut
down.
The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington on Thursday confirmed the Obama administration requested the meetings in January 2016,
but embassy representatives attended only some of the sessions.
"Unfortunately, the Embassy of Ukraine in Washington, D.C., was not invited to join the DOJ and other law enforcement-sector meetings,"
it said. It said it had no record that the Party of Regions or Burisma cases came up in the meetings it did attend.
Ukraine is riddled with corruption, Russian meddling and intense political conflicts, so one must carefully consider any Ukrainian
accounts.
But Telizhenko's claim that the DOJ reopened its Manafort probe as the 2016 election ramped up is supported by the DOJ's own
documents, including communications involving Associate Attorney General Bruce Ohr, his wife, Nellie, and ex-British spy Christopher
Steele.
Nellie Ohr and Steele worked in 2016 for the research firm, Fusion GPS, that was hired by Clinton's campaign and the Democratic
National Committee (DNC) to find Russia dirt on Trump. Steele wrote the famous dossier for Fusion that the FBI used to gain a warrant
to spy on the Trump campaign. Nellie Ohr admitted to Congress that she routed Russia dirt on Trump from Fusion to the DOJ
through her husband during the election.
DOJ emails show Nellie Ohr on May 30, 2016, directly alerted her husband and two DOJ prosecutors specializing in international
crimes to the discovery of the "black ledger" documents that led to Manafort's prosecution.
"Reported Trove of documents on Ukrainian Party of Regions' Black Cashbox," Nellie Ohr
wrote to her husband and federal prosecutors
Lisa Holtyn and Joseph Wheatley, attaching
a news article
on the announcement of NABU's release of the documents.
Bruce Ohr and Steele worked on their own effort to get dirt on Manafort from a Russian oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, who had a soured
business relationship with him. Deripaska was "almost ready to talk" to U.S. government officials regarding the money that "Manafort
stole," Bruce Ohr wrote in notes from his conversations with Steele.
The efforts eventually led to a September 2016 meeting in which the
FBI asked Deripaska if he could help prove Manafort was helping Trump collude with Russia. Deripaska laughed off the notion as
preposterous.
Previously, Politico reported
that the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington assisted Clinton's campaign through a DNC contractor. The Ukrainian Embassy acknowledges
it got requests for assistance from the DNC staffer to find dirt on Manafort but denies it provided any improper assistance.
Now we have more concrete evidence that the larger Ukrainian government also was being pressed by the Obama administration
to help build the Russia collusion narrative. And that onion is only beginning to be peeled.
But what is already confirmed by Ukrainians looks a lot more like assertive collusion with a foreign power than anything detailed
in the Mueller report .
John Solomon is an award-winning investigative journalist whose work over the years has exposed U.S. and FBI intelligence
failures before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal scientists' misuse of foster children and veterans in drug experiments, and numerous
cases of political corruption. He serves as an investigative columnist and executive vice president for video at The Hill. Follow
him on Twitter @jsolomonReports
"... According to its filings to the US Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), BGR is a registered agent for none other than President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, whose ascension to Ukrainian presidency was brought about by the Maidan revolution of 2014, a coup cheered on most fervently by John McCain himself. ..."
"... It remains to be seen whether this relationship will change in June, when TV personality Volodymyr Zelensky takes office, having triumphed in a landslide runoff election this past weekend. Judging by Zelensky's official Facebook account of his February meeting with Volker – "a friend of Ukraine" with whom he "reached full understanding on all questions" – that seems unlikely, however. ..."
"... Turns out another McCain confidant, David Kramer , also works at Volker's institute, listed as "senior director for Human Rights and Democracy." Kramer was identified as the individual who during the 2016 campaign spread the "Steele Dossier" (accusing Trump of ties with Russia) to the press and a number of other people in Washington, including the "midwife of Maidan" herself, Victoria Nuland. ..."
US special envoy for Ukraine Kurt Volker is drawing a salary from John McCain's think tank,
which is funded by George Soros and a DC lobbying firm working for Ukrainian President Petro
Poroshenko, among others.
Volker was appointed Special Representative for Ukraine negotiations in July 2017, by
then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and has been "mediating" the Ukrainian crisis on behalf
of the US ever since in much the same way his colleague Elliott Abrams has
been doing with Venezuela.
The twist is that Volker is doing this " on
a voluntary basis without compensation" and "not taxing the taxpayers," drawing a salary
from his day job as executive director of the McCain Institute for International Leadership in
Arizona. Named after the late and hawkish US senator John McCain, the think tank is dedicated
to "advancing leadership in the United States and around the world." The two positions are very
much aligned, Volker has said, allowing him to get his "hands dirty and actually solve our
problems."
In practice, that means things like taking part in the "Occupied Crimea: 5 years of
resistance" conference in Odessa – the same city where US-backed nationalists burned
alive their political opponents in May 2014 – and parroting Bellingcat talking points on
the Kerch Strait incident, themselves cribbed from the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU).
This is not surprising, however, since the list of donors of the McCain Institute includes
something called the "BGR Foundation." It shares the same Washington, DC address – and
name – with Barbour Griffith Rogers, a high-profile lobbying firm that lists Volker as "Senior
International Advisor" and former international managing director.
According to its filings to the US
Department of Justice under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), BGR is a registered
agent for none other than President of Ukraine Petro Poroshenko, whose ascension to Ukrainian
presidency was brought about by the Maidan revolution of 2014, a coup cheered on most fervently
by John McCain himself.
The "National Reforms Council of Ukraine," which officially retained BGR's services, is led
by none other than Dmytro Shymkiv, "Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration of Ukraine,"
as per the filing BGR sent to the
DOJ in January 2017.
It remains to be seen whether this relationship will change in June, when TV personality
Volodymyr Zelensky takes office, having triumphed in a landslide
runoff election this past weekend. Judging by Zelensky's official Facebook
account of his February meeting with Volker – "a friend of Ukraine" with whom he
"reached full understanding on all questions" – that seems unlikely, however.
Whose envoy?
Volker was very close to the late Senator McCain, who was himself intimately involved with
the 2014 "revolution" in Kiev, visiting the demonstrators and personally sharing the stage with
Socialist-Nationalist Party leader Oleg Tyahnibok, for example. McCain was even offered an
advisory job with Poroshenko, back in 2015, but declined because that was not allowed under
US law.
Turns out another McCain confidant, David Kramer , also works at
Volker's institute, listed as "senior director for Human Rights and Democracy." Kramer was
identified as
the individual who during the 2016 campaign spread the "Steele Dossier" (accusing Trump of ties
with Russia) to the press and a number of other people in Washington, including the "midwife of
Maidan" herself, Victoria Nuland.
Among the McCain Institute's other donors are George Soros and his Open Society Foundations,
as well as Saudi Arabia – though Volker had to disavow them last year, calling it a
one-time donation and saying he won't
accept any more Saudi cash after the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal
Khashoggi.
All of this adds up to the question no one seems to have asked yet: Whose interests in
Ukraine is Kurt Volker actually representing – those of the Trump administration, or
those of his donors and the ghost of John McCain?
No he is not. But he is the US puppet. Yet another neoliberal that will fleece Ukraine for the benefit of international
financial oligarchy.
The article is a usual incompetent neocon/neolib garbage and does not demonstrate any knowledge of the
Ukrainian political situation. But one paragraph does make sense. Zelensky was like Trump: he was
elected because the other candidate was despicable corrupt warmonger
The level of connections of Zelensky to oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi and Soros is still unclear.
Kolomoyskyi was rumored as one of the initiator and sponsors of Odessa massacre and the financier of pro-Nazi
Azov battalion (he is now hiding from persecution for his financial crimes in Israel) .
The
only question about Zelensky is whose puppet he is. Anyway Poor Ukraine is up top another round of stripping its wealth
by oligarchs and foreign financial sharks, while the standard of living will deteriorate and stay
of the same dismal level as now (essentially Central African poverty level).
Any attempt of Zelensky to escape the puppet status will be cut in short. In no way he can depose key officials from Nuland
junta which came in power in 2014, or challenge the power of the US embassy over Ukraine. With Biden in the past routinely
firing Ukrainian Chief Prosecutor, when he start digging on his son dealings in Ukraine.
Poroshenko lost not because Zelenskiy was better. Although hard to measure, it is perceived
by some in Ukraine's parliament that a vote for Zelenskiy was simply an anti-Poroshenko vote,
rather than a truly pro-Zelenskiy one.
Zakariah is an interesting example of the immigrant neocon class. Khalilzad is another.
Sebastian Gorka and Varney are others. They like the US, but, if only it were more
aggressive, less federal.
Khalizad told me once that you WASP types have no idea of the real uses of power. Etc.
Gorka may be in the "immigrant neocon class," but as harmful to USA foreign policy as is
Khalilzad, Gorka is not in his league: Gorka is a mediocre-talent, blowhard Wannabe.
--
re Mr. Bolan's critique of US "diplomacy" with Iran: a threshold question I ask is, By
what right?
What right has USA to demand that Iran "change its behavior."
The response from the neocon community was voiced most recently in a discussion titled,
Countering Violent Extremism
https://www.c-span.org/video/?460029-1/us-institute-peace-hosts-forum-combating-violent-extremism
moderated by David Ignatius and including such stellar 'diplomats' as Bushites Madeleine
Albright, Michael Singh and Stephen Hadley: USA created the "international order" post-WWII
and the institutions and values of that "international order" have maintained "peace,
stability and prosperity" in the world ever since. The proof: "there have been no major wars
between European powers since WWII." Democracy and stability are the keys to defeating
"violent extremism" and maintaining the international order.
To maintain that Pax Americana, the US is entitled undermine the sovereignty of-; destabilize
- , and impoverish any and all nations that resist its stabilizing efforts.
Smiling Joe Biden, the glad handler from Delaware, is nothing more than another neocon
wolf in sheep's clothing. His tenure as Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1993
resulted in the infamous Anita Hill debacle due to his failure to investigate Ms. Hill's
allegations that then SCOTUS nominee Clarence Thomas sexually harassed her several years
earlier. The result was an embarrassing televised hearing that exposed Biden's
incompetence, along with that of other members of the committee.
In the end, an unqualified right wing legal 'bump on the log' attained a seat as a
Supreme Court justice. Later it was proven that Ms. Hill's claims were true, but the damage
was done. BTW, Biden's penchant for fascists was on display in the Yugoslavian civil
war.
Well known Twitter "bot" Ian56 has published a thread about Biden
. I suggest people give it a looksee. Ian asks in his first entry:
"How the hell does the Oligarchy think they are going to get Creepy Joe Biden past the
public? I mean the average American Joe is extremely dumb & ignorant, but even they are
not that dumb."
I just posted the answer @11. Welcome to 1984. We are now officially at war with
Eastasia!
The good thing about Biden entering the race is that it complicates an already difficult path
to the nomination for the slew of establishment candidates. Biden is not a first choice for
the Democratic intelligentsia. Sample Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight regularly and you'll know
that Kamala Harris and boy-mayor Buttigieg are the favorites. Of course, Trump would eat
either whole.
I'm rooting for Sanders, not because I believe him to be uniquely authentic, but because
he is the one who scares the shit out of the big-ticket donors who guide the Democratic
Party.
Read last week's
front-pager from Jonathan Martin. Guaranteed if Bernie walks away with the primary in a
rout, you'll see prominent Dems back a third party candidate.
The fact that Biden survived the "GropeGate" stuff from a view weeks ago reinforces how the
msm is cooking coverage or withholding it altogether.
Take a look at some video compilations of ol' Gropey-Joe as he is swearing in elected reps
and photo-documenting the occasion.
Irrespective of his Obama-esque policies and status as standard-bearer for TPTB, the guy
is just a straight up creep. And a particularly bad Catholic.
...
I agree that Sanders-Gabbard would absolutely destroy Trump and garner perhaps even more
backing than Obama c. 2008.
I put the scary Socialist angle that is used against Sanders as carrying the same weight
as the whole Crouching Blackman, Hidden Muslim thing that followed Obama during his run.
It is just hard to tell as to how sensible they (Sanders and Gabbard) would be allowed to
be WRT FP.
But Trump had an opportunity to love his country. And he chose orherwise. SAD!
As long as Hunter Biden is still a director
of Burisma Holdings (which includes at least one other unpleasant individual on
the Board of Directors), there is always a chance that elements within or connected to the
Ukrainian government (even under Volodymyr Zelenskiy's Presidency, when he has his back
turned on his fellow politicians), the previous Poroshenko government or Poroshenko himself,
and / or the Maidan Revolution - Crowdstrike, Dmitri Alperovich and Chalupa sisters, we're
looking at all of you - might try to derail any or all of the Democratic Party presidential
candidates in attempts to have Joe Biden declared the official Democrat presidential
contender in 2020. The only question is how openly brazen these people are going to be in
order to save their pet project in Kiev before Ukraine erupts in civil war (and it won't be
civil war in the Donbass area) and the entire country goes down in flames.
As for the rest of the 20 candidates, I would prefer Tulsi Gabbard out of the lot. In this
respect India's general elections, already under way, are going to be important. Gabbard
needs to let go of Narendra Modi and his Hindutva BJP party - her friendship with Modi and
his association with Hindutva are sure to come under scrutiny as will also any connections
she and her office staff have with
The Science of Identity Foundation organisation.
Joe Biden is hard wired to the corruption in the corporate DNC. The tell on this will be when
the media starts to roll him out with the fanfare of a new model car. It is hard to imagine
that he can inspire voters in the primaries. But if the sell goes overboard and it becomes
obvious that the fixers are determined to hand him the nomination; then it will be a real
poke in the eye, and another PSYOPS to grossly demoralize voters in this country. Biden is
about as exciting as a glass of milk that's curdled overnight on the end table by the bed.
The Deep State wanted a MAGA nationalist to counter the challenge from Russia and China and
that's what they got.
Sanders is a sheepdog/stooge that works for the Zionist establishment and Deep State just
like Biden and a few others that are in the race. As much as you wag your 'tale', the stink
remains.
The oligarchy reels out all tired scams over and over, until you want to cry out in anguish.
Don't let them wear you down. Never capitulate. If Biden by some horrible chance has the
winning hand, I'm guessing he will pick Gillibrand for his VP, a centrist of compromising
kind, a shapeshifting clone to remind people of Hillary on some subconscious level. More of
the same will fix us right up, on our journey to virtual political reality, and the end of
humanity. These fucks will use the "little nukes" as they tuck us into bed.
Ukraine with the help of lunatics in the Washington, DC is moving to the right direction
in order to become Malorussia soon. It will not take long. Chervonarussia a.k.a. Ruthenia in
Hapsburg newspeak will take longer time. However, people in that region still identify
themselves as Russinians (Русины). With coming
dissolution of once Anglo-German-Dutch City-on-the-Hill into amorphous salad of different
cultures and total loss internal cohesion we may see comparative bloodless transition to new
era.
the gfc tells us otherwise. a financial collapse is a probable scenario; leading to a
prolonged depression. May not be the catastrophic vision our friend has in mind, but would be
pretty bad. Even in today's great economy forty million are living in poverty. Another
financial collapse could see that number double
"What lessons can Western policymakers learn from Poroshenko's crushing defeat?"
A pointless question as the US/EU establishment don't seem to be able to accept the
reality of what is happening, and won't accept any lessons as that might get in the way of
the Neoliberal globalist expansionist agenda and undermine its supporting narratives.
Zelensky won't be a quantum improvement, but at least he isn't a raving Ultra-nationalist
looney. He's not much more that the Ukro version of Frances Micron, a political light-weight
foisted onto the public by the mostly-hidden hand of corrupt Oilgarchs. Ukraines rot from
within will continue...
As most Russians, I don't have high hopes for Zelensky. Almost certainly, his campaign was
bankrolled by oligarch Kolomoisky. So he will represent the interests of large money, not of
Ukranian people. And he will have to deal with these crazy nationalists, which are over 25%
of population. And the debts with IMF strings attached. He stood on his knees at the debate
with Poroshenko - I think he will have to be forced to do that more often than that during
his presidency.
Donbass will remain the festering wound in Ukraines side that weakens and eventually
destroys the accursed Banderite state. Russia needs to keep up the pressure and ensure that
the DPR/LPR can defend themselves against the Kiev regime and make sure the nationalist
whack-jobs understand that any attempt to seizethe territory of Free Ukraine will result in a
world of pain descending on their heads. Time is on Russia's side as the US loses focus, the
EU loses interest, and the harsh realities of geo-politics and economics takes its toll on
the bumbling tin-pot kleptocracy that Ukr has become.
Parashenko is criminal. The same as Saakashvili. Both shelled peaceful living homes from
artillery and with rockets. They both deserve to be hanged. But the West calls them
"democrats".
Western policy is infinitely malleable and adaptable to whatever agenda they want to
pursue. They will defend the Banderite madhouse in Ukropistan as a "democracy" (even as it
makes war on its own people) yet insist that Venezuela is a dictatorship, despite the free
and fair elections that return the Chavistas to power, time and time again. They will rail
against Russia for being "corrupt" (even though they jail senior figures who still try to
extract Yeltsin-era "tributes") yet strain their collectives necks as they look away from
watching Ukr regime insiders conduct outright theft of IMF loan cash.
Sometimes, too little pride in one's nation can be a problem, providing no sense of
cohesion, purpose or unity. And sometimes, too much pride can also be equally
problematic.
Is it liberal to complain about not being hard enough on Russia?
Interesting that Hillary Clinton said Trump was a "Russian puppet" (probably after
Obama sent the FBI after the GOP campaign) and NBC's Holt (Nov 9 2016) said the US
election was a Russian coup. Since when (except maybe if Joe McCarthy were a
democrat).
A parallel maybe. In Ukraine since 2004 the popularly elected president was deposed
twice by extreme right wing ultra nationalists. In 2014 the popular Yanukovych was
deposed in the Maidan revolution with help from the US replaced with no election by Petro
Poroshenko.
Sunday we hear that a comedian Zelenskiy soundly beat Poroshenko in a popular
vote.
To this Poroshenko: "Poroshenko said on social media he thought Zelenskiy's win would
spark celebrations in the Kremlin."
"They believe that with a new inexperienced Ukrainian president, Ukraine could be
quickly returned to Russia's orbit of influence," he wrote.
Clinton and Holt could be writing for Poroshenko, a far right wing ultra
nationalist!
I worry a lot about Obama's spying on the Trump campaign and the supposed liberals in
this country sounding like far right, ultra nationalist, looking for a new, expensive
cold war!
"... While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests. Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia, Israel, Big Oil and the MIC. ..."
"... In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform. They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat. They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is through next November. ..."
"... I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp she helped create. ..."
"... Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral, humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States. ..."
"... Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions. ..."
"... Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic "wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous groups known as "terrorists. ..."
"... Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear itself. ..."
"... the British ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. ..."
"... The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020 election. ..."
"... They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused card. ..."
"... There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.) ..."
Here's my take on the 'Russian Collusion Deep State LIE.
There was NO Russian Collusion at all to get Trump in the White House. Most probably,
Putin would have favored Clinton, since she could be bought. Trump can't.
What did happen was illegal spying on the Trump campaign. That started late 2015, WITHOUT
a FISA warrant. They only obtained that in 2016, through lying to the FISA Court. The basis
for that first warrant was the Fusion GPS Steele Dossier.
Ever since Trump won the election, they real conspirators knew they had a problem. That
was apparent ever after Devin Nunes did the right thing by informing Trump they were spying
on him.
Since they obtained those FISA warrant through lying to the FISA Court (which is treason)
they needed to cover that up as quickly as possible.
So what did they do? Instead of admitting they lied to the FISA Court they kept on lying
till this very day. The same lie through which they obtained the FISA warrants to spy on the
Trump campaign was being pushed openly.
The lie is and was 'Trump colluded with the Russians in order to win the Presidential
Election'.
They knew from day one Trump didn't do anything wrong. They did know they spied on Trump
through lying to the FISA Court, which again, is treason. According to the Constitution,
lying to the FISA court= Treason.
In order to avoid being indicted and prosecuted, they somehow needed to 'take down' the
Attorney General. At all costs, they needed to try and hide what really happened.
So there they went. 'Trump colluded with the Russians. Not just Trump, but the entire
Trump campaign!'.
'Sessions should recuse himself', the propaganda MSM said in unison. 'Recuse, recuse'.
Sessions, naively recused himself. Back then, even he probably didn't know the entire
story. It was only later on that Sarah Carter and Jon Solomon found out it had been Hillary
who ordered and paid the Steele Dossier.
The real conspirators hoped that through the Special Counsel rat Mueller they might be
able to achieve three main objectives.
1: Convince the American people Russia indeed was meddling in the Presidential
Election.
2: Find any sort of dirt on Trump and/or people who helped him win the Election in order
to 'take them down'.
Many people were indicted, some were prosecuted. Yet NONE of them were convicted for a
crime that had ANYTHING to with with the elections. NONE.
They stretched it out as long as possible. 'The longer you repeat a lie, the more people
are willing to believe the lie'.
So that is what they did. They still do it. Mueller took TWO years to brainwash as many
people as possible. 'Russian Collusion, Russian Collusion. Russia. Russia. Russia. Russia.
Rusiaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh ..
Why did they want to make sure they could keep telling that lie as long as possible?
Because they FEAR people will learn the truth. There was NEVER any Russian Collusion with
the Trump campaign.
There was spying on the Trump campaign by Obama in order to try and make Hillary win the
Presidential Election.
That is the actual COLLUSION between the Clinton Campaign and a weaponized Obama
regime!!
So what did 'Herr Mueller' do?
He took YEARS to come up with the conclusion that the Trump campaign did NOT collude with
Russia.
The MSM tried to make us all believe it was about that. Yet it was NOT.
His conclusive report is all about the question 'did or didn't the Trump campaign collude
with the Russians'.
Trump exonerated, and the MSM only talks about that. Trump, Trump, Trump.
They still want us all to believe that was what the Mueller 'investigation' was all about.
Yet it was not.
The most important objective of the Mueller 'investigation' was not to 'investigate'.
It was to 'instigate' that HUGE lie.
The same lie which they used to obtain the FISA warrant on the Trump campaign.
"Russia'.
So what has 'Herr Mueller' done?
A: He finds ZERO evidence at all which proves the Trump campaign colluded with ANY
Russians.
And now the huge lie, which after all was the main objective right from the get go. (A was
only a distraction)
B: Russians hacked the DNC.
That is what they wants us all to believe. That Russia somehow did bad stuff.
Now it was not Russia who did bad stuff.
It was Obama working together with the Clinton campaign. Obama weaponized his entire
regime in order to let Clinton win the Presidency.
That is the REAL collusion. The real CRIME. Treason!
In order to create a 'cover up' Mueller NEEDED to instigate that Russia somehow did bad
things.
That's what the Mueller Dossier is ALL about. They now have 'black on white' 'evidence'
that Russia somehow did bad things.
Because if Russia didn't do anything like that, it would make us all ask the fair question
'why did Obama spy on the Trump Campaign'.
Let's go a bit deeper still.
Here's a trap Mueller created. What if Trump would openly doubt the LIE they still push?
The HUGE lie that Russia did bad things?
After all, they NEED that LIE in order to COVER UP their own crime.
If Trump would say 'I do not believe Russia did anything to influence the elections, I
think Mueller wrote that to COVER UP the real crime', what would happen?
They would say 'GOTCHA now, see Trump is colluding with Russia? He even refuses to accept
Russia hacked the DNC, this ultimately proofs Trump indeed is a Russian asset'.
They believe that trap will work. They needed that trap, since if Russia wasn't doing
anything wrong, it would show us all THEY were the criminals.
They NEED that lie, in order to COVER UP.
That is the 'Insurance Policy' Stzrok and Page texted about. Even Sarah Carter and Jon
Solomon still don't seem to see all that.
They should have attacked the HUGE lie that Russia was somehow hacking the DNC. That is
simply not true. It's a Mueller created LIE. That LIE = the Insurance Policy.
What did they need an Insurance Policy for? They want us all to believe that was about
preventing Trump from being elected.
Although true, that is only A.
They NEEDED an Insurance Policy in the unlikely case Trump would become President and
would find out they were illegally spying on him!
The REAL crime is Obama weaponized the American Government to spy on even a duly elected
President.
What's the punishment for Treason?
About Assange and Seth Rich.
Days after Mueller finishes his 'mission' (Establish the LIE Russia did bad things) which
seems to be succesfull, the Deep State arrest the ONLY source who could undermine that
lie.
Assange Since he knows who is (Seth Rich?) and who isn't (Russia) the source.
If Assange could testify under oath the emails did not come from Russia, the LIE would be
exposed.
No coincidences here. I fear Assange will never testify under oath. I actually fear for
his life.
Deniz , April 23, 2019 at 13:48
While I wholeheartedly agree with you that Obama and Clinton are criminals, the far less
convincing part of your argument is that Trump is not now beholden to the same MIC interests.
Bolton, Abrahams, Pompeo, Pence his relationship with Netanyahu, the overthrow of Madura are
all glaring examples that contradict the Rights narrative that he is some type of hero. Trump
may not have colluded with Russia, but he does seem to be colluding with Saudia Arabia,
Israel, Big Oil and the MIC.
Whether one is on the Right or Left, the house is still made of glass.
It's not enough that Trump is clearly a classic narcissist whose behavior will continue to
deteriorate the more his actions and statements are attacked and countered? You know what
happens when narcissists are driven into a corner by people tearing them down? They get
weapons and start killing people.
There is already more than ample evidence to remove Donald Trump from office, not the
least being he's clearly mentally unfit. Yet the Democrats, some of whom ran for office on a
promise to impeach, are suddenly reticent to act without "more investigation". Nancy Pelosi
stated on the record prior to release of the Mueller report impeachment wasn't on the agenda
"for now". She's now making noises in the opposite direction, but that's all they are:
noise.
The bottom line is the Clintonite New Democrats currently running the party have only one
issue to run on next year: getting rid of Donald Trump. They still operate under the delusion
they will be able to use him to draw off moderate Republican voters, the same ones they were
positive would come out for Hillary Clinton in '16. Their multitude of candidates pay lip
service to progressive policy then carefully walk back to the standard centrist positions
once the donations start coming, but the common underlying theme was and continues to be
"Donald Trump is evil, and we need to elect a Democrat."
In short, without Donald Trump in the Oval Office, the Democrat Party has no platform.
They need him there as a target, because Mike Pence would be impossible for them to beat.
They are under orders, according to various writers who've addressed the Clinton campaign, to
block Bernie Sanders and his platform at all costs; and they will allow the country to crash
and burn before they disobey those orders. That means keeping Donald Trump right where he is
through next November.
Dump Pelousy , April 23, 2019 at 13:21
I totally agree with you, and in fact believe that this whole 22month expensive and mind
numbing circus has been played out JUST to keep the public from knowing what the emails
actually said. Can you imagine Madcow focusing with such ferocity on John Pedesta as she has
on Putin, by discussing what he wrote during a presidential campaign to "influence the
election" ? We'd be a different country now, not fighting our way thru the McCarthite Swamp
she helped create.
Jeff Harrison , April 22, 2019 at 10:50
Thank you, Three Names. The so-called "most qualified presidential candidate ever" who's
only actual qualifications are the destruction of what had formerly been a peaceful, secular
state into a failed state riven with religious rivalry and racking up a billion frequent
flyer miles has left us with a Gordian knot of misinformation, disinformation, and outright
lies that will bedevil the country and our relations with other countries for some time to
come.
There's a special place in hell for people like you.
Charron , April 22, 2019 at 10:04
I see that the very liberal Noam Chomsky has recently stated that he was sure the Russians
did not to do the hacking of the DNC emails and that accusing Trump of being a party to this
was only going to help him in the 2020 elations because it wasn't true.
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:20
Thank you Caitlin for providing a most necessary corrective to the incessant drone that I
– unwillingly but have no other radio station available (and it is, however nauseating
and rant inducing, necessary to know what propaganda the corporate-capitalist-imperialist
state media are disseminating) – hear on both the BBC World Service and NPR. (We
refused to pay to watch television and I have continued that partnership tradition since my
husband died. So thankfully I've not seen the Maddow money raking insanity.)
And thank you for suggesting some clear ways to counter the Kool Aid infected codswallop.
It amazes just how much even the highly educated have completely accepted the
corporate-capitalist-imperialist propaganda, just as I am amazed that the same people
(friends of my husband, though what he'd think about their swallowing it all ) really seem to
be completely unconcerned about what the US has done and is doing to other peoples in other
countries (you know, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine – ah yes that coup – Yemen and
so on and on). And they clearly are more afraid of Russia than of their (our) own
military-deep state-police
DW Bartoo , April 22, 2019 at 08:16
Julian Assange is a vilified human being.
When vilification occurs a very necessary question that critical thought must ponder is
who benefits from such scapegoating?
However, for the moment, let us ponder, again in service to actual critical thought, why
aligning Assange with Russia is expected by those who will and intend to benefit from that
association. Why is suggesting that Assange is "a Russian agent" expected to convince
millions of USians that Assange is "a bad person"?
Why would millions accept that assertion without questioning it at all?
Caitlin suggest that those millions are "herd animals", implying that they are led into
believing two things. The first is that Russia and the Russian people are "bad", we have even
recently had a much trusted official suggest that Russians are "genetically" predisposed to
badness with a malignant tendency to single out the innocent, and one indispensable nation,
the United States for the most nefarious of Russian "interventions", amounting, according to
a famous Hollywood actor, who occasionally portrays a certain deity in the movies, to "an
attack".
In the meager interest of context and history, stretching back a bit more than a century,
some USians who are aware of that history, recognize that the US, under President Woodrow
Wilson sent US military troops into Russia in order to end the rise of the Bolshevik
rebellion/revolution.
Thus began the official demonization of Russia. A demonization very convenient to the
necessity of having an implacable enemy always ready to pounce on the good, moral,
humanitarian, and freely enterprising United States.
Now, conflating any individual with Russia, will always immediately result in that person
becoming, in the US, in the U.K. and in other US-kept vassal nations totally tarred with all
sorts of nefarious and always unexamined assumptions.
Mark Twain once suggested that the deity created war that USians might learn geography.
Clearly, it is a laborious process and has failed to create much global geographical
awareness among the millions, most of whom are content to think whatever nation is correctly
being ministered to or in the sights of "everything is on the table" as simply being,
vaguely, "over there".
That is why the US must strike "them" "over there" so as to avoid the frightening thought
of having "them" have to be dealt with "here" in the "Homeland" of "the free and the
brave".
This suggests that the "herd" has to be led to certain conclusions.
Unlike horses, the herd HAS to drink.
If the herd does not consume the elixir, then it may not be willing to joyfully send the
"flower of its youth" off to become cannon fodder should the Table of Everything so
demand.
I grew up in the nineteen fifties when the first Cold War was in full blossom. We school
students were told and taught that Russia hated us, wanted to attack and kill us all,
intended to rule the world with an iron hand and ruthless godlessness.
Thanks to the intelligence community, the political elite, notably in the Democratic
"wing" of the War Party, but with the support of the Republican wing of that party, and
certain individual players aligned with the US policy "Full Spectrum Dominance" which, of
course, is compassionate goodness and not to be confused with the vile aims of Russia, China,
Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and a whole host of other "bad guy" nations or amorphous
groups known as "terrorists.
Now, by tying Assange to that hodge-podge of baddies, the many may rest assured that he
has been put in his proper place.
Clearly, the consensus opinion is shaped, not inside the minds of millions of people, all
projecting their very worst fears or even their own worst proclivities on individuals like
Putin or whoever is the "Hitler" of the convenient moment, but rather on the efforts of, let
us call them "entities" who plan to benefit from a populous aroused to anxiety or even fear
itself.
The list of beneficiaries includes the financial elites who always profit from war and
"confusion", the political elites who serve those monied interests, the media, academia, the
military, intelligence, weapons manufacturers, energy producers, military contractors and so
on.
Assange, to his great and everlasting credit, exposed a very large amount of this
including, with the invaluable efforts
of Chelsea Manning, actual war crimes perpetrated by the US, even beyond beginning wars based
on lies.
Fortunately, the media, having overplayed it hand in the manipulation has exposed itself
to many as being but a propaganda industry.
A very real question for those concerned with engaging critical thought processes is just
how many humans are still being led, rather easily, around by the fallacious and very
dangerous concoctions of the opinion "shapers" in think tanks, media echo chambers, corporate
boardrooms, and academic snake pits?
Perhaps there comes a time for humanity, if it is not to trot along in the footsteps of
the dodo bird to look not where the fingers of deceit are pointing, but at those to whom the
fingers are attached?
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 09:33
DWB – as a USian of English birth (of about the same age, I would imagine) I am
amazed at the fear the US had of the USSR back in the 1950s. When my husband told me, in the
1980s, about how he and his schoolmates had had nuclear air raid attack drills (sheltering
under desks and so on!) I'm sure that I gawped, fly-catchingly. What??? Nowt remotely similar
occurred in the UK during the 1950s in schools or elsewhere.
It was only since I began studying history (late in life) that I learnt that the British
ruling elites have hated the Russians for well over a hundred years. Still not quite sure
why, nor yet why whatever the Russians did (Crimean War in the 1850s?) that pissed them off
so royally should have any bearing on Russia-UK relations nowadays. But that could be because
I'm dim. And because I've no hatred, dislike, fear of Russians (or Chinese or Iranians) at
all. My fears revolve around the hubris-arrogance and determination to retain economic and
more general world domination by the US and its poodles in the UK-FR-NATO and Israel (though
their status as dog or leash is debatable). These are the countries to be afraid of.
Sam F , April 22, 2019 at 20:34
Yes, the remarkably unprovoked hatred of Russia among the UK aristocracy, regardless of
era or government there, is a great wonder. They did not even have eras of invasion threats,
colonial competition, or competing navies, as with France, Spain, and Portugal. Britain's
19th century invasions of Afghanistan were apparently provoked by nothing but fear, and their
several lost wars there apparently did not even engage Russians. Even complete transitions of
Russian government from monarchy to communism to capitalism failed to affect UK's fears. If
the cause were mere cultural difference, they would have feared the orient.
Perhaps their aristocracy was not polite enough, or those backwards Ns, upside down Rs,
and Pi symbols terrified the British.
geeyp , April 22, 2019 at 23:49
Anne R. – For more on your second paragraph, visit Larouchepac.org The late Lyndon
Larouche's site has a lot of info on this.
Zhu , April 23, 2019 at 00:50
Britain & Russia were rivals for empire. Both were expanding in Asia – The Great
Game. Russia got Turkestan, Britain got India, both wanted China. Hence the elite's hatred,
although now it's probably traditional and automatic.
Keep studying history – it's ales ts enlightening!
AnneR , April 23, 2019 at 09:22
Yes Zhu – I do continue with history, although of course no historian and thus
history is ever free (as with all scholars) of their personal worldview. And yes I realize
that the UK, when an imperial power, viewed the world pretty much as the US does now: its
domain. So obviously any and all contenders were up for vitriolic loathing and war. But it
still doesn't explain the particularly vicious attitude toward Russia on the part of the
British ruling elites. After all the Brits also had France, Holland and Germany (earlier
Spain and Portugal) as competitors, admittedly at different time periods, and no they weren't
"liked" and were often at war with each other. But there was never the same bitterness toward
western European rivals as there was and continues to be toward Russia.
That the USSR provoked deep, undying hatred among the aristos and their hangers' on does
not surprise: can't have anything remotely similar happening in our cushy backyard, can't
have the unwashed, ignorant, prole herd actually learning any lessons from the Soviets.
Yet even so – no nuclear air raid drills in schools or anywhere during red-baiting
season. Nothing kindred.
The truth is Hillary Clinton, John Brennan, Rachel Maddow, and the rest if the Scooby Doo
gang handed Agent Orange the victimhood script he needs to feed his Trumpets to win the 2020
election.
They've also guaranteed no matter what heinous gangster scam shit he has done in the past
or will do in the future, none of it will stick because he'll play the falsely accused
card.
For the idiot Americans watching White House reality TV at home, this means celebrity
Trump now has immunity and can't be voted off the island this season or next.
Ah yes, the evil Rooskies. From the article you obviously didn't read: In fact, WikiLeaks has published hundreds of thousands of documents pertaining to Russia,
has made critical comments about the Russian government and defended dissident Russian
activists, and in 2017 published an entire trove called the Spy Files Russia exposing Russian
surveillance practices. wikileaks russia files: https://wikileaks.org/spyfiles/russia/
I think we can tell who the "tool" is.
AnneR , April 22, 2019 at 12:30
Did you not actually read Caitlin's article? And other similar ones? YES Wikileaks has
published thousands of documents regarding Russian secret activities – and the Russian
government has not been at all happy about it. However, unlike the USian government it hasn't
trampled all over people's rights under international law to persecute Assange.
Frankly – if the USian government and its "comrades" in the UK don't like their
filthy linen being revealed for what it is – perhaps they should stop creating it in
the first place.
Red Douglas , April 22, 2019 at 16:08
>>> " Do they publish anything on Russia?"
Yes, as you and all of the many, many others who ignorantly and endlessly repeat this
question would know, if you had ever bothered to review WikiLeaks' work. In this case, you
would know if you had even bothered to read the article above your comment.
Likewise, the sky is green, the grass is blue and the sun rises in the West
michael , April 22, 2019 at 07:06
"People take this repetition as a substitute for proof due to a glitch in human psychology
known as the illusory truth effect, a phenomenon which causes our brains to tend to interpret
things we've heard before as known truths." I think it is a deeper phenomenon than repetition
of lies (which have been legal since 2014 with the 'modernization' of Smith-Mundt, our
anti-propaganda law).
The #resistence seems to fulfill people who have never accepted any religions
whole-heartedly; there is something in the human psyche which demands an intuitive
evidence-free, faith-based acceptance of beliefs which go beyond facts and evidence. This is
a powerful dream world where their illusions are more powerful than reality.
There is an inability to accept the fact that people in DC and NYC and Boston and San
Francisco and other Financial/ MIC-driven areas were doing well relative to the bulk of
Americans and life was wonderful until the 2016 Election. For these people "America Has Never
Stopped Being Great!" (Similar to the "I've got mine, Jack! " attitude of Great Britain, as
their labor unions lost unity with rest of the working class.)
Their comments have moved away from ad hominem "You are a Putin stooge!" arguments to appeals
to Authority fallacies: "All our Intelligence Agencies Know that Assange worked with Russians
to embarrass Hillary and cost her the Election". Religiosity is largely Authority-driven, and
avoids the angst of critical thinking and putting facts together that (thanks to our
Intelligence Agencies!) don't fit together.
OlyaPola , April 22, 2019 at 03:23
"The only people claiming that Assange is a Russian agent are those who are unhappy with
the things that WikiLeaks publications have exposed, whether that be U.S. war crimes or the
corrupt manipulations of Democratic Party leaders."
Perhaps fuller understanding would be gained by considering the following pathway.
People who who think that "Assange is a Russian agent" is a plausible belief are the
audience encouraged in the view that "Assange is a Russian agent".
Much of this notion of plausible belief is founded on the creation of holograms consisting
in large part of projections of the believer's expectations/experiences of the evaluation
criteria used in choosing agents to recruit (for the public largely projected from their
experience of creating resumes and attending job interviews) , what motivates an agent to be
recruited, how such motivation can facilitate the purpose of the recruiter of the agent, what
are the potential dangers of recruiting the agent, and most importantly what is the purpose
of and reasons why the recruiter considers recruiting an agent to achieve her/his
purpose.
On projection catalysing plausible belief you will be aware that some encourage the belief
that Mr. Putin is the richest man on the planet since in all societies there are
assumptions/expectations on motivations.
However in the presently self-designated "The United States of America" as functions of
"exceptionalism", "we the people hold these truths to be self-evident" and lack of direct
experience of foreign cultures by many, the population are particulrly prone to projection
giving rise to the paradox of "exceptionalists" engaging in the them/us conflation.
For
decades, Washington's favourite means of punishing nations that do not subscribe to its
narrative has been through the imposition of economic sanctions. This has become particularly
apparent with the ongoing and increasing sanctions against Iran, Russia and North Korea. While
sanctions against these governments have garnered headlines for the past few years, in fact,
there are far more sanctions that we rarely hear about.
In 1950, the Office of Foreign
Assets Control was formed as part of the United States Department of the Treasury. OFAC
administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions that are based on U.S. foreign policy and
national security goals. Sanctions have been imposed for the following reasons:
1.) terrorism
2.) international narcotics trade
3.) proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
4.) threats to national security, foreign policy and/or economy of the United States
Economic sanctions, in their most basic form, are defined as the withdrawal of trade and
financial relations with a targeted nation for foreign and security policy purposes. Economic
sanctions can take many forms including freezing of assets, arms embargoes, trade restrictions
and bans, capital restraints, foreign aid reductions and travel bans. According to the Council on
Foreign Relations , the United States uses economic and financial sanctions more than any
other nation.
In the United States, sanctions can originate in either the Executive or Legislative branches
of government. Presidents begin the process by issuing an Executive Order or EO which affords
the president social powers to regulate commerce with a given entity. Under the EO, the
president declares that there is a national emergency in response to "unusual and
extraordinary" foreign threats, for instance, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction
and the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States. In addition to Executive actions,
Congress can also pass legislation to both modify and impose sanctions. Most sanctions programs
are administered by the previously mentioned OFAC, however, other government departments may be
involved including Homeland Security, Justice, State and Commerce.
On the OFAC website interested parties can search for information on federally mandated
sanctions programs. Under each sanctions program there is an exhaustive listing of changes to
the programs, guidelines that must be followed under penalty of law. There is also a listing of
"General Licences" which are issued in order to authorize activities that would otherwise be
prohibited under law. Here is a
list from OFAC showing active sanctions programs and the date of their last update:
OFAC also tracks " Specially
Designated Nationals (SDNs) and Blocked Individuals ". This list contains the names of
individuals and companies that are owned, controlled by or acting on behalf of targeted nations
as well as the names of terrorists and narcotics traffickers that are not affiliated with any
nation. The assets of these SDNs are blocked and American citizens and permanent residents are
prohibited from doing business with them. Here is a very small sampling of SDNs from the PDF
version of the complete listing:
In total, there are 1157 pages listing the names of over 6000 SDNs and blocked individuals.
Here is a specific person showing how difficult it is to ensure that you are not dealing with a
SDN with an unknown number of aliases:
In this case, the SDGT following his name indicates that he is sanctioned under the Global
Terrorism Sanctions Regulations.
OFAC can impose civil penalties on individuals and organizations that act in contradiction to
the imposed sanctions. So far in 2018, there have been two penalties imposed as shown
here
for doing business with Iran:
...and here for doing business with Sudan:
During 2017 , 16 OFAC
Enforcement Actions resulted in penalties of $119,527,845, up substantially from penalties
totalling $21,609,315 in 2016.
Let's now look at the sanctions programs that are currently in place from the Council on
Foreign Relations. Here is a graphic showing the current U.S. sanctions programs and their year
of inception:
With this background on Washington's use of sanctions, let's look at what the World Economic
Forum (WEF) has to say about the effectiveness of
sanctions . The key factor in the effectiveness of sanctions is the size and capacity of
the nation being sanctioned and the power of the sanctioning nation or coalition. Applying
sanctions is a double-edged sword; for instance, in the case of Iran, China and Russia have
stepped in to develop Iran's massive natural gas reserves whereas American oil companies are
banned from investing and profiting from their potential investments in Iran. There are also
longer term impacts of sanctions as show in this quote from the WEF:
" The consequences of this trend are evolving, but they potentially include companies'
"de-globalization". That is, as companies are increasingly forced to think of themselves as
tied to their home governments, they will think twice before investing in certain markets
abroad. Other consequences include changes in traditional foreign trade patterns in line with
new geopolitical alignments. Faced in 2006 with the Russian wine embargo, Georgia had to
look for new markets in the West, where it was headed politically. When in 2014 Russia faced
Western sanctions, it accelerated its rapprochement with China, the one major power that
refused to condemn its actions and shared Moscow's opposition to US global dominance. The outcome of these geo-economic campaigns is not a zero-sum game. The stronger economy
backed by other forms of power can incur more damage on the target country than it will sustain
in return, but it does not always alter the political behaviour of the government to be
"punished". Sometimes sanctions can make that behaviour even more problematic. Ironically,
the true winner may be a third party that jumps into the opening: European countries in the
initial phases of US-Iran sanctions; China in the case of current Western sanctions against
Russia; Russia in the case of the post-Tiananmen Western weapons ban on China; Turkey in the
situation when EU pressure made Russia abandon its South Stream gas pipeline project. " (my
bolds)
In many cases (i.e. Iran, Syria and North Korea), the ultimate desired impact of sanctions is
to create an atmosphere where the targeted government is subjected to "regime change". As well,
sanctions are generally less effective against nations that are adversaries since the sanctions
may create a political climate where there is a stiffening of resolve of the people being
punished by an outside power. We need look no further than the example of Vladimir Putin who,
despite nearly five years of sanctions, still retains the backing of the majority of Russians
as shown here :
One would think that Washington would have concluded that economic sanctions have not
necessarily proven to be an effective means of getting its way in the world and, in fact, may
have punished domestic businesses more than they punished foreign adversaries. The lessons
taught by nearly 70 years of American economic isolation against Cuba are a prime example;
while the sanctions have been painful, they resulted in a nation that has maintained its
resolve in the face of economic difficulties and a leader that outlived and out ruled the
reigns of U.S. Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush I,
Clinton and Bush II.
Tuesday, April 23, 2019US Power
Wielding - Unconventional Warfare and Financial Power Back in December 2008, WikiLeaks
released a relatively little-noted document "
US Army Special Operations Forces Unconventional Warfare ". This 248-page, nine chapter
publication was the September 2008 revision of the U.S. Army Field Manual 3-05.130, the
keystone doctrine for Army special operations forces operations in unconventional warfare.
This document defines unconventional warfare as:
" Operations conducted by, with or through irregular forces against a variety of state and
no-state opponents. "
These operations are conducted:
" ...in support of a resistance movement, an insurgency, and ongoing or pending conventional
military operations "
Such operations have the following common conceptual core:
". ..working by, with, or through irregular surrogates in a clandestine and/or covert manner
against opposing actors. "
In Chapter 2, the document outlines the instruments of United States national power which help
the United States to achieve its national strategic objectives. These instruments of national
power include diplomacy, information, intelligence, economic, financial, law enforcement and
military. For the purposes of this posting, let's focus on one of these instruments as follows,
the Financial Instrument of National Power . Here's how the document describes this
instrument:
" The financial instrument of national power promotes the conditions for prosperity and
stability in the United States and encourages prosperity and stability in the rest of the
world. The Department of the Treasury (Treasury) is the primary federal agency responsible
for the economic and financial prosperity and security of the United States and as such is
responsible for a wide range of activities, including advising the President on economic and
financial issues, promoting the President's growth agenda, and enhancing corporate governance
in financial institutions. In the international arena, the Treasury works with other federal
agencies, the governments of other nations, and the international financial institutions to
encourage economic growth; raise standards of living; and predict and prevent, to the extent
possible, economic and financial crises." I like that " encourages
prosperity and stability intherest of the world ". That is true, unless you
happen to live in a nation which doesn't share Washington's viewpoint. Just ask people living
in one of many nations who are currently subject to one or another of Washington's long list of
sanctions as shown here (current to
mid-2017):
The document proceeds to note the following:
" T he application of economic or financial incentives is among the most powerful ideas
in the U.S. arsenal of power. Although some U.S. adversaries are irreconcilable to
accommodation with U.S. interests and must be engaged in other ways, many declared or
potential adversaries can be persuaded or dissuaded by economic or financial means to become
declared or potential allies (or at least neutralized) the ability of the United States
government to affect the economic environment is enormous, and it has economic weapons at its
disposal. Unconventional warfare planners must carefully coordinate the introduction and
withholding of economic and financial assets into the Unconventional Warfare Operational Area
(UWOA) with their interagency partners. For example, direct application of USAID grants to
specific human groups can alter negative behaviors or cement positive affiliations. At the
highest levels of diplomatic and financial interaction, the United States Government's ability
to influence international financial institutions -- with corresponding effects to exchange
rates, interest rates, credit availability, and money supplies -- can cement multinational
coalitions for unconventional warfare campaigns or dissuade adversary nation-state governments
from supporting specific actors in the UWOA. " (my bolds)
As you can see, the United States is willing to use financial blackmail including exchange and
interest rate manipulation, credit availability and the supply of money to either persuade
certain nations to join its unconventional warfare campaign or to dissuade adversarial nations
from supporting the "other side" of an unconventional warfare strategy.
Here is a screen capture of page 2-8 of the document outlining how the United States can use
financial incentives to manipulate other nations (ARSOF = Army Special Operations Forces and UW
= Unconventional Warfare, DOS = Department of State, IC = Intelligence Community):
Note this sentence:
" Government can apply unilateral and indirect financial power through persuasive
influence to international and domestic financial institutions regarding availability and terms
of loans, grants, or other financial assistance to foreign state and nonstate actors
."
It is also interesting to note that the document clearly states that the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and Bank for
International Settlements are basically functioning as organizations that Washington can use to
drive its global agenda and as yet another tool in America's quest for global hegemony. This
isn't terribly surprising in the case of the World Bank since we find the following on its
website:
In addition, the Treasury Department's
Office of Foreign Assets Control whose sole responsibility is as follows:
". ..to administer and enforce economic and trade sanctions based on U.S. foreign policy and
national security goals against targeted foreign countries and regimes, terrorists,
international narcotics traffickers, those engaged in activities related to the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction and other threats the national security... "
...has a " long history of conducting economic warfare valuation to any Army Special
Operations Forces unconventional warfare. ".
This Army manual, leaked over a decade ago by WikiLeaks, gives us a very clear view of how
Washington uses financial manipulation through its influence on the World Bank, IMF, OECD and
other "global" groups to wage unconventional warfare on any nation that doesn't share its view
of how the world should function and that threatens America's control of the globe. The use of
financial blackmail to bend countries to America's narrative and overthrow nations who do not
succumb to America's wishes is not terribly surprising, however, it is interesting to actually
see one key aspect of Washington's unconventional warfare methodology in print.
"When you have 200,000 tons of diplomacy that is cruising in the Mediterranean. This is
what I call diplomacy, this is forward deployed diplomacy." Jon Huntsman, U.S. Ambassador to
Russia
As I know you're aware of, we're really talking about 200,000 tons of target.
No one has done it yet. No one has called that bluff, and destroyed the US facade.
I personally think two things: (1) lots of people can do it, and (2) no one sees that the
moment is right yet.
Like a fool rushing to self destruction, the US keeps pushing the world in an
adolescent dare - but the grown-ups watching all this are waiting for the moment. The
"moment" is when the supercomputers and the humans agree that one can destroy the machismo of
the US and not trigger nuclear escalation.
At this very moment - or rather, in the moments, hours and days after it - we can all
relax and start to parse the new world coming forth, absent US aggression.
Both Yeah, Right at #75 and karlof1 at #78 remark about the 'stoutness' of a US aircraft
carrier. During early WW2 carriers which weren't sunk tended to get badly hit. Modern ones
are much larger, and better defended, but in the end they're just large ships with a flat
top. Navies around the world have had over 70 years to devise ways to neutralize them. IMO
it's folly to imagine some of the special weapons won't do the job. Consider the large
Japanese battleship Yamato. The wiki for this 65,000 ton ship speaks of a side belt of 16"
armor, and deck armor of 8". Sinking it - even though it was essentially undefended from air
attack - wasn't easy.
From the first attack at 12:37 to the explosion at 14:23, Yamato was hit by at least 11
torpedoes and six bombs. There may have been two more torpedo and bomb hits, but this is
not confirmed.
A modern US carrier will cost several billion dollars, and the airplanes aboard it will be
an additional large fraction of that sum. A modern anti-ship missile costs around 2 million
dollars. In theory you could fire three or four thousand such missiles and still break even
if you destroyed the ship. But in practice, can anyone imagine a carrier surviving an attack
of 100 such AS missiles? They'd be coming in from all directions, and some of them would be
homing on the defensive radars. Perhaps jamming those radars. At some point the carrier would
just run out of defensive armaments. In my humble opinion Ambassador Jon Huntsman Jr. is a
complete and total moron. One more time with that quote:
US Ambassador to Russia: Each of Our Carriers "Represents 100,000 Tons of Diplomacy"
Understand this if nothing else, Khalifa Haftar is a terrorist hand puppet of the CIA. He
is a thief, a liar, a thug, and a traitor to Libya. He threatens legitimate Libyans daily and
uses the NSA listening equipment (brought into Libya in 2011) to target any Libya who speaks
his name. Khalifa Haftar would not ever be supported by Russia. This lie has been perpetrated
in the mainstream for years. Now they have stepped up their game and have stated that Russian
mercenaries are in Libya supporting Haftar at the behest of the leader of Russia. Nothing
could be farther from the truth.
The Great Tribes have confirmed to me everything that I have written.
Libya has lost their country to terrorist thugs, their infrastructure has been destroyed,
their wealth has been stolen and continues to be stolen. They have had one million Libyans
killed....
It is the assets and geographical location that they would own. The ruination, destruction
and death of Libya and her people are just acceptable collateral damage to achieve their evil
agenda.
The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction or SIGAR just released the
third edition of its High-Risk List to the 116th Congress of the United States and the
Secretaries of both State and Defense. In this report, SIGAR identifies the most serious
threats to the American government's $132 billion reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan. This
information is of particular interest and importance given that negotiations are currently
underway to end the United States' involvement in Afghanistan, involvement that began on
October 7, 2001, making this the longest military engagement in American history.
The report opens with this rather sobering summary of the past, present and future in
Afghanistan:
" The $132 billion appropriated since 2002 for Afghanistan's reconstruction has been used to
train and equip Afghan security forces, strengthen government institutions, promote the rule of
law, protect women's rights, improve health and education, and stimulate economic development,
among other objectives. Yet the gains from our nation's investment in Afghanistan's reconstruction face multiple
threats: continued insecurity, endemic corruption, weak Afghan institutions, the insidious
impact of the narcotics trade, and inadequate coordination and oversight by donors. While an equitable and sustainable peace agreement in Afghanistan could end much of the
violence that presents the greatest threat to the reconstruction effort, a peace agreement may
bring its own set of challenges to sustaining the gains that the United States, its Coalition
partners, and the Afghan government have achieved over that time." (my bold)
Here is a listing of the eight current high risk areas: 1.) Widespread Insecurity - whether a peace plan is put into place or not, Afghanistan
is likely to continue to experience multiple violent extremist organizations. The Afghan
National Defense and Security Forces require annual funding of between $4 billion and $5
billion to remain viable. 2.) Underdeveloped Civil Policing Capability - The United States has spent more effort
reconstructing the Afghan National Army than on the Afghan National Police meaning that there
is no strategy for a competent civil police force backed by rule of law. Sustaining a national
police force will require significant foreign funding. 3.) Endemic Corruption - Corruption is endemic and forms a significant threat to the
Afghan government. This means that reconstruction programs will continue to be subverted and
are likely to fail. Here is a graphic from Transparency International showing where Afghanistan
lies on the global spectrum when it comes to corruption:
Afghanistan has the world's 9th lowest corruption score as shown on this list: 4.) Sluggish Economic Growth - Afghanistan's legal economy is sluggish and there are
numerous barriers to further economic growth. 5.) Illicit Narcotics Trade - Afghanistan remains the world's largest producer of opium
poppies and had the two highest years of cultivation in 2017 and 2018. Funds from the illicit
drug trade fund the Taliban, corrupt members of the Afghan government, military and police and
also employ 600,000 Afghanis. 6.) Threats to Women's Rights - More than $1 billion has been spent since 2002 to
advance the status of women in Afghanistan but gains made so far are fragile, particularly in
rural areas, and are likely to be unprotected should the Taliban be part of a peace
settlement. 7.) Challenge of Reintegration - The social, economic and political reintegration of
tens of thousands of former fighters back into Afghan society will be difficult, particularly
in light of the nation's weak economy and political uncertainty and distrust. 8.) Restricted Oversight - If a peace settlement includes reductions in foreign
personnel providing oversight on foreign funded programs, problems in the nation will only
increase thanks to high levels of corruption.
Let's look at some examples of where U.S. tax dollars have been spent in Afghanistan. Since
2001, an estimated $780 billion has been appropriated for Afghanistan including war funding,
diplomatic and consular programs, military and embassy construction projects etcetera. Of this
$738 billion or 95 percent of the total was obligated by the Department of Defense.
Reconstruction costs make up 15 percent of total U.S. funds obligated for Afghanistan since
2001 and are broken down as follows: 1.) Security - $83.1 billion (63 percent of the total) to build up Afghan military and
police. In fiscal 2019, 82 percent of the funds appropriated for Afghanistan reconstruction
were spent on assisting the security sector. The "success" of this program can be put into
perspective with
this map showing the areas of Afghanistan that are under control of the Taliban, the
original target of Operation Enduring Freedom: 2.) Governance and Economic Development - $33.9 billion (26 percent of the total). In
fiscal 2018, only 12 percent of the funds appropriated for Afghanistan reconstruction were
spent on improving the nation's economy. 3.) Counternarcotics Programs - $8.9 billion (7 percent of the total).
The remaining 4 percent of reconstruction funds have been spent to support civilian operations,
humanitarian initiatives and in combating society-wide corruption.
Let's close by looking at a few quotes from the report that show just how dire the situation in
Afghanistan still is nearly 18 years after Operation Enduring Freedom began and how unlikely a
peace settlement is likely to change the situation on the ground: 1.)Failure to successfully reintegrate an estimated 60,000 Taliban fighters and
their families, and other illegal armed groups, could undermine the successful implementation
of any peace agreement.
2.) The opium trade plays a significant role in the Afghan economy and it is difficult to
seehow a peace accord between the Afghan government and the insurgency would translate
into the collapse or contraction of the illicit drug trade. The country requires a growing
economy or favorable economic conditions to provide farmers and former insurgents with
legitimate employment and a reliable income to replace opium poppy cultivation. The Afghan
government also needs to pursue major drug traffickers, which it has not done consistently or
successfully. According to the Department of Justice, "certain influential people are above the
law."
3.) Effective policing will require a force that gives citizens the presumption of innocence
rather than anticipating and taking preemptive offensive operations against perceived threats.
U.S. agencies, such as the Justice Department, currently lack the personnel numbers and
para-military strength to accompany Afghan National Police trainees into high-threat
districts.
4.) In a post-settlement environment, depending on the terms of an agreement, there may also
be the challenge of integrating former Taliban fighters into the national security forces and
society. These issues could become more acute should international financial and military
support decline sharply before, during, or after peace talks between the Afghan government and
the Taliban.
Let's close this sobering view of Afghanistan's future with an excerpt from the prepared
remarks given by
the the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, John F. Sopko that
accompanied the release of the report:
" If the U.S. reduces its presence in Afghanistan but feels compelled to provide significant
financial support for reconstruction, there may be little choice but to provide a greater
proportion of funding as on-budget assistance. But if that road is taken, assistance should be
conditioned on an independent finding that adequate monitoring mechanisms and internal controls
for the Afghan ministry or multilateral trust fund in question are in place. If those conditions are lacking and assistance is provided anyway, we may as well set the
cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do. I urge Congress to not just think about how much money should be given, but also to think
about how that money will be provided and monitored. If the need for oversight is ignored or
sidelined, both the American taxpayer and the Afghan people will suffer, even with a successful
peace agreement." (my bold)
At the very least, it appears that 18 years of war has accomplished almost nothing when it
comes to meaningful and permanent changes in Afghanistan despite the spending of hundreds of
billions of hard-earned taxpayers' dollars.
Israel and the Ukraine are now the two countries on the planet in which both the
President [Zelenskii] and the Prime-Minister [Groisman] are Jews
just a day after his election Zelenskii is already making all sorts of anti-Russian
statements.
since Zelenskii has no personal power base of any kind, Kolomoiskii will have him do
exactly as he is told and Kolomoiskii can easily be told to behave by the Empire.
Here is a new ruler of Ukraine, the Israeli/Ukrainian/Swiss citizen Kolomoisky
:
The ethnically Jewish Kolomojsky has been the main financier of Azov Battalion
:
The Azov Battalion was initially formed out of the neo-Nazi gang Patriot of Ukraine.
Azov Battalion -- which is accused of human-rights abuses, including torture, by Human
Rights Watch and the United Nations -- was incorporated into Ukraine's National Guard.
The New York Times called the battalion "openly neo-Nazi," while USA Today, The Daily
Beast, The Telegraph, and Haaretz documented group members' proclivity for swastikas,
salutes, and other Nazi symbols
"... RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners. During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's control by the government, rather than western media. ..."
"... On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence: " Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. " ..."
"... It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia. ..."
"... As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign by providing propaganda of its own. ..."
While
it received relatively little coverage from the Western mainstream media establishment, a
recent 42 megabyte upload on an Anonymous server provides us with an inside glimpse into
the genesis of the Western anti-Russia narrative.
According to the documents, an organization (rather ironically) named Integrity Initiative with the moniker
"Defending Democracy Against Disinformation" was organized to mobilize global public opinion
against Russia and its agenda as you can see on the organization's "About" webpage:
The non-for-profit charity was set up in 2015 as a partnership of several independent
organizations led by The Institute for Statecraft. It claims that it is dedicated to "
education in good governance and to enabling societies to adapt to a rapidly changing
world. ", a rather benign mission statement. In its first two years, it was funded by
private individuals, however, funding for 2017 and 2018 was largely provided by governments,
particularly the United Kingdom, reflecting the U.K.'s appreciation of the " importance of
the threat, and a wish to support civil society programmes seeking to rebuild the ability of
democratic societies to resist large scale, malicious disinformation and influence
campaigns."
According to the documents a number of organizations including the United States Department of
State, the U.K.'s Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), NATO, Facebook and the Lithuanian
Ministry of Defense were looking to fund the Integrity Initiative as you can see here:
Integrity Initiative
states the following about its services:
" It is inevitable that a programme tackling disinformation in Europe finds itself spending
much of its time addressing the activities of the Russian State, including those carried out
through its intelligence services. The Kremlin has invested more operational thought, intent
and resource in disinformation, in Europe and elsewhere in the democratic world, than any other
single player. "
Not surprisingly, Integrity Initiative has comments on the leaking of its own documents by
Anonymous:
" We note both the attempts by Russian state propaganda outlets to amplify the volume of
this leak; and the suggestion by a major Anonymous-linked Twitter account that the Kremlin
subverted the banner of Anonymous to disguise their responsibility for it...
It is of course a matter of deep regret that Integrity Initiative documents have been stolen
and posted on line, still more so that, in breach of any defensible practice, Russian state
propaganda outlets have published or re-published a large number of names and contact details.
We have not yet had the chance to analyse all of the documents, so cannot say with confidence
whether they are all genuine or whether they include doctored or false material.
Although it is clear that much of the material was indeed on the Integrity Initiative or
Institute systems, much of it is dated and was never used. In particular, many of the names
published were on an internal list of experts in this field who had been considered as
potential invitees to future cooperation. In the event, many were never contacted by the
Integrity Initiative and did not contribute to it. Nor were these documents therefore included
in any funding proposals. Not only did these individuals have nothing to do with the programme
– they may not even have heard of us. We are of course trying to contact all named
individuals for whom we have contact details to ensure that they are aware of what has
happened. "
With that background, let's look at four of the documents that were posted.
1.) A undated document discussing Russia's use of social media as a proxy for
propaganda:
Note the following comments regarding Russia Today aka RT:
" RT has been able to capitalise on growing mistrust of western media among westerners.
During the breaking of the coverage of many political scandals, RT articles aggressively raised
issues that many felt were not being pursued by the western media, which is frequently seen as
covering up non-PC stories. Many users believe that RT is willing to talk about incidents that
western media will not, a belief that RT actively encourages. As such, many users of a both
far-right and far-left disposition are willing to listen to RT, even being aware of RT's
control by the government, rather than western media. "
Here is a page from the document which discusses the target audiences for Russian social
media propaganda:
Note that the memo clearly states that Russian media outlets like RT and Sputnik are
targeting an audience that is "distrusting of statecraft and major media groups.". I wonder why
Westerners would be distrusting of their own media?
2.) A 2017 document outlining plans for developing an American arm of Integrity
Initiative:
Note that the writer of the memo states that the West is badly in need of a reassertion of
U.S. leadership and that America needs to rebuild its understanding of Russia and how to deal
with it. It also notes that the international community needs to rebuild its understanding of
Russia to ensure that Western governments get the popular support that democracies require
(i.e. a strongly anti-populist movement).
3.) An undated document showing how Integrity Initiative is planning to expand "expert
clusters" to other nations including Austria, Canada, Poland, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland
among others:
4.) A
January 2015 document showing Integrity Initiative's views on setting up anti-Russia
sanctions with the goal of changing Russia's behaviour, peace in Ukraine, a return of Crimea
and, most importantly, possible regime change in Russia:
On page four of this this interesting sentence we find the following sentence:
" Driving a wedge between Russians and government is key. "
It is interesting to see that Integrity Initiative was ahead of the game when it came to
punishing Russia for its involvement in Crimea's move to independence from Ukraine to the point
that their greatest hope was that there would be regime change in Russia.
As you can see from these documents, Integrity Initiative, a government-funded, not-for-profit
charity has a mandate to ensure that the West is immune to Russia's ongoing propaganda campaign
by providing propaganda of its own. It's certainly a good thing that Integrity Initiative has
the "real truth" and is willing to pressure us into seeing the global geopolitical quagmire
with its 20/20 vision. Apparently, integrity in this post-truth era is in the eye of the
beholder/purveyor.
Five years after the " EuroMaidan " protests in Kiev and elsewhere
toppled the government of now-exiled former president Viktor Yanukovych, the people of Ukraine
are set to elect a new leader. Over 34 million Ukrainian citizens will be eligible to cast
their vote on 31 March ,
although several million will be prevented from participating due to the ongoing conflict
situation in the country's eastern Donbass region. Should none of the candidates receive an
absolute majority, a second round of voting will be held on 21 April.
Ukraine consistently ranks among the poorest countries in Europe – last year it
overtook Moldova to occupy the top spot in the list. The largest post-Soviet state after Russia
in terms of population, it finds itself torn between the European Union promising economic
integration and a limited degree of freedom of movement, and deepening the country's
relationship with Moscow, the largest consumer of Ukrainian exports to which Ukraine is tied by
centuries of shared history, tradition, and repeated conflict.
EuroMaidan exacerbated the country's ongoing economic decline and
mounting social pressures in 2013–14, ultimately triggering the war in the Donbass
region and the Russian annexation of the Crimean peninsula. These tensions have facilitated the
rise of a vicious
Ukrainian nationalism that the government led by current president Petro Poroshenko is not
afraid to manipulate for its own purposes. Attacks on left-wing activists and ethnic minorities
are becoming increasingly common, while armed far-right paramilitaries like the so-called "Azov
Battalion" are
normalized and integrated into mainstream political life.
That said, not everyone in Ukraine is happy about these developments. Although none of the
candidates in the upcoming elections offer a particularly radical or progressive vision for the
country, voters will at least be able to decide whether to endorse Poroshenko's current course
or throw their support behind another figure. Loren Balhorn of the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung
spoke with Kiev-based sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko to get a better understanding of the
candidates, the state of the county, and what is at stake for the people of Ukraine in
2019.
Loren Balhorn (LB): Ukraine is scheduled to hold presidential elections at the end of the
month, preceding elections to the national
parliament , or "Verkhovna Rada," later this year. Is there anything special about the
timing? What exactly is the president's role in the Ukrainian political system, and what
implications will the vote have for parliamentary elections in October?
Volodymyr Ishchenko (VI): The timing is simple: it's been five years since 2014 and the
Maidan Uprising, when snap elections were called that saw Viktor Yanukovych and his Party of
Regions lose a lot of strength. The first round of the presidential elections is at the end of
the month, and it is very likely that there will be a second round because no candidate will
receive over 50 per cent (at least according to polls).
The president is very important in Ukrainian politics. The country is formally a
parliamentary-presidential system, neither fully parliamentary nor fully presidential, but this
is a very uneasy balance of power. The prime minister is an important position elected by the
parliamentary majority, but the president also has influence over important government
ministers. As is true of many post-Soviet states, however, beyond this formal institutional
division of powers the informal divisions are much more decisive. Who is loyal to whom and who
is dependent on whom plays a much bigger role in "real" Ukrainian politics than formal powers
and privileges.
Petro
Poroshenko , the current president, is the most important person in Ukrainian politics. His
powers are formally limited but he has other ways to exercise influence and his own party, the
"Petro Poroshenko Bloc" that forms the government together with the "People's Front," the party
of former Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk. Another important figure in that party is the
current Minister of Internal Affairs, Arsen Avakov , who is also a very wealthy
man.
LB: Avakov also cultivates ties to the Azov Battalion, no?
VI: This is widely suspected, but the precise nature of those ties has never been proven. I
am skeptical of the idea that the Azov Battalion is merely a puppet of Avakov,
I suspect it is something like a mutually beneficial cooperation.
If Poroshenko loses we will see a lot of defections by MPs from his bloc. Ukrainian politics
operates as what political scientists call a "neopatrimonial regime," meaning it is
characterized by rival, informal power blocs. If the Poroshenko Bloc loses, it will reshuffle
loyalties in the parliament from one patriarch to another.
LB: What do you mean by "neopatrimonial regime"?
VI: By that I mean Ukrainian politics is characterized by competition between various power
blocs, you could also call them pyramids or even clans. Poroshenko builds his pyramid while
Arakov builds his own pyramid, etc. The current Prime Minister, Volodymyr Groysman, was
originally perceived as a loyalist of Poroshenko, but now even he seems to be cultivating his
own pyramid and will probably triangulate between various political blocs.
LB: How did Groysman come to replace Yatsenyuk?
VI: As friction between Poroshenko and Yatsenyuk grew, Poroshenko financed a public campaign
against him, attacking him and calling for his resignation. But Yatsenyuk had a lot of support
from the West, especially the U.S. Vice-President at the time, Joe Biden. Eventually an
agreement was reached that he would step down and be replaced by Groysman.
This represented a conflict between different patrimonial structures within the governing
elite, but also reflected a wider conflict between Ukrainian oligarchs and the West more
generally. Many leftists in Ukraine see the country as a colony of the United States, but it's
much more complicated than that. Ukraine is definitely dependent on Western economic and
financial aid, political support against Russia, etc., but it's not a colony – it's not
ruled from the American Embassy. Local oligarchs like Poroshenko and Arakov have their own
interests that they defend staunchly against the West. At its core, this is a conflict between
transnational capital and the local bourgeoisie.
One key issue in these debates, and the crucial issue for the West and the IMF, was
corruption and the establishment of "anti-corruption" institutions to ensure transparent rules
of the game in Ukraine. But what they call "corruption" is basically the most important
advantage that the Ukrainian bourgeoisie has against transnational capital: namely, their
property is secure from the state while that of their competitors is not. This is also what
scares away potential international investors. Because of this fear, foreign direct investment
(FDI) is actually declining despite the Ukrainian government's steps toward Western
integration.
LB: So fear of corruption is harming investment?
VI: Yes, although the war is of course another factor.
In the beginning, in 2014 and 2015, we had a lot of people in the government without
Ukrainian citizenship who received their positions because they were neoliberal,
Western-oriented professionals, like the Lithuanian citizen Aivaras Abromavičius who was a
minister under Yatsenyuk. Gradually, those neoliberal reformers were pushed out and replaced by
people loyal to the ruling oligarchs. Yatsenyuk being replaced by Groysman was just one
particularly important example of this process.
LB: It sounds like a pretty grim scenario. But even if electoral politics is just
competition between oligarchic factions, certainly there must be some other issues being
debated at least on the surface? What are the dominant themes the candidates are using to
attract support?
VI: Poroshenko has been most successful in setting the agenda with an aggressively
nationalist campaign – his main slogan is "Army, Faith, Language." He side-lined the
socially populist issues that Yulia Tymoshenko tried to raise by
portraying the election as a choice between him or Putin and depicting his opponents as puppets
of Moscow.
LB: And is it working?
VI: Yes, to some extent. His support has been rising in the polls since the recognition of
the independent Ukrainian Orthodox Church by the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople.
LB: Was that split between the Ukrainian Church and Moscow supported by the government?
VI: Yes, it was actively organized by Poroshenko as a strategy to win the election.
Formally, the Ukrainian Orthodox church enjoyed broad autonomy but was dependent on the Moscow
Patriarchate and was recognized by other Orthodox churches. A separate church founded in the
early 1990s, the Kiev Patriarchate, was unrecognized by any other international church but
still fairly popular in the country. In reality most people didn't care which church they
attended. The split was purely political, there were no theological differences.
Poroshenko started to push the theme in 2017 and 2018 that the Ukrainian Orthodox Church was
something like an "agent of Moscow" in Ukraine. The details are quite complicated, and to be
honest many people in Ukraine didn't really understand these structures until last year either,
but for people who care about national issues, who care about Ukraine asserting itself against
Russia, this was an important step. Nevertheless, it looks like the majority of local parishes
will actually stay with the Moscow Patriarchate.
LB: You have alluded to the conflict with Russia several times now as setting the terms of
the debate, and making it easier for politicians to distract from social questions by focusing
on nationalism. Is there any kind of visible, vaguely progressive social opposition in the
country?
VI: Most politicians and the three leading candidates for the president are not
significantly different on the question of the conflict in the Donbass region. Poroshenko,
Tymoshenko, and Volodymyr Zelensky are all within the patriotic consensus, although Poroshenko
is more militant. Candidates who actually have a different opinion and are not as popular
sprang from the former Party of Regions, later branded the "Opposition Bloc." They failed to
negotiate a common candidate for the so-called "Southeast," the region where the
Russian-speaking minority mostly lives. Despite raising important issues like peace in Donbass,
re-claiming national sovereignty from the West, and re-industrialization, these candidates
– Yuriy Boyko and Oleksandr Vilkul – are representatives of major oligarchic
financial-industrial groups. There is no significant "grassroots" movement behind the issues.
There are of course labour struggles, and there have been some strikes, but they are weak.
There are some feminist mobilizations but they are miniscule compared to the radical
nationalists. Not just the anti-capitalist "Left," but also progressive liberalism is very
weak.
The Left is in a bad
situation. The
Communist Party has been banned. They are appealing the ban but their public visibility has
declined to practically zero. Their leader, Petro Symonenko, tried to register as a
presidential candidate but was not accepted by the government, and no other relevant left-wing
parties exist on the national level.
LB: Government corruption, oligarchic control of the economy, a decimated Left – a lot
of this sounds familiar. Couldn't we, at least to some extent, compare conditions in Ukraine to
the situation in all of the former Eastern Bloc countries?
VI: I don't think so. EU membership makes a big difference, it imposes certain rules that
are absent in Ukraine. The presence of strong oligarchs, for example, is pretty specific. The
other Eastern Bloc countries don't have a strong local bourgeoisie, but are largely dominated
by Western capital. There are no Polish oligarchs, Czech oligarchs, Hungarian oligarchs –
we only hear about Russian and Ukrainian oligarchs. What makes Ukraine different is that the
oligarchic system is pluralistic. We have multiple, competing oligarchs, whereas in Russia and
Belarus one neopatrimonial pyramid managed to emerge as dominant in the last 15 years.
The promise of EU membership restructured Eastern European politics beginning in the 1990s,
whereas this was never a prospect in Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus. But we still didn't see the
rise of any figure like Vladimir Putin or an Alexander Lukashenko in Ukraine. I think this has
to do with the country's divided identity: almost every election has been framed as a question
of "East vs. West," with one candidate supported by the western half and the other by the
eastern half. In this sense it's comparable with Donald Trump: any time a Ukrainian president
comes to power he is opposed by half the population from day one. This makes it very difficult
to consolidate nationwide power.
LB: Are there not also economic aspects to the East/West division?
VI: Yes, the East has more heavy, Soviet-era industry, exporting primarily to the markets of
the former USSR and uncompetitive on Western markets. For example, the people supporting
Yanukovych and opposing EuroMaidan were at least partially concerned about keeping their jobs
in a Ukrainian economy dominated by the EU.
LB: So it's not only a nationalist issue, but also one of bread-and-butter economic
issues?
VI: Yes, absolutely.
LB: Speaking of "East vs. West," has anything changed since Ukraine's accession to the
visa-free regime for Schengen states in 2017?
VI: That was one of very few positive developments under Poroshenko, and he's touting it a
lot during the campaign. Freedom of movement is of course something good and something we
support, but it was particularly good for younger, highly educated Ukrainians in the major
cities.
It has also facilitated increased labour migration, which has really risen since 2014. I
don't have any precise statistics but we're talking about millions of people. Many Ukrainians
go to work in Poland, which actively recruits them because they are seen as culturally and
linguistically "closer" to Poles (unlike refugees from the Middle East). You could say that
cheap Ukrainian labour is subsidizing the Polish economic boom. The Czech Republic is also
popular, and Germany will probably be next.
As workers from the eastern EU states like Bulgaria and Poland move west to work they're
replaced by cheaper labour from Ukraine, but no one moves to Ukraine. There is a lot of
discussion in the Ukrainian media about how it simply does not make sense to work in the
country when you can make two or three times more across the border.
LB: But does this not mean that the Ukrainian labour market is gradually getting tighter?
Wouldn't it at least theoretically put organized labour in a more advantageous position to
fight for higher wages?
VI: Yes, theoretically! But Ukrainian trade unions are very weak, and they have failed to
take advantage of the situation.
LB: You recently gave an interview to Jacobin
Magazine in which you compared the situation of the Ukrainian Left with that of
Latin America in the 1970s. I found that very striking, given that the Left was quite large in
Latin America at the time and microscopic in Ukraine today. Could you flesh out that comparison
a bit? Where exactly do you see similarities?
VI: Ukraine is a deindustrializing, peripheral economy. Most Soviet-era industry fell apart
after 1991, and what remains is not competitive on the Western European market. Ukraine has
thus become a supplier of raw materials with low added value like iron. In this sense it is a
very peripheral capitalism characterized by extreme inequality and powerful oligarchs, like
Latin America. There is also the major role played by far-right paramilitaries – this
doesn't happen anywhere else in Europe, except for briefly in former Yugoslavia. We also have a
strongly pro-American and highly dependent government, very similar to Latin America.
I think it's logical to look for comparisons and lessons from similar historical social
formations. If the Ukrainian Left is looking to fight a corrupt, authoritarian, anti-Communist
regime, and given how weak the Left and even liberalism is, we have to work together to fight
for basic democratic rights and against the nationalist hysteria to lay the base for a movement
that could perhaps become more significant in the future. Here I see parallels to the Latin
American Left's struggle against dictatorship in the 1970s and 1980s.
LB: Do you think it's possible in a geopolitical situation where tensions between the EU and
Russia are so prominent to formulate a broad, democratic programme that stands above this
fray?
VI: It's obviously very difficult, but what other options do we have? Become puppets in the
geopolitical game? There was a split on the Left in 2014 when many chose EuroMaidan and the
"West" while others chose Anti-Maidan and the "Russian" side. Both sides ended up tailing more
powerful right-wing forces and failed to formulate their own independent positions.
LB: But would anything else have been possible?
VI: Well, obviously we can't seriously entertain the building of a strong left-wing party
under such difficult conditions. What is possible, however, is to maintain some kind of milieu
for left-wing ideas. The groups and networks that exist have to consolidate a possible embryo
for a strong Left in the future. It's important to be realistic and understand what's
possible or completely impossible. We might not be able to formulate some kind of "Third Camp"
in Ukrainian politics right now, but that is our objective situation, and we should try to
figure out what we can realistically do. We should work on strengthening our groups, our
unions, our intellectual initiatives, to hopefully be able to do something bigger in the
future.
Corbyn, Podemos, and Mélenchon are inspiring figures, but we need to understand what
is specific about the political regime in our country and respond in a specific way. We need to
try to expand the range of the possible for left politics at the moment. Even if it isn't so
inspiring and very weak, we still have to try. The kind of system that exists in Ukraine can't
last forever. There are many contradictions, divisions, and cleavages exacerbated by the ruling
groups, and all of these will lead to a situation at some point where weaker groups might
become politically relevant and important again.
LB: Before we wrap up I wanted to ask you about the third major candidate, Volodymyr Zelensky . If I
understand correctly, he stars in a TV show about a politician and has now become the
politician he plays on TV. Is that correct – and is he popular? Does he have a chance at
winning or is this a stunt?
VI: Actually, he's currently the most popular politician in the country. According to polls
he has significantly more support than both Poroshenko and Tymoshenko, and could very possibly
become the president.
There are basically three groups of people voting for him: firstly, fans of his TV show, a
very popular comedy about Ukrainian politics. Another large group are just so disappointed and
tired of these oligarchs that they will vote for any fresh face.
LB: So he's similar to Donald Trump in some ways?
VI: In some ways, but what's different from Trump is the third group of his supporters,
namely people who are voting for him because he is perceived as less nationalist than the other
candidates. Zelensky himself is Russian-speaking, he's from the central Ukrainian city of
Kryvyi Rih, and has attracted lots of support from Russian-speaking citizens.
That makes Zelensky different from Trump – he's actually trying to campaign on
unifying themes, not divisive ones. He opposes Poroshenko's attempts to push the Ukrainian
language on Russian speakers, for example.
Another thing that makes him different from Trump or Beppe Grillo is that he has no populist
movement behind him, or any movement at all for that matter. All he has is his TV show, around
which he is now trying to build a political party from scratch. This is different from other
populist figures – there was no mass mobilization preceding him. Trump, for example, is
obviously somehow a result of the Tea Party movement, while Grillo represents the Five Stars
Movement (in Italy).
Another difference is his connection to Igor Kolomoisky, one of Ukraine's richest oligarchs
now in opposition to Poroshenko who founded the country's largest bank, Privat Bank, and still
owns a controlling share of the national airline. Zelensky's show is broadcast on one of
Kolomoisky's eight TV stations, and one of his lawyers is a key architect of Zelensky's party,
Sluha Narodu , which translates to "Servant of the People" (also the name of his show).
Right now it's not possible to say how independent Zelensky is. I wouldn't call him a puppet,
but there are definitely connections to the ruling class.
All of this means that Zelensky will be very weak if he wins, and not only because he's
inexperienced. For the first half year he won't have much support in parliament. He has no
loyal political party behind him. He will surely get some opportunists to defect from other
parties, but hardly a majority. I don't know what he could do in that situation. After the
parliamentary elections he might face a more favourable constellation, but it will also depend
on how he does in the first months.
It's impossible to say how he would perform as president. He has zero political experience.
I fear that he may understand politics even less than Donald Trump. He is a blank page on which
anything can be written.
LB: So he reflects the vacuum in civil society more generally?
VI: Exactly. He is a glaring symptom of what's going on in Ukrainian society. People hate
the oligarchs, they hate the faces they've seen for decades. Revolutions come and go, elections
come and go, but life just gets worse and worse. People don't want another five years of
Tymoshenko or Poroshenko and are happy to vote for any recognizable fresh face who isn't
implicated in serious corruption. People are voting less out of hope than out of anger. Better
to vote for an incompetent comedian than the same old corrupt experts.
At the same time, civil society is so weak that it couldn't put up any competing figure.
Only a TV star was able to do that, nobody from the pro-Western, liberal NGOs came even close.
None of those figures poll even one per cent. This says a lot about Ukrainian "civil society":
it's totally incapable of producing competent, popular leaders.
If he is elected, it will be strong proof that the people are sick of the old style of
politics, that they aren't being manipulated by Poroshenko's nationalism and want something
better. Nevertheless, I am very sceptical that Zelensky will be able to change anything. Real
change in Ukraine will be a much longer process, and will require the building of a different
kind of political opposition that we haven't seen in this country for a very long time.
•
This article first published on the Rosalux.de
website.
President without his own party is lame duck President; a puppet. If it is true that Zelenski is really man of Soros and was
elected on Soros money that's a very bad omen. That's probably the worst possible scenario.
At the same time in Ukraine allegiance to a party is weak and some deputies might switch sides forming kind of "Zelenski
block" similar to "Block of Petr Poroshenko" so he can create some sudo-party. Also
he cancel the reelection of the Parliament. But he will need to deal with Yulia Timoshenko who is the leader of Batkivshchina
party and that will not be easy.
Might well be variation of the theme of Saakashvili. Dmitry Babish said that Zelenski is a neoliberal who is surrounded by
Soros people and several foreign born ministers that Poroshenko fired. His connection to the notorious oligarch Kolomoyski is
another very bad sign.
Notable quotes:
"... hope for Ukraine but I did not know that in Zelensky team there are Soros people according to the specialist in Moscow. ..."
"... I see Ukraine pulled a Trump. Good luck with that. What could possibly go wrong? ..."
hope for Ukraine but I did not know that in Zelensky team there are Soros people according to the specialist in
Moscow. Anyhow this analysis was very interesting
AJ what's your report card on Poroshenko, the chocolate king? I recall Poroshenko ordered
his troops to attack and bomb east Ukraine, Ukraine's own territory. I doubt the Russian
speaking Ukrainians have a tattoo on their forehead identified them as such. a comic won't do
any worse than a US selected oligarch.
USA elected Trump as president, a man with no political experience. In the UK we elect
politicians and end up with jokers. Good luck Ukraine I really hope it works for you.
Looks like tail wags the dog -- CIA controls the US foreign policy and in the last elections
also played active role in promoting Hillary. A the level of top brass we have
several people mentioned by Giraldi who are probably as dangerous as Allen Dulles was. Brennan
is one example.
The parade of rogues that Philip describes is really
alarming. Each with agenda that directly harms
the USA as a country promoting the interest of military-industrial complex and neocon
faction within the government...
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter. ..."
"... Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level would appear to be fully on board with that effort. ..."
"... Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was revealed in the press two weeks ago. ..."
"... Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of totally bereft of his senses. ..."
"... Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting attended by Pompeo, he told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent (one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down. ..."
"... And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration. Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been some Russian recruitment of Trump people. He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr. Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr. Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation." ..."
"... Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan, and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time. ..."
"... Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia. ..."
"... The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like the British MI5. The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words. ..."
"... As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants of the Deep State. ..."
"... The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary to its purposes. ..."
"... The CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service, long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has done. ..."
"... The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence Presidency. ..."
"... While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies, it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos, the bankster mafiosi. ..."
"... I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are – Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments. The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too well the truth about the Clintons and Obama. ..."
"... Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally oblivious to their own uselessness. ..."
"... How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries. On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN. ..."
"... Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began. ..."
"... Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside the group consensus. ..."
"... So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to face. ..."
"... Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set himself up for success in the next elections. ..."
"... What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink" in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles' thought pattern & subsequent action. ..."
"... To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically sworn in on a bible. ..."
Long ago, when I was a spear carrying middle ranker at CIA, a colleague took me aside and said
that he had something to tell me "as a friend," that was very important. He told me that his wife
had worked for years in the Agency's Administrative Directorate, as it was then called, where she
had noticed that some new officers coming out of the Career Trainee program had red tags on their
personnel files. She eventually learned from her boss that the tags represented assessments that
those officers had exceptional potential as senior managers. He added, however, that the reverse
appeared to be true in practice as they were generally speaking serial failures as they ascended
the bureaucratic ladder, even though their careers continued to be onward and upward on paper. My
friend's wife concluded, not unreasonably, that only genuine a-holes had what it took to get promoted
to the most senior ranks.
I was admittedly skeptical but some recent activity by former and current Directors and Acting
Directors of CIA has me wondering if something like my friend's wife's observation about senior management
might indeed be true. But it would have to be something other than tagging files, as many of the
directors and their deputies did not come up through the ranks and there seems to be a similar strain
of lunacy at other U.S. government intelligence agencies. It might be time to check the water supply
in the Washington area as there is very definitely something in the kool-aid that is producing odd
behavior.
Now I should pause for a moment and accept that the role of intelligence services is to identify
potential threats before they become active, so a certain level of acute paranoia goes with the job.
But at the same time, one would expect a level of professionalism which would mandate accuracy rather
than emotion in assessments coupled with an eschewing of any involvement in the politics of foreign
and national security policy formulation. The enthusiasm with which a number of senior CIA personnel
have waded into the Trump swamp and have staked out positions that contradict genuine national interests
suggests that little has been learned since CIA Director George Tenet sat behind Secretary of State
Colin Powell in the UN and nodded sagaciously as Saddam Hussein's high crimes and misdemeanors were
falsely enumerated.
Indeed, one can start with Tenet if one wants to create a roster of recent CIA Directors who
have lied to permit the White House to engage in a war crime. Tenet and his staff knew better than
anyone that the case against Saddam did not hold water, but President George W. Bush wanted his war
and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA had any say in the matter.
Back then as now, international Islamic terrorism was the name of the game. It kept the money
flowing to the national security establishment in the false belief that America was somehow being
made "safe." But today the terror narrative has been somewhat supplanted by Russia, which is headed
by a contemporary Saddam Hussein in the form of Vladimir Putin. If one believes the media and a majority
of congressmen, evil manifest lurks in the gilded halls of the Kremlin. Russia has recently been
sanctioned (again) for crimes that are more alleged than demonstrated and President Putin has been
selected by the Establishment as the wedge issue that will be used to end President Donald Trump's
defiance of the Deep State and all that pertains to it. The intelligence community at its top level
would appear to be fully on board with that effort.
The most recent inexplicable comments come from the current CIA Director Mike Pompeo, speaking
at the Aspen Institute Security Forum. He began by asserting that Russia had interfered in the U.S.
election
before saying that the logic behind Russia's Middle Eastern strategy is to stay in place in Syria
so Moscow can "stick it to America." He didn't define the "it" so one must assume that "it" stands
for any utensil available, ranging from cruise missiles to dinner forks. He then elaborated, somewhat
obscurely, that "I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think
they find that something that's useful."
Remarkably, he also said that there is only "minimal evidence" that Russia is even fighting
ISIS. The statement is astonishing as Moscow has most definitely been seriously and directly engaged
in support of the Syrian Arab Army. Is it possible that the head of the CIA is unaware of that? It
just might be that Pompeo is disparaging the effort because the Russians and Syrians have also been
fighting against the U.S. backed "moderate rebels." That the moderate rebels are hardly moderate
has been known for years and they are also renowned for their ineffectiveness combined with a tendency
to defect to more radical groups taking their U.S. provided weapons with them, a combination of factors
which led to their being denied any further American support by a presidential decision that was
revealed in the press two weeks ago.
Pompeo's predecessor John Brennan is, however, my favorite Agency leader in the category of
totally bereft of his senses. In testimony before the House Intelligence Committee back in May,
he suggested that some Trump associates might have been recruited by the Russian intelligence service.
He testified that
"I encountered and am aware of information and intelligence that revealed contacts and interactions
between Russian officials and US persons involved in the Trump campaign that I was concerned about
because of known Russian efforts to suborn such individuals. It raised questions in my mind whether
or not Russia was able to gain the co-operation of those individuals."
In his testimony, Brennan apparently forgot to mention that the CIA is not supposed to keep tabs
on American citizens. Nor did he explain how he had come upon the information in the first place
as it had been handed over by foreign intelligence services, including the British, Dutch and Estonians,
and at least some of it had been sought or possibly inspired by Brennan unofficially in the first
place. Brennan then used that information to request an FBI investigation into a possible Russian
operation directed against potential key advisers if Trump were to somehow get nominated and elected,
which admittedly was a longshot at the time. That is how Russiagate started.
Brennan is certainly loyal to his cause, whatever that might be. At the same Aspen meeting
attended by Pompeo, he
told Wolf Blitzer that if Trump were to fire special counsel Robert Mueller government officials
should "refuse to carry out" his orders. In other words, they should begin a coup, admittedly non-violent
(one presumes), but nevertheless including federal employees uniting to shut the government down.
A lesser known former CIA senior official is
John McLaughlin,
who briefly served as acting Director in 2004. McLaughlin was particularly outraged by Trump's recent
speech to the Boy Scouts, which he described as having the feel "of a third world authoritarian's
youth rally." He added that "It gave me the creeps it was like watching the late Venezuelan [President
Hugo] Chavez."
And finally, there is Michael Morell, also a former Acting Director, who was closely tied
to the Hillary Clinton campaign, apparently driven by ambition to become Director in her administration.
Morell currently provides commentary for CBS television and is a frequent guest on the Charlie Rose
show. Morell considerably raised the ante on Brennan's pre-electoral speculation that there had been
some Russian recruitment of Trump people.
He observed in August that Putin, a wily ex-career intelligence officer, "trained to identify
vulnerabilities in an individual and to exploit them [did exactly that] early in the primaries. Mr.
Putin played upon Mr. Trump's vulnerabilities In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr.
Putin had recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent of the Russian Federation."
I and others noted at the time that Putin and Trump had never met, not even through proxies, while
we also wondered how one could be both unwitting and a recruited agent as intelligence recruitment
implies control and taking direction. Morell was non-plussed, unflinching and just a tad sanctimonious
in affirming that his own intelligence training (as an analyst who never recruited a spy in his life)
meant that "[I] call it as I see it."
One could also cite Michael Hayden and James Clapper, though the latter was not CIA They all
basically hew to the same line about Russia, often in more-or-less the same words, even though no
actual evidence has been produced to support their claims. That unanimity of thinking is what is
peculiar while academics like Stephen Cohen, Stephen Walt, Andrew Bacevich, and John Mearsheimer,
who have studied Russia in some depth and understand the country and its leadership far better than
a senior CIA officer, detect considerable nuance in what is taking place. They all believe that the
hardline policies current in Washington are based on an eagerness to go with the flow on the comforting
inside-the- beltway narrative that paints Russia as a threat to vital interests. That unanimity of
viewpoint should surprise no one as this is more of less the same government with many of the same
people that led the U.S. into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. They all have a vested interested in the
health and well-being of a fully funded national security state.
And the other groupthink that seems to prevail among the senior managers except Pompeo is that
they all hate Donald Trump and have done so since long before he won the election. That is somewhat
odd, but it perhaps reflects a fear that Trump would interfere with the richly rewarding establishment
politics that had enabled their careers. But it does not necessarily reflect the viewpoint of CIA
employees. Though it is admittedly unscientific analysis on my part, I know a lot of former and some
current CIA employees but do not know a single one who voted for Hillary Clinton. Nearly all voted
for Trump.
Beyond that exhibition of tunnel vision and sheer ignorance, the involvement of former senior
intelligence officials in politics is itself deplorable and is perhaps symptomatic of the breakdown
in the comfortable bipartisan national security consensus that has characterized the past fifty years.
Once upon time former CIA officers would retire to the Blue Ridge mountains and raise Labradors,
but we are now into something much more dangerous if the intelligence community, which has been responsible
for most of the recent leaks, begins to feel free to assert itself from behind the scenes. As Senator
Chuck Schumer
recently warned "Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community -- they have six ways
from Sunday at getting back at you."
In jumping this fascist nihilist shark, the groupthinkers have closed themselves off from the
logical conclusion to their viewpoint, which is final annihilation.
Brennan, Morell, and Pompeo should better find ways to justify their salaries: the U.S. has
suffered the greatest breach in cybersecurity on their watch:
" an enormous breach of the United States Security Apparatus by as many as 80 Democrat members
of Congress (past and present). We rail on about the Russians and Trump, but t he media avoids
providing nightly updates about these 5 spies that have compromised Congress ."
"In total, Imran's firm was employed by 31 Democrats in Congress, some of whom held extremely
sensitive positions on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House
Committee on Foreign Affair s."
Nothing new. In the '50s CIA was making foreign wars and cultivating chaos at home, and
blaming all of it on Russia. In the '80s CIA was cultivating anti-nuke groups to undermine Reagan,
and blaming it on Russia. CIA has been the primary wellspring of evil for a long time.
And back to reality we have VIPS Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.
Yes you read that right and they are going to the rotten core of this coup against the
United States by presenting a report stating that the DNC was "Leaked" not hacked. The real hacking
came from President Obama's weaponizing of our intelligence agencies against Russia.
That is war, World War Three and it would seem now that Congress is marching that way, but
the report below hold the key to fighting back.
One of the VIPS is William Binney fomer NSA Technical Director, an important expert. leading
the group is Ray McGovern with some whit and grace, well yes how about some sanity, to which humor
is important to the insight and to stay in the sights of what is clever thievery and worse. Much
worse,
and there is a twinkle in the eye when realize that it is straight forward.
And Congress could stop it tout sweet, but well old habits but they have taken an Oath of Office,
so, so what, yeah they did go after Bernie, so will you challenge your elected officials, either
do their sworn duty or resign, for what this sanctions bill against Russia and Iran is a declaration
of war, not only against Russia and Iran, but a declaration of war against the United States.
for there is no reason to do this against Russia when indeed there are great opportunities to
get along, but war is the insanity as it is sedition and treason. Tell them that,
I wonder if groupthink exists.
In any organisation people know quite well why the organisation exists, what the threats are to
its existence.
If they think about this, I wonder.
The CIA is the USA's secret army, it is not comparable to a real intelligence organization like
the British MI5.
The CIA is more like WWII SOE, designed to set fire to Europe, Churchill's words.
If indeed Trump changes USA foreign policy, no longer trying to control the world, the CIA is
obsolete, as obsolete as NATO.
" but President George W. Bush wanted his war and, by gum, he was going to get it if the CIA
had any say in the matter."
Not to defend the CIA, but didn't Rumsfeld, doubt the enthusiasm of the CIA for providing the
slanted, bogus, "sexed up" intelligence the Executive required to make its "destroy Iraq now"
case ? So Rumsfeld therefore set up an independent intelligence agency within the Defence Dept
to provide/create the required "intelligence" ?
I think they find anyplace that they can make our lives more difficult, I think they find
that something that's useful."
Yeah, because that's what resource-constrained countries with limited ability to tap the global
capital markets do. Methinks Mr. Pompeo is projecting his and the neocons' fantasies on the Russians.
As has been the case for decades the Deep State allows Presidents and legislators to make minor
decisions in our government as long as those decisions do not in any way interfere with the Deep
State's goals of total world hegemony and increase in overwhelming power and wealth. Those who
make the important decisions in this country are not elected. The elected 'officials' are sycophants
of the Deep State.
Being resistant to jargon and catch phrases it is only slowly that I have accepted that "Deep
State" is not entirely pretentious waffle when used to describe aspects of the US. However I may
not be your only reader PG who would appreciate a clear explanatory description of the American
Deep State and how it works.
Here are some suggested parameters.
The term is appropriated from the use to describe the mutually loyal corps of Ataturkians in
the Turkish military and intelligence services who were united in service to uphold the ideal
of Ataturkian secular modernisation. The term implies no public accountability or publicity unnecessary
to its purposes.
And its origins imply that it is not just one in a number of major influences ln government or
those who vote for it.
So one has to acknowledge that in the US the Deep State has to be different in the important
respect that levers of power are observably wielded by lobbies for the aged, gun owners and sellers,
Israel, Wall Street, bio fuels, sugar and other ag, pharmaceuticals, oil and gas, the arms industry,
Disney and other Hollywood and media, health insurers and the medical profession, and I could
go on.
These are all relevant to legal events like votes on impeachment or to hold up appointments.
The CIA and FBI together completely united (and note how disunited 9/11 showed them to be) wouldn't
remotely approach the old Turkish Deep State's ability to stage a coup. Are all of the putative
elements of the Deep State together today as powerful as J.Edgar Hoover with his dirt files on
everyone? (A contrast and compare exercise of today's presumed Deep State configuration and modus
operandi with the simpler Hoover days might shine some light on who does what and how today. And
how effectively).
To avoid lack of focus can a convincing account of the US Deep State be best given in terms
of a plausible scenario for
getting rid of Trump as President and/or
maintaining the lunacy and hubris which has the US wasting its substance on totally unnecessary
antagonistic relations with China and Russia and interference in the ME?
I would read such accounts with great interest. (Handwavers need not apply).
Of course the US Deep State must hate Russia. First, Jews have a very long history of hating Russia and Russians. That never changed. The
USSR was not Russia; the USSR was Marxism replacing Russia. Jews tended to love that. Rich Jews
from across the world, from the US and the UK of most interest to us, sent money to support the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Russia managed to survive the USSR and is slowly coming back around to Russian common sense
from the Christian perspective. Neither Jews nor their WASP BFFs can ever forgive that. They want
Russia to act now to commit cultural and genetic suicide, like Western Europe and the entire Anglosphere
are doing.
@polistraThe CIA's source, its birth, is from British secret service. Brit spying. And Brit secret service,
long before the official founding of MI5, did exactly the kinds of things you note the CIA has
done.
The Mossad is another direct fruit of Brit secret service, as is the Saudi General Intelligence
Presidency.
While there can be no doubt about the crackpots in high positions of the most powerful bureaucracies,
it seems to me that the CIA loonies are merely shock troops for an even worse bunch of evil psychos,
the bankster mafiosi.
But doing so would mean a voluntary end to playing the role of Sauron, determined to find and
wear the One Ring to Rule Them All. The average Elite WASP, and his Jewish BFF, definitely would
prefer to destroy the world, at least outside their gated compounds of endless luxury, than to
step down from that level of global domination.
@Wizard
of Oz Wiz – Here is an article I did on the Deep State two years ago. It was one of the first
in the US media looking at the issue. It would have to be updated now in light of Trump, but much
of what it states is still more-or-less correct.
But we need to make certain that your use of the word 'mafiosi' does not lead anyone to assume
that group has more than a handful of Italians. Jews, WASPs, and continental Germanics each will
outnumber Italians by at least 30 to 1.
I am a retired CIA operations officer (something none of the men mentioned by Giraldi are –
Brennan was a failed wanna be, couldn't cut it as an ops officer). He is spot on in his comments.
The majority of people in the CIA, the ones who do the heavy lifting, are patriotic Americans
who are proud of serving their country. I am sure that most voted for Trump as they all know too
well the truth about the Clintons and Obama.
Giraldi is not the only one to notice the upward progress of the most incompetent yes-men in the
Agency. A close look at most of them reveals a track record of little or no operational success
balanced by excellent sucking up skills. These characters quickly figured out how to get ahead
and doing your job in the field is not it. Of course, most are ego maniacs so they are totally
oblivious to their own uselessness.
Well before he was elected I had a letter delivered to President Trump in which I outlined in
detail what would happen to him if he did not immediately purge the CIA of these assholes. I know
that at least some people on his staff read it but, of course, my advice was ignored. Trump has
paid dearly for not listening to an ordinary CIA guy who wanted to give him a reality brief on
those vicious snakes.
Historical facts teach humanity that Anglo-Saxon group of Nations was built on slavery, thuggery
and theft of other peace loving Civilizations.
We Slavs are the New "niggers", hate is the glue that holds you "toGether".
People of color have been successfully conditioned and practice it as well.
Time will tell how well it holds when balloon bursts and 99% gets called to serve as cannon fodder.
Terrorizing UNARMED and WEAKER is not true test of "superiority" and "exceptionalism".
Tiny, extremely tiny minority of Anglo-Saxons and Satraps understand this.
How "Russiagate" began: After the primaries, both Hillary and Donald faced divided political parties even though they
had won the nomination. These divisions were worse than the normal situation after contested primaries.
On the Democratic side, Hillay had just subverted the will of the voters of her party, who seemed
to favor Bernie Sanders over her. Hillay had won with corrupt collusion and rigging amongst the
DNC, the higher ranks of the Democratic Party, and major media such as the NYT and CNN.
Then, a leak of emails from the DNC HQ publicized her interference in the democratic processes
of the Democratic Party. This threatened to ene the Hillary for President campaign right then
and there. If the majority of Democrats who'd favored Bernie refused to support Hillary because
of her corruption and collusion in denying democracy within the party, she was a sure loser in
the fall election. The Hillary camp then immediately started blaming Russia for the exposure of her corruption
and rigging of the Democratic process. And that's how "Russiagate" began.
It probably does as do group psychoses and group fantasies.. Anyone who's ever served in a beuaracracy
knows that groupthink exists.
Take a bunch of mediocre minds. And, they do exist, as Garrison Keiler once famously made a
joke out of with his line Welcome to Lake Woebegone, where all the children are above average.
Take that bunch of mediocre thinkers, and then make most of them obsessed with their own career
advancement above all else. The most dangerous place for a career-obsessed individual is outside
the group consensus. If everyone is wrong, then there is safety in the group. After all, if they
are wrong, so was everyone else in the organization. Thus they are immune to attack and censure
for being wrong. But if someone takes a position outside of the group consensus, that can be a
career-ending move if they are wrong, as now everyone else will be in the I-told-U-So camp. And
even if they are correct, they will still be hated and shunned just for being the person who pointed
out to the group that they are wrong.
So, you take your typical average mind, and not only do they not have any great insights of
their own, but they tend to stick to the group out of sheer survival and then when you take a
mass of these mediocre minds you have 'groupthink'.
If only Trump would really clean the swamp - particularly the neo-cons and other traitors and
globalists. One can dream ....
What we've learned from Trump is that 'Draining the Swamp' will
take more than an individual. It will take a political movement.
One sees this on the fringes of politics. Someone gets the idea of running for President, and
they point out all that is wrong. But, they focus only on their own campaign, their own goal,
and they thus gloss over the fact that they'll be outnumbered and powerless even if they win.
Seen this often on the Left. The most recent example is Bernie Sanders. Likewise, had Bernie
been elected President, he too would face an entrenched establishment and media with only a small
fraction of the Congress supporting him.
Change has to be built from the bottom up. There are no shortcuts. Electing a Trump, or a Nader
or a Bernie does not lead to real change. Step one is to build the political movement such that
it has real voting block power and which has already won voting majorities in the legislature
before the movement achieves the election of a President.
What Trump has needed to be doing for this first two years is to form clear divisions that
he could then take to his voters in the mid-term elections. He's needed to lay out his own agenda.
So what if he loses votes in Congress? He then takes that agenda back to the voters in 2018 with
a nationwide slate of Congressional candidates who support that agenda and runs a midterm campaign
asking the voters to help him drain that swamp.
So, for instance, Trump should veto the act of war known as the recent sanctions bill. Who
cares if it gets overridden? Then he goes back to the voters, who are clearly sick of endless
war and who for obvious reasons don't want a nuclear war, and he says this is where I stand. Support
me by electing Fill-In-The-Blank to Congress. With the nuclear Doomsday Clock pushing ever closer
to midnight, he might just win that fight over the big money and media opposition he's sure to
face.
Not only has Trump failed to even try to fight the Deep State, but he's also failing to set
himself up for success in the next elections.
It is a serious error to consider President Trump "naive."
What we are seeing now is The Donald's role in the serial Zionist THEATER. Think deeper about the motive behind Mr. Giraldi's choice to use the Orwellian word "Groupthink"
in characterizing the CIA zeitgeist? In the classic work "1984," one observes Big Brother as the catalyst in control of the proles'
thought pattern & subsequent action.
To rise & FALL as a POTUS is a matter of theater and the American proles are entertained by
the political for either 4 or 8 years and the Zionists get their next Chosen actor/actress dramatically
sworn in on a bible.
Mr. Trump is neither naive nor stupid. Sheldon Adelson would not donate $millioms to any POTUS
wannabe who could not effectively lead the American Groupthink tradition. Subsequently, the political
horror show is brought to you in the understandable form of the perpetually elusive Deep State
which gets annual Academy Award.
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support
our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this
alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany
as it provides 9% of their needs.
Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a
problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state
-- Ukraine.
As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially
this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases
they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is
just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.
To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal
society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).
And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the
people" and neo-McCarthyism.
But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of
this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global
military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East
even if Iran is occupied)
In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While,
at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities
of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies
forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.
Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians
already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.
Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.
Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the
last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)
"Carnage needs to destroyed" mentality is dominant among the USA neoliberal elite and drives the policy toward Russia.
They all supported neoconservative extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda directed on weakening Russian and
establishing of world dominance. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this
Notable quotes:
"... There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this. ..."
"... This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya. ..."
"... And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. ..."
"... Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky. ..."
"... it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep.. ..."
"... I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields. Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence". ..."
"... It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of defiance which they will not tolerate. ..."
"... And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear. That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that. ..."
"... Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ..."
"... They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress West's posture; say 2040 ..."
"... In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG) dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. ..."
"... State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis" and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union ..."
"... About relation Steele-MI6, well, you never leave your IS. Or to put it in another way, you are never out of the scope of your past IS ..."
"... No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming. ..."
"... Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons. ..."
"... Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing. ..."
"... Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before any Steele's Dossier. This was a program. ..."
"... IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war. ..."
"... The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem for regular people, to worry about. ..."
"... A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario Scaramella. ..."
"... Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality? Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear. ..."
Steele, Shvets, Levinson, Litvinenko and the 'Billion Dollar Don.'
In the light of the suggestion in the Nunes memo that Steele was 'a longtime FBI source' it seems worth sketching out some background,
which may also make it easier to see some possible reasons why he 'was desperate that Donald Trump not get elected and was passionate
about him not being president.'
There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. It also seems clear that influential journalists, such as Glenn Simpson was before founding Fusion
GPS, along with his wife Mary Jacoby, have been strongly involved in this.
This agenda has involved hopes for 'régime change' in Russia, whether as the result of an oligarchic coup, a popular revolt, or
some combination of both. Also central have been hopes for a further 'rollback' of Russia influence in the post-Soviet space, both
in areas now independent, such as Ukraine, and also ones still part of the Russian Federation, notably Chechnya.
And, crucially, it involved exploiting the retreat of Russian power from the Middle East for 'régime change' projects which it
was hoped would provide a definitive solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the
area.
Important support for these strategies was provided by the 'StratCom' network centred around the late Boris Berezovsky, which
clearly collaborated closely with MI6. As was apparent from the witness list at Sir Robert Owen's Inquiry into the death of Alexander
Litvinenko, which produced a report based essentially on a recycling of claims made by the network's members, key players were on
your side of the Atlantic – notably Alex Goldfarb, Yuri Shvets, and Yuri Felshtinsky.
The question of what links these had, or did not have, with elements in U.S. intelligence agencies is thus a critical one.
In making some sense of it, the fact that one key figure we know to have been involved in this network was missing at the Inquiry
– the former FBI agent Robert Levinson, who disappeared on the Iranian island of Kish in March 2007 – is important.
Unfortunately, I only recently came across a book on Levinson published in 2016 by the 'New York Times' journalist Barry Meier,
which is now hopefully winging its way across the Atlantic. From the accounts of the book I have seen, such as one by Jeff Stein
in 'Newsweek', it seems likely that its author did not look at any of the evidence presented at Owen's Inquiry.
Had he done so, Meier might have discovered that his subject had been, as it were, 'top supporting actor' in the first fumbling
attempt by Christopher Steele et al to produce a plausible-sounding scenario as to the background to Litvinenko's death. A Radio
4 programme on 16 December 2006, presented by the veteran BBC presenter Tom Mangold, had been wholly devoted to an account by Shvets,
backed up by Levinson. Both of these were, like Litvinenko, supposed to be impartial 'due diligence' operatives.
The notion that any of them might have connections with Western intelligence agencies was not considered. The – publicly available
– evidence of the involvement of Shvets, whose surname means 'cobbler' or 'shoemaker' in Ukrainian, in the processing of the tapes
of conversations involving the former Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma supposedly recorded by Major Melnychenko, which had played
a crucial role in the 2004-5 'Orange Revolution' was not mentioned.
Still less was it mentioned that claims that the – very dangerous – late Soviet Kolchuga system, which made it possible the kind
of identification of incoming aircraft which radar had traditionally done, without sending out signals which made the destruction
of the facilities doing it possible, had been sold by Kuchma to Iraq had proven spurious.
What Shvets had done had been to take – genuine – audio in which Kuchma had discussed a possible sale, and edit it to suggest
a sale had been completed.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
As a former television current affairs producer, I can talk to you of the marvels which London audio editors can produce, very
happily. Unfortunately, the days when not all BBC and 'Guardian' journalists were corrupt stenographers for corrupt and incompetent
spooks, as Mangold and his like have been for Steele and Levinson, are long gone.
All this has become particularly relevant now, given that Simpson has placed the notorious Jewish Ukrainian mobster Semyon Mogilevich
and the 'Solntsevskaya Bratva' mafia group centre stage in his accounts not simply of Trump and Manafort, but also of William Browder.
For most of the 'Nineties, Levinson had been a, if not the, lead FBI investigator on Mogilevich.
(On this, see the 1999 BBC 'Panorama' programme 'The Billion Dollar Don', also presented by Tom Mangold, which has extensive interviews
both with Mogilevich and Levinson at
In the months leading up to Levinson's disappearance, a key priority for the advocates of the strategy I have described was to
prevent it being totally derailed by the patently catastrophic outcome of the Iraqi adventure.
Compounding the problem was the fact that this had created the 'Shia Crescent', which in turn exacerbated the potential 'existential
threat' to Israel posed by the steadily increasing range, accuracy and numbers of missiles available to Hizbullah in hardened positions
north of the Litani.
These, obviously, provided both a 'deterrent' for that organisation and Iran, and also a radical threat to the whole notion that
somehow Israel could ever be a 'safe haven' for Jews, against the supposedly ineradicable disposition of the 'goyim' sooner or later
to, as it were, revert to type. The dreadful thought that Israel might not be necessary had to be resisted at all costs.
What followed from the disaster unleashed by the – Anglo-American – 'own goal' in toppling Saddam was, ironically, a need on the
part of key players to 'double down.' Above all, it was necessary for many of those involved to counter suggestions from the Russian
side that going around smashing up 'régimes' that one might not like sometimes blew up in one's face.
Even more threatening were suggestions from the Russian side that it was foolish to think one could use jihadists without risking
'blowback', and that there might be an overwhelming common interest in combating Islamic extremism.
Another priority was to counter the pushback in the American 'intelligence community' and military, which was to produce the drastic
downgrading of the threat posed by the Iranian nuclear programme in the November 2007 NIE and then the resignation of Admiral William
Fallon as head of 'Centcom' the following March.
So in 2005 Shvets came to London. He and his audio editors had another 'bite at the cherry' of the Melnychenko tapes, so that
material that did in fact establish that both the SBU and FSB had collaborated with Mogilevich could be employed to make it seem
that Putin had a close personal relationship with the mobster.
All kinds of supposedly respectable American and British academics, like Professors Karen Dawisha and Robert Service, have fallen
for this, hook, line and sinker. It gives a new meaning to the term 'useful idiot.'
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
In a letter sent in December that year by Litvinenko to the 'Mitrokhin Commission', for which his Italian associate Mario Scaramella
was a consultant, this was used in an attempt to demonstrate that Mogilevich, while acting as an agent for the FSB and under Putin's
personal 'krysha', had attempted to supply a 'mini atomic bomb' – aka 'suitcase nuke' – to Al Qaeda. Shortly after the letter was
sent Scaramella departed on a trip to Washington, where he appears to have got access to Aldrich Ames.
(See http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160613090333/https://www.litvinenkoinquiry.org/evidence .)
At precisely this time, as Meier explains, Levinson was in the process of being recruited by a lady called Anne Jablonski who
then worked as a CIA analyst. It appears that she was furious at the failure of the operational side at the Agency to produce evidence
which would have established that Iran did indeed have an ongoing nuclear programme, and she may well have hoped would implicate
Russia in supplying materials.
There are grounds to suspect that one of the things that Berezovsky and Shvets were doing was fabricating such 'evidence.' Whether
Levinson was involved in such attempts, or genuinely looking for evidence he was convinced must be there, I cannot say. It appears
that he fell for a rather elementary entrapment operation – which could well have been organised with the collaboration of Russian
intelligence. (People do get fed up with being framed, particular if 'régime change' is the goal.)
It also seems likely that, quite possibly in a different but related entrapment operation, related to propaganda wars in which
claims and counter claims about a polonium-beryllium 'initiator' as the crucial missing part which might make a 'suitcase nuke' functional,
Litvinenko accidentally ingested fatal quantities of polonium. A good deal of evidence suggests that this may have been at Berezovsky's
offices on the night before he was supposedly assassinated.
It was, obviously, important for Steele et al to ensure that nobody looked at the 'StratCom' wars about 'suitcase nukes.' Here,
a figure who has played a key role in such wars in relation to Syria plays an interesting minor one in the story.
Some time following the destruction of the case for an immediate war by the November 2007 NIE, a chemical weapons specialist called
Dan Kaszeta, who had worked in the White House for twelve years, moved to London.
In 2011, in addition to founding a consultancy called 'Strongpoint Security', he began a writing career with articles in 'CBRNe
World.' Later, he would become the conduit through which the notorious 'hexamine hypothesis', supposedly clinching proof that the
Syrian government was responsible for the sarin incidents at Khan Sheikhoun, Ghouta, Saraqeb, and Khan Al-Asal, was disseminated.
Having been forced by the threat of a case being opened against them under human rights law into resuming the inquest into Litvinenko's
death, in August 2012 the British authorities appointed Sir Robert Owen to conduct it. (There are many honest judges in Britain,
but obviously, if one sets out to find someone who will 'cover up' for the incompetence and corruption of people like Steele, as
Lord Hutton did before him, you can find them.)
That same month, a piece appeared in 'CBRNe World' with the the strapline: 'Dan Kaszeta looks into the ultimate press story: Suitcase
nukes', and the main title 'Carry on or checked bags?' Among the grounds he gives for playing down the scare:
'Some components rely on materials with shelf life. Tritium, for example, is used in many nuclear weapon designs and has a twelve
year half-life. Polonium, used in neutron initiators in some earlier types of weapon designs, has a very short halflife. US documents
state that every nuclear weapon has "limited life components" that require periodic replacement (do an internet search for nuclear
limited life components and you can read for weeks).'
What Kaszeta has actually described are the reasons why polonium is a perfect 'StratCom' instrument. In terms of scientific plausibility,
in fact there were no 'suitcase nukes', and in any case 'initiators' using polonium had been abandoned very early on, in favour of
ones which lasted longer.
For 'StratCom' scenarios, as experience with the 'hexamine hypothesis' has proved, scientific plausibility can be irrelevant.
What polonium provides is a means of suggesting that Al Qaeda have in fact got hold of a nuclear device which they could easily
smuggle into, say, Rome or New York, or indeed Moscow, but there is a crucial missing component which the FSB is trying to provide
to them. By the same token, of course, that missing component could be depicted as one that Berezovsky and Litvinenko are conspiring
to suppl to the Chechen insurgents.
In addition, the sole known source of global supply is the Avangard plant at Sarov in Russia, so the substance is naturally suited
for 'StratCom' directed against that country, which its intelligence services would – rather naturally – try to make 'boomerang.'
According to Glenn Simpson, Christopher Steele is a 'boy scout.' This seems to me quite wrong – but, even if it were true, would
you want to unleash a 'boy scout' into these kinds of intrigue?
As it is not clear why Kaszeta introduced his – accurate but irrelevant – point about polonium into an article which was concerned
with scientific plausibility, one is left with an interesting question as to whether he cut his teeth on 'StratCom' attempting to
ensure that nobody seriously interested in CBRN science followed an obvious lead.
In relation to the question of whether current FBI personnel had been involved in the kind of 'StratCom' exercises, I have been
describing, a critical issue is the involvement of Shvets and Levinson in the Alexander Khonanykhine affair back in the 'Nineties,
and the latter's use of claims about the Solntsevskaya to prevent the key figure's extradition. But that is a matter for another
day.
A corollary of all this is that we cannot – yet at least – be absolutely confident that the account in the Nunes memo, according
to which Steele was suspended and then dismissed as an FBI source for what the organisation is reported to define as 'the most serious
of violations' – the unauthorised disclosure of a relationship with the organisation – is necessarily wholly accurate.
Who did and did not authorise which disclosures to the media, up to and including the extraordinary decision to have the full
dossier, including claims about Aleksej Gubarev and the Alfa oligarchs, in flagrant disregard of the obvious risks of defamation
suits, and who may be trying to pass the buck to others, remains I think less than totally clear.
thanks david... fascinating overview and conjecture..
it seems to me the usa and uk have been tied at the hip for a very long time... when it comes to foreign affairs policy
and wars - the one will always vouch for the other without hesitation... it tells me the relationship is really deep..
Thank you very. As ever you have illuminated a few more things for me. Kaszeta's involvement is interesting. He is someone
I am in the middle of researching in relation to Higgins and Bellingcat.
I think the English are using you, they are unsentimental empirical people that only do these that benefit the Number One.
The chief beneficiary of the Coup in Iran was England and not US.
That Newsweek piece about Levinson is very superficial to me.
Re: Levinson
# Who suggested to who 'first' the Iran caper...Anne Jablonski to Levinson or Levinson to Jablonski? It was reported earlier
by Meier that in December 2005, when Levinson was pitching Jablonski on projects he might take on when his CIA contract was approved
he sent her a lengthy memo about Dawud's potential as an informant.
# Ira Silverman, the Iran hating NBC guy, pitched a Iraq caper to Levinson with Dawud Salahuddin, as his Iran contact and Levinson
went to Jablonski with it.
# And what was with Boris Birshstein, a Russian organized crime figure who had fled to Israel and Oleg Deripaska, the "aluminum
czar" of Russia whose organized crime contacts have kept him from entering the United States jumping in to help find Levinson?
The FBI allowed Deripaska in for two visits in 2009 in exchange for his alleged help in locating Levinson but obviously nothing
came of it.
I think there were more little agents/agendas in this than Levinson and Jablonski and US CIA.
As usual a wonderful analysis. I admire your insight, integrity and courage. I wish you could write more on why the Borg
is so much against Trump, even though they have Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference for them.
I and my friends consider it a given that most, if not all, anglo-zionist moves in the ME are to "provide a definitive
solution to the – inherently intractable – security problems of a Jewish settler state in the area. " It is an open secret that
the izzies are the reason why a few Russians, some Turks, lots of Kurds and countless Arabs are dying in the Syrian battlefields.
Another open secret: the takfiris and kurds have been, and are, supported by the West. That the "masters of the universe™" have
been conceiving and doubling down on such disastrous policies give lie to their much-vaunted "intelligence".
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time. "
David as usual fascinating work connecting the dots. One question that comes to my mind is about the above point you are making.
Is it your understanding or believe that these IC individuals on both side of Atlantic, are pursuing/forcing their (on behalf
of the Borg) foreign policy agenda outside of their respected seating governments? If not, why is it that incoming administration
cannot stop them? So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but
not fundamentally.
I am not David Habakkuk, obviously. But I will venture a little opinion anyway. It is not enough that the Borgists get their
policy preferences. If it were, then Kushner, Adelson and Co. running interference would be enough for them.
It is the very FACT of Trump even getting elected at ALL which outrages and terrifies them so much. They are used to seeing
themselves as successful manipulators and engineers of every major event. They were engineering the whole electoral battlespace
to get Clinton elected. The mere fact of Trump's victory in the teeth of their Electoral Engineering for Clinton is an act of
defiance which they will not tolerate.
And if they fail to bring Trump down at all, they will stand revealed as being defeatable. And this is their big fear.
That if people see they have defeated the Borg once on keeping Trump in the teeth of Borg's efforts, that people might try to
defeat and smash down the Borg on another issue. And then another. And then another after that.
So that is why the Borg cares so much. They view the Trump election as an insurgency, and they view themselves as waging a
counterinsurgency, which they dare not lose.
Thanks for your analysis. I always enjoy and learn from your posts. I wish you would post more often.
In my non-expert opinion, the Borg and the media were all in for Hillary. They were convinced that she was gonna win. To curry
favor with the Empress who would be certainly crowned after the election they were eager and convinced that their lawlessness
would become a badge for promotion and plum positions in her administration. In their conceit, they believed they could kill two
birds with one stroke. They could vilify Putin and create the mass hysteria to checkmate him, while at the same time disparage
and frame Trump as The Manchurian Candidate to seal their certain electoral victory.
Unfortunately for them voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin didn't buy their sales pitch despite the overwhelming
media barrage from all corners. Even news publications who have only endorsed Republican candidates for President for over a century
endorsed her.
Trump's election win caused panic among the political establishment, the media and the Deep State. They were already all-in.
Their only choice was to double down and get Trump impeached. Now their conspiracy is beginning to unravel. They are doing everything
possible to forestall their Armageddon. Of course they have many allies. This battle is gonna be interesting to watch. Trump is
clearly getting many Congressional Republicans on side as his base of Deplorables remains solidly behind him. That is what's befuddling
the Borg pundits.
So far I can't see any strategic changes on US foreign policy toward ME or Russia, at tactical level yes but not fundamentally.
Because it is not possible to do on fundamental level yet, especially with US foreign policy establishment and so called
consensus being built almost entirely, in ideological and, most importantly, cadres senses, on the ultimate exceptionalist agenda
in which Russia is the ultimate obstacle and enemy. Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp.
This swamp (Borg, deep state, etc.) still thinks that it can use Cold War 1.0 Playbook and address very real and dangerous
American economic issues. They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with.
They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.
You are right CWII is very much desired and on agenda, but i am not sure of setup, the setup/board has been changed tremendously
and IMO benefits the Asian side of Bosphorus, for one thing technology is no longer exclusive, and financial burden is heavier
on atlantic side.
''Establishment in saturated with neocons and likes. They are the swamp. ''
The locust keep trying and trying, destruction is their life's work.
'1977-1981: Nationalities Working Group Advocates Using Militant Islam Against Soviet Union'
In 1977 Zbigniew Brzezinski, as President Carter's National Security Adviser, forms the Nationalities Working Group (NWG)
dedicated to the idea of weakening the Soviet Union by inflaming its ethnic tensions. The Islamic populations are regarded
as prime targets. Richard Pipes, the father of Daniel Pipes, takes over the leadership of the NWG in 1981. Pipes predicts that
with the right encouragement Soviet Muslims will "explode into genocidal fury" against Moscow. According to Richard Cottam, a
former CIA official who advised the Carter administration at the time, after the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1978, Brzezinski
favored a "de facto alliance with the forces of Islamic resurgence, and with the Republic of Iran." [Dreyfuss, 2005, pp. 241,
251 - 256]
'November 1978-February 1979: Some US Officials Want to Support Radical Muslims to Contain Soviet Union'
State Department official Henry Precht will later recall that Brzezinski had the idea "that Islamic forces could be used
against the Soviet Union. The theory was, there was an arc of crisis, and so an arc of Islam could be mobilized to contain the
Soviets." [Scott, 2007, pp. 67] In November 1978, President Carter appointed George Ball head of a special White House Iran task
force under Brzezinski. Ball recommends the US should drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the radical Islamist opposition
of Ayatollah Khomeini. This idea is based on ideas from British Islamic expert Dr. Bernard Lewis, who advocates the balkanization
of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. The chaos would spread in what he also calls an "arc of crisis"
and ultimately destabilize the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union
"There is reason to suspect that some former and very likely current employees of the FBI have been colluding with elements
in other American and British intelligence agencies, in particular the CIA and MI6, in support of an extremely ambitious foreign
policy agenda for a very long time."
Yes, that is what appears to be just what is coming to light. I wonder just what position Trey Gowdy is going to have since
he won't be running for re-election. The rage from the left is palpable. I'm sure the next outraged guy on the left will know
how to shoot straighter than the ones who shot up Congressman Scalise or the concert goers at Mandalay Bay.
"They are wrong, since most of them didn't read the playbook correctly to start with."
-- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
England preferred NAZI Germany to USSR, this is well known. As to what would have happened, the outcome of the war, in my opinion,
did not depend on US participation in the European Theatre. All of Europe would have become USSR satellite or joined USSR.
"unsentimental empirical people"? Absolutely disagree with you. Now the Iranians, they strike me as a singularity unsentimental
people. Just general impressions, mind you.
Yes, US was the first country to proudly deliver Manpads to be used by "rebels" (Mojahadin later Taleban) against USSR in Afghanistan
back in 80s. And, as per the architect of support for the rebels (Zbigniew Brzezinski) very proud of it with no regret. With that
in mind, I don't see how western politicians, the western governments and their related proxy war planers, will be regretting,
even sadden, once god forbid we see passenger planes with loved ones are shot down taking off or landing at various western airports
and other places around the word. Just like how superficialy with crocodile tears in their eyes they acted in aftermath of the
terrorist events in various western cities in this past 16 years. Gods knows what will happens to us if the opposite side start
to supply his own proxies with lethal anti air weapons. "Proudly", I don't think anybody in west cares or will regret of such
an escalation.
I think it likely that what Meier produces is only a 'limited hangout', and am hoping that when the book arrives it will contain
more pointers.
It is important to be clear that one is often dealing with people playing very complicated double games.
An interesting document is the 'Petition for Writ of Habeus Corpus' made on behalf of Khodorkovsky's close associate Alexander
Konanykhin back in 1997,when the Immigration and Naturalization Service were – apparently at least – cooperating with Russian
attempts to get hold of him. An extract:
'During the immigration hearing FBI SA Robert Levinson, an INS witness, confirmed that in 1992 Petitioner was kidnapped and
afterwards pursued by assassins of the Solntsevskaya organized criminal group. This organized criminal group is reportedly the
largest and the most influential organized criminal group in Russia, and operates internationally.'
Note the similarities between the 'StratCom' that Khonanykin and his associates were producing in the 'Nineties, and that which
Simpson and his associates have been producing two decades later.
Another useful example is provided by a 2004 item in the 'New American Magazine', reproduced on Konanykhin's website:
'One of those who testified on behalf of Konanykhine was KGB defector Yuri Shvets, who declared: "I have a firsthand knowledge
on similar operations conducted by the KGB." Konanykhine had brought trouble on himself, Shvets continued, when he "started bringing
charges against people who were involved with him in setting up and running commercial enterprises. They were KGB people secretly
smuggling from Russia hundreds of millions of dollars . This is [a] serious case, and I know that KGB ... desperately wants to
win this case, and everybody who won't step to their side would face problems."'
So – 'first hand knowledge', from a Ukrainian nationalist – look at what the Chalupas have been doing, it seems not much has
changed.
For a rather different perspective on what Konanykhin had actually been up to, from someone in whose honesty – if not always
judgement – I have complete confidence, see the testimony of Karon von Gerhke-Thompson to the House Committee on Banking and Financial
Services hearings on Russian Money Laundering. In this, she described how she had been approached by him in 1993:
'"Konanykhine alleged that Menatep Bank controlled $1.7bn [Ł1bn] in assets and investment portfolios of Russia's most prominent
political and social elite," she recalled. She said he wanted to move the bank's assets off shore and asked her to help buy foreign
passports for its "very, very special clients".
'In her testimony to the committee Ms Von Gerhke-Thompson said she informed the CIA of the deal, and the agency told her that
it believed Mr Konanykhine and Mr Khodorkovsky "were engaged in an elaborate money laundering scheme to launder billions of dollars
stolen by members of the KGB and high-level government officials".
Coming back to Steele's 'StratCom', in July 2008, an item appeared on the 'Newnight' programme of the BBC – which some of us
think should by then have been rechristened the 'Berezovsky Broadcasting Corporation' – in which the introduction by the presenter,
Jeremy Paxman, read as follows:
'Good evening. The New Russian President, Dmitri Medvedev, was all smiles and warm words when he met Gordon Brown today. He
said he was keen to resolve all outstanding difficulties between the two countries. Yada yada yada. Gordon Brown smiled, but he
must know what Newsnight can now reveal: that MI5 believes the Russian state was involved in the murder of Alexander Litvinenko
by radioactive poisoning. They also believe that without their intervention another London-based Russian, Boris Berezovsky, would
have been murdered. Our diplomatic editor, Mark Urban, has this exclusive report.'
When Urban repeated the claims on his blog, there was a positive eruption from someone using the name 'timelythoughts', about
the activities of someone she referred to as 'Berezovsky's disinformation specialist' – when I came across this later, it was
immediately clear to me that she was Karon von Gerhke, and he was Shvets.
She then described a visit by Scaramella to Washington, details of which had already been unearthed by my Italian collaborator,
David Loepp. Her claim to have e-mails from Shvets, from the time immediately prior to Litvinenko's death, directly contradicting
the testimony he had given, fitted with other evidence I had already unearthed.
Later, we exchanged e-mails over a quite protracted period, and a large amount of material that came into my possession as
a result was submitted by me to the Inquest team, with some of it being used in posts on the 'European Tribune' site.
What I never used publicly, because I could only partially corroborate it from the material she provided, was an extraordinary
claim about Shvets:
'He was responsible for bringing in a Kremlin initiative that was walked Vice President Cheney's office on a US government
quid pro quo with the Kremlin FSB SVR involving the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky – a cease and desist on allegations of a politically
motivated arrest of Khodorkovsky, violations of rules of law and calls from Russia's expulsion from the G 8 in exchange for favorable
posturing of U.S. oil companies on Gazprom's Shtokman project and intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq,
Iran and Syria, all documented in reports I submitted to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and MI6.
'Berezovsky's DS could not be on both sides on that isle. His Kremlin FSB SVR sources had been vetted by the CIA and by the
National Security Council. They proved to be as represented. As we would later learn, however, he was on Berezovsky's payroll
at same time. The FSB SVR general he was coordinating the Kremlin initiative through was S. R. Subbotin, the same FSB SVR general
who was investigating Berezovsky's money laundering operations in Switzerland during the same timeframe. His FSB SVR sources surrounding
Putin were higher than any Lugovoy could have ever hoped to affiliate with.
'R. James Woolsey (former CIA DCI), Marshall Miller (former law partner of the late CIA DCI William Colby), who I coordinated
the Kremlin initiative through that Berezovsky's DS had brought in were shocked to learn that he was affiliated with Berezovsky
and Litvinenko. He was in Berezovsky's inner circle and engaged in vetting Russian business with Litvinenko. He operated Berezovsky's
Ukraine website, editing and dubbing the now infamous Kuchma tapes throughout the lead up to the elections in the Ukraine. Berezovsky
contributed $41 million to Viktor Yushchenko's campaign, which he used in an attempt to force Yushchenko to reunite with Julia
Tymoschenko. It failed but would succeed later after Berezovsky orchestrated a public relations initiative through Alan Goldfarb
in the U.S. on behalf of Tymoschenko.'
Having got to know Karon von Gerhke quite well, and also been able to corroborate a great deal of what she told me about many
things, and discussed these matters with her, it is absolutely clear to me that she was neither fabricating nor fantasising. What
later became apparent, both to her and to me, was that in the 'double game' that Shvets was playing, he had succeeded in fooling
her as to the side for which he was working.
It seems likely however that the reason Shvets could do what he did was that quite precisely that many high-up people in the
Kremlin and elsewhere were playing a 'double game.' In this, Karon von Gerhke's propensity for indiscretion – of which I, like
others, was both beneficiary and victim – could be useful.
An exercise in 'positioning', which could be used to disguise the fact that Shvets was indeed 'Berezovsky's disinformation
specialist', could be used to make it appear that 'intelligence on weapon sales during the Yeltsin era to Iraq, Iran and Syria'
was actually credible.
This could have been used to try to rescue Cheney, Bush and their associates from the mess they had got into as a result of
the failure of the invasion to provide any evidence whatsoever supporting the case which had been made for it. It could also have
been used to provide the kind of materials justifying military action against Iran for which Levinson and Jablonski were looking,
and for similar action against Syria.
Among reasons for bringing this up now is that we need to make sense of the paradox that Simpson – clearly in collusion with
Steele – was using Mogilevich and the 'Solnsetskaya Bratva' both against Manafort and Trump and against Browder.
There are various possible explanations for this. I do not want to succumb to my instinctive prejudice that this may have been
another piece of 'positioning', similar to what I think was being done with Shvets, but the hypothesis needs to be considered.
A more general point is that people in Washington and London need to 'wise up' to the kind of world with which they are dealing.
This could be done quite enjoyably: reading some of Dashiell Hammett's fictions of the United States in the Prohibition era, or
indeed buying DVDs of some of the classics of 'film noir', like 'Out of the Past' (in its British release, 'Build My Gallows High')
might be a start.
Very much of the coverage of affairs in the post-Soviet space since 1991 has read rather as though a Dashiell Hammett story
had been rewritten by someone specialising in sentimental children's, or romantic, fiction (although, come to think of it, that
is really what Brigid O'Shaughnessy does in 'The Maltese Falcon.')
The testimony of Glenn Simpson seems a case in point. The sickly sentimentality of these people does, rather often, make one
feel as though one wanted to throw up.
"They act and believe that they are Olympians. You have to wait for them to age and die before any substantive change in Fortress
West's posture; say 2040.}
No, three years at tops and could be much sooner if dimes starting dropping by exposed people that don't want to take the
fall for their superiors whom they always detested. One possible thing to get the process started sooner is if the recent Russian
Intelligence delegation to DC that Smoothie mentions on another thread gave the current administration, as a diplomatic courtesy
of course, the audio recordings of Madame Sectary Nuland's infamous mental meltdown at Kaliningrad. No telling what beans were
spilled in her moment of panic, but I am willing to bet key names were dropped. Either way the time is coming.
- If they have read the important books at all... The ongoing scandal has been revealing a stunning incompetence of the "deciders."
Too often they look comical, ridiculous, undignified. This is dangerous, considering their power.
My coming book is precisely about that. Especially, once American policy-makers who saw and experienced war (Ike, George
Marshall's generation) departed things started to roll down hill with Reagan bringing on board a whole collection of neocons.
Unawareness is always dangerous, a complete blackout in relations between two nuclear powers is more than dangerous--it
is completely reckless. Again, the way CW 1.0 is perceived in the current US "elites" it becomes extremely tempting to repeat
it. Electing Hillary was another step in unleashing CW 2.0 by people who have no understanding of what they were doing.
Obama started crushing US-Russian relations before any campaigns were launched and before Trump was even seriously considered
a GOP nominee, let alone a real contender. New confrontation hinged on HRC being elected. In fact, she was one of the major driving
forces behind a serious of geopolitical anti-Russian moves. Visceral Russo-phobia became a feature in HRC campaign long before
any Steele's Dossier. This was a program.
I think the failure of Deciders is nothing new - Fath Ali Shah attacking Russia, or the abject failure of the Deciders in 1914.
Europe is still not where she was in 1890.
I read the post and responses early on, so forgive me if this point has been addressed in the meantime. If the memo information
on non-disclosure of material evidence to the warrant issuing court is accurate, as soon as that information came to the attention
of the authorities (clearly some time ago) there was a duty on them (including the judge(s) who issued the warrants) to have the
matter brought back before the court toot sweet. If that had happened it would surely be in the public domain, so on the assumption
the prosecutors and maybe even the judge didn't see the need to review the matter, even purely on a contempt/ethics basis, the
memo information only seems convincing if the FISA system is a total sham. I really doubt that.
IMO, the bigger problem for American not shying away from wars, or being silent about them , is when your home, your mom and
dad' home, the town you grew up in, are immune and away from the war.
The security and safety of the two oceans, encourages or at least, in an all volunteer military makes it a secondary problem
for regular people, to worry about. As I remember that wasn't the case at the end of VN war when i first landed here. At
that time even though the war was on the other side of the planet and away from homeland, still people, especially young ones
in colleges were paying more attention to the cost of war.
Diana West has uncovered some interesting "Red Threads" (6 part article at dianawest-dot-net) on all the Fusion GPS folks. Seems
ole Russian speaking Nellie Ohr got herself a ham radio license recently. Wonder why she would suddenly need one of those? They
are all Marxists with potential connections back to Russia.
Been there. I am also a latecomer to SST. You have to read the back numbers. How? My IT expertise dates from the dawn of the internet
and was lamentable then but I find Wayback sometimes allows easier searches than the SST search engine. A straight search on google
also allows searches with more than one term. This link -
- gets you to a chronological list and for recent material is sometimes quicker than fiddling around with search engines. "Categories"
on the RH side is useful but then you don't get some very informative comments that cross-refer.
If those sadly elementary procedures fail resort to the nearest infant. There's a blur of fingers on the keyboard and what
you want then usually appears. Never ask them how they did it. They get so fed up when you ask them to explain it again.
"Who is David Habakkuk?" That's a quantum computer sited, from internal evidence you pick up from time to time, somewhere in
the Greater London area. Cross references like you wouldn't believe and over several fields, so maybe he's two quantum computers.
The "Borg"?. Try Wittgenstein. Likely a prog but you can't be choosy these days. Early on in "Philosophical Investigations"
(hope I get this right) he discusses the problem of how you can view as an entity something that has ill-defined or overlapping
boundaries. The "Borg" is that "you know it when you see it" sort of thing. A great merit of this site is that the owner and many
of the contributors know it from inside.
In general you may regard your new found site as a microcosm of the great battle that is raging in the West. It's a battle
between the (probably apocryphal but adequately stated) Roveian view of reality that regards truth as an adjunct to or as a by-product
of ideology and Realpolitik and the objective view of reality as something that is damned difficult to get at, and sometimes impossible,
but that has a truth in it somewhere that is independent of the views and convictions of the observer. It's a battle that's never
going to be won but unless it tilts back closer to common sense it can certainly be lost and the West with it.
Clearly the Labor Party in the UK preferred the USSR to Nazi Germany. (cepting that short interlude where the Soviets signed the
Agreement with Hitler, and the Left Organized Leadership all across Europe, for the most part, lined up with Hitler). But for
the most part, Labor was Left.
Elements (the ones that won out in the end) of the Conservative Party loathed both Hitler and Stalin. An element of the Conservative
Party was sympathetic, but only up to a certain point, with the Nazis. This ended in 1939, sept.
So I don't think it fair, or accurate, to say 'England prefered the Nazis....and even if it not those things, it certainly
not "well known", except to the people who have used the false premise to butter their wounds from supporting Stalin in his Pact
with Hitler. Or are inclined to bash the British in general.
All right, perhaps I should have said "The English Government". Google "Litvinov", you may discover how the English Government
pushed Stalin to make a deal with Hitler to buy USSR time.
Witness the infamous State Department protest memo calling for more war on Syria.
The State Department employees that signed that memo were sure that HRC would win and that their diligent work in pushing the
Deep State agenda would sure be rewarded.
Since entering office, Trump appears to have taken the line that if he gives the Deep State everything it demands, he will
be allowed to remain in office, even if he is not allowed to remain in power.
jonst That's broadly accurate, but specifically Attlee brought the motion of no confidence in Chamberlain, which the conservative
appeasers won but which led to Churchill's opportunity. Attlee was essential in cabinet to Churchill's resistance after the retreat
of the BEF.
FM
What are you doing here? You said you dislike the military. Are you really in the Spanish Basque country? Bilbao maybe? break
- David Habakkuk is a private scholar of the Litvinenko murder and Soviet/Russian politics and intelligence affairs. His surname
comes from Wales where in the 18th (?) Century the ancestral village were all "chapel" and changed their surnames to Old Testament
names. His father was master of one of the Cambridge colleges and David is himself a graduate of Cambridge. pl
The hard, blinding truth:
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/02/05/will-conspiracy-trump-american-democracy-go-unpunished/
"In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it,
and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting
their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations." – Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
This troll showed up recently at b's place doing the same accusations. There is group that is running sacred and pulling out
all the stops in "info ops" side of the spectrum. The damn fools don't or, most probably, won't get thru their thick heads and
even thicker hearts that it is a failed strategy that turns bystanders into their opponents.
Here for your edification is the definitive analysis of the GOP memo by Alexander Mercouris over at The Duran.
And it is a masterpriece - and quite long, possibly his longest analysis of anything so far. He buries the counterarguments
being passed around by the Democratic opposition and the anti-Trump media.
Mercouris writes on legal affairs alongside his foreign policy stuff and he writes with a lawyer's precision. And in this article
he points out that the GOP memo is writter as a legal document - probably by Trey Gowdy - with additional political insertions
by Nunes. So it should properly be referred to as the "GOP memo" or the "Gowdy memo", not the Nunes memo."
Why this is important is that the GOP memo is basically written as a defense lawyer would in contesting a case -- this case
being the FISA warrant application. Which means its orientation is proving failure to disclose relevant and material information
to the FISA court and in some cases rising to the point of contempt of court.
"Seeking transparency and cooperation should not be this challenging," Grassley said in a statement after posting a heavily
redacted version of the criminal referral that he and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina sent to the Justice Department
last month. " The government should not be blotting out information that it admits isn't secret. "
I suppose DOJ/FBI believe that by obstructing, stalling and obfuscating they can buy time and that the Republicans in Congress
will get tired of the games and go home. This seems like a pretty straightforward memo, highlighting the discrepancy between Steele's
court filings and the FBI's version of Steele's discussions with them. Grassley is pointing out that either Steele or the FBI
is lying.
What is interesting is the difference in process and ability between the House & Senate. The House can release their memos
on its own, even if not declassified by the Executive, whereas the Senate requires the Executive to declassify it's memos that
are based on classified documents.
We have not had a self declared communist on SST before although LeaNder in her youth may have come close to that exalted status.
You might want to read the wiki on me and the CV I have posted on the blog to avoid tedious accusations of this or that. I am
thought by some to have some knowledge of the ME so please do not try to lecture me about how much you love the Arabs. I speak
their language and have lived with them for a long time. There are people who write to SST who are pro-Trump and some who are
anti-Trump. I seek a mixture of views so long as personal insult and invective are eschewed. Personally, I do not belong to a
political party and would describe myself as an original intent, strict constructionist.
Trump is the constitutionally and legally elected president of the United States. Your descriptors with regard to him are,
in my opinion, only plausible if seen from the point of view of various kinds of leftist including Marxist-Leninists like you.
You sound very smug and self-satisfied but we will see if you can have an open mind at all. pl
Found him, Ali Babacan XVPM, XFM and M of finance. Yes god forbid, if he is a decendent of Ardisher Babakan and another claimant
to Iranian throne, which CIA and Soros can jump on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Babacan MBA from
Northeestern
I do not believe Trump is a misogynists - he stated publicly that he likes beautiful women. I also do not think he is a racist.
I think he is the first US leader in many decades who has been willing to publicly talk about US problems. For most other US politicians
- they largely live in "the best of all possible worlds".
Colonel - sincere apologies if my comment above disrupted the discussion on a fascinating article.
David Habakkuk - I should say that "Quantum Computer" referred solely to the ability to gather and collate great amounts of
material. It's an ability I admire. On Steele, you are among other things setting out something that is unfamiliar to me though
not to most others here, I imagine, and that is the milieu in which he is or was working as a UK Intelligence operative. That
you have also done in previous articles; it doesn't seem to be a particularly savoury milieu. As far as Steele's US activities
are concerned, from you I'm not getting the picture of a lone operative, all ties with MI6 neatly severed, working solo in the
States on some chance assignment in 2016. I'm getting the picture of someone still very much in the swim and selected because
of that.
The only problem with that second picture is the dossier, or the 30% or so of it - what Comey, I think it was, described as
"salacious and unverified". Surely that's got to be amateur night. Not something that a practised professional working with other
professionals would put his hand to. Does that not support the picture of an ex-operative who's gone off the rails and is fumbling
around unsupervised?
The Steele affair touched a nerve. One is always I suppose aware that IC professionals are getting up to all sorts and it doesn't
seem improbable that "all sorts" includes political stuff and smear campaigns. But it's not heaps of corpses in Syria or farm
boys being sent to certain death in the Ukraine. And even within the UK Intelligence Community and their contractors or whatever
they're called, compared with what our IC people have done in the ME or compared with what one fears Hamish de Bretton Gordon
might have got himself involved in, Christopher Steele's just a choirboy. Nevertheless there's something deeply repellent about
what he did. Whatever your view of Trump there he was, newly elected, obviously wanting to make a go of it, and already faced
with difficulties. Then some chancer throws "Golden Showers" in his face and makes his position, not maybe for the insiders but
for the general public, that bit more untenable.
So from a UK perspective the question of whether Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK becomes important. If he
was truly working solo then that from a UK point of view is regrettable but one of those things. In that case MI6 would just have
to tighten up its controls on what ex-operatives get up to, put out the appropriate disclaimers, and that's the end of it as far
as the UK is concerned. But if Golden Showers and the rest of it was a "Welcome Mr President" from UK IC professionals as a group
then those professionals should be hung drawn and quartered together with whoever set them on.
I've read your article several times now and apart from the fact that much of what you pull together isn't material I'm up
on, it doesn't seem to me that you're definitely coming to one conclusion or the other. There are many more facts to come out
so perhaps this question is premature, but do you think Steele was acting in concert with others in the UK or was he, at least
as far as the UK is concerned, working solo?
Most Iranian females Named Fatima/ Fatimah after prophet' daughter, call themselves Fati, and if they are of aristocrat type,
they are called Bibi Fati Khanam, which is honorable lady Fati and if they are westernized they become Fay or Fifi.
Much of your commentary seems directed to David Habakkuk and PT rather than I. I don't think the FBI would have started to
pay him until he left UK service. pl
Colonel - Further apologies - I should have submitted comment 79 as two items.
Yes, the question about Steele was in response to DH's article. The UK side of the affair is I suppose only a small part of
the question you and your Committee are examining but it's a dubious part however one looks at it. Although it's early days yet
I was hoping DH, with his encyclopaedic knowledge of the UK intelligence scene, might feel able to cast more light on that UK
side.
Cortes - " ... where, exactly, do you expect the great public to look beyond the initial scabrously defamatory storytelling about
the "golden showers"? "
I don't think one can expect the public, at least in the UK, to look very far beyond the initial scandal. The investigations
and enquiries presently under way in the US are complex and are taking place in a different system. This member of the UK public
wouldn't be able to give you a coherent account of those enquiries and I doubt many of my fellows could.
So we have to take on trust, most of us, what we're told. As far as I can tell the underlying theme from the BBC and the media
is generally that Trump is subverting the American Justice system in order to ensure his own misdemeanours aren't investigated.
Some of us take that as gospel. Others of us assume that the politicians and the media are untrustworthy and ignore them. I
doubt many of us go into much more detail than that. Therefore the original story will stick in our minds.
But for some in the UK there are questions in there as well. How come the UK got mixed up in all this? How much did the UK
get mixed up in it?
When I belatedly started looking at the Litvinenko mystery, as a result of a strange email provoked by comments of mine on
SST which arrived in my inbox in March 2007 from someone who turned out to be a key protagonist, it was rather obvious that improvised
and chaotic 'StratCom' operations had been put into place on both the Russian and British sides to cover up what had happened.
A particular interesting feature of those on the British side – in which we now know Christopher Steele must have played
a leading role – were the bizarre gyrations those responsible were going through trying to explain away the extraordinary fact
that when he had broken the story of his poisoning, Litvinenko had pointed the finger of suspicion at his Italian associate Mario
Scaramella.
When I started delving, I came across some very interesting pieces on Scaramella and related matters posted on the 'European
Tribune' website by a Rome-based blogger using the name 'de Gondi' in the period after the story broke.
His actual name is David Loepp, by profession he is an artisan jeweller specialising in ancient and traditional goldsmith techniques,
and I already knew and respected his work from his contributions to the transnational internet investigation into the Niger uranium
forgeries – an earlier MI6 clusterf**ck.
So in May 2008 I posted a longish piece on that site, setting out the problems with the evidence about the Litvinenko case
as I saw them, in the hope of reactivating his interest. This paid off in spades, when he linked to, and translated a key extract
from, the request from Italian prosecutors to use wiretaps of conversations with Senator Paolo Guzzanti in connection with their
prosecution of Scaramella for 'aggravated calumny.'
The request, which up to not so long ago was freely available on the website of the Italian Senate, was denied, but the extensive
summaries of the transcripts provided a lot of material.
The extract from the wiretap request which David Loepp posted, which like Litvinenko's letter containing the claims he and
Yuri Shvets had concocted about Putin using Mogilevich to attempt to supply Al Qaeda with a 'mini nuclear bomb' is dated 1 December
2005, contains key pointers to the conspiracy. It concludes:
'A passage on Simon Moghilevic and an agreement between the camorra to search for nuclear weapons lost during the Cold War
to be consigned to Bin Laden, a revelation made by the Israeli. According to Scaramella the circle closes: camorra, Moghilevic-
Russian mafia- services- nuclear bombs in Naples.'
Subsequent conversations make clear that Scaramella left on 6 December 2005 for Washington, on a trip where he was to meet
Shvets. The summary of a report on this to Guzzanti reads:
'12) conversation that took place on number [omissis] on December 18, 2005, at 9:41:51 n. 1426, containing explicit references
to the authenticity of the declarations of Alexander Litvinenko acquired by Scaramella, to the trustworthiness of the affirmations
made by Scaramella in his reports to the commission and to the meetings Scaramella had with Talik after having denounced them
[presumably Talik and his alleged accomplices]. (They can talk with HEIMS thanks to the help of MILLER. SHVEZ says that he had
been a companion of CARLOS at the academy; SHVEZ has already made declarations and is willing to continue collaboration. Guzzanti
warns that a document in Russian arrived in commission in which the name of SCARAMELLA appears several times, these [sic] say
that directives to the contrary had been given to Litvinenko. Scaramella says that he went to the meeting with TALIK in the company
of two treasury [police] and a cop, Talik spoke of a person from the Ukrainian GRU who would be willing to talk and a strange
Chechen ring in Naples. Assassination attempt against the pope, CASAROLI was a Soviet agent.)'
The summary of a later conversation also refers to 'MILLER':
'conversation that took place on number [omissis] on January 13, 2006, at 11:22:11 n. 2287, containing references to Scaramella's
sources in relation to facts referred in the Commission, the means by which they were obtained by Scaramella from declarations
made abroad, the role of Litvinenko, also on the occasion of declarations made by third parties and the credibility of the news
and theses given by Scaramella to the commission (Scaramella reads a text in English on the relation between the KGB and PRODI.
Guzzanti asks if its credibility can be confirmed and if the taped declarations can be backed up; Scaramella answers that there
were two testimonies, Lou Palumbo and Alexander (Litvinenko), and that the registration made in London at the beginning of the
assignment [Scaramella's?] had been authenticated by a certain BAKER of the FBI. As he translates the text from English, Scaramella
notes that the person testifying does not say he knows Prodi but only that he thinks that Prodi ...; all those who worked for
the person testifying in Scandinavia said that Prodi was "theirs." The affair in Rimini, Bielli is preparing the battle in Rimini.
Meetings with MILLER for the three things that are needed. Polemic about Pollari over the pressure exerted on Gordievski.)'
In the exchanges on my May 2008 post, I mentioned and linked to some extraordinary comments on a crucial article by Edward
Jay Epstein, in which Karon von Gerhke claimed that his sceptical account fitted with what her contacts in the British investigation
had told her. When that July I came across her equally extraordinary claims in response to the BBC's Mark Urban piece of stenography
– which Steele may also have had a hand in organising – I found she was referring to precisely that visit to Washington by Scaramella
which had been described in the wiretap request.
As you can perhaps imagine, the fact that 'Miller' had featured in the conversations with Guzzanti both as a key contact, who
could introduce Scaramella to Aldrich Ames (which is who 'Heims' clearly is), and with whom there had been meetings about 'the
three things that are needed' made me inclined to take seriously what Karon von Gerhke said about his role.
In December 2008, I put up another post on 'European Tribune', putting together the material from David Loepp and that from
Karon von Gerhke – but not discussing the references to 'Miller.' As I had hoped, this led to her getting in touch.
Among the material with which she supplied me, which I in turn supplied to the Solicitor to the Inquest, were covers of faxes
to John Rizzo, then Acting General Counsel of the CIA. From a fax dated 23 October 2005.
'John: See attached email to Chuck Patrizia. Berezovsky alleges he is in possession of a copy of a classified file given to
the CIA by Russia's FSB, which he further alleges the CIA disseminated to British, French, Italian and Israeli intelligence agencies
implicating him in business associations with the Mafia and to ties with terrorist organizations. Yuri Shvets was authorised/directed
by Berezovsky to raise the issue with Bud McFarlane scheduled for Thursday. McFarlane is unaware the issue will be raised with
him.'
From a fax dated 7 November 2005:
'John: I am attaching an email exchange between Yuri Shvets and me re: 1) article he published on his Ukraine website on alleged
sale of nuclear choke to Iran, which I reproached him on as having been planted by Berezovsky and 2 the alleged FSB/CIA document
file that Berezovsky obtained from Scaramella, which Yuri acknowledges in his e-mail to me. Like extracting wisdom teeth to get
him to put anything on paper, especially in an e-mail! [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is the source McFarlane referred Yuri to re:
Berezovsky's visa issue. She proposed meeting Berezovsky in London. Alleged it would take a year to clear up USG issues and even
then could not guarantee him a visa. She too has access to USG intelligence on Berezovsky. Open book.'
From a fax dated 5 December 2005:
'John. From Mario Scaramella to Yuri Shvets to my ears, the DOJ has authorised Mario Scaramella to interview Aldrich Ames with
regard to members of the Italian Intelligence Service agent recruited by Ames for the KGB. Scaramella, as you may recall, is who
gave Boris Berezovsky's aide, a former FSB Colonel [LITVINENKO – DH], that alleged document number to the FSB file that the CIA
disseminated on Berezovsky – a file that Bud McFarlane's "Madam Visa" [NAME REDACTED BY ME – DH] is alleged is totting off to
London for a meeting with Berezovsky, who has agreed to retain her re: his visa issue. Quid pro quo's with Berezovsky and Scaramella
on the CIA agent currently facing kidnapping charges for the rendition of the Muslim cleric? Scott Armstrong has a most telling
file on Scaramella. Not a single redeeming quality.'
In the course of very extensive exchanges with Karon von Gerhke subsequently, we had some rather acute disagreements. It was
unfortunate that her filing was a shambles – a crucial hard disk failed without a backup, and the 'hard copies' appeared to be
in a chaotic state.
However, the only occasion when I can recall having reason to believe that was deliberately lying to me was when David Loepp
unearthed a cache of documentation including the full Italian text of the letter from Litvinenko containing the 'StratCom' designed
to suggest that Putin had attempted to supply a 'mini nuclear bomb' to Al Qaeda. Having been asked to keep this between ourselves
for the time being, Karon insisted on immediately sending it to her contacts in Counter Terrorism Command, and then produced bogus
justifications.
Time and again, moreover, I found that I could confirm statements that she made – see for example the two posts I put up on
the legal battles following the death in February 2008 of Berezovsky's long-term partner Arkadi 'Badri' Patarkatsishvili in June
and July 2009, which were based on careful corroboration of what she told me.
(I should also say that I acquired the greatest respect for her courage.)
And while Owen and his team suppressed all the evidence from her, and almost all of that from David Loepp, which I had I provided
to them, the dossier about Berezovsky is described in a statement made by Litvinenko in Tel Aviv in April 2006, presented in evidence
in the Inquiry.
Other evidence, moreover, strongly inclines me to believe that there were overtures for a 'quid pro quo', purporting to come
from Putin, but that this was a ruse orchestrated by Berezovsky.
Part of the purpose of this would almost certainly have been to supply probably bogus 'evidence' about arms sales in the Yeltsin
years to Iraq, Iran and Syria. Moreover, I think there was an article on the second 'Fifth Element' site run by Shvets about the
supposed sale of a nuclear 'choke' – whatever that is – to Iran.
The likelihood of the involvement of elements in the FBI in these shenanigans seems to quite high, given what has already emerged
about the activities of Levinson. Also relevant may be the fact that the 'declaration' which was part of the attempt to frame
Romano Prodi was authenticated, in London, by 'a certain BAKER of the FBI.')
I know something of spectroscopy. The critical issue here is the provenance of the samples and not the sophistication of the techniques used in the analysis
itself or its instrumentation. The paragraph that you have quoted:
"To figure out signatures based on various synthetic routes and conditions, Chipuk says that the synthetic chemists on his
team will make the same chemical threat agent as many as 2,000 times in an ..." reeks of intellectual intimidation - trying to
brow-beat any skeptic by the size of one's instrument - as it were."
And then there is a little matter of confidence level in any of the analysis - such things are normally based on prior statistics
- which did not and could not exist in this situation.
David, it's no doubt interesting to watch how attention on Victor Ivanov in another deficient inquiry on the British Isles, was
managed in that inquiry. If I may, since he pops up again in the Steele dossier. You take what's available? Is that all there
is to know?
I know its hard to communicate basics if you are deeply into matters. Usually people prefer to opt out. It's getting way too
complicated for them to follow. You made me understand this experience. But isn't this (fake) intelligence continuity "via" Yuri
Svets what connects your, no harm meant I do understand your obsession with the case, with what we deal with now in the Steele
Dossier? Again, one of the most central figures is Ivanov.
Of course later reports in the Steele Dossier go hand in hand with a larger public relations campaign. Creating reality?
Irony alert: as informer/source I would by then know what the other side wants to hear.
By the way, babbling mode, I found your Tom Mangold transcription. It felt it wasn't there on the link you gave. I used the
date, and other search terms. Maybe I am wrong. Haven't looked at what the judge ruled out of the collection. Yes, cozy session/setting.
why California, Kooshy #18? California among other things left this verbal trace, since I once upon time thought a luggage storage
in SF might be free/available now: this is my home, lady.
Tourists from many -- but not all -- foreign nations wishing to enter Kish Free Zone from legal ports are not required to
obtain any visa prior to travel. For those travelers, upon-arrival travel permits are stamped valid for 14 days by Kish officials.
Who are the not all? Can we assume Britain is not one of those? The German link is different. How about the Iranian? or isn't this the Kish we are talking about?
another Ivanov. I struggled with names (...) in Russian crime novels, admittedly. But that's long ago from times Russian crime
and Russian money flows and rogues getting hold of its nuclear material surfaced more often in Europe. 90s
"... North Stream is a problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support
our new client state -- Ukraine. ..."
"... But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of this
alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad ..."
Best bet is for Russia to want to trade with the US and Europe. The gas pipeline will not be enough leverage on Germany
as it provides 9% of their needs.
Yes. And that's against the USA interests (or more correctly the US-led neoliberal empire interests). North Stream is a
problem as the goal is to economically weaken Russia, tie the EU to the USA via energy supplies and support our new client state
-- Ukraine.
As you know, nothing was proven yet in Russiagate (and DNC hacks looks more and more like a false flag operation, especially
this Guccifer 2.0 personality ), but sanctions were already imposed. And when the US government speaks "Russia" in most cases
they mean "China+Russia" ;-). Russia is just a weaker link in this alliance and, as such, it is attacked first. Russiagate is
just yet another pretext after MH17, Magnitsky and such.
To me the current Anti-Russian hysteria is mainly a smokescreen to hide attempt to cement cracks in the façade of the USA neoliberal
society that Trump election revealed (including apparent legitimization of ruling neoliberal elite represented by Hillary).
And a desperate attempt to unite the society using (false) war propaganda which requires demonization of the "enemy of the
people" and neo-McCarthyism.
But this is also related to attempts to prevent/weaken the alliance of Russia and China. As geopolitical consequences of
this alliance for the USA-led neoliberal empire are very bad (for example, military alliance means the end of the USA global
military domination; energy alliance means that is now impossible to impose a blockade on China energy supplies from Middle East
even if Iran is occupied)
In this sense the recent descent into a prolonged fit of vintage Cold War jingoistic paranoia is quite understandable. While,
at the same time, totally abhorrent. My feeling is that unless Russia folds, which is unlikely, the side effects/externalities
of this posture can be very bad for the USA. In any case, the alliance of Russia and China which Obama administration policies
forged spells troubles to the global neoliberal empire dominated by the USA.
Trump rejection of existing forms of neoliberal globalization is one sign that this process already started and some politicians
already are trying to catch the wind and adapt to a "new brave world" by using preemptive adjustments.
Which is why all this Trump-Putin summit hysteria is about.
Neither hard, nor soft neoliberals want any adjustments. They are ready to fight for the US-led neoliberal empire till the
last American (excluding, of course, themselves and their families)
"... Poroshenko's government greatly encouraged glorification of those troops and leaders as fighters for Ukrainian freedom who it insisted sided with Germany only in order to fight against the Russian-controlled Soviet Union. ..."
"... Meanwhile, in the western city of Lviv, nationalists became emboldened enough to celebrate with city authorities' permission the anniversary of the 14th Galician division of the Waffen SS. The anniversary events featured men parading in Nazi SS uniforms on the street. ..."
"... On this subject, Zelensky has said only that he personally does not favor the veneration of people like Bandera, whom he described as "a hero to some Ukrainians." It was a markedly reserved formulation compared to the unreserved endorsement of figures like Bandera by officials under Poroshenko. ..."
"... In some far-right circles, Zelensky's work in a television stationed owned by the Jewish billionaire Igor Kolomoisky was proof of his belonging to a "Jewish cabal." But it made Zelensky popular with other nationalists who appreciated Kolomoisky's reputation as a fiery patriot. ..."
"... Not denying his Jewish ancestry, Zelensky declined to explore it at length in the interview, Levy wrote. On this subject, he replied with typical self-deprecating humor, telling Levy: "The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults." ..."
"... This popularity has allowed Zelensky to both win on an unusually vague platform and distinguish himself from his professional politician rivals, with their proclivity to hyperbole and nationalist slogans. ..."
"... For example, when a reporter asked him how he would deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky reverted to his comic roots, saying "I would speak to him at eye level." It was a reference to him and Putin being at least three inches shorter than Poroshenko, a 6-footer. ..."
"... "We will need to wait and see what kind of president Zelensky turns out to be," said Dolinsky, who was an outspoken critic of some policies of the Poroshenko administration. "What is clear is that Poroshenko's attempt to appeal to nationalism has failed. Ukrainians said they wanted change. And I am feeling optimistic." ..."
Ukrainian comedian and presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky reacts after the announcement of the first exit poll results in
the second round of Ukraine's presidential election at his campaign headquarters in Kiev on April 21, 2019. (Photo by Sergei GAPON
/ AFP) JTA -- Following the victory of Volodymyr Zelensky in Ukraine's presidential elections, the country will become the only one
in the world besides Israel whose president and prime minister are both Jewish.
When Zelensky is sworn in as president, his prime minister -- at least for a while and possibly until the parliamentary elections
scheduled to take place sometime later this year -- will be Volodymyr Groysman, a Jewish politician who was the mayor of the city
of Vinnytsia.
To some of incumbent Petro Poroshenko's critics, the landslide success of the vague campaign by the politically inexperienced
Zelensky, a comedian, was not surprising in light of widespread resentment over the persistence of corruption under Poroshenko, who
was elected in 2014 on a platform that vowed remedial action on exactly that front.
More unusual to some, however, was how Zelensky's appears to have won the elections so decisively in spite of how his Jewish ancestry
– his mother, Rima, is Jewish and he has jokingly referred to this during the campaign -- is well known in Ukraine.
After all, Russia and other critics claim Ukrainian society has a serious anti-Semitism problem and legacy.
"Imagine, a pure-blooded Jew with the appearance of a Sholom Aleichem protagonist wins by a landslide in a country where
the glorification of Nazi criminals is enacted into law," wrote Avigdor Eskin, a Russian-Israeli columnist, in an analysis published
earlier this month by the Regnum news agency.
Eskin in column on Zelensky downplayed allegations of widespread anti-Semitism in Ukraine, attributing much of the attention to
the problem in media and beyond to propaganda by Russia, which is involved in an armed conflict over territory with Ukraine. But
Eskin's statement about Ukrainian laws glorifying Nazi criminals is not inaccurate, and Russia is not alone in criticizing Ukraine
over this and other issues connected to anti-Semitism.
Last year, Israel's government singled out Ukraine as a regional trouble spot in the Israeli government's annual report on anti-Semitism.
"A striking exception in the trend of decrease in anti-Semitic incidents in Eastern Europe was Ukraine, where the number of recorded
anti-Semitic attacks was doubled from last year and surpassed the tally for all the incidents reported throughout the entire region
combined," the report said. The authors of the report counted more than 130 reported anti-Semitic incidents in Ukraine in 2017, they
said.
Also last year, more than 50 US Congress members condemned Ukrainian legislation that they said "glorifies Nazi collaborators"
and therefore goes even further than Poland's controversial laws limiting what can be said about local complicity during the Holocaust.
A letter signed by the US lawmakers stated, "It's particularly troubling that much of the Nazi glorification in Ukraine is government-supported."
It noted ceremonies, gestures and legislation venerating leaders of the UPA and OUN militias, who fought alongside Nazi Germany during
World War II and whose troops participated in atrocities against Jews and other victims.
Poroshenko's government greatly encouraged glorification of those troops and leaders as fighters for Ukrainian freedom who
it insisted sided with Germany only in order to fight against the Russian-controlled Soviet Union.
Several cities across Ukraine named streets for the Nazi-collaborator Stepan Bandera, who prior to Poroshenko's time in office
was openly glorified only in the country's west.
Meanwhile, in the western city of Lviv, nationalists became emboldened enough to celebrate with city authorities' permission
the anniversary of the 14th Galician division of the Waffen SS. The anniversary events featured men parading in Nazi SS uniforms
on the street.
Such sights would have been unthinkable under Viktor Yanukovych, the corrupt president who was deposed in a 2013 revolution that
ended with Poroshenko's election. Careful to alienate neither ethnic Russians in Ukraine nor its powerful neighbor to the east, Yanukovych
was less tolerant of this nationalist phenomenon.
On this subject, Zelensky has said only that he personally does not favor the veneration of people like Bandera, whom he described
as "a hero to some Ukrainians." It was a markedly reserved formulation compared to the unreserved endorsement of figures like Bandera
by officials under Poroshenko.
The presidential campaign itself has featured some anti-Semitism. In some far-right circles, Zelensky's work in a television
stationed owned by the Jewish billionaire Igor Kolomoisky was proof of his belonging to a "Jewish cabal." But it made Zelensky popular
with other nationalists who appreciated Kolomoisky's reputation as a fiery patriot.
Alexander Paliy, an influential political analyst supporting Poroshenko, last month stirred controversy when he wrote on Facebook
that, despite his "respect" for Jews and some Russians, "The president of Ukraine should be Ukrainian and Christian, like the absolute
majority of Ukrainians."
Such rhetoric is shocking to many of Ukraine's 300,000-odd Jews, whose ancestors suffered murderous anti-Semitism in Ukraine for
centuries before, during and decades after the Holocaust.
The French-Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy also referenced Ukrainian Jew's bloody history in an interview with Zelensky,
the 41-year-old son of scientists who lived near major Soviet army bases in Ukraine, that he published earlier this month in the
Le Point weekly.
"His Judaism. It's extraordinary that the possible future president of the country of the Shoah by Bullets and Babi Yar is a self-affirmed
Jew from a family of survivors from Kryvy Rih near Dnipro – the land of pogrom if ever there was one," Levy wrote. "This postmodern
kid, is he new proof that the virus of anti-Semitism has been contained" after the revolution, Levy added.
Not denying his Jewish ancestry, Zelensky declined to explore it at length in the interview, Levy wrote. On this subject,
he replied with typical self-deprecating humor, telling Levy: "The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults."
Zelensky, whose mother, Rima, is Jewish, has ingratiated himself with the Ukrainian public with such jokes as the star of "Servant
of the People" – a primetime television show where he portrays a teacher thrust by an unlikely chain of events to become Ukraine's
president. He announced his candidacy in January, becoming an instant favorite.
This popularity has allowed Zelensky to both win on an unusually vague platform and distinguish himself from his professional
politician rivals, with their proclivity to hyperbole and nationalist slogans.
For example, when a reporter asked him how he would deal with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Zelensky reverted to his comic
roots, saying "I would speak to him at eye level." It was a reference to him and Putin being at least three inches shorter than Poroshenko,
a 6-footer.
Zelensky opaqueness means a high level of uncertainty, Dolinsky, the Jewish community leader, said.
"We will need to wait and see what kind of president Zelensky turns out to be," said Dolinsky, who was an outspoken critic
of some policies of the Poroshenko administration. "What is clear is that Poroshenko's attempt to appeal to nationalism has failed.
Ukrainians said they wanted change. And I am feeling optimistic."
It is clear that like in Trump vs Hillary situation many voted not for Zelensky but against
Poroshenko. Coul be that the same screwed political consultants who ensured Trump victory work in
Ukraine.
Zelensky is that same candidate as Obama, Trump and Macron: he has zero political history. So
you can project into him the expectation of electorate and that trick works. During the campaign,
concerns were raised over his links to the oligarch Ihor Kolomoyskyi (he proposed a tax amnesty
and a 5% flat tax for big
business ).
From Wikipedia: In an interview in December 2018, Zelensky stated that as President he would
try to end the ongoing
War in Donbass by
negotiating with Russia .
[49]
As he considered the leaders of the Donetsk People's Republic and the
Luhansk
People's Republic (DPR and LPR) to be Russia's "puppets", it would "make no sense to speak
with them". [49]
He did not rule out holding a referendum on the issue. [50][49]
In an interview published three days before the 2019 presidential election (on 21 April) Zelensky
stated that he was against granting the Donbass region "special status". [51]
In the interview he also said that if he were elected President he would not sign a law on
amnesty for the militants of the DPR and LPR. [51]
Edited Google translation.
Using phase form cult novel The Golden Calf by Ilya Ilf and
Evgeny Petrov "Children of lieutenant Schmidt" Poroshenko can be called a son of undersecretary
Nuland. He has no space for maneuver, space for negotiation as confrontation with Russia is the
geopolitical goal of neocon establishment which stands behind Victoria Nuland. That's probably
why he lost.
Poroshenko's triad -- "faith, army, language" -- was not born from scratch. Poroshenko
emphasized Ukrainization of all aspects of the country's life. In culture, history, even the
economics. Especially in the economics. All these decisions, orders and sanctions were aimed at
cutting economic ties with Russia under very simple ideological basis -- "Ukrainization uber
alles"
Of course, this was a gesture of despair of the man who came to power via "Washington Obcom"
at a time when Ukraine already lost a part of its territory -- the Crimea and was on the verge
of even greater loss -- Donbass, and maybe the entire South-East.
Poroshenko in this situation enforced blatant confrontation with Russia (instead of
negotiations and search of compromises) as the tool to unite the nation against common enemy.
Having accepted the obvious situation in which he can do nothing to return the lost territories
(and it would be unprofitable for him politically), he pushed the confrontation as if there is
no tomorrow, please his US sponsors. Which resulted is sliding of the standard of living as
lost markets at the East were not compensated by new market at the West. He unleashed personal
war with Russia hoping that it will help to survive him politically and instead it
backfired.
In other words Poroshenko assumed that he can unite Ukranina peole of the base of the his
fight with Russia. A common enemy always unites rulers and people.
However, during the presidential elections, which were held just five years after the
triumph of nationalist ideology on EuroMaydan, it turned out that this the majority of the
population does not share this ideology with Pyotr Alekseevich. And that the sliding standard
of living, rampant inflation and personal corruption of EuroMaydan junta has a greater
weight.
The majority, apparently, doesn't want exclusivity of the Ukrainian nation... They want
European standard of living.
"Yet so desperate are America's neo-liberals, as well as neo-conservatives to topple
democratically twice –elected President Maduro that they are pulling off their bright
smiling wholesome masks that are the public face of globalization to reveal the snarling,
cowardly, crazed little creeps behind them.
"We saw this phenomenon last week when Fareed Zakaria, the Golden Pin-Up Boy of global
liberalism, used his two supposedly most influential platforms – his talk show on CNN
and op-ed page access in The Washington Post to call for the immediate toppling of Maduro and
then for a full superpower confrontation with Russia as well."
The article is actually quite fitting for Easter--Global death of the fealty to the Outlaw
US Empire while those nations seek resurrection and far better prospects with BRI/EAEU.
National leaders unwilling to see the Devilish/Satanic nature of the Outlaw US Empire that's
so evident for all to see must think hard on what they're partnering with. If they continue
their partnership, then their citizenry will do the proper thing and exorcize such leaders
from their body politic. Globally, there's only one entity that's similar in nature to the
Outlaw US Empire--Zionistan--two equally, evilly possessed threats to humanity.
Decades long "image" of London's spy school fall spectacularly apart, apparently it is not
populated with the high IQ, highly educated brass any more, average intelligence however
cannot play on international stage, script is poor, directing mediocre, inconsistencies and
deep holes in story negate logics...
it is time that London joins Washington, hand in hand,
like lowers to seek fortunes elsewhere, the prey is still to be found in oligarchs of
Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Romania and the like places with spineless political caricatures.
Go London go...there is no fortune for you in EU...and by now you stench of your morals and
ethics reaches shores of smallest island on GMT+12 time scale.
It's been a year since the Salisbury incident. We still don't have the investigative
conclusion. We don't know who's responsible and how exactly the Skripals were poisoned or if
they were even poisoned at all. But international relations sure were poisoned. It appears that
our ambassador to Britain, the esteemed Alexander Yakovenko is a spy decorated with military
medals.
Why don't the Russians just lay out the facts of the story as told by the British? The
Brits story is so stupid it makes zero sense... According to the British media Skripal and
his daughter came into contact with "military grade" Novichok nerve agent and both
survived... Even though they said a tiny drop can be fatal... The poor woman who did die was
a homeless drug addict. Supposedly, her boyfriend found a bottle of "perfume" in a "perfume
box" that was in a trash receptacle. The boyfriend retrieved it from the waste bin and gave
it to to the unfortunate woman. She died. According to the British government, Russian spies
put the Novichok in the perfume bottle and planted the bottle in the trash bin so the
boyfriend would find it... Personally, I blame the death of the homeless woman on a "false
flag" operation run by British intelligence. Someone had to die. Why not an "expendable"?
Meanwhile, the Skripals remain under house arrest, cut off from the outside world... And no
one in the British media has asked to talk to them. No one.
The British story about the Skripals is falling apart. First we were told an off duty
police officer found them. Then we are told that an off duty nurse helped the police officer.
Then it was the off duty nurse that found them and was helped by the police officer. Then it
was the daughter of the off duty nurse that found them. Then the off duty nurse turned out to
be Britain's highest ranking female military medic. Then we are told the police officer never
attended them and had been sent to their house the following day. This week the local TV news
channel (BBC Points West) interviewed a woman that said SHE was the first one to find the
Skripals who were alone on the bench frothing at the mouth. She claims she walked over and
was going to phone an ambulance when a female police officer arrived. Then the female police
officer was interviewed and stated she was driving her police van and was the first on scene
after someone had phoned them for help. She also stated that although she didn't know what
was wrong with the Skripals, she thought the vomit on the ground was suspicious and requested
a Hazmat team in full protective gear to remove the vomit.
Maria is an intelligent in a very high level, fiery and articulate. The British political
system would trade at least half of their politicians for one of her.
Vladimir,can you find out if England has just set up Ireland by sending someone there and
having them post flammable packages back to England? The addresses were so vague that they
should have alerted someone in the postal service,especially since England is on high alert
for terror attacks.That says to me that the government knew they were coming.ISIS would claim
responsibility for a silent fart in a packed room.No-one in Ireland has claimed
responsibility for the packages,probably because it's "highly likely" that England has set up
Ireland.If the Brits are found to be behind it,like black people and Israeli's have been
caught out spraying racist graffiti against themselves,Salisbury will be even more
questionable.Elliot Abrams shipped arms in "aid" convoys,so now no-one believes the aid to
Venezuela isn't hiding weapons.What have the filthy Brits been caught doing in recent years
that would make them look guilty like Elliot Abrams?
Maria Zacharova may be simply too decent a human being to realise that the west is run by
a mafia-like cabal that cares not a jot for their own peoples, let alone those in foreign
realms. She looks for logical explanations that might account for actions, but needs to face
the reality that monumental greed and corruption have hollowed out all corridors of power in
western governments. Any semblance of an unbiased independent media went extinct a long time
ago, replaced by well placed operatives from the intelligence agencies, who manage a vast
array of pseudo "journalists". The western puppet regimes are simply useful idiots who obey
instructions, they sell themselves for money and privilege. In other words, traitors to the
people who put them in office. Those public officials and politicians who perhaps had a shred
of integrity get eliminated, or compromised by indiscretions that are held over them, or by
simple intimidation tactics -- the classic "carrot and stick" method. Russians lifted
themselves from the disastrous days of "perestroika" and have restored their nation to near
normalcy. The west may at some point do the same, but it will take a complete collapse of
their present totalitarian regimes to start the healing, if it is to happen. With each
passing day, the zombification of the masses continues, let us hope it has not already got to
the stage where a return to a better world becomes unattainable.
Mrs Spokeswoman really nailed it: US & UK resort to this Dead Cat tactics everyday
now. That was the Case with Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, Syria & now Venezuela. However,
they only manage to bait in their "Allies" (better said Vassals)- and then they fail to
deliver since Syria. Russian Intervention & People waking up to their Lies makes their
Case less and less credible. The paralel Universe they are creating inside their brainwashing
Media is fading away. And that makes them the more dangerous...
It's sad when the only real news people in the US can get is from the Russian media. The
west is financially and morally bankrupt. Thank you Zacharova and Russia for telling the
truth about the evil deeds of the west. Median approval of U.S. leadership across 134
countries and areas stands at a new low of 30%, according to a new Gallup report. Maybe the
tide is finally turning and the evil deeds of the west will be exposed.
I think the underlying cause of all the UK anti-Russia carry ons goes right back to the
damage you did to them during the Crimean War...you bloodied their nose and they have never
forgiven you...silly buggers!
💥💥💥🇦🇺🇦🇺🇦🇺
The Roman-Israeli Brits are born liars, but liars will always fall apart because their
stories never add up. I suspect that the Skripals were never even poisoned but paid by the
British to confirm the lie. The Western politicians have become so corrupt that you cannot
believe a word coming from their lying mouths. Over the decades they have become so confident
that everybody would swallow their reckless lies that they don't even care what they say and
what they do without thinking or caring about the consequences of their actions.
To UK & US: Please show some respect for world ordinary people. We are not stupid. We
are intelligent & also kind compassionate human beings. U're insulting our
intelligence!
I think they have completely lost the plot, relying on stupidity and arrogance to achieve
the least amount possible in the messiest most insane way possible. Seriously, the publicly
state the reality, conduct regime change operations, to get US troops into and country and
then charge 150% of cost of that occupation, protection, straight out of a Mafioso playback,
only their blind arrogance and ignorance, make that kind of public stance possible. Any
government that signs onto it, traitors to their own people, selling out to an foreign
occupation, using Americans forces to sustain autocratic control of that country, those
citizens paying for the bullets Americans will use to kill them, should they try to end the
occupation. The more forces required to quell the public, the more they bill the occupied
country and the MORE PROFITABLE IT BECOMES, utter insanity. Only utterly blind stupidity
could make that public statement possible, beyond something you would expect from a backward
third world country and some despot drunk on power, nope, this from the USA, the not home of
freedom, the not home of justice and clearly the not home of democracy, the best people
killers on the planet, ready to back militarily any despot it puts in charge, at the expense
of their victims. Any sane country would hide this embarrassment, nope the US proud.
Imagine a parallel universe where Maria is the British Prime Minister. The British
politicians are not in her league. She is notionally just a spokeswoman, in Britain we don't
have such free speaking spokesmen. It seems everything said in Britain has to be a lie. So
refreshing and much more intellectually engaging to have the truth. There is the small matter
of appearance, nobody in British politics now or ever is dressed as well as Maria. Or this
show's host. I also like it how Maria has her notes on her phone.
But,
for the past three years, elite Democratic Party partisans, along with their media partners,
force-fed thousands of "Bombshell" headlines to millions of Americans, without ever providing a
lick of evidence. The absence of evidence supporting their outrageous lies coupled with the
results of Mueller's investigation and Barr's conclusions establishes collusion – not
between Russia and the Trump family to influence the 2016 presidential election, but amongst
the Democrats and mass media to delegitimize the
Trump presidency.
The Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said, "We saw cold, hard evidence of the Trump
campaign, and indeed the Trump family, eagerly intending to collude with Russia." Pelosi has
never presented any evidence to support this claim or any of the many other suspect claims the
speaker has made.
The Chairman of House Intelligence Committee Adam Schiff said, "I have evidence of collusion
with Russia and kompromat. It's all in plain sight." Schiff regularly repeated this claim to
the public yet never provided any evidence. He appeared on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC over 150
times and was never called out for repeating these lies over and over again.
Congressman Eric Swalwell on MSNBC said, "Donald Trump is a Russian agent; we have evidence
Trump and his family colluded with Russia." Swalwell has parroted this and many other claims
since 2016. Evidence provided: none.
Congresswoman Maxine Waters stated, "Trump and his buddies are scumbags who are all Putin's
puppets; we will Impeach 45." Waters has been shrieking "Impeach 45" since election day in
2016. Water's reason: she hates Trump and the entire Grand Old Party "GOP."
Many other Democratic members of Washington DC's swamp echoed similar propaganda that
mobilized the Trump "resistance." Their hit list of frequent salacious claims included "Trump
in handcuffs;" "The entire Trump family, frog-marched, and jailed forever;" "Treason, much
worse than Watergate, we have evidence;" "Trump has been a Russian asset since 1987;" "Trump is
a racist, sexist, misogynist, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, anti-Semitic, xenophobic,
white-national, white-supremacist;"
and let's not forget "He's the next Hitler." This "hit list" has become the Democratic party
mantra since Donald trump announced his candidacy in 2015.
Ex-Central Intelligence Agency "CIA" director John Brennan, who just so happens to be on
MSNBC's payroll, also weighed in on Trump. "Trump's behavior is treasonous. He committed high
crimes and misdemeanors. There is evidence that proves many people in Trump's orbit are guilty
of serious crimes and indictments are coming, and soon. Trump committed Treason" The penalty
for committing "treason" in America, death. Brennan never provided any evidence. Brennan's lies
have destroyed the CIA's reputation and credibility.
Viewers of CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and ABC were inundated with purposeful misrepresentations that
continuously promised faithful audiences that Mueller and his team had "mountains" of evidence
of Trump's collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice. Day after day, these media outlets
repeated how Mueller would deliver an indictment of President Trump, who had committed "treason
and high crimes and misdemeanors" that would lead to his impeachment and jail time. The corrupt
media represented that Trump's family members, who were also guilty of similar crimes, would be
sent to prison. All the above were outrageous lies.
In fact, the only convictions that arose through the Mueller investigation were low-level
process crimes which had NOTHING to do with Trump. $25 million wasted, bravo! These salacious
accusations proved to be part of an elaborate scheme to delegitimize the sitting president and
his administration in order to remove him from office. However, the Democrats and mass media
could not have done it without FBI Director James Comey's exploitation of the United States
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
We know the whole coup d'état was facilitated by FBI Director James Comey's October 20,
2016 submission of a 66-page application to the FISA court.
Comey and Sally Quillian Yates, the Deputy Attorney General of the United States, signed
this application. Judge Rosemary M. Collyer, the presiding judge of the secret FISA court,
granted an order that led to our intelligence agencies spying on the presidential campaign of
Donald J. Trump. The FBI ran a counter-intelligence investigation named "Crossfire Hurricane"
on Trump's campaign.
Comey's FISA application was largely based on information contained in the Steele dossier, a
dossier written by a disgraced MI6 agent named Christopher Steele. The dossier made wild,
unsubstantiated claims and was financed by the campaign of Hillary Clinton and the Democratic
National Committee via Clinton's law firm Perkins Coie through a company named Fusion GPS.
In a meeting with President Trump in early January 2017, James Comey told President Trump
about the existence of the Steele dossier and told him not to worry about it. Comey stated that
the dossier's contents were salacious, unverified, and untrue. Apparently, James Comey knew,
yet never disclosed to Judge Collyer, that the Steele dossier was garbage prepared by political
partisans that did not want Trump to be
elected and financed by Hillary Clinton's campaign. Three days after Comey's meeting with Trump
the entire Steele dossier was "leaked" to numerous media sources and published in it's entirety
on Buzzfeed with no mention that none of the claims in the Steele dossier had been
verified.
Comey signed and submitted two more FISA applications, one in Jan 2017, and another in April
2017 which relied upon the Steele dossier. FISA Judge Michael W. Mosman signed the January
renewal, and Judge Anne C. Conway signed the April renewal.
Apparently, Comey never disclosed, to any of the FISA judges, that the Steele dossier was:
paid for by the Hillary Clinton campaign, and the DNC, or that the Department of Justice's
Bruce Ohr had warned on the credibility of the unverified Steele Dossier, or that Bruce Ohr's
wife worked for Fusion GPS and helped back door the Steele dossier into the FBI, or that the
dossier was filled with baseless allegations, lies, and
propaganda. It appears that four secret court, FISA, judges were lied to in order to kick- off
the biggest scandal in history.
FBI's Deputy Director Andrew McCabe recently stated during Congressional testimony that
"without the Steele dossier, the FISA warrants would have never been granted." Recent reports
suggest that it was ex-CIA director John Brennan who insisted that the Steele dossier be
included in the intelligence report used to request the FISA warrants. Senator Rand Paul has
issued a call that Brennan be called to testify under oath in Congress.
The entire Mueller investigation would have never been possible without this fake dossier
being used to illegally obtain FISA warrants by the omission of material facts within the
original FISA application and the three subsequent renewal applications.
Why is Judge Collyer not looking into these and other material misrepresentations used in
the FISA application to obtain search warrants to spy on Americans and on a presidential
campaign by its opposition and enabled by a weaponized Obama Department of Justice? The silence
of secret FISA court Judges Mosman, Conway, and Dearie is frightening. America's secret courts
should be abolished.
Prior to the war Bolshevism was so reviled the West refused Russia's pleas to form an
alliance to oppose Hitler, in particular to ward off what they knew would be Hitler's assault
on Czechoslovakia. Stalin rebuffed at every attempt, finally to buy time for Russia to
prepare for what he knew would be Hitler coming for them, formed the non-aggression pact.
The Russians with the material aid from Churchill did a merciless amount of the heavy
lifting that kept Hitler from focusing on crossing the Channel. Churchill was willing to
float supply ships in British blood to aid the Russians any way possible knowing full well if
Russia collapsed to the German onslaught Britain would be next.
Russia even today should be our best friend in the world. The reason I hated Hillary
Clinton.
Personally, I was especially shocked when Prince Charles casually compared Putin to
Hitler. Oh, and he is not supposed to succumb to his own propaganda.
The fact is that the British, unlike the Americans, really suffered greatly from the Nazis
and fought with them in an almost hopeless situation. Moreover, we all should be grateful to
them for the fact that in the 40s they had already declared Hitler's Germany an infernal
force, and a war with it a Christian, that is, Holy War.
But after the war, something happened, and in all countries of the anti-Hitler coalition
there were pro-Nazi coups. And this wave rolled exactly from England, and not from Trumen's
America.
Personally, I think that the British, being completely devastated by the war, feeling the
iron fingers of American business at their throats, made a deal with the devil and allowed
Bormann's money, which is so well depicted in "17 Moments of Spring", to be legalized in
transnational corporations.
No, of course the role of Truman, Harriman, Thyssen, Dulles and Prescott Bush was very
great and they did at some point make state policy their conviction that the United States
fought on the wrong side during WWII.
But they were opposed by the American army, which fought against the Nazis in Western
Europe and saw Dachau concentration camp with their own eyes. And in 1952, the Truman
Doctrine went into oblivion.
Especially American soldiers did not like the fact that Truman and Dulles created an army
of German soldiers in Denmark, which they wanted to throw against the Soviet Army in Germany.
They were completely confident about the outcome of this battle, given the combat experience
of the Soviet Army, and after the instant defeat of the Kwantung Army and the Korean War, it
became clear to the American military that, despite a certain number of atomic bombs, the
American army would not even be able to stop the Alaskan invasion army of General
Oleshev.
And Truman withdrew his candidacy, and General Eisenhower, becoming President of the
United States, for a while stopped the part of the Democratic Party that supported Democratic
President Truman and Republican Senator McCarthy, a great friend of the Kennedy family. And
it was here that Great Britain entered the game, scared to death by Truman, who during this
time quite clearly showed how he appreciates the "English world".
For several years, a wave of reprisals against the people who played the most prominent
role in the defeat of Hitler's Germany swept the world.
First they dealt with Turing, whose value is difficult to overestimate, then General
Bradley, holder of the orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov, was dismissed from the post of chairman
of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff and soon resigned, soon someone surrendered
Burgess, coordinator of the Cambridge Five, in Israel, they drowned Altalena and dealt with
Irgun, which consists entirely of former prisoners of concentration camps, and in Poland
begins the reprisal of the Stalinist Marshal of the Soviet Union Konstantin Rokossovsky.
So the English monarchy has its skeletons in the closet, in which it is afraid to admit
even to itself, and over time it turned into a cognitive dissonance (if not psychosis)
between the memory of its participation in the "Holy War", sincere hatred for Hitler's
Germany and the need to cooperate with Adenauer and his "economic miracle", clearly financed
not only by the Marshall Plan, but also by Bormann's money.
"... What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years after he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book, Strategic Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition (decline?) without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos. ..."
"... Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future. ..."
"... Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of US decline and the final collapse of the liberal world order. ..."
"... "The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today" Thanks for the laugh. It was over with the passing of the 1947 National Security Act. ..."
"... It is not a coincidence that this anti-Russian climate of hatred started back when Putin showed up the left's president, Barack Obama, over Libya. ..."
"... political globalists who wanted a liberal world order but didn't think about the economic side of things much and so let their economic policy be decided by the central banking mafia ..."
"... You should think more about US being aced. Syria was a masterstroke, but so was Ukraine, and not for Russia. Russia lost an extremely valuable ally and a trully brother nation, maybe forever. Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia. ..."
"... You definitely missed last 25 years of Russian-Ukrainian relations. You also, evidently, have very vague understanding of the Ukrainian inner dynamics. I am not sure we can speak of "brother nation" because Ukraine as political nation (and she did form as such by early 2000s) can not be "brother nation" to Russia by definition. In fact, being anti-Russia is the only natural state of Ukrainian political nation ..."
"... As it turned out, Russia is doing just fine without Ukraine. In a long run, if what is called Ukraine today decides to commit suicide by the cop, she sure can try to place US military bases East of Dniepr and we will observe a rather peculiar case of fireworks. ..."
"... It would have been a total catastrophe for Russia had she lost Sebastopol; but so long as Crimea is safely in Moscow's hands, Ukraine is not make-or-break. Russia's global position now, in fact, is even stronger than it was in 2014. ..."
"... Western corporations have been competing with each other (for decades now) to offshore everything to reduce costs /increase profits. The idea is to sell at Western prices and produce at Eastern prices, and this arbitrage has reached crazy proportions. ..."
"... Jews also hate nationalism since it threatens their (minority) power and highlights dual loyalty (or no loyalty) so the Zio-Glob are on one side, and the public on the other, with little common ground between them. ..."
"... At least Brzezinski became well aware of this shift. So many of America's neo-conservatives have largely failed in expressing this defeat. Between Brzezinski and Boot, & the Others, they've all turned out to be fanatic ideologues. ..."
The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today, is rapidly collapsing. The center of gravity is
shifting from west to east where China and India are experiencing explosive growth and where a revitalized Russia has restored its
former stature as a credible global superpower. These developments, coupled with America's imperial overreach and chronic economic
stagnation, have severely hampered US ability to shape events or to successfully pursue its own strategic objectives. As Washington's
grip on global affairs continues to loosen and more countries reject the western development model, the current order will progressively
weaken clearing the way for a multipolar world badly in need of a new security architecture. Western elites, who are unable to accept
this new dynamic, continue to issue frenzied statements expressing their fear of a future in which the United States no longer dictates
global policy.
At the 2019 Munich Security Conference, Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, underscored many of these same themes. Here's an excerpt
from his presentation:
"The whole liberal world order appears to be falling apart – nothing is as it once was Not only do war and violence play a
more prominent role again: a new great power confrontation looms at the horizon. In contrast to the early 1990s, liberal democracy
and the principle of open markets are no longer uncontested .
In this international environment, the risk of an inter-state war between great and middle powers has clearly increased .What
we had been observing in many places around the world was a dramatic increase in brinkmanship, that is, highly risky actions on
the abyss – the abyss of war .
No matter where you look, there are countless conflicts and crises the core pieces of the international order are breaking
apart, without it being clear whether anyone can pick them up – or even wants to. ("Who will pick up the pieces?",
Munich Security Conference )
Ischinger is not alone in his desperation nor are his feelings limited to elites and intellectuals. By now, most people are familiar
with the demonstrations that have rocked Paris, the political cage-match that is tearing apart England (Brexit), the rise of anti-immigrant
right-wing groups that have sprung up across Europe, and the surprising rejection of the front-runner candidate in the 2016 presidential
elections in the US. Everywhere the establishment and their neoliberal policies are being rejected by the masses of working people
who have only recently begun to wreak havoc on a system that has ignored them for more than 30 years. Trump's public approval ratings
have improved, not because he has "drained the swamp" as he promised, but because he is still seen as a Washington outsider despised
by the political class, the foreign policy establishment and the media. His credibility rests on the fact that he is hated by the
coalition of elites who working people now regard as their sworn enemy.
The president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, Richard Haass, summed up his views on the "weakening of the liberal
world order" in an article that appeared on the CFR's website. Here's what he said:
"Attempts to build global frameworks are failing. Protectionism is on the rise; the latest round of global trade talks never
came to fruition. .At the same time, great power rivalry is returning
There are several reasons why all this is happening, and why now. The rise of populism is in part a response to stagnating
incomes and job loss, owing mostly to new technologies but widely attributed to imports and immigrants. Nationalism is a tool
increasingly used by leaders to bolster their authority, especially amid difficult economic and political conditions .
But the weakening of the liberal world order is due, more than anything else, to the changed attitude of the U.S. Under President
Donald Trump, the US decided against joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership and to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. It
has threatened to leave the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Iran nuclear deal. It has unilaterally introduced steel
and aluminum tariffs, relying on a justification (national security) that others could use, in the process placing the world at
risk of a trade war .America First" and the liberal world order seem incompatible." ("Liberal World Order, R.I.P.", Richard Haass,
CFR )
What Haass is saying is that the cure for globalisation is more globalization, that the greatest threat to the liberal world order
is preventing the behemoth corporations from getting more of what they want; more self-aggrandizing trade agreements, more offshoring
of businesses, more outsourcing of jobs, more labor arbitrage, and more privatization of public assets and critical resources. Trade
liberalization is not liberalization, it does not strengthen democracy or create an environment where human rights, civil liberties
and the rule of law are respected. It's a policy that focuses almost-exclusively on the free movement of capital in order to enrich
wealthy shareholders and fatten the bottom line. The sporadic uprisings around the world– Brexit, yellow vests, emergent right wing
groups– can all trace their roots back to these one-sided, corporate-friendly trade deals that have precipitated the steady slide
in living standards, the shrinking of incomes, and the curtailing of crucial benefits for the great mass of working people across
the US and Europe. President Trump is not responsible for the outbreak of populism and social unrest, he is merely an expression
of the peoples rage. Trump's presidential triumph was a clear rejection of the thoroughly-rigged elitist system that continues to
transfer the bulk of the nation's wealth to tiniest layer of people at the top.
Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future.
As we noted earlier, the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, which is the one incontrovertible fact that cannot be
denied. Washington's brief unipolar moment –following the breakup of the Soviet Union in December, 1991 -- has already passed and
new centers of industrial and financial power are gaining pace and gradually overtaking the US in areas that are vital to America's
primacy. This rapidly changing economic environment is accompanied by widespread social discontent, seething class-based resentment,
and ever-more radical forms of political expression. The liberal order is collapsing, not because the values espoused in the 60s
and 70s have lost their appeal, but because inequality is widening, the political system has become unresponsive to the demands of
the people, and because US can no longer arbitrarily impose its will on the world.
Globalization has fueled the rise of populism, it has helped to exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions, and it is largely responsible
for the hollowing out of America's industrial core. Haass's antidote would only throw more gas on the fire and hasten the day when
liberals and conservatives form into rival camps and join in a bloody battle to the end. Someone has to stop the madness before the
country descends into a second Civil War.
What Haass fails to discuss, is Washington's perverse reliance on force to preserve the liberal world order, after all, it's not
like the US assumed its current dominant role by merely competing more effectively in global markets. Oh, no. Behind the silk glove
lies the iron fist, which has been used in over 50 regime change operations since the end of WW2. The US has over 800 military bases
scattered across the planet and has laid to waste one country after the other in successive interventions, invasions and occupations
for as long as anyone can remember. This penchant for violence has been sharply criticized by other members of the United Nations,
but only Russia has had the courage to openly oppose Washington where it really counts, on the battlefield.
Russia is presently engaged in military operations that have either prevented Washington from achieving its strategic objectives
(like Ukraine) or rolled back Washington's proxy-war in Syria. Naturally, liberal elites like Haass feel threatened by these developments
since they are accustomed to a situation in which 'the world is their oyster'. But, alas, oysters have been removed from the menu,
and the United States is going to have to make the adjustment or risk a third world war.
What Russian President Vladimir Putin objects to, is Washington's unilateralism, the cavalier breaking of international law to
pursue its own imperial ambitions. Ironically, Putin has become the greatest defender of the international system and, in particular,
the United Nations which is a point he drove home in his presentation at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly in New York
on September 28, 2015, just two days before Russian warplanes began their bombing missions in Syria. Here's part of what he said:
"The United Nations is unique in terms of legitimacy, representation and universality .We consider any attempt to undermine
the legitimacy of the United Nations as extremely dangerous. It may result in the collapse of the entire architecture of international
relations, leaving no rules except the rule of force. The world will be dominated by selfishness rather than collective effort,
by dictate rather than equality and liberty, and instead of truly sovereign nations we will have colonies controlled from outside."(Russian
President Vladimir Putin at the 70th session of the
UN General Assembly )
Putin's speech, followed by the launching of the Russian operation in Syria, was a clear warning to the foreign policy establishment
that they would no longer be allowed to topple governments and destroy countries with impunity. Just as Putin was willing to put
Russian military personnel at risk in Syria, so too, he will probably put them at risk in Venezuela, Lebanon, Ukraine and other locations
where they might be needed. And while Russia does not have anywhere near the raw power of the US military, Putin seems to be saying
that he will put his troops in the line of fire to defend international law and the sovereignty of nations. Here's Putin again:
"We all know that after the end of the Cold War the world was left with one center of dominance, and those who found themselves
at the top of the pyramid were tempted to think that, since they are so powerful and exceptional, they know best what needs to
be done and thus they don't need to reckon with the UN, which, instead of rubber-stamping the decisions they need, often stands
in their way .
We should all remember the lessons of the past. For example, we remember examples from our Soviet past, when the Soviet Union
exported social experiments, pushing for changes in other countries for ideological reasons, and this often led to tragic consequences
and caused degradation instead of progress.
It seems, however, that instead of learning from other people's mistakes, some prefer to repeat them and continue to export
revolutions, only now these are "democratic" revolutions. Just look at the situation in the Middle East and Northern Africa already
mentioned by the previous speaker. Instead of bringing about reforms, aggressive intervention indiscriminately destroyed government
institutions and the local way of life. Instead of democracy and progress, there is now violence, poverty, social disasters and
total disregard for human rights, including even the right to life.
I'm urged to ask those who created this situation: do you at least realize now what you've done?" (Russian President Vladimir
Putin at the 70th session of the UN General Assembly)
Here Putin openly challenges the concept of a 'liberal world order' which in fact is a sobriquet used to conceal Washington's
relentless plundering of the planet. There's nothing liberal about toppling regimes and plunging millions of people into anarchy,
poverty and desperation. Putin is simply trying to communicate to US leaders that the world is changing, that nations in Asia are
gaining strength and momentum, and that Washington will have to abandon the idea that any constraint on its behavior is a threat
to its national security interests.
Former national security advisor to Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, appears to agree on this point and suggests that the US
begin to rethink its approach to foreign policy now that the world has fundamentally changed and other countries are demanding a
bigger place at the table.
What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years after
he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book, Strategic
Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition (decline?)
without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos. Here's a short excerpt from an article
he wrote in 2016 for the American Interest titled "Toward a Global Realignment":
"The fact is that there has never been a truly "dominant" global power until the emergence of America on the world scene .That
era is now ending .As its era of global dominance ends, the United States needs to take the lead in realigning the global power
architecture .The United States is still the world's politically, economically, and militarily most powerful entity but, given
complex geopolitical shifts in regional balances, it is no longer the globally imperial power.
America can only be effective in dealing with the current Middle Eastern violence if it forges a coalition that involves, in
varying degrees, also Russia and China .
A constructive U.S. policy must be patiently guided by a long-range vision. It must seek outcomes that promote the gradual
realization in Russia that its only place as an influential world power is ultimately within Europe. China's increasing role in
the Middle East should reflect the reciprocal American and Chinese realization that a growing U.S.-PRC partnership in coping with
the Middle Eastern crisis is an historically significant test of their ability to shape and enhance together wider global stability.
The alternative to a constructive vision, and especially the quest for a one-sided militarily and ideologically imposed outcome,
can only result in prolonged and self-destructive futility.
Since the next twenty years may well be the last phase of the more traditional and familiar political alignments with which
we have grown comfortable, the response needs to be shaped now . And that accommodation has to be based on a strategic vision
that recognizes the urgent need for a new geopolitical framework." ("Toward a Global Realignment", Zbigniew Brzezinski,
The American Interest
)
This strikes me as a particularly well-reasoned and insightful article. It shows that Brzezinski understood that the world had
changed, that power had shifted eastward, and that the only path forward for America was cooperation, accommodation, integration
and partnership. Tragically, there is no base of support for these ideas on Capital Hill, the White House or among the U.S. foreign
policy establishment. The entire political class and their allies in the media unanimously support a policy of belligerence, confrontation
and war. The United States will not prevail in a confrontation with Russia and China any more than it will be able to turn back the
clock to the post war era when America, the Superpower, reigned supreme. Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of US decline
and the final collapse of the liberal world order.
Zbig has fially admitted that America needs to become friends with Russia. We can not handle the world alone,but with Russia we
would have 90% of the worlds nuclear weapons and vast geopolitical ifluence. Americans do hot have anything against Russia. It
is the neocon cabal that is fostering conflict . Thet just can not get over the fact that they tried and failed to take control
of Russia. They are trying to do so to the u.S.A.
"2. Russia should become the real leader of the new process. (It has already become it but not yet aware of the fact.) The
West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible only through
Russia. Only Russia in an alliance with the Muslim world can keep China in check without conflicts, helping it find its new place
in the world as another super-power.
3. Leaders of Russia, America, Israel, Europe, Iran, India, and international financial capitals must initiate a dialogue over
leaving this crisis behind and preventing events like those which swept America on September 11.
A time of change is upon us, and it's futile to wish we were living in some other era. We have to change ourselves and change
the world "
Novaya Gazeta
No. 75 October 2001
THE THIRD FORCE OF WORLD WAR III
[MORE]
"THE AMERICANS DON'T REALIZE IT YET, BUT CHINA HAS WRITTEN ITS OWN SCRIPT FOR SQUEEZING THE UNITED STATES OFF THE WORLD STAGE.
CHINA SUPPORTS ACTIONS OF THE WEST AIMED AT MUTUALLY ASSURED DESTRUCTION OF RUSSIA AND THE MUSLIM WORLD. THE WEST, RUSSIA, ISRAEL,
AND THE MUSLIM WORLD MUST WORK TOGETHER.
THE WESTERN SCRIPT
[ ]
"Using techniques of manipulating public opinion, the West is trying to establish the illusion of a global forces with the
fascist- like ideology of Wahhabi fundamentalism. As far as the West is concerned, Wahhabi and Islam are the same thing. It is
because of this that the essential terrorism of Wahhabi ideas is being formulated so simply for public consumption: all Muslims
are terrorists by nature.
The preliminary objective of brainwashing (Islam is the basis of terrorism) is thus achieved. "
"This script becomes possible when we assume that some Western elites and secret services made a kind of covert pact with this
still-unknown Player."
THE CHINESE SCRIPT
[ ]
" Throw a great deal of dollars into the market all at once, and the dollar will crash. A conflict with Taiwan may follow.
It will be a conflict waged with American money, with American weapons, investment, and high technology. Add the nuclear factor
here. Suffice it to recall the recent scandal when Chinese intelligence obtained all major nuclear secrets of the United States.
"
What most people don't realize about Brzezinski, is that he dramatically changed his views on global hegemony a few years
after he published his 1997 masterpiece The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperative. In his 2012 book,
Strategic Vision, Brzezinski recommended a more thoughtful and cooperative approach that would ease America's unavoidable transition
(decline?) without creating a power vacuum that could lead to global chaos.
So somebody put forth a deluded crack-pot idea that got great traction and made a lot of people very rich and powerful who
want to stay that way, but the originator now says he was wrong and we should change. Yeah, those rich and powerful people just
have to agree to give up some of that. How likely is that without a major catastrophe forcing them, given what we know about human
nature?
Maybe the lesson is to have realistic ideas about foreign policy and relations in the future. Did anybody seriously believe
countries with long histories like Russia and China were always going to be happy playing second fiddle to the US?
Haass's critique illustrates the level of denial among elites who are now gripped by fear of an uncertain future.
True, but their problem is compounded with their fear which is anchored in the past, whose real history blows all current,
being discredited as I type this, narratives out of the water. This, plus most of them, Haas and CFR included, do not operate
with actual facts and data.
"The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world"
Unfortunately, this is probably not entirely feasible considering the United States's inappropriately close relationship to
Israel and the American government's radical stance of forcing LGBTQ issues; as San Jose proves, these people aren't simply going
to leave you alone, but rather they will make you conform under threat. Probably what will happen in the future is a Japan-EU-Russia
alliance that makes peace with the Middle East and contains the Chinese military as much as possible.
The US could very well find itself cut out at some point. It has already proved itself both reckless and incompetent
with its handling of Iran, Israel, and Venezuela. Also, I suspect that neither ordinary EU citizens nor Asians will want to be
ruled over by a group of POC racists who discriminate against Europeans, Asian males, and traditional families.
I think the rest of the world should begin considering alternate defense arrangements. The US cannot afford to defend their
interests forever with an aging, shrinking white Caucasian population and a growing, less capable and less conscientious replacement
population less willing to die in imperial wars. Increasingly, the US will be less capable of defending others in the Pacific
from China as it Affirmative Actions its air force; Obama was trying to do that throughout the whole of the American military
and accomplished his objective by lowering standards. I think this process should continue in the future with disastrous results.
In the future, Asia will try to make peace with China before they get too strong and China will reciprocate with generous territorial
concessions in exchange for neutrality. For example, the Chinese may relinquish territorial claims in the Philippines in exchange
for a treaty stating that the Philippines will not base the American military or buy weapons from them, but they would be allowed
to buy weapons from third parties such as the Russians. A series of moves like this might dramatically weaken the American position
in the region, allowing China to jumpskip to Africa and the Middle East more effectively. Perhaps a similar deal will be worked
out with Taiwan: autonomy and a peace treaty in exchange for no weapon purchases or defense arrangements with the US, but Taiwan
could still buy Russian weapons.
"Zbig has fially admitted that America needs to become friends with Russia."
As Karlin has noted, I don't see this happening in the near future, not with the insane levels of anti-Russian hate coming
from the American left, some of which is just pure racial hatred of whites projected onto Russians.
All this is irrelevant in the long run. America will be a third-world country in 50 years or less. Imagine a government filled
with AOCs, Omars, and Bookers, with a constituency that matches. Brazil of the North isn't going to be a superpower. We can look
on that as a silver lining.
The United States will not prevail in a confrontation with Russia and China any more than it will be able to turn back the
clock to the post war era when America, the Superpower, reigned supreme. Confrontation will only accelerate the pace of
US decline and the final collapse of the liberal world order.
Very dangerous times are ahead. A declining superpower in late empire mode may make risky decisions. I wonder if America will
have a Suez event in the upcoming decade? The 1956 Suez crisis heralded the rise of a new superpower and the eclipse of another
one.
"The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today" Thanks for the laugh. It was over with the
passing of the 1947 National Security Act.
@Walt I don't know how
fucked up you have to be to use "We" to refer to the murderous US State but you should seek competent professional psychiatric
assistance, Soon.
The attitudes and political beliefs of your average Russian are very similar to many Red State conservatives, as has been noted
on this webzine at least once in recent memory (and with an accompanying political map with similarities noted between American
Blue and Red States compared with Russia). The American left projects its racist hate onto the Russians in response to those similarities.
It is not a coincidence that this anti-Russian climate of hatred started back when Putin showed up the left's president,
Barack Obama, over Libya.
That also explains the left's hypocrisy on war: their tribe's racial leader, Obama, wanted war in Libya, so war is now good;
Russia opposed it and later prevented war in Syria (which Obama wanted), so the Russians are now the bad guys. It's purely a matter
of tribal affiliation and racial hate on the part of the American left.
I wonder if America will have a Suez event in the upcoming decade?
She already had it and one is unfolding right this moment. For an empire of this size and influence, granted declining dramatically,
it takes a sequence of events. "Suez Moment" for Britain happened during WW II, the actual Suez crisis was merely a nominal conclusion
to British Empire dying in WW II.
We'll see in the coming years if we get a crisis that lays it all bare.
Ongoing real Revolution in Military Affairs and US losing conventional (and nuclear) arms race is what unfolds right now. Realistically,
Putin's March 1, 2018 Speech to Federal Assembly was also one of these moments -- as I said, the process is protracted and at
each of its phases US geopolitical cards have been aced and trumped, NO pun intended.
when i read these people i get the impression there are two camps:
1) political globalists who wanted a liberal world order but didn't think about the economic side of things much and so
let their economic policy be decided by the central banking mafia
and
2) The central banking mafia who understood globalization was simply their criminal looting of the West backed
up by a big military who could be rented out from a corrupted political class.
it seems the first group still don't understand that it was the banking mafia's neoliberal economics
– currency debasement
– usury
– cheap labor
that destroyed their dream.
the same three things have been destroying civilizations for 3000 years.
The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible
only through Russia.
i think this is short-sighted. The global north needs to combine to contain the global south or the central banking mafia will
eventually use them to destroy the north's genetic advantages and all our descendants will end up as 85 IQ slave-cattle.
The liberal world order, which lasted from the end of World War 2 until today, is rapidly collapsing.
Really? Where? US is still in Middle East and now threatens war with Iran. Venezuela is on the brink. Japan and EU are the
ever loyal dogs of the US. If they've been upset with Trump, it's not because he wants to exert more influence but less.
the actual Suez crisis was merely a nominal conclusion to British Empire dying in WW II
The Atlantic charter signed aboard the HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland on August 14, 1941 by FDR and Churchill
was probably the moment when the old British empire traded places with the new global power, the United States. So you are correct
in your analysis.
@MarkinLA This is not
really about history, it is about power. Many of the US allies have much longer histories, but that does not help them in the
power department. China and Russia have enough power to stand only on their own two feet.
@Andrei MartyanovYou should think more about US being aced. Syria was a masterstroke, but so was Ukraine, and not for Russia. Russia lost an
extremely valuable ally and a trully brother nation, maybe forever. Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for
Russia.
The West and Israel need a strategic alliance with the Muslim world more than anything else, and this alliance is possible
only through Russia.
Sberbank calls on UAE businesses to invest in Russia, offers help
"According to the statement, the Gulf countries' total capital available for investment is estimated at more than $3.2 trillion
but only "a small part" of capital earmarked for investing in Russia has actually gone into Russia-based projects."
"The Russian visitors set out Sberbank's technology strategy and described achievements by the Moscow-based lender in artificial
intelligence development.
They also "pointed out interest in Islamic finance", the statement said."
Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia.
You definitely missed last 25 years of Russian-Ukrainian relations. You also, evidently, have very vague understanding
of the Ukrainian inner dynamics. I am not sure we can speak of "brother nation" because Ukraine as political nation (and she did
form as such by early 2000s) can not be "brother nation" to Russia by definition. In fact, being anti-Russia is the only natural
state of Ukrainian political nation.
There is another twist to all this–these are Russians now, who do not want to deal with Ukraine in any of her manifestations
and, to rub the salt into the wound, Zbig was delusional when thought that denying Ukraine to Russia would spell the end of Russian
"imperialism". As it turned out, Russia is doing just fine without Ukraine. In a long run, if what is called Ukraine today
decides to commit suicide by the cop, she sure can try to place US military bases East of Dniepr and we will observe a rather
peculiar case of fireworks.
The Atlantic charter signed aboard the HMS Prince of Wales,in Placentia Bay,Newfoundland on August 14, 1941 by FDR and Churchill
was probably the moment when the old British empire traded places with the new global power, the United States.
This happened in 1941 at secret ABC (America-Britain-Canada) consultations where Lord Halifax was trying to recruit American
resources for defense of Britain's imperial interests. US "politely" declined. Big Three became Big Two and a Half at 1943 Tehran
Conference at which Stalin was very specific that USSR wanted American as a head of Overlord.
All this pursuant to a strategic scandal between US and British Empire at Casablanca where General Stanley Embick of Marshall's
OPD accused Britain in his memorandum of avoiding fighting main Nazi forces due to Britain's imperial interests. Churchill knew
the significance of Tehran and suffered non-stop bouts of jealousy and suspicion towards FDR and Stalin.
I am sure Sir Winston knew that FDR wanted to meet Stalin without him. Stalin refused to do so without Churchill. As per "global
power"–sure, except for one teeny-weeny fact (or rather facts), since WW II "global power" didn't win a single war against even
more-or-less determined enemy.
Ukraine, in the grand scheme of things, is a huge defeat for Russia.
It would have been a total catastrophe for Russia had she lost Sebastopol; but so long as Crimea is safely in Moscow's
hands, Ukraine is not make-or-break. Russia's global position now, in fact, is even stronger than it was in 2014.
It will be much worse than Brazil, Brazil managed to cover up the reality that whites dominate politics and the economy (although
there is a new push to copy the American affirmative action ideology). In America whites will not be able to do what is happening
in Brazil, all politics will be non white dominated, likewise the woke corporate blue haired brigade will ensure that non whites
dominate all companies, no exceptions allowed. The end result of this is predictable, Americans will be wishing they were like
Brazil.
@Republic No it was
earlier, it was when it decided to declare war on the Third Reich. It decided that Poland was more important than keeping its
empire.
Globalization has fueled the rise of populism, it has helped to exacerbate ethnic and racial tensions, and it is largely
responsible for the hollowing out of America's industrial core.
Western corporations have been competing with each other (for decades now) to offshore everything to reduce costs /increase
profits. The idea is to sell at Western prices and produce at Eastern prices, and this arbitrage has reached crazy proportions.
The US has in fact exported whole industrial sectors (with the jobs and innovation). Same in Europe with a company such as
Decathlon (Europe's Nº1 sport goods supplier) entirely sourcing its products outside Europe.
Conclusion that if globalization fails, then so do these companies, and they have a massive incentive buy political protection
from Western governments – which they are doing. Nationalism and America First are anathema to them and they have (amazingly)
managed to built globalization and open frontiers into the ethos of the EU and US – with all the self-serving multicultural Save
the World blah.
Jews also hate nationalism since it threatens their (minority) power and highlights dual loyalty (or no loyalty) so the
Zio-Glob are on one side, and the public on the other, with little common ground between them.
This doesn't mean that it's impossible to stop outsourcing. If it happened, then Decathlon would either go bankrupt or have
to switch production to Rumania or Portugal = higher prices, but at least the money would stay in Europe. Same with the other
industries, and the first step has to be to cut down the power of the EU bureaucracy and Washington.
Just prepare fort the impending surge in Totalitarian methods to halt the inevitable in the USA.
The rest of the world is not our playground.
Good luck.
@Andrei Martyanov
Haas and CFR included, do not operate with actual facts and data.
Absolutely correct. Without an honest media, it is impossible to make good decisions.
Those Zionists who control the media in the West are deluding themselves. They will be the biggest losers when ordinary people
finally wake up to the fact that they have been lied to for over 100 years – WW1, WW2, Palestine, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Ukraine,
Russia, Crimea, MH-17, Skripals, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, 9/11 and many other instances.
Not so fast. OK, so maybe Zbig had some second thoughts about the whole project in 2012. But didn't the same Zbig opine in 2015,
at the start of Russia's Syria intervention, that the US should strike hard and fast before the Russkies managed to complete their
buildup there? To me that sounded rather much like an unprovoked attack on Russian troops, who were legally in Syria at the invitation
of its internationally recognized government.
Bottom line, for all of his far-too-long career Mr. Brzezinski has been exactly what one would expect from the spiritual father
of al-Qaeda: a vile and reckless individual. Anyone looking that way for salvation needs some time out for reflection.
This strikes me as a particularly well-reasoned and insightful article. It shows that Brzezinski understood that the world
had changed, that power had shifted eastward,
This is an excellent article, which addresses the key historic driver of our time. By 2015, world GDP had already passed the
threshold where the GDP share of the West had become lesser than the share of the Rest.
The major share of global wealth shifting towards Asia is an ineluctable historic re-alignment; it is a natural return to the
long-term historic balance pre-Industrial Revolution.
Western politicians ' problem is that they don't want to "break the news" to their people that Western standards of living
are going to degrade ineluctably over the coming years , because that would expose their incompetence, as well as highlight
the need to address wealth inequality in the West .
It is easier instead to the blame the disenfranchised, pauperised citizens voting for Trump, Brexit, and other "extreme" political
parties.
At least Brzezinski became well aware of this shift. So many of America's neo-conservatives have largely failed in expressing
this defeat. Between Brzezinski and Boot, & the Others, they've all turned out to be fanatic ideologues.
@notanon Ralph Nader
used to say the big issue is money in politics -- the money that "Congress Critters" use to get their government jobs at $174k.
To get one of those government jobs, you don't have to understand something as complex as the banking system, which is made more
opaque by the globalist neoliberals who want to maintain the Cheap Labor Lobby's beloved status quo.
You don't have to be Nomi Prins, someone who actually worked on Wall Street and knows its nooks and crannies, to get a Congress
Critter job. You just have to be the right kind of pander bear with the right kind of faux outrage at selective moments.
The other problem is that -- like most of us in the general public -- Congress Critters have to rely on people in the financial
system to navigate the terrain. It's a math-heavy field. Politicians have apparently always done this. They have created more
than one era with too-big-to-fail institutions. That is what one of Prins' books describes.
But it does not matter whether it's bankers or the manufacturers, employing welfare-assisted illegal aliens or foreign nationals
on foreign soil. And it does not matter that Congress Critters occasionally put the bigwigs on the hot seat as a PR stunt. They
aren't going to do anything to actually change policy unless the corporate masters who fund their campaigns give them the go ahead.
And they don't really even understand why.
[MORE]
If you think Congress Critters understand the global banking system, you should watch the banking committee hearing on C-SPAN,
where they grilled the Treasury Secretary, dressing him down like he was a $10-per-hour call center worker. It makes for good
theater.
Just like at a call center, the humiliation parade had nothing to do with the details of the work or getting anything done
other than convincing voters that a bunch of fabulously wealthy legislators (every one) with a 212-day work year really care,
especially about predatory factors in the financial system that supposedly affect only oppressed skin-pigmentation factions, located
in their districts.
You vicariously enjoy rebellious facial expressions that you could never exhibit during a frequently absentee mom manager's
tirades for fear of being fired from a churn job that does not cover the cost of rent that has risen by 72% over 25 years, even
when you add any paltry commission for taking the trouble to always meeting your numbers. But that will be the extent of it. It
is for show.
My favorite part was Empire-related; it involved the Rep. from Guam, a Congress Critter from one of US's far-flung territories.
His mild and precise disposition made a strong contrast with the Chairwoman's fiery ambiguity. Since his questions were math-related
and about specific budgetary matters, the Treasury Secretary seemed more frazzled than when he was receiving the emotional Sermon
from the gavel-happy chairwoman.
Guam Rep asked the Treasury Secretary about a massive transference of funds from the budget, affecting things like the territory's
education budget, trying to clarify whether the Earned Income Tax Credit was actually a "liability."
The language of most of our legislators reflects how bought off they are by the Cheap Labor Lobby. Which is why this Rep from
Guam's straight-forward language was so refreshing.
By design, the "Child" "Tax" "Credit" and the Earned Income Tax Credit sound like things that would not subtract from the overall
budget to me, too, but this is not money going to people who paid too much income tax. This is money that is credited back to
people who make too little to pay income tax.
The moms often call it their "taxes," when explaining to you what they plan to spend it on. It is not education, Rep. from
Guam. It is stuff like trips to the beach with a boyfriend and tattoos. That's doable for many low-wage mom workers since their
major monthly bills are covered by government.
I enjoyed the Treasury Secretary's facial expressions at this point as well. It appeared to be two math types who didn't really
thrive on the process of figuring out how to spin this fiscal irresponsibility, squirming in their chairs and / or looking kind
of aghast at the absurdity of the situation.
It would have been nice if the Rep from Guam had been honest enough to narrow that down even more, explaining that the small
amount of EITC money going to non-womb-productive, non-welfare-eligible citizens who mostly don't bother to claim such a paltry
sum is the not the big issue.
It is the Refundable Child Tax Credit up to $6,431, not so much the smaller maximum EITC of up to $451. It is the big check,
given as an additional reward to single-breadwinner, womb-productive households that also often receive free EBT food, reduced-cost
rent, monthly cash assistance and free electricity when the single breadwinner works part-time, keeping her income under the earned-income
limits for the programs.
He mentioned that Guam has a lot of poor workers like that, but so does the mainland. It is one of the big reasons for the
impending collapse: undremployment of prime-aged citizens.
If it is due to technology, it is just because employers of office workers now mostly need data entry people since advanced
software does most of the mid-level analytical work. And employers love to hire a near-100% womb-productive "diversity"of childbearing-aged
moms with spousal income, rent-covering child support or welfare and refundable child tax credit cash who do not need decent pay
or full-time hours. "It would mess them up with the government," as one all-mom employer put it.
Employers benefit from a welfare-fueled workforce that does not need higher pay. The Cheap Labor Lobby benefits. Congress Critters
at $174k benefit via fat campaign war chests, but the many welfare-ineligible job seekers who need for pay alone to cover all
household bills are screwed royally in this rigged system.
It is also screwing the SS Trust Fund that is no longer running surpluses and a lot of other things.
Guam Rep asked the Treasury Secretary if he was responsible and, specifically, what could he done to help restore fiscal order.
Of course, the Treasury Secretary isn't responsible for the mid-allocation of funds. Pandering Congress Critters are. They have
the "power of the purse" per US Constitution. The Treasury Sec. just tries to balance the books.
But it was nice that at least one of them showed some non-theatrical concern for finding out which of the six-figure Critters
is responsible. He sounded like he wanted constructive action to stop the Neoliberal House of Cards from just putting more structurally
unsound cards on the deck.
Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a
formidable machine.
Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg
Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression
against Iraq long before 9/11.
"... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
"... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
"... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
"... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
"... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
"... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
"... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
"... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
"... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
"... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
"... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
"... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
"... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
"... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
"... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
"... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
"... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
"... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
"... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
"... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
"... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
"... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call
the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a
brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.
Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he
would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the
corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he
wanted to during the campaign.
Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion
with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of
paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which
the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe
or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him
to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by
all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the
zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.
The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine
with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have
been there anyway.
No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The
Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they
have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful
way
The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a
threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.
The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The
rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was
really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion
on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was
hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.
" ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people."
All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were
the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.
I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present.
A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated
the 98% poor, to stay rich.
When there were insurrections federal troops restored order.
Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It
is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from
it.
The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America
and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and
Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.
Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.
"The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and
unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident
Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story
after another would achieve the desired result "
But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out
neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions
fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.
I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's
not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of
brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and
facts don't matter!
Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about
intimidating them.
Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then
devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no,
the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in
the less-mainstream fake news media.
So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too
stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The
US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?
The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the
WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or
cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.
By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose
of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and
most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which
means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite
Mohammedans.
So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of
hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an
attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.
The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the
Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless
lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was,
and that means as bad as Hell itself.
Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable
approach for a book.
Here's the problem.
Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The
custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of
photoshopping.
OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had
made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist
wouldn't be paid.
Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the
60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major
role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally
flawed. I would say more so.
All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The
triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind
and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..
America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution
and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the
greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side
of American history is taught.
"There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate
this level of panic."
You continue to claim what you cannot prove.
But then you are a Jews First Zionist.
Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of
"Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a
straight face
Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually
coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and
permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.
Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks
from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.
The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys
Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were
the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.
After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with
the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924,
despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.
Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil
fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they
should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad
today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else
wanted.
'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" --
Michael Kenney
Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the
catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1)
by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by
NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.
It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans.
OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do
Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a
half.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration.
I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration.
While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The
second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by
Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?
It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling.
Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American
public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.
The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst
has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton
gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.
This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.
Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.
The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the
Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of
these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.
[The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held
views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist
line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign
policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also
long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of
state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not
appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on
Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with
Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete
withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.
Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it
would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling
Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third
major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who
has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel
Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016,
donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in
Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]
Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It
means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources
and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital
the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US
debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will
steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in
Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple
Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington
must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate
their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain
its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to
success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.
American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency,
and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state –
particularly the Chinese.
First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists
defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army
conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic
ambitions.
The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.
Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news
gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who
dictates what they can and can't say.
They are given the political line and they broadcast it.
The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with
the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for
the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is
that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by
factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people. That can only lead to trouble.
At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the
media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet
Bolshevik model.
On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the
Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's
Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.
Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt,
compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most
people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of
mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into
something much worse.
The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are
maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with
neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources
in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last
events show – with acceleration.
It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for
those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free"
population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the
free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start
one.
All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.
The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not
improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.
Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the
deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy"
narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.
And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they
were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and
CIA-trained.
Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign
nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's
that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six
month actions – they go on and on.)
Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the
grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these
politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave
office.)
Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are
we attacking with drones? Where is congress?
Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it
goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them
more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!
9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various
peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.
We are being exceptionally arrogant.
Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.
"... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
"... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
"... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
"... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
"... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
"... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
"... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite
that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite
inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like
the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately
on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when
he was elected will help clarifying these theses.
Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even
religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces
at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple
expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material
welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of
time.
From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of
US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism,
a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing
population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production,
initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was
broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist
goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson
and Madison, among others.
As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces
caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted
interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation
of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during
the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the
US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the
domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.
The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the
ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's
aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic
forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment,
as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War
II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.
Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War
II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces
shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time.
The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence
of NATO, for instance.
Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable
to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown.
Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in
the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the
bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened
and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict
across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.
Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated
white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its
manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting
immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign
policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump
administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and
economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.
Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's
actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from
his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically
seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really
cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to
honor
their funding commitments.
From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy
initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently,
they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones
used in the past.
Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge
it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues,
will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is
that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning,
much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is
not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority
of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.
As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints
of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further
increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an
attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences
that it may cause.
On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find
a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd
combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep
down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that
will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few
years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although
it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in
international affairs.
In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the
inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence
or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.
Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous
deterioration of relations seems inevitable.
Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in
world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using
it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even
inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands
taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).
While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing
capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it
becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's
relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.
A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its
different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in
its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily
a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The
deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is,
for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because
it has a very short history itself.
Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there
is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined
with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous
combination.
Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and
Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa.
He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting
across emerging markets.
Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power
structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us
know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which
refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's
true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its
political and
media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and
unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If
everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to
take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's
imprisonment, thereby
establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around
the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him
you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or
near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet
in his head.
Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our
fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big
part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they
appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information
which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help
of hundreds of
tips from my
readers and social media followers
I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people
can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the
disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.
This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on
Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of
refutation.
Powerful video about US propaganda machine. Based on Iraq War propaganda efforts. This is a
formidable machine.
Shows quite vividly that most US politicians of Bush era were war criminal by Nuremberg
Tribunal standards. Starting with Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld. They planned the war of aggression
against Iraq long before 9/11.
"... Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers. ..."
"... Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him to act. This was the beginning of downward slope. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer. ..."
"... The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have been there anyway. ..."
"... No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful way ..."
"... " ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American people." ..."
"... All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests. ..."
"... A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated the 98% poor, to stay rich. When there were insurrections federal troops restored order. Also FDR put down strikes with troops. ..."
"... The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter. ..."
"... "The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story after another would achieve the desired result " ..."
"... But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world. ..."
"... I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and facts don't matter! ..."
"... Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about intimidating them. ..."
"... The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was, and that means as bad as Hell itself. ..."
"... Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the 60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally flawed. I would say more so. ..."
"... Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than during Obama administration. ..."
"... That pre-9/11 "cooperation" nearly destroyed Russia. Nobody in Russia (except, perhaps, for Pussy Riot) wants a return to the Yeltsin era. ..."
"... The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it. ..."
"... [The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank. ..."
"... Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran. ..."
"... Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington. ..."
"... Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who dictates what they can and can't say. ..."
"... Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt, compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into something much worse. ..."
"... Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six month actions – they go on and on.) ..."
"... Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are we attacking with drones? Where is congress? ..."
"... Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies. ..."
Sadly, Brennan's propaganda coup only works on what the Bell Curve crowd up there would call
the dumbest and most technologically helpless 1.2σ. Here is how people with half a
brain interpret the latest CIA whoppers.
Again Mike Whitney does not get it. Though in the first part of the article I thought he
would. He was almost getting there. The objective was to push new administration into the
corner from which it could not improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he
wanted to during the campaign.
Convincing Americans in Russia's influence or Russia collusion
with Trump was only a tool that would create pressure on Trump that together with the fear of
paralysis of his administration and impeachment would push Trump into the corner from which
the only thing he could do was to worsen relations with Russia. What American people believe
or not is really secondary. With firing of Gen. Flynn Trump acted exactly as they wanted him
to act. This was the beginning of downward slope.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration. Trump can concentrate on Iran in which he will be supported by
all sides and factions including the media. Even Larry David will approve not only the
zionist harpies like Pam Geller, Rita Katz and Ilana Mercer.
The only part that is absurd is that Russia posed a bona fide threat to the US. I'm fine
with the idea that he ruined Brennen's plans in Syria. But thats just ego we shouldn't have
been there anyway.
No one really cares about Ukraine. And the European/Russian trade zone? No one cares. The
Eurozone has its hands full with Greece and the rest of the old EU. I have a feeling they
have already gone way too far and are more likely to shrink than expand in any meaningful
way
The one thing I am not positive about. If the elite really believe that Russia is a
threat, then Americans have done psych ops on themselves.
The US was only interested in Ukraine because it was there. Next in line on a map. The
rather shocking disinterest in investing money -- on both sides -- is inexplicable if it was
really important. Most of it would be a waste -- but still. The US stupidly spent $5 billion
on something -- getting duped by politicians and got theoretical regime change, but it was
hell to pry even $1 billion for real economic aid.
" ..factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people."
All the more powerfully put because of its recognisably comical. understatement. Thank you Mr Whitney. Brilliant article that would be all over the mainstream media were
the US MSM an instrument of American rather than globalist interests.
I am reading Howard Zinn, A Peoples History of the USA, 1492 to the Present.
A sad story, how the USA always was a police state, where the two percent rich manipulated
the 98% poor, to stay rich.
When there were insurrections federal troops restored order.
Also FDR put down strikes with troops.
You should be aware that Zinn's book is not, IMO, an honest attempt at writing history. It
is conscious propaganda intended to make Americans believe exactly what you are taking from
it.
The elephant in the room is Israel and the neocons , this is the force that controls America
and Americas foreign policy , Brennan and the 17 intel agencies are puppets of the mossad and
Israel, that is the brutal fact of the matter.
Until that fact changes Americans will continue to fight and die for Israel.
"The absence of evidence suggests that Russia hacking narrative is a sloppy and
unprofessional disinformation campaign that was hastily slapped together by over confident
Intelligence officials who believed that saturating the public airwaves with one absurd story
after another would achieve the desired result "
But it DID achieve the desired result! Trump folded under the pressure, and went full out
neoliberal. Starting with his missile attack on Syria, he is now OK with spending trillions
fighting pointless endless foreign wars on the other side of the world.
I think maybe half the US population does believe the Russian hacking thing, but that's
not really the issue. I think that the pre-Syrian attack media blitz was more a statement of
brute power to Trump: WE are in charge here, and WE can take you down and impeach you, and
facts don't matter!
Sometimes propaganda is about persuading people. And sometimes, I think, it is about
intimidating them.
Whitney is another author who declares the "Russians did it" narrative a psyop. He then
devotes entire columns to the psyop, "naww Russia didn't do it". There could be plenty to write about – recent laws that do undercut liberty, but no,
the Washington Post needs fake opposition to its fake news so you have guys like Whitney in
the less-mainstream fake news media.
So Brennan wanted revenge? Well that's simple enough to understand, without being too
stupid. But Whitney's whopper of a lie is what you're supposed to unquestionably believe. The
US has "rival political parties". Did you miss it?
The US is doing nothing more than acting as the British Empire 2.0. WASP culture was born of a Judaizing heresy: Anglo-Saxon Puritanism. That meant that the
WASP Elites of every are pro-Jewish, especially in order to wage war, physical and/or
cultural, against the vast majority of white Christians they rule.
By the early 19th century, The Brit Empire's Elites also had a strong, and growing, dose
of pro-Arabic/pro-Islamic philoSemitism. Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and
most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which
means being pro-Wahhabi and permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite
Mohammedans.
So, by the time of Victoria's high reign, the Brit WASP Elites were a strange brew of
hardcoree pro-Jewish and hardcore pro-Arabic/islamic. The US foreign policy of today is an
attempt to put those two together and force it on everyone and make it work.
The Brit secret service, in effect, created and trained not merely the CIA but also the
Mossad and Saudi Arabia's General Intelligence Presidency. All four are defined by endless
lies, endless acts of utterly amoral savagery. All 4 are at least as bad as the KGB ever was,
and that means as bad as Hell itself.
Fair enough. I didn't know that about the foreword. If accurate, that's a reasonable
approach for a book.
Here's the problem.
Back when O. Cromwell was the dictator of England, he retained an artist to paint him. The
custom of the time was for artists to "clean up" their subjects, in a primitive form of
photoshopping.
OC being a religious fanatic, he informed the artist he wished to be portrayed as God had
made him, "warts and all." (Ollie had a bunch of unattractive facial warts.) Or the artist
wouldn't be paid.
Traditional triumphalist American narrative history, as taught in schools up through the
60s or so, portrayed America as "wart-free." Since then, with Zinn's book playing a major
role, it has increasingly been portrayed as "warts-only," which is of course at least equally
flawed. I would say more so.
All I am asking is that American (and other) history be written "warts and all." The
triumphalist version is true, largely, and so is the Zinn version. Gone With the Wind
and Roots both portray certain aspects of the pre-war south fairly accurately..
America has been, and is, both evil and good. As is/was true of every human institution
and government in history. Personally, I believe America, net/net, has been one of the
greatest forces for human good ever. But nobody will realize that if only the negative side
of American history is taught.
"There must be something really dirty in Russigate that hasn't yet come out to generate
this level of panic."
You continue to claim what you cannot prove.
But then you are a Jews First Zionist.
Russia-Gate Jumps the Shark
Russia-gate has jumped the shark with laughable new claims about a tiny number of
"Russia-linked" social media ads, but the US mainstream media is determined to keep a
straight face
Most of that group became ardently pro-Sunni, and most of the pro-Sunni ones eventually
coalescing around promotion of the House of Saud, which means being pro-Wahhabi and
permanently desirous of killing or enslaving virtually all Shiite Mohammedans.
Thanks for the laugh. During the 19th century, the Sauds were toothless, dirt-poor hicks
from the deep desert of zero importance on the world stage.
The Brits were not Saudi proponents, in fact promoting the Husseins of Hejaz, the guys
Lawrence of Arabia worked with. The Husseins, the Sharifs of Mecca and rulers of Hejaz, were
the hereditary enemies of the Sauds of Nejd.
After WWI, the Brits installed Husseins as rulers of both Transjordan and Iraq, which with
the Hejaz meant the Sauds were pretty much surrounded. The Sauds conquered the Hejaz in 1924,
despite lukewarm British support for the Hejaz.
Nobody in the world cared much about the Saudis one way or another until massive oil
fields were discovered, by Americans not Brits, starting in 1938. There was no reason they
should. Prior to that Saudi prominence in world affairs was about equal to that of Chad
today, and for much the same reason. Chad (and Saudi Arabia) had nothing anybody else
wanted.
'Putin stopped talking about the "Lisbon to Vladivostok" free trade area long ago" --
Michael Kenney
Putin was simply trying to sell Russia's application for EU membership with the
catch-phrase "Lisbon to Vladivostok". He continued that until the issue was triply mooted (1)
by implosion of EU growth and boosterism, (2) by NATO's aggressive stance, in effect taken by
NATO in Ukraine events and in the Baltics, and, (3) Russia's alliance with China.
It is surely still true that Russians think of themselves, categorically, as Europeans.
OTOH, we can easily imagine that Russians in Vladivostok look at things differently than do
Russians in St. Petersburg. Then again, Vladivostok only goes back about a century and a
half.
Anyway, the mission was accomplished and the relations with Russia are worse now than
during Obama administration.
I generally agree with your comment, but that part strikes me as a bit of an exaggeration.
While relations with Russia certainly haven't improved, how have they really worsened? The
second round of sanctions that Trump reluctantly approved have yet to be implemented by
Europe, which was the goal. And apart from that, what of substance has changed?
It's not surprising that 57 percent of the American people believe in Russian meddling.
Didn't two-thirds of the same crowd believe that Saddam was behind 9/11, too? The American
public is being brainwashed 24 hours a day all year long.
The CIA is the world largest criminal and terrorist organization. With Brennan the worst
has come to the worst. The whole Russian meddling affair was initiated by the Obama/Clinton
gang in cooperation with 95 percent of the media. Nothing will come out of it.
This disinformation campaign might be the prelude to an upcoming war.
Right now, the US is run by jerks and idiots. Watch the video.
Only dumb people does not know that TRUMP IS NETANYAHU'S PUPPET.
The fifth column zionist jews are running the albino stooge and foreign policy in the
Middle East to expand Israel's interest against American interest that is TREASON. One of
these FIFTH COLUMNISTS is Jared Kushner. He should be arrested.
[The key figures who had primary influence on both Trump's and Bush's Iran policies held
views close to those of Israel's right-wing Likud Party. The main conduit for the Likudist
line in the Trump White House is Jared Kushner, the president's son-in-law, primary foreign
policy advisor, and longtime friend and supporter of Netanyahu. Kushner's parents are also
long-time supporters of Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank.
Another figure to whom the Trump White House has turned is John Bolton, undersecretary of
state and a key policymaker on Iran in the Bush administration. Although Bolton was not
appointed Trump's secretary of state, as he'd hoped, he suddenly reemerged as a player on
Iran policy thanks to his relationship with Kushner. Politico reports that Bolton met with
Kushner a few days before the final policy statement was released and urged a complete
withdrawal from the deal in favor of his own plan for containing Iran.
Bolton spoke with Trump by phone on Thursday about the paragraph in the deal that vowed it
would be "terminated" if there was any renegotiation, according to Politico. He was calling
Trump from Las Vegas, where he'd been meeting with casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, the third
major figure behind Trump's shift towards Israeli issues. Adelson is a Likud supporter who
has long been a close friend of Netanyahu's and has used his Israeli tabloid newspaper Israel
Hayomto support Netanyahu's campaigns. He was Trump's main campaign contributor in 2016,
donating $100 million. Adelson's real interest has been in supporting Israel's interests in
Washington -- especially with regard to Iran.]
Putin's dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It
means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources
and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital
the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US
debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will
steadily lose its grip on power. That's why it is imperative for the US prevail in
Ukraine– a critical land bridge connecting the two continents– and to topple
Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington
must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate
their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain
its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam's path to
success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.
American dominance is very much tied to the dollar's role as the world's reserve currency,
and the rest of the world no longer want to fund this bankrupt, warlike state –
particularly the Chinese.
First, it confirms that the US did not want to see the jihadist extremists
defeated by Russia. These mainly-Sunni militias served as Washington's proxy-army
conducting an ambitious regime change operation which coincided with US strategic
ambitions.
The CIA run US/Israeli/ISIS alliance.
Second, Zakharova confirms that the western media is not an independent news
gathering organization, but a propaganda organ for the foreign policy establishment who
dictates what they can and can't say.
They are given the political line and they broadcast it.
The loosening of rules governing the dissemination of domestic propaganda coupled with
the extraordinary advances in surveillance technology, create the perfect conditions for
the full implementation of an American police state. But what is more concerning, is
that the primary levers of state power are no longer controlled by elected officials but by
factions within the state whose interests do not coincide with those of the American
people. That can only lead to trouble.
At some point Americans are going to get a "War on Domestic Terror" cheered along by the
media. More or less the arrest and incarceration of any opposition following the Soviet
Bolshevik model.
On the plus side, everyone now knows that the Anglo-US media from the NY Times to the
Economist, from WaPo to the Gruniard, and from the BBC to CNN, the CBC and Weinstein's
Hollywood are a worthless bunch of depraved lying bastards.
Such a truthful portrait of reality ! The ruling elite is indeed massively corrupt,
compromised, and controlled by dark forces. And the police state is already here. For most
people, so far, in the form of massive collection of personal data and increasing number of
mandatory regulations. But just one or two big false-flags away from progressing into
something much worse.
The thing is, no matter how thick the mental cages are, and how carefully they are
maintained by the daily massive injections of "certified" truth (via MSM), along with
neutralizing or compromising of "troublemakers", the presence of multiple alternative sources
in the age of Internet makes people to slip out of these cages one by one, and as the last
events show – with acceleration.
It means that there's a fast approaching tipping point after which it'd be impossible for
those in power both to keep a nice "civilized" face and to control the "cage-free"
population. So, no matter how the next war will be called, it will be the war against the
free Internet and free people. That's probably why N. Korean leader has no fear to start
one.
All government secrecy is a curse on mankind. Trump is releasing the JFK murder files to the public. Kudos! Let us hope he will follow up with a full 9/11 investigation.
The objective was to push new administration into the corner from which it could not
improve relations with Russia as Trump indicated that he wanted to during the campaign.
Good point. That was probably one of the objectives (and from the point of view of the
deep-state, perhaps the most important objective) of the "Russia hacked our democracy"
narrative, in addition to the general deligitimization of the Trump administration.
And, keep in mind, Washington's Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they
were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and
CIA-trained.
Clearly the CIA was making war on Syria. Is secret coercive covert action against sovereign
nations Ok? Is it legal? When was the CIA designated a war making entity – what part of the constitution OK's
that? Isn't the congress obliged by constitutional law to declare war? (These are NOT six
month actions – they go on and on.)
Are committees of six congressman and six senators, who meet in secret, just avoiding the
grave constitutional questions of war? We the People cannot even interrogate these
politicians. (These politicians make big money in the secrecy swamp when they leave
office.)
Syria is only one of many nations that the CIA is attacking – how many countries are
we attacking with drones? Where is congress?
Spying is one thing – covert action is another – covert is wrong – it
goes against world order. Every year after 9/11 they say things are worse – give them
more money more power and they will make things safe. That is BS!
9/11 has opened the flood gates to the US government attacking at will, the various
peoples of this Earth. That is NOT our prerogative.
We are being exceptionally arrogant.
Close the CIA – give the spying to the 16 other agencies.
"... Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. ..."
"... The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment, as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player. ..."
"... Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time. The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence of NATO, for instance. ..."
"... Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown. Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline. ..."
"... Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues, will consolidate its economic domination. ..."
"... A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its different dimensions ..."
"... Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous combination. ..."
Donald Trump's presidency, like preceding ones, is trapped by the interests of the power elite
that has ruled America since World War II. The constraints imposed on domestic policy by this elite
inevitably have a direct impact on America's foreign policy. Alternative social forces, like
the ones behind Trump's presidential triumph, only have a limited impact on domestic and ultimately
on foreign policy. A conceptual detour and a brief on history and on Trump's domestic setting when
he was elected will help clarifying these theses.
Beyond the different costumes that it wears (dealing with ideology, international law, and even
religion), foreign policy follows domestic policy. The domestic policy actors are the social forces
at work at a given point of time, mainly the economic agents and their ambitions (in their multiple
expressions), including the ruling power elite. Society's aspirations not only relate to material
welfare, but also to ideological priorities that population segments may have at a given point of
time.
From America's initial days until the mid 1800s, there seems to have been a broad alignment of
US foreign policy with the wishes of its power elite and other social forces. America's expansionism,
a fundamental bulwark of its foreign policy from early days, reflected the need to fulfill its growing
population's ambitions for land and, later on, the need to find foreign markets for its excess production,
initially agricultural and later on manufacturing. It can be said that American foreign policy was
broadly populist at that time. The power elite was more or less aligned in achieving these expansionist
goals and was able to provide convenient ideological justification through the writings of Jefferson
and Madison, among others.
As the country expanded, diverging interests became stronger and ultimately differing social forces
caused a significant fracture in society. The American Civil War was the climax of the conflicted
interests between agricultural and manufacturing led societies. Fifty years later, a revealing manifestation
of this divergence (which survived the Civil War), as it relates to foreign policy, is found during
the early days of the Russian Revolution when, beyond the ideological revulsion of Bolshevism, the
US was paralyzed between the agricultural and farming businesses seeking exports to Russia and the
domestic extractive industries interested in stopping exports of natural resources from this country.
The growing misalignment between government policies and people's yearnings coincides with the
ascent of the military establishment within the power elite that rules America. Despite the country's
aggressive expansionism, America's power elite was initially driven mainly by political and economic
forces and much less by its growing military strength. It is fair to say that the military establishment,
as an influential component of the American power elite, only appeared in the context of World War
II. Nowadays, it is a dominant player.
Today's power elite in America is fundamentally the same as the one that emerged after World War
II and which was accurately described by C. Wright Mills in the 1950s. Consequently, the main forces
shaping US domestic and foreign policies have not changed since then. The collapse of the Soviet
Union and the end of the Cold War did not make irrelevant the existing power elite at that time.
The elite only became more vocal in its efforts to justify itself and this explains today's existence
of NATO, for instance.
Despite its economic and entrepreneurial might, the US distilled version of capitalism is unable
to attain the needs of a growing number of its population, as the Great Recession of 2008 has shown.
Within the OECD, arguably the club with the highest levels of economic and social development in
the world, US rankings are abysmal, for instance concerning education and health, as it lays at the
bottom in learning metrics and on critical health measures such as obesity. The wealth gap has widened
and the social fabric is broken. American economic decline is evident and growing social conflict
across economic, social and geographic lines is just a reaction to this decline.
Trump won his presidency because he was able to get support from the country's growing frustrated
white population. His main social themes (bringing jobs to America by stopping the decline of its
manufacturing industry, preventing further US consumer dependence on foreign imports and halting
immigration) fitted well with the electors' anger. Traditional populist themes linked to foreign
policy (like Russophobia) did not play a big role in the last election. But whether or not the Trump
administration can align with the ruling power elite in a manner that addresses the key social and
economic needs of the American people is still to be seen.
Back to foreign policy, we need to distinguish between Trump's style of government and his administration's
actions. At least until now, focusing excessively on Trump's style has dangerously distracted from
his true intentions. One example is the confusion about his initial stance on NATO which was simplistically
seen as highly critical to the very existence of this organization. On NATO, all that Trump really
cared was to achieve a "fair" sharing of expenditures with other members and to press them to
honor
their funding commitments.
From immigration to defense spending, there is nothing irrational about Trump's foreign policy
initiatives, as they just reflect a different reading on the American people's aspirations and, consequently,
they attempt to rely on supporting points within the power elite which are different from the ones
used in the past.
Concerning China, Trump is learning about the limits of his ability to successfully challenge
it economically. It seems virtually impossible to reverse China's momentum which, if it continues,
will consolidate its economic domination. A far-reaching lesson, although still being ignored, is
that China's economic might is showing that capitalism as understood in the West is not winning,
much less in its American format. It also shows that democracy may not be that relevant, as it is
not necessarily a corollary or a condition for economic development. Perhaps it even shows the superiority
of China's economic model, but this is a different matter.
As Trump becomes more aware about his limitations, he has naturally reversed to the basic imprints
of America's traditional foreign policy, particularly concerning defense. His emphasis on a further
increase in defense spending is not done for prestigious or national security reasons, but as an
attempt to preserve a job generating infrastructure without considering the catastrophic consequences
that it may cause.
On Iran, Obama's initiative to seek normalization was an attempt to walk a fine line (and to find
a less conflictive path) between supporting the US traditional Middle East allies (mainly the odd
combination of Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey) and recognizing Iran's growing aspirations. Deep
down, Obama was trying to acknowledge Iran's historical viability as a country and a society that
will not disappear from the map, while Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, may not be around in a few
years. Trump's Iran policy until now only represents a different weighing of priorities, although
it is having far reaching consequences on America's credibility as a reliable contractual party in
international affairs.
In the case of Afghanistan, Trump's decision to increase boots on the ground does not break the
inertia of US past administrations. Aside from temporary containment, an increasing military presence
or a change in tactics will not alter fundamentally this reality.
Concerning Russia, and regardless of what Trump has said, actions speak more than words. A continuous
deterioration of relations seems inevitable.
Trump will also learn, if he has not done so already, about the growth of multipolar forces in
world's events. Russia has mastered this reality for several years and is quite skillful at using
it as a basic tool of its own foreign goals. Our multipolar world will expand, and Trump may even
inadvertently exacerbate it through its actions (for instance in connection with the different stands
taken by the US and its European allies concerning Iran).
While fulfilling the aspirations of the American people seems more difficult within the existing
capitalist framework, there are also growing apprehensions coming from America's power elite as it
becomes more frustrated due to its incapacity of being more effective at the world level. America's
relative adolescence in world's history will become more and more apparent in the coming years.
A fundamental weakness of American foreign policy is its inability to understand war in all its
different dimensions. The US has never suffered the consequences of an international conflict in
its own backyard. The American Civil War, despite all the suffering that it caused, was primarily
a domestic event with no foreign intervention (contrary to the wishes of the Confederation). The
deep social and psychological damage caused by war is not part of America's consciousness as it is,
for instance in Germany, Russia or Japan. America is insensitive to the lessons of history because
it has a very short history itself.
Despite the need to see through Trump's true intentions beyond his pomp and circumstance, there
is an important warning to be made. Trump's eventual inability to fulfill his promises, combined
with his bravado and America's incapacity to take a more sobering approach to world events is a dangerous
combination.
Oscar Silva-Valladares is a former investment banker that has lived and worked in North and
Latin America, Western & Eastern Europe, Saudi Arabia, Japan, the Philippines and Western Africa.
He currently chairs Davos International Advisory, an advisory firm focused on strategic consulting
across emerging markets.
Have you ever noticed how whenever someone inconveniences the dominant western power
structure, the entire political/media class rapidly becomes very, very interested in letting us
know how evil and disgusting that person is? It's true of the leader of every nation which
refuses to allow itself to be absorbed into the blob of the US-centralized power alliance, it's
true of anti-establishment political candidates, and it's true of WikiLeaks founder Julian
Assange.
Corrupt and unaccountable power uses its
political and
media influence to smear Assange because, as far as the interests of corrupt and
unaccountable power are concerned, killing his reputation is as good as killing him. If
everyone can be paced into viewing him with hatred and revulsion, they'll be far less likely to
take WikiLeaks publications seriously, and they'll be far more likely to consent to Assange's
imprisonment, thereby
establishing a precedent for the future prosecution of leak-publishing journalists around
the world. Someone can be speaking 100 percent truth to you, but if you're suspicious of him
you won't believe anything he's saying. If they can manufacture that suspicion with total or
near-total credence, then as far as our rulers are concerned it's as good as putting a bullet
in his head.
Those of us who value truth and light need to fight this smear campaign in order to keep our
fellow man from signing off on a major leap in the direction of Orwellian dystopia, and a big
part of that means being able to argue against those smears and disinformation wherever they
appear. Unfortunately I haven't been able to find any kind of centralized source of information
which comprehensively debunks all the smears in a thorough and engaging way, so with the help
of hundreds of
tips from my
readers and social media followers
I'm going to attempt to make one here. What follows is my attempt at creating a tool kit people
can use to fight against Assange smears wherever they encounter them, by refuting the
disinformation with truth and solid argumentation.
This article is an ongoing project which will be updated regularly where it appears on
Medium and caitlinjohnstone.com as new information comes in and new smears spring up in need of
refutation.
As he does nearly every day, Max Boot, the
Washington Post
's in-house neocon columnist, wrote some words today. As has been the case quite a few times
before, none of his latest words, even when strung together into a coherent sentence, were particularly good. For
this very reason, several of those sentences were noteworthy. So let's (OK,
let me
) look at just what that beautiful, smooth organ in Boot's skull considers a "neoconservative."
According to Merriam-Webster, a neoconservative is a person who cites dictionary definitions in their writing.
It's also, simply put, someone in American politics who's conservative on economic issues, hews to the middle or
even center-left on social issues, and also really, really likes to Do War. That last one is a big requirement, so
don't forget it -- war equals a strong, responsible nation.
Boot opened his column with a critique of
Rep. Ro Khanna's recent op-ed in the
Post
,
with Boot writing that Khanna's position -- that neocons were responsible for the Iraq War -- is little more than an
oft-repeated "canard" that plagues the American discourse. He then proceeded to take the reader through what a
real neoconservative looks like by rewriting the top-summary of
the neoconservatism Wikipedia page
.
Boot started by citing a group of 1970s characters he classified as the True Neocons. (Initially, the term was
embodied by folks who were a little more skeptical of the Soviet Union than some of their Democratic
counterparts.) Boot then argued neocons simply were not in power at the time the Iraq War was being decided on (a
fact that is demonstratively untrue) by citing Bush administration officials widely credited as architects of the
Iraq War:
The "neocons" -- second-tier officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith, and vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- were not the decision-makers. The
decision to invade was made by President George W. Bush in consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin
Powell. None of them would ever label themselves a "neocon."
Note the last sentence -- Boot frames his argument in a way that hangs the burden of proof that one is a
neoconservative, or acts in a neoconservative fashion, on the stipulation that they publicly identify themselves
as such, which, plainly, is so fucking dumb that I'm going to show you him doubling down on this line of thinking
just because it's so unbelievably shallow.
Moreover, a bipartisan majority of both houses approved the use of military force. Are Democratic then-Sens.
Joe Biden, John Kerry, Charles E. Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein
neocons?
To state the obvious: Yes! All of those people are absolutely neocons, at least in some way.
The idea that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden don't at the very least actively display numerous neoconservative
tendencies is an outright rejection of what Americans have watched play out in the political realm since the
national Democratic Party imploded in the 70s. Democrats can be neocons; Republicans can be neolibs. Neos of some
sort or the other are probably around you, right this very second, and no, not
the good kind
!
The concept that political identity is wholly defined as being a list of beliefs a person writes down in their
diary or says aloud during a campaign ad, and not by the actions conducted by said person, is one that has needed
to die for at least the past half-century of American politics. But, again, Boot's column is not engaging in a
discussion about what a neocon actually is in 2019. It's a deceptive and even laudatory tactic, but Boot is
purposefully choosing to frame his argument around how politicians frame themselves. And that's a major problem if
you happen to be employed to write down your opinions for one of the major news outlets in a nation and not for
the political operatives themselves.
If anything, the fact that this batshit lazy argument permeated the top three-fourths of his column offered a
bit of relief with how it would end. Then this sentence appeared and I ascended to heaven:
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear,
but...
Gordon begins her
comparison by exploring the main charge levied against Nazis during the Nuremberg trials, which was
committing a crime against peace due to Germany's breach of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which, she
explains, "essentially outlawed war." American prosecutors in the mid-20th century insisted that this
initial crime was the unlawful act from which all other crimes committed by the Nazis originated.
"By comparison," the author tells Scheer, "I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make
an unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.
"It's very clear from the documentary record that exists that the main reason people were being
tortured [by the U.S. before the Iraq War began] was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say
that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaida, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq,"
Gordon says.
Throughout the so-called war on terror, the ethics expert says, the U.S. has also violated several
rules set forth in just-war theory, including what constitutes collateral damage and proportionality, in
its slaughter of countless Iraqi civilians.
"We took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed and cosmopolitan countries in that part of
the world -- which was Iraq -- and we essentially did what [U.S. military officials] used to say they wanted to
do to North Vietnam: bombed it back to the Stone Age," Gordon says.
Listen to Scheer and Gordon discuss a range of moral issues that Americans for several generations
have swept under the rug as the government both openly and secretly commits crimes in their name abroad.
You can also read a transcript of the interview below the media player.
Robert Scheer:
Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence.
The intelligence comes from my guests. In this case, it's Rebecca Gordon. And she has her doctorate in
ethics and social theory. I teach ethics at USC; you teach at the University of San Francisco, which is a
Catholic school, so presumably with all their difficulties they're still concerned about ethics. And
actually we have a good pope, in major ways, who's dealing with the subject I want to talk to you about:
the ethics of war making, and the violence that has been unleashed on the world. And you wrote two very
important books, maybe the most important in some ways. One is called
Mainstreaming Torture,
and
another is called
American Nuremberg.
So the question I want to ask you, you know, because we've
always treated the crimes of others, particularly the Germans, the worst crimes of modern history, as an
aberration in the development of the human race. Those people went berserk, crazy, and they were evil;
now we have another category, Muslims are evil, they do terrible things. We're recording this on a day
where in New Zealand, some 48 people trying to practice their religion were killed. So we see a lot of
crime against Muslims, as there was obviously a lot of crimes against Jews and other people. And in your
writing, you're very clear that the crimes of Nuremberg, of the Nazis, are a low level of evil. But the
real question is, the Germans are so much like Americans. They were–largest number of immigrants in this
country were Germans; they're a white, Anglo-Saxon population; they're highly educated, probably the
highest level of music and science at that point. And can it happen here?
Rebecca Gordon:
And that, of course, is the question many of us have been asking at
least since the election of 2016, and probably before that. And the answer in some ways, of course, is
that it did happen here with the invasion of the Americas by people from Europe, and the destruction of
all the peoples who were living here at the time. So there has been a genocide on this continent and in
South America that, you know, we just forget about, because it happened a while ago. But coming to
Nuremberg, what I was trying to do in the book is to say how important the principle was that was
established at Nuremberg, which is that international law is real law. And when you break international
law, there are genuine consequences, and people can and should be held accountable. So what I looked at
was the conduct of this so-called War on Terror in the post-September 11th period, and asked: Could the
United States be accused of the same categories of crimes for which the Nazi leadership were held
accountable? And there were three categories that were established by the prosecution, and these were
crimes against peace; ordinary war crimes, which had already been well described in the body of
international law; and a new category, crimes against humanity, which was created in order to take in the
enormity of what had been done in Europe by the Nazis. But what was very interesting is that it was
Americans who insisted that the first of these crimes should be crimes against peace. So what's that?
That means making an aggressive war. It means starting a war that was not a war of self-defense, that was
not a war of so-called necessity, but making an aggressive war. Why was that illegal? It was illegal
because Germany and the United States and many other countries in Europe had signed a treaty in 1928
called the Kellogg–Briand Treaty, which essentially outlawed war. It said that nations will not use war
to settle their disputes. And the argument that the U.S. prosecutors made was that all the other crimes
that the Germans committed actually sprang from this first crime of making this aggressive, unnecessary,
illegal war. And so by comparison, I look at the Bush-Cheney administration's decision to make an
unnecessary and illegal war, both in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq. And just as the Nazi crimes
arose from this making of a war that was wrong and illegal, the U.S. crimes–and specifically now because
my area of expertise is torture, I look at the reasons why the United States became involved in torture.
And in the beginning, it's very clear from the documentary record that exists, that the main reason
people were being tortured, both in the CIA dark sites and also at Guantanamo under the Department of
Defense, was because they wanted to get somebody somewhere to say that Saddam Hussein was in league with
Al-Qaeda, so that there could be an excuse for invading Iraq. And so the other crimes–
RS:
But wait, let's be very clear about that. This would be like the Nazis saying,
Jewish bankers destroyed our economy and colluded with Western powers, and therefore made life untenable
in Germany. That was the vicious scapegoating argument to justify Nazi expansion and destruction of other
societies. So this thing of whether Bush–you know, it's kind of become part of folklore–they lied us into
the war in Iraq. But what you're saying, and very clearly, the very idea of going to war in Iraq over the
9/11 incident, which not only did Saddam Hussein have–
RG:
Nothing to do with.
RS:
–nothing to do with, but actually he was opposed to Al-Qaeda, and it was the one
country where Al-Qaeda could not operate in, was Iraq. But instead of going to war with Pakistan, or
going to war, you know, elsewhere–no. We–
RG:
Or Saudi Arabia.
RS:
Well, of course, Saudi Arabia, where 15 of the 19 hijackers–
RG:
Came from.
RS:
–came from. You could actually make an argument to go into–hey, you attacked us,
you supplied the money and so forth. No, we whitewashed the Saudi Arabia thing and went to war with Iraq.
So your analogy, listeners should understand, is very precise. It is inventing an excuse, a defensive
excuse, to engage an offensive invasion.
RG:
Exactly. And from that spring all of these other kinds of crimes. So then I look
at ordinary war crimes, and if you go over the Geneva Conventions and the various other laws of war, you
can see that there are a number of categories of crimes. Many of them have to do with failing to make the
distinction between civilians and fighters, combatants. And of course the Bush-Cheney administration very
early on decided to create a third, nonexistent category called unlawful combatants. But this designation
doesn't exist in the International Red Cross's understanding; it doesn't exist in the Geneva
Convention's. It was just a convenient way of saying this particular group of people, whoever it is that
we choose to capture, detain forever, torture–they have no legal standing in the world. They exist
outside of international law.
RS:
So let me pick up on that also. And I don't want to lose the earlier thread of
the invention of war, and connecting with this incredibly important work you've done on torture. And you
made the statement, which I think people should ponder: the reason we were torturing these people was not
to get information about a future attack. We already had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and everything, we knew
everything about it, and so forth. The real reason for it was to invent an alibi for the invasion, to get
somebody to say Saddam Hussein was backing them. And I think that's a very important–a reason, by the
way, to read your book,
Mainstreaming Torture
; let me give a plug here. But this other argument
is also interesting, the whole idea of the noncombatant. And we are doing this interview at a time when
Chelsea Manning, formerly Bradley Manning, is in prison–
RG:
Yes.
RS:
–again, because they want to fabricate a story about WikiLeaks and all that, and
get everybody off the hook for all of the crimes and torture and everything they've done. But the
interesting thing is, if you look at what did WikiLeaks–and they were just like in the position of the
Washington Post
with the Pentagon Papers, they're the publisher–what did Chelsea Manning reveal?
She revealed the death of noncombatants, including journalists. So why don't you develop that a little
bit, because that is so critical to the moment, that no one–no one has been prosecuted for those attacks
that she revealed with the data. But she is now sitting in prison.
RG:
And this is, of course–the fate of whistleblowers all over the world, and
certainly in this country, is exactly that. That the matters that they have revealed disappear in a story
that becomes about the crimes of the revealer. And of course in the war in Iraq, there was tremendous
amounts of civilian death. And it falls into a number of categories; one category is those people who had
actually been detained and were being held by U.S. forces. And for example at Abu Ghraib, we know–which
is the prison outside of Baghdad that had been Saddam Hussein's major torture site, and which the U.S.
decided in its wisdom would be the perfect place to hold detainees, and where we know a group of
reservists ended up torturing people. But the real torture was going on upstairs, by the employees of
various C.I.A. contractors, and by the C.I.A. itself. And that's where people actually died. So there's
that whole category of people, but that's a much smaller category than the category of ordinary civilians
whose lives were either ended or destroyed by the regular U.S. use of warfare in places like Fallujah and
other cities. So that we took what had been one of the most vibrant, developed, and cosmopolitan
countries in that part of the world–which was Iraq–and we essentially did what they used to say they
wanted to do to North Vietnam, bombed it back to the Stone Age. And so in just war theory, there are
these rules about discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, and you are permitted a certain
number of civilian deaths as long as they are side effects of your attempt to go after some legitimate
military target. And this is called collateral damage; it's, collateral means on the side, right? But in
fact, in Iraq, we don't know because there are many different counts, but anywhere between 500,000 and a
million people have died in the U.S. invasion and occupation in Iraq. And when you lay that against the
3,000 people who died on September 11th, none of whom were killed by anyone even from Iraq, you also see
that we have violated another rule of just war theory, which is proportionality. We have destroyed human
life out of all proportion.
RS:
And let me just–you know, it's so difficult to grapple with these questions. And
you are teaching at one of the major Catholic universities here.
RG:
It's a Jesuit university, and that's a little different. And these are the
left-wing Jesuits.
RS:
I'm not putting down your school. [Laughter] Hey, I teach ethics at the
University of Southern California–
RG:
Enough said.
RS:
–and clearly, yes, we are ethically challenged at this moment. I was about to
actually celebrate the pope in this regard. And so there is a certain necessity for being consistent in
the application of these principles, or they mean nothing.
RG:
Exactly.
RS:
And I think that's the body of your life's work, to remind us of that. So in a
sense, you are at a good place where you're teaching. I'm just wondering, how is this disregarded so
widely? I mean, people make a big deal about don't kill the unborn child. You know, I could see arguments
about that. But if that's the beginning of a consistent, pro-life position, yes, it makes certain sense.
If it's the end of a pro-life position, and then you end welfare and you don't care what happens to the
baby and so forth, you're into a deep immorality. And it seems to me you're at a very interesting place.
Because for better or worse, this pope seems to be the only one able to challenge, let's call it U.S.
imperialism or imperial ventures, on a moral basis.
RG:
I think that's right. He certainly is doing a better job of that than either of
his last two predecessors.
RS:
Or the major–
RG:
Other major, yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think, you know, it's
interesting that at USF, we have Reserve Officers' Training Corps. We have people who are training to be
second lieutenants when they leave university in the U.S. Army. And I have had students tell me, I had a
student from Guam who told me, you know, Professor Gordon, I know that when they send me to basic
training, they're going to try to take me apart and change me from being a person into being a soldier.
And I just want you to know that I'm not going to let them do that to me. He said, but you know, ROTC was
my ticket off the island, and I have a duty now to follow through with my promise. And I just, my heart
broke for him. Because what they do to you in basic training is actually a slightly lighter version of
what they do when they train torturers. Everyone who becomes a torturer–and people don't just torture on
a whim; people are trained to be torturers. And part of that training involves being brutalized first
yourself, and having survived that ordeal, you emerge with this sense of yourself as an elite person who
therefore has the right, as a superior being, and now the skills, to turn around and abuse and torture
people who come along behind you. And the U.S. has its own methods of training, and its own locations
where this happens.
RS:
[omission for station break] I'm back after our break with Professor and Doctor
Rebecca Gordon. And we were just talking about how we train people to be torturers. And this is
fascinating, because if you don't consider this question, that you're getting basically good people to do
horrible things, you're missing the whole point. But I just want to say something about the good German.
Because the basic appeal of Hitler was the solid–you know, he was going to make Germany great again. And
this is, I'm not demonizing Germans here, but Donald Trump's father was obviously familiar with this in
his lineage, in that tradition. And the whole appeal, even though this dictator Hitler was this
funny-looking guy, hardly the Aryan model–was to a notion of order. And even in the concentration camps,
keeping direct bookkeeping of how many teeth you pulled and gold you found in the teeth, and so forth.
But it's not–manners. They had the manners. And what bothers me about the very simplistic Trumpwashing
that we're going through now, that Trump is uniquely evil–it's all about manners. He's crude, he's
boorish, he's a misogynist, he says these things, he does these things, he grabs people's private parts,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That's not his crime. His crime is he's continuing a tradition of
bombing people who we have no right to bomb. And so I want to push this a little bit more, the whole
question of manners. Because what Nuremberg did is unmask the manners. And this was also true in the
Eichmann trial that Hannah Arendt talked about, when she talked about the banality of evil. Evil can be
masked by manners. Smile while you learn to kill, right?
RG:
That's exactly right. And I especially know, when you talk about the meticulous
records that they kept, this is a hallmark of torture regimes all over the world. This very careful
record-keeping, this documentation of the work that's been done–because there's no shame about the work.
The process of becoming a torturer includes developing a sense of yourself as doing something uniquely
courageous, uniquely necessary, a unique sacrifice that you as the torturer, more in sorrow than in
anger, are being forced to do by the tremendous evil that confronts you. And so you're absolutely right
that especially among upper-class liberals in the United States, the objection to Trump is his manner,
and his manner is crude and obnoxious, as you say. But what he's really doing is not only continuing to
kill people, and in fact increasing the number of drone strikes, for example, over the already great
number that the Obama administration–
RS:
A man of impeccable manners. Barack Obama. I even feel that way about Bill
Clinton. When Bill Clinton's on television, I smile. I like him. He's warm, he's encouraging. And then I
forget, he's the guy that ended the welfare system, for example. Yes.
RG:
Exactly. Exactly right. And you know, Trump is now with his, I don't know if
you've taken a look at his so-called budget, but he's planning to take away our Medicare and Medicaid,
just in case you might have wanted to have healthcare. Obviously, that's dead on arrival. But
nonetheless, the point is that he is masking what he is actually doing by distracting us with this
bombastic display. And in fact, one of his officials in the EPA actually recently said exactly that, that
they've been able to make all these regulatory changes because every time it looks as though the press is
going to notice, Trump fires off a tweet, and everybody's like, ooh, shiny!
RS:
This is a really important point. Because if you look at the Nuremberg Trial or
you look at the Eichmann trial, these people all hid behind manners. They were well spoken, they were
well educated, and they were following a Charlie Chaplinesque figure, a ludicrous figure; Hitler was
certainly a, yes, he was a more ludicrous figure than Trump, in terms of manners and style and
everything. But his popularity was largely based on being a sort of comic figure, in a way. He inspired a
whole nation of logical, scientific, well-educated–probably the best-educated population in the world.
And so I've had this experience, I've talked to people in the business community and they say well, you
know, but Trump is good for business. And we did have a mess before, and then look at what's happened to
unemployment, and so forth and so on. And so we are really at the limit of manners as a guide. And that's
really what Nuremberg is about. Nuremberg was unmasking manners. Now, we didn't continue after that; we
had the brief Eichmann trial. But what we didn't really ever do in this country–and this is why I want
people to listen or to read your book, better to read it, although listening is great–we never really
took apart the Nazi experience. Because we wanted the ex-Nazis and other Germans to be our allies in the
Cold War. So we have never had that investigation of how an incredibly well-educated, Christian,
law-and-order nation goes into madness.
RG:
Not only that, we never did what the next step was supposed to be, which is
establish a venue in which U.S. war crimes could also be examined in World War II. And there were a
number of people who developed the Nuremberg principles, and worked on the original trial, who really
honestly believed that this would be the prelude to establishing an international court for trying
offenses committed during war, and expected that the United States would in fact be held accountable, not
only for the firebombing of German cities, but for the destruction of up to 60 Japanese cities which were
constructed of wood and paper and reduced to ashes, in a campaign that really very few people in this
country even know about. Although Robert McNamara actually describes it in that excellent documentary–
RS:
The Fog of War
, yeah.
RG:
--
The Fog of War.
RS:
And it's excellent because you see that McNamara was involved in designing the
bombing of Japan and Germany. But also, I mean–like, we talk about Korea. Oh, North Korea, animals, and
Kim Il-sung and his progeny–nobody I ever run into knows we leveled every single structure in North Korea
during the Korean War. Again, a war that was not needed; it was an attempt to get a Chinese communist who
had come to power the year before. I mean, it's bizarre. Then you look at what we did to North Vietnam,
and the carpet bombing, and everything. So this is critical. American exceptionalism–I've mentioned this
a number of times on this podcast–to my mind, is a really, it's the most profound problem that American
people have to face.
RG:
It's a vicious idea. And it's been taken up in different ways by both the liberal
democratic world, and by the, you know, the hard right in this country. The idea that by definition, the
United States can do no wrong, because we are the leader of the so-called free world. Which is a locution
I don't even understand anymore, given that we're not competing anymore with the unfree communist world
that supposedly we were in opposition to. But the idea that–and this was the argument, actually, that the
Bush administration made about torture. By definition, the United States is a country that does not
torture. Therefore, whatever it is that you are observing, it cannot be torture, because that would be a
logical contradiction, because we are the nation that doesn't do that. And it's almost impossible to
enter into that understanding of the world, because no amount of evidence that you can present to the
person who believes that is going to break that worldview. And so American exceptionalism allows us not
only to have military bases in over 100 countries around the world; not only to conduct secret wars that
the people in this country don't even know about–we just suddenly woke up and said, oh my gosh, we're
having a war in Somalia! Who knew. And not to mention Yemen–I was very heartened to see that the Senate
had actually voted with the House to reprimand the U.S. alliance with Saudi Arabia in Yemen. But leave
that aside. This whole idea that we are a unique bearer of human rights and democracy in the world–it's
very hard to break, because it's a concealed, hermetically sealed worldview that people imbibe in grade
school. And they imbibe it as they grow up, and it takes a lot of effort to break through. And one of the
sad things that I see, especially with younger people that I've worked with in organizations like War
Times/Tiempo de Guerras, is that once you've broken through, it then becomes very hard to imagine that
the United States is not permanently and always going to be the hegemon. It almost, having made the
effort and understood the danger the U.S. actually presents to the world, it becomes almost impossible to
recognize when the U.S. actually loses one. And I think it's very important we claim our victories.
RS:
Well you know, you hit it clearly with this, the abandonment by the Democratic
Party of any serious oppositional role. [With] control of the House now, there should be hearings about
what are we doing in these different countries. And instead they're actually criticizing Trump for being,
kind of selling out by getting out of Afghanistan, or not fighting more aggressively in Syria. And we've
actually sort of lost the peace movement, in a way, is a theme I get back to once in a while here. And we
forget, actually, most of the terrible wars since World War II have been fought under democrats, and
financed enthusiastically. So I want to get back to basic moral principles, because they don't mean
anything if you're not consistent. You have to call out people on the left or on the right, you have to
call out war crimes, you have to call out the attacks on homosexuals, black people, Jewish
people–anybody, any other, and so forth. It's something that Jesus reminded us of in the tale of the Good
Samaritan, if you can believe that Luke is the word of God, and not the others, [Laughter] where the Good
Samaritan doesn't appear. I don't want to get into your whole Catholic university thing here. But it's
interesting to me, this notion of consistency. Because it's painful to be consistent. It requires
examining the motives of people you voted for. And this was the problem of Germany: people forget Hitler
was elected. People forget Germany had all the trappings of a–
RG:
Of a democracy.
RS:
–of a democracy. And more important, the conceit that somehow
education–education, and manners–will prevent genocide is a lie. Maybe it's time to recognize this whole
notion of American greatness is the end of thought; if you are by definition great, there's nothing to
question. And it seems to me that main religions that we've had, their one demand that they have in
common is you must question not only your nation's morality, but your own. The devil is in you. We have
to struggle with this devil, we have to struggle with these forces. Yet as a nation, we think America the
beautiful absolves us all. And that's what you're saying in your torture book. That basically, you take
these young recruits that have a very limited knowledge of our history, and you convince them that they
are the agents, really, of a higher power.
RG:
Absolutely right. And in doing that, you pervert the very virtues that we say the
United States is supposed to represent. The virtue of courage, for example, becomes the courage to
suppress your squeamishness at causing pain to another human being. And justice becomes the idea that you
give the punishment first and the trial later, if ever. Right? And this is exactly what we see in the way
our detainees have been treated. And honestly, another locus of this that we don't often recognize is
what goes on on the U.S. soil prisons and jails in this country, where we have 2.2 million people locked
up in cages, and where torture is a regular feature of prison life. It's no accident that the reservists
who were downstairs at Abu Ghraib, they were from West Virginia, and most of them in their civilian life
were prison guards. They were corrections officers. And there's a famous email that one of the
ringleaders, Charles Graner, sent home which said: The Christian in me knows it's wrong, but the
corrections officer in me loves to see a grown man piss himself. And that is exactly the attitude of the
people who are caging up 2.2 [million] largely, vastly disproportionately, black and Latino, Latinx,
people in this country today. And so torture actually is a red thread that runs through the entire
history of the United States, beginning with the Native American population. Slavery itself would not
have been as successful as it was at allowing the amassing of capital–which is, you know if you're a good
Marxist, the congealed labor of these unpaid, captive people, who when they got to the United States, or
what was not even yet the United States, would not work unless, the farmers figured out, they were caused
physical pain. And it was the use, the concerted, intentional, well-documented use of physical pain in
the cotton fields a century later that forced people to develop a physical technology of their bodies
that allowed them, in the course of 40 years, to multiply by eight times the amount of cotton a human
being could pick in a day, because the alternative was to have the skin taken off your back with a whip.
RS:
You know, increasingly in my life I have been a bad Marxist. And I've embraced
some truths that seemed to come out of these religions that, growing up, really frightened me or were
intimidating, and also were on the wrong side. But let's take it back to the pope, let's take it back to
the Jesuit school, University of San Francisco, where you teach. There's a wisdom that I daresay Karl
Marx did not sufficiently embrace. It is that we all have a capacity for evil. That we have virtue; we
care, we bring children into this world, we nurture them, we care about others, we can cry over a
refugee. On the other hand, the 2.2 million–I've been on Death Row quite recently interviewing Kevin
Cooper, who I believe is an innocent man. And fortunately, the governor of California has suspended the
death penalty, and I think Gavin Newsom deserves great credit for his courage. But–and it is a cage, and
we don't care; we don't care about these people. And we don't care about the people we bomb, and we don't
care–they're expendable, they're throwaway people. You want them out of sight, out of mind. It's very
deliberate. And the problem is, if Marxism were accurate [Laughter]–I don't know, not too many people
care, anyway, but since the two of us are talking about it–you know, if it was just the economic motive,
we'd probably do better. The libertarians, for instance–to the degree that they're right, they're right,
yes. But the wars don't make sense. And growing that cotton that way didn't ultimately make sense. And
slavery didn't make sense. Except–except if we have a barbaric part of our nature, if we have a need to
exploit others. Not just for economic reasons; if power corrupts. And this, not to quote Marx, but to
quote Jefferson or Washington, these people who came to power in this great experiment of ours, with all
its contradictions–I repeat this ad nauseum on these podcasts. All their, yes, white, male, I got it, I
got it, slave owners, the whole thing–they were on to a wisdom about their own corruption. And the reason
we have the First Amendment, the reason we have all the amendments, the reason we have separation of
powers, is that power corrupts.
RG:
Absolutely.
RS:
And what comes through in these torture stories and so forth–I talked, I have one
student, just like you, I've had students go off to these wars. I had one who ended up at Abu Ghraib and
at Guantanamo, a reserve officer. He was outside with the families. I'm not going to compromise his
privacy. But he told me what shook him up was he was being told all these things about the people inside
the jail, but his job was to herd the families that were trying to visit. And he could not deny that
there was some kind of humanity going on with these people inside, or why would all these people care so
much about them. And I think we need to be reminded of our own capacity for evil. I think that's what
Nuremberg was about, that the people who commit evil don't present as evil and are not inherently more
evil than we are.
RG:
Exactly.
RS:
And we have to struggle with this. And the good liberals who accommodate this,
and say well, you know, Barack Obama had to do this with the drones, and governor so-and-so had to kill
these people even though he didn't believe in the death penalty–we have to challenge that. Because that
is the fount of evil.
RG:
So, my favorite virtue, Aristotle calls it phronesis, or practical wisdom. St.
Thomas Aquinas calls it prudentia, prudence. But what it really is, is that capacity of the mind that
allows you to actually understand the moral questions that are in front of you. And not to be fooled by
the fog of American exceptionalism, by the distraction of a Trumpian tweet, but to be able to actually
examine and really see, in this case, the effects of U.S. policy on actual human beings around the world.
And this requires a kind of courage to be willing to accept that your own self-understanding, and the
understanding of your people, your country, might be wrong. But it also requires a willingness to look,
to actually see and examine what's in front of you. And if there's one virtue I would like to see
developed, and that I try to develop in my own students, it's this virtue of practical wisdom, where you
actually are responsible for what the effects of your actions can reasonably be foreseen to be. And this
is something that we in the United States really don't have. It's trained out of us, we don't have it.
And part of it, yes, is that capacity to understand that the ability to do evil things exists in all of
us, and it's also to understand that when you multiply that capacity by the technological and economic
power that a country like the United States has, the results–well, the results
While the world mourns the victims of today's terrorist atrocities in Sri Lanka, Ukraine has
conducted its first election since 2014 -- the year in which the fragmented post-Soviet
republic changed forever. This year, the debates were not a contest between those seeking to
reverse the tide of 2014 versus those committed to an even more radically pro-western approach,
but instead the question uniformly revolved around how a country that before 2014 was
ethnically and religious fragmented, poor, corrupt and seemingly ungovernable has become even
worse by all objective measurements.
Because of the popular discontent in the country due to the worsening of already abysmal
economic conditions, it was always going to be difficult for outgoing President Petro
Poroshenko to play the jingoistic anti-Russian/anti-Donbass card when most Ukrainian citizens
are becoming more worried about the price of gas and the price of food than they are worried
about playing a game of political football started by Barack Obama.
As such, the entire political class that took charge after 2014 (ironically many such people
were connected to the old regime they claimed to hate) are roundly reviled throughout Ukraine.
Against this background, comedian Volodymyr Zelensky decided to run for president and early
indications are that he has won the election in a landslide.
Zelensky's campaign was one based on a broadly anti-corruption platform that was as
pro-western and as anti-Russian as that of his closest rivals. The difference was that for the
first time in its history, Ukraine had a political figure with a human face rather than that of
a cold, calculating oligarch aspiring to be an autocrat. Outside of Ukraine and Russia,
Zelensky's candidacy has received the most attention in Israel.
Israeli
media have become excited by the fact that Ukraine will now have a Jewish head of state and
one whose chief backers are particularly close to Tel Aviv. While Israel has often condemned
the rise in genuine antisemitism throughout much of Ukraine, Tel Aviv has nevertheless
increased its economic relations with Kiev since 2014. As such, it can be assured that under
Zelensky, relations between Tel Aviv and Kiev will continue to grow.
This incidentally comes at a time when Russia and Israel are becoming increasingly close
allies as was recently detailed in a Eurasia Future piece by Andrew
Korybko . Whilst Moscow and Kiev cannot agree on seemingly anything at this point in
history, they can agree on one thing: Israel is considered a friendly nation and a valued
partner.
Just because Vladimir Putin is a friend of Israel and something of a philosemitie, it does
not automatically mean that he will develop a warm relationship with a Ukrainian leader who
happens to be Jewish and who happens to be friendly with prominent Israeli businessmen.
However, because the Kremlin has long sought to reach some sort of conclusion to the stand off
with Ukraine (against the wishes of many Russian patriots and the two main opposition parties),
a fresh face in Kiev who has ties to Israelis may well be a small step towards bridging the gap
between his own government and Moscow.
None of this will likely play out before the cameras because in much of Ukraine it is
considered near treasonous to talk of anything resembling a detente with Moscow. Likewise, at a
time when Vladimir Putin's popularity is dipping due to an unpopular proposed pension reform
and internal economic/infrastructural issues, it would be viewed by at least some Russian
patriots as a sell out to effectively compromise with a Kiev regime that has attempted to
commit ethnic cleansing against the people of Donbass.
That being said, behind the scenes things will likely be very different, just as they were
after 2015 when Russia and Turkey rapidly mended ties out of the view of the public, before
later becoming openly close partners as they are today.
As a political novice in a country whose "experienced politicians" are self-evidently
nothing to learn by, Zelensky may well seek advice from Israeli experts, many of whom are
becoming increasingly close to Putin's Russia. This could represent the beginning of a slowly
turning tide for both Moscow and Kiev.
As he does nearly every day, Max Boot, the
Washington Post
's in-house neocon columnist, wrote some words today. As has been the case quite a few times
before, none of his latest words, even when strung together into a coherent sentence, were particularly good. For
this very reason, several of those sentences were noteworthy. So let's (OK,
let me
) look at just what that beautiful, smooth organ in Boot's skull considers a "neoconservative."
According to Merriam-Webster, a neoconservative is a person who cites dictionary definitions in their writing.
It's also, simply put, someone in American politics who's conservative on economic issues, hews to the middle or
even center-left on social issues, and also really, really likes to Do War. That last one is a big requirement, so
don't forget it -- war equals a strong, responsible nation.
Boot opened his column with a critique of
Rep. Ro Khanna's recent op-ed in the
Post
,
with Boot writing that Khanna's position -- that neocons were responsible for the Iraq War -- is little more than an
oft-repeated "canard" that plagues the American discourse. He then proceeded to take the reader through what a
real neoconservative looks like by rewriting the top-summary of
the neoconservatism Wikipedia page
.
Boot started by citing a group of 1970s characters he classified as the True Neocons. (Initially, the term was
embodied by folks who were a little more skeptical of the Soviet Union than some of their Democratic
counterparts.) Boot then argued neocons simply were not in power at the time the Iraq War was being decided on (a
fact that is demonstratively untrue) by citing Bush administration officials widely credited as architects of the
Iraq War:
The "neocons" -- second-tier officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, Undersecretary of
Defense Douglas Feith, and vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- were not the decision-makers. The
decision to invade was made by President George W. Bush in consultation with Vice President Dick Cheney,
national security adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin
Powell. None of them would ever label themselves a "neocon."
Note the last sentence -- Boot frames his argument in a way that hangs the burden of proof that one is a
neoconservative, or acts in a neoconservative fashion, on the stipulation that they publicly identify themselves
as such, which, plainly, is so fucking dumb that I'm going to show you him doubling down on this line of thinking
just because it's so unbelievably shallow.
Moreover, a bipartisan majority of both houses approved the use of military force. Are Democratic then-Sens.
Joe Biden, John Kerry, Charles E. Schumer, Harry Reid, Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton and Dianne Feinstein
neocons?
To state the obvious: Yes! All of those people are absolutely neocons, at least in some way.
The idea that Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden don't at the very least actively display numerous neoconservative
tendencies is an outright rejection of what Americans have watched play out in the political realm since the
national Democratic Party imploded in the 70s. Democrats can be neocons; Republicans can be neolibs. Neos of some
sort or the other are probably around you, right this very second, and no, not
the good kind
!
The concept that political identity is wholly defined as being a list of beliefs a person writes down in their
diary or says aloud during a campaign ad, and not by the actions conducted by said person, is one that has needed
to die for at least the past half-century of American politics. But, again, Boot's column is not engaging in a
discussion about what a neocon actually is in 2019. It's a deceptive and even laudatory tactic, but Boot is
purposefully choosing to frame his argument around how politicians frame themselves. And that's a major problem if
you happen to be employed to write down your opinions for one of the major news outlets in a nation and not for
the political operatives themselves.
If anything, the fact that this batshit lazy argument permeated the top three-fourths of his column offered a
bit of relief with how it would end. Then this sentence appeared and I ascended to heaven:
I am by no means suggesting that everyone who uses the neocon label is doing so as an anti-Semitic smear,
but...
STEPHEN COHEN: But the point here is that Russia has been torn between East and the West forever. Its best policy, in its
own best interest, is to straddle East and West, not to be of the East or the West, but it's impossible in this world today. And
U.S.-led Western policy since the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly since Putin came to power in 2000, has persuaded the
Russian ruling elite that Russia can not count any longer, economically, politically, militarily, on being part of the West. It has
to go elsewhere. So all this talk about wanting to win Russia to an American position that's anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese is conceived
in disaster and will end in disaster. They should think of some other foreign policy.
...Haven't these people learned anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes won't be
happy until we're at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the fever-dreams of Putin haters:
Unilaterally abandoned 1987 Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty
Expelled 60 diplomats and closed 3 Russian diplomatic annexes
Bombed Syria, a Russian ally, with Russian troops in country
Sold arms to Ukraine, which is actively at war with Russia
Threatened Germany to cancel a new Russian pipeline through the Baltic (effort failed)
Even more sanctions against Russia and Russian nationals
Stationed missile defense systems on the Russian border in violation of arms treaties
Massive military exercises in Europe on the Russian border
Stationed troops in Poland
Negotiating with Poland to build a permanent US military base in Poland
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, if so, it's a fool's folly. Russia is leaving the West. I mean,
it can't leave the West geopolitically, because Russia is so big, it's half in the West and a
half in the un-West geographically. But American foreign policy, NATO expansion, the unwise
policies made in Brussels and Washington, are driving Russia from the West.
STEPHEN
COHEN: And not only China, where else? All major powers that are not members of NATO,
including Iran. So when Putin came to power, he was very much in the tradition of Gorbachev and
Yeltsin. He wanted a strategic alliance with the United States. Who was the first person to
call up Bush after 9/11? Putin. And he said, "George, anything." And if you go back and look at
what the Russians did to help the American ground war in Afghanistan against the Taliban,
whether you think it was a good idea or not, that ground war, Russia did more to save American
lives -- Russian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan -- than any NATO country did.
PAUL JAY: No, Iran did more than any NATO country to help America.
STEPHEN COHEN: But Russia had assets, unbelievable assets, and corridors for
transportation, and even an army, the Northern Alliance, that it kept in Afghanistan. It gave
it all to the United States. Putin wanted a strategic alliance with the United States, and what
did he get in return? He got from Bush, the second Bush, more NATO expansion right to Russia's
borders, and as I mentioned before, American withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty,
which had been the bedrock of Russian nuclear security for 30 or 40 years. He got betrayed, and
they use that word, "We were betrayed by Washington." This is serious stuff.
The pivot away from the West begins there and continues with these crazy policies that
Washington has pursued toward Russia. It doesn't mean that Russia is gone forever from the
West, but if you look at the billions of dollars of investment, you look at which way the
pipelines flow, you look at Russia -- Putin meets like six times a year, maybe more, with the
leader of China. They've each called each other their best friend in politics. Trump meets with
Putin and we think, "Oh my god, how can he meet with him." I mean, it's normal.
PAUL JAY: Netanyahu just met with Putin; nobody said a word.
STEPHEN COHEN: But the point here is that Russia has been torn between East and the
West forever. Its best policy, in its own best interest, is to straddle East and West, not to
be of the East or the West, but it's impossible in this world today. And U.S.-led Western
policy since the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly since Putin came to power in 2000,
has persuaded the Russian ruling elite that Russia can not count any longer, economically,
politically, militarily, on being part of the West. It has to go elsewhere. So all this talk
about wanting to win Russia to an American position that's anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese is
conceived in disaster and will end in disaster. They should think of some other foreign
policy.
PAUL JAY: I agree, but I think that's what Trump's -- the people around Trump that
wanted the detente --
STEPHEN COHEN: We should get new people.
PAUL JAY: Well
STEPHEN COHEN: I'll tell you truthfully, if Trump really wants to cooperate with
Russia for the sake of American national security, if we forget all this Russiagate stuff and
we say, "The guy is a little dim, but his ideas are right, you've got to cooperate with
Russia," he has to get some new advisors. Because the people around him don't have a clue how
to do it.
PAUL JAY: I don't think that is the intent, the intent is make money. I don't think
there's any other intent. Make money for arms manufacturers, fossil fuel --
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, hope dies with us. I just don't see that constant bashing of
Trump demeaning him, though it's so easy to do, helps us think clearly about American national
interests.
PAUL JAY: I don't think bashing Trump by dredging up the demons of the Cold War is
anything but war mongering. On the other hand, I don't think we should create any illusions
about who Trump is.
STEPHEN COHEN: So let me give you the part with a paradox. We shouldn't have any
illusions about who Trump is, that seems like --
PAUL JAY: Or who the system is, really.
STEPHEN COHEN: OK. So let's say -- I mean, that seems a sensible point of view. But
let me ask you a question. Why was it that American presidents since Eisenhower could do
detente with Soviet communist leaders, and they weren't demonized after Stalin, but we're not
permitted -- and certainly Trump is not permitted -- to do detente with a Russian Kremlin
anti-communist leader, which Putin is? Did we like the communists better than the
anti-communists in the Kremlin?
PAUL JAY: No. I'll give you what I think, it's just a layman's opinion. I think the
foreign policy establishment, the elite, they were absolutely furious that after all these
decades of trying to overthrow the Soviet Union, and they finally accomplish -- although I
think it was mostly an internal phenomenon, but still -- and then they get Yeltsin and they
have open Wild West, grabbing all these resources. I think they were really pissed that a state
emerged, led by Putin, that said, "Hold on, it may be oligarchs, but they're going to be
Russian, and you Americans aren't going to have a free-for -- all, taking up the resources and
owning the finance. We're not going to be a third world country to your empire."
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src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" />
STEPHEN COHEN: I've got more hair. You've distracted me. What we share, despite the age
difference, is that we grew up at a time when we were told -- whether you or I believed it or
not, but our generations, two generations, were told we are against Russia because it's
communist. We were told that for decade after decade after decade. Now, Russia, the Kremlin, is
not communist, it's anti-communist, and we're still against Russia. How do Russian
intellectuals and policy-makers interpret that turnabout, that it was never about communism, it
was about Russia? There's a saying in Russia formulated by a philosopher, his name was
Zinoviev, he passed on but he was very influential, they were shooting -- meaning the West --
they were shooting at communism, but they were aiming at Russia.
And the view, very widespread among the Russian policy intellectual class today, is that
Washington, in particular, will never accept Russia as an equal great power in world affairs,
regardless of whether Russia is communist or anti-communist. And if that is so, Russia has to
entirely reconceive its place in the world and its thinking about the West. And that point of
view is ascending in Russia today due to Western policy. But just remember the view that all
during the previous Cold War, they claim they were shooting at communism, but it was really
Russia. And they still are today.
PAUL JAY: Yeah, I agree with that. I just --
STEPHEN COHEN: But we don't -- you and I may agree, but we don't want Russians to
think that way.
PAUL JAY: But I think the view coming out of World War II about being the global
hegemon, the superpower, what that also means is you can't have any adversarial regional
powers. And whether it's Russia or Iran, if you're not in the smaller American sphere of
influence, the umbrella, you can't be there.
STEPHEN COHEN: It's funny you say that. I mean, I'm not a Putin apologist or a Trump
apologist, but I do like intellectual puzzles. If you're saying that we have to give up our
thinking about a multipolar world, so to speak, that there'll be other regional superpowers or
great powers, then isn't Trump the first American president who seems to be OK with that? I
don't see in Trump much a demand that we be number one.
PAUL JAY: Oh, I think Make America Great Again?
STEPHEN COHEN: But he didn't say Make American Number One Again. Maybe that's what he
means, but you don't have Trump --
PAUL JAY: I don't think it kind of matters what the hell Trump thinks or says. And I
think --
STEPHEN COHEN: Have you heard Trump say this thing that Obama and Madeleine Albright
ran around saying for years, that American is "the indispensable nation?" Do you know how
aggravated that made other states in the world? I mean, stop and think about it. Who runs
around saying "we're indispensable?" I haven't heard Trump say that, maybe he has.
PAUL JAY: I just don't think we should put too much weight into whatever Trump says.
I think he's a vehicle, he's a vessel.
STEPHEN COHEN: You take what you can get these days.
PAUL JAY: He's a vessel, first and foremost, for the arms manufacturers, for the
fossil fuel industry. He's a vessel for right-wing evangelical politics. He's not a philosopher
king. He's not a peacenik.
STEPHEN COHEN: You have to have priorities.
PAUL JAY: I think he's rather banal.
STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, probably, but you have to have priorities. My priority in
international affairs is to avoid a military conflict with Russia. In my book, my new book, War
with Russia?, when I start writing that book in 2013, I never intended to give it that title.
But as I worked and watched events unfold since 2013 to 2019, for the first time in my long
career, I thought war with Russia was possible. I didn't even think there was going to be a war
-- as I remember it, I don't remember it vividly -- during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, I
assure you, the new Cold War is fraught with multiple Cuban Missile Crises. Take your pick; in
the Baltic area where NATO is building up, in Ukraine where we've got ourselves involved in a
proxy war, in Georgia where NATO is trespassing again as we talk, in Syria where American and
Russian forces are flying and fighting on the ground in close proximity. By the way, Trump was
absolutely right in withdrawing those -- what were they -- 3000 Americans in Syria because
whatever, Russia had killed just one of them.
With Trump in the White House, the trip wires, a war between nuclear Russia and nuclear
America, are far greater and more multiple than they have ever been. That's the danger.
Therefore, at this moment, if Trump says it's necessary to cooperate with Russia, on that one
issue we must support him. It's existential at this moment. And believe me, and believe me,
people love to hate on Putin in this country; "Putin's evil, Putin's bad." It's nonsense. Putin
is a recognizable leader in Russia's tradition. Putin, as you said I think before, came to
power wanting an alliance with the United States. He's spoken of his own illusions publicly.
Leaders very rarely admit they ever had an illusion, rights, it's not something they do. He is
reproached in Russia, reproached in Russia, for still having illusions about the West. You know
what they say about him in high places in Russia? "He's not proactive, he just reacts, he waits
for the West to do something abysmal to Russia, and then he acts. Why doesn't he first see
what's coming?" What do they cite? They cite Ukraine.
PAUL JAY: Well, that's the next segment, because my question to you is going to be,
"Did Putin make a mistake in Crimea?" So please join us for the continuation of our series of
interviews with Stephen Cohen on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
Yet another delusional remark at odds with reality. Haven’t these people learned
anything from the implosion of their pathetic Russiagate hysteria? The Russophobes
won’t be happy until we’re at war with a nuclear power and the nukes are about to
land.
Here are things Trump has actually done, as opposed to red-limned fantasies drawn from the
fever-dreams of Putin haters:
"... A lot of money not only in the USA but from the vassal states is and was at stake thus when Trump came along with his anti-imperial rhetoric ..."
"... Whatever Candidate Trump may or may not thought about a militaristic foreign policy, once in office he was properly tutored in the realities of the game. He now realizes that the MIC exists purely through the sufferance of external "enemies"; that "Full-Spectrum Dominance" means what it says; that America Numba One is non-negotiable; that Israel sets ME policy for the US; and that there is no limit to the DoD budget. Any policy changes outside of those parameters is tolerated and here we are plus ça change, etc., etc. ..."
President Bush withdrew the United States unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile
Treaty, correct? Now, this treaty was related, because it forbid the deployment of so-called
missile defense in a way that either side, American or Russian, could think that it had such
great missile defense, it had a first strike capability. And everybody agreed nobody should
think that. Mutually assured destruction had kept us safe in the nuclear age. But if Russia
or the United States gets a first strike capability, then you don't have assured mutual
destruction, and some crazy person might be tempted to risk it. So how did the Russians react
to that? They began to develop–as I said before, when we began to deploy missile
defense–a new generation of weapons. In other words, you're getting this classic
action, reaction, action, reaction that drove the previous nuclear arms race, and now it's
happening again.
Decisions on whether to go to nuclear war are down to less than 5 minutes. That's the reason
the Doomsday clock is closer to midnight than ever before. And Trump, Pompeo, and Bolton will
be making the decisions.
Since the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire Washington has been worried that its
existence as an imperial capital was in danger due to the rise of the small government right.
A lot of money not only in the USA but from the vassal states is and was at stake thus when
Trump came along with his anti-imperial rhetoric the entire Washington Establishment rose as
one and screamed "off with his head" so Trump had to mollify everyone by more warlike
rhetoric and allying himself with the Saudis and the neo-fascists in Israel and it looks like
he will finish out his term.
Detente will never come no matter who wins next year and no one
wants nuclear war but we could step into it as Cohen warns.
But I believe today that military
leaders have shown how adept they were in avoiding conflict in Syria so I'm more hopeful than
Cohen.
Whatever Candidate Trump may or may not thought about a militaristic foreign policy, once
in office he was properly tutored in the realities of the game. He now realizes that the MIC
exists purely through the sufferance of external "enemies"; that "Full-Spectrum Dominance"
means what it says; that America Numba One is non-negotiable; that Israel sets ME policy for
the US; and that there is no limit to the DoD budget. Any policy changes outside of those
parameters is tolerated and here we are plus ça change, etc., etc.
"... Great points, Mr. Cohen....this protracted attack on Russia via the phoney "Russiagate" investigation has set back relations with Russia for years to come. ..."
"... That Trump represents a thinking that the post Soviet reality is not of a uni-superpower world, but one of a multi-polar world dominated by US economic empire. ..."
"... After reading "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century" in 2005, I came to the idea that the most dangerous section of the American elite were those that posited this uni-superpower world order idea; ..."
"... The problem is the incorrigible Big C (Capital) that wanted to eat away Russian minerals that Putin stopped in national interest. Any subsequent cooperation from the Russian side was probably was only for strategic cooperation with the U.S. to have world peace. ..."
"... Not a word in Cohen's appraisal about US criminality. Jay was pushing in that direction. I hope they get around to the criminality of the Deep State Mafia. ..."
"... Despite all the chaos and the moral panics that keep rocking the White House, Trump's three National Security Advisors - Flynn, McMaster, Bolton - had one core commonality: they want war with Iran. Watching the sinister neo-con Jim Woolsey betray the frothing neo-con Flynn to Joe Biden was a comedy of neo-con infighting. A major part of Russiagate was the older 'Atlanticist' neo-cons boxing in the boorish 'Trumpist' neo-cons. Whether Atlantic Council or US-homegrown both flavors of neo-conservatism want war with Iran. ..."
PAUL JAY: Welcome back to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. I'm Paul
Jay.
And we're continuing our series of discussions with Stephen Cohen. And his biography is down
below the video player, and you really should watch the first few segments anyway and you'll
get where we are. Thanks for joining us again.
STEPHEN COHEN: Thank you.
PAUL JAY: So I've watched several of your interviews. You've done Larry King and
others, and you've been positive about Trump's attitude towards sort of a detente, lowering
tensions with Russia. And in terms of my personal view, I think you're right. I think anything
that lowers tensions between two nuclear powers is a good thing, and I think this
self-righteous American attitude towards Putin and Russia– when you look at the scale of
crimes committed by countries internationally, there is nothing that Russia has done that
compares to the Iraq war, and go on and on with the United States has done, and to have some
self-righteous attitude Two, it's clear it's so hypocritical to worry about political rights in
Russia, because it's clear in terms of U.S. foreign policy if you can ally with Saudi Arabia,
the Israeli occupation, and you name it how many dictators the United States has supported over
the years, it's not about democracy.
So whatever Trump's intent is, I think I agree that this is a good thing. I actually think
Trump framed it quite well himself, where he said, "Russia is not our adversary, they're our
competitor, the way other big capitalist countries are our competitors." I think all that makes
sense. Where I push back is I think you need to add that one of the prime reasons Trump wants
to diminish tensions with Russia–assuming he really does, because some of the people that
work for him, Nikki Haley in the UN and others, have said as outrageous stuff about Russia as
any Democrat has said.
All that being said, I think the Trump presidency is one of the most dangerous presidencies
ever, and he is planning and his whole foreign policy agenda has been regime change in Iran.
And I think that if they don't accomplish that through economic warfare against Iran, with John
Bolton there, the possibility of some kind of at least bombing attack on Iran before 2020 is
very possible. One of the reasons I think he wants to lower tensions with Russia is so he can
go after China. His acting defense secretary justified this new military expenditure, the new
budget, the 765 billion dollar budget, with three words, "China, China, China." Their strategic
vision–and you can see this in Steve Bannon's interviews and language–is diminish
the tensions with Russia, go after Iran and go after China. And I think one needs to say this,
otherwise it kind of looks like Trump is some kind of peacenik. And far from it, I think
they're militarists.
STEPHEN COHEN: Not sure what the question is, though. Is it about–
PAUL JAY: Well, my question is, I think when you are saying positive things about
Trump diminishing tensions with Russia, which I think is correct, but I think you need to add
this guy does not have peaceful intentions, he's very dangerous.
STEPHEN COHEN: I live in a social realm–to the extent that I have any social
life at all anymore– where people get very angry if I say, or anybody says, anything
positive about Donald Trump. When Trump was campaigning in 2016, he said, "I think it would be
great to cooperate with Russia." All of my adult life, my advocacy in American foreign
policy–I've known presidents, the first George Bush invited me to Camp David to consult
with him before he went to the Malta Summit. I've known presidential candidates, Senators and
the rest, and I've always said the same thing. American national security runs through Moscow,
period. Nothing's changed.
In the era of weapons of mass destruction, not only nuclear, but primarily nuclear, ever
more sophisticated, the Russians now have a new generation of nuclear weapons–Putin
announced them on March 1, they were dismissed here, but they're real–that can elude any
missile defense. We spent trillions on missile defense to acquire a first strike capability
against Russia. We said it was against or Iran, but nobody believed it. Russia has now thwarted
us; they now have missile defense-evading nuclear weapons from submarines, to aircraft, to
missiles. And Putin has said, "It's time to negotiate an end to this new arms race," and he's
100 percent right. So when I heard Trump say, in 2016, we have to cooperate with Russia, I had
already become convinced–and I spell this out in my new book, War with Russia?–that
we were in a new cold war, but a new cold war more dangerous than the preceding one for reasons
I gave in the book, one of them being these new nuclear weapons.
So I began to speak positively about Trump at that moment–that would have been
probably around the summer of 2016–just on this one point, because none of the other
candidates were advocating cooperation with Russia. And as I told you before, Paul, all my life
I've been a detente guy. Detente means cooperate with Russia. I saw in Trump the one candidate
who said this is necessary, in his own funny language. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, was
very much a hawk. When she said publicly that Vladimir Putin has no soul, you could not commit
or utter a more supreme statement of anti-diplomacy, and particularly addressing the Russians,
who put a lot of stock in soul. To say somebody has no soul and then go on to equate him with
Hitler, I found that so irresponsible. I didn't vote for Trump, but I did begin to write and
broadcast that this was of vital importance that we have this discussion, that we needed a new
detente because of the new and more dangerous Cold War.
Since he's been president, I think he's been ineffective in regard to pursuing detente with
Russia for a couple of reasons. I think that the people who invented Russiagate were the
enemies of detente, and they piled on. So they've now demonized Russia, they've crippled Trump.
Anything he does diplomatically with Putin is called collusion. No matter what Mueller says,
it's collusion. This is anti-democracy, and detente is pursued through democracy. So whatever
he really wants to do–it's hard to say–he's been thwarted. I think it's also one of
the reasons why he put anti-detente people around him.
PAUL JAY: Why didn't he pull out of the arms treaty?
STEPHEN COHEN: So this is a separate issue now, and a complicated one. We have been
in violation–let's be clear for folks which treaty we're talking about. We're talking
about the so-called Intermediate-Range Treaty. This band of deployment of missiles that could
fly roughly from 500, I think, to 3000 miles, they were exceedingly dangerous. The American
ones have been based in Europe. They were very dangerous because they tested high-alert
systems. They flew low, fast, they could elude radar. They were dangerous. Reagan and Gorbachev
abolished them in 1987, correct? Now, stop and think for a minute, Paul. What Reagan and
Gorbachev did in 1987 was the first ever, ever in history, act of nuclear abolitionism. They
abolished an entire category of nuclear weapons. That was a sacred act. It needed to be
cherished and preserved forever, no matter what difficulties emerged.
But then comes the history, and we need to remember the history. In 2002, the second
President Bush withdrew the United States unilaterally from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty,
correct? Now, this treaty was related, because it forbid the deployment of so-called missile
defense in a way that either side, American or Russian, could think that it had such great
missile defense, it had a first strike capability. And everybody agreed nobody should think
that. Mutually assured destruction had kept us safe in the nuclear age. But if Russia or the
United States gets a first strike capability, then you don't have assured mutual destruction,
and some crazy person might be tempted to risk it. So how did the Russians react to that? They
began to develop–as I said before, when we began to deploy missile defense–a new
generation of weapons. In other words, you're getting this classic action, reaction, action,
reaction that drove the previous nuclear arms race, and now it's happening again.
So that brings us to Trump's decision. We don't know yet where it's going to lead, because
Trump has said we're withdrawing. He said the Russians have been in violation. But in fact,
we've been in violation since we deployed the missile defense systems. Just for the record, by
the way–and professor Theodore Postol at MIT has been very good about this–these
missile defense installations that we've installed around Russia, land, air, and sea, can
actually fire cruise missiles. They are in violation of that Intermediate-Range Treaty, so
we've been in systematic violation. Pushes come to shove, we withdrew, the Russians have now
withdrawn. But Trump has said two things that are interesting and maybe correct, that
technically the treaty was out of date because of the new weaponry. And secondly, who has the
most cruise missiles? China. 30 years ago in 1987, it was only the United States and Russia,
the Soviet Union. But now China, because of its vast regional presence, has all these
intermediate range missiles.
So Trump says offhandedly, maybe in a Tweet, "Have you ever looked at the military budget of
Russia, China, and the United States? It's obscene. We should cut it." What does that mean?
What does that mean? It's a good idea, right? Then he said, "We can't have such a treaty
without China." The Russians know this too, so let us hope that what they're stumbling toward
is a new, modernized intermediate-range ban that would include China. China, however, will
never sign it. But if they begin the negotiations and China doesn't deploy any more during the
negotiations, and the negotiations go on indefinitely, we are safer than we now are. Now, do I
think that Trump is cunning and thought this up? I'm not sure, but he's got China on the mind,
and I don't quite agree with you that–he's got a kind of dualistic attitude toward China.
It's a threat, but every time he makes a new trade deal with China, he brags on it that it's
great for us.
You would agree with that, right? He's always talking about, "We're going to have this
wonderful trade agreement with China, it's going to be so good for us." So in his mind, Trump's
mind, China is kind of potentially–in his businessman mind–this big economic plus
that he alone is going to get right. Let him try.
PAUL JAY: I don't know how much of this policy at all is Trump or not Trump. I think
the brains behind a lot of this policy now is Bolton and some of the other neocon crazies
around him.
STEPHEN COHEN: But Trump has been saying the same thing about cooperating with Russia
long before he took on Bolton. There's two ways to look at this.
PAUL JAY: But his attitude towards China–
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, just stay for one minute on Russia, because the China thing is
worth talking about too. But he says, almost alone, for the first time–how long has it
been since we had a president really pursue detente? It's been a very long time. Obama called
it a reset, but it was fraudulent. It was basically saying to the Russians, "Give us
everything, and we aren't going to give you anything." It was doomed from the beginning. Plus,
they wagered that Putin wouldn't return to the presidency. Do you know, by the way, speaking of
meddling, that Biden went to Moscow and told Putin not to return to the presidency in 2012?
PAUL JAY: No.
STEPHEN COHEN: Wrap your head around that a minute. The vice president of the United
States goes to Moscow and tells Putin, who's now prime minister because he termed out, but he
could return, "We don't think you should return to the presidency." So you know what I'm
wondering, I'm wondering whether Biden's calling up Putin today and asking Putin whether Biden
should get into the presidential race here. I mean, what the hell? What the hell? And we talk
about meddling? So the point about Trump, to finish this, is for the first time in many, many
years, a presidential candidate, one that I didn't vote for and didn't care for, had said it's
necessary to cooperate with Russia.
PAUL JAY: OK, but I've got to contextualize it. Because it's not enough–because
first of all, Trump's a big liar, and everyone, from beginning to end, for real.
STEPHEN COHEN: Politicians lie, Paul. Welcome to the world,
PAUL JAY: No, but I think he lied on Russia.
STEPHEN COHEN: About what?
PAUL JAY: Well, on two things. I think number one–I think two things drove his
Russia–
STEPHEN COHEN: Let me get my word in. Then I'll give it to you, I promise I'll pass
it right to you, because this is going to set you up beautifully. When he said, Trump, 2016,
"It's necessary to cooperate with Russia," there are two ways to interpret that. He was wise
and smart, or the Kremlin had something on him.
PAUL JAY: No, I don't think either of those are true.
STEPHEN COHEN: And then we go straight to Russia.
PAUL JAY: Neither of those are true.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, I'm not saying you say that, but that's the way it was
taken.
PAUL JAY: No, I think there's two things drove the Russia thing. Number one, they
wanted sanctions lifted because Tillerson and the American oil companies, especially Exxon,
wanted a big energy play in Russia, and they needed to lift the sanctions to do it, and
Tillerson was all positioned for it. And if it hadn't been for this whole Russiagate stuff,
they would have sailed along, had a detente, lifted the sanctions, and had a whole realm of new
energy.
STEPHEN COHEN: You mean under Trump.
PAUL JAY: Under Trump. And I think that would have been a good thing. I'm not
critiquing that in the sense that anything that reduces tensions between the United States and
Russia is a good, thing normalizing, even if it's exploitive and ripping off the Russian people
in their oil, I don't care. The nuclear threat is so paramount, anything that reduces those
tensions are good. But these are not peacenik intentions.
STEPHEN COHEN: Where do we disagree? You've lost me.
PAUL JAY: I'm not saying we necessarily disagree on this. The second part of it
is–and this is where I think is the dangerous part. Because I think sometimes when Trump
and Putin get together and talk quietly, part of that conversation could well be about Iran.
Because when they had the first big round of sanctions on Iran, Russia supported them, Russia
came in on it. And if your foreign policy objective–and clearly it is, between whether it
was Flynn, or whether it was Mattis, or whether it was Bolton, all of them are "regime change
in Iran is the prime objective." And if you want to do that, wouldn't you want Russia to at the
very least step back a little bit?
STEPHEN COHEN: I got you now, I see where you're going.
PAUL JAY: Number one. And number two, the big strategic guns are focused on China. So
if you want to focus on China, wouldn't it be nice to have a strategic normalization with
Russia, try to split Russia from China? Because in their minds, the real enemy is not Russia,
the real enemy is a superpower economy–
STEPHEN COHEN: In whose mind?
PAUL JAY: Much of the American foreign policy establishment, both Democrat and
Republican.
STEPHEN COHEN: The real enemy is ?
PAUL JAY: China. Because that's the global economy, that's going to be the competing
superpower.
STEPHEN COHEN: Let's say you're right.
PAUL JAY: And that doesn't in any way say it's still, in the final analysis, a good
thing if Trump can diminish these tensions. But let's give it the whole context.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, but it doesn't–I'm not sure what the whole context is. It
seems to me you just said to me that Trump or these people were playing for Russia's support
against Iran in China.
PAUL JAY: As one piece of this, yeah.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, if so, it's a fool's folly. Russia is leaving the West. I mean,
it can't leave the West geopolitically, because Russia is so big, it's half in the West and a
half in the un-West geographically. But American foreign policy, NATO expansion, the unwise
policies made in Brussels and Washington, are driving Russia from the West.
PAUL JAY: No doubt.
STEPHEN COHEN: And when you leave the West, where do you end up, Paul?
PAUL JAY: They are pushing exactly the kind of a line–
STEPHEN COHEN: Where do you go?
PAUL JAY: Well, with China, of course.
STEPHEN COHEN: And not only China, where else? All major powers that are not members
of NATO, including Iran. So when Putin came to power, he was very much in the tradition of
Gorbachev and Yeltsin. He wanted a strategic alliance with the United States. Who was the first
person to call up Bush after 9/11? Putin. And he said, "George, anything." And if you go back
and look at what the Russians did to help the American ground war in Afghanistan against the
Taliban, whether you think it was a good idea or not, that ground war, Russia did more to save
American lives–Russian soldiers fighting in Afghanistan–than any NATO country
did.
PAUL JAY: No, Iran did more than any NATO country to help America.
STEPHEN COHEN: But Russia had assets, unbelievable assets, and corridors for
transportation, and even an army, the Northern Alliance, that it kept in Afghanistan. It gave
it all to the United States. Putin wanted a strategic alliance with the United States, and what
did he get in return? He got from Bush, the second Bush, more NATO expansion right to Russia's
borders, and as I mentioned before, American withdrawal from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty,
which had been the bedrock of Russian nuclear security for 30 or 40 years. He got betrayed, and
they use that word, "We were betrayed by Washington." This is serious stuff.
The pivot away from the West begins there and continues with these crazy policies that
Washington has pursued toward Russia. It doesn't mean that Russia is gone forever from the
West, but if you look at the billions of dollars of investment, you look at which way the
pipelines flow, you look at Russia–Putin meets like six times a year, maybe more, with
the leader of China. They've each called each other their best friend in politics. Trump meets
with Putin and we think, "Oh my god, how can he meet with him." I mean, it's normal.
PAUL JAY: Netanyahu just met with Putin; nobody said a word.
STEPHEN COHEN: But the point here is that Russia has been torn between East and the
West forever. Its best policy, in its own best interest, is to straddle East and West, not to
be of the East or the West, but it's impossible in this world today. And U.S.-led Western
policy since the end of the Soviet Union, and particularly since Putin came to power in 2000,
has persuaded the Russian ruling elite that Russia can not count any longer, economically,
politically, militarily, on being part of the West. It has to go elsewhere. So all this talk
about wanting to win Russia to an American position that's anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese is
conceived in disaster and will end in disaster. They should think of some other foreign
policy.
PAUL JAY: I agree, but I think that's what Trump's–the people around Trump that
wanted the detente–
STEPHEN COHEN: We should get new people.
PAUL JAY: Well
STEPHEN COHEN: I'll tell you truthfully, if Trump really wants to cooperate with
Russia for the sake of American national security, if we forget all this Russiagate stuff and
we say, "The guy is a little dim, but his ideas are right, you've got to cooperate with
Russia," he has to get some new advisors. Because the people around him don't have a clue how
to do it.
PAUL JAY: I don't think that is the intent, the intent is make money. I don't think
there's any other intent. Make money for arms manufacturers, fossil fuel–
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, hope dies with us. I just don't see that constant bashing of
Trump demeaning him, though it's so easy to do, helps us think clearly about American national
interests.
PAUL JAY: I don't think bashing Trump by dredging up the demons of the Cold War is
anything but war mongering. On the other hand, I don't think we should create any illusions
about who Trump is.
STEPHEN COHEN: So let me give you the part with a paradox. We shouldn't have any
illusions about who Trump is, that seems like–
PAUL JAY: Or who the system is, really.
STEPHEN COHEN: OK. So let's say–I mean, that seems a sensible point of view.
But let me ask you a question. Why was it that American presidents since Eisenhower could do
detente with Soviet communist leaders, and they weren't demonized after Stalin, but we're not
permitted–and certainly Trump is not permitted–to do detente with a Russian Kremlin
anti-communist leader, which Putin is? Did we like the communists better than the
anti-communists in the Kremlin?
PAUL JAY: No. I'll give you what I think, it's just a layman's opinion. I think the
foreign policy establishment, the elite, they were absolutely furious that after all these
decades of trying to overthrow the Soviet Union, and they finally accomplish–although I
think it was mostly an internal phenomenon, but still–and then they get Yeltsin and they
have open Wild West, grabbing all these resources. I think they were really pissed that a state
emerged, led by Putin, that said, "Hold on, it may be oligarchs, but they're going to be
Russian, and you Americans aren't going to have a free-for–all, taking up the resources
and owning the finance. We're not going to be a third world country to your empire."
STEPHEN COHEN: That's correct.
PAUL JAY: And they're pissed off at that.
STEPHEN COHEN: They, meaning ?
PAUL JAY: The Americans.
STEPHEN COHEN: Our people.
PAUL JAY: Our people. Well, I don't want to even take ownership for it.
STEPHEN COHEN: Don't run away. I don't know your age–
PAUL JAY: I'm 67.
STEPHEN COHEN: So we've established that I'm older than you.
PAUL JAY: No doubt. But you look younger, and I'm pissed at that.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, that's a separate subject.
PAUL JAY: You've got more hair.
STEPHEN COHEN: I've got more hair. You've distracted me. What we share, despite the
age difference, is that we grew up at a time when we were told–whether you or I believed
it or not, but our generations, two generations, were told we are against Russia because it's
communist. We were told that for decade after decade after decade. Now, Russia, the Kremlin, is
not communist, it's anti-communist, and we're still against Russia. How do Russian
intellectuals and policy-makers interpret that turnabout, that it was never about communism, it
was about Russia? There's a saying in Russia formulated by a philosopher, his name was
Zinoviev, he passed on but he was very influential, they were shooting–meaning the
West–they were shooting at communism, but they were aiming at Russia.
And the view, very widespread among the Russian policy intellectual class today, is that
Washington, in particular, will never accept Russia as an equal great power in world affairs,
regardless of whether Russia is communist or anti-communist. And if that is so, Russia has to
entirely reconceive its place in the world and its thinking about the West. And that point of
view is ascending in Russia today due to Western policy. But just remember the view that all
during the previous Cold War, they claim they were shooting at communism, but it was really
Russia. And they still are today.
PAUL JAY: Yeah, I agree with that. I just–
STEPHEN COHEN: But we don't–you and I may agree, but we don't want Russians to
think that way.
PAUL JAY: But I think the view coming out of World War II about being the global
hegemon, the superpower, what that also means is you can't have any adversarial regional
powers. And whether it's Russia or Iran, if you're not in the smaller American sphere of
influence, the umbrella, you can't be there.
STEPHEN COHEN: It's funny you say that. I mean, I'm not a Putin apologist or a Trump
apologist, but I do like intellectual puzzles. If you're saying that we have to give up our
thinking about a multipolar world, so to speak, that there'll be other regional superpowers or
great powers, then isn't Trump the first American president who seems to be OK with that? I
don't see in Trump much a demand that we be number one.
PAUL JAY: Oh, I think Make America Great Again?
STEPHEN COHEN: But he didn't say Make American Number One Again. Maybe that's what he
means, but you don't have Trump–
PAUL JAY: I don't think it kind of matters what the hell Trump thinks or says. And I
think–
STEPHEN COHEN: Have you heard Trump say this thing that Obama and Madeleine Albright
ran around saying for years, that American is "the indispensable nation?" Do you know how
aggravated that made other states in the world? I mean, stop and think about it. Who runs
around saying "we're indispensable?" I haven't heard Trump say that, maybe he has.
PAUL JAY: I just don't think we should put too much weight into whatever Trump says.
I think he's a vehicle, he's a vessel.
STEPHEN COHEN: You take what you can get these days.
PAUL JAY: He's a vessel, first and foremost, for the arms manufacturers, for the
fossil fuel industry. He's a vessel for right-wing evangelical politics. He's not a philosopher
king. He's not a peacenik.
STEPHEN COHEN: You have to have priorities.
PAUL JAY: I think he's rather banal.
STEPHEN COHEN: Yeah, probably, but you have to have priorities. My priority in
international affairs is to avoid a military conflict with Russia. In my book, my new book, War
with Russia?, when I start writing that book in 2013, I never intended to give it that title.
But as I worked and watched events unfold since 2013 to 2019, for the first time in my long
career, I thought war with Russia was possible. I didn't even think there was going to be a
war–as I remember it, I don't remember it vividly–during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Today, I assure you, the new Cold War is fraught with multiple Cuban Missile Crises. Take your
pick; in the Baltic area where NATO is building up, in Ukraine where we've got ourselves
involved in a proxy war, in Georgia where NATO is trespassing again as we talk, in Syria where
American and Russian forces are flying and fighting on the ground in close proximity. By the
way, Trump was absolutely right in withdrawing those–what were they–3000 Americans
in Syria because whatever, Russia had killed just one of them.
With Trump in the White House, the trip wires, a war between nuclear Russia and nuclear
America, are far greater and more multiple than they have ever been. That's the danger.
Therefore, at this moment, if Trump says it's necessary to cooperate with Russia, on that one
issue we must support him. It's existential at this moment. And believe me, and believe me,
people love to hate on Putin in this country; "Putin's evil, Putin's bad." It's nonsense. Putin
is a recognizable leader in Russia's tradition. Putin, as you said I think before, came to
power wanting an alliance with the United States. He's spoken of his own illusions publicly.
Leaders very rarely admit they ever had an illusion, rights, it's not something they do. He is
reproached in Russia, reproached in Russia, for still having illusions about the West. You know
what they say about him in high places in Russia? "He's not proactive, he just reacts, he waits
for the West to do something abysmal to Russia, and then he acts. Why doesn't he first see
what's coming?" What do they cite? They cite Ukraine.
PAUL JAY: Well, that's the next segment, because my question to you is going to be,
"Did Putin make a mistake in Crimea?" So please join us for the continuation of our series of
interviews with Stephen Cohen on Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network.
In a country where the media runs the lives of gullible citizens, it is easy to
believe that all the moves are being made for the peace and well being of all. Behind the
curtains, a narcissistic and egotistic machine is hard at work trying to sell war for
peace. This business only benefits a few and causes great suffering on others ... but who
am I kidding, no one cares, as long money is being made ... no one really cares!
The US Constitution and other supporting documents have long stymied attempts at
direct democracy in the US. Beware of anyone claiming to be a strict Constitutionalist !
They hate democracy and embrace slavery in all its disguises.
Great points, Mr. Cohen....this protracted attack on Russia via the phoney
"Russiagate" investigation has set back relations with Russia for years to come....of
course, even here in Bezerkeley, there were signs posted everywhere before the 2016 election: "Hillary=WWIII
(just sayin')".....even the libs around here knew the Clinton cabal wanted a war with
Russia ASAP
That Trump represents a thinking that the post Soviet reality is not of a
uni-superpower world, but one of a multi-polar world dominated by US economic empire.
I think that's true.
After reading "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New
Century" in 2005, I came to the idea that the most dangerous section of the American
elite were those that posited this uni-superpower world order idea; an impossibility in
this age of technology (one in which even small economies like Canada could lead the
world in nuclear physics understandings and implementation, and one where our collective
wealth of scientific understanding and method, plus systems management, can 'leap' a
large agrarian/industrial economy (China) to a 2nd generation industrial world power in
50 years, proves that understanding).
I haven't read the first part. But what the second part reveals is not that
unravelling. American power is despotic. No principles. Money gain only. Russia turned
democratic after enlightened brains like Yuri Andropov (Jewish-born ex-KGB Chief), old
fox Andrei Gromyko, Gorbachev plus- plus, decided to change the system. In other words,
Russia was willing for openness. But American oligarchs wanted to usurp Russian wealth
with a hand stroke after Soviet State implosion.
Second, why did Rothschild-Rockefeller Banker vassals like Henry Kissinger, Schultz under
Edward Teller influence, sabotage the Reagan-Gorbachev understanding to eliminate nuclear
weapons entirely in Reykjavik, insisting unilateral Star Wars capability for the U.S. to
remain as sole Superpower.
The problem is the incorrigible Big C (Capital) that wanted to eat away Russian minerals
that Putin stopped in national interest. Any subsequent cooperation from the Russian side
was probably was only for strategic cooperation with the U.S. to have world peace.
Steve belongs to that lone group of handful, distinguished U.S. intellectuals who see
problems as they are in eventual meaningfulness for objective U.S. politics. I admire his
talent and courage and support him.
George Chakko, former U.N. correspondent, now retiree in Vienna, Austria.
Vienna, 20/04/2019 06:05 am CET
Not a word in Cohen's appraisal about US criminality. Jay was pushing in that
direction. I hope they get around to the criminality of the Deep State Mafia.
That is the
narrative that will get the most results. Trump is greedy and the neocons have already
attacked him on two fronts: Russiagate and his need for money. He will likely do what the
New World Order folks want him to do. Russiagate will turn out to be a benefit as long as
he sticks with the program that the Neocons want. Who has pushed the US hard to get into
war with Russia? Hilary, Obama, Cheney, now Bolton --all New World Order soldiers who
will commit any crime to rule the world. This is what we are facing.
Trump like every POTUS since JFK does the bidding of the Zionist masters. Every POTUS
except Nixon and Carter that is, and they were demonised and side tracked respectively.
Nixon for his feral decision to recognise China and Jimmy Carter for being a dangerous
liberal. But Trump is a normal run of the mill POTUS minus the PR masking tape. Perhaps
the system has decided that the nice respectable masking tape is now an unnecessary
add-on and every future president (if there are any or many) will do the will of Wall St
and Tel Aviv as openly as does Trump and the msm will assure us that this is good and
necessary. Good fo the economy and necessary to protect the poor suffering Jewish nation
from the anti Semitic hatred of the deluded Palestinian lovers
and finally i think Putin is for Russian greatness, trump is for money for himself and
his family, but also for a white America if that can fit in with his money making
schemes.
I'm sorry, but Paul Jay, whom I sincerely admire, though with some reservations,
sounds in this--very important--interview as if he were suffering from attention deficit
syndrome. You see it most of all in the transcript. Stephen Cohen attempted to keep the
discussion coherent and focused, and Paul injected irrelevancies. Paul, please keep your
eye on the ball. Stephen Cohen is presenting an important message. It's OK to disagree
with it, if you have coherent reasons, but it's important even if it's wrong.
I think it's a mistake to take Trump at his word on anything that doesn't directly
benefit himself. He is two things; an economic animal and a con man, and his motives are
no more complicated than those of a cat. Unlike HRC, Bolton, Cheney Bush etc. he's no
ideologue for war, however, I don't think he has any deep seated dislike of it either, so
taking him at his word, either for or against any military action is foolish; basically,
he's running a con and seeing where it goes, especially if there's any money in it for
him or his family, a very obvious characteristic of his relationship with the Saudis and
his continuing support of their genocidal war in Yemen, a gift he inherited from our
Nobel Peace Prize president.
In the long run, there will be no stopping an alliance between the PRC and Russia,
especially given our political elites' inability to see we are living in a world they can
no longer dominate through an institution, the military, that few have ever been in, and
those of Vietnam war draft eligibility, avoided at all costs, and they will continue that
losing effort until the combined economic might of those nations and their geographic
location on the world's most important land mass, Eurasia, and its proximity to resource
rich Africa, eventually bring about the downfall of the American Empire.
1) Trump personally doesn"t want wars, never mind a war with Russia, though he's no
philosopher or angel.
2) the neolibs, who almost had Russia in the bag before Putin came to power, have been
pissed off at Putin and want regime change in Russia.
3) the same neolibs also want to pit russia, iran, and china against each other, in order
to complete and maintain their New World Order.
4) the same neolibs panicked at Trump's election victory but has reined him in since with
Russiagate. so whatever Trump wants matters not at the moment.
5) the same neolibs have miserably failed in their pursuit of 2) and 3) because of the
alliance of the three, russia, china, and iran. now the entire arab world has declared
independence from the US of Israel, because they now see an alternative bloc of russia,
china, and iran to work with.
all the above are true. more and more people see the truth and reject the neolibs that
the DNC leadership represents.
Trump will be reelected in 2020, if he fires bolton / pompeo / mnuchin / abrams etc.
so far, he's been all bark but no bite, which is a good sign.
Ever noticed how contradictory people you know can be? Ever noticed how contradictory
in yourself, in your own attitudes and deeds you can be? So why be surprised that Trump
can be Stephen Cohen's Trump as much as Paul Jay's Trump? No problem really :-)
There is no contraction between Cohen's observation that
Trump is a voice of sanity on Russia (it just shows how bad US discourse on Russia is)
and Jay's concern that detente with
Russia is part of larger plan for war (economic, kinetic or
hybrid) against Iran and China.
Real or fake, Trump's isolationism has produced no more peace than
Obama's tepid liberalism did and Trump's veto of a bipartisan resolution to forced an end
to American military involvement in Yemen has shown any arguments for an 'anti-war' Trump
were pure self-delusion.
Despite all the chaos and the moral panics that keep rocking the White House, Trump's
three National Security Advisors - Flynn, McMaster, Bolton - had one core commonality:
they want war with Iran. Watching the sinister neo-con Jim Woolsey betray the frothing
neo-con Flynn to Joe Biden was a comedy of neo-con infighting. A major part of Russiagate
was the older 'Atlanticist' neo-cons boxing in the boorish 'Trumpist' neo-cons. Whether
Atlantic Council or US-homegrown both flavors of neo-conservatism want war with Iran.
Wonderful article with Mr Jay playing the role of village idiot ? Mr Cohen speaks with
extreme clarity on Russia, which is totally unacceptable in for profit America by all
sides, where arms sales are us. In regards to Crimea , I'd ask Mr Jay, did Bush 1 make a
mistake in Panama where we killed 4 thousand civilians in keeping China from acquiring an
interest in the Panama canal?
There are so many contradictions under the tent of Killer Clown's circus that it
really isn't possible to make clear sense of them, is there?
I'll just say that he absolutely pimps "Amerika über alles", as it's the putrid
patriotic red white and blue meat he throws his base.
Does he buy his own sales pitch? He does whatever his tiny but tricky little mind
tells him is to his benefit. He'd be perfectly happy as a Russian oligarch or Saudi
prince (as long as Putin or MBS let him bloviate to his heart's content).
His only allegiance is to the state of his ego and bank account.
"... Sanctions are road rage. When you don't have a real policy, you do sanctions. But what's the logic of the sanctions? The sanction is we put this punishment on you. But when you change your behavior we will remove the punishment. Isn't that what we say with sanctions? Therefore sanctions have to be discussed if you're going to have diplomacy. So I would expect an American president to say to the Kremlin we need to have a lot of discussions, including the discussion of sanctions. The ones we've imposed. ..."
"... Actually, by now, depending on what comes next, I don't think the Kremlin cares very much. They've coped very nicely with the sanctions. Though it's hurting their ability to roll over their loans with Western banks, it's true. But generally speaking, they've managed. And Europe wants the sanctions ended, because it's hurt European manufacturers, I think there's 9,000 German firms that were or are making a profit in Russia. It's hurt European -- we have almost no trade with Russia, the United States. Sanctions is -- hurting Europe. ..."
"... Flynn was a professional intelligence officer. Let's repeat that. A professional intelligence officer. He knew everybody was listened to. It didn't bother him. The president had told him to have conversations with the Russian ambassador. There was a tradition of doing this. He had nothing to hide. ..."
"... The psychopaths in the Clinton campaign had no concern that the Russiagate meme would cause enormous consequences in the US relationships with important governments around the globe. Hillary Clinton attempted to damage Trump, the candidate that she wished for the Republicans to nominate, by alleging he was "Putin's puppet." More importantly, Clinton wanted to change the subject from her corruption that was evidenced in her leaked emails (likely by the murdered Seth Rich to Assange). The emails, among other things, proved that she and her toady Debbie Wasserman Schultz et al schemed to steal the nomination from Bernie Sanders. ..."
"... It's about Russian interference alright, but not in the election, rather with Washington's hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe (Ukraine), then in the Middle East (Syria) and now in South America (Venezuela). Charles Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" is over, the Bear is back. ..."
PAUL JAY: Welcome to Reality Asserts Itself on The Real News Network. And I'm Paul
Jay.
People that follow this show know I particularly like to interview people that stick their
neck out and stick to their guns for what they believe in, what they're fighting for. And our
next guest is someone who's done both of those things under a lot of pressure. So this is the
story, to begin with, of Stephen Cohen. Stephen is emeritus professor of politics at Princeton
University, professor emeritus of Russian studies and history at New York University, and his
most recent book: War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russia. Thanks for
joining us again.
STEPHEN COHEN: Thanks, Paul.
PAUL JAY: So a lot of people were rather happy with Barr's summary of the Mueller
report. And as we sit here talking today we haven't seen the Mueller report, it hasn't been
given to Congress yet, and it may even happen tomorrow. We don't know. And it may change what
we think of what I'm about to ask, but I don't think it's going to change too much about what
I'm going to ask.
Obviously President Trump's pretty happy so far with the no collusion argument. And that was
pretty clear from what Mueller said; what Barr says Mueller said. There's a quote from Mueller
in Barr's summary. But I thought some people who've been critical of Russiagate were a little
bit too happy about this, because the more important, I thought, substance of what Mueller says
is that, in fact, Russia did interfere in the elections. And he takes it very seriously. And
the more important part of Russiagate narrative, I don't think, was ever the collusion part. In
fact, we all knew Mueller was not heading down any big collusion road anyway, because as you
pointed out in one of your interviews, I don't know if it was Larry King, you know, you could
see from how other people were being charged, Manafort and others, there was no breadcrumb
leading you to a collusion argument with Trump. The real problem is the underlying idea is that
this is an existential threat to American democracy, and Mueller more or less confirms
that.
And I thought people shouldn't be so happy about that part of it, because the substantial
argument -- and I'll quote you again -- is that whatever they did it was low-level stuff. It
happens all the time between these countries. They all interfere in each other's elections. And
then it gets raised to the existential level. That's the problem. And Mueller more or less
confirms that.
STEPHEN COHEN: You are absolutely right, only not right enough. This expression,
which has become a truth in the media and for too many politicians that "Russia attacked
America during the 2016 presidential election" is both exceedingly dangerous and a complete
falsehood. Why is it dangerous? Because if a great power is attacked, that great power has to
eventually attack back, counterattack. This is a ticking time bomb in relations with Russia. No
attack on America occurred in 2016. I was awake, present, and observant. I saw no missiles
descending on our country. No Russian paratroopers. No Russian submarines. No Russian combat
planes. Nothing. It's a complete fiction.
It's a form, I guess, of hyperbole. Did the Russians meddle? Some Russians? I don't know.
I'm not even sure the Kremlin knew anything about it. But the Russiagate story is that Putin
decided he wanted Trump to be in the White House. So he attacked American elections and rigged
it. So Trump is now in the White House. I don't know how many people actually believe this. But
too many continue to say it, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC. Too
many influential news outlets are putting out an exceedingly dangerous fiction which is a form
of warmongering. It didn't happen, but they won't let go of it.
So I agree with you. There was no attack on America. But they're keeping this up. Was there
meddling? As you say, sure. So let's do the -- briefly -- the history of Russian-American
meddling in each other's politics. Where would you like to begin? Should we begin with the
American intervention in the Russian Civil War in 1918? I mean, Wilson sent about 8,000
American troops to try to help overthrow the new red Communist government. Was that meddling?
Really, is it meddling? You tell me. Sounds like meddling to me.
PAUL JAY: It's armed intervention.
STEPHEN COHEN: It's armed intervention. All right. What about, to leap forward, 1996?
I was in Moscow, I observed it. Then-president of post-Soviet Russia Boris Yeltsin stood no
chance of being reelected. No chance whatsoever. He was like 3 percent in the polls. But the
Clinton administration desperately needed to keep him in power. So they meddled, big time. They
sent electoral experts -- not unlike, by the way, Paul Manafort. Guys who make a living
advising other countries about how to rig elections. We've got lots of them who do this for big
money. So they set up in the presidential hotel. You could see them. Clinton arranged, I think,
it was $10 billion, I may be wrong there, IMF loan to Yeltsin so Yeltsin could pay pensions and
salaries he hadn't paid for five years. I mean, we did the whole -- I mean this was a massive
intervention into Russia's election. And basically we kept Russia, Yeltsin, in the presidency.
Is that meddling? Is that meddling?
PAUL JAY: Yeah, of course.
STEPHEN COHEN: What happened with Russian meddling in 2016, compared to the kind of
meddling both sides have done, was jaywalking. The only reason it became one of the worst
scandals, and I think most damaging in American history, because of the loathing for Trump and
because the Clinton people couldn't accept that she was defeated fair and square. So they made
up a story. You know, there's this book Shattered which tells about how they sat around and
said we'll blame it on the Russians. However, it's exceedingly unpatriotic. It's warmongering.
It's damaging our institutions of the presidency.
I mean, if it's true -- for example, let's say it's true that the Kremlin can put Trump in
the White House. Then evidently our electoral system in this country is not reliable. And why
not a governor, or a senator, or a member of the Congress that Putin likes? And what about the
next one? I think it's going to erode confidence in our electoral system on the part of
American voters. And what about the presidency itself? I mean, people actually say that a
Kremlin puppet sits in the presidency. Do they think that the damage done to the institution of
the presidency is going to end when Trump leaves? And do they think Republicans aren't going to
do something similar to the next Democratic president?
And the media's scandalous coverage of this, abandoning their own standards. I mean, you
don't get your virginity back quite that easily. I mean, they've got a lot to atone for, but at
the moment they're not even prepared to say they did anything wrong. Just the other day the
heads of these -- CNN, the executive editor of the New York Times and the Washington Post --
all said they thought their coverage of Russiagate had been great. I mean, really? Really? I
mean, that's like a brain surgeon missing cancer, and then saying he thought he did a good job.
I mean, it's preposterous.
So we have a major problem here. And the myth -- there was no Russian attack. The Russians
meddled. Mainly what made the meddling different from the kind of meddling that went on, for
example, when there were Russian-backed American communist parties, for example, in this
country, is social media. It was a social media thing.
And a final point. Let's say that the Russians -- they didn't -- launched a major social
media attack to distort the thinking of American voters, and were successful. Because that's
one of the premises, right? People are saying that, right?
PAUL JAY: Yeah.
STEPHEN COHEN: What does that say for American voters? What contempt people have for
American voters. So-called American Democrats have contempt for American voters. And now what
are they doing? They're out busy censoring social media so that we won't get any information
that might disorient an American voter. You can't -- if you don't believe that the electorate
will reach a rational decision in voting by whatever interests individual voters have, you're
not a democrat. I don't mean a member of the Democratic Party. You're not a democratic person.
If you don't believe in voters you can't be a democratic person. Then you're an
authoritarian.
PAUL JAY: The story that got completely lost as they focused on low-level meddling
that was mostly -- that I think anyone can determine rather ineffective -- was the Cambridge
Analytica story, and Bannon, and the use of troll farms, American-controlled troll farms, to do
this targeted social media manipulation. And that's out there, including an arm of Cambridge
Analytica which helped shape the Brexit vote in the United Kingdom. And the role of Robert
Mercer, who funded Bannon and Kellyanne Conway and originally backed Cruz, and then helped
create Trump as president, I mean, that's the real story of the Trump presidency. Not this
low-level meddling. And they've never really told that story in mainstream media. We did a
whole documentary on it on The Real News. This whole thing's been lost about the real kind of
sinister dark side to the 2016 elections.
STEPHEN COHEN: What worries me more, though, is the way Russiagate, Russiagaters, the
zealots of Russiagate, have criminalized contacts with Russia. I think that this Clinton
organization -- what's it called, Center for American Progress, or something, CAP, which has a
website called Thought Progress or something -- has some posted 150 Trump-related contacts with
Russia. I mean, I've had most of those contacts with Russia. I mean, I've had contacts with
Russian intelligence agents. One was a good friend of mine. Five or six of them I worked with
in a historical archive, and we did smoking breaks and lunch breaks together, and we talked. I
mean, I've had all sorts of contacts in my nearly 50 years of dealing with Russia. There was a
time when contacts were supposed to be good because it was a way of understanding and avoiding
conflict. Part of detente. Part of diplomacy. But Russiagate, the allegations -- and I don't
believe any of them, by the way -- the allegations have criminalized contacts.
Incidentally, as we talk, this young Russian woman, Marina Butina -- sometimes pronounced
here BuTIna, but it's BUtina, B-U-T-I-N-A -- has been sitting in an American prison for more
than six months, most of it in solitary, for doing nothing other than what many Americans do in
Russia, and that is go around talking about how good the American political system is to
Russia, Russians. She went around bragging on Putin and the Russian political system here. For
that she's been kept in prison, and was, as Russians say, finally broken. Literally. That's how
Russians break people. They lock you away to you confess. We call confession a plea. So she --
and she's still in prison, even though she pled.
What did she plead guilty to? Coming here and advocating Russian perspectives without
registering as a foreign agent. This is a Soviet practice, Paul. One of the things that worries
me is that Russiagate has generated too many Soviet-style practices by American authorities.
The use of informers. People who were sent to inform on members of Trump's team, like
Papadopoulos, for example. Holding people's families hostage. I mean, Mueller held General
Flynn's son hostage, essentially, until Flynn pled. And Flynn never should have pled guilty.
Never. In fact, he said the other day he regretted it.
Let's talk about Flynn, for example, to see how bogus this is. Flynn was taped, as he knew
he would be, making contact after Trump was elected, before Trump came President, with the
Russian ambassador, correct? That was how the story began.
PAUL JAY: And they had to know they were being listened to.
STEPHEN COHEN: Of course they [inaudible].
PAUL JAY: Or he should have.
STEPHEN COHEN: Well, so you would say if he knew he was being listened to, why would
he go forward and have this meeting, or discussions, with the Russian ambassador? Because Trump
had told him to do it. And the reason is very simple to anyone who knows even a little history.
At least since Nixon -- maybe since Eisenhower and Kennedy -- but at least since Nixon, every
American president-elect has made a so-called back channel connection with the Russians, with
the Kremlin, before taking office. End of story. And we know -- I mean, Kissinger did it for
Nixon.
PAUL JAY: But Nixon did it with the North Vietnamese, and Johnson called it
treason.
STEPHEN COHEN: I don't care. The point of it is it's become traditional standard
practice for the president-elect to reach out to the Russians to say basically chill out, we're
going to discuss everything. I mean, you got to remember what happened. I mean, this was
dangerous. Obama, to his eternal disgrace, threatened the Russians with a cyberattack. He
threatened them. He said we've implanted in your infrastructure some kind of cyber thing.
PAUL JAY: And passed sanctions.
STEPHEN COHEN: But forget the sanctions. Forget the sanctions. He threatened them
with a secret attack on their infrastructure. Did it mean their medical system? Did it mean
their banking system? Did it mean their nuclear control system? And then the nitwit Vice
President -- Obama's -- goes out and tells jokes about it on late night TV. Yeah, hey, we got
him. What kind of behavior is this?
So I think Trump did absolutely the right thing. He told General Flynn, after Obama had made
this reckless statement, but after Trump was elected, but not yet president, told Flynn, go
tell the Russians not to overreact to what Obama said. Don't do anything crazy. We'll sort this
out when I take office. I personally am grateful he did that, because there were people in
Moscow arguing to Putin that they had to wage some kind of counterattack first. I mean, this
was a very dangerous moment that Obama created, unnoticed in this country. Unreported on.
But not only was it the tradition that the president-elect made contact with the Russians.
Backdoor. Everyone had done it. But in this case it was essential, because the crazies in
Moscow were urging Putin to do something based on what Obama had said. By the way, who's
vanished. On the question of Russiagate, Obama has disappeared himself. I mean Russiagate began
on Obama's watch as president. You'd think he'd have something to say. He hadn't said a
word.
PAUL JAY: But let me counter. I mean, I think the sanctions Obama put on Russia for
Russia's meddling in the U.S. elections was uncalled for; aggressive, and so on. And a
continuation of a bunch of aggressive policy. But their argument is Obama was the president,
and the sanctions had been implemented. And Trump was saying to Putin, don't worry, we're going
to get rid of them.
STEPHEN COHEN: No there's no record. This is-
PAUL JAY: I thought that was Flynn's conversation.
STEPHEN COHEN: No. No. What Flynn told Kislyak, so far as we know, I haven't heard
the tape, was do not overreact to this statement by Obama that your infrastructure is going to
be attacked, and we will discuss everything, maybe he said including sanctions, when Trump
takes the White House.
Now, let's back up a minute. Why shouldn't we discuss sanctions? The logic -- I don't
believe in sanctions. They're road rage. I mean, as we talk, a few nitwit senators are up on
the Hill trying to think up some new sanctions. And if you ask them what they're sanctioning
Russia for today, they couldn't tell you. Everything. In fact, they do tell you. It's called
for Putin's malign behavior in the world. It's not about Crimea anymore. It's not about voter
interference. It's just basically he's a malign character, and you can't have too many
sanctions.
Sanctions are road rage. When you don't have a real policy, you do sanctions. But what's
the logic of the sanctions? The sanction is we put this punishment on you. But when you change
your behavior we will remove the punishment. Isn't that what we say with sanctions? Therefore
sanctions have to be discussed if you're going to have diplomacy. So I would expect an American
president to say to the Kremlin we need to have a lot of discussions, including the discussion
of sanctions. The ones we've imposed.
Actually, by now, depending on what comes next, I don't think the Kremlin cares very
much. They've coped very nicely with the sanctions. Though it's hurting their ability to roll
over their loans with Western banks, it's true. But generally speaking, they've managed. And
Europe wants the sanctions ended, because it's hurt European manufacturers, I think there's
9,000 German firms that were or are making a profit in Russia. It's hurt European -- we have
almost no trade with Russia, the United States. Sanctions is -- hurting Europe.
PAUL JAY: Well, let's get back to Flynn. How could he not know that's being listened
to? And I guess they assume that this was not abnormal for an incoming president to have a
conversation like this.
STEPHEN COHEN:Flynn was a professional intelligence officer. Let's repeat that.
A professional intelligence officer. He knew everybody was listened to. It didn't bother him.
The president had told him to have conversations with the Russian ambassador. There was a
tradition of doing this. He had nothing to hide.
PAUL JAY: OK. There's a part of this that I don't think we're going to agree on, and
we're going to talk about that in the next-
STEPHEN COHEN: I don't even know you were disagreeing with me. Those are just facts I
gave you.
PAUL JAY: I didn't disagree up until this point. We might agree on something and then
disagree in the next segment. So please join us for the next segment of our series of
interviews with Stephen Cohen.
Stephen Cohen: "... [B]ecause of the loathing for Trump and because the Clinton people
couldn’t accept that she was defeated fair and square. So they made up a story. You
know, there’s this book Shattered which tells about how they sat around and said
we’ll blame it on the Russians."
The psychopaths in the Clinton campaign had no concern that the Russiagate meme would
cause enormous consequences in the US relationships with important governments around the
globe. Hillary Clinton attempted to damage Trump, the candidate that she wished for the
Republicans to nominate, by alleging he was "Putin's puppet." More importantly, Clinton
wanted to change the subject from her corruption that was evidenced in her leaked emails
(likely by the murdered Seth Rich to Assange). The emails, among other things, proved
that she and her toady Debbie Wasserman Schultz et al schemed to steal the nomination
from Bernie Sanders.
In fact Billary won the "election" by 3 million votes. But since we are not a
democracy it did not matter. Trump was appointed by America's elites, claiming otherwise
just serves the status quo. I'm sure Mr Cohen knows that?
It's about Russian interference alright, but not in the election, rather with
Washington's hegemonic ambitions in Eastern Europe (Ukraine), then in the Middle East
(Syria) and now in South America (Venezuela). Charles Krauthammer's "unipolar moment" is
over, the Bear is back.
Just a question Paul. Who is "too happy" that no collusion was found? Can you name
names? Russiagate debunkers like Glenn Greenwald and Aaron Mate may feel vindicated, but
I don't see happiness in the fact that the whole episode probably helps Trump.
"But I thought some people who’ve been critical of Russiagate were a little bit
too happy about this, because the more important, I thought, substance of what Mueller
says is that, in fact, Russia did interfere in the elections..."
If there was interference , it was , as Cohen says , on the level of jaywalking in its
seriousness. What would really constitute "an existential threat to American democracy"
is if this whole affair began and continued as a fabricated-from-whole-cloth stitch-up of
a candidate and then sitting President , orchestrated and implemented at the highest
levels of the CIA , FBI , Justice and State Depts. , etc., and possibly all the way up to
ex-Pres. Obama. If the origin of this whole mess is ever investigated properly , as it
should be , I hope TRNN will cover it and the ramifications of its findings at least as
thoroughly as it has the hoax itself , and will invite Stephen Cohen back to contribute
to that analysis. You certainly won't hear from him on the MSM , where such honesty and
clarity of thought are effectively banned.
Where is part 2? What is it that Paul Jay disagrees with Cohen? Sanctions are utterly
stupid. ALL sanctions against all countries should be removed, including those on Russia,
Iran, Venezuela, China and even North Korea. No self-respecting counties will submit to
the ridiculous demands of the terrorist empire because of sanctions.
Sanctions, embargoes, and tariffs, are a forms of taxation that harm the masses in the
state that applies them, while their rulers blame others for the resulting shortages and
higher prices.
fewer and fewer parties are concerning themselves about the US sanctions. not "even"
north korea, according to their latest communique. maybe that's why cohen says "forget
the sanctions."
Okay, Mr. Cohen spends a lot of time trashing the Clintons but is almost an apologist
for the Trump administration. He states correctly that the U.S. has meddled in Russian
politics in the past, notably in the 1920s and 1990s, which we probably shouldn't have
done but that does not make it okay for the Russians to do the same to us. His position
seems to be, tit-for-tat, eye-for-an-eye, so what, forget it. He dismisses, with
contempt, the idea that Russia meddled at all, but no one knows how much they meddled or
what the effects were because no one has looked into it.
Mr. Cohen states that Russia did not attack the U.S. by which he means militarily with
troops and missles. Obviously, that is true but so what. Is cyberassault not something
the U.S. should worry about? Also Mr. Cohen seems to imply that Vladimir Putin is not
that bad as leaders go, despite the poisonings, the assassinations, the imprisonment of
critics and banning of political opponents, and most egregious, the invasion of the
Ukraine and occupation of Crimea. He seems to think invading other countries is okay and
that the Europeans don't care because sanctions against Russia cause them economic
hardship. I suspect that many Europeans care very much about European countries invading
each other. He criticizes President Obama for placing sanctions on Russia and states that
Obama did so because the U.S. doesn't have a strategy regarding Russia. How does he think
the U.S. should respond? What does he think U.S. policy should be towards Russia?
Mr. Cohen defends Michael Flynn stating all new administrations contact Russia to
reassure them. Maybe so but that doesn't explain why Mr. Flynn failed to register as a
lobbyist for Turkey. Mr. Mueller would not have been able to hold Mr. Flynn's son
"hostage" if neither Flynn or his son had not done something illegal. Cohen also defends
Ms. Butina even though she was in contact with the National Rifle Association.
Altogether I don't find Mr. Cohen persuasive because of his dismissive arrogance of
everything supporting the Russiagate scandal. At this point no on is in a position to
accurately critique Russiagate until the report by Mr. Mueller is released.
It would have helped his case if he had expressed as much contempt for the Trump
Administration as he did of the Clinton and the Democrats such as some acknowledgement
that Trump is a dispicable, cruel, vicious and pathological narcissist. It also did not
help that Mr. Jay seemed embarrassed to question or critique Mr. Cohen's assertions.
Unfortunately in making his points Mr. Cohen takes too much information out of context
and leaves out far too many details of the Russiagate scandal.
I think if you listen more to professor Cohen (try Stephen Cohen John Batchelor show)
, you find acknowledgement of all of Trumps faults as well that you accurately described
and realize his "dismissive arrogance" relates to his informed knowledge of the
Russiagate scandal.
I couldn’t have put it any more coherently. I don’t find Mr. Cohen
persuasive at all, particularly after watching the Russian intelligence and counter
intelligence cohort at the House Intelligence Committee hearing. (They were extremely
knowledgeable.) After hearing them, this guy seems unbelievable to me. But! Paul got his
anti-Mueller report guy. At this point, this country is like a boulder ready to roll down
a cliff and finish democracy for good. Two of the issues I found ironic was that Mr.
Cohen 1) feels that Democrats must not think voters are very smart if they are swayed by
the Social Networks (ha!) and 2) he really believes (straight face) that our voting
system and elections in this country are solid and uncorrupted. Where has he been? Thank
you, Mark Swanson, for your eloquent analysis.
An historically factual and informative article once again based based on a false
premise. Trump was not elected. Billary won the election by 3 million votes. Trump was
appointed POTUS by the Electoral College, as Bush2 was appointed by the SCOTUS and then
employed a government official in Ohio to stuff electronic ballot boxes to secure himself
a second term, and the US media forced fed to desperate but credulous Americans the empty
suit Obomber turned out to be to. The US is not and has never been a Democracy, more a
police state run by Plutocrats . Mr Cohen simply trumpets the corporate approved
narrative offering incrementalism for obedience. Kissinger and friends, investment
advisers to most of the worlds tyrants, continues to facilitate Putin's end run around US
sanctions helping him invest his enormous fortune.
you don't like the rules? then change the rules first. Trump won the election fair and
square, following the rules. if the rules had been different, voters and candidates would
have behaved totally differently as well in terms of campaign strategies and voting.
Trump could have won the popular vote by a landslide. ever thought about that? no.
"... Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures for the various departments. ..."
"... I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet. ..."
"... A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies). ..."
It is not about politics, but Trump's peculiar management style, Timofey Bordachev, Director
of the Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies of the Faculty of World Economy
and International Affairs at Russia's High School of Economics, told RIA Novosti.
"Those who have been studying the business biography of the newly elected president have
noted that he has always played off his high-ranking employees against each other. While doing
so he remained above the fight," he said.
And
Gevorg Mirzayan, an assistant professor of the Political Science department at the Financial
University in Moscow pointed out two purposes for the nominations.
The above brings rationality to the diverse selections made by Trump.
However, the black swan event will be an economic collapse (fast or protracted over several
years). That will be the defining event in the Trump presidency. I have no inkling how he or those
who may replace him would respond.
I had guessed myself that Trump was going to run the government as a business corporation. Surrounding
himself with people of competing viewpoints, and hiring on the basis of experience and skills
(and not on the basis of loyalty, as Hillary Clinton might have done) would be two ways Trump
can change the government and its culture. Trump's main problem in this respect is that the diversity
of viewpoints within the military, the NSA or other government agencies might already be too narrow
and he needs a Republican version of Stephen Cohen who has always advocated for engagement with
Russia, along with other people from outside Washington DC but with experience in state legislatures
for the various departments.
If running the US government as a large mock business enterprise brings a change in its culture
so it becomes more open and accountable to the public, less directed by ideology and identity
politics, and gets rid of people engaged in building up their own little empires within the different
departments, then Trump might just be the President the US needs at this moment in time.
Interesting that Russian academics have noted the outlines of Trump's likely cabinet and what
they suggest he plans to do, and no-one else has. Does this imply that Americans and others in
the West have lost sight of how large business corporations could be run, or should be run, and
everyone is fixated on fake "entrepreneurship" or "self-entrepreneur" (whatever that means) models
of running a business where it's every man, woman, child and dog for itself?
I agree and I suspect Trump regards Putin as a fellow CEO and perhaps the best one on the planet.
Trump may have noted how Putin did an incredible turnaround of Russia and it all started with
three objectives: restore the integrity of the borders, rebuild the industrial base and run off
the globalists/liberals/kreakles. I am certainly not the first one to say this and I think that
there is a lot of basis for that analysis. However, Trump will have a far more difficult challenge
and frankly I don't think he has enough allies or smarts to pull it off.
A more fundamental problem is that the US has not yet reached rock bottom. So, its delusions
remain strong. Trump, as said before, may be a false dawn unless the bottom is closer than suspected
and he has new allies (perhaps foreign allies).
So the USA helped to re-install medieval treatment of woman in Afghanistan and then called it progress toward human rights...
Notable quotes:
"... But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open. Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as well. ..."
Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal.
... ... ...
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the
discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a
critical history that has been suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the
attacks occurred, when "some people did something." Many of those people served at the highest
levels of U.S. government, and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an
international network – and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Taliban 'Unimportant'
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy
weapons in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi
clerics such as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of
dollars worth of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them
to commit acts of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to
wreak havoc on the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause
with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
To some in Washington, the Taliban were a historical footnote. To others, they were allies
of convenience. As a top State Department diplomat commented to journalist Ahmed Rashid in
February 1997, "The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There be [the Saudi-owned
oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with
that."
CIA Cover-ups and Blowback
Back in the U.S., some people fueled the blowback from the Afghan proxy war. The Blind
Sheikh was given a special entry visa by the CIA as payback for the services he provided in
Afghanistan, allowing him to take over the al-Kifah Center in New York City, which had
functioned as the de facto U.S. arm of Al Qaeda's Services Bureau. Under his watch and with
help from bin Laden, some people and lots of aid were shuttled to the front lines of U.S. proxy
wars in Bosnia and Chechnya while the Clinton administration generally looked the other
way.
Though the Blind Sheikh was eventually convicted in a terror plot contrived by a paid
informant for the FBI, some people in federal law enforcement had been reluctant to indict him.
"There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and
what the circumstances were around that," one of his defense lawyers, Abdeed Jabara told me.
"The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it
suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be
exposure of that. Because there's no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and
the Americans were using the jihadists. There's a symbiotic relationship."
During the 1995 trial of members of the Blind Sheikh's New York-based cell, another defense
lawyer, Roger Stavis, referred to his clients before the jury as "Team America," emphasizing
the role they had played as proxy fighters for the U.S. in Afghanistan. When Stavis attempted
to summon to the witness stand a jihadist operative named Ali Abdelsauod Mohammed who had
trained his clients in firearms and combat, some people ordered Mohammed to refuse his
subpoena. Those people, according to journalist Peter Lance, were federal prosecutors Andrew
McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald.
The government lawyers were apparently fretting that Mohammed would be exposed as an active
asset of both the CIA and FBI, and as a former Army sergeant who had spirited training manuals
out of Fort Bragg while stationed there during the 1980s. So Mohammed remained a free man,
helping Al Qaeda plan attacks on American consular facilities in Tanzania and Kenya while the
"Day of the Planes" plot began to take form.
In early 2000, some people gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to prepare the most daring Al
Qaeda operation to date. Two figures at the meeting, Saudi citizens named Nawaf al-Hazmi and
Khalid al-Midhar, were on their way to the United States. While in Kuala Lumpur, the duo's
hotel room was broken into by CIA agents, their passports were photographed, and their
communications were recorded. And yet the pair of Al Qaeda operatives was able to travel
together with multiple-entry visas on a direct flight from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles. That's
because for some reason, some people from the CIA failed to notify any people at the FBI about
the terror summit that had just taken place. The "Day of Planes" plot was moving forward
without a kink.
In Los Angeles, some people met Hazmi and Midhar at the airport, provided the two
non-English speakers with a personal caretaker and rented them apartments, where neighbors said
they were routinely visited each night by unknown figures in expensive cars with darkened
windows. Those people were Saudi Arabian intelligence agents named Omar Bayoumi and Khaled
al-Thumairy.
Crawford , Texas
It was not until August 2001 that Midhar was placed on a terrorist watch list. That month,
some people met at a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reviewed a classified document headlined,
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." The bulletin was a page-and-a-half long, with
detailed intelligence on the "Day of Planes" plot provided by Ali Mohammed, the Al
Qaeda-FBI-CIA triple agent now registered as "John Doe" and disappeared somewhere in the
federal prison system. Those people reviewed the document for a few minutes before their boss,
President George W. Bush, moved on to other matters.
According to The Washington Post , Bush exhibited an "expansive mood" that day,
taking in a round of golf. "We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die,
and it could be in the U.S.," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black warned days later. Bush
did not meet with his cabinet heads again to discuss terrorism until Sept. 4.
A week later, on Sept. 11, some people did something.
They hijacked four civilian airliners and changed the course of American history with little
more than box cutter blades in their hands. Fifteen of those 19 people, including Hazmi and
Midhar, were citizens of Saudi Arabia. They were products of a Wahhabi school system and a
politically stultifying society that had thrived under the protection of a special relationship
with the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. had showered theocratic allies like Saudi Arabia with aid and
weapons while threatening secular Arab states that resisted its hegemony with sanctions and
invasion. The Saudis were the favorite Muslims of America's national security elite not because
they were moderate, which they absolutely were not, but because they were useful.
In the days after 9/11, the FBI
organized several flights to evacuate prominent Saudi families from the U.S., including
relatives of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Islamophobia erupted across the country, with even
mainstream personalities such as TV news anchor Dan Rather taking to the airwaves to claim
without evidence that Arab-Americans had celebrated the 9/11 attacks.
Unable to find a single operational Al Qaeda cell in the country, the FBI turned to an army
of paid snitches to haul in mentally unstable Muslims, dupes and idlers like the Lackawanna 6
in manufactured plots. Desperate for a high-profile bust to reinforce the "war on terror"
narrative, the bureau hounded Palestinian Muslim activists and persecuted prominent Islamic
charities like the Holy Land Foundation, sending its directors to prison for decades for the
crime of sending aid to NGOs in the occupied Gaza Strip.
As America's national security state cracked down on Muslim civil society at home, it turned
to fanatical Islamist proxies abroad to bring down secular and politically independent Arab
states. In Libya, the U.S. and UK helped arm the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a longtime
affiliate of Al Qaeda, using it as a proxy to depose and murder Muammar Gaddafi. As that
country transformed from a stable, prosperous state into an Afghanistan-style playground for
rival militias, including a chapter of the Islamic State, the Obama administration moved to do
the same to Damascus.
In Syria, the CIA armed an outfit of supposedly "moderate rebels" called the Free Syrian
Army that turned out to be nothing more than a political front and weapons farm for an array of
extremist insurgent factions including Al Qaeda's local affiliate and the Islamic State. The
latter two groups were, of course, products of the sectarian chaos of Iraq, which had been
ruled by a secular government until the U.S. came knocking after 9/11.
The blowback from Iraq, Libya and Syria arrived in the form of the worst refugee crises the
world has experienced since World War II. And then came the bloodiest terror attack to hit the
UK in history – in Manchester. There, the son of a Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member,
who traveled to Libya and Syria on an MI6 ratline, slaughtered concert-goers with a nail
bomb.
Cataclysmic social disruptions like these were like steroids for right-wing Islamophobes,
electrifying Trump's victorious 2016 presidential campaign, a wing of the Brexit "Leave"
campaign in the UK, and far-right parties across Europe. But as I explain in "The Management of
Savagery," these terrifying trends were byproducts of decisions undertaken by national security
elites more closely aligned with the political center – figures who today attempt to
position themselves as leaders of the anti-Trump resistance.
Which people did which things to drag us into the political nightmare we're living through?
For those willing to cut through the campaign season bluster, Ilhan Omar's comments dare us to
name names.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
" Republican
Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," "
The
Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of
Savagery ," published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles
for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including "
Killing Gaza " and "
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded the
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions. 36 comments for "Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of 9/11"
Jeff Harrison , April 19, 2019 at 11:24
The US doesn't seem to have the ability to see ourselves as others see us. This explains
why we don't understand why other countries/peoples react badly towards us. This will get
worse as we move into a more imperialistic mode. We continue to use the anachronistic phrase
"leader of the free world" all the while missing out on the fact that the rest of the world
has, in essence, become free and they, for the most part, don't want us leading them.
bill haymes , April 19, 2019 at 05:20
everyone who has not examined ALL THE EVIDENCE of 9/11 WITH AN OPEN MIND is imo simply
whistling in the wind
Anarcissie , April 19, 2019 at 11:12
I suppose, then, that that would mean going back to the earliest days of the 20th century,
when the British leadership, considering that its future navy, a main pillar of its empire,
would have to be fueled with oil instead of coal, and that there was a lot of oil in the
Middle East, began its imperial projects there, which of course involved wars, police, spies,
economic blackmail, and other tools of empire. The US seized or wangled or inherited the
imperial system from the British and thus acquired the associated regional, ethnic, and
religious hostilities as well. Since the Arabs and other Muslims were weak compared with the
Great Powers, resistance meant terrorism and guerrilla warfare on one side and massive
intervention and the support of local strongmen, Mafia bosses, dictators, and so on on the
other.
After 9/11. mentioning this important fact became 'justifying bin Laden' or 'spitting on
the graves of the dead' so you couldn't talk about it.
But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a
conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open.
Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as
well.
Abe , April 18, 2019 at 23:23
Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby
Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's
National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an
impressive exercise in burying the leads.
Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel
Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection
between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's
national security state.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has
interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to
initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and
has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media
to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all
that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That
country is, of course, Israel."
i really like her and support her but if she just had the good sense to have simply said
"some people did something terrible" none of the present chapter of "islamophobia" would be
acted out..no matter how much we think we know about the real truth(?) what happened that day
did not blow up the white house, congress or the ruling class of america but nearly three
thousand pretty ordinary folks yes, just like what "we" do repeatedly, but nevertheless, and
considering the overwhelming mind fuck that went on with replaying the tragedy on tv for days
so that millions across the nation were put in shock, we need to be just a little more
considerate and possibly understanding both about how many people might feel and how some
people might use any opportunity to perform this second rate islamophobia, which is a tiny
fractional form of the original monstrous behavior that has destroyed nations, governments
and millions of people in the islamic world..that is islamophobia, not the reactionary crap
that passes for it which should be as understandable – under the circumstances –
as terrorism!
Zhu , April 18, 2019 at 22:32
It should have been obvious that our government had made enemies around the world &
that some would attempt revenge some day. Instead, we all thought that what we did to other
people could never happen to us.
Joe Tedesky , April 18, 2019 at 21:41
This is a must read for the skeptics who doubt any questioning of the official 9/11
Commission Report. This investigative reporting by Max Blumenthal is another good reason to
read the Consortium.
hetro , April 18, 2019 at 17:18
Max Blumenthal's emphasis on "somebody did something" in echo to Ilhan Omar's comments,
plus his emphasis on what has been "suppressed," will hopefully lead on to further
disclosures of what took place for the 9/11 event.
Anyone who watches the Omar video will see she is mainly emphasizing a disgraceful
demonizing of Muslims in general. Additionally, what has brought on all the hatred to her,
she did not speak with the "quasi-theological understanding" that demands the official
narrative, with hushed tones, while speaking of the event:
Max Blumenthal above:
". . . by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves anti-Muslim
narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must
be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
It would be a fine thing for CN, despite Mr. Parry's former reservations, to open up
enquiry into further discussion of what has been "suppressed"–or at the very least to
the very serious questions that have not yet been answered on that horrible day.
OlyaPola , April 18, 2019 at 14:17
"Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal."
All processes of suppression tend to spread that which is being suppresed facilitating
de-suppression of much that is being suppressed leaving a residual.
Framing and access to sources may continue the lack of perception of this residual and
hence facilitate misrepresentation through ommission.
"Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly."
Restriction of frame is a tool of obfuscation and choice of point of initiation a tool of
misrepresentation.
During the early 1970's due to internal factors primarily but not wholly in the period of
1964 to 1970, the Politburo of the Soviet Union agreed detente on the bases of spheres of
influence with the United States of America facilitating the creation of a greater assay of
and reliance upon the US dollar fiat currency, further butressed by commodity arrangements
including but not restricted to the petro-dollar, in part to underpin the United States of
America economic recovery including recovering their control over their perceived threats
within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan.
In reaction/attempt at circumvention in 1973 Mitsui-Mitsubishi representing the zaibatsu
sought to jointly develop the Trans-Siberian railway, the port of Nahodka and other
industrial options including in Japan primarily in Northern Honshu and in Hokkaido with the
Soviet Union but this project was terminated by the Politburo, the reason given being
potential threats from China after confrontation including on the Amur and the need to build
BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway – the projects
rejected were ancestor of the present OBOR project with differing participants re-explored
from 1993 onwards.
These opportunities and trajectories in the 1970's were explained to the Politburo in the
1970's but rejected by the Politburo.
The Soviet Union was invited into Afghanistan by the Afghani government and hence never
"invaded" Afghanistan.
The Politburo accepted the invitation of the Afghani government despite the advice of
those practiced in strategic evaluation – the illusion that the Politburo was practiced
in strategic evaluation endured in an ideological half-life post August 1968 but increasingly
was ignored in practice.
During the 1970's there was an oscillating aspect of contrariness and attempt to regain
perceived control in many of the decision of the Politburo led by the man who loved medals
and awards Mr. Brezhnev.
Consequently the Politburo and the Soviet Union was complicit in facilitating
opportunities for " Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert
operation to trap the Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft
underbelly."
However the targets of these operations were not restricted to the Soviet Union but
included as part of an ongoing "strategy" "to underpin the United States of America economic
recovery/maintainence including recovering/maintaining their control over their perceived
threats within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan." and the
location of these efforts were chosen the middle of Central Asia in reaction to experiences
in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Israel post 1973.
The above are necessarily thumbnails in confirmation and extension of the not widely
perceived causation/facilitation/ history/trajectories/time horizons which may aid
perception, as may testing the hypotheses that Ms. Omar is being attacked for challenging
myth irrespective of which myth she attempts to challenge.
For Western world, especially people of the USA, the collapse of the USSR was really geopolitical catastrophe, as Putin
once put it. It unleaseshed cannibalistic instincts of neoliberal elite.
" "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski "
Yeah, I can.
There never would have been a war on Iraq in 1991 nor an obliteration of Iraq in 2003,
which has lasted until the present day. The destruction of Yugoslavia never would have taken
place and the wars and proxy wars on Syria and Libya would have only existed in the twisted
and depraved imaginations of the Zionist and militarist psychos in our midst.
TINA never would have been an imperative and the working people of the Western world
(primarily the U.S.) wouldn't be in a race to the bottom as it comes to wages, healthcare
insurance, poverty levels, infant mortality, life-expectancy, union power in the workplace,
secure retirements, and outlandish housing costs. With the demise of the USSR the millionaire
capitalist-investor class really took the gloves off and saw no reason to provide the working
masses with certain life-affirming policies, it was time to really sock it to the bottom
90%.
Despite some its faults, the world's people have been paying dearly for the demise of the
USSR.
For further reading on what I've outlined above:
"Blood Lies" by Grover Furr
"Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti
"Fool's Crusade" by Diana Johnstone
"Against Empire" by Michael Parenti
essays and articles by Paul Craig Roberts
essays and articles by Andre Vltchek
Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:31
In short, without an antidote, the US does what the neocons and Israel decide to do.
Welcome to the world of "my way, or the highway" cowboy mentality
Actually, people in the USSR lived lives of constant fear (they call it the “Time of
Terror”) that their friends, relatives, neighbors, strangers, even their children,
would “tattle” on them and they would wind up in the torture chambers. They lived
in stark, nearly unbearable poverty; the only comfort was that they all were in the same
godforsaken boat. Communism might be a good idea on paper, but in reality, because of the
ignorance of the bureaucratic leadership, it was a dismal failure.
The demise of the USSR would have no effect whatsoever on the hegemonic madness of the US
which, under the guiding light of the Monroe Doctrine (established way before the USSR),
carries on destroying one country after another. I would ask, “What would the world do
without the USA?” Live in a much more peaceful world for sure. As for Omar, I wish her
the fortitude to continue telling the truth. Again, Max Blumenthal proves himself one of the
world’s best reporters.
OlyaPola , April 19, 2019 at 05:33
“constant fear”
The years of 1928 to 1953 were not constant since there were the years 1954 and
subsequent.
That’s not true Rob Roy. You’re parroting Western capitalist talking points. A whole host of brand new scholarly literature
has hit the shelves in just the last few years proving the USSR was nowhere near as horrible as the Washington imperialist
media made it out to be. In fact, under Stalin the Soviet Union made substantial gains in women’s rights, literacy, healthcare
and industrial wages. Also, had it not been for Stalin’s agrarian plan there would have been more famines and more severe
famines.
And as everyone knows, if
Stalin never crash course industrialized the country they never would have defeated Nazi
Germany.
Far from the USSR being a police-state it was often seen as a giant trough in which, for
example, rent wouldn’t be paid and no one would come around to collect it.
Please see the following books for a truth trip: “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr and
“Stalin, Waiting for the Truth” by Grover Furr. Also, Michael Parenti’s
“Blackshirts and Reds is excellent.
Dump Pelousy , April 18, 2019 at 20:52
Micheal Perenti is the best. He was the Truth To Power voice before 9/11, before all the
yuppie reporters sold their souls for “access” and a talking heads show. I
watched it happen in slow motion with great dismay.
mp66 , April 18, 2019 at 22:23
Spot on. The western owner class was forced to share at least one plate with the rest of
the population to make the west appear superior in material terms, and with that incentive or
threat gone, there is no more need for a plate, few crumbs under the table should be
sufficient. But as usual, greed goes along with stupidity, they forgot that doing so for
decades undermines the stability of the system. Trump, Brexit, trade wars, abrogations of
treaties, blatant disregard for bare basics of international law etc. are just symptoms of
deeper discontent across the globe.
The military offensive against Tripoli is more political than in fact a military offensive
to overwhelm the enemy. Of course battles are fought but just the fact that heavy weapons
(tanks, artillery etc...) were not used in the first few weeks could indicate that the attack
was somehow aiming to be fast, to aim fo tribal allegiance shifts or just to make a point.
Only in the past week or so we have seen tanks and air strikes taking place, which seems an
escalation of the conflict.
Haftar's LNA has won this war, though many battles will be fought ahead, the LNA has
brought a very united support from Egypt, KSA and UAE and with that it brings France, Russia
and now the US in supporting it, either as opportunistic, individual agenda or simply to
speed up the peaceful process.
The fact is the GNA is becoming seriously isolated, very few support besides Turkey, Qatar
and Italy, all the indication that there is a good chance for Tripoli to saved from
destruction in a mix of military/political solution in weeks to come. Key tribal vocal and on
the ground support, like Zittan's, will be crucial for this peace process.
Then Misrata will be a totally different animal, here Muslin Brotherhood/al Qaeda and ISIS
are packed and strong, support from Turkey and Qatar is abundant, there is no peaceful
solution for Misrata, only annihilation of the filthy terrorists, like in Idlib in Syria.
Trump is supporting Haftar because he is STILL a CIA asset and to keep Russia's hands off
Libya. Haftar is also friends with the Egyptian Zionist Sissy and likewise, MbinSaw.
So now, there's only one smart thing for Putin to do; support THE OTHER SIDE. If he
doesn't do this, the U.S. has a CIA stooge ruling Libya, who is friends with all its allies
including the most lunatic state of the 3 -- Israel, though all three are ruled by despot
nutjobs.
Putin should at worst remain neutral or support the other side to mess with Trump's
geo-engineering.
Now that Putin and Kim will be holding a summit soon; it would be nice to see Putin f...ck
up U.S. plans in Libya too!
It's about putting up roadblocks to the Empire's geopolitical grab. That's the way you
balance power. If ever war breaks out, you want to have as many allies, friendly air space
and allied ports as possible. It doesn't mean a World War will happen again, but it could,
and geostrategy is good INSURANCE. The U.S. will never be Russia's natural ally, not even
close, therefore Putin better play it smart always planning for the worst while hoping for
the best.
Alas, I'm not sure what Putin's thinking lately allowing the lunatic state to attack
Iranian military assets in Syria! Too many Zionist oligarchs in Putin's sphere. One day Putin
will utter Caesar's last words: Et tu, Brute? Because you sure as hell can't trust a Zionist
when it comes to securing your own power!
But only the LNA and GNA are mentioned. I thought there were 3 governments in Libya - one
west, one east, and one pushed by the UN. Wikipedia's Libyan Civil War entry adds the
National Salvation Army to the LNA and GNA. But the NSA may no longer play a part with the
militias rising to the fore. And do the militias support the UN-backed GNA? From what I've
read the militias are working together against "one-man rule" of Haftar.
Libya is a broken country, Haftar brings stability, the end of the militias, Islamists and
slavery. Haftar has already won that is why the US are now supporting him.
Russia has had a long standing dialogue with Haftar. Haftar will probably gain some sort
of independence by balancing these conflicting powers (Russia and US). The US will get oil at
the price they want (need) but I expect that Russia will gain most from Haftar coming out on
top.
Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA
poodle.
Haftar was part of the revolution that brought Gadaffi to power - I doubt that he is a CIA
poodle.
Posted by: ADKC | Apr 19, 2019 5:30:50 PM
Hogwash. You left out the part where Haftar joined the revolution that deposed and
murdered Gaddafi after returning to Libya from Langley! Haftar is a ruthless power-lusting
butcher and not trustworthy at all!
Yes he was part of the forces that overthrew Gaddafi and also connected to the CIA - I
didn't mean to suggest otherwise. I would very much prefer Gaddafi to still be in power -
Libyans almost certainly feel the same (the vast majority felt the same when the uprising
happened).
But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist militias.
So what choice is there really? Haftar brings a much greater likelihood of peace and
stability. But, he won't be bringing back the life that Libyans had when Gaddafi was in
charge.
It appears that he instigated his war in 2015 without the agreement/support of US &
CIA and this may well indicate that he is his own person - but this might just be a
smokescreen. Regardless, what real choice is there for ordinary Libyans - continuing war,
chaos and conflict or accepting that Haftar has won?
But Haftar has won and the alternative to Haftar is criminal gangs and Islamist
militias. So what choice is there really?
Wrong. It's not an either Haftar or terrorists situation, dynamic whatever. This falsehood
is UAE, SAUDI bullshet propaganda. Wahhabism is trying to take over Libya and Sudan! Wherever
the Saudis are involved trouble follows lest you forget Syria and Yemen!
Haftar is bad for Libya PERIOD. More proof is that before Trump called Haftar to offer his
support, he spoke with UEA's MBZ. It all stinks! Leave Libya alone -- hands off! All foreign
influence out! That's the best option.
financial matters , Apr 19, 2019 7:08:35 PM |
link
Nice to see Russia and the US on the same side actually fighting real terrorism. This is a
win against the deep state.
The US doesn't care what murderous thug is in charge.
Posted by: BraveNewWorld | Apr 19, 2019 3:22:46 PM | 9
My first thought was -- now they are telling us?
Of course, HRC put it nicely in a debate with Trump: "you will never see me singing
praises for a dictator or strongmen who does no love America." Qaddafi, RIP, did not love
America, so he had to go once an opportunity emerged. Maduro does not love America. Sisi may
have a kind word now and then etc.
"... But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open. Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as well. ..."
Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal.
... ... ...
To effectively puncture Trump's demagogic ploys, the
discussion of 9/11 must move beyond a superficial defense of Omar and into an exploration of a
critical history that has been suppressed. This history begins at least 20 years before the
attacks occurred, when "some people did something." Many of those people served at the highest
levels of U.S. government, and the things they did led to the establishment of Al Qaeda as an
international network – and ultimately, to 9/11 itself.
Taliban 'Unimportant'
Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly. They put heavy
weapons in the hands of Islamist warlords such as Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, dispatched Salafi
clerics such as "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman to the battlefield, and printed millions of
dollars worth of textbooks for Afghan children that contained math equations encouraging them
to commit acts of violent martyrdom against Soviet soldiers. They did anything they could to
wreak havoc on the Soviet-backed government in Kabul.
These people were so hellbent on smashing the Soviet Union that they made common cause
with the Islamist dictatorship of Pakistan's Zia-ul-Haq and the House of Saud. With direct
assistance from the intelligence services of these U.S. allies, Osama bin Laden, the scion of
Saudi wealth, set up his Services Bureau on the Afghan border as a waystation for foreign
Islamist fighters.
These people even channeled funding to bin Laden so he could build training camps along the
Afghan-Pakistan border for the so-called freedom fighters of the mujahideen. And they kept
watch over a ratline that shepherded young Muslim men from the West to the front lines of the
Afghan proxy war, using them as cannon fodder for a cold-blooded, imperial operation marketed
by the Wahhabi clergy in Saudi Arabia as a holy obligation.
These people were in the CIA, USAID, and the National Security Council. Others, with names
like Charlie Wilson, Jesse Helms, Jack Murtha, and Joe Biden, held seats on both sides of the
aisle in Congress.
When they finally got what they wanted, dislodging a secular government that had provided
Afghan women with unprecedented access to education, their proxies plunged Afghanistan into a
war of the warlords that saw half of Kabul turned to rubble, paving the way for the rise of the
Taliban. And these people remained totally unrepentant about the monster they had created.
"Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski, the former NSC director who sold President Jimmy Carter on the
Afghan proxy war. "So yes, compared to the Soviet Union, and to its collapse, the Taliban were
unimportant."
To some in Washington, the Taliban were a historical footnote. To others, they were allies
of convenience. As a top State Department diplomat commented to journalist Ahmed Rashid in
February 1997, "The Taliban will probably develop like Saudi Arabia. There be [the Saudi-owned
oil company] Aramco, pipelines, an emir, no parliament and lots of Sharia law. We can live with
that."
CIA Cover-ups and Blowback
Back in the U.S., some people fueled the blowback from the Afghan proxy war. The Blind
Sheikh was given a special entry visa by the CIA as payback for the services he provided in
Afghanistan, allowing him to take over the al-Kifah Center in New York City, which had
functioned as the de facto U.S. arm of Al Qaeda's Services Bureau. Under his watch and with
help from bin Laden, some people and lots of aid were shuttled to the front lines of U.S. proxy
wars in Bosnia and Chechnya while the Clinton administration generally looked the other
way.
Though the Blind Sheikh was eventually convicted in a terror plot contrived by a paid
informant for the FBI, some people in federal law enforcement had been reluctant to indict him.
"There was a whole issue about [Abdel-Rahman] being given a visa to come into this country and
what the circumstances were around that," one of his defense lawyers, Abdeed Jabara told me.
"The issue related to how much the government was involved with the jihadist enterprise when it
suited their purposes in Afghanistan and whether or not they were afraid there would be
exposure of that. Because there's no question that the jihadists were using the Americans and
the Americans were using the jihadists. There's a symbiotic relationship."
During the 1995 trial of members of the Blind Sheikh's New York-based cell, another defense
lawyer, Roger Stavis, referred to his clients before the jury as "Team America," emphasizing
the role they had played as proxy fighters for the U.S. in Afghanistan. When Stavis attempted
to summon to the witness stand a jihadist operative named Ali Abdelsauod Mohammed who had
trained his clients in firearms and combat, some people ordered Mohammed to refuse his
subpoena. Those people, according to journalist Peter Lance, were federal prosecutors Andrew
McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald.
The government lawyers were apparently fretting that Mohammed would be exposed as an active
asset of both the CIA and FBI, and as a former Army sergeant who had spirited training manuals
out of Fort Bragg while stationed there during the 1980s. So Mohammed remained a free man,
helping Al Qaeda plan attacks on American consular facilities in Tanzania and Kenya while the
"Day of the Planes" plot began to take form.
In early 2000, some people gathered in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to prepare the most daring Al
Qaeda operation to date. Two figures at the meeting, Saudi citizens named Nawaf al-Hazmi and
Khalid al-Midhar, were on their way to the United States. While in Kuala Lumpur, the duo's
hotel room was broken into by CIA agents, their passports were photographed, and their
communications were recorded. And yet the pair of Al Qaeda operatives was able to travel
together with multiple-entry visas on a direct flight from Kuala Lumpur to Los Angeles. That's
because for some reason, some people from the CIA failed to notify any people at the FBI about
the terror summit that had just taken place. The "Day of Planes" plot was moving forward
without a kink.
In Los Angeles, some people met Hazmi and Midhar at the airport, provided the two
non-English speakers with a personal caretaker and rented them apartments, where neighbors said
they were routinely visited each night by unknown figures in expensive cars with darkened
windows. Those people were Saudi Arabian intelligence agents named Omar Bayoumi and Khaled
al-Thumairy.
Crawford , Texas
It was not until August 2001 that Midhar was placed on a terrorist watch list. That month,
some people met at a ranch in Crawford, Texas, and reviewed a classified document headlined,
"Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside the US." The bulletin was a page-and-a-half long, with
detailed intelligence on the "Day of Planes" plot provided by Ali Mohammed, the Al
Qaeda-FBI-CIA triple agent now registered as "John Doe" and disappeared somewhere in the
federal prison system. Those people reviewed the document for a few minutes before their boss,
President George W. Bush, moved on to other matters.
According to The Washington Post , Bush exhibited an "expansive mood" that day,
taking in a round of golf. "We are going to be struck soon, many Americans are going to die,
and it could be in the U.S.," CIA counterterrorism chief Cofer Black warned days later. Bush
did not meet with his cabinet heads again to discuss terrorism until Sept. 4.
A week later, on Sept. 11, some people did something.
They hijacked four civilian airliners and changed the course of American history with little
more than box cutter blades in their hands. Fifteen of those 19 people, including Hazmi and
Midhar, were citizens of Saudi Arabia. They were products of a Wahhabi school system and a
politically stultifying society that had thrived under the protection of a special relationship
with the U.S. Indeed, the U.S. had showered theocratic allies like Saudi Arabia with aid and
weapons while threatening secular Arab states that resisted its hegemony with sanctions and
invasion. The Saudis were the favorite Muslims of America's national security elite not because
they were moderate, which they absolutely were not, but because they were useful.
In the days after 9/11, the FBI
organized several flights to evacuate prominent Saudi families from the U.S., including
relatives of Osama bin Laden. Meanwhile, Islamophobia erupted across the country, with even
mainstream personalities such as TV news anchor Dan Rather taking to the airwaves to claim
without evidence that Arab-Americans had celebrated the 9/11 attacks.
Unable to find a single operational Al Qaeda cell in the country, the FBI turned to an army
of paid snitches to haul in mentally unstable Muslims, dupes and idlers like the Lackawanna 6
in manufactured plots. Desperate for a high-profile bust to reinforce the "war on terror"
narrative, the bureau hounded Palestinian Muslim activists and persecuted prominent Islamic
charities like the Holy Land Foundation, sending its directors to prison for decades for the
crime of sending aid to NGOs in the occupied Gaza Strip.
As America's national security state cracked down on Muslim civil society at home, it turned
to fanatical Islamist proxies abroad to bring down secular and politically independent Arab
states. In Libya, the U.S. and UK helped arm the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, a longtime
affiliate of Al Qaeda, using it as a proxy to depose and murder Muammar Gaddafi. As that
country transformed from a stable, prosperous state into an Afghanistan-style playground for
rival militias, including a chapter of the Islamic State, the Obama administration moved to do
the same to Damascus.
In Syria, the CIA armed an outfit of supposedly "moderate rebels" called the Free Syrian
Army that turned out to be nothing more than a political front and weapons farm for an array of
extremist insurgent factions including Al Qaeda's local affiliate and the Islamic State. The
latter two groups were, of course, products of the sectarian chaos of Iraq, which had been
ruled by a secular government until the U.S. came knocking after 9/11.
The blowback from Iraq, Libya and Syria arrived in the form of the worst refugee crises the
world has experienced since World War II. And then came the bloodiest terror attack to hit the
UK in history – in Manchester. There, the son of a Libyan Islamic Fighting Group member,
who traveled to Libya and Syria on an MI6 ratline, slaughtered concert-goers with a nail
bomb.
Cataclysmic social disruptions like these were like steroids for right-wing Islamophobes,
electrifying Trump's victorious 2016 presidential campaign, a wing of the Brexit "Leave"
campaign in the UK, and far-right parties across Europe. But as I explain in "The Management of
Savagery," these terrifying trends were byproducts of decisions undertaken by national security
elites more closely aligned with the political center – figures who today attempt to
position themselves as leaders of the anti-Trump resistance.
Which people did which things to drag us into the political nightmare we're living through?
For those willing to cut through the campaign season bluster, Ilhan Omar's comments dare us to
name names.
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling
" Republican
Gomorrah ," " Goliath ," "
The
Fifty One Day War " and " The Management of
Savagery ," published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles
for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including "
Killing Gaza " and "
Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie ." Blumenthal founded the
Grayzone in 2015 to shine a
journalistic light on America's state of perpetual war and its dangerous domestic
repercussions. 36 comments for "Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of 9/11"
Jeff Harrison , April 19, 2019 at 11:24
The US doesn't seem to have the ability to see ourselves as others see us. This explains
why we don't understand why other countries/peoples react badly towards us. This will get
worse as we move into a more imperialistic mode. We continue to use the anachronistic phrase
"leader of the free world" all the while missing out on the fact that the rest of the world
has, in essence, become free and they, for the most part, don't want us leading them.
bill haymes , April 19, 2019 at 05:20
everyone who has not examined ALL THE EVIDENCE of 9/11 WITH AN OPEN MIND is imo simply
whistling in the wind
Anarcissie , April 19, 2019 at 11:12
I suppose, then, that that would mean going back to the earliest days of the 20th century,
when the British leadership, considering that its future navy, a main pillar of its empire,
would have to be fueled with oil instead of coal, and that there was a lot of oil in the
Middle East, began its imperial projects there, which of course involved wars, police, spies,
economic blackmail, and other tools of empire. The US seized or wangled or inherited the
imperial system from the British and thus acquired the associated regional, ethnic, and
religious hostilities as well. Since the Arabs and other Muslims were weak compared with the
Great Powers, resistance meant terrorism and guerrilla warfare on one side and massive
intervention and the support of local strongmen, Mafia bosses, dictators, and so on on the
other.
After 9/11. mentioning this important fact became 'justifying bin Laden' or 'spitting on
the graves of the dead' so you couldn't talk about it.
But, yes, 'somebody did something'. You don't need a conspiracy theory, because a
conspiracy is a secret agreement to commit a crime, and this crime is right out in the open.
Millions of people killed for fun and profit. Not that there weren't other conspiracies as
well.
Abe , April 18, 2019 at 23:23
Behind the Omar Outrage: Suppressed History of the pro-Israel Lobby
Max Blumenthal's article and his 2019 book, The Management of Savagery: How America's
National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump (2019), is an
impressive exercise in burying the leads.
Blumenthal does chronicle a decades-long panoply of active measures by numerous pro-Israel
Lobby figures, groups and think tanks. Yet he fails to explicitly recognize the connection
between pro-Israel Lobby efforts and the covert operations and overt invasions of America's
national security state.
Julian Assange of Wikileaks was more explicit. Assange named the "country that has
interfered in U.S. elections, has endangered Americans living or working overseas and has
corrupted America's legislative and executive branches. It has exploited that corruption to
initiate legislation favorable to itself, has promoted unnecessary and unwinnable wars and
has stolen American technology and military secrets. Its ready access to the mainstream media
to spread its own propaganda provides it with cover for its actions and it accomplishes all
that and more through the agency of a powerful and well-funded domestic lobby [ ] That
country is, of course, Israel."
i really like her and support her but if she just had the good sense to have simply said
"some people did something terrible" none of the present chapter of "islamophobia" would be
acted out..no matter how much we think we know about the real truth(?) what happened that day
did not blow up the white house, congress or the ruling class of america but nearly three
thousand pretty ordinary folks yes, just like what "we" do repeatedly, but nevertheless, and
considering the overwhelming mind fuck that went on with replaying the tragedy on tv for days
so that millions across the nation were put in shock, we need to be just a little more
considerate and possibly understanding both about how many people might feel and how some
people might use any opportunity to perform this second rate islamophobia, which is a tiny
fractional form of the original monstrous behavior that has destroyed nations, governments
and millions of people in the islamic world..that is islamophobia, not the reactionary crap
that passes for it which should be as understandable – under the circumstances –
as terrorism!
Zhu , April 18, 2019 at 22:32
It should have been obvious that our government had made enemies around the world &
that some would attempt revenge some day. Instead, we all thought that what we did to other
people could never happen to us.
Joe Tedesky , April 18, 2019 at 21:41
This is a must read for the skeptics who doubt any questioning of the official 9/11
Commission Report. This investigative reporting by Max Blumenthal is another good reason to
read the Consortium.
hetro , April 18, 2019 at 17:18
Max Blumenthal's emphasis on "somebody did something" in echo to Ilhan Omar's comments,
plus his emphasis on what has been "suppressed," will hopefully lead on to further
disclosures of what took place for the 9/11 event.
Anyone who watches the Omar video will see she is mainly emphasizing a disgraceful
demonizing of Muslims in general. Additionally, what has brought on all the hatred to her,
she did not speak with the "quasi-theological understanding" that demands the official
narrative, with hushed tones, while speaking of the event:
Max Blumenthal above:
". . . by reinforcing the quasi-theological understanding of 9/11 that leaves anti-Muslim
narratives unchallenged. "The memory of 9/11 is sacred ground, and any discussion of it must
be done with reverence," insisted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi."
It would be a fine thing for CN, despite Mr. Parry's former reservations, to open up
enquiry into further discussion of what has been "suppressed"–or at the very least to
the very serious questions that have not yet been answered on that horrible day.
OlyaPola , April 18, 2019 at 14:17
"Trump's demagogic ploy with the freshman lawmaker raises the more serious question of who
and what led to the "Day of Planes," writes Max Blumenthal."
All processes of suppression tend to spread that which is being suppresed facilitating
de-suppression of much that is being suppressed leaving a residual.
Framing and access to sources may continue the lack of perception of this residual and
hence facilitate misrepresentation through ommission.
"Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert operation to trap the
Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft underbelly."
Restriction of frame is a tool of obfuscation and choice of point of initiation a tool of
misrepresentation.
During the early 1970's due to internal factors primarily but not wholly in the period of
1964 to 1970, the Politburo of the Soviet Union agreed detente on the bases of spheres of
influence with the United States of America facilitating the creation of a greater assay of
and reliance upon the US dollar fiat currency, further butressed by commodity arrangements
including but not restricted to the petro-dollar, in part to underpin the United States of
America economic recovery including recovering their control over their perceived threats
within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan.
In reaction/attempt at circumvention in 1973 Mitsui-Mitsubishi representing the zaibatsu
sought to jointly develop the Trans-Siberian railway, the port of Nahodka and other
industrial options including in Japan primarily in Northern Honshu and in Hokkaido with the
Soviet Union but this project was terminated by the Politburo, the reason given being
potential threats from China after confrontation including on the Amur and the need to build
BAM (Baikal-Amur Railway) to the north of the Trans-Siberian Railway – the projects
rejected were ancestor of the present OBOR project with differing participants re-explored
from 1993 onwards.
These opportunities and trajectories in the 1970's were explained to the Politburo in the
1970's but rejected by the Politburo.
The Soviet Union was invited into Afghanistan by the Afghani government and hence never
"invaded" Afghanistan.
The Politburo accepted the invitation of the Afghani government despite the advice of
those practiced in strategic evaluation – the illusion that the Politburo was practiced
in strategic evaluation endured in an ideological half-life post August 1968 but increasingly
was ignored in practice.
During the 1970's there was an oscillating aspect of contrariness and attempt to regain
perceived control in many of the decision of the Politburo led by the man who loved medals
and awards Mr. Brezhnev.
Consequently the Politburo and the Soviet Union was complicit in facilitating
opportunities for " Back in 1979, some people initiated a multi-billion-dollar covert
operation to trap the Red Army in Afghanistan and bleed the Soviet Union at its soft
underbelly."
However the targets of these operations were not restricted to the Soviet Union but
included as part of an ongoing "strategy" "to underpin the United States of America economic
recovery/maintainence including recovering/maintaining their control over their perceived
threats within their sphere of influence, particularly but not exclusively Japan." and the
location of these efforts were chosen the middle of Central Asia in reaction to experiences
in Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and Israel post 1973.
The above are necessarily thumbnails in confirmation and extension of the not widely
perceived causation/facilitation/ history/trajectories/time horizons which may aid
perception, as may testing the hypotheses that Ms. Omar is being attacked for challenging
myth irrespective of which myth she attempts to challenge.
@5 I had listed some curious incidences of "training exercises" including a bioterrorism
training exercise that happened in New York three
days before 9/11.
I am adding to my own personal notes another bioterrorism training exercise that happened
just prior to the highly suspicious Skripal poisoning.
-------
Add to the list, "Toxic Dagger", a biological/chemical training exercise held
just prior to the Skripal poisoning. Toxic Dagger is the largest annual British army
biological/chemical training exercise.
"Completing the training and exercising against these scenarios provides
a challenging programme for the Royal Marines to demonstrate their proficiency in
the methods to detect, assess and mitigate a CBRN threat."
The first person to discover the Skripals was the Chief Nursing Officer of the British
Army (whose experience includes deployment to Sierre Leone to help fight Ebola).
"An experienced officer, highly connected, who is also known for handling highly
infectious patients?"
The nurse claimed later that it was actually her daughter that was with her that detected
and assessed the Skripal scenario.
The daughter was 16 at the time and we presume the Lifesaver Award she received would be a
feather in her cap useful for her imminent application for admission to a university. Wonder
if Lori Loughlin had thought of using such an angle?
Btw on the Skripal thing does that nurse also run over to every "spice" zombie she sees in
public? Anyone in a puddle of their own partly digested booze? Does she go hunting under
bridges for heroin addicts and glue sniffers? Does she check on everyone sleeping on a bench
or in some doorway? It is England after all.
Weird hobby she's got and with her kid in tow too :P
(Yes I'm being facetious about a bullshit narrative straight out of the 1950ies).
For Western world, especially people of the USA, the collapse of the USSR was really geopolitical catastrophe, as Putin
once put it. It unleashed cannibalistic instincts of neoliberal elite.
" "Can you imagine what the world would be like today if there was still a Soviet Union?"
remarked Zbigniew Bzezinski "
Yeah, I can.
There never would have been a war on Iraq in 1991 nor an obliteration of Iraq in 2003,
which has lasted until the present day. The destruction of Yugoslavia never would have taken
place and the wars and proxy wars on Syria and Libya would have only existed in the twisted
and depraved imaginations of the Zionist and militarist psychos in our midst.
TINA never would have been an imperative and the working people of the Western world
(primarily the U.S.) wouldn't be in a race to the bottom as it comes to wages, healthcare
insurance, poverty levels, infant mortality, life-expectancy, union power in the workplace,
secure retirements, and outlandish housing costs. With the demise of the USSR the millionaire
capitalist-investor class really took the gloves off and saw no reason to provide the working
masses with certain life-affirming policies, it was time to really sock it to the bottom
90%.
Despite some its faults, the world's people have been paying dearly for the demise of the
USSR.
For further reading on what I've outlined above:
"Blood Lies" by Grover Furr
"Blackshirts and Reds" by Michael Parenti
"Fool's Crusade" by Diana Johnstone
"Against Empire" by Michael Parenti
essays and articles by Paul Craig Roberts
essays and articles by Andre Vltchek
Al Pinto , April 18, 2019 at 13:31
In short, without an antidote, the US does what the neocons and Israel decide to do.
Welcome to the world of "my way, or the highway" cowboy mentality
Actually, people in the USSR lived lives of constant fear (they call it the “Time of
Terror”) that their friends, relatives, neighbors, strangers, even their children,
would “tattle” on them and they would wind up in the torture chambers. They lived
in stark, nearly unbearable poverty; the only comfort was that they all were in the same
godforsaken boat. Communism might be a good idea on paper, but in reality, because of the
ignorance of the bureaucratic leadership, it was a dismal failure.
The demise of the USSR would have no effect whatsoever on the hegemonic madness of the US
which, under the guiding light of the Monroe Doctrine (established way before the USSR),
carries on destroying one country after another. I would ask, “What would the world do
without the USA?” Live in a much more peaceful world for sure. As for Omar, I wish her
the fortitude to continue telling the truth. Again, Max Blumenthal proves himself one of the
world’s best reporters.
OlyaPola , April 19, 2019 at 05:33
“constant fear”
The years of 1928 to 1953 were not constant since there were the years 1954 and
subsequent.
That’s not true Rob Roy. You’re parroting Western capitalist talking points. A whole host of brand new scholarly literature
has hit the shelves in just the last few years proving the USSR was nowhere near as horrible as the Washington imperialist
media made it out to be. In fact, under Stalin the Soviet Union made substantial gains in women’s rights, literacy, healthcare
and industrial wages. Also, had it not been for Stalin’s agrarian plan there would have been more famines and more severe
famines.
And as everyone knows, if
Stalin never crash course industrialized the country they never would have defeated Nazi
Germany.
Far from the USSR being a police-state it was often seen as a giant trough in which, for
example, rent wouldn’t be paid and no one would come around to collect it.
Please see the following books for a truth trip: “Blood Lies” by Grover Furr and
“Stalin, Waiting for the Truth” by Grover Furr. Also, Michael Parenti’s
“Blackshirts and Reds is excellent.
Dump Pelousy , April 18, 2019 at 20:52
Micheal Perenti is the best. He was the Truth To Power voice before 9/11, before all the
yuppie reporters sold their souls for “access” and a talking heads show. I
watched it happen in slow motion with great dismay.
mp66 , April 18, 2019 at 22:23
Spot on. The western owner class was forced to share at least one plate with the rest of
the population to make the west appear superior in material terms, and with that incentive or
threat gone, there is no more need for a plate, few crumbs under the table should be
sufficient. But as usual, greed goes along with stupidity, they forgot that doing so for
decades undermines the stability of the system. Trump, Brexit, trade wars, abrogations of
treaties, blatant disregard for bare basics of international law etc. are just symptoms of
deeper discontent across the globe.
Not only they lost all moral authority. UK MSM became openly neofascist in some areas exceeeding the press of Third Riech and the
USSR in distortions and falsifications. .
Notable quotes:
"... Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV. ..."
"... In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do' ..."
Even if the Skripal affair WAS staged, you shouldn't get too excited about it. In fact, you should be rather pleased because
it would demonstrate that the tired, incompetent old UK is still capable of mounting an operation of which young, vigorous, competent
Russia would be proud.
The UK can fake events with the best of them! I would find that reassuring rather than deplorable because it's a nasty world
out there.
The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time. Sometimes they blatantly lie. Most people
still believe most of what they say, as there is an in-built trust of authority, for some very good historical reasons. The Skripal
story, made it obvious to a large number of people, that some of it could not be true. Most still believe it or din't take much
notice. The arrest of Julian Assange made it clearer, to an even larger number of people, that the government and the media, had
lost all moral authority. Still many people didn't take much notice, or were convinced by the lies in the media, that he was a
rapist and should be in jail.
The lies and corruption from government, is now increasingly out in the open. I believe that this is deliberate. I also think
that it is exceedingly dangerous for society for multiple reasons. We are conditioned to accept authority as our moral guide.
They act as an example of acceptable behaviour. If society as a whole, behaved like government, all trust would break down. Virtually
all functions of society are based on trust. Without such trust, nothing will work.
Corruption of government and media, is also exceedingly dangerous, for everyone's mental health. People begin to subconsciously
know that they are being lied to, but they cannot accept it, because the lies conflict with their worldview, which quite naturally
is based on trust for authority, and that nice man reading the news on TV.
I believe this has all been pre-planned, and it will result in a disastrous effect on all society, unless something happens
to bring the governments and media back to truth and sanity. I have no idea what that might be, but I expect it will not be pleasant.
The following was an early warning of the mass insanity affecting The US Government. It has spread like a highly infectious
disease.
In 2004, Karl Rove in The Bush Government " Guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined
as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [ ] 'That's not the way the world
really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying
that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
how things will sort out. We're history's actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'
China has risen explosively, from being clearly a "Third World" country forty years ago to
become a very serious and rapidly advancing competitor to America. Anyone who has seen today's
China (I recently spent two weeks there, traveling muchly) will have been astonished by the
ubiquitous construction, the quality of planning, the roads and airports and high-speed rail,
the sense of confidence and modernity. Compare this with America's rotting and dangerous
cities, swarms of homeless people, deteriorating education, antique rail, deindustrialized
midlands, loony government, and ahe military sucking blood from the economy like some vast
leech, and America will seem yesterday's country. The phrase "national suicide" comes to
mind.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion that
the Chinese can't invent anything, just copy and steal. What one actually sees is a combination
of rapid and successful adoption of foreign technology (see Shanghai maglev below) and,
increasingly, cutting edge science and technology. More attention might be in order.
This year. A couple of decades ago, Chinese students in the US often refused to return to a
backward and repressive country. It now appears that Asia is where the action is and they want
to be part of it.
All those things you mentioned are micro-innovations, not macro ones.
China hasn't come up with a game-changer like the internet.
But we must keep in mind that most of the West hasn't been all that innovative either.
Rather, there have been spurts and sudden explosions followed by little activity.
Look at the Greeks. So creative long long ago but what happened to that fire during
Byzantine yrs? And what are Greeks today? And Italians? And Renaissance was mostly about few
parts of Northern Italy. Italy made some great films in the 20th century but hasn't been a
key player in much of anything.
And most European peoples haven't been all that innovative. It was only pockets of places
in UK, France, and Germany mostly in the modern era. What big thing came out of Poland,
Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, and etc? There are surely exceptions, but they weren't major
players.
Innovations are about sparks. Sparks of inspiration, ingenuity. But for sparks to catch
fire, there has to be dry wood. The problem for East Asia was it tended to suppress
spark-mentality and, besides, the wood was wet with tradition and customs.
But then, a nation that defines itself by genius and innovation alone will fail too. Why?
Because only a tiny number of people are genius or innovative. Most people are 'lame'. If a
nation comes to define itself mainly by wealth, smarts, and genius, then most people will
have no value. Also, the top smarties will identify mainly with smarties in other parts of
the world than with their own 'lame' folks. This is why Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and
Singapore are going the wrong path. They've emphasized excellence so much that only elites
have value, and these elites feel closer to Western elites than with their own 'lame' masses
who are to be replaced like white folks in US and EU.
Certain sectors are doing better than ever. Also, US continues to be the top magnet of
talent around the world.
But in other ways, it is falling apart.
Much of US will end up worse but much of it will get richer.
US will be like a hyper Latin American nation with great riches and great poverty.
A common response to these observations from thunder-thump patriots is the assertion
that the Chinese can't invent anything, just copy and steal.
Well, let's do a thought exercise and simply assume that this is 100% true, that the
Chinese can't invent anything, just copy, steal and maintain what whites invent. Does that
change your opinion that China will overtake the West? It shouldn't.
The West is slowly (at least for now) imploding. We are importing the 3rd world, while we
demonize whites. The West has managed to avoid dramatic decline because whites were still a
large majority of the citizens. That is changing. Whites are less than 50% of births in the
United States. Non-whites account for 1 in 3 births in England. Muslims account for at least
20% of births in France with Sub-Saharan Africans making up between 5% and 10% of the
births.
We'll reach a tipping point at some point where things start to noticeably decline. China
doesn't need to outdo the West. It just has to avoid declining with the West. If China simply
maintains the technology and societal organization of the West while the West falls into
tribal warfare – hot or cold – China will become the dominate power.
@Anon I'd agree with that.
But under that scenario, China will still become the dominant world power. We're on our way
to be a sort-of Brazil of the North. Well, Brazil doesn't do much on the world stage.
We simply won't have the money or talent to maintain a global military and cultural
presence. Then again, we'll probably still be run by Jews, so we'll like remain a presence in
the Middle East.
"... I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had. ..."
"... It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions in Russia. It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever ..."
I don't completely agree . or perhaps I should say, I am concerned, mostly for Russia.
Good management practices can be applied to anything, positive or negative, and Orlov points
out that there seems to be a new generation of "professional" politicians developing in
Russia. This worries me as such people have a way of wanting to stay in power at almost any
cost, and not always considering the well being of the country.
Will they have the real world experience of Putin? I don't know. Will they be fooled by
the West's propaganda? Have to wait and see.
The Russian leaders who went through WW2 had a vision and experience which you can't buy
and this saved the world many times over.
But one thing I am certain of, Russia is a greater hope for the world than is the US.
I fear that in the new liberalist oligarchic Russia they have managers (generally trained in
very expensive western universities/think thank) but not statesmen and overall statesmen with
an original strategic view for a national independent interest like the old USSR had.
For the near future a simple copy of a normal western state (colony). And perhaps that future is already here.
"new liberalist oligarchic Russia have managers (generally trained in very expensive western
universities/think thanks)".
If thats true, its depressing. Shiny globo-homo eyes having Europe in their heart.
It means TPTB already have a generation of brainwashed liberal narratives in key positions
in Russia.
It takes a 15-20 years to build up a new generation of nationalists and defenders of their
heritage, so this could easily take 50-100 years to change if ever
"... The document "determines a list of those goods that it will be possible to export to Ukraine only on the basis of separate decisions from June 1." "This category includes fuel and energy products, including coal as well as the oil and petroleum products," he said. ..."
Russia is banning exports of crude oil, petroleum products and coal to Ukraine.
"A few days ago the Ukrainian Cabinet of Ministers took the latest unfriendly step with
respect to our country and expanded the list of Russian goods which cannot be imported to
Ukrainian territory. In these conditions we are forced to protect our interests and take
response measures," Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said at a meeting of the Russian
cabinet.
Medvedev said he had signed a resolution "banning the export of Russian crude oil and
petroleum products to Ukraine."
The document "determines a list of those goods that it will be possible to export to Ukraine
only on the basis of separate decisions from June 1." "This category includes fuel and energy
products, including coal as well as the oil and petroleum products," he said.
British propaganda is clearly as close to neofascist propaganda as one can get... British neocons are even closer to neofascists then the US neocons. And British security services are closer to
the Third Reich security services then any other.
Skripals is a such a grandiose false flag operation that Gellen (of operation Gladio fame) probably would be amazed and humbled.
Notable quotes:
"... The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story.... ..."
"... If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written previously. ..."
"... Oh dear oh dear.. It appears the UK may be denying there were any poor ducks involved... https://twitter.com/haynesdeborah/status/1118409471754153984 ..."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any remaining
truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be concluded to be
a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything said by UK's
Tory government.
"The official narrative of the Salisbury incident is ever-fluctuating. Seemingly each and
every article, news segment, official statement or documentary about any element of the case
contains new information, requiring the established account to be at least partially
rewritten and/or contradicting established elements of the story....
"If nothing else, that Haynes was willing to transmit an apparently obvious fiction speaks
volumes about the willingness of mainstream journalists to parrot each and every fresh claim
in the Skripal case, even if it wildly conflicts with what they themselves have written
previously."
"Difficult to verify your version of events given it involves nameless officials. Knowing
you're often used by security services to peddle propaganda seemed a reasonable assumption
they'd urged you to backtrack your earlier advocacy as story detonates official #Skripal
narrative."
It seems highly reasonable to conclude the NY Times item has blown away any
remaining truthfulness to the Skripal Saga and the entire Saga--like Russiagate--can be
concluded to be a very serious hoax, and that there's no reason whatsoever to trust anything
said by UK's Tory government.
"... Skripal was just one more effort to tighten sanctions against Putin's allies in the Russian oligarchy and isolate Trump from foreign policy initiatives not approved by the Deep State. ..."
"... The significance of the NY Times story, then, is that, inadvertently it reinforces the reality that in the matter of Russiagate and Trump all roads lead to London, the Tory Establishment, which has been living off US-Russian tensions for seventy years and security agencies doing what the CIA cannot do for itself. ..."
Craig Murray has a piece on this today. There is nothing very new in what he writes but he
sees the significance of this story, which is not about ducks or children or Donald Trump's
personality but a concerted and thorough campaign, carried out largely by British state
actors, to deepen the 'west's' isolation of Russia.
The real story of both the Cold War and the continually recurring propaganda stories about
the "millions" of "victims of communism" is that the Soviet Union was manipulated throughout
its history by capitalist control over the international economy. Like a demonic organist
capitalist governments pulled out all the stops to control the moods and the policies of a
state that the Bolsheviks never did get to rule.
In the end the Politburo gave in and did what the 'west' had always been wanted which is
to hand over the country, lock, stock and population to the cannibals of capital.
The result being what was probably, after the 1930-45 war, the largest kill off of
Russians in modern history: Yeltsin plus Harvard Business School being responsible for many
more deaths than even the intoxicated propagandist Robert Conquest ever dreamed of.
It is that total control over Russia, through the manipulation of its economy, and the
direction of its capitalists, that is behind the long series of sanctions, which are being
added to every day: their purpose is to re-invent Yeltsinism, re-empower the Fifth Column in
the Kremlin, and, in a stroke, re-establish the inevitable and eternal hegemony of the
Washington centered Empire.
In this work the assistance of the 'cousins'in MI6 and GCHQ, plus the entire British
military establishment has been crucial in a period in which the subservience of POTUS to the
Deep State was, thanks to the underestimation of his electoral chances, very much in
question. During a period in which Trump had to be tamed and brought under control the UK
Establishment's assistance in coming up with a series of highly publicised interventions was
crucia l.
Lysias points out that Haspel had acted as the CIA's Head of Station in London in 2016. It
was in London that the entire "Russiagate" nonsense was put together, with British based
actors continually prodding Congress, the media and the Democrats to act on revelations
regarding Papadopolous, Mifsud, Stefan Halper.
Skripal was just one more effort to
tighten sanctions against Putin's allies in the Russian oligarchy and isolate Trump from
foreign policy initiatives not approved by the Deep State.The significance of the
NY Times story, then, is that, inadvertently it reinforces the reality that in the matter of
Russiagate and Trump all roads lead to London, the Tory Establishment, which has been living
off US-Russian tensions for seventy years and security agencies doing what the CIA cannot do
for itself.
The Saker: What will happen once Nord Stream II is finished? Where is Europe heading
next, especially in its relationship with the USA and Russia?
Dmitry Orlov: The new pipelines under the Baltic and the Black Sea will be completed, along
with the second LNG installation at Sabetta, and Russia will go on supplying natural gas to
Europe and Asia. I suspect that the fracking extravaganza in the US is entering its end game
and that the dream of large-scale LNG exports to Europe will never materialize.
The nations of Europe will gradually realize that its relationship with Russia is mostly
beneficial while its relationship with the US is mostly harmful, and will make certain
adjustments. The Ukraine, its natural gas pipeline system decrepit and beyond repair, will
continue to import natural gas from Europe, only now the methane molecules will actually flow
to it from the west rather from the east.
Way to brave predictions, I think... I think he grossly underestimates
durability of neoliberal state like the USA. May be in 20 years the USA will really start
experiencing huge problems like he described due to the end of cheap oil". But before that only
huge exogenous shock can crash such a society.
Notable quotes:
"... It will be interesting to see how public and government workers, as a group, react to the realization that the retirements they have been promised no longer exist; perhaps that will tip the entire system into a defunct state. ..."
"... And so, Trump or no Trump, we are going to have more of the same: shiny young IT specialists skipping and whistling on the way to work past piles of human near-corpses and their excrement; Botoxed housewives shopping for fake organic produce while hungry people in the back of the store are digging around in dumpsters ..."
"... well-to-do older couples dreaming of bugging out to some tropical gringo compound in a mangrove swamp where they would be chopped up with machetes and fed to the fish; and all of them believing that things are great because the stock market is doing so well. ..."
"... But he simply does not understand the USA. He’s been predicting collapse for some time and it has not occurred or come close to happening. Washington is filled with smart kleptocrats who understand they cannot afford to destroy the country that keeps on giving them the wealth and power they crave. Trump, can flounce around Washington and the rest of the country and do and say outrageous things and it has no effect on life whatsoever. ..."
"... While, on the surface, people support ideas like higher minimum wage, universal health-care and other aspects of social democracy, it their masters say “no” then they’ll forgo it and take pride in their ability to endure suffering, early death, their children on heroin or meth, and so on. ..."
"... Since I’m fairly “connected” to the lower/working class and its struggles in my part of the world I can assure you people almost enjoy suffering to a degree that foreigners easily miss and seldom ascribe it to the thieves and criminals who run our society. ..."
"... Will there be a civil war in the US, like in the 1861-1865 period ? No, I don’t think so. Will there be severe social disturbances ? Yes, these I do expect, leading to the break up of the US. The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force will be the old South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. The US has been kicking the financial can down the road for a long time. This cannot last for ever. ..."
"... with people like Siluanov and Nabiullina in charge of the nation’s money, I am not optimistic… ..."
"... The acceleration of economic collapse in the West will be likely bring (overt) fascism and war–world war. ..."
"... In particular, the AngloNazi sorry Anglosphere nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and of course America) are a clear and present threat that should not be underestimated, discounted, or spin-doctored away. ..."
"... But the Anglos studiously avoid facing the reality that their precious way of life, capitalist system, and Anglo-American world order itself are premised upon their own ruthless exploitation of the Global South and developing nations in general. ..."
"... Trump and the MAGA hordes, as well as similar xenophobic and nationalist movements throughout the Anglosphere and Europe, are only a precursor to what is coming. They represent the grievances of the lower-middle classes within the Anglo American Empire and Europe who want a greater cut of the economic loot of empire for themselves–which necessitates an even more aggressive and militaristic grab for global resources, markets, and geopolitical power. ..."
"... He’s way too negative on the USA’s domestic prospects. Despite its absurdities, the US system is fundamentally robust and unlikely to suffer any major, sudden collapse, at least for many decades. It will certain decline further, plumbing the depths of depravity more than it has to date, but the system will chug along. The US has vacuumed up talent from all over the world, bolstering it’s economic capacity and the rents extracted by oligo. It’s day to day institutions, such as courts, post offices and the like function better now than they did in the 80s or 90s. ..."
"... All the incentives are there to keep the thing together, with little real risk of some sort of succession movement or serious insurrection. The main advantages the US has on this score are it’s mass surveillance system, policing infrastructure and media. The US media can make the great bulk of the people believe absolutely anything, if given enough time. ..."
The Saker: You recently wrote an article titled " Is the USS
Ship of Fools Taking on Water? " in which you discuss the high level of stupidity in
modern US politics? I have a simple question for you: do you think the Empire can survive Trump
and, if so, for how long?
Dmitry Orlov: I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn't been
put to any sort of serious stress test yet, and so nobody realizes that this is the case. Some
event will come along which will leave the power center utterly humiliated and unable to
countenance this humiliation and make adjustments. Things will go downhill from there as
everyone in government in media does their best to pretend that the problem doesn't exist. My
hope is that the US military personnel currently scattered throughout the planet will not be
simply abandoned once the money runs out, but I wouldn't be too surprised if that is what
happens.
The Saker: Lastly, a similar but fundamentally different question: can the USA (as
opposed to the Empire) survive Trump and, if so, how? Will there be a civil war? A military
coup? Insurrection? Strikes? A US version of the Yellow Vests?
Dmitry Orlov: The USA, as some set of institutions that serves the interests of some
dwindling number of people, is likely to continue functioning for quite some time. The question
is: who is going to be included and who isn't? There is little doubt that retirees, as a
category, have nothing to look forward to from the USA: their retirements, whether public or
private, have already been spent. There is little doubt that young people, who have already
been bled dry by poor job prospects and ridiculous student loans, have nothing to look forward
to either.
But, as I've said before, the USA isn't so much a country as a country club. Membership has
its privileges, and members don't care at all what life is like for those who are in the
country but aren't members of the club. The recent initiatives to let everyone in and to let
non-citizens vote amply demonstrates that US citizenship, by itself, counts for absolutely
nothing. The only birthright of a US citizen is to live as a bum on the street, surrounded by
other bums, many of them foreigners from what Trump has termed "shithole countries."
It
will be interesting to see how public and government workers, as a group, react to the
realization that the retirements they have been promised no longer exist; perhaps that will tip
the entire system into a defunct state.
And once the fracking bubble is over and another third of the population finds that it can
no longer afford to drive, that might force through some sort of reset as well. But then the
entire system of militarized police is designed to crush any sort of rebellion, and most people
know that. Given the choice between certain death and just sitting on the sidewalk doing drugs,
most people will choose the latter.
And so, Trump or no Trump, we are going to have more of the same: shiny young IT specialists
skipping and whistling on the way to work past piles of human near-corpses and their excrement;
Botoxed housewives shopping for fake organic produce while hungry people in the back of the
store are digging around in dumpsters; concerned citizens demanding that migrants be allowed
in, then calling the cops as soon as these migrants set up tents on their front lawn or ring
their doorbell and ask to use the bathroom; well-to-do older couples dreaming of bugging out to
some tropical gringo compound in a mangrove swamp where they would be chopped up with machetes
and fed to the fish; and all of them believing that things are great because the stock market
is doing so well.
At this rate, when the end of the USA finally arrives, most of the people won't be in a
position to notice while the rest won't be capable of absorbing that sort of upsetting
information and will choose to ignore it. Everybody wants to know how the story ends, but that
sort of information probably isn't good for anyone's sanity. The mental climate in the US is
already sick enough; why should we want to make it even sicker?
I love Orlov’s wit and general cynical attitude as it mirrors mine (perhaps not the
wit). I think he seems to understand the Ukraine and Russia relatively well though I’m
not in a position to question him on that but I do know something about the politics of
NATO/EU/USA and their intentions and that Orlov gets.
But he simply does not understand the USA. He’s been predicting collapse for some
time and it has not occurred or come close to happening. Washington is filled with smart
kleptocrats who understand they cannot afford to destroy the country that keeps on giving
them the wealth and power they crave. Trump, can flounce around Washington and the rest of
the country and do and say outrageous things and it has no effect on life whatsoever.
If
anything the economy actually is “better” not as good as the cooked statistics
indicate but things have improved for people I know in that area. Americans, despite the
obvious propaganda nature of the media still are true-believers in the official Narrative
because meaning and myth always trumps reality.
While, on the surface, people support ideas
like higher minimum wage, universal health-care and other aspects of social democracy, it
their masters say “no” then they’ll forgo it and take pride in their
ability to endure suffering, early death, their children on heroin or meth, and so on.
Since
I’m fairly “connected” to the lower/working class and its struggles in my
part of the world I can assure you people almost enjoy suffering to a degree that foreigners
easily miss and seldom ascribe it to the thieves and criminals who run our society. Americans
strut around but feel powerless and don’t have a plan or think they can have a plan
because they lack the conceptual frameworks to understand that their leadership is thoroughly
rotten.
Having said that, I agree with Auslander, Americans don’t need the central
government and would do better, initially, in a highly chaotic situation and establish their
own order in their communities and rig up a new set of arrangements very quickly.
In some
ways the fall of Washington would be the best thing to ever happen in my country.
I am afraid you are wrong. Orlov does understand the US, just like I do, as I have lived
in the US. Yes, Orlov has been predicting the collapse of the US, and it will happen. I would
like to direct your attention to the following video (the second part is very
interesting):
Will there be a civil war in the US, like in the 1861-1865 period ? No, I don’t
think so. Will there be severe social disturbances ? Yes, these I do expect, leading to the
break up of the US. The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force
will be the old South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. The US has been
kicking the financial can down the road for a long time. This cannot last for ever.
“The only part of the US which probably will emerge as a cohesive force will be the old
South, Dixie land, which has history and tradition behind it. ”
Maybe, but actually I would say most regions of the USA have some kind of “old
tradition” —and a lot nicer ones than that of the old racist South. I’ll
take New England and the Maritimes any day over the steamy South where the kudzu creeps over
I mean *everything*, the snakes proliferate, and you can’t survive the summer without
AC 24/7.
Well…I just started in on this piece and already I have a major
beef…Orlov’s notion that the dissolution of the Soviet Union was good for
Russia…
China was [and arguably still is] an empire of diverse regions, ethnicities and
religions…but how is that holding China back today, or during previous centuries of
imperial glory…?
Clearly China doesn’t fit into Orlov’s idea of an empire as a ‘wealth
pump’ that sucks from the periphery to enrich the center…this is true of course
of exploitation-based imperial projects such as western colonialism…but is clearly not
applicable to the Chinese model, which has been both the biggest and most durable empire in
human history…so that is a big hole in Orlov’s ‘theory’…
It is true that the USSR was a fundamentally different kind of empire from the
exploitative western colonialism…and it is also true that it ultimately did not
succeed…although it managed to accomplish almost incomprehensible progress in
modernization, science and technology…and industrialization…the foundations of
Russian strength today rest squarely on the foundations put in place during the Stalin
era…
Elsewhere on this site there is a brilliant series of essays by Ramin Mazaheri about the
tumultuous cultural revolution of the 1960s…and why it was necessary…Russia
also needed a cultural revolution around this time…the system needed to be rejigged to
better serve the people…in living standard…fairness and
justice…opportunity for social advance…etc…
But it never happened…instead the system became more sclerotic than ever…and
the welfare of the people stagnated…at the very moment in time when the capitalist
west, especially the United States, was able to reign in the appetites of its parasite class
and provide the people with a decent share of its [largely ill-gotten, by means of global
finance colonialism] gains…[during the postwar decades, the share of national wealth
of the 0.1 percent fell to an all time low of about 7 percent…about a quarter of
historic, and current levels]…
This was the golden age in the US…well paying jobs in industry were plentiful and
the company president made perhaps ten times what the shop floor worker took home…a
second household income was completely unnecessary…university education at state
colleges was practically free…
The life of the Soviet citizen in the1960s was not too far behind…Stalin’s
five year plans in the1930s had created an industrial powerhouse…it was Russia’s
ability to produce that allowed it to prevail over Germany in the existential war…and
despite the devastation of the people, cities and countryside Russia was able to quickly
become a technological superpower…as an aerospace engineer I have a deep appreciation
of the depth and breadth of Russian technical achievements and the basic scientific advances
that made that possible…the US was laughably left in the dust, despite having skimmed
the cream of Nazi Germany’s technical scientific talent…and contrary to what US
propaganda would have the people believe…
... ... ...
Of course the massive Chinese empire has been adapting like this for centuries, if not
millennia…Russia with the Soviet Union only needed to make similar smart
adjustments…instead they threw out the baby with the bathwater…let’s see
where Russia goes from here, but with people like Siluanov and Nabiullina in charge of the
nation’s money, I am not optimistic…
But back to Orlov…let’s see where he goes after starting off very clumsily.
.
The acceleration of economic collapse in the West will be likely bring (overt) fascism and
war–world war.
In particular, the AngloNazi sorry Anglosphere nations (Britain, Canada, Australia, New
Zealand, and of course America) are a clear and present threat that should not be
underestimated, discounted, or spin-doctored away.
As collapse intensifies, these Anglo American entities led by the USA will surely lash out
in even more aggressive wars to maintain their unipolar world order that they have ruled over
since the fall of the Soviet Union. The use of tactical nuclear weapons, bio-warfare, and
other "exotic" weapons should not be ruled out.
At base, the Anglo Americans possess an inbred sense of economic entitlement. They whine
like snowflakes about the foreign outsourcing of jobs or "illegal immigrants stealing our
jobs" as a chauvinistic demand for a greater share of the economic spoils of imperialism.
But the Anglos studiously avoid facing the reality that their precious way of life,
capitalist system, and Anglo-American world order itself are premised upon their own ruthless exploitation of the Global
South and developing nations in general.
And God forbid that the Anglos lose their parasitic way of life and (horror) are compelled
to live like the vast majority of humanity in the developing world from Africa to Asia to
Latin America to the Middle East.
The disaffected middle classes and labor aristocracy of the Anglosphere will comprise the
grassroots basis for 21st-century fascism, similar to how these socio-economic classes were
the grassroots support for the German Third Reich or Mussolini's Italy in the 1930s-40s.
Trump and the MAGA hordes, as well as similar xenophobic and nationalist movements
throughout the Anglosphere and Europe, are only a precursor to what is coming. They represent
the grievances of the lower-middle classes within the Anglo American Empire and Europe who
want a greater cut of the economic loot of empire for themselves–which necessitates an
even more aggressive and militaristic grab for global resources, markets, and geopolitical
power.
As Martin Lee has put it, the Beast reawakens.
Boswald Bollocksworth on April 17, 2019 · at 9:37 pm EST/EDT
He’s way too negative on the USA’s domestic prospects. Despite its absurdities, the US system is fundamentally robust
and unlikely to suffer any major, sudden collapse, at least for many decades. It will certain decline further, plumbing the
depths of depravity more than it has to date, but the system will chug along. The US has vacuumed up talent from all over the
world, bolstering it’s economic capacity and the rents extracted by oligo. It’s day to day institutions, such as courts, post
offices and the like function better now than they did in the 80s or 90s.
All the incentives are there to keep the thing together, with little real risk of some sort of succession movement or
serious insurrection. The main advantages the US has on this score are it’s mass surveillance system, policing infrastructure
and media. The US media can make the great bulk of the people believe absolutely anything, if given enough time.
The US capacity to meddle overseas will wither, after all how well can a submarine filled with drag queens and single
mothers operate? And who’d be willing to endure shelling for a monstrosity like contemporary America?
But the domestic system is brilliantly designed, not going anywhere.
Not sure if extensive Lavrov interview earlier in April was reported on saker
..extract
"Question: Have you seen any grounds for optimism in the results of the first round of the
presidential election in Ukraine?
Sergey Lavrov: To be honest, I haven't seen any grounds for either optimism or pessimism.
What's the point of guesswork? This is a process that should take place and will be
completed. I do not doubt this or that the West will recognise this election.
OSCE observers released their preliminary report on the results of the first round of the
presidential election, which abounds in examples of flagrant violations: corruption, bribery,
pressure on voters and many other things. However, all this is described in a neutral tone. I
think if they wrote about us, they would present these facts emotionally. Now they are doing
it in an understated way and conclude that this did not affect the legitimacy of the
election. Neither was it affected by the flagrant violation of OSCE rules when our observers
were kicked out and over three million Ukrainians working and living in Russia were deprived
of the right to vote. These are facts of life in Ukraine.
I think that the results of the election and the way it was organised came as no surprise
to those who have been following domestic developments in Ukraine and its external ties. They
are already calling each other puppets It's probably interesting to watch from the side but I
don't think that Ukrainian citizens are happy about this kind of democracy.
Question: Are the prospects of Russia-Ukraine cooperation still vague?
Sergey Lavrov: We are open to dialogue if the aim is not chatting and looking for excuses
to do nothing but rather the practical implementation of the Minsk agreements. I have no
doubt that Petr Poroshenko does not want to do this and won't do this. When Viktor Medvedchuk
just suggested seriously discussing what autonomous rights may be granted to Donbass, he was
called a traitor. Poroshenko said this will never happen although he himself signed a
document on the special status of Donbass, which is described with sufficient detail in the
Minsk agreements.
These provisions on what rights Donbass should have were formulated by German Chancellor
Angela Merkel personally, among others, but her ward has got out of hand. This is a fact. On
the one hand, he doesn't listen to Germany or France because he has American "patrons". On
the other hand, they find it embarrassing to pressure him in public because by doing so they
will admit that what they call their "mediation" has failed.
However, there is no other document except for the Minsk agreements. They can certainly be
supplemented. For instance, it is possible to provide OSCE observers with UN armed guards, as
we suggest in response to the apprehensions of Ukrainians about their safety. But the core of
these agreements must remain unchanged. The main point is that all issues are settled
directly between Kiev, Donetsk and Lugansk .."
The Toltec sages used to say: "To really know something means that it must also entail the
knowledge of what course of action to take. And once you know what to do, you actually do
it". So they firmly stated that the only worthy knowledge is a functional one. Normally, the
trascendental matters were integrally consulted with the "Eagle" (i.e. the Entity out there
with limitless consciousness, which sounds pretty much like "God") through a link that in the
west is ignorantly dismissed as "intuition". This to remark that the big decisions must not
rely entirely on the rational part, because it is too prone to make mistakes.
We all know who the adversary is: it's not the AZE (AngloZionist Empire) per se, it's who
rule the Empire. And what they are doing in Ukraine is pretty clear:
* The endgame is to carve another Poland from the Russian population, as a means to weaken
the Russian State. The steps are obvious and unfortunately, maybe definitive: zioimposed
religious schism, forceful and exclusive use of "Ukrainian" from 2020 on, denial to belong to
other country different from "Ukraine" (a patchwork assembled through land thefts).
Fortunately Russia recovered Crimea, and the mining/industrial regions are disputed, but the
Khazarians control 2 critical assets: the other coastal oblasts and the chernozem soils.
* Stating that Russia cannot absorb Novorossiya is bullsh¡t. Germany, a smaller economy
with no sovereign government could absorb the RDA. If Russia doesn't decide, the situation
will decide by itself. Russia is already receiving a lot of displaced Russians, plus tons of
Russians in Ukraine who became the source of cheap labor for Russian companies. And what
about the costs of humanitarian assistance and military support to Russians under the Ukraine
dictatorship? Let's say it takes 30 years to revert the decay, so what? Russia has been
around longer and has had successful comebacks under way more destruction.
* The Donbass people already decided twice, by clear majority of the popular vote, to become
part of the Russian Federation. The right thing to do is simply accepting them. Not doing so
sends the signal that no matter what the other southwestern Oblasts do, they will not be
accepted either. Russia should openly support the Russians in the southeast of Ukraine who
want to secede and reintegrate with the Russian Federation.
For example, financing a
reunification party, granting contracts and jobs to the Russian allies there, logistically
supporting a secession movement, even militarily, because the Khazarians will not let go
without bloodshed.
"... Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee"). ..."
"... The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. ..."
"... n terms of its internal functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery. Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up. ..."
"... Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you excited yet? ..."
"... None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits, a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one. ..."
The Saker: What is your take on the first round of Presidential elections in the
Ukraine?
Dmitry Orlov: The first round of the elections was an outright fraud. The object of the
exercise was to somehow allow president Poroshenko to make it into the second round. This was
done by falsifying as many votes as was necessary. In a significant number of precincts the
turnout was exactly 100% instead of the usual 60% or so and counted votes from people who had
moved, died or emigrated. All of these fake votes went to Poroshenko, allowing him to slither
through to the second round.
Now the fight is between Poroshenko and a comedian named Vladimir Zelensky. The only
difference between Poroshenko and Zelensky, or any of the other 30+ people who appeared on the
ballot, is that Poroshenko has already stolen his billions while his contestants have not had a
chance to do so yet, the only reason to run for president, or any elected office, in the
Ukraine, being to put oneself in a position to do some major thieving.
Thus, there is an objective reason to prefer Zelensky over Poroshenko, which is that
Poroshenko is a major thief while Zelensky isn't one yet, but it must be understood that this
difference will begin to equalize the moment after Zelensky's inauguration. In fact, the elites
in Kiev are currently all aquiver over their ingenious plan to sell off all of Ukraine's land
to foreign investors (no doubt pocketing a hefty "fee").
The platforms of all the 30+ candidates were identical, but this makes no difference in a
country that has surrendered its sovereignty. In terms of foreign relations and strategic
considerations, the Ukraine is run from the US embassy in Kiev. I
n terms of its internal
functioning, the main prerogative of everyone in power, the president included, is thievery.
Their idea is to get their cut and flee the country before the whole thing blows up.
It remains to be seen whether the second round of elections will also be an outright fraud
and what happens as a result. There are many alternatives, but none of them resemble any sort
of exercise in democracy. To be sure, what is meant by "democracy" in this case is simply the
ability to execute orders issued from Washington; inability to do so would make Ukraine an
"authoritarian regime" or a "dictatorship" and subject to "regime change." But short of that,
nothing matters.
The machinations of Ukraine's "democrats" are about as interesting to me as the sex lives of
sewer rats, but for the sake of completeness, let me flowchart it out for you. Poroshenko got
into second round by outright fraud, because the loss of this election would, within the
Ukrainian political food chain, instantly convert him from predator to prey. However, he was
none too subtle about it, there is ample proof of his cheating, and the contender he squeezed
out -- Yulia Timoshenko -- could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would
invalidate the entire election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather,
rinse, repeat.
Another option would be for Poroshenko to cheat his way past the second round (in an even
more heavy-handed manner, since this time he is behind by over 30%), in which case Zelensky
could theoretically contest the result in court and win. This would invalidate the entire
election and leave Poroshenko in charge until the next one. Lather, rinse, repeat. Are you
excited yet?
None of this matters, because we don't know which of the two is the US State Department's
pick. Depending on which one it is, and regardless of the results of any elections or lawsuits,
a giant foot will come out of the sky and stomp on the head of the other one.
Of course, it
will all be made to look highly democratic for the sake of appearances. The leadership of the
EU will oblige with some golf claps while choking back vomit and the world will move on.
KIEV, April 17. /TASS/. The Ukrainian State Investigation Bureau launched a criminal case on
"the intentional surrender" of Crimea against Verkhovna Rada Speaker Andrei Paruby, Secretary
of the Ukrainian Council of National Security and Defense Alexander Turchinov, former Prime
Minister Arseny Yatsenyuk and others, the Ukrainian law union Aver Lex told TASS on
Wednesday.
READ ALSO
Court finds Yanukovich not guilty of 'losing Crimea' -- attorney
"The State Investigation Bureau opened a criminal case on the intentional surrender of
Crimea, violent upheaval, treason and the organization of mass murders on the 'maidan' in
2014 by Ukraine's top officials, in particular by Arseny Yatsenyuk, Alexander Turchinov,
Andrei Paruby, [former head of Ukraine's Security Service] Valentin Nalivaichenko, [Verkhovna
Rada member] Sergei Pashinsky, [Permanent Representative to the UN] Yuri Sergeyev, [Kiev
Mayor] Vitaly Klichko, [head of the Freedom nationalist party] Oleg Tyagnibok, [former Acting
Defense Minister] Igor Tenyukh, [Prosecutor General] Yuri Lutsenko, [Defense Minister] Stepan
Poltorak and others," Aver Lex said.
I'm wondering what the purpose of the Guardian article is.
On the face of it it looks like just another Guardian attempt to besmirch Trump over his
putative commitment and connections to Russia and Putin, but equally, it could be read as an,
almost surreptitious, attempt to point up that Trump only responded as he did because he was
deliberately (?) misinformed/duped by the American (and British?) security services, thereby
questioning the aims, motives, methods and narrative of those security services.
If you read any of the books about behind the scenes at Trump's WhiteHouse you will find a
familiar scenario which corroborates this account, where Trump is easily manipulable by his
aides, who know very well how to push his buttons. Bolton, AIPAC, Bannon have all employed
this strategy successfully and of course Fox News have a mainstream connection to his brain.
So it sounds par for the course. As well as suggesting that Trump wouldn't have been inclined
to agree to the UK's request without the nonsense pictures, which also rings true to
form.
As for his general conduct, Simon Tisdall's excoriating account of his preference for his
Saudi friend, overriding the American people's request to get out of the Yemen massacres, is
on the ball, and sums up what a clear and present danger he is.
Somehow I don't think Donald Trump is going to ignore every story in the papers and TV and
listen to a professional manipulator from the CIA. More likely he saw an opportunity to talk
fake tough on Russia in order to take some of the heat out of Mueller's investigations,
buying time.
He must know Bolton's a neo-con nut-case and that the re-launching of dirty wars on South
America on the pretext of Russian and Chinese interference is as much of a fatuous waste of
time as the MacCarthyian idiocy.
Russia enters an era in which Western leadership is as unscrutable and bonkers as
Stalin's.
China enters an era in which having spied on everything western, it now dreads itself being
spied on by Western spies.
Politics is surely not so crude as village one-upmanship, where the loudest and most
bombastic talkers get all the admiration from the community, just because they are too lazy
or too busy to run the village themselves? Whatever outrageous claim lifts the town's skirts
up ends up with the big gold chain.
There's a lot of assumptions and projections of your own there, as well as
mischaracterising what is being said about him. there is ample evidence of his manchild
attitude – arrogance, bullying, narcissism, naivety, inability to concentrate, laziness
and a fundamental lack of intelligence.
I don't think Trump's reversing of Obama's creation and funding Islamic State shows a lack
of intelligence or narcissism. He came into office and instead of veni vidi vici as per
madame bloodsucker Clinton, he deployed Iran and Syrian Kurds to round them up and disperse
them.
At last someone in the White House grew some nuts and nouse, for a change.
This report today in the Guardian appears to be not so much about the Scrotals, more about
trying to portray Trump as a gullible idiot.
Yet another piece of evidence to confirm what I wrote in the comments sections on here
months ago. That the Skripal event was a total Psyop, carried out by the corrupt government.
Same as the fabricated terror Psyops at Westminster, London Bridge and Manchester.
@ Ian April 17, 2019 at 22:42
Ever hear of Operation Gladio? I suggest you read up on it, as you are very naive if you
believe the PTB won't sacrifice innocents if it suits their plans. False Flag ops (and
bald-faced lies) are the favoured way to spark off wars, or to introduce stricter limitations
on the people's freedoms (Patriot Act, stuff like that).
@ Ian April 18, 2019 at 00:11
Do you accept that the Operation Gladio attacks were False Flag operations, murdering
innocent European citizens in order to place the blame on the Reds? 'I have heard of
so-called Operation Gladio ' sounds very much like you are dismissive of the attacks.
'..which has nothing to do with these allegations ' It has to do with the fact that False
Flag ops killing one's own citizens is not an unknown phenomena, whilst you appear to have
believed it was, by your response.
I am not claiming Manchester was a False Flag, though I may well suspect it was.
You would be surprised how much evidence many 'conspiracy theorists' have to back up their
dismissal of government and MSM 'narratives'.
So we have a new contributor here by the name of Villanelle. This name has nothing to do
with villains but is a French term meaning:
"a pastoral or lyrical poem of nineteen lines, with only two rhymes throughout, and some
lines repeated."
-- –
[ Mod: "Villanelle" is merely the latest incarnation of a serial sockpuppeteer who comments
under different names in nearly every thread. Craig has been kept informed. ]
-- –
So there are recurring rhymes or themes. An apparently simple but very open question based
on a very non- specific enquiry: what evidence would convince you of a certain occurrence? I
can imagine this as a famous punchline in a legal drama or the like.
A famous barrister just winding up the case of a convicted triple murderer with the line
to the judge: " Your honour, you seem to have made many assumptions in this case, but please
tell me what evidence would you require to prove that my client is innocent?"
Of course in real life the judge would tell the barrister to go where the sun does not
shine. How can you ask such a question, repeatedly, then followed by next, when the case and
all the evidence have already been discussed?
I think Alexander is on the right track. Villanelle is an agent provocateur. (S)he
dominated this thread by also meticulously at least initially answering almost every single
comment by deflection. But contrary to what Alexander says I think he is not CB but is more
like our Wikipedia prolific commentator previously featuring here. Who knows whether this is
not some form of fishing or phishing by something like the II?
'A police officer stands guard outside of the home of former Russian military intelligence officer Sergei Skripal, in Salisbury,
BritainNew York Times Accidentally Unravels UK Government's Official Skripal Narrative':
Latest from Sputnik: includes pic and reference to Craig's present blog post. ' There could be several explanations for this
seeming anomaly. To name just some of the most unsettling:
Several children were hospitalised, and several ducks did die, and for reasons unclear the British government didn't inform
the public and prevented the children and their parents from revealing they'd been affected, while secretly communicating the
fact to other governments in literally graphic detail.
Counterfeit and/or misleading images may have been produced by persons unknown to bolster Britain's case for concerted international
action, and further been relayed to Haspel (if not other overseas officials), conning her and Trump into backing its mass-expulsion
policy.
Alternatively of course, perhaps the stirring tale of Haspel converting the reticent President with impactful images is mere
gossip, or spin -- after all, the article's authors didn't discuss the episode with the CIA chief herself, but based their article
on interviews "with more than a dozen current and former intelligence officials who have briefed or worked alongside her" .'
@ Villanelle April 17, 2019 at 13:27
A hell of a lot more than the load of BS narrative served up by HMG in lieu of any evidence.
But I'll give you a question, as you appear to have swallowed HMG hogwash hook, line and sinker: Can you explain why neither Sergei
nor Yulia have contacted their nonagenarian respective mother/grandmother for months, though she has begged HMG to allow contact?
Given that Sergei used to phone her every week or two, and that Yulia was her loving carer?
Is this not somewhat putting the cart before the horse? Last I was aware it was up to those making the accusation to prove
their case. If you read the articles relating to the Skirpal case on here, you would see that most of the evidence put forward
for this being a Russian assassination attempt has been widely discredited and comes from sources with dubious links to British
security services. So something beyond speculation would be a start.
If I was to indulge in such speculation, I'd say it looks most likely to me on the back of what I've read that Sergei was attempting
to return to Russia with some kind of information or material, and this whole affair was an ill planned and on the fly attempt
to stop Sergei, and pin the blame on the Ruskies as a nice bonus.
howsabout, say , a widely respected and trusted Foreign Minister, standing up in the mother of all parliaments and saying "I,
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, will immediately instigate a full and integral inquiry upon my own initiative and once all
the facts are established, following institutional statecraft, we will then make a considered response to whichever agency bounced
the UK into this mess"
see references:
"Serial liar Boris Johnson caught lying again?" Kevin Maguire, an editor at Daily Mirror,
howsabout, say , a widely respected and trusted Foreign Minister, standing up in the mother of all parliaments and saying "I,
Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, will immediately instigate a full and integral inquiry upon my own initiative and once all
the facts are established, following institutional statecraft, we will then make a considered response to whichever agency bounced
the UK into this mess"
see references:
"Serial liar Boris Johnson caught lying again?" Kevin Maguire, an editor at Daily Mirror,
We have had so many contradictory stories from the media and government, that there is definitely something very wrong.
The Guardian has made no attempt to contradict the concocted story that ducks died and "sickened" children had to be hospitalised
– it just didn't happen, it was "fake news" spread by the muderous gina Haspel.
Johnson told us that only Russia could have produced Novichok, which was a complete lie.
The policeman who was contaminated, was originally supposed to be one of the first on the scene, then he visited the Skripal's
house, supposedly wearing police isswue gloves, which later turned out to be a full Hazchem suit.
He was put in isolation in hospital, with doctors and nurses wearing Hazchem suits, yet his wife and daughter were not required
to wear them.
The two boys feeding the ducks in the park were not hurt, no ducks died from the Skripal contaminated bread fed to them.
When did the Skripals get poisoned?
Was it when they left the house – how did they manage to walk around for hours before collapsing? That is definitely not how military
grade nerve agents work.
Where are the Skripals now?
Villanelle, you have just come on here spouting pro government rubbish, and yet you seem to have no idea how much this case
has been researched by Craig and the posters on here.
@ Villanelle April 17, 2019 at 13:57
If as many contend it is a UK False Flag set-up, no evidence on earth would convince me that the Russians were responsible, because
they weren't.
But the real question should be: what evidence is there for the government narratives (plural because they change with the weather)?
To portray some one or group as guilty of a crime, it is normal to provide evidence. Maybe old fashioned, but things work better
that way.
But of course, the UK has form: it went to war in Afghanistan without proof, just on Uncle Sam's say-so.
It bombed Syria over Chemical Weapon 'allegations', with no proof.
It attacked Iraq over alleged Chemical Weapons.
And it bombed Libya over false allegations.
So, yep, HMG has 'form' at fomenting false 'casus belli'.
·When did the Skripals return home to actually touch the door? Earliest door could've been coated around 12 noon. No cctv of
their car returning and timeline is off.
· Why did they both fall ill later that afternoon at precisely same moment despite different body compositions?
·The fact the potential assassins walked up the street in broad daylight unconcerned about any CCTV, why did Sergei's house have
no CCTV.
·The method – insanely risky given Skripal wasn't hiding, living at that address under his real name with no CCTV.
·The fact that for days after these events police stood outside, right next to the door in question with no protective clothing,
this despite an officer apparently falling ill after 'forcing entry' – no sign of forced entry on that door.
· Why did Charlie Rowley and his brother insist in TV interviews he broke the bottle spilled a quantity on his hands and then
wash it off? He even talked of its 'oily' consistency and its smell. A google search shows all the MSM reported the bottled 'splintered'
into pieces. It's reported the sample handed to the OPCW was 98.3% pure.
· Ţhe fact both Skripals have all but vanished despite Yulia feeling the need to phone her cousin during her 'situation'.
There are many other inconsistencies.
If these are answered satisfactorily, I guess Craig and all other querying folk will be convinced.
@ Villanelle April 17, 2019 at 14:09
The following should teach you all you need to know about the OPCW – it is afraid to deal honestly in cases which go against the
Western (US) narrative:
'Was UK paying White Helmets to produce Syria 'chemical weapon' PR as cover for Jaish Al Islam?': https://www.rt.com/op-ed/454205-uk-paying-white-helmets-syria-jaish/
?
And in my estimation, Syria was what was behind the Salisbury Saga. The UK wanted to get across to the public the idea Russia
used Chemical Weapons, in time for the next 'False Flag' CW ops (real or hoax) that the British founded and funded 'White Helmets'
mercenary head-choppers' PR outfit organised in Syria.
I am, Villanelle.
If only Sergey Skripal suddenly and unexplainably died in first year or two after he was swapped. You know, that type of death,
like heart attack during your usual morning fitness, or falling out of the window, or perhaps you remember the guy who was found
dead in his travel bag and somehow it was attributes to his sexual play with his gay partner. Something of this kind.
Gosh, even simple death of rat poison would do.
Not the absurd story about FSB trying to kill an ex-spy with secret warfare in rural England, near the fence of Porton Down, with
the most experienced Army Nurse rushing to help and brave British doctors successfully treating Novichok poisoning. So successfully,
that Yulia was able to read and write two languages, using complex grammar constructions She even didn't stumble on foreign words,
reciting long text in front of cameras and her facial expressions are all relevant, healthy and telling of good self-possession.
So NO, I'm not convinced.
Villanelle has asked a silly question but provided no evidence for his/her/its belief in some "official" version of events
which somehow involves Russian guilt. The simple fact is that there is no evidence for any Russian state involvement in the disappearance
of the Skripals. As for their alleged poisoning – all samples went through Porton Down, a UK government agency – so there is no
independent chain of custody. Just as with the OPCW "investigation" of the alleged Khan Sheykhoun CW "attack" in Syria where all
samples were supplied through terrorists and their White Helmets associates. And OPCW itself refused to visit the Syrian airbase
even when invited and guaranteed security for such a visit.
Russian visitors Petrov and Boshirov (there is no evidence that these are false identities) were in Salisbury on 3 and 4 March
2018 either as tourists or for some other purpose, but the police have been unable to link them in any way with the Skripals.
Craig Murray and others have pointed out innumerable logical impossibilities – not just inconsistencies – in official and media
reports.
There is no case for Russia to answer. Russia needs no defence. The simple answer to Villanelle is that after all the official
obfuscation by UK government and intelligence agencies, there is NOTHING that would now convince me of Russian guilt.
The way honest people proceed is as follows:
Firstly, we assemble the known facts, and then secondly we invent an explanation that's consistent with those facts.
Villanelle evidently goes about things differently.
The question asked, in paraphrase, is:
"The explanation is that the KGB tried and failed to kill Skripal. What facts can we invent that would be consistent with that
explanation?"
This is revealing, I feel.
Charlie Rowley has even met with a Russian ambassador, asking him for help as the British government have kept him in the dark
over the death of Dawn Sturgess, and the matter as a whole.
Even Charlie's meeting with the ambassador was spun though. I saw several information light reports on that in UK media, attempting
to portray the meeting as a result of Russian stonewalling, not British.
As a 'Murrayista' I must say I do roll around with mirth every time Craig posts. I have no theories, banal geopolitics, only
total incredulity at the official narrative. It is so hilarious, and yet they go on straight-faced putting it out. You Bostock,
seem to be happy to accept the bizarre facts and somehow feel they prove something. Vilanelle just keeps popping up squeaking
at some minor point or other.
There is a gigantic smell over the Salisbury incident, but it is not true that ALL the media just suck it up. One or two brave
souls like Mary Djevsky ask simple basic journalistic questions and gets a pile of ordure poured over her for her trouble. The
rest seem cowed into silence. Why does the establishment fear such questions?
Rob Slane (blogmire.com) and his intrepid band of commenters are also poring over this
dead duck story today. Somewhere on Rob's page is reference to the parents of the
duck-feeding boys being told, two weeks after the event, to burn the children's clothes. To
save myself time, I'm paste in here my comment on that aspect of the official script which I
pasted under Rob's article.
So, two weeks after the duck feed, the parents were instructed to burn the boys' clothes.
It seems like an extreme measure given that everyone else in Salisbury was advised just to
launder any clothes under suspicion of contamination. Luckily for the boys and their family
and community (if not the nation), the parents remembered exactly which clothes the boys had
been wearing. Even more luckily, neither the boys nor their duck-feeding clothes had come
into contact with anyone or anything in the intervening fortnight. It's a miracle.
We have been told by many/various sources, that the Novichok was applied in gel form to
the Skripal's door furniture.
Gel does not evaporate.
If the Novichock had in fact been applied by an atomiser spray, then there would have been no
need to wear protective clothing and cordon off large areas of Salisbury because it would
have evaporated.
Your serve Villanelle.
Your own link provides the answer to that question, if you were actually processing it
rather than selectively picking out the bits which support the government narrative.
The whole point of chemical weapons is to cause as much death, injury and incapacity as
possible amongst the enemy, with the added bonus of it severely limiting or reducing their
ability to operate in the affected area. So given what we know from the government's
narrative of alleged Russian application to the doorknob – why would you chose an agent
which burns off at atmospheric temperatures if it's known that there could be several hours
between application and contact with the intended victim?
None of which adequately explains all of the other inconsistencies in the properties of
this agent, either?
How were the samples tested by the OPCW of such high purity so long after the event? How
do you tie this up with agent failing to kill the apparent targets? According to chemists, a
minute dosage of this substance is enough to kill at such high purity?
Perhaps it would be better, Villanelle, if you could let everyone else know which parts of
the "UK Govt. version", you find most compelling. Which pieces of evidence supplied by the UK
Govt. do you find the most convincing?
Bearing in mind that this evidence is brought to you by Intelligence agencies and politicians
with a track record of lying and dissembling, it is surely incumbent on any seeker of truth
to treat with scepticism anything put out by known liars.
Do you believe that Saddam had WMD?
How about Syria? Have these same intelligence agencies and government officials, who you
believe without question now, been truthful and consistent throughout the aggression against
Syria?
I suspect, based on your half arsed attempts on this thread to whitewash the UK government,
that you would literally believe anything you're told as long as it came from official
sources.
It was pointed out to you earlier in the thread that you are way out of your depth on this
forum. I second that.
If you really want to know more about the holes in the official version, which I doubt, then
the archives on here as well as Moon of Alabama and the excellent Blogmire would help to fill
in the obvious gaps in your knowledge. It would also stop you asking stupid questions and
looking foolish.
What would convince me? Even the slightest effort by HMG to produce credible explanations
for the many lacunae that have been spotted in their narrative. Of course their point-blank
refusal to do so doesn't prove they have something to hide. I often feel that with devious
cunning they deliberately let dodgy narratives out into the public domain, then sit back and
watch 'the usual suspects' run around in frustration. Thank goodness we have RT to point out
the truth.
A lot of people take the piss out of the 'How to poison door knobs' manual, but through my
connections in the security services I have managed to get hold of a copy.
I translated it using Google translate.
Here is a section on the special protective Hazmat suits that the two agents would
obviously have worn to perform the job.
It's quite a long and complicated procedure because it is very hard to doff the suit
afterwards without contaminating yourself.
First, you need a buddy to help you, and a mirror, a tent and and chlorine solution.
No doubt they carried these in the small knapsack one of them was wearing.
It takes half an hour and this is a small fraction of the necessary procedure:
Engage the trained observer.
Disinfect outer gloves.
Remove outer apron.
Disinfect outer gloves
Remove and discard outer gloves
Inspect and disinfect inner gloves
Remove face shield
Disinfect inner gloves
Remove surgical hood
Disinfect inner gloves
Remove the coverall
Disinfect inner gloves
Remove boot covers
Change inner gloves
Remove the N95 respirator
Disinfect the new inner gloves
Disinfect your shoes
Disinfect inner gloves
Remove and discard inner gloves
Perform hand hygiene
Examine body for contaminants
Exit the doffing area
Take a shower.
Go and feed ducks
For videos showing the procedure can be found here:
After reading the manual I have tremendous respect for the assassins: to do all that in
broad daylight on a Sunday morning in Salisbury without being spotted.
Clearly they were real pros. So no more laughing please.
"Possibly the Guardian and New York Times are inventing utter drivel, as in the Manafort
meeting Assange story. That would in itself be worrying. "
To my mind they have been doing it for years. It is getting worse. Rusbridger, although he
admitted to being controlled, was a real editor in comparison to Katherine Viner. There is no
moral compass anymore. Yet there are still readers who have been reading it for years who
think it is the same radical organ it was when known as the Manchester Guardian.
Perhaps more important than the Stephen Davies letter is the diagnosis that fentanyl was
the poison involved – quite a strong opoid. But it was quite clear from the start
– as far as the medical profession is concerned – that there was no evidence of a
nerve agent. Novichok is a word circulated by the west to point the finger at Russia. It
means newcomer. This morning I joined a Russian website. Under my name it said Novichok.
Too bad there's not an established legal process in the Western world for adjudicating
these claims. I am thinking of a venue where each side could openly present its case on the
basis of whatever evidence each is able to supply, could ask questions of the other side,
etc., and would agree to abide by whatever decision the citizens appointed by lot to
administer this venue would decide.
No idea how something like this hypothetical structure or institution might be brought
about, but it would seem helpful to have in cases like these, no?
I take this discussion back to my original point, which to my amazement was published
(unfortunately the joke wasn't) Tony_0pmoc
April 17, 2019 at 11:44 which starts
"The Government and the media, have not been telling the whole truth for a long time.
Sometimes they blatantly lie."
Many people posting here, quite obviously still believe most of what is published in the
mainstream media. Most people I know, rarely lie, and when they do, its pretty obvious. yet
some people I know, are quite obviously compulsive liars. they are addicted to it, but
unfortunately do not have exceedingly good memories, to remember all their lies. I never
trust a word such people say any more, unless I know they are telling the truth, which
sometimes they do.
Same girl?
Just Believe – The Magic of Novichok – Before Novichok – After
Novichok
But they don't need good memories when the media don't raise inconsistencies that arise
some time later.
'We are the United States of Amnesia, which is encouraged by a media that has no desire to
tell us the truth about anything, serving their corporate masters who have other plans to
dominate us.' – Gore Vidal
Some ask, why the obsession with the MSM, but they are all we've got holding power to
account. Especially here in the UK with no written constitution. The reason powerful people
give for being against the codified rules of a written constitution, is it'd restrict their
room to act . But in fact, you really do need a set of 'codified' rules – a line that
EVERYONE is afraid of crossing.
The reason why we need a written constitution is because it's not clear where power and
responsibility reside in the UK.
The security services seem to have free rein so
politicians can claim plausible deniability.
Look at the to and froing over historical accusations of UK involvement in torture, with
Straw and Blair basically accusing Mi6 of going rogue. Both insist they never authorised
torture in TV interviews last year (Straw on radio , Blair on Newsnight); they claim they
never signed the documents, despite their signatures being on said documents. The whole
situation is a mess and many MPs have called for a judge-led inquiry , both Blair and Straw
have stated they are happy to cooperate. And yet
Theresa May however, has other ideas; the govt missed its own deadline \to respond last
year and the whole thing seems to have been forgotten.
more drivel from sycophant puppets that proves the US and UK is run by imbeciles who take
the public for gullible idiots, anyone who believes a word they say is just that. Wishing
Julian Assange well in his upcoming court appearance, it's a sick world that allows crooks to
lock up brave and courageous lamplighters like Assange and Manning, their integrity shines
brightly over the dung heap trying to silence them.
That the official Skripal story is bogus should be clear to anyone with eyes, ears and the
barest minimum of intellectual honesty. What is needed to send the story to its final resting
place and raise a more interesting story is information on the whereabouts of the Skripals to
this day. Their disappearance smells like month-old fish, and the best bet is that some
highly placed people in the British Foreign Office and intelligence community have something
very embarrassing to hide. Frankly, I am surprised that nothing has been leaked on this
score.
When the person who was home secretary for six years, then prime minister for a couple of
years, steps down from her current role towards oblivion, new people can take up the
baton.
New people will be able to ask new questions.
1) where are the Skripals?
2) why was all this fabricated?
3) who put all this twaddle in place?
I doubt very much any harm has come to them, they are either innocent victims or went
along with 'spy games ' as Trump called it. But clearly someone doesn't want them giving any
unscripted or unsupervised interviews were all the variables can't be controlled.
Most likely probably resettled somewhere now with new identities: US, Canada, NZ ,
Australia. Could be anywhere, take yer pick.
The unquestioning MSM, pretending as if they never existed, makes you feel like the
country has gone to all hell.
I'm stuck here waiting for your answer to my earlier post. What's holding you up?
Whilst you are about it, could you kindly enlighten us as to the main aim of the Skripal
"narrative" (Ugh – that word reminds me of A.Campbell).
Was it
A) To take Skripal out of circulation before the Steele dossier s**t hit the fan
B) To connect Russia to "chemical weapons" as part of the Syria deal
C) To further drive in the wedge between Trump and Russia
D) To Divert the Attention of the Dopey UK electorate from the Brexit mess
E) Other
Please put in correct order of importance.
It's just occurred to me that you probably knock off at 1730. You are probably down on the
river now the trout season has kicked off. What's the fishing like around Hermitage?
Do get back to us tomorrow!
Agreed.
'The incident is cited as an example of the then deputy CIA director (now director). Gina
Haspel.'
'She is said to have '
Both these quotes from the Guardian article imply (to me) there is no reliable source. It
may not have happened.
Its an office rumour to big up the Director and piss off the boss. One would assume to piss
of the boss you'd actually have to show him a picture of someone pissing on him and that's
opening up a whole other can of worms.
I'll give you points for trying but nowhere does any report from the OPCWsay that the
tests showed Novichok.
Their references are ' toxic chemical ' and even Porton Down's wording ( in the MSM you'll
hate to know ) was similar to – It's what the government says it is.
Despite the waffle the above is not a very specific – is it?
Being as you know a few things answer a few questions please:
How many doors were at the front of the Skripal house and how many handles ( the MSM keep
saying doorknobs) were tested in total?
Why was Charlies flat only given a cursory clean up with say Cilit Bang and the Skripal
house dismantled being as Charlie and Dawn got a massive dose of alleged Novichok?
What was the actual cause of Dawn's death, bearing in mind her relatives said the first
inquest showed no damage to her internal organs?
What colour was Yulia's hair in the Duck feeding ultra clear video(s) and what was Sergei
wearing?
What colour hair did the young woman found on the bench have and what colour hair did the
Salisbury Hospital staff notice?
If the ' Toxic Chemical ' was extremely deadly Russian Novichok , how is it that no-one
else has died or been contaminated ( even slightly ) save three people from the alleged
original attack and two later after opening a ' shrink wrapped sealed ' bottle of what the
Authorities say was the same as that ' smeared ?' – ' sprayed ' on only one door
handle.
If the above is true why didn't the Zizzis staff suffer from some contamination to or the
pub staff who handled the Skripal's cutlery plates and drinks glasses as well as those who
touched the handles of the doors the Skripl's touched with no bad effects?
How come the sprayers/sealers didn't die or fall ill themselves? Hazmat suits in a cul de
sac on a Sunday?
That's just a few questions for an expert to be going on with.
Well after reading the entire piece, I must admit I'm not impressed
The main global dynamic right now is the Chinese industrial and economic juggernaut a
geopolitically resurgent Russia and the unraveling of the dollar dominated global financial
order
The problem with the west is not so much cultural as it is economic the west is a giant
Ponzi scheme that must ultimately collapse as all 'financialized' economies have collapsed
since the beginning of money as any careful reader of Michael Hudson can tell you
One morning we will wake up and the machine will be out of gas simple as that no money no
funny
That's why the rest of the world is moving toward a trading system that circumvents the
dollar, or any kind of so-called 'reserve' currency the US itself is shoving this process
forward by weaponizing trade and finance by means of sanctions gone wild
There does not need to be any kind of universal trading currency in the digital age it is
simply a matter of putting the settlement mechanisms in place and more important, bypassing
the HUMAN exchange networks now in place ie the old boys club through which dollar
denominated global trade now flows
Once these processes mature, there will be no way of perpetuating the western financial
Ponzi scheme it has crashed before most recently a decade ago but has been kept on life
support by negative interest rates, plus further impoverishment of the marginal class but
once the reserve currency is gone, and with it the ability to print free money the machine is
dead for good
At that point the west needs to earn its living the honest way that may be a tough
transition
"... That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. ..."
"... Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes. ..."
"... Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye and gave him a paycheck. ..."
"... I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men. ..."
"... Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using it on POWs. ..."
"... just reinforces the feeling that those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better light. ..."
"... A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and will not go away unless she come clean. ..."
Before Gina became the Chief of Staff for Rodriguez, what role did she play in the waterboarding of two AQ operatives in Thailand?
It appears that she was at least witting of what was going on. Did she have the authority to decide what measures to apply to the
two? Did she make such decisions?
Those are facts still to be determined. I am inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt. But there are others who I respect
that are adamant in opposing her nomination. The only thing I know for sure is that her nomination will be a bloody and divisive
political battle. If it comes down to embracing waterboarding as an appropriate method to use on suspected terrorists, then a majority
of Americans are supportive of that practice and will cheer the appointment of Haspel.
That fact is a very sad and disturbing commentary
on what America is or has become. Tolerating torture and excusing such an activity in the name of national security is the same justification
that Stalin and Castro employed to punish dissidents. It is true that one man's terrorist is another woman's freedom fighter.
Let me be clear about my position. If Gina was in fact the Chief of Base and oversaw the application of the waterboarding
and other inhuman treatment then she lacks the moral authority to head the CIA. Unfortunately, the United States has a long history
of overlooking human rights violations and war crimes.
Students of WW II will recall that US military intelligence recruited and protect Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon,
as an asset after the war. He murdered Jews and sent others to Auschwitz. He should have been hung. Instead, we turned a blind eye
and gave him a paycheck.
I've read that she enjoyed torture and mocked a prisoner who was drooling by accused him of faking it. I never knew anything about her sexual orientation but now I have to consider if she's so cruel because she hates men.
IIRC, Haspel was the chief of staff to whom Rodriguez refers. That does not sound like a bit player. Would you say that Kelly
is a bit player in the Trump admin? As you say, we should know the facts, but so far it looks like she both participated in torture
and in its cover-up.
With all the crap going on at the FBI, the last thing we need now is a divisive candidate for any top level government position
(torture advocacy is divisive for many of us).
A woman, a lesbian, who cares as long as they are a capable and decent law-abiding
individual.
Yes, waterboarding is torture. We considered it so egregious that we prosecuted Japanese military officers after WWII for using
it on POWs.
And where do you get "admitted" terrorists from? In America, even with suspected terrorists, there is the principle
of innocent until proven guilty. At least we once believed in that standard.
And I very much respect you for your position on this (it is this American's view as well).
What amazes me (and yet doesn't) is the example of Rodriguez's supposed introspection "How bad could this be?" Really?!? That
just strikes me as not having any feel for the media, US citizenry, or even common sense, and just reinforces the feeling that
those at the upper echelons are completely out of touch or alternatively are just lying/posturing to present themselves in a better
light.
PT -- Thank you. Much to consider in these times. I come down on the "no torture and waterboarding is torture" side of the debate
but am also just eager for some competence and professional experience in key positions.
That these positions may be mutually
exclusive says a great deal about our current situation. Again, thank you, for your opinions and information.
A torturer is a torturer, no matter how one try to glaze it, or sugar coat it. If one is against torture, or the fancy name for
it EIT, one should come out and say it like it is. This lady is accused of torturing captives ( enemy combatant) that can't and
will not go away unless she come clean.
At the end of the day that don't matter, since as a policy, and base on your own statement,
this country's government will prosecut and punish for liking of torture but not torture and tortures. And, furthermore, is not
even willing to do away with it, per it's elected president. Trying to show a clean, moral, democracy on the hilltop image, is
a BS and a joke.
"... The idea that Trump was kidded along in this way with photos of suffering children is similar to that which allegedly persuaded him to bomb Syria (along with the UK and France) after the more recent also alleged Douma chemical weapons attacks. So who actually was telling him porkies and why or is this just another myth to prove Trump's crassness – in which case there is no need to make anything up. ..."
"... Trump doesn't give a toss about suffering children or suffering anyone else, so it's not likely that he was persuaded by the kind of argument that runs from injured children to the need for US diplomatic action. ..."
"... Trump forgets he lies in minutes. He'd not heard about Julian Assange? If I was reporter I would have played him his words from my laptop and ask: Mr President is this you or a fake President? ..."
"... Actually he is a fake President as most US Presidents are. The man's a dunce. I thought after George W Bush US Presidents couldn't get any worse but know history hits us up the backside with a banjo yet again. ..."
I took note when I read that on the Guardian website late last night. What struck me was
the treatment of the statement as if it could be true, but in more than one way.
The idea that Trump was kidded along in this way with photos of suffering children is
similar to that which allegedly persuaded him to bomb Syria (along with the UK and France)
after the more recent also alleged Douma chemical weapons attacks. So who actually was
telling him porkies and why or is this just another myth to prove Trump's crassness –
in which case there is no need to make anything up.
Even if the story is true, the article accepts it as fact and in no way qualifies it,
which is just plain misrepresentation as Craig points out.
The reference to the two Russian operatives at that time is certainly a give away one way
and another – but nothing in the article to highlight that inconsistency.
Strange timing too for the appearance of the article too. No doubt there will be a
response from the Russian Embassy.
Trump brings together stupidity, narcissistic mental illness and obnoxiousness such that
when an official has to deal with him their attitude must surely be to tell the moron
whatever gets him to do what they want as soon as possible, so they don't have to spend any
more time than necessary in a room with him.
He lies all the time – the guy can't stop
lying – nobody wants to spend time with a person like that – even his wife can't
stand the sight of him – and it doesn't matter what it is that you tell him or show
him.
Trump doesn't give a toss about suffering children or suffering anyone else, so it's not
likely that he was persuaded by the kind of argument that runs from injured children to the
need for US diplomatic action.
The question is who was behind the anti-Russian side of the
Skripal story and why. Not much progress will be made without looking at the British
defence review and the huge increase in military spending that warfare interests have
moved Gavin Williamson's lips to call for.
"(E)xtremely clear CCTV footage of the duck feeding"? So there are fixed cameras watching
where the ducks swim in Queen Elizabeth's Park in Salisbury, are there? Because I haven't
been able to find even some lamp posts they might be secured to. (
Some images .) Which is not to say the Skripals weren't photographed. And how's the
Nikolai Glushkov inquest going?
Trump forgets he lies in minutes. He'd not heard about Julian Assange? If I was reporter I would have played him his words from my laptop and ask: Mr President
is this you or a fake President?
Actually he is a fake President as most US Presidents are. The man's a dunce. I thought after George W Bush US Presidents couldn't get any worse but know history hits
us up the backside with a banjo yet again.
Simple really: Show the video of the Skripal actively feeding the ducks – blank the
kids faces and we'll be able to see them in all of their pre poisoned glory.
All this has been done before by the MS – The London Bridge attackers – 7/7
and so on.
So why not show the video? Because it shows something(s) which they want to hide. I have my views as to why, as do others but once you start lying you have to develop a
good memory and ' British Intelligence ' is a misnomer.
Let us not for one moment forget: Yulia musty be alive somewhere. I reckon they did in
Sergei – serve him right for being a double (or triple) agent – but Yulia must
still be around. She TOLD US in her video she was fine and getting better.
Thank god for Craig Murray and the Off-Guardian, they have preserved our sanity over this mad
story, this maddest of British Intel cockups.
@Nicholas – I'd advise delaying the conclusion that it was a cockup, except in the
sense that in most military and intelligence operations something cocks up –
until we hear what happens with British military spending plans.
Someone said to me on Twitter that confirmation of Novichock was from a Mass Spec of the
nerve agent bound to some enzyme (probably acetyl cholinesterase). Is this really the
official line? If so it's rubbish. Whoever made such a claim was clearly no chemist. Acetyl
Cholinesterase weighs about 66700 Daltons and the nerve agent weighed, say between 200 and
400 daltons. Firstly a mass spectrum of the protein would be that of the protein plus or
minus anything upto about 300 water molecules Which makes the mass (69400 +/- 2700) and a
multitude of other possible ions or other factors bound to it. The error in the mass of the
protein clearly exceeds the mass of the nerve agent. Given that, because of the blinding
uncertainties as to what species are actually hitting the detector in the mass spectrometer,
no-one anywhere attempts to study ligands bound to proteins by mass spec and certainly not
one of this size, why would they do it in this case?
The CIA Director tells outright lies to her boss, who as a result approves a stern
national rebuke.
In a cartoon version of life where Dick Dastardly gets to be an intelligence supremo, and
a total dummy gets to be President, this would be highly likely. Needless to say, to believe
such a scenario would exist in the real world requires a massive suspension of logic.
More likely there's something coming down the track that requires Haspel, and or the CIA,
to be discredited prior to its becoming visible to the public ?
What could possibly be coming down the track that isn't comparable to what we already know
about Haspel and the CIA though?
If you can straight faced maintain support for an admitted and documented human rights
abuser who heads a non accountable government spy agency that has been extra judicially
torturing, assassinating and over throwing any who stands in its way for 70 years; what on
earth could be about to come out that's suddenly going to convince our bought and paid for
media, and by extension the general public, that these monsters have been discredited?
UK spooks are switching to damage limitation mode, with the help of the Deborah Haynes of
Sky and II:
"Update: UK security sources say they're unaware of children hospitalised because of
#novichok or wildlife killed in #Skripal attack. May have been a photo of a dead swan though
not evidence swan was killed by #Novichok. If that's true, I wonder what these images used by
CIA were! "
"... I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation. Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. ..."
"... Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of Power. ..."
"... American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy." ..."
"... Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities: Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious. ..."
"... There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government. ..."
"... If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!" ..."
"... I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them. ..."
"... She was put in charge there not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect. ..."
"... furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states " For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition? ..."
"... Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be considered in the contexts of these words. ..."
Nothing will say more about who we are, across three American administrations -- one that demanded torture, one that covered it
up, and one that seeks to promote its bloody participants -- than whether Gina Haspel becomes director of the CIA.
Haspel oversaw the
torture of human beings in Thailand as the chief of a CIA black site in 2002. Since then, she's worked her way up to deputy director
at the CIA. With current director Mike Pompeo slated to move to Foggy Bottom, President Donald Trump has proposed Haspel as the Agency's
new head.
Haspel's victims waiting for death in Guantanamo cannot speak to us, though they no doubt remember their own screams as they were
waterboarded. And we can still hear former CIA officer
John Kiriakousay : "We did
call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because
they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information."
It was Kiriakou who exposed the obsessive debate over the effectiveness of torture as false. The real purpose of torture conducted
by those like Gina Haspel was to seek vengeance, humiliation, and power. We're just slapping you now, she would have said in that
Thai prison, but we control you, and who knows what will happen next, what we're capable of? The torture victim is left to imagine
what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, creating his own terror.
Haspel won't be asked at her confirmation hearing to explain how torture works, but those who were waterboarded under her stewardship
certainly could.
I met my first torture victim in Korea, where I was adjudicating visas for the State Department. Persons with serious criminal
records are ineligible to travel to the United States, with an exception for dissidents who have committed political crimes. The
man I spoke with said that under the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee he was tortured for writing anti-government
verse. He was taken to a small underground cell. Two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with
one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked no questions. They barely spoke to him at all.
Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, he said the subsequent humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what
really affected his life. It destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting
pen to paper again. The men who destroyed him, he told me, did their work, and then departed, as if they had others to visit and
needed to get on with things. He was released a few days later and driven back to his apartment by the police. A forward-looking
gesture.
The second torture victim I met was while I was stationed in Iraq. The prison that had held him was under the control of shadowy
U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. Inside, masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said they
neither asked him questions nor demanded information. They did whip his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of
his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar
ordinarily used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What destroyed him was the feeling of utter helplessness, the inability
to control things around him as he once had. He showed me the caved-in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation
with faint signs of metal grooves.
Gina Haspel is the same as those who were in the room with the Korean. She is no different than those who tormented the Iraqi.
As head of a black site, Haspel had sole authority to halt the questioning of suspects, but she allowed torture to continue.
New information
and a redaction of earlier reporting that said Haspel was present for the waterboarding and torture of Abu Zubaydah (she was
actually the station chief at the black site after those sessions) makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture
of all of the prisoners there, but pay it little mind. The confusion arises from the government's refusal to tell us what Haspel
actually did as a torturer. So many records have yet to be released and those that have been are heavily redacted. Then there are
the tapes of Zubaydah's waterboarding, which Haspel later pushed to have destroyed.
Arguing over just how much blood she has in her hands is a distraction from the fact that she indeed has blood on her hands.
Gina Haspel is now eligible for the CIA directorship because Barack Obama did not prosecute anyone for torture; he merely signed
an executive order banning it in the future. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured that almost all government documents
on the torture program remained classified. He did not prosecute the CIA officials who destroyed videotapes of the torture scenes.
Obama ignored the truth that sees former Nazis continue to be hunted some 70 years after the Holocaust: that those who do evil
on behalf of a government are individually responsible. "I was only following orders" is not a defense of inhuman acts. The purpose
of tracking down the guilty is to punish them, to discourage the next person from doing evil, and to morally immunize a nation-state.
To punish Gina Haspel "more than 15 years later for doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told
were lawful orders, would be a travesty and a disgrace,"
claims one of
her supporters. "Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well,"
said Michael Hayden,
who headed the CIA during the height of the Iraq war from 2006-2009.
Influential people in Congress agree. Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which will soon review
Haspel's nomination,
said , "I know Gina personally and she has the right skill set, experience, and judgment to lead one of our nation's most critical
agencies."
"She'll have to answer for that period of time, but I think she's a highly qualified person,"
offered Senator
Lindsey Graham. Democratic Senator Bill Nelson
defended Haspel's
actions, saying they were "the accepted practice of the day" and shouldn't disqualify her.
His fellow Democrat Senator Dianne Feinstein, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, signaled her likely acceptance,
saying , "Since my concerns were raised over the torture situation, I have met with her extensively, talked with her She has
been, I believe, a good deputy director." Senator Susan Collins
added that Haspel "certainly has the expertise and experience as a 30-year employee of the agency." John McCain, a victim of
torture during the Vietnam War,
mumbled only that Haspel would have to explain her role.
Nearly alone at present, Republican Senator Rand Paul says he will
oppose Haspel's nomination. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich, both Democrats, have told Trump she is unsuitable and will
likely also vote no.
Following World War II, the United States could have easily executed those Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, or thrown them
into some forever jail on an island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who wouldn't have supported brutally torturing
them at a black site. Instead, they were put on public trial at Nuremberg and made to defend their actions as the evidence against
them was laid bare. The point was to demonstrate that We were better than Them.
Today we refuse to understand what Haspel's victims, and the Korean writer, and the Iraqi insurgent, already know on our behalf:
unless Congress awakens to confront this nightmare and deny Gina Haspel's nomination as director of the CIA, torture will have transformed
us and so it will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of
We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People andHooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan. He tweets@WeMeantWell.
Covering up torture is quite possibly the worst thing Obama did. (I'd put it neck-and-neck with targeted killing.) This nation
desperately needs a president who will expose all of these horrors, and appoint an attorney general who will prosecute these acts
as war crimes.
Trump likes waterboarding. He said so himself. One assumes he meant, being a whimpering coward himself, when someone else does
it to someone else. But who knows? Enjoy judge Gorsuch.
"doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders"
To complete the parallel, we would need to prosecute and punish those who asked her to do it, and those who told her those
orders were lawful. Instead, some are doing paintings of their toes, some are promoted to be Federal judges, and some are influential
professors at "liberal" law schools. Why punish *only* her?
I was not in the least surprised at reports that a known torturer was slated to head the CIA, and I expected quick confirmation.
Such is my opinion of our ruling classes. I am in full support of Mr. Van Buren's thesis. However, Pro Publica, which seems
to have been the source of much reporting of Haspel's torture record, has retracted the claim that Haspel had tortured in Thailand.
Mr. Van Buren quotes another source from his blog that supports the thesis that Haspel is a torturer. How does one know what to
believe? Whatever Haspel may be, we can be sure the CIA will continue to torture, detain people without charge, assassinate
and terrorize with its own drone force, and cause mayhem around the world and at home. No one can be trusted with the Ring of
Power.
Its because we lost our sense of what makes us who we are. We are an empire that dances for private interests. In Rome they were
called families and led by patricians, they had money private guards, gladiators, and even street people supporting them. In the
Modern USA they are called Interest Groups and/or Corporations. They are lead by CEOs and instead of gladiators they have Lawyers.
Our being better matters less then their own squabbles which is why a torturer could reach the highest seat in intel. The majority
of Americans have lost their sense of being Americans instead they are Republicans, Democrats, etc, etc. Things that once use
to be part of an American have come to define us.
American Exceptionalism is perhaps the most toxic ideology since Nazism and Stalinism. It says that the United States is always
virtuous even when it tortures, when it bombs towns, villages, cities in the name of "freedom or installs dictators, military
governments, trains torturers, and, yes, rapes and loots in the name of "democracy."
At least this appointment along with the election of Trump shows the true face of the United States in international affairs.
When we face the fact we are (a) an oligarchy and (b) a brutal Empire we might have a chance to return to something more human.
Few readers, even of TAC, will want to look at our recent history of stunning brutality and lack of interest in even being in
the neighborhood of following international law.
CIA has purposefully refused to disclose Haspel's role for a decade+ They have selectively released information last week to discredit
those criticizing her. I don't think we should play their game, letting them set the agenda. Instead, I declaim torture itself
and any role she played in it, whether she poured the water or kept the books.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of the CIA's Haspel put him at risk?
In the 2003 film "Love Actually" the British Prime Minister (played by Hugh Grant) jokes with a Downing Street employee Natalie
(Martine McCutcheon):
"PM: You live with your husband? Boyfriend, three illegitimate but charming children? –
"NATALIE: No, I've just split up with my boyfriend, so I'm back with my mum and dad for a while.
"PM: Oh. I'm sorry.
"NATALIE: No, it's fine. I'm well shot of him. He said I was getting fat.
"PM: I beg your pardon?
"NATALIE: He said no one's going to fancy a girl with thighs the size of big tree trunks. Not a nice guy, actually, in the end.
"PM: Right You know, being Prime Minister, I could just have him murdered.
"NATALIE: Thank you, sir. I'll think about it.
"PM: Do – the SAS are absolutely charming – ruthless, trained killers are just a phone call away."
It's just a film. It's just a joke. But the joke works because the public knows that – in reality – the security services have
the skills-sets and the abilities, to do damage anyone they want to do damage to -- and to probably get away with it.
Fast forward to January, 2017 and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer telling MSNBC's Rachael Maddow that President-elect
Donald Trump is "being really dumb" by criticizing the intelligence community and its assessments on Russia's cyber activities:
Shumer: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you, So even
for a practical, supposedly hard-nosed businessman, he's being really dumb to do this." No, Shumer wasn't joking. He was serious.
Fast forward again to yesterday, March 17, 2018: Former CIA Director John Brennan wasn't joking when he reacted to the firing
of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe -- and President Donald Trump's tweeted celebration of it -- by tweeting this attack against
Trump:
"When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful
place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America America
will triumph over you."
Obama UN Representative Samantha Power followed up on the Brennan tweet with this:
"Not a good idea to piss off John Brennan."
When public officials and former public officials -- like Shumer, Brennan and Power -- make such public statements it must
necessarily have a chilling effect on public criticism of the security services.
After all, none of the three are joking. They're serious. And the American people know that they're serious.
Does Peter Van Buren's criticism of CIA operative Haspel put him at risk?
New information makes it less clear whether Haspel oversaw the torture of all of the prisoners at her black site, but pay it little
mind. The confusion is because the government refuses to tell us what Haspel actually did as a torturer. Arguing over just how
much blood she has on her hands is a distraction when she indeed has blood on her hands.
The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient to disqualify her from heading the Agency. If the
Agency wishes to clarify her role, as was done via trial for the various Nazis at Nuremberg, we can deal with her actions more
granularly.
Since we have not had any more successful attacks on the scale of 9-11, it is very easy to be scrupulous regarding rough treatment
of terrorists.
But if we had suffered a dozen or more such attacks, of increasing magnitude and maybe involving nuclear weapons, how many
of you would still be condemning Mrs Haspel et al.? Or would you then be complaining they had not used water-boarding enough?
The 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was caught weeks before 9-11. Investigators figured out he was up to no good, tried
to get permission to search his computer, but were denied. The U.S. Government carefully protected his privacy rights. So are
you pleased with the outcome, Mr van Buren?
I'm sorry – this whole piece is a massive non sequitur. Ms. Haspel has no 'blood' on her hands as US extreme interrogation techniques
(sleep deprivation, uncomfortable positions, waterboarding) didn't draw any. They are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating
the genitals, pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones. US techniques might have been bad policy – won't argue – but lets not fall
for a false equivalency.
Ms. Haspel was an agent of her government, acting on it's orders under it's policies and guidelines. Which leads to
Nuremberg. The Nuremberg tribunals (they were military tribunals – not trials) were conducted by a victorious military force
against a defeated military force. They were widely criticized as vengeance even by such august people as Chief Justice of the
Supreme Court Stone and associate Justice Douglas. There won't be a 'Nuremberg' tribunal because Al Qaida didn't defeat the
United States, and you'd have to convict not just Ms. Haspel, but a sizeable portion of the U.S. Government.
And lastly there's this from a comment of the authors: "The idea is her participation on any level at the black site is sufficient
to disqualify her from heading the Agency." Utter nonsense. That was the mission of the Agency at that time. It's like saying
a 33yr old Drone Pilot who takes out an ISIS/Al Qaida operative as well as 15 civilians is disqualified to be the Sec Def 2 decades
later.
If nothing else, the appointment of Bloody Gina as CIA head finally drives a wooden stake through the heart of the myth
that "we're The Good Guys(tm)!" or its cousin "all we gotta do is elect Team D and we can be The Good Guys(R) again!"
We demonize Russia at every opportunity, but I don't see Russia rewarding torturers by appointing them to high office.
I didn't know too much about this woman's background until I read that Rand Paul opposes her nomination. I tend to take notice
whenever Rand Paul holds forth on any subject. All I can say is that if her actual record even approximates what has been alleged,
then this woman is unfit for the post–Nuremberg or no Nuremberg.
"As we've proved, we're not better than them. Any of them." Oh, -PLEASE-, spare us the hyperbole! WE burn alive captives held
in cages? WE saw off their heads?
Thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape
(S.E.R.E.) training programs.
All of the torturers should be brought to justice. So should all of the officials who ordered or authorized torture.
There is no statute of limitations on capital Federal crimes. For a U.S. citizen to kill via torture is a capital Federal crime,
no matter where the torture took place. If statutes of limitations make it too late to prosecute some acts of torture, it is not
too late to bring about some measure of justice by making torturers pariahs. As many sexual harassers have recently learned, there
is no statute of limitations in the court of public opinion.
The story linking her to torture has been formally retracted. She had nothing to do with torture anywhere. How about a retraction
of this story and an apology.
I do not know whether to admire Mr. van Buren's idealism or be astonished at his naivete. Has he never heard of the School
of the Americas, of sinister reputation, or the Condor Plan, aided and abetted by U.S. intelligence? People in Latin America know
better than to believe the U.S. protestations of virtue. They know about torturers, and the U.S. support for them.
Personally,
I prefer that the cruelty should be, as Lincoln once put it, "unalloyed by the base metal of hypocrisy"
bob sykes: you should read Pro Publica's retraction (
https://www.propublica.org/article/cia-cables-detail-its-new-deputy-directors-role-in-torture
) of the claim that Haspel was in charge of the Thai black site when Abu Zubaydeh was tortured. She was put in charge there
not long after and oversaw the waterboarding of at least one prisoner, and later followed orders to destroy the tapes of waterboarding
at that site. Your claim that " She had nothing to do with torture anywhere" is incorrect.
Winston: why do you suppose "thousands of US Navy and Air Force pilots have been waterboarded as part of their Survival, Evasion,
Resistance and Escape (S.E.R.E.) training programs"? Is it not to prepare them for the possibility of what we call torture when
used by our adversaries?
furbo: your contention that " US extreme interrogation techniques are not equivalent to forcible sodomy, beating the genitals,
pounding the kidneys, or breaking bones" is wrong. The UN Convention against Torture, to which the US is a signatory, states "
For the purposes of this Convention, the term "torture" means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,
is intentionally inflicted on a person " Ask anyone who has been waterboarded whether that fits the official definition?
Wilfred, the problem was not that the Feds protected Zacarias Moussaoui's right to privacy. The problem is that it let any of
the 20 Arab Muslims into the US in the first place. Closing our borders and mass deportations would have been the best thing to
do in the aftermath of 9/11, not torture and invasions.
Very well put. Lest we forget: Bush also delivered the stern warning that "war crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be
punished, and it will be no defense to say, 'I was just following orders'."
Ceterum censeo: given that the Iraq invasion and occupation was an act of aggressive war in violation of the UN Charter
and thus illegal under US law, it is not just torturers but also war criminals in government and general staff that have to be
considered in the contexts of these words.
Chris Mallory (Mar 19 @1:47 p.m.), I agree with you. We shouldn't be letting them in.
But if someone had sneaked-a-peek at Moussaoui's laptop during the 3 weeks they had him before 9-11, we might have been able
to thwart the attack altogether. (And the Press has been strangely incurious about investigating whoever it was who issued the
injunction protecting Moussie's precious computer). This type of hand-wringing cost us 3,000 lives. Even more, considering the
Afghan & 2nd Iraq wars would never have been launched, were it not for 9-11.
Therefore, where is a Western Solzhenitsyn to document artistically what transpires in
a society deeply in debt and in social & moral decline
well, Dmitry Orlov, for one, is doing yeoman service. from his latest
:
Then society breaks down. And only then, after all that, do people finally realize that
the problem was inside their heads all along (cultural collapse). Quickly adopting a better,
more right-thinking culture is, of course, a good idea. An alternative is to go through a
Dark Age followed by an extended period of mindless slaughter
The New York Times article is too tongue in cheek for carelessness (of course the CIA
director is NOT manipulating Trump ...). They had sent two reporters to Salisbury and indeed
Russia to get impressions on the ground - that means money. And somehow their interest was
very much
if the British government story sticks or not .
"Others fret about the ducks that used to gather on the Avon River near where the Skripals
collapsed, saying they must have been quietly culled. (Mr. Dean, the City Council head,
says they simply migrated downstream.) Others wonder why some places the Skripals went on
the day of the poisoning, but not others, were cordoned off for safety reasons."
So somehow ducks are a running feature in the New York Times reporting.
When Deripaska was hit with sanctions in April, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign
Assets Control (OFAC) alleged that he and other rich and influential Russian oligarchs were
profiting off their ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin and from the state's "malign
activity" around the world.
The lawsuit questions whether Treasury can really back up those claims. It asks the
court to order OFAC to hand over evidence and other records and remove Deripaska from the
sanctions list.
The White House has received a long-awaited package of new sanctions on Russia, intended to
punish the Kremlin for a 2018 nerve-agent attack on a former Russian spy in the U.K.
U.S. officials at the State and Treasury departments have vetted the sanctions and are
awaiting approval from the White House to issue them, according to two people familiar with
the matter who discussed the internal deliberations on condition of anonymity.
Don't forget – a government minister told us (with a straight face!) that we've
captured a special, secret Russian manual, which details just how to apply poison to
door handles. Doubtless these spies had their own copy to refer to, in order to get the job
done right.
It was a dead duck from the moment they said the poison was on the door handle, which is
just stupid. The official narrative has been a catalogue of stupidities aimed at political
goals. Those who've taken it up are invested in the goals.
If anyone cared what had happened, the first point of enquiry would've been the guinea pigs,
the clue is in the name.
OBTW Who was responsible for the clean up of Salisbury, after which Dawn Sturgess met her
end ??
I would recommend to watch a drama series called "Killing Eve". It was written, produced
and released before the Skripal saga. There is a scene where a deadly poison is administered
on a door handle. Clearly it isn't as far fetched as you suggest.
Coincidentally (?) there was also the joint Sky/US drama series 'Strike Back' broadcast in
November 2017 featuring an attack by a Russian with 'Novichok'. But which came first? Fiction
or 'reality'? Think about it.
"... The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative =
British, Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on. ..."
"... The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. ..."
The Steele dossier is British, Orbis intelligence = British, Institute for statecraft / Integrity Initiative = British,
Skripal defection. Location, evidence, statements = British, the list goes on and on.
You'd think someone might have noticed something of a trend by now.
They just don't bother anymore, the level of double black psy-ops and gaslighting is a mine field of disinformation. That's what
you get when Washington - Obama, gives the green light to propagandizing their people. It's escalated, like we haven't noticed,
under Trump despite his pathetic attempts at assuring folks it's fake news.
The UK's propaganda machine rivals and even surpasses Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany. I watched about 10 minutes of a
documentary about Easter Island, as an example, and it was revisionist to the nth degree. Just absolute rubbish insinuating that
white European travelers destroyed the Island. This is what British kids are now being marinated in, "He who controls the past"
We respect the ICC and its judgment on Kosovo "independence" (which, by the way, was
purely advisory and non-binding) which we helped carve out from her mother country via 78
days of day-and-night bombing raids. ICC is the highest legal institution of the world
community and its rulings must be mandatory on all UN members. Therefore, the Kosovo
"independence" is a legally done deal and must be respected.
(fast forward 11 years):
The very same United Kingdom Government:
The ICC's ruling on Chagos Archipelago is a piece of **** and the institution itself is
totally illegitimate and illegal farce and should be disbanded. Of course the British
government has no intention whatsoever of ever complying with such an idiotic ruling from a
quasi-legal institution. The right lies where our might rests.
So there, folks. Take it from the royal horse's mouth.
"The suit was brought by Mauritius and some of the 1,500 Chagos islanders who were
forcibly removed from the archipelago in 1973."
The decision was made on Feb 25, 2019. What happened in the 46 years between 1973 and the
court decision?
Did it take that long for the UN Court to be bribed?
"Diego Garcia: Is The "Terror Fulcrum" of the United States in the Eastern
Hemisphere's Indian Ocean.
The delusional American people think their government is such a benevolent, kind,
peace-loving force in the world. My God... the results of the tribe's decades-long
brainwashing upon an ignorant goy host is breathtaking.
Hold on here, Poncho. The US does not recognize the Hague-based International Court of
Justice as legitimate in the matter. Furthermore, such court is impotent in matters of
enforcement. So the US military will be staying on the island for a period not to exceed
indefinitely. And that's a very, very long time.
Strange how people develop reading comprehension problems when they don't like facts - the
main thrust of the article is here: ' How Great Britain can argue for international law in
the Crimea and South China Sea, while ignoring the International Court of Justice on the
Chagos'............ nope, we don't like it when other people do what we do, cant do that! we
are exceptional..........
"Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf of the USA but rather to its own
ends."
CIA probably was involved in Skripals false flag operation as well. Because the behaviour of Theresa May suggest that she from
the very beginning was sure about the USA full and unconditional support and putting pressure on EU allies. Then now we know
that Gina Haspel, who was also involved in Steele dossier and handled most oversees assets involved in entrapment of Trump, misled
Trump and pervaded him to expel 80 Russian diplomats.
Notable quotes:
"... Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly how the buildings came down. ..."
"... According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia ..."
"... So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our democracy. ..."
"... Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media. ..."
"... So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader. Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man? ..."
"... None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next? ..."
"... "If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics ..."
Many in the USA have come to realize this stealth organization does not work on the behalf
of the USA but rather to its own ends. And, in this realization, comes a jaded view of both the
CIA and the government it represents.
This realization may have begun with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The Warren
Commission, a congressional investigation was convened. The commission concluded there was a
single lone shooter, a fringe outcast, Lee Harvey Oswald who acted alone in the assassination
of the president. Many felt, in light of the facts, that the Warren Commission was a cover up
of what really went down on November 22, 1963, in Houston, Texas.
In 1976, the Congress reopened the Kennedy investigation. They created The United States
House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) to investigate the
assassination of John F. Kennedy (and Martin Luther King Jr.).
The HSCA completed its investigation in 1978 and determined the Warren Commission was faulty
and there was more than one shooter and there was indeed a conspiracy to kill the president. So
much for the official narrative of the Warren Commission.
Why the Warren Commission cover up back then that even the Congress in 1976 (HSCA) reported
was bogus? One theory April 25, 1966, The New York Times wrote, "And, President Kennedy, as the
enormity of the Bay of Pigs disaster came home to him, said to one of the highest officials of
his Administration, that he wanted to splinter the C.I.A. in a thousand pieces and scatter it
to the winds."
Kennedy was no fan of the Director of the C.I.A. Allen Dulles or his agency, and in the
autumn of 1961 he purged the C.I.A. of Dulles and his entourage. This included Deputy Director
for Plans Richard M. Bissell Jr. and and Deputy Director Charles Cabell. You do not mess with
Allen Dulles and the C.I A. Let's leave it at that. Kennedy was dead within two years.
Then there is 9/11. This one also has a USA government narrative that defies logic. This
time it is so blatant and egregious that an organization called "Architects & Engineers for
9/11 Truth" was founded by Richard Gage, an architect with vast experience in steel structured
buildings and fire. The organization demands on official investigation by Congress into exactly
how the buildings came down.
By December 2014, over 2,300 architectural and engineering professionals had signed a
petition for this investigation. If one looks at controlled demolitions and how the buildings
actually came down it is obvious the collapse was not due to an airplane flying into the
buildings, but rather a controlled demolition. 2,300 architects and engineers with verified
credentials all testify that the narrative of the government is patently false and
scientifically implausible if not impossible.
At about nine a.m. the Twin Towers are crashed into and collapse. At about five twenty p.m.
that same day, Building Seven collapses. No planes fly into Building 7, it just collapses.
Again, the videos show a controlled demolition.
There are various theories as to why 7 WTC was taken down. Theories range from 7 WTC being
the operation center for the demolition of the Twin Towers to more nefarious motives. "
According to a statement reported by the BBC , Loose Change film producer Dylan Avery thinks the
destruction of the building was suspicious because it housed some unusual tenants, including a
clandestine CIA office on the 25th floor, an outpost of the U.S. Secret Service, the Securities
and Exchange Commission, and New York City's emergency command center." Wikipedia
What is important to remember is that NO STEEL FRAME HIGH RISE HAS EVER TOTALLY COLLAPSED
DUE TO FIRE.
These are but two examples of hundreds where we have been mislead by the official narrative
of the government and its MSM news. Remember the Trump Dossier that was leaked and printed as
fact? Or, the death of Seth Rich, a "botched" robbery? Or, the list of 200 news outlets in the
USA that were Russian Propaganda fronts? All reported as fact by the New York Times and
Washington Post. All fake news by the MSM fed to an unsuspecting American people.
So now we have Prime Minister, Teresa May, accusing Putin and Russia of the May 4 nerve
agent attack of Sergei V. Skripal (66) and his daughter, Yulia (33), in Salibury, England. Both
are in critical condition after being found unconscious on a bench outside The Maltings
Shopping Center in Salibury. As we all know Russia is the new Antichrist. The harbinger of all evil. The enemy we all
must view with the utmost fear and loathing. Daily, the MSM in USA recoils as they report story
after story of Russia meddling in our elections, shaking the very foundations of our
democracy.
Let's get this straight. Mr. Skripal was convicted of high treason in Russia in 2004. He was
not tortured, killed or murdered, rather he was allowed to settle in Britain after a spy swap
in 2010. Sounds pretty friendly to me, considering that Putin is portrayed as a sadistic
monster out to settle scores with those who cross him, by the Western media.
Teresa May called the act "reckless" and "indiscriminate", and basically said Putin put
innocent English bystanders at risk. She upped the ante by dismissing 23 Russian diplomats, the
largest such expulsion in thirty years.
On Thursday, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov accused May of grandstanding in her
response to the incident. Russian news agency Interfax reported that The Kremlin denies
involvement in the nerve agent poisoning, insisting one motive was to complicate Russia's
hosting of the World Cup this summer. Ah, dear Kremin, the motive was much deeper than the
World Cup games, which were only a bonus to the attack.
So, why now? Why this attempted assassination now? This is the question, dear reader.
Why attempt to assassinate Mr. Skripal now? He was convicted of high treason 14 years ago. He
has been in England for eight years. Russia knew at this point he was no threat to them with no
new secrets to betray. What would be gained at this point by assassinating the man?
None. However, if the CIA took him out, or paid unscrupulous foreign mercenaries to take
him out, much could be gained. The narrative of big bad Putin, in his big bad Russia, would be
reinforced. Now, not only is he meddling in elections, getting the dastardly Trump elected, he
is using nerve gas to take out enemies on foreign soil. My god, what will be next?
Nikki Haley, Ambassador to the UN tells us, "The United States of America believes that
Russia is responsible for the attack on two people in the United Kingdom using a military-grade
nerve agent," Haley said in her remarks at a UN Security Council emergency session, blasting
the Russian government for flouting international law.
"If we don't take immediate concrete measures to address this now, Salisbury will not be
the last place we see chemical weapons used," said Haley. "They could be used here in New York
or in cities of any country that sits on this council." CNN Politics
The USA needs an enemy to foment fear to justify it's astronomical defense budget. It just
loves a good cold war. However, now that Russia is no longer a pinko commie nation to be
demonized, and is indeed a capitalist democracy, we have to resurrect a new straw man to
hate.
It is remarkable the degree to which the liberal left has bought into this
industrial-military-complex narrative. The USA always has to be bombing someone, droning
someone or napalming someone to keep the monies flowing into the defense budget. Take a look at
our spending compared to Russia or other nations.
Alas, it is certainly not out of the question that the CIA was behind the attack. After this
amount of time Mr. Putin had nothing to gain in assassinating Mr. Skripal and his daughter. In
fact, he had a lot to lose. The CIA? They had a lot to gain, and nothing to lose. Never
underestimate the CIA and its brilliance in setting the narrative for its agenda. And, never
underestimate Mr. Putin in his resolve not to become their lapdog.
Ms. Simpson was a radio personality in New York. She was a staff writer for The Liberty Report.
A PBS documentary was done on her activism for human rights. She is a psychotherapist and
political commentator.
B, here's a remarkable fact: The Skripal Novichok perfume bottle assassination story is is
eerily similar to episode 2 of BBC show 'Killing Eve' where an assassin uses a perfume bottle
to kill her target and where later an innocent person accidentally dies after coming into
contact with said perfume bottle.
The episode aired around a month after the Skripal attack but well before the other 2
people fell ill and the perfume bottle theory emerged.
You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams
being hired to direct our foreign policy.
The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and
flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.
It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep
fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.
Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet
who buys that nonsense.”
McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling.
He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi
dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability
for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John
Kerry.
And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies,
it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit
of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.
Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s
years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.
Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war
was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
“Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would
like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of
a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push
their weight to have their way.
If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?
My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first,
and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual
honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.
Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French
after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders
and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked
to hold their viking-won inheritance.
At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to
the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.
We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending
conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican
politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract
our attention while corruption is rampant at home.
Thanks, I appreciate this article.
I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial
and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children
overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to
each.
The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it.
Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.
America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders
them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German
Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed,
including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to
be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is
better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian
Pacifism.
“Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was
all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link
below.
“Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting
NATO ‘Allies’”?
We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very
stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big
give away to what’s going on.
If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11,
reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed
to do.
Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.
Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems
that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
“Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very
structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it
didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally
a family affair.
The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two
things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the
world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.
We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy
written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan
and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
You're right. I see people like Robert Kagan's opinions being respectfully asked on foreign affairs, John Bolton and Elliott Abrams
being hired to direct our foreign policy.
The incompetent, the corrupt, the treacherous -- not just walking free, but with reputations intact, fat bank balances, and
flourishing careers. Now they're angling for war with Iran.
It's preposterous and sickening. And it can't be allowed to stand, so you can't just stand off and say you're "wrecked". Keep
fighting, as you're doing. I will fight it until I can't fight anymore.
Fact-bedeviled JohnT: “McCain was a problem for this nation? Sweet Jesus! There quite simply is no rational adult on the planet
who buys that nonsense.”
McCain had close ties to the military-industrial complex. He was a backer of post-Cold War NATO. He was a neoconservative darling.
He never heard of a dictator that he didn’t want to depose with boots on the ground, with the possible exception of various Saudi
dictators (the oil-weaponry-torture nexus). He promoted pseudo-accountability of government in campaign finance but blocked accountability
for the Pentagon and State Department when he co-chaired the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs with John
Kerry.
And, perhaps partly because of the head trauma and/or emotional wounds he suffered at the hands of Chinese-backed Commies,
it’s plausible to think he was regarded by the willy-nilly plotters of the deep state as a manipulable, and thus useful, conduit
of domestic subversion via the bogus Steele dossier.
Unfortunately, the episode that most defines McCain’s life is the very last one–his being a pawn of M-16 in the the deep state’s
years-long attempt to derail the presidency of Donald Trump.
Measuring success means determining goals. The goals of most wars is to enrich the people in charge. So, by this metric, the war
was a success. The rest of it is just props and propaganda.
“Pyrrhic Victory” look it up the Roman Empire Won but lost if the US is invaded and the government does not defend it I would
like to start my own defense: But the knee jerk politics that stirs America’s cannon fodder citizens is a painful reminder of
a history of jingoist lies where at times some left and right agree at least for a short moment before the rich and powerful push
their weight to have their way.
If All politics is relative Right wingers are the the left of what? Nuclear destruction? or Slavery?
My goodness! I am also a veteran, but of the Vietnam war, and my father was a career officer from 1939-1961 as a paratrooper first,
and later as an intelligence officer. He argued vigorously against our Vietnam involvement, and was cashiered for his intellectual
honesty. A combat veteran’s views are meaningless when the political winds are blowing.
Simply put, we have killed thousands of our kids in service of the colonial empires left to us by the British and the French
after WWII. More practice at incompetent strategies and tactics does not make us more competent–it merely extends the blunders
and pain; viz the French for two CENTURIES against the Britsh during the battles over Normandy while the Planagenet kings worked
to hold their viking-won inheritance.
At least then, kings risked their own lives. Generals fight because the LIKE it…a lot. Prior failures are only practice to
the, regardless of the cost in lives of the kids we tried to raise well, and who were slaughtered for no gain.
We don’t need the empire, and we certainly shouldn’t fight for the corrupt businessmen who have profited from the never-ending
conflicts. Let’s spend those trillions at home, so long as we also police our government to keep both Democrat and Republican
politicians from feathering their own nests. Term limits and prosecutions will help us, but only if we are vigilant. Wars distract
our attention while corruption is rampant at home.
Thanks, I appreciate this article.
I’ll make two points, my own opinion:
it’s the same story as Vietnam, the bull about how the politicians or anti-war demonstrators tied the military ‘hand,’ blah, blah.
Nonsense. Invading a nation and slaughtering people in their towns, houses…gee…what’s wrong with that, eh?
The average American has a primitive mind when it comes to such matters.
Second point I have, is that both Bushes, Clinton, Obama, Hillary and Trump should be dragged to a world court, given a fair trial
and locked up for life with hard labor… oh, and Cheney too,for all those families, in half a dozen nations, especially the children
overseas that suffered/died from these creeps.
And, the families of dead or maimed American troops should be apologized to and compensation paid by several million dollars to
each.
The people I named above make me sick, because I have feelings and a conscience. Can you dig?
Though there is a worldly justification for killing to obtain or maintain freedoms, there is no Christian justification for it.
Which suggests that Christians who die while doing it, die in vain.
America’s wars are prosecuted by a military that includes Christians. They seldom question the killing their country orders
them to do, as though the will of the government is that of the will of God. Is that a safe assumption for them to make? German
Christian soldiers made that assumption regarding their government in 1939. Who was there to tell them otherwise? The Church failed,
including the chaplains. (The Southern Baptist Convention declared the invasion of Iraq a just war in 2003.) These wars need to
be assessed by Just War criteria. Christian soldiers need to know when to exercise selective conscientious objection, for it is
better to go to prison than to kill without God’s approval. If Just War theory is irrelevant, the default response is Christian
Pacifism.
“Iraq Wrecked” a lot of innocent people. Millions are dead, cities reduced to rubble, homes and businesses destroyed and it was
all a damned lie. And the perpetrators are Free.
Now there is sectarian violence too, where once there was a semblance of harmony amongst various denominations. See article link
below.
“Are The Christians Slaughtered in The Middle East Victims of the Actions of Western War Criminals and Their Terrorist Supporting
NATO ‘Allies’”?
We are a globalist open borders and mass immigration nation. We stand for nothing. To serve in this nation’s military is very
stupid. You aren’t defending anything. You are just a tool of globalism. Again, we don’t secure our borders. That’s a very big
give away to what’s going on.
If our nation’s military really was an American military concerned with our security we would have secured our border after 9/11,
reduced all immigration, deported ALL muslims, and that’s it. Just secure the borders and expel Muslims! That’s all we needed
to do.
Instead we killed so many people and imported many many more Muslims! And we call this compassion. Its insane.
Maybe if Talibans get back in power they will destroy the opium. You know, like they did when they were first in power…. It seems
that wherever Americans get involved, drugs follow…
“Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved. So is the very
structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether
sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” In Eisenhower’s televised farewell address January 17, 1961.
Rational thought would lead one to believe such words from a fellow with his credentials would have had a useful effect. But it
didn’t. In point of fact, in the likes of Eric Prince and his supporters the notion of war as a profit center is quite literally
a family affair.
The military-industrial complex couldn’t accomplish this all by its lonesome self. The deep state was doing its thing. The two
things overlap but aren’t the same. The deep state is not only or mainly about business profits, but about power. Power in the
world means empire, which requires a military-industrial complex but is not reducible to it.
We now have a rare opportunity to unveil the workings of the deep state, but it will require a special counsel, and a lengthy
written report, on the doings in the 2016 election of the FBI (Comey, Strzok, et. al.), and collaterally the CIA and DIA (Brennan
and Clapper). Also the British government (M-16), John McCain, and maybe Bush and Obama judges on the FISA courts.
"... The U.S. alone expelled 60 Russian officials. Trump was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year ago the Washington Post described the scene: ..."
"... Today the New York Times portraits Gina Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position. They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its own purpose: ..."
"... Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals. She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives. ..."
"... Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he embraced the strong option. ..."
"... If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked. ..."
"... The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to manipulate him: ..."
"... The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own policies. ..."
"... The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma all agency owned men. ..."
"... The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead. ..."
"... It is interesting to see that nations that have traditionally been pro-American feel that the threat posed by American power is growing. ..."
"... Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter. ..."
"... Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn, completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold for their putative boss. ..."
"... Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War. ..."
"... after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the msm will not be talking about integrity initiative.. ..."
"... once Teresa May has spoken in Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative version of the truth is possible. ..."
"... Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger one to blame the Russians. ..."
"... The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about both. ..."
"... Haspel will not be fired. ..."
"... It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). .. ..."
"... The actors in government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the rest of the world. ..."
An ass kissing portrait of Gina Haspel,
torture
queen and director of the CIA, reveals that she lied to Trump to push for more
aggression against Russia.
In March 2018 the British government asserted, without providing any evidence, that the
alleged 'Novichok' poisoning of Sergej and Yulia Skripal was the fault of Russia. It urged
its allies to expel Russian officials from their countries.
The U.S. alone expelled
60 Russian officials. Trump
was furious when he learned that EU countries expelled less than 60 in total. A year
ago the Washington Post described the scene:
President Trump seemed distracted in March as his aides briefed him at his Mar-a-Lago
resort on the administration's plan to expel 60 Russian diplomats and suspected spies.
The United States, they explained, would be ousting roughly the same number of
Russians as its European allies -- part of a coordinated move to punish Moscow for the
poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter on British soil.
"We'll match their numbers," Trump instructed, according to a senior administration
official. "We're not taking the lead. We're matching."
The next day, when the expulsions were announced publicly, Trump erupted, officials
said. To his shock and dismay, France and Germany were each expelling only four Russian
officials -- far fewer than the 60 his administration had decided on.
The president, who seemed to believe that other individual countries would largely
equal the United States, was furious that his administration was being portrayed in the
media as taking by far the toughest stance on Russia.
The expulsion marked a turn in the Trump administration's relation with Russia:
The incident reflects a tension at the core of the Trump administration's increasingly
hard-nosed stance on Russia: The president instinctually opposes many of the punitive
measures pushed by his Cabinet that have crippled his ability to forge a close
relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The past month, in particular, has marked a major turning point in the
administration's stance, according to senior administration officials. There have been
mass expulsions of Russian diplomats, sanctions on oligarchs that have bled billions of
dollars from Russia's already weak economy and, for the first time, a presidential tweet
that criticized Putin by name for backing Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad.
Today the New York Timesportraits Gina
Haspel's relation with Trump. The writers seem sympathetic to her and the CIA's position.
They include an anecdote of the Skripal expulsion decision that is supposed to let her
shine in a good light. But it only proves that the CIA manipulated the president for its
own purpose:
Last March, top national security officials gathered inside the White House to discuss
with Mr. Trump how to respond to the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal,
the former Russian intelligence agent.
London was pushing for the White House to expel dozens of suspected Russian
operatives, but Mr. Trump was skeptical. ... During the discussion, Ms. Haspel, then deputy C.I.A. director, turned toward Mr. Trump.
She outlined possible responses in a quiet but firm voice, then leaned forward and told
the president that the "strong option" was to expel 60 diplomats.
To persuade Mr. Trump, according to people briefed on the conversation, officials
including Ms. Haspel also tried to show him that Mr. Skripal and his daughter were not
the only victims of Russia's attack.
Ms. Haspel showed pictures the British government had supplied her of young children
hospitalized after being sickened by the Novichok nerve agent that poisoned the Skripals.
She then showed a photograph of ducks that British officials said were inadvertently
killed by the sloppy work of the Russian operatives.
Ms Haspel was not the first to use emotional images to appeal to the president, but
pairing it with her hard-nosed realism proved effective: Mr. Trump fixated on the
pictures of the sickened children and the dead ducks. At the end of the briefing, he
embraced the strong option.
The Skripal case was widely covered and we
followed it diligently (scroll down). There were no reports of any children affected by
'Novichok' nor were their any reports of dead ducks. In the official storyline the
Skripals, before visiting a restaurant,
fed bread to ducks at a pond in the Queen Elizabeth Gardens in Salisbury.
They also
gave duck-bread to three children to do the same. The children were examined and their
blood was tested.
No
poison was found and none of them fell ill . No duck died. (The duck feeding episode
also disproves
the claim that the Skripals were poisoned by touching a door handle.)
If the NYT piece is correct, the CIA director, in cooperation with the British
government, lied to Trump about the incident. Their aim was to sabotage Trump's announced
policy of better relations with Russia. The ruse worked.
The NYT piece does not mention that the pictures Gina Haspel showed Trump were
fake. It pretends that her lies were "new information" and that she was not out to
manipulate him:
The outcome was an example, officials said, of how Ms. Haspel is one of the few people
who can get Mr. Trump to shift position based on new information.
Co-workers and friends of Ms. Haspel push back on any notion that she is manipulating
the president. She is instead trying to get him to listen and to protect the agency,
according to former intelligence officials who know her.
The job of the CIA director is to serve the president, not to protect the agencies own
policies. Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game:
Ms. Haspel won the trust of Mr. Pompeo, however, and has stayed loyal to him. As a
result, Mr. Trump sees Ms. Haspel as an extension of Mr. Pompeo, a view that has helped
protect her, current and former intelligence officials said.
Posted by b on April 16, 2019 at 08:37 AM |
Permalink
I don't see how it's possible to manipulate someone (and especially the US president) into
doing something they don't want to do with lies like the ones described here. On the
contrary presidents, CEOs etc. favor the staffers who tell them the kind of lies they want
to hear in order to reinforce what they wanted to do in the first place.
I've never seen any reason to alter my first position on Trump, that like any other
president he does what he wants to do.
The 1970s movie 3 Days of The Condor is about the evils of the See Eye A. Also they create
trial balloon in the movie about taking middle east oil. This later happens in real life
with NeoCon See Eye A stooges - Poppy Bush then later GW Bush-Cheney, Clintons and Oboma
all agency owned men.
The joke 7in the final scene Robert Redford tells See Eye A man Cliff Robertson that he
gave all the evidence to the NY Times. What a joke. The NY Times and the Wash Post are the
mouthpieces for the SEE Eye A. The AP news sources most of their stories from those two
papers and other lackey See Eye A newspapers.
One final criticism in moon's story. The head of the See Eye A is to serve the elites-Central banksters not the
President. They did not serve JFK. Any President who crosses the central bankers aka roth-schilds ends up dead.
After this, she got the top job, so what is the real lesson here? Sociopathic liars get
promoted....or you can tell the truth, try to be honorable and fade into obscurity.. In a nest of psychos, you have to really be depraved to become the top psycho...
Nuke it for orbit, it's the only way to be sure...
Backing up Russ's point, when will you realise the "buck stops" on Trump's desk for any
and all departments he oversees, which are run by his appointees? Trump is dedicated to
creating a neoconservative foreign policy melded to a neoliberal economic policy favouring
his corporate fascist sponsors. Recently, you've been all over the Assange indictment,
Trump's relationship with Nuttyahoo and the related rollback of JCPOA. Is this what you
want to see continued into a second term?
There is much evidence to show Trump and the GOP working steadily towards a "democracy"
where Congress is castrated (one might say the system castrates Congress anyway), opposing
candidates are jailed, opposition votes are suppressed and the media is weakened to the
point where no one can tell the difference.
They haven't got there quite yet but once the judiciary is controlled by GOP ideologues
it's game over. And McConnell is dedicating his life to make that the reality ASAP.
Meanwhile back at the ranch we are dedicated to knocking down any and all potential
opposition to this GOP hostile takeover for some reason I've yet to fathom.
Hopefully Trump will hear about the anecdote, recognize how he was had, and fire
Haspel. He should not stop there but also get rid of her protector who likely had a role in
the game[Pompeo]
Hopefully yes to all four propositions. Why am I sceptical though (except conceivably
the first)?
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. He's the first POTUS in decades I
believe to not even pretend to like dogs by having an official White House dog and every
policy his Administration can take against animals, they have taken. I'm not even sure I
buy the spin that he cared about dead kids either. And NYT readers know this about him, so
I don't understand what the point of peddling this fiction is other than to paint Torture
Queen in some kind of good light (and we KNOW that she certainly doesn't care about dead
anything).
another example of trump's stupidity and pathological inability to think for himself. he
gets his views from fox and his policy from bolton. his equally vapid daughter and kushner
whine to him about sooper sad syria pictures they saw in a sponsored link while googling
for new tmz gossip.
even worse that this is the twat in charge of one of russiagate's main instigating "deep
state" agencies. he spent the entirety of his presidency railing against their various lies
then takes this wankery at face value. it's just like the "chinese soldiers in venezuela";
if those pictures were legit they'd have been splattered over every front page and
permanently attached to screeching cnn and msnbc segments demanding trump "finally get
tough" on "putin's russia".
my only surprise is that she didn't tell him about british babies ripped from incubators
and dipped in anthrax powder.
the nyt shilling for a soCIopAth? not that surprising.
The consultant in emergency medicine at Salisbury hospital wrote to The Times, shortly
after the Skripal incident. His choice of words was odd, and some have said they indicate
no novichok poisoning occurred. Leaving that to one side, his letter certainly puts paid to
the idea that more than three people (the Skripals and the policeman, DCI Bailey) were
poisoned.
https://www.onaquietday.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/DocSaysNoNerveAgentInSalisbury.jpg
" the nerve agent attack in Britain on Sergei V. Skripal, "
There was no attack on the Skripals. or on anyone else.
The Russophobia in whose context it falls, is of a higher order, in which a fabricated
narrative of a Skripal-like attack had an important function.
The Skripals were perfectly happy to lend their name to the fabrication, and are living
happily, probably in New Zealand.
The Daily Beast article that b linked to describes how many serious, well-informed people
felt that Haspel was unsuitable to lead the CIA. Even more strange and troubling was that Haspel was supported by Trump's nemesis,
John Brennan.
Despite all that, MAGA Trump still nominated her. Any notion that Trump is at odds with, or "manipulated" by, Haspel, Bolton, or Pompeo is
just propaganda. We've seen such reporting before (esp. wrt Bolton) and Trump has taken no
action.
I see that Trump derangement is alive and well here at MoA. Commenters talk as if Trump is
the first president stupid enough to be manipulated by the security agencies and shadow
government sometimes referred to as a "deep state". People don't have to be historians or
look back to Rome, just read the books about how the great general who "won WWII" was used
by the oligarchy which had full control of US foreign policy throughout Eisenhower's term in
office.
Works produced after WWII, C. Wright Mills, The Power elite was written in 1956,The
Brothers and The Divil's Chessboard each about the Dulles Brothers and how they operated US
foreign policy for the interests of the oligarchy, and the work Peter Phillips, GIANTS: The
Global Power Elite and the work of David Rothkopf which thoroughly describes the feudal
system under which the Western cultures are ruled.
The US government is a pantomime it is a show it has no power.
How many here can honestly say they understand that the US dollar itself and the ENTIRE
GLOBAL FINANCIAL SYSTEM is privately owned. Why do you think the "banks were bailed out"?
because the banks were in power not the government. The US is 22 trillion in debt - the
oligarchy is the creditor - take over the US gov. and you have a powerless pile of
debt.
Around 6,000 people control 85% of global assets until that changes nothing will change.
The oligarchy won virtually all the mines and control the price of all basic commodities
necessary for modern life, the internet, oil of course and more.
What is failing and what has failed over and over for 500 years is Western Civilization and
its three "great religions" which preach obedience, oppression, domination by a one god
suffocating mythology.
But the oligarchy doesn't own just the basic commodities, it owns the religions and it owns
the drugs and all illegal trade as well.
Western "civilization" is really nothing more than one vast feudal kingdom, with royal
courts in DC, Tel Aviv and Ryiadh. Wheather there is a god or not, religion is made of
flesh and blood not miracles. No Rabbi or Priest or Imam claims visitations by god to
instruct them on doctrine - they are flesh and blood and they want power so they behave
like sycophants to the money they need to expand their power...all for the good souls under
their care.
Haspel was CIA station chief in London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired
to stop Trump's candidacy. In her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more
likely she participated in it. That Brennan supported her argues for the latter.
What can we expect from a tv personality who became a US president? A man who ran with an
advertisement worthy of a business man like him, "Make America Great Again." How does he go
about doing it? Giving more money to the military industrial-Congressional complex, even
though we are really flat broke. Using aggressive tactics used by Wall Street in hostile
company takeovers to really intimidate other nations. And hire and place those he really
agrees with in important positions who really reflect his true feelings. I'm sure when he
spoke with Haspel before offering her the job, he brought up the topic of torture and
agreed with her on its use on terrorists.
I think there's a reasonable case to be made that they conspired not to stop Trump but
to further speculation of Trump's "collusion" with Russia (what would later be known as
Russiagate). The "collusion" and "Russia meddled" accusations are what fueled the new
McCarthyism.
I'll just add to Jerry's comment at #3 that the final line in the movie "Day of the Condor"
is something like "But will they print it?" which really spoke to the message of the film
in its entirety. The condor being an endangered bird for whom the hero is named, and the
beginning outrage being the brutal murder of book lovers researching useable plot details
for the 'company'makes this message current and applicable to what we see in the Skripal
case. And instead of librarians, we now have online commenters, a doughty breed, and we
have Assange.
Instead of 'Will they print it?' I am wondering 'Will they make another movie about
it?'
Remind me, where is Yulia Skripal these days? Well and truly 'disappeared' it seems. The
mask is off. the snarling face of the beast is there for all to see.
What a total waste of an article discussing a story published in NYT or WaPo.
b, the World has divided itself into those who consume alternative media such as this
and stupidos who consume MSM. There is nothing in-between that you are attempting to
discuss and dissect here. NYT = cognitive value zero.
Fake News not worth one millisecond of our time, not even to decode what the regime
wants us to know, we know all that already. Personally, I am only interested in the new
methods of domestic repression, what is next after the warning of Assange arrest, future
rendition and torture. The Deep Stare appears to be coming out into open, will it soon get
rid of the whole faux democracy construct and just use iron fist to rule? It already impose
its will as the rule of law. All of the Western block is heading in this direction.
Photos of fake dead ducks and fake sickened children confirm the Skripal story is, in turn,
completely fake. It says a lot that the NY Times either does not know this or that its
contempt for its readership matches the contempt by which the intelligence agencies hold
for their putative boss.
The story veers into complete fiction when it claims that pictures of dead ducks had any
effect on Trump. He doesn't like, nor care about animals. Mataman | Apr 16, 2019 9:45:30 AM
This assumes that Trump would primarily care about the ducks (and children) when he
approved a massive expulsion, rather that his image and "ah, in that case it would look bad
if we do not do something really decisive".
In any case, I was thinking why NYT would disclose something like that. The point is
that readers of Craig Murray (not so few, but mostly Scottish nationalists who are also
leftist and have scant possibilities and/or inclination to vote in USA) and MoonOfAlabama
would quickly catch a dead fish here, but 99.9% of the public is blissfully unaware of any
incongruences in the "established" Skripal narrative.
BTW, it is possible that the journalist who scribbled fresh yarn obtained from CIA did it
earnestly. Journalists do not necessarily follow stories that they cover -- scribbling from
given notes does not require overtaxing the precious attention span that can be devoted to
more vital cognitive challenges. I am lazy to find the link, but while checking for news on
Venezuela, I stumbled on a piece from Express, a British tabloid, where Guaido was named a
"figurehead of the oposition" supported by "450 Western countries". My interpretation was
that more literate journalists were moved for to more compelling stories as Venezuela went
to the back burner.
Yes, indeed, the Skripal Affair is one of the obviously contrived stunts we've seen.
Just outrageous in its execution. On a par with the US having a man who didn't even run for president of Venezuela swear
himself in and then pressure everyone to accept him as president.
Interesting, I had no idea Gina Haspel - aka, The Queen of Blood - played a role. I
thought it was all original dirty work by Britain's Theresa May. Boy, I hope people are through with the false notion that if women just get into
leadership, the world will become a better gentler place.
Macron was (afaik?) the only EU 'leader' who was quoted in the MSM as bruiting re. the
Skripal affair a message like:
.. no culpability in the part of Russia has been evidenced .. for now...
I suppose he was enjoined to shut his gob right quick (have been reading about brexit so
brit eng) as nothing more in that line was heard.
Hooo, the EU expelled a lot of Russ. diplomats, obeying the USuk, which certainly
created some major upsets on the ground.
Some were expelled, went into other jobs, other places, but then others arrived, etc.
The MSM has not made any counts - lists - of names numbers - etc. of R diplos on the job -
anywhere. As some left and then others arrived.
Once more, this was mostly a symbolic move, if extremely nasty, insulting, and
disruptive.
Theresa May's speech re. Novichok, Independent 14 March 2018:
.. on Monday I set out that Mr Skripal and his daughter were poisoned with a
Novichok: a military grade nerve agent developed by Russia. Based on this capability,
combined with their record of conducting state sponsored assassinations – including
against former intelligence officers whom they regard as legitimate targets – the UK
Government concluded it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for this reckless and
despicable act. ..
imo, the media has, once again, simply taken its lead from trump himself, & started
making things up completely. & you're absolutely correct in pointing out that, much
like trump's true believers, the msm's targeted audience never even notices...
Thanks for bringing this Skripal segment to light, b, as most of us don't read the NY
Times in any form. Haspel likely had a hand in the planning of the overall scheme of
which the Skripal saga and Russiagate are interconnected episodes. Clearly, the Money Power
sees the challenge raised by Russia/China/Eurasia as existential and is trying to counter
hybridly as it knows its wealth won't save it from Nuclear War.
after integrity initiative, we know the uk is full of shite on most everything... thus, the
msm will not be talking about integrity initiative..
what i didn't know is what @18 lysias pointed out.."Haspel was CIA station chief in
London in 2016, when U.S. and Brit intel agencies conspired to stop Trump's candidacy. In
her position, Haspel had to know about the plotting, more likely she participated in it.
That Brennan supported her argues for the latter." ditto jr's speculation @20 too...
so gaspel shows trump some cheap propaganda that she got from who??
my main problem with b's post - i tend to see it like kiza @23) is maintaining the idea
trump isn't in on all of this.. the thought trump is being duped by his underlings.. if he
was and it mattered, he would get rid of them.. the fact he doesn't says to me, he is in on
it - get russia, being the 24/7 game plan of the west here still..
Please stop listening to idiot libertarians and their "US is flat broke" meme.
The reality is that: so long as Americans transact in dollars, the United States government
can tax anytime it feels like by issuing new dollars via the Fed.
Equally, so long as 60% of the world's trade is conducted in dollars, this is tens to
hundreds of billions of dollars of additional taxation surface area.
The MMT people - I don't agree 100% with everything they say, but they do understand the
actual operation of fiat currency.
The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion to
hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that currency
devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy.
I doubt Haspel knew the ducks were fake - she was probably just given stuff to pass up
the chain.
It is a lot like John Kerry who was shown convincing satellite data of the BUK launch that
hit MH17 - but no one could be bothered to pass on even the launch site coordinates to the
JIT. I'm sure this stuff goes on all the time, and of course, once Teresa May has spoken in
Parliament, and Trump committed to expelling embassy staff, there is no way any alternative
version of the truth is possible.
Skripal of course was a colleague of Steele, and possibly the only person he asked to
get info for the dossier beyond what Nellie Ohr had already given him. His evidence might
have been crucial. The CIA and others have a strong motive to kill Skripal and a stronger
one to blame the Russians.
The fact that the 'Dirty Dossier' and the 'Skripal "story"' both
originate in one and the same small town in the UK, tells you all you need to know about
both.
"The people who want a hard currency are either wealthy (and understand that conversion
to hard currency cements their wealth) or are useful idiots who don't understand that
currency devaluation is the single easiest way to tax in a democracy."
The useful idiocy is most surprising among US farmers. In the 19th century they broadly
understood that fiat money was good for chronic low-wealth debtors like themselves, while
hard money was bad and a gold standard lethal. This was the basis of the Populist movement.
Nothing has changed financially, but today's farmers, and the low-wealth debtor class in
general, seem more likely to be goldbuggers than to have any knowledge of economics or of
their own political history.
karlof1 36
Once a faction becomes submerged in the Mammon theocracy and becomes nothing but
mercenary nihilists, thinking is no longer necessary or desirable, except to come up with
attractive, pseudo-plausible lies.
This certainly characterizes "the right" (including liberals), but they have no monopoly
on it. By now "the left" is nearly as thoughtless and instrumental on behalf of Mammon,
except to the extent that a few people are starting to really grapple with what it means to
have an intrinsically ecocidal and therefore suicidal civilization. That's really the only
thought frontier left, all else has been engulfed in Mammon, productionism, scientism and
technocracy.
I remind that Mussolini wasted his legislature.. 1 balmy after noon @ a roadside spot.
it made his government stronger.?
It is clear the USA, France, Israel and UK are fasting approaching ungovernable .. no
one in government can keep the lies of the other hidden, and none of the governed believes
anyone in government, the MSM, the MIC or the AIG (ATT, Intel and Google). ..
The actors in
government, their lawyers, playmates and corporations have become the laughing stock of the
rest of the world. Everyone in the government is covering for the behaviors of someone else
in government, the MSM has raised the price of a pencil to just under a million, stock
markets are bags of hot thin air, and everyone in side and outside of the centers of power
at all levels of government have lied thru their teeth so much that their teeth are melting
from the continuous flow of hot deceitful air.
Corrupt is now the only qualification for
political office, trigger happy screwball the only qualification for the police and the
military and . making progress is like trying to conduct a panty raid at a female nudist
camp.
John Anthony La Pietra , Apr 16, 2019 3:47:03 PM |
link
NATO has reverted to Cold War behavior and virtually no cooperation between the bloc and
Moscow exists, the Russian deputy FM says. There are no signs the situation will improve, since
the alliance is craving a new arms race.
Relations between NATO and Russia - or lack thereof - was the main topic of a long interview
with Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Aleksandr Grushko, published by RIA Novosti on Monday.
"Civil and military cooperation has ceased completely. NATO itself has dropped any positive
agenda in relations with Russia . It does not exist. And so far there are no signs that NATO
knows how to get out of this deadlock ," Grushko stated.
While cooperation between Russia and NATO has been put on hold before - in 1999 when the
bloc attacked Yugoslavia and in 2008, during the conflict between Georgia and South Ossetia -
the ongoing crisis is the longest one.
Since 2014, relations between NATO and Moscow have rapidly deteriorated and the military
bloc claimed there can be no "business as usual" after Moscow's reunification with Crimea.
Hitting back, Grushko said that confrontation-seeking has become "business as usual" for the
Western alliance.
"NATO has gone too far in pumping confrontation with Russia, and it is not yet clear when
and where common sense will prevail," the diplomat said, adding that the old, trusty 'Russian
threat' narrative turned out to be the best thing to reinvigorate the alliance.
"They've dusted off the Harmel doctrine of dialogue and deterrence. Yet, there's too much
deterrence and too little dialogue in this formula now."
The alliance is actively modernizing its infrastructure, honing the rapid troops
redeployment skills - primarily, on its "eastern flank" - basically, on Russia's borders. The
combined military spending of NATO is growing and it surpassed $1 trillion last year , Grushko
said, adding that Russia spends 22 times less on its military.
NATO countries - the US primarily - are pushing for a new arms and budget race, and the US
military-industrial complex is the main beneficiary of it. While NATO is eager to drag Russia
into it - to further peddle the 'Russian threat' narrative, Moscow will not follow the
path.
Even people on the fringe of the Jewish Israeli society, the Russian Israelis, were all for
Jewish nationalism and against socialism and Arabs. This is really silly. They are hardly
considered Jews, to begin with. The Ministry of Interior plans to check them for DNA and
whether they are Jewish at all.
The Russians are weak economically, and their participation in the national discourse is
minimal. There is not a single Russian on the national Israeli TV channels.
They have a party of their own, the party of Mr Lieberman. However, the main demands of Mr
Lieberman are (1) to bring the death penalty upon Arabs, (2) to bomb and invade Gaza, and (3)
to make Mr Lieberman the Minister of Defence. And the Russian Israelis voted for him – or
for Mr Netanyahu – anyway.
Israelis of Oriental origins who inhabit poor peripheral towns are similar to Russians. They
also vote for Netanyahu and for his nationalist right-wing party, Likud. They are proud they
vote against the Ashkenazi Blue-and-White Party, though all leaders of Likud are Ashkenazi
Jews.
Is there a chance to change things in Israel, with such a Parliament? Well, yes. A military
defeat can change minds, like it did in many countries many times. Otherwise, it is hard to
imagine what would cause Netanyahu to change his course in view of the US support, Saudi
friendship, Syrian weakness, and good election results. He is not for resolving conflicts, he
is for managing conflict, and he is doing that well.
Russia's Putin plays ball with Bibi, too. Perhaps he does not like Bibi's relentless attacks
on Syria, perhaps his heart goes for Palestinians, but he is a cautious statesman, and he does
not want to antagonise the man who can mobilise American Jews into an action against Russia.
There are enough American Jews against Russia and against Putin as things are; Putin does not
need more. Besides, the Israeli opposition is not keen on Putin; they are lining up with the US
Democrats and with Brussels Europeans. They called for direct intervention in Syria on the side
of 'moderate rebels', while Netanyahu had kept Israel out of Syrian War and did not obstruct
Putin's Syrian campaign.
Will Netanyahu annex the whole of the West Bank, as he said during the election campaign?
Probably not; as nothing will be obtained by such an act but making apartheid visible. Instead,
he is likely to annex every place where Jews live in the West Bank, turning the territory of
Palestine into a slug-eaten cabbage leaf. He also may annex Area C, a bigger part of
Palestinian territory presently under Israeli military control and Palestinian civilian
administration. The Jewish settlers demand it, for, they say, Palestinians damage the
contiguity of the Jewish settlements.
The Jewish religious parties came out stronger in the new parliament. They also enjoy a very
high natural growth with families of 5 to 8 children average. They are not eager to compete on
the labour market, and prefer to be paid for studying Talmud and having kids. While it may
annoy some Israelis, in my view, it is an internal issue of little interest or importance for
anybody outside the Jewish milieu.
Is there a possible solution for the conflict? It is definitely not the Deal of the Century
of Mr Jared Kushner, some yet undefined arrangement usually done with smoke and mirrors.
Probably One Democratic State, where Jews and non-Jews are equal, is the only possible
solution, as the place is too small to divide but large enough to share.
As people were forming up to stage this year's March 8 rally for women's rights in Kiev, a
group of about three dozen young men, clad in dark clothes, started harassing the marchers by
tearing off their lapel pins and ripping away their placards.
Some of the men tried to pull away a banner from Mariya Dmytriyeva, a well-known spokeswoman
for feminist causes. She resisted. "Woman, why are you so nervous?" they jeered at her.
Fortunately, she says, police intervened and separated them.
It's a familiar scene in Ukraine these days, where radical ultra-rightists are an
increasingly threatening presence on the streets. "I think that overall these groups are very
insignificant in size. But they are very radical and very loud," Ms. Dmytriyeva says. "If they
can get away with attacking us like that, it shows there is something dangerous there."
Though few in number overall, far-right groups operate with a high degree of impunity in
Ukrainian society, allowing them to harass and attack minorities and human rights advocates
without repercussions. Some worry that such groups, given their anti-democratic ideals,
paramilitary discipline, and freedom to operate, could have an outsize influence should Ukraine
return to political instability. Though the ultra-rightists were given much latitude due to
their help protecting the Maidan Revolution and the fledgling government that followed, now
they highlight a key weakness of the current system.
"During the Maidan there was a context that was comfortable for [the radical right]. During
the war [with rebels in the east], it was very comfortable," says Vyacheslav Likhachev, a
historian and expert on Ukraine's right-wing movements. "Today we do not have a context in
which a small minority, with street fighting skills, have the means to create instability. But
in case there is instability, they are a very dangerous factor."
Operating with
impunity
Ukraine's far-right groups, some of which include armed veterans of the war in Donbas, are
an extremely controversial topic. And despite considerable stabilization in Ukrainian society
over the past five years, the danger they pose appears to be growing.
Just a couple of days after the March 8 rally, scores of far-right activists belonging to
the new National Corps party attacked the motorcade of President Petro Poroshenko in the
Ukrainian city of Cherkasy,
injuring 19 police officers . In the past year, far-right organizations have carried out
over two dozen violent assaults on women's groups, LGBT activists, and Roma encampments that
have left many injured and at least one person dead. It is very rare,
activists say , that police intervene as they did in Ms. Dmytriyeva's case, much less bring
the attackers to justice.
Analysts say the strength of these groups derives mainly from the weakness of Ukraine's
post-Maidan state, or rather its reluctance to enforce law and order when it comes to the
depredations of radical rightists. That may be in part due to the role ultra-right fighters
played during the Maidan revolt against former President Viktor Yanukovych, as organized
defenders of the protest encampment and sometimes initiators of violence against
police.
Even more important is their status as war heroes who formed private battalions and
rushed to the front in 2014 to battle separatist rebels at a time when the Ukrainian Army was
in serious disarray. As a result they enjoy connections with authorities, and a level of social
respectability, that would probably not be the case otherwise.
It's important to point out that despite their high public visibility and the apparent
impunity with which they act on the streets, the far-right groups do not appear to represent
any social upsurge of radical nationalism. Indeed, a joint candidate put forward by five of
Ukraine's leading ultra-rightist groups in the March 31 first round of Ukrainian presidential
elections, Ruslan Koshulynskyi, won less than 2% of the votes.
Rather, the fear among many here is that if Ukraine's weak state institutions should again
suffer any sort of breakdown, these highly organized, disciplined, armed, violence-prone,
and ideologically determined groups might punch far above their weight in determining a
political outcome.
'We are not democrats'
Instability is a prospect that may not be far from the surface in post-Maidan Ukraine. The
Right Sector, a militant ultra-nationalist group that played a very prominent role during the
Maidan uprising, has since consolidated itself as a political party with an armed wing and a
youth movement. It may not be the largest right-wing movement in Ukraine, but it has maintained
its revolutionary sense of purpose and complete rejection of the existing order.
"We are not democrats. We participate in elections only because they are a step to
revolution," says Artyom Skoropadskiy, press spokesman of the Right Sector party. "We want to
change the whole system. New people, new order, new rules in the state system of Ukraine. We
oppose Russia, and we are against Ukraine joining the European Union and NATO. We want Ukraine
to be a self-sufficient, independent state."
The Right Sector backed Mr. Koshulynskyi's presidential bid simply because it offered an
opportunity for political agitation, he says, and the vote tally is of secondary interest.
"Our organization is designed to take power. If circumstances warrant, that could happen by
nondemocratic methods. Believe me, we are very capable of acting in extreme situations," he
adds. "At the Maidan we had only 300 activists, and look what we did. In fact, if you consider
that there was never more than 1 million people participating in the Maidan altogether, out of
a population of 42 million, it shows how things really work. The active minority always leads
the passive majority. Scenarios change, and we are ready. Our purpose is to save Ukraine."
The Right Sector, and other militant street groups such as C-14 and the newly created
National Corps, already pose a real and present danger to vulnerable groups of the population,
such as gay and transgender people, women's activists, Roma, as well as any dissidents who
might, rightly or wrongly,
be viewed as "pro-Russian."
Ulyana Movchan, director of Insight, a nongovernmental group that provides legal services
and other support to LGBT groups, says that people who do not belong to these vulnerable groups
of the population should wake up and be more concerned about what is happening.
"The problem is that these right-wing activists are armed; they have combat experience.
They are organized into illegal military groups," she says. "They are trying to control the
streets and maybe, in future, political life as well. We do not know what they might do. They
don't just pose a personal danger to certain activists, they are a threat to the whole
society."
Giving too much leeway to nationalists?
Many Ukrainian analysts argue that these new rightist groups are not "nationalist," but
rather racist, intolerant, and extreme social conservatives. But it may be a problem that more
mainstream Ukrainian nationalists, such as the Svoboda party – which does not participate
in street violence – tend to make heroes of 20th-century "fighters for Ukrainian
independence." Those include Stepan Bandera, whose fascist ideology, collaboration with the
Nazis, and participation in
wartime ethnic cleansing against Poles and Jews makes him and those like him poor role
models for modern Europe-bound Ukraine.
The Ukrainian parliament has passed legislation making it illegal to deny the hero status of
Mr. Bandera. In Kiev, a major boulevard was recently renamed "Bandera Prospekt." It should be
no surprise that groups like the Right Sector model themselves on such World War II-era
Ukrainian nationalist fighters.
"We are a Ukrainian nationalist group, in the image of Stepan Bandera," says Mr.
Skoropadskiy.
Tensions over these historical issues are real enough, especially in the more Russified
eastern Ukraine – where everyone's grandfather served in the Red Army – and they
may be part of the explanation for the very high first round vote for Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a
Russian-speaker from eastern Ukraine who plays down nationalist themes.
"During the past five years the government made more steps [to legitimize figures like Mr.
Bandera] than much of society is willing to accept," says Mr. Likhachev. "Most of society feels
we don't need Lenin or Bandera. But you can't really mobilize people politically with these
issues. There has been no big public movement against it."
More significant is the strong attraction these new radical right groups seem to exercise
over Ukrainian youth. They articulate a cause. They have slick promotional materials and
maintain a big infrastructure of sports clubs, training camps, and regular activities.
"I see how many young people want to be part of a movement," says Ms. Movchan. "It's kind of
fashionable these days to join something, and here they are with all kinds of tools of
recruitment, such as fight clubs, training grounds, and parades. They bring out the worst
emotions, like homophobia and racism, to channel their aggression. I wish we could broaden our
own audience to show young people there are other ways to be active, like fighting for human
rights."
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George
W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible
for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road
to Hell is paved with good intentions.
For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional
sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to
need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???
I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with
more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send
someone else's sons to war."
You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.
You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive
the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason
why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas
a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.
To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able
to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't
be president.
More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written
about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that
as well as a special counsel's report.
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove
their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.
The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog
is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field
(medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though
systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you
have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that
catch the errors.
Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional
complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades
ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide
down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long
gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world
and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't
matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did
not come home; all died at their own hands."
Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?
The navel gazing never stops.
Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions
of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government
in the world on their side.
Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many
times!
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did
you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way?
Not possible.
Just a cynical take, but implying that there are lessons to be learned from previous or present wars that should keep us from
engaging in future wars presumes that the goal is to, where possible, actually avoid war.
It also suggests a convenient, simplistic narrative that the military/DOD is incompetent and stupid, and unable to learn from
previous engagements.
I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military; if it seems as though there is no
plan, no objective, no victory for these engagements, maybe that is because the only objectives and victory are to provide practical
war training for our troops, test equipment and tactics, keep defense contractors employed and the Pentagon's budget inflated,
and to project power and provide a convenient excuse for proximity to our 'real' enemies.
Draping these actions under a pretense of spreading 'peace and democracy' is just a pretense and, as we can see by our track
record, has nothing to do with actual victory. "Victory", depending on who you ask, is measured in years of engagement and dollars
spent, period.
And because it is primarily taking place in the far away and poorly understood Middle East, it is never going to be enough
of an issue with voters for politicians to have to seriously contend with.
This person is a crybaby. At 49 he went to a war that most rational people knew already, was an immoral, illegal waste of people,
time and money. But now he wants to whine about PTSD. I have the same opinion about most soldiers who fought there also. Nobody
made them volunteer for that junk war so quit whining when things get a little hard
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George
W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible
for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road
to Hell is paved with good intentions.
For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional
sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to
need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???
I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with
more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send
someone else's sons to war."
You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.
You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive
the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason
why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas
a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.
To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able
to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't
be president.
More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written
about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that
as well as a special counsel's report.
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove
their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.
The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog
is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field
(medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though
systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you
have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that
catch the errors.
Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional
complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades
ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide
down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long
gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world
and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't
matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did
not come home; all died at their own hands."
Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?
The navel gazing never stops.
Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions
of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government
in the world on their side.
Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many
times!
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did
you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way?
Not possible.
Just a cynical take, but implying that there are lessons to be learned from previous or present wars that should keep us from
engaging in future wars presumes that the goal is to, where possible, actually avoid war.
It also suggests a convenient, simplistic narrative that the military/DOD is incompetent and stupid, and unable to learn from
previous engagements.
I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military; if it seems as though there is no
plan, no objective, no victory for these engagements, maybe that is because the only objectives and victory are to provide practical
war training for our troops, test equipment and tactics, keep defense contractors employed and the Pentagon's budget inflated,
and to project power and provide a convenient excuse for proximity to our 'real' enemies.
Draping these actions under a pretense of spreading 'peace and democracy' is just a pretense and, as we can see by our track
record, has nothing to do with actual victory. "Victory", depending on who you ask, is measured in years of engagement and dollars
spent, period.
And because it is primarily taking place in the far away and poorly understood Middle East, it is never going to be enough
of an issue with voters for politicians to have to seriously contend with.
This person is a crybaby. At 49 he went to a war that most rational people knew already, was an immoral, illegal waste of people,
time and money. But now he wants to whine about PTSD. I have the same opinion about most soldiers who fought there also. Nobody
made them volunteer for that junk war so quit whining when things get a little hard
"... According to the Army's website, the Brigade is a combined "Regular and Army Reserve" unit, which aims to challenge the "difficulties of modern warfare" through "non-lethal engagement" and "legitimate non-military levers". ..."
"... In a nod to its social media purpose, the website adds that the 77th Brigade collects, creates and disseminates "digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks". ..."
"... Journalists, social media experts and researchers are listed as potential recruits. ..."
A SCOTTISH Labour candidate
and former Better Together boss has been called on to explain her links to a "military
propaganda unit" within the British Army.
Kate Watson is believed to be part of the Berkshire-based 77th Brigade, which was described
by one newspaper as a "special force of Facebook warriors".
She declined to comment, but
David Miller, a professor of political sociology at Bristol University ,
said: "The 77th Brigade is involved in manipulation of the media including using fake online
profiles.
Formed in 2015, the 77th Brigade specialises in non-lethal warfare in the age of 24/7
rolling news and social media platforms.
With Vladimir Putin's Russia being accused of exploiting the openness of Western democracies
– pumping out conspiracy theories on state-owned TV stations, and spreading fake stories
on Twitter and Facebook – the military has been determined to regain control of the
narrative.
In a November article, Wired magazine reported that the Brigade's soldiers do not fight, but
instead "edit videos, record podcasts and write viral posts".
Given access to the unit, the magazine said of the office: "There was a suite full of large,
electronic sketch pads and multi-screened desktops loaded with digital editing software.
"The men and women of the 77th knew how to set up cameras, record sound, edit videos.
Plucked from across the military, they were proficient in graphic design, social media
advertising, and data analytics.
"Some may have taken the army's course in Defence Media Operations, and almost half were
reservists from civvy street, with full-time jobs in marketing or consumer research."
According to the Army's website, the Brigade is a combined "Regular and Army Reserve" unit,
which aims to challenge the "difficulties of modern warfare" through "non-lethal engagement"
and "legitimate non-military levers".
Using marketing jargon, the Army says that the 77th conducts "audience, actor and adversary
analysis", as well as "supporting counter-adversarial information activity".
In a nod to its social media purpose, the website adds that the 77th Brigade collects,
creates and disseminates "digital and wider media content in support of designated tasks".
Journalists, social media experts and researchers are listed as potential recruits.
As director of operations at Better Together, Watson played a key day-to-day role in an
organisation set up to keep Scotland in the
United Kingdom.
After the referendum, she got a job working for Consequitur, a consultancy owned by former
Labour shadow foreign secretary Douglas Alexander. According to The Courier newspaper, she also
graduated with a postgraduate qualification in terrorism studies in 2013.
She also has political ambitions, having stood for Labour in Glasgow East at the last
General Election and
losing by 75 votes. She has since been selected to contest the same seat.
An online left-wing magazine, in a write-up of the fiercely-contested Labour selection
contest, claimed in June last year that she is part of the 77th Brigade, which Miller told this
newspaper is a "secretive military propaganda unit".
Another politician linked to the unit is Tory junior defence minister Mark Lancaster. The
MP's website states that he has been "selected as Deputy Commander 77 Brigade".
Speaking about the Brigade in Parliament
last week, Lancaster said: "We have focused on just one aspect of the role of 77th Brigade,
which is web ops, but it also encompasses some of the traditional capabilities we also have, be
that what we would know as CIMIC – civil-military co-operation – the outreach group
or the media group.
"By bringing all those components together, you are effectively updating what was a
20th-century capability for the 21st century and the introduction of the web and the internet.
There is no doubt that information advantage is very much a key component of all the work that
we will be doing in the future.
"I will give one example of interest to us as politicians, where recently I went on an
exercise. Traditionally, military exercises tend to escalate upwards, but actually the key
component there to allow de-escalation, which politicians are always interested in, was the use
of information advantage and the web."
Between February 2017 and February 2018, 29 personnel from 77th Brigade were "forward
deployed" on operations, according to a written parliamentary answer.
Meanwhile, it was reported in December that a security alert had been issued at UK military
bases in Britain after a Russian TV crew was seen outside the 77th Brigade's headquarters. A
journalist was spotted filming close to the Brigade's 25ft barbed wire perimeter fence, but he
later denied trying to infiltrate the army base.
The MoD said the journalist's "suspicious" behaviour was monitored by the base's security
systems.
Editor's Note: @ProfessorsBlogg tweeted 14/4 a translation of "Mi
Amigo Julian Assange", authored by Ms Alicia Castro, formerly Argentina's ambassador in the
UK and Venezuela. The text in Spanish appeared the same day in Página 12 ,
Argentina. Text translated by Prof. Marcello Ferrada de Noli, April 14, 2019.
In 2012, the year I arrived in London as ambassador, Julian Assange obtained the
diplomatic asylum of Ecuador and settled in the embassy on Hans Crescent Street. That day the
embassy was surrounded by cars of the British police and some agents struggled to enter. My
first reflection was to send some trays with meat pasties -"empanadas"- and sweet pastries to
alleviate the doings of ambassador Ana Alban. During the following days, together we organized
a meeting of Latin American ambassadors, to follow from the legation of Ecuador the session of
the OAS [the Organization of American States] where the asylum of Assange was discussed. We
sat, for the first time, around that dark table, in an austere room. Suddenly, and discreetly,
as we all were waiting, Julian Assange burst in. He was already a legend. I expressed to him
how much, we the Latin Americans, had to thank for his revelations about the diplomatic cables
that showed the deep and perverse degree of interference by the United States government in our
affairs. I myself had as proof the cable that the ambassador of the United States in Argentina,
Lino Gutierrez, wrote about my appointment as ambassador in Venezuela, where specific details
of my actions are described, which I did not even remember.
That day began a long series of encounters that I had with Julian throughout the four years
of my mission in London and in subsequent years, when I visited him several times. Our first
conversation revolved around the accusations in Sweden about sexual abuse; We spoke frankly,
and I concluded that it was a fabrication of two unscrupulous women with whom he had casual
relationships, who had been manipulated to accuse him of criminal doings. Sweden demanded his
extradition to respond to these allegations -they never pressed charges against him- while his
lawyers tirelessly requested that he could testify in London, since Sweden would extradite him
to the United States for revealing state secrets.
At that time, the embassy was crowded with interesting people who visited him; philosophers,
politicians, musicians, designers. And I could regret that I had missed the visit of Zizek,
Yoko Ono or Yannis Varoufakis, but in a next meeting I was meeting the designer Vivienne
Westwood, the human rights lawyer Helena Kennedy, the filmmaker Ken Loach, Bianca Jagger, and
mythical investigative journalists -such as the American Gavin MacFadyen, creator of the Centre
for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) and the Australian John Pilger. Many of them are my friends
until today. We tried to alleviate [Julian Assange's] confinement with any excuse: we
celebrated his birthday parties, his 100 days of asylum -for which I brought a cake with the
number 100-, my daughter and I went with enthusiasm to assemble Julian's Christmas tree,
and I also accompanied him at some New Year Eve festivities. end of the year accompanying him.
Ecuador came to be at the centre of London's political and cultural life, and former President
Rafael Correa was recognized by the progressive sectors as a definite defender of human
rights.
In each of my long conversations with Julian I learned something, that he is a man obsessed
with a clear and uncommon mission: to democratize the truth. Unlike other platforms, Wikileaks
does not reveal information related to a certain political affiliation , but publishes the
information it receives, once it is accurately deciphered and checked, and without revealing
the source. It has published more than 10 million classified documents revealing the secrets
that once belonged to a small elite linked to the military industrial complex
As time went by, the threats at the embassy were decreasing; the next ambassador prescribed
stricter visiting conditions; there was hardly any food one night when former Foreign Minister
Ricardo Patiño visited him -when he caught me by surprise that he tirelessly sings a
whole Latin American repertoire, being totally abstemious, and [also] the grace of Judge
Baltasar Garzon (one of the Assange team's lawyers) in dancing flamenco . We tried
unsuccessfully that Julian would sing a syllable or dance, but we never succeeded. He relaxed
though and accompanied us with that radiant smile of his, which is lost today. One day I
realized that Julian had not touched an animal for years, and I began to visit him with my dog
Mandiyu, whom he sat on his lap and became fond of, as he did of "empanadas"
[meat pasties] and our Malbec wine, which I brought him occasionally.
Then we succeeded that he would be allowed to have a kitten, whose company he greatly
enjoyed, and whose presence at the embassy has generated one of the most odd and obtuse amongst
the complaints raised by the current president of Ecuador. Lenin Moreno took away [Julian
Assange's] diplomatic asylum in violation of international law and the resolution of UN
Committee on Arbitrary Detention which established in 2015 that Assange's detention is
arbitrary and illegal and that he should be released.
The last times I saw him, his situation was worrisome. He was being spied on, and had a
ribbon hanging from his neck with a series of pen drives. We talked in the dining room, around
that table where we met for the first time, raising the volume of the radio and writing part of
what we wanted to say, exchanging two notebooks and covering our heads to avoid cameras and
microphones. He would never give up.
Julian was violently dragged out from the embassy of Ecuador and taken captive by the police
of the decadent Teresa May, while he was shouting that the United Kingdom must resist the
pressure of Trump. That image destroys me and I cannot see it without crying, nor can I stop
thinking of my friend now unjustly confined in prison.
Lenin Moreno has agreed with Donald Trump the rendition [of Assange] to the United States,
and Assange will have to face an extradition trial, accused of "conspiracy" for alleged
cooperation with the former intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to decipher the password of a
US Defence Ministry computer belonging to the Secret Internet Protocol Network (SIPRNet). Trump
and May defend and implement the espionage on the private life of the citizens and the opacity
of the States.
Today, that all of us are victims of the gross manipulation of information, subject to media
operations designed to demonize and wage causes against political and social leaders , in the
middle of a war of "fake news" that distorts reality, it is shocking and paradoxical that a
journalist is imprisoned for acting as a soldier of the truth.
Assange is not American [citizen] and the Wikileaks platform is a foreign news
organization. The idea that the government of the United States can reach and extradite a
member of any media in the world is terrifying. Never in the history of the United States has
an editor been persecuted for presenting truthful information to the public. It creates the
precedent that any journalist can be extradited, tried and imprisoned for publishing accurate
information about the United States. The freedom of the press does not consist only in the
right to publish, but also in the right to read, in the right to be informed, in the right to
be informed that we have, as readers.
This universal right has its best defender in Julian Assange, a hero of a new type, for whose
freedom we will tirelessly claim, together with the men and women of the world who believe that
the truth will set us free.
"... For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork??? ..."
"... I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy ..."
"... To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't be president. ..."
"... Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field (medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that catch the errors. ..."
"... Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors. ..."
"... "Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands." ..."
"... Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government in the world on their side. ..."
"... It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many times! ..."
"... The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way? Not possible. ..."
The invasion of Iraq was a mistake of historic dimensions. The "weapons of mass destruction" excuse was a lie. When I see George
W. Bush smiling on TV, I want to puke. Likewise, I cannot view an image of Lyndon Johnson without revulsion. They are both responsible
for much death and suffering. I have heard people try to excuse both of them, with the statement that "they meant well." The road
to Hell is paved with good intentions.
For Christ's sake! The "Deep State"!?! With a well documented pathological liar and a seemingly endless supply of professional
sycophants in our government selling our nation to the highest bidder in plain sight why in the world do you folks continue to
need grand delusions of demons in the woodwork???
I have no reason to believe Comey, Clapper and Brennen have served this nation with honor and integrity in dealing with
more responsibility than that required to sit safely at home and blabber about as the victim of some grand conspiracy.
The war In Afghanistan would have ended 15 years ago if the sons of members of Congress were being drafted. "It's easy to send
someone else's sons to war."
You left out the phrase "anything other than" following the phrase "have served this nation with" in your last sentence.
You forgot to express your confidence in John McCain. Good luck with that. McCain's top aide flew to a foreign city to receive
the Steele dossier, gave it to the senator, who then gave it to the FBI–as per Steele's script, I assume. It's another reason
why we need a special counsel to look into the FBI's role. A special counsel can hardly omit the McCain piece of the puzzle, whereas
a regular prosecutor can easily ignore it and cover McCain's keister.
To the extent that McCain comes out looking bad in a special counsel's report, Trump haters like you will no longer be able
to talk about Trump's supposed terrible character in dissing noble John McCain, and holding it up as Exhibit A of why Trump shouldn't
be president.
More than anything else concerning the FBI's election shenanigans, the McCain-Steele nexus–specifically the report written
about it by a special counsel–could expose the deep state's modus operandi. Not even an inspector general's report can do that
as well as a special counsel's report.
Your book will go out of print. In 10 to 20 years it will be reprinted and sell well. It takes that long for people to remove
their heads from their nether regions and be willing to contemplate the errors made.
The real irony is that we know better. There is a vast body of literature on major cognitive errors, and the whole catalog
is on display in the debacle described. Our failures of statecraft are quite analogous to the ongoing errors in my field
(medicine), well described in "To Err is Human." We've made a lot of progress in medicine in addressing them, mostly though
systems engineering. That's because the tendency toward these errors is a result of how human brains are wired, and if you
have a human brain, no matter how smart or well educated you are, you have those tendencies. The key is to create systems that
catch the errors.
Now we have to figure out how to create systems to constrain politicians, and especially the military-industrial-Congressional
complex (Eisenhower's actual original term), from making those errors.
I commiserate with your disillusioning journey because I went through a similar odyssey into self-awareness like yours many decades
ago. I served as a medical corpsman in Vietnam (31 May 1967 – 31 May 1968). It's all been downhill from there. A gradual slide
down the slippy slope of history in our decline as a nation. There's not much one can really do. But at my age, I will be long
gone when our country hits burns and crashes as it hits bottom.
"Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that traveling to the other side of the world
and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't
matter that I might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in, three soldiers did
not come home; all died at their own hands."
Enough books and movies about those poor damaged American boys yet?
The navel gazing never stops.
Here is a thought; the unprovoked American aggression in Iraq wrecked Iraq! There is no comparison between the millions
of dead, dispossessed, displaced, terrorized and radicalized Iraqis and a few thousand PTSD cases with the richest government
in the world on their side.
Get over yourselves! Honestly! It's like a pimp complaining about bruised knuckles on account of hitting a woman too many
times!
The title of your book sounds like "Invading Iraq was a Good Idea but the Implementation was Bad and I Couldn't Fix It". Did
you really think we could invade a sovereign country based on lies and win "hearts and minds" if we just did it the right way?
Not possible.
Just a cynical take, but implying that there are lessons to be learned from previous or present wars that should keep us from
engaging in future wars presumes that the goal is to, where possible, actually avoid war.
It also suggests a convenient, simplistic narrative that the military/DOD is incompetent and stupid, and unable to learn from
previous engagements.
I wonder if the Middle East is nothing more than a live-fire laboratory for the military; if it seems as though there is no
plan, no objective, no victory for these engagements, maybe that is because the only objectives and victory are to provide practical
war training for our troops, test equipment and tactics, keep defense contractors employed and the Pentagon's budget inflated,
and to project power and provide a convenient excuse for proximity to our 'real' enemies.
Draping these actions under a pretense of spreading 'peace and democracy' is just a pretense and, as we can see by our track
record, has nothing to do with actual victory. "Victory", depending on who you ask, is measured in years of engagement and dollars
spent, period.
And because it is primarily taking place in the far away and poorly understood Middle East, it is never going to be enough
of an issue with voters for politicians to have to seriously contend with.
This person is a crybaby. At 49 he went to a war that most rational people knew already, was an immoral, illegal waste of people,
time and money. But now he wants to whine about PTSD. I have the same opinion about most soldiers who fought there also. Nobody
made them volunteer for that junk war so quit whining when things get a little hard
I recently spoke to some college students who, I realized, were in fifth grade when I got on
a plane to Iraq. They now study that stuff in history classes like "Opportunities and Errors:
21st-Century America in the Middle East." About halfway through our conversation, I realized
it's coming up on 10 years since I first went to Iraq. Now that's real history.
I was a Foreign Service Officer then, a diplomat, embedded with the U.S. Army at a series of
forward operating bases and in charge of a couple of reconstruction teams, small parts of a
complex failure to rebuild the Iraq we wrecked. I ended up writing a book about it all,
explaining in tragicomic terms how we failed (those "Errors").
The book, We Meant Well: How I Helped
Lose the Battle for the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People was -- and wasn't --
well-received. People laughed at the funny parts, but my message -- it didn't work and here's
why -- was largely dissipated at the time (2012) by government and media propaganda centered on
The Surge. That was David Petraeus's plan to pacify the Sunnis and push al-Qaeda away, while
clearing, holding, and building across the country, apparently to make room so ISIS and the
Iranians could move in.
Meanwhile, the new American president, elected in part based on his "no" vote on the war in
2003, proclaimed it all a victory and started bringing the troops home even while I was still
in Iraq. Meanwhile my employer, the U.S. Department of State, was unhappy with my book. After a
year-long
process , State pushed me into early retirement. My career was history.
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Iraq wrecked me, even though I somehow didn't expect it to. I was foolish to think that
traveling to the other side of the world and spending a year seeing death and poverty, bearing
witness to a war, learning how to be mortared at night and deciding it didn't matter that I
might die before breakfast, wasn't going to change me. Of the military units I was embedded in,
three soldiers did not come home; all died at their own hands. Around us, Iraqis blew
themselves up alongside children. Everyone was a potential killer and a potential target. I did
this at age 49, on antidepressants and with a good family waiting back home. I cannot imagine
what it would have done to 18-year-old me. And I had it easier than most, and much easier than
many.
People asked in line at Trader Joe's and in interviews on semi-important TV shows, "Was it
all worth it to you?" I always answered yes. I'm not important, I said, but the story is. And
now we're making the same mistakes in Afghanistan. The only way to even start to justify it was
to think there might be some meaning behind it all. It didn't do anything for me but fill my
soul with vodka but maybe somehow it helped?
See, my book wasn't aimed at cataloging the failures in Iraq per se, but in trying to make
sure we didn't do the same thing in Afghanistan. The initial title wasn't We Meant Well,
but Lessons for Afghanistan from the Reconstruction of Iraq . The early drafts were
pretentious scholarly stuff, outlining our mistakes. Harvard Business School-like case studies.
Maps. Footnotes. It would have sold maybe five copies, and so my editors encouraged me to add
more funny parts. NPR's Fresh Air actually added a laugh track to my
interview . I figured I'd get the lessons across with humor more effectively anyway. In
such situations, you have to think that way. You can't believe that what you went through
didn't matter and keep getting out of bed every morning.
I now know officially that it did not matter. It was pointless. SIGAR shows I accomplished
nothing.
SIGAR is the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction, a government oversight
body that is supposed to prevent waste, fraud, and mismanagement of the billions of dollars
being spent rebuilding Afghanistan but that has its hands full just keeping a CVS
receipt-length history of what's wrong. Sound familiar?
SIGAR just released its " 2019 High-Risk List ," which
points out especially egregious things that will follow in the wake of any peace agreement in
Afghanistan. Here are some quoted highlights:
set the
cash ablaze on the streets of Kabul for all the good it will do."
That last line really got me. In my book, I'd written, "While a lot of the money was spent
in big bites at high levels through the Embassy, or possibly just thrown into the river when no
one could find a match to set it on fire ." Had SIGAR read what I'd written? Or was the
joke just so obvious that we'd both come to the same punchline 10 years and two countries
apart?
Word for word as in Iraq, and after over 17 years of American effort, the U.S. has failed to
establish a viable government in Afghanistan, eliminate the local
insurgents/patriots/residents, establish a civil society, tamp down corruption, and ensure some
sort of national defense. Afghanistan has almost no chance of survival except as a Taliban
narcoland with financial support needed indefinitely to avoid whatever "worse" would be in that
calculus.
But there still are semi-believers. One former State Department colleague is on her fourth
assignment in Kabul, roughly half her career. Her job is to liaise with the few NATO officials
still hanging around. She says it's easy work; they've known each other for years. She's heard
we're making progress.
Around the same time as the SIGAR report, the Army War College released its history of the Iraqi Surge, a quagmire of dense
prose that I'm only about halfway through, but so far no mention of the impact of
reconstruction. The theme seems to be that the Army had some good ideas but the politicians got
in the way. Fair enough, but they misspelled Vietnam as I-r-a-q all throughout.
The post-9/11 wars have metastasized across three presidencies so far. Pick the thing you
detest most about Bush, Obama, and Trump, and complain about how it was never investigated
enough and how there weren't enough hearings. And then I'll disagree, for most everything that
happened and continues to happen in Iraq and Afghanistan has gone uninvestigated, unheard of,
and unpunished. It's ancient history.
We all want to believe that what we did, what we didn't do, the moral injury, the PTSD, the
fights with spouses, the kid at home we smacked too hard when she wouldn't eat her green beans,
all of what we saw and heard, mattered. You read that SIGAR report and tell me how. Because
basically I'm history now.
Peter Van Buren, a 24-year State Department veteran, is the author of We Meant Well : How I Helped Lose the Battle for
the Hearts and Minds of the Iraqi People and Hooper's War : A Novel of WWII Japan.
"... In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of the US military. ..."
"... And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons belong to them. ..."
You ask a question about European political class's perception and defence of European
interests that is as perplexing here as it is in regard to Libya and Syria, to name just
these. There was at least some coherent defence of international law and principle during
Bush II's lead up to the Iraq war, but Europe's defence of law and Europe's common interests
seem to have ceased at some point since then.
Because, like the US European government is a tool of the Global Power Elite, it is
nothing more than pantomime. The West is fully owned and operated by the global elite.
In books going back to C Wright Mills' The Power Elite in 1956 to SUPERCLASS by David
Rothkopf, and GIANTS: The Global Power Elite by Peter Phillips clearly outline just how
powerful the Global Elites really are.
In SUPERCLASS we learn that this class of people actually own and control the three
largest Western religions and many of the secondary ones - they all preach obedience to
authority as paramount. They also own the drugs trade around the world. 95% of the world
supply of opium comes out of Afghanistan under the watchful eye of the Elite through use of
the US military.
There is one and only one Western empire - that of the Global Elites.
85% of the valuable assets in the world are controlled by the Global Elites.
There is no offsetting force against them, there simply does not exist today a force
capable of challenging their ownership of the world.
And just as an aside to any historians out there, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the
Twenty-first Century shows how a critical mass of capital was had formed 500 years ago and
has grown consistently at a rate greater than the general economy ever sense. He showed that
before, during and after the French Revolution and later the US "revolution" the core capital
of the west made profits. These revolutions, like government today, were pantomimes whilew
the real power profited from the slaughter. The Elite prosper from war that is why there has
been continual war and slaughter on their behalf sinse August 6, 1945. The nuclear weapons
belong to them.
This slur "authoritarian state" is now peddled by neocons as synonym for the "countries we do not like"
This neocons in not very inventive... We already saw this line from Robert Kagan, who
actually is a better writer. This neocon/neolib pressitute can't even use proper terms such as
"neoliberalism" and "Washington consensus"
And slide to far-right nationalism and neo-fascism is direct result of neoliberalism
dominance for the last 40 years (since Carter) and sliding of the standard of living of workers
and the middle class.
Notable quotes:
"... Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world. ..."
As international rivalry intensifies, the core strategic task for the U.S.-led democratic
community is to contain the geopolitical influence and political disruption caused by
authoritarian great powers, namely China and Russia. Yet that task is made all the harder
because illiberalism -- and sympathy for those illiberal powers -- is simultaneously surging
among key actors on the political right. If the U.S. and its allies are to succeed in the great
global rivalry of the 21st century, the right must confront the threat of illiberalism within
its ranks -- just as the left did during a previous twilight struggle in the 20th century.
... ... ...
This time, the threat is not expansionist communism, but a combination of autocracy and
geopolitical revisionism. China has been moving toward a dystopian future of high-tech
authoritarianism, as it pushes for greater power and influence overseas. Putin's Russia has
consolidated an illiberal oligarchy, while using information warfare, political meddling and
other tools to subvert liberal democracies in Europe, the U.S. and beyond.
Both countries have touted the virtues of their systems, while arguing that Western
values are a source of decadence, amorality and disorder in the Western world.
... ... ...
It is not for nothing that the political scientist Marc Plattner has
written that the gravest threat to liberal democracy today is “that it will end up
being abandoned by substantial segments of the right.” And even in the U.S., there are
alarming signs that conservative commitment to the norms of liberal democracy is under
strain.
Communism was not a threat, but actually benefited the world in many ways.
It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair share of wealth and
income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed, capitalism returned to its avaricious roots,
resulting in stagnant wages for the working class. And the pauperization of the working class
in recent decades is the cause for the current revolt against liberal capitalism.
So it was the competition from communism that was helping capitalism to stay healthy. Without
it capitalism has degenerated into a Dickensian dystopia. We should therefore welcome any
alternative socio-economic models to liberal capitalism.
It was communism that put pressure on capitalism to provide labor a fair
share of wealth and income. As soon as Soviet communism collapsed,
capitalism returned to
Thats a great point Che.
I have never ever looked at it from that angle.
Interesting.
Robert Kagan of the Brookings Institution, who has long been a leading conservative
intellectual, warns that this disillusion with liberal democracy “is clearly present
among American conservatives, and not just among the ‘alt-right.’
Honest and real conservatives are far and fewer in today's MAGA/tea party infested GOP.
Forget career politicians like Ted Cruz or McConnell, even the previously decent conservative
think tanks/pundits like from NR or Erik Erickson or others have all given up on any
principles and just bow at the altar of Trump now.
No they haven’t, Trump decided to put McConnell in charge so of course the
#neverTrumpers like the McConnell presidency...which consists of appointing Republican judges
at record pace and little else.
The biggest need is to resist holy warriors like Hal Brands who want to destroy the world
if it resists their version of revealed truth. They are the biggest threat to the human
future. The United States has to learn to live in a world that it cannot control. The
American goal should be to work towards a constructive human future not some kind of holy war
to impose American control on the rest of the world. The United States is the biggest
military spender. In recent history, It has been the world's global aggressor.
It has an
history of wars that have made little difference whether America won or lost them. Perhaps
the United States could succeed with some kind of genocide that wiped out all of the parts of
the world that refuse to accept American supremacy. But, short of that kind of disgrace, the
United States is not going to succeed in achieving any meaningful goal through war. As long
as America does not destroy the world, the future is going to be determined by economic
competition and the destinies that the people of different parts of the world choose for
themselves.
I had wondered if it was noticed the Liberalism was dying. The world has turned hard
right, with all the anger, nationalism, do-as-I-say, and social intolerance.
I don't even the children of today.
I might suggest that liberals themselves are destroying their freedoms with illogical
illiberal liberalism.
YOU can't do that, say that, act like that, think like that...no no no...we must act and
be correct, nice, polite, all forgiving and never critical.
Huh?
The freedoms that so many of us marched for, fought for, voted for, sang about (thank gawd
the music still lives), got bloody for, even died for, are slipping away quicker than you can
say me, me, me...it's all about me.
Maybe...small maybe...our youth can once again awaken America and the world's conscience.
Maybe? Maybe not!
Wha? It seems our LIttle Cultural Revolution is just warming up. Wait till AOC et al are
all growed up.
"This is a moment when the “free world” needs to be strong and united."
Is this the same "free" world that jails grandmothers over contested historical views?
That has reneged on free speech?
Thanks to a truly ethnomasochistic immigration policy, I assure you that this will not
happen. The West will be lucky if squeaks through this period without a civil war.
"... Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing In Defense of Empire . Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. ..."
"... Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they had ruled Africa. ..."
"... Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view of social justice.... ..."
"... The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came to be nations. ..."
"... So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel. ..."
"... This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get richer that is why they went to war. ..."
"... Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. Just more dumbing down the "stupid class". ..."
"... The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general. ..."
"... In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war. ..."
"... And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire, and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their profit. NOTHING MORE. ..."
"... You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming. ..."
"... It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. ..."
Neocon Robert Kaplan is writing
In Defense of Empire
. Empire is good, he believes, even for those who a ruled by it without having any representation. The lunacy of his arguments can
be show best when one substitute the object of his essay:
Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often been provided by slavery, Western or Eastern. Anarchy reigned
in the interregnums. To wit, the British may have failed in Baghdad, Palestine, and elsewhere, but the larger history of the British
slaveholdership is one of providing a vast armature of stability, fostered by sea and rail communications, where before there
had been demonstrably less stability.
...
But slavery is now seen by global elites as altogether evil, despite slaveholdership having offered the most benign form of
order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable minimum.
Compared
with slaveholdership, democracy is a new and uncertain phenomenon. Even the two most estimable democracies in modern history,
the United States and Great Britain, were slaveholdership for long periods. "As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership
was born before the United States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto. Following their
initial settlement, and before their incorporation as states, the western territories were nothing less than slaveholdership possessions
of Washington, D.C. No surprise there: slaveholdership confers a loose and accepted form of sovereignty, occupying a middle ground
between anarchy and full state control.
...
Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of slavery
order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic
heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.
...
That, I submit, would be a policy direction that internalizes both the drawbacks and the benefits of slaveholdership, not as
it has been conventionally thought of, but as it has actually been practiced throughout history.
It is somewhat frightening that people believing such nonsense have influence in political circles.
In October of 2001, Max Boot wrote a Weekly Standard piece, "
The Case for
American Empire ," that featured perhaps the most representative neoconservative-authored sentence of all time:
Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets ."
GENERAL PLAN EAST Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
By Mark Mazower (Allen Lane 2008)
"Hitler's empire was not, of course, simply a continuation of the Habsburg legacy. There were many other factors, not least
the persistent envy in German circles after 1919 of the other imperial powers: empire still seemed attractive to those who did
not have one, or one large enough, and Mazower shows how Japanese and Italian imperial ambitions meshed with German in trying
to divide the world up anew, as it had been divided by European states for four hundred years. The absence of any clear planning
or forethought also found Hitler dragging ex-colonial officials back into public life to try to rule Eastern Europe the way they
had ruled Africa."
isn't he married to Victoria "Fuck the EU" Nuland?
if it was Kagan , yes, but as already pointed above, it's Robert "how we would fight china" KaPLan... Let's say it's the KK
brotherhood of lunatic warhawks
Racism is not at all a legacy of slavery but a constitutive and sustaining element of the White Supremacy system estab lished
by European power during the centuries of trans-Atlantic enslavement of Black Africans. Hence its extreme resistance to eradication.
Racism is, certainly, not a "residual legacy" in the passive sense of the dead hand of the past. It is not like a motion imparted
to an object by an impulse withdrawn long ago; a motion sustained entirely by inertia. Because it is a constitutive element, it
has been necessary to systematically apply force and fraud to maintain, in mutant forms, this vital pillar of white supremacy.
Accordingly, new forms of "slave trade" and slavery as well as new structures of raci
sm are still being elaborated and justified, even today, as they have been, whenever needed, since the 16th century.
For example, on Nov. 11, 2006, in Philadelphia, at a Wharton Business School conference on business in Africa, World Trade
Organization representative Hanniford Schmidt announced the creation of a WTO initiative for "full private stewardry of labor"
for the parts of Africa
that have been hardest hit by the 500 years of Africa's free trade with the West. "Full, untrammelled stewardry is the best
available solution to African poverty, and the inevitable resu
lt of free-market theory," Schmidt told more than 150 attendees.
Schmidt acknowledged that the stewardry program -- which will require Western companies doing business in some parts of Africa
to own their workers outright-- was similar in many ways
to slavery, but explained that just as "compassionate conservatism" has polished the rough edges on labor relations in industrialized
countries, full stewardry, or "compassionate slavery," could be a similar boon to developing ones.
Elites who have never worked a day in their lives....never served in the military (right or wrong)....have a one dimensional view
of social justice....and on and on...
Anyone else notice the picture that went with the article? Its a picture of a man holding up the world. The same bollocks that people 150 years ago claimed that Great Britain was 'Holding Up The World' by killing Africans and ruling
over India. Such bollocks. The rhetoric of 2 centuries ago is the same rhetoric of today. Nothing ever changes, but people never learn
to see the propaganda for what it is.
Kaplan is Jewish, and it is utterly bizarre
that he can write positively about empire, given that the paradigmatic empire, the Roman one, colonized the area now called Israel,
with the Jews revolting, to which Rome responded by destroying the Temple in Jerusalem, an event which forced Kagan's religion
to be reconstituted, since up until the Temple was destroyed by the Romans, Judaism centered around the Temple.
Kagan seems to be completely unaware of his own heritage, or at least not to care about it: but then why does he start his
piece with a pogrom? This reminds me of something that Putin has said in a
speech :
Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples
and cultures. Society is now required not only to recognise everyone's right to the freedom of consciousness, political views
and privacy, but also to accept without question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are opposite
in meaning. This destruction of traditional values from above not only leads to negative consequences for society, but is also
essentially anti-democratic, since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the
majority, which does not accept the changes occurring or the proposed revision of values.
It's symptomatic that certain hasbara troll missed no opportunity to take up strategic position and drop some initial disinfo
in order to block here any inquiry into who really were the masters of the slave trade over centuries ?
Robert kagan or Robert Kaplan both are lunnies and unfortunately, in the past several US administrations, these cooks have risen
to the top. These guys are a product of nazi Germany at its worst where the thinking that the powerful nations have a god given
mission to rule and the rest of the world is here to be slaves to be taken care of.
Not sure how many people caught this, but
the prince of Wales, on a visit to Iraq was filmed during a visit to British troops saying just that. "These people are happy
to have us here to rule them just like we did before".
Neocons are today's version old British imperial superiority which led to the Second World War along with nazi ideology.
Someday we are going to have an overwhelming US neocon administration and this will be the end.
I think this is definitely the direction the neoliberal neocons want to take us -- back to slavery. I was struck by a statement
made by Silicon Valley venture capitalist Thomas Perkins (who created a stir in January with a letter published in the WSJ comparing
the 1% in the U.S. to Jews persecuted by the Nazis during Kristallnacht). In this statement, Perkins is calling for suffrage based
on the total number of tax dollars the voter pays.
Perkins gave a
talk titled "The War on the 1%" last month at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco:
Mr. Perkins' interlocutor, Adam Lashinsky, soon had the frustrated look of a man trying to swim in a vat of molasses.
Mr. Lashinsky pointed out, for instance, that it was ridiculous to equate powerless Jews in the Third Reich with extremely
powerful tech overlords in present-day America.
"No, I think the parallel holds," Mr. Perkins said calmly. For one thing, "If you pay 75 percent of your life's earnings
to the government you are being persecuted."
He had a better plan: "You don't get to vote unless you pay a dollar in taxes. later he added, "A million in taxes, you
get a million votes." He said he was kidding about that last part, kind of.
One could argue that Citizens United already creates the dollarocracy system Perkins imagines. Slavery can't be far off.
Personally I think the Neos would be fine with a modified Feudalism: Serfs are easier to control than slaves.
But the difference is minimal and largely rhetorical. Ultimately neither has much freedom.
Anyway, what Perkins was advocating (different amounts of votes depending on wealth) isnt new. Some folks advocated that in
the 1800s.
But its so weird to see a modern person advocating that openly. Thats supposed to be a thing youre only supposed to talk about
behind closed doors. But I guess times are changing and some kind of NeoFeudalism will probably be endorsed publicly by the mainstream
in a few decades.
I personally do not think bush was a neocon. He was a patsy who was manipulated by neocons. He didn't have the brains, the
ability to plot or the vision of these two loonies and the neocon masses that seems to be growing everyday in the US. Bush was
a twit. A neocon administration is what we will see with hitlery Clinton if she is elected. Nothing worse that an intelligent,
motivated, self entered, ambitious neocon to set the road for a PNAC scenario.
But Cheney was a Neocon, and he and Rumsfeld hired the whole PNAC crew and set all that crap in motion. He was also trying
to make up for damned near bankrupting what then became Halliburton. And he succeeded on both counts. There isn't a person in
the US today with any "serious" foreign policy creds who has any business running anything. So our choice next time will be...
bad and worse.
Kaplan effectively believes that the Empire is AngloZionist:
the British had their hands full in Mesopotamia in 1941: given the tendency of the Arab masses toward anti-Western and anti-Zionist
ideologies (a tendency that was itself at least in part a reaction to British dominance)
So maybe I was unfair to the Saker when I said in an earlier thread that I regretted his using this term.
Kaplan/Kagan is an amusing slip, but they're equally insane and the point is well made - that supremacists are a bit too eager
to fall in love with their own bullshit.
"As both a dream and a fact the American slaveholdership was born before the United
States," writes the mid-20th-century historian of westward expansion Bernard DeVoto.
Actually, I think these neocons fail on their on there own terms. I mean that they're actually very poor imperial strategists
even if one accepts the neocon argument that empire is a good thing. If anything, it's the neocons who have no grasp of realpolitik
and who are blinded by an ideology that is far more pro-Israel than pro-American. All the wars they've promoted have been debacles
that have diminished not increased America's standing. Unconditional support for Israel (which earns successive American administrations
only Israeli contempt, never gratitude) and the obsession with punishing and destabilizing Iran totally distorts not only American
Middle East policy but American foreign policy as a whole. Pushing for a new Cold War with Russia creates a powerful enemy where
previously there was none. So for all their seemingly shameless promotion of empire, these people will one day be noted only for
their contribution to American decline.
Robert Kagan is Victoria Nuland's husband no? My question would be how did Ms. Nuland get promoted to Under-Secretary? Hillary
Clinton had to have signed off on that.
" the most benign form of order for thousands of years, keeping the anarchy of ethnic, tribal, and sectarian war bands to a reasonable
minimum"
Am i mistaken? Because I am quite certain sectarian wars have never been worse. Syria, Yugoslavia, Iraq, and Rwanda, and DRC.
These countries became mixed at some point. And now they are being torn apart.
Finally, we get to discuss the poisonous, rotten core of Imperial Supremacy and who authored, promotes it and is the main driving
force behind it. Hallelujah! This is exactly where we must begin. Finally, the purpose of all these discussions becomes more defined.
I'm not sure if your error in the author's name was really so bad. Maybe it was meant this way for all to investigate further
, because that is precisely what everyone is failing to do in these discussions on imperial supremacy: to research the authors
of this evil ideological foreign policy and there are many behind it in different arenas: politics, finance, media, lobbies, religious
groups, all honing the message, driving the narrative, driving policy, bribing politicians to push this twisted ideology forward.
Your error, intentional or otherwise was nonetheless so timely and auspicious at a moment in history when we are starting to
see , what evil injustice is being advanced in our name against other nations, and this article falls into our lap in an
almost prophetic manner with such perfect timing as a warning to us all: to look for the root and squash it before it's too late,
because unless we see where it originates, we are powerless. The fact that your error perplexed many here already can only be
a good thing, because it peaks their curiosity: hey, wait a minute; this is not the author, what's going on here? And then
upon further research, they discover two names to familiarize themselves with, and then three, and then a pattern starts to emerge,
and then they go further connecting the dots until they finally get the big picture that: the advancement of imperial supremacy
in this day and age...is most definitely a Zionist-driven operation.
So they have similar names, and are no relation but they're united in the cause of Zionism and the imperial project
that will shelter Zionism permanently.:
This individual, Kaplan, is obviously trying to make the case for imperial supremacy which sets the stage for justifying
the injustice that Zionism has wrought in Israel and that Zionists want to permanently legitimize by any means possible.
These Ziocons will bombard us and the world from left, right and centre with an argument designed for every political persuasion
to justify legitimizing imperial supremacy where Zionism can exist comfortably with permanent impunity and be cleansed of its
ongoing and future crimes.
Now I know I'm going to have fun here separating the chaff from the wheat on this issue. This is a subject that Zionists, whether
liberal (a non-existent creatures in Zionism; because Zionism turns all who embrace it into fascists) or conservative, are irresistably
drawn to and at the same time it's a subject that draws out their duplicitous nature. Those who are secretly with Zionism's goals
will do ANYTHING to steer us off course and prevent us from visualizing the pattern, and if we dare to; they'll hurl their most
convenient slander; A.S.
Thank you for making us aware of this article which lays the foundation for all discussions on what we are witnessing in Ukraine
and the Middle East with advancing imperial supremacy and which hopefully will motivate everyone to further explore the depth
and scope of Zionist involvement in this expanding foreign operation that is evil to its core.
And don't worry, apparently you're not the first to mix up these names and make this fortunate mistake, because in essence,
whether one author is blunt and the other doublespeaks liberal jargon they are united in their cause and we should be aware of
what we're up against to tear their structure down and derail their agenda.
It's great to see others stumble upon the truth that was begging to be found. If not for this timely omen, I might have given
up trying to make everyone see and have started doubting even the sound of my own fury.
Who set these wheel in motion Robert Kagan and William Kristol or Dick and Rummy? Come on...the authors of the PLAN of course.
Sure Cheney's a lunatic, but even he couldn't come up with this. Cheney's part of the muscle.
We've been fighting this fight, Kalithea, for a long time now, every way we can. So you'll not find me defending a one of them.
But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. We're "just" dealing with the current
crop, and hopefully we'll somehow succeed before there's no Palestine, Palestinians or olive trees left. Or Syrians, or Iraqis,
or Ukrainians, or... Just don't think for a minute that these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews,
low and high, who share the same damned values even if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen". And they've
ALL got to be stopped.
This is from a 2004 article by Uri Avnery at Counterpunch:
The "oligarchs" are a tiny group of entrepreneurs who exploited the disintegration of the Soviet system to loot the treasures
of the state and to amass plunder amounting to hundreds of billions of dollars. In order to safeguard the perpetuation of their
business, they took control of the state. Six out of the seven are Jews.
In the first years of post-Soviet Russian capitalism they were the bold and nimble ones who knew how to exploit the economic
anarchy in order to acquire enormous possessions for a hundredth or a thousandth of their value: oil, natural gas, nickel and
other minerals. They used every possible trick, including cheating, bribery and murder. Every one of them had a small private
army.
But the most intriguing part of the series recounts the way they took control of the political apparatus. After a period
of fighting each other, they decided that it would be more profitable for them to cooperate in order to take over the state.
At the time, President Boris Yeltsin was in a steep decline. On the eve of the new elections for the presidency, his rating
in public opinion polls stood at 4%. He was an alcoholic with a severe heart disease, working about two hours a day. The state
was, in practice, ruled by his bodyguard and his daughter; corruption was the order of the day.
The oligarchs decided to take power through him. They had almost unlimited funds, control of all TV channels and most of
the other media.
Vladimir Putin, the taciturn and tough ex-KGB operative, assumed power, took control of the media, put one of the oligarchs
(Mikhail Khodorkovsky) in prison, caused the others to flee (Berezovsky is in England, Vladimir Gusinsky is in Israel, another,
Mikhail Chernoy, is assumed to be hiding here.
George W. Bush and John Kerry both brag about their talent for raising enormous sums of money. From whom? From pensioners?
From the mythical "old lady in tennis shoes"? Of course not, but from the cabals of billionaires, the giant corporations and
powerful lobbies (arms dealers, Jewish organiztions, doctors, lawyers and such). Many of them give money to both candidates–just
to be on the safe side.
All of these expect, of course, to receive a generous bonus when their candidate is elected. "There is no such thing as
a free lunch", as the right-wing economist Milton Friedman wrote. As in Russia, every dollar (or ruble) invested wisely in
an election will yield a ten- or hundred-fold return.
Even educated Americans speak of Putin as a "thug". All he has done is restore the rule of law, what Germans used to call a
Rechtsstaat .
It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously a man
of the people. He also takes the political ideas that European civilization was built on seriously, something that can be said
for no Western leader I know of.
It is turning out as the nineteenth century Slavophiles thought it would: Russia has become the last defender of Western civilization.
Someone above mentioned the Robert Kaplan piece in the Atlantic "how we would fight china" that appeared in 2005. This was not
lunatic but a very interesting article on US military plans on how to confront China just off of China's territorial waters (I
think the lunacy is the notion that US national interests require us to maintain a war footing in the Western Pacific, but that
is an argument we have lost here in the US). I hadn't seen this before. In any case it should be read by anyone interested in
US plans against China. It explains Hillary's 'pivot to Asia' policy.
By the same token, Ukrainians can be understood when they kick out a president who wants to bring them into the Russian orbit
against their will.
I was surprised to read that. I should have thought that Avnery has a concept of the rule of law. Also, is Avnery so uninformed
not to know that most Ukrainians do not want to join NATO?
"Even educated Americans". That must be either a relative term, or the voice of the educated is never heard. It is difficult for
me to imagine how an "educated" person could be so ill-informed. Back on planet earth, this would never happen.
Maybe this is far-fetched and I know that Putin bailed out some the the Russian Oligarchy during the 2008 recession so they would
owe him support at this crucial time. But recently I watched an interview on 60 Minutes with businessman Bill Browder who trashed
talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder who at one point alleges
being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country. Anyway I'm not sure what kind of subterfuge
he was up to when he stayed in Russia but he made some nasty accusations against Putin.
A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during
Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the Soviet
Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.
Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless revolution.
Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.
I believe it is during this time Putin became aware of the power of Zionist media to destroy political careers.
In October, in an interview in Le Figaro, Putin announced that he would no longer tolerate criticism of the government by media
controlled by the oligarchs. "If necessary we will destroy those instruments that allow this blackmail", he declared.
There's no doubt in my mind that Zionist influence had a hand in what is happening in Ukraine and the protests that tried to
interfere with Putin's re-election. Maybe Putin pissed off some other Zionist oligarchs. I haven't been able to research more
on this issue but hopefully some of you will look further.
But this just reinforces the point I've been trying to make that Zionists are involved in this imperial global expansion, in
this case because the capitalist system feels threatened by Putin and potential reforms. Zionists are up to their eyeballs in
this imperial advance and I still believe they're in the driver's seat.
Are you kidding me? Do you think the U.S. could ever dream of reining 1.3 billion stray cats with nukes and a formidable army?
For gawd's sake this article is practically a manifesto on Zionism supremacy, it's that transparent. But of course, you'll never
admit it.
Oh the Neocons were absolutely behind this Ukrainian gambit, and I'm thinking their goals were twofold: to keep Russia preoccupied
and get hold of Sevastopol. That way, it would be very difficult for her to help Syria and, of course, Iran -- still the main
goals for those creeps. And yeah, find me one Neocon, anywhere, who does not support Israel. So yeah, Zionists.
remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:37:51 PM |
58
really, read some history? u s imperialism is the single most dangerous threat to humanity
israel is a vassal state
exactly as indonesia was under suharto, or colombia under any of its creep compradors
your sense of disproportion amazes me truly, maybe it is because you are american, you want to blame someoen else for your
barbarity, 'the smart jew' is again the perfect target for imbeciles
it is a puppet state, it is a non state, who does exactly what washington wants it to do. it effects only only middle east
policy & even that it is by far the junior party, if washington told israel to go live in the sudetenland, the state of israel
would, is is a pantin, a puppet increasingly with more bark than bite
you choose anti semitism because as american you are frightened of being obliged to burn your shithouse down
Oh no, rememberringgiap, no. It's the combination of the two. And for gosh sakes, I've known how bad America was since I was a
kid, and spent most of my life trying to do something about it so I'm hardly afraid to admit it. We see the end coming, it's gonna
be UGLY, and we know we deserve it; not a nice place to be but it's honest. And Israel is equally nasty, sometimes in the lead,
sometimes as a follower, and I don't hate Jews but I sure do loathe Zionists, whatever faith they may be. (And again, in America,
there are a lot more Christians blindly supporting Israel than Jews.)
remembererringgiap , Mar 21, 2014 11:49:14 PM |
60
they are puppets, nothing more nothing less. the actual state of israel began criminally with deir yassin & that state gets worse,
it is little surprise, that its population is leaving in droves, more than at any other time, so would i with nutcases like lieberman
& netanyahu
but they are no more than donkeys
pakistan on the other hand frightens the living shit out of those united states
In the atlantic.com article In Defense of Empire the words "slave" or "slavery" in fact do not exist.
or example, in the above quoted text, we find this phrase: "Throughout history, governance and relative safety have most often
been provided by slavery ...". From the atlantic.com url, instead we find: "Throughout history, governance and relative
safety have most often been provided by empires ...".
The same types of differences exist in every single case. Obviously, this is a huge problem. Either the quotes are wrong in
this post or they have been edited out in a later version of the atlantic.com version and replaced with the words "empires," "imperialism",
etc.
Which lets Israel/zionist Jewish fascists off the hook for the war crimes they are responsible for. "They're just pawns of
a larger poer, pity them, but don't condemn them. And for god's sakes, don't do anything meaningful that might interfere in their
sacred mandate from the godhead."
Which is essentially what Jewish zionist hasbara is all about, whether from the zionist left or the zionist right.
It's never "us", it's always "them".
Excuse me while I go puke, Charles Manson in drag.
@48 Yes, totally not lunatic for the United States to go to war with one of the most populated countries on the planet.
Wanting to go to war with enormous countries like China, Russia or even Iran (not as big, but still what, over twice as big
as iraq and afghanistan combined?) is totally and completely rational.
Thank goodness Putin did some house-cleaning, but he no doubt made enemies among Zionists no doubt on Wall Street as well.
They must have had capital tied up in these Zionist-run Russsian companies.
@62 WHAT Zionist left? There is none. All the Democrats or whatever that are zionists are also right wing. They just dress up
imperialism in fancy words like 'humanitarianism', thats all.
There hasnt been a zionist left since the last communist zionists in Israel retired or died decades ago.
@57 You realize that critiquing zionism, which is a modern political ideology, is NOT the same as critiquing Judaism, the religion,
right? Right? Guess not.
Because there are zionist Christians (probably more than there are zionist jews) and nonzionist jews (a growing number of young
jews realize Israel is an apartheid state).
So stop trying to slur anti-zionists as anti-semites, thats just slander.
Hey kalithea, the Russians let Khodorkovsky out of prison early. Almost the first thing the loyal Israeli citizen did was go to
the Ukraine and encourage the neo-nazis running the place now to get even more brutal and nazi like.
I could ask what's up with that, but I think everybody here knows the answer.
@65: I think b made it very clear. He used the word "substitute", and the title of the post was directly followed by the same
title, but without the substitution.
This kind of snark is just part of leftist blog culture. (I don't know if right wingers do it.)
I'm beginning to think that the substitution of "Kagan" for "Kaplan" was snark too, but that I didn't pick up on.
Do Michelle and her speechwriters really think that Chinese rulers don't take that as a big joke? I'm sure they're laughing
their heads off behind her back. I hope that the reason speechwriters put stuff like that in there is for the domestic American
audience.
And yet another Zionist oligarch who bilked Russia and hates Putin.:
On 23 August 2003, Gusinsky travelled from Israel to Athens, where he was arrested under a Greek-Russian treaty for fraud amounting
to millions in damages.[5] Intense pressure from American leaders (mainly from US ambassador in Athens Tomas Miller), Israeli
officials and the European Jewish Congress on the Greek government led to Gusinsky's release within five days.[6]
Mr Gusinsky says we will all pay the price if western leaders appease President Putin. He likens the situation apocalyptically
to the 1930s and the world's treatment of Hitler. Mr Putin's hands, he says, are already red with the blood of murdered Chechens.
Mr Putin's popularity comes in part from his promise to do away with the oligarchs, a group of 20-odd billionaire businessmen
who got rich stripping assets from privatised companies they bought for nothing.
Posted by: remembererringgiap | Mar 22, 2014 12:46:04 AM | 75
"just read strormfront that enough - that's the level of research repeated ad finitum - whether its lagos or louisiana"
It's well known stormfront is a zionist front/agent provocateur site, much like freerepublic, though tailored to the more hardcore
freak. Why promote them?
Maybe Zionists deserve to rule, they're smarter, they work harder and are better organized. You folks couldn't organize an ice
cream social. Just sayin'
But the wheels were set in motion before any of us were born, and I'm an old woman now. ... Just don't think for a minute that
these monsters were not, and are not, encouraged and enabled by non-Jews, low and high, who share the same damned values even
if they don't personally give a crap about Israel or its "chosen".
Testify Sister! Tell us who set the wheels in motion, tell us all what the plan is. What tricks did the Jews pull on us non-Jews
way back then, how are non-Jews enabling their diabolical worldwide plan?
WTF are you trying to say? The Zionist have no position on US-China relations as far as anyone can see. I read that article
by Robert Kaplan and he reported the views of officers in the US Navy. I am quite sure that Israel has not penetrated the US Navy.
This is a perspective of good old fashioned US imperialism. I know that the Zionist work in the background and try to influence
US policy, but they do not control it. Especially inside the US Navy. You have no idea how power is distributed inside the US.
"... I have told the whole truth in that, and only dead men can tell the truth in this world ..." Mark Twain
Eugenics is evil ... however, in Kagans case, his removal from the gene pool and his ilk, could only be seen as a darwinian,
evolutionary advancement for humanity.
thank you, rememberinggiap, for your calmness. you are correct in saying that many of us (and that includes myself look for causes
outside our internal history. perhaps the fixed point should be the Dulles brothers, who if they did not set us down this infernal
path, gave us a mighty and prolonged push. Mark Twain had it all figured out over a century ago. as to American zionists, Jews
of my and Nora's generaton lived through the discrimination of convenanted housing tracts, university quotas and professional
exclusions down to the Vietnam war, and they can't put it out of their mind. they probably don't know that they were not the only
ones. when I was a student at Yale living with George Bush Sr.'s aunt in New Haven, Catholics and most of the Yale professors
were excluded from the lawn tennis club situated just behind the new school of management on Whitney avenue. No Irish or italians
need apply. the us is a swarm of internal contradictions, and it's history is out of control.
Nora at 45: Kindly cancel that request. Just answer this. Do you agree with this quote from Pragma:
Neither is it coincidence that (before the creation of izrael but about the time of the balfour deal ...) Russia was poisoned
by zionist "communists" (just another projection), nor is it coincidence that Germany was relentlessly pushed into war and
later broken and crushed and not reinstated until this very day ...
If that's a good summary of them, maybe there's no need for you to tell us about your 'historical' beliefs.
Also, in fact I only think Pragma is the actual 'destroy moonofalabama' operative here. You and his other supporters seem to
hold your beliefs sincerely. FWIW and for what they're worth which is less than zero.
The US Navy has known it Carriers are simply very large targets for many, many years, and so do the PLAN.
Carrier battle groups are for projecting brute military force and creating invasive sovereignity(sic) in support of Empire
around the globe ... NEVER , in the modern era to be risked against 1st world powers. All those billions upon billions
of $ would be lost in the briefest moment of conflict with the PLAN. See: Anti-ship ballistic missiles (ASBM).
I must admit I didn't compare the original text with what b cited, I still had too much of a confidence into him which now vanished
totally. Others @6) and Massinissa discovered the bluff immediately, so they deserve the honour. I really don't know what the
purpose of this double bluff is: changing the text and the author??? I would say just stupid...
It also damages people like Chinweizu @10), the famous nigerian writer who presented a case of REAL stewardry of labour by
WTO close to slaveholdership
maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of
us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes to the commenters here confusing all of us.... I
think the whole blog here is really disintegrating, from top to bottom...
Knut at 83: Lenin had this figured out, imperialism is a stage of capitalism, a reaction to excess production and internal markets
being exhausted of opportunities for excess profits. The European capitalist countries began struggling with this phenomenon in
the late 19th century and the US a few decades later. There's really no solution other than ending capitalism and/or social democracy.
In that context, pinning responsibility for imperialism on Jews is just idiotic, and pinning things on the US will just make
folks less wary of its natural successor, China. That doesn't mean it's not a good thing when there is multi-polar world, because
that coincided in the post-war era and may coincide again with greater 'space' for independent, populist, democratic regimes to
arise.
And that also doesn't mean I accuse Russia of being an imperialist. Lenin was making a general observation (I think) and there
are exceptions. Regimes under attack by 'big imperialism' sometimes produce sincere democratic/populist nationalists. I hope/think
Russians are lucky enough to have one of those running their country now. The people should be aware they'll likely need to struggle
'some day soon' to avoid reverting to the 'imperialist norm'.
@87) where is the enlightment of readers doing this? all empires, great and less great, historically have been founded on slaveholdership,
now changing to a form of forced labour like in most of the arabic monarchistic countries or work without the minimum ILO standards
like in the case of the Sotchi Olympic workers....
Human Trafficking and Slavery by the US Government, Military and Corporations for MASSIVE PROFIT is very, very real,
in a 'literal' sense, too ... all of it corrupt and illegal even under US Law ... and no one will ever be prosecuted ...
12 years a Slave , indeed ... as I recall,
no individual, business or official involved was ever held accountable for the multiple crimes, even then illegal, committed against
Solomon Northup , then a Freeman ... one hundred and
sixty years has passed and where are we now ?
But if Congress approves, the Army would drop from today's active-duty force of 522,000 soldiers to between 440,000 and 450,000
over the next three years.
"Since we are no longer sizing the force for prolonged" ground wars, the Army is larger than required and "larger than we
can afford," Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, who announced the plan, said at the Pentagon.
California may win more than it loses in the shift of resources as older aircraft are phased out and new ones are brought
on board.
Spending for cyberwarfare will increase under the plan. That could benefit larger government contractors in Silicon Valley,
including Cisco Systems Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., Oracle Corp. and a growing number of start-ups in defense-related equipment
and software.
In addition, Northrop Grumman Corp. uses a facility in Palmdale to build the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk drone aircraft that
will replace the high-flying U-2 spy planes, famous in the early Cold War but now proposed for retirement. The company has
about 2,500 employees on the program in Southern California.
The Pentagon previously had planned to mothball a version of the Global Hawk and keep the U-2 flying. But Hagel said
the operating costs of the drone had fallen and that with its greater range and endurance, it "makes a better high-altitude
reconnaissance platform for the future."
The Air Force has 32 U-2s based at Beale Air Force Base in Marysville, Calif.
Hagel also called for retiring the Air Force's entire fleet of A-10 "Warthog" ground attack fighters, as well as mothballing
half of the Navy's fleet of 22 cruisers, and building only 32 of the Navy's littoral combat ships, not 52 as previously planned.
The shallow-draft, lightly armed warship is designed for clearing mines and anti-submarine warfare. Hagel said it might not
be heavily armed enough and called for studying whether a new frigate would be better.
The only military force to grow would be special operations forces. Increasingly used for training and counter-terrorism
missions around the world, the elite force would increase by several thousand to 69,700 .
Which would give the US a spoiling, blackmail power to push for its interests but no imperial power.
Rather than Obama's post-imperialism, in which the secretary of state appears like a lonely and wayward operator encumbered
by an apathetic White House, I maintain that a tempered imperialism is now preferable.
No other power or constellation of powers is able to provide even a fraction of the global order provided by the United
States. U.S. air and sea dominance preserves the peace, such as it exists, in Asia and the Greater Middle East. American military
force, reasonably deployed, is what ultimately protects democracies as diverse as Poland, Israel, and Taiwan from being overrun
by enemies. If America sharply retrenched its air and sea forces, while starving its land forces of adequate supplies and training,
the world would be a far more anarchic place, with adverse repercussions for the American homeland.
Rome, Parthia, and Hapsburg Austria were great precisely because they gave significant parts of the world a modicum of imperial
order that they would not otherwise have enjoyed. America must presently do likewise, particularly in East Asia, the geographic
heartland of the world economy and the home of American treaty allies.
He seems to realize his argument is an uphill struggle as he adds this
This by no means obliges the American military to repair complex and populous Islamic countries that lack critical components
of civil society. America must roam the world with its ships and planes, but be very wary of where it gets involved on the
ground. And it must initiate military hostilities only when an overwhelming national interest is threatened. Otherwise, it
should limit its involvement to economic inducements and robust diplomacy -- diplomacy that exerts every possible pressure
in order to prevent widespread atrocities in parts of the world, such as central Africa, that are not, in the orthodox sense,
strategic.
That he goes back to "White Man's Burden" in his arguments presumably means he is too old and
out
of touch with US demography .
There is a great
RT interview
by Anastasja Churkina - the daughter of the Russian UN ambassador - with Amy Goodman on the role of corporate media - when
corporations profit from war.
It was very revealing for me to watch his recent informal press conference and his speech to the Duma. He is obviously
a man of the people.
Indeed. It's also instructive to compare a Putin speech and say an obama or merkel speech. While Putin *evidently and doubtlessly*
really addresses the people and explains what has been, or must be, done and why, the western puppets merely utter system standard
pieces of text and are ignoring the people.
kalithea (53)
Bill Browder who trashed talked Putin. Browder ran a Capital Management firm investing in Russia's largest oil companies. Browder
who at one point alleges being a supporter of Putin ended up blacklisted as being a threat to the country.
Well, depending on whom you ask, weztern media and even (reliably and confrontingly jew defending) wikipedia, or Russian investigators,
witnesses, and victims, the answer will be very different.
Actually browder was deeply and dirtily linked to a concerted crime operation that tried to steal Russias (mostly hydrocarbon)
resources in a "professional" way. This, of course *had* to be understood for what it was, a direct attack on Russias life blood,
which maybe was not even the goal of browder and accomplices but at least a non issue for them. Looking closer you will also find
khodorkovsky and the "devils advocate" magnitsky in those circles.
Funnily the wezt and wikipedia paint browder as a gently minded businessman who got thrown out by evil Putin for unmasking
Putin and his crime gang (well noted, that's how the weztern thugs paint it).
A Zionist Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky who went into exile in the U.K. after being accused of fraud and embezzlement during
Primkov's government in 1999 also hated Putin. Beresovsky is one of those oligarchs by the way who exploited the fall of the
Soviet Union to his advantange. Beresovsky later became a vocal opponent of Putin.
Berezovsky publicly threatened Putin and stated that he was on a mission to bring down Putin "by force" or by bloodless
revolution. Berezovsky held media holdings in Russia and used them to slam Putin's policies.
berezovsky didn't stick to the deal, he left the frame so clearly - and wisely - assigned by Putin. Quite possibly berezovsky
is the symbol of the "political oligarchs" which, of course, were not at all happy about Putin stopping their free looting of
Russia.
It is noteworthy - yet widely "forgotten" - that berezovsky later, in London, more or less confessed his crimes and evil spirited
attacks and asked Putin to forgive him and to please, pretty please, let him go back to Russia.
One might also have a good case here for the difference between jews and zionists. Yes, most oligarchs are jews but that's
not the point. The point is that extremely greedy people with a large crime register wanted to and still want to earn ever more
billions, jew or not jew. But that's it. And one can make agreements with them, even agreements in favour of Russia and even agreements
basically employing those oligarchs for the good of Russia.
Not so with the zionists. The zionist oligarchs never respected Putin, nor the people, nor Russia herself. To them Russia was
but a helpless but very rich lady they would loot and rob with utmost brutality. And as soon as anyone dared to stop them they
would scream "anti-semites!" and leave to izrael or another zio controlled country.
For those oligarchs who stuck and stick to the agreements one must not care about jew or not and indeed there are non-jews,
too. The most brutal and despicable criminals though are zio-jews, each and all of them.
Ad "zusa attacking China":
That must be a joke. Anyone with some basic knowledge about military issues will tell you a simple truth: zusa must hope and
pray that none of their protectees, namely japan, sk, and taiwan, ever comes in a situation to ask for zusa help. For a simple
reason. zusa would be doomed.
Japan being the least dangerous, sk would pretty much be lost before zusa could fire some shots, and taiwan (and largely sk)
are basically denied zones.
Not only are 100% of taiwan covered by Chinese anti-air systems but worse for zusa, zusa would be stopped dead in its tracks
because China can interdict the ca. 600 - 750km wide "belt" around taiwan needed for zusa air operations. About the only tool
not interdicted would be zusa firing cruise missiles; as those are old tech., and slow China would comfortably kill at least 80%
(and more realistically around 90%) of those. Would do zusa that, would zusa protect taiwan knowing there is little they could
do but there would be a very considerable risk of China (rightfully!) destroying major parts of the zusa fleet? I strongly doubt
that.
About the most realistic and favourable (for zusa) scenario I see would be a China japan war with zusa interfering somewhat.
And even that is doubtful as it might "invite" nk to use China supplied weapons against both japan and the much hated zusa.
maybe Mr Pragma is also his creation, b is a talented computer freak and I think he is LoL in his little room about all of
us; and also about having added two hysterical anti-zionist broads programmes
maybe? MAYBE? What an incompetent asshole! OF COURSE I'm a programm! But not by b; I've been programmed by KGB on a rusty typewriter.
izrael should ask zusa for more funds or they should ask one of the zio-controlled countries. Obviously izrael *urgently* needs
funds for better agents. Current ones like thomas miss even the most obvious points.
Ceterum censeo israel americanamque vehementer delenda esse!
He has been an active supporter of Jewish initiatives in Russia and Europe. In 1996 Fridman was one of the founders of the
Russian Jewish Congress, now sitting on the RJC Presidium. He makes large contribution to the work of the European Jewish Fund,
a non-profit organization aimed at developing European Jewry and promoting tolerance and reconciliation on the continent.[5]
Presently, a member of the Public Chamber of Russia. Was presented with an award by Bill Clinton, uber-supporter of Zionism.
What is this? A case of keep your friends close and enemies closer? I wouldn't trust a Zionist as far as I can spit! How many
Zionists are in his entourage? I hope Putin doesn't end up like Caesar - stabbled in the back by those close to him - et tu Brute?
Mikhail Fridman and his fellow Russian Jewish philanthropists are ponying up some serious cash to create what is being touted
as a "Jewish Nobel Prize." The Russian billionaire and co-founder of the five-year-old Genesis philanthropy group announced
the creation of a $1 million prize that will be awarded to Jews who win global recognition for their professional achievements,
including in the world of science and the arts. The prize, launched in collaboration with the Israeli government, was announced
on Tuesday, which coincided with the visit of Russian president Vladimir Putin to Israel. The award will be presented annually
by the Israeli prime minister around Passover time. As if the world was short on Jewish Nobel Prize winners.
Neocon Zionists, aka Israeli Firsters, and most of the One Percent on Wall Street have owned Congress and the mainstream media
propaganda machine since the beginning of modern print, and then broadcast media. By this control of what people read, hear, and
see, they have been able to control what people believe and think. Game set match, until now.
Now, the internet has opened the Pandora's box of Truth, and as people have an instinct for the truth, they are beginning to
see what was concealed from them before. (And they're inevitably getting smarter, developing the skill needed to distinguish noisy
nonsense from correct information.) So Robert Kagan and other neocon Zionists like him whose first loyalty is to Israel, are rightly
worried that when the "tapestry of lies" is stripped away, and the American people see the extent of the Zionist subversion, there
will be consequences.
This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals,
then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This
is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.
This is sad enough, but as an American, I'm particularly dismayed, because the American Jews in my surrounding community have
-- too easily I must confess -- been hoodwinked into supporting the Zionist criminal enterprise.
Stealing someone else's country to start your own -- despite all the historical precedent -- is not a good strategy, particularly
when the folks whose country you stole have a billion and a half co-religionists out there unhappy about the theft.
Let's get some definitions right, ok. Zionism in this day and age means no more and no less than a strong supporter of the state
of Israel. It simply doesn't mean "Jew", but it does mean condoning increased settlements and outrageous attacks against Gaza,
etc. The entire movement is a bit more than 100 years old; it began at roughly the same time that TR and his lovely "White Fleet"
sailed the Pacific to do some of the same lovely stuff to the Philippines that we'd been doing to North America since the 1600's
and the rest of the Americas since the 1800s (the entire purpose of the Monroe Doctrine was to legitimize it).
Okay, a bit more history: our entry into WWI was, among other things, closely related to the Balfour Doctrine. We did it for
many mercantile reasons as well (DuPont vs. Krupp, etc.), but the point is, just like the Yalies in OSS whose families had been
bankrolling Hitler before (and during, see: Prescott Bush) WWII then snarfed up a bunch of leading Nazis afterwards, different
people w/different goals and beliefs, can work together when it suits their purposes. And "Israel returning to Zion" was and is
a MAJOR theme for the Puritans, both here and in England (look up Dispensationalism; it's a big deal) and various other groups
of Christians.
So yes, no CT here at all, but why waste time separating out blame: it's a many-headed monster that's easily judged simply
by its effects, summed up as harm to innocent people in the furtherance of... whatever.
fairleft, I left some stuff for you that you may not have read. I'm putting it here but will not engage you again until you've
digested at least one of the readings I suggested.
I have an honest question I wish you'd really think about. I'm assuming you're an American, like me. And we have no compunction
praising our fellow Americans when they do something in accord with our values, and criticizing them when they don't. I.e., we're
not blindly zenophobic, right? And I think that's pretty generally true for most of the people here, whatever their ethnicity:
they can criticize "their own" when they find it warranted, based on what the person, or group of people, did. So I'm wondering
about your blind spot: are all Jews blameless just by definition, or might some of them, sometimes, do something objectionable?
And if so, why is no one allowed to say so? In my family's background are lots of different peoples who at various times were
subjected to hideous repression, ethnic cleansing and yes, genocide, but I still see no reason not to criticize them when they're
doing something wrong -- why can't you? And please don't invoke the Holocaust: I can trump you in my own background by hundreds
of years and millions of people. Really: not all Jews are perfect or blameless, and we're not really talking Jews anyhow, we're
talking support for criminal acts by the state of Israel, supported here in America by a LOT more Christians than Jews. I.e.,
Zionism.
Sometimes this knee-jerk respose is just group-think by otherwise decent people who've been frightened and brainwashed their
entire lives and might possibly be reachable. Gilad Atzmon, Israel Adam Shamir and Philip Weiss, to name just three, all started
out like that too -- and then grew. I was trying to give fairleft an opportunity to open his mind a bit; he can take it not, as
he chooses.
You seem like a decent person: please read these. It won't be easy for you -- it's hard to challenge deeply-ingrained beliefs
-- but reading these books with a mind open to seeing things differently is more than worth it.
In all friendliness, it seems you just don't get it. Yes, fairleft is somewhat more professional than, say thomas, in not exclusively
relying on crude attacks and gross propaganda.
He is, however, nevertheless and evidently a fervent pro-zionist and trying his best to do their work here.
(But of course, this is but some friendly sentences. Feel free by all means to continue your endeavour)
Just giving him the benefit of the doubt this one last time.
But those two books and Allison Weir's piece imo are important for anyone who wants to be informed; there's a lot of data in
each of them that simply cannot be refuted. And Shahak's book is still available online, I think.
Imperialism benefits no one but a small slice of the ruling class. But it's always defended as if it's the only thing providing
food for the average person. It's been true since the Roman empire. The looting oriented British Raj stripped away so much and
somehow almost none of it ended up in the hands of the average Briton. Same for the Kingdoms of Spain and Portugal. It's just
no good. I don't know how long it will take for average people to understand it.
The interest in slavery is not just neo-connish etc. but in a way, underground, an interest of Big Corporations (1).
Not, imho, in first place because of the 'cheap labor' but because of issues of control.
Right now we are living in a world that is organized in part by nation-states (as a kind of ultimate authority) and for another
part, not well coordinated with the first, by Big Corporations, who increasingly control Banking and Finance, thus also say pol.
contributions in the US, territory (2) and its uses, supra-territorial matters such as communications and benchmarks (internet,
the control of space, rating agencies, for ex.), and other related matters like patent laws.
Slavery as an official doctrine is not in their interests, cheap labor is already available thru modern slavery. So they keep
a low profile, and let their 'elected' representatives take the flack.
Such clashing interests are well illustrated in the case of Ukraine, where the confusion of the Western 'nation-states' has
become pathetically ridiculous, as they cannot make public their lack of power and attendant subservience to Corporate interests.
They are kind of 'holding on' to keep some hand in the game, and mobilizing their 'electorate' with propaganda, as that is where
their livelihood come from.
1. Shell, BP, Total, plus many others in the energy field. Also the likes of Glencore Xstrata, Cargill, AXA, Monsanto, Nestlé,
JP Morgan, etc. etc. all entwined in a kind of global network.
2. Straight out buying and leasing land; owning thru investments and 'deals', exploration rights, mineral rights, agriculture,
transport hubs (pipelines, shipping, ports, the machines that implement the transport, etc.)
In the tiny minds of these neocons, it is possible that in some simplified way, the marxist theory of the falling rate of profit
penetrated, at least sufficiently for this one to infer that wage labour is inexorably doomed by its own internal contradictions.
However, applying the same marxian analysis, it is possible to prove that an economy based on slave labour generates no capitalist
profits at all.
Israel (in the form of its present Govmt, and past as well) is US State number 51, a splinter outpost on foreign lands.
Its continuing existence in the shape of its crazily belligerent and racist, apartheid stance, and all the dire cruelties we
know about, is maintained by the unwavering support and investment from the US, though EU poodles have followed along. (See e.g.
UN vetos, etc.) It is a sick, symbiotic relationship, with one party acting the thug, encouraged by the backer. It is economically
dependent on its masters so cannot stop, and leaders of course join for their own personal interests.
Not to minimize the influence of the "Jewish / Isr. lobby" e.g. Walt and Mearsheimer, etc. whatever - exists because it is
welcomed, and then provides strange grist to many lunatic mills.
NBC News: New U S. State Dept travel warning tells citizens to defer travel to east regions
of Kharkiv, Donetsk and Lugansk in Ukraine .......................so is west ukraine safe?>!!
Good points. The sorrow is, average people have rarely been in a position to do anything anyhow; they're generally too busy
just trying to survive. What we're seeing now in both the EU and US is the steep downward slope of economic and political disempowerment
while (hopefully) heading upwards is the shallower slope of public understanding. Will they intersect in time, i.e., while people
still have enough power to do something about it? Who knows. And what can people do? In the US the angry folks with guns have
been successfully brainwashed to ultimately support TPTB -- while believing they're rebelling against them. (Some really clever
work there, worth of Goebbels at his best.)
This is the pattern of five-thousand years of Jewish history: they go somewhere, do very well by themselves and the locals,
then they get powerful, and they overreach and become abusive, at which point the locals accost them, or holocaust them. This
is how Jewish talent becomes Jewish self-destruction.
Hi Cynthia! Are you part of Pragma's takedown of moonofalabama or are you just a stupid solo anti-Semite? If the latter, how
did you find your way here?
Nora @ 108: Your're on a roll today it seems. Your expression at 108 truly fits MOST folks here at MOA, at least I sincerely hope
so. Like society in general, there are people afoot in this world, who get PAYED to disrupt objectivity on the Internet and the
Media.
@126 - true. it would be nice if folks ignored those who they believe are full of shite too, lol.. i think b would benefit correcting
the kagan verses kaplan issue.. both of them are friggin nutso's but still..
In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in which
he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.
The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to
prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.
The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather
racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil"
while the other is "totally good"
If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically
inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.
Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".
Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them
with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and
souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul
and the souls of cattle." (Reuters Photo)
Remarks by the Israeli Minister of Interior Yaakov Neeman suggesting that the Jewish religious law (Halacha) should be adopted
as the "law of the land" in the Jewish state has drawn strong reactions from both Jews and non-Jews.
"Step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halacha into the binding
law of the nation," Neeman told Rabbis at a Jewish law convention in occupied Jerusalem in December 2009.
"We must bring back the heritage of our fathers to the nation of Israel," he said. "The torah has the complete solution
to all of the questions we are dealing with."
Neeman's statements were met applauds from participants who included high-ranking Rabbis, as well as representatives of
religious parties.
However, for non-Jews, who now constitute nearly 50 percent of the total population in occupied Palestine, Neeman's remarks
are a serious cause for concern since Halacha, at least according to the Orthodox Jewish interpretation, does not recognize
the full humanity of non-Jews.
Hence, non-Jews living under Halacha must accept to live under a perpetual state of inferiority, if not persecution.
Lesser in Every Aspect
According to Orthodox Judaism, a non-Jew (goy) is inferior to a Jew in every conceivable aspect. This inferiority is absolute,
inherent, intrinsic, and not subject to any related or unrelated factors.
Rabbi Abraham Kook, the religious mentor of the settler movement, taught that "the difference between a Jewish soul and
souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper than the difference between a human soul
and the souls of cattle."
The teachings of Kook are based on the Lurianic Cabala (Jewish mysticism), which teaches the absolute superiority of the
Jewish soul and body over the non-Jewish soul and body. This means, according to one Rabbi who is member of the Chabadi Lubovitcher
sect, that "every simple cell in a Jewish body entails divinity and is part of God."
In 2003, Rabbi Saadya Grama of the Beth Medrash Govoha, the renowned Talmudic school of Lakewood, NJ, published a book in
which he claimed that Gentiles were completely evil and that Jews constituted a separate, genetically superior species.
The book published under the Hebrew Title "Romemut Yisrael Ufarsahat Hagalut" quoted numerous classical Jewish sources to
prove Jewish superiority over the rest of humankind.
The difference between Jews and gentiles, he argued, is not religious, historical, cultural, or political. It is rather
racial, genetic, and scientifically unalterable. The one groups is at its very root and by natural constitution "totally evil"
while the other is "totally good"
"Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face
total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."
"The Jews themselves brought about their own destruction during the Holocaust, since they arrogantly endeavored to overcome
their very essence, dictated by divine law."
While castigated by many Jewish figures, religious and secular, for its brazen racism, Grama's thesis is not really in conflict
with the Rabbis of Gush Emunim (the settler camp) and the rest of the National religious movement in Israel today.
He readily applies Torah passages against idolaters, other pagans to Christianity and Islam, and other monotheists who worship
the God of Abraham, the very God proclaimed by the Torah.
He also ignores extensive Rabbinic deliberations during the medieval period, which concluded that both Islam and Christianity
as "licit, monotheistic faiths."
Hence, Muslims and Christians could not be lumped in one category with the idol-worshipers of earlier times.
Sub-human Slaves
If gentiles (goyem) are inherently inferior to Jews, and if their very humanity is presumed to be denied, it is axiomatically
inferred from this that these gentiles have inherently lesser rights than Jews do.
Indeed, some Talmudic references do refer to gentiles as "animals walking on two feet instead of four".
Even today, some Rabbis, such as David Batsri, invoke the "bestiality" of non-Jews, claiming that the Creator created them
with two legs instead of four in deference to Jews, because it is not appropriate that Jews be served with four-legged animals.
It is true that this view is not shared by all Rabbis, especially the enlightened ones. However, it is also true that some
prominent sages holding both Halachic and historical weight are among the main advocates of this pure racism.
For example, according to the code of Maimonides (Rambam): "A Jew who killed a non-Jew is exempt from human judgment, and
has not violated the prohibition of murder."
This code is implicitly practiced by Jewish settler judges when dealing with Jews convicted of killing Palestinians, which
explains the extremely light punishments meted out to the perpetrators, especially in comparison to Arabs convicted of the
same felony.
And here's the perfect explanation for ummm...imperial supremacist hegemony:
"Jewish successes in the world are completely contingent upon the failure of all other peoples. Only when the gentiles face
total catastrophe, Jews do experience good fortune."
"Non-Jews were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world-only to serve the People of Israel."
In Israel, death has no dominion over them With gentiles, it will be like any person-They need to die, but God will give
them longevity. Why? Imagine that one's donkey would die, they'd lose their money.
"This is his servant That's why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew."
"why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap; and we will sit like an effendi and eat."
"That is why gentiles were created."
And settler Rabbi Abraham Kook (great last name!):
"The difference between a Jewish soul and souls of non-Jews -- all of them in all different levels -- is greater and deeper
than the difference between a human soul and the souls of cattle."
Teach your children well; to load Kalashnikovs write on bombs that kill and main Palestinian children and kick and spit on
their poor grandmothers while you pull off their hijab.
This is what the new generation of Zionists are learning.
The actual kinship of zionism and US-imperialism is based on both israel and the US are settler-societies that never came
to be nations.
The expression "nation-state" inverses the factual notions of nation and state. Though a state can enforce submission
it can't establish sovereignty. Souvereignty has to be effected by mental and ideological submission of the subject itself to
his master and therefore its not fully established without the rule of law.
While the American secession war is duly called a civil war, because it established rule of law within the union states
it left the relation of union states to the federal state widely outside this rule. The rule of the federal state became and stayed
a military and mafia-like hegemony established on constant war and the amalgamation of military, political and economic clout
in corporative elite clans, families, alumnis and the union bureaucracy itself.
The force, that drove this rule of war and corporative hegemony in the American federation after the civil war was accomplishment
of the genocide of native cultures. It followed (selection): Spanish-American war, Philippine war, the enforcement of the Monroe
Doctrine in Cuba, Hawai, Samoa, Venezuela. But it had another component: The federal war on the working class and their partly
imported organizations. Then followed WWI and WWII, which were essentially wars against the French and British empire.
So the USA never became a nation. The settler-state of freedom of private property was directly converted to an empire-state
ruled by a corporative elite of oligarchs, military staff and a serfing legion of descendant bureaucratic personnel.
It is easy to see, that the never established and unestablishable "Jewish State", the corporative military rule of a zionist
Oligarchy in Israel follows roughly the same pattern.
This is a kind of basic line in a history full of contradictions. Mind the suez-war followed by the nuclear armament of Israel
by France against the will of the american hegemon. And mind that Israel nowadays has but one enemy it has to fear: The faction
of US-elite, which wants to establish a new and stable order in the middle east instead of "creative" chaos in favour of Israel
and SA. The faction that would welcome an iranian gas-pipeline from South Pars to the mediterranian, try to keep the integrity
of Syria and Lebanon and split the GCC.
...
I tried my best to bring forward my thougts in a tongue that never became mine although I read it every day, because there
was nobody deconstructing the "zionist evil"-talk without referring to quasi-religious attitudes and delusive facts and figures
that tell nearly nothing about their coherence. If it was too bad - just tell me and I won't follow up or try again.
Okay, thank you, then I want ro add an inference though it needed a bunch of constituents and chain-links to corroborate it:
The US Federal State is warring for it's very existance. If it ends being the executive power of imperialistic metropolises
it will probably fall apart, even in the most favorable circumstances you might think of, because of its lack of national substance.
Thats the interface to the fight of the zionist oligarchy for their status as "villa in the jungle", their rule as warlords
who can and "must" project power in all the near and middle east and even north africa to stay the ruling power in Palestine.
This strongly associates them to the before mentioned faction of the US-elite, especially the MIF(inancial)C.
There is no other evil as the evil of war and it's cause in freedom and accumulation of competing private property.
I've cut-and-pasted everything bc I just can't give it the time it deserves right this afternoon. I will though, I
promise: it just may take me a little while bc it's a very different way of looking at things and I really need to examine it
more carefully. And again, thank you, it's really good food for thought and I'll give it my best.
@137 /144 - tomgard. i 2nd nora's response to you in that i find your commentary highly educational in so far as you articulate
a similar viewpoint of mine, but from a very different angle. i am curious what you mean by MIF(inancial)C. - that sounds like
what i tend to think military/industrial/financial/complex.. they are definitely rolled into one, even though people look at these
entities as being separate and not connected..
The result of the neocon meddling in Ukraine has created, as usual, a terrible mess for the "west" and even more so for the
Ukrainians. Is there any way to prevent a repeat of such misdeeds?
Yeah, sticking the neocons under water for a week.
The American political Elite consists of both Zionists and Anglophiles. Just as Lindbergh said.
Now, as far as the Iraq War,
as Congressman Moran said, the Jews were not even nearly solely responsible for driving the United States in, based on WMD lies,
but as a group they could have politically vetoed the move, dominant and decisive. On other foreign/domestic matters, your fractional
mileage may vary.
Dan Gertler's grandfather, Moshe Schnitzer (d. November 2007), was known in Israel as "Mr. Diamond;" in youth he joined the
pre-state underground organization Etzel (Irgoun), an Israeli military cell self-defined as an "untra-nationationalist Jewish
militia," but one that committed acts of terrorism in service to the Israeli cause.8 Moshe Schnitzer assumed a major role in
the Africa-Israeli diamond trade in the 1950's in a partnership business called Schnitzer-Greenstein. Schnitzer later founded
the Israel Diamond Exchange in Tel Aviv in 1960, which today brings Israel $14 billion annually in blood business, and is the
country's second-largest industry, but Israel's top export. King Leopold III of Belgium decorated Schnitzer in recognition
of his activities favoring the close relationship of Belgium, Israel and the DeBeers diamond cartels, and Schnitzer was also
President of the Harry Oppenheimer Diamond Museum in Israel.80
The diamond jewelry trade in the United States is more than $30 billion annually, and 99% -- everything that is not synthetic
or artificial diamonds -- involves blood diamonds and the above organized crime syndicates. Israel buys more than 50% of the
world's rough diamonds, and the U.S. buys two-thirds of these. The diamond factories are located in Nethanya, Petach Tikvah,
Tel Aviv, Ramat Gan, Jerusalem, and other cities around the country, but most of the offices were in Tel Aviv in the financial
district on Ahad Ha'am Street.81 Dan Gertler's father, Asher Gertler, and his uncle, Shmuel Schnitzer, manage the original
family business, and Shmuel is Vice-Chairman of the Belgian-based World Diamond Council -- the entity that spends more money
promoting the false image of "conflict-free" diamonds than it does helping any of the people dispossessed or brutalized by
the diamond industry.48
On August 16, 2007, Rabbi Bentolila in Kinshasa received a communication asking: "What does the Torah say about men exploiting
other men for vast profits while other men are starving and dying all around them? Is there some hierarchy to the Torah that
suggests, for example, that black people or Africans are lesser beings, and therefore not to be a concern where profound profits
are being made?"
There was no reply from Rabbi Bentolila, he was apparently busy readying for another Bar Mitsvah in Belgium. Unfortunately
for Dan Gertler and his spiritual advisers, the Torah says that a Jew can keep a slave, but a Jew kept as a slave must be redeemed,
and that -- an empty, foolish justification for exploiting innocent people -- is how religion falsifies spirituality.
The confusion began when b did one of his usual deliberate substitutions to provoke a bit of thought by substituting slavery
for empire.
The normal confusion, generally engendered by the more pedantic of us whenever b does a semantic substitution, was hugely increased
when b himself confused two asshole neocons of similar name with each other.
Normally b's substitutions generate thought because the concept summoned by the original wording is considerably different
to the concepts generated by its replacement.
This is not the way it is with empire and slavery - two concepts I have always believed to be pretty much indistinguishable
from one another.
That is the heart of the issue here, but but adding the confusion from the juxtaposition of similar terms is the confusion
many people have about slavery.
For me slavery is enforced labour where a human, regarded as the property of another, is forced to live in a way that is beneficial
to his/her 'masters' wants, with no regard for his/her own needs.
Amerikan slavery just like the slavery instituted by the original english colonisers, also featured no payments or wages be
given the slaves.
That isn't always the case slaves who are paid are still slaves and may be worse off because of that. The Greek slaves who
worked as doctors, secretaries, and retail assistants in imperial Rome frequently were paid for their work, but they were still
slaves - their lives were not their own. They were humans who belonged to someone else.
Berkeley is correct at #118 where he points out that slavery without pay ultimately destroys capitalism.
This is why amerika had a civil war. The southern elites wanted to continue as always importing African slaves and paying them
nothing, while providing the bare minimum for survival as food & shelter. The factory and retail giant owning Northen elites couldn't give a flying fuck about 'the rights of man' they wanted to get
richer that is why they went to war.
The northern elites preferred the form of slavery that had been evolving in Europe since the industrial revolution, where slaves,
imported from Europe and more culturally acclimated to factory work than Africans, whose culture and sense of self had been deliberately
destroyed, leaving the recipients of that horror in a vacuum.
The 'new slaves' would be responsible for their own upkeep receiving minimum payment to keep themselves in food and shelter,
just enough to (a) keep them highly motivated at work and (b) for the elites to profit by taking it back.
Both forms are slavery - the vast majority of humans born into poverty in so-called 'developed' nations such as amerika, england,
or israel, have as little say in their own destiny as does a domestic slave in Saudi Arabia.
The biggest difference is that the rules are unwritten & unstated allowing the western elites great flexibility in fucking
everyone else over.
They don't need to be written because once the responsibility for feeding yourself and your family is put onto your shoulders
in the opprressive and domineering manner which neo-liberal unsocieties put on individuals, the majority follow the same well
worn path to personal impoverishment and elite enrichment.
Those who veer off the path - climb outta the rut - can be picked off one by one as needs must. Occasionally one may achieve
independence in the form of what seems to be economic self determination, but with few exceptions that is because their divergence
suits (& enriches), the slave owners.
This egregious exploitation of ordinary, normal, unsociopathic, humans by the sociopathic elites has been around a lot longer
that the organised political movement created to enable followers of Judaism to colonise the Jordan Valley.
If permitted to, ruthless domination of the decent by the greedy will continue long after the zionists have been driven out
of the area and the land returned to its original indigenous owners.
Palestinians are the descendants of the people who stayed on, minding their farms and orchards when the despotic monarchists
who had comprised Jerusalem's ruling elite fled from their Roman replacements.
It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming amerikan imperialism on the corrupt israeli regime, it
is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty crims (yes
they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of amerika, israeli leaders are petty crims), but most importantly because
blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites.
If the elites are to be beaten it will be when all the 'normal' humans have stuck together in common cause against those who
consciously butcher any/all of us for profit.
Once we have learned not to be distracted by deliberately nurtured divisive arguments about race, gender, nationality etc -
then we will rid ourselves of the leeches and then, that time, provided we have managed to do so without making any scapegoats,
maybe then we will be able to asshole-proof our communities ensuring no new sociopaths slink in again under cover of saving us
from oldies, 'those kids', morbidly obese, anorexics, gypsies, kaffirs, niggers or jews.
How many inhabitants does Israel have? How many the US? What percentage of US citizens are Jewish? You must have a theory of Jews being the superior race if you think they can dominate. Of course Israel is a puppet state. What people are trying with their "anti-zionist" theories of "zionist" rulership of the world is very transparent. They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about
history, about who got killed and why.
The recipe is so simple. Tell the stupid class xy people are responsible for their trouble, make them fight each other and
rule them.
Substituting exploitation of labor-power for slavery, then the rule of law in trade and exchange for rule of a "greedy", "indecent",
"sociopathic" (and, as many consequently say: mentally ill) elite introduces one tribe ("lunatics") for another ("Jews")
and therefore an alternative racist doctrine. Both are manifestations of still the same patriarch pattern of subjugation of one
gender to the other (slavery of women), "order" vs. "chaos", rule of command vs. rule of reason, rule of decalogue over collective
knowledge and judgement,"good" over "evil", and, following up this pattern, rule of a pristhood over patriarchs, of "God" over
"men", of intellectual workforce ("Kopfarbeit) over handcraft and, ultimately, the worship of psyche. It's religion combined with
the everyday racist interpretation of competition- results by a mix of functionally allocated benchmarks of (awe of) "success"
and (worship of) "virtue". The slightly "modern" manifestations, mythologies and patterns are toothless against the inquisitional
redoctrination of "good" and "evil" in times of war, that shows up in a renaissance and reconstruction of tribal thought.
Don't know if this rant was kind of understandable, so, simply:
There is no such THING as "common cause" . That's the simple source and agent of racism! But if it's so one has to infer:
There is a common source of the delusion of "common cause" that is transformed in tribal or racist thought. I name this
common source: Negation of class struggle. Wage-labor is a historical formation of slavery, thats right, and its based on sheer
military power like antique slavery, thats right as well. Its usefull and even necessary to remind those roots, but, since the
social fundament of wage-labor slavery is not only different, but antithetic to elder formations, its criticism and scandalization
has to be different and even antithetic. "Freedom" is not a cause, even less a "common" one, there is no such THING as freedom
except freedom of private property. Walking freely is a cause of lust, convenience and a resulting desire. If it becomes obligative
and necessary freedom is over and delusion comes in, solemnizing free movement against the bondage of slavery. Americans could
have learned this of native leaders they preferred to stab when they couldn't break them in cages.
the poor are many, the rich are few. Why do the rich control their lives as well as those of all the poor? What is the ratio
of guards to prisoners in a jail? by your logic the prisoners should be in control.
seriously, you can do better than that.
regardless, there is way too much time and effort spent on blaming the jews for this mess. there was plenty of inequality before
Moses led the slaves out of Egypt.
166) Of course, numbers translate into political influence.
But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. So let's compare the
sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we?
The "zionist conspiracy" theory is designed for the "stupid class".
[...] But in the last analysis power is in the end of a gun. Money gets you nothing if you cannot defend it. [...]
Sure, no guns no power, but at the same token, no money no guns. You see, one needs the money first, and thats where your friendly
neighborhood banker comes into the picture. But before it gets too conspiratorial for you, I better won't elaborate any further.
[...] So let's compare the sizes of the US army and the Israeli army, shall we? [...]
Why? Would only make sense to do so if we'd assume those two are enemies. But they are not. They are close allies, to the point
that if Israel would be attacked by any force strong enough to cause sweat in Tel Aviv the US would without blinking once have
its military might come to the rescue.
That's why I called NATO Israel's ultimate henchmen, troops it knows it can call on should things get hairy one day.
Since the start of the 20th century no country was allowed to attack the US Navy without getting its teeth kicked in, just
Israel. Nearly sinking in 1967 the USS Liberty, killing 34 US sailors and wounding more than a 100, but still best friends. Weird
relationship to say the least, better not think too much about it.
The reason the above argument is irresolvable is that neither side is willing to query the relatively PC term "Zionists" in favour
of the more inclusive "Jews". They say that to do this would be "divisive of the class struggle", which obviously is supposed
to be against "the bourgeoisie", whoever they are - technically, I should say, all those who live off profits or as they call
them 'dividends'. But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently
deliberate neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident.
So we have to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism,
and after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. There cannot be more
than a few tens of thousands of these specialised creatures, worldwide, and one would like to know whether, by the ruse of history,
many of them are Jewish. Then the artificial question of 'Zionists' versus 'Non-Jewish USAian Imperialists' would resolve itself,
because we would be able to see who was pulling the money strings, which ultimately decide all questions great and small.
Kagan, while he is of Jewish belief, has Zionist tendency, his and his kind ultimate aim, is the resurrection of the Khazar empire,
the control of the desert religions, the destruction of the Rus as a nation state.
Somebody, you keep referring to the stupid class. By doing so you're putting yourself right in it, subset "chardonnay sipping
intellectual up themselves bozos".
Well, then lets compare the US GDP to Israel's GDP. Sorry, there is no way Israel can dominate the US. [...]
You are stuck in this idea that one country dominates the other. What would help our discussion along is if you would open your
mind to the possibility a third party dominates both countries. Once you allow for this reality the weird and opaque relationship
the US and Israel have, or the EU for that matter, starts to make sense.
The fact that there is this seemingly never ending discussion going on about which country is the dog and which one the tail
should tell you that there are enough arguments to be found to make either theory appear plausible. The only way that is possible
is if there is a third "unifying" theory, one which explains those arguments without confusion.
And I am afraid to tell you man, the reason those two countries act in unison so often and have each others back in all important
international affairs is because the top echelons in both countries live at the whim of someone far more powerful than them. A
group of people who with their extended family have say 10 trillion dollars in assets, that's three times Germany's GDP, and control
a network of influence so wide and ingrained it knows no rival.
Rowan @170
[...] But anyway, this brings us back to the weakness in Marx himself which I mentioned before, namely the apparently deliberate
neglect of the power of bankers over industrial capitalists, which even in the 1860s must have been quite evident. So we have
to ask, who are the bankers, specifically, the 'merchant bankers' who financed the development of western colonialism, and
after them the 'international bankers' who orchestrate the global pecking order under neo-colonialism. [...]
Great summary. Their fingerprints are all over the history of wars.
I don't believe its tens of thousands, at the very tip of the pyramid, where there isn't much room left for competition as
wealth is so concentrated a clash would cause death to all, I expect a couple of hundred at the most.
They are either crazy and obsessed or they try to intentionally disrupt the discussion. They sure don't know anything about
history, about who got killed and why.
The only person trying to intentionally disrupt is YOU.
I haven't posted consistently on this blog since the Ukraine crisis, so I didn't much analyze the intentions of every poster.
But it didn't take me long to have you pegged. You are as transparent as Zionists come. You divert, you distract all discussion
away from the real guilty party. That's your main mission here. A hasbara spy in the house of free speech.
FYI, it's not the percentage, buddy, it's the power. Occupy was protesting against the 1% holding all the power and hoarding
all the wealth.
If I do a run-down of the heads of all the top banks, equity capital and venture capital firms; I'm talking those that have
hundreds of billions invested in the whole spectrum of American industry I come up with at least 80% run by supporters of Zionism.
That's a whole lot of power behind Zionism!
So don't give me the percentages bullshit, what level of intelligence quotient do you think we own around here??? Quit insulting
our intelligence!
boy, this "zionism" discussion is getting a but much, lately...
Uh, no. IMO, the subject of Zionism has been way too neglected everywhere, especially considering the gravity of our situation
and the increasing threat that Zionism presents to the integrity of justice and our own freedoms in the West, and security in
this day and age. Never mind the Palestinians; WE are at risk now. Our own rights are under fire here!
The start of Neoconism led by Kagan, Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith and others (the majority, Zionists) was the start of the Zionization
of America and subsequently the Zionization of other Western nations, the U.S., Canada and U.K being the most affected with Australia
and others now catching up.
Of course it started quietly, sinuously working its way through the system trying not to attract too much attention. But ever
since the exposé on the Lobby, we're starting to discover just how rampant is Zionism's influence and hold and how much control
is exerted on the public's perception and how it's already started chiseling away at rights we used to take for granted.
We are so bombarded with propaganda now in the Zionist media that we've all turned to the internet because we no longer trust
the media. But now, they're after our rights and freedom here!
I read a saying the other day that went something like this: The Palestinians will never be free until America is freed. How
true! But this problem isn't only America's any more.
Today I posted somewhere else a modified version of MLKs quote on justice: An injustice to someone anywhere is an injustice
to us all everywhere. Because it's so true, that if we allow that injustice to fester indefinitely, in particular, the injustice
against Palestinians and ignore or smother the problem; eventually the rest of us will be subjected to a version of that injustice.
I'll tell you something, every airport in the world is starting to ressemble Ben Gurion. When I travel now; I feel like I'm
at an Israeli checkpoint; I can almost taste the abuse! I can only imagine the level of humiliation and pain Palestinians endure
daily.
Our freedom of speech is also on the line; the internet is no longer a free speech zone; we are monitored; we are censored;
we are bombarded with junk. When I research now, I feel like the results have been altered, like what may appear to be offensive
events or fact has been relegated to back pages or altogether removed to pink wash or whitewash what is happening. It almost feels
like the search engine is laundering information and spitting it out in the cleanest order. Is it my imagination? I don't think
so; I've been using the internet for quite some time and I'm noticing a change; something's off now.
Our privacy is threatened more than ever. Our intuitive intellect is being smothered or ridiculed. Our financial system is
dominated by individuals who not only are supporting a grave injustice, which I believe is supremacist imperialism emerging from
Zionism, but they're intent on creating a uniform system globally that is affecting the livelihoods of millions everywhere with
a selfish supremacist intention in mind based on monopolization. This is as well as I can express it given my limited economic
understanding; but I'm witnessing the results and I like everyone else is in the position to judge and criticize and stop this
outrage.
The Federal Reserve has been run by a succession of Zionists, as is the IMF and the top 1%, well just look it up; it's all
there; it's disheartening.
Honestly, wherever one looks, one sees a Zionist driving the system. What can I say, if they had honorable, decent, altruistic
intentions; personally I might not give a shit; but I really don't like where we're heading; I really don't like where they're
steering and I feel my rights and everyone's rights are being threatened and diminished and I don't want my country and the world
heading down this destructive path.
When they started accusing Occupy of anti-Semitism it appeared like Zionism was trying to control the 99%'s right to protest,
in order not to discover how really rampant Zionism is at the top 1%. I see it; everyone knows it, but we're being muzzled and
wrist tied with that pity card "anti-Semitism" that has turned into a whip against our rights instead of a means to protect people
from hate crimes.
Maybe, you and those who want to shield Zionism try to deny what our eyes plainly recognize as a threat to our freedom! Do
our eyes deceive us? You want us to stop seeing by telling us our lying eyes deceive us or we're anti-Semites? Bullshit!
Our eyes and our intuition don't deceive us! And we won't be robbed of our rights so that a supremacist ideology can exist, be
legitimized and carry on with impunity permanently!
There is the chaff and the wheat here. The wheat see without denying their inner voice and the chaff are here to ridicule that
voice and distract from the truth.
Well I see the hasbara reinforcements have arrived!
The "zionism" discussion is no discussion at all, but a constant, percussive irritant.
And expect it to get progressively more constant, progressively more irritating and percussive. This is but the beginning
of Ravel's bolero, my friend because we're still at the beginning, it's still a whisper, but it's gonna turn into a ROAR.
Zionism is going to be exposed for all it is, for the criminal supremacist, racist ideology that it is. It's really to bad
for your that it's so fatally flaw and that it's expiry date is already is view! You're on the wrong side of history and I
can't wait til you eat your words. It's coming!
kalithea, i tend to agree with copeland fwiw.. does every conversation have to turn into a discussion on zionism? as for mr.
pragma's creative use of the letter z, it is a bit inane on another level. i am willing to accept and agree with the fact it is
a large issue and of concern, but that to bring it into every conversation seems redundant. while it is true the thread title
makes for a natural fit here, but that is not the case with every thread. i think that is partly what copeland is getting at and
i agree with them on this.
So, some people have no qualms about zusa wanton mass murdering thousands and thousands ... but they are gravely irritated
by someone adding a letter too often?!
Whenever I think the zionists have finally hit the bottom of the pit they somehow manage to pierce through to an ever deeper
level.
But I'm a well minded man, so I make you an offer: As soon as zionists stop slaughtering innocent people I shall refrain from
adding the of so harmful and evil letter 'z' to words, OK.
No, seriously, I hope I never will have to deal with your "argument".
I got bad news for you and your fellow legion of hasbarists: expect my argument, ie the truth about Zionism, to grow exponentially,
and to get more constant and more persuasive and to go viral with millions more. You can't stop this cause anymore; you can't
stop the truth from busting loose and becoming the pain in your ass it'll be until it's acknowledged.
Before Obama was first elected in 08, I was being censored and labelled an anti-Semite for referring to The Zionist Lobby as
a den of spies and political browbeaters and hustlers for Zionism. And wo' and behold, turns out they've ruined careers, and were
being investigated by the FBI for espionage. Few dared type Aipac or Zionism in a negative context for fear of being banned. Now,
we can justifiably attack these from every angle because they're proving exactly what they are and many of us predicted they were.
We've come a long way, baby! And this is going all the way until Zionism goes down into the pages of historical INFAMY, and
nothing less will suffice!
You can ridicule all you want, but I won't rest and neither will the growing number, who believe as I do that Zionism is a
threat to us all and not just to Palestinians!
james @185:
The Zionist connection redundant? Not a chance! What it is, is pivotal in getting to the heart of these foreign interventions.
Lest you forget, we're usually discussing a consistent policy of foreign meddling: in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, possibly Russia
and Iran next, each one practically rebounding off the other because Syria was the road to Iran and Russia, and Ukraine
is to Russia what Syria is to Iran in this agenda; the proxies; it's all connected and if you don't get this; you're dumber
than I thought or pretending to be.
Russia doesn't only have a port at stake in Syria, Russian companies are involved in gas and oil exploration off Syria's coast,
an area that Zionists want to hoard for themselves, and Russia was heavily involved in Libya and Iraq until the mess created in
both which weakened Russian influence in both, although Russia's trying to recover it, another reason Russia's a thorn in Zionism's
side. And Ukraine is the strategy to get Russia mired in a problem on its own doorstep to take Russia's focus off Syria, deprive
it of Tartus, and again try to weaken its influence in the Middle East, and at the same time weaken Russia's economy so that it
will never be a competitive threat again in the Middle East! So you bet Zionism's fingerprints are all over this! And the connections
to Zionism go beyond what I've just stated which I've already outlined in other posts.
All these incursions even Ukraine are linked to ZIOCON foreign agenda; forget neocon forever; the term "Neocon" was always
a red herring; a Zionist euphemism used to disguise how many Zionists are actually involved in the hegemonic operation.
So don't give me that redundant crap. Neocons are ZIONISTS with an aggressive global initiative based on neutralization; and
they're driving this policy and you better believe I'm going to harp on that!
It's easy to see the mental disturbance occurring in the writings of a polemicist, in the mindless overuse of a particular
word in any given tract. It's obvious kalithea, that an abundance of couple of these words, is not a question of style in your
writing, but of obsession. First of all, this is a literate group, composed of a lot of longtime readers. Another thing is that
your irresponsible use of "hasbara" is nothing but a smear against those who have a record here of opposing the outrages of Israeli
governments, and their war crimes, about which you bark. This doesn't make you look so good.
What you remind me of most, is an enforcer of party discipline, whose job it is to crack the whip, and to hand out censures,
in other words, to excoriate and verbally abuse anyone who doesn't keep to your dogma.
The issue of the injustices handed out to Palestinians has been focused upon by most of us here for a long time; but it is
not courageous, or good of you, to fire polemic broadsides, or to dispense wantonly,
the charges of hasbara, upon anyone who hasn't tipped over into your particular fantasies.
I don't have time for those who seek to use the crimes committed against jews by europeans to excuse the crimes committed by israel
against the indigenous people of the Jordan Valley, but I don't believe that is what Tom G is doing. I supposed he was pointing
out that having half yer family knocked off by assholes tends to focus the mind (there is a lesson in there for israelis but if
they haven't learned by now its unlikely they ever will).
Pragma et al may have confused predecessors with ancestors. Predecessor is not another word for ancestor; it is someone who
precedes someone else in an office or title.
When I read Tom G's post which alluded to kalithea's predecessors I assumed that he was referring to the last mob of cheerleaders
for judeophobia - the nazis.
At no stage did I consider Tom G had some sorta special insight into the mindset of kalithea's primogenitors.
Those people who focus upon a persons race rather than the person's actions are always gonna be susceptible to believing that
others operate on the same basis.
I'm all for kicking alla the talk of antisemitism into touch as long as we can stick to considering people by what they say
and do rather than what we believe their genetics to be.
Occupy Wall Street was on the right track. People of the world need to rise up against the 1% banksters AND Zionism although they're
one and the same. These forces are driving the Ziocon imperial advance. If Occupy hadn't dissolved because of winter; Zionists
were ready to kill it because they were very worried that the Occupy Movement would eventually merge with the BDS movement against
Zionism and gain momentum on a larger scale and this is exactly what was starting to happen. People are starting to feel like
the Palestinians under Zionism; they're starting to feel like their leaders are collaborators with Zionism like Abbas and the
PA negotiating to screw their people. People are feeling like they no longer have a voice against the powerbrokers in Washington
and on Wall Street. They're feeling like they can't trust the media, because it's full of Ziocon propaganda. We are watched; we
are listened to; we are monitored. We are now the OCCUPIED of Wall Street and Zionism.
There are all kinds of articles on the web written by Zionists condemning Occupy as anti-Semitic. Google Zionism and Occupy
Wall Street. Why were Zionists so scared of Occupy? Because they know Wall Street is run by Zionists and everyone at Occupy knew
saw this; that's why they're next target was The Lobby; and they were planning to occupy Aipac. Zionists realized that the Occupy
movement getting closer and closer to the cause of Occupied Palestine. The Occupy Movement was starting to move against Zionism.
Zionism has no clothes and because we all see this FACT; they accuse us of anti-Semitism. Occupy Wall Street needs to mobilize
again, and occupy not only Wall Street, but the Zionist Lobby as well as it planned to and join with the BDS movement, because
if we don't mobilize soon against Ziocon expansion we will become the empire of Orwellian slavery that this Zionist Kaplan dreams
of. Maybe that's Zionism's PROMISED LAND.
"It isn't merely incorrect to put the cart before the horse by blaming American imperialism on the corrupt Israeli regime,
it is fucking dangerous and destructive - firstly because it causes too much time and energy be spent upon a mob of petty
crimes
(yes they are psychopaths, but in comparison to the crimes of America, Israeli leaders are petty criminals), but most importantly
because blaming 'the Jews' for the world's ills is so destructive to resistance against the asshole elites."
Thank god finally some one other than myself said this, and in a much more eloquent way than I could ever do; because I am
afraid what 'mearsheimer and walt' are doing is precisely that : "putting the cart before the horse" and the direct implication
of that is "blaming 'the jews' for the world's ills".
Sadly this is an inevitable consequence that very often is neglected by decent progressive people, in a way that I some times
feel being a part of a very small minority even on this site!
I find your argument naive*, but I won't argue it, except for the short paragraph below; and whether he meant predecessors
as in people he thinks held my beliefs, or he meant ancestors - it's still slanderous crap, because he doesn't know me and I am
not no Nazi-lover just as I'm no Zionist lover! What I am sick to death of is that bloody victim card and having it shoved in
my face like so much shit, and hung over me like the sword of Damocles! I am not German and even if I were I wouldn't be responsible
for the crap Nazis pulled. That was then and this is now. I know what I see, I see Zionist supremacy, and I always call things
as I see them and if he's offended. Tough, scroll or get lost.
I don't buy into exclusivity, exceptionalism or choseness bullshet of any kind and if that's some genetic bias than too bad
get off the f*cking chosen pedestal! I can't stand monarchies either. And I really can't stand people who don't get the concept
of universality.
Oh well, predecessor, ancestor, whatever. I think everyone could understand what I was meaning.
Anyway TomGard can hardly know
about kalitheas predecessors, ancestors, or whatever-cestors.
Debs is dead brought up an interesting point, which I'd like to extend.
Actually I remember quite well, what my first thought was when I for the first time didn't simply brush off as "oh well, palestinians
are terrorists anyway" (I should mention that I was a young man then, quite innocent or stupid, depending on ones pov) but actually
began to understand what israelis did there.
It was "Hell no! If anyone on earth is to know how evil it is to terrorize others for being of this or that race or for believing
in this that God, then it must certainly be the israelis!"
For while my anger grew and I began to despise jews. Until one day a patient elderly french jew explained it me. He showed
me the smearings on their synagogue and explained "whenever israel commits cruelties the smearings here in at our cemetery increase
in frequency and anger".
That was my lesson about the jews and the israelis and about them not always being one and the same.
And although I had all I needed to understand more I still somehow didn't arrive at the conclusion that there might be evil
planning behind it. It took me again several years and a coincidence to understand that the "jewish" in "jewish state" (israel)
might actually be a really evil disguise and a perfidious one at that.
Perfidious because israel willfully abused the negative image of "the jews" for which they were responsible in the first place.
But perfidious also because israel greatly profits from anti-semitism, both real and grossly attributed anti-semitism because
it perfectly fits israels "jews should come to israel to live there" credo.
kiev is just another case of that in a series of cases.
There is a lot more to tell but I will cut it at that point for the moment.
But although it took me long to pervade through that complex matter and often disguised by different layers and tricks, I made
it a habit to tell zionists who tried the "half of my family was killed by nazis" plot to mute someone that may dare to create
demands on history once they have proven to themselves have learned from the nazi time what is to be learned, namely that racial
or religious based terror is cruel, inhumane, and utterly despicable. Someone supporting a regime that acts not that much different
from what the nazis have been accused have simply no right to recur on that time, and even less to base demands on it, as long
as their very fucking own actions prove that, if at all, they only learned to be the criminals themselves in the very crime they
complain about.
As far as I'm concerned israel can burn and so can all its supporters.
What you guys don't understand, is that "Zionism" is the manifestation of the global Western imperialism in middle
east. It is nothing more. Is it ugly? Yes! Is it criminal? Yes! Is it responsible for all the crimes in the world? NO! Was
Zionism
responsible for the coup of 1953 in Iran? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup in Guatemala
in 1954? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism responsible for the coup against Sukarno? NO!
Was Zionism responsible for the Vietnam war? NO! Who was responsible it? The Western imperialism! Was Zionism behind the coup
against Allende? NO! Who was behind it? The Western imperialism!
IN FACT: Was Zionism behind Zionism? NO! It was the Western imperialism and its ambitions to hegemonize the world energy resources
which was behind Zionism to begin with (Balfour declaration)!
Israel's birth predates 1948! Its real birth was in 1939 when *BRITISH IMPERIALISM* massacred Palestinians and suppressed the
Arab revolt! Zionism is the manifestation of the Western imperialism *in middle east* and not the other way around!
What a load of crock! Guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky were behind Zionism so don't gimme that crap.
I already wrote in another post here that power in the U.S. started turning Zionist sometime during Kennedy's Presidency, not
that I blame him he was otherwise very occupied. So you could have saved yourself some time screaming all those historical references
at me. And why are you so freakin' defensive anyway?
The Ziocon Jews Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, Leo Strauss were the earlier founders of the so-called neoconservatism
movement, and were vehemently opposed to relaxing foreign policy in regards to the Soviet Union and communism in general.
In the early nineties the Ziocon torch was passed on to the likes of William Kristol, Douglas Feith, Paul Wolfowitz and
Richard Perle. And we all know what followed next...years of endless war.
All these "neocons" were Zionists and Jews and were instrumental in influencing foreign policy.
So as you can see Zionists and Zionism was leading the charge. Maybe you should read Paul Wolfowitz's speech at West Point.
Wolfowitz Doctrine...Not intended for public release, it was leaked to the New York Times on March 7, 1992,[1] and sparked
a public controversy about U.S. foreign and defense policy. The document was widely criticized as imperialist as the
document outlined a policy of unilateralism and pre-emptive military action to suppress potential threats from other nations
and prevent any other nation from rising to superpower status.
A real manifesto for authored by a Zionist for supremacy and imperialiam.
But this is not all the Zionist cabal authored as you well know: Zionist Pnac members also authored another document called:A
Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm
This subject has been talked about extensively, and I really don't have the desire to get into a useless and endless
debate recounting the history especially when people want to obstinately shut their eyes to the most obvious facts going on right
before their eyes; facts such as what's going on in Ukraine and the bloody war waged to disintegrate Yugoslavia which has/had
nothing to do with zionism.
I will just go over a couple of points in your argument which were quite nonsense (well your whole comment was nonsense but
I will just go over a couple of points).
First of all US imperialism in particular and the Western imperialism in general did not start with Kennedy, the coup against
Mosaddegh in 1953, the coup against Arbenz in 1954, the first indochina war (with absolute and active support of the French by
the USA), the Korean war and the attrocities commited by USA in Korean peninsula, the whole hearted support for Batista and brutal
suppression of the cubans, the coup against Patrice Lumumba, The colonization of India and brutal suppression of Indians by the
british, the coup after coup made against the constitutional revolution in Iran etc. etc. ALL PREDATE Kennedy. In fact in case
of USA its very inception was based on imperialism, land grab, ethnic cleansing, genocide and slavery, all happening LONG before
Kennedy and having ZERO to do with zionism.
Secondly guys like Herzl and Jabotinsky are nothing but clowns. Ineffective idiots who without the active support and the absolute
control and management of the Western imperialism would not be able to make an autonomous village let alone making an independent
country based on ethnic cleansing and mass murder. Land grab through ethnic cleansing, mass murder of the native population and
wars against all local nations require CAPITAL and MILITARY. And No capitalist invests such huge sums of capital without any rate
of return. Capital is invested for RATE OF RETURN and a hegemony to make possible the continous flow of that rate of return, not
for some nationalistic, racial or religious motive!
And so Israel was not created by the likes of Herzl, it was created by the force (monetary and military) of British empire,
and such creations by the British was not peculiar to middle east and Israel, the British had many other such wonderous feats
of crime all over the globe, of which Israel constitutes but a single example! The British did not create Israel because they
were in love with the Jews or were obssessed with Jewish nationalism. They did it because it was PROFITABLE. Hegemony is always
profitable. And they did in the middle east, what they had done all over the globe to maintain their hegemony and increase their
profit. NOTHING MORE.
Had the geology followed a different trend and all that oil been formed some where other than middle east -say in the region
of Tibet- Herzl and Jabotinsky would not have been even remembered today!
Omg, where do I start? I won't; I don't even want to dignify most of that. First, if you want to be taken seriously, paragraphs
might help.
Second, I never said imperialism started with Kennedy; at least quote me for God's sakes; it's in front of you! I said that
power in the U.S. get it? i.e. those who wield power in the US , such power started changing hands from Anglo to Zionist
during Kennedy's presidency, and I'm talking about the top of the corporate food chain, the super-wealthy who influence power
in Washington, and the evolution of the Ziocon movement. But it started discreetly without becoming obvious. Only in the 1980s
did it start becoming obvious, because it had grown so much and it's influence was becoming more transparent. The flaw with Zionists
is that they're control freaks (rig every corner of the system as much as possible in Zionism's favor) maybe it has to do with
latent paranoia, but that's the reality; don't blame me.
As far as the other wars you mention; most were to fight communism; but guess why the Ziocons, Kristol sr., Podhoretz and Strauss
formed this Ziocon movement? To prevent Communism from spreading! They broke with the Democratic party because they saw these
liberals trying to relax relations with the Soviet Union and they wanted to go in another direction: neutralize; using force.
You can blame the British all you want but around the late 50s early 1960s, again, while Kennedy was a rising star and becoming
President, Zionists were in charge of their affairs, and the worst crimes of Zionism, the worst unilateral attacks on neighboring
countries happened under Zionist sovereignty. Zionist were so in charge of their fiefdom that they started developing nuclear
weapons behind Kennedy's back; that's how powerful they were becoming.
I stated over and over again that I'm not concerned with ancient history; I'm concerned with post-WWII after the Partition,
when Zionists started bombing Palestinian villages, ethnic cleansing and massacre upon massacre. Okay Zionists started their terrorism
before, but that was only to set the stage for frustrating the British to impose their rule over the Palestinians with brutal
force.
Let's agree to disagree; you and r'giap and TomGuard can't stand my attacking Zionism, and the power it wields to keep perpetuating
the longest-running most brutal occupation in modern history and committing crimes with total impunity. You don't get to subert
the rule of law without astounding power and influence.
Your not so cogent narrative only serves to protect Zionism, and thus perpetuate this horrific injustice.
Dont' bother replying; you will never change my mind; I know what I see; and I'm going to call it as I see it: based on the
obvious exponential growth of Zionist power in the U.S.; cause I repeat; you don't get away with such crimes with TOTAL impunity
without pretty significant power, and stiffling that truth is what perpetuates Zionist Injustice against Palestine. That power
sustains injustice!
Defense of slavery and the slave trade -- the most inhuman form of exploitation conceivable. Defense of United States imperialism. One and the same. Arnold Lockshin, political exile from the US living in Moscow
It's very convenient for you, Arnold, to blame simply "US imperialism", as if it fell out of the sky. It didn't. It was directed
by finance capital, which is not an impersonal force but a collection of individual investors, more than a few of whom are interested
particularly in Jewish welfare, as they conceive it: that is to say, they want to use Jewish issues, to which the general US public
is already well conditioned, to push through an entire program of global domination by force. One wonders who these individuals
are, and why they chose Jewish issues as their cover, if they're not Jews.
"... I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!! ..."
"... Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's disgusting. ..."
"... Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb, stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy." ..."
"... "The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational" ..."
"... Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood produces. ..."
"... "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation." ..."
"... Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties make better bank robbers than men with guns." ..."
I thought Mr. Reed provided a good summary of the situation. The diversity of responses
suggests that he struck a nice balance in presenting his observations.
I am a mixed-ethnicity Roman Catholic but starting with college and ever since, most of my
closest associates and many of those with whom I work and play, except for immediate family,
have been middle class Jews. I have found these individuals to be generous and kind and not
at all clannish. All regard themselves as and in fact are patriotic Americans. Many have
achieved extraordinary success and contributed to the commonweal. Many have gone out of their
way to help and comfort me in times of personal crisis.
I find my personal experiences with individual Jews hard to reconcile with the – to
me – obvious observation that, considered as a group, American Jews have had a
disastrous impact on the United States in many areas including invidious control of (1) the
news media, publishing, and entertainment industries, (2) culture generally, (3) finance, (4)
legal institutions. (5) the government generally, and (6) foreign policy in particular.
In high school I monitored a college course on democratic political theory (excluding
Rousseau's totalitarian version) and democracy's totalitarian opponents, i.e., communism and
fascism. The readings on fascism included lengthy sections from Rosenberg's "Myth of the
Twentieth Century".
At the time, I thought that even the less hyperbolic of Rosenberg's rants verged on
insanity. Now, after observing our Jewish-dominated late republic hurtling towards utter
ruination, I'm not so sure.
"What have Jews actually done to you? Hacked your bank account? Gypped you out of your house?
Shot your dog?" and the answer will likely be, "Nothing."
Simple. I served in the Marines for about 7 years as an infantry officer. I met, worked
with and greatly valued many 10s of thousands of Marines.
Infantry is combat arms as are artillery, special ops, missile forces, Marine Air,
etc.
I MET ONE JEWISH OFFICER IN COMBAT ARMS, PERIOD!!!!!
Now, they were everywhere in professional positions in our sister service, the Navy.
Doctors, lawyers, dentists, etc. But almost none in combat arms in America but well
represented in the armed forces of Israel.
Compare that to their ever-presence in politics and, in particular, among the Neocons
who are ceaselessly starting wars and sending non-Jews to die for them. It's
disgusting.
Onward Christian soldier is the new Jewish American national anthem. They're disloyal
cowards and they're a fifth column for Israel here in the U.S. If they vaporized tomorrow
we'd be better off.
Here's a quote from Kissinger which neatly sums it up: "Military men are just dumb,
stupid animals to be used as pawns in foreign policy."
No wonder to me why they were burned in the crematoriums in German during WWII.
I've long wondered how that 2% number was arrived at. Who is counted as Jewish? If it's
only those who actively practice the religion, then I'd guess 2% is about right. But how many
more are there whose ancestors were Jewish but who aren't religious (like me) or practice
Christianity (like my brother)?
Granted, the number of non-religious Jews is shrinking, as Corvinus pointed out upthread.
My brothers and I would all be considered Jewish by ancestry, but none of our children are,
because their mothers aren't.
I suspect that support for Israel and Zionism is much stronger among religious Jews than
my sort. I've never been to Israel, and you'd have to pay me a lot of money to get me to go
there. My parents' opinion was that the state of Israel should never have been created.
This article should be entitled "1000 Reasons why Fred Reed is a Complete Moron".
"The dislike is profoundly visceral, not rational"
Let's see Fred.. Heard of the Neocons, near exclusively Jews, running US foreign
policy to establish Israel's hegemony in the Middle East a la Oden Yinon? Who openly
acknowledges running Hollywood, Freddie? How about the moral quality of what Hollywood
produces.
Fred apparently slept through Bible class, but the New Testament refers to it as devouring
widow's houses.
Matthew 23:14 "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye devour widows' houses, and for a
pretence make long prayer: therefore ye shall receive the greater damnation."
Also, there's the paraphrased quote from the Godfather Movie; "men in suits and ties
make better bank robbers than men with guns."
Interesting but very controversial. Jewish people do possess business acumen and are more oriented toward money success. Just
look what happened in the USSR after its dissolution and Yeltsin privatization. Most "oligarchs" turned to be Jewish ;-)
Also the achievement of Jewish people in science should be be underestimated. This nation gave world a lot of top
physicists mathematicians and philosophers.
Notable quotes:
"... Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular Iraq and Syria. ..."
"... Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats' by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for its war crimes in occupied Palestine. ..."
"... It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia' – clearly another example of the Jewish genius. ..."
"... A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews. Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion. ..."
"... All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street. ..."
Ethno-religious (ER) beliefs and practices have been harmless when individuals or
groups linked to those practices have limited influence over the state and economy. In contrast,
when such groups exercise a disproportionately powerful influence over the state and economy, they
dominate and exploit majorities while forming closed self-replicating networks.
Examples of powerful ethno-centric regimes in the 1930's are well known for their brutality and
devastating consequences. These include the white Christians in the US, Germany and the European
colonial settlement regimes in Rhodesia, South Africa, India and Indonesia, as well as the Japanese
imperialists in Asia.
In the post-colonial or neo-colonial era, ethno-centrism has taken the form of virulent anti-Islamic
hysteria resulting in predatory Western regimes embarking on wars and military occupations in the
Middle East.
The rise of Judeo-centrism, as an economic and political force, occurred in the last half of
the 20th century. The Jewish-Zionist seizure, occupation and ethnic cleansing of historic Palestine
and their rising economic and political influence within the United States has created a formidable
power bloc with significant implications for world peace.
The rise of Jewish ethnocentrism (JE) has confounded its proponents as well as its adversaries;
Zionists and anti-Semites alike are surprised by the scope and depth of JE.
Advocates and adversaries, of all persuasions, conflate the power of what they call 'the Jews',
for their own purposes. Advocates find proof of 'Jewish genius' in every prestigious position and
attribute it to their own unique culture, heredity and scholarship, rather than the result of a greater
social-cultural context. The anti-Semites, for their part, attribute all the world's nefarious dealings
and diabolic plots to 'the Jews'. This creates a strange duality of illusions about the exceptionalism
of a minority group.
In this paper I will focus on demystifying the myths buttressing the power of contemporary Judeo-centric
ideology, belief and organizational influence. There is little point in focusing on anti-Semitism,
which has no impact on the economy and the exercise of state power with the possible exception of
Saudi Arabia. Even the Saudi Monarchy's occasional outbursts against Israel do not inhibit it from
engaging in large-scale financial transactions with the Jewish banking elite on Wall Street and City
of London and from forming covert alliances with Israeli intelligence in order to overthrow secular
pro-Palestinian Arab regimes – as has happened in Libya, Iraq and Syria. They have both benefited
from the massive ethnic cleansing of the highly educated minority Christian populations of secular
Iraq and Syria.
Fake Anti-Semitism: Operational Weapon of the Ethno-Centric Jews
Fake anti-Semitism is most recently seen in the launching of series of anti-Semitic 'threats'
by ethno-centric Jews to create hysteria, serves many purposes following the recent rise of populism
in Europe and the election of the American President Donald Trump who had promised to withdraw the
US from wars in the Middle East. First, it secures widespread support from North American and European
regimes, especially when Israel is criticized throughout the world and at the United Nations for
its war crimes in occupied Palestine. Widespread fake anti-Semitic attacks divert attention to Judeo-ethno
centrists and validate their claims to be the first among the history's victims. Second, widely publicized
'fake' acts of anti-Semitism arouse the ethnocentric foot soldiers and increase rich donor contributions
to the illegal Jewish settlements and the Israeli military. Third, 'fake anti-Semitism' is used to
threaten, repress and outlaw any organizations and individuals who criticize Israel and the influence
of Jewish ethnocentric organizations in their home countries.
How many 'anti-Semitic' acts are staged is uncertain: On March 23, 2017, an Israeli-American
man was arrested in Israel for sending hundreds of fake anti-Semitic threats to Jewish institutions
and schools in four European countries and nine US states. Such threats led to the emergency grounding
of two US airlines and the panicked evacuation of countless schools and cultural centers. This man
used a sophisticated system of cloaking accounts to appear to originate in other countries. Despite
his high skills at cyber-terrorism, Israeli authorities preposterously described him as a 'teenager
with a learning disability'. The Israeli-American cyber-terrorist's arrest made the 'back-pages'
news in the US for one day while his (and others') fake threats continued to make international headlines
for weeks.
These scores of fake anti-Semitic bomb threats were cited by the major ethnocentric leaders in
the US to pressure the US President and hundreds of Congressional leaders, University Presidents,
etc. to mindlessly echo their clamor for greater police state investigations against critics of Israel
and to offer special 'protection' for potential 'Jewish victims'. Moves to outlaw criticism of Israel
as 'anti-Semitism' and a 'hate crime' increased.
Not surprisingly the leading Jewish organizations never backed down or called on the US government
to investigate the source of the fake anti-Semitic threats: that is Israeli-American Zionists, who
carry both nations' passports and can enter and exit with total ease and enjoy immunity from extradition.
It is almost certain that the US FBI had identified the perpetrator of these acts as they uncovered
the sophisticated operation based in Israel. The FBI would have demanded Israeli police arrest 'the
culprit' and shut down the operation. Israeli police staged their own 'fake' investigation and concluded
that the complex cloaked cyber operations 'were the work of a shy nineteen year old with dyslexia'
– clearly another example of the Jewish genius.
It is more likely that the hundreds of false-anti-Semitic
threats were part of an Israeli state operation identified by the FBI who 'diplomatically' pressured
Tel Aviv to cut out the monkey business. The news report of the lone-wolf teenager in Israel allowed
the Israeli intelligence to cover-up their role. Once the Israelis passed off the unbelievable tale
of a brilliant, if troubled, young 'lone wolf', the entire US mass media buried the story forever.
In due time the so-called perpetrator will be released, amply rewarded and his identity re-cycled.
In the meantime the US government, as well as several European governments, was forced to allocate
tens of millions of dollars to provide extra security to Jewish institutions in the wake of these
fake threats.
Jewish Power: The Top 25 American Multi-Billionaires
In February 2017, Forbes magazine compiled a list of the world's billionaires, including a country-by-country
account. The top five countries with multi-billionaires among its citizens are: the US with 565,
China with 319, Germany with 114, India with 101, and Russia with 96. Moreover, since 2016 the net
worth of the multi-billionaires grew 18% to $7.67 trillion dollars.
While the US has the greatest number of billionaires, China is fast catching up.
Despite China's advances, the US remains the center of world capitalism with the greatest concentration
of wealth, as well as the greatest and growing inequalities. One reasonably can argue that who controls
US wealth controls the world.
'Jews' among the Top 25 Multi-Billionaires in the US
A review of the top 10 US multi-billionaires finds four who are identified as 'Jews': Mark Zuckerberg
with $56 billion, Larry Ellison with $52.2 billion, Michael Bloomberg with $47.5 billion and Sergey
Brin $39.4 billion. In other words 40% of the super-richest Americans are 'Jews' while 60% are non-Jews.
Among the top ten in the US, billionaire Jews with a total of $195.1 billion are collectively less
rich than the top billionaire Gentiles who own $282.7 billion.
Of the top 25 multi-billionaires in the US, 11 of the 25 are Jews. In other words 'the Jews'
represent 44% of the top 25 biggest billionaires – outnumbered by Gentiles but catching up.
Analysis of the 'Richest Jews'
We place 'Jews' in quotation marks because this is a doubtful signifier – more useful to both
Zionist fanatics and anti-Semitic polemicists. Most are not 'practicing' or are completely disinterested
in tribal religions. Nevertheless, half of secular Jews in the US are active supporters of Israel
or involved in Fifth Column Israeli 'front groups'.
In other words, about half of the richest 'Jews' do not consider themselves to be religiously
or ethnically 'Jewish'. Super rich Jews are divided regarding their ethnic loyalties between the
US and Israel.
Moreover what is murkier, many of the richest so-called 'Jews' were born to 'mixed marriages'.
Strictly religious Jews do not recognize the children of such marriages as Jews because their mothers
are not Jewish. The omnivorous Zionists, on the other hand, classify all of them as Jews on the basis
of their actual or potential contribution to the State of Israel. In other words, the Zionist classification
of 'Jews' becomes arbitrary, politicized and dependent on organizational affiliation. Religious practice
and ethno-cultural purity are less important.
Judeo-Centrism and the Intrinsic Superiority Fallacy
Among the many zealous advocates of the Judeo-centric world, the most tiresome are those who
claim they represent the product of superior genetics, culture and heritage – unique and intrinsic
to Jews.
For many centuries most Jews were illiterate believers of religious tribal myths, taught by anti-scientific
rabbis, who closed off the ghettos from the accomplishments of higher culture and forbade integration
or mixed marriages. The high priests punished and expelled any Jews who were influenced by the surrounding
Hellenistic, Romanized, Arabic, Renaissance and Rationalists cultures, like the great Spinoza.
In other words, Jews who had rejected Jewish law, the Scriptures and the Torah were expelled
as apostates. But these 'apostates' were most open to the modern ideas of science. Jews greatly benefited
from the emancipatory laws and opportunities following the French Revolution. Under Napoleon, Jews
became citizens and were free to advance in science, the arts and finance by attending secular universities
away from the primitive, superstitious Rabbi-controlled ghetto 'schools'.
The dramatic growth of intellectual excellence among Jews in the 19th century was a result of
their ceasing to be Jews in the traditional closed religious sense. Did they suddenly switch on their
'genius genes' or invent a fake history or religion, as the ethno-centrist would have us believe?
It seems far more likely that they took great advantage of the opportunities opened to them with
major social and political developments in the greater society. As they assimilated and integrated
in secular traditions, they ceased to be Jews in the tribal religious sense. Their scientific, medical
and financial success came from learning, absorbing and exchanging scientific ideas, high culture
and conservative, liberal and socialist ideas with the larger progressive non-Jewish society.
It is no coincidence that 'great Jewish achievers' like the totally secular Albert Einstein were
educated in German universities by German professors and drew on scientific knowledge by German and
non-Jewish scholars. His intellectual development was due to his free association with the great
scientists and scholars of Germany and Europe, not closeted away in some ethno-tribal commune.
The Jews who remained embedded in the Polish, Lithuanian and Russian ghettos, under the reign
of the leading Rabbis, remained illiterate, poor and backward. Most of the claims of 'superior' cultural
heritage or traditions are the creation of a mythical folk history serving ethno-national supremacists.
The Myth of the Contemporary Genius
The modern ethnocentric ideologues ignore the 'dilution of Jewishness' in their celebratory identification
with successful 'Jews'.
Many of the best thinkers, writers, scientists and political leaders were conversos (Christian
converts), or integrated European secular nationalists, socialists, monarchists, bankers and professionals.
Some remained 'reformed Jews' or later transformed into secular Zionists: nationalists who despised
non-Europeans as inferior and couldn't even conceive of Arab Palestine as their 'homeland'. It wasn't
until the 20th century that Zionism was in part 'Judacized'. Early Zionists looked at various locations
for a homeland, including Argentina and parts of Africa and Russia.
These ethno-chauvinist ideologues lay claim to all brilliant individuals, no matter how tenuous
as examples of 'Jewish genius'. Even those personally opposed Jewish ethno-religious beliefs and
indifferent to tribal loyalties end up being claimed as examples of the 'Jewish genius'. Once some
'matrilineal link' could be found, their success and brilliance was tied to the mystical lineage,
no matter how tenuous.
This bizarre practice became even more commonplace following the Jewish military conquest and
brutal ethnic cleansing of Palestine, with the military, political and financial backing of non-Jewish
Europe and the United States. With myths and inflated ideas of unique virtue and brilliance, Israel
was established as a racist apartheid state. A new militant, ethnocentric Judaism converted Israel and its overseas backers into an ethno-ideological
international power with religious trappings, based on the myth of its 'exceptionalism'. To maintain this myth, the personal histories of all prominent 'Israel Firsters' were sanitized
and scrubbed of anti-social and destructive behavior.
All Jewish billionaires were to be portrayed as uniquely philanthropic, while the exploits of
Jewish billionaire swindlers (Bernie Madoff, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky) were not to be mentioned
in polite company. The conquests of billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, rapist-procurer head of
the IMF Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Governor Elliot Spitzer, Congressman Anthony Weiner and other similar
perverts quietly slithered off the edge of the planet although all had once been hailed as examples
of 'ethnocentric genius'.
Major Jewish political donors to US-UK-French electoral parties were hailed while their work
on behalf of Israel was naturally assumed but not discussed. The dizzying shifts between open adulation
and selective whitewash served to reinforce the illusion of superiority. Anyone, Jew or Gentile,
bold enough to point out the obvious hypocrisy would be immediately censored as 'self-hating' (Jew)
or 'anti-Semite' (Gentile).
Return to the Beginning: Judeo-Centric Power
As mentioned above, Jews represent a substantial minority among the top multi-billionaires, but
they are still a minority. Below the top level of wealth are the single digit billionaires and triple
and double digit multi-millionaires; here the proportion of 'Jews' increases. These 'less-than-super-billionaires'
are among the most active and the biggest financial and political supporters of the ethno centric
ideology and tribal cohesion.
Los Angeles-based Israeli-American billionaire Haim Saban contributed tens of millions of dollars
to support of the Jewish state's occupation of Palestine and brutal colonial land grabbing 'settlers'.
His wealth is largely based on his 'genius' in pushing culturally vacuous Japanese cartoons (Mighty
Morphing Power Rangers) on the nation's children. He is the primary donor to the Democratic Party
pushing Israel's agenda – his number one priority as an American citizen.
The lesser 'foot soldiers' of the Zionist power structure are the millionaires and affluent professionals,
dentists, stockbrokers, lawyers, doctors and impresarios. The middle and lower levels of wealth and
power are a diverse group – mostly ethno-religious and secular, but very self-identified ethno-Jews.
A minority is totally secular or converted to non-Jewish religions (especially Buddhism, Christianity)
Despite the constant drumbeat of ethnocentric identity, an increasing number of young US 'Jews'
do not identify with Judaism or Israel. Their influence however is minimal.
The wealthy ethno-religious and secular ethnic Jews may or may not constitute a numerical majority
but they are the best organized, most political and most adamant in their claims to 'speak for and
represent the Jewish community' as a whole, especially during waves of (fake) 'anti-Semitism'!
The many former-Jews, anti-tribal Jews and 'non-Jewish' Jews are no match for the ethnocentric
political apparatus controlled by the chauvinists.
When the tribalists appropriate the glory of a secular non-Jewish Jewish scientist or major 'prize
winner' they claim his or her tribal affiliation in order to impress the 'goys' and to seduce younger
more skeptical Jews about the advantages of ethno-chauvinism.
All the high-tech computer and financial billionaires are just assumed by the tribalists to view
themselves as 'Jewish geniuses' even though they may have learned and borrowed ideas and knowledge
from their non-Jewish partners and mentors in Silicon Valley or Wall Street.
Upward mobility within academia, government and business circles is automatically assumed by
the tribalists to be a reward for superior merit – 'Jewish genius' – rather than nepotism or connections.
Tribal networks and 'understandings' play a powerful unspoken role in career success and immunity
from the consequences of failure, incompetence or dishonesty.
Multi-billionaires and multi-millionaires prospered because they entered establish lucrative
fields or made their career choices highly profitable.
Early on, many powerful Gentile bankers provided entry for talented Jews to succeed. This is
despite revisionist history bemoaning the exclusion of US Jews on Wall Street and their degrading
denial of membership in select WASP country clubs. These myths of brutal oppression on Wall Street
or Long Island yacht clubs have empowered generations of American Jews to assume the role of spokespersons
for the oppressed everywhere. The expression 'crying all the way to the bank' comes to mind.
By the last quarter of the 20th century and especially in the 21st century, deindustrialization
and the shift to financialization in the US economy increased the power and privilege of a disproportionate
number of multi-billionaire/millionaire Jews. This seismic shift has coincided with the pervasive
impoverishment of the marginalized working class in the former 'rust belt' and central parts of the
country and the incredible concentration of national wealth at the top 1%. This is a demographic
shift and ethno-class apartheid of huge, but unstudied, significance.
The most important political question is not how many Jews are super-wealthy but what proportion
of them are influential political donors and active in the Democratic or Republican Parties in order
to intervene on behalf of clan, tribe and motherland (Israel). Majorities among Jews are not crucial
– most are not politically active. What is decisive is the percentage of all the super-wealthy who
are politically active, organized and contribute substantially to influence and control the mass
media to promote their ethno-centric ideology and punish critics.
Conclusion
Overt and covert Jewish supremacists have embroidered a fake history and legacy of exceptional
intelligence ignoring the context of advanced non-Jewish science and cultures, which preceded and
later provided Jews with opportunities for education and wealth.
The danger inherent in all ethno-centric tribes is that they work to dominate majority populations
by creating systems of assigning superiority and inferiority. They then use these to justify growing
inequalities of wealth, education and political power!
Historically favored minorities tend to overreach and, like the eyeless Sampson, bring down the
Temple on everyone. Power corrupts and absolute ethno-chauvinist power corrupts absolutely. Intelligent
Jews of principle are abandoning
This is a pretty accurate description of "Myth about the USA" which is very common in xUSSR area too.
Notable quotes:
"... The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road for his village as a typical example. ..."
"... A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators, bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old alone. ..."
"... A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there." ..."
"... She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks. ..."
"... As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars, but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one. ..."
America's most enduring export has been its image. Self-infatuated, it seduces everyone into
worshipping its self-portrait. In 1855, Walt Whitman wrote, "The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem," then set out to define this "greatest poem" to the rest of the
world, a monumental achievement. In 2005, Harold Pinter said, "I put to you that the United
States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and
ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most
saleable commodity is self-love. It's a winner."
The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people
have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the
US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not
jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US
had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road
for his village as a typical example.
These aborted
boat people looked at me with scorn when I told them there are plenty of poor Americans,
with many in such despair they drug themselves to death, and life in the US is often a very
lonely experience, even for the native-born, with roots going back generations. I was
besmirching these naïfs' religion.
A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie
and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into
everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators,
bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old
alone.
A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How
can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there."
She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on
taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks.
Most people in Ea Kly have never even seen an American. In the next town, Krong Buk, there's
a white resident, the only one in a 30 mile radius. Most of his neighbors know him as simply
ông Tây, Mr. Westerner, though some do call by his first name, Peter.
A man said to Peter, "Merci, madame," the only Western phrase he knew.
Most have no idea that Peter is actually
Swiss
, and not American, but he's rich enough, by local standards, so he's more or less an
American.
White people are rich, live in fabulous countries, travel all over and can suddenly show up
even in Krong Buk to buy a nice piece of land by the lake, build an elegant house, with a guest
bungalow next to it. Whereas the locals only
fish
in this lake ,
the white man swims daily, for he knows how to enjoy life.
The apex of whiteness, though, is the United States of America, a country that didn't just
drop seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as well as 20 million gallons
of herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, but sent twelve tall, clean cut and good intentioned white
men to the moon, a transcendental feat that's still unequaled after half a century, and it's a
safe bet that neither the Russians, Chinese nor anyone else will be able to accomplish this for
a while, maybe ever. Of course, Americans can return to the moon tomorrow if they want to, but
they're already looking way beyond it.
As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become
covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars,
but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as
near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one.
"... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
"... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
"... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
"... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
"... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
"... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
"... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
"... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
"... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox
religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of
mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of
mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.
After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are
allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which
has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit
by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment.
That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative
British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think
tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations
into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia
to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat
to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled
for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while
elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny
"cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.
There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who
benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China
with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.
My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian
Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State
University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented
deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and
the media" (preface p. XIII)
Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal,
LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).
There, Mettan
informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom
between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American
psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".
Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied
by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia
also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in
his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal
Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with
his book
, "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.
But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?
In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis
is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together
with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent.
In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars
and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided
by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences
between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker
perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as
NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much
legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and
concerns of Russia today."
Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W.
Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our
own reality."]
Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists"
to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa
points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale
for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with
its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons
which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of
Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO
expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country
ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members
of the Soviet Union.
"Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"
And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to
Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan,
as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés
and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the
wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.
"That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated,
and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as
he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in
his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves
from the great writer.
"The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans.
And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was
being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia
to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not
changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
"He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first
fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended
his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and
felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to
be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".
Russophobia: akin to Racism
From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural
pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.
Until in high school, I
became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the
other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I
began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an
African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from
Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?
So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are
reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America
and Russia from the Nazis.
These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class
citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior
table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic
hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness
with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and
demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.
And the week following
the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political
delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support
our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated
all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen
Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker
T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt
with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.
Regime Change Comes Home
Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships
and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh
to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back
for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?
In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its
way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed
"RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than
a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another
"Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its
44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of
this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger
of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President
Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.
A Florentine Epiphany
But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular
view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after
his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision
and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking
along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the
peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and
where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"
The 21st Century Inquisition
So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic
age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange
confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq
invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who
was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!
Any Good Sense Left?
So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and
Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place,
which we can call reality."
"Walden" 1854
If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:
For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream
Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR,
PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.
This is a pretty accurate description of "Myth about the USA" which is very common in xUSSR area too.
Notable quotes:
"... The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road for his village as a typical example. ..."
"... A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators, bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old alone. ..."
"... A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there." ..."
"... She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks. ..."
"... As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars, but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one. ..."
America's most enduring export has been its image. Self-infatuated, it seduces everyone into
worshipping its self-portrait. In 1855, Walt Whitman wrote, "The United States themselves are
essentially the greatest poem," then set out to define this "greatest poem" to the rest of the
world, a monumental achievement. In 2005, Harold Pinter said, "I put to you that the United
States is without doubt the greatest show on the road. Brutal, indifferent, scornful and
ruthless it may be but it is also very clever. As a salesman it is out on its own and its most
saleable commodity is self-love. It's a winner."
The farther you are from the US, the more mythical it becomes. Here in Ea Kly, most people
have never been to Saigon, much less California, New York or Las Vegas, so their faith in the
US can become childishly fanatical. This week, I met three brothers who still regret not
jumping on a boat to escape, forty years ago. Every Vietnamese they know who ended up in the US
had become fabulously rich, they insisted, and they cited a man who returned to build a road
for his village as a typical example.
These aborted
boat people looked at me with scorn when I told them there are plenty of poor Americans,
with many in such despair they drug themselves to death, and life in the US is often a very
lonely experience, even for the native-born, with roots going back generations. I was
besmirching these naïfs' religion.
A man in his 40's asked me if wife swapping is common in the US. As evidenced by every movie
and music video, America is this insanely sexed up place where everybody is always jumping into
everybody else's bed, not the land of widespread porn addiction, compulsive masturbators,
bitter divorcees, smart phone exhibitionism, paid cuddlers and the never married growing old
alone.
A woman told me that she had a friend in the US who was making "only" $2,400 a month, "How
can you live on so little?" "Many Americans make less than that," I answered. "I sure did most of my time there."
She looked amused. She had no idea most Americans have to pay around 20% of their incomes on
taxes, and that housing and transportation costs eat up half of their paychecks.
Most people in Ea Kly have never even seen an American. In the next town, Krong Buk, there's
a white resident, the only one in a 30 mile radius. Most of his neighbors know him as simply
ông Tây, Mr. Westerner, though some do call by his first name, Peter.
A man said to Peter, "Merci, madame," the only Western phrase he knew.
Most have no idea that Peter is actually
Swiss
, and not American, but he's rich enough, by local standards, so he's more or less an
American.
White people are rich, live in fabulous countries, travel all over and can suddenly show up
even in Krong Buk to buy a nice piece of land by the lake, build an elegant house, with a guest
bungalow next to it. Whereas the locals only
fish
in this lake ,
the white man swims daily, for he knows how to enjoy life.
The apex of whiteness, though, is the United States of America, a country that didn't just
drop seven million tons of bombs on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, as well as 20 million gallons
of herbicides, mostly Agent Orange, but sent twelve tall, clean cut and good intentioned white
men to the moon, a transcendental feat that's still unequaled after half a century, and it's a
safe bet that neither the Russians, Chinese nor anyone else will be able to accomplish this for
a while, maybe ever. Of course, Americans can return to the moon tomorrow if they want to, but
they're already looking way beyond it.
As New York, Chicago, Miami, Houston, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles become
covered with feces from homeless Americans, American colonies will be set up not just on Mars,
but Venus, Mercury, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, in whatever order, for they're all as
near as Hollywood, or your computer, assuming you'll still have one.
"... My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). ..."
"... Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal, LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017). ..."
"... "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) ..."
"... Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent. In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and concerns of Russia today." ..."
"... From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma. ..."
"... So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America and Russia from the Nazis. ..."
"... And the week following the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC. ..."
"... Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not? ..."
"... So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers ..."
Russophobia, as psycho-social-political pathology, is diagnosed as a disorder in The West since before the 1000-year-old Roman-Orthodox
religious schism and most recently manifested with a vengeance in the course of the 2013-14 with Edward Snowden's revelations of
mass surveillance by the US and its covert activities leading to the Ukraine coup with Russophobia used thereafter as a weapon of
mass deception to inflame this latent pathology in the public.
After more than a year since we first heard the BBC "breaking news" about the "Russians Poisoning the Skipals", all we have are
allegations, but there is still no real evidence to present before a judge and jury for a just trial, only media propaganda which
has provoked even more fear and hysteria meant to distract people from the government's bungling and high level of anxiety over Brexit
by once again blaming Russia . Never-the-less, it prompted politicians to administer instant sanctions against Russia as punishment.
That first day, the "evidence", presented in the usual clipped, "authoritative" British accents, included interviews with a conservative
British MP, then the former US Ambassador to Russia, Alexander Vershbow (2001-05), now with the notoriously hawkish US-based think
tank, the Atlantic Council. Thus, the three of them: the BBC "journalist" and the two "experts", colluded to transform false allegations
into "facts"... fueled, as always, by their perpetual prejudice, RUSSOPHOBIA, in the course of their propaganda war to force Russia
to surrender to American-led Western Domination or else: have their economy destroyed & their people suffer. Indeed, it is a threat
to the whole world played to the discord of rattling nuclear swords with a chorus of vindictive Russian oligarchs, whom Putin expelled
for robbing the Russian people. So, now living in London as expats, they would seem to be the more likely culprits. All the while
elsewhere in London, thanks to our "special US-UK relationship", Julian Assange has been excommunicated and imprisoned in a tiny
"cell" at the Ecuador embassy for revealing embarrassing American secrets via Wikileaks.
There we have it: the poisoning of our minds by the media and politicians which are owned and controlled by the US-UK-EU 1%, who
benefit from Western Hegemony. So, these deluded few are now desperately defending it from the rising powers led by Russia and China
with India not far behind demanding a multi-polar, democratic world order.
My search for the roots of this particularly vicious and extremely dangerous hate campaign began in a Dartmouth College Russian
Foreign Policy course, which led me to the book, "Russophobia: Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy" by San Francisco State
University Professor Andrei P. Tsygankov (2009). And there, the detoxification of my mind began as I studied his deft, well-documented
deconstruction of the political propaganda disseminated "by various think tanks, congressional testimonials, activities of NGOs and
the media" (preface p. XIII)
Then in Italy the following winter, I discovered the work of the Swiss journalist, Guy Mettan, in the Italian geopolitical journal,
LiMes: an excerpt from his book, "Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria" (2017).
There, Mettan
informs us that this psycho-social pathology in Western Civilization" goes back more than 1000 years: to the division of Christendom
between the Orthodox and Roman churches. Indeed, his research into the depths of history confirms the diagnosis by our renowned American
psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, in his 2003 book, "Superpower Syndrome: America's Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World".
Therein, Lifton states: "More than merely dominate, the American superpower now seeks to control history. Such cosmic ambition is accompanied
by an equally vast sense of entitlement, of special dispensation to pursue its aims." (p.3) And Mettan's analysis of Russophobia
also underscores the work of University of Chicago Professor John J. Mearsheimer, our leading international relations "realist" in
his three Henry L. Stimson lectures at Yale University November 2017: "The Roots of Liberal Hegemony", "The False Promises of Liberal
Hegemony" and "The Case for Restraint": with
his book
, "The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams, International Realities" published in 2018.
But what about "Russian Aggression" in Ukraine & Crimea?
In the first place, it was the astute Mearsheimer, who, in the Sept-Oct 2014 Foreign Affairs, informed us "Why the Ukraine Crisis
is the West's Fault: The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin" (pp 77-89), but the American foreign policy establishment, together
with ambitious politicians and the me-too media, paid no heed and continues to repeat its fabricated "facts".
Never-the-less, Mearsheimer is backed up by Richard Sakwa, Professor of Russian and European Politics at the University of Kent.
In Sakwa's book, "Russia Against the Rest: The Post-Cold War Crisis of World Order", 2017, we turn to the section on "Reality Wars
and American Power" on p. 217 to read: "It does indeed seem that Russia and Western elites live in totally different worlds, divided
by different epistemological understandings of the nature of contemporary reality. The Ukraine crisis crystallized the profound differences
between Russian and Atlanticist understandings of the breakdown and its causes." And he continues on p. 218: "Elite and policy-maker
perceptions and attitudes forged in the Cold War years sustain these legacies and frame the discussions of such crucial issues as
NATO enlargement, democracy promotion in the post-Soviet area, and strategic arms talks." Adding that these "are no longer so much
legacies as self-regenerating narratives and modes of discourse that preclude a more open-ended understanding of the dynamics and
concerns of Russia today."
Karl Rove: "We're an empire now; we create our own reality."
[In 2004, journalist Ron Suskind wrote in The New York Times magazine that a top White House strategist for President George W.
Bush -- identified later as Karl Rove, Bush's Deputy White House Chief of Staff -- told him, "We're an empire now, we create our
own reality."]
Thus, we've become trapped in a contrived "reality" promulgated by neo-conservative warriors under cover of neo-liberal "democracy-spreading-humanitarian-interventionists"
to justify an American Empire promoting itself as the indispensable "Liberal World Order". However, under that global order, as Sakwa
points out on p. 219: "If a foreign power is considered to have violated 'international order', then it can be overthrown" as a rationale
for American "regime change" anywhere around the world: whether to control the supply of copper in Chile or oil in Iran. And, with
its eye on Russia's vast oil, gas and other natural resources, America claims the right to threaten Russia by ringing it with weapons
which we would not abide were the Russians to place missiles in Mexico as the Soviets did in Cuba to defend it after our "Bay of
Pigs" invasion that brought humanity to the brink of nuclear war. Thus, Russia was defending itself in Ukraine against further NATO
expansion while Crimean citizens, by majority vote in a democratic referendum, chose to rejoin Russia as they had been one country
ever since Catherine the Great except for an interval in the '50s when Crimea was" gifted" to Ukraine while they were all members
of the Soviet Union.
"Ditching Solzhenitsyn, Defender of Russia"
And not to forget that in 1974, after being expelled from the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and his family fled first to
Zurich then to Vermont in 1976 and lived on a farm near Cavendish, where he continued to write and publish his work. Meanwhile, Mettan,
as a journalist covering events related to Russia, became quite distressed over "the widespread prejudices, cartloads of clichés
and systematic anti-Russian biases of most western media." And he went on to say that "the more I traveled, discussed and read, the
wider I perceived, the more the gap of incomprehension and ignorance between Western Europe and Russia became evident.
"That was why, during the 1990s, I was shocked by the way the West treated Solzhenitsyn. For decades, we had published, celebrated,
and acclaimed the great writer as bearing the torch of anti-Soviet dissidence. We had praised Solzhenitsyn to the skies as long as
he criticized his native country, communist Russia. But as soon as he emigrated, realizing that he preferred to isolate himself in
his Vermont retreat to work rather than attending anticommunist conferences, western media and academics began to distance themselves
from the great writer.
"The idol no longer matched the image they had built and was becoming a hindrance to their academic and journalistic career plans.
And once Solzhenitsyn had left the United States to go back to Russia and defend his humiliated, demoralized motherland that was
being sold at auction, raising his voice against the Russian 'Westernizers' and pluralist liberals who denied the interests of Russia
to better revel in the troughs of capitalism, he became a marked man, an outdated, senile writer, even though he himself had not
changed in the least, denouncing with the same vigor the defects of market totalitarianism as those of communist totalitarianism.
"He was booed, despised, his name was dragged through the mud for his choices, often by the very people who had praised his first
fights. Despite that, against all odds, against the most powerful powers that were trying to dissuade him, Solzhenitsyn defended
his one and only cause, that of Russia. He was not forgiven for having turned his pen against that West that had welcomed him and
felt it was owed eternal gratitude. A dissident today, a dissident wherever truth compelled, such was his motto. This deserves to
be remembered." Mettan, pp. 15-16 in "Creating Russophobia".
Russophobia: akin to Racism
From another perspective: Mettan's chapter on "German Russophobia" set me thinking that this "Western Supremacy" political-cultural
pathology known as Russophobia is like the racism which I knew growing up in totally segregated Oklahoma.
Until in high school, I
became so perplexed and appalled by the curtain of hate and "justifications" in which we were smothered: the Negro schools on the
other side of town? and why were there separate waiting rooms, drinking fountains & restrooms in bus and train stations?...that I
began poking holes in the curtain to see what was outside...and found a book in the library: "South of Freedom" by Carl Rowan, an
African-American Minneapolis Star Tribune journalist, describing his journey from South to North. So, thanks to what I learned from
Rowan, I began to tear the whole damned curtain down...at least in my mind.
Whom the Gods would destroy, they first drive mad?
So, here's a Swiss journalist punching a hole in this wall of Russophobic Western Supremacy and through that gaping hole, we are
reminded that the Russians are Europe's neighbors who sacrificed more than 26 million of their own lives to save Europe, America
and Russia from the Nazis.
These are not poor "niggers" from the Eurasian ghetto we've been trying to club into submission as second-class
citizens of "The Liberal World Order" dominated by US; they're nuclear-armed and no longer willing to sit at a separate, inferior
table with no vote and no voice over who makes the rules...nor are China, India and Brazil. And last year, while the wave of Russophobic
hysteria over alleged "Russian poisoning" was rolling out of the UK and engulfing the Western world in the latest siege of mass madness
with only Jeremy Corbyn, leader of the British Labor party, having the courage to stand up in Parliament on the Ides of March and
demand Evidence! only to be pilloried by the mindless politicians and media led by the once esteemed BBC.
And the week following
the August 7, 2018 Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, will surely go down in psychiatric circles as another case of mass media-political
delusions led by cheer-leader-in-chief, Rachel Maddow of MSNBC.
Meanwhile, not to forget that it was Hearst newspaper propaganda that whipped the American public into a war frenzy to support
our first step in empire-building: our 1898 intervention in Cuba's war for independence from the Spanish Empire which had dominated
all of Latin America for 500 years. As the former NYTimes journalist/bureau chief in Istanbul, Berlin & Central America, Stephen
Kinzer reminds us in his latest book "The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of American Empire", Twain, Booker
T. Washington and even Andrew Carnegie leading a handful of other anti-imperialists...were not able to prevail against Roosevelt
with his Rough Riders and the Hearst newspapers' war propaganda.
Regime Change Comes Home
Never-the-less, after a very long run of American "regime change" abroad leaving a bloody trail of destruction, dictatorships
and chaos from Iran in 1953, when we joined with the British to overthrow the democratically-elected President Mohammad Mossadegh
to maintain the Brit-US control of its oil on through Guatemala, Vietnam and Chile to name a few of our interventions we were back
for a second round with "coalitions of the willing" or not?
In the Middle East where our regime-change machine managed to plow its
way through Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya before breaking down in Syria. Until now it's been brought home again, renovated and renamed
"RussiaGate" for another attempt at removing a President for trying to mend US relations with Russia. Though even after more than
a year of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigations accompanied by such cinematic support as the movie, "Felt", another
"Watergate" re-run. Did anyone else notice the resemblance between "Felt" and Mueller? And despite the media's commemoration of its
44-year-old "moment of courage" with the movie "The Post" to promote Trump's ouster, our democratically-elected President, as of
this writing, remains in power. However, in this rush to "regime change", didn't the our "ruling elite" read Jane Mayer's "The Danger
of President Pence" in the 10/23/17 New Yorker? At least the 70s' "ruling class" was smart enough to remove an unqualified Vice President
Spiro (who?) Agnew before "regime changing" Nixon and replacing him with the more or less benign Gerald Ford.
A Florentine Epiphany
But back to last January in Florence, Italy, when I was hiking in the hills beyond the Piazzale Michelangelo, with its spectacular
view of that Renaissance city and its centerpiece, the Duomo, I came across the Villa Galileo, which had been his last home after
his trial as a "heretic", during which to save himself from torture and execution, he was forced to deny his helio-centric vision
and henceforth lived under "villa arrest", from 1631 until his natural death in 1642. While pondering his fate, I continued walking
along the gently rising, ever-narrowing road between ancient stone walls overlooking villas and olive groves until I reached the
peak, where I felt as if I were standing on top of the world as I contemplated both the Arno and Ema river valleys far below and
where I swear I heard Galileo declare: "The world does not turn on an American axis!"
The 21st Century Inquisition
So how is it that we now have contemporary Inquisitors persecuting so many truth tellers such as Edward Snowden, our electronic
age "Solzhenitsyn?" in Russian exile; Chelsea Manning, imprisoned some 7 years for revealing US brutality in Iraq; Julian Assange
confined to his Ecuadorian Embassy exile in London since August 2012; Katharine Gun, a whistleblower attempting to stop the Iraq
invasion, who faced 2 years of British imprisonment before her case was dropped; James Risen, former New York Times journalist who
was persecuted by our "justice" system for revealing our government's surveillance of US!
Any Good Sense Left?
So, do we the people have enough good sense & independent thinking left to follow the advice of Henry David Thoreau?
"Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition,
and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and
Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place,
which we can call reality."
"Walden" 1854
If not, the Doctor prescribes Shock Therapy:
For a week, a month, or however long it takes to cleanse and open the mind, one must adhere to strict abstinence from Mainstream
Media propaganda, junk news, pseudo analysis, fake photos, TV & videos including absolutely NO phony "for, by & of the people" NPR,
PBS, BBC or other Government-funded Neo or LibCon Imperial tranquilizer.
Some comments look like from April 1 and are textbook demonstration of the American exceptionalism, but still some comments are very insightful and come from people with real
experience of living in Russia at least for a short period of time.
Notable quotes:
"... "Any touch to an American is taken as a violation of his personal space, so in the U.S., as a rule, people do not take each other by the elbow and do not tap each other on the shoulder if they" do not want to be charged with harassment or domestic vio and end up in American gulag. ..."
"... But if "to a white guy from the West their politeness felt like fakeness and I was stressed out because of it" then this "is how many black people feel when hanging around white people. What we see as just common courtesy, comes off as" 'microaggression' and 'cultural appropriation' to them. To each his own. And not YOUR own. ..."
"... No wonder the "biggest breath of fresh air that comes to mind, is the absence of PC culture". ..."
"... One of the more endearing compliments I ever received was from an old Russian girlfriend, who told her friends, "He's one of the good ones he has a Russian soul." She and her friends were just as described above, generous to a fault despite what was an obvious wealth gap. ..."
"... Should have married that girl. Then again, I might have dodged the Babooshka bomb. Interestingly enough, she had no desire to ever go to the US, so that was not a part of the calculus. ..."
"... Have some sympathy for our poor consular officers abroad they spend far too much time face to face with the wretched refuse of the world trying to scam their way into the US. ..."
"... is seems that all our governments just end up being dictatorships sooner or later anyway; so that being the case, I would prefer a sane dictatorship (like Russia or Singapore) to an insane one, which is what we Americans have at the moment. ..."
"... I reckon you're young and mixing with a set a bit more affected by Western media propaganda than they or you realise. Some of what you write about your adopted home comes across as a bit churlish as well ..."
"... Given Aussie and Danish cultures are very similar in many respects, that suggests 2 years for a Westerner in either Japan or Russia is way too little. I'm taking what you say on specifics with a grain of salt but the overall message the gist of it is accurate all the same. ..."
"... I'd say six years is about the mean for getting the hang of a new culture if as you are living it. ..."
"... To understand Russia you have to see the other cities. You can't just go to Moscow and St Petes. It's a huge country, some parts of which are decaying due to migration and demographic collapse (e.g., Perm). Other parts are vibrant and fun. I've seen about 1/3rd of the larger cities, but never Siberia or the far East, nor Chechnya/Dagestan/Ingushetia/Adygea. Hard to travel to some of those places as a foreigner. ..."
"... If you think that Russian food is bad, you are either an idiot or don’t know what to order. If you go to Omsk and order sashimi, you are going to be disappointed. But native Russian dishes such as solyanka, borsch, kulebiaka, kholodets, etc etc are excellent. Not to mention the Georgian and Uzbek dishes that are as common in Russia as Mexican and Chinese are in ‘Murika. And you can eat well in a workers’ cafeteria, not just in an expensive restaurant. ..."
"... In all other respects, you can’t even begin to compare Russia and Ukraine with a straight face – be that infrastructure, law and order, average incomes ..."
"... Yep, I'm 25% Russian, more like 15% as I had some German Nordic Russian nobility on that side. This Slavic gene is always there to call BS on idiot Liberals or worse Libertarians that want to talk, talk, talk make excuses for the worst Paki sexual groomers. Nah, the Russian way is better. ..."
"... Just realistically looking at all the places I have lived, the US would be the last place I'd go to, it's an empire in decline. Morally, spiritually, economically, politically educationally and socially. (And I have lived in the US for 20 years) The only part of American life that seems appealing is the kind of homesteading movement that is occurring in some states. ..."
"... Whatever beefs one may have with Russia or Putin, corruption, noise, etc. The fact is Russia is holding it's own and improving its diplomatic relations and increasing it's allies and trade partners, has become militarily a force to be reckoned with and therefore more secure, it has become more self sufficient in many areas such as agriculture, is improving it's infrastructure, people are earning more, it has almost no external debt, huge reserves of gold, is beginning to attract tourism, is expanding in fields of science, and has the reputation of being a reliable partner. ..."
"... As the author mentions, people in Russia are very generous and family oriented. I think this gives more meaning of life and an overall feeling of well being than striving for more and more income to buy more and more stuff. Especially as particularly in the US and Europe, people are living so much on credit. ..."
"... Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country ..."
"... Although discriminated against, most Americans, except maybe those down on their luck and real life losers without any skills, live in nice, clean suburbs and in many cases they don't even need to lock their doors ..."
"... While it's not Germany or Sweden when garbage is concerned, America utilizes its trash quite properly, and about 75 to 85% is incinerated. ..."
"... Meanwhile in Russia: "If government officials continue ignoring the problem, in a few years the Russians will live in a landfill, as it is now happening with the residents of Haiti" ..."
"... Americans in the US now total about 55% of the population: Wikipedia says: "197,285,202 (Non-Hispanic: 2017), 60.7% of the total U.S. population"- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_American , however this number is flawed as they count various non-whites like Berbers, or Turkic people like Albanians, Turks, Kurds, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis as whites. ..."
"... Then we have: "About 46 million Americans live in the nation's rural counties, 175 million in its suburbs and small metros"- http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ . Which seems to confirm that Americans (Whites) live in either suburban or rural areas. ..."
Most places you apply to online won't take your overseas application serious, just like I
don't take my" pseudonymous fictional interview serious. The Kreutzer Sonata it ain't. All
the same, if you have "a Russian husband, who has himself published some essays about some of
the unexpected cultural differences a Russian encounters in America", make sure your Zlobin
doesn't turn out to be a Pozdnyshev.
So maybe is true this "Russian concept is that you're safe when you're with the
crowd."
At least in some situations. And yes,
"Any touch to an American is taken as a violation of
his personal space, so in the U.S., as a rule, people do not take each other by the elbow and
do not tap each other on the shoulder if they" do not want to be charged with harassment or
domestic vio and end up in American gulag.
But if "to a white guy from the West their politeness felt like fakeness and I was
stressed out because of it" then this "is how many black people feel when hanging around
white people. What we see as just common courtesy, comes off as" 'microaggression' and
'cultural appropriation' to them. To each his own. And not YOUR own.
No wonder the "biggest breath of fresh air that comes to mind, is the absence of PC
culture".
Not a bad deal for 99.9999% of the Earth's population who would do anything to
escape it.
Or "if all else fails, just buy a bus ticket [from] Minnesota" to Washington P.C.
& see what it's like to live in Tel Aviv for two years.
One of the more endearing compliments I ever received was from an old Russian girlfriend, who
told her friends, "He's one of the good ones he has a Russian soul." She and her friends were
just as described above, generous to a fault despite what was an obvious wealth gap.
But the funniest thing she ever did was to use her bare hand to kill a cock-roach that had
dared to cross our table at a restaurant.
Should have married that girl. Then again, I might have dodged the Babooshka bomb.
Interestingly enough, she had no desire to ever go to the US, so that was not a part of the
calculus.
Have some sympathy for our poor consular officers abroad they spend far too much time face
to face with the wretched refuse of the world trying to scam their way into the US.
The thing is, I don't want a "benevolent dictatorship" like Singapore or Russia. I want
to live in a country like the Founding Fathers of America intended.
Pick a number: everybody wants to "live in a country like the Founding Fathers of America
intended," probably even the Founding Fathers themselves did. But is seems that all our
governments just end up being dictatorships sooner or later anyway; so that being the case, I
would prefer a sane dictatorship (like Russia or Singapore) to an insane one, which is what
we Americans have at the moment.
The other mistake I see people make is that they toil away for 80% of the year in a job
they hate, so they can splurge for a few days in an Americanized luxury resort. Why not
make every day exotic and truly get a feel for the local atmosphere by moving somewhere for
a year instead?
So true.
If all else fails, just buy a bus ticket to Minnesota and see what it's like to live in
Somalia for a day.
Russian tourist visas are a little complex, best to use a private agency. Cost should run
around $200-300, takes about 10-14 days. Can get a multi entry visa good for 5 years with a
180 day stay per visit.
One can enter Belarus without a visa for up to 7 days if flying into Minsk.
Now also possible to stay in Belarus for 30 days during certain sporting events, same in
Russia
Ukraine is visa free for most citizens of advanced countries.
Tourists on ships can stay up to 72 hours in St Petersburg
I lived in the "benevolent dictatorship" of Singapore, and it was pretty nice:
Clean, orderly, low-crime, prosperous. Since I worked and didn't engage in socially
unacceptable behaviour, it was very accomodating and Big Brother Goh left me more in peace to
go about my life there than my crazy jealous girlfriend, Uncle Sam. In some ways, it is much
freer.
I went back a few years ago to visit, and while waiting for the light to cross the street,
the guy next to me threw a piece of trash on the ground, so I looked at him and said, "You
wouldn't do that if Lee Kuan Yew was still in charge." He sheepishly picked it up.
I reckon you're young and mixing with a set a bit more affected by Western media propaganda
than they or you realise. Some of what you write about your adopted home comes across as a
bit churlish as well. Also a couple of years is no time at all to get to know any place let
alone the culture.
I've spent 3 times as long on average getting to know my new homes and
they were no more distant than Denmark on one occasion.
I'd say I barely reached a plateau of
understanding and appreciation after a cycle of admiration, loathing, frustration and finally
reappraisal after 6 years!
Given Aussie and Danish cultures are very similar in many
respects, that suggests 2 years for a Westerner in either Japan or Russia is way too little.
I'm taking what you say on specifics with a grain of salt but the overall message the gist of
it is accurate all the same.
Still I'd like to see you cut those apron strings to yankee land before seeing too much
more of your advice about other cultures. I mean that, I'd like it because your insight is
interesting all the same, you are clearly smart and thoughtful so this is not an attack. In
my experience you have not even begun to scratch the surface until you begin to dream in the
language of your new home.
I'm currently trying to find communion between my Western and South Asian culture of my
wife and after 7 years am far from getting it. This is due to living in my country not hers
though.
I'd say six years is about the mean for getting the hang of a new culture if as you
are living it.
You should see the guy who works for me in marketing. More metal crap in his face and small
scooter rubber tires in his ear lobes as best I can tell, than you'd want to know about.
Absolute freak show brother. He is unfortunately also extremely intelligent and competent at
what he does. I say unfortunately because if his performance matched his appearance it would
be easy to say bye bye, but fact is he's brilliant and a nice bloke too. Beats me why this
kid would do this to himself.
He's a very handsome young man with mixed Chinese/Aussie
parents. Yet his face looks like a junkyard tossed across a picturesque park. It would make
more sense if he was gay but he is even straight, just like this kid writing the article
appears to be. They don't even look like men when they do this, so it beats me.
I've spent a lot of time in both, although last time I saw Ukraine was 3 years ago. The food
in Ukraine is great, Russia well, horrendous. Peasant food, basically, and not particularly
good peasant food either. There's a markedly different feeling in Ukraine these days, losing
population like mad, poor economy, etc.
To understand Russia you have to see the other cities. You can't just go to Moscow and St
Petes. It's a huge country, some parts of which are decaying due to migration and demographic
collapse (e.g., Perm). Other parts are vibrant and fun. I've seen about 1/3rd of the larger
cities, but never Siberia or the far East, nor Chechnya/Dagestan/Ingushetia/Adygea. Hard to
travel to some of those places as a foreigner.
I like Ekaterinburg, but my wife refuses to move there.
Plato's Dream says: March 26, 2019 at 1:59 pm GMT • 100 Words
@jbwilson24
If you think that Russian food is bad, you are either an idiot or don’t know what to order. If you go to Omsk and order
sashimi, you are going to be disappointed. But native Russian dishes such as solyanka, borsch, kulebiaka, kholodets, etc etc
are excellent. Not to mention the Georgian and Uzbek dishes that are as common in Russia as Mexican and Chinese are in
‘Murika. And you can eat well in a workers’ cafeteria, not just in an expensive restaurant.
In all other respects, you can’t even begin to compare Russia and Ukraine with a straight face – be that
infrastructure, law and order, average incomes etc. It’s like Barbados and Jamaica – both speak English, both are in the
Caribbean; but that’s where the similarity ends.
Maybe they are. After all, I can guarantee if something like Rotherham or Cologne
happened in Russia, they wouldn't wait for the right paperwork and lawyers to get justice.
They would beat the living shit out of everyone in a 5KM radius and not bother navigating
red tape like we do.
Overly optimistic. Such episodes are very much the exception, not the rule.
The authorities are trouble averse, so they tend to turn a blind eye to Caucasian
malfeasance.
The sound waves are not uniform, but rather polarized sharp spikes. Blaring techno with
bone rattling bass at 3AM. Screaming couples at 1AM. Hammering and drilling at 9AM. I
finally figured out why. My girlfriend's brother told me that there's no word for "privacy"
in Russian.
... ... ...
However, you should note that 11pm – 7am (I think, I might be off by an hour) are
supposed to be "quiet hours" in Moscow and you have the right to complain to your neighbors
about their noise, and, if they do not desist, to contact the police.
"Maybe they are. After all, I can guarantee if something like Rotherham or Cologne happened
in Russia, they wouldn't wait for the right paperwork and lawyers to get justice. They would
beat the living shit out of everyone in a 5KM radius and not bother navigating red tape like
we do."
America used to have people like that. Primarily they were southerners. Secondarily they
were European Catholic immigrants and the children of European Catholic immigrants. And then
the Yank WASP Elites and their Jewish BFFs spent decades and billions of dollars forcing
those people to start thinking and acting like WASP peasants bowing to the Anglo-Zionist
Empire.
Where can I personally meet this hip, tell it like it is Vietnamese guy and some of his
subjects?
I love the way –Michael Kreutzer (28-years-old) just sums up the eternal Russian way
of thinking about alien rapists, Islamic terrorists that sort of thing:
" I can guarantee if something like Rotherham or Cologne happened in Russia, they wouldn't
wait for the right paperwork and lawyers to get justice. They would beat the living shit out
of everyone in a 5KM radius and not bother navigating red tape like we do. The immigrants
from the CIS countries know this and behave."
I respond:
Yep, I'm 25% Russian, more like 15% as I had some German Nordic Russian nobility on that
side. This Slavic gene is always there to call BS on idiot Liberals or worse Libertarians
that want to talk, talk, talk make excuses for the worst Paki sexual groomers. Nah, the
Russian way is better.
Just realistically looking at all the places I have lived, the US would be the last place I'd
go to, it's an empire in decline. Morally, spiritually, economically, politically
educationally and socially. (And I have lived in the US for 20 years) The only part of
American life that seems appealing is the kind of homesteading movement that is occurring in
some states.
Whatever beefs one may have with Russia or Putin, corruption, noise, etc. The fact is
Russia is holding it's own and improving its diplomatic relations and increasing it's allies
and trade partners, has become militarily a force to be reckoned with and therefore more
secure, it has become more self sufficient in many areas such as agriculture, is improving
it's infrastructure, people are earning more, it has almost no external debt, huge reserves
of gold, is beginning to attract tourism, is expanding in fields of science, and has the
reputation of being a reliable partner.
These things would make it a much better place to
be/go then a declining country/empire, such as the US, Europe and possibly China.
As for being poorer or wealthier, I can truly and emphatically from experience state, that
wealth does not create or provide happiness. As the author mentions, people in Russia are
very generous and family oriented. I think this gives more meaning of life and an overall
feeling of well being than striving for more and more income to buy more and more stuff.
Especially as particularly in the US and Europe, people are living so much on credit.
Americans are mostly ignorant to the fact that they live in a 2nd world country
Although discriminated against, most Americans, except maybe those down on their luck and
real life losers without any skills, live in nice, clean suburbs and in many cases they don't
even need to lock their doors, except for areas that are adjacent to urban, Hispanic, or
Black neighbourhoods, which they have abandoned and given up on decades ago following the
anti American Civil Rights movement. Show me a place in America where garbage trucks don't
come every week.
While it's not Germany or Sweden when garbage is concerned, America utilizes its trash
quite properly, and about 75 to 85% is incinerated.
Americans in the US now total about 55% of the population: Wikipedia says: "197,285,202
(Non-Hispanic: 2017), 60.7% of the total U.S. population"- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_American
, however this number is flawed as they count various non-whites like Berbers, or Turkic
people like Albanians, Turks, Kurds, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis as whites.
I think most people, (especially Russians), can relate to this sentiment. The average Ruski
is incredibly hard on their own country. But it's like how you can make fun of your siblings,
but when someone else does you knock their teeth in. I'd like to say I always respected this,
but it's not true. I was more brazen in my earlier days of travel, and hypocritically
complained about Japan with the very Muslim I referred to earlier. It's not just me, though. Go
on any expat forum, and it's full of gripes.
The first thing ESL teachers talk about when they meet is how much they miss peanut butter
or how they hate the pollution or whatever. And yet, they don't go home. The same is true of
Mexican immigrants in America and Africans in Europe, if you ever take the time to chat with
them. (Which is part of what made me more rightwing and nationalist.) The vast majority who
don't go home are economic migrants. Economic in terms of balancing the supply & demand of
money, or balancing sexual market value.
... ... ...
What is some advice you have for Americans who also want to get out?
YOU ARE INCREDIBLY LUCKY!!!
It really can't be overstated how blessed you are to have American citizenship. You can be
in tons of debt, have zero dollars in the bank, and several misdemeanors, and you'll still get
an automatic 90 day visa on arrival. Even with a one way plane ticket. This is unheard of and
will likely not be the case in the near future if current demographic trends continue. So seize
the day!
Seriously. In these past 8 years, I've met so many wealthy, well educated, amazing
[Russian] people who have to jump through so many hoops and sacrifice so much for the mere
chance of a USA tourist visa. If you only knew
... ... ...
Or "life happens" and you'll need to pay for the broken water heater or flat tire. So just
run away while you still can. The other mistake I see people make is that they toil away for
80% of the year in a job they hate, so they can splurge for a few days in an Americanized
luxury resort. Why not make every day exotic and truly get a feel for the local atmosphere by
moving somewhere for a year instead? In my experience, the most expensive part of travel is the
plane ticket. So be smart and just get a one way ticket and find a job once you get there.
have peace of mind knowing the American Embassy will take care of your spoiled ass.
Pfft. What an idiot! The State Dept employees at my local embassy wouldn't piss on me if I
was on fire – mostly because they would spend half the day researching what the proper
protocol is, and if wasn't in the book(which is most often the case) their un-thinking ass
wouldn't know whether to shit or wind their watch.
If you needed a big headed egotistical asshole for whatever reason you'd be in the right
place.
One of the more endearing compliments I ever received was from an old Russian girlfriend, who
told her friends, "He's one of the good ones he has a Russian soul." She and her friends were
just as described above, generous to a fault despite what was an obvious wealth gap.
But the funniest thing she ever did was to use her bare hand to kill a cock-roach that had
dared to cross our table at a restaurant.
Should have married that girl. Then again, I might have dodged the Babooshka bomb.
Interestingly enough, she had no desire to ever go to the US, so that was not a part of the
calculus.
Have some sympathy for our poor consular officers abroad they spend far too much time face
to face with the wretched refuse of the world trying to scam their way into the US.
The thing is, I don't want a "benevolent dictatorship" like Singapore or Russia. I want
to live in a country like the Founding Fathers of America intended.
Pick a number: everybody wants to "live in a country like the Founding Fathers of America
intended," probably even the Founding Fathers themselves did. But is seems that all our
governments just end up being dictatorships sooner or later anyway; so that being the case, I
would prefer a sane dictatorship (like Russia or Singapore) to an insane one, which is what
we Americans have at the moment.
The other mistake I see people make is that they toil away for 80% of the year in a job
they hate, so they can splurge for a few days in an Americanized luxury resort. Why not
make every day exotic and truly get a feel for the local atmosphere by moving somewhere for
a year instead?
So true.
If all else fails, just buy a bus ticket to Minnesota and see what it's like to live in
Somalia for a day.
"... "The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty – this is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization – is losing its attractiveness and is no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov said. ..."
"... "The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others," Lavrov noted. ..."
"... "They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic and financial standpoint, the US – alone or with its allies – can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues," he said. ..."
"... "In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don't hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states." ..."
"... Agree with the assessment other than the claim the US has had centuries long global dominance, or even influence. ..."
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov declared today that the Western, liberal model of society is dying, and a new world order
is taking its place.
Lavrov made the comments at his annual meeting with students and professors at the Foreign Ministry's Diplomatic Academy, reported
Russian state news agency TASS.
"The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty – this
is what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization – is losing its attractiveness and is
no more viewed as a perfect model for all. Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov
said.
According to him, global development is guided "by processes aimed at boosting multipolarity and what we call a polycentric world
order."
"Clearly, multipolarity and the emergence of new centers of power in every way requires efforts to maintain global stability
and search for a balance of interests and compromises, so diplomacy should play a leading role here," Lavrov went on to say.
"Particularly because there are a lot of issues that require generally acceptable solutions."
These include regional conflicts, international terrorism, food security and environmental protection. This is why we believe
that only diplomacy can help make agreements and reach sustainable decisions that will be accepted by all.
"The US and its allies are trying to impose their approaches on others," Lavrov noted.
"They are guided by a clear desire to preserve their centuries-long dominance in global affairs although from the economic
and financial standpoint, the US – alone or with its allies – can no longer resolve all global economic and political issues,"
he said.
"In order to preserve their dominance and recover their indisputable authority, they use blackmail and pressure. They don't
hesitate to blatantly interfere in the affairs of sovereign states."
Perry Colace
When I was a kid, the Soviet Union was the enemy. Now Russia (with an economy, population, military and world influence the
fraction of the United States) seems to be one of the few places in the world that makes any bit of sense and ACTUALLY cares a
little bit about its culture and people.
Fluff The Cat
"The Western liberal model of development, which particularly stipulates a partial loss of national sovereignty – this is
what our Western colleagues aimed at when they invented what they called globalization – is losing its attractiveness and is
no more viewed as a perfect model for all.Moreover, many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov
said.
A Judaic-Masonic world order is the end goal. It entails the complete loss of sovereignty for all Western nations and the slow
genocide of white Christians via miscegnation and displacement by third-worlders.
lnardozi
I can't think of a man more American than Putin.
Sell the bases, come home, stop bothering others and trying to run world affairs.
Then we can spend a nice nice century or so rebuilding our infrastructure and trimming our out-of-control federal government.
The clue is right there in the name - the united STATES of America. A state is a sovereign country with its own laws - except
for those powers enumerated in the Constitution which the federal government should have.
That's the whole point - competition in government. You don't like the state you're in - you're guaranteed the choice of 49
others, along with all your possessions.
notfeelinthebern
Agree with the assessment other than the claim the US has had centuries long global dominance, or even influence.
johnnycanuck
Western global dominance, US took over from the British Empire with the assistance of the banksters class. It's all there in
the history books, you just need to spend time
consider me gone
As much as I hate to say it, this was Winston Churchill's idea. Even as the war was just starting, he was a major advocate
for the West controlling the globe after WWII.
But I'll bet he had no idea that the West would abandon traditional Western values in the process. He wouldn't watch TV and
predicted it would turn society into unthinking idiots. He nailed that one anyhow.
The Alliance
"...many people in the very western countries are skeptical about it," Lavrov said.
Skeptical?
I, for one, would show up early and highly motivated to march against, and to destroy, these treasonous, malevolent, collectivist
Globalists.
The Globalists within the United States government are traitors--traitors, by definition. They have declared war on our republic.
CDN_Rebel
Russia works because they have a ruthless tyrant who happens to be incredibly competent. That same system with a weak ruler
will collapse entirely in a matter of months. I like Putin, but he needs to groom an ironfisted successor pronto.
As for the chows - they need to print half a trillion a month to stay afloat and that's your model?
The west is only fucked because the sleeping masses refuse to acknowledge that Marxists have undermined our institutions...
It would take only a few years to scrub these subversive ***** from our society if we had the balls to do it
johnnycanuck
yadda yadda yadda.. marxists, subversives, commies, all the catch phrases of ye old Joe McCarthy. Russia works because Russians
have a history of enduring adversity. Unlike Americans.
Moribundus
It is eventually end of era of western imperialism, era that lasted 900 years. Game is over
Money quote (from comments): This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with
Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling
pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel.
Notable quotes:
"... As usual, Trump made the announcement of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials: ..."
"... After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. ..."
"... Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies ..."
"... There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors. ..."
"... Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders flatter and praise him. ..."
"... Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support. ..."
"... I wonder what Mr. Kagan has to say now about "authoritarian" regimes?! ..."
"... Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. ..."
"... The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it. ..."
"... I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats, for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain sight with Israel. ..."
"... To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off, a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend. ..."
"... Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye. ..."
"... Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism, and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation. ..."
"... All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either, because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the Middle East into. ..."
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials:
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do.
Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing
with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The
substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be good, but the lack of an organized policy process on
major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
Whatever short-term benefit Israel gains from it, the U.S. gains nothing and stands to lose quite a bit in terms of our international
standing.
There has been no consideration of the costs and problems this will create for the U.S. in its relations with other regional states
and beyond because Trump couldn't care less about the long-term effects that his decisions have on the country.
Once again, Trump has put narrow political ambitions and the interests of a foreign government ahead of the interests of the
United States. That seems to be the inevitable result of electing a narcissist who conducts foreign policy based on which leaders
flatter and praise him.
Trump's bad decision can be traced back to Bolton's visit to Israel earlier this year:
Administration officials said that National Security Advisor John Bolton was instrumental to the decision, after visiting Israel
in January to assure officials there that the United States would not abandon them in Syria despite Trump's sudden withdrawal
of troops from the battlefield.
Nervous Israeli officials saw an opportunity. "It was an ask," one Israeli source said, "because of the timing -- it suddenly
became a relevant issue about Iran."
Bolton is usually the culprit responsible any destructive and foolish policy decision over the last year, and his baleful
influence continues to grow. We can also see the harmful effects of the administration's Iran obsession at work. In the end, the
Syria "withdrawal" hasn't happened and apparently isn't going to, but Trump nonetheless gives Israel whatever it wants in exchange
for nothing so that they will be "reassured" of our unthinking support.
Well, of course Trump puts America last. There is one and only one person he is interested in -- himself. As you say this is his
narcissistic personality at work.
My never ending question is always, "Why does any Republican with a conscience remain silent? Are they really all this shallow
and self absorbed? Is there nothing Trump does that will finally force them to put country before party and their own ambition?"
It's a really sad state of events that has put this country on the road to ruin.
Trump is making one hell of a mess for the next president to clean up. Straightening out all this stupidity will take
years. Here's hoping that Trump gets to watch his foreign policy decisions tossed out and reversed from federal prison.
The decision to leave the INF treaty was taken in a similar way and with a total disregard for the consequences. The leaders
of the European NATO countries have shown utter spinelessness in going along with it.
The administration says that a Russian missile violates the treaty but it will not tell us what the range of the missile is.
Nor will it allow its weapons inspectors to go and look at it.
The reason is clear: Fear that the weapons inspectors' findings would contradict the administration's claims.
I voted Republican ever since I started voting. I voted for Bush I, Dole, Dubya, and McCain. I couldn't vote for either Obama
or Romney, but I voted for Trump because of Hillary Clinton.
I am shocked and horrified by what I've seen under Trump. I am deeply disappointed that so few Republicans (or Democrats,
for that matter) have stood up to him on foreign policy, and I will never vote Republican again. This GOP/Israel connection stinks
to high heaven. Anyone who studied or remembers our problem with Communist spies back in the '50s has got to be hearing alarm
bells ringing in their ears. Worries about Soviet spying and Russian meddling pale in comparison to what's now going on in plain
sight with Israel.
To be fair, it ain't just Team R that has the sloppy crush on Israel. Team D is just as bad, even if they don't gush quite
so publicly. In fact, episodes such as this one are useful in a way, as they make it hard to pretend that this is just a one-off,
a misguided decision that we have to go along with to appease a powerful friend.
Europoliticians tell that last one a lot. "We really don't want to but the Americans twisted our arms ZOMG Special Relationship
so sorry ZOMG!" Only with a lot more Eurobureaucratese.
I agree with the article's premise, but not because of this move regarding Israel.
Personally, I believe this move will have little impact on the outcome of the crisis in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the
other Arab monarchies are too focused on containing Iran and Turkey to give a crap about what Israel does. The only Arab states
that I can see objecting to this move are Syria (obviously) and the others who were already allied with Iran and/or Turkey to
begin with.
Right now, the REAL center of attention in the region should be Northern Syria. THAT's where the next major war likely will
begin. In that area, Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Turkey and the United Arab Emirates are the ones doing the major escalations,
while Israel has virtually no role at all aside from sideline cheer-leading. And of course, Trump is doing nothing to stop what
could become the next July Crisis. What's "America First" about that?
Nevertheless, Israel should be very concerned about Northern Syria. If war breaks out and the US is forced to go to war
with its own NATO ally as a result, Israel should prepare to kiss its alliance with the US goodbye.
There is no way our international reputation will come out of this war unscathed, and odds are we'll be in a far worse position
diplomatically than we were at any point in our history, even during the Iraq war. When that happens, the American people will
be out to assign blame. Many (rightfully or not) will blame Israel due to its connections to neoconservatism and Saudi jingoism,
and consequently we may end up seeing BOTH parties becoming unfriendly to Israel over the subsequent generation.
All of this could be prevented if President Trump would just tell Saudi Arabia to STOP the nonsense. But no. He's too focused
on MIC profits. He's not America First. And quite frankly, I'm starting to think Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israel-first either,
because if he were he'd be warning Trump about the mess he's going to end up getting America, Israel, and much of Europe and the
Middle East into.
"... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
"... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a
"key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).
Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council,
the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense.
He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a
scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies.
Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government:
Israel.
"... Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a "key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz). ..."
"... It is true that Putin is different from the silver-spooned Trump and the rabid war-mongers Pompeo and Bolton. ..."
Michael Ledeen has been an influential activist of the US politics. Ledeen is known as a
"key player" in the operation Gladio (the holy Graal of holo-biz).
Ledeen is "a former consultant to the United States National Security Council,
the United States Department of State, and the United States Department of Defense.
He held the Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute where he was a
scholar for twenty years and now holds the similarly named chair at the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies.
Ledeen is considered an "agent of influence" for a foreign government:
Israel.
"... It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself. ..."
"... All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. ..."
"... It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying. ..."
"... Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error. ..."
In the neocon journal
Commentary , Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published
an op-ed by Edward Snowden . Boot's objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a "traitor." In
objecting, Boot made these claims:
Oddly enough nowhere in his article -- which is datelined Moscow -- does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host,
Vladimir Putin , which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has
taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as
Kim Philby. . . .
But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to.
It's much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB's thugs. The only
mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.
It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank
warmonger is
the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his
liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for
one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort
of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.
All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone
else a coward. But it's so much worse if he lies when doing so. Did he do so here? You decide. From Snowden's NYT op-ed today:
Basic technical safeguards such as encryption -- once considered esoteric and unnecessary -- are now enabled by default in
the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private.
Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the
arbitrary passage of anti privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
The meaning of that passage -- criticisms of Russia's attack on privacy -- is so clear and glaring that it caused even
Time magazine to publish this today :
The first sentence of Time 's article: "Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Ed Snowden has taken a surprising swing at his new
home, accusing Russia of 'arbitrarily passing' new anti-privacy laws ." In other words, in the very op-ed to which Boot objects,
Snowden did exactly that which Boot accused him of lacking the courage to do: "criticize" the country that has given him asylum.
This is far from the first time Snowden has done exactly that which the Tough and Swaggering Think Tank Warrior proclaimed Snowden
would never do. In April, 2014, Snowden wrote
an
op-ed in The Guardian under this headline:
With Max Boot's above-printed accusations in mind, just re-read that. Did Boot lie? To pose the question is to answer it. Here's
part of what Snowden wrote in that op-ed:
On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. . . . I went on to challenge whether,
even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. . . . In his
response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial.
In countless speeches, Snowden has said much the same thing: that Russian spying is a serious problem that needs investigation
and reform, and that Putin's denials are not credible. Boot simply lied about Snowden.
It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking
courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal
journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear
whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying.
UPDATE : In typical neocon fashion, Boot first
replies by minimizing his own error to a mere innocent oversight, and implying that only hysteria could cause anyone to find
what he did to be problematic. Even then, the facts negate his self-justification. But
then he says he was actually right all along
and his "point stands":
Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error.
The dream of dismantling Russia is still very much alive in Washington neocon think tanks and intelligence agencies
Notable quotes:
"... This sort of drivel is nothing new, dissolution of Russia has been a long-standing intent of the US, NATO and their boot licking lackeys like the Polish government and the coup government in Kiev. Putin and fellow politicians have said precisely this on several occasions. ..."
"... "Russians paying big money to have their babies born in US" https://www.foxnews.com/us/... I don't see any Americans traveling to Russia to have their babies born there ..."
"... Isn't it amazing how so many Russians have "Faith" in the future of the United Sates and NONE in their own country of Russia that they'd flock to the US so their children can have a U.S. passport. ..."
"... Lots of people want to go USA for better life and that is a simple human desire as USA can provide at least basic living standards to majority, but the question is how they can do that... ..."
"... Answer; They print dollars, they go around and kill people and pillage countries of their human and material capital, install governments in other countries that work against their own people for the benefit of USA etc... ..."
This sort of drivel is nothing new, dissolution of Russia has been a long-standing intent of
the US, NATO and their boot licking lackeys like the Polish government and the coup
government in Kiev. Putin and fellow politicians have said precisely this on several
occasions.
Thanks for the confirmation of the articles truth IVAN.
I hear Russian woman will pay big money to travel to the the U.S. so they can have their
babies born here. Anchor babies with U.S. citizenship as 'Insurance' against the next
inevitable Russian political/economic collapse.
"Russians paying big money to have their babies born in US"
https://www.foxnews.com/us/... I don't see any Americans traveling to Russia to have their babies born there, doublely so
these days with the Russian FSB looking for Americans in Russia to take as hostages.
Isn't it amazing how so many Russians have "Faith" in the future of the United Sates and
NONE in their own country of Russia that they'd flock to the US so their children can have a
U.S. passport.
Lots of people want to go USA for better life and that is a simple human desire as USA can
provide at least basic living standards to majority, but the question is how they can do
that...
Answer; They print dollars, they go around and kill people and pillage countries of
their human and material capital, install governments in other countries that work against
their own people for the benefit of USA etc...
The fact that Glenn Greenwald proved to be a despicable pressitute cast a long shadow of
Snowden and Assange.
Notable quotes:
"... Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US doesn't approve of. ..."
A quick comment about the two Russian alleged assassins, exposed, we are told by the
'investigative' Website, Bellingcat. Not mentioned by any of the major news media is the fact
that Bellingcat is funded by the National Endowment for Democracy (sic), renowned for its
interference in foreign elections, funding terrorists and overthrowing governments the US
doesn't approve of.
Media Lens picked up on this awhile back in reference to another Western financed
outfit, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), funded by the UK Foreign Office. I've
also expanded this by quoting from Media Lens' other article that deals with Western-funded
disinfo, ' Douma: Part 1
– Deception In Plain Sight':
Liberal corporate journalists and politicians have been impressed by the fact that SOHR
and White Helmets claims have been supported by ostensibly forensic analysis supplied by the
Bellingcat website, which publishes 'citizen journalist' investigations. As we noted
in a recent alert, Bellingcat is funded by the National
Endowment for Democracy (NED), which is funded by the US government and is 'a notorious
vehicle for US soft power'. – '
The Syrian Observatory – Funded By The Foreign Office ', Media Lens, June 4
2018
It's worth quoting more of the Media Lens article as it exposes the nature of Western
so-called lefties and their attachment to Western (funded) propaganda outfits:
In the New Statesman, Paul Mason
offered a typically nonsensical argument, linking to the anti-Assad website,
Bellingcat:
'Despite the availability of public sources showing it is likely that a regime Mi-8
helicopter dropped a gas container onto a specific building, there are well-meaning people
prepared to share the opinion that this was a "false flag", staged by jihadis, to pull the
West into the war. The fact that so many people are prepared to clutch at false flag theories
is, for Western democracies, a sign of how effective Vladimir Putin's global strategy has
been.'
Thus, echoing Freedland's reference to 'denialists and conspiracists', sceptics can only
be idiot victims of Putin's propaganda. US media analyst Adam Johnson of FAIR accurately
described Mason's piece as a 'mess', adding :
'I love this thing where nominal leftists run the propaganda ball for bombing a country 99
yards then stop at the one yard and insist they don't support scoring goals, that they in
fact oppose war.'
Surprisingly, the Bellingcat website, which publishes the findings of 'citizen journalist'
investigations, appears to be taken seriously by some very high-profile progressives.
In the Independent, Green Party leader Caroline Lucas also
mentioned the Syrian army 'Mi-8' helicopters. Why? Because she had read the same
Bellingcat blog as Mason, to which she linked:
'From the evidence we've seen so far it appears that the latest chemical attack was likely
by Mi-8 helicopters, probably from the forces of Syria's murderous President Assad.'
On Democracy Now!, journalist Glenn Greenwald said of
Douma:
'I think that it's -- the evidence is quite overwhelming that the perpetrators of this
chemical weapons attack, as well as previous ones, is the Assad government '
This was an astonishing comment. After receiving fierce challenges (not from us),
Greenwald partially retracted, tweeting :
'It's live TV. Something [sic – sometimes] you say things less than ideally. I think
the most likely perpetrator of this attack is Syrian Govt.'
We wrote to Greenwald asking what had persuaded him of Assad's 'likely' responsibility for
Douma. (Twitter, April 10, direct message)
The first piece of evidence he sent us (April 12) was the Bellingcat blog mentioning
Syrian government helicopters cited by Mason and Lucas. Greenwald also sent us a
report from Reuters, as well as a
piece from 2017, obviously prior to the alleged Douma event.
This was thin evidence indeed for the claim made. In our discussion with him, Greenwald
then completely retracted his claim (Twitter, April 12, direct message) that there was
evidence of Syrian government involvement in the alleged attack. [My emph. WB] – '
Douma: Part
1 – Deception In Plain Sight'
"... It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank warmonger is the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself. ..."
"... All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone else a coward. ..."
"... It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying. ..."
"... Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error. ..."
In the neocon journal
Commentary , Max Boot today complains that the New York Times published
an op-ed by Edward Snowden . Boot's objection rests on his accusation that the NSA whistleblower is actually a "traitor." In
objecting, Boot made these claims:
Oddly enough nowhere in his article -- which is datelined Moscow -- does he mention the surveillance apparatus of his host,
Vladimir Putin , which far exceeds in scope anything created by any Western country. . . .That would be the same FSB that has
taken Snowden into its bosom as it has previously done (in its earlier incarnation as the KGB) with previous turncoats such as
Kim Philby. . . .
But of course Ed Snowden is not courageous enough, or stupid enough, to criticize the dictatorship that he has defected to.
It's much easier and safer to criticize the country he betrayed from behind the protection provided by the FSB's thugs. The only
mystery is why the Times is giving this traitor a platform.
It is literally the supreme act of projection for Max Boot to accuse anyone of lacking courage, as this particular think tank
warmonger is
the living, breathing personification of the unique strain of American neocon cowardice . Unlike Snowden -- who sacrificed his
liberty and unraveled his life in pursuit of his beliefs -- the 45-year-old Boot has spent most of his adult life advocating for
one war after the next, but always wanting to send his fellow citizens of his generation to die in them, while he hides in the comfort
of Washington think tanks, never fighting them himself.
All of that is just garden-variety neocon cowardice, and it's of course grotesque to watch someone like this call someone
else a coward. But it's so much worse if he lies when doing so. Did he do so here? You decide. From Snowden's NYT op-ed today:
Basic technical safeguards such as encryption -- once considered esoteric and unnecessary -- are now enabled by default in
the products of pioneering companies like Apple, ensuring that even if your phone is stolen, your private life remains private.
Such structural technological changes can ensure access to basic privacies beyond borders, insulating ordinary citizens from the
arbitrary passage of anti privacy laws, such as those now descending upon Russia.
The meaning of that passage -- criticisms of Russia's attack on privacy -- is so clear and glaring that it caused even
Time magazine to publish this today :
The first sentence of Time 's article: "Former CIA officer and NSA contractor Ed Snowden has taken a surprising swing at his new
home, accusing Russia of 'arbitrarily passing' new anti-privacy laws ." In other words, in the very op-ed to which Boot objects,
Snowden did exactly that which Boot accused him of lacking the courage to do: "criticize" the country that has given him asylum.
This is far from the first time Snowden has done exactly that which the Tough and Swaggering Think Tank Warrior proclaimed Snowden
would never do. In April, 2014, Snowden wrote
an
op-ed in The Guardian under this headline:
With Max Boot's above-printed accusations in mind, just re-read that. Did Boot lie? To pose the question is to answer it. Here's
part of what Snowden wrote in that op-ed:
On Thursday, I questioned Russia's involvement in mass surveillance on live television. . . . I went on to challenge whether,
even if such a mass surveillance program were effective and technically legal, it could ever be morally justified. . . . In his
response, Putin denied the first part of the question and dodged on the latter. There are serious inconsistencies in his denial.
In countless speeches, Snowden has said much the same thing: that Russian spying is a serious problem that needs investigation
and reform, and that Putin's denials are not credible. Boot simply lied about Snowden.
It's not surprising that someone whose entire adult life is shaped by extreme cowardice would want to accuse others of lacking
courage, as it distracts attention away from oneself and provides the comfort of company. Nor is it surprising that government-loyal
journalists spew outright falsehoods to smear
whistleblowers. But even neocon rags like Commentary shouldn't be able to get away with this level of blatant lying.
UPDATE : In typical neocon fashion, Boot first
replies by minimizing his own error to a mere innocent oversight, and implying that only hysteria could cause anyone to find
what he did to be problematic. Even then, the facts negate his self-justification. But
then he says he was actually right all along
and his "point stands":
Being a neocon coward means never having to admit error.
"... Then on 29 March, Salisbury District Hospital unexpectedly said that "Yulia Skripal is improving rapidly and is no longer in a critical condition." She was even "conscious and talking" at that stage, according to the BBC. ..."
"... A few days later, she was able to phone Viktoria, who said she sounded perfectedly normal, and a few days after that, Yulia was discharged from hospital. Around that time too, the hospital announced that Sergei's condition also improved rapidly. ..."
"... The whole thing was staged, and the script written months beforehand. ..."
"... Bizarrely, however, one day before Yulia's rapid recovery was announced, the British police presented a new version of events which begins with skin contact. This is the door handle story, where the Skripals first made contact with Novichok at the front door of Sergei's house. ..."
"... This breifing proceeds on the premise that the Skripal's were exposed to A-234. I can not see that this has been established beyond reasonable doubt. ..."
"... And hasn't it been suggested in many places, including the article above, that Skripal's apparent connection with the Steele Dossier could be a motive for some western spooks to want to silence him? ..."
"... So the revelation of Sergei Skripal's trips to Prague and Estonia actually supports the evidence for his connection with the dossier. However, they have been presented in the media as the opposite – as a motive for the Kremlin to try to kill him. ..."
"... These latest media reports smell a lot like damage limitation. What do you do if you cannot stop an embarrassing fact from being revealed? The best action is to spin it to completely change its significance, so that it shifts the blame onto your enemy ..."
timhayward The following briefing note is developed
by academics researching the use of chemical and biological weapons during the 2011-present war in Syria. The note reflects work
in progress. However, the substantive questions raised need answering, especially given the seriousness of the political situation
in the Middle East and UK-Russian relations. The authors welcome comments and corrections.
The Skripals were exposed to a phosphoroamidofluoridate compound named A-234, of high purity indicating that it was most likely
prepared for research purposes.
A-234 or similar compounds have been synthesized at bench scale by national chemical defence labs in Russia and the US in
the 1990s, and more recently in Iran and Czechia. A small quantity of A-234 from a Russian state lab was used in the murder of
Ivan Kivelidi and Zara Ismailova in 1995.
No data on the toxicity of A-234 are available in the public domain. The police statement that the Skripals were exposed through
contact with their front door is implausible as there are no known nerve agents that cause onset of symptoms delayed by several
hours, and it is improbable that absorption through the skin would cause both individuals to collapse later at exactly the same
time.
Although Russia is one of several countries that have synthesized A-234 or similar compounds, there is no evidence other than
Vil Mirzayanov's story that these compounds were ever developed (implying industrial-scale production and testing of munitions)
for military use. Mirzayanov's credibility as an independent whistleblower is undermined by his role in a Tatar separatist movement
during 2008-2009, backed by the US State Department.
There are multiple indications that the UK is hiding information:-
the withholding of the identity of the compound as A-234. For example, the
UK statement to the OSCE 12 April 2018 states only that ' the name and structure of that identified toxic chemical is contained
in the fall classified report to States Parties'.
See
also this briefing. The Chief Executive of Porton Down,
in his statement 3 April, referred to the compound only as 'Novichok'.
the withholding of information about its toxicity
the issue of a Defence Media Security Advisory notice on the identity of Skripal's MI6 handler and the attempt to conceal
or deny his role in Orbis Business Intelligence.
the sequestration of Yulia Skripal.
The UK government's case against Russia, stated in a letter to NATO, is based on asserting that "only Russia has the technical
means, operational experience and motive for the attack on the Skripals". Each of these points is open to question:-
Technical means : it is not seriously disputed that compounds such as A-234 can be produced at bench scale in any
modern chemistry lab.
Operational experience : it is alleged that Russia has a track record of state-sponsored assassination, but this
is not enough to support the assertion that "only Russia" could have enough experience to attempt unsuccessfully to assassinate
two unprotected individuals.
Motive : No other attempted assassinations of defectors from Russian intelligence services have been recorded. Even
if such an assassination campaign had been ordered, the Russian state would have good reasons not to initiate it in the first
half of 2018. In contrast there are obvious possible motives (outlined below) for other actors to have taken steps to silence
Sergei Skripal at this time.
What was the agent used?
An early report that the hospital was dealing with
poisoning caused by an opiate such as fentanyl was most likely based on the initial working diagnosis. Signs of organophosphate
poisoning – constricted pupils, vomiting, reduced consciousness and reduced breathing – could easily be mistaken for opiate overdose,
usually a more likely diagnosis. OPCW has stated that the BZ detected by the Swiss Federal Institute for Nuclear, Biological and
Chemical Protection in one of the samples sent by OPCW was not from Salisbury but was in a
control sample .
The Russian ambassador reported that on 12 March the Foreign Secretary
had told him that the nerve agent used against Mr and Ms Skripal had been identified as A-234. The
OPCW report issued on 12 April
did not identify the agent but stated that they had confirmed the identification made by the UK and that this identification had
been included in the confidential report provided to "States parties". On 14 April the Russian Foreign Minister
stated that A-234 had been reported by the Swiss Federal Institute for Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Protection that was one
of the four accredited labs used by OPCW to analyse the Salisbury samples.
Based on public reports, a ChemSpider record for
A-234 has been created which assigns it the IUPAC name ethyl [(1E)-1-(diethylamino)ethylidene] phosphoramidofluoridate. Its predicted
vapour pressure is very low indicating that it is predicted to be non-volatile. No information on its stability is available. The
OPCW director Uzumcu
stated in a newspaper
interview that the agent "seems to be very persistent," and "not affected by weather conditions". This was confirmed the next
day by an OPCW press statement that: "the chemical substance found was of high purity, persistent and resistant to weather conditions".
Ian Boyd, the chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was
reported to have stated: "The chemical does not degrade quickly. You can assume it is not much different now from the day it
was distributed". No experimental studies of the stability of A-234 have been reported.
Who could have produced A-234 in bench-scale quantities?
It is no longer seriously disputed that,
as noted
in our earlier briefing , any well equipped university lab can synthesize and purify such chemicals at bench scale. OPCW r
eported that the agent
(presumably A-234) was of high purity with "almost complete absence of impurities". This suggests that it was from a batch that had
been synthesized for research, rather than for assassination purposes where it would be unnecessary to purify the agent.
Uzumcu stated in an
interview with the
New York Times that he had been told by UK officials that 50-100 grams of the agent was used.
"For research activities or protection you would need, for instance, five to 10 grams or so, but even in Salisbury it looks
like they may have used more than that. Without knowing the exact quantity, I am told it may be 50, 100 grams or so, which goes
beyondresearchactivities for protection"
OPCW quickly contradicted this in a
statement that "OPCW would not be able to estimate or determine the amount of the nerve agent that was used in Salisbury on 4
March 2018. The quantity should probably be characterized in milligrams".
Who has studied A-234 or similar compounds?
Bench-scale research on the toxicity of agents that might be used in chemical warfare is entirely legitimate under the Chemical
Weapons Convention, and does not have to be declared to OPCW.
Russia
Since our
last briefing
note , more material from
the investigation of the Kivelidi poisoning has been published by Novaya Gazeta, updating the earlier
article published on 22 March
. The second article includes an image of the mass spectrometry profile of the sample recovered from the telephone handset, which
matches that submitted by Edgewood to the NIST98 mass spectrometry database. The Russian experts who commented on the original result
appear not to have had access to the mass spectrometry profile of A-234, and to have incorrectly reconstructed the structure from
a best guess, based on the mass-charge ratios of the fragments, as something like the GV agent (both agents have molecular mass 224
daltons, and a 58-dalton fragment). This establishes that Russia had synthesized this compound at bench scale by the mid 1990s, but
does not confirm that it was ever developed for military use as alleged by Mirzayanov.
US
A 1997 newspaper article
refers to a secret US army intelligence report referring to Russian development of A-232 and its "ethyl analog" A-234, indicating
that the designation of these compounds and their structures was known to the US by this time. As noted in our last briefing note,
the Edgewood lab submitted a mass spectrometry profile for A-234 to the public database NIST98, which was current from 1998 to 2001.
A patent application submitted by a US government lab
in 2008 mentions "Novichoks", but examination shows that the structures given for these compounds were the dihaloformaldoxime structures
previously published as supposed "Novichoks", not the phosphoramidofluoridates published by Mirzayanov later in 2008. This does not
indicate that the applicants were studying these compounds – most likely they included them to make their patent as broad as possible.
Iran and Czechia
A study from Iran published in 2016 reported
synthesis for research purposes of a compound similar to A-234, differing from it only by the presence of methyl instead of ethyl
groups. In an
interview with Czech television , President Zeman stated that in November 2017 the related compound designated A-230 was studied
at the Brno Military Research Institute.
Other labs
The director of Porton Down has
declined to comment on whether Porton Down has stocks of A-234 for research purposes. The OPCW labs that identified A-234 in
the specimens from Salisbury were most likely matching it against a mass spectrometry profile in OPCW's Central Analytical Database.
What is known of the toxicity of A-234?
No data on the toxicity of A-234 are available in the public domain. The printout of the entry in the NIST 98 database appears
to cross-reference an entry in the database RTECS ( Registry of Toxic Effects of Chemical Substances) but no entry for this
compound now exists in RTECS.
Why was the structure of A-234 revealed?
The structure of A-234 was revealed in a book by Vil S Mirzayanov in 2008, some 13 years after he had emigrated to the US with
the story of a secret programme to develop chemical weapons of a class named "Novichoks". During 2008-2009 the US government, with
an active part for the Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, was
encouraging the development
of a separatist movement in Tatarstan. As part of this, Mirzayanov was declared head of a Tatar government-in-exile in December
2008. The publication of his book may thus have been part of an effort to build up Mirzayanov's status as a dissident. His role in
this operation may explain why subsequent discussion of his book by OPCW delegates was closely
monitored (and discouraged) by the US State Department
. Mirzayanov's involvement in this operation undermines his credibility as an independent whistleblower.
When and where were the Skripals exposed to A-234?
A summary of the different versions on which journalists were apparently
briefed by security sources was given by the Russian embassy:-
– The Skripals could be sprayed with poison by attackers in the street (Daily Mail, 6 March, source: "Anti-terror police").
– The nerve agent could be planted in one of the personal items in Yulia Skripal's suitcase before she left Moscow for London.
According to this theory the toxin was impregnated in an item of clothing or cosmetics or else in a gift that was opened in the house
of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury, meaning Yulia Skripal was deliberately targeted to get at her father (The Telegraph, 15 March, source:
"Senior sources in the intelligence agencies").
– The nerve agent could be planted in the air conditioner of the car of Skripals (Daily Mail, 19 March, source: "Security expert
Philip Ingram").
– The Skripals could be poisoned through buckwheat that Yulia Skripal had asked her friend to buy and bring for her father,
because she had forgotten to pick up the grocery gifts herself (The Sun, 1 April, source: "British investigators").
On 28 March the police announced that "at this point in our investigation, we believe the Skripals first came into contact
with the nerve agent from their front door".
Although it is possible that a nerve agent could be prepared in a formulation that would be absorbed only slowly through the skin,
it is implausible that two individuals exposed through contact with the front door would have received doses that caused them to
collapse suddenly and so nearly simultaneously that neither had time to call for help, at least three hours later. It is more likely
that they were attacked shortly before they were found collapsed on the park bench.
Sergei Skripal's link with Orbis: possible motive for murder
In the first few days after the poisoning there were media reports that Sergei Skripal had been in
regular contact
with his MI6 handler, whose Linked-In profile had stated that he was a consultant for Orbis Business Intelligence. On 7 March this
profile was
deleted and a Defence and Security Media Advisory
Notice was issued to caution journalists against disclosing the identity of this consultant. However at Skripal's trial in 2007
his MI6 handler had been identified as Pablo Miller , and the
link between Skripal and Miller had been
described in detail
by Russian opposition media on 6 March.
This link between Skripal and Orbis may be relevant to the dossier compiled by Christopher Steele, the founder of Orbis, containing
derogatory information on Donald Trump's alleged ties to Russia. This dossier had been
used by the FBI
to apply for a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court order authorizing surveillance of Trump's campaign. By early 2018
the unravelling of this story was creating serious difficulties for Steele and for those he had worked with. These difficulties included
a
referral for criminal investigation by two US Senators , a libel case in the US against the publisher of the dossier which had
led to a court ruling
that Steele should be questioned in an English court, and a
libel case in
England against Orbis and Steele. It is not difficult to postulate a situation in which the potential for damage to US-UK relations
could have provided a motive for actors on both sides of the Atlantic to ensure that Sergei Skripal would not be available to give
evidence.
The UK government's position
This was summarized in a
letter from the National Security Adviser , Sir Mark Sedwill to the NATO Secretary-General on 13 April 2018. Sedwill's letter
made several assertions that were substantiated only by "intelligence":
By 1993, when Russia signed the Chemical Weapons Convention, it is likely that some Novichoks had passed acceptance testing,
allowing their use by the Russian military
Russia further developed some Novichoks after ratifying the convention
During the 2000s, Russia commenced a programme to test means of delivering chemical warfare agents and to train personnel
from special units in the use of these weapons. This programme subsequently included investigation of ways of delivering nerve
agents, including by application to door handles.
In the mid-2000s, President Putin was closely involved in the Russian chemical weapons programme
Within the last decade Russia has produced and stockpiled small quantities of Novichoks
Appearing before the House of Commons Defence Committee on 1 May, Sedwill
(11:39) extolled the government's
reaction to the Salisbury incident as "an example of the Fusion Doctrine in practice". The
Fusion Doctrine
brings other government departments under the National Security Council with "the introduction of senior officials as senior responsible
owners to deliver each of the NSC's priorities".
Sedwill's
involvement in the preparation of the now
widely discredited dossier 'Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction' , released in September 2002, calls into question his credibility
in making these uncorroborated assertions. The UK government's case as set out by Sedwill is based on asserting that "only Russia
has the technical means, operational experience and motive for the attack on the Skripals". Each of these points is open to serious
criticism:-
Technical means: it is not seriously disputed that A-234 can be produced at bench scale in any organic chemistry lab.
Operational experience: it is alleged that Russia has a track record of state-sponsored assassination, but this does not support
the assertion that only Russia has the operational experience for such an assassination. On the contrary, the failure of the assassination
attempt, against two unprotected individuals, suggests that the perpetrators lacked the operational experience and competence
that one would expect of state-directed assassins.
Motive: no other attempted assassinations of defectors from Russian intelligence services have been recorded. If the Russian
state had decided to begin assassinating these defectors, it is unlikely that they would have chosen to start in March 2018, just
before the presidential election and three months before the FIFA World Cup. However, as noted above, it is possible to identify
motives for other actors to silence Sergei Skripal at this time.
Awesome journalism. The kind we sourly lack in the msm. But I guess they are all "bought and paid for" This whole story has looked
like a farce from the start, especially in the msm. Like they were making it up while they were going along Sounded like: (
https://www.crisis-solutions.com/ ) Who do exactly that sort of
thing.
My question is: Is it even likely that two people will touch the same door handle, either on their way in or out of the house?
Two people and two door handles (inside and outside).
When you leave together, only ONE person will touch the outside door handle, when closing the door, usually the last one to
leave, right?
The authors say " there are no known nerve agents that cause onset of symptoms delayed by several hours, "
A publication from 2009 contradicts this, but it seems to suggest that the onset is gradual rather than sudden:
"Even a lethal drop may require 30 minutes, rather than seconds, to manifest clinically, and a small, nonlethal drop may develop
symptoms over 18 hours."
This delayed reaction still does not explain the unbelievable timeline of the symptoms in the official British version of the
Skripal case. As the authors point out, that version is unlikely to be true, as it would mean that the two victims collapsed suddenly
and almost simultaneously after a long delay.
It is all the more unlikely, as Yulia should have collapsed later than Sergei, due to the difference in the skin layers in
men and women. Because the subcutaneous layer is thicker in women, the nerve agent's transit time is longer, according to Newmark's
piece.
Those comments by Newmark refer to absorption of nerve agent through the skin. This is in contrast to what he says about inhalation
of a large amount of vapour:
"In a vapor challenge of sufficient magnitude, perhaps 0.5 LCt50 or higher, the sequence of symptoms can be so fast as to seem
clinically simultaneous. Many patients have been described who, after a large vapor challenge, lost consciousness, seized, and
developed all of the other symptoms essentially within seconds of exposure."
This sudden attack due to vapour appears very consistent with the Skripals' inability to call for help when they collapsed.
Furthermore, for more than three weeks after the incident, the only methods of poisoning that were taken seriously involved
the inhalation of nerve agent. First, it was supposed to have been sprayed on the Skripals in the park. Later, it was believed
that Novichok in powder form had been placed in the ventilation system of Sergei's car.
As well as the rapid onset of symptoms of vapour inhalation, Newmark also describes its possible long term effects, which he contrasts
with those resulting from skin contact:
"Vapor nerve casualties, if removed from the source of contamination, or masked, and treated aggressively, either die or improve
rapidly. Humans metabolize a circulating nerve agent quickly if it does not kill them. No depot effect is observed with vapor
casualties. The situation is quite different with the patient who gets a drop of liquid nerve agent on the skin."
The most important part of that section is "Vapor nerve casualties either die or improve rapidly." This is consistent with
the prognosis for the Skripals both before and after their recovery.
For three weeks, Sergei and Yulia were given little chance of recovery. On Monday 26 March, Prime Minister Theresa May told
Parliament "Sadly, late last week doctors indicated that their condition is unlikely to change in the near future and that they
may never recover fully."
In the two days after that, others – who were close to the Skripals – put it more bluntly.
Viktoria Skripal, who is Sergei's niece and Yulia's cousin, told the BBC that there was "maybe 1 percent of hope" and that they
had "a very small chance of survival".
Ross Cassidy, a close friend and former neighbour of Sergei, told Sky News: "We've already been told they will be severely
mentally impaired and I don't think they would want that. I think death would probably be merciful."
Then on 29 March, Salisbury District Hospital unexpectedly said that "Yulia Skripal is improving rapidly and is no longer in
a critical condition." She was even "conscious and talking" at that stage, according to the BBC.
A few days later, she was able to phone Viktoria, who said she sounded perfectedly normal, and a few days after that, Yulia
was discharged from hospital. Around that time too, the hospital announced that Sergei's condition also improved rapidly.
All of this indicates a much greater likelihood that Yulia and Sergei were poisoned by means of inhalation than skin contact.
Not only that, but the doctors treating them, and the UK authorities, must have believed that too.
Bizarrely, however, one day before Yulia's rapid recovery was announced, the British police presented a new version of events
which begins with skin contact. This is the door handle story, where the Skripals first made contact with Novichok at the front
door of Sergei's house.
This version gives the impression that the investigators had not noticed the Novichok on the front door during the weeks of
intensive investigation by hundreds of officers! This is in spite of the fact that it was known that their colleague, Detective
Nick Bailey, had been to the house before he suffered from the effects of the nerve agent.
The unexpected announcements of both the door handle story and Yulia's rapid recovery within a day of one another, three weeks
after the incident, appears to be a remarkable coincidence in timing.
It reminds us of another such example that was already mentioned – the Skripals' collapse at almost the same time, hours after
touching the Novichok. That's part of the same unbelievable door handle theory.
This is just speculation, but the timing of the shift in narrative indicates that the UK authorities were afraid of what Yulia
might reveal. Now that she was "conscious and talking", she might even be able to help to identify the attackers.
Because of this, they may have wanted to discredit what she might say about what she noticed in the centre of Salisbury on
the day of the poisoning. By moving the crime scene to Sergei's house, the police could dismiss any such statements by Yulia as
irrelevant, or maybe as the result of hallucination caused by the nerve agent.
Just a summary of some facts about the Skripal case that might point to the means of poisoning. These all indicate that it was
not by skin contact, but much more likely by inhalation, or possibly ingestion. The first two facts match what the literature
says about nerve agent vapour:
– Rapid (instead of gradual) onset of the poison's effects in both victims at the same time.
– Grim prognosis, followed by rapid improvement ("Vapor nerve casualties either die or improve rapidly").
– The investigators' belief for weeks that the poison was either in aerosol or powder form or was added to food. (we can see
these scenarios both in the leaks to the media and in the focus of investigation in Salisbury town centre).
– In contrast, the apparent complete lack of belief for weeks in the door handle theory, which involves skin contact.
– The strange timing of the first mention of this version. It was presented – almost as a fact – after three and a half weeks
of intensive investigation, approximately on the day of Yulia's unexpected recovery.
This breifing proceeds on the premise that the Skripal's were exposed to A-234. I can not see that this has been established beyond
reasonable doubt.
If the information referred to by Segei Lavrov is reliable, it must pertain to environmental samples and not
biomedical samples. Presumably A-234 is a fast acting nerve paralyzing agent, it would therefore seem incongruous that the Skripals
could have had any significant exposure to it but be recovering fully (apparently).
Not least if they were exposed to it and then
initially assessed and treated for fentanyl exposure.
And how prescient of the MD of UK CBRN respirator-maker, Avon Protection, to write a piece on the BBC pretty much predicting a
chemical attack on a NATO member, possibly involving 'new super chemicals many times more potent than nerve agents like Sarin
and VX', just days before the Salisbury incident
The latest story is that the Kremlin targeted Sergei Skripal because he travelled to Prague and Estonia in order to provide security
officers with information on Russian espionage.
But wait isn't Estonia the place where another Salisbury resident, Skripal's alleged handler, Pablo Miller was based for years
as an MI6 agent?
And wasn't Prague the location of a meeting between Trump's lawyer Michael Cohen and Russian officials, as alleged in the Steele
Dossier?
And wasn't that meeting – just a couple of months after Skripal's trip to Estonia in 2016 – monitored by the Estonian secret
service, according to Newsweek?
And hasn't it been suggested in many places, including the article above, that Skripal's apparent connection with the Steele
Dossier could be a motive for some western spooks to want to silence him?
So the revelation of Sergei Skripal's trips to Prague and Estonia actually supports the evidence for his connection with the
dossier. However, they have been presented in the media as the opposite – as a motive for the Kremlin to try to kill him.
These latest media reports smell a lot like damage limitation. What do you do if you cannot stop an embarrassing fact from
being revealed? The best action is to spin it to completely change its significance, so that it shifts the blame onto your enemy.
Full marks for your work here – are there any updates coming in the light of recent events?
The way you've gone about this is particularly impressive and useful – posing questions and answering them as and when you
can.
This stands in rather stark contrast to a few of the more prominent 'company-liners' on twitter.
I've had a diverting, but not entirely fruitful, few exchanges with @dankaszeta on the subject of Novichok persistence and
the delayed, simultaneous, rapid onset story (to my mind the most obvious flaw in the Governments yarn). In April he was happy
enough to state that all OP chemicals degrade in the presence of water as it suited him in his, ahem, Myth Busting piece for politics.co.uk.
Now, however, it's all actually rather persistent and down to viscosity and all that. I fully understand how it might be were
it enclosed in a vial or syringe or something, but it all looked a bit like he was having his cake and eating it when he'd used
the hydrolysis argument to explain why the Skripals weren't killed (or why, I assume PC Bailey wasn't either).
Philip Ingrm (@PhilipIngMBE) chimed in on a recent thread – informing me that the persistence was why they (I'm assuming he
meant the Russians) decided to use Novichoks.
When it came to the delayed collapse story he told me that this was answered in
his, Kaszeta's or Hamish DBG's threads. It's a tactic that certainly Kaszeta has deployed more than once – feign weariness when
questions get tricky and then refer people to tweets they're too busy or tired to dig out themselves.
I told Ingram that I thought
this was a little lame and pointed him to this site by way of example of good practice.
"... In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more dangerous level. War-level dangerous. ..."
In an especially imbecile display in 2015, Western reporters (unable to find his website)
thinking he hadn't been
seen for several days started a contest of speculation about coups, death, wars, plastic
surgery, secret births and other nonsense; when he "re-appeared", the story went down the
Memory Hole.
For some reason, Americans personalise everything. In meetings with US intelligence agencies
I was always fascinated how they would reduce every complicated reality to a single individual.
But it isn't Saddam, or Assad, or Qaddafi, or Osama, or Aidid, or Milosevic, or Maduro, or
Castro or any of the other villains-of-the-day, it's a whole country : these people got
to the top for good reasons. Removing the boss makes some difference but never all the
difference. They go but they never leave a Washington-friendly country behind and Washington
does it all over again somewhere else. This peculiar blindness drives Putin Derangement
Syndrome and has infected everybody else.
But Putin is much worse than the others. The other enemies had relatively weak countries but
Russia could obliterate the USA. But worse, Putin's team has steadily become more powerful and
more influential. And worst of all, he's still there: huffing and puffing has not blown him
down, sanctions strengthen the economy and there is nothing to suggest he won't be succeeded by
someone who carries on the same policies. It's a whole country, not just one man.
But laughing has passed – Putin Derangement Syndrome has become dangerous.
In 2016 Hillary Clinton lost a sure-fire election to Donald Trump and, looking for an
excuse, jumped on the Russia claim. Putin Derangement Syndrome was ramped up to a much more
dangerous level. War-level dangerous.
Clinton's victory was
99% certain until it wasn't and excuses were needed. Clinton
went through a lot of them but "Russian interference" was always the big one.
That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech. [9 November
2016] Mook and Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to
engineer the case that the election wasn't entirely on the up-and-up. For a couple of hours,
with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to
the press and the public. Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument. (From
Shattered
, quoted
here .)
In What Happened, Clinton also says Russian President Vladimir Putin's support for Trump was
driven by his own anti-women sentiment, stacking the deck against her: "What Putin wanted to do
was...influence our election, and he's not exactly fond of strong women, so you add that
together and that's pretty much what it means." At press events for her memoir, Clinton
continues to warn Americans against Russia's power over Trump and the country. "The Russians
aren't done. This is an ongoing threat, and that is one of the reasons why I wrote the book and
one of the reasons I'm talking about it," she said on Sunday at Southbank Centre's London
Literature Festival. (
Newsweek )
(None of these "experts" ever seem to wonder why Putin's influence, so decisive far away,
is so ineffective in Ukraine or Georgia. But then, it's not actually a rational, fact-based
belief, is it?)
The entire ramshackle construction is collapsing: if Mueller says there was no collusion
then even the last ditch believers will have to accept it:
Robert Mueller Prayer Candles are out of stock, time to
toss the other tchotchkes , it wasn't a Mueller Christmas after all . Clinton's
fabrication had two parts to it: 1) Putin interfered/determined the election 2) in collusion
with Trump. When the second part is blown up, so must the first be. And then what will happen
to all the loyal little allies crying "ours were interfered with too"!? The two halves of the
story had the same authors and the same purpose: if one dies, so must the other. Now that Trump
is secured from the
obstruction charges that hung there as long as Mueller was in session , he is free to
declassify the background documents that will show the origin, mechanics, authors and extent of
the conspiracy.
And he has said he will . In the process, both halves of the story will be destroyed:
they're both lies.
Will the exposure of the plot and the plotters end the war-talk stage of Putin Derangement
Syndrome? In a rational world, it would (but can its believers be embarrassed by the exposure
of their credulity? Can they be made to think it all over again from the beginning?). It is
true that Russia stands in the way of the neocons and liberal interventionists who have been
guiding Washington this century, but that hardly means that Putin is the enemy of the American
people. Because, properly considered, it's the neocons/liberal interventionists and their
endless wars burning up lives, money and good will that are the enemies of Americans; in that
respect Putin (unintentionally) stands with the true best interests of the American people. But
the propaganda is so strong and the hysteria so unrestrained, that anyone who suggests that
blocking the war party is in the best interests of Americans would be run out of town on a
rail. (
As the attacks on Tulsi Gabbard show .) The USA is far down the rabbit hole. (Although I
should say US elites: a
Rasmussen poll shows that slightly more Americans think Clinton colluded with a foreign power
than think Trump did . Considering the news coverage of the last two and a half years,
that's a very interesting finding.)
So, the sad conclusion is that Putin Derangement Syndrome will probably endure and the best
we can hope for is that it is dialled down a bit and the "act of war" nonsense is quietly
forgotten. Derangement was strong before the interference/collusion lie and it will exist as
long as Putin does: the war party is too invested in personalities ever to realise that it's
Russia, not its president, that's the obstacle. Let alone ever understand that much of what
Moscow does is a pushback against Washington's aggression.
"What the hell? I worked so hard on this -- if I wasn't colluding with the Trump
campaign, who the hell was I colluding with?" said the dumbfounded Russian president, growing
increasingly angry as he scrolled through his email inbox and recounted his numerous efforts at
covert communication with individuals who he had thought were high-ranking Trump officials, but
now he suspected were bots or anonymous internet trolls."
"... Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky has responded to remarks by incumbent President Petro Poroshenko about the former's dependence on Ukrainian businessman Ihor Kolomoisky with a statement about ex-First Deputy Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) Oleh Hladkovsky (formerly Oleh Svynarchuk), the suspect identified in corruption in the defense sector by investigative journalists. ..."
"... He said again that I am a puppet of Kolomoisky. I have only one question, I think he will be amazed too: So you are a puppet of Svynarchuk, or is Svynarchuk your puppet? ..."
Presidential candidate Volodymyr Zelensky has responded to remarks by incumbent President
Petro Poroshenko about the former's dependence on Ukrainian businessman Ihor Kolomoisky with a
statement about ex-First Deputy Secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council
(NSDC) Oleh Hladkovsky (formerly Oleh Svynarchuk), the suspect identified in corruption in the
defense sector by investigative journalists.
"I've just watched the press conference of our guarantor. He said again that I am a puppet
of Kolomoisky. I have only one question, I think he will be amazed too: So you are a puppet of
Svynarchuk, or is Svynarchuk your puppet? Please, pass this question on to the guarantor of the
constitution (president)," Zelensky said at a briefing at his election headquarters on Sunday
evening.
As reported, Poroshenko on Sunday evening after publication of exit polls in the
presidential election said he was fated to run against "Kolomoisky's puppet" in the second
round of presidential elections scheduled for April 21.
"We will not give Kolomoisky any chance," Poroshenko said.
Possibly relevant this morning in the Wall Street Journal George P. Schultz, William J.
Perry, and Sam Nunn have an op-ed highlighting that a nuclear threat is not a thing of the
past.
The good news: they characterize the U. S.'s Russia policy as "dysfunctional" (which it
is) and call for renewed dialogue with Russia.
The bad news: they also call for strengthening NATO.
It seems to me that those two goals are contradictory. Expanding NATO beyond its original
membership is a key component of the dysfunction and a barrier to renewed dialogue with
Russia.
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to
the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’
done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been
a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that
organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored
by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from
‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly
goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has
been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating
for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
Money quote: "The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from
the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White
House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. There are clear parallels between the end stages
of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from
reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against
the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not
lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate."
Notable quotes:
"... Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016 – a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’ ..."
"... Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come. It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk .) ..."
"... Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic, with Dearlove certainly among them. ..."
"... ‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes #Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’ ..."
"... The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same. ..."
"... A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation. ..."
"... In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’) ..."
"... The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief. ..."
"... There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from ‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller." ..."
"... I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary, increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language. ..."
"... The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go. This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House. It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler. ..."
"... There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire crashes we may not be so fortunate. ..."
"Dan, Thanks for the reference, which I will follow up. Unfortunately, although Bongino has produced a lot of extremely valuable
material, a lot of it is buried in the 'postcasts', searching through which is harder than with printed materials. It would greatly
help if there were transcripts, but of course those cost money.
I am still trying to fit the exploding mass of information which has been coming out into a coherent timeline. Part of the
problem is that there is so much appearing in so many different places. In addition to trying to think through the implications
of the information in this post and the subsequent exchanges of comments, I have been trying to make sense of evidence coming
out about the British end of the conspiracy.
An important development here has been rather well covered by Chuck Ross, in a recent ‘Daily Caller’ piece headlined ‘Cambridge
Academic Reflects On Interactions With 'Spygate’ Figure’ and one on ‘Fox’ by Catherine Herridge and Cyd Upson, entitled ‘Russian
academic linked to Flynn denies being spy, says her past contact was “used” to smear him.’ However, the evidence involved has ramifications
which they cannot be expected to understand, as yet at least.
At issue is the attempt to use the – apparently casual – encounter between Lieutenant-General Flynn and Svetlana Lokhova at a
dinner in Cambridge (U.K.) in February 2016 to smear him by, among other things, portraying her as some kind of ‘Mata Hari’ figure.
Among interesting dates, it appears that Stefan Halper was already trying to reach out to Lokhova in January-February 2016
– a lot earlier than his approaches to Papadopoulo s and Page. This was done through Professor Christopher Andrew, co-convenor with
Halper and the former MI6 had Sir Richard Dearlove of the ‘Cambridge Intelligence Seminar.’
This suggests that this was not simply a case Halper acting on his own. It also I think brings us back to the central importance
of Flynn’s visit to Moscow in December 2015.
Meanwhile, Lokhova has set up a blog on which she has posted a some interesting relevant material, with perhaps more to come.
It is very well worth a look.(See https://www.russiagate.co.uk
.)
Of particular interest, to my mind, is the full text of her – unpublished – May 2017 interview with the ‘New York Times.’ This
points us back to is the fact – of which Lokhova shows no signs of awareness – that the idea that the Western powers and the Russians
might have a common interest in fighting jihadist terrorism has been absolute anathema to many key figures on both sides of the Atlantic,
with Dearlove certainly among them.
Some of Lokhova’s comments on ‘twitter’ are extremely entertaining. An example, with which I have much sympathy:
‘AN APOLOGY: Yesterday, I compared @nytimes journalists, who smeared @GenFlynn and accused me of being a Russian spy, to
cockroaches. In good conscience, I must apologize to the cockroaches for the distress caused to them for being compared to @nytimes
#Russiagate hoaxers. Sorry!’
Meanwhile, another interesting recent ‘tweet’ comes from Eliot Higgins, of ‘Bellingcat’ fame. He is known to some skeptics as
‘the couch potato’ – perhaps he should be rechristened ‘king cockroach.’ It reads:
‘Looking forward to gettin g things rolling with the Open Information Partnership, with @bellingcat, @MDI_UK, @DFRLab, and @This_Is_Zinc
https://www.openinformation...’
There is an interesting ‘backstory’ to this. The announcement of an FCO-supported ‘Open Information Partnership of European Non-Governmental
Organisations, charities, academics, think-tanks and journalists’, supposedly to counter ‘disinformation’ from Russia, came in a
written answer from the Minister of State, Sir Alan Duncan, on 3 April.
In turn this followed the latest in a series of releases of material either leaked or hacked from the organisations calling themselves
‘Institute for Statecraft’ and ‘Integrity Initiative’ by the group calling themselves ‘Anonymous’ on 25 March.
The centerpiece of this is a proposal submitted to the FCO in August last year by what seems to be essentially the same consortium
whose existence as a government contractor has now been made public. The ‘Institute for Statecraft’ has vanished, and one consortium
member, ‘Aktis Strategy’, has gone into liquidation. But other key members are the same.
A central underlying premise is that if anyone has any doubts as to whether the ‘White Helmets’ are a benevolent humanitarian
organisation, or the Russians were responsible for the poisoning of the Skripals or the shooting down of MH17, the only possible
explanation is that their minds have been poisoned by disinformation.
An interesting paragraph reads as follows:
‘An expanded research component could generate better understanding of the drivers (psychological, sociopolitical, cultural
and environmental) of those who are susceptible to disinformation. This will allow us to map vulnerable audiences, and build scenario
planning models to test the efficiency of different activities to build resilience of those populations over time.’
They have not yet got to the point of recommending psychiatic treatment for ‘dissidents’, but these are still early days. The
‘Sovietisation’ of Western life proceeds apace.
In fact, what is at issue an ambitious project to co-ordinate and strengthen a very large number of organisations in different
countries which are committed to a relentlessly Russophobic line on everything. (The possibility that it might not be very bright
to push Russia into the arms of China, the obviously rising power, does not seem to have occurred to these people – perhaps they
need less ons from Sir Halford Mackinder, or indeed Niccolò Machiavelli, on ‘statecraft.’)
Study of the proposal hacked/leaked by ‘Anonymous’ bring out both the ‘boondoggle’ element – there is a lot of state funding available
for people happy to play these games – and also the strong transatlantic links.
A particularly significant presence, here, is the ‘DFRLab’. This is the ‘Digital Forensic Research Lab’ at the ‘Atlantic Council’,
where Eliot Higgins is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’ The same organisation has a ‘Cyber Statecraft Initiative’ where Dmitri Alperovitch
is a ‘nonresident senior fellow.’
It cannot be repeated often enough that it is difficult to see any conceivable excuse for the FBI to fail to secure access to
the DNC servers. One would normally moreover expect that, on an issue of this sensitivity, they would have the ‘digital forensics’
done by their own people.
There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has been
a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating for that
organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic ‘Atlantic Council’ is even more preposterous.
The clear close integration of other cyber people from the ‘Atlantic Council’ into Orwellian ‘information operations’ sponsored
by the British Government simply puts these facts into sharp relief.
There has to be a strong possible ‘prima facie’ case that anyone in authority prepared to accept the ‘digital forensics’ from
‘CrowdStrike’ is complicit in the conspiracy against the constitution, and/or the conspiracy to cover-up that conspiracy. This certainly
goes for Comey, and I think it also goes for Mueller."
OT but related, just watched a former naval Intelligence officer, now working for the Hoover Institute interviewed on FOX about
the Rooshins in Venezuela. Said, the 100 Russians are there to protect Maduro because he cannot trust his own army. Maduro's days
are numbered because he is toxically unpopular.
Got me thinking, our Intelligence services are good at psy-ops and keeping our gullible MSM in line but God help us if we ever
actually needed real Intelligence about a country. I remember about a month ago how all of these 'Think Tank Guys' were predicting
how the only people loyal to Maduro were a few of his crony Generals, that the rank and file military hated him and there were
going to be mass defections.
It didn't happen and we are all just supposed to forget that.
[not a socialist, don't have any love for Maduro, I just know that I will never learn anything of about Venezuela from these think
tank dudes, we are just getting groomed]
Venezuela isn't about "socialism," or even Maduro--it's about the oil. They have the largest proven reserves in the world, though
much of it is non-conventional and would need a ton of investment to exploit. But it's their oil, not ours, and we have no right
to meddle in their internal affairs.
Venezuela is neither about socialism nor oil in my opinion. It is everything to do with the neocons. And Trump buying into their
hegemonic dreams. Notice the resurrection of Elliott Abrams of Iran-Contra fame as the man spearheading this in a triumvirate
with Bolton & Pompeo. IMO, a perfect foil for Putin & Xi to embroil the US in another regime change quagmire that further weakens
the US.
"There can be no conceivable excuse for relying on a contractor selected by the organisation which is claiming that there has
been a hack, when an alternative possibility is a leak: and the implications of the alternative possibility could be devastating
for that organisation.
To rely on a contractor linked to the notoriously Russophobic 'Atlantic Council' is even more preposterous."
True; and true. It is also true that the Clinton e-mail investigation was faux, a limp caricature of what an investigation
would look like when it is designed to uncover the truth. Allowing a subject's law firm to review the subject's e-mails from when
she was in government for relevancy is beyond preposterous. An investigation conducted in the normal way by apolitical Agents
in a field office would not walk away from a trove of evidence empty handed.
The inter-relatedness and overlapping of DoJ, CIA, and FBI personnel assigned to the Clinton e-mail case, the Russophobic nightmare
of a 'case' targeting Carter Page, and by extension, the Trump presidential campaign, and yes, the Mueller political op, all reek
of political bias and ineptitude followed by more political bias; and then culmination in a scorched earth investigation more
characteristic of something the STASI might have undertaken than American justice.
Early morning raids, gag orders, solitary confinements, show indictments that will never see adjudication in a court room - truly
unbelievable.
In your opinion was this surveillance, criminal & counter-intelligence investigation as well as information operations against
Trump centrally orchestrated or was it more reactive & decentralized?
There are so many facets. Fusion GPS & Nellie Ohr with her previous CIA connection. Her husband Bruce at the DOJ stovepiping
the dossier to the FBI. Brennan and his EC. Clapper and his intelligence assessment. Halper, Mifsud, Steele along with Hannigan
and the MI6 + GCHQ connection. Downer and the Aussies. FISA warrants on Page & Papadopolous. The whole Strzok & Page texting.
Comey, Lynch & the Hillary exoneration. McCabe. Then all the Russians. And the media leaks to generate hysteria.
I'd recommend for reading Alexei Yurchak's "Everything Was Forever, Until It was No More: The Last Soviet Generation." Its
about a class of apparatchiks and bureaucrats and hangers on who spoke this arcane, abstract dogmatic language that anyone normal
had long since given up trying to understand. It had long ceased to have any relevance or attachment to the lives lived by ordinary,
increasingly suffering people, who started talking to each other in practical and direct language.
And yet the chatterati
continued to chatter and invent ludicrously unreal worlds and analyses of the actual world they lived in until... bang... it was
no more.
I'd skip the first few chapters which are full of impenetrable marxist jargon.
The Russian collusion investigation was based solely on the dodgy Steele Dossier that was discredited here from the get-go.
This was a product of British Intelligence Community. The intent was to keep and then to get Donald Trump out of the White House.
It failed but they did succeed in turning him into a neo-lib-con fellow traveler.
There are clear parallels between the end stages of the Soviet Union and the American Empire. My take since the Iraq Invasion
is that they are insane. The ruling elite is detached from reality, incompetent and arrogant. Sooner or later someone with their
facilities still intact will lead a middle-class revolt against the global plutocracy to restore democracy and reverse the rising
inequality. We were lucky that the fall of the Soviet Union did not lead to a nuclear war. The next time a nuclear armed Empire
crashes we may not be so fortunate.
Sakers has a strong pro-Russian bias, and it shows. the process of distancing from Russia was
common for all post-Soviet republics and actually was caused by the mere fact of acquiring
independence. That it took such a self-destructive form in Ukraine is many ways the net result to
Washington geopolitical machinations (supported by Germany, Poland and Sweden).
The key problem is not EuroMaydan nationalist "revolution" per se, but that fact that
Ukrainian nationalists proved to be neoliberal compradors. Ukraine became the debt slave of the
West. Under neoliberal neocolonialism this is a very stable condition that guarantees that the
standard of living of people will not improve. The country will be sacked dry. So Ukraine is an
example of "Latin-Americanization" of post Soviet space -- that policy that Washington actively
implemented since 1991. After huge initial success with puppet Yeltsin regime, they failed to
weaken and dismember Russia further due to ascendance of Putin. But for all other republics it
was pretty successful neocolonial policy. They now have military bases in few of those republics
and most of them are debt slaves of IMF and World bank. In a way EuroMaydan signified the
finishing touches of conversion of this region into dent slaves.
Neoliberal Washington was turned into an oligarchy, an autocracy run by Davos billionaires.
Their "liberty" and democracy was an early example of Orwellian Doublethink. It was to destroy
everybody else's liberty so they could grab whatever they could, enslave the debtors and
create the polarized hostile to each other countries in post-Soviet state that are easily
controlled ("divide and conquer" strategy along with "Full Spectrum Dominance" mantra and
neoliberal "Washington Consensus" method of enslavement). Ukraine is the most glaring example of
this enslavement --the country with Central African level of poverty. It is very similar how
Roman oligarchy behaved -- the Roman oligarchy accused anyone of supporting debtor rights and
opposing its land grabs of "seeking kingship." Such men were murdered, century after century. It
seems that unless there's a Hammurabi-style "divine king" or some elected civic regulatory
authority arise, local neoliberal oligarchies arise and help to exploit their societies by
Washington as much as they can, while trying to prevent the country from defending itself. In few
countries like Hungary far right ascendance slowed down this process, but for how long is unlearn
as global finance is controlled from London and Washington and can crash any individual country
like a bug.
The Romans brutal "mission civilisatrice", can be viewed as to instll local oligarchy and and
kind of "financialized" economy in other countries. For performing this service, the imperial
power takes all the money that its colonies can generate. Washington is not different. That's why
the US meddles in foreign politics of other countries, as we have just seen in Ukraine, Libya and
Syria.
This overgrowth of debt under neoliberalism is highly destabilizing. Financial oligarchy have
broken free of tax liability and are enriching themselves not by helping the overall country
economy grow and raising living standards, but just the opposite: by getting the country into
bigger and bigger debt. This is the essence of Poroshenko regime -- corrupt comprador
oligarchy.
So there is no surprise that everybody hates Poroshenko and even huge "administrative
resource" and personal wealth did not help him to get more then 15% of votes (of which 5-10% are
probably fraudulent). That's typical for any neoliberal president who stand for re-election in a
debt slave country. But it is important to to note that this Washington marionette made the
situation much worse that the situation existed under Yanukovich (which was also corrupt as
hell).
The role of Israel in EuroMaydan is open to review and one comment below addresses that.
Some comments are more informed and are more interesting then the article, for example by
Beckow.
An interesting and funny detail is proliferation of "Children of lieutenant Schmitt" --
Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. People who were born in 1945, the first post-war generation, are
now 75, right ? And life expectantly for this generation is probably 65 for men and 75 for
women.
Notable quotes:
"... Poroshenko's absolutely vital goal was to make it into the 2nd round. Had he failed to make it he would have had to immediately jump into an aircraft and leave the country (because the most likely victor of the Presidential election would have been Iulia Tymoshenko and we can be darn sure that she would immediately jail him and most of his cronies). ..."
"... it is practically impossible to falsify an election and compensate for, say, a 15%-20% difference. But to cheat and change a result by less than 5% is much more doable. ..."
"... As for Zelenskii, he scores just like Poroshenko. ... ... ... ...Zelenskii is just a glorified puppet and everybody in the Ukraine knows that his puppet-master is Igor Kolomoiskii who is waiting out the final outcome of the Presidential election safely hidden in, you guessed it, Israel. ..."
"... Still, in theory, it is almost impossible for Poroshenko to win this one. Not only do all the other candidates hate Poroshenko way more than they would dislike Zelenskii, voters for Tymoshenko or Boiko are far more likely to vote for Zelenskii than for Poroshenko. ..."
"... Most votes went to Zelenski that is indication that Ukrainians now did loose their enthusiasm, and they are becoming more lethargic. ..."
"... Hillary Clinton's State Department funneled $5 billion to orchestrate a "revolution" to overthrow the elected President of Ukraine in 2014. (See my June 7, 2016 blog post for details.) Ukraine's President was ousted because he refused to support Ukraine joining the EU and NATO, and violence spread throughout Ukraine as CIA funded factions fought for power. ..."
"... With the exception of the Baltic states, that simply isn't true of any nation from the former Soviet Union. Otherwise, the Russians couldn't have set up the Eurasian Customs Union which covers ~90% of the former USSR. There are even many Georgians working in Russia, in spite of the short war that was started by US dummy and former Georgian then Ukrainian, now stateless, Mikheil Saakashvili. ..."
"... I say the best solution for Ukraine would be to leave the nazis among themselves by giving independence to Galicia. If it's the price to pay to reintegrate Donbass, for the economy, and for peace and stability, it's worth it. ..."
"... He has been in the office for 5 years and 85% of people want someone else. How much clearer could this be? This was a massive vote of no-confidence by Ukrainians. If Porky squeezes or cheats his way into staying as president, he is asking for trouble – it is not sustainable and Washington knows it. ..."
"... Galicia and Donbas also clearly cannot coexist in the same non-federated state, they are on opposite sides. ..."
"... That takes away 3-5% of the Ukrainian economy. If Russia piles on and restricts more trade, or limits remittances, there will inevitably by a recession in Ukraine. The circus is about to re-start, no wonder the clowns are renting stadiums. But at some point the distractions will cease to distract – and then the damn reality will hit even harder ..."
"... Most importantly, the masters are OK with it. Imperial gauleiter of Ukraine Volker has already voiced his support for Porky. Porky would likely be more obedient than anyone else: he can be blackmailed, as he has already earned gallows (or life in prison in countries that don't have death penalty). So, the masters have already chosen their favorite puppet. We'll see on April 21st how much influence they have. ..."
"... I am not saying that Zelensky (and his puppet master Kolomoisky) won't do, but from masters' point of view old clown is apparently preferable to the new one. ..."
"... the first step when things don't go well, is to rotate the clowns. We got Macron, the German doppelganger for Merkel, elites tried Renzi in Italy, so maybe Zelinsky could work. He is a complete tabula rasa, non-entity, that wouldn't know how to find the executive washroom. At a minimum, he would buy some time. Next they can still try Tymoshenko. This will not get resolved through the political process. ..."
"... If the masters allow new clown to win, Gas princess can be made the speaker of the Rada ..."
"... I am not sure what is left to be gained in Ukraine, it is all costs and very few benefits. That's what happens when the layered lying becomes so convoluted that the masters lose track of the objectives. ..."
"... They wanted Crimea (actually Russia out of Crimea bases, NATO in) – that failed. Everything else were distractions, false promises, and payoffs to locals. A normal master would accept the defeat, take his toys home, and wait for the next time. The post-modern Washingtonians instead pretend that the sweet talk was real , try for silly, secondary objectives (how about a few missiles on the Russian border? that would work out great), or refuse to accept the obvious. Making the whole fiasco more costly. ..."
"... As to a few missiles on Russian border, they already have that in Baltic vaudeville states, which are much closer to Moscow and especially Sankt Petersburg then Zhmerinka. ..."
"... Then again, I am looking at it rationally, whereas Washington politburo is getting even less rational that the Soviet one under Brezhnev. ..."
"... In April this year [2018] the U.S. supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine and in May 2018 the U.S. Congress approved $250m of military funding, specifically including deliveries of lethal weaponry. ..."
"... President Donald Trump's special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker (a neocon, acolyte of senator John McCain, previously appointed by George Bush as U.S. ambassador to NATO) announced further U.S. arms supplies would follow, boasting of rising anti-Russian sentiment in Ukraine. ..."
"... The zionists have been in cahoots with the neo-Nazi throughout the whole State Dept. criminal enterprise in Ukraine. The Kagans clan of holo-biz survivors and other pro-Nazi Jewish activists such as Gershman (NED) and Foxman (ADL) have been the moving force towards banderization of Ukraine ..."
By "Nazis" I primarily
mean their main figurehead – Petro Poroshenko (the rest of the "minor Nazis" did so
poorly that they don't matter anymore). Think of it: in spite of his immense wealth (he
outspent everybody else and even spent more that twice what the next big spender –
Tymoshenko – doled out for each vote), in spite of his immense "administrative resource"
(that is the Russian expression for the ability to use the power of the state for your personal
benefit), in spite of his "victory" with the Tomos , in spite of triggering the Kerch bridge
incident, in spite of breaking all the remaining treaties with Russia, in spite of his control
of the media and in spite of the (now admittedly lukewarm) support of the West, Poroshenko
suffered a crushing defeat. Look at the only two regions Petro Poroshenko (i.e. the Nazis)
actually won (in blue) and see how nicely they overlap with the rough historical contours of
the Galicia region.
But Poroshenko managed to even lose part of that to Iulia Tymoshenko! Bottom line: except for a
minority of rabid hardcore Nazis in Galicia, the rest of the Ukraine hates the Poroshenko
Ukronazi regime. We always knew that, but now we have the proof. ... ... ... Remember how
Poroshenko promised peace in weeks, a full respect for the Russian language and prosperity for
all? Well, all he delivered was chaos, insecurity, poverty, violence, a massive influx of
Ukronazis from Canada and the USA and, above all, a completely hysterical, rabid,
russophobia combined with abject groveling before the AngloZionist Empire. He also brought
an absolutely unbelievable level of corruption, having personally doubled his net worth many
times over. The legacy Ziomedia and the Ukropropaganda can say all they want, and they can try
to ban the Russian media and Internet in the Ukraine. But the truth is that everybody in the
Ukraine knows that the Ukraine went from being the richest Soviet Republic to the poorest
country in Europe. In fact, there are quite a few African countries which are doing much
better than the Ukraine. The truth is, and has been for several years now, that the Ukraine
is a failed state and that there is absolutely no even vaguely plausible scenario in the
foreseeable future in which the Ukraine could begin to recover. Hence this amazing result:
short of the Galician Nazis, everyone else absolutely hates the regime in power. So
Poroshenko's score is a humiliating defeat for all the Ukronazis. But not for Petro Poroshenko
himself!
Poroshenko's absolutely vital
goal was to make it into the 2nd round. Had he failed to make it he would have had to
immediately jump into an aircraft and leave the country (because the most likely victor of the
Presidential election would have been Iulia Tymoshenko and we can be darn sure that she would
immediately jail him and most of his cronies). In order to make it into the 2nd round,
Poroshenko did not have to defeat Zelenskii, but only defeat Tymoshenko and that Poroshenko
also succeeded in doing. Oh sure – it was thanks to a huge, massive fraud all over the
country (especially in the easternmost and westernmost regions) and he beat her only by 2.5%
but that is more than enough.
Besides, it is practically impossible to falsify an election and compensate for, say, a
15%-20% difference. But to cheat and change a result by less than 5% is much more doable.
In fact, if we assume that a 5% fraud is well within the means of an outgoing President and
billionaire, then we can also see that we will never know who really won . See here for an
almost finished (99.68%) count for the top four contenders: While Zelenskii is untouchable and
way ahead of everybody else, Poroshenko, Tymoshenko and Boiko are all within less than 5% of
each other. Interesting, no?
Keep in mind that Boiko is the closest thing to a pro-Russian candidate and that just a few
years ago he was virtually unknown. See for yourself: 2014 results vs 2018 poll Look at the
stats for 2014: Poroshenko had 55% of the vote, Tymoshenko 8% and Boiko just about 0%. Please
also notice that in the 2018 poll Tymoshenko is way ahead of Poroshenko while Boiko is not far
behind.
As for Zelenskii, he scores just like Poroshenko. ... ... ... ...Zelenskii is just a
glorified puppet and everybody in the Ukraine knows that his puppet-master is Igor Kolomoiskii
who is waiting out the final outcome of the Presidential election safely hidden in, you guessed
it, Israel. This is how the Tablet concludes:
The transformation wrought in Ukraine by the Maidan revolution has been an exhilarating
roller coaster that has not bypassed Ukrainian Jewry, which is now in the midst of an
exciting period of cultural revival paralleling that of the wider Ukrainian society, which is
still just beginning to rediscover its own past and imagine an independent future. Whether
this post-Soviet country will choose to elect an openly Jewish president, or a part-Jewish
president, or continue with its current philo-Semitic president, the future of Ukraine's Jews
would appear to be brighter than anyone might reasonably have imagined.
Where Poroshenko was the ultimate apparatchik Zelenskii is the ultimate outsider
and just as the people of the USA did not vote "for" Trump as much as they voted "against"
Hillary, so the people of the Ukraine did not really vote "for" Zelenskii, but "against"
Poroshenko. In fact, Zelenskii does not have anything resembling a political program (only
vague and nice sounding slogans) and he most certainly has no other political record other than
being a standup comedian and actors in several (pretty good) satirical series. Frankly, it
appears that Zelenskii was as stunned by his victory as Trump was by his.
Still, in theory, it is almost impossible for Poroshenko to win this one. Not only do
all the other candidates hate Poroshenko way more than they would dislike Zelenskii, voters for
Tymoshenko or Boiko are far more likely to vote for Zelenskii than for Poroshenko. This
creates an extremely dangerous situation: Poroshenko can only win by a massive fraud . Now
Tymoshenko did declare that the first round was stolen, but she decided not to appeal this
officially. Furthermore, it is now apparent that Tymoshenko was ditched by most of her US
supporters, something which she clearly did not expect and which came as a total shock to her,
hence her stunned reaction to the announced figures. She has always been, and still is, a
remarkably intelligent lady and a very calculating realist: she simply knows that an official
rejection of the outcome from her would make no difference. But you can be sure that behind the
scenes the interests Tymoshenko represents are now talking to the people of Kolomoiskii and
that Poroshenko is fully aware of that. ... ... ...
Poroshenko is now truly cornered: he absolutely must win, or he must run. In order to win,
his options are very limited
... ... ...
The infamous Minister of the Interior, Arsen Avakov, arguably currently the most powerful
and dangerous man in the Ukraine, has made an
most interesting statement about Zelenskii:
"A decent man from another world. From another plane. Ready to deal with problems, but
at the same time recognizing that in many issues he is not fully competent. In my
understanding, this means that he is ready to delegate authority. However, the question
arises: can we – Ukrainian society – offer the quality of the elite, which can
be entrusted with the implementation of such powers? After all, if he delegates authority
to scoundrels – as it happens in some series of "Servants of the people" – it
will be very bad for the country. Using expats is also not an option "( ) "He knows for
sure that from point A it is necessary to come to point B, and I am ready to agree with it.
But the problem is how to go this way. Often, if you go head-on, you will crash into a wall
or break. Therefore, it is necessary to choose the right path – and here should work
competent and honest specialists"
In plain English this simply means: Zelenskii has no personal power base, he will be a
puppet, so he better offer me a good deal (" delegate authority "), or I will turn
against him and, how knows, an unpredictable accident (" you will crash into a wall or
break ") can easily happen. Shocking? Welcome to "Ukrainian thug politics"! Besides, if
the Nazis decide to kill Zelenskii they can easily blame it on Russia. Either that, or on a
"lone, deranged, gunman" which they can find in the thousands amongst the various Nazi
death-squads.
Right now the Nazis are in a total panic, they are declaring that Zelenskii's victory is
"Moscow's triumph", they say that Zelenskii will sell out everything Ukrainian and that he is
a Putin agent. At the very least, they will now dig up as much dirt on Zelenskii as possible
(whether real or manufactured).
Zelenski means green man and has Polish indication. So he is one of the holocaust
survivors. (There are suspiciously too many of them these days.)
Timoshenko was virulently anti Russian but not so much anymore. All industrial plants in
Ukraine were built by Russians making products for Russia, I have doubt that they can make
anything that west needs. So Ukraine now is fully depended on agriculture. That is why
Ukraine is going down.
Most votes went to Zelenski that is indication that Ukrainians now did loose their
enthusiasm, and they are becoming more lethargic.
Galicia is multicultural area consisting mostly Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian,
Russian, and some other nationals. There is no unity there, and never will be
@Ilyana_Rozumova Maybe Galicia should be returned to Poland? From my blog:
May 1, 2017 – Must Ukraine Return Volhynia?
Hillary Clinton's State Department funneled $5 billion to orchestrate a "revolution"
to overthrow the elected President of Ukraine in 2014. (See my June 7, 2016 blog post for
details.) Ukraine's President was ousted because he refused to support Ukraine joining the
EU and NATO, and violence spread throughout Ukraine as CIA funded factions fought for
power.
Crimea was part of Russia for over a century until it was administratively attached to
Ukraine in 1954 by a Soviet premier to promote Soviet solidarity. Russians are the majority
people in Crimea and Russian is the common language, but they were not consulted. In 2014,
after years of Ukrainian political turmoil and an American coup in Kiev, Russia accepted a
request by the people of Crimea to rejoin Russia after 94% voted in favor. (See my Aug 8,
2016 blog post for details.) Russians and Crimeans were puzzled by intense American
opposition to this reannexation, and rightly concluded the Americans really wanted "NATO"
military bases in strategic Crimea.
For those concerned about European borders and justice, they should address a truly
outrageous annexation. In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Poland and seized half of its land
while Soviet police massacred 22,000 influential Polish POWs and civilians. This area was
invaded by Germany two years later, which formed Ukrainian paramilitary units that murdered
over 100,000 Poles during the war.
Entire Polish villages disappeared as Ukrainians massacred everyone to include women and
children, who were buried in mass graves. After the war, the Polish regions of Volhynia and
Eastern Galicia were formally annexed by Soviet Ukraine after 1.5 million Poles were
forcibly deported. Over the next decade, another 1.5 million Poles were deported by Ukraine
to ethically cleanse these regions (noted in yellow below).
The West did nothing about this brutality because it occurred within the powerful Soviet
Union. However, that union broke up and Ukraine is weak and at odds with Russia. On July
22, 2016, the Parliament of Poland passed a resolution recognizing the massacres of ethnic
Poles in Volhynia and Galicia as genocide. Poland is now part of NATO and American troops
are based there. Thousands of Poles are still alive who were expelled from these regions.
Homes and land were seized from millions of Poles. Ukrainian war criminals remain at
large.
This raises several questions. If Poland demands a return of its territory or
compensation for Poles, will powerful NATO support its demand? Will sanctions be imposed
against Ukraine for this genocide and illegal seizure of Polish territory? Since Crimea was
attached to Ukraine without a democratic vote, and the citizens of Crimea voted to rejoin
Russia, should sanctions against Russia be removed?
Informed people know these issues will never be addressed because NATO does not exist to
protect member states, but is a proxy arm of America's neocon empire trying to conquer the
world. However, as Poland's military grows stronger and Ukraine struggles, this issue may
arise, and crafty Russia may support a return of Poland's, Slovakia's, and Romania's seized
territories!
With the exception of the Baltic states, that simply isn't true of any nation from
the former Soviet Union. Otherwise, the Russians couldn't have set up the Eurasian Customs
Union which covers ~90% of the former USSR. There are even many Georgians working in
Russia, in spite of the short war that was started by US dummy and former Georgian then
Ukrainian, now stateless, Mikheil Saakashvili.
I say the best solution for Ukraine would be to leave the nazis among themselves by
giving independence to Galicia. If it's the price to pay to reintegrate Donbass, for the
economy, and for peace and stability, it's worth it.
@Carlton Meyer Poles would be crazy to take back Galicia. Just fence the nazi lunatics
in with electrified barbed wire and leave them among themselves.
@One Tribe Well, yes, in a fashion. I'm from the old South (Roosevelt was in his second
term when I was born). Though I was educated at a fine old southern university and though I
have lived a significant part of my adult life in Europe, Asia and Africa, I still revel in
being called a redneck, a hick, a yokel, a cracker.
I embrace all of those terms because they only illustrate the ignorance of those who use
them in a derogatory manner. I also embrace being a part of the goyim. Those who use those
terms to wound only shows their fear, their own sense of inferiority to me, to us,
Christian southerners both white and black.
"Zionist praise for a Nazi" Poroshenko has Jewish ancestry, you dimwit. Go read the article
in Forward called 'Poroshenko's Secret Jewish Roots'. Ukraine has three Jewish men in a row
as prime minister. How interesting, given their rather low population percentage.
Nazi, Nazi, Nazi. Do these guys ever stop? It reminds me of the old Jews in Queens, NY,
every time they got into a disagreement with anyone, they yelled "Nazi". Even the regular
Jews got sick of it. The Ukrainians have a long history of nationalist thinkers, opposed to
Russian domination. Like the Finns, the Ukrainian patriots may have taken German support in
WW2, but that doesn't make the "Nazis". The National Socialists were a unique party to the
Germany of the 1930s, would you call Italian Fascists "Nazis"?
Ask yourself why, in general, one country/nation hates another? It's because of attempts
at invasion and domination. And historically, who is going to invade/dominate you? Those
geographically closest obviously. Sure, there are exceptions to this–the Mongol
Empire, the Arab Caliphate, and most strikingly, the Western invasion of well, everywhere
in the 16th-20th centuries.
But in most of the world most of the time for most of human existence, it's the guy next
door who is going to screw you and whom you in turn will screw.
One commenter suggested a comparison with Latin American attitudes towards the US. This
is partly true, but there are several differences. First, national identity is, on the
whole, relatively weak in New World. What does it really mean to be a Honduran? Secondly,
the main US security mechanism in the Western Hemisphere has been its navy which means
relatively less direct occupation and repression of places like Mexico. Russia, invaded
from East and West, has always sought security zones that inevitably mean occupation and
subjugation. Third, US hegemonism has only really gotten going over the last 125 years, so
it hasn't had as much time to antagonize its neighbors, and we had the good fortune of
ravaging most of the locals near at hand with the small pox, etc that we brought along with
us.
These factors combine to explain why the hatred quotient towards Russia by its neighbors
is higher than that towards the US.
"Zelenski means green man and has Polish indication. So he is one of the holocaust
survivors. (There are suspiciously too many of them these days.)"
– The endless numbers of "survivors" are especially amazing since it's claimed
that 'the Germans tried to kill every Jew they could get their hands on.'
Galicia is multicultural area consisting mostly Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Romanian,
Russian, and some other nationals. There is no unity there, and never will be.
Then why do they seem to behave politically in ways that set them apart from all those
around them?
Really? I never thought of Slovaks as owning much of anything–not even Slovakia
historically. Hungarians, Austrians, Czechs all dominated Slovakia. Could you expand on
your notion of the majority of Galicia belonging to Slovakia?
When a sitting president anywhere in the world runs for re-election and gets 15%, the
decent thing is to step aside. It doesn't matter how many other candidates run, there could
be hundreds – what matters is that 85% of people voted against Porky as their
first choice .
He has been in the office for 5 years and 85% of people want someone else. How much
clearer could this be? This was a massive vote of no-confidence by Ukrainians. If Porky
squeezes or cheats his way into staying as president, he is asking for trouble – it
is not sustainable and Washington knows it.
Galicia and Donbas also clearly cannot coexist in the same non-federated state, they
are on opposite sides.
Economy: is it not going to get better. The bad news have been pushed after the
elections, and in 2020 two things will happen:
Kiev will have to start paying back at
least some of the Western loans Income from gas transit will be gone (and possibly the gas
itself).
That takes away 3-5% of the Ukrainian economy. If Russia piles on and restricts more
trade, or limits remittances, there will inevitably by a recession in Ukraine. The circus
is about to re-start, no wonder the clowns are renting stadiums. But at some point the
distractions will cease to distract – and then the damn reality will hit even
harder
@Vojkan The Poles deserve the ziocon-"renovated" & "liberated" Galicia festering
with the active Banderites. Look how the Poles have been treating the monuments to the
fallen Soviet soldiers. Let the Poles enjoy their passionate brotherly love with the ZUSA.
As Saker writes,
Fundamentally, Nazis and Zionists are twin brothers, even if deep down they hate (and
often admire!) each other.
If there is something positive about Maidan regime change, it is the revelation of the
ziocons active role in the revival of neo-Nazism in Ukraine. The revelation is a death blow
to the holo-biz profiteering schema.
Whether the Jewish State's provisions of Israel-made ammunition to the neo-Nazis or the
ADL & Simon Wiesenthal Center support for the neo-Nazi (see the zionists scandalous
behavior re the Conyers' Amendment), the zionists did indeed come out (again!) as the "twin
brothers" of the worsts among Nazis.
I disagree that Porky is dumb. He successfully fleeced the whole country, including
competing oligarchs, for 5 years. Dumb are the people who still support him. Ukrainians
voting for Porky are like chickens voting for Colonel Sanders. But some morons never
learn.
Porky might be fond of his drink. He showed up seriously inebriated several times
publicly, but he wouldn't be able to steal hundreds of millions consistently while being
drunk all the time. Saakashvili (admittedly, hardly a reliable source of info) said that
Porky ran the country into the ground being sober. Well, Porky never cared about the
country, all he is interested in is the trough. That's why he wants five more years of
stealing, and he is reluctant to yield his place at the trough to someone else.
Most importantly, the masters are OK with it. Imperial gauleiter of Ukraine Volker
has already voiced his support for Porky. Porky would likely be more obedient than anyone
else: he can be blackmailed, as he has already earned gallows (or life in prison in
countries that don't have death penalty). So, the masters have already chosen their
favorite puppet. We'll see on April 21st how much influence they have.
I am not saying that Zelensky (and his puppet master Kolomoisky) won't do, but from
masters' point of view old clown is apparently preferable to the new one.
@Oscar Peterson Transcarpathia is a long extension of Slovakia. It was taken from
Czechoslovakia after WWII and given to Soviet Ukraine. The people of this region never
thought of themselves as Ukrainian or Galician but as Rusyns or Ruthenians. Transcarpathia
was mainly given to Soviet Union because it is a good gateway for tanks into Eastern Europe
such as the case for Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. This region also has a
large Hungarian population, since Hungary used to rule it in the Austro-Hungarian empire
times.
For some he is preferable, he is more reliable. Anytime a new clown is elevated, there
is some unpredictability. Bosses hate surprises.
On the other hand, the first step when things don't go well, is to rotate the
clowns. We got Macron, the German doppelganger for Merkel, elites tried Renzi in Italy, so
maybe Zelinsky could work. He is a complete tabula rasa, non-entity, that wouldn't know how
to find the executive washroom. At a minimum, he would buy some time. Next they can still
try Tymoshenko. This will not get resolved through the political process.
Next they can still try Tymoshenko. This will not get resolved through the
political process.
Why not? If the masters allow new clown to win, Gas princess can be made the speaker
of the Rada . Then an unfortunate accident can be easily arranged, and she becomes
next successor perfectly legally. The masters do these things pretty often: remember Ulof
Palme or Aldo Moro. Zelensky can be got rid of the same way, if the masters decide that
it's to their benefit.
@AnonFromTN That's a possible scenario. But in that part of the world, scenarios never
play out the way they are planned.
I am not sure what is left to be gained in Ukraine, it is all costs and very few
benefits. That's what happens when the layered lying becomes so convoluted that the masters
lose track of the objectives.
They wanted Crimea (actually Russia out of Crimea bases, NATO in) – that
failed. Everything else were distractions, false promises, and payoffs to locals. A normal
master would accept the defeat, take his toys home, and wait for the next time. The
post-modern Washingtonians instead pretend that the sweet talk was real , try for
silly, secondary objectives (how about a few missiles on the Russian border? that would
work out great), or refuse to accept the obvious. Making the whole fiasco more
costly.
The only reason they didn't abandon failed Ukrainian project I can see is that from
imperial standpoint the more irritants you create for Russia, the better. Current Ukraine
is an irritant. When its further disintegrates and becomes a huge Somalia on Russian
doorstep, it would become an even grater irritant. Of course, Poles would suffer, too,
but when did the masters take aborigines into account?
As to a few missiles on Russian border, they already have that in Baltic vaudeville
states, which are much closer to Moscow and especially Sankt Petersburg then
Zhmerinka.
Then again, I am looking at it rationally, whereas Washington politburo is getting
even less rational that the Soviet one under Brezhnev.
In April this year [2018] the U.S. supplied Javelin anti-tank missiles to Ukraine
and in May 2018 the U.S. Congress approved $250m of military funding, specifically
including deliveries of lethal weaponry.
President Donald Trump's special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker (a neocon, acolyte
of senator John McCain, previously appointed by George Bush as U.S. ambassador to NATO)
announced further U.S. arms supplies would follow, boasting of rising anti-Russian
sentiment in Ukraine.
Kurt Volker, similar to the deceased McCain, is a loyal servant to ziocons and war
profiteers. Actually, Volker is a war profiteer himself.
The US's envoy to Ukraine, Kurt Volker, who is connected to Raytheon, is in favor of
this arms shipment, and it's inevitable that it [arms shipment] will reach Azov
[Battalion]
Azov Battalion functions in a lot of ways like ISIS has in Syria and Iraq Azov camps
with an enormous trove of weapons .. we are talking about hundreds of pounds of C4
explosives, automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
Azov's own website demonstrates that US military trainers have visited Azov in the
field to train and exchange logistical information. They appeared in uniform with Azov
Battalion members who were wearing the wolf's angel patch, which is a Nazi SS symbol, a
runic neo-Nazi symbol on their arm. This is just a scandalous spectacle. Not only that,
contracts have been revealed showing that the Texas-based AirTronic arms company has
produced PSRL-1 grenade launchers that were actually authorized under this watch of the
State Department and delivered directly into the hands of the Azov Battalion. The US has
armed Azov.
Again, what the ADL has been squeaking about -- that there are too many Holo-biz
Deniers? -- The zionists have been in cahoots with the neo-Nazi throughout the whole
State Dept. criminal enterprise in Ukraine. The Kagans clan of holo-biz survivors and other
pro-Nazi Jewish activists such as Gershman (NED) and Foxman (ADL) have been the moving
force towards banderization of Ukraine (Babij Yar, ADL?).
None of them cares about the memory of WWII victims the zionists only care about
profits. As for Kurt Volker, he is with zionists in the search for mega-profit. He is a
regular opportunist devoid of dignity.
Volker served on the staff of Senator John McCain from 1997 to 1998. He was
appointed United States Permanent Representative to NATO in July 2008 by President George
W. Bush.
Volker went into the private sector in 2009, becoming an independent director at The
Wall Street Fund Inc. He was a member of the board of directors at Capital Guardian Funds
Trust Volker was also an independent director at Evercore Wealth Management Macro
Opportunity Fund
Volker served as a senior advisor at McLarty Associates, a global consulting firm. In
2011, he joined BGR Group, a Washington-based lobbying firm and investment bank
He has been a Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, Johns Hopkins
University School of Advanced International Studies since September 2009, and a Senior
Advisor at the Atlantic Council since October 2009. [Atlantic Council has been a safe
harbor for the rabidly Russophobic Elliot Higgins and Dmitri Alperovich of Russia-gate
fame, https://consortiumnews.com/2019/01/29/how-russia-gate-rationalizes-censorship/
)
Kurt Volker, a certified war profiteer and money manager using his position as a
government employee for making money on lobbying What can be wrong with his judgements?
Special Education comment for the fluoride-lobotomized vegetables, known internationally as
AMERICANS: Petro Poroshenko, described in this article as the figurehead of rhe "Nazis" is
a Jew. When the US sponsored the coup in the Ukraine, both the democratically elected
President and Prime Minister were replaced by Jews.
The alleged Neo-Nazis, "Right Sector" were unemployed punks led by Israeli mercenaries,
virtually unchallenged by effectively bribed, Ukrainian military commanders.
If Adolf Hitler were alive today and controlled the Ukraine, he would order that --
without exception -- every member of Right Sector be either euthanized or sterilized to
prevent the Right Sector Stupid Gene to infect the Aryan Race.
Anyone or any organization that refers to the Jewish president of the Ukraine and his
followers as "Nazis" are obviously Zionist propaganda agents misleading the mentally
feeble.
@AnonFromTN When we were kids we would climb into neighbours' gardens to steal
cherries. You climb up a tree, break a few branches, take the cherries. No guilt. Every kid
feels ' exceptional , it is something that comes naturally to all 12-year olds.
The weird thing about modern Washingtonians is that they never outgrew that infantile
stage. They still feel 'exceptional', taking other people's stuff is ok. Why wouldn't be ?
If one is exceptional, he is by definition better than others, and the others really have
no rights, except the ones given to them by the exceptional people.
When a thieving raid by the exceptional people is blocked – as in Crimea
– it leaves no good options. Should one admit that they were about to take the
'stuff' (the Sebastopol bases), lost out, and simply retreat? No, it is hard to stay
exceptional when losing. Image and perceptions are everything in Washington.
Should they escalate and try to storm Crimea to get what they want and deserve?
Again, no, because exceptional people can't risk hurt or injury, they are too precious,
they are after all 'exceptional'.
Should they send their decidedly unexceptional underlings to storm Crimea? Well, that
would be ideal, but the underlings are too stupid to even get into the garden, and climbing
a tree is way beyond their ability. One can train them, send them ladders – but
everyone knows that they will never do it.
That leaves the least bad option of sticking around to ' irritate ' Russia. There
is not much gain in it, it gets old very quickly, it is also costly and even dangerous. But
it preserves the image of 'exceptional' people, it can be spun around for different
perceptions, and it makes the local allies less antsy and less likely to run away with
their loot. Other than that it achieves nothing.
That's where we are: a bunch of unserious morons sitting in a car parked outside the
cherry orchard, scared to go in, scared to leave, hoping that nobody notices, and still
craving the sweet cherries without even being able to admit that's what they are there
for.
"... The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes ..."
"... there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. ..."
"... In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. ..."
"... Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction ..."
"... The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. ..."
"... concerns about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated." Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. ..."
"... Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money. ..."
"... Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now." ..."
"... Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates can raise money from the Jewish community. ..."
"... Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors in the Middle East are OK by them. ..."
"... any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class. ..."
"... Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." ..."
"... Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way. ..."
"... Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation. ..."
"... I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it, for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation," he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black people." ..."
"... Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru. ..."
"... Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. ..."
"... First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. ..."
"... The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course, an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts. ..."
"... anyone who believes that the interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly naďve or worse ..."
"... "Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University. ..."
"... "American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel.'" ..."
"... Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky. ..."
"... The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing to resist. ..."
"... Phil likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel. ..."
"... on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization" surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think. ..."
"... The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness. ..."
"... Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that. ..."
"... 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian people under Occupation. ..."
"... Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests. ..."
"... A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents – even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land. ..."
This weekend the New York Times
breaks
one of the biggest taboos , describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party's slavish support for Israel.
Nathan Thrall's groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we've reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins,
as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism–
that's the nut. Though that party is breaking up. Thrall's labors are minimized by the New York Times with the headline "The Battle
Over B.D.S.," but his message is that the progressive base has a highly-critical view of Israel that the leadership has refused to
reflect, and that's about to change. We're inside the tent. The party is going to have to reflect pro-Palestinian positions. Ben
Rhodes tells Thrall that the moment of overcoming the fear of the pro-Israel lobby (as the Cuba fear was overcome) is about to happen.
The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for
instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of
Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes. Deep into his piece, Thrall explains why progressives
aren't being heard. Megadonors.
For all the recent tumult over Israel in Washington, the policy debate remains extremely narrow Despite pointed critiques of American
support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and Omar, there is little willingness
among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel.
In part, some Hill staff members
and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater
than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by
Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room.
Though
the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing
in the opposite direction
As we reported from Ben Rhodes's book,
Rhodes tells Thrall that donors forced Obama to hew to the Netanyahu line.
According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser and one of Obama's closest confidants, several members of the
Obama administration wanted to adopt a more assertive policy toward Israel but felt that their hands were tied. "The Washington
view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists
are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is." Peter Joseph, an emeritus chairman of the center-left Israel
Policy Forum, told me that the views of major Democratic Jewish donors could act as a check on the leftward pull by progressive
voters who are strongly critical of Israel: "I can't imagine that mainstream Democratic Jewish donors are going to be happy about
any Democratic Party that is moving in that direction."
Off the record, people go further. The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till
the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. We reported as much at the time.
Another former member of the Obama White House, who asked not to be named, fearing professional retaliation, said that concerns
about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated."
Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. Faced with a 2016 United Nations
Security Council resolution condemning settlements, the Obama administration abstained (effectively supporting the resolution),
but only after having signaled it would not consider backing any resolution before November. "There is a reason the U.N. vote
did not come up before the election in November," the former official said. "Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald
Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn't want Clinton to face pressure
to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it."
Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money.
What worries establishment Democrats, the former official added, is that the partisan divide over Israel will concretize -- with
Republicans defined as pro-Israel, Democrats defined as anti-Israel -- and that the party coffers will empty. Joel Rubin, a deputy
assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a
founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters.
It's more about donors now."
Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out
what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg
and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates
can raise money from the Jewish community. We always said Sanders could be better on Palestine because he avoided the donor class
of the Democratic party. Rhodes agrees.
"If you don't rely on a traditional fund-raising model, then you have more freedom on these types of issues," Rhodes said. "You're
not worried about the one-hour phone call that you're going to have to do after the presidential debate with a really angry donor."
The key element here is, older Jewish donors are conservative about Israel. A former Clinton campaign official:
"There's no major donor that I can think of who is looking for someone to take a Bernie-like approach." And whereas none of the
most liberal Jewish donors have threatened to withdraw support because a candidate was too pro-Israel, pro-Israel donors and PACs
have a history of financing opposition to candidates deemed unfriendly. Haim Saban, one of Hillary Clinton's top five donors in
2016, has financed opponents of Democratic candidates critical of Israel
Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors
in the Middle East are OK by them.
In the same [Mellman] poll -- conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved
the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut
humanitarian aid to Palestinians -- roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump's handling of relations
with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements
in the West Bank,
a November
2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned
with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel.
Those Jews are conservative compared to the base, which is increasingly people of color and real progressives.
Members of the Democratic Party's progressive activist base, by contrast, find themselves light years from their representatives
in Washington.
And any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class.
Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable
with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." In October, just weeks before the 2018 midterm election,
as the Democratic leadership was working to take back the House, a Democratic staff member, who asked not to be named for fear
of professional retaliation, told me that it was important to retain the support of all major donors, not just the most liberal
ones.
Referring to two of the largest Jewish donors to Democrats, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the staff member
said: "Our members need George Soros and Haim Saban. And they need everything in between."
Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure
last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way.
Michigan's administration quickly issued a statement that it would not appoint a committee to investigate divestment. A month
later, the board of regents released a letter backing the decision. (The two regents who didn't sign it were the only people of
color on the board.) Like many large American universities, the University of Michigan has extensive research partnerships with
Israeli universities. And many of its institutes and buildings are named after alumni donors who have contributed large sums to
Israel or pro-Israel groups.
Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the
intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation.
"The American Jewish community, which is broadly speaking liberal, has allowed itself in the name of defending Israel and fighting
B.D.S. to become the leading edge of illiberalism by pushing legislation to curb free speech."
OK now let's get to some of the good news here. Thrall's overall point is that the battle is breaking out, thanks to those women
of color in the House and the progressive base.
As the Democratic Party is pulled toward a more progressive base and a future when a majority of the party will most likely be
people of color, tensions over Israel have erupted. In the past several months, a fierce debate over American support for Israel
has periodically dominated the news cycle and overshadowed the Democrats' policymaking agenda.
BDS is gaining ground. Israel knows it.
Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told me, "Despite the overwhelming support for Israel in the U.S.,
we see that the attempt to delegitimize Israel is gaining ground, especially among extreme left-wing marginal groups."
When have you ever seen such a fair assessment of BDS in the Times?
Instead of tying itself to a specific outcome, the B.D.S. movement insisted on these three principles, which could be fulfilled
any number of ways: two states, one state with equal individual rights, a confederation with equal collective rights.
This is a simple turn by Thrall on why Zionism is racist at its core.
Following the 1948 war, which erupted after the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine into two states, the
Jews who fled could return; Palestinians could not.
Here's another great moment, brilliant reporting.
I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it,
for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation,"
he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black
people."
Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we
say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."
Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru.
Currently, hundreds of Israeli towns have admissions committees that can bar Palestinian citizens from living in them based on
"social suitability." (It's illegal for people to be excluded on the basis of race, religion or nationality, but the rubric of
"social suitability" permits the rejection of applicants who are not Zionist, haven't served in the army or don't intend to send
their children to Hebrew-language schools.)
More than 900 towns in Israel contain no Arab families, according to Yosef Jabareen,
a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Palestinian schools can lose government funding if they commemorate
the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency
for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.
And that's why MD Rep. Donna Edwards and two white congressional colleagues locked arms and sang We Shall Overcome in apartheid Hebron:
Edwards and her colleagues looked up to see garbage-filled nets hanging above their heads, put up to catch trash thrown by Israeli
settlers. "We had never seen anything like that," she told me recently. "Hebron is the place where I think you can see in the
most frightening way what the injustice is, where you have people on one side of the street who live one way and people on another
side of the street living another way. And streets that some people can cross and walk on, but other people cannot. To me, it
looked like the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me about living in the South."
The great news at the end of the article. Edwards et al are taking over the party. Thrall cites Electronic Intifada's influence,
and Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow too.
Politicians speaking on Israel-Palestine used to worry primarily about attacks from pro-Israel media and activist groups; now
progressives are starting to feel some heat from the pro-Palestinian side.
But it's over. All the anti-Omar stuff of recent weeks is just the froth on the wave. Jim Zogby got slamdunked on the platform in
2016 by the Clintonites. But that wont' happen again.
James Zogby says that standing for Palestinian rights is guaranteed to be a major topic in the 2020 election: "It's a smell-test
issue. If you go to young people, they know you stink if you don't talk about it right." A senior Democratic staff member on Capitol
Hill told me: "People like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders have opened the floodgates on this issue. It may be painful
for the party as we move in a more progressive direction. But we'll come out in a better place -- a more moral and evenhanded
place -- in the end."
This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. And Thrall did the shrewd
thing of avoiding the word "lobby." I guess it's been anathematized, but that's what this article is about. That and race. People
of color are driving this change. They are going to be punished. Betty McCollum doesn't get taken to the woodshed for calling it
apartheid, but one county west, Ilhan Omar is going to be primaried next year.
About Philip
Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
" This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. "
Wrong. Read it again. He focuses mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party so he doesn't say much about them, but
he does say that they are among the most pro-Israel groups, but are also mostly Republican voters.
I just read it again and I think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic
Party" is flat out wrong – it covers that but a lot else as well. It's a big sprawling piece that covers campus politics, the
human rights situation is Israel, the political temperature in the American Jewish community, the whole anti-semitism debate in
the U.S. and so on. I take the last paragraph as support for Phil's assertion that the piece will have an impact:
During his introduction of Sanders, King spoke of the Vermont senator's family members murdered in the Holocaust, and how
coming of age in these circumstances "gave Bernie a deep sense of right and wrong." King said: "He has always rejected the status
quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa, when -- crazily -- that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today," King
added, "he speaks out against apartheid like conditions in Palestine, even though it's not popular." The crowd erupted in cheers.
"Israel Lobby and Pro-Israel House Democrats Tried to Excommunicate Ilhan Omar, They Failed"
By Richard Silverstein
EXCERPT:
... ... ...
"The 2018 Congressional election marked a watershed, sweeping a new progressive class into office. Most prominent among them
were Reps. Rashid Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, women who challenged the system, incumbents, and the Democratic
machine to win sweeping victories on truly progressive platforms. Their Middle East agenda was particularly forthright, and therefore
shocking: they opposed U.S. aid to Israel, supported BDS and a one state solution (AOC has not expressed herself as explicitly
on these issues, but presumably shares many of her colleagues' views).
"Anyone who knows the Israel Lobby knew that the other shoe was bound to drop. They just didn't know when. And it didn't take
long. Both Tlaib and especially Omar have been outspoken on Israel-Palestine since their elections. And their markedly pro-Palestine
views have rapidly become grist for the anti-Semitism mill churned by the Lobby and its water-carriers in Congress.
"First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the
Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. But somehow, noting that the
Lobby derived its power from money morphed into outright anti-Semitism. The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course,
an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the
media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre
to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts.
"But the Lobby plays a game of smoke and mirrors. It sees a clear statement attacking it and manages through a bit of hocus-pocus
to transform it into a classic anti-Semitic charge, when in actuality there is absolutely no connection.
"Now, the Lobby has done it again after Omar gave a talk at a Washington DC bookstore in which she criticized those in Congress
and the Lobby who had a foreign allegiance: 'I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K.
for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.'
"By this, of course she meant that groups like Aipac and their Congressional sponsors who take their marching orders either
from Israel directly, or who conceive their agenda totally with Israel and its interests in mind. They may believe that the interests
of the U.S. and Israel are the same; and that therefore they are not betraying U.S. interests. But anyone who believes that the
interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly
naďve or worse.
"After Omar's statement, the Lobby went into Defcon mode. The attack was launched by Eliot Engel, a veteran of the New York
Democratic machine, who attacked the Somali-American Congresswoman:
"Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are
more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It
was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the
first president of Brandeis University.
And he used the term to deride precisely the figures Omar is now attacking: a powerful
Lobby and its apologists who put Israel before all else. This is a passage from the 1961 American Jewish Yearbook:
"American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar,
president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among
Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside
of Israel.'"
"The NY Times headline about the speech said Sachar derided the 'dogma of Israel.' If American Jews can quarrel over the meaning
and primacy of Israel in Jewish life, why would we deny Arab American the same right, considering that their Palestinian sisters
and brothers are under the boot heel of Israeli Occupation?
"It would not be so bad if Israel was a democratic, secular nation like the U.S. and most western democracies. Then at least
there would be a confluence of interests and values. But Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run
by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic
west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and
oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents
used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky.
"Apparently, Congress has not yet read the memo. It is sunk in old ways and habits. The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing
to resist. But the old ways are dying. The election victories I referenced above testify to that more strongly than a $100-million
Sheldon Adelson donation.
"That's why the anti-Semitism fire-drill convened by the Democratic Congressional leadership was initially so infuriating.
It decided to take Omar to the woodshed and whip her by passing a resolution denouncing anti-Semitism by its members. This represented
the Democratic Party eating its young. Nancy Pelosi, at the goading of Engel, Nita Lowey and other pro-Israel members, tabled
a pointless resolution. It would have forced members to swear allegiance on pain of getting a public spanking like Omar. The final
wording never ended up referring directly to Omar. But the message was clear: shut up on the subject or the Party caucus will
exact a toll."
"think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party" is flat out wrong – it covers
that but a lot else as well. "
That's true. It is one of the best pieces I have ever seen in this subject. I am not knocking the piece -- I am correcting
Phil. Thrall doesn't write much about why Republicans support Israel, where Christian Zionists are a major factor. Phil claimed
he didn't say anything about Christian Zionists when he actually did. Phil didn't notice that because to the extent the piece
was about political parties in the US, it focused on the Democrats where Christian Zionists are not very important. Also, Phil
likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel.
Liberal Christian guilt about anti-Semitism also plays a role.
If Thrall were writing about the political right he would have to say a lot about how many on the Christian Right see Israel
as a central element in their belief on how the world was going to end. He would be writing about Hal Lindsay's books and later
the "Left Behind" series and how on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization"
surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think.
That included both Jews and Muslims who were tortured on the rack, also known as the auto-da-fe
I realize this is a bit of a nitpick, but the auto-da-fé was the final public confession prior to execution – it had
nothing whatsoever to do with any specific instrument of torture.
The fact that nobody in the entire editorial process noticed this obvious screwup, speaks volumes about the lack of
standards (and the lack of knowledge of European history) in the modern print media.
Given that the author was using the Inquisition as a rhetorical device, it would have been nice if he didn't come away from
the attempt looking like an ignoramus.
The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference
is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness.
My one beef with Mondoweiss
is that you regularly downplay the role of American Evangelical Christianity in the oppression of the Palestinians.
I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what is essentially
a public relations war for control of the Middle East. Right-wing Christianity – especially those who espouse Dominionist beliefs
– will tolerate ANY form of behavior that fits their views of Biblical prophecy. Absent these believers, who honestly don't give
a crap about Israel's behavior, the hue and cry of anti-semitism is the only weapon the Zionists have.
Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match
the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that.
TERRYHEATON- ". I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what
is essentially a public relations war for control of the Middle East."
Well, you would say that wouldn't you? Miss the 700 club do you? The reality is that Evangelical Christian support for Israel
and Zionism didn't really take off until the late 1970s as a consequence of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's recruitment of their support.
This was well after Israel and Zionism had firmly established itself following the 1967 six day war. Zionism and Israel is an
overwhelmingly Jewish project, Christian Zionists little more than opportunistic camp followers. The Christian Zionist leadership
has taken advantage of the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of Jewish Zionist power. While these Christian Zionists may be
numerous, they lack the access to the corridors of power comparable to the Jewish Zionists, although their alliance with Jewish
Zionism has improved their status.
Phil is correct to downplay the power of the Christian Zionists. They have negligible effect upon the policies of either Israel
or the American Jewish Zionists, pats on the head notwithstanding. Their power lies more in supporting the rightward drift in
American politics.
Keith, thanks for the input. If you've read my book, then you already know my feelings about The 700 Club and Pat Robertson.
Sadly, Christian Zionists are not at all merely clinging to right-wing beliefs. They started many of them. In fact, that's what
we did at The 700 Club. Rather, they're waiting and hoping for the return of Jesus Christ, who will then, the thinking goes, elevate
them and bring peace for 1,000 years. So their support of Israel is from their interpretation of scripture, and that's a powerful
force that permits them to look the other way whenever Israel's behavior is questioned. They don't care, because they have their
eyes on what they view as a bigger prize. Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. would never get their way without the blind support of
this massive group of citizens.
'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's
our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian
people under Occupation.
Thanks, Chuck, for the enlightenment! Boy, do I feel dumb now!!
@ genesto: 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course,
we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' ||
So according to Mr. Schumer's "logic" any lack of peace with Muslims isn't the fault of Muslims – it's the fault of non-Muslims
(including Jews) who do not believe in the Qur'an.
Very good! Unfortunately,
logic was never a strong point among the Zionists.
Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer (guardian) of the state of Israel in the Congress (Did someone say dual loyalty???), somehow
manages to be both humorous and frightening at the same time. Nice trick, if you can do it.
Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed
as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests.
There's little point analysing this nonsense in terms of what is or isn't silly. After all, the entire shebang is predicated
on an idea that is breathtaking in its silliness: in a nutshell it's this –
A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents
– even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land.
It's absolutely no coincidence that Herzl and his mob could not get any rabbi west of Lviv to endorse their nonsense: the rabbis
of all genuine centres of scholarship repudiated the Zionist project as an abomination.
So Herzl etc just kept going further East until they found someone theologically illiterate enough to give a rabbinical imprimatur,
and hence a veneer of intellectual respectability, to their project.
It's an indictment on the Polish rabbinate that they signed off on such an obvious apostasy it would have been nice if Herzl
etc had really had to go full retard and end up relying on a Chinaman (a Kaifeng) – but if that's what it would have taken at
the time, they would have done so.
(I'm an atheist, so I reject the idea that a project is validated if some religio-dipshit whackball waves some magic words
at it but Herzl's project wanted a religious imprimatur).
"... The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes ..."
"... there is little willingness among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel. ..."
"... In part, some Hill staff members and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by Jewish donors. ..."
"... Though the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing in the opposite direction ..."
"... The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. ..."
"... concerns about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated." Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. ..."
"... Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money. ..."
"... Joel Rubin, a deputy assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now." ..."
"... Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates can raise money from the Jewish community. ..."
"... Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors in the Middle East are OK by them. ..."
"... any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class. ..."
"... Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." ..."
"... Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way. ..."
"... Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation. ..."
"... I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it, for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation," he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black people." ..."
"... Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru. ..."
"... Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza. ..."
"... First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. ..."
"... The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course, an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts. ..."
"... anyone who believes that the interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly naďve or worse ..."
"... "Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the first president of Brandeis University. ..."
"... "American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar, president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside of Israel.'" ..."
"... Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky. ..."
"... The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing to resist. ..."
"... Phil likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel. ..."
"... on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization" surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think. ..."
"... The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness. ..."
"... Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that. ..."
"... 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian people under Occupation. ..."
"... Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests. ..."
"... A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents – even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land. ..."
This weekend the New York Times
breaks
one of the biggest taboos , describing the responsibility of Jewish donors for the Democratic Party's slavish support for Israel.
Nathan Thrall's groundbreaking piece repeats a lot of data we've reported here and says in essence that it really is about the Benjamins,
as Rep. Ilhan Omar said so famously. The donor class of the party is overwhelmingly Jewish, and Jews are still largely wed to Zionism–
that's the nut. Though that party is breaking up. Thrall's labors are minimized by the New York Times with the headline "The Battle
Over B.D.S.," but his message is that the progressive base has a highly-critical view of Israel that the leadership has refused to
reflect, and that's about to change. We're inside the tent. The party is going to have to reflect pro-Palestinian positions. Ben
Rhodes tells Thrall that the moment of overcoming the fear of the pro-Israel lobby (as the Cuba fear was overcome) is about to happen.
The article is a thorough-going rebuke of every journalist and former official (Daniel Shapiro, former ambassador under Obama, for
instance, as well as the Forward and the Times opinion writers) who says that money is not at the root, or very near the root, of
Democratic Party support. So let's follow the money, and review the money quotes. Deep into his piece, Thrall explains why progressives
aren't being heard. Megadonors.
For all the recent tumult over Israel in Washington, the policy debate remains extremely narrow Despite pointed critiques of American
support for Israel by representatives like Betty McCollum of Minnesota, [Rashida] Tlaib and Omar, there is little willingness
among Democrats to argue publicly for substantially changing longstanding policy toward Israel.
In part, some Hill staff members
and former White House officials say, this is because of the influence of megadonors: Of the dozens of personal checks greater
than $500,000 made out to the largest PAC for Democrats in 2018, the Senate Majority PAC, around three-fourths were written by
Jewish donors. This provides fodder for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, and for some, it is the elephant in the room.
Though
the number of Jewish donors known to prioritize pro-Israel policies above all other issues is small, there are few if any pushing
in the opposite direction
As we reported from Ben Rhodes's book,
Rhodes tells Thrall that donors forced Obama to hew to the Netanyahu line.
According to Ben Rhodes, a former deputy national-security adviser and one of Obama's closest confidants, several members of the
Obama administration wanted to adopt a more assertive policy toward Israel but felt that their hands were tied. "The Washington
view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists
are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is." Peter Joseph, an emeritus chairman of the center-left Israel
Policy Forum, told me that the views of major Democratic Jewish donors could act as a check on the leftward pull by progressive
voters who are strongly critical of Israel: "I can't imagine that mainstream Democratic Jewish donors are going to be happy about
any Democratic Party that is moving in that direction."
Off the record, people go further. The Obama administration didn't just support the occupation, it kept supporting it right up till
the November 2016 election so that Hillary Clinton wouldn't lose donors. We reported as much at the time.
Another former member of the Obama White House, who asked not to be named, fearing professional retaliation, said that concerns
about donors among Democrats dominated not just "what was done but what was not done, and what was not even contemplated."
Even the timing of the administration's policies toward Israel was dictated by domestic politics. Faced with a 2016 United Nations
Security Council resolution condemning settlements, the Obama administration abstained (effectively supporting the resolution),
but only after having signaled it would not consider backing any resolution before November. "There is a reason the U.N. vote
did not come up before the election in November," the former official said. "Was it because you were going to lose voters to Donald
Trump? No. It was because you were going to have skittish donors. That, and the fact that we didn't want Clinton to face pressure
to condemn the resolution or be damaged by having to defend it."
Everyone knows this math. And the Democrats fear they'll lose all their money.
What worries establishment Democrats, the former official added, is that the partisan divide over Israel will concretize -- with
Republicans defined as pro-Israel, Democrats defined as anti-Israel -- and that the party coffers will empty. Joel Rubin, a deputy
assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs in the Obama administration, former political director at J Street and a
founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, agreed: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters.
It's more about donors now."
Thrall says the Democratic Party leadership is perfectly happy with AIPAC, but he leaves out
what we reported here: the extent of the reliance on Jewish donors is "gigantic" and "shocking," according to insiders JJ Goldberg
and the head of Emily's List, and AIPAC gets to script congressional campaigns on their middle east positions before the candidates
can raise money from the Jewish community. We always said Sanders could be better on Palestine because he avoided the donor class
of the Democratic party. Rhodes agrees.
"If you don't rely on a traditional fund-raising model, then you have more freedom on these types of issues," Rhodes said. "You're
not worried about the one-hour phone call that you're going to have to do after the presidential debate with a really angry donor."
The key element here is, older Jewish donors are conservative about Israel. A former Clinton campaign official:
"There's no major donor that I can think of who is looking for someone to take a Bernie-like approach." And whereas none of the
most liberal Jewish donors have threatened to withdraw support because a candidate was too pro-Israel, pro-Israel donors and PACs
have a history of financing opposition to candidates deemed unfriendly. Haim Saban, one of Hillary Clinton's top five donors in
2016, has financed opponents of Democratic candidates critical of Israel
Sadly the Jewish community is largely supportive of Israel, as Thrall shows. By and large, American Jews are Zionists. Trump's horrors
in the Middle East are OK by them.
In the same [Mellman] poll -- conducted after the United States closed the Palestinian diplomatic mission in Washington, moved
the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, appointed a fund-raiser for the settlements as U.S. ambassador and cut
humanitarian aid to Palestinians -- roughly half of American Jews said they approved of President Trump's handling of relations
with Israel. On what is considered the most divisive issue in U.S.-Israel relations, the establishment of Israeli settlements
in the West Bank,
a November
2018 post-midterm election poll of more than 1,000 American Jews that was commissioned by J Street, the pro-Israel lobby aligned
with Democrats, found that roughly half said the expansion of settlements had no impact on how they felt about Israel.
Those Jews are conservative compared to the base, which is increasingly people of color and real progressives.
Members of the Democratic Party's progressive activist base, by contrast, find themselves light years from their representatives
in Washington.
And any declension in US support is seen as alienating the donor class.
Joel Rubin said: "The problem for center-left groups that are more critical of Israel is that the Jewish donor class is comfortable
with current U.S. policies. They just don't like Trump on other issues." In October, just weeks before the 2018 midterm election,
as the Democratic leadership was working to take back the House, a Democratic staff member, who asked not to be named for fear
of professional retaliation, told me that it was important to retain the support of all major donors, not just the most liberal
ones.
Referring to two of the largest Jewish donors to Democrats, on opposite ends of the political spectrum, the staff member
said: "Our members need George Soros and Haim Saban. And they need everything in between."
Thrall shows that fear of losing donors played a role when the University of Michigan student body passed a narrow divestment measure
last fall– to divest only from companies doing business in the occupation -- and still the administration said No way.
Michigan's administration quickly issued a statement that it would not appoint a committee to investigate divestment. A month
later, the board of regents released a letter backing the decision. (The two regents who didn't sign it were the only people of
color on the board.) Like many large American universities, the University of Michigan has extensive research partnerships with
Israeli universities. And many of its institutes and buildings are named after alumni donors who have contributed large sums to
Israel or pro-Israel groups.
Lara Friedman of Foundation for Middle East Peace and formerly of Peace Now continues to blaze a trail by honestly describing the
intolerance in the Jewish community for debate of Israel. That community has pushed the anti-BDS legislation.
"The American Jewish community, which is broadly speaking liberal, has allowed itself in the name of defending Israel and fighting
B.D.S. to become the leading edge of illiberalism by pushing legislation to curb free speech."
OK now let's get to some of the good news here. Thrall's overall point is that the battle is breaking out, thanks to those women
of color in the House and the progressive base.
As the Democratic Party is pulled toward a more progressive base and a future when a majority of the party will most likely be
people of color, tensions over Israel have erupted. In the past several months, a fierce debate over American support for Israel
has periodically dominated the news cycle and overshadowed the Democrats' policymaking agenda.
BDS is gaining ground. Israel knows it.
Emmanuel Nahshon, a spokesman for Israel's foreign ministry, told me, "Despite the overwhelming support for Israel in the U.S.,
we see that the attempt to delegitimize Israel is gaining ground, especially among extreme left-wing marginal groups."
When have you ever seen such a fair assessment of BDS in the Times?
Instead of tying itself to a specific outcome, the B.D.S. movement insisted on these three principles, which could be fulfilled
any number of ways: two states, one state with equal individual rights, a confederation with equal collective rights.
This is a simple turn by Thrall on why Zionism is racist at its core.
Following the 1948 war, which erupted after the United Nations announced its plan to partition Palestine into two states, the
Jews who fled could return; Palestinians could not.
Here's another great moment, brilliant reporting.
I asked [Zionist Organization of America's Morton] Klein why he believed it was "utterly racist and despicable," as he put it,
for [Richard] Spencer to promote a state for only one ethnic group but not racist for Israel to do so. "Israel is a unique situation,"
he said. "This is really a Jewish state given to us by God." He added, "God did not create a state for white people or for black
people."
Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we
say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."
Thrall says Israel is Jim Crow society thru and thru.
Currently, hundreds of Israeli towns have admissions committees that can bar Palestinian citizens from living in them based on
"social suitability." (It's illegal for people to be excluded on the basis of race, religion or nationality, but the rubric of
"social suitability" permits the rejection of applicants who are not Zionist, haven't served in the army or don't intend to send
their children to Hebrew-language schools.)
More than 900 towns in Israel contain no Arab families, according to Yosef Jabareen,
a professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Palestinian schools can lose government funding if they commemorate
the Nakba, the displacement of Palestinians in 1948. Israeli law forbids citizens to obtain citizenship or permanent residency
for Palestinian spouses from the West Bank and Gaza.
And that's why MD Rep. Donna Edwards and two white congressional colleagues locked arms and sang We Shall Overcome in apartheid Hebron:
Edwards and her colleagues looked up to see garbage-filled nets hanging above their heads, put up to catch trash thrown by Israeli
settlers. "We had never seen anything like that," she told me recently. "Hebron is the place where I think you can see in the
most frightening way what the injustice is, where you have people on one side of the street who live one way and people on another
side of the street living another way. And streets that some people can cross and walk on, but other people cannot. To me, it
looked like the stories that my mother and my grandmother told me about living in the South."
The great news at the end of the article. Edwards et al are taking over the party. Thrall cites Electronic Intifada's influence,
and Jewish Voice for Peace, and IfNotNow too.
Politicians speaking on Israel-Palestine used to worry primarily about attacks from pro-Israel media and activist groups; now
progressives are starting to feel some heat from the pro-Palestinian side.
But it's over. All the anti-Omar stuff of recent weeks is just the froth on the wave. Jim Zogby got slamdunked on the platform in
2016 by the Clintonites. But that wont' happen again.
James Zogby says that standing for Palestinian rights is guaranteed to be a major topic in the 2020 election: "It's a smell-test
issue. If you go to young people, they know you stink if you don't talk about it right." A senior Democratic staff member on Capitol
Hill told me: "People like Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Bernie Sanders have opened the floodgates on this issue. It may be painful
for the party as we move in a more progressive direction. But we'll come out in a better place -- a more moral and evenhanded
place -- in the end."
This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. And Thrall did the shrewd
thing of avoiding the word "lobby." I guess it's been anathematized, but that's what this article is about. That and race. People
of color are driving this change. They are going to be punished. Betty McCollum doesn't get taken to the woodshed for calling it
apartheid, but one county west, Ilhan Omar is going to be primaried next year.
About Philip
Weiss
Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
" This piece is going to resonate for weeks. It's going to come under fierce attack. Because it's huge, and it's calm and factual.
It doesn't say a word about Christian Zionists because they don't have influence in the Democratic Party. "
Wrong. Read it again. He focuses mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party so he doesn't say much about them, but
he does say that they are among the most pro-Israel groups, but are also mostly Republican voters.
I just read it again and I think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic
Party" is flat out wrong – it covers that but a lot else as well. It's a big sprawling piece that covers campus politics, the
human rights situation is Israel, the political temperature in the American Jewish community, the whole anti-semitism debate in
the U.S. and so on. I take the last paragraph as support for Phil's assertion that the piece will have an impact:
During his introduction of Sanders, King spoke of the Vermont senator's family members murdered in the Holocaust, and how
coming of age in these circumstances "gave Bernie a deep sense of right and wrong." King said: "He has always rejected the status
quo. He spoke out against apartheid in South Africa, when -- crazily -- that was an unpopular thing to do. And even today," King
added, "he speaks out against apartheid like conditions in Palestine, even though it's not popular." The crowd erupted in cheers.
"Israel Lobby and Pro-Israel House Democrats Tried to Excommunicate Ilhan Omar, They Failed"
By Richard Silverstein
EXCERPT:
... ... ...
"The 2018 Congressional election marked a watershed, sweeping a new progressive class into office. Most prominent among them
were Reps. Rashid Tlaib, Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, women who challenged the system, incumbents, and the Democratic
machine to win sweeping victories on truly progressive platforms. Their Middle East agenda was particularly forthright, and therefore
shocking: they opposed U.S. aid to Israel, supported BDS and a one state solution (AOC has not expressed herself as explicitly
on these issues, but presumably shares many of her colleagues' views).
"Anyone who knows the Israel Lobby knew that the other shoe was bound to drop. They just didn't know when. And it didn't take
long. Both Tlaib and especially Omar have been outspoken on Israel-Palestine since their elections. And their markedly pro-Palestine
views have rapidly become grist for the anti-Semitism mill churned by the Lobby and its water-carriers in Congress.
"First, of course there was the famous 'Benjamins' tweet in which Omar noted that members of Congress were obedient to the
Lobby because of the hundreds of millions it raises and distributes to loyal pro-Israel candidates. But somehow, noting that the
Lobby derived its power from money morphed into outright anti-Semitism. The way this happened was instructive: there is, of course,
an ancient anti-Semitic trope that Jews are rich and use their wealth to control the finance, banking, entertainment, and the
media sectors, etc. That of course, has nothing to do with the true statement that the Lobby raises and distributes massive lucre
to its favored candidates. A reasonable person can see the difference between these two concepts.
"But the Lobby plays a game of smoke and mirrors. It sees a clear statement attacking it and manages through a bit of hocus-pocus
to transform it into a classic anti-Semitic charge, when in actuality there is absolutely no connection.
"Now, the Lobby has done it again after Omar gave a talk at a Washington DC bookstore in which she criticized those in Congress
and the Lobby who had a foreign allegiance: 'I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is O.K.
for people to push for allegiance to a foreign country.'
"By this, of course she meant that groups like Aipac and their Congressional sponsors who take their marching orders either
from Israel directly, or who conceive their agenda totally with Israel and its interests in mind. They may believe that the interests
of the U.S. and Israel are the same; and that therefore they are not betraying U.S. interests. But anyone who believes that the
interests of one of the greatest powers on earth is the same as that of a small Middle Eastern theocratic state is either terribly
naďve or worse.
"After Omar's statement, the Lobby went into Defcon mode. The attack was launched by Eliot Engel, a veteran of the New York
Democratic machine, who attacked the Somali-American Congresswoman:
"Pro-Israel Jews like Engel are particularly exercised by the implication of dual loyalty. That is, that pro-Israel Jews are
more loyal to Israel than America. An especially apt historical phrase connoting dual loyalty is the term 'Israel Firster.' It
was not invented by an anti-Semite or white supremacist. But rather by the dean of American Jewish historians, Abe Sachar, the
first president of Brandeis University.
And he used the term to deride precisely the figures Omar is now attacking: a powerful
Lobby and its apologists who put Israel before all else. This is a passage from the 1961 American Jewish Yearbook:
"American Jews continued to object to Israel's claim that a genuine Jewish life was possible only in Israel. Abram L. Sachar,
president of Brandeis University, at the biennial convention of JWB [Jewish Welfare Board], declared on April 2, 1960 that among
Jews there is no room 'for Israel Firsters whose chauvinism and arrogance find nothing relevant or viable in any area outside
of Israel.'"
"The NY Times headline about the speech said Sachar derided the 'dogma of Israel.' If American Jews can quarrel over the meaning
and primacy of Israel in Jewish life, why would we deny Arab American the same right, considering that their Palestinian sisters
and brothers are under the boot heel of Israeli Occupation?
"It would not be so bad if Israel was a democratic, secular nation like the U.S. and most western democracies. Then at least
there would be a confluence of interests and values. But Israel is no longer a democracy. Instead it has become a theocracy, run
by fundamentalist extremists bent on holy war with the Muslim world. Israel's interests are diverging from those of the democratic
west more than ever. And this fissure can only continue to widen as Israel sinks ever deeper into mass murder, Occupation and
oppression. Israel's interests and America's are no longer the same. Not even close. That little sliver of daylight which presidents
used to boast about not existing when it came to Israel and U.S. interests: it's now a wide-open expanse of sky.
"Apparently, Congress has not yet read the memo. It is sunk in old ways and habits. The smell of greenbacks remains too enticing
to resist. But the old ways are dying. The election victories I referenced above testify to that more strongly than a $100-million
Sheldon Adelson donation.
"That's why the anti-Semitism fire-drill convened by the Democratic Congressional leadership was initially so infuriating.
It decided to take Omar to the woodshed and whip her by passing a resolution denouncing anti-Semitism by its members. This represented
the Democratic Party eating its young. Nancy Pelosi, at the goading of Engel, Nita Lowey and other pro-Israel members, tabled
a pointless resolution. It would have forced members to swear allegiance on pain of getting a public spanking like Omar. The final
wording never ended up referring directly to Omar. But the message was clear: shut up on the subject or the Party caucus will
exact a toll."
"think your characterization of the piece as "mostly on the struggle within the Democratic Party" is flat out wrong – it covers
that but a lot else as well. "
That's true. It is one of the best pieces I have ever seen in this subject. I am not knocking the piece -- I am correcting
Phil. Thrall doesn't write much about why Republicans support Israel, where Christian Zionists are a major factor. Phil claimed
he didn't say anything about Christian Zionists when he actually did. Phil didn't notice that because to the extent the piece
was about political parties in the US, it focused on the Democrats where Christian Zionists are not very important. Also, Phil
likes to downplay the role of Christian Zionists, while others who feel uncomfortable talking about Jewish donors ( fearing the antisemitism charge) like to emphasize them. The truth is that they are both important in why the US supports Israel.
Liberal Christian guilt about anti-Semitism also plays a role.
If Thrall were writing about the political right he would have to say a lot about how many on the Christian Right see Israel
as a central element in their belief on how the world was going to end. He would be writing about Hal Lindsay's books and later
the "Left Behind" series and how on the secular level American rightwingers sometimes see Israel as a bastion of "Western civilization"
surrounded by the heathens. Of course some of that last part overlaps with what Israel supporters in the Democratic Party think.
That included both Jews and Muslims who were tortured on the rack, also known as the auto-da-fe
I realize this is a bit of a nitpick, but the auto-da-fé was the final public confession prior to execution – it had
nothing whatsoever to do with any specific instrument of torture.
The fact that nobody in the entire editorial process noticed this obvious screwup, speaks volumes about the lack of
standards (and the lack of knowledge of European history) in the modern print media.
Given that the author was using the Inquisition as a rhetorical device, it would have been nice if he didn't come away from
the attempt looking like an ignoramus.
The truth is the GOP's courting of the donor class comes from the same motivation – the counting of the donor Benjamins. The difference
is they can better hide their support (of Zionism) under banners of defense, business, and righteousness.
My one beef with Mondoweiss
is that you regularly downplay the role of American Evangelical Christianity in the oppression of the Palestinians.
I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what is essentially
a public relations war for control of the Middle East. Right-wing Christianity – especially those who espouse Dominionist beliefs
– will tolerate ANY form of behavior that fits their views of Biblical prophecy. Absent these believers, who honestly don't give
a crap about Israel's behavior, the hue and cry of anti-semitism is the only weapon the Zionists have.
Trump plays to this crowd with his actions in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Finally, this "donor class" could hardly match
the daily U.S. gift of $10 million, so the pitch they make is to American taxpayers, although nobody ever talks about that.
TERRYHEATON- ". I think it's at the very top of the list, for Jewish Zionists simply don't have the numbers to win what
is essentially a public relations war for control of the Middle East."
Well, you would say that wouldn't you? Miss the 700 club do you? The reality is that Evangelical Christian support for Israel
and Zionism didn't really take off until the late 1970s as a consequence of Israeli PM Menachem Begin's recruitment of their support.
This was well after Israel and Zionism had firmly established itself following the 1967 six day war. Zionism and Israel is an
overwhelmingly Jewish project, Christian Zionists little more than opportunistic camp followers. The Christian Zionist leadership
has taken advantage of the opportunity to jump on the bandwagon of Jewish Zionist power. While these Christian Zionists may be
numerous, they lack the access to the corridors of power comparable to the Jewish Zionists, although their alliance with Jewish
Zionism has improved their status.
Phil is correct to downplay the power of the Christian Zionists. They have negligible effect upon the policies of either Israel
or the American Jewish Zionists, pats on the head notwithstanding. Their power lies more in supporting the rightward drift in
American politics.
Keith, thanks for the input. If you've read my book, then you already know my feelings about The 700 Club and Pat Robertson.
Sadly, Christian Zionists are not at all merely clinging to right-wing beliefs. They started many of them. In fact, that's what
we did at The 700 Club. Rather, they're waiting and hoping for the return of Jesus Christ, who will then, the thinking goes, elevate
them and bring peace for 1,000 years. So their support of Israel is from their interpretation of scripture, and that's a powerful
force that permits them to look the other way whenever Israel's behavior is questioned. They don't care, because they have their
eyes on what they view as a bigger prize. Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. would never get their way without the blind support of
this massive group of citizens.
'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course, we say it's
our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' Damn, and I thought that the reason there was no peace was because of the oppressive, prison-like conditions of the Palestinian
people under Occupation.
Thanks, Chuck, for the enlightenment! Boy, do I feel dumb now!!
@ genesto: 'Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic minority leader, similarly told the Aipac conference in 2018: "Of course,
we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace."' ||
So according to Mr. Schumer's "logic" any lack of peace with Muslims isn't the fault of Muslims – it's the fault of non-Muslims
(including Jews) who do not believe in the Qur'an.
Very good! Unfortunately,
logic was never a strong point among the Zionists.
Schumer, the self-proclaimed shomer (guardian) of the state of Israel in the Congress (Did someone say dual loyalty???), somehow
manages to be both humorous and frightening at the same time. Nice trick, if you can do it.
Of course it is "all about the Benjamins". Contending to the contrary is simply silly. One might well add that BDS can be viewed
as a good thing for Israel, and in that country's true best interests.
There's little point analysing this nonsense in terms of what is or isn't silly. After all, the entire shebang is predicated
on an idea that is breathtaking in its silliness: in a nutshell it's this –
A collection of primitive Bronze Age fictional gibberish can confer land titles over bits of the Middle East, to its adherents
– even to adherents with absolutely no ancestral connection to the land.
It's absolutely no coincidence that Herzl and his mob could not get any rabbi west of Lviv to endorse their nonsense: the rabbis
of all genuine centres of scholarship repudiated the Zionist project as an abomination.
So Herzl etc just kept going further East until they found someone theologically illiterate enough to give a rabbinical imprimatur,
and hence a veneer of intellectual respectability, to their project.
It's an indictment on the Polish rabbinate that they signed off on such an obvious apostasy it would have been nice if Herzl
etc had really had to go full retard and end up relying on a Chinaman (a Kaifeng) – but if that's what it would have taken at
the time, they would have done so.
(I'm an atheist, so I reject the idea that a project is validated if some religio-dipshit whackball waves some magic words
at it but Herzl's project wanted a religious imprimatur).
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
"On Friday, the United Nations Security Council, following a closed-door meeting, issued a
statement to the press calling for Hifter's LNA to "halt its military activity" near Tripoli.
When Britain proposed a formal resolution along these lines, however, Russia opposed it, no
doubt fearing that it could become the pretext for a fresh Western intervention in Libya.
The British draft included a passage calling "for those who undermine Libya's peace and
security to be held to account."
What hypocrisy! There was no such call when the UK joined with France and the United
States to overthrow the country's government and inflict death upon its population and
destruction upon its infrastructure.
*****No one, from Barack Obama, Nicolas Sarkozy and David Cameron on down, was ever held
accountable for a criminal war of aggression that turned the country into a living
hell.****
Launched under the pretext of a UN resolution authorizing the imposition of a no-fly zone
over Libya to halt the supposed (but non-existent) threat of a massacre in the eastern city
of Benghazi, the war saw money and arms poured into Islamist militias and lavished on Al
Qaeda operatives, who were backed by a relentless bombing campaign, which included nearly
30,000 sorties in the course of seven months.
A war launched on the pretext of protecting civilians culminated in the carpet bombing of
Sirte, a bastion of popular support for Gaddafi, and the lynch-mob torture and murder of the
Libyan leader, over which then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton laughingly gloated, "We
came, we saw, he died."
"In the intervening eight years, the attempts to install a pro-Western puppet regime in a
devastated country controlled by clashing Islamist, tribal and other militias have failed
miserably. The regime headed up by Sarraj, recognized as Libya's "legitimate" government,
barely controls even Tripoli. Under its supposed rule, the country's education and health
systems have collapsed, while inflation is ravaging living standards, the unemployment rate
has reached 30 percent, and fully a third of the population lives below the poverty line.
Conditions of life for masses of Libyans have deteriorated dramatically since the overthrow
of Gaddafi."
For its part, the United States insists on running Ukraine, appointing a special envoy
– Kurt Volker – to preserve its feeling of international importance after it was
pointedly left out of the Normandy Format; Meddlers R Us; we don't need no steenking
invitations.
A glance over trade statistics suggests this
was a wise choice for the Exceptional Nation – the year before the Glorious Maidan,
Revolution of Dignity, the USA did around $3 Billion worth of trade with Ukraine, selling it
$1.92 Billion worth of goods and services, and buying $1.03 Billion worth of goods and services
from it, posting an American trade surplus of $888 Million. Last year the USA did around $4
Billion worth of trade with Ukraine, selling it $2.46 Billion in goods and services, and buying
$1.35 Billion worth of goods and services from it, handsomely increasing the American trade
surplus to $1.13 Billion. Considering Ukraine is impoverished and living on handouts, while the
per-capita GDP has fallen by more than 6% despite the country having lost about 3 million
people (Ukraine's population today is almost exactly what it was in 1960), that's quite an
achievement.
"... Poroshenko's electoral appeal is rooted in the notion of 'better the devil you know' and his presidential campaign rests on his ability to convince voters that he is the lesser of all available evils." ..."
"... Let me put my cards on the table here – the current political class in Washington, irrespective of party affiliation and almost without exception, is so debauched and untethered that it enthusiastically supports the election of unabashed criminals where their election serves American foreign-policy goals. Is it too late to be astounded? Yes, it is. Ukraine is lightly chided for its rampant corruption, while Russia is held up to universal scorn because Putin. ..."
Poroshenko's electoral appeal is rooted in the notion of 'better the devil you know' and
his presidential campaign rests on his ability to convince voters that he is the lesser of all
available evils."
Poroshenko might have an uphill battle convincing his own voters of that reality, but he has
plainly gone down a treat in Washington.
Let me put my cards on the table here – the current political class in Washington,
irrespective of party affiliation and almost without exception, is so debauched and untethered
that it enthusiastically supports the election of unabashed criminals where their election
serves American foreign-policy goals. Is it too late to be astounded? Yes, it is. Ukraine is
lightly chided for its rampant corruption, while Russia is held up to universal scorn because
Putin.
Well, Poroshenko would certainly need to explain how he could win in the second round against
a candidate who polled twice the vote as he did in the first round. But Poroshenko owns or
controls a lot of media, and it's all about pushing a narrative. Ukrainians were satisfied,
the story will go, that Poroshenko learned his lesson from being rebuked in the first round;
he is sorry, and humbled, and will turn over a new leaf.
Meanwhile (still the story), many
Ukrainians are waking up to the shock of what they did, and are suffering buyers remorse, bla, bla. He only needs to squeak out a narrow win when it's down to just he and Zelinskiy,
and the west will immediately hoot that democracy has spoken, my, what an exciting ride, and
Zelinskiy will fade back into political obscurity.
Actually Peter Dickinson is just one of several supposed "experts" and "observers" at The
Atlantic Council of Ukraine's political scene who have expressed opinions that basically
exonerate Poroshenko as godfather of a group of hucksters smuggling Russian weapons and
military spare parts into Ukraine and then charging the Ukrainian government hefty prices for
them. John Herbst thinks it's great that the Banderites got weapons from Russia and the only
thing they did wrong was take a hefty personal cut from the sale; never mind that they broke
some other laws, let's say, laws that forbid Ukraine from purchasing anything from Russia
because Russia is under US / EU sanctions. Other opinions suggest that Poroshenko should just
distance himself from the people involved in the scandal because the most important thing is
to lead Ukraine as far away from Russia as possible – as if it is that easy for
Poroshenko to do, because if he did, his associates in the scandal will squeal on him.
It's hilarious reading those "opinions" and see how far those Atlantic Council people are
trying to excuse Poroshenko by blaming the journalists for bringing up the story or
insinuating that Tymoshenko or the Kremlin is trying to bring Poroshenko down.
I shall paste her article below as I have access beyond the pay-wall to a limited number
of articles published in that rag:
Some in Ukraine may feel that April Fool's Day 2019 started a few hours early, at 8pm
the previous evening to be precise, when the polls in the first round of the country's
presidential election closed and the exit polls showed an actor who plays a fictional
president beating the real president into second place by a margin of almost two to
one.
Official results give Volodymyr Zelensky (the actor) around 30 per cent of the vote,
compared with 16 per cent for president Petro Poroshenko. From a field of 39 – yes, 39
– presidential hopefuls, it will be these two heading into the run-off on 21
April.
Yulia Tymoshenko – the only woman anywhere near the top 10 and the most
recognisable face for many outside Ukraine as "la pasionaria" of the 2004 Orange Revolution,
had led when the campaign began last December, but was knocked into third place. Mercifully,
the 3 percentage point margin between her and Poroshenko is probably clear enough to pre-empt
any challenge or dispute.
The question now facing the more than half of Ukraine's 35 million electorate who voted
for neither Zelensky nor Poroshenko on Sunday is which of the two to choose in three weeks'
time – and for the rest whether to stick with their original choice.
It would be fair to say that opinions about Zelensky are sharply divided. On the one
hand are those who argue that anything has to be better than the glacial pace of change and
endemic corruption over which Poroshenko has presided.
They include many young people who have joined what might be described as the
pan-European anti-politics tendency that brought Italy's current government to power.
Zelensky and his team of largely young volunteers ran a welcoming and modern campaign that
took on a life of its own as – rather like Jeremy Corbyn's 2017 campaign in the UK
– supporters spread the word on social media.
At the same time, there are many – perhaps over-represented among highly educated
professional Ukrainians at home and abroad – who view Zelensky with trepidation and
suspicion as just another populist, capitalising on his fame in another sphere. Their fear
– tinged with condescension – is that he could endanger the relative stability
Poroshenko has brought after the tumult of the Euromaidan (a wave of demonstrations) five
years ago.
The size of Zelensky's first-round vote, however, and its geographical spread –
he managed to appeal to Russian-speakers in the eastern areas bordering the war zone as well
as those in central and southern Ukraine – have led even doubters to feel that this
election is now his to lose. Poroshenko, however, should not be written off too soon. It is
not just fear of the unknown that could make the run-off very close; there are other reasons
why Poroshenko could yet prevail.
One is that, although Zelensky comes across well when he appears on his own terms
– at the comedy shows he preferred to conventional political rallies – he
performed poorly in the few television interviews he gave, appearing out of his depth and
using language that suggested a rather unreconstructed view of women.
It had been expected that one or more formal television debates might test his mettle,
but the plan for first-round debates foundered when Poroshenko and Zelensky both declined to
take part, and it now appears there may be no second-round debate either. With the contest
now reduced to two, however, this is bound to concentrate minds.
Another is the question of Zelensky's funding. Some suspect that the hand (and money)
of the exiled businessman/oligarch, Ihor Kolomoisky, is behind him. Zelensky denies that he
depends on anyone, and some close to the campaign say that associates of Kolomoisky are at
best on the outer fringe of the campaign. But the suspicion persists, and when Poroshenko
spoke of "populists" and "puppets" in his campaign speeches, the inference was clear.
Poroshenko's first-round campaign pitch – a responsible leader whose video
stresses the importance of the nation, the army and the Church – could have more
resonance now that it will be pitted directly against what could seem a leap into the unknown
with Zelensky. Then again, just looking at the way the two handled the provisional
first-round results on the night – Poroshenko looking exhausted and just a little
jaded, and Zelensky bouncing around, smiling, with a ready word for the media and
glad-handing his supporters, it was tempting to imagine a new Ukraine already eclipsing the
old.
But – to put it at its most basic – will Zelensky be "allowed" to win?
While there have been some reports of polling violations on Sunday, the first round appears
to have been an admirably clean and open election to the point where a complete outsider was
not only able to stake a claim to the country's top job, but to reach the run-off. And the
outside attempts to influence the poll (by Russia and the west), so apparent in previous
elections, were almost not in evidence.
With the presidency itself now at stake, however, and the confusion of a ballot paper
with 39 candidates safely in the past, could the old ways make a comeback? Might there be a
sudden upsurge of attempts to influence the campaign from the outside: new money, hacking,
dirty tricks,"Kompromat"? Is there a "deep state" that could stop Zelensky?
Leaving aside the imponderable, there are perhaps three factors to watch over the three
weeks. The first is whether any of the other first-round candidates who obtained more than a
handful of votes will endorse – or do any deal with either of the candidates. And if
they did – if Timoshenko, for instance, or Yuriy Boyko, the pro-Russia candidate,
backed Zelensky – would it have a positive or negative effect on his campaign? One key
broker could be the anti-corruption candidate, Anatoliy Hrytsenko, who came fifth.
The second is how far Zelensky can convince his critics that he could actually do the
job. Members of his team told me that he was consulting widely and taking the prospect very
seriously and he has attracted at least two past ministers to his team. The fluidity of
Ukraine's political parties also means that not having a developed party of his own might not
be a huge liability in parliament, as MPs might well flock to a winner. Parliamentary
elections later in the year could do the rest.
His manifesto is also more specific than his detractors say: it includes an end to
immunity from prosecution for MPs and government officials; "not a battle, but the defeat, of
corruption", referendums on important state issues, including possible membership of Nato,
talks with Russia to end the fighting in eastern Ukraine, tax breaks for entrepreneurs, a
drive to introduce technology in schools, higher pay for the military.
But the biggest question could be this: how far will voters distinguish between
Zelensky the real-life candidate and the fictional schoolmaster-turned-president whose
secretly taped anti-corruption rant propelled him to the top job?
By using the title of the series Servant of the People as his campaign slogan, and the
name of his embryonic political party, Zelensky could be accused of encouraging the
confusion. And the fictional president comes with an attitude and an almost naive agenda that
is the stuff of many a Ukrainian's dreams. He is principled, quizzical, supports the "little
man" and has the welfare of his people at heart. The less voters are able, or choose, to
distinguish the two, the better Zelensky's chances of leading the real Ukraine.
Note how, in the extract below, Dejevsky displays her lack of objectivity in the way she
regards the Ukraine from her oh-so-liberal point of view and, thereby, morally castigating
the dump after having right at the top her article mentioned that Tymoshenko was "the only
woman anywhere near the top 10":
although Zelensky comes across well when he appears on his own terms – at the
comedy shows he preferred to conventional political rallies – he performed poorly in
the few television interviews he gave, appearing out of his depth and using language that
suggested a rather unreconstructed view of women .
[my stress]
Yes, that will really turn the Yukies against him, I am sure, Ms
Dejevsky!
A filthy mysogynist!
How shocking!!!
One could not possibly cast one's vote for such a monster!
And what's with this criticism of both Zelensky and Poroshenko's refusal to have a
televised debate?
True, they hold such debates in US presidential elections as part of the "real democracy"
show in the "exceptional nation", but if other countries shy from similar performances, is
that so bad, so "undemocratic"?
And one comment, so far to the article, from a frequent troll at the Independent who likes
to add ПТН X̆ЛО (abbreviation for the Russian "Putin is a
prick) just to show how smart he is:
As usual no mention of any Russian monkey business so I guess Mary is still angling for
the dacha near Moscow.
I have a dacha near Moscow, wanker! Does that mean I am a tool of the Kremlin?
How about digging up the evidence for "Russian monkey business" and presenting it
yourself, arsehole, if you are so sure that such interference by Russia in Banderastan
politics exists?
"... Booker is a close friend of the controversial "America's rabbi" Shmuley Boteach and has taught himself enough Hebrew to pop out sentences from Torah with Jewish audiences. ..."
"... Last week the Intercept published a secret recording of Booker meeting with a group of Jews from New Jersey at the recently concluded AIPAC summit in Washington, which Booker, unlike a number of other Democratic presidential hopefuls, attended enthusiastically. Booker pandered so assiduously that it is hard to believe that he actually knows what he is saying in an effort to be more Israeli than the Israelis. ..."
"... Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss sums up the high points of what Booker said and did not say in the meeting: "Donald Trump is endangering Israel's security in Syria; there is no 'greater moral vandalism' than dividing the U.S. and Israel; ..."
"... A progressive senator who invokes Martin Luther King Jr. over and over again has not one word to say about the Jim Crow status of Palestinians while describing Israel as a 'country that I love so deeply, that changed my life from the day I went there as a 24 year old.'" ..."
"... Booker elaborated in his own words: "Israel is not political to me. It's not political. I was a supporter of Israel well before I was a United State Senator. I was coming to AIPAC conferences well before I knew that one day I would be a federal officer. If I forget thee, o Israel, may I cut off my right hand." ..."
"... Normally progressive Booker, who has criticized the endless war in Afghanistan on the campaign trail, has hypocritically condemned Trump for not continuing war in Syria to protect Israel ..."
"... Do we need a man like Cory Booker as President of the United States? He is articulate enough to cite "moral vandalism" but not perceptive enough to take the concept one step further and appreciate that uncritical close ties to Israel's feckless and fascist government could easily lead to a nuclear war that would constitute something far worse. He further believes that Israel's hand deep in the U.S. Treasury is a desirable policy, that unlimited "all resources" support of Israel is a U.S. national imperative, that ending the continued American military presence in the Middle East "would endanger our ally" Israel, and that moves to nonviolently oppose Israel's oppression of the Palestinians must be made illegal. ..."
"... Frankly, we already have an American leader who puts Israel first in Donald Trump and we don't need another round of wag the dog in our next president. ..."
Israel works hard to influence the United States at all levels. Its tentacles dig deep, now extending to local and state government
levels where candidates for office can expect to be grilled by Jewish constituents regarding their views on the Middle East. The
constituents often insist that the responses be provided in writing. The candidates being grilled understand perfectly well that
their answers will determine what kind of press coverage and level of donations they will receive in return.
One of the most blatant propaganda programs is the sponsorship of free "educational" trips to Israel for all newly elected congressmen
and spouses. The trips are normally led by Israel boosters in Congress like Democratic House Speaker Steny Hoyer, who recently boasted
at an AIPAC gathering how he has done 15 trips to Israel and is now preparing to do another with 30 Democratic congressmen, including
nearly all of those who are newly elected. The congressional trips are carefully coordinated with the Israeli government and are
both organized and paid for by an affiliate of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee called the
American Israel Education Foundation (AIEF) . Other trips sponsored
by AIEF as well as by other Jewish organizations include politicians at state and even local levels as well as journalists who write
about foreign policy.
As noted above, all the trips to Israel are carefully choreographed to present a polished completely Israel-slanted point of view
on contentious issues. Visits to Palestinian areas are arranged selectively to avoid any contact with actual Arabs. Everyone is expected
to return and sing the praises of the wonderful little democracy in the Middle East, which is of course a completely false description
as Israel is a militarized ethno-theocratic kleptocracy headed by a group of corrupt right-wing fanatics who also happen to be racists.
Even progressive politicians who are aware that the Israeli message is bogus and also resent the heavy handedness of the Israelis
and their diaspora friends often decide that it is better to go along for the ride rather than resist. But some embrace it enthusiastically,
like Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey, a liberal Democrat running for his party's nomination for president, who has, by his own
admission, visited Israel many times. Israel and its friends are, of course, both courting and promoting him assiduously.
Booker inevitably reminds one of ex-President Barack Obama because he is black but the similarity goes beyond that as he is also
presentable, well-spoken and slick in his policy pronouncements. One suspects that like Obama he would say one thing to get elected
while doing something else afterwards, but we Americans have become accustomed to that in our presidents. More to the point, Booker
was and is a complete sell-out to Israel and its Jewish supporters during his not completely successful career in New Jersey as mayor
of Newark as well as in his bid for the presidential nomination. Booker is
a close friend of the controversial
"America's rabbi" Shmuley Boteach and has taught himself enough Hebrew to pop out sentences from Torah with Jewish audiences.
Last week the Intercept published
a secret recording of Booker meeting with a group of Jews from New Jersey at the recently concluded AIPAC summit in Washington,
which Booker, unlike a number of other Democratic presidential hopefuls, attended enthusiastically. Booker pandered so assiduously
that it is hard to believe that he actually knows what he is saying in an effort to be more Israeli than the Israelis. He described
an Israel that deserves total commitment from Washington and stated clearly that he wants to create a "unified front" against the
nonviolent boycott movement (BDS). He said that there is "no greater moral vandalism than abandoning Israel."
Phil Weiss on Mondoweiss sums up
the high points of what Booker said and did not say in the meeting: "Donald Trump is endangering Israel's security in Syria; there
is no 'greater moral vandalism' than dividing the U.S. and Israel; Booker would cut off his right hand before abandoning Israel;
he lobbied black congresspeople not to boycott Netanyahu's 2015 speech because we need to show a 'united front' with Israel; AIPAC
is an 'incredible great' organization whose mission is urgent now because of rising anti-Semitism; he 'text messages back and forth
like teenagers' with AIPAC's president Mort Fridman; and he swears to uphold bipartisan support in the Congress for Israel and give
it even more money. And Booker says not one word about Palestinian human rights or Israel's persecution of Palestinians. That's right.
A progressive senator who invokes Martin Luther King Jr. over and over again has not one word to say about the Jim Crow status of
Palestinians while describing Israel as a 'country that I love so deeply, that changed my life from the day I went there as a 24
year old.'"
Booker elaborated in his own words: "Israel is not political to me. It's not political. I was a supporter of Israel well before
I was a United State Senator. I was coming to AIPAC conferences well before I knew that one day I would be a federal officer. If
I forget thee, o Israel, may I cut off my right hand."
Booker described how he is appalled by the rise of alleged anti-Semitic incidents in the U.S. and worldwide. Rather than using
that possible development as leverage to get Israel to behave more humanely, he instead prefers to punish all Americans with new
legislation intended to strip all everyone of their First Amendment rights. Per Booker "We must take acts on a local stage against
vicious acts that target Israel. That's why I'm cosponsor of Senate Bill 720. Israel anti-Boycott Act."
Normally progressive Booker, who has criticized the endless war in Afghanistan on the campaign trail, has hypocritically condemned
Trump for not continuing war in Syria to protect Israel, saying
"This administration's seeming willingness to pull away from Syria makes it more dangerous to us, makes it more dangerous to
Israel, and this is not sound policy . When you're tweeting about pulling out of Syria within days, when that would create a vacuum
that would not only endanger the United States of America but it would endanger our ally Israel as well. We need a comprehensive
strategy for that region because Israel's neighborhood is getting more dangerous than less. Syria is becoming a highway for Iran
to move more precision guided missiles to Hezbollah. There has got to be a strategy in this country to support Israel that is
bipartisan that is wise and that frankly calls upon all the resources of this country, not just military".
And because Israel always needs more money, Booker is ready to deliver: "Unequivocally 100 percent absolutely [yes] to the 3.3
billion [a year]. I have been on the front lines every time an MOU is up to make sure Israel gets the funding it needs. I even pushed
for more funding."
Do we need a man like Cory Booker as President of the United States? He is articulate enough to cite "moral vandalism" but not
perceptive enough to take the concept one step further and appreciate that uncritical close ties to Israel's feckless and fascist
government could easily lead to a nuclear war that would constitute something far worse. He further believes that Israel's hand deep
in the U.S. Treasury is a desirable policy, that unlimited "all resources" support of Israel is a U.S. national imperative, that
ending the continued American military presence in the Middle East "would endanger our ally" Israel, and that moves to nonviolently
oppose Israel's oppression of the Palestinians must be made illegal.
One does not see an actual American interest in any of that, but perhaps special spectacles made in Israel are needed, an environment
where Booker has clearly spent a great deal of time both physically and metaphorically. Or maybe it's the Benjamins. Booker will
need millions of dollars to mount his campaign and he knows where to go and what he needs to say to get it.
One struggles to see just a tiny bit of humanity in Booker vis-à-vis the Arabs who have lost their homes and livelihoods to Israeli
criminality, but none of that comes through in a session in which, admittedly, the Senator from New Jersey is speaking with his Jewish
donor/supporters. Booker is on record favoring an Israel-Palestine "two state solution," which is no longer viable, though he has
not objected to Israeli army snipers shooting dead children, journalists, medical personnel and unarmed protesters in Gaza.
Frankly,
we already have an American leader who puts Israel first in Donald Trump and we don't need another round of wag the dog in our next
president.
Cory Booker should work hard to maintain his perfect attendance record at AIPAC as he texts "like a teenager" with Mort
Fridman, but maybe someday he will actually grow up and learn to think for himself. As he is a U.S. Senator that certainly is something
we might all hope for.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational
foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is [email protected].
Russian research team which claimed to have detected signs of intelligent life in Washington has now discovered the life there
not to be quite so intelligent after all.
A Russian spokesman, who wishes to remain anonymous, told our Moscow science correspondent -- who also wishes to remain anonymous
-- that the Washington atmosphere has been poisoned by huge clouds of putrid hot air belching from the corporate media. He explained
that such a hostile environment makes it almost impossible for intelligent life to survive, let alone evolve a sustainable culture.
The Russian team believes there may still be small pockets of intelligent life elsewhere on the North American continent but without
the necessary conditions they need to thrive they are destined to disappear without trace.
Speaking off the record, the Russian spokesman, who asked us not to disclose his identity, added that hopes of finding intelligent
life in London, Paris, Berlin and other Western European locations, where it might be expected to flourish, are fading fast. Though
it is believed intelligent life once existed in Occiental Europe, an atmosphere suitable for the maintenance of such life has all
but evaporated.
"... T]he main spokesman for these accusations was Serhiy Leshchenko , a Ukrainian politician and journalist who works closely with both top Hillary Clinton donors George Soros and Victor Pinchuk, as well as to the US Embassy in Kyiv. ..."
"... The New York Times should also explain why they didn't mention that Leshchenko had direct connections to two of Hillary Clinton biggest financial backers. Victor Pinchuk, the largest donor to the Clinton Foundation at a staggering $8.6 million also happened to have paid for Leshchenko's expenses to go to international conferences. George Soros, whose also founded the International Renaissance Foundationthat worked closely with Hillary Clinton's State Department in Ukraine, also contributed at least $8 million to Hillary affiliated super PACs in the 2016 campaign cycle . – Lee Stranahan via Medium ..."
"... Meanwhile, according to former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, Leshchenko was a source for opposition research firm Fusion GPS , which commissioned the infamous Trump-Russia dossier. ..."
"... Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for the Washington, D.C.-based Fusion GPS, testified on Oct. 19 that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist turned Ukrainian lawmaker, was a source for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign. ..."
RT CrossTalk host Peter Lavelle and The Duran's Alex Christoforou take a look at new
evidence to surface from Ukraine that exposes a plot by the US Embassy in Kiev and the National
Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) to leak Paul Manafort's corrupt dealings in the
country, all for the benefit of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Via
Zerohedge
Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has launched an investigation into the head of
the Ukrainian National Anti-Corruption Bureau for allegedly attempting to help Hillary Clinton
defeat Donald Trump during the 2016 US election by releasing damaging information about a "
black
ledger " of illegal business dealings by former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
"Today we will launch a criminal investigation about this and we will give legal assessment
of this information," Lutsenko said last week, according to
The Hill.
Lutsenko is probing a claim from a member of the Ukrainian parliament that the director of
the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Artem Sytnyk, attempted to the benefit
of the 2016 U.S. presidential election on behalf of Hillary Clinton .
A State Department spokesman told Hill.TV that officials aware of news reports regarding
Sytnyk. –
The Hill
"According to the member of parliament of Ukraine, he got the court decision that the NABU
official conducted an illegal intrusion into the American election campaign," said Lutsenko,
speaking with The Hill's John Solomon about the anti-corruption bureau chief, Artem
Sytnyk.
"It means that we think Mr. Sytnyk, the NABU director, officially talked about criminal
investigation with Mr. [Paul] Manafort, and at the same time, Mr. Sytnyk stressed that in such
a way, he wanted to assist the campaign of Ms. Clinton ," Lutsenko continued.
Solomon asked Lutsenko about reports that a member of Ukraine's parliament obtained a tape
of the current head of the NABU saying that he was attempting to help Clinton win the 2016
presidential election, as well as connections that helped release the black-ledger files that
exposed Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort 's wrongdoing in Ukraine .
"This member of parliament even attached the audio tape where several men, one of which
had a voice similar to the voice of Mr. Sytnyk, discussed the matter." –
The Hill
What The Hill doesn't mention is that Sytnyk released Manafort's Black Book with
Ukrainian lawmaker
Serhiy Leshchenko – discussed in great length by former Breitbart investigator
Lee Stranahan , who has been
closely monitoring this case.
Serhiy Leshchenko
T]he main spokesman for these accusations was Serhiy
Leshchenko , a Ukrainian politician and journalist who works closely with both top
Hillary Clinton donors George Soros and Victor Pinchuk, as well as to the US Embassy in
Kyiv.
James Comey should be asked about this source that Leshchenko would not identify. Was the
source someone connected to US government, either the State Department or the Department of
Justice?
The New York Times should also explain why they didn't mention that Leshchenko had direct
connections to two of Hillary Clinton biggest financial backers. Victor Pinchuk, the largest
donor to the Clinton Foundation at a staggering $8.6 million also happened to have paid for
Leshchenko's expenses to go to international conferences. George Soros, whose also founded
the International Renaissance Foundationthat worked closely with Hillary Clinton's State
Department in Ukraine, also contributed at least $8 million to Hillary affiliated super PACs
in the 2016 campaign cycle . –
Lee Stranahan via Medium
Meanwhile, according to former Fusion GPS contractor Nellie Ohr, Leshchenko was a source for
opposition research firm Fusion GPS , which commissioned the infamous Trump-Russia dossier.
Nellie Ohr, a former contractor for the Washington, D.C.-based Fusion GPS, testified on
Oct. 19 that Serhiy Leshchenko, a former investigative journalist turned Ukrainian lawmaker,
was a source for Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign.
"I recall they were mentioning someone named Serhiy Leshchenko, a Ukrainian," Ohr said
when asked who Fusion GPS's sources were, according to portions of Ohr's testimony confirmed
by The Daily Caller News Foundation. – Daily
Caller
Also absent from The Hill report is the fact that Leshchenko was convicted in
December by a Kiev court of interfering in the 2016 US election .
A Kyiv court said that a Ukrainian lawmaker and a top anticorruption official's decision
in 2016 to publish documents linked to President Donald Trump's then-campaign chairman
amounted to interference in the U.S. presidential election .
The December 11 finding came in response to a complaint filed by another Ukrainian
lawmaker, who alleged that Serhiy Leshchenko and Artem Sytnyk illegally released the
documents in August 2016, showing payments by a Ukrainian political party to Trump's
then-campaign chairman, Paul Manafort.
The documents, excerpts from a secret ledger of payments by the Party of Regions, led to
Manafort being fired by Trump's election campaign.
The Kyiv court said that the documents published by Leshchenko and Sytnyk were part of an
ongoing pretrial investigation in Ukraine into the operations of the pro-Russian Party of
Regions . The party's head had been President Viktor Yanukovych until he fled the country
amid mass protests two years earlier.
-RadioFreeEurope/Radio Liberty (funded by the US govt.).
So while Lutsenko – Solomon's guest and Ukrainian Prosecutor is currently going after
Artem Sytnyk, it should be noted that Leshchenko was already found to have meddled in the 2016
US election.
Establishment
historians claim that U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt never wanted war and made every reasonable effort to prevent war. This
article will show that contrary to what establishment historians claim, Franklin Roosevelt and his administration wanted war and
made every effort to instigate World War II in Europe.
The Germans seized a mass of documents from the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs when they invaded Warsaw in late September 1939.
The documents were seized when a German SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular
German army. Von Kuensberg's men took control of the Polish Foreign Ministry just as Ministry officials were in the process of burning
incriminating documents. These documents clearly establish Roosevelt's crucial role in planning and instigating World War II. They
also reveal the forces behind President Roosevelt that pushed for war.
[1] Weber, Mark,
"President Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents," The Journal of Historical Review, Vol.
4, No. 2 , Summer 1983, pp. 136-137, 140. Some of the secret Polish documents were first published in the United States
as The German White Paper . Probably the most-revealing document in the collection is a secret report dated January 12, 1939
by Jerzy Potocki, the Polish ambassador to the United States. This report discusses the domestic situation in the United States.
I quote (a translation of) Ambassador Potocki's report in full:
There is a feeling now prevalent in the United States marked by growing hatred of Fascism, and above all of Chancellor Hitler
and everything connected with National Socialism. Propaganda is mostly in the hands of the Jews who control almost 100% [of the]
radio, film, daily and periodical press. Although this propaganda is extremely coarse and presents Germany as black as possible–above
all religious persecution and concentration camps are exploited–this propaganda is nevertheless extremely effective since the
public here is completely ignorant and knows nothing of the situation in Europe. At the present moment most Americans regard Chancellor
Hitler and National Socialism as the greatest evil and greatest peril threatening the world. The situation here provides an excellent
platform for public speakers of all kinds, for emigrants from Germany and Czechoslovakia who with a great many words and with
most various calumnies incite the public. They praise American liberty which they contrast with the totalitarian states. It is
interesting to note that in this extremely well-planned campaign which is conducted above all against National Socialism, Soviet
Russia is almost completely eliminated. Soviet Russia, if mentioned at all, is mentioned in a friendly manner and things are presented
in such a way that it would seem that the Soviet Union were cooperating with the bloc of democratic states. Thanks to the clever
propaganda the sympathies of the American public are completely on the side of Red Spain. This propaganda, this war psychosis
is being artificially created. The American people are told that peace in Europe is hanging only by a thread and that war is inevitable.
At the same time the American people are unequivocally told that in case of a world war, America also must take an active part
in order to defend the slogans of liberty and democracy in the world. President Roosevelt was the first one to express hatred
against Fascism. In doing so he was serving a double purpose; first he wanted to divert the attention of the American people from
difficult and intricate domestic problems, especially from the problem of the struggle between capital and labor. Second, by creating
a war psychosis and by spreading rumors concerning dangers threatening Europe, he wanted to induce the American people to accept
an enormous armament program which far exceeds United States defense requirements. Regarding the first point, it must be said
that the internal situation on the labor market is growing worse constantly. The unemployed today already number 12 million. Federal
and state expenditures are increasing daily. Only the huge sums, running into billions, which the treasury expends for emergency
labor projects, are keeping a certain amount of peace in the country. Thus far only the usual strikes and local unrest have taken
place. But how long this government aid can be kept up it is difficult to predict today. The excitement and indignation of public
opinion, and the serious conflict between private enterprises and enormous trusts on the one hand, and with labor on the other,
have made many enemies for Roosevelt and are causing him many sleepless nights. As to point two, I can only say that President
Roosevelt, as a clever player of politics and a connoisseur of American mentality, speedily steered public attention away from
the domestic situation in order to fasten it on foreign policy. The way to achieve this was simple. One needed, on the one hand,
to enhance the war menace overhanging the world on account of Chancellor Hitler, and, on the other hand, to create a specter by
talking about the attack of the totalitarian states on the United States. The Munich pact came to President Roosevelt as a godsend.
He described it as the capitulation of France and England to bellicose German militarism. As was said here: Hitler compelled Chamberlain
at pistol-point. Hence, France and England had no choice and had to conclude a shameful peace. The prevalent hatred against everything
which is in any way connected with German National Socialism is further kindled by the brutal attitude against the Jews in Germany
and by the émigré problem. In this action Jewish intellectuals participated; for instance, Bernard Baruch; the Governor of New
York State, Lehman; the newly appointed judge of the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter; Secretary of the Treasury Morgenthau, and
others who are personal friends of Roosevelt. They want the President to become the champion of human rights, freedom of religion
and speech, and the man who in the future will punish trouble-mongers. These groups, people who want to pose as representatives
of "Americanism" and "defenders of democracy" in the last analysis, are connected by unbreakable ties with international Jewry.
For this Jewish international, which above all is concerned with the interests of its race, to put the President of the United
States at this "ideal" post of champion of human rights, was a clever move. In this manner they created a dangerous hotbed for
hatred and hostility in this hemisphere and divided the world into two hostile camps. The entire issue is worked out in a mysterious
manner. Roosevelt has been forcing the foundation for vitalizing American foreign policy, and simultaneously has been procuring
enormous stocks for the coming war, for which the Jews are striving consciously. With regard to domestic policy, it is extremely
convenient to divert public attention from anti-Semitism which is ever growing in the United States, by talking about the necessity
of defending faith and individual liberty against the onslaught of Fascism.
[2] Count
Jerzy Potocki to Polish Foreign Minister in Warsaw, The German White Paper: Full Text of the Polish Documents Issued by the
Berlin Foreign Office; with a foreword by C. Hartley Grattan, New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, 1940, pp. 29-31.
On January 16, 1939, Potocki reported to the Warsaw Foreign Ministry a conversation he had with American Ambassador to France William
Bullitt. Bullitt was in Washington on a leave of absence from Paris. Potocki reported that Bullitt stated the main objectives of
the Roosevelt administration were:
1. The vitalizing foreign policy, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, severely and unambiguously condemns totalitarian
countries. 2. The United States preparation for war on sea, land and air which will be carried out at an accelerated speed and
will consume the colossal sum of $1,250 million. 3. It is the decided opinion of the President that France and Britain must put
[an] end to any sort of compromise with the totalitarian countries. They must not let themselves in for any discussions aiming
at any kind of territorial changes. 4. They have the moral assurance that the United States will leave the policy of isolation
and be prepared to intervene actively on the side of Britain and France in case of war. America is ready to place its whole wealth
of money and raw materials at their disposal."
[3] Ibid
., pp. 32-33. (Count Jerzy Potocki to Polish Foreign Minister in Warsaw, The German White Paper: Full Text of the Polish Documents
Issued by the Berlin Foreign Office; with a foreword by C. Hartley Grattan, New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, 1940, pp.
29-31.)
Juliusz (Jules) Łukasiewicz, the Polish ambassador to France, sent a top-secret report from Paris to the Polish Foreign Ministry
at the beginning of February 1939. This report outlined the U.S. policy toward Europe as explained to him by William Bullitt:
A week ago, the Ambassador of the United States, W. Bullitt, returned to Paris after having spent three months holiday in America.
Meanwhile, I had two conversations with him which enable me to inform Monsieur Minister on his views regarding the European situation
and to give a survey of Washington's policy . The international situation is regarded by official quarters as extremely serious
and being in danger of armed conflict. Competent quarters are of the opinion that if war should break out between Britain and
France on the one hand and Germany and Italy on the other, and Britain and France should be defeated, the Germans would become
dangerous to the realistic interests of the United States on the American continent. For this reason, one can foresee right from
the beginning the participation of the United States in the war on the side of France and Britain, naturally after some time had
elapsed after the beginning of the war. Ambassador Bullitt expressed this as follows: "Should war break out we shall certainly
not take part in it at the beginning, but we shall end it."
[4] Juliusz
Lukasiewicz to Polish Foreign Minister in Warsaw, The German White Paper: Full Text of the Polish Documents Issued by the Berlin
Foreign Office; with a foreword by C. Hartley Grattan, New York: Howell, Soskin & Company, 1940, pp. 43-44.
On March 7, 1939, Ambassador Potocki sent another remarkably perceptive report on Roosevelt's foreign policy to the Polish government.
I quote Potocki's report in full:
The foreign policy of the United States right now concerns not only the government, but the entire American public as well. The
most important elements are the public statements of President Roosevelt. In almost every public speech he refers more or less
explicitly to the necessity of activating foreign policy against the chaos of views and ideologies in Europe. These statements
are picked up by the press and then cleverly filtered into the minds of average Americans in such a way as to strengthen their
already formed opinions. The same theme is constantly repeated, namely, the danger of war in Europe and saving the democracies
from inundation by enemy fascism. In all of these public statements there is normally only a single theme, that is, the danger
from Nazism and Nazi Germany to world peace. As a result of these speeches, the public is called upon to support rearmament and
the spending of enormous sums for the navy and the air force. The unmistakable idea behind this is that in case of an armed conflict
the United States cannot stay out but must take an active part in the maneuvers. As a result of the effective speeches of President
Roosevelt, which are supported by the press, the American public is today being conscientiously manipulated to hate everything
that smacks of totalitarianism and fascism. But it is interesting that the USSR is not included in all of this. The American public
considers Russia more in the camp of the democratic states. This was also the case during the Spanish civil war when the so-called
Loyalists were regarded as defenders of the democratic idea. The State Department operates without attracting a great deal of
attention, although it is known that Secretary of State [Cordell] Hull and President Roosevelt swear allegiance to the same ideas.
However, Hull shows more reserve than Roosevelt, and he loves to make a distinction between Nazism and Chancellor Hitler on the
one hand, and the German people on the other. He considers this form of dictatorial government a temporary "necessary evil." In
contrast, the State Department is unbelievably interested in the USSR and its internal situation and openly worries itself over
its weaknesses and decline. The main reason for the United States interest in the Russians is the situation in the Far East. The
current government would be glad to see the Red Army emerge as the victor in a conflict with Japan. That's why the sympathies
of the government are clearly on the side of China, which recently received considerable financial aid amounting to 25 million
dollars. Eager attention is given to all information from the diplomatic posts as well as to the special emissaries of the President
who serve as ambassadors of the United States. The President frequently calls his representatives from abroad to Washington for
personal exchanges of views and to give them special information and instructions. The arrival of the envoys and ambassadors is
always shrouded in secrecy and very little surfaces in the press about the results of their visits. The State Department also
takes care to avoid giving out any kind of information about the course of these interviews. The practical way in which the President
makes foreign policy is most effective. He gives personal instructions to his representatives abroad, most of whom are his personal
friends. In this way the United States is led down a dangerous path in world politics with the explicit intention of abandoning
the comfortable policy of isolation. The President regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own
personal ambition. He listens carefully and happily to his echo in the other capitals of the world. In domestic as well as foreign
policy, the Congress of the United States is the only object that stands in the way of the President and his government in carrying
out his decisions quickly and ambitiously. One hundred and fifty years ago, the Constitution of the United States gave the highest
prerogatives to the American parliament which may criticize or reject the law of the White House. The foreign policy of President
Roosevelt has recently been the subject of intense discussion in the lower house and in the Senate, and this has caused excitement.
The so-called Isolationists, of whom there are many in both houses, have come out strongly against the President. The representatives
and the senators were especially upset over the remarks of the President, which were published in the press, in which he said
that the borders of the United States lie on the Rhine. But President Roosevelt is a superb political player and understands completely
the power of the American parliament. He has his own people there, and he knows how to withdraw from an uncomfortable situation
at the right moment. Very intelligently and cleverly he ties together the question of foreign policy with the issues of American
rearmament. He particularly stresses the necessity of spending enormous sums in order to maintain a defensive peace. He says specifically
that the United States is not arming in order to intervene or to go to the aid of England or France in case of war, but because
of the need to show strength and military preparedness in case of an armed conflict in Europe. In his view this conflict is becoming
ever more acute and is completely unavoidable. Since the issue is presented this way, the houses of Congress have no cause to
object. To the contrary, the houses accepted an armament program of more than 1 billion dollars. (The normal budget is 550 million,
the emergency 552 million dollars). However, under the cloak of a rearmament policy, President Roosevelt continues to push forward
his foreign policy, which unofficially shows the world that in case of war the United States will come out on the side of the
democratic states with all military and financial power. In conclusion it can be said that the technical and moral preparation
of the American people for participation in a war–if one should break out in Europe–is proceeding rapidly. It appears that the
United States will come to the aid of France and Great Britain with all its resources right from the beginning. However, I know
the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the opinion that the possibility
that America will enter the war as in 1917 is not great. That's because the majority of the states in the mid-West and West, where
the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at all costs. They remember the declaration of
the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty
nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of
unpaid billions which the European states still owe America.
[5] Germany.
Foreign Office Archive Commission. Roosevelts Weg in den Krieg: Geheimdokumente zur Kriegspolitik des Praesidenten der Vereinigten
Staaten . Berlin: Deutscher Verlag, 1943. Translated into English by Weber, Mark, "President Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite
War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents," The Journal of Historical Review, Summer 1983, Vol. 4, No. 2 , pp.
150-152.
These secret Polish reports were written by top-level Polish ambassadors who were not necessarily friendly to Germany. However, they
understood the realities of European politics far better than people who made foreign policy in the United States. The Polish ambassadors
realized that behind all of their rhetoric about democracy and human rights, the Jewish leaders in the United States who agitated
for war against Germany were deceptively advancing their own interests. There is no question that the secret documents taken from
the Polish Foreign Ministry in Warsaw are authentic. Charles C. Tansill considered the documents genuine and stated, "Some months
ago I had a long conversation with M. Lipsky, the Polish ambassador in Berlin in the prewar years, and he assured me that the documents
in the German White Paper are authentic."
[6] Tansill,
Charles C., "The United States and the Road to War in Europe," in Barnes, Harry Elmer (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
, Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 184 (footnote 292). William H. Chamberlain wrote , "I
have been privately informed by an extremely reliable source that Potocki, now residing in South America, confirmed the accuracy
of the documents, so far as he was concerned."
[7] Chamberlain,
William Henry, America's Second Crusade , Chicago: Regnery, 1950, p. 60 (footnote 14). Historian Harry Elmer Barnes also
stated, "Both Professor Tansill and myself have independently established the thorough authenticity of these documents."
[8] Barnes,
Harry Elmer, The Court Historians versus Revisionism , N.p.: privately printed, 1952, p. 10. Edward Raczyński, the Polish
ambassador to London from 1934 to 1945, confirmed in his diary the authenticity of the Polish documents. He wrote in his entry on
June 20, 1940: "The Germans published in April a White Book containing documents from the archives of our Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
consisting of reports from Potocki from Washington, Łukasiewicz in Paris and myself. I do not know where they found them, since we
were told that the archives had been destroyed. The documents are certainly genuine, and the facsimiles show that for the most part
the Germans got hold of the originals and not merely copies."
[9] Raczynski,
Edward, In Allied London , London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1963, p. 51. The official papers and memoirs of Juliusz Łukasiewicz
published in 1970 in the book Diplomat in Paris 1936-1939 reconfirmed the authenticity of the Polish documents. Łukasiewicz
was the Polish ambassador to Paris, who authored several of the secret Polish documents. The collection was edited by Wacław Jędrzejewicz,
a former Polish diplomat and cabinet member. Jędrzejewicz considered the documents made public by the Germans absolutely genuine,
and quoted from several of them. Tyler G. Kent, who worked at the U.S. Embassy in London in 1939 and 1940, has also confirmed the
authenticity of the secret Polish documents. Kent says that he saw copies of U.S. diplomatic messages in the files which corresponded
to the Polish documents.
[10] Weber,
Mark, "President Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents," The Journal of Historical Review,
Summer 1983, Vol. 4, No. 2 , p. 142. The German Foreign Office published the Polish documents on March 29, 1940. The Reich
Ministry of Propaganda released the documents to strengthen the case of the American isolationists and to prove the degree of America's
responsibility for the outbreak of war. In Berlin, journalists from around the world were permitted to examine the original documents
themselves, along with a large number of other documents from the Polish Foreign Ministry. The release of the documents caused an
international media sensation. American newspapers published lengthy excerpts from the documents and gave the story large front-page
headline coverage.
[11] Ibid
., pp. 137-139. (Weber, Mark, "President Roosevelt's Campaign to Incite War in Europe: The Secret Polish Documents," The Journal
of Historical Review, Summer 1983, Vol. 4, No. 2 , p. 142.) However, the impact of the released documents was far
less than the German government had hoped for. Leading U.S. government officials emphatically denounced the documents as not being
authentic. William Bullitt, who was especially incriminated by the documents, stated, "I have never made to anyone the statements
attributed to me." Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounced the documents: "I may say most emphatically that neither I nor any of
my associates in the Department of State have ever heard of any such conversations as those alleged, nor do we give them the slightest
credence. The statements alleged have not represented in any way at any time the thought or the policy of the American government."
[12] New
York Times , March 30, 1940, p. 1. American newspapers stressed these high-level denials in reporting the release of the
Polish documents. These categorical denials by high-level U.S. government officials almost completely eliminated the effect of the
secret Polish documents. The vast majority of the American people in 1940 trusted their elected political leaders to tell the truth.
If the Polish documents were in fact authentic and genuine, this would mean that President Roosevelt and his representatives had
lied to the American public, while the German government told the truth. In 1940, this was far more than the trusting American public
could accept.
While the secret Polish documents alone indicate that Roosevelt was preparing the American public for war against Germany, a large
amount of complementary evidence confirms the conspiracy reported by the Polish ambassadors. The diary of James V. Forrestal, the
first U.S. secretary of defense, also reveals that Roosevelt and his administration helped start World War II. Forrestal's entry
on December 27, 1945 stated:
Played golf today with Joe Kennedy [Roosevelt's Ambassador to Great Britain in the years immediately before the war]. I asked
him about his conversations with Roosevelt and Neville Chamberlain from 1938 on. He said Chamberlain's position in 1938 was that
England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going to war with Hitler. Kennedy's view: That Hitler would
have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had not been for Bullitt's urging on Roosevelt in the summer
of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland; neither the French nor the British would have made Poland a cause of
war if it had not been for the constant needling from Washington. Bullitt, he said, kept telling Roosevelt that the Germans wouldn't
fight; Kennedy that they would, and that they would overrun Europe. Chamberlain, he says, stated that America and the world Jews
had forced England into the war. In his telephone conversations with Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 the President kept telling
him to put some iron up Chamberlain's backside. Kennedy's response always was that putting iron up his backside did no good unless
the British had some iron with which to fight, and they did not . What Kennedy told me in this conversation jibes substantially
with the remarks Clarence Dillon had made to me already, to the general effect that Roosevelt had asked him in some manner to
communicate privately with the British to the end that Chamberlain should have greater firmness in his dealings with Germany.
Dillon told me that at Roosevelt's request he had talked with Lord Lothian in the same general sense as Kennedy reported Roosevelt
having urged him to do with Chamberlain. Lothian presumably was to communicate to Chamberlain the gist of his conversation with
Dillon. Looking backward there is undoubtedly foundation for Kennedy's belief that Hitler's attack could have been deflected to
Russia ."
[13] Forrestal,
James V., The Forrestal Diaries , edited by Walter Millis and E.S. Duffield, New York: Vanguard Press, 1951, pp. 121-122.
Joseph Kennedy is known to have had a good memory, and it is highly likely that Kennedy's statements to James Forrestal are accurate.
Forrestal died on May 22, 1949 under suspicious circumstances when he fell from his hospital window. Sir Ronald Lindsay, the British
ambassador to Washington, confirmed Roosevelt's secret policy to instigate war against Germany with the release of a confidential
diplomatic report after the war. The report described a secret meeting on September 18, 1938 between Roosevelt and Ambassador Lindsay.
Roosevelt said that if Britain and France were forced into a war against Germany, the United States would ultimately join the war.
Roosevelt's idea to start a war was for Britain and France to impose a blockade against Germany without actually declaring war. The
important point was to call it a defensive war based on lofty humanitarian grounds and on the desire to wage hostilities with a minimum
of suffering and the least possible loss of life and property. The blockade would provoke some kind of German military response,
but would free Britain and France from having to declare war. Roosevelt believed he could then convince the American public to support
war against Germany, including shipments of weapons to Britain and France, by insisting that the United States was still neutral
in a non-declared conflict.
[14] Dispatch
No. 349 of Sept. 30, 1938, by Sir Ronald Lindsay, Documents on British Foreign Policy , (ed.). Ernest L. Woodard, Third Series,
Vol. VII, London, 1954, pp. 627-629. See also Lash, Joseph P., Roosevelt and Churchill 1939-1941, New York: Norton, 1976,
pp. 25-27. President Roosevelt told Ambassador Lindsay that if news of their conversation was ever made public, it could mean
Roosevelt's impeachment. What Roosevelt proposed to Lindsay was in effect a scheme to violate the U.S. Constitution by illegally
starting a war. For this and other reasons, Ambassador Lindsay stated that during his three years of service in Washington he developed
little regard for America's leaders.
[15] Dallek,
Robert, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy 1932-1945 , New York: Oxford University Press, 1979, pp. 31, 164-165.
Ambassador Lindsay in a series of final reports also indicated that Roosevelt was delighted at the prospect of a new world war. Roosevelt
promised Lindsay that he would delay German ships under false pretenses in a feigned search for arms. This would allow the German
ships to be easily seized by the British under circumstances arranged with exactitude between the American and British authorities.
Lindsay reported that Roosevelt "spoke in a tone of almost impish glee and though I may be wrong the whole business gave me the impression
of resembling a school-boy prank." Ambassador Lindsay was personally perturbed that the president of the United States could be gay
and joyful about a pending tragedy which seemed so destructive of the hopes of all mankind. It was unfortunate at this important
juncture that the United States had a president whose emotions and ideas were regarded by a friendly British ambassador as being
childish. [16]
Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed , Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989,
pp. 518-519. Roosevelt's desire to support France and England in a war against Germany is discussed in a letter from Verne Marshall,
former editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette , to Charles C. Tansill. The letter stated:
President Roosevelt wrote a note to William Bullitt [in the summer of 1939], then Ambassador to France, directing him to advise
the French Government that if, in the event of a Nazi attack upon Poland, France and England did not go to Poland's aid, those
countries could expect no help from America if a general war developed. On the other hand, if France and England immediately declared
war on Germany, they could expect "all aid" from the United States. F.D.R.'s instructions to Bullitt were to send this word along
to "Joe" and "Tony," meaning Ambassadors Kennedy, in London, and Biddle, in Warsaw, respectively. F.D.R. wanted Daladier, Chamberlain
and Josef Beck to know of these instructions to Bullitt. Bullitt merely sent his note from F.D.R. to Kennedy in the diplomatic
pouch from Paris. Kennedy followed Bullitt's idea and forwarded it to Biddle. When the Nazis grabbed Warsaw and Beck disappeared,
they must have come into possession of the F.D.R. note. The man who wrote the report I sent you saw it in Berlin in October, 1939.
[17] Tansill,
Charles C., "The United States and the Road to War in Europe," in Barnes, Harry Elmer (ed.), Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace
, Newport Beach, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1993, p. 168.
William Phillips, the American ambassador to Italy, also stated in his postwar memoirs that the Roosevelt administration in late
1938 was committed to going to war on the side of Britain and France. Phillips wrote: "On this and many other occasions, I would
have liked to have told him [Count Ciano, the Italian Foreign Minister] frankly that in the event of a European war, the United States
would undoubtedly be involved on the side of the Allies. But in view of my official position, I could not properly make such a statement
without instructions from Washington, and these I never received."
[18] Phillips,
William, Ventures in Diplomacy , North Beverly, Mass.: privately published, 1952, pp. 220-221. When Anthony Eden returned
to England in December 1938, he carried with him an assurance from President Roosevelt that the United States would enter as soon
as practicable a European war against Hitler if the occasion arose. This information was obtained by Senator William Borah of Idaho,
who was contemplating how and when to give out this information, when he dropped dead in his bathroom. The story was confirmed to
historian Harry Elmer Barnes by some of Senator Borah's closest colleagues at the time.
[19] Barnes,
Harry Elmer, Barnes against the Blackout , Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1991, p. 208. The American
ambassador to Poland, Anthony Drexel Biddle, was an ideological colleague of President Roosevelt and a good friend of William Bullitt.
Roosevelt used Biddle to influence the Polish government to refuse to enter into negotiations with Germany. Carl J. Burckhardt, the
League of Nations High Commissioner to Danzig, reported in his postwar memoirs on a memorable conversation he had with Biddle. On
December 2, 1938, Biddle told Burckhardt with remarkable satisfaction that the Poles were ready to wage war over Danzig. Biddle predicted
that in April a new crisis would develop, and that moderate British and French leaders would be influenced by public opinion to support
war. Biddle predicted a holy war against Germany would break out.
[20] Burckhardt,
Carl, Meine Danziger Mission 1937-1939 , Munich: Callwey, 1960, p. 225. Bernard Baruch, who was Roosevelt's chief advisor,
scoffed at a statement made on March 10, 1939 by Neville Chamberlain that "the outlook in international affairs is tranquil." Baruch
agreed passionately with Winston Churchill, who had told him: "War is coming very soon. We will be in it and you [the United States]
will be in it."
[21] Sherwood,
Robert E., Roosevelt and Hopkins, an Intimate History , New York: Harper & Brothers, 1948, p. 113. Georges Bonnet, the
French foreign minister in 1939, also confirmed the role of William Bullitt as Roosevelt's agent in pushing France into war. In a
letter to Hamilton Fish dated March 26, 1971, Bonnet wrote, "One thing is certain is that Bullitt in 1939 did everything he could
to make France enter the war."
[22] Fish,
Hamilton, FDR The Other Side of the Coin: How We Were Tricked into World War II, New York: Vantage Press, 1976, p. 62.
Dr. Edvard Beneš, the former president of Czechoslovakia, wrote in his memoirs that he had a lengthy secret conversation at Hyde
Park with President Roosevelt on May 28, 1939. Roosevelt assured Beneš that the United States would actively intervene on the side
of Great Britain and France against Germany in the anticipated European war.
[23] Beneš,
Edvard, Memoirs of Dr. Edvard Beneš , London: George Allen & Unwin, 1954, pp. 79-80. American newspaper columnist Karl
von Wiegand, who was the chief European newspaper columnist of the International News Service, met with Ambassador William Bullitt
at the U.S. embassy in Paris on April 25, 1939. More than four months before the outbreak of war, Bullitt told Wiegand: "War in Europe
has been decided upon. Poland has the assurance of the support of Britain and France, and will yield to no demands from Germany.
America will be in the war soon after Britain and France enter it."
[24] "Von Wiegand
Says-," Chicago-Herald American , Oct. 8, 1944, p. 2. When Wiegand said that in the end Germany would be driven into the
arms of Soviet Russia and Bolshevism, Ambassador Bullitt replied: "What of it. There will not be enough Germans left when the war
is over to be worth Bolshevizing."
[25] Chicago-Herald
American , April 23, 1944, p. 18. On March 14, 1939, Slovakia dissolved the state of Czechoslovakia by declaring itself an
independent republic. Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha signed a formal agreement the next day with Hitler establishing a German
protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the Czech portion of the previous entity. The British government initially
accepted the new situation, reasoning that Britain's guarantee of Czechoslovakia given after Munich was rendered void by the internal
collapse of that state. It soon became evident after the proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia that the new regime
enjoyed considerable popularity among the people living in it. Also, the danger of a war between the Czechs and the Slovaks had been
averted. [26]
Hoggan, David L., The Forced War: When Peaceful Revision Failed , Costa Mesa, Cal.: Institute for Historical Review, 1989,
p. 250. However, Bullitt's response to the creation of the German protectorate over Bohemia and Moravia was highly unfavorable.
Bullitt telephoned Roosevelt and, in an "almost hysterical" voice, Bullitt urged Roosevelt to make a dramatic denunciation of Germany
and to immediately ask Congress to repeal the Neutrality Act.
[27] Moffat,
Jay P., The Moffat Papers 1919-1943 , Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956, p. 232. Washington journalists
Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen reported in their nationally syndicated column that on March 16, 1939, President Roosevelt "sent
a virtual ultimatum to Chamberlain" demanding that the British government strongly oppose Germany. Pearson and Allen reported that
"the President warned that Britain could expect no more support, moral or material through the sale of airplanes, if the Munich policy
continued."
[28] Pearson, Drew and Allen, Robert S., "Washington Daily Merry-Go-Round," Washington Times-Herald , April 14, 1939, p. 16.
Responding to Roosevelt's pressure, the next day Chamberlain ended Britain's policy of cooperation with Germany when he made a speech
at Birmingham bitterly denouncing Hitler. Chamberlain also announced the end of the British "appeasement" policy, stating that from
now on Britain would oppose any further territorial moves by Hitler. Two weeks later the British government formally committed itself
to war in case of German-Polish hostilities. Roosevelt also attempted to arm Poland so that Poland would be more willing to go to
war against Germany. Ambassador Bullitt reported from Paris in a confidential telegram to Washington on April 9, 1939, his conversation
with Polish Ambassador Łukasiewicz. Bullitt told Łukasiewicz that although U.S. law prohibited direct financial aid to Poland, the
Roosevelt administration might be able to supply warplanes to Poland indirectly through Britain. Bullitt stated: "The Polish ambassador
asked me if it might not be possible for Poland to obtain financial help and airplanes from the United States. I replied that I believed
the Johnson Act would forbid any loans from the United States to Poland, but added that it might be possible for England to purchase
planes for cash in the United States and turn them over to Poland."
[29] U.S. Department
of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (Diplomatic Papers), 1939, General, Vol. I, Washington: 1956, p. 122.
Bullitt also attempted to bypass the Neutrality Act and supply France with airplanes. A secret conference of Ambassador Bullitt with
French Premier Daladier and the French minister of aviation, Guy La Chambre, discussed the procurement of airplanes from America
for France. Bullitt, who was in frequent telephonic conversation with Roosevelt, suggested a means by which the Neutrality Act could
be circumvented in the event of war. Bullitt's suggestion was to set up assembly plants in Canada, apparently on the assumption that
Canada would not be a formal belligerent in the war. Bullitt also arranged for a secret French mission to come to the United States
and purchase airplanes in the winter of 1938-1939. The secret purchase of American airplanes by the French leaked out when a French
aviator crashed on the West Coast.
[30] Chamberlain,
William Henry, America's Second Crusade , Chicago: Regnery, 1950, pp. 101-102. On August 23, 1939, Sir Horace Wilson,
Chamberlain's closest advisor, went to American Ambassador Joseph Kennedy with an urgent appeal from Chamberlain to President Roosevelt.
Regretting that Britain had unequivocally obligated itself to Poland in case of war, Chamberlain now turned to Roosevelt as a last
hope for peace. Kennedy telephoned the State Department and stated: "The British want one thing from us and one thing only, namely
that we put pressure on the Poles. They felt that they could not, given their obligations, do anything of this sort but that we could."
Presented with a possibility to save the peace in Europe, President Roosevelt rejected Chamberlain's desperate plea out of hand.
With Roosevelt's rejection, Kennedy reported, British Prime Minister Chamberlain lost all hope. Chamberlain stated: "The futility
of it all is the thing that is frightful. After all, we cannot save the Poles. We can merely carry on a war of revenge that will
mean the destruction of all Europe."
[31] Koskoff,
David E., Joseph P. Kennedy: A Life and Times , Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974, p. 207; see also Taylor, A.J.P.,
The Origins of the Second World War , New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005, p. 272.
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers played a crucial role in planning and instigating World War II. This is
proven by the secret Polish documents as well as numerous statements from highly positioned, well-known and authoritative Allied
leaders who corroborate the contents of the Polish documents.
When these documents were published, their authenticity was denied by both Bullitt and by the Polish Ambassador to the
U.S. The Polish Ambassador later informed Hoover that he denied their authenticity at the request of the State Department.
@Paul More than four months before the outbreak of war, Bullitt told Wiegand: "War in Europe has been decided upon.
Poland has the assurance of the support of Britain and France, and will yield to no demands from Germany. America will be
in the war soon after Britain and France enter it."[24] When Wiegand said that in the end Germany would be driven into the
arms of Soviet Russia and Bolshevism, Ambassador Bullitt replied: "What of it. There will not be enough Germans left when
the war is over to be worth Bolshevizing."
those behind the wars do not serve ideology or democracy. they serve their own interests. then and now. they rule by
dividing the rest of the world. by pitting germany against russia, in this case, they worked toward their own domination.
their short term goal is the elimination of competitions by all means. their long tern goal is their hegemony and domination
of the world. they believe that they are that superior.
Roosevelt was no incompetent or fool. he knew exactly what he was doing. he was executive and ran his show.
Roosevelt was elite and smart enough to know how to compromise and neutralize the american socialist cat until he had
a war to smash all worker opposition, directing it into war and depopulation of the capitalist opposition.
@Wally
The Nazis very clearly did dismember Czechoslovakia, which is what destroyed Hitler's credibility with the British. It's also
what German_reader found objectionable about the original piece.
I'm not a supporter of the Icebreaker thesis, though obviously Bolshevism had aggressive intentions.
If true, that's indeed interesting, I might have to look into this. The arguments in the article above (referring to
a lot of pretty weak sources like newspaper articles or much later reminiscences) don't seem convincing to me though.
What would have been Roosevelt's reasoning for pushing for a European war? I know he was pathologically anti-German and
soft on communism, but that doesn't seem like a sufficient rationale.
Commenters here would of course argue that he was a mere puppet of the Jews, but I don't buy that either (during the war
the Holocaust doesn't seem to have been a central preoccupation for him).
It may be down simply to politics.
Roosevelt's New Deal proved to be a failure, and the Roosevelt Recession was especially damaging to his power and prestige.
While it could be a coincidence (or merely a response to increasingly assertive German policy), it's noteworthy that the aggressive
turn in Roosevelt's foreign policy coincided with the Roosevelt Recession.
It's forgotten today, but many of the policies of the New Deal were not Keynesian and were actually inspired by WW1 planning.
FDR's prewar budget deficits were on average lower than American fiscal deficits are today. Thus rearmament appeared to offer
a way out of the intractable Depression.
That Roosevelt himself was a Germanophobe, an Anglophile, a naval enthusiast, and extremely weak on communism no doubt contributed.
Biographers have also noted that FDR always wanted to be a wartime President, comparing himself to Lincoln.
Roosevelt was also influenced by the theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Halford John Mackinder. Thus he subscribed to the
idea that the US needed to prevent any one power from controlling the "heartland". Wartime American propaganda reflects these
ideas by noting the strategic need to prevent the Axis powers from completely controlling two of the world's three "industrial
regions".
I know about those sentiments on the other hand his policy made the US the dominant world power, at the cost of the lowest
casualties among WW2 combatants.
Personally I've come to view US post-war dominance quite negatively (not least because it facilitated the spread of US liberalism
with its particularly demented manifestations like Negrophilia, which may well lead to the eventual destruction of the entire
pan-European world), but from the point of view of most Americans FDR's foreign policy must be seen as highly successful
imo.
This American views FDR's foreign policy very negatively, and the domestic effects of America's strategic reorientation
must be considered in any assessment. The perceived requirements of WW2 and the subsequent Cold War led to the replacement
of America's "white nationalism" with "civil rights". It also led to the dismantling of America's formidable protective barriers
and those which existed between the other industrial powers, which in turn allowed them to converge with America's level of
economic development.
FDR simply converted latent potential into military and diplomatic power. What actually turned America into the world's
greatest power was seizing the best parts of the North American continent, populating it with white people, a good legal and
economic system, and a consistent pro-manufacturing policy orientation until 1945.
WW2 in fact planted the seeds for the end of America (via the destruction of its racial identity) and its eclipse as the
world's foremost power by China (via its unification).
It's also worth pointing out that other than the capital expenditures made during the war Americans got nothing out of victory.
Just a bunch of vassal states to garrison with troops and propped up with ruinous economic concessions. The only actual gains
were German scientists and intellectual property.
This fundamental reorientation of America has persisted for more than seventy years and is destroying the country. It has
also had decidedly negative consequences for Europe as you note.
@jacques
sheeteHitler was to blame? Tell us about how blameless the Marxist "world revolution" fanatics and their Wall Street
backers were. Then you can enlighten us about the Treaty of Versailles and how that played so little part in the ensuing hostilities.
Long standing British imperialistic policies? No problem, eh? Zionist intrigue? Never happened, right? (Ever hear of "rabbi"
Stephen Wise? G-wd's messenger on Earth, right?)
The problem with such uber-contextual logic is that everyone can blame the world for all his actions. He can say the World
made me do it.
Yes, there was Versailles Treaty, communism, and British fears of Germany. All of that is true.
But there was also this. Brits came around to feeling that Germans got a raw deal after WWI. British hostility mostly ebbed
away by the time of Hitler's rise.
It's true that World Jewry hated the rise of Hitler and tried to hurt Germany. But Jews back then didn't have the power
to force world governments to strangulate Germany.
The fact is France and UK let Germany retake the Rhineland. They allowed the unification of Germany and Austria. And they
let Germany take Sudetenland. And when Germany overstepped its bounds and took Crezh territory, UK made a deal with Germany.
But Germans went beyond that and invaded Poland. They didn't just invade but made a pact with USSR. Now, this was an evil
pact but very smart on Hitler's part. He knew that aggression against Poland could set UK and France against him. So, as backup,
it was good to have Russia on his side.
People say World War II began with invasion of Poland but no so. Poland was quickly quelled, and German-French war ended quickly.
With most of Western allied with Germany, occupied by Germany, or neutral and with USSR on his side, the smart thing for Hitler
was to wait it out in a war of contrition with UK. But Hitler decided to attack Russia, and that set off the real WWII in 1941,
esp sealed after Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and brought US into the war.
Even if FDR wanted war or hostility, the fact is most American didn't want war, and FDR had run on peace. He couldn't bring
US to war against Germany UNLESS Germans(and their Japanese allies) did something spectacularly foolish.
If Germany hadn't attacked USSR and hadn't emboldened Japan to make a even dumber move against the US, WWII could have been
avoided.
Some argue that Hitler invaded USSR because Stalin planned to attack first, and their evidence is offensive Soviet positions
against German lines. But knowing Stalin, it's difficult to imagine he was willing to risk everything. Stalin was more a scavenger
than hunter. He looked for weak spots and easy opportunities. He didn't like to risk all. If Soviet positions had really been
placed offensively against Germany, it was likely a bluff to force Germans into defensive position, making them less likely
to take the offensive initiative. Stalin was a mind-gamer like Hitler, who was also a mind-gambler.
From the article above, it's instructive to know that the events that led to WWII weren't entirely Hitler's fault and that
he was working within the context of larger world politics, but as John Lukacs said, HE was the main driver of events that
led to WWII. It wasn't FDR or Stalin or Churchill even though some of their actions made things worse. A more cautious and
sensible Hitler could have prevented the war from turning into a total war.
It's like events in the Middle East since end of Cold War must be mostly blamed on Jewish Globalists. They were the main
drivers. Sure, Iran, Iraq, and etc. did their part to destabilize the region, but the main drivers were Zionists who took the
initiative to turn the whole place upside down to serve Zionist supremacism.
However, I know the American public and the representatives and senators who all have the final word, and I am of the
opinion that the possibility that America will enter the war as in 1917 is not great. That's because the majority of the
states in the mid-West and West, where the rural element predominates, want to avoid involvement in European disputes at
all costs. They remember the declaration of the Versailles Treaty and the well-known phrase that the war was to save the
world for democracy. Neither the Versailles Treaty nor that slogan have reconciled the United States to that war. For
millions there remains only a bitter aftertaste because of unpaid billions which the European states still owe America
.
the average American was bitter because of unpaid billions still owed or because they lost a father, a brother, or another
relative in that war?
Czechoslovakian President Emil Hácha signed a formal agreement the next day with Hitler establishing a German protectorate
over Bohemia and Moravia, which constituted the Czech portion of the previous entity.
It might have had something to do with Hitler's threat to bomb Prague, if Hácha didn't give in to his blackmail.
It soon became evident after the proclamation of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia that the new regime enjoyed considerable
popularity among the people living in it.
Lol. Sure, Czechs must have been thrilled at losing their independence and being occupied by a foreign power, at least some
of whose representatives eventually developed extremely sinister plans for the future of Czechs (Heydrich during his time in
the protectorate thought that about 50% of Czechs had to be "deported", while 50% could be Germanized, but Czech nationhood
had to disappear in any case).
I don't know why Ron Unz keeps publishing these absolutely retarded "revisionist" pieces which are little more than full-on
Nazi apologetics, completely unconvincing in their arguments (the documents cited above are totally unremarkable imo and in
no way show Roosevelt "instigated" WW2 it was Hitler's decision to start a war with Poland).
Best book about these events is The Forced War by David Hoggan. He goes over many of these same events with a great attention
to detail, though certainly from a pro-German stance.
He said Chamberlain's position in 1938 was that England had nothing with which to fight and that she could not risk going
to war with Hitler. Kennedy's view: That Hitler would have fought Russia without any later conflict with England if it had
not been for Bullitt's urging on Roosevelt in the summer of 1939 that the Germans must be faced down about Poland
Stalin understood that he was freeing Hitler to strike in the west by making a pact with Hitler. In effect he facilitated
it. The British considered the Soviet Union to be the real problem. Stalin had already grabbed the Baltic states plus parts
of Finland and Romania. The British were mobilizing against the USSR over the war with Finland even after declaring war
with Germany. The British guarantee to Poland originally covered only their independence not territory ; the British
thought allowing Germany to take Polish land was acceptable and it would make war between Germany and the USSR quite likely
(Chamberlain's strategy was to let Hitler and Stalin into conflict). Only after the Nazi-Soviet Pact was announced was the
guarantee extended to Poland's territory because at that point the British decided war was necessary; Germany and the USSR
being friendly was not acceptable as it meant Hitler was going to go West instead of East.
Clearly Stalin wanted to sit the war between the capitalists out and reap the rewards. Neville Chamberlain wanted to see
the fighting done by the Germans and Bolshies, we know he thought that because he said so to a meeting of important Tories.With
the the Nazi-Soviet pact the powerful Soviet deterrent to any aggression was out of the equation and the British realized the
balance of power had moved against them, which was unacceptable in a way that war between the Nazis and Soviets was not. If
Hitler didn't have to worry about the Soviets at his back that suddenly made all the previous calculations obsolete.
Although Stalin may have anticipated territorial demands or military pressure such as border incidents he was astounded
when Hitler subjected the USSR to an all out attack with the promethean goal of conquering the Soviet state. Everybody underestimated
the effectiveness of the combination of Weimar reforms increasing centralised revenue raising for military purposes, Hitler's
decisiveness and the German army's fighting power.
@German_reader
As thrilled as the Germans were when Bohemia and Moravia was taken from them (Austria) and over three million Germans forcibly
became Czech citizens in a newly created state that never existed before.
This video is banned here in Europe, where the lies are upheld by the law, but it can be viewed in the USA.
1942 – At a mass meeting in Prague, 200,000 Czechs pledge loyalty to their homeland and to the German Reich. Czech Minister
Emanuel Moravec addresses the large rally on July 3, 1942, on Wenceslas Square, near the historic statute of St. Wenceslas.
He concludes with an expression of confidence in a better future for the Czech people, and of support for the "new Europe,"
the "National Socialist revolution," "our leader, Adolf Hitler," and "our state president, Dr. Hacha." Emil Hacha, head of
the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia government is present, along with many other officials. The meeting concludes with the
crowd singing the Czech national hymn. Three minute newsreel clip, with Czech narration.
@anonthe average American was bitter because of unpaid billions still owed or because they lost a father, a brother, or another
relative in that war?
The Wikipedia says that 4,000,000 American soldier were mobilised and 111,000 killed – mostly by disease.
That is absolutely nothing compared to the losses of Imperial Russia (12,000,000), France (8,900,000) and the British Empire
(9,000,000). The demographics of France will never recover.
The USA entered the war only 18 months before it ended. Of course, it took months before the troops even got there.
I fear that the average educated American has no idea what war is like when it is fought in their homeland. Putin warned
the Americans that the next war will not be fought on Russian soil. The American elites think that he means it will be fought
in Europe. LOL
a German SS brigade led by Freiherr von Kuensberg captured the center of Warsaw ahead of the regular German army
Nonsense. Gruppe Künsberg was sent into Warsaw in October 1939 after the unconditional surrender at the end of September
of Warsaw's defenders.
U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and his advisers played a crucial role in planning and instigating World War II.
Also nonsense. Preparing for a (by that time foreseeable) war is not the same as instigating it. Unless you can show that
the US was behind Hitler breaching the Munich Agreement & later attacking Poland, you have no case.
There is a lot of interesting information in the article and reports hitherto not familiar to me but I think the author has
too limited a focus and certainly doesn't justify the big claims that WW2 was aimed for and caused by FDR. You only have to
suppose that, in Roosevelt's judgment Hitler was going to make war and that the US had to be in it for its long term security.
He may eell have regarded the Soviet Union as weak and vulnerable enough for their to be no reason to be actively anti Bolshevik.
And – maybe alternatively – he would have had the Japanese well in mind and applauded the Soviet Union having recently given
them a licking.
Most of the information in this article was gathered together by Herbert Hoover who wrote it up in long book form in the 1950s.
He worked from Polish documents captured in Warsaw as the article says. Hoover's Ms remained unpublished for many years. After
it was published, as Freedom Betrayed a few years ago, I wrote to the editor, Stephen Nash who did not reply. I also called
the publisher's editor who would not discuss it with me. I concluded that they were hostile because my German histories, Other
Losses and Crimes and Mercies, by and large confirmed that the tales told by court historians such as Nash, Stephen E Ambrose.
"Sir" Michael Howard, Martin Gilbert and so on are sweet-smelling fantasies laid on the rotting corpses of the people who died
because of the mistakes made and hatred fomented by leaders on all sides. The leaders included Roosevelt in a gallery of the
guilty running from him through Churchill, and Hitler to Stalin and Henry C Morgenthau, deviser of the infamous Morgenthau
Plan for the destruction of the German people.
US and USSR emerged as superpowers.
Post-war Europe recovered fast and living standards improved greatly.
Jews lost a great deal in the war. Shoah.
If Jews emerged victorious, it was because they took over institutions in the US. It would have happened even without WWII
though, minus the Shoah narrative, Jewish power would have had less of a moral shield.
@German_readerthese absolutely retarded "revisionist" pieces which are little more than full-on Nazi apologetics, completely unconvincing
in their arguments (the documents cited above are totally unremarkable imo and in no way show Roosevelt "instigated" WW2 it
was Hitler's decision to start a war with Poland).
These revisionist pieces are 50% kooky but offer up kernels of facts and insights that reveal aspects of the time mostly
buried by the Judeo-centric media. It has elements of Nazi apologia, but keep in mind that much of US narrative is Jewish Supremacist
propaganda.
Now, there is something to be learned from the Jewish Narrative as it isn't all lies either.
If we can select the truths from the Jewish Supremacist narrative and truths from the Nazi-sympathizing narrative, we can
construct a truer narrative. Of course the lies and distortions of both.
The recent events in Iraq and Syria and the whole Russia Collusion hysteria go to show that the 'liberal'corporate media
can be just as full of BS as any totalitarian press.
Of course, the difference is Putin and Assad are NOT Hitlers whereas Hitler was truly a hitler, a pathological demagogue.
Hitler is mainly to blame for WWII, and one could argue that FDR's hostility toward Hitler was well-grounded given Hitler's
actions against Poland and then against the USSR, an ally. Also,Hitler was someone with whom diplomacy was often impossible
since he regarded the compromise of others as weakness to exploit.
But it's also true that the US, for ideological, imperial, and tribal reasons of its own, believed Germany must be toppled
first before its preferred world order could prevail.
This is another great article and both the author and UR deserve to be highly commended.
Potocki's reports (according to the translations given) were amazingly perceptive on all points.
The President regards the foreign policy of his country as a means of satisfying his own personal ambition.
That's a conclusion that, while obvious, is almost never addressed but should be. It also sounds a lot like the doofus,
Woody Wilson, and his fake messianic "idealism." Both of those clowns were amoral narcissistic fools to the max and menaces
to world peace. Both were functionally crazy, cunning and downright evil.
It's interesting to note that FDR was taken to task for essentially sitting out WW1 at a desk job by Teddy Roosevelt ( another
militaristic, blowhard, self stroking fool) while Teddy's 4 sons were fighting in Europe, so he took a "playtime" tour of the
battlefields to bolster his "war" credentials.
He also
was enjoying every aspect of being a man of authority in a government at war. Early on he had confided to a friend, "It
would be wonderful to be a war president."
– Thomas Fleming,
The Illusion of Victory, p254 (2003)
For me, one of the morals of all that is that men cannot be trusted in positions of power and "we" must act accordingly.
Another lesson learned is that the US government has long acted against the interests of the American prols, peasants, peons
and pissants, and no doubt shall as long as it exists. What to do about it appears to be, at this point, an individual thing.
It might have had something to do with Hitler's threat to bomb Prague, if Hácha didn't give in to his blackmail.
Credible source, please.
Now go back and read the article and try to find out who was threatening whom. You could also review the causes of WW1,
but that may be asking too much.
Also, it would be interesting to hear your opinion on the report that New York "Jews" declared war on Germany in 1933, years
before the Nazis did anything (they were subsequently accused of) to the Jews.
I concluded that they were hostile because my German histories, Other Losses and Crimes and Mercies, by and large confirmed
that the tales told by court historians are sweet-smelling fantasies laid on the rotting corpses of the people who died
because of the mistakes made and hatred fomented by leaders on all sides.
@German_reader
The Nazi apologism of these pieces is unfortunate (e.g. casually glossing over the German destruction of Czechoslovakia as
you cite), but other than that they're quite valuable. The standard narrative is that America was completely neutral until
the outbreak of war, after which it adopted pro-British neutrality.
The reality is that the Roosevelt Administration actively worked to foment war, and once war had broken out its policy was
to commit America to the war.
That obviously does not absolve the Axis powers. If the US had maintained its neutrality, perhaps the Poles would've accepted
German demands. It of course doesn't follow that this would've preserved the peace in Europe.
This also has special relevance for American politics as Roosevelt has long been a despised figure on the American right.
Preparing for a (by that time foreseeable) war is not the same as instigating it.
Duh.
That's a classic straw man fallacy. Unless you can show that the author claimed what you said he did, you have no case.
And since the Dizzard agreed with you, it's almost certain that you have none.
No doubt the Roosevelt administration was agitating for war. Between the Soviets, the Nazis and FDR's chums what chance
did Europe have? Always found the US saving Britain meme particularly offensive.
somehow you left the belligerent Churchill out of this mix
note that he was on the hook to some jew bankers for the solvency of his entire estate, also note the quip by a Rothschild
woman "if my sons didn't want wars there would be no wars"
Maybe a few little ones did, but the bigshot moneybag crowd probably did not.
Here's an anecdote to ponder.
The new [Jewish] prosperity was born in rearmament, and that was begun in the name of anti-Communism and anti-Semitism.
Abyssinia, Spain and China have already shown that the new armaments race spells death, not for Jews, but for indiscriminate
millions of helpless Gentiles, Africans, Chinese and whatnot. The profits from the armaments race will go largely into
the pockets of Jews, because of their preponderant share in retail trade Such is Hitler's achievement in the cause of
antiSemitism.
I was talking one day to Z, a Jewish journalist expelled from Germany who has settled in Vienna, where he has a pleasant
home and a motor car. He talked with bitter resentment of Germany. 'Ah', he complained, 'the Poles murdered us, but the
Germans have robbed us', and it was quite clear from his tone which was the worse thing for him. Then he told me how his
son was still working for a big German film company in Berlin and had thrice had his salary raised to induce him not to
leave and emigrate, as he desired, wishing to join his father. The Jews. As I write, in Vienna, they are all about me, watching
with non-committal, veiled, appraising eyes the comedy that is going on in Insanity Fair. They know that when Hitlerism
has passed away they will still be trading in the Kärntnerstrasse.
Hitler is mainly to blame for WWII, and one could argue that FDR's hostility toward Hitler was well-grounded
Hitler was to blame? Tell us about how blameless the Marxist "world revolution" fanatics and their Wall Street backers were.
Then you can enlighten us about the Treaty of Versailles and how that played so little part in the ensuing hostilities. Long
standing British imperialistic policies? No problem, eh? Zionist intrigue? Never happened, right? (Ever hear of "rabbi" Stephen
Wise? G-wd's messenger on Earth, right?)
I don't think so, imo those pieces without exception are so stupid that they'll actually be counter-productive and reinforce
existing narratives.
I actually think there are some areas of WW2 where revisionism might be justified (and you don't even have to go to kooky "revisionists"
for it, the gap between the mythology and the writings even of many quite mainstream historians is often wide) but Unz review
has nothing to contribute in this regard.
The reality is that the Roosevelt Administration actively worked to foment war
I don't think the article above demonstrated that, tbh the documents cited in it appear to be totally unremarkable to me
and don't support such a thesis.
Maybe someone else has made a better case for it, but that Roosevelt actively wanted a European war seems unlikely to me.
If the US had maintained its neutrality, perhaps the Poles would've accepted German demands.
But the US didn't really do anything in 1939/40, it was just words. iirc even Lend-Lease was only adopted after the fall
of France.
The backing of Britain and France (still seen as premier world powers at the time, and in the case of France with a large army
with modern equipment) was probably enough for Poland, I don't think the remote possibility of American intervention (which
was years away anyway) was decisive.
A fundamental issue was of course that Hitler had already shown with the destruction of Czechoslovakia (so casually dismissed
in the article above) in March 1939 that his ambitions went beyond merely uniting all majority German areas in the Reich and
that he wasn't trustworthy at all.
In the beginning of World War I, Woodrow Wilson had adopted initially a policy of neutrality. But the Morgan Bank, which
was the most powerful bank at the time, and which wound up funding over 75 percent of the financing for the allied forces during
World War I pushed Wilson out of neutrality sooner than he might have done, because of their desire to be involved on one side
of the war.
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are started for no other purpose than
to force private central banks onto nations, so let me share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is
mired in so many wars against so many foreign nations. There is ample precedent for this.
from the up-to-date history of the second world war it is now possible to see the utter madness, irrelevance really of white
people! from Churchill and the English, to Roosevelt, the Germans, the Russians.. and all others at the top of the white countries..the
white elites..what on earth are they, what are they about on planet earth, what do they want?
they smash, beat, poison, blow up, lie all the time, cheat, steal, draw all human profit off into few hands, bring world
economy to a standstill then create wars for all and every socially controlling purpose including the reduction of ordinary
people..all working people. war is to protect the money grubbers and economic slavers from the mess they make in their own
profit taking and exploitation of the people..to reduce the people to easy captivity, their numbers as a fighting force capable
of social revolution and on and on, permitting the restart of another profit taking cycle and the same flow of events again
and again and again
by new information when properly considered Hitler comes of a relatively sane man who did not want war..but look at the
things he did himself!
and over all of this, like mad directors of a horror movie are the fake Jews, the Khazars who collectively must be the devil
himself, directing a MADD movie of existence.
LOOK AT WHAT THEY ARE ALL COLLECTIVELY DOING -HAVE DONE. IT IS CONSTANT CENTURIES LONG LUNACY, PURE NAKED INSANITY THAT
THEY HAVE MANAGED TO PUT OR PULL A CONSISTENT PATINA OVER, THAT ALLOWS THE REST OF US TO TAKE THEIR BEHAVIOR AS SANE AND TO
ACCEPT WHITE PEOPLE AS LOGICAL AND RIGHT IN THE WORLD..THE ACTUAL OPPOSITE OF WHO/WHAT THEY ARE
I don know of anything historically like the 19 century. from the Japanese Russian war, the first world war, the Russian
revolution, the economic games of the years between 1920-39 they call the great crash, the second world war..all the way to
currently when white people appear to be finally tired of themselves and are ready to end it all in another explosion of war
with nuclear weapons..we have had such a show of absolutely human insanity there are negative words capable of describing that
flow of human time and the people involved.
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Churchill, Chamberlin, Mussolin, DeGaulle,..all, an endless flow of terrible human beings..and it
has not stopped, all the way through the Clintons, Obama, Macron..and on and on and on, the same carnage, the same insanity..it
never stops, never ever. nothing depresses me as human history does..the white part of it..the rise of the white man. there
is no way out of it..white outlook and socially dominant power, will not allow for anything positive in the human potential
to manifest. only genocide, human engineering and the development of social grotesque forms of social organization looms for
the human future
and they say some god made this life..a supreme and good god worked all this out and made ot, let it be. and of course that
is more grotesque nonsense that leads to more hell for humanity.
I dont see the point to life. the ancient Africans had a point. they developed a life in nature, accepted nature as the
template and flowed accordingly. in that way they gave us all a chance by developing the basis of survival, of social organization
and spiritual sanity. the white man took that and poisoned it, twisted it into all the insane religious nonsense that drives
human suicide currently.
but with the rise of the white male into global power for 500 years now humanity has gone totally insane..impenetrably insane,
comprehensively insane. we have all been made nuts by white logic. we have ringed ourselves by that same logic with every conceivable
weapon that can kill all humanity. we have actually set the stage for the possible rise out of nature itself organic mutations
that may wipe humanity all on their own..mutations changed by what we have routinely thrown into the world as waste for which
humanity has no biological defense.
that is the white mans logic..operating on the principle that there is a free lunch, always looking for on and causing existential
chaos in the process. I want to cite the obvious stupidity in that approach..a collectively arsine approach..but it is far,
far, far, far .. worse than that. the condition of the white man appears to be irreversible, cannot be changed and with the
destructive means the white elites now have it is totally unlikely that humanity comes out of the experience of white power,
white global domination, alive..or in one piece. we may crawl out alive but we wont be human anymore
SCREW ROOSEVELT. HE WAS THE WORST FROM THE START! I KNEW THAT SINCE I WAS MUCH YOUNGER AND COULD CONSIDER REALITY. ROOSEVELT
HAS BEEN BUILT INTO A HERO, HE IS A FAKE HERO!.
I HOPE TO LIVE LONG ENOUGH TO SEE HIS STATUE TORN DOWN AS LENIN'S STATUE WAS WITH THE FALL OF RUSSIAN STATE CAPITALISM
The myth that the US and their henceforth junior partner UK- along with the Soviet Union- "liberated" Europe ought to be
put to rest. There was no "liberation" of Europe from Germany, unless massive civilian deaths and the unprecedented destruction
of property and cultural landmarks equates to "liberation." As an American, this is disturbing to me, but it is the truth.
FDR was an ignoramus and an ingenue surrounded, in his later years, by communists and their sympathizers. Had he adopted
National Socialist economic policies here in the US, he could have ended the depression and brought America to unprecedented
prosperity and the ultimate fulfillment of its great providential mission to be an impregnable continental power. Instead,
he squandered all that and doubled down on the catastrophically error of his predecessor Wilson.
In both cases- FDR's and Wilson's- Europe lost. Disastrously and tragically.
I tend to concetrate on Rosenfeldt's actions in the Pacific, knew about many non-neutral actions in the Atlantic, non-neutrality
of 'lend-lease', but most (all )of the content of this article is new to me.
Very interesting.
Changing the subject a little for entertainment, I enjoy reading Charles Bukowski (RIP) at times.
His account of the behaviour of young men post-Pearl Harbour is hilarious, he is drinking (and drunk) on a park bench, suddenly
sees them start shouting 'godawar' and frantically running around.
I forget the title, but it is a very laconic and funny description.
When seeing Starship Troopers by Verhoeven, I always think that at least one of the scriptwriters must have read
Bukowski.
"... In so doing, he has effectively repudiated the entire post-World War II international order and signalled that wars of conquest and territorial aggrandisement are the order of the day. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions, enacted in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of similar actions carried out by Germany's Nazi regime, which set the stage for the outbreak of war in 1939. ..."
"... Netanyahu's announcement will give succour to his support base among fascistic layers of the settlers and religious nationalists, driving Israel's capitalist political setup ever further toward outright apartheid, fascism and military dictatorship. It is a prelude to intensified Israeli military aggression in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and the broader Middle East. ..."
"... He has brought into his electoral coalition, and a possible share of government power should he win, outright fascist elements linked to the banned Kach Party of the late Meir Kahane, a party that was designated a terrorist organization by the US, Canada, the European Union, Japan and Israel itself. ..."
"... Trump's naked interference in the Israeli elections is bound up with US imperialism's broader aim of escalating its military intervention in the Middle East to roll back the growth of Iranian influence in the wake of the successive debacles suffered by Washington in Iraq, Libya and Syria. ..."
"... The political antecedents of Netanyahu's Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionists, who were to remain a minority tendency until the 1970s, articulated this position most clearly. Their aim was the establishment of a Jewish state on the entire land of Biblical Palestine, including Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would necessarily mean expelling the Arab population to ensure its Jewish character. ..."
"... In 1923, Jabotinsky explained, in an article titled "The Iron Wall," that the Zionist project could be achieved only against the wishes of the native population. He envisaged the need for an iron wall to protect the Jews from the native population. He said, "A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future." Without a garrison, Zionist colonization of Palestine would be impossible, and "therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force." ..."
"... Netanyahu has now made explicit what has long been implicit: the incorporation of the West Bank into a Greater Israel. It can be achieved and sustained only through the imposition of military rule. To this end, his government has passed a series of measures, including the openly racist "Nation-State Law" enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state, bringing the political and legal system into alignment with the reality of Jabotinsky's garrison state, based on the brutal oppression of an entire people, the Palestinians. ..."
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has declared his intention of extending Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank, captured in
the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, if he is re-elected prime minister in Tuesday's general election.
In so doing, he has effectively repudiated the entire post-World War II international order and signalled that wars of conquest
and territorial aggrandisement are the order of the day. Such annexations were declared illegal under the Geneva Conventions, enacted
in the wake of the Second World War to prevent the repetition of similar actions carried out by Germany's Nazi regime, which set
the stage for the outbreak of war in 1939.
Netanyahu's announcement will give succour to his support base among fascistic layers of the settlers and religious nationalists,
driving Israel's capitalist political setup ever further toward outright apartheid, fascism and military dictatorship. It is a prelude
to intensified Israeli military aggression in the occupied West Bank, Gaza and the broader Middle East.
Netanyahu told a television Channel 12 interviewer on Saturday that he would not "evacuate any community." Nor would he divide
Jerusalem, a reference to Palestinian demands for East Jerusalem to serve as the capital of a future Palestinian state. He said,
"I will not divide Jerusalem, I will not evacuate any community and I will make sure we control the territory west of Jordan."
He added, "A Palestinian state will endanger our existence and I withstood huge pressure over the past eight years. No prime minister
has withstood such pressure. We must control our destiny."
Netanyahu made it clear that he viewed President Donald Trump's recognition of Israel's illegal annexation of Syria's Golan Heights,
captured in 1967, as a green light to press on with Likud's long-held expansionist policy of a Greater Israel. He said, "Will we
move ahead to the next stage? Yes. I will extend sovereignty, but I don't distinguish between the settlement blocs and the isolated
ones, because each settlement is Israeli, and I will not hand it over to Palestinian sovereignty."
Speaking about the Bedouin community of Khan al-Ahmar, which he has pledged to evacuate despite international outrage, Netanyahu
promised that "it will happen." He added, "I promised, and it will happen at the soonest opportunity."
Netanyahu's announcement was aimed at bolstering his position in the election, which he had called ahead of schedule in order
to win political backing to ensure his immunity from prosecution on a raft of corruption charges. Facing unexpectedly strong opposition
from a slate of generals assembled by the so-called Blue and White coalition, headed by former chief of staff Benny Gantz, he has
leveraged Trump's support to appeal to his right-wing support base.
He has brought into his electoral coalition, and a possible share of government power should he win, outright fascist elements
linked to the banned Kach Party of the late Meir Kahane, a party that was designated a terrorist organization by the US, Canada,
the European Union, Japan and Israel itself.
Trump's naked interference in the Israeli elections is bound up with US imperialism's broader aim of escalating its military
intervention in the Middle East to roll back the growth of Iranian influence in the wake of the successive debacles suffered by Washington
in Iraq, Libya and Syria.
Netanyahu's growing alliance with the House of Saud and the petro-monarchs of the Gulf has served to ensure their acquiescence
-- with pro forma denunciations -- to this latest assault on the Palestinians.
But apart from Netanyahu's short-term political calculations, his announcement derives from Zionism's foundation upon exclusivist
conceptions of racial, religious and linguistic hegemony to justify the establishment of a Jewish state through the violent dispossession
of the indigenous Arab population, who formed the overwhelming majority of the population, making use of the horrors of the Holocaust
as a rationale for the oppression of another people.
The political antecedents of Netanyahu's Likud Party, Vladimir Jabotinsky's Revisionists, who were to remain a minority tendency
until the 1970s, articulated this position most clearly. Their aim was the establishment of a Jewish state on the entire land of
Biblical Palestine, including Transjordan. With the Jews a minority in Palestine, such a state would necessarily mean expelling the
Arab population to ensure its Jewish character.
In 1923, Jabotinsky explained, in an article titled "The Iron Wall," that the Zionist project could be achieved only against
the wishes of the native population. He envisaged the need for an iron wall to protect the Jews from the native population. He said,
"A voluntary reconciliation with the Arabs is out of the question either now or in the near future." Without a garrison, Zionist
colonization of Palestine would be impossible, and "therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force."
The establishment of a Jewish state was viewed with sympathy by millions of people around the world, who were appalled at the
catastrophe that had befallen the Jews. But the major powers excluding Britain, but including the Soviet Union, supported the establishment
of a Jewish state as a means of blocking Britain's position in the Middle East. As a result, the UN voted in 1947 for the partition
of Palestine, hailing the new state as a progressive entity dedicated to building a democratic and egalitarian society for the most
cruelly oppressed people of Europe.
As soon as the State of Israel was declared in 1948, war broke out between the Arabs and the Jews, who were able to seize more
land than was included in the 1947 partition plan, driving out some 750,000 Palestinians from their homes. Not wanting to pay the
price of the concessions demanded by the superpowers, in terms of borders and refugees, Israel's Labour government did not try to
make peace after the war, instead instituting a policy of "striving for peace" -- but not too fast -- which became the template for
future governments. The more Israel got used to the situation of neither peace nor war, the louder grew the voices calling for the
maintenance of the status quo.
After the 1967 war, when Israel captured East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan, Gaza from Egypt and the Golan Heights from
Syria, the Labour government moved rapidly to annex East Jerusalem and build settlements in the occupied territories that are now
home to some 700,000 Israeli Jews, many of them extreme nationalists and religious zealots who are heavily armed. Labour had, in
effect, adopted the Revisionists' policy.
The war and the settlement movement spawned the growth of immensely reactionary political and social forces within Israel itself,
with Menachem Begin's Likud party demanding the territories be brought under Israeli sovereignty on the grounds that they were the
Biblical lands of Samaria and Judea, promised by God to the Jewish people.
In 1993, a Labour government signed an illusory peace deal, the Oslo Accords, brokered by the US, with the Palestine Liberation
Organization. Ostensibly, the agreement was to usher in a Palestinian statelet. But its real purpose was to prevent the intifada
that broke out in 1987 from developing into a revolutionary uprising by the Palestinian masses in the occupied territories, and to
subcontract the task of suppressing the masses to the Palestinian bourgeoisie.
Instead of peace and a Palestinian state, the Oslo Accords set the stage for an expansion of the settlements and land seizures
to control the access roads to these enclaves and strengthen their connection to Israel itself, with the Palestinian Authority left
to police small patches of land, mostly impoverished cities, surrounded and cut off by Israeli troops.
In line with its long-held policy, the Likud Party vehemently opposed any territorial concessions to the Palestinians embodied
in the Accords. Its leaders stood by as its angry supporters called Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin a traitor, paving the way for his
murder in 1995 by a right-wing fanatic. With none of the mainstream political parties prepared to make any fundamental changes, the
fraudulent peace process was all but dead.
Netanyahu has now made explicit what has long been implicit: the incorporation of the West Bank into a Greater Israel. It
can be achieved and sustained only through the imposition of military rule. To this end, his government has passed a series of measures,
including the openly racist "Nation-State Law" enshrining Jewish supremacy as the legal foundation of the state, bringing the political
and legal system into alignment with the reality of Jabotinsky's garrison state, based on the brutal oppression of an entire people,
the Palestinians.
The so-called "centre-left" opposition in the elections, led by Gantz, has not challenged Netanyahu's annexation pledge, resorting
to verbal obfuscations and calls for a "regional conference" or "secure separation," thereby signifying consent.
This marks the historic bankruptcy and culmination of the entire reactionary Zionist project and all such nationalist programs.
Since the 1971 floating of the US dollar onto the global markets, and 1973 creation of the
Petro dollar, the world has experienced a consistent collapse of productive manufacturing jobs,
infrastructure investment, long term planning on the one hand and a simultaneous increase of
de-regulation, short term speculation, financial services, and low wage retail jobs. During
this post 1971 process of decline, debt slavery became a norm both in developed countries and
developing sector nations alike, while outsourcing caused the castration of national
sovereignty and an ever greater reliance on "cheap labor" and "cheap resources" from abroad. It
was even called the
"controlled disintegration" policy of Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker in 1978 as he
was preparing to raise interest rates to levels that made it impossible for a majority of small
and medium agro-industrial enterprises to compete against corporate monoliths. The most
concrete model of this collapse was unveiled to the world in 1996 by the late American
economist Lyndon LaRouche known as the Triple Curve Collapse Function.
Some have called this collapse "a failure of globalization". Executive Intelligence Review's
Dennis Small has
repeatedly stated over many years that this is characterization is false. Globalization
should rather be seen as a complete success- in that when looked at from a top down
perspective, it becomes increasingly clear that the architects of this policy achieved exactly
what they set out to do. That intention was to impose an artificial closed/zero-sum game
paradigm upon a species whose distinguishing characteristic is its creative reason and capacity
constantly grow and self-perfect both on the surface of the earth and beyond. A primary figure
in the oligarchy's tool box of sociopathic agents who shaped this program for depopulation and
zero sum thinking over the years is a Canadian-born operative by the name of Maurice Strong.
Although having died in 2015, Strong's life and legacy are worth revisiting as it provides the
modern reader a powerful, albeit ugly insight into the methods and actions of the British-Deep
State agenda that so mis-shaped world history through the latter half of the 20 th
century.
While this exercise will have value for all truth seekers, this story should carry
additional weight for Canadians currently witnessing
their own government collapsing under the weight of the contradictions built into a system
which Strong led in shaping (i.e.: the need for nuclear and industrial productive potential
embodied by SNC Lavalin and the obedience to a "green" post-industrial paradigm antagonistic to
such productive capacity).
Journalist Elaine Dewar's groundbreaking 1994 book "Cloak of Green" which every
truth-seeker should read, dealt rigorously with Strong's role as a recruit of Rockefeller
assets in the 1950s, an oil baron, vice president of Power Corporation by 30, Liberal Party
controller, Privy Councilor, and founder of Canada's neo-colonial external aid policy towards
Africa which tied Africa into IMF debt slaves, we will focus here on the role Strong has played
since 1968 in subverting the anti-entropic potential of both his native Canada and the world at
large. It was through this post-1968 role that Strong performed his most valued work for the
genocidal agenda of his British masters who seek to reduce the world population to a "carrying capacity"
of less than a billion .
RIO and Global Governance
In 1992, Maurice Strong had been assigned to head the second Earth Summit (the first having
been the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment also chaired by Strong). The Rio
Summit had established a new era in the consolidation of NGOs and corporations under the
genocidal green agenda of controlled starvation masquerading behind the dogma of
"sustainability'. This doctrine was formalized with Agenda 21 and the Earth
Charter , which Strong co-authored with his collaborated Jim Macneil during the 1990s. At
the opening of the Rio Summit, Strong announced that industrialized countries had "developed
and benefited from the unsustainable patterns of production and consumption which have produced
our present dilemma. It is clear that current lifestyles and consumption patterns of the
affluent middle class, involving high meat intake, consumption of large amounts of frozen and
convenience foods, use of fossil fuels, appliances, home and work-place air-conditioning, and
suburban housing- are not sustainable. A shift is necessary toward lifestyles less geared to
environmentally damaging consumption patterns."
"The concept of national sovereignty has been an immutable, indeed sacred, principle of
international relations. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the
new imperatives of global environmental cooperation. What is needed is recognition of the
reality that in so many fields, and this is particularly true of environmental issues, it is
simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states,
however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security."
Two years earlier, Strong gave an interview
wherein he described a "fiction book" he was fantasizing about writing which he described in
the following manner:
" What if a small group of world leaders were to conclude that the principal risk to the
Earth comes from the actions of the rich countries? And if the world is to survive, those rich
countries would have to sign an agreement reducing their impact on the environment. Will they
do it? The group's conclusion is 'no'. The rich countries won't do it. They won't change. So,
in order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the
industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring that
about?"
When this statement is held up parallel to this man's peculiar life, we quickly come to see
that the barrier between reality and fiction is more than a little blurry.
The Destruction of Nuclear Power
It is vital to examine Strong's role in crippling Canada's potential to make use of nuclear
power, one of the greatest beacons of hope mankind has ever had to break out of the current
"fixed" boundaries to humanity's development. Indeed, the controlled use of the atom, along
with the necessary discovery of new universal principles associated with this endeavor, have
always represented one of the greatest strategic threats to the oligarchic system, which
depends on a closed system of fixed resources in order to both manage current populations and
justify global governance under "objective" frameworks of logic. Fission and fusion processes
exist on a level far beyond those fixed parameters that assume the earth's "carrying capacity"
is no greater than the 2 billion souls envisioned by today's London-centered oligarchy. If
mankind were to recognize his unique creative potential to continuously transcend his
limitations by discovering and creating new resources, no empire could long exist. With Canada
as the second nation to have civilian nuclear power, and a frontier science culture in physics
and chemistry, the need to destroy this potential in the mind of the British Deep State of
Canada was great indeed.
To get a better sense of the anti-nuclear role Strong has played in Canadian science policy,
we must actually go back once again to Strong's reign at the Department of External Aid in
1966.
Humanity's trend towards utilizing ever more dense forms of fire was always driven by a
commitment to scientific and technological progress. The realization that this process drives
the increase of human potential population density (both in quantity and quality of life) was
recognized at the turn of the 20th century and serves as the foundation for American economist
Lyndon LaRouche's method of economic forecasting. The graph above features American per capita
access to energy and the post-1975 sabotage of the expected transition to nuclear fission and
fusion
Technological Apartheid for Africa
A key reason that Strong had been brought into Canada's Civil Service to head up the
External Aid office in 1966 was to sabotage the international efforts leading scientists and
statesmen had achieved in making Canada an exporter of its original CANDU reactors. Since 1955,
leading patriots within Atomic Energy Canada Ltd. (AECL) and the National Research Council such
as C.D. Howe and his collaborator C.W. Mackenzie, ensured that the export of advanced nuclear
technology was made available to developing countries such as India and Pakistan. In Canada
this policy was advanced vigorously by Prime
Minister John Diefenbaker, who also saw atomic power as the key to world peace.
The banners under which this advanced technology transfer occurred were both the Columbo Plan and President
Dwight Eisenhower's
Atoms for Peace . This progressive approach to international development defined "external
aid" not around IMF conditionalities, or simply money for its own sake, but rather as the
transfer of the most advanced science and technology to poor countries with the explicit
intention that all nations would attain true sovereignty. This is the model that China has
adopted today under the
Belt and Road Initiative.
When Strong got to work in External Aid, and later formed the Canadian International
Development Agency, Canada's relationship to "LDCs" (lesser developed countries) became reduced
to advancing "appropriate technologies" under the framework of monetarism and a perverse form
of systems analysis. After JFK's assassination, a parallel operation was conducted in America's
USAid. No technology or advanced infrastructure policy necessary for the independence of former
colonies were permitted under this precursor to what later became known as "sustainability" and
"zero growth". Under Strong's influence, Canada's role became perverted into inducing LDCs to
become obedient to IMF/World Bank "conditionalities" and the reforms of their bureaucracies
demanded by the OECD in order to receive money. Both in Canada and in developing countries,
Strong was among the key agents who oversaw the implementation of the OECD's strategy of
"closed systems analysis" for national policy management.
Petrol and Pandas
In his role as President of Petro Canada (1976-78), Strong endorsed the national call to create a nuclear moratorium for
Canada which had been carried out by the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility in
1977. This document not only demanded an immediate halt to the continuation of all reactors
then under construction, but also made the sophistical argument that more jobs could be created
if "ecologically friendly" energy sources and conservation methods were developed instead of
nuclear and fossil fuels. Strange desires coming from an oil executive, but not so strange
considering Strong's 1978-1981 role as Vice-President of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an
organization founded by the British and Dutch monarchies as a Royal Dutch Shell initiative in
1963. Strong was Vice President during the same interval that WWF co-founder Prince Philip was
its President.
In 1971, while still heading up the External Aid Department, Strong was a founding member of
the 1001 Club, which was an elite international organization created by Prince Bernhard of the
Netherlands created to finance the emerging green agenda for world governance. The 1001 Club
worked in tandem with Prince Bernhard's other secretive club known as the "Bilderberg Group"
which he founded in 1954. In this position, Strong helped to recruit 80 Canadian "initiates" to
this elite society otherwise known as "Strong's Kindergarten", the most prominent being Lord
Conrad Black, Barrick Gold's Peter Munk (1927-2018) and Permindex's late Sir Louis Mortimer
Bloomfield (1906-1984). As documented elsewhere, the latter was discovered to be at the heart
of the plot to
assassinate President John F. Kennedy by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison.
Strong Decapitates Ontario Nuclear Energy
By 1992, Strong had completed his role heading the Rio Earth Summit in Brazil and had
returned to his native land to attempt to finalize the dismantling of Canada's nuclear program
in his new assignment as President of Ontario Hydro, a position he held from 1992 to 1995 under
the formal invitation of Bob Rae, then-NDP Premier of Ontario and brother of Power Corp.'s John
Rae. Bob Rae later served as the leader of the Liberal Party from 2011-2013 in preparation for
Justin Trudeau's appointment to become the party's new figurehead in April of 2013.
Strong was brought in to this position at the time that Ontario had the most ambitious
nuclear program in North America and was proving to be a thorn in the side of the zero-growth
agenda demanded by the British Empire. The completion of the massive Darlington system in
Ontario had demonstrated what successful long-term science planning could accomplish, although
the utility found itself running far over budget. The budgetary problems (which occurred during
a deep recession in 1992) were used by Strong to "restructure" the provincial energy
utility.
The "remedies" chosen by Strong to solve Ontario Hydro's financial woes involved immediately
canceling all new planned nuclear energy development, firing 8 of the 14 directors, and
downsizing the utility by laying off 14 000 employees, many of whom were the most specialized
and experienced nuclear technicians in Canada.
Before leaving his post in 1995 with the fall of Bob Rae's government, Strong ensured that
his work would continue with his replacement Jim MacNeill who headed Ontario Hydro from 1994 to
1997. MacNeill was co-architect of both the Earth Charter and the genocidal Agenda 21 during
the Rio Summit and a long time Deep State agent. Under MacNeill, Strong's mandate to
unnecessarily shut down eight reactors for refurbishment and one permanently was effected in
1997, while Ontario Hydro itself was broken up into three separate entities. With the
irreparable loss of specialized manpower and skills Strong and MacNeill left Ontario Hydro and
AECL mortally wounded for years to come.
Surprising all observers, AECL and the Ontario utilities were able to remobilize their
remaining forces to pull together the successful refurbishment of all reactors– the last
of which came back online in October 2012. While Canada's moratorium on nuclear power
continued, with SNC Lavelin's 2011 takeover, an approach for cooperation on international
nuclear construction in
partnership with China began in July 2014, much to Strong's chagrin.
Strong's Failed Attempt to Infiltrate China
For much of the 21 st century, Strong's talents were put to use in an attempt to
subvert the aspirations of Asian development, and of a Eurasian alliance formed around the
driving economic grand design of the emerging Belt and Road Initiative. Strong was deployed to
Beijing University where he acted as Honorary Professor and Chairman of its Environmental
Foundation and Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Institute for Research on Security and
Sustainability for Northwest Asia.
In the face of the meltdown of the Trans-Atlantic economy, the Chinese have successfully
resisted the Green New Deal agenda that demanded the submission of their national sovereignty
to the "New World Order" of zero-growth and depopulation. In spite of this pressure, a powerful
tradition of Confucianism and its commitment to progress has demonstrated its powerful
influence in the various branches of the Chinese establishment who see China's only hope for
survival located in its strategic partnership with Russia and long term mega projects to lift
its people out of poverty and into the 22nd Century. This was made fully clear when China
rejected the "special relationship" with Canada in December 2017 .
Speaking of the importance of the Belt and Road Initiative which had combined with the
Eurasian Economic Union and BRICS, President Xi Jinping stated in 2017: "We should foster a
new type of international relations featuring win-win cooperation; and we should forge
partnerships of dialogue with no confrontation and of friendship rather than alliance. All
countries should respect each other's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity, each
other's development paths and social systems, and each other's core interests and major
concerns In pursuing the Belt and Road Initiative, we will not resort to outdated geopolitical
maneuvering. What we hope to achieve is a new model of win-win cooperation. We have no
intention to form a small group detrimental to stability, what we hope to create is a big
family of harmonious co-existence."
The Belt and
Road Initiative has arisen as a true opposition to the bipolar insanity of western right
wing militarism/monetarism on the one side and left wing depopulation under "
Green New Deals " on the other. Trillions of dollars of credit in great infrastructure
projects across Eurasia, Africa and Latin America have resulted in the greatest burst of
cultural optimism, productivity and if the population and leadership of the west act with the
proper passion and wisdom, there is a very good opportunity to rid humanity of the legacy of
Maurice Strong.
Tough talk about the need to punish Russia for meddling in the 2016 U.S. election is running into the reality that
Congress's enthusiasm for additional sanctions is waning.
"We face a little bit of sanctions fatigue around here these days," said Republican Senator Marco Rubio of
Florida, the sponsor of one of the bills aimed at Russia. "Hopefully we'll get more people on board."
Two main proposals are circulating aimed at increasing pressure on Russian individuals and companies by
restricting their access to U.S. markets and capital. Both Senate bills received significant attention in 2018
after President Donald Trump failed to condemn Russia for its election meddling, but they lost steam after
November's midterm elections and aren't moving any faster in this year's Congress.
Many lawmakers still want Russia to face stronger consequences for its actions in the U.S. and elsewhere, but
there's no clear consensus on how to send the right message to the Kremlin. Two other factors add to the
hesitation: concern about unintended
economic
consequences, and the difficulty of passing legislation in a divided Congress when the measures don't
have the president's support.
"Sanctions can often be a double-edged sword," said Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, chairman of
the Homeland Security Committee. "So we really should take a little bit of a step back and assess where we are and
what we can really do."
Sovereign Debt
Markets are closely watching the next U.S. moves on sanctions, since any action may
affect
Russia's sovereign debt. The ruble has depreciated against the dollar since 2014, when the U.S. imposed
sanctions on during the Obama administration.
Senators Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, in February
reintroduced their
DASKA Act
, which would impose sanctions on Russian individuals, cyber operations and liquid natural gas export
facilities. The legislation calls for the president to "
prescribe
regulations
" for sanctions on sovereign debt issued 90 days after the law is enacted. The bill would also
reinforce support for NATO, and would create a new office in the State Department to respond to cyber threats.
The other Senate bill, the
DETER Act
, was reintroduced last week by Rubio and Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland. It would
require the Director of National Intelligence to tell Congress on any foreign interference within 60 days of a
federal election. If a Russian violation is found, sanctions would target that country's political figures and its
energy and defense sectors. Sanctions could also extend to government and state-owned company bonds issued after
the bill is signed into law.
Van Hollen said the current version of his bill includes an
option
for the president to waive sanctions in the interest of "national security." Senators considered adding
this provision in 2018 as an escape valve that would improve its chances of getting a floor vote, after the
Treasury Department
warned of
potential economic spillover.
Previous versions of both bills failed to advance at the end of 2018 as Congress turned its focus to government
spending measures, judicial nominations and a farm bill.
Van Hollen said the new version would deter Russian misbehavior because it would punish future action.
"We're not talking about adding new sanctions now, we're sending a clear signal that if you screw around in our
elections again, there's going to be swift and severe punishment," he said. "It makes much more sense to tie a
sanction to future conduct to deter the conduct."
The U.S. has
sanctioned
roughly 700 Russian entities since 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and fostered unrest in eastern
Ukraine. Other sanctions were imposed
following
the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the
poisoning
of a former Russian agent and his daughter in the U.K. in March 2018.
Lawmakers last year stepped up the push for legislation compelling new sanctions after Trump sparked bipartisan
outcry
when he stood beside Russian President Vladimir Putin following a one-on-one summit in Helsinki and
said he believed Putin's denial of Russia interference in U.S. elections.
Mueller Momentum
While senior lawmakers now express mixed feelings about what to do next, the upcoming release of portions of
Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation of the 2016 election and the Trump campaign could bring renewed
attention to the sanctions bills.
"You'll see more interest in this from other members who may not have been as involved when they can see the
full Mueller report," said Senator Mark Warner, a Democrat from Virginia and vice chairman of the Intelligence
Committee.
Some key lawmakers are taking their time, though, as they try to decide the best next steps. Senate Foreign
Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch, an Idaho Republican, said he isn't backing any particular proposal at this
time.
'It's Getting Worse'
"The purpose is to persuade people to adjust their conduct, and it's not happening," Risch said. "In fact, if
anything it's getting worse. That's what is causing the discussion."
Risch said he couldn't "really judge what the appetite is" in the Senate for more sanctions, but he'd like to
see a strong stance from the U.S. "I'm interested in seeing Russia change their conduct," he said. "And the
Russian administration, they're not nice people. They do bad things."
Jim Risch
Photographer: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg
Senator Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire, a Democrat on Risch's committee, said Congress's willingness to
further punish Russia will also hinge on that country's participation in other conflicts around the world.
"We're seeing their activities in Venezuela," Shaheen said of Russia's support for the faltering Nicolas Maduro
regime
that the U.S. has sought to transition out of power. "If we see those kinds of activities continue,
that there will be a growing appetite for additional sanctions."
Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat also on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Congress should be
thinking "a little more creatively about how to make Russia pay a price." Murphy said the focus should be on how
to address underlying geopolitical problems, rather than focusing on isolated punitive measures.
"We could spend our time talking about actual long-term strategies to try to combat Russia's influence, or we
could spend all our time slapping sanctions on Russian individuals and banks," Murphy said. "The former is
probably more important than the latter."
Russiagate is about keeping Russian down via additional sections. As simple as that. Epidemics of Neo-McCarthyism also
helps to cement cracks in the US neoliberal facade and, as such, is very helpful for the US elite.
It also absolves Neoliberal Democrats of the political fiasco of the century -- rejection of establishment candidate by
the majoring of working Americans which happened when Hillary Clinton was defeated by a person with zero political experience and no
political patty behind him.
Notable quotes:
"... "The results of Mueller's investigations are a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air. The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited. Only an idiot can believe them now." ..."
"... We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, made in an interview when he said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever." ..."
"... To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many in the United States know nothing about our country. ..."
Alexey Pushkov, a former diplomat and a political analyst,
tweeted to his 360,000 followers on Tuesday
, following the release of Attorney General William Barr's summary of the report:
"The results of Mueller's investigations are
a disgrace to the U.S. and their political elite. It's now confirmed that all their allegations have been plucked out of thin air.
The media have played a shameful role of lie-mongers in a campaign built on lies. The adherents of this conspiracy theory are discredited.
Only an idiot can believe them now."
To the Kremlin and its supporters, Russia is the aggrieved party here, and the government's consistent denials of interfering
in America's internal affairs have been fully vindicated. Appearing on the Russian talk show "60 Minutes," Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman
for the foreign ministry, said the ministry was preparing a report to name and shame the "brigade of propagandists" -- pointing at,
among others, Fareed Zakaria -- who tried to tie Mr. Trump to Russia. She added that "apologies are expected."
... ... ...
...it becomes clear that whatever the outcome of
the Mueller investigation, our relationship with America has changed.
We've seen anti-Russian xenophobia spread into the American mainstream. Etched in our minds are comments like the one James
Clapper, the former director of national intelligence,
made in an interview when he
said that Russians are "almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever."
... ... ...
In the atmosphere where "contacts with Russians" has become cause for suspicion, every bank transaction and visa application faces
extra scrutiny. I've heard from people I know about how exchange programs, conferences and businesses are suffering.
To those of us who paid attention to American media and politics over the past two years, it quickly became clear that too many
in the United States know nothing about our country. Ominous images of onion-shaped domes
taking over the
White House baffled us; St. Basil's Cathedral is not part of the Kremlin complex and has no political connotation. The ubiquity
of hammers and sickles in visuals accompanying Trump-Russia reports seemed likewise absurd. Our country hasn't been Communist for
about 30 years.
I know many people have a great deal of difficulty comprehending just how many wars are
started for no other purpose than to force private central banks onto nations, so let me
share a few examples, so that you understand why the US Government is mired in so many wars
against so many foreign nations.
Thank you in spades for bringing our attention to that truth.
"... The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed. ..."
"... The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers. ..."
"... *Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on terror" and use "Long War". ..."
7 years after the US - led by Obama, Hillary & @SamanthaJPower - bombed Libya in the
name of "humanitarianism" along with the UK & France & then utterly ignored it, the
country is so violent, unstable & dangerous that US troops can no longer safely
remain
American troops in Libya moved out of country as violence escalates near capital
The announcement comes as the U.N.-backed government in Tripoli vowed to defend the
capital against a renegade militia seeking to storm its way into the city, a showdown that
threatened to spill into bloody urban combat in the streets of Tripoli.
How come none of this is on page one above the fold?
EMichael, goes after Chinese oppression of Muslims, but never a word about humanitarian
tragedies US spreads from Caracas to Yemen through Kandahar to Pyongyang.
Russia doing any of this to Ukraine or Georgia would be howled about!
The seeds sown in the US' "Long War"* are terrible. Libya discord gave arms and bases for
US support to Salafi jihad in Syria, ISIS is US sown, Iraq is to be a permanent occupation
more dangerous than South Korea, Afghanistan is a tottering escapade each new commander
bringing a fresh set of objectives none connected to an end to the blood shed.
The press is at fault, they work for the empire's war profiteers.
*Many commentators on the US' military horrors since 9/11/01 stopped saying "global war on
terror" and use "Long War".
"... Privatization typically enriches the politically connected few who secure lucrative rents by sacrificing the national or public interest for private profit, even when privatization may not seem to benefit them. ..."
"... For example, following Russian voucher privatization and other Western recommended reforms, for which there was a limited domestic constituency then, within three years (1992-1994), the Russian economy had collapsed by half, and adult male life expectancy fell by six years. It was the greatest such recorded catastrophe in the last six millennia of recorded human history. ..."
"... Soon, a couple of dozen young Russian oligarchs had taken over the commanding heights of the Russian economy; many then monetized their gains and invested abroad, migrating to follow their new wealth. Much of this was celebrated by the Western media as economic progress. ..."
<img
src="http://b.scorecardresearch.com/p?c1=2&c2=16807273&cv=2.0&cj=1" />
Has
Privatization Benefitted the Public? Posted on April 7,
2019 by Jerri-Lynn Scofield Jerri-Lynn
here. Another succinct post by Jomo Kwame Sundaram that makes clear the "benefits" of
privatization are not evenly distributed, and in fact, typically, "many are even worse off"
when the government chooses to transfer ownership of the family silver.
Note that SOE is the acronym for state owned enterprise.
For those interested in the topic, see also another short post by the same author from last
September, debunking other arguments to promote the privatization fairy, Revisiting
Privatization's Claims .
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram, former UN Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development.
Originally published at Inter Press
Service
In most cases of privatization, some outcomes benefit some, which serves to legitimize the
change. Nevertheless, overall net welfare improvements are the exception, not the rule.
Never is everyone better off. Rather, some are better off, while others are not, and
typically, many are even worse off. The partial gains are typically high, or even negated by
overall costs, which may be diffuse, and less directly felt by losers.
Privatized Monopoly Powers
Since many SOEs are public monopolies, privatization has typically transformed them into
private monopolies. In turn, abuse of such market monopoly power enables more rents and
corporate profits.
As corporate profits are the private sector's yardstick of success, privatized monopolies
are likely to abuse their market power to maximize rents for themselves. Thus, privatization
tends to burden the public, e.g., if charges are raised.
In most cases, privatization has not closed the governments' fiscal deficits, and may even
worsen budgetary problems. Privatization may worsen the fiscal situation due to loss of revenue
from privatized SOEs, or tax evasion by the new privatized entity.
Options for cross-subsidization, e.g., to broaden coverage are reduced as the government is
usually left with unprofitable activities while the potentially profitable is acquired by the
private sector. Thus, governments are often forced to cut essential public services.
In most cases, profitable SOEs were privatized as prospective private owners are driven to
maximize profits. Fiscal deficits have often been exacerbated as new private owners use
creative accounting to avoid tax, secure tax credits and subsidies, and maximize retained
earnings.
Meanwhile, governments lose vital revenue sources due to privatization if SOEs are
profitable, and are often obliged to subsidize privatized monopolies to ensure the poor and
underserved still have access to the privatized utilities or services.
Privatization Burdens Many
Privatization burdens the public when charges or fees are not reduced, or when the services
provided are significantly reduced. Thus, privatization often burdens the public in different
ways, depending on how market power is exercised or abused.
Often, instead of trying to provide a public good to all, many are excluded because it is
not considered commercially viable or economic to serve them. Consequently, privatization may
worsen overall enterprise performance. 'Value for money' may go down despite ostensible
improvements used to justify higher user charges.
SOEs are widely presumed to be more likely to be inefficient. The most profitable and
potentially profitable are typically the first and most likely to be privatized. This leaves
the rest of the public sector even less profitable, and thus considered more inefficient, in
turn justifying further privatizations.
Efficiency Elusive
It is often argued that privatization is needed as the government is inherently inefficient
and does not know how to run enterprises well. Incredibly, the government is expected to
subsidize privatized SOEs, which are presumed to be more efficient, in order to fulfil its
obligations to the citizenry.
Such obligations may not involve direct payments or transfers, but rather, lucrative
concessions to the privatized SOE. Thus, they may well make far more from these additional
concessions than the actual cost of fulfilling government obligations.
Thus, privatization of profitable enterprises or segments not only perpetuates exclusion of
the deserving, but also worsens overall public sector performance now encumbered with remaining
unprofitable obligations.
One consequence is poorer public sector performance, contributing to what appears to be a
self-fulfilling prophecy. To make matters worse, the public sector is then stuck with financing
the unprofitable, thus seemingly supporting to the privatization prophecy.
Benefits Accrue to Relatively Few
Privatization typically enriches the politically connected few who secure lucrative rents by
sacrificing the national or public interest for private profit, even when privatization may not
seem to benefit them.
Privatization in many developing and transition economies has primarily enriched these few
as the public interest is sacrificed to such powerful private business interests. This has, in
turn, exacerbated corruption, patronage and other related problems.
For example, following Russian voucher privatization and other Western recommended reforms,
for which there was a limited domestic constituency then, within three years (1992-1994), the
Russian economy had collapsed by half, and adult male life expectancy fell by six years. It was
the greatest such recorded catastrophe in the last six millennia of recorded human history.
Soon, a couple of dozen young Russian oligarchs had taken over the commanding heights of the
Russian economy; many then monetized their gains and invested abroad, migrating to follow their
new wealth. Much of this was celebrated by the Western media as economic
progress.
Yes it does. I've now added a sentence to my introduction to make that clear. I noticed
the omission when I was uploading the post, but wasn't sure whether readers would be
confused.
As a rule of thumb, I'd say that any privatisations that require the introduction of
convoluted pseudo-market structures or vast new regulatory bureaucracies or which derive most
of their ongoing income from the public sector are likely to be contrary to the long-term
public interest. In the UK, unfortunately, all these ships sailed a long time ago
After the recent Chicago municipal elections, I wrote up some notes on the reasons for the
discontent. This article by Sundaram explains exactly how these schemes work. Further, you
can apply his criteria of subsidies for the rich, skimming, and disinheriting the middle
class and poor to all of the following instances in Chicago.
If I may–some for instances of how Sundaram's observations turn up in U.S.
cities:
Chicago is the proving grounds for thirty or so years of the Democrats' surrender to
neoliberalism and austerity politics. Let us not forget, brethren and sistren, that Rahm is
the Spawn of Bill + Hill as well as dear friend and advisor of Obama. So there is the work of
Daley to undo and the work of the Clintonians to undo. It will take more than one term for
Lightfoot.
Consider:
–Parking meters and enforcement have been privatized, starving the city of funds and,
more importantly, of its police power.
–Taxes have been privatized in TIFs, where money goes and is never heard from
again.
–There have been attempts to privatize the park system in the form of the Lucas museum
and the current Obama Theme Park imbroglio, involving some fifty acres of park land.
–The school system has been looted and privatized. The Democrats are big fans of
charter schools (right, "Beto"), seeing them as ways to skim money off the middle class and
the poor.
–Fare collection on public transit has been privatized using a system so deliberately
rudimentary and so deliberately corrupt that it cannot tell you at point of service how much
you have paid as fare.
–Boeing was enticed to Chicago with tax breaks. Yes, that Boeing, the one that now
deliberately puts bad software in your airplane.
–Property tax assessment has been an opaque system and source of skimming for
lawyers.
–Zoning: Eddie Burke, pond scum, is just the top layer of pollution.
–And as we have made our descent, all of these economic dogmata have been enforced by
petty harassment of the citizenry (endless tickets) and an ever-brutal police force.
And yet: The current Republican Party also supports all of these policies, so let's not
pretend that a bunch of Mitch McConnell lookalikes are headed to Chicago to reform it.
Providing professional services i.e. architecture, engineering, etc. for a public entity,
local or federal, does not yield unreasonable profits. Typically, the public agencies have
their own staff to monitor and cost control a project. The professional services provided to
private developers yields far more profit- oftentimes twice the profits associated with
public agency work. Most professional services companies will transition their work to the
public agencies during a recession.
At any rate, especially in Illinois, privatizing the work to avoid pension liabilities is
no longer a choice. Michael Madigan pension promises will require the public to maintain a
public service budget with no staff to fill potholes. Essentially, these are the no work jobs
made popular by the Soprano crew twenty years ago.
Discussion of the downside of the privatization of public services is merely an
oscillation from discussing the weather, the Bears or any other kitchen table discussion
– nothing more than pleasant small talk to pass the time.
Privatization, at any cost, is no longer a choice. We have abused the pension system and
now the public must pay for private companies to provide the most basic services.
The question is, what can one do to help arrest this wholesale theft of public resources
and their expropriation into the hands of well connected. " Public", as in, it is the working
public over the last 100 or 200 years that created (or paid for), the electricity grid, or
public schools, or entire armed or police forces
I keep thinking that perhaps an Act could or should be introduced here in UK (same for the
States, i suppose), which should ensure that all politicians that enable any type of
privatisation of public resources or PFI arrangement (yes that old chesnut), should be made
personally responsible for the results therof.
And any losses to the public accidentally or "accidentally" occasioned by such
commandeering over public resources, to be treated like deliberate misappropriation by the
said public officials.
With the financial and custodial penalties as may be appropriate.
Anybody out there with similar thoughts or should i really try harder and give up on
drugs?
Michael Hudson, to his immense credit, explains the pernicious effects of privatization of
common goods repeatedly throughout his work, and demonstrates that it has been with us at
least as long as the ancient practice of land alienation and rural usury.
Natural monopolies ought to be nationalised, full stop.
I support public ownership of natural monopolies, however it would be helpful if these
pieces contained data, case studies or footnoted entries providing some empirical evidence of
the author's thesis.
This article comes at a time when the clarion call for privatizing Eskom, SA's electricity
utility, is hitting deafening levels. To the private sector, efficiency = maximizing profits
by making the "bloated" enterprise lean (aka cutting the workforce) and quite literally mean
(aka cutting services to "unprofitable" segments of the market, iow, the poor and
vulnerable). When profits soar because the holy grail of efficiency is achieved, the
mainstream business press brings out the champagne and toasts this "success" as proof that
the previously "moribund" (they always exaggerate the state of things) monopolistic monolith
has been given a new lease on life by privatizing it and the template is set for rescuing
other "ailing" SOEs.
The drawbacks are never laid out as cleary as they are in this article and the plight of
those worst affected, whether laid-off workers or those whose services have been cut, never
makes it into the headlines.
And then there is prison privatization where the burden of operation and maintaining the
institution should clearly be on the public so as to be constant reminder of the burden,
among others reasons. The motivations by private prison operators to reduce services and
costs out of site of the pesky prying eyes of the public are manifold.
Privatization is a great way to avoid having user fees wasted by providing services, and
instead put to better use funding the re-election campaigns of politicians supporting
privatization. Plus, it provides much-needed consulting fees for former politicians as well
as job-creating 7-figure salaries for the CEOs,
(/snark, if you couldn't tell)
On a side note, the Dilbert comic strip is written about private industry ,
There was a rudimentary plan
put forward last June that recommended some pretty substantial privatizations of U.S.
government assets and services which include:
-Privatizing the US Post Office ( through an Initial Public Offering or outright sale to a
private entity ).
-Sell off U.S. government owned electricity transmission lines ( U.S. government owns 14% of
this nations power transmission lines through TVA, Southwestern Power Administration, Western
Area Power Administration, and Bonneville Power Administration ).
-Spin-off the Federal Aviation Administrations air traffic control operations into a private
nonprofit entity.
-Spin-off the Department of Transportations operations of the Saint Lawrence Seaways Locks
and Channels into a private non-profit entity.
-End the federal conservatorship of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then regulate a new system of
private guarantors for their MBS securities.
At heart, the problem with privatization is that marketing to a government-employed
purchaser or "purchase influencer" is ridiculously cheap, due to their poor accountability
strictures.
This is abetted by the Katamari Damacy process (self-accretionary tendency) of money and
power.
In Oz the electricity grids were privatized as they would be cheaper that way – or
so people were told. Instead, the cost of electricity has risen sharply over the years to the
point that it is effecting elections on both the State and Federal level as the price hikes
are so controversial. A problem is that those companies have to pay back the loans used to
buy the public electricity grids and as well, the senior management award themselves sky-high
wages because they are totally worth it. These are factors that were never present when it
was publicly owned. And just to put the boot in, those very same companies have been
'gold-plating' the electricity grid for their gain-
Meanwhile, whatever money the governments made selling their electricity companies has
been long spent on white elephants or buying themselves re-elections by giving out goodies to
voters.
buying themselves re-elections by giving out goodies to voters.
I don't reside in the states, so I don't see much of the detail of daily life. What are
these "goodies" of which you speak? In what I am able to read on the internet, people aren't
being given goodies any more. At least the old-time politicians handed out jobs, and turkeys
at Christmas. The current crop do hand out jobs to their kids and immediate family, but not
so much to anyone else.
"... I was immediately uncomfortable and suspicious of these charges, because as a Chinese American we understand this xenophobic tendency to conflate some individuals seeking personal gain/access with U.S. politicians as part of some grand ChiCom conspiracy to influence the U.S. ..."
"... Ultimately, the habit of herding ethnic Russians, or Chinese, as enemies of the state, rather than just shady individuals who were after their self-interest. ..."
@RD – Love this line: "Anyone with a Russian-y surname "had ties to Putin,"
"connections to Russian intelligence," or was at least an oligarch."
Finally one of the few articles written on #RussiaGate and its genesis that articulates
the inherent xenophobia and "othering" of the whole narrative, wherein anyone Russian was
viewed not objectively as an individual, but automatically as a cog in the elaborate Putin
machinery.
I was immediately uncomfortable and suspicious of these charges, because as a Chinese
American we understand this xenophobic tendency to conflate some individuals seeking personal
gain/access with U.S. politicians as part of some grand ChiCom conspiracy to influence the
U.S.
When the Republicans were shouting TREASON at every random Chinese businessman taking
photos with Al Gore, or with our national security agencies charging TREASON for Chinese
American employees for family visits to China, or the current Mar-a-Lago nothingburger with
Cindy Yang and ilk.
Ultimately, the habit of herding ethnic Russians, or Chinese, as enemies of the state,
rather than just shady individuals who were after their self-interest.
My wife was born and raised in Kharkov, Ukraine. Just south of Belgorad and Prokhorovka,
Russia. Her city was liberated as a result of the battle of Kursk in August, 1943. The day,
August 23, is celebrated every year to this day as the "Day of the City". More than 275,000
residents of Kharkov died in the war, more than ALL Americans killed in the European theater.
I think every American should visit the former Soviet Union to understand what CAN happen,
what DID happen. The scale of it is beyond comprehension. It is not for the weak of heart to
visit Babi Yar Ravine in Kiev and walk on what is the grave of more than 150,000 people, or
to visit St. Petersburg (Leningrad) which endured an inhuman siege killing more than a
million people. I had the great opportunity to live and work in the former Soviet Union
(where I met my wife). I worked in Odessa, among other places, Kiev, Kharkov, Donetsk. In
Odessa, where 50,000+ people were massacred in just a few weeks in 1941-42. You walk in a
nice park and see a plaque. A marker like we often see in the USA...some historical event,
you know, "Abe Lincoln was here"...that kind of thing. But this sign says that at this place
in 1941 there was a bomb crater and the SS "conducted" 400 children to this place and SHOT
THEM, pushed them in the hole and buried them. There are few heroes left from that time now.
When I worked there, there were many more. They wear their medals pinned to their civilian
clothes.They were, and are, revered by the people, even the young people today. They were,
and are, greeted and offered seats on public transportation and told to go ahead of people in
lines. The people always say "Thank you, Grandfather, for my freedom" Or "Thank you for my
happiness". Young couples getting married, go to the city's "Memorial of Glory" in their
wedding clothes and thank the 275,000 people buried there for their future, for the
opportunity to meet their spouse. The Air Force Academy in the city does their daily running
through the Memorial of Glory. They have not forgotten. Anyone who thinks they have, I invite
you to attend one of many celebrations on May 9...Victory Day.
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
Tulsi is a really great polemist with a very sharp mind and ability to find weak points in the opponent platform/argumentation
and withstand pressure. In the debate she will probably will wipe the floor with Trump. IMHO he stands no chances against her in the
open debate
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. ..."
"... While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed. ..."
"... In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote. ..."
US President Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly bashing everything linked to what he sees as 'socialism,' is himself no stranger
to using socialist principles to support the US arms industry, Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. One could hardly suspect Trump of being
a socialist in disguise.
After all, the US president has emerged as one of the most ardent critics of the leftist ideological platform.
Just recently, he announced he would "go into the war with some socialists," while apparently referring to his political opponents
from the Democratic Party.
But the president also seems to be quite keen on borrowing some socialist ideas when it fits his agenda, at least, according to
the congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently wrote in a tweet that "Trump
is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers."
Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money
would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity.https://t.co/tcNqsNQVbN
She was referring to a
piece in The Los Angeles Times, which cheerfully reported that Trump's whopping military budget helps to breathe some new life
into a Pentagon-owned tank manufacturing plant somewhere in northwestern Ohio that was once on the verge of a shutdown.
While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a
skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted
to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist
move indeed.
It is very much unclear if Trump had this Ohio plant or any other factories like it in mind when he supported the record Pentagon
budget. After all, redistributing large sums of public money in favor of the booming US military industrial complex does not look
very much like socialism.
In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion
boost in defense
spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy,
and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to be pretty confident that his policies indeed “make America great again” while it is those
pesky socialists that threaten to ruin everything he has achieved. “I love the idea of 'Keep America Great' because you know
what it says is we've made it great now we're going to keep it great because the socialists will destroy it,” he told an audience
of Republican congress members this week, while talking about the forthcoming presidential campaign.
Money quote: "Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots
that the West is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets
should be built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion.
But the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union. "
Notable quotes:
"... Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative. The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international organizations. ..."
"... The Magnitsky Act, in my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally. ..."
"... There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent investigator or judge. ..."
In 2016, Andrei Lvovich Nekrasov, a well-known Russian film-maker, playwright, theater director, and actor, released a docudrama
entitled, The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes . Although the film won many artistic accolades, including a special commendation
from the Prix Europa Award for a Television Documentary, public screenings were abruptly canceled in both Europe and the United States.
Political pressure from various constituents and the threat of lawsuits from William Browder, the American-British billionaire and
human-rights activist, ensured the limitation of the film to a single website. To the knowledge of this author, there has been only
one public screening of The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes in the United States. In June 2016, Seymour Hersch, a renowned investigative
journalist, presided over a showing of the film at the Newseum in Washington, DC, that generated much controversy. The American press
has not been kind to either the film or the director, Andrei Nekrasov. The Washington Post, The New York Times, The New Yorker,
and The Daily Beast all seem to agree that the film is an overt work of Russian propaganda that aims to introduce confusion
about the circumstances leading to the death of tax accountant, Sergei Magnitsky, in the minds of the viewers. The Putin administration,
which has been the prime target of both the 2012 Sergei Magnitsky Rule of Accountability Act and the 2016 Global Magnitsky Human
Rights Accountability Act, has good reason to promote a film that questions the circumstances surrounding Magnitsky's untimely death
in Moscow's Butyrka Prison in 2009.
Despite a flood of persuasive articles and editorials by well-known journalists suggesting that this inconvenient film deserves
no more than a quick burial, I was drawn to reconsider both the film and the political controversy that it continues to create for
two main reasons. First, as the collapse of the Soviet Union and our own recent presidential campaigns show, we can never entirely
prohibit the intrusion of propaganda or politically slanted content into the public sphere. Instead, as a historian and faculty member
who serves at a public university, I believe that it is my job to teach our students how to diagnose an issue, and how to consider
the many sides that a story necessarily involves. As an intellectual process this has immense value both in and of itself. Source
criticism is a time tested and reliable means through which we can make sense of an event or a phenomenon. Our students need to learn
both the mechanics and the intellectual value of analyzing a source and should be able to evaluate the nature of political content
whether it is embedded in a Facebook post, a scholarly article, or a documentary.
The Magnitsky Act -- Behind the Scenes can serve as an important vehicle to introduce the contested nature of historical
truth, and as a prism, it allows us to view the multiple modes through which various versions of the truth are disseminated in the
twenty-first century. Taught in tandem with William Browder's book Red Notice , this film can provide students with a
real-life experience in the practice of critical thinking. The film also allows us to revive a discussion of Hayden White's penetrating
analysis of the ways in which the structure of the form necessarily influences the content of any artistic or historical narrative.
The vehicle of the docudrama that Nekrasov uses in his film, and the competing narratives about the circumstances leading to Magnitsky's
death, merit literary and intellectual analysis, along with geopolitical commentary.
Second, I am concerned by the fact that both critics and supporters have turned the debate about the film into a referendum on
William Browder, his business dealings as well as his global human rights activism, and the Putin administration. In this interview
with Andrei Nekrasov, I turn the spotlight back on the film-maker, his motivations for making the film, and on his political experiences
since the release of the film. It is important to remember that in the past Nekrasov has made several politically charged films including
Disbelief (2004), and Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File (2007) -- films that are extremely critical of the
Putin administration. Nekrasov, a student of philosophy and literature, is in the unique position of having experienced censorship
in the Soviet Union, Putin's Russia, and in the democratic countries of Western Europe and the United States.
1) Why did you want to make a film about the Magnitsky Act? What drew you to this project?
Andrei Nekrasov : I felt that the story of Magnitsky, in its accepted version, was very powerful and important. I thought that
Sergei Magnitsky was a hero, and I wanted to tell the story of the modern hero, my compatriot. His case seemed very special because
Magnitsky, a tax lawyer (in reality, an accountant) had come from the world of capitalism, to symbolize all that is good and moral
in modern Russia. I believed that Magnitsky did not surrender under torture and sacrificed his life fighting corruption.
2) Who has funded the making of this film and what motivated them to invest in this production?
AN : The film was produced by Piraya Film, a Norwegian company. There is a long list of funders, and none are from Russia. (Please
visit www.magnitskyact.com for further information). And they are all
very "mainstream." I believe in the United States and Russia it is easier to construe the specific reasons that motivate funders,
who are mostly private, to support a project. In Europe, where more public money is available for the arts, the state is more or
less obliged to fund the cultural process. So I submit an idea to a producer, and if they like it, they introduce it into a complex
system of funding that is supposed to be politically neutral. Only quality matters, in theory. In practice "quality" has political
aspects, and its interpretation is open to prejudices.
But it would be a simplification to say the film was funded because I had set out to tell Browder's version of the Magnitsky case.
Those funders who were (through their commissioning editors) monitoring the editing process, ZDF/ARTE, for example, became aware
of the inconsistencies in Browder's version and supported my investigation into the truth. What they did not realize was who, and
what, we were all dealing with. They did not realize that Browder was supported by the entire political system of North America and
Western Europe. They realized that only when they were told by politicians to stop the film. And they obeyed, contrary to what I
thought was their principles.
3) How has the role of censorship, both in Russia and the West, affected your artistic career?
AN : Censorship has had a very strong and damaging impact on my career. But while censorship in Russia had never been something
surprising to me, the way that the film T he Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes was treated by western politicians was totally
unanticipated and shocking. Yet, intellectually, the experience was very illuminating. The pro-Western intelligentsia of Russia,
a class to which I have belonged, idolizes the West and believes that the freedom of expression is an essential and even intrinsic
part of Western culture. The notion that the interests of economically powerful groups can set a geopolitical agenda and that easily
overrides democratic freedom of expression is considered to be a remnant of Soviet era thinking. So I had to have a direct and personal
experience of Western censorship to realize that that notion is rooted in reality.
The issue of censorship in Russia is, on the other hand, often misunderstood in the West. There is no direct political censorship
of the kind that existed in the Soviet Union, and that possibly exists in countries like China today. Many popular Russian news outlets
are critical of the government, and of Putin personally as evidenced by the content in media outlets such as Ekho Moskvy, Novaya
Gazeta, Dozhd TV, New Times, Vedomosti, Colta. ru, and others. The internet is full of mockery of Putin, his ministers and of
his party's representatives. There is neither a system nor the kind of wellresourced deep state structures that control the flow
of information. Many Russian media outlets, for example, repeat Browder's story of Magnitsky killed by the corrupt police with the
state covering it up. All that is perfectly "allowed" while Putin angrily condemns Browder as a criminal and Browder calls himself
Putin's number one enemy. In reality, it is not allowed but simply happens because of the lack of consistent political censorship.
However, you will hardly ever hear a proper analysis and criticism in the Russian media of the big corporations, and of the oligarchs
that make up the state. It is also true that such acute crises as military operations, such as Russian-Georgian war of 2008 produce
intolerance to the voices of the opposition. My film Russian Lessons (2008) about the suffering of the Georgians during that
short war and its aftermath wasbanned in Russia. But nationalism is not only a government policy. It's the prevailing mood. The supposedly
democratic leader of the opposition, that the West seems to praise and support, Alexei Navalny, was on the record insulting Georgians
in jingo-nationalistic posts during the war. The film industry is, of course, easier to steer in the "right direction" as films,
unlike articles and essays, are very expensive to produce. But Russia is a complex society, deeply troubled, but also misunderstood
by the West. If my films, such as Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File , and Russian Lessons (2010) were attacked
by pro-government media, then some of my articles were censored by the independent, "opposition" outlets, such as Ekho Moskvy
.
4) Did you actually begin filming the movie with an outcome of supporting Browder's story in mind, as you represent in the
film, or did you plan from the start of the filming process to end the film as it now stands?
AN : I started filming the story. I totally believed in the story that Browder had told me, and all the mainstream media repeated
after him.
5) You know that there are many more "disappeared" journalists and others listed in the formal US Congress Magnitsky Act
who have suffered from the effects of corrupt power in Russia. Why did you not address the fates of some of those others as well
in your film?
AN : I may be misunderstanding this question, but I do not see how addressing the fates of "disappeared" journalists and others'
would be relevant to the topic of my film in its final version. I obviously condemn the "disappearance" of journalists and others.
In Russia journalists disappear usually by being "simply" shot (not in "sophisticated" Saudi ways), and as far as I remember only
one is referred to in The Magnitsky Act , Paul Khlebnikov. He was the editor of Forbes, Russia , and was shot in 2004
when Bill Browder was a great fan of Vladimir Putin and continued to be for some time. I have not seen any evidence or even claim,
that Putin may have been behind that murder. I was a friend of Anna Politkovskaya, perhaps the most famous of all Russian journalists
who was assassinated in the recent past. She is featured in my film, Poisoned by Polonium .
The Magnitsky Act – Behind the Scenes is about the ways in which the notion of human rights is sometimes used as a
fake alibi for white-collar crimes. Though I explore just one case, I think that I have managed to show that those ways are exceptionally
sophisticated and efficient, and enlist all the major media, civil society, NGOs, governments, parliaments, and major international
organizations.
6) Does William Browder's role in the formulation of the Magnitsky Act invalidate its value and that of the Global
Magnitsky Act, in seeking to provide protection for those suffering from the effects of deadly and corrupt power such as the recently
deceased Saudi Arabian journalist, Jamal Khashoggi?
AN : Let me, for the argument's sake, pose myself what would seem like a version of your question: "Would Browder's role in creating
a weapon that could protect someone like Khashoggi from deadly and corrupt power invalidate that weapon?" My answer would be, no,
it would not invalidate that weapon. However, we are dealing with a fallacy here, in my humble opinion. The Magnitsky Act, in
my view, is not a weapon that can protect people. The Magnitsky Act was designed to punish those deemed murderers and torturers of
Magnitsky. Well, if my film demonstrates that Magnitsky was not murdered (by the people Browder claims he was murdered by), nor was
he tortured, the Magnitsky Act is nonsensical. You cannot punish someone for something that did not happen. Can you then say, never
mind, human rights violations happen, and it's good to have a mechanism to punish violators even if there's no evidence that people
named as violators are guilty? I don't think one can say "never mind". Neither legally, nor, morally.
There is no evidence whatsoever that the government of the United States conducted independent investigations of the policemen
and the judges who were supposedly involved in the death of Magnitsky. And no one seems to be concerned of course about the rights
of those on the Magnitsky list, who can't even reply to the accusations, let alone have the accusations verified by an independent
investigator or judge.
Instead of protecting people, the Magnitsky case helps the "bad guys" to demonstrate to their Russian compatriots that the West
is rotten to the core, its policies are created by compliant stooges (lying thieves and useful idiots), and more rockets should be
built to confront America's injustice towards Russia and others. A lie can never really protect anyone, in my humble opinion. But
the problem is worse. It turns human rights into a hypocritical ideology to protect the interests of the powers that be, a bit like
the slogans about brotherhood and justice in the Soviet Union.
Choi Chatterjee is a Professor of History at California State University, Los Angeles. Chatterjee, along with Steven Marks,
Mary Neuberger, and Steve Sabol, edited The Wider Arc of Revolution in three volumes (Slavica Publishers).
Tulsi is a really great polemist with a very sharp mind and ability to find weak points in the opponent platform/argumentation
and withstand pressure. In the debate she will probably will wipe the floor with Trump. IMHO he stands no chances against her in the
open debate
Notable quotes:
"... Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity. ..."
"... While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist move indeed. ..."
"... In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion boost in defense spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote. ..."
US President Donald Trump, who has been relentlessly bashing everything linked to what he sees as 'socialism,' is himself no stranger
to using socialist principles to support the US arms industry, Tulsi Gabbard has claimed. One could hardly suspect Trump of being
a socialist in disguise.
After all, the US president has emerged as one of the most ardent critics of the leftist ideological platform.
Just recently, he announced he would "go into the war with some socialists," while apparently referring to his political opponents
from the Democratic Party.
But the president also seems to be quite keen on borrowing some socialist ideas when it fits his agenda, at least, according to
the congresswoman from Hawaii and Democratic presidential candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who recently wrote in a tweet that "Trump
is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers."
Trump is for socialism when it comes to taxpayers underwriting military contractors and arms manufacturers. The same money
would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country's infrastructure and green economy, and it would be better for humanity.https://t.co/tcNqsNQVbN
She was referring to a
piece in The Los Angeles Times, which cheerfully reported that Trump's whopping military budget helps to breathe some new life
into a Pentagon-owned tank manufacturing plant somewhere in northwestern Ohio that was once on the verge of a shutdown.
While the paper hailed the fact that the Pentagon's budget increase allowed local workers to keep their jobs and encouraged a
skilled workforce to move to a small town in rural Ohio, Gabbard apparently hinted that the whole story in fact described what amounted
to re-distribution of money from taxpayers to a de-facto depressed area to save some jobs – a social-democratic if not outright socialist
move indeed.
It is very much unclear if Trump had this Ohio plant or any other factories like it in mind when he supported the record Pentagon
budget. After all, redistributing large sums of public money in favor of the booming US military industrial complex does not look
very much like socialism.
In her post, Gabbard also added that the US might have had a better use for a $160 billion
boost in defense
spending over two years. “The same money would create more jobs used for rebuilding our country’s infrastructure and green economy,
and it would be better for humanity,” she wrote.
Trump, meanwhile, seems to be pretty confident that his policies indeed “make America great again” while it is those
pesky socialists that threaten to ruin everything he has achieved. “I love the idea of 'Keep America Great' because you know
what it says is we've made it great now we're going to keep it great because the socialists will destroy it,” he told an audience
of Republican congress members this week, while talking about the forthcoming presidential campaign.
"You see all of these Russian connections -- there's a new one every single day, and increasingly benign explanations
for what the Trump, for what they're up to, benign explanations are just not credible."
A technical issue that Boeing flagged in a safety warning after the deadly 737 MAX 8 crash
in Indonesia could happen to any other aircraft, and it's "not unlikely" that the manufacturer
knew about it, aviation experts told RT. Earlier this week, Boeing issued a safety update
to pilots flying its newest 737 MAX airliner, warning of a possible fault in a sensor that
could send the aircraft into a violent nosedive.
That sensor measures air flow over a plane's wings, but its failure can lead to an
aerodynamic stall.
International aviation experts told RT that a problem of this kind could doom aircraft of
any type. The tragedy that happened to Lion Air's Boeing 737 MAX is not the first of its kind
to involve a faulty
"Pitot tube" – a critical air-speed sensor that measures the flow velocity
– explained Elmar Giemulla, a leading German expert in air and traffic law.
"This is not unusual in the way it happened before," he noted, mentioning incidents
similar to the Lion Air crash. Back in 1996, a Boeing 757 operated by Turkey's Birgenair
stalled and crashed in the Caribbean because of a blocked pitot tube. Likewise, erroneous
air-speed indications, coupled with pilot errors, led to the crash of an Air France Airbus A330
over the Atlantic in 2009.
While the problem is not entirely new, it is unclear how Boeing had tackled it, according to
Giemulla. "It is not very unlikely" that Boeing knew about the problem, he said, warning
that "more than 200 planes are concerned and this could happen tomorrow again."
There is so much experience with [using Pitot tubes] that it surprises me very much
that this could happen to a newly developed plane.
However, the expert doubted that there has been any cover-up of the issue, instead
suggesting that "obviously gross negligence" had been involved.
A 737 MAX 8 servicing Lion Air flight 610 last week ploughed into the waters of the Java Sea
shortly after take-off from Jakarta, killing all 189 people on board. Investigators say there
is a possibility that inaccurate readings fed into the MAX's computer could have sent the plane
into a sudden descent.
If NATO were a person, it would be five years past retirement age
. In fact,
as Ron Paul notes
, NATO should have retired back in the early 1990s when its reason for
existence - the Warsaw Pact - ceased to exist. Instead, new missions had to be created and new
enemies had to be made to justify the massive behemoth that provides lush jobs for the
well-connected and vast fortunes for the weapons makers.
NATO must die and the sooner the
better
.
When the North Atlantic Treaty Organization was created 70 years ago in 1949 it was formed as a
blatant military instrument for waging the Cold War, a war that the US, Britain and other European
allies had newly embarked on.
NATO's public relations cant about "peace and security" is
but Orwellian rhetoric.
But,
as The Strategic Culture Foundation notes,
the supposed allies of the Soviet Union
hastily went from an ostensible joint purpose of defeating Nazi Germany during the Second World War
to initiating hostility towards Moscow.
Already in 1946, British war-time leader Winston
Churchill was fulminating about "an Iron Curtain" descending across Europe, in language adapted
from Third Reich propaganda maestro Joseph Goebbels. The ensuing Cold War would last for nearly
half a century until the Soviet Union collapsed from its internal political and economic stresses.
NATO's first secretary general, Britain's Lord Ismay, was candid in the mission of the military
alliance. Its objective, he said, was to,
"Keep Russia out, the Americans in, and
Germany down".
Of course,
Western propaganda always portrayed the Soviet Union as the "aggressor",
alleging that the so-called Red Menace had designs on conquering all of Europe. Not much has
changed when one listens to Western contemporary claims of Russia being an aggressor. As in the
past, present innuendo casting Moscow as a demonic force has a decidedly hollow quality, at least
for those willing to be critical about Western state and media "information".
Lord Ismay, perhaps unwittingly, let the cat out of the bag in his statement all
those years ago.
The purpose of NATO was to serve as a means of dividing and ruling
over Europe for Washington and its always closely aligned, servile British partner.
If countering Soviet aggression was the real purpose of NATO, as officially claimed, then one
must ask why is this organization still in existence – some 30 years after the alleged "evil
communist empire" dissolved?
NATO is a military monster desperately in search of a purpose.
The substitution
of Russia as an enemy in place of the Soviet Union doesn't quite hold the same propaganda cachet,
but nonetheless that is why Moscow continues to be designated the official "enemy" – in order to
justify the existence of NATO. The US-led military bloc needs enemies like a junkie needs a
narcotic fix.
NATO's real function is at least three-fold
.
First, it gives the US an excuse to justify its enormous military presence in Europe.
Instead of appearing as an occupying force, which it is, the Americans claim to be a
protector of allies against malign Russia, or formerly the Soviet Union. This allows Washington
to exert political control over its so-called European allies, and specifically to prevent any
normalized relations with Russia. US vice president Mike Pence this week scolded Germany and
fellow NATO member Turkey for daring to continue relations with Moscow, in the form of the Nord
Stream 2 gas project and Ankara's purchase of Russian S-400 air defense system. Pence inferred
treasonous conduct on the part of Berlin and Ankara just because these two nominally independent
countries have chosen to do business with Russia. Pence was thus demonstrating the classic NATO
purpose of dividing Europe from Moscow.
A second function of NATO is to serve as an extension of the US military-industrial
complex and, in turn, an important buttress for American corporate capitalism, which is totally
dependent on military spending.
When President Donald Trump castigates European allies,
like Germany, for not spending enough on military and NATO, his real concern is for European
nations to buy more American weaponry, such as the vastly over-priced and over-rated F-35
fighter jet. If NATO were to be disbanded – as it should from its obsolete objective purpose –
then US capitalism would suffer a major withdrawal of European subsidy in the form of decreased
weapons purchases.
The irony here is that Trump has previously denigrated NATO as obsolete. In his irascibility,
he is more correct than he seems to realize. But Trump has – despite superficial griping – still
continued to boost NATO for the purpose of hiking European military spending. What Trump means
by "obsolete" is that the past financial tribute from the Europeans to the US militarized
economy must henceforth be significantly increased. The outrageous demands by Trump are inciting
tensions within NATO. At a time of massive civilian social needs across Europe being neglected
due to "fiscal constraints", the American ultimatums for more military spending are bound to be
seen by the wider European populace as an intolerable dictate.
A third function of NATO for its American leadership is that it gives a pseudo legal
cover of "multinationalism" to what would otherwise be seen as blatant US imperialist aggression
all over the globe.
NATO forces have assisted US illegal wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, among other
interventions. This by an organization that self-declares itself a bastion of security and
peace.
It was 20 years ago that US-led forces under the cover of NATO bombed Serbia and its capital
Belgrade. That marked a watershed assault on international law, and the unleashing of US global
violence with impunity.
Washington could not carry out its aggression without the political and legal cover of NATO.
Jens Stoltenberg, the present NATO secretary general, was in Washington this week calling for
more aggression towards Russia. The Norwegian figurehead is a shameless warmonger who is
violating the UN Charter for the sake of feathering his career as an American puppet.
It is all the more disturbing that this week in Washington, foreign ministers of the 30
member states belonging to NATO deferred to the US calls for naval forces to be deployed to the
Black Sea "in defense" of Ukraine and Georgia from "Russian aggression".
These two
countries have done everything possible to provoke Russia. They are cat's paws for their NATO
master, and are reckless enough to instigate a full-on war. Washington and its NATO minions have
the audacity, or intelligence deficit, to call such an explosive situation as "defense" against
Russia.
NATO, or rather the US, is giving itself a green light to mount even more aggression
against Russia than it already has done over the past 30 years.
In that period, NATO
membership has almost doubled with the result that the military bloc is now on Russia's border –
and at the same time claiming with Orwellian double-think that it is defending Europe from Russian
aggression. As Russian wit would have it: Russia has had the temerity to move its border towards
NATO offensive forces.
Global security and peace is too serious for jokes.
The maintenance of
NATO, with its original aggressive objective against Moscow still intact, is a grotesque joke. A
joke sickeningly played on the people of Europe who could benefit greatly from halting the
squandering of billions of dollars each year on military budgets. NATO's gratuitous belligerence
towards Russia – based on trumped-up, ridiculous propaganda – is an obscenity. This organization is
a dinosaur that somehow outlived its Cold War environment because those powers who control it from
Washington and London want it to live on for their own selfish, ideological, economic reasons.
For the sake of world peace, the citizens of North America and Europe should demand that
NATO be liquidated. Thirty years too late.
Relationship with the only nation on Earth besides US is the main casualty of Russiagate. Ever since the religious schism of 1054,
the West has failed to understand Russia. In the 19th Century only Harvard even offered a Russian language course. Our main ally,
Britian, has been irrationally Russophobic since Benjamin Disraeli. There is no evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The Internet Research Institute was a commercial click bait business, staffed by underpaid grad students, not KGB spies. The DNC
files were not hacked, they were downloaded by disgruntled Bernie Bros and given to Wikileaks.
Trump gave Putin the respect he deserves at Helsinki. Putin has done much for his country, and the world, by checking Western
Imperialism in the Ukraine, Syria, and now Venezuela. History will recognize Putin as the preeminent statesman of the early 21
Century, and will honor Trump to the extent Trump recognizes that.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow lost a whopping 20 percent of her audience after the release of the Mueller Report proved
she shamelessly deceived her audience for more than two years.
The
release
of this report -- you know, the one that exonerates President Trump of any and all allegations of Russia
collusion, is, arguably, the biggest news of the last two years -- and in the heat of this massive news cycle that
lands directly in Maddow's sweet spot, a huge chunk of her audience just up and disappeared.
For two years a cloud of illegitimacy hung over the Trump presidency and for two years the establishment media,
most especially MSNBC and CNN, maniacally fire hosed the American people with fake news to smear the president as a
Russian spy. But of all those guilty of spreading this dishonest hysteria, no one came close to Rachel Maddow.
Night after relentless night, over two-plus years, Maddow kept her suckers on the hook by weaving from whole cloth
a conspiracy tale about Trump being owned by Putin. And with this tale came the promise that Trump's removal from
office was always right around the corner, and that Robert Mueller would be the deliverer -- the angel who would end
the nightmare of a terrible national mistake known as the Trump presidency.
Because this hysteria was everywhere (except in the conservative media that got everything right), there was no
way to warn Maddow's suckers that they were in fact suckers, that like a cult leader promising the end of the world,
she was hustling them, lying to them, and enriching herself in the process to the tune of about $10 million a year.
Maybe now, though, the Cult of Maddow is cracking. I doubt it, but there is some hope in the latest numbers
On Monday March 18, four days before the Mueller Report proved her a liar, 2.977 million people tuned in to
Maddow's carnival bark.
This past Monday, the 25th, three days after the Mueller Report proved her a liar, only 2.513 million tuned in, a
loss of nearly 500,000 viewers.
Lawrence O'Donnell -- whose show immediately follows Maddow and who is almost as obsessed with deceiving his
audience about those damn, dirty Reds -- took a similar hit: a drop from 2.2 million to 1.845 million.
In my decade or so of media coverage, MSNBC has rarely pinged my radar. Who cares about an openly left-wing outlet
being openly left-wing? If CNN would stop its laughable pose as objective, that fake news network would probably
never hear from me again.
This thing with Maddow, though, is bigger because she's a snake oil saleswoman, a bunco artist, a grifter selling
vials of hope filled with lies. For years, and only as a means to stay in the ratings fight with Sean Hannity, Maddow
deliberately played millions and millions of people for suckers, for rubes She hustled them, lied to them, deceived
and hoaxed them in the most cynical way imaginable.
Mueller's got the goods, she promised, and Trump will be marched in cuffs out of the Oval Office, and you must
tune in every single night or you will miss
The Most Important Development Yet
.
And it was all bullshit, a con, a fever swamp of desperate dot-connecting backed by maniacal talking heads and
unhinged "experts" screaming about treason! and indictments! and bombshells! and walls closing in!
So is it possible, dare we dream The Truth has set as much as 20 percent of Maddow's gullible viewers free?
Or is this just more denial and avoidance by the Cult of Rachel. The Daily Beast (that first reported Maddow's
ratings dive) describes it
this way
: "[I]t's also possible that the Mueller disappointment drove loyal viewers away in much the same way
that people avoid looking at their 401(k)s when the stock market is down."
My guess is that the suckers will be back. Maddow will pivot with a wrist flick and a never-mind right into the
next fever dream.
There's a market among neurotic leftists for the drug of delusional denial and the Hoax Queen's got an endless
supply.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter
@NolteNC
.
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here
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Editor's note
: Vladislav Surkov has been called the "Kremlin's Ideologist" and partly due to his
formidable intellectual firepower, as this article demonstrates, wields power in Russia regardless of what office he
currently holds.
A former Deputy Prime Minister and Deputy Chief of Staff to Putin, Surkov excels the white arts of
PR, Propaganda, electoral chicanery (which he denounces in this article, he of all people should know what a fraud
modern democracy is). This article appeared on Monday in Russian in Moscow, and there were immediate and predictable
howls from the Russia-hating media. '
Russia
is 'playing with the West's minds' says Putin advisor
' quips London's Independent. Surkov is something of an
obsession for Russia's tiny liberal opposition and for their fellow-traveler, Russia-hating Academia and Punditry,
and he has been written about endlessly, films have been made about him, etc. etc. Here is a good recent example by
Whitney Malam on Medium
. He is always painted as some kind of Dark Prince of Deception, which is their way of
saying he is smarter than they are.
Surkov is no longer in the limelight, but he occasionally hurls down these rhetorical thunderbolts. What he says
is always interesting and sometimes profound, and we think this essay is very much the latter. It argues that the
system which has evolved in Russia over the last 18 years is extremely durable, and could well last for centuries,
and that it is more honest and works far better than the clown show in the West.
Well, judge for yourself. The translation here is brilliant, because it was done by
regular contributor Dmitry Orlov
, who if you
haven't read, you should. One doesn't often see translations of this calibre, because the people capable of doing
them don't tend to be translators. - Charles Bausman, Editor, RI
Putin's Lasting State
"It only seems that we have a choice." These words are amazing in their depth of meaning and audacity. They were
uttered a decade and a half ago, and today they have been forgotten and are not quoted. But according to the laws of
psychology that which is forgotten affects us much more than what we remember. And these words, taken far outside the
context in which they were first uttered, have as a result become the first axiom of the new Russian statehood upon
which have been built all theories and practices of contemporary politics.
Vladislav Surkov
The illusion of choice is the most important of all illusions, the main trick of the Western way of life in
general and Western democracy in particular, which has for a long time now adhered more closely to the ideas of P.T.
Barnum than to those of Cleisthenes. The rejection of this illusion in favor of the realism of predestination has led
our society first to reflect upon its own special, sovereign version of democratic development, and then to
completely lose interest in any discussions on the subject of what democracy should be like and whether it should
exist even in principle.
This opened up paths toward the free development of the state, directed not by imported chimeras but by the logic
of historical processes, by that very "art of the possible." The impossible, unnatural and counter-historical
disintegration of Russia was, albeit belatedly, definitively arrested. Having collapsed from the level of the USSR to
the level of the Russian Federation, Russia stopped collapsing, started to recover and returned to its natural and
its only possible condition: that of a great and growing community of nations that gathers lands. It is not a humble
role that world history has assigned to our country, and it does not allow us to exit the world stage or to remain
silent among the community of nations; it does not promise us rest and it predetermines the difficult character of
our governance.
And so the Russian state continues, now as a new type of state that has never existed here before. It took form
mostly in the middle of the 2000s, and so far it has been little studied, but its uniqueness and its viability are
now apparent. The stress tests which it has passed and is now passing have shown that this specific, organically
arrived at model of political functioning provides an effective means of survival and ascension of the Russian nation
not just for the coming years, but for decades and, most likely, for the entire next century.
In this way, Russian history has by now known four main models of governance, which can provisionally be named
after their creators: the government of Ivan the Third (the Great Principality/the Kindom of Moscow and of All Rus,
XV-XVII century); the government of Peter the Great (Russian Empire, XVIII-XIX century); the government of Lenin
(USSR, XX century); and the government of Putin (Russian Federation, XXI century). Created by people who were, to use
Lev Gumilev's term, possessed of "long-term willpower," one after another these large-scale political machines
repaired themselves, adapted to circumstances along the way and provided for the relentless ascent of the Russian
World.
Putin's large-scale political machine is only now revving up and getting ready for long, difficult and interesting
work. Its engagement at full power is still far ahead, and many years from now Russia will still be the government of
Putin, just as contemporary France still calls itself the Fifth Republic of de Gaulle, Turkey (although now ruled by
anti-Kemalists) still relies on the ideology of Atatürk's "Six Arrows," and the United States still appeals to the
images and values of its half-legendary "founding fathers."
What is needed is a comprehension and a description of Putin's system of governance and the entire complex of
ideas and dimensions of Putinism as the ideology of the future -- specifically of the future, because present-day Putin
can hardly be considered a Putinist, just as, for example, Karl Marx was not a Marxist and we can't be sure that he
would have agreed to be one had he found out what that's like. But we need this explanation for the sake of everyone
who isn't Putin but would like to be like him -- and to have the possibility of applying his methods and approaches in
the coming times.
This description must not be in the form of dueling propagandas -- ours vs. theirs -- but in a language that would be
perceived as moderately heretical by both Russian and anti-Russian officialdoms. Such language can be made acceptable
to a sufficiently large audience, which is exactly what is needed, because the political system that has been made in
Russia is fit to serve not just future domestic needs but obviously has significant export potential. Demand for it
and for certain specific components of it already exists, its experience is being studied and partially adopted, and
it is being imitated by both ruling and opposition groups in many countries.
Foreign politicians accuse Russia of interfering in elections and referenda throughout the planet. But in reality
the situation is even more serious: Russia interferes with their brains, and they don't know what to do with their
own transformed consciousness. After the disastrous 1990s, once Russia turned away from all borrowed ideologies, it
started generating its own ideas and began to counterattack the West. Since then European and American experts have
been erring in their predictions more and more frequently. They are surprised and vexed by the paranormal preferences
of the electorates. In confusion, they have sounded the alarm about an outbreak of populism. They can call it that,
if they happen to be at a loss for words.
Meanwhile, the interest of foreigners in the Russian political algorithm is easy to understand: there are no
prophets in their lands, but everything that is happening to them today has been prophesied from Russia a long time
ago.
When everyone was still in love with globalization and made noise about a flat world without borders, Moscow
pointedly reminded them that sovereignty and national interests are important. Back then many people accused us of
"naďve" attachment to these old things, which had supposedly fallen out of fashion long ago. They taught us that it's
futile to hold on to XIX-century values, but that we should bravely step into the XXI century, where there supposedly
won't be any sovereign nations or nation-states. However, the XXI century is turning out the way we said it would.
British Brexit, American #GreatAgain, anti-immigrant enclosure of Europe -- these are but the first few items in a long
list of commonplace manifestations of deglobalization, re-sovereignization and nationalism.
When on every corner someone lauded the Internet as an inviolable space of unlimited freedom, where everyone is
allowed to be anyone and all are equal, it was specifically from Russia that came a sobering question for
Internet-addled humanity: "Who we are on the World Wide Web, spiders or flies?" And now everyone, including the most
freedom-loving of bureaucracies, is busy trying to untangle the Web and accusing Facebook of accommodating foreign
interlopers. The once free virtual space, which had been advertised as a prototype of the coming heaven on Earth, has
been seized and cordoned off by cyber-police and cyber-criminals, cyber-armies and cyber-spies, cyber-terrorists and
cyber-moralists.
When the hegemony of the "hegemon" was not contested by anyone, the great American dream of world domination was
close to being fulfilled, and many people hallucinated the end of history with the final comment of "the people are
silent," in that silence there came Putin's Munich speech. At the time it sounded as dissenting, but today everything
in it seems self-evident: nobody is happy with America, including the Americans themselves.
The previously little-known Turkish political term
derin devlet
has been popularized by American media.
Translated into English as "deep state" it was then picked up by the Russian media. The term indicates a harsh,
absolutely nondemocratic networked organization of real authoritarian structures hidden behind showy democratic
institutions. This mechanism, which in practice exerts its authority through acts of violence, bribery and
manipulation, and remains hidden deep beneath the surface of a hypocritical and simple-minded civil society which it
manipulates while bribing or repressing all who accuse it.
Having discovered in their midst an unpleasant "deep state," Americans were not particularly surprised, since they
have long suspected that it exists. If there is a "deep net" and a "dark net," then why not a "deep state" or even a
"dark state"? From the depths and darkness of this un-exhibited and unadvertised power there float up shining mirages
of democracy special-made for mass consumption that feature the illusion of choice, the feeling of freedom, delusions
of superiority and so on.
Mistrust and envy, which democracy uses as prioritized sources of social energy, inevitably lead to a sharpening
of criticism and an increased level of anxiety. Haters, trolls and the angry bots that have joined them have formed a
screechy majority that has forced out the once dominant, respectable middle class which once upon a time set quite a
different tone.
Nobody believes any more in the good intentions of public politicians. They are envied and are therefore
considered corrupt, shrewd, or simply scoundrels. Popular political serials, such as "The Boss" and "The House of
Cards," paint correspondingly murky scenes of the establishment's day-to-day.
A scoundrel must not be allowed to go too far for the simple reason that he is a scoundrel. But when all around
you (we surmise) there are only scoundrels, one is forced to use scoundrels to restrain other scoundrels. As one
pounds out a wedge using another wedge, one dislodges a scoundrel using another scoundrel There is a wide choice of
scoundrels and obfuscated rules designed to make their battles result in something like a tie. This is how a
beneficial system of checks and balances comes about -- a dynamic equilibrium of villainy, a balance of avarice, a
harmony of swindles. But if someone forgets that this is just a game and starts to behave disharmoniously, the
ever-vigilant deep state hurries to the rescue and an invisible hand drags the apostate down into the murky depths.
There is nothing particularly frightening in this proposed image of Western democracy. All you have to do is
change your perspective a little, and it would no longer seem scary. But it leaves a sour feeling, and a Western
citizen starts to spin his head around in search of other models and other ways of being. And sees Russia.
Our system, as in general everything else that's ours, is no more graceful, but it is more honest. And although
the phrase "more honest" is not a synonym of "better" for everyone, honesty does have its charms.
Our state is not split up into deep and external; it is built as a whole, with all of its parts and its
manifestations facing out. The most brutal constructions of its authoritarian frame are displayed as part of the
façade, undisguised by any architectural embellishments. The bureaucracy, even when it tries to do something on the
sly, doesn't try too hard to cover its tracks, as if assuming that "everyone understands everything anyway."
The great internal tension caused by the need to control huge, heterogeneous geographic areas, and by the constant
participation in the thick of geopolitical struggle make the military and policing functions of the government the
most important and decisive. In keeping with tradition, they are not hidden but, quite the opposite, demonstrated.
Businessmen, who consider military pursuits to be of lesser status than commercial ones, have never ruled Russia
(almost never; the exceptions were a few months in 1917 and a few years in the 1990s). Neither have liberals
(fellow-travelers of businessmen) whose teachings are based on the negation of anything the least bit police-like.
Thus, there was nobody in charge who would curtain off the truth with illusions, bashfully shoving into the
background and obscuring as much as possible the main prerogative of any government -- to be a weapon of defense and
attack.
There is no deep state in Russia -- all of it is on display -- but there is a deep nation.
On its shiny surface sparkles the elite which, century after century (let's give it its due) has involved the
people in its various undertakings -- party conferences, wars, elections, economic experiments. The deep nation takes
part in these undertakings, but remains somewhat aloof, and doesn't appear at the surface but leads it own,
completely different life down in its own depths. Two lives of the nation, one on the surface and one in the depths,
sometimes run in opposite directions, sometimes in the same direction, but they never merge.
The deep nation is always as cagey as can be, unreachable for sociological surveys, agitation, threats or any
other form of direct influence. The understanding of what it is, what it thinks and what it wants often comes
suddenly and too late, and not to those who can do anything about it.
Rare is the sociologist who would venture to define whether the deep nation is equivalent to its population or is
a part of it, and if a part of it, then which one. At different times it was taken to be the peasants, the
proletariat, the non-party-members, the hipsters, the government employees. People searched for it and tried to
engage it. They called it the executor of God's will, or just the opposite. Sometimes they decided that it is
fictional and doesn't exist in reality, and launched galloping reforms without looking back upon it, but quickly
bashed their foreheads against it and were forced to concede that "something really does exist." More than once it
retreated under the press of domestic or foreign conquerors, but it always came back.
With its gigantic mass the deep nation creates an insurmountable force of cultural gravitation which unites the
nation and drags and pins down to earth (to the native land) the elite when it periodically attempts to soar above it
in a cosmopolitan fashion.
Nationhood, whatever that is taken to mean, is a precursor of the state. It predetermines its form, restricts the
fantasies of theoreticians and forces practitioners to carry out certain acts. It is a powerful attractor, and all
political trajectories without exception lead back to it. In Russia, one can set out from any position -- conservatism,
socialism, liberalism -- but you will always end up with approximately the same thing. That is, with the thing that
actually exists.
The ability to hear and to understand the nation, to see all the way through it, through its entire depth, and to
act accordingly -- that is the unique and most important virtue of Putin's government. It is adequate for the needs of
the people, it follows the same course with it, and this means that it is not subject to destructive overloads from
history's countercurrents. This makes it effective and long-lasting.
In this new system all institutions are subordinated to the main task: trust-based communication and interaction
between the head of state and the citizens. The various branches of government come together at the person of the
leader and are considered valuable not in and of themselves but only to the extent to which they provide a connection
with him. Aside from them, and acting around formal structures and elite groups, operate informal methods of
communication. When stupidity, backwardness or corruption create interference in the lines of communication with the
people, energetic measures are taken to restore audibility.
The multilayered political institutions which Russia had adopted from the West are sometimes seen as partly
ritualistic and established for the sake of looking "like everyone else," so that the peculiarities of our political
culture wouldn't draw too much attention from our neighbors, didn't irritate or frighten them. They are like a Sunday
suit, put on when visiting others, while at home we dress as we do at home.
In essence, society only trusts the head of state. Whether this has something to do with the pride of an
unconquered people, or the desire to directly access the truth, or anything else, is hard to say, but it is a fact,
and it is not a new fact. What's new is that the government does not ignore this fact but takes it into account and
uses it as a point of departure in its undertakings.
It would be an oversimplification to reduce this theme to the oft-cited "faith in the good czar." The deep nation
is not the least bit naďve and definitely does not consider soft-heartedness as a positive trait in a czar. Closer to
the truth is that it thinks of a good leader the same way as Einstein thought of God: ingenious but not malicious.
The contemporary model of the Russian state starts with trust and relies on trust. This is its main distinction
from the Western model, which cultivates mistrust and criticism. And this is the source of its power.
Our new state will have a long and glorious history in this new century. It will not break. It will act on its
own, winning and retaining prize-winning spots in the highest league of geopolitical struggle. Sooner or later
everyone will be forced to come to terms with this -- including all those who currently demand that Russia "change its
behavior." Because it only seems as if they have a choice.
Fred - I don't think it's going to go away that easily. This is the BBC web site today, again
keeping alive much the same theme as your man of courage. We're moving on from whether Trump
was a Russian agent to whether Trump deliberately attempted to stop us finding out whether he
was a Russian agent -
"But Mr Mueller declined to draw a conclusion on whether Mr Trump had obstructed
justice, saying only that the president could not be exonerated.
Attorney General Barr, who was appointed by the president, concluded in his summary of
the report that there was not enough evidence to determine if the president had committed the
offence."
So it's too useful a theme to be let go entirely, and fits with the general suspicion of
Russian interference.
It's a difficult one, that. Looking at the Integrity Initiative and 77 Brigade it's clear
that information warfare at all levels - academia, the media, on down to the little
subsidized web sites and right on down to the individuals who are paid to insert comments on
social media - is now regarded in England as an integral part of Intelligence work.
Presumably everyone else is doing it too so why not the Russians? But to trace the huge
political movements of our time back to Moscow, as if they were due to sinister Russians
cleverly playing us via social media and other propaganda outlets, seems to me to be grossly
overdone. After all, if it were that easy it would have worked for the West too. Iran would
now be another Syria and Syria long since gone.
No, even the most ardent Russophobes on our side of the Atlantic might have to admit
sometimes that the reason we're screwed up in Europe at present is that we've screwed
ourselves up. We are not uniformly happy prosperous peoples who would continue to be
uniformly happy and prosperous were it not for Moscow. So it must be in the States.
Even so, the Russians are still the get-out for many. On English web sites "Putin done it"
surfaces regularly as the reason for us voting Brexit. There were suggestions that he had
stirred up the Yellow Vests in France. The Italians are sometimes viewed with suspicion for
the same reason.
And I got caught up in an unusual traffic hold-up just this morning. I can't prove to you
it was the Russians. But can you prove to me it wasn't?
"... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
"Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as
European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot
toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012
The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles
across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim.
The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political
establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.
Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division"
in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington.
That's what Russiagate is really all about.
US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly
confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy
focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence."
In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten
the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region
in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically
axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.
. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its
enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's
known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic
Books, page 31, 1997)
14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and
demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It
was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt
from the speech:
"As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot
point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be
smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership,
secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will
therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific
region
Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge
technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than
half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015,
we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."
("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)
The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy
theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and
diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's
provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao
summed it up like this:
"The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military
alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American
government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on
us from the east, south, and west."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced
Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's
relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.
Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war
era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted
from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and
gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening
rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred
and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.
Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors
in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention
in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That
plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which
acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging
everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.
This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail
Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.
What does that mean in practical terms?
It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community
(The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces.
Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts
to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)
Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's
grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.
As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains
how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China.
Here's an excerpt:
"China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They
are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress
their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity."
They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories,
employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)
Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries
around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')
"Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries
target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation
bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news
stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense
one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:
"Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively
compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing
a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political
and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.
We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control
in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts,
including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .
Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement
with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests
" ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community",
USG )
Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that
Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East,
and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault
with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given
Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:
"We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy
complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps
in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines
start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political
whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly
relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."
The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate.
This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012,
Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to
re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it,"
she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."
"Slow down or prevent it"?
Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national
debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?
Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and
thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.
But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free
market system more effectively that the US.
Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.
"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We
are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a
security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition,
not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."
(Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign
policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)
"Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions
of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound
up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:
"China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model
"China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .
Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.
Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions
and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system",
is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line,
because it's not a fair system.
These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon
and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with
Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At
the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The
greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion,
the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.
And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed
to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with
the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes
on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations
(PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately
the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."
The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and
perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the
The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia,
Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles,
even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight
each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.
Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of
the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with
Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite –
US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.
Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan
(incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants
far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.
Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight
– whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience
to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning
a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan,
watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia
and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe.
And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is
a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year
there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the
real problem for the U.S.
"The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes
and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their
vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "
Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence
officer.
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing
"Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist"
and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation
of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself
proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".
Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives'
is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent
arrogance.
Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how
difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.
One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral
'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).
"The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its
tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda,
but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire
Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."
TRUE!
I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.
"Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants
in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn
the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging,
and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle
Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."
Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist
Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform
that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense
backing down to prevent mass slaughter.
Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own
backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South
America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And
he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic
sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields
related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing
more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki
himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American
Primacy".
Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability
to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the
military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't
apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.
(Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981
"Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services
began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979
In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give
a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted
about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.
@DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm
Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?
Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist
revolutionary groups?
This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by
any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks
total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
@anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic
states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons
to attack Russia.
The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian
Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in
the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against
Russia.
"... This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else. ..."
"Russia is an inalienable and organic part of Greater Europe and European civilization. Our citizens think of themselves as
European. That's why Russia proposes moving towards the creation of a common economic space from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean,
a community referred to by Russian experts as 'the Union of Europe' which will strengthen Russia's potential in its economic pivot
toward the 'New Asia.'" Vladimir Putin, President of the Russian Federation, February 2012
The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its tentacles
across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda, but the victim.
The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire Washington political
establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony.
Try to imagine for a minute, that the hacking claims were not part of a sinister plan by Vladimir Putin "to sow discord and division"
in the United States, but were conjured up to create an external threat that would justify an aggressive response from Washington.
That's what Russiagate is really all about.
US policymakers and their allies in the military and Intelligence agencies, know that relations with Russia are bound to get increasingly
confrontational, mainly because Washington is determined to pursue its ambitious "pivot" to Asia plan. This new regional strategy
focuses on "strengthening bilateral security alliances, expanding trade and investment, and forging a broad-based military presence."
In short, the US is determined to maintain its global supremacy by establishing military outposts across Eurasia, continuing to tighten
the noose around Russia and China, and reinforcing its position as the dominant player in the most populous and prosperous region
in the world. The plan was first presented in its skeletal form by the architect of Washington's plan to rule the world, Zbigniew
Brzezinski. Here's how Jimmy Carter's former national security advisor summed it up in his 1997 magnum opus, The Grand Chessboard:
American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives:
"For America, the chief geopolitical prize is Eurasia (p.30) .. Eurasia is the globe's largest continent and is geopolitically
axial. A power that dominates Eurasia would control two of the world's three most advanced and economically productive regions.
. About 75 per cent of the world's people live in Eurasia, and most of the world's physical wealth is there as well, both in its
enterprises and underneath its soil. Eurasia accounts for 60 per cent of the world's GNP and about three-fourths of the world's
known energy resources." ("The Grand Chessboard:American Primacy And Its Geostrategic Imperatives", Zbigniew Brzezinski, Basic
Books, page 31, 1997)
14 years after those words were written, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took up the banner of imperial expansion and
demanded a dramatic shift in US foreign policy that would focus primarily on increasing America's military footprint in Asia. It
was Clinton who first coined the term "pivot" in a speech she delivered in 2010 titled "America's Pacific Century". Here's an excerpt
from the speech:
"As the war in Iraq winds down and America begins to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan, the United States stands at a pivot
point. Over the last 10 years, we have allocated immense resources to those two theaters. In the next 10 years, we need to be
smart and systematic about where we invest time and energy, so that we put ourselves in the best position to sustain our leadership,
secure our interests, and advance our values. One of the most important tasks of American statecraft over the next decade will
therefore be to lock in a substantially increased investment -- diplomatic, economic, strategic, and otherwise -- in the Asia-Pacific
region
Open markets in Asia provide the United States with unprecedented opportunities for investment, trade, and access to cutting-edge
technology ..American firms (need) to tap into the vast and growing consumer base of Asia The region already generates more than
half of global output and nearly half of global trade. As we strive to meet President Obama's goal of doubling exports by 2015,
we are looking for opportunities to do even more business in Asia and our investment opportunities in Asia's dynamic markets."
("America's Pacific Century", Secretary of State Hillary Clinton", Foreign Policy Magazine, 2011)
The pivot strategy is not some trifling rehash of the 19th century "Great Game" promoted by think-tank fantasists and conspiracy
theorists. It is Washington's premier foreign policy doctrine, a 'rebalancing' theory that focuses on increasing US military and
diplomatic presence across the Asian landmass. Naturally, NATO's ominous troop movements on Russia's western flank and Washington's
provocative naval operations in the South China Sea have sent up red flags in Moscow and Beijing. Former Chinese President Hu Jintao
summed it up like this:
"The United States has strengthened its military deployments in the Asia-Pacific region, strengthened the US-Japan military
alliance, strengthened strategic cooperation with India, improved relations with Vietnam, inveigled Pakistan, established a pro-American
government in Afghanistan, increased arms sales to Taiwan, and so on. They have extended outposts and placed pressure points on
us from the east, south, and west."
Russian President Vladimir Putin has been equally critical of Washington's erratic behavior. NATO's eastward expansion has convinced
Putin that the US will continue to be a disruptive force on the continent for the foreseeable future. Both leaders worry that Washington's
relentless provocations will lead to an unexpected clash that will end in war.
Even so, the political class has fully embraced the pivot strategy as a last-gasp attempt to roll back the clock to the post war
era when the world's industrial centers were in ruins and America was the only game in town. Now the center of gravity has shifted
from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and
gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn the applecart by bullying allies and threatening
rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging, and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred
and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end.
Washington has many ways of dealing with its enemies, but none of these strategies have dampened the growth of its competitors
in the east. China is poised to overtake the US as the world's biggest economy sometime in the next 2 decades while Russia's intervention
in Syria has rolled back Washington's plan to topple Bashar al Assad and consolidate its grip on the resource-rich Middle East. That
plan has now collapsed forcing US policymakers to scrap the War on Terror altogether and switch to a "great power competition" which
acknowledges that the US can no longer unilaterally impose its will wherever it goes. Challenges to America's dominance are emerging
everywhere particularly in the region where the US hopes to reign supreme, Asia.
This is why the entire national security state now stands foursquare behind the improbable pivot plan. It's a desperate "Hail
Mary" attempt to preserve the decaying unipolar world order.
What does that mean in practical terms?
It means that the White House (the National Security Strategy) the Pentagon (National Defense Strategy) and the Intelligence Community
(The Worldwide Threat Assessment) have all drawn up their own respective analyses of the biggest threats the US currently faces.
Naturally, Russia is at the very top of those lists. Russia has derailed Washington's proxy war in Syria, frustrated US attempts
to establish itself across Central Asia, and strengthened ties with the EU hoping to "create a harmonious community of economies
from Lisbon to Vladivostok." (Putin)
Keep in mind, the US does not feel threatened by the possibility of a Russian attack, but by Russia's ability to thwart Washington's
grandiose imperial ambitions in Asia.
As we noted, the National Security Strategy (NSS) is a statutorily mandated document produced by the White House that explains
how the President intends to implement his national security vision. Not surprisingly, the document's main focus is Russia and China.
Here's an excerpt:
"China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity. They
are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress
their societies and expand their influence." (Neither Russia nor China are attempting to erode American security and prosperity."
They are merely growing their economies and expanding their markets. If US corporations reinvested their capital into factories,
employee training and R and D instead of stock buybacks and executive compensation, then they would be better able to complete globally.)
Here's more: "Through modernized forms of subversive tactics, Russia interferes in the domestic political affairs of countries
around the world." (This is a case of the 'pot calling the kettle black.')
"Today, actors such as Russia are using information tools in an attempt to undermine the legitimacy of democracies. Adversaries
target media, political processes, financial networks, and personal data." (The western media behemoth is the biggest disinformation
bullhorn the world has ever seen. RT and Sputnik don't hold a candle to the ginormous MSM 'Wurlitzer' that controls the cable news
stations, the newspapers and most of the print media. The Mueller Report proves beyond a doubt that the politically-motivated nonsense
one reads in the media is neither reliably sourced nor trustworthy.)
The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community is even more explicit in its attacks on Russia. Check it out:
"Threats to US national security will expand and diversify in the coming year, driven in part by China and Russia as they respectively
compete more intensely with the United States and its traditional allies and partners . We assess that Moscow will continue pursuing
a range of objectives to expand its reach, including undermining the US-led liberal international order, dividing Western political
and security institutions, demonstrating Russia's ability to shape global issues, and bolstering Putin's domestic legitimacy.
We assess that Moscow has heightened confidence, based on its success in helping restore the Asad regime's territorial control
in Syria, ·Russia seeks to boost its military presence and political influence in the Mediterranean and Red Seas mediate conflicts,
including engaging in the Middle East Peace Process and Afghanistan reconciliation .
Russia will continue pressing Central Asia's leaders to support Russian-led economic and security initiatives and reduce engagement
with Washington. Russia and China are likely to intensify efforts to build influence in Europe at the expense of US interests
" ("The Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community",
USG )
Notice how the Intelligence Community summary does not suggest that Russia poses an imminent military threat to the US, only that
Russia has restored order in Syria, strengthened ties with China, emerged as an "honest broker" among countries in the Middle East,
and used the free market system to improve relations with its trading partners and grow its economy. The IC appears to find fault
with Russia because it is using the system the US created to better advantage than the US. This is entirely understandable given
Putin's determination to draw Europe and Asia closer together through a region-wide economic integration plan. Here's Putin:
"We must consider more extensive cooperation in the energy sphere, up to and including the formation of a common European energy
complex. The Nord Stream gas pipeline under the Baltic Sea and the South Stream pipeline under the Black Sea are important steps
in that direction. These projects have the support of many governments and involve major European energy companies. Once the pipelines
start operating at full capacity, Europe will have a reliable and flexible gas-supply system that does not depend on the political
whims of any nation. This will strengthen the continent's energy security not only in form but in substance. This is particularly
relevant in the light of the decision of some European states to reduce or renounce nuclear energy."
The gas pipelines and high-speed rail are the arteries that will bind the continents together and strengthen the new EU-Asia superstate.
This is Washington's greatest nightmare, a massive, thriving free trade zone beyond its reach and not subject to its rules. In 2012,
Hillary Clinton acknowledged this new threat and promised to do everything in her power to destroy it. Check out this excerpt:
"U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton described efforts to promote greater economic integration in Eurasia as "a move to
re-Sovietize the region." . "We know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it,"
she said at an international conference in Dublin on December 6, 2012, Radio Free Europe."
"Slow down or prevent it"?
Why? Because EU-Asia growth and prosperity will put pressure on US debt markets, US corporate interests, US (ballooning) national
debt, and the US Dollar? Is that why Hillary is so committed to sabotaging Putin's economic integration plan?
Indeed, it is. Washington wants to block progress and prosperity in the east in order to extend the lifespan of a doddering and
thoroughly-bankrupt state that is presently $22 trillion in the red but continues to write checks on an overdrawn account.
But Russia shouldn't be blamed for Washington's profligate behavior, that's not Putin's fault. Moscow is merely using the free
market system more effectively that the US.
Now consider the Pentagon's 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS) which reiterates many of the same themes as the other two documents.
"Today, we are emerging from a period of strategic atrophy, aware that our competitive military advantage has been eroding. We
are facing increased global disorder, characterized by decline in the long-standing rules-based international order -- creating a
security environment more complex and volatile than any we have experienced in recent memory. Inter-state strategic competition,
not terrorism, is now the primary concern in U.S. national security."
(Naturally, the "security environment" is going to be more challenging when 'regime change' is the cornerstone of one's foreign
policy. Of course, the NDS glosses over that sad fact. Here's more:)
"Russia has violated the borders of nearby nations and pursues veto power over the economic, diplomatic, and security decisions
of its neighbors ..(Baloney. Russia has been a force for stability in Syria and Ukraine. If Obama had his way, Syria would have wound
up like Iraq, a hellish wastelands occupied by foreign mercenaries. Is that how the Pentagon measures success?) Here's more:
"China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model
"China and Russia are now undermining the international order from within the system .
Get the picture? China and Russia, China and Russia, China and Russia. Bad, bad, bad.
Why? Because they are successfully implementing their own development model which is NOT programed to favor US financial institutions
and corporations. That's the whole thing in a nutshell. The only reason Russia and China are a threat to the "rules-based system",
is because Washington insists on being the only one who makes the rules. That's why foreign leaders are no longer falling in line,
because it's not a fair system.
These assessments represent the prevailing opinion of senior-level policymakers across the spectrum. (The White House, the Pentagon
and the Intelligence Community) The USG is unanimous in its judgement that a harsher more combative approach is needed to deal with
Russia and China. Foreign policy elites want to put the nation on the path to more confrontation, more conflict and more war. At
the same time, none of these three documents suggest that Russia has any intention of launching an attack on the United States. The
greatest concern is the effect that emerging competitors will have on Washington's provocative plan for military and economic expansion,
the threat that Russia and China pose to America's tenuous grip on global power. It is that fear that drives US foreign policy.
And this is broader context into which we must fit the Russia investigation. The reason the Russia hacking furor has been allowed
to flourish and spread despite the obvious lack of any supporting evidence, is because the vilifying of Russia segues perfectly with
the geopolitical interests of elites in the government. The USG now works collaboratively with the media to influence public attitudes
on issues that are important to the powerful foreign policy establishment. The ostensible goal of these psychological operations
(PSYOP) is to selectively use information on "audiences to influence their emotions, motives, objective reasoning, and ultimately
the behavior of organizations, groups, and individuals."
The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes and
perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the
The emerging Euro-Asian power block is very heterogeneous. Russia, China, and the smaller affiliated players like Central Asia,
Iran, Syria, Turkey don't agree on almost anything. They have different cultures, religions, economies, demographic profiles,
even writing systems. The most rational strategy to prevent the Euro-Asian block from consolidating would be to get them to fight
each other. Alternatively, find the weakest link and attack it in an area where its reluctant allies don't share its interests.
Exactly the opposite has happened in the last 5-10 years: US has seemingly worked overtime to get China-Russia alliance of
the ground. They used to distrust each other, today, after Ukraine, South China See, etc they have become close allies. Same with
Iran and Syria: instead of letting them stew in their own internal problems – mostly religious and having a nepotistic elite –
US has managed to turn the fight into an external geo-political struggle, literally invited Russia to join in, and ended up losing.
Bush turned Iraq from a fanatically anti-Iran bastion to a reliable ally of Iran and started an un-winnable land war in Afghanistan
(incredible!). Obama turned Libya, the richest and most stable African country that threatened no-one and kept African migrants
far away, into a chaotic hellhole where slave trade flourishes and millions of Sub-Saharan Africans can use it to move on to Europe.
Then Obama tried to coup-de-etat Erdogan in Turkey, and – even worse – failed miserably. This gang can't shoot straight
– whatever they put in their position papers is meaningless drivel because they are too stupid to think. They have no patience
to wait for the right time to move, no ability to manage on the ground allies, and an aversion to casualties that makes winning
a war impossible. Today Trump threatens Germany over its energy security (pipelines), further antagonises Turkey and Erdogan,
watches helplessly as EU becomes the next UN (lame and irrelevant), and bets everything on a few small allies like Saudi Arabia
and Izrael that are of almost no use in Euro-Asia.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that ' maybe I had bad information ' is no master of the universe.
And he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or ' information warfare ' – is
a pathetic sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
the russophobia is just drama to keep the MIC spending at $700+ billion per year
there is no way to justify that level of spending and pretend they don't have $25 billion one time to actually help solve the
real problem for the U.S.
"The USG now sees the minds of ordinary Americans as a legitimate target for their influence campaigns. They regard attitudes
and perceptions as "the cognitive domain of the battlespace" which they must exploit in order to build public support for their
vastly unpopular wars and interventions. "
Here is a short guide on how to detect subversion of the mind by the media and their handlers by a former military intelligence
officer.
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing
"Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia", "Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an "realist"
and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation
of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki himself
proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American Primacy".
Recognizing this however one can't escape the conclusion that this "Grand Chessboard" with its consistent 'amoral realist imperatives'
is serving up inherently immoral 'imperatives' as inescapable options dressed up in academic language and with absolutely abhorrent
arrogance.
Stating that Brennan's Russophobia is somehow a degeneration of Brzezinki's "Grand Chessboard" is completely overlooking how
difficult it would be to outdo Brzezinki's own total moral degeneration.
One has to recognize that by now the only bipartisan aspect of US policy can be found in sharing these despicable and immoral
'imperatives' to maintain that "American Primacy" at all cost (of course to the rest of the world).
"The allegations of 'Russian meddling' only make sense if they're put into a broader geopolitical context. Once we realize that
Washington is implementing an aggressive "containment" strategy to militarily encircle Russia and China in order to spread its
tentacles across Central Asian, then we begin to understand that Russia is not the perpetrator of the hostilities and propaganda,
but the victim. The Russia hacking allegations are part of a larger asymmetrical-information war that has been joined by the entire
Washington political establishment. The objective is to methodically weaken an emerging rival while reinforcing US global hegemony."
TRUE!
I would suggest that the initials 'US' in the final sentence be changed to: Anglo-Zionist Empire.
"Now the center of gravity has shifted from west to east, leaving Washington with just two options: Allow the emerging giants
in Asia to connect their high-speed rail and gas pipelines to Europe creating the world's biggest free trade zone, or try to overturn
the applecart by bullying allies and threatening rivals, by implementing sanctions that slow growth and send currencies plunging,
and by arming jihadist proxies to fuel ethnic hatred and foment political unrest. Clearly, the choice has already been made. Uncle
Sam has decided to fight til the bitter end."
Just like the Brit Empire – of which the Yank Empire is merely Part 2, the part where it becomes obvious that it is the Anglo-Zionist
Empire, which, like a band of screeching Pharisees standing on the walls of Jerusalem hurling curses at the Romans they inform
that Jehovah will soon wipe out all Romans to save His Chosen Race, would choose utter destruction for all over any common sense
backing down to prevent mass slaughter.
Nothing harmed US more than Brzezinski's ideology. US did build up far east with their investments, while neglecting their own
backyard. US should have build up rather North and South America and make it the envy of the world. Neglecting particularly South
America now created Desperate south American people, who have no jobs and no future and these people are now invading US.
A guy who says about the Russia-gate collusion fiasco that 'maybe I had bad information' is no master of the universe. And
he run the joint under Obama. Complaining about Russia saying bad stuff about you – or 'information warfare' – is a pathetic
sign of weakness. Maybe the testosterone levels have dropped more than we have been told.
Testosterone plus steady, unrelenting decline and corruption of American "elites" most of who have no background in any fields
related to actual effective governance especially in national security (military) and diplomatic fields. Zbig's book is also nothing
more than doctrine-mongering based on complete lack of understanding of Russian history.
Reluctant to use that Hitler comparison one ought to read the Introduction of the "Grand Chessboard" in which Brzezinki
himself proudly refers to both Hitler and Stalin sharing his ideas about control over Eurasia as a prerequisite for that "American
Primacy".
Zbig was a political "scientist" (which is not a science) by education, fact aggravated by his Russophobia, and thus inability
to grasp fundamentals of military power and warfare–a defining characteristic of American "elites". He, obviously, missed on the
military-technological development of 1970s through 1990s, to arrive to the inevitable conclusion that classic "geopolitics" doesn't
apply anymore. Today we all can observe how it doesn't apply and is made obsolete.
(Jan.1998) US history – "How Jimmy Carter I Started the Mujahideen" – Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor 1977-1981
"Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services
began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security
adviser to President Carter.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Taliban Pakistan Afghanistan pep talk 1979
In 1979 Carters National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski went into Pakistans border regions with Afghanistan to give
a little pep talk to some prospective majehadeen (Holy Warriors). In a 1997 interview for CNN's Cold War Series, Brzezinski hinted
about the Carter Administration's proactive Afghanistan policy before the Soviet invasion in 1979, that he had conceived.
@DESERT FOX Why was it that the Brit Empire kept acting throughout the later 18th, the 19th and early 20th centuries to harm
Russia, even when it technically was allied with Russia? Why the Crimean War, for example?
Why, for example, was Brit secret service all over the assassination of Rasputin and tied in multiple ways to most non-Marxist
revolutionary groups?
This entire article fleshes out one central truth – capitalism as practiced by the US Government inevitably involves war by
any and all means, seeking total domination of every human being on the planet, foriegn or native to the US Hegemon. It seeks
total rule of the rich and powerful over everyone else.
@anon Like the Ukranians, the 'Balts' virtually always are controlled by somebody else. When Russia does not control the Baltic
states, they are controlled by either Poles or Germans. Russians know what that means: the Baltic states are then used as weapons
to attack Russia.
The region is much calmer when Russia controls the Baltic states, and that is before taking into consideration how the Polish-Lithuanian
Empire turned its Jews lose to terrorize all Orthodox Christians and how Germanic states later used Lutheranism as a force in
the Baltics to ignite war with Russia and, under the queer Frederick the Great also used Jewish bankers to finance wars against
Russia.
@Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in
Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it.
Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the
Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.
Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I
could live with the Reichsmark.
@anon
As most aggressive and most rotten player in the most rotten and most massmurderous part of
humanity, the Anglosphere, you dare to compare Russian dealing with a Soviet hunger
catastrophe, which occured all over the Soviet Union, btw worst in Kazakhstan and western
Siberia, and in Ukraine, where consfiscation of grain occured mainly by Ukrainian Soviets,
and hunger in Ukraine mostly in eastern Ukraine, where people felt and feel close to Russia,
with USAist ongoing practice of aggressive wars, genocidal supremacy and massmurder?
See as well: Philipp Merl : Sowjetisierung in Wirtschaft und Landwirtschaft, EGO (European
History Online), pdf.
That solid German historians unanimously revealed propagandistic attempts to sell the
1932/33 famine remotely as equivalent to Anglosaxon hunger genocides, like that of the Irish,
Indians and Iranians, has nothing to do with historiography, but with anti-Russian hate
propaganda, can be clearly deduced from publications by the German historians Jürgen
Zarusky and Jörg Ganzenmüller.
The best places to learn about Nazi atrocities is btw Berlin.
However, where is the place where the two intertwined most massmurderous nations of the
planet openly expose their crimes, which are the most horrendous and giant humanity has
committed?
It simply does not exist.
Nobody else has liquidated more than 90% of the indigenous populatio on robbed territory
but USAist and Australians, both degenerated Anglosaxons.
Nobody else has robbed as much territory from a neighbour country than the US has done with
Mexico.
Nobody committed comparable genocidal losses on Indian ground, Iranian ground, even
Chinese
ground – in proportion, Japanese in WW2 could not compete, than Brits. In Africa,
British bloodtoll is likewise unequalled – France and Belgium come close behind, but do
not match that bloodtoll.
No other nation, not even in Europe and not even Nazi Germany, has committed a genocide of
neighbours which resembles what Brits die with their Irish neighbour country, whose
population was three times in history reduced by 50% by them.
From the last genocide in the midst of the 19th century, Ireland has not even recovered
after 150 years: There population of 12 million Irish then was never achieved again.
In comparison: In the Soviet Union, which btw was not identical with Russia, Ukrainian
population was 29.5 million in 1926 and 40.469 million in 1939. This is official Soviet
Census, which Ukraine keeps still as their official national census. And you have the cheek
to suggest with a solely propagandistic term that Georgian Stalin, whatever his
responsibility in the famine was, committed anything comparable with Anglosaxon ongoing
slaughtering?
The US started their history with the eracidation of 90% of native Americans.
They have , in their short history, conducted more than a hundred aggressive wars, were in
wars, which were never against anybody who had remotely threatened USAists on their ground,
325 years in 349 years of US history and have, since 1949 alone, caused further 30 million
causualties minimum.
And in that role, they were since the Round Table of Cecil Rhode the followers of the most
genocidal nation of the planet, Brits, whose suprematist colonialism massmurdered more than
100 million people minimum.
In the Cold War, btw, the US was most willing to conduct a nuclear Holocaust of 200
million western Europeans, 200 million eastern Europeans, including Russians, and 200 million
eastern Asians – if Soviet atomic bombs had not posed the danger that USAists could die
a nuclear death in that case as well. https://www.democracynow.org/2017/12/6/doomsday_machine_daniel_ellsberg_reveals_he
AND YOU HAVE NEVER CEASED TO BE MASSMURDERERS – EVEN WILLING TO COMMIT HUMANOCIDE AS
A WHOLE – TO MAINTAIN HEGEMONY OF THE WORLD's CULTURALLY MOST DISTORTED AND DEGENERATED
NATION.
And you vermin dare to point with a finger on Russians?
"... the behavior of the US after the Cold War suggests NATO was primarily for US hegemony and not for fending off the Evil Empire of the Soviets. ..."
"... After all, Gorbachev and Reagan ended the Cold War. And then communism collapsed(or was collapsed from the top) in Russia. And Russia was reaching out to the West for friendship and aid. Russia was at its weakest position since who knows? And it was totally friendly to the West. It was a tamed bear. But what did the US do when Russia was most pro-Western and most willing to submit(and even surrender its sovereignty)? The US expanded NATO up to Russian borders. ..."
"... Why expand NATO when there's no more Soviet threat and when Russia wants to be a friendly player with the West? It's like the moment when Vito Corleone realizes it had been Barzini all along. ..."
"... It seems NATO was never about the principle of defending free nations from the Soviets. It was about imposing US hegemony on Europe. So, the chances are that, even if Soviets had ended the Occupation of Eastern Europe soon after end of WWII, the US would have created something like NATO and pushed it all the way up to Soviet borders. ..."
"... @Asagirian As Lord Ismay once said: "The purpose of NATO is to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down." ..."
It's been our understanding that NATO was necessary
because of the Iron Curtain. Soviets took over Eastern Europe and denied it freedom, and there
was the danger that Soviets would expand further West.
So, US and Western European nations made a Three Musketeers or Mickey Mouseketeers pact of
'one for all and all for one'.
Now, suppose we do a thought experiment of alternative history: The Soviets withdrew from
Eastern Europe, and Eastern European nations like Poland and Hungary became democratic and
capitalist soon after WWII. And there is no East and West Germany but just democratic
Germany.
Would NATO still have been created? If so, for what? To contain the Soviets? But the Soviets
left Eastern Europe in our hypothetical scenario. If NATO was created even after Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe soon after WWII,
there could be only one reason: US hegemony and domination over Western Europe.
Now, there is no way to validate a 'what if' scenario.
However, the behavior of the US after the Cold War suggests NATO was primarily for US
hegemony and not for fending off the Evil Empire of the Soviets.
After all, Gorbachev and Reagan ended the Cold War. And then communism collapsed(or was
collapsed from the top) in Russia. And Russia was reaching out to the West for friendship and
aid.
Russia was at its weakest position since who knows? And it was totally friendly to the West. It
was a tamed bear. But what did the US do when Russia was most pro-Western and most willing to submit(and even
surrender its sovereignty)? The US expanded NATO up to Russian borders.
Why expand NATO when there's no more Soviet threat and when Russia wants to be a friendly
player with the West? It's like the moment when Vito Corleone realizes it had been Barzini all along.
It seems NATO was never about the principle of defending free nations from the Soviets. It
was about imposing US hegemony on Europe. So, the chances are that, even if Soviets had ended
the Occupation of Eastern Europe soon after end of WWII, the US would have created something
like NATO and pushed it all the way up to Soviet borders.
...NATO is even more of a US
imperialist project. And this time, the 'new cold war' was entirely the fault of the US.
@JR ssaid:
If one recognizes that Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard, American Primacy & Its
Geostrategic Imperatives (1997)" in replacing "Lebensraum" with "control over Eurasia",
"Tausendjähriges Reich" with "American Primacy" and providing our 'elite' with an
"realist" and "amoral" excuse to act completely and consistently immoral one has to recognize
too that this "Grand Chessboard" is an amalgamation of 'Mein Kampf' and 'Il Principe".
Except that Germany did not send Germans into the conquered territories during WWII,
though they wanted to do so.
"... Well, since 2002, people made a lot about the neo-cons being heavily influenced by Leo Strauss. I think this is only part of it. These people seem to me to be just as heavily influenced by George Berekeley: things don't really exist, there's no causation, therefore there's no consequences to one's own actions. ..."
"... "Corruption cannot lead to prosperity." Nor can it field a competent military with functional weapon systems. ..."
"... The comments at the end about how Turkey can maintain good relations with NATO and at the same time develop cooperation with Russia is clearly nonsense. NATO whole reason for existence now is as an anti-Russia military alliance. Pence is absolutely right about that ... you cannot be a member of NATO and develop close cooperation with Russia. ..."
Tweeting direct from NATO
meeting provides inside details not found in press articles, particularly the NATO
talking-point ending. IMO, the tweeter Mehta was right to highlight this exchange:
"Bennan: Do you know what the US policy in syria is?
"Çavuşoğlu: No, and this is the problem.
"He points to different statements from WH, Pentagon, CENTCOM, State. 'There is no clear
strategy. This is the problem.'"
Further on:
"Wow. Çavuşoğlu just compared Turkey to Ukraine, saying Ukraine let
itself be told it had to decide between West and Russia, and look what happened; Turkey
cannot be forced into same choice."
Pence threat is also stupid as there is no mechanism to expulse any member from NATO. NATO
members can only leave voluntarily.
Since when this stopped the USA?
The reason Turkey won't exit NATO are many. Among them:
1) Turkey's economy is in meltdown. It only didn't collapse yesterday because, luckily,
Turkey has only "burnt" one third of its Dollar reserves. For comparison, the usurper
government which toppled Dilma Rousseff burnt almost 50% of Brazil's then gigantic US$ 795
billion -- only to try to keep interest at a staggering 9.5% rate. Lucky for the Turkish
people, Erdogan survived the 2016 coup, but he was already trounced in the three main cities
and those reserves won't last forever. Time is in favor of the Americans in this case;
2) Contrary to, e.g. China and Russia, Turkey has a strong pro-USA political-popular base.
It really doesn't need to topple Erdogan through a violent coup (Obama made an unforced error
in 2016) in order to install a puppet government in Turkey;
3) The USA has the IMF. The IMF is the only institution which can do regime change and
nobody will question. Erdogan is, for now, refusing its "aid", but he's just one man. That
means that, even if Turkey remains with an Islamist (Ottomanist) or end up electing a neutral
government, the Americans will still be capable of exerting formidable pressure;
4)Turkey is, perhaps, the geostrategically most important individual country for NATO. If
the Americans still dream of defeating and balkanizing Russia through a hot war, then the
path will go through Turkey and the Bosphorus. It is not on rogue POTUS or Veep who will
change that.
"But current American elites have no concept of own actions having consequences."
Well, since 2002, people made a lot about the neo-cons being heavily influenced by Leo
Strauss. I think this is only part of it. These people seem to me to be just as heavily
influenced by George Berekeley: things don't really exist, there's no causation, therefore
there's no consequences to one's own actions.
Bolton
unwittingly utters truism but has no idea that it applies to him and the Outlaw US
Empire billions of times over: "Corruption cannot lead to prosperity." Nor can it field a
competent military with functional weapon systems.
Another OT note, this one about the technical development of generation 6 military
aircraft,
Hypersonic and hydrogen fueled and most likely piloted by droids or remotely given speed
and G-forces.
The US are threatening friend and foe alike, whereas those sanctions against their foe's are
real, sanctions against NATO members can be counterproductive, for instance Germany being
told to stop Nord Stream 2 and increase its contributions to NATO, 2% of Germany's GDP [4
trillion dollars] is an enormous amount of money to protect against a non existent enemy.
The
time will come when the US will be ignored, then, unless the US acts on those threats, its
own credibility will be called into question, then the only way is down.
Whenever anyone suggests that we should stop supplying bombs and military equipment to the
Saudis who are murdering Yemenis, moralists like Mike Pence, Pompeo, and the rest of the
religious right thunder, 'THEY WILL BUY ARMS FROM THE ROOOSHINS!'
So it is quite funny that they are willing to play hardball with the Turks.
The comments at the end about how Turkey can maintain good relations with NATO and at
the same time develop cooperation with Russia is clearly nonsense. NATO whole reason for
existence now is as an anti-Russia military alliance. Pence is absolutely right about
that ... you cannot be a member of NATO and develop close cooperation with Russia.
At
least in the eyes of NATO (i.e. the US) Russia is the enemy.
Junk author, junk book of the butcher of Yugoslavia who would be hanged with Bill clinton by
Nuremberg Tribunal for crimes against peace. Albright is not bright at all. she a female bully
and that shows.
Mostly projection. And this arrogant warmonger like to exercise in Russophobia (which was the
main part of the USSR which saved the world fro fascism, sacrificing around 20 million people)
This book is book of denial of genocide against Iraqis and Serbian population where bombing with
uranium enriched bombs doubled cancer cases.If you can pass over those facts that this book is
for you.
Like Robert Kagan and other neocons Albright is waiving authoritarism dead chicken again and
again. that's silly and disingenuous. authoritarism is a method of Governance used in military.
It is not an ideology. Fascism is an ideology, a flavor of far right nationalism. Kind of
"enhanced" by some socialist ideas far right nationalism.
The view of fascism without economic circumstances that create fascism, and first of
immiseration of middle and working class and high level of unemployment is a primitive
ahistorical view. Fascism is the ultimate capitalist statism acting simultaneously as the civil
religion for the population also enforced by the power of the state. It has a lot of common with
neoliberalism, that's why neoliberalism is sometimes called "inverted totalitarism".
In reality fascism while remaining the dictatorship of capitalists for capitalist and the
national part of financial oligarchy, it like neoliberalism directed against working class
fascism comes to power on the populist slogans of righting wrong by previous regime and kicking
foreign capitalists and national compradors (which in Germany turned to be mostly Jewish)
out.
It comes to power under the slogans of stopping the distribution of wealth up and elimination
of the class of reinters -- all citizens should earn income, not get it from bond and other
investments (often in reality doing completely the opposite).
While intrinsically connected and financed by a sizable part of national elite which often
consist of far right military leadership, a part of financial oligarchy and large part of lower
middle class (small properties) is is a protest movement which want to revenge for the
humiliation and prefer military style organization of the society to democracy as more potent
weapon to achieve this goal.
Like any far right movement the rise of fascism and neo-fascism is a sign of internal problem
within a given society, often a threat to the state or social order.
Still another noted that Fascism is often linked to people who are part of a distinct ethnic
or racial group, who are under economic stress, and who feel that they are being denied rewards
to which they are entitled. "It's not so much what people have." she said, "but what they think
they should have -- and what they fear." Fear is why Fascism's emotional reach can extend to
all levels of society. No political movement can flourish without popular support, but Fascism
is as dependent on the wealthy and powerful as it is on the man or woman in the street -- on
those who have much to lose and those who have nothing at all.
This insight made us think that Fascism should perhaps be viewed less as a political
ideology than as a means for seizing and holding power. For example, Italy in the 1920s
included self-described Fascists of the left (who advocated a dictatorship of the
dispossessed), of the right (who argued for an authoritarian corporatist state), and of the
center (who sought a return to absolute monarchy). The German National Socialist Party (the
Nazis) originally came together ar ound a list of demands that ca- tered to anti-Semites,
anti-immigrants, and anti-capitalists but also advocated for higher old-age pensions, more
educational op- portunities for the poor, an end to child labor, and improved ma- ternal health
care. The Nazis were racists and, in their own minds, reformers at the same time.
If Fascism concerns itself less with specific policies than with finding a pathway to power,
what about the tactics of lead- ership? My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remem-
ber best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established an emotional link to
the crowd and, like the central figure in a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the
sur- face. This is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democ- racy. Unlike a monarchy
or a military dictatorship imposed on society from above. Fascism draws energy from men and
women who are upset because of a lost war, a lost job, a memory of hu- miliation, or a sense
that their country is in steep decline. The more painful the grounds for resentment, the easier
it is for a Fascist leader to gam followers by dangling the prospect of re- newal or by vowing
to take back what has been stolen.
Like the mobilizers of more benign movements, these secular evangelists exploit the
near-universal human desire to be part of a meaningful quest. The more gifted among them have
an apti- tude for spectacle -- for orchestrating mass gatherings complete with martial music,
incendiary rhetoric, loud cheers, and arm-
lifting salutes. To loyalists, they offer the prize of membership in a club from which
others, often the objects of ridicule, are kept out. To build fervor, Fascists tend to be
aggressive, militaristic, and -- when circumstances allow -- expansionist. To secure the
future, they turn schools into seminaries for true believers, striv- ing to produce "new men"
and "new women" who will obey without question or pause. And, as one of my students observed,
"a Fascist who launches his career by being voted into office will have a claim to legitimacy
that others do not."
After climbing into a position of power, what comes next: How does a Fascist consolidate
authority? Here several students piped up: "By controlling information." Added another, "And
that's one reason we have so much cause to worry today." Most of us have thought of the
technological revolution primarily as a means for people from different walks of life to
connect with one another, trade ideas, and develop a keener understanding of why men and women
act as they do -- in other words, to sharpen our perceptions of truth. That's still the case,
but now we are not so sure. There is a troubling "Big Brother" angle because of the mountain of
personal data being uploaded into social media. If an advertiser can use that information to
home in on a consumer because of his or her individual interests, what's to stop a Fascist
government from doing the same? "Suppose I go to a demonstra- tion like the Women's March,"
said a student, "and post a photo
on social media. My name gets added to a list and that list can end up anywhere. How do we
protect ourselves against that?"
Even more disturbing is the ability shown by rogue regimes and their agents to spread lies
on phony websites and Facebook. Further, technology has made it possible for extremist
organiza- tions to construct echo chambers of support for conspiracy theo- ries, false
narratives, and ignorant views on religion and race. This is the first rule of deception:
repeated often enough, almost any statement, story, or smear can start to sound plausible. The
Internet should be an ally of freedom and a gateway to knowledge; in some cases, it is
neither.
Historian Robert Paxton begins one of his books by assert- ing: "Fascism was the major
political innovation of the twentieth century, and the source of much of its pain." Over the
years, he and other scholars have developed lists of the many moving parts that Fascism
entails. Toward the end of our discussion, my class sought to articulate a comparable list.
Fascism, most of the students agreed, is an extreme form of authoritarian rule. Citizens are
required to do exactly what lead- ers say they must do, nothing more, nothing less. The
doctrine is linked to rabid nationalism. It also turns the traditional social contract upside
down. Instead of citizens giving power to the state in exchange for the protection of their
rights, power begins with the leader, and the people have no rights. Under Fascism,
the mission of citizens is to serve; the government's job is to rule.
When one talks about this subject, confusion often arises about the difference between
Fascism and such related concepts as totalitarianism, dictatorship, despotism, tyranny,
autocracy, and so on. As an academic, I might be tempted to wander into that thicket, but as a
former diplomat, I am primarily concerned with actions, not labels. To my mind, a Fascist is
someone who identifies strongly with and claims to speak for a whole nation or group, is
unconcerned with the rights of others, and is willing to use whatever means are necessary --
including violence -- to achieve his or her goals. In that conception, a Fascist will likely be
a tyrant, but a tyrant need not be a Fascist.
Often the difference can be seen in who is trusted with the guns. In seventeenth-century
Europe, when Catholic aristocrats did battle with Protestant aristocrats, they fought over
scripture but agreed not to distribute weapons to their peasants, thinking it safer to wage war
with mercenary armies. Modern dictators also tend to be wary of their citizens, which is why
they create royal guards and other elite security units to ensure their personal safe- ty. A
Fascist, however, expects the crowd to have his back. Where kings try to settle people down,
Fascists stir them up so that when the fighting begins, their foot soldiers have the will and
the firepower to strike first.
Hypocrisy at its worst from a lady who advocated hawkish foreign policy which included the
most sustained bombing campaign since Vietnam, when, in 1998, Clinton began almost daily
attacks on Iraq in the so-called no-fly zones, and made so-called regime change in Iraq
official U.S. policy.
In May of 1996, 60 Minutes aired an interview with Madeleine Albright, who at the time was
Clinton's U.N. ambassador. Correspondent Leslie Stahl said to Albright, in connection with
the Clinton administration presiding over the most devastating regime of sanctions in history
that the U.N. estimated took the lives of as many as a million Iraqis, the vast majority of
them children. , "We have heard that a half-million children have died. I mean, that's more
children than died in Hiroshima. And -- and, you know, is the price worth it?"
Madeleine Albright replied, "I think this is a very hard choice, but the price -- we think
the price is worth it.
While I found much of the story-telling in "Fascism" engaging, I come away expecting much
more of one of our nation's pre-eminent senior diplomats . In a nutshell, she has devoted a
whole volume to describing the ascent of intolerant fascism and its many faces, but punted on
the question "How should we thwart fascism going forward?"
Even that question leaves me a bit unsatisfied, since it is couched in double-negative
syntax. The thing there is an appetite for, among the readers of this book who are looking
for more than hand-wringing about neofascism, is a unifying title or phrase which captures in
single-positive syntax that which Albright prefers over fascism. What would that be? And, how
do we pursue it, nurture it, spread it and secure it going forward? What is it?
I think Albright would perhaps be willing to rally around "Good Government" as the theme
her book skirts tangentially from the dark periphery of fascistic government. "Virtuous
Government"? "Effective Government"? "Responsive Government"?
People concerned about neofascism want to know what we should be doing right now to avoid
getting sidetracked into a dark alley of future history comparable to the Nazi brown shirt or
Mussolini black shirt epochs. Does Albright present a comprehensive enough understanding of
fascism to instruct on how best to avoid it? Or, is this just another hand-wringing exercise,
a la "you'll know it when you see it", with a proactive superficiality stuck at the level of
pejorative labelling of current styles of government and national leaders? If all you can say
is what you don't want, then the challenge of threading the political future of the US is
left unruddered. To make an analogy to driving a car, if you don't know your destination, and
only can get navigational prompts such as "don't turn here" or "don't go down that street",
then what are the chances of arriving at a purposive destination?
The other part of this book I find off-putting is that Albright, though having served as
Secretary of State, never talks about the heavy burden of responsibility that falls on a head
of state. She doesn't seem to empathize at all with the challenge of top leadership. Her
perspective is that of the detached critic. For instance, in discussing President Duterte of
the Philippines, she fails to paint the dire situation under which he rose to national
leadership responsibility: Islamic separatists having violently taken over the entire city of
Marawi, nor the ubiquitous spread of drug cartel power to the level where control over law
enforcement was already ceded to the gangs in many places...entire islands and city
neighborhoods run by mafia organizations. It's easy to sit back and criticize Duterte's
unleashing of vigilante justice -- What was Mrs. Albright's better alternative to regain
ground from vicious, well-armed criminal organizations? The distancing from leadership
responsibility makes Albright's treatment of the Philippines twin crises of gang-rule and
Islamist revolutionaries seem like so much academic navel-gazing....OK for an undergrad
course at Georgetown maybe, but unworthy of someone who served in a position of high
responsibility. Duterte is liked in the Philippines. What he did snapped back the power of
the cartels, and returned a deserved sense of security to average Philippinos (at least those
not involved with narcotics). Is that not good government, given the horrendous circumstances
Duterte came up to deal with? What lack of responsibility in former Philippine leadership
allowed things to get so out of control? Is it possible that Democrats and liberals are
afraid to be tough, when toughness is what is needed? I'd much rather read an account from an
average Philippino about the positive impacts of the vigilante campaign, than listen of
Madame Secretary sermonizing out of context about Duterte. OK, he's not your idea of a nice
guy. Would you rather sit back, prattle on about the rule of law and due process while
Islamic terrorists wrest control over where you live? Would you prefer the leadership of a
drug cartel boss to Duterte?
My critique is offered in a constructive manner. I would certainly encourage Albright (or
anyone!) to write a book in a positive voice about what it's going to take to have good
national government in the US going forward, and to help spread such abundance globally. I
would define "good" as the capability to make consistently good policy decisions, ones that
continue to look good in hindsight, 10, 20 or 30 years later. What does that take?
I would submit that the essential "preserving democracy" process component is having a
population that is adequately prepared for collaborative problem-solving. Some understanding
of history is helpful, but it's simply not enough. Much more essential is for every young
person to experience team problem-solving, in both its cooperative and competitive aspects.
Every young person needs to experience a team leadership role, and to appreciate what it
takes from leaders to forge constructive design from competing ideas and champions. Only
after serving as a referee will a young person understand the limits to "passion" that
individual contributors should bring to the party. Only after moderating and herding cats
will a young person know how to interact productively with leaders and other contributors.
Much of the skill is counter-instinctual. It's knowing how to express ideas...how to field
criticism....how to nudge people along in the desired direction...and how to avoid ad-hominem
attacks, exaggerations, accusations and speculative grievances. It's learning how to manage
conflict productively toward excellence. Way too few of our young people are learning these
skills, and way too few of our journalists know how to play a constructive role in managing
communications toward successful complex problem-solving. Albright's claim that a
journalist's job is primarily to "hold leaders accountable" really betrays an absolving of
responsibility for the media as a partner in good government -- it doesn't say whether the
media are active players on the problem-solving team (which they have to be for success), or
mere spectators with no responsibility for the outcome. If the latter, then journalism
becomes an irritant, picking at the scabs over and over, but without any forward progress.
When the media takes up a stance as an "opponent" of leadership, you end up with poor
problem-solving results....the system is fighting itself instead of making forward
progress.
"Fascism" doesn't do nearly enough to promote the teaching of practical civics 101 skills,
not just to the kids going into public administration, but to everyone. For, it is in the
norms of civility, their ability to be practiced, and their defense against excesses, that
fascism (e.g., Antifa) is kept at bay.
Everyone in a democracy has to know the basics:
• when entering a disagreement, don't personalize it
• never demonize an opponent
• keep a focus on the goal of agreement and moving forward
• never tell another person what they think, but ask (non-rhetorically) what they think
then be prepared to listen and absorb
• do not speak untruths or exaggerate to make an argument
• do not speculate grievance
• understand truth gathering as a process; detect when certainty is being bluffed;
question sources
• recognize impasse and unproductive argumentation and STOP IT
• know how to introduce a referee or moderator to regain productive collaboration
• avoid ad hominem attacks
• don't take things personally that wrankle you;
• give the benefit of the doubt in an ambiguous situation
• don't jump to conclusions
• don't reward theatrical manipulation
These basics of collaborative problem-solving are the guts of a "liberal democracy" that
can face down the most complex challenges and dilemmas.
I gave the book 3 stars for the great story-telling, and Albright has been part of a great
story of late 20th century history. If she would have told us how to prevent fascism going
forward, and how to roll it back in "hard case" countries like North Korea and Sudan, I would
have given her a 5. I'm not that interested in picking apart the failure cases of
history...they teach mostly negative exemplars. Much rather I would like to read about
positive exemplars of great national government -- "great" defined by popular acclaim, by the
actual ones governed. Where are we seeing that today? Canada? Australia? Interestingly, both
of these positive exemplars have strict immigration policies.
Is it possible that Albright is just unable, by virtue of her narrow escape from Communist
Czechoslovakia and acceptance in NYC as a transplant, to see that an optimum immigration
policy in the US, something like Canada's or Australia's, is not the looming face of fascism,
but rather a move to keep it safely in its corner in coming decades? At least, she admits to
her being biased by her life story.
That suggests her views on refugees and illegal immigrants as deserving of unlimited
rights to migrate into the US might be the kind of cloaked extremism that she is warning us
about.
Albright's book is a comprehensive look at recent history regarding the rise and fall of
fascist leaders; as well as detailing leaders in nations that are starting to mimic fascist
ideals. Instead of a neat definition, she uses examples to bolster her thesis of what are
essential aspects of fascism. Albright dedicates each section of the book to a leader or
regime that enforces fascist values and conveys this to the reader through historical events
and exposition while also peppering in details of her time as Secretary of State. The climax
(and 'warning'), comes at the end, where Albright applies what she has been discussing to the
current state of affairs in the US and abroad.
Overall, I would characterize this as an enjoyable and relatively easy read. I think the
biggest strength of this book is how Albright uses history, previous examples of leaders and
regimes, to demonstrate what fascism looks like and contributing factors on a national and
individual level. I appreciated that she lets these examples speak for themselves of the
dangers and subtleties of a fascist society, which made the book more fascinating and less of
a textbook. Her brief descriptions of her time as Secretary of State were intriguing and made
me more interested in her first book, 'Madame Secretary'. The book does seem a bit slow as it
is not until the end that Albright blatantly reveals the relevance of all of the history
relayed in the first couple hundred pages. The last few chapters are dedicated to the reveal:
the Trump administration and how it has affected global politics. Although, she never
outright calls Trump a fascist, instead letting the reader decide based on his decisions and
what you have read in the book leading up to this point, her stance is quite clear by the
end. I was surprised at what I shared politically with Albright, mainly in immigration and a
belief of empathy and understanding for others. However, I got a slight sense of
anti-secularism in the form of a disdain for those who do not subscribe to an Abrahamic
religion and she seemed to hint at this being partly an opening to fascism.
I also could have done without the both-sides-ism she would occasionally push, which seems
to be a tactic used to encourage people to 'unite against Trump'. These are small annoyances
I had with the book, my main critique is the view Albright takes on democracy. If anything,
the book should have been called "Democracy: the Answer" because that is the most consistent
stance Albright takes throughout. She seems to overlook many of the atrocities the US and
other nations have committed in the name of democracy and the negative consequences of
capitalism, instead, justifying negative actions with the excuse of 'it is for democracy and
everyone wants that' and criticizing those who criticize capitalism.
She does not do a good job of conveying the difference between a communist country like
Russia and a socialist country like those found in Scandinavia and seems okay with the idea
of the reader lumping them all together in a poor light. That being said, I would still
recommend this book for anyone's TBR as the message is essential for today, that the current
world of political affairs is, at least somewhat, teetering on a precipice and we are in need
of as many strong leaders as possible who are willing to uphold democratic ideals on the
world stage and mindful constituents who will vote them in.
The book is very well written, easy to read, and follows a pretty standard formula making
it accessible to the average reader. However, it suffers immensely from, what I suspect are,
deeply ingrained political biases from the author.
Whilst I don't dispute the criteria the author applies in defining fascism, or the targets
she cites as examples, the first bias creeps in here when one realises the examples chosen
are traditional easy targets for the US (with the exception of Turkey). The same criteria
would define a country like Singapore perfectly as fascist, yet the country (or Malaysia)
does not receive a mention in the book.
Further, it grossly glosses over what Ms. Albright terms facist traits from the US
governments of the past. If the author is to be believed, the CIA is holier than thou, never
intervened anywhere or did anything that wasn't with the best interests of democracy at
heart, and American foreign policy has always existed to build friendships and help out their
buddies. To someone ingrained in this rhetoric for years I am sure this is an easy pill to
swallow, but to the rest of the world it makes a number of assertions in the book come across
as incredibly naive. out of 5 stars
Trite and opaque
We went with my husband to the presentation of this book at UPenn with Albright before it
came out and Madeleine's spunk, wit and just glorious brightness almost blinded me. This is a
2.5 star book, because 81 year old author does not really tell you all there is to tell when
she opens up on a subject in any particular chapter, especially if it concerns current US
interest.
Lets start from the beginning of the book. What really stood out, the missing 3rd Germany
ally, Japan and its emperor. Hirohito (1901-1989) was emperor of Japan from 1926 until his
death in 1989. He took over at a time of rising democratic sentiment, but his country soon
turned toward ultra-nationalism and militarism. During World War II (1939-45), Japan attacked
nearly all of its Asian neighbors, allied itself with Nazi Germany and launched a surprise
assault on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, forcing US to enter the war in 1941. Hirohito
was never indicted as a war criminal! does he deserve at least a chapter in her book?
Oh and by the way, did author mention anything about sanctions against Germany for
invading Austria, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Poland? Up until the Pearl Harbor USA and
Germany still traded, although in March 1939, FDR slapped a 25% tariff on all German goods.
Like Trump is doing right now to some of US trading partners.
Next monster that deserves a chapter on Genocide in cosmic proportions post WW2 is
communist leader of China Mao Zedung. Mr Dikötter, who has been studying Chinese rural
history from 1958 to 1962, when the nation was facing a famine, compared the systematic
torture, brutality, starvation and killing of Chinese peasants compares to the Second World
War in its magnitude. At least 45 million people were worked, starved or beaten to death in
China over these four years; the total worldwide death toll of the Second World War was 55
million.
We learn that Argentina has given sanctuary to Nazi war criminals, but she forgets to
mention that 88 Nazi scientists arrived in the United States in 1945 and were promptly put to
work. For example, Wernher von Braun was the brains behind the V-2 rocket program, but had
intimate knowledge of what was going on in the concentration camps. Von Braun himself
hand-picked people from horrific places, including Buchenwald concentration camp. Tsk-Tsk
Madeline.
What else? Oh, lets just say that like Madelaine Albright my husband is Jewish and lost
extensive family to Holocoust. Ukrainian nationalists executed his great grandfather on
gistapo orders, his great grandmother disappeared in concentration camp, grandfather was
conscripted in june 1940 and decommissioned september 1945 and went through war as
infantryman through 3 fronts earning several medals. his grandmother, an ukrainian born jew
was a doctor in a military hospital in Saint Petersburg survived famine and saved several
children during blockade. So unlike Maideline who was raised as a Roman Catholic, my husband
grew up in a quiet jewish family in that territory that Stalin grabbed from Poland in 1939,
in a polish turn ukrainian city called Lvov(Lemberg). His family also had to ask for an
asylum, only they had to escape their home in Ukraine in 1991. He was told then "You are a
nice little Zid (Jew), we will kill you last" If you think things in ukraine changed, think
again, few weeks ago in Kiev Roma gypsies were killed and injured during pogroms, and nobody
despite witnesses went to jail. Also during demonstrations openly on the streets C14 unit is
waving swastikas and Heils. Why is is not mentioned anywhere in the book? is is because
Hunter Biden sits on the board of one of Ukraine's largest natural gas companies called
Burisma since May 14, 2014, and Ukraine has an estimated 127.9 trillion cubic feet of
unproved technically recoverable shale gas resources? ( according to the U.S. Energy
Information Administration (EIA).1 The most promising shale reserves appear to be in the
Carpathian Foreland Basin (also called the Lviv-Volyn Basin), which extends across Western
Ukraine from Poland into Romania, and the Dnieper-Donets Basin in the East (which borders
Russia).
Wow, i bet you did not know that. how ugly are politics, even this book that could have been
so much greater if the author told the whole ugly story. And how scary that there are
countries where you can go and openly be fascist.
To me, Fascism fails for the single reason that no two fascist leaders are alike. Learning
about one or a few, in a highly cursory fashion like in this book or in great detail, is
unlikely to provide one with any answers on how to prevent the rise of another or fend
against some such. And, as much as we are witnessing the rise of numerous democratic or
quasi-democratic "strongmen" around the world in global politics, it is difficult to brand
any of them as fascist in the orthodox sense.
As the author writes at the outset, it is difficult to separate a fascist from a tyrant or
a dictator. A fascist is a majoritarian who rouses a large group under some national, racial
or similar flag with rallying cries demanding suppression or exculcation of those excluded
from this group. A typical fascist leader loves her yes-men and hates those who disagree: she
does not mind using violence to suppress dissidents. A fascist has no qualms using propaganda
to popularize the agreeable "facts" and theories while debunking the inconvenient as lies.
What is not discussed explicitly in the book are perhaps some positive traits that separate
fascists from other types of tyrants: fascists are rarely lazy, stupid or prone to doing
things for only personal gains. They differ from the benevolent dictators for their record of
using heavy oppression against their dissidents. Fascists, like all dictators, change rules
to suit themselves, take control of state organizations to exercise total control and use
"our class is the greatest" and "kick others" to fuel their programs.
Despite such a detailed list, each fascist is different from each other. There is little
that even Ms Albright's fascists - from Mussolini and Hitler to Stalin to the Kims to Chavez
or Erdogan - have in common. In fact, most of the opponents of some of these
dictators/leaders would calll them by many other choice words but not fascists. The
circumstances that gave rise to these leaders were highly different and so were their rules,
methods and achievements.
The point, once again, is that none of the strongmen leaders around the world could be
easily categorized as fascists. Or even if they do, assigning them with such a tag and
learning about some other such leaders is unlikely to help. The history discussed in the book
is interesting but disjointed, perfunctory and simplistic. Ms Albright's selection is also
debatable.
Strong leaders who suppress those they deem as opponents have wreaked immense harms and
are a threat to all civil societies. They come in more shades and colours than terms we have
in our vocabulary (dictators, tyrants, fascists, despots, autocrats etc). A study of such
tyrant is needed for anyone with an interest in history, politics, or societal well-being.
Despite Ms Albright's phenomenal knowledge, experience, credentials, personal history and
intentions, this book is perhaps not the best place to objectively learn much about the risks
from the type of things some current leaders are doing or deeming as right.
Each time I get concerned about Trump's rhetoric or past actions I read idiotic opinions,
like those of our second worst ever Secretary of State, and come to appreciate him more.
Pejorative terms like fascism or populism have no place in a rational policy discussion. Both
are blatant attempts to apply a pejorative to any disagreeing opinion. More than half of the
book is fluffed with background of Albright, Hitler and Mussolini. Wikipedia is more
informative. The rest has snippets of more modern dictators, many of whom are either
socialists or attained power through a reaction to failed socialism, as did Hitler. She
squirms mightily to liken Trump to Hitler. It's much easier to see that Sanders is like
Maduro. The USA is following a path more like Venezuela than Germany.
Her history misses that Mussolini was a socialist before he was a fascist, and Nazism in
Germany was a reaction to Wiemar socialism. The danger of fascism in the US is far greater
from the left than from the right. America is far left of where the USSR ever was. Remember
than Marx observed that Russia was not ready for a proletarian revolution. The USA with ready
made capitalism for reform fits Marx's pattern much better. Progressives deny that Sanders
and Warren are socialists. If not they are what Lenin called "useful idiots."
Albright says that she is proud of the speech where she called the USA the 'Indispensable
Nation.' She should be ashamed. Obama followed in his inaugural address, saying that we are
"the indispensable nation, responsible for world security." That turned into a policy of
human rights interventions leading to open ended wars (Syria, Yemen), nations in chaos
(Libya), and distrust of the USA (Egypt, Russia, Turkey, Tunisia, Israel, NK). Trump now has
to make nice with dictators to allay their fears that we are out to replace them.
She admires the good intentions of human rights intervention, ignoring the results. She says
Obama had some success without citing a single instance. He has apologized for Libya, but
needs many more apologies. She says Obama foreign policy has had some success, with no
mention of a single instance. Like many progressives, she confuses good intentions with
performance. Democracy spreading by well intentioned humanitarian intervention has resulted
in a succession of open ended war or anarchy.
The shorter histories of Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and Venezuela are much more
informative, although more a warning against socialism than right wing fascism. Viktor Orban
in Hungary is another reaction to socialism.
Albright ends the book with a forlorn hope that we need a Lincoln or Mandela, exactly what
our two party dictatorship will not generate as it yields ever worse and worse candidates for
our democracy to vote upon, even as our great society utopia generates ever more power for
weak presidents to spend our money and continue wrong headed foreign policy.
The greatest danger to the USA is not fascism, but of excessively poor leadership
continuing our slow slide to the bottom.
@Rurik Upon consideration, what Putin should do is set up a "Free" German government in
Königsburg just like the US is doing with Gaido in Venezuela. Get China to recognize it.
Then they should start negotiating lucrative contracts, treaties and alliances between the
Free Germans and the rest of OBOR. It would be fascinating to see how ZOG reacted.
Oh, and most important of all, declare a new debt free currency, perhaps gold backed. I
could live with the Reichsmark.
Wealthy politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption in their native lands are fleeing to a safe haven where their wealth
and influence shields them from arrest.
They have entered this country on a variety of visas, including one designed to encourage investment. Some have applied for asylum,
which is intended to protect people fleeing oppression and political persecution.
The increasingly popular destination for people avoiding criminal charges is no pariah nation.
It's the United States.
An investigation by ProPublica, in conjunction with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, has
found that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, South Korea, Bolivia and Panama have found refuge for themselves and
their wealth in this country, taking advantage of lax enforcement of U.S. laws and gaps in immigration and financial regulations.
Many have concealed their assets and real-estate purchases by creating trusts and limited liability companies in the names of lawyers
and relatives.
American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges.
But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.
One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after
his country's Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school
lunch program.
Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department's radar since he was elected in 2009.
That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began
sending diplomatic cables warning
about the president's "dark side," including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.
Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in
the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country's Supreme Court.
On Jan. 28, 2015,
just hours before
the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a
meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium
on Miami's swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.
The State Department declined to comment on Martinelli's case, saying visa records are confidential and it is the U.S. Customs
and Border Protection that decides who is allowed to enter the country. CBP said privacy regulations prevent the agency from commenting
on Martinelli.
Efforts to reach Martinelli, including a registered letter sent to his Miami address, were unsuccessful.
In September this year, Panama asked to extradite Martinelli, but the former president is fighting that request, arguing there
are no legal grounds to bring him back to his home country where the investigation has broadened to include insider trading, corruption
and abuse of authority. Last December, Panama's high court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he used public funds to
spy on over 150 political opponents. If found guilty, he could face up to 21 years in jail.
Rogelio Cruz, who is defending Martinelli in Panama's Supreme Court, said that the former president "will return to Panama once
adequate conditions exist with respect to due process, where there are independent judges -- which there aren't."
The United States has explicit policies that bar issuing visas to foreign officials facing criminal charges in their homelands.
In 2004, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation
designed to keep the United States from becoming a haven for corrupt officials. Proclamation 7750, which has the force and effect
of law, directed the State Department to ban officials who have accepted bribes or misappropriated public funds when their actions
have "serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States."
Under the rules implementing Bush's order, consular officers do not need a conviction or even formal charges to justify denying
a visa. They can stamp "denied" based on information from unofficial, or informal sources, including newspaper articles, according
to diplomats and State Department officials interviewed for this report.
The State Department declined to provide the number of times Proclamation 7750 has been invoked, but insisted that it has been
used "robustly."
But numerous other foreign government officials, including former presidents and cabinet ministers, have slipped through the cracks,
according to court documents, diplomatic cables and interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in the United States and abroad.
The charges involved a wide range of misconduct, from stealing public funds to accepting bribes.
Six months before Martinelli entered the United States, a former Colombian agriculture minister and onetime presidential candidate,
Andres Felipe Arias, fled to Miami three weeks before he was convicted of funneling $12.5 million to wealthy political supporters
from a subsidy program that was intended to reduce inequality in rural areas and protect farmers from the effects of globalization.
The U.S. embassy in Bogota had been following Arias' trial closely and
reporting on the scandal in cables to Washington.
The trial
featured documents and witnesses saying that under Arias' watch, the agriculture ministry had doled out millions in subsidies
to affluent families, some of whom, according to media reports, had donated to Arias' political allies or his presidential campaign.
Subsidies went to relatives of congressmen, companies owned by the richest man in Colombia, and a former beauty queen. One powerful
family and its associates received over $2.5 million, according to records released by prosecutors. Another family, which included
relatives of a former senator, received $1.3 million. Both families had supported Arias' chief political ally, former Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe, with campaign contributions.
The law that
established the program did not ban wealthy landowners from getting grants, but some elite families had received multiple subsidies
for the same farm. They gamed the system by submitting multiple proposals in the names of different family members and by subdividing
their land so they could apply for grants for each parcel, court records indicate.
Yet, in November 2013, while the trial was going on, the U.S. embassy in Bogota renewed Arias' visitor visa. The State Department
refused to discuss the case, saying that visa records are confidential. But a
recent filing in federal court
showed that the U.S. embassy had flagged Arias' application, and asked him to provide documents to support his request to leave the
country while charges were pending. Arias submitted documents from the Colombian court, including a judicial order that allowed him
to travel. In the end, the embassy issued a visa because he had not yet been convicted.
Andres Felipe Arias, a former Colombian agriculture minister, who fled to the United States before he could be convicted
of funneling money from a subsidy program (GDA via AP Images)
On the night of June 13, 2014, three weeks before the judges convicted him of embezzlement by appropriation, a Colombian law that
penalizes the unauthorized use of public funds to benefit private entities, Arias packed his bags and boarded a plane. The following
month, the U.S. embassy in Bogota revoked the visa. But Arias hired an immigration attorney and applied for asylum.
"If you looked up 'politically motivated charges' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Andres Arias next to it," said
David Oscar Markus, Arias' lead attorney. "The case [against him] is absurd and not even one that is recognized in the United States."
Over the next two years, Arias built a new life in South Florida with his wife and two children, opening a small consulting company
and renting a house in Weston.
On August 24, he was
arrested by U.S.
authorities in response to an extradition request from Colombia. He spent several months in a detention facility until his release
on bail in mid-November. Arias argues that the United States cannot extradite him because it has no active extradition treaty with
Colombia, but the U.S. Attorney's Office disagrees. A plea for asylum does not shield defendants from extradition if they are charged
in Colombia with a crime covered by the treaty between the two countries.
The agency that administers the program, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has adopted regulations designed to prevent
fraud, including requiring foreign investors to submit evidence, such as tax returns and bank statements, to prove they obtained
their money legally.
But these safeguards did not stop the daughter-in-law and grandsons of former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan from using Chun's
ill-gotten gains to get U.S. permanent residency.
In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of receiving more than $200 million in bribes while in office in the 1980s, from companies
such as Samsung and Hyundai. He was ordered to return the bribes, but refused.
Part of Chun's fortune was funneled into the United States through his son, who purchased a $2.2 million house in Newport Beach,
California, according to South Korean prosecutors and real-estate records.
Millions of dollars from Chun's bribery proceeds were hidden in bearer bonds, which are notoriously difficult to trace. Unlike
regular bonds, which belong to registered owners, there is no record kept about the ownership or transfer of bearer bonds. The bonds
can be cashed out by whoever has them.
Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan addresses the press at the White House in 1985. Chun's relatives later gained
permanent residency in the United States by using money Chun obtained through bribes. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
In 2008, Chun's daughter-in-law, a South Korean actress named Park Sang-ah, applied for an immigrant investor visa. Park listed
her husband's bearer bonds as the source of her funds without mentioning that the money had been initially provided to him by Chun.
Eight months later, Park and her children received their conditional U.S. permanent residency cards in the mail.
In 2013, at the request of South Korean prosecutors, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Chun family's
wealth in the United States and subsequently
seized $1.2 million of the family's U.S. assets in the United States. The money was returned to South Korea. Despite that, Chun's
family members have retained their residency status.
Chun's relatives obtained their permanent residency by investing in an EB-5 project managed by the Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation, a nonprofit company. The PIDC pooled Chun's $500,000 with money from 200 other foreign investors to finance an expansion
of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.
The same project in Philadelphia also helped to secure permanent residency for Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese government official accused
of embezzling more than $40 million from a state-owned grain storehouse, according to reports in the People's Daily, the Chinese
Communist Party's newspaper. Qiao had divorced his wife, Shilan Zhao, in China in 2001, a fact he did not disclose to U.S. immigration
authorities. When Zhao applied for an EB-5 visa, Qiao qualified for U.S. permanent residency as an applicant's spouse.
The Justice Department launched an investigation only when it was tipped off by Chinese authorities. In January 2014,
a federal grand jury indicted Zhao and her ex-husband, Qiao, for immigration fraud, money laundering and internationally transporting
stolen funds. Zhao was arrested and released on bail. Federal authorities are pursuing Qiao, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
A trial has been set for February 2017. U.S. government attorneys have filed asset forfeiture cases to recover real estate linked
to Qiao and Zhao in Flushing, New York, and Monterey Park, California.
In April 2015, Qiao appeared on the Chinese
government's list of 100 "most wanted" officials who fled abroad after being accused of crimes such as bribery and corruption.
He and 39 other government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders on the list allegedly fled to the United States.
The list, called "Operation Skynet," is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has vowed to take
down what Chinese officials describe as corrupt "tigers" and "flies" within the country's ruling Communist Party.
Fengxian Hu was another fugitive on China's list. A former army singer and radio broadcaster, Hu headed the state-owned broadcasting
company that had a joint venture with Pepsi to distribute soft drinks in Sichuan province. In 2002, The Washington Post and The Wall
Street Journal
reported that Pepsi had accused Hu of looting the joint venture and using company funds to buy fancy cars and go on European
tours.
The same year, in a widely publicized move, Pepsi filed a case with international arbitrators in Stockholm, asking that the joint
venture be dissolved. Despite this, Hu was given a visa that allowed him to fly regularly to Las Vegas, where he was a VIP client
at the MGM casino.
In January 2010, Chinese authorities investigated Hu for corruption. But the month before, Hu had entered the United States on
a B1 visitor visa, joining his wife, a U.S. citizen living in New York.
Hu tried to obtain a green card through his wife, but the petition was rejected by U.S. immigration authorities. He applied for
asylum instead.
Meanwhile, he had gotten into trouble in the United States for losing millions in a Las Vegas casino and failing to pay a $12
million gambling debt. In 2012, he was indicted in a Nevada court on two counts of theft and one count of intentionally passing a
check without sufficient funds.
Hu pled not guilty to the charges; his lawyers claimed that his checks bounced because his bank account had been closed by Chinese
authorities. The charges against him in the U.S. were considered an aggravated felony, which is a common basis for deportation. Hu,
however, had a pending asylum case and so could not be deported.
In August 2015, a New York immigration judge denied the asylum claim. But Hu's lawyers argued that he would be tortured if he
returned to China and invoked the United Nations Convention
Against Torture , which says that an alien may not be sent to a country where he is likely to be tortured. In the end, the immigration
court suspended Hu's removal order, allowing him to remain in the United States and work here indefinitely. He will not, however,
be given permanent residency or be allowed to travel outside the country.
The absence of an extradition treaty -- coupled with a high standard of living -- makes the United States a favored destination
for Chinese officials and businessmen fleeing corruption charges.
In April 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security , made a 48-hour trip to Beijing. The visit
was intended to pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit in September 2015, according to a memorandum Johnson wrote,
which was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the memo, Johnson said the Chinese government is seeking 132 people it said have fled to the United States to avoid prosecution.
This represents a greater number of fugitives than Chinese authorities have publicly acknowledged.
"I'm told that in prior discussions, the Chinese have been frustrated by the lack of any information from us about the 132 fugitives,"
Johnson wrote.
The Chinese request for assistance posed a dilemma for the United States. American officials are concerned about a lack of fairness
in China's criminal justice system. Human rights groups say that China continues to use torture to extract false confessions from
suspected criminals. Torture has also been documented to be part of shuanggui -- a secretive discipline process reserved for
members of the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts see the crackdown on corrupt officials as part of a purge aimed at the current regime's political rivals and ideological
enemies. U.S. officials say this makes returning corrupt officials to China a delicate issue for the United States.
In 2003, headlines around the world reported
widespread
street protests in Bolivia that led to security forces killing 58 people, most of them members of indigenous groups. Not long
afterward, as protesters massed up on the streets of La Paz demanding his resignation, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
resigned and fled his country along with his defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.
The two men flew to the United States, where they continue to reside. In 2006, Berzain applied for political asylum, which he
was granted in 2007. On
his application, when the form asked, "Have you or your family members ever been accused, charged, arrested, detained, interrogated,
convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned in any country other than the United States?" Berzain checked the box "no," even though by
then he and de Lozada had been formally accused of
genocide by Bolivia's attorney
general. The indictment was approved
by Bolivia's Supreme Court in 2007. Berzain also stated on his application that the State Department had arranged for his travel
to the United States.
The de Lozada administration was vocally pro-American. Before it was ousted, officials had announced they would facilitate gas
exports to the United States.
After their departure, Bolivia's attorney general
publicly stated
that the administration had embezzled millions from government coffers, but did not formally file charges. He said de Lozada
had taken some $22 million from the country's reserve funds before fleeing.
De Lozada and members of his administration have dismissed the allegations as part of a politically motivated smear campaign,
but there is evidence to suggest irregularities may have occurred in the handling of the reserve funds. The former president signed
a decree shortly before leaving office authorizing the interior and finance ministers to withdraw money from Bolivia's reserve funds
without going through the normal approval process. De Lozada's former interior minister
pleaded guilty in 2004 to embezzlement after $270,000 in cash was found in an associate's home.
De Lozada, a mining mogul before he became president, moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. He
now lives in a two-story brick house bought for $1.4 million by Macalester Limited, a limited liability company that was formed in
the British Virgin Islands and lists a post office box in the Bahamas as its principal address.
De Lozada's immigration status is unclear. He said in a sworn deposition in 2015 that he was not a U.S. citizen. His son-in-law,
who spoke to ProPublica on his behalf, would not say whether de Lozada had applied for asylum.
Berzain, meanwhile, settled in South Florida. Records show that he and his brother-in-law personally own or are listed as officers
or members of business entities that together control around $9 million worth of Miami real estate.
Some of the purchases were made in the names of entities that appear to list different variations of Berzain's name in business
records.
In addition, in the purchase of two properties, Berzain's name was added to business records only after the deal had gone through.
Berzain's brother-in-law incorporated a company called Warren USA Corp in October 2010, for example, and the company purchased a
$1.4 million residential property the following month. Three weeks after Warren USA Corp became the owner of an elegant Spanish-style
villa in Key Biscayne, Berzain was added as the company's secretary.
The following year, in May 2011, Berzain's brother-in-law created Galen KB Corp and registered as the company's president. A month
later, Galen KB Corp purchased a $250,000 condo. In August, Berzain replaced his brother-in-law as the company's president, according
to business records. Berzain is no longer listed as a company officer in either company.
During an interview in January, Berzain told ProPublica "I don't have any companies." When asked about several of the companies
associated with his name or address in public records, the former defense minister said he had a consulting firm that helped clients
set up companies and that he was sometimes added to the board of directors. Efforts to reach Berzain's brother-in-law, a wealthy
businessman and the owner of a bus company in Bolivia, were unsuccessful. Berzain's brother-in-law has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The practice of purchasing real estate in the name of a business entity like a limited liability company, or LLC, is a common
and legal practice in high-end real-estate markets, and one that enables celebrities and other wealthy individuals to protect their
privacy.
But the practice also allows foreign officials to hide ill-gotten gains. U.S. regulations allow individuals to form business entities
like LLCs without disclosing the beneficial owner. The LLCs can be registered in the names of lawyers, accountants or other associates
-- or even anonymously in some states -- and used to purchase real estate, making it nearly impossible to determine the actual owner
of a property.
Government investigators and lawmakers have pointed out persistent gaps in U.S. policy that have enabled corrupt officials to
evade justice and hide their assets in this country. But little has changed.
Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation
said it can be "difficult" for immigration officials to identify the true source of an immigrant investor's funds. Immigration
officials told the government auditors that EB-5 applicants with ties to corruption, the drug trade, human trafficking and other
criminal activities have a strong incentive to omit key details about their financial histories or lie on their applications.
"It's very easy to get lost in the noise if you're a bad person," said Seto Bagdoyan, the accountability office's director of
forensic audits, who co-authored the GAO report.
Immigration officials, he added, have an "almost nonexistent" ability to thoroughly evaluate investors' backgrounds and trace
their assets.
Despite such weaknesses, Congress has continually
extended the EB-5
program with minor changes. The program is backed by
real-estate lobbyists who argue that it is a crucial source of financing for luxury condos and hotels. The program is
expected to thrive in a
Trump presidency because the president-elect is a developer and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received $50 million in EB-5 funds to
build a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey.
In 2010, a Senate report described how powerful foreign officials and their relatives moved millions of dollars in suspect funds
into the United States. The report said investors bypassed anti-money laundering regulations with help from U.S. lawyers, real-estate
agents, and banking institutions. Last year, ABC News
reported that lobbyists for real estate and other business groups spent $30 million in 2015 in an effort to protect the EB-5
program.
Senate investigators proposed legislation that would require companies to disclose their beneficial owners and make it easier
for authorities to restrict entry, deny visas and deport corrupt foreign officials.
A few of the proposals have been adopted, but they have not made much difference. Banks have stepped up their efforts to identify
corrupt officials and monitor their accounts. Professional groups such as the American Bar Association have issued non-binding guidelines
for their members on compliance with anti-money-laundering controls. The U.S. government has also worked with the
Financial Action Task Force , an international body set up
to fight money laundering, to bring its anti-corruption controls in accordance with the body's guidelines.
In May, the Treasury Department enacted a new rule that will take full effect in 2018 and will require financial institutions
to identify the beneficial owners of shell companies. Some advocates see the rule as a step backward. The new rule allows shell companies
to designate the manager of the account as the beneficial owner, concealing the identity of the person ultimately exercising control.
The State Department declined to say what progress, if any, it has made on the Senate subcommittee's recommendation to more aggressively
deny visas through Proclamation 7750. "The Department takes seriously congressional recommendations and devotes resources to addressing
corruption worldwide," a State Department official wrote in response to questions.
In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The small unit, which has grown
to include 16 attorneys, aims to recover assets in the United States that are tied to foreign corruption and return the money to
the looted countries.
Over the past six years, the unit has filed around two dozen civil asset forfeiture cases in an attempt to seize money, real estate
and other assets tied to government officials from 16 countries. Assets have ranged from a lone diamond-encrusted glove worn by Michael
Jackson that was purchased by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President, Teodoro Obiang, to a $1 billion fund tied to Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak.
Yet most of the money the Department of Justice has pursued remains in limbo. The case involving Chun, the former president of
South Korea, is one of only two instances in which corrupt gains have been returned to the home country through the Justice Department's
efforts. The other arose when Justice Department officials
returned $1.5 million to Taiwan from property bought with bribes paid to the family of Chun Shui Bian, the former president of
Taiwan.
The agency faces myriad challenges when attempting to seize and return assets acquired by corrupt foreign officials, including
a lack of witnesses, said Kendall Day, head of the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. These officials
often shield their transactions through shell companies, offshore companies or a network of associates.
"The mission of the Kleptocracy Initiative is really to target what we call grand foreign corruption that impacts the U.S. financial
system," Day said, citing the Chun case as an example.
The 2012 Magnitsky Act gives the government power to deny visas and freeze the assets of Russian nationals accused of corruption
or human rights violations. The Global Magnitsky Act would extend the same sanctions to the rest of the world, but it has yet to
be passed by Congress. Unlike Proclamation 7750, the Magnitsky laws require the government to publish a list of foreign government
officials who are barred from the United States.
In addition, the Treasury Department imposed regulations this year that aim to crack down on the use of shell companies to purchase
real estate in places like Miami and Manhattan. Title insurance companies are now required to identify the real owners of companies
purchasing high-end real estate without a mortgage. These regulations, however, are temporary.
Wealthy politicians and businessmen suspected of corruption in their native lands are fleeing to a safe haven where their wealth
and influence shields them from arrest.
They have entered this country on a variety of visas, including one designed to encourage investment. Some have applied for asylum,
which is intended to protect people fleeing oppression and political persecution.
The increasingly popular destination for people avoiding criminal charges is no pariah nation.
It's the United States.
An investigation by ProPublica, in conjunction with the Stabile Center for Investigative Journalism at Columbia University, has
found that officials fleeing prosecution in Colombia, China, South Korea, Bolivia and Panama have found refuge for themselves and
their wealth in this country, taking advantage of lax enforcement of U.S. laws and gaps in immigration and financial regulations.
Many have concealed their assets and real-estate purchases by creating trusts and limited liability companies in the names of lawyers
and relatives.
American authorities are supposed to vet visa applicants to make sure they are not under active investigation on criminal charges.
But the ProPublica examination shows that this requirement has been routinely ignored.
One of the most prominent cases involves a former president of Panama, who was allowed to enter the United States just days after
his country's Supreme Court opened an investigation into charges that he had helped embezzle $45 million from a government school
lunch program.
Ricardo Martinelli, a billionaire supermarket magnate, had been on the State Department's radar since he was elected in 2009.
That year, the U.S. ambassador to Panama began
sending diplomatic cables warning
about the president's "dark side," including his links to corruption and his request for U.S. support for wiretapping his opponents.
Soon after Martinelli left office in 2014, Panamanian prosecutors conducted a widely publicized investigation of corruption in
the school lunch program, and in mid-January 2015, forwarded their findings to the country's Supreme Court.
On Jan. 28, 2015,
just hours before
the Supreme Court announced a formal probe into the charges, Martinelli boarded a private plane, flew to Guatemala City for a
meeting and then entered the United States on a visitor visa. Within weeks, he was living comfortably in the Atlantis, a luxury condominium
on Miami's swanky Brickell Avenue. He is still here.
The State Department declined to comment on Martinelli's case, saying visa records are confidential and it is the U.S. Customs
and Border Protection that decides who is allowed to enter the country. CBP said privacy regulations prevent the agency from commenting
on Martinelli.
Efforts to reach Martinelli, including a registered letter sent to his Miami address, were unsuccessful.
In September this year, Panama asked to extradite Martinelli, but the former president is fighting that request, arguing there
are no legal grounds to bring him back to his home country where the investigation has broadened to include insider trading, corruption
and abuse of authority. Last December, Panama's high court issued a warrant for his arrest on charges that he used public funds to
spy on over 150 political opponents. If found guilty, he could face up to 21 years in jail.
Rogelio Cruz, who is defending Martinelli in Panama's Supreme Court, said that the former president "will return to Panama once
adequate conditions exist with respect to due process, where there are independent judges -- which there aren't."
The United States has explicit policies that bar issuing visas to foreign officials facing criminal charges in their homelands.
In 2004, President George W. Bush issued a proclamation
designed to keep the United States from becoming a haven for corrupt officials. Proclamation 7750, which has the force and effect
of law, directed the State Department to ban officials who have accepted bribes or misappropriated public funds when their actions
have "serious adverse effects on the national interests of the United States."
Under the rules implementing Bush's order, consular officers do not need a conviction or even formal charges to justify denying
a visa. They can stamp "denied" based on information from unofficial, or informal sources, including newspaper articles, according
to diplomats and State Department officials interviewed for this report.
The State Department declined to provide the number of times Proclamation 7750 has been invoked, but insisted that it has been
used "robustly."
But numerous other foreign government officials, including former presidents and cabinet ministers, have slipped through the cracks,
according to court documents, diplomatic cables and interviews with prosecutors and defense attorneys in the United States and abroad.
The charges involved a wide range of misconduct, from stealing public funds to accepting bribes.
Six months before Martinelli entered the United States, a former Colombian agriculture minister and onetime presidential candidate,
Andres Felipe Arias, fled to Miami three weeks before he was convicted of funneling $12.5 million to wealthy political supporters
from a subsidy program that was intended to reduce inequality in rural areas and protect farmers from the effects of globalization.
The U.S. embassy in Bogota had been following Arias' trial closely and
reporting on the scandal in cables to Washington.
The trial
featured documents and witnesses saying that under Arias' watch, the agriculture ministry had doled out millions in subsidies
to affluent families, some of whom, according to media reports, had donated to Arias' political allies or his presidential campaign.
Subsidies went to relatives of congressmen, companies owned by the richest man in Colombia, and a former beauty queen. One powerful
family and its associates received over $2.5 million, according to records released by prosecutors. Another family, which included
relatives of a former senator, received $1.3 million. Both families had supported Arias' chief political ally, former Colombian President
Alvaro Uribe, with campaign contributions.
The law that
established the program did not ban wealthy landowners from getting grants, but some elite families had received multiple subsidies
for the same farm. They gamed the system by submitting multiple proposals in the names of different family members and by subdividing
their land so they could apply for grants for each parcel, court records indicate.
Yet, in November 2013, while the trial was going on, the U.S. embassy in Bogota renewed Arias' visitor visa. The State Department
refused to discuss the case, saying that visa records are confidential. But a
recent filing in federal court
showed that the U.S. embassy had flagged Arias' application, and asked him to provide documents to support his request to leave the
country while charges were pending. Arias submitted documents from the Colombian court, including a judicial order that allowed him
to travel. In the end, the embassy issued a visa because he had not yet been convicted.
Andres Felipe Arias, a former Colombian agriculture minister, who fled to the United States before he could be convicted
of funneling money from a subsidy program (GDA via AP Images)
On the night of June 13, 2014, three weeks before the judges convicted him of embezzlement by appropriation, a Colombian law that
penalizes the unauthorized use of public funds to benefit private entities, Arias packed his bags and boarded a plane. The following
month, the U.S. embassy in Bogota revoked the visa. But Arias hired an immigration attorney and applied for asylum.
"If you looked up 'politically motivated charges' in the dictionary, there would be a picture of Andres Arias next to it," said
David Oscar Markus, Arias' lead attorney. "The case [against him] is absurd and not even one that is recognized in the United States."
Over the next two years, Arias built a new life in South Florida with his wife and two children, opening a small consulting company
and renting a house in Weston.
On August 24, he was
arrested by U.S.
authorities in response to an extradition request from Colombia. He spent several months in a detention facility until his release
on bail in mid-November. Arias argues that the United States cannot extradite him because it has no active extradition treaty with
Colombia, but the U.S. Attorney's Office disagrees. A plea for asylum does not shield defendants from extradition if they are charged
in Colombia with a crime covered by the treaty between the two countries.
The agency that administers the program, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has adopted regulations designed to prevent
fraud, including requiring foreign investors to submit evidence, such as tax returns and bank statements, to prove they obtained
their money legally.
But these safeguards did not stop the daughter-in-law and grandsons of former South Korean dictator Chun Doo-hwan from using Chun's
ill-gotten gains to get U.S. permanent residency.
In 1996, a Korean court convicted Chun of receiving more than $200 million in bribes while in office in the 1980s, from companies
such as Samsung and Hyundai. He was ordered to return the bribes, but refused.
Part of Chun's fortune was funneled into the United States through his son, who purchased a $2.2 million house in Newport Beach,
California, according to South Korean prosecutors and real-estate records.
Millions of dollars from Chun's bribery proceeds were hidden in bearer bonds, which are notoriously difficult to trace. Unlike
regular bonds, which belong to registered owners, there is no record kept about the ownership or transfer of bearer bonds. The bonds
can be cashed out by whoever has them.
Former South Korean President Chun Doo-hwan addresses the press at the White House in 1985. Chun's relatives later gained
permanent residency in the United States by using money Chun obtained through bribes. (Bettmann via Getty Images)
In 2008, Chun's daughter-in-law, a South Korean actress named Park Sang-ah, applied for an immigrant investor visa. Park listed
her husband's bearer bonds as the source of her funds without mentioning that the money had been initially provided to him by Chun.
Eight months later, Park and her children received their conditional U.S. permanent residency cards in the mail.
In 2013, at the request of South Korean prosecutors, the U.S. Justice Department launched an investigation into the Chun family's
wealth in the United States and subsequently
seized $1.2 million of the family's U.S. assets in the United States. The money was returned to South Korea. Despite that, Chun's
family members have retained their residency status.
Chun's relatives obtained their permanent residency by investing in an EB-5 project managed by the Philadelphia Industrial Development
Corporation, a nonprofit company. The PIDC pooled Chun's $500,000 with money from 200 other foreign investors to finance an expansion
of the Pennsylvania Convention Center in downtown Philadelphia.
The same project in Philadelphia also helped to secure permanent residency for Qiao Jianjun, a Chinese government official accused
of embezzling more than $40 million from a state-owned grain storehouse, according to reports in the People's Daily, the Chinese
Communist Party's newspaper. Qiao had divorced his wife, Shilan Zhao, in China in 2001, a fact he did not disclose to U.S. immigration
authorities. When Zhao applied for an EB-5 visa, Qiao qualified for U.S. permanent residency as an applicant's spouse.
The Justice Department launched an investigation only when it was tipped off by Chinese authorities. In January 2014,
a federal grand jury indicted Zhao and her ex-husband, Qiao, for immigration fraud, money laundering and internationally transporting
stolen funds. Zhao was arrested and released on bail. Federal authorities are pursuing Qiao, whose whereabouts remain unknown.
A trial has been set for February 2017. U.S. government attorneys have filed asset forfeiture cases to recover real estate linked
to Qiao and Zhao in Flushing, New York, and Monterey Park, California.
In April 2015, Qiao appeared on the Chinese
government's list of 100 "most wanted" officials who fled abroad after being accused of crimes such as bribery and corruption.
He and 39 other government officials and state-owned enterprise leaders on the list allegedly fled to the United States.
The list, called "Operation Skynet," is part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign, which has vowed to take
down what Chinese officials describe as corrupt "tigers" and "flies" within the country's ruling Communist Party.
Fengxian Hu was another fugitive on China's list. A former army singer and radio broadcaster, Hu headed the state-owned broadcasting
company that had a joint venture with Pepsi to distribute soft drinks in Sichuan province. In 2002, The Washington Post and The Wall
Street Journal
reported that Pepsi had accused Hu of looting the joint venture and using company funds to buy fancy cars and go on European
tours.
The same year, in a widely publicized move, Pepsi filed a case with international arbitrators in Stockholm, asking that the joint
venture be dissolved. Despite this, Hu was given a visa that allowed him to fly regularly to Las Vegas, where he was a VIP client
at the MGM casino.
In January 2010, Chinese authorities investigated Hu for corruption. But the month before, Hu had entered the United States on
a B1 visitor visa, joining his wife, a U.S. citizen living in New York.
Hu tried to obtain a green card through his wife, but the petition was rejected by U.S. immigration authorities. He applied for
asylum instead.
Meanwhile, he had gotten into trouble in the United States for losing millions in a Las Vegas casino and failing to pay a $12
million gambling debt. In 2012, he was indicted in a Nevada court on two counts of theft and one count of intentionally passing a
check without sufficient funds.
Hu pled not guilty to the charges; his lawyers claimed that his checks bounced because his bank account had been closed by Chinese
authorities. The charges against him in the U.S. were considered an aggravated felony, which is a common basis for deportation. Hu,
however, had a pending asylum case and so could not be deported.
In August 2015, a New York immigration judge denied the asylum claim. But Hu's lawyers argued that he would be tortured if he
returned to China and invoked the United Nations Convention
Against Torture , which says that an alien may not be sent to a country where he is likely to be tortured. In the end, the immigration
court suspended Hu's removal order, allowing him to remain in the United States and work here indefinitely. He will not, however,
be given permanent residency or be allowed to travel outside the country.
The absence of an extradition treaty -- coupled with a high standard of living -- makes the United States a favored destination
for Chinese officials and businessmen fleeing corruption charges.
In April 2015, Jeh Johnson, the Secretary for the Department of Homeland Security , made a 48-hour trip to Beijing. The visit
was intended to pave the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping's U.S. visit in September 2015, according to a memorandum Johnson wrote,
which was obtained through a request under the Freedom of Information Act.
In the memo, Johnson said the Chinese government is seeking 132 people it said have fled to the United States to avoid prosecution.
This represents a greater number of fugitives than Chinese authorities have publicly acknowledged.
"I'm told that in prior discussions, the Chinese have been frustrated by the lack of any information from us about the 132 fugitives,"
Johnson wrote.
The Chinese request for assistance posed a dilemma for the United States. American officials are concerned about a lack of fairness
in China's criminal justice system. Human rights groups say that China continues to use torture to extract false confessions from
suspected criminals. Torture has also been documented to be part of shuanggui -- a secretive discipline process reserved for
members of the Chinese Communist Party.
Some analysts see the crackdown on corrupt officials as part of a purge aimed at the current regime's political rivals and ideological
enemies. U.S. officials say this makes returning corrupt officials to China a delicate issue for the United States.
In 2003, headlines around the world reported
widespread
street protests in Bolivia that led to security forces killing 58 people, most of them members of indigenous groups. Not long
afterward, as protesters massed up on the streets of La Paz demanding his resignation, Bolivian President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada
resigned and fled his country along with his defense minister, Jose Carlos Sanchez Berzain.
The two men flew to the United States, where they continue to reside. In 2006, Berzain applied for political asylum, which he
was granted in 2007. On
his application, when the form asked, "Have you or your family members ever been accused, charged, arrested, detained, interrogated,
convicted and sentenced, or imprisoned in any country other than the United States?" Berzain checked the box "no," even though by
then he and de Lozada had been formally accused of
genocide by Bolivia's attorney
general. The indictment was approved
by Bolivia's Supreme Court in 2007. Berzain also stated on his application that the State Department had arranged for his travel
to the United States.
The de Lozada administration was vocally pro-American. Before it was ousted, officials had announced they would facilitate gas
exports to the United States.
After their departure, Bolivia's attorney general
publicly stated
that the administration had embezzled millions from government coffers, but did not formally file charges. He said de Lozada
had taken some $22 million from the country's reserve funds before fleeing.
De Lozada and members of his administration have dismissed the allegations as part of a politically motivated smear campaign,
but there is evidence to suggest irregularities may have occurred in the handling of the reserve funds. The former president signed
a decree shortly before leaving office authorizing the interior and finance ministers to withdraw money from Bolivia's reserve funds
without going through the normal approval process. De Lozada's former interior minister
pleaded guilty in 2004 to embezzlement after $270,000 in cash was found in an associate's home.
De Lozada, a mining mogul before he became president, moved to Chevy Chase, Maryland, an upscale suburb of Washington, D.C. He
now lives in a two-story brick house bought for $1.4 million by Macalester Limited, a limited liability company that was formed in
the British Virgin Islands and lists a post office box in the Bahamas as its principal address.
De Lozada's immigration status is unclear. He said in a sworn deposition in 2015 that he was not a U.S. citizen. His son-in-law,
who spoke to ProPublica on his behalf, would not say whether de Lozada had applied for asylum.
Berzain, meanwhile, settled in South Florida. Records show that he and his brother-in-law personally own or are listed as officers
or members of business entities that together control around $9 million worth of Miami real estate.
Some of the purchases were made in the names of entities that appear to list different variations of Berzain's name in business
records.
In addition, in the purchase of two properties, Berzain's name was added to business records only after the deal had gone through.
Berzain's brother-in-law incorporated a company called Warren USA Corp in October 2010, for example, and the company purchased a
$1.4 million residential property the following month. Three weeks after Warren USA Corp became the owner of an elegant Spanish-style
villa in Key Biscayne, Berzain was added as the company's secretary.
The following year, in May 2011, Berzain's brother-in-law created Galen KB Corp and registered as the company's president. A month
later, Galen KB Corp purchased a $250,000 condo. In August, Berzain replaced his brother-in-law as the company's president, according
to business records. Berzain is no longer listed as a company officer in either company.
During an interview in January, Berzain told ProPublica "I don't have any companies." When asked about several of the companies
associated with his name or address in public records, the former defense minister said he had a consulting firm that helped clients
set up companies and that he was sometimes added to the board of directors. Efforts to reach Berzain's brother-in-law, a wealthy
businessman and the owner of a bus company in Bolivia, were unsuccessful. Berzain's brother-in-law has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The practice of purchasing real estate in the name of a business entity like a limited liability company, or LLC, is a common
and legal practice in high-end real-estate markets, and one that enables celebrities and other wealthy individuals to protect their
privacy.
But the practice also allows foreign officials to hide ill-gotten gains. U.S. regulations allow individuals to form business entities
like LLCs without disclosing the beneficial owner. The LLCs can be registered in the names of lawyers, accountants or other associates
-- or even anonymously in some states -- and used to purchase real estate, making it nearly impossible to determine the actual owner
of a property.
Government investigators and lawmakers have pointed out persistent gaps in U.S. policy that have enabled corrupt officials to
evade justice and hide their assets in this country. But little has changed.
Last year, a U.S. Government Accountability Office investigation
said it can be "difficult" for immigration officials to identify the true source of an immigrant investor's funds. Immigration
officials told the government auditors that EB-5 applicants with ties to corruption, the drug trade, human trafficking and other
criminal activities have a strong incentive to omit key details about their financial histories or lie on their applications.
"It's very easy to get lost in the noise if you're a bad person," said Seto Bagdoyan, the accountability office's director of
forensic audits, who co-authored the GAO report.
Immigration officials, he added, have an "almost nonexistent" ability to thoroughly evaluate investors' backgrounds and trace
their assets.
Despite such weaknesses, Congress has continually
extended the EB-5
program with minor changes. The program is backed by
real-estate lobbyists who argue that it is a crucial source of financing for luxury condos and hotels. The program is
expected to thrive in a
Trump presidency because the president-elect is a developer and his son-in-law Jared Kushner received $50 million in EB-5 funds to
build a Trump-branded tower in New Jersey.
In 2010, a Senate report described how powerful foreign officials and their relatives moved millions of dollars in suspect funds
into the United States. The report said investors bypassed anti-money laundering regulations with help from U.S. lawyers, real-estate
agents, and banking institutions. Last year, ABC News
reported that lobbyists for real estate and other business groups spent $30 million in 2015 in an effort to protect the EB-5
program.
Senate investigators proposed legislation that would require companies to disclose their beneficial owners and make it easier
for authorities to restrict entry, deny visas and deport corrupt foreign officials.
A few of the proposals have been adopted, but they have not made much difference. Banks have stepped up their efforts to identify
corrupt officials and monitor their accounts. Professional groups such as the American Bar Association have issued non-binding guidelines
for their members on compliance with anti-money-laundering controls. The U.S. government has also worked with the
Financial Action Task Force , an international body set up
to fight money laundering, to bring its anti-corruption controls in accordance with the body's guidelines.
In May, the Treasury Department enacted a new rule that will take full effect in 2018 and will require financial institutions
to identify the beneficial owners of shell companies. Some advocates see the rule as a step backward. The new rule allows shell companies
to designate the manager of the account as the beneficial owner, concealing the identity of the person ultimately exercising control.
The State Department declined to say what progress, if any, it has made on the Senate subcommittee's recommendation to more aggressively
deny visas through Proclamation 7750. "The Department takes seriously congressional recommendations and devotes resources to addressing
corruption worldwide," a State Department official wrote in response to questions.
In 2010, then-Attorney General Eric Holder launched the Kleptocracy Asset Recovery Initiative. The small unit, which has grown
to include 16 attorneys, aims to recover assets in the United States that are tied to foreign corruption and return the money to
the looted countries.
Over the past six years, the unit has filed around two dozen civil asset forfeiture cases in an attempt to seize money, real estate
and other assets tied to government officials from 16 countries. Assets have ranged from a lone diamond-encrusted glove worn by Michael
Jackson that was purchased by Equatorial Guinea's Vice President, Teodoro Obiang, to a $1 billion fund tied to Malaysian Prime Minister
Najib Razak.
Yet most of the money the Department of Justice has pursued remains in limbo. The case involving Chun, the former president of
South Korea, is one of only two instances in which corrupt gains have been returned to the home country through the Justice Department's
efforts. The other arose when Justice Department officials
returned $1.5 million to Taiwan from property bought with bribes paid to the family of Chun Shui Bian, the former president of
Taiwan.
The agency faces myriad challenges when attempting to seize and return assets acquired by corrupt foreign officials, including
a lack of witnesses, said Kendall Day, head of the Department of Justice's Asset Forfeiture and Money Laundering Section. These officials
often shield their transactions through shell companies, offshore companies or a network of associates.
"The mission of the Kleptocracy Initiative is really to target what we call grand foreign corruption that impacts the U.S. financial
system," Day said, citing the Chun case as an example.
The 2012 Magnitsky Act gives the government power to deny visas and freeze the assets of Russian nationals accused of corruption
or human rights violations. The Global Magnitsky Act would extend the same sanctions to the rest of the world, but it has yet to
be passed by Congress. Unlike Proclamation 7750, the Magnitsky laws require the government to publish a list of foreign government
officials who are barred from the United States.
In addition, the Treasury Department imposed regulations this year that aim to crack down on the use of shell companies to purchase
real estate in places like Miami and Manhattan. Title insurance companies are now required to identify the real owners of companies
purchasing high-end real estate without a mortgage. These regulations, however, are temporary.
Долгие годы я
жил в ощущении
правильности
произошедшего
в 1991 и 1993 годах. Хотя,
конечно, у меня
были серьезные
внутренние
разногласия с
той толпой,
которая
носилась по
Москве и ломала
памятники. Но я
это в себе как-то
давил. В 1993 году
мне казалось
правильным, что
танк стреляет
по дому с
вооруженными
людьми. Я тоже
хотел
раздавить
гадину, потому
что гадина
представлялась
мне гадиной. Я
был юн и еще не
понимал, что
демократия -- это
всегда толпа,
ломающая
памятники. И что
любой
парламент -- это
всегда гадина.
Но это не значит,
что его надо из
танков
расстреливать.
Но даже когда
ко мне пришло
понимание этих
двух
постулатов, я
все равно
продолжал
смеяться над
мифологией
защитников
гадины. О
массовых
расстрелах на
стадионе
"Красная Пресня".
И, конечно, о
таинственных
снайперах,
которые
стреляли по
простым
прохожим. Зачем
снайперам
стрелять по
простым
прохожим? Какой
в этом военный
тактический
смысл? Однако
время всё
ставит по своим
местам.
Снайперы,
стреляющие по
простым
прохожим нужны
для того же, для
чего нужны две
бочки хлора. Для
провокации.
А где же еще мы
видели
снайперов,
стрелявших по
людям для
провокации
насилия?
Правильно, мы
видели их в
Киеве на
Майдане. И вот
когда у тебя в
голове вдруг
складывается
Майдан и 1993 год, то
становится
неприятно.
Потому что ты
начинаешь
понимать
природу
произошедшего
в 1993 году. Это был
такой же Майдан.
И он, как и в
Киеве, победил.
Раздавили
гадину. Америка,
матушка-спасительница,
помогла. И в 1993м. И в
2014. Только почему
же ты, сволочь,
тогда был на
одной стороне, а
потом -- на
другой? А потому
что дурак был.
А когда
картинка
сложилась,
сразу же много
стало понятнее.
И весь тот ад
девяностых,
который был так
похож на то, что
ныне
происходит на
Украине. Война
против
собственных
граждан
негодной,
разворованной
армией. Полный
крах экономики,
зависимость от
денег МВФ,
выделяемых по
милостивому
разрешению США.
Вооруженные
люди, убивающие
друг друга в
центрах
городов.
Эта мысль
может
показаться
диковатой, но
вот, наконец, у
нее случилось
документальное
подтверждение.
В США
опубликованы
расшифровки
телефонных
разговоров
президента
Билла Клинтона.
В том числе и с
президентом
Борисом
Ельциным. В
которых Ельцин
пугает
Клинтона
коммунистами,
жалуется, что
коммунисты,
если победят,
могут отобрать
Крым (!). И просит
два с половиной
миллиарда
долларов на
выборы. После
чего МВФ
выделяет
России займ, а в
Москве
приезжают
американские
политические
консультанты. И
выборы 1996 года
превращаются в
Оранжевую
революцию --
только вместо
концертов на
Майдане тур
"Голосуй или
проиграешь". А в
результате всё
равно
сфальсифицированные
результаты.
Методы и те же,
разве что
последовательность
разная.
И вот с высоты
этого
понимания
хорошо бы
оглядеть
перспективы. В
России
случился Путин,
она очистилась
от скверны и
таки приняла
вернувшийся
Крым. Значит ли
это, что
подобный исход
событий
возможен на
Украине?
Интересная
могла бы
получиться
экстраполяция:
Порошенко
находит
какого-то
малоизвестного
человека,
выходца из СБУ,
которого
назначает
преемником.
Этот человек
выгоняет
американцев,
восстанавливает
экономику,
мирится с
Донбассом,
равноудаляет
старых
олигархов и
возвращает
Крым? Сценарий,
как вы
понимаете,
фантастический.
И дело даже не в
Крыме, который
никуда
"возвращаться"
не собирается,
потому что он
уже вернулся
домой. Дело в
том, что Ельцин
вовсе не хотел,
чтобы Путин
сделал всё то,
что он сделал. Он
хотел просто
гарантий
безопасности
для себя и семьи.
И то, что Путин
оказался не тем,
кем его
представлял
себе Ельцин --
это счастливая
случайность.
Божий промысел,
если хотите. Pussy Riot
просили
Богородицу,
чтобы она
забрала Путина,
а устами
художника
всегда говорит
Бог. То есть,
прося
Богородицу,
чтобы она
забрала Путина,
Pussy Riot тем самым (и
сами того не
понимая)
говорили нам,
что Богородица
Путина нам дала.
Это шутка,
конечно.
Впрочем, как мне
кажется,
довольно
изящная.
Порошенко,
разумеется,
тоже ничего из
того, что сделал
Путин, не хочет.
Он хочет или
остаться у
власти (что
мирным путем
невозможно) или
же обеспечить
себе
безопасность.
Кто именно мог
бы обеспечить
ему такую
безопасность
(то есть -- быть
потенциальным
украинским
Путиным) отсюда
пока никак не
просматривается.
Но вопрос ведь
не в этом. Вопрос
в том, будет ли к
этому иметь
отношение
Богородица.
А также в том,
что нам теперь
совсем не с руки
смеяться над
нынешней
Украиной и ее
выбором. Мы с
вами вышли из
такого же
дерьма. Природа
современного
русского
государства
такая же --
поддержанный
американцами
майдан. И хорошо
бы никогда об
этом не
забывать. И
соответственно
относиться к
тем, кто тоскует
по тем
временам.
А лично мне
достаточно
того, что
Богородица не
послушала Pussy Riot. И
слава богу. RT
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the
current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal
propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an
extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like
constatation of already accomplished goal.
Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no
longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.
In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major
U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's
infamous intercepted
phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"
Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk,
its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people
rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the
Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt
sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government.
Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy
put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"
More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014,
represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at
least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected
president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this
revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.
On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is
stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt
conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding
its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way
the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not
plotting to oust one government and install another.
The Times
article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in
2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United
States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt,
seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had
said."
Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or
early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have
thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.
You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they
were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie
evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's
border.
The 'No Coup' Conclusion
But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long
pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly
a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring
that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave
and not coming back.
That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including
the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to
know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in
last year's long-form article.
Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually
looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you
were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.
"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent,
'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular
uprising," Higgins and Kramer
wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's
line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about
how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."
The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by
his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone
else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by
protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the
review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's
own efforts to make peace."
Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup
had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in
1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government
operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and
economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come
and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly
elected leader made a hasty departure.
In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the
next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military
regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.
Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an
alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is
brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in
the 1960s and 1970s.
' Color Revolutions'
But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which
operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure
on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the
restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to
justify his removal.
Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is
ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as
happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have
to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of
the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup
in history."
Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to
create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and
capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in
2013.
On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a
major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and
called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100
million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for
journalists and organizing business groups.
As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe
will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.
Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near
abroad but within Russia itself."
At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of
reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013
when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160
billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There
was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International
Monetary Fund.
Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western
Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of
protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to
show restraint.
Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous
$15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and
the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a
brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.
Cheering an Uprising
The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian
business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European
aspirations."
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland
speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by
Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists
from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their
challenge to the Ukrainian government.
As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist
elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades
or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other
weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners
and even a Confederate flag.
Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted
in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The
chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and
protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other
weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80
including more than a dozen police.
U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper
attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have
suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor
extremists.
To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on
Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of
office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.
The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street
fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their
lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department
with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime
minister.
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted
protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who
fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American
people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and
simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times
report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death
by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that
an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as
simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and
peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel
determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had
played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup
resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians
simply became "Russian aggression."
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a
Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing
of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II –
reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the
neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by
quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men.
[See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's
'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]
But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to
call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into
dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.
And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is
stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39
Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the
process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue
revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will
not know the difference until it is too late.
The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a
counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too
destructive in its natural development.
Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49
Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's
gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated
industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.
The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the
first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't
try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing
the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine
refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe
President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the
border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to
DPR Donesk/Lugansk.
Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50
I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I
looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov
cocktails.
We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we
demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging
ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?"
Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26
"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the
CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots
were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army
after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be
that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?
Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00
Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very
similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup
government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media
– propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John
Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" –
https://vimeo.com/16724719 .
archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45
It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that
Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated
this.
Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57
Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through
instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and
the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen.
They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in
that.
Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51
You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying
tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded
its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he
had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by
the historians.
"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has
been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington
Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling
Russian President Vladimir Putin."
It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.
Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in
Washington during September 2013.
Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine
Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just
five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with
Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013.
Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the
time.
Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never
appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same
mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being
photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with
leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.
Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst,
describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had
worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran
negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.
The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future –
it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together,
and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow
of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:
Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail,
piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP
AMERICA.
Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06
Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a
result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths
controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy"
Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to
flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.
Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40
Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with
Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know
anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in
Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have
rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh
as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another
angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were
reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the
US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests
(British Petroleum):
New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):
The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one
here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye
on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier
Mossadegh.
Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our
ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him
as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made
different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry,
personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own
people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of
the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the
Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to
destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.
His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes
-the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are
anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes.
There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The
peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and
nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong
enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.
All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian
intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following
policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's
apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.
Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth
in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a
strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians
because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely
to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we
remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most
media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually
think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela
in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media
manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US
Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions
for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times
immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US
fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US)
then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.
SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16
How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists,
paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such
dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a
coup "hidden in plain sight".
Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36
Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of
regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the
name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed
candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war,
this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney
are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the
Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's
future.
Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11
I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea
and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?
Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11
Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the
scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?
This article by late Robert Parry is from 2016 but is still relevant in context of the
current Ukrainian elections and the color revolution is Venezuela. The power of neoliberal
propaganda is simply tremendous. For foreign events it is able to distort the story to such an
extent that the most famous quote of CIA director William Casey "We'll know our disinformation
program is complete when everything the American public believes is false" looks like
constatation of already accomplished goal.
Exclusive: Several weeks before Ukraine's 2014 coup, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Nuland had already picked Arseniy Yatsenyuk to be the future leader, but now "Yats" is no
longer the guy, writes Robert Parry.
In reporting on the resignation of Ukrainian Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, the major
U.S. newspapers either ignored or distorted Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland's
infamous intercepted
phone call before the 2014 coup in which she declared "Yats is the guy!"
Though Nuland's phone call introduced many Americans to the previously obscure Yatsenyuk,
its timing – a few weeks before the ouster of elected Ukrainian President Viktor
Yanukovych – was never helpful to Washington's desired narrative of the Ukrainian people
rising up on their own to oust a corrupt leader.
Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland, who pushed for the
Ukraine coup and helped pick the post-coup leaders.
Instead, the conversation between Nuland and U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt
sounded like two proconsuls picking which Ukrainian politicians would lead the new government.
Nuland also disparaged the less aggressive approach of the European Union with the pithy
put-down: "Fuck the E.U.!"
More importantly, the intercepted call, released onto YouTube in early February 2014,
represented powerful evidence that these senior U.S. officials were plotting – or at
least collaborating in – a coup d'etat against Ukraine's democratically elected
president. So, the U.S. government and the mainstream U.S. media have since consigned this
revealing discussion to the Great Memory Hole.
On Monday, in reporting on Yatsenyuk's Sunday speech in which he announced that he is
stepping down, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal didn't mention the Nuland-Pyatt
conversation at all. The New York Times did mention the call but misled its readers regarding
its timing, making it appear as if the call followed rather than preceded the coup. That way
the call sounded like two American officials routinely appraising Ukraine's future leaders, not
plotting to oust one government and install another.
The Times
article by Andrew E. Kramer said: "Before Mr. Yatsenyuk's appointment as prime minister in
2014, a leaked recording of a telephone conversation between Victoria J. Nuland, a United
States assistant secretary of state, and the American ambassador in Ukraine, Geoffrey R. Pyatt,
seemed to underscore the West's support for his candidacy. 'Yats is the guy,' Ms. Nuland had
said."
Notice, however, that if you didn't know that the conversation occurred in late January or
early February 2014, you wouldn't know that it preceded the Feb. 22, 2014 coup. You might have
thought that it was just a supportive chat before Yatsenyuk got his new job.
You also wouldn't know that much of the Nuland-Pyatt conversation focused on how they
were going to "glue this thing" or "midwife this thing," comments sounding like prima facie
evidence that the U.S. government was engaged in "regime change" in Ukraine, on Russia's
border.
The 'No Coup' Conclusion
But Kramer's lack of specificity about the timing and substance of the call fits with a long
pattern of New York Times' bias in its coverage of the Ukraine crisis. On Jan. 4, 2015, nearly
a year after the U.S.-backed coup, the Times published an "investigation" article declaring
that there never had been a coup. It was just a case of President Yanukovych deciding to leave
and not coming back.
That article reached its conclusion, in part, by ignoring the evidence of a coup, including
the Nuland-Pyatt phone call. The story was co-written by Kramer and so it is interesting to
know that he was at least aware of the "Yats is the guy" reference although it was ignored in
last year's long-form article.
Instead, Kramer and his co-author Andrew Higgins took pains to mock anyone who actually
looked at the evidence and dared reach the disfavored conclusion about a coup. If you did, you
were some rube deluded by Russian propaganda.
"Russia has attributed Mr. Yanukovych's ouster to what it portrays as a violent,
'neo-fascist' coup supported and even choreographed by the West and dressed up as a popular
uprising," Higgins and Kramer
wrote . "Few outside the Russian propaganda bubble ever seriously entertained the Kremlin's
line. But almost a year after the fall of Mr. Yanukovych's government, questions remain about
how and why it collapsed so quickly and completely."
The Times' article concluded that Yanukovych "was not so much overthrown as cast adrift by
his own allies, and that Western officials were just as surprised by the meltdown as anyone
else. The allies' desertion, fueled in large part by fear, was accelerated by the seizing by
protesters of a large stock of weapons in the west of the country. But just as important, the
review of the final hours shows, was the panic in government ranks created by Mr. Yanukovych's
own efforts to make peace."
Yet, one might wonder what the Times thinks a coup looks like. Indeed, the Ukrainian coup
had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in
1953 and in Guatemala in 1954.
The way those coups played out is now historically well known. Secret U.S. government
operatives planted nasty propaganda about the targeted leader, stirred up political and
economic chaos, conspired with rival political leaders, spread rumors of worse violence to come
and then – as political institutions collapsed – watched as the scared but duly
elected leader made a hasty departure.
In Iran, the coup reinstalled the autocratic Shah who then ruled with a heavy hand for the
next quarter century; in Guatemala, the coup led to more than three decades of brutal military
regimes and the killing of some 200,000 Guatemalans.
Coups don't have to involve army tanks occupying the public squares, although that is an
alternative model which follows many of the same initial steps except that the military is
brought in at the end. The military coup was a common approach especially in Latin America in
the 1960s and 1970s.
' Color Revolutions'
But the preferred method in more recent years has been the "color revolution," which
operates behind the façade of a "peaceful" popular uprising and international pressure
on the targeted leader to show restraint until it's too late to stop the coup. Despite the
restraint, the leader is still accused of gross human rights violations, all the better to
justify his removal.
Later, the ousted leader may get an image makeover; instead of a cruel bully, he is
ridiculed for not showing sufficient resolve and letting his base of support melt away, as
happened with Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
But the reality of what happened in Ukraine was never hard to figure out. Nor did you have
to be inside "the Russian propaganda bubble" to recognize it. George Friedman, the founder of
the global intelligence firm Stratfor, called Yanukovych's overthrow "the most blatant coup
in history."
Which is what it appears if you consider the evidence. The first step in the process was to
create tensions around the issue of pulling Ukraine out of Russia's economic orbit and
capturing it in the European Union's gravity, a plan defined by influential American neocons in
2013.
On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has been a
major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington Post and
called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling Russian
President Vladimir Putin.
At the time, Gershman, whose NED is funded by the U.S. Congress to the tune of about $100
million a year, was financing scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists, paying for
journalists and organizing business groups.
As for the even bigger prize -- Putin -- Gershman wrote: "Ukraine's choice to join Europe
will accelerate the demise of the ideology of Russian imperialism that Putin represents.
Russians, too, face a choice, and Putin may find himself on the losing end not just in the near
abroad but within Russia itself."
At that time, in early fall 2013, Ukraine's President Yanukovych was exploring the idea of
reaching out to Europe with an association agreement. But he got cold feet in November 2013
when economic experts in Kiev advised him that the Ukrainian economy would suffer a $160
billion hit if it separated from Russia, its eastern neighbor and major trading partner. There
was also the West's demand that Ukraine accept a harsh austerity plan from the International
Monetary Fund.
Yanukovych wanted more time for the E.U. negotiations, but his decision angered many western
Ukrainians who saw their future more attached to Europe than Russia. Tens of thousands of
protesters began camping out at Maidan Square in Kiev, with Yanukovych ordering the police to
show restraint.
Meanwhile, with Yanukovych shifting back toward Russia, which was offering a more generous
$15 billion loan and discounted natural gas, he soon became the target of American neocons and
the U.S. media, which portrayed Ukraine's political unrest as a black-and-white case of a
brutal and corrupt Yanukovych opposed by a saintly "pro-democracy" movement.
Cheering an Uprising
The Maidan uprising was urged on by American neocons, including Assistant Secretary of State
for European Affairs Nuland, who passed out cookies at the Maidan and reminded Ukrainian
business leaders that the United States had invested $5 billion in their "European
aspirations."
A screen shot of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for European Affairs Victoria Nuland
speaking to U.S. and Ukrainian business leaders on Dec. 13, 2013, at an event sponsored by
Chevron, with its logo to Nuland's left.
Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, also showed up, standing on stage with right-wing extremists
from the Svoboda Party and telling the crowd that the United States was with them in their
challenge to the Ukrainian government.
As the winter progressed, the protests grew more violent. Neo-Nazi and other extremist
elements from Lviv and other western Ukrainian cities began arriving in well-organized brigades
or "sotins" of 100 trained street fighters. Police were attacked with firebombs and other
weapons as the violent protesters began seizing government buildings and unfurling Nazi banners
and even a Confederate flag.
Though Yanukovych continued to order his police to show restraint, he was still depicted
in the major U.S. news media as a brutal thug who was callously murdering his own people. The
chaos reached a climax on Feb. 20 when mysterious snipers opened fire, killing both police and
protesters. As the police retreated, the militants advanced brandishing firearms and other
weapons. The confrontation led to significant loss of life, pushing the death toll to around 80
including more than a dozen police.
U.S. diplomats and the mainstream U.S. press immediately blamed Yanukovych for the sniper
attack, though the circumstances remain murky to this day and some investigations have
suggested that the lethal sniper fire came from buildings controlled by Right Sektor
extremists.
To tamp down the worsening violence, a shaken Yanukovych signed a European-brokered deal on
Feb. 21, in which he accepted reduced powers and an early election so he could be voted out of
office. He also agreed to requests from Vice President Joe Biden to pull back the police.
The precipitous police withdrawal opened the path for the neo-Nazis and other street
fighters to seize presidential offices and force Yanukovych and his officials to flee for their
lives. The new coup regime was immediately declared "legitimate" by the U.S. State Department
with Yanukovych sought on murder charges. Nuland's favorite, Yatsenyuk, became the new prime
minister.
Throughout the crisis, the mainstream U.S. press hammered home the theme of white-hatted
protesters versus a black-hatted president. The police were portrayed as brutal killers who
fired on unarmed supporters of "democracy." The good-guy/bad-guy narrative was all the American
people heard from the major media.
The New York Times went so far as to delete the slain policemen from the narrative and
simply report that the police had killed all those who died in the Maidan. A typical Times
report on March 5, 2014, summed up the storyline: "More than 80 protesters were shot to death
by the police as an uprising spiraled out of control in mid-February."
The mainstream U.S. media also sought to discredit anyone who observed the obvious fact that
an unconstitutional coup had just occurred. A new theme emerged that portrayed Yanukovych as
simply deciding to abandon his government because of the moral pressure from the noble and
peaceful Maidan protests.
Any reference to a "coup" was dismissed as "Russian propaganda." There was a parallel
determination in the U.S. media to discredit or ignore evidence that neo-Nazi militias had
played an important role in ousting Yanukovych and in the subsequent suppression of anti-coup
resistance in eastern and southern Ukraine. That opposition among ethnic-Russian Ukrainians
simply became "Russian aggression."
Nazi symbols on helmets worn by members of Ukraine's Azov battalion. (As filmed by a
Norwegian film crew and shown on German TV)
This refusal to notice what was actually a remarkable story – the willful unleashing
of Nazi storm troopers on a European population for the first time since World War II –
reached absurd levels as The New York Times and The Washington Post buried references to the
neo-Nazis at the end of stories, almost as afterthoughts.
The Washington Post went to the extreme of rationalizing Swastikas and other Nazi symbols by
quoting one militia commander as calling them "romantic" gestures by impressionable young men.
[See Consortiumnews.com's " Ukraine's
'Romantic' Neo-Nazi Storm Troopers ."]
But today – more than two years after what U.S. and Ukrainian officials like to
call "the Revolution of Dignity" – the U.S.-backed Ukrainian government is sinking into
dysfunction, reliant on handouts from the IMF and Western governments.
And, in a move perhaps now more symbolic than substantive, Prime Minister Yatsenyuk is
stepping down. Yats is no longer the guy.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The
Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America's Stolen
Narrative, either in print here or
as an e-book (from
Amazon and
barnesandnoble.com ).
Khalid Talaat , April 16, 2016 at 20:39
Is it too far fetched to think that all these color revolutions are a perfection of the
process to unleash another fake color revolution, only this time it is a Red, White and Blue
revolution here at home? Those that continue to booze and snooze while watching the tube will
not know the difference until it is too late.
The freedom and tranquility of our country depends on finding and implementing a
counterweight to the presstitutes and their propaganda. The alternative is too
destructive in its natural development.
Abe , April 15, 2016 at 18:49
Yats and Porko are the guys who broke Ukraine. By the end of December 2015, Ukraine's
gross domestic product had shrunk around 19 percent in comparison with 2013. Its decimated
industrial sector needs less fuel. Yatsie did a heck of a job.
The timing of "Yats" departure is ominous. Mid-April, six weeks from now would be the
first chance to renew the invasion of DPR Donesk/Lugansk."Yats" failed in 2014, and didn't
try in 2015. Who is "the new guy"? Will the new Prime Minister begin raving about renewing
the holy war to recover the lost oblasts? 2016 is really Ukraine's last chance. Ukraine
refuses to implement Minsk2, and they have been receiving lots of new weapons. I believe
President Putin put the Syrian operation on " standby" not only to avoid approaching the
border, provoking a Turkish intervention, but also so he can give undistracted attention to
DPR Donesk/Lugansk.
Bill Rood , April 12, 2016 at 11:50
I guess I must be inside the Russian propaganda bubble. It was obvious to me when I
looked at the YouTube videos of policemen burning after being hit with Molotov
cocktails.
We played the same game of encouraging government "restraint" in Syria, where we
demanded Assad free "political prisoners," but we now accuse him of deliberately encouraging
ISIS by freeing those people, so that he can point to ISIS and ask, "Do you want that?"
Targeted leaders are damned if they do and damned if they don't.
Andrei , April 12, 2016 at 10:26
"the Ukrainian coup had many of the same earmarks as such classics as the
CIA-engineered regime changes in Iran in 1953 and in Guatemala in 1954", Romania 1989 Shots
were fired by snipers in order to stirr the crowds (sounds familiar?) and also by the army
after Ceasescu ran away, which resulted in civilians getting murdered. Could it possibly be
that it was said : "Iliescu (next elected president) is the guy!" ?
Joe L. , April 12, 2016 at 11:00
Check out the attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in Venezuela 2002, that is very
similar with protesters, snipers on rooftops, IMF immediately offering loans to the new coup
government, new government positions for the coup plotters, complacency with the media
– propaganda, funding by USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy etc. John
Pilger documents how the coup occurred in his documentary "War on Democracy" –
https://vimeo.com/16724719 .
archaos , April 12, 2016 at 09:45
It was noted in the minutes of Verkhovna Rada almost 2 years before Maidan 2 , that
Geoffrey Pyatt was fomenting and funding destabilisation of Ukraine.
All of Svoboda Nazis in parliament (and other fascisti) then booed the MP who stated
this.
Mark Thomason , April 12, 2016 at 06:57
Also, the Dutch voted "no" on the economic agreement the coup was meant to force through
instead of the Russian agreement accepted by the President it overthrew. Now both "Yats" and
the economic agreement are gone. All that is left is the war. Neocons are still happen.
They wanted the war. They really want to overthrow Putin, and Ukraine was just a tool in
that.
Realist , April 12, 2016 at 05:51
You're right, it doesn't have to be the military that carries out a coup by deploying
tanks on the National Mall. In 2000, it was the United States Supreme Court that exceeded
its constitutional authority and installed George W. Bush as president, though in reality he
had lost that election. I wonder when that move will rightfully be characterized as a coup by
the historians.
"On Sept. 26, 2013, National Endowment for Democracy President Carl Gershman, who has
been a major neocon paymaster for decades, took to the op-ed page of the neocon Washington
Post and called Ukraine "the biggest prize" and an important interim step toward toppling
Russian President Vladimir Putin."
It should be remembered that Victoria Nuland took up the post of Assistant Secretary of
State for European and Eurasian Affairs in Washington on September 18, 2013.
Coincidentally, two other women closely connected to events in Ukraine were also in
Washington during September 2013.
Friend of Nuland and boss of the IMF, which has its own HQ in Washington, Christine
Lagarde was swift to respond to a Ukraine request for IMF loans on February 27th 2014, just
five days after the removal of Yanukovych on February 22nd. Lagarde is pictured with
Baronness Catherine Ashton in Washington in a Facebook entry dated September 30th 2013.
Ashton was High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy at the
time.
Though visiting Kiev at the same time as Nuland in February 2014 Catherine Ashton never
appeared in public with her, which seems a little odd considering the women were on the same
mission, and talking to the same people. Nevertheless, despite appearing shy of being
photographed with each other the two women weren't quite so shy of being pictured with
leaders of the coup, including the right wing extremist, Oleh Tyahnybok.
Ashton refused to be drawn into commenting on Nuland's "Fuck the E.U.!" outburst,
describing Nuland as "a friend of mine." The two women certainly weren't strangers, they had
worked closely together before. September 2012 saw them involved in discussions with Iran
negotiator Saeed Jalili over the country's supposed nuclear arms ambitions.
The question is not so much whether the three women talked about Ukraine's future –
it would be ridiculous to think they did not – but how closely they worked together,
and exactly how closely they might have been involved in events leading up to the overthrow
of the legitimate government in Kiev. More on this here:
Another failed "regime change". Aren't these guys (Neoconservatives) great. They fail,
piss off/kill millions, yet seem to keep making money and retaining power. Time to WAKE UP
AMERICA.
Skip Edwards , April 11, 2016 at 20:06
Read "The Devil'Chessboard" by David Talbot to understand what has been occurring as a
result of America's Dark, Shadow government, an un-elected bunch of vicious psychopaths
controlling our destiny; unless stopped. Get a clue and realize that "Yats is our guy"
Victoria Nuland was Hillary Clinton's "gal." Hillary Clinton is Robert Kagen's "gal." Time to
flush all these rats out of the hold and get on with our lives.
Joe L. , April 11, 2016 at 18:40
Mr. Parry thank you for delving into the proven history of coups and the parallels with
Ukraine. It amazes me how anyone can outright deny this was a coup especially if they know
anything about US coups going back to WW2 (Iran 1953, Guatemala 1954, Chile 1973, attempt in
Venezuela 2002 etc. – and there are a whole slew more). I read before, as you have
rightly pointed out, that in 1953 the CIA led a propaganda campaign in Iran against Mossadegh
as well as financing opposition protesters and opposition government officials. Another
angle, as well, is looking historically back to what papers such as the New York Times were
reporting around the time of the coup in Iran – especially when we know that the
US/Britain overthrew the democratically elected Mossadegh for their own oil interests
(British Petroleum):
New York Times: "Mossadegh Plays with Fire" (August 15, 1953):
The world has so many trouble spots these days that one is apt to pass over the odd one
here and there to preserve a little peace of mind. It would be well, however, to keep an eye
on Iran, where matters are going from bad to worse, thanks to the machinations of Premier
Mossadegh.
Some of us used to ascribe our inability to persuade Dr. Mossadegh of the validity of our
ideas to the impossibility of making him understand or see things our way. We thought of him
as a sincere, well-meaning, patriotic Iranian, who had a different point of view and made
different deductions from the same set of facts. We now know that he is a power-hungry,
personally ambitious, ruthless demagogue who is trampling upon the liberties of his own
people. We have seen this onetime champion of liberty maintain martial law, curb freedom of
the press, radio, speech and assembly, resort to illegal arrests and torture, dismiss the
Senate, destroy the power of the Shah, take over control of the army, and now he is about to
destroy the Majlis, which is the lower house of Parliament.
His power would seem to be complete, but he has alienated the traditional ruling classes
-the aristocrats, landlords, financiers and tribal leaders. These elements are
anti-Communist. So is the Shah and so are the army leaders and the urban middle classes.
There is a traditional, historic fear, suspicion and dislike of Russia and the Russians. The
peasants, who make up the overwhelming mass of the population, are illiterate and
nonpolitical. Finally, there is still no evidence that the Tudeh (Communist) party is strong
enough or well enough organized, financed and led to take power.
All this simply means that there is no immediate danger of a Communist coup or Russian
intervention. On the other hand, Dr. Mossadegh is encouraging the Tudeh and is following
policies which will make the Communists more and more dangerous. He is a sorcerer's
apprentice, calling up forces he will not be able to control.
Iran is a weak, divided, poverty-stricken country which possesses an immense latent wealth
in oil and a crucial strategic position. This is very different from neighboring Turkey, a
strong, united, determined and advanced nation, which can afford to deal with the Russians
because she has nothing to fear -and therefore the West has nothing to fear. Thanks largely
to Dr. Mossadegh, there is much to fear in Iran.
My feeling is that the biggest sin that our society has is forgetting history. If we
remembered history I would think that it would be very difficult to pull off coups but most
media does not revisit history which proves US coups even against democracies. I actually
think that the coup that occurred in Ukraine was similar to the attempted coup in Venezuela
in 2002 with snipers on rooftops, immediate blame for the deaths on Hugo Chavez where media
manipulated the footage, immediate acceptance of the temporary coup government by the US
Government, immediately offering IMF loans for the new coup government, government positions
for many of the coup plotters, and let us not leave out the funding for the coup coming from
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy. I also remember seeing the New York Times
immediately blaming Chavez and praising the coup but when the coup was overturned and US
fingerprints started to become revealed (with many of the coup plotters fleeing to the US)
then the New York Times wrote a limited retraction buried in their paper. Shameless.
SFOMARCO , April 11, 2016 at 15:16
How was NED able to finance "scores of projects inside Ukraine training activists,
paying for journalists and organizing business groups", not to mention to host such
dignitaries as Cookie Nuland, Loser McCain and assorted Bidens? Seems like a recipe for a
coup "hidden in plain sight".
Bob Van Noy , April 11, 2016 at 14:36
Ukraine, one would hope, represents the "Bridge Too Far" moment for the proponents of
regime change. Surely Americans must be catching on to what we do for selected nations in the
name of "giving them their freedoms". The Kagan Family, empowered by their newly endorsed
candidate for President, Hillary Clinton, will feel justified in carrying on a new cold war,
this time world wide. Of course they will not be doing the fighting, they, like Dick Cheney
are the self appointed intellects of geopolitical chess, much like The Georgetown Set of the
Kennedy era, they perceive themselves as the only ones smart enough to plan America's
future.
Helen Marshall , April 11, 2016 at 17:11
I wish. How many Americans know ANYTHNG about what has happened in Ukraine, about Crimea
and its history, and/or could even locate them on a map?
Pastor Agnostic , April 12, 2016 at 04:11
Nuland is merely the inhouse, PNAC female version of Sidney Blumenthal. Which raises the
scary question. Who would she pick to be SecState?
Under neoliberalism any regime change is necessary followed by an economic rape. That was the case with the USSR in 1991,
that was the case in Ukraine in 2014. Only the size and length of the looting varies depending of the strength of new government.
Both the size and the length is maximal if in power are marionette like Yeltsin or Yatsenyuk/Poroshenko.
Saying "Beware of Greeks bearing gifts" now should sound as "Beware of Americans who bring you color revolutions." They bring the
economic rape (aka "Disaster
capitalism") as the second phase. That's the nature of neocolonialism -- now you do not need to occupy the country.
It's enough to make it a debt slave using IMF and install compradors to endure the low of money and continuing impoverishment of the
population.
With such crooked and greedy friends as Biden and Kerry and their narcoaddicts sons you do not need enemies. But the main
danger are not individual sharks but Western financial institutions like IMF and World bank. Those convert countries into debt slaves
and that means permanently low standard (Central African in case of Ukraine, something like $2 a day) of living for generations
to come.
What is interesting is that unlike say German nationalists in 30th, the Ukrainian nationalists proved to be completly
useless in defending the Ukraine from looting. They actually serves as supplementary tool of the same looting.
The standard of living of Ukrainians dropped 2-3 times since 2014. How pensioners survive, on $50 a month pension I simply do not
understand. In any case Neoliberalism proved to be very effecting is keeping "developing" nations economic growth down and converting
them into debt slaves. The fact that Biden use loans as a tool of extortion (as in threat to cancel one billion loan) to close criminal
investigation of his sons company is just an icing on the cake. Poroshenko and his camarilla should be tried in the court of law for
his corruption and pandering to the Western sharks, who were happy to steal from Ukraine as much as then can.
To pay $166K a month for Biden's son cocaine is way too much to such impoverished country as Ukraine.
Notable quotes:
"... "I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko. ..."
"... " Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat. ..."
"... The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm Burisma Holdings that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member. ..."
"... U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. - The Hill ..."
"... And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill: ..."
"... The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's case against Burisma; ..."
"... President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 ..."
"... Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse. ..."
"... Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now! ..."
"... At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski. Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified. ..."
"... Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This is basic stuff. ..."
"... Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$. ..."
Originally from:
Forget 'Creepy'
- Biden Has A Major Ukraine Problem Joe Biden appears to have made a major tactical error last year when he bragged to an
audience of foreign policy experts how he threatened to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy if their top prosecutor, General Viktor Shokin,
wasn't immediately fired, according to
The Hill 's John Solomon.
In his own words, with video cameras rolling,
Biden described
how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in
U.S. loan guarantees , sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn't immediately fire Prosecutor General
Viktor Shokin. -
The Hill
"I said, ' You're not getting the billion .' I'm going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at
them and said: ' I'm leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you're not getting the money, '" bragged Biden, recalling
the conversation with Poroshenko.
" Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council
on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
Interviews with a half-dozen senior Ukrainian officials confirm Biden's account, though they claim the pressure was applied
over several months in late 2015 and early 2016, not just six hours of one dramatic day . Whatever the case, Poroshenko and Ukraine's
parliament obliged by
ending Shokin's tenure as prosecutor. Shokin was facing steep criticism in Ukraine, and among some U.S. officials, for not
bringing enough corruption prosecutions when he was fired. -
The Hill
And why would Biden want the "son of a bitch" fired?
In what must be an amazing coincidence, the prosecutor was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas
firm - which Biden's son, Hunter, sat on the board of directors.
The prosecutor he got fired was leading a wide-ranging corruption probe into the natural gas firm
Burisma Holdings
that employed Biden's younger son, Hunter, as a board member.
U.S. banking records show Hunter Biden's American-based firm, Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC, received regular transfers
into one of its accounts -- usually more than $166,000 a month -- from Burisma from spring 2014 through fall 2015, during a period
when Vice President Biden was the main U.S. official dealing with Ukraine and its tense relations with Russia. -
The Hill
The Hill 's Solomon reviewed the general prosecutor's file for the Burisma probe - which he reports shows Hunter Biden, his business
partner Devon Archer and their firm, Rosemont Seneca, as potential recipients of money.
And before he was fired, Shokin says he had made "specific plans" for the investigation - including "interrogations and other
crime-investigation procedures into all members of the executive board, including Hunter Biden." "I would like to emphasize the fact
that presumption of innocence is a principle in Ukraine," added Shokin. Joe Biden "clearly had to know" about the probe before he
insisted on Shokin's ouster . Via The Hill:
Although Biden made no mention of his son in his 2018 speech, U.S. and Ukrainian authorities both told me Biden and his office
clearly had to know about the general prosecutor's probe of Burisma and his son's role. They noted that:
Hunter Biden's appointment to the board was widely reported in American media;
The U.S. Embassy in Kiev that coordinated Biden's work in the country repeatedly and publicly discussed the general prosecutor's
case against Burisma;
Great Britain took very public action against Burisma while Joe Biden was working with that government on Ukraine issues;
Biden's office was quoted, on the record, acknowledging Hunter Biden's role in Burisma in a New York Times article about the
general prosecutor's Burisma case that appeared four months before Biden forced the firing of Shokin. The vice president's office
suggested in that article that Hunter Biden was a lawyer free to pursue his own private business deals.
President Obama named Biden the administration's point man on Ukraine in February 2014 , after a popular revolution ousted
Russia-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych and as Moscow
sent military forces into Ukraine's Crimea territory.
***
Key questions for 'ol Joe:
Was it appropriate for your son and his firm to cash in on Ukraine while you served as point man for Ukraine policy? What work
was performed for the money Hunter Biden's firm received? Did you know about the Burisma probe? And when it was publicly announced
that your son worked for Burisma, should you have recused yourself from leveraging a U.S. policy to pressure the prosecutor who
very publicly pursued Burisma?
Remember Victoria Nuland's famous phone recording of "**** the EU?" This was nothing more than another CIA destabilization
campaign carried out of another Sovereign Country. With the goal of breaking the Bush Senior & Jim Baker agreement of not surrounding
Russia with NATO countries after their Collapse.
Let's face it. If Ukrainians loved it's Country, Joey, Hunter and the Choco-**** would have wound up like Mikhail Lesin
during an all night party in an upscale grotto in Kiev by now!
Amazing that all 3 of them are still alive and that "Song Bird" McCain (#4) was allowed to die from his brain cancer instead
of joining them or being dismembered and put on display when he made these visit(s) (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IbfsTcJCKDE ) along
with General Vallely (#5)!!!
Taras Bulba , 1 hour ago
At last some questions for this dirt ball-burisma is tied in with one of the most if not the most corrupt oligarch, Koloimiski.
Biden is up to his eyeballs in some dodgy deals in china as well-this guy and his son are walking corruption personified.
CarifonianSeven, 2 hours ago
Didn't Hillary teach Joe that a tax free foundation is better than using your son's LLC for laundering the bribes... This
is basic stuff.
Pernicious Gold Phallusy, 1 hour ago
Joe cheated his way through undergrad and law school. He would be unable to understand any of that.
whittler, 1 hour ago
What? You mean folks will finally care about little Hunter hiring Azov neo-Nazi fighters (oops! security I mean) to protect
his fracking site just north of the 'troubles' in the eastern Ukraine? I'm sure they were working for free and that no Biden money
was ever used to payoff (oops again! I mean pay the wages of) a bunch of Nazis (dang it again, I mean neo-Nazis, it sounds so
much warmer and fuzzier when you add 'neo').
Creepy Joe and all D's agree, 'Nazi' = bad, neo-Nazi = warm, fuzzy and good; heck, they even like to kill Russians Russians
Russians!!!
Cracker 16 , 1 hour ago
Joe "the Conqueror" "Caesar Magnus" Biden. Joe of Ukraine, the best bud of $oro$.
Last week a Wall Street Journal editorial revealed the incorrigible hypocrisy with which conservatives have long suffered. Conservatives,
of course, have long suffered this malady with respect to domestic policy given their ardent devotion to Social Security, Medicare,
foreign aid, and other welfare-state programs even while decrying the left's devotion to socialism.
But this particular WSJ editorial revealed the incorrigible conservative hypocrisy with respect to foreign policy.
"Vladimir Putin has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get away with it."
Why is that sentence funny?
Because it also describes ever single U.S. president for the last 100 years!
Every president from Woodrow Wilson through today has made a career of intervening abroad and seeing if the world lets him get
away with it. Indeed, the central feature of the U.S. government for the last 100 years has been and continues to be empire and foreign
interventionism.
Clearly, conservatives do not see anything wrong with foreign interventionism as long as the interventionists are wearing an American
flag on their sleeves and reciting the Pledge of Allegiance every morning. They obviously consider foreign interventionism to be
bad only when those pesky Russkies (of Russia-Trump conspiracy fame) do it.
Another humorous aspect to the editorial is the verbiage that the Journal' s editorial writer uses to condemn Putin's interventionism.
The editorial condemns Putin for extending his interventionism in Syria to Venezuela.
Why is that point humorous?
Because the U.S. government, with the full support of conservatives, has also been intervening in both Syria and Venezuela! Thus,
the Journal could just as easily have stated that "Putin pulls a U.S. in Syria and Venezuela," except, well, for one thing: The regimes
in both countries invited Russia into their countries. The U.S. government, on the other hand, is intervening in both countries illegally
with the intent of ousting both regimes from power and installing pro-U.S. regimes in their stead.
The Journal pointed out Russia's intervention in Crimea and Ukraine. Not surprisingly, the Journal failed to point out that after
the end of the Cold War, NATO, that old Cold War-era dinosaur controlled by the U.S., proceeded to absorb former members of the Warsaw
Pact and was threatening to absorb Ukraine, which would then have put U.S. forces on Russia's border. In the eyes of conservatives,
that sort of interventionism just doesn't count because it's U.S. interventionism.
In fact, notice that conservatives, while lamenting Russian and Chinese support of Latin American countries hardly ever lament
U.S. government support of European, Eastern European, and Asian countries. That's hypocrisy in its purest and most incorrigible
form.
Venezuela is an independent country. As such, it has the right to seek and receive help from anyone it wants, including Russia,
China, North Korea, or any other regime, Red or not. Conservative calls to put a stop to this process are a throwback to the old
Cold War mindset that the Reds were coming to get us as part of the supposed worldwide communist conspiracy that was supposedly based
in Moscow. That's what gave rise, of course, to the conversion of our federal government from a limited-government republic to a
national-security state and to an even bigger expansion of an interventionist foreign policy.
That's in fact why the CIA, the Pentagon, and the NSA embarked on a decades-long policy of assassinations of foreign leaders,
invasions, occupations, coups, partnerships with dictatorial regimes, torture, indefinite detention, sanctions, embargoes, regime-change
operations, secret surveillance, and other dark-side practices. The national-security triumvirate said that all this dark-side activity
was necessary to protect us and keep us safe from the Russians (i.e. Soviets), Chinese, North Koreans, North Vietnamese, Cubans,
and other Reds. In other words, we had to become like the Reds in order to prevent them from taking control of the United States
and teaching communism in America's public (i.e., government-owned) schools.
Which raises the important question : Simply because Russia, China, North Korea, or other foreign regimes engage in foreign interventionism,
assassination, torture, secret surveillance, indefinite detention, or other dark-side practices, does that mean that the U.S. government
must do the same as a defensive or protective measure?
The answer is no. The U.S. government should never have gone down the road to empire and foreign interventionism regardless of
what the Reds were doing, and it should never have become a national-security state, which is a type of dark-side governmental structure
that is inherent to totalitarian and authoritarian regimes.
The United States should restore its founding principles of a limited-government republic and a non-interventionist foreign policy
regardless of what foreign regimes are doing. The U.S. should be leading the world to freedom by example, not by copying the Russians,
Chinese, North Koreans, or Vietnamese.
Looks like the reviewer is a typical neocon. Typical neocon think tanks talking points that
reflect the "Full Spectrum Dominance" agenda.
As for Ukraine yes, of course, Victoria Nuland did not interfere with the event, did not push for the deposing Yanukovich to
spoil agreement reached between him and the EU diplomats ("F**k EU" as this high level US diplomat eloquently expressed herself)
and to appoint the US stooge Yatsenyuk. The transcript of Nuland's phone call actually introduced many Americans to the
previously obscure Yatsenyuk.
And the large amount of cash confiscated in the Kiev office of Yulia Timostchenko Batkivshchina party (the main opposition party
at the time run by Yatsenyuk, as Timoshenko was in jail) was just a hallucination. It has nothing to do with ";bombing with
dollars"; -- yet another typical color revolution trick.
BTW "government snipers of rooftops" also is a standard false flag operation used to instill uprising at the critical moment of
the color revolution. Ukraine was not the first and is not the last. One participant recently confessed. The key person in this
false flag operation was the opposition leader Andriy Parubiy -- who was responsible for the security of the opposition camp.
Google "Parubiy and snipergate" for more information.
His view on DNC hack (which most probably was a leak) also does not withstand close scrutiny. William Binney, a former National
Security Agency high level official who co-authored an analysis of a group of former intelligence professionals thinks that this
was a transfer to the local USB drive as the speed of downloads was too high for the Internet connection. In this light the
death of Seth Rich looks very suspicious indeed.
As for Russiagate, he now needs to print his review and the portrait of Grand Wizard of Russiagate Rachel Maddow, shed both of
them and eat with Borscht ;-)
"... Writing off Brazil (and India and South Africa for that matter) just because the empire has succeeded in swinging an election or two in those places, or because the empire's lawfare scams seem to be working at the moment, is a mistake. ..."
"... These conspicuous successes of the Empire of Chaos , as Escobar calls America, do not significantly change the anti-imperialist attitudes of the populations in these countries. ..."
Writing off Brazil (and India and South Africa for that matter) just because the
empire has succeeded in swinging an election or two in those places, or because the empire's lawfare scams seem to be working at the moment, is a mistake.
These conspicuous
successes of the Empire of Chaos , as Escobar calls America, do not significantly
change the anti-imperialist attitudes of the populations in these countries.
There will be
backlash against the fascists in Brazil, and the right wing leaderships in governments
elsewhere in Latin America that the US has maneuvered into place as these leaders fail to
deliver material gains to their populations. And fail they will considering we are in
late-stage capitalism.
"... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
"... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
"... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
"... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
"... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
"... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
"... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
"... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
"... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
"... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
"... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
"... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
"... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
"... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
"... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
"... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
"... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably,
it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent
American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin
is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4
But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal
vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints
in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations.
Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous
Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place....
We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3
Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's
editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology
-- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed
publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray
ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying
Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.
As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's
anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New
York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building
a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive
relationship."'
But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently
explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version
of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start
thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.
Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians,
when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers
to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to
the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)
In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin.
Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including
those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.
By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand
at least who he is not:
Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President
Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." Democratization began and developed in
Soviet Russia under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the years from 1987 to 1991.
Yeltsin repeatedly dealt that historic Russian experiment grievous, possibly fatal, blows. Among his other acts, by using tanks,
in October 1993, to destroy Russia's freely elected parliament and with it the entire constitutional order that had made Yeltsin
president. By waging two bloody' wars against the tiny breakaway province of Chechnya. By enabling a small group of Kremlin-connected
oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty' and misery',
including the once-large and professionalized Soviet middle classes. By rigging his own reelection in 1996. And by' enacting a
"super-presidential" constitution, at the expense of the legislature and judiciary but to his successor's benefit. Putin may have
furthered the de-democratization of the Yeltsin 1990s, but he did not initiate it.
Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his
will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass
terror. Due to the increasing bureaucratic routinization of the political-administrative system, each successive Soviet leader
had less personal power than his predecessor. Putin may have more, but if he really is a "cold-blooded, ruthless" autocrat --
"the worst dictator on the planet" 1 " -- tens of thousands of protesters would not have repeatedly appeared in Moscow
streets, sometimes officially sanctioned. Or their protests (and selective arrests) been shown on state television.
Political scientists generally agree that Putin has been a "soft authoritarian" leader governing a system that has authoritarian
and democratic components inherited from the past. They disagree as to how to specify, define, and balance these elements, but
most would also generally agree with a brief Facebook post, on September 7, 2018, by the eminent diplomat-scholar Jack Matlock:
"Putin ... is not the absolute dictator some have pictured him. His power seems to be based on balancing various patronage networks,
some of which are still criminal. (In the 1990s, most were, and nobody was controlling them.) Therefore he cannot admit publicly
that [criminal acts] happened without his approval since this would indicate that he is not completely in charge."
Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union."
13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia
today, they barely warrant comment. Stalin's Russia was often as close to unfreedom as imaginable. In today's Russia, apart from
varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been.
(When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an "appalling human rights situation in Putin's Russia," 1 " they
should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)
Putin clearly understands that millions of Russians have and often express pro-Stalin sentiments. Nonetheless, his role in
these still-ongoing controversies over the despot's historical reputation has been, in one unprecedented way, that of an anti-Stalinist
leader. Briefly illustrated, if Putin reveres the memory of Stalin, why did his personal support finally make possible two memorials
(the excellent State Museum of the History of the Gulag and the highly evocative "Wall of Grief') to the tyrant's millions of
victims, both in central Moscow? The latter memorial monument was first proposed by then-Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, in
1961. It was not built under any of his successors -- until Putin, in 2017.
Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption.
This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers
and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged.
Putin has adopted a number of "anti-corruption" policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate
debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin's oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But
branding Putin "a kleptocrat" 16 also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing.
A recent scholarly book finds, for example, that while they may be "corrupt," Putin "and the liberal technocratic economic
team on which he relies have also skillfully managed Russia's economic fortunes." 1 ' A former IMF director goes further,
concluding that Putin's current economic team does not "tolerate corruption" and that "Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the
World Bank's Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010." 18
Viewed in human teims, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost
even modest legacies of the Soviet era -- their life savings; medical and other social benefits: real wages; pensions; occupations;
and for men life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the "kleptocrat" Putin had mobilized
enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation
in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin "Vladimir
the Savior."
Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing
of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss
because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it. And yet, it is ubiquitous. Times editorial writers and
columnists -- and far from them alone -- characterize Putin as a "thug" and his policies as "thuggery" so often -- sometimes doubling
down on "autocratic thug" 19 -- that the practice may be specified in some internal manual. Little wonder so many politicians
also routinely practice it, as did US Senator Ben Sasse: "We should tell the American people and tell the world that we know that
Vladimir Putin is a thus. He's a former KGB aaent who's a murderer." 20
Leaving aside other world leaders with minor or major previous careers in intelligences services. Putin's years as a KGB intelligence
officer in then -East Germany were clearly formative. Many years later, at age 67. he still spoke of them with pride. Whatever
else that experience contributed, it made Putin a Europeanized Russian, a fluent Geiman speaker, and a political leader with a
remarkable, demonstrated capacity for retaining and coolly analyzing a very wide range of information. (Read or watch a few of
his long interviews.) Not a bad leadership trait in very fraught times.
Moreover, no serious biographer would treat only one period in a subject's long public career as definitive, as Putin demonizers
do. Why not instead the period after he left the KGB in 1991, when he served as deputy to the mayor of St. Petersburg, then considered
one of the two or three most democratic leaders in Russia? Or the years immediately following in Moscow, where he saw first-hand
the full extent of Yeltsin-era corruption? Or his subsequent years, while still relatively young, as president?
As for being a "murderer" of journalists and other ''enemies." the list has grown to scores of Russians who died, at home or
abroad, by foul or natural causes -- all reflexively attributed to Putin. Our hallowed tradition puts the burden of proof on the
accusers. Putin's accusers have produced none, only assumptions, innuendoes, and mistranslated statements by Putin about the fate
of "traitors." The two cases that firmly established this defamatory practice were those of the investigative journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006; and Alexander Litvinenko, a shadowy one-time KGB defector with ties to
aggrieved Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who died of radiation poisoning in London, also in 2006.
Not a shred of actual proof points to Putin in either case. The editor of Politkovskaya's paper, the devoutly independent Novaya
Gazeta. still believes her assassination was ordered by Chechen officials, whose human-rights abuses she was investigating. Regarding
Litvinenko, despite frenzied media claims and a kangaroo-like "hearing" suggesting that Putin was "probably" responsible, there
is still no conclusive proof even as to whether Litvinenko's poisoning was intentional or accidental. The same paucity of evidence
applies to many subsequent cases, notably the shooting of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, "in [distant] view of the Kremlin,"
in 2015.
About Russian journalists, there is, however, a significant overlooked statistic. According to the American Committee to Protect
Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered -- 41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82 -- 41
under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still -- pairtially corrupt post-Soviet economic system,
not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters. The
former wife of one journalist thought to have been poisoned concludes as much: "Many Western analysts place the responsibility
for these crimes on Putin. But the cause is more likely the system of mutual responsibility and the culture of impunity that began
to form before Putin, in the late 1990s.""
More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it
seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. Putin no doubt regards
it as a blood slur, and even on the surface it is, to be exceedingly charitable, entirely uninformed. How else to explain Senator
Ron Wyden's solemn warnings, at a hearing on November 1, 2017, about "the current fascist leadership of Russia"? A young scholar
recently dismantled a senior Yale professor's nearly inexplicable propounding of this thesis.' 3 My own approach is
compatible, though different.
Whatever Putin's failings, the fascist allegation is absurd. Nothing in his statements over nearly 20 years in power are akin
to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the asserted superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of
a vast multi-ethnic state -- embracing scores of diverse groups with a broad range of skin colors -- such utterances or related
acts by Putin would be inconceivable, if not political suicide. This is why he endlessly appeals for harmony in "our entire multi-ethnic
nation" with its "multi-ethnic culture," as he did once again in his re-inauguration speech in 2018. 24
Russia has, of course, fascist-white supremacist thinkers and activists, though many have been imprisoned. But a mass fascist
movement is scarcely feasible in a country where so many millions died in the war against Nazi Geimany, a war that directly affected
Putin and clearly left a formative mark on him. Though he was born after the war, his mother and father barely survived near-fatal
wounds and disease, his older brother died in the long German siege of Leningrad, and several of his uncles perished. Only people
who never endured such an experience, or are unable to imagine it, can conjure up a fascist Putin.
There is another, easily understood, indicative fact. Not a trace of anti-Semitism is evident in Putin. Little noted here but
widely reported both in Russia and in Israel, life for Russian Jews is better under Putin than it has ever been in that country's
long history."
Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been
exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war.26 At best, this is an
"in-the-eve-of-the-beholder" assertion, and half-blind. At worst, it justifies what even a German foreign minister characterized
as the West's "war-mongering" against Russia."
In the three cases widely given as examples of Putin's "aggression," the evidence, long cited by myself and others, points
to US-led instigations, primarily in the process of expanding the NATO military alliance since the late 1990s from Germany to
Russia's borders today. The proxy US-Russian war in Georgia in 2008 was initiated by the US-backed president of that country,
who had been encouraged to aspire to NATO membership. The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the longstanding
effort to bring that country, despite large regions' shared civilization with Russia, into NATO.
And Putin's 2015 military intervention
in Syria was done on a valid premise: either it would be Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus or the terrorist Islamic
State -- and on President Barack Obama's refusal to join Russia in an anti-ISIS alliance. As a result of this history, Putin is
often seen in Russia as a belatedly reactive leader abroad, as a not sufficiently "aggressive" one.
Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet
Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually
said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.
Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation,
naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians:
"Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has
no head." 28 , 29
The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed
the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America."30
, 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in
2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United
States.
How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of
supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell
Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded
could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?
Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was
a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations,
he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital
from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States."
3 "
Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to
have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We
all change." 33
A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy,
without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West
is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of
George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the
American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian
history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different
-- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like.
I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem
attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that
the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they
assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
"... Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. ..."
"... As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive relationship."' ..."
"... But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'. ..."
"... In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin. Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West. ..."
"... Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." ..."
"... Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass terror. ..."
"... Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union." 13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia today, they barely warrant comment. ..."
"... Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption. This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged. ..."
"... Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." ..."
"... More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. ..."
"... Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war. ..."
"... Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians. ..."
"... The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America." ..."
"... Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations, he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States." 3 " ..."
"... A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy, without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34 ..."
"... <img src="https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/amazon-avatars-global/default._CR0,0,1024,1024_SX48_.png"> P. Philips ..."
"... "In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" ..."
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"... If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris. ..."
THE SPECTER OF AN EVIL-DOING VLADIMIR PUTIN HAS loomed over and undermined US thinking about Russia for at least a decade. Inescapably,
it is therefore a theme that runs through this book. Henry' Kissinger deserves credit for having warned, perhaps alone among prominent
American political figures, against this badly distorted image of Russia's leader since 2000: "The demonization of Vladimir Putin
is not a policy. It is an alibi for not having one." 4
But Kissinger was also wrong. Washington has made many policies strongly influenced by' the demonizing of Putin -- a personal
vilification far exceeding any ever applied to Soviet Russia's latter-day Communist leaders. Those policies spread from growing complaints
in the early 2000s to US- Russian proxy wars in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, and eventually even at home, in Russiagate allegations.
Indeed, policy-makers adopted an earlier formulation by the late Senator .Tolm McCain as an integral part of a new and more dangerous
Cold War: "Putin [is] an unreconstructed Russian imperialist and K.G.B. apparatchik.... His world is a brutish, cynical place....
We must prevent the darkness of Mr. Putin's world from befalling more of humanity'." 3
Mainstream media outlets have play'ed a major prosecutorial role in the demonization. Far from aty'pically', the Washington Post's
editorial page editor wrote, "Putin likes to make the bodies bounce.... The rule-by-fear is Soviet, but this time there is no ideology
-- only a noxious mixture of personal aggrandizement, xenophobia, homophobia and primitive anti-Americanism." 6 Esteemed
publications and writers now routinely degrade themselves by competing to denigrate "the flabbily muscled form" of the "small gray
ghoul named Vladimir Putin." 7 , 8 There are hundreds of such examples, if not more, over many years. Vilifying
Russia's leader has become a canon in the orthodox US narrative of the new Cold War.
As with all institutions, the demonization of Putin has its own history'. When he first appeared on the world scene as Boris Yeltsin's
anointed successor, in 1999-2000, Putin was welcomed by' leading representatives of the US political-media establishment. The New
York Times ' chief Moscow correspondent and other verifiers reported that Russia's new leader had an "emotional commitment to building
a strong democracy." Two years later, President George W. Bush lauded his summit with Putin and "the beginning of a very' constructive
relationship."'
But the Putin-friendly narrative soon gave away to unrelenting Putin-bashing. In 2004, Times columnist Nicholas Kristof inadvertently
explained why, at least partially. Kristof complained bitterly' of having been "suckered by' Mr. Putin. He is not a sober version
of Boris Yeltsin." By 2006, a Wall Street Journal editor, expressing the establishment's revised opinion, declared it "time we start
thinking of Vladimir Putin's Russia as an enemy of the United States." 10 , 11 The rest, as they' say, is history'.
Who has Putin really been during his many years in power? We may' have to leave this large, complex question to future historians,
when materials for full biographical study -- memoirs, archive documents, and others -- are available. Even so, it may surprise readers
to know that Russia's own historians, policy intellectuals, and journalists already argue publicly and differ considerably as to
the "pluses and minuses" of Putin's leadership. (My own evaluation is somewhere in the middle.)
In America and elsewhere in the West, however, only purported "minuses" reckon in the extreme vilifying, or anti-cult, of Putin.
Many are substantially uninformed, based on highly selective or unverified sources, and motivated by political grievances, including
those of several Yeltsin-era oligarchs and their agents in the West.
By identifying and examining, however briefly, the primary "minuses" that underpin the demonization of Putin, we can understand
at least who he is not:
Putin is not the man who, after coming to power in 2000, "de-democratized" a Russian democracy established by President
Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and restored a system akin to Soviet "totalitarianism." Democratization began and developed in
Soviet Russia under the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, in the years from 1987 to 1991.
Yeltsin repeatedly dealt that historic Russian experiment grievous, possibly fatal, blows. Among his other acts, by using tanks,
in October 1993, to destroy Russia's freely elected parliament and with it the entire constitutional order that had made Yeltsin
president. By waging two bloody' wars against the tiny breakaway province of Chechnya. By enabling a small group of Kremlin-connected
oligarchs to plunder Russia's richest assets and abet the plunging of some two-thirds of its people into poverty' and misery',
including the once-large and professionalized Soviet middle classes. By rigging his own reelection in 1996. And by' enacting a
"super-presidential" constitution, at the expense of the legislature and judiciary but to his successor's benefit. Putin may have
furthered the de-democratization of the Yeltsin 1990s, but he did not initiate it.
Nor did Putim then make himself a tsar or Soviet-like autocrat, which means a despot with absolute power to turn his
will into policy, the last Kremlin leader with that kind of power was Stalin, who died in 1953, and with him his 20-year mass
terror. Due to the increasing bureaucratic routinization of the political-administrative system, each successive Soviet leader
had less personal power than his predecessor. Putin may have more, but if he really is a "cold-blooded, ruthless" autocrat --
"the worst dictator on the planet" 1 " -- tens of thousands of protesters would not have repeatedly appeared in Moscow
streets, sometimes officially sanctioned. Or their protests (and selective arrests) been shown on state television.
Political scientists generally agree that Putin has been a "soft authoritarian" leader governing a system that has authoritarian
and democratic components inherited from the past. They disagree as to how to specify, define, and balance these elements, but
most would also generally agree with a brief Facebook post, on September 7, 2018, by the eminent diplomat-scholar Jack Matlock:
"Putin ... is not the absolute dictator some have pictured him. His power seems to be based on balancing various patronage networks,
some of which are still criminal. (In the 1990s, most were, and nobody was controlling them.) Therefore he cannot admit publicly
that [criminal acts] happened without his approval since this would indicate that he is not completely in charge."
Putin is not a Kremlin leader who "reveres Stalin" and whose "Russia is a gangster shadow of Stalin's Soviet Union."
13 , 14 These assertions are so far-fetched and uninfoimed about Stalin's terror-ridden regime, Putin, and Russia
today, they barely warrant comment. Stalin's Russia was often as close to unfreedom as imaginable. In today's Russia, apart from
varying political liberties, most citizens are freer to live, study, work, write, speak, and travel than they have ever been.
(When vocational demonizers like David Kramer allege an "appalling human rights situation in Putin's Russia," 1 " they
should be asked: compared to when in Russian history, or elsewhere in the world today?)
Putin clearly understands that millions of Russians have and often express pro-Stalin sentiments. Nonetheless, his role in
these still-ongoing controversies over the despot's historical reputation has been, in one unprecedented way, that of an anti-Stalinist
leader. Briefly illustrated, if Putin reveres the memory of Stalin, why did his personal support finally make possible two memorials
(the excellent State Museum of the History of the Gulag and the highly evocative "Wall of Grief') to the tyrant's millions of
victims, both in central Moscow? The latter memorial monument was first proposed by then-Kremlin leader Nikita Khrushchev, in
1961. It was not built under any of his successors -- until Putin, in 2017.
Nor did Putin create post-Soviet Russia's "kleptocratic economic system," with its oligarchic and other widespread corruption.
This too took shape under Yeltsin during the Kremlin's shock-therapy "privatization" schemes of the 1990s, when the "swindlers
and thieves" still denounced by today's opposition actually emerged.
Putin has adopted a number of "anti-corruption" policies over the years. How successful they have been is the subject of legitimate
debate. As are how much power he has had to rein in fully both Yeltsin's oligarchs and his own, and how sincere he has been. But
branding Putin "a kleptocrat" 16 also lacks context and is little more than barely informed demonizing.
A recent scholarly book finds, for example, that while they may be "corrupt," Putin "and the liberal technocratic economic
team on which he relies have also skillfully managed Russia's economic fortunes." 1 ' A former IMF director goes further,
concluding that Putin's current economic team does not "tolerate corruption" and that "Russia now ranks 35th out of 190 in the
World Bank's Doing Business ratings. It was at 124 in 2010." 18
Viewed in human teims, when Putin came to power in 2000, some 75 percent of Russians were living in poverty. Most had lost
even modest legacies of the Soviet era -- their life savings; medical and other social benefits: real wages; pensions; occupations;
and for men life expectancy, which had fallen well below the age of 60. In only a few years, the "kleptocrat" Putin had mobilized
enough wealth to undo and reverse those human catastrophes and put billions of dollars in rainy-day funds that buffered the nation
in different hard times ahead. We judge this historic achievement as we might, but it is why many Russians still call Putin "Vladimir
the Savior."
Which brings us to the most sinister allegation against him: Putin, trained as "a KGB thug," regularly orders the killing
of inconvenient journalists and personal enemies, like a "mafia state boss." This should be the easiest demonizing axiom to dismiss
because there is no actual evidence, or barely any logic, to support it. And yet, it is ubiquitous. Times editorial writers and
columnists -- and far from them alone -- characterize Putin as a "thug" and his policies as "thuggery" so often -- sometimes doubling
down on "autocratic thug" 19 -- that the practice may be specified in some internal manual. Little wonder so many politicians
also routinely practice it, as did US Senator Ben Sasse: "We should tell the American people and tell the world that we know that
Vladimir Putin is a thus. He's a former KGB aaent who's a murderer." 20
Leaving aside other world leaders with minor or major previous careers in intelligences services. Putin's years as a KGB intelligence
officer in then -East Germany were clearly formative. Many years later, at age 67. he still spoke of them with pride. Whatever
else that experience contributed, it made Putin a Europeanized Russian, a fluent Geiman speaker, and a political leader with a
remarkable, demonstrated capacity for retaining and coolly analyzing a very wide range of information. (Read or watch a few of
his long interviews.) Not a bad leadership trait in very fraught times.
Moreover, no serious biographer would treat only one period in a subject's long public career as definitive, as Putin demonizers
do. Why not instead the period after he left the KGB in 1991, when he served as deputy to the mayor of St. Petersburg, then considered
one of the two or three most democratic leaders in Russia? Or the years immediately following in Moscow, where he saw first-hand
the full extent of Yeltsin-era corruption? Or his subsequent years, while still relatively young, as president?
As for being a "murderer" of journalists and other ''enemies." the list has grown to scores of Russians who died, at home or
abroad, by foul or natural causes -- all reflexively attributed to Putin. Our hallowed tradition puts the burden of proof on the
accusers. Putin's accusers have produced none, only assumptions, innuendoes, and mistranslated statements by Putin about the fate
of "traitors." The two cases that firmly established this defamatory practice were those of the investigative journalist Anna
Politkovskaya, who was shot to death in Moscow in 2006; and Alexander Litvinenko, a shadowy one-time KGB defector with ties to
aggrieved Yeltsin-era oligarchs, who died of radiation poisoning in London, also in 2006.
Not a shred of actual proof points to Putin in either case. The editor of Politkovskaya's paper, the devoutly independent Novaya
Gazeta. still believes her assassination was ordered by Chechen officials, whose human-rights abuses she was investigating. Regarding
Litvinenko, despite frenzied media claims and a kangaroo-like "hearing" suggesting that Putin was "probably" responsible, there
is still no conclusive proof even as to whether Litvinenko's poisoning was intentional or accidental. The same paucity of evidence
applies to many subsequent cases, notably the shooting of the opposition politician Boris Nemtsov, "in [distant] view of the Kremlin,"
in 2015.
About Russian journalists, there is, however, a significant overlooked statistic. According to the American Committee to Protect
Journalists, as of 2012, 77 had been murdered -- 41 during the Yeltsin years, 36 under Putin. By 2018, the total was 82 -- 41
under Yeltsin, the same under Putin. This strongly suggests that the still -- pairtially corrupt post-Soviet economic system,
not Yeltsin or Putin personally, led to the killing of so many journalists after 1991, most of them investigative reporters. The
former wife of one journalist thought to have been poisoned concludes as much: "Many Western analysts place the responsibility
for these crimes on Putin. But the cause is more likely the system of mutual responsibility and the culture of impunity that began
to form before Putin, in the late 1990s.""
More recently, there is yet another allegation: Putin is a fascist and white supremacist. The accusation is made mostly, it
seems, by people wishing to deflect attention from the role being played by neo-Nazis in US-backed Ukraine. Putin no doubt regards
it as a blood slur, and even on the surface it is, to be exceedingly charitable, entirely uninformed. How else to explain Senator
Ron Wyden's solemn warnings, at a hearing on November 1, 2017, about "the current fascist leadership of Russia"? A young scholar
recently dismantled a senior Yale professor's nearly inexplicable propounding of this thesis.' 3 My own approach is
compatible, though different.
Whatever Putin's failings, the fascist allegation is absurd. Nothing in his statements over nearly 20 years in power are akin
to fascism, whose core belief is a cult of blood based on the asserted superiority of one ethnicity over all others. As head of
a vast multi-ethnic state -- embracing scores of diverse groups with a broad range of skin colors -- such utterances or related
acts by Putin would be inconceivable, if not political suicide. This is why he endlessly appeals for harmony in "our entire multi-ethnic
nation" with its "multi-ethnic culture," as he did once again in his re-inauguration speech in 2018. 24
Russia has, of course, fascist-white supremacist thinkers and activists, though many have been imprisoned. But a mass fascist
movement is scarcely feasible in a country where so many millions died in the war against Nazi Geimany, a war that directly affected
Putin and clearly left a formative mark on him. Though he was born after the war, his mother and father barely survived near-fatal
wounds and disease, his older brother died in the long German siege of Leningrad, and several of his uncles perished. Only people
who never endured such an experience, or are unable to imagine it, can conjure up a fascist Putin.
There is another, easily understood, indicative fact. Not a trace of anti-Semitism is evident in Putin. Little noted here but
widely reported both in Russia and in Israel, life for Russian Jews is better under Putin than it has ever been in that country's
long history."
Finally, at least for now. there is the ramifying demonization allegation that, as a foreign-policy leader. Putin has been
exceedingly "aggressive" abroad and his behavior has been the sole cause of the new cold war.26 At best, this is an
"in-the-eve-of-the-beholder" assertion, and half-blind. At worst, it justifies what even a German foreign minister characterized
as the West's "war-mongering" against Russia."
In the three cases widely given as examples of Putin's "aggression," the evidence, long cited by myself and others, points
to US-led instigations, primarily in the process of expanding the NATO military alliance since the late 1990s from Germany to
Russia's borders today. The proxy US-Russian war in Georgia in 2008 was initiated by the US-backed president of that country,
who had been encouraged to aspire to NATO membership. The 2014 crisis and subsequent proxy war in Ukraine resulted from the longstanding
effort to bring that country, despite large regions' shared civilization with Russia, into NATO.
And Putin's 2015 military intervention
in Syria was done on a valid premise: either it would be Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in Damascus or the terrorist Islamic
State -- and on President Barack Obama's refusal to join Russia in an anti-ISIS alliance. As a result of this history, Putin is
often seen in Russia as a belatedly reactive leader abroad, as a not sufficiently "aggressive" one.
Embedded in the "aggressive Putin" axiom are two others. One is that Putin is a neo-Soviet leader who seeks to restore the Soviet
Union at the expense of Russia's neighbors. Fie is obsessively misquoted as having said, in 2005, "The collapse of the Soviet Union
was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," apparently ranking it above two World Wars. What he actually
said was "a major geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century," as it was for most Russians.
Though often critical of the Soviet system and its two formative leaders, Lenin and Stalin, Putin, like most of his generation,
naturally remains in part a Soviet person. But what he said in 2010 reflects his real perspective and that of very many other Russians:
"Anyone who does not regret the break-up of the Soviet Union has no heart. Anyone who wants its rebirth in its previous form has
no head." 28 , 29
The other fallacious sub-axiom is that Putin has always been "anti-Western," specifically "anti-American," has "always viewed
the United States" with "smoldering suspicions." -- so much that eventually he set into motion a "Plot Against America."30
, 31 A simple reading of his years in power tells us otherwise. A Westernized Russian, Putin came to the presidency in
2000 in the still prevailing tradition of Gorbachev and Yeltsin -- in hope of a "strategic friendship and partnership" with the United
States.
How else to explain Putin's abundant assistant to US forces fighting in Afghanistan after 9/1 1 and continued facilitation of
supplying American and NATO troops there? Or his backing of harsh sanctions against Iran's nuclear ambitions and refusal to sell
Tehran a highly effective air-defense system? Or the information his intelligence services shared with Washington that if heeded
could have prevented the Boston Marathon bombings in April 2012?
Or, until he finally concluded that Russia would never be treated as an equal and that NATO had encroached too close, Putin was
a full partner in the US-European clubs of major world leaders? Indeed, as late as May 2018, contrary to Russiagate allegations,
he still hoped, as he had from the beginning, to rebuild Russia partly through economic partnerships with the West: "To attract capital
from friendly companies and countries, we need good relations with Europe and with the whole world, including the United States."
3 "
Given all that has happened during the past nearly two decades -- particularly what Putin and other Russian leaders perceive to
have happened -- it would be remarkable if his views of the W^est, especially America, had not changed. As he remarked in 2018, "We
all change." 33
A few years earlier, Putin remarkably admitted that initially he had "illusions" about foreign policy,
without specifying which. Perhaps he meant this, spoken at the end of 2017: "Our most serious mistake in relations with the West
is that we trusted you too much. And your mistake is that you took that trust as weakness and abused it." 34
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of
George Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the
American People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian
history. But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different
-- inspired by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like.
I never respond specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem
attacks. Instead, I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that
the orthodox policies my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they
assail -- are patriotic heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
In the letter that was addressed to Avakov on March 15, French Ambassador Isabelle Dumont
wrote on behalf of her fellow ambassadors that "the G7 group is concerned by extreme political
movements in Ukraine, whose violent actions are worrying in themselves."
"They intimidate Ukrainian citizens, attempt to usurp the role of the National Police in
safeguarding elections, and damage the Ukrainian government's national and international
reputation," Dumont continued, in a thinly veiled reference to the National Corps and National
Militia, the far-right Azov group's political and vigilante wings, respectively.
... ... ...
'Nationalist Hate Groups'
The National Corps and National Militia were products of the Azov Battalion, a volunteer
military regiment formed in the early days of the conflict against Russia-backed separatists in
eastern Ukraine that began in 2014. The battalion has been accused by international human
rights groups of "war crimes" on the battlefield and has since been brought under the control
of the National Guard, which is overseen by Avakov.
Members of the National Corps and National Militia have been blamed for multiple violent
attacks on minorities in Ukraine, particularly Roma and LGBTI persons, in the past year.
The U.S. State Department described those far-right entities as "nationalist hate groups" in
its Ukraine country report on Human Rights for 2018 released on March 13.
.... ... ...
On March 9, the National Corps and National Militia clashed with police outside the
presidential administration in Kyiv and later in Cherkasy, where Poroshenko was campaigning.
At least 15 police officers were wounded.
"The violent incidents of March 9 were a reminder that, just a few weeks ahead of the
elections, one crucial challenge is to prevent an escalation of tensions," Dumont wrote in the
letter to Avakov. "We have noted with concern that the very same groups involved in the violent
incidents have registered as election observers and publicly threatened to use violence should
they consider that election fraud is occurring."
Indeed, Ukraine's Central Election Commission has approved the National Militia to monitor
the polling. Soon after that announcement, the group's spokesman warned that "if law enforcers
turn a blind eye to outright violations and don't want to document them," then they plan to
follow the lead of a group leader
who said they would "punch someone in the face in the name of justice...without
hesitation."
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
"... The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years. ..."
"... It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people. Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land. ..."
"... Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because Russians are subhumans. ..."
"... The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored, as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring with each other. ..."
"... The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course, endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language with the same Cyrillic writing system. ..."
The purpose is very simple: to create the perception that the government of Russia still somehow controls or manipulates
the US government and thus gains some undeserved improvements in relations with the U.S. Once such perception is created, people
will demand that relations with Russia are worsened to return them to a "fair" level. While in reality these relations have been
systematically destroyed by the Western establishment (CFR) for many years.
It's a typical inversion to hide the hybrid war of the Western establishment against Russian people. Yes, Russian people.
Not Putin, not Russian Army, not Russian intelligence services, but Russian people. Russians are not to be allowed to have any
kind of industries, nor should they be allowed to know their true history, nor should they possess so much land.
Russians should work in coal mines for a dollar a day, while their wives work as prostitutes in Europe. That's the maximum
level of development that the Western establishment would allow Russians to have (see Ukraine for a demo version). Why? Because
Russians are subhumans.
Whatever they do, it's always wrong, bad, oppressive, etc. Russians are bad because they're bad. They must be "taught a lesson",
"put into their place". It would, of course, be beneficial and highly profitable for Europeans to break with Anglo-Saxons and
to live in peace and harmony with Russia, but Europeans simply can not overcome their racism towards Russians. The young Europeans
are just as racist, with their incessant memes about "squatting Russians in tracksuits", "drunken Russians", etc., as if there's
nothing else that is notable about a country of 147 million people.
The end goal of the Western establishment is a complete military, economic, psychological, and spiritual destruction of
Russia, secession of national republics (even though in some of them up to 50% of population are Russians, but this will be ignored,
as it has been in former Soviet republics), then, finally, dismemberment of what remains of Russia into separate states warring
with each other.
The very concept of Russian nation should disappear. Siberians will call their language "Siberian", Muscovites will call
their language "Moscovian", Pomorians will call their language "Pomorian", etc. The U.S. Department of State will, of course,
endorse such terminology, just like they endorse the term "Montenegrian language", even though it's the same Serbo-Croatian language
with the same Cyrillic writing system.
What sets disinformation apart from other forms of manipulative or persuasive
content
Why today's information environment amplifies disinformation
What is Disinformation? Is it Different from Propaganda?
Disinformation is a relatively new word. Most observers
trace it back to the Russian word dezinformatsiya , which Soviet planners in the
1950s defined as "dissemination (in the press, on the radio, etc.) of false reports intended
to mislead public opinion." Others suggest that the
earliest use of the term originated in 1930s Nazi Germany. In either case, it is much younger
(and less commonly used) than ' propaganda, ' which originated in
the 1600s and generally connotes the selective use of information for political effect.
Whether and to what degree these terms overlap is subject to debate. Some define propaganda
as the use of non-rational arguments to either advance or undermine a political ideal, and
use disinformation as an alternative name for undermining propaganda. Others consider
them to be separate concepts altogether. One popular distinction holds that disinformation
also describes politically motivated messaging designed explicitly to engender public
cynicism, uncertainty, apathy, distrust, and paranoia, all of which disincentivize citizen
engagement and mobilization for social or political change. "Misinformation," meanwhile,
generally refers to
the inadvertent sharing of false information.
Analysts generally
agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily composed of outright
lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts, stripped of context or blended
with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is always part of a larger plan or
agenda. In the Russian context, observers
have described its use to pursue Moscow's foreign policy goals through a "4D" offensive:
dismiss an opponent's claims or allegations, distort events to serve political
purposes, distract from one's own activities, and dismay those who might
otherwise oppose one's goals.
Analysts generally agree that disinformation is always purposeful and not necessarily
composed of outright lies or fabrications. It can be composed of mostly true facts,
stripped of context or blended with falsehoods to support the intended message, and is
always part of a larger plan or agenda."
Disinformation in the Digital Age
The reemerging interest in disinformation is
not because such techniques are novel. There are similarities between the contemporary 4D
model and, for example, Soviet active
measures . Rather, a
growingconsensus
asserts that while the use of disinformation is not new, the digital revolution has
greatly enhanced public vulnerability to manipulation by information -- a trend which is
predicted to continue .
In part, these changes have been wrought by the advent of
new social media platforms and their growing dominance over advertising revenues.
This shift in the media funding environment has weakened traditional media gatekeepers,
changed incentives for content providers, and promoted the rise of unprofessional and/or
unscrupulous outlets capable of drawing large audiences at a low cost. As digital advertising
assumes an ever-larger role in shaping news consumption, targeted advertising allows for more
sophisticated forms of propaganda: for example, in September of 2017, Facebook
disclosed that roughly 3,000 ads related to divisive US political issues were purchased
by a network of 470 accounts and pages suspected to be run out of Russia. The company says
that at
least a quarter of those ads were geographically targeted. Twitter
later deleted two hundred accounts linked to those same Facebook accounts and pages and
revealed that in 2016, the Russian state-funded broadcaster RT spent $274,100 on advertising
targeting users in the United States.
Research suggests the total scale of "low quality political information" on those
platforms during the 2016 US elections was much larger, particularly in swing states. The
degree of Russian influence on this market for digital disinformation is unknown;
post-election, researchers are launching new efforts to track and analyze
it.
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media."
The Rise of 'Fake News'
The role of disinformation in recent elections has given rise to another distinct, but
related, term: '
fake news .'
Although there is no universal definition, fake news generally refers to misleading
content found on the internet, especially on social media. One analysis lays
out five types of fake news, including intentionally deceptive content, jokes taken at face
value, large-scale hoaxes, slanted reporting of real facts, and coverage where the truth may
be uncertain or contentious. These are not new: an
example of fake news from 2011 involves websites masquerading as real news organizations
to spread false information about the health benefits of acai berries.
Much of this content is produced by for-profit websites and Facebook pages
gaming the platform for advertising revenue. By producing tailored false content targeted
at the views, concerns, and preferences of social media users, these pages can generate tens
of thousands of interactions and thousands of dollars a month. In 2015, Facebook began
taking steps
to curtail this content, which it called a form of "news feed spam." By 2016, it became clear
the problem was growing out of control. Fabricated and fiercely partisan political content --
much of it
produced abroad for profit -- in some instances
outpaced engagement with credible mainstream news outlets.
Facebook initially downplayed the
potential influence of fake news, although it also pledged to pursue a response involving
expanded partnerships with fact-checkers, increased emphasis on detection and reporting,
warning labels for untrustworthy stories, and a crackdown on for-profit fake news pages.
Twitter
also reacted , developing an experimental prototype feature to allow users to report
"fake news" and exploring the use of machine learning to detect automated accounts spreading
political content.
Is Fake News Disinformation?
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to a
larger agenda. One attempt to classify
various types of misleading and manipulative news content separates misinformation
(inadvertent sharing of false information) from disinformation, which is deliberate, and
arranges examples by motivation and degree of deception. Most of the fake news described
above falls somewhere in the middle: not inadvertent, but motivated by profit rather than
influence. To the degree that its purpose can be described as political, fake news begins to
resemble more insidious content.
Fake news' political prominence does have lessons for analysts of disinformation. Fake
news draws audiences because it validates their political preconceptions and worldviews,
capitalizing on media consumers' confirmation
bias . Many argue that because social media curates content according to user
preferences, it has a
polarizing effect that leaves consumers more vulnerable to manipulation in this way.
Political actors have been able to use this to their advantage by producing incendiary
content that spreads rapidly through grassroots online networks (some call this "
political astroturfing ").
More often than not, fake news does not meet the definition of disinformation or
propaganda. Its motives are usually financial, not political, and it is usually not tied to
a larger agenda."
Marketing, Public Affairs, Public Diplomacy, and other "Information
Campaigns"
Some analysts also differentiate
between various types of "information campaigns" -- organized attempts to communicate with
large groups of individuals -- which may include marketing, public affairs, and public
diplomacy. All of these terms are worth disentangling from each other and from propaganda and
disinformation writ large.
Marketing and public relations rely on a mix of facts, opinions, and emotional cues to
persuade audiences and build affinity between individuals and brands or organizations. As
promotional activities meant to augment or protect the reputation of the messenger, their
goals may be commercial or political, or they may simply aim to generate publicity. Similarly
promotional is public diplomacy, which states utilize to represent their viewpoints to
foreign audiences and promote positive associations with that country among foreign publics.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes
itself from propaganda by never intentionally spreading false information or relying on
non-rational means of persuasion (though marketing and public relations, of course, may rely
on such non-rational devices).
Marketing, public relations, public diplomacy, and similar information campaigns are all
related to the field of " strategic
communication ," broadly defined as the purposeful use of information and messaging to
advance the mission of a given organization, be it a corporate, government, non-profit, or
military actor. In the military context, a 2007 paper
from the U.S. Army War College emphasizes that strategic communication in a military
context aims to influence adversaries, reassure allies, and persuade publics. Because it may
be impossible to deceive one of these audiences without deceiving others, some
advocate that "deception should be rigorously forbidden in strategic communication" and
that the use of disinformation should never fall under the rubric of strategic
communication.
Done well, public diplomacy distinguishes itself from propaganda by never intentionally
spreading false information or relying on non-rational means of persuasion."
Intent as a Distinguishing Feature
Some
argue the intent of the messenger is crucial to distinguishing between different types of
messages. This makes it difficult to draw a bright, clear line between marketing, public
relations, and public diplomacy, on one side, and propaganda and disinformation on the other.
This is especially true when the content in question includes both objective fact and
subjective interpretation but no clear falsehood, because it may be unclear whether the
message reflects a genuine perspective or an intent to mislead. When content does include
falsehoods, it may be unclear whether they are accidental or purposeful.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences' understanding
or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its undermining
function. This is not solely the realm of the state:
many activities undertaken by
non-state actors may also fit this description.
If an information campaign uses falsehoods and emotional appeals not to persuade or
attract but to disrupt, divide, confuse, or otherwise damage target audiences'
understanding or political cohesion, it more closely aligns with disinformation and its
undermining function."
Information Operations as a Tool of Political Influence
Information campaigns with these goals in mind are now sometimes referred to as
"information operations," a term until recently used primarily by defense officials in
referring broadly to the use of communications in military operations. In April 2017,
Facebook
described "information (or influence) operations" on the platform, which aim "to achieve
a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome" using "a combination of methods, such as false news,
disinformation, or networks of fake accounts (false amplifiers) aimed at manipulating public
opinion." In the run-up to the 2017 French presidential election, Facebook deleted 30,000
fake French accounts from the platform, providing a sense of the scale these operations can
reach.
In that election, an information operation (
likely of Russian origin ) released
hacked documents just before the beginning of a legally mandated election news blackout
in order to damage the campaign of Emmanuel Macron, the eventual winner. The manipulation of
information has been a
feature of Syria's civil war since the conflict's beginning.
Research from a diverse set of country case studies suggests that a wide array of
political, military, and private actors now routinely use social media to manipulate public
opinion. Italy's populist Five Star Movement, for instance,
is tied to a large constellation of online disinformation outlets. Taiwanese democracy
must grapple with both
domestic and cross-strait sources of disinformation. Information operations, including
those involving the use of disinformation during elections, are likely to remain a tool of
political influence well into the foreseeable future.
Brief prepared by Dean Jackson, International Forum for Democratic Studies.
It is now apparent with the
release
of the Mueller investigation findings
, that the great storm that has embattled the US
government and establishment since 2016 over supposed Russia-Trump collusion during the US
elections,
originates not from a genuine tangible source, but a constant stream of
rhetoric driven by partisan corporate media.
One certainty though is the Western
narrative of Russia as a 'malign influence' will not go away.
While America's liberal establishment continues to rage at Trump, Europe allies, under the
influence of Washington, maintain their aggressive stance towards Russia following the
catastrophic
US
meddling in Ukraine
in 2014 and the subsequent
reunification
of Crimea with Russia
.
The question is how can the narrative of 'malign Russian influence' be kept going?
Mainstream media will continue its role in this, but Western governments are also pouring
resources into promulgating certain narratives while containing others.
This week, hackers released more documents from the UK government-funded project
known as the
Integrity
Initiative
, revealing British government plans to build an umbrella network of
organisations across Europe to counter 'Russian disinformation'.
The following is a look at one of the EU projects already operating to ensure European
populations do not stray from this constructed narrative that at times crosses over into real
xenophobic racism, or Russophobia.
While researching this phenomenon, it was impossible not
to find some of the EU's counter-propaganda material quite funny.
If we want to know the meaning of disinformation, the American think tank known as the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which
funds
regime change
in the service of US corporate interests, has its own
definition
,
but it's not important – so long as we believe Russia or the Nazis invented the problem. In fact,
if we search the word 'disinformation,' a good number of the results tell us it originated in
Russia and is the baby of Stalin or the KGB. If we are not careful, we could end up thinking that
dishonesty is an inherent characteristic of Russians, a view actually
promoted
by
the former US Director of National Intelligence,
James Clapper
, who,
coincidentally was caught '
wilfully
'
lying
to
Congress.
The view of Russians being hard-wired for corruption was also promoted by the
New York Times
in
an article published in February,
The
Putin I knew; the Putin I know
, written by Franz J Sedelmeyer, exposing deep prejudice
behind the corporate media's shallow identity politics.
But this narrative fails to credit the CIA, which has spent decades crafting skills
carrying out the most grotesque deceptions in history targeted abroad and at home.
To
leave out the role of the CIA in disinformation must be the equivalent of writing an omelette
recipe and leaving out the eggs. In fact, the CIA doesn't just carry out disinformation campaigns,
as Victor Marchetti, former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the CIA described it:
the
CIA manufactures history
. Not to recognise American intelligence services or government in
the history of disinformation while painting Russia as its mother is to deprive America of the
recognition it deserves for one of its most notable institutions. Somewhat ironically, you can
learn all about the history of disinformation from both
Google
and
the
National
Endowment for Democracy
which are two entities which have received financial support from the
CIA.
What about the EU? Does Brussels think that Russia is an inherently dishonest nation? Are they
aware that the CIA could be manufacturing Europe's history this very moment? Members of the
European Parliament (MEPs) so concerned about disinformation might want to study the documented
atrocities
of
the CIA, some of which were carried out in Europe. Perhaps they are not aware of the
US
intelligence services' role
in the history of subterfuge in Europe:
memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a
fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American
wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
Paradoxically, given the probability rate of the CIA meddling in the EU, MEPs should consider
putting out a public warning:
The CIA is the most likely source of disinformation in Europe today. It manufactures
crises – and we've plenty of those.
But none of it. Instead, the European Parliament is fixated on ensuring its populations
fear
Russia
and are accepting of the narratives pushed on them. The EU released a new
report
this
month repeating the narratives it has been accumulating to justify increasing actions against
Russia, particularly since 2014 following the reunification of Crimea. It has passed a resolution
stating that Russia could no longer be considered a strategic partner of the EU:
While condemning the illegal occupation and annexation of Crimea, as well as Russia's
continued violation of the territorial integrity of Georgia and Moldova, Members stressed that
the EU cannot envisage a gradual return to business as usual until Russia fully implements the
Minsk Agreement and restores the territorial integrity of Ukraine
Members condemned Russia's involvement in the Skripal case, and in disinformation
campaigns and cyberattacks carried out by the Russian intelligence services aimed at
destabilising public and private communications infrastructure and at increasing tensions within
the EU and its Member States
They are concerned about the relations between the Russian government and the extreme
right-wing and populist nationalist parties and governments in the EU, such as in Hungary. They
also recalled that the interference of Russian state actors in the referendum campaign on Brexit
is currently under investigation by the UK authorities
As Russia can no longer be considered a strategic partner in the current circumstances,
Members believe that the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement should be reconsidered
As well as the coordinated strategic isolation of Russia by the EU, members of the G7 have
signed up to a
Rapid
Response Mechanism
(RRM) designed to:
see hostile states publicly 'called out' for their egregious behaviour – with coordinated
international attribution of cyber and other attacks.
The agreement involves
sharing intelligence
,
attribution of hostile activity
and
forming a
common narrative and response,
effectively a military-like propaganda
coordination between the countries that can be applied for a chosen agenda.
To protect its version of history the EU has created
mechanisms
to
fight off alternative realities, narratives, or truths – which ever word fits – claiming any fact
or opinion contrary to those of the stated EU decree must be condemned as pro-Kremlin, pro-Russian,
or 'Putinist', a derogatory depiction presently supported by the corporate media. The EU claims
these 'alternative narratives' are the product of a Russian disinformation campaign and has
developed resources to 'disprove' that disinformation. These are the EU vanguards of
truth
set
up and funded by the European Council in 2015: the
European External Action Service East
Stratcom Task Force
or unaffectionately known here as Team
East
Stratcom
. A brief study of their work only leads to further concerns about who is
manufacturing history, but also to the likely conclusion that Team East Stratcom is made up of
media studies students who drink beer and watch RT all day.
Here's how Team East Stratcom describes itself in a Q&A:
Does the team engage in counter-propaganda?
No. It identifies and corrects disinformation
Counter-propaganda vs correct disinformation (you say tomatto, I say tomayto).
Julian King, the EU's security commissioner, has described it as a
counter-propaganda
cell
. Come on Brussels, make up your mind.
What does Team East StratCom do, and what is the role of its website
EUVDisinfo
?
The Task Force reports on and analyses disinformation trends, explains and exposes
disinformation narratives, and raises awareness of disinformation coming from Russian State,
Russian sources and spread in the Eastern neighbourhood media space
RUSSIAN MEMES: Official EU conspiracy theory diagram explains how 'Russian disinfo'
permeates mainstream western discourse (
EU
External Action
2017)
Firstly, who defines what is disinformation? Is it just assumed that any information emanating
from a Russian media outlet is automatically disinformation?
Narratives and sources. Does this mean that any narrative which matches a Russian one is then
classed as
Russian
in origin? If a Western alternative media outlet publishes a narrative
which happens to match that of a Russian media outlet, does this then mean that the said
alternative media outlet is 'under Russian influence', or 'in league with the Kremlin'? Could such
a politicized method of labelling lead to potential McCarthyite targeting of independent
journalists?
The Task Force does not target opinions and does not seek to "blacklist" anyone. It
checks facts and identifies disinformation coming from Russian State, Russian language and
Eastern
Neighbourhood
media. It focuses on the disinformation message, not the messenger.
Yet, individual journalists are identified in many of these so-called 'disinformation cases' and
described as supporters of one leader or other on the EU's list of bogeymen. Team East StratCom –
there is no need to be shy about McCarthyism. Certain mainstream media stalwarts of establishment
narratives are more upfront about whom they do and do not want in the club, as Oliver Kamm of
The
Times
has demonstrated:
For an agency already struggling with the concept of truth, Team
East StratCom
is
not off to a great start.
So how does Team East StratCom protect EU narratives? The European Council made it
clear
in
2015 they wanted to counter narratives about
regime
change
in
Ukraine
and
its consequences. In fact, about half of its 'disinformation cases' are about Ukraine:
Ukraine tops the EUvsDisinfo database as the most frequent target with 461 references among
a total of 1,000 disinformation cases reported in the course of 2018.
So how does Team East StratCom counter propaganda sorry correct disinformation? The following
are a few case samples that help to illuminate their methodologies (although with a budget increase
from €1.1 million in 2018 to €3 million in 2019, it may find new and diverse ones):
Disinformation Example 1: Ukraine is the most corrupt country in Europe
Team East StratCom argues that undermining the credibility of Ukraine benefits Russia. It
reports that RT Deutsch described Ukraine as the most corrupt country in Europe. It then tries to
debunk this using
Transparency International
's
corruption perception index, a chart which is created and paid for by Western neoliberal
governments – the same ones that help to keep corrupt governments in power so long as they provide
opportunities to serve Western corporate interests.
Team East StratCom tries to disprove this case by drawing our attention away from corruption in
Europe to corruption worldwide. This puts 60 countries ahead of Ukraine. That is sneaky Team East
StratCom because, aside from Russia, which we must believe is the most corrupt country in Europe,
Ukraine actually tops the list. So why does the EU want to hide the extent of corruption in
Ukraine and is it the only thing being hidden about the country? According to Russian Foreign
Ministry Spokeswoman
Maria Zakharova
the West wants
to stop the world from recognising Crimea as part of Russia's territory. In order to do this it
must maintain a manufactured reality; the narrative of Ukraine being a victim of Russian aggression
and in no way a liability due, at least in part, to the West's meddling. This approach also entails
downplaying any suggestion that
the
West planned and orchestrated
a
coup d'etat
in Kiev in February 2014.
Disinformation Example 2: Far-right groups in Ukraine
This extract by Team East StratCom criticises the reporting of far-right groups in Ukraine:
Dehumanise, demoralise, make Ukraine the guilty party
Pro-Kremlin disinformation about Ukraine targets audiences in Russia, in Ukraine and in
third countries, including the West. Domestic audiences in Russia are e.g. faced with
narratives which dehumanise Ukrainians and show the authorities in Kyiv as a cynical modern heir
to 20th century Nazism. Such a strategy can turn Ukraine into an acceptable target of the
Kremlin's military aggression.
The involvement of far right groups in the run-up to and during 2014 Maidan events and
since
,
has already been widely reported across much of the global mainstream media, for example,
here
,
here
,
here
,
here
and
here
,
as well as in alternate media. To suggest that this narrative is Russian disinformation is
ludicrous. What's more, the
European
Parliament
have already recognised in 2012 the threat of the far-right parties like Svoboda and
Pravi Sektor in Ukrainian politics:
Parliament goes on to express concern about the rising nationalistic sentiment in
Ukraine, expressed in support for the Svoboda Party, which, as a result, is one of the two new
parties to enter the Verkhovna Rada. It recalls that racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic views
go against the EU's fundamental values and principles and therefore appeals to pro-democratic
parties in the Verkhovna Rada not to associate with, endorse or form coalitions with this party.
Team East StratCom, you are implying the EU dehumanised Ukraine! But then the EU did later
drop
its
objection as members of the same racist, anti-Semitic and xenophobic party
gained
positions in Ukraine's government
, so perhaps you will be forgiven. Perhaps sowing a little
confusion of its own, is Brussels.
Disinformation Example 3: Russia is depicted as a 'defender' and a 'peacekeeper' and
the West – as the villain
.
Team East Stratcom likes using Twitter graphics as evidence when 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation.' Never mind history, reason and common sense – just bring out a nice Twitter
graphic! According to disinfo mavens, any spike in Twitter activity with the words 'Russia'
'Moscow' or 'Putin' in reference to Venezuela is proof of a 'pro-Kremlin' disinformation campaign,
says Team East StratCom. Here is
their
graphical chart
of Twitter traffic:
But Russia is an ally of Venezuela so why would this not be reflected on Twitter when there is a
blatant attempt by a Western aggressor to impose its military and economic will on Venezuela? Such
was the situation in February when the US tried to pressure the Venezuelan government into allowing
in trucks, supposedly carrying humanitarian aid, into the country. Aid as a Trojan Horse for
weapons has historical context, especially with regards to the US and its new special envoy to
Venezuela,
Elliot Abrams
, a
convicted
war criminal
who illicitly supplied weapons to death squads in Nicaragua, El Salvador and
Guatemala on behalf of the Reagan presidency in the 1980s. Now that he is special envoy to
Venezuela, it is common sense to suspect foul play. Can such people really be seen as peacekeepers,
Team East Stratcom? And using a Twitter graphic to divert attention from a flagrant coup attempt by
an aggressive power is more than a little contemptible. What's more, a few days afterwards, one of
those trucks carrying supplies was found to contain nails and other materials useful for making
barricades:
And so to sum up the tactics used by Team East StratCom for 'disproving pro-Kremlin
disinformation', based on the above cases alone, a list could include for starters:
Categorical denial of any wrongdoing by Western powers or NATO members
Label any information emanating from a Russia media outlet as 'disinformation' or
'Kremlin propaganda'
Discredit alternate media journalists who stray from Official
Washington/London/Brussels position
Diversion and distraction – dazzle the public with colourful Twitter graphics
Remove any key political, geopolitical context
Obscure or erase history
Use of online tools like the Corruption Index promoted by same Western governments
that fund bloody imperialist wars
Use emotive, jingoistic themes
Associate perceived ideological opponents with leaders on Western bogeyman list
Repetition of pejorative terms and ad hominem smears such as 'pro-Kremlin' and'
'Putinist' to create division
Infer that any dissenter in the West is a 'traitor.'
But Team East StratCom can't erase history or delete context or bore us half to death
with those Twitter graphics and still expect to retain their credibility.
What's more, given the Russia-Trump collusion narrative has been exposed as a hoax, Team East
StratCom really ought to
let
that one go
.
And then Stephen Cohen of The Nation , another voice of reason, sent me a copy of his
book, "
War With Russia? " It's a collection of his heretical writings about our new, unnecessary
Cold War, and the opening essay ,
adapted from a talk he gave in Washington D.C., made me ashamed of my silence.
"Some people who privately share our concerns -- again, in Congress, the media,
universities and think tanks -- do not speak out at all. For whatever
reason -- concern about being stigmatized, about their career, personal
disposition -- they are silent. But in our democracy, where the cost of dissent
is relatively low, silence is no longer a patriotic option," Cohen wrote, adding, "We
should exempt from this imperative young people, who have more to lose. A few have sought my
guidance, and I always advise, 'Even petty penalties for dissent in regard to Russia could
adversely affect your career. At this stage of life, your first obligation is to your family
and thus to your future prospects. Your time to fight lies ahead'."
Well, what was my excuse?
Special Prosecutor Robert S. Mueller has now turned in his findings, and there's not much
there. For weeks beforehand, mainstream media warned about this -- exhorting
readers against succumbing to feeling "disappointed".
Disappointed? I guess, as my friend Taibbi has noted , it would have
been an immense relief had the U.S. president been found to be a high-level traitor. We
could have all brought picnic lunches to his execution.
Right before the species-ending war with Russia.
In their fanatic loyalty to the narrative, what used to be my favorite media have stridently
reminded us that, Mueller aside, "it's not over!" The "focus of the investigation" will move
now to the New York prosecutors, to House committees. The American intelligentsia will
continue to dream up wild theories -- they'll be Scotch-taped on every vertical
surface, connected by bits of yarn and magic marker scribbles and hyperverbal mania.
The question now is, has the Mueller report finally freed up the rest of us to challenge the
more insane flights of fantasy? Or is it instead so close to the 2020 presidential
elections -- and so legally dangerous for some of the intelligence insiders who
have tried to bring down the president -- that skeptical journalists more than
ever will be bullied to keep silent?
Rootless Whataboutism
As a test case -- a first step on the road to journalistic recovery --
can I suggest we at least retire the insane, Orwellian term "whataboutism?"
Whataboutism really deserves consideration as a "Word of the Year", and not in a good way.
There have been multiple non-ironic media reports about this odious concept,
on NPR , in the
Huffington Post ,
in The Washington Post , you name it.
"His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow," The Washington Post
told us awhile back, "but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet
propaganda tactic 'whataboutism,' the practice of short-circuiting an argument by asserting
moral equivalency between two things that aren't necessarily comparable."
NPR's version also claims that whataboutism is a Soviet-tainted practice. "It's not exactly
a complicated tactic -- any grade-schooler can master the
'yeah-well-you-suck-too-so-there' defense," NPR says. "But it came to be associated with the
USSR because of the Soviet Union's heavy reliance upon whataboutism throughout the Cold War and
afterward, as Russia."
Yet in my experience, it's not so much a Soviet tactic as an American one --
specifically, it's a way of demanding a loyalty oath to the anti-Trump resistance.
I have occasionally dared express skepticism about the entire overblown story that Russia
was involved in our 2016 elections at all. That's right. I don't buy it. I am not
entirely convinced that "Russian bots and trolls" infected anyone's mind by, say, taking
positions both for and against gun control after the Parkland high school mass shooting, or
by setting up
anti-masturbation hotlines , or by
giving bad reviews to "Star Wars: the Last Jedi."
I am also not entirely convinced that the Russians, having supposedly decided at the highest
levels of their government to try to sink Hilary Clinton's candidacy, couldn't think of
anything more clever than to spear-phish campaign manager John Podesta's G-mail.
Nor do I
share the concerns of The Times of London that the Russian animated cartoon "Masha
and the Bear" is part of a soft propaganda drive to weaken the minds of Estonian children ahead
of their eventual annexation by Red Army tanks.
Yet before I can even offer any subtler qualification of all this -- sure,
there is Russian-government, let's say, "illicit computer and social media activity" out there,
mixed with a lot of other noise signals (click-bait farms, which explains at least some of the
infamous Internet Research Agency's activities; ordinary Russians with pro-Kremlin positions
and personal Facebook accounts; and yes, people sitting on their beds who weigh 400 pounds),
but it has to be weighed against -- I'll be cut off.
"That's whataboutism ," I've been told flatly.
It's actually not -- that doesn't even meet the absurd quasi-official
definitions of this new Kafkaesque term -- but that's the whole point.
Disagreement is by its very nature whataboutist . Every skeptical question, after all,
could technically begin, "But what about ?"
Of course, it's far, far worse if I truly commit a whataboutism and -- God
forbid! God forbid! – I express curiosity about The New York Times
reporting about millions flowing to the Clintons and associated with the Russian purchase
of American uranium mines.
Whataboutism! It's so comparable to the old Soviet thought crimes --
Trotskyite, wrecker, cosmopolitan, rootless cosmopolitanism Every time I hear someone
flag a statement as guilty of whataboutism, I mentally add " rootless whataboutism."
People tell me Mueller missed the point. It's about Russian oligarch and Kremlin money,
invested in Trump real estate -- it's not over! All hail the Southern District
prosecutors! OK, let's see it, I'm open to that possibility. But if all Russian money is
tainted just because it's "oligarchical" -- good luck defining that
! -- then is it O.K. for the spouse of then-Secretary of State Hilary Clinton to
take $500,000 for a single hour's work, a speech in Moscow, for one of the most famous
"oligarch" banks?
"That's whataboutism! NPR and The Washington Post say that's a
Soviet-favored tactic! Your loyalty is thus suspect two-fold. Have you had contact with
any Russian nationals?"
Communists and Crickets
"EVIDENCE POINTS TO RUSSIA AS MAIN SUSPECT IN BRAIN INJURY ATTACKS ON DOZENS OF U.S.
DIPLOMATS" was the report by
MSNBC in September 2017, and they flogged that big scoop for months, and have never
really apologized for it.
Two dozen American diplomats in Cuba suffered headaches, dizziness and other vague symptoms
they blamed on strange sounds -- sounds some of them tape-recorded and supplied
to journalists, doctors and the government. "It sounds sort of like a mass of crickets," was
the opening line of the Associated Press report about the recordings (which you can
listen to yourself here ).
But no. Not crickets. As MSNBC reported, our intelligence services had intercepted
Russian communications (!) revealing the sounds were "some kind of microwave weapon,"
one so sophisticated that our top government minds were at a loss.
We might not know how it works, MSNBC reported, but we did know it was a weapon, and
"now Russia is the leading suspect."
"This is not an accident," reported anchorwoman Andrea Mitchell then. "This is not a
microwave listening device gone bad. This is an attack -- against American
diplomats and intelligence officers, and this was targeting."
What an amazing allegation. The Russian government was beaming a mysterious, high-tech
weapon at our citizens ; we had intercepted communications that made this
clear.
For more than a year, I and colleagues with Russia-reporting experience would be grilled
about this, and would just have to shrug apologetically. We just didn't know what to say. It
didn't make a lot of face-value sense -- why exactly would Russian agents, amid
all this rabid anti-Russia hysteria, beam a secret brain-frying weapon at two-dozen random
American diplomats and their family members in Cuba, for weeks apparently? What would be the
logic behind giving these random-seeming people headaches and making them dizzy and even
causing "brain injuries similar to concussions"?
As a physician, I also shared the s
kepticism of colleagues published about this in the Journal of the American Medical
Association. Playing odds, I agreed with those critics that I would have assumed either a
mass psychogenic illness or a viral infection more likely etiologies than a secret Siberian
death ray. I also read "brain injuries similar to concussions" as, "brain injuries that don't
show up on objective testing." (Of course, I've not examined any of these patients or reviewed
their cases so it's not for me to say.)
But in our fevered Russophobic environment, no one wanted to entertain alternative
scenarios -- after all, we don't even understand this sophisticated
weapon, which our intelligence agencies assure us (anonymously) they have intercepted Russian
communications bragging about, so how dare we debate the logic behind its use? (Maybe
this is how they control the president!)
Then three months ago, American scientists published in a peer-review journal their analysis
of the dastardly recordings and
identified the sounds : Crickets. Caribbean crickets.
Specifically, the echoing call of the male, short-tailed indies. During mating season.
But did MSNBC apologize, or retract?
Crickets.
Instead, during a historically cold week this winter, MSNBC star Rachel Maddow used
the excuse of a government panel about energy security to go on a Jack D. Ripper about Russia
someday deciding to freeze middle America to death.
"It is like negative 50 degrees in the Dakotas right now. What would happen if Russia killed
the power in Fargo today? What would happen if all the natural gas lines that service Sioux
Falls just 'poofed', on the coldest day in recent memories, and it wasn't in our power
whether or not to turn them back on?" Maddow asked. "What would you do if you lost heat indefinitely --
as the act of a foreign power! -- on the same day the temperature in
your front yard matched the temperature in Antarctica? I mean, what would you and your family
do?"
Gee, I don't know Rachel. What would my family and I do if Russia launched a nuclear weapon
at my front yard? I guess we'd all die. I guess I don't know who to trust anymore, I feel
exhausted by the news, sick of it all, I just want to stop caring, and you seem to feel the
same, and omigosh Rachel, we've been infected by the red virus!
'They Hate our Freedoms'
James Comey, the former FBI director, testified before the Senate after his firing that the
Russians are "coming after America," because, "They think that this great experiment of ours is
a threat to them, and so they're going to try to run it down and dirty it up as much as
possible."
Right. It's because "they hate our freedoms."
Where have I heard that before?
People had been waiting breathlessly for Mueller's report, but in reality, everything we
needed to know was right there in the first report -- the January 6, 2017, grand
announcement, the big reveal by our Intelligence Community -- the consensus of
CIA, FBI and NSA -- "Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions in Recent U.S.
Elections."
I remember finishing that report at the time and thinking:
Holy Cow, they have nothing.
Nothing!
Of the 15 pages with any meat to them in that report, seven were a long, bizarre complaint
about the existence and activities of RT (formerly RussiaToday ), the
Kremlin-sponsored English-language news channel.
Our intelligence agencies reported that RT has become "the most-watched foreign news
channel in the UK," had more YouTube viewers than the BBC or CNN , and was
surpassing al-Jazeera in New York and Washington D.C. ( Voice of America , which
is the U.S. government version of RT , has no sense of humor or passion and so no
viewers anywhere outside of Foggy Bottom.)
RT's success was, per the intelligence report, thanks to a combination of lavish
Kremlin funding and an alluring editorial slant. The intelligence report quoted RT's
editor as saying her station got lots of new viewers after offering sympathetic coverage of the
Occupy Wall Street movement. The intelligence report continued:
In an effort to highlight the alleged "lack of democracy" in the United States, RT broadcast,
hosted, and advertised third-party candidate debates and ran reporting supportive of the
political agenda of these candidates. The RT hosts asserted that the US two-party system does
not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a "sham." RT's reports
often characterize the United States as a "surveillance state" and allege widespread
infringements of civil liberties, police brutality, and drone use RT has also focused on
criticism of the US economic system, US currency policy, alleged Wall Street greed, and the
US national debt. Some of RT's hosts have compared the United States to Imperial Rome and
have predicted that government corruption and "corporate greed" will lead to US financial
collapse RT runs anti-fracking programming, highlighting environmental issues and the impacts
on public health
This was hilarious of course -- a public snit by our intel communities about
Russians racking up big numbers among American viewers in Washington and New York , just
by offering mildly critical takes on drone killings and fracking and "alleged Wall Street
greed" ("alleged"? Really ?). We were promised a major assessment of any improper
Russian influences on our 2016 electoral process and we got -- this? A formal
complaint that Russian TV gave Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein too much air time?
All this bitching and moaning about RT -- which, remember, is not some
secret plot, but just a public TV station you can go watch on YouTube or not watch
-- takes up well more than half of that grand intelligence community assessment.
It really speaks volumes about what was on their minds. And again, my conclusion reading it two
years ago was: So, they've got nothing.
The one caveat, though, was that there was a classified appendix. There's always a
classified appendix. So, who knew what was in that ? After all, immediately and in the
two years since, intelligence officials have occasionally been cited -- always
anonymously! --
in The Guardian ,
The New Yorker , and The
New York Times -- as claiming to have intercepted communications between the
Trump team and the Russian government.
Well, by now, we should realize the appendix is a myth.
First, we now know that
at least part of it -- and, I would guess, probably all of it --
was nothing more than the Steele report, the infamous document first posted on
BuzzFeed , that collection of anti-Trump opposition research paid for by the Hilary Clinton
campaign. (You know -- the pee tape stuff.)
And we now also know, courtesy of Robert Mueller's report, that there are no "intercepted
communications" between Russians and the Trump campaign teams. Just like there are no Russian
intercepts about secret Siberian brain-frying rays in Cuba, because that, again, was the mating
call of a short-tailed Caribbean cricket.
I don't know what's funnier about all of this -- and it is damned funny,
really -- the fact that all of this has actually happened , or the fact
that I feel the need to come out of journalistic retirement to help point it out.
A
President With a Traitor's Heart -- for Six More Years
And that's the way it is, and has been, all along for these past two years. There have been
non-stop media allegations that, one way or another, our narcissistic, loud-mouthed, overtly
racist U.S. president has a traitor's heart. Any errors or inaccuracies -- and
there have been a shocking number of retracted "scoops," as well as screwups like the Caribbean
crickets that have just been ignored -- are excused in service of this larger
truth: Our president has a traitor's heart.
But I already knew that! We all did!
We knew it the moment he said , "Russia, if you're listening, I
hope you'll be able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing" -- referencing
some official e-mails of Hilary Clinton's that were improperly handled and got deleted. (Among
the onion layers of irony to this political season is that Trump pioneered the 21st century
witch hunt. There has never been any evidence that Clinton's deleted emails represent anything
at all -- yet Trump hammered away at this as if it mattered, until one day it
did. And he didn't even suggest investigations, he skipped straight to "lock her up!").
Being racist, or stupid, or sexist, or a bully, or a New York real estate developer
-- all of these are deep character flaws. They are not always crimes. (Sexually
assaulting someone is always a crime, however, even if you are a TV star and remember
your breath mints.)
And yet, again, we already knew all of this. Remember this transcript
from The New York Times ?
Trump : I did try and fuck her. She was married and I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I
took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, "I'll show you
where they have some nice furniture." I took her out furniture -- I moved on
her like a bitch. But I couldn't get there.
Trump : Yeah, that's her [peeking out a trailer window at a different target, an
approaching actress] . I better use some Tic Tacs just in case I start kissing her. You
know, I'm automatically attracted to beautiful -- I just start kissing them.
It's like a magnet. Just kiss. I don't even wait. And when you're a star, they let you do it.
You can do anything.
Billy Bush [a fawning minor TV personality] : Whatever you want.
Trump : Grab 'em by the pussy. You can do anything.
Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.
I share your pain. And I have no doubt he'd trade his own son for majority ownership of a
moderately nice golf course. But I'm also, frankly, no longer very interested in him. I'm much
more interested in us -- the rest of us.
What happened to us?
Well, I'll amend that slightly. I am of course quite interested in seeing Donald Trump leave
office. I suspect, however, that these two-plus years of journalistic malpractice --
a politically-motivated Red Scare at a time when we don't even have any Reds anymore,
just Russians -- has locked in his second term. (What's that? Impeachment
you say? Oh please. He'd set up a government-in-exile in Mar-a-Lago and then he'd be around for
twenty more years instead of six. And he'd have half the nation with him the entire
time.) So thank you for that, MSNBC and NPR and New York Times.
"... Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. ..."
"... Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ..."
" Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent
political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure
to see it coming.
Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf
Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, "I guess people hated us
so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump ."
As a peedupon all I can see is that the elite seem to be fighting amongst themselves or
(IMO) providing cover for ongoing elite power/control efforts. It might not be about
private/public finance in a bigger picture but I can't see anything else that makes sense
Thanks for the Taibbi link. I hadn't seen it, and found him to be in good form. I do think
he ought to have spoken more about how bad Trump's Primary opponents were.
Most of those reporters were going to slant their stories the way their bosses wanted.
Their jobs are just too nice to do otherwise. Getting Trump as Hillary's opponent had to have
been a goal for the majority of them. He was the patsy who would become squished roadkill in
the treads of The Most Experienced Presidential Candidate In History. More on that for people
with strong stomachs:
Hillary Clinton is a knowledgeable, well-prepared, reasonable, experienced, even-tempered,
hardworking candidate, while her opponent is a stubbornly uninformed demagogue who has been
proven again and again to be a liar on matters big and small. There is no objective basis
on which to equate Hillary Clinton to her opponent.
The author had it half right. Turns out the voters knew quite a bit about Trump,
and still preferred him to the Butcher of Libya.
Seems to me what that BigLie's about is this tale: Relations with Russia during the
post-USSR age were going along swell until Russia began involved in the Venezuelan
Crisis.
The attempt is to try a new narrative using a different angle to blame Russia which is the
goal of the BigLie. Signal a new line of approach in dealing with the attitude toward Russia
to the trusty echoers of His Master's Voice.
They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by unexpectedly allowing waivers on
Iranian oil in November.
The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't have access to enough heavy oil
to meet their own needs.
Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue its empire. Without Venezuelan oil,
the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will remain so.
Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria, now Venezuela, Russia exposes the
U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.
If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are finished. For this reason the U.S. will
continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier actions, until it succeeds or breaks.
In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the U.S. will eventually move to destroy
Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.
Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out. Will the world become a multi-polar
world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by
a brutal, erratic hegemon?
So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
Notable quotes:
"... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
"... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
"... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
"... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
"... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
"... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
"... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
"... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
But as I foresaw well before the summary
of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests
are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent
of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been
a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves
engaged in " a cover-up
."
Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's
exculpatory finding actually mean that "
Russiagate
is dead " and indeed that " it expired
in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's
toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and
again in one form or another.
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller
investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged
"Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book
War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.
§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack
of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even
suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our
elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate
declining confidence in the entire electoral process.
Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites,
which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?
§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but
hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent
of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able
to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager,
Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a "
next time ."
§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers
and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate
media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media
did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January
2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here
about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi
has given us a meticulously documented
account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is
a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."
Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times
published on its front page
an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he
explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the
past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably
factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway.
In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the
Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "
have no regrets ."
§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational
institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the
party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell
from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance."
With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional
damage being done by Russiagate allegations.
As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.
Rachel Maddow
continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it
did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other
Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous
absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)
§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political,
economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived,
as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's
necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts
with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle
has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be "
derisive and scornful
" toward our political life.
They lost control of Saudi Arabia, after trying to take down MBS and then betraying him by unexpectedly allowing waivers on
Iranian oil in November.
The U.S. cannot take down Iran without Venezuelan oil. What is worse, right now they don't have access to enough heavy oil
to meet their own needs.
Controlling the world oil trade is central to Trump's strategy for the U.S. to continue its empire. Without Venezuelan oil,
the U.S. is a bit player in the energy markets, and will remain so.
Having Russia block the U.S. in Venezuela adds insult to injury. After Crimea and Syria, now Venezuela, Russia exposes the
U.S. as a loud mouthed-bully without the capacity to back up its threats, a 'toothless tiger', an 'emperor without clothes'.
If the U.S. cannot dislodge Russia from Venezuela, its days as 'global hegemon' are finished. For this reason the U.S. will
continue escalating the situation with ever-riskier actions, until it succeeds or breaks.
In the same manor, if Russia backs off, its resistance to the U.S. is finished. And the U.S. will eventually move to destroy
Russia, like it has been actively trying to do for the past 30 years. Russia cannot and will not back off.
Venezuela thus becomes the stage where the final act in the clash of empires plays out. Will the world become a multi-polar
world, in which the U.S. becomes a relatively isolated and insignificant pole? Or will the world become more fully dominated by
a brutal, erratic hegemon?
So Russiagate smoothly transferred in Neo-McCarthyism and it will poison the US political atmosphere for a decade or two.
Notable quotes:
"... But as I foresaw well before the summary of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." ..."
"... Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections ..."
"... Persistent demands to "secure our elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate declining confidence in the entire electoral process ..."
"... Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites, which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people? ..."
"... Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. ..."
"... Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, " have no regrets ." ..."
"... Leading members of the party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance." With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional damage being done by Russiagate allegations. ..."
"... Rachel Maddow continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.) ..."
"... Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political, economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived, as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be " derisive and scornful " toward our political life. ..."
But as I foresaw well before the summary
of Mueller's "Russia investigation" appeared, there is unlikely to be much, if any. Too many personal and organizational interests
are too deeply invested in Russiagate. Not surprisingly, leading perpetrators instead immediately met the summary with a torrent
of denials, goal-post shifts, obfuscations, and calls for more Russiagate "investigations." Joy Reid of MSNBC, which has been
a citadel of Russiagate allegations along with CNN, even suggested that Mueller and Attorney General William Barr were themselves
engaged in " a cover-up
."
Contrary to a number of major media outlets, from Bloomberg News to The Wall Street Journal , nor does Mueller's
exculpatory finding actually mean that "
Russiagate
is dead " and indeed that " it expired
in an instant ." Such conclusions reveal a lack of historical and political understanding. Nearly three years of Russiagate's
toxic allegations have entered the American political-media elite bloodstream, and they almost certainly will reappear again and
again in one form or another.
This is an exceedingly grave danger, because the real costs of Russiagate are not the estimated $25–40 million spent on the Mueller
investigation but the corrosive damage it has already done to the institutions of American democracy -- damage done not by an alleged
"Trump-Putin axis" but by Russsigate's perpetrators themselves. Having examined this collateral damage in my recently published book
War with Russia? From Putin and Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate , I will only note them here.
§ Clamorous allegations that the Kremlin "attacked our elections" and thereby put Trump in the White House, despite the lack
of any evidence, cast doubt on the legitimacy of American elections everywhere -- national, state, and local. If true, or even
suspected, how can voters have confidence in the electoral foundations of American democracy? Persistent demands to "secure our
elections from hostile powers" -- a politically and financially profitable mania, it seems -- can only further abet and perpetuate
declining confidence in the entire electoral process.
Still more, if some crude Russian social-media outputs could so dupe voters, what does this tell us about what US elites,
which originated these allegations, really think of those voters, of the American people?
§ Defamatory Russsiagate allegations that Trump was a "Kremlin puppet" and thus "illegitimate" were aimed at the president but
hit the presidency itself, degrading the institution, bringing it under suspicion, casting doubt on its legitimacy. And if an "agent
of a hostile foreign power" could occupy the White House once, a "Manchurian candidate," why not again? Will Republicans be able
to resist making such allegations against a future Democratic president? In any event, Hillary Clinton's failed campaign manager,
Robby Mook, has already told us that there will be a "
next time ."
§ Mainstream media are, of course, a foundational institution of American democracy, especially national ones, newspapers
and television, with immense influence inside the Beltway and, in ramifying synergic ways, throughout the country. Their Russiagate
media malpractice, as I have termed it, may have been the worst such episode in modern American history. No mainstream media
did anything to expose, for example, two crucial and fraudulent Russiagate documents -- the so-called Steele Dossier and the January
2017 Intelligence Community Assessment -- but instead relied heavily on them for their own narratives. Little more need be said here
about this institutional self-degradation. Glenn Greenwald and a few others followed and exposed it throughout, and now Matt Taibbi
has given us a meticulously documented
account of that systematic malpractice , concluding that Mueller's failure to confirm the media's Russiagate allegations "is
a death-blow for the reputation of the American news media."
Nor, it must be added, was this entirely inadvertent or accidental. On August 8, 2016, the trend-setting New York Times
published on its front page
an astonishing editorial manifesto by its media critic. Asking whether "normal standards" should apply to candidate Trump, he
explained that they should not: "You have to throw out the textbook American journalism has been using for the better part of the
past half-century." Let others decide whether this Times proclamation unleashed the highly selective, unbalanced, questionably
factual "journalism" that has so degraded Russiagate media or instead the publication sought to justify what was already underway.
In either case, this remarkable -- and ramifying -- Times rejection of its own professed standards should not be forgotten.
Almost equally remarkable and lamentable, we learn that even now, after Mueller's finding is known, top executives of the
Times and other leading Russiagate media outlets, including The Washington Post and CNN, "
have no regrets ."
§ For better or worse, America has a two-party political system, which means that the Democratic Party is also a foundational
institution. Little more also need be pointed out regarding its self-degrading role in the Russiagate fraud. Leading members of the
party initiated, inflated, and prolonged it. They did nothing to prevent inquisitors like Representatives Adam Schiff and Eric Swalwell
from becoming the cable-news face of the party. Or to rein in or disassociate the party from the outlandish excesses of "The Resistance."
With very few exceptions, elected and other leading Democrats did nothing to stop -- and therefore further abetted -- the institutional
damage being done by Russiagate allegations.
As for Mueller's finding, the party's virtual network, MSNBC, remains undeterred.
Rachel Maddow
continues to hype "the underlying reality that Russia did in fact attack us." By any reasonable definition of "attack," no, it
did not, and scarcely any allegation could be more recklessly warmongering, a perception the Democratic Party will for this and other
Russiagate commissions have to endure, or not. (When Mueller's full report is published, we will see if he too indulged in this dangerous
absurdity. A few passages in the summary suggest he might have done so.)
§ Finally, but potentially not least, the new Cold War with Russia has itself become an institution pervading American political,
economic, media, and cultural life. Russiagate has made it more dangerous, more fraught with actual war, than the Cold War we survived,
as I explain in War with Russia? Recall only that Russiagate allegations further demonized "Putin's Russia," thwarted Trump's
necessary attempts to "cooperate with Russia" as somehow "treasonous," criminalized détente thinking and "inappropriate contacts
with Russia" -- in short, policies and practices that previously helped to avert nuclear war. Meanwhile, the Russiagate spectacle
has caused many ordinary Russians who once admired America to now be "
derisive and scornful
" toward our political life.
I wouldn't hold my breath, there are two main factions that want unending conflict with
Russia. The first is the MIC, it needs enemies to feed the ever growing military budget. The
second is the woke people, hating Russia mandatory because of certain traits (white,
Christian, conservative, traditional).
With these two very powerful factions, things will only get worse.
In an article entitled Why the
double standard on justice for Canadians, Chinese? Ambassador Lu cut through the noise
being created by the media and western political class by exposing the over bloated western
surveillance state known as the Five Eyes which he properly identified as the outgrowth of the
unconstitutional Patriot Act, the Prism surveillance system which has annihilated all semblance
of privacy among trans-Atlantic nations.
After describing the double standard applied by Canadian elites who have constructed a
narrative that always paints China as the villain of the world while portraying the west as
"free and democratic" Ambassador Lu stated :
"these same people have conveniently ignored the PRISM Program, Equation Group, and
Echelon -- global spying networks operated by some countries that have been engaging in
large-scale and organized cyber stealing, and spying and surveillance activities on foreign
governments, enterprises, and individuals. These people also took a laissez-faire attitude
toward a country that infringes on its citizens' privacy rights through the Patriot Act. They
shouted for a ban by the Five Eyes alliance countries . on the use of Huawei equipment by these
countries' own enterprises"
For those who may not be aware, the Five Eyes is the name given to the British
GCHQ-controlled surveillance structure that involves the four primary Anglo-Saxon Commonwealth
countries (Britain, Canada, Australian and New Zealand) along with the United States. This is
the deep state that has been dedicated to overthrowing American President Donald Trump since
MI6 and their junior partners in America began organising Russia-gate in 2015-when it became
apparent that Trump had a serious chance of defeating the Deep State candidate Hillary
Clinton.
As many patriotic whistle blowers such as Bill Binney, Ray McGovern, and Edward Snowden
have
exposed throughout recent years , the Five Eyes system that the Ambassador referenced was
formed in the "post-911 world order" as a means of overriding each nations' constitutional
protection of its own citizens' by capitalising on a major legal loop hole (viz: Since it is
technically illegal for American intelligence agencies to spy on Americans without warrant, and
for CSIS to do the same to Canadians, it is claimed that it is okay for British/Canadian
intelligence agencies to spy on Americas and visa versa).
The Chinese Ambassador didn't stop there however, but went one step further, ending his
op-ed with a controversial claim which has earned him much criticism in the days since its
publication. It was in his closing paragraph that Ambassador Lu made the uncomfortable point
that the double standards employed against China and the west's willingness to ignore the Five
Eyes "is due to Western egotism and white supremacy" . Is this the "belligerent and
unfounded name calling" that his detractors are labelling it, or is there something more to
it?
When we look to the origins of the Five Eyes, which goes back MUCH further than September
11, 2001 , we can clearly see that Lu Shaye is touching a very deep and truthful nerve.
Cecil Rhodes and the Racist Roots of the Deep State
19 th Century spokesman for the British Empire, Cecil Rhodes wrote his infamous
"Seventh
Will" in 1877 where, speaking on behalf of an empire dying in the midst of the global
spread of republican institutions, called for the formation of a new plan to re-organise the
Empire, and re-conquer all colonial possessions that had been contaminated by republican ideas
of freedom, progress, equality and self-determination
[1] . Rhodes stated:
"I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we
inhabit the better it is for the human race. Just fancy those parts that are at present
inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if
they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence, look again at the extra employment a new country
added to our dominions gives. I contend that every acre added to our territory means in the
future birth to some more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence
. Why should we not form a secret society with but one object the furtherance of the British
Empire and the bringing of the whole uncivilised world under British rule for the recovery of
the United States for the making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire "
[2]
Race Patriot" Cecil Rhodes from Punch Magazine lording over Africa
The Rhodes Trust was set up at his death in 1902 to administer the vast riches accrued
during Rhodes' exploitation of diamond mines in Africa. Steered by Lord Alfred Milner, it was
this Trust which gave birth to the Round Table Movement and Rhodes Scholarship Fund which
themselves have been behind the creation of a century's worth of indoctrinated technocrats who
have permeated all branches of government, finance, military, media, corporate and academia-
both in America and internationally
[3] .
The Round Table Movement, (working in tandem with London's Fabian Society) didn't replace
the old British Empire's power structures, so much as re-define their behaviour based upon the
re-absorption of America back into the Anglo-Saxon hive. This involved centralising control of
the education of their "managerial elite" with special scholarship's in Oxford and the London
School of Economics- then sending the indoctrinated victims in droves back into their
respective nations in order to be absorbed into the British Empire's governance structures in
all domains of private and public influence. In Fabian Society terms, this concept is known as
"permeation theory"
[4] .
Although it sometimes took the early removal of nationalist political leaders from power,
via intrigue, coups or assassination, the 20 th century was shaped in large measure
by the cancerous growth of this British-directed network that sought to undo the republican
concept that progress and cooperation were the basis for both sovereignty and international law
as laid out in the
Treaty of Westphalia of 1648
[5] .
This is the deep state that President Roosevelt warned of when
he said in 1936"The economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the
institutions of America. What they really complain about is that we seek to take away their
power." This is the deep state that outgoing President Eisenhower warned of when he spoke of the
"acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military
industrial complex" in 1961 and that John Kennedy fought against when he fired Allen Dulles
and threatened to"splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter into the winds" . It is what Ronald
Reagan contended with when he attempted to break the world out of the Cold War by working with
Russia and other nations on Beam defense in 1983. It is this structure that owned
Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller's entire career , from his 1980s railroading of Lyndon
LaRouche into prison to his cover up of the Anglo-Saudi role in 911 as CIA director to his
efforts to impeach President Donald Trump today
[6] .
It is this same complex which is the direct outgrowth of the racist British-run drug wars on
China and suppression of India and Africa throughout the 19 th and 20 th
centuries.
In Canada, this was the network that destroyed the plans of nationalist Prime Minister John
Diefenbaker after he fired the Rhodes Scholar Governor of the Bank of Canada in 1959 during a
desperate struggle to take control of the national bank in order to fund his
Northern Vision
[7] . Earlier, it was this group that Lincoln-admirer Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier warned
of after his defeat in 1911 when he said "Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at
London, known as "The Round Table", with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria,
with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their
respective parties."
[8]
The lesson to be learned is that the Deep State is not "American" as many commentators have
assumed. It is the same old British Empire from which America brilliantly broke free in 1776
and which Cecil Rhodes and Milner led in re-organising on behalf of the monarchy at the
beginning of the 20 th century. It was racist when Lords Palmerston and Russell ran
it in the 19 th century and it continues to be racist today.
So when Ambassador Lu says "the reason why some people are used to arrogantly adopting
double standards is due to Western egotism and white supremacy – in such a context, the
rule of law is nothing but a tool for their political ends and a fig leaf for their practising
hegemony in the international arena" he is not being "belligerent or provocative", but is
rather hitting on a fact which must be better understood if the deep state will finally be
defeated and nations liberated to work with the new spirit of progress and cooperation
exemplified by China's Belt and Road
Initiative which is quickly spreading across the earth.
Footnotes
[1] By 1876, the American Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia showcased to a world
audience the success of the "American System of Political Economy" which asserted that the
value and behaviour of money was contingent upon the physical productive growth of the nation
rather than "British-system free markets". Lincoln's system was being adopted across South
American nations, Japan, China, India and many European powers as well (including Russia) which
had grown tired of being manipulated by British imperial intrigues.
[4] For anyone in Canada wishing to learn about this in greater depth, they may wish to ask
Canadian technocratic Foreign Minister Chrystia Freeland how her experience as a Rhodes Scholar
shaped her career.
[6]
Robert Mueller Is an Amoral Legal Assassin: He Will Do His Job If You Let Him by Barbara
Boyd , October 1, 2017 larouchepac.com. A common denominator among all of the mentioned
American leaders is not only that they waged war on the deep state structures but made constant
attempts to work constructively with Russia, China, India and other nations for industrial and
scientific development. This policy of "win-win cooperation" is antagonistic to all systems of
empire and is the reason why the Empire hates China and the potential created with Trump's
intention to work with both China and Russia.
[8] O.D. Skelton, The Life of Sir Wilfrid Laurier, p. 510
BIO: Matthew J.L. Ehret is a journalist, lecturer and founder of the Canadian Patriot Review. His works have been
published in Executive Intelligence Review, Global Resesarch, Global Times, Nexus Magazine, Los
Angeles Review of Books, Veterans Today and Sott.net. Matthew has also published the book
"The Time has Come for Canada to Join the New Silk Road " and three volumes of the Untold
History of Canada (available on untoldhistory.canadianpatriot.org). He has been associated with
the Schiller Institute since 2006.
Liked it? Take a second to support The Duran on Patreon!
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
One of the rare early realistic assessments of Trump foreign policy. most were wrong. Circe was right in major points. The
appointment of CIA director was the litmus test and Trump failed it by appointing neocon Pompeo.
Trump foreign policy is a typical neocon foreign policy. People just tried to overlook it in vain hopes that Trump will change the US
foreign policy
Notable quotes:
"... 95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time. ..."
"... And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for treason. ..."
"... Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,". ..."
"... Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon -unfriendly President was elected. ..."
"... Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The 'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to fund security agencies and buy arms. ..."
"... And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly. ..."
"... What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military (note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense. ..."
"... he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh? ..."
95% or more of the individuals Trump is considering for his administration, including those already picked have a deep-seated
obsession with Iran. This is very troubling. It's going to lead to war and not a regular war where 300,000 people die. This is
a catastrophic error in judgment I don't give a sh...t who makes such an error, Trump or the representative from Kalamazoo! This
is so bad that it disqualifies whatever else appears positive at this time.
And one more deeply disturbing thing; Pompeo, chosen to head the CIA has threatened Ed Snowden with the death penalty, if Snowden
is caught, and now as CIA Director he can send operatives to chase him down wherever he is and render him somewhere, torture him
to find out who he shared intelligence with and kill him on the spot and pretend it was a foreign agent who did the job. He already
stated before he was assigned this powerful post that Snowden should be brought back from Russia and get the death penalty for
treason.
Pompeo also sided with the Obama Administration on using U. S. military force in Syria against Assad and wrote this in the
Washington Post: "Russia continues to side with rogue states and terrorist organizations, following Vladimir Putin's pattern
of gratuitous and unpunished affronts to U.S. interests,".
That's not all, Pompeo wants to enhance the surveillance state, and he too wants to tear up the Iran deal.
Many of you here are extremely naďve regarding Trump.
b's speculation has the ring of truth. I've often wondered if Trump was encouraged to run by a deep-state faction that found
the neocons to be abhorrent and dangerous.
Aside: I find those who talk about "factions" in foreign policy making to be un-credible. Among these were those that spoke
of 'Obama's legacy'. A bullshit concept for a puppet. The neocons control FP. And they could only be unseated if a neocon-unfriendly
President was elected.
Trump is turning animosity away from Russia and toward Iran. But I doubt that it will result in a shooting war with Iran. The
'deep-state' (arms industry and security agencies) just wants a foreign enemy as a means of ensuring that US govt continues to
fund security agencies and buy arms.
And really, Obama's "peace deal" with Iran was bogus anyway. It was really just a placeholder
until Assad could be toppled. Only a small amount of funds were released to Iran, and US-Iranian relations have been just as bad
as they were before the "peace deal". So all the hand-wringing about Trump vs. Iran is silly.
What is important is that with Iran as the nominal enemy du jour plus Trump's campaign pledge to have the "strongest" military
(note: every candidate was for a strong military), the neocons have no case to make that Trump is weak on defense.
And so it is interesting that those that want to undermine Trump have resorted to the claim that he is close to Jews/Zionists/Israel
or even Jewish himself. Funny that Trump wasn't attacked like that before the election, huh?
The profound changes and profound butt-hurt lead to the following poignant questions:
>> Have we just witnessed a counter-coup?
>> Isn't it sad that, in 2016(!), the only check on elites are other elite factions?
An enormous cultural failure that has produced a brittle social fabric.
>> If control of NSA snooping power is so crucial, why would ANY ruling block ever allow the another to gain power?
Indeed, the answer to this question informs one's view on whether the anti-Trump protests are just Democratic Party ass-covering/distraction
or a real attempt at a 'color revolution'.
"... Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding? ..."
"... If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint. ..."
"... Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative destruction to government ..."
"... Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt. ..."
"... Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain. The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again ..."
"... One quibble: The destruction he applies will not be creative. It will be thorough but entirely unimaginative. ..."
"... Why do you think a war is brewing? What do you think is going to happen? They'll give him bad intel like they did with Bush? ..."
"... The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread. ..."
"... Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general I mean a state of mutual distrust. ..."
Just as an aside - not really economics, but I am really worrying about what the war between the future white house team and the
CIA that seems to be brewing. I don't see good solutions to this. It is sort of unprecedented in a major western country. Can
you think of a similar case (where the intelligence services - and perhaps the military as well regarded there own government
head as an enemy agent)?
Define unprecedented. What are your standards for a "major western nation"? Any moral standard? Do they include blowing up
countries, using militarized spooks with unlimited secret funding?
If you side with the devil what are you? In tilting with the CIA, Trump is a saint.
Don't worry. Be happy. Nothing can be done now. The voters wanted someone to "shake things up." Trump will be applying creative
destruction to government
Obama failed to drive the NeoCons out of government. Trump may do so, but the replacement might be fundamentally more corrupt.
As with Obamacare, the idea is to destroy it and replace it with something better. Most revolutions find it easy to destroy
and very much harder to build Most sane leaders recognize this difficulty and modify the existing rather than destroy and never
getting around to replacement or find the replacement to be worse than the existing.
Looters on the other hand love destruction. The resulting chaos affords them more opportunity to get windfalls. Trump will
give the voters the radical change they think they want. But Trump will use the destruction as an opportunity for personal gain.
The public will be left with a gutted government that will need to be rebuilt before it will function again
I don't believe in "creative destruction", I believe in "destructive creation" which is something quite different. But that is
not the point. This is not about the government as such, it is about the security apparatus in itself. It could get very nasty
if that ends up either totally alienated or politicized.
If I were President, provoking an organization whose specialty is covert operations and which has track record of bringing about
the demise of insufficiently agreeable leaders would not be high on my to-do list.
The meme that Trump will "get US into war" is a Clinton loser-whiner meme! Delusional and misleading; the neocon Clinton would
have done Putin first CIA fictional, regime change excuse the yellow press could spread.
Trump is an isolationist who repeatedly said the Iraq war was a disaster, which it was. If the CIA is going after Trump they're
doing a bad job. The worst they could come up with is some unverified accounts that Trump likes pee-pee parties.
Because they are already reportedly telling some of their contacts not to trust the government with information in case it
ends up with hostile governments. Maybe using the word "war" is misleading. Maybe "cold war" is more accurate, but in general
I mean a state of mutual distrust.
Kristof panic was premature and just shows that he is a really has no political analyst
talent whatsoever. Trump was quickly co-opted by neocons.
It is interesting that Kristof, even at such an early stages of Russiagate was already
"FullOfSchiff"
"... The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion. ..."
"... Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its attack
on the United States. ..."
"... Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship." ..."
In 1972, President Richard Nixon's White House dispatched burglars to bug Democratic Party
offices. That Watergate burglary and related "dirty tricks," such as releasing mice at a
Democratic press conference and paying a woman to strip naked and shout her love for a
Democratic candidate, nauseated Americans - and impelled some of us kids at the time to pursue
journalism.
Now in 2016 we have a political scandal that in some respects is even more staggering.
Russian agents apparently broke into the Democrats' digital offices and tried to change the
election outcome. President Obama on Friday suggested that this was probably directed by
Russia's president, saying, "Not much happens in Russia without Vladimir Putin."
In Watergate, the break-in didn't affect the outcome of the election. In 2016, we don't know
for sure. There were other factors, but it's possible that Russia's theft and release of the
emails provided the margin for Donald Trump's victory.
The CIA says it has "high confidence" that Russia was trying to get Trump elected, and,
according to The Washington Post, the directors of the F.B.I. and national intelligence agree
with that conclusion.
Both Nixon and Trump responded badly to the revelations, Nixon by ordering a cover-up and
Trump by denouncing the CIA and, incredibly, defending Russia from the charges that it tried to
subvert our election. I never thought I would see a dispute between America's intelligence
community and a murderous foreign dictator in which an American leader sided with the
dictator.
Let's be clear: This was an attack on America, less lethal than a missile but still
profoundly damaging to our system. It's not that Trump and Putin were colluding to steal an
election. But if the CIA is right, Russia apparently was trying to elect a president who would
be not a puppet exactly but perhaps something of a lap dog - a Russian poodle.
In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely (and unfairly) mocked as President George
W. Bush's poodle, following him loyally into the Iraq war. The fear is that this time Putin may
have interfered to acquire an ally who likewise will roll over for him.
Frankly, it's mystifying that Trump continues to defend Russia and Putin, even as he
excoriates everyone else, from CIA officials to a local union leader in Indiana.
Now we come to the most reckless step of all: This Russian poodle is acting in character
by giving important government posts to friends of Moscow, in effect rewarding it for its
attack on the United States.
Rex Tillerson, Trump's nominee for secretary of state, is a smart and capable manager.
Yet it's notable that he is particularly close to Putin, who had decorated Tillerson with
Russia's "Order of Friendship."
Whatever our personal politics, how can we possibly want to respond to Russia's interference
in our election by putting American foreign policy in the hands of a Putin friend?
Tillerson's closeness to Putin is especially troubling because of Trump's other Russia
links. The incoming national security adviser, Michael Flynn, accepted Russian money to attend
a dinner in Moscow and sat near Putin. A ledger shows $12.7 million in secret payments by a
pro-Russia party in Ukraine to Trump's former campaign manager Paul Manafort. And the Trump
family itself has business connections with Russia.
"... Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course. ..."
"... Thanks to George W. Bush – who dared show his face at the inauguration – and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy mess in Iraq and now Syria. ..."
"... This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what? No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.' ..."
"... If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. ..."
"... Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases, acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it. ..."
What I found most impressive this time was the reaffirmation of America's dedication to the peaceful transfer of political power.
This was the 45th time this miracle has happened. Saying this is perhaps banal, but the handover of power never fails to make me
proud to be an American and thankful we had such brilliant founding fathers.
This peaceful transfer sets the United States apart from many of the world's nations, even Britain and Canada, where leaders under
the parliamentary system are chosen in a process resembling a knife fight in a dark room. The US has somehow managed to retain its
three branches of government in spite of the best efforts of self-serving politicians to wreck it.
Each new president inherits a sea of problems from his predecessor. Donald Trump's biggest legacy headaches and priority will
be in the Mideast, a disaster area on its own but made far, far worse by the bungling of the Obama administration and its dimwitted
attempts to put the US and Russia on a collision course.
Thanks to George W. Bush – who dared show his face at the inauguration – and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Obama, Trump inherits
America's longest war, Afghanistan, with our shameful support of mass drug dealing, endemic corruption and war crimes. Add the crazy
mess in Iraq and now Syria.
This week US B-2 heavy bombers attacked Libya. US forces are fighting in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan and parts of Africa. For what?
No one is quite sure. America's foreign wars, fueled by its $1 trillion military budget, have assumed a life of their own. Once a
great power goes to war, its proponents insist, 'we can't be seen to back down or our credibility will suffer.'
Trump will struggle to find a face-saving retreat from these unnecessary conflicts and shut his ears to the siren songs of the
war party and deep state which just failed to stage a 'soft' coup to block his inauguration. Waging little wars against weak nations
is a multi-billion dollar national industry in the US. America has become as addicted to war as it has to debt.
If President Trump truly wants to bring some sort of peace to the explosive Mideast, he will have to reject the advice of the
hardline Zionists with whom he has chosen to surround himself. Their primary interest is Greater Israel, free of Arabs, not in a
Greater America. Trump is too smart not to know this. But he may also listen to his blood and guts former generals who lost the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Trump appears to have been gulled into believing the canard that Mideast-origin violence is caused by what he called in his inaugural
speech, radical Islamic terrorism. This is a favorite device promoted by the hard right and Israel to de-legitimize any resistance
to Israel's expansion and ethnic cleansing. The label of 'terrorism' serves the same purpose.
Trump should be reminded that the 9/11 attackers cited two reasons for their attack: 1. Occupation of Saudi Arabia by the
US; 2. Continued US-backed occupation of Palestine. Persistent attacks on western targets that we call terrorism are, in most cases,
acts of revenge for our neo-colonial actions in the Muslim world, the 'American Raj' as I term it.
Unfortunately, President Trump is unlikely to get this useful advice from the men who now surround him, with the possibly exception
of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. Let's hope that Tillerson and not Goldman Sachs bank ends up steering US foreign policy.
(Reprinted from EricMargolis.com by permission
of author or representative)
"... And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist. ..."
"... Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign. He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. ..."
"... On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right" media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington, D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naďve about the New World Order. I don't believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it. ..."
"... To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack. ..."
"... Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind (NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). ..."
"... You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration. ..."
"... Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. ..."
"... What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties. ..."
"... The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected. ..."
After my post-election column last week, a lady wrote to me and said, "I have confidence he [Trump] plans to do what is best for
the country." With all due respect, I don't! I agree wholeheartedly with Thomas Jefferson. He said, "In questions of power, then,
let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution."
If Donald Trump is going to be anything more than just another say-anything-to-get-elected phony, he is going to have to put raw
elbow grease to his rhetoric. His talk got him elected, but it is going to be his walk that is going to prove his worth.
And, as I wrote last week, the biggest indicator as to whether or not he is truly going to follow through with his rhetoric is
who he selects for his cabinet and top-level government positions. So far, he has picked Reince Priebus as White House chief of staff
and Stephen Bannon as White House chief strategist.
Reince Priebus is an establishment insider. He did NOTHING to help Trump get elected until toward the very end of the campaign.
He is the current chairman of the Republican National Committee. If that doesn't tell you what he is, nothing will. Trump probably
picked him because he is in so tight with House Speaker Paul Ryan (a globalist neocon of the highest order) and the GOP establishment,
thinking Priebus will help him get his agenda through the GOP Congress. But ideologically, Priebus does NOT share Trump's anti-establishment
agenda. So, this appointment is a risk at best and a sell-out at worst.
On the other hand, Stephen Bannon is probably a very good pick. He headed Breitbart.com, which is one of the premier "alt-right"
media outlets that has consistently led the charge against the globalist, anti-freedom agenda of the political establishment in Washington,
D.C. Albeit, Bannon is probably blind to the dangers of Zionism and is, therefore, probably naďve about the New World Order. I don't
believe anyone can truly understand the New World Order without being aware of the role that Zionism plays in it.
To be honest, the possible appointments of Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, John Bolton and especially Newt Gingrich are MORE
than troubling. Rudy Giuliani is "Mr. Police State," and if he is selected as the new attorney general, the burgeoning Police State
in this country will go into hyperdrive. NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden is already warning us about this. Chris Christie is a typical
New England liberal Republican. His appointment to any position bodes NOTHING good. And John Bolton is a Bush pro-war neocon. But
Newt Gingrich is the quintessential insider, globalist, and establishment hack.
There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the globalist elite gave Newt Gingrich the assignment of cozying up to (and "supporting")
Trump during his campaign with the sole intention of being in a position for Trump to think he owes Gingrich something so as to appoint
him to a key cabinet post in the event that he won. Gingrich could then weave his evil magic during a Donald Trump presidential administration.
Newt Gingrich is a HIGH LEVEL globalist and longtime CFR member. He is the consummate neocon. And he has a brilliant mind
(NO morals, but a brilliant mind--a deadly combination, for sure). If Donald Trump does not see through this man, and if he
appoints him as a cabinet head in his administration, I will be forced to believe that Donald Trump is clueless about "draining the
swamp." You cannot drain the swamp by putting the very people who filled the swamp back in charge. And that's exactly what Trump
would be doing if he appoints Gingrich to any high-level position in his administration.
Trump is already softening his position on illegal immigration, on dismantling the EPA, on repealing Obamacare, on investigating
and prosecuting Hillary Clinton, etc. Granted, he hasn't even been sworn in yet, and it's still way too early to make a true
judgment of his presidency. But for a fact, his cabinet appointments and his first one hundred days in office will tell us most of
what we need to know.
What we need to know right now is that WE CANNOT GO TO SLEEP. We cannot sit back in lethargy and complacency and just assume
that Donald Trump is going to do what he said he would do. If we do that, we might as well have elected Hillary Clinton, because
at least then we would be forever on guard against her forthcoming assaults against our liberties.
There is a reason we have lost more liberties under Republican administrations than Democratic ones over the past few decades.
And that reason is the conservative, constitutionalist, Christian, pro-freedom people who should be resisting government's assaults
against our liberties are sound asleep because they trust a Republican President and Congress to do the right thing -- and they give
the GOP a pass as our liberties are expunged piece by piece. A pass they would NEVER give to a Democrat.
The difference in this election is that Donald Trump didn't run against the Democrats; he ran against the entire Washington
establishment, including the Republican establishment. Hopefully that means that the people who supported and voted for Trump will
NOT be inclined to go into political hibernation now that Trump is elected.
I tell you again: this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change the course of a nation. Frankly, if this opportunity is squandered,
there likely will not be another one in most of our lifetimes.
Comey was a part of the coup -- a color revolution against Trump with Bremmen (possibly assigned by Obama) pulling the strings. That's right. This is a banana republic with nukes.
Notable quotes:
"... "Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials who have seen it. ..."
"... Comment: The FBI now flip-flops from its previous assessment: FBI rejects CIA assessment that Russia influenced presidential election ..."
FBI and National
Intelligence chiefs both agree with the CIA assessment that Russia interfered with the 2016 US presidential elections partly in an
effort to help Donald Trump win the White House, US media report.
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper are both convinced that Russia was behind cyberattacks
that targeted Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her campaign chairman, John Podesta,
The Washington Post and reported Friday, citing a message sent by CIA Director John Brennan to his employees.
"Earlier this week, I met separately with FBI [Director] James Comey and DNI Jim Clapper, and there is strong consensus among
us on the scope, nature, and intent of Russian interference in our presidential election," the message said, according to officials
who have seen it.
"The three of us also agree that our organizations, along with others, need to focus on completing the thorough review of this
issue that has been directed by President Obama and which is being led by the DNI," it continued.
So the question is: what's better proven corruption or a new face in politics? And the
best answer is, "Politicians and diapers should be changed often and for the same reason" -
Mark Twain
Don't laugh. Professional comedians are actually very intelligent. They have excellent
memory -- I know, think very very quick on their feet, and deal with hecklers of all stripes
all the time. Such attributes are handy in time of crisis. But don't expect them to crack a
joke once they're elected. Look at Al Franken. Having been elected to and served in the
Senate, he's yet to say anything funny in public, lest people not take him seriously.
That was written in March 2017. Looks like Paul Craig Roberts was completely detached from reality
Notable quotes:
"... By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade. ..."
"... These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure, experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems. ..."
"... Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself. At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions falls, Trump is next. ..."
"... Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are despicable, the scum of the earth. ..."
"... The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev, the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War. I know. I was there. ..."
"... Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"? ..."
"... The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security Deep State that is driving the world to destruction. ..."
"... W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel." ..."
"... "To see who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize." -Voltaire ..."
"... Hint: If you criticize them, you're called an anti-Semite. And they're not even Semites. ..."
"... Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't use other, more crude adjectives .. ..."
"... What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn. He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he is still there with his team. ..."
"... No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead. ..."
"... It's war and there is no going back. Trump has the will and the resources, so all we can do is support where possible....and hope. ..."
"... The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here. ..."
The question in the title is V.I. Lenin's question. His answer was to create a revolutionary "vanguard" to spread
revolutionary ideas among the workers, the economic class that Karl Marx had declared to be the class rising to the ascendency of
political power. Finally, democracy, frustrated by upper class interests in its earlier manifestations, would become reality. The
workers would rule.
Given the presence of evil and human failing, it did not work out in that way. But Lenin's question remains a valid one.
Americans whose economic life and prospects for their children have been destroyed by the offshoring of American manufacturing and
tradable professional skills jobs, such as software engineering, answered the question by electing Donald Trump.
The Americans, dispossessed by the offshoring corporations, elected Trump, because Trump was the only American running for a political
office who called attention to the problem and declared his intention to fix it.
By standing up for Americans, Trump alienated the global corporations, their executives and shareholders, all of whom benefit
from stealing the economic life of Americans and producing abroad where labor and regulatory costs are lower. Neoliberal junk economists
describe this labor arbitrage, which reduces the real incomes of the American labor force, as the beneficial working of free trade.
These offshoring firms not only have destroyed the economic prospects of millions of Americans, but also have destroyed the
payroll tax base of Social Security and Medicare, and the tax base of local and state governments, with the consequence that numerous
pension systems are on the verge of failure. The New York Teamsters Road Carriers Local 707 Pension Fund has just failed. This failure,
experts predict, is the beginning of a tsunami that will spread into municipal and state pension systems.
When you add up the external costs of jobs offshoring that are imposed on Americans, the costs far exceed the value of the profits
that flow to the One Percent. Clearly, this is an intolerable situation.
Dispossessed Americans rose up. They ignored the presstitute media, or perhaps were driven to support Trump by
the hostility of the media. Trump was elected by dispossessed America, by the working class.
The working class is out of favor with the elite liberal/progressive/left which abhors the working class as racist, misogynist,
homophobic, gun nuts who oppose transgendered toilet facilities. Thus, the working class, and their chosen representative,
Donald Trump, are under full assault by the presstitutes. "Trump Must Go" is their slogan.
And well he might. Trump, in a fit of stupidity, dismissed his National Security Advisor, Gen. Flynn, because Flynn did what he
should have done and spoke with the Russian ambassador in order to avoid a Russian response to Obama's provocation of expelling Russian
diplomats at Christmas.
Russians have been demonized and ascribed demonic powers. If you speak to a Russian, you fall under suspicion
and become a traitor to your country. This is the story according to the CIA, the Democratic Party, the military/security complex,
and the presstitute media.
Once Trump put Flynn's blood in the water, he set the situation for the sacrifice of other of his appointees, ending with himself.
At the present time, "the Russian connection" black mark is operating against Trump's Attorney General, Jeff Sessions. If Sessions
falls, Trump is next.
Let's be clear. As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sessions met with the Russian ambassador, just as he met with
a number of other countries' ambassadors. There is nothing unusual or surprising about a US senator meeting with foreign diplomatic
representatives.
Those who accuse Sessions of lying are misrepresenting the facts. Sessions met with ambassadors in his capacity
as a US Senator, not in his capacity as a Trump representative. As a former US Senate staffer, I can attest that it is perfectly
normal for US Senators to meet with diplomats. John McCain and Lindsey Graham even fly to the Middle East to meet with terrorists.
Despite the facts, the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN and all the rest of the CIA's media whores are consciously and
intentionally misrepresenting the facts. Americans do not need any more evidence that the entirety of the American media is totally
devoid of integrity and respect for truth. The American media is a collection of whores who lie for a living. The presstitutes are
despicable, the scum of the earth.
The real question is how has contact with Russian government officials become criminalized, grounds for removing a National
Security Adviser, an Attorney General, and impeaching a President himself. President John F. Kennedy had ongoing contact with Khrushchev,
the head of the Soviet government, in order to resolve the Cuban/Turkish missile crisis without nuclear war. President Nixon had
ongoing contact with the Russians in order to achieve SALT I and the anti-ballistic missile treaty. President Carter had ongoing
contact with Russians in order to achieve SALT II. President Reagan worked with the Russian leader in order to end the Cold War.
I know. I was there.
But if President Trump wants to defuse the extremely dangerous tensions that the reckless Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes
have resurrected with a powerful thermo-nuclear state that only wants peace with the US, President Trump and any of his appointees
who spoke to a Russian are unfit for office! This madness is the position of the idiot liberal/progressive/left, the CIA,
the Democratic Party, the right-wing morons of the Republican Party such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain, and the two-bit whores
that comprise the Western media.
Dear reader, ask yourself, how did communications with Russians in the interest of peace and the reduction of tensions become
a criminal act? Have laws been passed that it is forbidden for US officials to speak with Russian officials? Are you so utterly stupid
that a presstitute media that has never in your entire life told you anything that was truthful can convince you that those who seek
to avoid a conflict between thermo-nuclear powers are "Russian agents"?
I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and
awareness left anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western
media or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer.
The entirety of the world has been put on the knife edge of existence by the arrogance, stupidity, and hubris of the neoconservative
pursuit of American world hegemony. The neoconservative ideology is perfect cover for the material interest of the military/security
Deep State that is driving the world to destruction.
Trump needs to tighten up. Get even tougher than he is now. Go out and do more speeches. Take the message STRAIGHT to the masses.........unfiltered.
LET the MSM "fake" that.
W Bush: "Dad, what's a neocon?" HW Bush: "You want names or description?" W: "Description." HW: "Israel."
The neocons are Israel-first fanatics. They did 9/11 and support all terrorist groups. And because Russia came to Syria's aid,
they're after Russia as well.
In Dr Strangelove, the mindblowingly stupid response of the characters played by the generals saying "attack Russia no matter
what they do" was portrayed as a joke, and the audience got it. Nobody could be that stupid, so it looked funny.
We are in desperately sick times when the attitude displayed by those comedically-stupid characters has become our official
policy and our propaganda.
Let's pray the American people are not yet completely stupid, and that there are still enough who see this insanity for the
immediate and extreme danger that it is.
The purpose of all of this "RussiaDidIt" bollocks has long been postulated as having the purpose of starting the Last War.
The question arises: "Who benefits?" (Ordinarily, no-one 'benefits' and only morons think that a 'benefit' could arise)
But, just for a moment, turn it on its head and ask the counter-question: "Who benefits the least ?"
Pretty obviously, the USA and the Russian Federation come out badly. Assume the impossible: that it doesn't spread out and
result in planetdeath.
Who just (quite coincidentally - of course) had its main rivals effectively eliminated? Quietly. Efficiently. Anonymously...
Who, currently quietly colonizing Africa for its resorce base, might now divert their attentions to the (much greater and closer)
resource base to their North, West and East, ostensibly in the name of "reconstruction?"
Naturally, it's just a coincidence that a large slice of Global Manufacturing has recently been transferred to that country
(recent decades)
So congrats are due to the DemoCrud skum who perpetrated this crime against humanity as the willing "useful idiots" of the
PuppetMasters. Burn in Hell you motherfukkerz.
The only way to "drain the swamp" is to eliminate the brainwashed masses who enable the warmongering globalist neocons. Without
the democratic partys' tens of million sheeple, the power hungry devils like Soros, the Clintons, McCain, Pelosi, Feinstein, and
the rest of the "perverted elite" would have no power.
Having considered this FACT, I have decided not to oppose their quest to start a global thermonuclear war with Russia. I saw
war up close and personal in Viet-Nam. I am 71 years old, so not much time remaining to waste in a political battle against the
snowflakes here in Californicate. I feel confident that I have a better chance of surviving than they do.
I have also decided to sit back, with my personal defenses in hand, and watch them experience, up close and personal for themselves,
the horrors of war like they are presently inflicting on the mid-eastern countries. The children of these despots, if they survive,
will finally witness proof that their parents are the cause of their misery.
Then, and only then, will the survivors be able to reconstruct toward a peaceful world.
1. free from concern, worry, or anxiety; carefree; nonchalant.
I agree, we're way past that ... Robert's knows this , all too well ..
Insouciant is merely Paul Craig Roberts way of registering his extreme disgust, being a gentlemen, unlike me, he doesn't
use other, more crude adjectives ..
I cut him slack on his overuse of the word insouciant, because it would just seem so out of place substituting instead, "fucking
assholes," for every place it is prominently used in his writing.
I mean can you imagine?
No, I'm glad he's more refined than me. Makes for a more interesting and gentile world.
Hahaa Dr Strangelove. Strange movie, for even stranger times
"They have neither the time, the training, nor the inclination for strategic thought. I can no longer sit back and allow Communist
infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all
of our precious bodily fluids."
What we are witnessing is calculated, but is driven by desperation.. Trump has resources now that he did not have as a
candidate, and he is using them. Yes, it is taking longer than we hoped, but the progressives are doing everything possible to
slow if not stop him. I seriously doubt any president has faced such resistance before. We still don't know the story behind Flynn.
He surely knew his phones were tapped and is surely smart enough to know they would leak it. And, while he lost his title, he
is still there with his team.
Everything is obvious now and I think this is what Trump has been goading them into. Putting blood in the water to draw the
sharks to the surface. We will see.
i hope you're right. i keep wanting to think he's a clever fox but the acceleration of events is mind-boggling. the liberal
onslaught is from all directions and relentless. i pray he's able to withstand their attacks and counter with an epic T-Day rout--one
for the history books--that exposes and annihilates the seditious traitors in the world of public opinion, giving him political
capital to rid our nation of the unconstitutional Patriot Act and Big Brother's illegal 4th Amendment violations of illegal search
and seizure.
it's hard to keep the faith right now... i wanna believe he's got the wherewithall to pull this off. if i get weak and shout
for quick solutions, just downvote my stupid butt bigly.
No, because if he gets too close to anything important his family members start dropping dead. He knows this... he knew
it before he ran. If he goes after the rothchild-backed cabal he gets dead.
Give up guys... there's no winning this. The sooner we accept this the sooner we can maybe fucking DO something.
i think you are suggesting first touch/listen of utah spying. if true, step one. step 2 is to take down the main operatives
and bring them down with all the resources of the justice dept.
this is assuming that all parties stay in the confines of law...hmmm
Exactly, Trump needs to go on TV and speak plainly, layout the thesis as outlined in this article. Make sure the country knows
EXACTLY what is going on and what the stakes are. Most libtards don't have one fucking clue how they are being used by these sick
fucks. Get everything he knows and what he SUSPECTS, even with no direct evidence out into the general public. Time is running
short.
I don't twit. I don't even 'follow' a twit. I don't know how.
But I'm pretty sure this sort of message would take a hell of a lot more characters than, what is it, 140?
That means he would need some other means to deliver a complicated message that by-passes an inherently hostile media yet still
gets viewed by tens of millions.
Couldn't agree more. I fail to fathom how meeting with Russian diplomats constitutes any type of crime. That's what diplomats
do for God's sake. Wake up people before it's too late.
Ah, but everything PCR says is true. It's what he doesn't say that gives away the lie.
All of his articles demonize the west (and he's right). But he's deliberately not looking at the higher dynamics of this globalist,
central bank-led kabuki theater.
I think he's a 'gatekeeper' who's job is to point out the evils of the west and make the east look good in comparison, so that
when the 'reset' comes people will buy into the globalist one world currency that will be offered.
I've never seen him talk disparagingly about either China or Russia or the BRICS. Certainly he has mentioned the FED and the
IMF, but not the big one - the BIS - that I have seen. And until he does, he's just another Rothschild/Rockefeller plant to me.
he takes on the CIA, State Department, Pentagon, NATO, liberals, Ruling Establishment, Obama the War Criminal Butcherer of
Women and Children, Kissinger, pretty much everybody. i agree he's not a Russiaphobe, thankfully someone's got a balanced position.
anyway... we'll have to agree to disagree. i believe he's a patriot true blue... errr, red. nope. red, white and blue.
it's nothing to me and i'm not trying to defend him. i just think he's not what you suggest. professionals feel responsible
for their words and only write about what they know. we can all speculate about 9/11 but without launching our own investigation,
it's just "talk." and at PCR and Stockman's level, they refrain from flapping their lips to hear themselves speak, metaphorically.
> "He is a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy.
> He is a former editor at the Wall Street Journal.
> He was the "first occupant of the William E. Simon Chair for Economic Policy at the Center for Strategic and International
Studies [CSIS], then part of Georgetown University." It's worth noting that Georgetown is a Jesuit institution, and the Board
of Trustees of CSIS includes Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and representatives of Exxon Mobil, Boeing, Coca Cola, AIG,
GlaxoSmithKline, and Morgan Stanley (to name a few).
Looking at the high positions this guy has held in the Washington/Wall Street Establishment, ask yourself this: "Is PCR really
going against all of his lifelong associates or is he simply carrying water for them like he always has?" "
i consider myself open-minded and reviewed your link.
as far as the 3 bullet points the author suggests condemn PCR:
Austrian economics are largely followed by most conservative economists as opposed to Keynesian.
I would also argue the American govt pursues global hegemony, i.e., an American empire
Who among us would not believe there is widespread incompetence in DC? Would anyone use the term "competent" with Obama,
other than describing his knack for telling untruths and perhaps killing innocent Near East women and children?
He was former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy under Reagan
A strong critic of the Bush (and later
Obama ) administrations' handling of the
War on Terror , he has taken positions strongly at odds
with mainstream politicians: harshly criticising the ineffectiveness, severity and high rates of incarceration associated with
the War on Drugs , excessive police violence and use
of SWAT teams against civilians. He has criticised the
law and order politics and congressional
approval of increased government surveillance associated with the
War on Terror age, which he views as fundamental threats
to the civil liberties and Right to Privacy enshrined
in the US constitution, opening the way for an oligarchic
police state to be imposed upon the US population... --
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Craig_Roberts
sorry, i just don't see it. as far as his association with the WSJ and Georgetown Univ, that would pretty much be the aspirations
of most journalists. and lastly, here are the closing statements from his newsletter yesterday:
The voice here at this website, my voice, provides perspectives that permit escape from the Matrix, but it depends on your
support. As March is upon us, so is my quarterly request for your support. So far, we have both kept our word. You have supported
the site, and I have continued to ruin my reputation in Washington by writing explanations that are unpopular in the ruling circles.
but even more than that, i read his articles and take what i want and discard the rest. no one is mind controlling me. can't
be brainwashed. got to have a brain first. (;
"I have no doubt that the vast bulk of Western populations are insouciant. But if there is no intelligence and awareness left
anywhere in the population, and most certainly there is none whatsoever in the governments of the West or in the Western media
or the Identity Politics of the liberal/progressive/left, then don't expect to be alive much longer."
The public does know what is going on. Nobody is being fooled. The problem is that the press presents the narrative (often
implicitly) that gives the impression PCR is conveying here.
GOLAN HEIGHTS . Bingo! There goes the Western case on South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Karabakh, Transdnestr and, of course, Crimea.
(One yuuuge difference being, of course, that in the other
cases the locals were consulted.)
"... It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers live in the occupied Golan Heights today – now with the unambiguous backing of the US government. ..."
"... Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu that the prime minister once slept in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place. ..."
No country in the world recognizes Israel's rule over the Golan Heights, occupied by
Israel in 1967 and unilaterally annexed in 1981 – no country,
that is, until now.
Donald Trump signed a presidential proclamation on Monday formally recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, still
considered Syrian territory under international law. Standing by President Trump's side during an address by the two heads of state
in Washington DC, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, reportedly called Trump's decision "
historic justice " and gifted the president a box of wine from the occupied territory. As they embraced, Israeli forces began
an aerial bombardment of the besieged Gaza Strip after rockets launched from Gaza hit a house in a community north of Tel Aviv earlier
that day.
Trump's announcement is unmistakably an election-time favor for Netanyahu. Saddled with multiple corruption charges, including
one for bribery, Netanyahu and his Likud party have been flagging in the polls. Likud increasingly appears threatened by the center-right
Blue and White party, jointly headed by the taciturn retired general Benny Gantz and former TV personality Yair Lapid. Netanyahu's
desperation can be measured by the extremity of his rhetoric. He and his surrogates have spent the past several weeks waging a hateful,
vicious campaign, accusing the Arab political parties of supporting terrorism and explicitly warning that a Gantz and Lapid victory
would lead to dead Israelis.
Many in Israel, however, view Netanyahu, despite his flaws, as a talented statesman and skilled advocate for the country's interests
on the international stage, and Netanyahu has campaigned on achievements such as normalizing relations with the Gulf states and the
US embassy's move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Golan Heights declaration – which initially took even the secretary of state, Mike
Pompeo, who was in Israel at the time, by surprise – is likely meant to bolster this image.
Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right
But Trump's Golan Heights proclamation is not just a cynical political gambit. It is a dramatic change in US policy in the Middle
East that could have serious consequences. Trump, unlike his predecessors, has never even pretended to abide by international norms
and conventions. And yet the decision to recognize Israeli sovereignty over territory that the international community nearly unanimously
considers occupied, or at the very least disputed, is unprecedented.
It gives a formal US stamp of approval to Israel's violation of international law, and, in particular of the Fourth Geneva
Convention, which prohibits an occupying power from transferring its civilians into occupied territory. Roughly 20,000 Israeli settlers
live in the occupied Golan Heights today – now with the unambiguous backing of the US government.
This potentially paves the way for Israel's annexation, in part or whole, of the West Bank. It has long been a talking
point on the Israeli hard right that, despite the international community's protestations, there would be few consequences for extending
Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank . Trump's declaration,
it seems, has not only proven them right, but given them an added boost: unlike during the Obama years, they can be confident that
the global hegemon will take their side.
If Netanyahu's Likud wins enough seats on 9 April to form a government, it is very like that annexation, at the very least, will
be on the table for discussion. The Likud's central committee unanimously voted in 2017 in favor of annexing the West Bank. Naftali
Bennett, co-chair of the New Right party, has proposed a plan to annex parts of Area C of the West Bank. And the other rightwing
parties – the extremist Union of Parties of the Right and Moshe Feiglin's Identity party, both of which would almost certainly sit
in a future Likud government – have only more extreme proposals for dealing with "the Palestinian question", including the forced
transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank and into Jordan.
Trump's recognition of the Golan Heights marks the total capture of US policymaking in the Middle East by pro-Israel right. US
ambassador to Israel David Friedman is an opponent of the two-state solution who previously operated the charitable arm of
a rightwing orthodox religious seminary in the West Bank settlement of Beit El. Jared Kusher's family is so close Netanyahu
that the prime minister once slept
in Kushner's childhood bedroom . Between the Trump administration's personnel and rightward lurch in Israeli politics, the pieces
that would make the current one-state reality permanent are rapidly falling into place.
It is important to remember this in light of the glitz and pablum of the AIPAC policy conference taking place this week in Washington
DC, where the PR hacks and policy flacks are working hard to launder Israel's image, to obscure the fact that there is one sovereign
state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea that determines the lives of roughly 13 million people; that of those 13
million, only half – Israeli Jews – have full citizenship and social rights; and that the other half, the Palestinians, live under
a range of discriminatory systems, from codified discrimination but legal citizenship within Israel, to residency without the right
to vote in East Jerusalem, to military dictatorship in the West Bank.
Donald Trump , his administration, the pro-Israel lobby,
and Netanyahu all intend to keep it that way.
Joshua Leifer is an associate editor at Dissent. Previously, he worked at +972 Magazine and was based in Jerusalem
In a recent thought-provoking article
Gideon Levy, probably one of the last genuine Israeli voices for peace, claims that "It is
not Netanyahu who is responsible for Israeli 'racism, extreme nationalism, divisiveness,
incitement, hatred, anxiety and corruption.'" Behind Netanyahu, Levy says, there's a nation of
voters and other elected officials that aren't very different from their leader.
"Simply put, the people are the problem There are those who have hated Arabs long before
Netanyahu. There are those who despise blacks, detest foreigners, exploit the weak and look
down their noses at the whole world – and not because of Netanyahu. There are those who
believe they are the chosen people and therefore deserve everything."
Levy reaffirms the observation that I have been pushing for two decades. The problem with Israel is
not of a political
kind . The conflict with the Palestinians or the Arabs is not of a political nature as some
delusional characters within the Palestinian solidarity movement have been proclaiming for
years. Israel defines itself as the Jewish state. In order to grasp Israel, its politics, its
policies and the intrusive nature of its lobby, we must understand the nature of
Jewishness. We must learn to define the differences between Jews (the people), Judaism
(the religion) and Jewishness (the ideology). We have to understand how those terms are related
to each other and how they influence Israeli and Jewish politics globally.
Levy writes that "there are those who think that after the Holocaust, they are permitted to
do anything. There are those who believe that Israel is tops in the world in every field, that
international law doesn't apply to it, and that no one can tell it what to do. There are those
who think Israelis are victims – always victims, the only victims – and that the
whole world is against us. There are those who are convinced that Israel is allowed to do
anything, simply because it can."
In order to understand what Levy is referring to we must dig into the core of Jewish
identification and once and for all grasp the notion of Jewish choseness. Levy contends that
"racism and xenophobia are deeply entrenched here, far more deeply than any Netanyahu The
apartheid did not start with him and will not end with his departure; it probably won't even be
dented. One of the most racist nations in the world cannot complain about its prime minister's
racism." Netanyahu as such, is not the disease. He is a mere symptom.
ORDER IT NOW
The devastating news is that neither the Israeli 'Left' nor the Jewish so-called 'anti'
Zionist league are any less racist than their Zionist foes. The Israeli Left pushes for a 'two
state solution.' It crudely ignores the Palestinian cause i.e. the Right of Return. The Israeli
Left advocates segregation and ghettoization; not exactly the universal message of harmony one
would expect from 'leftists.' Disturbingly, the Diaspora Jewish 'anti' Zionist Left is even
more racially exclusive than the Israeli Right. As I have explored many times in the past,
Corbyn's 'favourite Jewish political group namely, Jewish Voice for Labour
(JVL) is a racially exclusive political cell. It wouldn't allow gentiles into its Jews-only
club. Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) is no better. It will happily take donations from Goyim but
will never allow those Goyim to become its board members.
Levy proclaims that "Netanyahu is the best thing to ever happen to Israeli politics –
you can dump everything on him." But in his most astute observation, which has been explored
before by Uri Avnery (may he rest in peace) and yours truly, Levy continues, "It would be great
if some local Nelson Mandela would arise, a brave leader with vision who would change the
country's basic values and lead a revolution. But no such person has been born here, and it's
doubtful he ever will be."
Levy points at the core of the Zionist failure. If early Zionism was a promise to civilise
the diaspora Jew by means of 'homecoming,' Israel happened to do the complete opposite. Not
much is left out of the Zionist promise to make the Jews 'people like all other people': as
Israel is about to perpetrate another colossal war crime in Gaza, we have to admit that we are
dealing with an institutionally racist and dangerous identity like no other.
Another good one Atzmon. I thinks it's hard for people to grasp outside of Israel the
connection you speak of between the religion, the people, and the ideology. Its underreported
for obvious reasons in the media, plus the control the Israel lobby and its donors the
Adelsons, Sabans, and Singers have in the US on what people hear about Israel and its
citizens. All you hear is it's a democracy among hostile states that hate it because of
freedom or democracy or whatever propaganda speak the mouth peace for Israel/Zionism media
uses. You never hear about Israel's and its citizens actions that cause it just the eternal
victim status they have been awarded.
Violent Islam is the Disease, Resistance Leaders are the Symptom
The author makes a good point. Netanyahu is not unique:
– Modi resists violent Islam in Kashmir.
– Jinping resists violent Islam in Xinjiang.
– Orban resists violent Islam in Hungary.
– Trump resists violent Islam in the U.S.
– Netanyhau resists violent Islam in Israel.
And, there are more cases not in the list above
Islam views all non-Muslims as infidels. Violent Islam wages Jihad until the infidels are
killed, converted, or willingly submit as Dhimmi slaves. Until Islam changes, Resistance
leaders will continue to protect their people. Perhaps the collapse of the Iranian government
and its funding of terrorism will open the door to that change.
______
Israel started as a far left venture where the people lived in true communist shared
estates know as Kibbutz. Seventy years of resisting violent Islam has changed the people into
a practical group that will do what is necessary to stay alive.
The upcoming election makes no difference in Israeli survival strategy. Netanyahu's only
serious competitor, Benny Gantz, openly states he will fight Iran's violent Islamic expansion
in Lebanon & Syria (Iranian Hezbollah) and in Gaza (Iranian Hamas).
First:
Yes, do let's differentiate between Jews, judaism and jewishness (lest anyone be accused of
criticizing "Jews the people," which is something only an anti-semite or a self-hating Jew
might do, isn't it?).
The Jews are the people, judaism is their deeply inculcated worldview and ethos, and
jewishness is their inherently logical behavior.
Or the Jews are the computer, judaism is its operating system and jewishness its
applications.
Or the Jews are the rice, while judaism and jewishness are the white on rice.
Second:
The zionism did NOT fail to deliver its promise to make the Jews "people like other people."
It is Atzmon who fails to understand that the Jews' definition of "people" ("nations") is
based on the very Jewish worldview of the model: irrationally hateful, brutal, greedy,
covetous, and ruthless "winners." I would say zionism succeeded remarkably well, but it had
eager students to start with.
Mr. Atzmon has painted himself in a corner on this otherwise tough editorial. But let's
give him some credit. Gilad's taken a hell of a lotta heat for his rough and penetrating
criticisms of the Zionist colony and its endless deceptions. And he (generally) pulls no
punches.
But when all is said and done, and all the hairs are split, and all the (overdue) debates
are finally finished (and we can somehow separate the 'racist' Jews from the good,
'humanitarian' Jews) we are nevertheless left with a core Jewish identity that puts God's
Chosen People forever and eternally above the rest of humanity. God says so!
Basically, the problem is that Jewishness and 'Jewish supremacism' are pretty much one and
the same.
@A123
"Israel started as a far left venture Seventy years of resisting violent Islam has changed
the people into a practical group that will do what is necessary to stay alive."
I wonder why the Palestinians employ violence ? Of course, the State of Israel was born out
of terrorism (King David hotel, multiple assassinations etc) & ethnic cleansing (ie Nakba
). And yes, the Palestinians were also violent.
As for Israel's "survival" -- that's been a none issue since the late 70's, at a minimum.
Israel with its 100's of nuclear weapons & it's US body guard has NO survival issues.
It's all the poor bastards around them who have survival problems : (Syria, Lebanon, Gaza,
Iran, Libya etc)
Typical brain dead Hasbara nonsense. Orban resists third world immigration, which I
support, the problem is about mass non white immigration not Islam. The ultimate problem is
the jew, it is they that push for mass immigration and miscegenation the most.
And the rest of this article just goes on and on about how evil , Israel, Israelis are ,
and as to how they are self-justified and unified in being so. And this is a Jew writing
this.
Wow. What is the world to do? Doesn't seem to be any other option or solution, except a
trip to Wannsee.
@A123
Dancing Isreaeli said to the cops:" We are not your problem . Arabs are "
This guy is shouting at China India Russia and at the God : Israel is not the problem Its
these Muslims.
Question is this : will these guys be allowed on the graves of the 911 victims strewn all
across the world- Germany Soviet Russia, Poland, American rust belt, WW1 and 2 British
cemeteries?
When did they say something that turned out to be true?
Having said that, the world would be a better place if they ended up destroying elite run
US UK . Yes they would cut the branch on which they are sitting . But they would jump the
ship just before taht happening
You know Albert Sasson whow as knighted , who married in Riothchilds family, whose grand
son / nephew or another Sasson – by name Amery gave us the Balfour in part . He was
thrown out of Iraq court for corruption He made it to Raj's India and planted the seed of
opium That soon ate up all the available fertile lands of north India . The opium made him
rich made India poor corrupted British Raj and led to Chinese deprivations rebellion and to
communism
@neutral
Regardless, Jews (definition as provided and all three facets) are the most coherent group
globally. They can muster the most coordination, the strongest drive, the detachment and
loyalty, add as needed,
Since everyone here on unz likes thinking in bursts, to the matter. That makes for
success. No reason to whine about for the loosing party, the WASP, traditional US elites. If
some other group has ambitions, it should acquire that type of quality identity.
Islam is a poor enemy, as Jews see them as target practice, so should other entities
maybe.
Western European descend Whites, and the ambition of enlightenment, (for one, all
individuals across ethnic and religious lines being equals), should stow their ambitions of
principle until they are in charge. That will require appropriating the same acerbic mindset
of the Jew, and not whine publicly about the teacher. White elites have sold out, they are
burdened by a commoner population that far exceeds any asset value. To disconnect their base,
also made them hostages of Jew elites.
From the point of view of the Euro-descend commoner, non-Jew, unpriviledged, as long as
they see themselves as genuine and belonging to the system, the US, and not the trash they
are treated as, as long as the non-Jewish middle classes continue their egocentric quest for
scraps, they deserve the Gaza they are converted into. No Jew should be blamed for pushing an
outsider into demise. The tactics are in the open for grabs, Whites (non-Latino, non-Jew)
have only themselves to blame for their demise.
Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she
sries about lst money.
She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more
then a year.
Notable quotes:
"... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
"... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
"... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
"... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
"... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
"... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
"... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)
The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump
and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which
wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.
According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came
close to crying as she commented
on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed
Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.
Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not
to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."
The internet laughed and laughed.
"Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted
radio host Mark Simone.
Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.
"This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the
bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.
This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill
comes due. @maddowhttps://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y
"#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history,"
quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.
"What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.
Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues
as she leads her Russiagate crusade.
"So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years,
@maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.
So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on
#Russiagate ?
For 2 years, @maddow has lead
@MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded
w/ Russia
What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?
Russia doesn't interfere in the affairs of other countries and has no intention of doing so, the
Kremlin said, dismissing accusations of meddling in US elections, contained in the Mueller report, as
groundless.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it isn't there,"
the President's
spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on the release of a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
report.
Doubling down is just stupid. And that war pig Rachel Maddow lost 500k viewers. That's why she cries. she
sries about lst money.
She does not cry about deceived and brainwashed public, which was subjected to unprecedented Neo-McCarthyism complagn for more
then a year.
Notable quotes:
"... The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments ..."
"... Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something." ..."
"... "Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted radio host Mark Simone. ..."
"... "This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson. ..."
"... "#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history," quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods. ..."
"... "So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years, @maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr. ..."
"... Later on Saturday, Maddow mocked the suggestion that she was watery-eyed and might have held back tears. ..."
Crying for indictments? Maddow 'holds backs tears' as she discusses end of Mueller probe (VIDEO)
The MSNBC host, who has devoted countless hours of airtime to gossiping about the alleged ties between President Donald Trump
and the Kremlin, struggled to keep her composure while discussing the end of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation, which
wrapped up on Friday without issuing any further indictments.
According to the Daily Caller, Maddow came
close to crying as she commented
on the Russiagate-deflating development. Many on Twitter insisted that she actually shed tears. A clip of the broadcast shows a watery-eyed
Maddow seemingly grappling with the reality that Donald Trump and his family will not be frog-marched out of the White House.
Maddow didn't succumb to this unexpected and shocking injustice, however, and reassured her viewers that Mueller's decision not
to issue a single collusion-related indictment is the "start of something apparently, not the end of something."
The internet laughed and laughed.
"Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up," noted
radio host Mark Simone.
Very rough night at MSNBC. Rachel Maddow looks like she's going to cry. Chris Hayes glasses are all fogged up.
"This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the
bill comes due. @maddow," tweeted OANN White House Correspondent Emerald Robinson.
This is what it looks like when you've deliberately misled your audience for two years, and then the music stops, and the bill
comes due. @maddowhttps://t.co/4bkBUEwx8y
"#Maddow either choking on kitty litter chunks or facing the hard cold reality she's the worst journalist in television history,"
quipped actor and conservative commentator James Woods.
"What's going on with Maddow? Has she been hospitalized? Sedated?" inquired journalist Michael Tracey.
Others expressed exasperation at Maddow's refusal to face the music, accusing the MSNBC host of ignoring real, pressing issues
as she leads her Russiagate crusade.
"So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on #Russiagate? For 2 years,
@maddow has lead @MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded w/ Russia What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?" asked author and activist Dennis Trainor Jr.
So can those of us on the left criticize Trump on the actual issues now, and FINALLY give up on
#Russiagate ?
For 2 years, @maddow has lead
@MSNBC in selling us the narrative that Trump colluded
w/ Russia
What will @maddow do now? Double down or actually
do journalism?
Russia doesn't interfere in the affairs of other countries and has no intention of doing so, the
Kremlin said, dismissing accusations of meddling in US elections, contained in the Mueller report, as
groundless.
"It's hard to find a black cat in a dark room, especially if it isn't there,"
the President's
spokesman Dmitry Peskov commented on the release of a summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's
report.
Bush II campaigned on "no nation building" mantra. He lied. Crump campaigned no foreign wars manta. He lied.
Notable quotes:
"... The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct. ..."
"... Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief. ..."
"... John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to retire that label . ..."
The 16th anniversary of the Iraq war last week was marked by a shortage of people defending the costliest foreign policy blunder
of this young century, even in circles where support for that misadventure was once sacrosanct.
Former George W. Bush mouthpiece Ari Fleischer supplied a
promptly ratioed
tweetstorm that quibbled with the "Bush
lied, people died" mantra concerning his old boss's handling of the intelligence on Iraq's nonexistent weapons of mass destruction.
Never Trumper David French
gamely argued
that Saddam Hussein was a greater source of instability than the chaos brought about by the invasion, followed by Barack Obama's
withdrawal. In so doing, French reminded us that, however off-putting some conservatives find Donald Trump, the president's
criticism
of the war matters more to
many of those who devote their time to denouncing his every utterance.
Yet even as the folly and injustice of Iraq congeals into conventional wisdom inside the Beltway, famously resistant to rethinking
bipartisan military interventions no matter how ill-advised, it is an open question whether anything has changed. Dick Cheney's
protestations notwithstanding , the presidential wars largely continue unimpeded by the "America First" commander-in-chief.
John Bolton seems to have more say about when American troops will leave Syria or Afghanistan than the president of the United
States. Trump's second veto will almost certainly be of a bipartisan resolution rebuking -- and terminating -- U.S. support for the
war in Yemen. We appear to be escalating in Somalia. Tensions are rising with Iran and Venezuela, with the administration trending
toward a functionally neoconservative position on both despite major newspapers publishing pleas to
retire that label .
Is Trump's Jared Kushner connection to the Chabad Lubavitch sect the cause for his dramatic U-turn? The sect is deliberately
fomenting a prophesied Third World War.
It believes Jews are God's chosen people and
everyone else is trash. In the book "Gatherings of Conversations"Rebbe
Schneerson tells his followers that Jewish people are an extension of God and
Gentiles are destined to serve the Jews .
"Israel wasn't a political discussion for him; it was his family, his life, his people,"
said Hirschy Zarchi, rabbi at the Chabad House at Harvard.
Between 2003 and 2013, his family foundation donated a total of $342,500 to various
institutions and projects associated with the movement. Especially endowed was the Chabad
center at Harvard University, which received $150,000 in 2007 (the foundation's single biggest
donation to a Lubavitch-affiliated enterprise) and then another $3,600 in 2013. In addition
, the Donald J. Trump Foundation has donated $11,550 to three Chabad institutions. In
2006,
Kushner's father Charles was sentenced to 24 months in prison for making illegal campaign
donations & witness tampering.
"The Iraq war began sixteen years ago tomorrow," Fleischer tweeted on March
19. "There is a myth about the war that I have been meaning to set straight for years. After no
WMDs were found, the left claimed 'Bush lied. People died.' This accusation itself is a lie.
It's time to put it to rest."
Fleischer goes on to declare that "The fact is that President Bush (and I as press
secretary) faithfully and accurately reported to the public what the intelligence community
concluded," before noting that "The CIA, along with the intelligence services of Egypt, France,
Israel and others concluded that Saddam had WMD. We all turned out to be wrong. That is very
different from lying."
As a Chief Weapons Inspector with the United Nations Special Commission (UNSCOM) in Iraq from
1991 through 1998, I was intimately familiar with the intelligence used by the U.S.
Intelligence Community to underpin the case for war (which I debunked in June 2002 in an
article published in Arms Control Today ). Armed with the
unique insights that came from this experience, I can state clearly and without any reservation
that Ari Fleischer, once again, has misrepresented the facts when it comes to the Bush
administration's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.
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The fact is, the Iraq War was never about WMD. Rather, it was waged for one purpose and one
purpose only -- regime change. Getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the sole focus of this effort,
and the so-called "intelligence" used to justify this act was merely an excuse for action. Ari
Fleischer knows this, and to contend otherwise -- as he does via twitter -- is simply a
continuation of the lies he told from the very beginning about the U.S. case for war with
Iraq.
UNSCOM had, by the fall of 2002, been relegated to the pages of history, replaced by a new
inspection organization, the United
Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) . It is through the
work of UNMOVIC that Ari Fleischer's defense of George W. Bush collapses. In November 2002 the
Bush administration pushed for the UN Security Council to pass Resolution
1441 , which found Iraq to be in "material breach" of its disarmament obligations.
Inspectors from UNMOVIC were dispatched to Iraq shortly thereafter in a last-ditch effort to
account for the totality of Iraq's WMD.
The work of the inspectors was undermined from the start by the Bush administration, led by
Ari Fleischer. "It is very well true that the inspectors who are working as diligently as they
can in an environment made very difficult for them by Iraqi actions, may not be giving notice,"
Fleischer
explained in a press conference, "but that does not mean Iraq is not receiving notice as a
result of their electronic means and other means to know what the inspectors are doing. Which
puts the inspectors in a very hard position."
But Fleischer had no evidence that Iraq was getting advance notice, and the experience of UNMOVIC
inspectors on the ground suggested otherwise. When asked by a reporter about the
possibility of giving the UN weapons inspectors more time to complete their task, Fleischer
fired back, asking "More time for what? More time to be run-around by a regime that has not
complied, that has concealed its weapons, and that has grown throughout the years --
particularly the four years when no one was in the country -- extraordinarily good at hiding
what they have and deceiving those who are there to do their level best."
Left unsaid was the fact that the inspectors had repeatedly asked the U.S. for access to the
very intelligence being used to underpin the American claims that Iraq was holding on to
prohibited WMD and were denied. "If the UK and the U.S. are convinced and they say they have
evidence," Hans
Blix, the head of UNMOVIC, had noted on December 20, 2002, "then one would expect they
would be able to tell us where is this stuff." When asked if they were getting cooperation from
U.S. and Western intelligence agencies, Blix replied, "Not yet. We get some, but we don't get
all we need."
In 2010,
Blix commented on the provisions of Security Council resolution 1441, which had declared
Iraq to be in "material breach" of its obligation to disarm, and which was cited
by Ari Fleischer to justify the invasion and occupation of Iraq in March 2003. "The
declaration, I felt, might give Iraq a chance for a new start," Blix noted, " except that it
was very hard for them to declare any weapons when they didn't have any. "
This is the conclusion that anyone taking umbrage with Ari Fleischer over his attempt to
whitewash the role he played -- as an extension of President George W. Bush -- in facilitating
the Iraq War should rely on. Deflecting blame onto the U.S. intelligence community ignores the
fact that the decision to go to war was the exclusive purview of the Executive Branch that
Fleischer served. Iraq's alleged retention of proscribed WMD were merely an excuse to achieve
the higher goal of regime change. The inspection process initiated in November 2002 to
investigate Iraq's WMD programs was, from the U.S. perspective, a façade created to
justify a decision to go to war that was made long before the inspectors ever set foot on the
ground.
"Intelligence," therefore, was an artifice manufactured by the Bush administration as a
smoke screen. A memorandum prepared by
the head of the British MI-6 intelligence service , Richard Dearlove, following a July 23,
2002 meeting in Washington, DC, underscores this truth: "There was a perceptible shift in
attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through
military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD . But the intelligence
and facts were being fixed around the policy."
Bush knew that the engagement with the United Nations, including the crafting of resolution
1441 and the dispatch of inspectors to Iraq, was simply an elaborate charade, cruel theatrics
meant to dangle the prospects of peace, all the while preparing for war -- something Ari
Fleischer knew all along, as this exchange
with the press aptly demonstrates:
Question: "Does regime change mean that you want to change the leader of Iraq, or you want
to change the nature of the regime?"
Fleischer: "The objective is for Saddam Hussein's Iraq to disarm, to stop threatening its
neighbors, to stop repressing minorities within its own country. And that's why Congress passed
the policy of regime change."
Press: "Well, which of those definitions is correct?"
Fleischer: "Well, let's do it -- let me cut to the bottom line on it. What I would propose
is that in the event Saddam Hussein gives the order, and under his leadership and direction
disarms Iraq, gives up its weapons of mass destruction, has no more chemical weapons, no more
biological weapons, stops using hostility as a way to deal with its neighbors, stops repression
of minorities with his own country, give me a call. After you cover Saddam Hussein doing these
things, let's talk about it. Until then, the president is focused on making sure that these
developments take place as a result either of the UN resolutions being enforced, or by whoever
in Iraq taking these actions to make it happen. But this is probably the mother of all
hypotheticals. Give me a phone call when it happens."
Press: "So Saddam could stay in power if those objectives were carried out?"
Fleischer: "Again, call me up when Saddam Hussein gives the directions for all those factors
to take place."
Press: "So, that's a yes?"
Fleischer: "I think this is a question of how many devils can dance on the head of a
pin."
Press: "It's not. Can he stay in power and have regime change?"
Fleischer: "You're asking the mother of hypotheticals. And I think it's a rather "
Press: "Does it refer to a leader or a government regime change?"
Fleischer: "It refers to actions that have to be taken to keep the peace."
Press: "So it's a question of policy, not personnel?"
Fleischer: "That's a good way to put it."
Press: "So he could stay in power if those things happen?"
Fleischer: "If you want to fool yourselves into believing that that's what Saddam Hussein
would do in policy, that's an interesting way to approach it."
The fact of the matter is that Saddam did, in fact, do everything listed by Ari Fleischer to
effect a change in the policies of Iraq in order to preserve his regime. But President Bush --
whom Fleischer represented -- never had any intention of recognizing such change, even when it
occurred. President Bush, Ari Fleischer and every representative of the U.S. administration
involved in formulating and implementing U.S. policy on Iraq was being dishonest in the extreme
when dangling the possibility of a peaceful resolution to the Iraq problem.
In short, they all lied, and Ari Fleischer was the mouthpiece for disseminating these lies,
a task he continues to perform to this day.
Scott Ritter is a former Marine Corps intelligence officer who served in the former
Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert
Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of WMD. He is the author ofDeal of the Century: How Iran Blocked the West's Road
to War . 14 Responses to Ari Fleischer Lied, and People Died
Thank you for another reminder of what really happened. My only quibble is that this uses
GWB, the figurehead, as the power and decision-maker. Like Bolton & Co today, the ones
calling the plays are not the public face that can get elected by the proles. It was the
Cheney/Wolfy/Rummy cabal, smokescreened by Rove, who sent Iraq back to the stone age at the
behest of Israel.
One down and more to go Iran is the next big target of the same mentality.
It is interesting to note the following requirement: "stops repression of minorities with
his own country". It indicates that Bush administration had a plan B for invading Iraq, on
the template of Kosovo
The writer states: "In short, they all lied, "
Therefore, based on the evidence that the Iraq war was a lie, where are the prosecutions?
Millions of people are dead, soldiers are dead or maimed, Iraq is reduced to rubble in parts
of its land and nothing happens to the perpetrators of lies. What does this say about our
so-called "justice system"? http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2018/12/will-war-criminals-be-brought-to.html
"But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy."
It is the same today with the intelligence being fixed to justify the US exit from the INF
treaty.
Why does the administration not tell us what the range of the disputed missile is?
Why would Russia deploy a land-based missile in breach of the treaty when it could deploy
it at sea and not violate any treaty?
Not surprisingly, this information has not been supplied.
Behind the decision to leave the INF treaty is John Bolton. He also fought to remove Jose
Bustani as the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) which
governs the Chemical Weapons Convention.
Bustani was trying to bring Iraq into that treaty. That is why he had to go. If he had
succeeded it would have removed the excuse for war.
It's astonishing that creeps like Fleischer have the temerity to show their faces in public.
His lies caused terrible damage to America and millions of innocent civilians in the Middle
East. He should shut the **** up and thank his lucky stars he wasn't sent to prison for his
part in this disgusting episode.
The War of Lies Against Iraq
By Eric S. Margolis
March 23, 2019
Sixteen years ago, the US and Britain committed a crime of historic proportion, the
invasion and destruction of Iraq. It was as egregious an aggression as Nazi Germany's 1939
invasion of Poland.
Large numbers of Iraqi civilians died from 2003-2007. Iraq's water and sewage systems were
bombed, causing widespread cholera. The UN estimated 500,000 Iraqi children alone died as a
result. Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State, said it was 'a price worth paying.'
[read more at link below]
And now we get to do all over again, with the right target this time, Iran. Don't forget that
after 9/11 the first call was to go after Iran and not our trusty allies in the ME who were
the real perps. Iraq was just the consolation prize for these insane ideologues, who should
all be in jailed for war crimes.
If you define weapons of mass destruction as nuclear war capabilities, then Iraq had none. If
you define weapons of mass destruction as chemical, then Iraq historically had these weapons
which it used against Iran, the Kurds, and shot some in Iraq War I at Israel. What happened
to the chemical weapons? They were sold/moved to Syria, where they still are today, and still
being used by the Assad regime. When the US troops got to Iraq in Gulf War II, the chemical
weapons were gone from Iraq, but not from Syria, which is why Iran, has a vested interest in
being involved in Syria, not to mention Israel. Does this help to make more sense of what
seems to be a perpetual war?
Trump just wanted these chemical weapons destroyed and never created again, and the US will
evacuate the Middle East once this is accomplished.
The article and the comments say it all: the lies, nothing else, were used to destroy Iraq!
No intell "mistake" can be offered-it is and was a neo con deception of the country and
the world.
Accountability, however, will not happen. Very ominous for the situation pertaining to
Iran and Venezuela. If the thugs in suits, pompeo, bolton, abrams, feel no consequence will
happen, why worry-it is off to intervention/regime change they go.
American sheeple have the institutional memory of a gnat and the mass media coverup and
malfeseance will continue.
"Liberals were called traitors, we were right
The Bush admin's push for war stank from the beginning"
On the issue of Iraq, there's no hiding behind liberal, democrats, conservative,
republicans, libertarians, etc.
Most of the country was heck bent on war as a matter of revenge, regardless of policy. The
fear mongering for policies adjecent to the actual events and actors of 9/11 was not only
coming out of DC, but main street. New Yorkers were no less intent on war making than the WH,
Congress or various think tanks, businesses or educators from elite or non-elite schools.
And what has occurred since moots any real escape in labels. The group who should have
been the least likely and the most prudent, the most thoughtful – the conservatives had
bent conservatism so out of distortion that even they had no defense against unreason.
I have tended to give the president and those in the WH and Congress the benefit of the
doubt that they sincerely considered a response in the region as a defense. I did not go to
select schools, and the schools I did attend did not require me to Ovid or an overview of the
classics in Greek or Latin. I had not attended a war college class or anything of the kind.
But when the case was presented for war – it simply didn't have the evidence or a
rationale that made sense. In fact, some of those contentions contradicted the what was known
as well as each other. It was deeply disturbing and disappointing. But when I read the
president's response to Dir. Tenet,
"If that's all you got, we can't go to war"
or words to that effect, they reflected my thoughts entirely. And for a long time I
considered that all of this mayhem was part of a diplomatic package. I was already outside
the main on the issue of Afghanistan, which I thought was overkill and strategically unsound
for the what should have been the goal – dealing with the actors of 9/11.
I do agree with Inspector Ritter, it was also quite clear that until the inspectors had
finished their mission, minus any evidence that Pres Hussein was in violation – there
was no case. Nor was there a case for invasion based on any humanitarian crisis or
genocide.
But what I have not been able to do is cross that line that they the president knowing and
deliberately conspired to manufacture (lie) evidence against an innocent party. And I have
been able to cross that line to despite having contemplated this article for two days and I
will no doubt read it again, to include the references. Those of that objected the first go
'round, if not pacifists, have problem read several pools of of information and arguments
regarding the case or lack thereof for war and the misleading the country by the leadership.
And it's frustrating that those who actually got the matter spot on are still battling the
those that got the matter and subsequent similar advances incorrect to this day. It's down
right painful considering the measures that were engaged to not merely silence opposition,
but to destroy people's lives.
What has been broken may not be repairable, one hopes it is, believes it is, but reading
this article is just too deep wound to see it. And what is salt in the wound has been three
years of accusations about Russian collusion for the purposes of undermining the executive
who claimed we should reconsider how we address the adventures. And the near total buy in of
that press by half of the country minus any catastrophic event, makes the wars seem as window
dressing to a much deeper and darker ethic that plagues us.
And then there is the question of what to do about all of this official misrepresentation.
Not only must we filter out whether they knowingly lied, but what to do about it. The
daunting task of arresting so many in so many positions of leadership and research. I
consider it serious business to make a false report, much less doing so on a document of
declaration for official business -- that is purjury. We impeached a president because he
mislead about what was a private intimate indiscretion --
What s described above is devastatingly more egregious by several Everests in
magnitude.
And it implicates our partners in what could only be a crime: Great Britain, Israel,
Australia, Poland and others who aided and abetted in the matter.
Caveat pre-defense: L'est I be called an anti-semite, Israel has a right to exist and self
defense.
They were wrong. And that the factual data contradicted their claims may not be enough to
claim they did not genuinely believe their own "lies" if "lies" they were. Or maybe I am just
unwilling to hold people on my team to account to the standard required. Perhaps, accepting
the idea that they knowingly perjured themselves is just too painful to accept.
Unwilling to call a spade a spade – maybe just too merciful or at the end of the day
-- cowardice.
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
"... The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to overturn the results of elections. ..."
"... At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this. ..."
"... I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee – Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this conspiracy. ..."
"... It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' – notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further. ..."
"... They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. ..."
"... Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal. ..."
"... The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue; ..."
"... Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law. ..."
"... It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection" operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.) ..."
There were no major disagreements between Mueller and his managers at the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ).
The Russians who tried to interfere in the 2016 election were exposed and charged -- but no
American was charged with any effort to conspire with Moscow and hijack the election.
the "Steele dossier" that was the main FISA evidence was paid for with funds
from Hillary Clinton
's campaign and the Democratic Party;
Christopher Steele, the dossier's author, had told a senior DOJ official he was desperate to
defeat Trump;
most of the dossier was not verified before it was used as evidence of alleged Trump-Russia
collusion; and
agents collected statements from key defendants such as Papadopoulos and Carter Page during
interactions with an FBI informant that strongly suggested their innocence.
Such omissions are so glaring as to constitute defrauding a federal court. And each and
every participant to those omissions needs to be brought to justice.
An upcoming DOJ inspector general's report should trigger the beginning of that
accountability in a court of law, and President Trump can assist the effort by declassifying
all evidence of wrongdoing by FBI, CIA and DOJ officials. " The Hill
------------
Pilgrims, the seditious conspiracy to depose the elected president of the United States for
conspiracy to commit treason with the Government of the Russian Federation has been
defeated.
The bent cops at the FBI and the madmen like Brennan, Clapper and Comey, who treacherously
used the government's forces against the Constitution, must be punished so severely as to make
an example that will dissuade other midgets on horseback from making similar attempts to
overturn the results of elections.
At the bottom of the cauldron overflowing with political misdeeds shines the face of Hillary
Clinton and the army of clever people who ran her 2016 campaign. They devised the clever,
clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with Washington co-conspirators and the
even more clever idea of marketing it back into the US political bloodstream through British
intelligence channels by feeding it to the erratic and spiteful senator from Arizona whose
staff peddled it all over Washington and New York. There must be retribution for this.
The leftist press is already discounting the results of Mueller's investigation while
gloating over how long the Democratic held House of Representatives can continue to search
through Trump's life trying to find criminality.
AG Barr should stand Mueller up next to him at a press conference to make clear the results
of his report and to answer questions about it. After that the prosecutions should begin.
pl
I would be most interested if one of the legally competent members of this Committee –
Robert Willman perhaps? – could give us us an idea of what charges could be leveled
against Christopher Steele under U.S. law in relation to his clearly central role in this
conspiracy.
It also seems reasonably clear that he was not acting in isolation, and that there is a
strong 'prima facie' case that senior figures in the British 'intelligence community' –
notably Robert Hannigan and probably Sir Richard Dearlove – were involved, in which
case the complicity is likely to have gone very much further.
The argument that declassification of relevant documentation would harm the intelligence
relationship between the U.S. and U.K. has clearly been made with great emphasis from this
side.
In fact, it is pure bollocks. A serious investigation on your side, which could lead to
the kind of clean-out which should have happened when the scale of the corruption of
intelligence in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq became clear, might pave the way for us
to reconstruct reasonably functional intelligence services.
Doing this on both sides of the Atlantic might pave the way for a reconstruction of an
intelligence relationship which was actually beneficial to both countries, as in recent years
it patently has not been.
Whether there is a realistic prospect of people on your side opening the cans of worms on
ours, as well as your own, of course remains a moot point.
I'm glad the Steele affair has been examined at the American end -
"They devised the clever, clever idea of creating the Steele Dossier in cahoots with
Washington co-conspirators and the even more clever of marketing it back into the US
political bloodstream through British intelligence channels, by feeding it to the erratic and
spiteful senator from Arizona whose staff peddled it all over Washington and New York.
"
What about the UK end? We're fussing over some little local difficulties in the UK at the
moment and at our end the questions still remain - Who in the UK authorised it and how high did it go?
The problem with criminal prosecution is one must cite a Brit or US law which was violated.
The only ones in US law that I am aware of stipulate that the plotting must be by means of
violence, "by force". All this appears to me to be only the propagation of rumors.
I think it might be more the investigation of the propagation of rumours. Think back to that election campaign, and to the period before the inauguration.
Both sides were furiously engaged in throwing mud at each other. Situation normal. Then an
odd thing happens. A particularly foolish piece of mud comes along. All that Golden Showers
nonsense. Regard that as normal if we please. I expect worse comes along sometimes. Then it
turns out that that piece of mud comes from an Intelligence source. Situation no longer normal.
With respect it is not propagating rumours to ask how that happened. As for my own
interest in the affair, it is not propagating rumours to ask how a senior UK ex-Intelligence
Officer comes to be mixed up in it all. I suppose I started to look on it as rather more than a prank or a few cogs slipping when
that senior UK ex-Intelligence Officer got whisked away to a safe house. We're a penny
pinching lot over here and we don't run to that sort of thing for nothing.
An investigation could certainly be predicated on the reasonable suspicion that Steele, et
al, conspired to defraud the United States, in this case a purposeful and knowing smear of a
candidate for office; also, another potential violation could be lying to the FBI, T 18 USC
1001.
The problem, as I see it, is sorting out the malignant from the merely incompetent. As I've
argued many times, the dossier should have been dismissed from the outset as a pile of
garbage, empty of actionable content, because the ultimate sources could not be vetted: the
information could not be said to be either credible or reliable. The information was acted on
by screening it behind the reliabilty and credibility, so called, of Steele. So it would be
necessary to show that Steele knew that the information, point by point, was false. This
could be difficult. Steele's first line of defense would be that he threw everything that he
heard from anyone at all into the mix in the expectation that the "professionals" would
figure it out.
Yes, they were all partisan, Steele, his sources, his bosses, the so called
professionals, and their partisanship would be easy to prove; and yes, almost assuredly their
partisanship contributed, perhaps even explained, their defective judgement as to how to
handle the scurrilous information, especially on the part of the so called professionals, but
proving they actually knew the materials to be false would be difficult.
They couldn't know
that it was false because they had no ability to run down the sources. The professionals
would defend themselves by saying they had no ability to vet the sources but the information
represented such a serious security threat that they had no alternative but to try to vet the
information by launching the investigation against the targets. This puts the cart before the
horse, represents an astonishing lack of judgement, especially considering the "exalted"
positions in the Intel Community the people exercising the bad judgement occupied, but there
it is - "we thought we were doing the right thing."
Perhaps this defense could be overcome by
demonstrating that people at such high and important heights of government could not possible
be so stupid... maybe.
And of course we have the orchestrated leaks to various media, the orchestrated unmaskings,
all of which kept the media frenzy fired up. All in all, it was the greatest political dirty
trick ever attempted in American Politics, and did devastating damage to both domestic
tranquility and national security. Trump survived, but the damage done is incalculable.
So It pains me greatly to think that the reckoning will likely have to be political rather
than criminal because the malice that can be demonstrated is so admixed and even overshadowed
by incompetence and judgement flaws; and even a political reckoning given the state of the
country is so uncertain.
I hope that I am wrong and that some kind of prosecution can be fashioned because of the
sheer enormity of violence that was done to our electoral system, surpassing by far the
chickenshit case Mueller brought against the Russian troll farm; but I fear that I am right.
It hurts to think that so much damage can be caused by scheming little political weasels and
that they all may well walk away scot free; and even be lionized by their political confreres
as having tried to do the right thing. This is the state of American politics today!!!
I see that some of the midgets on horseback are saying that they will bring Mueller before
congress to explain himself. Their knight in shining armor has failed to return with the holy
grail. A couple even suggested that perhaps Mueller has been influenced by the Russians or
somehow intimated by Trump.
The coup may be over, but the witch hunt will continue;
and that
+ all the crazy Marxism (social and economic), bad immigration policy and Green New Deal is
going to doom the Democrats in 2020. They look like they are jumping off a final sake fueled
banzai charge. Maybe they think the best defense is a good offense re; the prosecutions that
should happen. What is the chance that Mueller will pass *all* he has learned to help get the
criminal cases under way?
On 13 July 2018, when announcing the indictment of 12 Russian military officers by the
Mueller group for "conspiring to interfere" in the 2016 presidential election, Deputy
Attorney General Rod Rosenstein admitted that no "interference" actually happened. In this
video of his announcement, starting at 5 minutes, 52 seconds into it and ending at the 6
minute, 5 second mark, he says--
"There is no allegation in this indictment that any American citizen committed a crime.
There is no allegation that the conspiracy changed the vote count or affected any election
result."
Col. Lang is absolutely correct that those involved in attempting to reverse the results
of the 2016 election, de-legitimize an elected president, and remove him should be thoroughly
pursued through all avenues and procedures of the civil and criminal law.
However, I am concerned that the new attorney general, William Barr, will not do so based
on his past associations and work. I hope I am wrong about that, but I am not optimistic.
It's a dirty business. If half this stuff is true, and not just layers of increasingly
unbelievable cover stories (I mean, a tangential example, is the whole Skripal thing a
weirdly, too obviously fake cover show for what was in reality a "witness protection"
operation? A witness who could and would reveal much? On this matter even, perhaps. Such
obvious deceptions are harmful to respect for authority and the law.)
I'm wrestling with the idea that 'twas ever thus and now with the internet its workings
are revealed to a "lay" audience with no connection to the dark arts of the spy business. But
I am curious, with the good Colonel's indulgence, if the new tools of the trade have made
things which should be secret not possible to be kept secret?
Amen to the prosecutions. If there is seen to be no accountability for this fraud then we are
seriously damaging what's left of democracy. Who, in their right mind, is going to publicly
support and assist a political candidate who is not "Swamp approved" if they face the threat
of thereby triggering their own, and their family's destruction by the judicial system?
I suggest that even a pardon is not enough for those entrapped in this mess. There needs
to be restitution.
To put that another way, in my opinion, "birther" allegations could be passed off as
political tactics. Nobody got hurt. It is just good luck that Russiagate hasn't resulted in
suicide or worse - so far.
I certainly agree that consequences must be brought to bear: lying politicians without a
shred of evidence, nor did they offer any for their lies; press for their utter and complete
malfeasance and corruption without a shred of evidence, the doj/fbi corrupted and coup
plotting officials,and finally the shame to all who shrieked about "evil" putin, russia the
aggressor, etc. It has set our discourse back decades, forced any critics of this insanity
into the shadows, and completely killed any attempt at normal diplomacy between nations.
I noted one astute writer as equating this russiagate insanity to the lies surrounding wmd
and the destruction of iraq. Close. The damage from this criminality is incalculable!
Will the shrillest of all in the press lose their jobs? Nah, not a chance. Prob get raise
or promotion.Will the brennans, clintons, clappers, et al do the perp walk. Nah, not a
chance. High paid lawyers will tie the courts up for years if not decades.
And america has the institutional memory of a gnat. And of course, the question is as to
high up did this criminality go? I personally do not believe it is a question-it is obvious
to me. The major question for me is how high up the prosecution, if any, will go.
Problem is...who's going to do the prosecuting?
The DOJ - protector of the swamp - has become thoroughly corrupted as an arm of the
Democrat-media party.
Should (can) Trump appoint a special prosecutor as far as possible from the DOJ?
The president might use this and any Republican-led prosecutions as leverage to work out
deals that will allow him to achieve his agenda. I think he'll need to given how the
Democrats intend to use their house majority to launch investigations and hearings to find
something, anything to howl about and impede his agenda.
Still need to see the full report. I hope it is releasable. Otherwise the conspiracy theories
or leaks will never let up. The article cited is a partisan opinion piece, not a news report.
It accepts the fallback stance that yes, crimes were committed but collusion by Trump was not
among them. This actually seems possible if only in light of the chaotic condition of the
campaign.
That said, I would not be surprised to find collusion discounted. Not that the Russians
didn't interfere. That would be entirely in character. But I don't know any reason for
supposing that they would have a better understanding of American political dynamics than the
Americans who make good livings being the best in that arena. The Russians seem to have been
doing the same things as numerous other players. They shouldn't have been in that game, but
there is no strong reason for according them Superman status. Their strongest feature seems
to have been sheer quantity. Outrage over their actions often seems to flow from a poor grasp
of the real nature of normal political process.
"The Russians seem to have been doing the same things..."
Multiple members of the FBI and DOJ seem to have been interfering in the 2016 Presidential
election. How many other federal and state elections did they interfere with?
Can you cite a single piece of hard evidence, not simply allegation, that proves the Russians
interfered in the 2016 election? If so, please cite it, since I know of none. Thank you.
This month marks the 20th anniversary of Operation Allied Force, NATO's 78-day air war against Yugoslavia. It was a war waged
as much against Serbian civilians – hundreds of whom perished – as it was against Slobodan Milošević's forces, and it was a campaign
of breathtaking hypocrisy and selective outrage. More than anything, it was a war that by President Bill Clinton's own admission
was fought for the sake of NATO's credibility.
One Man's Terrorist
Our story begins not in the war-torn Balkans of the 1990s but rather in the howling wilderness of Afghanistan at the end of the
1980s as defeated Soviet invaders withdrew from a decade of guerrilla warfare into the twilight of a once-mighty empire. The United
States, which had provided arms, funding and training for the mujahideen fighters who had so bravely resisted the Soviet occupation,
stopped supporting the jihadis as soon as the last Red Army units rolled across the Hairatan Bridge and back into the USSR. Afghanistan
descended deeper into civil war.
The popular narrative posits that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, Washington's former mujahideen allies, turned on the
West after the US stationed hundreds of thousands of infidel troops in Saudi Arabia – home to two out of three of Sunni Islam's holiest
sites – during Operation Desert Shield in 1990. Since then, the story goes, the relationship between the jihadists and their former
benefactors has been one of enmity, characterized by sporadic terror attacks and fierce US retribution. The real story, however,
is something altogether different.
From 1992 to 1995, the Pentagon flew
thousands of al-Qaeda mujahideen, often accompanied by US Special Forces, from Central Asia to Europe to reinforce Bosnian Muslims
as they fought Serbs to gain their independence from the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. The Clinton administration
armed and trained these fighters in
flagrant violation of United Nations accords; weapons purchased by Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran were secretly shipped to the jihadists
via Croatia, which netted a hefty profit from each transaction. The official Dutch inquiry into the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in
which thousands of Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were slaughtered by Bosnian Serb and Serbian paramilitary forces, concluded
that the United States was "very closely involved" in these arms transfers.
When the Bosnian war ended in 1995 the United States was faced with the problem of thousands of Islamist warriors on European
soil. Many of them joined the burgeoning Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which mainly consisted of ethnic Albanian Kosovars from what
was still southwestern Yugoslavia. Emboldened by the success of the Slovenes, Croats, Macedonians and Bosnians who had won their
independence from Belgrade as Yugoslavia literally balkanized, KLA fighters began to violently expel as many non-Albanians from Kosovo
as they could. Roma, Jews, Turks and, above all, Serbs were all victims of Albanian ethnic cleansing.
The United States was initially very honest in its assessment of the KLA. Robert Gelbard, the US special envoy to Bosnia,
called it "without any question a terrorist
group." KLA backers allegedly included Osama bin Laden
and other Islamic radicals; the group largely bankrolled its activities by trafficking heroin and sex slaves. The State Department
accordingly added the KLA to its list of terrorist organizations in 1998.
However, despite all its nastiness the KLA endeared itself to Washington by fighting the defiant Yugoslavian President Slobodan
Milošević. By this time Yugoslavia, once composed of eight nominally autonomous republics, had been reduced by years of bloody civil
war to a rump of Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo. To Serbs, the dominant ethnic group in what remained of the country, Kosovo is regarded
as the very birthplace of their nation. Belgrade wasn't about to let it go without a fight and everyone knew it, especially the Clinton
administration. Clinton's hypocrisy was immediately evident; when Chechnya fought for its independence from Moscow and Russian forces
committed horrific atrocities in response, the American president
called the war an internal Russian affair
and barely criticized Russian President Boris Yeltsin. But when Milošević resorted to brute force in an attempt to prevent Yugoslavia
from further fracturing, he soon found himself a marked man.
Although NATO
called
the KLA "the main initiator of the violence" in Kosovo and blasted "what appears to be a deliberate campaign of provocation" against
the Serbs, the Clinton administration was nevertheless determined to attack the Milošević regime. US intelligence confirmed that
the KLA was indeed provoking harsh retaliatory strikes by Serb forces in a bid to draw the United States and NATO into the conflict.
President Clinton, however, apparently wasn't listening. The NATO powers, led by the United States, issued Milošević an ultimatum
they knew he could never accept: allow NATO to occupy all of Kosovo and have free reign in Serbia as well. Assistant US Secretary
of State James Rubin later
admitted that "publicly we had to make clear we were seeking an agreement but privately we knew the chances of the Serbs agreeing
were quite small."
Wagging the Dog?
In 1997 the film Wag the Dog debuted to rave reviews. The dark comedy concerns a Washington, DC spin doctor and a Hollywood
producer who fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract American voters from a presidential sex scandal. Many observers couldn't
help but draw parallels between the film and the real-life events of 1998-99, which included the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton's
impeachment and a very real war brewing in the Balkans. As in Wag the Dog , there were exaggerated or completely fabricated
tales of atrocities, and as in the film the US and NATO powers tried to sell their war as a humanitarian intervention. An attack
on Yugoslavia, we were told, was needed to avert Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanians.
There were two main problems with this. First, there was no Serb ethnic cleansing of Albanian Kosovars until after NATO
began mercilessly bombing Yugoslavia. The German government
issued several reports confirming this. One, from October 1998, reads, in part:
The violent actions of the Yugoslav military and police since February 1998 were aimed at separatist activities and are no
proof of a persecution of the whole Albanian ethnic group in Kosovo or a part of it. What was involved in the Yugoslav violent actions
and excesses since February 1998 was a selective forcible action against the military underground movement (especially the KLA) A
state program or persecution aimed at the whole ethnic group of Albanians exists neither now nor earlier.
Subsequent German government reports issued through the winter of 1999 tell a similar story. "Events since February and March
1998 do not evidence a persecution program based on Albanian ethnicity," stated one report released exactly one month before the
NATO bombing started. "The measures taken by the armed Serbian forces are in the first instance directed toward combating the KLA
and its supposed adherents and supporters."
While Serbs certainly did commit atrocities (especially after the ferocious NATO air campaign began), these were often greatly
exaggerated by the Clinton administration and the US corporate mainstream media. Clinton claimed – and the media dutifully parroted
– that 600,000 Albanians were "trapped within Kosovo lacking shelter, short of food, afraid to go home or buried in mass graves."
This was completely false . US diplomat David
Scheffer claimed that "225,000 ethnic Albanian men are missing, presumed dead." Again, a
total fabrication . The FBI, International War Crimes
Tribunal and global forensics experts flocked to Kosovo in droves after the NATO bombs stopped falling; the total number of victims
they found was around 1 percent of the figure claimed by the United States.
However, once NATO attacked, the Serb response was predictably furious. Shockingly, NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark declared
that the ensuing Serbian atrocities against the Albanian Kosovar population had been
"fully anticipated" and were apparently of little concern to Washington.
Not only did NATO and the KLA provoke a war with Yugoslavia, they did so knowing that many innocent civilians would be killed, maimed
or displaced by the certain and severe reprisals carried out by enraged Serb forces. Michael McGwire, a former top NATO planner,
acknowledged that "to describe the bombing as a humanitarian intervention is really grotesque."
Bloody Hypocrites
The other big problem with the US claiming it was attacking Yugoslavia on humanitarian grounds was that the Clinton administration
had recently allowed – and was at the time allowing – far worse humanitarian catastrophes to rage without American intervention.
More than 800,000 men, women and children were slaughtered while Clinton and other world leaders stood idly by during the 1994 Rwandan
genocide. The US also courted the medievally brutal
Taliban regime in hopes of achieving stability in Afghanistan and with an eye toward building a gas pipeline from Turkmenistan through
Afghanistan to Pakistan. Clinton also did nothing to stop Russian forces from viciously crushing nationalist uprisings in the Caucuses,
where Chechen rebels were fighting for their independence much the same as Albanian Kosovars were fighting the Serbs.
Colombia, the Western Hemisphere's leading recipient of US military and economic aid, was waging a fierce, decades-long campaign
of terror against leftist insurgents and long-suffering indigenous peoples. Despite
horrific brutality and pervasive human rights violations, US aid to Bogotá increased year after year. In Turkey, not only did
Clinton do nothing to prevent government forces from committing widespread atrocities against Kurdish separatists, the administration
positively encouraged its NATO ally with billions of dollars in loans and arms sales. Saudi Arabia, home to the most repressive fundamentalist
regime this side of Afghanistan, was – and remains – a favored US ally despite having one of the
world's worst human rights
records. The list goes on and on.
Much closer to the conflict at hand, the United States tacitly approved the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since
the Holocaust when as many as 200,000 Serbs were
forcibly expelled from the Krajina region of Croatia by that country's US-trained military during Operation Storm in August 1995.
Krajina Serbs had purged the region of its Croat minority four years earlier in their own ethnic cleansing campaign; now it was the
Serbs' turn to be on the receiving end of the horror. Croatian forces stormed through Krajina, shelling towns and slaughtering innocent
civilians. The sick and the elderly who couldn't escape were executed or burned alive in their homes as Croatian soldiers machine-gunned
convoys of fleeing refugees.
"Painful for the Serbs"
Washington's selective indignation at Serb crimes both real and imagined is utterly inexcusable when held up to the horrific and
seemingly indiscriminate atrocities committed during the NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia. The prominent Australian journalist
John Pilger noted that "in the attack on Serbia, 2 percent of NATO's missiles hit military targets, the rest hit hospitals, schools,
factories, churches and broadcast studios." There is little doubt that US and allied warplanes and missiles were targeting the Serbian
people as much as, or even more than, Serb forces. The bombing knocked out electricity in 70 percent of the country as well as much
of its water supply.
NATO warplanes also deliberately bombed a building containing the headquarters of Serbian state television and radio in the middle
of densely populated central Belgrade. The April 23, 1999 attack occurred without warning while 200 employees were at work in the
building. Among the 16 people killed were a makeup artist, a cameraman, a program director, an editor and three security guards.
There is no doubt that the attack was meant to demoralize the Serbian people. There is also no doubt that those who ordered the bombing
knew exactly what outcome to expect: a NATO planning document viewed by Bill Clinton, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair and French President
Jacques Chirac forecast as
many as 350 deaths in the event of such an attack, with as many as 250 of the victims expected to be innocent civilians living in
nearby apartments.
Allied commanders wanted to fight a "zero casualty war" in Yugoslavia. As in zero casualties for NATO forces, not the people they
were bombing. "This will be painful for the Serbs," Pentagon spokesman Kenneth Bacon sadistically predicted. It sure was. NATO warplanes
flew sorties at 15,000 feet (4,500 meters), a safe height for the pilots. But this decreased accuracy and increased civilian casualties
on the ground. One attack on central Belgrade mistakenly
hit Dragiša Mišović hospital with a laser-guided "precision" bomb, obliterating an intensive care unit and destroying a children's
ward while wounding several pregnant women who had the misfortune of being in labor at the time of the attack. Dragana Krstić, age
23, was recovering from cancer surgery – she just had a 10-pound (4.5 kg) tumor removed from her stomach – when the bombs blew jagged
shards of glass into her neck and shoulders. "I don't know which hurts more," she lamented, "my stomach, my shoulder or my heart."
Dragiša Mišović wasn't the only hospital bombed by NATO. Cluster bombs dropped by fighter jets of the Royal Netherlands Air Force
struck a hospital and a market in the city of Niš on May 7,
killing 15 people and wounding 60 more. An emergency clinic
and medical dispensary were also bombed in the
mining town of Aleksinac on April 6, killing at least five people and wounding dozens more.
Bridges were favorite targets of NATO bombing. An international passenger train traveling from Belgrade to Thessaloniki, Greece
was
blown apart by two missiles as it crossed over Grdelica gorge on April 12. Children and a pregnant woman were among the 15 people
killed in the attack; 16 other passengers were wounded. Allied commander Gen. Wesley Clark claimed the train, which had been damaged
by the first missile, had been traveling too rapidly for the pilot to abort the second strike on the bridge. He then offered up a
doctored video that was sped up more than three times so that the pilot's behavior would appear acceptable.
On May 1, at least 24 civilians, many of them children, were killed when NATO warplanes
bombed a bridge in Lužane just as a bus was crossing.
An ambulance rushing to the scene of the carnage was struck by a second bomb. On the sunny spring afternoon of May 30, a bridge over
the Velika Morava River in the small town of Vavarin was
bombed by low-flying German Air Force F-16 fighters while hundreds of local residents gathered nearby to celebrate an Orthodox
Christian holiday. Eleven people died, most of them when the warplanes returned and bombed the people who rushed to the bridge to
help those wounded in the first strike.
No One Is Safe
The horrors suffered by the villagers of Surdulica shows that no one in Serbia was safe from NATO's fury. They endured some 175
bombardments during one three-week period alone, with 50 houses destroyed and 600 others damaged in a town with only around 10,000
residents. On April 27, 20 civilians, including 12 children,
died when bombs meant to
destroy an army barracks slammed into a residential neighborhood. As many as 100 others were wounded in the incident. Tragedy
befell the tiny town again on May 31 when NATO
warplanes returned to bomb an ammunition depot but instead hit an old people's home; 23 civilians, most of them helpless elderly
men and women, were blown to pieces. Dozens more were wounded. The US military initially said "there were no errant weapons" in the
attack. However, Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre later testified before Congress that it "was a case of the pilot getting confused."
The CIA was also apparently confused when it relied on what it claimed was an outdated map to approve a Stealth Bomber strike
on what turned out to be the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade. Three Chinese journalists were killed and 27 other people were wounded.
Some people aren't so sure the attack was an accident – Britain's Observer later
reported that the US deliberately bombed the
embassy after discovering it was being used to transmit Yugoslav army communications.
There were plenty of other accidents, some of them horrifically tragic and others just downright bizarre. Two separate attacks
on the very Albanians NATO was claiming to help killed 160 people, many of them women and children. On April 14, NATO warplanes bombed
refugees along a 12-mile (19-km) stretch of road between the towns of Gjakova and Deçan in western Kosovo, killing 73 people including
16 children and wounding 36 more. Journalists reported
a grisly scene of "bodies charred or blown to pieces, tractors reduced to twisted wreckage and houses in ruins." Exactly one month
later, another column of refugees was
bombed near Koriša, killing
87 – mostly women, children and the elderly – and wounding 60 others. In the downright bizarre category, a wildly errant NATO missile
struck a residential neighborhood in the Bulgarian capital Sofia, some 40 miles (64 km) outside of Serbia. The American AGM-88 HARM
missile blew the roof off
of a man's house while he was shaving in his bathroom.
NATO's "Murderous Thugs"
As the people of Yugoslavia were being terrorized by NATO's air war, the terrorists of the Kosovo Liberation Army stepped up their
atrocities against Serbs and Roma in Kosovo. NATO troops deployed there to keep the peace often failed to protect these people from
the KLA's brutal campaign. More than 164,000 Serbs fled or
were forcibly driven from the Albanian-dominated province and by the summer of 2001 KLA ethnic cleansing had rendered Kosovo almost
entirely Albanian, with just a few die-hard Serb holdouts living in fear and surrounded by barbed wire.
The KLA soon expanded its war into neighboring Macedonia. Although NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson called the terror group
"murderous thugs," the United States – now with George W. Bush as president – continued to offer its invaluable support. National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice personally
intervened in an attempt to persuade Ukraine to halt arms sales to the Macedonian army and when a group of 400 KLA fighters were
surrounded at Aracinovo in June 2001, NATO ordered Macedonian forces to hold off their attack while a convoy of US Army vehicles
rescued the besieged militants. It later
emerged that 17 American military advisers were embedded with the KLA at Aracinovo.
Credibility Conundrum
The bombing of Yugoslavia was really about preserving the credibility of the United States and NATO. The alliance's saber rattling
toward Belgrade had painted it into a corner from which the only way out was with guns blazing. Failure to follow threats with deadly
action, said President Clinton, "would discredit NATO." Clinton
added
that "our mission is clear, to demonstrate the seriousness of NATO's purpose." The president seemed willfully ignorant of NATO's
real purpose, which is to defend member states from outside attack. British Prime Minister Tony Blair agreed with Clinton,
declaring on the eve of the war that
"to walk away now would destroy NATO's credibility." Gary Dempsey, a foreign policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute,
wrote that the Clinton administration
"transformed a conflict that posed no threat to the territorial integrity, national sovereignty or general welfare of the United
States into a major test of American resolve."
Waging or prolonging war for credibility's sake is always dangerous and seems always to yield disastrous results. Tens of thousands
of US troops and many times as many Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian soldiers and civilians died while Richard Nixon sought an "honorable"
way out of Vietnam. Ronald Reagan's dogged defense of US credibility cost the lives of 299 American and French troops killed in Hezbollah's
1983 Beirut barracks bombing. This time, ensuring American credibility meant backing the vicious KLA – some of whose fighters had
trained at Osama bin Laden's terror camps in Afghanistan. This, despite the fact that al-Qaeda had already been responsible for deadly
attacks against the United States, including the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.
It is highly questionable whether bombing Yugoslavia affirmed NATO's credibility in the short term. In the long term, it certainly
did not. The war marked the first and only time NATO had ever attacked a sovereign state. It did so unilaterally, absent any threat
to any member nation, and without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. "If NATO can go for military action without
international blessing, it calls into question the reliability of NATO as a security partner," Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak,
then Moscow's ambassador to NATO, told me at a San Francisco reception.
Twenty years later, Operation Allied force has been all but forgotten in the United States. In a country that has been waging
nonstop war on terrorism for almost the entire 21st century, the 1999 NATO air war is but a footnote in modern American history.
Serbs, however, still seethe at the injustice and hypocrisy of it all. The bombed-out ruins of the old Yugoslav Ministry of Defense,
Radio Television of Serbia headquarters and other buildings serve as constant, painful reminders of the horrors endured by the Serbian
people in service of NATO's credibility.
Brett Wilkins is a San Francisco-based author and activist. His work, which focuses on issues of war and peace and human rights,
is archived atwww.brettwilkins.com
I wonder if Boyko will be arrested upon his return?
TASS has several additional short items related to this meeting and the upcoming
election in Ukraine of March 31. IMO, if Boyko wins, the Outlaw US Empire's Ukrainian project
will be concluded.
What he discussed with Medvedev and Gazprom's Miller is of extreme importance to Ukraine's
economy and are important election issues.
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be
responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy
decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be
good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they
would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
As usual, Trump
made the announcement
of recognizing Israel's claim to the Golan Heights without any consultation with any of the relevant administration officials...
President Donald Trump's tweet on Thursday recognizing the Golan Heights as Israeli territory surprised members of his own
Middle East peace team, the State Department, and Israeli officials.
U.S. diplomats and White House aides had believed the Golan Heights issue would be front and center at next week's meetings
between Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House. But they were unprepared for any presidential
announcement this week.
No formal U.S. process or executive committees were initiated to review the policy before Trump's decision, and the diplomats
responsible for implementing the policy were left in the dark.
Even the Israelis, who have advocated for this move for years, were stunned at the timing of Trump's message.
After more than two years of watching Trump's impulsive and reckless "governing" style, it doesn't come as a surprise to anyone
that he makes these decisions without advance warning. There is no evidence that Trump ever thinks anything through, and so he probably
sees no reason to tell anyone in advance what he is going to do. Trump almost never bothers consulting with the people who will be
responsible for carrying out his policies and dealing with the international fallout, and that is probably why so many of his policy
decisions end up being exceptionally poor ones. The substance of most of Trump's foreign policy decisions was never likely to be
good, but the lack of an organized policy process on major decisions makes those decisions even more haphazard and chaotic than they
would otherwise be.
There is absolutely no upside for the United States in endorsing illegal Israeli claims to the Golan Heights. It is a cynical
political stunt intended to boost Netanyahu and Likud's fortunes in the upcoming election, and it is also a cynical stunt aimed at
shoring up Trump's support from Republican "pro-Israel" voters and donors.
The Trump administration has
ignored yet another mandated deadline for reporting to Congress on Yemen:
A senior Pentagon official had pledged to deliver the strategy report at the beginning of
March after failing to meet a Feb. 1 deadline mandated by law.
In recent months, the Trump administration has disregarded several certification
requirements from Congress. In February, the State Department refused to say whether the
Saudi-led force had reduced civilian casualties in the Yemeni conflict. And the White House
failed to respond to lawmakers' query about whether Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
was responsible for the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Last year, the administration met the first certification deadline by brazenly lying to
Congress that the Saudi coalition was successfully reducing harm to civilians in Yemen.
Congress completely failed to hold Secretary Pompeo accountable for those lies, and the
administration has obviously concluded that it can get away with disregarding these
requirements. For the last several months, both the Secretary of State and the Pentagon have
simply refused to comply with the law. In this case, the Pentagon probably can't "detail
specific US diplomatic and national security objectives" because the only discernible objective
of reflexive support for the Saudis and Emiratis in Yemen is to indulge them in whatever they
want to do. An administration that has illegally involved the U.S. in the war on Yemen for more
than two years obviously won't have any respect for legal requirements set by Congress when
they can't even be bothered to respect the Constitution.
The administration's contempt for the law and their disrespect for Congress are additional
reasons why the House should vote on and pass the antiwar Yemen resolution that the Senate
passed earlier this month. Beyond that, Congress needs to increase pressure on the Saudi and
Emirati governments with additional measures to cut off arms sales and hearings to scrutinize
the numerous human rights abuses and war crimes committed by their forces and their
proxies.
When war supporters object that Congress risks undermining the U.S.-Saudi relationship, it
is important for members of Congress to know that it is Mohammed bin Salman who has jeopardized
the relationship through his reckless and destructive behavior. The Saudi government has been
desperately lying about its conduct in Yemen and elsewhere to the U.S. and the entire world,
and the crown prince has proven himself to be completely unreliable and strikingly incompetent
at everything except grabbing more power for himself:
"We know who this guy is, we know what he's capable of, and treating him like he's an ally
or a reliable partner is totally untenable," said Jeremy Konyndyk, a former US Agency for
International Development director during the Obama administration.
The Saudi government has made itself a liability to the U.S. Since the administration puts
Saudi Arabia first and won't do anything to defend American interests, it falls to Congress to
do what the president won't.
Senator Kamala Harris hinted Tuesday that if she wins the election in 2020, she will continue to "prosecute"
President Donald Trump even after he leaves the White House.
Appearing on
Jimmy Kimmel Live
on Tuesday, the
Democrat candidate for president said that her experience as a prosecutor would figure into her actions as president
and that she thinks the voters would want her to "prosecute" Trump.
"I also believe that what voters are going to want is they are going to want that there is someone who has the proven ability
to prosecute the case against this administration and this president," she said. "And that is going to be about having an ability
and a proven ability to be able to articulate the evidence that makes the case for why we need new leadership in this country."
Kimmel pressed her on the point and asked if she intended to continue trying to jail Trump after he leaves the White
House, but Harris dissembled saying, "I am very supportive of Bob Mueller being able to finish his process and do his
job."
During her appearance, Harris also signed onto the new Democrat
narrative of abolishing the Electoral College.
"I'm open to the discussion," she told Kimmel. "There's no question that the popular vote has been diminished in
terms of making the final decision about who's the president of the United States, and we need to deal with that."
As to other hot-button policies, Harris also
signed on
with the so-called Green New Deal offered up by controversial liberal New York Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. In addition, the Californian
said
she supports "some type" of reparations for slavery.
"... The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications with Russian President Vladimir Putin. ..."
"... Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S. nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President Trump's inaugural committee." ..."
"... Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether anyone has sought to conceal those communications. ..."
"... The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders." ..."
A key House Democrat is renewing demands that the White House turn over documents about the use of private texts or emails by
Jared Kushner, saying Kushner's lawyer acknowledged that the senior aide used the non-secure WhatsApp application to communicate
with foreign leaders.
House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings said in a letter sent Thursday to White House Counsel
Pat Cipollone that the administration has failed to produce documents tied to Kushner and other officials despite requests from the
committee since 2017. Cummings also sought a briefing on how the official messages are being preserved.
... ... ...
The White House didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. But in another stand-off with House Democrats, Cipollone on
Thursday rejected a request renewed last week from Cummings and two other committee chairmen for information on Trump's communications
with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
WhatsApp
Cummings, to underscore his concern about whether unsecured White House communications have included classified information, said
in his letter that Lowell acknowledged during the December meeting that Kushner had used WhatsApp to communicate with foreign leaders.
Kushner is a senior White House adviser and the son-in-law of President
Donald Trump , overseeing the administration's Middle
East policies among other issues. Cummings said he and then-Oversight Chairman
Trey Gowdy , a Republican who has since retired from Congress,
met with Lowell in December.
Cummings's letter said Lowell said that Kushner has been in compliance with the law, and that he takes "screenshots" of communications
on his private WhatsApp account and forwards them to his official White House email account or to the National Security Council.
Cummings wrote that when asked whether Kushner ever used WhatsApp to discuss classified information, Lowell replied, "That's above
my pay grade."
The focus on Kushner and others follows the earlier investigations by the Justice Department and Republican-controlled congressional
committees of Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server when she served as secretary of state during the Obama administration.
'Alternative Means'
In Thursday's letter, Cummings said the White House's refusal to turn over documents is "obstructing the committee's investigation
into allegations of violations of federal records laws" and potential breaches of national security. He demanded that the White House
say by March 28 whether it intends to comply voluntarily with the renewed requests.
"If you continue to withhold these documents from the committee, we will be forced to consider alternative means to obtain compliance,"
Cummings said.
... ... ....
K.T. McFarland
Cummings also wrote that his committee has obtained new information about other White House officials that raises additional security
and federal records concerns about the use of private email and messaging applications.
His letter said others may have been involved in the practice while they worked at the White House, including former deputy national
security adviser K.T. McFarland and former chief strategist
Steve Bannon.
Cummings said the committee obtained a document that "appears" to show that McFarland conducted official business on her personal
email account. He said the document was related to efforts by McFarland and other White House officials to transfer sensitive U.S.
nuclear technology to Saudi Arabia "in coordination with Tom Barrack, a personal friend of President Trump and the chairman of President
Trump's inaugural committee."
The chairman said another document appeared to show that Bannon received documents "pitching the plan from Mr. Barrack through
his personal email account," at a time Bannon was at the White House and working on broader Middle East policy.
Regarding Trump's communications with Putin, Cummings, House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff and Foreign Affairs Chairman
Eliot Engel say they are examining the substance of in-person meetings and phone calls, the effects on foreign policy, and whether
anyone has sought to conceal those communications.
In a written response Thursday, Cipollone wrote, "While we respectfully seek to accommodate appropriate oversight requests, we
are unaware of any precedent supporting such sweeping requests."
The Constitution gives the executive branch exclusive power to conduct foreign relations, Cipollone said. "Congress cannot require
the president to disclose confidential communications with foreign leaders."
In a joint statement on Thursday night, Cummings, Engel and Schiff said that the Obama administration had "produced records describing
the president and secretary of state's calls with foreign leaders." The congressmen added that "President Trump's decision to break
with this precedent raises the question of what he has to hide."
( Updates with statement from Cummings, Schiff and Engel, in final paragraph.
"... A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side... ..."
"In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the
systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:"
Many thanks, and much respect to you Sir for bringing this important piece to my attention.
I apologize for another somewhat off topic posting, but I have not seen it posted here earlier, and I think that this should be
seen by as many eyes as possible.
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system -- and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international
news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means that Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages
around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles
are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews
are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side...
"... A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side... ..."
"In a remarkable report by British Channel 4, former CIA officials and a Reuters correspondent spoke candidly about the
systematic dissemination of propaganda and misinformation in reporting on geopolitical conflicts:"
Many thanks, and much respect to you Sir for bringing this important piece to my attention.
I apologize for another somewhat off topic posting, but I have not seen it posted here earlier, and I think that this should be
seen by as many eyes as possible.
It is one of the most important aspects of our media system -- and yet hardly known to the public: most of the international
news coverage in Western media is provided by only three global news agencies based in New York, London and Paris.
The key role played by these agencies means that Western media often report on the same topics, even using the same wording.
In addition, governments, military and intelligence services use these global news agencies as multipliers to spread their messages
around the world.
A study of the Syria war coverage by nine leading European newspapers clearly illustrates these issues: 78% of all articles
are based in whole or in part on agency reports, yet 0% on investigative research. Moreover, 82% of all opinion pieces and interviews
are in favor of the US and NATO intervention, while propaganda is attributed exclusively to the opposite side...
Intellectually Max Boot is a loud mouth nothing. I wonder how he managed to graduate from a prestigious university. he might be
able to work as copywriters, but not above that.
Neocon didn't "get it wrong." They understood that this is wrong. It was all about money for MIC which as lobbyists of MIC is
their first priority. That's why they lied the American people into wars. They are war criminals. They should be tried for
war crimes.
Tom Gorman (Feb 15, 8:36 am)–as evidence that Max Boot "has recanted his support of the
Iraq War"–quoted two sentences from Boot's 2018 book. Two sentences earlier in the same
book Boot wrote:
"In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in
consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don
Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a 'neocon.'
Those of us who supported the invasion were,
as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver
and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider."
Merkel might say: "There is definitely a place for Brazil in NATO. They can have ours."
Forget it! Merkel is the most servile lackey that the US could wish for. She is
doing everything her masters in Washington ask her to do. For example the German public is
awaiting a mildly entertaining show of their government on how to work around yesterdays
court decision:
International law is the yardstick for international politics. This has been clarified by
the Higher Administrative Court in Münster in a spectacular ruling on lethal US drone
missions in Yemen. Several relatives of victims who were killed in such attacks had sued.
They hold the Federal Republic of Germany jointly responsible for this because the United
States allegedly also uses the US airbase in Ramstein in Rhineland-Palatinate for these
fatal attacks.
There are important indications that the drone attacks in question violate international
law and the fundamental right to life. The Federal Republic of Germany must protect these
rights and stand up for them. Therefore the Federal Republic must clarify now in a first
step whether the attacks offend against international right.
NOT! Aside from the fact, that the public press largely ignores this decision, our
governments have a long record of doing actually nothing when formally independent judges
even from the highest courts ask them to adhere to the law.
Speaking of embarrassing lackeys, when the empire was seeking a new nodal point to more
efficiently drone bomb Northern Africa the most obvious/nearby European locations like Italy,
France or Greece all said "Nah, better not". But, don't you worry, Missus Merkel was of
course happy to offer Stuttgard in Southern Germany as base for AFRICOM!
This article was written 4 years ago, but the problem with Putin successor remains. Putin is a unique politician and his replacement
might be much weaker, causing troubles for Russia. This is not new problem for Russia, but this time it will be especially
acute. BTW this comment thread looks like "who is who" list for NATObots.
Notable quotes:
"... We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see. ..."
"... Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come ..."
"... Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously. ..."
"... It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways. ..."
"... He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship. Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work] ..."
"... Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed. ..."
"... Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section. ..."
"... PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ? ..."
I wonder if everyone on the Guardian staff has the same "man crush" on Putin? Could explain all these obsessive articles. I
also wonder if he spent any time in the penalty box?
laticsfanfromeurope -> Extracrispy 7 Oct 2015 17:06
You prefer ISIS and Al-Nusra then the legitimate Syrian gov. and the legitimate help of Russia...not a surprise from stupid
western supporters!
pfox33 7 Oct 2015 17:05
There isn't one of our western politicians that wouldn't sell his fucking mother to be getting the attention that Putin's getting.
I thought he was supposed to be isolated.
So to keep the hockey thing going, Putin's stolen the puck in the neutral zone, split the Nato defensemen who were too far
forward and is on a breakaway.
I feel sorry for Obama because I think he's a good leader but when it comes to trying to maneuver in a geopolitical situation
like Syria he's fucked before he leaves the house. Putin can just act without trying to herd cats like Obama has to do with his
Nato minions. He doesn't have a bunch of recalcitrant GOP senators calling him everything but a white man and running their mouths
about what they would do.
... ... ...
filin led -> Braminski 7 Oct 2015 16:55
It's you who are a troll, sir. By what you say, anything can be dismissed as paid propaganda. That means, you are as likely
to be a paid agent yourself. So, if you can't come up with a constructive argument, stop commenting please.
Mordantdude -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 16:40
As Russians say: "Envy silently".
giacinto101 7 Oct 2015 15:59
We could all use a real leader like Putin who takes no b.s. from anybody and is quick to adapt to any situation in a calm
assertive way. He earns our admiration every day, the way he steers across an ever changing minefield and not because of his mucho
image. We do not need leaders who deceit people by spewing relentless propaganda and no clarity. They fail as individuals and
as a group because they are spineless. If multiple people repeat the same lie it does not make it true. It must be a club membership
requirement to play the politics game and keep quiet about wrong things you see.
SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 15:54
Action man outwitting the Neocons in the international chess game. More surprises to come
CIAbot007 -> Poppy757 7 Oct 2015 15:39
Most of Aussies have a bit of common sense which says that you can't blame anyone before it is prooved. With Western MSM propaganda
machine blaming Russia and Putin even before anything happens you bet there's no such thing as balanced and unskewed reporting
and even will for any kind of such thing. Don't get fooled, use your brain or your brain will be used by someone else.
SilkverBlogger 7 Oct 2015 14:48
Karl Rove said "Empire creates its own reality". No wonder the mantra "Assad must go" is now enshrined in international
politics by the Neocon alliance. They didnt figure on Putin obviously.
PekkaRoivanen MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:30
In the West, we don't have a sycophantic press kissing the leader's backside:
Guardian: Barack Obama scores just 2 out of 22 basketball hoops - video
You wrote that Obama plays basketball and you prove it with this video where Obama wears dress shirt (tie removed :-D) and
scores badly.
Are you sure Obama plays basketball? Or is it just press kissing his backside?
Kev Kev Hektor Uranga 7 Oct 2015 14:28
the USA persecutes and kills people who speak out against it. Only difference is the USA does it in ways that nobody sees..
In other words the USA is the same as Russia only they do their work in the dark. When nobody is looking.
Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:26
That's the guy who is wishing Putin a happy birthday.
The US/UK duo have caused with their insane illegal wars more than a million deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, and
counting.
I recommend you look up a little the complex history and present situation in Chechnya and the North Caucasus region.
ISIS (which the insanely aggressive US/UK duo have in effect created) is already spreading its influence INSIDE the Russian
Federation. So Putin has direct interests to defeat ISIS and stabilise Syria (and Iraq). In addition, the south of the Russian
Federation is on the map of territories which ISIS plans to conquer.
See for example:
-
8 ISIS supporters killed in N. Caucasus special op
(2 August 2015)
Russian security forces have foiled a terrorist group that recently pledged allegiance to ISIS in Ingushetia, in the Northern
Caucasus, according to the National Anti-Terror Committee (NAC). Security forces seized explosives, weapons and over 2,000 rounds
of ammunition.
-
How Russian Militants Declared A New ISIS 'State' In Russia's North Caucasus
(26 June 2015)
The Islamic State group announced the creation of its northernmost province this week, after accepting a formal pledge of allegiance
from former al Qaeda militants in the North Caucasus region of Russia.
-
-
It is true that at present, the Chechens are begging Putin to let them strike in Syria (and this is also closely linked to the
complicated history of North Caucasus), but Putin has not unleashed them. See for example here:
-
-
Kadyrov asks Putin to allow Chechen infantry to fight in Syria (RT, 2 October 2015)
-
The head of the Chechen Republic has asked the Russian president to send Chechen units to fight Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL)
in Syria, adding that his fighters have sworn to fight terrorists till the end.
"Being a Muslim, a Chechen and a Russian patriot I want to say that in 1999 when our republic was overrun with these devils
we swore on the Koran that we would fight them wherever they are," the Chechen leader said. "But we need the Commander-in-Chief's
decision to do this," he emphasized. According to the Russian Constitution, the president [Putin] is also the commander-in-chief
of the military forces.
BMWAlbert clanview46 7 Oct 2015 14:26
It happens regardless, take the example in Volgograd (Vauxhall) two years ago. I am afraid that KSA and the Gulf States
will be funding the usual mix of 'moderately terroristic shenanigans" in reprisal, but they did this before anyways.
Julian1972 MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:21
That was last year...also it was authored by a combination of the CIA and their right-wing 'Operation Stay Behind' cohorts...though,
if you don't know that by now you doubtless never will.
Abiesalba MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:16
Murderers, thieves and embezzlers stroking each other's egos.
Putin has a long way to go to match the US/UK.
-
-
Here is a recent report about 'collateral damage' compiled by Physicians for Social Responsibility, Physicians for Global Survival
and the Nobel Prize-winning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War:
-
Body Count: Casualty Figures After 10 Years of the 'War on Terror' (Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan)
(March 2015)
-
This investigation comes to the conclusion that the war has, directly or indirectly, killed around 1 million people in Iraq, 220,000
in Afghanistan and 80,000 in Pakistan, i.e. a total of around 1.3 million.
NOT included in this figure are further war zones such as Yemen.
The figure is approximately 10 times greater than that of which the public, experts and decision makers are aware of and propagated
by the media and major NGOs.
And this is only a conservative estimate. The total number of deaths in the three countries named above could also be in excess
of 2 million, whereas a figure below 1 million is extremely unlikely.
-
-
For more about civilian casualties due to the US-led coalition strikes in Syria and Iraq, see the Airwars website:
584 – 1,720 civilians killed:
To date, the international coalition has only conceded two "likely" deaths, from an event in early November 2014. It is also
presently investigating seven further incidents of concern; is carrying out credibility assessments on a further 13; and has concluded
three more investigations – having found no 'preponderance of evidence' to support civilian casualty claims.
More Power -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:13
He making the US looked like whiny bitches. Good job; you alienate Russia and manage to strengthen the China-Russo relationrelationship.
Sanctions that don't work, secret economic wars and multiple failed coup d'etat in Georgia and Ukraine [also do not work].
Just look at the World Bank, BRICS is on the door step. Happy birth day Putin. A badass mofo
blueskis -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 14:06
The vats majority of the 5500 killed have been civilians in East Ukraine killed by airstrikes ordered by kiev/washington, fully
justifying Russian intervention.
ooTToo -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:40
Like US - Hospital - Afganistain. anyway ISIS are paid money by the CIA and don't care who they work for it's money that
they are motivated by not ideology, that ideology stuff is made-up. Google it and dig, get yourself informed.
geedeesee -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:19
Russia is attacking what they said they'd attack, Tavernier. ISIS, al-Nusrah, and other terrorist organisations.
inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:18
No he isn't. Anybody with a functioning brain knows he had nothing to do with that. Unlike the US genocide in the Middle East
- over 2 million dead and counting - not to mention the deliberate and sustained attack on a hospital. Maybe you don' get to see
the news in your ward?
inconvenienttruth13 -> MTavernier 7 Oct 2015 13:13
The US created, funds, trains and arms ISIS - they are only supporting terrorists in their campaign to effect regime change.
Russia is responding to a request fro the Syrian government, so its actions are entirely legal. The faces that the USA and the
KSA are the biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world.
monteverdi1610 7 Oct 2015 12:22
Not quite sure why Mr Putin playing ice-hockey on his birthday is worthy of a story to open up for comments unless the
Guardian is ' trawling ' to encourage some new anti-Putin Cold War rhetoric in the comments section.
PS / Don't forget that nice Israeli Prime Minister Mr Netanyahu's birthday and how he celebrates it. Ensure you open it
up for comment as I'm sure also that many will wish to voice an opinion. Will this now be a standard ' Birthday Feature ' for
all world leaders in the Guardian, or has this newspaper just granted an exception for Mr Putin's birthday ?
Foreign policy is no longer controlled by the President of the USA. It is controlled by the Deep state.
This article is from 2015 but can easily be written about Trump administration
Notable quotes:
"... Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis communautaire). ..."
"... First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state" officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way? ..."
"... In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe, while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule". ..."
"... Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently in Ukraine. ..."
"... Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all. ..."
"... Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant, ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. ..."
"... Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. ..."
"... Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos – such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine – Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. ..."
"... 'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'. ..."
"... "We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED] ..."
Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy... European
democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy
The avalanche of commentary since the Ukrainian crisis erupted a year ago has overshadowed any reflections on the immense forgone
benefits (technically speaking, the "opportunity cost") of what might have been if Washington had been working for peace and stability
instead of war and chaos.
Imagine the following: After the unraveling of the Communist bloc, Europe, in partnership with the US, had forged a new security
system in which Russia was treated as a valued and equal partner – one whose interests were respected. Russia, decimated by a century
of wars and Communist imperialism, would doubtless have eagerly reciprocated in kind. Most countries of the former Soviet Union would
have then proceeded to build a new Eurasian structure of which Russia would have served as the natural umbrella, given its long-standing
interaction with the region's diverse nations and cultures.
Indeed, as Putin himself had proposed in his visionary October 2011 article, the Eurasian Union could have become one of the
pillars of a huge harmonized economic area stretching from Lisbon to Vladivostok and based on the EU's single-market rules (acquis
communautaire).
The rising Far Eastern economic powerhouse, with the world's most populous country, China, at its centre, would have linked up
with the world's largest economy (the EU). An enormous Eurasian production and financial bloc would have been created – one that
drew primarily on secure supplies of Russian energy and other natural resources. Untold investment opportunities would have opened
up in Siberia and Russia's Far East as well as in Central Asia. Hundreds of millions of people in Eurasia and elsewhere would have
been lifted out of poverty. And, not least, the EU would have been refashioned as an integral part of the dynamic trans-Eurasian
economy (rather than as a German-centred empire, as appears to be the case today), thereby making a major contribution to overcoming
the ongoing global economic depression.
All of this was not to be, however. Why not? First and foremost, because the self-proclaimed "exceptional" power (actually, a
mere "outlying island" in the Atlantic, according to the founder of geopolitics, Halford Mackinder) and its dysfunctional "deep-state"
officialdom did not want it to be. How could they have permitted such a thing? How could they have allowed other countries to
get on with improving the lives of their citizens without being obliged to seek Washington's approval every step of the way?
European democracy is threatened by US, not Russian, foreign policy
In order to make sure that they were not side-lined, the US elites had to intervene. The Western propaganda machine started
churning out all sorts of nonsense that Putin is a new Hitler who is bent on restoring the Soviet empire and who is bullying Europe,
while continuing to bang on about his "increasingly autocratic rule".
Deadly attacks by chauvinistic proxies were launched on the Russophone people in South Ossetia, Georgia in 2008 and more recently
in Ukraine.
And in what is eerily reminiscent of Stalinist "bloc discipline", the EU/NATO nomenclature was ordered to implement the absurd
strategy of severing the Russian economy from the EU. For their part, the cowering Eurocrats willingly obliged by imposing sanctions
on Russia that, perversely, have had a negative impact on their own economies (but, let it be stressed, not that of the US). No questions
raised and no public debate on the wisdom of such a strategy permitted.
Stuck in an Orwellian nightmare, Europe has to demonstrate its unfailing loyalty to Big Brother and go along with the view
that Russia, an intrinsic and valuable part of the European mainstream both historically and culturally, represents universal evil
and that the Earth will not be safe until the Federation has been dismembered and Putinism wiped out once and for all.
This abuse and humiliation of Europe is unparalleled. The continent that gave the world the wonders of the Antiquity, modern democracy,
the industrial revolution and what is arguably the greatest tradition of philosophy, fine arts and classical music is being bullied
by its oversized offspring. Having self-destructed in two world wars, it has become an easy and even willing prey to an arrogant,
ignorant and power-drunk predator that has never experienced the hardships and horrors that Europe has. War and extermination
camps are etched into the European DNA. America "knows" about them only from afar – and, not least, from the Hollywood entertainment
industry.
Even more terrifying, intellectually third-rate Washington viceroys such as Victoria Nuland and the freelancing armchair warrior
Senator McCain are allowed to play God with our continent. The so-called European "leaders" are colluding with them in plunging
Europe into the abyss and thereby risking nuclear confrontation.
America, too, is a loser
But this is not just a tragedy for Europe and Eurasia. We are also witnessing the wilful misrule of America and, by default, of
the entire West. Indeed, Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy. The
"democracy-promoters" running Washington's foreign-policy apparatus apparently do not understand that America has nothing to lose
and a lot to gain from the Eurasian economic project: the rising tide of global economic welfare would lift everyone's boats, including
its own. Why should it matter to Washington if the rising tide comes from other quarters beyond its control?
Indeed, the damage extends beyond the economy. By aligning with the forces of chaos – such as chauvinistic extremists in Ukraine
– Washington and its Euro-vassals are corrupting the moral (and intellectual) core of the West. If it continues to support such
forces against Russia, united Europe will lose not only its backbone but its very soul. The moral consequences of this loss will
be enormous and could lead to the precipitous erosion of Western democracy.
The 'autocrats' want to work with the West, not against it
US and EU leaders believe that the Russian and Chinese "autocrats" are out to destroy the West because the latter hate freedom
(as George W. Bush might have put it). And hence, they argue, the autocrats must be stopped in their tracks. The simple truth is
that Western leaders are too blinkered to understand that far from desiring to destroy the West, Russia and China want it to prosper
so that they can work with it to everyone's benefit. Having enjoyed a privileged position over several centuries and having attained
unprecedented prosperity in recent decades, the West simply cannot understand that the rest of humanity has no interest in fomenting
the "clash of civilizations" but rather craves peace and stability so that it can finally improve its economic lot.
Perhaps, however, all is not yet lost. It is still possible that reason – and economic forces – will prevail and force the West
to correct the errors of its ways. What we need, perhaps, more than ever is the ability to step out of the box, question our fundamental
assumptions (not least about Russia and China) and find the courage to change policies that have proved disastrous. After all, critical
thought, dispassionate analysis and the ability to be open to new ideas is what made the West so successful in the past. If we are
to thrive once again in the future, we must resurrect these most valuable and unsurpassed assets.
What I cannot understand is the naive belief that elected politicians would act in the interests of those whom they represent.
Under what other circumstances do we see human beings act with disinterested altruism? So why would a bunch of people who have
been ruthlessly selected for selfishness, arrogance, and callousness - a bunch of carefully chosen psychopaths, if you will -
behave in that way?
'My Ph.D. dissertation chairman, who became a high Pentagon official assigned to wind down the Vietnam war, in answer to
my question about how Washington gets Europeans to always do what Washington wants replied: "Money, we give them money." "Foreign
aid?" I asked. "No, we give the European political leaders bagfuls of money. They are for sale. We bought them. They report to
us." Perhaps this explains Tony Blair's $50 million fortune one year out of office'.
- Paul Craig Roberts
jabirujoe
"Washington is betraying the best interests of the American people through its current foreign policy".
Not only it's foreign policy but it's domestic policy as well. Let's call it for what it really is. The Wall Street/Corporate
policy which is the driving force behind behind everything the US does
Toddrich
"We, the [CENSORED] people, control America and the Americans know it." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]
"When we're done with the U.S. it will shrivel up and blow away." -- Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of [CENSORED]
The welfare or future of the American people are not part of the equation.
"... "If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela. So not a smooth short % decline rate." ..."
"... Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has soared (expected to top $250T in 2019). ..."
"... Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since it will be a push over compared to Iran. ..."
"If that was to happen and no energy source can cover the decline rate, wouldn't the world be pretty fucked economically
thereafter? Hence one can assume or take a wild ass guess that the decline after peak would resemble something like Venezuela.
So not a smooth short % decline rate."
Energy is the economy, The economy cannot function without energy. Thus its logical that a decline in energy supply will reduce
the economy. The only way for this not to apply is if there are efficiency gains that offset the decline. But at this point the
majority of cost effective efficiency gains are already in place. At this point gains become increasing expensive with much smaller
gains (law of diminishing returns). Major infrastructure changes like modernizing rail lines take many decades to implement and
also require lots of capital. Real capital needed will be difficult to obtain do to population demographics (ie boomers dependent
on massive unfunded entitlement & pensions).
Realistically the global economy is already in a tight spot. It started back in 2000 when Oil prices started climbing from
about $10/bbl in 1998 to about $30/bbl in 2000. Then the World Major Central banks dropped interest which ended triggering the
Housing Boom\Bust and carried Oil prices to $147/bbl. Since then Interest rates have remained extremely low while World Debt has
soared (expected to top $250T in 2019).
My guess is that global economy will wipe saw in the future as demographics, resource depletion (including Oil) and Debt all
merge into another crisis. Gov't will act with more cheap and easy credit (since there is no alterative TINA) as well as QE\Asset
buying to avoid a global depression. This creating a wipesaw effect that has already been happening since 2000 with Boom Bust
cycles. This current cycle has lasted longer because the Major central banks kept interest rates low, When The Fed started QT
and raising rate it ended up triggering a major stock market correction In Dec 2018. I believe at this point the Fed will no longer
seek any further credit tightening that will trip the economy back into recession. However its likely they the global economy
will fall into another recession as consumers & business even without further credit tighting by CB (Central Banks) Because they've
been loading up on cheap debt, which will eventually run into issues servicing their debt. For instance there are about 7M auto
loans in delinquency in March of 2019. Stock valuations are largely driven by stock buybacks, which is funded by debt. I presume
companies are close to debt limit which is likely going to prevent them from purchase more stock back.
Probably the biggest concern for me is the risking risks for another World war: The US has been targeting all of the major
Oil exporters. The two remaining independent targets are Venezuela & Iran. I suspect Venzuela will be the next US take over since
it will be a push over compared to Iran. I think once all of remaining independent Oil Exports are seized that is when the
major powers start fighting each other. However is possible that some of the proxy nations (Pakastan\India),(Israel\Iran), etc
trigger direct war between the US, China, and Russia at any time.
Notice that the US is now withdrawing from all its major arms treaties, and the US\China\Russia are now locked into a Arms
race. Nuclear powers are now rebuilding their nuclear capacity (more Nukes) and modernizing their deployment systems (Hypersonic,
Very large MIRV ICBMS, Undersea drones, Subs, Bombers, etc.
My guess is that nations like the US & China will duke it out before collapsing into the next Venezuela. If my assessment is
correct, The current state of Venezuela will look like the garden of Eden compared to the aftermath of a full scale nuclear war.
Currently the Doomsday clock (2019) is tied with 1953 at 2 minutes:
1953 was the height of the cold war. I presume soon the Doomsday clock will be reduced to less than 2 Minutes later this
year, due to recent events in the past few weeks.
"the world's nuclear nations proceeded with programs of "nuclear modernization" that are all but indistinguishable from
a worldwide arms race, and the military doctrines of Russia and the United States have increasingly eroded the long-held taboo
against the use of nuclear weapons."
" The current international security situation -- what we call the "new abnormal" -- has extended over two years now.
It's a state as worrisome as the most dangerous times of the Cold War, a state that features an unpredictable and shifting
landscape of simmering disputes that multiply the chances for major military conflict to erupt."
Credibility of the US government and Justice system was greatly undermined, if not destroyed
by the Russiagate. Inability to investigate more plausible election interference by British an,
Saudi and Israeli actors by Mueller paints him as a despicable political operative working for
Clintons, not an independent Prosecutor, who diligently investigate the foreign interference in
elections.
The role of Rosenstein is the role of co-conspirator in a plot to deprive Trump of the
Presidency or, at least, for force him to pursue the Deep State foreign policy, which is totally
bankrupt policy. And they succeeded in this. Trump wet kiss with neocons was probably the part of
the deal.
Notable quotes:
"... When even Trump who was the victim of the machinations cares only to tweet witch hunt, why would anyone expect that any of those involved in the attempted "coup" would be held to account? ..."
"... I wondered about that myself. When I was doing clan work in Europe, recruiting UK citizens was absolutely forbidden. I needed special dispensation from Bonn Station to not declare my Russian assets to the Brits when they merely traveled to the UK. I think Steele's relationship with the FBI was not as a standard recruited asset or informer. It was a business contract. An article from a year ago sheds some light on that relationship. The first instance concerns his assistance in the FIFA investigation. ..."
When even Trump who was the victim of the machinations cares only to tweet witch hunt, why
would anyone expect that any of those involved in the attempted "coup" would be held to
account?
No one is going to face any consequences - legal or other. Hell, most of them will make money
from writing books about their "dedicated service." When was the last time the swamp applied
the laws to one of it's own. Answer: never.
The laws are enforced on us - the "deplorables out there," not the swamp creature
"elite." We are not governed, we are ruled.
And sadly that situation is as much the result of an indifferent and ignorant populace as
the behavior of the ruling class.
"One other important sidetone--there has been a longstanding agreement among the 5 Eyes
(i.e., US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) to NOT recruit as assets each other's
spies. Christopher Steele's employ with the FBI violates this policy."
I see Steele's surfacing again. Might I put in a minor query. Does this longstanding
agreement cover retired personnel?
I wondered about that myself. When I was doing clan work in Europe, recruiting UK citizens
was absolutely forbidden. I needed special dispensation from Bonn Station to not declare my
Russian assets to the Brits when they merely traveled to the UK. I think Steele's
relationship with the FBI was not as a standard recruited asset or informer. It was a
business contract. An article from a year ago sheds some light on that relationship. The
first instance concerns his assistance in the FIFA investigation.
"Steele might have been expected to move on once his investigation of the bidding was
concluded. But he had discovered that the corruption at FIFA was global, and he felt that it
should be addressed. The only organization that could handle an investigation of such scope,
he felt, was the F.B.I. In 2011, Steele contacted an American agent he'd met who headed the
Bureau's division for serious crimes in Eurasia. Steele introduced him to his sources, who
proved essential to the ensuing investigation. In 2015, the Justice Department indicted
fourteen people in connection with a hundred and fifty million dollars in bribes and
kickbacks."
The second instance of Steele's cooperation with the FBI even had a peripheral
relationship with Trump. "Several years ago, the FBI hired Steele to help crack an
international gambling and money-laundering ring purportedly run by a suspected Russian
organized-crime figure named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov. The syndicate was based in an apartment
in Trump Tower. Eventually, federal officials indicted more than thirty co-conspirators for
financial crimes. Tokhtakhounov, though, eluded arrest, becoming a fugitive. Interpol issued
a "red notice" calling for his arrest. But, in the fall of 2013, he showed up at the Miss
Universe contest in Moscow -- and sat near the pageant's owner, Donald Trump."
According to the New Yorker magazine article, it was standard Orbis procedure to warn
authorities about national security threats. Steele warned German authorities about IS
militants using the refugee flow to infiltrate Europe. "When Steele took his suspicions about
Trump to the FBI in the summer of 2016, it was in keeping with Orbis protocol, rather than a
politically driven aberration."
Within the FBI, I'm sure Steele was coded as a source in some way as a standard procedure
to use his information. We did the same with our non-asset sources in DOD. Hell, I was even
coded as an intelligence asset when I was a SMU operative/case officer. This was different
from the reporter number all case officers are given.
Philip Giraldi, on March 13, 2018, has an essay about this New Yorker article: 'Christopher
Steele as seen by the New Yorker. Liberal fantasies beatify the messenger.' This is in the
Unz Review.
www.unz.com/pgiraldi/christ... .
Mayer doesn't mention that Steele was almost certainly identified as MI6 during the
years (possibly 1990-1993) that he was stationed in Moscow under diplomatic cover. Russian
counterintelligence agents broke into his apartment, used the toilet, left it unflushed; they
stole his wife's best shoes. He was definitely identified by 1999 when he was in Paris. There
was a DSMA notice. Too late. Then, in 2006, when Steele is said to have had the Russia desk,
there was the highly embarrassing electronic spy rock in a Moscow park. Surely he held some
responsibility for that? And if Steele was a Russian expert why were his talents being wasted
in Afghanistan?
John Helmer quotes some old intelligence hands who deny that he was a particularly
impressive agent or was deeply knowledgeable about Russia. Steele never went back to Russia
after 1992 or 1993. Mayer, in the New Yorker article, makes no mention of what surely were
setbacks for British intelligence regarding Russia in which Steele likely was playing a large
part.
We've been here before in this discussion. The question remains-- was Steele an unwitting
puppet of a Russian master counterstrike, an aikido throw which has badly shaken and
distracted America? DH, we await your comments. Has TTG gone wobbly?
I'm also fairly certain RIS was aware of Steele's status as an MI6 officer when he was
stationed in Moscow. I would think anyone working out of a diplomatic embassy is first
assumed to be an intelligence officer by the host nation. I stayed away from embassies and
other government facilities just to avoid that taint. The one time I was summoned to an
embassy, I conducted extensive surveillance detection measures both before and after the
visit and I wore a disguise.
It was a normal matter for intelligence officers to be cycled through Afghanistan and Iraq
post 9-11, no matter what their former expertise. I did my turn. CIA's "Russia House" was
bitter about their fall from the pinnacle to be replaced by all things CT during that
time.
Was some of the raw information in Steele's dossier planted by RIS? That's very possible.
Several experienced former US intelligence officers have voiced that possibility, especially
about the more salacious bits of the dossier.
That's a nice piece in the New Yorker. They mention the golden shower episode in Moscow,
however, left out Loretta Lynch. "In was in her role as district attorney that her
involvement in the Fifa investigation began. Over the course of five years in Brooklyn..."
See the BBC article on FIFA from 2015: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32912118
So did Loretta Lynch talk to Christopher Steele during this case or did Steele just
talk to the FBI agent who was years later in London? When did then US attorney for New York's
Eastern District Lorretta Lynch get informed and by which FBI agent? Who did that agent tell
about the Steele dossier, when did it get to the AG's ears, and when did she tell
Obama?
"On January 5, 2017, it became clear that at least two Washingtonians remained in the dark
about the dossier: the President and the Vice-President. " Oh, apparently AG Lynch never told
Obama, because????????
Another New Yorker Enigma: "Robert Hannigan, then the head of the U.K.'s intelligence
service the G.C.H.Q., had recently flown to Washington and briefed the C.I.A.'s director,
John Brennan, on a stream of illicit communications between Trump's team and Moscow that had
been intercepted. (The content of these intercepts has not become public.) "
So the UK has been spying on US Presidential candidates? Oh, they said they were "illicit"
communications. What does that mean? Who was communicating with Whom? And how did G.C.H.Q.
decide these communications were "illicit" but others, well they'd have to have them all to
make a comparison, wouldn't they? Put a ribbon on top of that one. DId they also intercept
any of Hilary's communications?
Given that Steele played an important role in at least two major FBI investigations
leading to multiple indictments, I would assume Lynch knew about Steele. Whether they ever
conversed, I don't know.
Comey was not at all sure about Lynch's impartiality. It would not surprise me if he kept
details of the Russian investigation, including the dossier, from her. She probably learned
about it shortly before Obama and Trump were briefed on the dossier. Obama knew enough about
the Russian investigation, without the dossier, to warn Putin to knock it off in September
2016.
I don't know if the Brits spied on our Presidential candidates. I wouldn't doubt it. We
bugged Merkel's phone. What I am sure of is that the Brits spy on every Russian of importance
within their capabilities. If Trump's campaign was in contact with those Russians, the Brits
would know about it. They obviously thought those conversations were illicit enough to inform
their US counterparts and reveal that they did monitor members of the Trump campaign. They
wouldn't have done that just for shits and giggles.
"They obviously thought those conversations were illicit enough to inform their US
counterparts and reveal that they did monitor members of the Trump campaign."
They thought it illicit? Listening is one thing, giving information to aid your country's
government's preferred candidate is interference in an election process - ours. How many
times has our ally the UK interfered with US elections? They had plenty of help from the FBI
and DOJ here in the US in 2016. Who elected GCHQ to be arbiters of US elections? I can't
find them in the US Constitution. Using the FBI and DOJ to sabatouge your party's political
opponents, that's third world government standards.
If the Brits wanted to directly influence the election, they would have publicly released
their information about "illicit' contacts. Keeping it within intelligence channels does
nothing to influence an election. I would hope the Brits would never hold back on information
concerning a possible CI threat.
TTG - thank you for your reply above. The picture one gets of Steele is no longer that of
a loose canon who somehow got himself involved in a presidential election campaign. It is
that of an experienced and respected professional working in tandem, if perhaps
unconventionally, with other professionals.
And perhaps thinking that he or his contacts back home had stumbled over important
information showing that a presidential candidate was compromised. That information possibly
being the tip of the iceberg and urgently demanding further investigation.
But that makes what happened all the more unusual -
1. Why didn't the further investigation happen? Surely the fact that such an important
matter wasn't thoroughly investigated, and that using all possible resources in the States
and abroad, shows that it was no serious investigation in the first place?
And more to the point here -
2. If those involved were professionals working away soberly at a necessary investigation,
what were they doing suddenly branching out into a smear campaign?
For none, even the originators of the dossier, are claiming that the more discreditable
part of the Steele dossier is true. That is not Intelligence material. It is sensationalised
smear material.
This objection has been met in part with the claim that the dossier was all raw unsifted
Intelligence and therefore was released as is.
But surely experienced Intelligence professionals don't suddenly pitch raw unsifted
Intelligence into the middle of the political arena while they are supposed to be still
assessing that intelligence?
Irrespective of the question of whether Trump was compromised the question therefore
arises - what were American officials doing running a smear campaign against a presidential
candidate?
Which leads back to the original question. What officials this side of the Atlantic were
also involved, and how high did the authorisation for their involvement go in England.
.
On a matter I'm better informed about, I don't see the Colonel quietly farming away in
Kent. I see him striding across the limitless expanse of a Scottish grouse moor. If our lot
had known their business they'd have worked that into their offer.
The counterintelligence investigation was in progress through the lead up to the 2016
election and is still in progress. Through 2016, it was done in a remarkably quiet fashion.
That's how these investigations are supposed to work. No one hears about them until there is
an arrest or indictment. That's how Mueller is running his investigation. We hear nothing
from him except for the indictments already issued. And they are characteristically slow and
methodical, usually spanning years before an arrest is made.
None of this investigation, including Steele's reporting was used in a pre-election smear
campaign. In my opinion, the reason the Obama administration did not publicize the idea of
Russian interference with the election and possible involvement of Trump campaign officials
is that it would surely have been seen as a partisan smear campaign. The public did not hear
of the Steele dossier until well after the election was over.
It was not just British intelligence involved in collecting on Russian interference in
the election. The Estonians, the Dutch, the Australians and probably others contributed to
the intelligence picture. We may not learn the full extent of that cooperation for many
years. Given the changing nature of information warfare and social media manipulation, I
sincerely wish the full extent of that intelligence is made public quickly. Sure that would
probably also cramp Western media manipulation capabilities, of which we are far from
innocent, but the sunlight would help inoculate all of us against this malignant
phenomenon.
The retirement farm and the big stipend sounds pretty good. I could do without the best club
and the career assistance. Sounds like they appreciated you a lot more than DIA.
DIA made me an SES-4 with presidential rank (Distinguished). Looks like the Brits expected me
to have a lot of access. They claimed these guys were off the reservation. and that they were
not authorized to pitch me.
Off the reservation my ass. I would say those Brits were a bunch of cheeky blokes who did not
do a thorough enough job of assessing your susceptibility to recruitment.
You seem more upset over this than I was. We accepted their false statements of innocence
betrayed by their own and went right on working with them. Why would they try this? Simple.
As we do they wanted to know what we were not telling them. everyone does it. A basic
principle. Recruit your liaison.
You're right. I never worked out of an embassy or in any long term liaison function. If I was
the target of such a pitch, it would have meant that I was blown along with any operations I
was involved with. For me, it would have been life altering.
Thanks for this. I am wondering what Larry Johnson and the other members of this Committee of
Correspondence make of the possible connection between Christopher Steele, Pablo Miller, and
Sergei Skripal?
Some of Craig Murray's speculations in his latest post on the Skripal incident
regarding the coordinated role of Orbis Intelligence, the BBC, and the British state (which
issued a DSMA notice prohibiting press mention of Pablo Miller) are quite plausible. Murray
is, like the members of this committee, a veteran of the game....
Was Skripal coerced/encouraged by Miller to serve as one of Steele's unattributed
Russian "sources"? Did he later get cold feet? Or did he later attempt to buy his way back
into Russia with the claim that he could provide proof that the Dossier was a fraud? Or was
he working as a triple agent the whole time? Were the two sightseeing Russians "Borishov" and
"Petrov" sent to retrieve something from Skripal?
Try this. This theory ties together all the incoherencies of the official explanation better
than anything I have seen. And, I'm pleased to see it is getting reprinted here and
there.
https://michaelantonyblog.w...
I concur. This is the most plausible explanation of what really happened in Salisbury that I
have read so far.
Colonel - might this theory be worth a dedicated SST post? It is 5,000 words, so perhaps
Patrick, David Habakkuk, or another interested member of the committee would be happy to
summarize the salient details (e.g. that Borisov & Petrov intended to return to Russia
with Sergei Skripal). The author's contact details are in the comments section re reprint
rights.
Intellectually Max Boot is a loud mouth nothing. I wonder how he managed to graduate from a prestigious university. he might be
able to work as copywriters, but not above that.
Neocon didn't "get it wrong." They understood that this is wrong. It was all about money for MIC which as lobbyists of MIC is
their first priority. That's why they lied the American people into wars. They are war criminals. They should be tried for
war crimes.
Tom Gorman (Feb 15, 8:36 am)–as evidence that Max Boot "has recanted his support of the
Iraq War"–quoted two sentences from Boot's 2018 book. Two sentences earlier in the same
book Boot wrote:
"In truth the decision to go to war had been made by President George W. Bush, in
consultation with colleagues such as Dick Cheney, Condolezza Rice, Colin Powell, and Don
Rumsfeld, none of whom was remotely a 'neocon.'
Those of us who supported the invasion were,
as one of my friends said, like hapless passengers who got into a vehicle with a drunk driver
and could not escape as the car careened across the center divider."
This is anold, 2015 article that is still rrrelenet today. Well written overview of British policies toward Russia
Notable quotes:
"... Lyndon LaRouche has observed that anybody acting according to this British agenda with the intention of coming out on top is a fool, since the British financial-political empire is bankrupt and its entire system is coming down. ..."
"... EU: British imperial interests are intent on destroying Prime Minister Putin's bid for the Presidency, and throwing Russia into deadly political turmoil. ..."
"... In her testimony, Diuk came off like a reincarnation of a 1950s Cold Warrior, raving against the Russian government as "authoritarian," "dictators," and so forth. She said, "The trend lines for freedom and democracy in Russia have been unremittingly negative since Vladimir Putin took power and set about the systematic construction of a representation of their interests within the state." She announced at that point that the elections would be illegitimate: "[T]he current regime will likely use the upcoming parliamentary elections in December 2011 and presidential election in March 2012 with the inevitable falsifications and manipulations, to claim the continued legitimacy of its rule." ..."
"... The British-educated Nadia Diuk is vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy, from which perch she has spread "Cold War" venom against Putin and the Russian government. ..."
"... Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert, two top profilers of the Russian Internet, noted that the Runet grew five times faster than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East, in 2000-08. ..."
"... NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny (inset), the online "anti-corruption" activist and cult figure of the December demonstrations. Addressing crowds on the street, Navalny sounds more like Mussolini than a proponent of democracy. A Russian columnist found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic. Shown: the Dec. 24 demonstration in Moscow. ..."
January 9, 2012 -Organizers of the December 2011 "anti-vote-fraud" demonstrations in Moscow have announced Feb. 4 as the date
of their next street action, planned as a march around the city's Garden Ring Road on the 22nd anniversary of a mass demonstration
which paved the way to the end of the Soviet Union. While there is a fluid situation within both the Russian extraparliamentary opposition
layers, and the ruling circles and other Duma parties, including a process of "dialogue" between them, in which ex-Finance Minister
Alexei Kudrin is playing a role, it is clear that British imperial interests are intent on-if not actually destroying Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin's bid for reelection as Russia's President in the March 4 elections-casting Russia into ongoing, destructive political
turmoil.
Lyndon LaRouche has observed that anybody acting according to this British agenda with the intention of coming out on top
is a fool, since the British financial-political empire is bankrupt and its entire system is coming down.
Review of the events leading up to the Dec. 4, 2011 Duma elections, which the street demonstrators demanded be cancelled for fraud,
shows that not only agent-of-British-influence Mikhail Gorbachov, the ex-Soviet President, but also the vast Project Democracy apparatus
inside the United States, exposed by EIR in the 1980s as part of an unconstitutional "secret government,"[1]
have been on full mobilization to block the current Russian leadership from continuing in power.
Project Democracy
Typical is the testimony of Nadia Diuk, vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), before the Subcommittee
on Europe and Eurasia of the U.S. House Committee on Foreign Affairs last July 26. The NED is the umbrella of Project Democracy;
it functions, inclusively, through the International Republican Institute (IRI, linked with the Republican Party) and the National
Democratic Institute (NDI, linked with the Democratic Party, and currently headed by Madeleine Albright).
Diuk was educated at the U.K.'s Unversity of Sussex Russian studies program, and then taught at Oxford University, before coming
to the U.S.A. to head up the NED's programs in Eastern Europe and Russia beginning 1990. She is married to her frequent co-author,
Adrian Karatnycky of the Atlantic Institute, who headed up the private intelligence outfit Freedom House[2]
for 12 years. Her role is typical of British outsourcing of key strategic operations to U.S. institutions.
EU: British imperial interests are intent on destroying Prime Minister Putin's bid for the Presidency, and throwing Russia
into deadly political turmoil.
In her testimony, Diuk came off like a reincarnation of a 1950s Cold Warrior, raving against the Russian government as "authoritarian,"
"dictators," and so forth. She said, "The trend lines for freedom and democracy in Russia have been unremittingly negative since
Vladimir Putin took power and set about the systematic construction of a representation of their interests within the state." She
announced at that point that the elections would be illegitimate: "[T]he current regime will likely use the upcoming parliamentary
elections in December 2011 and presidential election in March 2012 with the inevitable falsifications and manipulations, to claim
the continued legitimacy of its rule."
Diuk expressed renewed hope that the disastrous 2004 Orange Revolution experiment in Ukraine could be replicated in Russia, claiming
that "when the protests against authoritarian rule during Ukraine's Orange Revolution brought down the government in 2004, Russian
citizens saw a vision across the border of an alternative future for themselves as a Slavic nation." She then detailed what she claimed
were the Kremlin's reactions to the events in Ukraine, charging that "the leaders in the Kremlin-always the most creative innovators
in the club of authoritarians-have also taken active measures to promote support of the government and undermine the democratic opposition...."
Holos Ameryky
The British-educated Nadia Diuk is vice president of the National Endowment for Democracy, from which perch she has spread
"Cold War" venom against Putin and the Russian government.
While lauding "the democratic breakthroughs in the Middle East" in 2011, Diuk called on the Congress to "look to [Eastern Europe]
as the source of a great wealth of experience on how the enemies of freedom are ever on the alert to assert their dominance, but
also how the forces for freedom and democracy will always find a way to push back in a struggle that demands our support."
In September, Diuk chaired an NED event featuring a representative of the NED-funded Levada Center Russian polling organization,
who gave an overview of the then-upcoming December 4 Duma election. Also speaking there was Russian liberal politician Vladimir Kara-Murza,
who predicted in the nastiest tones that Putin will suffer the fate of President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. In this same September period,
Mikhail Gorbachov, too, was already forecasting voting irregularities and a challenge to Putin's dominance.
The NED, which has an annual budget of $100 million, sponsors dozens of "civil society" groups in Russia. Golos, the supposedly
independent vote-monitoring group that declared there would be vote fraud even before the elections took place, has received NED
money through the NDI since 2000. Golos had a piecework program, paying its observers a set amount of money for each reported voting
irregularity. NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny-the online anti-corruption activist and cult figure of the December demonstrations-since
2006, when he and Maria Gaidar (daughter of the late London-trained shock therapy Prime Minister Yegor Gaidar) launched a youth debating
project called "DA!" (meaning "Yes!" or standing for "Democratic Alternative"). Gorbachov's close ally Vladimir Ryzhkov, currently
negotiating with Kudrin on terms of a "dialogue between the authorities and the opposition," also received NED grants to his World
Movement for Democracy.
Besides George Soros's Open Society Foundations (formerly, Open Society Institute, OSI), the biggest source of funds for this
meddling, including funding which was channeled through the NDI and the IRI, is the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).
Officially, USAID has spent $2.6 billion on programs in Russia since 1992. The current acknowledged level is around $70 million annually,
of which nearly half is for "Governing Justly & Democratically" programs, another 30% for "Information" programs, and only a small
fraction for things like combatting HIV and TB. On Dec. 15, Assistant Secretary of State, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs
Philip Gordon announced that the Obama Administration would seek Congressional approval to step up this funding, with "an initiative
to create a new fund to support Russian non-governmental organizations that are committed to a more pluralistic and open society."
Awaiting McFaul
White House/Pete Souza
The impending arrival in Moscow of Michael McFaul (shown here with his boss in the Oval Office), as U.S. Ambassador to Russia,
is seen by many there as an escalation of Project Democracy efforts to destabilize the country.
People from various parts of the political spectrum in Russia see the impending arrival of Michael McFaul as U.S. Ambassador to
Russia as an escalation in Project Democracy efforts to destabilize Russia. McFaul, who has been Barack Obama's National Security
Council official for Russia, has been working this beat since the early 1990s, when he represented the NDI in Russia at the end of
the Soviet period, and headed its office there.
As a Russia specialist at Stanford's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Hoover Institution, as well as the
Carnegie Endowment, and an array of other Russian studies think tanks, McFaul has stuck closely to the Project Democracy agenda.
Financing for his research has come from the NED, the OSI, and the Smith-Richardson Foundation (another notorious agency of financier
interests within the U.S. establishment). He was an editor of the 2006 book Revolution in Orange: The Origins of Ukraine's Democratic
Breakthrough, containing chapters by Diuk and Karatnycky.
In his own contribution to a 2010 book titled After Putin's Russia,[3]
McFaul hailed the 2004 Orange Revolution in Ukraine-which was notoriously funded and manipulated from abroad-as a triumph of "people's
political power from below to resist and eventually overturn a fraudulent election."
Before coming to the NSC, one of McFaul's many positions at Stanford was co-director of the Iran Democracy Project. He has also
been active in such projects as the British Henry Jackson Society which is active in the drive to overthrow the government of Syria.
The Internet Dimension
The December 2011 street demonstrations in Moscow were organized largely online. Participation rose from a few hundred on Dec.
5, the day after the election, to an estimated 20,000 people on Bolotnaya Square Dec. 10, and somewhere in the wide range of 30,000
to 120,000 on Academician Sakharov Prospect Dec. 24.
Headlong expansion of Internet access and online social networking over the past three to five years has opened up a new dimension
of political-cultural warfare in Russia. An EIR investigation finds that British intelligence agencies involved in the current
attempts to destabilize Russia and, in their maximum version, overthrow Putin, have been working intensively to profile online activity
in Russia and find ways to expand and exploit it. Some of these projects are outsourced to think tanks in the U.S.A. and Canada,
but their center is Cambridge University in the U.K.-the heart of the British Empire, home of Bertrand Russell's systems analysis
and related ventures of the Cambridge Apostles.[4]
The scope of the projects goes beyond profiling, as can be seen in the Cambridge-centered network's interaction with Russian anti-corruption
crusader Alexei Navalny, a central figure in the December protest rallies.
While George Soros and his OSI prioritized building Internet access in the former Soviet Union starting two decades ago, as recently
as in 2008 British cyberspace specialists were complaining that the Internet was not yet efficient for political purposes in Russia.
Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism produced a Soros-funded report in 2008, titled "The Web that Failed:
How opposition politics and independent initiatives are failing on the Internet in Russia." The Oxford-Reuters authors regretted
that processes like the Orange Revolution, in which online connections were crucial, had not gotten a toehold in Russia. But they
quoted a 2007 report by Andrew Kuchins of the Moscow Carnegie Center, who found reason for optimism in the seven-fold increase in
Russian Internet (Runet) use from 2000 to 2007. They also cited Robert Orttung of American University and the Resource Security Institute,
on how Russian blogs were reaching "the most dynamic members of the youth generation" and could be used by "members of civil society"
to mobilize "liberal opposition groups and nationalists."
Scarcely a year later, a report by the digital marketing firm comScore crowed that booming Internet access had led to Russia's
having "the world's most engaged social networking audience." Russian Facebook use rose by 277% from 2008 to 2009. The Russia-based
social networking outfit Vkontakte.ru (like Facebook) had 14.3 million visitors in 2009; Odnoklassniki.ru (like Classmates.com) had
7.8 million; and Mail.ru-My World had 6.3 million. All three of these social networking sites are part of the Mail.ru/Digital Sky
Technologies empire of Yuri Milner,[5]
with the individual companies registered in the British Virgin Islands and other offshore locations.
The Cambridge Security Programme
Rafal Rohozinski and Ronald Deibert, two top profilers of the Russian Internet, noted that the Runet grew five times faster
than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East, in 2000-08.
Two top profilers of the Runet are Ronald Deibert and Rafal Rohozinski, who assessed its status in their essay "Control and Subversion
in Russian Cyberspace."[6] At
the University of Toronto, Deibert is a colleague of Barry Wellman, co-founder of the International Network of Social Network Analysis
(INSNA).[7] Rohozinski is a
cyber-warfare specialist who ran the Advanced Network Research Group of the Cambridge Security Programme (CSP) at Cambridge University
in 2002-07. Nominally ending its work, the CSP handed off its projects to an array of organizations in the OpenNet Initiative (ONI),
including Rohozinski's SecDev Group consulting firm, which issues the Information Warfare Monitor.
The ONI, formally dedicated to mapping and circumventing Internet surveillance and filtering by governments, is a joint project
of Cambridge (Rohozinski), the Oxford Internet Institute, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, and
the University of Toronto.
Deibert and Rohozinski noted that the Runet grew five times faster than the next fastest growing Internet region, the Middle East,
in 2000-08. They cited official estimates that 38 million Russians were going online as of 2010, of whom 60 had broadband access
from home; the forecast number of Russia-based Runet users by 2012 was 80 million, out of a population of 140 million. Qualitatively,
the ONI authors welcomed what they called "the rise of the Internet to the center of Russian culture and politics." On the political
side, they asserted that "the Internet has eclipsed all the mass media in terms of its reach, readership, and especially in the degree
of free speech and opportunity to mobilize that it provides."
This notion of an Internet-savvy core of the population becoming the focal point of Russian society is now being hyped by those
who want to push the December demonstrations into a full-scale political crisis. Such writers call this segment of the population
"the creative class," or "the active creative minority," which can override an inert majority of the population. The Dec. 30 issue
of Vedomosti, a financial daily co-owned by the Financial Times of London, featured an article by sociologist Natalya
Zubarevich, which was then publicized in "Window on Eurasia" by Paul Goble, a State Department veteran who has concentrated for decades
on the potential for Russia to split along ethnic or other lines.
Zubarevich proposed that the 31% of the Russian population living in the 14 largest cities, of which 9 have undergone "post-industrial
transformation," constitute a special, influential class, as against the inhabitants of rural areas (38%) and mid-sized industrial
cities with an uncertain future (25%). Goble defined the big-city population as a target: "It is in this Russia that the 35 million
domestic users of the Internet and those who want a more open society are concentrated."
The Case of Alexei Navalny
In the "The Web that Failed" study, Oxford-Reuters authors Floriana Fossato, John Lloyd, and Alexander Verkhovsky delved into
the missing elements, in their view, of the Russian Internet. What would it take, they asked, for Runet participants to be able to
"orchestrate motivation and meaningful commitments"? They quoted Julia Minder of the Russian portal Rambler, who said about the potential
for "mobilization": "Blogs are at the moment the answer, but the issue is how to find a leading blogger who wants to meet people
on the Internet several hours per day. Leading bloggers need to be entertaining.... The potential is there, but more often than not
it is not used."
NED grant money has gone to Alexei Navalny (inset), the online "anti-corruption" activist and cult figure of the December
demonstrations. Addressing crowds on the street, Navalny sounds more like Mussolini than a proponent of democracy. A Russian columnist
found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic. Shown: the Dec. 24 demonstration
in Moscow.
It is difficult not to wonder if Alexei Navalny is a test-tube creation intended to fill the missing niche. This would not be
the first time in recent Russian history that such a thing happened. In 1990, future neoliberal "young reformers" Anatoli Chubais
and Sergei Vasilyev wrote a paper under International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) auspices, on the priorities
for reform in the Soviet Union. They stated that a certain personality was missing on the Soviet scene at that time: the wealthy
businessman. In their IIASA paper, Chubais and Vasilyev wrote: "We now see a figure, arising from historical non-existence: the figure
of a businessman-entrepreneur, who has enough capital to bear the investment responsibility, and enough technological knowledge and
willingness to support innovation."[8]
This type of person was subsequently brought into existence through the corrupt post-Soviet privatization process in Russia, becoming
known as "the oligarchs." Was Navalny, similarly, synthesized as a charismatic blogger to fill the British subversive need for "mobilization"?
Online celebrity Navalny's arrest in Moscow on Dec. 5, and his speech at the Academician Sakharov Prospect rally on Dec. 24 were
highlights of last month's turmoil in the Russian capital. Now 35 years old, Navalny grew up in a Soviet/Russian military family
and was educated as a lawyer. In 2006, he began to be financed by NED for the DA! project (see above). Along the way-maybe through
doing online day-trading, as some biographies suggest, or maybe from unknown benefactors-Navalny acquired enough money to be able
to spend $40,000 (his figure) on a few shares in each of several major Russian companies with a high percentage of state ownership.
This gave him minority-shareholder status, as a platform for his anti-corruption probes.
It must be understood that the web of "corruption" in Russia is the system of managing cash flows through payoffs, string-pulling,
and criminal extortion, which arose out of the boost that Gorbachov's perestroika policy gave to pre-existing Soviet criminal networks
in the 1980s. It then experienced a boom under darlings of London like Gaidar, who oversaw the privatization process known as the
Great Criminal Revolution in the 1990s. As Russia has been integrated into an international financial order, which itself relies
on criminal money flows from the dope trade and strategically motivated scams like Britain's BAE operations in the Persian Gulf,
the preponderance of shady activity in the Russian economy has only increased.
Putin's governments inherited this system, and it can be ended when the commitment to monetarism, which LaRouche has identified
as a fatal flaw even among genuinely pro-development Russians, is broken in Russia and worldwide. The current bankruptcy of the Trans-Atlantic
City of London-Eurozone-Wall Street system means that now is the time for this to happen!
Yale Fellows
In 2010, Navalny was accepted to the Yale World Fellows Program, as one of fewer than 20 approved candidates out of over a thousand
applicants. As EIR has reported, the Yale Fellows are instructed by the likes of British Foreign Office veteran Lord Mark
Malloch-Brown and representatives of Soros's Open Society Foundations.[9]
What's more, the World Fellows Program is funded by The Starr Foundation of Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg, former chairman and CEO
of insurance giant American International Group (AIG), the recipient of enormous Bush Jr.-Obama bailout largesse in 2008-09; Greenberg
and his C.V. Starr company have a long record of facilitating "regime change" (aka coups), going back to the 1986 overthrow of President
Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines. Navalny reports that Maria Gaidar told him to try for the program, and he enjoyed recommendations
from top professors at the New Economic School in Moscow, a hotbed of neoliberalism and mathematical economics. It was from
New Haven that Navalny launched his anti-corruption campaign against Transneft, the Russian national oil pipeline company, specifically
in relation to money movements around the new East Siberia-Pacific Ocean pipeline. The ESPO has just finished the first year of operation
of its spur supplying Russian oil to China.
Navalny presents a split personality to the public. Online he is "Mr. Openness." He posts the full legal documentation of his
corruption exposés. When his e-mail account was hacked, and his correspondence with U.S. Embassy and NED officials about funding
him was made public, Navalny acknowledged that the e-mails were genuine. He tries to disarm interviewers with questions like, "Do
you think I'm an American project, or a Kremlin one?"
During the early-January 2012 holiday lull in Russia, Navalny engaged in a lengthy, oh-so-civilized dialogue in Live Journal with
Boris Akunin (real name, Grigori Chkhartishvili), a famous detective-story author and liberal activist who was another leader of
the December demonstrations, about whether Navalny's commitment to the slogan "Russia for the Russians" marks him as a bigot who
is unfit to lead. Addressing crowds on the street, however, Navalny sounds like Mussolini. Prominent Russian columnist Maxim Sokolov,
writing in Izvestia, found him reminiscent of either Hitler, or Catalina, who conspired against the Roman Republic.
Navalny may well end up being expendable in the view of his sponsors. In the meantime, it is clear that he is working from the
playbook of Gene Sharp, whose neurolinguistic programming and advertising techniques were employed in Ukraine's Orange Revolution
in 2004.[10] Sharp, a veteran
of "advanced studies" at Oxford and 30 years at Harvard's Center for International Affairs, is the author of The Politics of Nonviolent
Action: Power and Struggle, which advises the use of symbolic colors, short slogans, and so forth.
While at Yale, Navalny also served as an informant and advisor for a two-year study conducted at Harvard's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, one of the institutions participating in the OpenNet Initiative, launched out of Cambridge University in the
U.K. The study produced a profile titled "Mapping the Russian Blogosphere," which detailed the different sections of the Runet: liberal,
nationalist, cultural, foreign-based, etc., looking at their potential social impact.
Allen Douglas, Gabrielle Peut, David Christie, and Dorothea Bunnell did research for this article.
[1] "Project Democracy:
The 'parallel government' behind the Iran-Contra affair," Washington, D.C.: EIR Research, Inc., 1987. This 341-page special report
explored the connection between the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the illegal gun-running operations of Col. Oliver
North, et al., which had been mentioned in cursory fashion in the Tower Commission report on that "Iran-Contra" scandal. Lyndon
H. LaRouche, Jr.'s introduction to the report identified the roots of North's "Irangate" gun-running in Henry A. Kissinger's reorganization
of U.S. intelligence under President Richard M. Nixon, in the wake of post-Watergate findings by the 1975 Senate Select Committee
to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee). The process of replacing traditional
intelligence functions of government with National Security Council-centered operations, often cloaked as promoting ``democracy''
worldwide, was continued under the Trilateral Commission-created Administration of Jimmy Carter. Supporting ``democracy''--often
measured by such criteria as economic deregulation and extreme free-market programs, which ravage the populations that are supposedly
being democratized--became an axiom of U.S. foreign policy. The NED itself was founded in 1983.
[2] "Profile:
'Get
LaRouche' Taskforce: Train Salon's Cold War Propaganda Apparat,"EIR, Sept. 29, 2006, reviews the Truman-era roots
of relations among Anglo-American intelligence figures John Train, James Jesus Angleton, Jay Lovestone, and Leo Cherne, all of
whom were later active against LaRouche and his influence. Cherne's International Rescue Committee (IRC) was described by Daniel
Patrick Moynihan, its one-time director of public relations, as an instrument of "psychological warfare." The closely related
Freedom House project was directed by Cherne for many years. Geostrategists such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, who has written that
Russia is destined to fragment as the Soviet Union did, have sat on its board.
[3] Stephen K. Wegren,
Dale Roy Herspring (eds.), After Putin's Russia: Past Imperfect, Future Uncertain, Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010,
p. 118.
[4] Craig Isherwood,
"Universal Principles vs. Sense Certainty," The New Citizen, October/November 2011, p. 12 (http://cecaust.com.au/pubs/pdfs/cv7n6_pages12to14.pdf).
Founded as the Cambridge Conversazione Society in 1820, by Cambridge University professor and advisor to the British East India
Company, the Rev. Charles Simeon, the Apostles are a secret society limited to 12 members at a time. Its veterans have held strategic
intelligence posts for the British Empire, both in the heyday of overt colonialism, and in the continuing financial empire and
anti-science "empire of the mind," for nearly two centuries, during which Cambridge was the elite university in Britain, Trinity
College was the elite college within Cambridge, and the Apostles were the elite within Trinity. Isherwood reported, "Among other
doctrines, the Apostles founded: Fabian socialism; logical positivism specifically against physical chemistry; most of modern
psychoanalysis; all modern economic doctrines, including Keynesianism and post-World War II 'mathematical economics'; modern digital
computers and 'information theory'; and systems analysis. They also founded the world-famous Cavendish Laboratory as the controlling
priesthood for science, to attack Leibniz, Gauss, and Riemann, in particular.... John Maynard Keynes, a leader of the Apostles,
... traced the intellectual traditions of the Apostles back to John Locke and Isaac Newton, and through Newton back to the ancient
priesthood of Babylon." The group's abiding focus on influencing Russia is exemplified by not only Bertrand Russell himself, but
also the involvement of several members of the Apostles, including Lord Victor Rothschild of the banking family, and future Keeper
of the Queen's Pictures Sir Anthony Blunt, in the Anglo-Soviet spy rings of the mid-20th Century.
[5] Billionaire Milner
is a self-described failed physicist. He worked for the World Bank on Russian banking issues in the 1990s, before making his fortune
as one of Russia's newly minted "oligarchs"-a business partner of now-jailed Mikhail Khodorkovsky in the Menatep banking group,
among other projects.
[6] In Access Controlled:
The Shaping of Power, Rights, and Rule in Cyberspace, an OpenNet Initiative (ONI) book, Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2010.
[8] Anatoliy Chubais
and Sergei A. Vasiliev, "Privatization in the USSR: Necessary for Structural Change," in Economic Reform and Integration: Proceedings
of 1-3 March 1990 Meeting, Laxenberg, Austria: IIASA, July 1990. The authors' notion of a charismatic businessman-entrepreneur
comes straight from Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter who coined the term Unternehmergeist, or "entrepreneur-spirit,"
to describe people he called agents of "creative destruction."
Epstein, a billionaire and friend of the Clintons (Bill Clinton flew on his "Lolita
Express" Boeing 727 jet dozens of times), was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for
prostitution. Published
The legal team for Attorney Alan Dershowitz has cautioned against press access to a hearing
regarding his former client and associate, convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein – who was
given a slap on the wrist in 2008 by then-US Attorney for southern Florida (and current Labor
Secretary) Alex Acosta. Epstein, who reportedly has an egg shaped penis , sexually abused dozens of underage girls
in his Palm Beach mansion, while Acosta is under fire separately of the sealed records
appeal.
Epstein, a billionaire and friend of the Clintons (Bill Clinton flew on his "Lolita Express"
Boeing 727 jet dozens of
times ), was convicted of soliciting an underage girl for prostitution – on of two
counts for which he served 13 months in "custody with work release."
Epstein, now 66, reached the deal in 2008 with then-Miami U.S. Attorney Alexander Acosta's
office to end the federal probe that could have landed him in prison for life. Epstein
instead pleaded guilty to lesser state charges, spent 13 months in jail, paid financial
settlements to victims and is a registered sex offender. – Time
Background facts from 2/21/2019 ruling in Jane Doe 1 and Jane Doe 2 vs. United States
The sealed records appeal relates to a 2015 defamation lawsuit in New York brought by
Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre against British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell. Giuffre
says Maxwell helped Epstein traffic herself and other underage girls to sex parties at the
billionaire pedophile's many residences. The case was settled in 2017 and the records were
sealed – leading to an appeal by the Miami Herald and several other parties seeking to
make them public in the hopes of shedding more light on the scope of Epstein's crimes –
along with determining who else was involved and whether any undue influence tainted the case
.
Dershowitz's attorney asked a New York judge whether the media should be barred from
Wednesday's hearing in the US District Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, since " his
oral arguments on behalf of his client could contain sensitive information that has been under
seal ," reports the Miami Herald 's
Julie K. Brown.
The appeals court had not responded to his concern as of Friday, but if the hearing is
closed during his lawyer's argument, it would represent the latest in a long history of
successful efforts to keep details of Epstein's sex crimes sealed .
Two women -- one of whom was underage -- have said Epstein and his partner, British
socialite and environmentalist Ghislaine Maxwell, directed them to have sex with Dershowitz,
80, and other wealthy, powerful men. Dershowitz and Maxwell have denied the claim s. –
Miami
Herald
Dershowitz – having been publicly implicated in Epstein's crimes by Giuffre, attempted
to have the judge to unseal certain records in the case which he claims will exonerate him.
Conservative pundit Mike Cernovich, a Dershowitz associate, also filed a motion to release some
of the sealed documents. Both requests were denied in 2016, as the case (which settled in 2017)
was ongoing, with the judge citing the need to avoid taining a potential jury pool.
After the case was settled, the Herald filed a more extensive motion, arguing that with
the case now closed, all the documents should be made public. The motion, filed in April
2018, came as the Herald was working on an investigative series, Perversion of Justice ,
which detailed how Epstein and his lawyers manipulated federal prosecutors to obtain one of
the most lenient sentences for a child sex offender in history.
Dershowitz's lawyer, Andrew G. Celli Jr., emphasized to the Herald that Dershowitz is not
trying to ban the media from the proceeding; he is simply giving the court a heads up that
his arguments could include information that has never been made public because it's under
seal. – Miami
Herald
"What the letter says very clearly is we intend to make reference to the sealed material in
open court, so we want to notify the judges that this is my intention to make my arguments,"
said Dershowitz attorney, Andrew Celli. "We want the courtroom to be open so long as we can
argue the substance of what we want to unseal."
Money quote: "The tragedy for the US leadership that buys this strategy is that they appear to be blinded
so much by their own passion that they cannot break free of it to save themselves."
Washington converted corruption charges into geopolitical weapon. Washington adversaries also can changes such political
US figure as late Senator McCain, Cheney in corruption, Clinton connection to narco-traffic and stealing historical
treasures from Iraq.
Notable quotes:
"... This interview, shown in full below, is extremely instructive in illustrating the nature of the American foreign policy directives such as they are at this time. ..."
"... Either you do as we tell you, or you are our enemy. You are not even permitted to out-compete with us in business, let alone foreign relations. The world is ours and if you try to step out of place, you will be dealt with as an enemy power. ..."
"... this interview is so clear it is tragic that most Americans will never see it. ..."
"... This is not the first time that such events have happened to an empire. It happened in Rome; it happened for England; and it happened for the shorter-lived empires of Nazi Germany and ISIS. It happens every time that someone in power becomes afraid to lose it, and when the forces that propelled that rise to power no longer are present. The US is a superpower without a reason to be a superpower. ..."
Mr. Cohen came on Russian TV for a lengthy interview running about 17 minutes. This
interview, shown in full below, is extremely instructive in illustrating the nature of the
American foreign policy directives such as they are at this time.
We have seen evidence of this in recent statements by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo
regarding Russia's "invasion" of Ukraine, and an honestly unabashed bit of fear mongering about
China's company Huawei and its forthcoming 5G networks, which we will investigate in more
detail in another piece. Both bits of rhetoric reflect a re-polished narrative that,
paraphrased, says to the other world powers,
Either you do as we tell you, or you are our enemy. You are not even permitted to
out-compete with us in business, let alone foreign relations. The world is ours and if you
try to step out of place, you will be dealt with as an enemy power.
This is probably justified paranoia, because it is losing its place. Where the United
Stated used to stand for opposition against tyranny in the world,
it now acts as the tyrant , and even as a bully. Russia and China's reaction might be seen
as ignoring the bully and his bluster and just going about doing their own thing. It isn't a
fight, but it is treating the bully with contempt, as bullies indeed deserve.
Ariel Cohen rightly points out that there is a great deal of political inertia in the matter
of allowing Russia and China to just do their own thing. The US appears to be acting paranoid
about losing its place. His explanations appear very sound and very reasonable and factual. Far
from some of the snark Vesti is often infamous for, this interview is so clear it is tragic
that most Americans will never see it.
The tragedy for the US leadership that buys this strategy is that they appear to be blinded
so much by their own passion that they cannot break free of it to save themselves.
This is not the first time that such events have happened to an empire. It happened in Rome;
it happened for England; and it happened for the shorter-lived empires of Nazi Germany and
ISIS. It happens every time that someone in power becomes afraid to lose it, and when the
forces that propelled that rise to power no longer are present. The US is a superpower without
a reason to be a superpower.
Fortunately the world today is very different from that of 2003, Washington's decrees are
less effective in determining the world order. But in spite of this new, more balanced division
of power amongst several powers, Washington appears ever more aggressive towards allies and
enemies alike, regardless of which US president is in office.
China and Russia are leading this historic transition while being careful to avoid direct
war with the United States. To succeed in this endeavor, they use a hybrid strategy involving
diplomacy, military support to allies, and economic guarantees to countries under Washington's
attack.
The United States considers the whole planet its playground. Its military and political
doctrine is based on the concept of liberal hegemony, as explained by political scientist John
Mearsheimer. This imperialistic attitude has, over time, created a coordinated and
semi-official front of countries resisting this liberal hegemony. The recent events in
Venezuela indicate why cooperation between these counter-hegemonic countries is essential to
accelerating the transition from a unipolar to a multipolar reality, where the damage US
imperialism is able to bring about is diminished.
Moscow and Beijing lead the world by hindering Washington
Moscow and Beijing, following a complex relationship from the period of the Cold War, have
managed to achieve a confluence of interests in their grand objectives over the coming years.
The understanding they have come to mainly revolves around stemming the chaos Washington has
unleashed on the world.
The guiding principle of the US military-intelligence apparatus is that if a country cannot
be controlled (such as Iraq following the 2003 invasion), then it has to be destroyed in order
to save it from falling into Sino-Russian camp. This is what the United States has attempted to
do with Syria, and what it intends to do with Venezuela.
The Middle East is an area that has drawn global attention for some time, with Washington
clearly interested in supporting its Israeli and Saudi allies in the region. Israel pursues a
foreign policy aimed at dismantling the Iranian and Syrian states. Saudi Arabia also pursues a
similar strategy against Iran and Syria, in addition to fueling a rift within the Arab world
stemming from its differences with Qatar.
The foreign-policy decisions of Israel and Saudi Arabia have been supported by Washington
for decades, for two very specific reasons: the influence of the Israel lobby in the US, and
the need to ensure that Saudi Arabia and the OPEC countries sell oil in US dollars, thereby
preserving the role of the US dollar as the global reserve currency.
The US dollar remaining the global reserve currency is essential to Washington being able to
maintain her role as superpower and is crucial to her hybrid strategy against her geopolitical
rivals. Sanctions are a good example of how Washington uses the global financial and economic
system, based on the US dollar, as a weapon against her enemies. In the case of the Middle
East, Iran is the main target, with sanctions aimed at preventing the Islamic Republic from
trading on foreign banking systems. Washington has vetoed Syria's ability to procure contracts
to reconstruct the country, with European companies being threatened that they risk no longer
being able to work in the US if they accept to work in Syria.
Beijing and Moscow have a clear diplomatic strategy, jointly rejecting countless motions
advanced by the US, the UK and France at the United Nations Security Council condemning Iran
and Syria. On the military front, Russia continues her presence in Syria. China's economic
efforts, although not yet fully visible in Syria and Iran, will be the essential part of
reviving these countries destroyed by years of war inflicted by Washington and her allies.
China and Russia's containment strategy in the Middle East aims to defend Syria and Iran
diplomatically using international law, something that is continuously ridden roughshod over by
the US and her regional allies. Russia's military action has been crucial to curbing and
defeating the inhuman aggression launched against Syria, and has also drawn a red line that
Israel cannot cross in its efforts to attack Iran. The defeat of the United States in Syria has
created an encouraging precedent for the rest of the world. Washington has been forced to
abandon the original plans to getting rid of Assad.
Syria will be remembered in the future as the beginning of the multipolar revolution,
whereby the United States was contained in military-conventional terms as a result of the
coordinated actions of China and Russia.
China's economic contribution provides for such urgent needs as the supply of food,
government loans, and medicines to countries under Washington's economic siege. So long as the
global financial system remains anchored to the US dollar, Washington remains able to cause a
lot of pain to countries refusing to obey her diktats.
The effectiveness of economic sanctions varies from country to country. The Russian
Federation used sanctions imposed by the West as an impetus to obtain a complete, or almost
autonomous, refinancing of its main foreign debt, as well as to producing at home what had
previously been imported from abroad. Russia's long-term strategy is to open up to China and
other Asian countries as the main market for imports and exports, reducing contacts with the
Europeans if countries like France and Germany continue in their hostility towards the Russian
Federation.
Thanks to Chinese investments, together with planned projects like the Belt and Road
Initiative (BRI), the hegemony of the US dollar is under threat in the medium to long term. The
Chinese initiatives in the fields of infrastructure, energy, rail, road and technology
connections among dozens of countries, added to the continuing need for oil, will drive
ever-increasing consumption of oil in Asia that is currently paid for in US dollars.
Moscow is in a privileged position, enjoying good relations with all the major producers of
oil and LNG, from Qatar to Saudi Arabia, and including Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria. Moscow's
good relations with Riyadh are ultimately aimed at the creation of an OPEC+ arrangement that
includes Russia.
Particular attention should be given to the situation in Venezuela, one of the most
important countries in OPEC. Riyadh sent to Caracas in recent weeks a tanker carrying two
million barrels of oil, and Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) has taken a neutral stance regarding
Venezuela, maintaining a predictable balance between Washington and Caracas.
These joint initiatives, led by Moscow and Beijing, are aimed at reducing the use of the US
dollar by countries that are involved in the BRI and adhere to the OPEC+ format. This
diversification away from the US dollar, to cover financial transactions between countries
involving investment, oil and LNG, will see the progressive abandonment of the US dollar as a
result of agreements that increasingly do away with the dollar.
For the moment, Riyadh does not seem intent on losing US military protection. But recent
events to do with Khashoggi, as well as the failure to list Saudi Aramco on the New York or
London stock exchanges, have severely undermined the confidence of the Saudi royal family in
her American allies. The meeting between Putin and MBS at the G20 in Bueno Aires seemed to
signal a clear message to Washington as well as the future of the US dollar.
Moscow and Beijing's military, economic and diplomatic efforts see their culmination in the
Astana process. Turkey is one of the principle countries behind the aggression against Syria;
but Moscow and Tehran have incorporated it into the process of containing the regional chaos
spawned by the United States. Thanks to timely agreements in Syria known as "deconfliction
zones", Damascus has advanced, city by city, to clear the country of the terrorists financed by
Washington, Riyadh and Ankara.
Qatar, an economic guarantor of Turkey, which in return offers military protection to Doha,
is also moving away from the Israeli-Saudi camp as a result of Sino-Russian efforts in the
energy, diplomatic and military fields. Doha's move has also been because of the fratricidal
diplomatic-economic war launched by Riyadh against Doha, being yet another example of the
contagious effect of the chaos created by Washington, especially on US allies Israel and Saudi
Arabia.
Washington loses military influence in the region thanks to the presence of Moscow, and this
leads traditional US allies like Turkey and Qatar to gravitate towards a field composed
essentially of the countries opposed to Washington.
Washington's military and diplomatic defeat in the region will in the long run make it
possible to change the economic structure of the Middle East. A multipolar reality will
prevail, where regional powers like Egypt, Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Iran will feel compelled to
interact economically with the whole Eurasian continent as part of the Belt and Road
Initiative.
The basic principle for Moscow and Beijing is the use of military, economic and diplomatic
means to contain the United States in its unceasing drive to kill, steal and destroy.
From the Middle East to Asia
Beijing has focussed in Asia on the diplomatic field, facilitating talks between North and
South Korea, accelerating the internal dialogue on the peninsula, thereby excluding external
actors like the United States (who only have the intention of sabotaging the talks). Beijing's
military component has also played an important role, although never used directly as the
Russian Federation did in Syria. Washington's options vis-a-vis the Korean peninsular were
strongly limited by the fact that bordering the DPRK were huge nuclear and conventional forces,
that is to say, the deterrence offered by Russia and China. The combined military power of the
DPRK, Russia and China made any hypothetical invasion and bombing of Pyongyang an impractical
option for the United States.
As in the past, the economic lifeline extended to Pyongyang by Moscow and Beijing proved to
be decisive in limiting the effects of the embargo and the complete financial war that
Washington had declared on North Korea. Beijing and Moscow's skilled diplomatic work with Seoul
produced an effect similar to that of Turkey in the Middle East, with South Korea slowly
seeming to drift towards the multipolar world offered by Russia and China, with important
economic implications and prospects for unification of the peninsula.
Russia and China – through a combination of playing a clever game of diplomacy,
military deterrence, and offering to the Korean peninsula the prospect of economic investment
through the BRI – have managed to frustrate Washington's efforts to unleash chaos on
their borders via the Korean peninsula.
The United States seems to be losing its imperialistic mojo most significantly in Asia and
the Middle East, not only militarily but also diplomatically and economically.
The situation is different in Europe and Venezuela, two geographical areas where Washington
still enjoys greater geopolitical weight than in Asia and the Middle East. In both cases, the
effectiveness of the two Sino-Russian resistance – in military, economic and diplomatic
terms – is more limited, for different reasons. This situation, in line with the
principle of America First and the return to the Monroe doctrine, will be the subject of the
next article.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of
her principles. What a fearless young lady.
And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who
ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session
of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000
unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
Notable quotes:
"... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
"... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
"... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people
are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉
I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have
I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate
Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins.
Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.
Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town
halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.
People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors
required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services?
Notable quotes:
"... Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? ..."
"... "Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5." ..."
"... Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll. ..."
"... The heart of the secret state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants. ..."
"... As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood at the end of their career". ..."
"... Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance. ..."
Can you trust the BBC news? How many journalists are working for the security services? The following extracts are from
an article at the excellent Medialens
And so to Nottingham University (on Sunday 26 February) for a well-attended conference...
I focus in my talk on the links between journalists and the intelligence services: While it might be difficult to identify precisely
the impact of the spooks (variously represented in the press as "intelligence", "security", "Whitehall" or "Home Office" sources)
on mainstream politics and media, from the limited evidence it looks to be enormous.
As Roy Greenslade, media specialist at the Telegraph (formerly the Guardian), commented:
"Most tabloid newspapers - or even newspapers in general - are playthings of MI5."
Bloch and Fitzgerald, in their examination of covert UK warfare, report the editor of "one of Britain's most distinguished
journals" as believing that more than half its foreign correspondents were on the MI6 payroll.
And in 1991, Richard Norton-Taylor revealed in the Guardian that 500 prominent Britons paid by the CIA and the now defunct
Bank of Commerce and Credit International, included 90 journalists.
In their analysis of the contemporary secret state, Dorril and Ramsay gave the media a crucial role. The heart of the secret
state they identified as the security services, the cabinet office and upper echelons of the Home and Commonwealth Offices, the armed
forces and Ministry of Defence, the nuclear power industry and its satellite ministries together a network of senior civil servants.
As "satellites" of the secret state, their list included "agents of influence in the media, ranging from actual agents of
the security services, conduits of official leaks, to senior journalists merely lusting after official praise and, perhaps, a knighthood
at the end of their career".
Phillip Knightley, author of a seminal history of the intelligence services, has even claimed that at least one intelligence agent
is working on every Fleet Street newspaper.
A brief history
Going as far back as 1945, George Orwell no less became a war correspondent for the Observer - probably as a
cover for intelligence work. Significantly most of the men he met in Paris on his assignment, Freddie Ayer, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ernest
Hemingway were either working for the intelligence services or had close links to them.
Stephen Dorril, in his seminal history of MI6, reports that Orwell attended a meeting in Paris of resistance fighters on behalf
of David Astor, his editor at the Observer and leader of the intelligence service's unit liasing with the French resistance.
The release of Public Record Office documents in 1995 about some of the operations of the MI6-financed propaganda unit, the
Information Research Department of the Foreign Office, threw light on this secret body - which even Orwell aided
by sending them a list of "crypto-communists". Set up by the Labour government in 1948, it "ran" dozens of Fleet Street journalists
and a vast array of news agencies across the globe until it was closed down by Foreign Secretary David Owen in 1977.
According to John Pilger in the anti-colonial struggles in Kenya, Malaya and Cyprus, IRD was so successful that the journalism
served up as a record of those episodes was a cocktail of the distorted and false in which the real aims and often atrocious behaviour
of the British intelligence agencies was hidden.
And spy novelist John le Carré, who worked for MI6 between 1960 and 1964, has made the amazing statement that the British secret
service then controlled large parts of the press – just as they may do today.
In 1975, following Senate hearings on the CIA, the reports of the Senate's Church Committee and the House of Representatives'
Pike Committee highlighted the extent of agency recruitment of both British and US journalists.
And sources revealed that half the foreign staff of a British daily were on the MI6 payroll.
David Leigh, in The Wilson Plot, his seminal study of the way in which the secret service smeared through the mainstream media
and destabilised the Government of Harold Wilson before his sudden resignation in 1976, quotes an MI5 officer: "We have somebody
in every office in Fleet Street"
Leaker King
And the most famous whistleblower of all, Peter (Spycatcher) Wright, revealed that MI5 had agents in newspapers and publishing
companies whose main role was to warn them of any forthcoming "embarrassing publications".
Wright also disclosed that the Daily Mirror tycoon, Cecil King, "was a longstanding agent of ours" who "made it clear
he would publish anything MI5 might care to leak in his direction".
Selective details about Wilson and his secretary, Marcia Falkender, were leaked by the intelligence services to sympathetic Fleet
Street journalists. Wright comments: "No wonder Wilson was later to claim that he was the victim of a plot". King was also closely
involved in a scheme in 1968 to oust Prime Minister Harold Wilson and replace him with a coalition headed by Lord Mountbatten.
Hugh Cudlipp, editorial director of the Mirror from 1952 to 1974, was also closely linked to intelligence, according
to Chris Horrie, in his recently published history of the newspaper.
David Walker, the Mirror's foreign correspondent in the 1950s, was named as an MI6 agent following a security
scandal while another Mirror journalist, Stanley Bonnet, admitted working for MI5 in the 1980s investigating the Campaign for Nuclear
Disarmament.
Maxwell and Mossad
According to Stephen Dorril, intelligence gathering during the miners' strike of 1984-85 was helped by the fact that during the
1970s MI5's F Branch had made a special effort to recruit industrial correspondents – with great success.
In 1991, just before his mysterious death, Mirror proprietor Robert Maxwell was accused by the US investigative
journalist Seymour Hersh of acting for Mossad, the Israeli secret service, though Dorril suggests his links with MI6
were equally as strong.
Following the resignation from the Guardian of Richard Gott, its literary editor in December 1994 in the wake of allegations that
he was a paid agent of the KGB, the role of journalists as spies suddenly came under the media spotlight – and many of the leaks
were fascinating.
For instance, according to The Times editorial of 16 December 1994: "Many British journalists benefited from CIA or MI6 largesse
during the Cold War."
The intimate links between journalists and the secret services were highlighted in the autobiography of the eminent newscaster
Sandy Gall. He reports without any qualms how, after returning from one of his reporting assignments to Afghanistan, he was asked
to lunch by the head of MI6. "It was very informal, the cook was off so we had cold meat and salad with plenty of wine. He wanted
to hear what I had to say about the war in Afghanistan. I was flattered, of course, and anxious to pass on what I could in terms
of first-hand knowledge."
And in January 2001, the renegade MI6 officer, Richard Tomlinson, claimed Dominic Lawson, the editor of the Sunday Telegraph
and son of the former Tory chancellor, Nigel Lawson, provided journalistic cover for an MI6 officer on a mission to the Baltic to
handle and debrief a young Russian diplomat who was spying for Britain.
Lawson strongly denied the allegations.
Similarly in the reporting of Northern Ireland, there have been longstanding concerns over security service disinformation. Susan
McKay, Northern editor of the Dublin-based Sunday Tribune, has criticised the reckless reporting of material from "dodgy security
services". She told a conference in Belfast in January 2003 organised by the National Union of Journalists and the Northern Ireland
Human Rights Commission: "We need to be suspicious when people are so ready to provide information and that we are, in fact, not
being used." (www.nuj.org.uk/inner.php?docid=635)
Growing power of secret state
Thus from this evidence alone it is clear there has been a long history of links between hacks and spooks in both the UK and US.
But as the secret state grows in power, through massive resourcing, through a whole raft of legislation – such as the Official
Secrets Act, the anti-terrorism legislation, the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act and so on – and as intelligence moves into
the heart of Blair's ruling clique so these links are even more significant.
Since September 11 all of Fleet Street has been awash in warnings by anonymous intelligence sources of terrorist threats.
According to former Labour minister Michael Meacher, much of this disinformation was spread via sympathetic journalists by
the Rockingham cell within the MoD.
A parallel exercise, through the office of Special Plans, was set up by Donald Rumsfeld in the US. Thus there have been constant
attempts to scare people – and justify still greater powers for the national security apparatus.
Similarly the disinformation about Iraq's WMD was spread by dodgy intelligence sources via gullible journalists.
Thus, to take just one example, Michael Evans, The Times defence correspondent, reported on 29 November 2002: "Saddam Hussein
has ordered hundred of his officials to conceal weapons of mass destruction components in their homes to evade the prying eyes of
the United Nations inspectors." The source of these "revelations" was said to be "intelligence picked up from within Iraq". Early
in 2004, as the battle for control of Iraq continued with mounting casualties on both sides, it was revealed that many of the lies
about Saddam Hussein's supposed WMD had been fed to sympathetic journalists in the US, Britain and Australia by the exile group,
the Iraqi National Congress.
Sexed up – and missed out
During the controversy that erupted following the end of the "war" and the death of the arms inspector Dr David Kelly (and the
ensuing Hutton inquiry) the spotlight fell on BBC reporter Andrew Gilligan and the claim by one of his sources that the government
(in collusion with the intelligence services) had "sexed up" a dossier justifying an attack on Iraq.
The Hutton inquiry, its every twist and turn massively covered in the mainstream media, was the archetypal media spectacle that
drew attention from the real issue: why did the Bush and Blair governments invade Iraq in the face of massive global opposition?
But those facts will be forever secret.
Significantly, too, the broader and more significant issue of mainstream journalists' links with the intelligence services was
ignored by the inquiry.
Significantly, on 26 May 2004, the New York Times carried a 1,200-word editorial admitting it had been duped in its coverage of
WMD in the lead-up to the invasion by dubious Iraqi defectors, informants and exiles (though it failed to lay any blame on the US
President: see Greenslade 2004). Chief among The Times' dodgy informants was Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the Iraqi National Congress
and Pentagon favourite before his Baghdad house was raided by US forces on 20 May.
Then, in the Observer of 30 May 2004, David Rose admitted he had been the victim of a "calculated set-up" devised to foster the
propaganda case for war. "In the 18 months before the invasion of March 2003, I dealt regularly with Chalabi and the INC and published
stories based on interviews with men they said were defectors from Saddam's regime." And he concluded: "The information fog is thicker
than in any previous war, as I know now from bitter personal experience. To any journalist being offered apparently sensational disclosures,
especially from an anonymous intelligence source, I offer two words of advice: caveat emptor."
Let's not forget no British newspaper has followed the example of the NYT and apologised for being so easily duped by the intelligence
services in the run up to the illegal invasion of Iraq.
~
Richard Keeble's publications include Secret State, Silent Press: New Militarism, the Gulf and the Modern Image of Warfare (John
Libbey 1997) and The Newspapers Handbook (Routledge, fourth edition, 2005). He is also the editor of Ethical Space: The International
Journal of Communication Ethics. Richard is also a member of the War and Media Network.
amazing, simply amazing. You need to watch this Town Hall in full to appreciate the skills she demonstrated in defense of
her principles. What a fearless young lady.
And this CNN warmonger, a prostitute of MIC was/is pretty devious. Question were selected with malice to hurt Tulsi and people who
ask them were definitely pre-selected with an obvious intent to smear Tulsi. In no way those were spontaneous question. This was a session
of Neocon//Neolib inquisition. Tulsi behaves like a modern Joan of Arc
From comments: "People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000
unique donors required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25"(mrfuzztone)
Notable quotes:
"... Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people are starting to get fed up with the show. About time ..."
"... WE CURRENTLY HAVE A CRONY CAPITALIST PYRAMID SCHEME AND CNN PLAYS IT'S PART TO KEEP THAT SYSTEM IN PLACE ..."
"... I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins. Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi. ..."
Braver then 99.9% of all men in power. They just enjoy watching the blood sports they create for profit. Looks like people
are starting to get fed up with the show. About time✌️ 😉
I'm 66, a Progressive formerly from Boston where we eat and breathe politics and I'll tell you... never in my life have
I seen a Democratic candidate like this fearless young woman who will simultaneously attract veterans AND anti-war folks AND moderate
Republicans AND youth. NO OTHER CANDIDATE CAN DO THIS. My absolute belief is that if Tulsi's not on the ticket... Trump wins.
Sorry Bernie, this time I'm going with Tulsi.
Tulsi handled these hacks like a pro LOOL Are you a capitalist? LOL What s stupid question.....CCN usually stacks there town
halls with corporate cronies. I bet Bernie picks her for a high position in his government.
People need to donate to Tulsi Gabbard for president so she is allowed on the DNC sponsored debate stages. 65000 unique donors
required to be in the debates. Donation can be as small as $1 if you can't afford $25.
"... General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC. MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market. Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women and Children. ..."
"... Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War". ..."
"... The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war. ..."
"... the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark forces. ..."
"... The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening ..."
"... In media universe there is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing. ..."
"... The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. ..."
"... Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department to your favorite media outlet. ..."
"... But all that research from MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and distorts and misrepresents the news every day. ..."
The American Public has gotten exactly what it deserved. They have been dumbed-down in our poor-by-intention school systems. The
moronic nonsense that passes for news in this country gets more sensational with each passing day. Over on Fox, they are making
the claim that ISIS fighters are bringing Ebola over the Mexican Border, which prompted a reply by the Mexican Embassy that won't
be reported on Fox.
We continue to hear and it was even reported in this very fine article by Ms. Benjamin that the American
People now support this new war. Really? I'm sorry, but I haven't seen that support anywhere but on the news and I just don't
believe it any more.
There is also the little problem of infiltration into key media slots by paid CIA Assets (Scarborough and brainless Mika are
two of these double dippers). Others are intermarried. Right-wing Neocon War Criminal Dan Senor is married to "respected" newsperson
Campbell Brown who is now involved in privatizing our school system. Victoria Nuland, the slimey State Department Official who
was overheard appointing the members of the future Ukrainian Government prior to the Maidan Coup is married to another Neo-Con--Larry
Kagan. Even sweet little Andrea Mitchell is actually Mrs. Alan Greenspan.
General Electric, the world's largest military contractor, still controls the message over at the so-called "liberal" MSNBC.
MSNBC's other owner is Comcast, the right wing media conglomerate that controls the radio waves in every major American Market.
Over at CNN, Mossad Asset Wolf Blitzer, who rose from being an obscure little correspondent for an Israeli Newspaper to being
CNN's Chief "Pentagon Correspondent" and then was elevated to supreme anchorman nearly as quickly, ensures that the pro-Israeli
Message is always in the forefront, even as the Israeli's commit one murderous act after another upon helpless Palestinian Women
and Children.
Every single "terrorism expert", General or former Government Official that is brought out to discuss the next great war is
connected to a military contractor that stands to benefit from that war. Not surprisingly, the military option is the only option
discussed and we are assured that, if only we do this or bomb that, then it will all be over and we can bring our kids home to
a big victory parade. I'm 63 and it has never happened in my lifetime--with the exception of the phony parade that Bush Senior
put on after his murderous little "First Gulf War".
Yesterday there was a coordinated action by all of the networks, which was clearly designed to support the idea that the generals
want Obama to act and he just won't. The not-so-subtle message was that the generals were right and that the President's "inaction"
was somehow out of line-since, after all, the generals have recommended more war. It was as if these people don't remember that
the President, sleazy War Criminal that he is, is still the Commander in Chief.
The Generals in the Pentagon always want war. It is how they make rank. All of those young kids that just graduated from our
various academies know that war experience is the only thing that will get them the advancement that they seek in the career that
they have chosen. They are champing at the bit for more war.
Finally, this Sunday every NFL Game will begin with some Patriotic "Honor America" Display, which will include a missing man
flyover, flags and fireworks, plenty of uniforms, wounded Vets and soon-to-be-wounded Vets. A giant American Flag will, once again,
cover the fields and hundreds of stupid young kids will rush down to their "Military Career Center" right after the game. These
are the ones that I pity most.
Let's be frank: powerful interests want war and subsequent puppet regimes in the half dozen nations that the neo-cons have been
eyeing (Iraq, Iran, Libya, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan). These interests surely include industries like banking, arms and oil-all of
whom make a killing on any war, and would stand to do well with friendly governments who could finance more arms purchases and
will never nationalize the oil.
So, the same PR campaign that started with Bush and Cheney continues-the exact same campaign. Obviously, they have to come
back at the apple with variations, but any notion that the "media will get it someday" is willfully ignorant of the obvious fact
that there is an agenda, and that agenda just won't stop until it's achieved-or revolution supplants the influence of these dark
forces.
IanB52, 10 October 2014 6:57pm
The US media are indeed working overtime to get this war happening. When I'm down at the gym they always have CNN on (I can
only imagine what FOX is like) which is a pretty much dyed in the wool yellow jingoist station at this point. With all the segments
they dedicate to ISIS, a new war, the "imminent" terrorist threat, they seem to favor talking heads who support a full ground
war and I have never, not once, heard anyone even speak about the mere possibility of peace. Not ever.
In media universe there
is no alternative to endless war and an endless stream of hyped reasons for new killing.
I'd imagine that these media companies have a lot stock in and a cozy relationship with the defense contractors.
Damiano Iocovozzi, 10 October 2014 7:04pm
The media machine is a wholly owned subsidiary of the United States of Corporations. The media doesn't report on anything but
relies on repeating manufactured crises, creating manufactured consent & discussing manufactured solutions. Follow the oil, the
pipelines & the money. Both R's & D's are left & right cheeks of the same buttock. Thanks to Citizens United & even Hobby Lobby,
a compliant Supreme Court, also owned by United States of Corporations, it's a done deal.
Oh, the greatest propaganda arm the US government has right now, bar none, is the American media. It's disgraceful. we no longer
have journalists speaking truth to power in my country, we have people practicing stenography, straight from the State Department
to your favorite media outlet.
Let me give you one clear example. A year ago Barack Obama came very close to bombing Syria to
kingdom come, the justification used was "Assad gassed his own people", referring to a sarin gas attack near Damascus. Well, it
turns out that Assad did not initiate that attack, discovered by research from many sources including the prestigious MIT, it
was a false flag attack planned by Turkey and carried out by some of Obama's own "moderate rebels".
But all that research from
MIT, from the UN, and others, has been buried by the American media, and every single story on Syria and Assad that is written
still refers to "Assad gassing his own people". It's true, it's despicable, and it's just one example of how our media lies and
distorts and misrepresents the news every day.
Vesti calls out Pompeo on lying about Russia invading Ukraine [Video]
Secretary Pompeo displayed either stunning ignorance or a mass-attack of propaganda about
what must be the most invisible war in history.
After the 2014 Maidan revolution and the subsequent secessions of
Lugansk and Donetsk in Ukraine, and after the rejoining of Crimea with its original nation of
Russia, the Western media went on a campaign to prove the Russia is (/ was / was about to / had
already / might / was thinking about / was planning to etc.) invade Ukraine. For the next year
or so, about every two weeks, internet news sources like Yahoo! News showed viewers pictures of
tanks, box trucks and convoys to "prove" that the invasion was underway (or any of the other
statuses confirming the possibilities above stated.) This information was doubtless provided to
US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.
Apparently, Secretary Pompeo believed this ruse, or is being paid to believe this ruse
because in a speech recently,
he talked about it as fact:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Russia's annexation of Crimea and aggression in
eastern Ukraine an attempt to gain access to Ukraine's oil and gas reserves. He stated this
at IHS Markit's CERAWeek conference in Houston, the USA,
Reuters reports.
Pompeo urged the oil industry to work with the Trump administration to promote U.S.
foreign policy interests, especially in Asia and in Europe, and to punish what he called "bad
actors" on the world stage.
The United States has imposed harsh sanctions in the past several months on two major
world oil producers, Venezuela and Iran.
Pompeo said the U.S. oil-and-gas export boom had given the United States the ability to
meet energy demand once satisfied by its geopolitical rivals.
"We don't want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2
project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies," Pompeo
said, referring to a
natural gas pipeline expansion from Russia to Central Europe .
Pompeo called Russia's invasion of Ukraine an attempt to gain access to the country's oil
and gas reserves.
Although the state-run news agency Vesti News often comes under criticism for rather
reckless, or at least, extremely sarcastic propaganda at times, here they rightly nailed Mr.
Pompeo's lies to the wall and billboarded it on their program:
The news anchors even made a wisecrack about one of the political figures, Konstantin
Zatulin saying as a joke that Russia plans to invade the United States to get its oil. They
further noted that Secretary Pompeo is uneducated about the region and situation, but they
offered him the chance to come to Russia and learn the correct information about what is going
on.
However, the oil and gas side of the anti-Russian propaganda operation by the US is
significant. The US wishes for Europe to buy gas from American suppliers, even though this is
woefully inconvenient and expensive when Russia is literally at Europe's doorstep with easy
supplies. However, the Cold War Party in the United States, which still has a significant hold
on US policy making categorizes the sale of Russia gas to powers like NATO ally Germany as a
"threat" to European security.
It is interesting that Angela Merkel herself does not hold this line of thinking. It is also
interesting and worthy of note, that this is not the only NATO member that is dealing more and
more with Russia in terms of business. It underscores the loss of purpose that the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization suffers now since there is no Soviet Union to fight.
However, the US remains undaunted. If there is no enemy to fight, the Americans feel that
they must create one, and Russia has been the main scapegoat for American power ambitions. More
than ever now, this tactic appears to be the one in use for determining the US stance towards
other powers in the world.
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"... President Trump ripped Christopher Steele after it was revealed that the former British spy used a 'citizen journalist' article from CNN's now-defunct 'iReports' website as part of his research. ..."
"... it was actually Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos telling Australian diplomat Alexander Downer that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton which reportedly launched the "Witch Hunt." ..."
President Trump ripped Christopher Steele after it was revealed that the former British spy
used a 'citizen journalist' article from CNN's now-defunct 'iReports' website as part of his
research.
"Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake &
Unverified Dossier with information he got from "send in watchers" of low ratings CNN. This is
the info that got us the Witch Hunt!"
Report: Christopher Steele backed up his Democrat & Crooked Hillary paid for Fake
& Unverified Dossier with information he got from "send in watchers" of low ratings CNN.
This is the info that got us the Witch Hunt!
Of note, it was actually Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos telling Australian diplomat
Alexander Downer that Russia had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton which reportedly launched the "Witch
Hunt." That said, let's also remember that it was Maltese professor and self-professed member
of the Clinton Foundation, Joseph Mifsud, who told Papadopoulos of the supposed Russian intel
in the first place . Some have referred to it as an
entrapment scheme .
CNN iReport?
Steele made the awkward revelation during a deposition last year in a case involving
Russian entrepreneur Aleksej Gubarev, who claims his companies Webzilla and XBT Holdings were
defamed by Steele after the dossier was published by BuzzFeed.
Steele was asked during the deposition how he verified allegations about Gubarev's
companies and whether he found "anything of relevance concerning Webzilla," according to the
newly released transcripts of the deposition.
"We did. It was an article I have got here which was posted on July 28, 2009, on something
called CNN iReport ," Steele said. –
Fox News
CNN iReport, which is long gone, was clearly disclaimed as a " user-generated site ,"
warning that " the stories submitted by users are not edited, fact-checked or screened before
they post ."
As Fox notes, even the site's banner included the slogan "Unedited. Unfiltered.
News." and made clear that users who submit content do not work for CNN.
Except super-spy Steele apparently missed that fact, or didn't care, as part of his
'extensive' research
"Do you understand that CNN iReports are or were nothing more than any random individuals'
assertions on the internet?" an examiner asked Steele.
"No, I obviously presume that if it is on a CNN site that it may has [sic] some kind of CNN
status. Albeit that it may be an independent person posting on the site," Steele replied.
"... Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion. ..."
"... Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information heading into Fusion GPS." ..."
"... Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice? Ohr's response: "My understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source. ..."
Department of Justice senior official Bruce Ohr's testimony contradicts testimony given by other senior government officials and
key witnesses who testified before Congress regarding the FBI's investigation into President Trump's 2016 campaign and alleged collusion
with the Russian government, according to the full transcripts released Friday.
Ohr's 268-page testimony, released by Republican member of the House Judiciary Committee Georgia Rep. Doug Collins, reveals inconsistency
and contradiction in testimony given by Glenn Simpson, founder of embattled research firm Fusion GPS and Deputy Attorney General
Rod Rosenstein, who is set to leave his post sometime this month.
It also reveals that many questions are still left unanswered.
The Contradictions and The Revelations
1. Glenn Simpson suggests in his testimony to the Senate that he never spoke to anyone at the FBI about Christopher Steele, the
former British spy he hired to investigate the Trump campaign during the election. However, Ohr suggest otherwise telling former
Rep.Trey Gowdy under questioning "As I recall, and this is after checking with my notes, Mr. Simpson and I spoke in August of 2016.
I met with him, and he provided some information on possible intermediaries between the Russian government and the Trump campaign."
2. In another instance, Simpson's testimony also contradicts notes taken by Ohr after a meeting they had in December, 2016. Unverified
allegations were decimated among the media that the Trump campaign had a
computer server that was linked to a Russian bank in Moscow: Alpha Bank. Simpson suggested to the Senate that he knew very little
about the Trump -Alpha Bank server story and couldn't provide information. But Bruce Ohr's own handwritten notes state that when
he met with Simpson in December 2016, Simpson was concerned over the Alpha Bank story in the New York Times. "The New York Times
story on Oct. 31 downplaying the connection between
Alfa servers
and the Trump campaign was incorrect. There was communication and it wasn't spam," stated Ohr's notes. This suggests that Simpson
was well aware of the story, which was believed by congressional investigators to have started from his research firm.
3. Ohr testified to lawmakers that Simpson provided information to federal officials that was false regarding Cleta Mitchell,
a well-known Republican campaign finance lawyer, and information regarding the National Rifle Association. Sean Davis, with the Federalist
pointed this out in a tweet today. Read one of those
stories here.
Bruce Ohr testified that Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS provided to federal officials information we know to
be false regarding Cleta Mitchell, a Republican campaign finance attorney, and the NRA. Giving false statements to federal officials
is a crime under 18 U.S.C. 1001. pic.twitter.com/vm0tc4ft5R
4. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein would not answer questions to lawmakers during testimony about when he learned that
Ohr's wife, Nellie Ohr, was working for Fusion GPS. Just check this out from Rep. Matt Gaetz's
interview with Judge Jeanine on Fox News.
"Rod Rosenstein won't tell us when he first learned that Nellie Ohr was working for Fusion GPS," said Gaetz, in August, 2018.
"So I want to know from Bruce Ohr, when did he tell his colleagues at the Department of Justice that in violation of law that required
him to disclose his wife's occupation his sources of income. He did not do that. So when did all of the other people at the Department
of Justice find this out because Rod Rosenstein, I've asked him twice in open hearing and he will not give an answer. I think there's
a real smoking gun there."
However, in Ohr's testimony he says he told the FBI about his wife's role at Fusion GPS but only divulged his role to one person
at the DOJ:
Rosenstein. At the time, Rosenstein was overseeing the Trump-Russia probe, and had taken the information from Ohr and gave it
to the FBI. Just read The Hill's John Solomon
full story here for the full background on Ohr's testimony. I highlighted an important date below: remember Rosenstein wouldn't
answer lawmakers questions as to when he knew about Nellie Ohr. It also appears he failed to tell lawmakers about the information
he delivered to the FBI.
Ohr stated in his testimony: "What I had said, I think, to Mr. Rosenstein in October of 2017 was that my wife was working
for Fusion GPS The dossier, as I understand it, is the collection of reports that Chris Steele has prepared for Fusion.
Ohr added: "My wife had separately done research on certain Russian people and companies or whatever that she had provided
to Fusion GPS But I don't believe her information is reflected in the Chris Steele reports. They were two different chunks of information
heading into Fusion GPS."
5. Ohr also told lawmakers in his testimony that the former British spy, Christopher Steele was being paid by the FBI at the same
time he was getting paid by the Hillary Clinton campaign and the DNC. However, there was another player paying Steele and it was
a Russian oligarch named Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska, a tycoon connected to Russian President Vladimir Putin, had well known animus
toward his former friend Paul Manafort.
Rep. Mark Meadows asked Ohr during testimony "Did Chris Steele get paid by the Department of Justice? Ohr's response: "My
understanding is that for a time he was a source for the FBI, a paid source.
In the testimony Ohr also revealed that Steele had told him details about his work with Deripaska saying Deripaska's attorney
Paul Hauser "had information about Paul Manafort, that Paul Manafort had entered into some kind of business deal with" Deripaska.
Ohr said Manafort "had stolen a large amount of money from" the Russian Oligarch and that Hauser was "trying to gather information
that would show that."
Vesti calls out Pompeo on lying about Russia invading Ukraine [Video]
Secretary Pompeo displayed either stunning ignorance or a mass-attack of propaganda about
what must be the most invisible war in history.
After the 2014 Maidan revolution and the subsequent secessions of
Lugansk and Donetsk in Ukraine, and after the rejoining of Crimea with its original nation of
Russia, the Western media went on a campaign to prove the Russia is (/ was / was about to / had
already / might / was thinking about / was planning to etc.) invade Ukraine. For the next year
or so, about every two weeks, internet news sources like Yahoo! News showed viewers pictures of
tanks, box trucks and convoys to "prove" that the invasion was underway (or any of the other
statuses confirming the possibilities above stated.) This information was doubtless provided to
US Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo.
Apparently, Secretary Pompeo believed this ruse, or is being paid to believe this ruse
because in a speech recently,
he talked about it as fact:
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo called Russia's annexation of Crimea and aggression in
eastern Ukraine an attempt to gain access to Ukraine's oil and gas reserves. He stated this
at IHS Markit's CERAWeek conference in Houston, the USA,
Reuters reports.
Pompeo urged the oil industry to work with the Trump administration to promote U.S.
foreign policy interests, especially in Asia and in Europe, and to punish what he called "bad
actors" on the world stage.
The United States has imposed harsh sanctions in the past several months on two major
world oil producers, Venezuela and Iran.
Pompeo said the U.S. oil-and-gas export boom had given the United States the ability to
meet energy demand once satisfied by its geopolitical rivals.
"We don't want our European allies hooked on Russian gas through the Nord Stream 2
project, any more than we ourselves want to be dependent on Venezuelan oil supplies," Pompeo
said, referring to a
natural gas pipeline expansion from Russia to Central Europe .
Pompeo called Russia's invasion of Ukraine an attempt to gain access to the country's oil
and gas reserves.
Although the state-run news agency Vesti News often comes under criticism for rather
reckless, or at least, extremely sarcastic propaganda at times, here they rightly nailed Mr.
Pompeo's lies to the wall and billboarded it on their program:
The news anchors even made a wisecrack about one of the political figures, Konstantin
Zatulin saying as a joke that Russia plans to invade the United States to get its oil. They
further noted that Secretary Pompeo is uneducated about the region and situation, but they
offered him the chance to come to Russia and learn the correct information about what is going
on.
However, the oil and gas side of the anti-Russian propaganda operation by the US is
significant. The US wishes for Europe to buy gas from American suppliers, even though this is
woefully inconvenient and expensive when Russia is literally at Europe's doorstep with easy
supplies. However, the Cold War Party in the United States, which still has a significant hold
on US policy making categorizes the sale of Russia gas to powers like NATO ally Germany as a
"threat" to European security.
It is interesting that Angela Merkel herself does not hold this line of thinking. It is also
interesting and worthy of note, that this is not the only NATO member that is dealing more and
more with Russia in terms of business. It underscores the loss of purpose that the North
Atlantic Treaty Organization suffers now since there is no Soviet Union to fight.
However, the US remains undaunted. If there is no enemy to fight, the Americans feel that
they must create one, and Russia has been the main scapegoat for American power ambitions. More
than ever now, this tactic appears to be the one in use for determining the US stance towards
other powers in the world.
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Rubble aftermath of a Saudi airstrike on a Yemeni neighborhood in 2015.
Almigdad Mojalli/Voice of America The Wall Street Journal echoes Pompeo's
obnoxious Yemen
lies in their editorial on the antiwar resolution that the Senate passed last week:
The Saudis aren't in danger of an Iranian invasion, but don't underestimate the signal
that abandoning our ally would send across the Middle East. It will be seen by Iran and
Russia as an invitation to more trouble-making, and another signal to allies that the U.S.
can't be trusted. More war is the likeliest result.
There is no foreign war so despicable and unjust that The Wall Street Journal won't
defend it to the end. It is telling that the WSJ editors don't talk about the war on
Yemen until Congress moves to try to withdraw the U.S. from it. The massive humanitarian crisis
that threatens the lives of as many as 15 million Yemenis doesn't concern them (and it never
comes up in this editorial), because if they mentioned it that would remind everyone that the
Saudi coalition bears the greatest responsibility for causing mass starvation and creating the
conditions for the world's worst modern cholera outbreak. The U.S. has not only been enabling
Saudi war crimes in its bombing campaign, but our government has also been helping to create
the world's worst humanitarian crisis through our unstinting support for the war. The editorial
omits all of this because including it would show how breathtakingly cynical and horrible the
pro-war argument is. War supporters never acknowledge the consequences of the destructive
policies they defend because they know it would discredit them, and so they try to change the
subject to anything else. In this case, war supporters have been desperate to make the Yemen
debate about Iran because they cannot honestly talk about the costs of the conflict or the U.S.
role in it.
Saudi Arabia is not an ally of the United States, and our government isn't obliged to
support them in a military intervention they chose to begin along with the United Arab Emirates
without consulting Washington. The U.S. certainly isn't obliged to indulge them in their failed
war of choice almost four years later. The war has become a drain on Saudi and Emirati
resources, and it has exposed them as weak, cruel, and incompetent as they have devastated
Yemen's infrastructure, starved its people, and failed achieved any of their stated goals. No
one should care about doing these despotic governments any favors, but forcing them to end
their war would be doing them a favor all the same. If the U.S. were perceived as abandoning
the Saudis by halting support for their war, that would be guaranteed to improve our country's
reputation around the world rather than harm it. The U.S.-Saudi relationship is a liability and
an embarrassment for our country, and the sooner we are rid of it in its current form the
better it will be for us and the region.
Supporters of the war on Yemen have no rational argument for continued U.S. involvement, and
so they are reduced to changing the subject from the war criminal states that the U.S. aids and
abets to the Iranian government that has almost nothing to do with the conflict. Ending U.S.
support for the war would be a "gift" to Iran, the WSJ editors tell us, as if four years
of keeping the Saudis and Emiratis bogged down in a war they cannot win has done anything to
harm Iran or curtail its influence in the region. The lie at the heart of the war on Yemen is
that it has something to do with opposing so-called Iranian "expansionism," but it is the war
itself that has done more for Iranian influence in Yemen than anything else. The longer that
the U.S. enables the Saudi coalition to continue its senseless and indefensible campaign, the
better it is for the Saudis' and Emiratis' rivals. Iran hawks are always wrong about what
benefits Iran's government and what harms it, and this is no exception.
The editorial's comparison between last week's vote and Congressional opposition to
continued involvement in the Vietnam War is unintentionally revealing and damning for their
side. Just like supporters of the Vietnam War, supporters of the war on Yemen are defending a
war that can't be won in a place where the U.S. should never have been involved. In this case,
war supporters are squarely on the side of the aggressors, and in their continued backing for
this disgraceful policy they show their utter contempt for the lives of the people of
Yemen.
This MIC prostitute Karan, like his wife Nuland are un-reformable. They just earn their living ing by warmongering. And they
will screem like pigs if they are deprived from those money, and do not care one bit how many people will be
killed as the result of their policies.
There is no war that those neocon chickenhawks do not like. It's their family racket.
Notable quotes:
"... Kagan's preferred foreign policy requires that there is some global "ideological confrontation" for the U.S. to be engaged in. If there isn't one, it has to be invented. ..."
"... Kagan isn't all that interested in details or accuracy. Those are "beside the point." ..."
"... Kagan doesn't make it explicit in this essay, but his larger goal in all of this is to advocate for a more confrontational foreign policy mobilized against the authoritarian enemies that he has described. He hints at this when he disparages contemporary "realists" ..."
"... realists, non-interventionists, and progressives that see no compelling reason for the U.S. to engage in destructive rivalries with major authoritarian powers in their own backyards. Except for a lame, overused comparison to the 1930s, Kagan doesn't even try to explain why we are wrong to think this. Kagan assumes that such destructive rivalries are both necessary and desirable, and this essay is the latest part of his effort to lay the groundwork for the ideological justification for those rivalries. ..."
"... A recent WSJ article (03/11/19) titled "Russian Gas Plan Divides U.S., Allies" with the subtitle "Washington fears undersea project would make Germany too reliant on Moscow" tells the tale of what the real reasons for America to demonize Russia and Putin. The U.S. leaders fear that the German-Russian pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, will make Europe reliant on Russian energy instead of Europe purchasing it energy from the United States. What gives the U.S. the right to stop one nation from doing commerce with other nations? The answer is "Greed." ..."
"... Kagan is and will until the bitter end defend American hegemony and the ideological mantle will be used as a cover ..."
"... People also forget that US is not a democracy, but a managed Republic, and according to all indicators, it is not even that liberal ..."
"... The fallout from the actions of these "interventionists" is millions are dead in a number of countries. Millions are refugees and thousands of soldiers are dead or maimed. More facts on these war criminals at link below. https://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2019/01/the-facts-on-crimes-of-war-criminals.html ..."
"... This Kagan family, with Robert now the lead figure, has done a great deal towards furthering conflicts and violence in the world. It is long past time that they be put in their place, whatever that is, but it will not happen because their Zionist mindset is very well funded. ..."
"... "The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed. We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher." We ought to do more than that. He should be muzzled and sent to live in a cave somewhere to repent the consequences of the terrible damage he and other incompetents have done to America. That people like this still have access to the media is almost beyond belief. ..."
Brookings Senior Fellow and author Robert Kagan in March 2018. (Brookings Institution/Paul Morigi) Robert Kagan
warns us about global authoritarianism:
Of all the geopolitical transformations confronting the liberal democratic world these days, the one for which we are least
prepared is the ideological and strategic resurgence of authoritarianism. We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a
distinct worldview that offers a real alternative to liberalism.
We are not used to thinking of authoritarianism as a distinct worldview because it isn't one. All authoritarian states share certain
things in common, and they may see some of the same things as threats, but there isn't a single worldview that all authoritarian
governments subscribe to. There is no one ideology that binds them together. Most of them are nationalistic to one degree or another,
but because of that they usually have competing and opposing goals. Treating all authoritarian regimes as part of the same global
threat lumps illiberal and majoritarian democracies together with kleptocracies, communist dictatorships, and absolute monarchies.
That exaggerates the danger that these regimes pose, and it tries to invent a Cold War-like division between rival camps that doesn't
really exist. If the U.S. treats these states as if they are all in league with one another, it will tend to drive together states
that would otherwise remain at odds and keep each other at arm's length.
Kagan's preferred foreign policy requires that there is some global "ideological confrontation" for the U.S. to be engaged in.
If there isn't one, it has to be invented. His account of the history of the 20th century shows how determined he is to see international
politics in terms of grand ideological battles even when there wasn't one. He takes seriously the idea that WWI is one of these struggles:
"But for those who fought it, on both sides, it was very much a war between liberalism and authoritarianism." Kagan makes the mistake
of treating wartime propaganda descriptions of the war as the real motivation for the war, and he relies on stereotypes of the nations
on the other side of the war as well. The world's largest colonial empires were not fighting for "the liberties of Europe" and they
certainly weren't fighting for the rights of small nations, as wartime British propaganda would have it, and that became abundantly
clear in the post-war settlement. It was primarily a war among empires for supremacy in Europe, and the surviving Allied empires
consolidated their hold on their own colonial possessions and gained more. To the extent that Americans genuinely believed that joining
the war had something to do with vindicating the cause of democracy, they were quickly disabused of that notion when they saw the
fruits of the vindictive settlement that their allies imposed on the losing side.
Kagan admits that there are many differences of regime type that he is trying to collapse into one group:
We have become lost in endless categorizations, viewing each type of non-liberal government as unique and unrelated to the
others -- the illiberal democracy, the "liberal" or "liberalizing" autocracy, the "competitive" and "hybrid" authoritarianism.
These different categories certainly describe the myriad ways non-liberal societies may be governed. But in the most fundamental
way, all of this is beside the point.
In other words, Kagan isn't all that interested in details or accuracy. Those are "beside the point." What matters is dividing
up the world into two opposing camps: "Nations are either liberal, meaning that there are permanent institutions and unchanging norms
that protect the "unalienable" rights of individuals against all who would infringe on those rights, whether the state or the majority;
or they are not liberal." The criteria for qualifying as a liberal nation are extremely demanding. What institutions can honestly
be called "permanent" and what norms are ever truly "unchanging"? Judged against this extreme and unreasonable standard, there won't
ever be many nations that qualify as liberal, including quite a few that we would normally consider liberal democracies in good standing.
That makes it a lot easier for Kagan to exaggerate the power of "resurgent authoritarianism."
Kagan doesn't make it explicit in this essay, but his larger goal in all of this is to advocate for a more confrontational foreign
policy mobilized against the authoritarian enemies that he has described. He hints at this when he disparages contemporary "realists"
whom he doesn't name or cite:
Just as during the 1930s, when realists such as Robert Taft assured Americans that their lives would be undisturbed by the
collapse of democracy in Europe and the triumph of authoritarianism in Asia, so we have realists today insisting that we pull
back from confronting the great authoritarian powers rising in Eurasia.
To be much more accurate, there are realists, non-interventionists, and progressives that see no compelling reason for the U.S.
to engage in destructive rivalries with major authoritarian powers in their own backyards. Except for a lame, overused comparison
to the 1930s, Kagan doesn't even try to explain why we are wrong to think this. Kagan assumes that such destructive rivalries are
both necessary and desirable, and this essay is the latest part of his effort to lay the groundwork for the ideological justification
for those rivalries.
Kagan's analysis suffers from the problem of mirror-imaging that always plagues ideologues. He assumes that everyone sees the
world in starkly ideological categories just as he does, and he thinks that other actors are just as determined to export their ideology
as he is. His entire worldview depends on linking great power competition with larger ideological causes, and for almost thirty years
there has been no such "ideological confrontation" for Kagan to theorize about. Despite Kagan's insistence to the contrary, there
still isn't. He wants the U.S. to take a more confrontational approach to dealing with Russia and China, and in order to sell that
today he has to dress it up as something more than the destructive and costly pursuit of hegemony that he has been pushing for decades.
The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for and endorsed.
We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher.
A recent WSJ article (03/11/19) titled "Russian Gas Plan Divides U.S., Allies" with the subtitle "Washington fears undersea
project would make Germany too reliant on Moscow" tells the tale of what the real reasons for America to demonize Russia and Putin.
The U.S. leaders fear that the German-Russian pipeline project, Nord Stream 2, will make Europe reliant on Russian energy instead
of Europe purchasing it energy from the United States. What gives the U.S. the right to stop one nation from doing commerce with
other nations? The answer is "Greed."
All wars are predicated on lies, and all wars are fought for economic reasons and not the so called humanitarian reasons that
are fed to the people.
Always insightful indeed: Kagan is and will until the bitter end defend American hegemony and the ideological mantle will
be used as a cover (Mel Gibson screaming "Freedom!" in Bravehart; killing the babies and stealing the incubators!).
People also forget that US is not a democracy, but a managed Republic, and according to all indicators, it is not even
that liberal
So better save this post because you are still young and in 30 years from now you will be able to re-post it and just change
a couple of names
Anytime, anywhere, anyone comes out and destroys kagan's Zionist globalist babble as you have done, it is a very commendable
exercise for the good of mankind and America.
This Kagan family, with Robert now the lead figure, has done a great deal towards furthering conflicts and violence in
the world. It is long past time that they be put in their place, whatever that is, but it will not happen because their Zionist
mindset is very well funded.
"The U.S. has spent the last twenty years fighting wars that Kagan and other like-minded interventionists advocated for
and endorsed. We shouldn't make the same mistake again when the stakes are even higher."
We ought to do more than that. He should be muzzled and sent to live in a cave somewhere to repent the consequences of the
terrible damage he and other incompetents have done to America. That people like this still have access to the media is almost
beyond belief.
Mitchell A. Orenstein
Authoritarian nationalists such as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán win support not only by attacking
immigrants, but also by delivering economic policies that benefit the poor and middle class. Western analysts and,
more important, Western leaders need to learn this lesson before it's too late.
On March 20, the European People's Party, the conservative bloc
in the European Parliament, will decide whether to expel Hungary's ruling party, Fidesz. The EPP has been slow to
censure Fidesz and Hungary's autocratic prime minister, Viktor Orbán, for its assault on democracy and rule of
law. Yet, Orbán's Western critics have been equally slow to understand the social and economic policies that
underpin his popularity.
Consider the
bold set of
family policies
that Orbán announced on February 10. So far, the verdict in the West on these policies, which
are aimed at addressing the country's low fertility rate and further reducing immigration, has been thunderously
negative and all but blind to their effectiveness in entrenching Orbán's support among Hungarian voters.
Western analysts fail to recognize that authoritarian
nationalists such as Orbán win support not only by attacking immigrants, but also by delivering economic policies
that benefit average people. Mainstream political parties in the West need to learn this economic lesson fast if
they want to compete against their own populist challengers.
Orbán is keen to connect his nationalist message to generous
and popular social policies, while encouraging Hungarian women and families to have more children. Hungary's
current fertility rate of
1.45 children per
female
is below replacement rate. And its population has been shrinking since 1989, mirroring declines in
other former communist countries that used to provide extensive social support to families.
The plan's centerpiece is a lifetime exemption from personal
income tax for women who bear and raise four or more children (Orbán and his wife have five). This and other
policies in the new package will have a real impact on all families in Hungary. Women under 40 who marry for the
first time and have worked for at least three years will be eligible for a $36,000 "childbearing" loan at a
discounted rate, which will be forgiven as they have children. Larger families can apply for an $9,000 government
grant toward the purchase of a seven-seat automobile. Grandparents taking care of children will be eligible for
leave from work and benefits. And the government will create 21,000 new subsidized childcare places.
Leading Western media, analysts, and politicians have been
almost universally critical of the plan, thereby falling right into Orbán's trap.
The Economist
, a
longtime advocate of the free-market economic policies that have impoverished many in Eastern Europe while
producing great wealth for a few and higher living standards for a middle-class
minority
,
predictably criticized
Orbán's plan for being too expensive. The new measures are "unlikely to give birth to a
baby boom" and could "swell an economy that is close to overheating, and inflate house prices."
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Journalist Adam Taylor echoed these sentiments in
The
Washington Post
,
arguing that
Orbán's policies will "barely move the needle on birthrate and may represent a poor return on
investment." We have heard this same Western critique for decades: helping people is too expensive and does not
work, paying for houses will only make them pricier, and it's better to rely on markets than on public policies.
But Orbán's critics ignore the examples of Poland and Russia,
which also have implemented natalist policies in recent years. Russia's fertility rate is up to 1.75 children per
female, from a low of 1.17 in 1999, partly owing to a
grant program
for new parents. Poland, too, has achieved higher birth rates since 2015 after introducing the
massive
Family 500+ initiative
, which enables parents to pay for school supplies, clothes, and vacations. Both schemes
were criticized as being too expensive, but Poland's public deficit has
fallen
, not risen. Rather,
these policies have stimulated economic growth while dramatically
reducing child poverty
and increasing
school enrollment.
Although free-market attacks on bold new social programs are no
surprise, some of the sharpest criticism of Orbán's policies has come from the left. Progressives strongly dislike
the fact that many of his proposals target women in a way that seems to advance a conservative, pro-family agenda.
To
The Guardian
's Afua Hirsch,
for example
, "the idea that assistance for those in poverty is conditional on obedient reproduction is verging
on the dystopian." Similarly, Princeton professor Kim Lane Scheppele, interviewed on
Public Radio
International
,
warned
that, "Women are going to bear the burden of Orbán's failed economic policies." And Swedish Social
Affairs Minister Annika Strandhäll
said
that, "This kind of policy will harm the autonomy for which women have struggled for decades."
These analysts are right that Orbán's policies are designed to
encourage women to marry, buy houses, bear more children, and stay in Hungary. But their criticism misses the mark
in important ways. Overall, these proposals are not coercive. Nor do they seek to keep women barefoot and
homebound. Instead, Orbán's plan is designed to help women manage their work-life balance. For that, it should be
celebrated, not excoriated.
Consider the lifetime income-tax exemption for women with four
or more children. The primary beneficiaries of this program will be women who work, because those with no income
will gain no advantage. In two-parent families where both partners have similar or equal earning potential, it may
make sense for the woman to work tax-free, or run the family business, while the man stays at home with the
children.
Likewise, giving grandparents childrearing benefits helps women
to enter the labor force. So does subsidized childcare. And although the new loan programs do encourage women to
have children, they also may enable them to buy a home. In short, these policies provide state support for women's
unpaid labor.
Like it or not, some of Europe's boldest new social-policy
initiatives are coming from its most illiberal governments. The negative reactions of mainstream opinion leaders
in the West show how unprepared they are to do battle with Orbán and others for voters' hearts and minds. The
populist right is pressing the rhetoric and policies of social democracy into the service of authoritarian
nationalism. If the West cannot see or understand the appeal of this, it will be unable to fight back.
I have this quote by Morgenthau on my desktop on my computer--it is from 1957 lecture in
Naval War College:
"I would say, and I have said many times before, that if the czars still reigned in
Russia, that if Lenin had died of the measles at an early age, that if Stalin had never been
heard of, but the power of the Soviet Union were exactly what it is today, the problem of
Russia would be for us by and large what it is today. If the Russian armies stood exactly
where they stand today, and if Russian technological development were what it is today, we
would be by and large confronted with the same problems which confront us today."
In 2015 Kissinger basically reiterated the point when stated that the goal of US elites is
a break up of Russia.
I was told the same thing by Soviet specialists of the US Army who thought that what I did
was irrelevant except for my demonstrated ability to recruit Soviets.
A newly declassified US intelligence memo has been unearthed this week and featured in a bombshell
Wall
Street Journal
report. It proves that the year prior to the Bush administration's 2003
invasion of Iraq the White House was expressly warned in great detail of all that could and would
go wrong in the regime change war's aftermath, including
the Sunni-Shia sectarian chaos and
proxy war with Iran
that would define Iraq and the whole region for years following. And
crucially, it reveals that seven months
before
the US invasion of Iraq, American
intelligence officials understood that
Osama bin Laden was likely "alive and well and
hiding in northwest Pakistan"
--
important given that a key Bush
admin claim to sell the war was that Saddam Hussein and bin Laden were
"in league"
against the
United States.
The
July 2002 memo
was authored by William Burns, then serving as assistant secretary of state for near eastern
affairs, and though clearly dismissed by the Bush neocons making the case for war, proved prescient
on many levels.
"Following are some very quick and informal thoughts on how events before,
during and after an effort to overthrow the regime in Baghdad could unravel if we're not careful,
intersecting to create
a 'perfect storm'
for American interests,"
Burns wrote
in the memo, classified 'Secret' and sent to Secretary of State Colin Powell.
The classified memo's existence was first brought to the public's attention through
Knight Ridder's reporting
in July 2003, which sought to reveal at the time there were pockets
of dissenting voices in the State Department and intelligence community pushing back against the
absurd White House claim that the whole operation would be a
"cakewalk"
and US troops would be greeted as "liberators". And there's Vice President Dick Cheney's infamous
declaration that the military effort
would take
"weeks rather than months."
Now, sixteen years after the start of the war the "perfect storm" intel briefing has been made
public in fully redacted form and it affirms, as the
WSJ reports
, "Diplomats accurately forecast many setbacks:
sectarian violence, attacks
on U.S. troops, Iranian intervention and long road to structural change
." Out of this came
the rise of ISIS and the continued unleashing of regime change and sectarian chaos on neighboring
Syria.
The ten page memo outlines a litany of
catastrophic doom and gloom scenarios
resulting from the invasion which would destabilize not only Iraq, but
unleash sectarian
hell on the entire region
.
Here are but a handful of the memo's many warnings which later proved right on target, as
summarized by the military reporting website
Task
& Purpose
:
Iran increasing aid to anti-American groups in both Iraq and Afghanistan because it
feared being "next on US hit list."
Security in Iraq collapsing following regime change because Iraqi troops and police would
be too afraid to patrol while Iraqis aligned with the United States would prove to be inept.
U.S. troops coming under increasing attacks as they patrol both Shiite and Sunni cities.
"If they intervene to stop disputes, they are perceived to have sided with one party or
another in a tribal dispute, thus incurring the wrath of the opposing party."
Afghanistan's security situation simultaneously deteriorating, creating the need for more
U.S. troops there.
"Carpetbaggers, bill collectors, expats and exiles," arriving in Iraq. "It will be a wild
mix."
"I don't mean to be pessimistic, because I really do believe that if we do it right this could
be a tremendous boon to the future of the region, and to U.S. national security interests," the
memo stated. "But we should have no illusion that it will be quick or easy."
And further contradicting Cheney's "weeks rather than months" claim, the memo accurately
predicted that U.S. troops would have to stay for,
"Five years – maybe four if we're lucky,
ten if we're not."
Some further interesting highlights from the July 2002 'Secret' report are below.
* * *
Osama bin Laden hiding in Pakistan
(the Bush admin claimed Saddam
and bin Laden were in cahoots)
"Osama bin Laden turns out to be alive and well and hiding in NW Pakistan. We press Paks,
internal stresses grow in Pakistan."
Iran and Syria targeted next
"Following US warnings that it would take the war on terrorism to all groups with global
capabilities, Iran and Syria hold summit meeting, decide US has targeted them."
Iran and Syria "strengthen positions in face of perceived US threat against them following
action in Iraq."
Sectarian score settling and Shia uprising
"This means night becomes the time for revenge, all over Iraq. A horrible wave of bloodletting
and private vengeance begins... US forces are helpless to stop the countrywide phenomenon. Police,
intelligence, senior military, and Baath Party officials effectively go into hiding..."
"Shia religious and political leaders, unhappy with composition of provisional government and
determined to secure greater share of power in post-Saddam Iraq... This leads to more violent
confrontations, and deaths, and the riots become a political tool to demonstrate power and increase
leverage against Sunnis and Kurds..."
Long US quagmire to put down sectarian powder keg
"Faced with inchoate and escalating disorder in the provinces, the US faces an agonizing
decision: step up to a more direct security role, or devolve power to local leaders."
"The Shia in the south, quietly aided by Iran, stage major revolt, taking over local government
offices and killing interim officials."
Weapons from Saddam's army will disappear (to be later used against US occupation)
"Law and Order, collecting weapons. We won't get them, most will go to ground."
"All for one, one for all, free for all - deals, short-term scrambles. It will be every clan for
itself."
TIME AND PREDICTIONS. Gorbachev became GenSek 34 years ago on Monday. I remember Dr Leonid Abalkin saying first
stage six months, second stage three years, third stage 30 years. And I've kept that in the
back of my mind ever since. Well, here we are, plus or minus: 1985.25+33.5=2018.75 years.
(Remember that he said this back when people were babbling about how you can't cross a chasm in
two steps, shock
therapy,500 days and
similar feel-good bromides. Read
Janine Wedel's book and go back to the day when some American operator knocked on a door in
St Petersburg, recognised his doppelganger, and they realised how much they could steal.
Now Russian
luxury cars in Swiss car shows which is a sign of something.) I met him again when I was a dip on
Moscow: I think he didn't become world-famous because he didn't speak English but, truth to
tell, English fluency probably wouldn't have helped because what he was saying didn't Fit The
Story. But the people who were proved wrong well before he was proved right are still out there
gilding turds; for example .
GUNS.
Shoygu addressed a Duma committee : 316 weapons tested in Syria. In six years 217 new
nuclear missiles; 3 SSBNs; 57 spacecraft; 7 submarines; 3,712 new and upgraded tanks; more than
1,000 planes and helicopters; 161 surface ships. See below and below.
WAR GAMES. Some
attention has been given to the
findings of RAND that the US has "its ass handed to it" in war games with Russia and China
. (In their home ground, of course: the USA remains almost 100% safe from foreign attack.) No
news to some of
us (I here
and
here ) but somewhat of a shock at home. But, you'll be happy to hear, the problem can be
fixed with a few billion dollars. (The US already outspends the
next eight countries but just a few more bucks and it'll be done.) What is striking about
this sort of thing is that there is never any consideration of what diplomacy could do or that
the US should stay out of Russia and China's home ground. Reminds one of Einstein's supposed
remark about insanity, doesn't it?
HOW WE LOST RUSSIA. US Ambassador explains. Haven't read it but a colleague has so I
don't have to: "our junior partner" "post-traumatic stress disorder" "little inclination to
concede much to a declining power." "Putin has a remarkable capacity for storing up slights and
grievances, and assembling them to fit his narrative of the West trying to keep Russia down."
Poor Americans! What can you do with such an sulky neighbour?
LEXUS AND VOVAN DO VENEZUELA. They catch both the puppeteer
and the puppet
. These two produce more truthful revelations than a year's subscription to the NYT.
John provides a very sparse recap of the Brexit Affair but neglects mention of why it was
passed: The vote was seen and acted upon as a referendum on Tory policies that were and are
destroying the UK's economy and social networks--Neoliberal "austerity" weaponizing Blair's
Third Way PPPs--which is part of the Creative Destruction discussed in the link I provided @20.
What's ongoing in UK is very much akin to the policy of Enclosure that makes war on the
commonfolk to enrich the fat few. The difference between then and now is the political power
held by commonfolk--power they could only dream of then.
"The government has amassed vast amounts of capital which it will now spend on domestic
programs designed to benefit the people, to help Russians live longer, healthier lives and have
more children. 'More children -- lower taxes' was one of the catchier slogans No opposition to
these proposals worth mentioning was voiced in any of the commentary that followed on news
programs and talk shows; after all, who could possibly be against spending amassed capital
on projects that help the population? " [My Emphasis]
The Neoliberal economic model run by the Outlaw US Empire, aped by EU and forced upon as
many nations as possible to feed the fat pigs is the who/what answer. China is busily lifting
its remaining millions out of poverty and that accomplishment's admired and beginning to be
emulated by ASEAN through BRI, which is why it's being targeted by the Empire. Yes, it's
Zero-sum versus Win-Win that lies at the bottom of Brexit and Corbynism.
John provides a very sparse recap of the Brexit Affair but neglects mention of why it was
passed: The vote was seen and acted upon as a referendum on Tory policies that were and are
destroying the UK's economy and social networks--Neoliberal "austerity" weaponizing Blair's
Third Way PPPs--which is part of the Creative Destruction discussed in the link I provided
@20. What's ongoing in UK is very much akin to the policy of Enclosure that makes war on the
commonfolk to enrich the fat few. The difference between then and now is the political power
held by commonfolk--power they could only dream of then.
"The government has amassed vast amounts of capital which it will now spend on domestic
programs designed to benefit the people, to help Russians live longer, healthier lives and
have more children. 'More children -- lower taxes' was one of the catchier slogans No
opposition to these proposals worth mentioning was voiced in any of the commentary that
followed on news programs and talk shows; after all, who could possibly be against
spending amassed capital on projects that help the population? " [My Emphasis]
The Neoliberal economic model run by the Outlaw US Empire, aped by EU and forced upon as
many nations as possible to feed the fat pigs is the who/what answer. China is busily lifting
its remaining millions out of poverty and that accomplishment's admired and beginning to be
emulated by ASEAN through BRI, which is why it's being targeted by the Empire. Yes, it's
Zero-sum versus Win-Win that lies at the bottom of Brexit and Corbynism.
Hate of Russia national runs deep with the infected bowels of the State Department. Sounds
like Neo-cons saber rattling and wanting to start WWIII over a bunch of Ukrainian Neo-Nazis
installed thanks to Victoria Nuland.
So much for detente with Russia. Trump proved to be just a marionette of MIC...
Sentiments about Trump at Zerohedge noticeably deteriorates since 2016
The US State Department announced on Friday that it would be joining
the European Union and Canada to impose new sanctions against Russia in response to the
Kremlin's "continued aggression in Ukraine."
Sanctions will apply to six "individuals who orchestrated the unjustified November 25 attack
on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait."
Also sanctioned by the United States are eight companies, including six Russian defense
firms, "including shipbuilding companies; two individuals involved in the NOvember sham
"elections" in Russia-controlled eastern Ukraine; and two Russian energy and construction
companies operating in Crimea."
Read the State Department announcement below:
Washington – Today, the U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets
Control (OFAC) designated six Russian individuals and eight entities in response to Russia's
continued and ongoing aggression in Ukraine. Today's action targets individuals and entities
playing a role in Russia's unjustified attacks on Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait,
the purported annexation of Crimea, and backing of illegitimate separatist government elections
in eastern Ukraine. These actions complement sanctions also taken today by the European Union
and Canada, and underscore the strength and commitment of the transatlantic partnership to
counter Russia's continued destabilizing behavior and malign activities.
"The United States and our transatlantic partners will not allow Russia's continued
aggression against Ukraine to go unchecked. This joint initiative with our partners in the
European Union and Canada reinforces our shared commitment to impose targeted and meaningful
sanctions in response to the Kremlin's attempts to disregard international norms and
undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity," said Treasury Secretary Steven T.
Mnuchin. "The international community is strongly aligned against Russia's naval attacks in
the Kerch Straight, purported annexation of Crimea, and support for the illegitimate
separatist-conducted elections in eastern Ukraine."
OVERVIEW
Five years after its invasion of Ukraine and its attempted annexation of Crimea, Russia
continues to undermine Ukraine's sovereignty and territorial integrity while failing to
implement its obligations under the Minsk agreements. On November 25, 2018, Russian authorities
opened fire on and rammed three Ukrainian ships off the coast of Crimea, seizing the ships and
capturing 24 Ukrainian crew members, who remain illegally detained in Russia. Russia also
continues its occupation of Crimea, and the Kremlin has also backed illegitimate elections held
by Ukrainian separatists in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic on November 11, 2018.
As a result of today's designations, all property and interests in property of the
designated individuals and entities are blocked, and U.S. persons are generally prohibited from
transacting with them. Moreover, any entities owned 50 percent or more by these designated
persons are also blocked by operation of law.
Designations Related to Russia's Attack in the Kerch Strait
OFAC today sanctioned four Russian officials who were involved in the Kerch Strait attack.
OFAC designated Gennadiy Medvedev, the Deputy Director of the Border Guard Service of Russia's
Federal Security Service; Sergey Stankevich, the Head of the Border Directorate of Russia's
Federal Security Service; and Andrey Shein, the Deputy Head of the Border Directorate and Head
of the Coast Guard Unit of Russia's Federal Security Service. Medvedev and Stankevich directly
controlled and organized the attack against the Ukrainian ships and their crew, while Shein
participated in the operation against the seized Ukrainian ships and crew.
OFAC also designated Ruslan Romashkin, the Head of the Service Command Point of the Federal
Security Service of the Russian Federation for the Republic of Crimea and Sevastopol.
Medvedev, Stankevich, Shein, and Romashkin are being designated pursuant to Executive Order
(E.O.) 13661 for being officials of the Government of the Russian Federation.
DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO RUSSIA'S PURPORTED ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA
Today's action also targets six Russian defense firms with operations in Crimea, several of
which misappropriated Ukrainian state assets to provide services to the Russian military. Four
of these entities are being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the defense and
related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy, and two entities are being
designated pursuant to E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is a Russian state-owned shipbuilding plant that has built
vessels for Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and the Russian Ministry of Defense.
Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is also the project developer for a naval vessel that was
completed at the Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" in Crimea. Yaroslavsky Shipbuilding Plant is
being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the defense or related materiel sector
of the Russian Federation economy.
Zelenodolsk Shipyard Plant, named after A.M. Gorky, is one of the largest ship manufacturers
in Russia and has produced missile frigates and corvettes for the Russian Navy. The Zelenodolsk
Shipyard Plant has collaborated with Crimea-based enterprise Skloplastic, which was unlawfully
nationalized by the Russian government following its illegal invasion of Crimea in 2014. The
Zelenodolsk Shipyard Plant is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the
defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
AO Kontsern Okeanpribor (Okeanpribor) is a producer of hydroacoustic equipment and has
supplied components to the Russian Navy. Okeanpribor has also collaborated on a naval project
at the Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" in Crimea. Federal SUE Shipyard "Morye" was designated by
OFAC on September 1, 2016. Okeanpribor is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating
in the defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
PAO Zvezda (Zvezda) is a supplier of diesel engines to the Russian Navy. Zvezda has also
supplied components for Russian naval vessels that were being built at the Federal SUE Shipyard
"Morye" in Crimea. Zvezda is being designated pursuant to E.O. 13662 for operating in the
defense and related materiel sector of the Russian Federation economy.
AO Zavod Fiolent (Fiolent) is a Crimea-based electronics manufacturer that has supplied
parts for use in Russian military equipment. Fiolent was unlawfully seized by the Russian
Federation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Fiolent is being designated pursuant to
E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
GUP RK KTB Sudokompozit (Sudokompozit) is a Crimea-based producer of defense components that
are supplied for Russian military use. Sudokompozit was unlawfully seized by the Russian
Federation following its annexation of Crimea in 2014. Sudokompozit is being designated
pursuant to E.O. 13685 for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
OFAC also designated the following two entities pursuant to E.O. 13685, due to their
activities in Crimea.
LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD is being designated for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine.
LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD, a limited liability company registered in the city of Simferopol,
Crimea, is one of Crimea's largest construction companies. LLC SK Consol-Stroi LTD is engaged
in the construction of residential and commercial real estate in cities throughout the Crimea
region including, among others, Feodosia, Kerch, Yalta, Simferopol, Sevastopol, and
Yepatoria.
LLC Novye Proekty is being designated for operating in the Crimea region of Ukraine. In
2016, Russian authorities awarded the private company Novye Proekty an oil and gas exploration
license for the Crimean Black Sea shelf. The Crimean shelf is believed to be rich in
hydrocarbons and authorities in Ukraine have reported that Ukraine lost about 80 percent of its
oil and gas deposits in the Black Sea due to Russia's purported annexation of Crimea. Novye
Proekty's license permits geological studies, prospecting, and the extraction of raw
hydrocarbon materials from the Black Sea's Glubokaya block. Prior to Russia's purported
annexation of Crimea the Glubokaya block was estimated to hold reserves of 8.3 million tons of
crude and 1.4 billion cubic meters of natural gas.
DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO ILLEGITIMATE SEPARATIST GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS IN UKRAINE
Today's action also targets two Ukrainian separatists who were involved in the organization
of the November 2018 illegitimate elections in the so-called Donetsk People's Republic. These
illegitimate elections clearly contradict Russia's commitments under the Minsk agreements, and
were strongly opposed by the United States and EU.
Aleksey Alekseevich Naydenko is the Deputy Chair of the Central Election Commission of the
so-called Donetsk People's Republic. Naydenko is being designated for being responsible for or
complicit in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten
the peace, security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
Vladimir Yurievich Vysotsky is the Secretary of Central Election Commission of the so-called
Donetsk People's Republic. Vysotsky is being designated for being responsible for or complicit
in, or having engaged in, directly or indirectly, actions or policies that threaten the peace,
security, stability, sovereignty, or territorial integrity of Ukraine.
View identifying information on the individuals designated today.
" DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO RUSSIA'S PURPORTED ANNEXATION OF CRIMEA"
purported
/pərˈpôrdəd/
adjective
appearing or stated to be true, though not necessarily so; alleged.
There is nothing "purported" about it, it was true and as legitimate as it could possibly
be.
Then under "DESIGNATIONS RELATED TO ILLEGITIMATE SEPARATIST GOVERNMENT ELECTIONS IN
UKRAINE" they claim that Russia violated its committments under Minsk 2, which the US never
officially recognized. Minsk 2 intended increased sovereignty for the Oblasts under a new
Ukraine Federal constitutional arrangement. That constitutional amendment has never been
initiated by Kiev, with the blessing of Uncle Sam. It is the Ukraine puppet government who is
in violation of Minsk 2.
If the US wrote this, assume the opposite to be true.
[Article]: " Sanctions will apply to six "individuals who orchestrated the unjustified
November 25 attack on three Ukrainian naval vessels near the Kerch Strait." "
Translation: "The propaganda lunacy will continue". "We will keep telling the same old
same old lies until people believe them".
My understanding of that incident is that the Ukrainian boats had some unexplained special
forces people on board and they refused to pull over when ordered to. From Russia's view,
there was a real risk of these people planning to plant explosives to blow up the Kerch
bridge.
Now it appears that no matter which government is in power they go along with the
aggressive agenda of the US.
Been like that since the '50's, just that you believed that the economy and world was
good.
Voting matters ZERO. The lie you are made to believe is that there is a choice when
voting, when in fact the ruling party is the financial engineers and bankers behind all
governments.
Voting is a waste of time. The heart of the beast is the USD reserve and the Rothschild
empire. Once we abolish that pig, all western governments implode under their own weight of
cheap talk and empty "policy".
The evidence that the orange swine is a Rothschild Trojan Horse is overwhelming at this
point. Only a scumbag or an absolute imbecile would fail to see it. Fvck you orange
roach.
I didn't read your comments at that time but I tip my hat to you. I realised that
everything he said during the campaign was bullsh!t after he started appointing Goldman Sachs
bankers to his cabinet...
Blooming Barricade , Mar 14, 2019 5:36:22 PM |
link
Pierre Omidyar opens up new Integrity Initiative
Omidyar's Democracy Fund has also helped to finance the "News Integrity Initiative," a
name that evokes the U.K.'s notorious Integrity Initiative. The latter group claimed to be an
independent charity battling foreign disinformation until it was exposed by hackers as a
propaganda mill run by military officers and covertly funded by the British Foreign Office to
cultivate public opinion in support of heightened conflict with Russia. Leaked communications
revealed how the Integrity Initiative mobilized clusters of journalists, self-styled
disinformation experts, academics and political figures throughout the West to advocate for a
long-term war footing against the Russian menace.
For its part, the News Integrity Initiative is a murky $14 million operation intended to
"combat media manipulation" through a network of "journalists, technologists, academic
institutions, non-profits, and other organizations." The set-up is eerily evocative of the
influence clusters developed by the British Integrity Initiative. Few specifics are provided,
however, on what the group actually does.
A hint about the agenda of the News Integrity Initiative lies in a grant of $1 million it
made to an outlet called Internews in 2017. The bulk of Internews' money -- some 80 percent
of it -- comes from the U.S. government. It has also received backing from liberal financier
George Soros and USAID, which provided the group with seed money for a Russian-language
television network, helped drive the pro-NATO color revolution in the Republic of Georgia,
and published footage of Russian casualties in Chechnya to erode Russian public support for
the war.
In countries that are considered official and semi-official enemies of the United States,
Internews has organized de facto boot camps for opposition journalists. "In the Middle East,"
says Internews founder David Hoffman, "training sessions often begin with discussion of
whether Internews is really U.S. propaganda or the CIA." However Hoffman answers the
question, it is abundantly clear that his outlet has advanced Washington's priorities abroad
behind the guise of independent journalism.
In November 2017, the News Integrity Initiative hosted a workshop alongside Internews and
the Omidyar-backed First Draft News in Kiev, Ukraine, according to the initiative's managing
director, Molly de Aguiar. Kiev is today a nexus for intelligence-connected media crusaders
and a launch pad for projects ostensibly aimed at countering Russia's "information warfare."
But, what exactly the News Integrity Initiative was doing there was left unsaid.
While Omidyar ploughs his fortune into organizations that claim to be countering
"disinformation," especially of the Russian variety, he has established a culture factory to
publicize the supposed feats of the journalists often hyped up by the cartel of media
transparency groups and fact-checking sites he funds.
You are a little wrong when you call this system "colonial". Today it is neo-colonialism.
When the United States subordinates the country, they do not bear any responsibility for the
fate of this country, since the formally subordinate country remains independent and all its
actions are performed "voluntarily."
Ukraine is a good example. Now this country commits ritual suicide "completely
voluntarily."
They've thought of that. That's why they tell us "The US has no colonies". Because you
have to support them if you admit to owning them. That's why by 1960, every colonial nation
on earth was giving its own colonies independence. They were costing more than they were
worth.
What we do now is to groom some local fellow, like Guaido, to take over the government and
run it the way we would like him to. We pay generously for this favor, in the form of loans
and direct investments. The fortunate ones near the seat of power come out fabulously well.
But neither we nor the country's rulers take on any responsibility for the welfare of their
people.
One of the dictators we backed was the director of the Brazilian military, who seized
power back in 1964... a fellow named Castelo Branco. And he was asked once at a press
conference how the economy was doing.
He replied "The economy, it is doing marvelously! The people, on the other hand-- not so
good."
If you don't offer protection to your puppet eventually some other power might try the
same trick and overthrow him. But if you do provide protection that area becomes a
colony.
So what you describing can only work when there is only one major power on the planet. The US
enjoyed it for some time but it can't have it anymore, that's reality.
The system is predicted to work some time into the future, for the reason that it is based
on subterfuge and military force. And we have a military as large as that of the entire rest
of the planet put together. So to us it doesn't matter what you call it. They control the
media, so they can just not report a word you say about them.
What will undo it will be a collapse of the dollar-based economy. And that will be kind of
hard to achieve, as every rich person on earth keeps his wealth denominated in dollars. So
there is little pressure to kill it. That's why we always used to call it The Almighty
Dollar.
However there are limits. Our main weapon now being used to enforce behavior is financial
sanctions. So it's pretty much assured that at some point in the near future the sanctioned
nations (Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela...) will be getting together to set up an alternate
financial system. Probably based on the yuan.
That's the thing about offensive weapons systems. As a Mexican wit put it "Let them build
a twenty foot wall. We will build a 21 foot ladder."
Can anyone confirm what will happen when Germany will shut down those US Command Center
(NATO) because Germany is able to finance their own. (US Personal has to go) Nato support Act
is an US Law and not an authorized NATO Law
TIME AND PREDICTIONS. Gorbachev became GenSek 34 years ago on Monday. I remember Dr Leonid Abalkin saying first
stage six months, second stage three years, third stage 30 years. And I've kept that in the
back of my mind ever since. Well, here we are, plus or minus: 1985.25+33.5=2018.75 years.
(Remember that he said this back when people were babbling about how you can't cross a chasm in
two steps, shock
therapy,500 days and
similar feel-good bromides. Read
Janine Wedel's book and go back to the day when some American operator knocked on a door in
St Petersburg, recognised his doppelganger, and they realised how much they could steal.
Now Russian
luxury cars in Swiss car shows which is a sign of something.) I met him again when I was a dip on
Moscow: I think he didn't become world-famous because he didn't speak English but, truth to
tell, English fluency probably wouldn't have helped because what he was saying didn't Fit The
Story. But the people who were proved wrong well before he was proved right are still out there
gilding turds; for example .
GUNS.
Shoygu addressed a Duma committee : 316 weapons tested in Syria. In six years 217 new
nuclear missiles; 3 SSBNs; 57 spacecraft; 7 submarines; 3,712 new and upgraded tanks; more than
1,000 planes and helicopters; 161 surface ships. See below and below.
WAR GAMES. Some
attention has been given to the
findings of RAND that the US has "its ass handed to it" in war games with Russia and China
. (In their home ground, of course: the USA remains almost 100% safe from foreign attack.) No
news to some of
us (I here
and
here ) but somewhat of a shock at home. But, you'll be happy to hear, the problem can be
fixed with a few billion dollars. (The US already outspends the
next eight countries but just a few more bucks and it'll be done.) What is striking about
this sort of thing is that there is never any consideration of what diplomacy could do or that
the US should stay out of Russia and China's home ground. Reminds one of Einstein's supposed
remark about insanity, doesn't it?
HOW WE LOST RUSSIA. US Ambassador explains. Haven't read it but a colleague has so I
don't have to: "our junior partner" "post-traumatic stress disorder" "little inclination to
concede much to a declining power." "Putin has a remarkable capacity for storing up slights and
grievances, and assembling them to fit his narrative of the West trying to keep Russia down."
Poor Americans! What can you do with such an sulky neighbour?
LEXUS AND VOVAN DO VENEZUELA. They catch both the puppeteer
and the puppet
. These two produce more truthful revelations than a year's subscription to the NYT.
"... Everything I understand about German behavior in regards to 3rd parties is totally in lockstep with the US - never mind that Germany has been occupied by the US since WW2 - so why not a scheme to build more Russian dependency on the West? ..."
"... The people who destroyed the USSR are still in power; their whole existence depends on whoring out Russia to the West because that is all they have ever done. They can't not stop because to stop would be an act of self-annihilation. Russian elites, at least a large faction of them, desperately want back into the clubhouse, if they cant get in they will find something else to do until the moment the clubhouse door is opened to them again, and then they will fall all over themselves to get in. ..."
Only a few weeks ago, German politicians and media were up in arms protesting to the Trump
administration for interfering in Berlin's internal affairs. There were even outraged
complaints that Washington was seeking "regime change" against Chancellor Angela Merkel's
government.
Those protests were sparked when Richard Grenell, the US ambassador to Germany,
warned German companies involved in the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia that they
could be hit with American economic sanctions if they go ahead with the Baltic seabed
project.
Earlier, Grenell provoked fury among Berlin's political establishment when he openly gave
his backing to opposition party Alternative for Germany. That led to consternation and
denunciations of Washington's perceived backing for regime change in Berlin. They were public
calls for Grenell to be expelled over his apparent breach of diplomatic protocols.
Now, however, Germany is shamelessly kowtowing to an even more outrageous American
regime-change plot against Venezuela.
... ... ...
Perhaps this policy of appeasement is also motivated by Berlin's concern to spare the
Nord Stream 2 project from American sanctions.
When NS2 is completed later this year, it
is reckoned to double the capacity of natural gas consumption by Germany from Russia. That will be
crucial for Germany's economic growth.
Another factor is possible blackmail of Berlin by Washington.
Recall the
earth-shattering revelations made by American whistleblower Edward Snowden a few years back when he
disclosed that US intelligence agencies were tapping the personal phone communications of
Chancellor Merkel and other senior Berlin politicians.
Recall, too, how the German state
remarkably
acquiesced
over what should
have been seen as a devastating infringement by Washington.
The weird lack of action by Berlin over that huge violation of its sovereignty by the Americans
makes one wonder if the US spies uncovered a treasure trove of blackmail material on German
politicians.
Berlin's pathetic kowtowing to Washington's interference in Venezuela begs an ulterior
explanation. No self-respecting government could be so hypocritical and duplicitous.
Whatever Berlin may calculate to gain from its unscrupulous bending over for Washington,
one thing seems clear, as Russian envoy Nebenzia warned: "One day you are next" for American
hegemonic shafting.
Well, Merkel is doing a good job of protecting Germany's interests by opposing the U.S.
regarding North Stream 2.
The German stand on Venezuela is disappointing, but they might be
figuring no skin off their back, since Venezuela is not in Europe, so might as well appease cheeto head.
I am personally suspicious of Nord Stream 2 and think Russia is making a HUGE mistake.
Everything I understand about German behavior in regards to 3rd parties is totally in
lockstep with the US - never mind that Germany has been occupied by the US since WW2 - so why
not a scheme to build more Russian dependency on the West? The Russians are fools to have
built this pipeline - they should be moving away from Europe, not foolishly trying to sew
themselves onto it as an appendage. This will come back to bite them on the ***, mark my
words.
And this, in a nutshell, is why Russia is always taking one step forward and two back. The
people who destroyed the USSR are still in power; their whole existence depends on whoring
out Russia to the West because that is all they have ever done. They can't not stop because
to stop would be an act of self-annihilation. Russian elites, at least a large faction of
them, desperately want back into the clubhouse, if they cant get in they will find something
else to do until the moment the clubhouse door is opened to them again, and then they will
fall all over themselves to get in.
Is there any other nation that wields such a stranglehold on any other as Israel does the
United States? Is there any other nation that has so completely surrendered its sovereignty
to another as has the United States to Israel. Does any other country (size of Israel) strike
fear and dread into the hearts of its lawmakers to the point of complete serfdom as Israel
does the US? Can any other country allow any foreign country to override its head of state to
address lawmakers as Israel has done to the US in the case of Obama, despite his complete
servility to Israel, thereby rendering himself a victim of dual abuses: racism and disregard
of American sovereignty? Has any other country sacrificed so many of its citizens for wars on
behalf of any other country as we have done for Israel? Can any other country receiving
billions of dollars of taxpayers money in aid and military hardware shamelessly call the
shots as Israel does with America, with America not as much as questioning orders from
Israel? Can we realistically celebrate Independence Day with so much fanfare when another
country has us so completely by the balls as to make a mockery of the word "independence".
Can any country strip any other of its sovereignty as Israel has done to the US, including
undermining its constitutional guarantees of freedom of expression, with our total collusion?
Having raised all these questions, can there be realistic grounds for hoping for a ray of
light at the end of the tunnel, short of a comprehensive revolution that would rehabilitate a
nation led by quislings into one of principled men and women?
anyone here who chooses to hate me. I recognize that that you have the right to do so. And
that that right s Constitutionally protected. You are entitled to your feelings.
What I must object to and call into question is your attempt to engage in acts that in any
threaten, thwart, disrupt my right as a US citizen to access every aspect of what is
guaranteed to me by the US constitution. That includes manufacturing false claims to
undermine the same.
I will defend your right to your feelings and your right to express them in a manner in
accordance with the first amendment. I cannot support acts that deprive myself my
constitutional rights in any manner.
I am not a promoter of hate, but I certainly recognize the right that people have for
their feelings and the desire to one's express them.
[Bret Stephens] attributes to her "insidious cunning" and "anti-Jewish bigotry"
observing how "she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he
called Congress "Israeli-occupied" territory."
If what Rep. Omar said wasn't too different from what Mr. Buchanan said previously, why
haven't we heard a peep out of him on this issue?
a liar and a hypocrite, and that alone should disqualify them for office.
Hello?
Where the bleep have you been, Pardner? You got that exactly backwards; mendacity
and hypocrisy are mandatory minimum qualifications for the positions.
Ms. Omar is dis qualified because she is honest enough to speak the truth.
Now, go learn to shoot straight before shooting off yer mug, and you can start with
this,
I must take issue with your observation that Mr. Truman is an habitual liar, not because
I disagree with you, but because I disagree with your manner in presenting it as a
derogatory statement. Is not the ability of lying necessary to political
leadership ?
And this, which illustrates several points regarding politicians, their characteristics
and motives.:
Two candidates for political office in a debate
SAUSAGE-SELLER
No, Cleon, little you care for his reigning in Arcadia, it's to pillage and impose on the
allies at will that you reckon; you wish the war to conceal your rogueries as in a mist,
that Demos may see nothing of them, and harassed by cares, may only depend on yourself for
his bread. But if ever peace is restored to him, if ever he returns to his lands to comfort
himself once more with good cakes, to greet his cherished olives, he will know the
blessings you have kept him out of, even though paying him a salary; and, filled with
hatred and rage, he will rise, burning with desire to vote against you. You know this only
too well; it is for this you rock him to sleep with your lies.
until there is a much larger block of anti israel congresspeople nothing is going to change.
What is the USs interest? They sure are not interested in making things better for the
majority/middle class. All the while continuing to enrich the already too wealthy ever more.
Media is a lying POS and yet people still watch Fox or Cnn or msnbc. All of them produce
nothing but propaganda garbage. Unfortunately, it seems like most in the USA just don't care.
In Venezuela look at the protesters the US media sets up and/or loves so much, try that in
the USA and you'll end up in jail.
For me, Ilhan Omar's statements were the most exciting political event in decades. I'm not
surprised that she is being punished, but the viciousness of the attacks have certainly gone
up a notch.
America's big mistake: allowing all the media to congeal into one big bullhorn that is
controlled by Jewish interests. As long as they control the media there will be no national
debate of zionist power in America.
Another great article by Giraldi. He is consistently the most forceful and articulate
writer regarding the subversion of America's national interests to Israel.
As much as I despise Omar's politics, in this case she is right to expose the dirty politics
that Israel uses on it's "friend and ally" the United States of America.
AIPAC is the most powerful foreign lobby in the United States and has done more to influence
and damage the American political process than just about any other lobby. It is a
loosely-guarded secret that, in order to garner jewish support, prospective politicians must
sign a loyalty oath promising support for Israel. This, in itself is un-American and borders
on treason. Failure to sign the loyalty oath almost always assures a political death. AIPAC
will spend millions to elect a candidate as long as he "toes the Israeli line".
Remember the USS Liberty (GTR-5), the American naval vessel that was deliberately attacked
with massive loss of American lives (an act of war) by "our friend and ally" Israel on June
8, 1967. If I had my way, Israel would have been turned into a "glass parking lot" on June 9,
1967.
As an aside, we must constantly hit our politicians with charges of treason, citing the
"loyalty oaths" to Israel that almost all of them have signed.
Dual citizens of Israel are through out the US government and have given America unending
wars and debt and an unconstitutional FED and IRS. No dual citizen from any nation should be
able to hold office in any government or state or county or city government in the US, no one
can serve two masters and citizens of Israel serve Israel and that is why America has been at
war for 18 years and counting in the Mideast!
Israel was everywhere at the Jewish day school I attended in New York. The Israeli and
American flags were proudly displayed together, no matter that I, like the majority of my
classmates, was not Israeli.
This alone might be innocuous, a loose cultural affinity that would be familiar in a
French or German language academy. But in Jewish day school life, outright political
mobilization for Israel and its policies was a requirement.
Every year we would be "strongly encouraged" to attend the Salute to Israel parade on
New York's Fifth Avenue. Teachers were marshals, and mocking stories about pro-Palestinian
activists were exchanged in class the following day.
One year, we were outright required to join a protest in support of Israel, during the
school day, at the United Nations.
This school-mandated allegiance seeped into even the most casual conversations. I
remember once debating with my group of friends whether we'd rather serve with the Israeli
Defense Forces or the U.S. military. Even though all of us, and our parents, were born and
raised in the United States, we were unanimous: we'd rather fight for Israel.
With any other cultural group in America, for any other country, these statements
would be shocking. After all, when was the last time you heard of an Italian-American
birthright trip to Sicily? But for American Jews, the centrality of allegiance to Israel in
our communal organizations is the norm.
There is one big omission in your article PG. If you read more than the tweet from Rep. Juan
Vargas that you linked as
"Questioning support for the US-Israel relationship is unacceptable."
you must have been pleased by the deluge (maybe hundreds) of Tweets uniformly condemning
him and including many from people claiming believably to be Jews.
BTW Australia doesn't allow dual citizenship by its national MPs and senators and has had
in the last few years a previously unparalleled spate of challenges to members already seated
in Parliament. The courts have interpreted the constitutional provision strictly and MPs
whose Italian born mothers filled in a form which gave them Italian citizenship without their
knowledge have been caught (or at least been taken to court).
I would tend to argue that dual citizenship should be declared but that it is up yo the
voters to decide whether they want to be represented by someone who isn't only an Australian.
There are counterarguments however and avoidance of America's Israel First situation is
certainly one of them.
It is simple, really. The US needs a law prohibiting anyone with dual citizenship to hold
public office. Stated allegiance to any other country should be treated as high treason,
which it is. However, I don't see Congress doing any of this: we all know what happens when
the improvements in henhouse safely is in the hands of foxes.
Anyway All US political system is running on bribery. So the bribery is legal and cannot be
tackled.
The only way to go is to distinguish the bribery and divide it into two groups.
Patriotic bribery and non patriotic bribery.
Here is a funny thing!!!!!!!!!
The Arabs have a proper English word for bribery: Backshish.
1 It is done in the back, so nobody sees it.
2 Shish means you should be quiet about it.
What bribery you may ask.
So what are those prepayed trips to Israel where the Congress people are treated as kings,
and they have chance to make love to the Jewish wall of the temple. They stick their wishes
written on paper into crevices of the wall. (Not too many records if the wall did take care
of their wishes.}
@AnonFromTN You
dont have to be a dual citizen be a traitor.
So what the US needs is an amendment to the Constitution expanding the definitions of
treason and subversion to better reflect the modern day realities of our political
system.
Perhaps suggest to the Magnificent Three that they put forth a bill calling for that.
What makes this piece meaningful is he is 100% correct. Representative Ilhar Omar should
be applauded for her bravery. She truly is courageous, as she not only risks her political
career but also her life. And by doing so she leaves open the door for others to follow.
We'll soon see how serious the Zionists take this matter.
JFK called for AIPAC to register as a foreign agent, however sense his murder not one
politician has ever mentioned it again. I think this says a lot about how much influence that
particular lobby has. Too much.
Dual loyalty is a fuzzy term. Why not go back to the tried-and-true fifth column? These
domestic Zionazis are Israel's fifth column. They constitute the vanguard of an
international, and their program is clearly shown here:
Israel leads a counterrevolutionary plan and conspiracy for bad-faith subversion of all
your human rights including your human right to peace. Israel's existence depends on domestic
Apartheid, totalitarian repression in client states such as the US, and continual threats to
peace worldwide. The government of Israel has forfeited its sovereignty by shirking its
responsibility to protect with the crime against peace of aggression and the crime against
humanity of extermination. In consequence, it must give way to a free Palestine.
The only way you're going to shake off Israel's fifth column is end Israel. You've got to
do to Israel what we did to South Africa.
"No politician can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or
he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve America and Israel."
@jo6pac There
are 40 Jews in the house and senate .that is not 89% of the total 500 congressmen and
senators.
Crap claims like this are actually harmful to the effort to get the Jewish Fifth Column
and Israel out of the US because the lie will be pointed out and much fun made of the
nutcases by the uber Jews.
Duel citizenship is only acceptable if one citizenship is from where you were born, over
which you had no choice, and the other is where you have chosen to live, made your home, and
become a citizen thereof. Two citizenship by choice is a sham: getting the benefactors of one
but maintaining your loyalty to another.
[Stephens] attributes to her "insidious cunning" and "anti-Jewish bigotry" observing how
"she wraps herself in the flag, sounding almost like Pat Buchanan when he called Congress
"Israeli-occupied" territory." And it's all " how anti-Zionism has abruptly become an
acceptable point of view in reputable circles. It's why anti-Semitism is just outside the
frame, bidding to get in.
Let's examine how and why the cunning and bigotry of Bret Stephens gets projected by him
onto Ilhan Omar.
1. Charge, sans evidence, your opponent with your own crimes and repeat the charge ad
nauseam.
2. In lieu of refutation of your opponent's argument, train your reader to identify his
argument as galling chutzpah and your galling chutzpah as an argument.
3. Double down on the accusatory inversion and invoke anti- Semitism: It is not the Jewish
demand that the USA shut-up and bow down before Israel which is threatening to provoke an
anti-Semitic reaction; no: anti-Semitism results from acknowledging as legitimate a scrutiny of
the claims and aims of the Zionist state.
Mr. Stephen's rhetoric is an admission that he and his kind hate Jews, insisting as it does
on the implicit acceptance of Jewish identity as irrational and homicidal. His rhetoric also
represents an ultimatum to the USA: honor Israel's irrational hatred and killing of its
neighbors or you are guilty of irrationally killing Jews.
This is known as desperation and is an infallible sign that yet another false Jewish messiah
– Neoconservatism-has failed.
"... I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters – "one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors " ..."
I thought we lived in a corporate state and since the Supreme Court has ruled corporations
have rights – the voting morons already have loyalty to their corporate masters –
"one nation, under God and all of his defense contractors "
Anti-Semitism theater – a carefully staged social movement organized by Government
owned media to divide the peons and make them hate each other. Real hate-group profit lies in
charging for vast quantities of militarism but making just enough to kill women and children
overseas.
Back home the flag waving patriots insist they need a giant military with weapons
for anyone who can pay to protect them and their families. Dual loyalty to the Jewish lobby
and the defense lobby.
Thanks for this. I am wondering what Larry Johnson and the other members of this Committee of
Correspondence make of the possible connection between Christopher Steele, Pablo Miller, and
Sergei Skripal?
Some of Craig Murray's speculations in his latest post on the Skripal incident regarding
the coordinated role of Orbis Intelligence, the BBC, and the British state (which issued a
DSMA notice prohibiting press mention of Pablo Miller) are quite plausible. Murray is, like
the members of this committee, a veteran of the game....
Was Skripal coerced/encouraged by Miller to serve as one of Steele's unattributed Russian
"sources"? Did he later get cold feet? Or did he later attempt to buy his way back into
Russia with the claim that he could provide proof that the Dossier was a fraud? Or was he
working as a triple agent the whole time? Were the two sightseeing Russians "Borishov" and
"Petrov" sent to retrieve something from Skripal?
"... That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me. ..."
Anyone remember Mullah Omar, the deceased leader of the Taliban? The U.S. military and intelligence services claimed over and
over again that he was hiding in Pakistan. Bette Dam
finds (pdf) that he wasn't:
After 2001, Mullah Omar never stepped foot in Pakistan, instead opting to hide in his native land -- and for eight years,
lived just a few miles from a major U.S. Forward Operating Base that housed thousands of soldiers.
In late 2001, after the U.S. invasion, Mullah Omar resigned as leader of the Taliban and the movement officially surrendered
to Hamid Karzai who promised them reconciliation. The U.S. did not like that and launched a vengeful campaign against all former
Taliban member. Eighteen years later the U.S. is suing for peace.
Mullah Omar lived quietly, meditated and studied religious text. Allah remarked on his death:
On April 23, 2013, Mullah Omar passed away. That day, Jabbar Omari told me, the hot, dry lands of southern Afghanistan experienced
something he'd never seen before: a hail storm. I assumed it was hagiographic bluster, but later I found a U.S. army publication
referring to that day: "More than 80 Task Force Falcon helicopters were damaged when a sudden unprecedented hailstorm hit
Kandahar Airfield April 23, where nearly half of the brigade's helicopters were parked."
The fact that Mullah Omar's death was suppressed for two years even from high-level official sources, indicates to me that the
theory bin Laden died in 2001 is very plausible. We even have a similar progression of statements regarding their respective health,
doubts of whether they were alive at the respective time, etc.
Of course, both terror leaders were kept "alive" for geopolitical reasons. Once ISIS (and later Russia/China) took over as
a serious threat in the corporate media narrative, they no longer had to cling to those old phantoms.
The story on Omar is astonishing, but to me not surprising. If the US spends billions on finding one guy, and at the end of the
day, he is literally just down the road, it shows how incompetent and useless our intelligence gathering has become.
That 93% of all personnel that are employed by the CIA are paper pushers in Langley and just 7% are in the field, of which
I read sometime ago, has a ring of truth to me.
Stupidity has a firm grip on our rulers, and they are getting, not only us but many others, killed for absolutely no reason.
And the dunces called the American voter, keep re-electing them. It leaves me breathless.
Hmmmm I think IMHO that any analogies with Gorbachev are misplaced and superficial. I
don't think Gorbachev knew what he was doing and was profoundly naive (or worse, but that's
the best that can be said about him, let's leave it at that – and I admired him as a
teen behind the iron curtain).
I think Sanders knows what he's doing and is clear eyed about who he's dealing with in
terms of system and people -- unlike Gorbachev.
As for people in the USSR giving up – I don't think they got anything of what they
really wanted, and I don't think anyone really asked them. So they never had a chance to give
up anything. They were simply led along a short hopeful path – and then summarily and
mercilessly crushed.
Sanders is a healthy thing for this country and the Dem party. Unlike Gorbachev, he's
ushering in healthy forces. Let the chips fall where they may.
"... The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful way. ..."
Trump has driving desire to be seen as the first businessman president.
The appeal of Trump making 'allies pay their fair share' any reality check on how counterproductive the effort is to the
waning US empire
Trump's unique candidacy put him in the White House without any real foreign policy staff who would have long ago gotten
Trump to abandon the silly idea - at least after he was elected.
The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline. Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection
money' will change that trend in any meaningful way.
The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these silly shakedown attempts as the most
efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.
Thanks B. This is how empires end, or at least one way. Hubris gets them every time. I for
one will be glad to see US troops at the very least reduced in Italy, and for all of Europe
for that matter.
Especially now that the INF is dead. And I hear that Italy is now looking at
embracing China's B&R Initiative. I say have at it! There's the shiver waiting to run up
Washington's spine. You might find this amusing, too: >
https://thesaker.is/us-treats-luxembourg-like-a-vassal-state-or-us-imperial-hubris-gone-bonkers/
Little Luxembourg. It does bring a big smile. Keep going, Trump. You're on the right track.
More Art of the Deal, anyone?
This will be good for every one. Trump demands the Germans and Japanese pay for US
protection, which they reject and the US military goes home. Isn't that an excellent outcome
for all parties?
The only section that is slightly unclear is, "The only sound reason to keep the 30,000
U.S. troops in Germany is to prevent them from moving to Poland from where they could
threaten the country."
Surely the US occupation of Germany has been tacitly or latently threatening and
controlling and dominating and bullying and extorting Germany for around 74 years?
So what major difference would it make if they were moved a few hundred kilometers
away?
Kick 'em out! Germany has more than served her sentence!
The European people should support Trump in his desire to eliminate NATO. Of course the Deep
State in both Europe and the US will fight it tooth and nail. Maybe the #GiletsJaunes who
have been erased from western media will finally topple the Party of Davos candidate Macron.
And similar populist movements in other European countries can topple other Deep State
stooges from western Europe. Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the
Social Democrats implode in Germany.
Extortion because you're broke. We don't have the money to pay for it, so this
administration resorts to mob tactics to keep the scam going. "The government and us are cut
from the same cloth." Sam Giancana, former Chicago mob boss.
If that graphic is any indication of public opinion in Germany, things are even worse than
I'd heard.
There has been a small series of events where the German Government gave the US meddlers a
shove-off. First was the new gas pipeline Nord 2 - they refused to fold for perfectly good
economic reasons. Next was the German rejection of the horrible F-35. Recently I'm seeing
headlines about Germany and the Chinese 5G company.
Given all of this, I'm beginning to doubt if the Germans will allow the US to plant new
short-range nuclear missiles on their soil. Becoming a WW3 target for no good reason except
to please the US of A Imperia wouldn't seem to be a very clever move on their part.
I agree with Elliott A that it is better to have the US troops in Poland than in Germany -
and better that the inviters of the US troops then become the target for the defensive
nuclear missiles they force Russia to deploy rather than Germany.
Furthermore, if Poland is forced to pay the full cost of their invited US guests, maybe
their voters will eventually come to their senses and vote in more rational Polish
politicians.
The Poles are generally pseudo-Catholic and mercenary, pro-American in-name-only; as soon
as it could hit them in the pocket, they will pipe down very quickly and balk/bridle.
Hence Poland is a worthy (temporary) stopover for the US (including the NSA) when evicted
from Germany. The fact that Merkel is out soon is dangerous because she doesn't really G/A/F,
and will defer the decision to the next poor blighter.
There could be a treaty in place that says American troops can remain in Germany until the
year 2500 but Trump's just shot himself in the foot again by giving Germany a get-out
clause.
Zero hedge is reporting that Pence went a bit further than that and urged Germany To provoke
Russian Navy in the Kerch Strait by sending ships there in a freedom of navigation exercise.
Strangely enough Merkel said she was willing to provoke Russia, but thought doing it wouldn't
accomplish anything so she didn't want to provoke Russia for no reason. God, how insane are
these idiots. And now it looks like in response Pence/Trump will extort Germany for not being
mindlessly obedient enough.
Merkel is already on her way out as the CDU/CSU combine and the Social Democrats implode
in Germany.
Posted by: ab initio | Mar 8, 2019 11:49:49 AM | 6
The problem is though, that the Deep State have already reserved their places in Merkel's
successors, the AfD. All of these right-wing "populist" parties acros Europe seem to be no
more than a cynical vehicle for the Deep State to hijack popular discontent and channel it
into a new form of slavery to replace the old. Hence Steve Banner's dubious and highly
dangerous politicking for the so-called populist movement in Europe.
A real future lies in Jeremy Corbyn and maybe also a few other left-wing parties in Europe
(as long as they don't become compradors like Syriza) - but the Deep State is fighting Corbyn
tooth and nail. In Germany there is Die Linke who have some good people and some good
policies (from my limited knowledge!) - but their popularity is still in the doldrums,
unfortunately.
And of course, the extortion must be paid in US Dollars. Clearly, the threat is all about
keeping Dollar Hegemony alive by reducing the massive trade deficit. I see AfD making capital
thanks to this. As for Japan, Russia will not sign a Peace Treaty with it until all foreign
military forces are removed--a condition that's been reiterated several times over the last
few months to which I've linked. Okinawans are furious at being twice colonized and are at
the end of their rope. So far they've been peaceful, but I think it's clear to them by now
that the only way to remove the foreign vermin is to literally push them into the sea.
Korea's situation's been discussed on that thread.
For the domestic Outlaw US Empire, shutting down the Overseas Empire of Bases and the
related destabilization projects globally would save @ $1 Trillion/year--an utter wastage of
monies for projects that are decidedly NOT in the National Interest. And as most here
understand, the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an
Outlaw and an Empire. And it would become cleaner too as the US Military is the most
polluting entity on the planet.
Isn't Poland offering to pay the United States $2 billion to establish a base called Fort
Trump?
BTW, perhaps this is a ruse to remove all U.S. troops from Syria. I'd love to be there
when Elliott "debt collector" Abrams turns up demanding the money from Assad. There is an
opportunity for one of the greatest reality TV programs ever (I'm a neo-con, get me out of
here) which makes me wonder if that's Trump's reason for this scheme.
All Americans needs to protect Americans in the US is a coast guard and a border patrol.
Everything else is either protection for corporations doing business [which should be added
to the price of their products/services to reflect true costs] or empire.
Yes, it's another damp squib, another no-win, another over-promise, another posture, like all
the others.
This is all Trump knows and integrity never enters the equation.
Any sign of that border wall, that the Mexican government was going to pay for?
Not exactly "The Art of The Deal". more like one long and embarrassing suicide note.
I don't exactly dislike Trump particularly as he has "Mullered" a number of cretinous
insiders whom required a reality check but he is hindbound by his capinet; none of his plans
went through and he is in it well over his depth particularly since he appears to be
suffering from ADHD, dementia and schizophrenia - just what you need in the
Commander-in-Chief?
On the bright side, you can get a bigly discount for being a faithful toady and swearing
allegiance to the US of A. Wonder where the US 'leaders' got the idea of swearing allegiance
to a foreign power?
....the world would be more peaceful if the Outlaw US Empire would cease being an Outlaw
and an Empire....
Trump's just demonstrated that by staying out of the very recent Indo-Pakistan incident.
Maybe he didn't want Americans dying in the shithole that is the sub-continent. Maybe he
didn't see any opportunity to line his own pocket. Whatever his reason, he did the right
thing. Would Hillary have done the same? I don't know.....
Empire is getting the rest of its plates spinning so that must mean that the end is
getting closer. I don't think that the Philippine's plate is spinning fast enough so Trump
needs to give it some special love.
Pretty soon we will need a plate spinning scorecard just to keep track of all the
action.
Syria
Iran
Ukraine
Venezuela
Russia
China
Korea
EU w/ NATO
and now Germany and Japan
What plates am I missing?
Think about how much of the peoples resources are going to keeping these plates
spinning.
Who are going to come to the table with what arguments when the debt music stops?
* Trump has driving desire to be seen as the first businessman president.
* The appeal of Trump making 'allies pay their fair share' any reality check on how
counterproductive the effort is to the waning US empire
* Trump's unique candidacy put him in the White House without any real foreign policy staff
who would have long ago gotten Trump to abandon the silly idea - at least after he was
elected.
The multi-polar world is quickly becoming a reality and the US empire is in decline.
Doubtful this brouhaha about 'protection money' will change that trend in any meaningful
way.
The only other explanation is this really is 4D chess on Trump's part where he sees these
silly shakedown attempts as the most efficient way of getting the US out of NATO.
American troops pack up your shit and get the f*ck out, oh and here's an invoice for $100
billion to cover the cost of cleaning up your toxic waste.
Thanks for your business.
The only Germans that want them are restaurants and shops located near the bases and other
businesses that cater to them.
Yes, Trump's new policy is very welcome if it gets Germany to kick them out or, better
yet, get out of NATO. I wonder if Trump intends it - or is he just plain stupid?
Victor Cha, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington, said the administration was sending a deliberate message by demanding "Cost
Plus 50" from South Korea first , even though that effort fell short.
Ouch, poor SK. What a timing, straight after 'successful' NK talks.
With allies like that, who needs enemies?
Perhaps this will finally get the EU to kick the US and its NATO out.
But I don't underestimate the ability of EU elites to crawl to the US. It's like second
nature. And they get their pockets stuffed full of dollars to be kept in line.
Let me guess the free loading douche bag country that gets the most support from the US will
magically be excluded from these demands yet again.
I sure hope they try this protection racquet in Iraq. The government is already under huge
pressure to kick the Americans out after Trumps visit there last month.
What's America's plan to maintain economic wealth at the end of the debt spiral and dollar
collapse????
I have an idea!! Tribute! Hey, it worked for the Aztecs. Soon many countries will
see it as a small price to pay to avoid having democracy brought to their countries. Previous
versions of this scheme, such as buying US treasury debt knowing full well it will never be
repaid wont cut it anymore. So we are moving towards the real thing.
When I used to play football in my young days (i.e. soccer for the american lads here), I had
to pass by a huge US military base in the south of Germany each time in order to reach the
training ground. But strangely, I never challenged the necessity of that base in the first
place - probably due to my lack of geopolitical, historical consciousness. Only after they
build a second, even bigger base directly on the opposite side of the road and after two
combat helicopters - for the first time - flew directly above my head, I finally became aware
and started to question things. I wonder how many people that drive the same road each day
actually do feel the same...
Anyway, thank you b and thanks to all the well-experienced forumites for providing the vital
informations and inputs that helped me to better understand what is going on after all.
This is quite a slap in the face as the US has been raising tensions with Russia and any
conflict with Russia would likely cause the destruction of Europe.
Wondering how this will play out in places such as the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain where
the U.S. actually pays the dictator to lease the Navy and Air Force bases? Where the U.K.
pays the dictator for a British naval facility, too, which is shared?
Remember when Bahrain and other Arab countries in the Persian Gulf didn't want bases to be
called bases? Instead they were each a Regional Operations Support Establishment, aka ROSE.
Surely there's a different term now, but we still pay to lease bases.
Give trump credit: he raises the issue. And by doing so he gives people the opportunity to be
thrust into the act of questioning.
I continue to believe that this is really the overriding attribute of his presidency. What
people like the Germans do with this opportunity is entirely incumbent on them. But it is an
opportunity nonetheless, and as b correctly asserts, this is a welcomed change from the
political grab ass of the preceding administrations.
We should wish good luck to the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) in hosting US
bases: not only will they have to foot the cost of hosting US forces but their entire
economies by now must be revolving around being open-air military barracks. All while their
own citizens are voting with their feet.
Psychohistorian @ 22: You're missing large parts of Africa (possibly Djibouti where there's a
US base; Rwanda which is a US satrapy under President Paul Kagame; western Africa where there
are offshore oil and gas deposits) and Georgia where the US operates a bioweapons laboratory.
Once again, on the surface this is obvious extortion. But I can't help but think this is
really a purposeful 'own goal.' I know this is likely giving Trump too much credit, but in a
parallel universe this is exactly what you would do if you had a hidden agenda to enfeeble
the US to cause our eventual pull back. There's no political way to slowly scale back our
involvement, but there is a way to overreach under everyone's noses and get the same end
result. Is this a 666d chess move or just what happens as empire descends into chaos,
grasping at straws? Either way I'm fine with the obvious result!
We are seeing the true colors. What we now have are Co-Presidents: Bolton, Trump; and Co-Vice
Presidents Pompous and Pence. The 4 morons do not realize they are isolating the U.S.A. and
hastening rejection of the USD.
Adhere my diktat and keep purchasing our T-bills.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has allegedly stood up to pressure from Washington as she
declined a proposal by Vice President Mike Pence to send German Navy ships towards Russia's
Crimea, Bloomberg reports, citing anonymous sources familiar with the matter. Pence
allegedly wanted German ships to sail through the Kerch Strait separating Crimea from
mainland Russia. France, [.]
next, trump asks venezuela to pay in advance for the invasion. in usd.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Mar 8, 2019 3:59:51 PM |
link
This is an utterly brilliant Empire-killing move by Trump. Speaking of the UK I wonder how
much we will be asked to pony up for the US air bases and troops still in the UK 75 years
after D-day. This should hit just after Brexit and we may have a different government in the
chair......
the germans would be owned by the russian,gadaffi saddam hussein serbia and hitler if it was
not for uk and usa.
we keep the world safe and stop irania and the hamas terroist pushing israel into the sea.
i say to the germans pay the man or be invaded by evil doers
Although I didn't read or watch, it appears most major BigLie Media have published/aired this
story, a point I was curious about since Friday's usually a slow news day, thus begging the
question: What's the public's reaction? Might there be a groundswell calling for returning
the troops home so that both the occupied nation and the occupier save monies? And what of
the opposite argument, that even more troops and bases are needed to defend against the Red
and Yellow Menace?
If I was a president who could not step too far out of line due to powerful forces all around
me, I would take the ideas of neocons et al and push them even further over the line past
reasonable.
No-one in power could argue against me because I'm implementing their ideas, even though I'm
taking them too far.
But pushing things too far creates real resistance, and makes the real policies obvious, and
brings about the end of the empire.
I might decide to:
1. Move the US embassy to Jerusalem, to make it clear who calls the shots
2. Demand that NATO countries pay more and publicly disrespect their leaders
3. Demand that Germany and Japan pay for their occupation
4. Obviously attack Venezuela (in contrast to previous less-obvious attacks)
5. and other increasingly outrageous demands until the vassals get fed up
Meanwhile I'd do other things that I have to do to keep the powerful forces happy.
I may be a terrible person with no 3-d chess master plan, but perhaps things would be
different after my term. And "different" might approximate "better".
"Obama
was a smiling murderer, says Ilhan Omar" And of course, she's 100% correct. As Ben Norton
noted in this tweet , Omar's
words were citied in a Politico article that he linked. You'll note, that by extension
she also called Trump a murderer, just not as "polished."
There's merit in your argument. For example, the so far small contingent of anti-war
Progressive Democrats either were elected or emboldened thanks to Trump, Rep. Omar being the
most prominent example. The same could be said of pushing the far-right's policy goals, as
that's also generated resistance. Too bad the initial call for resistance was based on the
Russiagate hoax. Time will tell!
Okay. If you don't get your weekly payola, then shut down the foreign bases. Only thing is,
what do we do with all these armed people trained to kill on command, looking for some action
in between saying the Pledge of Allegiance and painting Bible verses on bombs?
I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too
many cops on steroids as it is.
@ teri who wrote
"
I sure as shit don't want them all coming back here, loitering around in the US. Got too many
cops on steroids as it is.
"
Its called karma
I live here too....the energy needs to be refocused on planet rehab and going to the stars
along with my standard make global finance public
It sure will.
Especially the Neocons as they scramble around trying to collect all the rust flakes to glue
them back onto dilapidated USA's dilapidated Foreign Policy.
I'm sorry, but many people posting here are delusional about Trump's motives.
For a start, none of the issues discussed in this post would cause the American people
much in the way of dispute. Broadly, most Americans would think that other countries should
pay for US "support". Americans disagree quite a bit about "The Wall" and gender issues
around public restrooms; but not so much about the issues raised in this post. So there IS NO
RESISTANCE, and WILL NOT BE ANY RESISTANCE, within the US, on getting countries to pay.
Other countries might have problems but what other countries think has never been much of
an issue for Americans.
The issue of getting other countries to pay is about cost and the out-of-control US debt.
And, also, about Trump electioneering.
Should other countries refuse to pay (or request US troops to leave), then they can expect
to be sanctioned or economically damaged. Just consider how France (a US ally) had one of
their prize jewel (world-beating) nuclear technology intellectual assets, Alstom's
Arabelle steam turbine , taken from them by the US. This happened way before Trump so
demonstrates how the US operates (the art of the [coercive] deal is the way the US rolls).
France, and in particular Macron, who was French Finance/Economic Minster, at the time, had
no choice but to accept the takeover. Macron actually appeared quite gleeful about it (Macron
was effectively working for US, not French, interests).
Can Columbia or Kosovo afford to pay? Or will Washington increase the financial support they
give to those countries to cover the bill.
As for NATO, the core system was based on the countries that are members providing a
reliable easily-secured base for American expeditionary forces to attack and invade one of
the two countries that are at the heart of the Eurasian landmass. In exchange for that the
United States bankrolled NATO. If Trump breaks that bargain, what incentive is there for the
core members of NATO to allow wars to be fought on their territory particularly now that
Putin has said he is focused on improving the lives of ordinary Russians rather than going to
war with Europe but will make sure that the decision centres of any countries that attack or
are somehow involved in an attack on Russia will be destroyed. None as far as I can see, so
it looks like it'll be goodbye NATO.
@55ADKC - why would other countries pay to have the usa military on their soil? this explains
the whole agenda of fearmongering that has been in overdrive 24/7 since i was a kid...
nothing else explains it.. keep the fear up to justify this craziness.. i can't see anyone
paying for it.. i sure wouldn't want that if i was german, japanese or south korean for
example... now, maybe the leaders of these countries are going to be faced with a stark
choice... side with this b.s., or get removed from office... i praise trump for bringing this
forth and hope that he strikes a big fat zero from the countries that have usa bases on
them...
I think Trump believes the hype fed to Americans forever that the US soldiers are the good
guys and they really are protecting these countries. He also has a reputation for squeezing
contractors etc.
To MAGA he thinks it needs better deals and more people sending money in.
@59. I think that's right. He genuinely believes US forces are out there protecting 'our
allies' and keeping the world safe for democracy etc. But he also thinks 'our allies' are
taking advantage of American generosity. This is a common sentiment among Trump voters.
I think most Americans think they are protecting the world.
iv> i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and
norway for are freedoms.
we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big bat
folks must suffer.
the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world
does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be along
soon to take are democrasy
Posted by: chuck newsum , Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM |
link
i agrees we are the white hatters many folks hate the uk and usa and norway for are
freedoms.
we need to be able to affords a big bat to stomp the evil doers if we cannot afford the big
bat folks must suffer.
the uk and usa tax payers are sick of paying for new bats to protect the world if the world
does not pay for protection new hitlers arrafats,gadaffis and hezbollah terrosits will be
along soon to take are democrasy
Posted by: chuck newsum | Mar 8, 2019 6:50:20 PM |
link
Because they are (particularly, in Europe) occupied countries and many things can be done
to ensure compliance (economic, gladio operations, sanctions, theft of assets, prosecution
for any offence [no matter how small, incidental, or accidental] if a dollar is involved,
influx of refugees, war [directly or adjacent to target country], removal of post-colonial
areas of influence, instigating financial collapse [Deutche Bank is supposed to be very
vulnerable and would effect the entire EU/world], etc).
Why couldn't France protect Alstom? Would France be able to resist if the US targeted the
African CFA countries (which are France's neo-colonial milk-cows and essential to the
economic well-being of France and detrimental to the African people subject to the CFA
franc)?
You "praise Trump" for raising this issue but it's just the same old, same old.
The only place relatively secure is the Chinese/Russia milieu but that's the other side of
the real "wall" and restricts the expansion of OBOR. And the price (for Russia and China) is
having the entire western nuclear arsenal aimed at you.
Whether or not any payments are actually made will make no difference; US troops will
remain in occupied territory. (BTW: Europe will pay, the key is Germany. If Germany refuse to
pay the rest will follow. But Germany can't fudge this; it would amount to open resistance
and a re-negotiation of the outcome of the 2nd World War and, unless the US want to give up
the fruits of their 1945 victory, I don't see that happening. Germany will realise that, if
the US insist, they will have to comply; it's the direct consequence of losing the war and
being occupied.]
Moving American troops to Poland? Surely, the benefits are many. First, since the size of the
military is much smaller than in Warsaw block times, there are many military grounds.
Particularly in areas where forests are larger, climate harsher, and local men are fond of
beating up strangers when they get drunk. Local roads are crappy and American soldiers are
prone to hit side road trees. To summarize, martial skills and spirit are bound to improve.
For even better results, they should be moved to Estonia, Latvia and Finnmark, areas
bordering Russian Federation. OTOH, fleecing Balts would be like squeezing blood from stone.
E.g. Lithuania is an exemplary NATO member, spending 2% of GDP on the military, and yet they
cannot afford a tank.
He's already said he doesn't believe the hype. He said it 60 Minutes after his
inauguration...
"We've spent 6 Trillion dollars in the Middle East....6 Trillion! We could have rebuilt
America twice. It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop
to it."
The countries Trump wants to hit with fees are those he wanted the US military to pull out of
anyway. The cold war relics. Europe, Korea ect. Any bases to do with Israel Iran Venezuela
will not be hitting up the host country for extortion money. Bases he wants to use to
pressure China will also likely be exempt.
Those that do get hit with the fees, Trump doesn't give a shit if the US stays or leaves, so
long as the US is well paid if it stays.
I don't think Corbyn is the Messiah you take him for. He has sound ideas on not bombing
foreigners - unusual in a British politician - but apart from that he's a busted flush. Not
even close observers care to predict who will come out on top in the mud wrestling at
Westminster but if Corbyn makes it watch him accommodate.
.
With great respect, "b", and as happens rarely, I don't believe this article is on target.
America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence. Forget Aachen. It'll be a
long time before any purely European defence force is up to scratch.
The Europeans are hoping that America will hold the fort in the meantime. That's not an
alliance. It's a marriage of temporary convenience.
Of course the other problem with this is it makes the American forces official mercenaries
rather than national forces and all the legal consequences that flow from that.
History first as tragedy and later as a farce. Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "Beria reported only
to Stalin and Stalin reported only to Satan." Now Bolton reports only to Trump and Chump
reports only to Sreadsheets. So much winning and multi-dimensional chess... It's deplorable.
Lol
@59 and @60 This is why the shock will be all the more stunning to the Americans.
Its "allies" have no problem with Uncle Sam spending like a drunken sailor. As far as they
are concerned, well, who cares.
But if Trump insists THEY pay for American profligacy then they are going to say "no".
American pundits will then pontificate on how much MORE it would cost those allies, and
the response will be: don't be stupid, we won't spend money to protect ourselves against a
threat that doesn't exist.
Because - and let's be honest here - in a post-NATO world the only military threat to
Europe will be the USA, and the US Army will be on the other side of the Atlantic.
I see a number of comments where the question's begged: Just what nation intends to invade
Europe such that the continuing Outlaw US Empire's occupation's warranted? Putin and Xi want
Europe to join the EAEU/BRI confab--invasion via commerce?!
It appears the Anti-Communist Crusade is having a hard time dying in some quarters,
particularly where continually invoking it is required dogma by controlling interests.
I think Trump and his MAGA boils everything down to money. Money goes out and money comes in.
His job is to slow the money going out and get more money coming in. I think it is that
simple. You get bombed by our smart freedom and democracy bombs then you should be decent
enough to pay for it. Also our bases are protecting you from getting bombed by evildoers
bombs. You should definitely pay for that. Why are we?
I'd like to see a study of the amount of money spent into the local economy by the occupation
forces in Germany, Japan and South Korea. Not just by the military but by the servicemen,
families, civilian contractors for housing, travel, schools, food, entertainment, etc
Obviously paying to be occupied is not happening, but there is some logic to the idea that
the occupied receive some economic benefits from being occupied, including but not limited to
a reduction in spending on their own military.
Any spending into the local economy is dwarfed by the amount of ecological damage
done--just look at Subic Bay or Okinawa. And yes, studies have been done into both aspects;
I've read them, but have no links.
." It's unfair what's happened to the American people, and we're gonna put a stop to
it."
Trump just does not believe in others hype, only his own hype. So show me evidence he is
stopping the spending which was his main point in what was infaur to Americans. Spending on
the military is even higher, 6 trillion is now 8 trillion even if the accountants still cant
tell who got paid
If Trump has shown us anything it is that he believes in the hype that whats good for Big
Business is good for America. Even his request for more money from NATO countries is a
request/demand to buy more from the MIC and not money to offset US military spending.
Sure, the reasons for the increased military spending are bogus, but he adds fuel to
supposed conflicts with Iran, Russia, China, North Korea that allows him to justify more
spending. Trumps just replaced Obama/Bush hype with his own personal hype. Call it Trump
hype.
Pft, that's what economist Michael Hudson has been saying:
The US military spending overseas during the Vietnam war resulted in a balance of payments
crisis, with the surprise solution being the recycling of USD from offshore economies back
into the US financial sector.
And it's been going on ever since.
I'll try to get a link ... Super
Imperialism also recently linked by the indefatigable karlof1.
The larger America's balance-of-payments deficit becomes, the more dollars end up in the
hands of European, Asian and Near Eastern central banks, and the more money they must
recycle back to the United States by buying U.S. Treasury bonds.
It's worthwhile to read any and all of Hudson's writings, including his autobiographical
essay. He has worked in the belly of the beast; Chase Manhattan bank and Standard Oil (Exxon)
just for starters, the Treasury and Finance departments of USA and Canada amongst others.
People, people!...Where will the military go? It's so obvious, it is staring us in the
face...
Space!
Ah, but not just space --
Mars!
The War Planet!
And best of all -- there's no people there! They can have their war games ad infinitum!!!
To boldly go...ok, I know, that dates me...
But oh my, blow it up! Blow it all up!! Keep on making horrible weapons, ship them off to
Mars! Raytheon on steroids; what's not to love????? Trump will go down in history - no - up,
up, and AWAY!!! [Just think - he'll have to visit the troops at Thanksgiving, take them a
turkey - oh and take any Bushes and Boltons and Obamas and Clintons with him as it is rather
far, a few Thanksgivings away but who's counting?]
People are really thinking too hard.
The Trump strategy is simple a la "The Apprentice":
Get a bunch of ambitious people to commit to deliver to outlandish goals. These goals are set
such that achieving or failing them, the blame goes to the failure but the success goes to
the leader.
If they fail: "You're Fired"
If they succeed: "I'm Brilliant"
This proposal broadens USA's demand that Germany terminate its plans to obtain energy imports
from Russia via Northstream. Trump has already asserted publicly (weeks ago) that the added
cost of LNG imports should be viewed as a defense-related cost. Via this new mechanism, the
cost will be not be borne 100% by Germany.
To understand why this new approach is likely to work, please read ADKC's comments.
Pundits may poke fun but the AZ Empire is deadly serious and most AZ elites will be
supportive. Especially when they are insulated from the cost (as they are).
@6ADKC... i agree with arbys view on this... trump and an undue number of americans probably
think they are doing some good protecting others.. it's laughable! now, as to your question
about france and alstrom... i don't know the specifics, but i know how easily euro
politicians, and politicians in general can be bought... i think it is excellent trump is
raising this issue, as i hope the leadership in these poodle countries recognize their goose
will be cooked soon enough, as ordinary people won't stand for it.. so, i am simplifying here
and i have to race out and will be back later to add more.. i see what you and jackrabbit are
getting at, but at some point this mafia-gangster strategy is going to collapse.. maybe i am
too naive, or idealistic.. i will give you that!
Your assessment is fine and not without merits but the other variable you seem to be
missing is the German people and others in Europe, themselves.
Will this cowtowing to the US bullying not in the end fully ensconse their leaders as the
globalist shills they truly are and thus lead to their demise? That is what b us alluding to.
We are unaware of Trump's motivations, here, but that is inconsequential when we are talking
about him waking up the people of Europe to finally give US the boot.
While cruising around the internet tubes I ran into a casual remark about Syria to the effect
that since the US is doing an occupation there, aren't "we" entitled to payment? If there is
any truth to a spate of recent headlines, the neocons have already solved that one.
How would ISIS have acquired any tonnage of gold? Perhaps it was part-payment for the oil
they sold until the Russians intervened. (the US sure didn't bother those sales!) More likely
they stole it from citizens and businesses. There have been LOTS of reports about the US
secretly rescuing ISIS fighters. Now here is yet another motive for those airlifts. I predict
any such gold will be quickly melted down so as to make it forever untraceable. Would Pompeo
or Bolton do such a thing?
It's bad enough that Omar tackled AIPAC, but to dump on Saint Obama is likely to get her
pegged as a "self-hating negro". Wonder what Speaker Nancy will do this time? Threaten to
waterboard her?
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This was sent to me yesterday by a concerned Indian, with the tag of..."Be careful with
your country"
He's right!
Re: "America is the spine and most of the muscle of European defence."
Defence against whom exactly? People pushing the narrative that the Russian Federation is
a menace never mention the numbers involved. The European countries have roughly 3 times the
population, 5 times the military spending and a massive advantage in GDP, look it up. If you
add the US to the equation then more like 5 times the population and 15 times the military
spending. The Russians have nukes of course but with the odds stacked up so spectacularly
against them I don't blame them for thinking they need them as a deterrent. If you had
another adversary in mind don't be shy.
Thanks for the links. I have been following Hudson for the last 12 years and agree with
much of what he says. I do disagree that dollar holdings are a tax on other countries. These
dollars for the most part are paid to companies for goods and services. They exchange some of
this with their central bank to invest locally or pay expenses. The central bank then prints
their local currency out of thin air to exchange. The USD are then counted as reserves which
allows them to create more local currency by 10+ times, depending on their reserve
requirements. This money is spent or invested in the local economy.
The USD reserves can also be used to fund their own trade deficits with other countries,
or pay of USD denominated loans
A lot has changed since 1971. After the Vietnam War was winding down the US pulled out of
Bretton Woods as Hudson anticipated. They then established the Petrodollar which was not
anticipated. This put more USD into the hands of OPEC nations as they were told to accept
only USD and in return would be allowed higher oil prices, and much was recycled back to the
US, but they and the rest of the world had other options.
This option was the Eurodollar which began in the 60's in a limited fashion . A later
sub-option was Eurodollars in the many tax havens, which developed first on British
territories and then in the Carribean.
These options being exercised limited the amount of dollars coming back to the US and
caused higher interest rates in order to attract some more of the dollars back.
The 1985 Plaza accord put in place an agreement to weaken the dollar with the US to buy
more imported goods as they encouraged more US companies to move offshore to produce in low
wage countries to keep inflation down. In return the deficits would be funded by other
countries resending back the USD they received by buying treasuries. This was when the US
realized they could spend and run up fiscal/trade deficits without consequences, and so they
did. Oh my.
Then after the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent looting bu oligarchs the
Eurodollar Market, especially in the tax havens , exploded even further as these oligarchs
and western investors transferred their stolen loot to these offshore tax havens which were
already loaded with dollars from the criminal drug trade (mafia-five eyes) and multinational
corporations evading taxes at home
In 1990 the Fed then made it easier for US banks to import and use these Eurodollars by
setting a zero reserve requirement (same as Fed Funds) on Eurodollar deposits which they
could then loan out at many order of magnitudes. This fueled the great credit and asset
bubbles using drug money and stolen Soviet asset money which came in to buy Trumps property
and stocks. It also allowed banks to increase credit to cash strapped consumers who felt the
pinch of neoliberalism and globalization, since the banks were flush with cheap cash. This
led to the Great Collapse in 2008
Added to this Eurodollar supply from 1993 was Chinas own oligarchs growing increasingly
rich from US investment/trade and from converting the peoples assets to individual party
members who wanted a safe place to hide their loot and evade taxes in China
Quantitative Easing following the crash of 2008 provided another source of a cash influx
for the US. Toxic waste from foreign and local banks were bought with USD printed from thin
air.
Recent Quantitative Tightening meant trouble though. So Trumps new tax measures made it
possible for US corporations to return Eurodollars hidden offshore which is fueling stock
buybacks and propping up the market. If not for this a 2008 collapse would be here.
When the next crash happens, I am sure the US will surprise us yet again. Pretty sure the
fix will be named Green something or another and a Carbon Dollar/Tax
@70 english outsider.. i agree with @13 BM... however, the msm in the uk is so warped, maybe
they will succeed in marginalizing corbyn.. i thought
this article today from jonathan cook was pretty good.. as for the usa being the backbone
of europe military and etc.. europe needs to grow a spine themselves and stop taking it in
the rear from the usa.. this suggestion from trump is a good place to start by saying no...
maybe the poodles are incapable.. that sounds like what you are saying..
@pft... i think i agree with you, although i don't study the financial dynamics enough..
the bailout from 2008 will be followed by more bailouts.. they will just be bigger... that is
the name of the game - bust and bailout.. bailing out the banks, until the world asks for
something different..
Why would only blacks object to existence of these monuments? What about the purported
victors of that war? They could have objected but did not. The people attacking these
monuments are effectively declaring that they want a civil war, as I see it.
Icons of outstanding accomplishment seem nearly always to be about war.. and the political
figures that made the Oligarchs filthy rich prosecuting a war that killed millions. The more
dead, the bigger the statute.
Where are the monuments to Watson and Crick, Newton, the persons that discovered penicillin,
the engines that convert energy from one form to a more usable other form or statutes of the
persons that founded our great universities or the persons that discovered how to capture
electricity and make available in every household?
Few icons to those that have made the quality of our lives better are ever produced,
Why?
Probably because the war mongers would have none of that.. Oligarchs own 90% of the press,
the media, and
means of communicating their wars, no damn invention that makes life better for the
displicibles is going to get into the way of profit making wars that fund so much of Economic
Zionism.
Consider the recent invention at the U of Australia where hard work discovered 2,200
different places in the world, where a combination of sunlight and wind energy can produce
and store sufficient energy to supply 24/7 all the energy the entire world needs on the power
grid. Not a word of it in the media. Soon I expect to see a monument to the shock and awe
bastards?
Many people I talk to seem to think American foreign policy has something to do with
democracy, human rights, national security, or maybe terrorism or freedom, or niceness, or
something. It is a curious belief, Washington being interested in all of them. Other people
are simply puzzled, seeing no pattern in America's international behavior. Really, the
explanation is simple.
"Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment. " Oh rather you're brainwashed daily that Russia is an awful place
where Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment.
I'm pretty sure not a single Russian believes that the west is going to invade. For
reasons that are obvious, or should be obvious.
You must be joking ! 70 per cent of Americans do not know what the Constitution is, and
six per cent don't even know when Independence Day falls. In a recent survey just over a half
of Americans didn't know what the Taliban are , despite the fact they led the charge in
Afghanistan.
When looking at a map of the world, young Americans had a difficult time correctly
identifying Iraq (1 in 7) and Afghanistan (17%). This isn't that surprising, but only a slim
majority (51%) knew where New York was. According to Forbes and National Geographic, an
alarming 29% couldn't point to the Pacific Ocean.
Many didn't know where Europe is let alone Spain.
Americans cultural ? What a hoot !
runner911 -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 04:09
Be assured Russia is more than capable of defending itself against Western ( USA )
aggression, plus they hold the biggest nuclear arsenal on the planet , so lets be clear
no-one is going to attack Russia and risk nuclear annihilation in return. As regards being
surrounded by NATO, how do you think the yanks would react if the same were to apply to the
USA and that sad corrupt country was surrounded by Russian Forces ? The last time it happened
in 1962, as I recall the yanks were whining like whipped dogs, but eventually agreed to
dismantle their missiles in Turkey provided the Russians did the same in Cuba.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 5 Sep 2015 11:59
You lost the argument, so you are trying to change the subject. Now we can see why Western
media doesn't allow an open discussion - you don't have much to say.
East-central Europe was invaded by Germans, Russians, Ottomans, French, even the Swedes.
Germans murdered about 15 million people here. Ottomans (Turks) about 10 million. Russians
liberated us from a murderous German occupation after WWII and stayed way too long...
Russian victims are in tens of thousands. Given that Russians lost about 1.5 million
soldiers liberating us from Germans and saved us from planned extermination by Nazis over
time, we keep some perspective about it. But I am not sure your ideological and slogan-driven
thinking would understand any of it...
EugeneGur -> zenithmaster 5 Sep 2015 11:43
This has zero to do with Russia's poor relations with the EU and everything to do the
Russians' smaller spending power.
This is not quite true. You underestimate the power of the sentiment. One example:
Russian tourism to Estonia dropped 60% after the scandal with the Bronze soldier in 2007,
long before any decrease in the buying power, and it never recovered.
You are right, of course, that the decreased value of the ruble affected mass tourism,
but the effect was multiplied by the anger towards Europe, believe me, it was. Going through
the visa process was always annoying and humiliating but under the present circumstances it
became unbearable. This one thing that affects all European countries whether its Bulgaria or
Italy.
MaoChengJi -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 09:56
Yeah, something like what thecorporateclass said above.
I'll add this: deep down even people like you don't believe in any Russian 'invasion'
in Ukraine. They know: if Russia did invade, it would've been over long time ago. The
question, rather, is about Kiev regime's control of the border, which would amount to a
blockade of Donetsk-Lugansk republics; blocking all the supplies, attacking from all
directions, and exterminating people who feel ethnically Russian.
This can not happen: it would've brought the Russian government down, and therefore no
Russian government could participate in it; be it led by Putin, Dugin, or Navalny, or anyone
at all. It's just a physical impossibility. IMO.
TheCorporateClass -> jezzam 5 Sep 2015 06:37
The West agrees to drop this missile shield, Putin agrees to stop his military
interference in Ukraine.
This needs correcting IF it is to work as a solution.
The West agrees to drop this missile shield, agrees to stop it's interventions into
Ukrainian government and it's politics, agrees to stop FUNDING and GUIDING far right neo-nazi
militias and their political wings, agrees to stop making intentionally
false/unproven/fictional accusations against Russia & Putin's Government, stops providing
military intelligence to Ukraine (a non-Nato country), and admits to the direct connection
between the externally caused "political and social" instability in Ukraine begun by EU/NATA
and the externally caused "political and social" instability and then Civil War in Syria with
oil/gas supplies from Russia and Qatar ... then that would be a great first step towards the
truth of matters bullshit.
Then all of Russia and Putin at their ELECTED President would no doubt agree to stop his
humane military interference in Ukraine on behalf of those people having their human rights
and lives taken by ideologically driven psychopaths and their corrupt crazies from
Washington, Berlin, Riyadh, Doha, and Tel Aiv.
Simple really.
HollyOldDog -> raffine 5 Sep 2015 04:59
Whereas there are convoys of Russian trucks that are stopping the East Ukrainians of
starving to death. The only 'gifts' that West Ukraine gives to their East compatriates is
constant shelling, grad missile fire, mine fields and snipers that shoot any East Ukrainians
on sight whether they are men ,women or children.
MaoChengJi -> jezzam 4 Sep 2015 23:48
I believe the western anti-missile installations along the Russian borders give the
impression that the US is trying to break the MAD balance and create, at some point in the
future, a defense against retaliatory nuclear strike. That seems like the only rational
explanation for those installations. For do you think they are for?
MaoChengJi -> andy4248 4 Sep 2015 22:10
"Russians are brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to
invade them at any moment. "
Oh rather you're brainwashed daily that Russia is an awful pleace where Russians are
brainwashed daily that the West is an awful place and we are going to invade them at any
moment.
I'm pretty sure not a signle Russian believes that the west is going to invade. For
reasons that are obvious, or should be obvious.
crackling -> MaoChengJi 4 Sep 2015 22:03
fingerprints is copying GWBush's data collection on citizens and visitors to the US - last
night I just had my photo and fingerprints taken on customs entry to Taiwan - I expect it's
becoming the norm these days.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 21:22
Address Obama's admission that "US assisted in the transition of power", why do you skip
over it? $15 billion was a loan and it was used for the Ukrainian budget. If someone stole
some of it, prove it and charge them.
I never said that Russians didn't try to influence Kiev, but so did US - listen to the
recording, it assigns roles for different protest leaders. Ashton was an EU official and she
was standing with the protestors - so were many others, incl. Nuland, ambassador, etc... -
that goes way beyond "trade agreement".
I am a Slovak and I comment on anything I feel like. If you have a problem with that,
maybe you don't understand democracy and freedom of speech. By the way, most people in my
part of Europe (from Budapest to Vienna to Prague) roughly share my view of the situation. We
know Russians, we know Ukrainians, and we can judge for ourselves.
Popeyes -> andy4248 4 Sep 2015 19:45
It's very sad but Russians are for more aware of what's going on politically than their
Western counterparts. The fact that they have a low opinion of Westerners is hardly
surprising and they certainly don't have to be " brainwashed ' by the Kremlin to know what's
going on. They only have to look at Iraq, Libya, and Syria, Ukraine the list is endless to
figure it out. You could blame GM food for the fact that Americans seem to be pretty dim and
clueless on Europeans affairs, but as for the rest of Europeans I guess they are the ones
that are really "brainwashed".
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 19:32
Thou protest too much.
The "baroness" was an EU foreign secretary, that's pretty high up. In addition: US
ambassador, assistant sec for Europe (Nuland), and a number of other officials were at the
Maidan protests - videos and all.
The recording was very specific about who (Yats) should be Prime Minister and how it
should be done. If US also does that in Spain, that's even a bigger problem.
$5bn is a lot of "civil organizations" - most of it in the last 5-10 years. Russia gave a
loan - that is very different.
Finally, Obama literally said "we assisted with the transition of power in Ukraine"
what other proof can one possible have than an admission by the chief?
By the way I used the term "assist in an overthrow". To "orchestrate" is more pro-active.
Given what has been made public there definitely was "assistance" (see Obama's statement
above), whether that amounts to "orchestrate" like in 1953 Iran, I would leave to the
historians.
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 18:52
There are videos of dozens of Western leaders standing on the podium with the
demonstrators on Maidan (just imagine Lavrov joinig an Occupy protest in New York or
London).
There are recordings of Nuland deciding on who will run Ukraine ("f...k Europe").
US spent 5 billion in 20 years on "civil groups" in Ukraine.
If you prefer an infantile denial, I can't help you. Just don't be surprised if you become
irrelevant.
Beckow -> dmitryfrommoscow 4 Sep 2015 18:34
Yes it was always mostly about the visa-free access to EU. Ukrainians want to move to
Europe for jobs, benefits, school, etc... That was what drove Maidan energy (and US took
advantage of it).
But your numbers are off. There are about 1 million Ukrainians now in EU, mostly in UK,
Czech, Hungary and Poland. E.g. Poland has about 400,000 new Ukrainian migrants. The real
large numbers are yet to come. I think they will - they are watching the Syrians and getting
jealous, worried that all the empathy will be used up. Slovakia (my country) has camps ready
on the border. We also suddenly have a lot of Ukrainians who have discovered the Slovak (or
Czech) heritage. The same thing is going on in Poland, Romania and Hungary.
Millions are coming. And they won't be tourists or have money for Italian hotels. But I am
sure the Western media will find a way to blame it on Russia. Such are the pleasures of
dead-end ideologies, everything is very simple: "Putin did it!."
Beckow -> notoriousANDinfamous 4 Sep 2015 18:26
"US didn't orchestrate a coup in Ukraine and hasn't offered Kiev a military
alliance"
I suppose that would depend on your definition of "orchestrate" and a "coup". Most
rational observers would agree that US at a minimum assisted with the Maidan revolution (or a
coup). There are videos, recordings, financial transfers. Until the whole Maidan thing went
bad, the US State Department was very open about the assistance that they had provided on
Maidan, Obama said "we assisted with the transition of power in Ukraine" (actual quote).
US has said since 2008 that Ukraine will join Nato. They reiterated it last year and
Ukraine has an official policy of joining Nato. There are joint exercises and training with
Nato. It is rather conclusive that US and Ukraine are having a "military alliance".
Given those two facts how can you deny it? Or do you also deny the nose between your
eyes?
magicmirror1 4 Sep 2015 18:11
Fingerprints to get a visa.
Welcome to democratic EU. This is the future European leaders are building and I cannot
understand why.
dmitryfrommoscow -> Ola Smith 4 Sep 2015 16:46
Ola, the problem is there are no 45 million people in Ukraine these days. As many as 2.8
million people with Ukrainian passports work and live in Russia alone. And I think twice as
many live and work in the EU. And about five to seven million are in a crouch start position
to rush elsewhere at the first opportunity that avails itself. After all the Maidan
hullabaloo was about getting free access to European -- and probably North American -- job
markets and disappearing there for good. Let's throw aside all that talk about 'democracy and
values' and be honest about it.
A popular narrative in the West is that the world would be a much better place if all
countries just look and act more like the Western world. Indeed, the West has enjoyed great
wealth and growth over the years. But growing instability in the Western world has also raised
doubts about the Western-style of democratic governance.
In fact, there is a tendency to put Western-style democracy on a pedestal; but by doing so,
we overlook its faults and even potential dangers. From the never-ending gridlock in
Washington, to chaos in the House of Commons of United Kingdom over the Brexit mess, to people
rioting on the streets of Paris, more and more people are calling into question the
effectiveness of Western-style democracy.
Brexit, for some at least, encapsulates the perils and pitfalls of this style of democracy.
In June 2016, the people of the UK voted to leave the European Union and, for now at least, the
UK will leave the EU by March 29 this year, with or without a plan in place. The irrational
jump into the unknown and the chaos that followed has created a troubling situation for the
country, as well as other parts of the world, raising serious questions about the effectiveness
and legitimacy of UK-style democracy.
Whether to leave or stay in the EU is a complicated issue that requires careful study and
rational decisions from knowledgeable, well-informed people. It is irresponsible to just drag
people off the streets for a vote on a major policy issue like Brexit. For example, days after
the UK voted to leave the EU, a commentary on TIME's website wrote that the referendum was not
a triumph of democracy, but an ugly populist fiasco.
Thus, there is good reason why more and more people feel like Western-style democracy has
become a big joke. In the UK, the people voted to "take back control" of their country -- but
without a plan. In the United States, politics has become a soap opera and the system is
pitting Americans against Americans, splitting the country further apart. In fact, the US
government has become so divided and dysfunctional that it recently broke the record for the
longest shutdown in US history, which forced many government employees to turn to food banks to
feed their families.
Yet, a very different story is unfolding in Asia. During the more than month-long government
shutdown in the United States, China made history, too -- by landing the Chang'e-4 spacecraft
on the far side of the moon. As a US senator pointed out during the shutdown, China has
quadrupled its GDP since 2001, but the United States cannot even keep the government up and
running. He called the situation in the United States "ludicrous."
Clearly, Western-style democracy is not "the end of history," as some have predicted and
hoped for. This is not to say that the Western system is a failure or that China's system is
superior to Western-style democracy, but it is fair to say that China's own system is a good
fit for the country and it achieves the best results for the Chinese people.
For example, China has built the largest, most advanced high-speed train network in the
world. It is the envy for many in the world, even for many Americans, including former
President Barack Obama, who, nearly a decade ago, unveiled a plan for a national network of
high-speed passenger rail lines that was envisioned to transform travel in America. The plan,
like many others, turned out to be an American Dream that never came true. Just recently in
California, for example, the state's new governor killed the high-speed rail program that would
link Los Angeles to San Francisco -- a project beloved by the just-retired four-term Governor
Jerry Brown.
And then there is US President Donald Trump's ambitious plan to "Rebuild America," which he
has been unable to deliver. Stuck in an endless battle with Democrats over funding for the
border wall, Trump declared a national emergency to fulfill his pledge to construct a wall
along the US-Mexico border. His decision reflects a difference between the two countries'
models. Whereas the Chinese model is people-centered, the American model is vote-centered. With
regard to the "security and humanitarian crisis" on the country's southern border, the people
are asking, "where is the crisis?" And herein lies the dilemma: Decisions, like Trump's
decision to declare a national emergency, are essentially political stunts for votes. The
Western model reduces people to a source of votes, essentially turning democracy into a game of
likes.
This kind of decision-making is in stark contrast to the decision-making process in China,
which makes annual, five-year, and long-term plans to guide the country forward and conducts
extensive consultations to reach a broad consensus on major issues. A clear advantage of the
Chinese system is that it is constantly exploring ways to adapt to the changing times,
including large-scale reform of Party and government institutions to adapt to internal and
external changes.
Perhaps there was a time when one could argue that the Western model produced the best
results, but that is no longer the case. What we are seeing now is that it is increasingly
difficult for Western countries to reach a consensus on major issues and to form a strategic
plan. Western-style of democracy has become too rigid and Western democratic institutions are
in a state of degradation, making it next to impossible to carry out any substantial reform.
This can be seen in the fact that democracy in the Western world has increasingly become a
fight for money and a game of manipulating people for votes.
In China's socialist democracy, there is a strong and stable political force that represents
the interests of the great majority of the Chinese people. The Chinese government takes a
people-centered approach to politics and good governance ensures that results can be delivered.
It should be no wonder, then, that the Western model is barreling toward a cliff, while China
is making great progress in various aspects, including the nation's ambitious plan to eradicate
poverty by 2020. In a world of turmoil, there is reason for China and the Chinese people to be
confident in its path.
--it is fair to say that China's own system is a good fit for the country and it achieves
the best results for the Chinese people--
Putting it broadly 'One Size does not fit All' - as such values of the society, history of
the society and potential of the society are different everywhere - as such state management
be different. Moroever governance methods be flexible enough so that the decisions be adopted
according to the national and international requirements.
In some Western countries it's not the political system itself that is necessarily bad. In
the case of the present "sole superpower", for example, refusal to change policies based on
the extermination of over 95% of its indigenous population and centuries of inhuman slavery
of black people have perpetuated the present war against oppressed minorities. Further, the
continuation of aggressive wars overseas, a habit that prompted Martin Luther King Jr to call
his country "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world" has ensured the neglect of
infrastructure, healthcare, and quality of disenfranchised minorities, especially the
Afro-Americans. It's not surprising that in poll after poll, the US have garnered the most
votes for being the most dangerous country in the world. The much-maligned North Korea was
second.
Millions of poor people of all colours. The Africans used slaves long before the Arabs/
Europeans went to Africa and bought them from Africans, who used them for centuries, rounded
them up, for sale to anyone with trinkets. The A-rabs were real big slavers, real big. Russia
used Swedish slaves as did all nations use their fellow humans as slaves, only the US Negros
get all the publicity.
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee members Rand Paul
(R-KY) and Tom Udall (D-NM) introduced the 2019 American Forces Going Home After Noble (AFGHAN)
Service Act to end America's longest war, honor the volunteers who bravely serve our nation by
providing bonuses to those who have deployed in support of the Global War on Terrorism, and
redirect the savings from ending nation-building in Afghanistan to America's needs at home.
Though American troops achieved what they were sent to carry out in October 2001, the
mission shift to nation-building has kept our forces in Afghanistan over 17 years later. Over
2,300 military members have sacrificed their lives in the war, with another 20,000 wounded in
action. In addition, the Afghanistan war has cost the United States $2 trillion, with the war
currently costing over $51 billion a year.
"Endless war weakens our national security, robs this and future generations through
skyrocketing debt, and creates more enemies to threaten us. For over 17 years, our soldiers
have gone above and beyond what has been asked of them in Afghanistan. It is time to declare
the victory we achieved long ago, bring them home, and put America's needs first," said Sen.
Paul .
"Soon, U.S. service members will begin deploying to Afghanistan to fight in a war that began
before they were born. As we face this watershed moment, it's past time to change our approach
to the longest war in our country's history," said Sen. Udall . "Our armed forces in
Afghanistan, including many from New Mexico, have served with exceptional valor and
effectiveness in the face of extraordinary challenges. After expelling the Taliban from power
and dismantling Al Qaeda's base of power in Afghanistan, they enabled a new Afghan government
to be formed while also eliminating Osama Bin Laden. But it is Congress that has failed to
conduct the proper oversight of this nearly 18-year war. Now, we must step up, and listen to
the American people -- who rightly question the wisdom of such endless wars. This bipartisan
resolution would bring our troops home at long last, while implementing a framework for
reconciliation."
The 2019 AFGHAN Service Act
• Declares victory in Afghanistan. The masterminds of the 9/11 attack are no longer
capable of carrying out such an attack from Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011,
and Al Qaeda has been all but eliminated from Afghanistan.
• Pays, within one year, a $2,500 bonus to all members of the military who have served
in the Global War on Terrorism. Since 2001, more than 3,002,635 men and women have deployed
overseas in support of this effort. This would be a one-time cost of approximately $7 billion
and an immediate savings of over 83% when compared to the current yearly costs. The $51 billion
a year can be redirected to domestic priorities.
• Additionally, there is precedent for service bonuses going back to the Revolutionary
War.
• Sets guidelines for withdrawal. Within 45 days, a plan will be formulated for an orderly
withdrawal and turnover of facilities to the Afghan Government, while also setting a framework
for political reconciliation to be implemented by Afghans in accordance with the Afghan
Constitution. Within a year, all U.S. forces will be withdrawn from Afghanistan.
• At the completion of withdrawal, the 2001 AUMF will be repealed.
You can read the entire 2019 AFGHAN Service Act below:
Yes, in a slightly modified form this is a very true statement: "Disinformation destroys
reality. The USA is master of this -- they have built a parallel reality."
But the real issues here is the neoliberalism is in decline, and to compensate for loss of power of neoliberal propaganda
Western MSM now use neo-McCarthyism. That is a very sad but pretty understandable story.
Just as disturbing is an analysis of Russia's worldwide fake news
campaign , which spreads contradictory reports and Kremlin-friendly propaganda.
"The Russians understand Western media far better than the Western media understands
itself," one interviewee says. "And they play to the Western media's short attention span."
Another says: "Disinformation destroys reality. The Russians are masters of this -- they
have built a parallel reality."
Yes, in a slightly modified form this is a very true statement: "Disinformation destroys
reality. The USA is master of this -- they have built a parallel reality."
But the real issues here is the neoliberalism is in decline, and to compensate for loss of power of neoliberal propaganda
Western MSM now use neo-McCarthyism. That is a very sad but pretty understandable story.
Just as disturbing is an analysis of Russia's worldwide fake news
campaign , which spreads contradictory reports and Kremlin-friendly propaganda.
"The Russians understand Western media far better than the Western media understands
itself," one interviewee says. "And they play to the Western media's short attention span."
Another says: "Disinformation destroys reality. The Russians are masters of this -- they
have built a parallel reality."
His greatest accomplishment may well be that he has caused Washington's Swamp Dwellers to rise from the ooze and expose themselves
for all the world to see. That's weakened them immeasurably, perhaps fatally. To be sure, that's no small thing, and the next
Trump to come along is now on full alert as to who & what to bring with him.
You nailed it. Even if they do eventually succeed in foiling Trump, things will never be the same again. The whole world is watching
the circus in Washington, and so Washington's brand ('democracy') is now shot. 2016 was indeed an annus mirabilis! " things will
never be the same again. The whole world is watching the circus in Washington.."
It looks and sounds like dementia – as if a sick person behaving inappropriately, showing unprovoked aggression (like some
Alzheimer patients), using silly or senseless phrasing, and having the unreasonable demands and uncontrolled fits of rage like
a spoiled child. The marasmic McCain, marasmic Pelosi, and hysterical Max Boot, the openly lying Clapper and the hate-filled profiteer
Brennan.
As I have written here and elsewhere, President Swamp Drainer needs to get control of the DoJ. He got rid of Comey, which was
good, but got Rosenstein and Mueller in response. Meanwhile Jeff Sessions is twiddling his thumbs re the Russia witch hunt. Perhaps
his recusal was appropriate, but he's not doing anything whatsoever regarding Swamp Draining. So it feels like he's a disingenuous
old guard GOPer, who wants to obstruct any real progress, while dragging his feet with do-nothingness obscured behind a facade
of law enforcement community boosterism. By this tactic the GOP attempts to stall until 2020, when it can then point at Trump's
failures (failures they have enabled by their stalling, wink wink) and then campaign to take "their" party back. In short, Sessions
may just be an anti-Trump "mole" planted in the single most important position with regard to swamp draining, in order to ***prevent***
any swamp draining.
Let me be clear: in the last 24 years the DC political class has gone almost entirely criminal, with the last 13 years dedicated
to serial war crimes. In this sort of situation the DoJ, AG, and FBI head, becomes corrupted, and turns away from the rule of
law to become a shield for the DC criminal despotism.
So watch closely what happens next. Just today rumors have come out -- though I've been speaking of this for several weeks
now -- that there is talk in the White House about ***recess appointments*** . We have reached the crucial moment, and I for one
am surprised that, as important as this is, it has not been prominent in public discussion until now. The "August" was scheduled
to begin at the end of business tomorrow, July 28th. Because of the health care business, McConnell has postponed it for two weeks,
so let's call it for close of business Friday, August 11th. That's fifteen days from now.
When Congress goes home fifteen days from now, this country and the world may very well change forever. Go to Wikipedia and
look up "recess appointment". Here's what you will find:
" a recess appointment is an appointment by the President of a federal official while the U.S. Senate is in recess.
Recess appointments are authorized by Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting
Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session .
If Trump is the fighter I think he is, then this is what he has been waiting for, ever so patiently these last six months.
Notice that the Congress cannot countermand recess appointments. Recess appointments end by expiration, and then only at the end
of the following Congressional session. Other than impeachment, Congress cannot stop Trump from doing this .
So Trump dumps Sessions, purges the anti-Trump prosecutors from previous administrations, and appoints a new FBI head and dozens
of fire-breathing swamp-draining prosecutors who immediately start doling out orange jumpsuits. He could -- not saying that he
would execute this "nuclear option" -- but he could lock up virtually the entire Congress on war crimes charges; Neocons for conspiracy
to commit war crimes; Cheney, Addington, Yoo, and Bybee to the Hague for torture; Hillary and Obama for Libya.
Control of the DoJ is the key.
The next two weeks will show whether Trump is the real deal, or just another schlub.
Yes, in a slightly modified form this is a very true statement: "Disinformation destroys
reality. The USA is master of this -- they have built a parallel reality."
Just as disturbing is an analysis of Russia's worldwide fake news
campaign , which spreads contradictory reports and Kremlin-friendly propaganda.
"The Russians understand Western media far better than the Western media understands
itself," one interviewee says. "And they play to the Western media's short attention span."
Another says: "Disinformation destroys reality. The Russians are masters of this -- they
have built a parallel reality."
@Felix
Keverich You're full of shit what the heck do you know about industry you useless little
fart ? are you an industrial engineer do you have any technical qualifications whatsoever or
do you just pull buzzwords like 'marketable skills' out your wazoo, as needed ?
The Ukraine certainly had all kinds of 'entrepreneurs' they're called OLIGARCHS who
very capably enriched themselves unfortunately 'entrepreneurs' are what normal people would
call parasites, flim-flam men and hucksters
As for Ukrainian workers lacking 'marketable skills' I guess that would be 'skills' like
TROLLING, your specialty and making retarded statements on discussion fora
Ukraine had more very qualified engineers per capita than any country in Europe a huge
amount of intellectual capacity, and a very good industrial base especially in high tech
areas like aerospace and propulsion their problem was that they chose to play games with the
rotten west, instead of friendship with Russia, with which their industry was
integrated
You're a complete wanker in the A. Karlin mold. Get lost you have nothing to
contribute
@Big
Bill They fought that it was Russia, that was holding them back, and by separating they
could quickly achieve Western European standard of living. The first guy to become
president of independent Ukraine promised people that they were going to "live like France"
.in 5 years (!). lol
So their plan was something like this:
Lately, they began to think that the Ukraine's path to prosperity goes through EU
membership, hence popular support for Euromaidan, and you know the results
You're full of shit what the heck do you know about industry you useless little fart
? are you an industrial engineer do you have any technical qualifications whatsoever or do
you just pull buzzwords like 'marketable skills' out your wazoo, as needed ?
Your industries are worth ZERO, if you're unable to sell your products, and the Ukraine
struggled to sell its manufactured goods after 1991. Its traditional customer – Russia
began to import Western goods.
You sound like Martyanov. lol It doesn't take any "special qualification" to figure out
that Soviet-era factories were churning out worthless crap – there is a reason why that
system fell apart, you know.
The Duran's Alex Christoforou and Editor-in-Chief Alexander Mercouris discuss the Munich Security Conference,
and Angela Merkel's stunning defiance of Mike Pence, after the United States Vice President urged Germany to cease
its economic activities with Russia and China, starting with Nord Stream 2 and the deepening energy links to
Russia.
U.S. Congress wants to know about Putin's income and assets
It is assumed that information about Putin's income will help protect democracy in the United
States
WASHINGTON, February 28, 2019, 02:27 -- REGNUMmembers of the house of
representatives of the U.S. Congress, Val Demings and Elise Stefanik, have introduced a bill
demanding that the intelligence services provide information on the income and property of
the Russian President Vladimir Putin, reports the ABC channel .
According to ABC, the bill called "The Vladimir Putin Transparency Act" has been
proposed by these members of the Intelligence Committee. The bill is related to the alleged
ambitions of Russia to undermine American democracy. It is assumed that information about
Putin's income will help defend democracy in the United States.
Also in January, the U.S. Senate introduced a bill on protection against "Kremlin
aggression". The bill also contained a request that the intelligence community provide data
on the assets and income of the Russian leader.
What a breathtaking example of stupidity. They can't even get reliable data on their own
current president's income, and a significant element of the American electorate will never
be satisfied with the proof provided that the previous president was not born in Kenya.
America's obsession with Putin is getting creepy, in a distinctly disturbing,
mentally-unstable way. Especially considering you can tell them anything, so long as you say
their own intelligence services have a 'high confidence' that it is true, and they will
believe it – witches flying around the rotunda on brooms, no problem. How did it turn
out that such a nation of crackpots is also the custodian of a huge nuclear arsenal?
I imagine both Putin and Russia will refrain from reacting, except to chuckle with
amusement at such foolishness. But it will be interesting to see what they come up with;
remember, Gennady Timchenko threatened to sue The Economist for saying in print that Putin
was a ghost owner of Gunvor Energy, which Timchenko in fact co-owned with Swedish billionaire
Torbjörn Törnqvist, and The Economist backed down and issued an apology. Presumably
the American intelligence services will find eager sources in 'Kremlin insider' fatboy
blabbermouths Stas Belkovsky and Gleb Pavlovsky, both of whom can yarn on all day long about
the oozing evil of Putin and the unimaginable billions he has salted away. But they will have
no proof whatsoever, as except for a few luxurious perks like fancy wristwatches and a mohair
workout suit, Putin lives what is to all appearances a somewhat austere and totally
non-indulgent lifestyle, and gives no sign of being stinking rich. The 'palaces' attributed
to him all belong to the state, although he has the use of them owing to his office as
president. So what will Russia do if the US intelligence services report some fantastic sum,
but decline to offer any proof which might be quickly refuted? Sue them for defamation?
Let's get it on the record – never before has such a self-important busybody
republic existed, so full of itself and absorbed with its omnipotent airs. The less a truly
democratic global presence and trusted world citizen it becomes, the louder it screeches
about its own greatness and exceptionalism. Wow. Embarrassing. And I didn't think that was
still possible. Shows how much I know.
Russia should respond tit for tat: for everything the Americans publish (be it true or lies),
the Russian press should publish major dirt on American politicians and lawmakers.
American culture is devoid of shame or decency – what 'dirt' could you possibly throw
at them? Being caught with a dead girl is survivable, as Edward Kennedy demonstrated, and
being caught with a live boy is now a bonus. Joe Biden stole a speech from Neil Kinnock and
can't appear in public without groping somebody, and he's frequently floated as a
presidential candidate.
About the only thing that does rouse indignation anymore is having met a Russian once, and
even that's excusable as long as you profess to hate them like the plague now. Beyond posting
old yearbook photos of American politicians in blackface I don't know what you could possibly
hope to shame these creatures with.
Ahhh..yes..nothing like the handiwork of the shitstains,morons ,leprechauns, cnts and
cckskkers in the USA State Department over the last few decades that COUL:D have fostered
fundamental sanity in international relations but did not do so:
"A nuclear catastrophe in the making?
No one should underestimate the danger of what would be the first-ever war between
nuclear-armed states. Since the 2001-2002 war crisis, which saw a million Indian troops
deployed on the Pakistan border for nine months, both countries have developed hair-trigger
strategies, with a dynamic impelling rapid escalation. In response to India's Cold Start
strategy, which calls for the rapid mobilization of Indian forces for a multi-front invasion
of Pakistan, Islamabad has deployed tactical or battlefield nuclear weapons. India has, in
return, signaled that any use by Pakistan of tactical nuclear weapons will break the
"strategic threshold," freeing India from its "no first use" nuclear-weapon pledge, and be
met with strategic nuclear retaliation.
All this would play out in a relatively small, densely populated area. The center of
Lahore, Pakistan's second largest city with a population in excess of 11 million, lies little
more than 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the Indian border. The distance from New Delhi to
Islamabad is significantly less than that between Berlin and Paris or New York and Detroit
and would be travelled by a nuclear-armed missile in a matter of minutes.
A nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would not only kill tens of millions in
South Asia. A 2008 simulation conducted by scientists who in the 1980s alerted the world to
the threat of "nuclear winter" determined that the detonation of a hundred Hiroshima-scale
nuclear weapons in an Indo-Pakistani war would, due to the destruction of large cities,
inject so much smoke and ash into the upper atmosphere as to trigger a global agricultural
collapse. This, they predicted, would lead to a billion deaths in the months that followed
South Asia's "limited" nuclear war."
"dropped from up high" – gosh, the technical terminology scientists use makes their
reports difficult to follow. Naturally only Assad possessed the capability to drop something
from up high, so it must have been him.
I also note the report says some guy who was not from the hospital ran in shouting
"Chemical! Chemical!", whereupon others started grabbing people and washing them, and that
the alleged victims did not present as victims of a chemical attack.
But I daresay the press will conclude this is irrefutable proof that a chemical attack
occurred in Douma and that Assad – backed by the Russians – was responsible.
My, Ukraine's American Minister of Health – Yuliana Suprun – is doing an
outstanding job. Ukraine was the locus of the world's biggest rise in measles cases in 2018,
from about 5,000 cases the year before to 35,120 the year just past. Moreover, 24,042 new
cases were reported in the first 2 months of this year.
But it was the Moskali who caused the epidemic by trolling social network sites with false
information as regards the efficacy of vaccination against measles.
Russian-backed attempts to sabotage Ukraine's economic, political, and health
developments have left the country fighting a measles outbreak and continuing a bloody,
undeclared war. The situation is emblematic of increasing tension between the ideologies of
President Vladimir Putin and countries of the pro-democratic, neoliberal west.
The measles outbreak -- affecting other countries including Serbia, Georgia, Greece,
and Italy -- has hit Ukraine hardest, with the country's 23 000 cases accounting for
more than half the European regional total. Kremlin-supported social media accounts spreading
discredited theories about the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) vaccine, combined with shortages
and underfunding, have been blamed for the outbreak. Research published on Aug 23 concluded
Russian trolls promoted discord and, masquerading as legitimate users, created a false
impression that arguments for and against vaccination were equipoised. The result has been an
erosion of public consensus on the value of vaccine programmes. The precipitous fall in
vaccination level began after 2008, when 95% of eligible children in Ukraine received their
second (and final) recommended dose of the MMR vaccine. By 2016, the rate was 31%, among the
lowest in the world.
Although now rising again, the latest 85% measles vaccination rate recorded by WHO
remains below that needed for herd immunity. Records in 2016 show poor vaccination rates for
other diseases: only 19% of children received the third recommended dose of the
diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis vaccine and 56% received the third recommended dose of oral
polio vaccine.
Hepatitis B vaccination was low, with coverage with hepatitis B birth-dose and
third-dose vaccines at 37% and 26%, respectively. WHO estimates between 3% and 5% of the
Ukraine's 45 million population has been infected with hepatitis C.
Ukraine bears the second largest HIV epidemic in eastern Europe and central
Asia.
The above was printed in the much respected "The
Lancet" . Who wrote it, I know not -- but I can hazard a guess.
It begins with the outrageous statement that "Russia" is resposible for the epidemic,
specifically, the"ideology" of the Russian president is the cause of the epidemic.
No proof given: no data: sweet fuck all. Just an assertion that "Pyutin" is
responsible.
You know, it's a shame Ukrainians are so gullible, and believe Russia's lies without checking
any other sources of information – don't they know how to use The Microsoft and The
Google? Not to mention gullible Americans, who also fell for it.
Oh, and the Australians, who were so gobsmacked by Russia's campaign to discredit
vaccinations that being a 'vaccine skeptic' is now punishable by up to 10 years in
prison.
Mind you, the 'anti-vaxxers' in those instances are reportedly Australian nurses and
midwives – but I daresay they. too, were taken in by clever Russian trolls posing as
legitimate users on social media.
Some of you will probably be asking "At what point, for the love of Christ, are people
expected to take responsibility for their own decisions, instead of hiding behind the
feebleminded excuse that they were tricked by the Russians?" For my part, I am convinced that
Russia is going to take over the world, because Russian trolls are so much smarter than the
public in any country you care to name. With a few cat pictures and a sprinkling of Black
Lives Matter stories, many of them generated after the American election was actually over,
the Russians tricked the American electoral college into making Donald Trump president of the
United States instead of Mrs. Clinton, but in such a way that more of the public actually
voted for Clinton than for Trump. And the electoral college is supposed to be made up of
America's leaders. Brilliant, you must admit.
Watch out for the Kremlin campaign against photography – because having your picture
taken steals your soul – due to open in The Ukraine this summer. Then there will not
even be a photographic record of all the Ukrainians who died from measles, conniption fits,
brain fever and the fantods, as the Kremlin wipes them out with their own gullibility.
Survival of the fittest, baby.
Red Alert!! Nobody will ever know the true winner (cough * Petro Poroshenko * cough) of the
Ukrainian elections in 2019, because the Russians are already preparing fake exit-poll
results, so that not even those who vote will be able to remember who they voted for. The
situation probably cannot be stabilized until the reigning government reviews the results and
supplies the ballots it says were properly counted. Better just play it safe, and leave
Poroshenko as president forever.
Please note, the fake exit-poll meddling is in addition to other Russian meddling efforts
which will take place at polling stations during the vote. It is literally not possible to
hold an actual democratic election any more, Putin has ruined everything. Democracy is dead.
Voting as a means of selecting a national leader is over.
This is so confusing -- Porko has single digit support last I heard so it would be expected
that exit polls would show a similar result. But, if the exit polls are consistent with
Porko's opinion polls then it must be a sign of Russian meddling! Geez, I would have thought
it would be the other way around -- an inconsistently high exit poll result would only be
consistent with pro-Porko rating swindle. Shows how little I know about these matters.
Exit polling is tremendously important, and in previous colour revolutions the west always
tried to get control of exit polling; often it was invited to do so by the target country,
since it was felt by the government that the imprimatur of western observers would help
reassure nervous westerners that the elections were fair and democratic. They apparently did
not realize that all the west needs to tip over your victory is exit-poll results which are
dramatically different from the way the vote was counted -- for example, Yanukovych wins with
39% of the vote, but the exit polls, in which those just leaving the polling station are
asked who they voted for, say his opponent got way more votes than he did. Bingo -- the
election is a big fraud -- campers, set up your tents on the Maidan, we're not going anywhere
until this grievous wrong has been redressed. Thanks, Berezovsky, for the tents and the hot
soup. But nobody really knows what the actual exit-poll results were, so the western
observers can basically say anything they want, and the western press will immediately run
with it.
Porky knows this very well, so he is trying to de-legitimize the vote in advance, knowing
he doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell of winning himself. If Zelenskiy wins, he'll be
a Russian pawn put in place by Putin, and consequently will have to make the most belligerent
statements against Russia and swear that he sleeps with a life-size blow-up doll of Bandera
so as not to be thought 'soft' on the Kremlin.
The west was not invited to do exit polls in Russia, but in each of Putin's wins as well
as that of Medvedev, the vote was consistent with pre-election polling in which decided
voters announced who they intended to vote for. Nonetheless, there is always a great boil of
noise afterward about ballot-stuffing and carousel voting, even by those who like to use the
term but don't know what it means.
I have often wondered which news agency Matt works for.
If he really did not know what carousel voting was, he should have contacted Yulia
Latynina, she 'd have told him; she's the carousel voting specialist: she can spot voters
being bused in at a 1,000 paces. During elections, she drives around Moscow sussing them out,
trailing them, writing reports on her findings in Novaya Gazeta or on the Ekho Moskvy site or
ranting on about them in her talk show there.
I wonder what she's doing now? I heard she had emigrated. She still sends in copy for the
aforementioned news media, though.
I remember with affection the old Anatoly Karlin, who could not endure western hypocrisy
without pointing it out with highly-enjoyable sarcasm. In the instance I'm thinking of, it
was the 'huge protest' (organizers claimed 120,000, police said around 29,000, objective
analysis put it at about 80,000) in Sakharov St. where the 'fiery' Alexey Navalny said he saw
'enough people to take the Kremlin'. The answering roar must have terribly tempted him to try
it, but he didn't. Anyway, there was a photo of that protest, taken from overhead – I
can't find it now – which showed a large block of city buses drawn up side-to-side;
transport for the protesters. They were 'bused in'. When you're going to attend a
western-backed demonstration, of course, you're just 'proceeding in an
environmentally-conscious manner to a responsible protest action'. When you are part of a
factory crew and the company lays on a bus to take everyone to the polls, you're 'bused in
for carousel voting', and the bus takes the entire contingent to multiple polling places
where they vote again and again. Or so Latynina says, although all she ever shows to back up
her assertions is a photo of a bus with people on it. But the western press is perfectly
happy to accept her word that they are seeing another sad example of the perversion of
democracy in Russia.
So there you have it, as usual – western exceptionalism goes global. When we do it
('we' being the children of the Limousine Liberals), we're just using a socially-responsible
method of getting to a place where we can make our voices heard and hold the authorities
accountable. When they do it, they're cheating democracy and imposing an oligarchical system
on us.
I have seen lots of photos of people on buses, and am perfectly happy to accept that they
all came from the same workplace – that makes perfect sense to me, and I see nothing
ominous in it. I have never seen any evidence that such people vote multiple times as a
group, and must therefore conclude that 'carousel voting' is a buzzword dreamed up by western
analysts in concert with sympathetic Russian liberal enablers.
The son of Dawn Sturges, who died in 2018 as a result of poisoning in Amesbury, has
written to Russian President Vladimir Putin an open letter in which he asks him to help in
the investigation.
"I'm desperate. Putin is the only person that can make it so that justice will prevail.
I need his help to pay tribute to my mum. I'm counting on it", Evan Hope told the British
tabloid "The Mirror". The publication presents the full text of the message:
"It's been almost a year since my mother, Dawn, was killed by Novichok in Salisbury,
and my pain, like the pain of my family members, does not pass. The British police believe
that at least two Russian citizens are responsible for her death, but it seems that they are
under the protection of your state. I'm asking you as a person, to allow our officers to
question these people about the murder of my mother. She at least deserves
somejustice."
Mr. Hope told the publication that the UK government has not provided any support for
his family. "I feel betrayed by the government", he said. He stated that it endorsed the
support of Sergei and Yulia Sripal, who was poisoned by the same substance. "But my family
has had no such support, and we are the ones who have lost our mother. She was an innocent
victim, but we have never heard from Theresa May nor the government -- no phone call, no
letter, nor anything else", he said.
Unsubstanttiated allegations taken as gospel. Wonder who put Evan up to writing to
"Pyutin"?
Zakharova is already girding her loins for the 1st anniversary (tomorrow) of the diabolical nerve agent
attack by Pyutin's agents that took place in Salisbury on March 4, 2018.
"Caroline's friend told "The Sun" that Dawn had switched from being a popular pupil at Durrington school
in Wiltshire to a homeless alcoholic due to post-natal depression when her son Aidan was born.
Her personality changed. She became like a zombie."
It's clearly very wrong for members of the British establishment to exploit members of Dawn Sturges's family
in this way. What they should get help in pressing for is a proper non-politicised investigation into what
exactly happened to her.
The relative clause "
who died in 2018 as a result of poisoning in Amesbury
" should not have had
commas separating it from the main clause "
The son of Dawn Sturges has written to Russian President
Vladimir Putin an open letter in which he asks him to help in the investigation
", in that it is a
defining relative clause whose antecedent is "Dawn Sturges" and not the subject of the main clause, "Ewan
Hope".
As a result of mistakenly placing commas before and after the relative clause in question, that clause is
a non-defining relative clause, adding, in parentheses as it were, additional information about the subject
of the main clause.
Ewan Hope is alive: his mother, who was Dawn Sturges, is the woman who died of unnatural causes in
Amesbury last year. (Two relative clauses in the preceding sentence, each having "who" as its relative
pronoun, the first relative clause being non-defining and having "mother" as its antecedent, the second
being defining, having "woman" as its antecedent.)
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Perhaps I have lived too long here: all relative clauses, be they defining or non-defining, are separated
by commas in Russian.
It is ironic that almost every week I have to point out to Russians the very different English
punctiation rules as regards relative clauses, an English grammar topic that Russians often find hard to
grasp.
Wrong usage of commas in contracts drawn up in English can sometimes have unforeseen and very costly
results.
I often ask Russians what information is given about the subject (the passengers) in the following two
sentences, which are, apart from their punctuation, identical:
The passengers who could speak Russian had few problems at immigration control.
The passengers, who could speak Russian, had few problems at immigration control.
In each instance, how many passengers had few problems?
Are your impressive grammatical skills typical of English folks of your generation? Us Americans (see
what I did?) can hardly put two words together without screwing up a grammatical rule.
In London staged a Shenderovich play "To See
Salisbury". The heroes are two gay men who want to save the world
The theatrical production company StageRC has announced the premiere of a play by the writer Viktor
Shenderovich "To see Salisbury", which will be held in late March in London.
The comedy is built on the fact that Boshirov and Petrov are really two gays who went to England to see the
cathedral. At the end of the play, an apocalypse takes place.
Shenderovich himself also spoke about his new work. "The play 'To See Salisbury' began with my bold assumption
that these people (Petrov and Boshirov) were telling the truth. This is a couple who love each other, and, keeping
it secret from their families, just went off to London. One of them, in addition to loving his partner, also loves
Gothic architecture. And I have assumed that this is true. And this assumption seemed to me so touching", said the
writer.
The company website informs that the premiere performances in Russian and English will be held on March 30 and
31.
The play, balancing between the Theatre of the Absurd and farce, ends on the verge of apocalypse -- the
insane Dementia Petrovna being ready to start a nuclear war.
The drunk feller she defended shakes her hand in gratitude. Notice that two other guys come from around the
corner and take the bully's place in the queue.
Darren Till who posted that video is a mixed martial arts practitioner. Wonder if he'll offer the woman a
place in his training camp?
A few of his followers have fallen in love with her.
"... I gather our President lectured our President Elect on the necessity to stand up to Russia. (My first thought is that like that stupid charitable campaign to Stand Up to Cancer!, another place where the phrase was either meaningless or foolhardy.) ..."
"... IF Russia ever started actually interfering in our relations with our neighbors or attempted to get us thrown out of our legal bases in foreign nations, I would say that Barack Obama might have a point. Since we are the party guilty of such actions, he would do better to clean up his own administration's relations with Russia, apologize to Russia, and then STFU. ..."
"... 'Obama Urges Trump to Maintain Pointless, Hyper-Aggresive Encirclement of Russia Strategy, Acknowledge Nuclear Apocalypse "Inevitable"' ..."
"... In the best of circumstances, Obama in his post-presidency will be akin to Jimmy Carter and stay out of politics, less or less. (I think he has exhausted all trust and value.) If he goes the Jimmy Carter route; he is bound to do worse and will fade away. I don't think he'll go the Clinton route unless Michelle tries to run for office. ..."
"... The good people of the US are awaiting DHS' final report on Russia's attempts to hack our elections. We deserve as much. ..."
"... If there's any basis to the allegations it's about time someone provided it. Up till now it's been unfounded assertions. Highly suspect at that. ..."
"... My guess is the whole Russian boogeyman was a ploy to attract those "moderate Republicans" who liked Romney. ..."
"... "My hope is that the president-elect coming in takes a similarly constructive approach, finding areas where we can cooperate with Russia where our values and interests align, but that the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia when they are deviating from our values and international norms," Obama said. "But I don't expect that the president-elect will follow exactly our approach." ..."
"... Yes, because "U.S. values" as defined by the actions of the last 16 years have been so enlightened and successful and because the U.S. is a sterling example of adhering to international norms ..."
"... Just how deluded, ignorant or sociopathic does a person need to be that they can say things like that without vomiting? ..."
I gather our President lectured our President Elect on the necessity to stand up to Russia.
(My first thought is that like that stupid charitable campaign to Stand Up to Cancer!, another
place where the phrase was either meaningless or foolhardy.)
IF Russia ever started actually interfering in our relations with our neighbors or attempted
to get us thrown out of our legal bases in foreign nations, I would say that Barack Obama might
have a point. Since we are the party guilty of such actions, he would do better to clean up his
own administration's relations with Russia, apologize to Russia, and then STFU.
Which I am sure he will do once everyone recognizes that that is the appropriate thing to do.
But as we well know everyone else will have to do the heavy lifting of figuring that out before
he will even acknowledge the possibility.
In the best of circumstances, Obama in his post-presidency will be akin to Jimmy Carter
and stay out of politics, less or less. (I think he has exhausted all trust and value.) If he
goes the Jimmy Carter route; he is bound to do worse and will fade away. I don't think he'll go
the Clinton route unless Michelle tries to run for office.
In this case, Obama is probably too vain and Michelle being the saner of the two might rein
him in? Best of any world would, as you say, STFU. (As the Ex Prez. Obamamometer, that is probably
not in the cards.)
Maybe he will end up like Geo Bush, sitting in the bathtub drooling while he paints childish
self-portraits
Or maybe he will end up like OJ, where he tries to go hang out with all his cool friends and they
tell him to get lost
Ppl still mention him as a master orator, etc. Lots of post presidency speaking engagements
I suppose. I'd prefer him not to but then again if he makes enough annually from it to beat the
Clintons we might get the satisfaction of annoying them
"My hope is that the president-elect coming in takes a similarly constructive approach,
finding areas where we can cooperate with Russia where our values and interests align, but that
the president-elect also is willing to stand up to Russia when they are deviating from our values
and international norms," Obama said. "But I don't expect that the president-elect will follow
exactly our approach." What Obama is saying is he wants Russia to join America in bombing
hospitals, schools, children, doctors, public facilities like water treatment plants, bridges,
weddings, homes, and civilians to list just few – while arming and supporting terrorists for regime
change. And if anyone points this out, Russia like the US is supposed to say "I know you are but
what am I?"
Yes, because "U.S. values" as defined by the actions of the last 16 years have been so
enlightened and successful and because the U.S. is a sterling example of adhering to international
norms
Just how deluded, ignorant or sociopathic does a person need to be that they can say things
like that without vomiting?
Is this the same Russia that just hacked our election and subverted our fine democracy? Why,
President Obama, I believe it behooves you to stand up to Russia yourself. Show President-Elect
Trump how it is done sir!
First vices about the color revolution against Trump were heard on December 2016
Notable quotes:
"... Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you. ..."
"... Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to win concession after concession from the Trump White House. ..."
"... There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's immigration laws. ..."
"... On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump. But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging. ..."
"... Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms. Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers" from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power to do so. ..."
"... on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement. ..."
"... Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican Party. ..."
Several months ago I was asked what advice I would give to the Trump campaign.
I said, only half joking, that he had better pick a vice presidential candidate the establishment
hates more than it hates him. That would be his only insurance against impeachment. Those drums have
already begun to beat, be it ever so subtly.
Is anyone surprised how quickly the establishment that Donald Trump campaigned against has announced
opposition to much of his policy agenda? No. But few understand that the passionate opposition includes
a willingness to impeach and remove President Trump if he does not come to heel on his America First
goals.
Ferocious opposition to Trump from the left was expected and thus surprises nobody. From the comical
demands for vote recounts to street protests by roving bands of leftist hate-mongers and condescending
satire on late-night television, hysterical leftist opposition to Trump is now part of the cultural
landscape.
But those are amusing sideshows to the main event, the Republican establishment's intransigent
opposition to key pillars of the Republican president's agenda.
Republican leaders in Congress are already sending Trump a subtle but clear warning: accept our
business-as-usual Chamber of Commerce agenda or we will join Democrats to impeach you.
If you think talk of impeachment is insane when the man has not even been sworn into office yet,
you have not been paying attention. Impeachment has been the goal of Democrats since the day after
Trump won the election, and the Republican establishment will use the veiled threat as leverage to
win concession after concession from the Trump White House.
What are the key policy differences that motivate congressional opposition to the Trump agenda?
There are at least four Trump campaign promises which, if not dropped or severely compromised, could
generate Republican support for impeachment: Trump's Supreme Court appointments, abandoning the Trans
Pacific Partnership, radical rollback of Obama regulatory projects, and real enforcement of our nation's
immigration laws.
On regulatory rollback, Congress can legitimately insist on negotiating the details with Trump.
But on the other three, immigration, the TPP, and Supreme Court nominees, Trump's campaign promises
were so specific - and so popular - that he need not accept congressional foot-dragging.
Yet, while the President-elect 's transition teams at the EPA, State Department and Education
Department are busy mapping ambitious changes in direction, Congress's Republican leadership is busy
doubling down on dissonance and disloyalty.
Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell announced this week he will oppose Trump's tax reforms.
Senator Lindsey Graham is joining Democrats in sponsoring new legislation to protect the "Dreamers"
from deportation after their unlawfully granted legal status and work permits expire. Senator Susan
Collins will oppose any restrictions on Muslim refugees, no matter how weak and inadequate the vetting
to weed out jihadists. Senator Lamar Alexander aims to protect major parts of Obamacare, despite
five years of voluminous Republican promises to "repeal and replace" it if they ever had the power
to do so.
And then, on the House side, we have the naysayer-in-chief, Speaker Paul Ryan, who refused to
campaign with Donald Trump in Wisconsin, and who has vowed to obstruct Trump's most important and
most popular campaign promise - an end to open borders and vigorous immigration law enforcement.
It is no exaggeration to say that Trump's success or failure in overcoming the opposition to immigration
enforcement will determine the success or failure of his presidency. If he cannot deliver on his
most prominent and most popular campaign promise, nothing else will matter very much.
So, the bad news for President Trump is this: If he keeps faith with his campaign promises on
immigration, for example to limit Muslim immigration from terrorism afflicted regions, which is within
his legitimate constitutional powers as President, he will risk impeachment. However, his congressional
critics will face one enormous hurdle in bringing impeachment charges related to immigration enforcement:
about 90 percent of what Trump plans to do is within current law and would require no new legislation
in Congress. Obama disregarded immigration laws he did not like, so all Trump has to do is enforce
those laws.
Now, if you think talk of impeachment is ridiculous because Republicans control Congress, you
are underestimating the depth of Establishment Republican support for open borders.
The first effort in the 21st century at a general amnesty for all 20 million illegal aliens came
in January 2005 from newly re-elected President George Bush. The "Gang of Eight" amnesty bill passed
by the US Senate in 2013 did not have the support of the majority of Republican senators, and now
they are faced with a Republican president pledged to the exact opposite agenda, immigration enforcement.
And yet, do not doubt the establishment will sacrifice a Republican president to protect the globalist,
open borders status quo.
The leader and spokesman for that establishment open borders agenda is not some obscure backbencher,
it is the Republican Speaker of the House. Because the Speaker controls the rules and the legislative
calendar, if he chooses to play hardball against Trump on immigration he can block any of Trump's
other policy initiatives until Trump abandons his immigration enforcement goals.
What all this points to is a bloody civil war within the Republican Party fought on the battlefield
of congressional committee votes.
Donald Trump won a electoral mandate to change direction and put American interests first, beginning
with border security. If the congressional Republican establishment chooses to block the implementation
of that electoral mandate, it would destroy not only Trump's agenda, it would destroy the Republican
Party.
Never believe the CIA. Ever! January 26, 2019 CIA Was Aiding Jihadists Before Soviets
Invaded Afghanistan
According to recently declassified documents of the White House, CIA and State Department
as reported by Tim Weiner for The Washington Post, the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before
the Soviets invaded in 1979. The then American President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA
directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979, whereas the former Soviet Union invaded
Afghanistan in December the same year.
Author Originally, there were four parties involved in the Afghan conflict which are
mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly, the former Soviet Union
which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan's security agencies which
nurtured the Afghan so-called "mujahideen" (freedom fighters) on the behest of
Washington.
what you say is true and correct. Fast forward to 2019. I never thought I would have to
believe those "authorities" or organizations to stop our own president. How far down the
rabbit hole we are. Keep it up . I should mention that consortium news was one of the sites
that was hit by a barrage of not true things. Do you remember KIllary Shillary, world war 3
on this website? That is when I stopped. No defence of Ms Clinton, but the attacks were
relentless. I do believe consortium news was hijacked by some really partisan people.
OlyaPola , February 22, 2019 at 3:12 am
"Before Soviets Invaded Afghanistan"
The Soviet forces were invited to Afghanistan by the Afghani Government – they never
invaded Afghanistan or Syria.
"They call Russia pretty much the biggest threat to the US," he said. " that is not true.
Russia wants a fulfilling, equal and friendly relationship with the United States. Russia is
not threatening anyone. All our actions in the security sphere are responsive and defensive in
nature."
... ... ...
That post-Soviet Russia feels unequal in many ways to the United States should be a given:
its military capability, for a start, is many, many times less.
But it is also apparent from the way in which it has co-opted almost wholesale some of the
forms, if not the content, of US institutional life: the inauguration ceremony, for one; and
the
State of the Union address , for another, which becomes year by year more of a clone of the
real thing.
If Trump's advisers were listening, they might draw the following conclusions. In the
absence of a sensible negotiating partner in the US, Russia is looking elsewhere to mitigate
its isolation. It would like to normalise relations with the EU; it is interested in closer
ties with India, and Putin is still hoping to conclude a peace treaty with Japan.
The geographical logic of all that is unimpeachable, while the absence of China from the
list might be telling. Most of all, though, Russia wants a new-generation security arrangement
with the United States in which it is treated as an equal.
As of now, that looks a distant prospect, which may be why, in his 2019 state of the nation
address and without the pressure of an imminent election, Russia's president seemed reconciled
to a long wait.
This is from 2015. Not much changed... But relevant for Venezuela. So what will happen with Venesuellians if
the color revolution suceeed, is easy to predict using Ukrainian example
Notable quotes:
"... Ukraine, what a mess. As though it was ever about the people. It was a grab for resources, 19-century style. But with 21st-century stakes. You can see what the West is after when you look at the US-Ukraine Business Council. ..."
"... Meanwhile last night & this morning, just to distract the people of what is going on in the West, Kiev launched a massive shelling over Donetsk and other places in Donbass using weapons forbbiden by the Minsk agreements, including Tor missiles, one of which fell at a railway station but didn't explode... it was defused by emergency workers but the proof is there if you care to see... it was thesecond biggest attack since the cease fire... ..."
"... This is the IMF hired guns now going after the very people who helped the Wall Street IMF shysters in the illegitimate coup and the set up of the illegitimate Kiev junta, a mix of half Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian mongrels. ..."
"... Furthermore, instead of bringing in the people who helped overthrow Janukovich into the government fold, the IMF is placing it's foreign collaborators in ministerial positions by making them instant Ukrainian citizens, while keeping the right wing, without whose help the coup would not have succeeded, out of government and slowly trying to eliminate them with their private foreign mercenary force. ..."
"... Madame "F*ck the EU Nuland from the US state department bordello, a devout Zionist, enticed these supposed Ukrainian NAZIs to help her in her dirty deeds, no doubt with promises of power sharing. ..."
"... She no doubt got her position not by intelligence but by connections. More than 6000 Ukrainians, human beings, innocent men women and children, have died in madame Nuland's engineered coup, putting her in league with her mentor, Henry Kissinger, aka the butcher of Vietnam. ..."
"... The Ukrainian sub-saharan African minimum wage is now being accompanied by Somali-style politics. ..."
"... The BBC are bravely sticking to their decision not to report this story. Congratulations are in order for such dedication. The graun protected its readership from this confusing information for 24 hours and then caved to the temptation to report news. Too bad. ..."
"... Can we officially congratulate Nuland for a crappy job and also for providing Putin with all the tools he needed to bring back Ukraine under his wing. False flag operations for American private interests must stop now. They are immoral, unethical and only bring death and destruction to otherwise stable societies. The UN should have a say. ..."
"... Neither Azov nor Right Sector want peace. On 3 July 4,000 men from these units protested in Kiev, calling for resumption of the war against the eastern provinces. They favour ethnic cleansing. ..."
"... The west would not have dialogue with Russia because it was not what Washington wanted. Washington wanted to push a wedge between Russia and EU at any cost even 6500 lives and unfortunately they succeeded ..."
"... The Right Sector does not exist, or if it does, it has been created by Moscow. The crisis in Greece is also the work of Russian agents. The ISIS is financed and trained by Putin. Ebola was cooked up in a laboratory in Saint Petersburg. Look for the Russian! ..."
"... this is what happens when you play with fire: you get burned. Using Neo-Nazi's to implement Nato expansionist policies was always a very bad idea. It's just a shame it is not people like Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland who will have to suffer the blowback consequences- it is the poor Ukrainian people. This is not that different to what has happened in Libya- where Islamic extremists were used as a proxy force to oust Gaddafi. ..."
"... the jihadists in Ukraine are the integral part of Iraqization of Ukraine. The lovers of Nuland's cookies are still in denial that Ukraine was destined by the US plutocrats to become a sacrificial lamb in a fight to preserve the US dollar hegemony. ..."
"... Why, don't you know? They infiltrated Ukraine, the CIA (and NATO and the EU somehow) created Maidan, their agents killed the protesters, then they overthrew a legitimate government and installed a neo-nazi one, proceeded to instigate a brutal oppression against Russian speakers, then started a war against the peaceful Eastern Ukrainians and their innocent friends in the Kremlin, etc etc. Ignorant question that, by now you should know the narrative! ..."
"... The BBC investigative reported earlier this year that a section of Maidan protesters deliberately started shooting the police. This story was also reported in the Guardian. Google and you will easily find it. The BBC also reported that the Prosecutors Office in Kiev was forbidden by Rada officials from investigating Maiden shooters. ..."
"... have you ever studied geography? If yes, you should remember the proximity of Ukraine to Russia (next door) and the proximity of Ukraine to the US (thousands miles away). Also, have you heard about the CIA Director Brennan and his covert visit to Kiev on the eve of the beginning of the civil war in Ukraine? This could give you an informed hint about the causes of the war. Plus you may be interested to learn about Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (Ms. Nudelman), her cookies, and her foul language. She is, by the way, a student of Dick Cheney. If you were born before 2000, you might know his name and his role in the Iraq catastrophe. Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (and the family of Kagans she belongs to) finds particular pleasure in creating military conflicts around the globe. It is not for nothing that the current situation in Ukraine is called Iraqization of Eastern Europe. ..."
"... This newspaper and other western media documented the armed members of far right groups on Maidan. One BBC journalist was actually shot at by a Svoboda sniper, operating from Hotel Ukraina - the video is still on the BBC website. ..."
"... As predicted the real civil war in Ukraine is still to happen. The split between the east and the ordinary Ukrainian was largely manufactured ..."
"... "When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as it is, in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules all Western mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at that time?" ..."
"... in time Ukrainians will regard Maidan's aftermath as most of them view the Orange Revolution -- with regret and cynicism. ..."
"... Of course the Guardian doesn't like to explain that 'Right Sector' are genuine fascists - by their own admission! These fascists, who wear Nazi insignia, were the people who overthrew the elected government of Ukraine in the US / EU-supported coup - which the Guardianistas and other PC-brainwashed duly cheered on as a supposed triumph of democracy. Since that glorious US-financed and EU-backed coup, wholly illegal under international law, Ukraine's economy has collapsed, as has Ukrainians' living standards. ..."
The Georgian authorities have asked Interpol to put a Red notice on Mikheil Saakashvili as the
request to Ukraine to return him for trial in Georgia was refused.
ww3orbust PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 20:22
That does not detract from the fact that the Ukrainian cabinet has been chosen by the US state
department. Natives of the US, Georgia and Lithuania were hastily granted Ukrainian citizenship
in order to maintain an iron grip on Ukraine, while accusing Putin of appointing majors or governors
- in his capacity as head of state?
ww3orbust 13 Jul 2015 20:16
Amazing, nothing at all mentioned by the BBC. It does not fit in to their narrative to see the
country descend into a new stage of anarchy, between the people who murdered police and protesters
on Maidan square, and the US state department installed cabinet. Presumably if Right Sector refuse
to disarm and continue torturing civilians and murdering police, the BBC will continue to ignore
it and focus instead on its Russo-phobic narrative, while accusing Russia of propaganda with the
self-righteous piety that only the BBC are capable of. Or god forbid, more stories about what
colour stool our future king has produced this week.
The thing is, Ukraine is unique in allowing their Nazi thugs to be armed and have some semi-official
status. Everywhere else (including Russia), governments are looking to constrain the activities
of Nazis and prosecute them where possible.
jgbg Pwedropackman 13 Jul 2015 18:26
If it was not for the right sector, Ukraine would still be one united nation.
Them and Svoboda. If it had just been Orange Revolution II, with a simple change of Jewish
oligarchs in charge, there might have been some complaints but little more. It is the Russian-hating
far right that has brought about the violence and everything that has happened since.
PrinceEdward GreatMountainEagle 13 Jul 2015 18:22
Last I heard, Ukraine owes China billions for undelivered Grain.
HollyOldDog gimmeshoes 13 Jul 2015 18:11
But the Euro Maidan press is just an Ukrainian rag that invents stories to support its corrupt
government in Kiev.
jgbg PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 17:54
I forget the article, but in the comments I mentioned that multiple Georgians were being
appointed to high level positions by Kiev, and some Russophobe called me a liar.
Not a few days later, Shakashvilli was appointed governor of Odessa. An ex-president of another
country, as governor of a province in another one! Apparently, none of the millions upon millions
of Ukrainians were qualified for the job.
Sakashvilli's former Minister of Internal Affairs in Georgia, Eka Zguladze, is First Deputy
Minister of Internal Affairs of Ukraine. Of course, the Georgian people removed these chumps from
power the first chance they got but the Ukrainian electorate haven't had any say in the appointments
of foreigners in their country.
Well ... when it comes to Ukraine, the need to stock up on popcorn. This bloody and unpredictable
plot is not even in the "Game of Thrones." And this is only the middle of the second season.
Today Speaker of the "RS" Andrew Sharaskin, said: Sports Complex in Mukachevo where the shooting
occurred, was used as the base of the separatists DNR.
- A place 1,000 kilometers from Donetsk! But it's a great excuse to murder the guard in the café
and wounded police officers.
I think tomorrow will say that there have seen Russian Army tanks and Putin - 100%
"Ukraine is part of Europe" - the slogans of the Maidan in action...
Pravyi Sektor were not wrong. However, you cannot have armed groups cleaning up corruption
outside the law...that only works in Gotham City.
Right Sector weren't trying to clean up corruption, they were simply trying to muscle in on
the cigarette smuggling business. If Right Sector cared about crime and public order, they wouldn't
be driving around, armed to the teeth, in vehicles stolen in the EU. (In the video linked in the
article, all of their vehicles have foreign number plates. At least one of those vehicles is on
the Czech police stolen vehicle database:
http://zpravy.idnes.cz/pravy-sektor-mel-v-mukacevu-auta-s-ceskymi-spz-fqj-/zahranicni.aspx?c=A150713_102110_zahranicni_jj)
The EU and the US have stated on many occasions that there are "No Right Wing Nationalists" operating
in Ukraine and its simply propaganda by Putin.
So there shouldn't be anything to worry about should there ?
Stas Ustymenko hfakos 13 Jul 2015 15:15
Yes, yes. You seem to tolerate Medvedchuk and Baloga mafias way better, for years.
Transcarpathian Region is the most corrupt in all of Ukraine (which is quite a fit). What we see
here is a gang war in fatigues.
tanyushka Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 15:14
sorry i posted the same above... i was just to hasty.. sorry again...
in the main picture of the same article it's interesting to notice the age of most of the conscripted
soldiers... they are in their 30's, theirs 40's and even in their 50's... it's forced conscription,
they are not volunteers... while all the DPR & LPR soldiers are real volunteers...
an uncle, the father of a cousin, was conscripted in Kherson... my cousin had to run away to South
American to say with an aunt to avoid conscription... many men are doing it in Ukraine nowadays...
not because they are cowards but because they don't want to kill their brothers & sisters for
the benefit of the oligarchs and their NATO masters (and mistresses...)
did you know that all the conscripts have to pay for their own uniforms and other stuff, while
in the National Guard and the oligarchs batallions everything is top quality and for free... including
bulletproof vests and other implements courtesy of NATO
Demi Boone 13 Jul 2015 15:13
Well finally they reveal themselves. These Ukraine Nationalists are the people who instigated
the anarchy and shootings at Maidan and used it as an excuse to wrongfully drive out an elected
President and in the chaos that followed bring in a coup Government which represents only West-Ukraine
and suppress' East-Ukraine. You are looking at the face of the real Maidan and not the dream that
a lot of people have tried to paint it to be.
Stas Ustymenko MartinArvay 13 Jul 2015 15:11
Many Right Sector members are indeed patriots. But it looks like the organisation itself is,
sadly, much more useful for providing thugs for hire than "justice".
BMWAlbert PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 14:20
But seriously, the naval base is probably the reason, it is too important for some interests
to have a less-reliable (Ukrainian) in charge, this is a job only for the most trusted poodles.
If things had gone differently, the tie-eatimng chap would have been appointed Mayor of Sebastopol.
BMWAlbert PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 14:15
There appears to be a Quisling-shortage in Ukraine at present.
Stas Ustymenko obscurant 13 Jul 2015 13:32
More accurately, Kolomoyskiy is Ukrainian oligarch. Who happens to be ethnically, culturally
and, by all accounts, religiously, a Jew.
Stas Ustymenko Kaiama 13 Jul 2015 13:24
Ukrainian Volunteer Corps of the Right Sector fighting in Donbass is two battalions. How is
this a "key organization"? They are a well-known brand and fought bravely on some occasions, but
the wider org is way too eager to brandish arms outside of combat or training. They will be reigned
in, one way or another, and soon.
GameOverManGameOver Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 12:02
Shh shh shh. This news does not exist yet in the western media, therefore it's nothing but
Russian propaganda.
Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 11:54
It gets worse - soldiers from the UA are now refusing to follow orders in protest against the
total anarchy sweeping the chain of command, and their lack of rest and equipment.
Tensions have been rising between the government and the Right Sector militia that has
helped it fight pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
Finally, the Guardian decided to report the actual new after satisfying itself with ample discussion
of the quality of Russian cheeses. Right sector "helped" to fight "separatists"? Really? Does
Alec Luhn know that there are currently two (!) RS battalions at the front and 19 (!) inside Ukraine?
They are some warriors. Now they are occupying themselves fighting as criminals they are for the
control of contraband.
At the ATO zone, they help consists of plundering, murdering and raping the local population.
They enter a village, take everything of value from houses and then blow them up. They rape women
and girls as young as 10 years old. They've been doing this for more than a year, and we've been
telling you that for more than a year. But apparently in the fight against "pro-Russian separatists"
everything is good. These crimes are so widespread, even the Ukrainian "government" is worried
this will eventually becomes impossible to deny. Some battalions such as Shakhtersk and Aidar
have been officially accused of crimes and ompletely or partially reformed.
Examples: http://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/EUR50/040/2014/en/ http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=bfb_1413804655
Ukraine, what a mess. As though it was ever about the people. It was a grab for resources,
19-century style. But with 21st-century stakes. You can see what the West is after when you look
at the US-Ukraine Business Council. It bring NATO, Monsanto and the Heritage Foundation under
one roof:
You'd be surprised, but I like Bandera (controversial as he was) way more than I trust some
people who wrap themselves in his red-and-black Rebel banner. Yarosh included. Banderite rebellion
ended 60 years ago. Its major goal was establishing a "united, free Ukrainian state"; by contrast,
stated ultimate goals of the Right Sector are way murkier; I'm not sure even most of the movement's
members are clear on what these are.
With present actions, Right Sector has a huge image problem in the West. If it will come to all-out
conflict, no doubt the West will back Poroshenko government over a loose confederation of armed
dudes linked by the thin thread of 30ies ideology (suspect even then). And the West will be right.
Stas Ustymenko Nik2 13 Jul 2015 11:03
Methinks you're way overselling a thug turf war as "major political event. Truth is, the region
has been long in the hands of organized crime. The previous regime incorporated and controlled
almost all organized crime in the country, hence no visible conflict. Now, individual players
try to use temporary uncertainty to their advantage.
Right Sector claims they were trying to fight
the smuggling, but this doesn't sound plausible. The word is, what's behind the events is struggle
for control over lucrative smuggling between two individuals (who are both "businessmen" and "politicians",
members of Parliament). Both are old-school players, formerly affiliated with Yanukovitch party.
One just was savvy enough to buy himself some muscle under Right Sector banner. Right Sector will
either have to straighten out its fighters (which it may not be able to do) or disappear as a
political player. I fail to see how people see anything "neo-Nazi" in this gang shootout.
PaddyCannuck Cavirac 13 Jul 2015 10:21
Nobody here is an apologist for Stalin, who was a brutal and cruel despot, and the deportations
of the Crimean Tatars were quite indefensible. However, a few observations might lend some perspective.
1. Crimea has been invaded and settled by an almost endless succession of peoples over the
millennia. The Crimean Tatars (who are of Turkic origin) were by no means the first, nor indeed
the last, and cannot in any meaningful sense be regarded as the indigenous people of Crimea.
2. The Crimean Tatars scarcely endeared themselves to the Russians, launching numerous raids,
devastating many towns, including the burning of Moscow in 1571, and sending hundreds of thousands,
if not millions of Russians into slavery in the Ottoman Empire.
3. The deportations took place in 1942 - 1943 against the backdrop of World War II, when a lot
of bad stuff happened, including -
4. The American (and also Canadian) citizens of Japanese ethnicity who had their property confiscated
and were likewise shipped off to camps. Their treatment, if anything, was worse.
Sevastopol, Pearl Harbor. What's the difference? What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
Meanwhile last night & this morning, just to distract the people of what is going on in the West,
Kiev launched a massive shelling over Donetsk and other places in Donbass using weapons forbbiden
by the Minsk agreements, including Tor missiles, one of which fell at a railway station but didn't
explode... it was defused by emergency workers but the proof is there if you care to see... it
was thesecond biggest attack since the cease fire...
Nik2 6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:53
Not exactly. By now, BBC has made good coverage of these events in Ukrainian and Russian languages,
but not in English. It looks like BBC considers that Western public does not deserve the politically
sad truth about armed clashes between "champions of Maidan Revolution" and "new democratic authorities,
fighting corruption". Western public should not be in doubt about present-day "pro-European" Ukraine.
And "The Guardian" still has only one article on the issue that could be a turning point in Ukrainian
politics. This is propaganda, not informing about or analyzing really serious political events.
VictorWhisky 13 Jul 2015 09:51
This is the IMF hired guns now going after the very people who helped the Wall Street IMF shysters
in the illegitimate coup and the set up of the illegitimate Kiev junta, a mix of half Ukrainian
and non-Ukrainian mongrels.
Furthermore, instead of bringing in the people who helped overthrow Janukovich into the government fold, the IMF is placing it's foreign collaborators in ministerial
positions by making them instant Ukrainian citizens, while keeping the right wing, without whose
help the coup would not have succeeded, out of government and slowly trying to eliminate them
with their private foreign mercenary force.
Madame "F*ck the EU Nuland from the US state department
bordello, a devout Zionist, enticed these supposed Ukrainian NAZIs to help her in her dirty deeds,
no doubt with promises of power sharing.
So madame Nuland was perfectly willing to get in bed
with the Ukrainian NAZI devils (her Jewish friend should be proud) and when the dirty deed was
done, she is now turning against Ukrainian nationalists in the attempt to have outside forces
in control of Ukraine. Madame Nuland is not as intelligent or capable as portrayed, because if
she was, she would have known Ukraine has a very delicate and very complicated political structure
and history with nearly half the country speaking Russian and more loyal to the Russians than
to the US.
An intelligent person familiar with Ukrainian history would know any attempt of placing
a US stooge in Kiev would certainly result in a civil war.
She no doubt got her position not by
intelligence but by connections. More than 6000 Ukrainians, human beings, innocent men women and
children, have died in madame Nuland's engineered coup, putting her in league with her mentor,
Henry Kissinger, aka the butcher of Vietnam. That intelligent idiot's policies resulted in the
death of 3 million Vietnamese and 50,000 young Americans. Does madame Nuland intend to sacrifice
that many Ukrainians to prove her ultimate stupidity?
Jeremn Luminaire 13 Jul 2015 09:51
The conscripts didn't want to shoot their fellow Ukrainians. The nationalists don't believe
the people in the east are their fellow Ukrainians.
Because they were lovely guys, evidently, and their "popularity" has nothing to do with armed
thugs beating you up if you say anything against them (or the state prosecuting you for denying
or questioning their heroism).
Jeremn jezzam 13 Jul 2015 09:35
Ukrainian media, reporting Ukrainian government official:
12 police dead in two days, 180 wounded with gunshot wounds.
Still Kremlin lies?
Jeff1000 13 Jul 2015 09:30
Thank God Ukraine is finally free and democratic. The old autocratic regime actually had the
gall to make running street battles illegal - but those dark days are in the past. In the liberated
Ukraine you are free spend the dollar a day you get paid on a bullet proof vest so the rampant
Nazi street gangs don't kill you.
Jeremn SHappens 13 Jul 2015 09:26
You'd be surprised, there are Bandera-lovers in the UK too. There's a Bandera museum. And there
is this lot, teaching Christian values to children. And telling them that Bandera was a hero.
Future Right Sector supporters being crafted as we type.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:24
The Ukrainian sub-saharan African minimum wage is now being accompanied by Somali-style politics. Luckily, the Russians have liberated Crimea so piracy on the high seas isn't an option for
the Ukrainians.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:18
Apparently, UAVs generously supplied to Ukrainians by the Canadian taxpayers are being put
to good use smuggling cigarettes into Slovakia.
6i9vern 13 Jul 2015 09:12
The BBC are bravely sticking to their decision not to report this story. Congratulations are
in order for such dedication.
The graun protected its readership from this confusing information for 24 hours and then caved
to the temptation to report news. Too bad.
aucontraire2 13 Jul 2015 08:36
Can we officially congratulate Nuland for a crappy job and also for providing Putin with
all the tools he needed to bring back Ukraine under his wing.
False flag operations for American private interests must stop now. They are immoral, unethical
and only bring death and destruction to otherwise stable societies. The UN should have a
say.
SomersetApples 13 Jul 2015 08:25
The country is bankrupt; the Kiev putschists are selling off the country's assets to their
New York allies, the oligarchs and Nazis are at war against each other and the illegal putschist
government and now toilet mouth Nuland is back on the scene. Looks like a scene form Dante's Inferno.
todaywefight Polvilho 13 Jul 2015 07:54
Which Russian invasion will this be the of he approximately 987 mentioned by Poroshenko and
our man Yatz...or are you referring to the people of the AUTONOMOUS REPUBLIC OF CRIMEA's (yes
that was what was called after the 1994 referendum) massive wishes to (like Donbass) go against
a government who illegally dismissed an elected president a wish that was reflected on a referendum
which was allowed by their constitution 18(7)
Bosula Scepticbladderballs 13 Jul 2015 07:38
Yes. Most of the protesters are good people who just want a better deal in life.
monteverdi1610 13 Jul 2015 06:54
Remember all those CIF threads when those of us who pointed to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine were
immediately called ' Putinbots ' ?
PS/ Apologies would be the order of the day , perhaps ?
Sturney 13 Jul 2015 06:49
Apparently this conflict is over. Temporarily over. Anyway in ever-contracting economy, in
a Mariana trench between Russia and EU, in the most totalitarian country in history, such conflicts
will continue. Since Nuland tossed yeast in the outhouse nobody can stop fermentation of sh*t.
Help yourself with some beer and shrimps. I am looking forward when these masses splash out to
EU, preferably to Poland. Must be fun to watch. (Lipspalm)
Justin Obisesan 13 Jul 2015 06:33
In the run-up to the Euro 2012 football tournament, jointly hosted by Poland and Ukraine, I
remember how the media in this country worked themselves into a frenzy harping on about the presence
of violent neo-Nazi groups in Ukraine. After the removal of Mr Yanukovych from office, the same
media organisations changed their tune by describing any talk of neo- Nazis in Ukraine as "Russian
propaganda". The Western media coverage of the Ukrainian crises has been so blatantly pro-Kiev
and anti-Donbass that their claims of impartiality and objectivity cannot be taken seriously anymore.
Jeremn jgbg 13 Jul 2015 06:16
It is fine when they are shooting at Donetsk, but not so good when they use the same tactics
in western Ukraine.
Azov are the same, violent neo-Nazi thugs given authority, and this article notes that PrivatBank
is the bank that services requests for donations to the Azov funds, using J P Morgan as intermidiary.
Neither Azov nor Right Sector want peace. On 3 July 4,000 men from these units protested in
Kiev, calling for resumption of the war against the eastern provinces.
They favour ethnic cleansing.
Jeremn William Fraser 13 Jul 2015 06:10
The people who support Bandera are in western Ukraine. They are the ones who say Stalin starved
the Ukrainian people.
Trouble is, in the 1930s, western Ukraine belonged to Poland.
It was the Russians, eastern Ukrainians and other Soviet people who starved, not the western
Ukrainians.
Kefirfan 13 Jul 2015 06:02
Good, good. Let the democracy flow through you...
Pwedropackman SHappens 13 Jul 2015 05:53
It will be interesting to see which side the US and Canada will support. Probably Poroshenko
and the Oligarchs because the Right Sector is not so happy about the ongoing sales of Ukraine
infrastructure to US corporates.
SHappens 13 Jul 2015 05:14
Harpers' babies are out manifesting, supporting the good guys:
"Supporters of Ukraine's Right Sector extremist group rallied in Ottawa Sunday amid the
radicals' ongoing standoff with police in western Ukraine."
The rally outside the Ukrainian embassy was organized by the Right Sector's representative
office in the Canadian capital, 112 Ukraine TV channel reported, citing the Facebook account of
the so-called Ukrainian Volunteer Corps.
careforukraine 13 Jul 2015 05:09
I wonder how long it will be before the us denounces nazi's in ukraine?
Kind of seems like we have seen this all before.
Almost like how ISIS were just freedom fighters that needed our support until ?.....
Well we all know what happened there.
Pwedropackman 13 Jul 2015 05:04
If it was not for the right sector, Ukraine would still be one united nation.
GameOverManGameOver Chris Gilmore 13 Jul 2015 04:41
Yes, I agree, they do wreck the economy. That was my point. Russia want's strong economies
to do business with, not broken economies that only ask for financial aid.
Like I said, no evidence of Russian troops in Donbass and South Ossetia asked for the presence
of Russian troops to deter the Georgian government from trying another invasion.
And organisations like CIS are meant to expand economic ties. Just like the EU I suppose. They
function in pretty much the same way with everyone getting a chance to lead. So I don't know why
that should be a bad thing. Since the EU is not interested in admitting Russia why can't Russia
go to other organisations?
VladimirM Dmitriy Grebenyuk 13 Jul 2015 04:26
It's a poisonous sarcasm, I think. But I've heard that RS accuse the Ukrainian government of
being pro-Putin as the government accuse them of being Russian agents. Surreal a bit.
stewfen FOHP46 13 Jul 2015 04:24
The west would not have dialogue with Russia because it was not what Washington wanted. Washington
wanted to push a wedge between Russia and EU at any cost even 6500 lives and unfortunately they
succeeded
GameOverManGameOver Chris Gilmore 13 Jul 2015 03:54
I'll admit that frozen conflicts could be useful to Russia. But only from a security point
of view. And why not, exactly? NATO is Russia's biggest threat, so it would make sense for the
government to want to avoid it expanding any further. I understand your misgivings since you're
speaking from the position that NATO should expand to deter Russi I mean 'Iran', but surely you
understand that Russia wanting to prevent that makes logical sense? Sure, it's at someone else's
expense but let's not pretend that big countries doing something at someone else's expense is
a new and revolutionary concept reserved only to Russia. And the Georgian conflict dates back
to the very early 90's.
From an economic point of view though, no sense at all. Frozen conflicts usually bring economic
barriers. Believe it or not Russia's priority isn't expansion, but the economy. And trade with
it's neighbours is an important element of the Russian economy. It's very hard to trade with areas
that are in the middle of a frozen conflict. So in that sense the last thing Russia would want
are profitable areas in a frozen conflict around it's borders hampering it's economic growth.
And none of this has anything to do with Marioupol.
Debreceni 13 Jul 2015 03:38
The Right Sector does not exist, or if it does, it has been created by Moscow. The crisis in
Greece is also the work of Russian agents. The ISIS is financed and trained by Putin. Ebola was
cooked up in a laboratory in Saint Petersburg. Look for the Russian!
Kaiama PrinceEdward 13 Jul 2015 02:50
We don't know if PS were also doing it as well or just poking their noses into someone else's
business. Who started it? I doubt the correct answer will ever be known. Two unsavoury groups
arguing about an illegal business. The problem is that the MP is an MP whereas PS is a national
organisation.
It's never the US....it's never the West.....
(you know, to balance things) : )
todaywefight 13 Jul 2015 01:53
If any one on the other side, the dark side, ever thought that these lot will hold hands with
any one, lay down their arms and sing Kumbaya, uou are either utterly naive or willfully ignorant.
Apparently, these lot have 23 battalions, armed to their teeth, the added bonus for the Privy
Sektor is that , due to expedience and cowardice , they have just made legal and incorporated
into the Ukrainian army, Kyiv is in a highway to nowhere.
Incidentally, unlike the maidan demonstrations which essentially were only in Kyiv there are
demonstrations in more than a dozen cities, and have established dozen of check points already
and Yarosh a member of the VT. have clearly instructed them to fight if necessary.
GameOverManGameOver Omniscience 13 Jul 2015 01:35
So? Yes there are nationalists in Russia, just like everywhere else. You get a gold star for
googling. Shall I get some articles with European and American nationalists to parade around to
make a vague point? If you want I can get you an article of Lithuanians dressed up as the Waffen
SS parading around Vilnius. That's Lithuania the EU and Nato member. Funny how EU principles disappear
when it's one of their own violating them.
You seem to be missing the point entirely. While all countries have their nationalists, those
nationalists are a very small minority, have no power, have no popular support, have no seats
in government, usually derided by the majority of the population and they certainly aren't armed
to the teeth roaming around the country killing, torturing and kidnapping people with the blessing
of their government
HollyOldDog Joe way 13 Jul 2015 00:09
The Right Sector were / are Ukrains Storm Troopers who have had more advanced training by the
Americans. If the Right Sector turn on the Kiev Government they will be difficult to defeat, and
who knows if the civilian population of Ukraine may join in the 'fun' by ousting the current unpopular
Ukrainian government.
sorrentina 12 Jul 2015 23:35
this is what happens when you play with fire: you get burned. Using Neo-Nazi's to implement
Nato expansionist policies was always a very bad idea. It's just a shame it is not people like
Victoria 'fuck the EU' Nuland who will have to suffer the blowback consequences- it is the poor
Ukrainian people. This is not that different to what has happened in Libya- where Islamic extremists
were used as a proxy force to oust Gaddafi.
annamarinja jgbg 12 Jul 2015 23:31
The threshold has been guessed impatiently by the US neocons (while the provocateur Higgins/
Bellingcat fed the gullible the fairy tales about Russian army in Ukraine). The US needs desperately
a real civil war in Ukraine, the Ukrainians be damned. Just look what the US-sponsored "democracy
on the march" has produced in the Middle East. Expect the same bloody results in eastern Europe.
annamarinja obscurant 12 Jul 2015 23:25
perhaps you do not realize that your insults are more appropriate towards the poor Ukrainians
that have been left destitute by the cooky-carrying foreigners and their puppets in Kiev. The
Ukrainian gold reserve has disappeared... meanwhile, the US Congress has shamed the US State Dept
for collaborating with Ukrainian neo-nazis. Stay tuned. But do not expect to hear real news from
your beloved Faux News.
annamarinja quorkquork 12 Jul 2015 23:14
the jihadists in Ukraine are the integral part of Iraqization of Ukraine. The lovers of Nuland's
cookies are still in denial that Ukraine was destined by the US plutocrats to become a sacrificial
lamb in a fight to preserve the US dollar hegemony.
Bud Peart 12 Jul 2015 22:59
Well we always knew it would end this way. With a stalemate in the war with the East the Right
wing paramilitaries and private oligarch militias (whom the west funded and trained) have gone
completely feral and are now in fighting directly with whats left of the Ukrainian National Army.
This is pretty much the rode to another breakaway in Galacia which would effectively end the Ukraine
as a functional state.
The government should move as fast as possible to get a decent federal structure (copy switzerland)
in place before the whole of the West goes into revolt as well.
DelOrtoyVerga LostJohnny 12 Jul 2015 22:38
That is what you get when you put fascists in your government.
I rather reword it to
That is what you get when you enable and rely on thugish pseudo-fascist radical para-military
groups to impose order by force and violence against dissident segments of your own population
(which is armed to the teeth probably by Russia)
Bosula Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 22:37
What do you think it is?
There were several people identified directly or indirectly in this BBC story whose stories should
have been formally pursued by legal authorities in Kiev.
If you lived in the West you would understand that we call these references as possible 'leads'
- you follow these 'leads' and see where they take you. That is what Western police do.
The story says that Kiev didn't want to follow up any of these points. Why? What harm could this
do?
You state that you do not understand the point that this BBC journalist was making. But I have
in a fair way tried to to explain the point that the BBC was making.
This story caused quite a stir went it came out - and the BBC chose to stick with it and support
their British reporter. In an edited and shorter form the story is still on the BBC - the editing
is also acknowledged by the BBC.
Do you think the BBC should have blocked or not published this investigative piece?
If so - why?
And why hasn't Kiev followed up these issues?
Have I addressed your point yet?
HollyOldDog Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 21:34
I am just watching a program recorded earlier. Hiroshima: The Aftermath. I have got past the
part when the Japanese 'survivors' had to drink from the pools of Black Rain ( highly radioactive)
and watched the part when American Army Tourists visited the city to take a few photos ( no medical
help though) while gawking at the gooks. In fact the Japanese civilians recieved no medical assistance
at all from the Americans. The commentator just said that they were just there to study the effects
of nuclear radiation on a civilian population. These nuclear bombs were just dropped on Japan
to save One Day of the surrender of the Japanese forces.
The next documtary I will watch another day is the sinking of the Tirpitz by the RAF using
Tallboy bombs. At least this had a useful pupose in helping to stop the destruction of the North
Atlantic convoys, sending aid to Russia. That aid along with the rebuilding of the Soviet Armies
helped the Soviet Union to destroy the invading Nazi forces and provided a Second Front to the
Western Allies to invade Normandy. A lot of good can be achieved when the East and West work together
- maybe avoiding the worst effects of Global Warming but the Americans only seem to want to spend
Trillions $ building more powerful nuclear weapons. Is this all that America has now, an Arms
Industry - I can see it now, cooling the planet with a Nuclear Winter.
HollyOldDog Scepticbladderballs 12 Jul 2015 20:33
The USA caused the chaos in Ukraine so they must pay the billions of $ to fix it then leave
Ukraine alone.
6i9vern 12 Jul 2015 20:29
One of the amusing features of the Soviet media was the long silences it maintained on possibly
embarrassing breaking news until it became clear what the Party Line was.
Eventually, a memo would go out from Mikhail Suslov's office to various media outlets and the
silence would be broken.
At least everyone knew exactly how that system worked. What is happening with the British media
is much more murky.
The beeb/graun seem to be the Pravda/Izvestia, whilst the torygraph is a sort of Trybuna Ludu
- ie real news very occasionally appears in it.
6i9vern 12 Jul 2015 20:08
So, after a mere 24 hours the Graun ran a story on Mukachevo. The Torygraph actually had the
nerve to run the AFP wire report more or less straight away.
The BBC are still keeping shtum.
The Beeb/Graun complex have well and truly had the frighteners put on them.
PrinceEdward Kaiama 12 Jul 2015 20:07
There's no doubt. I agree that the MP was probably running cigarettes, but also Right Sektor
was going to muscle in.
If you asked somebody 3 years ago if Ukraine would be rocked by armed bands with RPGs and Light
Machine Guns fighting in towns, they would have thought you were crazy.
This isn't Russia, this is the Ultranats/Neo-Nazis.
PrinceEdward obscurant 12 Jul 2015 20:05
Right, it's the people in Donbass who bury 14th SS Division veterans with full honors, push
for full pensions to surviving Hiwi and SS Collaborators... not those in Lvov. Uh huh.
BMWAlbert 12 Jul 2015 20:04
11 months of investigations by the newKiev regime, attempting to implicate the the prior one
for the murder of about 100 people in Kiev early last year was unsuccessful. There may be better
candidates here.
fragglerokk ploughmanlunch 12 Jul 2015 19:55
It always amazes me that the far right never learn from history. The politicians and oligarchs
always use them as muscle to ensure coup success then murder/assasinate the leaders to make sure
they dont get any ideas about power themselves. Surprised its taken so long in ukraine but then
the govt is barely hanging onto power and the IMF loans have turned to a trickle so trouble will
always be brewing, perhaps theyve left it too long this time. Nobody will be shedding any tears
for the Nazis and Banderistas.
Why, don't you know? They infiltrated Ukraine, the CIA (and NATO and the EU somehow) created
Maidan, their agents killed the protesters, then they overthrew a legitimate government and installed
a neo-nazi one, proceeded to instigate a brutal oppression against Russian speakers, then started
a war against the peaceful Eastern Ukrainians and their innocent friends in the Kremlin, etc etc.
Ignorant question that, by now you should know the narrative!
Kaiama gimmeshoes 12 Jul 2015 19:53
If you think Pryvi Sektor want to "clean up" then yes, but not in the way you imagine - they
just want the business for themselves.
Geordiemartin 12 Jul 2015 19:51
I am reminded of AJP Taylor premise that Eastern Europe has historically had either German
domination or Russian protection.
The way that the Ukrainian government had treated their own Eastern compatriots leaves little
reason to believe they would be welcome back into the fold and gives people of Donbass no reason
to want to rejoin the rest of the country.
If government is making an effort to reign in the likes of Right sector it is a move in the
right direction but much much more will be needed to establish any trust.
Some Guy yataki 12 Jul 2015 19:45
just because they are nazis doesnt mean they are happy about doing any of this... now. look
at greece and the debacle that has unfolded over the past week has been . the west ukraine wanted
to be part of the euro zone and wanted some of that ecb bail out money. now they are not even
sure if they could skip out on the bill and know they are fighting for nothing . russia gave them
14 bil dollars . the west after the coup only gave the 1 bil
Andor2001 Kaiama 12 Jul 2015 19:44
According to the eyewitnesses the RS shot a guard when he refused to summon the commanding
officer. It was the beginning of the fight.
Andor2001 yataki 12 Jul 2015 19:41
Remember Shakespeare "Othello"? Moor has done his job, Moor has to go..
The neo-Nazis have outlived their usefulness.
Bosula caaps02 12 Jul 2015 19:39
The BBC investigative reported earlier this year that a section of Maidan protesters deliberately
started shooting the police. This story was also reported in the Guardian. Google and you will
easily find it.
The BBC also reported that the Prosecutors Office in Kiev was forbidden by Rada officials from
investigating Maiden shooters.
Maybe the BBC is telling us a lie? The BBC investigation is worth a read - then you can make up
your own mind.
Bosula William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 19:29
Kazakhstan had the highest percentage of deaths from Stalin's policies in this period when
he prevented the nomad herders moving from the mountains to the planes to take advantage of the
benefits of seasons and weather.
Stalin forced the nomads to stay in one area and they perished in the cold of the mountains or
the heat of the summer plains (whichever zone they were forced to stay in).
Some of my family is Ukrainian and some recognise that Stalin's policies weren't specifically
aimed at Ukrainians - the people of Kazakhstan suffered the most (as a percentage of population).
Either way, there is no genetic difference between Slavs or Russian or Ukrainian origin in Ukraine
or Russia - they are all genetically the same people.
This information should be better taught in Ukraine.
The problem is that it would undermine the holy grail story of right wing nationalism in Ukraine.
It's been one of the biggest mistakes ( although Ukraine's military started in a desperately
poor condition ) , to allow militia groups to get so powerful. Right sector should not have arms
and guns... The national Ukraine military should, If members of Right sector want to fight , they
should leave Right sector and join the army.
This was and will happen if they don't disband such armed groups.
annamarinja silvaback 12 Jul 2015 18:18
have you ever studied geography? If yes, you should remember the proximity of Ukraine to Russia
(next door) and the proximity of Ukraine to the US (thousands miles away). Also, have you heard
about the CIA Director Brennan and his covert visit to Kiev on the eve of the beginning of the
civil war in Ukraine? This could give you an informed hint about the causes of the war. Plus you
may be interested to learn about Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (Ms. Nudelman), her cookies, and her foul language.
She is, by the way, a student of Dick Cheney. If you were born before 2000, you might know his
name and his role in the Iraq catastrophe. Mrs. Nuland-Kagan (and the family of Kagans she belongs
to) finds particular pleasure in creating military conflicts around the globe. It is not for nothing
that the current situation in Ukraine is called Iraqization of Eastern Europe.
Bev Linington JJRichardson 12 Jul 2015 18:10
Ukrainians shot down the plane. East, West does not matter as they were all Ukrainians before
the government overthrow. Leaders of the new government could not look past some Ukrainian citizens
ethnicity, instead of standing together united, they decided to oppress which lead to the referendum
in Crimea and the rise of separatists in the East.
jgbg Chirographer 12 Jul 2015 17:53
And for the Pro-Russian posters the newsflash is that could also describe the situation
inside the Donbass.
It certainly describes the situation in Donbass where Right Sector or the volunteer battalions
are in charge. In Dnepropetrovsk, Right Sector would simply turn up at some factory or other business
and order the owner to sign document transferring the enterprise to them. In other cases, they
have kidnapped businessmen for ransom. Some people have simply disappeared under such circumstances.
The Ukrainian National Guard simply break into homes left empty by people fleeing the war and
steal the contents. Such was the scale of looting, the Ukrainian postal service have now refused
to ship electrical goods out of the ATO area unless the senders have the original boxes and receipts.
jgbg AlfredHerring 12 Jul 2015 17:45
Maybe Kiev just needs to bomb them some more.
Putin promised to protect the Russian speaking people in Ukraine - but he hasn't really done
that. His government has indicated that they would not allow Kiev to simply overrun or obliterate
the people of Donbass. Quite where their threshold of actual intervention lies is anyone's guess.
The "pro-Russian" government that you refer to was only elected because it promised to sign
the EU trade agreement. It then reneged on that promise...
Yanukovych's government was elected the previous one was useless and corrupt.
Yanukovych wanted to postpone the decision to sign for six months, while he attempted to extract
more from both the EU and Russia. Under Poroshenko, the implementation of the EU Association Agreement
has been delayed for 15 months, as the governments of Ukraine, the EU and Russia all recognised
that Russian trade (with the favourable terms which Ukraine enjoys) are vitail to Ukraine's economic
recovery. Expect that postponement to be extended.
.... severely and brutally curtailing freedom of speech and concentrating all power in the
hands of Yanukovich's little clan...
As opposed to sending the military to shell the crap out of those who objected to an elected
government being removed by a few thousand nationalists in Kiev.
There was no "coup".
An agreement had been signed at the end of February 2014, which would see elections in September
2014. The far right immediately moved to remove the government (as Right Sector had promised on
camera in December 2013). None of the few mechanisms for replacing the president listed in the
Ukrainian constitution have been followed - that makes it a coup.
The Maidan protesters were not armed
This newspaper and other western media documented the armed members of far right groups on
Maidan. One BBC journalist was actually shot at by a Svoboda sniper, operating from Hotel Ukraina
- the video is still on the BBC website.
....the interim government that was put in place by the parliament in late February and
the government that was elected in May and Oct. of 2014 were and are not fascist.
The interim government included several ministers from Svoboda, formerly the Socialist Nationalist
Party of Ukraine. These were the first Nazi ministers in a European government since Franco's
Spanish government that ended in the 1970's. In a 2013 resolution, the EU parliament had indicated
that no Ukrainian government should include members of Svoboda or other far right parties.
pushkinsideburn vr13vr 12 Jul 2015 16:45
There has been a marked change in rhetoric over the last few weeks. Even CiF on Ukraine articles
seems to attract less trolls (with a few notable exceptions on this article - though they feel
more like squad trolls than the first team). Hopefully a sign of deescalation or perhaps just
a temporary lull before the MH17 anniversary this week?
pushkinsideburn calum1 12 Jul 2015 16:38
His other comments should have been the clue that arithmetic, like independent critical thinking,
is beyond him.
normankirk 12 Jul 2015 16:19
Right sector were the first to declare they wouldn't abide by the Minsk 2 peace agreement.Nevertheless,
Dmitry Yarosh, their leader is adviser to Ukraine's Chief of staff. Given that he only received
about 130,000 votes in the last election, he has a disproportionate amount of power.
As predicted the real civil war in Ukraine is still to happen. The split between the east and
the ordinary Ukrainian was largely manufactured . In the long term no body would be able to live
with the right sector or more precisely the right sector cant share a bed with anyone else.
sashasmirnoff RicardoJ 12 Jul 2015 15:44
"When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as
it is, in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules
all Western mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at
that time?"
This may be why:
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media." - former CIA Director William
Colby
Alexander_the_Great 12 Jul 2015 15:43
This was so, so predictable. The Right Sector were the main violent group during the coup in
2014 - in fact they were the ones to bring the first guns to the square following their storming
of a military warehouse in west Ukraine a few days before the coup. It was this factor that forced
the Police to arm themselves in preparation.
Being the vanguard of the illegal coup, they then provided a useful tool of manipulation for
the illegal Kiev government to oppress any opposition, intimidate journalists who spoke the truth
and lead the war against the legally-elected ELECTED governments of Donetsk and Lugansk.
Having failed in the war against the east, western leaders have signalled the right sector
has now outlived its usefulness and has become an embarrassment to Kiev and their western backers.
The Right Sector meanwhile, feel betrayed by the establishment in Kiev. They have 19 battalions
of fighters and they wont go away thats for sure. I think one can expect this getting more violent
in the coming months.
SHappens jezzam 12 Jul 2015 15:40
Putin is a Fascist dictator.
Putin is not a dictator. He is a statist, authoritarian-inclined hybrid regime ruler that possesses
some democratic elements and space for opposition groups.
He has moderate nationalist tendencies in foreign affairs; his goal is a secure a strong Russia.
He is a patriot and has a charismatic authority. Russians stay behind him.
ploughmanlunch samuel glover 12 Jul 2015 15:31
'this notion that absolutely everything Kiev does follows some master script drawn up
in DC and Brussels is simplistic and tiresome'
Agreed.
As is everything is Russia's fault.
ConradLodziak 12 Jul 2015 15:26
This is just the latest in a string of conflicts involving the right sector, as reported by
RT, Russian media and until recently many Ukrainian outlets. The problem, of course, is that Porostinko
has given 'official' status to the right sector. Blow back time for him.
CIAbot007 William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 15:06
Yes, Russia (USSR) from the USSR foundation had been forcing people of the then territory of
Ukraine to identify themselves as Ukrainians under the process of rootisation - Ukrainization,
then gave to Ukraine Donbass and left side Dniepr and Odessa, Herson and Nikolaev, and then decided
to ethnically cleane them.. It doesn't make sense, does it? Oh, wait, sense is not your domain.
annamarinja William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 15:05
let me help you with arithmetics: 72 years ago Europe was inflamed with the WWII.
There was a considerable number of Ukrainians that collaborated with Hitler' nazis:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/14th_Waffen_Grenadier_Division_of_the_SS_(1st_Galician)
In short, your government finds it is OK to glorify the perpetrators of genocide in Europe during
the WWII.
Nik2 12 Jul 2015 15:04
These tragic events, when YESTERDAY, on Saturday afternoon, several civilians were unintentionally
wounded in gun battles in previously peaceful town near the Hungary and Slovakia borders, vividly
exposes Western propaganda. Though mass media in Ukraine and Russia are full of reports about
this from the start, The Guardian managed to give first information exactly 1 day later, and BBC
was still keeping silence a few minutes ago. Since both sides are allies of the West (the Right
Sector fighters were the core of the Maidan protesters at the later stages, and Poroshenko regime
is presumably "democratic"), the Western media preferred to ignore the events that are so politically
uncomfortable. Who are "good guys" to be praised? In fact, this may be the start of nationalists'
revolt against Ukrainian authorities, and politically it is very important moment that can fundamentally
change Ukrainian politics. But the West decides to be silent ...
annamarinja William Fraser 12 Jul 2015 14:59
Do your history book tell you that the Holodomor was a multiethnic endeavor? That the Ukrainians
were among the victims and perpetrators and that the whole huge country had suffered the insanely
cruel policies of multiethnic bolsheviks? The Holodomor was almost a century ago, whereas the
Odessa massacre and the bombardments of civilian population in east Ukraine by the neo-nazi thugs
(sent by Kiev), has been going during last year and half. Perhaps you have followed Mr. Brennan
and Mrs. Nuland-Kagan too obediently.
foolisholdman zonzonel 12 Jul 2015 14:58
zonzonel
Oops, the presumably fascist govt. is fighting a fascist group.
What is a poor troll to do these days??
Antiukrainian copywriting just got more difficult, perhaps a raise is needed? Just sayin.
What's your problem? Never heard of Fascist groups fighting each other? Never heard of the
"Night of the Long Knives"? Fascists have no principles to unite them. They believe in Uebermenschen
and of course they all think that either they themselves or their leader is The Ueberuebermensch.
Anyone who disagrees is an enemy no matter how Fascist he may be.
samuel glover ploughmanlunch 12 Jul 2015 14:55
Y'know, I'm no fan of the Russophobic hysteria that dominates English-language media. I've
been to Ukraine several times over the last 15 years or so, and I'm sorry to say that I think
that in time Ukrainians will regard Maidan's aftermath as most of them view the Orange Revolution
-- with regret and cynicism.
That said, this notion that everything, absolutely everything Kiev does follows some master
script drawn up in DC and Brussels is simplistic and tiresome. Most post-revolution regimes purge
one end or the other of the current ideological wings. Kiev has already tangled with the oligarch
and militia patron Igor Kolomoisky. So perhaps this is another predictable factional struggle.
Or maybe, as another comment speculates, this is a feud over cigarette tax revenue.
In any case, Ukraine is a complex place going through an **extremely** complex time. it's too
soon to tell what the Lviv skirmish means, and **far** too soon to lay it all on nefarious puppetmasters.
TheTruthAnytime ADTaylor 12 Jul 2015 14:49
The only thing that makes me reconsider is their service to their country,...
Is the CIA their country? So far they've only seemed to serve the interests of American businesspeople,
not Ukrainian interests. Also, murdering eastern Ukrainians cannot really be considered such a
great service to Ukraine, can it?
annamarinja ID075732 12 Jul 2015 14:44
Maidan was indeed a popular apprising, but it was utilized by the US strategists for their
geopolitical games. The Ukrainians are going to learn hard way that the US have never had any
interest in well-being of the "locals" and that the ongoing civil war was designed in order to
create a festering wound on a border with the Russia. The Iraqization of Ukraine was envisioned
by the neocons as a tool to break both Russia and Ukraine. The sooner Ukrainians come to a peaceful
solution uniting the whole Ukraine (for example, to federalization), the better for the general
population (but not for the thieving oligarchs).
vr13vr 12 Jul 2015 14:38
"Couple of hundred Right Sector supporters demonstrated in Kiev?" Come on! Over the last week,
there have been enough of videos of thousands of people in fatigues trying to block access to
government buildings and shouting rather aggressive demands. The entire battalions of "National
Guard." This is much bigger than just 100 people on a peaceful rally. Ukraine might be heading
towards Maidan 3.0.
ID075732 12 Jul 2015 14:26
The situation in Ukraine has been unravelling for months and this news broke on Friday evening.
The Minsk II cease fire has not been honoured by Poroshenko, who has not managed to effect
any of the pledges he signed up to. The right sector who rejected the cease-fire from the start
are now refusing the rule of their post coup president in Kiev.
Time for Victoria Nuland to break out the cookies? Or maybe it's too late for that now. The
country formerly know as Ukraine is turning out to be another outstanding success of American
post -imperial foreign policy.
Meanwhile in UFA the BRIC's economic forum is drawing to a close, with representatives from
the developing world and no reporting of the aspirations being discussed there of over 60% of
the world's population. It's been a major success, but if you want to learn about it, you will
have to turn to other media sources - those usually reported as Russian propaganda channels or
Putin's apologists.
The same people who have been reporting on the deteriorating situation in Kiev since the February
coup. Or as Washington likes to call it a popular up rising.
'The only thing that makes me reconsider is their service to their country'
Don't get me wrong. I detest the fascist militias and their evil deeds.
However, despite their callousness, brutality and stupidity, they have been the most effective
fighting force for Kiev ( more sensible Ukrainians have been rather more reluctant to kill their
fellow countrymen ).
Deluded ? Yes. Cowardly ? No.
Even more reprehensible, in my opinion are the calculating and unprincipled Kiev Government
that have attempted to bully a region of the Ukraine that had expressed legitimate reservations,
using those far right battalions, but accepting no responsibility for the carnage that they carried
out.
mario n 12 Jul 2015 12:52
I think it's time Europe spoke up about dangers of Ukrainian nationalism. 72 years ago Ukrainian
fascists committed one of the most hideous and brutal acts of genocide in the human history. Details
are so horrifying it is beyond imagination. Sadly not many people remembers that, because it is
not politically correct to say bad things about Ukraine. Today mass murderers are hailed as national
heroes and private battalions and ultranationalist groups armed to the teeth terrorise not only
Donbas but now different parts of the country like Zakarpattia where there is strong Hungarian,
Russian and Romanian minority.
How many massacres and acts of genocide Europe needs before it learns to act firmly?
SHappens 12 Jul 2015 12:49
Kiev has allowed nationalist groups including Right Sector to operate despite allegations
by groups like Amnesty International, that Right Sector has tortured civilian prisoners.
You know what, you dont play with fire or you will get burnt. It was written on the wall that
these Bandera apologists would eventually turn to the hand that fed them. I wonder how Kiev will
manage to blame the russians now.
RicardoJ 12 Jul 2015 12:33
Of course the Guardian doesn't like to explain that 'Right Sector' are genuine fascists - by
their own admission! These fascists, who wear Nazi insignia, were the people who overthrew the elected government
of Ukraine in the US / EU-supported coup - which the Guardianistas and other PC-brainwashed duly
cheered on as a supposed triumph of democracy. Since that glorious US-financed and EU-backed coup, wholly illegal under international law,
Ukraine's economy has collapsed, as has Ukrainians' living standards.
The US neocons are losing interest in their attempted land grab of Ukraine - and the EU cretins
who backed the coup, thinking it would be a nice juicy further territorial acquisition for the
EU, are desperately looking the other way, now that both the US and EU realize that Ukraine is
a financial black hole.
When the Guardian claims to be a fearless champion of investigative journalism - as it is,
in some areas - why did it obey the dictats of the US neocon media machine which rules all Western
mainstream media over the Ukrainian land grab, instead of telling the truth, at that time?
jgbg 12 Jul 2015 12:15
The move came after a gunfight broke out on Saturday, when about 20 Right Sector gunmen
arrived at a sports complex controlled by MP Mikhail Lano. They had been trying to stop the
traffic of cigarettes and other contraband, a spokesman for the group said.
Put another way, one group of gangsters tried to muscle in on the cigarette smuggling operation
of another group of gangsters. Smuggling cigarettes into nearby EU countries is extremely lucrative. Here's some video of some of the events:
Note the registration plates driven by both Right Sector and the other gangsters i.e. not Ukrainian.
In all likelihood, these cars are all stolen. Right Sector and fighters from "volunteer battalions" have become accustomed to muscling in
on other people's activities (legal or not) in Donbass. This sort of thuggery is routine when
these folk come to town. It is only when since they have continued such activities on their home
turf in west and central Ukraine that the authorities have taken any notice.
Forward, Comrades (Russian: Вперед,
товарищи; Chinese:
前进，达瓦里希; pinyin: Qiánjìn,
dáwǎlǐxī; literally: "Advance, tovarish") is a 2013 Chinese animated
short film by Wang Liyin of the Beijing Film Academy. The film focuses on the fall of the
Soviet Union as its main theme, told from the perspective of a young girl. As an original net
animation with a strong political backdrop, the film has triggered strong reactions from
various audiences.
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his
public tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant
Sergei Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to
the last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video
discussing this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date
with brandscum...
It may be possible to partly unravel the Skripal affair, after all.
I first thought the Skripals were food poisoned, or were somehow accidentally
'contaminated.' I changed my mind when Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were 'poisoned' - I
will explain why much later on.
Two assumptions are taken on board for now.
-- The photo of the perfume package published by the Met on the internet is of an object
found in the Rowley home, or said to be so, by the Met. / Scotland Yard / anti-terror force /
PTB.
-- The photo of the bottle + dispenser is that of objects truly or allegedly found in the
Rowley home, or a fair facsimile. (The original bottle and dispenser, if they exist, are
evidence, might be contaminated, etc.)
Imho the box package counterfeit is quite, even startlingly, convincing. The surface,
color, sheen, graphics, organization, text, font, closely resemble the box of Eau de Parfum
*Premier Jour* by Nina Ricci, 50ml. With one glaring difference.
The quantity on the true box (boxes, these vary some with year, country..) is
50ml - 1.7 FL OZ
or
e50ml - 1.7 FL. OZ. (e is a certification)
The Rowley box sports
5.5 ml - 17FL OZ
The forger is telling us that there is about a teaspoon of XXX in the package. Conversion
to fluid ounces isn't made - the creator can't be bothered, so just removed the decimal
point, making nonsense of that. The introduction of the decimal point, a different number, an
extra space, to conventionally signal that quantity, cannot be ignorant, careless copy errors
such as LFOZ or 500 mL might be. Particularly in view of the great care taken with the
rest.
Premier Jour bottles of 50ml or more are of special style and shape and never come with a
separate dispenser / vaporiser / nozzle to attach so as to be able to spray. No high-end
perfumes or fragrances do, as the containers and spray mechanisms (if any) are an integral
part of the object, certifying the brand, its 'look', etc. as well as its working order.
(Fakes often have non-functioning sprays.)
Smaller quantities of Premier Jour such as 33ml exist, the box is completely different.
The bottles are longish thin vials with a spray mechanism attached to the top, always such
for small quantities of designer fragrances - made to be carried in handbags.
Great care was taken to produce a convincing or in-your-face box, sealed correctly with
cellophane. Inside it a bottle that might pass for genuine via cursory inspection, as it is
inscribed *Premier Jour - Nina Ricci* in the same (correct) fonts as on the box. Plus a
dispenser, ensuring that its first use would be a deliberate act, and possibly to ensure a
tight seal.
No scammer hawking fake perfumes would ever produce this.
links in sep post
In Part II we examine its alleged handling by Dawn and Charlie and trace it back in
time.
Addition: Imho the Rowley box is smaller than the real one(s). The text / letters etc. are
too large, take up too much space, I can't measure it at present, don't have a real box to
hand.
Frances at 65 -- yes the perfume bottle could be a plant as you suggest (not photoshop) by
MI5 (or whomever), sure . i did write 'allegedly', 'assumed' or clear words to that
effect.... the trick is to figure out if so, or not. anyway never mind. these details aren't
on their own of much interest with grand debates on the menu --:
One way the PTB fool and trick ppl is to get them all riled up about side issues.
Like vaccines. This gets the public, particularly parents, mothers, loving their littles,
into crazy hyper mode, absorbing their energy to 'contest' in any way, question other
matters, such as crap schools, heath care, corrupt pols, etc.
They get involved in groups, stick to their principled guns, argue to the death (sic),
watch pols for attention to 'their issue', and on and on. They have been deprived of even the
most basic rights in a just society (ex. basic health care) and are shunted to the corridors
of the losers, they don't realise it, yes they are viewed with cynical, and calculated,
disdain.
@Asagirian I've read that
she is still in line to primary Trump. Surely someone will, so it might as well be a neocon
Israel-first Sikh woman who is even more ignorant and psychotic that our current
Tweeter-in-Chief. If she wins, she can even keep Pompeo and Bolton to finish off Iran and
start WWIII.
> It is very likely that Russia+ Canada will peak within the next two years.
I agree that Russia is close to its peak. But, at the same time, Russia has a huge Arctic
territory with a very low density of population (due to harsh conditions), which probably is
not explored that well. Also with their gas reserves, they might be able to increase the
condensate production considerably, repeating the USA path.
The other possibility is Russia sliding in chaos after Putin retirement, as there is no
any politician of equal caliber able to pick up the helm among the current elite. And there
will be "external helpers" like after Brezhnev's death who will try to get some comprador at
the top. Also, the leadership change historically is a huge problem in Russia.
Russia is a kind of 'A riddle wrapped up in an enigma.' Everybody wrote Russia off in late
90th. It is difficult to make predictions about Russia.
If I remember correctly, Fernando Leanme used to work at Russia in the past, and he might
share his thoughts about this issue.
What is interesting is that due to the use of natural gas in transport, Russia does not
consume that much oil internally, which makes an important difference with KSA.
Increasing Russia's Arctic production is feasible, but this will take many years, and I don't
think it can offset decline to make much of a difference. Yamal has huge gas condensate
reservoirs located under the Cenomanian, but they need many more wells. I believe they can
produce 1 mmbopd of condensate, but that would take 15 to 20 years.
I believe Putin is smart enough to set up a successful replacement, and the Russian elite
will also be keen on a smooth transition because they think they are under attack (yes, they
are convinced the USA, Germany, France and others are very keen on making them submit).
1.Russians are not very happy with Putin
2. Most Russians will support him in any circumstances. This is a principle. Otherwise,
chaos.
3.95% Rosiyan has a negative attitude towards liberals, as well as to "democratic values"
(this is a declaration that has no common with reality)
4.Most Russians dissatisfied with property inequality that appeared in the last 25 years
5. The greatest dissatisfaction is the destruction of industry. The lack of productive labor.
(We live with the income of hydrocarbons, the country-gas station). The consequence of
globalism.
>>>
During 2016-2017 Rosneft and the Russian government have been elaborating in details
additional options for the development of unique Samotlor field. As a result a joint decision
was made for an investment incentive in the form of an annual mineral extraction tax
reduction of RUB 35 billion during 10 years.
The Board has confirmed the Company's obligations to drill over 2,400 wells during
2018-2027 that would provide additional output in the amount of more than 50 mtoe. The
extended Samotlor development program would result in an increase of tax liabilities to
budgets of all administrative levels to RUB 1.7 trln. The investment incentives should give
new momentum to the development of one of the largest fields in the country and bring
significant multiplicative effect for Russian economy.
<<<
2,400 wells in a decade is 240 a year. This article is discussing just Samotlor.
A conventional field drilling a well more often than once every two days. Quite a bit more
than that I imagine in the good time of the year with the swings in Siberian weather
conditions.
That's nuts. It's also going to shark fin at some point.
Interesting, Schlumberger said during q&a in their q3 they they had a contract for 400
wells 2019-2021 for the saudis, it was ghawar and one neighbouring field to the west that i
cant remember name of that all 400 wells were going into. They were also quite honest about
its purpose that it was to mitigate declines.
So that makes it pretty much exactly 50% of the russian drill rate per day in samotlor you
mention abowe.
I asked in previous thread why that many wells were needed if we are to believe saudis
200gb+ of world class reserves remaining. In my opinion i didn't get any answer to that
question.
Somebody way up above said because Russia uses natgas for transport they don't consume much
oil.
Gas consumption growth last year was 1.3% Oil consumption growth was 1%.
Russian car sales grew 18% last year after a double digit gain the previous year. Lada
dominates their sales, and as best I can see they are all petrol fueled. Hyundai and Kia are
a substantial presence as well, but I see no evidence in general of natgas dominating
transport.
American model sales seem at best obscure. It's Lada, Hyundai, Kia, BMW, VW.
The statement about Russia using natural gas heavily for transport is simply inaccurate.
Russia "only" consumes 3.2 million barrels per day of oil. But that's more because the
country does not have anywhere near the continent-wide car infrastructure and other wealthy
sprawl the United States built out.
Videos of Browder disposition in the United States in which he contradicts all his public
tales about the Russian fraud case against him, and ofthe fate of his accountant Sergei
Magnitsky - Part 1Part 2Part 3Part 4
Imagine if Trump was as evasive in a deposition with Mueller as Broder was in the videos. It
just reinforces my view that Americans have no problem at all with hypocrisy, probably to do
with exceptionalism.
the videos on browder - 4 parts - focus on him being questioned in 2015...you could skip to the
last one near the end, but vid 3 and 4 are both pretty good and gaining an insight into
browder.. i am sure most here don't need any more insight into browder then they already
have... the data in the video is organized by some canucks back east in quebec i suppose..
53 million in aid from canada to the border of venezuala, mostly in columbia and some in
brazil.. that is more then twice the amount coming from the usa... interesting video discussing
this
here.. i am sure crystia freeland had a direct hand in this.. maybe she can get a date with
brandscum...
It may be possible to partly unravel the Skripal affair, after all.
I first thought the Skripals were food poisoned, or were somehow accidentally
'contaminated.' I changed my mind when Dawn Sturgess and Charlie Rowley were 'poisoned' - I
will explain why much later on.
Two assumptions are taken on board for now.
-- The photo of the perfume package published by the Met on the internet is of an object
found in the Rowley home, or said to be so, by the Met. / Scotland Yard / anti-terror force /
PTB.
-- The photo of the bottle + dispenser is that of objects truly or allegedly found in the
Rowley home, or a fair facsimile. (The original bottle and dispenser, if they exist, are
evidence, might be contaminated, etc.)
Imho the box package counterfeit is quite, even startlingly, convincing. The surface,
color, sheen, graphics, organization, text, font, closely resemble the box of Eau de Parfum
*Premier Jour* by Nina Ricci, 50ml. With one glaring difference.
The quantity on the true box (boxes, these vary some with year, country..) is
50ml - 1.7 FL OZ
or
e50ml - 1.7 FL. OZ. (e is a certification)
The Rowley box sports
5.5 ml - 17FL OZ
The forger is telling us that there is about a teaspoon of XXX in the package. Conversion
to fluid ounces isn't made - the creator can't be bothered, so just removed the decimal
point, making nonsense of that. The introduction of the decimal point, a different number, an
extra space, to conventionally signal that quantity, cannot be ignorant, careless copy errors
such as LFOZ or 500 mL might be. Particularly in view of the great care taken with the
rest.
Premier Jour bottles of 50ml or more are of special style and shape and never come with a
separate dispenser / vaporiser / nozzle to attach so as to be able to spray. No high-end
perfumes or fragrances do, as the containers and spray mechanisms (if any) are an integral
part of the object, certifying the brand, its 'look', etc. as well as its working order.
(Fakes often have non-functioning sprays.)
Smaller quantities of Premier Jour such as 33ml exist, the box is completely different.
The bottles are longish thin vials with a spray mechanism attached to the top, always such
for small quantities of designer fragrances - made to be carried in handbags.
Great care was taken to produce a convincing or in-your-face box, sealed correctly with
cellophane. Inside it a bottle that might pass for genuine via cursory inspection, as it is
inscribed *Premier Jour - Nina Ricci* in the same (correct) fonts as on the box. Plus a
dispenser, ensuring that its first use would be a deliberate act, and possibly to ensure a
tight seal.
No scammer hawking fake perfumes would ever produce this.
links in sep post
In Part II we examine its alleged handling by Dawn and Charlie and trace it back in
time.
"... When we suggest turning to universally approved OSCE documents that reject as unacceptable any obstacles standing in the way of the public or journalists getting access to information, we are told that this was the case in 1990 and should remain there. ..."
"... It wasn't us that bombed Libya and turned it into a "black hole." It still remains such and through it bandits, terrorists and arms traffickers travel to the Sahara-Sahel zone whereas migrants are heading to the north. Therefore, we leave it up to them to deal with those who are responsible for this. ..."
"... Apparently, the international legal space is being fragmented – the US is doing this all along the way while the EU is isolating itself when it comes to a number of issues. The processes that are taking place in Eurasia may also be interpreted as isolation at some point but in reality we want to launch something that will become all-embracing. ..."
"... Maybe, there is a rational idea in everything that is taking place. As Vladimir Lenin used to say, "before uniting it is necessary resolutely to draw lines of demarcation." Maybe, we should be fragmented to understand who the main global players are. ..."
We are now saying that the world is changing and the interdependence of states is growing. Do you think international regulation,
for instance, in communications, can be radically improved in perspective? Because of fake news navigation in the sea of information
leaves much to be desired. Is it possible to regulate a host of other things related to migration flows and capital management?
Is it possible to raise international regulation to a new level or is this altogether impossible? Will countries continue to strike
unstable alliances for shorter or longer periods of time or are there grounds to hope for an improvement of this situation?
Sergey Lavrov:
This question is fairly controversial. In brief, currently this regulation that should be ideally based on universal principles
of international law is being replaced with narrowly interpreted rules elaborated in a narrow circle of states.
As for fake news, France, for example, adopted a law that filters the media space the way it wants. The Russian media Russia Today
and Sputnik are political outcasts. They are not allowed to visit the Elysee Palace or attend any special events. When we address
French officials in this context, they tell us that everything is correct because in their view these are propaganda instruments
rather than news agencies. This is what regulation is all about.
When we suggest turning to universally approved OSCE documents that reject as unacceptable any obstacles standing in the way
of the public or journalists getting access to information, we are told that this was the case in 1990 and should remain there.
There are other examples as well. When France failed to use the OPCW exclusively for passing remotely a verdict on who is guilty
and who is not in violation of all conceivable norms of the Chemical Weapons Convention, it took the initiative to establish an International
Partnership against Impunity for the Use of Chemical Weapons that was not linked with any international structures. A few months
later the EU made a decision to the effect that if the new structure reveals violators, Brussels will impose sanctions on them. This
is, of course, regulation but this regulation is based on the narrow interpretation of broad interests by an individual group of
countries.
As for the internet, the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) has been talking for years, if not decades, about the way
the internet should function so as to not offend anyone. No results have been produced and there will not be any in the foreseeable
future for obvious-to-all reasons. I have practically no doubts about this. Likewise, for the same reason virtually not a single
Western country supported our proposals that were endorsed by the UN General Assembly at the onset of work on the rules of responsible
conduct in cyberspace.
You mentioned migration. There is the Global Compact for Migration that was adopted last year. The West was fighting for it to
include a provision on the equal and divided responsibility for the migration crisis. Russia and other countries objected. It
wasn't us that bombed Libya and turned it into a "black hole." It still remains such and through it bandits, terrorists and arms
traffickers travel to the Sahara-Sahel zone whereas migrants are heading to the north. Therefore, we leave it up to them to deal
with those who are responsible for this.
We are now talking about the formation of the multipolar international order. Its development was preceded by a whole historical
era.
Apparently, the international legal space is being fragmented – the US is doing this all along the way while the EU is isolating
itself when it comes to a number of issues. The processes that are taking place in Eurasia may also be interpreted as isolation at
some point but in reality we want to launch something that will become all-embracing.
Maybe, there is a rational idea in everything that is taking place. As Vladimir Lenin used to say, "before uniting it is necessary
resolutely to draw lines of demarcation." Maybe, we should be fragmented to understand who the main global players are.
Not those that established the UN in 1945 but those that are playing today, in the middle of the 21 st century. Only
after this we should think what to do next, for instance, with the UN. It is absolutely clear that the UN Security Council requires
a reform because the world's developing regions of Asia, Africa and Latin America are not properly represented in it. Today, up to
one third of the UN Security Council is represented by EU countries. I don't think that if more countries from the historical West
are added to this structure, it will gain the diversity we want to see in it.
@Asagirian I've read that
she is still in line to primary Trump. Surely someone will, so it might as well be a neocon
Israel-first Sikh woman who is even more ignorant and psychotic that our current
Tweeter-in-Chief. If she wins, she can even keep Pompeo and Bolton to finish off Iran and
start WWIII.
NATO's Aggression Against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999
The NATO launched a military intervention against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (Serbia
and Montenegro) on March 24th, 1999 in the name of protection of human rights of Kosovo
Albanians. In other words, the 78 days of barbaric air-strikes were formally justified by
"humanitarian intervention" which was mainly based on the false flags and fake news (like the
Rachak case) by Western corporate mass media or brutal lies from the ground (like by William
Walker – a Head of the Kosovo Verification Mission).
In essence, regional organizations like the NATO, according to the UN Charter, do not have
the right to interfere in internal affairs of any country, not even in internal affairs of
their own member states. This superior international document and instrument of global security
explicitly demand the approval of the UNSC for the undertaking of any armed action by any
regional organization. The NATO never asked and never became authorized to carry out military
intervention against Serbia and Montenegro in 1999 and, therefore, according to modern Public
International Law, this "humanitarian" intervention under arms was a pure act of brutal
aggression against a sovereign country and as such a crime against peace. Subsequently, human
rights served in this case just as a justification for the realization of certain geopolitical
aims in the Balkans. It became of crystal visibility in February 2008 when Kosovo Albanians
proclaimed an independent Republic of Kosovo which became recognized by all US' satellites
around the world. In 1999 NATO did not bomb Serbia and Montenegro for the sake of Kosovo
independence but only to protect "human rights" (of Albanians). However, the same NATO nothing
did to continue the protection of human rights (of Kosovo Serbs and other non-Albanians) after
the war when the province became put under complete protectorate and control by the NATO who
nothing did to prevent comprehensive ethnic cleansing of the province committed by Albanian
extremists (former members of the KLA).
Although, as it is presented above, every armed intervention is strictly prohibited by both
Public International Law and the UN Charter, the NATO, established in 1949 on the foundation of
Article 51 of the UN Charter which is dealing with the right to collective and individual
self-defense, attacked the FYR on March 24th, 1999 with continual barbaric air-strikes for the
next 77 days. The term "air-strikes", the NATO was regularly used at its own press conferences
during the aggression on Serbia and Montenegro like the term "collateral damage" for the mass
destruction and civilian casualties resulted by the NATO bombing. In their official statements,
NATO's officials declaratively claimed that the focal reason for those (illegal) air-strikes
was a set of humanitarian issues among them the most important have been three:
1) protection of individual human rights,
2) violation of Albanian rights in Kosovo as a national minority, and
3) prevention of the potential policy of genocide and ethnic cleansing against ethnic
Albanians by Yugoslavia's security forces.
Nevertheless, the aggression was accompanied by dirty and powerful media propaganda which
was, of course, directly supported by a number of politically "correct" legal and human rights
experts for the purpose to wash the brains of the Western audience. Most of them justified the
aggression with the right of Kosovo Albanians to self-determination, although such right is not
supported by any valid international instrument if the right to self-determination means the
destruction of territorial integrity of the country. However, the same experts did not
recognize the same right to self-determination to Croatia's and Bosnia's Serbs during the break
up of ex-Yugoslavia.
Former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, center, with court security guards at left and
right, appears before the U.N. war crimes tribunal in The Hague, Tuesday July 3, 2001.
Milosevic walked into the U.N. tribunal courtroom, Tuesday, without lawyers to represent him
against charges of war crimes against ethnic Albanians in Kosovo in 1999. Milosevic died in his
prison cell in the Hague on March 11, 2006 allegedely of a heat attack jist a few months begore
the verdict to be annouced.
To keep in our mind, according to Public International Law and the UN Charter, the
aggression also includes bombing by the armed forces of one country against the territory of
another country or use of any arms and armed forces of one country against the territory of
another as, for instance, NATO used Kosovo Albanian KLA as ground forces during the Kosovo War.
But the crucial fact in relation to the 1998−1999 Kosovo War was that since there was no
real humanitarian catastrophe before the NATO aggression starred on March 24th, 1999 against
the FRY, it had to be created what exactly NATO did during the air-strike campaign of 78 days
in order to justify its occupation of the province after the war followed by Kosovo's secession
from Serbia in 2008.
Violation Of Human Rights In Kosovo
No one claims that human rights of all citizens including and ethnic Albanians in
Kosovo-Metochia have not been violated to a certain extent before NATO's military campaign in
1999. This fact was approved in several resolutions by the UNSC before the NATO aggression but
what is systematically hidden as a fact is that original flagrant violation of human rights in
the province came from the side of Albanian KLA as this terrorist organization launched a
widespread policy of attacking, kidnapping and killing of the Serbs in order to provoke
Serbia's security forces who reacted as they did it by violation of human rights of those
Albanians who participated in the actions of and/or supported the KLA's activities. Here we
have to keep in mind that a majority of Kosovo's Albanians did not support the methods of
combat by the KLA including and Dr. Ibrahim Rugova – a political leader of Kosovo's
Albanians. In order to calm down a political situation in the province, the Yugoslav Government
concluded with different international organizations, like the OSCE or the NATO, several
agreements allowing the OSCE monitoring mission in Kosovo-Metochia. The Yugoslav Government as
well as agreed to restrain the activities by its security forces if the opposite side (the KLA)
would do the same. That the Albanian side before NATO's aggression was committing war crimes is
clear from the invitation to both the Yugoslav and Kosovo's Albanian sides by the international
community to cooperate with the UN special Tribunal (est. 1993) for the crimes committed on the
territory of ex-Yugoslavia (including Kosovo-Metochia too). The fact was that regarding this
invitation to cooperate with the Tribunal's prosecutor in the Hague, the leaders of the
"Albanian national community" were also invited but not only the Yugoslav side to participate
in the investigation for all offenses within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal. The Albanian
side was, in other words, invited to participate in the investigation of personal involvement
of the KLA members in the crimes committed against other ethnic groups in Kosovo-Metochia, with
the final political aim to secede the province from the FRY.
Nevertheless, in no one resolution on Kosovo before March 24th, 1999, it was not mentioned
any "threat to peace" in the province nor did they order the UNSC to form international armed
forces with the right to re-establish the peace and order in Kosovo, that was to undertake
certain armed actions against Serbia and Montenegro. In 1998, the FRY as a sovereign state was
combating separatist Albanian movement in Kosovo-Metochia, in some cases with inordinate use of
force, but, nevertheless, there was no real humanitarian catastrophe at that time. The recent
historical experience of violation of human rights according to contemporary definition, in the
province suggests that the critical situation was escalating with the creation of the KLA in
1995 which took comprehensive terrorist actions for the sake to bring about the secession of
Kosovo from Serbia. The Yugoslav security forces came into serious conflict with different
groups of the KLA, and the judiciary of the FRY accompanied by relevant experts and scholars
justifiably qualified the armed actions of Kosovo's separatists as classic terrorism and
criminal acts against a sovereign state.
[iv]
Former leader of KLA Ramush Haradinaj arrested on 5 January 2017 on a Serbian arrest warrant
by French border police upon his arrival at EuroAirport Basel Mulhouse Freiburg on a flight
from Pristina. Serbian authorities urged France to extradite Haradinaj, citing that he
personally took part in the torture, murder, and rape of civilians. On 27 April 2017, a French
court turned down a Serbian request to extradite Ramush Haradinaj and released him. Since
September 9, 2017 Haradinaj is the Prime Minister of self-proclamed Kosovo.
In essence, there were prior to NATO's aggression on the FRY the problems of protection of
human rights in Kosovo-Metochia, but certainly no to such extent as it was exaggerated by the
Western mass media and policymakers at least no bigger than in many other corners of the world
like in Colombia or Turkey's eastern part populated by ethnic Kurds. Surely, the situation in
regard to human rights in Turkey since 1994 onward is much more serious than it was in
Kosovo-Metochia in 1998 as the Kurdish human and minority rights are drastically violated like
in 1994 when a large number of the Kurdish villages were destroyed by the Turkish police and
regular army's forces and when almost one million of ethnic Kurds fled Turkey to neighboring
states but the US administration simply did nothing to protect the Kurdish human rights. Even
no initiative was launched for the UN to undertake a legitimate international action in order
to prevent Turkey's authorities to stop with the production of a humanitarian
catastrophe.
Producing Humanitarian Catastrophe But Characterized As No Aggression
The focal result of NATO's bombing of Serbia and Montenegro was a huge number of refugees of
all nationalities from Kosovo-Metochia that became, in fact, a real humanitarian catastrophe.
However, during such exodus of people, NATO's military aggression under the umbrella of the
"armed humanitarian intervention" became even strengthened in spite of all prohibitions which
have been existing in Public International Law. However, during and after the bombardment of
the FRY, the UN resolutions, like the UNSC Resolution of June 10th, 1999, simply did not
mention the bombardment at all for a very reason: if mentioned it would have to be officially
qualified as "aggression" what means a violation of Public International Law and the UN
Charter. In this case, however, due to the established voting system in the UNSC (threat of
using Russian and Chinese veto rights), no resolution could be adopted. The Resolution of June
10th, 1999, in fact, is speaking only about deployment of international security forces
including and those of the NATO in the province after the war for the sake to " establish safe
environment for all people in Kosovo, as well as to facilitate safe return of all displaced
people and refugees to their homes". In other words, nowhere in the whole text of the
resolution is mentioned the bombardment of the FRY and, therefore, a pure act of aggression
against a sovereign state. That was the same with another previous resolution adopted during
the aggression (Resolution 1239 on May 14th, 1999) which does not say any single word about
NATO's bombardment but instead it only says that international community expresses serious
concern in respect to the humanitarian catastrophe in and around Kosovo as a result of
continuing crisis but who produced this crisis is absolutely unclear from the text of the
resolution. The same text confirms the rights of all refugees and displaced persons to return
to their homes in a safe and dignified manner but what was a real background of the crisis is
not clear. According to the UN resolutions on Kosovo, the NATO barbaric bombardment and a
classic act of aggression on a sovereign state, in fact, believe or not, never happened!
We have to mention that there were several attempts by Russia and China in the UNSC to adopt
an appropriate resolution in which would be recognized that NATO's air-strikes in 1999 really
happened on the ground and subsequently they had to be characterized as "aggression". However,
such resolution's proposals failed as not being adopted for the only reason – used veto
rights by the USA, the UK, and France (the Western obstruction).
Arguments Against
Humanitarian Intervention
There are several focal objections by the scholars, policy-makers, and lawyers to
humanitarian intervention advocated at various times. Here, we will address the most important
arguments against humanitarian intervention taking primarily the case of NATO's bombing of the
FRY in 1999:
No real basis for humanitarian intervention in Public International Law . The common good
is best preserved by maintaining a ban on any use of force not authorized by the UNSC.
Interveners have typically either claimed to be acting in self-defense according to the
"implied authorization" of the UNSC resolutions and the UN Charter or have refrained from
making any reasonable legal argument based on Public International Law at all.
States do not intervene for primarily humanitarian reasons . States always have mixed
real reasons for humanitarian and other interventions and are very rarely prepared to
sacrifice their own soldiers overseas. It means that humanitarian intervention is guided by
calculations of national interest but not by what is best for the victims in whose name the
intervention is formally carried out.
States are not allowed to risk the lives of their own soldiers in order to save strangers
. Political leaders do not possess any moral right to shed the blood of their own citizens on
behalf of suffering foreigners. Citizens are having the exclusive responsibility of their own
state, and their state is entirely their own business and, therefore, if a civil authority
has broken down this is the responsibility only of the citizens and political leaders of that
state but not of the foreign powers.
T he issue of abuse . In the absence of a not politically colored mechanism for deciding
when a real humanitarian intervention is permissible, states have a possibility to espouse
humanitarian motives just as a formal pretext to morally cover the pursuit of national
self-interest as, for instance, A. Hitler did with the Sudetenland.
Selectivity of response . States all the time apply principles of humanitarian
intervention selectively following their own national interest but not real protection of
human rights. In other words, a state's behavior is always governed by what the Government
decides to be in their interest and, therefore, states are selective about when they choose
to intervene. As an example, the selectivity of response is the argument that NATO's
"humanitarian" intervention in Kosovo in 1999 could not be driven by real humanitarian
concerns as it has done nothing to address, for instance, the very much larger humanitarian
catastrophe in Darfur, a province in West Sudan (Darfur genocide).
A problem of moral principles . There is no generally reached consensus on a set of moral
principles about humanitarian intervention which should not be permitted in the face of
disagreement about what constitutes extreme cases of the violation of human rights.
Practically, humanitarian intervention does not work . Humanitarian intervention is not
workable as the outsiders cannot impose human rights especially by those who have the same
problem in their homes. Democracy can be established only by a domestic struggle for liberty
but not from the outside. It means that human rights cannot take root if they are imposed by
outsiders. The argument is that the oppressed people should by themselves overthrow
non-democratic authority.
Conclusion
The norms of Public International Law and doctrine of collective security after 1945
presented above, unfortunately, did not stop different forms of armed interventions around the
globe but especially by the US – a country which became a global champion of aggression.
Armed "humanitarian" interventions are still going to be a reality of the present and future
international relations under the umbrella of the R2P.
After the Cold War, the most brutal, illegal and shameful "humanitarian intervention" was in
the southern Serbian province of Kosovo-Metochia in 1999 that was, in fact, NATO's aggression
against the FRY in a form of an air campaign. However, beside this example of "humanitarian
intervention" as a violation of Public International Law, there were many similar interventions
before like when in 1983 the USA invaded a sovereign state of Granada with some 8.000 soldiers
under justification to protect the lives of about 1.000 American citizens living there under
the belief that they were threatened due to the unrest in this country. However, the real
reason of such "humanitarian intervention" has been of purely political and geostrategic nature
rather than humanitarian one as US' troops occupied the whole island (state) of Granada
including and those parts in which US' citizens did not live. The focal proof of abuse of
Public International Law was a fact that the American troops de facto occupied Granada as they
stayed on the island even after all the American citizens had left and changed the Government
of it.
From the presentation above, it is quite clear that NATO's military action against Serbia
and Montenegro in 1999 cannot be characterized as a just war of "humanitarian intervention"
even according to the criteria by the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius not to speak
about the modern set of criteria incorporated into the UN Charter and Public International Law.
Therefore, the action was rather a classic example of brutal military aggression against a
sovereign state covered by politicized Western mass media. It is true that "media are not only
spectator in modern conflicts, but must be considered active participants forming public
opinion and also creating and directing threat perception" that was exactly the case of the
1998−1999 Kosovo War when the Western corporate mass media succeeded to convince public
opinion that NATO's "humanitarian intervention" was a just war.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made a formal electoral pact for the upcoming
April election with the Otzma Yehudit (literally, "Jewish Power") party which has as its policy
the expulsion of all non-Jews from Israel, and whose leaders have said that "Christians are
'blood sucking vampires' who should be expelled from Israel."
News of the alliance was carried in the media aimed directly at Jews, such as the
Times of Israel , but has been completely suppressed in the Jewish lobby controlled media
in Europe and America -- because there, the Jewish lobby always pushes "non-racialism" as its
official policy for non-Jews.
According to the
Times of Israel
, Netanyahu has reached a deal with the Jewish Home Party to grant that "national-religious
party" a pair of ministerial posts after April's elections in exchange for it merging with the
Otzma Yehudit party, whose name in Hebrew literally translates as "Jewish Power."
The Times of Israel reported that the Jewish Home party earlier agreed to run in the
April elections jointly with the "National Union," party, which "has come under increasing
pressure from Netanyahu to make an alliance with Otzma Yehudit and Eli Yishai's Yachad, arguing
that a failure on those smaller parties' part to clear the electoral threshold could deprive
his Likud of enough potential partners to form a ruling coalition."
Analytic piece on staged chemical attacks " ... weaponized disinformation campaigns,
staged videos and fake news are common approaches used by the US military and special services
to promote their own agenda around the world. The US was actively using these tools during its
intervention in Iraq and after it.
According to the later revelations, the employed programs were varying from placing
Pentagon-provided articles in Iraqi newspapers as "unbiased news" to producing footage, which
were made to look as if they had been "created by Arabic TV," and CDs with fake al-Qaeda
videos, which then distributed through various channels.
The employed propaganda approaches are constantly evolving. Therefore, propaganda coverage
of the conflict in Syria has some differences with those which were observed in Iraq. Now,
mainstream media, the Pentagon, the intelligence services and diplomats are actively using
Hollywood-style approaches. This style of the coverage is based on providing catchy, even if
horrible, pictures and videos influencing the emotions of the audience rather than convincing
it with logical conclusions.
Just like with Hollywood movies, the mainstream news has increasingly been turning away from
the logical narration of stories with realistic motivations to emotional judgements based on
anonymous sources, non-verified images, pocket citizen journalists and even open speculation.
The content developed within the framework of this approach is usually based on the results of
social and psychological research. This allows results to be maximised by the targetted
development of content and appropriate segmentation of the audience. An interesting and
successful example of this audience reaction modelling can be seen in the mainstream media
coverage of the Salisbury incident, which gave rise to large-scale hysteria in Western
countries about Russian spies." SF
-------------
Well, pilgrims, you heard it first here and often over the last years. This piece speaks for
itself. pl
"mainstream news... to emotional judgements based on anonymous sources, non-verified images,
pocket citizen journalists and even open speculation. " That fits the latest news events from
the Right to Life March or the Jussie Smollett hate hoax.
"weaponized disinformation campaigns" I was thinking of writing something along the lines
of "Where have all the good communists gone". It sure seems their agitprop tactics are alive
and well.
"... When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon. ..."
"... Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice. ..."
"... A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has. ..."
"... America cannot compete with China commercially ..."
"... Beijing's advantages are too great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government that can plan well into the future. ..."
"... Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." ..."
"... As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's founder. ..."
When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world
empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them
occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America,
Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military,
controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was
in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.
Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the
real lunge came with the attack on Iraq. Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating
the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
The world runs on oil. Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those
countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each
other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen
what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line.
The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.
A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American
forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians
aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of
another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing
what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria?
Guess what Nigeria has.
Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geostrategically vital to a world
empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars
for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry. All God's chillun love the
Empire.
For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must
be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions. At the same time
Washington pushes NATO, its sepoy militia, ever eastward, wants to station US forces in Poland,
plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia, drops out of the
INF Treaty for the same reasons, and seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and
the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).
China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire. Ergo the trade war. America
has to stop China's economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it
will not get another chance.
The present moment is an Imperial crunch point. America cannot compete with China
commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing's advantages are too
great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a
for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government
that can plan well into the future.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated
economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely
had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit with almost everybody,
carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes few things that the world
can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells
other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." The indispensable
country is an indispensable market. With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if
it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the
Chinese economy would wither. Tariffs, note, are just a way of not buying China's stuff.
Since the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often do as ordered.
But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.
As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no
choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead.
Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal
with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the
Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's
founder.
The tide runs against the Empire. A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete
technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling
speed. It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers, launches moonlanders, leads in 5G
internet, does leading work in genetics, designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and
920) and smartphones. Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing
edge.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by popularity
contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education deteriorates
under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military instead of
infrastructure and the economy. It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new
administration.
The first rule of empire is, "Don't let your enemies unite." Instead, Washington has pushed
Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire. It might have been brighter to
have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let
America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe
than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By
imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes dedollarization and
recognition that America is not an ally but a master.
It is now or never. If America's great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of
the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions
subdue the world, or Washington starts a world war. Or America becomes just another
country.
To paraphrase a great political thinker, "It's the Empire, Stupid."
"Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire."
Turkey may soon join them, then Iraq might revolt. South Korea has tired of the
warmongering and may join too, which is why Washington is giving them the lead in dealing
with North Korea. But a united Korea identifes more with China than the USA, so the USA wants
to block that idea. The Germans are unhappy too, with all the warmongering, immigration, and
American arrogance.
Sorry Fred, but you're too late. It's all over. Just that your maniacal rulers, i.e. Pompeo,
Bolton et al can't see it. Or, Cognitive Dissonance being painful, refuse to.
Warsaw recently was a case in point. The two biggest European countries, Germany and France
refused to even send a senior representative. All people did was listen in an embarrassed
silence while Pompeo tried to make like a latter day Julius Cesear. At the same time, Russia,
Turkey and Iran met in Sochi, and worked out how they were going to take the next solving the
mess in Syria, the way they want it.
Incidentally, you could also go onto YouTube and watch RT's subtitled [also horrible voice
over, but you can't have everything I guess] of President Putin's "Address to Parliament and
the Nation". It runs for close to 1.5 hours. You will hear the problems Russia has, how Putin
addresses the concerns of the people, their complaints re poor access in country areas to
medicine, and his orders on how this is to be fixed.
But you will also hear the moves forward, that Russia now has a trade surplus [remember
those?] and can afford all the programs it needs. It's the world leading exporter of Wheat,
and other commodities are catching up.
Then he will tell you and show videos of the latest 2 defense weapons – and they are
things America cannot defend against. He also in light of the US withdrawing from the INF
treaty made a very clear statement, should the US be so stupid as to think it can use Europe
as it's war ground, and have Europeans get killed instead of Americans. "Put Intermediate
sites in Europe and use just one, and not only will we fire on the European site that sent
it, but we will also take out the "decision making centre", wherever this is".
Ponder that for a while. There is nothing US can do. The dollar is slowly being rejected and
dumped. The heartland is reamed out after billions took the productive facilities and put
them in China [so kind]. The homeless and desperate are growing in numbers.
It's all over, Fred. Time to start planning what to do when the mud really hits the fan.
Can't argue with that! Usually, I read Fred for amusement, but this is all spot on. I
particularly liked:
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by
popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education
deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military
instead of infrastructure and the economy.
Incredible. US government cooks up lies to invade and wreck Iraq, destroy Libya, and subvert
Syria. It pulled off a coup in Ukraine with Neo-Nazis. US and its allies Saudis and Israel
gave aid, direct and indirect, to ISIS and Al-Qaida to bring down Assad or turn Syria upside
down.
But, scum like Pompeo puts forth hard-line stance against terrorists. What a bunch of vile
phonies and hypocrites.
It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American
econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have
worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast
empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China.
Russia is more than racially closer, Russia is culturally much closer and by culturally I
don't mean this cesspool of new "culture". But, as you brilliantly noted:
The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather
than by competence.
Britain's time of full spectrum dominance (well trade, industry and navy really) did not
emerge fully formed from isolation as did America. England and the UK played balance of power
politics. The US can still do that for a very long time, given some basic diplomatic sense.
India, China & Pakistan present an interesting triangle. Indonesia and Vietnam are no
friends of China. Nigeria is heading for 400m people and will want to exert its own power,
not take instructions from Peking, etc, etc. Balance of power requires more fluidity than the
US has shown to date. Seeing Russia as an hereditary enemy illustrates this failure.
Can the US make the changes necessary to play balance of power politics?
The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
.
Not to notice (or rather, not to notice one's own noticing) what the majority doesn't
notice (OK: they don't notice that they notice, actually) is part of humankind's cerebral
package too.
You once called it the law of the pack. It can be given innumerable names -- just it doesn't
change.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted.
.
It's what follows ripe democracy, invariably -- meanjng that it can arguably not be
helped.
@Godfree Roberts
Finally a bright spot in an otherwise depressingly-fairly-truthful article. Less Government
spending is a GOOD thing, I mean, unless you are a flat-out Communist, of course ohhhhh .
And yes, the scale is WAY off. How could those 0.8 to 2.05% numbers seem even close to
reality to anyone who has a clue. I can't vouch for China, but the US number is off by a
factor of 20 to 25 . Come on, Godfree, you're (a tad bit) better than that!
That's not a bad article in general, but, as usual, Mr. Reed doesn't really have that
analytical mind to know what's really been, and is, going on.
1) There were PLENTY of Americans, many of them even politicians who wanted a "peace
dividend" after the Cold War was won. G.H.W Bush and the neocons put the kibosh on that. The
current version of empire-building didn't have to be. The Israeli-influenced neocons are most
of the reason for the post-Cold-War empire building.
2) It's not ALL about oil anymore – it seems to be a diminishing factor, what with
the US producing more oil than it imports, at this point. Mr. Reed could use a dose of
Zerohedge.com, as, along with their gloom-and-doom, they have opened my eyes to the American
meddling around the world to keep support of the Reserve Currency, the US dollar. Lots of the
countries in which the US causes trouble were trying to get out of the dollar world with
their trade.
3) Related to (2) here, China and Russia both want to eliminate the use of the dollar in
trade, including with each other. That bothers a lot of people who understand how bad the
outlook for the US economy really is, and what it would mean for the dollar to no longer be
used around the world for trade.
4) American government has handed China a completely one-sided deal (FOR China) in trade
since the mid-1990's and Bill Clinton. It's time to end that, which is what the trade war is
about. I don't dispute that American could be in a whole lot more pain over it than the
Chinese, but it's like medicine – take it now, or suffer even more later.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once
dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade
surplus, and barely had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit
with almost everybody, carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes
few things that the world can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
@peterAUS I agree ..
Canada is "not" under America's boot. As a Canadian I respect the security America provides
Canada on the world stage but it would be a cold day in hell when i would submit to an
America with a gun in his hand. And im pretty sure our best buddies in jolly ol England might
have something to say. This isnt a pissing match. Empire is a fickle bitch.
@Bruce County Pretty
much.
As far as Australia and New Zealand are concerned it's crystal clear. Somebody has to provide
security for our way of life here; before it was United Kingdom, now it's USA.
Hehe definitely preferable to China.
Or Japan.
Or anyone here in Pacific.
If Americans want to deploy a full corps, whatever, no prob. Again, as far as "fair
skinned" English speaking citizens here are concerned. I'd even say it applies to Polynesians
around.
Now, can't say it applies to our Mohammedan citizens, and definitely not to Chinese.
It's amusing to see Westerners around here keen on replacing USA empire with Chinese. Hehe
talking about self-hate.
Granted, there are people among them who really believe in all that propaganda coming from
Beijing. Well better than taking Prozac or similar, I guess, so all good.
"Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is
that some people don't notice." That is pretty astonishing, given that most of the columns on
sites like this & even in more MSM-style publications rehash this theme ad infinitum. It
may, in fact, be more a matter of people simply getting tired of hearing it over and over
that leads them to shrug and turn to something different. It's not news anymore. How many
columns can anyone squeeze out of the same threadbare topic. Many years ago, during first
Cold War, it was still somewhat daring to expose this partially hidden truth; but now it's
old hat on both the left & right.No one really needs someone to tell them again what
everyone already knows, that's easy – but what to do about it, that's the hard part!
@Philip Owen This is
a subset of government spending and only covers R&D.
It doesn't cover corporate R&D spending, though I'm guessing that in that regard, the
two countries are even. If anyone has the numbers I'd be grateful if they'd share them.
"... When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America, Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military, controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon. ..."
"... Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice. ..."
"... A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria? Guess what Nigeria has. ..."
"... America cannot compete with China commercially ..."
"... Beijing's advantages are too great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government that can plan well into the future. ..."
"... Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." ..."
"... As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead. Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's founder. ..."
When the Soviet Empire collapsed, America appeared poised to establish the first truly world
empire. The developed countries were American vassals in effect if not in name, many of them
occupied by American troops: Among others, Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea, Latin America,
Saudi Arabia, and Australia. The US had by far the dominant economy and the biggest military,
controlled the IMF, NATO, the dollar, SWIFT, and enjoyed technological superiority.. Russia was
in chaos, China a distant smudge on the horizon.
Powerful groups in Washington, such as PNAC, began angling towed aggrandizement, but the
real lunge came with the attack on Iraq. Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating
the planet. The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
The world runs on oil. Controlling the supply conveys almost absolute power over those
countries that do not have their own. (For example, the Japanese would soon be eating each
other if their oil were cut off.) Saudi Arabia is an American protectorate,and, having seen
what happened to Iraq, knows that it can be conquered in short order if it gets out of line.
The U. S. Navy could easily block tanker traffic from Hormuz to any or all countries.
A major purpose of the destruction of Iraq was to get control of its oil and put American
forces on the border of Iran, another oil power. The current attempt to starve the Iranians
aims at installing a American puppet government. The ongoing coup in Venezuela seeks control of
another vast oil reserve. It will also serve to intimidate the rest of Latin America by showing
what can happen to any country that defies Washington. Why are American troops in Nigeria?
Guess what Nigeria has.
Note that Iraq and Iran, in addition to their oil, are geostrategically vital to a world
empire. Further, the immensely powerful Jewish presence in the US supports the Mid-East wars
for its own purposes. So, of course, does the arms industry. All God's chillun love the
Empire.
For the Greater Empire to prevail, Russia and China, the latter a surprise contender, must
be neutralized. Thus the campaign to crush Russia by economic sanctions. At the same time
Washington pushes NATO, its sepoy militia, ever eastward, wants to station US forces in Poland,
plans a Space Command whose only purpose is to intimidate or bankrupt Russia, drops out of the
INF Treaty for the same reasons, and seeks to prevent commercial relations between Russia and
the European vassals (e.g., Nordstream II).
China of course is the key obstacle to expanding the Empire. Ergo the trade war. America
has to stop China's economic and technological progress, and stop it now, as it
will not get another chance.
The present moment is an Imperial crunch point. America cannot compete with China
commercially or, increasingly, in technology. Washington knows it. Beijing's advantages are too
great: A huge and growing domestic market, a far larger population of very bright people, a
for-profit economy that allows heavy investment both internally and abroad, a stable government
that can plan well into the future.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once dominated
economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade surplus, and barely
had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit with almost everybody,
carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes few things that the world
can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
Increasingly America's commercial power is as a consumer, not a producer. Washington tells
other countries, "If you don't do as we say, we won't buy your stuff." The indispensable
country is an indispensable market. With few and diminishing (though important) exceptions, if
it stopped selling things to China, China would barely notice, but if it stopped buying, the
Chinese economy would wither. Tariffs, note, are just a way of not buying China's stuff.
Since the profligate American market is vital to other countries, they often do as ordered.
But Asian markets grow. So do Asian industries.
As America's competitiveness declines, Washington resorts to strong-arm tactics. It has no
choice. A prime example is the 5G internet, a Very Big Deal, in which Huawei holds the lead.
Unable to provide a better product at a better price, Washington forbids the vassals to deal
with Huawei–on pain of not buying their stuff. In what appears to be desperation, the
Exceptional Nation has actually made a servile Canada arrest the daughter of Huawei's
founder.
The tide runs against the Empire. A couple of decades ago, the idea that China could compete
technologically with America would have seemed preposterous. Today China advances at startling
speed. It is neck and neck with the US in supercomputers, launches moonlanders, leads in 5G
internet, does leading work in genetics, designs world-class chipsets (e.g., the Kirin 980 and
920) and smartphones. Another decade or two of this and America will be at the trailing
edge.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by popularity
contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education deteriorates
under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military instead of
infrastructure and the economy. It is politically chaotic, its policies changing with every new
administration.
The first rule of empire is, "Don't let your enemies unite." Instead, Washington has pushed
Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire. It might have been brighter to
have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American econosphere, but Israel would not have let
America do this. The same approach would have worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe
than China and acutely aware of having vast empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China. By
imposing sanctions of adversaries and allies alike, Washington promotes dedollarization and
recognition that America is not an ally but a master.
It is now or never. If America's great but declining power does not subjugate the rest of
the world quickly, the rising powers of Asia will swamp it. Even India grows. Either sanctions
subdue the world, or Washington starts a world war. Or America becomes just another
country.
To paraphrase a great political thinker, "It's the Empire, Stupid."
"Washington has pushed Russia, China, and Iran into a coalition against the Empire."
Turkey may soon join them, then Iraq might revolt. South Korea has tired of the
warmongering and may join too, which is why Washington is giving them the lead in dealing
with North Korea. But a united Korea identifes more with China than the USA, so the USA wants
to block that idea. The Germans are unhappy too, with all the warmongering, immigration, and
American arrogance.
Sorry Fred, but you're too late. It's all over. Just that your maniacal rulers, i.e. Pompeo,
Bolton et al can't see it. Or, Cognitive Dissonance being painful, refuse to.
Warsaw recently was a case in point. The two biggest European countries, Germany and France
refused to even send a senior representative. All people did was listen in an embarrassed
silence while Pompeo tried to make like a latter day Julius Cesear. At the same time, Russia,
Turkey and Iran met in Sochi, and worked out how they were going to take the next solving the
mess in Syria, the way they want it.
Incidentally, you could also go onto YouTube and watch RT's subtitled [also horrible voice
over, but you can't have everything I guess] of President Putin's "Address to Parliament and
the Nation". It runs for close to 1.5 hours. You will hear the problems Russia has, how Putin
addresses the concerns of the people, their complaints re poor access in country areas to
medicine, and his orders on how this is to be fixed.
But you will also hear the moves forward, that Russia now has a trade surplus [remember
those?] and can afford all the programs it needs. It's the world leading exporter of Wheat,
and other commodities are catching up.
Then he will tell you and show videos of the latest 2 defense weapons – and they are
things America cannot defend against. He also in light of the US withdrawing from the INF
treaty made a very clear statement, should the US be so stupid as to think it can use Europe
as it's war ground, and have Europeans get killed instead of Americans. "Put Intermediate
sites in Europe and use just one, and not only will we fire on the European site that sent
it, but we will also take out the "decision making centre", wherever this is".
Ponder that for a while. There is nothing US can do. The dollar is slowly being rejected and
dumped. The heartland is reamed out after billions took the productive facilities and put
them in China [so kind]. The homeless and desperate are growing in numbers.
It's all over, Fred. Time to start planning what to do when the mud really hits the fan.
Can't argue with that! Usually, I read Fred for amusement, but this is all spot on. I
particularly liked:
The American decline is largely self-inflicted. The US chooses its government by
popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather than by competence. American education
deteriorates under assault by social-justice faddists. Washington spends on the military
instead of infrastructure and the economy.
Incredible. US government cooks up lies to invade and wreck Iraq, destroy Libya, and subvert
Syria. It pulled off a coup in Ukraine with Neo-Nazis. US and its allies Saudis and Israel
gave aid, direct and indirect, to ISIS and Al-Qaida to bring down Assad or turn Syria upside
down.
But, scum like Pompeo puts forth hard-line stance against terrorists. What a bunch of vile
phonies and hypocrites.
It might have been brighter to have integrated Iran tightly into the Euro-American
econosphere, but Israel would not have let America do this. The same approach would have
worked with Russia, racially closer to Europe than China and acutely aware of having vast
empty Siberia bordering an overpopulated China.
Russia is more than racially closer, Russia is culturally much closer and by culturally I
don't mean this cesspool of new "culture". But, as you brilliantly noted:
The US chooses its government by popularity contests among provincial lawyers rather
than by competence.
Britain's time of full spectrum dominance (well trade, industry and navy really) did not
emerge fully formed from isolation as did America. England and the UK played balance of power
politics. The US can still do that for a very long time, given some basic diplomatic sense.
India, China & Pakistan present an interesting triangle. Indonesia and Vietnam are no
friends of China. Nigeria is heading for 400m people and will want to exert its own power,
not take instructions from Peking, etc, etc. Balance of power requires more fluidity than the
US has shown to date. Seeing Russia as an hereditary enemy illustrates this failure.
Can the US make the changes necessary to play balance of power politics?
The astonishing thing is that some people don't notice.
.
Not to notice (or rather, not to notice one's own noticing) what the majority doesn't
notice (OK: they don't notice that they notice, actually) is part of humankind's cerebral
package too.
You once called it the law of the pack. It can be given innumerable names -- just it doesn't
change.
The American decline is largely self-inflicted.
.
It's what follows ripe democracy, invariably -- meanjng that it can arguably not be
helped.
@Godfree Roberts
Finally a bright spot in an otherwise depressingly-fairly-truthful article. Less Government
spending is a GOOD thing, I mean, unless you are a flat-out Communist, of course ohhhhh .
And yes, the scale is WAY off. How could those 0.8 to 2.05% numbers seem even close to
reality to anyone who has a clue. I can't vouch for China, but the US number is off by a
factor of 20 to 25 . Come on, Godfree, you're (a tad bit) better than that!
That's not a bad article in general, but, as usual, Mr. Reed doesn't really have that
analytical mind to know what's really been, and is, going on.
1) There were PLENTY of Americans, many of them even politicians who wanted a "peace
dividend" after the Cold War was won. G.H.W Bush and the neocons put the kibosh on that. The
current version of empire-building didn't have to be. The Israeli-influenced neocons are most
of the reason for the post-Cold-War empire building.
2) It's not ALL about oil anymore – it seems to be a diminishing factor, what with
the US producing more oil than it imports, at this point. Mr. Reed could use a dose of
Zerohedge.com, as, along with their gloom-and-doom, they have opened my eyes to the American
meddling around the world to keep support of the Reserve Currency, the US dollar. Lots of the
countries in which the US causes trouble were trying to get out of the dollar world with
their trade.
3) Related to (2) here, China and Russia both want to eliminate the use of the dollar in
trade, including with each other. That bothers a lot of people who understand how bad the
outlook for the US economy really is, and what it would mean for the dollar to no longer be
used around the world for trade.
4) American government has handed China a completely one-sided deal (FOR China) in trade
since the mid-1990's and Bill Clinton. It's time to end that, which is what the trade war is
about. I don't dispute that American could be in a whole lot more pain over it than the
Chinese, but it's like medicine – take it now, or suffer even more later.
America? It's power is more fragile than it may seem. The United States once
dominated economically by making better products at better prices, ran a large trade
surplus, and barely had competitors. Today it has deindustrialized, runs a trade deficit
with almost everybody, carries an astronomical and uncontrolled national debt, and makes
few things that the world can't get elsewhere, often at lower cost.
@peterAUS I agree ..
Canada is "not" under America's boot. As a Canadian I respect the security America provides
Canada on the world stage but it would be a cold day in hell when i would submit to an
America with a gun in his hand. And im pretty sure our best buddies in jolly ol England might
have something to say. This isnt a pissing match. Empire is a fickle bitch.
@Bruce County Pretty
much.
As far as Australia and New Zealand are concerned it's crystal clear. Somebody has to provide
security for our way of life here; before it was United Kingdom, now it's USA.
Hehe definitely preferable to China.
Or Japan.
Or anyone here in Pacific.
If Americans want to deploy a full corps, whatever, no prob. Again, as far as "fair
skinned" English speaking citizens here are concerned. I'd even say it applies to Polynesians
around.
Now, can't say it applies to our Mohammedan citizens, and definitely not to Chinese.
It's amusing to see Westerners around here keen on replacing USA empire with Chinese. Hehe
talking about self-hate.
Granted, there are people among them who really believe in all that propaganda coming from
Beijing. Well better than taking Prozac or similar, I guess, so all good.
"Current foreign policy openly focuses on dominating the planet. The astonishing thing is
that some people don't notice." That is pretty astonishing, given that most of the columns on
sites like this & even in more MSM-style publications rehash this theme ad infinitum. It
may, in fact, be more a matter of people simply getting tired of hearing it over and over
that leads them to shrug and turn to something different. It's not news anymore. How many
columns can anyone squeeze out of the same threadbare topic. Many years ago, during first
Cold War, it was still somewhat daring to expose this partially hidden truth; but now it's
old hat on both the left & right.No one really needs someone to tell them again what
everyone already knows, that's easy – but what to do about it, that's the hard part!
@Philip Owen This is
a subset of government spending and only covers R&D.
It doesn't cover corporate R&D spending, though I'm guessing that in that regard, the
two countries are even. If anyone has the numbers I'd be grateful if they'd share them.
"... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
"... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
"... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic
cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:
" We must stand up
against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up
new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and
hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our
middle class."
It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing
so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.
As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what
happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military
industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American
taxpayers at least six trillion dollars.
[1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans may have suffered brain injuries."
[2]
Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and
destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the
Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle
East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.
The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both
parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about
you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that
matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of
the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you
should all agree with Gabbard here.
[1] Ernesto Londono, "Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion," Washington
Post , March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars," The Nation , March 29,
2013; "Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson
Institute Study," Huffington Post , May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, "The $5 Trillion War
on Terror," Time , June 29, 2011; "Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have
been done?," LA Times , March 18, 2013.
[2] "360,000 veterans may have brain injuries," USA Today , March 5, 2009.
"We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new
places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy,
our security, and destroying our middle class."
"... Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her ..."
"... Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn. ..."
"... The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you should all agree with Gabbard here. ..."
Tulsi Gabbard has recently launched a new attack on New World Order agents and ethnic
cleansers in the Middle East, and one can see why they would be upset with her. She said:
" We must stand up
against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up
new wars to wage, new places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and
hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy, our security, and destroying our
middle class."
It is too early to formulate a complete opinion on Gabbard, but she has said the right thing
so far. In fact, her record is better than numerous presidents, both past and present.
As we have documented in the past, Gabbard is an Iraq war veteran, and she knew what
happened to her fellow soldiers who died for Israel, the Neocon war machine, and the military
industrial complex. She also seems to be aware that the war in Iraq alone will cost American
taxpayers at least six trillion dollars.
[1] She is almost certainly aware of the fact that at least "360,000 Iraq and Afghanistan
veterans may have suffered brain injuries."
[2]
Gabbard is smart enough to realize that the Neocon path leads to death, chaos, and
destruction. She knows that virtually nothing good has come out of the Israeli narrative in the
Middle East -- a narrative which has brought America on the brink of collapse in the Middle
East. Therefore, she is asking for a U-turn.
The first step for change, she says, is to "stand up against powerful politicians from both
parties" who take their orders from the Neocons and war machine. These people don't care about
you, me, the average American, the people in the Middle East, or the American economy for that
matter. They only care about fulfilling a diabolical ideology in the Middle East and much of
the world. These people ought to stop once and for all. Regardless of your political views, you
should all agree with Gabbard here.
[1] Ernesto Londono, "Study: Iraq, Afghan war costs to top $4 trillion," Washington
Post , March 28, 2013; Bob Dreyfuss, The $6 Trillion Wars," The Nation , March 29,
2013; "Iraq War Cost U.S. More Than $2 Trillion, Could Grow to $6 Trillion, Says Watson
Institute Study," Huffington Post , May 14, 2013; Mark Thompson, "The $5 Trillion War
on Terror," Time , June 29, 2011; "Iraq war cost: $6 trillion. What else could have
been done?," LA Times , March 18, 2013.
[2] "360,000 veterans may have brain injuries," USA Today , March 5, 2009.
"We must stand up against powerful politicians from both parties who sit in their ivory towers thinking up new wars to wage, new
places for people to die, wasting trillions of our taxpayer dollars and hundreds of thousands of lives and undermining our economy,
our security, and destroying our middle class."
"... Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes vote. ..."
"... how being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure, for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic? ..."
Foreign policy is more than just war and peace, it is a nuanced and complex issue that
directly affects us here at home. In this interview, Dr. Jane Sanders sits down with
Representative Tulsi Gabbard to talk about U.S. foreign policy and how it affects us here at
home.
Tulsi this is the first I've explored who you are. This conversation felt like a life
giving refreshment. The constant war and regime change policy of every administration since I
was a young child has been utterly confounding. We are bankrupting our society and
civilization with military expenditure exactly like a life destroying heroin addict except
it's on a global scale. These people in the powers that be together with the masses that back
them are literal sociopaths and they're entirely in control at both the highest and base
levels. The only other time I've felt as nourished by a public figure that somehow pierced
through the mainstream media was Bernie Sanders actually expressing the fact that we are an
oligarchy not a democracy. Like oligarchy, anti-war and imperialism is just not talked about.
US Americans won't acknowledge the scale of our imperialism.
Tulsi should run and both Sanders should follow her lead. As much as I love him, Bernie's
too old to be president - when it gets to the stage against Trump, we need a young, vibrant
face. Add onto that the fact that she's a veteran who actually asked to be deployed in
comparison to him, a draft dodger - he looks like an old fat pathetic septogenarian next to
an early 40s real populist. Ultimately it is up to Sanders whether this whole thing is about
a man or a movement. If he runs, he'll probably win the primary but it is not a guarantee
that he'd win - Tulsi would win and she'd be around for decades to come as a standard barer
too.
"Sensible politics" seems to be an oxymoron these days and pretty much throughout the
history of our country. It's so refreshing to see a politician who has a vision for the
future that the majority of us can get behind. It scares me though. I've read quite a bit
about JFK the past few years, and he amassed a number of very powerful and dangerous enemies.
They won't just stand by and allow someone in a position of influence to get the truth out
about our immoral and illegal wars. Tulsi, I support your efforts to bring peace to the
Middle East and elsewhere, but please do be careful. You're a fighter and I admire that, but
we all want you to be safe and healthy for many years to come.
Tulsi Gabbard, I am thrilled to have someone like you running for president. I am a fellow
Veteran dealing with disability and I am glad to have a candidate who understands the issues
Veterans are dealing with. I also realize that the voting public will support the person who
resonates with their personal lives and issues that don't exist in their life they will
disregard.Thank you for you're support.
The DNC will lie cheat and steal the election from Tulsi Gabbard just like they did Bernie
Sanders, and the 15 million Americans who Left the un-Democratic party will double and
triple....DEMEXIT
Tulsi Gabbard needs to be the president of the United States of America period. If she not
the president of our country will not survive. That is a fact, how stupid can our government
be. I guess very stupid, what else can I say. We don't hear that in main news media, the
reason we do hear it the media . The news media is totally brought, the main news media love
money and the devil, simple as that. How are you going to hear about wars from main news
media. They do care about the citizens or the country. We really don't have a real news
media, it all propaganda. All fake news, that why one doesn't hear anything from the new
medias.
Congress needs to take back the war powers. The fact that no one wants to be the one
responsible for deciding to go to war might help slow down if not stop all these regime
change wars. Maybe if Congress votes on it enough of them will be reluctant to make a yes
vote.
WAKE UP, PEOPLE! Bernie is a sell-out - a sheeple-herder that never intended to win. He
was a gatekeeper for Hillary because she is AIPAC-beloved and he is an Israel-firster. He
threw his supporters under the bus as they told him in real time that the nomination was
being stolen. He's part of the con, and the sooner we realize this, the better off we'll be.
BERNIE WORKS FOR DEMOCRATS. Vote Third Party (REAL third parties, not the Bernie Sanders'
kind).
Kinky, 2 months ago
Tulsi - re your comment about our veterans who have "served and sacrificed for their country," could you clarify how
being a mercenary soldier/terrorist in other people's countries, murdering their people and destroying their infrastructure,
for military and multinational corporate profits and Wall St., translates to "serving and sacrificing for the people of our
country"? How do you make that weird leap in logic?
"Joseph Stalin, Soviet dictator, creator of great power, and destroyer of tens of millions
of lives " Thus begins this episode of Uncommon Knowledge, which dives into the biography of
Joseph Stalin. This episode's guest, Stephen Kotkin, author of Stalin: Waiting for Hitler,
1929-1941(
https://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Waiting... ), examines the political career of Joseph Stalin
in the years leading up to World War II, his domination over the Soviet Union, and the terror
he inspired by the Great Purge from 1936–38.
"Why does Joseph Stalin matter?" is a key question for Kotkin, as he explains the history of
the Soviet Union and Stalin's enduring impact on his country and the world. Kotkin argues that
Stalin is the "gold standard for dictatorships" in regard to the amount of power he managed to
obtain and wield throughout his lifetime. Stalin stands out because not only was he able to
build a massive amount of military power, he managed to stay in power for three decades, much
longer than any comparable dictator.
Kotkin and Robinson discuss collectivization and communism and how Stalin's regime believed
it had to eradicate capitalism within the USSR even in regions where capitalism was bringing
economic success to the peasants, with the potential of destabilizing the regime. This led to
the Great Purge, a campaign of political repression that resulted in the exile and execution of
millions of people.
Stalin is one of the most misunderstood and undervalued people that ever lived and it is
no wonder - much of history of Russia is secretive and hidden and you can understand Stalin
only if you know history of Russia itself. First of all you have to realize this - revolution
of 1917 was initiated from abroad, mainly from UK, France and most importantly Germany, what
followed was civil war and multiple interventions from all superpowers of that time. Second
you have to understood this - civil war was the bloodiest thing that ever happened in Russian
history, yes even more so then ww2. Even tho it seems very obvious no historians understand
this one very crucial thing - this civil war + interventions + ww1 made sure that people of
Russia became very cruel, violent and nihilistic and this is most important - they did not
speak any other language then violence anymore. Third, you have to understand one thing very
clearly - Stalin knew it was only a matter of time before western countries will attack
Russia again, when in 1933 Hitler, who clearly wrote in Mein Kampf that he will in fact
attack Russia, came to power, it was a matter of years, not decades when the attack will
begin. Stalin had to industrialize or Russia would perish forever. Yes, there was a lot of
things done by Stalin that looking form our perspective today seems like a crime against
humanity, but let me tell you this - if you had a country full with men, who had seen death,
endless death and cruelty, and if you had understanding that either you take these men and
organize them and repair and prepare country for war that was coming or Russia will perish,
it would be inevitable for anyone to make such inhumane decisions, or even worse decisions.
Imagine what would have happened if Stalin had not acted the way he did. Imagine if he had
not re industrialized Russia? Hitler defeated combined armies of France and UK in a month.
MONTH. If Russia, at that time, had someone in charge, who would not make these seemingly
inhuman decisions, we would be reading about Russians in history books. I know people who had
suffered from Stalins repressions. It was horrible. Could Stalin have done it without all of
these inhumane things. I would say it was impossible - it would have taken too long, if at
all possible, and chances are Stalin would have been killed himself. Let me repeat this once
more - tragic history of ww1, interventions from all superpowers of that time and civil war
made Russians understand only one language, that of the violence. Truth is even to this day
there is deep trauma in Russian psyche which has not healed, to think, to hope, to be able to
stop that chaos and create some order, yes brutal, bloody, but still order, was a titanic
undertaking, undertaking that in my opinion knows no equal in modern history. Very existence
of modern civilization, even the possibility to look at Stalin and say he is a murderer and
dictator, is only possible because Stalin made order out of utter chaos of endless violence
that was Russia in time to prepare for war and to defeat Hitler. No serious thinker can
argue, that if Russia had fallen there would be a force in world that could stop Hitler. Had
Hitler had resources of Russia it would have been game over for any opposing force, so before
spitting on Stalins grave be sure to remember that.
Mao did the same exact thing -- Watch and see if the same thing happens here in the US.
All the US idiots that supported the financial destruction of the US will find the same
fate.
Our nations education system has done a serious disservice to our countrymen by not
teaching the horrors of communism at the same level as they teach about the nazis. Both serve
in their equal way as a reminder of how extremists can over take a nation and they death they
leave in their wake.
This guy has a way of making an extremely interesting subject incredibly boring. All dry
details, no insight or interesting conclusions. How would anyone remember this video without
any connection to the rest of life?
I know that Stalin is terrible..., but who did all those atrocities? People, many people.
Not a small group of tens or even hundreds maniacs, but millions of people directly or
indirectly participated in those crimes and they had incentives to do just that. Why now
Russians don't want to talk about it? Because there is a blood on hands of their ancestors
and many of them are the direct beneficiaries of those crimes. Stalin is terrible..., but he
expressed the will of a huge portion of the population. Without a support of millions he
alone could not do it . Who will have a courage to write a book about that?
His analysis is wrong, Stalin installed Orwellin facism. It's the Coinflip between Hitler
and Stalin, Kapitalist facism and Kommunist facism. Both are equal... Hitler would have
killed as much and even more people if he had the time...
And they criticise Hoover for being anti communist and going after communists rats in
Uncle Sams cabin if only the majority of people in Western society read about the history of
communism and how 100 million people ended up dying because of it but they're ignorant and
don't care while its gaining momentum in our country and people in Russia are having
nostalgia for Stalin. It should be mandatory in schools to read about Stalin, lenin, Mao and
Castro.
The power of ideology over common sense.. "They believed that capitalism is evil", the
moment one believes into something by definition it means without the support of the facts,
like believing into JC being part of trinity, called God. The same devastating results. Now
we have the new progressive left falling into the same trap of neo Marxism that is destroying
the west.
This shows how ideology is all bogus, Communism and Capitalism. The fact is that integrity
and justice is what builds wealth, not ideologies that are all destabilizing. Justice demands
that people are rewarded for their labors and note that things went well when the working
peasants owned and worked without coercion. When capitalism becomes coercive it is no
different than communism. Justice, freewill and integrity is everything and that is what
builds wealth. Greed and selfishness and lust for power destroys everything. Communism
brought collectivization and incorporation of wealth brings the same thing since not it is
not the collective that owns everything in capitalism but in reality the same thing called
the corporation that actually becomes essentially a monopoly that mimics a communist
collective. Small businesses and companies, not corporations, in a truly democratic and
competitive structure has produced great wealth. If you look at where the jobs are being
generated and where wealth for the average person is being generated, it is small businesses
in a fair market system.
I like it when someone of Jewish descent dares to critisize Stalin. Stalin contributed a
lot to saving Jewry from physical extermination, to foundation of Israel, lots of
Russian/Soviet elite members were of Jewish descent etc. I think this is the only case when
it is appropriate to say: "Don't like Stalin? Go and kill yourself", because if you really do
not appreciate him, you do not appreciate what he did, like saving your life, in particular.
The same goes to Polish, Ukrainians who claim to be especially offended by Stalin but don't
want to return the geographical and other perks they got after the WWII and deny the crimes
they committed (like killing the Jews in Poland 1944-1945) and were punished for by
Stalin.
"Collectivization enslaved 100 million people" It is fascinating really how western
narratives can reach new standards of pseudo-scientific levels every day. Why Stalin matter?
Because he was leader of the first free worker state since the dawn of states and he made
(not alone ofc) capitalism seem soooooooo old and outdated.
I still cannot get over thinking Stalin is just a low class opportunist who rode in on the
coat-tails of the more visionary Lenin and then adopted whatever ideals would foster his
survival. He's utilitarian crude but not even as considerate of alternatives as Mao. He
simply lucked into killing who he needed like a rising mafioso. If he was intelligent he
would've left Russia more in a state of compromised communism like Deng Xiaoping instead of
liquidating al rivals who would foster that, realizing ideology could always resurface if
power in other spheres allows. Stalin was utilitarian but not pragmatic. Stalin lasted long
enough to tamper with the legacy of his story so that he left an impression that he was
semi-legitimate to inherit Lenin's mantle. Stalin was the Corleone of empirical Marxism not
Machiavelli. He was a deus ex machina who instead of leaving robust progressives like Mao did
(they suffered but survived) who changed what was needed to thrive, decimated the hierarchy
and left the weakest successors one could fathom, epitomized by Khrushchev. His rebirth is
Putin. Russia needs a more Deng Xiaoping or better yet Lee Kuan Yew figure to bolster its
power.
Lol perfect example of American academics and students being so laughably indoctrinated
about even some of the most simple, easily verifiable facts... These new generation of
students created by capitalism and American ignorance are going to be the defeat of
America
Stalin destroyed his "superpower" country as soon as he created it. Please note USSR
starts decaying as soon as Stalin dies. Only repression and violations of human rights kept
it together as long as they did
(((Joseph Stalin)))........I can't even pronounce his real name if I tried....Bullsheviks
are such scums, lower than animals, lower than insects. A bunch of conniving mongrels that
project their unspeakable crimes onto their victims.
This guy understood almost nothing (judging from interview, didn't read the book).
Collectivization was the tool to create market for industrialization. Individual peasant
farms were too poor to buy tractors and other expensive products of Soviet industrial
revolution of 1920-th. Collective farms were able (and ordered) to do so. Not defending moral
side here just like moral side "Enclosure" – immediate prerequisite of British
industrialization of XVI century. Idea was the same – creation of industrial might on
the back of peasants. Big deal. Btw among my ancestors were Kulaks (meaning "Fist" in
Russian, quite pre-communist peasant term describing peasant "bankers" who lent seeds and
equipment to poor peasants for interest) so I'm not in position to defend commies but just
amused to hear this rubbish. As for repressions of mid 1930-th. Stalin (like everybody else)
knew who (Western bankers) and why (to crush Soviet Union) took Hitler to power. From that
moment on Soviet Union was preparing for war. Btw not only with Germany but with United
Europe. It is easier to list EU countries which didn't invade us in 1941: Spain, Portugal,
Switzerland, Great Britain and Turkey. Except for Great Britain all of them traded, got
diplomatic relations etc. with Germany (including btw US till 1942 when Hitler declared war
to US lol). Anyways those repressions cleansed Soviet ruling class of old commie demagogues
good for nothing expect babbling. Especially the army. Btw in 1944 Goebbels realized (in his
diary) how genius it was: Hitler's generals were old tards in their mid-70-th at best, while
Soviet generals were in their mid-40-th – ambitious and energetic. The same was true
for civil administration. Anyways I'm not defending SU (after all it failed, whatever the
reason) I'm just amazed to see the guy who is actually knowledgeable on details but fails to
understand the general picture so-to-speak.
I get annoyed when Communist sympathizers (Tankies) suggest that there is no other
alternative than unrestrained capitalism and Marxism. I disagree. There of course, is the
middle-way between socialism and capitalism. West Germany, Adenauer, and Erhard enshrined
this with their "social market economy", robust social welfare programs and the free-market
system operating within it.
You Westerners, especially Americans (both liberals and conservatives) are obsessed by the
crimes of non western rulers and dictators and other political leaders (to the point extreme
exaggeration) but you never look into your own mirror and see your own bloody crimes. If you
did that would see that you were no better at all. British empire throughout its history was
no better than USSR and comitted terrible attrocities around the world (just ask people of
India or Africa) but no one ever calls them evil empire as they do for Soviets. If you look
more deeply into the Russian history you will see that Stalin was not much different than
other tyranical rulers of Russia like Peter the Great, Cathrerine the Great of Ivan the
Terrible. He followed the same geopolitical doctrine established by Peter the Great (create
buffer zone in the west from eastern European countries, take control of Balkan pennisula and
eastern part of Mediterranean which Stalin failed, create preasure on Turkey and Persia
(Iran) to secure borders which he also did, take full control of Black sea etc.) Stalin is
not hated in the West just because of his crimes but mainly because he created a huge
geopolitical rival . That is the very same reason why is he considered as the most popular
historical figure in modern Russia.For them he is the great leader, 20th century equivalent
to Alexander Nevsky, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great or Putin today. Cruel but rightful,
the one who will lead them to the new victories and protect them from western invasion (tbh
there were multiple tries to invade Russia from west : Teutonic Knights,Poland ,Sweden,
Napoleon and Hitler all tried but failed). They (Russians) see the history from their own
point of view and you see it from your own, but the real truth is somewhere in the middle.
This is a geopolitical battle nothing more than that. Greetings from Serbia.
So in short, because capitalists would not loan money to the USSR, USSR instead forced
collectivization to raise grain to exchange for hard cash. In addition, because capitalists
would not loan money to the USSR, we alienated the USSR, lost it as a potential ally against
Hitler in the 30s, which allowed Germany to rise, and 55,000,000 people get killed. PLUS
citizens of the capitalist nations wind up paying for that war anyway, at far higher cost
than those refused loans. Thanks, capitalists! Btw this Hoover Institution interviewer could
not think outside the box if his life depended on it.
No matter how hard Kotkin tries, this clueless interviewer can't appreciate history
because he's so damned wedded to the status quo explanation that touts the US and condemns
Stalin. Kotkin's fundamental message is that Stalin is perhaps the only man history has seen
who could stand this rigorously for the principles at which the USSR was aiming. Kotkin says,
the goals were there, the methods would have to be severe, Stalin followed through, hence his
greatness. Interviewer responds: "Yeah the terror." Just a dolt.
Stalin has industrialized and in many ways modernized for 20-30 years a totally devastated
and disorganized, vastly peasant country, at the expense of enormous political and social
repressions. Fact. People forget that Russia was pretty much still a feudal country before
the revolution. Was he right aiming and doing that and were there better ways - is another
thing. Was he brutal and inhuman from modern western perspective - of course. But the moral
judgement itself does not explain many other historical phenomena.
Interesting, how professor jumped from "Stalin survived" to "USSR economy is back on
rails", missing the part, how bad collectivisation overcame exellent private farming. While
it is obviouse, that collective work on a ground is MORE productive, and even MUCH MORE
productive because it can be mechanised with tracktors and other machines. Theory over
reality? Ha. P.S. The farther I listern, the more I wondering, what sources this professor
used. Solzhenitzin? No crisys in 193x? Ever heard about Mein Kampf? 830000 killed in
1936-1938? Where are those numbers came from? Official NKVD internal number is about
600000 executed from 1935 to 1953. All of them including common crimes like murder. And it`s
crosscheked. Read a god damn official NKVD documents. They are opened to read
today.
Just an off the wall idea, i know nix of this history but is it possible that the Terror
starting in 1936 that so weakened the Soviet Union before the war that Hitler knew was
coming, that Stalin is suggested to have instigated against his own regime's supporters to
consolidate his own position from any challenge, could have been a Nazi psychological
operation directly targeting Stalin and using his own authority against the SU in
general?
STALIN was a GEORGIAN SEMINARIST like other ortodox seminaristen of Gergian he hate the
jews and the Otomans...Trosky said to Spanish Ambassador in Paris Don Pepe Quiñones de
León in SdN that STALIN said Germans want the open Vienna to OTOMANS...German is in
the hands of Otoman Turkish and only RUSSIA can save GEORGIA and ARMENIA....and Moscow was in
the hands of KAUKASIANS ready to stop OTOMANS and NAZI...Ruddolf HESS was the founder
ofMUSLIM BRODERHOOD in Aegypt
Same Anglo-American propaganda to malign Russia and Stalin. The fact is it is because of
Stalin Hitler could be defeated. The fact is after the war USA formed these institutions and
fake historians who and rehabilitated former Nazi generals (War criminals) to malign Russia
and Stalin.
Western countries more precisely western ruling elites think that they some kind of moral
highground or moral integrity to criticize other nation's leaders. The problem is they don't
have minimal moral integrity to apply such criticism. Minimal moral integrity means that if
we think that something wrong or bad when others do it, it is also bad when we do it.
Everything else is hypocrisy. Western elites don't hate and despise Stalin not just because
of his crimes or because of his ideology. Imagine that Stalin was nightmarish version
Yeltsin, submissive and cooperative to the West but in the same timr tyranical and merciless
to his own people (somethin like Saudia Arabia but 10 times worse). Nobody would say anything
, they would just pretend that nothing happened. Stalin strenghtened Ŕussia like no
other Russian leader before even Peter the Great can't come close to him. Under Stalin's rule
Russia/USSR evolved from agrarian country that was ripped apart by war with illiterate mostly
rural population with no health care to powerful industrial war machine, with modern
infrastructure and science, with millitary that was able to compete with Hitler (and defeat
him) and later with USA, that had nuclear weapons that still protect Russia. From agrarian
society to nuclear superpower and independent geopolitical rival with second most powerful
economy right after USA (until Brezhnev era of stagnation). This is the main reason why West
hates him (similar can be applied to Putin today but to much lesser degree).This is also the
only side that most Russians see about Stalin, and usualy ignore the other much darker side
of his rule. Never before in Russian history so many people were shot and sent to death
camps-Gulag. Never before in history of Russia so many people died from hunger or were
forcibly moved from their homes. It was a reing of remarkable political terror, time of
purges of anyone who thought different from main party line. This is what West heavily
exploits in their propaganda to the point when it becomes ridiculous. Similar can be said
about communist China and Mao Zedong. Communist victory in 1949 was labelled by Americans as
"the loss of China". What was exactly lost? Did China dissapear from the face of earth? None
of that, the only thing that was lost is Western influence over China. For more than 100
years China was under Western and Japanese influence (100 years of humilliation as Chinese
would say). Chinese people were humilliated and killed, their former empire's treasures
looted, strategic parts of territory taken away by British and Japanese, with any atempt of
rebellion or reformation by standards of western democracy crushed ruthlessly by either by
West (British,French and Americans) or by Japanese and their chinese warlord puppets . When
communista won everyone was outraged because China finally become independent and free from
foreing occupation, therefore becoming a rival. They don't care about democracy or human
rights, they just don't want you to be independent and have control over your territory and
natural resources. Democratic or despotic it doesn't matter at all, only what matters is are
you independent or not.
Oh please. Another propaganda piece that tells the American/Bourgeois perspective. Which
is 80% bullshit and misrepresentation. Stalin was not a dictator, nor was he a genocidal
maniac. This is purely American propaganda. In fact, 70% of all Russians still believe Stalin
was the best figure of the 20th century. Stalin first of all did not support a dictatorship.
Nor was collectivization "forcing" collectivization on "innocent peasants." In 1917, during
the Russian Febuary and October Revolution, the Soviet vanguard (the leaders of the
Bolsheviks) did not control most of Russia. Even into the 30's, the state could not police
the entire Soviet Union. It was simply to large. Instead, local workers councils decided how
their communities were run. The Soviets (A Soviet is Russian for council) decided how to
manage their factories and communities. The Soviets were made up 100% of workers who
willingly consented to join in a greater entity to gain democratic control over their
communities. They also established workers militias and police forces. The peasants, who due
to the revolution and natural famines that came after, (Russia had experienced many famines
before 1917) wanted food to eat. So naturally, they went to the people who had an abundance
of grain. These people were the Kulaks. The Kulaks hoarded grain so that they could
artificially raise prices on the starving peasants. In response the vangaurd and local
soviets told the Kulaks to hand over their grain so as to feed the hungry masses. When they
refused, and helped contribute to worsening the issue of food scarcity, they were told they
could either release control of their hoarded grain, or face Soviet law. This is where the
whole "forced collectivization" meme comes from. Also, a collective is not state run. It is
state guided. A collective, or cooperative as they are known as in most Capitalist countries
was a independent entity that was run in a decentralized local fashion. Workers
democratically decided most of the decisions that were made in the cooperatives/collectives.
And state only served to ensure health standards and guide production. Next, the Stalin never
"enforced" anything on the workers. The workers were in charge of their own destiny. You can
see this in the 1936 constitution. A constitution in which Stalin fought tooth and nail to
get secret ballots put in. Stalin, contrary to popular belief in the west, could not on a
whim tell the NKVD to go kill Ukrainians or some shit. There was the Politburo. Which was
comprised of other high ranking Soviet officials. Many of these officials opposed Stalin and
his reforms. Leading to less democracy in the USSR than there should have been. Stalin tried
multiple times until his death to give more power to the Soviets. However, at every turn his
revisionist opponents would stop him. Stalin also was the one who mandated that the corrupt
NKVD be purged after he found out about the wrongful detention of innocents. In 1939, Stalin
led the purging of the NKVD and all innocent victims were released and compensated. This is
quite contrary to image this video is trying to paint. As for the "muh 60-100 million dead
Ukrainians!" This is also bullshit. No where in and Soviet census are these ridiculous claims
found to be accurate. Under Stalin Soviet population had an annual growth of around 1.4%.
During the second World War, population dropped drastically, with around 10 million dead.
However the largest fall in Soviet Union population was in 1992, when the USSR fell due to
traitors within the party. The same who opposed Stalin's reforms and destroyed his name. The
same who allied with the enemies of the USSR. Please don't believe this libelous nonesense.
This IS propaganda. If you want to know my sources just ask and I'll provide. I also suggest
watching TheFinnishBolshevik if you want to see the other perspective on the USSR. One last
thing, Capitalism kills 2 million each year...
"Stalin is the one who did it?" quoth the pseudo-intellectual interviewer. Sure, one guy
did it! What nonsense! The Holodomir was about killing the Christian middle class of the
Ukraine, who were land-owning farmers (called "peasants" by rootless cosmopolitans). There is
a curious religious component to bolshevism. Kaganovich and Yagoda played interesting roles
in the Holodomir and other ethnic purges. The necessity of collectivization is taught by the
same rootless cosmopolitans who created Stalin and implemented "change, change, change," then
jumped ship for the US.
I have to note that both, Stalin and Hitler both were creative individuals , both were
creating world around them the way they were believing it. Hitler was an artist, in his early
years , Stalin , as a young boy wrote very nice poetry. The tremendous determination comes
from this creative energy,which makes this individuals stand out from others. They were good
or bad, let's put this in this kind of simple way, is the question of the different kind.
I see a questionable statement early on: Marxism-Leninism requires collectivization of
peasants. Marx and Lenin dealt with the urban proletariat without really addressing the rural
economy. The Bolsheviks improvised their rural economic policies as they went and Stalin
collectivized not for socialist ends, but for nationalist ends. The nation needed to take the
kulaks land and force them into more efficient collectives.
The Hoover Institute is filled to the brim with blood-thirsty neocons, and are pushing for
more wars in the middle East. The Trump regime is plundering the American people for the 0.1
percent. White fascism is emboldened, gun violence and hate crimes are rising. But yes, tell
us about how some paranoic hallucinated emergent Stalinism is the greatest threat to America.
The quivering voice of "I hope millennials are listening" from this blood sucking
world-killer is pathetic.
New Economic Policy stopped bringing benefits in the middle of 20s, stagnation and decoy,
it couldn't feed all the people, to build new industry. Collectivization and
industrialization solved that problem with 15% economic growth per year, non of capitalistic
states could even dream about similar digitals...Hey, Kotkin, why didnt you tell how Stalin
wanted to make the direct elections on every ruling positions in his 1936 Constitution to
make USSR even more democratic but lost it and than Nomenklatura started repressions as an
answer to destroy Stalin's crew? Stalin edited confessions.. oh my god, what a bullshit.. now
i understand why westeners never understand Stalin because of freaks like this Kotkin who
creates fake history.
Bolshevik revolution was envisioned and led by Jews. While Jews constituted 1.2% of
Russian population, Bolshevik ;leadership was 85% Jewish. Bolsheviks murdered or starved over
20 Million people, mostly Orthodox Christians. While all are concerned about 4 Million Jews
killed during WWII, nobody cares about Jewish Communists killing 20 Million people in
Russia.
Take land away from the peasants? lol. You mean the landlords and the Abrahamic church.
The peasants were brainwashed fools who thought jesus would be mad if they didn't serve their
landlords. There were around 10,000 people executed by Stalin and Mao. Not even close to
millions. Most of which were utter morons. My father lived in the USSR under Stalin and it
wasn't bad or that much different than the USA. The US just put more perfume and lipstick on
the pig. Like this nonsense I'm watching right now.
Why can't you say Trotsky was a genius Jew? A great Jewish revolutionary, and Marx was a
Jewish revolutionary. It's about Jews trying to create their Utopian Heaven on Earth, a
perfect society, the dream of the Jews who dream of equality. Bolsheviks were mostly Jews
promoting Communism, for their Utopian Holy Land. Hitler hated Jews because they supported
Communism and Russia who wanted to take over Germany and it's wealth and economy. Communists
DID take over Germany for fifty years. Hitler saw this coming.
I find it strange that Kotpic mentions 'judeo/bolshevism' once, and only in passing. Yet
bolshevism is all tied up with the Jews. Trotsky was a Jewish revolutionary, who delivers
seed money directly from American Jewish banker Jacob Schfiff to early Russian
revolutionaries, most of whom are Jewish . Kotpic fails to inform us that many of those
cadres, sent into the country side to help collectivize the farms, are themselves Jews. He
makes absolutely no reference to chief Jewish lieutenants of Stalin, like kagonovich and
Yagoda. These two murderous thugs are just like their boss. Does Kotpic keep these figures
out of the narrative because he is a Jew as well? I don't know, but one has to wonder
Because Jews cannot forgive Stalin for removing Jewish Bolsheviks from the helm, stopping
Lev Bronstein's (Trotsky) Permanent Revolution and disbanding their Third International! Of
course it did not stop the suffering of the Russian people a bit: after millions tortured,
raped and murdered by Jewish Bolsheviks during the "Russian" revolution and the ensuing
bloody civil war Jews continued their work under Stalin: just check out the crimes of Lazar
Kaganovich and Genrikh Yagoda (aka Yenokh Iyeguda): those are just a couple of prominent
Jewish mass-murderers that are personally responsible for millions of deaths in the Ukrainian
famine and in GULAG death camps that each of them created! So they keep on sulking and
bemoaning that lost opportunity to impose their evil bloody Bolshevik rule on the rest of the
world - and Stalin is their convenient scapegoat, including for the genocide of the Russian
and the Ukrainian people that their kind has committed!
Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe has refused to deny reports that he nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel
Peace Prize after being "informally" asked to do so by the White House, in a move that prompted
ridicule online.
"... But while China has succeeded in conserving a degree of control on capital outflows and private accumulation, the characteristic of Putin's Russia is an unbounded drift into kleptocracy. Between 1993 and 2018, Russia had massive trade surpluses: approximately 10% of GDP per annum on average for 25 years, or a total in the rage of 250% of GDP (two and a half years of national production). In principle that should have enabled the accumulation of the equivalent in financial reserves. This is almost the size of the sovereign public fund accumulated by Norway under the watchful gaze of the voters. The official Russian reserves are ten times lower – barely 25% of GDP. ..."
One would have to be incredibly naive on the order of say a 3 year old or maybe Forrest
Gump to believe Putin isn't a very wealthy man who will never want for anything as long as he
has billionaire cronies indebted to him politically in one way or the other.
Of course, some people must cling to their illusions, er I mean their idealism, of others
no matter what. Dog knows why.
More generally, the Soviet disaster led to the abandon of any ambition of redistribution.
Since 2001, income tax is 13%, whether your income be 1,000 roubles or 100 billion roubles.
Even Reagan and Trump have not gone as far in the destruction of progressive taxation.
There is no tax on inheritance in Russia, nor in the People's Republic of China. If you
want to pass on your fortune in peace in Asia, it is better to die in the ex-Communist
countries and definitely not in the capitalist countries such as Taiwan, South Korea or
Japan where the tax rate on inheritance on the highest estates has just risen from 50% to
55%.
But while China has succeeded in conserving a degree of control on capital outflows and
private accumulation, the characteristic of Putin's Russia is an unbounded drift into
kleptocracy. Between 1993 and 2018, Russia had massive trade surpluses: approximately 10%
of GDP per annum on average for 25 years, or a total in the rage of 250% of GDP (two and a
half years of national production). In principle that should have enabled the accumulation
of the equivalent in financial reserves. This is almost the size of the sovereign public
fund accumulated by Norway under the watchful gaze of the voters. The official Russian
reserves are ten times lower – barely 25% of GDP.
Where has the money gone? According to our estimates, the offshore assets alone held by
wealthy Russians exceed one year of GDP, or the equivalent of the entirety of the official
financial assets held by Russian households. In other words, the natural wealth of the
country, (which, let it be said in passing, would have done better to remain in the ground
to limit global warming) has been massively exported abroad to sustain opaque structures
enabling a minority to hold huge Russian and international financial assets. These rich
Russians live between London, Monaco and Moscow: some have never left Russia and control
their country via offshore entities. Numerous intermediaries and Western firms have also
recouped large crumbs on the way and continue to do so today in sport and the media
(sometimes this is referred to as philanthropy). The extent of the misappropriation of
funds has no equal in history.
Well, there can be no doubt Amerikkkans, Euros, Asians, Middle Easterners, grifters,
entrepreneurs, lumpen proles and many others of all persuasions participated in the sacking
of Russia's national wealth since the fall of the USSR. Probably even a few Canadiens took
part. Lol.
Capitalust feeding frenzies of this magnitude are ugly sights to behold, like the
Washington DC pig trough on a daily basis.
Russia's is truly a global phenomenon to be sure.
Or maybe a "globalist" phenomenon is a better way to putin words.
And of course, the chart at the top of Piketty's post is most interesting too....it shows
the US equally as unequal as Russia. I'm not letting the US off the hook here in any way
shape or form. But this thread is about Russia and worse exposits a demented sort of idealism
by many posters about the country and its Dear Leader that is unwarranted, IMHO. Not you of
course.
The heinous accumulation of Russian wealth is intertwined...leaving Russia and shunted
through tax havens, laundered, anonymised and ending up invested in the West....not back home
in Mother Russia....where it could lead to more economic development and opportunities for
the non-oligarchs....instead of more growth in the US and West, where agin most ends up in
the pockets of our own oligarchs, one Donald Trump among them.
As the narrative of a 'racist, homophobic
attack' on actor Jussie Smollett in Chicago continues to collapse, politicians and celebrities
who fueled the outrage over the incident are quietly backing away and hoping no one
notices.
Japanese Prime
Minister Shinzo Abe has refused to deny reports that he nominated Donald Trump for the Nobel
Peace Prize after being "informally" asked to do so by the White House, in a move that prompted
ridicule online.
A few randomish thoughts: As I've noted previously, not as a result of science on my part
but of impression, leading candidates for the title of Most Demonized Leader over the last
century have been Hitler, Trump and Putin. Now leaving aside any further analysis of the
failings and virtues of the former pair, let us merely note that what the three have in
common is at least a powerful nominal emphasis on national sovereignty. Or to put in another
way, the 'globalization' meme, with its 'national sovereignty is outmoded, etc', was and is
at least nominally repudiated by all three.
Supporters of the globalization meme have included those gaining power via the
transnational corporate and financial juggernaut, those committed to variations on the theme
of 'full spectrum domination', those who became captive of the ideology that the only way to
prevent a global nuclear war was to end the nation state and set up a global totalitarianism,
and well meaning people who liked the sound of 'we're all just part of the global village
now', with a nod to the "I prefer it such that I can fly anywhere and do anything I want'
credit-card powered crowd.
But most of us have our roots attached to place, its people and history and future
prospects. We're locals, attached to a country.
Curiously, after much Putin and Russia bashing, there was a petition in Alaska in 2014
– at some point it had 30,000 signatures – asking Russia to take Alaska back.
But RT weighed in with the news that 85% of Germans saw US-German relations as negative or
very negative, and an astounding 2% saw Russia as a problem.
There has been a long standing meme represented by the words 'the ugly American'. This was
the dollars flush barbarian going off to far off lands and demonstrating a startling lack of
diplomatic culture and proper upbringing. But even so, if we say fly mentally back to early
nineteen sixties, the admiration for America was still very strong, even in the USSR. When
Jackie Kennedy visited India for example, it was like a hugely noted and positive event.
Now, after decades of foreign wars of aggression - the greatest crime - direct and by
proxy, all camouflaged by lies, the 'war' turns on America itself, with tens of thousands of
swat team raids, excelling in killing the family dog, and some of the streets of San
Francisco looking like ghoulish zombie land, among the many symptoms of extreme and perhaps
terminal dysfunction.
Who would want that? Countries around the planet are definitely in the alternative
approach mode.
There are so many aspects to the cultural divide between Russia and say the US. Note that
Russia has encouraged organic agriculture - good for people and environment - banned
GMOs.
And Russia's protective standards on Electromagnetic exposures, last I checked, were far more
protective than that prevailing in US (and Canada for that matter).
I've read the article by Dugin now, and gone back to read Surkov. I probably need to read
them both again, perhaps forever, because I think they illustrate the nation of Russia trying
to find its way forward into "life beyond Putin", and both articles are of extreme importance
as two sides of a dialog.
I think Dugin is correct when he says that Putin has fallen short of creating a new system
of state that can itself endure. And that the oligarchs will naturally attempt, after Putin,
to rule the state as in the old way. He is correct in saying that no alternative to Putin has
come forth in all this time, and that this is a failing of the situation. He is also correct,
as many friends of Russia here would agree, that the day of reckoning for the fifth column
and the corrupt vested interests has not come under Putin, and that it remains yet to happen
- if at all - after Putin.
And this is the crux. Will that day of reckoning come, or will evil gain in strength again
when Putin is gone?
Dugin says that the Russian people have to have this fight and overthrow that privileged,
non-patriotic, class of people. I personally would call it a class revolution of sorts that
establishes a formal strain of socialism into the system - creating a hard-wired system that
Dugin himself would trust to endure, regardless of leaders.
Surkov meanwhile is saying that the people are the source of all power, and that Putin's
genius is that he is naturally plugged into that source. And that any successive leaders must
follow the Putin model and be plugged into the people. Surkov seems to think that this will
happen because it must, by force of the dynamic itself, and its imperative itself. Maybe this
is so. And maybe it happens because of advocates like Surkov in attendance to its birth.
What I take from both these sides of the one argument - which is simply and purely how to
envision a world beyond Putin - is that Putin has not left a changed system but he has left a
spiritual benchmark for the goodness of the state, and it is intimately bound up with the
well being of the people. This benchmark will endure, for a time, after Putin, but how the
people rise to fill the void and create a more perfect system, I think remains to be seen,
remains to happen. In this regard, I see no reason for despair or complacency.
I humbly thank those thanking me. It's very gratifying!
Jose Garcia @59 distilled much into his short appraisal, to which I only endorse. I see
the following caught b's eye and those of others:
"Russia ... returned to its natural and its only possible condition: that of a great
and growing community of nations that gathers lands. It is not a humble role that world
history has assigned to our country, and it does not allow us to exit the world stage or to
remain silent among the community of nations; it does not promise us rest and it
predetermines the difficult character of our governance."
Any open-minded, closely watching, student of Russian history would easily understand
what's meant by the bolded text; although presently, the lands being gathered are those of
its allies. And in those words, the author admits Russia remains an Empire, although
diminished somewhat from its greatest extent. However, it's a Communal Empire, embracing over
100 different ethnic groups, numerous tongues, and every major religion. Yet, the
"Nationality Question" that so intrigued Sovietologists as a possible way to implode the USSR
provides the inner core of Russia's "deep nation," and on almost every public occasion I've
seen Putin attend he shows a pride in Russia's diversity Trump and ilk are completely
incapable of.
And what would be the state of the world today if not for Russia? What coalition would
have been capable of stopping Napoleon if Russia hadn't sacrificed first? The Kaiser's racial
war for dominance between Teutons and Slavs, which would've likely been a slam-dun repeat of
1870 if not for the need for two fronts. The 25+ Million Soviets and other nationalities that
allied on the Eastern Front to defeat Hitler's Armies. And perhaps I'll go outside the box
and allege that if not for the USSR, post-war USA would have colonized the planet as it still
desires.
But what of "Putinism." We should return to Jose's sharp analysis and add: Putin insists
on the dedicated involvement of his fellow citizens; that they work just as hard and
diligently as he; and that they also play and enjoy life just as much. In return, he will be
as honest and open with his fellows as possible--which is really rather amazing to observe
and is of another universe from what we get "treated" to in the West. He wants
feedback--positive and negative--he wants to hear about the problems he never gets to hear
about--his humanism is startling, again, as it's so diametrically different. And he's almost
always positive--even when he's being negative. If he errs, he owns up. Then there's the
courage of his convictions and constancy of being morally, ethically, and legally
correct--which in Russia means he's also politically correct. Does it really require someone
special to have those traits? I don't think so, although there're personality types that
would never be capable of performing as does Putin. I think it's all related to the basics:
Parenting, schooling, mentoring, but also the overall context of growing up in what is truly
a cosmopolitan nation that's accepting of Others--again, to be Russian means to embrace
Russianness, which is unique amongst national cultures as noted above. In short, only a
Russian is capable of emulating Putin.
But, the question's begged: Would Putin fit as head-of-state for a Western nation, or
would that be impossible due to the vastly differing contexts?
veritas semper vincit , Feb 16, 2019 9:38:37 PM | link
This was one of your best articles, and there's no short supply here. Thank you, Mr. B.
Russia is fulfilling old prophecies.
The country is an enormous mass land, between East and West, and because of this and its
history, I believe it is the world 's balancer.
Russia has been to Hell and back and in the process managed to learn from past mistakes( and
we have to remember that some of those mistakes, like the Bolshevik revolution, were financed
by the west: Trotsky( Bronshtein) and his 2 Bil in today's money from Kuhn and Loeb Bank,
Jacob Schiff, Lenin with millions in gold from Germany).
What did not kill Russia, made her stronger. Russia witnessed the "superior" US system,
liberalism, during Yeltsin's era, not only communism. And Russia chose neither.
She chose Mr. Putin, a real patriot, who took Russia from her knees and elevated her to the
role she has today: a superpower.
I don't think the Russians wanted this role, but they didn't have a choice. Somebody has to
fight the psychopaths.
As for US, the coup d'erat was incremental: the cornerstone was in 1913, with the creation of
the private Federal Reserve, with its 9 big banks shareholders,the root of all evil .Money
created as debt( credit) and loaned to people with interest. Fractional reserve banking
later. Everything else is bribes and blackmails.
Then 1963, the removal of the only semi independent president, who would have put a stop to
their NWO.
1970's with replacement of Bretton Woods with the petro-dollar deal and the subsequent wars
.
And 2001 as the grand finale: total control.
Now US has to protect the petro-dollar, the only think giving it relevance; This explains our
wars, enemies, allies( like KSA).
Some say that US was a FreeMason construct from the very beginning. And looking at all
Masonic signs: dollar bill, Statue of Liberty, apotheosis of Washington , Washington DC
plans, most founding fathers, etc. they may be right.
I was listening to a podcast and one speaker asserted that Venezuelans would be grateful
for their improved living conditions and remain loyal to Maduro, and the other speaker said
that people tend to take their improvements for granted and demand more. https://cprnews.podbean.com/e/cpr-news-february-11-2019/
As I understand it, that is what happened in the USSR. The recovery of housing and food after
the destruction of WW2 was completed by the 80s, and then people wanted more. The leaders
started increasing meat production, leading to buying grain from the US, and then the US
bribed top KGB officials and bureaucrats, and then Yeltsin and the bribed leaders of Ukraine
and Belarus signed away the USSR, against the wishes of the vast majority of the
population.
Only brainwashed westerners would announce that that the destruction of the Soviet Union
was "bloodless". That ignores the bombing of the White House, the murders of opposition
leaders and the mass die off of millions of people, referred to in the West as "life
expectancy dropped dramatically" (because the west is the undisputed king of spin and
propaganda).
The population of Russia is only now recovering to their 1990 level, but let us blather on
and on about how wonderful the destruction of the USSR was.
It wasn't so great for the rest of the world, either. Our gloating leader, George H. W.
Bush, flush with delight and greed, as Russia lay prostrate and ready for plundering, in
1991, announced "There is now a New World Order", meaning that the USA would rule the world.
We can all see what that means for the rest of the world, and for the population of the US,
now also stripped and looted, increasingly in the last 26 years. The US went on a worldwide
killing spree, while at home, with no USSR as a good example, or to support rational left
politics, we have lost our unions, our jobs, our houses and our damn common sense. Now they
are telling us that men can be women and vice versa, in the final Big Brother control of
reality and perception. War is Peace, check. Ignorance is Strength, check. It is possible to
change your biological body with the power of your mind, check.
They have turned us into blithering idiots, fit only to bicker as the final looting
commences.
This is a "big picture" article short on detail. Putin will go down as one of the great
leaders of Russian (and world) history. Fine. What comes after him? What is the plan to
transfer power to a subsequent COMPETENT leader? It is fine to trust Putin, power flowing
from Putin outward, but what if after Putin Russia gets another Gorbachov? What then?
On the contrary: evidence shows us the military was the last resistance against the
desintegration of the USSR. The thing here is that it didn't need to desintegrate to
reform.
The main problem with the USSR is that it created a system where any reform could only be
radical. It wasn't a question of "ideological rigidity": the Soviets knew their problems
since at least the 1950s (and, even before that, when Lenin was still alive, after the
Kronstadt tragedy, an event that triggered the NEP - the reforms which would, 58 years later,
inspire the new Chinese socialist model).
DontBelieveEitherPropaganda , Feb 16, 2019 9:30:03 AM | link
One thing to add:
While Surkov writes that people in the west are losing faith in their politicians and now
would be looking at Russia as a positive example of a political system:
The problem for the majority of people in the western country i live in (Germany) and IMHO
for the most other so called western countrys is NOT that the demoocratic system itself would
be the problem, but that this system has been corrupted by politicians, neoliberals, neocons,
and anti democratic cancers like deep state elites and the like.
Here most people HATE e.g. the social democrats NOT because they are social democrats, but
because the are now only social democrats by NAME ONLY.
The democratic system may be flawed, but it still is without any real alternative for the
majority of non extremist people.
Scrapping that for toothless pseudo opposition like in Russia would not be in the interest
for the majority of people.
This is IMHO a different story for every country. Russia IMHO needs to go its own way, and
like Putin said himself, is not ready for a full democracy. It would lead directly back into
the 90s, and the huge majority of Russians know that, and therefore vote for the much lesser
"evil".
This may be hard to understand for a western person, but IMHO it is a sane and consious
decision for the russians.
But again, every country is different. This is why the right for every people and country
to develop in its own pace and values is to important, and why globalism is creating faliure
for each and everyone exepct some rich SOBs.
The 'western' view of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the "long-lost meaningless war", is
that it was the catastrophic for the Soviet Union and led to its demise (pdf). That view is
wrong. The war was neither meaningless, nor lost.
I think that is the "western" view that justifies throwing money at Nazis or terrorists in
order to create problems for US enemies.
@Ellis "I get stuck understanding what gathering lands might mean in this context"
It would seem to refer to the traditional move to expand the sphere to what is believed by
some in Russia to be their "natural" dimensions: to add by various means including annexation
all the Russian territories, East Slavic lands, Belarus and the Ukrainian regions
In that light the Russian view of the conflict in Ukraine has to be understood: not just
as reaction towards to expansion of EU and NATO but more as reaction against the EU/NATO's
interference with Ukraine's direction of moving closer to the Russian sphere over
time, seen as something inevitable unless countered with lots of effort, promises and
energizing of radical movements or other nationalistic or young, pro-West groups.
In other words, some claims that the Kremlin desires to expand are not wholly unjustified.
But as explained in the article some Russian leaders might see expansion as unavoidable and
therefore deep down rational to pursue. One can counter this view with the remark that it's
almost like some echo of the Soviet (and pseudo-Marxist) view of historical materialism.
Ending at the time with transporting intellectuals who differed, to re-education camps as one
concluded that something wrong "had to be wrong" with them, opposing the inevitable and
rational! Search for the term "psycho-pathological mechanisms of dissent" to see how it might
reflect some of the elite thinking in Russia still today!
Surkov supports the 'Deep State' in Russia and elsewhere to the extent that he
derides/undermines democratic process.
Surkov's viewpoint is aligned with that of the neocons. Neocons argue that democratic
processes can not properly weigh matters that concern the 'Deep State'. Those that benefit
from Deep State largess (MIC, intel agencies, oligarchs, and large corporations) naturally
support that view.
The "Deep State" is ultimately class warfare. IMO the best that we can hope for (for now)
is that 'Deep States' of the major powers will try to improve the lives of the ordinary
people they govern as part of the State-to-State competition. A unilateral world order would
have no such virtue. In such a world we would quickly feel the truth of: "We are all black,
we are all Palestinian, we are all ... a plaything or a nuisance of the oligarchic
in-group.
Hoarsewhisperer , Feb 16, 2019 12:14:10 PM | linkRed Ryder , Feb 16, 2019 12:26:14 PM | link
There are a number of commenters here who, living up to their former ignorance on many
topics, expose their lack of knowledge and understanding of things Russian.
Russia is a civilization. It's psyche is neither East nor West. It's vocabulary and syntax
are not Western, either.
Surkov's work, even by ideologues of vast disparate differences is recognized as a
political-literary work whose translation requires deft handling.
Think of de Tocqueville or some of Tom Paine.
And all Russian commenters at the highest level perceive exactly what his words and his
construction means.
You also, those of you who think you are more intelligent than Surkov, should want to read
his article of last year. In that, he describes Russia's unique path forward. Use Yandex for
a translation.
You will see the linkage from last year's article and this year's work. Surkov is a gifted
"grey cardinal" whose intellect is valued by Putin.
When he speaks, and especially, when he writes, Sukov has the top echelon of Russia paying
"deep attention".
If you fall for the word usage of Deep in this present work and equate it with our Western
Deep State, you do not comprehend the Russian context.
>The Deep State wants no competition, just obedience.
> Posted by: stonebird | Feb 16, 2019 8:33:39 AM | 10
This. This is the central organizing principle of Uncle Sam Land. Every interaction with
the police and other state actors says: "Obey or Die". And they mean it, a thousand dead
civilians a year. Every year.
Its not only black and brown people. I live in the whitest part of the whitest US state.
It is rural, remote, and sparsely populated. White skin did not save my neighbor's brother
who was gunned down in his own home. What really happened? Only the cops know, and they ain't
sayin.
My conclusion is that the US police state is the inevitable result of imposing a top-down
hierarchy on society. This is why skin color, clothes, education, religion, sex, income, etc.
are so important: these characteristics and others are used to put everyone in their proper
slot in the hierarchy, and to make sure everyone knows their place, and stays there.
Uncle Sam Land is a downwardly-mobile society. The fear of downward mobility keeps people
passive, afraid, and easier to control. The lack of labor strife is a good example. After
decades of failure, workers understand that most strikes and other job actions will end with
less pay and worse working conditions.
The psychopathic scum at the top like it there and intend to stay, regardless of the cost
to the peons, who only exist to serve the state. Therefore everyone is disposable. None of
this is new, of course, but Bull-in-the-China-Shop Trump has done an excellent job of
unintentionally shredding the facade of "freedom". It is now getting difficult even for
establishment elites to ignore the nature of the machine they are dedicated to
sustaining.
The Dear Leaders will not take a hint and step down, or work to create a more humane
society where just being alive is good enough reason to get access to the Earth's bounty.
Instead they will use even more violence to impose obedience. A near-monopoly on violence is
what makes a nation-state, so violence is the only tactic it knows.
Can Russian really be a nation-state that is not based on hierarchy, violence and
coercion? I'd like to think it could be possible, but I remain very, very skeptical.
I find that in the article of Surkov the main message is sincere and reflects the will of
the current elites to self-preservation and to preserve the regime in an unchanged state and
in the post-Putin period. So that Putin himself does not decide to change something by
chance, he is reassured: everything is perfect. But sincerity does not mean truth. The
solipsism of the ruling elite still cannot replace history and political logic. Therefore,
Surkov's analysis of the state of the political regime in modern Russia is entirely and
completely false in its very foundations.
Lohmann , Feb 16, 2019 1:10:09 PM | linkNoirette , Feb 16, 2019 1:28:28 PM | link
Any message that praises Russia and goes against demonising + slandering it is welcome to
me. If it can prod some to re-think, I'm all for it.
The text is superficial, a straightforward 'bash others' and Laud the True Nation
essay, close to school-boy-ish, grade 12.
The ability to hear and to understand the nation, to see all the way through it,
through its entire depth, and to act accordingly -- that is the unique and most important
virtue of Putin's government.
Is v. similar to the USA's mealy mouthed enshrining of demo-crassy, freee-dom and
equality, etc. Putin may be doing a good job, is imho, but seeing into the entire depth etc.
is hyperbole, .. OK, cultural standards differ.
It is adequate for the needs of the people, it follows the same course with it, and
this means that it is not subject to destructive overloads from history's countercurrents.
This makes it effective and long-lasting.
Many Kings Queens Despots Tyrants touted the same. Meaningless.
The various branches of government come together at the person of the leader and are
considered valuable not in and of themselves but only to the extent to which they provide a
connection with him. Aside from them, and acting around formal structures and elite groups,
operate informal methods of communication.
Translation may be poor, styles of writing vary greatly in diff. cultures, etc. But what
does it mean? Note the 'person of the leader'
Our state is not split up into deep and external; it is built as a whole, with all of
its parts and its manifestations facing out.
Should be queried.
Missing is anything of substance, ex. method of Gvmt. of a large Federation (geographical,
climate, cultural, variations..), which would be interesting to know about, put forward, for
praise. E.g. health care, housing, transport, education - Relations with China, for ex.
Yes! I get it, that was not the point.
Puff Pieces don't address such practical matters.
Why is this article praised on MoA? One might write something very similar about Trump,
Macron, Erdogan or Italy, etc.
I disagree with Surkov in the sense that, albeit it may have a political purpose for the
specific historical time it was written, it doesn't have scientific value.
Modern Russia is a full-fledged capitalist country, therefore equally subject to the inner
contradictions of the system. No, I don't think Russia is some kind of "third system". No, I
don't think it is a stable society: it is full of inner contradictions. Yes, it has a
different culture from the West. Yes, it is good Russia still exist. But let not kiss the
cross: this Russia is not the future for humanity; unless it suddenly becomes socialist
again, there's nothing there.
The underlying message of Vladislav Surkov's essay is that the relationship between a leader
and the nation he leads must be based on mutual trust, and that trust must be based on a
system of governance that is transparent to all, and on foundations and values that a
would-be leader must respect and with which s/he must align her/his own values and beliefs.
The foundations and values on which government relies and which the leader must always
bear in mind (and heart as well) arise from the history or histories and the beliefs of the
nation the leader governs.
The Chinese have a similar concept known as the Mandate of Heaven.
If the West ever had something similar to what Surkov is suggesting, it was embodied in
the Social Contract.
The significant difference is that the West with its Roman Catholic / Protestant view of
humans as having been born in sin and needing to be saved by belief in Jesus as their saviour
(and the corollary that human nature essentially is incapable of moral and spiritual
improvement, and can only be made perfect by being forced into the right spiritual path), has
long been governed by a set of values that based on suspicion and mistrust of others. In a
sense, much of European history (with its history of small states at constant war or rivalry
against one another, which they later took beyond European bounds during the 15th century and
after) and why it was so, compared to other parts of the world, might be explained as a
result of societies based around a particular set of beliefs, values and view of the human
condition.
The US Constitution with its checks and balances on the executive, legislative and
judiciary functions of government reflects something of the view of humans as untrustworthy
and essentially moral and spiritual infants, obsessed with their own immediate
self-gratification and short-term interests. Much classical economics (with the belief in the
free market and the idea that competing interests eventually reach a balance or equilibrium
point) is based on this despairing view of humans; the neoliberal incarnation of classical
economics exalts this view and portrays it as the ideal.
veritas semper vincit , Feb 16, 2019 9:38:37 PM | link
This was one of your best articles, and there's no short supply here. Thank you, Mr. B.
Russia is fulfilling old prophecies.
The country is an enormous mass land, between East and West, and because of this and its
history, I believe it is the world 's balancer.
Russia has been to Hell and back and in the process managed to learn from past mistakes( and
we have to remember that some of those mistakes, like the Bolshevik revolution, were financed
by the west: Trotsky( Bronshtein) and his 2 Bil in today's money from Kuhn and Loeb Bank,
Jacob Schiff, Lenin with millions in gold from Germany).
What did not kill Russia, made her stronger. Russia witnessed the "superior" US system,
liberalism, during Yeltsin's era, not only communism. And Russia chose neither.
She chose Mr. Putin, a real patriot, who took Russia from her knees and elevated her to the
role she has today: a superpower.
I don't think the Russians wanted this role, but they didn't have a choice. Somebody has to
fight the psychopaths.
As for US, the coup d'erat was incremental: the cornerstone was in 1913, with the creation of
the private Federal Reserve, with its 9 big banks shareholders,the root of all evil .Money
created as debt( credit) and loaned to people with interest. Fractional reserve banking
later. Everything else is bribes and blackmails.
Then 1963, the removal of the only semi independent president, who would have put a stop to
their NWO.
1970's with replacement of Bretton Woods with the petro-dollar deal and the subsequent wars
.
And 2001 as the grand finale: total control.
Now US has to protect the petro-dollar, the only think giving it relevance; This explains our
wars, enemies, allies( like KSA).
Some say that US was a FreeMason construct from the very beginning. And looking at all
Masonic signs: dollar bill, Statue of Liberty, apotheosis of Washington , Washington DC
plans, most founding fathers, etc. they may be right.
psychohistorian "My thought is that Putin knows that the only way to limit the control of his
internal oligarchs is to insure the fall of the private finance led Western system that they
need to execute their perfidy."
I have watched a youtube video of Putin talking about the CIA victory parade in Moscow in
the early nineties. I looked for this when I read Grieved's comment but could not find it.
There was lot of anger - savagery perhaps a better word - in his voice.
When the US pulled out of the ABM treaty in, I think 2002, he initiated the research and
development of deterrent that would bypass and make obsolete any US ABM system.
I think Putin will see out the US empire. Like the next gen weapons that were unveiled last
year with the publication of Trump's Nuclear Posture Review, I believe Putin would have been
working on the downfall of the US empire since the day he took office as president of the
Russian federation.
3) Putinism is (by design?) transferable 0 it's being offered as a practical
model that other countries can adopt / are adopting.
4) My sense is that Putinism transcends politics. There is a cultural aspect that rejects
Western philosophy and theology.
The Western church has failed its moral mission. It was always compromised but now that
"God is dead", Western political elites pay little heed to moral principle. Heartless neolibs
and neocons meet with virtually no resistance as they comfort the comfortable and afflict the
afflicted.
Coinciding with the moral decay, "checks and balances" have also failed. Western
government debt has soared. Western political elites circumvent Constitutional rights and
government oversight (by using cut-outs and foreign funding). Wealthy Westerners (the "people
that matter") do not speak up - instead they keep tens of trillions "off-shore". And Western
corporate presstitutes serve as a propaganda mouthpiece.
<> <> <> <> <> <> <> <> <>
As many details are yet unknown, it's difficult to access how robust the "Deep Putin"
model of politics and governance may be.
Russia's delineating their own independent path is somewhat good news for the West. It
means that they will not be subservient to China. But Western neocon asshats might muck that
up by probing every possible way of undermining Russia.
Repeating what I've said before: countries don't have friend's, the have interests -BUT-
if a country hopes to rule the world, those interests must include some sort of morality. The
West is reaping what it sowed. Will they take that to heart, or succumb to neocon asshats
that always seek to double-down?
Deep state exists in any state officially under any political system democracy and autocracy.
As for Tsar letters from 1917 who confirmed that his was abandoned and power was taken over
by security apparatus, the same was in 2014 in Ukraine that his personal security unit
mutined while he, his family and two security guard we saved due to Russian help as they were
evacuated from Donbass where rhetoric fled. Electoral theater makes no difference to deep
state that continues until real and bloody revolution occurs, to create new deep state
protecting ruling elite interests same in Russia, same in the US as Mills noticed over a
century ago.
As they posited, when men want to rule without seeming to do so, .. because they cannot
[openly] lay claim to the required legitimacy, they will rule invisibly and "benignly,"
shielding themselves behind the rhetoric of popular rule.
Although "authority [in the US supposedly] formally resides 'in the people,' . . . the
power of initiation is in fact held by small circles of men."[In hands of behind the scenes
ruling oligarchic elite]. This is not to be known. There is the risk that power becomes
identified by its true colors. "That is why the standard strategy of manipulation is to make
it appear that the people . . . 'really made the decision'" (ibid., 317).
This is the idea behind allowing people or as Lippmann described them "meddlesome
spectators" to go through in fact meaningless voting ritual.
[In the US we have,] .. to use Sheldon Wolin's terminology, .. a "managed democracy,"
political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to
control," form of government that attempts to keep alive appearance of democracy while
simultaneously defeating democracy's primary purpose, self-government.
As quoted above both, Tocqueville and Mills, identified hidden menacing power structure of
fused state and private tyranny [also called Deep State] and its rules of control that are
hidden, subtle unutterable, unspoken about, power that denies itself as power under guise of
false free choice and propaganda of democratic participation.
The mere existence or if necessary exertion of this hidden power is the key ingredient in
fragmenting population, producing masses of "sheeple" who lack capacity of self-understanding
or even recognizing that they are being directly controlled both individually and
collectively, that acquire their irrational/self-defeating behavior within a political
realm.
Yeltsin had a lot of faults. He also appointed and sacked many prime ministers. He
appointed Putin prime minister, then appointed Putin president to serve out the remainder of
his own term. For all Yeltsin's faults, in appointing and sacking pm's, he was looking for
somebody who could lead Russia.
Back to the Future
George Orwell was born in Bihar, India. The name Bihar comes from the root word, Vihar, which
means temple. An auspicious place. A place where we can understand the idea of time; the
past, present and future as one. Mr Orwell certainly achieved this feat; perhaps destined to
by virtue of the circumstances of his birth. He was, or at least his writings were,
prophetic. He could see the reality of how the world was, because of how the people were and
consequently he could see how the future would unravel, logically. He was not wrong then and
he is not wrong in these darkened days in which we are dying.
In his masterpiece, 1984, he introduces us to a dystopian reality that has encompassed the
globe; three fascistic power blocs of the northern hemisphere, Oceania, Eurasia and East Asia
fighting each other for the resources of the southern hemisphere. London was the capital of
Airstrip One, an offshore island and part of the superstate of Oceania (North America and the
British Isles). She was at endless war with her neighbours, rivals and enemies in the battle
for global domination, Eurasia (Europe and Russia) and East Asia (China and the states that
border her today).
The debacle which has enveloped the United Kingdom and the European Union over the
former's decision to withdraw from the latter's club, has created the opportunity for two
thirds of this fiction to become real facts, eventually and inevitably forcing the hand of
the Peoples Republic to realise a historical belief and vision, espoused many years before on
the BBC's Dateline London programme by a Chinese TV journalist (London correspondent,
probably), that if it looks Chinese, then it is Chinese. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia and
Laos would return to the bosom of the motherland, as Austria, the Sudatenland etc was annexed
to the German fatherland.
All this because Russia and the Europeans would have come together, probably quite
naturally, in response to Great Britain and Ireland having joined as the fifty first, second,
third and fifty fourth states, of the United States. These four ancient nations will find no
other way to resolve the #Brexit conundrum and they will see this as the only logical option
- an English speaking block, based on common free trade ideals, that guarantees their
sovereignty. It would appeal to each of the four nations, the English, Scots, Welsh and
Irish, perhaps for different reasons but they would be accepting because their national ego's
will be satisfied with this international recognition of each of their sovereign rights.
There is a certain historical inevitability about the whole thing. As a man who spent the
formative years of his life in India, he will be aware of the darkness of the age in which we
live, an age that the Hindus know as the age of Kali, Kal Yug. An age of darkness and
destruction, of deviance and distrust. It is an age that has come before and that will come
again, just as the golden ages have come and in time must pass again, back into history. Each
has their time and their place. The creatures born in such an age must accept it and refuse
to capitulate to it's mesmerising illusions. Of course they won't - it is all too mesmeric,
the illusion too beautiful. The illusion of self, of nation, of country, of power, of right
and of wrong. It is the illusion of the physical, of the material, of the possibilities of
each, that will drive nations together into the power structures from which there will be no
escape until the Armageddon, that is theoretically believed in by many of the participants,
will arrive and the age will turn, again.
"Glubina" also means the Russian countryside (an analogy would be "la France profonde") -
everywhere outside the cities is the "glubina" for which the people have a mystical
attachment.
Western sanctions have been a great boon to Russian agriculture, as well cementing
national solidarity. The new sanctions being contemplated in Washington will, if they are
confirmed, act as a spur for Russia to quarantine itself against the next western financial
collapse. My impression has always been that VVP greatly values stability and a reacts to
attacks from the outside only reluctantly and after great thought as to where Russia's
fundamental interests lie.
I think that imperialism has invaded the Western psyche to such an extent that many people,
particularly in the 5Eyes countries, seem to believe that their first impressions are of such
weight and credibility that thoughtful consideration of a subject is unnecessary. This is
apparent in so many of the comments here which come off as edicts or proclamations from on
high and which treat alternative viewpoints with derision and contempt.
Conversely, many of the comments are thoughtful and well reasoned, open to other's views,
but these are often drowned out. I can't be the only one who's noticed that someone here is
using numerous identities in order to dominate the discussion, create consensus, and to "gang
up" on people. It creates a microcosm of imperialism which, to me, speaks louder than any
position or ethic that this keyboard emperor(ess) professes.
Add: This is
John Helmers unsentimental summary on the recent attempt to find an "official"
justification for power.
The issue is not political. It is the economic success of the Chinese model (which is very
different from the Russian one, but Russia might get closer to it, than it is to Western
neoliberalism).
In the doctrine of the Mandate of Heaven, the concept of Heaven encompasses the order of
the natural world where the ruler governs the people, and is not merely concerned with
humanity's relations with the spiritual world. If the natural world is beset by drought,
famine or other natural disasters, that is a sign that the ruler is not caring for the people
and the people have the right to overthrow that ruler.
The effects of drought, famine, flooding and some other natural disasters can be
prevented, minimised or alleviated, sometimes to the extent that life can even carry on as if
the disaster had not happened, so in the past emperors did have reason to fear prolonged or
repeated disasters from one year to the next - because those disasters could very well be
consequences of past inaction or past actions that were wrong or corrupt.
The concept doesn't advise or tell leaders how to stay in touch with the people; they
presumably must figure this out for themselves to be effective leaders.
"Globalization" would be the diminishing of the strength of the nation-states with the
corresponding increase in the strength of the trading entities, the corporations. That's easy
to reject!
But when the nation-states fade away because the traders have faded away and there's no
longer any need to control and regulate them, then you have the dreamed about condition.
One can formulate any philosophy of government one wants, but it is certainly better that
one not see trade as being natural and eternal.
Understanding of Russia perplexed Westerners of centuries (Chinese did not seem to care too
much). Genuine curiosity can be detected in news sections not related to politics, as it can
be witnessed by an article in Forbes, Food and Drink section. Title and a quote:
Want To Find A Rich Person In Russia? Look For The Lemons
Lizzy Saxe Contributor, "I write about the future of food, business, and culture." Food &
Drink
Quote: Harold noticed that "Russians consume a lot more lemons per capita than many other
parts of the world. I was wondering, is that because they drink a lot of vodka? Is it because
they're big tea drinkers? Why are they using so many lemons?" He started to investigate. He
discovered that the answer wasn't quite that universal.
Unsurprisingly, lemons don't grow in Russia. It's too cold to produce them, so you have to
buy them from far, far away. That makes the sour yellow citrus expensive. So expensive, in
fact, that, "wealthy Russians really like to incorporate lemons into their lifestyle. It
communicates to people that they have the means to be able to afford them. They call it the
bling of produce."
====
Someone sold simple-minded Lizzy a tall story, and Russians and Russophiles have a
hilarious stream of twits today. For a journalist in a business publication that should know
a thing or two about marketing, the fact that a product has high per capita consumption
should suggest that it is not restricted to the rich, unless the country in question has
reversed income pyramid, enormous percentage of status seeking rich folks. In fact, since
long time, tea drinking was popular in Russia, perhaps because their Siberian holdings
required them to sell furs, Chinese mandarins like to have fur hats and fur trimmed robes,
and China had to offer products to pay for those furs, and that was tea. Russians got hooked
on tea -- as were the Mongols, Tibetans, all nations of Central Asia, iran etc. Tea that
trades well at long distances was black and bitter. However, even a relatively small amount
of vitamin C reduces bitterness a lot as it reacts with tea tannins (the same holds for
another bitter drink, mate, but coffee bitterness is not caused by tannins, so adding lemon
to coffee was never popular). The result was that even peasant families would possess
samovars for making hot water for tea and brew tea in a hot spot at the samovar top, and
would add thin slices of lemons to tea.
As a product needed for the welfare of the working class, lemon supplies were one of
Communist priorities, I kid you not. In my youth in Communist Poland, a kilo of bananas and
oranges would cost 40, while a kilo of lemons mere 30. The communist blocks produced some
lemons, and was getting the rest from barter agreements with India, Brazil etc. In the
stores, bananas and oranges could appear and disappear, but lemons were always there.
Of course, a household where lemons are always present would find some other uses. For
example, borsch is an ubiquitous dish and it is based on beets that should be fermented for
several days to create a sour taste, but in an urban household, beets were sliced, a lemon
was squeezed and a borsch would be cooked right away. Fish would always be garnished with
lemon etc. In other words, every urban household would use lemons every day, and those slices
could add up (I am not sure about villages, there are also forest berries with vitamin C and
sour taste, and villagers would collect a lot of them).
As posted on Twitter, the current store price of lemons in Russia is 1 dollar per
kilogram, apparently the authorities keep lemon prices low, a tradition inherited from the
Communist predecessors. Allegedly, this is the same as average lemon price in the
international trade, but (a) Russia has long standing import tradition with low cost
producers like India (b) the markup on lemons is low.
That said, it is quite possible that the Russian rich display lemons on their table, but
the reasons are not as Harold surmised. In eastern and central Europe there is a strong
conviction that the traditional food is healthy, good for soul and body. When my family
visited Poland (we lived in USA), it was striking that tourist dominated town sections would
have lots of foreign cousines, while the business section would have predominantly
traditional food, stuff that "every" household would cook at home.
..for Surkov unveiling all the Russian policy, internal and external, and that is too
much asking
Yes, but I couldn't read beyond it (= between the lines, underneath, etc.), as you
say:
Being his personal style of writing most of the time kind of confusing and always
sounding like including hided and double meanings/senses
Maybe some stuff went over my head. I failed to grasp a deeper / more intruiging, vital,
novel meaning or message.
Jen 54 points out that Good-Gvmt. is based on Trust, sure, like satisfactory business
dealings, happy families and solid marriages .. not flash news.
The Saker is potty about Putin and will post anything that idolises the Great Leader
(say.)
I'm a 'fan', of Putin and Lavrov myself, and have nothing against Surkov, but going
overboard on personalia vs. pol / economic systems, resources, geography etc. is a
distraction.
If framed properly it is OK: Who is the nicer person, Ocasio-Cortez or Gabbard? Would
Megan M. be a better Queen than Kate M.? Etc.
Do you also agree with donkeytale's glibe comparison of the Putin go ernment to the
Nazi Hitler regime and the Trump administration?
Posted by: QuietRebel | Feb 17, 2019 4:18:22 AM | 83
Of course he doesn't agree with that "glib comparison."
Neither do I.
What I introduced was a simile to illustrate my implication that Surkov is hardly an
objective observer of the Russian political system and thus not creditable in this
instance.
But nice bit of of setting a trap for James to keep him captured within community
standards of subjectivity. Lol
Also, y'know, if you have any issues with my comment you could, y'know, raise them with me
directly.
I will state that Trump would of course enjoy the comparison with Putin, since he is on
record as an admirer, would also love to jail his political opponents at election time (as
Putin does), clearly enjoys using his political power to enrich himself (as Putin also does),
and surely would love to find a way to circumvent term limits to remain President for life
(as Putin does). This last may be necessary to keep himself, his family and flunkies out of
prison.
In other notes, LMAO at all the high falutin rhetorical flights of fancy in this thread
extolling the Godlike virtues of the Russian people and Putin, the Chinese "Mandate of
Heaven" etc.
This is doubtlessly inspired by Surkov's own flight of fancy in his essay. Yes, the
Russian people are to be commended for their centuries of struggle to overcome their
historically sad socioeconomic plight and of course for defeating the Nazis (don't know how
much credit I can give the Russian people for defeating Napoleon---that one seemed much more
like a win for the czarist forces of oppression as opposed to liberation of the masses).
Putin is a great leader and statesman, easily the most accomplished on the world scene
today. The problem lies not with him necessarily. The problem is with Surkov's fantasy as it
infects the usual suspects in this thread, who should know well but will never admit (because
their goal is to rhetorically reinforce a prevailing blog narrative rather than strive to
attain the synthesis of truth--that is, the honest intellectual pursuit of knowledge through
debate, point and counterpoint) that one man can never successfully embody the political
system and the political system cannot adequately reflect the greatness of one man --- for
more than the life of that one man --- because that one man is not a god and will eventually
wither away and die.
Thus the system he embodies and animates with his greatness cannot be replicated
indefinitely after he goes, if it can be sustained even with his immediate successor.
This is a lesson obtained from history, religious texts, legends, mythology. Man is weak,
evil, greedy, all the seven sins. Someone mentioned the US Constitution was formulated as a
defense mechanism against agains the perfidy of man and of course it was! Lol. Imperfect as
it is look we can fight off Trump much better than the Russians will be able to fight off a
future Trumpkov.
The Chinese could not reach their present level of capitalist/imperialist success until
Mao was long gone, his cult of personality repudiated and replaced by a "communist" party
from which succession is dependent more on bureaucrats than charismatic leaders.
Hatred of the Evil Empire doesn't automatically confer righteousness to its opponents no
matter how flowery the oratory supporting such contention.
Especially when the so-called opponents aren't even truly ideological opponents but in
fact erely represent differing spheres of influence and trading blocs, at worst.
That's an awfully long way of just saying that Russia after Putin is very unlikely to be
an improvement along commonly accepted metrics over Russia with Putin, or that whatever Putin
has changed will guarantee a modicum of continuity past the next, say, two Russian leaders.
Same type of thing for China, but for both you seem to amplify the effects of the few
pro-Russia/pro-China posts into more than they are, including a narrative that you attribute
to the owner of the blog (b)? And I don't see anyone making the argument that "hatred" of the
"Evil Empire" automatically confers righteousness to the adversary(ies) other than perhaps
that, given the history, it's nice to see there might actually be some adversaries who may
not simply fold and fall in line. They still may, but unlikely.
I kinda wish someone would have talked about - or at least explicitly - the fact that all
the praise being heaped on Putin is still just praise for a man and his accomplishments,
which to my knowledge don't involve concrete changes to the Russian constitution (or
equivalent - not much of a Russia scholar myself) that might serve to "guarantee" (insofar as
it's ever possible) that future leaders in his position are constrained or empowered in such
a fashion that they are most likely to govern in Putin-esque terms.
I dunno, maybe I should read the essay linked by b, but I can't muster much interest in
reading propaganda no matter where it's coming from. To me it's sufficient to know that even
if they're just different spheres of influence or competing trading blocs, it's nice that the
world isn't necessarily doomed to unipolar US/UK dominance - again, given their sordid
history, including the very recent. AND I think it's good that the other side is being
presented in such a manner as to reach at least a small western audience given the way the
corporate MSM has openly censored any such prose and banned any such thought.
I also happen to think that presenting the other side humanizes the Russians and even
Putin and provides a bit of understanding into how they view themselves, all of which and all
of the above being helpful in synthesizing a worldview on those matters as well as choosing
an appropriate lens through which to view the one-sided, hysterical, often evidence-free,
accusations of election tampering, utility grid hacking, and the supposed desire to see
"western democracy" toppled, as you might expect to see from someone on NBC or from
craigsummers.
@donkeytale
You blame me for misinterpting you comment, but you are the one who added the Nazi and Trump
tropes. If you just wanted to make a point about propaganda you you have just posted the
first part of your comment,but you went on. Putin is often seriously compared to Hitler,and
you expect me to be able to read your mind when you make a comparison of Putin to Hitler. I
stand by my original comment.
I also tend to add layers of digressions which lengthen my statements but don't help me
necessarily because it gives more ammo to attack me on one of those instead of my main
point.
I don't disagree with anything you say here. Also, as often happens after I post I notice
Noirette has also posted a more concise, better made point right above mine.
Noirette rocks.
The Surkov essay is well worth reading, IMHO and shouldn't be dismissed because it's
propaganda. It reads more liek self-justification to me but it has blatant logical/historical
issues as Noirette points out.
As for the comments by others who drive in automatic extoll the virtues mode all the time,
perhaps it is just a figment of my overheated imagination.
@93. "Putin enjoys using his political power to enrich himself." Now, you may be right, or
you may be wrong, but I am damned if I know how you know. Over the years, the number of times
I have been told that Putin secretly owns MTS, Surgutneft, etc etc, that his money is looked
after in Zurich (and someone knows his fund managers!). The point being of course is to brand
him as a greedy self-serving bandit like all the rest.
I would very much doubt that he keeps wealth outside Russia. Given the theme of this
discussion, this is an important distinction. The Panama Papers showed, for example, that
Poroshenko has stashed obscene sums of money, presumably looted from Ukraine, in the
Caribbean (as have thousands of Russians), so when the time for looting is over, they can go
and live the life of rich men in the West.
Putin lives and dies with Russia - there will be no comfortable retirement for him in
Switzerland, assuming that he wanted it, which I am sure he doesn't. The Russians know
this.
No worries, I'm not blaming you at all, and I'm not asking you to retract or anything. I
disagree with you that I was making a glib comparison. In quickly searching for similes I
came up with those 2, mainly because I thought they were funny.
Of course, Russia today doesn't compare with Nazi Germany. I apologise if I offended you
even though a comparison was not my intent. In my way of seeing the blogosphere, it is always
on the writer when the reader miscomprehends. I sought to clarify not blame you.
Quite frankly, the US, China and Russian systems all have much more in common than any of
them do with Nazi Germany.
It's important to note that the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan was not an
invasion. The legitimate Afghan government requested Soviet military intervention, and the
Soviets actually hesitated to send military assistance.
From this
phone conversation between Taraki (President of Afghanistan) and Kosygin (Soviet
Premier), Taraki says:
We ask you that you extend practical and technical assistance, involving people and arms.
In the phone conversation, Taraki begs for military aid from the Soviet Union, but is
greeted with hesitation since "It is a very complex matter", as Kosygin put it.
Russia's cause in Afghanistan and Syria are the same -- fighting terrorism -- but only the
former is dubbed an "invasion" when it was a perfectly legal police action (unlike the Yankee
aggression against Vietnam) under international law.
I agree with your understandings but would take them further:
1)"...that inherent genius of Putin to identify with the ordinary people..."
Here I would expand the term to include all the people, the elites as well as the ordinary
(supposing that to mean less well-off). It is important to remember that Putin did offer the
wealthy a choice - either to leave or be prosecuted, or to use their wealth in service to the
nation. Surov doesn't just mean 'deep nation' to be the earthy folk - he wants every stratum
included, and that is what makes it such an all-encompassing enigmatic force. It would
include Putin's political opposition as well as the old vestiges of the communist state. All
of these are being given the opportunity to contribute, just as all ethnic communities do.
And each will be at one point or another asked to sacrifice - as for instance seniors with
respect to their pensions - when the need arises. The difference here is that they are not
being 'told' this is what is going to happen, like it or lump it - they are given detailed
explanations and apologies that this needs to happen for the short term to enable the long
term to happen - how different this from what goes on in the US when it comes to state
policy![to be continued]
In MoH doctrine the people are an agent of Heaven. Surkov's Deep Putin(tm)/Putinism is an
agent of the People. That's why I write @ "Les gens, c'est moi").
MoH Dynastic change includes war/foreign intrigue. That is dangerous in today's world.
Under MoH, for example, a Color Revolution stoked by foreign interests becomes a divine
manifestation.
Immediate context: It seems to me that there is still much resistance to the turn away
from the West, despite it's being forced upon Russia. Many Russian elites could benefit
greatly by a reversal. These elites form a competing 'Deep State'.
The contemporary model of the Russian state starts with trust and relies on trust. This is
its main distinction from the Western model, which cultivates mistrust and criticism. And
this is the source of its power."
This is propagandist picture, the reality is less bright for sure, but not THAT bleak. As
we are all to well aware, trust is something that can be earn or inculcated by other means.
However, it a government wants to be trusted, it helps to focus on what people want.
For example, after the oil prices declined from 90-100 range to 40-ties with subsequent
oscillation -- now ca. 55 (Brent and Urals ca. 65), Putin responded with almost terrifying
decisiveness. Rubble depreciated by factor 2 or more, in line with oil. Imports were slashed
correspondingly. Positive balance of trade was maintained. A huge chunk of foreign reserves
was pulled back and Russian debt was sharply reduced. Real incomes were allowed to drop, to
meagerly rise afterwards. HOWEVER, as a commentator noted very briefly, the employment did
not drop, and thus the number of people severely affected was small. There was a drop in
construction, but a rise in agriculture and to lesser extend, manufacturing. Russia engaged
in "import substitution". Russian lost growth of incomes but preserved stability, and the
majority preferred it that way: oil crisis in an oil country must foster an economic crisis,
so the choice was for some minority to loose a lot or everybody loosing a little.
These choices perplexed observers in Western media. Just because it is popular, Russia
decreased free trade, competition and "mobility of labour" that The Economist tirelessly
advocates. And forget about "free financial markets". But what about "necessary painful
reforms"?
Actually, being a budget freak, Putin does have painful stuff on the agenda. Russia
amassed reserves during "fat years", but with oil contributing much less to the budget, some
taxes have to go up and some benefits have to go down. Road tolls were introduced and
truckers rebelled. Retirement age was increased and the popularity of Putin dropped. However,
in each case the government modulated the "reforms" with concessions, and of course, it keeps
making the case why the reforms are needed, so truckers are still trucking, and the
retirement reforms were not entirely abandoned. The popularity is still quite healthy, if not
in the stratosphere.
In other words, Putin's government is very cautious and strategic about "necessary
painful" stuff that Western politicians dish quite freely. What insanity overtook them to
keep pushing for "ever more free trade"? Or foreign interventions -- where are the crowds of
Britons of France being jubilant that a few countries got destroyed and refugees are flooding
in, documenting the superiority of the economic/political system, voting with their legs?
But what about Putin's own interventions? Again, we can see strategic and careful
approach. In the case of Crimea, ca. 80% are glad that it was absorbed by Russia, and in
Crimea itself the percentage may be higher. In the case of Syria, Russia made a huge effort
to keep costs down, both in treasure and blood, and effects up, Syrians being trained to do
the bulk of heavy lifting, and ACTUALLY doing that -- unlike hapless Afghan army etc.
Lastly, the deep state. In Russian there is a newish word "siloviki" = "people of
strength/power", and they are definitely a material phenomenon rather than a myth. The main
difference is that in the West, the smart people work for financial services, or big pharma
etc., and intellectually, the "deep state" is very, very mediocre, the casting of The
Ministry of Silly Walks.
Putinism sounds a lot like Erdogan's MB-infused nationalism. Erdogan propagandists/apologists
conflate the people's interests and Erdogan's policies/actions to the point that they are
essentially the same. Erdogan thus embodies the people and critics are perceived as traitors.
Kurov hints at an institutional mechanism(s) that:
1) ensures Putinism remains connected to the people/people's interests, and
2) is able to be adoptable by other countries.
Looking forward to details of this mechanism that might elevate Kurov's Deep Putin(tm) from
propaganda to political model.
So you're saying that Putinism is a philosophical approach to governance that doesn't have
(or has no need for) institutional mechanism(s) for correctness and longevity? Jackrabbit |
Feb 17, 2019 1:42:39 PM
I am not a great believer in "philosophical approaches". More precisely, you can design a
mechanism that will surely work badly, but you cannot assure good outcomes with a
"mechanism". US constitution is pretty good, but if the Congress members, President etc.
choose to be beholden to special interests and the population tolerates it, then hard to see
how it could be improved with, say, proportional representation, ban on moving from key
political and administrative position to lucrative posts in private sector etc.
=============
Someone compared Putin to Erdogan. One big difference is that Putin is very careful, plans
long term and gets approval from a decisive majority, using "dirty tricks" like actually
paying attention to what people want. Erdogan gets 50% of popular support and when in doubt,
increases repressions, censorship etc. If you compare with Turkey, China, etc., the hand of
the state in Russia is pretty light, opposition minded people may have newspapers, websites,
if demonstrations are "illegal" the demonstrators are released quickly etc. If you are a
policeman or a prison guard in Russia who killed a person, the chances of getting seriously
sentenced are much higher than in USA where those professions enjoy considerable impunity --
which is used.
'Why Russia no longer regrets its invasion of Afghanistan'
FYI russia nver 'invaded' afghanistan! it was asked to help by the legit govt in Kabul
james , Feb 17, 2019 4:24:34 PM | linkBlooming Barricade , Feb 17, 2019 4:26:54 PM | link
It's a shame that they "apologised" to begin with. They were wrong to have ever done so. The
recent dialogue over this war by the US media laughing at Trump and telling him off for
calling the Mujahideen terrorists (which they were) as opposed to "freedom fighters" has
amazingly been phrased as "Trump's comments aren't in line with what the US believed at the
time," as opposed to citing actual opinion, ie the US's opinion is "reality" on every given
event regardless of the facts. By far the worst part of this is that I don't even think that
the individual journos are purposefully propagandising the public, they actually believe that
the US tells the truth. Similarly, the New York Times intelligence editors wrote that they
learn the most from the official DNI presentation meetings. Aren't reporters supposed to go
beyond what the government tells them? Sad, so sad....
Not only were the Russians invited - even beseeched - into Afghanistan, the locals still
remember them with great fondness and respect. Andre Vltchek took a drive through that
country in 2017 and reported that very fact:
Yes, the last chapter in the Anti-Communist Crusade consists of the massive Big Lie about
the USSR and Afghanistan--many within the Outlaw US Empire think Rambo-3 was based on fact,
particularly the Soviet Sadism. The Truth is almost the exact opposite of the West's
propaganda as was even clear at the time for those of us who relied on different print
sources and already knew not to believe the false narrative generated by the Crusade.
One would have to be incredibly naive on the order of say a 3 year old or maybe Forrest
Gump to believe Putin isn't a very wealthy man who will never want for anything as long as he
has billionaire cronies indebted to him politically in one way or the other.
Of course, some people must cling to their illusions, er I mean their idealism, of others
no matter what. Dog knows why.
More generally, the Soviet disaster led to the abandon of any ambition of redistribution.
Since 2001, income tax is 13%, whether your income be 1,000 roubles or 100 billion roubles.
Even Reagan and Trump have not gone as far in the destruction of progressive taxation.
There is no tax on inheritance in Russia, nor in the People's Republic of China. If you
want to pass on your fortune in peace in Asia, it is better to die in the ex-Communist
countries and definitely not in the capitalist countries such as Taiwan, South Korea or
Japan where the tax rate on inheritance on the highest estates has just risen from 50% to
55%.
But while China has succeeded in conserving a degree of control on capital outflows and
private accumulation, the characteristic of Putin's Russia is an unbounded drift into
kleptocracy. Between 1993 and 2018, Russia had massive trade surpluses: approximately 10%
of GDP per annum on average for 25 years, or a total in the rage of 250% of GDP (two and a
half years of national production). In principle that should have enabled the accumulation
of the equivalent in financial reserves. This is almost the size of the sovereign public
fund accumulated by Norway under the watchful gaze of the voters. The official Russian
reserves are ten times lower – barely 25% of GDP.
Where has the money gone? According to our estimates, the offshore assets alone held by
wealthy Russians exceed one year of GDP, or the equivalent of the entirety of the official
financial assets held by Russian households. In other words, the natural wealth of the
country, (which, let it be said in passing, would have done better to remain in the ground
to limit global warming) has been massively exported abroad to sustain opaque structures
enabling a minority to hold huge Russian and international financial assets. These rich
Russians live between London, Monaco and Moscow: some have never left Russia and control
their country via offshore entities. Numerous intermediaries and Western firms have also
recouped large crumbs on the way and continue to do so today in sport and the media
(sometimes this is referred to as philanthropy). The extent of the misappropriation of
funds has no equal in history.
It might be that russia has invested its surplus into massive internal
investment, like the military with projects such as the technopolis and
rebuilding its industrial base and technical expertise. I've read that
russia was acutely consciousness of the demonic game empire was playing
and maybe that accounts for the concentration on the military. Russia is again
a military superpower and that requires enormous expenditure and investment. For
the well-nigh impossible task of simultaneously being a servant of the people
and a servant of the supreme being, putin seems to be doing as admirable a job
as any human being is capable. He is certainly supremely intelligent, maybe a
political genius, and a decent person, but as the article points out he is
just the tip of the iceberg of the deep russian culture and spirit, honed by
centuries of suffering. Didn't dostoevsky say that suffering was the beginning of
consciousness? This is where russia has the decadent west beaten, because obscene
wealth corrupts obscenely. Italy also seems to have found decent leadership.
There's a great clip at Vesti News right now, with Karen Shakhnazarov on Vladimir Soloviev's
show. It's 12 minutes but I highly recommend it. He talks around the 6 minute mark about how
Russia has not developed an economic model, and needs to get one. The US has one, China has
one, Russia needs one.
This evolves into the concept that a nation has to have an IDEA of what it's doing and
where it's going, something that it believes in. Soloviev joins in at the end with some
excellent commentary too.
Russia is looking for its way forward, and the debate is open and intense throughout the
country.
The clip also has the usual matter-of-fact, clear-eyed perspective on the US - hence the
title of the clip by the headline-lovin' gang at Vesti - but in the end it's about the
crucial survival value of meaning in a nation's life, with lives being lived meaningfully,
from the soul.
As the first cracks of the Soviet Empire's eroding iron facade opened, Australian-born
author, political essayist, professor of political science, and policy advisor to presidents
and prime ministers, John Helmer headed for Moscow, determined to establish what was to
become the longest continuously operating foreign press bureau in the capital.
From his position as an independent of single-national, or commercial sponsorship
reporter, he ventured into the country's unpredictable, and often precarious economic
transition period; a time that would see coup attempts, the undoing of international
political superstar, Mikhail Gorbachev, and fall of Russia's communist system itself. It
would too usher in the tempestuous Age of the Oligarchs.
Some of John Helmer's book titles include: 'The Deadly Simple Mechanics of Society',
'Drugs and Minority Oppression', (with Claudia Wright) 'The Jackal's Wedding – American
Power, Arab Revolt', 'Grand Strategy for Small Countries, Case Studies in Transforming
Weakness into Power,' (and with Ajay Goyal) 'Uncovering Russia'. His latest book is the newly
out political and personal memoir, 'The Man Who Knows Too Much About Russia'.
pogohere , Feb 18, 2019 1:34:24 AM | linkpogohere , Feb 18, 2019 2:04:52 AM | link
The "Deep Nation of Russia". An apt title.
Earlier in the thread I put up a link to Yeltsin's speech. Putin when asked in interviews
about some of the things that happened in the 90's is exceptionally angry, yet when asked of
his views on Gorbachev and Yeltsin, he says that everybody knew Russia, or the Soviet Union
at that time, had to change, but nobody knew how.
Russia like China cannot be looked at in the same perspective as so called western nations,
who's politics and outlook derives from westminster.
China is east. Russia is where east meets west.
But I think my point in general stands: Russia is still vulnerable to American sanctions
in the financial sector. Otherwise, it wouldn't be working on another system and buying
gold.
approximately 2/3 of Japanese, South Koreans and Mexicans feared the US, and in Germany 49%
fear US and only 30% fear Russia.
But RT weighed in with the news that 85% of Germans saw US-German relations as negative or
very negative, and an astounding 2% saw Russia as a problem.
There has been a long standing meme represented by the words 'the ugly American'. This was
the dollars flush barbarian going off to far off lands and demonstrating a startling lack of
diplomatic culture and proper upbringing. But even so, if we say fly mentally back to early
nineteen sixties, the admiration for America was still very strong, even in the USSR. When
Jackie Kennedy visited India for example, it was like a hugely noted and positive event.
Now, after decades of foreign wars of aggression - the greatest crime - direct and by proxy,
all camouflaged by lies, the 'war' turns on America itself, with tens of thousands of swat team
raids, excelling in killing the family dog, and some of the streets of San Francisco looking
like ghoulish zombie land, among the many symptoms of extreme and perhaps terminal
dysfunction.
Who would want that? Countries around the planet are definitely in the alternative approach
mode.
There are so many aspects to the cultural divide between Russia and say the US. Note that
Russia has encouraged organic agriculture - good for people and environment - banned GMOs.
And Russia's protective standards on Electromagnetic exposures, last I checked, were far more
protective than that prevailing in US (and Canada for that matter).
Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Feb 16, 2019 1:34:44 PM | 38
"... The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963. After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed. ..."
<
>if we say fly mentally back to early nineteen sixties, the admiration>
> for America was still very strong, even in the USSR.
> Posted by: Robert Snefjella | Feb 16, 2019 1:34:44 PM | 38
My uncle was in the US Navy in the early sixties. He made many ports of call in the
Mediterranean basin, where he and his mates were warmly greeted. Not so much now, I'm
sure.
Some here might recall that Ike was extremely pissed off at the British, French, and
Israelis for attacking Egypt and creating the 1956 Suez crisis. He threatened to dump UK
bonds and crash their financial system. That's pretty serious stuff!
So how did the Israelis manage to shift US policy 180 degrees, like a parasite taking over
the host's brain? Perhaps the answer to that could yield clues as to how to remove said
parasite without killing the host. Although the host is already brain-dead, so maybe it
wouldn't matter...
The turning point may well have been John F Kennedy's assassination in November 1963.
After that event - which some say was organized by various individuals and groups, of which
Mossad and the Israeli government may have been two co-conspirators -- a great deal changed.
The US began to escalate its war in Vietnam and the cost of pursuing that war eventually led
to the US government in 1971 taking the US dollar off the gold standard and allowing it to
create fiat money.
Something must have happened well before 1967 when the USS Liberty was strafed by Israeli
fighter jets in the intent to destroy it and all its crew and the incident blamed on the
Egyptians in an effort to draw the US into the Six Day War.
See the real connection between the fake Steele Dossier and the Skipal hoax.
The UK MI6 is behind everything with Australia and Nato. War with Russia is coming to
avoid the Brexit. It has been planned 5 years ago. The Brexit is just a good excuse.
The continued NATO harassment, sanctions and campaigns of lies and false accusations
against Russia, including the blatant war rhetoric of the British Defence Secretary, do not
bode well for the future. For the US to tear up nuclear arms treaties and then blame Russia
is beyond shameful: it is destroying all possibility of negotiations to avert war. The Kerch
Strait incident staged by the puppet regime in Kiev, sending gunboats into the Kerch Strait
without observing the 2003 Protocol requiring them to notify in advance the Port of Kerch (a
protocol observed by the dozens of ships that go through the Strait peacefully every day) was
clearly part of a NATO plan to set up a major naval clash in the Black Sea.
That clash (followed by an attempt to recapture Crimea or at least blow up its magnificent
bridge, a reproach to a man who cannot even build a wall) may be expected in coming months,
perhaps as a distraction from Brexit or a way of derailing it. NATO, in short, is on a clear
trajectory towards war with Russia, which their deluded worldview convinces them they can
win.
Their initial use of Russia as a scapegoat and bogeyman to unite the NATO vassals against
a common threat, keeping Europe in subjection to America, has got out of hand, and is
heading, under the impetus of hysterical rhetoric, towards actual war. Unless decent people
unite to stop this escalation then the nuclear catastrophe will occur.
Exposing the barefaced lie of the Skripal false flag attack may be a step towards averting
that global cataclysm.
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam,
Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending
wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
Notable quotes:
"... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into
an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously
pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our
republic.
Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and
Elliott Abrams.
I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters:
if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked
Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A
republic, madam, if you can keep it."
The USA state of continuous war has been a bipartisan phenomenon starting with Truman in Korea and proceeding with Vietnam,
Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and now Syria. It doesn't take a genius to realize that these limited, never ending
wars are expensive was to enrich MIC and Wall Street banksters
Notable quotes:
"... Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our republic. ..."
The one thing your accurate analysis leaves out is that the goal of US wars is never what the media spouts for its Wall Street
masters. The goal of any war is the redistribution of taxpayer money into the bank accounts of MIC shareholders and executives,
create more enemies to be fought in future wars, and to provide a rationalization for the continued primacy of the military class
in US politics and culture.
Occasionally a country may be sitting on a bunch of oil, and also be threatening to move away from the petrodollar or talking
about allowing an "adversary" to build a pipeline across their land.
Otherwise war is a racket unto itself. "Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable,
and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. "
― George Orwell
Also we've always been at war with Oceania .or whatever that quote said.
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into
an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously
pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our
republic.
Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and
Elliott Abrams.
I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters:
if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked
Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A
republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread
Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans
themselves?
Hmm (strokes beard)
Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)
1. Bolton is evil, 2. Pompeo is a liar, 3. Pence is a moralizing buffoon.
I detest them all but who do I hate the least? I'm going to go with Bolton.
Since I believe that Pence is an honest man, it twists my mind how someone can stand on a
stage and seriously believe that other countries have a moral obligation to obey the U.S. in
who they do and don't do business with. How dare you undermine U.S. sanctions he thunders,
and the look on his face, priceless.
At least Bolton embraces the fact that he is simply
exerting power over others without the insufferable moralizing of a Mike Pence.
Feb. 14, 2019 (EIRNS) -- Responding to the U.S. Senators' efforts to impose new sanctions on
Russia by proposing a bill on Feb. 13 called the "Defending American Security from Kremlin
Aggression Act (DASKA)" of 2019, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said behind such proposals
"there is an absolutely concrete, pragmatic and aggressive trading approach, having
nothing to do with international trade rules.... This policy sometimes borders on
racketeering. I mean various provisions of the draft law aimed at disrupting various energy
projects of Russian companies, undermining the activities of Russian banks with state
participation,"
Peskov said, reported TASS.
The proposed legislation, an updated version of an earlier bill that did not muster enough
support, seeks to increase economic, political, and diplomatic pressure on Russia "in response
to Russia's interference in democratic processes abroad, malign influence in Syria, and
aggression against Ukraine, including in the Kerch Strait," said Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), who
proposed the bill with Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), among other members of the Foreign Relations
Committee.
That why war is called racket, And that's why dominance of military-industrial complex turns
any country in neo-fascist state. Still people can fight this cancer, even if changes are not
that great.
Notable quotes:
"... It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them. ..."
It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple
reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is
that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.
And I say this as a Veteran that also thought Iraq was a good idea back in 2001. The
difference is that I then went there to serve. As a result I have learned hard fought
lessons. Tucker is spot on. Maybe the follow up article can be a piece that discusses why we
need more "combat" Veterans up in the beltway. And it is good that more veterans are now
serving in Congress but not all are combat veterans.
That's probably why Max Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed
conflict,"y et never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces
Bottomfeeders like Robert Kagan, Bill Kristol, Max Boot are just peddlers of MIC interests.
Perhaps the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to
do with their worthless opinions.
They are not paid to be experts. They're paid to use thier meaningless credentials to enhance
their credibility of MIC policies of perpetual war for perpetual peace. They're PROPAGANDISTS,
not experts.
The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and colludes
to run the Federal government for themselves and MIC
So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of
the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around.
There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is
no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are
always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."
The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be
responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since
the Iraq and Afghan debacle.
There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even
Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.
You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other
than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!
The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot
declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat
to the American homeland."
-- -- -
There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And the perpetrators are Free. See
info below:
"They Speak "
"The destruction of Libya by NATO at the behest of the UK, the US and France was a crime,
one dripping in the cant and hypocrisy of Western ideologues " John Wight, November 27,
2017.
They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves
They are the dangerous hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell
Thousands upon thousands are dead in this unfortunate country
Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and dirty
Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free
Some of them are seen posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V.
Others have written books and others are retired from public office
And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was their accomplice
They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes
And this went unreported in the "media": was this by design?
There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society today
When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say
Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war
Now Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure
And the NATO gang that caused all this horror and devastation
Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations
The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law?
Can they get away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw?
Whatever happened to law and order in the so- called "democracies"?
When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not hypocrisy?
There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived
Now many of its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive
The future of this war torn country now looks very sad and bleak
If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead hypocrisy: They Speak
"The cause of the catastrophe in Libya in Libya was the seven month US-NATO blitzkrieg
from March to October 2011 in which thousands of bombs and rockets rained down on that
unfortunate land which was governed by President Muammar Ghaddafi whom the West was
determined to overthrow by assisting a rebel movement." Brian Cloughley, 12.02.2019
The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any
rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to
apologize for is the lack of sales.
These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling
the product.
Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.
"... It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them. ..."
It is easy for them to make the recommendation to head into to war for two very simple
reasons. The first is that it will not require any personal sacrifice. The other reason is
that it will not require any sacrifice of those closest to them.
And I say this as a Veteran that also thought Iraq was a good idea back in 2001. The
difference is that I then went there to serve. As a result I have learned hard fought
lessons. Tucker is spot on. Maybe the follow up article can be a piece that discusses why we
need more "combat" Veterans up in the beltway. And it is good that more veterans are now
serving in Congress but not all are combat veterans.
"... Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant low level set of global conflicts is perfect. ..."
"... The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to apologize for is the lack of sales. ..."
Why Are These Professional War Peddlers Still Around? Pundits like Max Boot and Bill
Kristol got everything after 9/11 wrong but are still considered "experts."
1. The goal of the neocons was to exploit 9/11 to destroy countries in the Middle East
that posed a threat to Israel. As Wesley Clarke told us a long time ago, they were going to
"do" Iraq first, and after that, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon and finally Iran. Most
of this has been accomplished. We are now in the end game and Iran is in their
cross-hairs.
From the perspective of the neocons, everything has gone their way.
2. The only people who got everything thing wrong were useful idiots like Rod Dreher,
Tucker Carlson and Walter "Freedom Fries" Jones who were too dense to see what the neocons
were really up to. You did not a PhD from Harvard to see that Bush and Blair had no evidence
to back up their claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction or to figure out the true
intentions of the neocons.
So why are Boot and Kristol still around? Because Iran is not yet reduced to an ash-heap,
courtesy of USA!USA!USA! so they still have work to do.
Why have they paid no price? Let's all pretend like we don't know the answer to this. And
don't forget to condemn Ilhan Omar for her tweets just to be on the safe side.
It's difficult to live in a post-America America where American interests are subordinate to
Israel and AIPAC and lunatics like Bolton and Pompeo, now have replaced the president in
matters of foreign policy.
Trump has done a 180 and given in completely.
I like Tulsi Gabbard
and hope that she might have a chance of winning the Democratic nomination in spite of the
fact that she now is being attacked by members of her own party, along with the
representative from Minnesota who has the courage to talk of the power of the Israel lobby
that functions solely in the interest of Israel. It seems the Democrats are not so tolerant
of strong women after all. And its time for everyone to stop being intimidated by the charge
of anti-Semitism. When Israeli interests are not those of America and Americans.
Because DC is bought and paid for by the defense industry. Constant wars are good for the
bottom line, so winning is not the right strategy. Loosing doesn't work either. A constant
low level set of global conflicts is perfect.
The goal of any "peddler" is to move product. When perpetual war is the product, then any
rationale that leads to more sales will do. Enemies become interchangeable. The only thing to
apologize for is the lack of sales.
These two hucksters are not experts on the product itself, but rather experts at selling
the product.
Pres. Eisenhower, a genuine "authority on armed conflict", warned us of such peddlers.
Yes the neocons have a poor track record but they've succeeded at turning our republic into
an empire. The mainstream media and elites of practically all western nations are unanimously
pro-war. Neither political party has defined a comprehensive platform to rebuild our
republic.
Even you, Tucker Carlson, mock the efforts of Ilhan Omar for criticizing AIPAC and
Elliott Abrams.
I don't personally care for many of her opinions but that's not what matters:
if we elect another neocon government we won't last another generation. Like the lady asked
Ben Franklin "What kind of government have you bequeathed us?", and Franklin answered "A
republic, madam, if you can keep it."
Why would Max Boot and Bill Kristol want to conquer the middle east in order to spread
Americanism while at the same time having nothing but disdain for actual Americans
themselves?
Hmm (strokes beard)
Hmmmmm (strokes beard more rapidly)
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm (tears out beard furiously without abandon)
Wouldn't surprise me one bit if Kristol and Boot work for the CIA and MI6. They tend to lead
with placed stories, either before or after events, helping to persuade those who have yet to
make up their minds or those looking to have someone else do their thinking for them.
With the ongoing internet reformation we are experiencing, its a lot easier for the masses
to see the bigger picture, the parties involved and the corrupt characters playing the puppet
strings for the media.
Glad to see these shysters exposed for what they are propagandists.
Something tells me he doesn't want to push this too much as money for this film came from
French and German sources. It is nice to see him sticking his neck out to uphold the Truth.
When I watched the US rep. who supposedly investigated this Magnitzky affair for the US
gov. state under oath that he never verified any of the info that Browder gave him, I kept
thinking "Is this guy serious ?" But when you realize that they never did any investigation
then it all seems logical.
The article states: " but by 2011 Boot had another war in mind. 'Qaddafi Must Go,' Boot
declared in The Weekly Standard. In Boot's telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat
to the American homeland." -- -- - There is reported evidence that Libya was a war crime. And
the perpetrators are Free. See info below:
They speak of "The Rule of Law" while breaking the law themselves They are the dangerous
hypocrites that bombed Libya, and created hell Thousands upon thousands are dead in this
unfortunate country Many would still be alive, if our "leaders" had not been down and
dirty
Libya is reportedly a war crime and the war criminals are free Some of them are seen
posturing on the world stage and others are on T.V. Others have written books and others are
retired from public office And another exclaimed: "We came, we saw, he died" as murder was
their accomplice
They even teamed up with terrorists to commit their bloody crimes And this went unreported
in the "media": was this by design? There is a sickness and perversion loose in our society
today When war crimes can be committed and the "law" has nothing to say
Another "leader" had a fly past to celebrate the bombing victory in this illegal war Now
Libya is in chaos, while bloody terrorists roam secure And the NATO gang that caused all this
horror and devastation Are continuing their bloody bombings in other unfortunate nations
The question must be asked: "Are some past and present leaders above the law? Can they get
away with bombing and killing, are they men of straw? Whatever happened to law and order in
the so- called "democracies"? When those in power can get away with criminality: Is that not
hypocrisy?
There is no doubt that Libya was better off, before the "liberators" arrived Now many of
its unfortunate people are now struggling to exist and survive The future of this war torn
country now looks very sad and bleak If only our "leaders" had left it alone; but instead
hypocrisy: They Speak
"... As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. ..."
"... Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on armed conflict." ..."
"... Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character. ..."
"... Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled "Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the Gulf." ..."
"... Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on TV to attack Donald Trump. ..."
"... Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump. ..."
"... By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria, and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at all. ..."
"... Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK, and requires big pay. ..."
"... Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following: Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than Kristol/Boot? ..."
One thing that
every late-stage ruling class has in common is a high tolerance for mediocrity. Standards
decline, the edges fray, but nobody in charge seems to notice. They're happy in their sinecures
and getting richer. In a culture like this, there's no penalty for being wrong. The talentless
prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, and breaking things along the
way. It happened to the Ottomans.
Max Boot is living proof that it's happening in America.
Boot is a professional foreign policy expert, a job category that doesn't exist outside of a
select number of cities. Boot has degrees from Berkeley and Yale, and is a fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations. He has written a number of books and countless newspaper columns
on foreign affairs and military history. The International Institute for Strategic Studies, an
influential British think tank, describes Boot as one of the "world's leading authorities on
armed conflict."
None of this, it turns out, means anything. The professional requirements for being one
ofthe world's Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict do not include relevant experience with
armed conflict. Leading authorities on the subject don't need a track record of wise
assessments or accurate predictions. All that's required are the circular recommendations of
fellow credential holders. If other Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict induct you into their
ranks, you're in. That's good news for Max Boot.
Boot first became famous in the weeks after 9/11 for outlining a response that the Bush
administration seemed to read like a script, virtually word for word. While others were
debating whether Kandahar or Kabul ought to get the first round of American bombs, Boot was
thinking big. In October 2001, he published a piece in The Weekly Standard titled "The
Case for American Empire."
"The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,"
Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation." In order to prevent more terror attacks in American cities, Boot called for a
series of U.S.-led revolutions around the world, beginning in Afghanistan and moving swiftly to
Iraq.
"Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in
Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote. "To turn Iraq into a beacon of hope
for the oppressed peoples of the Middle East: Now that would be a historic war aim. Is this an
ambitious agenda? Without a doubt. Does America have the resources to carry it out? Also
without a doubt."
In retrospect, Boot's words are painful to read, like love letters from a marriage that
ended in divorce. Iraq remains a smoldering mess. The Afghan war is still in progress close to
20 years in. For perspective, Napoleon Bonaparte seized control of France, crowned himself
emperor, defeated four European coalitions against him, invaded Russia, lost, was defeated and
exiled, returned, and was defeated and exiled a second time, all in less time than the United
States has spent trying to turn Afghanistan into a stable country.
Things haven't gone as planned. What's remarkable is that despite all the failure and waste
and deflated expectations, defeats that have stirred self-doubt in the heartiest of men, Boot
has remained utterly convinced of the virtue of his original predictions. Certainty is a
prerequisite for Leading Authorities on Armed Conflict.
In the spring of 2003, with the war in Iraq under way, Boot began to consider new countries
to invade. He quickly identified Syria and Iran as plausible targets, the latter because it was
"less than two years" from building a nuclear bomb. North Korea made Boot's list as well. Then
Boot became more ambitious. Saudi Arabia could use a democracy, he decided.
"If the U.S. armed forces made such short work of a hardened goon like Saddam Hussein,
imagine what they could do to the soft and sybaritic Saudi royal family," Boot wrote.
Five years later, in a piece for The Wall Street Journal , Boot advocated for the
military occupation of Pakistan and Somalia. The only potential problem, he predicted, was
unreasonable public opposition to new wars.
"Ragtag guerrillas have proven dismayingly successful in driving out or neutering
international peacekeeping forces," he wrote. "Think of American and French troops blown up in
Beirut in 1983, or the 'Black Hawk Down' incident in Somalia in 1993. Too often, when outside
states do agree to send troops, they are so fearful of casualties that they impose rules of
engagement that preclude meaningful action."
In other words, the tragedy of foreign wars isn't that Americans die, but that too few
Americans are willing to die. To solve this problem, Boot recommended recruiting foreign
mercenaries. "The military would do well today to open its ranks not only to legal immigrants
but also to illegal ones," he wrote in the Los Angeles Times . When foreigners get
killed fighting for America, he noted, there's less political backlash at home.
♦♦♦
American forces, documented or not, never occupied Pakistan, but by 2011 Boot had another
war in mind. "Qaddafi Must Go," Boot declared in The Weekly Standard . In Boot's
telling, the Libyan dictator had become a threat to the American homeland. "The only way this
crisis will end -- the only way we and our allies can achieve our objectives in Libya -- is to
remove Qaddafi from power. Containment won't suffice."
In the end, Gaddafi was removed from power, with ugly and long-lasting consequences. Boot
was on to the next invasion. By late 2012, he was once again promoting attacks on Syria and
Iran, as he had nine years before. In a piece for The New York Times , Boot laid out
"Five Reasons to Intervene in Syria Now."
Overthrowing the Assad regime, Boot predicted, would "diminish Iran's influence" in the
region, influence that had grown dramatically since the Bush administration took Boot's advice
and overthrew Saddam Hussein, Iran's most powerful counterbalance. To doubters concerned about
a complex new war, Boot promised the Syria intervention could be conducted "with little
risk."
Days later, Boot wrote a separate piece for Commentary magazine calling for American
bombing of Iran. It was a busy week, even by the standards of a Leading Authority on Armed
Conflict. Boot conceded that "it remains a matter of speculation what Iran would do in the wake
of such strikes." He didn't seem worried.
Listed in one place, Boot's many calls for U.S.-led war around the world come off as a
parody of mindless warlike noises, something you might write if you got mad at a country while
drunk. ("I'll invade you!!!") Republicans in Washington didn't find any of it amusing. They
were impressed. Boot became a top foreign policy adviser to John McCain's presidential campaign
in 2008, to Mitt Romney in 2012, and to Marco Rubio in 2016.
Everything changed when Trump won the Republican nomination. Trump had never heard of the
International Institute for Strategic Studies. He had no idea Max Boot was a Leading Authority
on Armed Conflict. Trump was running against more armed conflicts. He had no interest in
invading Pakistan. Boot hated him.
As Trump found himself accused of improper ties to Vladimir Putin, Boot agitated for more
aggressive confrontation with Russia. Boot demanded larger weapons shipments to Ukraine. He
called for effectively expelling Russia from the global financial system, a move that might be
construed as an act of war against a nuclear-armed power. The stakes were high, but with
signature aplomb Boot assured readers it was "hard to imagine" the Russian government would
react badly to the provocation. Those who disagreed Boot dismissed as "cheerleaders" for Putin
and the mullahs in Iran.
Boot's stock in the Washington foreign policy establishment rose. In 2018, he was hired by
The Washington Post as a columnist. The paper's announcement cited Boot's "expertise on
armed conflict."
It is possible to isolate the precise moment that Trump permanently alienated the Republican
establishment in Washington: February 13, 2016. There was a GOP primary debate that night in
Greenville, South Carolina, so every Republican in Washington was watching. Seemingly out of
nowhere, Trump articulated something that no party leader had ever said out loud. "We should
never have been in Iraq," Trump announced, his voice rising. "We have destabilized the Middle
East."
Many in the crowd booed, but Trump kept going: "They lied. They said there were weapons of
mass destruction. There were none. And they knew there were none."
Pandemonium seemed to erupt in the hall, and on television. Shocked political analysts
declared that the Trump presidential effort had just euthanized itself. Republican voters, they
said with certainty, would never accept attacks on policies their party had espoused and
carried out.
Republican voters had a different reaction. They understood that adults sometimes change
their minds based on evidence. They themselves had come to understand that the Iraq war was a
mistake. They appreciated hearing something verboten but true.
Rival Republicans denounced Trump as an apostate. Voters considered him brave. Trump won the South Carolina primary, and shortly after that, the Republican nomination.
Republicans in Washington never recovered. When Trump attacked the Iraq War and questioned
the integrity of the people who planned and promoted it, he was attacking them. They hated him
for that. Some of them became so angry, it distorted their judgment and character.
♦♦♦
Bill Kristol is probably the most influential Republican strategist of the post-Reagan era.
Born in 1954, Kristol was the second child of the writer Irving Kristol, one of the founders of
neoconservatism.
The neoconservatism of Irving Kristol and his friends was jarring to the ossified liberal
establishment of the time, but in retrospect it was basically a centrist philosophy: pragmatic,
tolerant of a limited welfare state, not rigidly ideological. By the time Bill Kristol got done
with it 40 years later, neoconservatism was something else entirely.
Almost from the moment Operation Desert Storm concluded in 1991, Kristol began pushing for
the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. In 1997, The Weekly Standard ran a cover story titled
"Saddam Must Go." If the United States didn't launch a ground invasion of Iraq, the lead
editorial warned, the world should "get ready for the day when Saddam has biological and
chemical weapons at the tips of missiles aimed at Israel and at American forces in the
Gulf."
After the September 11 attacks, Kristol found a new opening to start a war with Iraq. In
November 2001, he and Robert Kagan wrote a piece in The Weekly Standard alleging that
Saddam Hussein hosted a training camp for Al Qaeda fighters where terrorists had trained to
hijack planes. They suggested that Mohammad Atta, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, was actively
collaborating with Saddam's intelligence services. On the basis of no evidence, they accused
Iraq of fomenting the anthrax attacks on American politicians and news outlets.
Under ordinary circumstances, Bill Kristol would be famous for being wrong. Kristol still
goes on television regularly, but it's not to apologize for the many demonstrably untrue things
he's said about the Middle East, or even to talk about foreign policy. Instead, Kristol goes on
TV to attack Donald Trump.
Trump's election seemed to undo Bill Kristol entirely. He lost his job at The Weekly
Standard after more than 20 years, forced out by owners who were panicked about declining
readership. He seemed to spend most of his time on Twitter ranting about Trump.
Before long he was ranting about the people who elected Trump. At an American Enterprise
Institute panel event in February 2017, Kristol made the case for why immigrants are more
impressive than native-born Americans. "Basically if you are in free society, a capitalist
society, after two, three, four generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent,
lazy, spoiled, whatever." Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so
forth."
In February 2018, Kristol tweeted that he would "take in a heartbeat a group of newly
naturalized American citizens over the spoiled native-born know-nothings" who supported
Trump.
By the spring of 2018, Kristol was considering a run for president himself. He was still
making the case for the invasion of Iraq, as well as pushing for a new war, this time in Syria,
and maybe in Lebanon and Iran, too. Like most people in Washington, he'd learned nothing at
all.
Trump isn't the only one hated by useless establishment Republicans – with essays like
this so will Tucker. Thanks for this takedown of these two warmongering know-nothings. I wish
Trump all the time was like he was at that debate in S Carolina where he said what every
American knows: the Iraq invasion was stupid and we should not have done it!
So why are these professional war peddlers still around? For the same reason that members of
the leadership class who failed and continue to fail in the Middle East are still around.
There has not been an accounting at any level. There is just more talk of more war.
Well, the headline pretty much answers its own question if you know the purpose of Experts.
In any subject matter from science to economics to politics, Experts are paid to be
wrong. Nobody has to be paid to observe reality accurately with his own senses and rational mind.
Every living creature does that all the time. It's the basic requirement of survival.
Creating complex and convincing false narratives to support demonic purposes is HARD WORK,
and requires big pay.
""The September 11 attack was a result of insufficient American involvement and ambition,"
Boot wrote. "The solution is to be more expansive in our goals and more assertive in their
implementation.""
In other words, if we had only squandered even more blood and treasure, why, everything
would have been fine.
Why do so many true believers end up with some variation on the true believer's wheeze:
"Communism didn't fail ! It was never tried!" Then again one can't be sure that Boot
is a true believer. He might be a treacherous snake trying to use American power to advance a
foreign agenda.
Max Boot has indeed been an advocate of overseas intervention, but you fail to point out
that he has recanted his support of the Iraq War. In his 2018 book "The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I left the American Right," he states:
". . . I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it (The Iraq War) was all a big mistake.
Saddam Hussein was heinous, but Iraq was better off under his tyrannical rule than the chaos
that followed. I regret advocating the invasion and feel guilty about all the lives lost. It
was a chastening lesson in the limits of American power."
I'm glad to see that Boot, along with yourself and other Republicans, realize that
American use of force must have a clear objective with reasonable chance of success. I
suggest you send this article to John Bolton. I'm not sure he agrees with you.
Excellent article. It's a shame that the Bush era GOP took Boot and Kristol seriously. That
poor judgment led Bush to make the kinds of mistakes that gave Democrats the opening they
needed to gain power, which in turn led them to make even more harmful mistakes.
Being against the Iraq 2 I find this populist arguing very 'eye-rolling' as you were pimping
this war to death back in the day. (In fact I remember Jon Stewart being one of the few
'pundits' that questioned the war in 2003 & 2004.) And has dovish as Trump as been, his
administration is still filled with Hawks and if you are concerned about wars then maybe use
your TV show for instead of whining for past mistakes:
1) The administration action in Iran is aggressive and counter-productive to long term
peace. The nuclear deal was an effective way of ensuring Iran controlling behavior for 15
years as the other parties, Europe and China, wanted to trade with Iran. (Additionally it
makes our nation depend more on the Saudia relationship in which Washington should be slowly
moving away from.)
2) Like it or not, Venezuela is starting down the steps of mission creep for the Trump
Administration. Recommend the administration stay away from peace keeping troops and suggest
this is China's problem. (Venezuela in debt to their eyeballs with China.)
3) Applaud the administration with peace talks with NK but warn them not to overstate
their accomplishments. It is ridiculous that the administration signed big nuclear deals with
NK that don't exist.
I find it amazing that Boot is considered one of the "world's leading authorities on armed
conflict,"yet never appears to have served in any branch of the armed forces, nor even heard
a shot fired in anger. He is proof that academic credentials do not automatically confer
"expertise."
Any war, anytime, any place, and cause just so long as American boys and girls can be in the
middle of it.
Welcome to the American NeoCon movement, recently joined by Republican Never Trumpers,
elected Democrats, and a host of far too many underemployed Beltway Generals &
Admirals.
From a reformed Leftist, thank you Tucker for calling out the stank from the Republicans. The
detailed compilation of lowlights from Max Boot and Bill Kristol (don't forget Robert Kagan!)
should be etched in the minds of the now pro-war Democratic Party establishment.
I laughed out loud while reading this, and continued laughing through to the end, until I
saw who had the audacity to tell the truth about these utter incompetent failures (who have
failed upwards for more than a decade now) who call themselves "foreign policy experts."
Yeah -- "experts" at being so moronically wrong that you really start wondering if perhaps
the benjamins from another middle eastern nation, that can't be named, has something to do
with their worthless opinions, which always seem to do made for the benifit of the nameless
nation.
So hurrah for you!!!
Let the truth set us all free!
Praise the Lord & Sing Songs of Praise to his Name!!!!
Literally that's how great it is to hear the pure & unvarnished TRUTH spoken out loud in
this publication!
I hope you get such awesome feedback that you are asked to continue to bless us with more
truths!
Thank you! You totally made my day!
And thank you for your service to this country, where it used to be considered patriotic
to speak the truth honestly & plainly!
"Once we have deposed Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in
Baghdad, to go along with the one in Kabul," Boot wrote.
To which the reader might reasonably reply, "What do you mean we , Paleface?"
When I see Max Boot or Bill Kristol in uniform, carrying a rifle, and trudging with their
platoon along the dusty roads of the Middle East, I'll begin to pay attention to their bleats
and jeremiads.
Until that day, I'll continue to view them as a pair of droning, dull-as-ditchwater
members of the 45th Word-processing Brigade. (Company motto: "Let's you and him fight!")
It is my understanding that HRC led the charge to overthrow and hang Gaddafi in spite of a
reluctant Obama administration. Did Boot, in fact, influence her?
"Most Americans, Kristol said, "grew up as spoiled kids and so forth."" Unintentional irony, one must presume. Still it is astonishing that it took someone as addled as DJT to point out the
obvious–Invading Iraq was a massive mistake.
Just like Eliot Abrams, John McCain, GWB, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld or any other neocon, there is
no justice or punishment or even well deserved humiliation for these parasites. They are
always misinformed, misguided, or "well intentioned."
The US can interfere with sovereign governments and elections at will I guess and not be
responsible for the the unintended consequences such as 500k+ killed in the Middle East since
the Iraq and Afghan debacle.
There are sugar daddies from the MIC, the Natsec state (aka the Swamp), AIPAC, and even
Jeff Bezos (benefactor of WaPo) that keep these guys employed.
You need to be more critical of Trump also as he is the one hiring these clowns. But other
than that, keep up the good work Mr. Carlson!
These Chairborne Rangers in Washington know nothing about war. They are the flip side of the radical Dems. "Hey, we lost in 2016. Let's do MORE of what
made us lose in the first place!"
The GOP is as much an enemy to the Trump revolution
as the left. The Bush/Clinton/Obama coalition runs DC – controls the federal workforce, and
colludes to run the Federal government for themselves and their pet constituents.
Trump should have stuck it out on the shutdown until those federal workers left. I think
it was called RIF wherein after 30 days, he could dump the lot of em.
THE GOP IS NOT THE PARTY OF LESS GOVERNMENT. That's there motto for busy conservatives who
don't have the time or inclination to monitor both sides of the swamp.
Lots of spilled ink here that's pretty meaningless without an answer to the following:
Why does Trump employ John Bolton and Elliot Abrams? Explain Trump and Pence and Pompeo's Iran obsession and how it's any better than
Kristol/Boot?
Funny how when liberals said it was wrong to be in Iraq they were vilified. Yes some
conservatives changed their minds. Trump however is all over the map when it comes to wars.
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176527/
US Representative Ilhan Omar's (D-Minnesota) tweet is a critique of US-Israel collusion in
the Middle East, Institute for Public Accuracy's Sam Husseini tells RT America's Manila Chan.
#RTAmerica#InQuestionRT#QuestionMore
Democratic Congressmember Ilhan Omar of Minnesota is facing
criticism today after commenting on a tweet by Glenn Greenwald. On Sunday, Greenwald tweeted,
"GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy threatens punishment for @IlhanMN and @RashidaTlaib over their
criticisms of Israel.
It's stunning how much time US political leaders spend defending a foreign nation even if it
means attacking free speech rights of Americans." Rep. Omar retweeted his post and added the
line: "It's all about the Benjamins baby."
She later named AIPAC as the organization paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.
"... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
"... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
"... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
"... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
"... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
"... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
"... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
"... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
"... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
"... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
"... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
"... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
"... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had
somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.
An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business
contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian
click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence
that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.
Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate
is finished :
After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016
election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats
and Republicans on the committee.
...
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would
unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice
Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.
Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies
were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the
dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced
to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:
"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to
influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...
No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.
Russiagate created a lot of damage.
The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to
install censorship on social media. It was used
to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia.
Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was
held in solitary confinement
(recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out
of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from
there.
Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM |
Permalink
Comments next
page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or
parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the
Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some
comments of its own .
I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing,
all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff
like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!
as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing
down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm
at this point...
Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist
to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.
= ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent
The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.
= ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn
Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw
them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond
was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.
You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in
the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy
theorists.
I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver
bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.
I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate
proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even
if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.
The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee
chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine
Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.
They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct
so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft"
impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand
innuendoes and guilt-by-association.
Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt
to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate
the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.
Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)
Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget
how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate
a new narrative.
So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted
coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.
Putin solicits public input for essential national
policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos
argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their
economy.
Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI,
and within the entire Democrat Party.
I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several
stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point
made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful
idiot
for a take on the alternative reality some are living in
emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section...
as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM |
link
Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands
of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint
Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal
at the Daily Beast.
Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this
to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity
Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western
world.
The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly
4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most
of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.
Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s
Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance
who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.
Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically
justified by its diabolical policies.
I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power.
Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.
somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their
noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been
made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.
So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000
emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at
war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.
Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's
the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which
means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the
EU bloc.
Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely
to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that
will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.
I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but
the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".
You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in
supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.
Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane
by a properly functioning court of law.
I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no
investigation of Hillary ...
Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President,
Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and
propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.
Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep
State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn
and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?
Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have
gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu
and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because
he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.
I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties,
when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.
Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM |
link
Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated
either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.
This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.
On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen
to explore the facts.
Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead
the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were
commissioned to produce a 'report.'
Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.
Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information
was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.
Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."
In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests,
not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something
because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.
Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded
in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in
the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"
What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence
there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.
Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged
one evening after work and killed.
The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they
die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely,
the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL
FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.
That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than
in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid
of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish
state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West
and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and
Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!
He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all
along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35.
German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have
in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're
after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft,
that would be worth a try.
Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2)
he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)
It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate
they could manipulate.
Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both
hands, it would surprise me.
That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.
Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting
peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their
Government Lackeys.
It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made
that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do
it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it
to be so
Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded
by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign
governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other
countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.
Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well,
not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades
would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he
was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"
If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO
Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation,
propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to
move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral
college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.
It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a
warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians
tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real'
crimes which were done without a Russian assist.
I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed
a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney,
former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow
the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich.
So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?
Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie
Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The
documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also
this primer on Mueller's MO.
reply to Les 42
"It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they
could manipulate."
Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know
she is insane.
They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately
once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.
They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command
doesn't fully support.
Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)
The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the
democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to
increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia
collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this
request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will
happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe
the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!
Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.
The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions,
purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign
governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine
danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
@76Hw
I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have
a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking
hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to
pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?
Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump
infatuation, you should too!
Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's
Trump professing his endless love for Zionism:
Trump Resign
Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the
lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.
Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information
to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The
armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so
stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.
When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be
supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back
you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is
say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat
vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide
to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,,
Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise
trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives,
its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and
masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the
governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class
of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and
when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.
1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear
weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.
2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement,
and everybody laughed,
3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has
been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could
be a target, but
4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and
5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.
Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner
get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is
in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken
out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..
Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?
I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate
is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.
At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on
decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already
brainwashed population?
The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away
from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called
US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia
can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state
of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding
them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.
Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures
naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic
decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.
Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?
Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?
If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To
do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National
Emergency for more money for the wall.
The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need
a president to be more "presidential."
My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.
The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour,
"Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian
defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British
woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special
correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others,
the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry
of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.
Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know.
A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is
to be had even by academics for the right results.
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.
"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain --
that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not
Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely
excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously
welcomed."
On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of
The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's
Future.
Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship
imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward
Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that
had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for
example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very
hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."
"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece
published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."
"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or
seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this
Cold War and the preceding Cold War."
"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two
exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say
they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were
rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say –
could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."
"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you
would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are
used to these newspapers."
"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these
things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been
de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."
"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington
Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's
just the way the news business works now."
"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate
these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in
these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have
been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the
parameters of the debate."
"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my
lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no.
It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."
"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident
voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes
they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."
"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate
by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for
newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television
networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."
"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some
other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like
keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though
they haven't been convicted of anything."
"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said
– I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are
doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."
Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person
in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia
can be "appropriated by the right."
"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to
hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people
who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the
man said.
Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a
racist or a nationalist."
"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are
different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have
always been a nationalistic country."
"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not
permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the
way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is
making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities
– and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."
"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my
mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation ,
which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I
had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"
"... You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. ..."
"... Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means. ..."
"... Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI, and within the entire Democrat Party. ..."
"... Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western world. ..."
"... Stephen Cohen discusses how rational viewpoints are banned from the mainstream media, and how several features of US life today resemble some of the worst features of the Soviet system. https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/02/12/stephen-cohen-on-war-with-russia-and-soviet-style-censorship-in-the-us/ ..."
"... The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly 4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course. ..."
"... Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically justified by its diabolical policies. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their Government Lackeys. ..."
"... It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it to be so ..."
"... If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation, propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention. ..."
"... See also this primer on Mueller's MO. ..."
"... The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to increase military spending; and more, more, more war. ..."
"... Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished. a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians. ..."
"... At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already brainwashed population? ..."
"... The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. ..."
"... Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others, the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry. ..."
For more than two years U.S. politicians, the media and some bloggers hyped a conspiracy theory. They claimed that Russia had
somehow colluded with the Trump campaign to get him elected.
An obviously fake 'Dirty Dossier' about Trump, commissioned by the Clinton campaign, was presented as evidence. Regular business
contacts between Trump flunkies and people in Ukraine or Russia were claimed to be proof for nefarious deals. A Russian
click-bait company was accused of manipulating the U.S. electorate by posting puppy pictures and crazy memes on social media.
Huge investigations were launched. Every rumor or irrelevant detail coming from them was declared to be - finally - the evidence
that would put Trump into the slammer. Every month the walls were closing in on Trump.
Finally the conspiracy theory has run out of steam. Russiagate
is finished :
After two years and 200 interviews, the Senate Intelligence Committee is approaching the end of its investigation into the 2016
election, having uncovered no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia, according to both Democrats
and Republicans on the committee.
...
Democrats and other Trump opponents have long believed that special counsel Robert Mueller and Congressional investigators would
unearth new and more explosive evidence of Trump campaign coordination with Russians. Mueller may yet do so, although Justice
Department and Congressional sources say they believe that he, too, is close to wrapping up his investigation.
Nothing, zero, nada was found to support the conspiracy theory. The Trump campaign did not collude with Russia. A few flunkies
were indicted for unrelated tax issues and for lying to the investigators about some minor details. But nothing at all supports the
dramatic claims of collusion made since the beginning of the affair.
In a recent statement House leader Nancy Pelosi was reduced
to accuse Trump campaign officials of doing their job:
"The indictment of Roger Stone makes clear that there was a deliberate, coordinated attempt by top Trump campaign officials to
influence the 2016 election and subvert the will of the American people. ...
No one called her out for spouting such nonsense.
Russiagate created a lot of damage.
The alleged Russian influence campaign that never happened was used to
install censorship on social media. It was used
to undermine the election of progressive Democrats. The weapon salesmen used it to push for more NATO aggression against Russia.
Maria Butina, an innocent Russian woman interested in good relation with the United States, was
held in solitary confinement
(recommended) until she signed a paper which claims that she was involved in a conspiracy.
In a just world the people who for more then two years hyped the conspiracy theory and caused so much damage would be pushed out
of their public positions. Unfortunately that is not going to happen. They will jump onto the next conspiracy train continue from
there.
Posted by b on February 12, 2019 at 01:38 PM |
Permalink
Comments next
page " Legally, Maria Butina was suborned into signing a false declaration. If there were the rule of law, such party or
parties that suborned her would be in gaol. Considering Mueller's involvement with Lockerbie, I am not holding my breath. FWIW the
Swiss company that made the timers allegedly involved in Lockerbie have some
comments of its own .
I will be really glad when this 'get Russia' craziness is over, but I suspect even if the Mueller investigation has nothing,
all the same creeps will be pulling out the stops to generate something... Skripal, Integrity Initiative, and etc. etc. stuff
like this just doesn't go away overnight or with the end of this 'investigation'... folks are looking for red meat i tell ya!
as for Maria Butina - i look forward to reading the article.. that was a travesty of justice but the machine moves on, mowing
down anyone in it's way... she was on the receiving end of all the paranoia that i have come to associate with the western msm
at this point...
Hillary's loss is actually best explained as her throwing the election to Trump . The Deep State wanted a nationalist
to win as that would best help meet the challenge from Russia and China - a challenge that they had been slow to recognize.
= ... to smear Wikileaks as a Russian agent
The DNC leak is best explained as a CIA false flag.
= ... to remove and smear Michael Flynn
Trump said that he fired Flynn for lying to VP Pence but Flynn's conversations with the Russian Ambassador after Obama threw
them out for "meddling" in the US election was an embarrassment to the Administration as Putin's Putin's decision not to respond
was portrayed as favoritism toward the Trump Administration.
You can take this to the bank. Hardcore Russiagaters will never give up their belief in collusion and Russian influence in
the 2016 campaign -- never. Congress and Mueller will be accused of engaging in a coverup. This is typical behavior for conspiracy
theorists.
I hope that Russiagate is indeed "finished", but I think it needs to be draped with garlic-clove necklaces, shot up with silver
bullets, sprinkled with holy water, and a wooden stake driven through its black heart just to make sure.
I don't dispute the logical argument B. presents, but it may be too dispassionately rational. I know that the Russiagate
proponents and enthralled supporters of the concept are too invested psychologically in this surrealistic fantasy to let go, even
if the official outcome reluctantly admits that there's no "there" there.
The Democratic Party, one of the major partners mounting the Russophobic psy-op, has already resolved to turn Democratic committee
chairmen loose to dog the Trump administration with hearings aggressively flogging any and all matters that discredit and undermine
Trump-- his business connections, social liaisons, etc.
They may hope to find the Holy Grail: the elusive "bombshell" that "demands" impeachment, i.e., some crime or illicit conduct
so heinous that the public will stand for another farcical impeachment proceeding. But I reckon that the Dems prefer the "soft"
impeachment of harassing Trump with hostile hearings in hopes of destroying his 2020 electability with the death of a thousand
innuendoes and guilt-by-association.
Thus, even if the Mueller report is underwhelming, I think that the Democrats and TDS-saturated Trump opponents will attempt
to rehabilitate it by pretending that it contains important loose ends that need to be pursued. In other words, to perpetuate
the Mueller-driven political Russophobia by all other available means.
Put more succinctly, I fear that Russiagate won't be finished until Rachel Maddow says it's finished. ;)
Once a hypothesis is fixed in people's minds, whether true or not, it's hard to get them to let go of it. And let's not forget
how many times the narrative changed (and this is true in the Skripal case as well), with all past facts vanishing to accommodate
a new narrative.
So I, like others, expect the fake scandal to continue while many, many other real crimes (the US attempted
coup in Venezuela and the genocidal war in Yemen, for instance) continue unabated.
Putin solicits public input for essential national
policy goals . If ever there was a template to follow for an actual MAGAgenda, Putin's Russia provides one. While US politicos
argue over what is essentially Bantha Pudu, Russians are hard at work improving their nation which includes restructuring their
economy.
Russiagate has exposed the great degree of corruption within the Justice Department bureaucracy, particularly within FBI,
and within the entire Democrat Party.
I very much doubt it it is over. Trump is corrupt and has links to corrupt Russians. Collusion, maybe not, but several
stinking individuals are in the frame for, guess what - ...bring it on... The fact that Hilary was arguably even worse (a point
made ad-nauseum on here) is frankly irrelevant. The vilification of Trump will not affect the warmongers efforts. He is a useful
idiot
for a take on the alternative reality some are living in
emptywheel has an article up on the nbc link b provides and the article on butina is discussed in the comments section...
as i said - they are looking for red meat and will not be happy until they get some... they are completely zonkers...
Blooming Barricade , Feb 12, 2019 2:55:18 PM |
link
Now that this racket has been admitted as such, I expect all of the media outlets that devoted banner headlines, hundreds of thousands
of hours of cable TV time, thousands of trees, and free speech online to immediately fire all of their journalists and appoint
Glenn Greenwald as the publisher of the New York Times, Michael Tracey at the Post, Aaron Matte at the Guardian, and Max Blumenthal
at the Daily Beast.
Since this is obviously not going to be allowed to happen, and since these people get away with everything, expect this
to never end, despite all evidence to the contrary. It doesn't matter if they've been exposed as CIA propagandists or Integrity
Initiative stooges, the game goes on...and on.... the job security of these disgraced columnists is the greatest in the Western
world.
The US needs an enemy, how else can they ask NATO members to cough up 2% of GDP [just for one example Germany's GDP is nearly
4 Trillion dollars [2017] for defence spending, what a crazy sum all NATO members must fork out to please the US, but then most
of that money must be spent on the US MIC 'interoperability' of course.
Then of course Russia has to be surrounded by NATO should they try and take over Europe by surging through the Fulda gap./s
Then of course there are the professional pundits who have built careers on anti Russian propaganda, Rachel Maddow for instance
who earns 30,000$ per day to spew anti Russian nonsense.
Another great damage of Russiagate was the instigating of a nuclear arms race directed primarily at Russia, and ideologically
justified by its diabolical policies.
I'm sorry b is so down on Conspiracy Theories, since they reveal quite real staged homicidal false flag operations of US power.
Feeding into the stigmatizing of the truth about reality is not in the interests of the earth's people.
somehow I see this "revelation: tied to Barr's approaching tenure. I think they (FBI/DOJ) didn't want his involvement in their
noodle soup of an investigation and the best way to accomplish that was to end it themselves. I also suspect that a deal has been
made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone.
So we will see no investigation of Hillary, her 650,000
emails or the many crimes they detailed (according to NYPD investigation of Weiner's laptop) and the US will continue to be at
war all day, every day. Team Swamp rules.
Meanwhile, MSM is prepping its readers for the possibility that the Mueller report will never be released to us proles. If that's
the case, I'm sure nobody will try to use innuendo to suggest it actually contains explosive revelations after all...
Harry, its vitally important as the US desperately wants to keep Europe under its thumb and to stop this European army which
means Europe lead by Paris and Berlin becomes a world power. Trump's attempts to make nice with Russia is to keep it out of the
EU bloc.
Well, the liberal conspiracy car crash ensured downmarket Mussolini a second term, it appears...Hard Brexit Tories also look likely
to win thanks to centrist sabatoge of the left. You reap what you sow, corporate presstitutes!
Sane people have predicted the end of Russiagate almost as many times as insane people have predicted that the "smoking gun that
will get rid of Trump" has been found. And yet the Mighty Wurlitzer grinds on, while social media is more and more censored.
I expect it all to continue until the 2020 election circus winds up into full-throated mode, and no one talks about anything but
the next puppet to be appointed. Oops, I mean "elected".
You also need to behead the corpse, stuff the mouth with a lemon and then place the head down in the coffin with the body in
supine (facing up) position. Weight the coffin with stones and wild roses and toss it into a fast-flowing river.
Russiagate won't be finished until a wall is built around Capitol Hill and all its inhabitants and worker bees declared insane
by a properly functioning court of law.
I also suspect that a deal has been made with Trump, possibly in exchange for leaving his family alone. So we will see no
investigation of Hillary ...
Underlying your perspective is the assumption that USA is a democracy where a populist "outsider" could be elected President,
Yet you also believe that Hillary and the Deep State have the power to manipulate government and the intelligence agencies and
propose a "conspiracy theory" based on that power.
Isn't it more likely that Trump made it clear (behind closed doors, of course) that he was amenable to the goals of the Deep
State and that the bogus investigation was merely done to: 1) cover their own election meddling; 2) eliminate threats like Flynn
and Assange/Wikileaks; 3) anti-Russian propaganda?
Dowd, Trump's former lawyer on Russiagate stated there may not even be a report. If this is the case then the Zionist rulers have
gotten to Mueller who no doubt figured out that the election collusion breadcrumbs don't lead to Putin, they lead to Netanyahu
and Zionist billionaire friends! So Mueller may have to come up with a nothing burger to hide the truth.
B is the only alternative media blogger I've followed for a significant amount of time without becoming disenfranchised. Not because
he has no blind spot - his is just one I can deal with... optimism.
I will believe Russiagate is finished when expelled Russian staff gets back, when the US returns the seized Russian properties,
when the consulate is Seattle reopens and when USA issues formal apology to Russia.
Posted by: hopehely | Feb 12, 2019 5:14:49 PM |
link
Nobody has ever advanced the tiniest shred of credible evidence that 'Russia' or its government at any level was in any way implicated
either in Wikileaks' acquisition of the DNC and Podesta emails or in any form of interference with the Presidential election.
This has been going on for three years and not once has anything like evidence surfaced.
On the other hand there has been an abundance of evidence that those alleging Russian involvement consistently refused to listen
to explore the facts.
Incredibly, the DNC computers were never examined by the FBI or any other agency resembling an official police agency. Instead
the notorious Crowdstrike professionally russophobic and caught red handed faking data for the Ukrainians against Russia were
commissioned to produce a 'report.'
Nobody with any sense would have credited anything about Russiagate after that happened.
Thgen there was the proof, from VIPS and Bill Binney (?) that the computers were not hacked at all but that the information
was taken by thumbdrive. A theory which not only Wikileaks but several witnesses have offered to prove.
Not one of them has been contacted by the FBI, Mueller or anyone else "investigating."
In reality the charges from the first were ludicrous on their face. There is, as b has proved and every new day's news attests,
not the slightest reason why anyone in the Russian government should have preferred Trump over Clinton. And that is saying something
because they are pretty well indistinguishable. And neither has the morals or brains of an adolescent groundhog.
Russiagate is over, alright, The Nothingburger is empty. But that means nothing in this 'civilisation': it will be recorded
in the history books, still to be written, by historians still in diapers, that "The 2016 Presidential election, which ended in
the controversial defeat of Hillary Clinton, was heavily influenced by Russian agents who hacked ..etc etc"
What will not be remembered is that every single email released was authentic. And that within those troves of correspondence
there was enough evidence of criminality by Clinton and her campaign to fill a prison camp.
Another thing that will not be recalled is that there was once a young enthusiastic man, working for the DNC, who was mugged
one evening after work and killed.
The 'no collusion' result will only spur the 'beginning of the end' baboons to shout even more, they'll never stop until they
die in their beds or the plebs of the Republic made them adore the street lamp posts, you'll see. The former is by far more likely,
the unwashed of American have never had a penchant for foreign affairs except for the few spasms like Vietnam.
There was collusion alright but the only Russians who helped Trump get elected and were in on the collusion are citizens of ISRAEL
FIRST, likewise for the American billionaires who put Trump in the power perch. ISRAEL FIRST.
That's why Trump is on giant billboards in Israel shaking hands with the Yahoo. Trump is higher in the polls in Israel than
in the U.S. If it weren't that the Zionist upper crust need Trump doing their dirty work in America, like trying today get rid
of Rep. Omar Ilhan, then Trump would win the elections in Ziolandia or Ziostan by a landslide cause he's been better for the Joowish
state than all preceding Presidents put together. Mazel tov to them bullshet for the rest of us servile mass in the vassal West
and Palestinians the most shafted class ever. Down with Venezuela and Iran, up with oil and gas. The billionare shysters' and
Trump's payola is getting closer. Onward AZ Empire!
He proved himself so easy to troll during the election. It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all
along was to get him elected and have a candidate they could manipulate.
At least Germany has the good sense not to throw taxpayer money at the F-35.
German F-35 decision sacrifices NATO capability for Franco-German industrial cooperation I don't know what they have
in mind with a proposed airplane purchase. If they need fighters, buy or lease Sweden's Gripen. If attack airplanes are what they're
after, go to Boeing and get some brand new F-15X models. If the prickly French are agreeable to build a 6th generation aircraft,
that would be worth a try.
Regarding Rachel Maddow, I recently had an encounter with a relative who told me 1) I visited too many oddball sites and 2)
he considered Rachel M. to be the most reliable news person in existence. I think we're talking "true believer" here. :)
It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate
they could manipulate.
Considering how those "intelligence agencies" are hard pressed to find their own tails, even if you allow them to use both
hands, it would surprise me.
That Trump would turn out to be a tub of jello in more than just a physical way has been a surprise to an awful lot of us.
Russiagate was very successful. You just have to understand the objectives. It was a great distraction. Diverting
peoples attention from the continued fleecing of the "real people" which are the bottom 90% by the "Corporate People" and their
Government Lackeys.
It provided an excuse for the acting CEO (a figurehead) of the Corporate Empire to go back on many of the promises made
that got him elected, and to fill the swamp with Neocon and Koch Brother creatures with the excuse the Deep State made him do
it. More proof that there is no deception that is too ridiculous to be believed so long as you have enough pundits claiming it
to be so
Allowed the bipartisan support for the clamp down on alt media with censorship by social media (Deep State Tools) and funded
by the Ministry of Truth set up by Obama in his last days in office to under the false pretense of protecting us from foreign
governments interference in elections (except Israel of course) . Similar agencies have been set up or planned to be in other
countries followig the US example such as UK, France, Russia, etc.
Did anyone really expect Mr "Cover It Up " Mueller to find anything? Mueller is Deep State all the way and Trump is as well,
not withstanding the "Fake Wrestling " drama that they are bitter enemies. All the surveillance done over the past 2-3 decades
would have so much dirt on the Trumpet they could silence him forever . Trump knew that going in and I sometimes wonder if he
was pressured to run as a condition to avoid prosecution. Pretty sure every President since Carter has been "Kompromat"
If you've done just a cursory look into Seth Rich, you'd be very suspicious about the story of his life and death. IMO
Assange/Wikilleaks were set up. And Flynn was set up too. What they are doing is Orwellian: White Helmets, election manipulation,
propaganda, McCarthism, etc. If you're not angry, you're not paying attention.
Russians and likely at the behest of the Russian state interfered and it was fair payback for Yeltsin's election. It is time to
move on but not in feigned ignorance of what was done. Was it "outcome" affecting, possibly, but not clearly and if the US electoral
college and electoral system generally is so decrepit that a second level power in the world can influence then its the US's fault.
It's not like the 2000 election wasn't a warning shot about the rottenness of system and a system that doesn't understand a
warning shot deserves pretty much what it gets. But there's enough non-hype evidence of acts and intent to say yes, the Russians
tried and may have succeeded. They certainly are acting guilty enough. but still close the book move and move on to Trump's 'real'
crimes which were done without a Russian assist.
I seem to recall former UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan Craig Murray saying that it was not a hack and that he had been handed
a thumb drive in a field near American University by a disgruntled Democrat whistleblower. Further, I seem to recall William Binney,
former NSA Technical Leader for intelligence, conducting an experiment to show that internet speeds at the time would not allow
the information to be hacked - they knew the size of the files and the period over which they were downloaded. Plus, Seth Rich.
So why does anyone even believe it was a hack, @32 THN?
Just another comment re Mueller. There is a great documentary by (Dutch, not Israeli---different person) Gideon Levy, Lockerbie
Revisited. The narration is in Dutch, but the interviews are in English, and there is a small segment of a German broadcast. The
documentary ends abruptly where one set of FBI personnel contradict statements by another set of FBI personnel. See also
this primer on Mueller's MO.
reply to Les 42
"It wouldn't surprise me if aim of the domestic intelligence agencies all along was to get him elected and have a candidate they
could manipulate."
Not the intelligence agencies, the Military IMO. They knew HC for what she was; horrifically corrupt and,again IMO,they know
she is insane.
They saw and I think still see Trump as someone they could work with, remember Rogers (Navy) of the NSA going to him immediately
once he was elected? That was the Military protecting him as best they could.
They IMO have kept him alive and as long as he doesn't send any troops into "real" wars, they will keep on keeping him alive.
This doesn't mean Trump hasn't gone over to the Dark Side, just that no military action will take place that the military command
doesn't fully support.
Again, I could be wrong, he could be backed by fiends from Patagonia for all I really know:)
The button pushers behind the Trump collusion and Russia election hacking false narratives got what they wanted: to walk the
democrats and republicans straight into Cold War v2; to start their campaign to suppress alternative voices on the internet; to
increase military spending; and more, more, more war.
Boy, I hope Jackrabbit sees this. Everyone knows I believe Trump is the anointed chosen of the Zionist 1%. There was no Russia
collusion; it was Zionist collusion with a Russian twist...
Oh yeah! Forgot to mention the latest. Trump is asking Kim to provide a list of his nuclear scientists! Before Kim acts on this
request, he should call up the Iranian government for advise 'cause they have lots of experience and can warn Kim of what will
happen to each of those scientists. They'll be put on a kill-list and will be extrajudicially wacked as in executed. Can you believe
the chutzpah? Trump must think Kim is really stupid to fall for that one!
Aye! The thought of six more years of Zionist pandering Trump. Barf-inducing prospect is too tame.
The view from the hermitage is, we are in the age of distractions. Russiagate will be replaced with one of a litany of distractions,
purely designed to keep us off target. The target being, corruption, vote rigging, illegal wars, war crimes, overthrowing sovereign
governments, and political assasinations, both at home and abroad. Those so distracted, will focus on sillyness; not the genuine
danger afoot around the planet. Get used to it; it's become the new normal.
@76Hw
I have yet to read anything more delusional, nay, utterly preposterous. Methinks you over-project too much. Even Trump would have
a belly-ache laugh reading that sheeple spiel. You're the type that sees the giant billboard of Zionist Trump and Yahoo shaking
hands and drones on and on that our lying eyes deceive us and it's really Trump playing 4-D chess. I suppose when he tried to
pressure Omar Ilhan into resigning her seat in Congress yesterday, that too was reverse psychology?
Trump instagramed the billboard pic, he tweeted it, he probably pasted it on his wall; maybe with your kind of wacky, Trump
infatuation, you should too!
Russiagate is finished because Mueller discovered an embarrassing fact: The collusion was and always will be with Israel. Here's
Trump professing his endless love for Zionism:
Trump Resign
Russiagate was very successful <=pls read, re-read Pft @ 46.. he listed many things. divide and conquer accomplished.
a nation state is defined as an armed rule making structure, designed by those who control a territory, and constructed by the
lawyers, military, and wealthy and run by the persons the designers appoint, for the appointed are called politicians.
Most designs of armed nation states provide the designers with information feedback and the designers use that information
to appoint more obedient politicians and generals to run things, and to improve the design to better serve the designers. The
armed rule making structure is designed to give the designers complete control over those targeted to be the governed. Why so
stupid the governed? ; always they allow themselves to be manipulated like sheep.
When 10 angry folks approach you with two pieces of ropes: one to throw over the tree branch under which your horse will be
supporting you while they tie the noose around your neck and the other shorter piece of rope to tie your hands behind ..your back
you need at that point to make your words count , if five of the people are black and five are white. all you need do is
say how smart the blacks are, and how stupid the whites are, as the two groups fight each other you manage your escape. democrat
vs republican= divide to conquer. gun, no gun = divide to conquer, HRC vs DJT = divide to conquer, abortion, no abortion = divide
to conquer, Trump is a Russian planted in a high level USA position of power = divide to conquer, They were all in on it together,,
Muller was in the white house to keep the media supplied with XXX, to keep the law enforcement agencies in the loop, and to advise
trump so things would not get out of hand ( its called Manipulation and the adherents to the economic system called Zionism
For the record, Zionism is not related to race, religion or intelligence. Zionism is a system of economics that take's no captives,
its adherents must own everything, must destroy and decimate all actual or imaginary competition, for Zionist are the owners and
masters of everything? Zionism is about power, absolute power, monopoly ownership and using governments everywhere to abuse the
governed. Zionism has many adherents, whites, blacks, browns, Christians, Jews, Islamist, Indians, you name it among each class
of person and walk of life can be found persons who subscribe to the idea that they, and only they, should own everything, and
when those of us, that are content to be the governed let them, before the kill and murder us, they usually end up owning everything.
1. why the Joint non nuclear agreement with Iran and the other nuclear power nations, that prevented Iran from developing nuclear
weapons, was trashed? Someone needs to be able to say Iran is developing ..., at the right time.
2. Why Netanyohu made public a video that claimed Iran was developing nuclear stuff in violation of the Iran non nuclear agreement,
and everybody laughed,
3. Why the nuclear non proliferation agreement with Russia, that terminated the costly useless arms race a decade ago, has
been recently terminated, to reestablish the nuclear arms race, no apparent reason was given the implication might be Russia could
be a target, but
4. why it might make sense to give nukes to Saudi Arabia or some other rogue nation, and
5. why no one is allowed to have nuclear weapons except the Zionist owned and controlled nation states.
Statement: Zionism is an economic system that requires the elimination of all competition of whatever kind. It is a winner
get's all, takes no prisoners, targets all who would threaten or be a challenge or a threat; does not matter if the threat is
in in oil and gas, technology or weapons as soon as a possibility exist, the principles of Zionism would require that it be taken
out, decimated, and destroyed and made where never again it could even remotely be a threat to the Empire, that Zionism demands..
Hypothesis: A claim that another is developing nuclear weapon capabilities is sufficient to take that other out?
I am glad that most commenters understand that Russiagate will not go away. But the majority appear to miss the real reason. Russiagate
is not an accusation, it is the state of mind.
At the beginnng of Russiagate, I wrote on Robert Parry's Consirtium News that Russiagate is Idiocracy piggy-backing on
decades and literally billions of dollars of anti-Soviet and anti-Russian propaganda. How hard would it be to brainwash an already
brainwashed population?
The purveyors of Russiagate will re-compose themselves, brush off all reports and continue on. One just cannot get away
from one's nature, even when that nature is pure idiocy. Of course, the most ironic in the affair is that it is the so called
US "intellectuals", academics and other assorted cretins who are the most fervent proponents. If you were wondering how Russia
can make such amazing defensive weapons that US can only deny exist and wet dream of having, there is your answer. It is the state
of mind. The whole of US establishment are legends in their on lunch time and totally delusional about the reality surrounding
them - both Russiagate and MAGA cretins, no report can help the Russiagate nation.
Finally, I am thinking of that crazy and ugly professor bitch from the British Cambridge University who gives her lectures
naked to protest something or other. I am so lucky that I do not have to go to a Western university ever again. What a catastrophic
decline! No Brexit can help the Skripal nation.
Russiagate is finished, but is DJT also among the rubble?
Hardly any money for the border wall and still lingering in the ME?
If Hoarsewhisperer proves to be correct above re: DJT, he will really have to knock our socks off before election 2020. To
do this he will have to unequivocally and unceremoniously withdraw from the MENA and Afghanistan and possibly declare a National
Emergency for more money for the wall.
The problem is, when he does this, he will look impulsively dangerous and this may harm his mystique to the lemmings who need
a president to be more "presidential."
My money is on status quo all the way to 2020 and the rethugz hoping the Dems will eat their own in an orgy of warring identities.
The collusion story may be faltering, but the blame for Russia poisoning the Skripals lives on. The other night on The News Hour,
"Judy" led off the program with this: "It has been almost a year since Kremlin intelligence officers attempted to kill a Russian
defector in the British city of Salisbury by poisoning him with a nerve agent. That attack, and the subsequent death of a British
woman, scared away tourists and shoppers, but authorities and residents are working to get the town's economy back on track. Special
correspondent Malcolm Brabant reports."
Russiagate will not go away unfortunately because it has evolved in the "Russiagate Industry". As mentioned by others,
the Russiagate Industry has been very profitable for many industries and people. Russiagate has generated an entire cottage industry
of companies around censorship and "find us a Russian". Dow Jones should have an index on the Russiagate Industry.
Here is one recent example. You know the measles outbreak in the US Pacific Northwest. Yup, the Russians. How do we know.
A government funded research grant. The study found that 899 tweets caused people to doubt vaccines. Looks like money is
to be had even by academics for the right results.
"... Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... "The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the parameters of the debate." ..."
"... "When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media." ..."
"... "And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though they haven't been convicted of anything." ..."
"... "That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said – I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that." ..."
"... Russell Mokhiber is the editor of the Corporate Crime Reporter.. ..."
Cohen has largely been banished from mainstream media.
"I had been arguing for years -- very much against the American political media grain --
that a new US/Russian Cold War was unfolding -- driven primarily by politics in Washington, not
Moscow," Cohen writes in War with Russia. "For this perspective, I had been largely
excluded from influential print, broadcast and cable outlets where I had been previously
welcomed."
On the stage at Busboys and Poets with Cohen was Katrina vanden Heuvel, the editor of
The Nation magazine, and Robert Borosage, co-founder of the Campaign for America's
Future.
Cohen said the censorship that he has faced in recent years is similar to the censorship
imposed on dissidents in the Soviet Union.
"Until some period of time before Trump, on the question of what America's policy toward
Putin's Kremlin should be, there was a reasonable facsimile of a debate on those venues that
had these discussions," Cohen said. "Are we allowed to mention the former Charlie Rose for
example? On the long interview form, Charlie would have on a person who would argue for a very
hard policy toward Putin. And then somebody like myself who thought it wasn't a good idea."
"Occasionally that got on CNN too. MSNBC not so much. And you could get an op-ed piece
published, with effort, in the New York Times or Washington Post ."
"Katrina and I had a joint signed op-ed piece in the New York Times six or
seven years ago. But then it stopped. And to me, that's the fundamental difference between this
Cold War and the preceding Cold War."
"I will tell you off the record – no, I'm not going to do it," Cohen said. "Two
exceedingly imminent Americans, who most op-ed pages would die to get a piece by, just to say
they were on the page, submitted such articles to the New York Times , and they were
rejected the same day. They didn't even debate it. They didn't even come back and say –
could you tone it down? They just didn't want it."
"Now is that censorship? In Italy, where each political party has its own newspaper, you
would say – okay fair enough. I will go to a newspaper that wants me. But here, we are
used to these newspapers."
"Remember how it works. I was in TV for 18 years being paid by CBS. So, I know how these
things work. TV doesn't generate its own news anymore. Their actual reporting has been
de-budgeted. They do video versions of what is in the newspapers."
"Look at the cable talk shows. You see it in the New York Times and Washington
Post in the morning, you turn on the TV at night and there is the video version. That's
just the way the news business works now."
"The alternatives have been excluded from both. I would welcome an opportunity to debate
these issues in the mainstream media, where you can reach more people. And remember, being in
these pages, for better or for worse, makes you Kosher. This is the way it works. If you have
been on these pages, you are cited approvingly. You are legitimate. You are within the
parameters of the debate."
"If you are not, then you struggle to create your own alternative media. It's new in my
lifetime. I know these imminent Americans I mentioned were shocked when they were just told no.
It's a lockdown. And it is a form of censorship."
"When I lived off and on in the Soviet Union, I saw how Soviet media treated dissident
voices. And they didn't have to arrest them. They just wouldn't ever mention them. Sometimes
they did that (arrest them). But they just wouldn't ever mention them in the media."
"Dissidents created what is known as samizdat – that's typescript that you circulate
by hand. Gorbachev, before he came to power, did read some samizdat. But it's no match for
newspapers published with five, six, seven million copies a day. Or the three television
networks which were the only television networks Soviet citizens had access to."
"And something like that has descended here. And it's really alarming, along with some
other Soviet-style practices in this country that nobody seems to care about – like
keeping people in prison until they break, that is plea, without right to bail, even though
they haven't been convicted of anything."
"That's what they did in the Soviet Union. They kept people in prison until people said
– I want to go home. Tell me what to say – and I'll go home. That's what we are
doing here. And we shouldn't be doing that."
Cohen appears periodically on Tucker Carlson's show on Fox News. And that rankled one person
in the audience at Busboys and Poets, who said he worried that Cohen's perspective on Russia
can be "appropriated by the right."
"Trump can take that and run on a nationalistic platform – to hell with NATO, to
hell with fighting these endless wars, to do what he did in 2016 and get the votes of people
who are very concerned about the deteriorating relations between the U.S. and Russia," the
man said.
Cohen says that on a personal level, he likes Tucker Carlson "and I don't find him to be a
racist or a nationalist."
"Nationalism is on the rise around the world everywhere," Cohen said. "There are
different kinds of nationalism. We always called it patriotism in this country, but we have
always been a nationalistic country."
"Fox has about three to four million viewers at that hour," Cohen said. "If I am not
permitted to give my take on American/Russian relations on any other mass media, and by the
way, possibly talk directly to Trump, who seems to like his show, and say – Trump is
making a mistake, he should do this or do that instead -- I don't get many opportunities
– and I can't see why I shouldn't do it."
"I get three and a half to four minutes," Cohen said. "I don't see it as consistent with my
mission, if that's the right word, to say no. These articles I write for The Nation ,
which ended up in my book, are posted on some of the most God awful websites in the world. I
had to look them up to find out how bad they really are. But what can I do about it?"
A debate about the power in Washington of the pro-Israel lobby is underway, after Rep. Ilhan
Omar, D-Minn., responded sharply to reports that Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was targeting
both Omar and fellow Muslim Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Democrat from Michigan.
Omar quoted rap lyrics -- " It's all about the Benjamins baby
" -- to suggest McCarthy's move was driven by the lobby's prolific spending. Asked specifically
who she was referring to, Omar responded, " AIPAC !"
The debate over the influence of pro-Israel groups could be informed by an investigation by
Al Jazeera, in which an undercover reporter infiltrated the Israel Project, a Washington-based
group, and secretly recorded conversations about political strategy and influence over a
six-month period in 2016. That investigation, however, was never aired by the network --
suppressed
by pressure from the pro-Israel lobby .
In November, Electronic Intifada obtained and published the four-part
series, but it did so during the week of the midterm elections, and the documentary did not get
a lot of attention then.
In it, leaders of the pro-Israel lobby speak openly about how they use money to influence
the political process, in ways so blunt that if the comments were made by critics, they'd be
charged with anti-Semitism.
"Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them."
David Ochs, founder of HaLev, which helps send young people to American Israel Public
Affairs Committee's annual conference, described for the reporter how AIPAC and its donors
organize fundraisers outside the official umbrella of the organization, so that the money
doesn't show up on disclosures as coming specifically from AIPAC. He describes one group that
organizes fundraisers in both Washington and New York. "This is the biggest ad hoc political
group, definitely the wealthiest, in D.C.," Ochs says, adding that it has no official name, but
is clearly tied to AIPAC. "It's the AIPAC group. It makes a difference; it really, really does.
It's the best bang for your buck, and the networking is phenomenal." (Ochs and AIPAC did not
immediately return The Intercept's requests for comment.)
Without spending money, Ochs argues, the pro-Israel lobby isn't able to enact its agenda.
"Congressmen and senators don't do anything unless you pressure them. They kick the can down
the road, unless you pressure them, and the only way to do that is with money," he
explains.
He describes a fundraiser for Anthony Brown, a Democrat running for Congress in Maryland, as
typical. "So we want the Jewish community to go face to face in this small environment, 50, 30,
40 people, and say, 'This is what's important to us. We want to make sure that if we give you
money, that you're going to enforce the Iran deal.' That way, when they need something from him
or her, like the Iran deal, they can quickly mobilize and say look, we'll give you 30 grand.
They actually impact," Ochs tells the reporter.
Such a claim is not so different from what Omar was describing, and for which she was
roundly condemned. In the wake of Omar's tweets, the Washington Post,
for instance, reported , "The American Jewish Committee demanded an apology, calling her
suggestion that AIPAC is paying American politicians for their support 'demonstrably false and
stunningly anti-Semitic.'" (On Monday, Omar apologized for her tweets, but
insisted that AIPAC and other lobbyist groups are harmful to U.S. politics.)
In the censored documentary, Ochs went on to describe a fundraiser hosted by
Jeff Talpins , a hedge fund giant, as similar as well. "In New York, with Jeff Talpins, we
don't ask a goddamn thing about the fucking Palestinians. You know why? 'Cause it's a tiny
issue. It's a small, insignificant issue. The big issue is Iran. We want everything focused on
Iran," Ochs says. "What happens is Jeff meets with the congressman in the back room, tells them
exactly what his goals are -- and by the way, Jeff Talpins is worth $250 million -- basically
they hand him an envelope with 20 credit cards, and say, 'You can swipe each of these credit
cards for a thousand dollars each.'"
Ochs explains that the club in New York required a minimum pledge of $10,000 to join and
participate in such events. "It's a minimum commitment. Some people give a lot more than
that."
AIPAC, on its own
website , recruits members to join its "Congressional Club," and commit to give at least
$5,000 per election cycle.
Eric Gallagher, a top official at AIPAC from 2010 to 2015, tells the Al Jazeera reporter
that AIPAC gets results. "Getting $38 billion in security aid to Israel matters, which is what
AIPAC just did," he notes at one secretly recorded lunch. "Everything AIPAC does is focused on
influencing Congress."
The film, called "The Lobby," was produced by Al Jazeera's investigative unit, and features
hidden-camera footage obtained by the reporter, who posed as a Jewish, pro-Israel activist from
Britain who wanted to volunteer with the Israel Project. Join Our NewsletterOriginal reporting. Fearless journalism. Delivered to you. I'm in Outfitted with a
luxury apartment in Dupont Circle, the reporter hosted multiple gatherings and otherwise
socialized broadly within the pro-Israel community, winning the confidence of senior officials,
who divulged insider details, many of which have been leaked and created international
news.
A companion version of the film, which looked at the Israel lobby's influence in the United
Kingdom, did make it to air and was the subject of intense controversy. It exposed a plot by an
Israeli embassy official in the United Kingdom to "take down" pro-Palestinian members of
Parliament, leading to his resignation.
That film, however, included a snippet of footage from the United States. Officials here
quickly realized that they, too, had been infiltrated. In the U.K., the Israel lobby lodged an
official complaint claiming the series was anti-Semitic, but the U.K.'s communications agency
rejected the claim, finding that "the allegations in the programme were not made on the grounds
that any of the particular individuals concerned were Jewish and noted that no claims were made
relating to their faith."
Pro-Israel officials in the United States, rather than file an official complaint, exerted
political pressure. A bipartisan group of 19 lawmakers
wrote to the Justice Department requesting an investigation into "the full range of
activities undertaken by Al Jazeera in the United States," and suggesting that the organization
be made to register as a foreign agent. Ultimately, Qatar bent to the pressure and killed the
documentary.
"... But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job.. ..."
During the VN War Canada stripped Canadians of their citizenship if they fought for the US
although they had had no problem having US citizens in their ranks in both world wars with no
penalty from the US. One of my uncles did that in WW1. I did not know I was a Canadian
citizen until after I had left active US government service and no longer had a US government
information security clearance.
It is possible to be a dual national in the US government but
this requires individual judgments to be made by heads of agencies and it would probably bar
someone from high level jobs.
It used to be against US law to hold a second citizenship but
the law changed to accommodate US/Israeli citizenship and of necessity now applies to all. If
you act to the detriment of the US for the benefit of your second country I would say that is
prima facie proof of dual loyalty.
But if someone has joint US/Israel citizenship I guess the rules are different as Rahm
Emanuel served as White House chief of staff - can't get much higher level government job..
You must be new here. We have been through the issue of US information security clearances
several times. This security clearance system foe access to classified information is
entirely an artifact of Executive Orders, not of laws. therefore the president as the
ultimate executive can give anyone he wants access at any level.
Members of congress and
federal judges do not have access under this system.
They have access by virtue of their
constitutional office outside the Executive Branch.
- Ilhan Omar tweeted that AIPAC plays a role in encouraging a lot of Jewish Americans to
contribute campaign funds to congressional candidates? Is that a serious question? AIPAC is not
a PAC in American law and thus cannot make political contributions, but it illegally controls a
lot of real PACs and has a lot of political influence in the Jewish community.
- Ralph Northam said on TeeVee that the very first blacks brought to Virginia were initially
considered to be "indentured servants" in English law? He is correct although within a few
decades the colonists realized that it would be more profitable to keep them permanently as
slaves. One must remember that Northam is only now learning some actual Virginia history
- Lindsey Graham is IMO correct in suggesting that Trump should "pocket" the barrier money
in the negotiated bill, keep the government fully open, and then proceed to used additional
funds available to him as CinC to continue to build the barrier system.
- The National Guard of several states is probably serving on the border with federal
funding support although still under state control. There is a law which provides for that. If
the governors order a withdrawal from the border, Trump should IMO call these National Guard
forces into federal service. The governors would then have no control over this matter at all.
pl
To me, repeat, to me, the issue is less,, much less, what AIPAC does, or Israelis, or
American Jews do, than what the pols making policy do. I fully expect the three groups above
will try their damndest to do what they believe is in Israel's interest . I get that. I might
not like it that they are so damn successful...but that's another issue. But American pols
that betray their own Nation's interest is what bugs me. They are the ones selling their
people out. The Lobbyists are just doing their job. Dirty and counter productive job as I
think it will prove to be in the long run...
With friends like Marco Rubio, the United States doesn't need enemies. I still remember very
well, when then-candidate Donald Trump ridiculed Rubio as "little Marco" during the 2016
debates. He was perfectly right. Like Phil Giraldi demonstrated Rubio's "intellectual"
capability, It seems he has a birdbrain. Joke aside, Rubio's political busyness Israel is
concerned raises the question who owns his true loyalty. Instead of working for his
constituency, he is on the road primarily for Israel. As it seems he loves Israel more than
his birthplace the United States, and he despises Cuba that political system is more
social-oriented that the American one.
The problem with the Florida senator is his absolute blind obedience towards the Zionist
state, his engagement against the BDS movement and his loyalty to Israel's stalwarts in the
US. He is not the only US politician in Congress who is in the pocket of the Zionist lobby.
At least the American Middle Eastern policy is run by the Zionist Israel Lobby in the US. But
from all walks of life, their influence is also not to be underestimated.
The so-called unbreakable bond between the US and Israel is mere rhetoric, but most
members of Congress believe in this nonsense just out of mere political survival. Israel is
not an ally but a massive liability to US national interest in the region. The Zionist
political class uses the American political system to its advantage and pays nothing in
return. The opposite is true. The State of Israel is massively spying on the US and cause the
American people a lot of damage.
There are not only the assassinations of JFK and RFK, but also the killing of JFK, Jr.
who's private plane crashed into the sea right of the coast of Martha's Vineyard. It was the
same cover-up as in the case of his father and his uncle. There are persistent rumors in the
wind that the Israeli Mossad was behind it, such as Laurent Guyénot laid out in his
two excellent articles on UNZ Review. Among large parts of the truther movement, some
segments make a strong argument that Israel was behind the 9/11 attacks, although with the
collaboration of sections of the Bush/Cheney administration.
To refer to Israel as a friend or ally such as Rubio does is just a joke. Israel is
nothing more than an albatross like an ally. The whole American-Israeli relationship must be
put to the test. There is no room for romance because such romanticism is for the sole
detriment of the United States and the American People.
How such a lightweight came to be a Senator of the United States of America eludes
me.
I know this question is meant to be a bit rhetorical but let me try and answer it.
This senator, and the vast majority of his ilk in the Congress, are venal lying whores in
thrall to a foreign party and to money interests. He is not unique in this regard but only
one of many lying whores in power.
And the American people–by and large–are so dumbed down by a dumbed down
culture and a dumbed down media that they cannot recognize these treacherous weasels for the
traitors that they are.
The Senator is using contentions meant to protect us citizens from unfair business
practices by state and enterprise to launch protections against free speech for a foreign
entity.
That is painfully funny. I hope it is only a feeling, a sensation, but our political
leadership seems to have abandoned their collective minds. But this is convenient for the
Sen. because nullifying the constitution is one way of nullifying borders.
Zionists control our money via the unconstitutional FED and that gives the Zionist banking
cabal total control over the U.S. government and we the goyim/proles!
Nathan Rothschild infamously said, I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of
England for the man who controls the money supply controls the British Empire and I am that
man!
It is the same here in America and every country in the world that has a Zionist central
bank and that is almost all of them!
Rubio is just another puppet of the Zionist banking kabal and is just like the rest of
congress and in fact congress would be better named as the lower house of the Knesset.
Marco Rubio Is A Complete And Total Politician Whore For Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and
Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson.
Marco Rubio does the bidding of Jew Billionaires by putting the interests of Israel ahead
of the interests of the United States.
Jew Billionaires Norman Braman and Paul Singer and Shelly Adelson all push nation-wrecking
mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien invaders.
Marco Rubio pushes nation-wrecking mass legal immigration and amnesty for illegal alien
invaders.
Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman have bought the mass
legal immigration policies and the amnesty for illegal alien invaders immigration policy of
the Republican Party ruling class and Marco Rubio and Shyster Boy Trump.
Marco Rubio and New York City Shyster Boy Trump have been bought and paid for like common
whores by Jew Billionaires Shelly Adelson and Paul Singer and Norman Braman.
Israel is powerful only to extent its goals are well correlated with the goal of the US MIC.
So like neocons Israel serves as a collective lobbyist of MIC. If this would not be the case, all
power of AIPAC and similar organizations would disappear, and the organization itself would be
put under FARA where it belongs.
The same is true for Zionists billionaires. The minute they turn against MIC would the minute
some dirty dealing and connections with organized crime would be exposed and some pedophile
scandals put on the front pages of MSM.
Notable quotes:
"... There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran. ..."
All these anti-Semitic articles fail a basic logical test :
i) If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the
combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism
fails.
ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone like
China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate Russia or
the EU?
iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say about
whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the WN claim
is even weaker.
There is a reason that the conspiracy theories regarding Zionists don't get any purchase
outside of a small fringe.
@Thomm i) It's not so
surprising given the wholesale lies pedaled by the predominantly Zionists media and
entertainment sectors of Western civilization, compounded by the outright censorship of
opposing views by those same groups with the assistance of the ADL, SPLC, et al. Add to that
the altruistic nature and generally independent spirit of Whites as opposed to the *dare I
say tribal* nature of Zionists.
ii) China's recent ascent to global dominance was not built on usury and manipulation of
foreign nation states through a diaspora of what has been described as "nations within
nations." I'd say Zionists in Russia (ever hear of the Holodomor?) manipulated that part of
the world for over a century quite completely, and in Eastern Europe for slightly less time,
to the tune of 100 million dead White Christians.
iii) Interesting you bring up Blacks but leave out the part about Zionists manipulating
Whites with "Birth of a Nation" being the first movie many arriving White immigrants viewed.
Shock status: imagined. Clearly, that's but one of a laundry list of things any reasonably
educated White person could hold up as an example of manipulation of public opinion.
Calling truisms tropes doesn't absolve ... crimes committed against humanity.
Every single day Whites, Blacks, Hispanics, Han Chinese, are criticized and critiqued for
all sorts of reasons and all manner of circumstances. Only one category of people is immune
from criticism: Zionists. It's a double standard, and it must end.
> If gentiles are so smart, why are Zionists, whom gentiles outnumber 40:1 across the
combined Western World, able to control everything? The entire premise of White Nationalism
fails.
WN's largely agree that Zionists are more intelligent, so they are not surprised that
Zionists have been able to achieve outsized influence (to "control everything," in the
language of this lame troll).
ii) If Israel is able to manipulate the US government this totally, why can't someone
like China, with deeper pockets, do the same? Conversely, why can't Israel manipulate
Russia or the EU?
If the Chinese attempted the same thing, Americans would be permitted to notice .
Noticing Zionists political activity is "anti-semitic", so many Americans don't notice it (or
pretend not to).
There are far fewer Zionists in the EU and Russia, but they enjoy outsized influence in
those lands too – just not to the same extent as in the U.S.
iii) Virtually everything that White Nationalists say about Zionists is what blacks say
about whites. Given the small number of Zionists and no prior history of enslavement, the
WN claim is even weaker.
Incorrect. WN's admit that Zionists are more intelligent than white gentiles; blacks who
accuse whites of racism seldom admit that whites are more intelligent than blacks.
Ultimately, WN's want separation from Zionists. Blacks who accuse whites of racism virtually
never desire separation from whites. I'm not even a WN, but it really shouldn't be
controversial to admit these obvious facts.
Why does Phil have such a hard time banning moronic trolls like this clown? (Who everybody
suspects is just a sad little hindoo, but it's possible is a deranged little zionut.)
There wouldn't be calls for BDS movement if the US wasn't providing 3.8 billion per to a
country whose domestic policy is apartheid and foreign policy goal is an attack on Iran.
I was disappointed to see that one of my two senators voted for the bill. And I would have
to say the biggest surprise was Sen. Gillibrand who probably wanted to say 'aye' but
didn't.
The next step is likely to be that any public disagreement with the state of Israel is
akin to antisemitism. Which I'm certain that the Republicans will be happy to throw at the
Dem. congress.
"... However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute. ..."
Rep. Walter Jones, Jr. died at the age of 76 on Sunday after an extended illness for which was a granted a leave of absence from
Congress last year.
The Republican representative for North Carolina's 3rd congressional district since 1995 had initially been a strong supporter
of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and even became well-known for getting french fries renamed as "freedom fries" in the House cafeteria
as a protest against French condemnation of the US invasion.
... ... ...
However, he was one of the few politicians initially supporting the Iraq invasion to later express profound public regret
over his decision , and went on to become a consistent advocate for ending regime change wars and Washington's military adventurism
abroad. As part of these efforts, he was an original Board Member of the Ron Paul Institute.
Remembering Jones as a tireless advocate of peace, Ron Paul
notes that he " turned
from pro-war to an antiwar firebrand after he discovered how Administrations lie us into war . His passing yesterday is deeply mourned
by all who value peace and honesty over war and deception." The Ron Paul Institute has also called him "a Hero of Peace" for both
his voting record and efforts at shutting down the "endless wars".
And Antiwar.com also describes Jones as having been among the "most consistently antiwar members of Congress" and
a huge supporter
of their work:
By 2005, Jones had reversed his position on the Iraq War. Jones called on President George W. Bush to apologize for misinforming
Congress to win authorization for the war. Jones said, "If I had known then what I know today, I wouldn't have voted for
that resolution."
Jones went on to become one of the most antiwar members of Congress, fighting for ending US involvement in Afghanistan,
Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
Also the BBC describes Rep. Jones' "dramatic change of heart" concerning the Iraq war starting in 2005, after which he began reaching
out to thousands of people who had lost loves ones in combat.
Rep. Walter Jones led an effort in the House to call French Fries "Freedom Fries" instead, but came to profoundly regret his role
in supporting Bush's war.
Noting that "no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq" and that the war was justified by the Bush administration based
entirely on lies and false intelligence, the BBC describes:
At the same time, Mr Jones met grieving families whose loved ones were killed in the war. This caused him to have a dramatic
change of heart, and in 2005 he called for the troops to be brought home.
He spoke candidly on several occasions about how deeply he regretted supporting the war, which led to the deaths of more than
140,000 Iraqi and American people.
"I have signed over 12,000 letters to families and extended families who've lost loved ones in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,"
he told NPR in 2017. "That was, for me, asking God to forgive me for my mistake."
In total he represented his district for 34 years, first in the North Carolina state legislature, then in Congress. He took a
leave of absence last year after a number of missed House votes due to declining health.
"... By Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor-emeritus of South-North Development Monitor SUNS, is based in Geneva and has been monitoring and reporting on the WTO and its predecessor GATT since 1978; he is author of several books on trade issues; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, is Senior Adviser with the Khazanah Research Institute, and was . an economics professor and United Nations Assistant Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Inter Press Service ..."
"... Data governance infrastructure ..."
"... Enterprise competition ..."
"... Consumer protection ..."
"... Trade facilitation ..."
"... Describing what these TNCs are trying to push through as "digital colonialism" seems apt. In contrast to traditional colonialism, characterized as it was by massive investments in manpower and other resources required to conquer far-flung overseas territories, the marginal cost of adding one more overseas territory to a digital colonizers empire is miniscule compared to what old-school colonizers had to pony up to expand their list of colonies. ..."
"... Add to this weak regulatory firewalls in developing countries and market saturation in developed nations, it's obvious why these TNCs are determined to push through an international policy framework that advances their drive to uncover new pockets of growth in the developing world. It's also telling that they're aggressively pursuing this end before developing countries can mount a cohesive defense of their digital sovereignty. "Beware Proposed E-commerce Rules" indeed ..."
Beware Proposed
E-Commerce Rules Posted on February 10,
2019 by Jerri-Lynn ScofieldBy
Chakravarthi Raghavan, Editor-emeritus of South-North Development Monitor SUNS, is based in
Geneva and has been monitoring and reporting on the WTO and its predecessor GATT since 1978; he
is author of several books on trade issues; and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, is Senior Adviser with the
Khazanah Research Institute, and was . an economics professor and United Nations Assistant
Secretary General for Economic Development. Originally published at Inter Press
Service
In Davos in late January, several powerful governments and their allies announced their
intention to launch new negotiations on e-commerce. Unusually, the intention is to launch the
plurilateral negotiations in the World Trade Organization (WTO), an ostensibly multilateral
organization, setting problematic precedents for the future of multilateral negotiations.
Any resulting WTO agreement, especially one to make e-commerce tax- and tariff-free, will
require amendments to its existing goods agreements, the General Agreement on Trade in Services
(GATS) and the Trade-Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) agreements. If it is not an
unconditional agreement in the WTO, it will violate WTO 'most favoured nation' (MFN)
principles.
This will be worse than the old, and ostensibly extinct 'Green Room' processes -- of a few
major powers negotiating among themselves, and then imposing their deal on the rest of the
membership. Thus, the proposed e-commerce rules may be 'WTO illegal' -- unless legitimized by
the amendment processes and procedures in Article X of the WTO treaty.
Any effort to 'smuggle' it into the WTO, e.g., by including it in Annex IV to the WTO treaty
(Plurilateral Trade Agreements), will need, after requisite notice, a consensus decision at
Ministerial Conference (Art X:9 of treaty) . It may still be illegal since the subjects are
already covered by agreements in Annexes 1A, 1B and 1C of the WTO treaty.
Consolidating Power of the Giants
Powerful technology transnational corporations (TNCs) are trying to rewrite international
rules to advance their business interests by: gaining access to new foreign markets, securing
free access to others' data, accelerating deregulation, casualizing labour markets, and
minimizing tax liabilities.
While digital technology and trade, including electronic or e-commerce, can accelerate
development and create jobs, if appropriate policies and arrangements are in place, e-commerce
rhetoric exaggerates opportunities for developing country, especially small and medium
enterprises. Instead, the negotiations are intended to diminish the right of national
authorities to require 'local presence', a prerequisite for the consumer and public to sue a
supplier.
The e-commerce proposals are expected to strengthen the dominant TNCs, enabling them to
further dominate digital trade as the reform proposals are likely to strengthen their
discretionary powers while limiting public oversight over corporate behaviour in the digital
economy.
Developing Countries Must Be Vigilant
If digital commerce grows without developing countries first increasing value captured from
production -- by improving productive capacities in developing countries, closing the digital
divide by improving infrastructure and interconnectivity, and protecting privacy and data --
they will have to open their economies even more to foreign imports.
Further digital liberalization without needed investments to improve productive capacities,
will destroy some jobs, casualize others, squeeze existing enterprises and limit future
development. Such threats, due to accelerated digital liberalization, will increase if the
fast-changing digital economic space is shaped by new regulations influenced by TNCs.
Diverting business through e-commerce platforms will not only reduce domestic market shares,
as existing digital trade is currently dominated by a few TNCs from the United States and
China, but also reduce sales tax revenue which governments increasingly rely upon with the
earlier shift from direct to indirect taxation.
Developing countries must quickly organize themselves to advance their own agenda for
developmental digitization. Meanwhile, concerned civil society organizations and others are
proposing new approaches to issues such as data governance, anti-trust regulation, smaller
enterprises, jobs, taxation, consumer protection, and trade facilitation.
New Approach Needed
A development-focused and jobs-enhancing digitization strategy is needed instead. Effective
national policies require sufficient policy space, stakeholder participation and regional
consultation, but the initiative seeks to limit that space. Developing countries should have
the policy space to drive their developmental digitization agendas. Development partners,
especially donors, should support, not drive this agenda.
Developmental digitization will require investment in countries' technical, legal and
economic infrastructure, and policies to: bridge the digital divide; develop domestic digital
platforms, businesses and capacities to use data in the public interest; strategically promote
national enterprises, e.g., through national data use frameworks; ensure digitization conducive
to full employment policies; advance the public interest, consumer protection, healthy
competition and sustainable development.
Pro-active Measures Needed
Following decades of economic liberalization and growing inequality, and the increasing
clout of digital platforms, international institutions should support developmental
digitization for national progress, rather than digital liberalization. Developing country
governments must be vigilant about such e-commerce negotiations, and instead undertake
pro-active measures such as:
Data governance infrastructure : Developing countries must be vigilant of the
dangers of digital colonialism and the digital divide. Most people do not properly value data,
while governments too easily allow data transfers to big data corporations without adequate
protection for their citizens. TNC rights to free data flows should be challenged.
Enterprise competition : Developing countries still need to promote national
enterprises, including through pro-active policies. International rules have enabled wealth
transfers from the global South to TNCs holding well protected patents. National systems of
innovation can only succeed if intellectual property monopolies are weakened. Strengthening
property rights enhances TNC powers at the expense of developing country enterprises.
Employment : Developmental digitization must create decent jobs and livelihoods.
Labour's share of value created has declining in favour of capital, which has influenced
rule-making to its advantage.
Taxation: The new e-commerce proposals seek to ban not only appropriate taxation,
but also national presence requirements where they operate to avoid taxes at the expense of
competitors paying taxes in compliance with the law. Tax rules allowing digital TNCs to reduce
taxable income or shift profits to low-tax jurisdictions should be addressed.
Consumer protection : Strong policies for consumer protection are needed as the
proposals would put privacy and data protection at risk. Besides citizens' rights to privacy,
consumers must have rights to data protection and against TNC and other abuse of human
rights.
Competition : Digital platforms must be better regulated at both national and
international level. Policies are needed to weaken digital economic monopolies and to support
citizens, consumers and workers in relating to major digital TNCs.
Trade facilitation : Recent trade facilitation in developing countries, largely
funded by donors, has focused on facilitating imports, rather than supply side constraints.
Recent support for digital liberalization similarly encourages developing countries to import
more instead of developing needed new infrastructure to close digital divides.
Urgent Measures Needed
'E-commerce' has become the new front for further economic liberalization and extension of
property rights by removing tariffs (on IT products), liberalizing imports of various services,
stronger IP protection, ending technology transfer requirements, and liberalizing government
procurement.
Developing countries must instead develop their own developmental digitization agendas, let
alone simply copy, or worse, promote e-commerce rules developed by TNCs to open markets, secure
data, as well as constrain regulatory and developmental governments.
Describing what these TNCs are trying to push through as "digital colonialism" seems apt.
In contrast to traditional colonialism, characterized as it was by massive investments in
manpower and other resources required to conquer far-flung overseas territories, the marginal
cost of adding one more overseas territory to a digital colonizers empire is miniscule
compared to what old-school colonizers had to pony up to expand their list of colonies.
Add to this weak regulatory firewalls in developing countries and market saturation in
developed nations, it's obvious why these TNCs are determined to push through an
international policy framework that advances their drive to uncover new pockets of growth in
the developing world. It's also telling that they're aggressively pursuing this end before
developing countries can mount a cohesive defense of their digital sovereignty. "Beware
Proposed E-commerce Rules" indeed
It is still cold in davos, all the more reason to feel carefully, and be very sure
that the P-crats are not slipping you "a mickey" in the butt, because they
always repeat always do it!
The comment, and questions posed aren't clear.
The announcement (widely reported in media) was made to media at Davos after a breakfast
meeting, and almost immediately it appeared on WTO website as a "communication" from the
members at the breakfast meeting.
Beyond "intention" to negotiate, everything else was vague – whether it be issues to be
negotiated, where and how etc.
Why does this make me think of MERS and how the finance industry diverted at least
hundreds of thousands of dollars in transaction recording fees away from local government
real estate offices? If popular government is to remain meaningful it had better have in
place effective means of enforcing its tax entitlements and the will to do it.
"... Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and religion as havens of safety and security. ..."
Nationalism was an emancipatory political project during the anti-colonial struggles of the
second half of the 20th century. It was not tribalist or communalist.
According to Eric Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism since 1780, its aim was to extend the
size of the social, cultural and political group. It was not to restrict it or to separate it
from others. Nationalism was a political programme divorced from ethnicity.
Is this political nationalism a viable way of resisting neoliberalism today? Can it gainsay
the primacy of economic rationality and the culture of narcissist consumerism, and restore
meaning to the political question concerning the common good? Or has nationalism irreversibly become an ethnic, separatist project? It is not easy to say. So far, we have witnessed one kind of response to the social
insecurities generated by the global spread of neoliberalism. This is a return to ethnicity and
religion as havens of safety and security.
When society fails us owing to job insecurity, and, concomitantly, with regard to housing
and healthcare, one tends to fall back on one's ethnicity or religious identity as an ultimate
guarantee.
Moreover, nationalism as a political programme depends on the idea of the state. It holds
that a group defined as a "nation" has the right to form a territorial state and exercise
sovereign power over it. But given the decline of the state, there are reasons to think that
political nationalism has withdrawn as a real possibility.
By the "decline of the state" I do not mean that it no longer exists. The state has never
been more present in the private life of individuals. It regulates the relations between men
and women. It regulates their birth and death, the rearing of children, the health of
individuals and so forth. The state is, today, ubiquitous.
What some people mean by the "decline of the state" is that, with the existence of
transnational corporations, it is no longer the most important site of the reproduction of
capital. The state has become managerial. Its function is to manage obstacles to liberalisation
and free trade.
Perhaps that is one of the challenges of the 21st century. How is a "nation" possible, a
"national community" that is not defined by ethnicity, on the one hand, and, on the other, that
forsakes the desire to exercise sovereign power in general and, in particular, over a
territorial state?
The university is perhaps the place where such a community can begin to be thought.
Rafael Winkler is an associate professor in the philosophy department at the University
of Johannesburg
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
"... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
"... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
"... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
@Asagirian
Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
She famously
told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was
"worth it."
Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we
get two lunatics for the price of one.
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. ..."
"... The problem with the current occupants of the White House is not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts. ..."
"... Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law ..."
"... A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda. ..."
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
@Asagirian
Clinton wasn't a lunatic? I wonder what Fred thinks about his deranged Jewish Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
She famously
told Leslie Stahl on "60 Minutes" that the death of 500,000 Iraqi children, due to Clinton's years of punative sanctions, was
"worth it."
Doesn't seem like those preventable deaths of innocent children bothered Billy Boy too much. With the Clinton's, we
get two lunatics for the price of one.
"... The Trump administration announced on February 1 that the country was suspending its participation in the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF treaty) for 180 days pending a final withdrawal. Vladimir Putin, in a meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, announced on Saturday that the Russian Federation is also suspending its participation in the treaty in a mirror response to Washington's unilateral decision. ..."
"... "Two years before making public unfounded accusations against Russia of alleged INF Treaty violations, Washington not only took a decision, but also started preparations to production of missiles of intermediate and shorter range banned by the Treaty. Starting already June 2017, the program of expansion and upgrade of production facilities with the aims of developing intermediate and shorter range missiles banned by the Treaty was launched at Raytheon's plant in the city of Tucson, Arizona. The plant is a major diversified enterprise of the US aerospace industry that produces almost all types of missile weapons. Over the past two years the space of the plant has increased by 44% – from 55,000 to 79,000 square meters, while the number of employees is going to rise by almost 2,000 people, according to official statements. Almost at the same time as production facilities expanded, on November 2017, Congress provided the first tranche amounting to $58 mln to Pentagon, directly pointing at the development of a land-based missile of intermediate range. Consequently, the nature and time of the works demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that the US administration decided to withdraw from the INF Treaty several years before unfounded accusations against Russia of violating the Treaty were made public." ..."
"... "The (US) has announced research and development works, and we will do the same. I agree with the Defense Ministry's proposals to start the work on 'landing' Kalibr missiles and developing a new area to create a land-based hypersonic missile with intermediate range." ..."
The Trump administration announced on February 1 that the country was suspending its participation in the Intermediate-Range
Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF treaty) for 180 days pending a final withdrawal. Vladimir Putin, in a
meeting with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and Defence Minister Sergey Shoygu, announced on Saturday that the Russian Federation
is also suspending its participation in the treaty in a mirror response to Washington's unilateral decision.
The INF treaty was signed by the US and the USSR in 1987 at the height of negotiations that had begun years earlier and directly
involved the leaders of the two countries. The treaty entered into force in 1988, eliminating missiles with a range of 500-1,000
kilometers (short to medium range) and 1,000-5,500 km (intermediate range). The treaty has always concerned land-based launchers
and never sea- or air-launched missiles, a legacy of a bygone era where most nuclear warheads were positioned on missiles launched
from the mainland. In subsequent years, thanks to technological advances, solutions like submarines, stealth bombers and the possibility
of miniaturizing nuclear warheads became increasingly important in the military doctrines of both the US and Russia, nullifying the
basis on which the INF treaty was initially signed, which was to avert a direct confrontation between Washington and Moscow on the
European continent.
The INF treaty, together with the Strategic Arms Limitations Talks/Treaty (SALT treaty), signed by Washington and Moscow on the
issue of long-range missiles, aimed to create a safer global environment by seeking to avoid the prospect of a nuclear exchange.
It was also aimed at reducing the number of nuclear warheads owned by the US and the USSR, as well as generally reducing proliferation
in line with the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). In particular, the INF treaty guaranteed a lasting peace on the European continent
through Washington not deploying nuclear weapons in Europe aimed at the USSR and Moscow in turn not deploying systems capable of
eliminating these European-based US missiles. The initial promoters of an INF agreement were obviously the European countries, who
would have found themselves in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse in the event of war between Moscow and Washington.
With 1970s technology, the time between the launch and impact of a missile with a range of 500-5500 km was about 10-12 minutes;
that was the amount of time Moscow and Washington's leaders had during the Cold War to decide whether to retaliate and thereby launch
WWIII. With today's technology, the time to decide would probably be reduced to less than 5 minutes, making it all the more difficult
to avert a nuclear exchange in the event of an accident or miscalculation. The INF treaty was thus a life-insurance policy for humanity
that decreased the statistical probability of nuclear provocation or of an accident.
During the Cold War, the
concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) was central to the nuclear doctrines of the two great powers. The INF treaty served
the purpose of taking concrete steps towards greatly reducing the possibility of mutually assured destruction.
With the unilateral withdrawal from the treaty by the US, all these safeguards and guarantees are lost, with all the consequences
that ensue from such a reckless as dangerous act.
The American and European mainstream media have applauded the withdrawal from the INF, in the same way that they have applauded
Trump whenever he has been pro-war. Former CIA and military personnel, as well as the former CEO's of major arms manufacturers, have
been eager to share their views as "experts", literally invading television programs and thereby showing why they are paid lots of
money to lobby for the military-industrial complex. They praised Trump's move, blaming Moscow for the ending of the treaty, but in
the end revealing the covert geopolitical reason why Washington decided to end the deal, namely, the fact that China is not bound
by the same treaty.
These vaunted experts on MSNBC, CNN and Fox News alluded to the danger of Washington being bound by such a treaty while Beijing
was not, thereby limiting Washington's options in the Asia-Pacific. Trump and his staff view the INF treaty as an intolerable imposition
that ties America's hands in its efforts to contain China.
US foreign policy, especially under this administration, sees every kind of agreement, past or future, as a concession, and therefore
a sign of weakness. Trump and his generals drafted the National Defense Posture, stating that the time of
great-power competition is back and that Washington's peer competitors were Moscow and Beijing. The return of great-power competition
is an excuse to "strengthen the military", as Trumps loves to say, and his decision is in line with the new defense posture review
Trump approved, seeking to confront every adversary in any domain by all means. The newly announced Space Force is a reflection of
this, seeking to put weapons in space in violation of all existing treaties. At the same time, the development of tactical nuclear
weapons also expands the use of nuclear weapons in certain circumstances, pushing the envelope on the prohibition on the use of nuclear
weapons. These new programs will end up draining even more money from taxpayers to fill the coffers of shareholders, CEOs and lobbyists
for the big arms manufacturers.
To justify the withdrawal from the INF, the military-industrial complex, which drives US foreign policy, needed a suitable justification.
Of course in a time of anti-Russia hysteria, the choice was obvious. Since 2014, the attention of so-called US experts has been focused
on the 9M729 missile in particular, an evolution of the 9M728, used by the Iskander-K weapons system, a Russian technological gem
with few equals.
NPO Novator, the company that produces the 9M729, reassures that the missile does not violate the INF treaty and has a range shorter
than the 500 km limit (470 km). Moscow even organized an exhibition open to the public, with the missile on display along with its
main features, inviting Washington to officially send its experts to view the characteristics of the 9M729. Washington refused, knowing
full well that the missile does not violate the the INF, preferring instead to use the 9M729 as an excuse to abandonment the treaty.
Washington will suspend its participation in the treaty within 180 days, and Moscow has responded with an identical measure. With
hysteria surrounding Russia (Russiagate) and the impossibility of Trump and Putin engaging in dialogue following the complete sabotaging
of relations between Moscow and Washington, it is almost impossible that a fruitful dialogue can be created to seal a new agreement
in the remaining 180 days. This, however, is not even the basic objective of the Trump administration. Unofficially, Trump says that
he would rather include Beijing in the agreement with Moscow. But knowing that this goal is impossible to achieve, he is pursuing
his broader objective of withdrawing the US from all major treaties, including the INF treaty.
In the specific case of withdrawing from the INF, there is little need to raise a big hue and cry as was the case with the Paris
Agreement, as the media-intelligence-military apparatus has a lot to gain from this. This just goes to show how the MSM and their
rolled-out "experts" thrive on war and the money that is to be made from it. There is a major psyop going on to convince the American
public that the withdrawal from the INF treaty, and the resulting arms race with
major nuclear-armed countries, is apparently the best way to keep America safe!
The withdrawal from the INF treaty opens the gates for a new nuclear-arms race that will bring great advantages to arms industries,
with great returns for shareholders, executives and CEOs, all paid for by the American taxpayer. It is more than probable that the
official defense budget in 2020, having to cover for the development of weapons previously prohibited by the INF treaty, could be
more than 800 billion dollars, seeing an increase of tens of billions of dollars in the space of 12 months.
Moscow has for several years been accusing the US of malfeasance regarding various aspects of nuclear-weapons agreements. Russia's
defence minister stated to Tass
News Agency:
"Two years before making public unfounded accusations against Russia of alleged INF Treaty violations, Washington not only
took a decision, but also started preparations to production of missiles of intermediate and shorter range banned by the Treaty.
Starting already June 2017, the program of expansion and upgrade of production facilities with the aims of developing intermediate
and shorter range missiles banned by the Treaty was launched at Raytheon's plant in the city of Tucson, Arizona. The plant is
a major diversified enterprise of the US aerospace industry that produces almost all types of missile weapons. Over the past two
years the space of the plant has increased by 44% – from 55,000 to 79,000 square meters, while the number of employees is going
to rise by almost 2,000 people, according to official statements. Almost at the same time as production facilities expanded, on
November 2017, Congress provided the first tranche amounting to $58 mln to Pentagon, directly pointing at the development of a
land-based missile of intermediate range. Consequently, the nature and time of the works demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that
the US administration decided to withdraw from the INF Treaty several years before unfounded accusations against Russia of violating
the Treaty were made public."
The unilateral withdrawal by George W. Bush from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM Treaty) in 2002, citing the need for the
US to protect itself from countries belonging to the Axis of Evil (Iran, Iraq, North Korea), was an excuse to deploy the Aegis system
(land- or sea-based) in strategic areas around the Russian Federation, so as to diminish Moscow's deterrent capacity for a nuclear
second strike.
The Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense System (Aegis BMD) is designed to be able to theoretically intercept Russian missiles in their
initial boost phase, the period when they are the most vulnerable. Moscow has been openly questioning the rationale for the Aegis
system deployed in Romania. According to Russian military experts, the possibility of reprogramming the system from defensive to
offensive, replacing the conventional warheads used for intercepting missiles with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles, could be undertaken
within an hour, without the Russian Federation possibly being aware of it. Putin has cited this specific case and its technical possibility
more than once when pointing out that the US is already in violation of the INF treaty by deploying such systems in Romania.
The US unilaterally withdrew from the ABM treaty in 2002 in order to be able to disguise the deployment of an offensive system
under the guise of an
ABM system for the purported purposes of defending against Iran, thereby de facto violating the INF treaty, an excess of arrogance
and presumption. Such perfidy caused Putin to make his famous 2007 Munich speech, where he warned the US and her allies of the consequences
of reneging on such treaties and agreements. Deploying defensive systems close to the Russian border that can easily be converted
into offensive ones with a nuclear capacity was a red line that could not be crossed.
At the time the West ignored Putin's warnings, dismissive of the Russian leader. But only a few months ago, the Russian Federation
finally showed the world that the warnings issued in 2007 were not empty bluster. Hypersonic weapons, a submarine drone and other
cutting-edge systems were presented by Putin in March 2018, shocking Western military planners and analysts who had not taken Putin
seriously back in 2007. These new technological breakthroughs provide Russia with the ability to eliminate targets by kinetic, conventional
or nuclear means. Such offensive deployments near the Russian border as the ABM systems in Romania can now be eliminated within the
space of a few minutes, with no possibility of being intercepted.
"The (US) has announced research and development works, and we will do the same. I agree with the Defense Ministry's proposals
to start the work on 'landing' Kalibr missiles and developing a new area to create a land-based hypersonic missile with intermediate
range."
Putin has already put his military cards on the table, warning 10 years ago what would happen if Washington continued in its duplicitous
direction. As Putin said in March 2018: "They did not listen to us in 2007. They will listen to us now".
The consequences of withdrawing from the INF treaty fall most heavily on the shoulders of the Europeans. Federica Mogherini indicated
deep concern over Washington's decision, as well as the new super-weapons that were either being tested or were already operational
in Russia, causing consternation amongst the Western military establishment that had thought that Putin was bluffing in March 2018
when he spoke about hypersonic weapons.
The US military-industrial complex is rejoicing at the prospect of money rained down as a result of this withdrawal from the INF
treaty. But in Europe (with the exception of Romania and Poland), nobody is too keen to welcome US missiles that have no defense
against Russian hypersonic weapons. NATO's trans-Atlantic arms lobby will try to push as many European countries as possible towards
a new Cold War, with US weapons deployed and aimed at Moscow. It will be fun to see the reactions of European citizens facing the
prospect of being annihilated by Russian missiles simply to please the CEOs and shareholders of Lockheed Martin and Raytheon. No
doubt there will be some European politicians in countries like Poland keen to scream about the "Russian threat", ready to throw
tens of billions worth of Polish taxpayers' money into useless and ineffective projects for the purposes of pleasing their American
friends.
Are US generals even aware of how idiotic it is for the US to withdraw from the INF for Washington? Moscow is already ahead in
the development of such systems, both land-based but above all sea- and air-launched, without forgetting the hypersonic variants
of its conventional or nuclear missiles. Washington has a huge gap to close, exacerbated by the fact that in spite of heavy spending
over many years, there is little to show for it as a result of massive corruption in the research-and-development process. This is
not to mention the fact that there are few European countries willing to host offensive missile systems aimed at Russia. In reality,
there is little real advantage for Washington in withdrawing from the INF treaty, other than to enrich arms manufacturers. It diminishes
US military options strategically while expanding those of Beijing and Moscow, even as the latter oppose Washington's unilateral
withdrawal from the treaty.
The hope of expanding the INF treaty to include the US, Russia, China and the EU appears slim due to Washington's intransigence.
Washington only aims to increase expenditure for the development of weapons prohibited by the treaty, and in strategic terms, improbably
hopes to find some Asian and European countries willing to host these systems aimed against China and Russia.
The world is certainly more dangerous following Washington's decision, heading in a direction where there are less and less rules
while there are more nuclear powers. For decades, the United States has been trying to achieve nuclear supremacy by overcoming the
limitations of MAD, whereby Washington would be able to carry out a decapitating nuclear first strike without worrying about an opponent's
ability to launch a retaliatory second strike. It is precisely this type of thinking that is bringing humanity closer to the brink
of destruction from a nuclear accident or miscalculation. The miniaturization of nuclear warheads and the apparently limited nature
of "tactical nukes" further encourages the justification for using such weapons.
Moscow's decision in 2007 to develop state-of-the-art weapons and focus on new technologies like hypersonic missiles guarantees
that Russia and her allies have an effective deterrent against the attempts of the US to alter the nuclear balance of power, which
otherwise threatens the future of humanity.
The withdrawal from the INF treaty is another worrying sign of the willingness of the US to push the world to the brink of catastrophe,
simply for the purposes of enriching the CEOs and shareholders of it arms manufacturers through a nuclear arms race.
"... The job paid minimum wage and exposed Warren firsthand to the topics that would later define her career: the power of corporations and the effects of bankruptcy on the American consumer. ..."
"... Warren, who had been sharply critical of Clinton in part over her ties to Wall Street, ultimately chose not to challenge her for the Democratic party's nomination and endorsed the former secretary of state's campaign. It was also during this time that Warren proved among the few capable of getting under then candidate Donald Trump's skin. ..."
"... At the same time, Warren became a top target of conservatives and Trump himself. The president has repeatedly mocked Warren with the derisive nickname "Pocahontas" – including at an event intended to honor Native Americans. ..."
"... Republicans first tried to push the notion that Warren used her Native American ancestry to further her career in the 2012 Senate race, homing in on a single questionnaire in which she claimed mixed ancestry. ..."
"... But the matter did not end there. The Washington Post published a story revealing Warren listed her race as "American Indian" while seeking a Texas bar registration card in 1986. ..."
"... Warren's platform includes the single-payer healthcare system Medicare for All, debt-free college tuition and anti-corruption legislation designed to restore accountability in government. She is also poised to unveil a proposal that would impose a wealth tax on Americans worth over $50m. ..."
Warren's official entry into the race has differed sharply from when she captured widespread liberal enthusiasm in
her unlikely bid for the Senate seven years ago.
The two-term senator will join a crowded Democratic primary
field with no clear frontrunner – and several contenders jockeying to claim the progressive mantle that she
aspires to grasp. She has also found herself contending with a lingering controversy for previously identifying as
Native American over the course of nearly two decades.
The question now is whether Warren, who moved early to build an expansive field operation in anticipation of
her presidential run, can overcome early setbacks and reclaim her role as the Democratic party's top foil to
Donald Trump.
Born to middle-class parents in Norman, Oklahoma
, Warren has spoken
candidly about how her family's livelihood was upended when her father's heart attack forced him out of work.
Addressing crowds across the country, Warren often recalls how her late mother – determined not to lose the
family's home – "pulled on her best dress" and got her first paying job at the department store Sears.
The job paid minimum wage and exposed Warren firsthand to the topics that would later define her career:
the power of corporations and the effects of bankruptcy on the American consumer.
Her research in bankruptcy law – and the impact on the average person's medical bills, mortgage payments and
other installments – led Warren to become a leading expert on the subject and rise in the academia world.
"These are the issues she still cares about," said Charles Fried, a professor at Harvard Law School who helped
recruit Warren to its faculty.
"I think she is extraordinary for this reason, that she got into politics because she cared about some issues.
She didn't get into politics because she wanted to be in office and then tried to figure out what issues she cared
about."
Warren cultivated a profile as a populist firebrand against the backdrop of the Great Recession, earning the
ire of Wall Street by spearheading the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau – an agency
established under the Obama administration as part of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill of 2010.
Upon being passed over to head the agency she helped create, Warren decided to continue the fight from within
the government, embarking on a campaign to win back the late senator and liberal icon Ted Kennedy's seat from the
Republican incumbent, Scott Brown, in the high-profile 2012 Massachusetts Senate race.
Roughly $70m was spent on the bitterly waged contest, which catapulted Warren to the national stage.
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Elizabeth Warren speaks during day two of the Democratic national convention in Charlotte, North Carolina,
on 5 September 2012. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
The race also saw Warren cement herself as a leader of the burgeoning progressive movement within the
Democratic party; branding the choice before voters as "Wall Street versus you", Warren viewed the election as an
opportunity to hand a major defeat to what she once
dubbed
as "the largest lobbying force ever assembled on the face of the earth".
Following her victory, Warren's profile grew so rapidly that speculation swiftly emerged over a potential White
House run in 2016, despite the inevitability of Hillary Clinton's candidacy. A group of progressives even mounted
a #DraftWarren campaign.
Warren, who had been sharply critical of Clinton in part over her ties to Wall Street, ultimately chose not to
challenge her for the Democratic party's nomination and endorsed the former secretary of state's campaign. It was
also during this time that Warren proved among the few capable of getting under then candidate Donald Trump's
skin.
After Trump derided Clinton as a "nasty woman", Warren famously riffed: "Get this, Donald. Nasty women are
tough, nasty women are smart and nasty women vote, and on November 8, we nasty women are going to march our nasty
feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our lives forever."
The 2016 presidential election did not, however, produce the groundswell of unified opposition to Trump that
Democrats
had hoped for. Instead, it left the party in search of a clear leader to fill the void left by
Obama's departure from the White House.
For Warren, it looked as though her moment had arrived.
In the early days of the Trump administration, Warren quickly emerged as the face of the Democratic opposition,
matching the president's tweets with sharp ripostes of her own and holding his cabinet nominees to account when
they appeared for consideration before congressional committees.
During the confirmation process for the former attorney general Jeff Sessions, Warren famously read a letter
written 30 years prior by Coretta Scott King, in which the widow of Dr Martin Luther King Jr warned of Sessions'
civil rights record from the time of his nomination for a federal judgeship.
Silenced by Republicans mid-speech
on the Senate floor, Warren read the letter on Facebook Live. The hashtag
#LetLizSpeak trended on Twitter and the phrase "Nevertheless, she persisted" was coined.
At the same time, Warren became a top target of conservatives and Trump himself. The president has repeatedly
mocked Warren with the derisive nickname "Pocahontas" – including at an event intended to honor Native Americans.
Although Warren long ignored the president's taunts, she took the unusual step of addressing the issue head on
in October by making public the results of a DNA test revealing that she did, in fact, have some Native American
ancestry.
Rather than putting the topic to rest, Warren's move was rebuked by some tribal leaders, who felt it
politicized their identity, and reignited the story.
Republicans first tried to push the notion
that Warren used her
Native American ancestry to further her career in the 2012 Senate race, homing in on a single questionnaire in
which she claimed mixed ancestry.
An exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe found no evidence that Warren benefited from doing so, and
nearly every living Harvard law professor involved in her hiring
has said
it was not a factor in their votes to offer her a tenured position.
"When we brought her to Harvard, no one had a clue that she thought of herself as Native American," said
Laurence Tribe, the school's professor of constitutional law.
"I think she's had an unfair rap," he added. "I don't think it's the case that she ever exploited her family's
background or ancestry in a way that some people seem to think she did."
The Cherokee nation, one of the groups that was critical of Warren, said she privately apologized to to tribal
leaders.
But the matter did not end there. The Washington Post published a story revealing Warren
listed her race
as "American Indian" while seeking a Texas bar registration card in 1986. Warren apologized once more, telling reporters: "I'm not a tribal citizen.
"My apology is an apology for not having been more sensitive about tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty. I
really want to underline the point, tribes and only tribes determine tribal citizenship."
Warren remains a popular figure in the Democratic party
and was
easily re-elected to a second Senate term in the 2018 midterm elections.
Even so, she received fewer votes in her home state than Charlie Baker, the Republican governor of
Massachusetts, prompting Warren's hometown paper to urge the senator to reconsider a presidential bid.
"While Warren won re-election, her margin of victory in November suggests there's a ceiling on her popularity,"
the
Boston Globe editorial board
wrote. "Baker garnered more votes than she did in a state that is supposed to be
a Democratic haven."
She's hard-edged, not personally, but ideologically. She takes very sharp and
controversial positions
Barney Frank
"While Warren is an effective and impactful senator with an important voice nationally, she has become a
divisive figure," the board added. "A unifying voice is what the country needs now after the polarizing politics
of Donald Trump." Those close to Warren dismissed the editorial as having more to do with the personal biographies and
inclinations of those who sit on the board. "She's hard-edged, not personally, but ideologically," said Frank. "She takes very sharp and controversial
positions."
"So, yeah, they're going to be people who are unhappy with her."
More challenging for Warren, friends and former colleagues said, would be the task of distinguishing herself
within a diverse field of Democratic candidates that includes at least three of her Senate colleagues and a record
number of women seeking the party's nomination.
Warren's platform includes the single-payer healthcare system Medicare for All, debt-free college tuition and
anti-corruption legislation designed to restore accountability in government. She is also poised to unveil a
proposal that would impose a wealth tax on Americans worth over $50m.
Fried, who served as solicitor general under Ronald Reagan, said he disagreed with some of the more expansive
economic policies touted by Warren. But her greatest asset as a candidate, he acknowledged, would be to approach the campaign with the same steely
resolve to elevate the middle class that endeared her to voters seven years ago.
Although he is only occasionally in touch with Warren as she embarks on what will undoubtedly be a grueling
campaign for America's highest office, Fried recalled recently sending Warren a lengthy article about capitalism
and income inequality.
To his surprise, he received a response from Warren 10 days later. She had not only taken the time to read the
article, but highlighted a portion that stood out to her. "How many presidential candidates would do that?" Fried asked.
In her email, Warren also recounted to her old colleague how not very long ago they sat together on a flight
discussing the prospects of a Clinton presidency.
That day never came to fruition, Warren noted.
"I don't know what lies ahead," she added. "But I know what I'm fighting for."
While controversy around her heritage lingers, voters call the Democrat's fight against economic
injustice 'inspiring'
On a cold, blustery January day in 1912, immigrant women walked out of the Everett Mill in the
->
Massachusetts
factory town of Lawrence demanding higher wages and better working conditions. Mill owners and
city government responded in a swift and heavy-handed manner; local militias and police forces were called to the
streets. Protesters died. Many more were arrested.
On a cold, blustery February day 117 years later, the
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren stood in front of Everett Mill
->
to announce her candidacy for president of the United States
, channeling the spirit of those women as she told
her supporters that they were in a fight for their lives against a rigged system that favors the rich and
powerful.
ss="rich-link">
Why women 2020 candidates face 'likability' question even as they make
history
Read more
"These workers – led by women – didn't have much. Not even a common language. Nevertheless, they persisted,"
she said. "The story of Lawrence is about how real change happens in America. It's a story about power – our power
– when we fight together."
For Warren, who grew up in an economically struggling Oklahoma household and who first rose to mainstream
prominence by handing out practical financial advice to American families, the word "fight" is central to her
platform and political ethos – it was a word peppered throughout her speech.
But on Saturday, she made clear that hers was not just a fight against president Donald Trump, but against a
system she described as one where the rich, privileged and powerful oppress the rest of the country.
"The man in the White House is not the cause of what is broken, he is just the latest – and most extreme –
symptom of what's gone wrong in America, a product of a rigged system that props up the rich and the powerful and
kicks dirt on everyone else," she said. "So once he's gone, we can't pretend that all of this never happened."
The backdrop of the mill, where the so-called Bread and Roses strikes originated, was symbolic. But so too was
the choice of the modern day city of Lawrence, which is one of those places in America that has felt left behind
in recent times. To many in New England, Lawrence is synonymous with crime, drugs and poverty. The Republican
governors of Maine and New Hampshire have invoked the city's name when laying blame for the opioid crises in their
states. As was the case at the time of the strikes, Lawrence is a working class city of immigrants, with a
population that is about 80% Latino. It is a city where wealth is nearby, but out of reach for many.
Sebastian Brown, 31, moved to Lawrence five years ago. While he had yet to choose a candidate to support, he
was excited by Warren's message and was happy Warren chose the town as the site of her announcement.
ass="inline-garnett-quote inline-icon ">
I think we need a woman president and I think it will be the fight of our lives
Vicki Ward, rally attendee
"This is a working class city. And I think her – and Bernie [Sanders] – are running on platforms that speak to
the working class and how they're being screwed over by the rich and powerful," he said. "And I think she's a
great messenger for it."
While there was optimism about Warren's candidacy at her rally, she enters an already crowded Democratic field
amid
->
r
enewed controversy over her past identification as Native American.
For years now – since even before he was president –
->
Trump has needled Warren on the issue
, calling her "Pocahontas". He and others accuse Warren of falsely
presenting herself as Native American to gain unfair advantages in life.
The controversy was re-ignited last week when the Washington Post
->
published Warren's 1986 registration card
for the Texas State Bar. In it, she listed "American Indian" as her
race.
Warren has now apologised repeatedly for identifying as Native American, saying in recent days that she "should
have been more mindful of the distinction with tribal citizenship and tribal sovereignty". She still maintains
that Native American ancestry was part of her family's story passed down to her.
->
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Elizabeth Warren called Donald Trump the 'most extreme' symptom of a broken system. Photograph: Cj Gunther/EPA
How damaging the controversy will be remains to be see. Warren enters a diverse Democratic field where other
candidates belong to minority groups: New Jersey senator
->
Cory Booker is African American
;
->
California senator Kamala Harris
was born to an Indian mother and a Jamaican father.
->
Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard
is both the first Hindu and first Samoan-American member of Congress, and
the former San Antonio mayor
->
Julián Castro is Latino
. When the Democratic race gets heated, Warren's portrayal of race could prove to be a
point of attack.
Peter Devlin, a 56-year-old dentist from the nearby town of North Andover, said he was at the rally to hear
what Warren had to say but said that the Native American controversy "is going to be a problem" for her campaign.
"I voted for her as senator, but I'm concerned about her electability," he said. "It's going to be a tough run.
She's got a bit of baggage and she's so sort of cliche progressive liberal that I think there's a lot of America
that's not up for that. But I want to hear what she's up to."
ss="rich-link">
Stacey Abrams on the ticket? Democrat's star turn fuels talk for 2020
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However, other attendees, like 64-year-old Vicki Ward, who drove two hours to the event from Vermont, were
ready to throw their support behind Warren on the first day of the senator's presidential campaign.
"I think she's got the qualities that we need," she said. "I think we need a woman president and I think it
will be the fight of our lives."
Maryann Johnson, who came to Warren's announcement from New Hampshire, also said she was already sold on
Warren.
"I basically agreed with everything she said. We need to have more equality, there needs to be less corruption
in government," she said. "She's inspiring."
"... Vidal's view was that liberation from this system will come about as a result of an economic collapse possibly a global one. He further said as far as the US is concerned "This is inevitable, on the basis of the colossal debts we have been building up. This must lead to monetary breakdown at some stage. The writing is on the wall." ..."
America has bankrupted its economy, abandoned its original ideals, its sense of decency, its
core morality, that's what it looks like anyway.
One book that predicted and encapsulated the description of what America used to be and will
be was published in July 2002, it was in fact a series of essays written over 10 years. Its
name 'The Decline and Fall of the American Empire' written by the outstandingly unique genius,
the late Gore Vidal.
Vidal explained in his book how the pillars of the US constitution have been eroded and are
gone forever, until we force a violent people's revolution, something akin to the revolts all
across France today. Necessary, not least, to stop the latest idea of regime change in places
like Venezuela and Iran.
There has sadly been what looks like a silent coup in America – that has surrounded
Trump with warmongers, bringing the NeoCons of the 1990s back!
Trump appears to have been, to a degree, marginalised somehow.
In the first part of the 21st Century, resulting and triggered by 9/11, we witnessed the
destruction of the US constitution, due process of law and tragically the end of 'fair play' by
Britain as She became a mere US satellite or as Blair was described when Prime Minister, a lap
dog to American (and Israeli) interests.
Endless wars like Afghanistan. Why pray tell.
This fall of the American Republic in a worse case scenario could eventually lead to a
totalitarian State.
In Gore's opinion, "the [American] Republic ended in 1950. Since then we have had an
imperial system." What are the chief characteristics of this system?
First, the USA intervenes in an aggressive way in almost every part of the world. According
to Vidal research, since 1776, the USA has waged over 100 interventions and wars in different
parts of the globe. Yet the Constitution stipulates that any war must be approved by Congress,
not one of these wars or conflicts has been so approved. In fact, the last time an American
President sought and obtained congressional approval for a war was in 1941, after the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbour.
Vidal points out something that has been long known to academics and historians but has
never been publicly admitted, namely that President Roosevelt deliberately provoked the
Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor. "Roosevelt wanted the USA to enter the war against Hitler, but
he knew that 80 percent of Americans were against this. He knew that the only way to change
this was by a major shock, and therefore set out to provoke the Japanese – who were the
allies of Germany and Italy – to attack the US.
False flags have always been around one seems to be able to deduce.
Vidal then explained how President Truman got the USA involved in the Korean War ("which we
lost like Vietnam") by presenting it as a "police operation" (or 'stopping communism' in the
case of Indo-China) that did not require the approval of Congress.
The US military aggression in Korea took place under the banner of the UN – like many
many subsequent adventures.
Now we have wars called 'humantarian interventions' like Libya and soon could be in
Venezuela.
Its important to reflect that Vidal was a most effective raconteur, who also possessed the
necessary sense of humour. In his hands, wit is a deadly weapon, as sharp as a dagger. The
young George W. Bush ("How I love that man!") provides him with an endless source of anecdotes,
one of which was new to me and very worth repeating. Bush's opinion of the French: "The trouble
with those guys is that they just don't have a word for entrepreneur!"
If one is a pessimist, it wouldn't be difficult in surmising that the US 'Elite', 'the Deep
State' would seems to support a US led world akin to an 'Empire'.
US interventions are connected with only money; mega-projects, gas and oil.
Worth mentioning is another of Vidal's books 'Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace', which was
published in the USA, but then, as he remarked wryly, it 'vanished' to all intent and purposes.
Not a single American newspaper was prepared to review the book. There was no publicity and no
advertisements were accepted. As a well-known public figure and broadcaster, he received seven
invitations to appear on different television programmes. Five of these were soon cancelled.
CNN had invited him to debate his views, but the programme was cancelled half an hour before it
was due to commence. The instructions evidently came from the top level in Washington. Do the
words Orwellian or totalitarianism spring to mind and of course covert censorship seems far
more prevalent today than it was then.
Citizens' rights were demolished (the knee jerk after 9/11) when they passed the US Patriot
Act, a document of 300 odd pages that Vidal stated "nobody bothered to read". Rest of Europe
and Britain followed with similarly intrusive laws.
Vidal's view was that liberation from this system will come about as a result of an economic
collapse possibly a global one. He further said as far as the US is concerned "This is
inevitable, on the basis of the colossal debts we have been building up. This must lead to
monetary breakdown at some stage. The writing is on the wall."
So if you want to know what will happen next and for the rest of this century, should we see
it out without a nuclear Armageddon, just read Gore Vidal and also books and articles written
in the 1930s and 40s by Huxley, Orwell.
You will conclude the future looks pretty bleak. Let's hope not.
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically fascinating as now.
Appointment on Bolton essentially confirms Fred Reed diagnose of Trump: "profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law.
Notable quotes:
"... I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth ..."
"... The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive & inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation. The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's & naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer competitors. ..."
American government has become a collection of sordid and dangerous clowns. It was not
always thus. Until Bush II, those governing were never lunatics. Eisenhower, Truman, Kennedy,
Johnson, Nixon, Obama, Clinton had their defects, were sometimes corrupt, and could be
disagreed with on many grounds. They weren't crazy. Today's administration would seem
unwholesome in a New York bus station at three in the morning. They are not normal American
politicians.
In particular they seem to be pushing for war with Iran, China, Russia, and Venezuela. And
-- this is important -- their behavior is not a matter of liberals catfighting with
conservatives. All former presidents carefully avoided war with the Soviet Union, which
carefully avoided war with America.
It was Reagan, a conservative and responsible president,
who negotiated the INF treaty, to eliminate short-fuse nuclear weapons from Europe. By
contrast, Trump is scrapping it. Pat Buchanan, the most conservative man I have met, strongly
opposes aggression against Russia. The problem with the current occupants of the White House is
not that they are conservatives, if they are. It is that they are nuts.
Donald the Cockatoo
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a real-estate
con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in fury at this.
All politics being herd politics, the population has coalesced into herds fanatically pro-Trump
and fanatically anti-Trump. Yet Trump's past is not a secret. Well-documented biographies
describe his behavior in detail, but his supporters don't read them. The following is a bit
long, but worth reading.
"I always get even," Trump writes in the opening line of that chapter. He then launches
into an attack on the same woman he had denounced in Colorado. Trump recruited the unnamed
woman "from her government job where she was making peanuts," her career going nowhere. "I
decided to make her somebody. I gave her a great job at the Trump Organization, and over time
she became powerful in real estate. She bought a beautiful home.
"When Trump was in financial trouble in the early nineties .."I asked her to make a phone
call to an extremely close friend of hers who held a powerful position at a big bank and
would have done what she asked. She said, "Donald, I can't do that." Instead of accepting
that the woman felt that such a call would be inappropriate, Trump fired her. She started her
own business. Trump writes that her business failed. "I was really happy when I found that
out," he says.
"She had turned on me after I did so much to help her. I had asked her to do me a favor in
return, and she turned me down flat. She ended up losing her home. Her husband, who was only
in it for the money, walked out on her and I was glad. Over the years many people have called
me asking for a recommendation for her. I always gave her bad recommendation. I can't stomach
disloyalty. ..and now I go out of my way to make her life miserable."
All that because (if she exists) she declined to engage in corruption for the Donald. That
is your President. A draft dodger, a pampered rich kid, and Ivy brat (Penn, Wharton). This
increasingly is a pattern at the top: Ivy, money, no military service.
A particularly loathsome sort of politician is one who dodges his country's wars when of
military age, and then wants to send others to die in later wars. This is Pussy John, arch
hawk, coward, amoral, bully, willing to kill any number while he prances martially in
Washington. Speaking as one who carried a rifle in Viet Nam, I would like to confine this
fierce darling for life in the bottom of a public latrine in Uganda.
Pussy John, an Ivy flower (Yale) wrote in a reunion books that, during the 1969 Vietnam War
draft lottery, "I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy. I considered
the war in Vietnam already lost." In an interview, Bolton explained that he decided to avoid
service in Vietnam because "by the time I was about to graduate in 1970, it was clear to me
that opponents of the Vietnam War had made it certain we could not prevail, and that I had no
great interest in going there to have Teddy Kennedy give it back to the people I might die to
take it away from."
This same Pussy John, unwilling to risk his valuable being in a war he could have attended,
now wants war with Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Syria, and Afghanistan. In these wars millions
would die while he waggled his silly lip broom in the West Wing. His truculence is pathological
and dangerous.
Here is PJ on
Iran: which has not harmed and does not threaten America: "We think the government is under
real pressure and it's our intention to squeeze them very hard," Bolton said Tuesday in
Singapore. "As the British say, 'squeeze them until the pips squeak'."
How very brave of him. He apparently feels sadistic delight at starving Venezuelans,
inciting civil war, and ruining the lives of millions who have done nothing wrong. Whence the
weird hostility of this empty jockstrap, the lack of humanity? Forgot his Midiol? Venezuela of
course has done nothing to the US and couldn't if it wanted to. America under the Freak Show is
destroying another country simply because it doesn't meekly obey. While PJ gloats.
Bush II
Another rich kid and Yalie, none too bright, amoral as the rest, another draft dodger, (he
hid in the Air National Guard.) who got to the White House on daddy's name recognition. Not
having the balls to fight in his own war, he presided over the destruction of Iraq and the
killing of hundreds of thousands, for no reason. (Except oil, Israel, and Empire. Collectively,
these amount to no reason.) He then had the effrontery to pose on the deck of an aircraft
carrier and say, "Mission accomplished." You know, just like Alexander the Great. Amoral. No
empathy. What a man.
The striking pattern of the Ivy League avoiding the war confirmed then, as it does now, that
our present rulers regard the rest of America as beings of a lower order. These armchair John
Waynes might have called them "deplorables," though Hillary, another Yalie bowwow hawk, had not
yet made the contempt explicit. This was the attitude of Pussy John, Bushy-Bushy Two, and
Cockatoo Don. Compare this with the Falklands War in which Prince Andrew did what a country's
leadership should do, but ours doesn't..
Wikipedia: "He (Prince Andrew)
holds the rank of commander and the honorary rank of Vice Admiral (as of February 2015) in the
Royal Navy, in which he served as an active-duty helicopter pilot and instructor and as the
captain of a warship. He saw active service during the Falklands War, flying on multiple
missions including anti-surface warfare, Exocet missile decoy, and casualty evacuation"
The Brits still have class. Compare Andrew with the contents of the Great Double-Wide on
Pennsylvania Avernus.
Gina
A measure of the moral degradation of America: It is the only country that openly and
proudly engages in torture. Many countries do it, of course. We admit it, and maintain torture
prisons around the globe. Now we have a major government official, Gina Haspel, head of the
CIA, a known sadist. "Bloody Gina." Is this who represents us? Would any other country in the
civilized world put a sadist publicly in office?
Think of Gina waterboarding some guy, or standing around and getting off on it. You don't
torture people unless you like it. The guy is tied down, coughing, choking, screaming, begging,
desperate, drowning, and Gina pours more water. The poor bastard vomits, chokes. Gina adds a
little more water .
What kind of woman would do this? Well, Gina's kind obviously. Does she then run off to her
office and lock the door for half an hour? Maybe it starts early. One imagines her as a little
girl, playing with her dolls. Cheerleader Barbie, Nurse Barbie, Klaus Barbie .
Michael Pompeo
Another pathologically aggressive chickenhawk. In a piece in Foreign Affairs he describes Iran as a "rogue state that America must eliminate
for the sake of all that is good. Note that Pompeo presides over a foreign policy seeking to
destroy Venezuela's economy and threatens military invasion, though Venezuela is no danger to
the US and is not America's business; embargoes Cuba, which in no danger to the US and is not
America's business; seeks to destroy Iran's economy, though Iran is no danger to the US and
none of Americas business; sanctions Europe and meddles in its politics; sanctions Russia,
which is not a danger to the United States, in an attempt to destroy its economy, pushes NATO
up to Russia's borders, abandons the INF arms-control treaty and establishes a Space Command
which will mean nuclear weapons on hair trigger in orbit, starts another nuclear arms race;
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress; sanctions North
Korea; continues a seventeen-year policy of killing Afghans for no discernible purpose; wages a
war against Syria; bombs Somalis; maintains unwanted occupation forces in Iraq; increasingly
puts military forces in Africa; supports regimes with ghastly human-rights records such as
Saudi Arabia and Israel; and looks for a war with China in the South China Sea, which is no
more America's business than the Gulf of Mexico is China's.
But Pompeo is not a loon, oh no, and America is not a rogue state. Perish forfend.
Nikki Haley
A negligible twit -- I choose my vowel carefully -- but characterized, like Trump, PJ, and
Pompeo Mattis
"After being promoted to lieutenant general, Mattis took command of Marine Corps Combat
Development Command. On February 1, 2005, speaking at a forum in San Diego, he said "You go
into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap women around for five years because they didn't wear a
veil. You know, guys like that ain't got no manhood left anyway. So it's a hell of a lot of fun
to shoot them. Actually, it's a lot of fun to fight. You know, it's a hell of a hoot. It's fun
to shoot some people. I'll be right upfront with you, I like brawling."
Perhaps in air-to-air combat you want someone who regards killing as fun, or in an
amphibious assault. But in a position to make policy? Can you image Dwight Eisenhower talking
about the fun of squaring a man's brains across the ground?
The Upshot
We have until recently never had government as aggressive, reckless, or psychiatrically
fascinating as now. Again, it is not a matter of Republicans and Democrats. No administration
of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively toward war with so many
countries. These people are not right in the head.
I remember in high school one of my teachers stating how weird it seems that it would be the
leadership of the US military who would call for the American government to intervene less in
the affairs of other countries and to not be so quick to use military force. This was, of
course, decades ago.
A few years ago, I had a conversation with one of my colleages. He remarked how scary it
was that so many American politicians were calling for war with Russia (with Hillary Clinton
leading the pack?). I remarked how it seemed so strange that many of these hawks never fought
in a war even when they had ample opportunity in their youth (Vietnam).
Fred is absolutely correct: the current administration is pathological & insane.
However, it's worth remembering that their insane behavior is based on the same Imperial
goals that have been in play since at least 1945.
The crazy irresponsibility of Trump's foreign policy is entirely counter productive &
inexcusable, however it's symptomatic of a slowly swelling sense of unconscious desperation.
The reality, the feeling of unconstrained power the US experienced in the 90's &
naughties has gone. The US has slowly woken to the nightmare possibility of real peer
competitors.
China & Russia are real novelties -- & as such, damn scary. Taken together, they
are near equal military & economic rivals of the US.
To US elites this is almost incomprehensible. How ? How did China suddenly become leaders
in cutting edge tech? How did Russia suddenly appear with hypersonsic missiles ?
It's impossible ! Given the already existing moral & psychological inadequacies of
individual Trump team members, insanity & juvenile behavior are fairly predictable
responses .
The fact that you left Bill Clinton off this list (you know, the president that fired
Tomahawk missiles into the country of Sudan to take attention away from the Lewinsky
hearings, sexually assaulted subordinate women for decades, and spent time banging underage
sex slaves via the Lolita Express, pardons a bunch of Puerto Rican terrorists in 2000 to help
swing PR votes to his bag of shit wife in the New York Senate race and was, oh yeah, a draft
dodger) is pathetic even for you , Kiko. I guess NAFTA makes up for all that rapey shit, huh?
And when can we expect a detailed critique of the Mexican political climate, Kiko? Is it
still never? A little too worried about that knock on the door if you bring up all the
inconvenient murder going on down there, and all of the gutless politicians and law
enforcement that turn a blind eye to it, you insufferable hypocrite?
No administration of any party, stripe, or ideology has ever pushed to aggressively
toward war with so many countries. These people are not right in the head.
Now there, I will certainly agree with Mr. Reed, but in a qualified way. The Trump
administration is somewhat more warlike and interventionist in its talk than previous ones
have been. But, so far, all talk (except for its repudiation of the Iran nuclear deal, which
is ominous).
Also, even in terms of the bellicose hot air, the current regime's increase over its
predecessors is a matter of degree, not of kind. Even the increase itself I'd call
incremental.
Also, I wrote, "So far, all talk." That doesn't mean I'm not concerned. As the man who
jumped off a skyscraper said, when passing the 2nd floor, "All right so far!"
So what's the difference between Trump's neocons and the neocons who would have run Hillary?
Nothing. There is no one more chicken hawkish, and slavish to Israel than Hillary.
Give Trump some credit. He tried to ease ties with Russia and end war in Syria. But look how
the Jewish supremacists in media and Deep State goons all jumped on him. And almost no one in
the Establishment came to his side.
Obama and his goons pushed the Russia Collusion Hoax. Obama and Bush II have more in
common.
@Sean
wages a trade war against China intended to prevent its economic progress
"About time too. Nixon deciding the US would getting pally with China was a hostile act as
far as Russia was concerned."
Exactly right. Glad someone else remembers things as they were. Getting pally with China
will turn out to be the most disastrous mistake the USA has ever made in foreign policy.
Arrogantly thinking that we could make them our junior partners we have given or sold them
everything which made us great. Our industries, technology, patents, education at premier
research institutions etc. Now, utilizing everything we provided them, they will surpass and
then suppress us. Meanwhile our ignorant politicians, blinded by traitorous, dual-citizen
economists and bankers who promised a new economy based upon finance and "information", plod
along, single file, to oblivion.
Start with the head cheese, Donald Trump, profoundly ignorant, narcissistic, a
real-estate con man who danced just out of reach of the law. His supporters will explode in
fury at this.
Most of us knew that Trump is a flawed man but were willing to overlook that because he
was the only one talking sense on immigration and offering solutions that would benefit white
America. Of course, after two years Trump has been all tweet and little action on immigration
and appears poised to sell out out to Javanka, Sheldon Adelson, the Koch brothers and the
Business Roundtable.
He's narcissistic and a bit of a con man but not profoundly ignorant. Profoundly ignorant
people don't become billionaires and will themselves to the presidency.
Trump has done a 180 on his campaign foreign policy and filled his administration with
Israel first neocon retreads from the George W. Bush era instead of America firsters. People
like Bolton deserve all the hate and condemnation heaped upon them by Fredrico.
Fredrico just hates Trump because he doesn't worship Mexico and Mexicans like Fredrico
does and spoke the truth about many Mexican illegals being predisposed to violent crime.
Fredrico and his hispandering Bobbsey twin Ron Unz get easily triggered at the slightest
criticism of hispanics, even if based in fact, and fly into a foaming at the mouth rage.
@KenH
The first priority of any president is staying alive, which probably explains why every US
president, including Donald Trump ends up doing the exact opposite of what they promise on
the campaign trail. As to Trump's neocon advisors, I suspect they were appointed by the deep
state, with him having no say in the matter.
"... Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans' care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700 people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs." ..."
"... Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria. ..."
"... A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women ..."
"... Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population, under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate, and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16. ..."
"... The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act. ..."
"... Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more. ..."
"... It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists do not care for the facts. ..."
"... That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused. Brzezinski said, "None". ..."
An editorial published by the New York Times on February 4 titled "End the War in Afghanistan" has provoked a backlash from prominent
supporters of the decades-long US "war on terrorism" and the fraud of "humanitarian intervention."
The Times editorial was a damning
self-indictment by the US political establishment's newspaper of record, which has supported every US act of military aggression,
from the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001, to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the US wars for regime change in Libya
and Syria beginning in 2011.
The editorial presents the "war on terror" as an unmitigated fiasco, dating it from September 14, 2001, when "Congress wrote what
would prove to be one of the largest blank checks in the country's history," i.e., the Authorization for Use of Military Force against
Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which is still invoked to legitimize US interventions from Syria to Somalia, Yemen and, of course, Afghanistan.
On the day that this "blank check" was written, the Times published a column titled "No Middle Ground," which stated "the Bush
administration today gave the nations of the world a stark choice: stand with us against terrorism, deny safe havens to terrorists
or face the certain prospect of death and destruction. The marble halls of Washington resounded with talk of war."
It continued, "The nation is rallying around its young, largely untried leader-as his rising approval ratings and the proliferation
of flags across the country vividly demonstrate "
This war propaganda was sustained by the Times, which sold the invasion of Afghanistan as retribution for 9/11 and then promoted
the illegal and unprovoked war against Iraq by legitimizing and embellishing the lies about "weapons of mass destruction."
With the first deployment of US ground troops in Afghanistan, the Times editorialized on October 20, 2001: "Now the nation's soldiers
are going into battle in a distant and treacherous land, facing a determined and resourceful enemy. As they go, they should know
that the nation supports their cause and yearns for their success."
Now the Times acknowledges: "The price tag, which includes the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and increased spending on veterans'
care, will reach $5.9 trillion by the end of fiscal year 2019, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University. Since nearly
all of that money has been borrowed, the total cost with interest will be substantially higher More than 2.7 million Americans have
fought in the war since 2001. Nearly 7,000 service members-and nearly 8,000 private contractors-have been killed. More than 53,700
people returned home bearing physical wounds, and numberless more carry psychological injuries. More than one million Americans who
served in a theater of the war on terror receive some level of disability compensation from the Department of Veterans Affairs."
The massive loss of life, destruction of social infrastructure and vast human suffering inflicted by these wars on civilian populations
are at best an afterthought for the Times. Conservative estimates place the number killed by the US war in Afghanistan at 175,000.
With the number of indirect fatalities caused by the war, the toll likely rises to a million. In Iraq, the death toll was even higher.
What does the Times conclude from this bloody record? "The failure of American leaders-civilians and generals through three administrations,
from the Pentagon to the State Department to Congress and the White House-to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to
be studied for generations. Likewise, all Americans-the news media included-need to be prepared to examine the national credulity
or passivity that's led to the longest conflict in modern American history."
What a cowardly and cynical evasion! Three administrations, those of Bush, Obama and Trump, have committed war crimes over the
course of more than 17 years, including launching wars of aggression-the principal charge leveled against the Nazis at Nuremberg-the
slaughter of civilians and torture. These crimes should not be "studied for generations," but punished.
As for the attempt to lump the news media together with "all Americans" as being guilty of "credulity" and "passivity," this is
a slander against the American people and a deliberate cover-up of the crimes carried out by the corporate media, with the Times
at their head, in disseminating outright lies and war propaganda. The Times editors should be "prepared to examine" the fact that
journalistic agents of the Nazi regime who carried out a similar function in Germany were tried and punished at Nuremberg.
The Times editorial supporting a US withdrawal reflects the conclusions being drawn by increasing sections of the ruling establishment,
including the Trump administration, which has opened up negotiations with the Taliban. It is bound up with the shift in strategy
by US imperialism and the Pentagon toward the preparation for "great power" confrontations with nuclear-armed Russia and China.
The Times ' call for an Afghanistan withdrawal has provoked a heated rebuke by defenders of the "war on terrorism" and "humanitarian
intervention," who have denounced the newspaper for defeatism. Such a withdrawal, a letter published by the Times on February 8 argued,
would "accelerate and expand the war," "allow another extremist-terrorist phenomenon to emerge," and "result in the deaths and abuse
of thousands of women."
The signatories of the letter include Frederick Kagan, David Sedney and Eleanor Smeal.
Kagan has a great deal invested in the Afghanistan war. He and his wife Kimberly served as civilian advisers to top generals
who directed the war and elaborated the failed strategies of counterinsurgency (COIN). He has been a vociferous supporter of every
US war and every escalation, arguing most recently for the US military to confront Russian- and Iranian-backed forces in Syria.
Likewise Sedney, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense responsible for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, now working
at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS). Married to a top lobbyist for Chevron who worked extensively
in Central Asia, he has his own interests in the continuation of US military operations in the region.
Smeal is the president of the Feminist Majority Foundation (FMD) and a former president of the National Organization for Women
(NOW), who is widely described as one of "the major leaders of the modern-day American feminist movement."
A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women. In 2001, Smeal and her FMD circulated a petition thanking the Bush
administration for its commitment to promoting the rights of women in Afghanistan. After the bombing began on October 7, she declared,
"We have real momentum now in the drive to restore the rights of women." A few days later, she and representatives of other feminist
organizations showed up at the White House to solidarize themselves with the US war.
Urging on the conquest of Afghanistan, she wrote, "I should hope our government doesn't retreat. We'll help rip those burqas off,
I hope. This is a unique time in history. If you're going to end terrorism, you've got to end the ideology of gender apartheid."
Aside from costing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Afghan women, the US war has left women, like the entire population,
under worse conditions than when it began. Two-thirds of Afghan girls do not attend school, 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate,
and 70-80 percent face forced marriage, many before the age of 16.
Recent reports suggest that the maternal death rate may be higher than it was before the war began, surpassed only by South Sudan.
While USAID has poured some $280 million into its Promote program, supposedly to advance the conditions of Afghan women, it has done
nothing but line the pockets of corrupt officials of the US-backed puppet regime in Kabul.
The attempt by the likes of Smeal and leading elements within the Democratic Party to cloak the bloodbath in Afghanistan as a
crusade to "liberate" women and promote "democracy" is itself a criminal act.
On October 9, two days after Washington launched its now 17-year-long war on Afghanistan and amid a furor of jingoistic and militarist
propaganda from the US government and the corporate media, the World Socialist Web Site editorial board posted a column titled "Why
we oppose the war in Afghanistan." It rejected the claim that this was a "war for justice and the security of the American people
against terrorism" and insisted that "the present action by the United States is an imperialist war" in which Washington aimed to
"establish a new political framework within which it will exert hegemonic control" over not only Afghanistan, but over the broader
region of Central Asia, "home to the second largest deposit of proven reserves of petroleum and natural gas in the world."
The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. At most, it is a passive acceptance that war is the only means to fight terrorism,
a mood that owes a great deal to the efforts of a thoroughly dishonest media which serves as an arm of the state. Beneath the reluctant
endorsement of military action is a profound sense of unease and skepticism. Tens of millions sense that nothing good can come of
this latest eruption of American militarism.
"The United States stands at a turning point. The government admits it has embarked on a war of indefinite scale and duration.
What is taking place is the militarization of American society under conditions of a deepening social crisis.
"The war will profoundly affect the conditions of the American and international working class. Imperialism threatens mankind
at the beginning of the twenty-first century with a repetition on a more horrific scale of the tragedies of the twentieth. More than
ever, imperialism and its depredations raise the necessity for the international unity of the working class and the struggle for
socialism."
These warnings and this perspective have been borne out entirely by the criminal and tragic events of the last 17 years, even
as the likes of the New York Times find themselves compelled to admit the bankruptcy of their entire record on Afghanistan, and their
erstwhile "liberal" allies struggle to salvage some shred of the filthy banner of "human rights imperialism."
"The failure of American leaders -- civilians and generals through three administrations, from the Pentagon to the State Department
to Congress and the White House -- to develop and pursue a strategy to end the war ought to be studied for generations. Likewise,
all Americans -- the news media included -- need to be prepared to examine the national credulity or passivity that's led to the
longest conflict in modern American history."
What the New York Times should propose is a Nuremberg-style trial for the war criminals responsible for the genocide of millions,
the devastation of of the Middle East and Africa, and the looting of the US Treasury by war profiteers and the political duopoly.
If these criminals are NOT held accountable for their actions NOTHING will be learned and the violence, death and destruction
will continue.
"The fact that a person who committed an act which constitutes a crime under international law, acted as Head of State or responsible
government official, does not relieve him from responsibility under international law."
Gore Vidal rightly named America as the United States of Amnesia. They NEVER learn from their own history and they are never told
about what their terrorist government does in their name.
Eleanor Smeal's comment about "ripping off those burqas" in Afghanistan reminds me of Louisiana congressman John Cooksey's post-9/11
suggestion that police should pull over and question anyone with ''a diaper on his head''. Both use religious intolerance to increase
the power of the state.
"A leading figure in the Democratic Party, Smeal is no Jane-come-lately to the filthy campaign to promote the war in Afghanistan
as a "humanitarian" exercise in promoting the rights of women."
wouldn't it be more correctly "Janey comes lately" ..as in "Johnny come lately"..?
The completely insane fraud of waging imperialist war for "women rights" has been , unfortunately, extensively documented..the
US occupation has strengthened not weakened the Taliban
"The WSWS stated at the time: "Despite a relentless media campaign to whip up chauvinism and militarism, the mood of the American
people is not one of gung-ho support for the war. "
Not really in agreement with this statement although, everything has changed in almost 20 years.....
There are always elements that are gung ho for war. And I'll agree that the number was abnormally high for Afghanistan. But I
do think the majority still reluctantly agreed to the war as a necessary measure to fight "terrorism" as the more-than-likely-to-be-a-false-flag
9/11 event was very fresh in everyone's mind.
Afghanistan is a shitshow due to elite meddling. This editorial was nothing more than virtue-signaling to those that still
hate war. But the anti-war movement is effectively dead anyway. There are anti-war people, but no anti-war movement. That's the
crowd that the New York Times was appealing to. This is a stunt; nothing more.
What's more interesting is that the liberal elites will probably do their best to continue on with the war. But either way,
the USA will likely lose. In fact, it's already lost the war. The Taliban have won this one. That the elitists can't see that
shows just how far gone they are.
It was USA imperialism (under Carter and Brzezinski) which first had made Afghanistan a hell for women, but colonial feminists
do not care for the facts.
That is very true. "Death by a thousand cuts" was Brzezinski's scheme to destroy the Soviet Union in Central Asia. A few years
ago, he was interviewed by a journalist from PRC who asked if he had any regrets with all the destruction and death it caused.
Brzezinski said, "None".
"... "Constrained by the treaty's provisions, the United States has been prevented from deploying new weapons to counter China's efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and keep American aircraft carriers at bay. China was still a small and unsophisticated military power when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of a rapidly-weakening Soviet Union, negotiated the INF agreement." ..."
"... Over the past two years, the American military establishment has grown increasingly alarmed at the rapidity of China's technological development, which the United States sees as a threat not only to the profitability of its corporations, but the dominance of its military. ..."
"... As the latest US Worldwide Threat Assessment warns, "For 2019 and beyond, the innovations that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside the United States, as the overall US lead in science and technology shrinks" and "the capability gap between commercial and military technologies evaporates." ..."
"... The United States hopes that, by leveraging its military, it will be able to contain the economic rise of China and shore up US preeminence on the world stage. ..."
"... Nearly 75 years ago, the United States, after having "scorched and boiled and baked to death," in the words of General Curtis Lemay, hundreds of thousands of civilians in a genocidal "strategic bombing" campaign over Japan, murdered hundreds of thousands more with the use of two nuclear weapons: an action whose primary aim was to threaten the USSR. ..."
"... But ultimately, the continued existence of the Soviet Union served as a check on the genocidal impulses of US imperialism. ..."
"... Despite the triumphalist claims that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would bring about a new era of peace, democracy and the "end of history," it has brought only a quarter-century of neocolonial wars. ..."
"... the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have not achieved their intended purpose. Having spent trillions of dollars and killed millions of people, the global position of US imperialism is no better than when it launched the "war on terror" in 2001. ..."
"... Now, the United States is upping the ante: setting "great-power conflict" with Russia and China on the order of the day. In its existential struggle for global hegemony, US imperialism is going for broke, willing to employ the most reckless and desperate means, up to and including the launching of nuclear war. ..."
In an article that fully backs the White House's accusations against Russia, the New
York Times ' David Sanger, a conduit for the Pentagon, spells out with perfect lucidity
the real reasons why the United States is leaving the INF treaty:
"Constrained by the treaty's provisions, the United States has been prevented from deploying
new weapons to counter China's efforts to cement a dominant position in the Western Pacific and
keep American aircraft carriers at bay. China was still a small and unsophisticated military
power when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of a rapidly-weakening Soviet
Union, negotiated the INF agreement."
Sanger's own words make perfectly clear why the United States wants to leave the treaty,
which has nothing to do with Russia's alleged violations: Washington is seeking to ring the
island chain surrounding the Chinese mainland with a hedge of nuclear missiles. But Sanger
somehow expects, without so much as a transition paragraph, his readers to believe the hot air
spewed by Pompeo about Russia's "bad behavior."
Over the past two years, the American military establishment has grown increasingly alarmed
at the rapidity of China's technological development, which the United States sees as a threat
not only to the profitability of its corporations, but the dominance of its military.
Two decades ago, at the height of the dotcom bubble, China was little more than a cheap
labor platform, assembling the consumer electronics driving a revolution in communications,
while American companies pocketed the vast bulk of the profits. But today, the economic balance
of power is shifting.
Chinese companies like Huawei, Xiaomi and Oppo are capturing an ever-greater portion of the
global smartphone market, even as their rivals Samsung and Apple see their market share slip.
The Shenzhen-based DJI is the uncontested global leader in the consumer drone market. Huawei,
meanwhile, leads its competitors by over a year in the next-generation mobile infrastructure
that will power not only driverless cars and "smart" appliances, but the "autonomous" weapons
of the future.
As the latest US Worldwide Threat Assessment warns, "For 2019 and beyond, the innovations
that drive military and economic competitiveness will increasingly originate outside the United
States, as the overall US lead in science and technology shrinks" and "the capability gap
between commercial and military technologies evaporates."
It is the economic decline of the United States relative to its global rivals that is
ultimately driving the intensification of US nuclear war plans. The United States hopes that,
by leveraging its military, it will be able to contain the economic rise of China and shore up
US preeminence on the world stage.
But a consensus is emerging within the US military that Washington cannot bring its rivals
to heel merely with the threat of totally obliterating them with its massive arsenal of
strategic missiles. Given the fleet of nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarines possessed by
both Russia and China, this option, even ignoring the effects of nuclear winter, would result
in the destruction of the largest cities in the United States.
Rather, the US is working to construct a "usable," low-yield, "tactical" nuclear arsenal,
including the construction of a new nuclear-capable cruise missile. This week, a new low-yield
US nuclear warhead went into production, with a yield between half and one third of the "little
boy" weapon that leveled the Japanese city of Hiroshima, and hundreds of times smaller than the
United States' other nuclear weapons systems.
The Trump administration's Nuclear Posture Review, released last year, envisions using such
weapons to turn the tide in conflicts that begin with conventional weapons, under the pretense
(whether the Pentagon believes it or not) that such wars will stop short of full-scale nuclear
exchanges.
Nearly 75 years ago, the United States, after having "scorched and boiled and baked to
death," in the words of General Curtis Lemay, hundreds of thousands of civilians in a genocidal
"strategic bombing" campaign over Japan, murdered hundreds of thousands more with the use of
two nuclear weapons: an action whose primary aim was to threaten the USSR.
But ultimately, the continued existence of the Soviet Union served as a check on the
genocidal impulses of US imperialism.
Despite the triumphalist claims that the dissolution of the Soviet Union would bring about a
new era of peace, democracy and the "end of history," it has brought only a quarter-century of
neocolonial wars.
But the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have not achieved their intended
purpose. Having spent trillions of dollars and killed millions of people, the global position
of US imperialism is no better than when it launched the "war on terror" in 2001.
Now, the United States is upping the ante: setting "great-power conflict" with Russia
and China on the order of the day. In its existential struggle for global hegemony, US
imperialism is going for broke, willing to employ the most reckless and desperate means, up to
and including the launching of nuclear war.
4TruthBeTrue9 months
ago Putin is the most articulate leader I have seen. He demonstrates clear understanding of
the issues and causes at the core of the situation. Very intelligent. The world needs more
leaders of this calibre. The USA have stuck there beak in and stirred up a hornets nest, and
now there is unrest and instability in the land that has caused scores of people to perish or
be dislocated. And the repercussions a still being felt today. Obscure Shadow2 years
ago Putin speaks with the common sense & diplomacy of a true statesman. Compared to
him, US speak like a bunch of immature imbeciles. Many blessings & protection to him. 100+%
support to him & Russia from this American. I wish we could clone him here...
"I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more than
a little merit." As many have said, Trump is the symptom, not the disease.
Notable quotes:
"... Still, I find myself wondering: If a proposed troop drawdown in Afghanistan qualifies as a "mistake," as O'Hanlon contends, then what term best describes a war that has cost something like a trillion dollars, killed and maimed tens of thousands, and produced a protracted stalemate? ..."
"... And, if recent press reports prove true, with U.S. government officials accepting Taliban promises of good behavior as a basis for calling it quits, then this longest war in our history will not have provided much of a return on investment. Given the disparity between the U.S. aims announced back in 2001 and the results actually achieved, defeat might be an apt characterization. ..."
I don't wish to imply that political leaders and media outlets ignore our wars altogether.
That would be unfair. Yet in TrumpWorld, while the president's performance in office receives
intensive and persistent coverage day in, day out, the attention given to America's wars has
been sparse and perfunctory, when not positively bizarre.
As a case in point, consider the op-ed
that recently appeared in the New York Times (just as actual peace talks between the
U.S. and the Taliban seemed to be progressing
), making the case for prolonging the U.S. war in Afghanistan, while chiding President Trump
for considering a reduction in the number of U.S. troops currently stationed there. Any such
move, warned Michael O'Hanlon of the Brookings Institution, would be a "mistake" of the first
order.
The ongoing Afghan War dates from a time when some of today's recruits were still in
diapers. Yet O'Hanlon counsels patience: a bit more time and things just might work out. This
is more or less comparable to those who suggested back in the 1950s that African Americans
might show a bit more patience in their struggle for equality: Hey, what's the rush?
I don't pretend to know what persuaded the editors of the Times that O'Hanlon's
call to make America's longest war even longer qualifies as something readers of the nation's
most influential newspaper just now need to ponder. Yet I do know this: the dearth of critical
attention to the costs and
consequences of our various post-9/11 wars is nothing short of shameful, a charge to which
politicians and journalists alike should plead equally guilty.
I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more
than a little merit. Even more striking than Trump's critique is the fact that so few members
of the national security establishment are willing to examine it seriously. As a consequence,
the wars persist, devoid of purpose.
Still, I find myself wondering: If a proposed troop drawdown in Afghanistan qualifies as
a "mistake," as O'Hanlon contends, then what term best describes a war that has cost something
like a trillion dollars, killed and maimed tens of thousands, and produced a protracted
stalemate?
Disaster? Debacle? Catastrophe? Humiliation?
And, if recent press reports prove true, with U.S. government officials accepting
Taliban promises of good behavior as a basis for calling it quits, then this longest war in our
history will not have provided much of a return on investment. Given the disparity between the
U.S. aims announced back in 2001 and the results actually achieved, defeat might be an apt
characterization.
Yet the fault is not Trump's. The fault belongs to those who have allowed their immersion in
the dank precincts of TrumpWorld to preclude serious reexamination of misguided and reckless
policies that predate the president by at least 15 years.
You have to compare Trump with the alternative. The D's /progs make war on free speech,
attack the presumption of innocence, want essentially uncontrolled mass immigration and
relentlessly push in the direction of war with Russia. Add their cynical Russiagate
hoax-witch hunt for further illustration
of the danger they present. As many have said, Trump is the symptom, not the disease.
"I take it as a given that President Trump is an incompetent nitwit, precisely as his critics
charge. Yet his oft-repeated characterization of those wars as profoundly misguided has more
than a little merit."
I'm with Bacevich on the insanity of Endless War, but I question why he has to denigrate
Trump in his lead in. The cynical side of me believes that Bacevich thinks he has to be a
Trump-hater if he is to be listened to.
Hey Andrew sir Democracy is messy. But DJT is on your team and the MSM/Liberal
progs/Neocons aren't. Worth reflecting on
@fnn "As many have said,
Trump is the symptom, not the disease"
Actually, Trump is the microbe not the virus. He's the opportunistic microbe that attaches
itself to a sick and diseased body-politic. As to symptoms, they are borne by society
at-large and now manifest themselves in the majority of Americans who one way or the other
are "Lost in TrumpWorld"
Rigged: How Globalization and the Rules of the Modern Economy Were Structured to Make the
Rich Richer
By Dean Baker
The Old Technology and Inequality Scam: The Story of Patents and Copyrights
One of the amazing lines often repeated by people in policy debates is that, as a result
of technology, we are seeing income redistributed from people who work for a living to the
people who own the technology. While the redistribution part of the story may be mostly true,
the problem is that the technology does not determine who "owns" the technology. The people
who write the laws determine who owns the technology.
Specifically, patents and copyrights give their holders monopolies on technology or
creative work for their duration. If we are concerned that money is going from ordinary
workers to people who hold patents and copyrights, then one policy we may want to consider is
shortening and weakening these monopolies. But policy has gone sharply in the opposite
direction over the last four decades, as a wide variety of measures have been put into law
that make these protections longer and stronger. Thus, the redistribution from people who
work to people who own the technology should not be surprising -- that was the purpose of the
policy.
If stronger rules on patents and copyrights produced economic dividends in the form of
more innovation and more creative output, then this upward redistribution might be justified.
But the evidence doesn't indicate there has been any noticeable growth dividend associated
with this upward redistribution. In fact, stronger patent protection seems to be associated
with slower growth.
Before directly considering the case, it is worth thinking for a minute about what the
world might look like if we had alternative mechanisms to patents and copyrights, so that the
items now subject to these monopolies could be sold in a free market just like paper cups and
shovels.
The biggest impact would be in prescription drugs. The breakthrough drugs for cancer,
hepatitis C, and other diseases, which now sell for tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars
annually, would instead sell for a few hundred dollars. No one would have to struggle to get
their insurer to pay for drugs or scrape together the money from friends and family. Almost
every drug would be well within an affordable price range for a middle-class family, and
covering the cost for poorer families could be easily managed by governments and aid
agencies.
The same would be the case with various medical tests and treatments. Doctors would not
have to struggle with a decision about whether to prescribe an expensive scan, which might be
the best way to detect a cancerous growth or other health issue, or to rely on cheaper but
less reliable technology. In the absence of patent protection even the most cutting edge
scans would be reasonably priced.
Health care is not the only area that would be transformed by a free market in technology
and creative work. Imagine that all the textbooks needed by college students could be
downloaded at no cost over the web and printed out for the price of the paper. Suppose that a
vast amount of new books, recorded music, and movies was freely available on the web.
People or companies who create and innovate deserve to be compensated, but there is little
reason to believe that the current system of patent and copyright monopolies is the best way
to support their work. It's not surprising that the people who benefit from the current
system are reluctant to have the efficiency of patents and copyrights become a topic for
public debate, but those who are serious about inequality have no choice. These forms of
property claims have been important drivers of inequality in the last four decades.
The explicit assumption behind the steps over the last four decades to increase the
strength and duration of patent and copyright protection is that the higher prices resulting
from increased protection will be more than offset by an increased incentive for innovation
and creative work. Patent and copyright protection should be understood as being like very
large tariffs. These protections can often the raise the price of protected items by several
multiples of the free market price, making them comparable to tariffs of several hundred or
even several thousand percent. The resulting economic distortions are comparable to what they
would be if we imposed tariffs of this magnitude.
The justification for granting these monopoly protections is that the increased innovation
and creative work that is produced as a result of these incentives exceeds the economic costs
from patent and copyright monopolies. However, there is remarkably little evidence to support
this assumption. While the cost of patent and copyright protection in higher prices is
apparent, even if not well-measured, there is little evidence of a substantial payoff in the
form of a more rapid pace of innovation or more and better creative work....
Progressive Taxes Only Go So Far. Pre-Tax Income Is the Problem
By Dean Baker
In recent weeks, there have been several bold calls for large increases in progressive
taxation. First we had Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), often referred to as
AOC, proposing a top marginal tax rate on income over $10 million. This sent right-wing
talking heads into a frenzy, leading many to show they don't know the difference between a
marginal tax rate and an average tax rate. (AOC's 70 percent rate would only apply to an
individual's income above $10 million.)
More recently, we had Senator Elizabeth Warren propose a wealth tax that would apply to
people with assets of more than $50 million. This tax could have Jeff Bezos sending more than
$3 billion a year to the Treasury.
Given the enormous increase in inequality over the last four decades, and the reduction in
the progressivity of the tax code, it is reasonable to put forward plans to make the system
more progressive. But, the bigger source of the rise in inequality has been a growth in the
inequality of before-tax income, not the reduction in high–end tax rates. This suggests
that it may be best to look at the factors that have led to the rise in inequality in market
incomes, rather than just using progressive taxes to take back some of the gains of the very
rich.
There have been many changes in rules and institutional structures that have allowed the
rich to get so much richer. (This is the topic of my free book Rigged.) Just to take the most
obvious -- government-granted patent and copyright monopolies have been made longer and
stronger over the last four decades. Many items that were not even patentable 40 years ago,
such as life forms and business methods, now bring in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars
to their owners.
If the importance of these monopolies for inequality is not clear, ask yourself how rich
Bill Gates would be if there were no patents or copyrights on Microsoft software. (Anyone
could copy Windows into a computer and not pay him a penny.) Many other billionaires get
their fortune from copyrights in software and entertainment or patents in pharmaceuticals,
medical equipment and other areas.
The government also has rules for corporate governance that allow CEOs to rip off the
companies for which they work. CEO pay typically runs close to $20 million a year, even as
returns to shareholders lag. It would be hard to argue that today's CEOs, who get 200 to 300
times the pay of ordinary workers, are doing a better job for their companies than CEOs in
the 1960s and 1970s who only got 20 to 30 times the pay of ordinary workers.
Another source of inequality is the financial sector. The government has aided these
fortunes in many ways, most obviously with the bailout of the big banks a decade ago. It also
has deliberately structured the industry in ways that facilitate massive fortunes in
financial engineering.
There is no reason to design an economy in such a way as to ensure that most of the gains
from growth flow upward. Unfortunately, that has largely been the direction of policy over
the last four decades.
We can ignore the inequities built into the way we have structured the economy and just
try to tax the big winners, as is being proposed. However, there are two major problems with
this route, one practical and one political.
The practical problem is that the rich are not stupid. They will look to find ways to
avoid or evade the various progressive taxes being proposed. Both AOC and Warren have relied
on advice from some top economists in describing their tax proposals, but even the
best–designed tax can be gamed. (Is it worth $3 billion a year for Jeff Bezos to remain
a US citizen? As a non-citizen he wouldn't pay the wealth tax.)
Gaming the tax system will mean that we will collect considerably less revenue than a
static projection would imply. It also will lead to the growth of the tax gaming industry.
From an economic standpoint, this is a complete waste. We will have people designing clever
ways to try to hide income and wealth, and in some cases getting very rich themselves in the
process.
The political problem with going the tax route is that people attach a certain legitimacy
to the idea that income gained through the market is somehow rightfully gained, as opposed to
say, income from a government transfer program, like food stamps. The rich will be able to
win support from many non-rich by claiming that the government has taken away what they have
fairly earned.
By contrast, it is much harder for a drug company billionaire to cry foul because a drug
developed with public funds, and selling at generic prices, has destroyed the market for his
$100,000–a–year cancer drug. In the same vein, CEOs might have a hard time
getting sympathy for the complaint that new rules of corporate governance make it easier to
shareholders to bring their pay down to earth.
It is great that the rise in inequality seems likely to be a major topic in the 2020
presidential campaign. However, it is important that we think carefully about how best to
reverse it.
Matthew Daly - Associated Press - February 7, 2019
WASHINGTON -- Democrats including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York are calling
for a Green New Deal intended to transform the U.S. economy to combat climate change and
create thousands of jobs in renewable energy.
The freshman lawmaker and veteran Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts are teaming up on the
plan, which aims to eliminate the U.S. carbon footprint by 2030.
A joint resolution drafted by Ocasio-Cortez and Markey sets a goal to meet ''100 percent
of the power demand in the United States through clean, renewable and zero-emission energy
sources,'' including dramatic increases in wind and solar power.
A news conference at the Capitol is set for Thursday, the day they introduce the
resolution.
While setting lofty goals, the plan does not explicitly call for eliminating the use of
fossil fuels such as oil and natural gas, a nod to pragmatism that may disappoint some of
Ocasio-Cortez's strongest supporters.
Even so, their Green New Deal goes far beyond the Clean Power Plan proposed by President
Barack Obama. President Donald Trump has scrapped Obama's plan, which imposed emissions
limits on coal-fired power plants, as a job-killer.
The Democrats are likely to meet resistance to their proposal in Congress, especially in
the Republican-controlled Senate. Trump, who has expressed doubts about climate change, also
is likely to oppose it.
The resolution marks the first time Ocasio-Cortez and other lawmakers have attached
legislative language onto the Green New Deal, a concept that until now has been largely
undefined other than as a call for urgent action to head off catastrophic climate change and
create jobs.
Several Democratic presidential hopefuls have embraced the idea of a Green New Deal
without saying exactly what it means.
Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement that the plan will create ''unprecedented levels of
prosperity and wealth for all while ensuring economic and environmental justice and
security.'' She calls for a ''World War II-scale mobilization'' that includes high-quality
education and health care, clean air and water and safe, affordable housing.
Answering critics who call the plan unrealistic, Ocasio-Cortez says that when President
John F. Kennedy wanted to go to the moon by the end of the 1960s, ''people said it was
impossible.'' She also cites Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Lyndon B. Johnson's Great
Society and the interstate highway system begun under Dwight D. Eisenhower as examples of
American know-how and capability.
While focusing on renewable energy, Ocasio-Cortez said the plan would include existing
nuclear power plants but block new nuclear plants. Nuclear power does not emit greenhouse
gases, which contribute to global warming.
The resolution does not include a price tag, but some Republicans predict it would cost in
the trillions of dollars. They denounced the plan at House hearings on climate change on
Wednesday.
The Green New Deal would be paid for ''the same way we paid for the original New Deal,
World War II, the bank bailouts, tax cuts for the rich and decades of war -- with public
money appropriated by Congress,'' Ocasio-Cortez said.
Government can take an equity stake in Green New Deal projects ''so the public gets a
return on its investment,'' she said.
New Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker got a warning of sorts from Moody's ahead of the
governor's first budget address. The rating agency's most recent report* highlighted the
usual crises Pritzker must tackle: ballooning pension debts and chronic budget deficits.
Moody's rates Illinois just one notch above junk largely due to the state's finances and
malgovernance.
Moody's says new revenue likely will be required to achieve stability, as you'd expect,
because rating agencies love higher taxes. But for the first time, the agency has included
outmigration among its top-three credit concerns. That matters because Pritzker's number one
prescription to "fix" Illinois is tax hikes, something that's sure to accelerate Illinois'
out-migration trend and further erode the state's tax base.
---------------
Moody's is politely explaining that they are 180 deg out of cycle, the negotiation has
been finished, in the past.
Is the new gov confused or is he consciously doing the crawl back step? Whatever, the gov
will be confused no longer, he is clearly in crawl back stage, the next chapter in
bankruptcy.
It is now all about deciding which industry stays and which goes; a re-agglomeration, the
second step of the Hicksonian jump, shift expectations operator; you have to move stuff
around according to the agreement.
This 20 year old satire looks like it was written yesterday...
Notable quotes:
"... In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives ..."
"... Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products. ..."
"... condemned TV-exercise-show personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced to exercise for centuries on end ..."
"... In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of verbal abuse ..."
"... "In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a goddamn woman ever since." ..."
After nearly four years of construction at an estimated cost of 750 million souls,
Corpadverticus, the new 10th circle of Hell, finally opened its doors Monday.
Tenth Circle Added To Rapidly Growing Hell
The Blockbuster Video-sponsored circle, located in Nether Hell between the former eighth and
ninth levels of Malebolge and Cocytus, is expected to greatly alleviate the overcrowding
problems that have plagued the infernal underworld in recent years. The circle is the first
added to Hell in its countless-millennia history.
"A nightmarishly large glut of condemned spirits in recent years necessitated the expansion
of Hell," inferno spokesperson Antedeus said. "The traditional nine-tiered system had grown
insufficient to accommodate the exponentially rising numbers of Hellbound."
Adding to the need for expansion, Antedeus said, was the fact that a majority of the new
arrivals possessed souls far more evil than the original nine circles were equipped to handle.
"Demographers, advertising executives, tobacco lobbyists, monopoly-law experts retained by
major corporations, and creators of office-based sitcoms–these new arrivals represent a
wave of spiritual decay and horror the likes of which Hell has never before seen," Antedeus
said.
Despite the need for expansion, the plan faced considerable resistance, largely due to the
considerable costs of insuring construction projects within the Kingdom Of Lies. Opposition
also came from Hell purists concerned about the detrimental effect a tenth level would have on
the intricate numerology of Hell's meticulously arranged allegorical structure. In 1994,
however, funding was finally secured in a deal brokered between Blockbuster CEO Wayne Huizenga
and Satan himself.
Prior to the construction of the tenth circle, many among the new wave of sinners had been
placed in such circles as Hoarders and Squanderers, Sowers of Discord, Flatterers and Seducers,
Violent Against Art, and Hypocrites. Hell authorities, however, say that the new level, the
Circle of Total Bastards, located at the site of the former Well of Giants just above the
Frozen Lake at Hell's center, better suits their insidious brand of evil.
Frigax The Vile, a leading demonic presence, is one of the most vocal supporters of the new
circle.
" In the past, the underworld was ill-equipped to handle the new breed of sinners
flooding our gates -- downsizing CEOs, focus-group coordinators, telemarketing sales
representatives, and vast hordes of pony-tailed entertainment-industry executives
rollerblading and talking on miniaturized cell-phones at the same time. But now, we've finally
got the sort of top-notch Pits of Doom necessary to give such repellent abominations the
quality boilings they deserve."
Pausing to tear off the limbs of an Access Hollywood host, Frigax added, "We're all
tremendously excited about the many brand-new forms of torture and eternal pain this new
level's state-of-the-art facilities will make possible."
Among the tortures the Corpadverticus Circle of Total Bastards boasts: the Never-Ending
Drive-Thru Bank, the Bottomless Pit of Promotional Tie-In Keychains, and the dreaded Chamber of
Emotionally Manipulative Home Shopping Network Products.
The Circle also features a Hall of Aerobics, where condemned TV-exercise-show
personalities, clad in skin-tight Spandex outfits soaked in flesh-dissolving acid, are forced
to exercise for centuries on end , covered in vomit and prodded with the distended ribs of
skeletal, anorexic demons, accompanied by an unending, ear-splittingly loud dance-remix version
of the 1988 Rick Astley hit "Together Forever."
In a nearby area, corporate raiders are forced to carry the golf clubs of uneducated
Hispanic migrant workers from hole to hole for eternity, withering under a constant barrage of
verbal abuse from their former subservients as crows descend from trees to peck at their
eyes. In one of the deepest and most profane portions of the circle, unspeakable acts are said
to be committed with a mail-order Roly-Kit.
"In life, I was a Salomon Brothers investment banker," one flame-blackened shade told
reporters. "When I arrived here, they didn't know what to do with me. They put me in with those
condemned to walk backwards with their heads turned all the way around on their necks, for the
crime of attempting to see the future. But then I sent a couple of fruit baskets to the right
people, and in no time flat, I secured a cushy spot for myself in the first circle of the
Virtuous Unbaptized. Now that was a sweet deal. But before long, they caught on to my game and
transferred me here to the realm of Total Bastards. I've been shrieking for mercy like a
goddamn woman ever since."
His face contorted in the Misery of the Damned, a Disney lawyer said: "It's hell
here–there are no executive lounges, I can't get any decent risotto, and the suit I have
to wear is a cheap Brooks Brothers knock-off. I'm beeped every 30 seconds, and there's no way
to return the calls. Plus, I'm being boiled upside down in lard while jackals gnaw at the soles
of my feet. If I could just reach the fax machine on that nearby rock, I could contact some
well-placed associates and work something out, but it's just out of my grasp, and it's out of
ink and constantly blinking the message, 'Replace Toner Cartridge, Replace Toner Cartridge,
Replace Toner Cartridge.'"
He then resumed screaming in agony.
Grogar The Malefic, a Captain in Hell's elite Demon Corps and supervisor in charge of
admissions for the new circle, said Hell's future looks bright, thanks to the new circle.
"Things are definitely looking up," Grogar said. "We're now far better equipped, and we're
ready to take on the most Unholy Atrocities humanity has to offer."
"We're really on the grow down here," Grogar added. "This is an exciting time to be in
Hell."
What we are experiencing today is the worst and most extreme form of predatory and parasitic
financialised monopoly crony capitalism (crapitalism), allied with blatant aggressive
jingoistic militarism and the crudest form of imperialist exploitation.
I'm not sure even Marx envisaged anything this corrupt and degraded. This must be the
terminal stage of crapitalism's death throes. It can only end in war and complete
collapse.
It comes as no surprise to see the Faux Left Blairite Backstabbers and the
Oh-So-Right-On-Politically-Correct Trudeau Regime leading the charge for a bog standard
Pinochet style US coup behind the likes of Trump, Bolton, Pompeo and recycled neocon war
criminal and death squad queen Abrams.
They have taken off the mask and showed their true colours. The final outcome is uncertain
but the fall out will extend way beyond Venezuela. It may well sound the death knell of our
current system.
Isn't it amazing how the scum of the Earth arrange to get into high places? I am totally
outraged that Canada had anything to do with fostering a coup in Venezuela! It disturbs my
sense of national sovereignty and I rue the day that Trudeau made this apostosy a member of
his cabinet. What a poor choice for a Minister of Foreign Affairs! Just consider Canada's
recent problems with Saudi Arabia, the Meng problem with /China, the chastising of Russia
because it protected its sole military base on the Black Sea and now this foolish
interference in Venezuela's internal affairs brought on by US sanctions. Canada's stupidity
in all these matters makes me bilious.
Trudeau made Soros' protege Chrystia Freeland part of his cabinet because it was on that
condition that Soros generously funded and otherwise caused Trudeau's election bid to be well
supported. Billionaires make "democratic" politics so very easy. Canadians, naive,
unquestioning, insouciant, swayed by very well rewarded PR & media and with the
transacted aquiesence of the other two warmongering neoliberal parties (Conservative &
NDP) voted their hopes and Justin Trudeau to PM. But positioning Chrystia Freeland on the
global stage and creating a neoliberal path to imperious fascist globalization is the
assigned purpose of the swish disposable Canadian Dauphin. Harper played his Soros assigned
role, Trudeau will play his and Chrystia hers and they, as quislings all, will exit rewarded
as pet functionaries of Soros and his overly entitled ilk. We authorize Soros by wishing
& believing this coup is at worst simply a flawed democracy. Ukraine was a Soros coup,
Canada is a Soros coup and Venezuela is a Soros coup. All very, very profitable. Don't look,
this is how omelettes are made. Our political parties are always for rent by billionaires
–that is the main function of political parties. Being corrupt is a design
characteristic not a flaw. Buying political parties in supposed democracies is easier, less
risky and much more profitable than stealing candy from babies. Canada is undefended against
billionaires, invest here, concentrated public assets and resources are available and the
quaint people are professionally deactivated. m\\
Nations should explore better system to break US hegemony
"The US dollar is used for the international oil and gas trade and a wide part of global
trade. This gives the US an exorbitant privilege to sanction countries it opposes.
..
The latest sanctions on Venezuela's state-owned oil company aim to cut off source of foreign
currency of Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro's government and eventually force him to step
down.
..
A new mechanism should be devised to thwart such a vicious circle"
My question is really about those at the top of the power pyramid (those few hundred
families who own the controling share of the wealth of the world) -- those who position
idiots like Bolton to do their work, do they comprehend 'exergy' decline ?
If we can, then can they not? I agree with Parenti that they are not
'somnambulists'. They are strategists looking out for their own interests, and that means
scrutinising trends in political movements, culture, technology and, well, just about
everything. I find it hard, the idea that all these people -- people who have seen their
businesses shaped by resource discovery, exploitation and then depletion, have no firm grasp
on the realities of dwindling returns on energy.
The models were drawn up 47 years ago. I think that some of them at least, do
understand that economic growth is coming to a halt, and have understood for decades. If true
then they are planning that transition in their favour.
These hard to swallow facts about oil are still on the far fringes of any political
conversation. The neoliberal cultists are deaf to them for obvious reasons; the socialist
idealists believe that a 'New Deal' can lead us off the death train, but mostly ignore the
intractable relationship between energy decline and financial problems; even the anarchists
want their work free utopia run by robots and AI but stop short of asking whether solar
panels and wind turbines can actually provide the power for all that tech. It's the news that
nobody wants to think about, but which they will be forced to thinking about in the very near
future.
The Twitter feed 'Limits to Growth' has less than 800 followers (excellent though it
is).
I do not want to get into the mind of the Walrus of Death Bolton! I do not want to know
what he does, as he does. But at lower levels of government, and corporatism, there is an
awareness of surplus energy economics. And as Nafeez has also pointed out, the military (the
Pentagon) are taking an interest. And though it could rapidly change, who really appreciates
the nuances of EROEI? I'm guessing at less than a single percent of all populations? And how
many include its effects in a integrated political sense?
Its appreciation is sporadic: ranging from tech-utopia hopium to a defeated fatalism of
the inevitability of collapse. Unless and until people want to face the harshness of the
reality that capitalism has created: we are going to be involved in a marginal analysis.
There are very few people who have realised that capitalism is long dead.
Dr Tim Morgan estimates that world capitalism has conservatively had $140tn in stimulus
since 2008 -- without stimulating anything or reviving it at all. In fact, that amounts to
the greatest robbery in history -- the theft of the future. Inasmuch as they can, those
unrepayable debts -- transferred to inflate the parasitic assets of capitalists -- will be
socialised. Except they cannot be. Not without surplus energy.
Brexit, gilets jaunes, Venezuela, unending crises in MENA, China's economic slowdown, etc
-- all linked by EROEI.
It is a common socio-politico-economic energy nexus -- but linked together by whom? And
the emergent surplus energy-mind-environmental ecology nexus? All the information is
available. The formation of a new political manifesto started in the 1960s with the New Left
but it seems to have been in stasis since. Perhaps this might stimulate the conversation.
According to Nate Hagens: there is 4.5 years of human muscle power leveraged by each
barrel of oil. We are all going to be working for a very long time to pay back the debts
the possessing classes have built up for us -- with absolutely no marginal utility for
ourselves.
We are subsidising our own voluntary slavery unless we develop an emergent ecosocialist
and ecosophical alternative to carbon capitalism. We cannot expect paleoconservative carbon
relics like Bolton -- or anyone else -- to do it for us. The current political landscape is
dominated by a hierarchical, vested interest, carbon aristocracy. We can't expect that to
change for our benefit any time ever. Expect the opposite.
Graeber has a point, though. We could already have a post-scarcity, post-production society
but for the egregious maldistribution of resources and employment. Andre Gorz said as much 50
years ago (Critique of Economic Reason). Why do we organise around production: it makes no
sense but for the relations of production are, and remain, the relations of hierarchical
rule. So long as we assign value to a human life on the basis of meritocratic productivity --
we will have dehumanisation, marginalisation, and subjugation (haves and have nots). So why
not organisation around care, freedom and play?
Such a solution would require the transversalistion of society and not-full-employment: so
that no part of the system is subordinate, and no part is privileged. All systems and
sub-ordinate (care) systems would be co-equal, of corresponding value and worth. So, without
invoking EROEI, that would go a long way to solve our exergy, waste, pollution, and
inequality problems. It is the profligate, unproductive superstructure: supporting rentier,
surplus energy accumulating, profit-seeking suprasocieties -- that squanders our excess
energy and puts expansive spatio-temporal pressures on already stretched biophysical
ecological systems that engenders potential collapse. It is their -- the possessing classes
-- assets that are being inflated, at our environmental expense. When it comes to
survivability, we cannot afford a parasitic globalised superstructure draining the host --
the ecologically productive base. Without the over-accumulation, overconsumption, and wastage
(the accursed share) associated with the superstructure of the advanced economies -- and
their cultural, credit, military imperialisms I expect we could live quite well. Without the
pressures of globalised transportation networks, and unnecessary military budgets -- the
pressure on oil is minimised. It could be used for the 1001 other uses it has, rather than
fuelling Saudi Eurofighters bombing Yemeni schoolchildren, for instance. The surplus energy
could be used to educate, clothe and feed them instead. That would be a better use of
resources, for sure.
If we took stock of what we really have, and what we really are -- a form of spiritual
neo-self-sufficiency, augmented and extended into co-mutual care and freedom valorising
ecologies we wouldn't need to chase the perceived loss all over the globe, killing everything
that moves. The solutions are not hard, they are normative, once we are shocked out of this
awful near-life trance state of separationism. Thanks for the link.
It seems to me that there are two parallel arguments going on.
One is about social organisation, attitudes towards and policies determining work, money,
paid employment, technological development and the distribution of weath.
The other is fundamentally based on the laws of thermodynamics and concerns resource limits,
energy surpluses, the role of 'stored sunlight' in producing things and doing work for each
other, pollution and projections about these into the future.
I am surprised that Graeber (just as an example) seems to basically ignore the second of
these even though he clearly is an incisive thinker and makes good points about the first. It
is taken as a given that, theoretically at least, human civilisation could re-organise around
a new ethic, transform the economy into a 'caring economy', re-structure money, government
and do away with militarism. In terms of what to do now, as an individual, what choices to
make, it is disconcerting to me when talk of these ideals seems to ignore those latter
questions about overshoot.
I wonder if the egalitarian nature of much of indiginous North American society was
inescapably bound with the realities of a low population density, low technology,
intimate relationship with the natural world and a culture completely steeped in reverence
for Mother Earth.
The talk I hear from Bastani or Graeber along the lines of 'we could be flying around in jet
packs on the moon, if only society was organised sensibly' rings hollow to me.
Welcome to my world! Apart from as a managerial tool, systems thinking has yet to catch on
in the wider population. According to reductive materialism: there are two unlinked
arguments. According to Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) there is only one integrated argument --
with two inter-connected correlative aspects. We can only organise around what we can
energetically afford. Consequently, we cannot organise around what we cannot afford -- that
is, global industrialised production with a supervenient elitist superstructure.
Let's face it : ethical arguments carry little weight against organisation around
hierarchical rule. The current talk of an ethical capitalism -- in mixed economies with
'commons' elements -- is an appeasement. and distractional to the gathering and ineluctable
reality.
The current (2012) EROI for the UK is 6.2:1 -- barely above the 'energy cliff' of 5:1. The
GDP 'growth' and bullshit jobs are funded by monetised debt (we borrow around £5 to
make every £1 -- from Tim Morgan's SEEDS). From the Earth Overshoot Day website: the UK
is in economic overshoot from May 8th onward.
These are indicators that we will not be "flying jetpacks on the moon": even if we
reorganise. Everyone, and I mean everyone, will have to make do with less. A lot less.
Everything would have to be localised and sustainable. Production would be minimised, and not
at all full. Two major systems of production -- food (agroecology) and energy -- would have
to be sustainable and self-sovereign. And financialisation and the rentier, service economy?
Now you can see why no one, not even Dave the crypto-anarchist, is talking about reality.
Elitism, establishment and entitlement do not figure in an equitable future. We can't afford
it, energetically or ethically.
So when will the debate move on? Not any time the populace is bought into ideational
deferred prosperity. All the time that EROEI is ignored as the fundamental concept governing
dwindling prosperity -- no one, and I mean no one, will be talking about a minimal surplus
energy future. The magic realism is that the economic affordances of cheap oil (unsustainably
mimicked by debt-funding) will return sometime, somehow (the technocratic superfix). The
aporia is that the longer the delay, the less surplus energy we will have available to
utilise. Something like the Green New Deal -- that has been proposed for around two decades
now -- may give us some quality of life to sustain. Pseudo-talk of a Customs Union, 'clean'
coal, and nuclear power, will not.
An integrated reality -- along the model of Guattari's 'Three Ecologies' -- of mind,
economy, and environment is well, we are not alone, but we are ahead of the curve. The other
cultural aporia is that we need to implement such vision now. Actually, about thirty years
ago but let's not get depressive!
We are going to need that cooperative organisation around care and freedom just to get
through the coming century.
As mentioned elsewhere here, Venezualan oil deposits are not all that the hype cracks them up
to be. They are mostly oil sands that produce little in the way of net energy gain after the
lengthy process of extraction.The Venezuala drama is about the empire crushing democracy
(i.e. socialism), not oil. [not that this detracts from Kit's essential point in the
article].
The Left (as well as the Right), by and large have not come to terms with the realities of
the decline in net surplus energy that is unfolding around the world and driving the
political changes that we see. So they still view geopolitics in terms of the oil economy of
pre-2008.
The productive economies of Europe are falling apart (check Steve Keen's latest on Max and
Stacy -- although even i he doesn't delve into the energy decline aspect).
The carbon density of the global economy has not changed in the 27 years since the founding
of the UNFCCC.
The Peak Oil phenomenon was oversimplified, misrepresented and misunderstood as a simple
turning point in overall oil production. In truth it was a turning point in energy
surplus.
I predict that by the end of this or next year, everyone will be talking about ERoEI.
Everyone will realise that there is no way out of this predicament. Maybe there are ways to
lessen the catastrophe, but no way to avert it. This will change the conversation, and even
change what 'politics' means (i.e. you cannot campaign on a 'new start' or a 'better,
brighter future' if everyone knows that that physically cannot happen).
Everyone will understand that their civilisation is collapsing.
Does Bolton understand this?
If you were referring to my earlier comments about Venezuelan extra heavy crude: it's
still massively about the oil. The current carbon capitalist world system does not understand
surplus energy or EROEI, as it is so fixated on maximal short term returns for shareholders.
It can't comprehend that their entire business model is unsustainable and self cannibalising.
Which is bad for us: because carbon net-energy (exergy) economics it is foundational to all
civilisation. The ignorance of it and subsequent environmental and social convergence crises
threatens the systemic failure of our entire civilisation. The Venezuelan crisis affects us
all: and is symptomatic of a decline in cheap oil due to rapidly falling EROEI.
I can't find the EROEI specifically for Venezuelan heavy oil: but it is only slightly more
viscous than bitumen -- which has an EROEI of 3:1. Let's call it 4:1: the same as other tight
oils and shale. Anything less than 5:1 is more or less an energy sink: with virtually no net
energy left for society. The minimum EROEI for societal needs is 11:1. Does Bolton understand
this? Francis hit the nail on the head there.
Do any of our leaders? No. If they did, a transition to decentralisation would be well
under way. Globalised supply chains are systemically threatened and fragile. A globalised
economy is spectacularly vulnerable. Especially a debt-ridden one. Which way are our leaders
trying to take us? At what point will humanity realise we are following clueless Pied Pipers
off the Seneca Cliff -- into globalised energy oblivion?
The rapid investment -- not in a post-carbon transition -- but in increased
militarisation, and resource and market driven aggressive foreign intervention policies
reveal the mindset of insanity. As people come to understand the energy basis of the world
crisis: the fact of permanent austerity and increased pauperisation looms large. What will
the outcome be when an armed nuclear madhouse becomes increasingly protectionsist of their
dwindling share? Too alarmist, perhaps? Let's play pretend that we can plant a few trees and
captive breed a few rhinos and it will all be fine. BAU?
The world runs on cheap oil: our socio-politico-economic expectations of progress depend
on it. Which means that the modern human mind is, in effect, a thought-process predicated on
cheap oil. Oleum ergo sum? Apart from the Middle East: we are already past the point where
oil is a liability, not a viability. Debt funding its extraction, selling below the cost of
production -- both assume the continual expansion of global GDP. Oil is a highly subsidised
-- with our surplus socialisation capital -- negative asset. We foot the bill. A bill that
EROEI predicts will keep on rising. At what point do we realise this? Or do we live in hopium
of a return to historical prosperity? Or hang on the every word of the populist magic realism
demagogue who promises a future social utopia?
EROEI = Energy Returned on Energy Invested (also known as EROI = Energy Return on Investment)
EROEI refers to the amount of usable energy that can be extracted from a resource compared
to the amount of energy (usually considered to come from the same resource) used to extract
it. It's calculated by dividing the amount of energy obtained from a source by the amount of
energy needed to get it out.
An EROEI of 1:1 means that the amount of usable energy that a resource generates is the
same as the amount of energy that went into getting it out. A resource with an EROEI of 1:1
or anything less isn't considered a viable resource if it delivers the same or less energy
than what was invested in it. A viable resource is one with an EROEI of at least 3:1.
The concept of EROEI assumes that the energy needed to get more energy out of a resource
is the same as the extracted energy ie you need oil to extract oil or you need electricity to
extract electricity. In real life, you often need another source of energy to extract energy
eg in some countries, to extract electricity, you need to burn coal, and in other countries,
to extract electricity you need to build dams on rivers. So comparing the EROEI of
electricity extraction across different countries will be difficult because you have to
consider how and where they're generating electricity and factor in the opportunity costs
involved (that is, what the coal or the water or other energy source -- like solar or wind
energy -- could have been used for instead of electricity generation).
That is probably why EROEI is used mainly in the context of oil or natural gas
extraction.
While China is clearly a concern, the main beneficiaries of the INF treaty were
neither US nor USSR/Russia. It was European nations, especially the western ones on the
continent. So iit should be no surprise that they opposed ending the treaty, even as
Russia was violating it, and Trump withdrew from it unilaterally with Russia immediately
following.
Putin is not already a "hard core nationalist"? Compared to Putin, Trump looks very
much like a soft core one. Has he pulled anything remotely as hard core nationslist as
annexing Crimea?
likbez , February 8, 2019 3:14 pm
Barkley,
You should probably read more Professor Stephen F. Cohen on Russia, not NYT or WaPo.
Of course, as you do not know the language, it is difficult for you to access the situation
on the ground. And in this sense reading Stephen F. Cohen might be very helpful as he operates
with Russian language sources, nor NYT or WaPo propaganda. Also traveling to Moscow on
vacations might help to access the situation in a more rational style ;-)
> Putin is not already a "hardcore nationalist"? Compared to Putin, Trump looks very much
like a softcore one.
FYI Putin a "soft neoliberal," and as such he can't be the hardcore nationalist. For those,
you need to look at Ukraine's political scene. At best he can be "cultural nationalist," but I
doubt even that. He is a Philo-German politician, I think.
I think the main countervailing force that prevents Russians from jailing Yeltsin close
circle of neoliberal reformers (like Chubais, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatoly_Chubais
, aka the most hated man in Russia) is Putin.
The only guy who IMHO might qualify as a hardcore nationalist I think is Zhirinovsky (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Zhirinovsky
). But I do not know much about Russia anyway, so there might be more. In any case, it looks
like nationalism is on the upswing in Russia like in most European countries. Especially after
Euromaidan, when pro-Western neoliberals in Russia were decimated and lost all political
influence.
Putin also keeps Medvedev as the Prime minister and recently appointed Kudrin to an
important office. Both are neoliberals, proponents of "free markets" and privatization. Both
might well be jailed without Putin.
Trump also is a neoliberal politician (his tax cuts were clearly a neoliberal act), but his
main and defining features are incompetence and impulsivity.
He betrayed all his key promises to the electorate and thus can be called Republican
Obama.
To qualify for a far-right politician, you need to adhere to key points of NSDAP program of
1920:
7. We demand that the state is charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood
and way of life for the citizens. If it is impossible to sustain the total population of the
State, then the members of foreign nations (non-citizens) are to be expelled from the
Reich.
8. Any further immigration of non-citizens is to be prevented. We demand that all
non-Germans, who have immigrated to Germany since 2 August 1914, be forced immediately to leave
the Reich.
9.All citizens must have equal rights and obligations.
10.The first obligation of every citizen must be to work both spiritually and physically.
The activity of individuals is not to counteract the interests of the universality, but must
have its result within the framework of the whole for the benefit of all. Consequently, we
demand:
11.Abolition of unearned (work and labor) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.
12.In consideration of the monstrous sacrifice in property and blood that each war demands
of the people, personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the
people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.
13.We demand the nationalization of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).
14.We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.
15.We demand an expansion on a large scale of old age welfare.
16.We demand the creation of a healthy middle class and its conservation, immediate
communalization of the great warehouses and their being leased at low cost to small firms, the
utmost consideration of all small firms in contracts with the State, county or
municipality.
17.We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free
expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and
prevention of all speculation in land.
18.We demand struggle without consideration against those whose activity is injurious to the
general interest. Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be
punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.
21.The State is to care for the elevating national health by protecting the mother and
child, by outlawing child-labor, by the encouragement of physical fitness, by means of the
legal establishment of a gymnastic and sport obligation, by the utmost support of all
organizations concerned with the physical instruction of the young.
22. We demand abolition of the mercenary troops and formation of a national army.
The former head of Boris Berezovsky's
security service spoke about the relationship between famous blogger Alexey Navalny and the
British MI6 intelligence service. He succeeded in exporting about 60 servers containing a huge
amount of correspondence and documents.
"23rd December, 2007 - to the head of the Secret Intelligence Service A. Belt.
Report of agent Solomon about ending Navalny's verification and the assignment of the
pseudonym "freedom".
Had a conversation over an encrypted communication channel between the employee and the CRS
(SIS) and agent Solomon. The agent got approval for a confidential cooperation with Alexei
Navalny. It was mentioned that it is necessary for Navalny to arrange financial support to
carry out the tasks within the framework of special operation "Shiver" to undermine the
existing constitutional order in the Russian Federation. Navalny has a nickname of "freedom",
reads one of the documents.
Agent Solomon is the notorious William Browder, head of Hermitage Capital, inspirer of the
Magnitsky act, and a person who made a fortune in Russia in the 90's.
Operation "Shiver" had already been developed at Langley in 1986. The documents were signed
by then-CIA Director William Casey. The main goal of the project was to "change the
constitutional and political system in Eastern Europe and the USSR".
Tasks are described in as much detail as possible: to change the political and
constitutional state system, to acquire control over financial flows, and to extract assets
from emerging economies.
The USSR has not existed for a quarter of a century, however, the project "Shiver" is still
relevant.
"Browder spreads lies, and all his company is based solely on lies. Navalny is his student
and successor of his ideas. They partly work together, working in parallel. They absolutely
face the same direction," said Pavel Karpov, a former investigator of the Moscow Criminal
Investigations Department. He is one of those who has stirred Browder's "snake nest" and opened
schemes of tax evasion and illegal purchase of shares in Russia under the leadership of
Hermitage Capital.
Here is an example of correspondence between Navalny and Browder in 2006:
"Let me very frankly formulate what I want to offer. I will teach you to grab the monsters
of the Russian economy by the balls. Soon you will become a hero of the minority shareholders
and can have their reputational capital. Probably, and political. In return I ask you to
support me when my problems come out. Am I clear?" asks Browder to Navalny. "Your information
in exchange for the loyalty of my potential. However, I'm afraid you banked on the wrong
figure. I could have problems even in my party. There I seem to be a nationalist," -- says
Navalny.
Then, under the leadership of Browder, and with his financial support, the still unknown
blogger opened the cycle of revelations. At the same time the scene appears banker Vladimir
Ashurkov. He dealt with money matters for "revelatory activities".
"Agent "freedom" was acquainted with the first phase of the secret denunciation of the
conviction of corruption and embezzlement of Russian state assets. To implement the first phase
of the plan, agent "freedom" was funded to the amount of 100 million rubles. The first part of
funds, 7 million rubles, will be transferred to our authorised representative of the Moscow
Helsinki Group until January 26th. Agent A. Belt".
The activities of the Hermitage Capital in Moscow has been completely phased out as auditor
Sergey Magnitsky was appointed to clean up any traces that remained.
"People say that he was Browder's lawyer. This is an outright lie! He was an accountant, who
was engaged in tax evasion for Browder, i.e. registered companies through which money was
withdrawn from. As I was told by Magnitsky himself, these millions were withdrawn by his own
chief, who, as I learned later, was Mr. Browder," recalls journalist Oleg Lurie.
When Magnitsky was arrested, Navalny wrote to Browder, "William, sincerely sorry. People get
used to like those who suffer in our country I'm not saying that the suffering of Sergei is
your trump card, but the more these journalists and people will learn about this suffering, the
less they will want to know what is happening".
Browder's goal was to create the maximum noise possible with information, however the
situation abroad with the "legal auditor" responded little.
"20th September 2009. To the Director of Central Intelligence.
A conversation between agent Solomon and an employee of MI6.
Further growth of public resonance will be gone unless we make adjustments to the plans of
our ongoing special events. In his message to the agent, based on information available for it,
he noted the deteriorating health of Magnitsky. It was proposed to the agent, through
authorized persons in the penitentiary system of Russia, to organize a disruption of medical
assistance to Magnitsky. The deterioration of his health will be designated as a medical error
that could lead to his death. Please pay special attention to this information", -- stated the
documents.
Magnitsky was literally sacrificed. In November 2009, he died in the hospital of the
"Matrosskaya Tishina" detention facility, and Browder announced that the prisoner was tortured,
he was also refused medical care. And then there was the "Magnitsky list".
Here is what is said in the secret documents about it:
"January 23, 2010. Sash reports on a meeting with the agent "freedom", during which he gave
the agent $300,000 for the upcoming program to support the "Magnitsky list" on social networks.
The report of the agent Sash also said that the project is linked with the death of Sergei
Magnitsky, and already in the early stages it greatly undermined the credibility of Russian
citizens in the Russian judicial and law enforcement system. This leads to growing chaos in the
Russian judicial and law enforcement system, a reduction of its credibility, and a reduction in
the credibility of Vladimir Putin. Agent A. Belt".
All this time, Browder warned Navalny against political activity.
"We have our own tasks. Bill asks you to be careful. Urge you not to interfere in the
electoral process -- it is not your task. Monitoring, reporting -- Yes. Protests -- no," --
said in his message.
Apparently, the situation has since changed. It is noteworthy that the Skype accounts of Browder and Navalny, where they started talking
in 2006, are still operational. But we failed to contact subscribers.
Trump's comment about missile defense "improvements" in the SOTU; following the attention the war media gave to the missile
defense agency (MDA) report recently released imply some mixing of theory around missile defense with offensive weapons. A concept
that is misguided if not frightening!
In Europe MDA is deploying two aegis ashore weapon systems, one operating in Rumania and one to be built (2020) in Poland the
sensors are SPY-1 for foreign sales (not the latest greatest as upgraded SPY 1 on US Navy ships to be replaced by SPY-6 on new
Arleigh Burke destroyers). The interceptors are SM-2 vertical launch again not the greatest as US Navy going SM 3 and later SM
6.
With Patriot for close in and EU systems not sure I would call ABM in Europe not worthy of defeating much more complex threats
than Saddam SCUDs.
No rapid pentagon move to design new Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles.
Pershing II was dismantled in 1989, no similar missile is readily available and given the botch job on MX I doubt one will
be forth coming in the mid range future.
However, late versions of Tomahawk could be adapted to ground launchers and motivators already carrying US Army Tactical Ballistic
systems. That was the deployments in England and Belgium that caught the most protests prior to INF treaty.
The main claim of Russian violation is a cruise missile that could be modified like the US could modify Tomahawk .
INF is Asia need to think about that!
likbez , February 8, 2019 12:14 am
First of all, INF was tremendously beneficial for the USA, as the USSR has to destroy more missiles then the USA: 654 SS-20
missiles were build by the USSR. These and the 499 associated mobile launchers were destroyed by May 1991.
Now the problem for the USA is that other countries who did not sign this treaty are developing such systems. First of all
China. So this is probably the main consideration as for the USA.
But the devil is always in detail: the USA re-opens its forces in Europe and Japan to direct attack by this type of ground-based
missiles from Russian territory. Which now will be more sophisticated and difficult to intercept then famous SS-20 (Saber or Invisible)
with its unprecedented for its time accuracy of 450 meters.
So the shadow of SS-20 is again all over Western Europe. From military point of view the chances of surviving WWIII of any
European country with the USA bases in case WWIII starts dropped significantly
On Russia part, the fact that the USA unilaterally withdraw from the treaty that cost Russia so much is like a slap in the
face. That why Russia already demanded from the USA the destruction of all attack drones and all Tomahawks-compatible silos, which
means all negotiations ended.
Russian MIC is less well fed then the USA MIC and as such is definitely more happy then the USA MIC. They also probably has
some nasty asymmetrical surprise already on the drawing boards to compensate for the humiliation.
Most probably this response will became a huge headache for future US presidents. As if Putin is replaced by a hard-core
nationalist of Trump-style and temperament that will increase dangers of WWIII.
So, in a way, history repeats and Trump now is taking measures that are clearly in Russia favor (as one would expect from the
"Russia stooge" ;-) : Kaliningrad to Berlin distance is 328 miles. Distance from Kamchatka to Okinawa is 630 miles. The INF Treaty
prohibits ranges 310–620 mi and 620–3,420 miles and did not cover air- or sea-launched missiles which are the USA forte. And mobile
ground-based intermediate missiles are Russian forte: they already have the technology and variety of mobile launchers including
railcar based. .
So all huge advantages negotiated by Reagan team went into dumpster.
The US military-industrial complex is rejoicing at the prospect of money
rained down as a result of this withdrawal from the INF treaty. But in Europe (with the
exception of Romania and Poland), nobody is too keen to welcome US missiles that have no
defense against Russian hypersonic weapons. NATO's trans-Atlantic arms lobby will try to push
as many European countries as possible towards a new Cold War, with US weapons deployed and
aimed at Moscow. It will be fun to see the reactions of European citizens facing the prospect
of being annihilated by Russian missiles simply to please the CEOs and shareholders of Lockheed
Martin and Raytheon. No doubt there will be some European politicians in countries like Poland
keen to scream about the "Russian threat", ready to throw tens of billions worth of Polish
taxpayers' money into useless and ineffective projects for the purposes of pleasing their
American friends.
Are US generals even aware of how idiotic it is for the US to withdraw from the INF for
Washington? Moscow is already ahead in the development of such systems, both land-based but
above all sea- and air-launched, without forgetting the hypersonic variants of its conventional
or nuclear missiles. Washington has a huge gap to close, exacerbated by the fact that in spite
of heavy spending over many years, there is little to show for it as a result of massive
corruption in the research-and-development process. This is not to mention the fact that there
are few European countries willing to host offensive missile systems aimed at Russia. In
reality, there is little real advantage for Washington in withdrawing from the INF treaty,
other than to enrich arms manufacturers. It diminishes US military options strategically while
expanding those of Beijing and Moscow, even as the latter oppose Washington's unilateral
withdrawal from the treaty.
The hope of expanding the INF treaty to include the US, Russia, China and the EU appears
slim due to Washington's intransigence. Washington only aims to increase expenditure for the
development of weapons prohibited by the treaty, and in strategic terms, improbably hopes to
find some Asian and European countries willing to host these systems aimed against China and
Russia.
The world is certainly more dangerous following Washington's decision, heading in a
direction where there are less and less rules while there are more nuclear powers. For decades,
the United States has been trying to achieve nuclear supremacy by overcoming the limitations of
MAD, whereby Washington would be able to carry out a decapitating nuclear first strike without
worrying about an opponent's ability to launch a retaliatory second strike. It is precisely
this type of thinking that is bringing humanity closer to the brink of destruction from a
nuclear accident or miscalculation. The miniaturization of nuclear warheads and the apparently
limited nature of "tactical nukes" further encourages the justification for using such
weapons.
Moscow's decision in 2007 to develop state-of-the-art weapons and focus on new technologies
like hypersonic missiles guarantees that Russia and her allies have an effective deterrent
against the attempts of the US to alter the nuclear balance of power, which otherwise threatens
the future of humanity.
The withdrawal from the INF treaty is another worrying sign of the willingness of the US to
push the world to the brink of catastrophe, simply for the purposes of enriching the CEOs and
shareholders of it arms manufacturers through a nuclear arms race.
"... This seems entirely in line with the wishes of the antirussianitic mainstream establishment. Part of the reason is to re-establish the social mass-brain controls against American society believed to have obtained during the coldest Cold War. The establishment wants to re-impose social discipline to contain or suppress discontent during our upcoming Revolution of Falling Expectations. ..."
"... Does anyone know what the real impetus for this withdrawal is? Who gains and how? ..."
"... In general, however, the main reason is US economy whose main two pillars are US Dollar and perceived, largely inflated, US military omnipotence, and US fading as a "hegemon" is not taken lightly by increasingly irrational D.C. It needs some kind of "triumph", so we are entering the period of geopolitical volatility until US "elites", in full accordance to Kubler-Ross Grief Model, transition from Anger to Depression (in process) and eventually to Bargaining and Acceptance ..."
"... How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change. ..."
Russia does not have military bases near US territory, where a large
number of intermediate and shorter range missiles could be deployed
This phrase alone discredits the whole piece by South Front which increasingly begins to
remind sites similar to Russia-Insider, hell bent on fund raising instead of sound
analysis.
Russia DOES have bases near the United States within (West) coastal range--those
"bases" are called Kamchatka Peninsula. Of course, Russia can recall 1980s experience of
planning to position her RSD-10 Pioneer (one example is currently in the US in Smithsonian) at
Chuckotka, thus covering all of Canada and most North West and parts of mid-West of the US.
One of the arguments which convinced the American side to negotiate.
So, the article is a
complete click-bait pseudo-analysis. This is not to mention the fact that national security
is built and exists across all platforms and forces.
Having a single piece of territory technically in range is not the same thing as surrounding
a country's borders with missile emplacements. And the very best scenario for intercepting a missile is when its fired from a single known
location, rather than a flurry from all sides.
Literally if you take the two closest points the tip of Washington state to the coast of
Kamchatka you are the very limit of the treaty ranges.
How is it possible that the Russian nation renounced the most death dealing ideology in human
history and fear and loathing for all things Russian in the Brit and American deep states and
on the American political left increased exponentially?
Trump was elected, in part, for trying to bring accountability to those responsible for that
development, but that's all gone, along with any prospect for a near term exit into normalcy.
It looks like Cold War as far as the eye can see. Trump himself put this in evidence by the
gaping hole in his SOTU he left with the omission of exactly how the American future is going
to pay for the welfare - warfare state that continues to burgeon on his watch.
Just from a technological point of view, the INF treaty and probably similar treaties are
becoming obsolete. So many nations are now developing effective missiles including hypersonic
cruise missiles and launching capabilities that are bound to be in violation of this treaty.
The improvement in air defense capabilities are bound to violate the ABM treaty at some
point.
We all surely have the desire to keep developing these technologies. That desire is
obviously stronger than our desire to negotiate new treaties to address this increase in
lethality.
Amazing to me that a GOP senator would cheer about the breakup of a treaty signed by and
pushed for by President Reagan:
"Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., cheered the president's decision to withdraw
from the treaty, saying out that the Russians have violated the treaty
for years and China has stockpiled "thousands of missiles.""
This sure feels like it goes against the spirit of Trump's sometime-voiced wistful wish that
" wouldn't it be nice if we had good relations with Russia?"
This seems entirely in line with the wishes of the antirussianitic mainstream
establishment. Part of the reason is to re-establish the social mass-brain controls against
American society believed to have obtained during the coldest Cold War. The establishment
wants to re-impose social discipline to contain or suppress discontent during our upcoming
Revolution of Falling Expectations.
Has the RussiaGov been testing and bending what is permitted under the INF treaty?
Can anyone offer a fact-based well-argued answer offered in a spirit of truth? And if the
RussiaGov has been doing that, would it be in response to NATO expansion and hostility right
up to Russia's border?
Could this be Russo-American kabuki so they both can set eachother free to both address
IMF missilization by a rising China which never did sign that treaty?
One thing for sure, there is no missile defense against a hypersonic missile. Or a fleet
of hypersonic missiles.
If any wannabe-officeseeker considers Cold War 2.0 a bad thing to get started and a bad
thing to stay in, such officeseeker(s) will have to run on discussions with Russia to stand
down the violations-if-any on both sides and then re-instate the IMF. Because any
officeseeker elected withOUT that stated intention will have trouble seeking to intend it
after getting elected. Whereas any officeseeker overtly running ON that intention is free to
pursue it and advance it if elected in whole or in part because of it.
1. China and her primarily intermediate-range missiles in the region -- in a futile attempt to
"re-negotiate" -- China may fold, but...
2. Russia will not, in fact, Russia already called the bluff, but the US also needs to
threaten Russia from Europe while simultaneously putting Europe under the thumb.
3.In general, however, the main reason is US economy whose main two pillars are US Dollar
and perceived, largely inflated, US military omnipotence, and US fading as a "hegemon" is not
taken lightly by increasingly irrational D.C. It needs some kind of "triumph", so we are
entering the period of geopolitical volatility until US "elites", in full accordance to Kubler-Ross Grief Model, transition from Anger to Depression (in process) and eventually to
Bargaining and Acceptance. Granted US economy functions. US will have to learn to live as ONE
OF the great power and maybe (just maybe) become a normal country dealing with own serious
problems--there are many of those for sure.
EUrope has more overall people and more overall economic activity than the US has. EUrope
does not have to be under any thumb which the current Lords of EUrope do not exactly want
EUrope to be under.
EUrope is legally free to dissolve NATO from its end any time it likes. If they want to
have their own "after-NATO" defense organization, they can set it up just for their side of
the Atlantic, which is the Eastern Side. They could call it NEATO . . . for North East
Atlantic Treaty Organization. NEATO . . . get it?
As to America becoming a normal country among normal countries . . . that would require a
change of hearts and minds. It could be done, but only from within America its own self. And
as the joke goes . . . How many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb?Only one. But the light bulb has to want to change.
What would be a step toward the light bulb wanting to change? Setting aside the
psycho-cultural need to be Great. No more Greatness. Let's just make America an okay place
for the Americans.
MAOkayFA. Make America Okay For Americans. We will be partway there when a majority of
American people become comfortable saying to themselves . . . ." I am not an American
Greatness Exceptionalist.
I! am an American Okayness Ordinarian. And I'm okay with that."
Trump likes to rip up any old deal just for the sake of raising his profile, methinks.
Whatever happens to INF, it's the NPT that would be the bigger priority. Not a big Al Haig
fan, but he wrote a book about WW3 wherein his theory put the rogue Arab terrorist state in
the lead role as the nuke attacker that destroyed the world. I threw my copy away a long time
ago, but it resonates in my mind that the more likely scenario is the Nuke of Jihad is
employed against Tel Aviv. Would this not have an attenuating effect if the US had to
retaliate against say, Tehran, rather than a clear Russian or Chinese attacker?
I am old enough to remember when there was a lot of anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe
(especially in Germany). One might argue that the INF treaty was a stroke of genius in terms
of taking the wind out of the sails of the lefty peaceniks.
Since Russia wishes to cultivate allies in the anti-war left, perhaps an end to the INF
treaty will help in those efforts. I do wonder how long the Borg can accuse both Trump and
Tulsi Gabbard of being Russian stooges before people start to think "hey, maybe the Russians
are not as bad as our own news media".
Since Russia wishes to cultivate allies in the anti-war left, perhaps an end to the INF
treaty will help in those efforts.
I am not sure there is anti-war Left left as it was circa 1980s. Russia is really
apprehensive towards all kinds of Euro-left which is a totalitarian LGBTQC4ISR sect which has
nothing in common with Old Left. In fact, all of this left are globalist shills. Russia has
much better chances addressing real European conservative and nationalist circles. But I am
100% positive that this is viewed, correctly, as a routine foreign policy activity and
maintenance of contacts as it was previous years.
There was one leading US politician whose name escapes me for the moment. When Chavez was
president, he complained bitterly that Venezuela's oil wealth was being squandered on things
like healthcare, education, literacy and welfare. It could have been given instead to hard
pressed Wall Street fund managers in bigger bonuses. He wasn't being ironic.
"Everything (to the contrary) is propaganda"
Yes, they will never stop. Just think of this brand-new propaganda lie of Maduro allegedly
preventing aid shipment to come into Venezuela. See BBC: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-47143492
: " Venezuelan soldiers have blocked the crossing ahead of a delivery arranged by
opposition leader Juan Guaidó, who has declared himself interim president ".
Notice the word " ahead " in this sentence. This word appears because there was
never a " delivery " (truck) with aid shipment at the bridge!
The Venezuelan government ("Maduro") blocked the bridge only because of war-threatening
Columbia and USA.
If you want to send aid shipment to Venezuela you can send as much as you want anytime. Of
course you have to respect the regulations of the custom (like in every other country!). But
that's all!
Whets foul with this story?
Well, this aid " delivery " cannot have been collected in Colombia – and thus
being taken away from the people of Colombia, who are much poorer than the people of
Venezuela. So it would have to come from other country (USA, Europe, China, Japan). And then
you would not land this aid shipment in Columbia (a harbour, an airport), drive it, in
hot-humid air, through half of Colombia to the border crossing bridge of Cúcuta. Then
cross the bridge and then drive it through half of Venezuela!
Instead aid shipments for Venezuela would be landed directly in Venezuela – in an
Venezuelan harbour or airport.
As neocolonial empire of it s own (albeit the one that is vassal of the USA) yes it does,
especially in xUSSR state where EU wants to capture the makets. Ukraine is a nice example
here.
Does the European Union generate external instability?
The historic achievement of peace within a Europe of universal norms is belied by the external
instability engendered by violent and incoherent interventions.
By Branko Milanovic
The European Union is justly admired for making war among its members impossible. This is no
small achievement in a continent which was in a state of semi-permanent warfare for the past
two millennia.
It is not only that we cannot even imagine the usual 19th and 20th century antagonists, such
as France and Germany, going to war ever again. The same is true of other, lesser-known
animosities which have led periodically to bloodlettings: between Poles and Germans, Hungarians
and Romanians, Greeks and Bulgarians. Unthinkable is also the idea that the United Kingdom and
Spain could end up, regarding Gibraltar, in a reprise of the Falklands/Malvinas war.
Destabilised
But creating geopolitical stability internally has not, during the last two decades, been
followed by external geopolitical stability along the fringes of the union. Most of the big EU
member states (UK, Poland, Italy, Spain) participated, often eagerly, in Operation Iraqi
Freedom, which led to the deaths of some half a million people, destabilised the middle east
even further and produced Islamic State.
Then, seemingly not having learned from this fiasco, France and Italy spearheaded another
regime change, this time in Libya. It ended in anarchy, another civil war, two competing
governments and a UN Security Council deadlocked for years to come -- since it is clear that
China and Russia will not in the foreseeable future vote to allow another western military
intervention.
The wars along the long arc from Libya to Afghanistan, in which EU powers participated, were
the proximate cause of large refugee flows a few years ago, which continue even now. (As I have
written elsewhere, the underlying cause of migration is the large gap in incomes between
Europe, on the one hand, and Africa and the 'greater middle east', on the other, but the sudden
outbursts were caused by wars.)
The next example of generating instability was Ukraine, where the then government of Viktor
Yanukovych, having only postponed the signing of an EU agreement, was driven out of power in
2014 in a coup-like movement supported by the union. It is sure that a reasonable
counterfactual, with the same EU-Ukraine agreements being signed and without a war in eastern
Ukraine and with Crimea still part of Ukraine, would have been much preferable to the current
situation, which threatens to precipitate a war of even much greater dimensions.
Finally, consider Turkey, in an association agreement with the European Economic Community
since 1963, and thus in a membership-awaiting antechamber for more than half a century. The
initial period in power of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan was marked by pro-European policies, a
desire to create an 'Islamic democracy', in the mould of the Christian democracies of Italy and
Germany, and civilian control over the army. But realisation that, because of its size and
probably because of its dominant religion, Turkey would never be recognised as part of Europe
led Erdoğan, gradually, to move in an altogether different direction -- with an almost
zero chance that he would come back to his original pro-European stance.
The endless waiting period, with similarly protracted negotiations over what are now 35
chapters which need to be agreed between candidate countries and all 28 (or soon 27) members,
is what lies behind the frustration with the EU in the Balkans. Long gone are the days when
Greece could become a member after a couple of months (if that) of negotiations and an
agreement between the French president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, and the German
chancellor, Helmut Schmidt. The European bluff -- it neither has the stick nor the carrot --
albeit long hidden behind the veil of negotiations, was recently called by the Kosovo
leadership, when it engaged in a trade war with Serbia. The EU could express its 'regrets' but
it was squarely ignored. In the past, nether Kosovo nor any other Balkan state would have dared
to defy Europe so openly.
Slow and hesitant
It all means that Europe needs a much better thought-out external policy with respect to its
neighbours. There are already some signs that it is moving in that direction but it is doing so
too slowly and hesitantly. A multilateral compact with Africa is needed to regulate migration
from a continent with the fastest rising population and lowest incomes. Much more European
investment -- in hard stuff, not conferences -- is needed. Rather than complaining about
China's Belt and Road initiative, Europe should imitate it -- and, if it desires to counteract
Chinese political influence, invest its own money to make more African friends. A similar set
of much more proactive policies is required within the framework of the Mediterranean
initiative, while military options in the region should be forsworn no less clearly than they
are within the union.
When it comes to the potential members, as in the Balkans or the western republics of the
former Soviet Union, interminable talks should be replaced by either special association with
no expectation of EU membership or clearer, time-limited negotiations leading to membership.
Both would manage expectations better and avoid the build-up of resentment and frustration.
The most important challenge is the relationship with Turkey. The EU does not have a
blueprint for a Turkey after Erdoğan; nor can it offer anything to the Turkish secular
opposition, as it is not clear within itself whether it wants Turkey in or out. It should be
rather obvious that a European Turkey, with its vast economic potential and influence in the
middle east, would be a huge economic and strategic asset. Such a Turkey would also behave
differently in Syria and in Anatolia, because it would have an incentive to follow European
rules.
This rethinking of the EU's neighbourhood policy thus calls, in short, for three things:
greater economic aid to Africa, no support for wars or regime change, and much clearer rules
and time-limits for membership talks.
Perhaps, you ascribe to the EU successes that it did not create.
The formation of the EU is not the vehicle that created, nor sustained, the uneasy peace.
I suggest it was the resolution of WW2 that has determined the current state of
tolerance.
I fear that the formation of the EU, in the end, will be the cause of a re-instigation of
the age old skirmishes that have plagued the world, as you say, for two millennia.
The destruction of the Middle East by the West, not just the EU but the US, is a
foolishness of biblical proportions.
The EU's disposition of Greece and Brexit are red flags that the EU is an unsustainable
contrivance that will eventually, come undone. The mercantilist wars between France, England,
Spain, Germany, Italy, etc, may rise again. Hopefully, I'm wrong.
We just got done conquering Iraq. We haven't stayed to loot the oil.
The US has NOT successfully conquered Iraq (has not pacified the country). Oil is not like
a bag of diamonds, which you can grab and run. In order to steal a worthwhile amount of the
greasy stuff, you have to make a substantial investment up front, in wells and shipping
terminals. Not even the greediest thief will risk his money if there is even the slightest
chance that his wells and terminals will be blown up by righteous nationalists. This is why
the US hasn't stolen much from Iraq.
So now you believe we're going to Venezuela to take their crappy heavy oil?
That the US hasn't been able to steal much from Iraq tells us little about whether the
Americans have larcenous motives with regard to Venezuela. Especially as Trump has been
talking loudly about the oil.
It would be easier for us just to build a pipeline to Alberta and import all their
cheap, shut-in heavy crude.
I ran into Dan Kazeta a number of times at Bellingcat because of his dodgy claims about
Khan Sheikhoun and chemical weapons (Why has the green tube involved in delivering the
alleged chemical weapon never appeared in the west? Because it ain't what the jihadists
claimed it was and forensic tests would prove that?)
BTW, with Skripal, there can only be conspiracy theorists out in the wild because the
British government has made very little of the evidence behind its stupid claims public, and
what they have made public doesn't add up.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump lambasted America's endless and wasteful wars. But
as president, he has surrounded himself with individuals who have made defending and advancing
American empire a full-time career. Why did Trump cave and what could be the consequences for
him and his presidency?
CrossTalking with George Szamuely, Jeff Deist, and Lee Spieckerman.
That Lee guy demonstrated perfectly why the world should fear the USA. Dangerous stupid.
71 Likes
You are correct!
21 Likes
The danger comes from the arrogance with the stupidity. American exceptionalism at its
ugliest, on par with bolton and pompeo for sure.
I don't think tRump really knows what he is saying, as in big disconnect between brain and
mouth. More empty bluster than arrogance with his 5th grader stupidity.
23 Likes
The scary part is a lot of Americans are like him
23 Likes
Show 2 more replies
The "Lee" entity encapsulates everything that is wrong with consecutive US governments:
arrogant, obnoxious, I'll mannered, undiplomatic, belligerent, misinformed and dangerously
stupid.
43 Likes
Thanks for having this Lee Spieckerman on. It proves RT tries to show all sides and is a
shocking example of how crazy the far right is.
Keep it real!
37 Likes
Spickerman is living in cuckoo land with his claim US is a force for good and billions are
so happy to live under a bunch of mobster's Wrong
22 Likes
Lee Spickerman is a typical Sociopath
18 Likes
Lee Spickerman is mad like the US Governement.!!
The Monroe Doctrine gets evoked yet again. In written form it was "anti-colonial", but in
practice it was "imperial anti-colonialism" and used as a declaration of hegemony and a right
of unilateral intervention over the Americas.
This is why I feel we need to stop using the term "regime change" which also hides the
reality of what are really coup d'etats and imperialist wars. It's not a regime being changed,
but a regime trying to do the changing. Like Peter says at the end, it would take a long show
to talk about them all.
Do us all a favor and take Mr. Spieckerman off your guest list. He advances our knowledge
not a bit. He is merely one of the Bush claque. As for his admired public servant, John Bolton,
rarely does this country produce so maniacal a political operator. Giving Bolton a responsible
position was Trump's most egregious personnel error.
"... Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon official, told RT that Trump's failure to provide specifics about a withdrawal timeline from the warzones was disappointing – especially because the president had earlier indicated that troops would be returning home in the near future. ..."
"... While the president railed against "foolish wars" as one of the few obstacles standing in the way of the "miracle" of American economic might, Maloof said that Trump's threats directed at Venezuela and Iran show that Washington's penchant for "regime change" has not subsided. ..."
"... "Now [Trump] is threatening to have a new arms race with the Russians and the Chinese. We spend 10 times as much as the Russians, three times as much as the Chinese. Not enough money isn't our problem here. It is because the strategy is all wrong. I think he knows that," the former US diplomat said. ..."
Donald Trump's State of the Union speech sent mixed messages about where the president
stands on foreign policy, analysts told RT, as his anti-intervention views clash with his
threats against Iran and Venezuela.
While the commander-in-chief praised US troops serving in Afghanistan and Syria as having
"fought with valor," he gave little indication of a timeline for a possible pull-out from the
region, despite previous sentiments to the contrary. The omission did not sit well with
analysts.
Michael Maloof, a former Pentagon official, told RT that Trump's failure to provide
specifics about a withdrawal timeline from the warzones was disappointing – especially
because the president had earlier indicated that troops would be returning home in the near
future.
The president likely "glossed over" a withdrawal timeline because it would have been "very
controversial," Maloof suggested, adding that ultimately, Trump may even embrace his cabinet's
"neo-conservative approach to foreign policy."
While the president railed against "foolish wars" as one of the few obstacles standing in
the way of the "miracle" of American economic might, Maloof said that Trump's threats directed
at Venezuela and Iran show that Washington's penchant for "regime change" has not subsided.
"These are very scary times," Maloof warned, adding that despite its military might, the US
could once again "get bogged down in another Vietnam" in places like Venezuela.
Likening the speech to pouring "old neo-con wine into a new America First rhetorical
bottle," Jim Jatras, a former US diplomat, lamented that elements within the Trump
administration were working against the president's stated foreign policy objectives.
"The one bright spot is probably Korea but there are people in his administration who would
like to tank that one as well," Jatras said. Trump has signaled that he's open to
reconciliation between the two Koreas, but his cabinet – not to mention most of
Washington and the media – continue to paint peace efforts on the Korean peninsula as
naive and dangerous.
Trump's decision to pump record amounts of money into the military is also a cause for
concern, Jatras warned.
"Now [Trump] is threatening to have a new arms race with the Russians and the Chinese. We
spend 10 times as much as the Russians, three times as much as the Chinese. Not enough money
isn't our problem here. It is because the strategy is all wrong. I think he knows that," the
former US diplomat said.
"... Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely event that it poses a serious threat. ..."
"... It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start. ..."
"... Financial Times ..."
"... Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel, too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran. ..."
America's policymakers should ignore this advice, no matter how fervently it's offered. And
if any president is willing to tell this self-interested chorus to shut up, it is Donald
Trump.
Among the notable nations lobbying for America's attention are Israel and Taiwan, otherwise
isolated and vulnerable governments that seek Washington's military backing. Greece and Turkey
have carried their battle in the eastern Mediterranean back to D.C., as they fight over
America's role there. Kosovar insurgents worked with ethnic Albanians in the U.S. to push
Washington into the Yugoslav civil war in 1999. Gulf countries, especially Saudi Arabia and the
United Arab Emirates, spread cash lavishly around the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to pressure
American policymakers into such atrocities as the Yemen war.
The consequences can be long-lasting. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the
governments of the newly freed Eastern European states lobbied to join NATO. Their diasporas in
the United States -- derisively called "hyphenated Americans" during World War I -- helped win
Washington's support. The result was a rapid expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, compounding
humiliation with hostility, which continues to bedevil the West's relations with Moscow
today.
Advertisement
Sometimes foreigners talk as if they should be consulted and heeded whenever U.S.
policymakers act. In many cases, Washington has created this problem. Alliances in which other
states theoretically have authority over American military deployments encourage foreign
meddling. For instance, the Obama administration intervened in Libya at least partially in
response to pressure from Rome and Paris, which wanted to use the transatlantic alliance to
oust Libyan strongman Moammar Gaddafi. Europeans were essentially returning the favor by which
Washington had dragged them into the seemingly endless Afghan war, which never made sense for
them.
NATO is particularly problematic, since it's made ever less sense as foreign threats have
diminished, Europeans' capabilities increased, and gaps between allies' interests expanded.
Although America remains the big kahuna, recently empowered "friends" assert authority over
U.S. decisions and behavior. Today, the transatlantic alliance is made up of one transcendent
military power, America, and eight moderately important nations with serious, or at least
potentially serious, militaries: Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, Turkey, and the
United Kingdom.
The remaining score of NATO members are, well, largely irrelevant. That doesn't mean they
don't contribute to and suffer losses in Western military operations -- as The Netherlands has,
for example. But what they do doesn't and never will make much of a difference. Yet they sit at
the NATO table as nominal equals. Of these 20, three have populations of less than one million,
while another 11 come in at under 10 million. Incoming member (Northern) Macedonia barely
breaks the two million barrier.
Why the pretense that the opinions of micro-states Iceland, Luxembourg, and Montenegro
matter to Washington? Why should governments with more than their shares of controversies --
Albania, Romania, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and even Poland -- theoretically have a say on
the use of the alliance's one military that really matters? Imagine if Georgia, which helped
provoke war with Russia in 2008, and Ukraine, which ended up in conflict with Moscow after a
street putsch backed by the West ousted their elected president, joined NATO. Tbilisi and Kiev
would push to borrow the U.S. military to fight their wars. Who would blame them? But it
certainly would not be in America's interest to let them.
This presumptuousness reaches beyond European security. French President Emmanuel Macron
apparently called President Donald Trump to complain about the latter's decision to withdraw
from Syria, which he said he "deeply" regretted. Added Macron, "An ally must be dependable,"
which apparently means that America must forever maintain a deployment illegal under both U.S.
and international law. Macron said that French troops would remain, proclaiming: "To be allies
is to fight shoulder to shoulder." But that fight should stop when the justification for
fighting has ended.
Around the same time, an unnamed Israeli official was quoted as being "in shock" at the
president's decision. Obviously Trump hadn't read his intelligence briefing, explained the
Israeli: after all, there were Iranians in Syria! But so what? Perhaps President Trump decided
that Washington doesn't have to do everything for everyone in the Middle East. There is a very
powerful, nuclear-armed nation next door to Syria that so far has done quite well protecting
itself. Perhaps that country could take care of the Iran-in-Syria problem, in the unlikely
event that it poses a serious threat.
Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked complained that the withdrawal would hurt the Kurds,
whom she characterized as "allies" and "great heroes." Moreover, the pull-out "strengthens
[Turkish President Recep Tayyip] Erdogan, an antisemitic war criminal who carries out massacres
of the Kurdish people, and does so with a wink from the international community." Well, why
doesn't her country -- the one with nuclear weapons and a strong conventional military force --
rescue the Kurds? Israel is there and has far greater interests at stake than does America.
It is not just foreign leaders who complain about U.S. policy. There is hardly a war
that some foreigner somewhere is not busy advocating that Washington join or start.
For instance, TheEconomist , a British magazine, recently headlined an
article: "A deal to end the insurgency in Afghanistan would be wonderful: As long as it is not
a figleaf to cover an American retreat." Really? After 17 years of unsuccessfully trying to
plant a liberal democracy in Afghanistan, the only logical U.S. policy is to exit -- with
figleaf if possible, but without if necessary.
After the president announced his intent to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, the
Financial Times , a United Kingdom newspaper, declared that the decision made America
appear "erratic and inconsistent." Indeed, the United States needed a new defense secretary "to
stand up to the president's wilder impulses," like making sure America stayed involved in the
Syrian war as long as the FT thought necessary. The paper was horrified that the
withdrawal "constitutes, too, an abandonment of key allies" and "signals, more broadly, a US
retreat from the Middle East." Perhaps the anonymous FT writers should form a
volunteer unit to patrol the Mideast in America's stead. After all, it was British and French
line-drawing post-World War I that created the current national boundaries that are failing so
badly.
Roger Boyes, diplomatic editor of The Times of London, headlined his article: "Only
the US can rein in ambitions of Iran." And not just "can." Boyes explained, "As the Syrian war
nears its end, Trump must find ways to loosen Tehran's grip on the region." Frankly, I don't
remember Americans asking him for his advice. Why the U.S.? Is there no one else available?
Saudi Arabia, the other Gulf States, Jordan, Egypt, Turkey? That unnamed country that already
possesses nukes? Toss in a little assistance from the Brits and French, too.
Truth be told, Iran is a weak regional power that uses irregular warfare because it
lacks conventional strength. Missiles are its deterrence against better armed, threatening
neighbors. It certainly doesn't endanger America, with the globe's greatest military. Israel,
too, can launch a devastating retaliation against any attack. Saudi Arabia alone spends more
than five times as much on its armed forces as Iran.
Perhaps Americans should be honored that so many overseas "friends" have so much free advice
to offer. However, much of it is bad. Policy should be based on the interests of the U.S. --
protecting its people, territory, prosperity, and system of constitutional liberties. That
means advancing peace first and making war a last resort. Desiring to do good abroad cannot
justify sacrificing American lives, wealth, and security in never ending war.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global
Empire.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump lambasted America's endless and wasteful wars. But
as president, he has surrounded himself with individuals who have made defending and advancing
American empire a full-time career. Why did Trump cave and what could be the consequences for
him and his presidency?
CrossTalking with George Szamuely, Jeff Deist, and Lee Spieckerman.
That Lee guy demonstrated perfectly why the world should fear the USA. Dangerous stupid.
71 Likes
You are correct!
21 Likes
The danger comes from the arrogance with the stupidity. American exceptionalism at its
ugliest, on par with bolton and pompeo for sure.
I don't think tRump really knows what he is saying, as in big disconnect between brain and
mouth. More empty bluster than arrogance with his 5th grader stupidity.
23 Likes
The scary part is a lot of Americans are like him
23 Likes
Show 2 more replies
The "Lee" entity encapsulates everything that is wrong with consecutive US governments:
arrogant, obnoxious, I'll mannered, undiplomatic, belligerent, misinformed and dangerously
stupid.
43 Likes
Thanks for having this Lee Spieckerman on. It proves RT tries to show all sides and is a
shocking example of how crazy the far right is.
Keep it real!
37 Likes
Spickerman is living in cuckoo land with his claim US is a force for good and billions are
so happy to live under a bunch of mobster's Wrong
22 Likes
Lee Spickerman is a typical Sociopath
18 Likes
Lee Spickerman is mad like the US Governement.!!
The Monroe Doctrine gets evoked yet again. In written form it was "anti-colonial", but in
practice it was "imperial anti-colonialism" and used as a declaration of hegemony and a right
of unilateral intervention over the Americas.
This is why I feel we need to stop using the term "regime change" which also hides the
reality of what are really coup d'etats and imperialist wars. It's not a regime being changed,
but a regime trying to do the changing. Like Peter says at the end, it would take a long show
to talk about them all.
Do us all a favor and take Mr. Spieckerman off your guest list. He advances our knowledge
not a bit. He is merely one of the Bush claque. As for his admired public servant, John Bolton,
rarely does this country produce so maniacal a political operator. Giving Bolton a responsible
position was Trump's most egregious personnel error.
"... The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' ..."
"... Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers. ..."
"... Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. ..."
Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public
confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the
conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the
story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit.
(Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with
youthful lust.)
Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot
misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley
summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the
course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not
any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in
an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been
a fraud, philosophically.' Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.
Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break
compared with our home grown rightwingers.
abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many
useful insights:
A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional
experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of
the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong.
Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that
"fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one
forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he
imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the
slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at
all.
Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
"Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read."
When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out
that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never
actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
Jerry Vinokurov 01.28.19 at 2:22 pm (no link)
Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely,
that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre
community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more
reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It's "funny" because many of them are plainly
anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because
they're virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting
to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but
this was a revelation to me.
Jerry Vinokurov@ 23 : A
small potatoes objection/question. Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community,
including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of
individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of
emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more
reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
It's hard for me to say because I don't really have much exposure this culture's Cuban
counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they're
substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that
the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war
stuff isn't a huge motivator. I can't think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever
stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of
vote or other political activity.
They may not care much for it and I'm sure being e.g. LGBT
in this community is no picnic, but it's not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is.
I can't possibly count how many conversations I've had with relatives complaining about this
or that "onerous" regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same
"why are they wasting our money" and "I don't want to pay for this" tirade.
Needless to say
the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of
how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn't stop them
from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it's doing, it's doing it
wrong.
Glen
has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an
incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin' principle is what makes him, in
foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP
cannot stomach that, though they're happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.
January 25, 2019 I've been thinking about political converts
for a long time . At The New
Yorker , I take up the problem of Max Boot, who probably needs no introduction, and Derek
Black, who was a leading white supremacist and then renounced it all.
Here's a taste:
Max Boot, a longtime conservative who recently broke with the right over the nomination and
election of Donald
Trump , registered as a Republican in 1988. At the time, Boot writes in " The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ," he wanted to join the "party of ideas." A movement
of highbrows, conservatism was the work of the "learned, worldly, elitist, and eccentric lot"
of writers at National Review , "far removed from the simple-minded, cracker-barrel
populists who have taken control of the conservative movement today." It was a movement, Boot
explains at the outset, "inspired by Barry Goldwater's canonical text from 1960, The
Conscience of a Conservative . I believed in that movement, and served it my whole
life."
A hundred and seventy-five pages later, Boot inadvertently lets slip that reading
Goldwater's "actual words" was something he hadn't done until after Trump's election.
Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read.
But it turns out that the problem of Boot and Black goes much deeper than what
books were or weren't read. If you compare the conversions from left to right -- think Arthur
Koestler, James Burnham, Whittaker Chambers, and so on -- with those from right to left, you
find something interesting.
Curiously, the movement from right to left has never played an equivalent role in modern
politics. Not only are there fewer converts in that direction, but those conversions haven't
plowed as fertile a field as their counterparts have.
As your piece alludes to but does not say outright, Boot was a right-wing intellectual
because he said he was a right-wing intellectual. He celebrated, but hadn't actually
read , Goldwater and Buckley; his grasp of his other icons was equally weak. I
remember reading his stuff in UC Berkeley's The Daily Californian back in the middle
1980s and getting the impression that Boot was another dope-with-a-thesaurus like George F.
Will, with added militarist bloodthirst.
The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low, and in the present
day we see examples like Jonah Goldberg and Megan McArdle putting out high school
current-events assignments and being lauded as original thinkers. It's probably a reflection
of the preferences of the people who own the presses.
BruceJ 01.25.19 at 9:26 pm (no link)
Personally, I rather doubt Boot is truly repenting, but is rather merely taking advantage of
the zeitgeist.
"Anti-Trump Repentant Right" sells books, gets him on teevee, etc. The proof of the
pudding will be what he does when the neocons are ascendant again.
The likes of Michael Gerson and David Frum sliding from the Bush II White House to
"George Boosh?? Never heard of him!" critics of the right always seemed awfully
convenient for their post-WH careers.
As DocAmazing says, it's a reflection of the people who own the presses, of which there
has always been an orders of magnitude greater number, prominence and paychecks on the right
rather than the left.
The vast ( hugely interconnected, almost incestuously so) network of RW "Think Tanks" and
publishing houses funded by wealthy oligarchs pretty much guarantees a safe haven for
Left->Right apostates.
There really isn't such a network for the reverse. The L->R crownd don't have to spend
the long years in the wilderness atoning for their sins, like the R->L side does. (And
given the damage the Right has done over recent decades, there is much atonement needed )
b9n10nt 01.25.19 at 11:25 pm (no link)
Here's the lesson I'd expect from Corey: reactionaries need to continually contrive new
rationalizations for reaction, and might thus be inspired by Leftist rhetoric for the task.
The Left does not need to similarly borrow from the Right because there's no need to hide its
pursuit of liberty, equality, and solidarity before a popular audience. Hence, left
–> right converts are useful to the right in ways that right–>left converts
are not. & then you've got your empirical evidence to support the theory.
The emphasis, however, was on experience: the right needs to experience the vitality of
revolution to understand it and inform counter-revolution. This seems like a weaker
explanation, but perhaps the stronger argument would have seemed too shrill for the New
Yorker?
Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot
misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley
summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the
course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not
any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in
an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been
a fraud, philosophically.'
Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.
Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break
compared with our home grown rightwingers.
abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many
useful insights:
A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional
experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of
the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong.
Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that
"fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one
forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he
imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the
slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at
all.
Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
"Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read."
When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out
that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never
actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
abd 01.26.19 at 8:34 pm (no link)
@3 re neocons, this quote of Boot from Corey Robin's article:
"That my parents and hundreds of thousands of other Soviet Jews were finally able to
leave was due largely to neoconservative foreign policy," Boot writes. "In later life I
would support giving moral concerns a prominent place in US foreign policy, a stance that
has been associated with neoconservatism."
reminded me of an answer that E.L. Doctorow gave to following question from Bill Moyers in
1988:
How do you explain that so many intellectuals today are in service to orthodoxy?
The third element is very interesting, and I think it's been under-reported–and
that is the immense influence of the émigré, Eastern European intellectuals
who've come over here in the past fifteen or twenty years. Many of them are quite brilliant
writers and professors of different disciplines. They have tended to see American life in
terms of their own background and suffering, which has been considerable, as people in
exile from regimes that have done terrible things to them and their families. They come of
the terrible European legacy of monarchism and the reaction to it. So every attempt we make
to legislate some advance in our American society, some social enlightenment, they see as a
dangerous left-wing weakness leading toward totalitarianism. They've had enormous influence
in the American intellectual community. They tend to see things as either/or and feel that
you must be rigidly against any idea of improvement because the idea of perfection is what
kills society and creates totalitarianism. The Utopian ideal leads to revolution. They seem
to forget we had our revolution two hundred years ago. Our history is not theirs.
We've always gone out into the barn of the Constitution and tinkered. That's our very
pragmatic history. I don't think these people understand that. So any time we tune
something up and fix something and make it more just, make it work a little better, they
become alarmed.
I think the most reasonable account of Boot's conversion is that he hasn't converted. He's
profoundly angry at Trump because Trump, to the everlasting shame of our side, is the first
political figure in generations to dare to question US imperialism, and US imperialism is
what Boot is really about. He's mostly a military enthusiast. Were Trump to gin up a war with
Venezuela and/or Iran, Boot would be back on his side in a heartbeat. Blood and Iron!
abd 01.26.19 at 8:49 am (no link)
@13, You may have a point there, given the gullibility of folks in these parts. Finkelstein,
almost admiringly, noted the case of "the Polish émigré hoaxer, Jerzy Kosinski,
who, shrewdly siz[ed] up intellectual culture in America" and plied his rusty wares on the
university lecture with brio until his past caught up with him (many other European
émigrés, e.g. Man Ray, Bruno Bettelheim, etc. also come to mind; google for the
sordid details).
Heck, the moral beacon whom Corey Robin never tires of citing, Hannah Arendt, was also a
habitual "lifter" of material from others
laboring in the archives, not to mention the free ride , intellectually speaking, she got
because of "the widespread belief that philosophical murkiness signals philosophical
profundity."
The direction in which the intellectual impostures listed by Pankaj
Mishra below are "adjusting" to the prevailing winds is something to be expected from
their ilk:
Many journalists have been scrambling, more feverishly since Trump's apotheosis, to
account for the stunningly extensive experience of fear and humiliation across racial and
gender divisions; some have tried to reinvent themselves in heroic resistance to Trump and
authoritarian 'populism'. David Frum, geometer under George W. Bush of an intercontinental
'axis of evil', now locates evil in the White House. Max Boot, self-declared
'neo-imperialist' and exponent of 'savage wars', recently claimed to have become aware of
his 'white privilege'. Ignatieff, advocate of empire-lite and torture-lite, is presently
embattled on behalf of the open society in Mitteleuropa. Goldberg, previously known as
stenographer to Netanyahu, is now Coates's diligent promoter.
DocAmazing #1: "The bar for being a right-wing intellectual has traditionally been low "
Excepting for the brilliance of Corey Robin and a few others, it is no lower than the bar
on the left, but I think you correctly point to the asymmetry in the general acceptance of
the two piles of bosh that are usually produced. But going beyond BruceJ's fingering (at #3)
of the presses and thinktanks for embracing the right bosh, there is a cause in the basic
asymmetry of their political preferences, because the right justifies and praises the system,
while the left does not. This makes it easier for the productions of the right to slide by,
without critical inspection by the large mass of people who just want to get on with their
lives.
More complicated still: in our era the left (or most of it) doesn't want to tear down the
system; it would prefer a mixed economy with more redistribution than we have at present, but
not the destruction of private capitalism. This more nuanced preference can only explain
itself by wading into the deeper ends of economic explanation, while it's still much easier
for the moneyed right to demonize the left using the psychological critique of mere laziness
or lack of initiative. This leaves the left with a more complex rhetorical problem in dealing
with voter preferences than the right has, which, again, is another asymmetry.
I think the winds are not merely shifting, but we are approaching a different and less
stable era. The industrial economy is so successful that its winner-take-all mechanics is
increasing inequality. In the US, the intellectual disaster of the right fabricated its bad
policy of tax cuts and "smaller" government under Reagan, and the contradictions Reagan
engineered took 30 years to crack up the Republican Party until a grifter named Trump could
drive a plough through it. And he of course has come a cropper. At the same juncture, the
presses and thinktanks have fallen in influence due to the internet where everyone is drowned
out regardless of the viability of their ideas. In such a new, unstable, untested environment
perhaps the best approach is the one taken by Warren, AOC, etc. -- hammer on a few big ideas
with broad appeal.
"... No such glasnost ever took place in the pages of the Standard whose reputation has become indelibly wedded to its cheerleading for the calamitous 2003 Iraq War. The neocons had confused the Soviet Union's forfeiting of the cold war with American triumphalism, seizing upon its peaceful conclusion to search for new monsters to destroy abroad, whenever and wherever they could. The Standard itself constantly published taradiddles about the Middle East and Islam. Stephen F. Hayes, its last editor, lauded for his "integrity and courage" in the Trump era by David Brooks, wrote a phantasmagoric book called The Connection: How al Qaeda's Connection With Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America , not to mention reverential biographies of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. ..."
"... For his part, Kristol co-wrote a book with Lawrence F. Kaplan called The War Over Iraq that supported a worldwide crusade for democracy. Far from spreading democracy, the Iraq War ended up not only spreading chaos in the Middle East, but also enabling the rise of Trump. As Carlos Lozada recently observed in The Washington Post , "The Never Trumpers hold everyone culpable for the appeal of Trumpism except, in any worthwhile way, themselves." ..."
"... For most neocons, however, journalism has never been more than a Leninist means to an end -- to form an intellectual vanguard. For it is political influence that the neocons crave. In his memoir, Boot proudly recounts that he served as an adviser to Senator Marco Rubio as well as to Mitt Romney during his run for the presidency in 2012. Kristol worked to destroy the 1993 Clinton Healthcare bill and sought to mold first Dan Quayle, then Sarah Palin, into his political homunculi. During the 2016 primary, he desperately cast about for a viable candidate to oppose Donald Trump and incurred much ridicule when he floated the name of David French, a writer for the National Review . ..."
"... Kristol, Podhoretz, Boot, and others belong to a second generation of neocons that never drifted away from the Democrats toward the Republican Party. Instead, they were right from the beginning. While some have begun to duplicate the odyssey in reverse that neocon elder Norman Podhoretz chronicled in memoirs such as Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends , many seem simply politically adrift, like Russian exiles stranded in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution pining for the ancien régime . ..."
"... For his part, Kristol refused to concede that the GOP was irredeemably tainted by Trump. He acknowledged, "there are recessive genes in the GOP. They were always there and a lot of us didn't want to look too closely. There was a shining moment when the Bill Buckley conservatives came together with the neoconservatives and with Ronald Reagan," but "that went away quickly." Explaining his backing for Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in 2008, he said: "The instinct I had was you had to have a more populist flavor That would be a way to incorporate populist discontent." He concluded, "It will be very different if this ends up being a parenthesis or this is an inflection point where it becomes the culmination, or end point. That's a very different story We're less doomed than what some people say as a party and a movement." ..."
In April 2016, I
attended
a fortieth anniversary gala dinner in Washington, D.C., held by the Ethics and Public Policy Center at the St. Regis Hotel to honor
House Speaker Paul Ryan. The master of ceremonies was William Kristol. Kristol noted that Donald Trump, who won the New York Republican
primary that night to the dismay of the attendees who audibly groaned at the news, had described him as "dopey," the editor of a
"slightly failing magazine," and "very embarrassed to even walk down the street" thanks to his refusal to endorse Trump. Kristol
said, "It's been a tough two or three months of rehabilitation for me." After the audience stopped laughing, Kristol concluded: "This
should be a Trump-free evening so that's enough Trump."
It hasn't worked out that way. Instead, Kristol watched helplessly as Trump denounced the Iraq War as a fraud and trumpeted an
America First doctrine that repudiated the neocon crusading foreign policy doctrine. This past Friday, the saga of the neocons took
a fresh and unexpected turn with the demise of The Weekly Standard . Launched as a "redoubt of conservatism" by Kristol, Fred
Barnes, and John Podhoretz, with the backing of the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch, the Standard , TheNew
Yorkernoted in May 1995
, "will become the nation's only weekly journal of conservative opinion yet it will rely for editorial inspiration on a liberal model:
The New Republic . Just as Herbert Croly began The New Republic , in 1914, to conduct the intellectual debate at the
climax of the Progressive Era, The Standard appears at the dawn of a conservative one."
That was then. Now Colorado billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who bought the magazine from Murdoch in 2007, has decided to pull
the plug, in part over the brickbats the Standard lobbed at Trump. If so, his move has pleased the president. On Saturday,
Trump tweeted : "The pathetic
and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke
and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!"
Even as Trump gloats over Anschutz's move, however, a chorus of neocons is indicting Anschutz for willfully ending a golden age
of journalism. Alfred Kazin
observed in A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment , "Jews on the American scene. The neoconservatives have made it right
with the boss their grandfathers used to picket." But New York Times columnist David Brooks
echoedCommentary editor John Podhoretz in angrily accusing Anschutz of, in effect, committing murder and behaving like
a "run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire," On Monday, Podhoretz went on to deem Representative Steve King a "disgusting liar and a
stain on American public life" for assenting with Trump's claims about the Standard . Meanwhile, Max Boot, the author of
The Corrosion of Conservatism ,
wrote in TheWashington Post , "I devoutly hope a new Standard will arise to lead the Republican Party out
of the moral and political oblivion to which the president is consigning it."
It's an unlikely prospect. The most provocative and inventive writing on the right about Trump doesn't come from the neocons --
who are essentially Johnny-come-latelies in their criticisms of the GOP -- but from publications such as TheAmerican Conservative
, American Affairs, or even National Review . In TheAmerican Conservative , Daniel Larison pillories
the Trump administration for its recklessly high military budget -- something no neocon would aver -- and for repudiating the Iran
nuclear deal, while William Ruger deems neocon historian Robert Kagan's latest book, The Jungle Grows Back , a recipe for
"forever war."
At the same time, in The American Conservative 'slatest
issue , the historian Robert W. Merry declares that Trump will be a one-term president, partly because his foreign policy stands
repudiate his campaign promises. His point is well-taken. It's ironic that the Standard has imploded at the very moment when
the neocons' nemesis, Trump, has stolen their lunch money with an aggressively militarist foreign policy that is pro-Israel, hostile
to Iran and China, and disdainful of the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and other international institutions.
The only thing missing from the Trump program is the patina of democracy promotion. Perhaps the neocons have become a victim of their
own success; in Merry's words:
Trump himself has already reversed his campaign stance regarding the country's foreign policy, having installed Mike Pompeo
as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser -- men who personify the prevailing establishment outlook of
hegemonic liberalism. Thus, because of Trump's political and leadership shortcomings, Trump voters will see their hopes of a new
direction for America trampled and thwarted.
Julius Krein, the editor of American Affairs ,
disavowed
his support for Trump after the Charlottesville demonstrations in TheNew York Times , but his journal continues to
publish lengthy essays taking aim at neoliberal economic doctrines and includes well-known authors on the left such as
John B. Judis . And in National Review
, Michael Brendan Dougherty is attempting to formulate a populist approach toward workers and education. In a
December 17 cover story
, he politely acknowledges that the "Trump presidency is not what conservatives would have designed for themselves" but suggests
"conservatives should allow themselves to see that America's great middle class was the vessel for its previous electoral victories
and the preservation of the American order."
No such glasnost ever took place in the pages of the Standard whose reputation has become indelibly wedded to its cheerleading
for the calamitous 2003 Iraq War. The neocons had confused the Soviet Union's forfeiting of the cold war with American triumphalism,
seizing upon its peaceful conclusion to search for new monsters to destroy abroad, whenever and wherever they could. The Standard
itself constantly published taradiddles about the Middle East and Islam. Stephen F. Hayes, its last editor, lauded for his "integrity
and courage" in the Trump era by David Brooks, wrote a phantasmagoric book called The Connection: How al Qaeda's Connection With
Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America , not to mention reverential biographies of Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz.
For his part, Kristol co-wrote a book with Lawrence F. Kaplan called The War Over Iraq that supported a worldwide crusade
for democracy. Far from spreading democracy, the Iraq War ended up not only spreading chaos in the Middle East, but also enabling
the rise of Trump. As Carlos Lozada
recently observed in The Washington Post , "The Never Trumpers hold everyone culpable for the appeal of Trumpism except, in any
worthwhile way, themselves."
Indeed, it would be difficult to point to any significant essays that the Standard has published in recent years. Many
of the more prominent neocons who originally wrote for it have moved on to more mainstream outlets. TheWashington Post
, whose editorial page championed the Iraq War, has become a kind of bulletin board for Never Trumpers, including Max Boot, a regular
on CNN and a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and Jennifer Rubin, a former contributor to Human Events , Commentary
, and the Standard . Both Bari Weiss and Bret Stephens decamped from TheWall Street Journal for higher profile
jobs at TheNew York Times . Robert Kagan has long since left the Standard and the Project for the New American
Century behind to become a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. David Frum, who regularly wrote for the Standard and
was a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a staff writer at TheAtlantic .
For most neocons, however, journalism has never been more than a Leninist means to an end -- to form an intellectual vanguard.
For it is political influence that the neocons crave. In his memoir, Boot proudly recounts that he served as an adviser to Senator
Marco Rubio as well as to Mitt Romney during his run for the presidency in 2012. Kristol worked to destroy the 1993 Clinton Healthcare
bill and sought to mold first Dan Quayle, then Sarah Palin, into his political homunculi. During the 2016 primary, he desperately
cast about for a viable candidate to oppose Donald Trump and incurred much ridicule when he floated the name of David French, a writer
for the National Review .
Kristol, Podhoretz, Boot, and others belong to a second generation of neocons that never drifted away from the Democrats toward
the Republican Party. Instead, they were right from the beginning. While some have begun to duplicate the odyssey in reverse that
neocon elder Norman Podhoretz chronicled in memoirs such as Breaking Ranks and Ex-Friends , many seem simply politically
adrift, like Russian exiles stranded in Paris after the Bolshevik revolution pining for the ancien régime .
A
conference attended by about a hundred people last week at the
Niskanen Center
, a small think tank located near Capitol Hill, offered a timely reminder of their losses. The conference was not, as one might have
expected in the past, held at the American Enterprise Institute, whose senior vice president, Danielle Pletka, has suggested that
fears of climate change may be overblown, or the Heritage Foundation. Rather, it is the Niskanen Center that has become the unofficial
headquarters of what amounts to a rebel alliance of Democrats and Republicans united against Trump. Over the past year, they have
met on Tuesday mornings for off-the-record events under the auspices of a group called the Meeting of the Concerned, whose members
include George Conway, the husband of Kellyanne, and David Frum. In November, the group released
a formal
statement in support of Special Counsel Robert Mueller that was signed by Mickey Edwards, the former chairman of the House Republican
Policy Committee, and Kristol, among others.
The conference, which opened with moderate Republican Maryland Governor Larry Hogan reminding the attendees that his father, a
congressman, had helped kickstart the impeachment hearings against Richard M. Nixon, was titled "Starting Over: the Center-Right
After Trump." But Kristol, Jennifer Rubin, Mona Charen, the author of a book about liberals during the cold war titled Useful
Idiots , and Peter Wehner, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, grappled uneasily with the historical legacy of the GOP
and its implications for Trump's rise.
The center's president, Jerry Taylor, suggested, "There was a time not that long ago when you all had the commanding heights of
the world of conservative public intellectuals. Today, that's not the case. You've have been displaced." Rubin was incredulous. "Displaced,
displaced!" she expostulated. Then she went on to blame the GOP. "Intellectuals don't do well in a nativist, know-nothing party,"
said Rubin. "The party is not going to accept public intellectuals in the way it did."
For his part, Kristol refused to concede that the GOP was irredeemably tainted by Trump. He acknowledged, "there are recessive
genes in the GOP. They were always there and a lot of us didn't want to look too closely. There was a shining moment when the Bill
Buckley conservatives came together with the neoconservatives and with Ronald Reagan," but "that went away quickly." Explaining his
backing for Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate in 2008, he said: "The instinct I had was you had to have a more populist flavor
That would be a way to incorporate populist discontent." He concluded, "It will be very different if this ends up being a parenthesis
or this is an inflection point where it becomes the culmination, or end point. That's a very different story We're less doomed than
what some people say as a party and a movement."
So far, though, his efforts at regime change in Washington have proven as illusory as his dreams of transforming Iraq into a democracy
overnight.
1) continue to control the "prestige" outlets: academia, newspapers, major publishers,
2) censor the huge online platforms like Twitter and YouTube,
3) confine the samizdat to small-scale blogs and independent websites,
4) crush any sort of opposition smearing it using anti-Semimuticm chanrge (to keep the opposition confined to online ghettos).
5. ifrnore the rest
It's not going to work, though.
Notable quotes:
"... Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what he has termed, "benevolent global hegemony." ..."
"... In " The Case for the Empire ," Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can't make a "benevolent hegemony" omelet without breaking a few eggs. ..."
"... A year after Kristol published Last's essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct influence of neocons like Kristol and Last. ..."
"... In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq's security forces under the protective aegis of the US Air Force in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi's outfit was able to thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). And after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered much of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq). ..."
"... The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation, and to instead capitalize on America's new peerless preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped in the bud, and the new "unipolar moment" would last forever. ..."
"... What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell, the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut "police action" of unipolar "Team America, World Police." Paul Wolfowitz , the neocon and Iraq War architect, considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, recalled : ..."
"... Also in 1996, David Wurmser wrote a strategy document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was co-signed by Wurmser's fellow neocons and future Iraq War architects Richard Perle and Douglas Feith . "A Clean Break" called for regime change in Iraq as a "means" of "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." Syria itself was a target because it "challenges Israel on Lebanese soil." It primarily does this by, along with Iran, supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah, which arose in the 80s out of the local resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils Israel's ambitions in that country. ..."
"... The neocons used to be Democrats in the big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. After the Vietnam War and the rise of the anti-war New Left, the Democratic Party's commitment to the Cold War waned, so the neocons switched to the Republicans in disgust. ..."
"... According to investigative reporter Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first taste of power within the Reagan administration, in which positions were held by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot Abrams , and Michael Ledeen . They were especially influential during Reagan's first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare, and profligate defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan remembered so fondly in their "Neo-Reaganite" manifesto. ..."
Bill Kristol watches Star Wars
movies, he roots for the Galactic Empire. The leading neocon recently caused a social media
disturbance
in the Force when he tweeted this predilection for the Dark Side following the debut of the final trailer for Star Wars: The
Force Awakens .
Kristol sees the Empire as basically a galaxy-wide extrapolation of what he has long wanted the US to have over the Earth: what
he has termed, "benevolent global hegemony."
Kristol, founder and editor of neocon flagship magazine The Weekly Standard, responded to scandalized critics by linking
to a 2002 essay from the Standard's blog that justifies even the worst of Darth Vader's atrocities. In "
The Case for the
Empire ," Jonathan V. Last made a Kristolian argument that you can't make a "benevolent hegemony" omelet without breaking a few
eggs.
And what if those broken eggs are civilians, like Luke Skywalker's uncle and aunt who were gunned down by Imperial Stormtroopers
in their home on the Middle Eastern-looking arid planet of Tatooine (filmed on location in Tunisia)? Well, as Last sincerely argued,
Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru hid Luke and harbored the fugitive droids R2D2 and C3P0; so they were "traitors" who were aiding the rebellion
and deserved to be field-executed.
A year after Kristol published Last's essay, large numbers of civilians were killed by American Imperial Stormtroopers in their
actual Middle Eastern arid homeland of Iraq, thanks largely in part to the direct
influence of neocons like Kristol and Last.
That war was similarly justified in part by the false
allegation that Iraq ruler Saddam Hussein
was harboring and aiding terrorist enemies of the empire like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The civilian-slaughtering siege of
Fallujah , one of
the most brutal episodes of the war, was also specifically justified by the false allegation that the town was harboring Zarqawi.
In reality Hussein had put a death warrant out on Zarqawi, who was hiding from Iraq's security forces under the protective aegis
of the US Air Force in Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. It was only after the Empire precipitated the chaotic
collapse of Iraq that Zarqawi's outfit was able to
thrive and evolve into Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).
And after the Empire precipitated the chaotic collapse of Syria, AQI further mutated into Syrian al-Qaeda (which has conquered much
of Syria) and ISIS (which has conquered much of Syria and Iraq).
And what if the "benevolent hegemony" omelet requires the breaking of "eggs" the size of whole worlds, like how high Imperial
officer Wilhuff Tarkin used the Death Star to obliterate the planet Alderaan? Well, as Last sincerely argued, even Alderaan likely
deserved its fate, since it may have been, "a front for Rebel activity or at least home to many more spies and insurgents " Last
contended that Princess Leia was probably lying when she told the Death Star's commander that the planet had "no weapons."
While Last was writing his apologia for global genocide, his fellow neocons were baselessly arguing that Saddam Hussein was similarly
lying about Iraq not having a weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program. Primarily on that basis, the obliteration of an entire country
began the following year.
And a year after that, President Bush performed a
slapstick comedy act about his failure to find
Iraqi WMDs for a black-tie dinner for radio and television correspondents. The media hacks in his audience, who had obsequiously
helped the neocon-dominated Bush administration lie the country into war, rocked with laughter as thousands of corpses moldered in
Iraq and Arlington. A more sickening display of imperial decadence and degradation has not been seen perhaps since the gladiatorial
audiences of Imperial Rome. This is the hegemonic "benevolence" and "national greatness" that Kristol pines for.
"Benevolent global hegemony" was coined by Kristol and fellow neocon
Robert Kagan in their 1996 Foreign Affairs
article " Toward
a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy ." In that essay, Kristol and Kagan sought to inoculate both the conservative movement and US
foreign policy against the isolationism of Pat Buchanan.
The Soviet menace had recently disappeared, and the Cold War along with it. The neocons were terrified that the American public
would therefore jump at the chance to lay their imperial burdens down. Kristol and Kagan urged their readers to resist that temptation,
and to instead capitalize on America's new peerless preeminence by making it a big-spending, hyper-active, busybody globo-cop. The
newfound predominance must become dominance wherever and whenever possible. That way, any future near-peer competitors would be nipped
in the bud, and the new "unipolar moment" would last forever.
What made this neocon dream seem within reach was the indifference of post-Soviet Russia. The year after the Berlin Wall fell,
the Persian Gulf War against Iraq was the debut "police action" of unipolar "Team America, World Police."
Paul Wolfowitz , the neocon and Iraq War architect,
considered it a successful trial run. As Wesley Clark, former Nato Supreme Allied Commander for Europe,
recalled :
"In 1991, [Wolfowitz] was the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy -- the number 3 position at the Pentagon. And I had gone
to see him when I was a 1-Star General commanding the National Training Center. ( )
And I said, "Mr. Secretary, you must be pretty happy with the performance of the troops in Desert Storm."
And he said: "Yeah, but not really, because the truth is we should have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein, and we didn't But one
thing we did learn is that we can use our military in the region -- in the Middle East -- and the Soviets won't stop us. And
we've got about 5 or 10 years to clean up those old Soviet client regimes -- Syria, Iran, Iraq -- before the next great superpower
comes on to challenge us."
The 1996 "Neo-Reaganite" article was part of a surge of neocon literary activity in the mid-90s. It was in 1995 that Kristol and
John Podhoretz founded The Weekly Standard with funding from right-wing media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
Also in 1996, David Wurmser wrote a strategy
document for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Titled, "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," it was co-signed
by Wurmser's fellow neocons and future Iraq War architects
Richard Perle and
Douglas Feith .
"A Clean Break" called for regime change in
Iraq as a "means" of "weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria." Syria itself was a target because it "challenges Israel
on Lebanese soil." It primarily does this by, along with Iran, supporting the paramilitary group Hezbollah, which arose in the 80s
out of the local resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon, and which continually foils Israel's ambitions in that country.
Later that same year, Wurmser wrote another strategy document, this time for circulation in American and European halls of power,
titled "Coping with Crumbling States: A Western and Israeli Balance of Power Strategy for the Levant."
In "A Clean Break," Wurmser had framed regime change in Iraq and Syria in terms of Israeli regional ambitions.
In "Coping," Wurmser adjusted his message for its broader
Western audience by recasting the very same policies in a Cold War framework.
Wurmser characterized regime change in Iraq and Syria (both ruled by Baathist regimes) as "
expediting the chaotic collapse " of secular-Arab nationalism
in general, and Baathism in particular. He concurred with King Hussein of Jordan that, "the phenomenon of Baathism," was, from the
very beginning, "an agent of foreign, namely Soviet policy." Of course King Hussein was a bit biased on the matter, since his own
Hashemite royal family once ruled both Iraq and Syria. Wurmser argued that:
" the battle over Iraq represents a desperate attempt by residual Soviet bloc allies in the Middle East to block the extension
into the Middle East of the impending collapse that the rest of the Soviet bloc faced in 1989."
Wurmser further derided Baathism in Iraq and Syria as an ideology in a state of "crumbling descent and missing its Soviet patron"
and "no more than a Cold War enemy relic on probation."
Wurmser advised the West to put this anachronistic adversary out of its misery, and to thus, in Kristolian fashion, press America's
Cold War victory on toward its final culmination. Baathism should be supplanted by what he called the "Hashemite option." After their
chaotic collapse, Iraq and Syria would be Hashemite possessions once again. Both would be dominated by the royal house of Jordan,
which in turn, happens to be dominated by the US and Israel.
Wurmser stressed that demolishing Baathism must be the foremost priority in the region. Secular-Arab nationalism should be given
no quarter, not even, he added, for the sake of stemming the tide of Islamic fundamentalism.
Thus we see one of the major reasons why the neocons were such avid anti-Soviets during the Cold War. It is not just that, as
post-Trotskyites, the neocons resented Joseph Stalin for having Leon Trotsky assassinated in Mexico with an ice pick. The Israel-first
neocons' main beef with the Soviets was that, in various disputes and conflicts involving Israel, Russia sided with secular-Arab
nationalist regimes from 1953 onward.
The neocons used to be Democrats in the big-government, Cold Warrior mold of Harry Truman and Henry "Scoop" Jackson. After the
Vietnam War and the rise of the anti-war New Left, the Democratic Party's commitment to the Cold War waned, so the neocons switched
to the Republicans in disgust.
According to investigative reporter
Jim Lobe, the neocons got their first taste of power within the Reagan administration, in which positions were held by neocons such
as Wolfowitz, Perle, Elliot Abrams , and
Michael Ledeen . They were especially influential
during Reagan's first term of saber-rattling, clandestine warfare, and profligate defense spending, which Kristol and Kagan remembered
so fondly in their "Neo-Reaganite" manifesto.
It was then that the neocons helped establish the "Reagan Doctrine." According to neocon columnist
Charles Krauthammer , who coined the
term in 1985, the Reagan Doctrine was characterized by support for anti-communist (in reality often simply anti-leftist) forces around
the whole world.
Since the support was clandestine, the Reagan administration was able to bypass the "Vietnam Syndrome" and project power in spite
of the public's continuing war weariness. (It was left to Reagan's successor, the first President Bush, to announce following his
"splendid little" Gulf War that, "by God, we've kicked the Vietnam Syndrome once and for all!")
Operating covertly, the Reaganites could also use any anti-communist group they found useful, no matter how ruthless and ugly:
from Contra death squads in Nicaragua to the Islamic fundamentalist mujahideen in Afghanistan. Abrams and Ledeen were both involved
in the Iran-Contra affair, and Abrams was convicted (though later pardoned) on related criminal charges.
Kristol's "Neo-Reaganite" co-author Robert Kagan gave the doctrine an even wider and more ambitious interpretation in his book
A Twilight Struggle :
"The Reagan Doctrine has been widely understood to mean only support for anticommunist guerrillas fighting pro-Soviet regimes,
but from the first the doctrine had a broader meaning. Support for anticommunist guerrillas was the logical outgrowth, not the
origin, of a policy of supporting democratic reform or revolution everywhere, in countries ruled by right-wing dictators as well
as by communist parties."
As this description makes plain, neocon policy, from the 1980s to today, has been every bit as fanatical, crusading, and world-revolutionary
as Red Communism was in the neocon propaganda of yesteryear, and that Islam is in the neocon propaganda of today.
The neocons credit Reagan's early belligerence with the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union. But in reality, war is the health
of the State, and Cold War was the
health of Soviet State . The Soviets long used the American menace to frighten the Russian people into rallying around the State
for protection.
After the neocons lost clout within the Reagan administration to "realists" like George Schultz, the later Reagan-Thatcher-Gorbachev
detente began. It was only after that detente lifted the Russian siege atmosphere and quieted existential nuclear nightmares that
the Russian people felt secure enough to demand a changing of the guard.
In 1983, the same year that the first Star Wars trilogy ended, Reagan vilified Soviet Russia in language that Star
Wars fans could understand by dubbing it "the Evil Empire." Years later, having, in Kristol's words, "defeated the evil empire,"
the neocons that Reagan first lifted to power began clamoring for a "neo-Reaganite" global hegemony. And a few years after that,
those same neocons began pointing to the sci-fi Galactic Empire that Reagan implicitly compared to the Soviets as a lovely model
for America!
Fast-forward to return to the neocon literary flowering of the mid-90s. In 1997, the year after writing "Toward a Neo-Reaganite
Foreign Policy" together, Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan co-founded
The Project for a New American
Century (PNAC). The 20th century is often called "the American century," largely due to it being a century of war and American
"victories" in those wars: the two World Wars and the Cold War. The neocons sought to ensure that through the never-ending exercise
of military might, the American global hegemony achieved through those wars would last another hundred years, and that the 21st century
too would be "American."
The organization's founding
statement
of principles called for "a Reaganite policy of military strength and moral clarity" and reads like an executive summary of the
founding duo's "Neo-Reaganite" essay. It was signed by neocons such as Wolfowitz, Abrams,
Norman Podhoretz and
Frank Gaffney ; by future Bush administration
officials such as Dick Cheney ,
Donald Rumsfeld ,
Lewis "Scooter" Libby ; and by other
neocon allies, such as Jeb Bush.
Although PNAC called for interventions ranging from Serbia (to roll back Russian influence in Europe) to Taiwan (to roll back
Chinese influence in Asia), its chief concern was to kick off the restructuring of the Middle East envisioned in "A Clean Break"
and "Coping" by advocating its first step: regime change in Iraq.
The most high-profile parts of this effort were two "open letters" published in 1998, one in January addressed to
President Bill
Clinton , and another in May addressed to
leaders of Congress
. As with its statement of principles, PNAC was able to garner signatures for these letters from a wide range of political luminaries,
including neocons (like Perle), neocon allies (like
John Bolton ), and other non-neocons (like James Woolsey and Robert Zoellick).
The open letters characterized Iraq as "a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold
War," and buttressed this ridiculous claim with the now familiar allegations of Saddam building a WMD program.
Thanks in large part to PNAC's pressure, regime change in Iraq became official US policy in October when Congress passed, and
President Clinton signed, the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. (Notice the Clinton-friendly "humanitarian interventionist" name in spite
of the policy's conservative fear-mongering origins.)
After the Supreme Court delivered George W. Bush the presidency, the neocons were back in the imperial saddle again in 2001: just
in time to make their projected "New American Century" of "Neo-Reaganite Global Hegemony" a reality. The first order of business,
of course, was Iraq.
But some pesky national security officials weren't getting with the program and kept trying to distract the administration with
concerns about some Osama bin Laden character and his Al Qaeda outfit. Apparently they were laboring under some pedestrian notion
that their job was to protect the American people and not to conquer the world.
For example, when National Security Council counterterrorism "czar" Richard Clarke was frantically sounding the alarm over an
imminent terrorist attack on America,Wolfowitz was uncomprehending. As Clarke recalled, the then Deputy Defense Secretary
objected :
"I just don't understand why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden."
Clarke informed him that:
"We are talking about a network of terrorist organizations called al-Qaeda, that happens to be led by bin Laden, and we are
talking about that network because it and it alone poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States."
This simply did not fit in the agenda-driven neocon worldview of Wolfowitz, who responded:
"Well, there are others that do as well, at least as much. Iraqi terrorism for example."
"During that same time period [in 2001], the CIA was raising alarms too. According to Kurt Eichenwald, a former New York
Times reporter given access to the Daily Briefs prepared by the intelligence agencies for President Bush in the spring and
summer of 2001, the CIA
told
the White House by May 1 that 'a group presently in the United States' was planning a terrorist attack. On June 22, the Daily
Brief
warned
that al-Qaeda strikes might be 'imminent.'
But the same Defense Department officials who discounted Clarke's warnings pushed back against the CIA's. According to
Eichenwald's
sources , 'the neoconservative leaders who had recently assumed power at the Pentagon were warning the White House that the
C.I.A. had been fooled; according to this theory, Bin Laden was merely pretending to be planning an attack to distract the administration
from Saddam Hussein, whom the neoconservatives saw as a greater threat.'
By the time Clarke and the CIA got the Bush administration's attention, it was already too late to follow any of the clear leads
that might have been followed to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
The terrorist attacks by Sunni Islamic fundamentalists mostly from the Saudi Kingdom hardly fit the neocon agenda of targeting
the secular-Arab nationalist regimes of Iraq and Syria and the Shiite Republic of Iran: especially since all three of the latter
were mortal enemies of bin Laden types.
But the attackers were, like Iraqis, some kind of Muslims from the general area of the Middle East. And that was good enough for
government work in the American idiocracy. After a youth consumed with state-compelled drudgery, most Americans are so stupid and
incurious that such a meaningless relationship, enhanced with some fabricated "intelligence," was more than enough to
stampede the spooked American herd into supporting the
Iraq War.
As Benjamin Netanyahu once
said , "America is
a thing you can move very easily."
Whether steering the country into war would be easy or not, it was all neocon hands on deck. At the Pentagon there was Wolfowitz
and Perle, with Perle-admirer Rumsfeld as SecDef. Feith was also at Defense, where he set up two new offices for the special purpose
of spinning "intelligence" yarn to tie Saddam with al-Qaeda and to weave fanciful pictures of secret Iraqi WMD programs.
Wurmser himself labored in one of these offices, followed by stints at State aiding neocon-ally Bolton and in the Vice President's
office aiding neocon-ally Cheney along with Scooter Libby.
Iran-Contra convict Abrams was at the National Security Council aiding Condoleezza Rice. And Kristol and Kagan continued to lead
the charge in the media and think tank worlds.
And they pulled it off. Wurmser finally got his "chaotic collapse" in Iraq. And Kristol finally had his invincible, irresistible,
hyper-active hegemony looming over the world like a Death Star.
The post-9/11 pretense-dropping American Empire even had Dick Cheney with his Emperor Palpatine snarl preparing Americans to accept
torture by saying:
"We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will."
The Iraq War ended up backfiring on the neocons. It installed a new regime in Baghdad that was no more favorable toward Israel
and far more favorable toward Israel's enemies Iran and Syria. But the important thing was that Kristol's Death Star was launched
and in orbit. As long as it was still in proactive mode, there was nothing the neocons could not fix with its awful power.
This seemed true even during the Obama presidency. On top of Iraq and Afghanistan, under Obama the American Death Star has demolished
Yemen and Somalia. It also demolished both Syria and Libya, where it continues the Wurmsurite project of precipitating the chaotic
collapse of secular-Arab nationalism. Islamic terror groups including al-Qaeda and ISIS are thriving in that chaos, but the American
Death Star to this day has adhered to Wurmser's de-prioritization of the Islamist threat.
As Yoda said, "Fear is the path to the Dark Side." The neocons have been able to use the fear generated by a massive Islamic fundamentalist
terror attack to pursue their blood-soaked vendetta against secular-Arab nationalists, even to the benefit of the very Islamic fundamentalists
who attacked us, because even after 12 years Americans are still too bigoted and oblivious to distinguish between the two
groups.
Furthermore, Obama has gone beyond Wurmser's regional ambitions and has fulfilled Kristol's busybody dreams of global hegemony
to a much greater extent than Bush ever did. To appease generals and arms merchants worried about his prospective pull-outs from
the Iraqi and Afghan theaters, Obama launched both an imperial "pivot" to Asia and a stealth invasion of Africa. The pull-outs were
aborted, but the continental "pivots" remain. Thus Obama's pretenses as a peace President helped to make his regime the most ambitiously
imperialistic and globe-spanning that history has ever seen.
But the neocons may have overdone it with their Death Star shooting spree, because another great power now seems determined to
put a stop to it. And who is foiling the neocons' Evil Empire? Why none other than the original "Evil Empire": the neocons' old nemesis
Russia.
In 2013, Russia's Putin diplomatically frustrated the neocons' attempt to deliver the coup de grâce to the Syrian regime
with a US air war. Shortly afterward, Robert Kagan's wife Victoria Nuland yanked Ukraine out of Russia's sphere of influence by engineering
a bloody coup in Kiev. Putin countered by bloodlessly annexing the Ukrainian province of Crimea. A proxy war followed between the
US-armed and Western-financed junta in Kiev and pro-Russian separatists in the east of the country.
The US continued to intervene in Syria, heavily sponsoring an insurgency dominated by extremists including al-Qaeda and ISIS.
But recently, Russia decided to intervene militarily. Suddenly, Wolfowitz's lesson from the Gulf War was up in smoke. The neocons
cannot militarily do whatever they want in the Middle East and trust that Russia will stand idly by. Suddenly the arrogant Wolfowitz/Wurmser
dream of crumbling then cleaning up "old Soviet client regimes" and "Cold War enemy relics" had gone poof. Putin decided that Syria
would be one "Cold War relic" turned terrorist playground too many.
Russia's entry into Syria has thrown all of the neocons' schemes into disarray.
By actually working to destroy Syrian al-Qaeda and ISIS instead of just pretending to, as the US and its allies have, Russia threatens
to eliminate the head-chopping bogeymen whose Live Leak-broadcasted brutal antics continually renew in Americans the war-fueling
terror of 9/11. And after Putin had taken the US air strike option off the table, al-Qaeda and ISIS were the neocons most powerful
tools for bringing down the Syrian regime. And now Russia is threatening to take those toys away too.
If Hezbollah and Iran, with Russia's air cover, manage to help save what is left of Syria from the Salafist psychos, they will
be more prestigious in both Syria and Lebanon than ever, and Israel may never be able to dominate its northern neighbors.
The neocons are livid. After the conflicts over Syria and Ukraine in 2013, they had already started ramping up the vilification
of Putin. Now the demonization has gone into overdrive.
One offering in this milieu has been an article by Matthew Continetti in the neocon web site he edits, The Washington Free Beacon.
Titled " A Reagan Doctrine
for the Twenty-First Century ," it obviously aims to be a sequel to Kristol's and Kagan's "Toward a Neo-Reaganite Foreign Policy."
As it turns out, the Russian "Evil Empire" was not defeated after all: only temporarily dormant. And so Continetti's updated Reaganite
manifesto is subtitled, "How to confront Vladimir Putin."
The US military may be staggering around the planet like a drunken, bloated colossus. Yet Continetti still dutifully trots out
all the Kristolian tropes about the need for military assertiveness (more drunken belligerence), massive defense spending (more bloating),
and "a new American century." Reaganism is needed now just as much as in 1996, he avers: in fact, doubly so, for Russia has reemerged
as:
" the greatest military and ideological threat to the United States and to the world order it has built over decades as guarantor
of international security."
Right, just look at all that security sprouting out of all those bomb craters the US has planted throughout much of the world.
Oh wait no, those are terrorists.
Baby-faced Continetti, a Weekly Standard contributor, is quite the apprentice to Sith Lord Kristol, judging from his
ardent faith in the "Benevolent Global Hegemony" dogma. In fact, he even shares Lord Kristol's enthusiasm for "Benevolent Galactic
Hegemony." It was Continetti who kicked off the recent Star Wars /foreign policy brouhaha when he tweeted:
"I've been rooting for the Empire since 1983"
This elicited a concurring response from Kristol, which is what set Twitter atwitter. Of course the whole thing was likely staged
and coordinated between the two neocon operatives.
Unfortunately for the neocons, demonizing Putin over Syria is not nearly as easy as demonizing Putin over Ukraine. With Ukraine,
there was a fairly straight-forward (if false) narrative to build of big bully Russia and plucky underdog Ukraine.
However, it's pretty hard to keep a lid on the fact that Russia is attacking al-Qaeda and ISIS, along with any CIA-trained jihadist
allies are nearby. And it's inescapably unseemly for the US foreign policy establishment to be so bent out of shape about Russia
bombing sworn enemies of the American people, even if it does save some dictator most Americans don't care about one way or the other.
And now that wildly popular wild card Donald Trump is spouting unwelcome common sense to his legions of followers about how standing
back and letting Russia bomb anti-American terrorists is better than starting World War III over it. And this is on top of the fact
that Trump is deflating Jeb Bush's campaign by throwing shade at his brother's neocon legacy, from the failures over 9/11 to the
disastrous decision to regime change Iraq. And the neocon-owned Marco Rubio, who actually adopted "A New American Century" as his
campaign slogan, is similarly making no headway against Trump.
And Russia's involvement in Syria just keeps getting worse for the neocons. Washington threatened to withdraw support from the
Iraqi government if it accepted help from Russia against ISIS. Iraq accepted Russian help anyway. Baghdad has also sent militias
to fight under Russian air cover alongside Syrian, Iranian, and Hezbollah forces.
Even Jordan, that favorite proxy force in Israel's dreams of regional dominance, has begun coordinating with Russia, in spite
of its billion dollars a year of annual aid from Washington. Et tu Jordan?!
Apparently there aren't enough Federal Reserve notes in Janet Yellen's imagination to pay Iraq and Jordan to tolerate living amid
a bin Ladenite maelstrom any longer.
And what is Washington going to do about it if the whole region develops closer ties with Russia? What are the American people
going to let them get away with doing about it? A palace coup in Jordan? Expend more blood and treasure to overthrow the very same
Iraqi government we already lost much blood and treasure in installing? Start a suicidal hot war with nuclear Russia?
And the neocon's imperial dreams are coming apart at the seams outside of the war zones too. The new Prime Minister of Canada
just announced he will pull out of America's war in the Levant. Europe wants to compromise with Russia on both Ukraine and Syria,
and this willingness will grow as the refugee crisis it is facing worsens. Obama made a nuclear deal with Iran and initiated detente
with Cuba. And worst of all for neocons, the Israeli occupation of Palestine is being de-legitimized by the bourgeoning BDS movement
and by images of its own brutality propagating through social media, along with translations of its hateful rhetoric.
The neocons bit off more than they could chew, and their Galactic Empire is falling apart before it could even fully conquer its
first planet.
Nearly all empires end due to over-extension. If brave people from Ottawa to Baghdad simply say "enough" within a brief space
of time, hopefully this empire can dissolve relatively peacefully like the Soviet Empire did, leaving its host civilization intact,
instead of dragging that civilization into oblivion along with it like the Roman Empire did.
But beware, the imperial war party will not go quietly into the night, unless we in their domestic tax base insist that there
is no other way. If, in desperation, they start calling for things like more boots on the ground, reinstating the draft, or declaring
World War III on Russia and its Middle Eastern allies, we must stand up and say with firm voices something along the lines of the
following:
No. You will not have my son for your wars. And we will not surrender any more of our liberty. We will no longer yield to a regime
led by a neocon clique that threatens to extinguish the human race. Your power fantasy of universal empire is over. Just let it go.
Or, as Anakin finally did when the Emperor came for his son, we will hurl your tyranny into the abyss.
Tax havens are used as an instrument to increase the profitability of US multinationals at the expense of
the public, according to investigative economist and lawyer James Henry.
He told RT that there's a tiny group of the world's elite professionals, banks, law firms, and accounting
firms that make a nice living from the global tax haven industry. Multinational companies, and their
shareholders to some extent, have benefitted from the fact that they were able to park US profits
offshore and avoid paying US corporate income tax.
"The rest of us who have to pay for the taxes that corporations are not paying, are seeing the
race to the bottom, we're seeing many countries around the world slashing corporate taxes and putting
more of the costs of the government on ordinary taxpayers,"
said Henry, a senior advisor at the Tax
Justice Network.
He explained that America's wealthy kleptocrats, tax-dodgers, and particularly multinational companies
have been massively parking money offshore. By 2017, US multinationals have
"accumulated about $2.6
trillion offshore while they didn't have to pay the 35 percent US corporate tax,"
the economist
said.
Henry points out that the Trump administration has slashed that tax to about 15 percent and now they
have eight years to pay it while not even being required to repatriate the money hoarded offshore.
"The new tax bill was a disaster but it did benefit the major companies by allowing them to get
their $2.6 trillion back home tax free,"
Henry said.
The senior fellow at Yale noted that bringing the tax rate back to less than five percent from the
current fifteen, would mean
"a $600 – 800 billion gift to the wealthiest companies on the planet."
Ninety percent of corporate shares are owned by the top one percent, he said.
Tax havens are used as an instrument to increase the role of profitability of the US multinationals
and the oil companies all use tax havens aggressively to reduce taxation, according to Henry.
In general, since the financial crisis the world has increased its debt levels to an unprecedented
proportion. So, the countries tended to borrow to fill the gap.
"It would go a long way over time
toward chipping away from the massive debt burden that we have."
The US has actually become a safe haven of its own, Henry said, adding that there's no beneficial
ownership reporting, no country by country reporting.
"The US has some of the most aggressive
enablers on the planet – accounting firms and law firms that are enabling this activity. A lot of
multinationals that have been exploiting the tax haven system are US companies like Apple, Google, and
Microsoft."
While historically the US has always been a proponent of a progressive taxation lately that's been
lagging, he stressed.
In a flash, the US has scrapped the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty,
which safeguarded Europe and the world from a deadly US-Russia arms race. This is particularly
bad news for Europeans.
Russia must be feeling a lot like the Native Indians these days with regards to treaties
signed with the duplicitous Americans. For the second time in as many decades, the US has gone
back on its word, removing another pillar from the global arms reduction architecture.
The Trump administration, in its infinite wisdom, announced on the weekend it
would freeze US participation in the INF " for 180 days ," which, from a military perspective,
must be interpreted to mean forever. In the spirit of reciprocity, Vladimir Putin, expressing
regret that Russia " could not save " the Cold War treaty, said he would be forced to follow
suit.
The Russian leader emphasized, however, that Moscow would not deploy intermediate or smaller
range weapons " until the same type of American weapons " were placed in Europe or elsewhere in
the world.
This latest ratcheting up of tensions between Moscow and Washington was wholly avoidable
– that is, if avoiding confrontation is a goal of the US. Clearly, it is not. The
unpredictable hotheads now dictating foreign policy in the Trump administration, particularly
National Security Advisor John Bolton, a veteran hawk who the Washington Post recently
called a " serial arms control killer, " have somehow concluded that playing a game of
nuclear chicken on the European continent with Russia is the best way to resolve bilateral
issues.
The White House appears to be incensed over Russia's upgrade of a cruise missile, the
'9M729', which it claims exceeds the 500-km flight threshold set down by the treaty. The INF
treaty specifically banned the development, deployment, and testing of ground-based missiles
with a range between 500km and 5,500km (310-3,400 miles).
In fact, the development of this weapon has so irked the Trump administration that last year
the US Ambassador to NATO, Kay Bailey Hutchison, warned
Russia that if it did not halt its development NATO would be forced to " take out " the
missile. Although Hutchison later backtracked on the hyperbole, saying she did not mean to
suggest a preemptive strike on Russia, the remark nevertheless underscored the gravity of the
situation.
The obvious question is: does the US have legitimate grounds to be concerned over this
cruise missile, one of the latest in a series of new weapon systems to be
rolled out by the Russian military? Well, if they did have real cause for concern, they
deliberately missed several opportunities to examine the weapon firsthand. In fact, Moscow
invited US Secretary
of State Mike Pompeo to attend a public presentation where Russian military brass were on hand
to field queries about the missile. Yet the Americans snubbed the event, which could have
persuaded them to think twice before dumping a landmark arms control treaty.
On this point, it would have been refreshing to hear some impartial European voices weighing
in on the matter. After all, in the event of another arms race between the US and Russia, the
European continent will once again be forced to wear a large crosshairs on its back. Instead,
EU leaders predictably approached the issue from the American stance, parroting the narrative
that Russia, the perennial bogeyman, is in violation of the INF.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel, for example, without providing a shred of evidence,
said ,
"It is clear to us that Russia has violated this treaty the important thing is to keep the
window for dialogue open."
Immediately assuming Russia's guilt seems to be a non-starter for any sort of productive
negotiations.
What's behind America's madness?
In order to get a clearer picture of what exactly is motivating Washington's reckless
behavior, it is essential to remember that the Trump administration's withdrawal from the INF
is just the latest in a long string of aggressive moves against Russia . Indeed, this is not
the first time Washington has torn up an arms agreement with Moscow.
In 2002, the Bush administration terminated the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM
Treaty), which maintained something of a suicide pact between the Cold War nuclear rivals known
as 'mutually assured destruction'. From there it has been all downhill for bilateral
relations.
With the ABM Treaty swept away, the Bush and subsequent Obama administration proceeded to
unilaterally build – despite repeated offers from Moscow to cooperate on the system
– a US missile defense shield in Eastern Europe, just a stone's throw from the Russian
border. In May 2016, NATO announced its missile defense base in Romania was fully operational.
Following the announcement, Mikhail Ulyanov, head of the Russian Foreign Ministry's department
for arms control issues, warned that not only did the
US missile defense system threaten the strategic balance between nuclear powers, the launchers
in Romania could easily be re-fitted with offensive cruise missiles, thereby turning a shield
into a sword at a moment's notice.
In other words, Washington is now accusing Moscow of violating an arms control treaty that
it itself had most likely violated almost three years ago.
Pierre-Emmanuel Thomann, a geopolitics analyst from Paris 8 University, told RT this is the
desired outcome Washington was looking for, which already decided " beforehand to get out of
the treaty " irrespective of possible concessions from Moscow.
" The US already destabilized the nuclear balance when they decided to get out of the ABM
treaty in 2002, and when you look at a map the United States [is] putting missile defense
bases all around Eurasia, creating a feeling of encirclement in Russia and China ," Thomann
said.
This leads us to another possible reason why the Trump administration made the rash decision
to kill the INF treaty, and that is due to the huge strides made by the Chinese military of
late. Last year, as just one example, a Chinese firm reportedly completed the successful
launch of a supersonic missile, which the Chinese government said could compete on
international markets.
China, which is not bound by the conditions set down by the INF, has undergone breakneck
militarization ever since. Yes, the United States became an existential threat to Beijing when
the Obama administration announced the so-called '
pivot to Asia '. This disastrous doctrine saw a large chunk of US naval forces enter the
Pacific theater. Thus, Washington may be trying to bring the Chinese and Russians into some
sort of new three-way arms control treaty, but if that were true, it seems to be going about it
in the worst possible way.
Whatever the ultimate cause may be, the United States and its quest for global supremacy, in
cooperation with the European Union, which behaves like a powerless vassal state inside of the
'American empire', must assume a heavy part of the blame for the increasingly perilous state of
global relations today.
Konstantin Kosachev, head of the foreign affairs committee in the upper house of Russia's
parliament, adequately summed up the fate of the world following the latest US withdrawal from
yet another arms reduction pact.
" I 'congratulate' the whole world ," Kosachev told the Russian Senate.
" The United States has taken another step toward its destruction today. "
CIA Was Aiding Afghan Jihadists Before the Soviet Invasion
by Nauman
Sadiq Posted on
February 05, 2019 February 1, 2019 Originally, there were four parties involved in the
Afghan conflict which are mainly responsible for the debacle in the Af-Pak region. Firstly,
the former Soviet Union which invaded Afghanistan in December 1979. Secondly, Pakistan's
security agencies which nurtured the Afghan jihadists on the behest of Washington.
Thirdly, Saudi Arabia and the rest of oil-rich Gulf states which generously funded the
jihadists to promote their Wahhabi-Salafi ideology. And last but not the least, the Western
capitals which funded, provided weapons and internationally legitimized the erstwhile
"freedom fighters" to use them against a competing ideology, global communism, which posed a
threat to the Western corporate interests all over the world.
Regarding the objectives of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979, the then
American envoy to Kabul, Adolph "Spike" Dubs, was assassinated on Feb. 14, 1979, the same day
that Iranian revolutionaries stormed the US embassy in Tehran.
According to recently
declassified documents of the White House, CIA and State Department, as reported by Tim
Weiner for The Washington Post , the CIA was aiding Afghan jihadists before the
Soviets invaded in 1979.
President Jimmy Carter signed the CIA directive to arm the Afghan jihadists in July 1979,
whereas the former Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December the same year. That the CIA
was arming the Afghan jihadists six months before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan has been
proven by the State Department's declassified documents; fact of the matter, however, is that
the nexus between the CIA, Pakistan's security agencies and the Gulf states to train and arm
the Afghan jihadists against the former Soviet Union was formed several years before the
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
Historically, Pakistan's military first used the Islamists of Jamaat-e-Islami during the
Bangladesh war of liberation in the late 1960s against the Bangladeshi nationalist Mukti
Bahini liberation movement of Sheikh Mujib-ur-Rahman – the father of current prime
minister of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina Wajed, and the founder of Bangladesh, which was then a
province of Pakistan and known as East Pakistan before the independence of Bangladesh in
1971.
Jamaat-e-Islami is a far-right Islamist movement in Pakistan, India and Bangladesh –
analogous to the Muslim Brotherhood political party in Egypt and Turkey – several of
whose leaders have recently been hanged by the Bangladeshi nationalist government of Prime
Minister Sheikh Hasina Wajed for committing massacres of Bangladeshi civilians on behalf of
Pakistan's military during the late 1960s.
Then, during the 1970s, Pakistan's then-Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto began aiding
the Afghan Islamists against Sardar Daud's government, who had toppled his first cousin King
Zahir Shah in a palace coup in 1973 and had proclaimed himself the president of
Afghanistan.
Sardar Daud was a Pashtun nationalist and laid claim to Pakistan's northwestern
Pashtun-majority province. Pakistan's security establishment was wary of his irredentist
claims and used Islamists to weaken his rule in Afghanistan. He was eventually assassinated
in 1978 as a result of the Saur Revolution led by the Afghan communists.
Pakistan's support to the Islamists with the Saudi petrodollars and Washington's
blessings, however, kindled the fires of Islamic insurgencies in the entire region comprising
Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Soviet Central Asian States.
The former Soviet Union was wary that its forty-million Muslims were susceptible to
radicalism, because Islamic radicalism was infiltrating across the border into the Central
Asian States from Afghanistan. Therefore, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December
1979 in support of the Afghan communists to forestall the likelihood of Islamic insurgencies
spreading to the Central Asian States bordering Afghanistan.
Even the American President Donald Trump
recently admitted : "The reason Russia invaded Afghanistan was because terrorists were
going into Russia; they were right to be there." Incidentally, Trump also implied the reason
why Soviet Union collapsed was due to the economic burden of the Soviet-Afghan War, as he was
making a point about the withdrawal of American forces from Syria and Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding, in the Soviet-Afghan War between the capitalist and communist blocs,
Saudi Arabia and the rest of Gulf's petro-monarchies took the side of the capitalist bloc
because the former Soviet Union and Central Asian states produce more energy and consume
less. Thus, the Soviet-led bloc was a net exporter of energy whereas the Western capitalist
bloc was a net importer.
It suited the economic interests of the oil-rich Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries
to maintain and strengthen a supplier-consumer relationship with the Western capitalist bloc.
Now, the BRICS countries are equally hungry for the Middle East's energy, but it's a recent
development. During the Cold War, an alliance with the industrialized Western nations suited
the economic interests of the Gulf countries.
Regarding the motives of the belligerents involved, the Americans wanted to take revenge
for their defeat at the hands of communists in Vietnam, the Gulf countries had forged close
economic ties with the Western bloc and Pakistan was dependent on the Western military aid,
hence it didn't have a choice but to toe Washington's policy in Afghanistan.
In the end, the Soviet-Afghan War proved to be a "bear trap" and the former Soviet Union
was eventually defeated and was subsequently dissolved in December 1991. It did not collapse
because of the Afghan Jihad but that was an important factor contributing to the dissolution
of the Soviet Union.
Regardless, more than twenty years before the declassification of the State Department
documents as mentioned in the aforementioned Washington Post report, in the 1998
interview to the alternative news outlet The CounterPunch Magazine , former
National Security Advisor to President Jimmy Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, confessed that the
president signed the directive to provide secret aid to the Afghan jihadists in July 1979,
whereas the Soviet Army invaded Afghanistan six months later in December 1979.
Here is a poignant excerpt from the interview: The interviewer puts the question: "And
neither do you regret having supported the Islamic jihadists, having given arms and advice to
future terrorists?" Brzezinski replies: "What is most important to the history of the world?
The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation
of Central Europe and the end of the Cold War?"
Despite the crass insensitivity, one must give credit to Zbigniew Brzezinski that at least
he had the courage to speak the unembellished truth. It's worth noting, however, that the
aforementioned interview was recorded in 1998. After the 9/11 terror attack, no Western
policymaker can now dare to be as blunt and forthright as Brzezinski.
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused
on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and
petro-imperialism.
"... Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side ..."
I don't agree with Jimmy Dore on much, but he and Tucker are 100% right about Syria. There is a segment of the left and right
that aren't that far apart, but we keep getting manipulated to hate each other.
Jimmy, Just admit that you like and agree with Tucker. Every Tucker video has the premise of, "I disagree with 99% of what
Tucker says" or "If Tucker sees this then everyone should see it." Tucker is an interesting thinker who doesn't tow a party
line. We need more people like Jimmy and Tucker in the news. This is easily the 10th video of Jimmy taking Tucker's side
.
Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project.
Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran
Why are we there? To destabilize and baulkanize the remaining Middle East Who are we there for? For the greater 1srae1 project.
Who is isis? Massads people. What is our objective? Oil pipelines for 1srae1. Who are we going after next? Iran
Jimmy Dore: the only leftist journalist with any integrity. I legitimately believe that while he's wrong all the time (to my
far-right view), he's not lying.
Most important part in my opinion is comment about christians celebrating Christmass in Damascus. They wouldn't celebrate under
Al Nusra or Isis or other wahabi supported fractions, but they are celebrating under Assad. By the way US government is in some
way protecting HTS in Idlib wich is rebranded Al Nusra, Syrian ofshoot of Al Kaida so Assad army is not attacking them.
Pro war people don't just want to be there for the sake of it. They want to have US forces on the ground there for a whole
host of reason all related to maintaining US hegemony wherever they can. We have forces deployed throughout the middle east because
we want to be the primary hegemon in the middle east. Our primacy is threatened by no one nation but by a coalition of anti US
nations particularly Iran, Syria and Syria's longstanding alliance with Russia.
I find it a shame that the western nations are vilifying Russia as Putin hates the globalists and is fighting against the terrorists.
It appears that Russia should be our allies rather than Isra Hell and the Saudi regime. Putin was invited by Assad to help him
rid his country of the terrorists but the US weren't asked and just illegally invaded. Out of interest why does the US support
Isra hell when it has over 300 nukes but it thinks Iran is a problem? Isn't it more that Iran doesn't have a central (Rothschild)
bank? Just like North Korea, Cuba and now, Russia due to paying them off and ridding his country of the Rotschilds! They don't
own Russia like they do the US. Edited as I forgot to say I love Tucker and his common sense.
The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased
but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must
have been a freudian slip.
The best part by far of this was when Jimmy yelled, we are in these countries ILLEGALLY!! Jimmy I love you bc you are unbiased
but for you to complain we are somewhere illegally is rich considering how much you defended ILLEGAL immigration in America. Must
have been a freudian slip.
This guy can't admit that the Obama Administration started the Syrian civil war and created ISIS. What he really wants is to
PROTECT ISIS because after Syria they were trained to attack Russia in the Caucasus. Russia is sensibly wiping out ISIS in Syria
so they don't have to fight them in Chechnya. The Democrats and the neocons created Russiagate to prevent Trump from pulling out
two years ago, now Trump doesn't care, because they will invent shit about him regardless.
You're missing a major point -- I S R A E L These neocon and establishment democrats have tightened ass cheeks because Trump's
decision bypasses these Zionists' fervent wishes of keeping the US there in a proxy war as Israel's protectors.
Tucker is slowly but surely becoming increasingly sympathetic towards the third position.He's the only figure on the MSM who
thinks critically and asks uncomfortable questions. I wonder when the Zionists over at Fox News will pull the plug on him? You
should have Tucker on if it's at all possible. He is actually aligned with the left somewhat on economic issues.
Glen
has it right. Trump is nasty and ignorant and a stunningly incompetent President (as he was an
incompetent businessman) but his very disdain for high-falutin' principle is what makes him, in
foreign policy, an old-fashioned Republican isolationist. And the imperialists in the GOP
cannot stomach that, though they're happy to stomach his general nastiness and ignorance.
"... The GOP has always been a fraud, philosophically.' ..."
"... Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break compared with our home grown rightwingers. ..."
"... Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely, that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more reactionary bloc in all of American politics. ..."
Anyone who has spent time with Pentecostal/Evangelical Christians is familiar with public
confessions of pre-Salvation sin. The greater the sinning, the more impressive and prized the
conversion. If the sinner was a notable atheist, Satanist, evolutionist or communist, the
story of his or her conversion can become a lucrative career on the church lecture circuit.
(Pity the poor convert trying to attract attention with nothing more than a battle with
youthful lust.)
Mainmata 01.26.19 at 2:34 am (no link)
This is a really good article (as usual). I think the essential core is that Boot
misunderstood that conservatives and the GOP, in particular, were the party of ideas. Buckley
summarized it best when he stated that the role of conservatives was to stand astride the
course of history and stay "stop". The GOP has never been the party of ideas or at least not
any ideas that are all rational or workable. They claimed to be about "small government" in
an economy dominated by large multinational corporations and cartels. The GOP has always been
a fraud, philosophically.' Nowadays, they're mainly about racism, misogyny and aggressive foreign policy.
Boot was pretty clueless when he arrived in the US so I kind of give him a little break
compared with our home grown rightwingers.
abd 01.26.19 at 4:35 am (no link)
Norman Finkelstein's essay on the serial chameleon, Hitchens has many
useful insights:
A sharp political break must, for one living a political life, be a wrenching emotional
experience. The rejection of one's core political beliefs can't but entail a rejection of
the person holding them: if the beliefs were wrong, then one's whole being was wrong.
Repudiating one's comrades must also be a sorrowful burden. It is not by chance that
"fraternity" is a prized value of the left: in the course of political struggle, one
forges, if not always literally, then, at any rate, spiritually, blood bonds No doubt he
imagines it is testament to the mettle of his conviction that past loyalties don't in the
slightest constrain him; in fact, it's testament to the absence of any conviction at
all.
Bob Michaelson 01.26.19 at 2:45 pm (no link)
"Throughout his three decades on the right, it appears, Boot believed in the tenets of a book
he never read."
When Yale philosophy professor Paul Weiss was a guest on the Dick Cavett Show he pointed out
that when Buckley was a student of Yale he would typically talk about books that he had never
actually read. Indeed Buckley continued to do so for the rest of his life.
Jerry Vinokurov 01.28.19 at 2:22 pm (no link)
Very interesting piece, and it taught me something that I didn't know about Boot, namely,
that he is a member, like myself (albeit a half-generation older), of the Soviet emigre
community. Well, that explains so much, really: you'd be hard-pressed to find a more
reactionary bloc in all of American politics. It's "funny" because many of them are plainly
anti-religious but they make (wittingly or un-) common cause with evangelicals because
they're virulently opposed to the very concept of a public good or an active state attempting
to mitigate social ills. I need to finish the article before having further reactions, but
this was a revelation to me.
Jerry Vinokurov@ 23 : A
small potatoes objection/question. Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community,
including US born descendants of emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of
individuals make up a more reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
Considering only Soviet emigres, not the community, including US born descendants of
emigres, just the emigres themselves; does this group of individuals make up a more
reactionary bloc than its Cuban counterpart?
It's hard for me to say because I don't really have much exposure this culture's Cuban
counterparts. My impression with regard to a lot of the Cuban emigres is that they're
substantially more socially conservative than those who came from the former USSR. Not that
the latter group is any kind of bastion of wokeness, but for them most of the culture war
stuff isn't a huge motivator. I can't think of anyone from this group who, for example, ever
stated that abortion or opposition to gay marriage was the main motivator for any kind of
vote or other political activity.
They may not care much for it and I'm sure being e.g. LGBT
in this community is no picnic, but it's not a driver for them that, say, anti-tax mania is.
I can't possibly count how many conversations I've had with relatives complaining about this
or that "onerous" regulation or tax or whatever that they have to pay and listen to the same
"why are they wasting our money" and "I don't want to pay for this" tirade.
Needless to say
the vast majority of them, like most American in general, have only the foggiest notion of
how American governments (federal, state, local, etc.) operate, but that doesn't stop them
from hating it and knowing deep in their heart that whatever it's doing, it's doing it
wrong.
The freezing of Venezuelan gold by the Bank of England is a signal to all countries out of
step with US interests to withdraw their money, according to economist and co-founder of
Democracy at Work, Professor Richard Wolff. He told RT America that Britain and its central
bank have shown themselves to be "under the thumb of the United States."
"That is a signal to every country that has or may have difficulties with the US, [that
they had] better get their money out of England and out of London because it's not the safe
place as it once was," he said.
"... Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was mixed. ..."
"... PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem. ..."
"... There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go. ..."
"... I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq. ..."
Many of us, actually most of us, were pleased with candidate Trump's declared intent to end our involvement in endless foreign
interventions. He would put America first and refrain from sending our troops where they don't belong. Once elected, his record was
mixed.
We launched an ineffective volley of cruise missiles at a Syrian airbase in response to a trumped up gas attack, but we never
sought to establish a no fly zone and risk war with Russia. For a while we were well on our way to establish an enduring client state
in east Syria. We assumed this was all the doing of the cabal of manipulating neocons that Trump surrounded himself with. His call
for immediate withdrawal of troops from Syria surely proved this true. Finally Trump was allowed to be Trump. He was even seeking
a way out of Afghanistan, after a literal lifetime of war in that godforsaken land.
The neocons are fighting back bigly. The pace of withdrawal from Syria was slowed and there is no indication we would ever
give up our outpost on the Baghdad-Damascus highway at Tanf. Why? I think Trump laid out HIS thoughts on the matter during the traditional
pre-super bowl presidential interview.
-- -- -- --
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: We have to protect Israel. We have to protect other things that we have...
MARGARET BRENNAN: But you want to keep troops there [Iraq] now?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: [W]e spent a fortune on building this incredible base. We might as well keep it. And one of the
reasons I want to keep it is because I want to be looking a little bit at Iran because Iran is a real problem.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Whoa, that's news. You're keeping troops in Iraq because you want to be able to strike in Iran?
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: No, because I want to be able to watch Iran. All I want to do is be able to watch. We have an unbelievable
and expensive military base built in Iraq. It's perfectly situated for looking at all over different parts of the troubled Middle
East rather than pulling up. And this is what a lot of people don't understand. We're going to keep watching and we're going to
keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things, we're going to know it before
they do.
-- -- -- --
So, We are staying in Iraq to keep an eye on Iran and we are doing this to protect Israel. It was not any of the neocons who said
this. It was Trump himself. So much for America first. There also appears to be an effort to keep the Rojava Kurds as a proxy force
after our troops withdraw to Iraq. We continue sending combat and engineering equipment into Rojava and fully intend to continue
providing air support to the YPG. We just can't let it go.
However, Baghdad has thrown a monkey wrench into this developing Trump doctrine. Iraqi President Barham Salih has told Trump to
slow his roll.
-- -- -- --
BAGHDAD (Reuters) - Iraqi President Barham Salih said on Monday that President Donald Trump did not ask Iraq's permission for
U.S. troops stationed there to "watch Iran."
Speaking at a forum in Baghdad, Salih was responding to a question about Trump's comments to CBS about how he would ask troops
stationed in Iraq to "watch" Iran. U.S. troops in Iraq are there as part of an agreement between the two countries with a specific
mission of combating terrorism, Salih said, and that they should stick to that. (Reuters)
-- -- -- --
I see a confrontation in our future, especially with all the Iraqi PMS units in western Iraq.
This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all
key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena:
might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump
does not even bother.
In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs
of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016,
Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who
"oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
Notable quotes:
"... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
"... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
"... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
"... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
"... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
"... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
"... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
"... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
"... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
"... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
"... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
"... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
"... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
"... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
"... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right
wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro
was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.
Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international
actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the
same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives
and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using
Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor
overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).
Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés
and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.
Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist,
and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide
-- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal
globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries,
senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.
However, when he delivered his inaugural address
on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the
government's back on a long-standing policy of
cultural imperialism
, stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill
with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations
to put their own interests first".
Russia
Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office
-- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy
conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.
Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism
toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency,
Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear,
Trump has done precisely nothing
to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".
His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia,
have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of
trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary,
it has degraded " and his spokesman called
the relations " deplorable ".)
Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin
a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has
developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated
the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American
officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The
only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of
total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international
affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.
WikiLeaks
Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from
wars for regime change, Trump sold out again.
"I love WikiLeaks --
" -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.
After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches,
and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks
to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years
under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work,
call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange,
and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may
file arrest charges against Assange
. Mike Pompeo ,
chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself
cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared
WikiLeaks to be a "
non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.
Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one
that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit.
The backtracking is so obvious in this
interview
Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:
AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on
Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with
the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?
TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying
is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC,
but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack
both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said,
"Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."
AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?
TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .
AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to
arrest Julian Assange?
TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision,
but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.
First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to
hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others
decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.
Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt
for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship)
or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are
those of expedience and greed (he admits that much).
This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6
NAFTA
On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising
to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be
awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peńa
Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.
While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US,
witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support
for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to
them.
This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when
Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity
is part of the NAFTA agreement.
Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction.
Wisconsin alone has more
dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada.
Overall,
the US has a net surplus in the trade in
goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he
weakens his own criticisms of immigration.
Since NAFTA was implemented,
migration from Mexico to
the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately
drove them away from agriculture.
As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact,
per capita GDP is nearly a flat
line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures
that have been implemented, the
US leads the world .
To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims
he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only
when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.
His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at
the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core
of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing
about TISA and TTIP.
Mexico
Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any
evidence of production
in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should
also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC,
ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.
China
Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions
of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according
to Wilbur Ross, the "
after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not
because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on
selling out citizens' interests , and
particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating
North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade
issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical
neoliberals.
North Korea
Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a "
crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing
to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than
any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near
North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the
US Air Force publicly boasted of having
"nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly
60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and
sign a peace treaty
. Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in
addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly
provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: "
I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a
major, major conflict with North
Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you
can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure,
the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being
asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools
of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.
Syria
Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions
of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign,
he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the
US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared
to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute --
Trump made the point himself :
"I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go
the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that
attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching
it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will
tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last
few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".
Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories,
Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and
media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his
pursuit
of
public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist
culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical
merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above.
According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He
would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language
typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an "
animal ," who would
have
to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would
Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed
with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded
organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her
approval of even more drastic
action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap
on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest
opposition
, however, came from Trump's
own base , with a number of articles
featuring criticism from Trump's
supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a "
weakling
and a political ingrate ".
Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials
saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials
promising more if there
were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in
existence on Afghanistan); some said that
regime change was not the goal,
and then others made it clear that was the ultimate
goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed.
We're not going into Syria " -- even
though
Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least
protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation
that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a
renewal of neocon policy .
We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First,
Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius ,
a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the
neoconservative agenda and its hit list of
states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the
attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and
the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term
of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely
dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting
the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies.
His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters
of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless
in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil
liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.
Venezuela
It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead
up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest
regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of
Exxon
and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut
member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the
State
Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating
on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless
continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time
and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued
a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself
is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days
before the election, to a couple of weeks
after his inauguration, he has sent explicit
messages of support for anti-government
forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump
imposed sanctions on Venezuela's
Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.
NATO
Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding
reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: "
I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as
Ivanka Trump was about to represent
his government at a meeting of globalist women, the
W20 . NATO has served as
the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political
members of the TCC. 7
Saving Neoliberalism?
Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are
we still in the dying days of liberalism
? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents,
to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight
back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist
in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take
the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided
to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have
no way of knowing if it could be true.
Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist
media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that
their vision had been vindicated.
However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking.
If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US
and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.
Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?
Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a
left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it
did not originate with the
left , and that it has a long and distinguished history
in the US itself , then we can move
toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users,
is that one of the
significantreasons
why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for
example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and
no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America
anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial
thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against
globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity,
and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended
to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and
especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures
such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It
could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades,
essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders,
neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.
As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son --
then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8
On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism,
which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now
contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced.
In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption
of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining
economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily
caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking
about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power"
is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also
render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated,
and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward
various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart
of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.
As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism
. Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.
As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power
of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation
of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.
"... The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report it. ..."
The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her
latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the
democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York
rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to
overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report
it.
She's being paid no doubt by the usual suspects. She is personally 1 million in debt and
has signed with a Speakers agency to give speeches for 200,000 a pop.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCIV)
"Haley is currently quoting $200,000 and the use of a private jet for domestic speaking
engagements, according to CNBC
In October 2018, when Haley resigned, she said, she would be taking a "step up" into the
private sector after leaving the U.N. According to a public financial disclosure report based
on 2017 data, at the rate quoted for her engagements, just a handful would pay down more than
$1 million in outstanding debt that was accrued during her 14 years
This article from 2017 looks like it was written yesterday. Trump betrayal of his elctorate on multiple levels, essentially on all
key poin of his election program mkes him "Republican Obama".
What is interesting about Trump foreign policy is his version of neoliberal "gangster capitalism" on foreign arena:
might is right principle applied like universal opener. Previous administrations tried to put a lipstick on the pig. Trump
does not even bother.
In terms of foreign policy, and even during the transition before Trump's inauguration, there were other, more disturbing signs
of where Trump would be heading soon. When Fidel Castro died on November 25, 2016,
Trump seemed jubilant as if he had somehow been vindicated, and took the opportunity to slander Castro as a "brutal dictator" who
"oppressed his own people" and turned Cuba into a "totalitarian island".
Notable quotes:
"... However, when he delivered his inaugural address on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the government's back on a long-standing policy of cultural imperialism , stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations to put their own interests first". ..."
"... Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office -- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat. ..."
"... The entire conflict with Russia that has developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. ..."
"... Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from wars for regime change, Trump sold out again. "I love WikiLeaks -- " -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding. ..."
"... AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States? ..."
"... AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing? ..."
"... AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to arrest Julian Assange? ..."
"... While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US, witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to them. ..."
"... Since NAFTA was implemented, migration from Mexico to the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately drove them away from agriculture ..."
"... As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact, per capita GDP is nearly a flat line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures that have been implemented, the US leads the world . ..."
"... To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only when the US reaps the greater share of benefits. ..."
"... As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son -- then what an abysmally poor choice he is ..."
"... On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism, which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced. ..."
"... As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism . Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics. ..."
"... As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition. ..."
Trump could have kept quiet, and lost nothing. Instead what he was attacking -- and the irony was missed on his fervently right
wing supporters -- was someone who was a leader in the anti-globalist movement, from long before it was ever called that. Fidel Castro
was a radical pioneer of independence, self-reliance, and self-determination.
Castro turned Cuba from an American-owned sugar plantation and brothel, a lurid backwater in the Caribbean, into a serious international
actor opposed to globalizing capitalism. There was no sign of any acknowledgment of this by Trump, who instead chose to parrot the
same people who would vilify him using similar terms (evil, authoritarian, etc.). Of course, Trump respects only corporate executives
and billionaires, not what he would see as some rag-tag Third World revolutionary. Here Trump's supporters generally failed, using
Castro's death as an opportunity for tribal partisanship, another opportunity to attack "weak liberals" like Obama who made minor
overtures to Cuba (too little, too late).
Their distrust of "the establishment" was nowhere to be found this time: their ignorance of Cuba and their resort to stock clichés
and slogans had all been furnished to them by the same establishment they otherwise claimed to oppose.
Just to be clear, the above is not meant to indicate any reversal on Trump's part regarding Cuba. He has been consistently anti-communist,
and fairly consistent in his denunciations of Fidel Castro. What is significant is that -- far from overcoming the left-right divide
-- Trump shores up the barriers, even at the cost of denouncing others who have a proven track record of fighting against neoliberal
globalization and US interventionism. In these regards, Trump has no track record. Even among his rivals in the Republican primaries,
senators Ted Cruz and Rand Paul had more of an anti-interventionist track record.
However, when he delivered his inaugural address
on January 20, 2017, Trump appeared to reaffirm his campaign themes of anti-interventionism. In particular he seemed to turn the
government's back on a long-standing policy of
cultural imperialism
, stating: "We do not seek to impose our way of life on anyone". In addition he said his government would "seek friendship and goodwill
with the nations of the world," and he understood the importance of national sovereignty when he added, "it is the right of all nations
to put their own interests first".
Russia
Yet when it came to Russia, Trump could have instantly removed sanctions that were imposed by Obama in his last weeks in office
-- an irresponsible and dangerous act by Obama, where foreign policy was used as a partisan tool in the service of shoring up a crummy
conspiracy theory about "Russian hacking" in order to deny the Democrats any culpability in their much deserved defeat.
Instead, Trump continued the sanctions, as if out of meek deference to Obama's policy, one founded on lies and antagonism
toward Trump himself. Rather than repair the foul attempt to sabotage the US-Russian relationship in preparation for his presidency,
Trump simply abided and thus became an accomplice. To be clear,
Trump has done precisely nothing
to dampen the near mass hysteria that has been manufactured in the US about alleged -- indeed imaginary -- "Russian intervention".
His comments, both during the electoral campaign and even early into his presidency, about wanting good relations with Russia,
have been replaced by Trump's admissions that US relations with Russia are at a low point (Putin agreed: "I would say the level of
trust [between Russia and the US] is at a workable level, especially in the military dimension, but it hasn't improved. On the contrary,
it has degraded " and his spokesman called
the relations " deplorable ".)
Rather than use the power of his office to calm fears, to build better ties with Russia, and to make meeting with Vladimir Putin
a top priority, Trump has again done nothing , except escalating tensions. The entire conflict with Russia that has
developed in recent years, on the US side, was totally unnecessary, illogical, and quite preventable. Russia had actively facilitated
the US' war in Afghanistan for over a decade, and was a consistent collaborator on numerous levels. It is up to thinking American
officials to honestly explain what motivated them to tilt relations with Russia, because it is certainly not Russia's doing. The
only explanation that makes any sense is that the US leadership grew concerned that Russia was no longer teetering on the edge of
total socio-economic breakdown, as it was under the neoliberal Boris Yeltsin, but has instead resurfaced as a major actor in international
affairs, and one that champions anti-neoliberal objectives of enhanced state sovereignty and self-determination.
WikiLeaks
Just two weeks after violating his promise to end the US role as the world's policeman and his vow to extricate the US from
wars for regime change, Trump sold out again.
"I love WikiLeaks --
" -- this is what Trump exclaimed in a speech on October 10, 2016. Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks is thus truly astounding.
After finding so much use for WikiLeaks' publication of the Podesta emails, which became incorporated into his campaign speeches,
and which fuelled the writing and speaking of journalists and bloggers sympathetic to Trump -- he was now effectively declaring WikiLeaks
to be both an enemy and a likely target of US government action, in even more blunt terms than we heard during the past eight years
under Obama. This is not mere continuity with the past, but a dramatic escalation. Rather than praise Julian Assange for his work,
call for an end to the illegal impediments to his seeking asylum, swear off any US calls for extraditing and prosecuting Assange,
and perhaps meeting with him in person, Trump has done all of the opposite. Instead we learn that Trump's administration may
file arrest charges against Assange
. Mike Pompeo ,
chosen by Trump to head the CIA, who had himself
cited WikiLeaks as a reliable source of proof about how the Democratic National Committee had rigged its campaign, now declared
WikiLeaks to be a "
non-state hostile intelligence service ," along with vicious personal slander against Assange.
Trump's about-face on WikiLeaks was one that he defended in terms that were not just a deceptive rewriting of history, but one
that was also fearful -- "I don't support or unsupport" WikiLeaks, was what Trump was now saying in his dash for the nearest exit.
The backtracking is so obvious in this
interview
Trump gave to the AP , that his shoes must have left skid marks on the floor:
AP: If I could fit a couple of more topics. Jeff Sessions, your attorney general, is taking a tougher line suddenly on
Julian Assange, saying that arresting him is a priority. You were supportive of what WikiLeaks was doing during the campaign with
the release of the Clinton emails. Do you think that arresting Assange is a priority for the United States?
TRUMP: When Wikileaks came out never heard of Wikileaks, never heard of it. When Wikileaks came out, all I was just saying
is, "Well, look at all this information here, this is pretty good stuff." You know, they tried to hack the Republican, the RNC,
but we had good defenses. They didn't have defenses, which is pretty bad management. But we had good defenses, they tried to hack
both of them. They weren't able to get through to Republicans. No, I found it very interesting when I read this stuff and I said,
"Wow." It was just a figure of speech. I said, "Well, look at this. It's good reading."
AP: But that didn't mean that you supported what Assange is doing?
TRUMP: No, I don't support or unsupport. It was just information .
AP: Can I just ask you, though -- do you believe it is a priority for the United States, or it should be a priority, to
arrest Julian Assange?
TRUMP: I am not involved in that decision, but if Jeff Sessions wants to do it, it's OK with me. I didn't know about that decision,
but if they want to do it, it's OK with me.
First, Trump invents the fictitious claim that WikiLeaks was responsible for hacking the DNC, and that WikiLeaks also tried to
hack the Republicans. Second, he pretends to be an innocent bystander, a spectator, in his own administration -- whatever others
decide, is "OK" with him, not that he knows about their decisions, but it's all up to others. He has no power, all of a sudden.
Again, what Trump is displaying in this episode is his ultimate attachment to his class, with all of its anxieties and its contempt
for rebellious, marginal upstarts. Trump shuns any sort of "loyalty" to WikiLeaks (not that they ever had a working relationship)
or any form of gratitude, because then that would imply a debt and therefore a transfer of value -- whereas Trump's core ethics are
those of expedience and greed (he admits that much).
This move has come with a cost , with members of Trump's support base openly denouncing the betrayal. 6
NAFTA
On NAFTA , Trump claims he has not changed his position -- yet, from openly denouncing the free trade agreement and promising
to terminate it, he now vows only to seek modifications and amendments, which means supporting NAFTA. He appeared to be
awfully quick to obey the diplomatic pressure of Canada's Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and Mexico's President, Enrique Peńa
Nieto. Trump's entire position on NAFTA now comes into question.
While there is no denying the extensive data about the severe impacts of NAFTA on select states and industries in the US,
witnessed by the closure of tens of thousands of factories and the loss of hundreds of thousands of jobs, there is little support
for the claim that Canada and Mexico, as wholes, have instead fared well and that the US as a whole has been the loser thanks to
them.
This really deserves to be treated at length, separately from this article. However, for now, let's keep in mind that when
Trump complains about Canadian softwood lumber and dairy exports to the US, his argument about NAFTA is without merit. Neither commodity
is part of the NAFTA agreement.
Moreover, where dairy is concerned, the problem is US overproduction.
Wisconsin alone has more
dairy cows than all of Canada . There is a net surplus , in the US' favour, with respect to US dairy exports to Canada.
Overall,
the US has a net surplus in the trade in
goods and services with Canada. Regarding Mexico, the irony of Trump's denunciations of imaginary Mexican victories is that he
weakens his own criticisms of immigration.
Since NAFTA was implemented,
migration from Mexico to
the US skyrocketed dramatically. US agricultural industries sent millions of Mexican farmers into food poverty, and ultimately
drove them away from agriculture.
As for per capita GDP, so treasured by economists, NAFTA had no positive impact on Mexico -- in fact,
per capita GDP is nearly a flat
line for the entire period since 1994. Finally, Trump does not mention that in terms of the number of actual protectionist measures
that have been implemented, the
US leads the world .
To put Trump's position on NAFTA in bold relief, it is not that he is decidedly against free trade. In fact, he often claims
he supports free trade, as long as it is "fair". However, his notion of fairness is very lopsided -- a trade agreement is fair only
when the US reaps the greater share of benefits.
His arguments with respect to Canada are akin to those of a looter or raider. He wants to block lumber imports from Canada, at
the same time as he wants to break the Canadian dairy market wide open to absorb US excess production. That approach is at the core
of what defined the US as a "new empire" in the 1800s. In addition, while Trump was quick to tear up the TPP, he has said nothing
about TISA and TTIP.
Mexico
Trump's argument with Mexico is also disturbing for what it implies. It would seem that any
evidence of production
in Mexico causes Trump concern. Mexico should not only keep its people -- however many are displaced by US imports -- but it should
also be as dependent as possible on the US for everything except oil. Since Trump has consistently declared his antagonism to OPEC,
ideally Mexico's oil would be sold for a few dollars per barrel.
China
Trump's turn on China almost provoked laughter from his many domestic critics. Absurdly, what figures prominently in most renditions
of the story of Trump's change on China (including his own), is a big piece of chocolate cake. The missile strike on Syria was, according
to Wilbur Ross, the "
after-dinner entertainment ". Here, Trump's loud condemnations of China on trade issues were suddenly quelled -- and it is not
because chocolate has magical properties. Instead it seems Trump has been willing to settle on
selling out citizens' interests , and
particularly those who voted for him, in return for China's assistance on North Korea. Let's be clear: countering and dominating
North Korea is an established favourite among neoconservatives. Trump's priority here is fully "neocon," and the submergence of trade
issues in favour of militaristic preferences is the one case where neoconservatives might be distinguished from the otherwise identical
neoliberals.
North Korea
Where North Korea is concerned, Trump chose to manufacture a "
crisis ". North Korea has actually done nothing
to warrant a sudden outbreak of panic over it being supposedly aggressive and threatening. North Korea is no more aggressive than
any person defending their survival can be called belligerent. The constant series of US military exercises in South Korea, or near
North Korean waters, is instead a deliberate provocation to a state whose existence the US nearly extinguished. Even last year the
US Air Force publicly boasted of having
"nearly destroyed" North Korea -- language one would have expected from the Luftwaffe in WWII. The US continues to maintain roughly
60,000 troops on the border between North and South Korea, and continues to refuse to formally declare an end to the Korean War and
sign a peace treaty
. Trump then announced he was sending an "armada" to the Korean peninsula, and boasted of how "very powerful" it was. This was in
addition to the US deploying the THAAD missile system in South Korea. Several of his messages in Twitter were written using highly
provocative and threatening language. When asked if he would start a war, Trump glibly replied: "
I don't know. I mean, we'll see ". On another occasion Trump stated, "There is a chance that we could end up having a
major, major conflict with North
Korea. Absolutely". When the world's leading military superpower declares its intention to destroy you, then there is nothing you
can do in your defense which anyone could justly label as "over the top". Otherwise, once again Trump posed as a parental figure,
the world's chief babysitter -- picture Trump, surrounded by children taking part in the "Easter egg roll" at the White House, being
asked about North Korea and responding "they gotta behave". Trump would presume to teach manners to North Korea, using the only tools
of instruction that seem to be the first and last resort of US foreign policy (and the "defense" industry): bombs.
Syria
Attacking Syria , on purportedly humanitarian grounds, is for many (including vocal supporters) one of the most glaring contradictions
of Trump's campaign statements about not embroiling the US in failed wars of regime change and world policing. During the campaign,
he was in favour of Russia's collaboration with Syria in the fight against ISIS. For years he had condemned Obama for involving the
US in Syria, and consistently opposed military intervention there. All that was consigned to the archive of positions Trump declared
to now be worthless. That there had been a change in Trump's position is not a matter of dispute --
Trump made the point himself :
"I like to think of myself as a very flexible person. I don't have to have one specific way, and if the world changes, I go
the same way, I don't change. Well, I do change and I am flexible, and I'm proud of that flexibility. And I will tell you, that
attack on children yesterday had a big impact on me -- big impact. That was a horrible, horrible thing. And I've been watching
it and seeing it, and it doesn't get any worse than that. And I have that flexibility, and it's very, very possible -- and I will
tell you, it's already happened that my attitude toward Syria and Assad has changed very much. And if you look back over the last
few weeks, there were other attacks using gas. You're now talking about a whole different level".
Bending to the will of the prevailing Cold War and neo-McCarthyist atmosphere in the US, rife with anti-Russian conspiracy theories,
Trump found an easy opportunity to score points with the hostile media, ever so mindful as he is about approval ratings, polls, and
media coverage. Some explain Trump's reversals as arising from his
pursuit
of
public adulation -- and while the media play the key role in purveying celebrity status, they are also a stiff bastion of imperialist
culture. Given his many years as a the host of a popular TV show, and as the owner of the Miss Universe Pageant, there is some logical
merit to the argument. But I think even more is at work, as explained in paragraphs above.
According to Eric Trump it was at the urging of Ivanka that Donald Trump decided to strike a humanitarian-militarist pose. He
would play the part of the Victorian parent, only he would use missiles to teach unruly children lessons about violence. Using language
typically used against him by the mainstream media, Trump now felt entitled to pontificate that Assad is "evil," an "
animal ," who would
have
to go . When did he supposedly come to this realization? Did Assad become evil at the same time Trump was inaugurated? Why would
Trump have kept so silent about "evil" on the campaign trail? Trump of course is wrong: it's not that the world changed and he changed
with it; rather, he invented a new fiction to suit his masked intentions. Trump's supposed opponents and critics, like the Soros-funded
organizer of the women's march Linda Sarsour, showed her
approval of even more drastic
action by endorsing messages by what sounded like a stern school mistress who thought that 59 cruise missiles were just a mere "slap
on the wrist". Virtually every neocon who is publicly active applauded Trump, as did most senior Democrats. The loudest
opposition
, however, came from Trump's
own base , with a number of articles
featuring criticism from Trump's
supporters , and one conservative publication calling him outright a "
weakling
and a political ingrate ".
Members of the Trump administration have played various word games with the public on intervention in Syria. From unnamed officials
saying the missile strike was a "one off," to named officials
promising more if there
were any other suspected chemical attacks (or use of barrel bombs -- and this while the US dropped the biggest non-nuclear bomb in
existence on Afghanistan); some said that
regime change was not the goal,
and then others made it clear that was the ultimate
goal ; and then Trump saying, "Our policy is the same, it hasn't changed.
We're not going into Syria " -- even
though
Trump himself greatly increased the number of US troops he deployed to Syria , illegally, in an escalation of the least
protested invasion in recent history. Now we should know enough not to count this as mere ambiguity, but as deliberate obfuscation
that offers momentary (thinly veiled) cover for a
renewal of neocon policy .
We can draw an outline of Trump's liberal imperialism when it comes to Syria, which is likely to be applied elsewhere. First,
Trump's interventionist policy regarding Syria is one that continues to treat that country as if it were terra nullius ,
a mere playground for superpower politics. Second, Trump is clearly continuing with the
neoconservative agenda and its hit list of
states to be terminated by US military action, as famously confirmed by Gen. Wesley Clark. Even Trump's strategy for justifying the
attack on Syria echoed the two prior Bush presidential administrations -- selling war with the infamous "incubator babies" myth and
the myth of "weapons of mass destruction" (WMDs). In many ways, Trump's presidency is thus shaping up to be either the seventh term
of the George H.W. Bush regime, or the fifth straight term of the George W. Bush regime. Third, Trump is taking ownership of an extremely
dangerous conflict, with costs that could surpass anything witnessed by the war on Iraq (which also continues). Fourth, by highlighting
the importance of photographs in allegedly changing his mind, Trump has placed a high market value on propaganda featuring dead babies.
His actions in Syria will now create an effective demand for the pornographic trade in pictures of atrocities. These are matters
of great importance to the transnational capitalist class, which demands full global penetrability, diminished state power (unless
in the service of this class' goals), a uniformity of expectations and conformity in behaviour, and an emphasis on individual civil
liberties which are the basis for defending private property and consumerism.
Venezuela
It is very disturbing to see how Venezuela is being framed as ripe for US intervention, in ways that distinctly echo the lead
up to the US war on Libya. Just as disturbing is that Trump's Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, has a clear conflict of interest
regarding Venezuela, from his recent role as CEO of
Exxon
and its conflict with the government of Venezuela over its nationalization of oil. Tillerson is, by any definition, a clear-cut
member of the transnational capitalist class. The Twitter account of the
State
Department has a battery of messages sternly lecturing Venezuela about the treatment of protesters, while also pontificating
on the Venezuelan Constitution as if the US State Department had become a global supreme court. What is impressive is the seamless
continuity in the nature of the messages on Venezuela from that account, as if no change of government happened between Obama's time
and Trump's. Nikki Haley, Trump's neocon ambassador to the UN, issued
a statement that read like it had been written by her predecessors, Samantha Power and Susan Rice, a statement which in itself
is an unacceptable intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs. For Trump's part, from just days
before the election, to a couple of weeks
after his inauguration, he has sent explicit
messages of support for anti-government
forces in Venezuela. In February, Trump
imposed sanctions on Venezuela's
Vice President. After Syria and North Korea, Venezuela is seeming the likely focus of US interventionism under Trump.
NATO
Rounding out the picture, at least for now (this was just the first hundred days of Trump's presidency), was Trump's outstanding
reversal on NATO -- in fact, once again he stated the reversal himself, and without explanation either: "
I said it was obsolete. It's no longer obsolete ". This came just days after the US missile strike against Syria, and just as
Ivanka Trump was about to represent
his government at a meeting of globalist women, the
W20 . NATO has served as
the transnational military alliance at the service of the transnational capitalist class, and particularly the military and political
members of the TCC. 7
Saving Neoliberalism?
Has Trump saved neoliberal capitalism from its ongoing demise? Has he sustained popular faith in liberal political ideals? Are
we still in the dying days of liberalism
? If there had been a centrally coordinated plan to plant an operative among the ranks of populist conservatives and independents,
to channel their support for nationalism into support for the persona of the plant, and to then have that plant steer a course straight
back to shoring up neoliberal globalism -- then we might have had a wonderful story of a masterful conspiracy, the biggest heist
in the history of elections anywhere. A truly "rigged system" could be expected to behave that way. Was Trump designated to take
the fall in a rigged game, only his huge ego got in the way when he realized he could realistically win the election and he decided
to really tilt hard against his partner, Hillary Clinton? It could be the basis for a novel, or a Hollywood political comedy. I have
no way of knowing if it could be true.
Framed within the terms of what we do know, there was relief by the ousted group of political elites and the liberal globalist
media at the sight of Trump's reversals, and a sense that
their vision had been vindicated.
However, if they are hoping that the likes of Trump will serve as a reliable flag bearer, then theirs is a misguided wishful thinking.
If someone so demonized and ridiculed, tarnished as an evil thug and racist fascist, the subject of mass demonstrations in the US
and abroad, is the latest champion of (neo)liberalism, then we are certainly witnessing its dying days.
Is Trump Beneficial for Anti-Imperialism?
Once one is informed enough and thus prepared to understand that anti-imperialism is not the exclusive preserve of the left (a
left which anyway has mostly shunned it over the last two decades), that it
did not originate with the
left , and that it has a long and distinguished history
in the US itself , then we can move
toward some interesting realizations. The facts, borne out by surveys and my own online immersion among pro-Trump social media users,
is that one of the
significantreasons
why Trump won is due to the growth in popularity of basic anti-imperialist principles (even if not recognized under that name): for
example, no more world policing, no transnational militarization, no more interventions abroad, no more regime change, no war, and
no globalism. Nationalists in Europe, as in Russia, have also pushed forward a basic anti-imperialist vision. Whereas in Latin America
anti-imperialism is largely still leftist, in Europe and North America the left-right divide has become blurred, but the crucial
thing is that at least now we can speak of anti-imperialism gaining strength in these three major continents. Resistance against
globalization has been the primary objective, along with strengthening national sovereignty, protecting local cultural identity,
and opposing free trade and transnational capital. Unfortunately, some anti-imperialist writers (on the left in fact) have tended
to restrict their field of vision to military matters primarily, while almost completely neglecting the economic and cultural, and
especially domestic dimensions of imperialism. (I am grossly generalizing of course, but I think it is largely accurate.) Where structures
such as NAFTA are concerned, many of these same leftist anti-imperialists, few as they are, have had virtually nothing to say. It
could be that they have yet to fully recognize that the transnational capitalist class has, gradually over the last seven decades,
essentially purchased the power of US imperialism. Therefore the TCC's imperialism includes NAFTA, just as it includes open borders,
neoliberal identity politics, and drone strikes. They are all different parts of the same whole.
As argued in the previous section, if Trump is to be the newfound champion of this imperialism -- empire's prodigal son --
then what an abysmally poor choice he is. 8
On the one hand, he helped to unleash US anti-interventionism (usually called "isolationism" not to call it anti-imperialism,
which would then admit to imperialism which is still denied by most of the dominant elites). On the other hand, in trying to now
contain such popular sentiment, he loses credibility -- after having lost credibility with the groups his campaign displaced.
In addition to that, given that his candidacy aggravated internal divisions in the US, which have not subsided with his assumption
of office, these domestic social and cultural conflicts cause a serious deficit of legitimacy, a loss of political capital. A declining
economy will also deprive him of capital in the strict sense. Moreover, given the kind of persona the media have crafted, the daily
caricaturing of Trump will significantly spur anti-Americanism around the world. If suddenly even Canadian academics are talking
about boycotting the US, then the worm has truly turned. Trump can only rely on "hard power" (military violence), because "soft power"
is almost out of the question now that Trump has been constructed as a barbarian. Incompetent and/or undermined governance will also
render Trump a deficient upholder of the status quo. The fact that nationalist movements around the world are not centrally coordinated,
and their fortunes are not pinned to those of Trump, establishes a well-defined limit to his influence. Trump's antagonism toward
various countries -- as wholes -- has already helped to stir up a deep sediment of anti-Americanism. If Americanism is at the heart
of Trump's nationalist globalism, then it is doing all the things that are needed to induce a major heart attack.
As for Trump's domestic opposition, what should be most pertinent are issues of conflict of interest and nepotism
. Here members of Trump's base are more on target yet again, when they reject the presence of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner
in the White House ("we didn't elect Ivanka or Jared"), than are those distracted by identity politics.
As Trump leverages the presidency to upgrade the Trump family to the transnational capitalist class, and reinforces the power
of US imperialism which that class has purchased, conflict of interest and nepotism will be the main political signposts of the transformation
of the Trump presidency, but they could also be the targets for a refined strategy of opposition.
PoliticsTaxes/regulation (Dan here lifted from
Robert's Stochastic Thoughts ) Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession Max Boot is a
candidate member of the Rubin Gerson can't be a conservative anymore, because I always agree
with them club of Washington Post columnists. But he is a bit confused about US macroeconmic
history and macroeconomics. He wrote"The deficit spending of the Reagan years was at least
justified because it boosted the economy out of a deep recession " As a matter of timing, this
can't be right. The Kemp Roth tax cut was enacted in 1981. Real GDP peaked in 1981q3 -- the tax
cut corresponds to the beginning of the recession not the end.
The part that Boot misses (because it has been unimportant for the past 10 years) is
monetary policy. It is possible to cause a severe recession in spite of fiscal stimulus by
driving the Federal Funds rate up over 19 %. The combination of loose fiscal and very tight
monetary policy caused huge real interest rates and a collapse of investment. It also caused an
over-valued dollar, a huge surge in imports and deindustrialization.
pgl, January 30, 2019 5:05 pm
Towards the end of 1980 Volcker was backing off his initial tight monetary policy and
the economy inched towards a recovery from that initial recession. But when Volcker saw
Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max
Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does
get this – he is just another supply side liar.
Likbez
@pgl January 30, 2019, 5:05 pm
> ...when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the
1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just
another supply-side liar. "
That's probably the most concise explanation which is enough for the given case. Thank you!
Max Boots is a "wardog" --a rabid lobbyist of MIC, and, as such, is as far from economics (even voodoo
supply side economics) as one can get.
Also like all neocons, he is statist par excellence. If not MIC money, he would probably be forced to
paint houses for a living, instead of writing nonsense in Bezos blog.
"... An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran ..."
"... Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue? For another 100 years? ..."
"... The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness. ..."
Trump wants to
keep U.S. forces in Iraq so they can "watch" Iran:
President Trump plans to keep United States troops in Iraq to monitor and maintain pressure on neighboring Iran, committing
to an American military presence in the region's war zones even as he moves to withdraw forces from Syria and Afghanistan.
"I want to be able to watch Iran," Mr. Trump said in an interview aired Sunday on CBS's "Face the Nation." "We're going to
keep watching and we're going to keep seeing and if there's trouble, if somebody is looking to do nuclear weapons or other things,
we're going to know it before they do."
An indefinite military presence in Iraq makes no more sense for the U.S. than it does to have one in Syria. Keeping troops
in Iraq isn't going to give the U.S. any knowledge about what Iran's government is doing inside its borders, and announcing that
their mission is an anti-Iranian one exposes them to potential attack from militias aligned with Tehran.
Many Iraqis already want U.S. forces out of the country now that ISIS has been dealt with, and there will probably be even more
demanding our withdrawal if Trump tries to keep U.S. forces there for this purpose.
Trump's suggestion that Iran might "do nuclear weapons" is more of the same propaganda that he and his officials have been pushing
for months. Iran is unable to develop and build nuclear weapons because it is complying with the nuclear deal that Trump reneged
on. Thanks to the nuclear deal, the IAEA is able to conduct very intrusive inspections as part of the most rigorous verification
regime, and they would be the first to know if Iran were violating the restrictions set down in the JCPOA.
It is unlikely that the Iraqi government is going to agree to a U.S. presence that is being justified by hostility to its neighbor.
Iraq's president has already said that the U.S. military presence is permitted in the country only for the purposes of counter-terrorism:
Iraq's government wants to maintain good relations with Iran, and it isn't going to go along with an anti-Iranian agenda that
can only harm Iraq's economic and security interests. Many of Iran's neighbors are not as obsessed with and hostile to Iran as the
Trump administration, and Iraq definitely doesn't want to be a front-line state in some anti-Iranian coalition. Trump's proposal
would needlessly put U.S. troops at greater risk in Iraq, and it would gain the U.S. nothing except more resentment from Iraqis.
Another country with a large permanent garrison of US Troops to join Japan, Germany, South Korea, etc. how long will this
occupation of Iraq last? Five years? Fifty years? We have had Troops in Germany and Japan for 73 years. How long will this continue?
For another 100 years?
The neocons will not rest until we have US boots on the ground in every nation on earth. Enough of this foolishness.
PoliticsTaxes/regulation (Dan here lifted from
Robert's Stochastic Thoughts ) Reagan's Tax Cuts and the Volcker Recession Max Boot is a
candidate member of the Rubin Gerson can't be a conservative anymore, because I always agree
with them club of Washington Post columnists. But he is a bit confused about US macroeconmic
history and macroeconomics. He wrote"The deficit spending of the Reagan years was at least
justified because it boosted the economy out of a deep recession " As a matter of timing, this
can't be right. The Kemp Roth tax cut was enacted in 1981. Real GDP peaked in 1981q3 -- the tax
cut corresponds to the beginning of the recession not the end.
The part that Boot misses (because it has been unimportant for the past 10 years) is
monetary policy. It is possible to cause a severe recession in spite of fiscal stimulus by
driving the Federal Funds rate up over 19 %. The combination of loose fiscal and very tight
monetary policy caused huge real interest rates and a collapse of investment. It also caused an
over-valued dollar, a huge surge in imports and deindustrialization.
pgl, January 30, 2019 5:05 pm
Towards the end of 1980 Volcker was backing off his initial tight monetary policy and
the economy inched towards a recovery from that initial recession. But when Volcker saw
Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the 1982. If Max
Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does
get this – he is just another supply side liar.
Likbez
@pgl January 30, 2019, 5:05 pm
> ...when Volcker saw Kemp-Roth, he feared excess aggregate demand and overreacted which led to the
1982. If Max Boot does not understand this – he is just another uninformed idiot. Now if he does get this – he is just
another supply-side liar. "
That's probably the most concise explanation which is enough for the given case. Thank you!
Max Boots is a "wardog" --a rabid lobbyist of MIC, and, as such, is as far from economics (even voodoo
supply side economics) as one can get.
Also like all neocons, he is statist par excellence. If not MIC money, he would probably be forced to
paint houses for a living, instead of writing nonsense in Bezos blog.
Remember the almost universal reaction of horror when Bolton was appointed as National
Security Advisor? Well, apparently, either the Neocons completely missed that, which I doubt,
or they did what they always do and decided to double-down by retrieving Elliott Abrams from
storage and appointing him US Special Envoy to Venezuela. I mean, yes, of course, the Neocons
are stupid and sociopathic enough not to ever care about others
But in this case I think that
we are dealing with a "Skripal tactic": do something so ridiculously stupid and offensive that
it places all your vassals before a stark choice: either submit and pretend like you did not
notice or, alternatively, dare to say something and face with wrath of Uncle Shmuel (the
Neocon's version of Uncle Sam).
And it worked, in the name of "solidarity" or whatever else,
the most faithful lackeys of the Empire immediate fell in line behind the latest US aggression
against a sovereign nation in spite of the self-evident fact that this aggression violates
every letter of the most sacred principles of international law.
This is exactly the same
tactic as when they make you clean toilets with a toothbrush or do push-ups in the mud during
basic training: not only to condition you to total obedience, but to make you publicly give up
any semblance of dignity.
"... The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report it. ..."
The nuttiest member of the Trump administration is UN Ambassador Nikki Haley. Her
latest neo-nazi stunt was to join protestors last week calling for the overthrow of the
democratically elected government of Venezuela. She grabbed a megaphone at a tiny New York
rally and told the few "protesters" (organized by our CIA) to say the USA is working to
overthrow their President. This was so bizarre that our corporate media refused to report
it.
She's being paid no doubt by the usual suspects. She is personally 1 million in debt and
has signed with a Speakers agency to give speeches for 200,000 a pop.
COLUMBIA, S.C. (WCIV)
"Haley is currently quoting $200,000 and the use of a private jet for domestic speaking
engagements, according to CNBC
In October 2018, when Haley resigned, she said, she would be taking a "step up" into the
private sector after leaving the U.N. According to a public financial disclosure report based
on 2017 data, at the rate quoted for her engagements, just a handful would pay down more than
$1 million in outstanding debt that was accrued during her 14 years
Oil prices are on track for strong gains this week, and the price increases are not only the result of
the crisis in Venezuela.
The oil market received a boost from the US Federal Reserve this week, which signaled on Wednesday
that it would essentially suspend its plans to hike interest rates this year. Fed chairman Jerome
Powell said that economic growth remained
"solid"
but that the central bank had
"the
luxury of patience"
when deciding on further rate hikes. That is a big change from prior
guidance, in which the Fed very clearly outlined multiple rate increases in 2019.
"The case for
raising rates has weakened somewhat,"
Powell said. Slowing growth in China and Europe, a
weakening housing market, tepid inflation – these are not exactly the ingredients that call for
aggressive rate tightening.
The announcement contributed to strong gains for oil prices on Wednesday and Thursday. At the time
of this writing, WTI was trading in the mid-$50s, with Brent above $62 per barrel, both close to
two-month highs.
A more dovish position from the Fed boosts the bullish case for oil in two ways. First,
lower-than-expected interest rates will provide a jolt to the economy. Stock markets rose on the news.
But second, a softer rate outlook also undercuts the US dollar a bit. A weaker dollar stokes crude oil
demand in the rest of the world, and historically the dollar has had an inverse relationship with oil
prices.
Meanwhile, the oil market received a more direct boost this week on news that Saudi Arabia slashed
shipments to the United States. The US has the most transparent and up-to-date data on the oil market,
which include weekly releases on production levels, imports and exports, and inventories. That kind of
visibility is not readily available in most places around the world.
As a result, Saudi Arabia appears to be deliberately targeting that data. By reducing shipments to
the US specifically, Riyadh can help create the appearance of a tightening oil market. Saudi shipments
to the US dropped by 528,000 bpd last week to just 442,000 bpd, the lowest weekly total in more than
two years.
More to the point, OPEC's production declined by 890,000 bpd in January, according to a
Reuters
survey, the largest monthly decline since early 2017 (the month that the first round of
OPEC+ production cuts took effect). Iraq produced above its production ceiling, but aside from that,
the cartel is well on its way to implementing the production curbs.
In fact, there is suddenly a remarkable confluence of events pushing oil in a bullish direction.
First and foremost are the OPEC+ production cuts of 1.2 mb/d that are phasing in. But beyond that, US
shale is starting to slowdown, and while output is still expected to grow this year, the increase
could be the smallest in years.
Then there are the supply outages. Libya lost some output unexpectedly in December, with some of
its production still offline. Iran sanctions waivers are set to expire in May, and the US
hopes
to further cut into Iranian oil exports. The new
sanctions
on Venezuela threaten to create yet another major source of supply outages.
In fact, when considering that OPEC+ is determined to keep 1.2 mb/d of supply off of the market,
and painful US sanctions on Venezuela and Iran threaten to shut in even more output, it's pretty
amazing that Brent crude is only trading at $62 per barrel. The Fed backing off interest rate hikes is
the cherry on top.
Traders and investors are starting to wake up to this bullish sentiment.
"The market is more
convinced that there will be aggressive production cuts and the macro picture has improved a bit.
That's positive for prices going forward,"
Jean-Louis Le Mee, CEO of London-based oil hedge fund
Westbeck Capital,
told
the Wall Street Journal.
Another investor echoed that sentiment in comments to the WSJ.
"The Saudis are sincere about
higher oil prices, they need to balance their budget. The OPEC cuts will lower stocks so I'm pretty
bullish,"
said Mark Gordon, portfolio manager at the Ascent Oil Fund.
Oil prices are back up to where they were in November, and significant outages from Venezuela in
the short run could pave the way for more price increases.
US Sanctions as a Tool To Perpetuate Neocolonialism
by Nauman
Sadiq Posted on
February 02, 2019 January 31, 2019 It's an evident fact that neocolonial powers are ruled
by behemoth corporations whose wealth is measured in hundreds of billions of dollars, far
more than the total GDP of many developing nations. The status of these multinational
corporations as dominant players in international politics gets official imprimatur when the
Western governments endorse the congressional lobbying practice of so-called "special
interest" groups, which is a euphemism for corporate interests.
Since the Western governments are nothing but the mouthpiece of business interests on
international political and economic forums, therefore any national or international entity
which hinders or opposes the agenda of corporate interests is either coerced into accepting
their demands or gets sidelined.
In 2013, the Manmohan Singh's government of India had certain objections to further
opening up to the Western businesses. The Business Roundtable, which is an informal
congregation of major US businesses and together holds a net wealth of $6 trillion, held a
meeting with the representatives of the Indian government and literally coerced it into
accepting unfair demands of the Western corporations.
The developing economies, such as India and Pakistan, are always hungry for foreign direct
investment (FDI) to sustain economic growth, and this investment mostly comes from the
Western corporations. When the Business Roundtables or the Paris-based International Chamber
of Commerce (ICC) form pressure groups and engage in "collective bargaining" activities, the
nascent and fragile developing economies don't have a choice but to toe their line.
State sovereignty, that sovereign nation states are at liberty to pursue independent
policies, particularly economic and trade policies, is a myth. Just like the ruling elites of
the developing countries which maintain a stranglehold and monopoly over domestic politics;
similarly, the neocolonial powers and multinational corporations control international
politics and the global economic order.
Any state in the international arena which dares to transgress the trade and economic
policies laid down by neocolonial powers and multinational corporations becomes an
international pariah like Castro's Cuba, Mugabe's Zimbabwe; or more recently, Maduro's
Venezuela.
Venezuela has one of the largest known oil reserves in the world. Even though the
mainstream media's pundits hold the socialist policies of President Nicolas Maduro
responsible for economic mismanagement in Venezuela, fact of the matter is that
hyperinflation in its economy is the effect of US sanctions against Venezuela which have been
put in place since the time of late President Hugo Chavez.
Another case in point is Iran which was cut off from the global economic system from 2006
to 2015, and then again after May last year when President Donald Trump annulled the Joint
Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), because of Iran's supposed nuclear ambitions. Good for
Iran that it also has one of the largest oil and gas resources, otherwise it would have been
insolvent by now.
Such is the power of Washington-led global financial system, especially the banking
sector, and the significance of petrodollar, because the global oil transactions are pegged
in the US dollars all over the world, and all the major oil bourses are also located in the
Western financial districts.
The crippling "third party" economic sanctions on Iran from 2006 to 2015 have brought to
the fore the enormous power that the Western financial institutions and the petrodollar as a
global reserve currency wields over the global financial system.
It bears mentioning that the Iranian nuclear negotiations were as much about Iran's
nuclear program as they were about its ballistic missile program, which is an equally
dangerous conventional threat to Israel and the Gulf's petro-monarchies, just across the
Persian Gulf.
Despite the sanctions being unfair, Iran felt the heat so much that it remained engaged in
negotiations throughout the nearly decade-long period of sanctions, and such was the
crippling effect of those "third party" sanctions on Iran's economy that had it not been for
its massive oil and gas reserves, and some Russian, Chinese and Turkish help in illicitly
buying Iranian oil, it could have defaulted due to the sanctions.
Notwithstanding, after the brutal assassination of Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate
in Istanbul on October 2, and the clear hand of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in the
murder, certain naïve political commentators of the mainstream media came up with a
ludicrous suggestion that Washington should impose sanctions on Saudi Arabia.
As in the case of aforementioned Iran sanctions, sanctioning Saudi Arabia also seems
plausible; however, there is a caveat: Iran is only a single oil-rich state which has 160
billion barrels of proven oil reserves and has the capacity to produce 5 million barrels per
day (mbpd) of crude oil.
On the other hand, the Persian Gulf's petro-monarchies are actually three oil-rich states.
Saudi Arabia with its 266 billion barrels of proven oil reserves and 10 mbpd of daily crude
oil production, and UAE and Kuwait with 100 billion barrels of proven reserves, each, and 3
mbpd of daily crude oil production, each. Together, the share of the Gulf Cooperation
Countries (GCC) amounts to 466 billion barrels, almost one-third of the world's 1477 billion
barrels of total proven oil reserves.
Therefore, although imposing economic sanctions on the Gulf states might sound like a good
idea on paper, the relationship between the Gulf's petro-monarchies and the industrialized
world is that of a consumer-supplier relationship. The Gulf states are the suppliers of
energy and the industrialized world is its consumer, hence the Western powers cannot sanction
their energy suppliers and largest investors.
If anything, the Gulf's petro-monarchies had "sanctioned" the Western powers in the past
by imposing the oil embargo in 1973 after the Arab-Israel War. The 1973 Arab oil embargo
against the West lasted only for a short span of six months during which the price of oil
quadrupled, but Washington became so paranoid after the embargo that it put in place a ban on
the export of crude oil outside the US borders, and began keeping sixty-day stock of reserve
fuel for strategic and military needs.
Recently, some very upbeat rumors about the shale revolution have been circulating in the
media. However, the shale revolution is primarily a natural gas revolution. It has increased
the probable recoverable resources of natural gas by 30%. The shale oil, on the other hand,
refers to two starkly different kinds of energy resources: firstly, the solid kerogen –
though substantial resources of kerogen have been found in the US Green River formations, the
cost of extracting liquid crude from solid kerogen is so high that it is economically
unviable for at least a hundred years; secondly, the tight oil which is blocked by shale
– it is a viable energy resource but the reserves are so limited, roughly 4 billion
barrels in Texas and North Dakota, that it will run out in a few years.
More than the size of oil reserves, it is about per barrel extraction cost, which
determines the profits for the multinational oil companies. And in this regard, the Persian
Gulf's crude oil is the most profitable. Further, regarding the supposed US energy
independence after the purported shale revolution, the US produced 11 million barrels per day
(bpd) of crude oil in the first quarter of 2014, which was more than the output of Saudi
Arabia and Russia, each of which produces around 10 million bpd. But the US still imported
7.5 million bpd during the same period, which was more than the oil imports of France and
Britain put together. More than the total volume of oil production, the volume which an
oil-producing country exports determines its place in the hierarchy of petroleum and the
Gulf's petro-monarchies constitute the top tier of that pyramid.
Nauman Sadiq is an Islamabad-based attorney, columnist and geopolitical analyst focused
on the politics of Af-Pak and Middle East regions, neocolonialism and
petro-imperialism.
Ever hear of the "Hague Invasion Act" passed under Bush? In short, if you are an American
or an American ally (e.g. Israeli) and you find yourself in Hague charged with war crimes or
crimes against humanity, the Pentagon is authorized to go into the Hague, if necessary, and
break them out-
I remember being utterly amazed about 10 years ago when the Germans wanted to just look at
their gold in the vaults at the New York Fed, and were told by the US authorities "NO!" , and
the Germans backed down. And another moment of gob-smacking arrogance during the Reagan years
when the US refused to recognize the World Court's jurisdiction when Nicaragua sued the US for
mining it's harbors. The US refused to participate, lost the case and was able to get away with
not paying the judgment. Is my memory faulty on any of this?
I'm sympathetic to the argument, but coming from an academic the presentation is a bit
sloppy. Not only does he invent the meaningless phrase "quo bono" (as has been pointed out,
it's "cui bono") he's wrong about World Bank Presidents being former Defence Secretaries (the
current incumbent is Korean, anyway). He's completely confused about the legal side, and has
invented an entirely mythical organisation -- the "United Nations International Court." He
seems to be mixing up two organisations: the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which
is nothing to do with the UN, and settles international law questions where the countries agree
to accept its judgements, and the International Criminal Court also in The Hague which deals
with violations of international humanitarian law, and is a treaty-based organisation of which
the US is not a member anyway.
Five minutes checking in Wikipedia could have avoided all these errors. I wonder how many
others there are? As I say, I'm not unsympathetic to the argument, but you expect better from a
distinguished academic.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) is the principal judicial organ of the United
Nations (UN). It was established in June 1945 by the Charter of the United Nations and began
work in April 1946.
The seat of the Court is at the Peace
Palace in The Hague (Netherlands). Of the six principal organs of the United Nations, it
is the only one not located in New York (United States of America).
The Court's role is to settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes
submitted to it by States and to give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by
authorized United Nations organs and specialized agencies.
The Court is composed of 15 judges, who are elected for terms of office of nine years by
the United Nations General Assembly and the Security Council. It is assisted by a Registry,
its administrative organ. Its official languages are English and French
It predates the United Nations as the Permanent Court of International Justice, although it
has a link to the UN now, as practically all global organisations do. The UN is obviously the
right place to elect the judges, for example. It is not a "UN Court" and has jurisdiction only
over international law questions where both sides agree in advance to accept the verdict. The
article is conflating and confusing two organisations in the Hague, quite different, which in
each case have a link to the UN, but are not, individually or collectively, a "UN Court."
I second David's remarks. The author should get his terms right and be clear what court he's
referring to -- he does seem to conflate the ICC and the ICJ.
One other correction: I believe it was FDR, not LBJ, who famously remarked "He may be a son
of a [family blog] but he's our son of a [family blog]," in reference to the Nicaraguan
dictator Anastasio Somoza.
How come Poland's at 6% & Lithuania is at 29%? Don't they both import American LNG?
And how come Estonia is at 3%? Sounds like the Estonians import Russian gas. Bulgaria's at
37%. Now what were the assurances John McCain gave Sofia regarding alternative gas options to
Southstream? Please spell them out for me again, I'm pretty slow, you know!
What is so ridiculously ClusterFrack-Failed about this, is that BGR nixed a CNG Pipeline
Deal with RUS under pressure from the EU_EXECUTIVES.
Instead of Jobs and Transit Fee Income, BGR will have to stand in line and pay more for
CNG since TRK picked up the Pipeline. The Southeastern EUROZONE are STILL going to Import
that same RUS_CNG.
The project created controversy due to non-compliance with European Union competition and energy
legislation, in particular the Third Energy Package , which
stipulates the separation of companies' generation and sale operations from their
transmission networks.
It was seen as rival to the Nabucco pipeline project. Construction
of the Russian onshore facilities for the pipeline started in December 2012. The project
was cancelled by Russia in December 2014 following obstacles from Bulgaria and the EU, the
2014 Crimean
crisis , and the imposition of European sanctions on Russia. The project has been
replaced by proposals of Turkish Stream and Tesla pipeline .
Interestingly, the BAK Shalom group, which you called far-left, is one of the most
fanatical pro-Israel lobby groups in Germany. In my opinion, being a supporter of Israel
automatically means being far-right.
Its interesting that in Asia, the USG also says it wants to help build infrastructure for
LNG use (as an element of its anti China strategy) but then also wants Asian nations like
Vietnam to buy American LNG (to reduce America's trade deficits, etc.) once the
infrastructure is in place.
Except it would be economically stupid for anyone in Asia to buy more expensive US LNG,
when adequate supplies of LNG at lower costs are available from nations like Australia,
Malaysia and Indonesia and of course Qatar.
I guess when you really can't compete because you subsidize the military and FIRE sectors
and don't invest in your society, you resort to government interference in the market or
"regime change", and then criticize anyone for doing the same thing. Hypocrisy at its
finest.
" it has offered to sell high-priced LNG from the United States (via port facilities that do
not yet exist in anywhere near the volume required)." -- facilities that are themselves
dangerous and highly controversial. Oregon is in the midst of one of those controversies,
trying to stop construction of an LNG export "facility" at Coos Bay, a scenic but impoverished
port on the southern Oregon coast. It would come with a pipeline across the state, which is
also highly unwelcome. LNG facilities are a fuel-air bomb waiting to happen, if it should leak
-- the Oregon coast is subject to Magnitude 9 subduction quakes and tsunamis. The project would
also involve massive dredging that would threaten the local seafood industry. And gas pipelines
are subject to their own threats, doubly so in earthquake country. Maybe they can be built
uncontested in Europe -- but I doubt it.
Dominance in technology still represent pretty powerful lever used to damage and possibly subdue Russia. King of
technological imperialism.
Notable quotes:
"... As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods. ..."
"... In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions. ..."
"... - Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces. ..."
"... In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. ..."
"... -- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures. ..."
"... And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial. ..."
"... It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. ..."
Article from the newspaper: weekly "Arguments and Facts" № 1-2 09/01/2019
Is the scenario of suffocation of the USSR, carried out by the US 30 years ago, similar to
the events that are happening now, and what Russia needs to fear most? "AiF" asked these
questions to the Director of the Institute of new society, economist Vasily Koltashov.
How the world has changed
Alexey Makurin," AIF": Looking at the events taking place in recent years, you catch
yourself thinking that all this has already happened. The current strategy of suffocation of
Russia by America one in one copies the same strategy of times of Reagan. In the eighties, the
United States also hampered the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. The fall
in oil prices also drained our budget, and defense spending grew. And the army was involved in
the conflict in the southern country: Afghanistan. The West deliberately repeats the plan that
brought him victory in the cold war?
Vasily Koltashov: it's more of a coincidence. But even if there is some scenario, the game
this time is some stupid. In the days of Reagan and Bush senior Americans were more rational,
thinner. And now, in everything they do, there is an element of hysteria caused by the need to
respond to the complex state of their own Affairs. Compared with the eighties in the us huge
public debt and huge bubbles in the stock market, threatening investors ruin. The imbalances
that have accumulated in the economy are blocking the development of industrial production.
Much other than agriculture and raw material extraction is often expensive and uncompetitive.
These problems provoke a conflict not only with Russia, but also with China, with other
Eurasian centers of capitalism, which took shape in recent decades.
30 years ago, Western countries revived and developed after the crisis of the seventies. The
orbit of influence of the USA included Pakistan, Turkey, China. Now Trump has stopped financing
Pakistan. In Turkey, there was an attempt of a coup d'état in which Ankara accused
Washington. The Americans are waging a trade war against the Chinese. These and other countries
that do not find a common language with the United States, are increasingly trading among
themselves. The American press writes about the" Eastern Entente", implying the Eurasian
powers.
Increasingly, there are disputes and conflicts between Americans and their European allies,
which was unthinkable before. In such a situation, a plan to weaken Russia, similar to the
scenario of Reagan advisors, can no longer work.
-- What did the West want, putting pressure on the USSR in the eighties?
- I think the West did not seek to destroy the Soviet Union, but just tried to solved a more utilitarian
problem: acquiring new markets for their products. At that time, neoliberal globalization became the
main mechanism of economic growth, it was important for the West to draw countries into its
orbit, which were previously somehow isolated from the world market. They bought the Russian nomenklatura like they buy local
elites in Latin America and tried to concert Russia into Latin American country. They almost succeeded.
How did Ronald Reagan scare the USSR by joking on August 11, 1984?
-- What about Reagan's "evil Empire"statement?
-- It was preparation for the beginning of negotiations from a position of strength. Behind
this ideological rhetoric was another meaning: if you continue to maintain its planned economy,
closed to free trade, we will begin to destroy it, and if you agree to our terms, we will offer
you a deal.
As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington:
they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries.
Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs,
enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national
corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over
time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods.
In
response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions.
- What is their purpose in the current situation?
- Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its
representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian
domestic market and get the fattest pieces.
How Russia has changed
- This time Russia does not give up and attacks itself, as is happening in the same Syria.
What changed?
- The country and enterprises are now run by people with a market view of the world who know
the value of the wealth they dispose of. It was for Gorbachev that Soviet factories were an
abstraction, he did not understand their true value. His concessions to the US and Europe were
completely irrational from a commercial point of view. It's impossible now.
In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has
accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with
ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more
attractive. The war in Afghanistan was declared meaningless. And now the Syrian conflict,
Russia does not solve a particular ideological goals. The military plays the role of guards of
its economic interests. Without any doubt, it would be more difficult for our government to
agree with OPEC on limiting oil production, if not for the successes in Syria. This agreement
in 2017-2018 allowed to raise oil prices and helped to resume economic growth in Russia.
-- Was it possible for the Soviet leadership to influence world oil prices?
- The USSR, too, nothing prevented to sit down at the negotiating table with OPEC. But that
wouldn't change the situation. Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were then loyal allies of
the United States. The West then concentrated all the world's capital, he put the OPEC
countries conditions: create comfortable prices for us, and we will invest in your economy.
And today, Saudi capital seeks to play an independent role, Riyadh's relations with
Washington have become cooler, and with Moscow, on the contrary, warmer. And the US itself is
increasingly supplying hydrocarbons for export: it is predicted that in 2019 they will come out
on top in the world for oil production. But this leadership is provided to Americans by
expensive shale oil, the extraction of which becomes unprofitable at prices below $ 40 per
barrel. So, for the US, very low oil prices are now also unprofitable.
On the other hand, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas today is also higher
than 30-35 years ago, when the country had a more powerful industry. This is an additional
risk.
-- What new qualities acquired by the Russian economy allow it to successfully withstand
Western pressure?
-- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working
printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The
planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business
is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but
also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged
very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues
exceed expenditures.
Where the main threats
-- But aren't the military expenditures, which have to be made in the conditions of
confrontation with the United States, too high? Will it not be possible that the new arms race
will be too much for the country?
- Financing of the defense industry to the detriment of consumer and other civil industries
usually occurs in the planned mobilization system, where all the resources of the country are
concentrated by the state. And in a market economy, such imbalances appear only during the war,
when budget distortions arise and private companies begin to focus more on military orders than
on grass-roots demand. There is no such thing in Russia now, although the government's
attention to defense capability is growing along with the pressure of the US and its
allies.
- Where does the main danger come from in such a situation?
-- Not exactly from the USA. The main threat to Russia is low effective demand within the
country. The weakness of the ruble, the low rate of economic growth -- all this is a
consequence of the poverty of the mass buyer.
And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a
new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end
of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in
price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to
act and strongly non-trivial.
With whom will trade? Expert on how Russia can live under sanctions
It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At
the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a
new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within
the country. This is a traditional trade on the "method of cat Matroskin", which existed for
thousands of years: "To buy something you need, you must first sell something unnecessary." All
need to produce themselves.
And it is important to support the Russian buyer. This may be a preferential mortgage loan
at 3-5% per annum, which will stimulate demand for housing and the sectors of the economy that
are associated with construction. This may be an increase in the number of school teachers,
doctors and kindergarten workers. We need an hourly wage to let people know what their time is
worth. It is extremely important to have a tax-free minimum income (at least 50 thousand rubles
per month). It is necessary to interest migrant workers to live in Russia and leave money in
our country, which will help to create new jobs. We need to directly give people money and
encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship, release the economic energy of society.
Dominance in technology still represent pretty powerful lever used to damage and possibly subdue Russia. King of
technological imperialism.
Notable quotes:
"... As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington: they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries. Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs, enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods. ..."
"... In response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions. ..."
"... - Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian domestic market and get the fattest pieces. ..."
"... In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more attractive. ..."
"... -- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues exceed expenditures. ..."
"... And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to act and strongly non-trivial. ..."
"... It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within the country. ..."
Article from the newspaper: weekly "Arguments and Facts" № 1-2 09/01/2019
Is the scenario of suffocation of the USSR, carried out by the US 30 years ago, similar to
the events that are happening now, and what Russia needs to fear most? "AiF" asked these
questions to the Director of the Institute of new society, economist Vasily Koltashov.
How the world has changed
Alexey Makurin," AIF": Looking at the events taking place in recent years, you catch
yourself thinking that all this has already happened. The current strategy of suffocation of
Russia by America one in one copies the same strategy of times of Reagan. In the eighties, the
United States also hampered the construction of a gas pipeline from Siberia to Europe. The fall
in oil prices also drained our budget, and defense spending grew. And the army was involved in
the conflict in the southern country: Afghanistan. The West deliberately repeats the plan that
brought him victory in the cold war?
Vasily Koltashov: it's more of a coincidence. But even if there is some scenario, the game
this time is some stupid. In the days of Reagan and Bush senior Americans were more rational,
thinner. And now, in everything they do, there is an element of hysteria caused by the need to
respond to the complex state of their own Affairs. Compared with the eighties in the us huge
public debt and huge bubbles in the stock market, threatening investors ruin. The imbalances
that have accumulated in the economy are blocking the development of industrial production.
Much other than agriculture and raw material extraction is often expensive and uncompetitive.
These problems provoke a conflict not only with Russia, but also with China, with other
Eurasian centers of capitalism, which took shape in recent decades.
30 years ago, Western countries revived and developed after the crisis of the seventies. The
orbit of influence of the USA included Pakistan, Turkey, China. Now Trump has stopped financing
Pakistan. In Turkey, there was an attempt of a coup d'état in which Ankara accused
Washington. The Americans are waging a trade war against the Chinese. These and other countries
that do not find a common language with the United States, are increasingly trading among
themselves. The American press writes about the" Eastern Entente", implying the Eurasian
powers.
Increasingly, there are disputes and conflicts between Americans and their European allies,
which was unthinkable before. In such a situation, a plan to weaken Russia, similar to the
scenario of Reagan advisors, can no longer work.
-- What did the West want, putting pressure on the USSR in the eighties?
- I think the West did not seek to destroy the Soviet Union, but just tried to solved a more utilitarian
problem: acquiring new markets for their products. At that time, neoliberal globalization became the
main mechanism of economic growth, it was important for the West to draw countries into its
orbit, which were previously somehow isolated from the world market. They bought the Russian nomenklatura like they buy local
elites in Latin America and tried to concert Russia into Latin American country. They almost succeeded.
How did Ronald Reagan scare the USSR by joking on August 11, 1984?
-- What about Reagan's "evil Empire"statement?
-- It was preparation for the beginning of negotiations from a position of strength. Behind
this ideological rhetoric was another meaning: if you continue to maintain its planned economy,
closed to free trade, we will begin to destroy it, and if you agree to our terms, we will offer
you a deal.
As a result, the Soviet and post-Soviet elites adopted the rules established by Washington:
they became intermediaries between Western corporations and the wealth of their countries.
Russia paid for this deal with the destruction of its industry and the emergence of oligarchs,
enriched by mediation. But there were wins. The country has developed large national
corporations that have become prominent players on the global map. The same "Gazprom". Over
time, Russia has its own ambitions to expand the volume and list of exported goods.
In
response, 5 years ago, the US led an attack on it, declaring sanctions.
- What is their purpose in the current situation?
- Full and unconditional surrender of Russia in the economy. The West wants through its
representatives to manage Russian companies, without intermediaries to enter the Russian
domestic market and get the fattest pieces.
How Russia has changed
- This time Russia does not give up and attacks itself, as is happening in the same Syria.
What changed?
- The country and enterprises are now run by people with a market view of the world who know
the value of the wealth they dispose of. It was for Gorbachev that Soviet factories were an
abstraction, he did not understand their true value. His concessions to the US and Europe were
completely irrational from a commercial point of view. It's impossible now.
In addition, in the eighties the USSR lost to the West ideologically. Our society has
accumulated a great fatigue from ascetic "socialism" and international expansion with
ideological background. The Western model of life and economy began to seem more
attractive. The war in Afghanistan was declared meaningless. And now the Syrian conflict,
Russia does not solve a particular ideological goals. The military plays the role of guards of
its economic interests. Without any doubt, it would be more difficult for our government to
agree with OPEC on limiting oil production, if not for the successes in Syria. This agreement
in 2017-2018 allowed to raise oil prices and helped to resume economic growth in Russia.
-- Was it possible for the Soviet leadership to influence world oil prices?
- The USSR, too, nothing prevented to sit down at the negotiating table with OPEC. But that
wouldn't change the situation. Saudi Arabia and other oil exporters were then loyal allies of
the United States. The West then concentrated all the world's capital, he put the OPEC
countries conditions: create comfortable prices for us, and we will invest in your economy.
And today, Saudi capital seeks to play an independent role, Riyadh's relations with
Washington have become cooler, and with Moscow, on the contrary, warmer. And the US itself is
increasingly supplying hydrocarbons for export: it is predicted that in 2019 they will come out
on top in the world for oil production. But this leadership is provided to Americans by
expensive shale oil, the extraction of which becomes unprofitable at prices below $ 40 per
barrel. So, for the US, very low oil prices are now also unprofitable.
On the other hand, the dependence of the Russian budget on oil and gas today is also higher
than 30-35 years ago, when the country had a more powerful industry. This is an additional
risk.
-- What new qualities acquired by the Russian economy allow it to successfully withstand
Western pressure?
-- In the late eighties the Soviet Union accumulated external debts, in full working
printing press in order to Supplement the budget and ensure the salary of the people. The
planned economy was unable to provide the country with basic goods. And today, private business
is able to buy anything and anywhere. Agriculture not only feeds the country on its own, but
also has become a major exporter of grain, poultry and pork. The financial system is arranged
very rationally: the state debt is minimized and plays a purely technical role, budget revenues
exceed expenditures.
Where the main threats
-- But aren't the military expenditures, which have to be made in the conditions of
confrontation with the United States, too high? Will it not be possible that the new arms race
will be too much for the country?
- Financing of the defense industry to the detriment of consumer and other civil industries
usually occurs in the planned mobilization system, where all the resources of the country are
concentrated by the state. And in a market economy, such imbalances appear only during the war,
when budget distortions arise and private companies begin to focus more on military orders than
on grass-roots demand. There is no such thing in Russia now, although the government's
attention to defense capability is growing along with the pressure of the US and its
allies.
- Where does the main danger come from in such a situation?
-- Not exactly from the USA. The main threat to Russia is low effective demand within the
country. The weakness of the ruble, the low rate of economic growth -- all this is a
consequence of the poverty of the mass buyer.
And from this point of view, the country is again at a crossroads. In 2019, we can see a
new wave of the global economic crisis. The first signs of this were already evident at the end
of last year, when commodity prices fell sharply and the shares of American companies fell in
price. If these trends continue, Russia will not receive easing of sanctions. So, we need to
act and strongly non-trivial.
With whom will trade? Expert on how Russia can live under sanctions
It is already clear with whom we can develop further: with the leading Asian countries. At
the same time, expanding commodity expansion in foreign markets, it is important to move to a
new mercantilism: sell excess, buy only the most necessary, and produce everything else within
the country. This is a traditional trade on the "method of cat Matroskin", which existed for
thousands of years: "To buy something you need, you must first sell something unnecessary." All
need to produce themselves.
And it is important to support the Russian buyer. This may be a preferential mortgage loan
at 3-5% per annum, which will stimulate demand for housing and the sectors of the economy that
are associated with construction. This may be an increase in the number of school teachers,
doctors and kindergarten workers. We need an hourly wage to let people know what their time is
worth. It is extremely important to have a tax-free minimum income (at least 50 thousand rubles
per month). It is necessary to interest migrant workers to live in Russia and leave money in
our country, which will help to create new jobs. We need to directly give people money and
encourage all kinds of entrepreneurship, release the economic energy of society.
Technological superiority is a weapon and the USA know how to use it.
Notable quotes:
"... Made in China 2025 is the Chinese government's 10-year plan to update the country's 10 high-tech manufacturing industries, which include information technology, robotics, aerospace, rail transport, and new-energy vehicles, among others. ..."
"... Without U.S. semis, China will not be able to process the technology necessary to push forward the Made in China 2025 program. "American chips in many ways form the backbone of China's tech economy," Shah said. ..."
"... The Trump Administration's tariffs on Chinese goods were intended to severely disrupt the Chinese tech-advancement initiative. But Shah says that making U.S. chips more expensive for China could have consequences for the U.S. as well. ..."
"... "Over 50% of Chinese semiconductor consumption is supplied by U.S. firms In 2017, China consumed $138bn in integrated circuits (ICs), of which it only produced $18.5bn domestically, implying China imported $120bn of semis in 2017, up from $98bn in 2016 and $73bn in 2012." ..."
"... If the two leaders are unable to come to some sort of trade resolution at the meeting, U.S. tariffs on over $200 billion worth of Chinese goods will increase from 10% to 25% on January 1, 2019. ..."
"... While US has the upper hand on semis, a trade embargo on semis will (1) slows down China's move towards achieving Made in China 2025, (2) at the same time give China the impetus to rush ahead will all resources available to achieve the originally omitted goal of being self-sufficient in tech skills and technology, and (3) seriously hurt companies like Intel, AMD, Micron, and Qualcom as a huge percentage of their businesses are with China, and with that portion of their business gone, all these companies will end up in a loss and without the needed financial resources to invest into new technology in the near future. ..."
As trade tensions run hot between the U.S. and China, President Trump might have one key advantage in the trade war, according
to Nomura.
Analyst Romit Shah explained that China's dependence on U.S.-made advanced microchips could give Trump the upper hand.
"We believe that as China-U.S. tensions escalate, U.S. semiconductors give Washington a strong hand because the core components
of Made in China 2025 (AI, smart factories, 5G, bigdata and full self-driving electric vehicles) can't happen without advanced microchips
from the U.S.," Shah said in a note to clients.
BEIJING, CHINA – NOVEMBER 9, 2017: US President Donald Trump (L) and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands at a press conference
following their meeting at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Artyom Ivanov/TASS (Photo by Artyom Ivanov\TASS via Getty Images)
Made in China 2025 is the Chinese government's 10-year plan to update the country's 10 high-tech manufacturing industries, which
include information technology, robotics, aerospace, rail transport, and new-energy vehicles, among others.
One of Made in China 2025's main goals is to become semiconductor self sufficient. China hopes that at least 40% of the semiconductors
used in China will be made locally by 2020, and at least 70% by 2025. "Made in China 2025 made abundantly clear China's commitment
to semiconductor self-sufficiency. Made in China 2025 will upgrade multiple facets of the Chinese economy," Shah said.
According to Nomura's estimates, China is currently about 3 to 5 years behind the U.S. in dynamic random-access memory (DRAM)
chip production. However, Shah explained that if the trade war persists, the consequences could set Chinese chip production behind
by 5 to 15 years.
Without U.S. semis, China will not be able to process the technology necessary to push forward the Made in China 2025 program.
"American chips in many ways form the backbone of China's tech economy," Shah said.
Consequences for U.S.
The Trump Administration's tariffs on Chinese goods were intended to severely disrupt the Chinese tech-advancement initiative.
But Shah says that making U.S. chips more expensive for China could have consequences for the U.S. as well.
One concern centers around intellectual property theft. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has been working hard to punish China
for allegedly attempting to commit espionage. For example, the DOJ believes China was attempting to spy on the U.S. through Huawei
and asked U.S. allies to drop
the Chinese tech equipment maker.
However, while many U.S. chipmakers, such as Advanced Micro Devices (
AMD ), Qualcomm (
QCOM ) and Micron (
MU ), expressed gratitude that the DOJ was intervening
to prevent intellectual property theft, the companies are also concerned that it could spark retaliation from their Chinese business
partners and result in loss of access to the Chinese market. "Joint ventures, IP sharing agreements and manufacturing partnerships
are the price of admission into China, and thus far, companies are playing ball," Shah explained.
Shah essentially calls the Chinese tariffs a double-edged sword. While tariffs will hurt the Chinese if they can't have access
to freely source U.S. chips, it could also hurt U.S. chipmakers if they lose their business in China. According to Shah's research,
"Over 50% of Chinese semiconductor consumption is supplied by U.S. firms In 2017, China consumed $138bn in integrated
circuits (ICs), of which it only produced $18.5bn domestically, implying China imported $120bn of semis in 2017, up from $98bn in 2016 and $73bn
in 2012."
Trump
and China's President Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Thursday for a two-day
meeting. If the two leaders are unable to come to some sort of trade resolution at the meeting, U.S. tariffs on over $200 billion
worth of Chinese goods will increase from 10% to 25% on January 1, 2019.
"China could source equipment from Europe and Japan; however, we believe there are certain mission-critical tools that can only
be purchased from the U.S. We believe that U.S.-China trade is the biggest theme for U.S. semis and equipment stocks in 2019. Made
in China 2025 can't happen without U.S. semis, and U.S. semis can't grow without China. We hope this backdrop drives resolution,"
Shah said.
Heidi Chung is a reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter:
@heidi_chung .
R
While US has the upper hand on semis, a trade
embargo on semis will (1) slows down China's move towards achieving Made in China 2025, (2) at the same time give China the impetus
to rush ahead will all resources available to achieve the originally omitted goal of being self-sufficient in tech skills and
technology, and (3) seriously hurt companies like Intel, AMD, Micron, and Qualcom as a huge percentage of their businesses are
with China, and with that portion of their business gone, all these companies will end up in a loss and without the needed financial
resources to invest into new technology in the near future.
Apart from semis, China holds the throat of the US in the supply of
rare earth (used in semis, military weaponry, ans astronomical), as well as antibiotics..
Leaving aside his frequent criticisms of populism, Pope Francis called for a "Christian populism" during a visit
to Sicily this weekend, insisting that true populism must listen to and serve the people.
"Be afraid of the deafness that fails to hear the people," Francis said during his
homily
at Mass in Palermo Saturday. "This is the only possible populism: listening to your people, the only
Christian populism: listening to and serving the people, without shouting, accusing, or stirring up contentions."
Seeming to channel John F. Kennedy, the pope invited his hearers to take initiative rather than asking what the
Church and society can do for them.
"Wait not for the Church to do something for you, but begin yourself," Francis said. "Wait not for society to do
it, do it yourself."
The pope's apparent openness to populism -- or at least a version of it -- marks a significant change from earlier
discourses, in which Francis condemned populism, tying its rise to selfishness and egotism.
Last year, the pontiff
warned
of the perils of populism in western democracies, telling the German newspaper
Die Zeit
that "populism is
evil and ends badly, as the past century showed."
In an anti-nationalist
speech
in March 2017, the pope told European heads of state that there is a need "to start thinking once again as
Europeans so as to avert the opposite dangers of a dreary uniformity or the triumph of particularisms."
The European Union will only be lasting and successful if the common will of Europe "proves more powerful than the
will of individual nations," Francis said, advocating for a stronger, consolidated Europe against the rising tide of
populist movements.
Solidarity is "the most effective antidote to modern forms of populism," Pope Francis told the European Union
leaders, Francis said, while denouncing nationalism as a modern form of selfishness.
The pontiff contrasted solidarity, which draw us "closer to our neighbors," with populism, which is "the fruit of
an egotism that hems people in and prevents them from overcoming and 'looking beyond' their own narrow vision."
This past June, Pope Francis went further still,
insisting
that populism was not the solution to Europe's immigration crisis, just as Italy's new populist
government was beginning to enact measures to curb illegal immigration.
In an interview with Reuters, the pope was asked what he thought the solution is to the immigration crisis that
seems to be causing Europe to crumble.
"Populism is not the solution," Francis said emphatically, adding that Europe would disappear without migrants
because no one is having children.
Summing up, the pope said that "populism does not solve the problem; what solves it is welcoming, studying,
settling, and prudence, because prudence is a virtue of government and the government must reach an agreement. I can
receive a certain number and settle them."
On Tuesday, the Vatican and the World Council of Churches (WCC) will begin a two-day joint
conference
in Rome on "Migration, Xenophobia and politically motivated Populism."
The WCC is
partnering
with the Vatican department for Promoting Integral Human Development in organizing the conference as
part of ongoing work toward "peace-building and migration."
The secretary general of the WCC, Rev. Olav Fykse Tveit, said the meeting would be a "very useful and significant
workshop to dig a bit deeper" into the problems of xenophobia as an expression of populism, as well as its links to
racism, conflict, and violence in countries around the world.
"... This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty, as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification." ..."
"... Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan." ..."
"... Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021. ..."
The Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) has effectively collapsed following the
US announcing Friday that it's suspending all obligations under the treaty. Predictably
Moscow's response has been swift, with President Vladimir Putin saying in a meeting with his
foreign and defense ministers that Russia will now pursue missile development previously banned
under its terms .
Putin said "ours will be a mirror response" in a tit-for-tat move that the Russian president
ultimately blames on Washington's years-long "systematic" undermining of the agreement. "Our US
partners say that they are ceasing their participation in the treaty, and we are doing the
same," the Russian president said . "They say that they are doing
research and testing [on new weapons] and we will do the same thing."
Crucially, however, he noted that there were no plans to deploy short and mid-range missiles
to Europe unless the US does it first -- a worst nightmare scenario that has rattled European
leaders ever since talk began from Trump that the 1987 treaty could be scrapped.
Putin still seemed to allow some degree space for last minute concessions as "still on the
table" possibly in line with the Trump administration's desire to modernize and update a new
treaty taking into account new technological and geopolitical realities, such as China's
ballistic missile capabilities.
"Let's wait until our partners mature sufficiently to hold a level, meaningful conversation
on this topic, which is extremely important for us, them, and the entire world," Putin said.
But also lashing out during the press conference that followed the meeting with top officials
Putin
described :
Over many years, we have repeatedly suggested staging new disarmament talks, on all types
of weapons. Over the last few years, we have seen our initiatives not supported. On the
contrary, pretexts are constantly sought to demolish the existing system of international
security .
Specifically he and FM Sergei Lavrov referenced not only Trump's threats to quit the
agreement, which heightened in December, but accusations leveled from Washington that the
Kremlin was in violation. The White House has now affirmed the bilateral historic agreement
signed by Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan will be suspended for 180 days. Lavrov insisted
that Moscow "attempted to do everything we could to rescue the treaty."
This included "unprecedented steps going far beyond our obligations," Lavrov said, and noted
that part of Washington's "systematic" attempts to undermine the treaty included "testing
drones that matched the characteristics" of ground-based cruise missiles banned in the treaty,
as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can be
used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."
Putin noted further in the midst of Lavrov's remarks, "This is a direct a violation of the
INF." And Lavrov also added, "Such launchers have already been completed in Romania, more are
scheduled to be put into service in Poland and Japan."
Alarmingly, Putin concluded his remarks by saying Washington could be imperiling in the long
term the landmark New START treaty, set to expire in 2021.
" as well as installing "MK 41 launching systems for the defense shield in Europe that can
be used to fire mid-range Tomahawk cruise missiles without any modification."
US trying to get from Russia top position first-response list and get Europe on that
position.
Neocons should be remembered as oldcons because their bag of tricks is so well known that
they don't fool anyone. Think about this Reagan era fossil who tries to arrange his little
coup in Venezuela and will fall flat on his face. Think also about these Pompeo and Bolton
who are so desperate that they didn't even spend the necessary time to learn the checkers
rules before trying to take on Putin in his favorite chess play. No really, the level of
mediocrity and the lack of strategy or even sheer preparedness of these dudes is so low that
they may even be hung by their own subordinates who can't even stand that stench of fool
play. Trump should be ashamed he hired these clowns to ride their one trick ponies while the
titanic goes down. History will not be kind with him.
Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military
attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the
one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO
were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.
Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older
9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:
This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of
the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .
About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.
Additionally, just last week the Russian Ministry of Defense invited foreign military
attachés and journalists to inspect the new Iskander 9M729 cruise missile. This is the
one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of the US and NATO
were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up.
Interestingly, the 9M729 has a heavier warhead, and thus shorter range, than the older
9M728, which the US has not claimed violates the INF treaty. See it for yourself:
This is the one that the US claims is in violation of the INF treaty. Representatives of
the US and NATO were invited and expected to be there, but they never showed up .
About standard to ignore what doesn't fit the agenda.
"... Big tech companies have bullied competitors and outrun ethical standards in an effort to "own the world," Jean Case, the CEO of the Case Foundation and a former senior executive at AOL, told Yahoo Finance this week. "Many of those big companies are crowding out new innovations of young upstarts. That's not healthy," she said, in response to a question about Google and Facebook. ..."
Big tech companies have bullied competitors and outrun ethical standards in an
effort to "own the world," Jean Case, the CEO of the Case Foundation and a former
senior executive at AOL, told Yahoo Finance this week.
"Many of those big companies are crowding out new innovations of young upstarts.
That's not healthy," she said, in response to a question about Google and
Facebook.
"On the technology side, look, things have changed so fast," Case said. "I think
we just haven't kept pace with some of the ethics policies and frameworks that we
need to put around this stuff...used by millions of millions before thought is
given to implications."
Case made the comments in a conversation that aired on Yahoo Finance on Thursday
at 5 p.m. EST in an episode of "
Influencers
with Andy Serwer
," a weekly interview series with leaders in business,
politics, and entertainment. In addition to her comments on big tech, Case
explained why a woman can be elected president, what National Geographic has done
to thrive amid media industry tumult, and how it felt at AOL in the heady early
days of the internet.
Russia-gate mania spread beyond a strategy for neutralizing Donald Trump or removing him
from office into an excuse for stifling U.S. dissent that challenges the New Cold
War
It's not hard to see the parallels of how the US is treating China today compared with
Japan in 1939. The US sanctioned Japan and stopped them from importing Iron and Oil and today
China is being technologically sanctioned throughout the West with Huawei.
The US is bludgeoning every Govt throughout the world to get its own way both allied and
contested. This attitude can only lead to War eventually. Venezuela today, Iran tomorrow
which will continue to box in China and Russia.
The US is needing a war to rally its people around the flag and to attempt to keep its
hand on the Rudder of the world.
China will be forced to sink an American ship or shoot down an American Jet to save face
re Taiwan and their Islands in the China Sea.
The West is begging for war and the parallels now and before WW11 is scary.
The US' recent multidimensional asymmetric offensive against all manner of Russian interests
isn't the random symptom of psychotic Russophobia that it's being presented as, but is part of
a comprehensive strategy for pressuring Moscow to abandon its close cooperation with China
& Iran in exchange for a "New Détente", a scenario that shouldn't be ruled out if
Trump gets his way during the upcoming meeting with President Putin.
Many people are struggling to find any rhyme or reason behind the US' anti-Russian moves
over the past couple of years, especially the ones that Trump was supposedly forced into by the
"deep state" out of the mistaken belief that it would relieve the fake news-driven Russiagate
pressure on his administration, but the answer to it all is a lot simpler than it appears. The
fact of the matter is that everything that's happening is intentional and part of a
comprehensive strategy for getting Russia to abandon its close cooperation with China &
Iran in response to the US' multidimensional asymmetric offensive against its interests,
although it's proven itself to be a failed plan that requires urgent reform. Whether it's the
West's "Russian propaganda" witchhunt or the
Skripal chemical weapons false flag scandal
, every single anti-Russian move that's been undertaken in the last few years is designed to
advance this objective.
Taking Apart The Multipolar TriangleIran:
There was
crediblespeculation right after Trump's
2016 victory that his administration would try to split the Russian-Chinese-Iranian
multipolar triangle in Eurasia, and that's exactly what the President and his team are trying
to do, albeit in a different fashion than what people might have expected. Trump rightly calculated
that Obama's unprecedented outreach to Iran through the 2015 nuclear deal was being taken
advantage of by Tehran and that the Islamic Republic never had any serious intentions in
agreeing to the tacit
quid-pro-quo being offered at the time to replace Saudi Arabia as America's preferred
regional partner. Accordingly, he decided to pivot away from his predecessor's policy and use
nothing but "muscular means" to coerce Iran into
submitting to the US' military might, which is a work in progress and one that will
certainly be made all the more difficult by Tehran's mastery of asymmetrical
responses.
China:
As for China, Trump also learned from the mistake of his predecessor who at one time offered
the People's Republic a global partnership through the so-called " G-2 "
or "
Chimerica " concept but was rebuffed by a Beijing that's both too proud to share world
leadership with America and also reluctant into being tricked to take on responsibilities that
it didn't agree to or anticipate at the time.
It wasn't coincidental that the G-2's failure was soon thereafter followed up by China's
announcement of its One Belt One Road (OBOR) global vision of New Silk Road connectivity in
order to economically reform the structural basis for the "Washington Conesus" and consequently
facilitate the emerging
Multipolar World Order .
Trump's Kraken -like answer to
this challenge was to continue with Obama's Hybrid War policy in targeting the most
vulnerable "Global South" transit states for China's transnational infrastructure
megaprojects simultaneously with the commencement of a
trade war against the People's Republic.
Russia:
Iran's full-blown ideological resistance to striking a "deal with the devil" and China's
unflinching commitment to challenging the US' unipolar dominance of the world mean that there's
no realistic chance that either of them will budge from their previous refusals to abandon the
other in exchange for an alleviation of American pressure on their countries, thereby pointing
Trump in Russia's direction because he considers it to be the "weakest link" in this multipolar
arrangement.
After all, Russia has always insisted with total sincerity that it wants nothing more than
an equal relationship with what it still continues to call its "Western partners", which
logically entails them respecting the country's so-called "sphere of influence" in the former
Soviet space. Previous US administrations smacked away Russia's olive branch every time it was
offered, but Trump seemed to actually be interested in cutting a deal with Moscow before the
"deep state" intervened to stop him.
The "Deep State's" Folly
Ironically, that move might go down in history as the last possible chance that the US had
to realistically bring Russia back into the "Washington Consensus" by peaceful means, as Moscow
signaled that it was prepared to enter into a so-called "New Détente" with Washington
that would have obviously involved mutual "concessions/compromises". That "lost opportunity"
might never be regained because Russia's resolve has since hardened after feeling betrayed by
Trump and subject to his administration's humiliating punishments for not submitting to America
without any preconditions ("mutual concessions/compromises"), which is what the "deep state"
wanted after making the massive error of judgement in convincing themselves through
"groupthink" that President Putin would follow in Yeltsin's footsteps and surrender if the
powerful "oligarchic" class put enough pressure on him to do so in exchange for lifting the
sanctions. That ship has sailed and what's happening now is a combination of scorn and
strategy.
The US will never forgive President Putin for refusing to bow down to the Obama-era
liberal-globalist "deep state" that sabotaged Trump's outreach plan, which is why it's getting
so nasty in carrying out witch hunts against Russian media and expelling the country's
diplomats on unproven pretexts. For the "deep state", this is "personal", though while Trump
seems to understand the "effectiveness" of "playing dirty" as a form of psychological warfare
against the Russian leadership, he's never publicly swayed from his campaign pledge to cut a
deal with Russia if it was possible (i.e. the "deep state" lets him or he goes around their
backs). It's with this backdrop in mind that Trump invited
President Putin to the White House for a forthcoming meeting that will presumably be about
"ironing out their differences" and advancing the presumably mutual goal of a so-called "New
Détente", albeit not on the one-sided unconditional terms that the "deep state" is
obsessed with.
Describing The "New Détente"
Trump realized that Russia is digging in its heels by deepening its partnerships with China
and Iran in response to the "deep state's" multidimensional asymmetric aggression and that this
policy has been nothing but counterproductive to America's predominant New Cold War interest in
"containing" China. Furthermore, the President seems to have convinced the "patriotic" and
"pragmatic" elements of the "deep state" that this is the case and that it's impossible for
America to make any tangible progress in stopping the Silk Road if it has to multitask between
"containing" China, Iran, and Russia in vastly different theaters and with completely different
methods. It's much better, the billionaire businessman likely reckoned, to walk back some of
his administration's unnecessarily aggressive moves in Europe and perhaps elsewhere as part of
his country's "mutual concessions/compromises" with Russia for a "New Détente" than to
continue with this completely failed policy of pressure.
What the US wants from Russia in exchange is simple, and it's that it expects Moscow to
scale back its strategic partnerships with Tehran & Beijing and to not interfere with
Washington's "containment" campaigns against both of them. Russia is already passively
allowing the US and its allies to "contain" Iran in Syria out of self-interested prudence
in preventing
World War III , but it has yet to pull back from its Silk Road relationship with China.
It's unclear exactly how the US envisions Russia doing this in a "plausibly deniable" way that
mirrors the Iranian approach and avoids provoking a hostile reaction from China, but whatever
it is that Washington has in mind, it hopes that Moscow will agree to it so that President
Putin can forget about international drama and completely focus on fulfilling the
comprehensive domestic reform agend a that he plans to carry out during his fourth and final term.
It's impossible to speculate on whether Russia is even interested in such a scenario at this
point in time given all that's transpired between it and the West in the past year alone, but
playing "devil's advocate" for a moment, there might be another enticing reason aside from the
domestic one why Moscow might decide to "play ball". The increasing polarization of the world
economic system into globalization-spreading China and protectionist-espousing America is
broadly returning International Relations to its Old Cold War-era bipolarity in advance of its
eventual transition to multipolarity, and it's here where Russia could play a pivotal role in
leading a new Non-Aligned Movement ( Neo-NAM )
that helps other countries "
balance " their relations with both superpowers. The US might begrudgingly be forced under
the current circumstances and the objective limits of its power to accept the relative
curtailment of its influence over some countries by Russia so long as Moscow fulfills a similar
role vis-à-vis them and China.
The Great Unknown
It's a risky gamble because a Russian-led Neo-NAM could just as easily tilt the strategic
balance of global influence in the New Cold War towards China as it could towards America, but
Washington is wagering that Moscow might conclude that its self-interest could best be
protected by maintaining "harmony" between the two superpowers in Eurasia, thus enabling the US
to focus more on destabilizing the Silk Road through Hybrid Wars in Africa and the parts of the
supercontinent not covered by this "balancing bloc". Russia's low-cost but high-impact
"balancing" investments could yield enormous dividends for its influence, while any prospective
de-escalation in Europe due to the "New Détente" would free up the country's resources
to focus more on carrying out President Putin's ambitious domestic reform agenda and delivering
on the campaign promises that he made his countrymen in order to
sustainably guarantee his legacy .
Concluding Thoughts
To reiterate what was just written, there is no way to know for certain whether the US'
latest gambit in trying to reach a "New Détente" with Russia will succeed or not, but it
needs to be recognized that the multidimensional asymmetric aggressions that it's waged against
its rival's interests will eventually take their financial toll and that President Putin might
find it increasingly challenging to execute his comprehensive reform agenda on the home front
unless he cuts some kind of deal. This doesn't imply that Russia is at risk of "selling out" to
the US, but just that President Putin is accountable first and foremost to his people and then
only secondly to his country's international partners.
If the Kremlin concludes that Russia's interests would best be advanced through engaging in
a series of "mutual concessions/compromises" with the US as part of a "New Détente",
then it won't hesitate to make that move; likewise, if the savvy Russian leader recognizes that
he's being "taken for a ride" by Trump and that his "counterpart" is offering him a lopsided
deal that's doomed to make his country America's "junior partner" in Eurasia, then he won't
think twice about walking away with no "deal". Ultimately, everything depends on whatever deal
Trump puts on the table and whether he can convince President Putin that his newfound
truce with the
neoconservatives translates into being able to get the "deep state" to abide by the terms
of any prospective agreement.
If Russia is swayed by the carrot-and-stick combination of the Trump Administration's
possibly sincere commitment to a "New Détente" in exchange for an alleviation of
multisided and sometimes humiliating pressure against it, then the geopolitical implications
would be profound since Moscow would be ascending into the perfect position for "balancing"
Eurasian affairs . It wouldn't just have China's tacit support for this initiative but
America's too because each superpower would appreciate Moscow becoming a "balancing" force
vis-à-vis the other and freeing them up to focus on their rival in other areas of
concern, mostly in Africa. As such, Russia could count on being courted by both of them and
finally fulfilling its grand strategic goal to "balance" Eurasia, though provided that this
speculative deal goes through in the first place and is actually respected by the US
afterwards.
Taming of financial oligarchy and restoration of the job market at the expense of outsourcing and offshoring is required in the
USA and gradually getting support. At least a return to key elements of the New Deal should be in the cards. But Clinton wing of Dems
is beong redemption. They are Wall Street puddles. all of the them.
Issues like Medicare for All, Free College, Restoring Glass Steagall, Ending Citizen's United/Campaign finance reform, federal jobs
guarantee, criminal justice reform, all poll extremely well among the american populace
If even such a neoliberal pro globalization, corporations controlled media source as Guardian views centrist neoliberal Democrats
like Booker unelectable, the situation in the next elections might be interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin ..."
"... 2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy. ..."
In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic
party. Booker ,
Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)
and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college
tuition for most Americans.
But outward appearances aren't everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late -- on
Wall Street. According to
CNBC , all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone's Jonathan
Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.
Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which
just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and
Gillibrand weren't far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and
other powerful executives.
When CNBC's story about
Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support
for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take "no corporate Pac money". But what's most telling isn't
that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street's money, it's that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn't take
their contributions, she's signaling that she's just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus
their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional
coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.
Gillibrand and others are behaving perfectly rationally. The last presidential election cost $6.6bn -- advertising, staff and
conventions are expensive. But even more important than that, they know that while leftwing stances might help win Democratic primaries,
the path of least resistance in the general election is capitulation to the big forces of capital that run this country. Those elites
might allow some progressive tinkering on the margins, but nothing that challenges the inequities that keep them wealthy and their
victims weak.
Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances,
the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.
The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don't have a labor-backed social democratic party that could
create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It's telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper's
recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: "We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values
across sectors."
Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think
there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments
like that, it doesn't take fake news to convince working-class Americans that
Democrats don't really have their interests at heart.
Of course, the Democratic party isn't a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic
socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn't going to
scare capital away from the Democratic party, it's going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.
Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of
Bernie Sanders . It seems likely that he will run
for president, but he's been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising
ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team's experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal
will morph into all-out war.
Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It's afraid of the Democrats who will take them on -- and those,
unfortunately, are few and far between.
Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin
Just like universal health care, let's give up, it's too hard, we're not winners, we're not number one or problem solvers
and besides, someone at some time for some reason might get something that someone else might not get regardless if that someone
else needs it. Let's go with the Berners who seem to believe there will never be none so pure enough to become president.
The corporate state does not cast the votes. The public does.
Leaning farther to the left on issues like universal healthcare and foreign wars would be agreeing with the public. Not only
the progressive public, but the GENERAL public. The big money donors are the ONLY force against the Democrats resisting these
things.
2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform
that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and
well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy.
Bernie's challenge will "morph into all-out war". "Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats", blah, blah, blah. But we're
going to continue to play along? Why? Oh yeah, Bhaskar Sunkara will have us believe "There is no alternative". Remember TINA?
Give it up, man, just give it up.
One dollar, one vote.
If you want Change, keep it in your pocket.
We can't turn this sinking ship around unless we know what direction it's going. So far, that direction is just delivering money
to private islands.
Democrats have a lot of talk, but they still want to drive the nice cars and sell the same crapft that the Republicans are.
Taxing the rich only works when you worship the rich in the first place.
Election financing is the single root cause for our democracy's failure. Period.
I really don't care too much about the mouthing of progressive platitudes from any 2020 Dem Prez candidate. The only ones that
will be worth voting for are the ones that sign onto Sanders' (or similar) legislation that calls for a Constitutional amendment
that allows federal and state governments to limit campaign contributions.
And past committee votes to prevent amendment legislation from getting to a floor vote - as well as missed co-sponsorship opportunities
- should be interesting history for all the candidates to explain.
Campaign financing is what keeps scum entrenched (because primary challengers can't overcome the streams of bribes from those
wonderful people exercising their 'free speech' "rights" to keep their puppet in govt) and prevents any challenges to the corporate
establishment who serve the same rich masters.
Lol, Social Security, Medicare, unemployement protections, so many of the things you mentioned, and so much more, were from the
PROGRESSIVE New Deal, which managed to implement this slew of changes in 5 years! 5 years! You can't criticize "progressives"
in one sentence and then use their accomplishments to support your argument. Today, the New Deal would be considered too far left
by most so called "pragmatic liberals." I assume you are getting fully behind the proposed "Green New Deal" then, right?
Vintage59 pointed out lots of things people have changed. Here's an exhaustive list of the legislation passed by people
who didn't get elected but were more progressive than the people who did:
There is also a steadily growing list of Democrats who did worse in elections than a hypothetical Democratic candidate had
been projected to do.
The party can either continue being GOP-Lite or it can start winning elections. It can't do both.
Nobody is going to get elected on a far left platform. Not in the USA and not anywhere. That's just a fact. And everybody
is going to need $$$ in the campaign. Of course candidates are going to suck up to Wall street and business in general.
And we would have been a thousand percent better off with HRC in the white house than we are now with the Trumpostor.
We don't need a candidate with far-left platform, we need one that is left-leaning at all. HRC and her next generation of clones
are mild Republicans.
Those who want to push the Democrats to the left in order to win perhaps need to stop talking to each other and talk to
people who live outside of LA and NY. If you stay within your bubble it seems the whole world thinks like you.
How old will Sanders be in 2020?
The people (outside the coasts) lean to the left some big issues. Medicare for all. Foreign wars. etc.
A sane person might ask why in the hell the left-side party is leaning farther to the right than the general public.
Sanders is a dinosaur. If there is a reason for Wall Street to be wary of him then it is that the mentally challenged orange
guy may win another term if the Democrats run with Sanders.
Hopefully, Sanders will understand what many of his supporters do not want to see: At some time age becomes a problem. If
the Democrats decide to move to the left rather than pursuing a pragmatic centrist approach, Ocasio-Cortez might be an option.
If they opt for the centrist alternative, it might be Harris or Gillibrand. Or, in both cases, a surprise candidate. But Sanders'
time is over, just as Biden's Bloomberg's.
It's true, but Trump is such a clusterfuck that an 80yo president is still be a better situation. Many countries have had rulers
in their 80s at one time or another.
Trump is clearly showing early-stage dementia now. Compare footage of him 10+ years ago to anything within the last 6-12 months
and it's obvious. The stress levels of being the POTUS + blackmailed by Putin + investigations bearing down on him . . . it's
wearing him down fast.
Anti-trust would be a very good place to start with.
Universal healthcare is a lot harder than you seem to think. I'd love it, but getting there means putting so many people out
of work, it'll be a massive political challenge, even if corporations have no influence. Progressives might be better off focusing
on how to ensure the existing system works better and Medicaid can slowly expand to fill the universal roll in the future.
Where has offering candidates who actually have a chance to win gotten us? Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the ADA, Title
9, Social Security, and more. None of these exist without constant changes. All took years to pass against heavy opposition. None
went far enough. All were improvements.
The list of wrongheaded things that were also passed is longer but thinking nothing changes because it takes time is faulty
logic.
Our capitalist predators are still alive and well. The finance, insurance, and real estate
organizations are the worst predators in the USA.
They will eat your babies if you let them.
"... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
"... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
"... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
"... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
"... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
"... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
"... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
"... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this
for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for
starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise
Russia and Putin.
The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and
roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they
come across a particularly adorable baby.
Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while
producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.
Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.
I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's
books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back.
He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of
the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping
on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining.
Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.
But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and
zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks
together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41
Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?
The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained
legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger
on JFK, MLK herself (some think).
Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression,
Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot
and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.
George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual
beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems
these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war
is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and
once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.
During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the
church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain
apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.
At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about
Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that
at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has
instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.
I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some
redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on
Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.
But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc
will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.
The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round
good egg he was.
The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the
BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA
trained and orchestrated death squads.
Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising
of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in
Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists
fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the
gullible to believe in. Sigh
I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It
was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains
when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were
wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people
have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population
that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election,
just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and
Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max
failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to
export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks
to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence,
and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios
Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding
fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need
to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the
like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own
dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell
are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and
public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media
hacks like Tisdall.
Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for
Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The
eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for
alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when
you need him?
What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend
meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book
"Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking,
oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was
a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when
during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was
handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and
Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.
Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There
still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late
seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy,
determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination
that the truth never becomes public.
I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst
ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.
The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the
Truth which it used to proclaim.
It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person
maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists)
came and went a long time ago.
What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House
cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect
in the family.
Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
"The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more
and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from
over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5
times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger
area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected
by radiation poisoning
"DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time.
The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal
(which it is).
Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't
recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that
solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link,
which began my research into the JFK Assassination.
"... Yet another group of billionaires are the heads of large state companies, also loyal to Putin. Putin-era billionaires build roads, bridges, stadiums in Russia, invest in Russian defense, aerospace, car industries, while Yeltsin-era billionaires move profits out of the country and buy English Premier League clubs. ..."
"... ....The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s ..."
"... I'm inclined to agree. And this is why there is so much anger against Putin, in particular, in the 'west': the Russian oligarchs wield enormous power through the media which is at the service of anyone with money. Bill Browder being a prime example. ..."
"... The oligarchs were the tools that the City of London and Wall St employed to plunder Russia's socialised wealth and resources. ..."
"... I don't understand the people here who write that VVPutin is in thrall to the Zionists, the Oligarchs, or that he's lining his own pocket etc etc. IMHO his strategy has always been clear and direct, since the beginning. He values first of all stability - time for Russia to rebuild herself. Secondly, he performs a clever balancing act between the competing centres of power in Russia. ..."
"... His mistake, however, when he became president, was to believe quite sincerely that the West - and particularly Washington (the important one) - shared a desire for peaceful partnership with Russia. Doubts emerged in 2011 - he realised that he was being played - and the doubts became certainties in 2014, since when some fairly radical reorganisations has been taking place. Russia is - again, IMHO - now ready to take its real place in the international order. ..."
Putin is not "controlled by oligarchs". The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s: Gusinsky (the media oligarch),
Berezovsky (the political broker oligarch), Khodorkovsky (the oil oligarch). These people were real oligarchs, i.e. they were
using their wealth to control political processes through black media propaganda, having their own MPs/Ministers/Governors, etc.
After the destruction of Gusinsky and Berezovsky, the oligarchs were invited to a meeting with Putin and told to drop any meddling
in politics (including media) and focus on purely economic activities. They were also told to assume more social responsibility.
In return, they were given a guarantee that the results of the privatization won't be rolled back.
Khodorkovsky was the
only one who rebelled against the deal and hence was also destroyed. As a result of this deal, the oligarchs stopped being oligarchs,
now they're simply billionaires.
They are allowed some influence over the economic policies of the government, but no influence
over ideology, budget, military, foreign affairs, etc. In other words, the word "oligarch" as applied to Yeltsin-era billionaires
is another lie about modern Russia.
Putin-era billionaires (Timchenko, Rothenberg brothers, Kovalchuk) were created by Putin to
provide counter-balance to Yeltsin-era billionaires; their whole legitimacy is based on loyalty to Putin, who is himself dedicated
to strengthening Russia.
Yet another group of billionaires are the heads of large state companies, also loyal to Putin. Putin-era
billionaires build roads, bridges, stadiums in Russia, invest in Russian defense, aerospace, car industries, while Yeltsin-era
billionaires move profits out of the country and buy English Premier League clubs.
It is only recently that some of the Yeltsin-era
billionaires have "seen the light" (as a result of the sanctions) and started to bring some of their capital back to Russia.
Overall,
the country is controlled by Putin, military & intelligence (siloviki). Neoliberals still have strong influence over economy/finance/education/culture,
but are increasingly contested by industrialist economists as well as historians who are fighting neoliberal myths about Russian/Soviet
history.
The Chief Rabbi of Russia is of the Chabad sect simply because most of Russian orthodox Jewish communities are of the Chabad
sect. He is actually from Milan; he moved to New Jersey in his teenage years, then to Brooklyn, New York, then to Moscow.
The
"Putin's Rabbi" is a stupid moniker invented by Western "journalists"; he is neither Putin's creation, nor Putin's puppet.
It
is true that Putin has good relationship with the Chief Rabbi, just as he has good relationships with the Patriarch, the Old Believer
Patriarch, the Chief Mufti, the Chief Lama, and lesser religious figures.
Sometimes he meets all of them together (google some
photos, it's quite a sight), sometimes he has one-on-one meetings. The strongest relationship is with the Patriarch. There is
also an "alternative Chief Rabbi of Russia" who represents orthodox Jewish communities that refuse to be governed by a Chabad
rabbi.
Russian billionaires with Israeli passports are all Yeltsin-era billionaires (ex-oligarchs) and are not "Putin's supporters".
In fact, Friedman and his gang who own Russia's largest private bank, Alfa-bank, were caught several times trying to sponsor pro-US
opposition.
Most recently, they tried to do it through a high-ranked Alfa-bank employee, Vladimir Ashurkov, who was funneling
money to Alexey Navalny.
After the Presidential Administration called them out on that, they immediately fired and disavowed Ashurkov,
who is now living in London and is a member of Integrity Initiative's UK cluster.
Alfa-bank is also the only Russian bank that
does not have any problems with its Ukrainian branch. These people are not Putin's supporters, they are Putin's enemies. Putin
tolerates them because he keeps his end of the bargain (see my post #85).
1. I still insist we use the word "billionaire" to refer to Russian ultra-rich. Some of them may turn into oligarchs in the
future, but currently they are not oligarchs, as they are not making decisions regarding the strategy of the country. The strategy
is chosen by Putin based on data provided by the intelligence services, the military, and the government/the central bank.
I'll give you one example. The billionaires were not consulted on the return of Crimea. When they learned about the decision
from the news, almost all of them were against it. Timchenko, one of "Putin's billionaires", straight up refused to build the
Crimean bridge. (In the end, after much deliberation, Rothenberg brothers agreed to take up the job.) If Russian billionaires
really did control Putin, Crimea would not have returned to Russia.
Compare this to Ukraine, where the oligarchs do exist. Most of them decided it would be better for Ukraine to join the EU.
Economic calculations showed the opposite, but it did not matter. The oligarchs owned all TV channels, radio stations, news websites,
as well as politicians, and they pushed pro-Maidan propaganda 24/7. You know the result.
2. Putin did not "boot out one faction of oligarchs", he booted out all of them. First, he demanded that all large media companies
are transferred to state ownership (hence the war on Gusinsky and Berezovsky who initially refused to do that). Then, a few years
later, he demanded that the billionaires abstain from any political activity, including sponsorship of political parties (hence
the war on Khodorkovsky who not only refused to do that, but planned to sell Yukos to Americans and use the money to buy all MPs
and become President himself). You say "money buys influence". Well, it's not easy to do that when all large media companies are
owned by the state and you can't sponsor political parties (unless asked to do so by the Presidential Administration).
Putin was not "supported by a competing faction who benefit from less competition". The "competing faction" did not exist when
he came to power. Timchenko, Kovalchuk, and others were nobodies in the 90s. Putin made them billionaires through various schemes.
They did not create Putin; Putin created them.
3. Russia does have large income/wealth inequality and it's toxic to society. There seems to be a threshold in income above
which rich people start losing empathy for ordinary people. The economic inequality isn't just an ethical problem, but also an
economic one: ordinary people simply do not have enough money to buy goods and services. Personally, I believe it's the biggest
impediment to Russia's economic growth. Of course, it's connected to corruption/nepotism.
4. I did not say "most Russian Jews are Chabad", I said most Russian orthodox Jewish communities ("parishes") are Chabad. At
least according to the figures I saw. Please note that 28 years have passed since 1990. Also note that Chabad is extremely active
in engaging non-religious Jews. So it's plausible that they have grown their numbers to become the biggest orthodox Jewish sect
in Russia.
I read somewhere that 70% of the population regret the collapse of the USSR and given the chaos that followed, it's not surprising.
But the Russian Communist Party seems as clueless as all the other communist parties, none can offer a viable alternative to the
present madness.
" ....The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s: Gusinsky (the media oligarch), Berezovsky (the political broker oligarch),
Khodorkovsky (the oil oligarch). These people were real oligarchs, i.e. they were using their wealth to control political processes
through black media propaganda, having their own MPs/Ministers/Governors, etc..." @85
I'm inclined to agree. And this is why there is so much anger against Putin, in particular, in the 'west': the Russian oligarchs
wield enormous power through the media which is at the service of anyone with money. Bill Browder being a prime example.
The oligarchs were the tools that the City of London and Wall St employed to plunder Russia's socialised wealth and resources.
The hate campaign against Putin, who is in many ways a very conservative economist pursuing the sort of neo-liberal policies that
capitalist financiers approve of, is inexplicable unless we understand that the end game is a return to the looting that took
place under the Empire's anointed, Boris Yeltsin.
For the others who don't believe Putin is compromised especially 's' who makes some strong points.
Okay, so let's say Putin is not compromised by the Oligarchy and he created the Russian oligarchy instead of the other way
around, i.e. that they are the kingmakers. The oligarchy he created that are in his debt because they get to keep their wealth
and corporate power will never be completely loyal to someone, Putin, who keeps them in check, under his thumb and expects them
to finance big projects when the state needs funds.
They are like hostages who will always lie in wait of the opportunity to escape
control dethrone him and seize power. They may be stockholmed for now, but they're always lying in wait.
Therefore Putin
who understands this, is compromised by the fact that he must give on the Zionist issue which reprsents the biggest threat to
his power because Zionists wield power globally, and could present those oligarchs with just that opportunity.
Zionist Russians
with dual citizenship will never be as loyal to Russia and Putin as sovereignists are, as Zionists have one loyalty above all
others, and in turn Putin can never be completely loyal to sovereignists and their anti-Western vision of strength for Russia
because he knows that the authority he exerts over the Oligarchy he created is dependent on how he deals with Zionism abroad.
In a sense, by trying to please both sides he thinks he can have his cake and eat it too, but by caving or even placating the
demands of Zionists he Putin is walking a fine line and I think he'll get to a point where he has to throw one side under the
bus.
Sovereignists tolerate Putin for as long as he keeps Zionist power in check, and in turn Zionists don't mount a campaign
to dethrone Putin for as long as he doesn't check their power outside Russia, and Russia will never achieve the power and greatness
it needs to check the Empire's domination and stop its expansion by caving to Zionist power. Putin is in a catch-22, he is compromised,
no matter how you look at it.
Maybe he's trying to buy time, but if he allows the Empire to take down Iran by any means and contain
China then he will make Russia a vassal of the Empire, because even Russia cannot compete alone against the Empire without alliances
strategically in opposition to the Empire's domination. This time is a crossroads for Putin and he's going to have to make a choice
soon and stop straddling both sides or he'll lose the gains Russia has achieved.
I don't trust Putin when he pals around with the Empire's proxy, the Saudis, or placates the lunatic Zionist state.
I don't understand the people here who write that VVPutin is in thrall to the Zionists, the Oligarchs, or that he's lining his
own pocket etc etc. IMHO his strategy has always been clear and direct, since the beginning. He values first of all stability
- time for Russia to rebuild herself. Secondly, he performs a clever balancing act between the competing centres of power in Russia.
His mistake, however, when he became president, was to believe quite sincerely that the West - and particularly Washington
(the important one) - shared a desire for peaceful partnership with Russia. Doubts emerged in 2011 - he realised that he was being
played - and the doubts became certainties in 2014, since when some fairly radical reorganisations has been taking place. Russia
is - again, IMHO - now ready to take its real place in the international order.
I take great pleasure in reading and listening to his - and Sergei Lavrov's - words, at the same time regretting the low standard
of our own representatives.
Many thanks to b and all of you who continue always to inform me and sometimes enchant me.
Taming of financial oligarchy and restoration of the job market at the expense of outsourcing and offshoring is required in the
USA and gradually getting support. At least a return to key elements of the New Deal should be in the cards. But Clinton wing of Dems
is beong redemption. They are Wall Street puddles. all of the them.
Issues like Medicare for All, Free College, Restoring Glass Steagall, Ending Citizen's United/Campaign finance reform, federal jobs
guarantee, criminal justice reform, all poll extremely well among the american populace
If even such a neoliberal pro globalization, corporations controlled media source as Guardian views centrist neoliberal Democrats
like Booker unelectable, the situation in the next elections might be interesting.
Notable quotes:
"... Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin ..."
"... 2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy. ..."
In their rhetoric and policy advocacy, this trio has been steadily moving to the left to keep pace with a leftward-moving Democratic
party. Booker ,
Harris and Gillibrand know that voters demand action and are more supportive than ever of Medicare for All and universal childcare.
Gillibrand, long considered a moderate, has even gone as far as to endorse abolishing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice)
and, along with Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders' single-payer healthcare bill. Harris has also backed universal healthcare and free college
tuition for most Americans.
But outward appearances aren't everything. Booker, Harris and Gillibrand have been making a very different pitch of late -- on
Wall Street. According to
CNBC , all three potential candidates have been reaching out to financial executives lately, including Blackstone's Jonathan
Gray, Robert Wolf from 32 Advisors and the Centerbridge Partners founder Mark Gallogly.
Wall Street, after all, played an important role getting the senators where they are today. During his 2014 Senate run, in which
just 7% of his contributions came from small donors, Booker raised $2.2m from the securities and investment industry. Harris and
Gillibrand weren't far behind in 2018, and even the progressive Democrat Sherrod Brown has solicited donations from Gallogly and
other powerful executives.
When CNBC's story about
Gillibrand personally working the phones to woo Wall Street executives came out, her team responded defensively, noting her support
for financial regulation and promising that if she did run she would take "no corporate Pac money". But what's most telling isn't
that Gillibrand and others want Wall Street's money, it's that they want the blessings of financial CEOs. Even if she doesn't take
their contributions, she's signaling that she's just playing politics with populist rhetoric. That will allow capitalists to focus
their attention on candidates such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who have shown a real willingness to abandon the traditional
coziness of the Democratic party with the finance, insurance and real estate industries.
Gillibrand and others are behaving perfectly rationally. The last presidential election cost $6.6bn -- advertising, staff and
conventions are expensive. But even more important than that, they know that while leftwing stances might help win Democratic primaries,
the path of least resistance in the general election is capitulation to the big forces of capital that run this country. Those elites
might allow some progressive tinkering on the margins, but nothing that challenges the inequities that keep them wealthy and their
victims weak.
Big business is likely to bet heavily on the Democratic party in 2020, maybe even more so than it did in 2016. In normal circumstances,
the Democratic party is the second-favorite party of capital; with an erratic Trump around, it is often the first.
The American ruling class has a nice hustle going with elections. We don't have a labor-backed social democratic party that could
create barriers to avoid capture by monied interests. It's telling that when asked about the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper's
recent chats with Wall Street political financiers, a staff member told CNBC: "We meet with a wide range of donors with shared values
across sectors."
Plenty of Democratic leaders believe in the neoliberal growth model. Many have gotten personally wealthy off of it. Others think
there is no alternative to allying with finance and then trying to create progressive social policy on the margins. But with sentiments
like that, it doesn't take fake news to convince working-class Americans that
Democrats don't really have their interests at heart.
Of course, the Democratic party isn't a monolith. But the insurgency waged by newly elected representatives such as the democratic
socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, Ro Khanna and others is still in its infancy. At this stage, it isn't going to
scare capital away from the Democratic party, it's going to make Wall Street invest more heavily to maintain its stake in it.
Men like Mark Gallogly know who their real enemy is: more than anyone else, the establishment is wary of
Bernie Sanders . It seems likely that he will run
for president, but he's been dismissed as a 2020 frontrunner despite his high favorability rates, name recognition, small-donor fundraising
ability, appeal to independent voters, and his team's experience running a competitive national campaign. As 2019 goes on, that dismissal
will morph into all-out war.
Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats gaining power. It's afraid of the Democrats who will take them on -- and those,
unfortunately, are few and far between.
Bhaskar Sunkara is a Guardian US columnist and the founding editor of Jacobin
Just like universal health care, let's give up, it's too hard, we're not winners, we're not number one or problem solvers
and besides, someone at some time for some reason might get something that someone else might not get regardless if that someone
else needs it. Let's go with the Berners who seem to believe there will never be none so pure enough to become president.
The corporate state does not cast the votes. The public does.
Leaning farther to the left on issues like universal healthcare and foreign wars would be agreeing with the public. Not only
the progressive public, but the GENERAL public. The big money donors are the ONLY force against the Democrats resisting these
things.
2016 has shown that the Democratic party is beyond redemption. When it comes down to the choice of either win with a platform
that may impact the wealth and power of their owners, or losing, they will always choose the latter, and continue as useful (and
well paid) idiots in the charade presented as US democracy.
Bernie's challenge will "morph into all-out war". "Wall Street isn't afraid of corporate Democrats", blah, blah, blah. But we're
going to continue to play along? Why? Oh yeah, Bhaskar Sunkara will have us believe "There is no alternative". Remember TINA?
Give it up, man, just give it up.
One dollar, one vote.
If you want Change, keep it in your pocket.
We can't turn this sinking ship around unless we know what direction it's going. So far, that direction is just delivering money
to private islands.
Democrats have a lot of talk, but they still want to drive the nice cars and sell the same crapft that the Republicans are.
Taxing the rich only works when you worship the rich in the first place.
Election financing is the single root cause for our democracy's failure. Period.
I really don't care too much about the mouthing of progressive platitudes from any 2020 Dem Prez candidate. The only ones that
will be worth voting for are the ones that sign onto Sanders' (or similar) legislation that calls for a Constitutional amendment
that allows federal and state governments to limit campaign contributions.
And past committee votes to prevent amendment legislation from getting to a floor vote - as well as missed co-sponsorship opportunities
- should be interesting history for all the candidates to explain.
Campaign financing is what keeps scum entrenched (because primary challengers can't overcome the streams of bribes from those
wonderful people exercising their 'free speech' "rights" to keep their puppet in govt) and prevents any challenges to the corporate
establishment who serve the same rich masters.
Lol, Social Security, Medicare, unemployement protections, so many of the things you mentioned, and so much more, were from the
PROGRESSIVE New Deal, which managed to implement this slew of changes in 5 years! 5 years! You can't criticize "progressives"
in one sentence and then use their accomplishments to support your argument. Today, the New Deal would be considered too far left
by most so called "pragmatic liberals." I assume you are getting fully behind the proposed "Green New Deal" then, right?
Vintage59 pointed out lots of things people have changed. Here's an exhaustive list of the legislation passed by people
who didn't get elected but were more progressive than the people who did:
There is also a steadily growing list of Democrats who did worse in elections than a hypothetical Democratic candidate had
been projected to do.
The party can either continue being GOP-Lite or it can start winning elections. It can't do both.
Nobody is going to get elected on a far left platform. Not in the USA and not anywhere. That's just a fact. And everybody
is going to need $$$ in the campaign. Of course candidates are going to suck up to Wall street and business in general.
And we would have been a thousand percent better off with HRC in the white house than we are now with the Trumpostor.
We don't need a candidate with far-left platform, we need one that is left-leaning at all. HRC and her next generation of clones
are mild Republicans.
Those who want to push the Democrats to the left in order to win perhaps need to stop talking to each other and talk to
people who live outside of LA and NY. If you stay within your bubble it seems the whole world thinks like you.
How old will Sanders be in 2020?
The people (outside the coasts) lean to the left some big issues. Medicare for all. Foreign wars. etc.
A sane person might ask why in the hell the left-side party is leaning farther to the right than the general public.
Sanders is a dinosaur. If there is a reason for Wall Street to be wary of him then it is that the mentally challenged orange
guy may win another term if the Democrats run with Sanders.
Hopefully, Sanders will understand what many of his supporters do not want to see: At some time age becomes a problem. If
the Democrats decide to move to the left rather than pursuing a pragmatic centrist approach, Ocasio-Cortez might be an option.
If they opt for the centrist alternative, it might be Harris or Gillibrand. Or, in both cases, a surprise candidate. But Sanders'
time is over, just as Biden's Bloomberg's.
It's true, but Trump is such a clusterfuck that an 80yo president is still be a better situation. Many countries have had rulers
in their 80s at one time or another.
Trump is clearly showing early-stage dementia now. Compare footage of him 10+ years ago to anything within the last 6-12 months
and it's obvious. The stress levels of being the POTUS + blackmailed by Putin + investigations bearing down on him . . . it's
wearing him down fast.
Anti-trust would be a very good place to start with.
Universal healthcare is a lot harder than you seem to think. I'd love it, but getting there means putting so many people out
of work, it'll be a massive political challenge, even if corporations have no influence. Progressives might be better off focusing
on how to ensure the existing system works better and Medicaid can slowly expand to fill the universal roll in the future.
Where has offering candidates who actually have a chance to win gotten us? Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, the ADA, Title
9, Social Security, and more. None of these exist without constant changes. All took years to pass against heavy opposition. None
went far enough. All were improvements.
The list of wrongheaded things that were also passed is longer but thinking nothing changes because it takes time is faulty
logic.
Our capitalist predators are still alive and well. The finance, insurance, and real estate
organizations are the worst predators in the USA.
They will eat your babies if you let them.
"... The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they come across a particularly adorable baby. ..."
"... I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's books and media appearances. ..."
"... George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one). ..."
"... That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems these people don't have a conscience. ..."
"... Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking, oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's. ..."
"... The Deep State Guardian. Why don't they just change their name to 'The Daily Thatcherite' and have done with it. ..."
"... They should just show it's full title: The Guardian Of The Establishment ..."
"... well, yeah. but for us mad people it goes deeper even than that: https://geopolitics.co/2018/12/02/in-memoriam-george-h-scherff-jr-aka-george-hw-bush-sr/ ..."
British and most western media are either in the direct or indirect pay of their governments. What journalist can expose this
for us? Any of you willing to make the biggest scoop of the 21st century? Tom Bradbury at ITN must be on the spook payroll, for
starters? MI6 had foreign correspondents for years, but domestic mouthpieces must now be on the take too? All paid to demonise
Russia and Putin.
The Guardian has lost all sense of proportion – mention Tommy Robinson and the entire staff through themselves to floor and
roll round like dying flies – yet for when it comes to US neocons they go all misty eyed, redolent of a broody couple when they
come across a particularly adorable baby.
Simon 'white helmets' Tisdall is especially egregious – one can imagine him throwing darts at a picture of Putin while
producing his latest homily to the murderous actions of gangsters like Bush and his crime family.
Its hard not to despair now this has become the official face of Britains so-called liberal media.
I would wager a medium sum that Tisdall is on a payroll other than the Grauniad's, or he's an actual asset per Ulfkötte's
books and media appearances. As with Michael White, with whom I had a very illuminating argument via email a few years back.
He *is* an asset, not a journalist (and a massive dick, to boot)
I thought the attitude of the Bush family to their fellow Americans was best illustrated by Barbara's response to the plight of
the homeless victims of Katrina who had been transported to the Houston domed stadium. They spent their nights there sleeping
on hard benches and when good ole Babs heard of it, she opined that they probably had never had it so good so why were they complaining.
Could Mother Theresa have had greater generosity of spirit?
Not just one article, the awful Guardian is full of contents eulogising [yet another] mongrel of a president.
But look at conservative media. The crazy Infowars.com described this Bush as an Anti-American Globalist and Traitor!! .. and
zerohedge.com is celebrating: "The Evil Has Died" and "In 2016 he voted for Hillary Clinton, because the Deep State Swamp sticks
together". https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-12-02/exploring-dark-side-bush-41
Just tell me, who is the rabid neo-con right-wing rag that is glorifying wars and mass murderers?
The late Robert Parry, sad to say. Maybe that now both the 'MacBeths' are stains on the tarmac – Parry's notes of the bloodstained
legacy of that dynasty can finally be displayed? That Barbara was one cold blooded mother! Would have happily pulled a trigger
on JFK, MLK herself (some think).
Just about the whole century from the setup of the Fed, the two world wars, the depression,
Hitler, Korea, Cuba all of it, had a a Bush hand in it. He was the self crowned Caesar having publicly executed the whole of Camelot
and left us with a poison toad, reminds us how low the Bush's took the USA.
George Bush spent his adult life organizing operations and wars that killed a few million people. Anyone who has spiritual
beliefs must wonder how it is to die with so much killing on your record or conscience (if you have one).
That's something I've wondered about many times. If you review John McCain's actions and comments before he died, it seems
these people don't have a conscience. If you surround yourself with people of similar mindset and in a climate where war
is considered obligatory for US Presidents, you go into self denial. Wars are probably like an addiction for these people and
once you get to that stage you no longer have a conscience.
During John McCain's funeral where all living ex-presidents were in attendance, someone remarked on Twitter, 'Quick, lock the
church doors and hold the war crimes trial in the church!'. This was a far more realistic observation than the sickening McCain
apologist BBC coverage we were subjected to.
At the weekend I went to the place where Oliver Cromwell lived. There was an American tourist who told us she was shocked about
Oliver Cromwell being dug up from his grave and his head stuck on a pike. She said it was gruesome. I was tempted to say that
at least that was 350 years ago, and similar things are happening today in Iraq, Syria and Libya – all places where the US has
instigated the chaos and supports the perpretators. I resisted the temptation.
I note that Cromwell thought he was chosen by God to do what he did. But again that was in different times and there were some
redeeming factors in what he did, Probably on par with Obama – who wreaked havoc on the Middle East but reached agreements on
Iran and Cuba. Plus Obama looked cool while killing and droning.
But what goes around comes around. I sense the pure evil involved in the current regime change wars, government, media etc
will pay a heavy price – whether in this life or the next.
The state controlled BBC has just done another puff piece on McCain saying what a splendid chap and great statesman and all round
good egg he was.
The MSM likes to slag off Vlad The Bad by droning on about how he was in the KGB. But Bush wasn't just IN the CIA, he was the
BOSS of the CIA, at a time when hundreds of thousands of Central American peasant farmers and Indians were being killed by CIA
trained and orchestrated death squads.
Mark: jayzus Mark, don't you just want to projectile vomit when you see all this absolute bullshit, just straight out revising
of history, just the lies, on and on . I was involved in a Central American solidarity group in the 1980s – early 90s here in
Aussie, found out then all about U.S style 'democracatic values' and 'human rights concerns' and death squads and various fascists
fully supported by the United States, and places like Guatemala and Nicaragua. Its all an illusion for 'polite society' and the
gullible to believe in. Sigh
I can't remember the exact figures but I think it was over 200,000 murdered in Guatemala out of a population of 4 million. It
was the same story in El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Colombia. And of course the CIA satrap Noriega was hauled off in chains
when that country was invaded. But Uncle Sam is finally paying a price for his antics south of the border. Those societies were
wrecked and brutalised beyond repair. There is now an unbelievably high murder rate of women in Guatemala. Millions of those people
have sought some kind of refuge in the belly of the beast, causing an immigration crisis, with an illegal immigrant population
that may be as high as 30 million. Hence all the uproar over Trump's wall. The immigration crisis was a factor in Trump's election,
just as the tidal wave of migrants from the destroyed countries of the Middle East was a factor in Brexit. Cameron, Sarko and
Clinton thought it was a spiffing idea and quite a wizard wheeze to bomb Libya back to the Stone Age. So we now have a Mad Max
failed state complete with warlords and slave markets just across the Med. What goes around, comes around. You can't expect to
export violence and mayhem abroad and remain immune to it at home.
Mark: after Efrain Rios Montt seized power in a coup in Guatemala in 1982, US Ambassador Frederick Chapin declared that thanks
to the coup of Rios Montt "the Guatemalan Govt has come out of the darkness into the light". That sums it up in one sentence,
and you're probably aware of the mass killing and disappearances under his genocidal tyranny. Reagan kindly submitted that Rios
Montt was 'getting a bum rap on human rights, the same Reagan who declared the Contra's were 'The moral equal of our founding
fathers'. In El Salvador, the same mass slaughter, the same mass upheaval, and even murdering Archbishop Romero. You only need
to look at what happened in Central & South America to understand what the United States really represents.
That's entirely right. People understandably despise and revile people like Brady and Hindley, Sutcliffe, Dahmer, Bundy and the
like. But they killed a handful of people and were often very damaged individuals to begin with. And at least they did their own
dirty work. Subhuman scum sucking filth like Bush, Bush 2, Obama, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Rice, Blair, Straw and Campbell
are a thousand times worse. They kill millions without getting their hands dirty, and preen and posture as great statesmen and
public servants, expecting deference and state funerals and puff piece obituaries from nauseating, loathsome, lickspittle media
hacks like Tisdall.
Nailed it Kit. The attempt at revionism and rewriting history by these craven creatures, these sycophantic slimebag shills for
Imperialism and War and the Anglo Zionist Empire. They don't speak truth to power, they protect and grovel to the powerful. The
eulogising and fawning of Bush was stomach churning, as it was for the arch Imperialist McCain when he croaked. Thank God for
alternative news sites, and yeah Caitlin Johnston @ medium nailed it as well, as Fair Dinkum mentioned. Where's John Pilger when
you need him?
What no one seems to realize is that the VP often takes charge of the US National Security Council when POTUS is not able to attend
meetings, which are held weekly. Under Eisenhower it was Richard Nixon who often took charge of the meetings -- Tim Weiner's book
"Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA" gives some details on this. Reagan was primarily a mantle piece for the banking,
oil and defense sectors to run wild. Is it really so hard to believe GHW Bush was running the National Security Council? It was
a CIA wet dream come true (especially after the alligator-armed "investigations" of the 70's.
I don't know but as a fairly apolitical individual, I never much bothered with the Kennedy Assasination. All that changed when
during the fiftieth anniversary, BBC Radio Four ran a program which included an interview with the Dallas police officer who was
handcuffed to Lee Harvey Oswald when he was shot by Jack Ruby. The consensus of that program was that the case was open shut and
Oswald did it. Around that time, several newspapers in the UK featured articles claiming that Oswald acted alone.
Whether or not anyone actively involved still lives, their descendants still do and the probable organising body too. There
still appears to be determination in some quarters to spread disinformation about the case. Given that as long ago as the late
seventies the House of Representatives Assassination Committee concluded that JFK's death was probably the consequence of a conspiracy,
determination amongst the mainstream media to lay Kennedy's death at the hands of Oswald alone suggests that there is still determination
that the truth never becomes public.
I'm sickened by the Guardian's and BBC's obedience to the US neocon project to seek, or create, and destroy "enemies" and whilst
ignoring all the disgusting atrocities that arise as a consequence.
The Guardian is not even worth the paper it's printed on. It's become The Guardian Of The Establishment rather than of the
Truth which it used to proclaim.
It is in danger of losing its budgie-cage-liner status. If budgies can talk they may refuse to evacuate on it. What kind of person
maintains ties to such a a poor excuse for cage toiletry. The moral crunch time for their journalists (actually their opinionists)
came and went a long time ago.
What a great piece. My parents knew them in New York and they came over once and left behind an embossed packet of White House
cigs. I asked my father (before he died) what he thought of them and all he ever said was he thought that Barbara was the intellect
in the family.
Bloody annoying, thanks Pater.
"The induction of DU weapons in 1991 in Iraq broke a 46-year taboo. This Trojan Horse of nuclear war continues to be used more
and more. DU remains radioactive longer than the age of the earth (estimated at 4.5 billion years). The long-term effects from
over a decade of DU exposures are devastating. The increased quantities of radioactive material used in Afghanistan are 3 to 5
times greater than Iraq, 1991. In Iraq, 2003, they are already estimated to be 6 to 10 times 1991, and will travel through a larger
area and affect many more people, babies and unborn. Countries within a 1000-mile radius of Baghdad and Kabul are being affected
by radiation poisoning
"DU remains radioactive longer than [ ] 4.5 billion years." It's worse than that. It loses half of its radioactivity in that time.
The good news is that that slow release means "D"U doesn't zap you much. The bad news is it's chemically toxic, like a heavy metal
(which it is).
Also no mention of the body of circumstantial evidence linking Bush to JFK's murder, though Bush repeatedly insisted that he couldn't
recall his whereabouts that day (I can precisely recall where I was, and I was 9 years old in 1963), in spite of the fact that
solid documentary evidence exists that puts him in Dallas on Nov 22, 1963.
The very first Google Search I did was this, (George H.W. Bush+November 22, 1963) and it yielded a page like the following link,
which began my research into the JFK Assassination.
"... Yet another group of billionaires are the heads of large state companies, also loyal to Putin. Putin-era billionaires build roads, bridges, stadiums in Russia, invest in Russian defense, aerospace, car industries, while Yeltsin-era billionaires move profits out of the country and buy English Premier League clubs. ..."
"... ....The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s ..."
"... I'm inclined to agree. And this is why there is so much anger against Putin, in particular, in the 'west': the Russian oligarchs wield enormous power through the media which is at the service of anyone with money. Bill Browder being a prime example. ..."
"... The oligarchs were the tools that the City of London and Wall St employed to plunder Russia's socialised wealth and resources. ..."
"... I don't understand the people here who write that VVPutin is in thrall to the Zionists, the Oligarchs, or that he's lining his own pocket etc etc. IMHO his strategy has always been clear and direct, since the beginning. He values first of all stability - time for Russia to rebuild herself. Secondly, he performs a clever balancing act between the competing centres of power in Russia. ..."
"... His mistake, however, when he became president, was to believe quite sincerely that the West - and particularly Washington (the important one) - shared a desire for peaceful partnership with Russia. Doubts emerged in 2011 - he realised that he was being played - and the doubts became certainties in 2014, since when some fairly radical reorganisations has been taking place. Russia is - again, IMHO - now ready to take its real place in the international order. ..."
Putin is not "controlled by oligarchs". The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s: Gusinsky (the media oligarch),
Berezovsky (the political broker oligarch), Khodorkovsky (the oil oligarch). These people were real oligarchs, i.e. they were
using their wealth to control political processes through black media propaganda, having their own MPs/Ministers/Governors, etc.
After the destruction of Gusinsky and Berezovsky, the oligarchs were invited to a meeting with Putin and told to drop any meddling
in politics (including media) and focus on purely economic activities. They were also told to assume more social responsibility.
In return, they were given a guarantee that the results of the privatization won't be rolled back.
Khodorkovsky was the
only one who rebelled against the deal and hence was also destroyed. As a result of this deal, the oligarchs stopped being oligarchs,
now they're simply billionaires.
They are allowed some influence over the economic policies of the government, but no influence
over ideology, budget, military, foreign affairs, etc. In other words, the word "oligarch" as applied to Yeltsin-era billionaires
is another lie about modern Russia.
Putin-era billionaires (Timchenko, Rothenberg brothers, Kovalchuk) were created by Putin to
provide counter-balance to Yeltsin-era billionaires; their whole legitimacy is based on loyalty to Putin, who is himself dedicated
to strengthening Russia.
Yet another group of billionaires are the heads of large state companies, also loyal to Putin. Putin-era
billionaires build roads, bridges, stadiums in Russia, invest in Russian defense, aerospace, car industries, while Yeltsin-era
billionaires move profits out of the country and buy English Premier League clubs.
It is only recently that some of the Yeltsin-era
billionaires have "seen the light" (as a result of the sanctions) and started to bring some of their capital back to Russia.
Overall,
the country is controlled by Putin, military & intelligence (siloviki). Neoliberals still have strong influence over economy/finance/education/culture,
but are increasingly contested by industrialist economists as well as historians who are fighting neoliberal myths about Russian/Soviet
history.
The Chief Rabbi of Russia is of the Chabad sect simply because most of Russian orthodox Jewish communities are of the Chabad
sect. He is actually from Milan; he moved to New Jersey in his teenage years, then to Brooklyn, New York, then to Moscow.
The
"Putin's Rabbi" is a stupid moniker invented by Western "journalists"; he is neither Putin's creation, nor Putin's puppet.
It
is true that Putin has good relationship with the Chief Rabbi, just as he has good relationships with the Patriarch, the Old Believer
Patriarch, the Chief Mufti, the Chief Lama, and lesser religious figures.
Sometimes he meets all of them together (google some
photos, it's quite a sight), sometimes he has one-on-one meetings. The strongest relationship is with the Patriarch. There is
also an "alternative Chief Rabbi of Russia" who represents orthodox Jewish communities that refuse to be governed by a Chabad
rabbi.
Russian billionaires with Israeli passports are all Yeltsin-era billionaires (ex-oligarchs) and are not "Putin's supporters".
In fact, Friedman and his gang who own Russia's largest private bank, Alfa-bank, were caught several times trying to sponsor pro-US
opposition.
Most recently, they tried to do it through a high-ranked Alfa-bank employee, Vladimir Ashurkov, who was funneling
money to Alexey Navalny.
After the Presidential Administration called them out on that, they immediately fired and disavowed Ashurkov,
who is now living in London and is a member of Integrity Initiative's UK cluster.
Alfa-bank is also the only Russian bank that
does not have any problems with its Ukrainian branch. These people are not Putin's supporters, they are Putin's enemies. Putin
tolerates them because he keeps his end of the bargain (see my post #85).
1. I still insist we use the word "billionaire" to refer to Russian ultra-rich. Some of them may turn into oligarchs in the
future, but currently they are not oligarchs, as they are not making decisions regarding the strategy of the country. The strategy
is chosen by Putin based on data provided by the intelligence services, the military, and the government/the central bank.
I'll give you one example. The billionaires were not consulted on the return of Crimea. When they learned about the decision
from the news, almost all of them were against it. Timchenko, one of "Putin's billionaires", straight up refused to build the
Crimean bridge. (In the end, after much deliberation, Rothenberg brothers agreed to take up the job.) If Russian billionaires
really did control Putin, Crimea would not have returned to Russia.
Compare this to Ukraine, where the oligarchs do exist. Most of them decided it would be better for Ukraine to join the EU.
Economic calculations showed the opposite, but it did not matter. The oligarchs owned all TV channels, radio stations, news websites,
as well as politicians, and they pushed pro-Maidan propaganda 24/7. You know the result.
2. Putin did not "boot out one faction of oligarchs", he booted out all of them. First, he demanded that all large media companies
are transferred to state ownership (hence the war on Gusinsky and Berezovsky who initially refused to do that). Then, a few years
later, he demanded that the billionaires abstain from any political activity, including sponsorship of political parties (hence
the war on Khodorkovsky who not only refused to do that, but planned to sell Yukos to Americans and use the money to buy all MPs
and become President himself). You say "money buys influence". Well, it's not easy to do that when all large media companies are
owned by the state and you can't sponsor political parties (unless asked to do so by the Presidential Administration).
Putin was not "supported by a competing faction who benefit from less competition". The "competing faction" did not exist when
he came to power. Timchenko, Kovalchuk, and others were nobodies in the 90s. Putin made them billionaires through various schemes.
They did not create Putin; Putin created them.
3. Russia does have large income/wealth inequality and it's toxic to society. There seems to be a threshold in income above
which rich people start losing empathy for ordinary people. The economic inequality isn't just an ethical problem, but also an
economic one: ordinary people simply do not have enough money to buy goods and services. Personally, I believe it's the biggest
impediment to Russia's economic growth. Of course, it's connected to corruption/nepotism.
4. I did not say "most Russian Jews are Chabad", I said most Russian orthodox Jewish communities ("parishes") are Chabad. At
least according to the figures I saw. Please note that 28 years have passed since 1990. Also note that Chabad is extremely active
in engaging non-religious Jews. So it's plausible that they have grown their numbers to become the biggest orthodox Jewish sect
in Russia.
I read somewhere that 70% of the population regret the collapse of the USSR and given the chaos that followed, it's not surprising.
But the Russian Communist Party seems as clueless as all the other communist parties, none can offer a viable alternative to the
present madness.
" ....The oligarchs have been destroyed in the early 00s: Gusinsky (the media oligarch), Berezovsky (the political broker oligarch),
Khodorkovsky (the oil oligarch). These people were real oligarchs, i.e. they were using their wealth to control political processes
through black media propaganda, having their own MPs/Ministers/Governors, etc..." @85
I'm inclined to agree. And this is why there is so much anger against Putin, in particular, in the 'west': the Russian oligarchs
wield enormous power through the media which is at the service of anyone with money. Bill Browder being a prime example.
The oligarchs were the tools that the City of London and Wall St employed to plunder Russia's socialised wealth and resources.
The hate campaign against Putin, who is in many ways a very conservative economist pursuing the sort of neo-liberal policies that
capitalist financiers approve of, is inexplicable unless we understand that the end game is a return to the looting that took
place under the Empire's anointed, Boris Yeltsin.
For the others who don't believe Putin is compromised especially 's' who makes some strong points.
Okay, so let's say Putin is not compromised by the Oligarchy and he created the Russian oligarchy instead of the other way
around, i.e. that they are the kingmakers. The oligarchy he created that are in his debt because they get to keep their wealth
and corporate power will never be completely loyal to someone, Putin, who keeps them in check, under his thumb and expects them
to finance big projects when the state needs funds.
They are like hostages who will always lie in wait of the opportunity to escape
control dethrone him and seize power. They may be stockholmed for now, but they're always lying in wait.
Therefore Putin
who understands this, is compromised by the fact that he must give on the Zionist issue which reprsents the biggest threat to
his power because Zionists wield power globally, and could present those oligarchs with just that opportunity.
Zionist Russians
with dual citizenship will never be as loyal to Russia and Putin as sovereignists are, as Zionists have one loyalty above all
others, and in turn Putin can never be completely loyal to sovereignists and their anti-Western vision of strength for Russia
because he knows that the authority he exerts over the Oligarchy he created is dependent on how he deals with Zionism abroad.
In a sense, by trying to please both sides he thinks he can have his cake and eat it too, but by caving or even placating the
demands of Zionists he Putin is walking a fine line and I think he'll get to a point where he has to throw one side under the
bus.
Sovereignists tolerate Putin for as long as he keeps Zionist power in check, and in turn Zionists don't mount a campaign
to dethrone Putin for as long as he doesn't check their power outside Russia, and Russia will never achieve the power and greatness
it needs to check the Empire's domination and stop its expansion by caving to Zionist power. Putin is in a catch-22, he is compromised,
no matter how you look at it.
Maybe he's trying to buy time, but if he allows the Empire to take down Iran by any means and contain
China then he will make Russia a vassal of the Empire, because even Russia cannot compete alone against the Empire without alliances
strategically in opposition to the Empire's domination. This time is a crossroads for Putin and he's going to have to make a choice
soon and stop straddling both sides or he'll lose the gains Russia has achieved.
I don't trust Putin when he pals around with the Empire's proxy, the Saudis, or placates the lunatic Zionist state.
I don't understand the people here who write that VVPutin is in thrall to the Zionists, the Oligarchs, or that he's lining his
own pocket etc etc. IMHO his strategy has always been clear and direct, since the beginning. He values first of all stability
- time for Russia to rebuild herself. Secondly, he performs a clever balancing act between the competing centres of power in Russia.
His mistake, however, when he became president, was to believe quite sincerely that the West - and particularly Washington
(the important one) - shared a desire for peaceful partnership with Russia. Doubts emerged in 2011 - he realised that he was being
played - and the doubts became certainties in 2014, since when some fairly radical reorganisations has been taking place. Russia
is - again, IMHO - now ready to take its real place in the international order.
I take great pleasure in reading and listening to his - and Sergei Lavrov's - words, at the same time regretting the low standard
of our own representatives.
Many thanks to b and all of you who continue always to inform me and sometimes enchant me.
"... The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." ..."
"... What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100% certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals. ..."
"... That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so ..."
Convicted criminals. Such as disgraced former CIA boss,
David Petraeus, who's just been handed a $100,000
(Ł64,000) fine and two years' probation for leaking classified information.
Petraeus now works for the vulturous private equity firm KKR, run by Henry Kravis, who does arguably Bilderberg's best impression
of Gordon Gecko out of Wall Street. Which he cleverly combines with a pretty good impression of an actual gecko.
... ... ...
"Can I go now?" Another no. So I continued my list of criminals. I moved on to someone closer to home:
René Benko, the Austrian real estate baron, who had a conviction
for bribery upheld recently by the supreme court. Which didn't stop him making the cut for this year's conference. "You know Benko?"
The cop nodded. It wasn't easy to see in the glare of the searchlight, but he looked a little ashamed.
... ... ...
I decided to reward their vigilance with a chat about HSBC. The chairman of the troubled banking giant, Douglas Flint, is a regular
attendee at Bilderberg, and he's heading here again this year, along with a member of the bank's board of directors, Rona Fairhead.
Perhaps most tellingly, Flint is finding room in his Mercedes for the bank's busiest employee: its chief legal officer, Stuart Levey.
A Guardian editorial this week branded HSBC "a bank beyond shame" after it announced plans to cut 8,000 jobs in the UK, while
at the same time threatening to shift its headquarters to Hong Kong. And having just been forced to pay Ł28m in fines to Swiss regulators
investigating money-laundering claims. The big question, of course, is how will the chancellor of the exchequer,
George Osborne, respond to all this? Easy – he'll
go along to a luxury Austrian hotel and hole up with three senior members of HSBC in private. For three days.
High up on this year's conference agenda is "current economic issues", and without a doubt, one of the biggest economic issues
for Osborne at the moment is the future and finances of Europe's largest bank. Luckily, the chancellor will have plenty of time at
Bilderberg to chat all this through through with Flint, Levey and Fairhead. And the senior Swiss financial affairs official, Pierre
Maudet, a member of the Geneva state council in charge of the department of security and the economy. It's all so incredibly convenient.
Let's see, maybe because we have read over their leaked documents from the 1950s in which they discussed currency manipulation
and GATT. Everything they have discussed in their meetings over the past decades has almost come to fruition. There are elected
officials meeting with criminals such as HSBC. Did you even read the article? If you did, and you are not het up or whatever you
call it, then you are of a peasant mentality, and there is no use talking to you.
The Bilderberg set call people like you either their "dogs" (if you are in politics or the military) or the "dead." I won't
be looking for your response because you have confirmed that you do not matter.
Carpasia -> MickGJ 12 Jun 2015 10:52
Thank you for your comment, my good man. Hatred is human, and helps us all to avoid pain, for pain, especially unnecessary
pain, is allowed to be hated by the agreement of all, if nothing else is. I would hate to be beaten by Nazis. Thus, I would avoid
going to a place where that could occur. That is how hatred works for me. It is the only way it can work, and not be pernicious
to the self and others.
I distrust the international order as it is the means, harnessed by money, whether corporate or state or individual or monarchical,
by which this world is being destroyed. Could things have been better? Jesus is on one end of the spectrum, and Lord Acton on
the other, of the spectrums of viewpoints from which that could be properly assessed.
If the corruption at the heart of the international
order is not regulated properly, this world will come to an end, not the end of the world itself, but the end of the world as
we know it. This is happening now. The world is finite.
I am not a xenophobe. In my experience, the people that are most likely to hurt me, and thus deserve fear, are those closest.
Perhaps that is a cynical way of describing it, but anyone who thinks honestly about it would accede to the notion that it is
the people who "love" us that hurt us the most, for we agree too be vulnerable to them. It is the matrix of love.
As for Austria and Bavaria, I have visited both places and they were, both, the cleanest locales I have ever seen, with Switzerland
having to be mentioned in the same breath, of course.
I take a certain liberty in writing. I am not damning the human race, or strangers to me. If I did not entertain, but caused
offence, I apologize to you. I do not possess omniscience, and my words will have to speak for themselves.
Thank you, again.
DemonicWarlordSlayer 12 Jun 2015 08:02
"How Geo Bush's Grandfather Helped Hitler's Rise to Power" in the UK Guardian >
"Did Geo H W Bush Coordinate a JFK Hit Team" at Veterans Today >
"9/11 Conspiracy Solved, Names, Connections, Details" on youtube....dot-to-dot of the
Demonic Warlord's Crimes Against Humanity....end feudalism.
Carpasia 12 Jun 2015 07:09
Excellent article.
I visited Austria once, and I know of what he speaks. It was the one place I have ever visited that I thought I would be jailed
if I littered. I was wandering at the time, but I tentatively had a meal of chicken and departed henceforth.
Austrians are an interesting lot, to be sure. That they are perfect goes without saying. Their main virtue is that they do
not travel, and that strangers, which we call tourists these days, are not welcomed. If only we were all like that, the world
would be a far better place.
Austrians do everything well, including crime. Some of the greatest crimes in the world have been committed by Austrians, but
their crimes did not include not having their papers.
During World War 2, and I pass over Hitler, the German machine of death had an unusually high proportion of Austrians in commanding
roles assisting it. It can not be explained away by saying they were some kind of faux Germans, and so it matters not. Indeed,
if anything, Germans are faux Austrians, looked at in the broad brush of history. Men of many nations joined the Germans and adorned
themselves with the Death's Head, but many Austrians might as well have tattooed it onto their foreheads. I know of what I speak,
for I read on it, and will justify if questioned.
Reinhard Heydrich is an epitome of this, in the true sense of the word. Kurt Waldheim was another, too young too rise too far
before the Ragnarok of May of 1945, but government of the world was not out of his reach, a man who had materially assisted the
transportation of the Jews of Thessaloniki to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and, when challenged, was unrepentant, not as a racist,
but as something worse even, as a man whose great virtue was that he followed orders. It is order that the Austrians value over
everything. Even crime is ordered.
In the common-law west we think criminals are disordered beasts to be locked up. We do not give them papers. They are registered
only to warn us of their existence, and we do not like to let them travel, as much as we could benefit by their absence, because
we think they flee to license, and we think it wrong to inflict them upon innocents abroad. In Austria, the criminal is the man
with no papers. If he has papers, all is well, and he is no criminal, whatever he has done.
colingorton 12 Jun 2015 03:19
What do you mean "where criminals mingle with ministers". That is assuming that ministers are not criminals. Considering that
there will be ministers from the USA, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK, I'd suggest that there is a near 100%
certainty that some, if not all, the ministers there are criminals.
That one group of almost-certainly-criminals meets another group of almost-certainly-criminals is hardly surprising. That the
whole shebang is protected by the host's police force is even less so.
How far can all this mutual back scratching go? It seems that the only alternative left is far too drastic, but there really
seems to be no place for a legal alternative, does there?
"... Throughout the day, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Google News all led with breathless stories about Russian efforts to "sway American opinion and divide the country" (in the words of the Times). The propaganda barrage was based on a set of reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee by organizations with close ties to the US state and intelligence apparatus. ..."
"... Like countless other stories about alleged Russian "disinformation," Monday's media blast followed a script. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... The first of two reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency," was published by an organization known as New Knowledge, which purports to be a cybersecurity company, but whose primary public presence consists in advocacy for internet censorship. ..."
"... Ryan Fox, the co-founder of New Knowledge and a co-author of the report, worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for 15 years. New Knowledge's website notes that "prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative European SIGINT partners, he served under US Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC) as a CNO Analyst for the US Army." His partner, the company's CEO, is Jonathon Morgan, who has published for the state-connected Brookings Institution and worked as a special advisor to the State Department. ..."
"... The second report, "The IRA and Political Polarization in the United States," published under the imprimatur of Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project, in collaboration with the social media analysis firm Graphika, was likewise authored by figures with deep connections to the state and the military. Graphika staffer Camille Francois, a co-author, served as chief technical officer to the French prime minister and worked at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). ..."
"... Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, like Warner a member of the Intelligence Committee, appeared on the Public Broadcasting evening news program to chastise Facebook and demand that it be more "aggressive" in shutting down "disinformation." ..."
"... Commenting on the New Knowledge report, the New York Times ..."
"... The orchestrated hysteria over "disinformation" is itself a gigantic disinformation campaign, and the narrative about the sinister spread of "fake news" is an example of real "fake news." ..."
"... First all the anti Russian hysteria is concentrated in MSM media, completely absent from grassroots political discourse across kitchen table as it is dominated by economy-stupid daily struggle reality ( as Dems internal pols showed) , and is methodically debunked by most of alternative media except for blatant political hacks who fuel the nonsense on internet. ..."
"... The major reason for all they prefapaos and war mongering is as WSWS numerous times documented is because oligarchic policies of mass pauperization of population resulted in skyrocketing of class struggle and they just pull old worn down card of nationalism and war, Luxemburg warned over hundred years ago. ..."
"... "The new "proof" of Russian subversion is then used to demand even more sweeping measures to censor the internet, in the name of securing "our democracy." With each successive wave of stories, foreign "disinformation" is more directly identified with opposition to social inequality, police brutality and the capitalist system." ..."
"... It's the "War on Terrorism" brought to a whole new level . But it's the same class (in the service of the same class interests) bringing it. ..."
"... "It is highly significant that the posts cited by the reports as responsible for manipulating public opinion and undermining American democracy are predominantly left-wing in character." Against the same material interests of the working class. "These left-wing pages expressed "antiwar opposition" and "objections to US involvement in another country's affairs." ..."
"... The more things change, the more they stay the same: "The Black Panther party, without question, remains the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." -- J. Edgar Hoover, 1969 ..."
"... All Russia is doing ( if it even is Russia) is holding up a big mirror to the US, and big military industrial recipients like Mark Warner hate it. The criteria should be truth itself not the source of the truth. ..."
"... I simply call it NeoMcCarthyism propaganda. What they as me being disinformed, lol, then they would have had to start on me when I was in grammar school in the early to mid 1960s, and I don't recall there being a social media way back then. I formed own opinion way back then when, on my own I decided what I was getting the 6o'clock news was B.S. ..."
"... The USA is a hopeless war mongering terrorist state. It should, and must be, coming to an end. And, there are signs that the USA with all its weapons and lies is creeping toward that situation. ..."
"... The fact that Russia and China are starting to get rid of the worthless USA dollar is a major blow to the USA. The latest appointments of the neocon Bolton, and the CIA blowhard Pompous Pompeo is an indication that the only thing USA has to offer to the world is threats of war by these, and all their filthy war dogs! ..."
"... America survival is dependent upon its lies and misinformation it delivers each day through cable news and sports which also fetishsize militarism. The only situation that lies on the horizon is more of the same. ..."
"... America doesn't have "defense" spending. We have offense spending. ..."
Amid new exposures of Wall Street criminality, the White House's mass imprisonment of immigrant children, and growing demands
by US workers for decent wages, the US media was preoccupied Monday with the supposed efforts of Russian President Vladimir Putin
to make people believe that life in America is not a paradise.
Throughout the day, the New York Times, the Washington Post and Google News all led with breathless stories
about Russian efforts to "sway American opinion and divide the country" (in the words of the Times). The propaganda barrage
was based on a set of reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee by organizations with close ties to the US state
and intelligence apparatus.
Like countless other stories about alleged Russian "disinformation," Monday's media blast followed a script. Reports and testimony
from nominally independent organizations, which are, in reality, mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies, are commissioned by
Congress. They are "leaked" to the New York Times, which publishes a front-page article promoting them as "independent,"
scientific and authoritative, without, however, presenting any serious analysis of the actual evidence or the social and political
forces behind the studies. The reports in the Times (or the Washington Post) are then cited by countless media
outlets and politicians as new and irrefutable "evidence" of Russian "meddling" and "fake news."
The new "proof" of Russian subversion is then used to demand even more sweeping measures to censor the internet, in the name
of securing "our democracy." With each successive wave of stories, foreign "disinformation" is more directly identified with opposition
to social inequality, police brutality and the capitalist system.
The first of two reports submitted to the Senate Intelligence Committee, "The Tactics & Tropes of the Internet Research Agency,"
was published by an organization known as New Knowledge, which purports to be a cybersecurity company, but whose primary public
presence consists in advocacy for internet censorship.
Ryan Fox, the co-founder of New Knowledge and a co-author of the report, worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) for
15 years. New Knowledge's website notes that "prior to his civilian roles as a Counter Terrorism Fellow and NSA Representative
European SIGINT partners, he served under US Joint Special Operation Command (JSOC) as a CNO Analyst for the US Army." His partner,
the company's CEO, is Jonathon Morgan, who has published for the state-connected Brookings Institution and worked as a special
advisor to the State Department.
New Knowledge was established with a $1.9 million grant from Moonshots Capital. Moonshots' founders are Kelly Perdew, who,
according to the biography on the company's website, "served in the US Army as a military intelligence officer," and Craig Cummings,
who "spent 17 years in the Army, most of that time as an intelligence officer serving in support of the National Security Agency."
The second report, "The IRA and Political Polarization in the United States," published under the imprimatur of Oxford University's
Computational Propaganda Project, in collaboration with the social media analysis firm Graphika, was likewise authored by figures
with deep connections to the state and the military. Graphika staffer Camille Francois, a co-author, served as chief technical
officer to the French prime minister and worked at the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
In line with the by now well-established playbook, Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the leading advocate of internet censorship
in the US Senate, took to the airwaves to proclaim that these "independent" reports were a "wake up call." He continued: "These
attacks against our country were much more comprehensive, calculating and widespread than previously revealed." He added that
"addressing this challenge" was "going to require some much-needed and long-overdue guardrails when it comes to social media."
Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, like Warner a member of the Intelligence Committee, appeared on the Public Broadcasting evening
news program to chastise Facebook and demand that it be more "aggressive" in shutting down "disinformation."
In regard to their content, both reports are highly dubious and clearly politically motivated. The raw data is based on information
turned over to the Senate Intelligence Committee last year by Facebook, YouTube, Instagram and Twitter. After initially rejecting
as "crazy" claims that "Russian meddling" helped swing the election to Trump, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, together with the
leaders of other major technology companies, provided a list of accounts that they asserted-without providing any details on how
this conclusion was reached-were controlled by Russian operatives.
Even if one were to assume that this data and the content of the reports were accurate, whatever Russia may or may not have
done pales in comparison to the operations of US intelligence agencies all over the world, including within the United States
itself, not to mention the billions of dollars spent by the corporate and financial elite to manipulate US elections and determine
their outcome.
The claim, moreover, that Russian Twitter and Facebook posts are responsible for social discontent in the United States-the
most unequal country in the world-is beyond ludicrous.
It is highly significant that the posts cited by the reports as responsible for manipulating public opinion and undermining
American democracy are predominantly left-wing in character.
The New Knowledge report attempts to muddle this reality by categorizing content opposing police brutality as neither left-wing
or right-wing, but "Black." It states that of 62 Facebook pages allegedly tied to Russia, "Overall, 30 targeted Black audiences
and amassed 1,187,810 followers; 25 targeted the Right and amassed 1,446,588 followers, and 7 targeted the Left and amassed 689,045
followers."
The content of the accounts labeled by New Knowledge as targeting "Black audiences" is made clear in a subsequent section dealing
with the video streaming service YouTube. Of 1,063 videos turned over to the committee, the majority "related to the police and
focused on police abuses."
Commenting on the New Knowledge report, the New York Times declared that the Russian government's "tactics echo Soviet
propaganda efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States."
Here, the Timesdemonstrates the utterly reactionary pedigree of the campaign against "Russian meddling." During the
American civil rights movement, Southern segregationists claimed that African American workers were being stirred up by "communists"
and "outside agitators." The strivings of African Americans for equal rights were denounced as a Soviet plot.
Now, too, the deeply-felt hatred by American workers and youth of all races for police brutality and the epidemic of police
murders is presented as a "Russian" plot to "sow division" among "Black audiences."
"Left-leaning [Russian-inspired] pages," the report states, "criticized mainstream, established Democratic leaders as corporatists
or too close to neo-cons, and promoted Green Party and Democratic Socialist themes." These left-wing pages expressed "antiwar
opposition" and "objections to US involvement in another country's affairs."
The clear intent of the campaign by Warner and his co-thinkers is to de-legitimize such views as the product of "foreign meddling,"
and to effectively criminalize them. Their concern is not with Russia, but with the American working class.
As the year 2018 concludes, the intensification of the global economic crisis and heightening of war preparations are accompanied
by a renewed upsurge of the class struggle throughout the world.
The American ruling elite has made clear its intention to respond to this growing movement of the working class with censorship
and repression. Writing about the recent "yellow vest" protests in France, the New York Timeswarned that "the power of
social media to quickly mobilize mass anger, without any mechanism for dialogue or restraint, is a danger to which a liberal democracy
cannot succumb." The implication of such statements is clear: the campaign to censor the internet must be intensified.
The orchestrated hysteria over "disinformation" is itself a gigantic disinformation campaign, and the narrative about the sinister
spread of "fake news" is an example of real "fake news."
The ruling class and the corporate media are frustrated that their claims have had little impact on popular consciousness,
and very few people really believe that Russia is responsible for social discontent in the United States. But this only intensifies
their efforts to uphold and strengthen the grip of the "guardians" of information-that is, themselves.
The growth of working class opposition provides the means to counter these efforts to censor the internet. As workers enter
into struggle, they must take up the fight to defend freedom of expression on the internet as inseparable from the fight for social
equality.
see the brilliant Margaret Kimberley's article (and give some love to the BAR by subscribing and supporting the BAR): US and
UK Psy-op collusion
https://blackagendareport.c...
Another great report but I would like to push back on myth not necessarily proliferated in this report but widely present in
the media including alternative media about the McCarthyite anti Russian propaganda.
One of myths is that still too many Americans believe the MSM blatant lies even without any shred of evidence.
First all the anti Russian hysteria is concentrated in MSM media, completely absent from grassroots political discourse
across kitchen table as it is dominated by economy-stupid daily struggle reality ( as Dems internal pols showed) , and is methodically
debunked by most of alternative media except for blatant political hacks who fuel the nonsense on internet.
It is the very independent media which in some part like WSWS became in fact media of record diligently analyzing not as
much lies themselves, although they do, easily debunking them but to analyzing context of that public mostly black propaganda
campaign and what all those tabloid like productions including #metoo aim to obfuscate which is mostly preprogrammed economic
collapse of working class as well as peddling and funding fascism under guise of all used up trick of threat of foreign enemy
and unity under flag of nationalism.
In fact this lack of true conviction one way or another among Americans is simply due to, already observed by Mills, Tocqueville
referenced by Marx and in last three decades formulated by Chomsky, deep despotic totalitarian culture that underlies seemingly
open society of US as many Americans are conditioned to believe what they are told to believe without any intellectual curiosity
of what it is they must believe in today as they truly believe in money and power only, associated with whatever political
or religious mumbo jumbo like Russia Gate they do not bother to remember as long as their service to rulers paychecks arrive
regularity.
Many understand it as simple confession of state religion of Americanism and (similarly to exceptionalism of Orthodox Jews
or Hegel or Hitler) exceptionalism of American Nation, itself nothing but state religion nonentity used to stir up internal
divisions between those called by rulers Americans and others called by rullers un-American.
Such a curious division not existing in any other country founded on inclusive nationalism, is simply because there is no
reality or premise of American nation beyond those fantasies described in lying school textbooks.
And hence it is that totalitarian culture that MSM peddles as a primary counterrevolutionary measure of $billion a day propaganda
aimed at suppression of class struggle that itself repudiated that culture of submission to ruling elites for culture of unity
among all working class in US and elsewhere rejecting nationalism and exceptionalism and embracing internationalism devoid
of foreign enemies instead.
By the same token another myth that such belligerent anti Russia and anti Chinese propaganda by the West in any way weakens
grip of local rulers of global oligarchy (what ISO peddles) is also repudiated as their very political legitimacy is founded
on nationalism as a tool against class struggle and socialist revolution that would dispose of their power and political base
of saviors of nations via its inherent creed of internationalism.
In fact in spite of normal family infighting none of members of global oligarchy seems to be even slightly hurt so far and
even they appreciate such US belligerence as incentive to consolidate their local powers around nationalist fervent of suppose
siege while for example exports of China, Russia and even Iran to US increased since 2014 and oligarchy of those countries
while inconvenied are well compensated by loss of their visible roles in western corporates while they maintain control by
The major reason for all they prefapaos and war mongering is as WSWS numerous times documented is because oligarchic policies
of mass pauperization of population resulted in skyrocketing of class struggle and they just pull old worn down card of nationalism
and war, Luxemburg warned over hundred years ago.
Let's no fall for that bogus foreign boogeyman threats as this is all about vicious and brutal class war waged over working
class by global oligarchy. And for real boogyman mask we should check Buffet, Soros, Gates, Bezos, Brin, Cook Ellison or Musk
or Trump lower drawer of their executive desks, not abroad as other bogeymen in Russia China and EU will be taken care of by
our working class brothers and sisters when socialist revolution comes, very shortly.
"The new "proof" of Russian subversion is then used to demand even more sweeping measures to censor the internet, in the name
of securing "our democracy." With each successive wave of stories, foreign "disinformation" is more directly identified with
opposition to social inequality, police brutality and the capitalist system."
It's the "War on Terrorism" brought to a whole new level . But it's the same class (in the service of the same class
interests) bringing it.
"It is highly significant that the posts cited by the reports as responsible for manipulating public opinion and undermining
American democracy are predominantly left-wing in character." Against the same material interests of the working class. "These left-wing pages expressed "antiwar opposition" and "objections to US involvement in another country's affairs."
"The content of the accounts labeled by New Knowledge as targeting 'Black audiences' is made clear in a subsequent section
dealing with the video streaming service YouTube. Of 1,063 videos turned over to the committee, the majority 'related to the
police and focused on police abuses.'
Commenting on the New Knowledge report, the New York Times declared that the Russian government's 'tactics echo Soviet propaganda
efforts from decades ago that often highlighted racism and racial conflict in the United States.' "
The more things change, the more they stay the same: "The Black Panther party, without question, remains the greatest threat to the internal security of the country." -- J.
Edgar Hoover, 1969
The American Public's reaction to the lying disinformation campaign of the capitalist "press" should be as "The Dude's" reaction
to Sam Elliot's. Question in the great American classic film, "The Big Lebowski": Sam: "Tell me Dude; do you really have to
use that bad language?" The Dude: " WTF are you talking about?"
Let's just picket the HQ of this New Knowledge and demand that they shut down or retract their lies. Those who can't attend,
spam their FB or corporate contact page with a Photoshop of their logo and have it read something like "Old Lies, paid for
by the CIA". Or, register similar domain names and create a similar looking websites to theirs, but with the modified logos
exposing their leaders as cronies, containing links to the news they try to censor and then link the copycat sites to all your
friends. Best bet is if we can hack them and replace everything with our stuff every now and then. Force Google's algorithm
to ban their own ally or admit that our copycat sites have more popularity.
All Russia is doing ( if it even is Russia) is holding up a big mirror to the US, and big military industrial recipients like
Mark Warner hate it. The criteria should be truth itself not the source of the truth.
To add to Vivek Jain's welcome recommendations of "Moon of Alabama"'s ongoing incisive analysis of the massive Western anti-Russian
propaganda campaign, here's still another MOA post:
I simply call it NeoMcCarthyism propaganda. What they as me being disinformed, lol, then they would have had to start on me
when I was in grammar school in the early to mid 1960s, and I don't recall there being a social media way back then. I formed
own opinion way back then when, on my own I decided what I was getting the 6o'clock news was B.S.
Here's a list of the top things I would absolutely love if not for those evil Russians whispering in my ear:
Stagnant wages. I have been working for the same crap pay for over 10 years.
Ever-increasing rent. Unlike my wages, my rent increases every single year.
Health care with a $6500 deductible.
4) The constant warning threats from the spokespeople of the ruling-class that Social Security will soon run out of money.
Funny how they never issue warning threats that the military will soon run out of money.
5) Never-ending war. Oh man, I love death and destruction so much! We all do!
6) $1.5 trillion tax cuts for the super-rich. They are so deserving.
7) Our lord and savior Hillary Clinton and her love for the super-rich, imperialist wars, savage killing, and our military
killing machine.
8) Doing absolutely nothing about climate change as utter catastrophe draws ever closer. I don't want to save humanity.
I just want our richest capitalists to keep raking in huge yearly incomes.
9) The fact that in our beloved democracy, every major policy passed is always a boon for the super-rich 1% and a total
screwing up the backside for the 99%. Now THAT'S true democracy. We don't want those evil Russians getting in the way of that.
10) The prison industrial complex and the fact that capitalists have found brilliant ways to get rich off of war, killing
people, and putting millions of people in prison for decades. In fact, I read an article yesterday that points out that capitalists
are already busy investigating genius ways to get rich off of climate change and the potential deaths of billions of people.
11) The fact that I have no pension; that even as I've worked a labor job for the same company for 20 years, I'm classified
as an "independent contractor", which basically means that when they don't need me, I sit home and don't get paid while receiving
no benefits. Hey, who wants to survive retirement anyway? What lazy, greedy worker wants vacation pay? I sure don't. I just
want to leave this world knowing that rich people got a lot richer from my having been here.
Indeed, if not for evil Russians, I would be totally oblivious to all of the screwing up the ass I get from our universally-beloved
American capitalist daddies. That's right! None of that would have ever occurred to me. Nope. Damn you Russia! Damn you all
to hell!
Oh yes and the Yellow Vest protests are now being attributed to Russian control/influence. So yes the left is being targeted,
to be blamed overall, down the line. Because we all know Russia is still run by the Bolsheviks!
You'll notice that New Knowledge -- about as Orwellian a name as can be -- brags about its connections to the military-intelligence
apparatus as though it were a good thing. We're supposed to think that makes them credible. Scary.
it's a good thing for them, isn't it ? but for us continue the horrors of war and lack of rent money : a psychological projection
from the obtuse neo-fascist elites, but also the propaganda they're trained in, the elites all believe in, and it will be effective
with us because we are stupid, we are the vietnam peasant again ,reveling in the primitve of past centuries, and so we will
believe ! we must believe for we are not them --
and good comment : the word 'Scary' at the end resonates
The other Orwellian aspect is that the intelligence agencies are the Democratic Party's new best friend. Back in the 70's the
Church Committee investigated the unlawful infiltration of the CIA in the mainstream media. Now it's welcomed with open arms.
We've come along way baby into a reactionary right-wing political system which is no longer even a duopoly. It's a a one party
system controlled by the military/ security/ surveillance state.
As is the theme of the upper middle class liberal TDS, a sudden, unthinking, blind loyalty to and worship of the intelligence
agencies and characters with blood soaked hands from the depths of the swamp like Muller and Hayden and Bush. Anything, anyone
to desperately cling to, to protect them from owning up to true nature of their beloved status quo, and the shadowy sources
of their class privilege. Such are the lengths one goes to to justify the unjustifiable and defend the indefensible when the
other choice is self reflection and responsibility.
So important that WSWS is doing the work of exposing this propaganda attempt to create a moral panic about Russian meddling,
as a means to justify the censorship of the internet. One thing I'm sure of: academics will be buying the New York Times' and
Democratic Party's claims lock, stock, and barrel and will be further amplifying them. And any attempt to argue with this within
the universities will lead to one being oneself labeled as a peddler of Russian influence. It's a total closed loop.
Yes...but consider this: the fact that ruling class front people (like Mark Warner) are reduced to making such transparently
unsound arguments-based on such completely relativist notions of truth-betrays just how afraid and weak they are becoming.
Yes, they keep running the same circular scam -- running the same weak data from the intelligence community through this or
that shiny new think-tank, thence to the media, culminating in proposed legislation by some co-opted politicians -- it's a
strategy of diminishing returns.
At this point, they merely reflect ever-greater light back upon their own intellectual and political bankruptcy.
And, meanwhile, revolutionary social forces continue to grow.
Viva la revolucion!
yeah ! and Mark Warner ? what is he, some kind of nano-robot, a creature whipped up in nano-technology labs, some AI fabricated
to be a moron, whose only purpose is devotion to the intelligence agencies and to Capital ? if he had to, can he tie his own
shoelaces in the mornings ? on his athletic shoes ? i look at him and think : major trauma there -- and he murders us and all
those caught in our Imperialist wars !
Excellent antidote to mainstream corporate propaganda. Would suggest supplement with : "Racist 'Russians' Targeted African-Americans;
in 2016 election ploy, report claims" @https://
www.rt.com
(Also, just as an editing note, WSWS might want to clarify the notation "CNO"; according to the rt article it stands for "Computer
Network Officer".)
The only people that they are fooling is themselves.... and most likely not even that....
They haven't come and said the posts are not true...they just say that you should not believe them because they are propaganda.
That's really a bad strategy.
You know what would help the capitalist cause? Making life in America more equal. But that's not on your plate .
'Reports and testimony from nominally independent organizations, which are, in reality, mouthpieces for the intelligence agencies,
are commissioned by Congress. They are "leaked" to the New York Times, which publishes a front-page article promoting them
as "independent," scientific and authoritative, without, however, presenting any serious analysis of the actual evidence or
the social and political forces behind the studies. The reports in the Times (or the Washington Post) are then cited by countless
media outlets and politicians as new and irrefutable "evidence" of Russian "meddling" and "fake news."
This is the method that's always used to demonize political figures or a leader of a sovereign country which the intelligence
agencies have targeted for elimination. It's an insidious but clever way to influence public opinion. All mainstream media
news proliferates the same nonstop propaganda using each other as sources to substantiate a CIA fable.
All these efforts will intensify prior to the Dems taking control of the House in January. It's like watching the last phase
of a fireworks display as the pyrotechnic crescendo reaches it apex. Trump's impeachment might be imminent, but internet censorship
will have a greater and longer lasting impact on the remaining vestiges of our democracy.
Thank you, Mr. Damon, for showing us what proper journalism looks like. Unfortunately not enough people will read this excellent
exposé, and will simply assume that all the fuss has some basis in reality, while our right to the truth suffers further erosion.
I am endlessly amazed at how many of my friends and colleagues are blinded by their Dem partisanship and unwilling to see
how dangerous this conscious and blatant manipulation of the facts is to our chances of preserving a relatively open society.
I will post this piece everywhere I can and hope for the best.
For me, this theme, this Russian propaganda theme, is infantile, and nothing of this is of interest to those who work for a
living, as opposed to the elites: in all my life riding close to politics in Washington DC, never has the elite class presented
to our country such an immature and juvenile thesis, such an outrageous and laughable spectacle of projection, such a certitude
of vision in which the vision is absurd, irrelevant, with the seeming simple logic of a child in her belief that some bear
speaks to her, but these are adults ! do we laugh ? do we scorn ? do we hate ? yes, all 3, but do these elite politicians and
editors at the Times, do they really believe in talking bears ? fascists wallow in their propaganda --
I don't think they actually believe this BS but they believe that the public will believe it! As you said, it is ridiculous
and infantile but they obviously think the power of propaganda will prevail. They don't realize they are becoming more irrelevant
and ludicrous with each new "bombshell." People have more important things on their minds. Like survival.
Thanks for this important anaylisis of what the ruling class is thinking though what amazes me is that "Russian Interference"
is the only argument these highly educated people can come up with. With the fall of the Soviet Union the Capitalists were
in a position to further advance their cause which they did brutally and without mercy. They were like kids taking over a candy
store repeatedly gorging themselves and sharing none of it. In fact the Oligarchs began an assault on the working class all
over the world and the crisis of inequality is seething and bubbling over to open revolt.
That they used the fight against fascism by Captain America as an example of Russian interference shows the true nature
of these Rulers,corrupt,incompetent and total reactionaries.
I can't stand to read any of those papers but I'm glad someone does. The reporters for WSWS who read the NYT are like that
guy Mike on the show "Dirty Jobs" where he takes on the nastiest jobs in America. To immerse yourself in their caldron of lies
is truly a Dirty Job and you folks should get a Purple Heart for the wounds you've incurred.
After reading about the attack on the tune"Baby it's cold outside" and similar articles may I suggest the WSWS start a new
section "Socialist News of the Weird" as the maneuvers of the bourgeois though dangerous empty and delusional are truly weird.
An excerpt from a World Socialist Web Site 2010 obituary tribute to Howard Zinn, author of " A People's History of the United
States " ( by Tom Eley ) :
" People's History grew out of, and in turn contributed to, a growing skepticism of the democratic pretensions of the
American ruling class -- particularly among the youth. These characteristics of Zinn's work earned him the hatred of those
who wish to see college and high school curriculum more tightly controlled; after Zinn's death, right-wing ex-radicals David
Horowitz and Ronald Radosh penned columns attacking him for exposing truths about the US government to a mass audience ".
I read that presently David Horowitz is glorifying President Donald Trump in his latest " kick-liberal-ass " book. The Tom
Eley article on Howard Zinn was fair minded and excellent.
"With the fall of the Soviet Union the Capitalists were in a position to further advance their cause which they did brutally
and without mercy "
And they got moral support from not a few ( I guess ) ex-Stalinists. I recall reading one David Horowitz's book :" The Destructive
Generation " - a bitter denunciation of his own past. Never being devoted to Stalinism, I thought that Horowitz and hundreds
like him were spitting in public on the very IDEA and IDEAL of socialism. To be sure , the Trotskyists do not have the blood
of the Stalinist counter-revolution on their hands.
The last time I checked David Horowitz had evolved into a far right belligerent
Zionist interviewed on many radio and TV programs. At last he found found true freedom in Apartheid Israel == not quite a "
workers' paradise ".
In order to survive what else can the world plutocracy do but play divide and conquer games ? Today the sentencing of the
" treasonous " American general, Michael Flynn, will tell us how much Imperial America needs an " evil " enemy. In a universe
where everything changes only the military and the police are forever ?
The USA is a hopeless war mongering terrorist state. It should, and must be, coming to an end. And, there are signs that
the USA with all its weapons and lies is creeping toward that situation.
The fact that Russia and China are starting to get rid of the worthless USA dollar is a major blow to the USA. The latest
appointments of the neocon Bolton, and the CIA blowhard Pompous Pompeo is an indication that the only thing USA has to offer
to the world is threats of war by these, and all their filthy war dogs!
The Democratic Party has lost its way, and sanity, by living with the burned out one trick pony diatribe that Russia interfered
and meddled into the USA election. CNN should be censured and fined millions for promoting this deceit every hour of every
day. It is amazing to watch the stunned budgies (would be newscasters) on CNN trying to outdo each other in front of their
masters Wolf Blitzer et al as they revel in babbling the lies about Russia and China while praising the lies of the USA in
its march to WW111.
"The USA is a hopeless war mongering terrorist state. It should, and must be, coming to an end. And, there are signs
that the USA with all its weapons and lies is creeping toward that situation."
Nice platitude but what signs are those? Appears to me this current administration and the Democrats have given more money
to defense wasting er, I mean spending than ever before and both parties are itching for a war with Iran. So what signs?
America survival is dependent upon its lies and misinformation it delivers each day through cable news and sports which
also fetishsize militarism. The only situation that lies on the horizon is more of the same.
The EU didn't impose austerity on the UK, its own government did. We don't have the euro, in
case you haven't noticed. The US is our top overseas buyer. If we want more of that, we'll
have to take something like TTIP or worse.
The EU was a voice for African, Caribbean and Pacific producers against US transnationals,
and offered favorable terms. We've weakened that voice.
Brexit makes us more dependent on the IMF, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Citigroup
and Morgan Stanley. They're not EU bodies.
Britain opposed EU democratisation for forty years by upholding national governments' veto
powers over proposals supported by elected MEPs.
You voted against everything you claim to uphold. Because it was a vote against
everything.
None of that's even the issue. Do you have an insight to offer beyond antipathy to the
EU?
Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on
that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets
broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In
other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
Notable quotes:
"... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
"... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
"... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
"But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce
grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the
guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their
folly and change course?"
What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all
the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up
diversity.
And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices
would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might
change course?
Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.
mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm
GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social,
economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no
serious comparison with third world countries and regions.
As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as
compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of
recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.
If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any
real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based
on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information
ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and
irresponsibility.
That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the
rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune
to challenge.
Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am
The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere
citizens having influencing decisions like that.
Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm
What ineffable flummadiddle!
Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed
ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a
baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller
of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).
So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!
But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public
then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a
Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.
It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through
with it.
Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm
"Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually
existed is beside the point."
It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of
the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in
Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national
independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.
Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm
It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.
We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats,
frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And
they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.
A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that
Americans will be Americans again.
Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of
the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those
institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and
their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and
evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to
rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
Can the elite be afflicted by some mass disease. Is Neoconservatism a deadly infection ?
Theoretically Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based on
that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information ever gets
broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and irresponsibility. In
other words they spearheaded a dangerous disease to stay in power. And eventually got infected themselves.
Notable quotes:
"... "But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their folly and change course?" ..."
"... That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune to challenge. ..."
"... The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere citizens having influencing decisions like that. ..."
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil - begin to have real effect. ..."
"But what if the elites get things wrong? What if the policies they promulgate produce
grotesque inequality or lead to permanent war? Who then has the authority to disregard the
guardians, if not the people themselves? How else will the elites come to recognize their
folly and change course?"
What if, on election day, you only have a choice between 2 candidates. Both favoring all
the wrong choices, but one tends to talk up Christianity and family and the other talks up
diversity.
And both get their funding from the very wealthy and corporations. And any 3rd choices
would be "throwing your vote away". How would you ever get to vote for someone who might
change course?
Democracy has little to actually do with choice or power.
mlopez, January 18, 2019 at 6:22 pm
GB may not have been any utopia in 1914, but it was certainly geo-politically dominant. It's common people's social,
economic and cultural living standards most assuredly was vastly improved over Russian, or European peasants. There can be no
serious comparison with third world countries and regions.
As for the US, there can be absolutely no debate about its own dominance, or material standard of living after 1945 as
compared to any where else in the world. More importantly, even uneducated and very contemporary observers were capable of
recognizing how our elites had sold out their interests in favor of the furtherance of their own.
If we are on about democratic government, then it's been generations since either country and their peoples have had any
real democracy. Democracy depends on information freely available and responsibility of the citizenry to make decisions based
on that information. The political elites have made certain precious little of reliable, unclouded and relevant information
ever gets broadcast even while popularizing, promoting and rewarding every form of misrepresentation, ignorance and
irresponsibility.
That is how they maintain control and manipulate government to facilitate their own interests to the detriment of the
rest of society. Bretix and President Trump have upset their apple cart, which they felt certain was invulnerable and immune
to challenge.
Hello / Goodbye, January 19, 2019 at 11:40 am
The elites aren't interested in polls showing Americans want out of Syria and Afghanistan, are they? Can't have mere
citizens having influencing decisions like that.
Patzinak, January 19, 2019 at 5:07 pm
What ineffable flummadiddle!
Prominent Brexiteers include Boris Johnson (dual UK/US citizenship, educated in Brussels and at Eton and Oxford, of mixed
ancestry, including a link - by illegitimate descent - to the royal houses of Prussia and the UK); Jacob Rees-Mogg (son of a
baron, educated at Eton and Oxford, amassed a solid fortune via hedge fund management); Arron Banks (millionaire, bankroller
of UKIP, made to the Brexit campaign the largest ever political donation in UK politics).
So much for "the elite" being against Brexit!
But the main problem with Brexit is this. Having voted by a slim margin in favour of Brexit, the Great British Public
then, in the general election, denied a majority to the government that had undertaken to implement it, and elected a
Parliament of whom, by a rough estimate, two thirds oppose Brexit.
It ain't that "the elite" got "things wrong". It's that bloody Joe Public can't make his mind what to do - and go through
with it.
Rossbach, January 20, 2019 at 2:14 pm
"Whether the imagined utopia of a dominant Great Britain prior to 1914 or a dominant America after 1945 ever actually
existed is beside the point."
It wasn't to restore any defunct utopia that led people to vote for Brexit or Donald Trump; it was to check the descent of
the Anglosphere into the totalitarian dystopia of forced multi-cultural globalism that caused voters to reject the EU in
Britain and Hillary Clinton in the US. It is because they believed that only with the preservation of their national
independence was there any chance or hope for a restoration of individual liberty that our people voted as they did.
Ratings System, January 17, 2019 at 1:27 pm
It's why they won't enjoy their privileges much longer. That stale charade can't and won't last.
We don't have a meritocracy. We have a pseudo-meritocracy with an unduly large contingent of aliens, liars, cheats,
frauds, and incompetents. They give each other top marks, speak each other's PC language, and hire each other's kids. And
they don't understand why things are falling apart, and why they are increasingly hated by real Americans.
A very nasty decade or two is coming our way, but after we've swept out the filth there will be a good chance that
Americans will be Americans again.
Paul Reidinger, January 17, 2019 at 2:03 pm
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of
the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those
institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and
their inability to think - to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and
evil - begin to have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I see no way to
rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
New emails published by the U.S. Department of State reveal the real motives behind the
international invasion of Libya.
The new emails of Hillary Clinton reveal that the real reason behind the invasion were
primarily the countries large gold and oil reserves, and the extension of French influence in
North Africa.
Fort Russ reports:
The U.S. State Department has published a series of emails that reveal the volume of gold
reserves of Gaddafi. According to the documents, the reserves are so great that they could
become the basis for creating a pan-African currency, which, in turn, could compete with the
dollar in the region.
Also, the reasons for intervention were identified as the major oil reserves of Libya and
the strengthening of French influence in North Africa. However, in 2011, Western leaders
welcomed the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime as a democratic step. "Long live Benghazi, long
live Libya, long live the friendship between France and Libya!", – said French President
Nicolas Sarkozy.
"You showed the world that you can overthrow the dictator and have chosen freedom!" –
said the Prime Minister of Great Britain David Cameron, speaking to the Libyan people."The
people of Libya got rid of a dictator. Now it has a chance," claimed the Vice-President of USA
Joe Biden.
In the past five years, the violence and chaos in Libya has not stopped. In the background
of this, "Islamic State" is gaining momentum in the country and has captured new territory. In
January 2016, dozens of people were killed as a result of terrorist.
Previously, "Islamic State" had claimed responsibility for the attack on a training camp in
Zliten. According to the correspondent of the newspaper The Jerusalem Post Ariel Ben Solomon,
from the outset it was obvious that intervention in Libya would lead to negative consequences
for the country.
"The email to Clinton is confirmed by the results of studies that began to appear after the
invasion of Libya, organized by France with U.S. support. Major oil reserves of the country
were the main reason for intervention. Dictators lead many African countries, but the West is
in no hurry to intervene in each of them. The Obama administration from the beginning was
guided by rather naive misconceptions on the actions that needed to be taken to resolve the
situation in Libya after the war," said RT political analyst Ariel Ben Solomon.
Source:
http://yournewswire.com/clinton-email...Ozzie Crosby2 years ago
America needs war to survive. The United States IS the infidel. It's not just propaganda.
pav_k20072 years ago
modern day robbers! K Lyall2 years ago
Imagine a NWO puppet like her in the White House for 4 more years!
10 11
View reply Hide replies 1979USHI2 years ago The
Western nations governments are totally out of order and need to be taken to a real world
court. Notta
Dr2 years ago
incredibly disgusting what we are learning about warmongering corporate globalist elites. there
is a strong move starting in the other direction....more conservative nationalist leaders are
rising up everywhere. these monsters ask need to be arrested, tried and severely
punished....held to the highest level of accountability.
January 25, 2019For Thierry
Meyssan, one of the consequences of the successive ends of the bipolar and unipolar world is the re-establishment of colonial projects.
One after the other, the French, Turkish and English have publicly declared the return of their colonial ambitions. We still need
to know what form they will adopt in the 21st century. by Thierry Meyssan Part 3 - The British Empire
As for the United Kingdom, it has been hesitating for two years about its future after the Brexit.
A little after the arrival of Donald Trump at the White House, Prime Minister Theresa May went to the United States. Speaking to
the representatives of the Republican Party, she proposed re-establishing the Anglo-Saxon leadership of the rest of the world. But
President Trump has been elected to liquidate these imperial dreams, not to share them.
Disappointed, Theresa May then travelled to China in order to propose that President Xi Jinping share control of international exchanges.
The City, she said, was ready to ensure the convertibility of Western currencies into Yuan. But President Xi had not been elected
to do business with an heiress of the power which had dismantled his country and imposed on the Chinese their opium war.
Theresa May tried a third version with the Commonwealth. Some of the ex-colonies of the Crown, like India, are today enjoying powerful
growth and could become precious commercial partners. Symbolically, the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Charles, was raised to the
Presidency of this association. Mrs. May announced that we are on our way to a Global Britain.
In an interview with the Sunday Telegraph on 30 December 2018, the British Minister for Defence, Gavin Williamson, published
his analysis of the situation. Since the fiasco of the Suez Canal in 1956, the United Kingdom has implemented a policy of decolonisation,
and has withdrawn its troops from the rest of the world. Today, it conserves permanent military bases only in Gibraltar, Cyprus,
Diego Garcia and the "Falklands", to give these islands their imperial title.
For the last 63 years, London has been oriented towards the European Union, invented by Winston Churchill, but to which, initially,
he never imagined that England would belong. The Brexit "tears this policy to shreds". From now on, "the United Kingdom is back as
a global power".
London is planning to open two permanent military bases. The first will probably be in Asia (Singapore or Brunei), and the second
in Latin America - most likely in Guyana, in order to participate in the new stage of the Rumsfeld-Cebrowski strategy of the destruction
of those regions of the world which are not connected to globalisation. After the "African Great Lakes", the "Greater Middle East",
it's time for the "Caribbean Basin". The war will probably start with an invasion of Venezuela by Colombia (pro-US), Brazil (pro-Israëli)
and Guyana (pro-British).
If you have neither talent, nor education, but you have family connections you can always
became political commentator in the USA.
Notable quotes:
"... Kagan's argument would be slightly more persuasive if the U.S. were pursuing a policy of global retrenchment. Since that isn't happening, his explanation doesn't make any sense. ..."
"... Middle-class voters in many democratic states started rejecting mass democracy more than a decade ago and more because they were opposed to the empowerment of poorer voters, and that was already happening when Bush was still prattling about the "freedom agenda." ..."
"... It is essential to Kagan's larger case for a hyperactivist U.S. foreign policy that liberal democracy around the world and U.S. activism are inextricably intertwined ..."
"... The biggest problem with Kagan's story is that it mostly ignores the political conditions in the countries where authoritarian strongmen are consolidating power and in the countries where they have been losing it. U.S. support for many authoritarian rulers is undesirable and should be ended, but it doesn't account for the intensifying repression in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. ..."
"... Kagan rarely if ever makes any sense! This is standard for all neo/zio cons. The all important narrative does not rely upon facts, as a matter of course, facts and truth usually get in the way. ..."
"... Thank you Daniel Larison for your quick rebuttal to the ilk like Kagan, Boot, Applebaum and Rubin. Their dangerous ideas keep floating out in the policy sphere, and it's an admittedly mundane task to fact-check their writing each time some publications allow these hucksters to spread their bad ideas. Also, you deserve some type of prize for being the only writer who consistently focuses on the horrors in Yemen. ..."
"... Kagan will make up any story to keep American military engaged, mostly in the Middle East. Aside from the changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are aimed at repressing homegrown religious nationalism, the wave of so-called anti-democractic movements in Europe are responces to popular sentiments of national identity. ..."
makes
a very questionable claim about U.S. foreign policy:
Autocracy flourished in 2018 because when Washington pursues a so-called realist policy of
global retrenchment, it looks for dictators it thinks it can rely on.
Kagan's argument would be slightly more persuasive if the U.S. were pursuing a policy of
global retrenchment. Since that isn't happening, his explanation doesn't make any sense. The
argument would also be a little stronger if the U.S. didn't look for dictators it thinks it can
rely on at all times . If the U.S. isn't retrenching, and if the U.S. is always in the
market for cooperative authoritarian rulers, those things can't be major reasons why
authoritarian governments have been gaining ground in recent years.
There has been an increase
in illiberal democracies, one-party states, and authoritarian regimes over the last 10-15
years, and most of that has happened in the wake of the economic and political shocks caused by
the 2008 financial crisis.
Middle-class voters in many democratic states started
rejecting mass democracy more than a decade ago and more because they were opposed to the
empowerment of poorer voters, and that was already happening when Bush was still prattling
about the "freedom agenda."
Kagan is eager to tie the fortunes of liberal democracy around the world to the extent of
U.S. involvement abroad, but the former doesn't actually depend on the latter. He has to fall
back on the myth of "global retrenchment" by the U.S. when no such thing has happened, because
he needs that to be true to account for the growth of authoritarianism (or what he
anachronistically insists on calling autocracy). It is essential to Kagan's larger case for a
hyperactivist U.S. foreign policy that liberal democracy around the world and U.S. activism are
inextricably intertwined, but they aren't. Kagan's analysis doesn't hold up because
authoritarianism may wax or wane in various places around the world no matter what the U.S. is
or isn't doing abroad, and those changes are almost entirely beyond our control.
The biggest problem with Kagan's story is that it mostly ignores the political conditions in
the countries where authoritarian strongmen are consolidating power and in the countries where
they have been losing it. U.S. support for many authoritarian rulers is undesirable and should
be ended, but it doesn't account for the intensifying repression in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The
U.S. has backed the Egyptian dictatorship and Saudi monarchy for decades, so that doesn't tell
us why the Sisi dictatorship and Mohammed bin Salman's de facto rule are so much more
repressive and abusive than their predecessors'. That intensifying repression is one of the
reasons why the U.S. should stop supporting these regimes, but we shouldn't assume that the
repression will lessen once our support is withdrawn. Ethiopia is a recent counterexample
to the trend of growing authoritarianism, and the reasons for that are internal to
Ethiopia.
Kagan is so determined to lay the "springtime for strongmen" at the door of the "so-called
realist policy of global retrenchment" that he isn't paying attention to local causes for these
political changes that have little or nothing to do with us. That may be useful for promoting
his alarmism about the return of "the jungle," but his explanation for why these things have
been happening is based on a fantasy.
Kagan rarely if ever makes any sense! This is standard for all neo/zio cons. The all important narrative does not rely upon facts, as a matter of course, facts and
truth usually get in the way.
Thank you Daniel Larison for your quick rebuttal to the ilk like Kagan, Boot, Applebaum and
Rubin. Their dangerous ideas keep floating out in the policy sphere, and it's an admittedly
mundane task to fact-check their writing each time some publications allow these hucksters to
spread their bad ideas. Also, you deserve some type of prize for being the only writer who
consistently focuses on the horrors in Yemen.
Kagan will make up any story to keep American military engaged, mostly in the Middle East.
Aside from the changes in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which are aimed at repressing homegrown
religious nationalism, the wave of so-called anti-democractic movements in Europe are
responces to popular sentiments of national identity.
The justifications for military engagement by the neocons are obvious and comic, while the
cowardly writers who give them their patina of legitimacy are laughable and probably more
dangerous.
Neocons are "enemies of the people" independent of their party affiliation. Nuremberg principles were written not for nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks. ..."
"... The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence. ..."
There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene's classic "The Quiet American" in which the
title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated
than he'd imagined. "I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be
from principles or conviction," Pyle says. Surveying the wreckage of the American war effort,
he adds, "Looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than
fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake."
Greene's admirers will recognize that these lines do not actually come from his 1955 novel.
They are from Max Boot's new book, " The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ." Boot, a leading intellectual in the conservative
movement for the past two decades, is now apologizing for nearly everything he has done and
abided. He is denouncing not just Donald Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole. "Upon
closer examination," he writes in his 260-page atonement, "it's obvious that the whole history
of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance,
isolationism, and know-nothingism."
The temptation is to say, Bravo, here at last is a Republican willing to admit the emperor
has no clothes. That's the reaction of lots of journalists and
pundits who have flipped
through Boot's book. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the
Washington Monthly that Boot's "readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable."
Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic, tweeted , "You don't want to
punish people for getting the right answer." Boot is no longer a Republican (he quit the party
after Trump's election) but he is hardly an outcast in the political world -- he is a
Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a CNN
analyst. Such is the sweet life of a born-again intellectual.
It's easy to understand why a penitent like Boot appeals to liberals and other members of
the Trump resistance. He ratifies their sense of having been correct from the start, and his
confession is enunciated in perfect sound bites, with just the right dose of abasement. Boot is
an irresistible spectacle -- the sinner with tears running down his cheeks dropping to his
knees at the altar of all that is good, proclaiming that he has seen the light and wants to
join the army of righteousness. But here's the thing: Boot is only half-apologizing. And
because he's been wrong so many times and with so many ill consequences, he should be provided
with nothing more than a polite handshake as he's led out of the sanctuary of politics,
forever.
When I say wrong, I mean Guinness World Records wrong. In his first book, " Out of
Order ," Boot argued that the Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Brown v. Board of
Education that school segregation violated the Constitution ("I am not proud of 'Out of
Order,'" he now says); he was a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq ("Once we have deposed
Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the
one in Kabul," he proclaimed in 2001);
he thought John Bolton was treated unfairly when Democrats
opposed his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations ("He seems like a good choice
to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants");
he thought
Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly
maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone
except the staff of Commentary
magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the
GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks.
That's a lot of wrong. It's so much wrong that I can't imagine how or why anyone could look
at Boot and think, "Ah, here's a man we should listen to." I can pre-empt Boot's response to
this -- in his book, he complains that "doctrinaire leftists" will be satisfied with nothing
less than his "ritual suicide" for the war crimes he's committed. I've exchanged a few cordial
emails with Boot (we both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a few years
apart, and worked at its student newspaper, the Daily Californian ), and I can honestly say he seems a nice and
bright enough fellow to whom I wish no physical harm. But like Alden Pyle, he has helped create
so much havoc, he has been wrong so completely, that it would be the definition of insanity to
treat his ideas as fodder for anything other than a shredder. Here's a real line from "The
Quiet American," spoken about Pyle by the novel's weary narrator, that suits Boot perfectly: "I
never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Pyle's innocence, the
book explains, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no
harm."
The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and
intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic
consequence.
Boot is a perfect example, because he has been wrong so many times in such major
ways and is actually willing to admit it. But there are vast numbers of pundits , masters of
spin , and
allegedintellectuals who have been wrong
enough on enough big things (not just war, but climate change and more) to merit laughter
rather than praise. Yet there they are,
stroking their chins on our finest
op-ed pages and cable news channels. Mutual forgiveness is a necessity among pundits who are
stuffed with nonsense much of the time; without mercy on demand, they might all be out of jobs.
It's no surprise that Boot's book arrives with admiring blurbs from D.C. heavyweights James
Fallows, Jon Meacham, and David Corn, among others.
Whatever the truth, and I become daily more distrustful of the media that regularly attack
Putin in this way, I doubt very much if his crimes in this regard come anywhere near those of
Bush, Cheney, Blair, Cameron, Obama, and Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This is just routinely parroted by the MSM and equally routinely expanded upon by them.
Organs like the Guardian/ BBC casually announce that Putin has stolen £40 billion
(sometimes this is casually raised to £200 billion, which would make him the richest
man on the planet and people like Gates/ Buffett poor as church mice by
comparison.)Occasionally someone does ask for details, like bank transfers, property holdings
or whatever.
Nothing is ever forthcoming. All they come up with is that he has some nice Italian suits
and a nice gold watch that cost him $1,200.
Apart from that, these allegations must be true because some financial fraudster mate of
Khordokovsky who sought refuge in the US said so. Sounds pretty convincing to us here in the
MSM – what more evidence do you need? Of course Putin is just a kleptocratic thug and
James Bond cartoon villain who has people murdered purely for the fun of it.
Very late in the game I finally saw the documentary Icarus recently. I had passed it up
because I thought I could predict that it would be rampantly dishonest, and an exercise in
propaganda. It having received an Academy award seemed to be an independent confirmation of
my prejudice.
Well, I was right for once. It was disgraceful, and the most common image in it was of
Putin, accompanied by feeble ad hominem claims, without any counterpoints of any kind. So the
core issue, cheating at the Olympics, turned out to be presented with no context at all, for
the anti-Russian smear job. No mention of Balco, Carl Lewis, Marion Jones, and just a few
seconds of an unidentified Lance Armstrong.
So now we see awards for propaganda. The Americans don't do fairness or integrity, but now
they don't even pretend.
Tolkien also comes to mind here.
Us 'hobbits' are treated as inferior beings by the 'Saurons', 'Nazguls' and 'Gollums' of this
world.
Gandalf ?
We're waiting
Comments were true and apposite enough, but it's all been said really. But given that this is
largely an information war the truth needs continuously asserting.
Our opponents – the Guardian (minitru on thames) the New York Post (Pravda on the
Hudson) the Washington Post (Izvestia on the Potomac) – sole tactic is constant
repetition, this should be our tactic also but with evidence to back it up.
We need to constantly expand our readership and challenge the lunatic narrative of the
PTB. We are now in a pivotal historical moment. If we fail it will be Hunger Games.
I agree about the repetition but do you want to know what I think? I think you need to
play MSM and others a little bit at their own game. They don't back anything up with
evidence. They write short pieces of fiction as statements of fact. Yet they are
believed.
The thing is all 'our' evidence is already out there just by taking a look. (e.g White
Helmets will take you 15 minutes to doubt that narrative) You have an army of
researchers/journalists (e.g Kit Klarenberg, Vanessa Beeley etc) posting detailed evidence
out there. A lot of the independent/academic articles I read are well backed up with evidence
but the problem is to someone not up to speed, is less inclined to read a long article backed
up by detailed reasoning and evidence within it.
I think this article is clear and credible and prompts those new to independent thought to
look at different sources of information.
So perhaps more independent writing, which is creative setting out the facts in an
intelligent way as above and invite (through links) the reader to look at the evidence which
is plentiful, at their leisure.
Humour is another good way of spreading the message. The CJ Hopkins piece a few days ago
very effective.
Skripals case reminds us that the Red Brigades in Italy and Baader-Meinhof in Germany were
entirely bogus and controlled intelligence operations. It's the same story with the "Symbionese
Liberation Army" in the US. Then there's Gladio and Northwoods.
Realpolitik has become surrealpolitik. In Skripals case Russia was immediately blamed,
despite the fact an investigation had barely begun That instantly suggests british intelligence
services participation in Skripals poisoning.
Were are currently the father and daughter who were allegedly poisoned is unknown. Why they
are in hiding is also unknown. But such quetions are never raised by MSM.
In the Middle Ages, everybody knew that witches, fairies, pixies and elves existed and were
responsible for everything that went wrong in life, like the cows or the pigs falling sick or the
hens stopping laying. But round about the early 1600s, judges and juries started demanding
evidence and acquitting defendants in witch trials. They accepted their existence, but still
wanted to see some evidence. The folk in the 1600s were probably more sceptical and less
credulous than our friends like Harding at the Guardian today.
The public can be persuaded to accept almost anything providing the story chimes with deep
seated fears or prejudices, such as Russians threatening 'our way of life' (fears and prejudices
continually stoked by the media of course)
Skripal. The final illustration is the alleged of poisoning with "Novichok" of Sergei
Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury in March 2018. This was immediately blamed on
Russia, again before an investigation had been concluded, followed by sanctions, the expulsion
of Russian diplomats (including by Australia) and a general tirade of abuse against Russia in
general and President Putin in particular.
The Skripal case is a classic illustration of Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief,
Roh's magical realism and Orwell's doublethink (the act of simultaneously accepting two
mutually contradictory beliefs as correct) all rolled into one.
Rob Slane ( www.theblogmire.com 9
January 2019) has brilliantly deconstructed the many logical, scientific and political
absurdities in the official story. One will wait in vain for the merest hint of this demolition
in the mainstream media.
One possible reason for this non-coverage of the actual evidence and instead a non-stop
barrage of disinformation, suppression of evidence and manipulation of the public can be found
in the activities of a shadowy organisation known as the Institute for Statecraft, and one of
its projects known as the Integrity Initiative (sic).
Fresh revelations are emerging about this project on a daily basis and a proper analysis
must await developments. Suffice to note at this point that the Integrity Initiative is
known to be funded by the United Kingdom government, ostensibly to counter 'Russian
disinformation.' It is rather a major project to spread falsehoods about Russia through
"clusters" of journalists working in mainstream media outlets.
The latter have gone beyond the willing suspension of disbelief and instead actively promote
disinformation they know to be untrue. It is not only potential embarrassment that prevents
this story getting the attention it deserves. It is a strong suspicion, no more than that at
the time of writing, that a D Notice has been issued in the United Kingdom and
Australia.
The effect has been to prevent discussion of what is an extraordinary campaign to mislead
the public, attack opposition politicians and the alternative media, and generally undermine
what used to be regarded as a free press.
That some of the same personnel involved in the Integrity Initiative are also involved in
the Skripal matter (itself subject to a D Notice) reinforces the belief that this project has
wider tentacles than originally thought .
March 20, 2018, marks the 15th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq. While the American footprint in Iraq has drastically
changed over 15 years, a significant number of the original cheerleaders for the invasion still hold prominent roles in the media
today:
John Bolton, Fox News contributor
Bolton was President George W. Bush's
Undersecretary of State for Arms Control when the Iraq War began.
Bolton backed an Iraq invasion as early as 1998, when he signed a letter from the Project for a New American Century (PNAC),
a neoconservative group led by William Kristol, urging then-President Bill Clinton to attack Saddam Hussein. As the State Department's
top arms-control official during President Bush's first term, Bolton played a role in pushing the allegation that Saddam Hussein
sought uranium in Africa.
"We are confident that Saddam Hussein has hidden weapons of mass destruction and production facilities in Iraq." [BBC,
11/20/02
]
"I still think the decision to overthrow Saddam was correct." [Talking Points Memo,
5/14/15 ]
Larry Kudlow, CNBC senior contributor
Kudlow was economics editor of
National Review and a co-host of CNBC's Kudlow & Cramer when the Iraq War began.
"Could it be that a lack of decisive follow-through in the global war on terrorism is the single biggest problem facing the stock
market and the nation today? I believe it is. The shock therapy of decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple-thousand
points." [ National Review ,
6/26/02 ]
"Every day we wait for the impending invasion of Iraq is a day Saddam Hussein grows stronger, a day our national security is threatened,
and a day our economic security is jeopardized." [ National Review ,
2/6/03 ]
Boot's bloodthirstiness is united with a peculiar naďveté about America; it must be said that in this respect he is not unlike
Lansdale. Could it really have been, as Boot wrote in 2017, that only Trump opened his eyes to the fact that it's a bit easier
to be a white guy in America, that "I benefitted from my skin color and my gender -- and those of a different gender or sexuality
or skin color have suffered because of it"? Good for Max if he's had a change of heart and seen the world through more empathetic
eyes; one only wishes he could've had those moments of reflection, which seem so modest and so reasonable, circa 2001. But that
might not have changed anything. He wrote as recently as 2013 that he feels "No Need to Repent for Support of the Iraq War." He
declares, "I feel no shame being part of the 75 percent of Americans who believed at the beginning that this was a war worth waging."
This move is not quite honest: Boot wants to submerge himself into the center of a crowd, one of the democratic mass, when in
fact he was at its vanguard, pushing for the Iraq War early and often.
"Once Afghanistan has been dealt with, America should turn its attention to Iraq." [ The Weekly Standard ,
10/15/01 ]
"In places like Kosovo, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and very shortly Iraq, ordinary people clamor for American intervention, and welcome
U.S. troops as liberators." [Nimitz Memorial Lecture at University of California, Berkeley,
3/12/03 ]
"No need to repent for support of [the] Iraq war." [ Commentary ,
3/18/13 ]
"But how exactly does the Iraq War differ from previous wars? From World War I, when the Great Powers were said to have 'sleepwalked'
into a conflict that no one really wanted?" [ Commentary ,
7/6/16 ]
Richard Cohen, Washington Post columnist
Cohen
was a Washington Post columnist when the Iraq War began.
"Iraq not only hasn't accounted for its weapons of mass destruction but without a doubt still retains them. Only a fool -- or
possibly a Frenchman -- could conclude otherwise." [ The Washington Post ,
2/6/03 ]
"Initially, I thought bringing down Saddam Hussein was a good cause. I was wrong -- not about the cause, but about its practicality."
[ The Washington Post ,
4/1/08 ]
Ari Fleischer, Fox News contributor
Flesicher served as President Bush's
press secretary as the Iraq War began.
"My point is, the likelihood is much more like Afghanistan, where the people who live right now under a brutal dictator will view
America as liberators, not conquerors." [ The New York Times ,
10/12/02 ]
"There's no question that if force is used, it will achieve the objective of preserving the peace far faster than the current
path that we're on." [White House press briefing, 2/14/03
]
"Given the chance to throw off a brutal dictator like Saddam Hussein, people will rejoice." [White House press briefing,
3/21/03 ]
"I think that if you look at the Iraqi people, the Iraqi people are overwhelmingly pleased with the fact the United States has
helped them to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime. That was clear from their dancing in the streets, from the way they tore down
the statues. And I think that is the viewpoint of the overwhelming majority of the Iraqi people." [White House press briefing,
7/1/03 ]
Sean Hannity, Fox News host
Hannity was also a syndicated talk radio host
and a Fox News host when the Iraq War began.
"We're going to find all the weapons of mass destruction." [Fox News, Hannity & Colmes , 2/19/03, via Nexis]
"I was a real believer in the Iraq War. I still am to this day. I still feel that there were probably weapons of mass destruction.
I do believe they were likely moved to Syria in the long lead-up to the war." [Premiere Radio Networks, The Sean Hannity Show
,
9/7/16 ]
Stephen Hayes, Weekly Standard editor-in-chief
Hayes was a senior writer at The
Weekly Standard when the Iraq War began.
"Osama Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives
and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi
financial support for al Qaeda." [ The Weekly Standard ,
11/24/03 ]
Hayes' 2004 book was titled The Connection: How Al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America .
[ Media Matters ,
6/30/04 ]
Fred Hiatt, Washington Post editorial director
Hiatt has been
editorial page director of The Washington Post since 1999.
As Media Matters has
documented , the Washington Post editorial page -- headed by Hiatt since 1999 -- repeatedly echoed the Bush administration's
claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. A February 6, 2003,
editorial began, "After Secretary Of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it
is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction."
The Post 's editorial page also
linked the need to invade Iraq to the 9/11 attacks:
During the past decade the United States vowed many times to disarm Saddam Hussein, who made no secret of his hatred and enmity
toward the United States; but when the Iraqi dictator resisted, the United States chose to abandon its vows rather than use the
force that would have been needed to enforce them. In every case, the calculation, stated or unstated, was the same: Pay tribute,
don't make trouble, and maybe nothing worse will happen.
In the ruins of Lower Manhattan in September 2001, most Americans saw evidence that this calculation was incorrect as well
as craven. The nation's enemies would not be deterred or mollified by a gentle response; they would be emboldened. President Bush
rightly concluded that the nation had to defend itself more vigilantly but also that no defense could succeed unless accompanied
by an offensive against the terrorists and the states that sheltered them.
Bill Kristol, Weekly Standard editor-at-large
Kristol was a co-founder of
Project for a New American Century, a neo-conservative think-tank Kristol used to crusade for the Iraq War.
Saddam Hussein "will not disarm peacefully. And he must be disarmed. So war will come. The war itself will clarify who was right
and who was wrong about weapons of mass destruction. It will reveal the aspirations of the people of Iraq, and expose the truth about
Saddam's regime." [ The Weekly Standard ,
3/17/03 ]
Kristol bragged that the war would last just two months:
In 2015, Kristol
defended
the decision to invade Iraq:
Even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction, and the mistakes we made in failing to send enough troops at
first and to provide security from the beginning for the Iraqi people, we were right to persevere through several difficult years.
We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008.
Paul Gigot, Wall Street Journal editorial page editor
Gigot has been the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal since 2001.
Under Gigot, the editorial page
frequently hyped the likelihood that Saddam Hussein was close to producing or obtaining a nuclear weapon. The Journal
forwarded alarmist claims about Iraq's nuclear capabilities on numerous occasions:
August 2, 2002: "Above all, a debate would let Mr. Bush demonstrate that he has by far the stronger case. Even the critics
concede that Saddam is a threat, after all, a tyrant who has gassed his own people, tried to kill a U.S. President and whose military
routinely fires at American pilots patrolling no-fly zones over northern and southern Iraq. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
said Monday that before the Gulf War Saddam was 'within a year or two' of having nuclear weapons. And at Wednesday's Senate hearings,
former Iraqi nuclear engineer Khidir Hamza said Saddam will have enough weapons-grade uranium for three nuclear bombs by 2005."
August 29, 2002: "There is always the chance that Congress could refuse the President. But this must be measured against the
strong case the Administration has, a case Vice President Dick Cheney pressed earlier this week in Nashville. Mr. Cheney flatly
declared that when it comes to a nuclear-armed Saddam, 'the risks of inaction are far greater than the risk of action.'"
September 25, 2002: "And then there is the redoubtable Mr. Blair, an ally who continues to risk dissent in his party and country
for a cause in which he believes. Yesterday Mr. Blair released a dossier of intelligence on Iraq. The 50-page report describes
how Saddam has tried to buy uranium from Africa for use in nuclear weapons, has 20 missiles that could reach British military
bases in Cyprus as well as Israel and NATO members Greece and Turkey, and stating that Iraq's chemical weapons are on standby
for use within 45 minutes. 'The policy of containment is not working. The WMD program is not shut down. It is up and running,'
Mr. Blair told Parliament."
September 9, 2002: "Democrats hardly need two more months now to deliberate over this evidence, most of which they already
know. They merely want to push any decision past Election Day so their votes won't put their Senate majority at risk. They can
then posture as statesmen for two months but only declare themselves after the day when voters would be able to hold them immediately
responsible. Let's hope Saddam's nuclear weapons program is operating on the same wait-until-the-election timetable."
A January 27, 2003, editorial was titled "If Saddam Survives."
Judith Miller, Fox News contributor
Miller was a New York Times reporter
when the Iraq War began.
Miller produced a series of now-debunked reports that the Bush administration used to buttress its claim that Saddam Hussein possessed
weapons of mass destruction. As Franklin Foer wrote for New York magazine:
During the winter of 2001 and throughout 2002, Miller produced a series of stunning stories about Saddam Hussein's ambition
and capacity to produce weapons of mass destruction, based largely on information provided by [Ahmad] Chalabi and his allies --
almost all of which have turned out to be stunningly inaccurate.
For the past year, the Times has done much to correct that coverage, publishing a series of stories calling Chalabi's
credibility into question. [ New York magazine, 6
/7/04 ]
In a 2004 interview, she told The New
York Review of Books: "My job isn't to assess the government's information and be an independent intelligence analyst myself. My
job is to tell readers of The New York Times what the government thought about Iraq's arsenal."
Former New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller
discussed
Miller's Iraq War reporting with Media Matters in 2011:
New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller says one of his biggest mistakes as editor was not addressing the paper's
misleading pre-Iraq War coverage sooner, including the reporting of former Times writer Judy Miller.
Keller tells Media Matters that he is "not at all" surprised that Miller ended up at the "conservative" Fox News Channel
after she left the Times under a cloud of controversy related to her Iraq reporting.
Keller, who announced Thursday that in September he will leave the post he has held since July 2003, said: "Judy was the author
of a lot of those stories, and I should have dealt with the stories and with her I think as the sort of first order of business
when I took the job rather than waiting until the following year."
Keller was referring to the unusual
editor's note the
Times published on May 26, 2004, in which it admitted many of its pre-war stories about weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq -- a number of which were reported by Miller -- misrepresented the situation before the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
"The whole Judy Miller WMD experience was ... one of the low points of the last eight years," Keller said.
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC host
Scarborough
was hired by MSNBC as the Iraq War began.
Joe Scarborough repeatedly cheered on the Iraq War and attacked people who criticized it.
"Congressman [Jack] Kingston [R-GA], give me a quick response. How could there be anyone left on the planet today that doesn't
believe that Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction?" [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/5/03, via Nexis]
Toppling Saddam Hussein "will mean the end of his weapons of mass destruction." [MSNBC, MSNBC Reports , 3/11/03, via
Nexis]
"I'm waiting to hear the words 'I was wrong' from some of the world's most elite journalists, politicians and Hollywood types
. I just wonder, who's going to be the first elitist to show the character to say: 'Hey, America, guess what? I was wrong'? Maybe
the White House will get an apology, first, from the New York Times' Maureen Dowd. Now, Ms. Dowd mocked the morality of this war
.
"Do you all remember Scott Ritter, you know, the former chief UN weapons inspector who played chief stooge for Saddam Hussein?
Well, Mr. Ritter actually told a French radio network that -- quote, 'The United States is going to leave Baghdad with its tail between
its legs, defeated.' Sorry, Scott. I think you've been chasing the wrong tail, again.
"Maybe disgraced commentators and politicians alike, like Daschle, Jimmy Carter, Dennis Kucinich, and all those others, will step
forward tonight and show the content of their character by simply admitting what we know already: that their wartime predictions
were arrogant, they were misguided and they were dead wrong. Maybe, just maybe, these self-anointed critics will learn from their
mistakes. But I doubt it. After all, we don't call them 'elitists' for nothing." [MSNBC 4/10/03 via
FAIR ]
Bret Stephens, New York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor
Stephens
was editor of The Jerusalem Post when the Iraq War began.
As The New Yorker
noted , in 2003 Stephens' Jerusalem Post "named one of the Iraq War's chief architects, Paul Wolfowitz, its 'man of
the year.'"
"Saddam may unveil, to an astonished world, the Arab world's first nuclear bomb." [ The Jerusalem Post ,
11/15/02 ]
Stephens criticized the Obama administration's case for military intervention in Syria by contrasting it with Bush's decision
to invade Iraq, which he claimed was made based on "highly detailed" intelligence revealing weapons of mass destruction. Stephens
claimed that the "testimony of U.N. inspectors like Hans Blix" supported the Bush administration's case for war, and accusations
that the Bush administration lied were "libel" and "cheap slander." In fact, Blix told CNN in 2004 that the Bush administration "chose
to ignore" his team's concerns about the lack of solid evidence in favor of war, and that prior to the invasion the evidence of WMDs
in Iraq was revealed to be "shaky." [ Media Matters ,
4/13/17 ]
David Frum, Atlantic senior editor
Frum was a speechwriter for President
Bush when the Iraq War began.
Frum is renowned for writing George W. Bush's
"Axis of Evil" speech. Alex Nichols
described
Frum's Iraq boosterism in 2017:
Bush chief speechwriter Michael Gerson, a fellow fanatical interventionist and veteran of the neoconservative underworld, tapped
Frum for the speechwriting team in 2000. His greatest accomplishment was the authorship of Bush's 2002 State of the Union speech,
now known for its most famous phrase, "axis of evil." The axis was a grouping of three countries -- Iraq, Iran and North Korea
-- that were implicit allies in a plot to destroy America. The supposed ties between the three mostly came down to their mutual
love for imaginary "weapons of mass destruction" and non-existent collaboration with al-Qaeda. As Trump threatens war crimes against
civilians in Iraq and Syria, sanctions Iran despite its compliance with our nuclear agreement and threatens "fire and fury" for
North Korea, Frum must be held accountable for cementing them as boogeymen in the public imagination.
Frum resigned his post in February 2002 in order to join the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank then
working in close association with the Bush administration. With them, he emerged as one of the most enthusiastic supporters of
the War on Terror. In 2004, Frum and former adviser to the Bush Department of Defense Richard Perle published a book titled An
End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Its text was as audacious as its title. "An End to Evil will define the conservative
point of view on foreign policy for a new generation -- and shape the agenda for the 2004 presidential-election year and beyond,"
a description of it reads. By this time, the Iraq War was in full swing, and Frum and Perle offered full-throated apologia. Under
the assumptions that the war would bring stable democracy to Iraq and that the imaginary WMDs would be located soon enough, they
called for similar action against North Korea and Iran.
Eli Lake, Bloomberg View columnist
Lake was a State Department
correspondent for United Press International (UPI) when the Iraq War began.
As
noted
by Adam Weinstein for Gawker, Lake
argued
for the legality of the Iraq War in a 2003
column for UPI:
"On the facts of the case, it is hard to argue that Iraq has given up its weapons of mass destruction. ... With this kind of
evidence, far from being an international outlaw, the United States would be a the (sic) defender of the entire institution of
international (sic) should it lead a war to disarm Iraq."
Eliot Cohen, Atlantic contributing editor
Cohen was a co-founder
of Project for the New American Century.
MSNBC's Zachary Roth described
Cohen's role in boosting the Iraq War in 2013:
[Cohen] was a key agitator for an Iraq invasion and for a maximalist response to the 9/11 attacks. In a November 2001 op-ed
in which he called the War on Terror "World War IV," Cohen argued that the US. should "target" Iraq because it had "helped al
Qaeda" and "developed weapons of destruction." Not long after, he touted a spurious connection between Muhammed Atta, the chief
9/11 hijacker, and Saddam's regime. In Congressional testimony in 2002, Cohen framed a stark choice for policymakers: Allow Saddam
"to acquire weapons of mass destruction or to take action to overthrow him." In 2007, Cohen became a top adviser to Condoleezza
Rice at the State Department.
Ann Coulter
Coulter was a prominent conservative author and
commentator when the Iraq War began.
Coulter, alongside Sean Hannity,
pushed lies about Army Ranger Pat Tillman's opposition to the Iraq War. Asawin Suebsaeng
wrote in 2017 for The Daily Beast about Coulter's Iraq War boosterism and how she has pivoted away from it under Trump:
"I think Iraq was a crucial part of the war on terrorism -- if you had to choose between Iraq and Afghanistan, I'd take Iraq
over Afghanistan," Coulter said on a Fox Business panel, debating anti-war libertarians, in late 2011. "PATRIOT Act, fantastic,
Gitmo, fantastic, waterboarding, not bad, though [even harsher] torture would've been better."
Coulter went on to tell a bewildered John Stossel and Matt Welch that "[Iraq] is a fantastic country for regime change," that
"torture works beautifully," and that position regarding potential blowback or unintended negative consequences to the war were
merely a "crazy ACLU argument."
Rush Limbaugh
Limbaugh was also host of his own radio show when the Iraq War began.
On April 7, 2003, Rush Limbaugh said
, "We're discovering WMDs all over Iraq." On September 26, 2007, Limbaugh
called soldiers who advocated withdrawal from Iraq "phony soldiers." Limbaugh has
subsequently tried to justify the Iraq War, even declaring that President Bush should be
added
to Mount Rushmore . In January 2018, Limbaugh
accused the "deep state" of faking weapons of mass destruction evidence in Iraq to damage Bush.
Nicole Wallace, MSNBC host
Wallace
was George W. Bush's communications director as the Iraq War began.
"[Obama's] legacy on foreign policy is going to be that he didn't start a war in Iraq. He wasn't the president, thank God, in
the years after 9/11." [MSNBC, 5/30/14 ]
"... As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal Doomsday machine. ..."
"... That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State. ..."
"... In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914. ..."
"... Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington – not Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991. ..."
"... So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development, procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican predecessors during the 1920s. ..."
"... Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business. ..."
We've got NATO on our mind today because we learned this morning that the mere suggestion this obsolete relic of the Cold War
should be abandoned tends to trigger an absolutely virulent outburst of Trump Derangement Syndrome in the mainstream media.
So long as we were talking about the folly of Trump-O-Nomics and the Donald's rookie mistake in embracing an egregious stock market
bubble that is destined to crash and a failing, geriatric business cycle that at age 115 months has "recession ahead" written all
over its forehead, our host, Mika Brzezinski, was happy to nod approvingly.
But when we veered off into approval of the Donald's efforts to rein in the Empire and make peace with the Russkies, it was an
altogether different matter. We no more than launched the thought of it than Mika was sputtering in disbelief – as if we had committed
a grotesque sacrilege in public:
STOCKMAN: Beyond that – beyond that, trump tried to do the right thick with America first. He's been stymied at every turn
of the road. He was right. They wouldn't let him do it. He was right. NATO is obsolete. We should get rid of it. Everybody went
after him for he's trying to do the right thing in Korea and yet they keep coming after him on the basis of the status quo, which
has been wrong for last 60 years. So on the one hand, his economic policy is a failure. On the other hand, his effort to rein
in the empires I call it and get to something we can afford is being stymied. And then he's filled the swamp with $100 billion
more for the Pentagon that is doesn't need. That's the deep end of the swamp."
BRZEZINSKI: "David, David, hold on a second, hold on, hold on. You did a lot."
STOCKMAN: "Yes."
BRZEZINSKI: "I just want to like hone in on one – are you saying we should pull out of NATO?" [crosstalk]
STOCKMAN: "Sure. NATO is obsolete."
BRZEZINSKI: "What?"
STOCKMAN: "NATO is obsolete. It was only set up to stop the Soviet Union and 50,000 tanks on the Warsaw front. That ended 25
years ago. We don't need NATO. Europe can take care of itself. Russia's a pint-sized economy, 7 percent of size of U.S. economy.
NATO, US GDP combined is $36 trillion, Russia's $1.5 trillion. You think the Europeans can't handle it? Germany spends 1 percent
only of GDP on defense. If they really thought that the Russians were heading through the Brandenburg Gate, they would be providing
for their own defense. They're not pacifists.
So if you wonder why we insist that a fiscal calamity is barreling down the pike – just consider the implications of this exchange.
MSNBC is ground zero for the so-called progressive Left. Yet it has become so deranged by the Donald and convinced that he was elected
not because the electorate rejected its threadbare agenda, but because Putin and the Russkies threw the election to him, that it
has become a full-fledged champion of the War Party.
As we have explained elsewhere, the cost of Empire is now nearing $1 trillion per year when you count foreign aid and security
assistance, homeland security, the $200 billion Veterans budget and debt service on past wars. Add that to $2.5 trillion of entitlements
that neither party will touch and what will soon by $1 trillion per year of interest expense and you have nothing less than a Fiscal
Doomsday machine.
That is, spending that will be pushing 25-30% of GDP and a revenue base that amounts to less than 17% of GDP. Literally, the
nation's fiscal accounts are being drawn and quartered by the dual menace of the Welfare State and Warfare State.
Yet with respect to the latter, the last time we checked the old Soviet Union slithered off the pages of history 28 years ago.
Shortly thereafter the 50,000 Red Army tanks, which had been arrayed menacingly (and unbeknownst to the CIA, largely without spare
fuel) behind the Iron Curtain, were mostly melted down for scrap by the destitute statelets of the Warsaw Pact (Poland, Rumania,
Bulgaria, Albania etc.) and 14 ex-Soviet Republics (like Belarus, Moldova, Tajikistan, Ukraine, etc.)
What was left of the Soviet Empire was the rump state of Russia – shorn of much of its industrial base and with an aging population
of just 140 million compared to the 425 million souls who had been incarcerated in Stalin's dystopia.
So, yes, there was every reason to declare "mission accomplished" and disband NATO because the much exaggerated conventional military
threat of the Soviet Union had literally vanished from the face of the earth. At that point, NATO was, in fact, pointless.
So when President George Bush the Elder, who was no wimpy Yale pacifist, promised Gorbachev in 1989 that in return for his acquiescence
to the reunification of Germany that NATO would no move " a single inch to the east", he wasn't exactly selling the "free world"
(as they called it) down the drain.
In fact, as the above map unfolded, the 77-Years War that had incepted in August 1914 was finally over. If you want to count bodies,
150 million were killed by all the depredations which germinated in the Great War, its foolish aftermath at Versailles, and
the march of history into the second world war and cold war which followed inexorably thereupon.
To wit, upwards of 8% of the human race was wiped-out during that span. The toll encompassed the madness of trench
warfare during 1914-1918; the murderous regimes of Soviet and Nazi totalitarianism that rose from the ashes of the Great War and
Versailles; and then the carnage of WWII and all the lesser (unnecessary) wars and invasions of the Cold War including Korea and
Vietnam.
So finally the time had come for Washington to lead the world into a golden age of peace, disarmament and prosperous commerce
among the nations.
Yet there was a virulent threat to peace still lurking on the Potomac after the 77 Years War ended. The great general and president,
Dwight Eisenhower, had called it the "military-industrial complex" in his farewell address.
But that memorable phrase had been abbreviated by his speechwriters, who deleted the word "congressional" in a gesture of comity
to the legislative branch. So restore Ike's deleted reference to the legislative pork barrels and Sunday afternoon warriors of Capitol
Hill and toss in the legions of beltway busybodies that constituted the civilian branches of the cold war armada (CIA, State, AID,
NED etc.) and the circle would have been complete.
It constituted the most awesome machine of warfare and imperial hegemony since the Roman legions bestrode most of the civilized
world.
In a word, the real threat to world peace circa 1991 was that Pax Americana would not go away quietly into the good
night.
In fact, during the past 27 years Imperial Washington has lost all memory that peace was ever possible at the end of the cold
war. Today it is as feckless, misguided and bloodthirsty as were Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Vienna and London in August 1914.
Needless to say, there is no peace on earth today for reasons mainly rooted in Imperial Washington – not Moscow, Beijing,
Pyongyang, Tehran, Damascus, Mosul or Raqqah. The former has become a global menace owing to what didn't happen in 1991.
What needed to happen back in 1991 was for Bush the Elder to declare "mission accomplished" and slash the Pentagon budget from
$600 billion to $250 billion.
So doing he should have demobilized the military-industrial complex by putting a moratorium on all new weapons development,
procurement and export sales; dissolved NATO and dismantled the far-flung network of US military bases; slashed the US standing armed
forces from 1.5 million to a few hundred thousand; and organized and led a world disarmament and peace campaign, as did his Republican
predecessors during the 1920s.
Unfortunately, George H.W. Bush was not a man of peace, vision or even mediocre intelligence. He was the malleable tool of
the War Party, and it was he who single-handedly blew the peace when he plunged America into a petty argument between the impetuous
dictator of Iraq and the greedy Emir of Kuwait that was none of our business.
By contrast, even though liberal historians have reviled Warren G. Harding as some kind of dumbkopf politician, he well understood
that the Great War had been for naught, and that to insure it never happened again the nations of the world needed to rid themselves
of their huge navies and standing armies.
To that end, he achieved the largest global disarmament agreement ever made during the Washington Naval conference of 1921, which
halted the construction of new battleships for more than a decade.
And while he was at it, President Harding also pardoned Eugene Debs. He thereby gave witness to the truth that the intrepid socialist
candidate for president and vehement antiwar protester, who Wilson had thrown in prison for exercising his first amendment right
to speak against US entry into a pointless European war, had been right all along.
In short, Warren G. Harding knew the war was over, and the folly of Wilson's 1917 plunge into Europe's bloodbath should not be
repeated at all hazards.
The Unforgiveable Sins 0f George H.W. Bush
Not George H.W. Bush. The man should never be forgiven for enabling the likes of Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Robert Gates and
their neocon pack of jackals to come to power – even if he did denounce them in his bumbling old age.
Even more to the point, by opting not for peace but for war and oil in the Persian Gulf in 1991 he opened the gates to an unnecessary
confrontation with Islam. In turn, that nurtured the rise of jihadist terrorism that would not haunt the world today – save for forces
unleashed by George H.W. Bush's petulant quarrel with Saddam Hussein.
We will address more fully on another occasion the 45-year-old error that holds the Persian Gulf is an American Lake and that
energy security requires it be patrolled by the Fifth Fleet. As history proves, the real answer to high oil prices everywhere and
always is high oil prices and the wonders they work to rebalance the global energy market.
But first it is well to remember that there was no plausible threat anywhere on the planet to the safety and security of the citizens
of Springfield MA, Lincoln NE or Spokane WA when the cold war ended.
But rather than dismantling the NATO machinery, virtually the opposite happened. NATO has been expanded to 29 countries including
such powers as Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and now the statelet of Montenegro that has a military half the size of the
police force of Philadelphia.
In the context of this relentless and pointless NATO expansion to the very borders of the shrunken Russian state, Washington not
only sponsored and funded the overthrow of Ukraine's constitutionally elected government in February 2014. But once it had unleashed
a devastating civil war, it relentlessly blocked the obvious alternative to the bloodshed that has claimed 10,000 civilian and military
casualties.
That is, it's partition of its population among the Russian speaking provinces in the Donbas and Crimea and Ukrainians in the
west. After all, partition was accomplished peacefully in the artificial state of Czechoslovakia and at the insistence of NATO bombers
in the short-lived nation of Yugoslavia.
Had not the Donald been stopped cold by the hail of hysteria which emanated from the War Party and their dutiful stenographers
in the main stream media, the next step after his historic meeting with Putin in Helsinki would have been to take up where George
H.W. Bush faltered in 1991.
That is, on the dismantlement and interment of NATO and the reopening of Europe to peaceful commerce among all the nation's that
had been artificially separated by the now long departed Iron Curtain.
The fact is, Washington doesn't need its budget-busting $720 billion defense budget to defend Europe from Russia, nor should it
be endlessly haranguing those nations to waste more of their own money on defense than they already are.
That's because there is absolutely no reason to believe that Russia wants to attack Germany or any other country in Europe. Indeed,
the very idea is just plain madness.
As shown by the table below, the NATO-28 (excluding the US) are now actually spending $250 billion per year on defense
(2017). That's 4X Russia's entire military budget of $61 billion .
Likewise, the GDP of Russia is but $1.5 trillion compared to $18 trillion for the NATO-28. So is Cool
Hand Vlad so completely foolish and reckless as to think that he could invade and occupy territories that have an economy 13X bigger
than that of Russia?
Actually, it's far more ludicrous than that. The rump of Russia today is a giant hydrocarbon province attached to some wheat fields,
timber lands and mineral deposits – all dependent upon an aging work force afflicted with an undue fondness for Vodka etc.
What that means is that Russia must export its commodities big time or die. In fact, during 2017 Russian exports totaled $357
billion or 26% of its GDP. And 55% of that went to Europe!
Moreover, when you breakdown Russian exports it is plain to see that the industrial maw of Europe is the port of first call for
its vast tonnages of exported commodities. These included $173 billion of oil and gas and $60 billion of iron, steel, aluminum, precious
metals, forest products, fertilizers, grains and copper, among others.
Finally, the table on defense spending by country below speaks for itself as to the purported Russian threat. If the German government
really feared that Russian tanks would be soon rolling through the Brandenburg Gates, it would have more than 20 operational tanks,
and it would spend far more than $40.6 billion or 1.2% of GDP to defend itself.
And the same is even more true of the former Warsaw pact countries that are located cheek-by-jowl on Russia's border. Yet Romania
spends the tiny sum of $2.8 billion or 1.2% of GDP on its military.
Likewise, the figure for Hungary, which learned all about Soviet-style invasions in 1956, spends only $1.2 billion or barely 1.0%
of GDP. And besides that, its intrepid leader, Viktor Orban, doesn't even support NATO's ridiculous sanctions on Putin's cronies
and allies.
And as for the allegedly threatened Baltic states, their combined defense budgets are less than $1.5 billion, representing a minuscule
1.7% of combined GDP; and Bulgaria, fast upon the Russian Lake called the Black Sea, spends only $660 million or 1.4% of its GDP.
In short, European policy action on the defense spending front trumps all the hot air that wafts from NATO's spanking new Brussels
headquarters. Their governments and parliaments positively do not think they are threatened by the Russian Bear because they aren't.
What would help a lot, therefore, is for the Great Disrupter to forget about his unfortunate infatuation with the idea that bigger
is always better, and do what no other American politician in thrall to the Warfare State has been unable to do since 1991 when the
Soviet Union vanished.
That is, declare "mission accomplished" with respect to NATO and disband it forthwith.
You could call it a Mercy Killing. Indeed, a couple more NATO summits at which they are browbeat to waste ever more money on defense,
and the Europeans themselves may well start begging for exactly that.
Then again, could you imagine how loudly the progressive left would be screaming if the Donald even entertained the thought deep
beneath his bedraggled Orange Comb-Over?
and especially in the US, where any criticism of Israel is regularly treated as
'anti-semitism', just as it is here in the UK. I have never recognised the state of Israel,
even though my mother's family was exterminated almost in its entirety during WWII. And I
don't even know where or when my aunts, uncles, cousins et al vanished, even 70 yrs later.
Oft times I'm ashamed to be considered Jewish and see very little difference between Hitler's
Nazis and the so-called Jewish state that treats Palestinians as untermensch.
This write-up is an uncanny coincidence for me as I just watched the four part movie The
Lobby (UK) yesterday. As I watched the maneuvers of the israeli's lobby groups and their
wilful political accomplices, I kept smiling seeing how much they are putting into an
unwinnable war. They seem not to learn from history. Michelle Alexander would be vilified and
demonized but I think she will live in peace with herself. The Apartheid-Israel is indeed a
horrendous shame.
I falsely said earlier that every Congress-person is on the payroll but only 269 (62%) of
the 435 voting House delegates received pro-Israel money, an average of $23,220 each. . .
here
Neocons are "enemies of the people" independent of their party affiliation. Nuremberg principles were written not for nothing.
Notable quotes:
"... he thought Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone except the staff of Commentary magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks. ..."
"... The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic consequence. ..."
There is an unforgettable passage in Graham Greene's classic "The Quiet American" in which the
title character, a CIA agent named Alden Pyle, admits that Vietnam is much more complicated
than he'd imagined. "I had not realized how tribal politics was and how divorced it could be
from principles or conviction," Pyle says. Surveying the wreckage of the American war effort,
he adds, "Looking back with greater introspection and humility after the passage of more than
fifteen years, I can finally acknowledge the obvious: it was all a big mistake."
Greene's admirers will recognize that these lines do not actually come from his 1955 novel.
They are from Max Boot's new book, " The Corrosion of
Conservatism: Why I Left the Right ." Boot, a leading intellectual in the conservative
movement for the past two decades, is now apologizing for nearly everything he has done and
abided. He is denouncing not just Donald Trump, but the Republican Party as a whole. "Upon
closer examination," he writes in his 260-page atonement, "it's obvious that the whole history
of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, ignorance,
isolationism, and know-nothingism."
The temptation is to say, Bravo, here at last is a Republican willing to admit the emperor
has no clothes. That's the reaction of lots of journalists and
pundits who have flipped
through Boot's book. Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the
Washington Monthly that Boot's "readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable."
Adam Serwer, writer at The Atlantic, tweeted , "You don't want to
punish people for getting the right answer." Boot is no longer a Republican (he quit the party
after Trump's election) but he is hardly an outcast in the political world -- he is a
Washington Post columnist, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a CNN
analyst. Such is the sweet life of a born-again intellectual.
It's easy to understand why a penitent like Boot appeals to liberals and other members of
the Trump resistance. He ratifies their sense of having been correct from the start, and his
confession is enunciated in perfect sound bites, with just the right dose of abasement. Boot is
an irresistible spectacle -- the sinner with tears running down his cheeks dropping to his
knees at the altar of all that is good, proclaiming that he has seen the light and wants to
join the army of righteousness. But here's the thing: Boot is only half-apologizing. And
because he's been wrong so many times and with so many ill consequences, he should be provided
with nothing more than a polite handshake as he's led out of the sanctuary of politics,
forever.
When I say wrong, I mean Guinness World Records wrong. In his first book, " Out of
Order ," Boot argued that the Supreme Court erred when it ruled in Brown v. Board of
Education that school segregation violated the Constitution ("I am not proud of 'Out of
Order,'" he now says); he was a key proponent of the invasion of Iraq ("Once we have deposed
Saddam, we can impose an American-led, international regency in Baghdad, to go along with the
one in Kabul," he proclaimed in 2001);
he thought John Bolton was treated unfairly when Democrats
opposed his 2005 nomination for ambassador to the United Nations ("He seems like a good choice
to help drain the U.N. cesspool of corrupt bureaucrats and self-serving tyrants");
he thought
Ahmed Chalabi was "the most unfairly
maligned man on the planet" long after the Iraqi exile's dissembling was apparent to everyone
except the staff of Commentary
magazine; and as Boot notes in his mea culpa, he totally failed to notice the dark side of the
GOP. "It's amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed," he squeaks.
That's a lot of wrong. It's so much wrong that I can't imagine how or why anyone could look
at Boot and think, "Ah, here's a man we should listen to." I can pre-empt Boot's response to
this -- in his book, he complains that "doctrinaire leftists" will be satisfied with nothing
less than his "ritual suicide" for the war crimes he's committed. I've exchanged a few cordial
emails with Boot (we both graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, a few years
apart, and worked at its student newspaper, the Daily Californian ), and I can honestly say he seems a nice and
bright enough fellow to whom I wish no physical harm. But like Alden Pyle, he has helped create
so much havoc, he has been wrong so completely, that it would be the definition of insanity to
treat his ideas as fodder for anything other than a shredder. Here's a real line from "The
Quiet American," spoken about Pyle by the novel's weary narrator, that suits Boot perfectly: "I
never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused." Pyle's innocence, the
book explains, "is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no
harm."
The problem here isn't really Boot. It's the eternal forgiveness that journalists and
intellectuals bestow upon colleagues who should be cast out for errors of immense and tragic
consequence.
Boot is a perfect example, because he has been wrong so many times in such major
ways and is actually willing to admit it. But there are vast numbers of pundits , masters of
spin , and
allegedintellectuals who have been wrong
enough on enough big things (not just war, but climate change and more) to merit laughter
rather than praise. Yet there they are,
stroking their chins on our finest
op-ed pages and cable news channels. Mutual forgiveness is a necessity among pundits who are
stuffed with nonsense much of the time; without mercy on demand, they might all be out of jobs.
It's no surprise that Boot's book arrives with admiring blurbs from D.C. heavyweights James
Fallows, Jon Meacham, and David Corn, among others.
No, please no Max Boot anymore. This neocon clown should switch to painting houses as Tucker
Carlson suggested, not write "national security" commentary in Bezos blog (is this CIA blog or
Besos? ;-)
I am with tucker Carlson: painting Houses is probably the most quality job Max book can
perform with acceptable quality. The only danger is that he might steal some paint :-)
Why so many "national security" commentators are in reality national security parasites? Why
national security attracts bottomfeeders? This is an interesting question to
ponder.As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nothing changes since that time
January 15,
2019PaulR113
Comments The Washington Post has been banging the 'Trump is a Russian agent' drum
incessantly, and was at it again this week, with an
article by that well-known bastion of common sense and accurate analysis, Max Boot,
entitled 'Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian agent'. Boot's article doesn't actually
provide any evidence concretely linking Trump with the Russian intelligence agencies, but
that's pretty much par for the course. Boot ends with the words:
Now that we've listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian assets, let's look at the
exculpatory evidence:
[This page intentionally left blank]
I can't think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grapsing
what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could
actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. If Trump isn't actually a Russian
agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.
So what does a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent look like in real life? To answer
that we have to find examples of the Trump adminstration's policies towards Russia, and
fortunately the international press has just provided us with a good example. The German paper
Bild am Sonntag
reported on Sunday that the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, sent letters
to companies participating in the North Stream 2 gas pipeline project in which he told them
that, 'We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in
something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.' A spokesman for Grenell
subsequently clarified the Ambassador's letter by saying that it was not a threat, just a
'clear message of US policy', though I have to say that the distinction is lost on me.
Grenell's letter didn't come out of the blue. The United States has long been doing all it can
to sabotage North Stream 2. And Trump himself is fully signed up to the policy. At a meeting
with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia last year, the US president declared his
opposition to North Stream 2, declaring
:
Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of
dollars for energy into Russia. And I'm saying, 'What's going on with that? How come Germany
is paying vast amounts of money to Russia when they hook up a pipeline?' That's not
right.
This is indeed a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent. There's no doubt about it
– Trump is working for the Russians. Why else would he doing his damnedest to destroy one
of the Russian Federation's most valuable international trade projects? Does that make sense to
you? It doesn't to me. If Donald Trump is indeed a Russian agent, I have to conclude that he's
got to be the worst secret agent ever.
"... In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora ..."
"... The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness." ..."
"... When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran. ..."
"... One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election . ..."
"... Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone. ..."
"... Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it . ..."
"... That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America. ..."
The Roman poet Ovid's masterful epic The Metamorphoses includes the memorable opening line
regarding the poem's central theme of transformation. He wrote In nova fert animus mutatas
dicere formas corpora , which has been translated as "Of shapes transformed to bodies
strange, I purpose to entreat "
Ovid framed his narrative around gods, heroes and quasi-historical events but if he were
around today, he would no doubt be fascinated by the many transformations of the group that has
defined itself as neoconservative.The movement began in a cafeteria in City College of New York
in the 1930s, where a group of radical Jewish students would meet to discuss politics and
developments in Europe. Many of the founders were from the far left, communists of the
Trotskyite persuasion, which meant that they believed in permanent global revolution led by a
vanguard party. The transformation into conservatives of a neo-persuasion took place when they
were reportedly "mugged by reality" into accepting that the standard leftist formulae were not
working to transform the world rapidly enough. As liberal hawks, they then hitched their wagon
to the power of the United States to bring about transformation by force if necessary and began
to infiltrate institutions like the Pentagon to give themselves the tools to achieve their
objectives, which included promotion of regime change wars, full spectrum global dominance and
unconditional support for Israel.
The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they
moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill
Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the
Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White
House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was
buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his
administration's "weakness."
The neoconservatives lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, appalled by Donald Trump's
condemnation of their centerpiece war in Iraq and even more so by his pledge to end the wars in
Asia and nation-building projects while also improving relations with the Russians. They worked
actively against the Republican candidate both before he was nominated and elected and did
everything they could to stop him, including libeling him as a Russian agent.
When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but
chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well
as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all
odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as
National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is
Fred
Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump
added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for
countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with
Iran.
Meanwhile, the neocon metamorphosis is nearly complete as many of the neocons, who started
out as Democrats, have returned home, where they are being welcomed for their hardline foreign
policy viewpoint. Glenn Greenwald
reports that , based on polling of party supporters, the Democrats have gone full-Hillary
and are now by far more hawkish than the Republicans, unwilling to leave either Syria or
Afghanistan.
The neocon survival and rejuvenation is particularly astonishing in that they have been
wrong about virtually everything, most notably the catastrophic Iraq War. They have never been
held accountable for anything, though one should note that accountability is not a prominent
American trait, at least since Vietnam. What is important is that neocon views have been
perceived by the media and punditry as being part of the Establishment consensus, which
provides them with access to programming all across the political spectrum. That is why neocon
standard-bearers like Bill Kristol and Max Boot have been able to move effortlessly from Fox
News to MSNBC where they are fêted by the likes of Rachel Maddow. They applauded the Iraq
War when the Establishment was firmly behind it and are now trying to destroy Donald Trump's
presidency because America's elite is behind that effort.
Indeed, the largely successful swing by the neocons from right to left has in some ways
become more surreal, as an increasing number of progressive spokesmen and institutions have
lined up behind their perpetual warfare banner. The ease with which the transformation took
place reveals, interestingly, that the neocons have no real political constituency apart from
voters who feel threatened and respond by supporting perpetual war, but they do share many
common interests with the so-called liberal interventionists. Neocons see a global crisis for
the United States defined in terms of power while the liberals see the struggle as a moral
imperative, but the end result is the same: intervention by the United States. This fusion is
clearly visible in Washington, where the Clintons' Center for American Progress (CAP) is now
working on position
papers with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of
Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4
lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against
Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up
to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the
2016 election .
DDT is a prime example of how the neoconservatives and traditional liberal interventionists
have come together as it is in part funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire co-founder of
eBay who has provided
DDT with $600,000 in two grants through his Democracy Fund Voice ,
also a 501(c)4.
Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive
organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder
of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg
and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone.
Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding
the launch of
the launch of a new webzine The
Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the
recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting
itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least
some of the Omidyar money is behind it
.
Iranian-born Omidyar's relationship with Kristol is clearly based on the hatred that the two
share regarding Donald Trump.
Omidyar has
stated that Trump is a "dangerous authoritarian demagogue endorsing Donald Trump
immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust."
He has tweeted that Trump suffers from "failing mental capacity" and is both "corrupt and
incapacitated."
Omidyar is what he is – a hardcore social justice warrior who supports traditional big
government and globalist liberal causes, most of which are antithetical to genuine
conservatives.
But what is interesting about the relationship with Kristol is that it also
reveals what the neoconservatives are all about. Kristol and company have never been actual
conservatives on social issues, a topic that they studiously avoid, and their foreign policy is
based on two principles: creating a state of perpetual war based on fearmongering about foreign
enemies while also providing unlimited support for Israel. Kristol hates Trump because he
threatens the war agenda while Omidyar despises the president for traditional progressive
reasons.
That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no
character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is
quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of
America.
There was one man who completely delegitimized state of Israel and who, under political
pressure from Polish Government conducting political purge of Jews, Polish workers party
members, was fired from his job as director of hospital and pushed to leave country for
Israel and to denounce Polish Citizenship.
He, a Jew, in 1969 refused to immigrate to Israel because as he described it, Israel was
apartheid country run by Jewish Nazi collaborators and American Zionists.
This man was Marek Edelman, one of leaders of Warsaw Ghetto uprising in April 1943.
No need for further delegitimization of state of Israel.
iv> Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also
represent a sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just
appointed to the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to
the powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist
Manchurian Candidate.
Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed
Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department as
a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.
Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of Zionism,
Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!
Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS
(anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist
movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.
Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I bring
up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this world.
The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and now
they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying to
destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A pox
on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link
Two newly-elected Democrats in the House, Rhashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar also represent a
sea change with regards to open, vociferous criticism of Israel. Omar was just appointed to
the Foreign Affairs Committee--that should be interesting. Tlaib was appointed to the
powerful Oversight Committee. Let's see if she can help rid the White House of the Zionist
Manchurian Candidate.
Your pal, your buddy that you like to defend so much around here, Trump, appointed
Kenneth Marcus, a rabid BDS watchdog to the civil rights office of the Education Department
as a check and slayer of the growing BDS movement in Academia.
Maybe she's being tarred and feathered because she called the new high priest of
Zionism, Trump... Gee I wish I said it first!
Even the leader of the Women's March is getting painted with the Scarlett letters AS
(anti-Semite). Obviously, because, like Black Lives Matter, they are two powerful activist
movements sympathetic to Palestinian rights.
Okay, so if you bothered to peruse these articles you'll hopefully understand why I
bring up Zionism often in these threads as a force for evil on many fronts in this
world.
The powerful wider Lobby didn't waste a minute in destroying Occupy Wall Street, and
now they're going after every movement that aligns itself with Palestinian rights and trying
to destroy the fledgling careers of two powerful pro-Palestinian female voices in Congress. A
pox on Zionism for the evil it does! ">link
No, please no Max Boot anymore. This neocon clown should switch to painting houses as Tucker
Carlson suggested, not write "national security" commentary in Bezos blog (is this CIA blog or
Besos? ;-)
I am with tucker Carlson: painting Houses is probably the most quality job Max book can
perform with acceptable quality. The only danger is that he might steal some paint :-)
Why so many "national security" commentators are in reality national security parasites? Why
national security attracts bottomfeeders? This is an interesting question to
ponder.As Samuel Johnson observed in 1775 "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." Nothing changes since that time
January 15,
2019PaulR113
Comments The Washington Post has been banging the 'Trump is a Russian agent' drum
incessantly, and was at it again this week, with an
article by that well-known bastion of common sense and accurate analysis, Max Boot,
entitled 'Here are 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian agent'. Boot's article doesn't actually
provide any evidence concretely linking Trump with the Russian intelligence agencies, but
that's pretty much par for the course. Boot ends with the words:
Now that we've listed 18 reasons Trump could be a Russian assets, let's look at the
exculpatory evidence:
[This page intentionally left blank]
I can't think of anything that would exonerate Trump aside from the difficulty of grapsing
what once would have seemed unimaginable: that a president of the United States could
actually have been compromised by a hostile foreign power. If Trump isn't actually a Russian
agent, he is doing a pretty good imitation of one.
So what does a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent look like in real life? To answer
that we have to find examples of the Trump adminstration's policies towards Russia, and
fortunately the international press has just provided us with a good example. The German paper
Bild am Sonntag
reported on Sunday that the American ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, sent letters
to companies participating in the North Stream 2 gas pipeline project in which he told them
that, 'We emphasize that companies involved in Russian energy exports are taking part in
something that could prompt a significant risk of sanctions.' A spokesman for Grenell
subsequently clarified the Ambassador's letter by saying that it was not a threat, just a
'clear message of US policy', though I have to say that the distinction is lost on me.
Grenell's letter didn't come out of the blue. The United States has long been doing all it can
to sabotage North Stream 2. And Trump himself is fully signed up to the policy. At a meeting
with the presidents of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia last year, the US president declared his
opposition to North Stream 2, declaring
:
Germany hooks up a pipeline into Russia, where Germany is going to be paying billions of
dollars for energy into Russia. And I'm saying, 'What's going on with that? How come Germany
is paying vast amounts of money to Russia when they hook up a pipeline?' That's not
right.
This is indeed a 'pretty good imitation' of a Russian agent. There's no doubt about it
– Trump is working for the Russians. Why else would he doing his damnedest to destroy one
of the Russian Federation's most valuable international trade projects? Does that make sense to
you? It doesn't to me. If Donald Trump is indeed a Russian agent, I have to conclude that he's
got to be the worst secret agent ever.
"... In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora ..."
"... The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his administration's "weakness." ..."
"... When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is Fred Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with Iran. ..."
"... One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4 lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the 2016 election . ..."
"... Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone. ..."
"... Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding the launch of the launch of a new webzine The Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least some of the Omidyar money is behind it . ..."
"... That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of America. ..."
The Roman poet Ovid's masterful epic The Metamorphoses includes the memorable opening line
regarding the poem's central theme of transformation. He wrote In nova fert animus mutatas
dicere formas corpora , which has been translated as "Of shapes transformed to bodies
strange, I purpose to entreat "
Ovid framed his narrative around gods, heroes and quasi-historical events but if he were
around today, he would no doubt be fascinated by the many transformations of the group that has
defined itself as neoconservative.The movement began in a cafeteria in City College of New York
in the 1930s, where a group of radical Jewish students would meet to discuss politics and
developments in Europe. Many of the founders were from the far left, communists of the
Trotskyite persuasion, which meant that they believed in permanent global revolution led by a
vanguard party. The transformation into conservatives of a neo-persuasion took place when they
were reportedly "mugged by reality" into accepting that the standard leftist formulae were not
working to transform the world rapidly enough. As liberal hawks, they then hitched their wagon
to the power of the United States to bring about transformation by force if necessary and began
to infiltrate institutions like the Pentagon to give themselves the tools to achieve their
objectives, which included promotion of regime change wars, full spectrum global dominance and
unconditional support for Israel.
The neocons initially found a home with Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, but they
moved on in the 1970s and 1980s to prosper under Ronald Reagan as well as under Democrat Bill
Clinton. Their ability to shape policy peaked under George W. Bush, when they virtually ran the
Pentagon and were heavily represented in both the national security apparatus and in the White
House. They became adept at selling their mantra of "strong national defense" to whomever was
buying, including to President Obama, even while simultaneously complaining about his
administration's "weakness."
The neoconservatives lined up behind Hillary Clinton in 2016, appalled by Donald Trump's
condemnation of their centerpiece war in Iraq and even more so by his pledge to end the wars in
Asia and nation-building projects while also improving relations with the Russians. They worked
actively against the Republican candidate both before he was nominated and elected and did
everything they could to stop him, including libeling him as a Russian agent.
When Trump was elected, it, therefore, seemed that the reign of the neocons had ended, but
chameleonlike, they have changed shape and are now ensconced both in some conservative as well
as in an increasing number of progressive circles in Washington and in the media. Against all
odds, they have even captured key posts in the White House itself with the naming of John Bolton as
National Security Adviser and Mike Pompeo as Secretary of State. Bolton's Chief of Staff is
Fred
Fleitz , a leading neocon and Islamophobe while last week Trump
added Iran hawk Richard Goldberg to the National Security Council as director for
countering Iranian weapons of mass destruction. Goldberg is an alumnus of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies, which is the leading neocon think tank calling incessantly for war with
Iran.
Meanwhile, the neocon metamorphosis is nearly complete as many of the neocons, who started
out as Democrats, have returned home, where they are being welcomed for their hardline foreign
policy viewpoint. Glenn Greenwald
reports that , based on polling of party supporters, the Democrats have gone full-Hillary
and are now by far more hawkish than the Republicans, unwilling to leave either Syria or
Afghanistan.
The neocon survival and rejuvenation is particularly astonishing in that they have been
wrong about virtually everything, most notably the catastrophic Iraq War. They have never been
held accountable for anything, though one should note that accountability is not a prominent
American trait, at least since Vietnam. What is important is that neocon views have been
perceived by the media and punditry as being part of the Establishment consensus, which
provides them with access to programming all across the political spectrum. That is why neocon
standard-bearers like Bill Kristol and Max Boot have been able to move effortlessly from Fox
News to MSNBC where they are fêted by the likes of Rachel Maddow. They applauded the Iraq
War when the Establishment was firmly behind it and are now trying to destroy Donald Trump's
presidency because America's elite is behind that effort.
Indeed, the largely successful swing by the neocons from right to left has in some ways
become more surreal, as an increasing number of progressive spokesmen and institutions have
lined up behind their perpetual warfare banner. The ease with which the transformation took
place reveals, interestingly, that the neocons have no real political constituency apart from
voters who feel threatened and respond by supporting perpetual war, but they do share many
common interests with the so-called liberal interventionists. Neocons see a global crisis for
the United States defined in terms of power while the liberals see the struggle as a moral
imperative, but the end result is the same: intervention by the United States. This fusion is
clearly visible in Washington, where the Clintons' Center for American Progress (CAP) is now
working on position
papers with the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI).
One of the most active groups attacking President Trump is "Republicans for the Rule of
Law," founded by Bill Kristol in January 2018, as a component of Defending Democracy Together (DDT), a 501(c)4
lobbying group that also incorporates projects called The Russia Tweets and Republicans Against
Putin. Republicans Against Putin promotes the view that President Trump is not "stand[ing] up
to [Vladimir] Putin" and calls for more aggressive investigation of the Russian role in the
2016 election .
DDT is a prime example of how the neoconservatives and traditional liberal interventionists
have come together as it is in part funded by Pierre Omidyar, the billionaire co-founder of
eBay who has provided
DDT with $600,000 in two grants through his Democracy Fund Voice ,
also a 501(c)4.
Omidyar is a political liberal who has given millions of dollars to progressive
organizations and individuals since 1999. Indeed, he is regarded as a top funder
of liberal causes in the United States and even globally together with Michael Bloomberg
and George Soros. His Democracy Fund awarded $9 million in grants in 2015 alone.
Last week, the Omidyar-Kristol connection may have deepened with an announcement regarding
the launch of
the launch of a new webzine The
Bulwark , which would clearly be at least somewhat intended to take the place of the
recently deceased Weekly Standard. It is promoting
itself as the center of the "Never Trump Resistance" and it is being assumed that at least
some of the Omidyar money is behind it
.
Iranian-born Omidyar's relationship with Kristol is clearly based on the hatred that the two
share regarding Donald Trump.
Omidyar has
stated that Trump is a "dangerous authoritarian demagogue endorsing Donald Trump
immediately disqualifies you from any position of public trust."
He has tweeted that Trump suffers from "failing mental capacity" and is both "corrupt and
incapacitated."
Omidyar is what he is – a hardcore social justice warrior who supports traditional big
government and globalist liberal causes, most of which are antithetical to genuine
conservatives.
But what is interesting about the relationship with Kristol is that it also
reveals what the neoconservatives are all about. Kristol and company have never been actual
conservatives on social issues, a topic that they studiously avoid, and their foreign policy is
based on two principles: creating a state of perpetual war based on fearmongering about foreign
enemies while also providing unlimited support for Israel. Kristol hates Trump because he
threatens the war agenda while Omidyar despises the president for traditional progressive
reasons.
That hatred is the tie that binds and it is why Bill Kristol, a man possessing no
character and values whatsoever, is willing to take Pierre Omidyar's money while Pierre is
quite happy to provide it to destroy a common enemy, the President of the United States of
America.
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George
Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American
People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history.
But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired
by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond
specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead,
I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies
my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic
heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
This is a compelling book that documents and examines the senseless and dangerous demonizing of Russia and Putin. Unfortunately,
the elites in Washington and mass media are not likely to read this book. Their minds are closed. I read this book because I was
hoping for an explanation about the cause of the new cold war with Russia. Although the root cause of the new cold war is beyond
the scope of this book, the book documents baseless accusations that grew in frequency and intensity until all opposition was
silenced. The book documents the dangerous triumph of group think.
"On my planet, the evidence linking Putin to the assassination of Litvinecko, Nemtsov, and Politkovskaya and the attempt
on the Skripals is strong and consistent with spending his formative years in the KGB. The naive view from Cohen's planet is
presented on p 6 and 170."
Ukrainian history. That's evident to any attentive reader. I just want to state that Ukrainian EuroMaydan was a color revolution
which exploited the anger of population against the corrupt neoliberal government of Yanukovich (with Biden as the best friend,
and Paul Manafort as the election advisor) to install even more neoliberal and more corrupt government of Poroshenko and cut Ukraine
from Russia. The process that was probably inevitable in the long run (so called Baltic path), but that was forcefully accelerated.
Everything was taken from the Gene Sharp textbook. And Ukrainians suffered greatly as a result, with the standard of living dropping
to around $2 a day level -- essentially Central Africa level.
The fact is that the EU acted as a predator trying to get into Ukraine markets and displace Russia. While the USA neocons (Nuland
and Co) staged the coup using Ukrainian nationalists as a ram, ignoring the fact that Yanukovich would be voted out in six months
anyway (his popularity was in single digits, like popularity of Poroshenko those days ;-). The fact that Obama administration
desperately wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainians eludes you. I would blame Nuland for the loss of Crimea and the
civil war in Donbass.
Poor Ukrainians again became the victim of geopolitical games by big powers. No that they are completely blameless, but still...
It looks like you inhabit a very cold populated exclusively with neocons planet called "Russiagate." So Professor Cohen really
lives on another planet. And probably you should drink less American exceptionalism Kool-Aid.
So neoconservatives return to the Democratic Party in which they were hatched. When the party
became the second War Partty in Washington. nice...
Notable quotes:
"... Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire." ..."
"... his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy. ..."
"... Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy. ..."
"... The Corrosion of Conservatism ..."
"... A Choice Not an Echo ..."
"... In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal ..."
The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he
has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the
neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move
back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon
journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it's creating a vertiginous sensation.
James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair , "One of the chewier
ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I'm following former foes on Twitter and
elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency,
especially after the invasion of Iraq."
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right by Max Boot
Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more
crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front.
Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a
hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the
Atlantic . Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street
Journal to the New York Times . William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on
MSNBC.
And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot's breach with the Republican
Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn't sure that
he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a
lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on
Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, "Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President
Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation
today?," with this accompanying text: "Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no." His sallies have earned
him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a
"soulless, craven opportunist."
Boot's defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once
the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism
in a Weekly Standard cover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he
announced, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." His name became a synonym for neocon
warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential
aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.
In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances
that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race,
gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post , Boot has
relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. "If there has been an outcry against Trump's
virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it," he wrote in August. "The only
conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump's bigotry are those of us who are
#NeverTrumpers -- and, as I constantly hear online, we aren't 'real' conservatives because we
do not worship at the orange altar."
Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism , Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He
deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace
of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the
2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination,
Boot's Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He
became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with
Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump's
authoritarianism. When they didn't, he felt betrayed.
For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to
America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to
Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has
sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right , Boot was
never a Republican operative. He isn't trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order.
Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic
temperament hasn't changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.
The value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he
explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In
describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the
right.
Now it's the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he
missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted
with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy
mongering. And he is haunted by a question: "Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark
force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?"
Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills's Confessions of
a Conservative , the value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis.
Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative
madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide
of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor
for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler's remark in The God
That Failed : "When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know
what it's all about."
B oot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was
deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both
later immigrated to America. Boot's father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed
samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then
taught Russian in California.
Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father -- a self-described monarchist who
now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state -- is
quite constrained. But Alexander's gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he
was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers,
ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F.
Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers's
Witness , F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom , and Russell Kirk's The
Conservative Mind . Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the "evil empire" that Max and his
parents had fled, was Boot's contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with
the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.
Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony,
he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to
Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion
would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire."
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of
adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the
Christian Science Monitor . But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the
Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented
polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side
economics and a hawkish foreign policy.
Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned
that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that
he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an
assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased
Bartley. "I later learned," Boot writes, "that he liked to take writers who did not know much
about the subject and train them in his way of thinking."
In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the
cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went
to the monthly "Monday Meeting," where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold
standard to Central Park's horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a "made man" in 2007 when
he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a "love of
country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of
totalitarianism."
B ut Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal . He once invited
a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics,
which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. "This was an early
indication," Boot writes, "that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the
left." Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy
theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving
Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. "I thought he was a
deeply flawed man," Boot says of Clinton, "but I appreciated the achievements of his
presidency." But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote
the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.
One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's
acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has
always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to
ignore," he writes. For all the political right's hosannas for Buckley, he established the
revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to
treason. It's important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous
Joseph McCarthy -- a sentiment he never repudiated -- and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a
dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed
to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and
for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet
Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless
apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.
After McCarthy's demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully
reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo
suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from
winning. "It wasn't any accident," she claimed. "It was planned that way" by New York
financiers who supported "a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter
White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting
Red Russia and her satellites." The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet
agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn't any accident, either. The message was that egghead
liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.
One
of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that
Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark
underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes.
The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections.
But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point
began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now
Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has
become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the
rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he
maintained that the GOP should not " 'Rush' to embrace talk show democracy." He now
denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy
theories on Trump's behalf.
Perhaps the most notable part of Boot's book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco
that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and
was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. "It is not nearly as easy to remake a
foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003," he writes. And he recognizes that the
catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In
listening to Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes "my
callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale
University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be."
Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that
belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching
indictment of the GOP: "I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and
devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and
know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be
any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes." Indeed, he
concludes, "having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will
swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may
lead me."
There's a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered
the breaking-ranks genre in Witness , Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But
his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to
sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.
"... Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult. ..."
"... Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in. ..."
I wanted to like this book and Max Boot but couldn't. I'm an 'old white
guy' who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican family but switched allegiance to the Democrats
during the civil rights battles in the 60s. I was hoping to read about someone who went through
a similar transformation but Max's journey falls short.
The book is part autobiographical: Max was born in Russia into a Jewish family in 1969. His
family was allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the US in 1976 after pressure was placed
on the Communist government by the United States. Max states that the Boots survived here in
part on payments from Social Security for which Max says "Thank you, America" but ignores that
this support was from a program that was developed by liberals and that has been regularly
attacked by conservative Republicans. His mother was employed by the University of California, a state university, and Max received
his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. While he notes that it "cost next to nothing" at
the time, he doesn't point out that his tuition was low thanks to subsidies that were paid by
the taxes of the citizens of the State of California. The UC system is also a product of
progressive thinking and is partly responsible for the economic growth in California. It's paid
for itself many times over by developing a highly educated work force that supports the many
high paying, high skilled jobs in the state.
Max began his conversion to right wing politics at age 13 when he received a subscription to
the New Republic magazine. I suppose you can't expect much critical thinking from an
adolescent, but you would think that it would have taken less than 36 years to realize that
conservative Republican values and policies weren't conducive to helping people who have needs
similar to those of his family. Especially since Max seems certain that he is among the most
intelligent people to walk among us.
He states that he now sees that the messages of conservative Republicans were often "coded
racial appeals – those dog whistles" and that liberals have recognized this for decades.
He just didn't believe the liberals or bother to honestly evaluate their warnings. Max can't refrain from making the ad hominem attacks so prevalent among right wing pundits.
Most of these are directed at Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "liar, an ignoramus, and a
moral abomination". He also includes a chapter about the "Trump Toadies".
Max "loved the attention and notoriety" his conservative views generated in his youth. He
now recognizes that he has been a part of a movement that has been "morally and intellectually
bankrupt".
He also states that he no longer receives any pay from any conservative organization. Is
this the reason that he is looking for another group to hook up with? Or is he worried that
since he was not born in the United States his citizenship might be revoked and he might be
sent back to Russia if the anti-Semitic members of the right wing get their way?
So Max comes across as quite shallow even while showing off his extravagant vocabulary. While
he was quite willing to accept the offerings of a liberal society, he's been unwilling to
consider any responsibility to provide similar benefits to those who came after him.
The book is well written and is a quick read. Ultimately it's one man's awakening to the
awful realities of what conservative Republicanism has become. It doesn't really break any new
ground for those who have been following politics for any length of time.
In the epilogue Max lists his current beliefs and many of them are liberal. He states he is
pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration including offering a path
to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he is also in favor of free speech. He and I
might disagree on the details about how to reach some of these goals but in these areas we
would be pointing at similar directions.
But then Max attacks other progressive programs. For example, he states that single payer
medical insurance – Medicare for all – would cost too much and cause insurance
companies to go bankrupt or "find a new business model". Frankly if a company that makes its
money by increasing the cost of our health care has to "find a new business model", I believe
that would be a good thing for the health of our economy and of our people. As to the insurance
company employees, since claims would still have to be processed I suspect that the people
processing claims for the insurance companies would be able to make the switch to work for a
government agency processing claims easily, so they should be ok.
I hope that Max's rejection of conservative Republicanism is actually a genuine realization
that ALL people are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" including getting
affordable medical care. If that's the case, I would be happy to welcome him to join those of
us who vote for politicians who truly represent these values.
But I am not convinced by this book that he has truly escaped the "corrosion of
conservatism". Let's see if time will prove me wrong.
skeptic
Thank you for your review. Much appreciated...
I would add that it is important to understand that Max Boot is not an intellectual, he is essentially a well-paid MIC
lobbyist who pretends to be an intellectual. He does not have convictions per se, only the burning desire to belong to the
winning and/or better paid party.
The fact that he realized from which side the bread is buttered at early age just confirms what he always valued money
more then ideas.
The politics of the cold war created many political anomalies in the United States. One of
the biggest was the migration of the cold war hawks after 1968 from the Democratic Party to
the Republican Party. For many of them, it was less about a broad vision of politics than
narrow concerns over Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The alliance functioned up until the end
of the cold war and the establishment of republican control in the Senate and House. Then it
broke down completely during the Presidential Term of George W. Bush.
After a decade out of power and as a hanger-on in three failed presidential campaigns, Max
Boot has written this book which is sort of a combination of angry farewell letter and maoist
self-criticism covering his entire political career to 2016 or so.
The problems start at the beginning of the book. He defines "conservative" to mean to him
"incremental policy making based on empirical study". His conservative beliefs, in contrast
to what he considers "European" beliefs, rejects the nation-state and the idea of an American
identity. The only limit to the "social safety net" in his mind is when that safety net
begins to impact "individual initiative". He makes a special point of saying that what has
united the country since the beginning is not belief in a nation, but rather belief in ideas
or "self evident truths".
The problem with all that is that his ideas of conservatism are in fact liberalism.
Incremental government policy to incrementally perfect society is not a remotely conservative
concept. Further, when you conclude as he does that American Soil has no meaning and American
Blood shed has no value, you have to really wonder about how exactly he justifies his belief
in foreign wars. Are Americans who have served in the military just suckers? or slaves in
Pharaoh's army? Where is patriotism in his vision of what "conservative" means? Did people in
wars die for "self evident truths" rather than the flag?
He drifts further into liberal thought with his idea that there is more to the
constitution than what is in the constitution. Rather than just the text and intent, Boot
finds unwritten "norms" hidden within the constitution which he holds American Citizens
should respect equally with the constitution. This is not a new idea. Its the old idea of the
"living" constitution which only elite oracles can present to us its true hidden meaning.
Then, like many people, he claims that his ideas are those of Barry Goldwater in 1960. But
they are absolutely not. The ideas that Max Boot stands for are the ideas of Lyndon Johnson.
The ideas of using the power of government for social engineering. The idea of fighting
crusades for ideas overseas in places like Vietnam. A general rejection of any sort of
morality or patriotism in politics. Worst of all, the tendency to see the United States of
America as an intellectual crusade for justice in the world rather than as a country.
A large portion of the book is given over to complaints about Trump. But the problem is
that Max Boot's ideas and his idea of what a conservative is go far beyond just being for or
against Trump. In a very real sense, he represents the discredited politics of George W. Bush
who have no support among any party and only tend to have followers in places like the pages
of "The Atlantic". The question isn't really what happened to the republican party, but more
how someone with the outright liberal political worldview of someone like Max Boot ever
thought that those ideas are what conservative meant. He tries to attach himself to men of
the past like Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. But he fails to realize that he would not fit
in with the politics of any of those man. Perhaps he would have best fit with the old
Rockefeller Republicans but to me even that is far from certain.
Max Boot has in the past been critical of Ronald Reagan's decision not to fight a war in
Lebanon in the 1980s associating it with American "weakness" that led to 9/11. He blamed
Eisenhower's decision not to support the British/French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as starting
a "pattern of weakness" in America's dealing with the middle east which was not corrected
until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its equally doubtful that Max Boot would have supported the
ideas of Barry Goldwater over those of Lyndon Johnson.
The bulk of the book him talking about his favorite topic: himself. He proves once again
that he isn't any sort of intellectual or man of ideas. He complains about trump. He
complains about various republicans who he clearly expected to follow him out of the
republican party but did not.
There are some incredible claims in the book such as claiming that the welfare state is
what ensures the success of free market. He just loves Black Lives Matter and suddenly after
a long career, race is suddenly something he cars about while the police are now the bad
guys. He also discovered after the election of Trump that sexism is a problem in America. He
can't really explain why he didn't care about these issues for decades before Trump and now
cares about deeply after Trump. I don't think he really cares about much of anything other
than boots on the ground in the middle east or preparing for war with China.
He ends the book with a conclusion titled "the vital center". The title is of course a
shout-out to old school liberal (and kennedy henchmen) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In it, he
tells us that he is "socially liberal", He believes in fiscal responsibility but not if it
involves cutting the welfare state & along those lines supports "Simpson Bowles" which
called for fixing the deficit with higher taxes and a "public option" for health insurance.
He supports the welfare state because to him its the basis for the free market. He supports
gun control. He wants more immigration to deal with our "labor shortage". He sees China and
Russia as defense threats along with a list of other countries.
He concludes with a "moderate" (ironic of course) call for everyone to vote every single
republican out of office until Trump is out of office or removed as president. And while he
makes it (finally) clear at the end that he just loved Hillary Clinton and her brand of
politics, he could never become a democrat because of the threat of bernie sanders. His
vision is a party of what he calls "centerists" which would seemingly favor a policy of
expanding the welfare state while fighting wars overseas to save the world. But Max Boot's
politics don't represent the center of anything. Whatever the bad of Trump, Max Boot
represents something just as bad or worse.
Corrosion is a slow process but early in the 1960's the GOP sucked almost all of the racists
out of the Democratic Party right into the Republican Party just to elect Richard Nixon with
the GOP "Southern Strategy." Men like the followers of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the
rural south rushed to vote for the "Sanitary Republican Party."
Sanitary was old Jim Crow
code for "whites only." If any business identified itself with "sanitary" in its name, that
was a warning for "whites only."
Strom Thurmond had earlier literally executed the longest
filibuster in Congressional history to oppose a vote on a civil rights legislation promoted
by Democrats.
Then Ronald Reagan and the George Bush used Lee Atwater and Richard Quinn (a
South Carolina leader of the neo-Confederacy movement) to craft overt racist strategies,
narratives, and TV advertisements. The Southern Partisan was a publication aimed at
legitimating racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks. This block of GOP consultants
used the Southern Partisan publication to create a core database of neo-Confederacy racists
which was so reliably Republican that both John McCain and George W. Bush used Richard
Quinn's backing in their election efforts.
Around 1981 Clemson University founded the "Strom
Thurmond Institute" to co-opt this public university to historically immortalize the papers
and sentiments of Strom Thurmond in a revisionist manner.
Another product of Richard Quinn
was young Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who grew up working in his parent's business in
Central South Carolina, the "Sanitary Cafe," a bar, grill, and pool hall establishment.
Lindsey Graham was mentored into South Carolina politics by Richard Quinn who supplied Graham
with a heroic hard knocks narrative which never mentioned the neo-Confederacy roots of both
men. Now if you review the Congressional Record you see Lindsey Graham's voting record
follows a Republican Southern Strategy which Nixon, Reagan, George Bush, Strom Thurmond, and
Jesse Helms would have been proud of. These racist political narratives can be mapped to
every Republican strategist and their GOP candidate product. Max Boot ignores this historical
behavior infused into the Republican Party since before 1963.
Donald Trump is only different
in that he has Tweeted these sentiments ad nauseam and publicly voiced them expressly in his
political appearances and news conferences. If you are honest, the "N" word has been
"whispered" (Jim DeMint) as an "IN" word in secret congregations of Republicans for decades.
Lindsey Graham has created a consistent attempt at humor where he frequently quips "white
man" jokes while supporting voter suppression and gerrymandering by his party.
Max Boot is
correct that this racism has moved from the backrooms under the cover of Donald Trump, but,
to deny that this these sentiments have not been part of the Republican infrastructure for
decades is rude hypocrisy. As you read this book, to load this burden on Donald Trump alone
is to deny history and the public record. Donald Trump merely harnessed this latent DNA of
the Republican party while masterfully marketing himself as a new Republican unbound by swamp
politics (a political breed which does not exist in the Republican Party.) Look at Ben Sasse,
he writes as a centrist yet votes as a Trump man. Look at Lindsey Graham's descriptions of
Trump in 2016 and now listen to his praise of Trump today. Yet, Max Boot sees this as a
recent development in the Republican Party when it has been part of the GOP DNA which has
produced a racist voting record as each generation of Republicans is sworn in.
Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after
9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled
cult.
A month after 9/11, he called for the invasion of Iraq. Did he not think that almost
two decades of continuous war fighting would not radicalize the American populace? He's
making amends by writing a book, for which he probably received a hefty advance and will make
money off of from royalties. Should donate the proceeds to charity.
Max Boot is another smug, arrogant, self righteous, Gramscian, ruling class communist, that's
trying convince the "Base" that he knows what's best for them; all while devowing the little
bit of wealth they might have left to live on. Why?
Because the "Base" are the slaves of the
"Superstructure" ruling class. Remember, as Stalin put it, "the middle class is the enemy" to
the socialist. America is on slow-drip to Totalitarianism. And Max Boot is just one more in
the camp on the transition.
"Hi, I'm a bonafide conservative and here are
the ways Trump has embarrassed The Cause as defined by Ronald Reagan. Since I refuse to kiss
Trump's ring, I still gotta eat so I'm going to grandly announce that I have left the
Republican Party in the form of this book and hope you will give me a check to cash. Thank
you."
I know that's a harsh assessment of a book that I agree with 98% of what's written, Mr.
Boot offers no insight. Not once did I think, "Ah, good point. I didn't think of that."
It's
simply a rehashing of Mr. Trump's ridiculous gaffs (hell, I could have done that, there are sooo many to choose from) and at the very end a very lame path out of this quagmire (spoiler
alert: we just need someone else as charismatic as Trump that's not [insert negative
adjectives here] because the Republicans have proven they will follow ANYBODY over a
cliff).
I finished this book (though skipped many chapters because it was simply rehashing Trump's
train wrecks) and said, "That's all you got? [sigh of resignation]"
I never searched this book on Amazon, however, I did write a tweet about Max Boot, so I guess
Twitter shares with Amazon. To the review, however -- this is written by a person who writes
that Trump has failed us by leaving troops in war, and just 6 months later, writes an article
that totally contradicts the earlier statement, stating that Trump can never do anything
right because he is pulling troops out of war. Which is it? I would not line a birdcage with
this garbage.
Trump is just a symptom; an easy scapegoat because he's a twit. Boot helped create and
perpetuate the monster that the GOP became. Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few
more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in.
Unfortunately the author is venting his personal dislike of the current administration
without addressing the previous administrations attempt to divide the country by any means
possibly and subsequently putting the American people into a politically charged environment
that the author is trying to capitalize on.
"... As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them. ..."
"... "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics." ..."
"... Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting. ..."
"... "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history." ..."
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass
destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq...
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored
weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard
released its final
issue
. Two years removed from Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding
the publication's demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism -- an ideology that has been soundly
defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of
Bill Kristol
on cable news notwithstanding.
If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in
The New York
Review of Books
, the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP
and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives"
or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them.
"Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent
organs of opinion," Wertheim writes. "The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing
influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The
Washington Post."
In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to
9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat
in the form of "Islamofascism." Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss,
who wrote in the
"The City and
Man"
that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." For the
Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the
enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.
Trump's presidency has proved a clarifying moment. "[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first
time, whether they are more against 'totalitarianism' or 'globalism,'" continues Wertheim. "If anti-totalitarians
take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit
and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political
wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide."
Within Trump's cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who
has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism
is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken
aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has
made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration,
Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that "leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American
sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies."
"For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism'
from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics."
Which brings us to neoconservatives' suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican
apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the "next
best thing" to a foreign dictator: "an enemy within." His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have
allowed them to "reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America."
"More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these
neocons into their fold," Wertheim observes. "Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and
Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the 'axis
of evil' as George W. Bush's speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by
warning
of 'this hour of liberal peril' in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens
from The Wall Street Journal in an
effort
to 'broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,' a curious rationale given that
Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change
the op-ed page's lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist."
Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering
foreign policy advice
to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for
American Progress are
partnering
with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from
Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home
within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.
"What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy
but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent
decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy
and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons
indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands
for onto the ash heap of history."
"... Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation. ..."
"In a Time of Universal Deceit -- Telling the Truth Is a Revolutionary Act" is a well known quotation (but probably not of George
Orwell). And in telling the truth about Russia and that the current "war of nerves" is not in the interests of either the American
People or national security, Professor Cohen in this book has in fact done a revolutionary act.
Like a denizen of Plato's cave, or being in the film the Matrix, most people have no idea what the truth is. And the questions
raised by Professor Cohen are a great service in the cause of the truth. As Professor Cohen writes in his introduction To His
Readers:
"My scholarly work -- my biography of Nikolai Bukharin and essays collected in Rethinking the Soviet Experience and Soviet
Fates and Lost Alternatives, for example -- has always been controversial because it has been what scholars term "revisionist"
-- reconsiderations, based on new research and perspectives, of prevailing interpretations of Soviet and post-Soviet Russian history.
But the "controversy" surrounding me since 2014, mostly in reaction to the contents of this book, has been different -- inspired
by usually vacuous, defamatory assaults on me as "Putin's No. 1 American Apologist," "Best Friend," and the like. I never respond
specifically to these slurs because they offer no truly substantive criticism of my arguments, only ad hominem attacks. Instead,
I argue, as readers will see in the first section, that I am a patriot of American national security, that the orthodox policies
my assailants promote are gravely endangering our security, and that therefore we -- I and others they assail -- are patriotic
heretics. Here too readers can judge."
Cohen, Stephen F.. War with Russia (Kindle Locations 131-139). Hot Books. Kindle Edition.
Professor Cohen is indeed a patriot of the highest order. The American and "Globalists" elites, particularly the dysfunctional
United Kingdom, are engaging in a war of nerves with Russia. This war, which could turn nuclear for reasons discussed in this
important book, is of no benefit to any person or nation.
Indeed, with the hysteria on "climate change" isn't it odd that other than Professor Cohen's voice, there are no prominent
figures warning of the devastation that nuclear war would bring?
If you are a viewer of one of the legacy media outlets, be it Cable Television networks, with the exception of Tucker Carlson
on Fox who has Professor Cohen as a frequent guest, or newspapers such as The New York Times, you have been exposed to falsehoods
by remarkably ignorant individuals; ignorant of history, of the true nature of Russia (which defeated the Nazis in Europe at a
loss of millions of lives) and most important, of actual military experience. America is neither an invincible or exceptional
nation. And for those familiar with terminology of ancient history, it appears the so-called elites are suffering from hubris.
I cannot recommend Professor Cohen's work with sufficient superlatives; his arguments are erudite, clearly stated, supported
by the facts and ultimately irrefutable. If enough people find Professor Cohen's work and raise their voices to their oblivious
politicians and profiteers from war to stop further confrontation between Russia and America, then this book has served a noble
purpose.
If nothing else, educate yourself by reading this work to discover what the *truth* is. And the truth is something sacred.
America and the world owe Professor Cohen a great debt. "Blessed are the peace makers..."
This is a compelling book that documents and examines the senseless and dangerous demonizing of Russia and Putin. Unfortunately,
the elites in Washington and mass media are not likely to read this book. Their minds are closed. I read this book because I was
hoping for an explanation about the cause of the new cold war with Russia. Although the root cause of the new cold war is beyond
the scope of this book, the book documents baseless accusations that grew in frequency and intensity until all opposition was
silenced. The book documents the dangerous triumph of group think.
"On my planet, the evidence linking Putin to the assassination of Litvinecko, Nemtsov, and Politkovskaya and the attempt
on the Skripals is strong and consistent with spending his formative years in the KGB. The naive view from Cohen's planet is
presented on p 6 and 170."
Ukrainian history. That's evident to any attentive reader. I just want to state that Ukrainian EuroMaydan was a color revolution
which exploited the anger of population against the corrupt neoliberal government of Yanukovich (with Biden as the best friend,
and Paul Manafort as the election advisor) to install even more neoliberal and more corrupt government of Poroshenko and cut Ukraine
from Russia. The process that was probably inevitable in the long run (so called Baltic path), but that was forcefully accelerated.
Everything was taken from the Gene Sharp textbook. And Ukrainians suffered greatly as a result, with the standard of living dropping
to around $2 a day level -- essentially Central Africa level.
The fact is that the EU acted as a predator trying to get into Ukraine markets and displace Russia. While the USA neocons (Nuland
and Co) staged the coup using Ukrainian nationalists as a ram, ignoring the fact that Yanukovich would be voted out in six months
anyway (his popularity was in single digits, like popularity of Poroshenko those days ;-). The fact that Obama administration
desperately wanted to weaken Russia at the expense of Ukrainians eludes you. I would blame Nuland for the loss of Crimea and the
civil war in Donbass.
Poor Ukrainians again became the victim of geopolitical games by big powers. No that they are completely blameless, but still...
It looks like you inhabit a very cold populated exclusively with neocons planet called "Russiagate." So Professor Cohen really
lives on another planet. And probably you should drink less American exceptionalism Kool-Aid.
"... Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason. ..."
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad.
Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
Haigin88 ->
Tom J. Davis Clinton's Iraq
war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China, she probably perceived
that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from Clinton.
Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college;
her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton
and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think ,
Clinton's Iraq war vote. She was always dealing with the inverse Nixon In China rule. Just as only Nixon could speak with China,
she probably perceived that only males could be doves. That's an explanation not an excuse. Again, a total lack of integrity from
Clinton.
Also, much of Clinton's later foulness was attempted to be offset by her early opinions and actions - her speeches at college;
her working for children. Gabbard is around the other way: her record got better, offsetting much of her earlier nonsense. Clinton
and Gabbard are apples and oranges, I think
This bottom feeder never apologized for helping to get the country into Iraq War iether. Money don't smell. I just imagine how his pressitute would react if kids attacked by black supremacists were Jewish.
Notable quotes:
"... Bill Kristol asked his Twitter followers to consider "the contrast between the calm dignity and quiet strength of Mr. Phillips
and the behavior of MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism." ..."
"... And then when the actual facts emerged, Kristol quietly deleted his tweet. He never apologized, of course. He hasn't apologized
for the Iraq war, either. There's no need. People keep giving him money. ..."
But in case you think the response was entirely from the left, you should know that the abuse was bipartisan. This wasn't just
left versus right. It was the people in power attacking those below them as a group. Plenty of Republicans in Washington were happy
to savage the Covington kids, probably to inoculate themselves from charges of improper thought.
Bill Kristol asked his Twitter followers to consider "the contrast between the calm dignity and quiet strength of Mr. Phillips
and the behavior of MAGA brats who have absorbed the spirit of Trumpism."
So what's actually going on here? Well, it's not really about race. In fact, most of the stories about race really aren't about
race. And this is no different. This story is about the people in power protecting their power, and justifying their power, by
destroying and mocking those weaker than they are.
And then when the actual facts emerged, Kristol quietly deleted his tweet. He never apologized, of course. He hasn't apologized
for the Iraq war, either. There's no need. People keep giving him money.
The National Review, meanwhile, ran a story entitled, "The Covington Students Might As Well Have Just Spit on the Cross." That
story has since been pulled too, but not before the author admitted he never even bothered to watch all the videos. He knew what
he knew. That was enough.
We've known since WW2, that fighting fascism is difficult. Benito Mussolini defined fascism
as "Barely able to slip a cigarette paper between business and government." And when business
runs government, we have even exceeded fascism. The new battle against fascism is not going
to be easy.
Among few good things that Trump have done to the USA is that he destoryed credibility of
neoliberal MSM. They all are now firmly belong to the "fake news" catagory.
Notable quotes:
"... C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org . ..."
So the corporate media have gone and done it again. As they have, repeatedly, for the last
two and half years, they shook the earth with
a "bombshell" story proving beyond any reasonable doubt that Donald Trump colluded with the
Russians to steal the presidency from Hillary Clinton, or at least committed an impeachable
felony in connection with something to do with the Russians, or Ukrainians, or other Slavic
persons which story turned out to be inaccurate, or not entirely accurate, or a bunch of
horseshit.
This time it was BuzzFeed's Jason Leopold, " a
reporter with a checkered past " (i.e., a history of inventing
his sources ) who broke the "bombshell" Russiagate story that turned out to be a bunch of
horseshit. Leopold, and his colleague Anthony Cormier, reported that Trump had directed his
attorney, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress about plans to construct a Trump Tower in Moscow,
thus suborning perjury and obstructing justice. Their sources for this "bombshell" story were
allegedly "two federal law enforcement officials involved in an investigation of the
matter."
Approximately twenty-four hours later, Special Counsel Robert Mueller's office (i.e., the
office "involved in an investigation of the matter") stated that the BuzzFeed story was "not
accurate," which is a legal term meaning "a bunch of horseshit."
BuzzFeed is standing by its story , and is working to determine what, exactly, Mueller's
office meant by "not accurate." Ben Smith, BuzzFeed's Editor-in-Chief, has called on Mueller
"to make clear what he's disputing."
Liberals and other Trump-obsessives have joined in the effort to interpret the Special
Counsel's office's cryptic utterance. French hermeneuticists have been reportedly called in to
deconstruct the meaning of "accurate." Professional Twitter
semioticians are explaining that "not accurate" doesn't mean "wrong," but, rather, refers
to something that is "accurate," but which the user of the word doesn't want to disclose
publicly, or that legal terms don't mean what they mean or something more or less along those
lines.
But Greenwald's list is just a small sample of the Russiagate stories that have turned out
to be horseshit. For the record, here are several more:
"Seventeen intelligence agencies"
confirm Russia interfered in the U.S. elections (
New York Times ) Russia interfered in the Brexit referendum (
The Guardian ) Russia interfered in the German elections ( Reuters )
Russia hacked the French elections ( Politico and numerous other
outlets ) Michael Cohen conspired with the Russians in Prague ( BuzzFeed
)
I am using the terms "horseshit" and "a bunch of horseshit" (as opposed to terms like
"failures" and "errors"), not just to be gratuitously vulgar, but, also, to try to make a
point. One is not supposed to use these terms in connection with "serious," "respected" news
outlets. Which is why journalists like Greenwald and Aaron Maté (who have extensively
reported on the corporate media's ongoing production and dissemination of horseshit) do not use
such terms in the course of their reporting, and instead use less inflammatory terms like
"false," "inaccurate," "mistake," and "error." Principled journalists like Greenwald and
Maté are constrained by (a) their journalistic ethics, (b) their integrity, and (c)
their belief in the idea of a "free and independent press," which is one of the pillars of
Western democracy.
Being neither a respected journalist nor a believer in the existence of an "independent
press," I am under no such constraints. Because I'm not trying to get or keep a job, or
maintain a "respectable" reputation, I'm free to call a spade a spade and a bunch of horseshit
a bunch of horseshit. I am also free to describe "journalists" like Leopold,
Luke Harding ,
Craig Timberg ,
Franklin Foer , and many of their corporate media colleagues (not to mention
TV clowns like Rachel Maddow ) as the liars and rank propagandists they are. I don't need
to pretend their fabricated stories are simply the result of "shoddy journalism," or
"over-reliance on official sources," or any other type of "error" or "failure." These people
know exactly what they are doing, and are being extremely well paid to do it. They went to
school to learn how to do it. Then they butt-sucked and back-stabbed their way up the ladder of
establishment power to be able to do it.
Yes, of course, there are still principled journalists working for the corporate media, but
they are doing so by walking a very fine line. No one has to tell them where it is. Every
professional journalist knows precisely where it is, and what it is there for. Though they are
permitted to walk right up to it, occasionally (to keep them from feeling like abject whores),
one step over it and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the Blogosphere and
excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't believe me, just ask
Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic heretic.
If Russiagate serves no other useful purpose, it is at least exposing the corporate media as
the propaganda factories that they are. Given the amount of obviously fabricated horseshit they
have disseminated during the last two years, you'd have to be a total moron or a diehard
neoliberal cultist not to recognize the function they perform within the global capitalist
ruling establishment (which is essentially no different than the function the establishment
media perform in any other society, namely, to disseminate, maintain, and reify the official
narrative of its ruling classes).
Sadly, there's no shortage of morons and cultists. I don't blame the morons, because well,
they're morons. The cultists are another species entirely. These are people who, no matter how
often the corporate media feed them another "explosive," "bombshell" Russiagate story that
turns out to be a bunch of horseshit, will defend the concept of the "independent media" like
head-shaven, bug-eyed Manson followers. Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs
and they close their eyes and start chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing
spells. The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling classes)
is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western capitalism.
Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an actual person or
that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with actual democracy.
Think about it dispassionately for a minute. Why would any ruling establishment permit a
genuinely "independent" press to disseminate ideas and information willy-nilly throughout
society? If it did, it wouldn't last very long.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press," over, and over, and over again.
Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the
other corporate media repeatedly reminding you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they
are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic programming.
So let's not be shocked when the corporate media continue to bombard us with "bombshell"
stories about Trump and Russia that turn out to be horseshit. Personally, I welcome these
stories. The more corporate media horseshit the better! Who knows, if they dish out enough
blatant horseshit, more people might lose their "trust in the media," and begin to investigate
matters themselves. I know, that makes me a Nazi, right? Or at least a Russian propagandist? I
mean, encouraging folks to distrust the corporate media? Isn't there some kind of law against
that? Or have they not quite gotten around to that yet?
C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright, novelist and political satirist
based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play
Publishing (USA). His debut novel, ZONE 23 , is
published by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant Paperbacks. He can be reached at cjhopkins.com or consentfactory.org .
The Associated Press (AP) reports the latest bad news for the press: " Just 6 Percent of
People Say They Trust the Media ."
Carole Feldman and Emily Swanson began: Trust in the news media is being eroded by
perceptions of inaccuracy and bias, fueled in part by Americans' skepticism about what they
read on social media. Just 6 percent of people say they have a lot of confidence in the
media, putting the news industry about equal to Congress and well below the public's view of
other institutions.
Most people understand this intuitively, which is why the corporate media relentlessly
repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent press,"
People inversely brag about their short comings.
Militarized police states brag about their freedom.
A well heeled synchophant brags about his independence.
Dudes with small dicks -- big belt buckle and big hat.
I used to listen to the BBC and NPR until the corporo-globalist bias became unbearable. I
laughed at incidents such as Marketplace mocking the public's concern about GMO's. But it
went off the rails in 2016. They may have backed off from Trump Derangement Syndrome a bit
since then, but I've noticed that they have to call themselves "credible." Maybe if they say
that enough times we'll believe it, eh?
The Greenwald link is pretty important and I bookmarked it. These fake news outlets do
everything in their power to scrub these mistakes from the Google machine once they happen.
They remove stories, videos -- everything, in the hopes of shoving it all down the memory
hole. And since other fake news outlets don't hold them accountable, they get away with it.
This is why it's important to take screen shots of fake news and download videos if possible,
to create a record that's permanent and useful when you need it.
More than 6% of the population are technically, and this is the technical term, retarded
-- they are mentally disabled.
I know it's obvious our media is propaganda, but I don't think it's quite so obvious such
that adults watching Sesame Street who fully enjoy it (nothing wrong with that!) are aware of
it.
I would like to think it's true, but I think the Associated Press article is not true,
after all, can you identify their funding sources?
This fetishization of "the independent press" is a phenomenon unique to Western
capitalism. Basically, it's a childish fairy tale, like believing that Santa Claus is an
actual person or that voting in elections in a corporate oligarchy has anything to do with
actual democracy.
Great article. Articles on this theme should be published daily. The fetish must be
destroyed.
There is at least one other person who calls corporate media what it is, and it ain't
"mainstream."
"Sparkie" ain't gonna be happy about it either."Sparky" chewed me out good for correcting
the incomparable and always superb Linh Dinh for using the disgusting and inaccurate term,
"mainstream" when referring to coprophilic media. Oh, and speaking of "horseshit" one wag
suggested we call it main steam media, for accuracy as well as for giggles and that's
fine by me.
the corporate media relentlessly repeat the mantra-like phrase, "free and independent
press," over, and over, and over again. Seriously, switch on NPR, or have a look at The
Guardian or the Washington Post, or any of the other corporate media repeatedly reminding
you how "independent," "free" and "democratic" they are. It's essentially Neuro-linguistic
programming.
It's blatantly obvious that the same can be said about the self-legitimizing term,
"mainstream," too, so bless you sir, and to (bleep) with the Sparkies of the world.
Confront them with facts contradicting their beliefs and they close their eyes and start
chanting and humming and repetitiously babbling banishing spells.
Not only is Hopkins correct, but what he says about corporate media is not new. The Civil
Rights movement presented by the media was false. The media promotion of the US re-engaging
in Europe in the post WW1 period so we could defend dear ole England and sacred democracy.
The media preparing us for our need to fight WW1 so we could end all wars was false. The
media stirring us to go into Cuba and end the awfully evil Spanish Empire so we could start
the process of ending all empires
N o doubt it is a pleasure for you because C.J. Hopkins managed to scribble 1500
words about fake news without even once mentioning the CIA.
"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public
believes is false."
-- CIA Director, William Casey
Of course, our resident Bumpkin of Unz would have you believe that the CIA is a
corporation.
"The CIA owns everyone of any significance in the major media."
-- former CIA Director William Colby
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate -- a red herring, a
misleading label, a pig in a poke -- because it entirely excludes, avoids, overlooks, and
completely dismisses the role of our intelligence agencies in creating fake news ,
a.k.a. disinformation and propaganda.
The notion that the Western corporate media may serve the interests of the ruling
establishment (just like the media in every other society serve that society's ruling
classes) is unimaginable and tantamount to heresy.
This comes close to the term "regime media," which I like as a replacement for the
clunky-but-common terms "Mainstream Media" or MSM. "
Hopkins uses "corporate media," which appears fifteen times here including in the
title.
Several commenters have noted the problems with the term "mainstream media":
While better than "mainstream media," I'm not sure "corporate media" is sufficient.
"Corporate media," as a term, may wrongly convey the notion that the 'media' in question
complaisantly both [1] broadcasts the ruling ideology (interventionist capitalist
liberal democracy and multicultacracy) and [2] 'megaphones' (Steve Sailer's useful term)
against enemies thereto, coordinating our regular Two-Minute Hates.
That characterization misses an important point, to wit:
The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself consciously
part of the ruling apparatus . Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on the
side, but right at the regime's core. A useful distinction. Hence "regime media."
Jun. 14, 2012 These 6 Corporations Control 90% Of The Media In America
That's consolidated from *50* companies back in 1983. But the fact that a few companies
own everything demonstrates "the illusion of choice," Frugal Dad says.
Tom Charles Huston testified before the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, commonly known as the Church Committee,
on the 43-page plan he presented to the President Nixon and others on ways to collect
information about anti-war and "radical" groups, including burglary, electronic
surveillance, and opening of mail.
Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general public in the
United States, the home country of both authors. Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one
of the most important American philosophers, and for his international influence in the
field of education. By contrast, Walter Lippmann has been somewhat forgotten, though he
was a major journalist in the 1920s and 1930s. He was a widely familiar author at the
time, and wrote some cynical things about American democracy. The story America tells
itself politically is that since we're a democracy in which the citizens rule themselves,
there is a paramount need for an excellent public education so that the citizens can vote
wisely. We ourselves are the leaders. But of course it doesn't work that way in practice.
We actually have a surplus of ignorant and uninformed people who pay no attention to the
nuances of policy, and who vote based on the workings of demagoguery and short-sighted
self-interest. Any number of foolish decisions have been made by the American public.
This leads Lippmann to take the somewhat cynical line that America is destined to be
ruled by technocrats. We need experts to run things; the people are too clueless to rule
themselves. We'll pretend we have a democracy, but we actually don't. Now, Dewey reads
this, and he is temperamentally more optimistic, and he thinks: 'This is a really
stimulating book, but Lippmann is wrong. He is setting the bar too high for the people.
People were never supposed to be educated in depth about every issue, which is an
impossible demand. Even Lippmann doesn't have the time to master every issue, and he
covers politics for a living. Instead, Dewey says, political issues generate their own
publics in each case. I might care deeply about seven political issues. I might care
about national health insurance, but I don't care about gay marriage, or vice versa. So I
get involved in one debate and not the other. I take the trouble of becoming informed
about issues that interest me.
@Hail
Hail says: "The 'media' (in the sense of the "MSM") as we know it today, is itself
consciously part of the ruling apparatus. Not complaisantly, but actively; not lackeys on
the side, but right at the regime's core ":
Exactly. The MSM is the government [CIA/NSA/ etc. etc.] grinning right at you as
it continually lies , albeit behind a very thin veil of supposed integrity/respectability
that the general public still refuses to see through.
By way of illustration of this "outrageous" assertion of mine, here is part of a video
analysis of the original 5 channel US MSM "live" coverage of the morning of Sept. 11 2001,
which clearly demonstrates that on that morning, all 5 US networks broadcast entirely fake
"live" footage [ i.e. C.G.I. prefabricated imagery] for about 102 minutes :
So you see Sheete, the term "corporate media" is entirely inaccurate
I never claimed it was perfect. I do claim that the term, "mainstream," in this context
is entirely inaccurate and misleading. And you should be nice, as you admonished me,
regarding the author of this article. As for your complaint that he didn't mention the CIA,
may I remind you that he wrote, as you noticed, an article, not an encyclopedia.
Anyway, you have yet to establish that the CIA and our corporate masters are entirely
separate entities. Even a Dumb Sheete such as myself would find it somewhat, if not
entirely, incredible if they were.
But of course too everyone knows by now that Jews, Israel and Mossad did 9/11 all by
their lonesomes, and the CIA and the Air Force had nothing to do with it.
Ahem, you forgot to mention big, coprophilic, media. Please try to practice the
inclusiveness that you preach.
one step over [the line] and they will be cast into the Outer Darkness of the
Blogosphere and excommunicated from the Church of Respectable Journalism. If you don't
believe me, just ask Seymour Hersh, or John Pilger, or any other journalistic
heretic.
To this list I might also add CBS' Sharyl Attkisson, and Larry Conners of KMOV-TV, who
had the big brass balls to question the $85 million the Obamas spent on vacations.
NR kicked Derb to the curb, but that gutter's littered with Internet flotsam who
presumed integrity.
@Sean
Sean says: "Lippmann-Dewey debate, which is known to academics but not the general
public in the United States, the home country of both authors. "
Debate summary: 2 know-it-alls debating about how "best" to run everybody else's lives
[and with straight faces, I've no doubt].
Two sides of the same [pro-statist] coin, in other words. Oh, and one minor issue one
"thinks" that a ruling technocracy is "the answer".
Sean says: "Obviously, John Dewey is famous as one of the most important American
philosophers, and for his international influence in the field of education."
You mean: Dewey was important in the field of "public education" , otherwise known as
brainwashing.
Do you think Trump is in anyway worse than his predecessors?
Well from my perspective, he's worse than his predecessors because, for a brief period of
time, he offered to hand me over to Putin!
Well, I would imagine you do have skin in the game because of that.
Also, he doesn't seem to have the level of he doesn't read briefing reports or have any
specifications at all about what this guy's up to.
What is your opinion on the future of America as a result of what Putin did during the 2016
election? Has he succeeded in striking a permanent blow against democracy in this country, for
lack of a better way of putting it?
Well, I believe that the institutions of United States are now being tested. It's kind of
like a it's a virus that has now has tried to infect the United States. I believe the
institutions are the immune systems in the United States. I think that United States will
survive this attack, and as far as Putin is concerned, I think that he has done himself very
grave long-term harm to his own interests. Because the next regime in the United States is
going to come down so hard on Putin, he's not going to know what hit him. He's playing such a
short-term game that he doesn't understand that whether it's Democrats or Republicans, any
normal reasonable person will want to be absolutely, devastatingly aggressive towards Russia
after Trump is finished.
So in a sense this pop-culture image of Putin as a grand strategist you think is flawed?
I think he's a highly effective short-term tactician and a very, very stupid strategist,
because his long-term interests are not served by alienating the entire Western world to sort
of rally against him. He can do all these frauds and scams and tricks on a short-term basis,
but pretty much everybody understands what he's up to.
But without that
basic level of trust and understanding between them, any dialogue rests upon shaky foundations.
It was never supposed to be like this. The end of the Cold War was supposed to usher in a new
era.
For a time Russia retreated from the world stage, but now it is back with a vengeance, eager
to consolidate its position nearer home; to restore something of its former global role and to
make up for perceived slights perpetrated by the West.
So where did it all go wrong? Why were Russia and the West unable to forge a different type
of relationship? Who is to blame? Was it US over-reach and insensitivity, or Russia's nostalgia
for Soviet greatness? Why have things now got so bad and is it correct to describe the present
state of affairs as a "new Cold War"?
In 2014, in the wake of Russia's annexation of the Crimea, Mr Putin spoke to the Russian
Duma, noting that "if you compress the spring all the way to its limit it will snap back hard.
You must remember this", he stressed.
ISLAMABAD -- U.S. peace envoy Zalmay Khalilzad said on Saturday that Washington was ready
to "address legitimate concerns" of all Afghan sides in order to restore peace in
Afghanistan. Since being appointed in September, Khalilzad has met with all sides, including
the Taliban, Afghan officials and Pakistan's political and military leadership in efforts
aimed at finding a negotiated end to America's longest war in neighboring Afghanistan.//
The US managed the overthrow of the Afghanistan government seventeen years ago, then
creating a puppet government with a feckless army to fight the Afghan resistance while
assassinating many of the Afghan leaders who fought to regain their country, and now the US
is ready to "address legitimate concerns" of all Afghan sides?
Well the Afghan officials are US puppets, so rule them out of legitimate concerns (as the
Taliban has done). Pakistan? They fully support the Taliban's return to government, so that's
a "legitimate concern" as is the Taliban's return to power.
Anything less ain't gonna work, that's obvious. Khalilzad was appointed in September to
achieve results in six months, which is soon. So get with it, Zalmay. Get the US troops out
of there as the Taliban demands in your "peace" talks.
[T]he units have also operated unconstrained by battlefield rules designed to protect
civilians, conducting night raids, torture and killings with near impunity, in a covert
campaign that some Afghan and American officials say is undermining the wider American
effort to strengthen Afghan institutions.
The "special forces" and the people trained by them don't follow rules. This has been
going on for a long time.
The Clinton administration has enforced a near-total ban on the supply and sale of U.S.
military equipment and training for the Colombian military because of its deep involvement
in drug-related corruption and its record of killing politicians, human rights activists
and civilians living in areas controlled by guerrilla groups.
The piece goes on to say that Special Forces were immune from this ban on training a
foreign military to kill politicians, human rights activists and civilians" . It names
dozens of nations where this was happening.
Of course not all US Special Forces are wild and lawless. Unfortunately the ones who do
behave are at risk of being killed themselves.
Whenever you have a combination of lousy leadership and "Special Forces", there is going
to be a problem. Australia has recently made the news in that regard.
Individually, each claim is staggering: apparent execution of detainees; reported use of
so-called drop weapons, planted to cover up unlawful killings; confirmed reports of
commandos flying a Nazi flag on a combat patrol; alleged "blooding" of rookies, initiation
rites in which newcomers were pressured to execute unarmed men. In one particularly
sadistic case, a prosthetic limb was allegedly pilfered from the corpse of a dead Afghan,
only to be repatriated and repurposed as a novelty binge-drinking implement.
At some point a Special Forces person is going to shrug and say "so what?" He or she knows
they can double or triple their pay with Blackwater-type mercenary forces. So except for
taking minimal precautions against going on trial, they can do as they please.
The base attack took place in Maidan Wardak Province, where US Special Forces troops were
evicted five years ago for atrocities.
In 2013 President Hamid Karzai demanded the withdrawal of all U.S. Special Operations
Forces (SOF) from Wardak province after charges that U.S. special forces stationed in Wardak
province engaged in harassing, annoying, torturing and even murdering innocent people.
A Memorandum of Understanding signed May 12, 2012 between the U.S. military and the Afghan
Defence Ministry was trumpeted by the Obama administration as giving the Afghan government
control over such operations.
But a little-noticed provision of the agreement defined the "special operations" covered
by the agreement as those operations that are "approved by the Afghan Operational
Coordination Group (OCG) and conducted by Afghan Forces with support from U.S. Forces in
accordance with Afghan laws."
That meant that the SOF was still free to carry out other raids without consultation with
the Afghan government, until Karzai threw them out. But not the CIA.
The idea that the US isn't REALLY trying to win wars strikes me as more of a
rationalization of failure than a real explanation. The US is an economically declining power
that is trying to use its military dominance to maintain, and ideally increase its power. So
wouldn't it be in the US's best interests if Afghanistan or Iraq (for example) were
completely controlled by US controlled puppet governments, and US controlled corporations
were making huge profits by exploiting those countries mineral and human resources? Wouldn't
that be far more profitable than the mere creation of chaos?
Part of the reason I tend to find your ideas less than plausible, Pft, is that you always
seem to vastly exaggerate the competence and power of the US or transnational elites you
suspect are controlling everything. So I don't think the US's wars are either "fake" or
"forever". Instead they are failures. And they can't last forever, because the corrupt system
that generates them needs some successes, and soon, in order to continue to survive.
BuzzFeed's credibility has been seemingly dented by Special Counsel Robert Mueller's recent
dismissal of one of its 'Russiagate' stories. However, it is not the first time its stories on
Russia raised flags or were proven false. The New York-based news outlet has been holding
nothing back over the recent years as it diligently pressed the so-called 'Russiagate'
narrative about a supposed collusion between the US President Donald Trump and Moscow. Its
recent exploits, which claimed Trump told his ex-lawyer, Michael Cohen, to lie to Congress to
cover up some of his dealings with Russia, however, apparently led it a bit too far, as it
earned a rebuke from the office
of Robert Muller – the man in charge of the investigation into the very same alleged
collusion, among other aspects of perceived Russia's meddling into the 2016 elections.
'After this I don't even know if I can trust Buzzfeed's cat listicles anymore'
https://t.co/b4vyIKJAUL
The news sparked a wave of criticism on
the social media, with many people saying that the news outlet's credibility is now
discredited.
But was it that flawless before?
Buzzfeed was the first to publish the infamous Steele dossier – a report by an MI6
spy-turned-private investigator – which contained unverified allegations that Russia held
information on Trump which it was using to blackmail the US president. It also alleged
sustained and close working contacts between Trump aides and Kremlin representatives.
None of these allegations, which were used by the FBI as a reason for obtaining a spy
warrant against Trump adviser Carter Page, have been proven as of now. Instead, it was
revealed that the report
was based on information fed through people close to Hillary Clinton – Trump's rival at
the 2016 presidential elections.
Meanwhile, some of the reporters, who worked with the dossier, admitted that the
document's claims are "likely false." Christopher Steele himself also revealed
that one of his goals in compiling the report was to provide Clinton with a legal basis to
challenge the 2016 election results.
The publication of the dossier has brought a string of defamation lawsuits not only against
Steele but against BuzzFeed as well. The news media outlet was sued by the owners of a Russian
Alfa Bank and a Russian tech
expert Aleksey Gubarev who
were all mentioned in the infamous dossier. At the same time, Trump's personal lawyer also
filed a
defamation lawsuit against the company for pushing the Steele report.
However, Buzzfeed apparently does hope to get away with it. In case of Gubarev, a US court
already ruled in favor of the
news outlet in December 2018, citing a "fair report privilege." The businessman earlier
scolded the publication as "one of the most reckless and irresponsible moments in modern
journalism."
Steele was the source of another controversial episode in the history of BuzzFeed's attempts
to propagate the 'Russiagate' narrative. In March 2018, it claimed that the FBI was covering
the true causes of the death of a Russian media tycoon in Washington in 2015.
Citing a "secret report " by Steele, it claimed the man was allegedly killed by
associates of a Russian oligarch, who happens to be close to the Kremlin, the news outlet said.
A sheer coincidence, apparently. It also did not bother to give any plausible explanation as to
why the FBI, which did not hesitate to point a finger at Moscow in the past, would hide such
information at all.
Anyway, the whole story was debunked just days later
when the Metropolitan Police said the death of the tycoon was an accident. This fact did not
get much attention in the West, though. Neither did it cool BuzzFeed's ardor in stirring up
anti-Russian hysteria.
I have previously written that all wars have been started by the Democrats with the single exception of the
Iraq
War under Dick Cheney
and the
Neocons
. Now after Trump has pulled out of Syria, the
Neocons
are
meeting with the Democrats to retake the White House and restore the effort to bring World War III to the Middle East.
This is by no means something I care to have to write about. But there is a very dark cloud rising and all the people
who hate Trump so much are clueless that he is actually trying to prevent these people from creating war. The hatred
they are spreading about Russia is a deliberate attempt to paint them as evil to gain support for a war.
One of the
leading
Neocons
is Bill Kristol. I have previously written that back in 1976, Bill Kristol worked for
Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan's United States Senate campaign. Later, in 1988, Kristol was the campaign manager for
black Republican Alan Keyes's unsuccessful Maryland Senatorial campaign against Paul Sarbanes. So Kristol was on both
sides of the aisle.
It was the
Neocon
Kristol wrote the
War Over Iraq
:
Saddam's Tyranny And
America's Mission
with his co-author Lawrence F. Kaplan, which was published on
February
1st, 2003,
one month and change
BEFORE
the invasion to support Cheney. Today, Kristol is
very much anti-Trump. He is a true
Neocon
and wants to see conservatives challenge Trump for the 2020
nomination. He argues that the conservatives/
Neocons
need to seize control to reestablish the economic,
national security and his brand of moral principles to take over the Republican Party. Kristol argues that Trump's
support among the rank and file will diminish over time and they are really too stupid to know what is best for the
country.
The
British Magazine, the
Economist
,
call Kristol and crew the
Never Trumpers. These
Never Trumpers, claim to be
Republicans but are really
Neocons
who have no problem watching your children die for their political
experiments. They are Trump's critics from within the Republican Party and are vocal to advocate war after Trump pulled
out of Syria. This group of critics is led by conservative pundits such as Max Boot, David Brooks, Bill Kristol, David Frum, and George Will. That may appear to be few in number, but they are only the tip of the iceberg.
If
you pick up the rug to look at the dirt hidden below, you will find also Lindsey Graham and Hillary Clinton. Both
are the most reliable warmongers. Thank God John McCain is dead, he would have invaded Canada if you could argue there
was one terrorist lurking somewhere enjoying the skying. Hillary, you might recall, repeatedly criticized Obama being
too soft on military options. Both have come out and condemned Trump's decision to withdraw from Syria using the
Terrorist Card as always.
Americans, in general, have been historically isolationists. The Europeans who fled to
America
were adamantly against both World War I and World War II. Roosevelt had to go to Boston and lied to the people there to
get support for sending arms to Britain. He swore no troops would
EVER
be sent to Europe. Most were
Irish there who were insulted by the idea that their boys would go back and defend the British after what they did to
Ireland. It has always been the politicians who have lied about each and every war to get involved from Johnson
admitting the Vietnamese never fired on Americans at Tokin Gulf to weapons of mass destruction.
The
Neocons
actually delude themselves thinking they can create democracies in the Middle East by
force and this will end all wars. It is kind of like Napoleon who also claimed he could end all wars by conquering
everything. This is the same nonsense behind the EU – eliminate the sovereignty of all member nations in Europe and then
one government in Brussels will end all wars.
Nevertheless, their policy to justify war is always the same – this will be the war to end all wars.
There is not a single newspaper in the US that supports the views of the US President.
Nobody defended him when he was
accused , brazenly, in-your-face, of being a Russian agent. Nobody supported him when he
called to bring the troops home from Syria. Nobody came to his aid when he mulled parting with
NATO. There are tens of millions of men and women who voted for him, but he has only his
Twitter account at his disposal.
The media
accuses Trump of paying too little attention to Israel's needs. Israel needs US troops in
Syria and in Germany, US jets in Spain and Qatar, US ships in Italy and the Gulf. Israel needs
the US to lead NATO to contain Russia. If Israel needs it, the US should provide,
says Daniel Shapiro, the ex-ambassador. Not a single American newspaper, not a single US
statesman cared to reply that President Trump had been elected by the American people to do
what is needed for them, not for Israel
"... Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after 9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled cult. ..."
"... Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in. ..."
I wanted to like this book and Max Boot but couldn't. I'm an 'old white
guy' who grew up in an Eisenhower Republican family but switched allegiance to the Democrats
during the civil rights battles in the 60s. I was hoping to read about someone who went through
a similar transformation but Max's journey falls short.
The book is part autobiographical: Max was born in Russia into a Jewish family in 1969. His
family was allowed to leave the USSR and immigrate to the US in 1976 after pressure was placed
on the Communist government by the United States. Max states that the Boots survived here in
part on payments from Social Security for which Max says "Thank you, America" but ignores that
this support was from a program that was developed by liberals and that has been regularly
attacked by conservative Republicans. His mother was employed by the University of California, a state university, and Max received
his undergraduate education at UC Berkeley. While he notes that it "cost next to nothing" at
the time, he doesn't point out that his tuition was low thanks to subsidies that were paid by
the taxes of the citizens of the State of California. The UC system is also a product of
progressive thinking and is partly responsible for the economic growth in California. It's paid
for itself many times over by developing a highly educated work force that supports the many
high paying, high skilled jobs in the state.
Max began his conversion to right wing politics at age 13 when he received a subscription to
the New Republic magazine. I suppose you can't expect much critical thinking from an
adolescent, but you would think that it would have taken less than 36 years to realize that
conservative Republican values and policies weren't conducive to helping people who have needs
similar to those of his family. Especially since Max seems certain that he is among the most
intelligent people to walk among us.
He states that he now sees that the messages of conservative Republicans were often "coded
racial appeals – those dog whistles" and that liberals have recognized this for decades.
He just didn't believe the liberals or bother to honestly evaluate their warnings. Max can't refrain from making the ad hominem attacks so prevalent among right wing pundits.
Most of these are directed at Donald Trump, whom he describes as a "liar, an ignoramus, and a
moral abomination". He also includes a chapter about the "Trump Toadies".
Max "loved the attention and notoriety" his conservative views generated in his youth. He
now recognizes that he has been a part of a movement that has been "morally and intellectually
bankrupt".
He also states that he no longer receives any pay from any conservative organization. Is
this the reason that he is looking for another group to hook up with? Or is he worried that
since he was not born in the United States his citizenship might be revoked and he might be
sent back to Russia if the anti-Semitic members of the right wing get their way?
So Max comes across as quite shallow even while showing off his extravagant vocabulary. While
he was quite willing to accept the offerings of a liberal society, he's been unwilling to
consider any responsibility to provide similar benefits to those who came after him.
The book is well written and is a quick read. Ultimately it's one man's awakening to the
awful realities of what conservative Republicanism has become. It doesn't really break any new
ground for those who have been following politics for any length of time.
In the epilogue Max lists his current beliefs and many of them are liberal. He states he is
pro-LGBTQ rights, pro-environment, pro-gun control, pro-immigration including offering a path
to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and he is also in favor of free speech. He and I
might disagree on the details about how to reach some of these goals but in these areas we
would be pointing at similar directions.
But then Max attacks other progressive programs. For example, he states that single payer
medical insurance – Medicare for all – would cost too much and cause insurance
companies to go bankrupt or "find a new business model". Frankly if a company that makes its
money by increasing the cost of our health care has to "find a new business model", I believe
that would be a good thing for the health of our economy and of our people. As to the insurance
company employees, since claims would still have to be processed I suspect that the people
processing claims for the insurance companies would be able to make the switch to work for a
government agency processing claims easily, so they should be ok.
I hope that Max's rejection of conservative Republicanism is actually a genuine realization
that ALL people are entitled to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" including getting
affordable medical care. If that's the case, I would be happy to welcome him to join those of
us who vote for politicians who truly represent these values.
But I am not convinced by this book that he has truly escaped the "corrosion of
conservatism". Let's see if time will prove me wrong.
skeptic
Thank you for your review. Much appreciated...
I would add that it is important to understand that Max Boot is not an intellectual, he is essentially a well-paid MIC
lobbyist who pretends to be an intellectual. He does not have convictions per se, only the burning desire to belong to the
winning and/or better paid party.
The fact that he realized from which side the bread is buttered at early age just confirms what he always valued money
more then ideas.
The politics of the cold war created many political anomalies in the United States. One of
the biggest was the migration of the cold war hawks after 1968 from the Democratic Party to
the Republican Party. For many of them, it was less about a broad vision of politics than
narrow concerns over Vietnam and the Soviet Union. The alliance functioned up until the end
of the cold war and the establishment of republican control in the Senate and House. Then it
broke down completely during the Presidential Term of George W. Bush.
After a decade out of power and as a hanger-on in three failed presidential campaigns, Max
Boot has written this book which is sort of a combination of angry farewell letter and maoist
self-criticism covering his entire political career to 2016 or so.
The problems start at the beginning of the book. He defines "conservative" to mean to him
"incremental policy making based on empirical study". His conservative beliefs, in contrast
to what he considers "European" beliefs, rejects the nation-state and the idea of an American
identity. The only limit to the "social safety net" in his mind is when that safety net
begins to impact "individual initiative". He makes a special point of saying that what has
united the country since the beginning is not belief in a nation, but rather belief in ideas
or "self evident truths".
The problem with all that is that his ideas of conservatism are in fact liberalism.
Incremental government policy to incrementally perfect society is not a remotely conservative
concept. Further, when you conclude as he does that American Soil has no meaning and American
Blood shed has no value, you have to really wonder about how exactly he justifies his belief
in foreign wars. Are Americans who have served in the military just suckers? or slaves in
Pharaoh's army? Where is patriotism in his vision of what "conservative" means? Did people in
wars die for "self evident truths" rather than the flag?
He drifts further into liberal thought with his idea that there is more to the
constitution than what is in the constitution. Rather than just the text and intent, Boot
finds unwritten "norms" hidden within the constitution which he holds American Citizens
should respect equally with the constitution. This is not a new idea. Its the old idea of the
"living" constitution which only elite oracles can present to us its true hidden meaning.
Then, like many people, he claims that his ideas are those of Barry Goldwater in 1960. But
they are absolutely not. The ideas that Max Boot stands for are the ideas of Lyndon Johnson.
The ideas of using the power of government for social engineering. The idea of fighting
crusades for ideas overseas in places like Vietnam. A general rejection of any sort of
morality or patriotism in politics. Worst of all, the tendency to see the United States of
America as an intellectual crusade for justice in the world rather than as a country.
A large portion of the book is given over to complaints about Trump. But the problem is
that Max Boot's ideas and his idea of what a conservative is go far beyond just being for or
against Trump. In a very real sense, he represents the discredited politics of George W. Bush
who have no support among any party and only tend to have followers in places like the pages
of "The Atlantic". The question isn't really what happened to the republican party, but more
how someone with the outright liberal political worldview of someone like Max Boot ever
thought that those ideas are what conservative meant. He tries to attach himself to men of
the past like Eisenhower, Goldwater and Reagan. But he fails to realize that he would not fit
in with the politics of any of those man. Perhaps he would have best fit with the old
Rockefeller Republicans but to me even that is far from certain.
Max Boot has in the past been critical of Ronald Reagan's decision not to fight a war in
Lebanon in the 1980s associating it with American "weakness" that led to 9/11. He blamed
Eisenhower's decision not to support the British/French invasion of Egypt in 1956 as starting
a "pattern of weakness" in America's dealing with the middle east which was not corrected
until the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Its equally doubtful that Max Boot would have supported the
ideas of Barry Goldwater over those of Lyndon Johnson.
The bulk of the book him talking about his favorite topic: himself. He proves once again
that he isn't any sort of intellectual or man of ideas. He complains about trump. He
complains about various republicans who he clearly expected to follow him out of the
republican party but did not.
There are some incredible claims in the book such as claiming that the welfare state is
what ensures the success of free market. He just loves Black Lives Matter and suddenly after
a long career, race is suddenly something he cars about while the police are now the bad
guys. He also discovered after the election of Trump that sexism is a problem in America. He
can't really explain why he didn't care about these issues for decades before Trump and now
cares about deeply after Trump. I don't think he really cares about much of anything other
than boots on the ground in the middle east or preparing for war with China.
He ends the book with a conclusion titled "the vital center". The title is of course a
shout-out to old school liberal (and kennedy henchmen) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. In it, he
tells us that he is "socially liberal", He believes in fiscal responsibility but not if it
involves cutting the welfare state & along those lines supports "Simpson Bowles" which
called for fixing the deficit with higher taxes and a "public option" for health insurance.
He supports the welfare state because to him its the basis for the free market. He supports
gun control. He wants more immigration to deal with our "labor shortage". He sees China and
Russia as defense threats along with a list of other countries.
He concludes with a "moderate" (ironic of course) call for everyone to vote every single
republican out of office until Trump is out of office or removed as president. And while he
makes it (finally) clear at the end that he just loved Hillary Clinton and her brand of
politics, he could never become a democrat because of the threat of bernie sanders. His
vision is a party of what he calls "centerists" which would seemingly favor a policy of
expanding the welfare state while fighting wars overseas to save the world. But Max Boot's
politics don't represent the center of anything. Whatever the bad of Trump, Max Boot
represents something just as bad or worse.
Corrosion is a slow process but early in the 1960's the GOP sucked almost all of the racists
out of the Democratic Party right into the Republican Party just to elect Richard Nixon with
the GOP "Southern Strategy." Men like the followers of Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms in the
rural south rushed to vote for the "Sanitary Republican Party."
Sanitary was old Jim Crow
code for "whites only." If any business identified itself with "sanitary" in its name, that
was a warning for "whites only."
Strom Thurmond had earlier literally executed the longest
filibuster in Congressional history to oppose a vote on a civil rights legislation promoted
by Democrats.
Then Ronald Reagan and the George Bush used Lee Atwater and Richard Quinn (a
South Carolina leader of the neo-Confederacy movement) to craft overt racist strategies,
narratives, and TV advertisements. The Southern Partisan was a publication aimed at
legitimating racism and opposition to civil rights for blacks. This block of GOP consultants
used the Southern Partisan publication to create a core database of neo-Confederacy racists
which was so reliably Republican that both John McCain and George W. Bush used Richard
Quinn's backing in their election efforts.
Around 1981 Clemson University founded the "Strom
Thurmond Institute" to co-opt this public university to historically immortalize the papers
and sentiments of Strom Thurmond in a revisionist manner.
Another product of Richard Quinn
was young Lindsey Graham of South Carolina who grew up working in his parent's business in
Central South Carolina, the "Sanitary Cafe," a bar, grill, and pool hall establishment.
Lindsey Graham was mentored into South Carolina politics by Richard Quinn who supplied Graham
with a heroic hard knocks narrative which never mentioned the neo-Confederacy roots of both
men. Now if you review the Congressional Record you see Lindsey Graham's voting record
follows a Republican Southern Strategy which Nixon, Reagan, George Bush, Strom Thurmond, and
Jesse Helms would have been proud of. These racist political narratives can be mapped to
every Republican strategist and their GOP candidate product. Max Boot ignores this historical
behavior infused into the Republican Party since before 1963.
Donald Trump is only different
in that he has Tweeted these sentiments ad nauseam and publicly voiced them expressly in his
political appearances and news conferences. If you are honest, the "N" word has been
"whispered" (Jim DeMint) as an "IN" word in secret congregations of Republicans for decades.
Lindsey Graham has created a consistent attempt at humor where he frequently quips "white
man" jokes while supporting voter suppression and gerrymandering by his party.
Max Boot is
correct that this racism has moved from the backrooms under the cover of Donald Trump, but,
to deny that this these sentiments have not been part of the Republican infrastructure for
decades is rude hypocrisy. As you read this book, to load this burden on Donald Trump alone
is to deny history and the public record. Donald Trump merely harnessed this latent DNA of
the Republican party while masterfully marketing himself as a new Republican unbound by swamp
politics (a political breed which does not exist in the Republican Party.) Look at Ben Sasse,
he writes as a centrist yet votes as a Trump man. Look at Lindsey Graham's descriptions of
Trump in 2016 and now listen to his praise of Trump today. Yet, Max Boot sees this as a
recent development in the Republican Party when it has been part of the GOP DNA which has
produced a racist voting record as each generation of Republicans is sworn in.
Max Boot saw the light when it was too late. As an advocate for America's reckless wars after
9/11, he bears moral responsibility for the degrading of conservatism into a hate-filled
cult.
A month after 9/11, he called for the invasion of Iraq. Did he not think that almost
two decades of continuous war fighting would not radicalize the American populace? He's
making amends by writing a book, for which he probably received a hefty advance and will make
money off of from royalties. Should donate the proceeds to charity.
Max Boot is another smug, arrogant, self righteous, Gramscian, ruling class communist, that's
trying convince the "Base" that he knows what's best for them; all while devowing the little
bit of wealth they might have left to live on. Why?
Because the "Base" are the slaves of the
"Superstructure" ruling class. Remember, as Stalin put it, "the middle class is the enemy" to
the socialist. America is on slow-drip to Totalitarianism. And Max Boot is just one more in
the camp on the transition.
"Hi, I'm a bonafide conservative and here are
the ways Trump has embarrassed The Cause as defined by Ronald Reagan. Since I refuse to kiss
Trump's ring, I still gotta eat so I'm going to grandly announce that I have left the
Republican Party in the form of this book and hope you will give me a check to cash. Thank
you."
I know that's a harsh assessment of a book that I agree with 98% of what's written, Mr.
Boot offers no insight. Not once did I think, "Ah, good point. I didn't think of that."
It's
simply a rehashing of Mr. Trump's ridiculous gaffs (hell, I could have done that, there are sooo many to choose from) and at the very end a very lame path out of this quagmire (spoiler
alert: we just need someone else as charismatic as Trump that's not [insert negative
adjectives here] because the Republicans have proven they will follow ANYBODY over a
cliff).
I finished this book (though skipped many chapters because it was simply rehashing Trump's
train wrecks) and said, "That's all you got? [sigh of resignation]"
I never searched this book on Amazon, however, I did write a tweet about Max Boot, so I guess
Twitter shares with Amazon. To the review, however -- this is written by a person who writes
that Trump has failed us by leaving troops in war, and just 6 months later, writes an article
that totally contradicts the earlier statement, stating that Trump can never do anything
right because he is pulling troops out of war. Which is it? I would not line a birdcage with
this garbage.
Trump is just a symptom; an easy scapegoat because he's a twit. Boot helped create and
perpetuate the monster that the GOP became. Boot, and others like him, need to spend a few
more years in purgatory for the mess that he put us in.
Unfortunately the author is venting his personal dislike of the current administration
without addressing the previous administrations attempt to divide the country by any means
possibly and subsequently putting the American people into a politically charged environment
that the author is trying to capitalize on.
So neoconservatives return to the Democratic Party in which they were hatched. When the party
became the second War Partty in Washington. nice...
Notable quotes:
"... Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony, he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire." ..."
"... his true aspiration was to become an editor for the Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side economics and a hawkish foreign policy. ..."
"... Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy. ..."
"... The Corrosion of Conservatism ..."
"... A Choice Not an Echo ..."
"... In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal ..."
The NeverTrumpers may have failed to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, but he
has been a godsend for their public reputations. Instead of remaining in the wilderness, the
neoconservatives who make up the bulk of the NeverTrump movement have fitfully begun to move
back toward, or at least flirt with, the Democratic Party, which is where the original neocon
journey began. Among some of their longtime detractors, it's creating a vertiginous sensation.
James Wolcott, for example, recently observed in Vanity Fair , "One of the chewier
ironies of the Trump interregnum is finding that I'm following former foes on Twitter and
elsewhere that I once mocked, reviled, and cast into outer darkness during the Bush presidency,
especially after the invasion of Iraq."
The Corrosion of Conservatism: Why I Left The Right by Max Boot
Now that the neocons have, in a manner of speaking, been born again, they are once more
crusading for regime change against an authoritarian foe, only this time on the home front.
Trump, not Saddam Hussein, is the main object of their ire, and they are earning quite a
hearing in mainstream liberal outlets. Eliot A. Cohen and David Frum regularly appear in the
Atlantic . Bret Stephens and Bari Weiss have decamped from the Wall Street
Journal to the New York Times . William Kristol and Jennifer Rubin are regulars on
MSNBC.
And then there is Max Boot, a columnist for the Washington Post and senior fellow at
the Council on Foreign Relations. Unlike Kristol or Stephens, Boot's breach with the Republican
Party is complete. He does not believe that the party can be redeemed, and he isn't sure that
he should call himself a conservative anymore. The day after the 2016 election, after a
lifetime of backing the GOP, he re-registered as an independent. In August, he posted on
Twitter a screenshot of a fundraising pitch that read, "Hey, this is Newt Gingrich. President
Trump needs your help to elect more Republicans in 2018. Will you make a 4X matched donation
today?," with this accompanying text: "Hey, this is Max Boot. Hell no." His sallies have earned
him brickbats from the right; the pro-Trump website American Greatness has branded him a
"soulless, craven opportunist."
Boot's defection from conservative orthodoxy carries a particular sting because he was once
the most explicit exponent of American greatness. After 9/11, he endorsed American imperialism
in a Weekly Standard cover story. The benighted countries of the Middle East, he
announced, "cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by
self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets." His name became a synonym for neocon
warmonger, and he went on to advise the George W. Bush administration and presidential
aspirants such as Senator Marco Rubio.
In the past two years, however, Boot has not merely parted with the conservative stances
that he previously espoused, but has been actively assailing them, whether the issue is race,
gun control, or the Iraq War. Indeed, as a columnist for the Washington Post , Boot has
relentlessly attacked Trump and his enablers. "If there has been an outcry against Trump's
virulent racism from the right, I must have missed it," he wrote in August. "The only
conservatives who are willing to regularly call out Trump's bigotry are those of us who are
#NeverTrumpers -- and, as I constantly hear online, we aren't 'real' conservatives because we
do not worship at the orange altar."
Now, in The Corrosion of Conservatism , Boot charts his ideological odyssey. He
deftly recounts his early attraction to the conservative cause and his revulsion at its embrace
of Trump. For Boot, who immigrated to the United States from the Soviet Union as a child, the
2016 election felt like back to the future. As Trump sailed toward the Republican nomination,
Boot's Twitter account and email began to fill up with anti-Semitic, pro-Trump messages. He
became increasingly alienated from the conservatives who ended up trying to curry favor with
Trump, ranging from Rubio to Paul Ryan. He had naively expected them to repudiate Trump's
authoritarianism. When they didn't, he felt betrayed.
For Boot, it was personal. Joining the conservative movement had been part of coming to
America. It gave a young immigrant from Moscow a sense of identity and mission. In contrast to
Kristol, who has already begun plotting to stymie Trump in the 2020 primaries, or Frum, who has
sought to chart the ideological course of the GOP in books like Dead Right , Boot was
never a Republican operative. He isn't trying to rescue the GOP to restore the old order.
Instead, he is a historian who has always relished being an intellectual dissident. His basic
temperament hasn't changed at all, which is why he may be the ultimate neocon.
The value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis. Instead, he
explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative madrassa. In
describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide of the
right.
Now it's the Republican Party, not the left, that is in his sights. He understands that he
missed the real danger to freedom that was right in front of his nose: a party that flirted
with white nationalism, cozied up to Russian autocracy, and toppled into obsessive conspiracy
mongering. And he is haunted by a question: "Did I somehow contribute to the rise of this dark
force in American life with my advocacy for conservatism?"
Unlike previous accounts of breaking with the right, such as Garry Wills's Confessions of
a Conservative , the value of Boot's book does not rest in any original political analysis.
Instead, he explains what it was like to immerse himself in what amounted to a conservative
madrassa. In describing his self-conversion from zealot to apostate, he emerges as the Candide
of the right, offering fascinating insights into the psychology of a true believer. His fervor
for explaining why the right is wrong brings to mind Arthur Koestler's remark in The God
That Failed : "When all is said, we ex-communists are the only people on your side who know
what it's all about."
B oot, who was born in 1969 in Moscow, had firsthand experience with communism and was
deeply shaped by the persecution of Soviet Jews. His parents divorced when he was two, but both
later immigrated to America. Boot's father, Alexander, was a dissident who distributed
samizdat and managed to get out in 1973. His mother emigrated with Max in 1976 and then
taught Russian in California.
Boot makes it clear that his enthusiasm for his father -- a self-described monarchist who
now lives in England and devotes his time to denouncing atheism and the welfare state -- is
quite constrained. But Alexander's gift of a National Review subscription to Max when he
was thirteen left a lasting imprint. The younger Boot absorbed the worldview of its writers,
ranging from the reactionary Austrian aristocrat Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn to William F.
Buckley Jr. himself. Boot also read up on the standard conservative texts: Whittaker Chambers's
Witness , F. A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom , and Russell Kirk's The
Conservative Mind . Ronald Reagan, who inveighed against the "evil empire" that Max and his
parents had fled, was Boot's contemporary hero. The liberals who preached détente with
the Soviet Union, or even accommodation, were the new appeasers.
Boot's dream was to become the next Buckley or George Will. At his bar mitzvah ceremony,
he ignored the usual Torah theme to deliver an impassioned defense of Israel's invasion of
Lebanon in 1983. According to Boot, his remarks "displayed my precocity, my attachment to
Israel, a country I had not yet visited -- and my questionable judgment, since the invasion
would turn out to be a fiasco that would embroil Israel in a Vietnam-like quagmire."
As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Boot played the part of
adversary, battling against the campus left. Upon graduation, he went to work at the
Christian Science Monitor . But his true aspiration was to become an editor for the
Wall Street Journal op-ed page, which under the direction of the brilliantly talented
polemicist Robert L. Bartley had become an ideological battering ram on behalf of supply-side
economics and a hawkish foreign policy.
Boot says that in 1994 he received a call that Bartley wanted to meet with him. He reckoned
that Bartley would want to talk about his political philosophy. Instead, Bartley mentioned that
he had two positions open, one for an editorial writer on economic issues, another as an
assistant op-ed writer. Boot explained that he knew nothing about economics. This pleased
Bartley. "I later learned," Boot writes, "that he liked to take writers who did not know much
about the subject and train them in his way of thinking."
In the end, Boot took the latter position, and quickly plunged into the social whirl of the
cloistered New York conservative world. He attended dinners at the Manhattan Institute and went
to the monthly "Monday Meeting," where conservative activists promoted everything from the gold
standard to Central Park's horse-drawn carriages. He says he became a "made man" in 2007 when
he won the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism, which was established by
Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. and is bestowed annually on a writer who exhibits a "love of
country and its democratic institutions" and "bears witness to the evils of
totalitarianism."
B ut Boot had contrarian instincts from the outset at the Journal . He once invited
a Princeton professor named Paul Krugman to write an op-ed critical of supply-side economics,
which almost prompted Bartley to fire him. Needless to say, it never ran. "This was an early
indication," Boot writes, "that groupthink could be just as tenacious on the right as on the
left." Boot also confesses that he found it difficult to decipher the baroque conspiracy
theories that Bartley and his acolytes concocted about Bill and Hillary Clinton involving
Whitewater, the airport in Mena, Arkansas, and the death of Vince Foster. "I thought he was a
deeply flawed man," Boot says of Clinton, "but I appreciated the achievements of his
presidency." But Boot subordinated any reservations he may have felt in order to promote
the Reaganite principles of free trade and a crusading foreign policy.
One of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's
acknowledgment that Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has
always been a dark underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to
ignore," he writes. For all the political right's hosannas for Buckley, he established the
revanchist conservatism that views compromise, either at home or abroad, as tantamount to
treason. It's important to remember that Buckley began his career by supporting the iniquitous
Joseph McCarthy -- a sentiment he never repudiated -- and that he viewed Dwight Eisenhower as a
dangerous establishment Republican who refused to liberate eastern Europe militarily and failed
to roll back the New Deal. Nor was this all. Buckley also opposed the civil rights movement and
for decades supported the apartheid regime in South Africa. Even as they decried the Soviet
Union and China for human rights violations, Buckley and other conservatives were remorseless
apologists for one of the most odious regimes in the world.
After McCarthy's demise, the GOP remained addicted to conspiracy mongering. Boot usefully
reminds us that Phyllis Schlafly's 1964 best-selling tract A Choice Not an Echo
suggested that hidden kingmakers were preventing Republican presidential candidates from
winning. "It wasn't any accident," she claimed. "It was planned that way" by New York
financiers who supported "a continuation of the Roosevelt–Harry Dexter
White–Averell Harriman–Dean Acheson–Dean Rusk policy of aiding and abetting
Red Russia and her satellites." The failure to distinguish between White, who was a Soviet
agent, and Acheson, who was not, wasn't any accident, either. The message was that egghead
liberals, whatever they might say about battling communism, were, at bottom, traitors.
One
of the more unusual aspects of The Corrosion of Conservatism is Boot's acknowledgment that
Trump did not emerge from out of nowhere. "There is no doubt that there has always been a dark
underside to conservatism, and one that I chose for most of my life to ignore," he writes.
The populist style often played a key role in helping Republican candidates win elections.
But Boot distinguishes between a populist pose and actual populism. For him, the breaking point
began with Sarah Palin and ended with Trump. In his view, "[t]he rise of Palin and now
Trump indicates that the GOP really truly has become the stupid party. Its primary vibe has
become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger." Boot himself warned against the
rise of a meretricious populism in a 1994 Wall Street Journal column in which he
maintained that the GOP should not " 'Rush' to embrace talk show democracy." He now
denounces Fox News and figures like Dinesh D'Souza and Ann Coulter for peddling conspiracy
theories on Trump's behalf.
Perhaps the most notable part of Boot's book is his willingness to face up to the fiasco
that was the Iraq War. He notes that for years he felt defensive about his support for it and
was too stubborn to cede any ground to his critics. "It is not nearly as easy to remake a
foreign land by force as I had naively imagined in 2003," he writes. And he recognizes that the
catastrophic policies he espoused helped create the terrain for Trump to rumble to victory. In
listening to Trump's national security advisor, John Bolton, Boot says that he recognizes "my
callow, earlier self. Bolton, a conservative firebrand since his days as a student at Yale
University in the early 1970s, is whom I used to be."
Boot thus differs from the many other NeverTrumpers who often fail to recognize that
belligerent policies have led to disaster at home as well as abroad. He issues a scorching
indictment of the GOP: "I am now convinced that the Republican Party must suffer repeated and
devastating defeats. It must pay a heavy price for its embrace of white nationalism and
know-nothingism. Only if the GOP as currently constituted is burned to the ground will there be
any chance to build a reasonable center-right political party out of the ashes." Indeed, he
concludes, "having escaped the corrosion of conservatism, I am a political Ronin, and will
swear allegiance to no master in the future. I will fight for my principles wherever they may
lead me."
There's a whiff of grandiosity in this declaration. Like Whittaker Chambers, who pioneered
the breaking-ranks genre in Witness , Boot takes an apocalyptic view of politics. But
his readiness to reexamine his old convictions is admirable. If it ends up prompting him to
sign up as a Democrat, then his neocon journey will have come full circle.
"... As Stephen Wertheim argues in The New York Review of Books , the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives" or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them. ..."
"... "For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism' from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics." ..."
"... Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering foreign policy advice to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for American Progress are partnering with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting. ..."
"... "What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands for onto the ash heap of history." ..."
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored weapons of mass
destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq...
In December, after a 23-year run that saw it perpetuate the Bush administration lie that Saddam Hussein harbored
weapons of mass destruction and breathlessly champion the ensuing war in Iraq, The Weekly Standard
released its final
issue
. Two years removed from Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 election, one might be forgiven for concluding
the publication's demise sounded the final death knell of neoconservatism -- an ideology that has been soundly
defeated at the polls and appears to lack even a constituency, the ubiquity of
Bill Kristol
on cable news notwithstanding.
If only. As Stephen Wertheim argues in
The New York
Review of Books
, the neoconservatives are ascendant in Trump's America, reasserting themselves within GOP
and, more troublingly, renewing their ties to the Democratic Party. Together they constitute the "neo-neoconservatives"
or "post-neoconservatives," as he's dubbed them.
"Today, neoconservatives are riding high once more, in the White House, on Capitol Hill, in the most prominent
organs of opinion," Wertheim writes. "The Weekly Standard may have shuttered, but anti-Trump neocons enjoy increasing
influence in the center of the Republican and Democratic parties and in publications like The Atlantic and The
Washington Post."
In his essay, Wertheim traces the history of the movement from World War II through the Cold War and up to
9/11, which allowed Kristol and Commentary's Norman Podhoretz, among others, to forge an existential threat
in the form of "Islamofascism." Indeed, neoconservatism draws from the philosophical tradition of Leo Strauss,
who wrote in the
"The City and
Man"
that "the crisis of the West consists in the West's having become uncertain of its purpose." For the
Straussians and their intellectual descendants, military conflict offered that sense of purpose, whether the
enemy was Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Al-Qaeda.
Trump's presidency has proved a clarifying moment. "[He] has forced neoconservatives to decide, for the first
time, whether they are more against 'totalitarianism' or 'globalism,'" continues Wertheim. "If anti-totalitarians
take Trump to be perverting what they hold dear, anti-globalist neocons have found in Trump a kindred spirit
and vehicle for power. Yet, even as they are fracturing, neocons are flourishing. They have bypassed the political
wilderness and vaulted themselves to the vanguard on either side of the Trump divide."
Within Trump's cabinet, neoconservatism remains represented by national security adviser John Bolton, who
has served in every Republican administration since Ronald Reagan. Wertheim contends that while right-wing non-interventionism
is typically attributed to paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, neoconservatives have also historically taken
aim at global institutions, if not globalism itself. Few have embodied this notion more than Bolton, who has
made a career of bashing both the United Nations and its Security Council. During the Obama administration,
Wertheim notes, he regularly sounded the alarm that "leftists like Obama were attempting to give away American
sovereignty, bit by bit, to international bodies."
"For Bolton and company, Donald Trump turned out to be a deliverance," he observes. "Trump elevated 'globalism'
from a marginal slur to the central foil of American foreign policy and Republican politics."
Which brings us to neoconservatives' suddenly lofty perch outside of the Trump administration. For Republican
apostates like Jennifer Rubin, David Frum and Max Boot, Wertheim contends, the president has offered the "next
best thing" to a foreign dictator: "an enemy within." His personal degeneracy and unabashed corruption have
allowed them to "reclaim their preferred role as the moral truth-tellers in America."
"More surprising, perhaps, is that Democrats and outlets of the anti-Trump resistance have welcomed these
neocons into their fold," Wertheim observes. "Boot, Kristol, Rubin, and former advisers of George W. Bush and
Senator John McCain appear daily on MSNBC to excoriate Trump and Trumpism. David Frum, who coined the 'axis
of evil' as George W. Bush's speechwriter, earns resistance retweets by
warning
of 'this hour of liberal peril' in The Atlantic. In 2017, The New York Times hired Bret Stephens
from The Wall Street Journal in an
effort
to 'broaden the range of Times debate about consequential questions,' a curious rationale given that
Stephens represented just the kind of Never Trump pundit repudiated by GOP voters and did nothing to change
the op-ed page's lack of a single Trump-supporting columnist."
Ultimately, this embrace extends beyond pundits like Boot offering
foreign policy advice
to the party's leadership. Even purportedly liberal think tanks like the Center for
American Progress are
partnering
with the right-wing American Enterprise Institute. The question is why, decades removed from
Sen. Henry Martin "Scoop" Jackson and the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoconservatives once again feel at home
within the Democratic Party? Wertheim's conclusions are as credible as they are dispiriting.
"What best explains centrist Democrats' rapprochement with neoconservatives isn't an anti-Trump strategy
but rather a genuine affinity with their current political objectives and style," he writes. "Neocons have spent
decades reducing politics to an all-encompassing crisis, a Manichean struggle between an imperiled liberal democracy
and a pervasive totalitarian menace. Now certain liberals see things in much the same way. Lionizing the neocons
indulges these Democrats' fantasy that respectable Republicans will rise up to sweep Trump and all he stands
for onto the ash heap of history."
Buzzfeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity
Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares
Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost
Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a
Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to
Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three
Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its
Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew
in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either:
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and
Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to
the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times c laimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme
indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to
turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining
their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems
instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news
consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
Buzzfeed was once notorious for
traffic-generating "listicles" , but has since become an impressive outlet for deep
investigative journalism under editor-in-chief Ben Smith. That outlet was prominently in the
news this week thanks to its "bombshell" story about President Trump and Michael Cohen: a story
that, like so many others of its kind,
blew up in its face , this time when the typically mute Robert Mueller's office took the
extremely rare step to
label its key claims "inaccurate."
But in homage to BuzzFeed's past viral glory, following are the top ten worst media failures
in two-plus-years of Trump/Russia reporting. They are listed in reverse order, as measured by
the magnitude of the embarrassment, the hysteria they generated on social media and cable news,
the level of journalistic recklessness that produced them, and the amount of damage and danger
they caused. This list was extremely difficult to compile in part because news outlets
(particularly CNN and MSNBC) often delete from the internet the video segments of their most
embarrassing moments. Even more challenging was the fact that the number of worthy nominees is
so large that highly meritorious entrees had to be excluded, but are acknowledged at the end
with (dis)honorable mention status.
Note that all of these "errors" go only in one direction: namely, exaggerating the grave
threat posed by Moscow and the Trump circle's connection to it. It's inevitable that media
outlets will make mistakes on complex stories. If that's being done in good faith, one would
expect the errors would be roughly 50/50 in terms of the agenda served by the false stories.
That is most definitely not the case here. Just as was true in 2002 and 2003, when the media
clearly wanted to exaggerate the threat posed by Saddam Hussein and thus all of its "errors"
went in that direction, virtually all of its major "errors" in this story are devoted to the
same agenda and script:
10. RT Hacked Into and Took Over C-SPAN (Fortune)
On June 12, 2017, Fortune claimed that RT had hacked into and taken over C-SPAN and that
C-SPAN "confirmed" it had been hacked. The whole story was false :
9. Russian Hackers Invaded the U.S. Electricity
Grid to Deny Vermonters Heat During the Winter (WashPost)
On December 30, 2016, the Washington Post reported that "Russian hackers penetrated the U.S.
electricity grid through a utility in Vermont," causing predictable outrage and panic, along
with threats from U.S. political leaders. But then they kept diluting the story with editor's
notes – to admit that the malware was found on a laptop not connected to the U.S.
electric grid at all – until finally acknowledging, days later, that the whole story was
false, since the malware had nothing to do with Russia or with the U.S. electric grid:
8. A New, Deranged, Anonymous Group Declares
Mainstream Political Sites on the Left and Right to be Russian Propaganda Outlets and WashPost
Touts its Report to Claim Massive Kremlin Infiltration of the Internet (WashPost)
On November 24, 2016, the Washington Post
published one of the most inflammatory, sensationalistic stories to date about Russian
infiltration into U.S. politics using social media, accusing "more than 200 websites" of being
"routine peddlers of Russian propaganda during the election season, with combined audiences of
at least 15 million Americans." It added: "stories planted or promoted by the disinformation
campaign [on Facebook] were viewed more than 213 million times."
Unfortunately for the paper, those statistics were provided by a new, anonymous group that
reached these conclusions by classifying long-time, well-known sites – from the Drudge
Report to Clinton-critical left-wing websites such as Truthout, Black Agenda Report, Truthdig,
and Naked Capitalism, as well as libertarian venues such as Antiwar.com and the Ron Paul
Institute. – as "Russian propaganda outlets," producing one of the longest Editor's Note
in memory appended to the top of the article (but
not until two weeks later , long after the story was mindlessly spread all throughout the
media ecosystem):
7. Trump Aide Anthony Scaramucci is Involved in a
Russian Hedge Fund Under Senate Investigation (CNN)
On June 22, 2017, CNN reported that Trump aide Anthony Scaramucci was involved with the
Russian Direct Investment Fund, under Senate investigation. He was not. CNN retracted the story
and forced the three reporters who published it to leave the network.
6. Russia Attacked
U.S. "Diplomats" (i.e. Spies) at the Cuban Embassy Using a Super-Sophisticated Sonic Microwave
Weapon (NBC/MSNBC/CIA)
On September 11, 2017, NBC News and MSNBC
spread all over its airwaves a claim from its notorious CIA puppet Ken Dilanian that Russia
was behind a series of dastardly attacks on U.S. personnel at the Embassy in Cuba using a sonic
or microwave weapon so sophisticated and cunning that Pentagon and CIA scientists had no idea
what to make of it.
But then teams of neurologists began calling into doubt that these personnel had suffered
any brain injuries at all – that instead they appear to have experienced collective
psychosomatic symptoms – and then biologists published findings that the "strange sounds"
the U.S. "diplomats" reported hearing were identical to those emitted by a common Caribbean
male cricket during mating season.
5. Trump Created a Secret Internet Server to
Covertly Communicate with a Russian Bank (Slate)
4. Paul Manafort Visited Julian Assange Three
Times in the Ecuadorian Embassy and Nobody Noticed (Guardian/Luke Harding)
On November 27, 2018, the Guardian
published a major "bombshell" that Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had somehow managed
to sneak inside one of the world's most surveilled buildings, the Ecuadorian Embassy in London,
and visit Julian Assange on three different occasions. Cable and online commentators
exploded.
Seven weeks later,
no other media outlet has confirmed this ; no video or photographic evidence has emerged;
the Guardian refuses to answer any questions; its leading editors have virtually gone into
hiding; other media outlets have expressed serious doubts about its veracity; and an Ecuadorian
official who worked at the embassy has called the story a complete fake:
3. CNN Explicitly Lied About Lanny Davis Being Its
Source – For a Story Whose Substance Was Also False: Cohen Would Testify that Trump Knew
in Advance About the Trump Tower Meeting (CNN)
On July 27, 2018, CNN
published a blockbuster story : that Michael Cohen was prepared to tell Robert Mueller that
President Trump knew in advanced about the Trump Tower meeting. There were, however, two
problems with this story: first, CNN got caught blatantly lying when its reporters claimed that
"contacted by CNN, one of Cohen's attorneys, Lanny Davis, declined to comment" (in fact, Davis
was one of CNN's key sources, if not its only source, for this story), and second, numerous
other outlets retracted the story after the source, Davis, admitted it was a lie. CNN, however,
to this date has refused to do either:
2. Robert Mueller Possesses Internal Emails and
Witness Interviews Proving Trump Directed Cohen to Lie to Congress (BuzzFeed)
1. Donald Trump Jr. Was Offered Advanced Access to
the WikiLeaks Email Archive (CNN/MSNBC)
The morning of December 9, 2017, launched
one of the most humiliating spectacles in the history of the U.S. media. With a tone so
grave and bombastic that it is impossible to overstate, CNN went on the air and announced a
major exclusive: Donald Trump, Jr. was offered by email advanced access to the trove of DNC and
Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks – meaning before those emails were made public.
Within an hour, MSNBC's Ken Dilanian, using a tone somehow even more unhinged, purported to
have "independently confirmed" this mammoth, blockbuster scoop, which, they said, would have
been the smoking gun showing collusion between the Trump campaign and WikiLeaks over the hacked
emails (while the YouTube clips have been removed, you can still watch one of the amazing MSNBC
videos
here ).
There was, alas, just one small problem with this massive, blockbuster story: it was totally
and completely false. The email which Trump, Jr. received that directed him to the WikiLeaks
archive was sent after WikiLeaks published it online for the whole world to see, not before.
Rather than some super secretive operative giving Trump, Jr. advanced access, as both CNN and
MSNBC told the public for hours they had confirmed, it was instead just some totally pedestrian
message from a random member of the public suggesting Trump, Jr. review documents the whole
world was already talking about. All of the anonymous sources CNN and MSNBC cited somehow all
got the date of the email wrong.
To date, when asked how they both could have gotten such a massive story so completely wrong
in the same way, both CNN and MSNBC have adopted the posture of the CIA by maintaining complete
silence and refusing to explain how it could possibly be that all of their "multiple,
independent sources" got the date wrong on the email in the same way, to be as incriminating
– and false – as possible. Nor, needless to say, will they identify their sources
who, in concert, fed them such inflammatory and utterly false information.
Sadly, CNN and MSNBC have deleted most traces of the most humiliating videos from the
internet, including demanding that YouTube remove copies. But enough survives to document just
what a monumental, horrifying, and utterly inexcusable debacle this was. Particularly amazing
is the clip of the CNN reporter (see below) having to admit the error for the first time, as he
awkwardly struggles to pretend that it's not the massive, horrific debacle that it so obviously
is:
Dishonorable Mention:
ABC News' Brian Ross is fired for
reporting Trump told Flynn to make contact with Russians when he was still a candidate;
in fact, Trump did that after he won.
The New York Times c laimed Manafort provided
polling data to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a person "close to the Kremlin"; in fact, he
provided them to Ukrainians, not Russians.
Crowdstrike, the firm hired by the DNC, claimed they had evidence that Russia hacked
Ukrainian artillery apps;
they then retracted it .
Bloomberg and the WSJ reported Mueller subpoenaed Deustche Bank for Trump's financial
records; the NYT said
that never happened .
Rachel Maddow devoted 20 minutes at the start of her show to very melodramatically
claiming a highly sophisticated party tried to trick her by sending her a fake Top Secret
document modeled after the one published by the Intercept, and said it could only have come
from the U.S. Government (or the Intercept) since the person obtained the document before it
was published by us and thus must have had special access to it; in fact,
Maddow and NBC completely misread the metadata on the document ; the fake sent to Maddow
was created after we published the document, and was sent to her by a random member of the
public who took the document from the Intercept's site and doctored it to see if she'd fall
for an obvious scam. Maddow's entire timeline, on which her whole melodramatic conspiracy
theory rested, was fictitious.
The U.S. media and Democrats spent six months claiming that all "17 intelligence
agencies" agreed Russia was behind the hacks; the NYT finally
retracted that in June, 2017: "The assessment was made by four intelligence agencies --
the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency. The assessment was not
approved by all 17 organizations in the American intelligence community."
AP claimed on February 2, 2018, that the Free Beacon commissioned the Steele Dossier;
they thereafter acknowledged that was false and
noted, instead: "Though the former spy, Christopher Steele, was hired by a firm that was
initially funded by the Washington Free Beacon, he did not begin work on the project until
after Democratic groups had begun funding it."
Widespread government and media claims that accused Russian agent Maria Butina offered
"sex for favors" were
totally false (and scurrilous).
After a Russian regional jet crashed on February 11, 2018, shortly after it took off from
Moscow, killing all 71 people aboard, Harvard Law Professor and frequent MSNBC contributor
Laurence Tribe
strongly implied Putin purposely caused the plane to go down in order to murder Sergei
Millian, a person vaguely linked to George Papadopoulos and Jared Kushner; in fact, Millian
was not on the plane nor, to date, has anyone claimed they had any evidence that Putin
ordered his own country's civilian passenger jet brought down.
Special mention:
As I've said many times, the U.S. media has become quite adept at expressing extreme
indignation when people criticize them; when politicians conclude that it is advantageous to
turn the U.S. media into their main adversary; and when people turn to "fake news" sites.
If, however, they were willing to devote just a small fraction of that energy to examining
their own conduct, perhaps they would develop the tools necessary to combat those problems
instead of just denouncing their critics and angrily demanding that politicians and news
consumers accord them the respect to which they believe they are entitled.
The MSM and its allies in the controlled alternative media, and the global private-interest
financial, investment and banking system, are a tag-team, indispensable to each other.
Control of money and control of information. The first narrowly concentrates wealth and thus
power and influence. The second through agenda-driven selection, lies, censorship, spin,
misdirection and so on – disinformation – controls people's sense of what is real
and possible, thus dis-empowering them.
The American military and CIA have provided most of the overt and covert 'muscle' for that
control system.
The combined effort of narrowly controlled and narrowly advantaging globe straddling
finance, media, and muscle has facilitated the development of a near global Empire. In common
with traditional Empires this new Empire had totalitarian ambitions: but since its reach was
global, this is really a first attempt at global totalitarian control.
Russia under Putin – leaving aside China – has developed enough strength to
attempt alternative modes of communication and finance and development, not as adjuncts or
subordinates to the Empire's efforts in those regards. And their military is antidote and
opposition to the totalitarian project.
The forgoing is pretty obvious stuff, but I think that the Saker's concluding paragraph
provides a limiting summary of how the issue can play out.
"But fundamentally the Russian people need to decide. Do they really want to live in a
western-style capitalist society (with all the russophobic politics and the adoption
of the terminally degenerate "culture" such a choice implies), or do they want a
"social society" (to use Putin's own words) – meaning a society in which social and
economic
justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits.
You could say that this is a battle of greed vs ethics."
This is a simplistic way of looking at the choices available. We are all caught up in
transitional culture processes, no matter where we live. The conjunction of the cornucopia of
new technology and unprecedented environmental and social challenges is everywhere at play,
leading who knows where?
What the Russian people have been given, and this is near singular on Earth, is a
protected and enhanced opportunity of developing a culture in which honest national discourse
is a predominant feature. This is in complete contrast to the predominant 'fake news' system
of discourse control that is in place in so many countries. And full and honest discourse
will create its own original cultural developments.
The Russian adoption of more honest discourse is already having global influence. An
example is Russia Today, which far from perfect and all that, still provides an enormous
advance over the extremely controlled western mass media, and a powerful foe to 'fake
news'.
Perhaps the most visible exemplar of rationale discourse has been Putin himself, with for
example his marathon annual Q and A with the Russian people, or his articulate well
considered sallies on many issues
And with that – if Russia can use unfettered reason writ large as a prime ingredient
of cultural and political development, as a basic developmental 'steering tool' – then
the simple dichotomy of "western-style capitalist society" vs "a society in which social and
economic justice and the good of the country are placed above corporate and personal profits"
, as much as I'm sympathetic to the latter, seems to me to be a limiting way of expressing
the range of potential beneficent possibilities.
The problem is not Russia; the problem is the crisis of neoliberalism in the USA. And related legitimization of neoliberal
elite, which now Deep State is trying ot patch with anti-Russian hysteria
Notable quotes:
"... That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present. ..."
Baseless Russiagate allegations continue to risk war with Russia.
Anti-Trump Frenzy Threatens to End Superpower Diplomacy | The Nation
The New Year has brought a torrent of ever-more-frenzied allegations that President Donald Trump has long had a conspiratorial relationship
-- why mince words and call it "collusion"? -- with Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin.
Why the frenzy now? Perhaps because Russiagate promoters in high places are concerned that special counsel Robert Mueller will
not produce the hoped-for "bombshell" to end Trump's presidency. Certainly,
New York Times columnist
David Leonhardt seems worried, demanding, "The president must go," his drop line exhorting, "What are we waiting for?" (In some
countries, articles like his, and there are very many, would be read as calling for a coup.) Perhaps to incite Democrats who have
now taken control of House investigative committees. Perhaps simply because Russiagate has become a political-media cult that no
facts, or any lack of evidence, can dissuade or diminish.
And there is no new credible evidence, preposterous claims notwithstanding. One of The New York Times '
own recent "bombshells,"
published on January 12, reported, for example, that in spring 2017, FBI officials "began investigating whether [President Trump]
had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests." None of the three reporters bothered to point out that those "agents
and officials" almost certainly included ones later reprimanded and retired by the FBI itself for their political biases. (As usual,
the Times buried its self-protective disclaimer deep in the story: "No evidence has emerged publicly that Mr. Trump was secretly
in contact with or took direction from Russian government officials.")
Whatever the explanation, the heightened frenzy is unmistakable, leading the "news" almost daily in the synergistic print and
cable media outlets that have zealously promoted Russiagate for more than two years, in particular the Times , The Washington
Post , MSNBC, CNN, and their kindred outlets. They have plenty of eager enablers, including the once-distinguished Strobe Talbott,
President Bill Clinton's top adviser on Russia and until recently president of the Brookings Institution.
According to Talbott
, "We already know that the Kremlin helped put Trump into the White House and played him for a sucker . Trump has been colluding
with a hostile Russia throughout his presidency." In fact, we do not "know" any of this. These remain merely widely disseminated
suspicions and allegations.
In this cult-like commentary, the "threat" of "a hostile Russia" must be inflated along with charges against Trump. (In truth,
Russia represents no threat to the United States that Washington itself did not provoke since the end of the Soviet Union in 1991.)
For its own threat inflation, the Times featured not an expert with any plausible credentials but Lisa Page, the former FBI
lawyer with no known Russia expertise, and who was one of those reprimanded by the agency for anti-Trump political bias. Nonetheless,
the Times quotes Page
at length : "In the Russian Federation and in President Putin himself you have an individual whose aim is to disrupt the Western
alliance and whose aim is to make Western democracy more fractious in order to weaken our ability to spread our democratic ideals."
Perhaps we should have guessed that the democracy-promotion genes of J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and breeding in the FBI, though
for the Times , in its exploitation of the hapless and legally endangered Page, it seems not to matter.
Which brings us, or rather Russiagate zealots, to the heightened "threat" represented by "Putin's Russia." If true, we would expect
the US president to negotiate with the Kremlin leader, including at summit meetings, as every president since Dwight Eisenhower has
done. But, we are told, we cannot trust Trump to do so, because,
according to The Washington Post , he has repeatedly met with Putin alone, with only translators present, and concealed
the records of their private talks, sure signs of "treasonous" behavior, as the Russiagate media first insisted following the Trump-Putin
summit in Helsinki in July 2018.
It's hard to know whether this is historical ignorance or Russiagate malice, though it is probably both. In any event, the truth
is very different. In preparing US-Russian (Soviet and post-Soviet) summits since the 1950s, aides on both sides have arranged "private
time" for their bosses for two essential reasons: so they can develop sufficient personal rapport to sustain any policy partnership
they decide on; and so they can alert one another to constraints on their policy powers at home, to foes of such détente policies
often centered in their respective intelligence agencies. (The KGB ran operations against Nikita Khrushchev's détente policies with
Eisenhower, and, as is well established, US intelligence agencies have run operations against Trump's proclaimed goal of "cooperation
with Russia.")
That is, in the modern history of US-Russian summits, we are told by a former American ambassador who knows, the "secrecy
of presidential private meetings has been the rule, not the exception." He continues, "There's nothing unusual about withholding
information from the bureaucracy about the president's private meetings with foreign leaders . Sometimes they would dictate a memo
afterward, sometimes not." Indeed, President Richard Nixon, distrustful of the US "bureaucracy," sometimes met privately with Kremlin
leader Leonid Brezhnev while only Brezhnev's translator was present.
Nor should we forget the national-security benefits that have come from private meetings between US and Kremlin leaders. In October
1986, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev met alone with their translators and an American official who took
notes -- the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished. The result,
in 1987, was the first and still only treaty abolishing an entire category of such weapons, the exceedingly dangerous intermediate-range
ones. (This is the historic treaty Trump has said he may abrogate.)
And yet, congressional zealots are now threatening to subpoena the American translator who was present during Trump's meetings
with Putin. If this recklessness prevails, it will be the end of the nuclear-superpower summit diplomacy that has helped to keep
America and the world safe from catastrophic war for nearly 70 years -- and as a new, more perilous nuclear arms race between the
two countries is unfolding. It will amply confirm a thesis set out in my book
War with Russia? -- that anti-Trump
Russiagate allegations have become the gravest threat to our security.
The following correction and clarification were made to the original version of this article on January 17: Reagan and Gorbachev
met privately with translators during their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland, in October 1986, not February, and Reagan was also accompanied
by an American official who took notes. And it would be more precise to say that the two leaders, despite their disagreements, agreed
in principle that nuclear weapons should be abolished.
Stephen F. Cohen is professor emeritus of politics and Russian studies at Princeton and NYU and author of the new book
War with Russia? From Putin and
Ukraine to Trump and Russiagate . This commentary is based on the most recent of his weekly discussions of the new US-Russian
Cold War with the host of the John Batchelor radio show. (The podcast is
here . Previous installments, now in their fifth year, are at
TheNation.com . )
The Soviet war in Afghanistan lasted nine years. But it was largely successful in building
a stable government and the Soviets left a mostly competent Afghan military behind. Three
years later Russia ended its financial support for the Afghan government. Only that gave the
guerrilla the chance to destroy the state.
After 18 years in Afghanistan the U.S. military seems still unable to create and train
competent local forces.
The $8 billion spent on the
Afghan airforce have resulted in a mostly incapable force that depends on U.S. contractors to
keep its birds flying. This was the result of unreasonable decisions:
Aviation experts have criticized a decision to phase out the old workhorses of the Afghan
forces -- Russian-made Mi-17 helicopters -- for American-made UH-60 Black Hawks.
Mr. Michel, the retired general, said the Mi-17 was "the perfect helicopter" for
Afghanistan because it can carry more troops and supplies than the Black Hawk and is less
complicated to fly.
"Let's be candid," he said of the switch. "That was largely done for political
reasons."
The U.S. military built an Afghan force in its own image:
American trainers have built an Afghan Army that relies heavily on air power that the air
force might not be able to provide for years, said John F. Sopko, the special inspector
general for Afghan reconstruction.
Why the U.S. military, which since Vietnam proved inept at fighting local guerrilla,
believed that its ways of fighting suits an Afghan force is inexplicable. If the Taliban
manage to win without an airforce why should the Afghan military need one?
As Mr. Khan was driven away for questioning, he watched his home go up in flames. Within
were the bodies of two of his brothers and of his sister-in-law Khanzari, who was shot
three times in the head. Villagers who rushed to the home found the burned body of her
3-year-old daughter, Marina, in a corner of a torched bedroom.
The men who raided the family's home that March night, in the district of Nader Shah
Kot, were members of an Afghan strike force trained and overseen by the Central
Intelligence Agency in a parallel mission to the United States military's, but with looser
rules of engagement.
... ... ...
that the two most effective and ruthless forces, in Khost and Nangarhar Provinces, are
still sponsored mainly by the C.I.A.
This conflict between militarized CIA proxy forces and forces trained by the U.S. military
played out in every recent war the U.S. waged. In Iraq CIA sponsored Shia units clashed with
Pentagon sponsored Sunni militia. In Syria this CIA trained 'rebels' ended up shooting at
U.S. military trained 'rebels' and vice versa. In Afghanistan the rogue force under CIA
control is some 3.000 to 10,000 strong. It large alienates the same population the Afghan
military tries to protect.
Unity of command is an important condition for successful military campaigns. As the
military works in one direction while the CIA pulls in another one, the campaign in
Afghanistan continues to fail.
A similar split can be seen in Afghanistan's political field. The CIA is notorious for
bribing Afghan politicians, while the military launches anti-corruption campaigns. The
political system installed by such competing forces is unsustainable.
The last Afghan election with the top candidates being the Pashto Ashraf Ghani and the
Tajik Abdullah Abdullah, was marred in irregularities. The uncertain outcome led the U.S. to
fudge the results by making Ghani president and Abudullah his 'chief executive'. Both are now
again
competing against each other in the elections that are to be held later this year. They
will be as irregular as all elections in Afghanistan are. The disputed outcome might well
lead to new clashes between ethnic groups.
This upcoming conflict will further weaken the Afghan state. Why hasn't anything be done
to prevent it?
@1 @3
While appearing weak, incompetent and clueless the US implements chaos exactly as
intended. It works in Congo, it works in Libya, it works in South America and it works in
Afghanistan. Chaos is very profitable for extracting resources and supplying and controlling
the world narcotic business.
The USA goal is an incompetent state, a permanent war and the destruction of any stable
Afghan government that could make relations with neighboring states. Permanent conflict
prevents unity and transnational trade through the region. Same goes for the Baluchistan
rebels in the south.
Isolate Iran is all and no strategic care or thinking about anything else.
The USA will fight until the last Afghani civilian is killed.
"... The whole affair is psyop, we know that already ..."
"... Stranger and stranger British press is saying that they did CPR on both victims at the scene of their collapse; being a trained nurse one of the first things they would have done is to have taken their pulse and other vitals and miraculously managed to do this and not become contaminated. Methinks something doth stink! ..."
"... Before any free-trade agreement can be reached with the United States, the Queen must issue a written apology to President Trump for attempting to overthrow his government. ..."
The case of poisoned double-agent Sergei Skripal just got weirder after it was revealed that
the first responder to the scene was the Chief Nursing Officer for the British Army after he
daughter spotted Skripal and his daughter collapsed on a bench at the Maltings shopping center
in Salisbury on March 5 of last year.
According to
Spire FM , 16-year-old Abigail McCourt spotted the poisoned Russians while "out celebrating
her brother's birthday," and then quickly alerted her mother - Alison McCourt. The two McCourts
gave first aid to the Skripals until paramedics arrived.
Colonel McCourt - who was decorated
for her efforts to fight Ebola in Sierra Leone, proposed her daughter as a candidate for the
Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards.
"As a qualified nurse it was a fairly routine situation for me but my daughter was amazing.
Her prompt actions, spotting them in difficulty, and the way she assisted me to put Yulia
Skripal in the recovery position had a significant impact on the outcome of the two victims , "
said Alison of her daughter.
The coincidence - kept under wraps for nearly a year , is sure to give skeptics plenty of
new ammunition to refute the official narrative that Russia attempted to kill Skripal 10 years
after the voluntarily gave him up in a spy exchange with the UK.
... ... ...
Christopher Steele connection walked back
In an embarrassing walkback of a story from March 2018, The Telegraph now says that the
Kremlin laid a "false trail" linking Sergei Skripal to Christopher Steele - the former MI6 spy
who crafted the infamous anti-Trump "Steele Dossier" paid for by Hillary Clinton's
campaign.
The Telegraph understands that Col Skripal moved to Salisbury in 2010 in a spy swap and
became close to a security consultant employed by Christopher Steele, who compiled the Trump
dossier.
The British security consultant, according to a LinkedIn social network account that was
removed from the internet in the past few days, is also based in Salisbury.
On the same LinkedIn account, the man listed consultancy work with Orbis Business
Intelligence, according to reports. -
Telegraph
On Sunday that entire connection - which implied that Skripal was somehow involved with the
Steele Dossier, was
blamed on Russia .
Russian intelligence created a false trail linking the double agent Sergei Skripal to the
former MI6 officer behind the Trump dossier before carrying out the Salisbury nerve agent
attack, the Telegraph has been told.
Well-placed sources now believe that the plot to kill Col Skripal may have included a
'black ops' attempt to sow doubt on the veracity of the explosive dossier that claims Donald
Trump received Kremlin backing.
The year before the attempted assassination of Col Skripal, a mysterious post on LinkedIn
suggested his MI6 handler, who is not being named, worked as a "senior analyst" at Orbis
Business Intelligence, the firm that produced the Trump dossier.
...
But a number of sources have told The Telegraph that the LinkedIn profile is false - if it
ever properly existed at all - and that Skripal's MI6 handler never worked for Orbis.
It is now suspected that the LinkedIn profile was created by the GRU, the Russian military
intelligence unit which tried to kill Col Skripal with novichok nerve agent. -
Telegraph
"By creating this link, they are suggesting that MI6 are involved with the dossier or
Skripal or both. It adds to the confusion and acts as a wedge between the White House and
Downing Street. It is exactly the kind of operation the Russians would order to sow confusion,"
said the Telegraph 's "well placed source."
"An internet hyperlink to the LinkedIn page appeared in an obscure blog posting in January
2017 - more than a year before the Salisbury attack - but the actual LinkedIn page itself has
never been visible ," the Telegraph writes.
In other words, The Telegraph wrote an entire story in March of last year based on nothing
more than "an internet hyperlink to the LinkedIn page" without actually having viewed the
profile now blamed on a Russian black op.
But there was another possibility - one that is utterly ludicrous and now disproved - that
was none the less championed by conspiracy theorists. Namely, that the death of Col Skripal
was not ordered by the Kremlin at all - but carried out by British agents to silence the
former Russian intelligence officer.
The reason was simple. Col Skripal - so the theory went - had helped provide information
to Christopher Steele, a former senior MI6 officer, who authored an extraordinary dossier on
Donald Trump, alleging that the soon-to-be president was effectively a puppet of Putin. The
dossier claimed that the Kremlin had been "cultivating, supporting and assisting Trump for at
least five years".
Oddly, however, a British spy named Pablo Miller was claimed by Russian media in 2007 as the MI6 agent
who recruited Skripal in 1995. Miller apparently works (or worked) for Orbis - though it is
unclear whether he is the same person noted in the original Telegraph report.
So - the British Army's head nurse was the first one to provide assistance to the dying
Russians, while Skripal's link to Christopher Steele is now thought to be part of a Russian
plot to discredit the Steele Dossier. Fascinating.
Fascinating??? Too much fantasy in this piece of fiction. The author seems uninterested in
going beyond trying to make it look like a fantasy James Bond. Surely someone can give the
'patient in difficulty' symptoms. Good grief, to categorize this fantasy story cooked up by
British Intel and hard-sell journalists, as NEWS. Is this the drivel we have to expect from
journalism schools?
M eye 6 is complicit in the Steele Dossier on Fake Russian collusion, Trying to cover a
big black eye from a so called British ally to USA that tried to run a coup on a sitting
president...
We always knew Pablo Miller worked for Orbis, Steele's consultancy, and was skripals
handler,
the article brings out the the nurses daughter sad Yulia Skripal was not breathing, was
dead, neither suffered any contact problems, unlike the policeman who was first on the scene
on the old story.
The 'actor based reality,' which has always been a tool for TPTB to use the fair and
balanced press to divide the public at large, utilizes much more than vast corps of
characters, writers, producers and directors as the psyops event coordinators executing
preplanned large scale operations to steer our perception with proven mind control tactics.
But, they're tactics have become so simple to spot by researchers as the templates are
basically similar and the plots of they're fake large scale events have become mind numbingly
ridiculous for any body paying attention to even the smallest amount of detail exposed in
these hoaxed
Wow, (((THEY))) sure LOVE gaslighting us. This mess of an attempt at an article shows how
******* stupid they really think we are. Even their warped version of one alternate theory
fits their ******** narrative. ******* absurd.
Porton Down is 8 miles...10 miles away? .. staff live in Salisbury...numbers of medical
staff deployed at PD and area will be large...Interesting is all.
Stranger and stranger British press is saying that they did CPR on both victims at the
scene of their collapse; being a trained nurse one of the first things they would have done
is to have taken their pulse and other vitals and miraculously managed to do this and not
become contaminated. Methinks something doth stink!
British authorities have refined to a whole new level offering bald faced lies and patent
absurdities with a dignified stiff upper lip. I have it from a highly placed source that
envious American and Israeli official and unofficial liars have been practicing posturing as
dignified and putting glue on their upper lips.
It's all a coincidence. In fact the word coincidence is an exaggeration. Because the
coincidences are happening more and more. Which makes them no longer a coincidence.
The previous alleged first responder was a policeman who became dangerously ill because
the novichok was so potent but strangely, this woman and her daughter suffered no ill
effects. I can only guess that due to her work with the British Army, she and her daughter
had fortunately and coincidentally been innoculated with a novichok antidote.
The house was on lockdown forever. Even if you are a trained nurse, doctor, emt, you are
out in a park with your family. What equipment are you carrying to defeat the effects of a
biological weapon??? And they weren't affected. Simply amazing.
Before any free-trade agreement can be reached with the United States, the Queen must
issue a written apology to President Trump for attempting to overthrow his government.
xxx 10 hours ago (Edited) Washington is having radioactive ambitions. This is the worst time
in history to pick a fight against Russia. They haven't been this motivated and ready to fight
against external threats than today.
If the cabal couldn't do it after 1989, they deserve a good spanking if they think they
could do it now.
Anyway this is also the worst of times for the USA to try to attack Russia given the
situation back home.
America is becoming more and more moronic by the day...
xxx 10 hours ago Wake up and quickly. xxx 8 hours ago After the forced dissolution of the
USSR in 1991 , America in all its perfidious and treacherous glory , promised that NATO ( their
auxiliary army ) would not move one inch towards the Russian border....ever ! In true American
honesty , they kept their word until the ink was nearly dry and instantly started surrounding
Russia with hundreds of military bases. However , their arrogance and childlike
superciliousness led them to take their eye of the ball.....they really believed that they were
" The Indispensable Nation ". Russia , determined never to be humiliated again , quietly began
to develop 21st century weaponry and is now years ahead of America.
America can be as bombastic and militaristic as they like, but recent developments in the ME
has shown the awakened world that they are a spent force verging on bankruptcy and their future
is similar to what they had planned for Russia .....corruption , decay and disintegration !!!
xxx 8 hours ago (Edited) Yes it did and there was no ink to dry. It appears it was a verbal
promise. That is Gorbi's excuse which I think is BS. Gorbi is an agent thus he got his
foundation in San Francisco (don't tell anyone) later on.
on the other hand the USA is in a financial shitstorm. I'm guessing there is one brother who
wants to "nuke it" and the other brother is like, well lets not do that..
because anyone who is promised a piece of russia eats their nukes 11 hours ago Until the US
collapses on it's own accord there will be plenty of exceptional kool aid drinking small ****
clowns from the one exceptional nation on the planet that will push for war and destruction to
"keep us safe" and "kill them over there so they don't do it here." Plenty of idiots out there
that believe the outrageous military budget is a "small price to pay for our freedom" and
others who say we don't spend anywhere near enough. USA USA USA never wrong always right.
Ah yes, our freedoms that we must cherish. Our cars, phones, and internet devices squeal on
us. Cops and the IRS stealing your money and property with no charges levied. In one instance
the cops staked out nurseries and if you bought too much fertilizer it was assumed you were
growing pot. Based only on this the cops got a warrant and in the dead of night and busted into
the home of 2 ex CIA employees and handcuffed and terrorized these people as they tore their
house apart. Nothing was found as these people were not growing pot there or anywhere. Or some
loser in LA calling the the Wichita KS cops giving a local Wichita address claiming he already
shot one person and was holding others hostage. All a big lie with an unarmed man shot dead by
the cops. One phone call to the cops, whether true or not, and your freedom evaporates. Or some
idiot hates you so doctors a video that goes viral and you lose your job, your friends shun
you, and hate mail piles up in your mailbox and your boss won't hire you back even when the
truth wins out.
As far as confiscation far too many believe it is connected to drug deals. Plenty of small
business owners had their money stolen by the IRS because they were making regular cash
deposits under 10 grand and the banks were required to turn them in. In the eyes of the IRS
with no other proof that money was from dealing drugs. Plenty of people stopped for minor
infraction so the cops toss the car and if you're carrying a bunch of cash, even if you can
produce a withdrawl slip, it's confiscated as you must have acquired it dealing drugs. Happened
to one guy buying a car from a seller who would take only cash. In one instance they caught a
kid dealing drugs and confiscated and sold his parents house even though he did not make any
deals in the house, they couldn't prove it but assumed he did, nor were drugs found there. No
charges filed. Ah, but the DA's and cops say they are underfunded and need to do crime to fight
crime. Like giving themselves raises and vacations and having parties. Or your local cops
stocking up on hard core military hardware.
7 hours ago It's quite stunning that in the 'Land of The Free' the police routinely steal
citizens wealth as they want to. I'm not sure even the Robber Baron's in Europe hundreds of
years ago were that blatant.
Is there a plan to prevent this? A Union of decent people to join the police to force the
rotten core out and to form shell companies that safeguard people's possessions?
If not: why not make one now.
11 hours ago Lebensraum?
Were the National Worker's Socialist Party and the Third Reich on the right trail?
11 hours ago This has been the policy since the Clinton years. Nothing new here. 12 hours ago
(Edited) This Janusz Bugajski dude is a generic Russophobe of Polish descent. His irrational
hatred of all-things Russian is typical of the rabid Catholic Poles who've invaded Orthodox
Christian Russia multiple times over the last millennia.
In fact, in the early 17th century, during Russia's "Time of Troubles", the Catholic Poles,
with the Pope's blessing, invaded Russia several times burning hundreds of villages across
Russia while slaughtering many thousands of innocent ethnic Russian men, women, and children
when they wouldn't convert to Catholicism. This culminated in 1611 when the Poles nearly burned
Moscow to the ground.
After what the Catholic Poles (and various fk'ing Popes) have done to Orthodox Christian
Russians over the centuries, who can blame the Russians for wanting a little payback after WW2.
12 hours ago Russia owes the Poles trillions in reparations. A moar satanic betrayal is hard to
find as occurred in the period of 1939-1945. 11 hours ago
(Edited) Reparations can work both ways, particularly in Europe with its millennia-long history
of back-and-forth wars between nations.
Dependent upon what you define as the statue of limitations, are war reparations pegged to
the last century, three centuries, five centuries, etc ?. Be careful what you ask for; the
Catholic Poles have a nasty violent history that goes back many centuries, long before the USSR
ever existed.
If there's one thing everyone in today's Washington can agree on, it's that whenever an
official or someone being paid by the government says something truly outrageous or dangerous,
there should be consequences, if only a fleeting moment of media fury.
With one notable exception: Arguing that the US should be quietly working to promote the
violent disintegration and carving up of the largest country on Earth.
Because so much of the discussion around US-Russian affairs is marked by hysteria and
hyperbole, you are forgiven for assuming this is an exaggeration. Unfortunately it isn't.
Published in the Hill under the dispassionate title "Managing
Russia's dissolution," author Janusz Bugajski makes the case that the West should not only
seek to contain "Moscow's imperial ambitions" but to actively seek the dismemberment of Russia
as a whole.
Engagement, criticism and limited sanctions have simply reinforced Kremlin perceptions
that the West is weak and predictable. To curtail Moscow's neo-imperialism a new strategy is
needed, one that nourishes Russia's decline and manages the international consequences of its
dissolution.
Like many contemporary cold warriors, Bugajski toggles back and forth between overhyping
Russia's might and its weaknesses, notably a lack of economic dynamism and a rise in ethnic and
regional fragmentation. But his primary argument is unambiguous: That the West should actively
stoke longstanding regional and ethnic tensions with the ultimate aim of a dissolution of the
Russian Federation, which Bugajski dismisses as an "imperial construct."
The rationale for dissolution should be logically framed: In order to survive, Russia
needs a federal democracy and a robust economy; with no democratization on the horizon and
economic conditions deteriorating, the federal structure will become increasingly
ungovernable...
To manage the process of dissolution and lessen the likelihood of conflict that spills
over state borders, the West needs to establish links with Russia's diverse regions and
promote their peaceful transition toward statehood.
Even more alarming is Bugajski's argument that the goal should not be self-determination for
breakaway Russian territories, but the annexing of these lands to other countries . "Some
regions could join countries such as Finland, Ukraine, China and Japan, from whom Moscow has
forcefully appropriated territories in the past."
It is, needless to say, impossible to imagine anything like this happening without sparking
a series of conflicts that could mirror the Yugoslav Wars. Except in this version the US would
directly culpable in the ignition of the hostilities, and in range of 6,800 Serbian nuclear
warheads.
So who is Janusz Bugajski, and who is he speaking for?
The author bio on the Hill's piece identifies him as a senior fellow at the Center for
European Policy Analysis, a Washington, D.C. think-tank. But CEPA is no ordinary talk shop:
Instead of the usual foundations and well-heeled individuals, its financial backers seem to be mostly arms of the US
government, including the Department of State, the Department of Defense, the US Mission to
NATO, the US-government-sponsored National Endowment for Democracy, as well as as veritable
who's who of defense contractors, including Raytheon, Bell Helicopter, BAE Systems, Lockheed
Martin and Textron. Meanwhile, Bugajski chairs the South-Central Europe area studies program at
the Foreign Service Institute of the US Department of State.
To put it in perspective, it is akin to a Russian with deep ties to the Kremlin and
arms-makers arguing that the Kremlin needed to find ways to break up the United States and, if
possible, have these breakaway regions absorbed by Mexico and Canada. (A scenario which alas is
not as far-fetched as it might have been a few years ago; many thousands in California now
openly talk of a "Calexit," and many more in Mexico of a reconquista .)
Meanwhile, it's hard to imagine a quasi-official voice like Bugajski's coming out in favor
of a similar policy vis-a-vis China, which has its own restive regions, and which in
geopolitical terms is no more or less of a threat to the US than Russia. One reason may be that
China would consider an American call for secession by the Tibetans or Uyghurs to be a serious
intrusion into their internal affairs, unlike Russia, which doesn't appear to have noticed or
been ruffled by Bugajski's immodest proposal.
Indeed, just as the real scandal in Washington is what's legal rather than illegal, the real
outrage in this case is that few or none in DC finds Bugajski's virtual declaration of war
notable.
But it is. It is the sort of provocation that international incidents are made of, and if
you are a US taxpayer, it is being made in your name, and it should be among your outrages of
the month.
Putin knows that if he ignores the West and provides strong path for Russia growth,
re-building economy, manufacturing and military; building international relationships - it
will strengthen the country in a horror of it's enemies.
While others panicked over drop in oil prices - Putin was making adjustments to weather
out the storm. While many nations were taking out massive development loans [advised by city,
chase, goldman, etc] - Russia balanced the budget. While US government is in mayhem over
protecting the border [seems like no brainer] - Putin continues with strong central policy.
And the US sanction that crushed so many countries - appears to have limited effect [slowing
down some growth].
This author, Bugajski, [MI5 agent] wrote countless self-promoting books. Russia will never
want to fight a war with NATO [their customers]. Britain and France already lost that war.
Russia is just waiting for EU and NATO to collapse over money disagreement. Because they were
all happy as long as US was paying for all of it. Not anymore. Standby for Collapse of EU and
NATO show coming soon.
The Russian Confederation of Labour (KTR) says that the average life expectancy for men is
actually less than 65-years-old in over 60 regions in Russia. "KTR does not support such
decisions and declares its intention to launch a broad public campaign against their
implementation," the organization said in a statement .
You start off with "Putin is a cuck" which may or may not be a fact but if you actually
read the article it clearly states "President Medvedev" and raising the retirement age
from...wait for it... 60 to 63?? Really??
Most west european countries have a retirment age of around 65 years. In scandinavic
countries they are going to increase to 67. They realized that importing rapefugees is not
going to solve the demographic crisis.
"... Even as I was finishing this piece off, yet another round of nonsense was unleashed; this time, the news that the roof of 47 Christie Miller Road (including the roof of the study) is to be taken off and replaced. Remember, we're talking about a substance that can be cleansed with baby wipes. Remember, we're talking about a substance that apparently breaks down after 80 minutes of exposure to the air. But 11 months later, it is again so deadly, that a whole roof needs replacing! Of course the media is not bothering to ask the obvious questions about this action, such as: How exactly could the roof timbers have become contaminated? Who could have contaminated them? D.S. Bailey? But why would he have been in the attic? Why is the ceiling / roof in Zizzis [restaurant] not being replaced? Why has the roof in The Mill [pub] not been dismantled? What was really in the attic? Obvious questions, yet none of them will be asked. ..."
Next twist in the ongoing Skripal poisoning soap opera saga - it seems to be turning out
that way - must surely be an autobiography publishing deal for Abby McCourt, with the book
having a working title of "I Was A Teenage Frontline Emergency Responder in the Fight
against Putin, Novichok and Russia".
@ Paveway IV Post 1
Curiouser and curiouser goes the tale; apparently it was not just the door handle -
John Helmer's post, January 17th, 2019 on "The British state broadcaster BBC and other media have disclosed that the Salisbury
house (lead image) owned by Sergei Skripal is to be partially demolished and rebuilt over
the next four months."
a very long piece and a worthy read. the last three paragraphs tells all -
The second conclusion is that it was Skripal who exposed himself to a poison he was
handling inside the house. That he did so by accident is likely; the accident theory was
first reported here, on March 25, 2018.
The only independent British investigator of the affair, Rob Slane, has announced that
he is retiring from the case. Here is his last word.
" Even as I was finishing this piece off, yet another round of nonsense was
unleashed; this time, the news that the roof of 47 Christie Miller Road (including the
roof of the study) is to be taken off and replaced. Remember, we're talking about a
substance that can be cleansed with baby wipes. Remember, we're talking about a
substance that apparently breaks down after 80 minutes of exposure to the air. But 11
months later, it is again so deadly, that a whole roof needs replacing! Of course the
media is not bothering to ask the obvious questions about this action, such as: How
exactly could the roof timbers have become contaminated? Who could have contaminated
them? D.S. Bailey? But why would he have been in the attic? Why is the ceiling / roof
in Zizzis [restaurant] not being replaced? Why has the roof in The Mill [pub] not been
dismantled? What was really in the attic? Obvious questions, yet none of them will be
asked.
In conclusion, I think it abundantly clear that what we have been told about what
took place on 4th March in the beautiful city of Salisbury is not, in fact, true. It is
clear that something else happened, and much of what we have seen since then has been
theatre and an attempt to cover up what actually took place."
And, one last bit from the BBC report on March 8, 2018:
"...Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she
found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost
control of her bodily functions.
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the
recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.
She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical
agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.
The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added
that she "feels fine"
Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever...
And, one last bit from the BBC report on March 8, 2018:
"...Meanwhile, a doctor who was one of the first people at the scene has described how she
found Ms Skripal slumped unconscious on a bench, vomiting and fitting. She had also lost
control of her bodily functions.
The woman, who asked not to be named, told the BBC she moved Ms Skripal into the
recovery position and opened her airway, as others tended to her father.
She said she treated her for almost 30 minutes, saying there was no sign of any chemical
agent on Ms Skripal's face or body.
The doctor said she had been worried she would be affected by the nerve agent, but added
that she "feels fine"
Doctor, nurse, Chief Nursing Officer of the Army, whatever...
"... The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial. ..."
"... The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people", "Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence, fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified. ..."
"... The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important to them, and so dangerous us. ..."
Trump has been a disappointment to his base and is yet to implement half the policies he discussed on the campaign trail, but
he's not fully and totally being controlled by the warhawking Deep State yet, either. His policy of peace with North Korea and decisions
to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan show that there is a tug-of-war ongoing inside the administration. It's probably no coincidence
that this latest of many "bombshells" comes so quickly
on the heels of Trump's announcement of the Syria withdrawal. Careful "leaks", planted stories and social media witch-hunts remind
Trump how precarious his position is, whilst simultaneously distracting the public – both pro-Trump and anti-Trump – from real issues.
The case-specific "why?" doesn't matter so much as the general aim of this type of manipulation. The important question
is: Why does the media tell lies if they know they will be revealed as such? Clearly, the lies serve a purpose, regardless of their
retraction or qualification. Telling a lie loudly and then taking it back quietly is an old propaganda trick – it allows the paper
to maintain a facade of "accountability".
The point of this practice is to propagate lies into the public consciousness. It's a method that can be used to distract
and disseminate and divide. The accuracy of the statement is immaterial.
The point is, once it has been said it cannot be unsaid. There are countless examples: "Assange was working for Russia", "Trump
ordered Cohen to lie to Congress", "Russia hacked the US election", "Donald Trump worked for the KGB", "Assad gassed his own people",
"Jeremy Corbyn is an antisemite". The list goes on and on and on. None these have been proven. All were asserted without evidence,
fiercely defended as facts, and then discretely qualified.
That is the purpose of "fake news", to forge the Empire's
"created
reality" , and force us all to live in it. These are world-shaping, policy-informing, news-dominating narratives and are nothing
but feathers in the wind .
A perfect exemplar of this occurred just two days ago on the BBC's flagship Political debate show Question Time :
me title= The (notionally impartial) host not only sided with right-wing author Isabel Oakeshott in criticising
Labour's polling, but then joined in mocking the Labour MP Diane Abbott for attempting to correct the record. Both Oakeshott and
Fiona Bruce, the host, were
factually incorrect – as shown a hundred times over since. But that doesn't matter.
The lie was told, the audience laughed, the reality was created. "Labour are behind in the polls, anybody who says otherwise
is a laughingstock" . The lie goes around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on. That's why fake news is so important
to them, and so dangerous us.
Kit Knightly is co-editor of OffGuardian. The Guardian banned him from commenting. Twice. He used to write for fun, but now
he's forced to out of a near-permanent sense of outrage.
"... Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity. ..."
"... I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people ..."
It should be pointed out that the Integrity Initiative recently claimed on Twitter that some of the documents leaked in batch
#4 were not theirs and had been misrepresented as part of the organisation.
It doesn't really matter, though: all that we know, anti-socialist shills writing propaganda on behalf of II (Nimmo, Cohen,
Reid-Ross) have confirmed their own roles, and the Twitter account was proven to have pushed out slanderous material on Jeremy
Corbyn.
Note that "misrepresented" could have referred to the inclusion of the Corbyn slide show document which was presented at but
created by the II.
This organisation and all of those part of it should be treated as enemies of the people, as they have attacked, disingenuously
and using smears,
-Yellow Vests
– Jill Stein
-Jeremy Corbyn
-George Galloway
-Seuams Milne
-German Left Party
-French Left Party
-French Communist Party
-Greek Communist Party
-Podemos
-Norwegian Red Party
-Norwegian Socialist Left Party
-Swedish Left Party
-Swedish Greens
-International Anti-NATO Groups
-Greyzone Project
-Julian Assange
-MintPressNews
Via
-Infiltrating Corbyn and Sanders campaigns
-Inserting propaganda anonymously into local media including the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed, The Times, the Guardian, and more
-Using social media to orchestrate hate and dismissal campaigns against those mentioned above
-Hosting events for collaboration between members
-Building online "clusters" to deploy and shape discourse in the media and elsewhere
By repeating or openly collaborating with:
-Ben Nimmo
-Oz Katergi
-Anne Applebaum
-Peter Pomerantsev
-Bellingcat
-Atlantic Council
-Carole Cadwalladr
-David Aaronovitch
-Center For A Stateless Society
-PropOrNot
-Alexander Reid-Ross
-Nick Cohen
-Michael Weiss
-Jamie Fly
-Jamie Kirchick
Directed by:
-Tory Government
-NATO
-Facebook
-German Multinationals
Sedition is a crime and it is clear that the multiple seditious acts of II and IfS toward
many countries and with their band of controlled journalists was a deliberate and planned activity.
I don't expect any prosecutions but there is a chance of promotional impediments applying to some of those named. At least
for the next month. Every named employee of II and IfS is an enemy of democracy and its people.
Declassified documents show security assurances against NATO expansion to Soviet leaders
from Baker, Bush, Genscher, Kohl, Gates, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Hurd, Major, and Woerner
U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's famous "not one inch eastward" assurance about NATO
expansion in his meeting with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990, was part of
a cascade of assurances about Soviet security given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other
Soviet officials throughout the process of German unification in 1990 and on into 1991 ,
according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents posted today by
the National Security Archive at George Washington University ( http://nsarchive.gwu.edu ).
The documents show that multiple national leaders were considering and rejecting Central and
Eastern European membership in NATO as of early 1990 and through 1991 , that discussions of
NATO in the context of German unification negotiations in 1990 were not at all narrowly limited
to the status of East German territory, and that subsequent Soviet and Russian complaints
about being misled about NATO expansion were founded in written contemporaneous memcons and
telcons at the highest levels.
The documents reinforce former CIA Director Robert Gates's criticism of "pressing ahead with
expansion of NATO eastward [in the 1990s], when Gorbachev and others were led to believe that
wouldn't happen. "
[1] The key phrase, buttressed by the documents, is "led to believe."
President George H.W. Bush had assured Gorbachev during the Malta summit in December 1989
that the U.S. would not take advantage ("I have not jumped up and down on the Berlin Wall") of
the revolutions in Eastern Europe to harm Soviet interests; but neither Bush nor Gorbachev at
that point (or for that matter, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl) expected so soon the
collapse of East Germany or the speed of German unification.
[2]
The first concrete assurances by Western leaders on NATO began on January 31, 1990 , when
West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher opened the bidding with a major public
speech at Tutzing, in Bavaria, on German unification. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn (see Document 1)
informed Washington that Genscher made clear "that the changes in Eastern Europe and the German
unification process must not lead to an 'impairment of Soviet security interests.' Therefore,
NATO should rule out an 'expansion of its territory towards the east , i.e. moving it closer to
the Soviet borders.'" The Bonn cable also noted Genscher's proposal to leave the East German
territory out of NATO military structures even in a unified Germany in NATO.
[3]
https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/russia-programs/2017-12-12/nato-expansion-what-gorbachev-heard-western-leaders-early
falconflight 13 hours ago It was a horrible betrayal of a promise that should have been greatly
enhanced by promoting free enterprise concepts, and personal freedoms propaganda (Not lies),
and even economic assistance where reasonable. A historical opportunity lost. Those powerful
Kremlinologists couldn't pivot, it was easier to continue to treat Russia as an existential
adversary and in certain circumstances, purposely attempt to humiliate them, such as in
Serbia.
Imagine if, during President George W. Bush's occupation of Iraq, someone had predicted that
in about a decade, Republican voters would oppose war more than Democrats. Few would have
believed it.
Yet according to new polling, it's happening. It might even be President Donald Trump's
greatest accomplishment to date.
The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald broke down this new data in a recent piece in which he
claims Democrats are "
becoming far more militaristic and pro-war than Republicans ." Greenwald says that while
the overwhelming majority of Washington elites opposed -- or, more accurately, had a
total meltdown over -- Trump's December announcement that he would
withdraw U.S. troops from Syria, polling data from
Morning Consult/ Politico shows that 49 percent of Americans support the decision
while 33 percent oppose it.
Pluralities or
majorities of Americans
being tired of war is not new
. This is: "[W]hat is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of
support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and
independents overwhelming favor their removal," Greenwald writes.
"The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support
withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it," he notes.
And then the kicker: "Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14
percent."
Seventy-six percent? Think about that number. More than three quarters of GOP voters
today want to support the troops by bringing them home. A position that was once denounced as "
unpatriotic
" is now apparently part of making America great again.
Greenwald also notes that the poll shows similar results among those who voted Democrat in
the midterm election, with 28 percent supporting withdrawal and 54 percent opposing it.
"... An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have indoctrinated rather than educated. ..."
"... As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to have real effect. ..."
An excellent piece. I would add only that the so-called elites mentioned by Mr
Bacevich are largely the products of the uppermost stratum of colleges and universities, at
least in the USA, and that for a generation or more now, those institutions have
indoctrinated rather than educated.
As their more recent alumni move into government, media and cultural production, the
primitiveness of their views and their inability to think -- to say nothing of their
fundamental ignorance about our civilization other than that it is bad and evil -- begin to
have real effect. The new dark age is no longer imminent. It is here, and it is them. I
see no way to rectify the damage. When minds are ruined young, they remain ruined.
"... Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament. ..."
The UK government and other Western governments and the US in recent years have had increasing
difficulties persuading enough of their populations as to the legitimacy of the foreign
policies that they have been pursuing.
And at the same time, Western countries have been going through a period of political crisis
and economic crisis.
Piers Robinson, Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of
Sheffield, further explains:
I think a lot of this drive is as much about trying to shore up shaky official narratives and
trying to shore up political systems in a situation of political crisis, as it is actually
about countering Russian propaganda.
I would suspect that that's a little bit of an excuse here to really what's going on of
problems much closer to home. This is not just to do to UK, this is Europe-wide. And there are also indications from the
documents that they are intending to start to have some kind of impact within the United
States. So, it's a very wide-ranging network that seems to be established.
The reason why it needs to be covert, of course, is that if a media organization, or if a
journalist is to let on that he, or she, is involved in a program, which quite clearly is
pushing a particular agenda, then the credibility of that journalist will be damaged.
And this is really what is very deceptive about the Integrity Initiative . It's about
co-opting journalists and academics into, essentially, a campaign, which appears to be a
propaganda campaign, in order to manipulate opinions.
And the only way that can really work effectively, is if readers and viewers don't know that
what they're reading is something which has emerged from a particular political agenda.
Recall that, leaked documents passed to the Sunday Mail reveal Integrity
Initiative is funded with £2million of Foreign Office cash and run by military
intelligence specialists. Politicians and academics have reacted with fury to news a covert
Government-funded unit had been attacking the official opposition in Parliament.
So, it's not accidental that the organized and systematic propaganda campaign against labour
party has actually started under Corbyn's leadership. And that the campaign contains a lot of
personal attacks against the leader of the Labour party. That's because, of course, Jeremy
Corbyn is driving the party out of the neoliberal machine that has been dominating the UK
politics for decades.
But it seems that the agents of the neoliberal establishment are really desperate as they see
that the new narratives are not particularly successful.
It would not be exaggerating to suggest that the attacks against Leftist leaders like Jeremy
Corbyn and Bernie Sanders essentially bring the opposite effect. That's because especially the
younger generations have turned their back to the mainstream media.
And they understand that the more the media attack Corbyn and Sanders, the stronger the
indication that these leaders are not part of the neoliberal establishment that ruined their
lives becomes.
Today I participated in a nice web-based program started by the Central Bank of Russia (it
will be posted soon). An economist is being interviewed by another, and then the one who has
been interviewed becomes in his/her turn the interviewer of yet a third one. My friend Shlomo
Weber, the head of the New School of Economics interviewed me, and then I interviewed
Professor Natalya Zubarevich, from the Lomonosov Moscow State University and a noted scholar
of Russian regional economics.
Just a couple of days ago Natalia gave a very well-received talk at the Gaidar Forum in
Moscow on (what one might call) "unhealthy convergence" of Russian regions. In fact, Natalia
shows that most recently regional per capita GDPs have started a mild convergence, but that
this is due first to low growth rate of most of them and the economy as a whole, and to the
redistribution mechanism (mostly of the oil rent) between the regions. A healthy convergence,
Natalia says, would be the one where economic activity, and especially small and medium size
private businesses, were much more equally distributed across some ninety subjects of the
Russian Federation. She also had very interesting insights into the excessive
"verticalization" of economic power and decision-making in Russia, and the economic growth of
Moscow (much faster than of any other part of Russia) driven by centralization of that power,
and concentration of large state-owned or state-influenced enterprises as well as bureaucracy
in Moscow.
What most attracted my attention during Natalia's presentation at the Gaidar Forum was her
description of the current period of low growth rates in Russia as zastoi, or stagnation.
Now, zastoi has a very special political meaning in Russian because it was a disparaging term
used in the Gorbachev era, and by Gorbachev himself, to define the Brezhnevite period of
declining growth rates, lack of development perspectives, unchanging bureaucracy, and general
demoralization and malaise.
But I asked Natalia the following question. Looking over the past 150 years of Russian
history (and I think it is hard to go further back), were not really the best periods for
ordinary people exactly the periods of zastoi: incomes rose by little for sure, but the state
repression was weak, there were no wars, and probably if you look at violent deaths per
capita per year, the lowest number of people died precisely during the periods of zastoi. So
perhaps that zastoi is not so bad.
Natalia said, "I know I lived through the Brezhnevite period. Many people were
demoralized; but I used it to study. I never read so many books and learned so much as then
-- you could do whatever you wanted because your actual job really did not matter much."
(Even art, as I saw in the Tretyakovska Gallery, even if some of these paintings were never
exhibited in the official museums, seems to have done well during the Brezhnevite zastoi. And
as the recent film, which I have not seen, but read the reviews, Leto, appears to indirectly
argue as well.)
The best growth periods, as Natalia said, and as is generally accepted by economic
historians were the 1950s up to about 1963-65, and then the period of the two first Putin's
terms. In both cases, the growth spurs came as a ratchet effect to the previous set of
disasters: in the Khrushchev period, to the apocalypse of the Second World War, in the Putin
period, as a reaction to the Great Depression under Yeltsin during the early transition.
So this then made us think a bit back into the past (say, going back to 1905) and put
forward the following hypothesis: that Russian longer-term economic growth is cyclical. The
cycle has three components. First a period of utter turbulence, disorder, war, and huge loss
of income (and in many cases of life as well), followed by a decade or so of efflorescence,
recovery and growth, and finally by the period of "calcification" of whatever (or whoever)
that worked in that second period -- thus producing the zastoi or stagnation.
I do not know if this is something specific to the Russian economic history. It made me
think of Naipaul's observation on successful and unsuccessful countries. The history of the
former consists of a number of challenges and setbacks indeed, but certain things are solved
forever, and then new challenges appear. Take the United States: the Indian challenge and
then the independence from Britain were not easy to overcome/acquire, but eventually, they
were and they never came back; then the Civil War and the Emancipation; then the Great
Society etc. But unsuccessful countries, according to Naipaul (and he had, I think, Argentina
in mind) always stay within the circular history. The same or similar events keep on
repeating themselves forever without any upward trend -- and no single challenge is forever
overcome. In each following cycle everything simply repeats itself.
The challenges for Russia today is, I think, to break this cycle.
Russia's PL-19 Nudol, a system U.S. military
intelligence assesses will be focused primarily on anti-satellite missions, was successfully
tested twice in 2018. The weapon, which was fired from a mobile launcher, was last tested on
Dec. 23 and marked the seventh overall test of the system, according to one of the people who
spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The Russian anti-satellite weapon is expected to target communication and imagery satellites
in low Earth orbit, according to the other person, who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
For reference, the International Space Station and the Hubble Space Telescope travel in low
Earth orbit.
While anti-satellite missiles are by no means new, the latest revelation comes less than a
year after Putin touted his nation's growing military arsenal.
"I want to tell all those who have fueled the arms race over the last 15 years, sought to
win unilateral advantages over Russia, introduced unlawful sanctions aimed to contain our
country's development: You have failed to contain Russia," Putin said during a national address
in March.
A recently unclassified report from the National Air and Space Intelligence Center, or
NASIC, explained how the U.S. advantage above the Earth's atmosphere is eroding to "an emergent
China and a resurgent Russia."
The NASIC report said there number of foreign intelligence and imaging satellites "has
tripled" to 300 in orbit in the last two decades. The U.S. itself has 353 of its own space
assets in orbit for those purposes. In response, military superpowers have poured funding into
researching and developing anti-satellite weapons.
Missiles are the most high-profile, physical manifestation of anti-satellite weapons. Frank
Slazer, the vice president of space systems at the Aerospace Industries Association, told CNBC
about how those missiles may be physically effective, but are likely not the "first line of
approach on this."
"You'd much rather jam the satellite, blind it [with a laser], or take over its control
systems with a cyberattack," Slazer said. "Kinetic impacts could cause problems for other
nations, besides the one you are attacking, and possibly for your own system's for many years
afterwards."
Both Slazer and the NASIC report pointed to the example of China's anti-satellite test in
2007. China fired an anti-satellite missile at one of its own, discarded weather satellites.
The test was successful, but the satellite shattered into thousands of pieces, which continue
to zip around in an orbital cloud of deadly debris.
"A huge percentage of the debris in low earth orbit is still attributable to that one test,"
Slazer said.
As far as the U.S. military's ability to defend against anti-satellite weapons, the assets
and capabilities in orbit "are the same as they have been for awhile," Tommy Sanford, director
of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, told CNBC.
Sanford contends that there has not been much in the way of progress when it comes to
defending U.S. space-based assets. Sanford gave the example of using networks of smaller and
cheaper satellites, like cubesats and nanosats, to offer "effective platforms to augment and
support missions carried out by the DoD's larger exquisite satellites."
"The idea behind a distributed architecture for space support is – instead of having
one exquisite target – you'd have a system which could presumably survive some loss of
its elements and still be able to provide function," Slazer said.
You know there's a lot of rampant insanity sloshing around when every time there's a
debate about potential threats to the US, whether it starts with Russia, China, NK, or (?),
the Neocons rarely fail to include Iran.
I've been wondering what's fueling their obsession, given that Iran has never threatened
"Israel." The dominant factor which comes to mind is the Holocaust Conference held in Tehran
in 2006 to examine the numerous inconsistencies in the Official Narrative.
The conference was organised as a series lectures based on detailed research undertaken by
the speaker, or a spokesman for an organisation which had undertaken research into the
subject.
Much of the info consisted of statistical analysis of pre & post Holocaust population
factors which cast 'doubt' on the magnitude of various and varying claims made in the
Official Story.
At the end of the conference all of the 'papers' delivered during the conference were
published online and some of them were very well researched and very persuasive. In the
aftermath there were many objections from the 'usual suspects' which, instead of attempting
to refute the published findings, confined themselves to smearing the convenors and
participants. I found this response to be disappointing, lazy and stupid; and tantamount to
an endorsement, by default, of the findings.
It was NEVER the subject of public debate of any note or duration and was quickly 'forgotten'
by the MSM. However, despite the forgetfulness, Iran appears not to have been forgiven.
If a country ruled by a Muslim theocracy tolerates large numbers of Jews living in its
territory, that in itself contradicts Israel's claim to be the only country in the Middle
East that offers Jews the freedom, stability and security to worship as they wish. Israel
offered money to Iranian Jews to move but the Iranian Jewish community rebuffed the offer,
saying it considers itself Iranian first and Jewish second and its identity is not for
sale. https://www.haaretz.com/1.4952371
The fact that a Muslim theocratic state hosts a large Jewish community represents an
existential threat to Israel. Why does Israel need to exist for then, if other countries can
host Jewish communities so well that they don't feel they need to move?
I remember reading several years ago that Israel offered cash incentives to the French
Jewish community and that community also knocked back the offers. Since then France has had a
number of terrorist attacks - guess what those have done to the French Jewish community? https://edition.cnn.com/2016/01/22/middleeast/france-israel-jews-immigration/index.html
Iran has the second largest Jewish population in the Middle East after Israel.
...
Posted by: Jen | Jan 18, 2019 11:36:14 PM | 48
Thanks for the timely reminder.
I forgot all about Iran's Jewish citizens but, now that you've jogged my memory, I do recall
looking it up in 2006 and discovering the fact you've reiterated.
It begs a lot of questions about Jewish Unity, doesn't it?
It also reminds me of a rant by Gilad Atzmon called Judea Declares War On Obama. I haven't
posted a link because it's easy to find on the www. Suffice to say that it's about the
prelude to the Holocaust and is ... unflattering...
I dont call 12-15K Jews in a large country an existential threat to Israel.
Zionism was unpopular among most Jews, orthodox and assimilated Jews alike, up until the
holocaust. Without Hitler there never would be an Israel today
"... But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner. ..."
"... Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere. ..."
"... That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day. ..."
"... Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease ..."
"... what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals. ..."
"... The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU. ..."
"... Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing. ..."
"... Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018: ..."
"... The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok. ..."
"... The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites. ..."
"... It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state. ..."
"... So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army? ..."
"... Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why..... ..."
"... Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason. ..."
"... Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair. ..."
"... reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war. ..."
"... 'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'! ..."
On March 4 2018 the British/Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were found incapacitated on a bench in Salisbury. The British government asserts that they were affected by a chemical poison
of the so called Novichok group. The case led to a diplomatic conflict as Britain accused Russia of an attempt to kill the
Skripals. No evidence was provided by the British government to support those accusations. The Skripals have since been
vanished.
Today an intriguing new detail of the case came to light. Spire FM , a local
radio station in Salisbury,
reports of a young woman, Abigail McCourt, who was given a 'Lifesaver Award' for her
involvement in the Skripal case:
The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in
the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a
qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until
paramedics arrived.
It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a
former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.
...
Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the
pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.
But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the
"incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award
at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that
Abigail was a very worthy winner.
Earlier reports mentioned that a 'military nurse' had attended to the Skripals. Following
the above report Elena Evdokimova checked the name of the young women's mothers and found a
curiosity:
We were right, it was Alison McCourt who was that"unknown military nurse" who,
absolutely randomly, happened to be near the bench where #Skripals collapsed . Spire FM
alleges that it was her daughter Abigail alerted her, but no one mentioned her before
...
Colonel A L McCourt OBE ARRC QHN - Assistant Head Health Strategy / Chief Nursing Officer
(Army) - Senior Health Advisor (Army) Department.
Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month
before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some
11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere.
As I read this I had two thoughts. The first one is that the Brits have lost the competence
they once had with this stuff. "Operation Mincemeat" was, according to all accounts, a marvel
in planning, execution, and getting the desired reactions from the German High Command. The
"Double-Cross System" turned the extremely risky invasion at Normandy into a success. The
recent stuff is a comedy by comparison.
excellent reporting.. still we have little written collaborative evidence.. just as in 9/11
just top dogs saying improbable things.
What seems to me important now is to develop as you have done a set of hypotheses. and to
hack at them until we hit the ones which all evidence cannot dispute. Using your summary I
rewrite in hypothesis form,
hypothesis 1: Steele's dirty dossier is not related to the Skripal case.
hypothesis 2: Steele's dossier is not the result of an integrity initiative.
hypothesis 3: Downing street personnel were not involved in integrity initiative
hypothesis 4: media reported only supportable facts.
hypothesis 5: Neither the USA or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Israel or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 7: Neither Saudi Arabia or any of its Arab partners were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Republicans or Democrats in America were involved.
hypothesis 8: the FBI had no part in this.
hypothesis 9: Developing sufficient misinformation to justify attacking Nord 2
pipeline was not one of the objectives of the integrity initiative.
hypothesis 10: No private interest supported organizing a false flag op against
Russia
Too good. That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of
human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing
day.
Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent
battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics
and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease.
what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against
ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the
Skripals.
Coincidence? Probably like most here, I think not. But isn't this something of an own goal?
If indeed things are as we suspect, why would you put the daughter up for an award? Wouldn't
you want the can of worms this presents to remain unopened? Can they be this incompetent?
Well, looking at the Brexit process, I guess we know the answer to that last by now
rhetorical question.
The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for
the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange
that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the
poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU.
b, you are too suspicious. Nothing to see here.
Clearly way beyond a serious matter, this dastardly attack on Skripals by the Soviets, er,
the Russians, er, Putin.
In Canada our eloquent foreign Minister, in a barrage of outraged talking the talk that
was accompanied by making four Russian diplomats walk the walk home, said in words that will
surely take their high place in the history of inspired speeches, along with Churchill's
'Never have so many done so much for so few', and MLK's 'I have a nightmare':
And her words re the March 4 nerve agent attack on a close ally and partner of Canada "a
despicable, heinous and reckless act" that potentially endangered the lives of hundreds"
Strange - no military hospital in Salisbury but then there aren't military hospitals in
Britain anymore. Instead the military use civilian hospitals with a Ministry of Defence
Hospital Unit attached but none near Salisbury. The Ministry of Defence Hospital Units do not
treat operational casualties who are treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at
Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Birmingham. You'd think the Chief Nursing Officer for the
British Army, Colonel McCourt would work out off the most important site for defence medicine
in the UK (QEH in Birmingham) but instead she's based at Larkhill which from memory is where
the Royal Artillery is located.
Not so strange - The area inhabited by the British Army north of Salisbury (more specifically
north of the A303 road was classified as deprived because of the lack of shopping facilities,
so most residents of this area do their shopping in Salisbury which has the best shopping in
the area. There are now a Tesco superstore and a branch of Lidl in Tidworth so perhaps it's
not so deprived anymore.
The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in
Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of
the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok.
The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in
Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its
entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply
staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites.
The US is fracturing, the EU is fracturing, and therein lies the greatest danger. With the
overplayed sanctions only making the sanctioned effect work arounds to the point that the
primacy of the US dollar is threatened, with the contain China train having left the station
and recently pulling into a station purpose built on the dark side of the moon, their only
options look to be to either go nuclear or go away.
2019 looks to be a most interesting year!
exiled off mainstreet , Jan 19, 2019 6:05:32 PM |
link
It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled
media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family
member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge,
of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received
propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state.
So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to
be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?
Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in
the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't
die). How odd.
How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open
up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why.....
I am beginning to wonder if Sir Humphrey Appleby and some of his colleagues are conducting a
deliberate hoax, piling impossibility upon impossibility and contradiction upon
contradiction, just to see how long it takes the unbelievably gullible British public to get
the joke and start throwing cabbages and rotten fruit. Not so funny for the poor woman who died - but then, as Sir Humphrey has often been heard
to remark, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to
act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election.
See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of
the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy
Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency,
which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of
governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason.
Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the
entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions
operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,"
then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela,
Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian
athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it
BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own
to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely
Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past.
So, while it seems comical, this is all deadly serious.
The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such
as the Skripal affair.
Either Chris Donnelly of the Institute for Statecraft (IoS), (formally of the British
Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst), or UK General Sir Richard Barrons
reportedly stated that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response,
then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it
out of the political space."
great coverage b.. thank you... it's either a coincidence theory, or a conspiracy theory...
no other choices, until the uk gets down to doing an open investigation on integrity
initiative...the investigators investigating the investigators.. ain't going to happen...
similar deal in the usa now.. basically this will be when hell freezes over - a very long
time if ever.. meanwhile the skripals are persona non grata... it would be very interesting
to find out where they are kept... it looks like their is no chance for any type of normal
life for them here on out... even if the novihoax didn't kill them, the uk has done the
equivalent.. it is hard not to tie operation toxic dagger into all of this... the
coincidences are just too great..
@ petri.. thanks for the that.. how did you manage to figure that one out? does that mean
that allison mccourt is the daughter of pablo miller, or was allison from another
relationship/marriage? of course m16 and some folks know the answer to this amazing
coincidences and probably are unable to openly say..
@ Glen Brown and bevin with their correction to my comment.....thanks
I was not in my best of mind and along with misspelling his name I projected my desire for
more movement by the UK opposition in light of having the government paying folks to work
against them.....my bad idealism........
If it is true that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller as Petri Kohn asserts in
comment #1 then it looks like the daughter is being groomed for big things in the UK
government.....16 years old and already an award for criminal complicity.
Petri Krohn@1 - ? Only thing I could find is a reference to her husband Hugh - a
prison officer - and her two kids, Abagail (now 16) and Cameron (now 14). That was from a
DailyMail
article (I know...) from Dec. 20, 2014. She was spending time away from them during
Christmas when she was sent to Sierra Leone for the Ebola outbreak. The article also mentions
time away from Hugh and Abagail in 2003 when she was deployed to Iraq. Couldn't find anything
about Pablo Miller being married or having kids, but many mentions of his home in Salisbury.
Nice conjecture, except that those who devised the Dossier specifically said it was to be
used as insurance in case Trump won. Please see article I linked to in my comment.
The daughter is what's know as a "cutout". You can't have the "nurse of all nurses" be the
first on the scene. But, they didn't even bother with the daughter having to call mama at
home. She was luckily "nearby", presumably lurking behind a tree.
She might have been the commanding officer of 22 Field Hospital but now she's moved
on.
From the QARANC website:
Following promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2011, Alison attended the Advanced Command and
Staff Course. Her initial SO1 appointment was as Chief of Staff, Headquarters 2nd Medical
Brigade in York in Aug 2012. Alison assumed Command of 22 Field Hospital in July 2013 and
deployed the Unit to Sierra Leone on Op GRITROCK in Oct 14. She was awarded an OBE for her
leadership of 22 Field during Op GRITROCK.
On promotion to Colonel in Dec 2015 she assumed an appointment in the newly established
Senior Health Advisors department and has been the lead for Assurance and now Health
Strategy in that area.
Alison assumed the appointment of Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on 1 Feb 18.
@1 petri... unless they hooked up after 2014, your theory doesn't look very likely...
further to @36 paveways comment from the daily mail dec 20 2014 article - Even though
Lieut Col McCourt is a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, she admits this tour of
duty has taken a toll, and that she has depended on the support of her husband Hugh, a prison
officer, to help her through it. While this is her first Christmas apart from her children,
she is accustomed to leaving them and her husband behind. In 2003, she left Abigail, then
aged just eight months, in Hugh's arms while she went to Iraq to treat British soldiers
wounded in the Gulf War. She returned there in 2008 for a second tour of duty.
Lieut Col McCourt said: 'I have a very supportive husband. On both occasions I went to
Iraq he took sabbaticals from his job to ensure that our family life was maintained. Yes, it
was hard to say goodbye so soon after having my first child but you immerse yourself in your
work, and on an operational tour everyone is missing someone. This Christmas he'll be with
the children and my mum will join them at the family home in Aldershot. Of course I miss them
all but our focus has to be saving lives here.'
Suppose you were Russian and believed that the west would not attack because of the checks
and controls that exist in western democracy. Suppose a deadly incident occurred and Russia
was blamed and an attack became more likely. Suppose that (as a Russian) you knew Russia
wasn't involved and that the evidence was very sketchy and didn't make sense. Suppose this
was was all in the public domain but instead of the incident being questioned it was just
accepted and Russia was sanctioned and other western and allied countries (despite knowing it
was nonsense) joined in.
You might as a Russian come to believe that evidence didn't matter, that the west could
manipulate their populations at will and the idea that there was some "restraint" on western
attacks would be shown to be fanciful. You might, as a Russian, become very concerned that
you might be attacked and there was a lack of restraint on the west.
The west are blaming Russia for something they didn't do but, also, showing that they know
that Russia didn't do it and, more, letting Russia know they framed them, and showing Russia
that the evidence doesn't matter. Perhaps, not UK incompetence, maybe, it's all psyops.
Mr Moon, you have excelled yourself! A brilliant article, worthy of a standing ovation!
'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed
to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the
crowd cry out 'shame'!
John Helmer raises an important question, why does the roof of Sergei's house need to be
removed? Tongue firmly planted in cheek. The air leakage through the front door of Sergei's
house must be through the roof! How else does the fumes from novichok get from the front door
handle to the roof? Sure hope they do a proper energy efficient rebuild. Can't go wasting
that soon to be arriving at Perfidious Albion's shores horror of horrors, Russian gas. North
Sea gas wont last much longer.
"... But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the "incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that Abigail was a very worthy winner. ..."
"... Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some 11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere. ..."
"... That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing day. ..."
"... Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease ..."
"... what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the Skripals. ..."
"... The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU. ..."
"... Curious that Abigail McCourt received basic first aid training at school (in which she would have been taught CPR) yet when Spire FM hosts spoke to her, she says that her training was not needed. In almost the same sentence, she says Julia Skripal was not breathing. ..."
"... Off-Guardian on Twitter wonders if Alison McCourt had been involved in Exercise Toxic Dagger (chemical weapons training exercise) staged by The Defence Science and Technology Laboratory and the Royal Marines in February 2018: ..."
"... The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok. ..."
"... The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites. ..."
"... It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge, of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state. ..."
"... So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army? ..."
"... Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't die). How odd. How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why..... ..."
"... Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election. See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency, which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason. ..."
"... Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false," then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do." ..."
"... Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela, Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past. ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such as the Skripal affair. ..."
"... reminds me of the kuwaiti ambassador's daughter in the runup to the first gulf war. ..."
"... 'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the crowd cry out 'shame'! ..."
On March 4 2018 the British/Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were found incapacitated on a bench in Salisbury. The British government asserts that they were affected by a chemical poison
of the so called Novichok group. The case led to a diplomatic conflict as Britain accused Russia of an attempt to kill the
Skripals. No evidence was provided by the British government to support those accusations. The Skripals have since been
vanished.
Today an intriguing new detail of the case came to light. Spire FM , a local
radio station in Salisbury,
reports of a young woman, Abigail McCourt, who was given a 'Lifesaver Award' for her
involvement in the Skripal case:
The 16 year old, from Larkhill, was the first to spot two people collapsed on a bench in
the Maltings on March 4th and didn't hesitate to help. Abigail quickly alerted her mum, a
qualified nurse, who was nearby and together they gave first aid to the victims until
paramedics arrived.
It soon became clear this was no ordinary medical incident, but the poisoning of a
former Russian spy Sergei Skripal, and his daughter Yulia, with Novichok.
...
Immediately following the incident and with the world's media focused on Salisbury, the
pair didn't want any want press attention and kept their involvement quiet.
But Abby's mum now feels the time is right for her daughter to be recognised for the
"incredible" way she dealt with the scenario. Alison nominated her for the Lifesaver Award
at Spire FM's Local Hero Awards, and the judges were unanimous in their decision that
Abigail was a very worthy winner.
Earlier reports mentioned that a 'military nurse' had attended to the Skripals. Following
the above report Elena Evdokimova checked the name of the young women's mothers and found a
curiosity:
We were right, it was Alison McCourt who was that"unknown military nurse" who,
absolutely randomly, happened to be near the bench where #Skripals collapsed . Spire FM
alleges that it was her daughter Abigail alerted her, but no one mentioned her before
...
Colonel A L McCourt OBE ARRC QHN - Assistant Head Health Strategy / Chief Nursing Officer
(Army) - Senior Health Advisor (Army) Department.
Colonel McCourt was appointed Chief Nursing Officer on February 1 2018, just one month
before the Skripal incident happened. Colonel McCourt lives in Larkhill, a garrison town some
11 miles from Salisbury. She is known to visit elsewhere.
As I read this I had two thoughts. The first one is that the Brits have lost the competence
they once had with this stuff. "Operation Mincemeat" was, according to all accounts, a marvel
in planning, execution, and getting the desired reactions from the German High Command. The
"Double-Cross System" turned the extremely risky invasion at Normandy into a success. The
recent stuff is a comedy by comparison.
excellent reporting.. still we have little written collaborative evidence.. just as in 9/11
just top dogs saying improbable things.
What seems to me important now is to develop as you have done a set of hypotheses. and to
hack at them until we hit the ones which all evidence cannot dispute. Using your summary I
rewrite in hypothesis form,
hypothesis 1: Steele's dirty dossier is not related to the Skripal case.
hypothesis 2: Steele's dossier is not the result of an integrity initiative.
hypothesis 3: Downing street personnel were not involved in integrity initiative
hypothesis 4: media reported only supportable facts.
hypothesis 5: Neither the USA or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Israel or any of its agencies were involved
hypothesis 7: Neither Saudi Arabia or any of its Arab partners were involved
hypothesis 6: Neither Republicans or Democrats in America were involved.
hypothesis 8: the FBI had no part in this.
hypothesis 9: Developing sufficient misinformation to justify attacking Nord 2
pipeline was not one of the objectives of the integrity initiative.
hypothesis 10: No private interest supported organizing a false flag op against
Russia
Too good. That is such a great article b. I have had a great wry chuckle at the folly of
human hubris. Fancy setting up your own daughter for an award. Certainly looks less and less like novichok and more like novifraud with every passing
day.
Not only is the military mother Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent
battlefield against ebola , she is also the last line of defence for the Army medics
and other healthcare workers fighting the deadly disease.
what a stroke of luck Britain's most senior soldier on the virulent battlefield against
ebola was there, arguably the most qualified person in all of Britain to attend to the
Skripals.
Coincidence? Probably like most here, I think not. But isn't this something of an own goal?
If indeed things are as we suspect, why would you put the daughter up for an award? Wouldn't
you want the can of worms this presents to remain unopened? Can they be this incompetent?
Well, looking at the Brexit process, I guess we know the answer to that last by now
rhetorical question.
The story of the heroic Abigail McCourt in helping to save the Skripals must be too good for
the likes of The Fraudian and other so-called "progressive" MSM outlets to resist. Strange
that such a narrative was not brought up until now, coming close to the anniversary of the
poisoning and the deadline for Britain's exit from the EU.
b, you are too suspicious. Nothing to see here.
Clearly way beyond a serious matter, this dastardly attack on Skripals by the Soviets, er,
the Russians, er, Putin.
In Canada our eloquent foreign Minister, in a barrage of outraged talking the talk that
was accompanied by making four Russian diplomats walk the walk home, said in words that will
surely take their high place in the history of inspired speeches, along with Churchill's
'Never have so many done so much for so few', and MLK's 'I have a nightmare':
And her words re the March 4 nerve agent attack on a close ally and partner of Canada "a
despicable, heinous and reckless act" that potentially endangered the lives of hundreds"
Strange - no military hospital in Salisbury but then there aren't military hospitals in
Britain anymore. Instead the military use civilian hospitals with a Ministry of Defence
Hospital Unit attached but none near Salisbury. The Ministry of Defence Hospital Units do not
treat operational casualties who are treated at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine at
Queen Elizabeth Hospital (QEH) in Birmingham. You'd think the Chief Nursing Officer for the
British Army, Colonel McCourt would work out off the most important site for defence medicine
in the UK (QEH in Birmingham) but instead she's based at Larkhill which from memory is where
the Royal Artillery is located.
Not so strange - The area inhabited by the British Army north of Salisbury (more specifically
north of the A303 road was classified as deprived because of the lack of shopping facilities,
so most residents of this area do their shopping in Salisbury which has the best shopping in
the area. There are now a Tesco superstore and a branch of Lidl in Tidworth so perhaps it's
not so deprived anymore.
The main area for shoppers to park in Salisbury is just north of the Maltings (site of the alleged attack) so it's not surprising that someone shopping in
Salisbury would pass the bench the Skripals were found on. What is surprising it that none of
the family seems to have suffered any effects from the Novichok.
The Skirpal case, the Maidan coup and the related MH17 downing, the various gas attacks in
Syria, the most recent bombing incident also in Syria, the Mueller investigation in its
entirety - the sheer incompetence shown by the US and British deep states is simply
staggering, and in sharp contrast to the investigative ability of this and other sites.
The US is fracturing, the EU is fracturing, and therein lies the greatest danger. With the
overplayed sanctions only making the sanctioned effect work arounds to the point that the
primacy of the US dollar is threatened, with the contain China train having left the station
and recently pulling into a station purpose built on the dark side of the moon, their only
options look to be to either go nuclear or go away.
2019 looks to be a most interesting year!
exiled off mainstreet , Jan 19, 2019 6:05:32 PM |
link
It all adds up to stasi state bullshit. They are so arrogant and cocksure of the controlled
media that they can even draw attention to the provocation by seeking an award for a family
member despite the prominence of the mother and her role in the power structure. Knowledge,
of course, will remain limited to those who are canny enough not to believe the received
propaganda wisdom of the five eyes spy state.
So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed to
be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?
Even though this could have gone a long, long way to explaining the biggest discrepancy in
the government narrative (i.e. Novicock is way, way deadly only, err, umm, they didn't
die). How odd.
How very, very odd. You'd almost think that the government considered that acknowledging that fact would open
up more questions than it would answer. Hard to see why.....
I am beginning to wonder if Sir Humphrey Appleby and some of his colleagues are conducting a
deliberate hoax, piling impossibility upon impossibility and contradiction upon
contradiction, just to see how long it takes the unbelievably gullible British public to get
the joke and start throwing cabbages and rotten fruit. Not so funny for the poor woman who died - but then, as Sir Humphrey has often been heard
to remark, one cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.
Recall that it was recently established and published that the Steele Dossier was compiled to
act as an Insurance Policy in the event Trump won the election.
See here . I posted this news as a comment and b picked up on it too, but that aspect of
the Dossier is omitted from his essay above. We can see that the Dossier--like Blair's Dodgy
Dossier to sell the illegal war on Iraq--has had a massive impact on Trump's presidency,
which, whether you like Trump or not, is a matter of grave concern for the institutions of
governance of the USA, and IMO is very close to treason.
Sure, the nurse revelation is curious to say the least, but I'm far more interested in the
entire disinformation network built by the British along with previous and current versions
operated by CIA here in USA. Think back to what Bill Casey said, "We'll know our
disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false,"
then Rove's boast: "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're
studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new
realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's
actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
Add those to all the 100% evidence free accusations made against Russia, China, Venezuela,
Syria, other nations and private individuals--the "universal sports doping" by Russian
athletes was a massive smear proven to be 100% false--and you can understand why I call it
BigLie Media. Clearly, the Skripal story's utter fantasy. But the Brits will kill their own
to insure the story isn't compromised--Dr. David Kelly, Dawn Sturgess, and quite likely
Sergei Skripal, and likely others from incidents in the further past.
So, while it seems comical, this is all deadly serious.
The Integrity Initiative was also heavily involved in promoting an anti-Russian agenda such
as the Skripal affair.
Either Chris Donnelly of the Institute for Statecraft (IoS), (formally of the British
Army's Soviet Studies Research Centre at Sandhurst), or UK General Sir Richard Barrons
reportedly stated that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response,
then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it
out of the political space."
great coverage b.. thank you... it's either a coincidence theory, or a conspiracy theory...
no other choices, until the uk gets down to doing an open investigation on integrity
initiative...the investigators investigating the investigators.. ain't going to happen...
similar deal in the usa now.. basically this will be when hell freezes over - a very long
time if ever.. meanwhile the skripals are persona non grata... it would be very interesting
to find out where they are kept... it looks like their is no chance for any type of normal
life for them here on out... even if the novihoax didn't kill them, the uk has done the
equivalent.. it is hard not to tie operation toxic dagger into all of this... the
coincidences are just too great..
@ petri.. thanks for the that.. how did you manage to figure that one out? does that mean
that allison mccourt is the daughter of pablo miller, or was allison from another
relationship/marriage? of course m16 and some folks know the answer to this amazing
coincidences and probably are unable to openly say..
@ Glen Brown and bevin with their correction to my comment.....thanks
I was not in my best of mind and along with misspelling his name I projected my desire for
more movement by the UK opposition in light of having the government paying folks to work
against them.....my bad idealism........
If it is true that Alison McCourt is married to Pablo Miller as Petri Kohn asserts in
comment #1 then it looks like the daughter is being groomed for big things in the UK
government.....16 years old and already an award for criminal complicity.
Petri Krohn@1 - ? Only thing I could find is a reference to her husband Hugh - a
prison officer - and her two kids, Abagail (now 16) and Cameron (now 14). That was from a
DailyMail
article (I know...) from Dec. 20, 2014. She was spending time away from them during
Christmas when she was sent to Sierra Leone for the Ebola outbreak. The article also mentions
time away from Hugh and Abagail in 2003 when she was deployed to Iraq. Couldn't find anything
about Pablo Miller being married or having kids, but many mentions of his home in Salisbury.
Nice conjecture, except that those who devised the Dossier specifically said it was to be
used as insurance in case Trump won. Please see article I linked to in my comment.
The daughter is what's know as a "cutout". You can't have the "nurse of all nurses" be the
first on the scene. But, they didn't even bother with the daughter having to call mama at
home. She was luckily "nearby", presumably lurking behind a tree.
She might have been the commanding officer of 22 Field Hospital but now she's moved
on.
From the QARANC website:
Following promotion to Lieutenant Colonel in 2011, Alison attended the Advanced Command and
Staff Course. Her initial SO1 appointment was as Chief of Staff, Headquarters 2nd Medical
Brigade in York in Aug 2012. Alison assumed Command of 22 Field Hospital in July 2013 and
deployed the Unit to Sierra Leone on Op GRITROCK in Oct 14. She was awarded an OBE for her
leadership of 22 Field during Op GRITROCK.
On promotion to Colonel in Dec 2015 she assumed an appointment in the newly established
Senior Health Advisors department and has been the lead for Assurance and now Health
Strategy in that area.
Alison assumed the appointment of Chief Nursing Officer for the Army on 1 Feb 18.
@1 petri... unless they hooked up after 2014, your theory doesn't look very likely...
further to @36 paveways comment from the daily mail dec 20 2014 article - Even though
Lieut Col McCourt is a veteran of campaigns in Iraq and the Balkans, she admits this tour of
duty has taken a toll, and that she has depended on the support of her husband Hugh, a prison
officer, to help her through it. While this is her first Christmas apart from her children,
she is accustomed to leaving them and her husband behind. In 2003, she left Abigail, then
aged just eight months, in Hugh's arms while she went to Iraq to treat British soldiers
wounded in the Gulf War. She returned there in 2008 for a second tour of duty.
Lieut Col McCourt said: 'I have a very supportive husband. On both occasions I went to
Iraq he took sabbaticals from his job to ensure that our family life was maintained. Yes, it
was hard to say goodbye so soon after having my first child but you immerse yourself in your
work, and on an operational tour everyone is missing someone. This Christmas he'll be with
the children and my mum will join them at the family home in Aldershot. Of course I miss them
all but our focus has to be saving lives here.'
Suppose you were Russian and believed that the west would not attack because of the checks
and controls that exist in western democracy. Suppose a deadly incident occurred and Russia
was blamed and an attack became more likely. Suppose that (as a Russian) you knew Russia
wasn't involved and that the evidence was very sketchy and didn't make sense. Suppose this
was was all in the public domain but instead of the incident being questioned it was just
accepted and Russia was sanctioned and other western and allied countries (despite knowing it
was nonsense) joined in.
You might as a Russian come to believe that evidence didn't matter, that the west could
manipulate their populations at will and the idea that there was some "restraint" on western
attacks would be shown to be fanciful. You might, as a Russian, become very concerned that
you might be attacked and there was a lack of restraint on the west.
The west are blaming Russia for something they didn't do but, also, showing that they know
that Russia didn't do it and, more, letting Russia know they framed them, and showing Russia
that the evidence doesn't matter. Perhaps, not UK incompetence, maybe, it's all psyops.
Mr Moon, you have excelled yourself! A brilliant article, worthy of a standing ovation!
'So in all the police press briefings and all of the political posturing it was not deemed
to be important to mention that the Skripals-on-the-park-bench were attended to by the Chief
Nurse Of the British Army?' And how embarrassing for our 'fearless' journalists and tabloid truth seekers! Let the
crowd cry out 'shame'!
John Helmer raises an important question, why does the roof of Sergei's house need to be
removed? Tongue firmly planted in cheek. The air leakage through the front door of Sergei's
house must be through the roof! How else does the fumes from novichok get from the front door
handle to the roof? Sure hope they do a proper energy efficient rebuild. Can't go wasting
that soon to be arriving at Perfidious Albion's shores horror of horrors, Russian gas. North
Sea gas wont last much longer.
The
Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation
of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like
it in the annals of presidential history.
Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without
notes being taken.
When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:
Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor
Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except
for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit.
RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet
interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so,
whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.
Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks.
There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had
been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters
present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a
small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.
In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90
minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for
interpreters, over the two days here.
That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has
surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave
them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is
surely irrelevant.
What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia
at each and every corner.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter
its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below.
With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over
him is surely justified.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He
is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just
consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense
suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
It's also untrue that he "shot himself in the foot", as the event, if anything,
strengthened his image for the election.
What strengthened his image was an insane hysterics by the UK and the West in general. The
Russians do tend to consolidate when perceive themselves under external threat.
the pettiness of going after apparent pipsqueaks
Neither Putin personally nor the Russian government in general have ever shown themselves
to be petty. On the contrary, one of the notable qualities of Putin's is that he believes, as
we Russians put it, "the crown would not fall off his head if he bows". Apparently, he feels
strong, so he is not afraid to be magnanimous and make concessions. This quality is much
appreciated by some but drives other people crazy.
None of that however proves Putin did it. It's just a possibility.
Theoretically, it's a possibility that the Martians did it. However, given the behavior of
the UK authorities, there is no reason to believe anything even remotely like the picture
described happened in reality. There is a scientific impossibility to identify the agent,
first, as fast as it was supposedly done, and, second, unless they had a sample and/or
detailed information in their possession. It's scientifically impossible to establish
provenance unless the UK had samples of both the agent used and a comparison sample. Multiple
comparison samples, I should say, since there are many such compounds. But if they did, the
whole premise "only Russia could have done it" goes out of the window.
Add here the inconsistency of the symptoms and the outcome with the "military grade" nerve
agent poisoning – and here you have a complete a story of a very clumsy false flag
operation.
Like a gullible person I at first accepted that there was indeed some event that involved the
Skripals. Now I wonder if the entire thing was a scripted hoax, that nothing had hit them,
that it's all fake. It wouldn't be surprising. We seem to be in an age of rule by sociopaths
whose only compass is that of power and riches. The populations of our countries are being
hustled along for the benefit of the few. This can't have a happy ending for the majority of
people. The much vaunted democracy of the west looks like just a fixed shell game.
Looks like when it will all shake out, the net result will not be in the favor of the US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new
"normalcy of some sort."
"Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra
that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story."
In doing research for a dinosaur novel I'm planning to write, I was pleased to learn that the feature of the hydra sprouting
multiple heads to replace each one severed wasn't part of the original myth, but was added later during the decadent stage of
Greek culture. That ancient perception tallies well with the cultural-economic decadence of this collapsing civilization.
BTW I got my copy of Spirit in the Gene and look forward to reading it.
@65 pyschohistorian.. that is a good personal story of yours from today.. it is an easy analogy and many people will understand
it.. one person at a time maybe...
More than one person at a time came out to hear Bernie Sanders deliver that message. There is no doubt they heard it vaguely
via the US media but that was enough, they came in their tens of thousands. Such was the response that the Sanders campaign had
to sometimes book bigger venues and truck in extra PA and video gear to broadcast to crowds outside.
The yankee establishment is just desperate to smash any chance of this growing a second time. Come on Bernie and Tulsi Gabbard
and all those newly elected put on the yellow vest. I dare you. Millions of Americans are willing. Ditto throughout the world
millions of people are waiting to mock the BS colour revolutions and have a real one.
Socialism and thoughts of socialist economic management spread like pheromones on the wind.
Its all like living on the film set of Alice In Wonderland while reading 1984 and Brave New World at the same time while overdosing
on chocolate. Just batshit surreal, and the presstitutes keep pushing the World to the edge of the abyss in their continuous Russia
and Putin bashing. And the vast majority in the West are completely oblivious to what is going on in the World, and completely
oblivious to what is coming. And it will not be pleasant.
@57 James
Did anyone notice an article copied from the Guardian by Information Clearing House entitled "Brought to Jesus - the evangelic
grip on the Trump administration"? "Pense and Pompeo both call evangelical theology a powerful motivating force". "Evangelics
now see the US locked into a holy war against the forces of evil who they see embodied by Iran". It is a never-ending struggle
until.... the rapture." It is a chilling read, especially when it comes to their belief in the role of Zion. Extremely dangerous
because entirely irrational.
I also want to see it [yellow vest] on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps, in china
near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........
apparently you missed the fact that an anti-establishment, anti-euro(thus threatening global bond markets) government was elected
here in Italy last summer, precluding the necessity for protests in the streets. for the moment you might say we're riding the
avant-garde.
@61 NemesisCalling "Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in
Syria."
They would fit the definition of a Mercenary in Article 47 of the Geneva Conventions.
As such they would not be afforded the protections of Geneva Convention III.
"Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them."
I believe that Prince is advocating his own private mercenary airforce to provide support for his own mercenary army. Might
work as far as ground support goes, but not against SU-35 fighter jets.
So, yes, if Trump agrees to this proposal then it is inevitable that he will end up either providing a no-fly-zone for them
or be accused of leaving these brave, brave boys to be slaughtered.
I would assume that the Pentagon has told him that, but I make no assumption that he is paying that advice any attention.
"Open season on all guns for hire. In Afghanistan, too."
Well, yes, that's what International Humanitarian Law says.
So today we have US service men killed in Manbij and ISIS claim responsibility. It is reasonable to suspect that this is a false
flag (with actual deaths) in order to create political justification for US to stay in Syria. Many commentators here view ISIS
as being effectively a US proxy force.
In my view the only real evidence that the US would be leaving Syria would involve direct negotiations with the Syrian government.
In this case the US could leave saving face and securing some concessions that reflect their interests. The alternative is that
the US would leave with their tails between their legs being bombed out, very ignoble and looking like the withdrawal from Vietnam;
it is just not plausible that the US would leave in this way.
Yes. What better way to demonstrate that ISIS is not defeated and the US "job" in Syria is not done.
I suspect that Trump's rhetoric will not change. He will continue to insist that he is/will 'pull out' of Syria .... it's just
gonna take longer. Just how long will remain a mystery.
I see you have been accused of having a one sized fits all condom!😁
Your theory, unfairly, gets short shrift whereas ideas like "Trump is doing all the right things, but is frustrated at every
turn by the deep state" is just accepted unquestioningly.
However, the Syrian withdrawal could happen and this would not necessarily be incompatible with your theory; there may be tactical
reasons. Whatever, the idea that the US is just going to retreat and leave the Middle East alone is so far fetched that I am staggered
that people see this as a real possibility.
Personally, I think the US have a strategy for the world based on the model they created in Congo, South America, Libya and
Afganistan. All of these areas are hugely profitable for the Empire because "controlled" chaos allows cheap extraction of resources
and control of the world drug trade. This is what I believe the Empire has in mind for the Middle East, everywhere along OBOR
and, also, Europe (and, perhaps, the US itself?).
from Asia Times, quote:
On a mission from God: Pompeo messages evangelicals from the Middle East
The US secretary of state was communicating to an audience back home on his Middle East tour, the key Trump constituency of evangelical
Christians.
In Cairo: "This trip is especially meaningful for me as an evangelical Christian, coming so soon after the Coptic Church's Christmas
celebrations. This is an important time. We're all children of Abraham: Christians, Muslims, Jews. In my office, I keep a Bible
open on my desk to remind me of God and His Word, and The Truth." . .
here
Trump is being prosecuted by Robert Swan Mueller III, who entire career has been him covering up and fixing cases which involved
CIA criminality. Now William Barr is Trump's own choice for Attorney General. Barr spent the mid-1970s in the CIA. While there
he got his degree in law, suggesting his career path was being drawn by his employer. Unsurprisingly, GHW Bush moved him along
until he became Bush's AG.
Trump is either more demented than many have thought, he's in on the whole charade of his Presidency or he's in deep trouble
with the Deep State. The strings all lead back to Langley.
> Starting with Reagan, every President and/or VP has had, or rumored to have had, links to CIA: Bush Sr. had led the CIA;
Clinton allowed CIA flights into Arkansas; Obama's grandfather/mother. Questions have also been raised about Trump - the first
casino he purchase was rumored to have been involved in CIA money laundering (prior to Trump's purchase).
> Wolin, a respected Princeton University academic, described how the ruling establishment engages in "managed democracy"
to retain control. A key part of that management is the money-based electoral system which ensures that no real populist is
elected President.
If you enjoy the Kool-Aid then just pass over my comments.
Yes! Why nominate Barr for AG? Why nominate Gina Haspel for CIA? Why bring on Bolton? These choices make no sense for a President
that is supposedly at war with the Deep State.
Great list, b. Another. From the top of google (enter co name or part of post in goog for details.)
Afaik (please correct if), Trump tried to do biz in Russia but more or less failed or gave up or didn't get anywhere much,
nothing major transpired.
"There are 517 McDonald's restaurants in Russia, 73 of which were opened in 2014. The company's total revenue for 2014 in Russia
was 65.8 billion rubles.. the chain has been operating in Russia independently for 22 years."
"PepsiCo reported that in 2017, its Russian operations generated net revenue of $3.23 billion, which made up 5.1 percent of
the company's total net revenue."
Philip Morris has good sales in Russia. Cisco Systems (idk about this, look it up.) Abbot Labs (US) sells generic drugs in
Russia. Ford is still selling cars there.
The leading Chocolate co. in Russia is Mondelez (should be another topic .. )
Starbucks celebrated its 100 stores in Russia in 2015.
The CEOs of these cos. + their shareholders, employees, are in bed w. Russia and undermining US Democracy, interfering in people's
choices, the true shining light on the hill, or what? It is collusion! They meet and deal with Russians, all the time.
Note: Flynn revelation was likely just a tip of the iceberg. It was from his agency (DIA) that Judicial Watch got the memo (via
FOIA) that talked of how US allies wanted to establish a Caliphate.
These were important to understanding ISIS as a proxy force, not the grass-roots group of Jihadi hoodlums that the Obama Administration
wanted us to believe. Obama infamously called ISIS al Queda's "JV team" to explain why he was essentially ignoring it's rise.
Later, the story changed to "ISIS was created by Assad." LOL.
@68 uncle tungsten.. i wish you all the best trying to take back control of the gov't, or following thru on the yellow jacket
demonstrations... i am with you in spirit..
@70 montreal.. something is driving these folks... some whacky evangelical fantasy sounds about right... i can't believe how
easily duped people are with fundamental religion of all stripes...
@74 john.. you probably would have voted for frank zappa if he was running in the italian elections!
i've never embraced the argument that Trump is a president who is at war with the deep state. i've only said that this sort
of yammering is all conjecture and as such will never be sufficient grounds for proof...that it doesn't really matter anyway.
for all i know every incoming president is given a private screening of the zapruder film and the rest is left to his imagination.
i don't drink Kool-Aid, and if i passed over your comments i wouldn't know that they pretty much all say the same thing.
Fair enough! But what should be done about the many people that HAVE drunk the Kool-Aid and believe the Trump vs. Deep State
narrative?
I think some amount of repetition is unavoidable. Especially since the Trump vs. Deep State narrative is repeated ad nauseum
by MSM and even independent bloggers (that haven't thought it through).
@90 James.
As someone said, history doesn't always repeat itself but sometimes rhymes....... in India, in the early nineteenth century, the
British presence consisted largely of lowland Scots - evangelical Presbyterians. People like Dalhousie and Grant. They managed
to combine an iron conviction in their own Godly righteousness - and duty to improve the benighted heathen - with a sincere belief
that there was nothing wrong in robbing the natives blind whilst improving them. Their arrogance and greed led directly to the
disaster of the First Afghan War and subsequently the First Indian War of Independence (or Indian Mutiny depending on your point
of view). Maybe Presbyterian Evangelical certainty will be the American downfall as well. I do often hope so.
do you know the story
of when once president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel, appointed Frank as Special Ambassador to the West on Trade, Culture
and Tourism , much to the chagrin of then U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker?
apparently Baker declared, 'You can do business with the United States or you can do business with Frank Zappa.'
@93 montreal.. i was unaware of the specifics on the history in india as you note.. thanks for sharing that.. i just assumed it
was the british empire mindset, without looking more closely at the details of it..
@94 john.. lol! cool pic - man from utopia... i do recall frank getting that appointment from vaclav havel, but this is the first
time i heard of james bakers response! james baker is long forgotten, but frank zappa is a cultural icon that will be remembered
for a long time!
Superbowl democracy : pick the red team or pick the blue, really doesn't matter which you do, none of the wrestling is really
true, just a snare of a circus we're forced to view, where puppets pose and pretend to duel, and the House will always win...
Indeed the Levant is returning to the centre of Middle East and world attention in a stronger position than in 2011. Syria
has advanced precision missiles that can hit any building in Israel. Assad also has an air defence system he would have never
dreamed of before 2011 -- thanks to Israel's continuous violation of its airspace, and its defiance of Russian authority. Hezbollah
has constructed bases for its long and medium range precision missiles in the mountains and has created a bond with Syria that
it could never have established -- if not for the war. Iran has established a strategic brotherhood with Syria, thanks to its
role in defeating the regime change plan. . .
here
Alastair Crooke
NATO's support for the growth of ISIS has created a bond between Syria and Iraq that no Muslim or Baathist link could ever
have created: Iraq has a "carte blanche" to bomb ISIS locations in Syria without the consent of the Syrian leadership, and
the Iraqi security forces can walk into Syria anytime they see fit to fight ISIS. The anti-Israel axis has never been stronger
than it is today. That is the result of 2011-2018 war imposed on Syria". . .
here
And then add to that the current hectic itinerary of pompous Pompeo to explain the defeat to eight Middle East countries
in eight days, highlighted by his feeble pleas to Qatar to join with Saudi Arabia against Iran. Solidity is crucial! Pompeo
says, to which Qatar which shares a huge gas field with Iran gave pompous the middle finger. Another factor is the Turkey-Qatar
alliance promoting the Muslim Brotherhood, anathema to the Saudi despots. This will all shake out, not to the favor of the
US-Israel-Saudi axis. That will be the new "normalcy of some sort."
First of all, if Trump is so bad with and Russia, why are you and others here always loving on him, singing his praises and
defending him like he's still a naive schoolboy in short pants that the big boys are picking on?
@21 Jackrabbit
Bolton's not steering Trump into war with Iran, Trump hired Bolton so he'd have someone to blame and take the heat when
he greenlights war with Iran and things go bad; which they will.
Trump was an Iran hawk from start. He's been railing against Iran since he got off the Trump Tower escalator and stepped
behind the AIPAC podium.
@43 uncle tungsten
Wow, I mean wow. That's a bull's eye zinger. DB was really off the mark.
Yeah, and Israel still has one of the most powerful arsenals in the world funded to the tune of $38 billion, the largest
aid package to Israel in U.S. history delivered by Trump. and Israel has hundreds of nukes, still occupies Palestine and the
Golan Heights, and still has the Empire's bases where it wants them, and now has the GCC in its corner all in, and Trump has
delivered on so many promises already: tearing up the Iran deal, defunding aid to Palestinians, closing the Palestinians D.C.
mission office, moving the U.S. Embassy and declaring Jerusalem capital of Israel, and sabotaging a Resolution at the U.N condemning
settlements when he wasn't even President yet. Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.
You ask the question: "How will we ever gain control of our country."
As psychohistorian intones, private financial casinos and their ilk need to become public utilities to fund public activities
and protect the resources on which they're based, while the political/philosophical change to create that paradigm metes our
justice and cleans The Swamp. To discover the veracity of our prescription, one need only read
Michael Hudson's works , although there're others we might also cite.
Essentially, the Creditor Class and their allies--which have existed for several thousand years--constitute a real life Hydra
that must be slain, as was recognized by the Greeks who first told the whole story.
Of course, the end is far easier than the road to get there. But as the polling link I provided upthread and others show,
the public is roused and of greater solidarity for the first time this century. Why do ya think the Deep State's trying so
hard to limit and falsify information I an overt manner!
@ Circe | Jan 16, 2019 12:10:26 AM | 51 Poor Israel, so abandoned by Trump...NOT.
I never said Israel was abandoned by Trump, so I was never "really off the mark," was I. If Trump is doing any abandoning anywhere,
it's in Syria, Israel's enemy, now stronger due to Obama's mistake, one of many. Trump is a late arrival.
Aren't you getting a little ahead of yourself. US troops are still there. NY Times says the 'pull out' is expected to take
4-6 months.
How many times has US been rumored to be leaving Afghanistan?
US still has troops in Iraq! Years after Obama was forced (yes, forced) to remove the bulk of the forces in that country.
And what good is the 'pull out' if US keeps mercenaries/special forces in the country to fight with SDF? The plan seems
to be retain control of Syrian territory via proxies. There is NO TALK of a hand over to SAA.
Thanks karlof1 I will explore that Michael Hudson link it looks good from first scan.
Generally: I don't do graphics but I think a statue of liberty with a yellow vest would be a good theme for a behind the
scenes 'competition' submitted via email to b (if willing) then published here for a discussion and 'vote' would be a great
aid to mirth. I won't be in your revolution if I can't dance - sort of thing. Maybe its been done by now ?
I rarely harangue at US Exceptionalism like I did when I first began commenting here as it gets in the way of highlighting
other points, and with me it's a priori along with its kin Manifest Destiny. It should also be observed that all Imperialist
Nations share both to differing degrees and becomes part of Elite "Magic Mirror" persona--Mirror, mirror on the wall; who's
the fairest of them all..."--generating the deadliest of snobbishness. When I taught, I took pains to properly explain the
Outlaw US Empire's Mythos and show where it's present in everyday life--The Few; The Proud; The Marines. He's shooting the
ball. (You throw the damn thing; do baseball pitchers shoot their pitch!?)
The Canadian domestic situation differs from the USA's in numerous ways, but it faces the same forces trying to keep citizens
from gaining control over their destiny and that of their nation. And Canadians share much of the same negative American baggage.
Both nation's citizens would benefit by knowing the true nature of their past which would aid them greatly in their current
struggle.
@43 uncle tungsten is bang on... for some reason - maybe you need to read a tao te ching verse before i say this to you!
- you can't seriously believe trump has changed his fealty to israel? that is just not the reality as i see it.. the whole
of the usa establishment are completely subservient to israel.. take a look at trumps daughter and son in law.. what the fuck
is that?
trump is also totally down with war on iran.. why is that? was a little zionist birdie talking in his ear, or not? sure
looks like 24/7 fealty to israel is spite of whatever bullshit trump is tweeting about..
@56 karlof1... thanks.. i agree with you and see what you are saying... it seems though on one small level canucks are not
always thinking we are the fucking greatest.. that is the one difference i would point to.. so if that isn't exceptionalism
rearing it's ugly head, i don't know what to call it.. other then that - i agree with you and i suppose your point is that
the concept of exceptionalism is just another distraction..
@ karlof1 with the hat tip about gaining control of "our" country....thanks.
I am with uncle tungsten with wanting to put a yellow vest on the statue of liberty and especially the dance part because
I already do that twice a week. I also want to see it on the tower of london, somewhere in rome, fluttering in the Swiss alps,
in china near the sacred city, in Russia, in India........you get the picture.
We are entering that cleft of time where psychohistorian is suppose to wave its magic wand and greatly reduce the time before
"real change". Ok, so I did that. But that still means that others will need to play their roles as well for the change to
occur. We all need to continue the zombie awakening so that when the time comes for "we the people" to make a collective "sound",
it comes out as beautiful music that we can all dance to.
This is a good place to begin at Hudson's site as it explains a great many things about the recent past and present. I
would suggest this page next .
His opus, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire ought to be in every respectable library, for
which the videos here provide
a bit of context. If I add another link, this might be construed as spam, so I'll also highly suggest Life & Thought: An
Autobiography from last August. Enjoy!
Saw that Blackwater founder did an interview explaining that they can also replace the role of US troops in Syria.
Fine by me, as long as the US offers no protection or no-fly-zone for them.
Remember the episode where 100+ Russian contractors were strafed fighting alongside SAA by USAF? Open season on all guns
for hire. In Afghanistan, too.
YES!and some really good (short)5second? video to stream via whatever those social media platforms are. One on each of the
religious icons of whatever would be inviting.
"The fact that what amounts to palace intrigue -- the fracas between the White House, the two houses of Congress and a ghoulish
grand inquisitor named Mueller -- has taken center stage is uncannily reminiscent of various earlier political collapses, such
as the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire or of the fall and the consequent beheading of Louis XVI. The fact that Trump,
like the Ottoman worthies, stocks his harem with East European women, lends an eerie touch. That said, most people in the US
seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes movement (just as an example)
are definitely not."
By now everybody knows that Netanyahu asks and Trump delivers. The servility of US politicians and media to Israel is so obvious
that they world laughs at the "superpower USA, that is being rough shod" by a toy shit entity called Israel. THE GREATEST TREASON
OF ALL "Israel first"
@ james who quoted Orlov:
"
That said, most people in the US seem blind to the nature of their overlords in a way that the French, with their Gilets Jaunes
movement (just as an example) are definitely not."
"
This is part of the elite massaging of nationalism narratives. There is still too much "frontier" in America that blind
many to not feeling part of a government controlled community. I talked to a young guy today with 3 kids and living in a mobile
home on property in the sticks so he doesn't have problems with neighbors and government. I think I got my message across when
I pointed out that the roads he drives on to his house, the power and water he gets are forms of socialism and I just want
the tools of finance to be public-minded like that.
Actually, I think that in the end Russia has to thank the British for sending a great message
to her traitors and gangsters. Apart from the Skripal case, the UK seems up to confiscate the
wealth Russian expats in the UK looted back home. On the one hand, it's ~ $10bn worth that
will be definitely lost for Russia, on the other if the UK's treatment of Skripal and runaway
oligarchs won't heal Russian traitors and gangsters from their blissful enamourment with
England's climate, I don't know what will.
@Mike
P I can't find the comment because the comment archive is down -- I think it was
annamaria who reported that the British were holding assets of Russian oligarchs and that
Russia wanted the funds back. The speculation was that Teresa May would take possession of
the assets.
As these two articles state, most of the Russian billionaire oligarchs are Jewish
So at least (conspiracy theory) part of the Skripal scheme is for Teresa May to be an
angel and return their assets to the Jewish billionaires who stole Russian wealth fair and
square.
The
Washington Post's Greg Miller reported Sunday that President Donald Trump's confiscation
of the translator's notes from a one-on-one conversation with Russian President Vladimir
Putin in 2017 was "unusual." This is incorrect. It was unprecedented. There is nothing like
it in the annals of presidential history.
Not really. Other U.S. leaders held long private meetings with their counterparts without
notes being taken.
When Richard Nixon met Leonid Brezhnev he did not even bring his own interpreter:
Nixon would meet Brezhnev alone, the only other person in attendance being Viktor
Sukhodrev, the Soviet interpreter. "Our first meeting in the Oval Office was private, except
for Viktor Sukhodrev, who, as in 1972, acted as translator." Nixon on Brezhnev's 1973 visit.
RN, p.878 . Therefore, the only "notes" that would exist would be those of the Soviet
interpreter. Not sure he would have time to make notes and translate and, even if he did so,
whether those notes would be housed in any US archive.
Nixon's White House office was bugged. There are probably tape recordings of the talks.
There might also be recordings of the Trump-Putin talks.
Mr. Reagan and Mr. Gorbachev began their second day of talks with a private meeting that had
been scheduled to last 15 minutes but ran for nearly 70 minutes, with only interpreters
present . They met in a small room in the Soviet Mission , with the Soviet leader seated in a
small armchair and Mr. Reagan on a sofa.
In the afternoon, they meet alone for a little over 20 minutes and then again for 90
minutes. All told, the two leaders have spent 4 hours and 51 minutes alone , except for
interpreters, over the two days here.
That the FBI agents involved in the decision were avid haters of Russia and of Trump has
surely nothing to do with it. That the opening of a counter-intelligence investigation gave
them the legal ability under Obama's EO12333 to use NSA signal intelligence against Trump is
surely irrelevant.
What the FBI people really were concerned about is Trump's public record of favoring Russia
at each and every corner.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He is reluctant to counter
its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just consider the headlines below.
With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense suspicions of Russian influence over
him is surely justified.
Trump obviously wants better diplomatic relations with Russia. He
is reluctant to counter its military might. He is doing his best to make it richer. Just
consider the headlines below. With all those good things Trump did for Putin, intense
suspicions of Russian influence over him is surely justified.
When one adds up all those actions one can only find that Trump cares more about Russia,
than about the U.S. and its NATO allies. Only with Trump being under Putin's influence,
knowingly or unwittingly, could he end up doing Russia so many favors.
Suppose that ... CIA-MI6 were trying to ensure the election of Trump, not Hillary. As
I described in previous comments , Trump's election followed a logical progression that,
in sum, indicate manipulation on his behalf. Hal Duell @21 mentions some of the psyop
reality-making: White Helmets, MH-17, Skripal, etc. Karlof1 @30 notes the absolute hubris of
the Empire's "we make our own reality".
Lets say Integrity Initiative, working with CIA and MI6, wanted to use the 2016 election
to cast aspersion on the Russians. A populist running against Hillary was the logical choice.
The narrative: only with Russian help could a challenger hope to win against Hillary.
"Russian meddling" and Wikileaks as Russian agent are major "wins" for the establishment.
Integrity Initiative was formed soon after Kissinger's Op-Ed in August 2014 and before Trump
began his run for President.
"... The current round of bullshit is not about justifying the investigation, it is about concealing MI6 taking a leading role in the attempted coup. ..."
A Russian American was put on sanctions list based on Forbes list of Russian billionaires.
This guy founded a high tech industrial laser company employing over a thousand American
workers. Forbes realized they f'ed this guy over and took him off their Russian billionaire
list. But too late--he remains sanctioned.
In my experience, just about everyone here, including hordes of supposedly educated people
who really should know better, believe it. They really do. However, most of them don't
care--it's merely something to snark about or score points in a political conversation with,
not anything they perceive as an actual threat to their way of life.
It's nothing more than the undying legacy of anti-communism and racism thrown in for good
measure. It echoes the German Nazis and their treatment of Slavs (slaves, unter menchen). We
need only look at how the US viewed the Japanese (and the Germans) during WWII, with
Roosevelt calling for their extermination (I'll find the source).
And of course, there's US slavery and extermination of the original inhabitants that also
feeds into the psychosis.
London was said to be very subdued the day news came through that Sweden's Charles the twelfth
had been crushed at Poltava in 1709 . North Western European economic interests have clashed
with Russian across many centuries. Had Charles been successful in the Ukraine a new level of English and Swedish alliance was
in the offing .
I just read about Trump's AG candidate, commenting on the 'Russian interference' in US
elections ....and i'm struck that these are not stupid people....they are either totally
IGNORANT of the facts and analysis .....or they are good ol boys, ready to tow the deep state
lie, so they too can feed at the trough. It saddens me in either case ....what hope can one
entertain when such cretins and low lifes are the supposed LEADERS of the democratic west. I
hold no hopes.
Proof by absurdity. Trump and Deep State work together. MAGA is a policy choice as much as it is a
campaign slogan. Everyone wants to rail against the anti-Trump forces. Oh it feels so good. That Trump has
proven to be a faux populist like Obama is ignored. WTF? Welcome to the rabbit hole.
I didn't live through the entire Anti-Communist Crusade, but was certainly cognitively aware
of it from JFK's inauguration in 1961 until the USSR's dissolution. I very closely studied
the events that led to an emergent Russian Federation and the device meant to corral the
"Near-Abroad"--The Commonwealth of Independent States. Admittedly, I was somewhat horrified
by Yeltsin's attack on Russia's Duma's White House in 1993 and eagerly read Kargalitsky's
account as it was the only one written by a Parliamentarian in English and published in 1994.
It was possible to discern the outright looting of Russia and former Soviet nations, but the
depth of evil involved wasn't made clear until some publications in the late 1990s
documenting the Rape of Russia; all of which made clear what the underlying intent of the
Anti-Communist Crusade entailed, and that that Crusade wouldn't end until Russia was
absolutely broken and enslaved by NATO/Outlaw US Empire. As many have opined, the Cold
War/Anti-Communist Crusade never ended; rather, it just entered a new phase/chapter, and
that's what we're living through today. But as b portrays, the level of hysterics paraded via
BigLie Media go far beyond anything from the previous chapter and probably outweigh those
employed during Red Scares I and II combined.
It seems fairly plain to see that delusional madness and anger have combined as the
motivating factors, but why/what sparked them and when? IMO, when was during Carter's
presidency with the why/what being several seemingly disparate but connected happenings:
Church Committee Hearings; Stagflation; Iranian Islamic Revolution; OPEC actions; losing grip
on Latin America; informal end to War on Poverty, and institution of Neoliberalism and
Zerosumism; changing of Coldwarrior Guard to Israel First Coldwarrior Guard. The culmination
was CIA gaining control of Executive with DCI GHW Bush becoming Veep to senile, dementia
addled POTUS Reagan.
Interconnected with the above is the prepping of the World Trade Center buildings for
demolition during Clinton's 2nd term, the operative question being: Would the False Flag be
perpetrated by Gore/Liberman, or was Bush/Cheney deemed to do the deed by Deep State actors;
or does this aspect even matter--Liberman was as much of a Neocon as Cheney, all 4 are Israel
Firsters, and Gore was already a War Criminal due to his participation in Clinton's numerous
illegalities. Sure, the Bush/Cheney cabal was more radical; but given what we observed during
Clinton/Gore, Deep State support was quite abundant. The dismemberment of Yugoslavia was
finished and Kosovo created, Afghanistan was already targeted and Joint Vision 2010
--the blueprint for the Outlaw US Empire's Full Spectrum Dominance Policy--was published in
1996. Interestingly, at no time known to me has the Policy articulated by the authors of
Joint Vision 2010 or its update Joint Vision 2020 been announced by any POTUS
or senior member of the Duopoly as THE #1 policy goal of the Outlaw US Empire despite both
papers being available to the public. (If he were still alive, IF Stone would have written
about both umpteen numbers of times; while true to form, BigLie media remains 100% mute.)
Despite all the preparations and Trillions of dollars spent and looted, The failure to
implement the Yinon Plan seems to be directed at Russia, although it was indigenous Iraqis
who are responsible for the plan's defeat.
So, is the lying vitriol we're subjected to the result of Russian actions or the inability
to attain the #1 policy goal due to mistakes made at all levels--Deep State and Federal
Government? Recall that Russia/Putin didn't start to actively parry Outlaw Empire moves until
2008, well after the Yinon Plan's defeat by Iraqis.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 15, 2019 5:02:35 PM |
link
This inane narrative has gone too far. It's actually threatening chances for human survival
with its nationalism, poor focus, and banality:
--
"The key focus of the so-called "left" in the world's most polluting country, run by an
ecocidal vandal who deserves to be in the running for most destructive rulers of all time, is
whether or not that vandal is taking orders from the Russian Federation.
Let me repeat that: in the most wasteful society in human history, the forces designated
to oppose the rape of the planet and corporate slavery are concerned with treason and
betrayal of the "nation."
MSNBC: "The worst case scenario that we`ve all been talking about, which is the
possibility that the president had somehow been co-opted and was in the pocket of the
Russians."
THIS is the "worst case scenario" according to the "social justice" network of the
American "left?"
If we were to step back and look at this terrible situation honestly, we could only
conclude that American liberals, and the Democratic Party, are right-wing nationalist forces
concerned with geopolitical gambits and preservation of military alliances.
This isn't the politics of 2019, or 1999. It's the politics of 1819 - but even then, it's
the right wing politics of 1819, as there was already a left dedicated to popular solidarity
and social ownership existing, clandestinely, in the shadows of European cities.
It's worth analyzing how a "Seattle" would play out if it were to occur in the context of
today's US political discourse: the protestors would be seen as nationalist anti-Semites
doing the bidding of Putin, and perhaps Xi Jinping. The leaking of the Multilateral Agreement
on Investment would be condemned instantly as "information warfare." A focus on environmental
issues would be viewed in the context of "energy geopolitics." Indymedia would be shut down
by the authorities as a vehicle for "sowing discord" in Europe against NATO and
liberalism."
@14 karlof1... good post.. i don't know the answer to your questions, but it seems like a bit
of both but mostly the later... i am unaware of this joint vision 2010 paper..
As b points out, and Erelis @6, among others confirms, Kaplan's article in Slate is
worthless. Discredited by everything that has happened over the past two years.
The question is whether it matters. Who reads Slate? Are those who follow Kaplan anything
more than partisans, far beyond the reach of logical argument, committed to the Zionist
project and US hegemony, who read him for comfort and laughs rather than critically.
Kaplan, after twenty odd years of consistently being wrong and consistently impelling the
United States into foreign disasters, costly in lives and treasure, is a busted flush
politically. The only people his ravings effect are the true believers who are simply looking
for someone to articulate their idiotic prejudices.
This, after all is a man whose wife, an Obama/ Clinton favourite, parodying Marie Antionette,
midwifed the Bandera Reich in Kiev.
There is little point in arguing with him, just feed him ever more rope and he will hang
himself, his spouse, his country(s) and the Ukraine and its allies too.
Given the part we know about how self serving, corrupt and incompetent our IC is I fear it is
the tip of the iceberg. So many decades they have learned they can do as they will with
impunity. If I am not mistaken they are partly self financing through likely illegal and
unethical activities. They have gone rogue. Currently the dems think it's fitting however
they will also feel the bite. How will we ever gain control of our country.
Which are more salient--domestically: The attacks on Russia or those against Trump? Lots of
Trumpian, GOP and Corporate Democrat policy ploys go against the majority of the polity and
the National Interest. Unfortunately, the bloc known as the Resistance includes a 5th Column
consisting of most Corporate Democrats, who are essentially Republicans wearing donkey heads.
BigLie Media wants to promote the GOP & Corporate Democrat policy ploys, so the
anti-Russian news assault serves to cover-up popular domestic issues, like
this one regarding taxation and related income disparity . (Amazing that 60
Minutes provided Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez airtime to outline her proposals--airtime that
was meant to cut her down to size but backfired.)
As I outlined earlier, what I see as the struggle is for control of the Federal
Government--CIA/Deep State vs the American People--with the Anti-Communist Crusade used as
cover to diminish rights while enriching actors controlling government, which is exactly what
we see now. Yes, Trump's a player, but with few friends and little coaching. Arguably, his
only asset is the position he occupies.
That's probably wrong. Distancing from Russia was the main theme for all post Soviet States.
And the fact that Ukraine had chosen Baltin model -- becoming the sattelite of EU is not
surprising, taking into account connections of Western Ukraine and Germany which goes to the time
when this territory was a part of Austro-Hungarian Empire.
The the fact that this distancing took such a toxic and self-destructing form and incldes the
loss of territory and population, can be attributed to the USA. Here I would agree with the
author.
Notable quotes:
"... The term, roughly translated as Revolution of Dignity, was cooked up at the Jamestown Foundation in Washington, well in advance of Victoria Nuland's assumption of the throne as de facto "Queen of the Ukraine," lording over her subjects, playing the role of "donut dollie." ..."
"... The roots of the conflict in the Ukraine with thousands dead and the threat of, minimally, a wider regional conflict, are attributable to extremist elements in the United States -- those faces and voices seen and heard promoting the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the supporters of ISIS/Al Qaeda in Syria -- and the cheerleaders of the continued genocide against the Palestinian people." ..."
"A Pew poll from April 2014 revealed that 91 percent of Crimean respondents
believed the referendum was free and fair, 93 percent had confidence in Putin, and
85 percent believed Kiev should recognize the results.
Another poll in June 2014, this one from Gallup , showed 94 percent of
ethnic Russians in Crimea thought the referendum reflected the views of the people and 68
percent of ethnic Ukrainians in Crimea agreed . The poll found that 74 percent
believed that joining Russia would make life better.
A GfK poll from February 2015, sponsored by a pro-Ukrainian group in Canada,
revealed 93 percent of Crimeans endorsed the referendum."
"Enough documents have been released -- citing coup-backed snipers killing dozens of
protesters, US embassy officials planning false flag attacks, extremists downing a passenger
airliner and NATO peddling falsified intelligence -- to make it very clear that the "coup" is
more of an invasion than anything else.
The term, roughly translated as Revolution of Dignity, was cooked up at the Jamestown
Foundation in Washington, well in advance of Victoria Nuland's assumption of the throne as de
facto "Queen of the Ukraine," lording over her subjects, playing the role of "donut
dollie."
The roots of the conflict in the Ukraine with thousands dead and the threat of,
minimally, a wider regional conflict, are attributable to extremist elements in the United
States -- those faces and voices seen and heard promoting the invasion of Afghanistan and
Iraq, the supporters of ISIS/Al Qaeda in Syria -- and the cheerleaders of the continued
genocide against the Palestinian people."
"In 1950, the Nuremberg Tribunal defined Crimes against Peace, in Principle VI,
specifically Principle VI(a), submitted to the United Nations General Assembly, as:
(i) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation
of international treaties, agreements or assurances;
(ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the
acts mentioned under (i)."
@annamaria
Bravo, indeed, Annamaria. Beautiful, perfect, resounding, harsh, unforgiving words for a pair
of worthless human vermin masquerading as civilised, intelligent professionals with a moral
compass.
"... The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment. ..."
annamaria says: April 10,
2018 at 2:44 pm GMT 100 Words On the British Establishment:
The Skripal affair is better understood in the context of "sir" Savile' knighthood -- when the
influential pedophile had been raping and molesting kids for 40 years and none stood up to the
criminal. The BBC has dutifully refused to publish anything that would upset "sir" Savile. The
Scotland Yard looked the other way -- precisely as the Establishment ordered them to do.
Savile' specialty were orphans. He was the embodiment of British Establishment.
The British Establishment has done with the concepts of honor. The loudest lying voices
against Russia belong either to the whoring "aristocrats," who found that war profiteering (by
any means) pays well, or the opportunistic parvenu like Gavin Williamson representing the
vulgarity and intellectual inadequacy of the Establishment.
"... Even voters too ignorant to see Trump for what he really was - voters that are misinformed to the point that they unwittingly and continually vote against their own best interests - realized how much the Dems have sold out to Wall Street. ..."
"... That's why they anointed Obama who then proceeded to squander eight years of opportunity to remove big money from politics and enact progressive reforms to health care, the environment, etc. ..."
"... Bernie is a bit long in the tooth, so I am all in for Liz Warren. She's the only one with both the courage and the intelligence to take on the big money that controls our politics. ..."
"... Sanders or Warren would mean a change from neoliberal war mongering of the Clinton/W model. If the Democrats offer up another Clintonite they will lose. They need to offer something positive to the 90% who have lost the last 40 years of class war. ..."
The neoliberalism of the Democratic Party elite (and most of the rank and file) is one big
factor in our 2016 loss. Even voters too ignorant to see Trump for what he really was -
voters that are misinformed to the point that they unwittingly and continually vote against
their own best interests - realized how much the Dems have sold out to Wall Street.
HRC would have been nominated in '08 if she had kissed more Wall Street you-know-what.
That's why they anointed Obama who then proceeded to squander eight years of opportunity
to remove big money from politics and enact progressive reforms to health care, the
environment, etc.
Bernie is a bit long in the tooth, so I am all in for Liz Warren. She's the only one
with both the courage and the intelligence to take on the big money that controls our
politics.
Therefore, you can expect the Russian trolls to be coming for her in force. If you read
anything negative about Warren in the coming months, check the source and don't trust the
accuracy.
Sanders or Warren would mean a change from neoliberal war mongering of the Clinton/W
model. If the Democrats offer up another Clintonite they will lose. They need to offer
something positive to the 90% who have lost the last 40 years of class war.
Broadly, authoritarianism is the desire to impose one's own worldview on others in one's
society by institutionalized coercion. Authoritarians, therefore, see punishment as an
appropriate response when members of the group with which they identify [...] diverge too
far from values that the authoritarian believes are best for society – even if the
punished person has neither caused direct harm to another nor infringed another's
rights.
Yep,
The party has circled its wagons.
They insist that the Evil Vlad stole the last election.
Therefore, no need to examine Obama's centrist/neoliberal policies and the socio-economic
conditions that fueled the rejection of Hillary.
We're doomed to repeat our errors.
The farcical DNC leadership echoes the days of Brezhnev's intransigent politburo.
This is the realistic perspective we have to adopt in the US: the Democratic establishment
is part of the neoliberal machinery that has generated Bush's wars, Obama's bank bailouts,
deportations, and drone executions, and now Trump's anti-democratic populism.
"... Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly stayed on-message. ..."
In regards to the Hillary v Bernie question, it also didn't help that the primary vote was
wildly skewed by so-called 'superdelegates,' who don't actually commit their votes until the
DNC convention, but were being counted by the media as having already voted for Hillary,
which made it appear to many of the uninformed that Bernie didn't have any chance of winning,
which may have been intended to keep Bernie supporters home on primary day under the
assumption that Hillary was unbeatable.
As sensible as your suggestions may be, what you're calling for would require at least three
constitutional amendments to be practical - including scrapping the first amendment.
Maybe we should strive towards attainable goals instead?
Didn't help that the ostensibly neutral DNC was sending emails saying that they should play
up Bernie Sanders' Jewish faith (among other attack strategies), fed debate questions to the
Clinton campaign or tried to limit opportunities for Bernie and Hillary to share a stage
together.
Bernie Sanders is widely considered by many to be one of the most popular American
politicians, more than Trump and certainly more popular than Hillary. I think an interesting
phenomenon to notice is the lengths the GOP, in particular, will go to in order to convince
the average voter that anything that cuts taxes is inherently good for the 'little guy,'
while anything that raises taxes is bad. Trump's recent tax cuts are a good example. Most of
the actual cuts go toward the corporations and ultra-wealthy, which just increases the
deficit while shifting the proportion of taxes paid onto the middle class. It's a con that
many Americans are inexplicably susceptible to believing, for some reason.
Progressive believe in inclusion and if that is "moralistic rhetoric" then so be it.
The litany goes "round and round.
Hillary Clinton:
" you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of
deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you
name it!
"Barack Obama:
"Referring to working-class voters in old industrial towns decimated by job losses, the
presidential hopeful said: "They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion "
Bernie's bid was crushed by Clinton's superdelegates. No amount of throwing money against him
in the direct sense was doing any good. He took popular positions on issues and stubbornly
stayed on-message.
The Zionist Plan for the Middle East, also known as the Yinon Plan, is an Israeli
strategic plan to ensure Israeli regional superiority. It insists and stipulates that Israel
must reconfigure its geo-political environment through the balkanization of the surrounding
Arab states into smaller and weaker states.
The reach of a "Greater Israel", as described in the Yinon plan.
When viewed in the current context, the war on Iraq, the 2006 war on Lebanon, the 2011 war
on Libya, the ongoing war on Syria, not to mention the process of regime change in Egypt,
must be understood in relation to the Zionist Plan for the Middle East. The latter consists
in weakening and eventually fracturing neighboring Arab states as part of an Israeli
expansionist project.
"Greater Israel" consists in an area extending from the Nile Valley to the Euphrates.
Israeli strategists viewed Iraq as their biggest strategic challenge. This is why Iraq was
outlined as the centerpiece to the balkanization of the Middle East and the Arab World. In
Iraq, on the basis of the concepts of the Yinon Plan, Israeli strategists have called for the
division of Iraq into a Kurdish state and two Arab states, one Shiite and the other
Sunni.
The Atlantic, in 2008, and the U.S. military's Armed Forces Journal, in 2006, both
published widely circulated maps that closely followed the outline of the Yinon Plan. Aside
from a divided Iraq, the Yinon Plan calls for a divided Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria. The Yinon
Plan also calls for color revolutions (Arab Spring) North Africa and forecasts it as starting
from Egypt and then spilling over into Sudan, Libya, and the rest of the region.
"Greater Israel" requires the breaking up of the existing Arab states into small states.
The plan operates on two essential premises. To survive, Israel must
become an imperial regional power, and
must effect the division of the whole area into small states by the dissolution of all
existing Arab states.
Small here will depend on the ethnic or sectarian composition of each state. Consequently,
the Zionist hope is that sectarian-based states become Israel's satellites and, ironically,
its source of moral legitimation This is not a new idea, nor does it surface for the first
time in Zionist strategic thinking. Indeed, fragmenting all Arab states into smaller units
has been a recurrent theme.
Viewed in this context, the war on Syria is part of the process of Israeli territorial
expansion. Israeli intelligence working hand in glove with the US, Turkey and NATO is
directly supportive of the Al Qaeda terrorist mercenaries inside Syria.
The Zionist Project also requires the destabilization of Egypt, the creation of factional
divisions within Egypt as instrumented by the "Arab Spring" leading to the formation of a
sectarian based State dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Half of Americans don't bother voting for president. Why is the American media full only of people who insist that the country
is divided in half between Democrat and Republican supporters? Where are the people of influence who think it's a problem and
reflects poorly on the country that half of eligible voters don't see a reason to participate, and that it's worth changing things
in order to get more people to change their minds about that?
Both parties are content with being unpopular, but with political mechanisms ensuring they stay in power anyway. The Democrats
aren't concerned with being popular. They're content with being a token opposition party that every once in a while gets a few
token years with power they don't put to any good anyway. It pays more, I guess.
It still looks like if Americans want to live in a progressive country, they'll have to move to one. But as it is clear that the
neoliberalism of establishment Democrats has little or nothing to offer the poor and working class, or to non-wealthy millennials,
the times they are a-changing.
''Tis booming because the left/liberal/metropolitan muesli crunching elites (and I include
the Tories in that) who have reigned disdainfully over us since the Second World War have
ignored our fears over mass immigration and the changing of our established traditions and
cultures. They have also connived in the insanity of insisting every hair brained liberal
idea is worthy of being protected by the human rights legislative farce. Rapists being
offered a say in the upbringing of their issue, school uniforms being dragged into law and a
thousand and other one 'special issues' to a tiny minority being rammed down the throats of
the fed up majority at every opportunity by activists.
But that's the point, isn't it? That populist has been so vaguely defined that it encompasses
anything the authors don't like. It's a straw man, a pejorative.
Populism is a belief in the goodness of people, a belief that masses make better decisions
than elites and that the the rule of the elite come at the expense of the demos.
It's a term synonymous with grassroots, popular democracy. Proponents of elite rule with
reductionistic views democracy (rule with the consent of the governed and all that trash)
call their grassroots opponents 'populists' in attempt to tie them to strong men.
Noam Chomsky has a view on this issue and I am inclined to think he has a better
understanding of it than the author of this piece.
Chomsky rejects the term "populism" in this matter and offers, instead, the proposal that
;
"Working people are turning against elites and dominant institutions that have been
punishing them for a generation"
The theory of 'cause and effect' seems eminently more sensible to me than the shrill cries
of "It was the internet wot dun it"
The elites and dominant institutions that Chomsky refers to ( including mainstream media )
precipitated the current shift and would do better to acknowledge the part they played in it,
rather than insult and demean the consequential reaction of people on the receiving end of
it.
The enemy is not populism, it's the right's capture of the populist narrative. Trump is a
faux populist that has nothing but disdain for the people he employs and the people
rules.
The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through
our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my
ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
Isaac Asimov
"A Cult of Ignorance". Newsweek, January 21, 1980.
the very old school Christian conservative libertarians and old skool nutty right have
seized on the success populist narrative has had in recent elections and referendum.
I would argue that is is because establishment figures in the Democratic party -- the New
Democrats -- decided that the days of class struggle were over, that 'we are all capitalists
now' and ceded the populist narrative to the right. Yes, this a populist moment and the
question is not if we can reestablish faith in the elite but whether we can ensure that the
new populism goes is a left rather than right direction.
I don't agree that populism lacks depth -- probably because when I think of populism I
think of left populist intellectuals like Friere, Martin-Baro and the like who thought that
democracy should be built on the virtues of the people.
The occupy movement was a populist movement. It said we, the people on the ground, know
better than the elites in the towers. It made decisions democratically, this in stark
contrast to the hierarchical structures of decision making exercised by the financial elite.
I think populism, or grassroots, popular democracy has intellectual depth and
sophistication. Take a look a the writing of Sheldin Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chris Hedges, David
Graeber . . .
I don't agree with most of the definitions of populism we've been offered -- I think they
are little more that pejoratives dressed in academic language and have as much depth as the
right's favored "snowflake" pejorative.
I remember watching 'Tomorrows World' ' in the 1970s and they showed us an unpuncturable
cycle tyre that would last 25,000 miles.
The patent was bought by Europe's largest cycle tyre manufacturer, and AFAIK that was the
last ever heard of it.
If that happened why is the water fuel idea so fanciful?
If you inject water into the inlet port or combustion chamber of a petrol engine, compression
ratios, power output and efficiency can be raised dramatically, this has been known since WW1
and was employed in high altitude aero engines during WW2, yet has never been taken up by any
major car manufacturer as far as I know, why?
So the notion that inventions could be suppressed for commercial reasons is really not
fanciful at all, it would make less sense for such technology, if it existed, to be made
altruistically available on a single purchase basis than to shitcan it.
As far as I can see, our country has been ruled by a right-wing, monied elite for many
years- not a 'liberal' one. Liberals at least tend to think in terms of economic equality and
social freedoms, whatever their other faults might be.
But many working class and middle class people still carry on voting Tory even though it's
against their own interests.
We don't have a 'liberal elite' in the UK. We still have the old-fashioned right wing Tory
elite in power based on class and wealth. Why 'liberals' get all the abuse these days is
beyond me.
I'm researching populism on youtube - and it is seedy- and I have yet to turn on the FB news
feed, but the algorithms do support populism- watch a PragerU video and the feed is full of
other rightwing nonsense.
And all of it has the same empty lines.
I watched the Oxford Union Steve Bannon address- and it could have come from a left
winger- the globalised corporate world has abandoned the little guy, and Trump is fixing
it.
The on message is the MSM is lying
PC and activists are totalitarian = commies
either capitalism or socialism [commies] = freedom vs enslavement
and an over whelming anti intellectualism - where have we heard that before.
True but there is still a case for having decent housing etc and training our own
professionals as well and not hollow out professionals from less advantaged countries. When
we took hundreds of nurses from the Philippines in 2000 and whole clinics there had to shut
to terrible detriment of ill locals
"But populism has two chief characteristics. First, it offers immediate and supposedly
obvious answers to complicated problems, which usually blame some other group along the
way."
I think this point (simple solutions to complex problems) is often overstated. If you take
the issue of immigration (an issue that has fuelled populism) , it actually shouldn't
necessarily be that difficult to bring the number of new immigrants down, except that the
political and media establishment pretend that it is.
Take Trump's plan to build a wall on the Mexican border. I see absolutely nothing wrong
with this as it is ultimately every country's prerogative to defend its borders.
Ditto for intra-EU immigration (perhaps the main reason for Brexit): the EU acts as if
this principle of free movement is sacred, but why should that be the case? Or Germany, where
I live, where the constitution guarantees a right to asylum for those seeking refuge in the
country. Again, this is spoken of as though it were cast in stone, when it really shouldn't
be that difficult to amend. So I don't necessarily believe that solutions to problems always
have to be difficult and complicated.
I agree that advances in people's abilities to interact with greater numbers of other people
tend to usher in periods of social upheaval. A lot of the current nationalistic,
anti-foreigner sentiments are the result of our initial reactions against unfamiliar
influences coming from groups with whom we previously had relatively little contact.
Brexit, "Make America Great Again", and similar movements are the collective screams of
resistance against dealing with unfamiliarity, learning new things, and growing. Over time,
we will adapt, but this will probably require a generation or so, at minimum.
Of course, given the high pace of technological change, we are likely to be collectively
bonded together even more tightly before we are able to adapt to the current state of the
world. It won't be long before people will all be interconnected via implants, which means
that each and every thing we do and every emotion we have will be sent out over the
net.
In a way Populism is somewhat similar to Marxism: implicit message is that the class struggle
in the societies is the key problem, which is completely true. American middle class was robbed
from 1970th of a considerable chunk of its standard of living. So it is not surprising that the
neoliberal elite ( the News Class of as they are called the US nomenklatura) now feels threatened
and resorts to censorship, usage of intelligence agencies and mass surveillance, and other
oppressive tactics to squash the dissent.
But in such cases the dissent grows stronger despise such an efforts and might turn, at some
point, into insurrection against financial oligarchy as Marxists predicted.
The only problem is with Marxism is that they considered working class to the the next
dominant class and this proved to be a false idea. That will never never happens.
Populism is a range of political approaches that deliberately appeal to "the people,"
often juxtaposing this group against a so-called "elite." There is no single definition of
the term, which developed in the 19th century and has been used to mean various things
since that time. Few politicians or political groups describe themselves as "populists",
and in political discourse the term is often applied to others pejoratively. Within
political science and other social sciences, various different definitions of populism have
been used, although some scholars propose rejecting the term altogether.
the wiki
page is a bit more expansive you should try reading it.
The left is also guilty of populist ideas- blaming the rich, or banking [when in the UK we
get a lot of tax from international banking as a service].
The right has just seized on populism and mainly through social media- brexit and trump
are proof its works- but the people behind the populist message are the same old tired neo
con christian right of the Reagan era and the sad old far right conspiracy nut jobs. Their
message failed in the past- but people like Rees-mogg can now seize on this technique.
Your misunderstanding of what socialism means indicates you swallow the new right wing
propaganda. Poorly funded education will result in people without proper opportunity- S.Korea
is not a socialist country but they spend a huge amount on education and reap the rewards.
But they have a culture where children doing well academically is praised but can also have
negative pressure consequences.
It is complicated and worth discussion but populism wants the easy message.
One of the better reports on populism I've see recently is ''European Disunion'' by Yascha
Mounk, a lecturer on government at Harvard
https://newrepublic.com/article/143604/european-disunion-rise-populist-movements-means-democracy
.
A analysis by Harvard ''Trump, Brexit, and the Rise of Populism: Economic Have-Nots and
Cultural Backlash'' found that the primary factor driving populism is a cultural backlash
i.e. against [neo]liberal policies and immigration.
Populism is growing because wealth is being concentrated into the hands of the wealthy, at
the expense of everyone else.
Generations, instead of doing better, through working are doing worse because governments
are allowing individuals and corporations to reduce terms and conditions of the
workforce.
Twenty years ago, many UK workers had company pension schemes and jobs that paid the rent
& bills. Now, the pensions have largely dried up and as housing has got more expensive,
and incomes have shrunk.
Those at the top are pushing those beneath them closer to a bowl of rice a day, and shrug
at the social consequences as inevitable - and a necessary step to protect shareholder values
and profits.
In essence, it is the same situation that gave rise to populism in the thirties.
Who do you blame for the fact that house prices have gone up?
Who do you blame for the fact that your pension is going to be smaller than your
parents'?
Thing is the populist politicians are the very same people who cut your pension and made
money out of it. They just want you to blame someone else.
Some highlights from this thread (no names, no pack drill):
Populism is a kickback and correction to the forty years of political correctness where
the white masses of Europe and America were forbidden by the liberal establishment to be
their real selves
People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites.
Perhaps the reason that "populism" is thriving is that the liberal elites who ruled us
in the entire post war period became complacent out of touch with those they were meant to
represent.
there are millions of others whose voices have been ignored or silenced by the
mainstream news
We are disenfranchised by what the elites are saying because the elites control the
narrative in a way that makes sure the power will always reside with them.
The MSM has always been biased-
Why is democracy booming the article asks.
Well because the lies and bullshit of the liberal elite are there for all to see.
Take a look at what the MSM refuses to report, or what it deliberately distorts,
You can see the problem. It's like they are all reading from the same limited script which
has been handed to them. Given the freedom to express our opinions, we are regurgitating what
someone else has told us to say.
Maybe we should not be too pessimistic. The levels of opportunity for expression that the
internet and social media have given us might currently have exceeded our ability to think
critically about whatever bullshit we are being fed, but future generations may be better.
After all, it's only a small step from doubting whatever mainstream thought tells you, to
starting to wonder who is telling you to doubt those things and why and then to actually go
back and think for yourself about the issues.
So Corbyn and Trump are the same because they both have shirts. Well, color me
convinced!
Like so many of these articles -- including the long but uninformative 'long read' on the
same topic -- there is no mention of the failures of the elites.
Clinton sold us a false bill of goods. The Washington Consensus on economics would make
the country richer and, after some 'pain', would benefit the working class. Sure you wouldn't
be making cars but after some retraining you would work in tech.
This was a broken promise -- de industrialization has devastated the upper midwest. The
goods are made in China and the money goes to Bezos. People are rightly upset.
The Washington Consensus on war sold us a false bill of goods. Instead of peace through
strength we have seen a century of endless conflict. We have been caught in state of constant
killing since 2001 and we are no safer for it. Indeed the conflicts have created new enemies
and the only solution on offer is a hair of the dog solution.
People are fed up with the elite consensus because of the failures of the elites. Nowhere
are the repeated failures of the elites, the decades of broken promises mentioned in the
articles. Instead, those of us who prefer Sanders to Clinton, Corbyn to Blair are mesmerized
by emotional appeals and seduced by simplistic appeals to complex problems. And they wonder
why we don't accept their analyses . . .
TL;DR -- clickbait didn't get us here. The broken promises of the Washington consensus
did.
Why is populism booming asks the writer - simple, because people feel that no-one's
listening. Can it really be a surprise to The Guardian Opinion writers that people who have a
zero hours contract, pay a high rent and have little job security won't vote for more of the
same?
It's not a question as the writer suggests of 'if this wave of populism drifts into
authoritarianism or worse' it's more a question of when - and when it does the liberal left
will still be asking themselves - why?
I've grown very sceptical over the years about the whole issue of asylum. To me, the idea
that an individual can cross a border illegally without a visa, or without even a passport,
and then suddenly become quasi legal be declaring that they wish to seek asylum is a bit of a
farce. The situation becomes even more farcical when failed asylum seekers still aren't
deported. As for humanitarian and ethical obligations, I don't really buy into that either
because the demographics of the world are such that the West is at risk of losing its very
identity if it feels "obliged" to accept everyone seeking asylum and/or work from the world's
more troubled regions. I see the admission of refugees as a generous gesture, not as an
obligation.
If he can only succeed in a positive environment then there's not much hope for him, he needs to be able to fight and prove
he's got what it takes. As it is I'm not sure he's got it.
That's not what I said at all and you know it.
Last time, the only stories that the NYTimes and (mostly) the Guardian could manage to run were Bernie-negative
stories. The NYTimes has already begun the exact same campaign for the 2020 cycle. By comparison, the Guardian
has been providing balanced Bernie coverage.
Do not count on the mainstream media to support him. They're already hard at work smearing him and he hasn't even announced yet.
Half the time they dont even mention him as being a likely contender. It's Biden all day, all night. Might as well be Hillary
again.
Expect 2020 to be quite contentious, possibly even more than 2016. That just means as a supporter of Bernie you'll have to
work twice, maybe three times as hard. The corporate media is going to suppress and challenge him as much as possible. They don't
even mask it anymore.
[Jan 16, 2019] Corporatism is the control of government by big business. This is what we have in the USA today. The main difference between corporatism and fascism is the level of repressions against opposition. Corporatism now tales forma of inverted totalitarism and use ostracism instead of phycal repressions
That is why we need a Constitutional amendment to get the money OUT of politics. Make bribery illegal. THEN, we will not need
Wall Street, which doesn't serve MOST of the population of this country, and is mostly responsible for the wealth gap and lack
of opportunities for most of the population.
I'm not fooled. These are not progressives, they are corporatists, beholden to their donors. They have no courage, no interest
in serving their constituencies, but are only interested in the power and money. What our country , and the world, needs is radical
change from the profit-first point of view. I won't support either one of them.
These corporate-Dem candidates are not being forced to sell out to win elections. Quite the
opposite in fact. They are risking losing their elections for the sake of selling out.
Surely, many will comment that Democrats have no choice but to take the money in order to be
competitive. I have one truism for such folks to ponder: Why would you trust your allegiance
to those who don't care if you win?
Basic logic: rich people win the general election either way, so long as the
primary-winning Democrat is in their pocket (the GOP is always on their side). So this
monetary affection is certainly more about fixing an no-lose general than it is about ousting
Trump, or any Republican.
"... Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract. ..."
"... While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent. ..."
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who
appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal. Leventhal has been a staffer at the State
Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative
memo, he is listed as a current team member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with
"counter-propaganda," the State Department's Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My
old job at the State Department was as chief propagandist," confessed former Global
Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it
and they have to do it to their own population and I don't necessarily think it's that
awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's
international network, the Global Engagement Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying
smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an
outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian disinformation smugly explaining how he
would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would
marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation.
His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message and destroy the
messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000
British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page
lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation Advisor" to the State Department. If that were
true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
"... Petraeus stressed that Moscow prompted the alliance to deploy more troops and aircraft into Eastern Europe and the Baltic States as well as set up new command HQs in the region. It was done under the pretext of fighting 'Russian aggression' as relations between NATO and Moscow steadily deteriorated during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. In that sense, Putin is "the greatest gift" NATO has received since the conclusion of the Cold War, the American general said. ..."
Petraeus gives us an update on what U.S. Defense has been up to in Europe.
Russia successfully 'breathed new life' into NATO by giving it a reason to boost military
expansion into Eastern Europe and strengthen the US foothold on the continent, ex-CIA boss,
retired four-star general David Petraeus said.
Russia singlehandedly gave the American-led military bloc "a new reason for living," the
former general told the audience at an international conference in New Delhi, India on
Wednesday.
Petraeus stressed that Moscow prompted the alliance to deploy more troops and
aircraft into Eastern Europe and the Baltic States as well as set up new command HQs in the
region. It was done under the pretext of fighting 'Russian aggression' as relations between
NATO and Moscow steadily deteriorated during the presidency of Vladimir Putin. In that
sense, Putin is "the greatest gift" NATO has received since the conclusion of the Cold War,
the American general said.
He also 'credited' the Russian leader for providing the US with the rationale to return
an armored brigade to Europe "for the first time in a number of years." It is currently
stationed in Poland.
@ Circe | Jan 9, 2019 9:59:35 PM | 49
General Petraeus is a crooked unreliable opportunist, so why should we listen to him? One
would expect such a failure to hype the non-existent "Russia threat." And stupidly speaking
in India, which has decided (against US demands) to buy Russia's S-400 ABM system.
Posted this over at Mark Chapman's The New Kremlin Stooge blog:
The latest news from Salisbury: first, the park bench and the dining table walked the
Path of Fire, then the guinea pigs and a cat followed, a house may soon do so as well, and
the latest perhaps to join the queue
Several comments attached to that post are of "wish we had Novichok in our shopping
centre" or "they planned this all along" type. It seems that Salisbury shopping centre as it
is has not been doing well because of high rents previously imposed by Wiltshire Council and
it desperately needs a makeover. Call me cynical but maybe Wiltshire Council is using the
poisoning incident to bring forward its redevelopment plans for the Salisbury shopping centre
that will all but kill off local businesses.
A source close to Rosenstein said he intends to stay on until Mueller submits a report to
the Justice Department on the Russian meddling investigation. The source said that would mean
Rosenstein would remain until early March. Several legal sources have said they expect the
Mueller team to submit its report by mid-to-late February, although they said that timeline
could change based on unforeseen investigative developments.
Rosenstein had long intended to serve about two years as the Justice Department's No. 2
official, these officials say. They add that this is his own plan and that he is not being
forced out by the White House. That's despite the fact that he's been a frequent target of
criticism from President Donald Trump on Twitter.
The administration officials say he plans to remain on the job until after a new attorney
general is confirmed. After pushing out Jeff Sessions in November, Trump nominated William
Barr, who planned to be at the Capitol on Wednesday, beginning a round of courtesy calls with
senators ahead of his confirmation hearing, which begins Jan. 15.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said Wednesday on Fox News: "I know the deputy
attorney general has always planned to roughly stay around two years. My guess is that he is
making room for the new attorney general to build a team that he wants around him."
Rosenstein's intentions were first reported by ABC News. He did not respond to questions
Wednesday morning.
Rosenstein considered resigning last fall, after a report surfaced that he had advocated
secretly recording Trump, but he decided to stay on the job. Aides said he made a comment about
having someone "wear a wire" around the president as a joke during a meeting.
Rosenstein had been overseeing the Mueller's investigation into possible Trump campaign
collusion with Russia and obstruction of justice because Sessions recused himself because of
his role in the Trump campaign. And even with the arrival of acting Attorney General Matt
Whitaker, who took over the probe, Rosenstein has continued to help supervise it.
If Barr is confirmed, as seems likely, he will fully take over the investigation. Several
legal sources have said it appears that the Mueller investigation is entering its final stages.
But Barr would play a key role in deciding whether and how to share Mueller's expected report
with Congress and whether to make all or part of it public.
Responding to news of Rosenstein's impending departure, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of
Virginia told CNN's "New Day" that he has "deep concern" about how Barr will handle the Mueller
probe. He referred to a memo Barr wrote in which he was critical of the investigation.
"William Barr was sending freelance memos to the Trump administration making a case to
undercut the Mueller investigation," Kaine said. "So the deep concern will be if he comes in
and Rosenstein is gone, is this just a preface to either undercutting the investigation or
trying to keep the results of it hidden from the American public."
Rosenstein has been a consistent defender of Mueller and the Justice Department, responding
to attacks from Republicans in Congress. He told a Law Day conference last May that the
department "is not going to be extorted," after some House Republicans raised the prospect of
seeking Rosenstein's impeachment.
The attacks from Congress and the White House were a jolt for Rosenstein, who enjoyed
bipartisan support for most of his three decades as a federal prosecutor. But his congressional
support faltered when he wrote a memo providing a rationale for Trump's decision to fire FBI
Director James Comey.
By appointing Mueller to take over the Russia investigation as a special counsel, Rosenstein
won back Democrats but angered the president, who tweeted, "I am being investigated for firing
the FBI Director by the man who told me to fire the FBI Director! Witch Hunt."
"... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
"... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn,
might illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent
pissing in."
Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to
guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that
like a feudal fiefdom?
Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there"
gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant
threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson
factor.
Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but
Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite
capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.
Even elementary things are difficult for the US congress to understand. Being hell--bent of
building global neoliberal empire rules from Washington does not help and reuqres demonization of
Russia and its Leaders. Despite recent setbacks Washington policies represent a real danger for
the mankind...
Notable quotes:
"... Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a contributing editor at ..."
"... is the author of 12 books and more than 750 articles on international affairs. His latest book is ..."
...there is no evidence that Moscow harbors expansionist ambitions remotely comparable to
those of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Indeed, the Kremlin's actions suggest a much more
limited, perhaps even defensive, agenda. As professors Andrei Shleifer and Daniel Treisman
observed
in Foreign Affairs , "To many in the West, Russia's 2008 invasion of Georgia seemed to
prove the Kremlin's land hunger." But such a conclusion reflects poor logic: "Kremlin leaders
bent on expansion would surely have ordered troops all the way to Tbilisi to depose [Georgia
President Mikheil] Saakashvili. At the least, Russian forces would have taken control of the
oil and gas pipelines that cross Georgia. Instead, the Russians left those pipelines alone and
quickly withdrew to the mountains."
Shleifer and Treisman raise a very important point. If Putin is a rogue leader with massive
expansionist objectives, why would he relinquish territory that Russian forces had occupied?
Indeed, with very little additional effort, Russia could have captured Tbilisi and the rest of
Georgia. Yet it did not attempt to do so. Hitler never willingly gave up any of his conquests,
and until the collapse of the Eastern European satellite empire in 1989-1991, the USSR
disgorged only one occupied area: the portion of Austria it controlled at the end of World War
II. Even that modest retreat took place only after laborious negotiations for a treaty
guaranteeing Austria's strict neutrality. If Putin truly harbors malignantly expansionist
ambitions comparable to those of Hitler and Stalin, declining to conquer and absorb all of
Georgia when that achievement was easily within reach showed curious restraint. His decision
merely to perpetuate and consolidate Moscow's treatment of Georgia's two secessionist regions,
Abkhazia and South Ossetia, as Russian protectorates suggests much more limited ambitions.
Another aspect of Russia's behavior is decidedly inconsistent with a rogue expansionist
power: its military spending is modest and declining, not robust and surging. True, Putin has
sought to rebuild and modernize Russia's military, and he has achieved some success in
doing so. Russia's navy once again deploys modern vessels, and its air force is now flying
modern, even cutting-edge aircraft. Putin's regime has also focused on developing and deploying
long-range, precision-guided weapons, and is pursuing military research and development efforts
with respect to hypersonic aircraft and missiles.
Even those developments must be put into perspective, however. The restoration and
modernization follows a decade of military decline and decay during the 1990s under Boris
Yeltsin. Moscow's military budget is still a very modest $66.3 billion. Not only does the
gargantuan U.S. budget of $716 billion dwarf that amount, it is far less than China's $174.5
billion and only slightly more than the budgets of countries such as France and India
. Moreover, in contrast to the sizable annual increases in U.S. spending levels, Russia's
military spending is
declining, not rising . The 2017 budget was $69.2 billion, some $2.9 billion greater than
the current budget. That is an odd trend for a government that supposedly harbors vast
offensive ambitions.
The only undiminished source of Russian clout is Moscow's large nuclear arsenal. But as
various scholars have shown, while nuclear weapons may be the ultimate deterrent, they are not
very useful for power projection or
war fighting , except in the highly improbable event that a country's political leadership
is eager to risk national and personal suicide. And there is no evidence whatsoever that Putin
and his oligarch backers are suicidal. Quite the contrary, they seem wedded to accumulating
ever greater wealth and perks.
Too many Americans act as though we are still confronting the Soviet Union at the height of
its power and ambitions. It will be the ultimate tragic irony if, having avoided war with a
messianic, totalitarian global adversary, we now stumble into war because of an out-of-date
image of, and policy toward, a conventional, regional power. Yet unless U.S. leaders change
both their mindsets and their policies toward Russia, that outcome is a real danger.
Ted Galen Carpenter, a senior fellow in security studies at the Cato Institute and a
contributing editor at , is the author of 12 books and more than 750 articles on
international affairs. His latest book is Gullible Superpower: U.S. Support for Bogus
Foreign Democratic Movements (2019).
"... Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have been ignored, mocked or both. ..."
"... When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie? ..."
"... The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. ..."
Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the
better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in
Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have
been ignored, mocked or both.
Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how
they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no
response from President Trump. Or anyone else for that matter.
When was the last time you heard of a major US political figure go overseas and be refused
a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant flunkie?
I can't think of one. Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton
knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds. And he did this from Jerusalem.
The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the
situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump
Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.
No. In November 2018, the US rejected a symbolic UN resolution calling on Israel to end its
occupation of the Golan Heights. The resolution passed with 151 votes in favor, 14 abstentions and only two votes against
– the US and Israel itself They call it, "Occupied" for no reason. Gaza also an example but joos kept slicing it out ever since
installed there.
Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it
resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to
suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN
should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.
"The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing.
And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies
as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "
This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty
potentate, and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act of political suicide. He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions. Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.
"... I think Bolton is a sop to Sheldon Aldelson. He may be playing a similar role to "The Mooch", I hope. ..."
"... Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that like a feudal fiefdom? ..."
Why did Trump appoint Bolton? A saying of LBJ, I believe attributed to Sam Rayburn,
might illuminate. "It is better to have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent
pissing in."
Likewise, Pompeo is the Koch brother's man. Both authoritarian billionaires trying to
guarantee their investment in Trump. You see the US is being run like a business, or is that
like a feudal fiefdom?
Not to be a broken record but should we blame the Dems? Arguably Trump's "out there"
gestures to the right are because he has to keep the Repubs on his side given the constant
threat of impeachment from the other side. Extremes beget extremes. There's also the Adelson
factor.
Of course this theory may be incorrect and he and Bolton are ideological soul mates, but
Trump's ideology doesn't appear to go much beyond a constant diet of Fox News. He seems quite
capable of pragmatic gestures which are then denounced by a horrified press.
"... Good article. It accurately spells it out about the contempt and disrespect that America has of other countries, and the coercive tactics that America often applies to them. ..."
"... It really goes back to what Marine corps Major General Smedley Butler once reflected on, in 1933, about the U.S.,. He said: "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism". Apparently, that is how other countries see us operating as too. ..."
For another example I turn to U.S. Ambassador to Germany, Richard Grenell, who just sent a
letter to both Uniper and BASF to stop work on the Nordstream 2 pipeline or else face
further U.S. sanctions.
The Bild report raised the ire of some German politicians in Berlin. Fabio De Masi, a top
Left Party MP, demanded that the government reprimand Grenell, saying
: "The US Ambassador seems to make an impression that he is a viceroy of the Washington
emperor.
This is the real face of Trumpian diplomacy. Stop acting in your own best interest or we'll
bankrupt you.
The situation at this point is pretty clear. While our military strength is formidable it is
not, however, a blank check to enforce political edicts anymore.
In a world where U.S. prosperity is dependent on the prosperity of the entire world,
threatening financial ruin is just as much of a bluff as threatening physical ruin.
And we're seeing that bluff being called a lot. Country after country are now simply showing
U.S. strongmen like Pompeo, Bolton, Mattis and even Trump himself, the door and there is little
to no real response from them.
Trump tried to scare Erdogan into submission with sanctions and a collapse of the lira
last year. When it didn't work, Erdogan knew where his allies were. He acted accordingly,
siding with Putin's energy security for Turkey rather than a mercurial U.S.
India did the same thing over the purchase of Russian S-400 missile defense systems. They
said some nice things, invited us to talks and then sent us packing without a deal.
Germany refuses to yield on Nordstream 2.
Qatar was the first to pull out of the Syrian conflict and then turned around and
negotiated a major exploration and development deal with Iran in the North Pars gas
field.
Even Japan is in constant talks with Russia about working out their differences
officially (again, against U.S. wishes) and sign a peace treaty. Japan needs Russian energy
badly and Putin is patient enough to wait Prime Minister Shinzo Abe out while calling out his
hypocrisy.
Good article. It accurately spells it out about the contempt and disrespect that America
has of other countries, and the coercive tactics that America often applies to them.
It
really goes back to what Marine corps Major General Smedley Butler once reflected on, in
1933, about the U.S.,. He said: "I spent thirty-three years and four months in active
military service as a member of this country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps. I
served in all commissioned ranks from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that
period, I spent most of my time being a high class muscle-man for Big Business, for Wall
Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism".
Apparently, that is how other countries see us operating as too.
Something has changed in U.S. politics. And it may finally signal something changing for the
better. Since the announcement (but no real follow through) to end our military involvement in
Syria what passes for our statesmen - John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - have
been ignored, mocked or both.
Bolton attempted to box Trump in on not leaving Syria while Israel chest-thumped about how
they will not yield an inch to Iran. Turkish President Erdogan publicly lambasted him with no
response from President Trump.
Or anyone else for that matter.
When was the last time you heard of a major U.S. political figure go overseas and be refused
a meeting with a foreign head of state, publicly upbraided and sent home like an irrelevant
flunkie?
I can't think of one.
Bolton came into the Middle East and made demands like he was the President which Bolton
knew were clearly red lines for Erdogan -- guaranteeing the safety of the Syrian Kurds.
And he did this from Jerusalem.
The insult couldn't be plainer. The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the
situation was embarrassing. And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump
Administration's policies as beholden to a foreign power, Israel.
Well yes and I held a conference with resolutions in my backyard over some beers and it
resulted in calling out the occupation as the spoils of war. The Syrians will just have to
suck it up. Everyone else who pays attention to the bleating of ****** morons at the UN
should realize the backyard beer occupation resolution trumps all.
" The lack of Bolton's self-awareness and understanding of the situation was embarrassing.
And it left Erdogan the perfect opportunity to call out the Trump Administration's policies
as beholden to a foreign power, Israel. "
This fits into my theory regarding Trump as a good boss. He obviously could not avoid
hiring Bolton, as Trump's balancing act goes on. Bolton is an old PNAC petty
potentate,
and he obviously believes that triumphalist drivel from 2000. So, Bolton obviously
thought he could deke around Trump and defy him and walked right into this act
of political suicide.
He'l be fired when the time is right. He's too connected to get beat up like Sessions.
Trump will have to lever Bolton out using his own mustache and with the appropriate
backing. That's going to easier now that Bolton danced a jig in Jerusalm.
He essentially became a Republican Obama, save Nobel Peace Price. If Obama was/is a CIA-democrat, this guy is a
Deep State controlled republican. In any case he betrayed his voters in a way that resembles Obama betrayal. One has a
fake slogan "change we can believe in" that other equally fake "Make [middle] America Great Again" (which means restoration
of well-being of middle class and working class in my book, not the continuation of Obama foreign wars, and tax cuts for for
corporations and super rich.
And that means that he lost a considerable part of his electorate: the anti-war republicans
and former Sanders supporters. He might do good and not to try to run in 2020. He definitely is no economic nationalist.
Compare his policies with Tucker Carlson Jan 2, 2019
speech to see the difference. He is
"national neoliberal" which rejects parts of neoliberal globalization based on treaties and
prefer to bully nations to compliance that favor the US interests instead of treaties.
And his "fight" with the Deep State resemble so closely to complete and unconditional
surrender, that you might have difficulties to distinguish between the two.
Most of his appointees would make Hillary proud. That that extends beyond rabid neocons like Haley, Mattis, Bolton and
Pompeo.
Notable quotes:
"... The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them. ..."
"... Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. ..."
"... It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG, fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors. ..."
"... They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them. ..."
"... The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement. ..."
"... It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way ..."
Washington
Post stating that he "has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details" of his
discussions with Russian President Vladimir Putin - telling Fox News host Jeanine Pirro in a
phone interview that he would be willing to release the details of a private conversation in
Helsinki last summer.
"I would. I don't care," Trump told Pirro, adding: "I'm not keeping anything under wraps. I
couldn't care less."
"I mean, it's so ridiculous, these people making up," Trump said of the WaPo report.
The president referred to his roughly two-hour dialogue with Putin in Helsinki -- at which
only the leaders and their translators were present -- as "a great conversation" that
included discussions about "securing Israel and lots of other things."
"I had a conversation like every president does," Trump said Saturday. "You sit with the
president of various countries. I do it with all countries." -
Politico
In July an attempt by House Democrats to subpoena Trump's Helsinki interpreter was quashed
by Republicans.
"The Washington Post is almost as bad, or probably as bad, as the New York Times," Trump
said.
When Pirro asked Trump about a Friday night New York Times report that the FBI had opened an
inquiry into whether he was working for Putin, Pirro asked Trump "Are you now or have you ever
worked for Russia, Mr. President?"
"I think it's the most insulting thing I've ever been asked," Trump responded. "I think it's
the most insulting article I've ever had written."
Trump went on an
epic tweetstorm Saturday following the Times article, defending his 2017 firing of former
FBI Director James Comey, and tweeting that he has been "FAR tougher on Russia than Obama, Bush
or Clinton. Maybe tougher than any other President. At the same time, & as I have often
said, getting along with Russia is a good thing, not a bad thing. I fully expect that someday
we will have good relations with Russia again!"
rumcho
Jeff Bezos paid $250 million for Washington Post, five years later he gets a government contract with the CIA for $600
million. Are you connecting the dots? You do the numbers. This is how fascism works. Bezos is a crony capitalist joker.
is Trump waiting for Mueller to lay down his cards? Head him off at the pass and arrest Obama, Rice, Jarrett, Lynch, Comey,
Rosenstein and McCabe all on day 1
best defense is a good offense. Make the narrative about Dem sedition not impending House impeachment hearings.
You are President, start acting like it. Make them fear you.
your re-election depends on Mike Obama not being your opponent.
Let it Go
WaPo, again?
The Washington Post is without a doubt the most pro-establishment among all large mainstream publications, not only do
they defend the narratives of the Deep State but actively attacks anyone who challenges them.
Jeff Bezos owner of the Washington Post is also a contractor with the CIA and sits on a Pentagon advisory board all
part of doing everything he can to cozy up and ingratiate himself to the establishment on which his empire is built. The
article below delves into how WaPo is behind many of the big stories that manipulate America and moves the needle of public
opinion in huge ways.
It's really sad that people in the public believe this stuff. It's insane and ridiculous. We're living in an Insane Asylum
and the ones who should be there for the safety of themselves and others are walking around giving orders to Media and USG,
fomenting war and making a mockery of laws and "normal behaviors.
shadow54
They flooded the news with the old Helsinki/Putin stuff to hide the real news. Lisa Page's testimony revealed that
John Carlin, Mueller's former chief of staff was running the Russia investigation from the DOJ end, showing another conflict
of Mueller's. Now Mueller is covering for two best friends, Comey and Carlin and he has to frame Trump to save them.
The testimony also showed FBI David Bowditch was heavily involved, and Bowditch is now 2nd in command at the FBI and
blocking the public release of witness testimony, and one reason for it is it reveals his involvement.
It is also now revealed that John Brennan CIA had the dossier before the FBI, and the dossier was likely written by
Nellie Ohr, who belonged to a CIA group, and then the dossier was laundered by Steele to look like foreign intelligence to
get the Crossfire Hurricane investigation started on Trump. You would think it would be big news that Russians may have had
nothing to do with the dossier but the media doesn't see it that way.
Then there is the news that Fusion GPS worked with the Democracy Integrity Project and Knew Knowledge to run a fake Russian
bots campaign against Roy Moore. The Democracy Integrity Project was started by Feinstein's aide and with New Knowledge wrote
a report on Russian bots for the Senate Intelligence Committee. So the Senate Intelligence Committee hired creators of fake
Russian bots to write a report on Russian bots.
"... Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake Internationalists Newly-inaugurated Senator has been promoted to standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain. ..."
"... Washington Post ..."
"... Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan, he is author of ..."
Mitt Romney, Commander of the Fake
Internationalists Newly-inaugurated Senator has been promoted to standard-bearer for the
bipartisan War Party, filling in for John McCain.
No surprise: Senator Mitt Romney does not like President Donald Trump, as he recently
explained in TheWashington Post . But what, one wonders, was the former GOP
presidential candidate thinking two years ago when he supped with the man he now claims to
deplore while seeking an appointment as secretary of state?
Much of Romney's complaint is over manners. Yes, the president is a boor. Most people,
including many of Trump's supporters, recognize that. Trump won not because of his etiquette
but because of what he stood for -- and against.
Romney also defended The Blob, Washington's bipartisan foreign policy establishment. In his
article attacking the president, he offered the usual vacuous bromides that characterize the
interventionist consensus, which poses as internationalism but with plenty of bombing raids,
illegal occupations, and nation-building. Most importantly, this perspective presumes permanent
American domination, irrespective of cost.
Romney wrote: "America has long been looked to for leadership. Our economic and military
strength was part of that, of course, but our enduring commitment to principled conduct in
foreign relations, and to the rights of all people to freedom and equal justice, was even more
esteemed." Indeed, "The world needs American leadership, and it is in America's interest to
provide it. A world led by authoritarian regimes is a world -- and an America -- with less
prosperity, less freedom, less peace."
In fact, Romney appears more committed to dependence on allies than American leadership. For
him, these are two sides of the same coin. The only alternative he sees to Washington in
control is the bad guys leading.
Related is Romney's apparent belief that foreign policy is fixed, irrespective of
circumstance: the very same U.S.-dominated alliances created in 1950 are needed today. Although
America's friends have raced ahead economically, politically, even militarily, Washington must
forever treat them as helpless derelicts. For instance, Russia, a weakened declining power,
faces the U.S. and Europe -- which together have more than 20 times its GDP. Yet Romney sees
Moscow as the greatest threat facing America. It is 1945 all over again.
Romney's most important omission is Iraq. After the war there turned bad, he remained silent
about his support for it. The Iraq disaster is an important reason why Trump won and other
Republicans, including Romney, lost. In 2008, Americans rejected John McCain, the very symbol
of promiscuous war-making. Four years later, Romney criticized President Barack Obama for
leaving Iraq too soon, by which the Republican nominee probably meant leaving at any time. In
saying he would keep more troops in Iraq, he ignored the fact that the Iraqis had refused to
negotiate a status of forces agreement with the Bush administration.
Romney also failed to mention Afghanistan, both as a presidential candidate in 2012 and
senator in 2019. After all, what good can be said for entering the 18th year of nation-building
in a region of little strategic interest? As for Syria, last November, Romney predictably
denounced as "recklessness in the extreme" exiting a multi-sided civil war in a country never
important to America.
Now Romney is being touted as the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan War Party, filling
in for John McCain. Bloomberg columnist Hal Brands theorized that Romney was attempting to
"position himself as heir to John McCain as the congressional conscience of U.S. diplomacy"
(defined as advocating policies designed to prolifically kill and destroy).
Towards this effort, Romney is articulating "a renewed Republican internationalism based on
opposition to aggressive authoritarian regimes." Brands celebrates Romney's Russophobia, saying
he "deserves credit for being anti-Russia before being anti-Russia was cool." No hint that the
U.S. might have contributed to Moscow's hostility through the aggressive "internationalism" of
Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama -- violating commitments not to
expand NATO, dismantling Moscow's Slavic friend Serbia, and encouraging violent regime change
against an elected government that neighbored Russia. After all, equivalent Russian
intervention in Mexico would have triggered an extremely hostile reaction in Washington.
Neoconservative Max Boot lauded Romney for throwing "down the gauntlet to President Trump."
Indeed, argued Boot, "it now falls upon Romney to champion the cause of principled conservatism
in Washington." Boot hoped the freshman senator would lead a general opposition and seemed
especially pleased at Romney's support for the interventionist status quo.
Yet the passion-less Romney is a poor substitute for the perennially angry McCain. It is
difficult to imagine Romney leading Lindsey Graham and Joseph Lieberman on another apocalyptic
ride, demanding that death and destruction be visited upon an enemy du jour. Indeed, Romney
admitted as much, complained TheNew York Times , which noted that he said he
"would only speak out against Mr. Trump on issues of 'great significance,' which means not
much."
Worse, Romney is a typical denizen of Washington and lacks any connection to the disastrous
consequences of his policies. Give McCain credit: he and his sons served in the military. Not
Romney. He received four deferments during the Vietnam War, explaining that he "had other
plans." This sounds eerily like Dick Cheney, who said his five deferments reflected "other
priorities."
Moreover, none of Romney's five sons served. That is, of course, their prerogative. But
their decision further insulated Romney from any consequences of his policies. His response to
questions about their lack of service: "One of the ways my sons are showing support for our
nation is helping me get elected because they think I'd be a great president." Did Romney
believe working for him was as dangerous as fighting Iraqi insurgents in Fallujah? Or that his
personal interest in winning the election was as important as the nation winning a war?
My friend William Smith at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship at Catholic University
argued that Romney's article "is another clear sign that the bipartisan political establishment
is largely oblivious to the terrible tragedy of wartime casualties disproportionately inflicted
on certain communities." Candidate Trump did particularly well in states that so suffered.
Complained Smith: "What is astonishing is that, after all this tragedy, Romney offers only
cliched neoconservative bromides to the many heartbroken communities across the nation."
However, The Blob, which dominates foreign policy under both parties, poses an even larger
problem. These policymakers consider permanent war to be America's natural condition. They seek
to suppress dissident views to ensure united support for permanent war. Anyone who hesitates to
back every proposed new intervention is demonized and marginalized.
The favorite technique, recently employed by Frederick Kagan in The Hill, is to call
opponents, irrespective of their actual positions, "isolationists." Thus did Kagan urge left
and right "internationalists" -- meaning military interventionists -- to work together to
defend "the principle that the United States must remain actively engaged in the world," by
which he meant warring without end on multiple countries.
Exclaimed Kagan: "The isolationists who have condemned the United States involvement in the
Middle East and the rest of the world for decades are about to get their wish. We will witness
what the world looks like when left to its own devices."
Egads. Imagine what might have happened had the U.S. not intervened in the Lebanese Civil
War, armed Turkey to kill tens of thousands of Kurds and destroy thousands of Kurdish villages,
invaded Iraq and triggered sectarian conflict, fostered civil war in Libya and the chaos that
followed, supported decades of violent occupation over millions of Palestinians by Israel,
backed murderous Saudi Arabia in Bahrain and Yemen, supported a coup against Iran's
democratically elected government and a brutal invasion backed by chemical weapons against
Iran's Islamist regime, actively underwritten tyranny across the Middle East, and tried to sort
out the Syrian Civil War. Something bad might have happened.
Yeah.
In Syria, Kagan views as "isolationist" the withdrawal of an illegal military deployment
that risks violent confrontation with Syria, Turkey, Iran, and Russia over minor stakes. In
contrast, "internationalism" means war everywhere all the time, especially in a country like
Syria.
Trump, complained Kagan, is leaving "Afghanistan for no clear reason whatsoever." No reason
other than Washington long ago having achieved its objective of degrading and displacing
al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban for hosting al-Qaeda. And eventually having recognized,
after more than 17 years passed, trillions of dollars were spent, and thousands of lives were
lost, that using force to create a liberal democracy in Central Asia is a fool's errand. Why
leave, indeed?
It has oft been recognized that Donald Trump is a flawed vehicle to achieve almost any
foreign policy end. However, he still possesses far more common sense than Mitt Romney. It is
time to rescue "internationalism" from those who love humanity so much that they would destroy
the world in order to save it.
Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute. A former special assistant to
President Ronald Reagan, he is author of Foreign Follies: America's New Global Empire
.MORE FROM THIS AUTHOR
"No reason other than Washington long ago having achieved its objective of degrading and
displacing al-Qaeda and punishing the Taliban for hosting al-Qaeda."
One should avoid the back pedal here. the Taliban did not host Al Quaeda in the manner
your reference suggests.
I truly voted against Romney when he ran for president because of his omnidirectional
belligerence. I also didn't like his vulture capitalism style (and I did technical due
diligence for venture capital activities as a side line).
Romney just guaranteed that he won't get the nomination. Amazing, really, stupid and
gratuitous.
He could at the least have shown a little "growth" in the direction of populist disgust with
the wasteful, reckless, failed wars, not to mention concerns about the growth of government and
corporate mass surveillance of the public, and the continuing unholy collaboration between Wall
Street, Silicon Valley, and Washington in ripping off taxpayers and importing cheap labor to
take American jobs.
Not Mitt. He seems to think he's running for president of our utterly discredited,
pseudo-meritocratic "Establishment".
Let's all thank the knuckle-headed Utahns for delivering another unimaginative empty suit to
the Nation's State House. Sure, Trump is often a boor, and unmistakably human, but give me a
man-child with conviction and Devil-may-care determination over a dapper dolt whose ideas are
contrived platitudes and whose passion is a Macbeth-like obsession with stature and power any
day of the week and twice on Sunday. Well written Mr. Bandow! Keep fighting the good fight.
I get the sense that the "isolationist" line doesn't work any more. It was a commonly used
rhetorical weapon 10 years ago, and it effectively silenced opposition. Now it's not used much,
and it seems to be ignored or derided when it is used. Most Americans understand now that
maintaining and expanding an empire is destroying us.
You really don't get Romney, do you. Who are you to decided what anyone sees or feels. Do you
think you could use the word seems like a professional journalist. I don't construe
Romney that way. You SEEM to put words in his mouth and thought in his head. Please be
professional.
My take is Mitt see's himself as a Gerald Ford calming effect, for this 4 year disruption, the
Swamp battles with. The Deep state needs an impeachment win and soon. With that said it will be
ever difficult for the Beltway to change Americans perception , they don't trust the
government.
For someone so smart Romney should realize that Americans will reject him (again), when he
takes up the mantle of McCain (again) as quickly as they did the last time. But that he fails
to realize that substance trumps form, which is why 67 million Americans voted for the
President, demonstrates what a shallow narcisst and sociopath he is. I mean, it's okay to rob
your neighbor so long as you say "please" and "thank you," isn't it?
The writer states: "Now Romney is being touted as the new standard-bearer for the bipartisan
War Party, filling in for John McCain."
I believe The "War Party" are:
"The Maniacs of Militarism"
The maniacs of militarism are creating wars
Countries are bombed by warmongering whores
Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and other countries too
Are hell holes of the earth, "The work," of this insane crew
Enabled by politicians in positions of power
These well dressed war criminals hide and cower
The generals salute their political masters
Then the brainwashed obey these bemedaled disasters
Cities are destroyed and reduced to rubble
Where are the perpetrators that created all this trouble?
They are residing in luxury and given fancy titles
War crimes trials are needed, and are so vital
But this is not happening: the system is corrupted
And these evil beings, by some are worshiped
Blood-soaked villains that never do the fighting
They are the "experts" that do the inciting
They are the producers of death and destruction
Others are profiteers of all the bloody actions
Missiles, bombs and horrendous weapons
There is no end to the endless aggression
Millions are dead, and millions are homeless
Millions are refugees, and all this is atrocious
Once they had jobs, families, and homes as well
Then their countries were bombed by the agents from hell
Setting the world on fire is what these war arsonists do
The money for their depredations comes from me and you
They have made us all accessories to their criminal acts
Our Taxes are the blood money and that is a fact
Will the people ever say: "We have had enough"?
And put all these villains in secure handcuffs
Then lock them up in maximum security prisons
Then, we can say "goodbye" to the maniacs of militarism
[more info at link below] http://graysinfo.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-maniacs-of-militarism.html
-- --
And:
"More War "
More war is needed to keep armies trained and employed
More wars are needed so that countries can be destroyed
More killing, bombing, destruction and death
More of this is needed until the victims have nothing left
[read more at link below]
Romney is such an empty suit i'm not sure if he isn't weakening his position just by virtue
that, he Romney, supports it.
Does this guy inspire anyone to any emotion other than revulsion? Along with Hillary, they
both strike me both as elites who want to become president, not from any actual passions or
desires, but because they've run out of other things to add to their C.V.
The only thing I can say with certainty that Mitt Romney believes in, is Mitt Romney. So I'm
intensely skeptical that ANYONE in America, aside from the most firebrand resistance types, are
going to take anything coming out of this corporate drone's mouth with any seriousness. And
even for the resistance types the support would equally follow a labrador retriever, just so
long as it opposed Trump, so Mitt doesn't even have that thin thread of loyatly going for
him.
I guess that leaves him with the neocons as BFFs. They're welcome to each other.
Why are we ragging on Romney? Is it because he had the audacity to criticize Trump? Shouldn't
we wait until he actually does something bad before ragging on him? Has he lied 6,000 times in
the last few years, for example? Did he refuse to rake the forests?
I think Romney is simply miffed that the boorish Trump became president and he did not and
sadly, he may be running for president again. I think someone used the word revulsion about
Romney. I approve. It's ironic the boorish Trump isn't nearly as revolting as the urbane Mitt.
@Mike Clements
For me it's the straw man arguments that are most egregious. As an Arizonan, I knew John
McCain, and Romney is no McCain (whose like we will never see again, if we're lucky).
Just to single out one objection to Mr. Bandow's argument: Romney didn't refer to the SOFA,
which supposedly required Obama to abandon Iraq, for the very good reason that Leon Panetta,
who should know, has said that Obama, with plenty of time to do it, made no effort whatsoever
to re-negotiate the SOFA 2011 deadline. Panetta regrets this and so do I.
Romney is the epitome of the decay of the USA. Further, he shows the complete inability of the
Republican party to choose the correct casting. After Bush and Iraq they propose McPain. After
the Great Financial Crisis they propose Mittens. It's akin to cast Dany de Vito to play
Casanova. When Trump is gone, this party is finished.
I approve. It's ironic the boorish Trump isn't nearly as revolting as the urbane Mitt.
That Americans are revolted more by Romney than by Trump, in fact, speaks well for them. All
morally mature folk should be repelled more by a polite, urbane, well-scrubbed pirate, who made
his fortune destroying people's lives and wealth than by a loud-talking, crude womanizer, who
creates wealth and, in fact, shows his concern for the people below him more than the polite,
charming, well-bred pirate.
@Jeeves, Obama would have stayed in Iraq if the Iraqi's had allowed us to continue to kill with
impunity. Thankfully, they said no. And why on earth would you regret us not negotiating a new
SOFA?
If Utah has a problem with Trump they could have elected a Democrat.
Romney is obsolete. Never Trump Republicans are sinking in a tar pit. Romney cannot be
nominated much less elected even if Trump does not run. He can help with the impeachment of
Trump if it comes to that. But again, a Democrat would be more useful.
A perfectly good article, I'm sure, but why diffuse ourselves [and engender feelings of
fear and hopelessness as you express] when a strategic pressure point has presented?
Johnstone makes no mention of Bill Browder. Nor do the [100, so far] commenters.
BILL BROWDER is a key figure in the anti-Trump, anti-Russia hysteria. The notorious Trump
Tower meeting was about the Magnitsky Act, a fabrication by Browder to hide his financial
crimes. Browder "testified" in the Senate expressly to demonize Putin. Browder's contacts in
the IC, the Jewish Lobby, and the fawning media have enabled his propaganda assault this
week. He's appeared -- unchallenged, virtually unquestioned -- on countless talk shows. But
he's been running scared at the mention of interrogation by Russians. There are huge holes in
his story, made clear in his deposition in the Prevezon case. The truth will bring him down!
And perhaps his Deep State supporters, along with him.
Ask your Senators if they've heard/read Browder's 2015 deposition in the Prevezon
case. (See comment 161 under The Untouchable Mr. Browder? by Israel Shamir for
links.)
BTW, have you seen "THE MAGNITSKY ACT – BEHIND THE SCENES" that Phil Giraldi
posted today? Debunking anti-Russian criminal sociopaths like Bill Browder will go a long way
to improving relations. Not to mention easing pressure on the unfortunate Trump.
@RobinG
UWell, we here in Russia know all this (about Browder) for quite a time. What new did you
find? It's just one story in long list of those written and spoken for western idiots like
Scripals
, MH17, chemicals in Syria and WMD in Iraq, Russian meddling in f-n US elections and so on.
Eat it all dummies.
who has spent time in Ukraine knows how deep hatred of Russia goes
I don't know where is Ukraine you spent your time and in what company, but this is
complete BS. The South-Eastern Ukraine hates the Western Ukrainian "banderovtsi" as much as
the Russians do if not more -- after all, the followers of Bandera operated mostly on the
Ukrainian soil. There are deranged individuals in every country, of course, and Ukraine has
been subjected lately to intense hate propaganda as well as repressions, but there is no
hatred of Russia. This is contradicted by both sociology and everyday behavior of Ukrainian,
which move to Russia in droves, spend time in Russia, support Russian sport teams, etc.
we are supposed to dismiss the actual wishes of Ukrainians, Estonians, Poles, Georgians
and other peoples who hate Russia (and love the US)
Nobody is asking about what the real Ukrainians, Estonians, Georgians or even Poles
actually think, least of all the US. There are almost as many Georgians living in Russia as
there are in Georgia, and they show no desire to move back. In 2008 during the conflict,
their biggest fear was that they'd be deported.
The Ukraine's Maidan was a violent coup, where a few thousand militants armed and trained
abroad overthrew a government elected by the entire country. Protests that immediately
started all over the country were suppressed with force -- the one in Donbass still is.
How could anyone with an access to Internet remain unaware of these facts is beyond
me.
@Peter
Akuleyev Why should anyone freaking care and put his ass in the line of fire because you
bunch of primitives hate Russia? Between having a nuclear cataclysm because you pathetic
dwarfs of nations are frustrated to have a neighbour you can't bully and Russia obliterating
you, I say let Russia obliterate you, thus we won't have to suffer the ear-hurting
dissonnance of your incessant whining any more. Though I doubt Russia would stomp on you.
When you see shit, you don't stomp on it, you don't want you don't want your shoes to stink,
you just walk around it.
@EugeneGur
That's an interesting point. Even if true, doesn't matter. One could wonder ..who are the
people populating Ukrainian Armed Forces?
Or who are the guys, in Ukrainian Armed Forces, presently engaged against Donbass? All of
them. Including those is logistics/maintenance depots far away from the (current) line of
separation?
The will to fight against "Russia" ranges from a deep hate to simply not wishing to go
against the (current) Ukrainian government. The former are in those "shock" battalions. The
later are manning the logistics train. And everything in between.
Now .if/when a real shooting starts, as soon as Russia, as expected (and desired) by the
most of readers here, starts delivering ordnance into operational depth of Donbass enemy, the
ratio hate/don't care shall shift, hard and fast. Not in Russian favor, I suspect.
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.
A bombshell
domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence
psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting
"Russian disinformation."
The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of
a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government,
including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal
that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS,
where it has gained access to
Katharine Gorka and her
husband, the
fascist-linked cable news pundit
Sebastian Gorka .
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting
"a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the
most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships
with the media.
Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse
of public money.
In a
recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments
the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in
the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.
"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public
opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's
old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."
Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine
The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure
British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's
internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded
to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.
Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation --
and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid for
funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance
on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."
The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination
was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its
media cutouts
painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies
accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir,
"View From The Right."
These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.
Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"
A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where.
It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and
close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a
de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment,
but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold
The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior"
who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence
agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times
exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR"
-- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue
of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially
obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas
[and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"
These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents
that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be
"fed anonymously into local media." (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)
Keeping Up with the Gorkas
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like
Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned
right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.
The latter Gorka is an
open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation
of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.
Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night
Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates
that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded
military research center, CNA .
According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like
Mara Karlin
, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre
, and John McCain Institute executive director
Kurt Volker
, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers
inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
A Foreign Agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team
member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's
Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was
as chief propagandist," confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their
own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement
Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian
disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem
smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message
and destroy the messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation
Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials
and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.
Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation
An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for
its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000
for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
According to reporter
Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on
cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy
of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within
the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their
opponents."
Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level
in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,"
wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government
is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
The "Main Event" in Seattle
An Integrity Initiative internal
document argues that because
"DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the
organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic]
across the USA."
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, Washington
under the auspices
of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity
Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a
recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event
began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two
years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary
run, earning media write-ups as the
"Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized
in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered
a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and
political allies.
According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime
environment rather than peacetime."
During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses,"
referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."
"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean
sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."
The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in
notes of a private meeting
between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should
be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."
While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed
him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out
from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.
Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter
Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle
The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled
by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students
have given him dismal marks at Rate My
Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class."
But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic
has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits
and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories
to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly
controlled by the Kremlin.
The articles ultimately
generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public
retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross
as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international
national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college
organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"
In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside
Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting
far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona
and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative
news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross
has written for C4SS in the past.
The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.
Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates
C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed
child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to
"replace Marxism on the
left."
When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was
finally drummed out by his colleagues.
There's more: Spangler's understudy and
deputy in the C4SS, Kevin
Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory"
-- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender
of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS
man as "the Proudhon of our
time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged
anti-Semitism . Carson
only disowned Preston in 2009,
shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.
The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International
Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC,
LibertyCon, a who's
who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.
In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin,
and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and
formally apologized for having run them.
For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner
with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right
-- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that
MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has
stated
its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists,
think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.
Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he
sent a menacing email to the co-author
of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast
-- a publication that appears to enjoy a
special relationship
with Integrity Initiative personnel.
Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert,
government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly
said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."
making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these
people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".
Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and
arms dealing.
The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail
where they belong.
I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now,
but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.
This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting
to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.
Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.
Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations
that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.
What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds
that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?
Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers
to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century.
Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the
Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into
the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a
manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity
is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons
is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level
in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using
the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia
has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza
of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that
talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of
nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out
to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of.
Just a thought.
He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of
a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.
That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last
cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia
for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.
Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics.
This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less
a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.
It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or
other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.
If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going
to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.
The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of
Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations
about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?
After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.
Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd
New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before
the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.
I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out
of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?
But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms
Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.
Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the
U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips
of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!
That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia;
what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.
Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should
always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued."
The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at
eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter
Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda.
Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what
was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin
gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss
the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik,
we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC
that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's
enough.
Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching
down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly
intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological
position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil
as the former, in my mind.
You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you
mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed
enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.
I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument
embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she
criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in
a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.
It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point
where language impedes communication in the political sphere.
It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason
you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes
overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the
liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive
at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.
I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying
to find their way.
I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing
that I find annoying about the Russophobes.
Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.
Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although
it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english
parliament (at ransom by brexit).
Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:
(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily .)
YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded
to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One
has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber
Capital whose CEO,
Joseph
Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium
that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.
I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly
centre-left daily.
For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people
working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks
to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection
of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses
we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways
that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that
will happen.
Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start,
after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and
is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won.
We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.
Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.
It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the
relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British
intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states
that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently
argue that we still don't to this day.
but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat
a dead horse.
Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who
brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to
me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should
be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to
catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case.
Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?
"... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
"... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
"... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
"... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
"... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
"... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
"... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
"... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
"... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
"... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
"... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative
nirvana:
" for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United
States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared
to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose
authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"
"For a moment,"
swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard
editorial meeting."
Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an
expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.
As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated
their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the
classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the
coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.
So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia
religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing
Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between
1975-2015; Saudi Arabians
murdered 2369 !
Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate
sheiks?
Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected.
Curiously, they're currently rioting.
If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in
Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the
left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its
spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First"
plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."
Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."
In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost
overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and
the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man
rule .
When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration
-- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic
families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).
It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs.
In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign
Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly,
beheaded with a sword .
Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley,
was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At
least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world
affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)
Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently
barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are
dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like
this
one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.
No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of
Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of
"sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered
technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!)
"vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."
These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.
"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote
historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a
dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and
Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any
debate in Congress or the media."
Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American
people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the
president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000
additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not
undertaking nation building.
This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.
Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add
to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did
in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad
guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.
Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting
force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .
The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about
troops in Niger and
Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."
With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our
dangerously united political factions.
This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now
comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan,
Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.
How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate
Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.
Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right
cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit
that we of the callused
Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always
right.
Not going to happen.
To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of
genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight
of hand.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but
you cannot fool all the people all the time.
But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton,
Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.
So Trump did morph into Hillary.
Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but
expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State
calling the shots.
I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the
real political atmosphere in Washington.
Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do
whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of
the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."
I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is
"interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.
The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:
1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.
2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.
And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting
sovereignty – that of others and our own.
I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless
immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that
our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make
the same case at home.
If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and
relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick
Van Dyke show, i would reread,
"Adios , America."
In Col. Bacevich's book,
Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so
tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was
that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's
time.
@J.RossThe Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018
equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a
spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time
it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how
he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.
I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break
your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are
mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by
the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to
lose your support?
Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always
have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the
WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American
foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all
costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle
subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.
No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For
decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually
Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson,
Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish
billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.
But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews
with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into
politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of
pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies
(a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.
I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a
business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g.,
Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid
conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are
virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot
down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).
Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to
placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.
People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the
red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be
legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by
that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama
would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.
That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk
(Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its
legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018
congressional contests, ad nauseum.
Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes
to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it,
so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to
hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are
self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who
are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written
by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like
this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents
and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.
The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov
knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an
Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does
jack shit about it.
The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.
Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more
duplicitous.
Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will
eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they
have used to destroy so many others.
@anonymous
Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to
the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what
America needs in foreign policy.
And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy
necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it
is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.
And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of
white Christians while being pro-Jewish.
Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.
@neutral
Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly
situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,
I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of
hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior,
marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration
positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.
It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced
that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a
strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in
to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier
than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to
exhibit in office.
@Jake
The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the
fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.
The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free
trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.
On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than
the Christian ones
It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity,
but that was 500 years ago.
What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby
funnels into those fundamentalist churches.
If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful
of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore
election.
Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern
fundamentalists
@Twodees
Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put
in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like
Saban was Hillary's.
Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political
funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.
Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political
organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals
in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to
her group,
which raised a total of $915,000.
This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's https://www.haaretz.com › U.S.
News
Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in
September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent
speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is
a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.
The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard
dogs.
Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he
is.
The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.
The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the
neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist
side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free
speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.
@renfro
I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've
seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in
Israel.
But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start
those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set
up those big churches that just appear from nowhere
@Grandpa
Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.
As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap,
but not always.
From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became
dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).
@Twodees
Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG
naked without usual pretension.
Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American
history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried
fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter
besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,
He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to
revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend
Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of
course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab
Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .
Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to
drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply
corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As
Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"
@Twodees
Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing
stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not
judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo
But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and
blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign
promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but
drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.
US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they
might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole
world.
Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American
interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the
eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in
turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing
about its destruction.
I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.
Meh, hyperbole.
Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She
got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of
the opportunity.
People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic
of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to
detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.
But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts
of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the
politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor
as any.
In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does
when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and
tell him he'll never make it."
Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.
If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other
than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can
out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.
Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr.
Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist
Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)
In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with
his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies
to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that
engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large
overlap, but not always.
Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th
century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to
a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.
There is a large group of US politician non Jews
who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called
Neocons.
There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.
That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless
American jingoism and imperialism.
@dfordoom
Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on
another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to
correlate directly to wisdom.
If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp
You are exactly right.
Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his
Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.
" It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great
again"
So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"
How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that
doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries,
doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine
the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree
with it." Would that be too much to ask?
I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that
greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's
aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.
I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth
about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or
partially disagree with
And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking,
Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is
disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an
"elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money,
disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum
bunch
So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now
willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made
many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the
rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a
glorious end!"
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it
says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.
Indeed, it's
looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to
withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist
base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political
aisle, just like they always do:
Trump supporters are acting like he's a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik...
...his enemies are acting like he's feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into
Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin's breakfast, when in
reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact
that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on
words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate
headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely
ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist
policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic
mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation
from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions
and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often
claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in
this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An
excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at
Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the
infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing
but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who
helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's
said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive
behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every
breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and
it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way
is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant
analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available
evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as
well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and
there's no evidence that it did.
So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated
election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually
been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet
Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear
rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his
insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any
little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts,
Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear
posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear
superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it
combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which
existed in secretive US government agencies
long before the 2016 election .
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things
people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been
highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all
the time.
Humanity
lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of
heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in
through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and
attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it
would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going
on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and
identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our
very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so
nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental
narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are
wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can
control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell
themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political
influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more
efficiently than any dictatorship.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment
agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be
more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant
narratives is because an alliance
of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over
the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of
smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn.
It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics
are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only
potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that
it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share
information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the
establishment propaganda machine is
acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the
internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when
a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the
cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks
appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
"... By Mark Ames, co-host of the Radio War Nerd podcast , author of Going Posta l and publisher of The eXile, and Max Blumenthal, an award-winning journalist and the author of books including best-selling Republican Gomorrah , Goliath , The Fifty One Day War , and The Management of Savagery , which will be published in March 2019 by Verso. He has also produced numerous print articles for an array of publications, many video reports and several documentaries including Killing Gaza and Je Ne Suis Pas Charlie . Originally published at the Greyzone Project ..."
"... The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US. ..."
The Integrity Initiative has mobilized an international disinformation campaign across Europe. Now, with government and right-wing
foundation money, this massive "political smear unit" is infiltrating the US.
A bombshell
domestic spy scandal has been unfolding in Britain, after hacked internal communications exposed a covert UK state military-intelligence
psychological warfare operation targeting its own citizens and political figures in allied NATO countries under the cover of fighting
"Russian disinformation."
The leaked documents revealed a secret network of spies, prominent journalists and think-tanks colluding under the umbrella of
a group called "Integrity Initiative" to shape domestic opinion -- and to smear political opponents of the right-wing Tory government,
including the leader of the opposition Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn.
Until now, this Integrity Initiative domestic spy scandal has been ignored in the American media, perhaps because it has mostly
involved British names. But it is clear that the influence operation has already been activated in the US. Hacked documents reveal
that the Integrity Initiative is cultivating powerful allies inside the State Department, top DC think tanks, the FBI and the DHS,
where it has gained access to
Katharine Gorka and her
husband, the
fascist-linked cable news pundit
Sebastian Gorka .
The Integrity Initiative has spelled out plans to expand its network across the US, meddling in American politics and recruiting
"a new generation of Russia watchers" behind the false guise of a non-partisan charity. Moreover, the group has hired one of the
most notorious American "perception management" specialists, John Rendon, to train its clusters of pundits and cultivate relationships
with the media.
Back in the UK, Member of Parliament Chris Williamson has clamored for an investigation into the Integrity Initiative's abuse
of public money.
In a
recent editorial , Williamson drew a direct parallel between the group's collaboration with journalists and surreptitious payments
the CIA made to reporters during the Cold War.
"These tactics resemble those deployed by the CIA in Operation Mockingbird that was launched at the height of the cold war in
the early 1950s. Its aims included using the mainstream news media as a propaganda tool," Williamson wrote.
"They manipulated the news agenda by recruiting leading journalists to write stories with the express purpose of influencing public
opinion in a particular way," the Labour parliamentarian continued. "Now it seems the British Establishment have dusted off the CIA's
old playbook and is intent on giving it another outing on this side of the Atlantic."
Unmasking a British Military-Intelligence Smear Machine
The existence of the Integrity Initiative was virtually unknown until this November, when the email servers of a previously obscure
British think tank called the Institute for Statecraft were hacked, prompting allegations of Russian intrusion. When the group's
internal documents appeared at a website hosted by Anonymous Europe, the public learned of a covert propaganda network seed-funded
to the tune of over $2 million dollars by the Tory-controlled UK Foreign Office, and run largely by military-intelligence officers.
Through a series of cash inducements, off the record briefings and all-day conferences, the Integrity Initiative has sought to
organize journalists across the West into an international echo chamber hyping up the supposed threat of Russian disinformation --
and to defame politicians and journalists critical of this new Cold War campaign.
A bid for
funding submitted by the Integrity Initiative in 2017 to the British Ministry of Defense promised to deliver a "tougher stance
on Russia" by arranging for "more information published in the media on the threat of Russian active measures."
The Integrity Initiative has also worked through its fronts in the media to smear political figures perceived as a threat to its
militaristic agenda. Its targets have included a Spanish Department of Homeland Security appointee, Pedro Banos, whose nomination
was scuttled thanks a media blitz it secretly orchestrated; Jeremy Corbyn, whom the outfit and its
media cutouts
painted as a useful idiot of Russia; and a Scottish member of parliament, Neil Findlay, whom one of its closest media allies
accused of adopting "Kremlin messaging" for daring to protest the official visit of the far-right Ukrainian politician Andriy
Parubiy -- the founder of two neo-Nazi parties and author of a white nationalist memoir,
"View From The Right."
These smear campaigns and many more surreptitiously orchestrated by the Integrity Initiative offer a disturbing preview of the
reactionary politics it plans to inject into an already toxic American political environment.
Lessons from "The Man Who Sold the War"
A newly released Integrity Initiative document reveals that the outfit plans an aggressive expansion across the US.
The Integrity Initiative claims to have already established a "simple office" in Washington DC, though it does not say where.
It also boasts of partnerships with top DC think tanks like the Atlantic Council, the Center for European Policy Analysis, CNA, and
close relationships with US officials.
A major hub of Integrity Initiative influence is the State Department's Global Engagement Center, a
de facto US government propaganda operation that was established by President Barack Obama to battle online ISIS recruitment,
but which was rapidly repurposed to counter Russian disinformation following the election of Trump.
He is John Rendon, best known as "The Man Who Sold
The War" -- several wars, in fact, but most notoriously the Iraq invasion. Rendon was the self-described "information warrior"
who planted fake news in the major US-UK media about non-existent WMD threats. With deep ties to the CIA and other military-intelligence
agencies, his PR firm was paid $100 million to organize and sell Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. In 2002, the New York Times
exposed a Pentagon program using Rendon to plant "disinformation" -- including "false stories" and "the blackest of black PR"
-- in media outlets around the world, in order to shape public opinion and sell the Iraq invasion.
John Rendon (left) with Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass, US Africa Command Chief of Staff (photo by US Africom Public Affairs)
Journalist James Bamford outlined a catalogue
of disinformation feats Rendon performed for the Pentagon, such as identifying "the biases of specific journalists and potentially
obtain an understanding of their allegiances, including the possibility of specific relationships and sponsorships." Bamford also
found proposals and programs Rendon was involved in that aimed to "'coerce' foreign journalists and plant false information overseas
[and] find ways to 'punish' those who convey the 'wrong message.'"
These tactics seem particularly relevant to his work with the Integrity Initiative, especially considering the internal documents
that reveal further Rendon-style plans to produce reports and studies to be
"fed anonymously into local media." (Among
the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left Spanish daily.)
Keeping Up with the Gorkas
Internal documents also refer to interactions between Integrity Initiative Director Chris Donnelly and top Trump officials like
Katharine Gorka , a vehemently anti-Muslim Department of Homeland Security official, as well as her husband, Sebastian, who earned
right-wing fame during his brief tenure in Trump's White House.
The latter Gorka is an
open supporter of the Hungarian Vitezi Rend, a proto-fascist order that collaborated with Nazi Germany during its occupation
of Hungary. Following Trump's election victory in 2016, Gorka appeared for televised interviews in a black Vitezi Rend uniform.
Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb, with his wife, Katharine, on Election Night
Gorka was among the first figures listed on an itinerary for Donnelly to Washington this September 18 to 22. The itinerary indicates
that the two had breakfast before Donnelly delivered a presentation on "Mapping Russian Influence Activities" at the federally funded
military research center, CNA .
According to the itinerary, Donnelly was granted access to Pentagon officials like
Mara Karlin
, an up-and-coming neoconservative cadre
, and John McCain Institute executive director
Kurt Volker
, another neoconservative operative who also serves as the US Special Representative for Ukraine. Numerous meetings with staffers
inside the State Department's Office of Global Engagement were also detailed.
A Foreign Agent in the State Department?
Of all the State Department officials named in Integrity Initiative documents, the one who appeared most frequently was Todd Leventhal.
Leventhal has been a staffer at the State Department's Global Engagement Center, boasting of "20 years of countering disinformation,
misinformation, conspiracy theories, and urban legends." In an April 2018 Integrity Initiative memo, he is listed as a current team
member:
Funded to the tune of $160 million this year to beat back Russian disinformation with "counter-propaganda," the State Department's
Global Engagement Center
has refused to deny targeting American citizens with information warfare of its own. "My old job at the State Department was
as chief propagandist," confessed former
Global Engagement Center Director Richard Stengel. "I'm not against propaganda. Every country does it and they have to do it to their
own population and I don't necessarily think it's that awful."
Like so many of the media and political figures involved in the Integrity Initiative's international network, the Global Engagement
Center's Leventhal has a penchant for deploying smear tactics against prominent voices that defy the foreign policy consensus. Leventhal
appeared in an outtake of a recent NBC documentary on Russian
disinformation smugly explaining how he would take down a 15-year-old book critical of American imperialism in the developing world.
Rather than challenge the book's substance and allegations, Leventhal boasted how he would marshall his resources to wage an ad hominem
smear campaign to destroy the author's reputation. His strategic vision was clear: when confronting a critic, ignore the message
and destroy the messenger.
Integrity Initiative documents reveal that Leventhal has been paid $76,608 dollars (60,000 British pounds) for a 50% contract.
While those same documents claim he has retired from the State Department, Leventhal's own
Linkedin page lists him as a current "Senior Disinformation
Advisor" to the State Department. If that were true, it would mean that the State Department was employing a de facto foreign agent.
As a cut-out of the British Foreign Office and Defense Ministry, the Integrity Initiative's work with current and former US officials
and members of the media raises certain legal questions. For one, there is no indication that the group has registered under the
Justice Department's Foreign Agent Registration Act, as most foreign agents of influence are required to do.
Grants from the Neocons' Favorite Foundation
An Integrity Initiative memo states that the right-wing Smith Richardson Foundation has also committed to ponying up funding for
its US network as soon as the group receives 501 c-3 non-profit status. The foundation has already provided it with about $56,000
for covert propaganda activities across Europe.
The Smith Richardson Foundation has old ties to the US intelligence community and controversial cold war influence operations.
According to reporter
Russ Bellant , the foundation was secretly bankrolling radical right-wing "indoctrination campaigns for the American public on
cold war and foreign policy issues" -- programs that got the attention of Senator William Fulbright, who warned then-President Kennedy
of their dangers. At one of these indoctrination seminars, a Smith Richardson Foundation director "told attendees that 'it is within
the capacity of the people in this room to literally turn the State of Georgia into a civil war college,' in order to overcome their
opponents."
Smith Richardson has funded a who's who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American
Enterprise Institute and the Institute for the Study of War. "To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level
in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,"
wrote journalist
Kelley Vlahos.
Besides Smith Richardson, the Integrity Initiative has stated its intention to apply for grants from the State Department "to
expand the Integrity Initiative activities both within and outside of the USA." This is yet another indicator that the US government
is paying for propaganda targeting its own citizens.
The "Main Event" in Seattle
An Integrity Initiative internal
document argues that because
"DC is well served by existing US institutions, such as those with which the Institute [for Statecraft] already collaborates," the
organization should "concentrate on extending the work of the Integrity Initiative into major cities and key State capitals [sic]
across the USA."
This December 10, the Integrity Initiative organized what it called its "main event" in the US. It was a conference on disinformation
held in Seattle, Washington
under the auspices
of a data firm called Adventium Labs. Together with the Technical Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, the Integrity
Initiative listed Adventium Labs as one of its "first partners outside DC."
Adventium is Minneapolis-based research and development firm that has reaped contracts from the US military, including a
recent $5.4 million cyber-security grant from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA.
Inside a modest-sized hotel conference room, the Adventium/Integrity event
began with a speech by the Integrity Initiative's Simon Bracey-Lane. Two
years prior, Bracey-Lane appeared on the American political scene as a field worker for Bernie Sanders' 2016 presidential primary
run, earning media write-ups as the
"Brit for Bernie." Now, the young operator was back in the US as the advance man for a military-intelligence cut-out that specialized
in smearing left-wing political figures like Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader widely regarded as the British version of Sanders.
Bracey-Lane opened his address by explaining that Integrity Initiative director Chris Donnelly had been unable to appear at the
event, possibly because he was bogged down in the scandal back home. He proceeded to read remarks prepared by Donnelly that offered
a window into the frighteningly militaristic mindset the Integrity Initiative aims to impose on the public through their media and
political allies.
According to Donnelly's comments, the West was no longer in a "peace time, rules based environment." From the halls of government
to corporate boardrooms to even the UK's National Health System, "the conclusion is that we have to look for people who suit a wartime
environment rather than peacetime."
During Q&A, Bracey-Lane remarked that "we have to change the definition of war to encompass everything that war now encompasses,"
referring vaguely to various forms of "hybrid warfare."
"There is a great deal to be done in communicating that to young people," he continued. "When we mean being at war we don't mean
sending our boys off to fight. It's right here in our homes."
The emphasis on restructuring society along martial lines mirrored the disturbing thinking also on display in
notes of a private meeting
between Donnelly and Gen. Richard Barrons in 2016. During that chat, the two officers decided that the British military should
be removed from democratic supervision and be able to operate as "an independent body outside politics."
While Bracey-Lane's presentation perfectly captured the military mindset of the Integrity Initiative, the speakers that followed
him offered a diverse array of perspectives on the concept of disinformation, some more nuanced than others. But one talk stood out
from the rest -- not because of its quality, but because of its complete lack thereof.
Reanimating the "Red-Brown" Grifter
Alexander Reid Ross (left) and Emmi Bevensee at the Integrity Initiative's "main event" in Seattle
The presentation was delivered by Alexander Reid Ross, a half-baked political researcher who peddles computer-generated spiderweb
relationship charts to prove the existence of a vast hidden network of "red-brown" alliances and "syncretic media" conspiracies controlled
by puppeteers in Moscow.
Ross is a lecturer on geography at Portland State University with no scholarly or journalistic credentials on Russia. His students
have given him dismal marks at Rate My
Professors, complaining about his "terrible monotone lectures" and his penchant for "insert[ing] his own ideologies into our class."
But with a book, "Against the Fascist Creep," distributed by the well-known anarchist publishing house, AK Press, the middling academic
has tried to make his name as a maverick analyst.
Before the Integrity Initiative was exposed as a military-intelligence front operation, Ross was among a small coterie of pundits
and self-styled disinformation experts that followed the
group's Twitter account. The Integrity Initiative even retweeted his smear of War Nerd podcast co-host John Dolan.
In a series of articles for the Southern Poverty Law Center last year, Ross attempted to bring his warmed-over Cold War theories
to the broader public. He wound up trashing everyone from the co-author of this piece, Max Blumenthal, to Nation magazine publisher
Katrina Vanden Heuvel to Harvard University professor of international relations Stephen Walt as hidden shadow-fascists secretly
controlled by the Kremlin.
The articles ultimately
generated an embarrassing scandal and a series of public
retractions by the editor-in-chief of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen. And then, like some Dr. Frankenstein for
discredited and buried journalism careers, the British Ministry of Defense-backed Integrity Initiative moved in to reanimate Ross
as a sought-after public intellectual.
Before the Integrity Initiative-organized crowd, Ross offered a rambling recitation of his theory of a syncretic fascist alliance
puppeteered by Russians: "The alt right takes from both this 'red-brown,' it's called, or like left-right syncretic highly international
national of nationalisms, and from the United States' own paleoconservative movement, and it's sort of percolated down through college
organizing, um, and anti-interventionism meets anti-imperialism. Right?"
In a strange twist, Ross appeared on stage at the Integrity Initiative's Seattle event alongside
Emmi Bevensee , a contributor to the left-libertarian
Center for a Stateless Society (C4SS) think tank, whose tagline, "a left market anarchist think-tank" expresses its core aim of uniting
far-left anarchists with free-market right-libertarians.
Bevensee , a PhD candidate at the University of Arizona
and self-described "Borderlands anarcho into tech and crypto," concluded her presentation by asserting a linkage between the alternative
news site, Zero Hedge, and the "physical militarized presence in the borderlands" of anti-immigrant vigilantes. Like Bevensee, Ross
has written for C4SS in the past.
The irony of contributors to an anarchist group called the "Center for a Stateless Society" auditioning before The State – the
most jackbooted element of it, in fact – for more opportunities to attack anti-war politicians and journalists, can hardly be overstated.
But closer examination of the history of C4SS veers from irony into something much darker and more unsettling.
Pedophile Co-Founder, White Nationalist Associates
C4SS was co-founded in 2006 by a confessed
child rapist and libertarian activist, Brad Spangler, who set the group up to promote "Market anarchism" to
"replace Marxism on the
left."
When Spangler's child rape confessions emerged in 2015, the Center for Stateless Society founder was
finally drummed out by his colleagues.
There's more: Spangler's understudy and
deputy in the C4SS, Kevin
Carson -- currently listed as the group's "Karl Hess Chair in Social Theory"
-- turned out to be a longtime friend and defender
of white nationalist Keith Preston. Preston's name is prominently plastered on the back of Kevin Carson's book, hailing the C4SS
man as "the Proudhon of our
time" -- a loaded compliment, given Proudhon's unhinged
anti-Semitism . Carson
only disowned Preston in 2009,
shortly before Preston helped white nationalist leader Richard Spencer launch his alt-right webzine, Alternative Right.
The C4SS group currently participates in the annual Koch-backed International
Students For Liberty conference in Washington DC,
LibertyCon, a who's
who of libertarian think-tank hacks and Republican Party semi-celebrities like Steve Forbes, FCC chairman Ajit Pai, and Alan Dershowitz.
In 2013, C4SS's Kevin Carson tweeted out his dream fantasy that four Jewish leftists -- Mark Ames, Yasha Levine, Corey Robin,
and Mark Potok -- would die in a plane crash while struggling over a single parachute. Potok was an executive editor at the Southern
Poverty Law Center, which last year retracted every one of the crank articles that Alexander Reid Ross published with them and
formally apologized for having run them.
For some reason, the super-sleuth Ross conveniently failed to investigate the libertarian group, C4SS, that he has chosen to partner
with and publish in. That ability to shamelessly smear and denounce leftists over the most crudely manufactured links to the far-right
-- while cozying up to groups as sleazy as C4SS and authoritarian as the Integrity Initiative -- is the sort of adaptive trait that
MI6 spies and the Rendon Group would find useful in a covert domestic influence operation.
Ross did not respond to our request for comment on his involvement with the Integrity Initiative and C4SS.
Disinformation for Democracy
As it spans out across the US, the Integrity Initiative has
stated
its desire to "build a younger generation of Russia watchers." Toward this goal, it is supplementing its coterie of elite journalists,
think tank hacks, spooks and State Department info-warriors with certifiable cranks like Ross.
Less than 24 hours after Ross's appearance at the Integrity Initiative event in Seattle, he
sent a menacing email to the co-author
of this article, Ames, announcing his intention to recycle an old and discredited smear against him and publish it in the Daily Beast
-- a publication that appears to enjoy a
special relationship
with Integrity Initiative personnel.
Despite the threat of investigation in the UK, the Integrity Initiative's "network of networks" appears to be escalating its covert,
government-funded influence operation, trashing the political left and assailing anyone that gets in its way -- all in the name of
fighting foreign disinformation.
"We have to win this one," Integrity Initiative founder Col. Chris Donnelly
said , "because if we don't, democracy will be undermined."
making up lies to get paid. james angleton was paranoid (not that it seemed to make him more effective in counterintelligence)–these
people are just con artists, paid to be con artists.
i'm just waiting for "we have to undermine democracy in order to save it".
Agreed. Not only are they paid to make things up, but they have an ingenious scheme for paying themselves from narcotics and
arms dealing.
The most amazing feat of confidence artistry (apart from maybe the TARP bailout (c.f.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program
) is their remarkable ability to convince the population they are needed and working on our behalf instead of being in jail
where they belong.
I submitted a long comment on this about an hour ago, which seems to have been eaten by the system. I won't repost it now,
but I'll do so later if it doesn't surface.
This is something that has repeatedly happened to me too recently – it often takes 2 or more hours for most of my recent posting
to surface on the site. It rarely disappears altogether, so I would assume your post will eventually arrive.
Same here on the delays. Keep a copy.
But anyway, very glad you posted this piece. Whatever we make of Patreon, it's one way to support Mark Ames' work.
Sir Alan Duncan, responding on behalf of the Government to Emily Thornberry's urgent question (Dec 12) on recent allegations
that the Foreign Office funded a company which carried out a smear campaign against the official Opposition.
What a frightful fellow that Alan Duncan is eh? Talks like a Mafia lawyer and he's supposed to be a national leader. He reminds
that other MP, the POS who interrogated David Kelly on TV, they both use the same style. Is it a qualification for legislator?
Just a minor note to start off. That image of "Sebastian Gorka, in Vitezi Rend garb". I think that Vitezi Rend actually refers
to the medal he wears on the left. The jacket itself more resembles the patrol jacket that British officers wore in the 19th century.
Moving on! Notice how the same players keep on coming up again and again in all these stories of skulduggery? John Rendon, the
Atlantic Council, Ajit Pai and Alan Dershowitz – the same scum-bags with a few new wannabe players. As an example.
The penchant that Brad Spangler, C4SS co-founder, has for under-age girls is disgusting of course but you have to put it into
the context of the people that you are talking about. If Spengler was more rich or more powerful, you might see his name on a
manifest for the "Lolita Express" but his activities would not be splashed about in an article like this one. That sort of activity
is given a level of protection if you are in the right group. And it is a good thing that that British General Richard Barrons
is retired as his comments are deserving of being cashiered.
Funny how a group that claims to be about protecting democracy wants to push it aside and install propaganda on a "1984" level
in the pursuit of their aims. I cannot decide if their target of Russia is a means or an end. If it is a means, that means using
the boogy-man of Russia to radically restructure western society to their tastes. If it is an end, well, it is true that Russia
has about $75 trillion in resources, mostly in Siberia and the east, so if it was broken up eventually, that would be a bonanza
of wealth appropriation.
I was thinking about the activities of this group and how they go about their activities, especially the smearing of anybody that
talks truth to power. I wonder if anybody here made the connection with this story and the PropOrNot website that came out of
nowhere about two years ago and that had the stamp of approval of the Washington Post. I would not be surprised if it turns out
to be that PropOrNot was a trial balloon in the United States for the Integrity Initiative to establish what it was capable of.
Just a thought.
He looks like an extra from Star Wars – one of those nazi guys working the bridge of the Death Star. The "look and feel" of
a lot of pre-war fascism strikes us as silly in retrospect, though it really wasn't at the time.
That tailored black jacket Sebastian wears looks like something Winston Churchill would have changed out of before that last
cavalry charge at Omdurman. It seems intentionally designed to mimic 19th century great power imperial army officer garb. Nostalgia
for the good times, apparently. Goes with his fascist priorities.
Let us not get carried away with the exuberance of discovering skulduggery among fascist elements of the media and politics.
This does not mean that the conspiracy means Russia is thereby a Goodie Twoshoes. It also does not mean that Russia is any less
a pain in the ass than it has heretorfore be characterized.
It does mean that there is less reason (any?) than ever to put much faith in FoxNews (already a mere propaganda machine) or
other orgs. I am uncomfortable hearing CNA is caught up in this as they are a pseudo government thinktank with some Pentagon influence.
If true, the story should be used to clear out some journalists and analyst riffraff. However, this story is surely not going
to restore, much less create, any integrity among the Beltway Punditry.
The article and related matters may also shed more light on the abrupt resignation of
Robert Hannigan from the leadership of GCHQ in January 2017 a few days after Trump's inauguration. Given previous revelations
about GCHQ and NSA spying on each other's citizens, what else is next in the UK and in the US and elsewhere?
After reading about that Carson character and others I am ready for a shower to try to wash off the disgust.
Yves Smith: Thanks for this. I am wondering about two stories that have been flapping around here for a few days: That odd
New Knowledge company that produced the report about Russian influence on the elections as well as the story about the case before
the Supreme Court of the US in which a company is invoking claims of sovereign immunity.
I have a feeling that New Knowledge definitely fits into the framework outlined by Ames above. A contractor that appears out
of nowhere with a "distinguished" board of concerned semi-liberals (at the trough)?
But what do I know? Some guy named Volodya showed up at my house and bought my vote in 2016 for two bottles of pickled mushrooms
Perfideus Albion is not just a neat saying, but a truth that the Irish, French and
Germans (etc.) have known forever, the people don't deserve it, but the
jumped up Tories do in spades.
Thank you for highlighting this article! It names names and connects some dots, including some connections reaching into the
U.S. It also describes propaganda mechanisms that have been around forever but have become pervasive today. A few protruding tips
of a massive iceberg, in my view. I'm sure *this* "bombshell" story will get the massive coverage it deserves in the MSM -- not!
That was interesting. Well argued all the way through I thought, but they could take a closer look at the unwinding of Yugoslavia;
what Serbia and Syria have in common is having been targeted by outside state powers for dissolution, responses did vary.
Thank you diptherio for posting the C4SS response. Such responses are helpful in evaluating issues like this, and we should
always be open to the other side when they take the time to reply. However, I can't agree that the response was "well argued."
The author does make some valid points, but mainly she resorts to ad hominem attacks on Ames (based on some juvenile antics at
eXile that are often used to smear him), or on both authors because they may have agreed with "Assadists" like Ambassador Peter
Ford or "9/11 Truthers" like Piers Robinson, whose claims about Syria or the White Helmets are, of course, Kremlin propaganda.
Which brings up why Blumenthal would have changed his position on Syria; it was not because of his gradual understanding of what
was really happening there. Rather, while he had once grasp the truth of the "revolution," he made the mistake of going to a Kremlin
gala and the Rooskies (and RT) got to him. Now he is just another propagandist. Nowhere that I can see does the author discuss
the major claims made in Ames and Blumenthal's article, or the evidence cited (except to say that if it was in RT or Sputnik,
we can ignore it anyway as propaganda). Nor does she address the actual defamation made by Alexander Ross-Reid through the SPLC
that pissed off Blumenthal in the first place. There are other problems (don't get me started on the "red-brown" smear), but that's
enough.
Having said all that, I do think that in their criticism of C4SS, Ames and Blumenthal perhaps did some unnecessary punching
down. They could have made clearer the distinction between organizations like the Integrity Initiative, that are pretty clearly
intelligence operatives or cut-outs, versus groups like C4SS that function more like "useful idiots" because of their ideological
position (e.g. equating U.S. and Russian imperialism in this case in their "anarchist" appeal). The latter are in no way as evil
as the former, in my mind.
You are clearly much more engaged with the related debates than I. I read the piece as a response to the punching down you
mention in your last paragraph and felt like I got a respectable read on someone still developing their arguments. I'm not informed
enough to argue with much of it, but having read Diana Johnstone's "Fools Crusade", the Syria/Serbia bit stuck in my craw.
I had thought about commenting on the ad hominems directed at Ames, but didn't want to get into the whole identity argument
embedded in much of the language of the post. While I disagree with many of her positions and attitudes on the state actions she
criticizes without, in my opinion, adequate grounding, I judged it a mostly good faith effort trying to find solid footing in
a world increasingly thick with distorted narratives.
It's hard to argue now, from anywhere with out power, without being someone's "useful idiot": trust has decayed to the point
where language impedes communication in the political sphere.
It's funny you should mention Johnstone's book. I normally would not use the derogatory term "useful idiot" for the very reason
you imply; most such people are acting in good faith. I admit that her comments on Syria irritated me. But the reason I sometimes
overreact to that sort of narrative is because of my own experiences as a useful idiot, starting with Yugoslavia. I fell for the
liberal "humanitarian" argument hook, line, and sinker in the 1990s, even though I considered myself a knowledgeable progressive
at the time. It wouldn't be the last time I was duped, but I'd like to think I'm a little wiser today.
I appreciate your comment. We definitely need to distinguish empire propagandists from the beliefs of people honestly trying
to find their way.
I thought the later part of Ames' piece was unnecessary. It's kind of the same sort of guilt-by-attending-same-conference thing
that I find annoying about the Russophobes.
Keep focused on government malfeasance, not basement brown-shirts.
Oh well, there would be a lot to argue here. In one side it is nice to see that the "Initiative" is being exposed although
it doesn't appear yet to trigger any significant response from supposedly democratic institutions like, let's say the english
parliament (at ransom by brexit).
Just to demonstrate how this article is well focused and pointed I wanted to comment on this bit:
(Among the outlets listed as friendly hosts in Integrity Initiative internal memos are Buzzfeed and El Pais, the center-left
Spanish daily .)
YES! iIt is so true that the former "center-left" –if you wish– daily that years ago was a must read but has been degraded
to levels that I wouldn't have imagined, in a case that makes the Guardian as the "guardian of reporting-as-it should-be". One
has to bear in mind that the current most important shareholder of Grupo Prisa (owner of El Pais) is an english hedge fund Amber
Capital whose CEO,
Joseph
Oughorlian is chairman at Grupo Prisa and probably responsible for the Russia!Russia!Russia! campaign observed in this medium
that surprised me so much. You don't find nothing similar in Spain even in rigth and rigth of the rigth news outlets.
I believe this UK-based shareholder is clearly associated with the peculiar Russia!Russia!Russia! stance of the supposedly
centre-left daily.
For those of us from way back way back, these kooks relate to offshoots of the Watergate scandal, the original one, where people
working on those burglaries of psychiatrist's offices and Democratic headquarters got their start organizing small gangs of crooks
to infiltrate what was then a porous but trustable system of government – on they went to propose surveillance and collection
of data that was at first publicly laughed about but on they went. On they went. Technology with all its pluses has these minuses
we at first were able to counter (Church hearings) but the rats have scurried into all the back alleys and secretive pathways
that need a thorough cleanup. It can be done, but it needs to be done periodically. Hopefully this is finally the year when that
will happen.
Thank you, Yves. I believe these folk don't end up in a good place, but meanwhile they are wreaking havoc. The place to start,
after the brooms and mops, is to get money OUT of politics and restore a verifiable voting system that happens methodically and
is trustworthy. The citizenry will be behind this. We the people don't care how long it takes to vote or to find out who won.
We don't! Haste makes waste in more ways than we know.
Let's do this. And please, judges, do your duty or go to jail yourselves.
It's obvious that neither Ames or Blumenthal read the actual documents they're quoting from. Which is a shame considering the
relevant one involving the CIA's Operation Mockingbird comparison was only seven pages long. The CIA were merely imitating British
intelligence during the war and it is clearly stated as such when one of the replies involving General Sir Richard Barrons states
that they've done this before during the 1930s. The US didn't possess a foreign intelligence agency at the time and I'd fervently
argue that we still don't to this day.
but I've already commented about British Security Coordination in the aftermath of PropOrNot though and I'm reluctant to beat
a dead horse.
Ah, the smell (or should we say stench) of domestic propaganda in the morning, ironically by some of the same individuals who
brought us Iraq WMDs. While First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and other civil rights must be protected, it seems to
me that a careful balance can be drawn under new legislation that insulates us from such government-sponsored propaganda. We should
be able to rely on our government's representations. Instead, as with a former president who openly acknowledged, "My job is to
catapult the propaganda," the reverse, together with a related loss of trust, unfortunately seems to be increasingly the case.
Stop lying! What part of "of the People, by the People, for the People," is difficult to understand?
"... As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are. ..."
"... If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in Iranian politics. ..."
"... Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley, was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.) ..."
"... No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of "sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!) "vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors." ..."
"... These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose. ..."
"... "It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any debate in Congress or the media." ..."
"... To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight of hand. ..."
"... So Trump did morph into Hillary. Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State calling the shots. ..."
"... The Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018 equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within. ..."
"... The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative. ..."
"... I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g., Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!). ..."
It's fact: Neoconservatives are pleased with President Trump's foreign policy.
A couple of months back, Bloomberg's Eli Lake let it know he was in neoconservative
nirvana:
" for Venezuela, [Donald Trump] came very close to calling for regime change. 'The United
States has taken important steps to hold the regime accountable,' Trump said. 'We are prepared
to take further action if the government of Venezuela persists on its path to impose
authoritarian rule on the Venezuelan people.'"
"For a moment,"
swooned Lake , "I closed my eyes and thought I was listening to a Weekly Standard
editorial meeting."
Onward to Venezuela! Mr. Lake, a neoconservative, was loving every moment. In error, he and his kind confuse an
expansionist foreign policy with "American exceptionalism." It's not.
As it happens, neocons are in luck. Most Americans know little of the ideas that animated
their country's founding. They're more likely to hold ideas in opposition to the
classical-liberal philosophy of the Founders, and, hence, wish to see the aggrandizement of the
coercive, colossal, Warfare State. That's just the way things are.
So, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have enlisted the West in "a proxy Sunni-Shia
religious war," Riyadh's ultimate aim. Donald Trump has been perfectly willing to partake. After a campaign of "America First," the president sided with Sunni Islam while demonizing
Iran. Iranians have killed zero Americans in terrorist attacks in the US between
1975-2015; Saudi Arabians
murdered 2369 !
Iranians recently reelected a reformer. Pray tell who elected the Gulf petrostate
sheiks?
Moderates danced in the streets of Tehran when President Hassan Rouhani was reelected.
Curiously, they're currently rioting.
If past is prologue, Ron Paul is probably right when he says the CIA is likely meddling in
Iranian politics. For the Left and the pseudo-Right, this is a look-away issue. As the
left-liberal establishment lectures daily, to question the Central Intelligence Agency -- its
spooks are also agitating against all vestiges of President Trump's original "America First"
plank -- is to "undermine American democracy."
Besides, "good" Americans know that only the Russians "meddle."
In Saudi Arabia, a new, more-dangerous regime is consolidating regional power. Almost
overnight has the kingdom shifted from rule by family dynasty (like that of the Clintons and
the Bushes), to a more authoritarian style of one-man
rule .
When it comes to the Saudi-Israeli-American-Axis-of-Angels, the Kushner-Trump Administration
-- is that another bloodline in-the-making? -- has not broken with America's ruling dynastic
families (the Clintons and the Bushes, aforementioned).
It's comforting to know Saudi Arabia plays a crucial role in the UN's human rights affairs.
In January of last year, the Kingdom executed 47 people in one day, including a rather benign
Shiite cleric. Fear not, they went quickly,
beheaded with a sword .
Then US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, a woman as dumb and dangerous as Nikki Haley,
was cool with the carnage. (One almost misses Henry Kissinger's realpolitik . At
least the man was highly educated and deeply knowledgeable about history and world
affairs. Second only to Jared Kushner, of course.)
Our bosom buddies, the Saudi's, are currently
barricading Yemeni ports. No aid gets through her hermetically sealed ports. Yemenis are
dying. Some Twitter followers twittered with joy at the sight of starving Yemeni babies, like
this
one . Oh well, Yemeni babies can be sinister.
No one would deny the largely neoconservative nature of
Trump's National Security Strategy . Tucked in there somewhere is the Trumpian theme of
"sovereignty," but in watered-down words. The promised Wall has given way to "multilayered
technology"; to the "deployment of additional personnel," and to the tried-and-tested (not!)
"vetting of prospective immigrants, refugees, and other foreign visitors."
These are mouthfuls Barack Obama and Genghis Bush would hardly oppose.
"It's often said that the Trump administration is 'isolationist,'" wrote
historian Andrew J. Bacevich, in the UK Spectator. Untrue. "In fact, we are now witnessing a
dramatic escalation in the militarization of US foreign policy in the Middle East, Africa and
Afghanistan. This has not been announced, but it is happening, and much of it without any
debate in Congress or the media."
Indeed, while outlining his "new" Afghanistan plan, POTUS had conceded that "the American
people are weary of war without victory." (Make that war, full-stop.) Depressingly, the
president went on to promise an increase in American presence in Afghanistan. By sending 4000
additional soldiers there, President Trump alleged he was fighting terrorism, yet not
undertaking nation building.
This is tantamount to talking out of both sides of one's mouth.
Teasing apart these two elements is near-impossible. Send "4,000 additional soldiers to add
to the 8,400 now deployed in Afghanistan," and you've done what Obama and Bush before you did
in that blighted and benighted region: muddle along; kill some civilians mixed in with some bad
guys; break bread with tribal leaders (who hate your guts); mediate and bribe.
Above all, spend billions not your own to perfect the credo of a global fighting
force that doesn't know Shiite from Shinola .
The upshot? It's quite acceptable, on the Left and the pseudo-Right, to casually quip about
troops in Niger and
Norway . "We have soldiers in Niger and Norway? Of course we do. We need them."
With neoconservatism normalized, there is no debate, disagreement or daylight between our
dangerously united political factions.
This is the gift President Trump has given mainstream neoconservatives -- who now
comfortably include neoliberals and all Conservatism Inc., with the exceptions of Pat Buchanan,
Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson.
How exactly did the president normalize neoconservatism: In 2016, liberals accused candidate
Trump of isolationism. Neoconservatives -- aka Conservatism Inc. -- did the same.
Having consistently complained of his isolationism , the Left and the phony Right
cannot but sanction President Trump's interventionism . The other option is to admit
that we of the callused
Old Right, who rejoiced at the prospects and promise of non-interventionism, were always
right.
Not going to happen.
To some, the normalizing of neoconservatism by a president who ran against it is a stroke of
genius; of a piece with Bill Clinton's triangulation tactics. To others, it's a cynical sleight
of hand.
You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but
you cannot fool all the people all the time.
But you can fool the whole country all the time in American bi-partisan system. Clinton,
Bush, Obama, Trump each were brought to power by fooling their electorate.
So Trump did morph into Hillary.
Actually, it was something I was afraid of once I got the good news of Hillary losing, but
expected, considering that I view presidents as empty suits, and the National Security State
calling the shots.
I'm waiting for another one of those "Trump's Truth in Action" moments when describes the
real political atmosphere in Washington.
Trump was asked about something he said in a previous interview: "When you give, they do
whatever the hell you want them to do." "You'd better believe it," Trump said. "If I ask them, if I need them, you know, most of
the people on this stage I've given to, just so you understand, a lot of money."
I think its time to dump the label "neoconservative". The appropriate term is
"interventionists without a cause" (IWAC or IWC) or some other descriptor.
The real problem that Pres Trump has and I remain a Pres Trump supporter is two fold:
1. He seems to have forgotten he won the election.
2. He seems to have forgotten what he was elected to do.
And nearly everyone of these issues on foreign policy the answer rests in respecting
sovereignty – that of others and our own.
I didn't need to read,"Adios, America" to comprehend the deep state damage our careless
immigration policy has on the country. I don't need to reread, "Adios, America" to grasp that
our policies of intervening in the affairs of other states undermines our own ability to make
the same case at home.
If I weren't already trying to plow my way through several other books, documentaries and
relapsing to old school programming such as The Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and now the Dick
Van Dyke show, i would reread,
"Adios , America."
In Col. Bacevich's book,
Washington Rules, he posits a distressing scenario that the foreign policy web is so
tangled and entrenched, the executive branch is simply out his league. The expectation was
that Pres trump had the will to turn the matter. I hold out hope, but maybe not. There's
time.
@J.RossThe Trump holdouts that maintain his turncoat buffoonery is actually 5d chess are the 2018
equivalent of the 2009 hopey changey Obots and can't accept their big daddy is a liar and a
spineless turncoat. The system is broken and cannot be fixed from within.
The signs were already there before the election, too many people were hoping that this time
it will be different (it never is) and ignored them. He has jewish children and did say how
he was anti Iran, he was always a neo cohen servative.
I have a question for all the Trump supporters still in denial, what will it take to break
your delusions? He is not going to build a wall, mass immigration is up, the left wing are
mass censoring and essentially running everything now, his foreign policy is now endorsed by
the all the never Trumpers – so what is your limit, is there anything he must do to
lose your support?
Jews and the Jewish Media normalized Jewish NeoCons by guaranteeing that they always
have a voice and airtime in American culture and media. Never called out by the
WashingtonPost and NY Times for their previous blunders, they continue to shape American
foreign policy. And, of course, the end game here is Israel and the Israeli agenda at all
costs, you Jews are one issue folk. And You definitely do your part, with the subtle
subterfuge at work in the articles that you write.
No one should be surprised by Trump promoting Israeli interests über alles. For
decades he was so involved in Israel events in New York I debated whether he was actually
Jewish or not. Bannon said the embassy move to Jerusalem was at the behest of Adelson,
Trump's old casino buddy. In the campaign Trump got a lot of support from NY Jewish
billionaires (Icahn, Feinberg, Paulson, et al.). They know him and how he operates.
But being pro-Israel doesn't necessarily equate to neocon. The neocons are the dumb Jews
with serious inadequacy issues who could never make it in business and instead went into
politics and journalism. The latter are still staunchly opposed to Trump even after a lot of
pro-Israel moves. They might warm up to Trump's bellicosity towards a lot of Israel's enemies
(a long list with degrees of separation), but so far they've simply moved left.
I'm a little more sanguine about a Zionist President who approaches problems from a
business and deal-making position than from one who comes a neocon political position (e.g.,
Hillary, every other GOP candidate except Rand Paul). The former are pragmatic and will avoid
conflict, especially stupid conflict, at all costs. While the latter believe they are
virtuous in going to war and/or attacking countries. Did you hear Hillary threaten to shoot
down Russian planes in Syria during the campaign (WTF??!).
Lastly, I like to think Trump surrounded himself with neocons (McMaster, Haley, et al.) to
placate the GOP establishment because he knows he has to play the game.
People are inclined to believe that any activity -- in this instance, voting for the
red/blue puppets in Washington -- in which their participation is patronized must be
legitimate and effectual. Many duped in November 2016, even those who now feel betrayed by
that farce, were still around here a few weeks ago acting like a Senator Moore in Alabama
would be pivotal to reform, his defeat devastating.
That's how Ms. Mercer and her pundit ilk
(Buchanan, Napolitano, etc.) thrive -- supporting the Empire by never questioning its
legitimacy, just taking sides within the Establishment. And they'll be buying into the 2018
congressional contests, ad nauseum.
Of course, what is done to us, and to others in our name and with our money, never changes
to any meaningful degree. Americans might realize this if they thought critically about it,
so they don't. Instead, they lap up the BS and vote for who tells them the lie they like to
hear. When there are identity politics involved, the delusion seems even deeper. There are
self-styled "progressives" who used to advocate single-payer, nationalized health care who
are elated over the retention of so-called "Obamacare," the legislation for which was written
by and for the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Me? I cope by boycotting national elections and mass media, participating in forums like
this, and hoping that when the tottering tower of debt and gore tips over, as few innocents
and as many guilty as practicable are among those crushed.
The Zionist neocons and Israel did 911 and got away with it and everyone in the U.S. gov
knows it and they tried to sink the USS LIBERTY and got away with it and so normal is an
Orwellian society where Zionists can kill Americans and destroy the Mideast and nobody does
jack shit about it.
The neocons are Satanists warmongers and will destroy America.
Neocons are about as evil as proudly proclaimed Leftists, and they are obviously more
duplicitous.
Either Neocons will be refuted and publicly rebuked and rejected, or Neocons will
eventually destroy the country. Their long term fruits are destruction of that which they
have used to destroy so many others.
@anonymous
Far from all Neocons are Jews. However, virtually all Neocons are militantly pro-Israel to
the point of making Israel's foreign policy desires central to their assessment of what
America needs in foreign policy.
And the source is Anglo-Saxon Puritanism, which was a Judaizing heresy. Judaizing heresy
necessarily produces pro-Jewish culture. WASP culture is inherently pro-Jewish, as much as it
is anti-Catholic and anti-French and and anti-Spanish and anti-Irish, etc.
And all that means that WASP is opposed to the nest interests of the vast majority of
white Christians while being pro-Jewish.
Jews did not cause any of that. Anglo-Saxon Puritan heretics did.
@neutral
Pres Trump is a situational leader. It's a rare style, for good reason. However, he is openly
situational. That was clear during the campaign season. however,
I thought his positions were sincere. I don't think that this was any kind of slight of
hand, "watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat". His positions on Israel, same sex behavior,
marijuana, healthcare remain what they were going in. His foreign policy and immigration
positions have been buffered and he seems incapable of standing where he came in.
It was no secret he intended an assertive military. However, he seems easily convinced
that strong means aggressive, and that needlessly aggressive policy is a substitute for a
strong US -- that is a mistake. Syria cruise strike was the first sign that he was giving in
to the men whom he chose as advisers. As it it turns out winning the election has been easier
than governing. I assumed he had a much stronger backbone, than he has been willing to
exhibit in office.
@Jake
The Israeli/AIPAC bribery of American bible thumper preachers, especially in the
fundamentalist southern American states has more to do with it than the reformation.
The preachers get huge donations to pay for their churches and TV shows. They get free
trips to Israel for themselves and their families all the time.
On their Israel trips they pay more attention to the OT Jewish and holocaust sites than
the Christian ones
It's true that the reformation was a return to Judaism and a rejection of Christianity,
but that was 500 years ago.
What's important now is the vast amounts of money the Israeli government and the lobby
funnels into those fundamentalist churches.
If the southern fundamentalists only knew what Jews think of them. I really got an earful
of Jewish scorn and hate for southerners and fundamentalists during the recent Roy Moore
election.
Read Jewish publications if you want to learn what they think of southern
fundamentalists
@Twodees
Partain Trump appointed Haley because Sheldon Adelson told him to.
And contrary to the myth of trump funding his own campaign he did not the only money he put
in his campaign was a 1o million loan to it. Adelson was his biggest contributor just like
Saban was Hillary's.
Not coincidentally, however, neocon hopes may lie as well with the generous political
funding provided to Haley by Sheldon Adelson, the GOP's and Trump's single biggest donor.
Between May and June, 2016, Sheldon Adelson contributed $250,000 to Haley's 527 political
organization, A Great Day, funds that she used to target four Republican state senate rivals
in primaries. (Only one was successfully defeated.) Adelson was the largest contributor to
her group,
which raised a total of $915,000.
This powerful Adelson-funded Israel lobby could soon rival AIPAC's https://www.haaretz.com › U.S.
News
Oct 31, 2017 – Sheldon Adelson(L), The 3rd annual IAC National Conference, in
September, 2016, and Nikki Haley. . will feature, for the first time ever, a prominent
speaker from the ranks of the U.S. government: U.S. ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley, who is
a favorite among the right-leaning "pro-Israel" crowd.
The Jews have bought this government and trump and Haley are nothing but junk yard
dogs.
Not that there are good alternatives but anyone who stills supports trump is as crazy as he
is.
The title is ridiculous. Neo conservatives have been normal for decades.
The neocon movement was normalized in 2001 by the PATRIOT Act. The domestic side of the
neocon worldview -- or world-system -- was joined with the international or interventionist
side, just as anti-Palestinian actions by Israel were joined by way of repression of free
speech with the Charlottesville protest by conservatives of the desecration of monuments.
@renfro
I'm sure the evangelical preachers con their followers into donating money to Israel. I've
seen those late night ads begging for donations to feed ancient old holocaust survivors in
Israel.
But the Israelis pay for all those luxury trips to Israel And a lot of the money to start
those TV shows and for the big salaries come from Israel and AIPAC so does the money to set
up those big churches that just appear from nowhere
@Grandpa
Charlie I have always wondered why its okay to say WASP but not Jew in public.
One is more pc, the other is not allowed.
I have seen some articles about Jews replacing wasp, even from Jewish authors.
As for Neoconservatives. It depends how we define it.
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large overlap,
but not always.
From what I know modern Neoconservativism started somewhere around the 70s,80s? Became
dominant around the Bush years. (during Reagan years they got rid of many Paleocons).
@Twodees
Partain Not only Nikki is a prank, she is also a godsend. Now the world get to see USG
naked without usual pretension.
Trumps is probably the most honest Potus with highest integrity & bravery in American
history(stupid aside). He means what he said without mind boggling hypocrite lies, he tried
fulfilling all his election promises, fighting bravely with his only little weapon tweeter
besiege by entire states organs, CIA/FBI, both parties, MSM, world allies,
He put US Embassy in Jerusalem that all other Potus promised but never keep, he tried to
revise immigration policy that people blocked, building prototype wall now, try befriend
Russia become a treason act, reneged nuclear agreement with Iran, make US military great(of
course need hyper tension like nuclear NK), scraped Obacare, TTP, Climate deal, try to grab
Killary, bring back jobs with tax heaven .
Mann, this is really a man of his word. Didn't these are what you people voted him for, to
drain the swamp? He gotta shock the entire MSM brainwashed nation up to see the deeply
corrupted USG, collapse it quickly for a new one to move in(by whoever after his prank). As
Trumps had asked:"what you got to lose to vote me?"
@Twodees
Partain Yes..ues i admit, don't shoot. Im just been sarcastic, USG is in such a laughing
stock to the world now, many americans probably are exasperated if not yet numb. I am not
judging he is good, DT is just less evil typical business man..imo
But frankly, i do see why people are voting DT now. He is at least more entertaining and
blunt to screw up WH deep states show. Per msm (fake news), he is honouring all his campaign
promises rt? So that make him above hypocrite liar Obama who speak on peace(Nobel prize), but
drenched in Libyan and Syrians blood.
US msm brainwashed people need lot of shock & awe to wake up to reality, then they
might have hope to drain the swamp in unity or just await to implode and suck down whole
world.
Believing that the current world system no longer sufficiently advances American
interests ever since Washington lost control of its institutional tools, and that the
eventual outcome of this increasingly multipolar state of affairs is that the US will in
turn lose its global empire, Trump has decided to become the Agent of Chaos in bringing
about its destruction.
I know with certainty that Hillary is a beast from depth of hell.
Meh, hyperbole.
Hillary is no different from most politicians. She's in it for the wealth and power. She
got herself a real smart, duplicitous, pussy-chasing beast of a husband, and made the most of
the opportunity.
People -- the American people -- should be able to see this rather-evident characteristic
of politicians. They should be adequately educated, at least to the extent of being able to
detect the base chicanery and corruption that radiates from political personalities.
But, they don't. They don't see the evil. The media deftly conceals it, because the beasts
of the media, like jackals, feed on the morsels of wealth that fall to the ground as the
politicians devour the carcass of well, hell, freedom and democracy is as useful a metaphor
as any.
In this context, I am reminded of British comedian Alexei Sayle. When asked what he does
when he watches a really talented satirist performing, Sayle replied: "I go back stage and
tell him he'll never make it."
Indeed, the attitude to my work over 20 years has been the best proof of its quality.
If the Comments threads about "ilana mercer," on the Unz Review, prove anything (other
than that anti-Semitism lives), it is that mediocre "men" (for the most) hate a woman who can
out-think them. As a defender of men, this saddens me, but it is, nevertheless, true.
Ron Unz, our wonderful editor, chose the image appended to the column. (The brilliant Mr.
Unz is one of the few intellectually honest individuals I know in this biz. He, columnist
Jack Kerwick, and a handful of others.)
In reply to kunckle-dragger's sniveling: I'll continue to refrain from interacting with
his ilk ("fanboys") on my column's thread. But this particular dreadful cur (with apologies
to dogs, which I love) further embarrasses himself when he offers up the non sequitur that
engaging him is the litmus test for being a "good writer."
I see it as a case of American imperialism fused with pro Israel sentiment. Large
overlap, but not always.
Agreed. American imperialism has a long long history (going back to at least the mid-19th
century). That's why the neocons were able to gain so much influence. They were appealing to
a pre-existing imperialist sentiment.
There is a large group of US politician non Jews
who also are pushing this policies. So these two groups together would be called
Neocons.
There is a large group in US population, that find this idea very appealing.
That's why Make America Great Again was such a popular slogan. It appeals to mindless
American jingoism and imperialism.
@dfordoom
Edward Dutton stated that it was a trade-off between intelligence on one side and instinct on
another – both are necessary for survival. For me, intelligence does not seem to
correlate directly to wisdom.
If so, that reinforces my view that Trump doesn't know anybody in the Swamp
You are exactly right.
Trump really knew no one to hire or appoint to anything except his NY cronies , mainly his
Jewish lawyers and Kushner contacts.
So he appointed anyone they and his biggest donors recommended to him.
His ego and insecurity demanded he surround himself with his NY cohorts and close family.
" It appeals to mindless American jingoism and imperialism" = "Make America great
again"
So you would prefer : "Make America powerless and insignificant again"
How about "Make America a normal nation that respects other nations' sovereignty, that
doesn't plant military bases on foreign soil, that doesn't bomb other people's countries,
doesn't try to impose its views and its culture on the rest of the world, doesn't undermine
the governments of other countries and doesn't threaten any country that dares to disagree
with it." Would that be too much to ask?
I would have thought that someone "Mensa" qualified since 1973 could understand that
greatness should not be equated with behaving like a thug or a schoolyard bully. America's
aggression does tend to look like the manifestation of a massive inferiority complex.
I commend Ms. Mercer for publishing this which will no doubt bring to light an ugly truth
about many of her own tribesmen since there many of her other views which I wholly or
partially disagree with
And as was said sometime before, the thought process of earlier elites (the banking,
Hollywood and the neo-con, neo-lib crowd which was almost exclusively Zio-Jewish and is
disproportionately still is) has creeped into the very being of what constitutes to be an
"elite" in the west these days. Unlimited warfare and welfare using fraudulent money,
disturbing the social and sexual fabric of a society! Satan would be quite proud of this scum
bunch
So the zionist cabal still calls the shots and the slavish goyim second tier elites now
willingly go along and in fact share the same mentality
"... Look at Russiagate. An excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive behavior. ..."
"... That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and there's no evidence that it did. ..."
"... So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet Union. ..."
"... The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn. It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether. ..."
"... Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the establishment propaganda machine is acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the internet are getting more and more severe. ..."
Earlier this week, President Donald Trump tweeted the following:
"Endless Wars, especially those which are fought out of judgement mistakes that were made
many years ago, & those where we are getting little financial or military help from the
rich countries that so greatly benefit from what we are doing, will eventually come to a
glorious end!"
The tweet was warmly received and celebrated by Trump's supporters, despite the fact that it
says essentially nothing since "eventually" could mean anything.
Indeed, it's
looking increasingly possible that nothing will come of the president's stated agenda to
withdraw troops from Syria other than a bunch of words which allow his anti-interventionist
base to feel nice feelings inside. Yet everyone laps it up, on both ends of the political
aisle, just like they always do:
Trump supporters are acting like he's a swamp-draining, war-ending peacenik...
...his enemies are acting like he's feeding a bunch of Kurds on conveyor belts into
Turkish meat grinders to be made into sausages for Vladimir Putin's breakfast, when in
reality nothing has changed and may not change at all.
How are such wildly different pictures being painted about the same non-event? By the fact
that both sides of the Trump-Syria debate have thus far been reacting solely to narrative.
This has consistently been the story throughout Trump's presidency: a heavy emphasis on
words and narratives and a disinterest in facts and actions. A rude tweet can dominate
headlines for days, while the actual behaviors of this administration can go almost completely
ignored. Trump continues to more or less advance the same warmongering Orwellian globalist
policies and agendas as his predecessors along more or less the same trajectory, but frantic
mass media narratives are churned out every day painting him as some unprecedented deviation
from the norm. Trump himself, seemingly aware that he's interacting entirely with perceptions
and narratives instead of facts and reality, routinely makes things up whole cloth and often
claims he's "never said" things he most certainly has said. And why not? Facts don't matter in
this media environment, only narrative does.
Look at Russiagate. An
excellent recent article by Ray McGovern for Consortium News titled "A Look Back at
Clapper's Jan. 2017 'Assessment' on Russia-gate" reminds us on the two-year anniversary of the
infamous ODNI assessment that the entire establishment Russia narrative is built upon nothing
but the say-so of a couple dozen intelligence analysts hand-picked and guided by a man who
helped deceive the world into Iraq, a man who is so virulently Russophobic that he's
said on more than one occasion that Russians are genetically predisposed to subversive
behavior.
That January 2017 intelligence assessment has formed the foundation underlying every
breathless, conspiratorial Russia story you see in western news media to this very day, and
it's completely empty. The idea that Russia interfered in the US election in any meaningful way
is based on an assessment crafted by a known liar , from which countless relevant
analysts were excluded, which makes no claims of certainty, and contains no publicly available
evidence. It's pure narrative from top to bottom, and therefore the "collusion" story is as
well since Trump could only have colluded with an actual thing that actually happened, and
there's no evidence that it did.
So now you've got Trump being painted as a Putin lackey based on a completely fabricated
election interference story, despite the fact that Trump has actually
been far more hawkish towards Russia than any administration since the fall of the Soviet
Union. With the nuclear brinkmanship this administration has been playing with its only nuclear
rival on the planet, it would be so incredibly easy for Trump's opposition to attack him on his
insanely hawkish escalation of a conflict which could easily end all life on earth if any
little thing goes wrong, but they don't. Because this is all about narrative and not facts,
Democrats have been paced into supporting even more sanctioning, proxy conflicts and nuclear
posturing while loudly objecting to any sign of communication between the two nuclear
superpowers, while Republicans are happy to see Trump increase tensions with Moscow because it
combats the collusion narrative. Now both parties are supporting an anti-Russia agenda which
existed in secretive US government agencies
long before the 2016 election .
And this to me is the most significant thing about Trump's presidency. Not any of the things
people tell me I'm supposed to care about, but the fact that the age of Trump has been
highlighting in a very clear way how we're all being manipulated by manufactured narratives all
the time.
Humanity
lives in a world of mental narrative . We have a deeply conditioned societal habit of
heaping a massive overlay of mental labels and stories on top of the raw data we take in
through our senses, and those labels and stories tend to consume far more interest and
attention than the actual data itself. We use labels and stories for a reason: without them it
would be impossible to share abstract ideas and information with each other about what's going
on in our world. But those labels and stories get imbued with an intense amount of belief and
identification; we form tight, rigid belief structures about our world, our society, and our
very selves that can generate a lot of fear, hatred and suffering. Which is why it feels so
nice to go out into nature and relax in an environment that isn't shaped by human mental
narrative.
This problem is exponentially exacerbated by the fact that these stories and labels are
wildly subjective and very easily manipulated. Powerful people have learned that they can
control the way everyone else thinks, acts and votes by controlling the stories they tell
themselves about what's going on in the world using mass media control and financial political
influence, allowing ostensible democracies to be conducted in a way which serves power far more
efficiently than any dictatorship.
See how both A and B herd the public away from opposing the dangerous pro-establishment
agendas being advanced by this administration? The dominant narratives could not possibly be
more different from what's actually going on, and the only reason they're the dominant
narratives is because an alliance
of plutocrats and secretive government agencies exerts an immense amount of influence over
the stories that are told by the political/media class.
The narrative matrix of America's political/media landscape is a confusing labyrinth of
smoke and funhouse mirrors distorting and manipulating the public consciousness at every turn.
It's psychologically torturous, which is largely why people who are deeply immersed in politics
are so on-edge all the time regardless of where they're at on the political spectrum. The only
potentially good thing I can see about this forceful brutalization of the public psyche is that
it might push people over the edge and shatter the illusion altogether.
Trust in the mass media is already at an all-time low while our ability to network and share
information that casts doubt on official narratives is at an all-time high, which is why the
establishment propaganda machine is
acting so weird as it scrambles to control the narrative, and why efforts to censor the
internet are getting more and more severe. It is possible that this is what it looks like when
a thinking species evolves into a sane and healthy relationship with thought. Perhaps the
cracks that are appearing all over official narratives today are like the first cracks
appearing in an eggshell as a bird begins to hatch into the world.
Clinton Democrats (DemoRats) are so close to neocons that the current re-alliance is only natural and only partially caused by
Trump. Under Obama some of leading figures of his administration were undistinguishable from neocons (Samantha Power is a good
example here -- she was as crazy as Niki Haley, if not more). There is only one "war party in the USA which
continently consists of two wings: Repugs and DemoRats.
Notable quotes:
"... Both GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham , one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary Clinton , who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror jargon. ..."
"... That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's way" ..."
"... But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in 2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent. ..."
"... This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all troops from Afghanistan ..."
"... While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining ..."
"... At the same time, Democratic policy elites in Washington are once again formally aligning with neoconservatives , even to the point of creating joint foreign policy advocacy groups (a reunion that predated Trump ). The leading Democratic Party think tank, the Center for American Progress, donated $200,000 to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute and has multilevel alliances with warmongering institutions. ..."
"... By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet, MSNBC, is stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a "national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism"). ..."
"... All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation -- which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way. ..."
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP'S December 18 announcement that he intends to withdraw all U.S.
troops from Syria produced some isolated support in the
anti-war wings of bothparties , but largely provoked
bipartisan outrage among in Washington's reflexively pro-war establishment.
Both
GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the country's most reliable war supporters, and Hillary
Clinton, who repeatedly criticized former President Barack Obama for insufficient
hawkishness, condemned Trump's decision in very similar terms, invoking standard war on terror
jargon.
But while official Washington united in opposition, new polling data from
Morning Consult/Politico shows that a large plurality of Americans support Trump's Syria
withdrawal announcement: 49 percent support to 33 percent opposition.
That's not surprising given that Americans by a similarly large plurality agree with the
proposition that "the U.S. has been engaged in too many military conflicts in places such as
Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan for too long and should prioritize getting Americans out of harm's
way" far more than they agree with the pro-war view that "the U.S. needs to keep troops in
places such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan to help support our allies fight terrorism and
maintain our foreign policy interests in the region."
But what is remarkable about the new polling data on Syria is that the vast bulk of support
for keeping troops there comes from Democratic Party voters, while Republicans and independents
overwhelming favor their removal. The numbers are stark: Of people who voted for Clinton in
2016, only 26 percent support withdrawing troops from Syria, while 59 percent oppose it. Trump
voters overwhelmingly support withdraw by 76 percent to 14 percent.
A similar gap is seen among those who voted Democrat in the 2018 midterm elections (28
percent support withdrawal while 54 percent oppose it), as opposed to the widespread support
for withdrawal among 2018 GOP voters: 74 percent to 18 percent.
Identical trends can be seen on the question of Trump's announced intention to withdraw half
of the U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan, where Democrats are far more supportive of keeping
troops there than Republicans and independents.
This case is even more stark since Obama ran in 2008 on a pledge to end the war in
Afghanistan and bring all troops home. Throughout the Obama years, polling data
consistently showed that huge majorities of Democrats favored a withdrawal of all
troops from Afghanistan:
With Trump rather than Obama now advocating troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, all of this
has changed. The new polling data shows far more support for troop withdrawal among Republicans
and independents, while Democrats are now split or even opposed . Among 2016 Trump voters,
there is massive support for withdrawal: 81 percent to 11 percent; Clinton voters, however,
oppose the removal of troops from Afghanistan by a margin of 37 percent in favor and 47 percent
opposed.
This latest poll is far from aberrational. As the Huffington Post's Ariel Edwards-Levy
documented early this week , separate polling shows a similar reversal by Democrats on
questions of war and militarism in the Trump era.
While Democrats were more or less evenly divided early last year on whether the U.S. should
continue to intervene in Syria, all that changed once Trump announced his intention to
withdraw, which provoked a huge surge in Democratic support for remaining. "Those who voted for
Democrat Clinton now said by a 42-point margin that the U.S. had a responsibility to do
something about the fighting in Syria involving ISIS," Edwards-Levy wrote, "while Trump voters
said by a 16-point margin that the nation had no such responsibility." (Similar trends can be
seen among GOP voters, whose support for intervention in Syria has steadily declined as Trump
has moved away from his posture of the last two years --
escalating bombings in both Syria and Iraq and killing far more civilians , as he
repeatedly vowed to do during the campaign -- to his return to his other campaign pledge to
remove troops from the region.)
This is, of course, not the first time that Democratic voters have wildly shifted their
"beliefs" based on the party affiliation of the person occupying the Oval Office. The party's
base spent the Bush-Cheney years denouncing war on terror policies, such as assassinations,
drones, and Guantánamo as moral atrocities and war crimes, only to suddenly support those
policies once they
became hallmarks of the Obama presidency .
But what's happening here is far more insidious. A core ethos of the anti-Trump #Resistance
has become militarism, jingoism, and neoconservatism. Trump is frequently attacked by Democrats
using longstanding Cold War scripts wielded for decades against them by the far right: Trump is
insufficiently belligerent with U.S. enemies; he's willing to allow the Bad Countries to take
over by bringing home U.S. soldiers; his efforts to establish less hostile relations with
adversary countries is indicative of weakness or even treason.
By far the most influential [neo]liberal media outlet,
MSNBC, is
stuffed full of former Bush-Cheney officials, security state operatives, and agents , while
even the liberal stars are notably hawkish (a decade ago, long before she went as far down the
pro-war and Cold Warrior rabbit hole that she now occupies, Rachel Maddow heralded herself as a
"national security liberal" who was "all about counterterrorism").
All of this has resulted in a new generation of Democrats, politically engaged for the first
time as a result of fears over Trump, being inculcated with values of militarism and
imperialism, trained to view once-discredited, war-loving neocons such as Bill Kristol, Max
Boot, and David Frum, and former CIA and FBI leaders as noble experts and trusted voices of
conscience. It's inevitable that all of these trends would produce a party that is increasingly
pro-war and militaristic, and polling data now leaves little doubt that this transformation --
which will endure long after Trump is gone -- is well under way.
Naomi Klein's book "Shock Doctrine", encapsulated by this post as "global elites used periods of crisis around the world to force
damaging neoliberal policies derived from the Chicago School and Washington Consensus upon unhappy populations that suffered greatly
as a result."
Notable quotes:
"... Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position). ..."
"... Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations. One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products. ..."
"... I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book? or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support. ..."
"... Somehow neoclassical economists always distort history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models. ..."
"... If you looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998. ..."
"... The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long as various macroaggregates eventually rose. ..."
"... Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward. ..."
"... Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different. The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected. ..."
"... Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian state – when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that. ..."
"... Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles. ..."
The argument largely seems to hold for the original poster boy example in Chile with the Pinochet coup against the socialist Allende
regime. A military coup replaced a democratically government. Whiole Chlle was experiencing a serious inflation, it was not in a
full-blown economic collapse. The coup was supported by US leaders Nixon and Kissinger, who saw themselves preventing the emergence
of pro-Soviet regime resembling Castro's Cuba. Thousands were killed, and a sweeping set of laisssez faire policies were imposed
with the active participation of "Chicago Boys" associated with Milton Friedman. In fact, aside from bringing down inflation these
rreforms did not initially improve economic performance, even as foreign capital flowed in, especially into the copper industry,
although the core of that industry remained nationalized. After several years the Chicago Boys were sent away and more moderate policies,
including a reimposition of controls on foreign capital flows, the economy did grow quite rapidly. But this left a deeply unequal
income distribution in place, which would largely remain the case even after Pinochet was removed from power and parliamentary democracy
returned.
This scenario was argued to happen in many other narions, especially those in the former Sovit bloc as the soviet Union disintegrated
and its successor states and the former members of the Soviet bloc in the CMEA and Warsaw Pact also moved to some sort of market
capitalism imposed from outside with policies funded by the IMF and following the Washington Consensus. Although he has since expressed
regret for this role in this, a key player linking what was done in several Latin American nations and what went down after 1989
in Eastern and Central Europe was Jeffrey Sachs. Klein's discussion especially of what went down in Russia also looks pretty sound
by and large, wtthout dragging through the details, although in these cases the political shift was from dictatorships run by Communist
parties dominated out of Moscow to at least somewhat more democratic governments, although not in all of the former Soviet republics
such as in Central Asia and with many of these later backsliding towards more authoritarian governments later. In Russia and in many
oothers large numbers of people were thrown into poverty from which they have not recovered. Klein has also extended this argument
to other nations, including South Africa after the end of apartheid.
likbez
The level of the naivety of Barkley Rosser is astounding.
Poland was a political project, the showcase for the neoliberal project in Eastern Europe and the USSR. EU was pressed to provide
large subsidies, and that marionette complied. The commenter ilpalazzo (above) is right that there has been " a tremendous development
in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been a serious engine of growth." Like in Baltics and Ukraine,
German, French, Swedish and other Western buyers were most interested in opening market for their products and getting rid of
local and xUSSR competitors (and this supported and promoted Russophobia). With very few exceptions. University education system
also was partially destroyed, but still fared better than most manufacturing industries.
I remember talking to one of the Polish professors of economics when I was in Poland around 1992. He said that no matter how
things will develop, the Polish economy will never be allowed to fail as the USA is interested in propelling it at all costs.
That means that there was no CIA activity to undermine the financial system, deindustrialize the country, and possibly to partition
the county like it was in Russia with Harvard mafia (Summers, Shleifer, etc.)
Still, they lost quite a bit of manufacturing: for example all shipbuilding, which is ironic as Lech Wałęsa and Solidarity
emerged in this industry.
Eventually, Poland emerged as the major US agent of influence within the EU (along with GB) with the adamant anti-Russian
stance. Which taking into account the real state of Polish manufacturing deprived of the major market is very questionable. Later
by joining sanctions, they lost Russian agricultural market (including all apple market in which they have a prominent position).
But they have a large gas pipeline on their territory, so I suspect that like Ukraine they make a lot of money via transit
fees simply due to geographic. So they parochially live off rent -- that why they bark so much at North Stream 2.
Polish elite is a real horror show, almost beyond redemption, and not only in economics. I do not remember, but I think it
was Churchill who said " Poland is a greedy hyena of Europe." This is as true now as it was before WWII.
Now they are propelled by cheap labor from Ukraine, which they helped to destroy (along with Sweden and Germany)
My post seem to have vanished into oblivion so I'm pasting from the clipboard.
I am a Pole and have been a daily reader here since 2008. I hope a better versed compatriot will come out of the closet and
give a better picture (I know there are a few).
Let's just say the shock was pretty bad. In terms of amount of human suffering the worst was dissolving state owned farms.
Hundreds of thousands of people were just let go without any help, although many farms were profitable and others could be restructured
or converted into collectives etc. I live in a small town where there was a huge state farm and I can see former employees started
to recover and get by just recently judging by the looks of their dwellings.
Most of the manufacturing and heavy industry was sold off and extinguished. We used to have pretty decent capital producing
capabilities like tooling etc. Not a trace of that now. There is a lot being manufactured now here but mostly simple components
for german industry to assemble.
Pension system was thoroughly looted by you know who and is a ticking time bomb. Most of it was quasi privatized – that is
managed by western companies but still part of the state system. There were supposed to be individual saving accounts managed
by sophisticated investment specialists but the money ended up invested in state bonds, issued to subsidize it. Managing fee 7
– 10 percent charge on every payment into the system, regardless of performance, anyone? It was a heist of the century.
The ticking time bomb is because a large part of young people working now are working on non – permanent contracts that don't
pay benefits. These people won't have any pension at all and there are a lot of them.
Healthcare is single payer fund but heavily underfunded. Private practice and hospitals are allowed and skim most profitable
procedures leaving the rest to public fund. There are unrealistic limits on number of procedures so if you need to see a specialist
in July or later prepare to pay cash or wait till January.
Municipal service companies, at least the most lucrative ones have ben sold off to foreign investment funds. A few of our cities'
municipal companies, like central heating or energy have been sold off to german municipal companies (!). State telecom has been
sold off to french state telecom (and one of the biggest and most famous fortunes made).
Local printed press is 90% german corps owned.
This is a map of state rail company railways in 1988 and 2009 . It
has been a meme here for some time. It is true. Cancelled lines are the subsidized ones workers relied on to get to job. I closely
know a thousand years old town that had rail built in 1860 by germans and liquidated right in 1990. The populace is now halved,
all young emigrated, businesses dead. There have been a huge investment in freeways and other kind of roads so every one has to
own a car to get to her job. Most cars are used 10+ year old german imports. Polish car mechanic and body shops are the best in
the world specialists of german automotive produce.
I live in a small contry town that was a home to a wealthy aristocrat. There is a beautiful baroque palace and huge park, the
complex is literally a third part of town. After the war it was nationalized, there were sporting facilities built in the park
for locals and school pupils to use. The palace was re-purposed as medical facility and office complex for state farm management.
In the nineties the whole thing was given back to aristocrat descendants – a shady bunch hiding in Argentina AFAIR. They couldn't
afford to keep it so they sold it to a nouveau – riche real estate developer. He fenced the whole thing off and refurbished into
a sort of conference complex – it is underway and still not clear what's gonna happen with it. The effect is that a third of my
town that used to be public space is fenced off and off limits now.
To conclude, there has been a tremendous development in real estate and infrastructure mostly funded by the EU that has been
a serious engine of growth. Lot of people got mortgage and financed homes or flats and there has been a whole industry created
around it. A few crown jewel companies (copper mining, petroleum and other chemistry) are state owned. But most of the sophisticated
furnishings used in real estate are german made (there is german made nat gas furnace in 95% of newly built homes) etc. Two million
young people emigrated to work mostly to UK and Ireland. I'd lived in Dublin for a year in 2003 and there were Chinese people
as salespersons in groceries and seven – elevens everywhere, now there are Poles instead.
Recommended reading about the transformation years dealing is this book:
Thanks for this. Gowan's book, Global Gamble, is also good on the details of shock therapy in the former Warsaw Pact nations.
One key problem was that shock therapy partly rested on he assumption that western European buyers would want to invest in modernizing
plant and equipment in industries they acquired, but it quickly turned out that the German and other western buyers were really
interested only in acquiring new MARKETS for their own products.
And in agriculture, they both insisted on the elimination of subsidies within the eastern nations, and proceeded to use the
area as a dumping ground for their own (often subsidized) agricultural surpluses.
All this gets back, in my minuscule view, to failure to have a decent answer to one little question:
What kind of political economy do "we, the mopes" want to live within?
And related to that, what steps can and must "we, the mopes" take to get to that hopefully wiser, more decent, more homeostatic
and sustainable, political economy?
And it likely doesn't matter for us old folks (obligatory blast at Boomers as cause of all problems and distresses, dismissing
the roots and branches of "civilization," current patterns of consumption, and millennia of Progress), given what is "baked in"
and the current distribution of weatlhandpower. But maybe "we, the mopes" can at least go down fighting. Gilets Jaunes, 150 million
Indians, all that
But without an answer to the first question, though, not much chance of "better," is there? Except maybe locally, for the tiny
set of us mopes who know how to do community and commensalism and some other "C" words
"We, the mopes" could make some important and effective changes. Enough of us, and soon enough, to avoid or mitigate the Jackpot?
Thanks very much for this. Very graphic. So, if you would, could you explain who the Law and Justice Party is, and why they
won the election, and what exactly are they doing to make themselves popular? Are they in fact enacting certain social programs
that we can read about or are they primarily relying on something else, like mainly Catholic traditionalism, for their political
power?
I remember a couple of paragraphs about Poland in my Economics 101 course, some 20 years ago. Was it in in Mankiw's book?
or Lipsey-Chrystal? I do not remember anymore. One of those vicious neoliberal propaganda mouthpieces, anyway. The textbook pitched
Poland's success story against Russia's abject failure, claiming that the former had dismantled and shut down all its inefficient
state-run companies, while the latter still kept its unprofitable heavy industry on life support.
It is unsurprising to read that Poland followed a more nuanced approach. Somehow neoclassical economists always distort
history into a cartoonish parody that confirms their models.
That was in the early 2000s. The university was then brand new and was still filling the shelves of the library. If you
looked carefully, you could still find older books, barely touched, that touted Albania as a neoliberal success story along the
same lines as Poland. Albania almost collapsed in civil war in 1998.
Klein at least provided footnotes, and sources for her claims. Which are conspicuously absent from this piece.
The World Bank, (World Development Indicators, 2006), one of Klein's sources, has a nationwide poverty rate only for 1993,
and has it at 23% at that point, or between 2.3 times and more than 4 time the most common estimate he cites under the ancient
regime.
The same source has unemployment averaging 19.9% in 1990-92, and 19% in 2000-2004.
As to the later poverty rate, Klein's source is Przemyslaw Wielgosz, then editor of the Polish edition of le Monde Diplomatique,
who gives this: " Poles living below the 'social minimum' (defined as a living standard of Ł130 (192,4 EUR) per person and Ł297
(440,4 EUR) for a three person family per month) affecting 15% of the population in 1989 to 47% in 1996, and 59% in 2003." but
whence he obtains these figures he does not say. Given that it falls in a period when unemployment was pushing 20% for a prolonged
period, and that both the EU's subsidies and outmigration to the EU as an escape valve only start to kick in in 2003, the figure
seems not wildly implausible.
The author's criticism doesn't really address Klein's central points at all, which would be that the crisis was used as
leverage to ram through otherwise politically unpalatable change, and that a great deal of the constraint forcing that was provided
by actors both undemocratic and external. He seems to be of the school that regards such niceties as beside the point, as long
as various macroaggregates eventually rose.
The contrast between what was done, and what Solidarnosc had claimed to be all about when in opposition is incredibly striking,
basically the difference between libertarian Communism and uber Dirigisme style capitalism.
Any discussion of the Polish economy that completely ignores this massive level of economic outmigration, and it's continued
rise among the young, misses a great deal. In a vibrant economy, it seems unlikely that so many educated Poles would find, for
example, lower tier jobs in Britain to be their best path forward.
Yes, your unemployment and poverty rates are lower if a significant fraction of the population works elsewhere in the EU, and
reatriates the money. Though the pattern may cause a few other problems. (while many nations like to export their unemployment,
not everybody wants to import it.)
Out-migration is a huge factor in eastern and central Europe and without it, the picture would look entirely different.
The Baltics, Bulgaria and Romania are even more affected.
The migration from Poland does not have only economic reasons. A lot of Poles migrate because they find the polish society
(especially small towns and rural) very stiffling.
A friend of mine left Poland the moment she got her MSc – literally, the same day she was on a bus to Germany. She's now a
sucessfull woman, director level at a large consultancy. Yet her father calls her "old spinster" (this is the polite version),
as she wasn't maried by 30, and she basically avoids going to Poland.
She says she could never be as sucessfull in Poland, being a woman, and not being keen on marrying. I've heard similar stories
from young Poles, not just women.
Inter-war Poland is celebrated a lot in Poland these days, conveniently ignoring the facts it was really a totalitarian
state – when Czechoslovakia was Muniched in 1938, Poles (and Hugarians) were quick to grab bits of territory right after that.
Kasia, January 10, 2019 at 5:17 pm
Poland has taken around a million Ukrainians over the past ten years so while many Poles are emigrating to Europe, they
are being replaced by Ukrainians, who are ethnically and linguistically fairly similar to Poles.
So Poland is proof that nationalist, populist policies can indeed work. Poland has had to taken rough measures with our judicial
system and media to ensure globalist forces do not undermine our successes. No one, I mean no one, in Poland mouths the words,
"diversity is our strength". Internationalist, liberal minded people who are so susceptible to globalist propaganda, are generally
the ones leaving the nation. Indigenous Western Europeans who are suffering the joys of cultural enrichment and vibrant diversity
are starting to buy property in Eastern Europe - more Hungary than Poland - but as the globalists push even more multiculturalism
and continue to impoverish indigenous Europeans, Eastern Europe will become a shining beacon on the hill free of many of the evils
of globalisation.
"... Neither Rob nor I have a sound theory of what really happened in Salisbury. There are many possible explanations, but none
for which there is sufficient evidence. What we do know is that the British government lied and lies about the case from A to Z. ..."
"... This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of
the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the rolling anti-Putin regime change operation. ..."
Stuff To Read: Integrity Initiative, Skripal, Kaspersky ...
The is no original piece ready to post today, but here are some interesting links:
The Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky was contacted by someone who it found to be related to the U.S. National Security
Agency. Kaspersky immediately told the NSA about the contact. Following that tip the FBI arrested Harold T. Martin, a NSA contractor
who had collected the NSA entire arsenal of digital weapon at is home. Despite that very helpful tip by Kaspersky the U.S. government
continues to harass the company and to claim that it was working as an agent of the Russian government. Exclusive:
How a Russian firm helped catch an alleged NSA data thief , Kim Zettler, Politico
There are several new stories about the Integrity Initiative though still none in any mainstream media.
Over several months Rob Slane at The Blogmire did a detailed analysis of the Skripal case and the often contradictory
information that officials and media have published. Rob has the advantage of living in Salisbury, where the Skripals were allegedly
poisoned. Today he published the summation of his
series about the case:
Last but not least a 20 minute video by Prolekult about the (geo-)politics of Brexit and the Skripal mess in Britain.
Interestingly Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn seems to be pushing the 'blame Russia' racket just as much as the Conservatives. (Disclaimer
- I do not endorse the views of the authors.):
History
is Marching | Part five: The Fall of the British Empire (vid)
Comments I posted this comment at Off Guardian. There are a couple of points that may be of interest:
The essential feature of this "Integrity Initiative" is that it is purportedly a charity or an NGO. Like Atlantic Council,
or Bellingcat, it is funded by government(s) but it has, as this video demonstrates, the capacity to distance itself from government,
Deniability.
Deniability is the central feature of all British regime change operations since 1945. The UK takes (took?) the UN Charter
and Nuremberg seriously. Not in the sense that it follows the rules but in so far as it tries not to get caught waging aggressive
wars and interfering in sovereign states by carrying out regime change operations.
Britain has become very good not just at keeping its secret operations secret and deniable. But, through its controls over
the media, stopping leaks by ensuring that whistle blowers are not heard.
What this case indicates is that people like Donnelly, contemptible careerists playing games with humanity's very existence,
have prevailed over the more cautious and sensible Civil Servants in the Foreign Office, who used to keep a lid on the irrepressible
folly of psychopaths like Christopher Nigel, and have been given license not only to kill but to do so without reference to 'M'
and Whitehall.
In this case, thanks to the weakness and demoralised state of the current government what has happened is that Donnelly has
improved on the rolling regime change operation against Russia, (consisting of taking advantage of opportunities to castigate
the Kremlin and blaming Putin for everything that goes wrong, every Russian expatriate's death, every botched poison gas gambit
by the White Helmets (another one of these NGOs run by 'retired MI types),).. improved on it to the extent that, now, rather than
waiting to comment on, and build frames around such events as Litvinenko's death, they are constructing them out of whole cloth.
The key word here is bricolage, as used by Levi Strauss to describe one of the characteristic reactions of traditional societies
to the irruption of western imperialism.
Donnelly, his acolytes and his dupes in the media are taking whatever they find lying around in the world and twisting it together
to form apparent events. The White Helmets, for example, attempt a chlorine gas attack on Syrian forces. It fails but rather than
deny that it ever happened British Intelligence convinces the media that, in fact the attack was not by the Jihadists but upon
them. The media dutifully takes its cues, from the clusters and, almost before you know it, the US is bombing Damascus on the
ground that Assad is carrying out poison gas attacks.
The MH17 affair is another instance: an airliner gets shot down, whether deliberately or not doesn't matter, and Russia is
blamed. All manner of phony 'evidence' is publicised. The real evidence such as Air Traffic Control records is suppressed. Sanctions
are imposed. Russia further isolated etc. Then we had the DNC emails, again, a leak probably by a decent person disgruntled by
the utter cynicism and criminality of the DNC's tactics in the primary elections. Twisted into something resembling a Russian
conspiracy against Clinton. Not one that anyone with enough brain to tie his shoelaces would credit but just enough to set the
media lynch mobs, led by their clusters, into operation.
All of which leads inexorably to Salisbury and the Skripals.
And here perhaps there is more than bricolage: rather than picking up what providence has delivered and making a passably plausible
story of it, here, one suspects, the matter was put together in advance. This wasn't an accident blamed on Putin but a planned
semi-assassination in which at least one of the victims was unaware of the plan designed from the beginning to be used in the
rolling anti-Putin regime change operation..
Which, and this is something that the old FO mandarins knew would happen if policy were left in the hands of Donnelly and Co,
(straight out of schoolboy comics like Magnet or Hotspur), has proved to be exactly what Russia needed: a series of kicks at the
Kremlin which drove it into the arms of Beijing and forced it to form an iron alliance which will lead not to regime change in
Moscow but to the destruction of the Atlantic empire.
Just would like to point out a small, interesting parallel between these Integrity Initiative documents and some of the mainstream
academic literature in the US about democracy, namely the use of the phrase "malign influence" to describe the influence of Russia
(and China). If one reads the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy (which names the NED as a partner or some such)
or the latest Freedom House report, one will find the academic version of the language used by mainstream journalism, warning
of the threat that Russia and China pose to the Western liberal democratic way of life.
I would call them a country run fully by intel agencies. I made a game today. Google research results are personalized. I asked several friends to search Google for „Integrity Iniative".
All the screenshots showed the same. One sputnik-Link, one to Nachdenkseiten, the rest international. Not one single main stream
medium was mentioned. Since November! There has been even a debate in the British parliament. If this is no top-down organized
consulting machine what is such a machine then?
@26 Ross Stanford. I had been posting on Craig Murray's website for nearly 10 years since I read his book Murder in Samarkand,
and very nearly turned up at the House of Commons as a witness - but he asked can anyone record this - which I did. I have never
actually met him. bevin posted for maybe a couple of years a couple of years ago. bevin wrote about The French political situation,
before it kicked off.
He is a very clever man, and to delete someone so intelligent who was almost literally predicting what was
likely to happen with yellow vests etc, seems a little bit both arrogant and immature in my my view. However all of us regardless
of our political views accept the Craig Murray is a Man of Great Integrity and Courage, even though on a lot of political issues
I disagree with him. Surely thats O.K. disagreeing about politics?
@30 The basic line seems to be that the West is vulnerable to Russian attacks because we have a free press. So why did it take
the free press such a long time to come up with a response? James Ball does admit that a secretive organization using government funding to slander Jeremy Corbyn might not have been a
great idea.
Posted this over at Mark Chapman's The New Kremlin Stooge blog:
The latest news from Salisbury: first, the park bench and the dining table walked the Path of Fire, then the guinea pigs
and a cat followed, a house may soon do so as well, and the latest perhaps to join the queue
Several comments attached to that post are of "wish we had Novichok in our shopping centre" or "they planned this all along"
type. It seems that Salisbury shopping centre as it is has not been doing well because of high rents previously imposed by Wiltshire
Council and it desperately needs a makeover. Call me cynical but maybe Wiltshire Council is using the poisoning incident to bring
forward its redevelopment plans for the Salisbury shopping centre that will all but kill off local businesses.
Blooming Barricade , Jan 9, 2019 6:17:08 PM |
link
@3
The irony is that, with a genuinely free press, RT would cease to have any appeal. The corporate media is hopelessly biased against
Jeremy Corbyn and Bernie Sanders, as well as pro-war, opposed to anarchism, openly pro-capitalism, and fails to report on issues
like fracking, oligarchic trade deals Palestinian struggles, police state brutality against left, and almost every other topic
the public would want to know about.
Projects like PropOrNot and the Intgerity Initiative exist solely to prevent the public from
knowing about those things by locking down the information sphere against independent media (today they claimed that "neoliberalism"
and "neoconservatism" aren't real concepts but Russian-invented insults against the rules-based liberal world order.
George Galloway weighs in
on the chaos engulfing the Empire in Washington, London and Paris. The Neoliberal ship is foundering while the uplifting of people-based
policies of Russia and China keep them on track to reach their aims. Soon, if Trump keeps the government shutdown, those idled
federal workers just might be seen in the streets. George has a penchant for connecting things, and had this to say about Macron:
"The very conditions Macron strove so very hard to bring about in Damascus and that France DID help bring about in Kiev are
now rocking the very foundations of the French Republic."
The false flag of Austerity--Neoliberalism preying on its own as was predicted at its beginnings is what we're witnessing,
while the actors that created the situation cling with bloody hands to the ship of state unwilling to surrender the wheel to those
who might salvage the situation. Metaphorically, Rome burns while Nero and his Senators fiddle.
The Guardian has produced an article about Integrity Initiative. It was so poorly written that they had to close the comment section
after 138 comments. People do know a lot more than the Guardian thinks.
the guardian never keeps comment sections open long if too many posters start disagreeing with their preferred line. their other
tactic is simply never to open comments on posts where they think this is likely to happen. and of course they haven't even acknowledged
the luke harding travesty, as they continue to beg for donations to support their fearless independent journalism.
I thought James Ball made a gallant effort to exonerate Western media considering he probably had a team of editors breathing
down his neck. It's the lack of transparency that seems to upset him most. Perhaps his next article will be an in depth look at
how Integrity Initiative got government funding.
What is absolutely remarkable to me in a very bad way is that this piece of trash received 681 reviews on Amazon, only 21
with one star and the balance above that for an overall rating of 4.8 out of 5.
Absolutely remarkable, again, but it is reflective of the brain dead sheeple currently doing any reading at all of books by
the rabid neo cons. I hesitate to guess what some extreme alarm sounding diatribe by Wolfowitz or the current "main man,"
max boot would register. Maybe Romney can lead us out of the wilderness (sarc)>
I know that this is Amazon and when it comes to the standards of what passes as accurate reporting and journalistic
standards,"wapo and bezos leads the pack into the sewer.
REPLY
AGREE/DISAGREE/ETC.
THIS COMMENTER
@El Dato
an American puppet inasmuch as he had Americans masterminding his political PR campaigns) start
giving ground that the situation becomes fluid.
Albright (and Nuland) had no idea what Russia as a normal nation state could be expected to put up with, because all they
had to go on was Yelstyn who was drunk most days. So the US was slowly but surely drawn into the power vacuum in the
territories the USSR withdrew from and Albright thought that was the way things were going to continue to be. The domestic
situation in America was also one where the elite had things their own way to an unsustainable extent. What Albright does
not like is the facts of life.
The whole discussion is so asinine.
Facism is not a form of government that can just be inserted or deleted.
It is a very specific reaction to the communist takeover of a nation.
At that point, other forms of government are no longer viable: totalitarianism of one kind of another becomes an absolute
necessity to rule.
We see western governments coming to this point-the moral law is lost, corruption reigns, and only pure force has currency.
So at this point you only have one of two choices, there simply are no alternatives:
communism or facism.
And it is quite clear that facism is a more reasonable and less murderous choice.
for as long as neo con history is a subject for study (she has plenty of competition for that recognition).
Most "history" taught in the US (and combined West) is one or another iteration (sometimes extreme, sometimes less so) of
US exceptionalism. Even American so called "realism" is built around exceptionalism. American military doctrines are
written primarily on exceptionalism basis. Results are easily observable.
The heroes of Dickens' Pickwick Papers visit the fictional borough of Eatanswill to observe an election between the candidates
of the Blue Party and the Buff Party. The town is passionately divided, on all possible issues, between the two parties. Each party
has its own newspaper : the Eatanswill Gazette is Blue and entirely devoted to praising the noble Blues and excoriating the perfidious
and wicked Buffs; the Eatanswill Independent is equally passionate on the opposite side of every question. No Buff would dream of
reading the "that vile and slanderous calumniator, the Gazette", nor Blue the ''that false and scurrilous print, the Independent".
As usual with Dickens it is both exaggerated and accurate. Newspapers used to be screamingly partisan before "journalism" was
invented. Soon followed journalism schools, journalism ethics and journalism objectivity: "real journalism" as they like to call
it (
RT isn't of course ). "Journalism" became a profession gilded with academical folderol; no longer the refuge of dropouts, boozers,
failures, budding novelists and magnates like Lord Copper
who know what they want and pay for it. But, despite the pretence of objectivity and standards, there were still Lord Coppers
and a lot of Eatanswill. Nonetheless, there were more or less serious efforts to get the facts and balance the story. And Lord Coppers
came and went: great newspaper empires rose and fell and there was actually quite a variety of ownership and news outlets. There
was sufficient variance that a reader, who was neither Blue nor Buff, could triangulate and form a sense of what was going on.
In the Soviet Union news was controlled; there was no "free press"; there was one owner and the flavours were only slightly varied:
the army paper, the party paper, the government paper, papers for people interested in literature or sports. But they all said the
same thing about the big subjects. The two principal newspapers were Pravda ("truth") and Izvestiya ("news"). This swiftly led to
the joke that there was no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestiya. It was all pretty heavy handed stuff: lots of fat capitalists
in top hats and money bags; Uncle Sam's clothing dripping with bombs; no problems over here, nothing but problems over there. And
it wasn't very successful propaganda: most of their audience came to believe that the Soviet media was lying both about the USSR
and about the West.
People in Crimea are pretty happy to be in Russia.
The US and its minions have given an enormous amount of weapons to jihadists.
Elections in Russia reflect popular opinion polling.
There really are a frightening number of well-armed nazis in Ukraine.
Assad is pretty popular in Syria.
The US and its minions smashed Raqqa to bits.
The official Skripal story makes very little sense.
Ukraine is much worse off, by any measurement, now than before Maidan.
Russia actually had several thousand troops in Crimea before Maidan.
There's a documentary that exposes Browder that he keeps people from seeing.
I typed these out as they occurred to me. I could come up with another ten pretty easily. There's some tiny coverage, far in the
back pages, so that objectivity can be pretended, but most Western media consumers would answer they aren't; didn't; don't; aren't;
isn't; where?; does; not; what?; never heard of it.
So, in a world where the Integrity Initiative is spending our tax dollars (pounds actually) to make sure that we never have a
doubleplusungood thought or are tempted into crimethink, (
and maybe they created the entire Skripal story – more revelations by the minute), what are we to make of our Free Media™? Well,
that all depends on what you're interested in. If it's sports (not Russian athletes –
druggies every one unlike
brave Western
asthmatics ) or "beach-ready bodies" (not
Russian
drug takers of course, only
wholesome Americans ) – the reporting is pretty reasonable. Weather reports, for example (
Siberian blasts excepted) or movie reviews (but all those
Russian villains ). But the rest is some weird merger of the Eatonswill Gazette and Independent: Blues/Buffs good! others, especially
Russians, bad!
So, as they say in Russia, что делать? What to do? Well, I suggest we learn from the Soviet experience. After all, most Soviet
citizens were much more sceptical about their home media outlets than any of my neighbours, friends or relatives are about theirs.
Notice what they're not telling you. For example: remember when Aleppo was a huge story two years ago? But there's nothing
about it now. One should wonder why there isn't; a quick search will find videos like
this (oops! Russian! not real journalism!) here's one
from Euronews . Clearly none of this fits the "
last
hospitals destroyed " and brutal
Assad memes of two years ago; that's why the subject has disappeared from Western media outlets. It is always a good rule
to wonder why the Biggest Story Ever suddenly disappears: that's a strong clue it was a lie or nonsense.
Most of the time, you'd be correct to believe the opposite . Especially, when all the outlets are telling you the same thing.
It's always good to ask yourself cui bono: who's getting what benefit out of making you believe something? It's quite depressing
how successful the big uniform lie is: even though the much-demonised Milosevic was eventually found innocent, even though Qaddafi
was not "bombing his own people", similar lies are believed about Assad and other Western enemies-of-the-moment. Believe the opposite
unless there's very good reason not to.
In the Cold War there was a notion going around that the Soviet and Western systems were converging and that they would meet in
the middle, so to speak. Well, perhaps they did meet but kept on moving past each other. And so, the once reasonably free and varied
Western media comes to resemble the controlled and uniform Soviet media and we in the West must start using Soviet methods to understand.
Always remember that the Soviet rulers claimed their media was free too; free from "fake news" that is.
Big brass and government executives play both sides of the military revolving door,
including "the only adult in the room."
Before he became lionized as the "only adult in the room" capable of standing up to
President Trump, General James Mattis was quite like any other brass scoping out a lucrative
second career in the defense industry. And as with other military giants parlaying their four
stars into a cushy boardroom chair or executive suite, he pushed and defended a sub-par product
while on both sides of the revolving door. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that contract
turned out to be an expensive fraud and a potential health hazard to the troops.
According to a
recent report by the Project on Government Oversight, 25 generals, nine admirals, 43
lieutenant generals, and 23 vice admirals retired to become lobbyists, board members,
executives, or consultants for the defense industry between 2008 and 2018. They are part of a
much larger group of 380 high-ranking government officials and congressional staff who shifted
into the industry in that time.
To get a sense of the demand, according to POGO, which had to compile all of this
information through Freedom of Information requests, there were 625 instances in 2018 alone in
which the top 20 defense contractors (think Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin) hired
senior DoD officials for high-paying jobs -- 90 percent of which could be described as
"influence peddling."
Back to Mattis. In 2012, while he was head of Central Command, the Marine General
pressed the Army to procure and deploy blood testing equipment from a Silicon Valley
company called Theranos. He communicated that he was having success with this effort directly
to Theranos's chief executive officer. Even though an Army health unit tried to terminate the
contract due to it's not meeting requirements, according to POGO, Mattis kept the pressure up.
Luckily, it was never used on the
battlefield.
Maybe it shouldn't be a surprise but upon retirement in 2013, Mattis asked a DoD counsel
about the ethics guiding future employment with Theranos. They advised against it. So Mattis
went to serve on its board instead for a $100,000 salary. Two years after Mattis quit to serve
as Trump's Pentagon chief in 2016, the two Theranos executives he worked with were indicted for
"massive"
fraud , perpetuating a "multi-million dollar scheme to defraud investors, doctors and
patients," and misrepresenting their product entirely. It was a fake.
But assuming this was Mattis's only foray into the private sector would be naive. When he
was tapped for defense secretary -- just three years after he left the military -- he was worth
upwards of $10 million . In addition to his retirement pay, which was close to $15,000 a
month at the time, he received $242,000 as a board member, plus as much as $1.2 million in
stock options in General Dynamics, the Pentagon's fourth largest contractor. He also disclosed
payments from other corporate boards, speech honorariums -- including $20,000 from defense
heavyweight Northrop Grumman -- and a whopping $410,000 from Stanford University's public
policy think tank the Hoover Institution for serving as a "distinguished visiting fellow."
Never for a moment think that Mattis won't land softly after he leaves Washington -- if he
leaves at all. Given his past record, he will likely follow a very long line, as illustrated by
POGO's explosive report, of DoD officials who have used their positions while inside the
government to represent the biggest recipients of federal funding on the outside. They then
join ex-congressional staffers and lawmakers on powerful committees who grease the skids on
Capitol Hill. And then they go to work for the very companies they've helped, fleshing out a
small army of executives, lobbyists, and board members with direct access to the power brokers
with the purse strings back on the inside.
Welcome to the Swamp
"[Mattis's' career course] is emblematic of how systemic the problem is," said Mandy
Smithberger, POGO's lead on the report and the director of its Center for Defense
Information.
"Private companies know how to protect their interests. We just wish there were more
protections for taxpayers."
When everything is engineered to get more business for the same select few, "when you have
a Department of Defense who sees it as their job to promote arms sales does this really serve
the interest of national security?"
That is something to chew on. If a system is so motivated by personal gain (civil servants
always mindful of campaign contributions and private sector job prospects) on one hand, and big
business profits on the other, is there room for merit or innovation? One need only look at
Lockheed's F-35 joint strike fighter, the most expensive
weapon system in history, which was relentlessly promoted over other programs by members of
Congress and within the Pentagon despite years of test failures and cost overruns , to see what
this gets you: planes that don't fly, weapons that don't work, and shortfalls in other parts of
the budget that don't matter to contractors like pilot training and maintenance of existing
systems.
"It comes down to two questions," Smithberger noted in an interview with TAC.
" Are we approving weapons systems that are safe or not? And are we putting
[servicemembers'] lives on the line" to benefit the interests of industry?
All of this is legal, she points out. Sure, there are rules -- "cooling off" periods before
government officials and members of Congress can lobby, consult, or work on contracts after
they leave their federal positions, or when industry people come in through the other side to
take positions in government. But Smithberger said they are "riddled with loopholes" and lack
of enforcement.
Case in point: current acting DoD Secretary Patrick Shanahan spent
31 years working for Boeing , which gets about $24 billion a year as the Pentagon's second
largest contractor. He was Boeing's senior vice president in 2016 just before he was confirmed
as Trump's deputy secretary of defense in 2017. Last week he recused himself from all matters
Boeing, but he
wasn't always so hands off. At one point, he "prodded" for the purchase of 12 $1.2 billion
Boeing F-15X fighter planes, according to Bloomberg.
But the revolving door is so much more pervasive and insidious than POGO could possibly
catalogue. So says Franklin "Chuck" Spinney , who worked
as a civilian and military officer in the Pentagon for 31 years, beginning in 1968. He calls
the military industrial complex a "quasi-isolated political economy" that is in many ways
independent from the larger domestic economy. It has its own rules, norms, and culture, and
unlike the real world, it is self-sustaining -- not by healthy competition and efficiency, but
by keeping the system on a permanent war footing, with money always pumping from Capitol Hill
to the Pentagon to the private sector and then back again. Left out are basic laws of supply
and demand, geopolitical realities, and the greater interest of society.
"That's why we call it a self-licking ice cream cone," Spinney explained to TAC.
" [This report] is just the tip of the iceberg. There's a lot more subtle stuff going on.
When you are in weapons development like I was at the beginning of my career, you learn about
this on day one, that having cozy relationships with contractors is openly encouraged. And
then you get desensitized. I was fortunate because I worked for people who did not like it
and I caught on quickly."
While the culture has evolved, basic realities have persisted since the massive build-up of the military
and weapons systems during the Cold War. The odds of young officers in the Pentagon making
colonel or higher are slim. They typically retire out in their 40s. They know implicitly that
their best chance for having a well-paid second career is in the only industry they know --
defense. Most take this calculation seriously, moderating their decisions on program work and
procurement and communicating with members of Congress as a matter of course.
" Let's just say there's a problem [with a program]. Are you going to come down hard on a
contractor and try to hold his feet to the fire? Are you going to risk getting blackballed
when you are out there looking for a job ? Sometimes there is no word communicated, you just
don't want to be unacceptable to anyone," said Spinney. It's ingrained, from the rank of
lieutenant colonel all the way up to general.
So the
top five and their subsidiaries continue to get the vast majority of work, usually in
no-bid contracts
($100 billion worth in 2016 alone) , and with cost-plus structures that
critics say encourage waste and never-ending timetables, like the $1.5 trillion F-35. "The
whole system is wired to get money out the door," said Spinney. "That is where the revolving
door is most pernicious. It's everywhere."
The real danger is that under this pressure, parties work to keep bad contracts alive even
if they have to cook the books. "Essentially from the standpoint of Pentagon contracting you
are not going to have people writing reports saying this product is a piece of shit," said
Spinney. Worse, evaluations are designed to deflect criticism if not oversell success in order
to keep the spigot open. The most infamous example of this was the
rigged tests that kept the ill-fated "Star Wars" missile defense program going in the
1980s.
* * *
Everyone talks about generals like Mattis as though they're warrior-gods. But for decades,
many of them have turned out to be different creatures altogether - creatures of a
semi-independent ecosystem that operates outside of the normal rules and benefits only a
powerful minority subset: the military elite, defense contractors, and Congress. More recently,
the defense-funded think tank world has become part of this ecology, providing the ideological
grist for more spending and serving as a way-station for operators moving in and out of
government and industry.
Call it the Swamp, the Borg, or even the Blob, but attempting to measure or quantify the
revolving door in the military-industrial complex can feel like a fool's errand. Groups like
POGO have attempted to shine light on this dark planet for years. Unfortunately, there is
little incentive in Capitol Hill or at the Pentagon to do the very least: pull the purse
strings, close loopholes, encourage real competition, and end cost-plus practices.
"We generally need to see more (political) championing on this issue," Smithberger said.
Until then, all outside efforts "can't result in any meaningful change."
So tell me again how "Mad Pedo" evaded Obama's axing of all the non-compliant General(s)
and Admiral(s) in charge of the U.S. strategic command?!!!
Answered my own question. He's like the rest of them since the Balkans that just does
counter insurgencies!...
"SUCCESS" in every direction on the weather vane you look!!!
Or... Another way of saying it.
How to build your successful U.S. military career turning $8 trillion in unfunded
liability debt into $200 trillion in unfunded liability debt in less than 20 years!
Who wants to line up for that 'self help book"?!!!
Mattis is just another self serving cockroach in a U.S uniform.
__name___3O4jF">Realname Wild tree , 31 minutes ago
link
It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the
blood of our nation.
It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations
security. Follow the money.
As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry.
Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he
knew.......
It has nothing to do with the defense of our nation, or the unnecessary spilling of the
blood of our nation.
It has everything to do with greed at the expense of our youths blood and the nations
security. Follow the money.
As the light of truth shines as this article illustrates, the cockroaches scurry.
Rumsfield's DoD 2 trillion missing comment the day before 9/11 comes to mind. Wonder how he
knew.......
Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from
the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity
Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and
NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.
The files were
released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the
content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the
least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and
internationally.
Sinister Timeline
One file
apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the
Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change",
"peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers"
span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and
"technology".
In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF
[Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries
as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over
1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence
officials by any government in history.
The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting
[sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of
'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was
promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and
in
October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear
who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a
response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and
take it out of the political space."
"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the
1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the
national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of
resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.
Operation IRIS Begins
On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.
Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news
spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.
The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its
auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to
analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.
It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon
Bracey-Lane
producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by
individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an
unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its
"own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious
pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the
Initiative.
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news
narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response.
One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key
messages bolded throughout.
It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out
yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in
Britain".
"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and
seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been
carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has
poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been
poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead.
Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a
gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.
The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the
government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic,
first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018
World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to
the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and
their families.
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to
journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the
Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream
media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of
Russian state involvement in the attack.
It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly --
if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's
also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on
March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.
Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations
in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident
routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number
of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack --
including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the
Skripal attack? --receiving 40
pence per word .
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document
apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6
recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document
is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and
Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions
about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same
tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year
before his poisoning. When I attended the
launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive
on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's
recruiter.
The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for
Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of
Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that
purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which
"[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could
be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.
After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others
have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be
honest with the public.
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... Ł2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding
media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated,
UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was
unmasked in November after hackers
released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly
fighting "Russian disinformation."
The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for
smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new
leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.
It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented
following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.
Operation Iris
Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to
"study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being
perceived" in a number of countries.
After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II)
launched
'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity
related to Skripal.
What role did # IntegrityInitiative
play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers
from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....
However, Harod's confidential
report
did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts"
accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."
Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman
from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.
Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo
is having a laugh with Ł2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents"
- has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative"
of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended
actions.
These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the
UK."
Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim
brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other
countries.
This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning
– which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.
Ahead of its time?
One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a
document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including
mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.
Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with
the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective
expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and
Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "
The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made
all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the
alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler
and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
# IntegrityInitiative meetings. There
is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.
It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity
Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were
drawn up years in advance.
"... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
"... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
"... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
"... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
"... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
"... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
"... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
"... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
"... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
"... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
"... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
"... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
"... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
"... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
"... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're
sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman
'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.
This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection
– cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job
creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance
the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest
shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually
all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they
really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like "
welfare
state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and
the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders
are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we
hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts
are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about
it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means
tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout
app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money.
That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase
your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his
power to claim economic benefit.
'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'
For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large
class of useless rentiers, well-described by the
French economist
Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend
the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big
pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard.
Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the
big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook
and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are
coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled
to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll
start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the
International Monetary Fund and the
Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist
thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they
gobble it up whole.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating
anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however,
is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares,
then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you),
and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies
that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means
of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw
is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields
a similar revenue model.
Take
tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of
other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers.
One of the richest people in the world,
Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The
same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the
Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the
face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely
that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like
GlaxoSmithKline and
Pfizer regularly
unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture
medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers,
and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the
result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google
, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries
and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid
paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing
growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult
to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article,
Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner,
creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider,
owns no real estate."
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because
they're cool and they're fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy
to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because
their friends are on Facebook.
Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for
free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg
has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with
free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an
astounding
64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only
make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more
and more ads.
Uber has
usurped the whole taxi sector just as
Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful
they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order
to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody
who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology
funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their
earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts.
So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who
was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it.
But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a
credit default swap
, or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue
model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too?
Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models
both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist
Matt Taibbi about
Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything
that smells like money."
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker.
He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity".
Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is
twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even
themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO
Lloyd Blankfein
was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is "
doing God's
work ". The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people
complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market
and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if
house
prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades
we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest
exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts.
En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich
rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding
them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a
kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he
had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely
in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised
within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon
a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks,
law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions
in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire.
Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier
drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may
explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers
and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.
Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies
tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest
freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through
a system of, say, employee shares, or a
universal basic
income .
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the
old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders
of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.
Hacking syndicate Anonymous has just released its fourth tranche of documents hacked from
the internal servers of the Institute for Statecraft and its subsidiary, the Integrity
Initiative. Several explosive files raise serious questions about the shadowy British state and
NATO-funded 'think tank' and its connections with the Skripal affair.
The files were
released just after 2:30pm GMT on January 4 -- I've barely scratched the surface of the
content, but what I've seen so far contains a panoply of bombshell revelations -- to say the
least, the organization(s) now have serious questions to answer about what role they played in
the poisoning of Sergei Skripal in March, and its aftermath both nationally and
internationally.
Sinister Timeline
One file
apparently dating to "early 2015" -- "Russian Federation Sanctions" -- written by the
Institute's Victor Madeira outlines "potential levers" to achieve Russian "behaviour change",
"peace with Ukraine", "return [of] Crimea", "regime change" or "other?". The suggested "levers"
span almost every conceivable area, including "civil society", "sports", "finance" and
"technology".
In the section marked "intelligence", Madeira suggests simultaneously expelling "every RF
[Russian Federation] intelligence officer and air/defense/naval attache from as many countries
as possible". In parentheses, it references 'Operation Foot' , the expulsion of over
1000 Soviet officials from the UK in September 1971, the largest expulsion of intelligence
officials by any government in history.
The section on sports also suggests "advocating the view [Russia] is unworthy of hosting
[sporting] events" -- and the section marked "information" recommends the sanctioning of
'Russian' media "in West for not complying with regulators' standards".
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
In April that year, Institute for Statecraft chief Chris Donnelly was
promoted to Honorary Colonel of SGMI (Specialist Group Military Intelligence), and
in
October he met with General Sir Richard Barrons. Notes from the meeting don't make clear
who said what, but one despaired that "if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a
response, then we need to find a way to get the core of government to realise the problem and
take it out of the political space."
"We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. We did this in the
1930s. My conclusion is it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government. We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the
national capabilities [and/or] capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of
resources to do it? We need this debate now. There is not a moment to be lost," they said.
Operation IRIS Begins
On 4 March 2018, former Russian military officer and double agent for MI6 Sergei Skripal and
his daughter Yulia were poisoned in Salisbury, England.
Within days, the Institute had submitted a proposal to the Foreign & Commonwealth
Office, "to study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news
spread and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" in a number of countries.
The bid was accepted, and the Initiative's 'Operation Iris' was launched. Under its
auspices, the Institute employed 'global investigative solutions' firm Harod Associates to
analyze social media activity related to Skripal the world over.
It also conducted media monitoring of its own, with Institute 'research fellow' Simon
Bracey-Lane
producing regular 'roundups' of media coverage overseas, based on insights submitted by
individuals connected to the Initiative living in several countries. One submission, from an
unnamed source in Moldova, says they "cannot firmly say" whether the country's media had its
"own point of view" on the issue, or whether news organizations had taken "an obvious
pro-Russian or pro-Western position", strongly suggesting these were key questions for the
Initiative.
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Moreover though, there are clear indications the Institute sought to shape the news
narrative on the attack -- and indeed the UK government's response.
One file dated March 11 appears to be a briefing document on the affair to date, with key
messages bolded throughout.
It opens by setting out "The Narrative" of the incident -- namely "Russia has carried out
yet another brutal attack, this time with a deadly nerve agent, on someone living in
Britain".
"Use of the nerve agent posed a threat to innocent British subjects, affecting 21 people and
seriously affecting a police officer. This is not the first time such an attack has been
carried out in the UK 14 deaths are believed to be attributable to the Kremlin Russia has
poisoned its enemies abroad on other occasions, most notably then-candidate for the Presidency
of Ukraine, Viktor Yushchenko, in 2004. Russian political activist Vladimir Kara-Murza has been
poisoned twice; and the journalist Anna Politkovskaya was also poisoned and later shot dead.
Since Putin has been running Russia, the Kremlin has a history of poisoning its opponents in a
gruesome way," the "narrative" reads.
The file goes on to declare the British response has been "far too weak it's essential the
government makes a much stronger response this time" -- and then lists "possible, realistic,
first actions", including banning RT and Sputnik from operating in the UK, boycotting the 2018
World Cup, withdrawing the UK ambassador from Moscow and expelling the Russian ambassador to
the UK, and refusing/revoking visas to leading Russians within Vladimir Putin's "circle", and
their families.
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
It's not clear who the document was distributed to -- but it may have been given to
journalists within the Initiative's UK 'cluster', if not others. This may explain why the
Institute's "narrative", and its various recommended "responses" utterly dominated mainstream
media reporting of the affair for months afterwards, despite the glaring lack of evidence of
Russian state involvement in the attack.
It's extremely curious so many of the briefing document's recommendations almost exactly --
if not exactly -- echo several of the suggested "levers" outlined in the 2015 document. It's
also somewhat troubling the "Global Operation Foot" spoken of in that file duly came to pass on
March 28 2018, with over 20 countries expelling over 100 Russian diplomats.
Likewise, it's striking Victor Madeira, the Institute staffer who made the recommendations
in 2015, made many media appearances discussing the poisoning following the incident
routinely documented by the Institute. Security consultant Dan Kaszeta also wrote a number
of articles for the Integrity Initiative website about chemical weapons following the attack --
including a July 14 article, How could Novichok have poisoned people four months after the
Skripal attack? --receiving 40
pence per word .
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
The Institute's bizarrely intimate connections with the incident don't end there. Another document
apparently dating to July 2018 contains the contact details of Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6
recruiter, handler and -- unbelievably -- neighbor in Salisbury. Anonymous claims the document
is an invitee list for a meeting the Institute convened between a number of individuals and
Syria's highly controversial White Helmets group, but this is yet to be verified.
Whatever the truth of the matter, the latest document dump raises yet further questions
about how and why it was BBC Diplomatic and Defense Editor Mark Urban -- who was in the same
tank regiment as Miller after leaving University -- came to meet with Skripal in the year
before his poisoning. When I attended the
launch of his book on the affair in October -- The Skripal Files -- he was evasive
on whether he played a role in connecting him with Skripal, and denied Miller was Skripal's
recruiter.
The latest trove also raises yet further questions about the activities of the Institute for
Statecraft and Integrity Initiative. In light of these revelations, reading the record of
Donnelly's meeting with General Barrons takes on an acutely chilling quality. It may be that
purely serendipitously the pair got their "catastrophe", their "something dreadful", which
"[woke] people up" and made the government "realise the problem" posed by Russia -- or it could
be they one way or another played a facilitative role of some kind.
After months of refusing to answer the vast number of questions I and thousands of others
have submitted to the paired organizations, it's high time for them to break cover, and be
honest with the public.
Images removed. Please brose the original to view them.
Notable quotes:
"... "Russian disinformation." ..."
"... "network of networks" ..."
"... It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence. ..."
"... "study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being perceived" ..."
"... "global investigative solutions" ..."
"... What role did # IntegrityInitiative play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow.... ..."
"... "pro-Russia troll accounts" ..."
"... "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case." ..."
"... Another document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative" ..."
"... These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK." ..."
"... "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" ..."
"... "threat Russia poses." ..."
"... This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning ..."
"... One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot. ..."
"... "the largest collective expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history." ..."
"... "Makes you think " ..."
"... The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute. ..."
"... It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended # IntegrityInitiative meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair. ..."
"... Ł2,276.80 in July 2018 during the # Skripal # Novichok affair for writing articles on the subjects of poison gas; nerve agents; treatment; nerve agent persistency & # PortonDown @ RTUKproducer 160 1:24 PM - Jan 4, 2019 ..."
"... It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were drawn up years in advance. ..."
The Integrity Initiative, a UK-funded group exposed in leaked files as psyop network, played a key role in monitoring and molding
media narratives after the poisoning of double agent Sergei Skripal, newly-dumped documents reveal. Created by the NATO-affiliated,
UK-funded Institute for Statecraft in 2015, the Integrity Initiative was
unmasked in November after hackers
released documents detailing a web of politicians, journalists, military personnel, scientists and academics involved in purportedly
fighting "Russian disinformation."
The secretive, government-bankrolled "network of networks" has found itself under scrutiny for
smearing UK Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn
as a Kremlin stooge – ostensibly as part of its noble crusade against anti-Russian disinformation. Now, new
leaks show that the organization played a central role in shaping media narratives after Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia
were mysteriously poisoned in Salisbury last March.
It's notable that many of the draconian anti-Russia measures that the group advocated as far back as 2015 were swiftly implemented
following the Skripal affair – even as London refused to back up its finger-pointing with evidence.
Operation Iris
Days after the Skripals were poisoned, the Institute solicited its services to the Foreign & Commonwealth Office, offering to
"study social media activity in respect of the events that took place, how news spread, and evaluate how the incident is being
perceived" in a number of countries.
After receiving the government's blessing, the Integrity Initiative (II)
launched
'Operation Iris,' enlisting "global investigative solutions" firm Harod Associates to analyze social media activity
related to Skripal.
What role did # IntegrityInitiative
play in the # Skripal affair? I looked for answers
from a brief look at the newly released files. More very much to follow....
However, Harod's confidential
report
did more than just parse social media reactions to the Skripal affair: It compiled a list of alleged "pro-Russia troll accounts"
accused of "bombarding the audience with pro-Kremlin propaganda and disinformation relevant to the Skripal case."
Among those who found themselves listed as nefarious thought-criminals were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa, and a gentleman
from Kent who goes by Ian56 on Twitter.
Neocon Fascist, al-Qaeda Supporting Treasonous Scumbag @ Benimmo
is having a laugh with Ł2m of Taxpayers money. Nimmo should be IN JAIL for Fraud & Treason
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and Petrovas GRU agents"
- has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French yellow jackets. I kid you not.
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018 – and titled "Sergei Skripal Affair: What if Russia is Responsible?" – contains a "narrative"
of the Skripal incident, which blames Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally, as well as containing a number of recommended
actions.
These included boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to
Germany, blocking Russian access to the SWIFT international banking system, and banning "RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the
UK."
Other suggestions included propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicize what has been happening with their Muslim
brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion [sic]" and getting members of parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
It's not clear who the document was drawn up for, but it may have been provided to II-affiliated journalists in the UK and other
countries.
This would certainly explain the evidence-deficient echo chamber that emerged in the aftermath of Skripal's poisoning
– which the UK and its allies unanimously blamed on Moscow.
Ahead of its time?
One of the more intriguing revelations from the fresh leaks is a
document from 2015, in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a series of measures targeting Russia, including
mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of 1971's Operation Foot.
Coincidentally, more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled from 20 Western countries in an apparently show of solidarity with
the UK following the Skripal attack. At the time, UK Prime Minister Theresa May welcomed what she said was "the largest collective
expulsion of Russian intelligence officers in history."
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents, written long before the Salisbury events, also call for the arrest of RT and
Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding: "Makes you think "
The new trove of hacked documents also revealed an unexplained link between the II and Skripal himself – a connection made
all the more noteworthy by the group's central role in coordinating an evidence-free campaign to blame and punish Moscow for the
alleged nerve-agent attack. A document from July 2018 contains contact details for Pablo Miller, Skripal's MI6 recruiter, handler
and (conveniently) neighbor in Salisbury. Miller, it seems, had been invited to a function hosted by the Institute.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
# IntegrityInitiative meetings. There
is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II initiated the affair.
It's not clear to what degree Miller is or was involved with the group, but his appearance on an Integrity
Initiative guest list adds another layer of mystery to a coordinated campaign which sought to impose punishments on Moscow that were
drawn up years in advance.
"... Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman ..."
"... 'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body' ..."
"... This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection – cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance the whole world. ..."
"... To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth. ..."
"... But there is also a second way to make money. That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his power to claim economic benefit. ..."
"... For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large class of useless rentiers, well-described by the French economist Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking. From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere. ..."
"... It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the International Monetary Fund and the Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they gobble it up whole. ..."
"... In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however, is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares, then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you), and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up. ..."
"... Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields a similar revenue model. Take tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers. One of the richest people in the world, Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent. ..."
"... Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google , Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose. ..."
"... Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger. ..."
"... Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an astounding 64% of all online ad revenue in the US. ..."
"... Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box. ..."
"... The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks, law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts. ..."
"... One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire. Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier drains a country of its vitality. ..."
Bankers, pharmaceutical giants, Google, Facebook ... a new breed of rentiers are at the very top of the pyramid and they're
sucking the rest of us dry @rcbregman
'A big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body'.
This piece is about one of the biggest taboos of our times. About a truth that is seldom acknowledged, and yet – on reflection
– cannot be denied. The truth that we are living in an inverse welfare state. These days, politicians from the left to the right assume that most wealth is created at the top. By the visionaries, by the job
creators, and by the people who have "made it". By the go-getters oozing talent and entrepreneurialism that are helping to advance
the whole world.
Now, we may disagree about the extent to which success deserves to be rewarded – the philosophy of the left is that the strongest
shoulders should bear the heaviest burden, while the right fears high taxes will blunt enterprise – but across the spectrum virtually
all agree that wealth is created primarily at the top.
So entrenched is this assumption that it's even embedded in our language. When economists talk about "productivity", what they
really mean is the size of your paycheck. And when we use terms like "
welfare
state ", "redistribution" and "solidarity", we're implicitly subscribing to the view that there are two strata: the makers and
the takers, the producers and the couch potatoes, the hardworking citizens – and everybody else.
In reality, it is precisely the other way around. In reality, it is the waste collectors, the nurses, and the cleaners whose shoulders
are supporting the apex of the pyramid. They are the true mechanism of social solidarity. Meanwhile, a growing share of those we
hail as "successful" and "innovative" are earning their wealth at the expense of others. The people getting the biggest handouts
are not down around the bottom, but at the very top. Yet their perilous dependence on others goes unseen. Almost no one talks about
it. Even for politicians on the left, it's a non-issue.
To understand why, we need to recognise that there are two ways of making money. The first is what most of us do: work. That means
tapping into our knowledge and know-how (our "human capital" in economic terms) to create something new, whether that's a takeout
app, a wedding cake, a stylish updo, or a perfectly poured pint. To work is to create. Ergo, to work is to create new wealth.
But there is also a second way to make money.
That's the rentier way : by leveraging control over something that already exists, such as land, knowledge, or money, to increase
your wealth. You produce nothing, yet profit nonetheless. By definition, the rentier makes his living at others' expense, using his
power to claim economic benefit.
'From Wall Street to Silicon Valley, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.'
For those who know their history, the term "rentier" conjures associations with heirs to estates, such as the 19th century's large
class of useless rentiers, well-described by the
French economist
Thomas Piketty . These days, that class is making a comeback. (Ironically, however, conservative politicians adamantly defend
the rentier's right to lounge around, deeming inheritance tax to be the height of unfairness.) But there are also other ways of rent-seeking.
From Wall Street to Silicon Valley , from big
pharma to the lobby machines in Washington and Westminster, zoom in and you'll see rentiers everywhere.
There is no longer a sharp dividing line between working and rentiering. In fact, the modern-day rentier often works damn hard.
Countless people in the financial sector, for example, apply great ingenuity and effort to amass "rent" on their wealth. Even the
big innovations of our age – businesses like Facebook
and Uber – are interested mainly in expanding the rentier economy. The problem with most rich people therefore is not that they are
coach potatoes. Many a CEO toils 80 hours a week to multiply his allowance. It's hardly surprising, then, that they feel wholly entitled
to their wealth.
It may take quite a mental leap to see our economy as a system that shows solidarity with the rich rather than the poor. So I'll
start with the clearest illustration of modern freeloaders at the top: bankers. Studies conducted by the
International Monetary Fund and the
Bank for International Settlements – not exactly leftist
thinktanks – have revealed that much of the financial sector has become downright parasitic. How instead of creating wealth, they
gobble it up whole.
In other words, a big part of the modern banking sector is essentially a giant tapeworm gorging on a sick body. It's not creating
anything new, merely sucking others dry. Bankers have found a hundred and one ways to accomplish this. The basic mechanism, however,
is always the same: offer loans like it's going out of style, which in turn inflates the price of things like houses and shares,
then earn a tidy percentage off those overblown prices (in the form of interest, commissions, brokerage fees, or what have you),
and if the shit hits the fan, let Uncle Sam mop it up.
The financial innovation concocted by all the math whizzes working in modern banking (instead of at universities or companies
that contribute to real prosperity) basically boils down to maximizing the total amount of debt. And debt, of course, is a means
of earning rent. So for those who believe that pay ought to be proportionate to the value of work, the conclusion we have to draw
is that many bankers should be earning a negative salary; a fine, if you will, for destroying more wealth than they create.
Bankers are the most obvious class of closet freeloaders, but they are certainly not alone. Many a lawyer and an accountant wields
a similar revenue model.
Take
tax evasion . Untold hardworking, academically degreed professionals make a good living at the expense of the populations of
other countries. Or take the tide of privatisations over the past three decades, which have been all but a carte blanche for rentiers.
One of the richest people in the world,
Carlos Slim , earned his millions by obtaining a monopoly of the Mexican telecom market and then hiking prices sky high. The
same goes for the Russian oligarchs who rose after the
Berlin Wall fell , who bought up valuable state-owned assets for song to live off the rent.
But here comes the rub. Most rentiers are not as easily identified as the greedy banker or manager. Many are disguised. On the
face of it, they look like industrious folks, because for part of the time they really are doing something worthwhile. Precisely
that makes us overlook their massive rent-seeking.
Take the pharmaceutical industry. Companies like
GlaxoSmithKline and
Pfizer regularly
unveil new drugs, yet most real medical breakthroughs are made quietly at government-subsidised labs. Private companies mostly manufacture
medications that resemble what we've already got. They get it patented and, with a hefty dose of marketing, a legion of lawyers,
and a strong lobby, can live off the profits for years. In other words, the vast revenues of the pharmaceutical industry are the
result of a tiny pinch of innovation and fistfuls of rent.
Even paragons of modern progress like Apple, Amazon, Google
, Facebook, Uber and Airbnb are woven from the fabric of rentierism. Firstly, because they owe their existence to government discoveries
and inventions (every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll). And second, because they tie themselves into knots to avoid
paying taxes, retaining countless bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists for this very purpose.
Even more important, many of these companies function as "natural monopolies", operating in a positive feedback loop of increasing
growth and value as more and more people contribute free content to their platforms. Companies like this are incredibly difficult
to compete with, because as they grow bigger, they only get stronger.
Aptly characterising this "platform capitalism" in an article,
Tom Goodwin writes : "Uber, the world's largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world's most popular media owner,
creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world's largest accommodation provider,
owns no real estate."
Facebook
Twitter
Pinterest 'Every sliver of fundamental technology in the iPhone, from the internet to batteries and from touchscreens to voice
recognition, was invented by researchers on the government payroll.' Photograph: Regis Duvignau/Reuters
So what do these companies own? A platform. A platform that lots and lots of people want to use. Why? First and foremost, because
they're cool and they're fun – and in that respect, they do offer something of value. However, the main reason why we're all happy
to hand over free content to Facebook is because all of our friends are on Facebook too, because their friends are on Facebook because
their friends are on Facebook.
Most of Mark Zuckerberg's income is just rent collected off the millions of picture and video posts that we give away daily for
free. And sure, we have fun doing it. But we also have no alternative – after all, everybody is on Facebook these days. Zuckerberg
has a website that advertisers are clamouring to get onto, and that doesn't come cheap. Don't be fooled by endearing pilots with
free internet in Zambia. Stripped down to essentials, it's an ordinary ad agency. In fact, in 2015 Google and Facebook pocketed an
astounding
64% of all online ad revenue in the US.
But don't Google and Facebook make anything useful at all? Sure they do. The irony, however, is that their best innovations only
make the rentier economy even bigger. They employ scores of programmers to create new algorithms so that we'll all click on more
and more ads.
Uber has
usurped the whole taxi sector just as
Airbnb has upended the hotel industry and Amazon has overrun the book trade. The bigger such platforms grow the more powerful
they become, enabling the lords of these digital feudalities to demand more and more rent.
Think back a minute to the definition of a rentier: someone who uses their control over something that already exists in order
to increase their own wealth. The feudal lord of medieval times did that by building a tollgate along a road and making everybody
who passed by pay. Today's tech giants are doing basically the same thing, but transposed to the digital highway. Using technology
funded by taxpayers, they build tollgates between you and other people's free content and all the while pay almost no tax on their
earnings.
This is the so-called innovation that has Silicon Valley gurus in raptures: ever bigger platforms that claim ever bigger handouts.
So why do we accept this? Why does most of the population work itself to the bone to support these rentiers?
I think there are two answers. Firstly, the modern rentier knows to keep a low profile. There was a time when everybody knew who
was freeloading. The king, the church, and the aristocrats controlled almost all the land and made peasants pay dearly to farm it.
But in the modern economy, making rentierism work is a great deal more complicated. How many people can explain a
credit default swap
, or a collateralised debt obligation ? Or the revenue
model behind those cute Google Doodles? And don't the folks on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley work themselves to the bone, too?
Well then, they must be doing something useful, right?
Maybe not. The typical workday of Goldman Sachs' CEO may be worlds away from that of King Louis XIV, but their revenue models
both essentially revolve around obtaining the biggest possible handouts. "The world's most powerful investment bank," wrote the journalist
Matt Taibbi about
Goldman Sachs , "is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything
that smells like money."
But far from squids and vampires, the average rich freeloader manages to masquerade quite successfully as a decent hard worker.
He goes to great lengths to present himself as a "job creator" and an "investor" who "earns" his income by virtue of his high "productivity".
Most economists, journalists, and politicians from left to right are quite happy to swallow this story. Time and again language is
twisted around to cloak funneling and exploitation as creation and generation.
However, it would be wrong to think that all this is part of some ingenious conspiracy. Many modern rentiers have convinced even
themselves that they are bona fide value creators. When current Goldman Sachs CEO
Lloyd Blankfein
was asked about the purpose of his job, his straight-faced answer was that he is "
doing God's
work ". The Sun King would have approved.
The second thing that keeps rentiers safe is even more insidious. We're all wannabe rentiers. They have made millions of people
complicit in their revenue model. Consider this: What are our financial sector's two biggest cash cows? Answer: the housing market
and pensions. Both are markets in which many of us are deeply invested.
Recent decades have seen more and more people contract debts to buy a home, and naturally it's in their interest if
house
prices continue to scale new heights (read: burst bubble upon bubble). The same goes for pensions. Over the past few decades
we've all scrimped and saved up a mountainous pension piggy bank. Now pension funds are under immense pressure to ally with the biggest
exploiters in order to ensure they pay out enough to please their investors.
The fact of the matter is that feudalism has been democratised. To a lesser or greater extent, we are all depending on handouts.
En masse, we have been made complicit in this exploitation by the rentier elite, resulting in a political covenant between the rich
rent-seekers and the homeowners and retirees.
Don't get me wrong, most homeowners and retirees are not benefiting from this situation. On the contrary, the banks are bleeding
them far beyond the extent to which they themselves profit from their houses and pensions. Still, it's hard to point fingers at a
kleptomaniac when you have sticky fingers too.
So why is this happening? The answer can be summed up in three little words: Because it can.
Rentierism is, in essence, a question of power. That the Sun King Louis XIV was able to exploit millions was purely because he
had the biggest army in Europe. It's no different for the modern rentier. He's got the law, politicians and journalists squarely
in his court. That's why bankers get fined peanuts for preposterous fraud, while a mother on government assistance gets penalised
within an inch of her life if she checks the wrong box.
The biggest tragedy of all, however, is that the rentier economy is gobbling up society's best and brightest. Where once upon
a time Ivy League graduates chose careers in science, public service or education, these days they are more likely to opt for banks,
law firms, or trumped up ad agencies like Google and Facebook. When you think about it, it's insane. We are forking over billions
in taxes to help our brightest minds on and up the corporate ladder so they can learn how to score ever more outrageous handouts.
One thing is certain: countries where rentiers gain the upper hand gradually fall into decline. Just look at the Roman Empire.
Or Venice in the 15th century. Look at the Dutch Republic in the 18th century. Like a parasite stunts a child's growth, so the rentier
drains a country of its vitality.
What innovation remains in a rentier economy is mostly just concerned with further bolstering that very same economy. This may
explain why the big dreams of the 1970s, like flying cars, curing cancer, and colonising Mars, have yet to be realised, while bankers
and ad-makers have at their fingertips technologies a thousand times more powerful.
Yet it doesn't have to be this way. Tollgates can be torn down, financial products can be banned, tax havens dismantled, lobbies
tamed, and patents rejected. Higher taxes on the ultra-rich can make rentierism less attractive, precisely because society's biggest
freeloaders are at the very top of the pyramid. And we can more fairly distribute our earnings on land, oil, and innovation through
a system of, say, employee shares, or a
universal basic
income .
But such a revolution will require a wholly different narrative about the origins of our wealth. It will require ditching the
old-fashioned faith in "solidarity" with a miserable underclass that deserves to be borne aloft on the market-level salaried shoulders
of society's strongest. All we need to do is to give real hard-working people what they deserve.
And, yes, by that I mean the waste collectors, the nurses, the cleaners – theirs are the shoulders that carry us all.
"... A conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of the Soviet Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi and the former head of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest person to Yeltsin's body), Alexander Korzhakov. ..."
"... (of the Communist Party – author's note) ..."
"... – If I understand it, it was then when you collected "11 suitcases of compromising evidence" against Yeltsin's team? Which also played a role in the confrontation. ..."
"... . About 30 staff members of the CIA worked under the guise of consultants with reformers in the government. And much more. And these were imaginary auctions, state bonds, what was the way they all were thought out? This process was led by staff members of the CIA, who worked in the government of the Russian Federation. ..."
"... I repeatedly asked Yeltsin: is it possible the work of foreign intelligence officers in the administration of the US President? He: Alexander Ivanovich, are you accidentally drunk? – No. I did not drink. I'm just asking you this question. – He: Of course not. – Why do we have 30 employees (of CIA)? And admitted them to top secret information? Where do we go? They are conducting these boys, who do not understand what they are doing, they get up these ugliness. And what will be the results? ..."
"... 30 staff members of the CIA worked in the government. They led the imaginary auctions, government bonds, were admitted to the top secret information. ..."
"... – And what happened to the words about Nechaev? ..."
"... – Listen, let's be honest. You were with Yeltsin in 1991 on one side of the barricades. You saw him, and thats why in the 1993 did not believe that he would go for blood, for assault. Was it so? ..."
"... It was later learned that Gorbachev had created the State Emergency Committee in March 1991, this was his initiative. He went to Foros to absolve himself of responsibility. ..."
"... Once again, when Yeltsin was going to hide in the US embassy in 1991, I stopped him, I said: Boris Nikolayevich, you can not do this, you are the head of Russia, how are you going to escape, let me fly to Foros. So Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov and I flew to Foros to take Gorbachev out of there and bring him back to his place. ..."
"... But in 1993, everything was planned differently. Here is the Maydan in Kiev – this is one in one repetition, a little under another sauce, really. But the conductors were from the same address. All these orders came from Washington. Because the tele-shooting was done, the operators were at such profitable points to completely shoot this massacre. They were seated in advance. And when the "Alpha" (Special Force unit) refuses to storm the building, they kill their fighter Sergeev, sniper kills him in the back, to provoke "Alpha". ..."
"... The Maidan in Kiev is one in one repetition of events in Moscow in 1993. But the conductors were from one place – from Washington. The operators were placed in advance so as to completely shoot this massacre. And when "Alpha" refuses to storm the building, the sniper kills their fighter Sergeev to provoke "Alpha". ..."
"... – And what did happen with those closets in which there was compromising material? ..."
"... – The situation was such that I was put to Lefortovo (detention unit for state security – author's note) ..."
"... – Korzhakov would better tell how at Vnukovo airport he met the snipers, who flew not from our country, how they went to Sofrino and got sniper rifles, how they planted these snipers on the roof and started killing policemen and representatives of the armed forces, gawkers and others. For what? – To provoke this assault. ..."
A conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of the Soviet
Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Rutskoi and the former head
of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest person to Yeltsin's body),
Alexander Korzhakov.
Twenty-two years ago, Moscow shuddered from the tank volleys, and people all over the
country clung to TV screens, on which Western TV stations broadcasted how Yeltsin's loyal
troops fire at the rebel troops of the Supreme Soviet (Parlament) of Russia. The opposition of
the Armed Forces and the President Yeltsin with his team, on the one hand, and Rutskoi and
Khasbulatov with the deputies, on the other, ended in great blood. Incongruous with the one
that spilled two years earlier, when the Emergency Committee tried to keep the USSR.
This was
the beginning of our conversation in the radio studio "Komsomolskaya Pravda" with the Hero of
the Soviet Union, the first and the last vice-president of Russia, Alexander Vladimirovich
Rutskoi and the former head of the President's Security Service (by definition, the closest
person to Yeltsin's body), Alexander Vasilyevich Korzhakov.
... ... ...
Rutskoy:
– Yeltsin's main argument against the Supreme Council was that it prevented him from
"carrying out reforms." What kind of reforms? – The privatization. I was appointed to
lead the Interdepartmental Commission on Combating Corruption, and I had information about how
it was conducted. Port Nakhodka went in ownership for 100 thousand dollars, Achinsk alumina
plant for 180 thousand, Uralmash, giant, the pride of our country, went to Bendukidze's
property for 500 thousand dollars, not for money but for vouchers. What is this nonsense? After
all, we proposed alternative privatization. First, the service sector. I still, being a member
of the Central Committee (of the Communist Party – author's note) , I was
expelled from the party for factionalism, suggested: why should the state have hairdressers,
tailors, canteens, cafes, restaurants? Let's privatize it, but on a competitive basis. A person
wins a contest, gets this object into management and pays real estate, the cost of this object
to the mortgage. The money goes to the social development fund of the country, which is
subordinated to a collegial body, not to the executive branch, to the Supreme Council. And then
the issues of building schools, hospitals, polyclinics, roads, housing and everything else
would be resolved.
The port of Nakhodka was privatized for 100 thousand dollars, the Achinsk alumina plant for
180 thousand, Uralmash, the giant, the pride of our country, went into the ownership of
Bendukidze for 500 thousand dollars. And it was not money, but vouchers.
This was our most important contradiction with Yeltsin and his team. And imagine how much
money would go into this social fund. And today, the problems in the social sphere would be
solved tenfold at the expense of that has touched.
– If I understand it, it was then when you collected "11 suitcases of compromising
evidence" against Yeltsin's team? Which also played a role in the confrontation.
Rutskoy:
– I figuratively said that those are 11 suitcases. You know, such fireproof large
metal cabinets. And there were documents in them. Not compromising evidence, but documents,
including all of these scams with privatization . About 30 staff members of the CIA worked
under the guise of consultants with reformers in the government. And much more. And these were
imaginary auctions, state bonds, what was the way they all were thought out? This process was
led by staff members of the CIA, who worked in the government of the Russian
Federation.
I repeatedly asked Yeltsin: is it possible the work of foreign intelligence officers in the
administration of the US President? He: Alexander Ivanovich, are you accidentally drunk?
– No. I did not drink. I'm just asking you this question. – He: Of course not.
– Why do we have 30 employees (of CIA)? And admitted them to top secret information?
Where do we go? They are conducting these boys, who do not understand what they are doing, they
get up these ugliness. And what will be the results?
30 staff members of the CIA worked in the government. They led the imaginary auctions,
government bonds, were admitted to the top secret information.
– Alexander Vasilievich, I was 31 years old and I was sitting at that time in
the company of Englishmen, who, going crazy, asked me: "Sasha, is this a movie?" And I answered
them that yes, only documentary and live". And they, even more crazy, bawled: "They must not
shoot the Parliament by tanks "
... ... ...
They figured out Yeltsin but conductors directed the country
Rutskoy:
– Yeltsin's only correct decision for all his being in office was to resign and make
his successor a worthy man who pulled the country out of this humiliating situation.
Incidentally, I have repeatedly told Yeltsin who his security service is, I asked –
remove these guys: both Barsukov and Korzhakov, they will then make you a gift that you will
never wash off. And in 1996, Yeltsin had the intelligence to get rid of these persons.
– You do not like them.
– You know, I always went to Boris Nikolaevich and, before making any public
statements, talked with him. And what did Korzhakov do? He resorted to Yeltsin and sang a song
to him, that I saw a chair under him. If you want I tell an interesting episode. There were a
strike at the automobile plant "ZIL". Boris Nikolayevich, as always, on vacation. It is clear
what a vocation it was. I got a call with the command from the President to go to ZIL and to
work out. I walk along the corridor, towards goes Viktor Palych Barannikov, the Minister of
Security. "Where are you going?" – "To ZIL, there's a strike. I was given a commission
from Boris Nikolayevich." – "Can I go with you?" – "Of course?". We had come,
listened to the workers. I convinced them that we must go back to the machines, stop the strike
and so on. And I allowed myself such a statement: "Boris Nikolayevich will come, I will ask him
to give me an opportunity to attach my guard to Nechayev (he was an economy minister), I will
give him your salary, three thousand rubles. And I'll see how this figure and rascal will
live." Farther. We sit at the one birthday party. Boris Nikolaevich asks me a question. I look,
there is a dictophone at his hands. He said me: Have you got three thousand rubles with you? I
say that I got more. And my brains turn on here. I see the recorder. Yeltsin is on public, and
this is the first circle, ministers, say, basically of the power structure. He turns on the
dictaphone. And there goes this record, but in another form – that Yeltsin will come, and
I'll give him three thousand, I'll attach my guard to him and so on.
They have deleted that part, and it turned out that I would do this to Yeltsin. Silent scene
in the hall. And then Barannikov takes out a dictophone from his pocket. And turns on a full
record, as it was. So, Yeltsin takes his recorder and launches in Korzhakov. Korzhakov bent
down and the tape recorder flew to the wall, smashed to smithereens.
Yeltsin takes the recorder and launches in Korzhakov. Korzhakov bent down and the tape
recorder flew to the wall, smashed to smithereens
– Listen, let's be honest. You were with Yeltsin in 1991 on one side of the
barricades. You saw him, and thats why in the 1993 did not believe that he would go for blood,
for assault. Was it so?
– Well, frankly, I hoped so. In 1991, there was a situation When some information
arrived that the assault was about to begin, Yeltsin immediately got into the car and was going
to leave for the US embassy. It was later learned that Gorbachev had created the State
Emergency Committee back in March of 1991, it was his initiative. He flew to Foros when a cope
started in August to absolve himself of responsibility.
It was later learned that Gorbachev had created the State Emergency Committee in March
1991, this was his initiative. He went to Foros to absolve himself of responsibility.
Once again, when Yeltsin was going to hide in the US embassy in 1991, I stopped him, I
said: Boris Nikolayevich, you can not do this, you are the head of Russia, how are you going to
escape, let me fly to Foros. So Yevgeny Maksimovich Primakov and I flew to Foros to take
Gorbachev out of there and bring him back to his place.
But in 1993, everything was planned differently. Here is the Maydan in Kiev – this is
one in one repetition, a little under another sauce, really. But the conductors were from the
same address. All these orders came from Washington. Because the tele-shooting was done, the
operators were at such profitable points to completely shoot this massacre. They were seated in
advance. And when the "Alpha" (Special Force unit) refuses to storm the building, they kill
their fighter Sergeev, sniper kills him in the back, to provoke "Alpha".
The Maidan in Kiev is one in one repetition of events in Moscow in 1993. But the
conductors were from one place – from Washington. The operators were placed in advance so
as to completely shoot this massacre. And when "Alpha" refuses to storm the building, the
sniper kills their fighter Sergeev to provoke "Alpha".
Neither "Alpha" nor "Vympel" went to the assault.
– But after all "Alpha" and "Vympel" did not go to storm the Kremlin too.
Remember, you ordered the pilots to bomb the Kremlin?
– I did not make such an order.
– You went on the air. I heard it with my ears.
– It was a psychological intimidation for the Kremlin – That is the first. And
the second, what was the way to stop them? I think, at least they will come to their senses,
stop doing it.
– And what did happen with those closets in which there was compromising
material?
– The situation was such that I was put to Lefortovo (detention unit for state
security – author's note) , and the next day, these non-combustible metal cabinets
were cracked and under the direction of Korzhakov these folders were extracted. Where did they
go, these folders, who gave the order to Korzhakov to withdraw everything related to the work
of the interdepartmental commission? No answer.
– There is a feeling that personal scores are not all finished between you
– Korzhakov would better tell how at Vnukovo airport he met the snipers, who flew
not from our country, how they went to Sofrino and got sniper rifles, how they planted these
snipers on the roof and started killing policemen and representatives of the armed forces,
gawkers and others. For what? – To provoke this assault.
Korzhakov would better tell how at Vnukovo airport he met the snipers, who flew not from our
country, how they went to Sofrino and got sniper rifles, how they planted these snipers on the
roof and started killing policemen and representatives of the armed forces, gawkers and others.
For what? – To provoke this assault.
I have nothing to hide. I have published the minutes of my interrogations. And the book
"Bloody Autumn" I wrote, deliberately, without even a hint on any emotions. I took the date,
the documents of the Supreme Council, which were released on that date, the decisions of the
Kremlin on the same date, and made a diary of events. In the end wrote: and now everyone draw
conclusions themselves, who is to blame that the blood of compatriots was spilled, that our
country was simply smeared, that the Soviet Union was destroyed, and people with far from a
decent biography were given the national property of the country. That's what I and many of my
comrades could not agree with, but it happened.
– It happened. And God grant us that we will never do it again.
IMO Senate anti-BDS bill is an Israeli effort to kill free speech in the US
"Pro-Israel lawmakers in Washington, undeterred by the partial shutdown of the United States
government, are pursuing their agenda full speed with the introduction of the first piece of
legislation before the 116th Senate -- a bill that aims to stifle the free-speech rights of
American critics of apartheid Israel.
The Republican-controlled Senate's first bill (S.1) would enact penalties on entities that
engage in boycotts of Israel -- one of many measures in the United States intended to push back
on the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.
BDS seeks to place economic pressure on companies and institutions that support Israeli ones
operating in illegally occupied areas in Palestine, in order to pressure the Israeli government
into compliance with international law and to cease its practices of apartheid, ethnic
cleansing, and the ongoing encroachment of Israeli settlements." Alexander Rubenstein
------------
Even as this travesty of law is driven forward in the senate, US senators Cruz and Cotton
are in Israel supporting Israeli annexation of the Syrian Golan Heights and official American
recognition of the annexation. These Syrian lands were seized in war by Israel in 1967 and
occupied ever since.
IMO this bill, if it became law, would be struck down by the courts as
unconstitutional.
Servants of a foreign power and enemies of the Constitution. Disgraceful. The Republic has
been utterly corrupted and these traitors should all be in jail.
Seems this Senate bill goes far beyond trying to muzzle our free speech. It attempts to
force us to buy Israeli products and invest in Israeli companies and institutions. There's
going to be some serious civil disobedience if this piece of crap passes.
Good to see the new Congress has got its priorities straight with 'Strengthening
Israel's America's Security in the Middle East Act of 2019'. The anti-BDS
bit is an abomination. As it is not yet illegal to petition your senator, and with our host's
permission, I'd urge everyone to make use of the ACLU's pro-forma message of objection to the
bill. Just fill in the form online:
Unfortunately this is probably not unconstitutional. It won't be illegal to call for a
boycott of Israel, it will just be illegal to boycott Israel. An analogy: it's not illegal to
say "don't hire black people," but it is illegal to not hire black people.
Also, I bet South Africa wishes they had a better lobby.
How do Cruz and Cotton get around the UN resolutions that recognize the Golan as Syrian
territory? And if they are successful what would that do to US relations with Jordan, the
Saudis, and the Gulf States?
I suspect Cruz and Cotton are just playing to that part of their evangelical base like
Jeffress and others that seem obsessed with apocalyptic literature.
Recognizing Taiwan involved similar problems but we finessed it - I think Israel's friends
in Congress can come up with something similar for "de facto but not official recognition" of
Golan as Israeli territory. The Izzies will be happy - they like to take things inch by
inch.
As for Jordan, KSA, and the Gulfies - they have had to swallow more bitter medicine in the
past, and they will again in the future. They have nowhere to go.
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation.
Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare
of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.
In re "Our man in Havana" I think there
are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head
round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.'
It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating
one ham-fisted cover-up after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador
Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in
Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate'
-- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about
it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying
Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with
Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem
to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating
their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened
in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world
(with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though
there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse
is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).
"... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
"... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic
Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.
The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine
and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.
This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science
but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and
provide fundamental knowledge.
"... If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.' It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating one ham-fisted cover-up after another. ..."
"... The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.' ..."
"... There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech. ..."
"... I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world (with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies. ..."
"... Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome. ..."
After contemplating the likely intelligence and propaganda efforts of HMG over the last 15 years or so I am puzzled as to motivation.
Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem to have little to do with the welfare
of Britain. Why? I suppose that the same question can be asked for the US and I have.
In re "Our man in Havana" I think there
are many issues raised in the work that apply directly to the trade of espionage.
The question why? is a very interesting but also very dispiriting one, but also one which it is quite hard to get one's head
round. I hope to have something more coherent to say about it.
Among many reasons, however, there has been a kind of intellectual disintegration.
If I had the talent and energy, I might write a sequel to the 'Quiet American', to be entitled 'The Noisy Englishmen.'
It would feature a series of inept conspiracies, involving ludicrous means used in support of preposterous ends, necessitating
one ham-fisted cover-up after another.
The central characters might be loosely based on Christopher Steele, Matt Tait, Eliot Higgins, and our former UN Ambassador
Matthew Rycroft, author of the July 2002 Downing Street memorandum, in which Sir Richard Dearlove was quoted explaining how, in
Washington, 'the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.'
Subsequently, of course, he set about colluding in the process. And, sixteen years later, Dearlove is still at it, with 'Russiagate'
-- and the product being actually accepted much more uncritically by the MSM than it was then.
And that is one of the problems -- nobody any longer pays any penalty for failure, or indeed feels any sense of shame about
it..
There is a 1990's British historian (whose name I've been trying to rediscover without success) who wrote a sunny book saying
Britain should return to its imperialist ways to bring light to the dark and repressive world we live in. It was a great hit with
Blair and his henchmen. Blair used its arguments in his notorious 1999 Chicago neo-conservative/liberal interventionist speech.
As the Colonel eloquently asks:
"I am puzzled as to motivation. Why? Why? The UK is now a regional power for which events in places like Syria would seem
to have little todo with the welfare of Britain. Why?"
I'd draw attention to "The Brideshead Revisited" generation especially at Oxford in the early 80's. Unashamedly celebrating
their wealth and upper middle class privately-educated backgrounds, they viewed themselves as a gilded, golden generation, preened
in narcissism, adept at networking and self-promotion. They are the generation now in power - politically, financially, in the deep state. Their fantasy of again ruling the world
(with American and Zionist aid) has led to a series of catastrophic blunders and overreaches in both foreign and domestic policies.
Our economic power - the base of any imperial power - is shrinking daily. All the Oxfordites (chief amongst them Theresa May,
Boris Johnson and Michael Gove) are still playing Oxford Union/PPE games and stabbing each other joyously in the back as though
there's no tomorrow. It most ressembles the halluciogenic decadence of the court of late Imperial Rome.
(I don't include the Maurice Cowling-ites in this fandango because they strike me as more Little Englanders. Though Peterhouse
is of course, shamefully, the HQ of the Henry Jackson Society).
"... The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents. ..."
"... "political science" is not a science but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and provide fundamental knowledge. ..."
Early on in her book, Albright says: My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic
Marked in bold is the most terrifying thing about Albright's book and I am not even going to read her pseudo-intellectual excrement.
The fact that obviously deranged fanatic hack has students is a testimony to a sewer level of the US "elite-producing" machine
and a pathetic sight contemporary US "elite" represents.
This is apart from the fact that "political science" is not a science
but pseudo-academic field for losers who do not want to study real history or take courses which actually develop intellect and
provide fundamental knowledge.
"... The British Private Eye finds a relation between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion. ..."
Forgot to link this: The
Briefing note
on the Integrity Initiative by Paul McKeigue, David Miller, Jake Mason and Piers Robinson is the most complete analysis of the
Integrity Initiative papers.
The British Private Eye finds a relation
between the Integrity Initiative and the Rendon Group which drove the propaganda for the Iraq invasion.
I'll have to say more on the issue. For some fun, check the attachment to this tweet. (Klarenberg writes for Sputnik.)
"Jornos for hire" are now mainstream. Much like escort services.
Again, it's pure projection. These vermin are literally incapable of looking at anything except in terms of how it can
be used as a weapon (or how it can be destroyed), so they automatically attribute that fundamentalist way of looking at things to everyone
else, and especially to the "enemy". So by definition anything Putin and the Russians do is some kind of "weaponization".
Notable quotes:
"... Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat). Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style. ..."
"... Here is what Americans really think about the anti-Russia hysteria coming from Washington: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/08/americans-on-russia-will-of-people.html Washington has completely lost touch with what Main Street America really believes. ..."
"... And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril islands: Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite" maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected. ..."
"... Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia, will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.) ..."
"... I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the population from reality. ..."
"... The underlying problem: Russia has weaponized telling the truth. ..."
"... Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media. ..."
"... Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. ..."
"... Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything they touch turns to weapons. ..."
"... But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian than Western governments ..."
"... Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it. ..."
Several of the pieces listed in it are products of the recently uncovered
British government
financed disinformation campaign , or of similar efforts by other governments. But these are only a part of the general anti-Russian
reflex that is ingrained in our 'western' culture. Nothing else can explain the craziness of these 'weaponizing' claims.
The updated list with some 65 issues, ideas and things that Russia allegedly 'weaponizes' will hopefully help to convince people
that most of what is said or written about Russia is likewise blatant nonsense.
Yes! All true! But I weaponised Vladimir Putin to make media profits, newspapers (Guardian!), radio (BBC), internet (Bellingcat).
Evidently only the Brits understand me. The US does the same in a different style.
And besides humor I am sure Putin is also weaponizing calendars, at least in Japan. Maybe in exchange for keeping the Kuril
islands:
Putin calendar sales surpassing those of Japanese stars in Japan What I am wondering is, if the socalled "Western Elite"
maybe actually believe what they are saying and are not aware that it is a self-created illusion they are chaught in. Otherwise
I can not understand why they are again and again surprised if Russia is not behaving they way they expected.
Yes, these are projections, and they tell us the final world war, a war of aggression by the US against China and Russia,
will be a total war beyond our imaginations. (Unless real leftists and real lovers of peace can stop it.)
I think this insane epidemic illustrates the degree to which the Western propaganda system has completely decoupled the
population from reality. Now whether it's believed or not is neither here nor there as it's built upon decades of anti-communism
and the inherent racism of the Anglo-Saxon Empire that has demonized the Russians as essentially backward peasants who cannot
be trusted. Worse still, the Russkies have ginormous weapons!
I agree that both 'sides' in a phony cold war 2.0 weaponize just about anything of a controversial nature or event in civilization.
Both sides are advancing agenda that are leading humanity in the same direction even as they create a false adversarial paradigm.
This has been termed non linear psychological warfare under which such a confusing array of created realities leaves the greater
public unable to define what is real or a fabrication. It takes at least two or more to create the illusions and the 'other' can
simply be created/funded as controlled opposition and then even this can be published to further create more confusion within
the confusion. Carl Rove told us this. He just didn't tell us that the 'Empire' also includes Russia, China and any number of
other corporate national jurisdictions.
More seriously, this is not "stupidity" of the political class, as some pundits would have you believe. It is a well thought-out
retrenchment plan of attempting to institute a new "iron curtain" to separate Europe from Asia after the demise of unipolarity.
Yes, I'd agree that's part of its purpose -- to prevent the unification of Eurasia, which as I wrote last week's proceeding
apace. They're trying to wall off Japan too, so I wonder if Japanese media's as flush with the same garbage as BigLie Media.
Russia's weaponized Arctic
Ocean or perhaps Russia's weaponized the lack of proper marine maintenance. Russia's also weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's
lack of naval or other Arctic Ocean land-based infrastructure -- there's zip to support any off-shore drilling from Alaska's coastline.
IOW, Russia's weaponizing a plethora of Outlaw US Empire weaknesses.
And what the Sputnik article refers to as the heavy US icebreaker Polar Star is more roughly one half the size of the
nuclear powered Russian icebreaker 50 Years of Victory, 50 лет Победы . I suspect the Russians would call the Polar
Star a light icebreaker. Sputnik probably probably being polite.
Way back in the 1950s the Pentagon (specifically the Air Force) was all atwitter over unsubstantiated reports (again leaked by
the Air Force) that the Soviets (read: the Russians) were building a nuclear powered strategic bomber that would have unlimited
range and flight time. Well now. You know what that means? We gotta have one too! So guess what. The Air Force dutifully volunteered
to save the US and Western civilization from being bombed back to the stone age and godless communism all at the same time by
building a nuclear powered bomber of our own. To make a long story short the effort failed miserably. The project managed to last
into the Kennedy administration but was cancelled in favor of developing submarine launched ICBMs. While the nuclear bomber program
died it's spirit lived on. During the Carter administration the then chief of Air Force intelligence (yes I know there's no such
thing) became convinced that the russkies were building ground-based and orbiting death ray machines to use against US satellites
and ICBMs. Thus was born "Star Wars." Of course this fit in perfectly with the Reagan administration's defense views even though
the engineering and science simply didn't exist then of now. Well as the french say the "more things change the more they remain
the same"
Some people get weaponized on business trips to Moscow. This video shows how they do it...
https://youtu.be/8cs4tKdiiI4 Posted by: dh | Dec 17, 2018 10:36:48
AM | 15
Move over Russia make room for the Chinese weapon program.. its much more dangerous than the Russian disinformation program,
unlike Russia, the Chinese circumvent the USA Senate, the President, and the SCOUS and go directly to the poor, innocent governed
humans, lending them money, creating for them jobs and developing infra structure to make life easier; such will be the end of
us all. WE MUST REMEMBER Aake news and made up fictions are produced by the six entities that own 92 of the media. Without the
Internet and other public infra structure, the media could not smear you with its dirty tricks. Someone please pass the soap.
"weaponizing terrorism "? because until Putin all "terrorists" sat around talking and sipping tea like the goddamn mclaughlin
group? then again, given the outsize influence of objectively insane think tanks in DC, maybe they were onto something.
funny how this can also be seen as what psychology types call "projection". in a culture like the west's (especially the states)
where the economies are built on warfare and financial voodoo, everything is either "weaponized" or collateralized. look at anything
on that list and it's something from which someone "atlantic" has tried or will try to make money. of course, many things start
out weaponized and are then collateralized
. weaponized taxes? weaponized corporate welfare?
hey, if a bunch of white/israeli suburbanite music executives in LA can control rap, it should be pretty easy. side note: rap
is officially banned in iran. some say it's been deemed "satanic". Years ago when i was grooving to das efx or public enemy i'd
have disagreed but now that the big names are drake, minaj and meek mill...only malevolent supernatural evil can explain that.
I'm shocked to learn that "Russia is weaponizing its Coast Guard",
https://warisboring.com/russia-is-weaponizing-its-coast-guard/
The author seems quite angry the Russians are using their "Coast Guard" of all things, to defend their coast. He thinks they should
have used their Navy instead!
"The use of the Russian Federation Navy to close the strait would have been more likely to escalate because it would have
been a military-on-military clash. In contrast, using the Russian coast guard made it a law enforcement issue rather than a
military-sanctioned act of war. Russia is adept at using legal channels to pursue violations of justice. It now appears willing
to use its coast guard for this purpose.
Onshore, the situation in eastern Ukraine has been stuck in a rut. Perhaps the escalation in the Sea of Azov was seen by
the Russians as a means to break the impasse, using the flimsy legal cover provided by the coast guard. No similar terrestrial
options exist, as the Russians have exhausted their plausible deniability for operations by police, volunteers and undercover
"little green men."
While Russian seizure of the Azov coast was anticipated, it was not expected to use its coast guard. Utilizing the Russian
coast guard in this way opens a new range of options for Moscow, in the Sea of Azov and beyond."
Although likely covered by weaponizing incompetence and stupidity, Putin has certainly weaponized the Outlaw US Empire's appalling
lack of a professional diplomatic corp--just look at who he gets Trump to nominate to key diplomatic positions. Indeed, perhaps
this ought to be enlarged to include weaponizing mediocrity as portrayed by Trump's entire Cabinet. We can also see the great
strides Putin's made in making the Outlaw US Empire appear as the Ogre it is by weaponizing Anglo-American Exceptionalism. It
seems, given the above list and its additions via comments, that the Outlaw US Empire is most exceptional at being incapable of
weaponizing anything aside from its #1 go-to--The BigLie.
Strategic Message Code One , Dec 17, 2018 3:04:33 PM |
link
Hey guys, guys, you are not getting the point man. There is something really creepy about this Russia place, like Midas. Everything
they touch turns to weapons. I seen it here as well, every Russia thing is trouble of some kind, like there is nothing else
that comes from there. I seen Russian people and they ok, but now I'm frightened to get close to them in case I turn into a weapon.
Aan here too guys, Russia touches the west an the west as consequence are all buying weapons an using them everywhere, they cant
do nothing cause Russia makes them weaponators too. Oh my, we are doomed man and waponized press freakin me out aaaaaaahhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A quote from the report mentioned in (50): "Although the NDS generally reflects the right priorities and objectives, it
is not supported by adequate investments. It is beyond the scope of this Commission's work to identify the exact dollar amount
required to fully fund the military's needs, but the available means are clearly insufficient to fulfill the strategy's ends.
This is true despite the two-year funding increase for FY2018 and FY2019 provided by the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2018."
What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the (we all know it) struggling news organizations.
I believe many of these quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that propaganda money. Most
of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount, but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid
well. I certainly think the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6.
The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia,
'weaponizing', hackers, cyber, fake news...
I believe the Saker was pointing out a few days ago that the Border Guards were often more like spetsnaz than what we in the
west think of as a border patrol. The Russian Coast Guard has probably maintained the tradition.
I see culture's already been deemed weaponized, but
here's Putin's actual plan he laid out in his speech to a meeting of the Presidential Council for Culture and Art in St Petersburg
two days ago. Introductory remarks:
"... global competition in creating best conditions for self-fulfilment and revealing the potential of each individual is
growing, and the world's leading powers including Russia, rightly see it as a key to the future. Of course, a significant role
here will belong to establishing a vibrant, rich cultural space, which will be interesting and attractive not only for the
citizens of our country but also for the whole world."
Meanwhile within the Outlaw US Empire, Boy Scouts of America is about to
file for bankruptcy thanks
to the many sexual abuse lawsuits it now faces. This leads me to declare yet another Russian accomplishment: Putin has weaponized
Machiavellian divide and rule by enticing the Outlaw US Empire's Deep State -- years prior to his birth! -- to promote and escalate
what's known as the Culture Wars used to ensure a continuing inability to achieve solidarity by the USA's polity.
Anaya, I take it you took a look-see at its staff and there's a lot of them! Yeah, that's what prompted my own feelings about
it. The report has apparently been published but I've not yet seen it.
The '150 million' influenced by those scheming Russkies, has been floating for awhie. I first saw it used in a Euro-based setup,
funded by NATO I think. I'll try and dig it out as I remember writing something about.
This kind of "Weaponization" is far less expensive than say an F35 or a 13bn Ford class Aircraft carrier, but the more of them
you build the safer you will be from the "Weaponization" of coloring books. Nuke crayons now! The state of the US and its
military in my view is that they can't win a war against anyone, all they can do is blow up the world with nukes - the only question
is will they deny the world to everyone if they can't own it.
It's a shame we can't massively disseminate our weaponization of ridicule contained in b's article and our commentary. I wonder
how many comedians are making good money ridiculing the entire weaponization meme, and not just in English.
What I'd like to see at all US government pressers is for uncontrollable laughter to break out amongst the press when the spokesperson
begins speaking and continue until it leaves the podium, followed by the press exiting the room.
In case you haven't yet heard, Heather Nauert replaces Nutty Nikki as US ambassador to the UN so 'tis there that Matt Lee and
his fellow journos must trek (it's gonna be a long way to NYC) to get their regular dose of laughter.
Here in my exceptional country it is customary at the end of each year to declare a "word of the year", some from past years were
truthiness, Y2K and hashtag.
but it didn't go after the current Russian govt. It pointed out how the US imitates the Soviets in weaponizing psychiatry by
declaring dissidents crazy. You have to be insane to disagree with TPTB.
I'm sure the comedian replacing Nauert will be just as distracting and of similar character.
Did you happen to read Caitlin Johnstone's
Twenty-One Thoughts On The Persecution Of Julian Assange , particularly #s 8-10 as they relate to her essay about narratives?
All our rather witty ridicule is almost totally wasted on us--we don't need to hear it; it's those people Caitlin refers to in
her 8-10 that require the deep pin-prick of ridicule to snap them from their torpor and return them to reality and to rational
thinking.
The biggest weapon in the West arsenal is private finance. Private finance is the jackboot that keep nations/governments/individuals
in line. Private finance has been the primary weapon of control for centuries. China/Russia are trying to weaponize alternative
finance......and succeeding......which is why the world is all in a tither.
I think it has to do with what one has studied. I have four university degrees: B.A. in Classics from Princeton, A.B. in Classics
from Oxford, Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard, and a J.D. from Yale. I spent a lot of time in the U.S. military: four
years in the active duty U.S. Air Force, plus something like 15 years in the reserves, largely of the U.S. Navy. For as long as
the original Cold War lasted and Communism ruled Russia, I was a true believer in the Cold War. It now looks to me as if I was
misguided at the time, but that is what I believed, whether despite or because of my education, I don't know which.
But since the fall of Communism in Russia, I have lost all belief in anything like a new Cold War. After all, when I was
in parochial school, we prayed for the conversion of Russia. Now, that has been accomplished. Russia's government is more Christian
than Western governments. I think someone with a classical education like the one I got is more capable of thinking for himself.
I don't think my education disabled me from thinking critically and independently.
BB 93 Truth weaponized. Five eyes pulling out all stops in its propaganda campaign to defeat it.
Hoarsewhisperer 95 He may well be, but with the passing of several years and his actions in that time appear to be ardent
zionist. The swamp to him are those that frittered away US unilateral power and those that did not sufficiently support Israel.
What Trump views as the swamp is not what most of us view as the swamp. Kissinger was not forced upon Trump, rather his thinking
is in line with that of Kissinger.
"... To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course, there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in 2003... ..."
To get an idea of how Gladio 2.0 is now investing each corner of our lives, including art
and education, I saw recently on the flyer of a sculpture exhibition in a 5-eyes country that
two artists, one born in 1901 and one in 1914 were "famous Cold War artists". Of course,
there was nothing political in their work, the first died in 1966 and the other in
2003...
In EU universities you now see all sorts of "labs" popping out, with EU funding from the
"digital" budget. They are trying to recruit people with a very odd profile: ambitious, ONG
oriented, IT familiar. The reason why these labs insist on the ONG type activities is
dubious. An example of US/EU sponsored project involving refugees in Greece, neurosciences
and mobile phones (check Harvard/Data&Society: Refugee Connectivity)
"... While she went under a 'Conservative' label, Thatcher was actually a neo-liberal. Her economic reforms would change Britain, but not in a way genuine 'conservatives' would have liked. In the Thatcher years, de-industrialization was welcomed. There was to be no state-aid to manufacturers who hit difficulties because of the high pound, unlike the billions of pounds in bailouts which the banks received in 2008. ..."
The era of what J.K. Galbraith called " private opulence and public squalor " really
began in Britain in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister. She was
determined to dismantle the post-war Keynesian economic model.
While she went under a 'Conservative' label, Thatcher was actually a neo-liberal. Her
economic reforms would change Britain, but not in a way genuine 'conservatives' would have
liked. In the Thatcher years, de-industrialization was welcomed. There was to be no state-aid
to manufacturers who hit difficulties because of the high pound, unlike the billions of pounds
in bailouts which the banks received in 2008.
During the 1980s, industrial towns in the north, Scotland, Wales and the Midlands took a big
hit. They had their heart and soul knocked out of them and they've never really recovered to
this day.
The economy was Americanized and financialized. The gap between rich and poor which had
reached historically low levels by the mid 1970s, began to rise sharply.
As the people at the very top of the pyramid pulled away from the rest, their wealth, often
boosted by the privatization of publicly-owned assets, a new underclass dependent on welfare
payments emerged at the bottom.
These trends were exacerbated by the austerity program of the last ten years with the burden
of the £500 billion bank bailouts being imposed on ordinary people. Local authorities
have seen the money they receive from central government
slashed and instead of making savings at the top, most have preferred to cut frontline
services, such as libraries and toilets.
A couple of weeks ago I visited Swindon, in Wiltshire, in south-western England. It was once
a famous railway town. Its engineering works were opened in 1843. But as the Thatcher
government targeted British Rail Engineering Ltd, a part of the state-owned railway, for
privatization, the works closed down in 1986.
I worked in Swindon for a while in the early 1990s. I remember it was still quite prosperous
then. But when I went back two weeks ago I was shocked to see just how run down it had become.
It's always been a very friendly place, but it's clear that the last few years haven't treated
it well. My wife and I parked in a council-owned multi-storey car park that looked as if it
hadn't had a coat of paint since the 1980s.
You'll find this low level of maintenance of municipal facilities across the UK now because
of the cuts. In the pre-neoliberal era, we used to have park wardens in uniforms. Local
authorities even operated self-service restaurants. There was a real pride in making your town
look smart and having excellent facilities for local people and those who visited.
The decline of the UK's seaside resorts has been particularly striking. Last year I took my
mother to Blackpool, in the north-west of England, to see the house where she was living when
WWII began.
We were both surprised to see so many hotels and guest houses boarded up along the South
Shore. Surprised, too, to see some parts of town looking so poor. In 2013, a report by the
Centre for Social Justice', said that Blackpool and seaside resorts like it had become "
dumping grounds for people facing problems such as unemployment, social exclusion and
substance abuse ." Sophie McBain wrote about the decline of Blackpool here .
While
here is a picture feature on the same theme from the Daily Mail Scarborough, on the
'opposite' North Yorkshire coast, is as beautiful as Sorrento on a sunny day, but here again,
facilities are being lost. In June this year, demolition work on the seafront Futurist Theatre,
where the Beatles once played, began. The council said it was 'not
sustainable'.
In Exmouth, in East Devon, the much-loved Elizabeth Hall, dating from the Victorian age, and
which I visited in 2012, has been demolished to make way for a Premier
Inn.
It's as if preserving the local heritage, doesn't matter to those in charge. Note that the
East Devon Council, which voted for the demolition of the historic hall, went under the name
'Conservative'. Surely we could get them under the 'Trades Description Act'?
So much that was of great worth has been destroyed by the neoliberals in the last forty
years. But we shouldn't just give up. There are practical steps that a government which
actually cared about Britain could take (along with local authorities and businesses), to undo
some of the damage and get the country looking smart again.
As I argued here , Labour
leader Jeremy Corbyn's 'Build it in Britain' plan, announced in July, is exactly what is needed
to regenerate the national economy.
The
cuts in government funding to local authorities, which will be even worse next year must be
reversed and councils obliged to spend the new money they receive not on high salaries for
executive officers, but on front-line services that the public rely on.
There must be no more closures of libraries, toilets and other council-run facilities, and
wherever possible, those that have been shut down in recent years, need to be re-opened.
Banks should be made to keep local branches open too. Almost 3,000 have shut in just three years which is an
absolutely disgrace given the huge profits these financial institutions make.
Public transport should be renationalized, with fares reduced by 50 percent across the
board, and at the same time car-parking prices in town centers slashed to encourage more
visitors. No new out-of-town retail parks should be sanctioned.
Rents and rates for town centers need to be significantly lowered with councils acting
swiftly to make sure that there are no boarded-up outlets in our high streets.
Britain's seaside resorts need a special 'Marshall Plan' style regeneration package. In
2017, the UK government
said it would contribute £40m from 2019-21 to the so-called Coastal Communities
Fund', set up in 2012.
But this is a drop in the ocean and has of course been negated by the overall impact of
austerity on local communities.
In the late 1970s, as I noted in my Guardian article 'The
great British seaside sell-off', a benign state met almost all of British holidaymakers' needs,
from cheap transport to and from the resort, to hotels and extensive leisure facilities run by
councils.
Government and local authorities can't do much about the weather, but they could do a lot
more to encourage Britons to holiday at least once a year in their own country as the knock-on
economic and social benefits would be immense.
How about each household being given a £100 voucher to go towards a break at a UK
seaside resort and heavily reduced fares on the new publicly-owned British Rail and National
Bus Company to take them there? Politicians could lead by example and take their main summer
holidays in Britain, as Labour's Harold Wilson, who loved the Scilly Isles, used to do in the
1960s.
Of course MPs need to go abroad and see how other countries operate, but first and foremost
they need to be aware of the state of their own backyard and they can only get that if they
travel around more, as the admirable Chris Williamson does with his Democracy Roadshow.
Run-down Britain can be fixed, but it requires a major change in how we do things. If we
carry on as we are at present, one shudders to think where we'll be in another forty years. And
when it comes to the Brexit debate, it's worth remembering that all this decline has taken
place during the time Britain has been a member of the European Union.
"... Subsidizing Europe's postwar recovery was not only of immense economic importance to Washington, it was also of vital strategic importance in pushing back against Soviet influence in Europe. Immediately after the war, this influence was riding high on the back of the Red Army's seminal role in liberating the continent from fascism ..."
"... A portion of Marshall aid money – in total some $12 billion (over $100 billion today) over four years between 1948 and 1952 – was diverted to fund various covert operations under the auspices of the CIA, designed to penetrate and subvert those governments and political parties that elicited a leaning towards socialist and communist ideas. ..."
"... Washington's influence over the European Union continues to this day. Most prominently the economic model that underpins this crisis-ridden economic and increasingly political bloc, neoliberalism, is one made in America. From inception as the lodestar of Western economic thought in the mid 1970s, prior to its adoption as the economic base of the US and UK in the early 1980s, neoliberalism has functioned alongside Washington's military might and overweening cultural values as part of an architecture of imperialism to which European elites have signed up as fully-fledged disciples, consciously or otherwise ..."
We live in a world fashioned by Washington, and as 2019 approaches the dire
consequences remain woefully evident. In 1948 US State Department mandarin George Kennan – the man
credited with devising the policy of
containment vis-à-vis the Soviet Union at the end of WWII, – laid bare the focus
of US foreign policy in the postwar period:
" We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 percent of its population
Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern or relationships which will permit us
to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we will have to dispense with all
sentimentality and daydreamings We are going to have to deal in straight power concepts
."
The " pattern of relationships " advocated by Kennan is embodied in the panoply of
international institutions that have governed our world and dominated the planet's economic,
geopolitical, and military architecture in the seven decades since.
The World Bank and the IMF came out of the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, along with the
establishment of the dollar as the world's primary international reserve currency.
The Truman administration's 1947 National
Security Act gave birth to a US military-industrial complex that married the nation's
economy to what was destined to become and remain a vast security and intelligence
apparatus.
NATO, an instrument of US imperial power, was established in 1949, the year after the
Marshall
Plan (European Recovery Program) was rolled out with the objective of creating markets and
demand in Europe for US exports; Washington having emerged from the war as a global economic
hegemon and creditor nation without peer. A similar plan was also rolled out to rebuild the
Japanese economy on the same basis.
Pausing for a moment, it has to count as a remarkable feat of forward thinking on the part
of US policymakers, embarking on a plan to not only affect the economic and industrial recovery
of its two defeated enemies, Germany and Japan, immediately after the war, but turn them into
regional economic powerhouses.
Subsidizing Europe's postwar recovery was not only of immense economic importance to
Washington, it was also of vital strategic importance in pushing back against Soviet influence
in Europe. Immediately after the war, this influence was riding high on the back of the Red
Army's seminal role in liberating the continent from fascism, buttressed by resistance
movements across occupied Europe in which Communist partisans had been most prominent.
A portion of Marshall aid money – in total some $12 billion (over $100 billion today)
over four years between 1948 and 1952 – was diverted to fund various covert operations
under the auspices of the CIA, designed to penetrate and subvert those governments and
political parties that elicited a leaning towards socialist and communist ideas.
In their titanic work 'The Untold History of the United States', co-authors Peter Kuznick
and Oliver Stone reveal that one of those operations involved " supporting a guerrilla army
in Ukraine called Nightingale, which had been established by the Wehrmacht in the spring of
1941 with the help of Stephan Bandera, head of the Ukrainian National Organization's more
radical wing OUN-B. The following year, Mikola Lebed founded the organization's terrorist arm,
the Ukrainian Insurgent Army made up of ultranationalist Ukrainians, including Nazi
collaborators ."
Given the nefarious role of Washington and its allies in aiding and abetting the rebirth of
ultra-nationalism in Ukraine in our time, Marx's dictum – History repeats itself, first
as tragedy, second as farce – is hard to avoid.
Another institution that was established with US economic and strategic objectives in mind
was the European Coal and Steel
Community (ECSC) in 1951, the forerunner of today's European Union. Yes, that's right; the
original incarnation of the EU was a triumph not of European diplomacy but US
diplomacy.
In his 2011 book 'The Global Minotaur', left-leaning economist Yanis Varoufakis writes:
" Students of European integration are taught that the European Union started life in
the form of the ECSC. What they are less likely to come across is the well-kept secret that it
was the United States that cajoled, pushed, threatened and sweet-talked the Europeans into
putting it together Indeed, it is indisputable that without the United States' guiding hand the
ECSC would not have materialized ."
He goes on:
" There was one politician who saw this clearly: General Charles de Gaulle, the future
President of France When the ECSC was formed, de Gaulle denounced it on the basis that it was
creating a united Europe in the form of a restrictive cartel and, more importantly, that it was
an American creation, under Washington's influence ."
Washington's influence over the European Union continues to this day. Most prominently the
economic model that underpins this crisis-ridden economic and increasingly political bloc,
neoliberalism, is one made in America. From inception as the lodestar of Western economic thought in the mid 1970s, prior to its
adoption as the economic base of the US and UK in the early 1980s, neoliberalism has functioned
alongside Washington's military might and overweening cultural values as part of an
architecture of imperialism to which European elites have signed up as fully-fledged disciples,
consciously or otherwise.
... ... ...
John Wight has written for a variety of newspapers and websites, including the
Independent, Morning Star, Huffington Post, Counterpunch, London Progressive Journal, and
Foreign Policy Journal.
Blooming Barricade , Dec 18, 2018 12:24:14 AM |
link
There are several logical questions to be asked from all this "weapon" talk. Namely, when is
information, culture, the economy, infrastructure, sex or what have you not "weaponised?" It
seems to me that Putin's alleged weapons - anti-fracking, anti-TTIP, no to NATO, socialist
parties, radical activism, left wing pages - turn out to be double edged swords that always
for some strange reason always seem to upset the elites. Anything that hurts them, after all,
is swiftly identified as part of his dastardly arsenal. Funny how that works...
It's hard to believe that the West's movers and shakers genuinely crave a hot with Russia
and/or China. So there's got to be a logical-ish explanation for all the infantile drivel.
Greedy people don't care how 'colourful' they may seem if there's a Pot Of Gold at the End
of the Rainbow. And the greediest and most mendacious of the Greedy & Mendacious are
probably over-represented among the Owners/Shareholders in the Military-Security Gravy Train
(M-S GT).
AmeriKKKa's doofus Military has 'eliminated' most of the pissant Imaginary Threats to
'security' and those adventures cost taxpayers at least 3 times more than they cost the M-S
GT to accomplish. So, having decided that it's time to tackle some big Imaginary Threats it
almost goes without saying that the M-S GT's budget will need to be increased to
'unpredictable' levels.
Because North Korea can "Manhattan" Manhattan anytime the Yanks get uppity, it's no longer
a pissant threat. China & Russia on the other hand are only interested in Peace,
Development & Prosperity for All, making them the Perfect (safe) New Boogeymen.
......
In his first TV interview after the election Trump said on 60 Minutes "I think politicians
for a long period of time have let people down. They've let them down on the job front...
they've even let 'em down in terms of the War front. You know, we've been fighting this war
in the ME for 15 years .. we've spent 6 Trillion dollars in the ME... 6 Trillion. We could
have rebuilt this country twice. It's unfair what's happened to the people in this country
and we're gonna put a stop to it."
In my not so humble opinion he's smart enough to pull it off.
"... While this Russia weaponizes everything stuff is good for a laugh for some of us, it is also as Putin has indicated above, a serious business. The repeated and repeated and repeated connection of the word 'weaponized' to Russia and Putin is intended to cultivate/encourage western hatred and fear and suspicion. ..."
"... And for some element of the population, it works. ..."
The Russian president on Saturday warned against attempts to ban and prosecute rappers,
describing such measures as "the least effective, the worst ones anyone could come up
with."
"The effect of them would be opposite to the desired one," Putin said.
Putin correctly focused on the drugs as the true harm to a society:
"If they like that stuff abroad – God help them, they can do anything they want. We
here should reflect on how to organize our work to prevent this."
As we have seen in countless theaters from China to the US - and now writ large in the
motivations of terrorists, who are very much fueled by drugs - drugs have been weaponized for
a long time.
Robert Snefjella , Dec 17, 2018 10:50:34 PM |
link
While this Russia weaponizes everything stuff is good for a laugh for some of us, it is
also as Putin has indicated above, a serious business. The repeated and repeated and repeated
connection of the word 'weaponized' to Russia and Putin is intended to cultivate/encourage
western hatred and fear and suspicion.
And for some element of the population, it works.
It makes easier, facilitates, the work of Russia-bashing western public perception
management professionals - propagandists.
It strengthens and expands an already widespread public subliminal hostile-to-Russia
attitudinal 'matrix'.
It greases the skids for economic warfare - sanctions etc, and towards actual war, and
for war preparation.
It provides a roadblock to the normalization of relations and reasonable discourse with
Russia.
Here are a couple of examples from Canada.
A fellow connected to the federal bureaucracy - lowly position but rubbing shoulders with
more influential people - offered that "You have to admit that Putin's kind of weird." Didn't
say it with any passion. My answer, Why do you say that? Turned out he knew nothing
substantial about Putin. Maybe he saw a picture of him riding a bear or something. But he had
been injected by a knee jerk casual negative impression.
Another person of my acquaintance - school teacher - had so imbibed casual propaganda re
Putin and Russia that it was a traumatic, startling experience to hear good things said about
Russia and Putin. This person had no great political interest, but regularly watched
conventional 'news' programming.
News that the BBC is trying to tie the Gilets Jaunes movement to the Kremlin reaches the
Russian Foreign Ministry. Betting that Lavrov, Zakharova and company are all having a laugh
as well.
Just when you think British news media couldn't fall any deeper into their rabbit hole ...
down, down farther they go into the abyss ... aaarrgghhh ...
"... Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large. ..."
"... People are building their careers on this garbage! ..."
The Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are run by people.
These people display a stunning level of immorality by lying and war-mongering.
Some of the people at the Oxford University's Computational Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project are banal
presstitutes ready to oblige the top clients (management) for a modest pay, whereas others are real criminals whose ideas and
orders have been endangering the western civilization -- and humankind at large.
It would be proper to publish a roster of the presstitutes and their idiotic managers working at the Oxford University's Computational
Propaganda Project and the Integrity Initiative Project
About half an hour ago I opened News.Google.Com these are some of their major headlines:
Russians sought to recruit 'assets' through social media, Senate told - CNN . one hour
ago
Russua favored Trump, targeted African-Americans with election meddling, reports say -
NBC News . one hour ago
New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the operation's
scale and sweep - The Washington Post . today
Senate report finds millions of social media posts by Russians aimed at helping Trump,
GOP - USA TODAY . 2 hours ago
Silicon Valley may have done 'bare minimum' to help Russia investigation, Senate Intel
Committee told - CNN . one hour ago
I opened the one from the Washington Post:
Headline: "New report on Russian disinformation, prepared for the Senate, shows the
operation's scale and sweep"
Subtext: "The report, a draft of which was obtained by The Washington Post, is the
first to analyze the millions of posts provided by major technology firms to the Senate
Intelligence Committee."
The headline is meant to give the impression that the report was prepared at *The Behest*
of the Senate. If you read the article it would have you believe that it *was* written at the
behest of the Senate but does not say that specifically.
Well? Was it? I have tried to track it down and could use some assistance.
Buried in a CBS NEWS version of the article is this sentence: "The Committee welcomed the
research effort without endorsing either report's findings."
USA TODAY says it *was* "Senate Reports". The lead paragraph is this: "WASHINGTON –
The Senate released Monday a pair of reports that found Russia engaged in an all-out social
media campaign on Donald Trump's behalf during the 2016 election and continued to support him
after he took office."
"People are building their careers on this garbage!"
Josh said at #60
"What would be particularly interesting is also to see how the money flow is helping the
(we all know it) struggling news organizations. I believe many of these
quasi-journalists are going hat in hand to various agencies that have some of that
propaganda money. Most of them would need to work for weeks getting paid a measly amount,
but doing a couple of these anti-Russia pieces gets them paid well. I certainly think
the Guardian has such an arrangement with MI5/6. The recipe is using the wonderwords like Putin, Russia, 'weaponizing', hackers, cyber,
fake news..."
Elements of fascism doctrine are noe constituent part of any Western national security state. In a sense fascism as a
derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for
this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but
the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US
citizens after the 9/11. Use of fascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute project.
Notable quotes:
"... "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. ..."
"... Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. ..."
"... In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. ..."
"... It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole ..."
"... Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime? ..."
It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism:
A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary
of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.
The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra
convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.
Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people
don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering
not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.
To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea
in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men
(and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.
However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II,
people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils.
In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist
Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but
form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying
[1] Albright
even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch
painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that
Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.
Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with
those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf States.
Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist
state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right
would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated
to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.
This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding
universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment
does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too
big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex,
the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I
suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign
enemies for governments domestically.
Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments
present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln,
De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims
of being "non-authoritarian."
In semi-democratic Venezuela or authoritarian Cuba? In democratic India or authoritarian China? In Atatürk's secular dictatorship
or Erdoğan's Islamist democracy? In authoritarian Yugoslavia or democratic Bosnia? In democratic Jamaica or authoritarian Singapore?
Try to be honest (with yourself).
I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical
of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the
book review already up by
Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think
are an interesting subject.
The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal
democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize
that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy – with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men
and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to – you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns
and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.
The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting
reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result,
they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average
dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)
Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence
and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up
communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at
the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek,
Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall – if he'd toned that back,
and just that might have been enough – I'd probably be typing in German today.
In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability.
This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and
democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As
Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness
that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether
they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in
ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally,
has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.
The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could
see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted
for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles.
Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?
The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted
and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic
line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether,
so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform
set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like
national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community – but in principle these can be anything, such
as equality, eugenics, or ecology.
Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the
bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear
word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought
quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.
Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism,
and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if
found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering
your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.
Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious
that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various
Islamist rebel groups – specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.
Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training
a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could
have prevented climate change.
It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do
democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and
power of the community as a whole.
Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am
an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual
right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.
I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let
us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a
much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to
do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and
corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified
museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin
American country – even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist
postwar Italy of 75 million.
More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless
you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist
nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course
they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.
Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world.
Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke
already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of
people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions
will die in the future.
White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the
merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.
Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves
had to say about their values: Mussolini's
Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored
with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.
Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance.
In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent – the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization –
dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy,
these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming
minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled
to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely
we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.
To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people
on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed
more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she
wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.
Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the
action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes,
including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not
whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.
Early on in her book, Albright says:
My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established
an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This
is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.
I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a
charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because
French President François Mitterrand
seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the
Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."
No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly,
the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the
Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular)
, the
Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual
media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality – as she claims – or simply
a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.
Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism
– funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including
under her tenure as secretary of State – is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like
the ADL in America and
the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a
Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today.
Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.
The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find
equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.
Notes
[1]
Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."
[2]
I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.
Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of
Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom
to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website.
Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
No results containing all your search terms were found.
The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT
Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to
achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?
Elements of fascism doctrine are noe constituent part of any Western national security state. In a sense fascism as a
derivative of corporatism (control of the state by finance and large industrialists and in turn enforcing policies beneficial for
this group) won in the form of "inverted totalitarism". So dominance of intelligence agencies was preserved and amplified, but
the political mobilization of masses are discouraged under neoliberalism. Go shopping was famous Bush II recommendation to US
citizens after the 9/11. Use of fascism in propaganda purposes more often then not constitute project.
Notable quotes:
"... "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people don't like. ..."
"... Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States. ..."
"... In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability. This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. ..."
"... It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and power of the community as a whole ..."
"... Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime? ..."
It is always gratifying when one's intuition is confirmed. I had the impression, picking up Madeleine Albright's book Fascism:
A Warning , that I would be treated to an exercise of "Fascism is bad. And everything I don't like is Fascism!" The former secretary
of State, a Jewish liberal originally hailing from Czechoslovakia, did not disappoint.
The book is essentially a set of portraits of various movements and leaders Albright considers to be "Fascist" ( contra
convention, she capitalizes even when not referring to Mussolini's National Fascist Party) and/or vaguely fascistic.
Albright warns early on that people use "fascism" as a catch-all derogatory term for just about any exercise of authority people
don't like. She proposes a somewhat reasonable definition of fascism and then goes on to do exactly what she warned against, covering
not only Mussolini and Hitler, but also Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and communist Czechoslovakia in her Fascist(ish) portraits.
To be fair, these vignettes are often quite informative. The chapters on Hugo Chávez, Recep Erdoğan, and the Kims of North Korea
in particular showcase a diplomat's sensitivity and nuance, making an effort to understand the motivations and appeal of these men
(and the movements and/or systems they represent), as well as their considerable failings.
However, to lump all of these under the broad heading "quasi-fascist" only makes sense in terms of branding. Since World War II,
people have been taught to consider authoritarianism, fascism, "Nazism," nationalism, racism, and eugenics as the supreme evils.
In fact, these things are quite different (there were democratic countries systematically practicing eugenics and racism, while Fascist
Italy if anything was quite slow to adopt such policies). These things are not really distinguished in people's minds however but
form a kind of hideous potpourri of sadistic bullying
[1] Albright
even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying." and senseless suffering, basically a Hieronymus Bosch
painting come to life, embodying their deepest fears as human beings. Emotionally it is very powerful and it is understandable that
Albright would want to misleadingly brand all her opponents as (quasi-)Fascists.
Opponents of American imperialism will observe that Albright's list of quasi-Fascist states corresponds quite closely with
those who have opposed U.S. foreign policies in recent decades. There is barely a word about America's authoritarian allies Saudi
Arabia and the Gulf States.
Strikingly, the word "Netanyahu" does not appear in the book's Index at all. The existence of a democratic ethno-nationalist
state goes against her whole narrative. For what it's worth, I suspect most people in European nationalist parties and in the Alt-Right
would be happy to preserve democracy if they could have their own Netanyahus, with the establishment of Western ethnostates dedicated
to their own people, with the explicit goal of preserving or restoring ethnic European demographic supermajorities.
This selectivity will encourage the impression that the State Department's talk of "human rights" has less to do with upholding
universal moral principles than with demonizing the United States' geopolitical opponents du jour . The American Establishment
does not bully China as much as Russia, despite being obviously more authoritarian. I suspect this is because China is already too
big to bully, while Russia can still be pushed around and serve as a useful bogeyman (always useful to the Military-Industrial Complex,
the National Security State, and for all the Establishmentarians who need a scapegoat for the rise of populism). On that note, I
suspect most diplomatic conflicts today have less to do with "realist" international power dynamics than with the utility of foreign
enemies for governments domestically.
Personally I prefer a republican government under the rule of law. But it would be dishonest to deny that authoritarian governments
present certain advantages. In times of crisis, all governments tend to revert to authoritarianism to get the job done (e.g.: Lincoln,
De Gaulle . . .). In the future, I'll write something on the merits and demerits of liberty and authority, and on the liberal claims
of being "non-authoritarian."
In semi-democratic Venezuela or authoritarian Cuba? In democratic India or authoritarian China? In Atatürk's secular dictatorship
or Erdoğan's Islamist democracy? In authoritarian Yugoslavia or democratic Bosnia? In democratic Jamaica or authoritarian Singapore?
Try to be honest (with yourself).
I will not quibble about the book's one-sided point of view, sometimes questionable assertions, and various hypocrisies typical
of U.S. foreign policy (on which see the
book review already up by
Morris V. de Camp on Counter-Currents ). I'd rather take the subject head-on: the merits and demerits of fascism, which I think
are an interesting subject.
The biggest and really inexcusable intellectual weakness of Albright's book is in lazily equating or associating the various illiberal
democratic regimes (meaning nothing more than democratic regimes liberals don't agree with) with fascist ones. It fails to recognize
that democracy causes populism . If you have democracy – with real freedom of speech and not a dictatorship of the money-men
and of the mainstream media which the postwar American generations were used to – you will get Trumps and Bolsonaros and Corbyns
and Erdoğans. This kind of mess is a feature, not a bug, of real democracy.
The governments of illiberal democracies, it seems to me, also behave more badly because they have to worry about getting
reelected. Unlike dictatorships, these governments are insecure, if they lose one election, they risk losing everything. As a result,
they seem to me to be more erratic and have more of a taste for (often damaging) spectacle and demagogic measures than does the average
dictatorship. (Again: compare the peace and orderliness of Cuba with the violence and chaos of Venezuela.)
Fascism entails a one-party state under the authority of a charismatic dictator, typically with a commitment to national independence
and power. The fascist claims that the right people, in practice the men willing to go out there and risk their lives to beat up
communists, ought to be in charge. The biggest risk, as in all personal dictatorships, is that the country's development is put at
the mercy of the wisdom and the stability of the leader. There have been plenty of competent dictators: Franco, Chiang Kai-shek,
Lee Kuan Yew, etc. Hitler's personal contempt for the Slavs, more than anything else, caused his downfall – if he'd toned that back,
and just that might have been enough – I'd probably be typing in German today.
In a dictatorship, the elimination of political and ideological pluralism means that the country can enjoy political stability.
This, by the way, is crucial in multiethnic countries such as Yugoslavia or Iraq, for which the fall of the dictatorship and
democratization led to atrocious ethno-religious civil war. As
Lee Kuan Yew , my favorite antidote to the political childishness
that prevails in the West today, said concerning his multiracial state of Singapore: "We had to lock up people, without trial, whether
they are communists, whether they are language chauvinists, or religious extremists. If you don't do that the country would be in
ruins today!" Few things have been as murderous as the promotion of "democracy" in Iraq, Libya, and Syria, a policy which, not coincidentally,
has destroyed several geopolitical opponents of Israel.
The government can furthermore take decisive actions where necessary. Fascism rose in Italy because veterans and others could
see that the parliamentary democracy was unable to stop communist-inspired chaos and was generally ineffectual. The Germans voted
for Hitler so as to free Germany from the chaos of Western financial capitalism and to overturn the injustices of the Treaty of Versailles.
Does anyone think the divided, social-democratic Weimar Republic could have overturned Versailles as quickly as the Third Reich did?
The lack of elections means political leaders have no need to pander to the 51% every couple of years. The rulers can adopt far-sighted
and sustainable policies without worrying about electoral change or unpopularity (the European Union follows this line anti-democratic
line of argument concerning macroeconomics, a field in which it is attempting to eliminate the influence of elected politicians altogether,
so as to ensure only "responsible" budgetary and monetary decisions are taken). The government can furthermore promote a uniform
set of values, in the case of fascism, this tends to be things like
national power, independence, and individual self-sacrifice for the community – but in principle these can be anything, such
as equality, eugenics, or ecology.
Fascism does not necessarily mean racism, eugenics, anti-Semitism, or perpetual warfare. Italian Fascism really should set the
bar in this area. As Albright admits, if Mussolini had chosen to join the winning side in World War II, fascism would not be a swear
word today. Mussolini only sided with Hitler because of the Anglo-French's opposition to his invasion of Ethiopia, which he thought
quite hypocritical, given that Britain and France already had vast colonial empires of their own.
Fascism is often quite inclusive: involving the masses, educating them, giving them access to culture, economic welfare, tourism,
and healthcare. In general, these systems try to be meritocratic (like any honest bureaucracy really), letting all apply and, if
found competent and appropriate, hired and promoted through the ranks. In short, a degree of socialism, but without slaughtering
your upper-classes, starving your Kulaks, or waging war against your own population.
Saddam Hussein's long-time foreign minister and deputy prime minister, Tariq Aziz, was a non-Arab Christian. It is also also notorious
that the Baathist regimes in Iraq and Syria were/are more tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities than have been the various
Islamist rebel groups – specializing in enslaving Yazidis and destroying priceless Greco-Roman architecture.
Fascism, in short, is a nation making an effort , according to whatever goals have been set (e.g. having more babies, training
a powerful army, reducing dependence on foreign imports . . .). Democracy is the pursuit of comfiness. An eco-fascism probably could
have prevented climate change.
It goes without saying that fascist and authoritarian countries in general pose a greater threat to U.S. hegemony than do
democratic ones who value above all money-making, individual choice, and the pretense of equality, rather than the well-being and
power of the community as a whole.
Personally, I think ancient republican theory is distinctly superior to the modern (I can barely read Locke and Rousseau). I am
an Aristotelian: I favor whatever promotes the collective flourishing of the community and of the species. e.g.: I support an individual
right if and only if it promotes the common good. Wrap your head around that.
I can't say how a Fascist Italy would have evolved had it won besides the other Allies or remained neutral in World War II. Let
us suppose a middling route: Italy would have maintained its colonial empire for far longer, it would have probably maintained a
much higher birth rate, it would have worked much harder to maintain economic independence (and had some means, via the empire, to
do so, especially in terms of oil), and would generally be a far more independent and powerful country than has been the supine and
corrupt Italian Republic, good for nothing except getting milked for usurious interests rates by international financiers, a glorified
museum and holiday resort. By way of comparison, look at how peaceful, healthy, and independent Cuba is compared to the average Latin
American country – even managing to send 25,000 soldiers to Angola in the 1970s to fight Apartheid. Now imagine that, but a Fascist
postwar Italy of 75 million.
More generally, you still have your basic human capital (a nation of inbred idiots will remain a nation of inbred idiots unless
you have an effective eugenics program). After colonial independence, most of the Third World was actually governed by kind-of-fascist
nationalist and socialist dictatorships, who had the merit of trying to ensure some level of stability and wealth-sharing. Of course
they tended to also be corrupt and incompetent, but regime type doesn't seem to matter much in that respect.
Ever since the French Revolution, liberals and democrats have sought to impose their ideological preferences on the entire world.
Unless you adopt their ever-changing and quite arbitrary list of rights, you are "evil" as far as they are concerned. As Edmund Burke
already saw back then, the imposition of such norms on other, vastly different societies is a recipe for chaos. Many millions of
people have died in the demoliberals' quest to impose their ideology on the whole world and I have no doubt that many more millions
will die in the future.
White liberals lack empathy for "fascists" and "racists" of their own race, although they are quite capable of considering the
merits and demerits of such positions when these concern other nations or science fiction settings.
Given fascism's importance in the history of the twentieth century, people owe it to themselves to look at what the fascists themselves
had to say about their values: Mussolini's
Doctrine of Fascism (co-authored
with philosopher Giovanni Gentile) is a concise and serious declaration of political principles.
Taking the long view, the democratization of Europe coincided almost perfectly with the Continent's collapse into irrelevance.
In 1914, Europeans and people of European descent – the people who had for all intents and purposes created modern civilization –
dominated virtually the entire globe and made up a third of the world's population. Less than 150 years after the triumph of democracy,
these same people will have not only lost their global empires but are set to even lose control of their own nations, by becoming
minorities in North America, Australasia, and even their historic, millennia-old homelands in Western Europe. They will have dwindled
to less than 5% of the world population and may well become under siege, like the Christians of Lebanon or the Serbs of Kosovo. Surely
we deserve a Cosmic Darwin Award for this.
To nationalists, postwar "democracy" was the regime which persecutes nationalists and systematically ignores the will of the people
on the critical issue of immigration. It appears no more than a sham to them. Albright acknowledges that Americans before agreed
more because a narrower media class carefully curated what Americans were allowed to see and read and think. To address this, she
wants to "put a saddle on the bucking bronco we call the Internet." So much for democracy and free speech.
Liberal-democracy means majority rule . . . except when liberals strongly disagree with the majority (then, they believe, the
action should be unconstitutional and/or the media-political class have a solemn duty to shut down the issue). In reality, all regimes,
including "democratic" ones, have official or unofficial Platonic Guardians enforcing certain values and ideas. The question is not
whether something is "democratic" but whether the values and ideas promoted by the Guardians are true.
Early on in her book, Albright says:
My students remarked that the Fascist chiefs we remember best were charismatic. Through one method or another, each established
an emotional link to the crowd and, like the central figure of a cult, brought deep and often ugly feelings to the surface. This
is how the tentacles of Fascism spread inside a democracy.
I believe that is the fundamental issue: Albright fears an organized mass of people with a strong emotional connection with a
charismatic leader, one who could actually shake up the system. This reminds me of that Jewish journalist who was offended because
French President François Mitterrand
seemed to care more about the millions of Frenchmen who died in World War I than the millions of his fellow Jews who died in the
Shoah : "[Mitterrand] became again, in these movements, that Gaulish chieftain that I did not like very much."
No sir, they don't like European chieftains leading impassioned followers. That could lead to a pogrom . . . or worse. Certainly,
the current absurdly skewed and unjust situation in the
Ivy Leagues (see the graphs in particular)
, the
Democratic Party , and much of the elite and audiovisual
media would probably be shut down. We can ask whether Albright's fears reflect universal morality – as she claims – or simply
a natural desire to defend one's ethnic interests and privileges.
Albright's alarmism about every tepid manifestation of Western civic nationalism and her casual ignoring of Jewish ethnonationalism
– funded at American taxpayers' expense and driving much of the murderous insanity of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, including
under her tenure as secretary of State – is a hypocrisy sadly typical of many American liberal Jews. Influential Jewish groups like
the ADL in America and
the CRIF in France have promoted immigration and multiculturalism in the West all the while demanding support for Israel as a
Jewish ethnostate. Growing awareness of this hypocrisy is contributing to the rise of anti-Jewish sentiment across the West today.
Many liberals and/or Jews simply cannot comprehend that this is happening. But it is.
The sooner we can discuss all issues and acknowledge untruths and injustices on all sides, the sooner we will be able to find
equitable and peaceful solutions to these problems. At least, that is my hope.
Notes
[1]
Albright even quotes Orwell claiming that fascism is nothing more than "bullying."
[2]
I know Singapore allows some minor parties to exist notionally, but power is dominated by the People's Action Party.
Albright's relationship to fascism was broadly advertised for about 10 years. From 1999 until Obama's first midterm a photo of
Albright and Hosni Mubarak in a warm embrace circulated on the internet. It's caption unironically feature "celebrating freedom
to the Balkans" circa post Serbian bombing campaign. Freedom along the Nile never came up on the, apparently, defunct website.
Just before the "Arab Spring" the photo disappeared from the internet. Here's what a google search turns up:
Showing results for madeleine albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
Search instead for madelin albright Hosni mubarak image "celebrating freedom to the Balkans"
No results containing all your search terms were found.
The Alarmist says: January 5, 2019 at 9:37 pm GMT
Wouldn't you consider a woman unbelievably comfortable with using sanctions to snuff a half-million Iraqi children to
achieve US policy objectives to be the poster-child of a facist regime?
Hackers who leaked documents from the Integrity Initiative, a shadowy outfit funded by the
UK government, claim they show its connections to the March 2018 alleged poisoning attack in
Salisbury and proposed actions against Russia. The Integrity Initiative (II) was set up in 2015
by the equally shadowy "Institute for Statecraft," according to the documents
published online in
November by hackers calling themselves a part of the Anonymous collective. While Anonymous
has denied the group was behind the leak, the Institute confirmed the authenticity of the first
batch of documents.
The hackers
posted a fresh batch of documents purportedly from the Initiative and the Institute on
Friday, hinting that both outfits had connections with Western media coverage of the March 2018
alleged poisoning of former Russian spy Sergey Skripal, and the actions against Russia taken
subsequently by the UK government and its allies.
One of the documents is the
confidential report by Harod Associates, a company hired by the Initiative to conduct
"mainstream & social media analysis" of the Skripal scandal coverage. The entire
undertaking was dubbed "Operation Iris."
Among those who found themselves named "Russian trolls" and Kremlin agents in the
report were Ukrainian-born pianist Valentina Lisitsa and a gentleman from Kent who goes by
Ian56 on Twitter.
Wanna see something funny? 🤣
"The Insider" - the same "Insider", that was credited by Bellingcat with "outing Boshirov and
Petrovas GRU agents" - has investigated and found me guilty of passing Putin orders to French
yellow jackets. I kid you not. https://t.co/I3X4ypylAP
Another
document , dated March 11, 2018, contains a "Narrative" of the Skripal incident,
blaming Russia and President Vladimir Putin personally and containing a number of recommended
actions, such as boycotting the 2018 World Cup, starting campaigns to boycott the Nord Stream 2
gas pipeline from Russia to Germany and block Russian access to SWIFT international banking
system, but also to "ban RT TV and Sputnik from operating in the UK."
Other suggestions include propaganda directed at British Muslims "to publicise what has been
happening with their Muslim brethren in Crimea since the Russian invasion" (sic) and getting
members of Parliament to publicize the "threat Russia poses."
The document dump also contains the April
14, 2018 email from Andy Pryce, whom the hackers describe as "chief propaganda man" at the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office, containing the official government narrative of the Skripal
affair and the alleged chemical attack in Douma, Syria. Pryce ends the email by recommending
"good sources of further information" on alleged Russian propaganda, including the
Atlantic Council's DFR Lab, Bellingcat and Stopfake.
Documents obtained and published by the hackers also show connections between Skripal's
recruiter and neighbor Pablo Miller, the Institute for Statecraft, and the so-called rescue
group White Helmets, created in militant-held areas of Syria by a former British official in
2013.
It was already known that Pablo Miller, the MI6 handler of Sergej Skripal, attended
#IntegrityInitiative
meetings. There is now more material to draw a connection. It is indeed possible that IfS/II
initiated the affair. https://t.co/Xv29Uk9z3e
There are also several invoices from Dan Kaszeta of the Institute for Statecraft, for
articles he wrote as supposedly a chemical weapons expert advancing the Institute's narrative
on both the Skripals and Syria.
The most intriguing, however, is
a document from 2015 , in which Victor Madeira of the Institute for Statecraft proposes a
series of measures targeting Russia, including mass expulsion of diplomats along the lines of
1971's Operation Foot. One of the actions by the UK, US and several other NATO countries in the
wake of claims that Russia used a nerve agent against Skripal was a mass expulsion of Russian
diplomats.
Former MP George Galloway noted that the documents written long before the Salisbury events
call for arrests of RT and Sputnik contributors (such as himself), adding, "Makes you think
"
Previously published documents have revealed the Initiative and the Institute as being
involved in widespread
propaganda operations targeting not only foreign countries and media outlets – as one
might expect from someone doing the bidding of the Foreign Office – but also domestic political
figures , such as Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.
"Return of the Neocons" [Stephen Wertheim, New York Review of
Books ]. "In Washington, D.C., liberal foreign policy hands have reacted to Trump's
presidency less by reaching out to ordinary citizens than by crossing K Street to make common
cause with their neighborhood neocons. Among otherefforts ,
the Center for American Progress (CAP), the leading Clintonian policy shop, is now issuing
joint reports
with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the leading neocon incubator, which this year
sent John Bolton to be National Security Adviser. CAP donated $200,000 to AEI in
2017. " • Neera Tanden even now making sure that Wertheim never eats brunch in this town
again .
BALANCE. The first successful test of the Avangard hypersonic
vehicle is announced . Super fast (
Mach 27 they say ) and highly manoeuvrable, development began when Washington withdrew from
the ABM Treaty. Putin promised that Russia would "act independently", it did and here we are
today. Avangard nullifies the entire US ballistic missile defence effort: "
We don't have any defense ". Impossible to shoot down: there's only about 20 minutes from
launch to anywhere and it can be coming in from any direction. Putin, in his presser, said
Avangard "maintains the balance". It's important to understand Moscow's point of view and not
respond with
petulance . Because, here as elsewhere, Moscow has got it right: the danger of ballistic
missile defence development is that one side might come to believe that its defence is good
enough to save it from a response and might be tempted to do a first strike. (Who's stupid
enough? Well, that's what all this stuff is about: removing the possibilities). The ABM Treaty
preserved the crazy, but stable, balance of mutual assured destruction. It was stable
because, each side knew that, whatever the start state, whatever happened in between, the end
state would always be the same: destruction of both. But Washington, convinced it would be
supreme forever, tossed the Treaty in 2001. Russia now has a weapon that cannot be stopped;
therefore there is no possible way to stop a retaliatory strike and so no first strike is
conceivable. We're back to the crazy stability of mutual assured destruction. This is
rebalancing. But it would have been much easier, cheaper and safer to have kept the original
Treaty.
RUSSIA INC. From Putin's presser . 2018 numbers so far. GDP up
1.7%, industrial output up 2.9%; fixed capital investment up 1.4%; real incomes showing small
growth of 0.5%; expect to hit inflation estimate of 4%; unemployment down to just under 5%;
trade surplus on track to be about $190 billion; gold and foreign currency reserves $464
billion. There will be a small budget surplus (first since 2011) and the National Welfare Fund
has grown about 22%. Life expectancy up a bit to 72.9 years. The Energy Minister estimates
Russia earned an extra $120 billion in two years of oil production cuts. Russia is
surviving the West's sanctions. Putin later added that Russia produces about 80% of "vital
medications".
PUTIN ON SOCIALISM. See this . Still a
тупик (Russian slang for dead end).
SKRIPALMANIA. Putin : "Without the Skripal case, they
would have come up with something else. This is quite obvious to me. Their only goal is to
contain Russia and prevent it from emerging as a potential competitor." Sochi toilets; MH17;
doping; "invasion of Crimea"; election whatever-the-story-is-now; Masha and the Bear and on and
on. Always something. (But I don't think Russia is losing this, do you?)
Short of Time so I cannot write to much, but a little thing of Note
Re: Paul Wheelan - the VK Page made of his Name, whose Updates go back to at least 2010
has 70 Friends, of this 70 - I think it looks as though 5~ are Female..
Ones views may vary but my own Experiences is that a lot of Western Men on VK are there
with very specific Goals in mind ))
Indeed some live rather paralel lives thanks to the 'distance' a different Social Network can
afford from ones Wives etc.
He does not appear to have had any such Motivations.
Another Observation, Of those Friends - quite a Number of them have Military Background
(Some Navy, Some VDV for example)... Not unusual - this is Russia. BUT the sheer Number of
Kursanty and that many come from RVVDKU raises Questions.
I personally have some connection to this little closed World, though I studied and
trained out of Ekaterinburg/Tolyatti respectively - while some Applicants may indeed speak
English the level of Conversational English and Practice for most Russians is low (lower
outside Moscow and Pitr), and it does NOT change that much once you look to many these
Institutions either..
It would indeed be interesting to know which Communities he is said to have made this
Contacts in, Spartak Forum or else? Chatter is low there, and some older Forums like
Bratishka a sort of 'Home' back in the Day for many Allumni has nothing
Indeed many this People in his list were born at the Time of or up to 10 Years AFTER he
was Graduating High School - itself not Pointing to the closest generational 'Commonality'
between him and his Friends, and in younger Generations said old 'Forums' is increasingly
less used for other Social Medias (Livejournal, VK, Insta, Twitter etc)
A Curious Case, it also would strike me as sensible to consider that indeed personal
Motivations could play a role in any such Activities if the Charges are 'true'
I am constantly showing people this graph of Russian GDP adjusted for inflation. Please note
that Putin came to power in 1999.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org...
I only just noticed the graph only goes up to 2014 - that is annoying, but I do think it
provides "the big picture".
There's only one thing necessary to maintain the respect and affection of DC's ruling political and media class: affirm standard
precepts of US imperialism & militarism. You can work for Trump, or cheer menacing authoritarians, and you'll still be revered
as long as you do that:
Nikki Haley @NikkiHaley
Congratulations to Brazil's new President Bolsonaro. It's great to have another U.S.-friendly leader in South America, who
will join the fight against dictatorships in Venezuela and Cuba, and who clearly understands the danger of China's expanding influence
in the region.
4 февраля
гостьей
программы
"Гордон" была
народный
депутат
Украины V - VII
созывов Елена
Бондаренко.
Сильные мира
сего умеют
хранить свои
тайны, и тем
интереснее
задавать им
прямые и
неудобные
вопросы, чтобы
отделить
правду от лжи и
узнать истину.
Они будут
пытаться
уклоняться от
ответов, но
Дмитрий Гордон
постарается
докопаться до
самой сути.
Эти люди
расскажут о том,
о чем принято
молчать – что
волнует
общество и
Дмитрия
Гордона в
частности.
Things have been quite active in the Eastern Mediterranean lately, with Israel, Cyprus and
Greece pushing forward for the realization of the EastMed pipeline, a new gas conduit destined
to diversify Europe's natural gas sources and find a long-term reliable market outlet for all
the recent Mediterranean gas discoveries. The three sides have reached an agreement in late
November (roughly a year after signing the MoU) to lay the pipeline, the estimated cost of
which hovers around $7 billion (roughly the same as rival TurkStream's construction cost). Yet
behind the brave facade, it is still very early to talk about EastMed as a viable and
profitable project as it faces an uphill battle with traditionally difficult Levantine
geopolitics, as well as field geology.
The EastMed gas pipeline is expected to start some 170 kilometers off the southern coast of
Cyprus and reach Otranto on the Puglian coast of Italy via the island of Crete and the Greek
mainland. Since most of its subsea section is projected to be laid at depths of 3-3.5
kilometer, in case it is built it would become the deepest subsea gas pipeline, most probably
the longest, too, with an estimated length of 1900km. The countries involved proceed from the
premise that the pipeline's throughput capacity would be 20 BCM per year (706 BCf), although
previous estimates were within the 12-16 BCm per year interval. According to Yuval Steinitz,
the Israeli Energy Minister, the stakeholders would need a year to iron out all the remaining
administrative issues and 4-5 years to build the pipeline, meaning it could come onstream not
before 2025.
The EastMed gas pipeline is expected to start some 170 kilometers off the southern coast
of Cyprus and reach Otranto on the Puglian coast of Italy via the island of Crete and the
Greek mainland.
Cyprus,Crete,Greece, Italy....
Yes, very stable EU supply line going through the most stable countries in the EU.
Yeah, I'm having trouble with the sub sea depth numbers too, despite the route cuts the
conflicts to a half a dozen from an infinite number.
Intuitively, shipping LNG offers comparable delivery price albeit at lower volumes,and can
be done off shore.
Even here in bucolic Pensyltucky, delivery of natty to market is limited by a lack of
piping infrastructure, limiting the gas boom. It gives the tree huggers time to throttle the
business. Figuring that the political climate and costs are going to get better with time
passing is foolish.
Also considered is price, still cheap, cheap, cheap.
Our local natty supplier just applied for, and received a price reduction, effective next
fall.
Since most of its subsea section is projected to be laid at depths of 3-3.5 kilometer,
in case it is built it would become the deepest subsea gas pipeline, most probably the
longest, too...
oh yeah bitchez. nothing could possibly go wrong with that plan. /s
none has even discovered the goods yet ... and we are told we have to go to war about
building some (((PIPELINES))) on something to be discovered in the future ... if ever
....
as Abba Waterloo song said the history books on the shelf just keeps repeating itself ...
that is why is not that difficult to see through the BS ...
World War I we are told was over some archiduke being killed by some extremist ...as a
result 1/3 of the Serb nation was killed ...
Russophobia is the standard deflection trick, designed to cement cracks in neoliberal society facade. And deep distrust of common
people toward neoliberal elite. With neoliberal elite completely immersed in its own groupthink, which reaches the level "Let them eat
cakes".
Notable quotes:
"... We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave. ..."
"... It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that Trump or Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises. ..."
While Russia-mania is widespread among today's political and cultural elites, it is not uniform.
For an older, right-wing section of the Western political and media class, otherwise known as the Cold War Re-Enactment Society,
Russia looms large principally as a military, quasi-imperial threat. Jim Mattis, the former US marine and general, and now US defence
secretary, said Russia was responsible
for 'the biggest attack [on the world order] since World War Two'. Whether this is true or not is beside the point. What matters
is that Russia appears as a military aggressor. What matters is that Russia's actions in Ukraine – which were arguably a defensive
reaction to NATO and the EU's expansion into Russia's traditional ally – are grasped as an act of territorial aggrandisement. What
matters is that Russia's military operations in Syria – which, again, were arguably a pragmatic intervention to stabilise the West-stoked
chaos – are rendered as an expression of imperial aggression. What matters is that Russian state involvement in the poisoning of
the Skripals in Salisbury – which, given its failure, proved Russian incompetence – is presented as 'part of a pattern of Russian
aggression against Europe and its near neighbours, from the western Balkans to the Middle East', to
quote Theresa May.
And it matters because, if Russia is dressed up as the West's old Cold War adversary, just with a new McMafia logo, then the crumbling,
illegitimate and increasingly pointless postwar institutions through which Western elites have long ordered the world, suddenly look
just that little bit more solid, legitimate and purposeful. And none more so than NATO.
This is why NATO has this year been accompanying its statements
warning Russia to 'stop its reckless pattern of
behaviour' with some of the
largest military exercises since the fall of the Berlin Wall nearly three decades ago. Including one in November in Norway, involving
50,000 troops, 10,000 vehicles, 250 aircraft and 60 warships.
Then there is the newer form of Russia-mania. This has emerged from within the political and cultural elite that came to power
after the Cold War, ploughing an uninspiring third way between the seeming extremes of the 20th century's great ideologies. Broadly
social democratic in sentiment, and elitist and aloof in practice, this band of merry technocrats and their middle-class supporters
have found in 'Russia' a way to avoid having to face up to what the populist revolt reveals – that the majority of Western citizens
share neither their worldview nor their wealth. Instead, they use 'Russia' to displace the people as the source of discontent and
political revolt.
We have seen this play out in the US in the continuing obsession, fronted by Troll-Finder General Robert Mueller, over alleged
Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election. And the same obsession has emerged in the UK, too, with politicians and pundits
claiming that a shadowy network of Russian influence tipped the EU referendum in favour of Leave.
It is never quite clear how the 'Russians' or 'Putin' did all this, beyond Facebook ads and decidedly dubious talk of so-called
dark money. But then clarity is not the point for this stripe of Russia-maniac. He or she simply wants to believe that
Trump or
Brexit were not what they were. Not expressions of popular
will. Not manifestations of popular discontent. Not democratic exercises.
No, they were the result, as one Tory MP
put it , of 'the covert and overt forms of malign influence used by Moscow'.
Or, in
the words of an Observer columnist, 'a campaign that purported to be for the "left behind" was organised and funded by men with
links across the global network of far-right American demagogues and kleptomaniac dictators such as Putin'.
Such has been the determination to blame 'Russia' or 'Putin' for the political class's struggles, that in August Tom Watson, Labour's
conspiracy-theory-peddling deputy leader,
called for a public inquiry into an alleged Russian Brexit plot. '[Voters] need to know whether that referendum was stolen or
not', he said.
Such a call ought to be mocked. After all, it is absurd to think 'Russia', 'Putin' and the trolls are the power behind every populist
throne. But the claims aren't mocked – they're taken as calls to action. Think of anything viewed as a threat to our quaking political
and cultural elites in the West, and you can bet your bottom ruble that some state agency or columnist is busy identifying Putin
or one of his legion of bots and trolls as the source. The
gilet jaunes protests
in France?
Check . Climate change?
Check . Italy's Five Star Movement?
Check
.
And all this from a nation with a GDP
equivalent to Spain, an ageing, declining population, and a failing infrastructure. The reality of Russia is not that of a global
threat, but of a struggling state. Russia is weak. Yet in the minds of those clinging desperately to the status quo, 'Russia' has
never been more powerful.
The USA is treating Russia the same way it treated the USSR and run all kind of subversive operations against it.
Notable quotes:
"... This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1440 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page , which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, or PayPal. Read about why we're doing this fundraiser, what we've accomplished in the last year and our current goal, more original reporting . ..."
"... By John Helmer , the longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with Bears ..."
"... In June 1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ..."
"... It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a lawful sovereign. ..."
"... This Vast Southern Empire ..."
"... A mentor in shamelessness: the man who taught Trump the power of publicity Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial, influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox ..."
"... Angels in America ..."
"... For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6 billion. ..."
"... Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion worth of U.S. citizen ads? ..."
"... Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing? ..."
Yves here. An important bit of history that can't be repeated too often: when the Clinton
Administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact countries, violating a
understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution, George Kennan said it would prove to be
the worst geopolitical mistake the US ever made.
By John Helmer , the
longest continuously serving foreign correspondent in Russia, and the only western journalist
to direct his own bureau independent of single national or commercial ties. Helmer has also
been a professor of political science, and an advisor to government heads in Greece, the United
States, and Asia. He is the first and only member of a US presidential administration (Jimmy
Carter) to establish himself in Russia. Originally published at Dances with
Bears
Joseph Alsop and George Kennan started the kind of Russia-hating in Washington which, today,
President Vladimir Putin, like the businessmen around him, think of as a novelty that cannot
last for long.
Alsop was a fake news fabricator, and such a narcissist as to give the bow-ties he wore a
bad name. Kennan was a psychopath who alternated bouts of aggression to prove himself with
bouts of depression over his cowardice. For them, Russia was a suitable target. The Washington
Post was the newspaper which gave their lunacy public asylum. This, according to a fresh
history by a university professor from California, started in 1947, long before the arrival in
Washington of the anti-communist phobia known after the name of Senator Joseph McCarthy.
Russia-hating was an American upper-class phenomenon, cultivated in the offices, cocktail
parties, clubs, and mansions of the deep state, as it emerged out of World War II. It needed a
new enemy to thrive; it fastened on Russia (aka the Soviet Union) as the enemy.
McCarthyism was an American lower-class phenomenon. It focused on the loyalty or disloyalty
of the upper-class deep-staters. That wasn't the same thing as Russia-hating; Wall Street
bankers, Boston lawyers, homosexuals, Jews, communists, were all the enemy. As the Senator from
Wisconsin characterized it himself in 1952, "McCarthyism is Americanism with its sleeves
rolled." He implied – without a middle-class tie; certainly not an upper-class
bow-tie.
Russia was not an enemy which united the two American lunacies, for they hated each other
much more than they hated the Russians. The Soviet Politburo understood this better then than
the Kremlin does now.
Gregg Herken's The Georgetown
Set , is so named because it records the activities of Alsop, Kennan and several other
State Department, Central Intelligence Agency and White House officials who lived as neighbours
in the Georgetown district of the capital city, together with Katharine (Kay) and Philip
Graham, proprietor managers of the Washington Post. The district – once a chartered city
of Maryland and river port, which was absorbed into the federal District of Columbia in 1871 --
was expensive, relatively speaking then; more so now. The richest of the set, including Alsop,
had town houses in Georgetown, and rural retreats in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and
Connecticut.
They were a set because because, as Herken said succinctly to an interviewer , "they got
together every Sunday for supper and, basically, they ran the country from those meetings." As
the book elaborates, they thought they were running the world. With a longer time lapse in
which to view the evidence, they were also losing it.
Newspapers exposed in the book for collaborating in all the deceits, failures and war crimes
of the history have reacted by calling
Herken's effort a "provincial corner". The New Yorker opined that the Russia-hating
and Russia war-making which Herken retells are dead and gone. "The guests at the Sunday
soirées no doubt felt that they were in the cockpit of history. But the United States is
a democracy, not a Wasp Ascendancy There was once an atmosphere of willingness that made a
system of bribes and information exchanges seem, to the people involved, simply a way of
working together for a common cause in a climate of public opinion that, unfortunately,
required secrecy. No one got rich from the arrangement. People just lost track of what was
inside their bubble and what was outside, as people tend to do. Vietnam was the reality check.
'I've Seen the Best of It' was the title Alsop gave to his memoirs. Things hadn't been the same
since, he felt. He was right about that, and we should be thankful." In the New York media
business these days it's possible to publish a selfie of pulling your own leg.
The Washington Post has deflected the indictment against itself by describing Herken's work
as "a very strange book (A) a rehash of the history of the Cold War as experienced in certain
Washington circles and (B) an almost obsessive recapitulation of the life and journalism of
Joseph Alsop." Alsop is dismissed as unworthy of a history at all because he was "utterly
repellent: arrogant, patronizing, imperious, uninterested in anyone except himself."
That's the truth about Alsop. The truth about the Washington Post is buried in this line by
the Post's books editor about the hand that fed him: "it must be very hard for people who did
not live through the '50s and '60s to understand how obsessed the American people were with the
threat from Moscow." That line appeared in
print on November 7, 2014. It was already history, that's to say, a misjudgement. How
monumentally mistaken is obvious now.
In covering the period from 1946 to 1975, Herken's research does repeat much of the history
of the Cold War which has been told elsewhere. It starts on February 22, 1946, the date of the
"Long Telegram", No. 511 -- Kennan's despatch from the US Embassy in Moscow to the State
Department, setting out his strategy of so-called containment and much more besides. Read it in
the declassified original
. Most of the war-fighting and other war crimes which the telegram set in motion under Kennan's
1948 rubrics, "organized political warfare" and "preventive direct action", are reported in
Herken's book; so too are Kennan's frequent funks, failures of conviction, reversals of
judgement, and pleas for help.
The book ends on December 30, 1974, the date of Alsop's last column. Alsop concluded with
the line: "I have never known the American people to be really badly wrong, if only they were
correctly and fully informed."
Herken shows how self-deluded and professionally delusional that was -- not because of
Alsop's character but because of his sources. Herken documents that they ran upwards from
foot-soldiers (also lubricious sailors) to presidents and cabinet secretaries. Herken doesn't
think the same of Kennan, who gets to walk off stage, aged 101, sounding more sceptical of
overthrowing Saddam Hussein than he ever was in his prime and in power to direct schemes of
what we call state terrorism today.
Left to right: Kennan died in 2005, aged 101; Alsop died in 1989 aged 78; Frank Wisner
died in 1965 aged 56. The deeper Herken gets into the private papers, the more he refers to his
subjects by their diminutives and nicknames – Joe, Oppie, Beetle, Dickie, the Crocodile,
Wig, Jack, Wiz, Soozle, Vangie, et al.
What is fresh about the sources is that Herken has had access to the private notes, letters
and diaries of the Alsop family; the Kennan diaries and letters; and the private papers of
Frank Wisner, the first director of covert operations against Russia. Wisner went mad and
killed himself, as did Graham. There's no doubt about the suicide outcome of their madness.
In the case of the mad ex-Defence Secretary James Forrestal his fatal jump from the window
of the Navy hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, in May 1949 might have been a homicidal push.
Herken concludes that Forrestal's death was "the first senior-ranking American casualty of the
Cold War." Herken thinks of their madness as anomalies. The history shows they were
normalities.
Missing from this history is any reference to official documents, now declassified; press
reporting of the time; or interviews with veterans of the same events but on other sides
– Russian and Soviet; British; German; French; Polish; Vietnamese; Chinese. This isn't so
much a fatal flaw in Herken's (right) book as the reason why his history is repeating itself
today. Call this a variation on Karl's Marx's apothegm that history starts as tragedy and
repeats itself as farce. Herken's blindness to this is as revealing as the Washington Post's
madness, not yet as suicidal as its former proprietor's, today.
So mesmerized is Herken by the moneyed backgrounds of his subjects and sources, and by the
amount of black cash from the US Government they spent on operations, he forgets to report what
they did to fill their own pockets. The claim by the New Yorker that "no one got rich from the
arrangement" – Alsop's fake news fabrications – is false, but Herken touches only
in passing on how they made (or kept) their money. Alsop's column, for example, was sold to 200
newspapers, and at one time claimed a readership of 25 million. His family inheritance is
recorded, but not its annual revenue value. Alsop's payola included silk shirts from Alfred
Kohlberg, a textile importer from China who backed Chiang Kai-shek against Mao Tse-tung, as did
Alsop. Alsop's patrons included Convair (General Dynamics), the company building the US Air
Force Atlas missile for procurement of which Alsop reported fictions about Soviet missile
strength.
In the US power which Alsop, Kennan and Wisner believed without hesitation, Herken is not
less a believer. "Anything could be achieved", Herken quotes a New York Times reporter quoting
Wisner. When the US force multiple changed, however, and US allies or agents were outgunned,
outspent, outnumbered, or outwitted, they were unable to acknowledge miscalculation,
attributing defeat instead to the superior force or guile of their adversaries, especially the
Russians.
This is madness, and there is good reason for recognizing the symptoms again. In 1958, when
Herken says Wisner's paranoid manias were becoming obvious to his friends and colleagues,
"Frank put forward a theory that the careless comment which had gotten George Kennan kicked out
of the Soviet Union was evidence the Soviets had succeeded in an area where the CIA's own
scientists had failed: mind control. Some agency hands alleged that Wisner attributed his own
increasingly bizarre behaviour to the Kremlin's sly manipulation."
From Washington in 1958, fast forward to Washington in 2017; for mind control and sly
manipulation, read Russian hacking and cyber warfare. From Wisner's and Kennan's balloon drops
of leaflets and broadcasts by Radio Free Europe, fast forward to Russia Today Television and
Russian infiltrations of Twitter, Google, the Democratic National Committee, and the Trump
organization.
It stands to reason (ahem!) that if you think what the US Government and its journalists
were doing then was mad, you are might conclude that what they is doing now is just as mad
– and not very different. When the incumbent president and his Secretary of State
publicly call for IQ tests on each other, all reason has failed. "The nation," as Alsop had
written, "had simply taken leave of all sense of proportion." That was in March 1954.
If you fast forward to now, there's one difference. Today the lunatic Russia warfighters
don't retire. They also don't fade away. Today's sleek successors to mad Wisner and mad Graham
sleep easily in their beds a-nights. For what they've done and do, they wouldn't dream of
taking shotguns to their heads.
Herken retells the story of the campaign Alsop waged against McCarthyism at the State
Department, against McCarthy himself, and the vulnerability Alsop himself presented until the
Boston lawyer Joseph Welch put an end to McCarthy on June 9, 1954 : "Have you no sense of decency,
sir, at long last?" Welch famously said. "Have you left no sense of decency?" The recurring
history reveals why, even if there are plenty of people to say the same thing today to the
Washington Post, New York Times, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, the madness will continue
repeating itself.
Wisner's son married the stepmother of Nicolas Sarkozy. This facilitated the Sarkozy
family's links with Wall Street (Guillaume at Credit Suisse and Carlyle and Nicolas'
stepdaughter Judith Martin (daughter of France's Bruce Forsyth and Cecilia Albeniz) at Morgan
Stanley, the latter at Canary Wharf).
A year ago, before his elimination in the Republicain primary, Sarko met executives from
Goldman Sachs to discuss a move from London to Paris due to Brexit. Sarko promised bespoke
personal and corporate tax arrangements in return for a relocation and fanfare. Sarko was
keen on the fanfare and planned to exploit that, thinking it would be a PR coup soon between
his election and the August shut down.
Kay Graham was the daughter of a former partner at Lazard Freres. Her father bought the
WaPo after his retirement. The family and its plaything rag formed part of Operation
Mockingbird.
Also worth mentioning that he purchased the WaPo in 1933. Per wikipedia, " In June
1933, he bought the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction, for $825,000 ".
Pre-sages Bezos buying the WaPo on the cheap too. Can't say I would have thought of Bezos
as being a Russia scare-monger. I guess it's the flip-side of regime change. If you're in the
regime preservation business, perhaps that means regime changing your enemies. In which case,
never let a good crisis go to waste. And if a crisis isn't available well if a newspaper
can't figure out how to manufacture a crisis out of the available pool of evil-doers, then
really why even have a newspaper?
Bezos to Russia, "It's nothing personal, it's just business". Bezos to Trump, "It's
personal."
Seems like that is the under the radar amount of supposed funding for Fronts.
Slowly it dawned on me, or I simply put two and two together realizing I was working for a
CIA/MI6 Front. Explained why mediocrities, liars & thieves had secure jobs.
American Airlines is most probably the inheritor of Air America's freight operations,
station agents, & to pilots a great system for overt & covert operations gets 685
million a year.
IN-Q-TEL the CIA retirement benefits fund for agents gets 685 million as well.
I don't remember where I read the figures. See what you find out?
When I worked the independent movie scene in NYC all the budgets were 100 thousand
dollars.
Now how you know, or the commentators know what they are saying here, I don't know. We are
aware that the US power structure found it convenient to blame, or imply the blame for all
that was stupid and violent in politics in the US on the Russians who as a secretive
organization by habit made the picture plausible.
If oligarchs money fleeing Russia came to America and was a source of Industrial Service
Banking it would be a victory. As it is the working classes in the US and Russia end up with
the same leaders only different.
As it is the game is the same with it being real estate and art.
If there is one thing about Russians, they lust to possess beauty.
Otherwise from my experience they are difficult to do business with and you get more respect
when you up front don't trust them so they can act like Russians.
I pitched to the Atlantic "Statehood for Russia" when the Cold War supposedly ended.
With the propaganda going into what Americans look at and voter system hacking it is evident
they want to be a state.
Outstanding article and excellent commentary points and to elaborate just on several facts
stated: ("Wisner went mad and killed himself, as did Graham.") -- this might have been the
case, but most curiously, both Wisner and Graham were first treated at Chestnut Lodge
Sanitarium in Rockville, MD at the CIA's MK ULTRA wing, then they both would return home and
commit suicide?! This was also the facility where the CIA would send a research nutritionist
(do not know whether they connived her, or it was against her will, etc., but she did not
work for the Agency) who was researching an Amazonian plant with unique properties, and after
her treatment, she never mentioned said plant or research ever again?!.
Also, this is where Richard Helms, then CIA director, had his famous auto accident right
before giving testimony before the Church Committee (when he perjured himself and later was
officially censured by Congress). Helms claimed he was seeing a psychoanalyst (basis for a
simpleton movie from Hollywood called "The President's Analyst" -- probably involved Harry
Weinstein) -- but it was because Helms was shredding all the MK ULTRA files kept there prior
to appearing before the Church Committee.
And Joe Alsop was cousin to several CIA dudes, Kermit Roosevelt and Archibald Roosevelt,
whereupon he received his "tips" or misinformation.
And the Colonel explains Sarkozy's familial background quite nicely, but to further add it
was Wisner and John Negroponte, working through the Franco-American Foundation, who were
supposed to be behind the concocted false scandals against Sarkozy's presidential opponent
which allowed Sarkozy to win the election the first time. (The second time, Sarkozy was
behind that NYC airport "incident" which blow up in his face, resulting in a Hollande
victory.)
There are further Wall Street links in the Sarkozy family. Olivier, half-brother of
Nicolas, was at CS First Boston and worked briefly with our company on an engagement some
years ago. His colleagues remarked on his pedigree and ability to open doors where others
couldn't.
So the USA had no hand in arming Japan and encouraging them to attack Russia, successfully
in 1904? Who stirred up Japan, forcing them with battleships to trade, actually firing on
Japan. USA has always had war plans for the invasion of every country on Earth, since the Civil
War, if not before.
It has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence against a
lawful sovereign. Except for 20 years!!!
WWII was a result of rearmament of Germany, by USA and its banker allies. They wanted USSR
in ashes. In the end they had to rescue Germany, failing in that and losing half of Europe.
That must be smart!
It [USA] has always been fighting on foreign soil since it was formed by violence
against a lawful sovereign.
The monarchy of George III? Lawful sovereign? Who elected George III? Nobody. Who elected
the members of Parliament? Nobody in America, and only adult males who could meet stringent
properly requirements in Britain. Britain in 1775/1776 was definitely not a lawful sovereign
over any territory in the North American continent.
Don't forget Woody Wilson sending the troops to Vladivostok after WW1. Communism was
always regarded as an existential threat by the then WASPy, now not so WASPy elites.
And re Kennan, the recent Ken Burns Vietnam documentary shows him casting doubts on the
Vietnam intervention at a Congressional hearing. Kennan said the policy was like the elephant
being terrified of the mouse. So his Russia obsession does seem to have been more about power
rivalry than ideological apostasy.
If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through
Lend Lease ,
during WW2?
Roughly 17.5 million tons of military equipment, vehicles, industrial supplies, and food
were shipped from the Western Hemisphere to the USSR, 94% coming from the US. For
comparison, a total of 22 million tons landed in Europe to supply American forces from
January 1942 to May 1945.
One item typical of many was a tire plant that was lifted bodily from the Ford Company's
River Rouge Plant and transferred to the USSR. The 1947 money value of the supplies and
services amounted to about eleven billion dollars.
Wasn't Henry Ford supposed to be a Na*i?
While repayment of the interest-free loans was required after the end of the war under
the act, in practice the U.S. did not expect to be repaid by the USSR after the war. The
U.S. received $2M in reverse Lend-Lease from the USSR. This was mostly in the form of
landing, servicing, and refueling of transport aircraft; some industrial machinery and rare
minerals were sent to the U.S. The U.S. asked for $1.3B at the cessation of hostilities to
settle the debt, but was only offered $170M by the USSR. The dispute remained unresolved
until 1972, when the U.S. accepted an offer from the USSR to repay $722M linked to grain
shipments from the U.S., with the remainder being written off.
So $722M in 1972 dollars for $11B in 1947 dollars?
If this is true, why did the US send 17.5 M tons of material to the USSR, through Lend
Lease, during WW2?
They suspended their death wish because without the USSR they could very well have lost to
the Nazis. Short of a successful invasion of Britain, the availability to the Nazis of a
small portion of the tank and aerial forces that were getting chewed up in the Soviet Union
would have led to the easy conquest of North Africa and the loss of the Suez canal. That
would have been hard for the Allies to recover from. Once the war was won it was time to
shift back into playing the innocent party responding to Soviet aggression.
The U.S. also sent $20 million in food aid to the Soviets during the famine of 1921-1922.
The U.S. attitude towards Russia / Soviet Union is complex and contradictory. Members of the
U.S. establishment mostly opposed the Soviets, but future President Herbert Hoover's role in
the famine relief project shows that there were exceptions.
By the 1930s, the behavior of Stalin justified opposition to the Soviets, although I think
that for a long time, many (perhaps most) of the Americans who opposed them did so for the
wrong reasons.
Hoover's role in famine relief was about more than food distribution. By 1911-1912 or so
he was director of the Russo-Asiatic Corporation and had extensive oil, mining, and timber
interests in Russia, all of which made him very, very wealthy. These interests were
relinquished prior to the Revolution, which Hoover vehemently opposed. According to Sayers
and Kahn in The Great Conspiracy Against Russia, "He was to remain one of the world's
bitterest foes of the Soviet Government for the rest of his life. It is a fact, whatever his
personal motive may have been, that American food sustained the White Russians and fed the
storm troops of the most reactionary regimes in Europe which were engaged in suppressing the
upsurge of democracy after the First World War. Thus American relief became a weapon against
the peoples' movements in Europe."
This is Disaster Capitalism 100 years ago.
The quote is footnoted. The footnote reads: "Herbert Hoover's activities as Food Relief
Administrator were directed toward giving aid to the White Russians and withholding all
supplies to the Soviets. Hundreds of thousands starved in Soviet territory. When, finally,
Hoover bowed to public pressure and sent some food to the Soviets he continued according to a
statement by a Near East Relief official in the New York World in April, 1922 -- to
'interfere with the collection of funds for famine-stricken Russia.' In February, 1992, when
Hoover was Secretary of Commerce, the New York Globe made this editorial comment:
'Bureaucrats centered throughout the Department of Justice, the Department of State and the
Department of Commerce for purposes of publicity are carrying on a private war with the
Bolshevist Government Washington propaganda has grown to menacing proportions Messrs. Hughes
and Hoover and Dougherty will do well to clean their houses before public irritation reaches
too high a point. The American people will not long endure a presumptuous bureaucracy which
for its own wretched purposes is willing to let millions of innocent people die."
In 1919, when the American Relief Administration first offered to help Russia, it's very
plausible that they only wanted to help the regions under White control. But the Soviets
refused foreign assistance at that time. In 1921, when the famine was worse, the Whites
didn't control much outside of portions of Siberia. I think the worst areas of famine were in
eastern Ukraine and the nearby parts of Russia. I don't think the Whites controlled any of
that territory any longer, but I could be wrong. I think that Hoover's aid helped a lot of
people in Soviet areas. And yes, he was anti-communist.
Also there was considerable sympathy towards Germany among the Latin American elites.
Several countries, such as Paraguay and Argentina, would likely have jumped aboard the Axis
bandwagon if it began to look like they'd come out on top.
The percentage of battle deaths incurred by the Germans on the Eastern front was at a
minimum 70%, and by some counts over 90%. If Operation Barbarosa had not been launched in
1941 and a truce had held on that front it is unlikely that the Anglo-American alliance could
have sustained a a landing on continental Europe in the west. This would have especially been
the case if the Germans, instead of putting their chips on Barbarosa, had been able to
successfully shut off British use of the Suez Canal, and thus deprive them of ready access to
the resources from India and especially the oil from Iran. Given British naval dominance of
the Mediterranean, however, this would have been difficult unless they were able to negotiate
passage to the Levant by land through Turkey and the Balkans.
Agreed. Instead of peddling diagnoses he would do well to stick with the attacking the
crudity of Kennan's view of world affairs. Kennan saw the Soviets as akin to "windup toys"
that were somehow driven to expand. In this he completely failed to account for the fact that
the Soviets were potentially autarchic, while the capitalist West was governed by
accumulation imperatives that pushed for market expansion. He doesn't bother himself with the
problem but jumps right into rationalizing base construction and an arms race. That Kennan is
seen as a kind of geostrategic genius speaks volumes regarding the self-deluded mindlessness
of US foreign policy.
This article sounds more like an angry emotional outburst from Helmer. It wouldn't
surprise me if he's one of the people taking a lot of crap in all this Russian propaganda
hysteria.
Yes, I know about his depression. But the claim that he was a psychopath? That stretches
believability. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy were examples of
psychopaths. I don't think that George Kennan was like them.
Russia-phobia is actually 100 years old. Strangely, I haven't seen any commemoration of
the centenary of 1917 Revolution. Nobody can deny that it was a world-changing event.
The Bolshevik Revolution, that overtook the Kerensky Revolution shocked the world to the
core, particularly the Church. It quickly alienated even syndicalists and anarchists, because
it developed into a strong centralized state, not the bottom up movement that Lenin found
when he entered Petrograd.
The last 4 years of Nato intervention in the Baltics, Poland and
the Ukraine have shown that the world has never recovered from that shock. British opposition
to Russia goes even deeper, back to the Great Game and the Crimean War. Without Churchill
vehemently opposing Russia in general and Stalin in particular would there even be a Nato?
History is more about continuity than discontinuity.
I'm glad you mentioned Churchill. Since the first Directors of the OSS and the CIA were
complete Anglophiles and modeled their collection techniques on Britian's SIS (MI-6) (until,
of course, those famous British spies were uncovered), it is not surprising that our first
after the war "enemies" were the same as Churchill's enemies
I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation
that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the
answers.
Humans have always faced the dilemma of how to organize society. The main sticking points
being how to control personal ambition in ones own group and how to get the work done that
needs doing- including protecting oneself form ones neighbors who are dealing with the same
issues.
Capitalism, and the west in general, seem to turn personal ambition loose. It takes a
persons personal confrontation and experience with the universe and makes that the primary
motivator for organization. It serves to reward the aggressive while insulating failure as a
personal shortcoming, not a flaw in the system. The Catholic religion, which underpins such a
system by giving it a spiritual legitimacy. The individual can have a personal relationship
with the creator of the universe- with the moderating teaching of caring for the poor to curb
excessive personal ambition or too close a connection. That hasn't worked out so well as the
poor are with us still and the argument is given that the poor will be with us forever. The
Divine right of Kings and all that.
Godless Communists challenged all that and the results still haven't worked themselves
out.
Endless wars seem to be an excuse to justify recurring cycles of hate. Love your God, and
spite your enemies.
The promise of Socialism is that the tools of science and reason can be used to relieve
human suffering and provide for a meaningful life. That vision remains unborn because those
sentiments are always snuffed out as quickly as they take hold.
I have a sneaking suspicion that the troubles of the world have such a basic foundation
that if they are ever solved, people will look back, marveling at the simplicity of the
answers.
I have the exact same suspicion. We might, in fact, understand the basic foundation and
already have the solutions but, to use your words, they are always snuffed out as quickly as
they take hold -- which is itself its own intractable problem.
Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes. Particularly
about what the hate and fear was directed against: bankers, lawyers, Jews, homosexuals,
communists One of the big actors in that great national drama was a fella named Roy Cohn, who
kind of fell into almost all of those categories (except maybe "communist", though with Cohn,
who was also a mob lawyer and buddy of J. Edgar Hoover, who knows?).
And for Trump haters, or those who are trying to "understand" the guy, there's even a
great big Cohn Connection, which is fun to read about here: " A mentor in shamelessness:
the man who taught Trump the power of publicity
Roy Cohn, the lawyer who embraced infamy during the McCarthy hearings and Rosenberg trial,
influenced Donald Trump to turn the tabloids into a soapbox " ,
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/20/roy-cohn-donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy-rosenberg-trial
Interesting observation about McCarthyism as a feature of the lower classes.
I noted that too. It gives credence to Matt Stoller's observation that the elites / 1%ers
are not monolithic but are fractions that can and do fight each other.
Tangentially, I saw the Angels in America in London, which includes a vivid
portrait of Roy Cohn. On his deathbed, watched over by Ethel Rosenberg, Cohn dekes Rosenberg
into singing him off to his last sleep out of pity A touching moment until Cohn sits up and
yells "Fooled ya!" (paraphrasing).
America was born of conquest. The North American continent is/was vast in scale and
resources. The vision was never to live in such a place as more to conquer it and extract its
resources. That mentality is still prominent as the resource base has not been depleted yet
and energies are directed to further exploitation- fracking and the opening of the arctic
regions. Even now, an argument can be made that American corporations are more concerned
about exploiting their customers for profit, than the health of the citizenry. That is the
motivational force behind our governing elite, not some attachment to the land and its people
and the desire to make the world a better place.
American Exceptionalism is based on conquest and the right for individuals to exploit
those resources to their own end. By that standard it continues to be a success. Communism,
in principle, was an ideology opposed to that vision. Under no circumstances can such an
ideology be allowed to exist, so was set for extermination by force and disinformation. Once
that process takes hold, you live in a world devoid of reality. It is fantasy.
Naked greed cannot be justified for long without some form of damage taking place in the
human psyche. Reflection is not prevalent in the American creed. The rise of American
Corporations to the detriment of the nations citizens is a confirmation of that fact. For how
can a nation be "Great" if its citizens are driven into poverty?
You become a Nation of crazy people.
Greed and misuse of Power lead to crazy. Instead of trying to talk sense to crazy people,
sanity lies in the opposite direction. Less greed and an articulation of the proper use of
power. Implementation is another matter.
Thanks for the reading suggestions, and I especially second the the mention of Douglass's
JFK and the Unspeakable. TTBOMK although it's nearly ten years old it's the best analysis out
there of the John Kennedy assassination.
Saying "Russia (aka the Soviet Union)" (as Helmer does) is akin to saying "California (aka
The United States". It is a false statement.
The Soviet Union (1917-1991) was a materialist anti-christian, anti religious totalitarian
State. Godlessness was the ruling precept of Soviet society.
In 1923, Lenin created the first Soviet Concentration Camp, at the "re-purposed", Russian
Orthodox Solovetsky Monastery. Solovetsky was used as the prototype for the Gulag network of
camps. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solovki_prison_camp
IMO, today, the USA is the World Epicenter of materialism, internationalism, greed and
godlessness.
Conversely, Russia (2017) is a Nationalist, Orthodox Christian Democracy. No wonder our
materialistic rulers are so "hysterically", (The APA says, "conversion disorder". Casual
psychiatric diagnosis of opponents is a breeze now!), fearful of Russia, and the Biblical,
little David, with his sling and stone (Putin).
There is a vast body of scholarly work on the origins of the Cold War from many different
perspectives, into which context this analysis is trivial and downright loopy. The Georgetown
Set got us into it? It was "mad" to oppose the Soviet Union and now Russia? Oh, please.
Western opposition to Russian communism pre-dates Joe Alsop and his bowties by decades.
The revolutionary regime that weakened the WWI alliance and prolonged that bloody war by
making a separate peace with Germany wasn't going to be well-liked by its former allies in
the first place. The same regime preached the violent overthrow of democratically-elected
western governments, who reacted as one might expect, including the (poorly-considered)
intervention of 1918-1920.
Stalin then gave the world many, many reasons not to trust Russia – brutal
repression on a hitherto unheard of scale, mass murder, disastrous economic policies leading
to mass famine, show trials and active promotion of Soviet-style take-overs elsewhere. Even
before WWII and the start of the Cold War there was plenty not to like. During the war,
Western governments bowed to geopolitical reality and allied with the USSR, despite Stalin's
cynical deal with Hitler to divide Poland just before, but Poland provides one of the best
samplings of why opposing the USSR/Russia after geopolitical realities changed at the end of
the war was not only understandable but a very good idea. Shortly after Russia took over in
eastern Poland the NKVD rounded up and brutally murdered 22,000 military officers, police
officers, public officials and assorted intellectuals, i.e. anyone who could think
independently and oppose Russian rule, and threw the bodies into pits dug in the Katyn
Forest. The Soviets denied this for decades, blaming it on the Nazi's, but finally fessed up
in 1990 during perestroika, now best understood as a brief twinkling of light in Russia's
dark history. Reports had leaked out of the massacre and other Soviet atrocities during the
war, which played a large role in mobilizing another major force in U.S. politics that was
deeply skeptical of the USSR after the war – ethnic Eastern Europeans.
The West and Russia did do deals at Yalta and Tehran on spheres of influence, but there
was ambiguity as to what that meant and words were thrown in about national
self-determination and free elections. After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic
government, at least in Europe, while the Soviets laughed at the joke and imposed their
brutal regimes anywhere they could. Stalin's last living legacy is the horror show in North
Korea, where he installed a Soviet agent as head of the regime, now a dynasty. Kennan's Long
Cable/Article X, which is still well worth reading, dealt with the causes of Soviet
expansionism as part of Russia's long, troubled history and urged containment as an
alternative to more active opposition ("roll-back"), which largely worked in Europe. As the
counterpoint to containment, when Sec State Dean Acheson omitted Korea from the U.S.
"defensive perimeter" in his January 1950 speech, the North invaded the South with Soviet
support five months later. It was after that experience that containment went global.
With the exception of Kennan, the people mentioned may have had influence but were not the
real policy makers. Truman, George Marshall and Dean Acheson were the primary architects of
U.S postwar policy. Only Acheson lived in Georgetown, and he thought Alsop was a "pest."
Acheson took on Kennan as his staff chief because he had deep expertise on Russia and largely
made sense. The off-hand comments in the article about Kennan being a psychopath and coward
were made with no support and are at odds with his reputation as a pragmatist and
traditionalist in foreign policy. He was recently most well known for his quaint view that
the U.S. should declare wars as required by the Constitution before getting into them. Alsop
was a commentator not a policy maker and was regarded as somewhat of a fringe character, not
least because he was gay in the 1950s. As for the rest of the U.S. elite at the time, far
more of them had been sympathetic to Russia in their youths than rabid anti-communists. The
typical Cold Warrior was made that way not by bowtie-wearing but by sober, mature observation
of what the Soviet regime was all about.
So let's do fast-forward to the present day. No one with an objective understanding of
Russian history is at all surprised that a regime headed by one of their former secret
policemen is tampering with elections, fomenting political divisions and trying to disrupt
the western alliance. All the evidence supports those conclusions and more comes out every
day. Facebook, Google, the scope is astounding. In Helmer's piece we see the birth of a new
phenomenon, on the same intellectual level as climate-change denial. It's electing-tampering
denial.
I think if NC-ers wanted to read official propaganda, they could just subscribe to NYT.
The only thing that your comment demonstrates is that you've no idea what "objective
understanding of Russian history" could possibly be.
Was that an argument? The problem Russian apologists have is that periodically, after
years or decades of denial, the truth finally comes out from a Russian source, usually when
it's convenient to blame their predecessor. Khrushchev finally admitted Stalin's "mistakes",
like anyone really needed confirmation that his regime had murdered millions. Gorbachev
finally had the guts to admit the NKVD liquidated the Polish elite, which everyone else
(except the "useful idiots") had known for a long time, etc. That was the context of the Cold
War and the original posting. U.S. containment policy responded to real actions and constant
lying by the USSR as it imposed totalitarian regimes throughout Eastern Europe and elsewhere,
not some goofy chatter at Georgetown cocktail parties. Every one of those countries, as soon
as they had freedom to choose, bolted for the West and NATO.
As for election-tampering denial, sure looks like it's real. This was a new twist –
deny something simply because it's been reported in the NYT (Russian sources, and Donald
Trump, being so much more credible). But some other historical truth-telling pertains here.
If you want to understand what Vladimir Putin and his fellow secret policemen did in East
Germany, despite decades of denial, you can now go to the Stasi archives. It's a museum that
documents 44 years of soul-crushing repression, cynical manipulation of neighbor against
neighbor and systematic subversion of anyone or any group that might speak up against the
state. It's not hard at all to believe that someone who came of age with that background
would take advantage of such an easy way to undermine their U.S. adversaries. In fact, it's
hard to believe they wouldn't.
Well said. Thank you. My comment was much shorter, but said many of the same things. It
was censored. Much shorter version: Asserting that George Kennan was a lunatic is lunacy.
For the life of me, I still cannot figure out why people are in an absolute panic over
Russian "agents" buying $100,000.00, or whatever, worth of advertising promoting either or
both sides of the election when U.S.citizens and Political Parties spent over $1.6
billion.
Are American citizens really so stupid as to fall for the amazingly, brilliantly conceived
and placed $100K worth of Russian advertising, so clever that it superseded $1.6 billion
worth of U.S. citizen ads?
Or (to misquote Shakespeare/Macbeth) is it a tale told by propagandists, full of sound and
fury, signifying nothing?
"After the war the West (mostly) promoted democratic government, at least in Europe, "
Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play?
I am surprised no one else responded to this screed. I agree that the Soviet Union had a
horrific human rights record, but that little snippet I quote above is like a relic from the
silliest days of Cold War propaganda. As for Russian meddling, the evidence is that probably
something happened, in my opinion, but if people were serious they would keep some sense of
proportion. I read the NYT articles and melodramatic language is doing an awful lot of work
with regards to the Facebook claims.
If I accepted everything I have read at face value our
democracy was so fragile literally anyone willing to hire some hackers and spend a minuscule
amount of money could have destroyed it. Heck, if I and a few friends were willing to
mortgage our homes and cash in our retirement funds we could fund its destruction
ourselves.
Richard Spence, professor of history at the University of Idaho, has just published "Wall
Street and the Russian Revolution: 1905 – 1925." This is a fascinating book that I
would think at least some of the above commenters would be interested in. Spence has updated
Anthony Sutton's earlier work with new/more archival research and access to new/more recently
declassified documents.
I haven't finished it as it came in the mail yesterday, but it does have a few interesting
comments about George Kennan not the above George Kennan but his distant cousin who in 1891
published a book entitled "Siberia and the Exile System." So it seems that Russia-hating ran
in the family. The cousin Kennan claimed to have assisted in the distribution of a ton and a
half of literature to Russian POWs in Japan during the Russo-Japanese War. This, according to
Kennan, was financed by Jacob Schiff and caused many of the POWs to become liberals and
revolutionaries opposed to the Tsar.
Fleshing out the role of capitalist/financial interests in the Revolution is certainly
important. These were the deep state actors of 100 years ago. The names of the people and the
interests they represent may have changed, but the chicanery hasn't.
" the Clinton administration decided to move NATO into former Warsaw Pact nations,
violating a understanding made as part of the peaceful dissolution". The "peaceful
dissolution" of the Soviet "union", I presume?
NATO was formed in 1948 in response to the Soviet refusal to withdraw from the Eastern
European nations it continued to control with puppet governments and Soviet troops after
WWll. The Soviets responded by forming the Warsaw Pact -- consisting of those very same
nations: (East) Germany, Poland, Czechoslavakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania. The
only time Warsaw Pact troops were used militarily was against its own members -- Hungary in
1956, and Czechoslavakia in 1968.
The collapse of the USSR started in 1989, with the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and
culminated in 1991 with the failed coup by hardliners against Gorbachev in August of 1991,
though the official end did not come until the formal dissolution on December 26, 1991.
In the following years, all of the Warsaw Pact nations, plus the illegally annexed and
occupied Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, having regained their sovereignty,
all made a point of joining NATO -- to make sure that the Russian bear did not return to do
even more damage.
What "understanding" was violated? It is a popular myth that the Russians were "promised"
that NATO would not expand to the east. Who made this promise to who, and under what
authority? Did the nations of Eastern Europe, after half a century of Russian control,
voluntarily cede the power to determine their future alliances to the Clinton Administration?
The premise is absurd on its face. In any case, how do you keep a "promise" to a political
entity- the USSR- which no longer exists?
Russian interference in Ukraine, and the forced annexation of Crimea (reminiscent of
Stalin's annexation of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1940), has validated the pragmatism
of its former vassal states in joining NATO. Russia is not being threatened by its neighbor's
membership in NATO; to them, Russia is the threat.
You should ask Jim Baker, who had confirmed that an agreement regarding NATO was made. In
addition to many other people present at the time Why try at revisionist history now ?
And FIY, Estonia, Latvia, and Litva were a part of the czarist Russia for more than 300 yrs.
Soviet Union gave up the territories in the terrible peace it had to sign with Germany before
the end of WWI. After the next war, which it won, it simply took back the areas – kinda
like the French took back Alsace-Lorraine, after victory over German in WWI.
Knowing history is really a good thing
More Russians troops are buried in the soil of the Crimea than the US lost in Europe
during WWI &WWII as well. The West or it's proxies have been after it for nearly as long
as The Great Game has been in play. But that's what Russia gets for helping Lincoln by
keeping France and Britain from actively coming in on the side of the Confederates. Never
help an ingrate.
That's two misreadings of history. There was no agreement not to expand NATO, which is
confirmed by both Jim Baker and Mikhail Gorbachev, the other guy there at the table. The only
agreement made was that NATO would not put nuclear weapons or non-German troops in the former
GDR. That agreement has been kept.
The Baltic states had all declared their independence from Russia before the Russian peace
with Germany, so they weren't anyone's to give. If they were ever "transferred" to Germany
they didn't stay German for long – in fact a couple of them defeated German armies in
battle towards the end of WWI. They were all independent by 1920, part of the wave of
national self-determination after WWI that saw the liberation of lots of smaller countries
that had been dominated by one of the defunct empires. Lithuania, of course, hadn't always
been so small – at one point it was the largest country in Europe and included parts of
what became Russia. Comparisons with Alsace are absurd on several levels.
"... Trumpism's Contradictions and American Jews, and Islamophobia ..."
"... "I do not stop repeating it to French Jews. Not only is the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism." ..."
"... Is Antisemitism on the rise? ..."
"... Anti-Semitism among Liberals and Conservatives ..."
"... Evangelical Christians: Friends of Israel, Enemies of secular American-Jews? ..."
"... What would happen to Jews in America and the relationship with Israel if they lost support from evangelical Christians? ..."
As it becomes increasingly apparent that the populist billionaire business "Messiah" behind
the mask of the "Trumpism" cult is merely in power to "Make America Great Again" by
transferring even more wealth from the lower and middle classes to the top 1% of wealthiest
Americans, the politics of rightwing extremism will intensify and even greater sociopolitical
division is inevitable. Billionaires and millionaires behind rightwing populism represent a
desperate effort to save the privileges that capitalists enjoy by driving a segment of society
ideologically and politically to the extreme right even if this entails embracing even more
austere police state methods, especially surveillance, than currently exist.
The Justice Department under Trump introduced harsher measures for petty crimes, loosening
any safety net protections of minorities from police abuse, while easing up on regulations
affecting white collar crime. Along with racism, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny,
anti-Semitism is in the broader mix that characterizes a segment of Trump supporters that the
Republican Party mobilizes. For the Republican Party to continue catering to the establishment
while claiming to be anti-establishment, populism is a useful vehicle as it breaks the
solidarity of the working class by advancing the policies of social discrimination.
The neoliberal establishment would have achieved the same goals of capital concentration
with a Democrat president in power. This was the case under both Bill Clinton and Barak Obama
catering to a different popular base distinguished by traditional Democrat identity politics
– feminists, gay rights, and greater integration of minorities into the capitalist
mainstream. While Republican rhetoric and policies project false hope to rightwing elements
from Reagan Democrats, Evangelicals to neo-Nazis that the social contract will be anti-elite
and focused on the white majority feeling threatened by identity politics, Democrats remain
focused on reviving the old Cold War with Russia and catering to Wall Street, while promoting
cultural and lifestyle issues with a greater commitment to balance the welfare state with
corporate welfare. Ironically, Democrat identity politics is actually just as divisive because
it refuses to address issues along structural lines, thus leaving many among the masses to be
duped by the promises of populist rhetoric.
Trumpism's Contradictions and American Jews, and Islamophobia
Although anti-Semitism has a long and ugly history, no minority group in US history has
suffered greater discrimination and institutionalized racism than African-Americans. The white
Anglo-Saxon majority has historically categorized ethnic immigrants in a hierarchy based on
skin color, ethnic origin, and religion. American Jews were not exempt from ethnocentrism,
remaining a favorite target of the KKK among other rightwing groups. Because class in some
cases transcends ethnicity, race and religion, Jews that became capitalists or moved into
middle class professions benefited from assimilation into the institutional mainstream much
more than those of the same faith in the lower middle class and working class.
By the early 21 st century, American Jews were well integrated into the
mainstream, reflecting society's diversity ideologically, politically, and socioeconomically.
From 2000 until 2016, Jewish voting patterns indicate that between two-thirds and three-fourths
supported the Democrat presidential candidates. Although these percentages are very similar to
Hispanic Catholic voting trends, stereotypes deeply ingrained in society remain just below the
thin façade of political correctness where saying the right thing in public is the only
thing that matters. Many within the rightwing populist movement accept the stereotypes that
Jews are in control of everything from Wall Street to the media, the political arena, higher
education, and the entertainment industry.
Interestingly, it never even occurs to anti-Semites to ask why so many of the elites are
Anglo-Saxon Protestant. This is indicative that American racists believe it is natural to be
Anglo-Saxon protestant and be among the elites because national identity rests with this
category of people since the republic was founded. While it is true that Jews are in every
sector of society, just as are Christians, a larger percentage of Jews is integrated into the
capitalist class in comparison to other minorities especially blacks and Hispanics. However, it
is blatantly false that Jews control the entire institutional structure and use it to advance
some amorphous "Jewish agenda", as neo-Nazi and other conspiracy theorists propagate. On the
contrary, throughout European and US history Jews have proved more loyal and more conformist to
the institutional structure than any other minority.
Conspiracy theories about Jewish control of the institutional structure are the basis of
anti-Semitism that has declined since the interwar era as much in the US as in Western Europe,
though the same does not hold true for Eastern Europe. With the rise of populism in American
politics during the presidential campaign of 2016, anti-Semitism assumed the spotlight once
again, despite the fact that Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner is Jewish with business and
personal connections to Israel. Moreover, top administration officials in control of financial,
economic and trade policy are also Jewish linked to Wall Street and specifically the
multinational financial syndicate Goldman Sachs.
While it is true that all US presidents cater to Wall Street, and all presidents since
Ronald Reagan have relied on former Goldman Sachs executives who have been invariably Jewish to
conduct fiscal, economic, trade and foreign policy, it is especially noteworthy that Trump has
long-standing links to Jewish billionaires. This in itself would not be unusual except that his
has been using populist anti-big business, anti-elite rhetoric to appeal to populist elements
among them neo-Nazis, KKK, and other varieties of racists and anti-Semites. The glaring
contradiction that cannot be reconciled is that Trumpism symbolizes and emboldens ethnocentrism
while the administration includes millionaire and billionaire American Jews who are in the
awkward position of accepting rightwing populism so that they can advance neoliberal
policies.
It is hardly surprising that some emboldened Trump supporters have engaged in anti-Semitic
activities, assuming that their leader really represents the extremist white Christian masses
rather than the multi-ethnic, including Jewish, capitalist elites. In March 2017, prominent
Jewish-American groups demanded that Trump denounce anti-Semitism in light of a rise in
documented incidents in different parts of the country. The corporate media exposed this issue,
but like Jewish organization the media did not frame it in its larger context of rightwing
populism where anti-Semitism is but one of many aspects of racism. Trump's refusal to accept
responsibility for his brand of populism giving rise to anti-Semitism was revealing and
somewhat shocking to all people embracing pluralism but especially to Jews who assumed he would
be friendlier because his daughter is married to Kushner.
Trump had no choice but to reject the suggestion that Trumpism entails anti-Semitism.
Admitting that Trumpism leads to anti-Semitism would have forced the president to accept that
his ideological/political movement is politically and culturally racist at its core and that
his administration is driven by the politics of exclusion rather than integration in a
pluralistic society. Even more alarming, the entire Republican establishment with few
exceptions refused to denounce the racist core of Trumpism, thus demonstrating that the party
clings to the rightwing populist base even when some within that base are neo-Nazis.
Contrary to how the media and many analysts who focused on the cult of personality see
Trumpism, this phenomenon did not fall to earth from space. It has deep roots in both parties,
but especially in the Republican Party going as far back as the 1920s. Despite "Trumpism" as an
integral part of the Republican Party and American society, anti-Semitism has actually remained
relatively low in comparison with Western Europe and especially Eastern Europe where it is only
exceeded by Islamic countries. Of course, opinion polls and hate crime reports cannot possibly
measure with any degree of accuracy the level of anti-Semitism across society. People conceal
their attitudes toward Jews as they do toward Muslims and blacks because in a pluralistic
society where political correctness takes precedence overt racism is unacceptable –
politically incorrect and bad for business given that the American consumer base is
multi-ethnic.
Some analysts were encouraged that anti-Semitism has been on the decline in the last two
decades because of the rise of Islamophobia, a form of religious discrimination that spiked
after the Iranian Revolution and assumed astronomical proportions after 9/11. However, the rise
of rightwing populism, which includes Christians driven by prejudice against other faiths, has
emboldened anti-Semitism as much in the US and across Europe in the past two decades when the
neoliberal elites celebrated the triumph of globalization. Neoliberalism is the catalyst in the
rise of globalization, the rise of rightwing populism and the rise of Islamophobia in the last
two decades.
Combined with a persistently anti-Islam bias in the media that has been reinforcing
Islamophobia and the rise of rightwing populism aimed at Islam in general and Muslim immigrants
specifically, the war on terror has been a catalytic factor in the change of mass attitudes
from anti-Semitism to Islamophobia. The fact that Israel has been pursuing apartheid policies
toward Palestinians and pursuing a militarist approach to foreign policy has worked in its
favor when it comes to attracting mainstream conservative and Cold War liberal elements across
the US and Western Europe, thus transferring the historic focus of prejudice from Jews to
Muslims.
France's National Front under Marine Le Pen is a good example of a political party that has
been focusing more on the Muslim enemy where all bourgeois political parties also focused
rather than clinging to anti-Semitism that carries a political and social stigma. In an
interview in June 2014, she stated: "I do not stop repeating it to French Jews. Not only is
the National Front not your enemy, but it is without a doubt the best shield to protect you. It
stands at your side for the defense of our freedoms of thought and of religion against the only
real enemy, Islamist fundamentalism."
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/04/marine-le-pen-national-front-jews-muslims/523302/
Ironically, the rising tide of populism across Western and Eastern Europe as well as Trump's
America has reinvigorated racists of all sorts, despite the official policies of governments to
support Israeli apartheid policies and militarism while keeping Islamophobia in the forefront
of the political dialogue. The fact that the US claims to support the war on terror while
remaining a major arms supplier to countries like Saudi Arabia where most jihadists have
originated and where the regime has been supplying jihadist rebels with weapons in both Syria
and Yemen does not seem to register any more with liberals than with conservatives. While the
US and EU arms manufacturers make billions in profits selling weapons to countries with a
history of supporting jihadists, the Western media and governments continue to promote the myth
about strengthening national security against Islamic terrorism, thus promoting Islamophobia
and xenophobia.
Although anti-Semitism has deep roots throughout the Western World as does Islamophobia,
many Christians learned anti-Semitism from their families while they learned about Islamophobia
from mainstream media and politicians since the Iranian Revolution. Overt or subtle hiding
behind political correctness, religious prejudice is convenient for opportunistic bourgeois
politicians, for the media and pundits when there are serious structural problems in the
economy as in 2008 great recession. Racists default the rise in unemployment, stagnant wages,
and political polarization following 2008 to Jewish elites and immigrant workers rather than
the political economy predicated on socioeconomic inequality and political marginalization.
The neoliberal system that creates greater socioeconomic inequality thrives on racism,
anti-Semitism and Islamophobia because it distracts focus from the root causes of structural
problems in society. Rightwing populism in the US and Europe finds a popular response from
angry middle class and working class that are unable to discern the structural inequality that
the political economy creates. Blaming Jews, Arabs, Hispanics, Blacks, and other minorities
because the system does not integrate the "native majority" into the upward trajectory of the
mainstream is simple and convenient because it also fulfills an emotional need to vent. Adolph
Hitler's belief that people need someone to hate rather than abstract systems and institutions
beyond their comprehension works just as well today as it did in the turbulent 1930s.
Is Antisemitism on the rise?
In January 2017 there were 40 to 68 bomb threats (depending on the source) against Jewish
community centers in 27 states, with Jewish cemeteries the most well publicized targets. When
we consider that the number of anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses in 2015 were twice as
many as in 2014, it appears that anti-Semitism had been rising under the Obama administration
pursuing neoliberal policies. Statistics from public opinion polls indicate that anti-Semitic
incidents rose immediately after Trump won the presidency, something that hardly surprised many
critics who had been warning that such is the price of appealing to extreme rightwing elements
for political support.
FBI statistics on hate crimes indicate that there have not been significant changes since
the presidential election of 2012, but threats against Jewish centers and Jewish journalists
did experience a spike in threats once Trump won the election. It is noteworthy that the
reporting of anti-Semitic incidents is more accurate and prevalent than the reporting of
racial, ethnic, or religious prejudice of other groups that the media routinely overlooks both
at the local but especially the national level. Hate crimes motivated by religion have targeted
Jews and Muslims since Trump's election, although Islamophobia spiked sharply since 9/11 and it
is under-reported in comparison with anti-Semitic incidents. While institutional anti-Semitism
is very low partly because of the cordial US-Israeli ties but also because Jews are more
thoroughly integrated in society, the same is not the case for institutional racism aimed at
Muslims and blacks.
Because Trump won with a populist appeal, it was inevitable that xenophobia aimed at Muslims
and Latin Americans as main targets, racism, sexism, homophobia, and chauvinism as main
cultural traits would become even more acceptable driven by the politics of division. In very
subtle ways, rightwing news organizations that have been supporting Trump have been promoting
social discrimination; some daring to cross the line to attack Jews backing liberal causes and
the Democrat Party. Although anti-Semitism finds no expression in public policy as does
Islamophobia, America's ideological orientation has become so rightwing than the Democrats find
it necessary to attack the Republican president by reviving Cold War anti-Russia propaganda.
Instead of remaining focused on specific allegations of corruption, collusion, money
laundering, and above all Republican policies that worsen inequality and weaken the middle
class and workers, Democrats committed to neoliberal policies are just as guilty as Republicans
for avoiding the key issue of social justice.
Anti-Semitism among Liberals and Conservatives
Anti-Semitism is subtle even among those liberal elements that cling to political
correctness often used to conceal real intentions. Leftist critics of Israel are driven by the
apartheid conditions and Israel's militarist approach to foreign policy and by the neoliberal
orientation of the entire Western World that the Israeli business and political elites support.
Critics are concerned that the Israeli government, not people, has come a very long way in
emulating the Third Reich's racism when it comes to treatment of Palestinians. This does not
mean that all leftists are free of anti-Semitism and they are not using Israel's horrific
policies to justify racism. Because it is true that anti-Zionism can lead to legitimizing
anti-Semitism, it is essential to denounce any form of discrimination and differentiate between
government policy and ethnic or religious prejudice. Labeling any critic of Israeli anti-Semite
merely for supporting peace in the Middle East is propaganda and a sign of using the pretext of
anti-Semitism to suppress dissent.
Rightwing elements are more comfortable in anti-Semitism because it is an integral part of
their ideological orientation. Besides the KKK, neo-Nazi groups and some new elements that
emerged with the explosion of rightwing media, anti-Semitism as an integral part of the
ideological rightwing has historical roots among Christian business and political elites that
looked the other way during the 1930s when the Third Reich was systematically persecuting Jews.
Anti-Semitism from the right has found expression from a number of social media outlets where
the white nationalist ALT-RIGHT among others has increased their anti-Semitic attacks with hate
speech. The anti-Defamation League reported 2.6 million tweets aimed at Jewish journalists in
12 months, summer 2015 to summer 2016. Although Trump does not use anti-Semitic rhetoric and he
has long-standing ties to Jewish millionaires and billionaires, many of his working class
Christian supporters assume he is talking about Jews in the liberal "fake" media when he speaks
of 'enemies of the people'.
https://www.adl.org/news/press-releases/adl-task-force-issues-report-detailing-widespread-anti-semitic-harassment-of
As the latest layer building on existing ones of American rightwing populism, Trumpism is
indicative of an ideological, political and cultural orientation, but also a reflection of
one's values as well as aspirations and illusions about what a populist regime led by a Messiah
businessman can deliver to its middle and working class base. Deeply imbedded in Trumpism is
anti-Semitism from the extreme right that has gained legitimacy because Trump is president, no
matter his ties to Jewish business elites. While the liberal left as represented by Senator
Bernie Sanders, the son of Jewish immigrants, has also criticized the financial and media
elites that include Jews, there is hardly a comparison between the Sanders movement to pursue
social justice for all people and the politics of hate and division that Trump and his
Republican propagandists promoted.
Evangelical Christians: Friends of Israel, Enemies of secular American-Jews?
Ever since the preeminence of neoconservatives in the Reagan decade of the eighties, there
has been a strange alliance between American Jews and Evangelicals. Besides their common
distaste for Muslims, their common Cold War militarist foreign policy and their common
conservative social values that brought these two groups closer together they seem like natural
allies, using religious dogmatism to justify imperialist foreign policies and social
inequality. Evangelicals have consistently remained in a military-solution mode when it came to
foreign policy hotspots and viewed Israel as defender of the Christian West against the Muslims
becoming radicalized after the Iranian Revolution of 1979.
The alliance between American Jews and Evangelicals began showing cracks in the presidential
elections of 2008 and 2012, but especially in 2016 when many Jews backed Hillary Clinton while
Evangelicals sided with Trump who promised them Reagan-style social and judicial conservatism,
along with jobs and economic nationalism intended to "make American great again", partly
implying the integration of white Christians into the mainstream from which they had been
excluded under the neoliberal regime of Bill Clinton and Obama. Besides the Evangelicals vote
for Trump and the American secular Jews largely backing Clinton in 2016, the rift between
Evangelicals and Jews was evident in the "liberal" vs. the populist rightwing media wars over
the Trump administration's policies and personalities such as Steve Bannon, former Goldman
Sachs banker and Breitbart news executive and no stranger to racism, white nationalism, and
anti-Semitism.
Israeli neoliberal and militarist elites continue to hope that they can have Evangelicals
supporting Israel, just as they supported Trump win the election. The Israeli-Evangelical
alliance appears on firm ground, but it is becoming increasingly problematic because Trumpism
not only entails xenophobia, ethnocentrism and nationalism, but anti-Semitism among many of its
voters, even some younger Evangelicals. The Republicans and the rightwing media have tried to
identify liberal Jews as the enemy, but such rhetoric only reinforces anti-Semitism.
Evangelicals and rightwing media have hammered at the close identification of the Democrats
with Jewish billionaires like George Soros famous for his support of liberal causes. This
association has reinforced anti-Semitism among the rightwing populists, largely because the
rightwing media and politicians keep at it.
Ironically, the same criticism of Jewish billionaires and their liberal causes is also made
across much of Europe, especially in Eastern Europe where the commitment to diversity and
pluralism is a pale imitation of what exists in Scandinavian countries. The same criticism is
never leveled against liberal Anglo-Saxon billionaires like Warren Buffet or others, projecting
the impression that Jewish money somehow corrupts the political process more than Protestant
money. The obvious hypocrisy on the part of right wingers including Evangelicals regarding
Jewish money vs. Protestant money influencing the political arena extends to Israel treated as
a friendly militarist state while Muslim militarist states are deserving of condemnation.
What would happen to Jews in America and the relationship with Israel if they lost
support from evangelical Christians?
Neoliberals from the Clinton and neoconservative leftovers from the Reagan decade have
cultivated close ties between American Evangelicals and Israel but the relationship is showing
signs of deterioration largely because the younger Evangelicals question the wisdom of
one-sided US foreign policy. Although public opinion polls indicate that American Jews largely
mistrust Evangelicals, Evangelical organizations remain committed to support of Israel as a
frontline state against the Arabs and radical Islam. This ideological commitment is largely
based on money pouring into Evangelical churches and their affiliate NGOs that are tools of
recruitment and indoctrination. The highly organized Evangelical groups using the media,
educational centers and Christian media remain a political force that helped to elect Trump
while keeping the populist wing of the Republican Party strong.
The irony of Evangelical support for Israel is that some of its members are anti-Semitic.
Ever since the Reagan administration, rightwing Christian fundamentalist elements, which
American Jews and the Israeli lobby have been trying to mobilize, are not just anti-Muslim but
some are anti-Semitic as well. While the war on terror shifted the focus of American
Evangelicals to the imminent Muslim threat as they understand it, this does not mean that
anti-Semitism disappeared. On the contrary, as socioeconomic conditions deteriorate, and as a
segment of the population perceives that Jewish elites from Wall Street to media and Hollywood
are to partly blame for the elusive American Dream not trickling down to the masses,
anti-Semitism will rise and support for Israel will diminish. Trump's 'America First' economic
nationalism and slashing foreign aid as part of neo-isolationism will eventually impact Israel,
especially as the administration will drive budgetary deficits and the public debt to record
levels because of corporate tax cuts and more corporate welfare at the expense of health and
social programs.
Regardless of who is in the White House, the US will always support Israel diplomatically
because both political parties have done so since 1948 and they will continue to do so for many
reasons. This is not only because of the very powerful Israeli lobby, but also the fact that
Israel serves the convenient role of perpetuating destabilization in the Middle East that helps
the defense industry of the US. Despite the apartheid conditions toward the Palestinians,
Israel will remain a key US ally even if younger Evangelicals question US support and even if a
segment of the rightwing Republican popular base becomes more anti-Semitic.
Conclusion
The political correctness rhetoric of liberals and conservatives alike notwithstanding, the
socioeconomic effects of neoliberal policies on society gives rise to ultra-rightwing
ideological and political movements. Through the media, the political and socioeconomic elites
help to indoctrinate and mobilize the masses into the rightwing camp using it as the popular
base of the Republican Party that caters to Wall Street, as much as the Democrats use identity
politics to mobilize their popular base while also catering to Wall Street. Given that the
two-party system represents the interests of the same elites despite ideological and political
affiliations among the elites, the masses merely follow instead of breaking away to create a
class-based grassroots movement that would bring social justice through systemic change.
Rightwing populism becomes the grassroots movement and its followers are convinced that it is
the vehicle to the fulfillment of the social contract; an illusion that conservative
politicians, media and pundits constantly reinforce.
Mobilizing the remnants of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party, Trumpism gained
momentum because neoliberal policies exacerbated socioeconomic polarization under Obama.
Although Trumpism will fade away along with Trump at some point, its imprint on society will
remain as did that of Reaganism that helped to bring a segment of the population father to the
rightwing ideological domain where discrimination assumes an unspoken legitimacy just below the
surface of political correctness. The rightwing orientation of society as an integral part of
deradicalization of the masses is essential to maintaining the political economy of inequality,
although it comes at the cost of the absence of social justice and social discrimination.
The bourgeois value system is based on individualism, but bourgeois institutions and
policies have historically promoted discrimination on the basis of group identity disregarding
the merits of the individual. Like all forms of prejudice rooted in ignorance, fear and social
conditioning, anti-Semitism is no different. It is futile to assume that anti-Semitism can be
mitigated in isolation of all other forms of prejudice separate from the larger issue of a
socially just society. All social, economic and political indicators point not to greater
social discrimination and prejudice in a society where the mass concentration of wealth at the
expense of the middle and working classes has resulted in the search for enemies to blame,
whether Muslims, Jews, Mexicans, etc.
As the US slowly creeps down the road of more authoritarianism and a surveillance state,
becoming less tolerant of differences and diversity amid its inevitable decline as the world's
preeminent economic power, it will have a much weaker middle class and a working class with
lower living standards. A segment of the population whose identity rests with the flag and the
cross will become more open to the idea of a police militarized state that enforces conformity
through constant surveillance and stricter laws that punish petty criminals while allowing the
legalized corporate thieves to enjoy a privileged status in society.
In the absence of embracing human rights and social justice there cannot possibly be an end
to anti-Semitism any more than any other form of prejudice. If the political economy feed a
culture of prejudice because it has an interest in maintaining the institutional structure,
then it is hardly surprising that prejudice would be widespread. Under neoliberalism thriving
under Trumpist populism, various forms of prejudice will manifest themselves once the promise
of "Make America Great Again" never filters down to the masses.
Jon V. Kofas , Ph.D. – Retired university professor of history – author of ten
academic books and two dozens scholarly articles. Specializing in International Political
economy, Kofas has taught courses and written on US diplomatic history, and the roles of the
World Bank and IMF in the world.
"... Graham is an interventionist fanatic, so it should raise red flags about the supposed Syria withdrawal that he is no longer concerned about it. ..."
"... If U.S. forces are still supposed to remain in Syria long enough to make sure that "Iran doesn't fill in the back end," that is essentially indistinguishable from the earlier Bolton position of an indefinite military presence until Iranian forces leave. It makes no difference to U.S. security whether or not Iran keeps some of its forces in Syria or "fills in the back end" after our withdrawal, and it is not our government's responsibility to police any part of Syria for any length of time. ..."
"... It's no secret that Netanyahu doesn't and never has cared about legality or the US Constitution. Our Constitution and laws are just a goddamned inconvenience as far as he's concerned. They're in the way , and to make matters worse, Adelson's complaining that the cost of US politicians like Durbin, Cotton, and Rubio is going through the roof. ..."
"... Congress is supposed to authorize use of military force. Not agitate to prevent it from ending. ..."
"... If those neocons and "humanitarian" interventionist set on US hegemony can't hem in Trump politically to stay in Syria do expect another 'false flag' to force Trump. ..."
"... I'm not saying I agree with Mattis' military advice, quite the contrary. But to project onto Trump some sort of principled and thoughtful policy here would be just that a projection. ..."
Adam Taylor
comments on Lindsey Graham's recent claims about Syria policy:
What explains Graham's newfound optimism about Trump's plan to leave Syria?
Well, there is one big but rather confusing reason. In Graham's retelling, Trump's plan to leave Syria sounds suspiciously
like a plan to stay in Syria -- one that could be extended indefinitely, too. Speaking to reporters Sunday, Graham described Trump's
Syria plan as a "pause situation" rather than a withdrawal.
Graham is an interventionist fanatic, so it should raise red flags about the supposed Syria withdrawal that he is no longer
concerned about it. It is possible that Graham is spinning what Trump told him and trying to box the president in with these
public statements, but if that were the case Trump would presumably reject Graham's interpretation in a series of angry tweets. The
fact that Trump hasn't done that suggests that Syria withdrawal isn't happening or will happen so slowly as to make little difference.
Graham describes Trump's Syria policy this way:
Considering these three elements, a full withdrawal would not be possible in the immediate future.
If U.S. forces are still supposed to remain in Syria long enough to make sure that "Iran doesn't fill in the back end," that
is essentially indistinguishable from the earlier Bolton position of an indefinite military presence until Iranian forces leave.
It makes no difference to U.S. security whether or not Iran keeps some of its forces in Syria or "fills in the back end" after our
withdrawal, and it is not our government's responsibility to police any part of Syria for any length of time.
It can't be stressed enough how unnecessary and illegal an American military presence in Syria is. Keeping troops there has nothing
to do with U.S. or allied security, and the most vocal advocates of keeping them there indefinitely are driven by an obsessive hostility
to Iran that blinds them to the costs and risks of further involvement in Syria. Congress never authorized any U.S. mission in Syria
against anyone, and no president had the authority to order U.S. forces into harm's way in that country. Our Syria policy for at
least the last four years has been in flagrant violation of the Constitution and international law, and it has been divorced from
U.S. interests from the very beginning.
Graham's playing him from the outside, Pompeo and Bolton are playing him from the inside, and Netanyahu's calling the shots.
It's no secret that Netanyahu doesn't and never has cared about legality or the US Constitution. Our Constitution and laws
are just a goddamned inconvenience as far as he's concerned. They're in the way , and to make matters worse, Adelson's
complaining that the cost of US politicians like Durbin, Cotton, and Rubio is going through the roof.
Graham has lost his way. He should wake up and start doing his duty. Congress is supposed to authorize use of military
force. Not agitate to prevent it from ending.
In this respect at least, Trump is starting to look like the only adult in the room, the only one capable of restraint.
If those neocons and "humanitarian" interventionist set on US hegemony can't hem in Trump politically to stay in Syria
do expect another 'false flag' to force Trump.
I think you're projecting meaning onto Trump's actions that aren't there. Trump has no problem at all with military action
in Syria and actions to contain Iran; he's even ordered such action before.
His recent withdrawal order, (and this is likely to come out when Mattis writes his memoirs if he does) was from animus towards
Mattis whose notions of service and native intelligence were starting to make Trump feel insecure and maybe dumb.
I'm not saying I agree with Mattis' military advice, quite the contrary. But to project onto Trump some sort of principled
and thoughtful policy here would be just that a projection.
"... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
"... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
"... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
"... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
"... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
"... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
"... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
"... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
"... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
"... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
"... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the
uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to
produce fake results.
SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week,
Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up
the gun control debate.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the
hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on
Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following
the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they
immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some
nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive
issues.
Those claims are based on this propaganda project:
Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall
Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds
of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian
influence campaign.
The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is
run by military lobbyists, CIA
minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its
claimed task is:
... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy
in the United States and Europe.
There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.
The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items"
and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing
complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the
hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It
claims
that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also
appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites
sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3.
accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and
2 tweet about.
Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which
group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one
"openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.
On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want
to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy,
wished everyone
a #MerryChristmas.
The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is
unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters,
Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all
of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably
nefarious:
Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President
Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started
kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...
The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is
definitely false :
Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not
Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary
indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is
either predominantly Russian.
The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.
The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch
keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found (
Dutch ,
English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:
In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag
was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment
and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to
be from a Russian troll.
In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the
Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the
Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And
even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero.
Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.
Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.
The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored
by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff
to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the
"Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended
to rank 2 of the
dashboard.
Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes
of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.
The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found
that only six people on Twitter, none
of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of
the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself
says :
[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents
The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda
shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with
rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those
then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.
Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of
active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the
dashboard?
But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow
shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian
influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.
This is nuts.
Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the
only site critical of it. It
predicted :
The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad
light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.
It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that
the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are
normal people.
The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence"
into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false
"Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy
contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times -
are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package
the venom and spread it to the public.
How long will it take until people die from it?
Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM |
Permalink
Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the
United States and Europe."
That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in
proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the
clearest cases.
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't
believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even
during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has
important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich
Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my
assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will
NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian
[sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are
the Big Lies.]
Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done
contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security
breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the
general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I
hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be
several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate
in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not
just economic and political but cultural and historical.
In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological
descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to
"correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World
War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk
That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from
an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical
officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council,
a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary
Clinton ally.
Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged
electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty
party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped
away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet
declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the
name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret
police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main
intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world
while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you
neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?
when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the
huge defense budget?
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia
and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly
hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream
political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The
collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The
idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that
their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things
like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.
let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one
regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid.
Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.
"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm
Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree,
February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar
Republic's democratic constitution.
Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933
and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen
the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political
interests.
Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people
vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump
openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral
success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become
a pressing one.
An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.
Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers
like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street.
Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.
How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact
a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back
to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?
Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully
ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished
hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.
Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."
I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government.
But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic
and many simply don't know how to change things.
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his
farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country.
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources"
to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The
skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only
reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill
Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the
discussion!
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the
proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no
circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much
government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was.
59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After
that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical
reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a
major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news
organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win
a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow.
It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.
Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you
know. :-)
Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions.
When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot
and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots
hang around to argue ad infinitum.
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how
poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I
wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag
event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...
They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the
west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like
Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident
that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the
actual powerlessness of the bully.
But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they
strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the
right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious
phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.
It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the
fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts
- are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is
over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually
shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its
non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way
to complete failure.
Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study
and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China -
and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on
the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC)
today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in
critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own
emotions or other people's emotions.
Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions
and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion"
(1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the
mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda
Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the
US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.
You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street
Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie
Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore
and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the
conductor?
When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray
McGovern somewhere among the flock.
Many of my thoughts as well.
The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact.
They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with
the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the
effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians.
Even the god's have abandoned the west...
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the
2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but
has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her
leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for
barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this
believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs
lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a
quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed
exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had
proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called
contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors
were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in
Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a
letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any
honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also
fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media
'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being
delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in
Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the
Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate
based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view.
Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes
to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.
The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly
giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children
with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous
artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or
that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured
children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent
offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and
blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.
Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.
Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing
Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what
one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the
"security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media
Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the
world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure
evil (TPTB contend).
So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.
re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was
both a Bolshevik and a Pole.
I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is
back into its highest gears promoting war.
"The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the
best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance
everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.
"China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the
combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.
Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans,
perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war
by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses
will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and
allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be
dealt with.
The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them
and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility
against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are
being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia
and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our
hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia
is a vital necessity.
It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population
had chosen Trump for that reason.
You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on
the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face
very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or
poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential
threat.
Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their
situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.
The Chicago boys were telling the
Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym
of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and
started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky
(?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft.
This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so
on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings,
lies and cheating is still deafening me.
It was the first Russian crime. The second one was
to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions).
They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A
third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.
The fourth was to put
back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were
not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a
political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.
More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions
(western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism -
remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to
discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side
their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored
reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was
decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to
fight it.
It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside
their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a
crime of treason to them in war time.
I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I
do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because
those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the
consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless
and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a
very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the
immediate and maximal profit.
You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet.
That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...
Conclusion regarding IP address data:
What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of
the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be
anonymous online, including malicious actors.
Overall Conclusion:
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like
Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used
by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor
exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent
relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any
website.
Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the
continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question
has again become a pressing one."
The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy
in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's
desired candidate, Hillary.
70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates,
and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would
win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our
anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).
In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with
the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less
immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions.
That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in
fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the
confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own
opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism
of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's
what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught
in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all
those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be
modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or
the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists
one.
One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.
When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the
future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB
are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in
themselves.
We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the
end, we just about deserve everything we get.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Media and its politicians have lost it completely,
and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western
MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3
with Russia will come easy.
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago.
"In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist
International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly
campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who
would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked
that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the
elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter -
Henry Jackson Society (UK) .
With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the
poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be
considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.
I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a
"knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign
Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm
for honest reporting.
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in
it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read
"No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.
The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia
is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it
as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as
the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need
some entity onto which they can project their own faults.
The US is progressing toward a
fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin.
The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the
Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the
planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of
"aggression." And so on
@Noirette 70
Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were
already there. gizmodo
, Jun 12, 2014: It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized
Nevertheless, now in WIRED
magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical
groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social
movements."
Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference
during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting
him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the
Russia....."
Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to
believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .
Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.
"Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like.
[Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT
spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion
defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth.
An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual
budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated,
highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."
Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.
james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"
You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how
psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a
large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand
Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which
boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling
off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).
Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last
target.
Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the
way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to
the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by
the book."
Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This
has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet
untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see
ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is
certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).
"Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.
nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety
legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern
for the environment and the workers.
That is the main issue I have with globalization.
Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and
productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will
have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition,
no matter how efficiently we work.
Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a
large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and
paranoia.
"....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's
businesses and workers."
it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the
right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this
planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon.
Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in
Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which
were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.
Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.
Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend
or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by
national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping
or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted
chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and
the United States.
One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs.
Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich
countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion
of secure employment.
the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty
much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality,
but certainly dangerous nonetheless.
no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .
Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering
to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the
differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the
other forces at play."
Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used
to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually
ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia
of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its
authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New
York Timesas a
group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S.
military and the intelligence agencies.
Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being
after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan,
for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that
purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also
worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by
NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and
USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims.
This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well
as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in
Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had
" orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore
campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT
This scandal is being perpetrated by the
United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a
splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation,
Hamilton 68.
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es
piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the
organizers boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He
dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT
There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots
weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly
responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in
a
textbook case of psychological projection ,
brainwashing, and
Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your
own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the
Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore
what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up
caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case
of all those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.
One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the
sooner it's over the better for everyone.
"... That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the clearest cases. ..."
"... For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity. ..."
"... American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources" to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. ..."
"... In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public. ..."
"... The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how poor their deceptions are. ..."
"... The cleverest trick used in propaganda against a specific country is to accuse it of what the accuser itself is doing. ..."
"... I've always put it down to the Washington Establishment having a severe case of psychological projection. ..."
"... The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own emotions or other people's emotions. ..."
"... Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion" (1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. ..."
"... The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the "security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure evil (TPTB contend). ..."
"... Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be dealt with. ..."
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists one. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
"... The US is progressing toward a fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin. The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of "aggression." And so on ..."
"... The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth. An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated, highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys." ..."
"... Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest). ..."
"... Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and paranoia. ..."
"... Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and the United States. ..."
"... One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs. Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion of secure employment. Hugh Stretton, Economics: A New Introduction ..."
"... The anti-russian think tanks, msm, bellingcat etc push this too much, making them look stupid. ..."
"... Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the other forces at play." ..."
The U.S. mainstream media are going nuts. They now make up and report stories based on the
uncritical acceptance of an algorithm they do not want to understand and which is known to
produce fake results.
SAN FRANCISCO -- One hour after news broke about the school shooting in Florida last week,
Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia released hundreds of posts taking up
the gun control debate.
The accounts addressed the news with the speed of a cable news network. Some adopted the
hashtag #guncontrolnow. Others used #gunreformnow and #Parklandshooting. Earlier on
Wednesday, before the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland,
Fla., many of those accounts had been focused on the investigation by the special counsel
Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
In other words - the "Twitter accounts suspected of having links to Russia" were following
the current news just as cable news networks do. When a new sensational event happened they
immediately jumped onto it. But the NYT authors go to length to claim that there is some
nefarious Russian scheme behind this that uses automated accounts to spread divisive
issues.
Those claims are based on this propaganda project:
Last year, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, in conjunction with the German Marshall
Fund, a public policy research group in Washington, created a website that tracks hundreds
of Twitter accounts of human users and suspected bots that they have linked to a Russian
influence campaign.
The "Alliance for Securing Democracy" is
run by military lobbyists, CIA
minions and neo-conservative propagandists. Its
claimed task is:
... to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy
in the United States and Europe.
There is no evidence that Vladimir Putin ever made or makes such efforts.
The ASD "Hamilton 68" website shows graphics with rankings of "top items"
and "trending items" allegedly used by Russian bots or influence agents. There is nothing
complicate behind it. It simply tracks the tweets of 600 Twitter users and aggregates the
hashtags they use. It does not say which Twitter accounts its algorithms follows. It
claims
that the 600 were selected by one of three criteria: 1. People who often tweet news that also
appears on RT (Russia Today) and Sputnik News, two general news sites
sponsored by the Russian government; 2. People who "openly profess to be pro-Russian"; 3.
accounts that "appear to use automation" to boost the same themes that people in group 1 and
2 tweet about.
Nowhere does the group say how many of the 600 accounts it claims to track belong to which
group. Are their 10 assumed bots or 590 in the surveyed 600 accounts? And how please does one
"openly profess" to be pro-Russian? We don't know and the ASD won't say.
On December 25 2017 the "Russian influence" agents or bots who - according to NYT - want
to sow divisiveness and subvert democracy,
wished everyone
a #MerryChristmas.
The real method the Hamilton 68 group used to select the 600 accounts it tracks is
unknown. The group does not say or show how it made it up. Despite that the NYT reporters,
Sheera Frenkel and Daisuke Wakabayashi, continue with the false assumptions that most or all
of these accounts are automated, have something to do with Russia and are presumably
nefarious:
Russian-linked bots have rallied around other divisive issues, often ones that President
Trump has tweeted about. They promoted Twitter hashtags like #boycottnfl,
#standforouranthem and #takeaknee after some National Football League players started
kneeling during the national anthem to protest racial injustice.
The automated Twitter accounts helped popularize the #releasethememo hashtag , ...
The Daily Beast reported earlier that the last claim is
definitely false :
Twitter's internal analysis has thus far found that authentic American accounts, and not
Russian imposters or automated bots, are driving #ReleaseTheMemo . There are no preliminary
indications that the Twitter activity either driving the hashtag or engaging with it is
either predominantly Russian.
The same is presumably true for the other hashtags.
The Dutch IT expert and blogger Marcel van den Berg was wondering how Dutch
keywords and hashtags showed up on the Hamilton 68 "Russian bots" dashboard. He found (
Dutch ,
English auto translation) that the dashboard is a total fraud:
In recent weeks, I have been keeping a close eye on Hamilton 68. Every time a Dutch hashtag
was shown on the website, I made a screenshot. Then I noted what was playing at that moment
and I watched the Tweets with this hashtag. Again I could not find any Tweet that seemed to
be from a Russian troll.
In all cases, the hash tags that Hamilton 68 reported were trending topics in the
Netherlands . In all cases there was much to do around the subject of the hashtag in the
Netherlands. Many people were angry or shared their opinion on the subject on Twitter. And
even if there were a few tweets with Russian connections between them, the effect is zero.
Because they do not stand out among the many other, authentic Tweets.
Van den Berg lists a dozen examples he analyzed in depth.
The anti-Russian Bellingcat group around couch blogger Eliot Higgins is sponsored
by the NATO propaganda shop Atlantic Council . It sniffs through open source stuff
to blame Russia or Syria wherever possible. Bellingcat was recently a victim of the
"Russian bots" - or rather of the ASD website. On February 10 the hashtag #bellingcat trended
to rank 2 of the
dashboard.
Bellingcat was thus, according to the Hamilton 68 claims, under assault by hordes
of nefarious Russian government sponsored bots.
The Bellingcat folks looked into the issue and found
that only six people on Twitter, none
of them an automated account , had used the #bellingcat hashtag in the last 48 hours. Some of
the six may have opinions that may be "pro-Russian", but as Higgins himself
says :
[I]n my opinion, it's extremely unlikely the people listed are Russian agents
The pro-NATO propaganda shop Bellingcat thus debunked the pro-NATO propaganda
shop Alliance for Securing Democracy.
The fraudsters who created the Hamilton 68 crap seem to have filled their database with
rather normal people from all over the world who's opinions they personally dislike. Those
then are the "Russian bots" who spread "Russian influence" and divisiveness.
Moreover - what is the value of its information when six normal people out of millions of
active Twitter users can push a hashtag with a handful of tweets to the top of the
dashboard?
But the U.S. media writes long gushing stories about the dashboard and how it somehow
shows automated Russian propaganda. They go to length to explain that this shows "Russian
influence" and a "Russian" attempt to sow "divisiveness" into people's minds.
This is nuts.
Last August, when the Hamilton 68 project was first released, the Nation was the
only site critical of it. It
predicted :
The import of GMF's project is clear: Reporting on anything that might put the US in a bad
light is now tantamount to spreading Russian propaganda.
It is now even worse than that. The top ranking of the #merrychristmas hashtag shows that
the algorithm does not even care about good or bad news. The tracked twitter accounts are
normal people.
The whole project is just a means to push fake stories about alleged "Russian influence"
into U.S. media. Whenever some issue creeps up on its dashboard that somehow fits its false
"Russian bots" and "divisiveness" narrative the Alliance for Securing Democracy
contacts the media to spread its poison. The U.S. media, - CNN, Wired, the New York Times -
are by now obviously devoid of thinking journalists and fact checkers. They simple re-package
the venom and spread it to the public.
How long will it take until people die from it?
Posted by b on February 20, 2018 at 03:15 PM |
Permalink
Comments next page " It's all too reminiscent of Duck Soup:
"to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin's ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the
United States and Europe."
That's pretty rich, coming from a country and from people who actually genuinely, and in
proven ways, have subverted democracy in Europe since the late 1940s - Italy being one of the
clearest cases.
For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia. I can't
believe it has to do with the economy. There's got to be a far better nefarious reason. Even
during the real cold war we tried to avoid conflict. Absolute insanity.
Gee, what could go wrong formulating policy founded upon a series of Big Lies? Kim Dotcom says he has
important info the FBI refuses to hear. At the Munich
Security Conference , neocon Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO, details my
assertion's factual basis that current policy is being formed on a series of Big Lies: "Will
NATO strengthen itself to contain Russian power in Eastern Europe giving what Russian
[sic] has done illegally in Crimea, in the Donbass, and in Georgia ?" [Bolded text are
the Big Lies.]
Clearly, this entire psyop was premeditated and its design was hastily done
contemporaneously with Russia's Syria intervention. NSA/CIA/FBI knew of HRC's security
breeches and rightly assumed their contents would find their way into the election, so the
general plan was ready to go prior to WikiLeaks publications. b has uncovered much, and I
hope he's planning to publish a book about the entire affair.
Ken @ 4: There doesn't necessarily need to be One Major Reason for going to war. There may be
several reasons all feeding and reinforcing one another and creating a psychological climate
in which Going To War is seen as the only solution and is inevitable. The reasons are not
just economic and political but cultural and historical.
In some countries allied with the US, the politicians in power are the ideological
descendants of those who collaborated with Nazi Germany - so in a sense they are committed to
"correcting" what they see as wrong. In the case of current Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe, he is the grandson of a former prime minister who once served in General Tojo's World
War II cabinet.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2012/12/26/national/formed-in-childhood-roots-of-abes-conservatism-go-deep/#.WoyZCG9uaUk
That's why pinning down the reason for wanting a war against Russia is so difficult.
Since the FBI never inspected the DNC's computers first-hand, the only evidence comes from
an Irvine, California, cyber-security firm known as CrowdStrike whose chief technical
officer, Dmitri Alperovitch, a well-known Putin-phobe, is a fellow at the Atlantic Council,
a Washington think tank that is also vehemently anti-Russian as well as a close Hillary
Clinton ally.
Thus, Putin-basher Clinton hired Putin-basher Alperovitch to investigate an alleged
electronic heist, and to absolutely no one's surprise, his company concluded that guilty
party was Vladimir Putin. Amazing! Since then, a small army of internet critics has chipped
away at CrowdStrike for praising the hackers as among the best in the business yet
declaring in the same breath that they gave themselves away by uploading a document in the
name of "Felix Edmundovich," i.e. Felix E. Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Soviet secret
police.
As noted cyber-security expert Jeffrey Carr observed with regard to Russia's two main
intelligence agencies: "Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add
Iron Felix's name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world
while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor."
muddy waters.. paid for propaganda.... look at all the russian bots, lol... cold war 2 / mccarthyism 2 is in effect... the historic parallels are marked. thank you
neo cons! it's working... the ordinary person in the usa can't be this stupid can they?
when does ww3 kick in? is that really what these idiots want? or is it just to prolong the
huge defense budget?
This is about conditioning voters in Europe and the United States for a long war with Russia
and China. In other words, a return to the 1950s. It is not working and becoming increasingly
hysterical because societies are not nearly as cohesive as they once were, and the mainstream
political parties, while better funded and more top-down organized, are basically hollow. The
collapse is coming. Four years or ten, take your pick.
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with Russia."
Most Americans probably don't. Just the chosen few with the deepest fall-out shelters. The
idea is to keep piling the pressure on to countries like Iran and Russia in the hope that
their populations will rise up and demand the freedoms that we enjoy in the West....things
like uncensored wardrobe malfunctions and transgender washrooms.
let's imagine that we have the pyramid of evilness, by which we measure bestiality of one
regime and its constituency. my firm belief is that us would be on the top of that pyramid.
Only dilemma would be between Zionist entity and the US.
"How could the masses be made to desire their own repression?" was the question Wilhelm
Reich famously asked in the wake of the Reichstagsbrandverordnung (Reichstag Fire Decree,
February 28, 1933), which suspended the civil rights protections afforded by the Weimar
Republic's democratic constitution.
Hitler had been appointed chancellor on January 30, 1933
and Reich was trying to grapple with the fact that the German people had apparently chosen
the authoritarian politics promoted by National Socialism against their own political
interests.
Ever since, the question of fascism, or rather the question of why might people
vote for their own oppression, has never ceased to haunt political philosophy.2 With Trump
openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the continued electoral
success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question has again become
a pressing one.
An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime.
Remember the "USS MAINE"! Media have long agitated for War in US History. Nothing sells newspapers
like a good ole war! Demonizing is a way to achieve it. What is sure is that this is a one way street.
Once over the cliff, there is no turning back.
How do you tell people that, at the flick of your magic switch, Putin is in fact
a swell guy and wonderful human being? Once love is gone who goes back
to the filthy, abhorrent and estranged spouse?
Surely the US establishment is playing with fire thinking they will successfully
ride out any conflict and come out on top secure in their newly reestablished
hegemony on the smoldering ruins of Humanity.
Make no mistake, we are all on the road to hell. Better enjoy todays peace as
tomorrow word will be filled with the sweet music of cemeteries.
@15 "An American people is in perfect harmony with its regime."
I'm not so sure. I think there are many Americans who deeply distrust their government.
But of course they don't want to appear unpatriotic. There are also many who are apathetic
and many simply don't know how to change things.
It's horrible I know to quote a Nazi, but Goring had this right:
Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm
want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his
farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in
England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all,
it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to
drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or
a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter
through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare
wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always
be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they
are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country
to danger. It works the same way in any country.
American media has graduated from simply repeating the lies of "unnamed government sources"
to repeating the lies of any organization unofficially blessed by the powers that be. The
skills required to repeat the text verbatim serve them well in both cases. Skepticism is only
reserved to anyone who tries to introduce logic or facts into the equation--such as when Jill
Stein was interviewed on MSNBC recently. How dare Ms. Stein try to bring FACTS into the
discussion!
In that The Narrative is tightly controlled in the corporate media, not matter how strong the
proofs or arguments about the falsity of these propaganda campaigns are, little or no
circulation of those proofs or arguments wlll reach the general public.
Thanks Jen. It still makes no sense. As a veteran of the Vietnam fiasco, I was pretty much
government oriented until McNamara outed the whole thing whining about haw sorry he was.
59,000 dead and he's sorry. They were able to hide the Gulf of Tonkin BS until then. After
that I researched the reasons for each war/conflict the USA started and could find no logical
reasons except hunger for power. But the little sandbox wars won't destroy the world like a
major war/conflict with Russia and it goes nuclear. Almost every politician, and major news
organizations are pushing for a war/conflict with Russia. This is insanity as no one will win
a war like this and I am sure they know that,,, but they keep the war drums beating anyhow.
It simply doesn't make sense. But Thanks again.
Same for dh, #14. Things are soooo stupid, your joking may be closer to the truth than you
know. :-)
Thank you for the post. I will save it and use it liberally, with proper attributions.
When one challenges the tribe on places like Twitter, it is hard to tell who is a real idiot
and who is a bot. How do you know? Maybe that the bots go away fairly quickly and the idiots
hang around to argue ad infinitum.
The thing that bothers me, is the fact that the MIC Globalists don't care what we think or how
poor their deceptions are. The public perception that "russia did it!!" continues to rise. I
wonder what the public acceptance level needs to be for them to execute a MAJOR false flag
event. They seem to think they are still on target, and its just a short matter or time...
They are going to do this when the perception management is complete... We really do not need another one of their disasters
The bully pushes and pushes until stopped by the first serious push back. The dynamic of the
west and the neocon/Zionists at the core is essentially that of the bully. Nations like
Venezuela and the Philippines have started to push back, and I hope and feel fairly confident
that they will both survive the rage of the US. In some part, they have begun to show the
actual powerlessness of the bully.
But the really killer nations - Russia and China - are holding their water as they
strengthen their force. I believe that one very serious push back from either of them in the
right circumstances will stop the bully. And yet, as they bide their time, we see a curious
phenomenon wherein the US is destroying itself from the inside.
It's as if all of the forces that exist to control the country - the lockstep media, the
fully rigged markets, the hysterical military, the bought legislature and the crooked courts
- are all acting far more strongly than should be necessary. The entire system is
over-reacting, over-reaching, over-boiling. And in the course of this, the US is actually
shedding power, and at an amazing rate. But not from the action of Russia but from its
non-action, the empty space that that allows the bully's dynamic to over-reach, all the way
to complete failure.
Is it possible that deep in the security states of Russia and China there's even a study
and a model for this? Is the collapse of the US actually being gamed by Russia and China -
and through the totally counter-intuitive action of non-action?
Hey b,
Just wanted to let you know that Joe Lauria mentioned your blog and the article you wrote on
the indictment of the 13 Russians. He was on Loud and Clear (Sputnik Radio, Washington DC)
today and brought you up at the start of the program.
Glad to see you get some recognition for all the great work you've been doing :)
Ken @ 24: The warmongering is not intended to make any sense - not many people are trained in
critical thinking and logic, and even when they are, they can be swamped by their own
emotions or other people's emotions.
Propaganda is intended to appeal to people's emotions
and fears. You can try reading works by Edward Bernays - "Crystallizing Public Opinion"
(1923) and "Propaganda" (1928) - to see how he uses his uncle Sigmund Freud's theories of the
mind to create strategies for manipulating public opinion. https://archive.org/details/EdwardL.BernaysPropaganda
Bernays' books influenced Nazi and Soviet propaganda and Bernays himself was hired by the
US government to justify in the public mind the 1954 US invasion of Guatemala.
You may be aware that Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation which owns the Wall Street
Journal, FOX News and 20th Century Fox studios, is also on the Board of Directors of Genie
Energy which owns a subsidiary firm that was granted a licence by an Israeli court to explore
and drill for oil and natural gas in Syria's (and Israeli-occupied) Golan Heights.
The national media speaks as one -with one consistent melody day after day. Who is the
conductor?
When will one representative of the mainstream media sing solo? There must be a Ray
McGovern somewhere among the flock.
Many of my thoughts as well.
The U.S.'s greatest fault is its tacit misunderstanding of just what russia is in fact.
They utterly fail to understand the Russian character; forged over 800 years culminating with
the defeat of Nazi Germany, absorbing horrific losses; the U.S. fails to understand the
effect upon the then Soviets, become todays Russians.
Even the god's have abandoned the west...
I watched bbc news this am in the hope that I would get to see the most awful creature at the
2018 olympics cry her croc tears (long story - a speed skater who cuts off the opposition but
has been found out so now when she swoops in front of the others they either skate over her
leading to tearful whines from perp about having been 'pushed', or gets disqualified for
barging. Last night she got disqualified so as part of my study on whether types like this
believe their own bullshit I thought I'd tune in but didn't get that far into the beebs
lies)
The bulk of the bulletin was devoted to a 'lets hate Russia' session which featured a
quisling who works for the russian arm of BBC (prolly just like cold war days staffed
exclusively by MI6/SIS types). This chap, using almost unintelligible english, claimed he had
proof at least 50 Russian Mercenaries (question - why are amerikan guns for hire called
contractors [remember the Fallujah massacre of 100,000 civilians because amerikan contractors
were stupid] yet Russian contractors are called mercenaries by the media?) had been killed in
Syria last week. The bloke had evidence of one contractor's death not 50 - the proof was a
letter from the Russian government to the guy's mother telling her he didn't qualify for any
honours because he wasn't in the Russian military.
The quisling (likely a Ukranian I would say) went on to rabbit about the bloke having also
fought in Donbass under contract - to which the 'interviewer (don't ya love it when media
'interview' their own journos - a sure sign that a snippet of toxic nonsense is being
delivered) led about how the deceitful Russians had claimed the only Russians fighting in
Donbass were contractors - yeah well this bloke was a contractor surely that proves the
Russians were telling the truth.
It's not what these propagandists say; they adopt a tone and the audience is meant to hate
based on that even when the facts as stated conflict with the media outlet's point of view.
Remember the childhood trick of saying "bad dog" ter yer mutt in loving tones - the dog comes
to ya tail wagging & licks yer hand. This is that.
The next item was more Syria lies - white helmets footage (altho the beeb is now mostly
giving them an alternative name to dodge the facts about white helmets) of bandaged children
with flour tipped on their heads.
The evil Syrians and Russians are bombarding Gouta - nary a word about the continuous
artillery barrage Gouta has subjected the citizens of Damascus to for the past 4 years, or
that the Syrians have repeatedly offered truces and safe passage for civilians. Any injured
children need to ask their parents why they weren't allowed to take advantage of the frequent
offers of transport out. Maybe the parents are worried 'the resistance' will do its usual and
blow up the busloads of children after luring them over with candy.
Anyway I switched off after that so never did learn if little miss cheat had a cry.
Thank you for reporting on this. The people behind the so-called Alliance for Securing
Democracy need to be exposed for the warmongering frauds that they are. Regardless of what
one thinks of him, Trump was correct when he said that NATO is obsolete.
The American Security State needs enemies to exist, otherwise there's no need for the
"security" which translates into big bucks for the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Media
Complex. They can't agree on the ranking of the enemies: North Korea is a threat to the
world! Iran is....! Russia is...! China is....! But the threats are there, and they are pure
evil (TPTB contend).
So the whole scenario makes perfect sense from that standpoint.
re Felix E. Dzerzhinsky: Ukrainian fascists have a particular hatred of Felix because he was
both a Bolshevik and a Pole.
I hate to do this but I just posted this elsewhere, at Off Guardian, where the Guardian is
back into its highest gears promoting war.
"The wardrums are beating in a way not heard since 1914-there is no reason for war except the
best reason of all: an imperial ruling class sees its grip slipping and will chance
everything rather than endure the humiliation of adjusting to reality.
"China is in the position that the US was in 1914-it can prevent the war or wait until the
combatants are too exhausted to defend their paltry gains.
Given the realities of nuclear warfare-which seem not to have sunk in among the Americans,
perhaps because they mistake a bubble for a bomb shelter- the wise option is to prevent war
by publicly warning against it. In the hope that brought face to face with reality the masses
will besiege their governments, as we can easily do, and prevent war.'
Sad but definitely correct. The first casualty of war is the truth. It's dead in the USA and
allies. Therefore, they're at war with Russia and China. If Russia is down, China will be
dealt with.
The horrible thing with the US attitude is that you do a white thing, you're attacking them
and if you do a black thing, you're attacking them too. This attitude is building hostility
against Russia. It's like programming a pet to be afraid of something. The western people are
being programmed into hating Russia, dehumanizing her people, cutting every tie with Russia
and transforming any information from Russia into life threatening propaganda. A war for our
hearts is running. The US population is being coerced into believing that war against Russia
is a vital necessity.
It will be a war of choice from the US "elites". Clinton announced it and the population
had chosen Trump for that reason.
You're wondering why they're doing it. I suppose that their narrative is losing its grip on
the western populations. They're also conscious of it. If they lose it, they'll have to face
very angry mobs and face the void of their lives. Everything they did was either useless or
poisonous. It means to be in a very bad spot. They're are therefore under an existential
threat.
Russia proved time and again that it's possible to get out of their narrative. Remember their
situation when Eltsin was reelected with the western help.
The Chicago boys were telling the
Russian authorities how to run the economy and they made out of the word democrat a synonym
of thief. They were in the narrative and the result was a disaster. Then, they woke up and
started to clean the house. I remember the "hero" of democracy whose name was "Khodorovsky
(?)". In the west he was a freedom fighter and in Russia he stole something like Rosneft.
This guy and others of the same sort were described in the west as heroes, pionniers and so
on. They were put back into submission to the law. The western silence about their stealings,
lies and cheating is still deafening me.
It was the first Russian crime. The second one was
to survive the first batch of sanctions against them (I forgot the reason of the sanctions).
They not only survived they thrived. It was against the western leading economic ideology. A
third crime was to push back Saakachvili and his troops with success.
The fourth was to put
back into order the Tchechen. Russia was back into the world politics and history. They were
not following the script written for them in Washington and Brussels. They were having a
political system putting limits to the big companies. And, worst of it, it works.
Everybody in the west who can read and listen would have noticed that they are making it.
More, with RT and Sputnik giving info outside the allowed ones or asking annoying questions
(western journalists lost that habit with their new formation in the schools of journalism -
remember the revolution in their education was criticised and I missed why - very curious to
discover why), they were exposing weaknesses of the western narrative. On the other side
their narrative became so poor and so limited that any regular reader would feel bored
reading the same things time and again and being asked to pay for it at a time his salary was
decreased in the name of competitivity. The threat to their narrative was ready. They had to
fight it.
It's becoming a crime to think outside their marks. It's becoming a crime to read outside
their marks. I don't even talk about any act outside their marks. Now, it's going to be a
crime of treason to them in war time.
I do feel sadness because many will die from their fear of losing their grip on our minds. I
do feel sadness because they have lost and are in denial about it. I do feel sadness because
those death aren't necessary. I do feel sadness because those people can't face the
consequences of their actions. They don't have the necessary spine. Their lives were useless
and even toxic. They could start repairing or mitigating their damages but it would need a
very different worldview, a complete conversion to another meaning of life outside the
immediate and maximal profit.
You have aptly described the most dangerous country on this planet.
That country must not be appeased, at any cost, because it would surely end us forever...
Conclusion regarding IP address data:
What we're seeing in this IP data is a wide range of countries and hosting providers. 15% of
the IP addresses are Tor exit nodes. These exit nodes are used by anyone who wants to be
anonymous online, including malicious actors.
Overall Conclusion:
The IP addresses that DHS provided may have been used for an attack by a state actor like
Russia. But they don't appear to provide any association with Russia. They are probably used
by a wide range of other malicious actors, especially the 15% of IP addresses that are Tor
exit nodes.
The malware sample is old, widely used and appears to be Ukrainian. It has no apparent
relationship with Russian intelligence and it would be an indicator of compromise for any
website.
Partisan @15: "With Trump openly campaigning for less democracy in America -- and with the
continued electoral success of far-right antiliberal movements across Europe -- this question
has again become a pressing one."
The above is entirely backwards. The bottom 2/3rds is frustrated by the LACK of democracy
in the US and that's a major reason many voted against the (in fact anti-democratic) elite's
desired candidate, Hillary.
70% of the voting age public was dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with both candidates,
and 40% of Americans didn't vote, so that means whichever of Clinton/Trump won, she/he would
win with approval of only 10% of the electorate. That's the best example possible of our
anti-democratic reality (it's not a worry or a threat, it's already here).
In the case of both Europe and the US, many people are generally very dissatisfied with
the anti-democratic response by the elite to 'the will of the people' that there be much less
immigration into countries with high unemployment and 'race to the bottom' labor conditions.
That's nearly the entire basis of what the corporate media calls 'the move right'... When in
fact restricting immigration is a pro-labor and therefore 'left' policy ... Except in the
confused and deliberately stupid political discourse the elite media pushes so hard.
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own
opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism
of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's
what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught
in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all
those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality. One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
Well, it is not...if you are believer in "democracy". Honestly, the story of democracy (by capitalist/liberal class) is a grand BS, to be
modest. The only thing what was truthful, paradoxically, is who is "lesser evil" of two. Or
the Bigger one in unrestrained capitalism, savage and monopoly, predatory and a fascists
one.
One way or other result is the same, it is: Barbarism.
When "trending on Twitter" became a news item in and of itself, I began to despair for the
future of reporting, political discourse and ultimately, democracy in America. Twitter and FB
are at best a source of information for news reporting, but not a source of news in
themselves.
We made ourselves vulnerable to any and every sort of pernicious manipulation and in the
end, we just about deserve everything we get.
The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the
same time over the means of mental production. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the
ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Media and its politicians have lost it completely,
and if you criticize them, well then of course you are a... "russian bot". Unfortunately 90% of westerners buy this western
MSM influence propaganda campaign, WW3
with Russia will come easy.
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
Chris Hedges has an article on the similar situation in Germany almost 100 years ago.
"In 1923 the radical socialist and feminist Clara Zetkin gave a report at the Communist
International about the emergence of a political movement called fascism. ...." https://www.truthdig.com/articles/how-we-fight-fascism/
Partisan @54: The facts contradict the statement in the quote that Trump was "openly
campaigning for less democracy." He wasn't. He in fact campaigned in part as a populist who
would oust (or at least repeatedly ridicule) an anti-democratic elite. If you've overlooked
that and believe more or less the opposite, you can't understand the 2016 election or the
elite's virulently anti-democratic reaction to it.
Earlier I wrote about the following relationship: Khodorkovsky - The Interpreter -
Henry Jackson Society (UK) .
With Bush and the Iraq War, Dutch PM Balkenende and FM de Hoop Scheffer were seen as the
poodle of the White House. In recent years PM Mark Rutte [of MH-17 crash fame] can be
considered its puppy. Perhaps a parrot would suit better.
I noticed a former journalist Hubert Smeets hs partnered with some people to found a
"knowledge center" Window on Russia [Raam op Rusland]. Laughable, funded by the Dutch Foreign
Ministry and a Dutch-Russia cultural exchange Fund. Preposturous in its simplicity and harm
for honest reporting.
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
The accusation is a lot like accusing somebody of despoiling an outhouse by crapping in
it, along with everyone else, but the outhouse in question had a sign on its door that read
"No Russians!" and the 13 Russians just ignored it and crapped in it anyway.
The reason the Outhouse of American Democracy is posted "No Russians!" is because Russia
is the enemy. There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy, and treating it
as such is incredibly foolish and dangerous, but that's beside the point. Painting Russia as
the enemy serves a psychological need rather than a rational one: Americans desperately need
some entity onto which they can project their own faults.
The US is progressing toward a
fascist police state; therefore, Russia is said to be a horrible dictatorship run by Putin.
The US traditionally meddles in elections around the world, including Russia; therefore, the
Russians are said to meddle in US elections. The US is the most aggressive country on the
planet, occupying and bombing dozens of countries; therefore, the Russians are accused of
"aggression." And so on
@Noirette 70
Yes, claiming that Russians are promoting polical division is silly -- the divisions were
already there. gizmodo
, Jun 12, 2014: It's Been 150 Years Since the U.S. Was This Politically Polarized
Nevertheless, now in WIRED
magazine: Their [Agency] goal was to enflame "political intensity through supporting radical
groups, users dissatisfied with [the] social and economic situation, and oppositional social
movements."
Bernie Sanders said he on Wednesday, "felt compelled to address Russian interference
during the US election. Sunday.... he was not aware and believes Russian bot promoting
him and went as far to said WikiLeaks published Hillary's email stolen by the
Russia....."
Can you really trust that lying basted? I'm probably one of the few MoA refused to
believe and trust Bernie Sanders and the fuckup Democrats .
Excellent article summarizing much of what B has posted and more.
"Finally, and as long was we are on the topic, here is what a real troll farm looks like.
[Picture of NSA] Yet this vast suite of offices in Fort Meade, Maryland, where 20,000 SIGINT
spies and technicians work for the NSA, is only the tip of the iceberg.
The US actually spends $75 billion per year---more than Russia's entire $69 billion
defense budget---spying on and meddling in the politics of virtually every nation on earth.
An outfit within NSA called Tailored Access Operations (TAO) has a multi-billion annual
budget and does nothing put troll the global internet and does so with highly educated,
highly paid professionals, not $4 per hour keyboard jockeys."
Great article. Great comments. I LOVE MoA! And it's great to see b getting recognition.
james wrote: "There aren't any compelling reasons why it should be the enemy"
You know the following; I think you're just too decent a human being to understand how
psychopaths operate. Russia is a huge area with enormous natural resources as well as a
large, educated populace. Zbignew Brzezenski explained in his 1997 book "The Grand
Chessboard" why global hegemony required taking control over Russia (and how to do it, which
boils down to taking the other chess pieces off the board (Iraq/Ukraine/etc. and then pulling
off a "color revolution," coup or military conquest).
Ziggy also noted that once Russia was incorporated, China is the next, and largely last
target.
Jen: NICE JOB putting together a big picture, from Bernays' control of the masses all the
way to Genie Energy. Add in Oded Yinon and PNAC and the "foreign policy blunders" that led to
the present situation in MENA look like a carefully-constructed, long-game being played "by
the book."
Fairleft. Any leftist/socialist movement which is not global is doomed to failure. This
has always been true, but with "offshoring" of manufacturing jobs and the internet
untethering many "white collar" jobs from any given geological location(s), workers must see
ourselves as a global entity rather than national or regional players - because that is
certainly how the 0.01% see us (and themselves).
"Workers of the world UNITE" is more true today than a century and a half ago.
nations that do not have to face costs arising from environmental, health or safety
legislation will almost always prevail in the world market over those that have some concern
for the environment and the workers.
That is the main issue I have with globalization.
Competing on wages is one thing; that can be a great impetus to become more efficient and
productive, but if we do nothing to force other countries to clean up their act, they will
have no impetus to do so and we will continue to lose jobs to the international competition,
no matter how efficiently we work.
Msm, bellingcat and other think tanks - they push their anti Russian racism too far making a
large section of westerners just tired of their hysteria. Exposing their own racism and
paranoia.
"....borderless globalization has been a catastrophe for most of the underdeveloped world's
businesses and workers."
it is always annoying when I see the 'globalization" argument is used whether from the
right or left. The globalization has started by the moment when us humans begin to roaming on this
planet. there are millions of examples yet somehow globalization is of recent phenomenon.
Lapis Lazuli mineral used in making blue color and paint is found on clay pottery in
Mesopotamia's ancient city of Ur. That city is also place where many legend originated which
were taken by major religion and can be found in their holy books. See even the myth are globalizied from very early on.
Most of the people do not even know what it is, not those who are writing about it.
Globalization . . . is a program to create private corporate rights to trade, invest, lend
or borrow money and buy and own property anywhere in the world without much hindrance by
national governments. It would bar governments from most of the common methods of helping
or protecting their national industries and employment. It is a winners' program promoted
chiefly by some business interests, governments and neoclassical economists in Europe and
the United States.
One of its purposes is to intensify international competition for jobs.
Together with other Right policies it is likely to maintain some unemployment in the rich
countries and reduce the wage rates of their lower-paid workers, and reduce the proportion
of secure employment.
the observable and demonstrable attempts are clearly futile, and have been pretty
much reduced to spasms and tantrums, largely devoid of cognizance, not to mention legality,
but certainly dangerous nonetheless.
no sir ree bob, we get our multipolar world or we scavenge a dead landscape of Alamogordo glass .
Assange: "Regardless of whether IRA's activities were audience building through pandering
to communities or whether a hare-brained Russian government plan to "heighten the
differences" existed, its activities are clearly strategically insignificant compared to the
other forces at play."
Cybersecurity "experts" in the United States have long alleged that "Russian bots" were used
to meddle in the 2016 elections.
But, as it turns out, the authors of a Senate report on "Russian election meddling" actually
ran the false flag meddling operation themselves.
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia
of depressing Democrat voter turnout by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its
authors , New Knowledge , quickly became a household name. Described by the New
York Timesas a
group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the U.S.
military and the intelligence agencies.
Morgan and Fox have both struck gold in the " Russiagate " scheme, which sprung into being
after Hillary Clinton blamed Moscow for Donald Trump's presidential victory in 2016. Morgan,
for example, is one of the developers of the Hamilton 68 Dashboard, the online tool that
purports to monitor and expose narratives being pushed by the Kremlin on Twitter. And also
worth mentioning, that dashboard is bankrolled by the German Marshall Fund's Alliance for
Securing Democracy – a collection of Democrats and neoconservatives funded in part by
NATO (North AtTreaty Tready Organization) and
USAID (United States Agency for International Development).
It is worth noting that the 600 " Russia-linked " Twitter accounts monitored by the
dashboard is not disclosed to the public either, making it impossible to verify these claims.
This inconvenience has not stopped Hamilton 68 from becoming a go-to source for hysteria-hungry
journalists, however. Yet on December 19, a New York Times
story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created the fake army of Russian bots, as well
as several fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in
Alabama's 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake
Twitter accounts with Russian names, and had them follow Moore. They also operated several
Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded voters to
support a write-in candidate instead . In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had
" orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea that the Moore
campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet ." – RT
This scandal is being perpetrated by the
United States media and has so far deceived millions, if not more. The botnet claim made a
splash on social media and was further amplified by
Mother Jones , which based its story on "expert opinion" from Morgan's dubious creation,
Hamilton 68.
Things got even weirder when it turned out that Scott Shane, the author of the Tim es
piece, had known about the meddling for months because he spoke at an event where the
organizers boasted about it!
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement
Technologies, a group run by Mikey Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar.
Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to suppress Republican
votes, "enrage " Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a " false flag " to hurt Moore. He
dubbed it " Project Birmingham ." -RT
There really was meddling in American democracy by " Russian bots. " Except those bots
weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly
responsible for creating and amplifying the " Russiagate " hysteria over the past two years in
a
textbook case of psychological projection ,
brainwashing, and
Nazi-style propaganda campaigns.
"... Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft (actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I am not alone after all. ..."
"... That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case of all those think tanks and media. ..."
"... War or the threat of war is needed to distract attention from rapidly devolving societal bonds and immense economic inequality. ..."
Some years ago, I noticed the American media and politicians were sort of going soft
(actually mushy) in the brain department, but I was told not to be so judgemental. As the
months went by, I saw more and more people saying "they have gone nuts". So, it turns out I
am not alone after all.
That madness comes from having no behavioural limits, no references outside of your
own opinion but groupthink, and manipulating the language to suit your ambitions (the
Orwellism of the US media has been repeatedly pointed at). Simply put, you don't know anymore
what's what outside of the narrative your group pushes, you go nuts. The manipulators ends up
caught in their lies. All the more when they makes money out of it, which would be the case
of all those think tanks and media.
One could argue that they are not going mad, that they know full well they are lying, but
I beg to differ: they don't see anymore how ridiculous or how dumb or smart their arguments
are. That would be congruent with a real loss of touch with reality.
One wonders what
they see when they look at themselves in a mirror, a garden variety propagandist or a
fearless anti-Putin crusader?
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Watching the USA these days is like watching a loved one with progressive dementia. I've reached the stage where I think the
sooner it's over the better for everyone.
"... At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like. ..."
"... I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum, however bloody and expensive. ..."
"... Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud. ..."
At risk of being censored and/or convicted of Thought Crime - it is *remarkable* how very
highly disproportionate the number of Jewish Zionists is who are in the media and in Congress
and in ThinkTankistan and shouting about Russian meddling, 'aggression,' and the like.
It's too bad it is forbidden to examine this phenomena as one part of the matrix of power
and lies leading the US into conflict with Russia, no?
I don't think Bill Kristol and David Frum and Jeff Goldberg are either honest nor
primarily concerned with American national security, nor the lives of MENA civilians. I think
they care only about using American blood and treasure to facilitate Israeli lebensraum,
however bloody and expensive.
Trump survives only if he dances for the Deep State *and* Likud.
"... Senate Resolution on December 19, 2019 which calls for "a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline ..."
"... Calling for a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. ..."
Senator Ron Johnson (R- Wis) and Richard Durban (D-Ill) and 39 of their colleagues introduced a Senate Resolution on December
19, 2019 which calls for "a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline" as shown
here :
Here is a list of co-sponsors of the resolution:
Sen. James Inhofe (R-Ok.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee; Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), ranking member of the
Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation; and Sens. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), Ben Cardin
(D-Md.), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), Christopher Coons (D-Del.), James Risch (R-Idaho),
Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.), Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), Ben Sasse (R-Neb.),
Johnny Isakson (R-Ga.), John Boozman (R-Ark.), John Hoeven (R-N.D.), Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.), Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.),
Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), Doug Jones (D-Ala.), Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.),
Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Gary Peters (D-Mich.), Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Roger Wicker
(R-Miss.), John Cornyn (R-Texas), John Thune (R-S.D.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), Mike Crapo (R-Idaho), Rob Portman (R-Ohio), Mitch
McConnell (R-Ky.), and Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.).
Here is the resolution (currently unnumbered) in its entirety:
Calling for a prompt multinational freedom of navigation operation in the Black Sea and urging the cancellation of the
Nord Stream 2 pipeline.
... ... ...
Whereas the United States has important national interests in the Black Sea region, including the security
of three NATO littoral states, the promotion of European energy market diversification by ensuring unfettered European access
to energy exporters in the Caucuses and central Asia, and combatting use of the region by smugglers as a conduit for trafficking
in persons, narcotics, and arms;
Whereas the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a proposed underwater natural gas pipeline project that would provide
an additional 55,000,000,000 cubic meters of pipeline capacity from the Russian Federation to the Federal Republic of Germany
through the Baltic Sea;
Whereas the Russian Federation's state-owned oil and gas company, Gazprom, is the sole shareholder of the Nord
Stream 2 project;
Whereas, in 2017, there was spare capacity of approximately 55,000,000,000 cubic meters in the Ukrainian gas
transit system;
Whereas Gazprom cut off natural gas exports to Europe via Ukraine in 2006, and again in 2009, over supply and
pricing disputes with Ukraine's state-owned oil and gas company, Naftogaz;
Whereas transit of Russian natural gas to Europe via Ukraine declined precipitously after the completion of
Nord Stream 1 in 2011, falling from 80 percent to between 40 and 50 percent of Russia's total exports to Europe;
Whereas, in 2017, Russian gas accounted for 37 percent of Europe's natural gas imports, an increase of
5 percent over 2016;
Whereas, on December 12, 2018, the European Parliament overwhelmingly passed a resolution condemning both the
Russian Federation's aggression in the Kerch Strait and the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline; and
Whereas, on December 11, 2018, the United States House of Representatives passed a resolution calling upon
the European
Union to reject the Nord Stream 2 pipeline and urging the President to use all available means to promote energy policies in
Europe that reduce European reliance on Russian energy exports:
... ... ...
(9) applauds and concurs with the European 2 Parliament's December 12, 2018, resolution condemning Russian aggression in the
Kerch Strait and
the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, calling for the pipeline's cancellation due to its threat to European energy security, and calling
on the Russian Federation to
7 guarantee freedom of navigation in the Kerch Strait;
and
(10) urges the President to continue working with Congress and our allies to ensure the appropriate policies to deter the Russian
Federation from further aggression.
Fortunately, these two neocons can make all the proclamations they want but without President Trump's support it's all just
words; neocon virtue signalling. And of course President Trump won't support what they're doing because he campaigned on and governs
as an anti-war president.
Ron Johnson is a Bushie neocon who actively supported the neocon ˇJebe! (Please Clap) Bush while Durbin is a Hillary Clinton
neocon who actively supported that drunken, corrupt, warmongering shrew.
Thank all that's holy that we have a genuine anti-war POTUS in office and not either of those two neocons, both of whom were
utterly in the pockets of defense contractors.
Thanks for your research on relevant naval law. The Ukrainian vessel is reported to have violated the ongoing protocol by failing
to take on a Russian pilot as it transited the strait and an important bridge could potentially have been attacked by those vessels.
This was a provocation by Ukraine that seems to have its desired effect on the U.S. Senate. For essential background on the Ukrainian
civil war, I recommend reading Stephen F. Cohen's article in the Nation in 2014, titled "Kiev's atrocities and the Silence of
the Hawks." https://www.thenation.com/article/kievs-atrocities-and-silence-hawks/
Poland and Ukraine cannot stop provoking laughter from international observers. After the
lunatic idea circulating in Ukraine of resurrecting the country's nuclear arsenal, it is
now Poland's turn to send shockwaves around Europe. Polish foreign minister Czaputowicz
proposed that France share its nuclear arsenal and hand over its seat on the United Nations
Security Council (UNSC) to the European Union. It is is worth noting that this suggestion did
not even receive an official comment from Paris, showing that there was little prospect of the
Polish idea being taken seriously . Warsaw continues its opposition to the EU's domestic
policies on migration and austerity, while in foreign policy, agrees with countries like
Ukraine and the United States, particularly the neocon faction opposed to Russia. If there is a
distinctive feature in the political proposals that come from Poland, it is an acute
Russophobia. The idea of hosting a US base on Polish territory, and assuming its
costs, is another Polish proposal. The Americans are serious considering taking them up on
the offer .
The Poles and the Ukrainians would be willing to sacrifice themselves on behalf of their
allies for the privilege of being able to poke the Bear. Fortunately for them, Paris, London
and Berlin have neither the military capabilities nor the suicidal intention to challenge
Moscow with permanent military bases on its border. Neither do they wish to share their nuclear
weapons with other EU countries, nor engage in any such hare-brained ideas that threaten
humanity as the American Aegis Ashore system or the planned US withdrawal from the INF
Treaty.
So read the headline in The Washington Post , Aug. 18, 2011.
The story quoted President Barack Obama directly:
"The future of Syria must be determined by its people, but President Bashar al-Assad is
standing in their way... the time has come for President Assad to step aside."
France's Nicolas Sarkozy and Britain's David Cameron signed on to the Obama ultimatum: Assad
must go!
Seven years and 500,000 dead Syrians later, it is Obama, Sarkozy, and Cameron who are gone.
Assad still rules in Damascus, and the 2,000 Americans in Syria are coming home. Soon, says
President Donald Trump.
But we cannot "leave now," insists Sen. Lindsey Graham, or "the Kurds are going to get
slaughtered."
Question: Who plunged us into a Syrian civil war, and so managed the intervention that were
we to go home after seven years our enemies will be victorious and our allies will "get
slaughtered"?
Seventeen years ago, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan to oust the Taliban for granting sanctuary
to al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden.
U.S. diplomat Zalmay Khalilzad is today negotiating for peace talks with that same Taliban.
Yet, according to former CIA director Mike Morell, writing in The Washington Post today, the
"remnants of al-Qaeda work closely" with today's Taliban.
It would appear that 17 years of fighting in Afghanistan has left us with these alternatives
:
Stay there, and fight a forever war to keep the Taliban out of Kabul,
or withdraw and let the Taliban overrun the place.
Who got us into this debacle?
After Trump flew into Iraq over Christmas but failed to meet with its president, the Iraqi
Parliament, calling this a "U.S. disregard for other nations' sovereignty" and a national
insult, began debating whether to expel the 5,000 U.S. troops still in their country.
George W. Bush launched Operation Iraq Freedom to strip Saddam Hussein of WMD he did not
have and to convert Iraq into a democracy and Western bastion in the Arab and Islamic
world.
Fifteen years later, Iraqis are debating our expulsion.
Muqtada al-Sadr, the cleric with American blood on his hands from the fighting of a decade
ago, is leading the charge to have us booted out. He heads the party with the largest number of
members in the parliament.
Consider Yemen. For three years, the U.S. has supported with planes, precision-guided
munitions, air-to-air refueling and targeting information, a Saudi war on Houthi rebels that
degenerated into one of the worst humanitarian disasters of the 21st century.
Belatedly, Congress is moving to cut off U.S. support for this war. Crown Prince Mohammed
bin Salman, its architect, has been condemned by Congress for complicity in the murder of
journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the consulate in Istanbul. And the U.S. is seeking a truce in the
fighting.
Who got us into this war? And what have years of killing Yemenis, in which we have been
collaborators, done to make Americans safer?
Consider Libya. In 2011, the U.S. attacked the forces of dictator Moammar Gadhafi and helped
to effect his ouster, which led to his murder.
Told of news reports of Gadhafi's death, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton joked, "We came,
we saw, he died."
The Libyan conflict has since produced tens of thousands of dead. The output of Libya's
crucial oil industry has collapsed to a fraction of what it was. In 2016, Obama said that not
preparing for a post-Gadhafi Libya was probably the "worst mistake" of his presidency.
The price of all these interventions for the United States?
Some 7,000 dead, 40,000 wounded and trillions of dollars.
For the Arab and Muslim world, the cost has been far greater. Hundreds of thousands of dead
in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, civilian and soldier alike, pogroms against
Christians, massacres, and millions uprooted and driven from their homes.
How has all this invading, bombing and killing made the Middle East a better place or
Americans more secure? One May 2018 poll of young people in the Middle East and North Africa
found that more of them felt that Russia was a closer partner than was the United States of
America.
The fruits of American intervention?
We are told ISIS is not dead but alive in the hearts of tens of thousands of Muslims, that
if we leave Syria and Afghanistan, our enemies will take over and our friends will be
massacred, and that if we stop helping Saudis and Emiratis kill Houthis in Yemen, Iran will
notch a victory.
In his decision to leave Syria and withdraw half of the 14,000 troops in Afghanistan, Trump
enraged our foreign policy elites , though millions of Americans cannot get out of there soon
enough.
In Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century,
The New York Times wrote,
"As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new generation to find a way
forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already created."
Probably not. It is just the the USA imperial interest and Israeli interests highly correlate in this region.
Notable quotes:
"... Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel. ..."
"... And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple as that. ..."
Mr. Giraldi ends on a hopeful note, that readers of Bret Stephen's article will conclude not that Trump is bad for Israel, but
that Israel is bad for America. Alas, wishful thinking.
Those who get their daily dose of lies from the NYTimes will believe what's written, as they believed Judith Miller's lies
that helped get us into the Iraq war for the sake of Israel.
And other lies by other liars for Mideast wars cooked up by loyal-to-Israel neocons. No Israel, no war. It's as simple
as that.
IOW time is running out for the neo-cons, and they're only going to get Iran destroyed
and hold onto power in the US through an outright Bolshevik style coup against the public
(some kind of fabricated National Emergency).
Well, we already had one "fabricated national emergency" -- the 9/11 false flag. Do you
think there'll be yet another? I mean something big, not like the Skripal thing.
As usual Philip Giraldi out writes the NYT hacks. Stephens and his cohorts at the Times are
constantly kvetching about Israel then they scream anti-Semitism if it's pointed out. It's
exhausting. I'm exhausted with neocons.
Trotskyism : the political, economic, and social principles advocated by Trotsky
especially the theory and practice of communism developed by or associated with Trotsky and
usually including adherence to the concept of worldwide revolution as opposed to socialism
in one country.
Pro-Zionist liberals such as those at the New York Times have the dilemma of how to
oppose President Trump, who pursues pro-Zionist policies. A solution seems to be to argue
that Trump is not really that pro-Zionist.
Inspired by the Scofield Bible, it is, regrettably, a fundamental belief of millions of
voters that Israel is good for America.
In John Hagee's words , '50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with
five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel.'
The linked article concludes: 'Not least among the many victims of the Scofield Bible are
5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by America's
Zionized Christians. Thanks to their indoctrination by Scofield's unholy book, they believe
that Palestine belongs not to the Palestinians -- many of whom are fellow Christians -- but
exclusively to "God's chosen people".'
I'm pleased to say I was not for moving the embassy and as for the Iran deal it was
better than the alternative, with the potential for further talks down the road. Stephens
didn't approve but both aspects of US foreign policy were good for the US. So why would we
expect him to?
Where the clash is going to come is the Democratic party is not going to put up with this
rubbish anymore. Yes there will be some holdovers (Schumer, Cardin et al.) but blanket
support is not going to play with the next congress. They will lose donor support as well as
media acceptance –from the Times– but Christian Zionism isn't a factor for Dem's
and constituents see that a brutal Israeli government that is focusing on attaching itself to
kindred spirit states led by strongman types, doesn't deserve support.
when we here about israel as the problem it is really not israel the country but israel the
people. they are spread out over many countries but all still believe in their cult of israel
i have read many times how the majority of them are not even ancestors of israel but are
instead converts form centuries ago there are lawsutis in the US against the government aid
to israel which vilotlates US law on providing aid to an undeclares nuke power,,,and against
aipac for not registering FARA,,,they have gone nowhere In my opinion, their whole power
comes from media control when the media goes on and on about bogus Russian influence and says
nothing of israel influence you know you have a problem
The World will never be free and peaceful until we can liberate AMERICAN & European
politcal, economic, military, intelligentsia, educational & cultural DECISION MAKING
CENTERS from destructive & inhuman ZIONIST lobby. As Stephen Walt & John Mearsheimr
wrote in their unique & worldwide known "US FOREIGN POLICY AND ISRAEL LOBBY" not only
these lobbying organizations are anti US interests but they are as well against the long term
interests of ISRAEL itself.
Briefly we should free mind of American people before all to have a ideal and productive
world.
Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the
truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most
Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening
to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand,
there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human
bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid
"ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress
are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your
power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep
it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
Social Media has opened the door and continues to pave the path for the world to see the
truth of the Apartheid State of Israel and the struggle of the Palestinian People. Most
Americans are struggling themselves, so many won't make the effort to learn what's happening
to foreigners living half a world away. It's perfectly understandable. On the other hand,
there are others of us–and the number is growing exponentially–who feel a human
bond with the suffering and humiliation Palestinian People experience daily from an Apartheid
"ally" who we–through our American taxes–support. Our representatives in congress
are heavily influenced to vote for measures to support Netanyahu's Apartheid Regime. Use your
power of the pen to reach out to your local representative in congress to stop now. And keep
it up my Brothers and Sisters. Social Media is the Way!
This is what I said on Pat Buchanan's page about a comment, very apropos to this article,
also from the NY Times "That comment from the NY Times exposes how aligned the globalist
leftist elite is with the NEOCON globalist elite. There's 'no daylight' between characters
like 'Linda' Graham and 'Up Chuck' Schumer when it comes to globalist hegemony. Thank God for
Donald and keep America First!" The comment that Pat made his point on was this: 'In
Monday's editorial celebrating major figures of foreign policy in the past half-century, The
New York Times wrote', "As these leaders pass from the scene, it will be left to a new
generation to find a way forward from the wreckage Mr. Trump has already
created." This is what Pat attacked in his column.
Correct me if I'm wrong but America still has NO formal alliance treaty with the Jewish
State, no?
And finally 'Bret Stephens'; How clever they are with their names.
@Hamed
Ghashghavi The problem 'Hamed from Tehran' is that the Main Stream Media and the
political class in the USA is almost completely owned by the rich 'Zionist Lobby'.
For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the
dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.
Aid to Palestinians: another $500 million.
Tax deductible funds going towards settlement expansion: several hundreds of million if
not billion.
Aid to Jordan. Aid to Lebanon.
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
I predict proactive Jewish Lobby Stink-Think Tanks have engineered plans to dramatically
influence Democrat Congress & presidential candidate elections, and which are underway
now.
Elections come and go but the Zio stump-song remains the same.
First, and as you should well understand Mark, particular campaigns for US Senate cost
$millions simply to get a candidate's mere "name" in front of ever longing & frustrated
American voters.
Of course, such efforts are enhanced by manifold "special interests" and billionaire
campaign contributions.
Regrettably, U.S. election campaign "donor support" (uh, speech?) trumps the will of the
paltry amount of Americans who indulge voting, and our Zionist Corporate Media obliges the
biggest beneficiary winner$, and can finagle ideologically blind & typically
GOP-Christian Zionist's to bloc vote for, i.e., brand-name & repackaged Zio Democrats,
Pocahontas, Bloomberg, Biden, Bob Casey, etcetera.
In short, Mark, the "brutal Israeli government" expertly followed Protocols of Zion by
neutering U.S. Congressional & Presidential democratic elections, and the Zionist
Corporate Media entertainingly promotes the THEATER.
National rejection of the great "rubbish" work of, for one little example, NYT's Bret
Stephens, is a giant step toward how America could become gallant/noble again, and afterward
repent & focus upon strivation to "greatness."
The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve
the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned
up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.
A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining
Palestinians.
This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States
into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the
Palestinian issue that they created.
"I still say that US and Russia should come to Israels help in hour of need.
But Israel also should stop behaving like rotten spoiled child."
Russia can provide the "Jewish Autonomous Oblast" (already exists), and the U$A can
provide the means to move them there. Of course the FORMER Israel will have to pay for
everything.
I support Great Britain and France, that does not mean I approve of colonial behavior or
trouncing British or French identity. I can certainly support the existence of Is areal and
chagrin their attacks and encroachments onto Palestine uninvited and without compensation
or shooting protectors for the matter.
I tend to agree with you on this. No matter what one thinks of the morality of the events
of 1948, most of today's Israeli Jews were born on the land and have a right to live there.
They're no more responsible for the sins of their grandfathers than a modern German, except
to the extent that they help perpetuate continued injustice.
With that said, what frightens me is the extent to which some of them have been emboldened
by a combination of unchecked ethnocentrism and a sense of immunity from scrutiny and
criticism. Particularly in the realm of ethnic bioweapons. Most of the leading DNA analysis
companies seem to be Jewish-owned. It seems to be an area of emphasis with them. It was
reported 20 years ago that Israel has an anti-Arab virus. Who else might be a target?
Israeli participation in spyware and their access to raw NSA data is also concerning. How
do we know that the data isn't be used to intimidate Americans from speaking out, or to
siphon money from ordinary investors by insider trading?
@polistra Israel
is hardly a normal country. It is an Apartheid Colony. That's why it needs American support
and will need it for the foreseeable future. It uses its co-religionists in the US to
maintain an iron grip on US mideast policy, making sure that it is at the heart of it and
that almost no dissenting voices can ever be elected in the US or get any mainstream media
access. If that sounds like a normal country to you, I have a bridge for sale.
but as far your critisisms of Israel policy and 'undemocratic' and 'illiberal' stances
and actions.
well guess what
You're missing the thrust of Giraldi's position. Israel can do whatever it likes as long
as it doesn't entangle the US in their fight. But, as you well know, Israel is not interested
in fighting this fight alone. It has dragged others into it, including the US. As long as the
American taxpayer is forced to pay an annual tribute of ~$4B, they have every right to
condemn Israeli policies that clearly don't align with their values. So, get used to it.
Israel is no friend of America , never was , never has been and never will be, and just a few
examples, JFK was shot and killed in full view of Americans for his executive order 11110
which would have restored America to constitutional money bypassing the FED, who benefits?
The USS Liberty was attacked by Israel killing 34 and wounding 174 in an attempt to blame
the attack on Egypt and bring the U.S. into the war against Egypt and of course Israel lied
about the attack and got away with it!
... ... ...
Israel is Bad for America, by Philip Giraldi - The Unz Review
You have to hand it to the Israelis for conquering like Romans.
As for the US in Syria, it has always had the potential for handing us a "Charge of the
Light Brigade" moment where, like in the Crimean War, we manage to keep the Russians and the
Iranians checked in the region for a few years, but at a cost where even the dulled senses of
the US voter can't escape the toll taken to achieve this fleeting "strategic objective."
@bucky Aware,
Bucky said: "This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the
United States into a war with Iran."
Appreciate your posting of the wise sentences, above, bucky. Thanks.
Israel will never allow their territory expansion/M.E. hegemon goals to get interrupted by
mere U.S. elections.
The will and desires of American voters are easily manageable, manipulated, & another
major & fear-provoking "Homeland" False Flag attack, and voila, it's Fire & Fury upon
Syria and Iran.
Well, Israel itself isn't bad for us. Israel is a normal country defending its own
interests fiercely. Every country SHOULD defend its own interests fiercely
But it is HOW they defend those interests that is problematic. Hungary has insisted
that they will never tolerate a large number of migrants in their country. Hungary will be
for Hungarians. They do not wage wars, they do not commit ethnic cleansing in other people's
lands. They have merely closed their borders and that is a peaceful way in which they
fiercely protect their interests. The same goes for Japan. Despite a stagnating economy
caused by plummeting birth rates, the Japanese insist on a strict no immigrant policy. That
is a peaceful way of fiercely protecting their interests.
Israel on the other hand is anything but peaceful. They engage in ethnic cleansing and
drag the US (and whoever else they can con) into their conflicts. If we are looking for a
foreign example to emulate, there's no question about it – we should emulate Japan and
not Israel. Japan is a civilized nation where the people genuinely love their country. Israel
is a thuggish and fascist state that justly deserves all the opprobrium they shamelessly
whine about.
The level of alienation of Palestians probably reached that stage at which reconciliation is impossible.
Notable quotes:
"... This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the Palestinian issue that they created. ..."
The proximate reason why Iran is a problem in this region is because Israel cannot resolve
the Palestinian issue. Iran is basically a gigantic wag the dog. Without this external ginned
up threat, Israel is simply stuck in a Palestinian mire.
A war with Iran would also serve as a pretext and cover for Israel to expel its remaining
Palestinians.
This is why they amp up the Iran threat. This is why they want to draw the United
States into a war with Iran. Fundamentally because they refuse to take responsibility for the
Palestinian issue that they created.
For example: aid to Egypt is necessary because of Israel. It is how we pay off the
dictatorship for not pressing the Palestinian issue. So add another 1.5 billion.
Aid to Palestinians: another $500 million.
Tax deductible funds going towards settlement expansion: several hundreds of million if
not billion.
Aid to Jordan. Aid to Lebanon.
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
@bucky It's more
that that, specifically to Izruel . If you include 'Non Governmental Agencies', the
'Charaties' and hedge funds funneling unknown amounts of ZOG bucks to the land of Zion plus
other underhanded methods of getting money to their Zionist bretheren, it's in the tens of
billions .
Other than
brain-dead Christian fundamentalist, it come's as no surprise that Jews who wrote the Old and
New Testament, granted themselves special permission to violate virtually every moral law and
restriction known to mankind, including the right to steal land and resources belonging to
others. While, at the same time, giving themselves the right to condemn anyone daring to
point-out their lying and deceptive ways.
Realist, January 1, 2019 at 7:44 pm GMT
@bucky
Add it all up and it probably is $20 billion each and every year.
Middle East involvement costs trillions of dollars.
"... Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military establishment. ..."
If Syria wins the award for Country of the Year 2018, I'd hate to see who gets the Wooden
Spoon for 2018. There must be quite a few serious contenders for that prize!
Britain must surely be in the running for many reasons: among others, the sheer
disaster that is Theresa May's government (and the various clowns and thuggish goons that
constitute her Cabinet), the Brexit mess, the Skripal poisoning circus, Britain's own
collapse in controlling the propaganda narrative on Syria and the revelations about Integrity
Initiative and the Institute of Statecraft, and their ties to the British military
establishment.
In these times, the real political debate is centered around the issues of migration and
national identity. It's what Brexit was all about. It's the reason the one thing all Trump
supporters really want him to do, is to build the wall. It would be an international symbol
of our longing for and right to nationhood a billion dollar monument to nationalism and a
trigger for nationalist revival.
This is why the forces of globalism will throw everything at stopping it's construction.
If Trump leaves office and that wall is not built, his presidency will have been for
naught.
"... Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial Civilisation. ..."
@4 "For the life of me I cannot figure why Americans want a war/conflict with
Russia."
Ever since US Crude Oil peaked its production in 1970, the US has known that at some
point the oil majors would have their profitability damaged, "assets" downgraded, and
borrowing capacity destroyed. At this point their shares would become worthless and they
would become bankrupt. The contagion from this would spread to transport businesses, plastics
manufacture, herbicides and pesticide production and a total collapse of Industrial
Civilisation.
In anticipation of increasing Crude Oil imports, Nixon stopped the convertibility of
Dollars into Gold, thus making the Dollar entirely fiat, allowing them to print as much of
the currency as they needed.
They also began a system of obscuring oil production data, involving the DoE's EIA and the
OECD's IEA, by inventing an ever-increasing category of Undiscovered Oilfields in their
predictions, and combining Crude Oil and Condensate (from gas fields) into one category (C+C)
as if they were the same thing. As well the support of the ethanol-from-corn industry began,
even though it was uneconomic. The Global Warming problem had to be debunked, despite its
sound scientific basis. Energy-intensive manufacturing work was off-shored to cheap
labour+energy countries, and Just-in-Time delivery systems were honed.
In 2004 the price of Crude Oil rose from $28 /barrel up to $143 /b in mid-2008. This
demonstrated that there is a limit to how much business can pay for oil (around $100 /b).
Fracking became marginally economic at these prices, but the frackers never made a profit as
over-production meant prices fell to about $60 /b. The Government encourages this destructive
industry despite the fact it doesn't make any money, because the alternative is the end of
Industrial Civilisation.
Eventually though, there must come a time when there is not enough oil to power all the
cars and trucks, bulldozers, farm tractors, airplanes and ships, as well as manufacture all
the wind turbines and solar panels and electric vehicles, as well as the upgraded
transmission grid. At that point, the game will be up, and it will be time for WW3. So we
need to line up some really big enemies, and develop lots of reasons to hate them.
Thus you see the demonisation of Russia, China, Iran and Venezuela for reasons that don't
make sense from a normal perspective.
It is partially tied direct to the economy of the warmongers as trillions of dollars of
new cold war slop is laying on the ground awaiting the MICC hogs. American hegemony is
primarily about stealing the natural resources of helpless countries. Now in control of all
the weak ones, it is time to move to the really big prize: The massive resources of Russia.
They (US and their European Lackeys) thought this was a slam dunk when Yeltsin, in his
drunken stupors, was literally giving Russia to invading capitalist. Enter Putin, stopped the
looting .........connect the dots.
Off topic...but of interest to many here at MoA....The snipers that executed the Maidan
massacre in Kiev have come forward and have made sworn testimony///
63
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201802151061669056-georgian-snipers-maidan-evidence
"Adding a new twist to the story about the 2014 Maidan shootings, a Sputnik correspondent has
met with the purported snipers. The agency has obtained the records of interrogation of Koba
Nergadze and Aleksandre Revazishvili. Both Georgian nationals, they are ready to testify in a
Ukrainian court."
It was a matter of time when the participants in the Maidan Massacre would surface the coup
d'état didn't stop the carnage of Ukrainians nor corruption of people in power. The
witness accounts were described in the hours as the events unfolded. Only the faces were not
known ...
Maidan Massacre Bombshell: #Georgian snipers reportedly confess to massacring along
with Lithuanian snipers both #Police and #maidan protesters in #Ukraine in Italian
#documentary just broadcast by most popular
#Italian #TV channel [h/t Ivan Katchanovski]
US media has gone bonkers. The original claim was Russian meddling and Russian
interference in the election. Then, a sort of bridging meme showed up (see also b
above), undermining democracy or subverting it. This in turn then morphed into
promoting divisive issues which is new (circa 2018, not before?)
Imho. US pols make it their business to create divisive issues, diviusses
(neologism), to the point of inventing rubbish ones. Part of the US public embraces that sh*t
as well, > tribalism and religious economics in lieu of policy politics. So such actions
should be viewed as gloriously democratic, ;) - ok easy to make fun.
The emphasis on 'divisive' is curious, it signals that some managers are calling for
'union' - 'cohesion' - 'group soldering' facing the outside enemy, threat.
Russia has really become the all-purpose épouvantail scarecrow, specter of
doom, etc. An awareness of the high costs of divisiveness if uncontrolled -> massive
social unrest, at extreme, civil war -- and that these are to be avoided, is evidenced.
Heh, or the whole storm is just fluff that distracts, occupies the pixels, airwaves, a
jamboree of knee-jerk reactions irrelevant to the present World Situation, with practically
no important body - faction of the PTB, Trump, the MIC, lame outsiders like the EU, etc.
having any clue.
Why Mikhail Gorbachev was elected General Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee on March 11, 1985? Was there a will of Yuri
Andropov? What was the cause of the sudden death of defense Minister Dmitry Ustinov, who could be the first person in the
country? Was the Secretary General Konstantin Chernenko really poisoned by low-quality fish? And why did Victor Grishin lose his
chance to become the Secretary General of the "master of Moscow"?
Gorbachev was recruited in 1976-77 years when he visited Europe, then eliminate Kulakov and promote the Central Committee
Gorbachev. I am sure that the KGB had their own people recruited by the CIA and pursued a policy of promoting their candidacy
for the post of first person of the USSR.
The stupidest commentaries are here. This rotten system has outlived its usefulness.........and no leader was able to save
her. There is no progressive Communist state in the world and can not be!
Not Gorbachev, so someone else.The USSR was naive and doomed.What, one Gorbachev did everything? Full of vultures sat and
waited for the corpse. My uncle, being the mayor of Tikhvin, in the late 70s, said that the country is doomed because we are
engaged in self-eating.Huge funds went to support the Communist parties around the world.
@Asenovska Tatiana uncle rasskazyval, as mayor....What the University taught me.....
And I , being the senior officer, after 4 wounds the write-off on the ground, the pilot....Past Afghan, and not only.....
I saw our planes to be cur in peaces on orders from Gorbachev.... .And submarines, costing hundreds millions. Payed by people who
save on everyting to secure indepence of the country.
And this creature, was given Nobel Peace Prize for selling everthing to the USA for pennies on the dollar...
The West praised him, and he DESTROYED noth the ARMY AND NAVY and then the USSR ... He gave up our victory in
WWII without and fight's...
After Gorbachov the USA was able to bomb Belgrade, and Iraq, and Livia without any fear for retribution. He should be executed .
And the body of this traitor should be disposed in manure...
And if not Putin, we would be the colony of the USA much like Latin american countries. .And the USA would bomb Syria into stone
age, kill the President and grap all the oil
Only Putin is not GORBACHEV!!!!! And the Big Uncle blew up in Syria and they did not risk thier place to test Russia
anti-aircraft missile systems.
Gorbachev first created a deceptive impression of a young, wise, business-like head of state. In fact, he was a banal traitor
of his country, sold the sovereignty of a great country for perdpnal fortume and villa in Germany. While Wewst grbbed all opur
natiural resourses and large part of iundustry. YELTSIN destroyed completely the economica, and high technolgy ijndurites in
the country, sold everything to oligarchs for pennies. Both Gorbachev and Yeltsin are enemies of the Fatherland .
Gorbachev came to the sinking ship and it was too late to patch the holes in it. The cold war and the arms race sucked the
last currency reserves from the USSR. The Kremlin Party bonzes forgot about the economy, forgot about the people. They
were obsessed with matching the weaponry of the phantom enemy (Americans), and as a result of the cold war the USSR
disintegrated and broke up into 15 independent States.
While we can blame the weakling and traitor Gorbachev, even before him the agriculture was in deep and irreversible
decline. We were forced to buy grad for abroad. After the US has imposed sanctions that have artificially reduced oil prices
to such a low level that game was over. Currency flow from oil sales seizes and there was no alternative then to take
loans from the West.
The Treasury started printed too much rubles, inflation started and with it nationalist feeling that finished off the
country. Add to this Chernobyl disaster. When in Armenia in December 1988 there was the major earthquake, the Kremlin
requested the "decadent West" about the humanitarian aid.
Economy of the Soviet Union fell through the floor and no wonder Gorbachev was tilted towards the West, toward privatization
of the industries.
Of course he was a fool and allowed West to plunder the country, but essentially he have no choice, reforms were needed
and he lost control of them, tried to stage a fake coup to regain control and was deposed as the result. Because he was very
weak, incompetent politician, not fit for such a grave moment in the history of the country, he destroyed the country.
The socialist camp collapsed, and Gorbachov refused to help the socialist countries, it was necessary to save his own ass. He
also finished stupid and unnecessary war in Afghanistan. That was the only positive step he made. And that was too little too
late.
Instead of that asshole, Heydar Aliyev should have been elected by Politburo. The only person who was really able to
pull the country out of the crisis, it was Aliyev G. in any other scenario, the country was doomed to collapse . And
about Gorbachev , you can say so in Russian history , no traitor is worse and higher rank than this pederast!!!, All
pleasant viewing!
And why the interior Ministry, KGB were inactive. As well as Party Control? How could this hump with foreign help and
some special color revolution technology to destroy all the obstacles. How he managed to subdue the Politburo power
structure ( including the axis of the Gromyko-Primakov and Yakovlev) ? As he had no trouble to expel from the Central
Committee able and less corrupted members of the Central Committee (V. Sherbitsky , V. Grishin, G. V. Romanov, G. A.
Aliyev, D, Kuhn...)?
Gorbachev - zero as the head of state, but the soil he has prepared Khrushchev and Brezhnev (Moskva), they let the country
drift, theft, drunkenness, took away people's faith.
А хули дебилам объяснять. Горбачев открыл окно в мир. Живите уроды ,работайте развивайтесь. Но началась элементарная борьба за
власть. Так как в этой стране на протяжении всей истории ничего путного создать не умели. Что с татар взять. Страна не могла
не развалится. Если бы не Беловежское соглашение, крови было бы немерянно. В каждой республики были свои лидеры которые тупо
хотели быть президентами и якобы независимыми.. Кто виноват ,что страна наводнена ублюдками у власти. которые вместо того что
бы создавать могучую страну напичканную всей таблицей Менделеева, начали ее растаскивать.И грабят по сей день, под
руководством Единой россии. Вспомните как все визжали, когда страна стала открываться. Когда народ перестал поклонятся
импортным одноразовым зажигалкам и фантикам от жвачек. Думать надо, прежде чем повторять кремлевские методички. Теперь
катаетесь на Порше кайене, живете в особняках и хотите назад в СССР. Я с вас хуею..
Хорошо помню 1985 год когда вьібрали Горбачева .То у нас в Тернополе наш учитель политекономии тогда говорил нам студентам что
старьіе партейцьі говорят что Горбачев будет изменик .А почему мьі спрашивали .А потому что он не любит наши отечественьіе
костюмьі а любит английские ....Сколько лет прошло а только времья показало кто прав а кто нет .Китай например посмотрел на
нашу историческую ошибку и принимает все необходимьіе мерьі чтобьі подобньіх Горбачевьіх там у руля власти не оказалось ....Все
большие Иудьі бьіли меченьіе ,как и бьіл мечен Горбачев ...Горбачева можна сравнить из Нероном которьій розвалил большое ....
У господина Млечина с аналитикой большие проблемы, а ведь журналист должен знать всё о своём герое. В отношении Горбачёва он
так и не понял, почему Семи- частный отверг кандидатуру Горбачёва. Семичастный знал, что Горбачёв не чист на руку, короче
говоря один из первых советских мафиози в г. Ставрополе по производству алкоголя. Мне лично рассказал об этом брат убитого по
приказу Горбачёва следователя (по пути из Краснодара в Невинномысск), который напал на след этого упыря, но ему была устроена
автомобильная катастрофа, в которой погиб этот следователь. А почему Брежнев убрал Семичастного, потому что Семичастный знал
всю кухню правительственного переворота по смещению Хрущёва, поэтому Брежнев, по словам самого Семичастного убрал его из
Москвы подальше, и в Киеве устроил третьим замом председателя правительства Украинской ССР, выступая Семичастный сказал, я так
и не понял, кем я стал работать, работы практически не было, он просто отсиживался на этой высокой должности до пенсии.
Слушаю и все время одна мысль в голову лезет - как же надо было руководить страной , до какого идиотизма довести ситуацию с
продуктами питания , если академики и композиторы с мировым именем и даже дочь генсека !!!! искали знакомства и расположения
директора магазина !!! . О чем думают люди , пишущие вечные сентенции - "какую страну мы потеряли " - а ведь в провинции было
все гораздо хуже и японцы создали анекдот - "Самая лучшая система снабжения создана в СССР - все товары завозятся в Москву - а
благодарный народ САМ развозит по стране..." Не могла быть жизнеспособной страна при таком маразме..
Лично мне похуй!!! Если сравнить СССР ,где все было нельзя и под запретом, под наблюдением людей в плащах и шляпах,то при
Горбачеве, народ вздохнул глоток свежего,опьяняющего,долгожданного и запретного воздуха из вне... Первые кооперативы, джинсы,
машины, кафе, иномарки,музыка, фильмы!!! Что то новое принес! Нельзя так,было больше жить.. Виновен он во многом,но есть и
плюсы его политики. Предали его, а он предал нас....
Горбачёв был типичный южный дурачок . Они умеют 3 вещи -выглядеть выгодно(лучше чем есть на самом деле ,подмазать где
надо , и болтать .... А ЛЮБОЕ дело которое им поручишь -ОБГАДЯТ . СИСТЕМА СССР была уже слаба тем ,что потеряла
ЖЁСТКОСТЬ и ЗАЩИТУ от Дурака . При Хрущёве -она сработала и дурачка убрали ,при Горби - ЕМУ ДАЛИ РУЛИТЬ ,и ВСЁ
развалилось .
Престарелый Черненко - это плохо. А не престарелые Горбачёв, Яковлев, Шеварднадзе и Лигачёв - это жутко хорошо? Дело,
похоже, не только и не столько в возрасте, сколько в деловых и моральных качествах его носителей. Все члены названнй
компашки реально вредили и реально (и крепко) навредили стране. А ведь престарелыми они отнюдь не были!
Поражаюсь туполобости некоторых "демократов-капиталистов" в комментариях. Почти тридцать лет мы живём в капиталистическом
обществе, имеем полный доступ к любой информации - изучай сколько влезет, называется... И вы за эти тридцать лет так и не
смогли впихнуть в свой мозг информацию о происходящих в мире тенденциях, её систематизировать и сделать из неё вывод - вы
безнадёжны.
Никто из вас не удосужился изучать источники разной направленности по теме капитализма и социализма, вы лишь прочли/услышали
что-то одно, и приняли это за аксиому. Это совершенно ненаучный и не конструктивный подход к изучению проблемы! К сожалению,
некоторые люди просто не способны думать объёмно, для них существует только плоскость или даже прямая линия, что есть признак
ужасно узкого кругозора.
Я увидел в комментариях одно выражение, которое просто повергло меня в шок: "Нет на свете ни одного прогрессивного
коммунистического государства и быть не может!" - здрасте! :D Вы хоть историю-то изучали? То есть СССР не был мировой
сверхдержавой? А, ну да, это же была "страшная, отсталая, грязная и бедная страна-недоразумение, которая возникла по ужасной
ошибке", как же я мог забыть современных историков) А как-же нынешний Китай? Он официально считается экономической
сверхдержавой, кандидатом в мировые сверхдержавы, и темпы развития в нём имеют наивысший показатель на данный момент.
Плоскость и однонаправленность вашего мышления меня просто поразила, вы имеете радикальные взгляды, а радикализм - это всегда
ошибочно. Кто-то написал: "Китай только официально коммунистический, на деле в нём другое устройство!" - ну это просто апогей
идиотизма) Вы разве не понимаете, что человеческие взгляды могут совершенствоваться и изменяться, а система реформироваться? В
Китае именно социалистический строй, который претерпел реформацию, в которой безусловно нуждался. Советский социализм также
нуждался в реформации, и никто не говорит, что он был идеальным социализмом.
Совершенствование системы - это неотъемлемая часть прогресса, и если вы считаете, что социализм может быть только таким, каким
он был в СССР - то вы глубоко ошибаетесь, и совершенно не понимаете значение слова "прогресс". Китай построил такой социализм,
который даёт ему возможность делать поистине чудеса экономики, Китай богатеет и уровень жизни в нём растёт - если это не
прогресс, то что тогда? Также хочу упомянуть КНДР. Да-да, США на неё повесили ярлык "отсталого голодающего тоталитарного
государства", и скорее всего вы, радикальные капиталисты, даже не думали с ними спорить и что-то дополнительно про КНДР
узнавать, что, опять-же, говорит о плоскости и некритичности, я бы даже сказал суеверности вашего мышления. КНДР - страна
очень маленькая, в основном с горной местностью, и природных ресурсов в ней очень мало. "Демократы" из ООН и НАТО обложили
КНДР санкциями со всех сторон, из-за которых она не может развивать внешнюю торговлю, что губительно для маленькой страны с
худым запасом ресурсов. Поддерживать экономику, снабжать людей достатком товаров и в целом держать страну на современном
уровне в условиях торговой изоляции и недостатка ресурсов - это неподъёмная задача для капитализма. Но корейский социализм
умудрился, при всех этих условиях, победить голод, поддерживать бесплатное образование, медицину и т.д., обеспечивать людей
местом жительства, работой и доходом, сохранить суверенность своего государства и идеологию, и, ВНИМАНИЕ,
создать с нуля ядерную бомбу
. Это чудеса, северокорейский строй решает задачи, которые поистине неподъёмные в её
условиях.
Конечно,
в КНДР жесткий тоталитаризм, ведь когда страна изолирована от внешнего мира во всех аспектах, соседние страны настроены
враждебно (а со стороны США вообще идёт угроза прямого вторжения, или даже ядерного удара), со страной ведут жёсткую
идеологическую информационную войну, сохранить существующий строй - задача крайне сложная, и выполнить её можно только при
жёсткой дисциплине и контрпропаганде. Я уважаю Северную Корею, она наглядно показывает, что социализм может творить чудеса.
Конечно же, я вас переубедить не смог, радикальные вы капиталисты, но тем из вас, кои способны хоть немножко думать своей
черепушкой, я, возможно, поселил мысль о том, что социализм - это далеко не только плановая экономика, что он может меняться и
прогрессировать, что именно к нему идут все развитые страны, и что утопический коммунизм - это строй, который мы ещё
представить себе не можем, но который обязательно наступит через многие годы, или столетия прогресса. Избавляйтесь от своих
радикальных взглядов, и старайтесь думать объективно - это очень полезно для кругозора. Спасибо.
По Млечину : хорошо разработанная и осуществлённая операция по устранению конкурентов и внедрению "своего". Возникают вопросы:
кто проводил операцию? Где была организация отвечающая за государственную безопасность (КГБ)? В 2017м демпартия США подняла
вой о,якобы,вмешательстве России в избирательный процесс в США. Кто ответит:было ли вмешательство заграницы в процессы, о
которых поведал Млечин? Если было,то России так же, по образу и подобию, надо поднимать вой. Это серьёзно.Кто ответит?
Горбачев Родину продал, а Ельцин её пропил. Горбачев виноградники повырубал, а Ельцин травил народ не качественным спиртом. В
итоге, если бы не Путин, то развязка была бы давным давно, хотя он тоже не подарок, отдал страну на разграбление олигархам.
Горбачёв типичный номенклатурщик. Послушный, мягкий, ну может и прогибался ради своей высокой карьеры, но наверняка не чаял
президентом стать. Но потом когда всё случилось, стал входить во вкус, то есть жена стала проникаться важностью своего
положения при таком муженьке. А когда пришлось отказаться от власти он НИСКОЛЬКО не скорбел о потерянном кресле и стране. Его
посдили "на мягкую подушечку" и он стал жить поживать в Америке, даже не понимая, что его бездарность, как политика, послужила
развалу СССР. Он не понимает этого и сейчас. А может НЕ желает признавать. Может на смертном одре передумает строить из себя
униженного и оскорблённого и в чём-нибудь признается, хотя бы самому себе. Правда, для этого смелость нужна.
Горбачев не увлекался горячительными напитками???? Ну ну!!! Я родственник председателя крайкома СК в бытность Горбачева...Его
из машин вытаскивали лежа
Нечего горбачева обеливать!Он виноват,да еще как!Будь он трижды проклят!Этот человек не руководитель,разве не видно было из
его речей,что за он скоморох?!Как может шут руководить огромной страной и как вообще можно было доверить легкомысленному
человеку руководить государством,он же не "А ни Б,НИ КУКАРЕКУ"?!Полный идиот!!!!!
Перед развалом Союза ,этот придурок начал обсирать КАЗАКСТАН,я тогда ушёл в запас,и было обидно за академика Кунаева,За
родину мою,а на флоте мы гордились ,когда перед строем кораблей Старший офицер Азаров говорил казакстанцы ,мы едим хлеб из
каз-й муки тушёнка из kz,балык и икра,одеты мы в KZ канадки и свитера из Кызыл орды,А вот атомные ПЛ из казакстанского
титана- и мы были горды за казакстан И вот ОН наносит обсирающий удар?а дальше нам все стало ясно.
Млечный как всегда врет , не умного Горбатого плохо говорящего по русски двигала ЦРУ и как я понимаю сейчас многие советские
парта геносе знали об этом , почему , ???почему они продали все советское в котором жили ???за деньги или разочарование
произошло от этого марксизма и ленинизма, ,,,мы простые люди не когда не узнаем...но я уверен , что Брежнев уже был не
руководитель что Путин ,,,,почему ???что то им мешает , а то и наоборот они и есть гарантия чтоб страна не развивалась ,
Пшеницу покупали в Канаде,Союз изжил себя,,,вина Горбача только в одном,,,первое Крым хохлам не отдавать,,и русских в
Прибалтике не трогать,все это надо было говорить Бушу,,ставить условия
"... They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Donald Trump is Bad for Israel ..."
"... The New York Times ..."
"... Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is ..."
American journalism has become in its mainstream exponents a compendium of half-truths and
out-and-out lies. The public, though poorly informed on most issues as a result, has generally
figured out that it is being hoodwinked and trust in the Fourth Estate has plummeted over the
past twenty years. The skepticism about what is being reported has enabled President Donald
Trump and other politicians to evade serious questions about policy by claiming that what is
being reported is little more than "fake news."
No news is more fake than the reporting in the U.S. media that relates to the state of
Israel. Former Illinois congressman Paul Findley in his
seminal bookThey Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's
Lobby observed that nearly all the foreign press correspondents working out of Israel are
Jewish while most of the editors that they report to at news desks are also Jews, guaranteeing
that the articles that eventually surface in the newspapers will be carefully constructed to
minimize any criticism of the Jewish state. The same goes for television news, particularly on
cable news stations like CNN.
A particularly galling aspect of the sanitization of news reports regarding Israel is the
underlying assumption that Israelis share American values and interests, to include freedom and
democracy. This leads to the perception that Israelis are just like Americans with Israel's
enemies being America's enemies. Given that, it is natural to believe that the United States
and Israel are permanent allies and friends and that it is in the U.S. interest to do whatever
is necessary to support Israel, including providing billions of dollars in aid to a country
that is already wealthy as well as unlimited political cover in international bodies like the
United Nations.
That bogus but nevertheless seemingly eternal bond is essentially the point from which a
December 26 th op-ed in The New York Times departs. The piece is by one of
the Times' resident opinion writers Bret Stephens and is entitled
Donald Trump is Bad for Israel .
Stephens gets to the point rather quickly, claiming that "The president has abruptly
undermined Israel's security following a phone call with an Islamist strongman in Turkey. So
much for the idea, common on the right, that this is the most pro-Israel administration ever. I
write this as someone who supported Trump moving
the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and who praised his decision to
withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal as courageous
and correct . I also would have opposed the president's decision to remove U.S. forces from
Syria under nearly any circumstances. Contrary to the invidious myth that
neoconservatives always put Israel first, the reasons for staying in Syria have everything to
do with core U.S. interests. Among them: Keeping ISIS beaten, keeping faith with the Kurds,
maintaining leverage in Syria and preventing Russia and Iran from consolidating their grip on
the Levant."
The beauty of Stephens overwrought prose is that the careful reader might realize from the
git-go that the argument being promoted makes no sense. Bret has a big heart for the Kurds but
the Palestinians are invisible in his piece while his knowledge of other developments in the
Middle East is superficial. First of all, the phone call with Turkey's President Recep Tayyip
Erdogan had nothing to do with "undermining Israel's security." It concerned the northern
border of Syria, which Turkey shares, and arrangements for working with the Kurds, which is a
vital interest for both Ankara and Washington. And it might be added that from a U.S. national
security point of view Turkey is an essential partner for the United States in the region while
Israel is not, no matter what it pretends to be.
Stephens then goes on to demonstrate what he claims to be a libel, that for him and other
neocons Israel always comes first, an odd assertion given the fact that he spends 80% of his
article discussing what is or isn't good for Israel. He supports the U.S. Embassy move to
Jerusalem, the end of the nuclear agreement with Iran, both of which were applauded in Israel
but which are extremely damaging to American interests. He attacks the planned withdrawal from
Syria because it is a "core interest" for the U.S., which is complete nonsense.
Contrary to Stephens' no evidence assertion, Russia and Iran have neither the resources nor
the desire to "consolidate[e] their grip on the Levant" while it is the United States has no
right and no real interest to "maintain leverage" on Syria by invading and occupying the
country. But, of course, invading and occupying are practices that Israel is good at, so
Stephens' brain fart on the issue can perhaps be attributed to confusion over whose bad
policies he was defending. Stephens also demonstrate confusion over his insistence that the
U.S. must "resist foreign aggressors the Russians and Iranians in Syria in this decade,"
suggesting that he is unaware that both nations are providing assistance at the request of the
legitimate government in Damascus. It is the U.S. and Israel that are the aggressors in
Syria.
Stephens then looks at the situation from the "Israeli standpoint," which is presumably is
easy for him to do as that is how he looks at everything given the fact that he is far more
concerned about Israel's interests than those of the United States. Indeed, all of his opinions
are based on the assumption that U.S. policy should be supportive of a rightwing Israeli
government, that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has recently been indicted for
corruption and has called for an early election to subvert the process.
Bret finally comes to the point, writing that "What Israel most needs from the U.S. today is
what it needed at its birth in 1948: an America committed to defending the
liberal-international order against totalitarian enemies, as opposed to one that conducts a
purely transactional foreign policy based on the needs of the moment or the whims of a
president."
Stephens then expands on what it means to be liberal-international: "It means we should
oppose militant religious fundamentalism, whether it is Wahhabis in Riyadh or Khomeinists in
Tehran or Muslim Brothers in Cairo and Ankara. It means we should advocate human rights, civil
liberties, and democratic institutions, in that order."
Bret also throws America's two most recent presidents under the bus in his jeremiad, saying
"During the eight years of the Obama presidency, I thought U.S. policy toward Israel --
the
hectoring , the incompetent
diplomatic interventions , the moral
equivocations , the
Iran deal , the backstabbing at the
U.N. -- couldn't get worse. As with so much else, Donald Trump succeeds in making his
predecessors look good." He then asks "Is any of this good for Israel?" and he answers
"no."
Bret Stephens in his complaining reveals himself to be undeniably all about Israel, but
consider what he is actually saying. He claims to be against "militant religious
fundamentalism," but isn't that what Israeli Zionism is all about, with more than a dash of
racism and fanaticism thrown in for good measure? One Israeli Chief Rabbi has called black
people "monkeys" while another
has declared that gentiles cannot live in Israel. Right-wing religious fundamentalist
parties currently are in power with Netanyahu and are policy making for the Israeli Government:
Shas, Jewish Home, and United Torah Judaism. None of them could be regarded as a moderating
influence on their thuggish serial financial lawbreaker Prime Minister.
And isn't Israel's record on human rights and civil liberties among the worst in the world?
Here is the Human Rights Watch's assessment of Israel :
"Israel maintains entrenched discriminatory systems that treat Palestinians unequally. Its
50-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza involves systematic rights abuses, including
collective punishment, routine use of excessive lethal force, and prolonged administrative
detention without charge or trial for hundreds. It builds and supports illegal settlements in
the occupied West Bank, expropriating Palestinian land and imposing burdens on Palestinians
but not on settlers, restricting their access to basic services and making it nearly
impossible for them to build in much of the West Bank without risking demolition. Israel's
decade-long closure of Gaza, supported by Egypt, severely restricts the movement of people
and goods, with devastating humanitarian impact."
Israel, if one is considering the entire population under its rule, is among the most
undemocratic states that chooses to call itself democratic. Much of the population living in
lands that Israel claims cannot vote, they have no freedom of movement in their homeland, and
they have no right of return to homes that they were forced to abandon. Israeli army snipers
blithely shoot unarmed demonstrators while Netanyahu's government kills, beats and imprisons
children. And the Jewish state does not even operate very democratically even inside Israel
itself, with special rights for Jewish citizens and areas and whole towns where Muslims or
Christians are not allowed to buy property or reside.
It is time for American Jews like Bret Stephens to come to the realization that not
everything that is good for Israel is good for the U.S. The strategic interests of the two
countries, if they were openly discussed in either the media or in congress, would be seen to
be often in direct conflict. Somehow in Stephens' twisted mind the 1948 theft of Palestinian
lands and the imposition of an apartheid system to control the people is in some way
representative of a liberal world order.
If one were to suggest that Stephens should move to Israel since his primary loyalty clearly
lies there, there would be accusations of anti-Semitism, but in a sense, it is far better to
have him stick around blathering from the pulpit of The New York Times . When he
writes so ineptly about how Donald Trump Is Bad for Israel the real message that comes through
loud and clear is how bad Israel is for America.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is Executive Director of the Council for the National
Interest, a 501(c)3 tax deductible educational foundation that seeks a more interests-based
U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is www.councilforthenationalinterest.org,
address is P.O. Box 2157, Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is[email protected].
At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political
distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which
has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.
And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up
of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was
without substance, if not a joke.
Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.
One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates
that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was
appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.
In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video.
And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal
establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the
basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.
But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the
Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants
to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of
them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.
This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two
evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.
We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the
narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to
money and power.
At the inception of this entire RussiaGate spectacle I suggested that it was a political
distraction to take the attention away from the rejection by the people of neoliberalism which
has been embraced by the establishments of both political parties.
And that the result of the investigation would be indictments for perjury in the covering up
of illicit business deals and money laundering. But that 'collusion to sway the election' was
without substance, if not a joke.
Everything that has been revealed to date tends to support that.
One thing that Aaron overlooks is the evidence compiled by William Binney and associates
that strongly suggests the DNC hack was no hack at all, but a leak by an insider who was
appalled by the lies and double dealing at the DNC.
In general, RussiaGate is a farcical distraction from other issues as they say in the video.
And this highlights the utterly Machiavellian streak in the corporate Democrats and the Liberal
establishment under the Clintons and their ilk who care more about money and power than the
basic principles that historically sustained their party. I have lost all respect for them.
But unfortunately this does open the door for those who use this to approve of the
Republican establishment, which is 'at least honest' about being substantially corrupt servants
to Big Money who care nothing about democracy, the Constitution, or the public. The best of
them are leaving or have already left, and their party is ruined beyond repair.
This all underscores the paucity of the Red v. Blue, monopoly of two parties, 'lesser of two
evils' model of political thought which has come to dominate the discussion in the US.
We are heavily propagandized by the owners of the corporate media and influencers of the
narrative, and a professional class that has sold its soul for economic advantage and access to
money and power.
Is this shadow of Integrity Initiative in the USA ? This false flag open the possibility that other similar events like
DNC (with very questionable investigation by Crowdstrike, which was a perfect venue to implement a false flag; cybersecurity area is
the perfect environment for planting false flags), MH17 (might be an incident but later it definitely was played as a false flag), Skripals
(Was Skripals poisoning a false flag decided to hide the fact that Sergey Skripal was involved in writing Steele dossier?) and Litvinenko
(probably connected with lack of safety measures in the process of smuggling of Plutonium by Litvinenko himself, but later played a
a false flag). All of those now should be re-assessed from the their potential of being yet another flag flag operation
against Russia. While Browder was a MI6 operation from the very beginning (and that explains
why he abdicated the US citizenship more convincingly that the desire to avoid taxes) .
Notable quotes:
"... Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior. ..."
"... Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election (not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign). ..."
"... By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were, actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling." ..."
"... The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people who have a vested interest in convincing us its true). ..."
For over two years now, the concepts of "Russian collusion" and "Russian election meddling" have been shoved down our throats
by the mainstream media (MSM) under the guise of legitimate concern that the Kremlin may have installed a puppet president in Donald
Trump.
Having no evidence of collusion aside from a largely unverified opposition-research dossier fabricated by a former British spy,
the focus shifted from "collusion" to "meddling" and "influence." In other words, maybe Trump didn't actually collude with Putin,
but the Kremlin used Russian tricks to influence the election in Trump's favor. To some, this looked like nothing more than an establishment
scheme to cast a permanent spectre of doubt over the legitimacy of President Donald J. Trump.
Election meddling "Russian bots" and "troll farms" became the central focus - as claims were levied of social media operations
conducted by Kremlin-linked organizations which sought to influence and divide certain segments of America.
And while scant evidence of a Russian influence operation exists outside of a handful of indictments connected to a St. Petersburg
"Troll farm" (which a liberal journalist
cast serious doubt ov er), the MSM - with all of their proselytizing over the "threat to democracy" that election meddling poses,
has largely decided to ignore actual evidence of "Russian bots" created by Democrat IT experts, used against a GOP candidate in the
Alabama special election, and amplified through the Russian bot-detecting "Hamilton 68" dashboard developed by the same IT experts.
Democratic operative Jonathon Morgan - bankrolled by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, pulled a Russian bot "false flag" operation
against GOP candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama special election last year - creating thousands of fake social media accounts designed
to influence voters . Hoffman has since apologized, while Morgan was suspended by Facebook for "coordinated inauthentic" behavior.
As Russian state-owned RT puts
it - and who could blame them for being a bit pissed over the whole thing, "it turns out there really was meddling in American democracy
by "Russian bots." Except they weren't run from Moscow or St. Petersburg, but from the offices of Democrat operatives chiefly responsible
for creating and amplifying the "Russiagate" hysteria over the past two years in a textbook case of psychological projection. "
A week before Christmas, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a report accusing Russia of depressing Democrat voter turnout
by targeting African-Americans on social media. Its authors, New Knowledge, quickly became a household name.
Described by the
New York Times
as a group of "tech specialists who lean Democratic," New Knowledge has ties to both the US military and intelligence agencies.
Its CEO and co-founder Jonathon Morgan previously worked for DARPA, the US military's advanced research agenc y. His partner,
Ryan Fox, is a 15-year veteran of the National Security Agency who also worked as a computer analyst for the Joint Special Operations
Command (JSOC). Their unique skill sets have managed to attract the eye of investors, who pumped $11 million into the company
in 2018 alone.
...
On December 19, a New York Times story revealed that Morgan and his crew had created a fake army of Russian bots, as well as
fake Facebook groups, in order to discredit Republican candidate Roy Moore in Alabama's 2017 special election for the US Senate.
Working on behalf of the Democrats, Morgan and his crew created an estimated 1,000 fake Twitter accounts with Russian names,
and had them follow Moore. They also operated several Facebook pages where they posed as Alabama conservatives who wanted like-minded
voters to support a write-in candidate instead.
In an internal memo, New Knowledge boasted that it had "orchestrated an elaborate 'false flag' operation that planted the idea
that the Moore campaign was amplified on social media by a Russian botnet."
It worked. The botnet claim made a splash on social media and was further amplified by Mother Jones, which based its story
on expert opinion from Morgan's other dubious creation, Hamilton 68. -
RT
Moore ended up losing the Alabama special election by a slim margin of just
In other words: In November 2017 – when Moore and his Democratic opponent were in a bitter fight to win over voters – Morgan
openly promoted the theory that Russian bots were supporting Moore's campaign . A year later – after being caught red-handed orchestrating
a self-described "false flag" operation – Morgan now says that his team never thought that the bots were Russian and have no idea
what their purpose was . Did he think no one would notice? -
RT
Disinformation warrior @ jonathonmorgan attempts to control
damage by lying. He now claims the "false flag operation" never took place and the botnet he promoted as Russian-linked (based
on phony Hamilton68 Russian troll tracker he developed) wasn't Russian https://www.
newknowledge.com/blog/about-ala bama
Even more strange is that Scott Shane - the journalist who wrote the New York Times piece exposing the Alabama "Russian bot" scheme,
knew about it for months after speaking at an event where the organizers bragged about the false flag on Moore .
Shane was one of the speakers at a meeting in September, organized by American Engagement Technologies, a group run by Mikey
Dickerson, President Barack Obama's former tech czar. Dickerson explained how AET spent $100,000 on New Knowledge's campaign to
suppress Republican votes, " enrage" Democrats to boost turnout, and execute a "false flag" to hrt Moore. He dubbed it "Project
Birmingham." - RT
Shane told BuzzFeed that he was "shocked" by the revelations, though hid behind a nondisclosure agreement at the request of American
Engagement Technologies (AET). He instead chose to spin the New Knowledge "false flag" operation on Moore as "limited Russian tactics"
which were part of an "experiment" that had a budget of "only" $100,000 - and which had no effect on the election.
New Knowledge suggested that the false flag operation was simply a "research project," which Morgan suggested was designed "to
better understand and report on the tactics and effects of social media disinformation."
While the New York Times seemed satisfied with his explanation, others pointed out that Morgan had used the Hamilton 68 dashboard
to give his "false flag" more credibility – misleading the public about a "Russian" influence campaign that he knew was fake.
New Knowledge's protestations apparently didn't convince Facebook, which
announced last week that five
accounts linked to New Knowledge – including Morgan's – had been suspended for engaging in "coordinated inauthentic behavior."
- RT
They knew exactly what they were doing
While Morgan and New Knowledge sought to frame the "Project Birmingham" as a simple research project, a leaked copy of the operation's
after-action report reveals that they knew exactly what they were doing .
"We targeted 650,000 like AL voters, with a combination of persona accounts, astroturfing, automated social media amplification
and targeted advertising," reads the report published by entrepreneur and executive coach Jeff Giesea.
The rhetorical question remains, why did the MSM drop this election meddling story like a hot rock after the initial headlines
faded away?
criminal election meddling, but then who the **** is going to click on some morons tactic and switch votes?
anyone basing any funding, whether it is number of facebook hits or attempted mind games by egotistical cuck soyboys needs a serious
psychological examination. fake news is fake BECAUSE IT ISNT REAL AND DOES NOT MATTER TO ANYONE but those living in the excited misery
of their tiny bubble world safe spaces. SOCIAL MEDIA IS A CON AND IS NOT IMPORTANT OR RELEVANT TO ANYONE.
far more serious is destroying ballots, writing in ballots without consent, bussing voters around to vote multiple times in different
districts, registering dead voters and imperosnating the corpses, withholding votes until deadlines pass - making them invalid.
Herdee , 10 minutes ago
NATO on behalf of the Washington politicians uses the same bullsh*t propaganda for continual war.
Mugabe , 20 minutes ago
Yup "PROJECTION"...
Yippie21 , 21 minutes ago
None of this even touches on the 501c3 or whatever that was set up , concerned Alabama voters or somesuch, and was funneled
a **** load of money to be found to be in violation of the law AFTER the election and then it all just disappeared. Nothing to
see here folks, Democrat won, let's move on. There was a LOT of " tests " for the smart-set in that election and it all worked.
We saw a bunch of it used in 2018, especially in Texas with Beto and down-ballot races. Democrats cleaned up like crazy in Texas,
especially in Houston.
2020 is going to be a hot mess. And the press is in on it, and even if illegal or unseemly things are done, as long as Democrats
win, all good... let's move on. Crazy.
LetThemEatRand , 21 minutes ago
The fact that MSM is not covering this story -- which is so big it truly raises major questions about the entire Russiagate
conspiracy including why Mueller was appointed in the first place -- is proof that they have no interest in journalism or the
truth and that they are 100% agenda driven liars. Not that we needed more proof, but there it is anyway.
Oldguy05 , 19 minutes ago
Dimz corruption is a nogo. Now if it were conservatives.......
CosineCosineCosine , 23 minutes ago
I'm not a huge fan, but Jimmy Dore has a cathartic and entertaining 30 minutes on this farce. Well worth the watch:
Really the bigger story is here is that these guys convincingly pretended to be Russian Bots in order to influence an election
(not with the message being put forth by the bots, but by their sheer existence as apparent supporters of the Moore campaign).
By all appearances, they were Russian bots trying to influence the election. Now we know it was DNC operatives. Yet we
are supposed to believe without any proof that the "Russian bots" that supposedly influenced the 2016 Presidential election were,
actually, Russian bots, and worthy of a two year long probe about "Russian collusion" and "Russian meddling."
The whole thing is probably a farce, not only in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia had any influence at all
on a single voter, but also in the sense that there is no evidence that Russia even tried (just claims and allegations by people
who have a vested interest in convincing us its true).
dead hobo , 30 minutes ago
I've been watching Scandal on Netflix. Still only in season 2. Amazing how nothing changes.They nailed it and memorialized
it. The MSM are useful idiots who are happy to make money publicizing what will sell the best.
chunga , 30 minutes ago
The media is biased and sucks, yup.
The reason the reds lost the house is because they went along with this nonsense and did nothing about it, like frightened
baby chipmunks.
JRobby , 33 minutes ago
Only when "the opposition" does it is it illegal. Total totalitarian state wannabe stuff.
divingengineer , 22 minutes ago
Amazing how people can contort reality to justify their own righteous cause, but decry their opposition for the EXACT same
thing. See trump visit to troops signing hats as most recent proof. If DJT takes a piss and sprinkles the seat, it's a crime.
DarkPurpleHaze , 33 minutes ago
They're afraid to expose themselves...unlike Kevin Spacey. Trump or Whitaker will expose this with one signature. It's
coming.
divingengineer , 20 minutes ago
Spacey has totally lost it. See his latest video, it will be a powerful piece of evidence for an insanity plea.
CosineCosineCosine , 10 minutes ago
Disagree strongly. I think it was excellent - perhaps you misunderstood the point? 6 minutes Diana Davidson look at it clarifies
"... The Pity of It All : A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933 ..."
"... Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine. ..."
"... The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results. ..."
"... Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal emphasis on an American dominated global empire. ..."
"... Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. ..."
"... Right now, their interests have diverged over the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. ..."
"... Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed. Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis. ..."
"... Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia. Or you can count their billions. ..."
"... The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop, confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality. ..."
"... Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country. They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on. ..."
"... "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper" ..."
"... "The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. " ..."
"... Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention. ..."
"... " (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper does not say that." ..."
"... But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld? ..."
"... Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS. ..."
"... But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence of the manifest destiny. ..."
At the Huffington Post, Jim Sleeper addresses
"A Foreign-Policy Problem
No One Speaks About," and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, even if he's not a warmongering neocon
himself. The Yale lecturer's jumping-off point are recent statements by Leon Wieseltier and
David Brooks lamenting the decline of
American power.
In addition to Wieseltier and Brooks, the "blame the feckless liberals" chorus has included Donald Kagan, Robert Kagan, David
Frum, William Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and many other American neoconservatives. Some of them have
been chastened, or at least been made more cautious, by their grand-strategic blunders of a few years ago ..
I'm saying that they've been fatuous as warmongers again and again and that there's something pathetic in their attempts to
emulate Winston Churchill, who warned darkly of Hitler's intentions in the 1930s. Their blind spot is their willful ignorance
of their own complicity in American deterioration and their over-compensatory, almost pre-adolescent faith in the benevolence
of a statist and militarist power they still hope to mobilize against the seductions and terrors rising all around them.
At bottom, the chorus members' recurrent nightmares of 1938 doom them to reenact other nightmares, prompted by very similar
writers in 1914, on the eve of World War I. Those writers are depicted chillingly, unforgettably, in Chapter 9, "War Fever," of
Amos Elon's
The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch, 1743-1933. Elon's account of Germany's stampede into World
War I chronicles painfully the warmongering hysterics of some Jewish would-be patriots of the Kaiserreich who exerted themselves
blindly, romantically, to maneuver their state into the Armageddon that would produce Hitler himself.
This is the place to emphasize that few of Wilhelmine German's warmongers were Jews and that few Jews were or are warmongers.
(Me, for example, although my extended-family history isn't much different from Brooks' or Wieseltier's.) My point is simply that,
driven by what I recognize as understandable if almost preternatural insecurities and cravings for full liberal-nationalist belonging
that was denied to Jews for centuries in Europe, some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves
into the Iraq War, and they have continued, again and again, to employ modes of public discourse and politics that echo with eerie
fidelity that of the people described in Elon's book. The Americans lionized George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
many others as their predecessors lionized Kaiser Wilhelm, von Bethmann-Hollweg, and far-right nationalist associates who hated
the neo-cons of that time but let them play their roles .
Instead of acknowledging their deepest feelings openly, or even to themselves, the writers I've mentioned who've brought so
much folly and destruction upon their republic, are doubling down, more nervous and desperate than ever, looking for someone else
to blame. Hence their whirling columns and rhythmic incantations. After Germany lost World War I, many Germans unfairly blamed
their national folly on Jews, many of whom had served in it loyally but only a few of whom had been provocateurs and cheerleaders
like the signatories of [Project for New American Century's] letter to Bush. Now neo-cons, from Wieseltier and Brooks to [Charles]
Hill, are blaming Obama and all other feckless liberals. Some of them really need to take a look in Amos Elon's mirror.
Interesting. Though I think Sleeper diminishes Jewish agency here (Sheldon Adelson and Haim Saban are no one's proxy) and can't
touch the Israel angle. The motivation is not simply romantic identification with power, it's an ideology of religious nationalism
in the Middle East, attachment to the needs of a militarist Sparta in the Arab world. That's another foreign policy problem no one
speaks about.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:11 pm
"Democracy in in the Middle East" was always just a weasel-word saying of "let's try to improve Israel's strategic position
by changing their neighbours".
The neocons basically took a hardline position on foreign interventionism based out of dual loyalty. This is the honest truth.
For anti-Semites, a handful of neocons will always represent "The Jews" as a collective. For many Jews, the refusal to come to
grips with the rise of the neocons and how the Jewish community (and really by "community" I mean the establishment) failed to
prevent them in their own midst, is also a blemish.
Of course, Jim Sleeper is doing these things now. He should have done them 15-20 years ago or so. But better late than never,
I guess.
Krauss, May 6, 2014, 2:16 pm
P.S. While we talk a lot about neocons as a Jewish issue, it's also important to put them in perspective. The only war that
I can truly think of that they influenced was the Iraq war, which was a disaster, but it also couldn't have happened without 9/11,
which was a very rare event in the history of America. You have to go back to Pearl Harbor to find something similar, and that
wasn't technically a terrorist attack but rather a military attack by Japan.
Leading up to the early 2000s, they were mostly ignored during the 1990s. They did take over the GOP media in the early 90s,
using the same tactics used against Hagel, use social norms as a cover but in actuality the real reason is Israel.
Before the 90s, in the 70s and 80s, the cold war took up all the oxygen.
So yeah, the neocons need to be talked about. But comparing what they are trying to do with a World War is a bit of a stretch.
Finally, talking about Israel – which Sleeper ignored – and the hardline positions that the political class in America have
adopted, if you want to look who have ensured the greatest slavishness to Israel, liberal/centrist groups like ADL, AJC and AIPAC(yes,
they are mostly democrats!) have played a far greater role than the neocons.
But I guess, Sleeper wasn't dealing with that, because it would ruin his view of the neocons as the bogeymen.
Just like "liberal" Zionists want to blame Likud for everything, overlooking the fact that Labor/Mapai has had a far greater
role in settling/colonizing the Palestinian land than the right has, and not to speak about the ethnic cleansing campaigns of
'48 and '67 which was only done by the "left", so too the neocons often pose as a convenient catch-all target for the collective
Jewish failure leading up to Iraq.
And I'm using the words "collective Jewish failure" because I actually don't believe, unlike Mearsheimer/Walt, that the war
would not have gone ahead unless there was massive support by the Israel/Jewish lobby. If Jews had decided no, it would still
have gone ahead. This is also contrary to Tom Friedman's famous saying of "50 people in DC are responsible for this war".
I also think that's an oversimplification.
But I focus more on the Jewish side because that's my side. And I want my community to do better, and just blaming the neocons
is something I'm tired of hearing in Jewish circles. The inability to look at liberal Jewish journalists and their role in promoting
the war to either gentile or Jewish audiences.
Kathleen, May 6, 2014, 6:53 pm
There was talk about this last night (Monday/5th) on Chris Matthew's Hardball segment on Condi "mushroom cloud" Rice pulling
out of the graduation ceremonies at Rutger's. David Corn did not say much but Eugene Robinson and Chris Matthews were basically
talking about Israel and the neocons desires to rearrange the middle east "the road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad" conversation.
Bumblebye, May 6, 2014, 2:33 pm
"some of today's American super-patriotic neo-conservatives hurled themselves into the Iraq War"
Have to take issue with that – the neo-cons hurled young American (and foreign) servicemen and women into that war, many to
their deaths, along with throwing as much taxpayer money as possible. They stayed ultra safe and grew richer for their efforts.
Citizen, May 7, 2014, 9:03 am
@ Bumblebye
Good point. During WW1, as I read the history, the Jewish Germans provided their fair share of combat troops. If memory serves,
despite Weimar Germany's later "stab in the back" theory, e.g., Hitler himself was given a combat medal thanks to his Jewish senior
officer. In comparison to the build-up to Shrub Jr's war on Iraq, the Jewish neocons provided very few Jewish American combat
troops.
It's hard to get reliable stats on Jewish American participation in the US combat arms during the Iraq war. For all I've been
able to ascertain, more have joined the IDF over the years. At any rate, it's common knowledge that Shrub's war on Iraq was instigated
and supported by chicken hawks (Jew or Gentile) at a time bereft of conscription. They built their sale by ignoring key facts,
and embellishing misleading and fake facts, as illustrated by the Downing Street memo.
Keith, May 6, 2014, 7:47 pm
PHIL- Perhaps you are making too much of the so called decline of the neocons. At the strategic level, there is little
difference between the neocon "Project for a the New American Century" and Brzezinski's "The Grand Chessboard," both of which
are consistent with US policy and actions in the Ukraine.
The most significant difference seems to me to be the neocon emphasis on American unilateral militarism versus Obama's
emphasis on multilateralism, covert operations and financial warfare to achieve the desired results.
Perhaps another significant difference is the neocon emphasis on the primacy of the American nation-state versus the neoliberal
emphasis on an American dominated global empire.
So yes, the nationalistic emphasis is an anachronism, however, the decline of the US in conjunction with the extension of a
system of globalized domination should hardly be of concern to elite power-seekers who will benefit. In fact, the new system of
corporate/financial control will be beyond the political control of any nation, even the US. If they can pull it off. An interesting
topic no doubt, but one which I doubt is suitable for extended discussion on Mondoweiss. As for power-seeking as a consequence
of a uniquely Jewish experience, perhaps the less said the better.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes that
10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition with
them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on the
same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over the
Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel itself
is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support the political
movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty antisemite whose followers killed many thousands
of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those left behind perished
during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any of them would identify
with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
(I know I'm always grabbing OT threads of discussion, but when it comes down to it, I know much less about Zionism and Israel/Palestine
than many, if not most of the regular commenters here.)
I also am going to drift further off-topic by saying there is strong evidence that the slaughter in Odessa last Friday was
highly orchestrated and not solely the result of spontaneous mob violence. Very graphic and disturbing images in all of these
links:
" and it turns out to Jewish identity, the need to belong to the powerful nation on the part of Jewish neoconservatives.
Sleeper says this is an insecurity born of European exclusion that he understands as a Jew, ..>>
Stop it Sleeper. Do not continue to use the victim card ' to explain' the trauma, the insecurities, the nightmares, the angst,
the feelings, the sensitivities, blah blah, blah of Zionist or Israel.
That is not what they are about. These are power mad psychos like most neocons, period.
And even if it were, and even if all the Jews in the world felt the same way, the bottom line would still be they do not have
the right to make others pay in treasure and blood for their nightmares and mental sickness.
As near as I can tell (correct me if I'm wrong), the Ukrainians themselves are about half and half pro Russia and Pro NATO.
Your glance at the history of the region as to why this is so, and your text on historical Ukranian suffering and POTV on MW commentary
on this –did not help your analysis and its conclusion.
There's a difference between isolationism and defensive intervention, and even more so, re isolationism v. pro-active interventionism
"in the name of pursuing the democratic ideal". See Ron Paul v. PNAC-style neocons and liberal Zionists.
Also, if you were Putin, how would you see the push of NATO & US force posts ever creeping towards Russia and its local environment?
Look at the US military postings nearing Russia per se & those surrounding Iran. Compare Russia's.
And note the intent to wean EU from Russian oil, and as well, the draconian sanctions on Iran, and Obama's latest partnering
sanctions on Russia.
Imagine yourself in Putin's shoes, and Iran's.
Don't abuse your imagination only by imagining yourself in Netanyahu's shoes, which is the preoccupation of AIPAC and its whores
in the US Congress.
Interesting to juxtapose Brzezinski and the neocons. In a Venn diagram they would over-lap 90%. The Ukraine crisis exposes
that 10% difference. Brzezinski I very much doubt has any emotional attachment to Israel though he is happy to work in coalition
with them to further his one true goal which is to isolate and defeat Russian influence in the world. In the 1980s both were on
the same page in the "let my people go" campaign against the Soviet Union. Brzezinski saw it as a propaganda opportunity to attack
Russia and the neocons saw it has a source of more Jews to settle Palestine.
Right now, their interests have diverged over
the Ukraine crisis. Though many of the American neocons do support subverting Ukraine as does Brzezinski it looks like Israel
itself is leaning towards supporting Russia. When it comes down to it it is hard for many Jews, right wing or not, to support
the political movement inside Ukraine that identifies with Bandera. Now that was one nasty anti-Semite whose followers killed
many thousands of Ukrainian Jews during the holocaust. My wife's family immigrated from Galicia and the Odessa region and those
left behind perished during the holocaust. The extended family includes anti-Zionists and WB settlers. There is no way that any
of them would identify with Ukrainian fascist movements now active there.
In any case, there does seem to be a potential split among the neocons over Ukraine. It would be the ultimate in hypocrisy
for all of those eastern European Jews who became successful in the US in the last few generations to enter into coalition with
the Bandera brigades.
Yonah writes The freedom of Ukraine is a worthy goal. If the US is not able to back up our attempt to help them gain their
freedom it is not something to celebrate, but something to lament.
What are you saying? Ukraine has been an independent nation for 22 years. What freedom is this? What we have witnessed is that
one half of Ukraine has gotten tired that the other half keeps on electing candidates that represent those Ukrainians that identify
with Russian culture. They (the western half) successfully staged a coup and purged the other (eastern half) from the government.
You call that "freedom". Doesn't it embarrass you, Yonah, that the armed militias that conducted that coup are descendants of
the Bandera organization.
Does that ring a bell? These are the Ukrainians that were involved in the holocaust. Does Babi Yar stir any memories Yohan?
It was a massacre of 40,000 Jews just outside of Kiev in 1942. It was the single largest massacre of Jews during WWII. The massacre
was led by the Germans ( Einsatzgruppe C officers) but was carried out with the aid of 400 Ukrainian Auxillary Police. These were
later incorporated into the 14th SS-Volunteer Division "Galician" made up mostly Ukrainians. The division flags are to this day
displayed at Right Sector rallies in western Ukraine.
Right Sector militias are the fighting force that led the coup against the legally elected Yanukovich government and were
almost certainly involved in the recent massacre in Odessa. And you support them for their fight for freedom? You should be ashamed.
Zionism is sinking to new lows that they feel the need to identify with open neo-Nazis.
Well, the point is that Zionists in Israel do not identify with that particular set of open neo-Nazis. I suspect that this
is simply a matter of the headcount of Jewish business tycoons that are politically aligned with (western) Ukraine and Russia.
Or you can count their billions. In any case, the neutral posture is sensible for Israel here. Which is highly uncharacteristic
for that government.
Toivo S- The history of Jew hatred by certain anti Russian elements in the Ukraine is not encouraging and nothing that I celebrate.
Maybe I have been swayed by headlines and a superficial reading of the situation.
If indeed I am wrong regarding the will of the Ukrainian people, I can only be glad that my opinion is just that, my opinion
and not US or Israel or anyone's policy but my own. I assume that a majority of Ukrainians want to maintain independence of Russia
and that the expressions of rebellion are in that vein.
My people were murdered by the einsatzgruppen in that part of the world and so maybe I have overcompensated by trying not to
allow my personal history to interfere with what I think would be the will of the majority of the Ukraine.
But Toivo S. please skip the "doesn't it embarrass you" line of thought. Just put a sock in it and skip it.
Well thanks for that Yonah. My wife's family descended from Jewish communities in Odessa and Galicia. They emigrated to the US
between 1900 and 1940. After WWII none of their relatives left behind were ever heard from again. Perhaps you have family that
experienced similar stories. What caused me to react to your post above is that you are describing the current situation in Ukraine
as a "freedom" movement by the Ukrainians when the political forces there descended from the same people that killed my inlaws
family (and apparently yours to). Why do you support them?
ToivoS- I support them because I trust/don't trust Putin. I trust him to impose his brand of leadership on Ukraine, I don't trust
him to care a whit about freedom. It is natural that the nationalist elements of Ukraine would descend from the elements that
expressed themselves the last time they had freedom from the Soviet Union, that is those forces that were willing to join with
the Nazis to express their hatred for the communist Soviet Union's rule over their freedom. That's how history works. The nationalists
today descend from the nationalists of yesterday.
But it's been 70 years since WWII and the Ukrainians ought to be able to have freedom even if the parties that advocate for
freedom are descended from those that supported the Nazis. (I know once i include the Nazi part of history any analogies are toxic,
but if I am willing to grant Hamas its rights as an expression of the Palestinian desire for freedom, why would I deny the Ukrainian
foul nationalist parties their rights to express their people's desire for freedom.)
Political parties are not made in a sterile laboratory, they evolve over history and most specifically they emerge from the
past. I accept that Ukrainian nationalism has not evolved much, but nonetheless not having read any polls I assume that the nationalists
are the representatives of the people's desire for freedom. And because Putin strikes me as something primitive, I accept the
Ukrainian desire for freedom.
What are you supporting? Let me refresh your historic memory: Black's Transfer Agreement. Now apply analogy, responding
to ToivoS. Might help us all to understand, explore more skillfully, Israel's current stance on the Putin-Ukranian matter .?
(I think Nuland's intervention caught on tape, combined with who she is married to, already explores with great clarification
what the US is doing.
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to play
the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. Most people here would probably disagree with Sleeper, because he does
not deny that the world needs a cop, nor that the US would play a positive role, if it only had the means and the desire to
do so. People here (overwhelmingly) see the US role as a negative one (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let
the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they want to do in their part of the world,"
The problem with your reasoning, Yonah, is that you are espousing the Neocon line while not apparently recognizing that
embarrassing fact. You lament that the US is no longer playing the role of the world's superpower, and acting as the world's cop,
confronting militarily Russia, China, Iran and anyone else. It is precisely that mentality that got us into Iraq, could yet have
us in a war with Iran, would like to see us defending Ukraine, and thinks we should confront China militarily over bits of rock
it and its neighbors are quibbling over. That is a neocon, American supremacy mentality.
Contrast that with the realist or realism approach recommended by George Kennan, and followed by this country successfully
through the end of the Cold War. That approach is conservative and contends we should stay out of wars unless the vital national
security interests of the US are at stake, like protecting WESTERN Europe, Japan, Australia, and the Western Hemisphere. This
meant we could sympathize with the plight of all the eastern Europeans oppressed by the Soviets, but would not defend militarily
the Hungarians (1956) or the Czechs (1968). It also meant we wouldn't send US troops into North Vietnam because we didn't want
to go to war with the Chinese over a country that was at best tangential to US interests. When we varied from that policy (Vietnam
and Iraq wars, Somalia) we paid a very heavy price while doing nothing to advance or protect our vital national security interests.
The sooner this country can return to our traditional realism-based foreign policy the better. Part of that policy would be
to disassociate the US from its entangling alliance with Likud Israel and its US Jewish supporters that espouse the Likud Greater
Israel line.
Zionism under Likud has played a major role in promoting the neocon approach to foreign policy in the US. It was heavily
involved in the birth of that approach, and has helped fund and promote the policy and its supporters and advocates in this country.
They (Likud Zionists and Neocons) played a major role in getting us into the Iraq war and are playing a major role in trying to
get us involved in a war with Iran, a war in Syria, and even potential wars in Eastern Europe. That is a very dangerous trend
and one folks as intelligent as you are, should be focusing on.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews. It is also directed
at Neoconservative foreign policy advocates, comprised of Jews and non-Jews, and overlap between the two groups. Please also note
my use of the term "major role", and that I am not saying the Neocons and their supporters (Jewish or non) were solely responsible
for our involvement in the Iraq war. I am offering these caveats in the hope that the usual changes of antisemitism can be avoided
in your or anyone else's response to my arguments.
The influence of Neocons on US foreign policy has been very harmful to this country and poses a grave danger to its future.
It would be wise for you to reflect on that harm and those dangers and decide whether you belong in the realist camp or want to
continue running with the Neocons.
Please note, my criticism is directed neither at all Jews in general, Jews in the US, nor or all Israeli Jews. It is directed
at a particular subset of Zionists who support Likud policies, and their supporters, many of whom are not Jews.
What about the role of *liberal Zionists*, like Hillary Clinton, in supporting and promoting the Iraq War? Clinton still hasn't
offered an apology for helping to drive the United States in a multi-trillion dollar foreign policy disaster - and she has threatened
to "totally obliterate" Iran.
What about Harry Reid's lavish praise of Sheldon Adelson?
"Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has for some time billed the Koch brothers as public enemy No.1 .
But billionaire Republican donor Sheldon Adelson? He's just fine, Reid says.
"I know Sheldon Adelson. He's not in this for money," the Nevada Democrat said of Adelson, the Vegas casino magnate who
reportedly spent close to $150 million to support Republicans in the 2012 presidential election."
@ yonah fredman "nationalist Armageddon that is nowhere found in the article by Sleeper"
Strange
"state into the Armageddon .. "
"The misadventure in Iraq has cost the US and the world a lot. The US a loss in humans and money and willingness to
play the role of superpower, and the world has lost its cop. "
Tough. Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi lives don't rate a mention.
" (let the Russians have their sphere of influence, let the Iranians have their bomb, let the Chinese do whatever they
want to do in their part of the world, for after all they hold a trillion dollars in US government debt and so let them act
like the boss, for in fact they have been put in that role by feckless and destructive and wasteful US policy). But Sleeper
does not say that."
You do tho, without quoting anyone "here".
BTW Pajero, strawmen no matter how lengthy and seemingly erudite, rarely walk anywhere
I'm going to put this down as Jewish navel gazing.
Jews are disproportionately liberal. Jews make up a huge chunk of the peace movement. Jews are relative to their numbers on
the left of most foreign policy positions.
Iraq was unusual in that Jews were not overwhelming opposed to the invasion, but it is worth noting the invasion at the time
was overwhelming popular. Frankly given the fact that Jews are now considered white people and the fact that Jews are almost all
middle class they should be biased conservative. There certainly is no reason they should be more liberal than Catholics. Yet
they are. It is the degree of Jewish liberalism not the degree of Jewish conservatism that is striking.
But even if we do focus on neocons, neocons don't have opinions about foreign policy and USA dominance that are much distinct
from what most Republican interventionists have. How much difference is there between David Frum and Mitt Romney or between Paul
Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld?
Strongly antiwar incumbent Rep. Walter Jones (R – NC) has won a hotly contested primary tonight, defeating a challenge from
hawkish challenger and former Treasury Dept. official Taylor Griffin 51% to 45%.
Voter turn out was light .. tea party types did a lot of lobbying for Griffin here .but Jones prevailed. Considering the
onslaught of organized activity against him by ECI and the tea partiers for the past month he did well.
@ lysias
Let's refresh our look at what Ron Paul had to say about foreign policy and foreign aid. Then, let's compare what his son has
said, and take a look of his latest bill in congress to cut off aid to Palestine. Yes, you read that right; it's not a bill to
cut off any aid to Israel.
Don't look to the US to get any justice in the ME, nor to regain US good reputation in the world. This will situation will
not change because US political campaign fiancé system won't change–it just gets worse, enhanced by SCOTUS.
The heavy artillery included the detestable Karl Rove, former Governor and RNC Chair Haley Barber and the War Party's highly
paid chief PR flack, Ari Fleischer.
But it was Neocon central that hauled out the big guns. Bill Kristol was so desperate to thwart the slowly rising anti-interventionist
tide within the GOP that he even trotted out Sarah Palin to endorse Jones's opponent"
But neoocns have the confidence that if they could impose the neocon's theology on the rest of the world, they can do it
here as well on American street . They call it education, motivation, duty, responsibility, moral burden, and above all the essence
of the manifest destiny.
"... Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market. ..."
"... The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension fund go? ..."
"... Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled. Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership. ..."
"... family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300 to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery. ..."
"... Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo. ..."
"... Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs. ..."
"... So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context. ..."
"... Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this. I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via the capitalist countries. ..."
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality. They still struggle
for access to the basics
... ... ...
The disparities in wealth that we term "income inequality" are no accident, and they can't be fixed by fiddling at the edges of
our current economic system. These disparities happened by design, and the system structurally disadvantages those at the bottom.
The poorest Americans have no realistic hope of achieving anything that approaches income equality; even their very chances for access
to the most basic tools of life are almost nil.
... ... ...
Too often, the answer by those who have hoarded everything is they will choose to "give back" in a manner of their choosing –
just look at Mark Zuckerberg and his much-derided plan to "give away" 99% of his Facebook stock. He is unlikely to help change inequality
or poverty any more than "giving away" of $100m helped children in Newark schools.
Allowing any of the 100 richest Americans to choose how they fix "income inequality" will not make the country more equal or even
guarantee more access to life. You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools, even when you're the master; but more
to the point, who would tear down his own house to distribute the bricks among so very many others?
mkenney63 5 Dec 2015 20:37
Excellent article. The problems we face are structural and can only be solved by making fundamental changes. We must bring
an end to "Citizens United", modern day "Jim Crow" and the military industrial complex in order to restore our democracy. Then
maybe, just maybe, we can have an economic system that will treat all with fairness and respect. Crony capitalism has had its
day, it has mutated into criminality.
Kencathedrus -> Marcedward 5 Dec 2015 20:23
In the pre-capitalist system people learnt crafts to keep themselves afloat. The Industrial Revolution changed all that. Now
we have the church of Education promising a better life if we get into debt to buy (sorry, earn) degrees.
The whole system is messed up and now we have millions of people on this planet who can't function even those with degrees.
Barbarians are howling at the gates of Europe. The USA is rotting from within. As Marx predicted the Capitalists are merely paying
their own grave diggers.
mkenney63 -> Bobishere 5 Dec 2015 20:17
I would suggest you read the economic and political history of the past 30 years. To help you in your study let me recommend
a couple of recent books: "Winner Take all Politics" by Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson and "The Age of Acquiescence" by Steve Fraser.
It always amazes me that one can be so blind the facts of recent American history; it's not just "a statistical inequality", it's
been a well thought-out strategy over time to rig the system, a strategy engaged in by politicians and capitalists. Shine some
light on this issue by acquainting yourself with the facts.
Maharaja Brovinda -> Singh Jill Harrison 5 Dec 2015 19:42
We play out the prisoner's dilemma in life, in general, over and over in different circumstances, every day. And we always
choose the dominant - rational - solution. But the best solution is not based on rationality, but rather on trust and faith in
each other - rather ironically for our current, evidence based society!
Steven Palmer 5 Dec 2015 19:19
Like crack addicts the philanthropricks only seek to extend their individual glory, social image their primary goal, and yet
given the context they will burn in history. Philanthroptits should at least offset the immeasurable damage they have done through
their medieval wealth accumulation. Collaborative philanthropy for basic income is a good idea, but ye, masters tools.
BlairM -> Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 19:10
Well, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, capitalism is the worst possible economic system, except for all those other economic
systems that have been tried from time to time.
I'd rather just have the freedom to earn money as I please, and if that means inequality, it's a small price to pay for not
having some feudal lord or some party bureaucrat stomping on my humanity.
brusuz 5 Dec 2015 18:52
As long as wealth can be created by shuffling money from one place to another in the giant crap shoot we call our economy,
nothing will change. Until something takes place to make it advantageous for the investor capitalists to put that money to work
doing something that actually produces some benefit to the society as a whole, they will continue their extractive machinations.
I see nothing on the horizon that is going to change any of that, and to cast this as some sort of a racial issue is quite superficial.
We have all gotten the shaft, since there is no upward mobility available to anyone. Since the Bush crowd of neocons took power,
we have all been shackled with "individual solutions to societal created problems."
Jimi Del Duca 5 Dec 2015 18:31
Friends, Capitalism is structural exploitation of ALL WORKERS. Thinking about it as solely a race issue is divisive. What we
need is CLASS SOLIDARITY and ORGANIZATION. See iww.org We are the fighting union with no use for capitalists!
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 18:04
You'd be better off reading Marx if you want to understand capitalism. I think you are ascribing the word to what you think
it should be rather than what it is.
It is essentially a class structure rather than any defined economic system. Neoliberal is essentially laissez faire capitalism.
It is designed to suborn nation states to corporate benefit.
AmyInNH -> tommydog
They make $40 a month. Working 7 days a week. At least 12 hour days. Who's fed you that "we're doing them a favor" BS?
And I've news for you regarding "Those whose skills are less adaptable to doing so are seeing their earnings decline." We have
many people who have 3 masters degrees making less than minimum wage. We have top notch STEM students shunned so corporations
can hire captive/cheaper foreign labor, called H1-Bs, who then wait 10 years working for them waiting for their employment based
green card. Or "visiting" students here on J1 visas, so the employers can get out of paying: social security, federal unemployment
insurance, etc.
Wake up and smell the coffee tommydog. They've more than a thumb on the scale.
I am a socialist. I decided to read this piece to see if Mr. Thrasher could write about market savagery without propounding the
fiction that whites are somehow exempt from the effects of it.
No, he could not. I clicked on the link accompanying his assertion
that whites who are high school dropouts earn more than blacks with college degrees, and I read the linked piece in full. The
linked piece does not in fact compare income (i.e., yearly earnings) of white high school dropouts with those of black college
graduates, but it does compare family wealth across racial cohorts (though not educational ones), and the gap there is indeed
stark, with average white family wealth in the six figures (full disclosure, I am white, and my personal wealth is below zero,
as I owe more in student loans than I own, so perhaps I am not really white, or I do not fully partake of "whiteness," or whatever),
and average black family wealth in the four figures.
The reason for this likely has a lot to do with home ownership disparities, which in turn are linked in significant part to
racist redlining practices. So white dropouts often live in homes their parents or grandparents bought, while many black college
graduates whose parents were locked out of home ownership by institutional racism and, possibly, the withering of manufacturing
jobs just as the northward migration was beginning to bear some economic fruit for black families, are still struggling to become
homeowners. Thus, the higher average wealth for the dropout who lives in a family owned home.
But this is not what Mr. Thrasher wrote. He specifically used the words "earn more," creating the impression that some white
ignoramus is simply going to stumble his way into a higher salary than a cultivated, college educated black person. That is simply
not the case, and the difference does matter.
Why does it matter? Because I regularly see middle aged whites who are broken and homeless on the streets of the town where
I live, and I know they are simply the tip of a growing mountain of privation. Yeah, go ahead, call it white tears if you want,
but if you cannot see that millions (including, of course, not simply folks who are out and out homeless, but folks who are struggling
to get enough to eat and routinely go without needed medication and medical care) of people who have "white privilege" are indeed
oppressed by global capitalism then I would say that you are, at the end of the day, NO BETTER THAN THE WHITES YOU DISDAIN.
If you have read this far, then you realize that I am in no way denying the reality of structural racism. But an account of
economic savagery that entirely subsumes it into non-economic categories (race, gender, age), that refuses to acknowledge that
blacks can be exploiters and whites can be exploited, is simply conservatism by other means. One gets the sense that if we have
enough black millionaires and enough whites dying of things like a lack of medical care, then this might bring just a little bit
of warmth to the hearts of people like Mr. Thrasher.
Call it what you want, but don't call it progressive. Maybe it is historical karma. Which is understandable, as there is no
reason why globally privileged blacks in places like the U.S. or Great Britain should bear the burden of being any more selfless
or humane than globally privileged whites are or have been. The Steven Thrashers of humanity are certainly no worse than many
of the whites they cannot seem to recognize as fully human are.
But nor are they any better.
JohnLG 5 Dec 2015 17:23
I agree that the term "income inequality" is so vague that falls between useless and diversionary, but so too is most use of
the word "capitalism", or so it seems to me. Typically missing is a penetrating analysis of where the problem lies, a comprehensibly
supported remedy, or large-scale examples of anything except what's not working. "Income inequality" is pretty abstract until
we look specifically at the consequences for individuals and society, and take a comprehensive look at all that is unequal. What
does "capitalism" mean? Is capitalism the root of all this? Is capitalism any activity undertaken for profit, or substantial monopolization
of markets and power?
Power tends to corrupt. Money is a form of power, but there are others. The use of power to essentially cheat, oppress or kill
others is corrupt, whether that power is in the form of a weapon, wealth, the powers of the state, or all of the above. Power
is seductive and addictive. Even those with good intensions can be corrupted by an excess of power and insufficient accountability,
while predators are drawn to power like sharks to blood. Democracy involves dispersion of power, ideally throughout a whole society.
A constitutional democracy may offer protection even to minorities against a "tyranny of the majority" so long as a love of justice
prevails. Selective "liberty and justice" is not liberty and justice at all, but rather a tyranny of the many against the few,
as in racism, or of the few against the many, as by despots. Both forms reinforce each other in the same society, both are corrupt,
and any "ism" can be corrupted by narcissism. To what degree is any society a shining example of government of, for, and by the
people, and to what degree can one discover empirical evidence of corruption? What do we do about it?
AmyInNH -> CaptainGrey 5 Dec 2015 17:15
You're too funny. It's not "lifting billions out of poverty". It's moving malicious manufacturing practices to the other side
of the planet. To the lands of no labor laws. To hide it from consumers. To hide profits.
And it is dying. Legislatively they choke off their natural competition, which is an essential element of capitalism. Monopoly
isn't capitalism. And when they bribe legislators, we don't have democracy any more either.
Jeremiah2000 -> Teresa Trujillo 5 Dec 2015 16:53
Stocks have always been "a legal form of gambling". What is happening now however, is that a pair of treys can beat out
your straight flush. Companies that have never turned a profit fetch huge prices on the stock market.
The stock market suckered millions in before 2008 and then prices plummeted. Where did the money from grandpa's pension
fund go?
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:45
Abraham Lincoln said that the purpose of government is to do for people what they cannot do for themselves. Government
also should serve to keep people from hurting themselves and to restrain man's greed, which otherwise cannot be self-controlled.
Anyone who seeks to own productive power that they cannot or won't use for consumption are beggaring their neighbor––the equivalency
of mass murder––the impact of concentrated capital ownership.
The words "OWN" and "ASSETS" are the key descriptors of the definition of wealth. But these words are not well understood by
the vast majority of Americans or for that matter, global citizens. They are limited to the vocabulary used by the wealthy ownership
class and financial publications, which are not widely read, and not even taught in our colleges and universities.
The wealthy ownership class did not become wealthy because they are "three times as smart." Still there is a valid argument
that the vast majority of Americans do not pay particular attention to the financial world and educate themselves on wealth building
within the current system's limited past-savings paradigm. Significantly, the wealthy OWNERSHIP class use their political power
(power always follows property OWNERSHIP) to write the system rules to benefit and enhance their wealth. As such they have benefited
from forging trade policy agreements which further concentrate OWNERSHIP on a global scale, military-industrial complex subsidies
and government contracts, tax code provisions and loopholes and collective-bargaining rules – policy changes they've used their
wealth to champion.
Gary Reber 5 Dec 2015 16:44
Unfortunately, when it comes to recommendations for solutions to economic inequality, virtually every commentator, politician
and economist is stuck in viewing the world in one factor terms – human labor, in spite of their implied understanding that the
rich are rich because they OWN the non-human means of production – physical capital. The proposed variety of wealth-building programs,
like "universal savings accounts that might be subsidized for low-income savers," are not practical solutions because they rely
on savings (a denial of consumption which lessens demand in the economy), which the vast majority of Americans do not have, and
for those who can save their savings are modest and insignificant. Though, millions of Americans own diluted stock value through
the "stock market exchanges," purchased with their earnings as labor workers (savings), their stock holdings are relatively minuscule,
as are their dividend payments compared to the top 10 percent of capital owners. Pew Research found that 53 percent of Americans
own no stock at all, and out of the 47 percent who do, the richest 5 percent own two-thirds of that stock. And only 10 percent
of Americans have pensions, so stock market gains or losses don't affect the incomes of most retirees.
As for taxpayer-supported saving subsidies or other wage-boosting measures, those who have only their labor power and its precarious
value held up by coercive rigging and who desperately need capital ownership to enable them to be capital workers (their productive
assets applied in the economy) as well as labor workers to have a way to earn more income, cannot satisfy their unsatisfied needs
and wants and sufficiently provide for themselves and their families. With only access to labor wages, the 99 percenters will
continue, in desperation, to demand more and more pay for the same or less work, as their input is exponentially replaced by productive
capital.
As such, the vast majority of American consumers will continue to be strapped to mounting consumer debt bills, stagnant wages
and inflationary price pressures. As their ONLY source of income is through wage employment, economic insecurity for the 99 percent
majority of people means they cannot survive more than a week or two without a paycheck. Thus, the production side of the economy
is under-nourished and hobbled as a result, because there are fewer and fewer "customers with money." We thus need to free economic
growth from the slavery of past savings.
I mentioned that political power follows property OWNERSHIP because with concentrated capital asset OWNERSHIP our elected representatives
are far too often bought with the expectation that they protect and enhance the interests of the wealthiest Americans, the OWNERSHIP
class they too overwhelmingly belong to.
Many, including the author of this article, have concluded that with such a concentrated OWNERSHIP stronghold the wealthy have
on our politics, "it's hard to see where this cycle ends." The ONLY way to reverse this cycle and broaden capital asset OWNERSHIP
universally is a political revolution. (Bernie Sanders, are you listening?)
The political revolution must address the problem of lack of demand. To create demand, the FUTURE economy must be financed
in ways that create new capital OWNERS, who will benefit from the full earnings of the FUTURE productive capability of the American
economy, and without taking from those who already OWN. This means significantly slowing the further concentration of capital
asset wealth among those who are already wealthy and ensuring that the system is reformed to promote inclusive prosperity, inclusive
opportunity, and inclusive economic justice.
yamialwaysright 5 Dec 2015 16:13
I was interested and in agreement until I read about structured racism. Many black kidsin the US grow up without a father in
the house. They turn to anti-social behaviour and crime. Once you are poor it is hard to get out of being poor but Journalists
are not doing justice to a critique of US Society if they ignore the fact that some people behave in a self-destructive way. I
would imagine that if some black men in the US and the UK stuck with one woman and played a positive role in the life of their
kids, those kids would have a better chance at life. People of different racial and ethnic origin do this also but there does
seem to be a disproportionate problem with some black US men and some black UK men. Poverty is one problem but growing up in poverty
and without a father figure adds to the problem.
What the author writes applies to other countries not just the US in relation to the super wealthy being a small proportion
of the population yet having the same wealth as a high percentage of the population. This in not a black or latino issue but a
wealth distribution issue that affects everyone irrespective of race or ethnic origin. The top 1%, 5% or 10% having most of the
wealth is well-known in many countries.
nuthermerican4u 5 Dec 2015 15:59
Capitalism, especially the current vulture capitalism, is dog eat dog. Always was, always will be. My advice is that if you
are a capitalist that values your heirs, invest in getting off this soon-to-be slag heap and find other planets to pillage and
rape. Either go all out for capitalism or reign in this beast before it kills all of us.
soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:32
Our antiquated class structure demonstrates the trickle up of Capitalism and the need to counterbalance it with progressive
taxation.
In the 1960s/1970s we used high taxes on the wealthy to counter balance the trickle up of Capitalism and achieved much greater
equality.
Today we have low taxes on the wealthy and Capitalism's trickle up is widening the inequality gap.
We are cutting benefits for the disabled, poor and elderly so inequality can get wider and the idle rich can remain idle.
They have issued enough propaganda to make people think it's those at the bottom that don't work.
Every society since the dawn of civilization has had a Leisure Class at the top, in the UK we call them the Aristocracy and
they have been doing nothing for centuries.
The UK's aristocracy has seen social systems come and go, but they all provide a life of luxury and leisure and with someone
else doing all the work.
Feudalism - exploit the masses through land ownership
Capitalism - exploit the masses through wealth (Capital)
Today this is done through the parasitic, rentier trickle up of Capitalism:
a) Those with excess capital invest it and collect interest, dividends and rent.
b) Those with insufficient capital borrow money and pay interest and rent.
The system itself provides for the idle rich and always has done from the first civilisations right up to the 21st Century.
The rich taking from the poor is always built into the system, taxes and benefits are the counterbalance that needs to be applied
externally.
Iconoclastick 5 Dec 2015 15:31
I often chuckle when I read some of the right wing comments on articles such as this. Firstly, I question if readers actually
read the article references I've highlighted, before rushing to comment.
Secondly, the comments are generated by cifers who probably haven't set the world alight, haven't made a difference in their
local community, they'll have never created thousands of jobs in order to reward themselves with huge dividends having and as
a consequence enjoy spectacular asset/investment growth, at best they'll be chugging along, just about keeping their shit together
and yet they support a system that's broken, other than for the one percent, of the one percent.
A new report from the Institute for Policy Studies issued this week analyzed the Forbes list of the 400 richest Americans
and found that "the wealthiest 100 households now own about as much wealth as the entire African American population in the
United States". That means that 100 families – most of whom are white – have as much wealth as the 41,000,000 black folks walking
around the country (and the million or so locked up) combined.
Similarly, the report also stated that "the wealthiest 186 members of the Forbes 400 own as much wealth as the entire Latino
population" of the nation. Here again, the breakdown in actual humans is broke down: 186 overwhelmingly white folks have more
money than that an astounding 55,000,000 Latino people.
family wealth" predicts outcomes for 10 to 15 generations. Those with extreme wealth owe it to events going back "300
to 450" years ago, according to research published by the New Republic – an era when it wasn't unusual for white Americans
to benefit from an economy dependent upon widespread, unpaid black labor in the form of slavery.
soundofthesuburbs -> soundofthesuburbs 5 Dec 2015 15:26
It is the 21st Century and most of the land in the UK is still owned by the descendants of feudal warlords that killed people
and stole their land and wealth.
When there is no land to build houses for generation rent, land ownership becomes an issue.
David Cameron is married into the aristocracy and George Osborne is a member of the aristocracy, they must both be well acquainted
with the Leisure Class.
I can't find any hard work going on looking at the Wikipedia page for David Cameron's father-in-law. His family have been on
their estate since the sixteenth century and judging by today's thinking, expect to be on it until the end of time.
George Osborne's aristocratic pedigree goes back to the Tudor era:
"he is an aristocrat with a pedigree stretching back to early in the Tudor era. His father, Sir Peter Osborne, is the
17th holder of a hereditary baronetcy that has been passed from father to son for 10 generations, and of which George is next
in line."
If we have people at the bottom who are not working the whole of civilisation will be turned on its head.
"The modern industrial society developed from the barbarian tribal society, which featured a leisure class supported
by subordinated working classes employed in economically productive occupations. The leisure class is composed of people exempted
from manual work and from practicing economically productive occupations, because they belong to the leisure class."
The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, by Thorstein Veblen. It was written a long time ago but
much of it is as true today as it was then. The Wikipedia entry gives a good insight.
DBChas 5 Dec 2015 15:13
"income inequality" is best viewed as structural capitalism. It's not as if, did black and brown people and female people somehow
(miraculously) attain the economic status of the lower-paid, white, male person, the problem would be solved--simply by adjusting
pay scales. The problem is inherent to capitalism, which doesn't mean certain "types" of people aren't more disadvantaged for
their "type." No one is saying that. For capitalists, it's easier to rationalize the obscene unfairness (only rich people say,
"life's not fair") when their "type" is regarded as superior to a different "type," whether that be with respect to color or gender
or both.
Over time--a long time--the dominant party (white males since the Dark Ages, also the life-span of capitalism coincidentally
enough) came to dominance by various means, too many to try to list, or even know of. Why white males? BTW, just because most
in power and in money are white males does not mean ALL white males are in positions of power and wealth. Most are not, and these
facts help to fog the issue.
Indeed, "income inequality," is not an accident, nor can it be fixed, as the author notes, by tweaking (presumably he means
capitalism). And he's quite right too in saying, "You can't take down the master's house with the master's tools..." I take that
ALSO to mean, the problem can't be fixed by way of what Hedges has called a collapsing liberal establishment with its various
institutions, officially speaking. That is, it's not institutional racism that's collapsing, but that institution is not officially
recognized as such.
HOWEVER, it IS possible, even when burdened with an economics that is capitalism, to redistribute wealth, and I don't just
mean Mark Zuckerberg's. I mean all wealth in whatever form can be redistributed if/when government decides it can. And THIS TIME,
unlike the 1950s-60s, not only would taxes on the wealthy be the same as then but the wealth redistributed would be redistributed
to ALL, not just to white families, and perhaps in particular to red families, the oft forgotten ones.
This is a matter of political will. But, of course, if that means whites as the largest voting block insist on electing to
office those without the political will, nothing will change. In that case, other means have to be considered, and just a reminder:
If the government fails to serve the people, the Constitution gives to the people the right to depose that government. But again,
if whites as the largest voting block AND as the largest sub-group in the nation (and women are the largest part of that block,
often voting as their men vote--just the facts, please, however unpleasant) have little interest in seeing to making necessary
changes at least in voting booths, then...what? Bolshevism or what? No one seems to know and it's practically taboo even to talk
about possibilities. Americans did it once, but not inclusively and not even paid in many instances. When it happens again, it
has to happen with and for the participation of ALL. And it's worth noting that it will have to happen again, because capitalism
by its very nature cannot survive itself. That is, as Marx rightly noted, capitalism will eventually collapse by dint of its internal
contradictions.
mbidding Jeremiah2000 5 Dec 2015 15:08
Correction: The average person in poverty in the U.S. does not live in the same abject, third world poverty as you might
find in Honduras, Central African Republic, Cambodia, or the barrios of Sao Paulo.
Since our poor don't live in abject poverty, I invite you to live as a family of four on less than $11,000 a year anywhere
in the United States. If you qualify and can obtain subsidized housing you may have some of the accoutrements in your home that
you seem to equate with living the high life. You know, running water, a fridge, a toilet, a stove. You would also likely have
a phone (subsidized at that) so you might be able to participate (or attempt to participate) in the job market in an honest attempt
to better your family's economic prospects and as is required to qualify for most assistance programs.
Consider as well that you don't have transportation to get a job that would improve your circumstances. You earn too much to
qualify for meaningful levels of food support programs and fall into the insurance gap for subsidies because you live in a state
that for ideological reasons refuses to expand Medicaid coverage. Your local schools are a disgrace but you can't take advantage
of so-called school choice programs (vouchers, charters, and the like) as you don't have transportation or the time (given your
employer's refusal to set fixed working hours for minimum wage part time work) to get your kids to that fine choice school.
You may have a fridge and a stove, but you have no food to cook. You may have access to running water and electricity, but
you can't afford to pay the bills for such on account of having to choose between putting food in that fridge or flushing that
toilet. You can't be there reliably for your kids to help with school, etc, because you work constantly shifting hours for crap
pay.
Get back to me after six months to a year after living in such circumstances and then tell me again how Americans don't really
live in poverty simply because they have access to appliances.
Earl Shelton 5 Dec 2015 15:08
The Earned Income Tax Credit seems to me a good starting point for reform. It has been around since the 70s -- conceived by
Nixon/Moynihan -- and signed by socialist (kidding) Gerald Ford -- it already *redistributes* income (don't choke on the term,
O'Reilly) directly from tax revenue (which is still largely progressive) to the working poor, with kids.
That program should be massively expanded to tax the 1% -- and especially the top 1/10 of 1% (including a wealth tax) -- and
distribute the money to the bottom half of society, mostly in the form of work training, child care and other things that help
put them in and keep them in the middle class. It is a mechanism already in existence to correct the worst ravages of Capitalism.
Use it to build shared prosperity.
oKWJNRo 5 Dec 2015 14:40
So many dutiful neoliberals on here rushing to the defense of poor Capitalism. Clearly, these commentators are among those
who are in the privileged position of reaping the true benefits of Capitalism - And, of course, there are many benefits to reap
if you are lucky enough to be born into the right racial-socioeconomic context.
We can probably all agree that Capitalism has brought about widespread improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions,
for example, compared to the feudal system that preceded it... But it also disproportionately benefits the upper echelons of Capitalist
societies and is wholly unequal by design.
Capitalism depends upon the existence of a large underclass that can be exploited. This is part of the process of how surplus
value is created and wealth is extracted from labour. This much is indisputable. It is therefore obvious that capitalism isn't
an ideal system for most of us living on this planet.
As for the improvements in healthcare, education, living conditions etc that Capitalism has fostered... Most of these were
won through long struggles against the Capitalist hegemony by the masses. We would have certainly chosen to make these improvements
to our landscape sooner if Capitalism hadn't made every effort to stop us. The problem today is that Capitalism and its powerful
beneficiaries have successfully convinced us that there is no possible alternative. It won't give us the chance to try or even
permit us to believe there could be another, better way.
Martin Joseph -> realdoge 5 Dec 2015 14:33
Please walk us through how non-capitalist systems create wealth and allow their lowest class people propel themselves to
the top in one generation. You will note that most socialist systems derive their technology and advancements from the more capitalistic
systems. Pharmaceuticals, software, and robotics are a great example of this.
I shutter to think of what the welfare of the average citizen of the world would be like without the advancements made via
the capitalist countries.
VWFeature 5 Dec 2015 14:29
Markets, economies and tax systems are created by people, and based on rules they agree on. Those rules can favor general prosperity
or concentration of wealth. Destruction and predation are easier than creation and cooperation, so our rules have to favor cooperation
if we want to avoid predation and destructive conflicts.
In the 1930's the US changed many of those rules to favor general prosperity. Since then they've been gradually changed to
favor wealth concentration and predation. They can be changed back.
The trick is creating a system that encourages innovation while putting a safety net under the population so failure doesn't
end in starvation.
A large part of our current problems is the natural tendency for large companies to get larger and larger until their failure
would adversely affect too many others, so they're not allowed to fail. Tax law, not antitrust law, has to work against this.
If a company can reduce its tax rate by breaking into 20 smaller (still huge) companies, then competition is preserved and no
one company can dominate and control markets.
Robert Goldschmidt -> Jake321 5 Dec 2015 14:27
Bernie Sanders has it right on -- we can only heal our system by first having millions rise up and demand an end to the corruption
of the corporations controlling our elected representatives. Corporations are not people and money is not speech.
moonwrap02 5 Dec 2015 14:26
The effects of wealth distribution has far reaching consequences. It is not just about money, but creating a fair society -
one that is co-operative and cohesive. The present system has allowed an ever divide between the rich and poor, creating a two
tier society where neither the twain shall meet. The rich and poor are almost different species on the planet and no longer belong
to the same community. Commonality of interest is lost and so it's difficult to form community and to have good, friendly relationships
across class differences that are that large.
"If capitalism is to be seen to be fair, the same rules are to apply to the big guy as to the little guy,"
Sorry. I get it now. You actually think that because the Washington elite has repealed Glass-Steagel that we live in a unregulated
capitalistic system.
This is so far from the truth that I wasn't comprehending that anyone could think that. You can see the graph of pages published
in the Federal Register here. Unregulated capitalism? Wow.
Dodd Frank was passed in 2010 (without a single Republican vote). Originally it was 2,300 pages. It is STILL being written
by nameless bureaucrats and is over 20,000 pages. Unregulated capitalism? Really?
But the reality is that Goliath is conspiring with the government to regulate what size sling David can use and how many stones
and how many ounces.
So we need more government regulations? They will disallow David from anything but spitwads and only two of those.
neuronmaker -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:16
Do you understand the concept of corporations which are products of capitalism?
The legal institutions within each capitalist corporations and nations are just that, they are capitalist and all about making
profits.
The law is made by the rich capitalists and for the rich capitalists. Each Legislation is a link in the chain of economic slavery
by capitalists.
Capitalism and the concept of money is a construction of the human mind, as it does not exist in the natural world. This construction
is all about using other human beings like blood suckers to sustain a cruel and evil life style - with blood and brutality as
the core ideology.
Marcedward -> MarjaE 5 Dec 2015 14:12
I would agree that our system of help for the less-well-off could be more accessible and more generous, but that doesn't negate
that point that there is a lot of help out there - the most important help being that totally free educational system. Think about
it, a free education, and to get the most out of it a student merely has to show up, obey the rules, do the homework and study
for tests. It's all laid out there for the kids like a helicopter mom laying out her kids clothes. How much easier can we make
it? If people can't be bothered to show up and put in effort, how is their failure based on racism
tommydog -> martinusher 5 Dec 2015 14:12
As you are referring to Carlos Slim, interestingly while he is Mexican by birth his parents were both Lebanese.
slightlynumb -> AmyInNH 5 Dec 2015 14:12
Why isn't that capitalism? It's raw capitalism on steroids.
Zara Von Fritz -> Toughspike 5 Dec 2015 14:12
It's an equal opportunity plantation now.
Robert Goldschmidt 5 Dec 2015 14:11
The key to repairing the system is to identify the causes of our problems.
Here is my list:
The information technology revolution which continues to destroy wages by enabling automation and outsourcing.
The reformation of monopolies which price gouge and block innovation.
Hitting ecological limits such as climate change, water shortages, unsustainable farming.
Then we can make meaningful changes such as regulation of the portion of corporate profit that are pay, enforcement of national
and regional antitrust laws and an escalating carbon tax.
Zara Von Fritz -> PostCorbyn 5 Dec 2015 14:11
If you can believe these quality of life or happiness indexes they put out so often, the winners tend to be places that have
nice environments and a higher socialist mix in their economy. Of course there are examples of poor countries that practice the
same but its not clear that their choice is causal rather than reactive.
We created this mess and we can fix it.
Zara Von Fritz -> dig4victory 5 Dec 2015 14:03
Yes Basic Income is possibly the mythical third way. It socialises wealth to a point but at the same time frees markets from
their obligation to perpetually grow and create jobs for the sake of jobs and also hereford reduces the subsequent need for governments
to attempt to control them beyond maintaining their health.
Zara Von Fritz 5 Dec 2015 13:48
As I understand it, you don't just fiddle with capitalism, you counteract it, or counterweight it. A level of capitalism, or
credit accumulation, and a level of socialism has always existed, including democracy which is a manifestation of socialism (1
vote each). So the project of capital accumulation seems to be out of control because larger accumulations become more powerful
and meanwhile the power of labour in the marketplace has become less so due to forces driving unemployment. The danger is that
capital's power to control the democratic system reaches a point of no return.
Jeremiah2000 -> bifess 5 Dec 2015 13:42
"I do not have the economic freedom to grow my own food because i do not have access to enough land to grow it and i do not
have the economic clout to buy a piece of land."
Economic freedom does NOT mean you get money for free. It means that means that if you grow food for personal use, the federal
government doesn't trash the Constitution by using the insterstate commerce clause to say that it can regulate how much you grow
on your own personal land.
Economic freedom means that if you have a widget, you can choose to set the price for $10 or $100 and that a buyer is free
to buy it from you or not buy it from you. It does NOT mean that you are entitled to "free" widgets.
"If capitalism has not managed to eradicate poverty in rich first world countries then just what chance if there of capitalism
eradicating poverty on a global scale?"
The average person in poverty in the U.S. doesn't live in poverty:
In fact, 80.9 percent of households below the poverty level have cell phones, and a healthy majority-58.2 percent-have computers.
Fully 96.1 percent of American households in "poverty" have a television to watch, and 83.2 percent of them have a video-recording
device in case they cannot get home in time to watch the football game or their favorite television show and they want to record
it for watching later.
Refrigerators (97.8 percent), gas or electric stoves (96.6 percent) and microwaves (93.2 percent) are standard equipment in
the homes of Americans in "poverty."
More than 83 percent have air-conditioning.
Interestingly, the appliances surveyed by the Census Bureau that households in poverty are least likely to own are dish washers
(44.9 percent) and food freezers (26.2 percent).
However, most Americans in "poverty" do not need to go to a laundromat. According to the Census Bureau, 68.7 percent of households
in poverty have a clothes washer and 65.3 percent have a clothes dryer.
Craig Murray is right that "As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier."
Collapse of neoliberal ideology and rise of tentions in neoliberal sociarties resulted in unprecedented increase of covert and false
flag operations by British intelligence services, especially against Russia, which had been chosen as a convenient scapegoat.
With Steele dossier and Skripal affair as two most well known.
New Lady Macbeth (Theresa May) Russophobia is so extreme that her cabinet derailed the election of a Russian to head
Interpol.
Looks like neoliberalism cannot be defeated by and faction of the existing elite. Only when shepp oil end mant people will
have a chance. The US , GB and EU are part of the wider hegemonic neoliberal system. In fact rejection of neoliberal
globalization probably will lead to "national neoliberals" regime which would be a flavor of neo-fascism, no more no less.
Notable quotes:
"... The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. ..."
"... I learnt how highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane just happened to be on holiday in the United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign. ..."
"... It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely unbalanced panel of British military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia. ..."
"... the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it. ..."
"... By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building . It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London. ..."
"... Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence. ..."
"... I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills. ..."
"... I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information. ..."
"... one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media, it would be the biggest story of the day ..."
"... As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier. ..."
"... You can bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy". ..."
The British state can maintain its spies' cover stories for centuries. Look up Eldred Pottinger, who for 180 years appears
in scores of British history books – right up to and including William Dalrymple's Return of the King – as a British officer who
chanced to be passing Herat on holiday when it came under siege from a partly Russian-officered Persian army, and helped to organise
the defences. In researching
Sikunder Burnes, I discovered and published from the British Library incontrovertible and detailed documentary evidence that
Pottinger's entire journey was under the direct instructions of, and reporting to, British spymaster Alexander Burnes. The first
historian to publish the untrue "holiday" cover story, Sir John Kaye, knew both Burnes and Pottinger and undoubtedly knew he was
publishing lying propaganda. Every other British historian of the First Afghan War (except me and latterly
Farrukh Husain) has just followed Kaye's official propaganda.
Some things don't change. I was irresistibly reminded of Eldred Pottinger just passing Herat on holiday, when I learnt how
highly improbable left wing firebrand Simon Bracey-Lane
just happened to be on holiday in the
United States with available cash to fund himself, when he stumbled into the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Recent university graduate Simon Bracey-Lane took it even further. Originally from Wimbledon in London, he was inspired to
rejoin the Labour party in September when Corbyn was elected leader. But by that point, he was already in the US on holiday. So
he joined the Sanders campaign, and never left.
"I had two weeks left and some money left, so I thought, Fuck it, I'll make some calls for Bernie Sanders," he explains. "I just
sort of knew Des Moines was the place, so I just turned up at their HQ, started making phone calls, and then became a fully fledged
field organiser."
It is, to say the least, very interesting indeed that just a year later the left wing, "Corbyn and Sanders supporting" Bracey-Lane
is hosting a very right wing event, "Cold War Then and Now", for the shadowy neo-con Institute for Statecraft, at which an entirely
unbalanced panel of British
military, NATO and Ukrainian nationalists extolled the virtues of re-arming against Russia.
Nor would it seem likely that Bracey-Lane would be involved with the Integrity Initiative. Even the mainstream media has been
forced to give a few paragraphs to the outrageous Integrity Initiative, under which the MOD-sponsored Institute for Statecraft
has been given millions of pounds of taxpayers' money by the FCO to spread covert disinformation and propaganda, particularly against
Russia and the anti-war movement. Activities include twitter and facebook trolling and secretly paying journalists in "clusters of
influence" around Europe. Anonymous helpfully leaked the Institute's internal documents. Some of the Integrity Initiative's thus
exposed alleged covert agents, like David Aaronovitch, have denied any involvement despite their appearance in the documents, and
others like Dan Kaszeta the US "novichok expert", have cheerfully admitted it.
The mainstream media have
tracked down
the HQ of the "Institute for Statecraft" to a derelict mill near Auchtermuchty. It is owned by one of the company directors, Daniel
Lafayeedney, formerly of D Squadron 23rd SAS Regiment and later of Military Intelligence (and incidentally born the rather more prosaic
Daniel Edney).
By sleuthing the company records of this "Scottish charity", and a couple of phone calls, I discovered that the actual location
of the Institute for Statecraft is the basement of 2 Temple Place, London. This is not just any basement – it is the basement of
the former London mansion of William Waldorf Astor, an astonishing building.
It is, in short, possibly the most expensive basement in London.
Which is interesting because the accounts of the Institute for Statecraft claim it has no permanent staff and show nothing
for rent, utilities or office expenses. In fact, I understand the rent is paid by the Ministry of Defence.
Having been told where the Institute for Statecraft skulk, I tipped off journalist Kit Klarenberg of Sputnik Radio to go and physically
check it out. Kit did so and was
aggressively
ejected by that well-known Corbyn and Sanders supporter, Simon Bracey-Lane. It does seem somewhat strange that our left wing
hero is deeply embedded in an organisation that
launches troll attacks on Jeremy Corbyn.
I have a great deal more to tell you about Mr Edney and his organisation next week, and the extraordinary covert disinformation
war the British government wages online, attacking British citizens using British taxpayers' money. Please note in the interim I
am not even a smidgeon suicidal, and going to be very, very careful crossing the road and am not intending any walks in the hills.
I am not alleging Mr Bracey-Lane is an intelligence service operative who previously infiltrated the Labour Party and the
Sanders campaign. He may just be a young man of unusually heterodox and vacillating political opinions. He may be an undercover reporter
for the Canary infiltrating the Institute for Statecraft. All these things are possible, and I have no firm information.
But one of the activities the Integrity Initiative sponsors happens to be the use of online trolls to ridicule the idea that the
British security services ever carry out any kind of infiltration, false flag or agent provocateur operations, despite the fact that
we even have repeated court judgements against undercover infiltration officers getting female activists pregnant. The Integrity
Initiative offers us a glimpse into the very dirty world of surveillance and official disinformation. If we actually had a free media,
it would be the biggest story of the day.
As the Establishment feels its grip slipping, as people wake up to the appalling economic exploitation by the few that underlies
the very foundations of modern western society, expect the methods used by the security services to become even dirtier.
You can
bank on continued ramping up of Russophobia to supply "the enemy".
As both Scottish Independence and Jeremy Corbyn are viewed as
real threats by the British Establishment, you can anticipate every possible kind of dirty trick in the next couple of years, with
increasing frequency and audacity
"... In his just published book, War With Russia? ..."
"... To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless repetition." ..."
"... Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared. ..."
"... The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned. ..."
Throughout the long Cold War Stephen Cohen, professor of Russian studies at Princeton University and New York University was a
voice of reason. He refused to allow his patriotism to blind him to Washington's contribution to the conflict and to criticize only
the Soviet contribution. Cohen's interest was not to blame the enemy but to work toward a mutual understanding that would remove
the threat of nuclear war. Although a Democrat and left-leaning, Cohen would have been at home in the Reagan administration, as Reagan's
first priority was to end the Cold War. I know this because I was part of the effort. Pat Buchanan will tell you the same thing.
In 1974 a notorious cold warrior, Albert Wohlstetter, absurdly accused the CIA of underestimating the Soviet threat. As the CIA
had every incentive for reasons of budget and power to overestimate the Soviet threat, and today the "Russian threat," Wohlstetter's
accusation made no sense on its face. However he succeeded in stirring up enough concern that CIA director George H.W. Bush, later
Vice President and President, agreed to a Team B to investigate the CIA's assessment, headed by the Russiaphobic Harvard professor
Richard Pipes. Team B concluded that the Soviets thought they could win a nuclear war and were building the forces with which to
attack the US.
The report was mainly nonsense, and it must have have troubled Stephen Cohen to experience the setback to negotiations that Team
B caused.
Today Cohen is stressed that it is the United States that thinks it can win a nuclear war. Washington speaks openly of using "low
yield" nuclear weapons, and intentionally forecloses any peace negotiations with Russia with a propaganda campaign against Russia
of demonization, vilification, and transparent lies, while installing missile bases on Russia's borders and while talking of incorporating
former parts of Russia into NATO. In his just published book, War With Russia? , which I highly recommend, Cohen makes a
convincing case that Washington is asking for war.
I agree with Cohen that if Russia is a threat it is only because the US is threatening Russia. The stupidity of the policy toward
Russia is creating a Russian threat. Putin keeps emphasizing this. To paraphrase Putin: "You are making Russia a threat by declaring
us to be one, by discarding facts and substituting orchestrated opinions that your propagandistic media establish as fact via endless
repetition."
Cohen is correct that during the Cold War every US president worked to defuse tensions, especially Republican ones. Since the
Clinton regime every US president has worked to create tensions. What explains this dangerous change in approach? The end of the Cold War was disadvantageous to the military/security complex whose budget and power had waxed from decades of
cold war. Suddenly the enemy that had bestowed such wealth and prestige on the military/security complex disappeared.
The New Cold War is the result of the military/security complex's resurrection of the enemy. In a democracy with independent media
and scholars, this would not have been possible. But the Clinton regime permitted in violation of anti-trust laws 90% of the US media
to be concentrated in the hands of six mega-corporations, thus destroying an independence already undermined by the CIA's successful
use of the CIA's media assets to control explanations. Many books have been written about the CIA's use of the media, including Udo
Ulfkotte's "Bought Journalism," the English edition of which was quickly withdrawn and burned.
The demonization of Russia is also aided and abetted by the Democrats' hatred of Trump and anger from Hillary's loss of the presidential
election to the "Trump deplorables." The Democrats purport to believe that Trump was installed by Putin's interference in the presidential
election. This false belief is emotionally important to Democrats, and they can't let go of it.
Although Cohen as a professor at Princeton and NYU never lacked research opportunities, in the US Russian studies, strategic studies,
and the like are funded by the military/security complex whose agenda Cohen's scholarship does not serve. At the Center for Strategic
and International Studies, where I held an independently financed chair for a dozen years, most of my colleagues were dependent on
grants from the military/security complex. At the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, where I was a Senior Fellow for three
decades, the anti-Soviet stance of the Institution reflected the agenda of those who funded the institution.
I am not saying that my colleagues were whores on a payroll. I am saying that the people who got the appointments were people
who were inclined to see the Soviet Union the way the military/security complex thought it should be seen.
As Stephen Cohen is aware, in the original Cold War there was some balance as all explanations were not controlled. There were
independent scholars who could point out that the Soviets, decimated by World War 2, had an interest in peace, and that accommodation
could be achieved, thus avoiding the possibility of nuclear war.
Stephen Cohen must have been in the younger ranks of those sensible people, as he and President Reagan's ambassador to the Soviet
Union, Jack Matloff, seem to be the remaining voices of expert reason on the American scene.
If you care to understand the dire threat under which you live, a threat that only a few people, such as Stephen Cohen, are trying
to lift, read his book.
If you want to understand the dire threat that a bought-and-paid-for American media poses to your existence, read Cohen's accounts
of their despicable lies. America has a media that is synonymous with lies.
If you want to understand how corrupt American universities are as organizations on the take for money, organizations to whom
truth is inconsequential, read Cohen's book.
If you want to understand why you could be dead before Global Warming can get you, read Cohen's book.
"... Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation program !!! ..."
"... the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global elites? ..."
"... Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they are fighting the commies. ..."
"... Integrity Initiative ..."
"... From his curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth. ..."
"... He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's Stabilisation Unit which is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI). ..."
"... This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine. ..."
"... That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia" ..."
"... In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested Military measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea: ..."
"... Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia? ..."
"... Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda ..."
"... Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures ..."
"... Russian information warfare - airbrushing reality ..."
"... Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria ..."
"... Russian penetration in Germany ..."
"... Russian conspiracy theory and foreign policy ..."
"... The most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the Initiative commissioned such research (pdf) and paid for it. ..."
"... Here is an interesting look at how little the Russia-linked entities spent on advertising on Google during the 2016 election: https://viableopposition.blogspot.com/2018/12/google-russia-and-4700-in-advertising.html Slowly but surely, the Russian meddling narrative is falling apart. ..."
"... McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow vest protesters. ..."
"... Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would have responded with force. ..."
"... It looks like one of the decision was to get closer to France (after getting very close friends in Homs and Aleppo?) See the list of people in the French II cluster dumped yesterday by Anonymous: half the names work at the fr Min of F Affairs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lancaster_House_Treaties and http://www.gmfus.org/publications/frances-defense-partnerships-and-dilemmas-brexit ..."
"... This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state. ..."
"... it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy. ..."
"... It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes fascism. ..."
"... Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art. ..."
"... Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller? ..."
"... Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. " Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11, with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians. ..."
"... Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM ..."
"... The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism (Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque (less defensible) reasons and missions. ..."
"... right after 2016 US elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation. Seems that veil has been dispensed with ..."
"... Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking, setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry. That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise of free markets and democracy. ..."
"... 'Integrity Initiative' - A Military Intelligence Operation Designed To Create A New Enemy ..."
Sounds to me like that Integrity initiative dude needs to go on a 'de-radicalisation
program !!! How many billions is that guna save us all ! not to mention lives saved.
Wrong JR. It seems quite the obvious that the big boy in the west, the US, would seem to be
the one spearheading the whole globalist agenda.
But this is a retarded proposition.
The US is nothing more than a Golem. It has been reduced to somnambulism and hijacked,
utilized for the ends of these Non-National elites. Sure, like many posters here, it feels good
to blame the US for everything. But the powerbrokers have always been in London and now its
hypercentralized endgame in Brussels. You can say that it is the US through and through, but
ask yourself who has more to gain from US FP abroad: average Americans or the global
elites?
Those former-Eastern Bloc countries, i.e. Poland and Ukraine, do not count as power
brokers. They have and will always be pawns in the game. So what if they still worship Icons of
Americanism which is a remnant culture of their F*ed up narrative where they still believe they
are fighting the commies.
Muntadhar al-Zaidi was arrested and tortured for it...
"They broke my teeth, my nose, my leg, they electrocuted me, lashed me, they would beat me,
they even broke a table or a chair over my back. I don't know, they had my eyes covered,"
al-Zaidi recalled. "This was one thing I never experienced before. Torture by the
authorities, by the rule of law."
I wish it had been a hand grenade.
The British government financed Integrity Initiative is tasked with spreading
anti-Russian propaganda and with influencing the public, military and governments of a number
of countries. What follows is an incomplete analysis of the third batch of the Initiative's
papers which was
dumped yesterday.
Christopher Nigel Donnelly (CND) is the co-director of The Institute for Statecraft and founder of its offshoot
Integrity Initiative . The
Initiative claims to "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation".
Both, the Institute as well as the Initiative, claim to be independent Non-Government
Organizations. Both are financed by the British government, NATO and other state donors.
Among the documents
lifted by some anonymous person from the servers of the Institute we find several papers
about Donnelly as well as some memos written by him. They show a russophobe mind with a lack of
realistic strategic thought.
There is also
a file (pdf) with a copy of his passport:
From his
curriculum vitae (pdf) we learn that Donnelly was a long time soldier in the British Army
Intelligence Corps where he established and led the Soviet Studies Research Centre at RMA
Sandhurst. He later was involved in creating the US Army's Foreign Military Studies Office
(FMSO) at Ft. Leavenworth.
He worked at the British Ministry of Defence and as an advisor to several Secretaries
General of NATO. He is a director of the Statecraft Institute since 2010. Donnelly also advises
the Foreign Minister of Lithuania. He is a "Security and Justice Senior Mentor" of the UK's
Stabilisation Unit which
is tasked with destabilizing various countries. He serves as a Honorary Colonel of the
Specialist Group Military Intelligence (SGMI).
During his time as military intelligence analyst in the 1980s Donnelly wrote several books
and papers about the Soviet Union and its military.
Our problem is that, for the last 70 years or so, we in the UK and Europe have been living in
a safe, secure rules-based system which has allowed us to enjoy a holiday from history.
... ... ...
Unfortunately, this state of affairs is now being challenged. A new paradigm of conflict
is replacing the 19th & 20th Century paradigm.
... ... ...
In this new paradigm, the clear distinction which most people have been able to draw
between war and peace, their expectation of stability and a degree of predictability in life,
are being replaced by a volatile unpredictability, a permanent state of instability in which
war and peace become ever more difficult to disentangle . The "classic" understanding of
conflict being between two distinct players or groups of players is giving way to a world of
Darwinian competition where all the players – nation states, sub-state actors, big
corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and so on – are constantly striving with each
other in a "war of all against all". The Western rules-based system, which most westerners
take for granted and have come to believe is "normal", is under attack from countries and
organisations which wish to replace our system with theirs. This is not a crisis which faces
us; it is a strategic challenge, and from several directions simultaneously.
In reality the "Western rules-based system", fully implemented after the demise of the
Soviet Union, is a concept under which 'the west' arbitrarily makes up rules and threatens to
kill anyone who does not follow them. Witness the wars against Serbia, the war on Iraq, the
destruction of Libya, the western led coup in Ukraine and the war by Jihadi proxies against the
people of Syria and Iraq. None of these actions were legal under international law. Demanding a
return to strict adherence to the rule of international law, as Russia,
China and others now do, it is not an attempt to replace "our system with theirs". It is a
return to the normal state of global diplomacy. It is certainly not a "Darwinian
competition".
In October 2016 Donnelly had a Private
Discussion with Gen Sir Richard Barrons (pdf), marked as personal and confidential. Barrons
is a former commander of the British Joint Forces Command. The nonsensical top line is: "The UK
defence model is failing. UK is at real risk."
Some interesting nuggets again reveal a paranoid mindset. The talk also includes some
realistic truthiness about the British military posture Barrons and others created:
There has been a progressive, systemic demobilisation of NATO militarily capability and a run
down of all its members' defences
...
We are seeing new / reinvented ways of warfare – hybrid , plus the reassertion of hard
power in warfare
...
Aircraft Carriers can be useful for lots of things, but not for war v China or Russia, so we
should equip them accordingly. ...
The West no longer has a military edge on Russia. ...
Our Nuclear programme drains resources from conventional forces and hollows them out. ...
The UK Brigade in Germany is no good as a deterrent against Russia. ...
Our battalion in Estonia are hostages, not a deterrent. ...
The general laments the lack of influence the military has on the British government and its
people. He argues for more government financed think tank research that can be fed back into
the government:
So, if no catastrophe happens to wake people up and demand a response, then we need to find a
way to get the core of government to realise the problem and take it out of the political
space. We will need to impose changes over the heads of vested interests. NB We did this in
the 1930s
My conclusion is that it is we who must either generate the debate or wait for something
dreadful to happen to shock us into action. We must generate an independent debate outside
government .
...
We need to ask when and how do we start to put all this right? Do we have the national
capabilities / capacities to fix it? If so, how do we improve our harnessing of resources to
do it? We need this debate NOW. There is not a moment to be lost.
This was an order from the core of the British thinking to Donnelly to get even deeper
into the inner-British influence business. Hype Russia as a threat so more money can be taken
from the 'vested interests' of the people and dumped into the military machine.
That particular advise of General Barrons was accepted. In 2017 the Integrity Initiative
bid for funding from the Ministry of Defence (pdf) for various projects to influence the
public, the parliament and the government as well as foreign forces. The bid lists "performance
indicators" that are supposed to measure the success of its activities. The top indicator for
the Initiative's proposed work is a "Tougher stance in government policy towards Russia"
.
Asking for government finance to influence the government to take a "tougher stand towards
Russia" seems a bit circular. But this is consistent with the operation of other Anglo-American
think tanks and policy initiatives in which one part of the government, usually the hawkish
one, secretly uses NGO's and think-tanks to lobby other parts of the government to support
their specific hobbyhorse and budget.
Here is how it is done. The 'experts' of the 'charity' Institute for Statecraft and
Integrity Initiative
testified
in the British parliament. While they were effectively paid by the government they lobbied
parliament under the cover of their NGO. This circularity also allows to use international
intermediates. Members of the Spanish cluster
(pdf) of the Initiative
testified in the British Parliament about the Catalan referendum and related allegations
against Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange. (It is likely that this testimony led to the change
in the position of the Ecuadorian government towards Assange.)
Unfortunately, or luckily, such lobbying operations are mostly run by people who are
incompetent in the specific field they are lobbying for. Chris Donnelly, despite a life long
experience in military intelligence, has obviously zero competence as a military strategist or
planner.
In March 2014, shortly after Crimea split from the Ukraine, Donnelly suggested
Military
measures (pdf) to be taken by the Ukraine with regards to Crimea:
If I were in charge I would get the following implemented asp
Set up a cordon sanitaire across the Crimean Isthmus and on the coast N. of Crimea with
troops and mines
Mine Sevastopol harbour/bay. Can be done easily using a car ferry if they have no
minelayers. Doesn't need a lot of mines to be effective. They could easily buy some
mines.
Get their air force into the air and activate all their air defences. If they can't fly
the Migs on the airfield in Crimea those should be destroyed as a gesture that they are
serious. Going "live" electronically will worry the Russians as the Ukrainians have the
same electronic kit. If the Russians jam it they jam their own kit as well.
Ukraine used to have some seriously important weapons, such as a big microwave
anti-satellite weapon. If they still have this, they should use it.
The government needs a Strategic communication campaign-so far everything is coming
from Moscow. They need to articulate a long-term vision that will inspire the people,
however hard that is to do. Without it, what have people to fight for?
They should ask the west now to start supplying Oil and gas. There is plenty available
due to the mild winter.
I am trying to get this message across
Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of Sevastopol harbor, the
frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in Crimea. Those "guestures"
would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear power which were legally
stationed in Crimea. And how was the west to immediately supply gas to Ukraine and Ukraine's
pipeline network is designed to unidirectionally receive gas from Russia?
Such half-assed thinking is typical for the Institute and its creation of propaganda. One of
its employees/contractors is Hugh Benedict Nimmo who the Initiative paid to produce
anti-Russian propaganda that was then disseminated through various western publications.
According to the (still very incomplete) Initiative files Ben Nimmo
received a monthly consultancy fee of £2.500 between December 2015 and March 2016. In
August 2016 he sent an invoice
(pdf) of £5,000 for his "August work on Integrity Initiative". A
Production Timetable (pdf) for March to June 2016 lists the following Nimmo outputs and
activities:
17 March Atlantic Council: Yes, Putin really believes his own propaganda , Ben
Nimmo
21 March Newsweek: Putin's paranoia is driving his foreign adventures , Ben
Nimmo
22 March, UK House of Commons: Russian information warfare - airbrushing
reality , Jonathan Eyal and Ben Nimmo
Mid May: Atlantic Council: Distract, deceive, destroy: Putin at war in Syria .
Ben Nimmo et al (Major study)
Early May timeframe: Russian penetration in Germany , Harold Elletson, Ben
Nimmo et al - 10,000 words
June timeframe: Atlantic Council, major report on Russian conspiracy theory and
foreign policy , Ben Nimmo (potential launch events in London and / or
Washington)
End-June: Mapping Russia's whole influence machine , Ben Nimmo - 10,000
words
One wonders how often Ben Nimmo double billed his various sponsors for these copy-paste
fantasy pamphlets.
In late 2017 Ben Nimmo and Guardian 'journalist' Carole Cadwalladr disseminated
allegations that Russia used Facebook ads to influence the Brexit decision. Cadwalladr even
received a price for her work. Unfortunately the price was not revoked when Facebook revealed
that "Russia linked" accounts had spend a total of 97 cents on Brexit ads. It is unexplained
how that was enough to achieve their alleged aim.
Cadwalladr is listed
as a speaker (pdf) at a "skill sharing" conference the Institute organized for November 1-2
under the headline: "Tackling Tools of Malign Influence - Supporting 21st Century
Journalism".
This year Ben Nimmo became notorious for claiming that
several real persons with individual opinions were "Russian trolls". As we
noted :
Nimmo, and several other dimwits quoted in the piece, came to the conclusion that Ian56 is
a Kremlin paid troll, not a real person. Next to Ian56 Nimmo 'identified' other 'Russian
troll' accounts:
One particularly influential retweeter (judging by the number of accounts which then
retweeted it) was @ValLisitsa, which posts in English and Russian. Last year, this account
joined the troll-factory #StopMorganLie campaign.
Had Nimmo, a former NATO spokesperson, had some decent education he would have
know that @ValLisitsa, aka Valentina Lisitsa , is a famous
American- Ukrainian pianist. Yes, she sometimes tweets in Russian language to her many fans
in Russia and the Ukraine. Is that now a crime? The videos of her world wide
performances on Youtube have more than 170 million views. It is absurd to claim that she is a
'Russian troll' and to insinuate that she is taking Kremlin money to push 'Russian troll'
opinions.
The
Institute for Statecraft Expert Team (pdf) list several people with military intelligence
backgrounds as well as many 'journalists'. One of them is:
Mark Galeotti
Specialist in Russian strategic thinking; the application of Russian disinformation and
hybrid warfare; the use of organised crime as a weapon of hybrid warfare. Educational and
mentoring skills, including in a US and E European environment, and the corporate world.
Russian linguist
Galeotti is the infamous inventor of the 'Gerasimov doctrine' and of the propaganda about
Russia's alleged 'hybrid' warfare. In February 2013 the Russian General Valery Gerasimov, then
Russia's chief of the General Staff, published a paper that analysed the way the 'west' is
waging a new type of war by mixing propaganda, proxy armies and military force into one unified
operation.
Galeotti claimed that Gerasimov's analysis of 'western' operations was a new Russian
doctrine of 'hybrid war'. He invented the term 'Gerasimov doctrine' which then took off in the
propaganda realm. In February 2016 the U.S. Army Military Review
published a longer analysis of Gerasimov's paper that debunked the nonsense (pdf). It
concluded:
Gerasimov's article is not proposing a new Russian way of warfare or a hybrid war, as has
been stated in the West.
But anti-Russian propagandist
repeated Galeotti's nonsense over and over. Only in March 2018, five years after Galeotti
invented the 'Germasimov doctrine' and two years after he was thoroughly debunked, he finally
recanted
:
Everywhere, you'll find scholars, pundits, and policymakers talking about the threat the
"Gerasimov doctrine" -- named after Russia's chief of the general staff -- poses to the West.
It's a new way of war, "an expanded theory of modern warfare," or even "a vision of total
warfare."
There's one small problem. It doesn't exist. And the longer we pretend it does, the longer
we misunderstand the -- real, but different -- challenge Russia poses.
I feel I can say that because, to my immense chagrin, I created this term, which has since
acquired a destructive life of its own, lumbering clumsily into the world to spread fear and
loathing in its wake.
The Institute for Statecraft's "Specialist in Russian strategic thinking", an expert of
disinformation and hybrid warfare, created a non-existing Russian doctrine out of hot air and
used it to press for anti-Russian measures. Like Ben Nimmo he is an aptly example of the
quality of the Institute's experts and work.
One of the newly released documents headlined CND Gen list 2
(pdf) (CND= Chris Nigel Donnelly) includes the names and email addresses of a number of
military, government and think tank people. The anonymous releaser of the documents claims that
the list is "of employees who attended a closed-door meeting with the white helmets". (No
document has been published yet that confirms this.) One name on the list is of special
interest:
Pablo Miller was the handler and friend of Sergej Skripal, the British double agent who was
"novichoked" in Salisbury. When Miller's name was mentioned in the press the British government
issued a D-Notice to suppress its further publishing,
Pablo Miller, a British MI6 agent, had
recruited Sergej Skripal. The former MI6 agent in Moscow, Christopher Steele, was also
involved in the case. Skripal was caught by the Russian security services and went to jail.
Pablo Miller, the MI6 recruiter, was also the handler of Sergej Skripal after he was released
by Russia in a spy swap. He reportedly also lives in Salisbury. Both Christopher Steele and
Pablo Miller work for Orbis Business Intelligence which created the "Dirty Dossier" about
Donald Trump.
At the very beginning of the Skripal affair, before there was any talk of 'Novichok', we
asked
if Skripal was involved in creating the
now debunked "Dirty Dossier" and if that was a reason for certain British insiders to move
him out of the way:
Here are some question:
Did Skripal help Steele to make up the "dossier" about Trump?
Were Skripal's old connections used to contact other people in Russia to ask about
Trump dirt?
Did Skripal threaten to talk about this?
If there is a connection between the dossier and Skripal, which seems very likely to me,
then there are a number of people and organizations with potential motives to kill him. Lots
of shady folks and officials on both sides of the Atlantic were involved in creating and
running the anti-Trump/anti-Russia campaign. There are several investigations and some very
dirty laundry might one day come to light. Removing Skripal while putting the blame on Russia
looks like a convenient way to get rid of a potential witness.
The
most recent release of Integrity Initiative documents includes lots of in-depth
reports (pdf) about foreign media reactions to the Skripal affair. One wonders why the
Initiative commissioned
such research (pdf) and paid for it.
After two years the Muller investigation found zero
evidence for the 'collusion' between Russia and the Trump campaign that the fake Steele
dossier suggested. The whole collusion claim is a creation by 'former' British intelligence
operatives who likely acted on request of U.S. intelligence leaders Clapper and Brennan. How
deep was the Russia specialist Chris Donnelly and his Institute for Statecraft involved in this
endeavor?
Checking through all the released Initiative papers and lists one gets the impression of a
secret military intelligence operation, disguised as a public NGO. Financed by millions of
government money the Institute for Statecraft and the Integrity Initiative work under a charity
label to create and disseminate disinformation to the global public and back into the
government and military itself.
The paranoia about Russia, which does way less harm than the 'western' "rules based system"
constantly creates, is illogical and not based on factual analysis. It creates Russia as an
"enemy" when it is none. It hypes a "threat" out of hot air. The only people who profit from
this are the propagandists and the companies and people who back them.
The Initiatives motto "Defend Democracy Against Disinformation" is a truly Orwellian
construct. By disseminating propaganda and using it to influence the public, parliament, the
military and governments, the Institute actively undermines the democratic process that depends
on the free availability of truthful information.
It should be shut down immediately.
---
Note: There have already been attempts to delete the released files from the Internet. A
complete archive of all Integrity Initiative files published so far is here . Should
the public links cease to work, you can contact the author of this blog for access to private
backups.
Aside from the fact that the government itself funds this organization, the creepiest thing
about it is that the "non-governmental individuals" that help fund it are the same people
that run the think tanks: a bunch of Rhodesians.
"Such half-assed thinking...Think for a moment how Russia would have responded to a mining of
Sevastopol harbor, the frying of its satellites or the destruction of its fighter jets in
Crimea. Those "gestures" would have been illegal acts of war against the forces of a nuclear
power which were legally stationed in Crimea."
It sure seems like this half-assed thinking isn't just the domain of a fringe element, but
is increasingly mainstream among the elites. Doesn't bode well.
Thank you B. It is truly amazing to watch the UK elites unravel as they have become truly
unhinged by their own connivances. It is a bad joke at the commoner's expense that they
propagandize and demonize in the name of the 'Western rules based system' even as they are
busy shooting themselves in both feet by committing Brexit. Although there are legitimate
grievances with the EU, it is clear that Brexit is a Tory power play that is all politics and
zero governance. Alas, Perfidious Albion has succumbed to Mad Cow disease.
What remains mysterious (not really) is why --if these initiatives are truly meant to save
and strengthen democracy-- they aren't proudly proclaimed and advertised, in the open,
transparent, for everyone one to see and judge, like an adult democracy that they claim to
stand for might want to debate and form an opinion on.
The fact that it isn't, is testimony to the nefarious anti-democratic, authoritarian and
totalitarian streak that runs in between every two lines that they put on paper.
McCarthyesque smear campaigns to discredit opponents and squash dissent has become normal
practice. Integrity Initiative tweets against Corbyn is a stark example, but there have been
MANY other people and groups that have been tarred with claims of being
sponsored/led/influenced by Russia, including Catalonian independence activists and Yellow
vest protesters.
Every time one scratches the surface of such smears, it seems there is a connection to
US/British MIC, Ukraine, or Israel - essentially, those who benefit (financially or
otherwise) from greater tensions with Russia.
At what point does neocon doubling-down on failed foreign policy become more than just
picking our pockets and warping our minds? At what point do they start killing our kids in
another unnecessary war?
Cold War has been over for nearly 30 years. It's time enough for Western countries to send
into real retirement every single cold-warrior, their time is over, their mindset is quaint
and useless, if not downright dangerous and counter-productive.
Thank you 'b'
I'll just say -- - there is safety in numbers ! Already valuable information, important to
the public good and democracy has been spread wide enough to be certain, this gene won't go
back in the bottle ! D notice or no ! And by doing that, has made the fearless journalists
and investigators lives all the safer ! Safety in numbers, spread this wide everyone?
Thanks for the continued exposition of this story b.....may it go viral
I want to comment on some of the wording you quote Donnelly as writing
" .....is giving way to a world of Darwinian competition where all the players
– nation states, sub-state actors, big corporations, ethnic or religious groups, and
so on – are constantly striving with each other in a "war of all against all".
"
This is Donnelly's characterization of a world in which finance is a public utility
instead of the private jackboot that it currently is. This is the delusion these people have
been led to believe.
So instead of his "war of all against all" that some might call human cooperation on the
basis of merit we have a mythical God of Mammon religion that continues to instantiate the
private finance led world of the West with it parasitic elite and fawning acolytes.
Dear god, what has gotten into the minds of the military and political "elite" within the
UK! Mining Sevastopol would have been an obvious act of war against Russia and Russia would
have responded with force.
Thankfully it wasn't done but the fact this was even discussed by senior figures confirms
that there was at least a sizable minority pushing for it. 30 years after the fall of the
Soviet Union, the Western elite have truly abandoned all sense of reality and embraced a
consequence free view of the use of force. After Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya they haven't
learned a thing! I'm becoming more and more certain that a peaceful transition to the
multipolar world is impossible and that it will only happen after the US or one of its'
vassal states blunder into a proxy war and get utterly and comprehensively defeated, forcing
a radical world realignment, but with nuts like John Bolton and the neocons in the Whitehouse
it could easily lead to a nuclear war
This group may have officially formed in 2015, but its work is no different from the
British propaganda that swamped the MSM when MH17 was downed. Tied into the Steel dossier and
Russian collusion in the US. This is the anglosphere or five eyes permanent state.
exiled off mainstreet , Dec 15, 2018 2:22:39 PM |
link
As an aside this happens to be "Bill of Rights Day", the anniversary of the passage of the
Bill of Rights as amendments to the yankee constitution. This reveals again how far from the
rule of law the yankee imperium, now the key element of the British Empire they supposedly
seceded from, has strayed, since it is apparent that this "Integrity Initiative" was
engaged in to ensure that the regime was in the safe hands of the harpy.
It has also ensured that the victorious candidate has been neutered and faithfully follows
the world control line put forward by the five eyes spy-masters making up the empire in its
present iteration. This also shows what a farce the regime, based on the rule of law, now
presents.
It is interesting that Trudeau, the Canadian figurehead, clothes his country's
kidnapping of the Chinese business figure as "in defence of the rule of law." All in all, it
is now apparent we would be far better off if the Kaiserreich, with all of its militaristic
and bombastic flaws, had triumphed in the Great War. No Hitler, no Stalin, no five eyes
fascism.
The "Western-based rules system" described in this article reminds me of a game called
"Calvin Ball" which appeared in the former comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes." In the strip
Calvin a wildly imaginative adolescent boy who plays a free-form of football with his
imaginary pet toy tiger (Hobbes). Rules of the game are made up as the game is played to
suit the players. There you have it real life imitates art.
b, I downloaded the zip file, and had also downloaded all the PDF's from pdf-archive
yesterday. There are more files in the zip, but the following were on pdf-archive and are NOT
in the zip:
integrity-france.pdf (this is a dud, looks like html, prob. response from a failed
attempt to put a file up on pdf-archive)
Better yet, can anyone name an NGO, any NGO ever, that's not closely if not directly
linked to "a secret military intelligence operation." Anyone? Mueller?
Thank you very much for this terrific analysis. Donnelly: "... it is we who must either
generate the debate or wait for something dreadful to happen to shock us into action. "
Numerous American publications featured very similar language in the years ahead of 9/11,
with "Islamic terrorist threat" substituted for the Russians.
Emmanuel Goldstein , Dec 15, 2018 4:21:51 PM |
link
The transcript of his conversation with the general shows very starkly that we would last
about two minutes in a nuclear exchange, but about half a day in a conventional one. No
reserves, no equipment stockpiles, a navy consisting of two fat targets, neither of which has
any aircraft and some destroyers which have propulsion problems, a smallish air force and
very small numbers of troops. The tripwire force in Estonia is wholly sacrificial. In fact he
lays bare the whole fallacy of biting the bear. With the armed forces in the state he
describes, and with the recruitment and retention problems, wouldn't it be better, as one
defense minister said, 'to go away and shut up'...
Thanks b and especially the link to Valentina Lisitsa who I had tinkling in the background as
I read your grand expose. These people are seditious morons, parasites infesting the state
apparatus. Shut these fools down. Nice touch publishing the passport image. I can just
imagine the frenzied aftermath of Kit's visit to the basement. Big thanks to anonymous and
Craig Murray too. Their IT personel are probably visiting Devil's Island or Diego Garcia as
we read.
Vesti News has published an excellent documentary on how "clusters" work....not only to
spread Russophobia...but also on continuous intends to overthrown Russian legitimate
government... https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=7&v=E8-Stfrl5aM
The British and US connections to loot and evade Russian riches and funds are exposed, as
well as the origin of sanctions, supposed "alt-media" "truth-seakers" like Meduza...or
supposed "pro-Russian" US intelligence operatives married to Russian women....
Amongst the many issues he usually passes over trying to make himself the fool, while at
the same time trying to convince us of the oustanding intellectual capacities, honesty and
classy stance of him and his "comittee"...
For that travel, to end bluntly and in such public view siding with the nazis of the "Azov
Regiment" and other criminals of war, there was no need of so many saddlebags, so as
pretending that the people who supported Trump as if there was no tomorrow, were enlightened
people who only wanted to rescue "America" for the "Americans", as if there would not be a
sign of blatant exceptionalism in appropriating of the term "Americans" for themselves in
such a huge continent....
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.
The FP pre-Soviet collapse consisted of one MO: GET THE COMMIES!
Since then, Neocons and Neolibs which are frontmen for this Non-National Globalized Elite,
have hijacked our country's military and have steered it to a Global agenda where dominance
in the ME means either superiority for these EURO elites or Vassal-hood.
The last two periods of the US FP could be understood thusly: (1) Pre-Soviet collapse
which was marked by a horrifically tragic and misplaced ideal of defending against communism
(Good guys v. Bad Guys); and (2) Post-Soviet collapse which has been a period of coup d'etats
where our hijacked military has been used for a Globalist Agenda for increasingly opaque
(less defensible) reasons and missions.
The average American could care less about the ME and the US would be 1000x better-off
reverting to an isolationist stance.
But this will not happen so long as Nationalism in the US and UK is repeatedly put-down.
It seems as though there is going to be another Brexit vote. Does anyone doubt that
miraculously the people by then will have second-guessed their will to Brexit and so will
vote against it given another crack at a vote?
Import IT workers and staff science faculties from abroad w dual citizens while kkr
buys wafer labs that outsource to mainland for manufacturing
Cry boo hoo hoo to wake up with indigenous capacity decades behind world players like
Russia, China, India, etc who operate on fractional budgets...
But this drama also exposes ashura/emigods intra necine warfare: right after 2016 US
elections there was a facade of split between military and intelligence differentiation.
Seems that veil has been dispensed with , but it invites other questions, insofar as UK
is Her Majesty's Service, so are we to read this with Prince Harry or Philip's culture, or a
"consent by silence") in mind? Defending crown or EU "Saturnus Sattelitus"?
Yeah, they hijacked a few other countries too, including Russia. Or if not hijacking,
setting the mood right for some shenanigans in the near future... I think you're quite right
about the cheif host of the globalist neolib parasite. Hijacked near fully. Being bled dry.
That unaccounted for 21 Trillion at the pentagon is a bit of a giveaway. All under the guise
of free markets and democracy.
Good to see Trump finally give it a face... 'you need freedom and security now pay up
bitches'
In my view, the USA's FP has been undermined by EURO elites which is forcing a game of
chicken with Russia.... Globalist Agenda
I think the opposite is true.
The US-led Empire and their globalist sycophants seek to weaken Europe so that it can not
act independently in its own best interests. They will do what ever they can to ensure that
the vassals never join with Russia/China and the SCO.
Russian scare-mongering and immigration have been effective in furthering this agenda.
Also note: what USA has termed "new Europe" - eastern European states like Poland and Ukraine
- are solidly pro-American.
It is very interesting and educational to read this pre-election article two years later and see where the author is
right and where he is wrong. The death of neoliberalism was greatly exaggerated. It simply mutated in the USA into "national
neoliberalism" under Trump. As no clear alternative exists it remain the dominant ideology and universities still
brainwash students with neoclassical economics. And in way catchy slogan "Make America great again" under Trump
means "Make American working and lower middle class great again"
It is also clear that Trump betrayed or was forced to betray most of his election promises. Standrd of living of common
americans did not improve under his watch. most of hi benefits of his tax cuts went to large corporations and financial
oligarch. He continued the policy of financial deregulation, which is tantamount of playing with open fire trying to
warm up the house
What we see under Trump is tremendous growth of political role of intelligence agencies which now are real kingmakers and can
sink any candidate which does not support their agenda. And USA intelligence agencies operated in 2016 in close cooperation
with the UK intelligence agencies to the extent that it is not clear who has the lead in creating Steele dossier. They are
definitely out of control of executive branch and play their own game. We also see a rise of CIA democrats as a desperate
attempt to preserve the power of Clinton wing of the Democratic Party ('soft neoliberals" turned under Hillary into into warmongers
and neocons) . Hillary and Bill themselves clearly belong to CIA democrats too, not only to Wall Street democrats, despite the fact
that they sold Democratic Party to Wall Street in the past. New Labor in UK did the same.
But if it is more or less clear now what happened in the USa in 2016-2018, it is completely unclear what will happen next.
I think in no way neoliberalism will start to be dismantled. there is no social forces powerful enough to start this job, We
probably need another financial crisi of the scale of 2008 for this work to be reluctantly started by ruling
elite. And we better not to have this repetition of 2008 as it will be really devastating for common people.
Notable quotes:
"... the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye turned to corporate evasion. ..."
"... It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism, when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present. ..."
"... In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has stagnated for over 30 years . ..."
"... On average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. ..."
"... As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late 70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none. As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable. ..."
"... Foreign Affairs ..."
"... "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both. ..."
"... According to a Gallup poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population. ..."
"... The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement. ..."
"... Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely one of secular stagnation . ..."
"... those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes, just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s. ..."
In the early 1980s the author was one of the first to herald the emerging dominance of neoliberalism in the west. Here he argues
that this doctrine is now faltering. But what happens next?
The western financial crisis of 2007-8 was the worst since 1931, yet its immediate repercussions were surprisingly modest. The
crisis challenged the foundation stones of the long-dominant neoliberal ideology but it seemed to emerge largely unscathed. The banks
were bailed out; hardly any bankers on either side of the Atlantic were prosecuted for their crimes; and the price of their behaviour
was duly paid by the taxpayer. Subsequent economic policy, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world, has relied overwhelmingly on monetary
policy, especially quantitative easing. It has failed. The western economy has stagnated and is now approaching its lost decade,
with no end in sight.
After almost nine years, we are finally beginning to reap the political whirlwind of the financial crisis. But how did neoliberalism
manage to survive virtually unscathed for so long? Although it failed the test of the real world, bequeathing the worst economic
disaster for seven decades, politically and intellectually it remained the only show in town. Parties of the right, centre and left
had all bought into its philosophy, New Labour a classic
in point. They knew no other way of thinking or doing: it had become the common sense. It was, as Antonio Gramsci put it, hegemonic.
But that hegemony cannot and will not survive the test of the real world.
The first inkling of the wider political consequences was evident in the turn in public opinion against the banks, bankers and
business leaders. For decades, they could do no wrong: they were feted as the role models of our age, the default troubleshooters
of choice in education, health and seemingly everything else. Now, though, their star was in steep descent, along with that of the
political class. The effect of the financial crisis was to undermine faith and trust in the competence of the governing elites. It
marked the beginnings of a wider political crisis.
But the causes of this political crisis, glaringly evident on both sides of the Atlantic, are much deeper than simply the financial
crisis and the virtually stillborn recovery of the last decade. They go to the heart of the neoliberal project that dates from the
late 70s and the political rise of Reagan and Thatcher, and embraced at its core the idea of a global free market in goods, services
and capital. The depression-era system of bank regulation was dismantled, in the US in the 1990s and in Britain in 1986, thereby
creating the conditions for the 2008 crisis. Equality was scorned, the idea of trickle-down economics lauded, government condemned
as a fetter on the market and duly downsized, immigration encouraged, regulation cut to a minimum, taxes reduced and a blind eye
turned to corporate evasion.
It should be noted that, by historical standards, the neoliberal era has not had a particularly good track record. The most dynamic
period of postwar western growth was that between the end of the war and the early 70s, the era of welfare capitalism and Keynesianism,
when the growth rate was double that of the neoliberal period from 1980 to the present.
But by far the most disastrous feature of the neoliberal period has been the huge growth in inequality. Until very recently, this
had been virtually ignored. With extraordinary speed, however, it has emerged as one of, if not the most important political issue
on both sides of the Atlantic, most dramatically in the US. It is, bar none, the issue that is driving the political discontent that
is now engulfing the west. Given the statistical evidence, it is puzzling, shocking even, that it has been disregarded for so long;
the explanation can only lie in the sheer extent of the hegemony of neoliberalism and its values.
But now reality has upset the doctrinal apple cart. In the period 1948-1972, every section of the American population experienced
very similar and sizable increases in their standard of living; between 1972-2013, the bottom 10% experienced falling real income
while the top 10% did far better than everyone else. In the US, the median real income for full-time male workers is now lower than
it was four decades ago: the income of the bottom 90% of the population has
stagnated for over 30 years .
A not so dissimilar picture is true of the UK. And the problem has grown more serious since the financial crisis. On average,
between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real
incomes between 2005 and 2014.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot
The reasons are not difficult to explain. The hyper-globalisation era has been systematically stacked in favour of capital against
labour: international trading agreements, drawn up in great secrecy, with business on the inside and the unions and citizens excluded,
the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and the
Transatlantic
Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) being but the latest examples; the politico-legal attack on the unions;
the encouragement of large-scale immigration in both the US and Europe that helped to undermine
the bargaining power of the domestic workforce; and the failure to retrain displaced workers in any meaningful way.
As Thomas Piketty has shown, in the absence of
countervailing pressures, capitalism naturally gravitates towards increasing inequality. In the period between 1945 and the late
70s, Cold War competition was arguably the biggest such constraint. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, there have been none.
As the popular backlash grows increasingly irresistible, however, such a winner-takes-all regime becomes politically unsustainable.
Large sections of the population in both the US and the UK are now in revolt against their lot, as graphically illustrated by
the support for Trump and Sanders in the US and the Brexit vote in the UK. This popular revolt is often described, in a somewhat
denigratory and dismissive fashion, as populism. Or, as Francis Fukuyama writes in a recent excellent
essay
in Foreign Affairs : "'Populism' is the label that political elites attach to policies supported by ordinary citizens
that they don't like." Populism is a movement against the status quo. It represents the beginnings of something new, though it is
generally much clearer about what it is against than what it is for. It can be progressive or reactionary, but more usually both.
Brexit is a classic example of such populism. It has overturned a fundamental cornerstone of UK policy since the early 1970s.
Though ostensibly about Europe, it was in fact about much more: a cri de coeur from those who feel they have lost out and been left
behind, whose living standards have stagnated or worse since the 1980s, who feel dislocated by large-scale immigration over which
they have no control and who face an increasingly insecure and casualised labour market. Their revolt has paralysed the governing
elite, already claimed one prime minister, and left the latest one fumbling around in the dark looking for divine inspiration.
The wave of populism marks the return of class as a central agency in politics, both in the UK and the US. This is particularly
remarkable in the US. For many decades, the idea of the "working class" was marginal to American political discourse. Most Americans
described themselves as middle class, a reflection of the aspirational pulse at the heart of American society. According to a Gallup
poll, in 2000 only 33% of Americans called themselves working class; by 2015 the figure was 48%, almost half the population.
Brexit, too, was primarily a working-class revolt. Hitherto, on both sides of the Atlantic, the agency of class has been in retreat
in the face of the emergence of a new range of identities and issues from gender and race to sexual orientation and the environment.
The return of class, because of its sheer reach, has the potential, like no other issue, to redefine the political landscape.
The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, is a function of politics
The re-emergence of class should not be confused with the labor movement. They are not synonymous: this is obvious in the US
and increasingly the case in the UK. Indeed, over the last half-century, there has been a growing separation between the two in Britain.
The re-emergence of the working class as a political voice in Britain, most notably in the Brexit vote, can best be described as
an inchoate expression of resentment and protest, with only a very weak sense of belonging to the labour movement.
Indeed, Ukip has been as important – in the form of immigration and Europe – in shaping its current attitudes as the Labour party.
In the United States, both Trump and Sanders have given expression to the working-class revolt, the latter almost as much as the
former. The working class belongs to no one: its orientation, far from predetermined, as the left liked to think, is a function of
politics.
The neoliberal era is being undermined from two directions. First, if its record of economic growth has never been particularly
strong, it is now dismal. Europe is barely larger than it was on the eve of the financial crisis in 2007; the United States has done
better but even its growth has been anaemic. Economists such as Larry Summers believe that the prospect for the future is most likely
one of secular stagnation .
Worse, because the recovery has been so weak and fragile, there is a widespread belief that another financial crisis may well
beckon. In other words, the neoliberal era has delivered the west back into the kind of crisis-ridden world that we last experienced
in the 1930s. With this background, it is hardly surprising that a majority in the west now believe their children will be worse
off than they were. Second, those who have lost out in the neoliberal era are no longer prepared to acquiesce in their fate – they
are increasingly in open revolt. We are witnessing the end of the neoliberal era. It is not dead, but it is in its early death throes,
just as the social-democratic era was during the 1970s.
A sure sign of the declining influence of neoliberalism is the rising chorus of intellectual voices raised against it. From the
mid-70s through the 80s, the economic debate was increasingly dominated by monetarists and free marketeers. But since the western
financial crisis, the centre of gravity of the intellectual debate has shifted profoundly. This is most obvious in the United States,
with economists such as Joseph Stiglitz, Paul Krugman, Dani Rodrik and Jeffrey Sachs becoming increasingly influential. Thomas Piketty's
Capital in the Twenty-First Century has been a massive seller. His work and that of
Tony Atkinson
and Angus Deaton have pushed the question of the inequality to the top of the political agenda. In the UK,
Ha-Joon Chang , for long isolated within the economics
profession, has gained a following far greater than those who think economics is a branch of mathematics.
Meanwhile, some of those who were previously strong advocates of a neoliberal approach, such as Larry Summers and the Financial
Times 's Martin Wolf, have become extremely critical. The wind is in the sails of the critics of neoliberalism; the neoliberals
and monetarists are in retreat. In the UK, the media and political worlds are well behind the curve. Few recognize that we are at
the end of an era. Old attitudes and assumptions still predominate, whether on the BBC's Today programme, in the rightwing
press or the parliamentary Labor party.
Following Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader, virtually no one foresaw the triumph of
Jeremy Corbyn in the subsequent leadership election.
The assumption had been more of the same, a Blairite or a halfway house like Miliband, certainly not anyone like Corbyn. But the
zeitgeist had changed. The membership, especially the young who had joined the party on an unprecedented scale, wanted a complete
break with New Labour. One of the reasons why the left has failed to emerge as the leader of the new mood of working-class disillusionment
is that most social democratic parties became, in varying degrees, disciples of neoliberalism and uber-globalisation. The most extreme
forms of this phenomenon were New Labour and the Democrats, who in the late 90s and 00s became its advance guard, personified by
Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, triangulation and the third way.
But as David Marquand observed in a review for the New Statesman , what is the point of a social democratic party if
it doesn't represent the less fortunate, the underprivileged and the losers? New Labour deserted those who needed them, who historically
they were supposed to represent. Is it surprising that large sections have now deserted the party who deserted them? Blair, in his
reincarnation as a money-obsessed consultant to a shady bunch of presidents and dictators, is a fitting testament to the demise of
New Labour.
The rival contenders – Burnham, Cooper and Kendall – represented continuity. They were swept away by Corbyn, who won nearly 60%
of the votes. New Labour was over, as dead as Monty Python's parrot. Few grasped the meaning of what had happened. A Guardian
leader welcomed the surge in membership and then, lo and behold, urged support for Yvette Cooper, the very antithesis of the
reason for the enthusiasm. The PLP refused to accept the result and ever since has tried with might and main to remove Corbyn.
Just as the Labour party took far too long to come to terms with the rise of Thatcherism and the birth of a new era at the end
of the 70s, now it could not grasp that the Thatcherite paradigm, which they eventually came to embrace in the form of New Labour,
had finally run its course. Labour, like everyone else, is obliged to think anew. The membership in their antipathy to New Labour
turned to someone who had never accepted the latter, who was the polar opposite in almost every respect of Blair, and embodying an
authenticity and decency which Blair patently did not.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better
Corbyn is not a product of the new times, he is a throwback to the late 70s and early 80s. That is both his strength and also
his weakness. He is uncontaminated by the New Labour legacy because he has never accepted it. But nor, it would seem, does he understand
the nature of the new era. The danger is that he is possessed of feet of clay in what is a highly fluid and unpredictable political
environment, devoid of any certainties of almost any kind, in which Labour finds itself dangerously divided and weakened.
Labour may be in intensive care, but the condition of the Conservatives is not a great deal better. David Cameron was guilty of
a huge and irresponsible miscalculation over Brexit. He was forced to resign in the most ignominious of circumstances. The party
is hopelessly divided. It has no idea in which direction to move after Brexit. The Brexiters painted an optimistic picture of turning
away from the declining European market and embracing the expanding markets of the world, albeit barely mentioning by name which
countries it had in mind. It looks as if the new prime minister may have an anachronistic hostility towards China and a willingness
to undo the good work of George Osborne. If the government turns its back on China, by far the fastest growing market in the world,
where are they going to turn?
Brexit has left the country fragmented and deeply divided, with the very real prospect that Scotland might choose independence.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives seem to have little understanding that the neoliberal era is in its death throes.
Dramatic as events have been in the UK, they cannot compare with those in the United States. Almost from nowhere,
Donald Trump rose to capture the Republican nomination
and confound virtually all the pundits and not least his own party. His message was straightforwardly anti-globalisation. He believes
that the interests of the working class have been sacrificed in favour of the big corporations that have been encouraged to invest
around the world and thereby deprive American workers of their jobs. Further, he argues that large-scale immigration has weakened
the bargaining power of American workers and served to lower their wages.
He proposes that US corporations should be required to invest their cash reserves in the US. He believes that the North American
Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) has had the effect of exporting American jobs to Mexico. On similar grounds, he is opposed to the TPP
and the TTIP. And he also accuses China of stealing American jobs, threatening to impose a 45% tariff on Chinese imports.
To globalisation Trump counterposes economic nationalism: "Put America first". His appeal, above all, is to the white working
class who, until Trump's (and Bernie Sander's) arrival on the political scene, had been ignored and largely unrepresented since the
1980s. Given that their wages have been falling for most of the last 40 years, it is extraordinary how their interests have been
neglected by the political class. Increasingly, they have voted Republican, but the Republicans have long been captured by the super-rich
and Wall Street, whose interests, as hyper-globalisers, have run directly counter to those of the white working class. With the arrival
of Trump they finally found a representative: they won Trump the Republican nomination.
Trump believes that America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources
The economic nationalist argument has also been vigorously pursued by
Bernie Sanders , who ran Hillary Clinton extremely
close for the Democratic nomination and would probably have won but for more than 700 so-called super-delegates, who were effectively
chosen by the Democratic machine and overwhelmingly supported Clinton. As in the case of the Republicans, the Democrats have long
supported a neoliberal, pro-globalisation strategy, notwithstanding the concerns of its trade union base. Both the Republicans and
the Democrats now find themselves deeply polarised between the pro- and anti-globalisers, an entirely new development not witnessed
since the shift towards neoliberalism under Reagan almost 40 years ago.
Another plank of Trump's nationalist appeal – "Make America great again" – is his position on foreign policy. He believes that
America's pursuit of great power status has squandered the nation's resources. He argues that the country's alliance system is unfair,
with America bearing most of the cost and its allies contributing far too little. He points to Japan and South Korea, and NATO's
European members as prime examples. He seeks to rebalance these relationships and, failing that, to exit from them.
As a country in decline, he argues that America can no longer afford to carry this kind of financial burden. Rather than putting
the world to rights, he believes the money should be invested at home, pointing to the dilapidated state of America's infrastructure.
Trump's position
represents a major critique of America as the world's hegemon. His arguments mark a radical break with the neoliberal, hyper-globalisation
ideology that has reigned since the early 1980s and with the foreign policy orthodoxy of most of the postwar period. These arguments
must be taken seriously. They should not be lightly dismissed just because of their authorship. But Trump is no man of the left.
He is a populist of the right. He has launched a racist and xenophobic attack on Muslims and on Mexicans. Trump's appeal is to a
white working class that feels it has been cheated by the big corporations, undermined by Hispanic immigration, and often resentful
towards African-Americans who for long too many have viewed as their inferior.
A Trump America would mark a descent into authoritarianism characterised by abuse, scapegoating, discrimination, racism, arbitrariness
and violence; America would become a deeply polarised and divided society. His threat to impose
45%
tariffs on China , if implemented, would certainly provoke retaliation by the Chinese and herald the beginnings of a new era
of protectionism.
Trump may well lose the presidential election just as Sanders failed in his bid for the Democrat nomination. But this does not
mean that the forces opposed to hyper-globalisation – unrestricted immigration, TPP and TTIP, the free movement of capital and much
else – will have lost the argument and are set to decline. In little more than 12 months, Trump and Sanders have transformed the
nature and terms of the argument. Far from being on the wane, the arguments of the critics of hyper-globalisation are steadily gaining
ground. Roughly two-thirds of Americans agree that "we should not think so much in international terms but concentrate more on our
own national problems". And, above all else, what will continue to drive opposition to the hyper-globalisers is inequality.
"... The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe ..."
"... The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity", have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask. ..."
"... Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be coming round to the idea that they are the problem. ..."
"... Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments. ..."
"... The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who came up with that theory , did not agree that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised. ..."
"... Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. ..."
The crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response should be a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is
created and distributed around the globe
Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT First published on Sat 8 Jun 2013 02.59 EDT
The IMF's limited admission of guilt over the Greek bailout is a start, but they still can't see the global financial system's
fundamental flaws, writes Deborah Orr. Photograph: Boris Roessler/DPA FILE T he International Monetary Fund has admitted that some
of the decisions it made in the wake of the 2007-2008 financial crisis were wrong, and that the €130bn first bailout of Greece was
"bungled". Well, yes. If it hadn't been a mistake, then it would have been the only bailout and everyone in Greece would have lived
happily ever after.
Actually, the IMF hasn't quite admitted that it messed things up. It has said instead that it went along with its partners in
"the Troika" – the European Commission and the European Central Bank – when it shouldn't have. The EC and the ECB, says the IMF,
put the interests of the eurozone before the interests of Greece. The EC and the ECB, in turn, clutch their pearls and splutter with
horror that they could be accused of something so petty as self-preservation.
The IMF also admits that it "underestimated" the effect austerity would have on Greece. Obviously, the rest of the Troika takes
no issue with that. Even those who substitute "kick up the arse to all the lazy scroungers" whenever they encounter the word "austerity",
have cottoned on to the fact that the word can only be intoned with facial features locked into a suitably tragic mask.
Yet, mealy-mouthed and hotly contested as this minor mea culpa is, it's still a sign that financial institutions may slowly be
coming round to the idea that they are the problem. They know the crash was a debt-bubble that burst. What they don't seem to acknowledge
is that the merry days of reckless lending are never going to return; even if they do, the same thing will happen again, but more
quickly and more savagely. The thing is this: the crash was a write-off, not a repair job. The response from the start should have
been a wholesale reevaluation of the way in which wealth is created and distributed around the globe, a "structural adjustment",
as the philosopher
John Gray has said all along.
The IMF exists to lend money to governments, so it's comic that it wags its finger at governments that run up debt. And, of course,
its loans famously come with strings attached: adopt a free-market economy, or strengthen the one you have, kissing goodbye to the
Big State. Yet, the irony is painful. Neoliberal ideology insists that states are too big and cumbersome, too centralised and faceless,
to be efficient and responsive. I agree. The problem is that the ruthless sentimentalists of neoliberalism like to tell themselves
– and anyone else who will listen – that removing the dead hand of state control frees the individual citizen to be entrepreneurial
and productive. Instead, it places the financially powerful beyond any state, in an international elite that makes its own rules,
and holds governments to ransom. That's what the financial crisis was all about. The ransom was paid, and as a result, governments
have been obliged to limit their activities yet further – some setting about the task with greater relish than others. Now the task,
supposedly, is to get the free market up and running again.
But the basic problem is this: it costs a lot of money to cultivate a market – a group of consumers – and the more sophisticated
the market is, the more expensive it is to cultivate them. A developed market needs to be populated with educated, healthy, cultured,
law-abiding and financially secure people – people who expect to be well paid themselves, having been brought up believing in material
aspiration, as consumers need to be.
So why, exactly, given the huge amount of investment needed to create such a market, should access to it then be "free"? The neoliberal
idea is that the cultivation itself should be conducted privately as well. They see "austerity" as a way of forcing that agenda.
But how can the privatisation of societal welfare possibly happen when unemployment is already high, working people are turning to
food banks to survive and the debt industry, far from being sorry that it brought the global economy to its knees, is snapping up
bargains in the form of busted high-street businesses to establish shops with nothing to sell but high-interest debt? Why, you have
to ask yourself, is this vast implausibility, this sheer unsustainability, not blindingly obvious to all?
Markets cannot be free. Markets have to be nurtured. They have to be invested in. Markets have to be grown. Google, Amazon
and Apple haven't taught anyone in this country to read. But even though an illiterate market wouldn't be so great for them, they
avoid their taxes, because they can, because they are more powerful than governments.
And further, those who invest in these companies, and insist that taxes should be low to encourage private profit and shareholder
value, then lend governments the money they need to create these populations of sophisticated producers and consumers, berating them
for their profligacy as they do so. It's all utterly, completely, crazy.
The other day a health minister,
Anna Soubry
, suggested that female GPs who worked part-time so that they could bring up families were putting the NHS under strain. The
compartmentalised thinking is quite breathtaking. What on earth does she imagine? That it would be better for the economy if they
all left school at 16? On the contrary, the more people who are earning good money while working part-time – thus having the leisure
to consume – the better. No doubt these female GPs are sustaining both the pharmaceutical industry and the arts and media, both sectors
that Britain does well in.
As for their prioritising of family life over career – that's just another of the myriad ways in which Conservative neoliberalism
is entirely without logic. Its prophets and its disciples will happily – ecstatically – tell you that there's nothing more important
than family, unless you're a family doctor spending some of your time caring for your own. You couldn't make these characters up.
It is certainly true that women with children find it more easy to find part-time employment in the public sector. But that's a prima
facie example of how unresponsive the private sector is to human and societal need, not – as it is so often presented – evidence
that the public sector is congenitally disabled.
Much of the healthy economic growth – as opposed to the smoke and mirrors of many aspects of financial services – that Britain
enjoyed during the second half of the 20th century was due to women swelling the educated workforce. Soubry and her ilk, above all
else, forget that people have multiple roles, as consumers, as producers, as citizens and as family members. All of those things
have to be nurtured and invested in to make a market.
The neoliberalism that the IMF still preaches pays no account to any of this. It insists that the provision of work alone
is enough of an invisible hand to sustain a market. Yet even Adam Smith, the economist who
came up with that theory , did not agree
that economic activity alone was enough to keep humans decent and civilised.
Governments are left with the bill when neoliberals demand access to markets that they refuse to invest in making. Their refusal
allows them to rail against the Big State while producing the conditions that make it necessary. And even as the results of their
folly become ever more plain to see, they are grudging in their admittance of the slightest blame, bickering with their allies instead
of waking up, smelling the coffee and realizing that far too much of it is sold through Starbucks.
The Last but not LeastTechnology is dominated by
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Baker III are just discernible to the trained ear.
Another one quite likely to have been cultivating a quiet exhalation was Hongkong and Shanghai Bank boss Sir William Purvis.
Peter Seaman:
Oswald Howe, Jr:
Southeast Bank:
Bankers Trust:
White & Case:
UBS, Lugano:
Indosuez:
THE KESWICK-JARDINE CONNECTION
Jardine Fleming is also listed in the same document as a "role player", a few lines beneath the name of Tony Buckingham – the high-profile head of Executive Outcomes. In an accompanying financial report it is revealed that EO used account number 600774426 at Jardine Fleming Bank Limited, located at Port Moresby, Hong Kong. The account, rendered as at 15 May 1998, held a balance of US$36 million, and included Tony Buckingham among those authorized to sign cheques on the account.
APARTHEID'S MISSING BILLIONS
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December 8, 2019 © Photo: Wikimedia For all of 2019
December has been a magnet. A number of major geopolitical issues come to head this month and
many of them have everything to do with energy. This is the month that Russian gas giant
Gazprom was due to finish production on three major pipeline projects – Nordstream 2,
Turkstream and Power of Siberia.
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Benjamin Bidder
Chris Gloag/ WirtschaftsWoche
The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 48/2019 (November 23rd, 2019) of
DER SPIEGEL.
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Propaganda Intensifies Trade War With China
To the top
euro is beginning to look like a credible rival to the dollar.
Boeing's new 737
MAX may 'abruptly dive' due to errors – media
Soaring by $38,000 per second: US national debt now exceeds
$21.5 trillion
7 hours ago It's quite stunning that in the 'Land of The Free' the police routinely steal
citizens wealth as they want to. I'm not sure even the Robber Baron's in Europe hundreds of
years ago were that blatant.
11 hours ago Lebensraum ?
11 hours ago This has been the policy since the Clinton years. Nothing new here. 
12 hours ago
(Edited) This Janusz Bugajski dude is a generic Russophobe of Polish descent. His irrational
hatred of all-things Russian is typical of the rabid Catholic Poles who've invaded Orthodox
Christian Russia multiple times over the last millennia.
2015 File
Written By Victor Madeira on Possible Anti-Russian Actions
Integrity Initiative Seeks Intelligence On How Overseas Media Reported Skripal
Incident
Post-Skripal Incident Anti-Russian Actions Recommended by Integrity Initiative
Invoice submitted to
Integrity Initiative by Dan Kaszeta Strange Connections
